Sadducees – מילון אנגלי-אנגלי
Sadducee
n.
member of an ancient Jewish sect characterized by its literal interpretation of the Bible
Sadducees
The
Sadducees (;
Hebrew:
Ṣĕdûqîm) were a
sect or group of
Jews that was active in
Judea during the
Second Temple period, starting from the second century BCE through the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. The sect was identified by
Josephus with the upper social and economic echelon of Judean society. As a whole, the sect fulfilled various political, social, and religious roles, including maintaining the Temple. The Sadducees are often compared to other contemporaneous sects, including the
Pharisees and the
Essenes. Their sect is believed to have become extinct sometime after the destruction of
Herod's Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, but it has been speculated that the later
Karaites may have had some roots in – or connections with – Sadducean views.
Sadducees
Sadducees [from Greek
saddoukaioi from Hebrew
tsadoq supposed to be the founder of the sect, meaning just, righteous] Among Europeans, a skeptic or doubter; originally the party of the Jewish priestly aristocracy which arose in the 2nd century BC under the later Hasmoneans. The Sadducees have come to be regarded as primarily a political party opposed to the Pharisees, called by some the party of the Scribes, but later Jewish tradition following Josephus more accurately regarded them as a philosophico-religious school. The Sadducees, a sect of erudite philosophers, opposed a great deal of the commonly accepted beliefs of the majority of the Jews, who were actually nearly all Pharisees -- as for instance, the immortality of the personal soul, and the actual resurrection of the physical body; yet they strongly upheld what they considered the genuine meaning, and therefore the true authority, of the Jewish scriptures. They likewise opposed no small number of doctrinal or religious innovations, some of them true, and some of them less true in nature, which had been accepted by the body of the Pharisees -- virtually by the Jewish people. And the reason for their reluctance to accept these innovations, whether of doctrine or interpretation of the Jewish scriptures, seems to be that they preferred a highly philosophical and even perhaps mystical interpretation, which they said the Jewish scriptures contained, rather than the more popular versions accepted by the Hebrew people as a whole. One may say that what the Gnostics were to the body of the Christians in the early centuries of the Christian era, the Sadducees were to the body of the Jews or Pharisees.
to be continue "
Sadducees2 "
Sadducees
followers of Sadoc, or Zadok
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary (1869) , by Roswell D. Hitchcock.
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Sadducees
(followers of Zadok), (Matthew 3:7; 16:1,6,11,12; 22:23,31; Mark 12:18; Luke 20:27; Acts 4:1; 5:17; 23:6,7,8) a religious party or school among the Jews at the time of Christ, who denied that the oral law was a revelation of God to the Israelites. and who deemed the written law alone to be obligatory on the nation, as of divine authority. Except on one occasion. (Matthew 16:1,4,6) Christ never assailed the Sadducees with the same bitter denunciations which he uttered against the Pharisees. The origin of their name is involved in great difficulties, but the most satisfactory conjecture is that the Sadducees or Zadokites were originally identical with the sons of Zadok, and constituted what may be termed a kind of sacerdotal aristocracy, this Zadok being the priest who declared in favor of Solomon when Abiathar took the part of Adonijah. (1 Kings 1:32-45) To these sons of Zadok were afterward attached all who for any reason reckoned themselves as belonging to the aristocrats; such, for example, as the families of the high priest, who had obtained consideration under the dynasty of Herod. These were for the most part judges, and individuals of the official and governing class. This explanation elucidates at once (Acts 5:17) The leading tenet of the Sadducees was the negation of the leading tenet of their opponents. As the Pharisees asserted so the Sadducees denied, that the Israelites were in possession of an oral law transmitted to them by Moses, See: Pharisees In opposition to the Pharisees, they maintained that the written law alone was obligatory on the nation, as of divine authority. The second distinguishing doctrine of the Sadducees was the denial of man's resurrection after death . In connection with the disbelief of a resurrection by the Sadducees, they likewise denied there was "angel or spirit," (Acts 23:8) and also the doctrines of future punishment and future rewards. Josephus states that the Sadducees believed in the freedom of the will, which the Pharisees denied. They pushed this doctrine so far as almost to exclude God from the government of the world. Some of the early Christian writers attribute to the Sadducees the rejection of all the sacred Scriptures except the Pentateuch ; a statement, however, that is now generally admitted to have been founded on a misconception of the truth, and it seems to have arisen from a confusion of the Sadducees with the Samaritans. An important fact in the history of the Sadducees is their rapid disappearance from history after the first century, and the subsequent predominance among the Jews of the opinions of the Pharisees. Two circumstances contributed, indirectly but powerfully, to produce this result: 1st. The state of the Jews after the capture of Jerusalem by Titus; and 2d. The growth of the Christian religion. As to the first point, it is difficult to overestimate the consternation and dismay which the destruction of Jerusalem occasioned in the minds of sincerely-religious Jews. In their hour of darkness and anguish they naturally turned to the consolations and hopes of a future state; and the doctrine of the Sadducees, that there was nothing beyond the present life, would have appeared to them cold, heartless and hateful. Again, while they were sunk in the lowest depths of depression, a new religion, which they despised as a heresy and a superstition, was gradually making its way among the subjects of their detested conquerors, the Romans. One of the causes of its success was undoubtedly the vivid belief in the resurrection of Jesus and a consequent resurrection of all mankind, which was accepted by its heathen converts with a passionate earnestness of which those who at the present day are familiar from infancy with the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead call form only a faint idea. To attempt to chock the progress of this new religion among the Jews by an appeal to the temporary rewards and punishments of the Pentateuch would have been as idle as an endeavor to check an explosive power by ordinary mechanical restraints. Consciously, therefore, or unconsciously, many circumstances combined to induce the Jews who were not Pharisees, but who resisted the new heresy, to rally round the standard of the oral law, and to assert that their holy legislator, Moses, had transmitted to his faithful people by word of mouth, although not in writing, the revelation of a future state of rewards and punishments.
Smith's Bible Dictionary (1884) , by William Smith.
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