ABSTRACT
Modern biblical study has been concerned not only with historical events lying behind the biblical stories, but also with the social matrix within which they occurred. This chapter examines the social scene in ancient Israel so far as it can be reconstructed, noting the existence of scribes, prophets, priests, and other groups with distinctive societal roles, and also notes that modern scholarship has discovered groups not explicitly mentioned in the Bible, such as ‘deuteronomists’. In the case of the New Testament there are the groups mentioned by Flavius Josephus: Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes (who may be identical with the members of the sect that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls). The early Church, and Judaism in the same period, had various distinctive social markers—such as baptism and the Eucharist in the case of Christians, and detailed dietary laws and customs such as circumcision in the case of Jews. For both, the Bible itself, which had largely come together by the early second century ad, was itself the focus of religious devotion.
