The history of the institution of the presidency in the history of the people of Israel from the days of the tribes to the fifth century AD
Dr. Yehiam Sorek, Historian, Beit Berel College
The first president of the State of Israel, Chaim Weizmann
(Introductory note: I am starting from an assumption, which I will find difficult to prove, especially in the face of emotional obsession, that there is and was no connection between the title of this list and the affair in which the current president of the country was involved. The list in question is the result of a very long research and was not born, neither in a temporal context nor events , under the circumstances of the time)
One of the "sweet" honey traps, into which many good people fall, fall and "eat", fall and be eaten, fall and be eaten, is the modularity of the one and the conformism of the other, which lead to banality. I will point out here for the sake of fairness and purity of morals, that I too fell into the same traps more than once, but it was precisely these testimonies that strengthened within me more and more the desire to examine events in their depth, and not be satisfied with the Dinkuta version on the one hand and the mitzvot of learned people on the other.
The modular view, which is built over generations, is not as comfortable and caressing (just like racist tendencies), since it does not require thought, examination and study. It is written somewhere, it is studied, taught, relied upon, so by virtue of such a long historical record, it seems that this is the real truth. Truth?! Sorry!?
As a result, when Man-Dhua, such as your faithful servant, comes to drop the ground under that pleasant and convenient modular system of historical memory, they immediately hang on him the boki-sariki of a traitor, a fox who sabotages the vineyards and other "compliments" of this kind. Breaking a collective-historical memory is not a matter of so-and-so.
For many generation years the banal historical puzzle of the Jewish presidency appears, one that presided over the Sanhedrin during the Second Temple period, and after the destruction (73-70 AD) it continued to function until the Roman imperial order of the fifth century AD, known by its nickname: "abolition of the presidency" (excessus patriarcharum).
Is it so? Let's check it out!
The phenomenon of the presidency is ancient and is recorded many times in the Bible. The truth is that there is a research difficulty in associating the defined public, state role of the president, and it is accepted to see him as the leader of the tribe, as a sort of sheikh, such as "Nathanel ... president of Issachar" (Exodus 18:7), or in general "and president of the sons of Zebulun" (Exodus XNUMX:XNUMX ). That is, as the number of tribes, so is the number of presidents. Sometimes they are called "the presidents of Israel", sometimes "the presidents of the community", or "the president of the sons of Yehuda", "the presidents of the fathers" as well as "the president of Beit-Av".
In my research, I noticed a very interesting phenomenon: the presidency is often mentioned in the "desert" texts, that is, the book of Exodus, very little in the book of Joshua, not at all in the book of Judges, minimally in the books of Kings, and once again there is a lot of evidence in the book of Ezra. That is, the status of the presidency in the biblical period was loose and generally temporary.
It is possible to understand the phenomenon of the decline of the presidency when its alternative was manifested in the state, governmental concentration by the kings, and from then until the destruction of the First Temple, that is, until the end of the biblical/biblical period.
The leadership of Shibat Zion, which symbolized the aspiration to renew-our-rights-as-before, to return-the crown-to-its-oldness, aspired, both from a pragmatic constraint (subordination to the Persian rule and the political limitations it imposed, namely the prohibition of the queen of a king) and from a nostalgic desire (return to the origins, to the roots) to renew the institution of the presidency , except that the priesthood, as cultivated by the Persian government, took the reins of leadership, and from then on the priesthood upgraded its status (it should be remembered that during the monarchy, in Judea and Israel/Samaria, the priesthood was subordinate to the monarchy and its power was therefore limited).
As mentioned, the priesthood strengthened its powers even during the transition from Persian to Hellenistic rule, and as evidence - its status is very prominent in external literature, both during the Egyptian, Ptolemaic, and the Syrian, Seleucid period. A very famous passage appears in the text of the Proverbs of Ben Sira, in which he describes the high priest in full pictorial and dramatic descriptions, literally as a king incarnate. There is, in this section, something to teach about the great, quasi-royal importance that marked the role and status of the high priest.
During this period, the days of the transition from the Ptolemaic to Seleucid rule, there is no doubt that Mtzua was a presidential figure, because the Sanhedrin actually operated in those days, and it was managed on the one hand by the high priest, and on the other hand by the president, the president of the Sanhedrin, but from a state-public perspective the holder of the presidential office held a very secondary status , and it barely blends into the sources of the period.
The outbreak of the Maccabean, Hasmonean rebellion (167 BC) revived the institution of the presidency, and even here, quite similar to the position of the priesthood in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah (fifth century BC), there was a kind of compromise between the limitations of the Hellenistic government (despite the rebellion) of prohibition The Queen of Kings, and the Maccabean family's desire to return the crown to her old age.
What else? The first, and also the last to a certain extent, who firmly held the title of president and gave him great honor, was Shimon, the last of the brothers. No one before him, neither Yehuda nor Jonathan held the title of president and neither did his successors. The status of the presidency (athanarchy) was realized, as mentioned, in the days of Shimon (from 141 BC) with the approval of the Syrian-Seleucid government. His successors - Yehuda Aristobulus and Alexander Janai defined themselves as kings and according to the people defined themselves as priests, as a kind of fraud. In their coins, the title King appears in Greek and Cohen in Hebrew.
The position of the presidency is renewed during the transition period between Hellenistic and Roman rule, so that John Hyrcanus II is defined as an atanarchus (president), but his powers were limited.
During the intermediate period of the rule of Herod (Herodas), who was crowned by the Romans as "king-friend and ally of the people and the Roman Senate", and who quite abused the members of the Sanhedrin, it seems that the status and powers of the president, as well as the high priest, were at a low ebb.
However, in the internal-Jewish aspect, the combined category of president and father of the court (since the Sanhedrin also functioned as a legal institution) as the heads of the Sanhedrin began to flourish, and as it happened in the Sage literature called "the pairs", such as Hillel and Shammai, and from then, into In the first century CE, the position of the presidency began to grow stronger, and even Josephus notes this and defines Beit Gamliel as the official presidential institution.
The period of the rebellion - during the Great Rebellion (66 AD onwards), the Presidency debates on the question of joining the rebellion. In the end, this house takes the position, headed by Rabbi Shimon ben Gamaliel the old man. It was a militant position against the Romans and as a result this presidency was marked as "persona non grata" and persecuted by the Romans. Towards the end of the siege of Jerusalem, as is well known, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakhai (=Riv XNUMX) decides to do something - to hand himself over to the Romans, and as a result of this and the convenient circumstances (the persecution of the Presidency) to receive de facto Roman approval to lead Jewish society, and at least to serve On their behalf as an official representative of the Jewish public.
No matter how we look at Ribaz's course, we cannot escape from one conclusion - Ribaz was a usurper under the auspices of the Romans. He rebelled against the traditional presidential house and behaved like a president for all intents and purposes.
During this period, his leadership in the Yavneh Sanhedrin and the halachic rulings he issued under his hand, were seen and seemed to be a significant blow to the presidency.
It is true that later, when the relations between the Jews and the Romans were thawed (more than 20 years after the revolt), Beit Gamliel returned to take his place on the throne of the presidency, but his position was quite shaky and corroded. It is true that he received Roman recognition, and for clear pragmatic reasons, considering an official address of the representative of the Jewish society to the Romans, but the circumstances of the above-mentioned hour severely eroded his status, and since there is no vacuum in nature, members of the Sanhedrin, also known as Tanaim, were drawn into positions of power and political power debates. Sages, or students of sages. These, who took advantage of the president's poor status, became stronger and led the main tone in the Sanhedrin.
Their power was expressed in the fact that most of the rulings and laws were by their name, in their name and in their name. An examination of the Sage literature brings up the following conclusion almost prominently: only a small part of the Sanhedrin's instructions bear the name and seal of the president.
Moreover, due to the strained relationship between the presidency and the sages, President Raban Gamliel asked to remove one of the distinguished sages from membership in the Mossad. The rest of the members stood up and decided to impeach the president. The impeachment of the president is a documented problem in Sage sources. It is not known whether he was removed from all his positions, or only from some of them, and it is possible that the removal was temporary. Anyway. This move expresses, on the one hand, the erosion of the institution of the presidency and, on the other hand, deepened the damage to it.
A fatal blow to the traditional, mythological presidency was delivered by Ben Khosva in his rebellion against the Romans. Hela, somewhat similar to the rebellious course of Ribaz, preceded by the Hasmoneans, crowned himself as president ("Ben Kusba, test Israel" as appears on his coins). Hela was not at all from the presidential dynasty and on the other hand he held the young "prince" - Rabbi Shimon ben Gamaliel - from the presidential family as a hostage ("house arrest" in Beit Ter).
From Shabgar, Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel, who held the presidency, the sages rebelled against him and split his position first into two functions and then into three, by placing next to him in order of importance the "Father of the Court" as the head of the judicial-Sanhedraic system and the "Sage" as the leader of the legislative/prescriptive system in the Sanhedrin.
The collapse of the presidential system and at the same time the Sanhedrin, of course gradually, is reflected in the existence of judicial institutions throughout the province of "Yudea", some of which are Roman, some local-police and some Jewish, but independent of the presidential and Sanhedrin system.
The presidency knew days of glory and glory during the time of Rabbi Shimon ben Gamaliel's successor, Rabbi Yehuda the Hanasi, the favorite of the Romans, who ruled the public with a high hand and whose extravagant assets were for nothing. However, from his successors onwards, the presidency did not return to its previous position, but to the period of depression that preceded the days of Rabbi Yehuda. The fortune of the House of Presidents ran into trouble, when the transition period between Rabbi Yehuda and his successors marked a period of terrible depression in the Roman Empire, as it is known as "the period of anarchy (284-235 CE). Moreover, during this period the star of Babylonian Judaism is stepping up, to such an extent that its leadership overshadows the center of the Land of Israel, in terms of another, fatal blow to the institution of the presidency in the province "Yudaia".
So what did we have?
The institution of presidency was lame in the biblical period, faded away in the Persian period ("Shibat Zion"), faltered in the Hellenistic period, gained a little momentum until the outbreak of the Great Revolt, went through unpleasant vicissitudes in the period after the rebellion, except for the days of Rabbi Yehuda Hanasi.
Against this information, they developed research books from one and textbooks from another and received a modular system of society, albeit enslaved, led by the presidency.
Food for thought!!!
