The Jewish Community

This chapter introduces Jewish approaches to divine guidance. Corinth was a leading community of the Jewish diaspora and maintained close connections with Jews elsewhere, especially in Jerusalem and Rome. There was a variety of “Judaisms” in this period, but their common focus was on the written Torah and the oral tradition of interpretation. God’s guidance is therefore closely linked to the community’s understanding of how God speaks over time through the Hebrew Bible and the oral law. Most Jews did not see the scriptures as having a life independent of the community’s inspired guidance in the present. This allowed for a degree of fluidity and changing interpretation, as witnessed in the Greek Septuagint and the books of mixed canonical status that came to be known as the Apocrypha. Of these, Tobit, Judith, and Susanna give particular insight into Jewish understanding of divine guidance.