Be Careful Who You Call Righteous

There is a class struggle between those with power and those without. To keep the unjust status quo intact, people with power can manipulate those with less power. If ‘history is written by the victors,’ then the history of the poor is a history we have to search for. When we put religion into the mix, we also have to wade through a bunch of bigoted dogma that obscures the truth. As it is today, so it was in first century Palestine. Getting to the bottom of who deserves power can be tricky, but the Good News is always first and foremost for the poor. So let’s start there.

Were Elizabeth and Mary related?

In Luke 1:36, Mary and Elizabeth are called syngenēs (G4773), a compound word combining the prefix syn-, with or same, with genēs, as in genes. They were not sisters, but they were somehow related by blood, by genetics. Some translations render the word “cousin,” and while we can never know for sure it is the most likely since Semitic cultures traced relations upward, not outward. While we Moderns might call the sons of Mary and Elizabeth “second cousins,” that was a foreign concept to first century Jews. But that doesn’t make it false.

What was Jesus’ tribal affiliation?

Given that Mary and Elizabeth are related by blood, that puts them under the same tribe in terms of heritage, but which one? Zechariah, Elizabeth’s husband Zechariah was a rank and file priest, putting him within the tribe of Levi. Luke 1:5 places Zechariah within the Order of Abijah, recipient of the eighth lot cast according to 1 Chronicles 24. That doesn’t tell us which clan Zechariah belonged to, only the order of his service in Herod’s Temple. As his service was not as High Priest, we can assume he was not an Aaronite.

Elizabeth, however, is described in the same verse as being “of the daughters of Aaron,” meaning she carried in her genes a legitimate claim to the High Priesthood. And as with Elizabeth’s genes, so too with Mary’s; not only was her Son, the Christ, a Levite, but a claimant to the High Priesthood as a descendent of Aaron, the first High Priest.

What about the Sadducees?

The High Priesthood was supposed to be an unbroken line of eldest males descended from Aaron himself. But around the time of the Maccabees, the position had been corrupted by political forces. When Herod came to power, not only did he raze Joshua’s Temple to bare soil (see Antiquities Book 15, chapter 11), he also usurped the power of the High Priesthood and made it a political appointment. He and his children kept a stranglehold on the Temple Economy by empowering the political party most loyal to them, a group asserting descent from the High Priest who built the First Temple under the patronage of King Solomon.

In Greek, the language of Josephus and the New Testament, this group is called Saddoukaios (G5423). The name is a messy transliteration of the Hebrew Ṣəḏūqīm, the righteous ones. Sāḏaq (H6663) is a primitive root verb meaning righteous, and Zadok (ṣāḏôq, H6659) is the name of the High Priest under Solomon. You might know them as Sadducees, but by calling themselves Ṣəḏūqīm they were killing two birds within one stones; not only could they pretend to be righteous, they could assume the mantle of the High Priesthood under the guise of Solomon’s overt opulence. They were the original Prosperity Gospellers, living that low church high life so they could reap a privileged life for which they never sowed.