Rosh ha-Shana as the fascist Judaean holiday

Jeff Dunetz proposes the theocratic view of the High Holy Days. Which start tomorrow night.

In Flavius Josephus' Judaism, as he proposed Contra Apionem: "theocracy" is the direct rule of G-d. G-d already wrote the Law for all of us, and instituted an "oral-torah" of, basically, rabbis. The lower-courts are settled. (Islam is quite similar excepting that it allows for a more-direct role of the State; but that is what Josephus and Jeff will not abide.) If we live by G-d's Law, we live under G-d, where the righteous State cannot touch us.

Jeff goes on that this entails a personalised approach to Yom Kippur and the ten days leading up to it. He claims it as an anti-socialist argument. On that much I think some archaeologists would be unsure.

The Torah was, if not composed, at least edited in the context of a State, and then of the Second Temple under the Achaemenids' state. Given that, Yom Kippur was likely a set date for Jubilee. This is the annulment of debts owed to... look, we're talking Antiquity, okay? "The Bank Of Yahud" was the Jerusalem Temple.

I don't know what the Holy Days are like under the Samaritans, who (mostly) share the Torah. That'd be useful to triangulate the following conjecture.

In the later days of the Second Temple, I suspect those days were when the jubilands (if that's a word) presented themselves to the Temple - that is, to their creditors. They had ten days' grace to show up and to pay their dues, certainly practical in the not-very-large precincts of the Achaemenid province (Samaritans had Gerizim). If the debtors didn't pay up - well, either they were deadbeats or they were legitimately destitute.

Some of those debtors would be "forgiven" - meaning, cleansed of their debts. Some prophets taught that the debtors were entitled to be forgiven those debts.

Pace Dunetz, chet might not be the spirit of Torah as Torah intended. The "sins" weren't mistakes, missing the mark in archery. They were debts that were owed: chôb, in Ezekiel's Aramaicised Hebrew.

All this implies that a state with the authority to be socialist, even (or maybe especially) if it usually chooses not to be socialist, is the intent behind the Ten Days.