The early Second Temple period had an undisputed protagonist whose role the sages struggled to downplay — the house of Zadok. Members of this priestly family controlled without interruption the Jerusalem temple up to the eve of the Maccabean revolt. They were the first editors, keepers, and interpreters of that Torah on which the sages would claim to have had exclusive control since its Mosaic inception.

Many centuries before the emergence of the rabbinic movement, the Zadokites had been themselves at the center of a similar revolution that reshaped the past of Israel in order to validate their rise to power. The Zadokite historiography presents the "reconstruction" of the Jerusalem temple after the Babylonian exile as the triumphant restoration of the preexilic order, or, better, of the Sinaitic order. Where ancient sources stress continuity, however, modern scholars see discontinuity and innovation, if not evidence of a coup d’etat.

The priest Joshua, who presided at the dedication of the new temple, was not the lucky scion of a noble dynasty of high priests to regain the position his family had been deprived of for some time. He was the first high priest to come to power in the history of Israel. His authority was not the natural result of an established tradition but the outcome of a ruthless struggle for supremacy that during the Babylonian exile and the early Persian period opposed the house of Zadok to the Davidic monarchy and to the other priestly families of Israel.

The balance of power within the Jewish people was dramatically altered. The returnees imposed their hegemony over the remainees, the peoples of the land and their leaders — the Tobiads of Ammon and the Sanballats of Samaria. With the fall of the last king of Judah, Zerubbabel, the house of David lost any political visibility and the Davidic prophets their religious authority; the priesthood of the Zadokites promptly preempted the monarchic and prophetic prerogatives. It took a much longer time to find a new balance within the priesthood that would enlarge the foundations of the Zadokite power without diminishing their supremacy. The hierarchy of high priests, priests, and levites was the result of struggle and ruthless exclusions, which the Priestly writing barely hides behind the Sinaitic view of a natural genealogical succession of "sons of Levi", "sons of Aaron", and "sons of Phinehas". Tensions gradually resulted in accommodation and compromise in which the majority of priestly groups found stability and mutual advantage.

Zadokite theology offered a framework of stability and order centered around the temple sacrificial system and the notion of personal responsibility and accountability. The Zadokites saw themselves as the faithful keepers of God’s creative order, established through a coherent system of graded purity and maintained under God’s omnipotent and unchallenged control.

In spite of its accomplishment and undeniable authority, however, the Zadokite hegemony was not without its critics. The Samaritan schism had tremendous and lasting consequences for the definition of Jewish identity. The Tobiads, although temporarily alienated, remained a significant political power. The legacy of the prophets never died off. But more important for the future developments of Jewish thought as well as for our search of rabbinic origins is the challenge that two internal movements of opposition posited to the Zadokite order. Enochic Judaism and Sapiential Judaism are the modern names we give to these movements.

The Maccabean revolt sees a further, important step in the gradual evolution of a protorabbinic tradition. The book of Daniel signals the emergence of "a third way" between Enochic and Zadokite Judaism. Daniel freely assumed themes and forms of the Enochic tradition while inserting them in an ideological context that denies them many of their original characteristics and draws them into the sphere of a covenantal theology.

With the Enochic Dreams Visions, Daniel shares the same apocalyptic worldview and accepts the idea that history is condemned to inexorable degeneration and then must have an end and a new beginning — a perspective that was in sharp contrast with the Zadokite idea of order and stability. Daniel, however, opposed the Enochic doctrine of the superhuman origin of evil and strenuously defended the tenets of Zadokite Judaism: the covenant (based on the Mosaic Torah) and the legitimacy of the Second Temple.

The contribution of Daniel was certainly not without consequences for the principles of Zadokite Judaism. The centrality of the covenant was reconfirmed only through courageous choices and painful renunciations by making a sharp distinction between corporate and individual retribution. Humankind preserves its freedom and denies evil any autonomy, yet accepts life in a history condemned to inexorable degeneration ("the four kingdoms"). The idea of the resurrection, on the one hand, solves a problem that had tormented generations from Job to Sirach, by removing God’s judgment from the scrutiny of human experience; on the other hand, it painfully distances the hope of seeing merit compensated and guilt punished from the horizons of human existence. The protests of Job and Jonah and the skepticism of Qoheleth belong to a distant past. From contradiction and scandal, the suffering of the righteous has become the norm of their existence.