Early Rabbinic Judaism: Historical Studies in Religion, Literature and Art

E A R L Y RABBINIC JUDAISM

STUDIES IN JUDAISM IN LATE ANTIQUITY EDITED BY

JACOB NEUSNER

VOLUME THIRTEEN

JACOB NEUSNER

E A R L Y RABBINIC JUDAISM

LEIDEN

E . J . BRILL 1975

EARLY RABBINIC JUDAISM HISTORICAL STUDIES IN RELIGION, LITERATURE AND ART BY

JACOB NEUSNER Professor of Religious Studies Brown University

LEIDEN E . J . BRILL 1975

ISBN

90

04

04256 3

Copyright 1975 by E. J. Brill, Leiden,

Netherlands

All rights reserved^ No part of this book may be reproduced or translated in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, microfiche or any other means without written permission from the publisher PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS

For Daniel Jeremy

Silver

TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface Acknowledgements

ix XIII

PART

ONE

RELIGION I. The Meaning of Oral Torah: With Special Reference to Kelim and Ohalot II. Emergent Rabbinic Judaism in a Time of Crisis: Four Responses to the Destruction of the Second Temple . . III. "Pharisaic-Rabbinic" Judaism: A Clarification .

PART

.

.

3 34 50

TWO

LITERATURE IV. The Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees before 7 0 : The Problem of Oral Transmission

73 .

90

VI. Types and Forms in Ancient Jewish Literature: Some Comparisons

V. The Written Tradition in Pharisaism before 70 .

.

100

PART THREE

ART Glosses on Goodenough's Jewish

Symbols

VII. The Demise of "Normative Judaism": A Review-Essay . V I I I . Notes on Goodenough's Jewish Symbols, I-VIII . I X . Jewish Use of Pagan Symbols after 70 X . Judaism at Dura-Europos X I . Goodenough on Psychology of Religion Index

.

.

139 152 174 188 209 216

PREFACE Rabbinic Judaism came into being between 70 and 170. It took shape in the aftermath of the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 and within less than a century produced the structures which, with much modulation and expansion, persisted to the present day. In the first two parts of this book I examine central problems in the forma­ tion of Rabbinic Judaism, and in the third I deal with the context in which it developed. Since what makes Rabbinic Judaism distinctive is its concept of the Oral Torah, contained within Mishnah-Tosefta, going back to Sinai and equal with the written Torah revealed to Moses "our rabbi," I begin with the most basic question, the phenomenon of Oral Torah. Rather than citing numerous rabbinic sayings on that subject, I prefer to seek evidence in the character of Mishnah-Tosefta itself. Since it is Mishnah-Tosefta which the rabbis claim is Oral Torah, I ask exactly what is that Oral Torah, and, of greatest importance, how does it relate to the written Torah, the other half of the "one whole Torah" of Our Rabbi Moses? Much more work has to be done on MishnahTosefta, as well as on the Tannaitic Midrashim, before we shall have a fair picture of what Oral Torah actually meant to the second century rabbis. I believe, however, that by taking seriously the rabbis' own claim in behalf of Mishnah-Tosefta—that is, in relationship to what they actually have given us—I have reshaped the definition of the problem. I hope, too, that we may now set aside the circumscribed agendum supplied by earlier historians of Judaism: What in Mishnah is "early" or "goes back before 7 0 " ? The real problem is not what in Mishnah is early, but what Mishnah is. The next two papers turn to the period in which Rabbinic Judaism as we now know it began to take shape. In the second essay I describe the several responses to the destruction of the Second Temple produced by various groups within Judaism. In the third I take up the problem of shaping viable definitions for both Pharisaism and Rabbinism and attempt to make use of those definitions in analyzing the character of the traditions attributed to the earliest authorities of Yavneh. Another major problem is presented by the literary traits of the rabbinic sources. It is commonly alleged that when the rabbis spoke

X

PREFACE

of "Oral Torah," they referred, in particular, to the ways in which traditions were formulated and handed on. W e have therefore to ask whether that allegation is found in the rabbinical sayings about the Pharisees before 70. Just as in the opening paper, I prefer to turn aside from sayings about a subject in favor of an inductive inquiry into the data themselves, here too I ask about the evidence of oral formulation and transmission contained within the sources which the rabbis themselves assign (whether rightly or not) to authorities before 70. (By "Pharisees" in this context I mean simply those figures who appear in stories obviously set in the period before the destruction of the Second Temple and those "rabbis" named in the chain of tradition contained in M. Avot Chapter One.) It seems to me we can hardly claim in behalf of the Pharisees before 70 more than the rabbis them­ selves said about them. To be sure, there are numerous sayings in Mishnah-Tosefta and other relatively early compilations which do not have names attached to them, and these too "may go back before 7 0 , " so it is claimed. However, I believe that in my History of the Mishnaic Law of Purities the unattributed sayings and whole pericopae are shown to be sus­ ceptible of assignment to specific strata in the formation of the law. In those tractates on which the work is done, Kelim and Ohalot, I know of not a single unassigned saying which cannot be shown to depend upon an assumption or principle demonstrably later than 70. In the fourth paper, I lay out the problem of oral formulation and oral transmission of traditions in the period before 70 as well as the internal evidence pertinent to the matter of memorization. In the fifth paper, by contrast, I show that the evidence is ambiguous and may well suggest formulation and transmission of traditions in writing. I believe that, having defined what is meant by Oral Torah as repre­ sented in Mishnah, I have in any case given reason to regard the matter of oral formulation and oral transmission as simply beside the main point. The sixth paper then carries forward the form-critical work, unimpeded by false or impertinent issues and assumptions. In the last set of papers, I confront still another problem of method, this time in the interpretation of archaeological evidence for the study of the history of Judaism. The seventh, eighth, and tenth papers are review-essays. The seventh introduces the now-abandoned conception of "Normative Judaism." It is difficult to realize that for fifty years that conception formed a major obstacle in the study of archaeological data, because the literary evidence produced by "Normative," that is,

PREFACE

XI

Rabbinic, Judaism seemed to make no room for what archaeologists had revealed. Today I cannot think of a single important scholar of the history of Judaism who conceives Rabbinic Judaism to have been "normative" in a descriptive, historical sense. T o be sure, relics of discredited conceptions persist. But they do not stand in the path or impede the flow of scholarship. When Erwin Goodenough first began to lay out the archaeological evidence on symbols important in ancient synagogues, however, "Normative Judaism" stood as a massive presence and, I believe, diverted him from more central matters. The eighth paper lays out what I think is important for the study of the history of Judaism in Goodenough's first eight volumes. The ninth is an effort to restate the problem of synagogue art in a way I believe more fruitful than Goodenough's. The tenth is an account of two approaches to the problem of the interpretation of the art of the synagogue at Dura-Europos. In the final paper I suggest areas for further inquiry in the study of Jewish symbols in ancient synagogues. All of these papers were written while Goodenough was alive and in response to his presence. In behalf of none of them do I claim more than to offer some notations in the margins of his great work, glosses from the perspective of the history of Judaism, and, in particular, of Rabbinic Judaism. I wish to thank the editors of the several journals in which these papers originally appeared for permission to reprint them here. I have revised the papers primarily by deleting materials which duplicate what is said elsewhere in this book, secondarily by removing ideas which I no longer hold. The dedication, to Rabbi Daniel Jeremy Silver, is a token of thanks to a loyal and good friend. For many years Dan Silver edited the Journal of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, during which time he made the journal into a forum for the discussion, before a large audience, of scholarly issues and problems, I was able many times to present my ideas under his auspices. At the same time he served as president of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, attempting to build that Foundation into a strong support for Jewish learning in America. As a member of the academic council, I learned to respect his scholarly taste, judgment, and discernment. A scholar himself, he has devoted much effort to make possible the scholarly work of others. I express my appreciation for what he has done for me and for many others. Dr. Charles Berlin, Harvard College Library Judaica Curator,

XII

PREFACE

kindly helped in locating copies of articles of mine no longer in my possession. Professor William Scott Green, University of Rochester, assisted in the selection and organization of the several papers. I thank them both.

J.N.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author thanks the following for permission to reprint his papers: American Jewish Congress for "Judaism in a Time of Crisis," Judaism X X I , 3, 1972, pp. 313-327. © 1972 by American Jewish Congress. University of Chicago Press for " 'Pharisaic-Rabbinic' Judaism, A Clarification." History of Religions X I I , 3, 1973, pp. 250-270. © 1973 by University of Chicago Press. Jewish Chronicle Publications for "The Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees before 70. The Problem of Oral Transmission," The Journal of Jewish Studies X X I I , 1-4, 1971, pp. 1-18. © 1971 by Jewish Chronicle Publications. E. J . Brill for " T h e Written Tradition in Pharisaism before 7 0 , " Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period, IV, 1, 1973. © 1973 by E. J . Brill. University of Chicago Press for "Types and Forms in Ancient Jewish Literature. Some Comparisons," History of Religions X I , 4, 1972, pp. 354-390. © 1972 by University of Chicago Press. American Jewish Congress for "Judaism in Late Antiquity. Reviewessay," Judaism X V , 1966, pp. 230-240. © 1966 by American Jewish Congress. The Rabbinical Assembly for "Notes on Goodenough's Jewish Symbols" Conservative Judaism X V I I , 3-4, 1963, pp. 77-92. © 1963 by The Rabbinical Assembly. University of Chicago Press for "Jewish Use of Pagan Symbols after 7 0 , " Journal of Religion X L I I I , 4, pp. 285-294. © 1966 by University of Chicago Press. University of Chicago Press for " J k i s m t Dura-Europos," History of Religions IV, 1, 1964, pp. 81-102. © 1964 by University of Chicago Press. Review of Religious Research for "Goodenough on Psychology Reli­ gion," Review of Religious Research V I , 1965, pp. 137-142. © 1965 by Review of Religious Research. U(

a

PART ONE RELIGION

CHAPTER O N E

THE MEANING OF ORAL TORAH With Special Reference

to Kelim

and

Ohalot

[Spertus College of Judaica, Chicago, Illinois. Lecture. November 24, 1 9 7 4 ]

The central conception distinguishing Rabbinic Judaism from all other conceptions of Judaism, past and present, is the belief in the myth of Moses as "our rabbi," and the conception that when God— also conceived in the model of the rabbi—revealed the Torah to Moses, he gave Torah in two parts, one in writing, the other as tradition handed on orally. The tradition handed on orally is now contained in the Mishnah and its cognate literature, Tosefta, Babylonian and Pale­ stinian Talmuds, the various Midrashim, and the like. Accordingly, at the center of Rabbinic Judaism are the concept of the dual Torah and the fundamental conviction that the written Torah is not the whole record of revelation. Indeed, one may say that just as the New Testament is represented by Christianity as the completion and fulfill­ ment of the Old Testament, so the Mishnah is understood by Rabbinic Judaism as the other half of Tanakh. Accordingly, from the beginning of modern Jewish scholarship, one crucial problem in the study of the history of Judaism has been the nature and meaning, in particular defined in terms of the origins and development, of Mishnah. In traditional circles, this problem, of course, was readily solved. The contents of the Mishnah constitute Torah shebe al peh, and their history is coextensive with that of Torah shebikhtav. That conception is phrased in historical language, in terms of origin and development, and, when so stated, is hardly compelling. But, as I shall try to show, that conception, when viewed from another angle, is essentially correct and represents a wholly accurate interpretation of the true nature and meaning of oral Torah. The reason that modern Orthodoxy phrased its conception of Torah shebe al peh in historical, rather than theological, terms is that Ortho­ doxy had to respond to the claim, phrased in historical language, of Jewish scholarship beginning in the nineteenth century, that the con­ cept of Torah shebe al peh is to be defined in terms of its beginning c

Q

Q

4

RELIGION

and growth, understood in the light of its origins and changes. Since the Reformers approached the reform of the tradition through historical means, the traditionalists reaffirmed the convictions of tradition in historical language. It was unavoidable. What is it that the Reformers alleged concerning the origins and meaning of Torah shebe al peh? The Reformers, beginning with Zechariah Frankel, saw the oral Torah as historical and contingent, not supernatural and autonomous. Oral Torah was represented as the product of the exegesis of the written Torah. It had no independent existence, no autonomy as a separate corpus of revelation, correlative to Torah shebikhtav. The Mishnah is the end-product of about six centuries of the exegesis of Scripture. Frankel holds that the scribes explained the commandments, then joined their explanation to the written Scriptures, and this, he said, is the crux of the oral law. Only later on were materials organized thematically, rather than exegetically, that is, by the formu­ lation of abstract law, "law which was meant to explain an issue of the Torah without being attached to the text of the Torah." So the beginning of Oral Torah did not lie in remote antiquity—the time of Moses—but in the time of Ezra and the scribes. The Mishnah in no way is to be regarded as an autonomous and separate Torah, but merely as the end of a long period of study and exegesis of the one written Torah of Sinai. The Mishnah serves merely to organize vast quantities of exegetically based laws. Frankel's follower, Jacob Briill, likewise h e l d that the scribes taught their laws in conjunction with biblical verses. First comes legal exegesis—midrash halakhah—and then comes Mishnah. Briill more­ over maintained that there are only a few laws which have no biblical basis, surely a logical inference based upon Frankel's fundamental conception of how Oral Torah came into being. Briill states quite openly, "The correctness of the name Oral Torah is not in that the Holy One told these laws to Moses... as the explanations of the written Torah, and also it is not in that it was prohibited to write such matters down. Oral Torah is the general and common name for all matters of - Torah which are not explained in the written Torah." Oral A includes these elements: " 1 . Explanations of the Written Torah which the Lord told to Moses; 2. those few laws which have no connection to a verse in the Scripture; and 3. the laws which originated z

1

2

3

1 Z . Frankel, Darkhe HaMishnah (Leipzig, 1 8 5 9 ) , p. 5. 2 Ibid., p. 6. Jacob Briill, Mavo HaMisbnah (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1 8 8 5 ) , II, p. 1. 3

THE MEANING O F ORAL TORAH

5

during the time of the prophets and from the days of Ezra onward... and all laws that originated through reason, through exegesis, through an ordinance or a decree..." Accordingly, for Briill, Frankel's continuator, the laws of the Mishnah are founded upon the written Torah. It would carry us far afield to investigate the historical circum­ stances, intellectual influences, and philosophical necessities, which led Frankel, Briill, and their successors to the present day to stress the historical origin of Torah shebe al peh in the period from Ezra to the editing of the Mishnah and through the process of exegesis. Rather, let us test their most fundamental allegation, that Oral Torah essentially is nothing more than the exegesis of written Torah, against the evi­ dence of Mishnah itself. It seems to me that it is only by an inductive inquiry into the actual interrelationships between Mishnah and Script­ ural law that we shall come to a sound picture of what classical, Rabbinic Judaism really understood by Mishnah, that is, by Oral Torah. c

II W e shall focus upon two tractates in Seder Tohorot, Kelim and Ohalot. The reason is that the laws of purities in Scripture are substantial and important. Further, we know that the Pharisees believed those laws were operative in ordinary life, not only in the Temple. Therefore, if any corpus of Mishnaic law is apt to rest upon a con­ siderable heritage of exegesis of the written Scriptures, we have to choose a corpus of law for which Scriptures to begin with provide abundant laws. At the same time, if any corpus of Mishnaic law is apt to derive directly and immediately from the Pharisaic authorities of the period before 70 and to represent what is surely the creation of Pharisaism, it will be the laws of purities, concerning which the Pharisees held distinctive beliefs. My argument is that we can fairly test the twin-concepts, first, that Mishnaic law is generated by the conceptions of Scripture through exegesis, and, second, that Mishnaic law is the product of the period from Ezra to the second century, specifically by examining laws which, we can agree at the outset, relate to major corpera of Scriptural legislation. These laws are quintessentially Pharisaic, that is, reflective of the distinctive convictions of authorities in the period of which Frankel and Briill speak. Our problem is in the history and morphology of ideas. On the one hand, we have to ask, What laws or principles lie at the very foundations of the two tractates under examination? And on the other, what concepts and fundamental ideas are contained within those laws,

6

RELIGION

and how do those concepts and ideas relate to the written Scriptures? W e shall answer these questions by asking, what is the verifiable datum, the absolute, minimum given, underlying the earliest assigned or attributed sayings in a given tractate of Mishnah? I f we can trace the ideas and conceptions of Mishnah from the time of Rabbi back­ ward to Usha, and from the time of the Ushan authorities, for instance, Meir, Judah, Simeon, and Yose, backward to the Yavneh rabbis, for instance, Aqiva, Gamaliel, Eliezer, and Joshua, and if we further can discern that rulings assigned to those earliest named masters rely upon conceptions never under dispute and always taken for granted in all rulings, then I believe we have gone as far back as we are able in the analysis of the history of Mishnaic laws after 70. Since, it is generally assumed, the Houses of Shammai and Hillel come before the destruction of the Second Temple, we may further ask, What are the givens of legal problems and disputes even in the period of the Houses? In stating matters thus, I report the result of my inquiry into the history of the Mishnaic law of purities, which has shown that there is a fairly orderly sequence or progression of legal and conceptual principles, one built upon the last, from the time of the Houses and the earlier authorities of Yavneh up to the time of the Mishnah. One generation does depend upon and make use of the legal con­ ceptions of the previous one. Accordingly, we can trace the history of the Mishnaic law backward to the earliest named authorities and then, with remarkably little speculation, state with some precision the fundamental principles upon which the entire structure of Mishnaic law is built. True, we shall not then know where or how these funda­ mental principles originated. But we can, at the very least, test the allegation that Mishnah—Torah shebe al peh—begins in the exegesis of Torah shebikhtav. At the end I shall further suggest reasons for supposing that that conception is not only wrong historically, but also wrong hermeneutically. That is, it misunderstands the nature of Torah shebe al peh. And I shall further propose that the basic conceptions of Torah shebe al peh are, if anything, prior to those of Torah shebikhtav for the tractates before us. c

c

c

c

If this can be accomplished, then we shall have to reject the entire picture of the history of Torah shebe al peh presently established in the mind of secular Jewish scholarship, and, it will necessarily follow, we shall have to redefine our conception of what the rabbis of the first and second centuries, who gave us the Mishnah, understood as c

THE MEANING OF ORAL TORAH

7

c

Torah shebe al peh. W e shall further have to reopen the question of the autonomy of Oral Torah and reconsider—and reaffirm—the claim of Rabbinic Judaism that it stands upon two autonomous, correlative Torahs. To be sure, the further reformulation of that claim in historical, rather than theological language, is not going to be the task of historians of Judaism of late antiquity. But the probability that the Rabbinic conception of Torah shebe al peh is coextensive in history, and correlative in conception, to Torah shebikhtav will, I believe, have been placed upon firm foundations. c

Ill Let us begin with Kelim and ask, What is the absolute and minimum given of the entire tractate? The pre-history of the Mishnaic law of Kelim begins with the assumption that the status as to uncleanness of utensils outside of the cult does matter, is consequential. That is, extra-cultic utensils have to be kept clean for any purpose whatever. If we have no reason to consider the status of the utensils as to clean­ ness, we also have no cause to begin with to investigate whether they are susceptible to uncleanness or insusceptible to uncleanness. Since only the Pharisees, among those known to us, thought someone who was not a priest had to keep pure outside of the cult (the Essene community at Qumran is a special case), we need not doubt that the fundamental conception of Kelim is part of the primary structure of Pharisaism. The laws of Kelim do not begin before Pharisaism in the formulation given it by lay people pretending to be priests. 4

5

4

All that follows is based upon my History of the Mishnaic Law of Purities (Leiden, 1 9 7 4 ) . I. Kelim. Chapters One through Eleven. II. Kelim. Chapters Twelve through Thirty. III. Kelim. Literary and Historical Problems. IV. Ohalot. Commentary. V. Ohalot. Literary and Historical Problems. In press now is VI. Negaim. Mishnah-Tosefta. VII. Negaim. Sifra is presently in progress, so too VIII. Negaim. Literary and Historical Problems. A preliminary examination of the sections of Sifra relevant to Mishnah-Tosefta Negaim, specifically Parashat Negaim and Parashat Mesora, strongly suggests that the purpose of Sifra is to prove that Mishnah's laws cannot be generated by mere reason, but must depend upon Scripture. That is to say, Sifra seems to be a 'critique' of Mishnaic reason from the viewpoint of Scriptural revelation. None of this suggests that Sifra claims Mishnah's laws to begin with originate in the exegesis of Scripture. Rather, it cites Mishnah's laws and then shows how they are—and must be—based upon Scripture, a very different purpose. Accord­ ingly, the presuppositions of Mishnah cannot be located in Sifra. That, at any rate, seems to be the state of the evidence. On the diverse origins and meanings of the sources of uncleanness, see Baruch A. Levine, In the Presence of the Lord. Aspects of Ritual in Ancient Israel (Leiden, 1 9 7 4 ) , in particular Part Two, Sacrifices of Expiation, and especially pp. 7 7 - 9 1 . 5

8

RELIGION

The one specific concept characteristic of the Mishnaic law of Kelim, beginning to end, is that a utensil which is susceptible to uncleanness is one which is whole, complete, useful—normal. That notion is to be discovered in Scripture. Leviticus 11:33 tells us that to clean an un­ clean utensil, one has to break it, make it useless. Then a utensil which can become unclean is one which is not broken, which is useful. The same exegete can have understood a utensil—a K L Y — t o be defined in the same place, "Every K L Y made of any material" refers to anything at all; "any K L Y used for any purpose" limits the fore­ going to useful objects only. Autonomy and distinctiveness follow in the wake of purpose. A second important early concept is that utensils are regarded as divided into their inside or inner part and their outside or outer part. The first implication of that division is that something which has a 'midst' or an inner part or a receptacle is susceptible to uncleanness, and something which does not—which is flat—is insusceptible. Lev. 11:33 readily generated that concept. To be sure, that Scripture in the first place need not have brought the idea into mind. The import­ ance of a receptacle in containing uncleanness may have derived from the larger notion of uncleanness. I f one conceived uncleanness as a kind of gas of heavy viscosity, which will flow every which way unless it is contained within some receptacle—a utensil or a Tent— but which then will be kept in that one place, then the importance of the receptacle depends not upon Lev. 11:33 but upon a quite sepa­ rate conception of the material qualities of uncleanness. Accordingly, the first major development in the formation of the law of the sus­ ceptibility of domestic utensils stressed two points, usefulness as the definitive criterion of what is a utensil which can be made unclean, and the presence of a receptacle as the requisite for the containment of uncleanness. Other early rules or conceptions cannot be so readily formulated. If we stand back from this first stage and ask what the Written Torah has contributed to the Oral Torah, the question may be simply answered. The Written Torah has said that those things which break the natural rhythm of life are unclean. The Oral Torah has said that those things which, among all objects, serve, or are part of, the normal course of life are susceptible to becoming unclean. The abnormal affects what is normal. The Yavneans raise the further, still fundamental questions on the susceptibility of utensils. These begin with the simple one: At what

THE MEANING O F ORAL TORAH

9

point does a utensil become susceptible to uncleanness? And in regard to a random and insusceptible object, must we process it for use in order to subject it to uncleanness? And if we must, then how much adaptation must be carried out? The principle is that an object must have a specific and distinctive purpose and must be irrevocably pro­ cessed for that particular purpose. These are most basic matters indeed. The Ushans then raise the matter of the processing of various distinctive materials: wood, leather, bone, matting, a tube, gourd, horn, glass, and the like. Thus while the Yavneans do not seem to differentiate among various materials, but treat all objects in a single theory as to the general traits of utensils of any substance, e.g., presence or absence of a receptacle, the Ushans go on to differentiate one sort of material from another, e.g., whether or not the receptacle is made of a substance which lasts permanently. The matter of adaptation is further developed. Among the Ushans, intention is the criterion. In­ tention alone is insufficient to render an object insusceptible; we require some form of permanent and irrevocable adaptation. The Yavnean rulings on the susceptibility of specific materials are of little consequence. Those on the susceptibility of objects come down to a single issue: Does the object have a receptacle? I f it does, it is susceptible, and if it does not, it is insusceptible. A second criterion, for metal objects, is whether they are autonomous or are part of some other object. Do they have a 'name' of their own? Clearly, an object also must function properly. If it is broken, it is clean. Yavneh also produces long lists of specific objects which are or are not susceptible. These lists yield the principles already stated. A utensil to be susceptible must have a receptacle, be fully processed and available for routine use, have a distinctive and permanent charac­ ter. A broken object is useless and clean; a whole and distinctive object is useful and unclean. T o these principles the Ushans add the concept that use is defined in terms of intention or human needs, a refinement of the idea of use by supplying the criterion: to whom must the object be useful? A further refinement concerns the receptacle. W e require a receptacle, but what if it serves only imperfectly? Again, what criterion determines distinctive character, shape, or purpose? Is it function or form? Do we depend upon a formal trait or the use to which the utensil is put? I f an object must serve man, must it serve man all the time? I f we have two materials, how do we know which is primary? Is it that which is fundamental to the function or to form of the utensil? Time and again we observe the mode of thought

10

RELIGION

characteristic of Ushans: to improve, refine, discern complexity and subtlety. Even their innovations are dependent, in the final analysis, upon available conceptions. Much as we may admire the genius of the Ushans, it is a fundamentally derivative genius which is theirs. The Yavneans, both those known to us by name as well as others whose ideas are subsumed into the law as a whole, laid the foundations and set forth the outlines of the law. And when we do know the name of the Yavnean responsible for the most fruitful developments in the law, it is, time and again, Aqiva. The matter of connection for the transmission of uncleanness from one part of an object to another and for the completion of the pro­ cesses of purification is treated at Yavneh in a fairly simple way. Yavneans ( Aqiva) see the important question as whether the mate­ rials of which an object is composed firmly adhere to one another. If they stick together, they are connected for contamination or puri­ fication. The Ushans refine this conception, holding that form (ad­ herence), that is the nature of the material alone, is not decisive. The question is, how do the materials function together? If the connector functions normally in tandem with the primary object, it is connected. Yavneans (Eliezer) also stress that we have to have a permanent, physical connection to produce shared susceptibility. Ushans refine the matter. They lay particular stress on whether the attached object func­ tions along with the primary one, that is, whether the normal func­ tioning of an object is permitted with the attachment. I f not, then we do not regard the attachment as connected. As to dividing utensils into inner and outer parts, the Yavneans are clear that such division is taken for granted. It also seems clear that the Hillelite conception, that the status of the inside of a utensil determines the condition of the whole, is taken for granted in the Yavnean rulings, even though in the period before 70, the question was moot. The Ushan improvement is to distinguish between formal and functional differentiation. The part which carries out an object's primary function is "inner," and that which does not is outer. Or the part which is, in form, on the inside, is inner. Susceptibility comes to an end when an object is broken. The Yavneans do not move beyond the Scriptural principle. But one im­ portant improvement occurs. I f we change the function of an object, we change its status as to susceptibility. The Ushans turn attention to the end of susceptibility of objects made of leather, wood, bone, and other materials. As before, so now they speak not of the traits c

c

11

THE MEANING OF ORAL TORAH

of objects in general but of the qualities of specific materials. The Ushans refine matters in another respect. Once we hold the useless object is clean, the Ushans ask about the case in which the broken object or sherd still works more or less as it did before. I f it does, it is not "useless." So the meaning of "breaking" or damage is refined. W e consider not only a break in form, but whether the break prevents functioning. Ushans also hold that if a utensil can carry out a secondary function even though it cannot perform its original one, it is still susceptible. Other Ushans reject this viewpoint. If an object serves, but not in a normal or comfortable way, it is no longer sus­ ceptible. The Ushans take account of the intention of the maker. Intention alone will not annul the effects of an.action. The change must be marked and irreversible. The Ushans make several highly suggestive but minor refinements as well. They ask whether the completion of process of manufacture can be carried out by an ordinary person, or whether only a skilled craftsman can do it. Second, they ask whether an object is useful only to a poor person or to anyone, poor or rich. They ask about whether one must actually carry out a deed or merely intend to do so before an object becomes insusceptible. And, finally, they ask about changing one object into another sort of object. Sherds and remnants fall, for Yavneans, within the generalization that "breaking is purifying." If a remnant of a utensil works as the whole utensil did, it is still susceptible. How do we know it continues to be functional? Eliezer says the matter is relative to the original use. Then the Ushans reject a fixed measure, following Aqiva who rejects that notion. They offer two criteria, either that of a relative measure, or that of the function of the utensil. Sherds are susceptible when serviceable, or sherds are never susceptible. The Yavneans leave open two issues. How to determine uselessness? And what to do with the useful sherds? As we see, the Ushans split on this second matter, one holding a useful sherd is susceptible, the other denying the sherd is susceptible at all, seeing it as fully broken. In general, the Ushans will do one of the following to materials received from Yavneh: ( 1 ) continue the received principles without alteration or development, but apply them in many new cases; ( 2 ) develop and apply established principles; or ( 3 ) introduce subtleties and refinements. Our firm result is that the laws of Kelim could have begun their development at any point, from the redaction of Leviticus onward, c

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at which someone opened the pertinent Scriptures and decided to apply them to utensils not involved in the cult, part of a larger inten­ tion to keep purity laws outside the Temple. No considerable exegesis was then required to demonstrate that the Torah required pretty much what the authorities before 70 and immediately afterward took at face value. While, as I said, the laws of Kelim could have begun their development any time from the completion of Leviticus to the first century, the greatest probability is that the laws of Kelim began their development shortly before the time of the Houses. It is only then that the traces of a secondary exegetical tradition are to be found, resting on something more complex than the simple and plain meaning of the Scriptures themselves. What was accomplished in the century from 70 to 170 is already clear. The results of the period from ca. 20 to ca. 70 should not seem meagre by contrast, for it was then that the most fundamental and original conception of all took shape, that utensils not in the Temple and not used for the cult to begin with should be subject to uncleanness. That, after all, is what is taken for granted even by the Houses' rulings. And neither Scriptures nor exegesis of Scriptures will have generated such an original and revo­ lutionary conception. The mere passage of time accounts for nothing. I think it likely that some one person or a small group of people effected the most profound development of all, laying the foundations for our tractate, as for much else in the Order of Purities and elsewhere. The fundamental theory of Kelim thus is that what is normal and useful is susceptible to uncleanness, what is abnormal or useless is insusceptible. So susceptibility is to the unusual and abnormal, which are represented by the sources of uncleanness—things which are out of the ordinary and regarded (for whatever reasons) as distasteful. These abnormal things affect their very opposite, things which are commonplace. To put it differently, the negative—the out-of-the ordi­ nary and disharmonious—affects the positive, the whole and complete, but not the negative. Accordingly, for Kelim we may describe the relationship of Torah shebe al peh to Torah shebikhtav as follows: Kelim in Scripture tells us about the negative; Kelim in Mishnah describes the positive. Without Mishnah, the Priestly Code describes only part of reality. Mishnah therefore completes the partial concep­ tions of Leviticus. And, a second major innovation in Kelim, while Scripture speaks of the cult, Mishnah speaks of the world outside the Temple. Scripture addresses itself to the realm of the sacred, Mishnah, to the world and to the secular reality outside of the cult. z

THE

MEANING OF ORAL TORAH

13

Just as Scripture tells what must not affect the cult, so Mishnah tells us what does affect ordinary things.

IV The relationship between Mishnah-treatise Ohalot and Numbers 19:11-21 is completely different from that between Mishnah-treatise Kelim and Leviticus l l : 3 3 f f . Before briefly outlining the history of the laws of Ohalot, let me focus upon what is the crucial issue. What is the conception of a Tent characteristic of Mishnaic law? I f we list the most profound presuppositions of Ohalot, held by the earliest named authorities, we find the following: ( 1 ) a Tent requires egress. This, logically and concommitantly, links to ( 2 ) the sealed tomb. But that presupposition should not obscure the conception upon which these statements, in their turn, depend. Corpse-uncleanness passes through a squared handbreadth of open space. Its passage may be prevented, therefore, by a handbreadth of closed space. The entire tractate of Ohalot is founded upon a single conception, to which we may refer, for the sake of convenience, as the standard measure. And what imposes that "measure" is the trait of corpse-uncleanness. Every­ thing else in one way or another is logically spun out of that single, fundamental trait of that which exudes from the corpse. In no way is that concept related to Scripture. No exegete even tried to find Scriptural foundations for it. And, as we recognize, what is at issue is not merely the measurement of a handbreadth, but all which is expressed by that simple measurement. For what the "handbreadth in breadth, depth, and height" means is that the Scriptural tent, a place where people actually live, has been left far behind us. The Tent as conceived by the Oral Torah, culmina­ ting in Mishnah, is anything but a place in which people dwell. So, while Sifre Num. seems to preserve important exegeses which originate before the earliest laws of Mishnah-Tosefta Ohalot, it contains no hint that that tradition begins with the exegesis of Scripture, the discovery in the Written Torah of the foundations of our tractate. W e have the Talmud's own statement to the same effect: little Scrip­ ture, many laws. What, then, is the conception of Tent laid out in the Oral Torah? The Written Torah speaks of a tent or a house in which people, whole and healthy in body and soul, live. The Oral Torah speaks of a Tent capable of containing that which exudes from the body at the moment of death, a Tent which takes the place of the body. It goes

14

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without saying that the laws of Numbers 19:1 Iff. were not under­ stood in this way by others who make reference to them. The Zadokite Documents ( C D 12:16-18) refer to the uncleanness of a house in which a corpse is found as follows (in the translation of Chaim Rabin, The Zadokite Documents [London, 1 9 5 8 ] , p. 6 2 ) : And all wood and stones and dust which are defiled by the unclean­ ness of a dead human being shall be reckoned like them (i.e., men) for conveying defilement; according to their uncleanness shall he that touches them become unclean [M. Ohalot 1:1-3]. And every utensil or nail or peg in the wall that are with the dead person in the house shall become unclean in the same manner as any working tool [M. Ohalot 16:2]. What we have here is little more than a reprise of the rules of Num­ bers 19:1 Iff. What is in the house with the corpse is made unclean. M. 16.2 will not have been surprised by the rule that a peg in the wall is contaminated. Josephus's reference [Against Apion 2:206) to the uncleanness of the house in which a corpse has lain is routine and casual. What therefore has the Oral Torah contributed? On the surface, as I just said, we have nothing more than a useful definition, a filling out of the Scriptural law with some necessary additional in­ formation. What is this tent, referred to in Num. 19:11? It is simply an enclosed space of a certain dimension. And what is that dimension? A handbreadth of enclosed space. I f this were the primary conceptual contribution of Mishnah, then our notion of the Oral Torah should be stated as follows: The role of Oral Torah—of Mishnah— is to fill in some unimportant gaps in Scriptural law, to supply some needed definitions. But a closer look at the basis of Mishnah's contribution requires a revision of our conception of the Oral Torah. For that squared handbreadth which is at the foundation of everything else is nothing other than a brief and elliptical way of referring to the space through which the contaminating effects of the corpse will make their way. W e observe time and again that "a corpse is assumed to pass through four handbreadths, its contaminating effects through one." When, therefore, we define a Tent as a handbreadth in height, breadth, and depth, what have we said? W e have defined a Tent not as a house or a building in which people can live or even in which a corpse will fit. W e have defined a Tent as the space occupied by the gaseous effusion of the corpse. This self-evidently has nothing to do with the house

THE MEANING OF ORAL TORAH

15

or building which people see and use. It has much, I think, to do with the house or building in which the person has existed, the body. Now to spell this out: when we say a Tent must measure a hand­ breadth, either to prevent uncleanness from entering its enclosed space, or to keep uncleanness within its enclosed space (without regard to the nature of the enclosure—walls or no walls), what is the meaning of such an allegation? What is this Tent to which reference is made in Ohalot? (Even if we substitute house for Tent, when house is used in Ohalot, the referent at some points seems to be burial niche, kokh, as much as a real house.) And what is it that can be contained in the Tent of which Ohalot speaks? The answer is not the body, for a whole body by definition is four times larger than a handbreadth, and there­ fore a body cannot be contained in a Tent. The terms of the answer, moreover, have to include that invisible viscuous gas which is unclean­ ness, because it is everywhere taken for granted that uncleanness cannot penetrate a closed area of a handbreadth or less, on the one hand, or will be prevented from exuding by that same closed area, if it is enclosed by it. Corpse-uncleanness is something which can be contained by a Tent. A Tent is something which can contain or interpose against corpseuncleanness. The one has—in the nature of things—to be defined in terms of the other. Our definition of a Tent is curiously out of phase with the simple meaning of Scripture. The issue of Scripture is drastically revised indeed, when Tent becomes "that which can contain what exudes from a corpse." When, therefore, we define Tent as we do here, and as is taken for granted throughout the Mishnaic laws which depend upon the simple definition before us, we mean something entirely different from what Scripture means. If the conception of death is that when a person dies, something leaves, exudes from, the body, then the Tent serves as the functional equivalent to the body, for it is able to receive and contain that which exudes from the body. The Tent, therefore, takes the place of the body, makes a place for that which, in the body, leaves at the point or moment of death. The Tent is to be understood as a surrogate for the body, restoring the order which has broken with the exit, from the body, of that which exudes from it. Death has released this effusion. The Tent then contains it. W e have avoided naming this thing which "exudes from the corpse at such a viscosity as to pass through an open space of a handbreadth or more, but no less." I see no point in calling

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it the soul and to allege that the "uncleanness" of the corpse is the "soul" which is the "spirit" surviving after death and requiring a new locale. (Simeon b. Gamaliel does refer to corpse-uncleanness as turnout hanefesh, T. to M. 11:1.) Philo seems to have had just such a notion: Further too, those who enter a house in which anyone has died are ordered not to touch anything until they have bathed themselves and also washed the clothes which they were wearing. And all the vessels and articles of furniture, and anything else that happens to be inside, practically everything is held by him to be unclean. For a man's soul is a precious thing, and when it departs to seek another home, all that will be left behind is defiled, deprived as it is of the divine image. For it is the mind of man which has the form of God, being shaped in conformity with the ideal archetype, the Word that is above all. Special Laws 3:206-207 (Trans. F. H. Colson, p. 605) It is only within the present supposition that we can understand how anyone will have asked about the "relationship" between a Tent and a utensil, as in Ohalot Chapter Ten. Why in the world should that question have been troubling, if a tent is pretty much the same as a house, and a utensil is a pot? Surely the difference between a house and a pot is clear: You sit in the one, excrete into the other. But if by Tent we mean, that which can contain the uncleanness exuded by a corpse, something a handbreadth in its breadth, depth, and height, then the difference between such a container and a pot or other utensil indeed is to be stated. It is not going to appear obvious. W e are given two answers. One is that a Tent is large, a utensil is not. That satisfied Ushans, particularly Meir and Judah ( M . Kel. 15:1, 18:1). But Ohalot Chapter Nine gives us another. A large object (here: a hive) which is whole and useful is indeed a utensil. I f the same object is broken, it is no longer a utensil, therefore it can serve as a Tent. That obviously can have meant to no one that the object may serve as a house or a place of dwelling. The conception is quite different. It is this: When broken, the object can contain corpse-uncleanness and will not let it exude. When whole and undamaged, it cannot do so. This conception, moreover, is already before us in the exegetical tradition. A Tent keeps back its uncleanness if it is merely covered, while a utensil has to be tightly sealed. So again we see that by Tent our Mishnah means something very concrete and specific, something to be defined. Yet it also means something quite abstract when meas­ ured against the given and established meaning of tent or house.

THE MEANING O F ORAL TORAH

17

A utensil, whole and serviceable, compresses uncleanness; it does not scatter its affects against its own roof or cover, so to speak. That is why corpse-matter in a pot spurts upward or downward, but not to the sides, while corpse-matter in a Tent spreads upward against the cover of the Tent, will not pass through the roof and upward and cleave perpendicularly. The stereotyped language, "breaks forth upward and downward," vividly expresses the conception. What is the difference between the Tent, which diffuses the corpse-matter's uncleanness against the roof and prevents its passage beyond (or diffuses it so that it will not enter), and the utensil, which does not have that capacity? As we saw, one conception is that the difference is size. The utensil compresses the corpse-matter because it is a small object, and the corpse-matter gathers strength and bursts through the cover, unless it is tightly sealed. The Tent, as I said, diffuses that same power over a wider area, with the stated result, interposition or generalized contamination to the sides, as well as perpendicularly. Yet the other conception—a Tent is a broken utensil—contains its own explanation. The utensil when whole cannot hold back the un­ cleanness. When broken, it can. This seems a strange paradox indeed. What is the meaning of the breakage? It is that the object no longer is susceptible to uncleanness, cannot be affected or acted upon by uncleanness. When the object is a utensil, it itself is subject to the uncleanness, and, as it were, it squeezes out the uncleanness within, causing it to spurt forth upward and downward. When it is not a utensil but a Tent, not subject to uncleanness, it contains that to which it is neutral and not susceptible. In a curious way, as Aqiva claims, the object itself—utensil or Tent—thus plays an active role in the dispersion or containment of the uncleanness. Philo might justly observe that the soul, having left its broken utensil, the corpse, now finds a domicile only in another broken utensil. Let us now turn to the history of Ohalot. The main lines of the history of Ohalot are somewhat confused. The reason is that we have two separate conceptions of what we mean by "tent," the one, a real tent, in which someone can live or die, the other, as I have stressed, a figurative or imaginary "container," a Tent of sufficient size not for a human being but for that which exudes from the human being upon death. Our tractate clearly speaks sometimes of the one, at other times of the other. And sometimes we cannot be certain which sort of Tent is under discussion. c

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The history of Mishnaic rules on the real tent is relatively simple to outline. W e have a few somewhat complex inquiries into the parts, e.g., projections, of such a tent, the divisions of the sides or coverfabric of such a tent, and related matters, along with some slight clari­ fications of what Scripture means by the corpse which contaminates in a tent. The history of the Mishnaic rules on the imaginary Tent and on overshadowing is of course far more difficult. The issue of overshadowing and the Tent occupies the bulk of our tractate. W e have two major notions. First comes the Tent as a real, formal container, with a door and walls. Second we have the Tent as anything with requisite size which overshadows a corpse, the Tent as "that which overshadows" or interposes. The Tent as a formal container, that which can hold what exudes from the corpse upon death, which must be a cubic handbreadth, produces the further question about the relationship between the Tent, with its rules, and the utensil, with its own laws. That this conception arises early in the history of the Mishnaic law is shown by Eliezer's importance in the development of the latter matter. Ushans, moreover, investigate the consequences of the conception of the Tent-as-a-house. Both notions—the Tent as that which overshadows, or interposes against corpse-uncleanness, and the Tent as that which contains corpseuncleanness—begin in a conception wholly alien to Scripture. This idea is that corpse-uncleanness ("the soul" for Philo) is sufficiently thick to pass through an area of a square handbreadth, on the one side, or to be contained by a cover of that same size, on the other. Scripture knows nothing about the space required to contain or to prevent the passage of that effusion. When we leave the realm of the real tent in which real people live and begin to define the matter in terms of the standard measure, the squared or cubic handbreadth, then the tent becomes the Tent, and the pre-history of our tractate commences. W e have abundant evidence that that conception lies far, far earlier than the pericopae attributed to the earliest authorities in our Mishnah-tractate. W e can hardly be surprised by the evidences of the relatively greater antiquity, of the longer pre-history, of Ohalot, as compared to the pre­ history of Kelim. Kelim, after all, cannot have started before someone supposed domestic utensils may be subject to uncleanness, and that uncleanness matters so far as the use of such utensils in the home is concerned. By contrast, corpse-uncleanness was immensely significant

THE MEANING OF ORAL TORAH

19

for the cult, as Num. 19:1 Iff. states explicitly. The laws and con­ ceptions concerning the Tent can have arisen in any group to which uncleanness produced by being overshadowed by a roof over a corpse, or by being in the same house with a corpse, was important. It goes without saying that that sort of uncleanness, important specifically to the priests, will have been subject to much reflection from the promul­ gation of the Priestly Code onward. The relative difference in the depth of the antecedent exegetical materials and of the earlier con­ ceptions, the deep layers of profound thought which seem to lie under­ neath even the earliest Mishnaic rules, are hardly surprising. But the facts we have thus far adduced simply do not lead us beyond that simple observation. Further conjecture or speculation seems without purpose. Domestic utensils mattered only to Pharisees to whom the table at home was like the altar of the cult. Corpse-uncleanness was important to the priesthood. The two tractates therefore probably arise in quite different circumstances. They are linked solely by the concept of uncleanness, a homogenizing notion which links together many quite separate phenomena. In Ohalot we find hardly any development in Scriptural conceptions of sources of uncleanness, rather a refinement of the sole important principle: a corpse contaminates what is with it in the Tent. What the Oral Torah adds is that things which are like a corpse function as does the corpse, not much of an advance. The specification of burial areas and other land which is unclean as is the corpse changes little. These additional sources of uncleanness can come from any source; the process is agglutinative. To this matter the Ushans add one major innovation, consideration of the principle of connection, which, as in regard to connection in Kelim, seems to have been the contribution of Ushans in particular. For Ohalot what is important is that with materials deriving from a corpse, connection applies only when it it natural, not man-made. A further Ushan contribution is the set of distinctions so handsomely constructed in M. 18:2-4, the three kinds of grave-area, together with what one may and may not plant in them and do with their dirt. This construction is what one would expect from Ushans: architectonically brilliant, but in no way original or ground-breaking. The larger Ushan contribution is to introduce secondary issues about who owns a field, the owner's intention, the possibility of creating one grave-area out of another, and the like. The Houses know only "the grave-area," while

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the Ushans tell us about three, a formal progression revealing a deep­ ening of logical tools but no innovative conceptions. The Houses take for granted that what lies outside of the exit of a Tent will be contaminated by the effusion of corpse-uncleanness. This is the foundation of their dispute in M. 7:3. The size of the egress, a handbreadth, is of course taken for granted. The secondary concep­ tion of the contamination effected through the exits clearly is based upon the exegesis of Sifre Num. The Houses assume that conception as well, their only problem being when the exit has to have been created which will channel all the uncleanness through itself and leave the other exits unaffected. Here we have five stages in logic: ( 1 ) the standard measure, ( 2 ) the egress of the standard measure, ( 3 ) the affect upon what is subject to the exit, ( 4 ) the notion that if we are sure the corpse-matter will exude through one exit, other exits are unaffected, and finally ( 5 ) the idea that if we have such a designated exit, it has to have been designated at an appropriate time. Yet if we consider this last item, it hardly is a natural outcome of the earlier ones. After all, at stage four, we have nothing to require us to impose the matter of intention (the issue of stage five) upon the law. And even stage four is problematic. Why should the designation of a single exit have any affect upon the uncleanness? All we know is that it naturally exudes. Why should it naturally also respond to our actions, let alone our intentions or wishes, as to its means of effusion? The primary conception of Ohalot, as I said, the view of a tent as a Tent, that which can contain what exudes or effuses from a corpse, begins the processes by which our tractate took shape. Aqiva's view (M. Ohalot 1:1) that the Tent combines the contaminating effects of all that is in its shadow supplies to the Tent an active role in the spreading of uncleanness, treats the Tent as a positive, transitive force, which, as it were, takes over the effusion and shapes or moulds it (much as the body takes an active role in containing the soul). Perhaps what he has done is penetrate the deepest implication of interpreting tent as Tent. For once tent becomes Tent—the dimension of the standard measure, with all that that implies—then the next stage is to attribute to the Tent a formative force in the process of contamination. That is to say, with Aqiva what becomes important is the meaning of H L as (active) overshadowing, rather than as (passive) Tent. That meaning imposes its own logic. Once something affirmatively acts by overshadowing, that active or transitive force dominates matters. The two names for our tractate, Ohalot and Ahilot, therefore appear c

c

3

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THE MEANING OF ORAL TORAH

in retrospect to contain within themselves the two large, conflicting (or, at least, not wholly harmonious) notions, the one, Tent as a formal entity, the other overshadowing as process or function, or, more simply still, a noun as against a verb, a structure or thing as against a process. That will account for the two conceptions' existing side by side in the tractate, the one built upon the formal structure and traits of a building, with projections, flaps, and so forth, the other formed upon function, the way in which materials, however formed, either interpose against, or permit the transfer of, uncleanness. Along the same lines we may interpret Aqiva's reworking of the inherited dimensions (M. Oh. 16:1-2): movables contaminate through overshadowing if they are a handbreadth in size. That is, after all, what establishes the viability of a material for interposing or permitting the transfer of uncleanness. Movables become unclean whatever their size. That is, they are objects of uncleanness, not agents of contamina­ tion, by virtue of their status as utensils or objects. This is nothing more than the fundamental notion of Kelim. Finally, they serve to bring uncleanness on the person.who carries them if they are as thick as an ox-goad, an intermediate stage, depending upon a mode of un­ cleanness other than Tent. The distinction underlying Aqiva's defini­ tion, therefore, is between carrying and Tent. Contact is subsumed in the second dimension, "bring uncleanness on themselves through contact over any surface whatever." The combining of separate sources of uncleanness, clearly an issue for Yavneans, therefore derives directly from Aqiva's conception of the Tent. The Ushans take up Aqiva's mode of thinking about the Tent as an active force and follow the next issue to its foundation: Do modes of contamination work together, as Aqiva has said sources of contamination may be brought together? But the issue is not logically parallel, not at all. For it is the Tent which combines the several sources of contamination. Whether or not we attribute to the Tent that active force, the result of the argument bears no implications whatever for the combining of separate modes by which contamination is spread. This is parallel formally, but not substantively. The Ushans' conception of the Tent as that which interposes carries within itself the requirement to define what will interpose or diminish the requisite handbreadth, and what will not interpose but permit the passage of uncleanness. The stress of Ohalot Chapter Eight is on the intrinsic traits of specific materials, rather than the quality of the objects. Materials which are permanent may serve as Tents; so too c

c

c

c

c

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those which are insusceptible. The main point of Chapter Eight is insusceptibility of any substance. In Chapter Thirteen our interest also is in the secondary question, the combination of various sources of contamination to produce a contaminating substance. This is a develop­ ment and revision of Aqiva's conception of combining through the affects of the Tent. W e have the combination—but now without consideration of the Tenths active power at all. The matter of projections from a Tent-as-a-house is worked out by Joshua and Eliezer. The primary principle is whether we create an imaginary union between an upper Tent and a lower one. I find it difficult to account for this conception, which does not appear in Mishnah and is introduced only by Tosefta. Perhaps it is read later on into the simple issue of whether a projection is part of a door or window from which it projects or regarded as entirely separate. What is of special interest here is the way in which Yavneans treat the Tent-as-a-house. The dominant tendency of Ushans, by contrast, is to dwell upon problems of Tent-as-overshadowing and Tent-as-interposition (the same thing). But we cannot claim that Tent-as-over­ shadowing begins in Usha and Tent-as-house ends in Yavneh. All we can propose is that the movement from the latter to the former is through Aqivas pivotal conceptions. The Ushan case of M. Oh. 7:2 treats Tent-as-house. I think the purpose is to make two points. First, we distinguish the surfaces of the Tent and treat them as two separate objects, in contrast with one another, for the purposes of uncleanness. Second, we wish to ask about whether a Tent must be a tent in form, or only in function, with Simeon demanding the form of the tent, Yose speaking solely of the function of interposition. In this instance, therefore, Ushans have revised the case in accord with the principle they wish to work out. A further instance of Ushan thought on the Tent-as-house is in M. Oh. 6:3ff., the conception of dividing the walls of a house in terms of the location of the corpse-uncleanness. Here Tent is seen in its most material, concrete, and natural guise, as a real house in which real people live. Or perhaps the use of "house" here is equivalent to "burial niche/" as seems clear in some of the specific discussions, e.g., the house wall created by excavating two "houses," one on either side. If that is so for M. Oh. 6:6, then why should the remainder of the pericope not have in mind the same conception? The Ushans further deal with the problem of the relationship between two Tents and that between the space enclosed by a Tent and the space round about it. c

c

THE MEANING OF ORAL TORAH

23

The Ushans also work out the partitions of a Tent, whether this be a whole house, as in Chapter Fifteen, or a large cabinet, as in Chapter Four. The Ushan capacity for high abstraction is best revealed in the spelling out of the concept of the Tent-as-interposition and the working of the Tent—overshadowing—as the absence of interposition in the problem of the pot and the hatchway (M. 10:1-7). Here all that constitutes a non-"Tent" is the opening of a handbreadth, and all that constitutes "overshadowing" or Tent is the closing of that opening to less than a handbreadth. Tents no longer have walls (to be divided), flaps, entry, or projections. A Tent is now "that which has a covering of a handbreadth and egress of a handbreadth." A Tent has come to mean an autonomous domain signified by adequate egress and that alone. Thus what is striking in the Ushans' contribution is their working out various problems around the theme of the standard measure. This appears, for instance, in their interest in problems of egress, on the one side, and of the establishment of an autonomous domain, on the other. With the Tent so abstract as "something which interposes against, or permits the passage of, uncleanness," little is left of the classic concept of Tent except the standard measure. It is the Ushans, therefore, who take the concept of H L as Tent and show its meaning when it is understood as overshadowing, a major trans­ formation. The relationship between the pot and the Tent (Chapter T e n ) seems to be a problem discerned and solved primarily by Ushans. But the matter begins long before Usha, with a case which is later inter­ preted as a statement of principle. Then that principle generates a whole new set of cases. The case is the Houses', and concerns the capacity for interposition of a pot. Does a clay pot protect all of its contents, as the Hillelites maintain, or only those contents which cannot be purified in a ritual pool, as the Shammaites hold? This is primary to Kelim and secondary to Ohalot. Once we ask about the clay pot in the context of Tents, we have to posit that the pot itself protects the upper room, the notion of the pot's "contents" thus being drastically revised. That, after all, is the only situation relevant to Ohalot in which we can impose the inherited problem. Then we are confronted with the problems of Ohalot, to which the original case was not meant to address itself. W e wonder how the pot, to begin with, functions in relationship to the Tent. This produces the rule 3

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that the pot does so in "conjunction with the walls of the Tent," a classic principle based upon the conception of the Tent-as-a-house. Once we have gone that far, what is left for the Ushans, but the effort to render the whole matter into a set of total abstractions? These begin with the question: When is a pot a pot and when is it a Tent (M. Oh. 9:16)? Clearly, that question begins with the assumption that a tent is a Tent, that is to say, something is a Tent when it measures a handbreadth. So the Ushans revise the earlier case by turning the conception of the Tent-as-a-house into that of the Tentas-that-which-contains-the-standard measure, thus once again: the Tent is that which interposes against what exudes from a corpse or con­ tains it. Here, interestingly, are the three stages with which we work, [ 1 ] Houses, [ 2 ] Yavneh, [ 3 ] Usha: [ 1 ] M. Oh. 5:1-4 + Aqiva; [ 2 ] M. Oh. 5:5-7; [ 3 ] M. Oh. 9:1-14. These correspond to the three major stages in the development of the pot/Tent relationship: ( 1 ) the Houses state their problem; ( 2 ) the Yavneans derive a principle from that problem; and, finally, ( 3 ) the Ushans treat the principle in the most abstract possible framework, thereby revising the problem and supplying it with an entirely new set of illustrations. T o sum­ marize: Once the pot protects its "contents" in the hatchway between a lower and an upper room ( 1 ) , it is going to follow that the pot has conjoined to the hatchway ( 2 ) , and the final stage will be to see the "pot" as some sort of Tent ( 3 ) . c

Eliezer's position ( M . Oh. 6:1-2) about the pot as equivalent to the Tent also stands in midcourse between the Houses and Usha. Had his position, instead of Aqiva's, prevailed, we could not have asked about the relationship between a pot and a Tent. For so far as he was concerned, the one indeed was the equivalent of the other. I f of requisite size, both Tent and pot could either interpose against, or spread, uncleanness. This matter requires that we return to Eliezer's position in M. Kel. 8:1. There Eliezer's position is that if a broken, then patched, hive is hung down into the airspace of an oven, and an insect is in the oven, food in the hive is clean, not affected by the insect in the oven. The sages say it is unclean. Now M. Kel.'s debate formulates Eliezer's reasoning so as to make his position depend upon mere consistency: " I f the hive affords protection in the Tent of a corpse, which is a serious source of contamination, it surely will afford protection in the case of a clay utensil, which is a minor source of contamination." The sages say, "They divide tents and do not divide c

THE MEANING OF ORAL TORAH

25

utensils." This is the view of M. Oh. 6:1-2: Tents and utensils do differ. That reply however suggests the real—and different—basis for Eliezer's position in M. Kel. The utensil is no different from a Tent, both being divisible. In other words, M. Kel. 8:1 repeats the position of Eliezer in M. 6:1. Accordingly M. Kel. 8:1 represents Eliezer's position as a matter of logic, but M. Oh. 6:1 suggests that position is a matter of law. GRA understands Eliezer's position in exactly this way. When the hive is broken, it ceases to constitute a utensil and then can form a Tent. GRA is on firm grounds, for Yohanan b. Nuri in T . Kel. B.Q. 6:3-4 rephrases the matter exactly in terms of Tents and utensils. To which tractate is the matter of Eliezer's opinion on utensils/Tents primary? Clearly it belongs to Ohalot, to which it is integral. Repeating it in Kelim is logical, but requires an explanation of Eliezer's opinion divorced from the facts of the case and allows only the sages to tell us what really is at issue. It goes without saying that the spelling out of issues common to Kelim and Ohalot is prior to the division of materials on common problems into the separate, thematic tractates, and the working out of cases "appropriate" to each of the two tractates follows that division. Way back in the Yavnean period or even before that time will come the grand problems and conceptions of law. These most basic conceptions will then have been applied to cases relevant to the theme and subjectmatter of the several tractates. When we come to the history, within the Mishnaic law, of the prior conception of the standard measure for the Tent, we find no development, but a major, and, to me, ultimately insoluble problem. Whether man or utensils give passage to uncleanness is made to depend upon whether we have the standard measure, the hole sufficient for the passage of corpse-uncleanness. The Houses assume that corpseuncleanness will pass only through a space at least as large as a hand­ breadth. A further assumption ( M . 11:2-3) is that some sort of passage way has to be constructed. The corpse-uncleanness will evaporate up­ ward, not be transferred from one domain to another, unless some sort of enclosed space of a handbreadth is provided, e.g., a reed, below the split in a roof, a handbreadth above the ground. (It is difficult to reject Mishnah Aharonatis observation that the reed is assumed a handbreadth in breadth, although the pericope contains no such suggestion.) The sole argument between the Houses in respect to men or animals is whether they contain an empty space, that is, how we regard the abdomen.

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The imposition of intention upon the standard measure in M. 13:lff., therefore, is exceedingly odd. The attribution to the Houses can be set aside, perhaps, with the claim that here Ushans assign as a datum of the Houses' conceptions what in fact is characteristically an Ushan concern. But what are we to make of Aqiva and Tarfon, who assume the same? I f a hole serves a useful, intended purpose, it will permit the passage of uncleanness whatever the size of the hole. This notion contradicts the (inherited) supposition of the remainder of the tractate. It furthermore has no impact whatever on any other pericope or composite. Everywhere else the standard measure alone prevails. And Aqiva's and Tarfon's assumption, further, is that a hole made by nature will afford passage to uncleanness however small it is, while the one made by man has to be a standard measure. What Tarfon here tells us is that the standard measure applies to holes made by man, but nature's apertures will allow uncleanness to pass whatever their size—a strange distinction indeed. W e are not going to be helped by either authority, Aqiva because here he does not see the hand­ breadth measure as standard, Tarfon because he supplies us with an impossible distinction. This is a most perplexing pericope. Yet there is one possible solution. Judah's view that a tent made by nature is no Tent, carried to its logical end, contradicts the assumption of the Houses, M. Oh. 13:lff., that a hole made by nature or one by man serves equally for the passage of uncleanness. Perhaps Judah's view depends upon the distinction, attributed to the Houses, between the hole made by nature and the one made by man. Or perhaps the con­ struction at M. Oh. 13:lff., even including Tarfon's and Aqiva's item, is wholly Ushan, with its stress on intention, on the one hand, function (of the hole) on the second, and the distinction between man and nature, on the third. These principles are characteristically Ushan. But, alas, that does not mean a pericope which assumes them is eo ipse the creation of an Ushan. So I do not know how to solve this problem. c

c

c

c

V Neither Kelim nor Ohalot begins in the Priestly Code. Neither tractate develops the lines laid out therein. Indeed, the most funda­ mental convictions of both tractates lie wholly outside of Scripture. For Kelim the issue is the susceptibility and insusceptibility to impurity of various non-cultic utensils. For Ohalot the issue is the nature and

THE MEANING OF ORAL TORAH

27

functioning of Tents (and utensils). Scriptural law knows little of either issue. The Mishnaic conception that we must ask about the susceptibility of one object as against that of another is utterly alien to those few references to Scripture which are even relevant to the laws of Kelim. The question, what is a Tent? would be ludicrous to the authority behind Num. 19:11-22, for he takes for granted that a Tent is a tent. Proof of the irrelevance of Scripture to the two Mishnaic tractates is contained in the exegetical compilations which purport to link the Oral Torah to the wholly Written one. Sifra has virtually nothing which, in conception, let alone in articulation, does not depend upon Mishnah-Tosefta as completed compilations. Sifre on Numbers does have exegeses which clearly seem in conception prior to, and in formu­ lation autonomous from, anything in Mishnah. But these accomplish virtually nothing in linking Scripture to the underlying conceptions of the Tent (which are far, far earlier than our tractate's inquiry). And even if, for both tractates, we had considerably richer collections of exegesis, we can hardly claim that many specific laws have been worked out in response to the exegesis (let alone eisegesis) of the Scriptures. The contrary is the case. Perhaps the exegetes took for granted that the bed-rock convictions of the laws also were assumed by the Scriptures. But they still have not shown us where, in Scripture, they locate those laws or principles, and I think the probable explana­ tion is that they could not (and did not care t o ) . That is why they remind us that Ohalot has much law but little Scripture. When, therefore, we refer to Scripture in seeking the beginnings, the pre-Mishnaic history, of Mishnaic law, we commit an error of gross anachronism. To put it very simply: Kelim begins somewhere, but not in Leviticus. At some stage in its early history, however, the sages who formed the law responded to such verses in Leviticus as seemed relevant to it, though the law's datum, its basic assumption, comes before the inquiry into Scripture. The problem of Ohalot, of course, is somewhat different, for the appended tractates, fore and aft, M. Oh. 1:1-3:5, M. Oh. 16:3-18:10, do little more than add some clarifications and explications to what Scripture tells us about corpsecontamination and modes by which corpse-contamination is conveyed. Yet the Tents, meaning the processes of overshadowing, of which Ohalot speaks, bear no relationship whatever to the tent, the real tent, in which a person has died, mentioned by Numbers 19:11, 14-16, etc. W e have, consequently, to address ourselves first to what is every-

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where taken for granted, and only second to what is found pertinent in the Priestly Code to that datum of the law, its primary conception.

VI Implicit in the contents and concept of Oral Torah therefore is the notion of the independence and autonomy of that Oral Torah. If, as I have suggested, the Mishnaic law is separate and autonomous from Scripture, though in its unfolding it is made to interrelate, where it can, to Scripture, then we must wonder whether we have not simply stated in historical language what the ancient rabbis meant in speaking, to begin with, of two Torahs, one in writing, the other transmitted orally. It certainly is a drastic misstatement of the facts to see these two Torahs as interrelated in their beginnings, so far as the pertinent and reciprocally relevant segments of Leviticus and Numbers, Kelim and Ohalot, are concerned. It is an accurate state­ ment of the facts to regard Leviticus and Numbers as one Torah, Kelim and Ohalot as another, separate but correlative, one. The authorities of Mishnah-Tosefta do not derive their laws from Scrip­ tures. On occasion they do twist Scriptures to make them fit precon­ ceived conclusions. The implicit question of the exegetical compilations on the law is, "How do we know X from the Torah," with X the given law or belief, and the problem being to justify it from Scripture, not to find out what Scripture teaches about that subject. I f we started with Scripture and asked what it taught, we should never, never discover even the simplest datum of rabbinic law. When we start with the answers—the rabbinic law—and ask how Scripture can be made to justify that law, the answers are anything but perspicuous. That the authorities of Mishnah-Tosefta understood these facts full well seems strongly implied by their conception of two Torahs, one written, the other oral. Having carefully distinguished Mishnaic from Pentateuchal con­ ceptions in respect to utensils and Tents, Kelim and Ohalot, we now see that there is virtually no fundamental and reciprocal relationship whatever. True, as I said, a few verses in Leviticus prove not only relevant to Kelim but also formative of elements in the basic stratum of laws, and the same seems so for Numbers and Ohalot. But the generative concept, the mythopoeic event or force, from which the Mishnaic tractates emerge is not Scripture, precisely as the rabbis of the second and later centuries claim, but an entirely separate "Torah" —"revelation" in theological language.

THE MEANING O F ORAL TORAH

29

W e have, therefore, to ask about the relationships between the two "Torahs," Scripture and Mishnah, just as did the third-century exegetes who stand behind much of Sifra and Sifre. W e eliminate one theoretical relationship at the outset: the historical and exegetical relationship. Because of their utter disparity, I cannot see how the two Torahs relate in some causal and sequential way, the written one first, which then originates or generates the oral one. And, it follows, exegesis of the Written Torah, the Pentateuch, did not create, and does not stand behind, the fundamental conceptions of the Oral one, the Mishnah, although once those primal conceptions were in being, the Pentateuch obviously would shape their articulation. The sole reciprocal relationship we can describe, therefore, is con­ ceptual, or, in a loose sense of the word, metaphysical. And here the relationship is amazingly close. The two Torahs complement one another, are necessary to one another, balance and complete the con­ ceptions of one another. The world-view of the one invites and in­ stigates the reflections which lay the foundations of the other. Specifically, in the case of Kelim, we noticed that the sources of uncleanness specified in Scripture are things which break the natural and normal course of life, the unusual or the abnormal (or, that which was perceived in remote times of antiquity to be unnatural or ab­ normal). Objects which are abnormal or useless are not affected by these processes. Susceptible to the unusual and abnormal are things which are commonplace, normal, everyday, and useful. The negative, the out-of-the-ordinary and disharmonious, affects the positive, that which is whole and complete. There is a striking correspondence between the priestly conception, in Leviticus, of the sources of un­ cleanness and the Mishnaic conception, in Kelim, of objects susceptible to the uncleanness imparted by those sources. For Ohalot, we may discern parallel correspondences. When some­ one dies, a change affects the economy of nature. The body which has housed the person lies lifeless. Scripture is clear that that body produces "uncleanness," specifying the various ways in which the uncleanness is transferred and the things affected by it. (This imba­ lance specified by Scripture uses the language "uncleanness" to refer to that which has taken place, and we do not have to diverge from that language.) What then happens to the uncleanness released from the body? Where does it go? What is it? The Oral Torah's answer, suggested above, is that that uncleanness now will find a new container, something which will keep and contain

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it as the body has done. What will do so? Something a handbreadth in height, breadth, and depth, with adequate entry (thus: egress) for the effusion of the corpse to find a way in. This new 'house,' the Tent, takes the place of the old, the body, thus restoring the natural economy and order. It may be envisioned as a 'house'/Tent, or it may be seen as something far more abstract, simply as that which will prevent the passage of uncleanness, keeping it in ("bringing the un­ cleanness") or preventing its entry ("interposing against the unclean­ ness"). The two processes, interposition or containment, are one and the same thing. The point of interest of the Oral Torah, therefore, is in righting the imbalance specified by the written one, in explaining how the whole, complete order or economy of reality is to be con­ ceived. The Written Torah tells about the unbalancing, the Oral Torah records the restoration, of the wholeness and completeness, the order and perfect form, of reality. This is so for both Kelim and Ohalot. I therefore affirm the view of Mary Douglas (stated in my Idea of Purity in Ancient Judaism, pp. 138ff.) who sees the total structure of purity laws as a "symbolic system." She says, " A symbolic system consists of rules of behavior, actions and expectations which constitute society itself. The rules which generate and sustain society allow meanings to be realized which otherwise would be undefined and ungraspable... In the case of the Bible, purity and impurity are the dominant contrastive categories leading to holiness. As in any social system, these rules are specifications which draw analogies between states. The cumulative power of the analogies enables one situation to be matched to another, related by equivalence, negation, hierarchy and inclusion.... The purity rules of the Bible... set up the great inclusive categories in which the whole universe is hierarchized and structured. Access to their meaning comes by mapping the same basic set of rules from one context to another." Douglas argues that each set of purity rules matches the next: "In this exercise the classification of animals into clean and unclean, the classification of peoples as pure and common, the contrast of blemished to unblemished in the attributes of sacrificial victim, priest and woman, create in the Bible an entirely consistent set of criteria and values. The table, the marriage bed, and the altar match each others' rules, as do the farmer, the husband and the priest match each others' roles in the total pattern...." Unintentionally and in a very circuitous way I have found the relationship between the conceptions of purity, the respective articula­ tions of the rules, of the Written and the Oral Torahs, to supply an

THE MEANING OF ORAL TORAH

31

apt illustration of Douglas's proposition. She has argued that the purity laws are a set of expressions, in discrete materials, of a single set of cogent and coherent categories, each parallel to the next, all necessary for a complete, whole conception of reality. In much the same way, the two Torahs, Written and Oral, create an entirely cogent and consistent set of conceptions. If we had one without the other, our structure (our "metaphysics") should be partial and incomplete. W e can say what constitutes the incompleteness of the one Torah without the other, just as Douglas can say what constitutes the unclean­ ness of the unclean animals and the cleanness of the clean. Just as she has told us about a whole symbolic system, so we have been able to discern elements in a vast expansion and completion of that same whole symbolic system, though only through discerning what must be a very tiny part of the metaphysic. Yet that is not the whole story. Clearly, the people who stand behind those segments of the metaphysics we discover in Kelim and Ohalot (and expect to see elsewhere) have done a great deal of selection. Why, after all, should a handful of verses in Leviticus have produced so vast a tractate as Kelim? The uncomplicated picture of Numbers 19:1 Iff. has been made to yield the extraordinarily complex laws of Ohalot. So what has been selected is not merely the Scriptural themes. Someone at some point has seen as terribly impor­ tant what Scripture at best alludes to, and then not in a conceptual framework remotely resembling what is before us in Oral Torah. A world-view is contained within the laws of the Oral Torah. As I said, that world-view not only corresponds to, but also complements and completes, the conceptions, such as they are, of the Written Torah. Yet the disproportions, the disequilibrium, are such as to prevent our claiming anything like balance and correspondence. Two massive and all-encompassing conceptions of reality—the one now in the Priestly Code, the other far in the background of Mishnaic law—existed, each with its distinctive areas of emphasis, special ob­ sessions, deep concerns. These are seen by us to be complementary, but this is only after the fact. To begin with, they were not. Why not? Because to the Priestly legislator, what is in the center of things is the cult. Utensils made unclean are not used in the cult. That is nearly the whole story, and a very minor story at that. In like manner, the person made unclean by a corpse cannot enter the cult. The pre­ dicate expressing the ultimate value in both cases is cultic. For the Oral Torah, by contrast, the obsession is not with the cult, which rarely

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occurs explicitly, but with the fact of cleanness or uncleanness itself. Uncleanness affects pots or houses, is contained or released, creeps through windows and doors or is kept out. The laws before us see cleanness and uncleanness not as contingent, dependent upon the cult for their importance, but as important in and of themselves. That does not mean that for the Priestly legislator uncleanness was relative and not absolute, immaterial and not material. T o him it was very real. But its importance—not its reality—depended upon the cult. For the Mishnah, by contrast, at times uncleanness may seem relative and immaterial, e.g., dependent upon a person's intention or conception of usefulness or upon time and circumstance. But uncleanness always is a given, a datum, assumed to affect all of one's affairs, not solely the cult or equivalent cultic activities. The Priestly legislator homo­ genizes all sorts and sources of "uncleanness" within a single term, tum?ah. The Mishnaic legislators differentiate that simple "unclean­ ness," assigning to it a rich vocabulary of highly articulated and definitive words. Working with the same themes, and, I think, working partly with the inherited materials of Scripture, the mind behind Mishnaic law has given us something quite different from those Scriptural materials. What is it? It is the picture of the relevance and importance of uncleanness as it must have existed before the Priestly lawyers took all modes and forms of uncleanness and turned them into a single cultic concern. In Mishnah, as in the time before the Priestly Code, uncleanness is everywhere consequential, not merely in the cult. It is highly different­ iated both as to causes and as to effects. Mishnaic law seems, there­ fore, to carry us back to the situation prevailing before the Priestly reformulation of purity. It not merely complements Scripture but reverses and revises Scripture's basic assumptions. So far as the second and third century rabbis were concerned, both Torahs, written and oral, came down from Sinai as one whole Torah. In a strange way we must now agree that the Oral Torah, contained in Mishnah-Tosefta, not only corresponds to but completes the Written Torah. The Oral Torah returns us to the conceptual world prevailing long before that time, restoring what was reformed by Leviticus. Perhaps a certain logic, inherent in the subject-matter, dictated that there should have to be two Torahs, the written one for the cult, the oral, other, one for the world outside the cult, one for the place of the holy, the other for the realm of the ordinary and profane. I f indeed

THE MEANING OF ORAL TORAH

33

there is such an inherent logic, then it is that which we may conclude —to speak in the language of rabbinic belief—was truly revealed to Moses at Sinai, one whole Torah indeed, completing the sacred with the profane.

CHAPTER T W O

E M E R G E N T RABBINIC JUDAISM I N A T I M E O F CRISIS Four Responses

to the Destruction

[Judaism,

of the Second

Temple

X X I , 3, 1972, pp. 313-327]

The destruction of the second temple marked a major turning in the history of Judaism in late antiquity. The end of the cult of animal sacrifice, which from remote times had supplied a chief means of service of God, placed the worldly modes of divine worship upon a quite new foundation. The loss of the building itself was of consider­ able consequence, for the return to Zion and the rebuilding of the Temple in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E. had long been taken to mean that Israel and God, supposed by prophecy to have been estranged from one another because of idolatry in first-temple-times, had been reconciled. Finally, the devastation of Jerusalem, the locus of cult and Temple piety, intensified the perplexity of the day, for, from ancient times, the city, as much as what took place in its Temple, was holy. The cultic altar, the Temple and the holy city, by August, 70, lay in ruins—a considerable calamity. My purpose is to survey some of the several ways in which individ­ uals and groups of Jews of that day responded to the calamity. I do not propose new interpretations of individual texts or promise to present previously unknown facts, but, rather, hope, by putting to­ gether a number of hitherto unconnected data, to facilitate the com­ parison of the different forms of Judaism of the period.

The Political

Problem 1

What kind of issue faced the Jews after the destruction of the Temple? It was, I contend, a fundamentally social and religious issue, not a matter of government or politics. For most historians of the Jews, it is axiomatic that the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in 70 C.E. marked a decisive political turning-point. For example, current rhetoric uses the year 70 as the date for the end of "Jewish self-government." Precisely what is meant

EMERGENT RABBINIC JUDAISM IN A TIME OF CRISIS

35

by that rhetorical flourish is difficult to determine. I f one means the end of Jewish independent government in Palestine, then that came to an end with the procurators, and, one might say, even with the advent of Herod. So the importance of the date must be located elsewhere. The Jews continued to govern themselves, much as they had in procuratorial times, though through different institutions, long after 70 C.E. Patriarchal government finally ended at the start of the 5 th century—a matter of Byzantine policy—but by that time large numbers of Jews had already left the land, and their institutions of self-government persisted in the countries of their dispersion. Then we must say that the significant event was the destruction of the Temple. But long before 70 the Temple had been rejected by some Jewish groups. Its sanctity, as we shall see, had been arrogated by others. And for large numbers of ordinary Jews outside of Palestine, as well as substantial numbers within, the Temple was a remote and, if holy, unimportant place. For them, piety was fully expressed through synagogue worship. In a very real sense, therefore, for the Christian Jews, who were indifferent to the Temple cult, for the Jews at Qumran, who rejected the Temple, for the Jews of Leontopolis, in Egypt, who had their own Temple, but especially for the masses of diasporan Jews who never saw the Temple to begin with, but served God through synagogue worship alone, the year 70 cannot be said to have marked an important change. The diasporan Jews accommodated themselves to their distance from the Temple by "spiritualizing" and "moralizing" the cult, as with Philo. T o be sure, Philo was appropriately horrified at the thought of the Temple's desecration by Caligula, but I doubt that his religious life would have been greatly affected had the Temple been destroyed in his lifetime. For the large Babylonian Jewish community, we have not much evidence that the situation was any different. They were evi­ dently angered by the Romans' destruction of the Temple, so that Josephus had to address them with an account of events exculpating Rome from guilt for the disaster. But Babylonian Jewry did absolutely nothing before 70 C.E. to support the Palestinians, and, thereafter, are not heard from. The Babylonian and Mesopotamian Jews' great war against Rome, in Trajan's time, was not the result of the Temple's destruction, but, in my opinion, of Trajan's evident plan to rearrange the international trade routes to their disadvantage. Nor does one hear of any support from the diaspora for Bar Kokhba, so apparently no one was ready to help him reestablish the Temple in a new Jerusalem.

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At any rate, the political importance of the events of 70 cannot be taken for granted. It was significant primarily for the religious life of various Palestinian Jewish groups, not to mention the ordinary folk who had made pilgrimages to Jerusalem and could do so no more. W e shall examine four responses to the challenges of the destruction of Jerusalem, the end of the Temple, and the cessation of the cult. These responses had to deal with several crucial social and religious problems, all interrelated. First, how to achieve atonement without the cult? Second, how to explain the disaster of the destruction? Third, how to cope with the new age, to devise a way of life on a new basis entirely? Fourth, how to account for the new social forms consequent upon the collapse of the old social structure? The four responses are of, first, the apocalyptic writers represented in the visions of Baruch and II Ezra; second, the Dead Sea community; third, the Christian church; and finally, the Pharisaic sect. When the apocalyptic visionaries looked backward upon the ruins, they saw a tragic vision. So they emphasized future, supernatural re­ demption, which they believed was soon to come. The Qumranians had met the issues of 70 long before in a manner essentially similar to that of the Christians, Both groups tended to abandon the Temple and its cult and to replace them by means of the new community, on the one hand, and the service or pious rites of the new community, on the other. The Pharisees come somewhere between the first and the second and third groups. They saw the destruction as a calamity, like the apocalyptics, but they also besought the means, in both social forms and religious expression, to provide a new way of atonement and a new form of divine service, to constitute a new, interim Temple, like the Dead Sea sect and the Christians.

The Apocalyptic

Response

Two documents, the Apocalypse of Ezra and the Vision of Baruch, are representative of the apocalyptic state of mind. The compiler of the Ezra apocalypse (II Ezra 3-14), who lived at the end of the first century, looked forward to a day of judgment, when the Messiah would destroy Rome and God would govern the world. But he had to ask, How can the suffering of Israel be reconciled with divine justice? To Israel, God's will had been revealed. But God had not removed the inclination to do evil, so men could not carry out God's will:

EMERGENT RABBINIC JUDAISM IN A TIME OF CRISIS

37

For we and our fathers have passed our lives in ways that bring death... But what is man, that thou art angry with him, or what is a corruptible race, that thou art so bitter against it? ... (Ezra 8:26). Ezra was told that God's ways are inscrutable ( 4 : 1 0 - 1 1 ) , but when he repeated the question, "Why has Israel been given over to the gentiles as a reproach," he was given the answer characteristic of this literature —that a new age was dawning which would shed light on such per­ plexities. Thus, he was told: ... if you are alive, you will see, and if you live long, you will often marvel, because the age is hastening swiftly to its end. For it will not be able to bring the things that have been promised to the righteous in their appointed time, because this age is full of sadness and infir­ mities... (4:10-26). An angel told him the signs of the coming redemption, saying: ... the sun shall suddenly shine forth at night and the moon during the day, blood shall drip from wood, and the stone shall utter its voice, the peoples shall be troubled, and the stars shall fall... (5:4-5). And he was admonished to wait patiently: The righteous therefore can endure difficult circumstances, while hoping for easier ones, but those who have done wickedly have suffered the difficult circumstances, and will not see easier ones (6:55-56). The pseudepigraphic Ezra thus regarded the catastrophe as the fruit of sin, more specifically, the result of man's natural incapacity to do the will of God. He prayed for forgiveness and found hope in the coming transformation of the age and the promise of a new day, when man's heart would be as able, as his mind even then was willing, to do the will of God. The pseudepigraph in the name of Jeremiah's secretary, Baruch, likewise brought promise of coming redemption, but with little prac­ tical advice for the intervening period. The document exhibited three major themes. First, God acted righteously in bringing about the punishment of Israel: Righteousness belongs to the Lord our God, but confusion of face to us and our fathers... (Baruch 2:6). Second, the catastrophe came on account of Israel's sin: Why is it, O Israel ... that you are in the land of your enemies...? You have forsaken the fountain of wisdom. If you had walked in the way of the Lord, you would be dwelling in peace forever (3:10-12).

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Third, as surely as God had punished the people, so certainly would He bring the people home to their land and restore their fortunes. Thus Jerusalem speaks: But I, how can I help you? For He who brought these calamities upon you will deliver you from the hand of your enemies... For I sent you out with sorrow and weeping, but God will give you back to me with joy and gladness forever... (4:17-18, 23). Finally, Baruch advised the people to wait patiently for redemption, saying: My children, endure with patience the wrath that has come upon you from God. Your enemy has overtaken you, but you will soon see their destruction and will tread upon their necks... For just as you purposed to go astray from God, return with tenfold zeal to seek Him. For He who brought these calamities upon you will bring you everlasting joy with your salvation. Take courage, O Jerusalem, for He who named you will comfort you (4:25, 28-30). The saddest words written in these times come in 2 Baruch: Blessed is he who was not born, or he who having been born has died But as for us who live, woe unto us Because we see the afflictions of Zion and what has befallen Jeru­ salem... (10:6-7) You husbandmen, sow not again. And earth, why do you give your harvest fruits? Keep within yourself the sweets of your sustenance. And you, vine, why do you continue to give your wine? For an offering will not again be made therefrom in Zion, Nor will first-fruits again be offered. And do you, O heavens, withhold your dew, And open not the treasuries of rain. And do you, sun, withhold the light of your rays, And you, moon, extinguish the multitude of your light. For why should light rise again Where the light of Zion is darkened? ... (10:9-12) Would that you had ears, O earth, And that you had a heart, O dust, That you might go and announce in Sheol, And say to the dead, "Blessed are you more than we who live." (11:6-7) Yohanan ben Zakkai's student, Joshua, met such people. It was reported that when the Temple was destroyed, ascetics multiplied in Israel, who would neither eat flesh not drink wine. Rabbi Joshua dealt with them thus:

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He said to them, "My children, On what account do you not eat flesh and drink wine?" They said to him, "Shall we eat meat, from which they used to offer a sacrifice on the altar, and now it is no more? And shall we drink wine, which was poured out on the altar, and now it is no more?" He said to them, " I f so, we ought not to eat bread, for there are no meal offerings any more. Perhaps we ought not to drink water, for the water-offerings are not brought anymore." They were silent. He said to them, "My children, come and I shall teach you. Not to mourn at all is impossible, for the evil decree has already come upon us. But to mourn too much is also impossible, for one may not promulgate a decree for the community unless most of the community can endure it... But thus have the sages taught: 'A man plasters his house, but leaves a little piece untouched. A man prepares all the needs of the meal, but leaves out some morsel. A woman prepares all her cosmetics, but leaves off some small item....' " (b. Bava Batra 60b) The response of the visionaries is, thus, essentially negative. All they had to say is that God is just and Israel has sinned, but, in the end of time, there will be redemption. What to do in the meantime? Merely wait. Not much of an answer. The Dead Sea Sect For the Dead Sea community, the destruction of the Temple cult took place long before 70 C.E. By rejecting the Temple and its cult, the Qumran community had had to confront a world without Jerusalem even while the city was still standing. In so stating matters, I am repeating the insight of my sometime colleague. Professor Yigael Yadin, who remarked to me that the spiritual situation of Yavneh, the community formed by the Pharisaic rabbis after the destruction of the Temple in 70, and that of Qumran, are strikingly comparable. Just as the rabbis had to construct—at least for the time being—a Judaism without the Temple cult, so did the Qumran sectarians have to construct a Judaism without the Temple cult. The difference, of course, is that the rabbis merely witnessed the destruction of the city by others, while the Qumran sectarians did not lose the Temple, but rejected it at the outset. The founders of the community were Temple priests, who saw themselves as continuators of the true priestly line, that is, the sons of Saddok. For them the old Temple was, as it were, destroyed in the times of the Maccabees. Its cult was defiled, not by the Romans, but

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by the rise of a high priest from a family other than theirs. They further rejected the calendar followed in Jerusalem. They therefore set out to create a new Temple, until God would come and, through the Messiah in the line of Aaron, would establish the Temple once again. As Bertil Gartner points out (in The Temple and the Com­ munity in Qumran and the New Testament. A Comparative Study in the Temple Symbolism in the Qumran Texts and the New Testa­ ment [Cambridge: At the University Press, 1 9 6 5 ] , p. 1 5 ) , "Once the focus of holiness in Israel had ceased to be the Temple, it was necessary to provide a new focus. This focus was the community, which called itself 'the Holy place' and 'the holy of holies.' " Thus, the Qumran community believed that the presence of God had left Jerusalem and had come to the Dead Sea. The community now con­ stituted the new Temple, just as some elements in early Christianity saw the new Temple in the body of Christ, in the Church, the Christian community. In some measure, this represents a "spiritualization" of the old Temple, for the Temple, as Gartner points out, was the community, and the Temple worship was effected through the com­ munity's study and fulfillment of the Torah. But, as Gartner stresses (p. 1 8 ) , the community was just as much a reality, a presence, as was the Jerusalem Temple; the obedience to the law was no less real than the blood sacrifices. Thus, the Qumranians represent a middle point, between reverence for the old Temple and its cult, in the here and now, and complete indifference to the Temple and cult in favor of the Christians' utter spiritualization of both, represented, for example, in the Letter to the Hebrews. If the old Temple is destroyed, then how will Israel make atone­ ment? The Qumranian answer, Gartner tells us, is that "the life of the community in perfect obedience to the Law is represented as the true sacrifice offered in the new Temple." The community thus takes over the holiness and the functions of the Temple (p. 4 4 ) and, so, is the "only means of maintaining the holiness of Israel and making atonement for sin." When these things come to pass in Israel according to all these laws, it is for the foundation of the holy spirit, for eternal truth, for the atonement of the guilt of sin and misdeeds, and for the well-being of the land by means of the flesh of burnt offerings and the fat of sacri­ fices, that is, the right offerings of the lips as a righteous sweet savour and a perfect way of life as a free-will offering, pleasing to God... (Manual of Discipline 9:3ff.)-

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The response of the Dead Sea sect, therefore, was to reconstruct the Temple and to reinterpret the nature and substance of sacrifice. The community constituted the reconstructed Temple. The life of Torah and obedience to its commandments formed the new sacrifice. The Christian

Community

The study of Judaism in late antiquity comprehends a considerable part of early Christian experience, simply because for a long time in Palestine, as well as in much of the diaspora, the Christian was another kind of Jew and saw himself as such. Moreover, the Christians, whether originally Jewish or otherwise, took over the antecedent holy books and much of the ritual life of Judaism. For our purposes they serve, therefore, as another form of Judaism, one which differed from the rest primarily in regarding the world as having been redeemed through the Word and Cross of Jesus. But one must hasten to stress the com­ plexity of the Christian evidences. Indeed, the response of the Christ­ ians to the destruction of the Temple cannot be simplified and re­ garded as essentially unitary. Because of their faith in the crucified and risen Christ, Christians experienced the end of the old cult and the old Temple before it actually took place, much like the Qumran sectarians. They had to work out the meaning of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, and whether the essays on that central problem were done before or after 70 is of no consequence. The issues of August, 70, confronted Qumranians and Christians for other than narrowly historical reasons; for both the events of that month took place, so to speak, in other than military and political modes. But the effects were much the same. The Christ­ ians, therefore, resemble the Qumranians in having had to face the end of the cult before it actually took place, but they were like the Pharisees in having to confront the actual destruction of the Temple, here and now. Like the Qumranians, the Christian Jews criticized the Jerusalem Temple and its cult. Both groups in common believed that the last days had begun. Both believed that God had come to dwell with them, as he had once dwelled in the Temple (Gartner, p. 1 0 0 ) . The sacrifices of the Temple were replaced, therefore, by the sacrifice of a blameless life and by other spiritual deeds. But the Christians differ on one important point. To them, the final sacrifice had already taken place; the perfect priest had offered up the perfect holocaust, his own body. So, for the Christians, Christ on the cross completed the old sanctity

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and inaugurated the new. This belief took shape in different ways. For Paul, in 1 Cor. 3:16-17, the Church is the new Temple, Christ is the foundation of the "spiritual" building. Ephesians 2:18ff. has Christ as the corner-stone of the new building, the company of Christians constituting the Temple. Lloyd Gaston (in No Stone on Another. Studies in the Significance of the Fall of Jerusalem in the Synoptic Gospels [Leiden: E. J . Brill, 1 9 7 0 ] , pp. 97ff.) has persuasively argued that the Jerusalem Christ­ ians probably did not continue to worship in the Temple. Jesus was fundamentally indifferent to the cult and, for him, Gaston claims (p. 2 4 0 ) , the functions of the old Temple were to be fulfilled in the new Temple which Jesus had come to found. That new Temple was, as at Qumran, the community, not himself alone. Gaston says that the church, from the beginning, was uninvolved in the cult of the Temple. For the Christians long before 70, as much as for those coming later on, the Temple had ceased to exist as a holy place. But, unlike the Qumranian community, the Christian Jews continued to revere Jerusalem as the holy city—an important distinction. The Temple, before 70, served as the focus of Israel's national cult; it was, therefore, to be used as a place of proclamation of the Gospel. But while the early Christians felt a solidarity with Israel the people, with Jerusalem, and with the Temple, to them the cult of the Temple was meaningless, for the forgiveness of sins had taken place once for all through the last sacrifice, which rendered the continuation of the cult a matter of indifference. Perhaps the single most coherent statement of the Christian view of cult comes in Hebrews. Whether or not Hebrews is representative of many Christians or comes as early as 70 is not our concern. What is striking is that the Letter explores the great issues of 70, the issues of cult, Temple, sacrifice, priesthood, atonement, and redemption. Its author takes for granted that the church is the Temple, that Jesus is the builder of the Temple, and that he is also the perfect priest and the final and most unblemished sacrifice. Material sacrifices might suffice for the ceremonial cleansing of an earthly sanctuary, but if sinful men are to approach God in a heavenly sanctuary, a sacrifice different in kind and better in degree is called for ( F . F. Bruce, "Hebrews," Peake's Commentary on the Bible, ed. Matthew Black and H. H. Rowley [London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd., 1 9 6 2 ] , p. 1 0 1 5 ) . It is Jesus who is that perfect sacrifice, who has entered the true, heavenly sanctuary and now represents his people before

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God: "By his death he has consecrated the new covenant together with the heavenly sanctuary itself." Therefore, no further sacrifice—his or others'—is needed. The Pharisees Before

70

W e know very little about the Pharisees before the time of Herod. During Maccabean days, according to Josephus, our sole reliable evi­ dence, they appear as a political party, competing with the Sadducees, another party, for control of the court and government. Afterward, they all but fade out of Josephus's narrative. But the later rabbinical literature fills the gap—with what degree of reliability I do not here wish to say—and tells a great many stories about Pharisaic masters from Shammai and Hillel to the destruction. It also ascribes numerous sayings, particularly on matters of law, both to the masters and to the Houses of Shammai and of Hillel. These circles of disciples seem to have flourished in the first century, down to 70 and beyond. The legal materials attributed by later rabbis to the pre-70 Pharisees are thematically congruent to the stories and sayings about Pharisees in the New Testament Gospels, and I take them to be accurate in sub­ stance, if not in detail, as representations of the main issues of Pharisaic law. After 70, the masters of Yavneh seem to have included a pre­ dominant element of Pharisees, and the post-70 rabbis assuredly regarded themselves as the continuators of Pharisaism. Yohanan ben Zakkai, who first stood at the head of the Yavnean circle, was later on said to have been a disciple of Hillel. More credibly, Gamaliel II, who succeeded Yohanan as head of the Yavnean institution, is regarded as the grandson of Gamaliel, a Pharisee in the council of the Temple who is mentioned in Acts 5:34 in connection with the trial of Paul. In all, therefore, we shall have to regard the Yavnean rabbis as succes­ sors of the pre-70 Pharisees and treat the two as a single sect, or kind, of Judaism. What was the dominant trait of Pharisaism before 70? It was, as depicted both in the rabbinic traditions about the Pharisees and in the Gospels, concern for certain matters of rite, in particular, eating one's meals in a state of ritual purity as if one were a Temple priest, and Carefully giving the required tithes and offerings due to the priest­ hood. The Gospels' agenda on Pharisaism also added fasting, Sabbathobservance, vows and oaths, and the like, but the main point was keeping the ritual purity laws outside of the Temple, where the priests had to observe ritual purity when they carried out the requirements

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of the cult. To be sure, the Gospels also include a fair amount of hostile polemic, some of it rather extreme, but these intra-Judaic matters are not our concern. All one may learn from the accusations, for instance, that the Pharisees were a brood of vipers, morally blind, sinners, and unfaithful, is one fact. Christian Jews and Pharisaic Jews were at odds. The Pharisees, thus, were those Jews who believed that one must keep the purity laws outside of the Temple. Other Jews, following the plain sense of Leviticus, supposed that purity laws were to be kept only in the Temple, where the priests had to enter a state of ritual purity in order to carry out the requirements of the cult, such as animal sacrifice. They also had to eat their Temple food in a state of ritual purity, but lay people did not. T o be sure, everyone who went to the Temple had to be ritually pure, but outside of the Temple the laws of ritual purity were not observed, for it was not required that noncultic activities be conducted in a state of Levitical cleanness. But, as I said, the Pharisees held, to the contrary, that even outside of the Temple, in ones home, one had to follow the laws of ritual, purity in the only circumstance in which they might apply, namely, at the table. They therefore held one must eat his secular food, that is, ordinary, everyday meals, in a state of ritual purity as if one were a Temple priest. The Pharisees thus arrogated to themselves—and to all Jews equally—the status of the Temple priests and did the things which priests must do on account of that status. The table of every Jew in his home was seen to be like the table of the Lord in the Jerusalem Temple. The commandment, "You shall be a kingdom of priests and a holy people," was taken literally. The whole country was holy. The table of every man possessed the same order of sanctity as the table of the cult. But, at this time, only the Pharisees held such a viewpoint, and eating unconsecrated food as if one were a Temple priest at the Lord's table thus was one of the two significations that a Jew was a Pharisee, a sectarian. The other was meticulous tithing. The laws of tithing and related agricultural taboos may have been kept primarily by Pharisees. Here we are not certain. Pharisees clearly regarded keeping the agricultural rules as a chief religious duty. But whether, to what degree, and how other Jews did so, is not clear. Both the agricultural laws and purity rules in the end affected table-fellowship: How and what one may eat. That is, they were "dietary laws." W e see, therefore, that the Dead Sea Sect, the Christian Jews, and the Pharisees all stressed the eating of ritual meals. But while the

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Qumranians and the Christians tended to oppose sacrifice as such, and to prefer to achieve forgiveness of sin through ritual baths and com­ munion meals, the Pharisees before 70 continued to revere the Temple and its cult, and afterward they drew up the laws which would govern the Temple when it would be restored. In the meantime, they held that (b. Berakhot 55a), "As long as the Temple stood, the altar atoned for Israel. But now a man's table atones for him." The Pharisees never opposed the Temple, though they were critical of the priesthood. While it stood, they seem to have accepted the efficacy of the cult for the atonement of sins, and in this regard, as in others, they were more loyal to what they took to be the literal meaning of Scripture. More radical groups moved far beyond that meaning, either through rejecting its continued validity, as in the Christian view, or through taking over the cult through their own commune, as in the Qumran view. While the early Christians gathered for ritual meals, and made them the climax of their group life, the Pharisees apparently did not. What expressed the Pharisees' sense of self-awareness as a group apparently was not a similarly intense, ritual meal. Eating was not a ritualized occasion, even though the Pharisees had liturgies to be said at the meal. No communion-ceremony, no rites centered on meals, no specification of meals on holy occasions, characterize Pharisaic table-fellowship. Pharisaic table-fellowship thus was a quite ordinary, everyday affair. The various fellowship-rules had to be observed in a wholly routine circumstance—daily, at every meal, without accompanying rites, other than a benediction for the food. Unlike the Pharisees, the Christians' myths and rituals rendered table-fellowship into a much heightened spiritual experience: Do these things in memory of me. The Pharisees told no stories about purity laws, except (in later times) to account for their historical development (e.g. who had decreed which purity-rule?). When they came to table, so far as we know, they told no stories about how Moses had done what they now do, and they did not "do these things in memory of Moses our rabbi." In the Dead Sea commune, table-fellowship was open upon much the same basis as among the Pharisees: appropriate undertaking to keep ritual purity and to consume properly grown and tithed foods. As we know it, the Qumranian meal was liturgically not much different from the ordinary Pharisaic gathering. The rites pertained to, and derived from, the eating of food and that alone. The Dead Sea sect's meal would have had some similarity to the 1

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Christian Eucharist if it had included some sort of narrative about the Temple cult, stories about how the sect replicated the holy Temple and ate at the table of God, how the founder of the community had trans­ ferred the Temple's holiness out of unclean Jerusalem, how the present officiants stood in the place of the High Priest of Jerusalem, how the occasion called to mind some holy event of the past, and comparable tales. But we have no allusions to the inclusion of such mythic elements in the enactment of the community meal. Josephus's Essenes have a priest pray before the meal and afterward: "At the beginning and the end they do honor to God as the provider of life." This seems to me no different from the Pharisaic table-rite. The primary difference is the prominence of priests in the life of the group. The table-fellowship of Qumranians and Pharisees thus exhibits less of a ritual embodiment of sacred myth than does that of the early Christians. On the other hand, both Christians and Pharisees lived among ordi­ nary folk, while the Qumranians did not. In this respect the common­ place character of Pharisaic table-fellowship is all the more striking. The sect ordinarily did not gather as a group at all, but in the home. All meals required ritual purity. Pharisaic table-fellowship took place in the same circumstances as did all non-ritual table-fellowship: com­ mon folk ate everyday meals in an everyday way, among ordinary neighbors who were not members of the sect. They were engaged in workaday pursuits like everyone else. The setting for law-observance was the field and the kitchen, the bed and the street. The occasion for observance was set every time a person picked up a common nail, which might be unclean, or purchased a se'ah of wheat, which had to be tithed—by himself, without priests to bless his deeds or sages to instruct him. Keeping the Pharisaic rule required neither an occasional exceptional rite at, but external to, the meal, as in the Christian sect, nor taking up residence in a monastic commune, as in the Qumranian sect in Judaism. Instead, it imposed the perpetual ritualization of daily life, on the one side, and the constant, inner awareness of the com­ munal order of being, on the other. The Pharisees after 70: The Rabbinic

Reformulation

The response of the Pharisees to the destruction of the Temple is known to us only from rabbinic materials, which underwent revisions over many centuries. A story about Yohanan ben Zakkai and his disciple, Joshua ben Hananiah, tells us in a few words the main outline of the Pharisaic-rabbinic view of the destruction:

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Once, as Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai was coming forth from Jeru­ salem, Rabbi Joshua followed after him and beheld the Temple in ruins. "Woe unto us," Rabbi Joshua cried, "that this, the place where the iniquities of Israel were atoned for, is laid waste!" "My son," Rabban Yohanan said to him, "be not grieved. We have another atonement as effective as this. And what is it? It is acts of lovingkindness, as it is said, For I desire mercy and not sacrifice' [Hos. 6:6] (Avot de Rabbi Natan, Chap. 6 ) . How shall we relate the arcane rules about ritual purity to the public calamity faced by the heirs of the Pharisees at Yavneh? What connec­ tion between the ritual purity of the "kingdom of priests" and the atonement of sins in the Temple? T o Yohanan ben Zakkai, preserving the Temple was not an end in itself. He taught that there was another means of reconciliation between God and Israel, so that the Temple and its cult were not decisive. What really counted in the life of the Jewish people? Torah, piety ( W e should add, Torah as taught by the Pharisees and, later on, by the rabbis, their continuators.) For the zealots and messianists of the day, the answer was power, politics, the right to live under one's own rulers. What was the will of God? It was doing deeds of lovingkindness: "I desire mercy, not sacrifice" (Hos. 6:6) meant to Yohanan, " W e have a means of atonement as effective as the Temple, and it is doing deeds of lovingkindness." Just as willingly as men would contribute bricks and mortar for the rebuilding of a sanctuary, so they ought to contribute renunciation, self-sacrifice, love, for the building of a sacred community. Earlier, Pharisaism had held that the Temple should be everywhere, even, in the home and the hearth. Now Yohanan taught that sacrifice greater than the Temple's must characterize the life of the community. I f one were to do something for God in a time when the Temple was no more, the offering must be the gift of selfless compassion. The holy altar must be the streets and marketplaces of the world, as, formerly, the purity of the Temple had to be observed in the streets and marketplaces of Jerusalem. In a sense, therefore, by making the laws of ritual purity incumbent upon the ordinary Jew, the Pharisees already had effectively limited the importance of the Temple and its cult. The earlier history of the Pharisaic sect thus had laid the groundwork for Yohanan ben Zakkai's response to Joshua ben Hananiah. It was a natural conclusion for one nurtured in a move­ ment based upon the priesthood of all Israel. Why did Yohanan ben Zakkai come to such an interpretation of the

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meaning of the life of Israel, the Jewish people? Because he was a Pharisee, and the Pharisaic party had long ago reached that same con­ clusion. Though it had begun as a political party, not much different from other such groups in Maccabean times, toward the end of the Maccabean period the party faced the choice of remaining in politics and suffering annihilation, or giving up politics and continuing in a very different form. On the surface, the Pharisees' survival, the achieve­ ment of Hillel and his response to the challenge of Herod, tells us that the choice had been made to abandon politics. But that is not the whole answer. The Pharisees determined to concentrate on what they believed was really important in politics, and that was the fulfillment of all the laws of the Torah, even ritual tithing, and the elevation of the life of the people, even at home and in the streets, to what the Torah had com­ manded: You shall be a kingdom of priests and a holy people. A king­ dom in which everyone was a priest, a people all of whom were holy—a community which would live as if it were always in the Temple sanc­ tuary of Jerusalem. Therefore, the purity laws, so complicated and inconvenient, were extended to the life of every Jew in his own home. The Temple altar in Jerusalem would be replicated at the table of all Israel. To be sure, only a small minority of the Jewish people, to begin with, obeyed the law as taught by the Pharisaic party. There­ fore, the group had to reconsider the importance of political life, through which the law might everywhere be effected. The party which had abandoned politics for piety now had to recover access to the instruments of power for the sake of piety. It was the way toward realization of what was essentially not a political aspiration. The

Outcome

Of the four responses briefly outlined here, only the ones associated with the Christians and the Pharisees produced important historical consequences. The visionaries who lamented the past and hoped for near redemption enjoyed considerable success in sharing their vision with other Jews. The result was the Bar Kokhba War, but no redemp­ tion followed; rather, severe repression for a time. Then the Pharisees' continuators, the rabbis led by the patriarch, gained complete control within the Jewish community of Palestine, and their program of attempting to make all Jews into priests, which to them meant into rabbis, was gradually effected. The Qumran community did not survive the war, but its viewpoint

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seems to have persisted within the complex of Christian churches. For the Christians, the events of August, 70, were not difficult to explain. Jesus had earlier predicted that the Temple would be destroyed; the Jews' own words had convicted them, as Matthew, writing in the aftermath of 70, claims, "Our blood be upon our own heads." But the new Temple and the new cult would go forward. The picture is complex, involving Jesus, become Christ, or the Church, embodying the new Temple, but the outcome is clear. The events of 70 served to confirm the new faith, and the faith itself supplied a new set of images to take over and exploit the symbols of the old cult. The destruction of the Temple, Jerusalem, and the cult therefore marked a considerable transformation in the antecedent symbolic struc­ tures of Judaism. The ancient symbols were emptied of their old mean­ ings and filled with new ones; they continued formally unchanged but substantively in no way the same.

CHAPTER THREE "PHARISAIC-RABBINIC" JUDAISM A

Clarification

{History of Religions, X I I , 3, 1973, pp. 250-270}

It is customary to refer to the Judaism represented by talmudic and cognate literature as "Pharisaic-rabbinic" or sometimes merely as "Pharisaic." Little effort has gone into defining, let alone different­ iating, Pharisaism and rabbinism. The reason is that the rabbinic Heilsgeschichte, which shapes and predominates in virtually every account of the history of Judaism in late antiquity ("the Talmudic period"), regards the rabbis known after the destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70 as the heirs and continuators of the Pharisees of the period before that time. This unilinear view of a unitary tradi­ tion simply represents a modern continuation, in secular garb, of the rabbinic history of the oral Torah. That history holds that along with the written Torah (Pentateuch), an oral Torah was revealed at Sinai to Moses, passed on from him to Joshua, then to the Judges, the Prophets, the Men of the Great Assembly, the scribes, the "sages" of Second Temple Pharisaism, and finally, to the rabbis, who wrote it all down in the Mishnah, the Tosefta, the two Gemarot, Babylonian and Palestinian, and related compilations—all containing the revelation of Sinai. Since the talmudic rabbis saw all their predecessors as rabbis, beginning with Moses "our rabbi," it was natural to regard their immediate antecedents as no different from themselves. The oral Torah was seen to constitute a single, continuous tradition, and its history would produce "Pharisaic-rabbinic" as readily as "Biblical-talmudic" Judaism. At what point, however, does a Pharisee of pre-70 times turn into a rabbi of the post-70 period? No one supposes that on the tenth of Av, the day after the Temple's destruction in the year 70, Yohanan ben Zakkai awoke and said, "Today I am a Rabbi." Then, just how is one to understand the movement out of Pharisaism and into rabbinism or, more accurately the relationships between them, if more than the post70 adoption of the title "rabbi" is at issue? To answer these questions, we shall consider two important figures of the earliest stratum of the

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Yavnean period, circa A.D. 70-125: Yohanan b. Zakkai, supposed to have founded the institution at Yavneh and to have begun the custom of bestowing the title "rabbi" on disciples; and Eliezer b. Hyrcanus, the first important master of the Yavnean period. Eliezer ben Hyrcanus as a Pharisee Pre-70 Pharisaism is clearly defined by the Gospels' Pharisaic pericopes and the rabbinic traditions about the Pharisees. Both stress the same concerns: first, eating secular food in a state of ritual purity; second, careful tithing and giving of agricultural offerings to the priests, and obedience to the biblical rules and taboos concerning raising crops; third, to a lesser degree, some special laws on keeping the Sabbaths and festivals; and, finally, still less commonly, rules on family affairs. Therefore, late Pharisaism—that which flourished in the last decades of the Temple's existence and which is revealed in the Gospels and in rabbinic traditions—is a cult-centered piety, which proposes to replicate the cult in the home, and thus to effect the Temple's purity laws at the table of the ordinary Jew, and quite literally to turn Israel into a "kingdom of priests and a holy nation." The symbolic structure of Pharisaism depends upon that of the Temple; the ideal is the same as that of the priesthood. The Pharisee was a layman pretending to be priest and making his private home into a model of the Temple. The laws about purity and careful tithing were dietary laws, governing what and how a person should eat. If a person kept those laws, then, when he ate at home, he was like God at the Temple's altar table, on which was arrayed food similarly guarded from impurity and produced in accord with Levitical revela­ tion. By contrast, the rabbi was like God because he studied the Torah on earth, as did God and Moses "our rabbi" in the heavenly academy. The best corpus of traditions supplied by the post-70 rabbis concerns the Houses, or disciples, of Shammai and Hillel, circa A.D. 10-70, approximately sixty-five of whose pericopes are attested by early Yavnean comments or continuations or other discussions indicating knowledge of pericopes in pretty much their present state. When we compare the pericopes of Eliezer, attested at Yavneh, with those of the Houses, evidently deriving from the same period, we find that Eliezer stands well within the framework of pre-70 Pharisaism. The 1

1

Jacob Neusner, The Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees before 70, vols. 1-3 (Leiden, 1 9 7 1 ) .

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subject matter of Eliezer's rulings attested at Yavneh covers much the same ground as the Houses' rulings but introduces new issues as well. The two bodies of material compare as follows ("same" = Eliezer rules on or in the same pericope): Houses

Eliezer

A. Temple Law, Jerusalem, Pilgrimage, and Priestly Dues 1. Burning unclean with clean meat 2. Laying on of hands 3. Bitter-water ritual 4. Israelites eat first-born animals with priests 5. Children make pilgrimage 6. 7. 8. 9-10. 11.

12.

13.

1. Same 2. 3. ... (But Eliezer rules on other aspects of the ritual; M. Sot. 1:1) 4. 5.

6. Cattle given to the Temple are not sacrificed but sold 7. Liability for lost redemption lamb set aside for firstling of an ass 8. One may not dedicate all one's pro­ perty to Temple 9-10. Preparing sin-offering water, two rulings 11. Whole-offering parts confused with sin-offering parts are burned to­ gether 12. Blood from blemished offerings mixed with blood from unblemish­ ed offerings is sprinkled 13. Wrong intention renders meal offer­ ing invalid B. Agricultural Tithes, Offerings, and Taboos

1. Unclean heave offering mixed with clean (Eliezer b. Hyrcanus) 2. Giving heave offering of grapes, and the remainder is eventually made into raisins (Eliezer b. Hyrcanus) 3. Removing old produce at Nisan (Joshua b. Hananiah) 4. Pe°ah from olives, carobs—how given (Gamaliel II) 5. Forgotten-sheaf rules (Eliezer b. Azariah; Joshua b. Hananiah) 6. Seventh-year-produce rules (Tarfon) 7. Second-tithe money in Jerusalem (Tarfon; Ben Zoma; Ben Azzai; Aqiba) 8. Heave-offering vetches ( Aqiba) 9. Fleece offering ( Aqiba) 10. Date of New Year for trees ( Aqiba)

1. Same 2. Same

3. 4. 5.

c

6. 7.

c

c

c

c

c

8. 9. 10.

53

"PHARISAIC-RABBINIC'' JUDAISM 11. Olive presses in walls of Jerusalem (CAqiba) 12. Fourth-year-fruit rules ( Aqiba) 13. Mixed seeds in vineyard ( Aqiba) 14. Heave offering from black and white figs (Ilai) 15. 16. c

c

11. 12. 13. 14. Same 15. Clean heave offering for unclean 16. Cakes of thank offering of Nazirite exempt from dough offering 17. Orlah laws abroad 18. Status of etrog 19. Seventh-year oil may be used for anointing hide 20. Dough offering on 15 Nisan 21. First-fruits in garden are guarded, therefore liable 22. Fruit from abroad is free of liability 23. Making olives and grapes into oil and wine c

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

... (but cf. M. Shev. 4:2B)

22. 23.

C. Sabbath Law c

1.

c

2.

1. Eruv in public domain (Hananiah, nephew of Joshua) 2. Eruv for separate kinds of food (Hananiah, nephew of Joshua) 3. Eruv for alley (Eliezer b. Hyrcanus + Aqiba + disciple of Ishmael) 4. Gentile/Sadducee in alley re eruv (Gamaliel II = Meir + Judah) 5. W o r k started before Sabbath' (CAqiba) 6. 7. ... (but see no. 4 ) c

3. Same

c

c

4.

... (but see no. 7 )

5. c

6. No eruv if field has wall 7. Failure of partner to participate in eruv does not restrict others 8. Woman may wear tiara on Sabbath 9. Acquiring a share in the eruv c

8. 9.

c

D. Festival Law 1. How much does one drink to be liable on the Day of Atonement (Eliezer b. Hyrcanus) ? 2. Large cakes re Passover (Gamaliel II) 3. Pick pulse on festival (Gamaliel II) 4. Other festival rules (Gamaliel II) 5. Size of Sukkah (Eleazar b. R. §addoq) 6. 7-10. 11. ... (Eliezer attests Houses' dispute: M. Bes. 1:1) 12.

1. Same

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Hart's tongue on Passover 7-10. Rulings on rite of Atonement 11. Egg born on festival 12. New millstone on festival week

54

RELIGION

E. Liturgy 1. Order of blessing: oil versus myrtle (Gamaliel II) 2. Proper position of saying Shema (Eleazar b. Azariah; Ishmael; Tar­ fon) 3. How far recite Hallel at Seder (Tar­ fon; Aqiba) 4. Tefillin in privy ( Aqiba) 5. Where shake lulav ( Aqiba, re Gamaliel; Joshua) 6. Limit re shit (Jonathan b. Batyra) 7. Circumcision of child born circum­ cised (Eleazar b. R. Saddoq) 8. c

1. 2.

c

3.

c

c

c

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. New Year liturgy (Lev. 23:24)

F. Uncleanness Laws 1. Quarter qab of bones in "tent" (Joshua b. Hananiah) 2. Woman kneading in "tent" ( Aqiba; Joshua b. Hananiah) 3. If man shook tree—preparation for uncleanness by reason of water (Joshua b. Hananiah) 4. Uncleanness of liquids—Yose b. Yo ezer (Eliezer b. Hyrcanus + Aqiba) 5. Uncleanness of scroll wrappers (Gamaliel II) 6. When do olives receive uncleanness in harvest (Gamaliel II) 7. Mustard strainer (Eleazar b. R. Saddoq) 8. Itch inside itch (cleanness rite) ( Aqiba) 9. Insusceptibility of sheet ( Aqiba) 10. Searching grave area ( Aqiba) 11. Issue of semen in third day ( Aqiba) 12. Uncleanness of fish Aqiba) 13. 14. c

1. 2. 3.

4. Same

c

c

5. 6. 7. 8.

c

c

c

c

c

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. Partitions in "tent" 14. Shoe on the last is incomplete, there­ fore clean 15. Even though door is open, house is clean—re "tents" 16. Jars tightly covered with bit of corpse inside 17. Dirt from grave area 18. Leprosy sign deliberately removed 19. Ritual status of honeycomb

G. Civil Law, Torts, and Damages; Criminal Law c

1. Damaged bailment ( Aqiba) 2.

1. 2. Woman hanged ±

naked

"PHARISAIC-RABBINIC'' JUDAISM

55

H. FAMILY LAW AND INHERITANCES 1. VOW NOT TO HAVE INTERCOURSE (ELIEZER) 2. HUSBAND'S INHERITANCE WHEN WIFE DIES AS A MINOR (ELIEZER B. HYR­ CANUS) 3. SIGNS OF ADULTHOOD (ELIEZER B. HYRCANUS) 4. LEVIRATE RULES RE BROTHERS MARRIED TO SISTERS (ELIEZER B. HYRCANUS; ELEAZAR B. AZARIAH; ABBA SAUL) 5. LEVIRATE RULES RE CO-WIVES (TARFON; ELEAZAR B. AZARIAH; AQIBA; JOSHUA B. HANANIAH) 6. TEST RAGS FOR EACH ACT OF INTERCOURSE (JOSHUA B. HANANIAH) 7. SANCTIFIES PROPERTY AND INTENDS TO DIVORCE WIFE (JOSHUA B. HANANIAH + ELIEZER B. HYRCANUS) 8. WIFE REMARRIES ON TESTIMONY OF ONE WITNESS ( AQIBA; GAMALIEL II) 9. GROUNDS FOR DIVORCE ( AQIBA) 10. DIVIDING ESTATE WHERE ORDER OF DEATHS IS UNCLEAR ( AQIBA) LI. BLOOD OF WOMAN WHO HAS GIVEN BIRTH AND NOT IMMERSED (ELIEZER) [2. ... (BUT SEE NO. 2 ) 3. [4. ... (BUT SEE NO. 9 )

1. SAME (MAY NOT BE OUR ELIEZER) 2. SAME

3. SAME

4. SAME

C

C

C

5.

6. 7. SAME

8.

C

C

9. 10.

C

11. SAME 12. 13. 14. 15.

DEED OF A FEMALE MINOR IS NULL LEVIR REFUSED BY MINOR CONDITIONAL DIVORCE VALID MINOR WHO HAS EXERCISED RIGHT OF REFUSED STILL CONTROLS USUFRUCT OF melog ( = NO. 12)

I. MISCELLANY 1. TABOO AGAINST DRINKING GENTILE WINE (GAMALIEL II) 2. ELIEZER B. HYRCANUS RE OVERTURNING COUCH BEFORE FESTIVAL (B. M.Q. 20A) IS GIVEN BY ELEAZAR B. R. SIMEON AS HOUSES DISPUTE (TOS. M.Q. 2:9)

1. 2. SAME

ELIEZER ALONE 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

RELEASING VOWS MADE EASY GAMBLER MAY NOT TESTIFY SAMARITAN BREAD PERMITTED TO ISRAELITES REPENT BEFORE DEATH MANY SINFUL ACTS OF A SINGLE TYPE ARE PUNISHED BY AN EQUIVALENT NUMBER OF SIN OFFERINGS 6. SPINNING BLUE WOOL FOR FRINGE 7-9. NAZIR WHO CONTRACTS UNCLEANNESS ON LAST DAY OF HIS PERIOD—VARIOUS RULINGS

56

RELIGION

The themes of Eliezer's rulings are much the same as those of the Houses, and the proportions seem about right, with one exception. In this stratum, Eliezer is strikingly silent on liturgical matters. This would accord with his ruling that a fixed liturgy is not to be followed; if so, Eliezer would not issue many rulings on the subject. But the substance in detail of Eliezer's rulings strikingly differs from that of the Houses. Eliezer paid attention to dedications to the Temple; the pericopes of the Houses attested at Yavneh ignore the subject. He has important rulings on the preparation of sin-offering water. The Houses do not rule on the subject. He solves through logic various problems of mixtures of diverse holy materials and how they are to be disposed of. The Houses do not enter those problems at all. He deals with the problem of intention in the cult. The Houses do not. His rulings on the Temple thus concern strikingly fundamental matters. The tendency of those rulings is to figure out the logic and consistent order to be imposed on the Temple cult. What actually was done never enters his framework of discussion. He seems to have attempted to develop a coherent and internally logical set of rules on the Temple cult and its conduct. While some of the rules on agricultural taboos concern both the Houses and Eliezer, others involve Eliezer alone. These tend to repre­ sent striking innovations in antecedent laws. Two themes seem im­ portant; first, the status of the produce of foreign countries; second, and of fundamental importance, the easing of the distinctions in pro­ duce subject to heave offering. As to Sabbath law, for both the Houses and Eliezer, the eruv (Sabbath limit) appears as a predominate con­ cern. In respect to festival law, Eliezer has important new rulings on the rite of the Day of Atonement—appropriate for his agendum for the Temple, which concentrates on the conduct of the cult. The subject matter of the uncleanness rules is pretty much the same, but the specific rulings of Eliezer are original. Again, his ten­ dency is to solve problems through abstract reasoning rather than through a simple edict or citation of established practice. This would account for the difference between the discrete rules attributed to the Houses on when and whether various objects are susceptible to uncleanness, in contrast with Eliezer's effort on the same themes to give reasons for rulings applying to more than the single case at hand. Civil and criminal law is virtually ignored by both the Houses and Eliezer. The interest in family law and inheritances is much the same; vows, inheritances, Levirate rules, and divorces concern both parties. c

"PHARISAIC-RABBINIC'' JUDAISM

57

But Eliezer's generalization about the nullity of the deed of a female minor and the rule, susceptible to generalization and expansion, about the conditional divorce are unknown to the Houses and constitute far-reaching theoretical innovations. Entirely new legal themes involve releasing vows, rules of testimony, the law of the Nazirite who has become unclean, and the general principle about liability for various similar sinful acts. These do not yield completely new agenda of legislative legal interest. But they are, individually, quite novel topics on which the Yavnean pericopes of the Houses are silent. Yohanan

ben Zakkai as a Pharisee

Clearly, Eliezer was a post-70 continuator of pre-70 Pharisaism. But what evidence do we have that Yohanan was a Pharisee in pre-70 times? I f we examine his legal rulings, we find strikingly few that are pertinent to the predominant agenda of pre-70 Pharisaism: 1. Sifre Num. 123: Heifer sacrifice carried out in white garments 2. Sifra Shemini 7:12: Loaf unclean in the second degree makes another unclean in the third 3. Sifra Emor 16:9: Lulav taken as a memorial to the Temple 4. Sifra Emor 16:9: New produce is prohibited on the entire Day of Waving 5. M. (Mishnah) Shabbat 16:7: One may cover a scorpion on the Sabbath 6. M. Shabbat 22:3: One may open a jar to eat dried figs, but one may not pierce the plug of a jar on the Sabbath 7. M. Sheqalim 1:4: Priests have to pay the sheqel 8. M. Sukkah 2:5: Food must be eaten in the Sukkah even for a random meal 9. M. Rosh HaShanah 1:1: The shofar may be sounded on the Sabbath 10. M. Rosh HaShanah 4:4: Witnesses may testify about the new moon throughout the day 11. M. Ketuvot 13:1: A woman swears at the end with respect to maintenance 12. M. Ketuvot 13:2: A person who maintains another man's wife has no claim to recompense 13. M. Sanhedrin 5:2: Evidence should be carefully tested 14. M. Eduyyot 8:3, 7: Courts cannot tell the priests whom to marry 15. M. Kelim 2:2: Broken sides of large jugs are not susceptible to uncleanness 16. M. Kelim 17:16: A beam of a balance (etc.) is susceptible to uncleanness (not attributed to Yohanan) c

58

RELIGION

17. M. Yadaim 4:3: Ammon and Moab give poorman's tithe in the seventh year 18. M. Yadaim 4:6: Scriptures render the hands unclean (not attri­ buted to Yohanan) The Mishnaic evidence deals, therefore, with the following: Temple and priesthood: Nos. 1, 7, 14 Agricultural rules: Nos. 4, 17 Festival law: Nos. 5, 6 Liturgy: Nos. 3, 8, 9, 10 Uncleanness laws: Nos. 2, 15, 18 Civil law, torts, damages, criminal law: Nos. 11, 12, 13 Family law and inheritances: None Pre-70 Pharisees and Eliezer tend to rule primarily on agricultural law, Sabbath and festival rules, and uncleanness. Yohanan's traditions are scattered; most of those on the festivals have to do with the problems posed by the destruction of the Temple and adoption of its rites in the synagogue. The law in numbers 11, 12, 17, and 18 is not accredited to Yohanan; he simply approves what others have done. In all, Yohanan's legal agenda hardly correspond to those of the pre-70 Houses—about which he himself knows nothing—and seem, on the whole, to focus upon the consequence for the liturgy and priesthood of the Temples destruction, rather than upon any other matter. The greater number of his other rulings has to do with Sabbath and festival laws. To be sure, the whole thing adds up to very little. But while, on the basis of the extant laws, one may reasonably claim Eliezer was a Pharisee, on the same basis one cannot claim the same for Yohanan. At best, one may say he might have been a Pharisee. The external evidence does not help; Luke-Acts knows Gamaliel; Josephus knows Simeon b. Gamaliel; but no external source knows about Yohanan, despite the decisive role in events of the day claimed for him by the later storytellers. Eliezer's Pharisaism for the Post-Temple

Period

Eliezer legislated, in theory if not in practice, primarily for people subject to Pharisaic discipline and mainly about matters important to Pharisaic piety, so his program for the post-Temple period con­ cerned Pharisaism and little else. We simply do not know what, if anything, he might have had to say to non-Pharisaic Jews at Yavneh and in other parts of the country. Perhaps saying, at that time, to repent before death would have seemed more important than it does

PHARISAIC-RABBINIC'' JUDAISM

59

now; but it hardly constitutes much of a program for a country which has just lost its autonomous government and capital and for a people suddenly without a sanctuary or a cult. In the aftermath of the destruction, Eliezer intended to liberalize the application of the Pharisaic discipline. I see no necessary connec­ tion between his intent and the recent disaster. Perhaps he simply thought that, by making it easier for large numbers of Jews to take on the Pharisaic way of living, he might win over people who formerly were not Pharisees. Since, moreover, the Pharisaic laws enabled Jews outside of the Temple to participate in its cult in their own homes and so to share in its sanctity, he may have posited the Pharisaic way as a means of preserving both the sanctity and the symbolic presence of the cult during the interim in which they were no more. Hence, it may have seemed wise to formulate the Pharisaic laws in as lenient a way as possible. But if this was Eliezer's intent—and we certainly cannot show that it was—I doubt his motive was purely propagan­ dists He gives no evidence that his interest was to win as many Jews as possible to the Pharisaic way and by subterfuge to make it easier for them to undertake the sect's discipline. The main outlines of his policy for the present age are clear. From the Jews outside of Palestine, obedience to neither the laws of tithing nor the laws of ritual purity nor the agricultural taboos would be required. For the Pharisees among them, the conditions of life in exile were made considerably easier. But this was done by effectively destroying the entire form of their earlier piety. We have no evidence of what, if anything, was offered in its stead. For Pharisees in Pale­ stine, the application of the primarily sectarian laws was to be done in a more lenient way than earlier. Giving heave offering was simpli­ fied. One no longer would have to distinguish between clean and unclean produce of the same species in the same state but might give heave offering from the one for the other. Presumably, other distinc­ tions formerly operative in the giving of heave offering would likewise be obscured. The laws of the seventh year similarly would be applied less rigidly than earlier, if the case of the hide anointed by seventhyear oil signifies a broader policy. Hence, greater benefit from the produce of the seventh year would be enjoyed by the pietists. It may be that the more difficult conditions of economic life required some such lenient ruling, but we have not a shred of evidence that economic considerations figured in Eliezer's enactments. The Pharisaic custom of providing an eruv, or Sabbath limit, to permit carrying on the c

60

RELIGION

Sabbath was extended, so that, first, a fence would be sufficient to establish a single courtyard, however large; second, a person might simply buy a share in an eruv from a storekeeper; third, any sort of food, not merely bread, might be used; and fourth, dissenters or forgetful people would not be subject to pressure from their neighbors. This last point suggests that Eliezer hoped to improve relationships between Pharisees and other Jews, on the one side, and between Jews and Samaritans, on the second. Eliezer allowed Jews to eat with Sama­ ritans. Hence, the xenophobia characteristic of the recent war was rejected in favor of a more irenic approach to relationships within the Jewish community, formerly characterized by heated sectarian and civil strife, and between Jewry and its neighbors, earlier marked by Jewish hostility toward closely kindred groups. The Sabbath rules were set aside in favor of other, equally important religious duties. The tendency to erect ever higher walls around the Sabbath was thus countered by Eliezer's view that the Sabbath was to be no more important than other religious requirements such as circumcision or the Passover. (This corresponds to the Gospels' "son of man is Lord of the Sabbath" philosophy.) Its sanctity was separate and distinct from, and no greater than, that of the coincident festival. Eliezer may have planned also to liberalize the rules governing work on the intermediate days of a festival. Vows were to be virtually excluded from the pious life. To be sure, temperamental people would continue to make them. But Eliezer would render the nullification of a vow a routine and simple matter. One might, on any pretext whatever, simply express regret that he had vowed, and the matter was done with. The dedication of one's property to the Temple—which now would mean its destruction—was limited. An oath to give the whole of one's property to the sanctuary was null. Presumably anyone in sufficient command of his senses to refrain from giving the whole lot would be unlikely to make such a gift to begin with. Likewise, a Nazir, subject to his earlier vow, would not be forced by last-minute accidents into a perpetual renewal of the binding rules. His liability was limited to a few days rather than to the repetition of the whole spell of Naziriteship. Consistent with his leniency in the giving of tithes and heave offerings, Eliezer may have intended to limit the effect of the unclean­ ness rules by ruling that uncleanness pertains to no liquids, except (presumably) those specified in Scriptures. Here, matters are less certain; we have a number of conflicting details which seem not wholly c

"PHARISAIC-RABBINIC" JUDAISM

61

in accord with one another or with this basic principle. Certainly, Eliezer wanted to make it easy to neutralize the prohibiting effects of holy materials which have fallen into secular produce or of impaired materials of the cult mixed with acceptable materials. The rules of neutralizing heave offering which has fallen into secular produce are enforced in a lenient way. Mixtures of bowls of blood or of blemished and unblemished sacrificial parts will be readily rendered fit for use on the pretext that one may easily remove the prohibited substance. Eliezer evidently proposed for the cult to be ruled in accord with an orderly logic, which would settle all manner of details. What may have seemed to him illogical or inconsistent was to be rationalized. I do not see what practical consequences for the Yavnean situation were to be anticipated. Eliezer continued the earlier Pharisaic tendency to apply to the Red-Heifer ceremony a less strict rule as to purity and other questions than was regarded by the Sadducees as proper. But this is not original to him and therefore has nothing to do with his Yavnean program. One ethical issue seems important. Eliezer held that, faced with a choice of taking affirmative action to prevent a possible violation of the law or of doing nothing at all, a person should assume responsi­ bility and therefore take action. It would not be proper to disclaim responsibility and to stand aside. The contrary view was that one needs do nothing at all, so long as his own hands are not sullied. In general, therefore, the tendency of Eliezer's own rulings seems to have been in a single direction, and that was toward the rationaliza­ tion and the liberalization of the application of Pharisaic law. We cannot, to be sure, take for granted that all of even the very bestattested traditions derive from Eliezer and have been formulated in his exact language. Nor is our interpretation of each detail necessarily the only possible way of seeing things. But if this view of Eliezer's own contribution is in the main valid, then it follows that what is asserted by the later tradition is absolutely correct: Eliezer really said nothing he had not heard from his masters. In an exact sense, he was profoundly "conservative." By attempting to reform details and to ease the strictness of the Pharisaic law, he hoped to conserve the Pharisaic way of piety substantially unchanged and unimpaired, essen­ tially intact. This must mean that for Eliezer the destruction of the Temple did not mark a significant turning in the history of Judaism. Just as the destruction of the first Temple was followed, in a brief period, by the construction of the second, so he certainly supposed

62

RELIGION

the same would now happen. He would see to it that the third Temple would be different from the second only in the more logical way in which its cult would be carried on, on the side, and in the slightly simpler requirements of the application of the cult's purity rules to daily life and of the enforcement of the priestly taxes, on the other. In Eliezer's time, Rome ended its former experiments with the government of the Jews and established direct rule. We know nothing about Eliezer's attitude toward Rome and the new regime in Palestine. Gamaliel had to negotiate with it; Eliezer evidently did not. This must mean that in Yavneh he did not enter into direct relationships with the Roman regime; but we do not know whether other masters of the day, except for Gamaliel, had any more direct contact with the Romans than he evidently did. The larger problems faced by the Jews deprived of their cult and its celebrations, including the observance in the Temple and in Jerusalem of the pilgrim festivals, not to mention the bringing of first fruits and of the second tithes or equivalent funds to the city for consumption—none of these seems to have elicited his attention. He does not legislate about the observance of Sukkot after the destruction, as did Yohanan b. Zakkai, although we have two rulings pertinent to the festival. He has nothing to say about the New Year or the use of the shofar on the Sabbath that coincides with the New Year, as did Yohanan; also omitted are the use of new produce and the waving of the omer. The various Temple-oriented festival celebrations subject to Yohanan's taqqanot (ordinances) are ignored in Eliezer's legislation. This is striking, for Eliezer, as an early Yavnean master, ought to have had more to say about the sacred rites now no longer possible to effect than we can discern in respect to these lively issues. Eliezer certainly did not anticipate that the Temple would never be rebuilt. He had no program for any considerable time before the re­ construction. Perhaps it was hoped that the Romans would not delay in permitting the buildings to be restored. No one in his time could foresee the disastrous Bar Kokhba war or the definitive prohibition of the Jews from Jerusalem in its aftermath. c

Rabbinism

at Yavneh

Eliezer's legislation, therefore, suggests he presumed life would soon go on pretty much as it had in the past. Issues important to pre-70 Pharisees predominate in his laws; issues absent in the rabbinic tradi­ tions about the Pharisees are—except the cult—mostly absent in his as

"PHARISAIC-RABBINIC'' JUDAISM

63

well. Eliezer therefore comes at the end of the old Pharisaism. He does not inaugurate the new rabbinism, traces of which are quite absent in his historically usable traditions. Indeed, on the basis of his laws and sayings, we can hardly define what this rabbinism might consist of. The centrality of the oral Torah, the view of the rabbi as the new priest and of study of Torah as the new cult, the definition of piety as the imitation of Moses "our rabbi" and the conception of God as a rabbi, the organization of the Jewish community under rabbinic rule and by rabbinic law, and the goal of turning all Israel into a vast academy for the study of the (rabbinic) Torah—none of these motifs characteristic of later rabbinism occurs at all. Since by the end of the Yavnean period the main outlines of rabbin­ ism were clear, we may postulate that the transition from Pharisaism to rabbinism, or the union of the two, took place in the time of Eliezer himself. But he does not seem to have been among those who generated the new viewpoints; he appears as a reformer of the old ones. His solution to the problem of the cessation of the cult was not to replace the old piety with a new one but, rather, to preserve and refine the rules governing the old in the certain expectation of its restoration in a better form than ever. Others, who were his contemporaries and successors, developed the rabbinic idea of the (interim) substitution of study for sacrifice, the rabbi for the priest, and the oral Torah of Moses "our rabbi" for the piety of the old cult. Eliezer has not been anachronistically "rabbinized." To be sure, the transmitters and compilers of traditions later on assumed everyone before them—back to Moses—was a rabbi. But they did not regularly attribute to Eliezer sayings to link him specifically to the rabbinic system of symbols; and this suggests that, just as with the laws a limited agendum defined topics appropriate for attribution to Eliezer, so, with theological matters, ideas originally not within Eliezer's agen­ dum were not commonly added afterward. If so, we may take seriously the attribution of rabbinic ideas to others of his contemporaries. Where do we first find them? Clearly, Yohanan b. Zakkai—whom we could not conclusively show to have been a Pharisee—stands well within the structure of rabbinic symbols and beliefs. It is in his sayings, admittedly first occurring in late compilations, that we find the claim of replacing the cult with some­ thing—anything—just as good. He is alleged to have told Joshua that deeds of lovingkindness achieve atonement just as satisfactorily as did the cult. He is further made to say that man was created in order to

64

RELIGION

study the Torah. When Israel does the will of its father in heaven— which is contained in the Torah and taught by the rabbi—then no nation or race can rule over it. The cult is hardly central to his teachings and seldom occurs in his laws. The altar, to be sure, serves to make peace between Israel and the father in heaven, but is not so important ("how much the more so") as a man who makes peace among men or is a master of Torah. Yohanan's taqqanot are even better testimony, for they take account of the end of the cult and provide for the period of its cessation. The Temple rites may be carried on ("as a memorial") outside of the old sanctuary. The old priesthood is subjected to the governance of the rabbi. The priest had to pay the sheqel and ideally should marry anyone the rabbi declares to be a fit wife. Eliezer says nothing of the sort; what Yohanan has to say about the situation after 70 is either without parallel in Eliezer's sayings or contradicted by their tendency. T o be sure, we are scarcely able to claim that rabbinism begins with Yohanan or that Pharisaism ends with Eliezer. But Yohanan's tradition certainly reveals the main themes of later rabbinism, although these themes are more reliably attributed to later Yavneans and still more adequately spelled out in their sayings. And Eliezer's laws and theological sayings are strikingly silent about what later on would be the primary concern of the rabbinic authorities, the oral Torah in all its social and political ramifications, and are remarkably narrow in their focus upon the concerns of pre-70 Pharisaism. Further investiga­ tion may show that the list of M. Avot 2:1 of Yohanan's disciples represents a composite of the five components of the Yavnean group: Eliezer clearly was a Pharisee; Yose was a priest; Simeon b. Nathaniel was an am ha?ares, not observant of the purity laws; Eleazar b. Arakh was a mystic; and Joshua b. Hananiah should represent rabbinism. But this remains to be studied. z

Rabbinism

c

and Scribism

If Eliezer stands for the old Pharisaism, who stands for the pre-70 scribes? The scribes form a distinct group—not merely a profession— in the Gospels' accounts of Jesus's opposition. Scribes and Pharisees are by no means regarded as one and the same group. T o be sure, what scribes say and do not say is not made clear. One cannot derive from the synoptic record a clear picture of scribal doctrine or symbolism, if any, although one certainly finds an account of the Pharisaic law on ritual uncleanness and tithing. Since the materials now found in

"PHARISAIC-RABBINIC'' JUDAISM

65

the synaptics were available in Palestine between 70 and 90, however, they may be presumed accurately to portray the situation of that time, because their picture had to be credible to Christians of the period. (Even the fourth Gospel contains traditions that go back to Palestine before 70, but we concentrate attention on the picture presented by the synoptics.) If so, we have in the synoptics a portrait of two groups at Yavneh in close relationship with one another but not entirely unified. Now, having seen in Eliezer an important representative of the old Pharisaism, we find no difficulty in accounting for the Pharisaic component of the Yavnean synthesis. It likewise seems reasonable to locate in the scribes the antecedents of the ideological or symbolic part of the rabbinic component at Yavneh. Admittedly, our information on scribism in the rabbinic literature is indistinguishable from the later sayings produced by rabbinism. But if we consider that scribism goes back to much more ancient times than does Pharisaism, and that its main outlines are clearly represented, for instance, by Ben Sira, we may reasonably suppose that what the scribe regarded as the center of piety was study, interpretation, and application of the Torah. To be sure, what was studied and how it was interpreted are not to be identified with the literature and interpretation of later rabbinism. But the scribal piety and the rabbinic piety are expressed through an identical symbol, study of Torah. And one looks in vain in the rabbinic traditions about the Pharisees before 70 for stress on, or even the presence of the ideal of, the study of Torah. Unless rabbinism begins as the innovation of the early Yavneans—and this seems to me un­ likely—it therefore should represent at Yavneh the continuation of pre-70 scribism. But pre-70 scribism continued with an important difference, for Yavnean and later rabbinism said what cannot be located in pre-70 scribal documents: The Temple cult is to be replaced by study of Torah, the priest by the rabbi ( = scribe); and the center of piety was shifted away from cult and sacrifice entirely. So Yavnean scribism made important changes in pre-70 scribal ideas. It responded to the new situation in a more appropriate way than did the Yavnean Phari­ saism represented by Eliezer. Eliezer could conceive of no piety outside of that focused upon the Temple. But Yavnean and later scribismrabbinism was able to construct an expression of piety which did not depend upon the Temple at all. While Eliezer appears as a reformer of old Pharisaism, the proponents of rabbinism do not seem to have

66

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reformed the old scribism. What they did was to carry the scribal ideal to its logical conclusion. If study of Torah was central and knowledge of Torah important, then the scribe had authority even in respect to the Temple and the cult; indeed, his knowledge was more important than what the priest knew. This view, known in the sayings of Yohanan b. Zakkai, who certainly held that the priest in Yavnean times was subordinate to the rabbi, is not a matter only of theoretical consequence. Yohanan also held that he might dispose of Temple practices and take them over for the Yavnean center—and for other places as well—and so both preserve them ("as a memorial") and remove from the Temple and the priests a monopoly over the sacred calendar, festivals, and rites. Earlier scribism thus contained within itself the potentiality to supersede the cult. It did not do so earlier because it had no reason to and because it probably could not. The latter rabbinism, faced with the occasion and the necessity, realized that potentiality. By contrast, earlier Pharisaism invested its best energies in the replication of the cult, not in its replacement. After 70, it could do no more than plan for its restoration. Scribism as an ideology, not merely a profession, begins with the view that the law given by God to Moses was binding and therefore has to be authoritatively interpreted and applied to daily affairs. That view goes back to the fourth century B.C., by which time Nehemiah's establishment of the Torah of Moses as the constitution of Judea produced important effects in ordinary life. From that time on, those who could apply the completed, written Torah constituted an important class or profession. The writings of scribes stress the identification of Torah with wisdom and the importance of learning. Ben Sira's sage travels widely in search of wisdom and consorts with men of power. Into the first century, the scribes continue as an identifiable estate high in the country's administration. Otherwise, the synoptics' view is incomprehensible. Therefore, those who were professionally ac­ quainted with the Scriptures—whether they were priests or not— formed an independent class of biblical teachers, lawyers, administra­ tors, or scribes, alongside the priesthood. We do not know what they actually did in the administration of the country. Perhaps Yohanan b. Zakkai's reference to decrees of Jerusalem authorities (M. Ketuvot 13:1 ff.) alludes to the work of scribes, who therefore were involved —as the Pharisees certainly were not—in the determination of family law and in the settlement of trivial disputes. The New Testament references support the supposition that the

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scribes were a separate group, differentiated from Sadducees and Pha­ risees. The scribes occur in association with the high priests in Matt. 2:4, 16:21, 20:18, 21:15, 27, 27:41; Mark 8:31, 10:33, 11:18, 27, 14:1, 43, 53, 15:1, 31, etc.; with the Pharisees in Matt. 5:20, 12:38, 15:1, 23:2, 13 ff.; Mark 2:16, 7:1, 5. But they are not the same as the one or other. The scribes are called "learned in the law" and jurists (Matt. 22:35; Luke 7:30, 10:25, 11:45, 52, 14:3). They are teachers of the law (Luke 5:17; Acts 5:34). Mishnaic literature obviously will miss the distinction between Pharisees and scribes, both of whom are regarded as HKMYM, sages. But we have no reason to suppose all scribes were Pharisees, any more than that all Pharisees were scribes. Indeed, as Schiirer points out, "Inasmuch ... as the 'scribes' were merely 'men learned in the law/ there must have been also Sadducaean scribes. For it is not conceivable that the Sadducees, who acknowledged the written law as binding, should have had among them none who made it their profession to study it. In fact those passages of the New Testament, which speak of scribes who were of the Pharisees (Mark 2:16, Luke 5:30, Acts 23:9) point also to the existence of Sadducaean scribes." The scribes there­ fore represent a class of men learned in Scriptures, perhaps lawyers in charge of the administration of justice. They therefore had to develop legal theories, teach pupils, and apply the law. Naturally, such people would come to the center of the administration of government and law, so they could not have remained aloof from Yavneh. Some of them may, to be sure, have come because they were Pharisees. But others, whatever their original ritual practices, would have come because Yavneh represented the place in which they might carry on their profession. Josephus—himself a new adherent of the Pharisees—does not con­ fuse the scribes with the Pharisees. In none of his allusions to the Pharisees does he also refer to the scribes (grammatels) or call Phari­ sees scribes. In Life 197-98, he refers to a delegation of Jerusalemites to Galilee. Two were from the lower ranks of society and adherents of the Pharisees, the third was also a Pharisee, but a priest; the fourth was descended from high priests. These were all able to assert that they were not ignorant of the customs of the fathers. To be sure, the Pharisees are referred to as knowledgeable in the Torah; and they have 2

2

E . Schiirer, A History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ (Edin­ burgh, 1 8 8 9 ) , I, pt. 2:319ff.

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"traditions from the fathers" in addition to those that Moses had revealed. But they are not called scribes. They were (War 1:107-14) exact exponents of the laws. But again they are not called scribes. The long "philosophical school" account in Antiquities 18:11-17 describes the Pharisees as virtuous and says that "all prayers and sacred rites of divine worship are performed according to their exposition"—but they too are not scribes. When Josephus does refer to scribes, he does not refer to Pharisees. For example, in War 1:648 ff. ( = Antiquities 1 7 : 1 5 2 ) , he refers to two sophistai who ordered their disciples to pull down the eagle that Herod had set up in the Temple. They are Judah son of Sepphoraeus and Matthias son of Margalus, men who gave lectures on the laws, attended by a large, youthful audience. I f these are scribes, they are not said also to be Pharisees, who do not occur in the account. W e find also hierogrammatels and patrion exegetai nomon—but not in the context of the passages about the Pharisees. While, therefore, the Pharisees and the scribes have in common knowledge of the country's laws, the two are treated separately. Josephus does not regard the scribes as wholly within the Pharisaic group; he presents the scribe as a kind of authority or professional teacher of law. Josephus's further references to grammateus (singular or plural) are as follows: Apion 1:290: The sacred scribe Phritobeuates; Antiquities 6:120: It was reported to the king by the scribes that the host were sinning against God, 7:110: He made Seisa scribe; 7:293 = 7:110; 7:219: Joab took the chiefs of the tribes and scribes and took the census; 7:364: David appointed six thousand Levites as judges of the people and as scribes; 9:164: When the scribe and priest of the treasury had emptied the chest; 10:55: When the money was brought, he gave superintendence of the temple ... to the governor of the city [and] Sapha the scribe, etc.; 10:94f.: Baruch, scribe of Jeremiah; 10:149: the scribe of Sacchias; 11:22, 26, 29: Semelios the scribe, etc.; 11:128: On the scribes of the sanctuary you will impose no tribute; 12:142: The scribes of the Temple; 11:248, 250, 272, 287: scribes of the Persian kings; 16:319: the scribe Diophantus had imitated his manner of writing; 20:208f.: The sicarii kidnapped the secretary of the captain; War 1:579: village clerks; 5:532: Aristeus, the secretary of the council. 3 It is clear that Josephus does not associate scribes with Pharisees; no scribe is a Pharisee; and no Pharisee is described as a scribe. The two are separate and distinct. One is a sect, the other is a profession. 3

H. Thackeray, Josephus Lexicon, fasc. 2, pp. 117-18. The entries for hierogrammateus and sophistes are not available as yet.

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Since later rabbinism found pre-70 scribism highly congenial to its ideal, it is by no means farfetched to trace the beginnings of Yavnean rabbinism to the presence of representatives of the pre-70 scribal class, to whom the ideal of study of Torah, rather than the piety of the cult and the replication of that cultic piety in one's own home, was central. At Yavneh, therefore, were incorporated these two important strands of pre-70 times—the one the piety of a sect, the other the professional ideal of a class. Among them, as we have seen, Eliezer's teachings made for pre-70 Pharisaism an important place in the Yavnean synthesis. Institutionalized

Rabbinism

Thus far, our definition of rabbinism has focused upon its central symbols and ideals. These seem to continue symbols and ideas known, in a general way, from "scribism"—if not known in detail from individual scribes, who, as I have stressed, formed a profession, not a sect. But what of the later, and essential, singularly characteristic traits of rabbinism: its formation as a well-organized and well-disci­ plined movement, its development of important institutions for the government of the Jewish communities of Palestine and Babylonia, its aspiration to make use of autonomous political instruments for the transformation of all Jews into rabbis? Of this, we have no know­ ledge at all in the earliest stratum of the Yavnean period. Clearly, Yohanan b. Zakkai worked out the relationship between the synagogue and the Temple. But the nature of the "gathering" at Yavneh— whether it was some sort of "academy," or a nascent political institu­ tion, or merely an inchoate assembly of various sorts of sectarians, professionals, pre-70 authorities, and whatever—is simply unilluminated. Eliezer's historical record is strikingly silent on this very point. From his materials, we have no evidence on either how he enforced or applied the law outside of his own household or disciplecircle or how anyone else did. We have no hint about the evolution of an institution one might regard as a nascent political authority— a government—in any terms. Eliezer's laws omit reference even to the legal theory behind such an authority. And they are strikingly silent about the whole range of laws to be applied in civil life. Whence such laws reached the Yavneans we do not know. They cannot have 4

4

See my History of the Jews in Babylonian, vols. 1-5 (Leiden, 1965-70), and There We Sat Down: Talmudic Judaism in the Making (Nashville, Tenn., 1 9 7 2 ) , which trace the characteristics and historical effects of Babylonian rabbinism.

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come from Eliezer, and, given the nature of the rabbinic traditions about pre-70 Pharisaism, they also do not derive from other Pharisees. So in all the "rabbinism" possibly present in Yohanan's corpus and remarkably absent in Eliezer's is simply the symbolic and ideol­ ogical element represented by the study of Torah as the central ex­ pression of piety. The political institutions and social expressions of rabbinism make no appearance in the earliest years of the Yavnean period. They emerge, for the first time, in the development of the government under the patriarchate and its associated rabbinical func­ tionaries, beginning with Gamaliel II—circa A.D. 90—and fully articulated, in the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba debacle, by Simeon b. Gamaliel II, circa A.D. 150. At that point, the rabbinical ideal produced serious effects for the political and social realities of Judaism.

PART T W O LITERATURE

CHAPTER FOUR

T H E RABBINIC TRADITIONS A B O U T T H E P H A R I S E E S B E F O R E 70 The Problem [The

of Oral

Transmission

Journal of Jewish Studies, X X I I , 1-4, 1971, pp. 1-18]

The rabbinic traditions about the Pharisees before A.D. 70 are contained in pericopae of Talmudic and Midrashic literature which mention either those masters who lived before the destruction of the Temple or the Houses of Shammai and Hillel. The masters are the teachers either named in the chains of authorities down,to Simeon b. Gamaliel or referred to in the pericopae in which those authorities figure. Some others, presumed by the Tannaitic tradents to have lived before 70 and to have been Pharisees, left us no substantial teachings. The rabbinic traditions about the Pharisees before A.D. 70 consist of 371 separate items—stories or sayings—occurring in 655 passages. Of these, 280 items, in 462 pericopae, pertain to Shammai, Hillel, and the Houses of Hillel and Shammai, i.e. approximately 75 per cent of the whole. A roughly even division of the materials would give twentythree traditions in forty pericopae to each name, so the disparity is enormous. Clearcut and well-defined literary forms were used for the trans­ mission of all the materials relative to the Houses and of most Hillelpericopae. There was a form for attributing a doctrine to identifiable authorities—X says—which may also be employed in a dispute-form— X says, Y says—and be followed by the debate—They said to them ... They said to them ... or similar formulas. All are well-attested at the early Yavneh stage primarily in connection with the Houses, second­ arily the masters standing behind the Houses, finally the later firstcentury authorities. 1

2

1

The traditions will be found in my Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees before 70 A.D. (Leiden, 1971: E . J . Brill). I. The Masters. II. The Houses. III. Conclusions. These figures are less exact than one might prefer, since much depends upon how one counts the components of a composite pericope, and whether one adds several distinct versions of a single tradition. 2

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The Houses-form—Problem of law ... House of Shammai say ... House of Hillel say ... —is utilised when the schools are of roughly equal strength. This corresponds to the beginning of the Yavneh period because it is at that point that the Houses met as equals to reconstruct Pharisaic tradition. Earlier the Shammaites prevailed, after­ wards, the Hillelites. The whole corpus of the older materials charact­ eristic of the respective Houses was then incorporated into the joint Houses-form, with antithetic opinions expressed on mutually agreed upon agenda of legal problems. The circles responsible for the redaction of the pericopae concerning the Houses appear to have been responsible for the introduction of mnemonic techniques. The apodosis of the Houses' passages is, House of X say ... House ofYsay... Furthermore, the actual opinions of the Houses are normally expressed with the help of mnemonic devices. 3

3

Statistically the material may be summarised as follows (see below, pp. 100-104):

1. Pericopae without mnemonic-formulae or patterns—105. 2. Pericopae with mnemonic formulae or patterns—82. (a) Redactional formula (e.g. three things)—18. Formula external to substance of pericope, imposed to link discrete materials. (b) Redactional patterns (e.g. epistles, debates)—3. Pattern internal to substance of pericope. (c) Narrative pattern (repetition of sequences of actions or of sentences)—8 ( + 3?). (d) Substantive pattern—17 ( + 1 3 ? ) Apophthegms, some lists, fixed framework, e.g. supplied by Scripture. Recurrent phrases are integral to pericope, not merely redactional. (e) Substantive formula—3. Formula integral to saying. 3. Pericopae containing small units of tradition or following other mnemonic forms—314. (a) Small units 1. Fixed opposites Liable vs. free Unclean vs. clean Prohibit vs. permit Unfit vs. fit Midras vs. Teme-Met Inside vs. outside (etc.) 2. Balance of meter 3. Balance of meter and change of single letter (b) Syntactical and morphological changes functionally equivalent to small units of tradition 1. Tenses and numbers 2. Distinction vs. no distinction (and vs. or) 3. Reversal of word-order 4. Statement of law + / — negative 5. Negative statement + permit 6. P in second lemma 3

disciplined 86 66 8 28 9 10 2 7 18 2 142 1 21 14 61 25 14

RABBINIC TRADITIONS ABOUT THE PHARISEES BEFORE 70

75

II The question of oral transmission requires serious consideration. It is taken for granted by students of the Pharisaic-rabbinic, indeed more generally of Talmudic literature, that the written material is the end product of a lengthy previous oral process. The "Oral Torah" of Talmudic Judaism was handed down—so the literature claims—from (c) Differences in word choice (d) Number-sequences (e) Houses-disputes not closely balanced (structural balance only: x say vs. y say)

24 34 28

Pericopae exhibiting no clear mnemonic pattern pertain primarily to named masters other than Hillel and Shammai and the Houses. Pericopae containing small units of tradition or following other mnemonic forms concern the Houses alone. Among the pericopae exhibiting mnemonic patterns of some sort, we find the following distri­ bution: Houses: 31 + 314 = 345 Hillel + Shammai: 19 Gamaliel + Simeon b. Gamaliel: 9 Chains ending with Shammai-Hillel: 2 Baba b. Buta: 1 Joshua b. Gamala: 2 Abba Joseph: 1 Hananiah Prefect of the Priests: 3 Simeon the Just: 2 Yose's: 4 Yohanan High Priest: 1 Hanina b. Dosa: 1 Simeon b. Shetah: 2 Shema iah and Abtalion: 1 c

In addition, the sayings in Avot follow a redactional pattern. As to the first group of pericopae, we find the following distribution: Simeon the Just: 4 Yose's: 2 Joshua b. Perahiah: 3 Judah b. Tabbai and Simeon b. Shetah: 9 Shema iah and Abtalion: 5 Shammai: 6 Hillel: 17 Houses: 8 (all in structural balance) Hillel and Shammai: 3 Gamaliel: 14 Simeon b. Gamaliel: 4 Baba b. Buta: 2 Hananiah Prefect of the Priests: 9 Rest scattered. c

W e may therefore say that the Houses and Hillel and Shammai-pericopae normally are balanced in some way and the pericopae of other named masters are apt not to be balanced or to exhibit mnemonic patterns.

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LITERATURE

master to disciple by memorisation and oral repetition. Strikingly no such assertion is made apropos of the Pharisees. While there is reference in Sifre Deut. 351 to two Torahs, one oral and one in writing (the attribution to Gamaliel I is not firm), nothing is stated concerning the formation and handing down of traditions. At the outset, it must be emphasised that all evidence supporting the oral theory relies on literary data. That these data indicate a back­ ground of oral transmission is a conclusion reached by many, but it is not a fact implied by the traditions. Organisation of materials for easy memorisation reveals nothing about their origin; it merely testifies to the organisers' teaching programs. The traditions were to be learned by heart and were therefore formulated so as to facilitate memorisation. Ill The later rabbinic tradition derives its authority from Moses "our rabbi" and explicitly states that alongside the written Scriptures, Moses revealed an Oral Torah, first expressed by him, and later transmitted in schools for centuries from master to disciple by word of mouth: Our rabbis taught: How was the Mishnah ordered (KYSD SDR MSNH) ? A. Moses learned from the mouth of the Almighty. Aaron entered, and Moses recited to him [Aaron] his [Aaron's] chapter (PRQW). Aaron departed and sat at the left hand of Moses. His sons entered and Moses recited to them their chapter. His sons departed; Eleazar sat at the right hand of Moses and Itamar at the left of Aaron. (Rabbi Judah says, "Aaron surely sat at the right hand of Moses.") Again the elders entered and Moses taught them [the elders] their chapter. The elders departed and all the people entered, and Moses taught them [the people] their chapter. So it came out that in the hand of Aaron [were] four, in the hand of his sons three, and in the hand of the elders two, and in the hand of the whole people one ... B. On this basis ( M K N ) R. Eliezer said, "A man is required to repeat to his disciple four times ... R. Aqiba says [sic}, How do we know that a man is liable to teach his disciple until he learns it ? As it is said ... (b. Eruvin 54b) 3

c

c

Judah b. Ilai's interpolation supplies a firm terminus ante quern for the pericope, Usha. Eliezer's and Aqiba's sayings are appropriately attached ( M K ? N ) , but stand independent of the story, which conc

RABBINIC TRADITIONS ABOUT THE PHARISEES BEFORE 70

77

forms to Eliezer's view. Indeed, the story may have been formulated on the basis of the dispute of Eliezer and Aqiba, thus supplying a precedent for the position of the former. In consequence, there is here firm evidence that the pattern of oral formulation and transmission of traditions was well established, indeed taken for granted by Usha (Judah). W e may push the date back to middle-Yavnean times, ca. A.D. 100, and even earlier, at which point Eliezer's and Aqiba's argument suggests that the procedures of oral instruction had not yet been fixed. Now it is one thing to conclude from this story that even in Yavneh it was customary to formulate and transmit materials mnemonically; it is quite another to assume that the same process was underway from the time of Moses (or, remote antiquity) to A.D. 70. Yet such an allegation finds its way into nearly every account of the formation and transmission of Pharisaic-rabbinic literature. The proof-text routinely cited to prove that the "Oral Torah" could not be written down is the saying of Judah b. Nahmani: c

c

R. Judah b. Nahmani, the Meturgeman of R. Simeon b. Laqish, ex­ pounded (DRS), "It is written, Write for yourself these words (Ex. 34:27), and it is written, For according to the mouth of these words (Ex. 34:27). How now [to reconcile writing with ( L PY) memoriz­ ing]? Things which are in writing you are not permitted to state from memory. Things which are memorized (DBRYM 3B L PH), you are not permitted to state in writing R. Yohanan said, "God made a covenant with Israel only for the sake of things which are oral (DBRYM §B L PH). As it says, For by the mouth ( L PY) of these words I have made a covenant with thee and ivith Israel (Ex. 34:37). (b. Gittin 60b = b. Temurah 14b) C

C

C

C

The third-century Amoraic references are taken at face value as evi­ dence for pre-70 practice. Judah's interpretation probably is new to him. All others had earlier understood the verse to mean that oral traditions are especially beloved —standard rabbinic polemic against those who did not accept the authority of Oral Torah (meaning of the rabbis), and tliey were said to be many. An exegesis of Ex. 34:27 strictly forbidding to write down oral traditions is not found before his time. It therefore hardly seems warranted to extend the rule back to Moses. The most extreme claim on behalf of the view that the rabbinic traditions now in our hand comprise originally orally composed and orally transmitted materials comes from Birger Gerhardsson, Memory

78

LITERATURE

and Manuscript (Uppsala, 1961). Gerhardsson repeats the views of Jewish scholars, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, of the past century, who routinely quote b. Git. and other sayings as entirely valid testimonies for the Second Temple period. He like his authorities relies on unexamined allegations erected into the composite "TalmudicMidrashic view" rather than on a close scrutiny of internal evidence. This fundamentalist reading of pertinent sayings is conceptually primi­ tive. It requires the assumption that the conditions for the formation and transmission of traditions were constant from remote antiquity. The way in which the Mishnah was published is the way in which everything else was given its substance and form. From the reliance of teachers from Aqiba to Judah the Patriarch on oral means for the formulation and transmission of the Mishnah, their arrangement of materials to facilitate the mnemonic process, and most important, from the assumption that they had received the traditions in the same way as they transmitted them, conclusions are drawn regarding Pharisaic teaching in the remote past. Morton Smith in "A Comparison of Early Christian and Early Rab­ binic Tradition" (Journal of Biblical Literature 82, 1963, pp. 16976) has rightly summed up the main weakness of Gerhardsson's theory: "To reach back into the period before 70 the developed rabbinic technique ... [attested at] 200 A.D. is a gross anachronism." That very anachronism characterises nearly the entire corpus of scholarly literature cited by Gerhardsson. Smith observes that there is no ade­ quate evidence to determine the methods of transmission used in the early churches or in pre-70 Pharisaism, and the most important extant evidence is to be found in the traces of transmission preserved in the surviving material. The large place assigned to memorisation in ancient education seems to Gerhardsson similar in Judaism. But what students of classical civilisation were to learn by heart was a text, not the words of a teacher. Smith comments, "Of course, all teaching hopes for remembrance. The question is, How accurate? Remembrance of the substance only, or remembrance of the exact wording? With respect to what the teacher said, classical education aimed at the former, rabbinic at the latter." Smith's observations introduce an important distinction between general traditions—stories, ideas, sayings—passed on orally, on the one hand, and traditions first formulated orally and then exclusively transmitted word for word mnemonically until many centuries later someone wrote them in their exact, original "oral" form. The latter c

RABBINIC TRADITIONS ABOUT THE PHARISEES BEFORE 70

79

mode of transmission is claimed by the rabbinic tradition for itself from ca. A.D. 80 onward, and for the Pharisaic tradition before that time. The two propositions, that the materials never were written down but framed at the outset without the medium of writing, and that they thereafter were handed on from master to disciple by the process described in b. Eruv. and elsewhere, until the original oral formula was recorded in script—these are the foundations for the view of practically every student of the formation of Pharisaic and rabbinic literature. I cannot, therefore, perceive any conceptual difference be­ tween the accounts of b. Eruv. and of scholars down to Gerhardsson. There is no doubt that there were traditions, even oral traditions, but the real issue confronting the scholar is this: Do the existing written traditions reproduce ipsissima verba, the very words originally spoken by those masters to whom they are attributed? Thus expressed, the problem implies a twofold question. ( 1 ) Did the masters actually say what now is attributed to them? This no one knows. (2) Does the present literature contain exact replica of sayings originally formu­ lated orally and transmitted orally? It is to be admitted, as has been noted earlier, the Hillel traditions and nearly the whole corpus of Houses do exhibit mnemonic patterns. But whether the transmitted pericopae derive from originally oral materials is a question that cannot be settled, one way or the other, by the character of materials which we now have only in written form. Since, apart from Yavneh, there is no reference to the manner in which materials were formulated, the contents of the traditions themselves supply no help. They certainly do not prove that they are the first written version of until then orally transmitted data. The theory of a dual Torah by itself is not pertinent. The Qumran community, for one, had a corpus of "revelations" external to the Scriptures, but they wrote down at least part of these. But the admis­ sion that various sects possessed traditions, oral traditions, does not help to solve our problem, unless it can be shown that on behalf of such traditions, their holders claimed not merely essential accuracy but exact verbal correspondence with the original statements. That is what is alleged apropos of the Pharisees by the rabbis and their modern pupils. One of the prerequisites for the safe handling of oral materials is the availability of professionals. In the Parthian civilisation, there existed the institution of the gosan or professional minstrel. Mary c

c

LITERATURE

80

Boyce ("The Parthian Gosan and Iranian Minstrel Tradition/' Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1957, pp. 10-45) notes that Armenian tradition establishes, that these tales "were in verse, were sung, and were not written down" (p. 13). Miss Boyce continues, "The cumu­ lative evidence suggests that the gosan played a considerable part in the life of the Parthians and their neighbours, down to late in the Sasanian epoch: entertainer of king and commoner, privileged at court and popular with the people ... eulogist, satirist, story-teller, musician; recorded of past achievements and commentator of his own times" (p. 1 8 ) . She observes that the gosan must have had to learn many traditions by memory, in addition to learning how to compose and recite. She further brings evidence to show that professional minstrelsy flourished under the Achemenids as well as under the Sasanians. By contrast, we nowhere hear of a single minstrel, let alone a minstrel class, in all the rabbinic traditions about the Pharisees. The Tanna first occurs in Aqiban times. The characteristic medium for the preservation of Jewish traditions was writing. Palestine was a literate society. The Qumran community wrote most of its traditions. Indeed, it had a library and had a large room for the purpose of writing down its documents. Josephus wrote his histories, and assumed that the Aramaic version would be read. The apocryphal and pseudepigraphical books were written down at the outset. So the authors apparently expected to be read. The opposition whom Jesus calls hypocrites were scribes and Pharisees. Scribes occur from Ezra onward. In the rabbinic traditions about the Pharisees, scribes appear in Gamaliel and Simeon b. Gamaliel stories. When a Persian embassy wishes to be entertained, it called (according to the narrative of Simeon b. Shetah and Yannai, in y. Berakhot 7:2) not for minstrels—there is no word for minstrel in the texts before us—but for a rabbi, who said, not sang, wise things. In short, in pre-70 writings there are no memorisers or min­ strels, but we do find scribes; there is no evidence for the oral com­ position of materials, but we see in the Qumran writings the proof of the practice of written composition. So why should anyone before 70 have resorted to "oral composition"? c

IV We have every reason to suppose that the Pharisees possessed tradi­ tions apart from Scripture. The testimonies of two independent sources, Josephus and the Gospels, as well as of the rabbinic traditions about the Pharisees are clear on that point. If for the moment we make

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the highly unlikely assumption that the b. Shabbat 30b-31a story about Shammai and Hillel accurately reports what Shammai and Hillel actually said to the potential converts, we may grant that the theory of two Torahs, one in writing, the other oral, was held by both masters. Gamaliel (or Yohanan b. Zakkai, Sifre Deut. 3 5 1 ) explains to Agenitos that there were two Torahs. Josephus's evidence is more credible and quite unequivocal: the Pharisees did possess traditions apart from Scriptures. In War 2: 162-3 (Antiquities 13:171-3), the Pharisees are simply referred to as the most accurate interpreters of the laws; there is no precise reference to orally transmitted or other external traditions. In his later story of John Hyrcanus and the Pharisees, Josephus mentions, however, tradi­ tions unwritten in the Bible, although without specifying oral trans­ mission, let alone oral formulation, of ipsissima verba: For the present I wish merely to explain that the Pharisees had passed on to the people certain regulations handed down by former genera­ tions and not recorded in the Laws of Moses, for which reason they are rejected by the Sadducean group, who held that only those regu­ lations should be considered valid which were written down [in Scripture], and that those which had been handed down by former generations need not be observed ... (Antiquities 13: 277-8, 293ff., transl. Ralph Marcus, p. 377) If we had no preconceptions about oral tradition, this passage would not have led us to such an idea. It could as well pertain to documents like the Manual of Discipline as to to lay/not to lay ( M . Hagigah 2 : 2 ) . But even if Josephus had meant to refer to traditions of the fathers, one cannot forthwith derive the picture of formulation and trans­ mission given by b. °Eruv. etc. It is one thing to allege that the fathers had handed on traditions external to Scriptures, even not writing them down at all. It is quite another to claim that the extra-Scriptural traditions of the Pharisees are in substance and also in form precisely the ones laid down by Moses, in the very language of Moses himself. Josephus certainly stops short of this. In Antiquities 18:12-15, he speaks of no doctrine handed on orally, but merely Pharisaic belief in foresight, predestina­ tion, and the like. The Sadducees, he stresses ( 1 8 : 1 6 ) , follow no observance outside of the laws. In Life 2, he compares the Pharisees to the Stoic school; in Life 38 the Pharisees are described as experts in "their country's laws." Interestingly, the Mishnaic materials on the Perushim and Sadduqim i

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(assuming that Perushim means Pharisees) are equally reticent about the existence of oral tradition or Oral Torah as a point of difference between the sects. M. Yadaim 4:6 is concerned with uncleanness caused by Holy Scriptures; 4:7 with cleanness rules; 4:8 with the use of the name of the governor in bills of divorce. M. Hagigah 2:7 deals with garments of the Perushim as midras for those who eat heaveoffering; M. Eruvin 6:2 concerns the Sadducean disbelief in the eruv\ M. Makkot 1:6 relates a dispute about executing false witnesses; M. Parah 3:7 regulates the burning of the red heifer; and M. Niddah 4:2 describes Sadducean women who follow the ways of their fathers, as Samaritans, but those who follow the ways of Israel, as Israelites (a saying expressed in present form by the time of R. Yose). The references of the Synoptic Gospels to "the tradition of the elders" (Mk. 7:4, Mt. 15:2) are consistent with Josephus's picture. What characterised the Pharisees was firm belief in parados is ton presbuteron (Mk. 7.4). Josephus nowhere states that the Pharisees possessed a non-literary tradition. They had a tradition, but this was not the law of Moses: it was additional to it. Guided by Josephus and the Gospels, we may conclude that the Pharisees possessed ancient traditions but not how such traditions were formulated and transmitted. We are not entitled to speak of Oral Torah (Torah shebe°al peh). In this respect, the rabbinic traditions relative to the Pharisees can scarcely be said to differ from the evidence of Josephus and the New Testament. c

z

V I now must reiterate as clearly as possible the central issue. It is not whether there were traditions or whether they were handed on in some form, perhaps oral. All evidence points toward the existence of extra-Scriptural traditions among all parties of ancient Judaism, EsseneQumranian, Pharisaic, and Sadducean. Some were in writing; others probably were not. The issue is not whether we find terms like "tradi­ tion," "to pass on as tradition," and "to receive as tradition." These terms are adequately established. In his reply to M. Smith's review, Gerhardsson (Tradition and Transmission in Early Christianity [Copenhagen, 1964, p. 7 1 ] ) satis­ factorily phrases the real problem: We might ask a simple and purely historical question: What was meant in this particular milieu by "tradition" and how, practically speaking, did they set about transmitting this tradition—practical

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tradition (not expressed in words) and verbal tradition (articulate: oral or written) ? // is with verbal tradition that we shall be chiefly concerned here. (Italics supplied.) It is alleged not merely that traditions of one sort or another existed, whether set down in writing or not. The claim is that materials were formulated "verbally", meaning without being written down and then transmitted only orally. "When we have determined"—so Gerhardsson writes—"what the situation was at this particular time [from Aqiba onward] and in this particular sphere, we can trace a course backward in time to the Palestinian milieu of the first century A.D. and then to early Christ­ ianity and Jesus." Yet the assumed continuity between the Yavnean and earlier "pedagogical" practices is not supported by any data. Peda­ gogical conservatism in general, moreover, tells us nothing about peda­ gogical innovation in particular situations and for particular reasons. There is no evidence that, as he claims, it was part of the "conscious program [of Pharisaism] to preserve the words and customs of the fathers inviolate." Hillel's words in M. Edduyot 1:3 are explained as identical to those of his masters, yet the very same passage in which that is alleged shows the contrary: the words of Shema iah and Abtalion are different from Hillel's! Such examples by themselves mean little, but when used to demonstrate verbal tradition, it is im­ portant to point out that they may demonstrate a tradition, but not a "verbal" tradition. Gerhardsson claims that rabbinic pedagogics "have a long history, which can be traced far back into Old Testament times" (p. 15). This is begging the question. We are supposed to assign to the Pharisees and later rabbis practices for which antecedents are claimed; yet the Pharisaic traditions of the rabbis persistently, and nearly uniquely for their time, ignore nearly the whole range of types (Gattungen) of biblical literature, and bypass every form in which biblical materials are shaped. That again points to the opposite conclusion, namely, that the Pharisees of the rabbinic tradition were innovators who paid no attention to the forms of biblical literature. c

c

c

VI The first claim that someone has received a tradition in the precise language in which that was formulated and transmitted orally comes from Yohanan b. Zakkai, via Eliezer b. Hyrcanus and Joshua b. Hananiah.

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R. Joshua said, "I have received as a tradition from Rabban Yohanan b. Zakkai, who heard from his teacher, and his teacher from his teacher, as a halakhah given to Moses from Sinai, that Elijah will not come to declare unclean or clean, to remove afar or to bring nigh, but to remove afar those that were brought near by violence, and to bring near those that were removed by violence." M. Eduyyot 8:7 c

The antecedent tradition is as follows: R. Joshua and R. Judah b. Bathyra testified that the widow of one who belonged to an Isah family was eligible for marriage with a priest ... Rabban Simeon b. Gamaliel said, "We accept your testimony, but what shall we do, for Rabban Yohanan b. Zakkai decreed that courts may not be set up concerning this. The priests would hearken to you in what concerns putting away, but not in what concerns bringing near." c

M. Eduyyot 8:3 The latter is specific, legal, and credible; it would pertain to Yavneh. The former is aggada and has nothing to do with a legal question. But it is the first reference to exact words supposedly orally formulated by a master (Moses), then orally transmitted, and now set down in writing. Joshua likewise alludes to words of Yohanan b. Zakkai (M. Sotah 5:2, 5 ) , but in that instance, in fact those words were not formulated in a fixed, oral lemma; indeed Yohanan's statement was either lost or suppressed, or it was not given any sort of official for­ mulation at all. So when Joshua heard something along the lines of Yohanan's thought, he referred to his teaching, but not to a fixed saying in which the teaching was formulated. An identical statement concerning Yohanan derives from Eliezer: On that day ... they voted and decided that Ammon and Moab should give Poorman's Tithe in the Sabbatical Year. And when R. Yose the son of the Damascene woman came to R. Eliezer in Lydda, he said to him, "What new thing did you have in the school today?" He said to him, "They voted and decided that Ammon and Moab must give Poorman's Tithe in the Sabbatical Year." R. Eliezer wept and said, "The secret of the Lord is with them that fear him, and he will show them his covenant (Ps. 25:14). Go and tell them, 'Be not anxious by reason of your voting, for I have received a tradition from Rabban Yohanan b. Zakkai, who heard it from his teacher, and his teacher from his teacher, as a halakhah given to Moses at Sinai, that Ammon and Moab should give Poorman's Tithe in the Sabbatical Year.'" M. Yadaim 4:3

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85

Eliezer's assertion comes in reference to the on that */^-traditions concerning Gamaliel's deposition. This case offers much better evidence than the materials deriving from Joshua's circle, that orally formulated and orally transmitted traditions were ascribed to Yohanan deriving from Sinai in exactly their present form. But the sayings of Yohanan never survived in their original form! Eliezer and Joshua alluded to them—but they did not quote them. And Eliezer spoke only when Gamaliel II had been ousted. So if Yohanan's saying had earlier been given fixed form, and if this was done orally, and if it was thereupon taught to Eliezer for memorisation and oral transmission, then that saying nonetheless was not published, for only Eliezer knew about it. And he did not cite a fixed verbal form. The others were in the dark, so had to vote. This pericope hardly conforms to the picture of the oral formulation and transmission of a public tradition, the Oral Torah. But it does indeed give good evidence that at that time the words of masters were believed to be formulated orally and transmitted through the memories of disciples—and I take it as fact that was the case. Perhaps it was alleged by Yohanan, on the basis of Joshua's citation, that he possessed the exact words revealed by Moses at Sinai. The evidence is not very persuasive, but one cannot routinely dismiss it. So the first claim, possibly coming around the time of Yohanan, very likely among his disciples, is that one has accurate traditions of the essential content of the ancient Torah. Certainly among the following generation of Yavneh comes the second, and directly consequent, claim, that these accurate traditions are not merely of the content, but of the exact words orally formulated and handed on earlier. The third stage then is the effort to reproduce that mnemonic process in the formulation and transmission of Yavnean materials. As has been noted, the picture of Moses' oral formulation and trans­ mission of traditions was certainly held by rabbinic masters from Judah b. Ilai onwards, hence ca. A.D. 150. So between ca A.D. 100 and ca. 150 the process described in b. Eruvin 54b probably took shape. Clearly the Yavneans from Eliezer b. Hyrcanus and Joshua b. Hana­ niah did make reference to the oral formulation and transmission of teachings. Eliezer and Aqiba in b. Eruvin 54b leave no doubt on this question. R. Tarfon refers to hearing a tradition: " I heard but I could explain." R. Joshua says, "Thus have I heard plain ( S T M ) " (M. Parah 1:1). R. Aqiba (Mekhilta de Ishmael to Ex. 21:1, Lauterc

c

c

c

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LITERATURE c

bach, III, p. 1 = b. Eruvin 54b) teaches that one must repeat a tradition until it has been learned. I see no reason to doubt that to Yavneans it was important to claim that the Oral Torah was formulated and preserved orally and not in writing. These sayings moreover are congruent to the literary data we have examined, all of which point toward Yavneh as the place of origin both of clearly defined literary forms and datable, mnemonically structured and balanced pericopae. While the process may have begun with Joshua and Eliezer, it was probably Aqiba who fully developed them, for it was he who set forth the foundations of the Mishnah, and it was in his time that the institution of the Tanna, or reciter, is first referred to. c

VII Thus, from the claim of exact verbal tradition, which may have been made by Yohanan b. Zakkai, but certainly was by his disciples, the rabbis progressed to an alleged imitation of Moses' actual prodecure. This, by all accounts, was the achievement of Aqiba and his contem­ poraries. The procedure was highly anachronistic. It obviously did not accord with the technical attainments of the day or with long-established procedures. Saul Lieberman describes the process of formulating and transmit­ ting the Mishnah in "The Publication of the Mishnah" (Hellenism in Jewish Palestine. Studies in the Literary Transmission, Beliefs, and Manners of Palestine in the I Century B.C.E.—IV Century C.E. [N.Y., 1950], pp. 83-99). He asks, Was the Mishnah published? That is, either did professional copyists hear it dictated and write it down? Or did an authentic original take written form, and was it then deposited in an archive? Some Jewish books were published in the second way, that is, they were written and deposited. However, Lieberman notes, "Since in the entire Talmudic literature we do not find that a book of the Mishnah was ever consulted in case of controversies or doubt concerning a particular reading, we may safely conclude that the compilation was not published in writing." Rabbis did possess written halakhot and comments, but they were private notes without legal authority, with no more authority than an oral assertion (p. 87). The Mishnah was published in a different way: "A regular oral ... edition of the Mishnah was in existence, a fixed text recited by the Tannaim of the college. The Tanna ('repeater') committed to memory the text of certain portions of the Mishnah, which he subsequently c

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recited in the college in the presence of the great masters of the Law ... When the Mishnah was committed to memory and the Tannaim recited it in the college it was thereby published..." The authority of the college-Tanna ["a word apparently first used for college-reciter in the time of Aqiba," p. 88, n. 3 9 ] was that of a published book (p. 8 9 ) . What was the nature of that living book? "How was the mass of diverse material arranged and systematized before it was delivered to the Tanna, before he memorized it (p. 9 0 ) ? " At the time of Aqiba, the body of the Mishnah comprised only the opinions of the representa­ tives of the Houses of Shammai and Hillel and their predecessors (p. 9 3 ) . Aqiba organised matters, sifting through the whole and crystallising it in an exact and definite shape. His work resulted in the compilation of a new Mishnah (p. 9 3 ) . Then the procedure was as follows: The Master "taught the new Mishnah to the first Tanna; afterwards he taught it to the second Tanna and so on. After the Mishnah was systematized and the Tan­ naim knew it thoroughly by heart, they repeated it in the college in the presence of the master, who supervised the recitation and corrected it and gave it its final form" (p. 9 3 ) . The disciples of Aqiba continued the work, adding comments and developed a large number of different versions of the Mishnah. Judah the Patriarch then under­ took a new edition. His Mishnah was virtually canonized, the rest were declared unofficial, with only secondary authority in comparison with the Mishnah of Judah. So here we have the picture of the way in which a tradition was formulated orally. Someone made up a sentence and dictated it to memorisers, and the professional memorisers then mastered the tradi­ tion and constituted its testimonies. Now the picture of b. Eruvin 54b conforms to an identifiable situation; we may presumably draw on it for evidence of practices before the time of Judah b. Ilai. c

c

c

c

c

VIII c

Why should Aqiba and his successors have adopted such an unwieldy, anachronistic means for the formulation and transmission of the Mishnah? One can hardly argue that technical limitations played a role. Writing was sufficiently commonplace for the Qumran sectaries and Christians to transmit materials through that medium. It seems to me that the best explanation derives from the claim made by the early Yavneans: the law of the Pharisaic party, now administered with Roman support in Jewish Palestine by the patriarchal-rabbinic courts,

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but formerly unknown to or Ignored by the masses of Jews, was not simply a biased, sectarian code. Now for the first time Jewry was called to live by the Torah of Moses, the whole Torah of Sinai, and taught to do so by men possessing the authentic traditions of Sinai. No one ignored Scripture. But to those Sadducees who adhered to the view that all Moses had revealed was a Written Torah, to those remnants of other groups that had had their own written traditions in addition to the Bible, and above all, to those ordinary folk who knew nothing other than the Scriptures and local customs, elements of the rabbinic Torah must have proved alien. The authority of the new class of judges and bureaucrats surely rested on little more than Roman fiat. The claim of Mosaic "authorship" for the rabbinic Torah and its authentication by Moses constituted powerful propaganda. The out­ sider, made aware that the rabbis' teaching was memorised, and that this continued the method adopted by Moses, Aaron, and all the elders, prophets, and sages from Sinai to the present day, could not have been wholly unimpressed. The Roman support for patriarchal-rabbinic government thus was made to seem incidental and unimportant. The authority of the rabbis derived from Moses, not from Rome. Aqiba's later support for the anti-Roman movement culminating in the Bar Kokhba revolution, wiped out all memory of any earlier collaboration with Rome. So it seems to me plausible that what the early Yavneans did in formulating tradiitons in mnemonic patterns and teaching them in the manner described in b. Eruvin was ritually to act out the part of the Torah-myth most pertinent to their political needs. It was an effective move. The processes of formulating and handing down the law were ritualised—one repeats so and so many times, no fewer, no more; one arranges traditions to facilitate memorisation, by this time (if not long before) an unnatural means of composition and trans­ mission of materials. Its very anachronism constituted part of its attraction. But who were the intended beneficiaries of rituals based upon the rabbinic Torah-myth? Outsiders to the schools could not have known much of what went on there; besides, there were only a few schools, none in Galilee, before 140. Such Sadducees and Essenes as had survived could not have been any more persuaded by the rabbinic heirs of Pharisaism than by the claims of the sect before 70. The common folk cannot be supposed to have known from mere observation just what the rabbis' gestures meant. So it seems that the imitation of Moses' c

c

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pedagogy was important primarily to the rabbis themselves. In that case, Aqiba and those around him may have proceeded along the lines described in b. Eruvin on account of considerations essentially internal to the rabbinic movement itself, rather than for outside con­ sumption. This theory attempts to account for a set of facts: ( 1 ) early Yavnean reference to oral traditions; ( 2 ) insistence on traditions not being based only on written sources; ( 3 ) the establishment of fixed, stereo­ typed forms for the transmission of traditions. The Pharisees certainly possessed traditions apart from the Bible. The post-70 rabbis, the New Testament, and Josephus all testify to that fact. But the traditions before 70 are not said to have been orally formulated and orally transmitted in the manner of the later rabbinical Tannaim. W e are, in fact, nowhere told how the Pharisees before A.D. 70 preserved their extra-biblical traditions. c

z

4

4

c

c

Two pericopae, Mishnah Ma aser Sheni 5:15 and Mishnah Eduyyot 8:4, per­ taining to Yohanan the High Priest (John Hyrcanus) and Yose b. Yo ezer, respect­ ively, consist of lists of "three things" or legal rulings, in the former instance, by Yohanan on tithing and cultic matters, in the latter, by Yose on purity law. These lists may supply a model for the form of other, early Pharisaic materials. Apart from the attribution to named masters, they are similar in form to the Qumran laws, which are organised in little lists on a single theme. c

CHAPTER FIVE T H E W R I T T E N T R A D I T I O N IN PHARISAISM B E F O R E 70 [Journal

for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic,

and Roman

Period,

IV, 1, 1973, pp. 56-65.]

Some pericopae in Mishnah-Tosefta are attested in what seems to be their present formulation in the earliest stages of the Yavnean period, by Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, Gamaliel II, Joshua, and others of that time, even by Yohanan ben Zakkai. The attestations often consist of glosses on details of established, and already-formulated law, leaving the very strong impression that the law itself in its current wording was available for gloss. It is exceedingly difficult to gloss a tradition preserved only through memorization, for the introduction of a clearcut gloss, rather than a revision in the tradition itself, will break down the process of memorization and public acceptance of what is memorized. It would therefore seem plausible, according to present theories as to the formulation and transmission of 'oral' tra­ ditions, that the presence of glosses and their acceptance into the tradition may signify the glossed words existed in some written form, though, admittedly, this is by no means certain. In any event pericopae attested in early Yavneh should begin in the pre-70 period, though of 1

1

David Weiss-Halivni, Meqorot uMesorot (Tel Aviv 1968) has demonstrated how the oral transmission of a tradition will produce changes in its original formulation. Halivni states, "Source criticism seeks to differentiate between the original statements as they were enunciated by their authors and the forms they took as a consequence of being orally transmitted; that is, between the sources and their later traditions ... what survives is the form assumed in the last phase of transmissional development." Halivni's results vindicate his theory. Now what is important is this: His analysis is of materials which evidently were formulated for oral transmission. He then shows that these materials were apt not to have been glossed or to have received interpolations (though both happened), but rather to have been reshaped or revised in the very formulation of the fundamental tradition itself. It would seem to me important, therefore, that when orally-formulated and orally transmitted materials require alteration, it will tend to be accomplished through revision of the primary statement, rather than through interpolation into, or gloss of, that statement. Then it will follow that where it is possible to gloss a lemma, that lemma would seem to have been in written form before the glossator. This argument is not decisive, but it seems worth proposing.

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course we have no way of assessing the source or point of origin of such early law. The sole moot assumption in this observation is that the attribution of a saying to a specific authority is apt to have been accurate—that is, that authority actually stands behind the gloss, whether or not it is phrased in the exact words he originally spoke. W e have no evidence deriving from the period before 70 as to how Pharisaic authorities formulated and transmitted their materials. The rabbinic traditions about the Pharisees, both named masters and the Houses of Shammai and Hillel, maintain remarkable silence on that subject. They tell us little to suggest that a well-developed system of oral formulation and oral transmission, relying, for example, upon the loyalty of disciples to the exact words of the masters, was in existence. W e have no laws for the school-house, such as appear later on, or for the process of memorization, such as are attested by Judah b. Ilai possibly back to Aqiva and Eliezer. The evidence we do have is in written form. Evidence that what is now written down may have begun orally would consist, for one thing, in mnemonic patterns which facilitate the memorization of a law. Such patterns would not prove beyond doubt that the law originally was formulated so as to be preserved only through memory, and not by writing, for even a written law-code in some measure would be memorized. But it would give some indication that memorization was a predominant consi­ deration in the formulation of the law. I have shown that mnemonic patterns of various sorts govern the formulation of hundreds of pericopae assigned to the Houses of Shammai and Hillel. Indeed, the use of very well-defined, sometimes elegant forms and the construc­ tion of those forms in balanced patterns, once demonstrated, allow us to undertake a considerable literary-critical task, to recover in peri­ copae which diverge from the established forms and patterns what 2

c

2

In my Eliezer ben Hyrcanus. The Tradition and the Man (Leiden 1 9 7 3 ) I have assembled considerable evidence in favor of the accuracy of attributions of legal sayings to Eliezer. Nearly half of all his legal sayings are attested by his disciples and others who lived in his life-time. Many more traditions are consistent in legal principle with these first-attested materials, and still others lie within the same thematic framework, though not on the principle attested in early strata. And the themes of some of the remaining traditions are well-attested for other Yavneans, if not for Eliezer in particular. Finally, I find it assuring that materials which, according to my larger theory of Eliezer, ought not to be attributed to him are not in fact assigned in his name, and that rule applies not only to legal, but also to theological sayings. However, it will be a long time before we are able to demonstrate the likelihood that the people to whom legal sayings are attributed actually said them, either in their present formulation or in any other.

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ought to have been their original language. But these mnemonic patterns occur solely in the apodosis, never in the protasis, of pericopae. So if the former was constructed to facilitate memorization, the latter was not. On such a basis, we may hardly conclude that the evidence now in our hands strongly suggests the materials were consistently formulated for the purposes of memorization and transmission, in that exact formulation, by means other than writing. Such evidence as is adduced in favor of the view that pre-70 Pharisaic traditions were orally formulated and orally transmitted invariably derives either from later rabbinic times, or from non-Pharisaic sources. 3

I I have no theory to propose for the tradental situation of pre-70 Pharisaism. It seems worthwhile, however, to call attention to a few passages which suggest that before 70 some sort of traditions, later handed on to Yavnean masters and glossed by them, did exist. Since these traditions exhibit no mnemonic structure or other traits to suggest they were originally formulated so as to be memorized, and since the glosses cannot have been included in the original formulation and therefore had to have been added later on, it would stand to reason that the traditions before us were written down, though that is by no means certain. Let us consider, first of all, a passage which is very likely to have been completed before ca. 80 or 90 A.D.: 3

It would be difficult to assemble a less persuasive case than is offered by J . M. Baumgarten, 'The Unwritten Law in the Pre-Rabbinic Period,' Journal for the Study of Judaism 3 ( 1 9 7 2 ) , pp. 7-29. He cites the well-known passage in Antiquities 13:297, but does not take seriously the fact that it was composed ca. 95 A.D., at which time we have good evidence the Yavnean authorities did claim orally to formulate and transmit their traditions. He cites Philo and says, "We thus have indications that in the time of ... Philo, oral transmission was looked upon as the characteristic medium of the Pharisaic tradition." But Philo makes no reference to Pharisees, let alone to how they in particular preserved their teachings! Nahman b. Isaac, a fourth-century Babylonian, is asked to tell us about first-century Palestine: "Although this is a later Amoraic comment on the baraita, it authentically depicts the Pharisaic position ..." How do we know what is authentic, and how do we know Nahman b. Isaac knew about conditions four hundred and more years before his day? He resurrects the crisis-theory of redaction, which has been applied with equally slight basis to the redaction of the Avesta, of the Mishnah, and of various other ancient documents about the redaction of which people really had no information. The post-Talmudic Scholion to Megillat Ta anit is called to testify to pre-rabbinic times. CD has to have attacked only the Pharisees—there are no other candidates to serve as object of the polemic. And so on. c

THE WRITTEN TRADITION IN PHARISAISM BEFORE 70

93

[As to] vessels of wood, leather, bone, or glass, their flat parts are clean, their receptacles unclean. If they are broken, they are clean ... [As to] vessels of clay and alum-crystal, their [capacity to receive] uncleanness is alike ... And breaking them is purifying them. M. Kelim 2:1 [As to] the smallest [size] of earthenware vessels, their bottoms, sides which can set without supports, [if the whole vessels were unclean, their sherds remain unclean] if their measure is as much [oil as needed for] anointing a small finger of a child, [etc.] the words of R. Ishmael. M. Kelim 2:2 c

There follow opinions attributed to Aqiva and Yohanan ben Zakkai. Assuming these attributions are sound, we have an early or middle Yavnean law defining the size of the sherds of an unclean vessel of clay which retain the uncleanness that permeated them when the vessel was whole and before it was broken. Since M. Kelim 2:1 states that the specified object is broken, it is regarded as freed of its former uncleanness, M. Kelim 2:2 would seem to stand in opposition to the foregoing rule. The sherds of the vessel are not clean at all. They may be still unclean if they are of a specified size. M. Kelim 2:1 could readily have generated M. Kelim 2:2—that is, it is natural to refine the law about breaking a vessel and to ask, Into what size of sherds? But M. Kelim 2:2 could not have generated M. Kelim 2 : 1 . That is, once you know there are specified measure­ ments for the sherds, you are not going to formulate the law as, "[Merely] breaking them [into pieces of any size whatever] is puri­ fying them." Accordingly, M. Kelim 2:2 comes after M. Kelim 2 : 1 . Since the substance of M. Kelim 2:2 is associated with early and middle Yav­ neans, it stands to reason that the law which for reasons of logic ought to come after M. Kelim 2:1 in like manner for reasons of the associated attributions does come after M. Kelim 2 : 1 . That should mean the first rule comes at the very outset of Yavnean times or from the period before then. II Now let us turn to an entire tractate and see whether we may locate its fundamental stratum. W e shall consider Berakhot. The tractate opens with a dispute among Eliezer, sages, and Gamaliel.

94

LITERATURE Q

"From what time do they read the Shema in the evening? From the time that the priests go in to eat their Heave-offering/' c

Then follows the time at which one no longer may read the

Shema :

1. "Until the end of the first watch"—the words of R. Eliezer. 2. Sages say, ''Until midnight." 3. Rabban Gamaliel says, "Until the morning star rises." c

The three sayings have been formulated in the same way, ad plus the specified time. They take for granted that the time from which the Shema may be recited requires no comment. That language is singu­ larly inappropriate, for not everyone is a priest waiting the permissible time for eating Heave-offering. Most are not. The language of the opening clause is important, in particular the use of the present participle in the plural: qdrtn. M. Berakhot 1:2 proceeds in the same formula, "From what time do they read the Shema in the morning?" Eliezer provides an answer different from that given anonymously. Then follows, "And he completes it before ( ad) sunrise." Now Joshua gives a different opi­ nion, which is glossed. M. Berakhot 1:3 now introduces a completed Houses-pericope, and M. Berakhot 1:4 tells us about the blessings said before and after reciting the Shema , with allusions to various customs. The present participle in the plural next occurs in M. Berakhot 1:5, "They make mention of the going forth from Egypt at night." This then is glossed by a saying of Eleazar b. Azariah. So the whole of M. Berakhot Chapter One, when attested at all, is attested by early Yavneans, and the attested passages all use the same verbal construc­ tion. Chapter Two when attested is shown to be Ushan: the afore-ment­ ioned verbal construction does not occur. 3:1 is about one who has yet to bury the dead, and 3:2 completes the rule. The next available passage following the earlier construction tells us that women, slaves, and children are free [of the obligation] of saying the Shema , the tejillin, but are liable to say the Prayer and so forth. This is unattested. 3:4, 5, and 6 deal with unclean people in connection with the Shema . Chapter Four does not contain the important verbal construction. This brings us to 5:1, "They do not stand to say the Prayer except reverentially ... They make mention of the Power of Rains in the [prayer for] the resurrection of the dead and ask for rains in the bles­ sing of the years and Havdalah in 'Who graciously grants knowledge.' " 0

Q

c

c

c

c

c

THE WRITTEN TRADITION IN PHARISAISM BEFORE 70

95

c

This is attested by Aqiva and Eliezer, who have different opinions on that matter. 5:3-5 deal with other matters and do not use the present participle in the plural, which next occurs in 6 : 1 : How do they bless fruit? But this is answered, omer, he blesses, and is attested by Judah b. Ilai. 7:1 is no help. 7:2 has, Women, slaves and children are not invited to participate in the Blessing of food after meals. Then 7:3, "How do they invite to participate in the blessing of food after meals?" This is answered at some length, with Aqiva, Ishmael, and Yose the Galilean, of whom the sole authority integral to the pericope is Yose. Chapter Eight deals with the Houses' purity rules and how they affect meals. 8:6 has, "They do not bless the light, spices of gentiles, nor the light or spices prepared for the dead, etc." Chapter Nine is not relevant and does not exhibit the specified verbal con­ struction. The passages which use the present tense participle in the plural, when placed side to side, therefore produce the following little enchiridion: c

c

1. Reciting the Shema , evening and morning. 2. Referring to the Exodus in the evening Shema . 3. Women, slaves, and children are not obligated to recite the Shema (etc.). 4. When they say the Prayer, they must do so with reverence. 5. They include Powers of Rain in the paragraph of the Prayer dealing with Resurrection, rains in the Blessing of the Years, and Havdalah in "Who graciously favors man with knowledge." 6. How do they bless fruit? [This shifts to 'he says' and is attested only by Judah b. Ilai. The rest of the chapter ignores the present plural participle form, even where it might be used, e.g., 6:6.] 7. How do they invite [people] to say the Blessing of Food? 8. They bless the light and spices not of gentiles or of the dead etc. [in connection with Havdalah}. c

c

The foundations of the tractate, as delineated by the specified verbal form, would deal with the most fundamental matters of prayer: the Shema , the Prayer, the blessing of food and particularly the Grace after meals, and the Havdalah. This last item is not ideal; if it had been placed at the appropriate point, it would come after 5:2. It is included with the Houses because they discuss the order of blessings for Havdalah, referring to light and spices. O f course we cannot now know what other items were included in this list. c

96

LITERATURE

But that we have an enchiridion for the liturgical life seems to me likely. Only item 6 is dubious. Without it, we still have the three things people are expected to know: Shema , Prayer, Grace after Meals, and 8 is out of place and possibly anomalous. W e have already observed that the more important items in the handbook if attested at all, are attested by the earliest strata of Yavnean authorities. It would carry us far afield to show how this list has been broken up and augmented, glossed, filled with interpolations, and otherwise ex­ panded by the later generations, beginning with the authorities who in the first place attest its original elements. But that the Mishnahtractate starts here seems to me beyond serious question, and the substance as well as the form of the later strata builds upon the primary set of rules. I do not know who stands behind the original handbook (if that is what it was), why it was formulated in so consistent a way as seems (within our hypothesis) to have been the case, or when it was origi­ nally composed. But I think it very likely that it was composed before the time of Eliezer and Gamaliel, and this leads us to the very begin­ nings of Yavneh and possibly to the period before that time. None of the specified pericopae contains a mnemonic device of any sort. c

4

Ill To show the importance of that fact, let me now introduce one example of a mnemonic construction within the same tractate, M. Berakhot 8:1-5. Here we have two techniques. The more common is simply to change the arrangement of words, X , Y , then Y , X . This mnemonic occurs scores of times in Houses' disputes. The rest of the construction is fixed. The chapter begins with the simplest superscription: "These are things which are between the House of Shammai and the House of Hillel in reference to the meal." Each opinion is introduced by "The House of Shammai say ... The House of Hillel say . . . " Then we have: 8:1: He blesses over the day and afterward he blesses over the wine. He blesses over the wine and afterward he blesses over the day. 4

A careful analysis of M. Ber. 1:1 will show beyond much doubt that proGamalielean redactors have had a decisive hand in the matter, and this suggests that the redaction was done before Gamaliel's disagrace. The conservatism of the tradents will account for its being preserved afterward, and of course Simeon b. Gamaliel and Judah the Patriarch were not averse to including materials favorable to the earlier patriarch, their ancestor, in Mishnah. Gamaliel's traditions are analyzed by Sharmai Kanter, The Legal Traditions of Gamaliel II (in press).

THE WRITTEN TRADITION IN PHARISAISM BEFORE 70

97

All that changes is day/wine, wine/day. 8:2 follows the same pattern, this time with "they wash the hands and afterward they mix the cup" versus the opposite order. 8:3 breaks the pattern. 8:4 resumes, "They sweep the house and afterward they wash the hands" versus the oppo­ site order. 8:5 depends entirely on word-order, without even auxiliary verbs: Light, food, spices, Havdalah versus light, spices, food, Hav­ dalah. 8:5D is not mnemonically formulated; it could not have been. The other mnemonic is much more subtle, but is not uncommon. It consists in making use of the same words plus a single different word, in reversed order, with the change of a single letter from the first to the second opinion. 8:7 starts with a superscription serving both Houses' opinions: "He who ate and forgot and did not bless [the food after he ate i t ] . " Then comes: House of Shammai say, "Let him return to his place and bless." House of Hillel say, "Let him bless in the place in which he remem­ bered." Thus we have the same words, 1. return 2. place 3. bless vs. 3. bless, 2. place, 1. remember. Return ( H Z R ) and remember ( Z K R ) are identical except for H / Z . Now this is what might have been done to facilitate the memoriza­ tion of a pericope. But in the handbook of liturgical life, no effort seems to have been made to produce mnemonics. Perhaps none was needed; it may have seemed logical to memorize the materials simply because of their appropriate order: Shema , Tefillah, Blessing of Food. And again, it may be argued that using questions and answers ( 1 : 1 , 2 ) was meant to serve the purpose of facilitating recitation, if not memo­ rization. But then the answers to the questions are difficult because of their allusiveness; they do not directly respond to the question at all. 5

c

IV W e cannot prove "the handbook" was written down. W e have no evidence that whoever formulated it hoped to make it easy to memo­ rize. But there is an argument from history; whatever literature has survived from the first century—for this surely is a first-century document—was written, for instance, by Josephus or Philo. The early 5

Numerous other examples of this subtle mnemonic, and many more obvious ones, are given in my Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees before 70 (Leiden 1 9 7 1 ) , III, pp. 101-143.

98

LITERATURE

Church may have orally preserved stories about Jesus, but very rapidly wrote them down and was unwilling to commit the stories to the uncertainties of memories. The Qumran group wrote its traditions. And of the Pharisees we know only that reliable evidence claims they had traditions in addition to Scripture, without suggesting how these traditions were preserved. W e know, moreover, that where it was intended to formulate and hand on materials solely through the memories of authorities, elaborate measures were taken to assure the accuracy and permanence of those memorized traditions. These measures were institutional, as in the case of the rabbis' Tannas, or they were professional, as in the case of the Parthian Gosan. What evidence do we have that the pre-70 Pharisees made provision for the oral formulation and oral trans­ mission of their traditions? So far as we now know, the pre-70 Phari­ sees did not legislate, as did the later rabbinic authorities, about the master-disciple relationship, about the proper way of behaving in the school-house, about how to memorize traditions, or about the other issues which should have faced a group planning on keeping its traditions other than in writing. That seems to me a decisive con6

6

The cited materials may be attested at best to the first stratum of Yavnean formulation, if not redaction. I have not introduced the many pericopae, involving the Houses of Shammai and Hillel, which seem to gloss in formulation, and certainly in substance do attest to, an antecedent law. Such Houses-attestations would throw the original law back into the last decades of the Second Temple period, for the Houses' form itself is apt to antedate 70 by at least a few years. Y . I. Halevy, Dorot HaRishonim, and Y . N . Epstein, Mevo ot leSifrut HaTanna?im were well aware of this phenomenon. Halevy lists many dozens of laws which he holds are attested by the Houses' disputes about details of such laws. Epstein accepts Halevy's reasoning, but rejects some of his examples, while adding others. It is disappointing that the detailed analyses of these scholars play no role in the formulation of arguments about the antiquity of the "Oral Torah." It is as if internal evidence and particularly the details of law will not be taken seriously, but the most specious arguments constructed out of non-Pharisaic and non-rabbinic documents must serve instead. To be sure, the point of Halevy's analysis is not that the laws were written down, only that they were, in their present formulation, very old. Epstein exhibited greater reserve on the question of oral formulation and oral transmission. For our present purpose it suffices to observe that the process of glossing antecedent and already formulated legal lemmas would seem to begin even before 70. But I must stress that not a single one of the rabbinic traditions assigned to pre-70 authorities provides an attestation for any other one of those traditions, so far as I can see, and this strongly suggests the major part of the work of commen­ tary began at Yavneh, not before. It remains possible that the legal corpus—at least, some pericopae—subject to commentary derives from pre-70 times, but, as is clear, this matter requires investigation item by item. 0

THE WRITTEN TRADITION IN PHARISAISM BEFORE 70

99

sideration, for all the evidence we now have is in written form, so there is no possibility of adducing concrete evidence of continuing memorization of materials. The theory of a dual Torah is entirely impertinent, for groups such as the Qumranians who had such a corpus of revealed materials external to Scriptures wrote down at least part of them. It therefore did not seem necessarily to follow from a theory of unwritten, or external, tradition that one must memorize such tradition and preserve it in no other way. Nothing said here is decisive evidence for a written fundament to Mishnah-Tosefta. If we cannot demonstrate through detailed analysis of individual pericopae, in all their readings and through all the exegetical complexities, that materials originally were written down, then we cannot be certain that was the case: what we cannot show, we do not know. But assembling masses of external evidence, pertinent or otherwise, serves only to postpone the task of detailed analysis of the preserved materials. Interpreting that evidence solely in terms of what it alleges, without regard to the time, place, and reliability of the authority alleged to be responsible for the allegation, not only raises unnecessary obstacles to careful study of detail, it also obfuscates the primary issue and introduces obsolete modes of argument and inquiry.

CHAPTER S I X TYPES AND FORMS IN A N C I E N T J E W I S H L I T E R A T U R E Some Comparisons [History of Religions. An International Journal for Comparative Historical X I , 4, 1972, pp. 354-390.]

Summary of Forms and Types of Rabbinic Pharisees

Traditions

Studies,

about the 1

The rabbinic traditions concerning the Pharisees before A.D. 7 0 , both named masters and the Houses of Shammai and Hillel, follow a number of clear-cut forms, as follows: A. Law: total of 363 pericopae 1. Legal sayings—305 a. Standard, dispute, and variations ( 2 6 8 ) Standard: X says + direct discourse Dispute: X says + direct discourse Y says + direct discourse + / — superscription b. Debate ( 2 8 , 17 "authentic") X said to them + direct discourse Y (or, they) said to them - f direct discourse c. Testimony ( 9 ) X testified concerning/that 2. Legal narratives—58 a. Epistles ( 2 ) Authority + setting - f he said to him Write + address, salutation, content b. Ordinances ( 8 ) At first + historical situation Ordained + authority 1

The traditions under discussion pertain to all masters who are named in Talmudic literature and who, it is assumed, flourished before A.D. 70. The expression "Pharisaic-rabbinic" in this setting means rabbinic traditions pertaining to pre-70 Pharisees. The individual pericopae are translated and analyzed in my Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees before 70, 3 vols. (Leiden: E . J . Brill, 1 9 7 1 ) .

TYPES AND FORMS IN ANCIENT JEWISH LITERATURE

101

That + rule Chains and lists ( 2 ) X says to + infinitive X + Y decreed + uncleanness + on + object d. Precedents ( 1 6 ) Subject + verb + apodosis Generally: simple declarative sentences, little dialogue; sometimes: Ma aseh be. First-person sayings and stories ( 9 ) " I " + direct discourse, often in narrative setting f. Illustrations and proofs ( 1 6 ) (Stories pertinent to law, 12) Stories generally told through dialogue g. Exegesis to story ( 5 ) Scripture + exegesis + X would do/did

c.

z

2

B. Aggadic traditions: total of 96 pericopae 1. Short biographical references—12 Simple declarative sentences, no direct discourse 2. Biographical and historical stories—40 a. Long biographical stories told through dialogue ( 1 8 ) Brief statement of setting + he said to him ... he said to him ... he did so and he said to him b. Short biographical stories told through dialogue ( 2 ) c. Long historical stories told through narrative ( 1 0 ) Simple declarative sentences d. Long historical stories told through dialogue ( 4 ) e. Short historical stories told through narrative ( 6 ) 3. Sayings—44 a. " I " sayings Contain first-person statements or references ( 4 ) b. Sayings not in narrative setting ( 2 3 ) c. Apophthegms in narrative setting ( 1 2 ) d. Woe sayings ( 2 ) e. Formulaic sayings ( 3 ) C. Scriptures: total of 72 pericopae 1. Law—47 a. References to Scriptures ( 8 ) 2

For a list of abbreviations used, see p. 136.

102

LITERATURE

b. Exegeses and eisegeses ( 3 5 ) c. Proof texts ( 4 ) 2. Aggadah—25 a. References to Scriptures ( 6 ) b. Exegeses and eisegeses ( 1 0 ) c. Proof texts ( 9 ) Through "types" of traditions we mean to categorize and catalog the varieties of the materials before us. These come in two groups, legal and nonlegal. While the forms vary, the type—legal tradition— uniformly applies throughout. The nonlegal types require somewhat more detailed differentiation. One model for such classification is supplied by Gunkel, who finds the following kinds of legends: etiological, ethnological, etymological, ceremonial, geological. Other sorts of Gattungen are poetry of various kinds, love songs, wisdom sayings, litanies, myths, sagas, and the like. None of these types applies to, or may be found in, the rabbinic traditions about the Pharisees. (It would lead us far afield to speculate on whether we have "myth," "legend," or other genres of literature; the application of such terms raises questions not directly pertinent to our inquiry.) 3

A. Stories with a moral 1. Against pride (Sifre Num. 22) (Simeon the Just) 2. Giving to Temple (B. B.B. 133b) (Yose's son) 3. Acquiring the world to come (Gen. R. 65:27) (Yose's nephew) 4. Torah brings honor ( Y . Ber. 7:2) (Simeon b. Shetah and Yannai) 5. Honesty with gentiles ( Y . B.M. 2:5) (Simeon b. Shetah) 6. Descendants of gentiles who do the work of Aaron come to peace ( B . Yoma 71b) 7. Do not trust yourself until death (Yohanan the High Priest) (B. Ber. 29a) 8. Companionship or death (Abba Hilqiah) ( B . Ta. 23b) 3

H. Gunkel, Legends of Genesis (New York, 1 9 4 6 ) , pp. 13-36.

TYPES AND FORMS IN ANCIENT JEWISH LITERATURE

103

9. Holy spirit comes only to a worthy generation (Tos. Sot. 13:3) (Hillel) 10. Good man does not fear bad news ( Y . Ber. 9:3) (Hillel) 11. Poor and rich must study Torah ( B . Yoma 35b) (Hillel, Eleazar) 12. According to painstaking is reward ( A R N chap. 12) (Hillel) 13. It is a misvah to bathe (Lev. R. 34:3) (Hillel) ' 14. Patience is better than impatience ( B . Shab. 30b-31a) (Hillel) 15. Honor husband ( B . Ned. 66b) (Baba b. Buta) 16. Be circumspect ( B . B.B. 4a) (Baba b. Buta) B . Heavenly messages 1. Simeon the Just + Yohanan the High Priest heard decree an­ nulled, young men victorious ( B . Sot. 33a) 2. Echo quotes Song 8:7—Hillel and Shebna ( B . Sot. 21a) 3. Echo praises Hillel (Tos. Sot. 13:3) 4. Echo chooses Hillelites ( B . Eruv. 13b) (N.B. Tos. Nez. 1:1—Hillelites accept testimony of an echo.) c

C. Philosophical stories 1. Is there reward and punishment ( A R N chap. 5) (Antigonus of Sokho) D. Biographical stories, including miracles 1. Simeon the Just predicted death ( Y . Yoma 5:2) 2. Alexander saw visage of Simeon and conquered (Lev. R. 13:5) 3. Healing of Gamaliel's son by Hanina through prayer ( B . Ber. 34b = M. Ber. 5:5) 4. Simeon b. Gamaliel juggled (Tos. Suk. 4 : 4 ) E. Song 1. Woe is me ( B . Pes. 57a)

104

LITERATURE

F. Biographical references (Twelve pericopae, e.g., when Gamaliel died, the glory of the Torah ceased.) G. Historical stories and sayings 1. Kutaeans vanquished by Simeon the Just ( B . Yoma 69a) 2. Founding the Temple of Onias ( B . Men. 109b) 3. Reproach against grape clusters after the Yose's (Tos. B.Q. 8:13) 4. Jesus admired whore ( B . Sot. 47a = B . Sanh. 107b) 5. Rained in days of Simeon b. Shetah (Sifra Behuqotai 1:1) 6. Honi made rain (M. Ta. 3:8) 7. Simeon b. Shetah and the witches ( Y . Hag. 2:2) 8. End of jurisdiction in property litigation in days of Simeon b. Shetah ( Y . Sanh. 1:1) 9. Yannai breaks with the Pharisees ( B . Sanh. 19a-b) 10. Man crushed in Temple in days of Hillel ( B . Pes. 64b) 11. Origin of disputes (Tos. Hag. 2:9) 12. Hillel laid hands on whole offering (Tos. Hag. 2:11) 13. Sword in schoolhouse ( B . Shab. 17a) H. Nonlegal historical records and lists 1. W h o prepared the red heifer—Simeon the Just, etc. (M. Par. 3:5) 2. Changes in Temple cult at death of Simeon the Just (Tos. Sot. 13:7) Some

Comparisons

Our first comparison is between the forms and types of rabbinic pericopae about the Pharisees and those of the first important rabbinic figure after 70, Yohanan b. Zakkai. Among Yohanan's traditions we find legal sayings in standard form, debates, epistles, ordinances, precedents, illustrations, proofs, and references to legal rulings; short biographical references; long biographical references told through dialogue; sayings both in a narrative setting and otherwise; legal and aggadic exegeses and eisegeses; and, of course, a wide range of proof texts and scriptural references scattered through his pericopae. Almost 4

4

These are set forth in my Development of a Legend: Studies on the Traditions Concerning Yohanan ben Zakkai (Leiden: E . J . Brill, 1 9 7 0 ) .

TYPES AND FORMS IN ANCIENT JEWISH LITERATURE

105

the entire repertoire of types and forms of rabbinic pericopae about the Pharisees recurs with reference to Yohanan b. Zakkai. The legal traditions occur primarily not in the standard form; in this respect, Yohanan appears more like the pre-70 masters than the post-70 ones, for example, Eliezer and Joshua, whose legal sayings come chiefly in standard form. But from a literary and formal perspective, Yohanan marks no break whatever in the formation of traditions. It will now be instructive to compare briefly and in a general way the types of rabbinic traditions about pre-70 Pharisees and the forms in which those traditions are transmitted with those of other groups in ancient Judaism. The first body of literature for comparison of forms and types obviously is the Hebrew Scriptures. Here we find practically nothing in common. No important type of tradition, except for law and moral sayings, and no significant rabbinic form used for a tradition about the Pharisees, without exception, is to be discerned in the whole Tanakh. While apocryphal and pseudepigraphic writers consistently imitate the style and forms of biblical history, psalms, and visions, make use of the names of biblical authorities in assigning authorship to their books, and sometimes try to represent their works as direct continuations of biblical writings, the rabbinic traditions about the Pharisees practically ignore the forms and types of Hebrew Scriptures. Excluding the reference to Scriptures as proof texts and the like—and these are remarkably few, given the range of law and lore of the Pharisaic-rabbinic tradition—we may say that the Hebrew Bible played no central role in shaping the literary forms and in the formulation of the agenda of types of rabbinic traditions about the Pharisees. A convenient catalog of the types of pericopae in biblical literature is supplied by Bentzen. Apart from the song quoted by Abba Hanan ( B . Pes. 5 7 a ) , I discern no Pharisaic pericope one might call poetry; nothing exhibits the standard traits of biblical poetry, such as parallelismus membrorum, nor do we find a disciplined rhythmic system applying to a complete pericope. Bentzen lists the following kinds of poetry in biblical literature, none of which has a Pharisaic-rabbinic parallel: workers' songs; mocking, drinking, and watchmen's songs; wedding poetry; funeral songs (without Pharisaic equivalent, exclu5

6

5

Aage Bentzen, Introduction to the Old Testament, 3 vols. (Copenhagen, 1 9 5 7 ) , 1: 102-251. 6 Ibid., p. 119.

106

LITERATURE 7

ding the HY-sayings about Hillel and Samuel the Small, which hardly compare with the dirges of Jer. 9:16, Amos 5:2, 2 Sam. l:17ff., and other examples of biblical laments); war poetry; benedictions and curses spoken by patriarchs; patriarchal words (Hillel's citation of Prov. 8:21 hardly compares); psalms, hymns, thanksgiving odes, lamentations, and other religious poetry, whether collective or indi­ vidual, cultic or synagogual. In the category of Wisdom literature, we find nothing similar to popular proverbs, though later rabbinic literature is full of them. W e do find Wisdom sentences. This is one of two important types of biblical literature that recur in rabbinic traditions about the Phari­ sees. But the form of the biblical Wisdom sentences does not seem to have influenced that of the rabbinical moral sayings as it did in Ben Sira's. For example, Proverbs contains no consistent attributions ("Solomon says . . . " ) to authorities such as stand behind every moral saying in Pharisaic-rabbinic literature. The monotonous, but artful contrasts of Proverbs—for example, a wise son makes a glad father, but a foolish son is a sorrow to his mother (Prov. 10:1)—hardly characterize most Pharisaic sayings. In general we find the reversal of a statement, that is, gather versus scatter, as in a legal contract, which is not like the parallels of Proverbs. The redactional techniques are quite different, not only because of the inclusion of named masters, but also because of the construction in brief pericopae, by groups of three, as in M. Avot 1:1-18, a form with no antecedent in Proverbs, where the pericopae are long and highly developed. The proverbial sentence, with its parallel sections, its rhythms, and its formal unity thus by and large is not replicated in the rabbinic moral sayings attributed to Pharisees, which tend to ignore parallelism, to exhibit no rhythm scheme, and to be discrete. As to the other sorts of Wisdom literature, such as riddles, parables, fables of animals or trees, and allegories, we find nothing comparable in the materials before us. Bentzen alludes to priestly oracles, benedictions, and curses; sermons and speeches of retirement; prophetic oracles and revelations; raptures, visions, auditions, and reports of supernatural experiences; speeches of reproach and admonitions. None of these types of litera­ ture has a close equivalent in the rabbinic traditions about the Pharisees. 8

9

7 Tos. Sot. 13:3. 8 Y . Ned. 5:6. 9 Y . Ber. 9:5.

TYPES AND FORMS IN ANCIENT JEWISH LITERATURE 10

107

Biblical prose is divided by Eissfeldt into three headings: spee­ ches, documents, and narratives. Bentzen supplies a "more different­ iated register." As to speeches, outside of the framework of nar­ ratives, we have nothing equivalent to substantial biblical speeches. Perhaps the closest is R. Yohanan's recreation of Yohanan the High Priest's speech to the Jews with reference to the tithes, "Come, my children and I shall teach you." Yet that "speech" is artificially constructed out of the agenda of the tithing laws set forth in M. Demai 5:15. The listeners are ignored; without the prelude, it is a set of laws. It hardly exhibits significant rhetorical interest. W e find no Pharisaic-rabbinic equivalent to items such as political speeches and sermons. As to documents, we have no copies of specific contracts of covenants, but we do have models of contracts of marriage, divorce, and the like—documents referred to, but not spelled out, in Deut. 24:1, Is. 5 0 : 1 , and Jer. 3:8. For some biblical catalogs (e.g., genealogies, lists of officials, heroes, towns) we have approximate equivalents, for example, the reference of Joshua b. Hananiah to the marriage of certain Temple officials (Tos. Yev. 1:13-15). The allusions to offices and their holders by Hananiah, Prefect of the Priests, and lists of legal rulings in M. Eduyyot are not comparable. W e have two letters, not like the biblical ones in form, to be sure. The type of literature called an epistle, or "artificial letter," has no parallel in the Pharisaic-rabbinic literature. Etiological legends about origins of local phenomena are unavailable in the materials before us. Sanctuary legends obviously will be absent, but so too are legends describing the origins of usages in daily life and in the cult, unless one might want to regard the stories of masters' legal rulings and decrees as efforts to describe such "beginnings." Stories of Simeon the Just may account for the absence of cultic miracles. It seems to me the purpose of stories such as Hillel and the Alexandrians' Ketuvah is not to tell how it comes about that we interpret the language of documents of ordinary folk. The purpose rather is to justify the procedure by reference to Hillel's authority. W e have re­ markably few devotional legends, though the materials about Ha1 1

1 2

c

1 3

1 4

1 5

1 0

Bentzen, p. 2 0 3 . 11 Ibid.

12 Y. M.S. 5:5. 13 Tos. Sot. 13:7b. i* Tos. Ket. 4:9. 1 Bentzen, p. 327. 5

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nina b. Dosa's praying, eating, and other habits; Honi the Order's famous prayers, and Abba Hilqiah's gestures and prayers may be compared with biblical stories with "religious tendency and edifying form" about holy persons. Legends of the prophets may be compared as a type with biographical narratives about rabbis, but only in a general way. The forms are entirely unrelated. One cannot maintain that legends of Samuel (e.g., 1 Sam. 7:2-8:22, 10:17-27, and the like) have shaped the ways in which stories about any Pharisaic master were told. On the contrary, we have no Pharisaic-rabbinic equivalent to such sustained narratives. The longer biographical narratives about Pharisaic masters are hardly the same as biblical ones in important literary ways. The more appropriate equivalent to biblical hero legends would be the brief apophthegms in narrative settings, where things Hillel saw and said are set forth as models for behavior. But the biblical stories which show the heroes vis a vis the great events of history, or in the process of working great wonders, or indeed relating their religious and spiritual life (such as Elijah at Horeb) have no rabbinic-Pharisaic equivalent. Nor do we find fairy tales. I f by myth one means a legend dealing with divine persons, then the Pharisaic traditions as formulated in rabbinic literature contain no myth. Two important categories remain: history-narrative and law. As to the former, we have a number of interesting examples of historical narratives, two of them possibly based upon the Aramaic version of Josephus: the Simeon b. Shetah tales about the banquet of Yannai and the trial of Yannai's servant. But the kind of history preserved in biblical literature, in which events are described in full with sustained interest; in which something more than a limited episode is related, then put into relationship with other episodes to tell a long story; and in which such stories are then strung together into larger units—none of this sort of historiography is available in the rabbinic traditions about the Pharisees. At best we find a few brief historical and bio­ graphical references and some, somewhat longer, narratives of episo­ des, always complete in themselves and never related to a larger effort at interpretation of the meaning and direction of history. In the sense that biblical history concentrates on such larger questions, we may say that Pharisaic-rabbinic literature contains no history, only historical stories. W e find, moreover, nothing like Ruth, Esther, 1 6

1 7

1 8

16 B . Ta. 23a-b. 1 Banquet: Y . Ber. 7:2; trial: B . Sanh. 19a-b. I have offered an explanation for the absence of genuine historical interest in 7

1 8

TYPES AND FORMS IN ANCIENT JEWISH LITERATURE

109

and similar historical stories; they differ both as to length and in their interest in personality and character. Pharisaic rabbis never have mo­ tives or feelings. They say things and do things, but they do not emerge as individuals, differentiated from other rabbis or from ordinary folk. They are not given inner thoughts or hopes, have no complicated schemes. They are one dimensional, flat—the narrative equivalent of frontality in art—and nearly all cut of the same model. The contrasts between Hillel and Shammai do not much change the picture. They merely are made to embody and typify virtues or vices. Biblical and Pharisaic-rabbinic tradition come together in the legal interests characteristic of both literatures, though not in equivalent proportions. Since Pharisaic-rabbinic tradition obviously based itself upon biblical law, it is astonishing that we find few literary traits or forms in common. Let us compare laws on the same subject—the Sabbath, a theme that occurs in legal materials we shall examine below. Biblical Sabbath laws occur in several ways, for example, as stories, the story of the manna, Ex. 16:22-30, in which the law is given by Moses, primarily in imperatives: bake ... boil ... lay by ... eat it today ...; as general rules about resting, with the reason for the law, Ex. 20:8, Deut. 5:12-15, and Ex. 31:12-17, 34:21. By contrast, the Pharisaic-rabbinic tradition is highly detailed and specific, phrased in descriptive verbs of continuous action, present tense participles: they do not soak, they do not place, they do not sell. One never finds the imperative. T o generalize, biblical laws come in three forms: cases and hypotheses, beginning / / or when\ imperative or categorical com­ mandments; and mixed forms. For the Pharisaic-rabbinic tradition, even where / / or when is called for, it frequently does not occur, for example, an unclean se°ah of Terumah fell into a hundred se°ahs of clean lacks the required //. The hypothetical-law style, introduced by means of participles, does of course predominate in the Pharisaicrabbinic materials; the protasis of Lev. 2 0 : 1 1 — T h e man who lies with his father's wife has micovered his father's nakedness; both of them shall be put to death—is formally not distant from such legal sayings as rely on present participles, except for the specification of the penalty. Much more is to be said in the comparison of biblical and rabbinic forms. These brief observations suffice to make clear that the Pharisaicrabbinic tradition stands independent of the forms of biblical literarabbinic literature in "Religious Uses of History," History and Theory 5 ( 1 9 6 6 ) : 153-71 and in Invitation to the Talmud (N.Y., 1973: Harper & R o w ) , pp. 223-246.

110

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ture even where the same matters are under discussion; and the rabbinic tradition about the Pharisees has few types of materials in common with biblical literature. Charles categorizes the predominant types of materials (without reference to forms) as follows: 1 9

1. 2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

Long historical books: 1 Esdras, 1-3 Maccabees, Letter of Aristeas Historical books with a moral or legal purpose: Tobit, Judith, Jubilees Apocalypses: 1-2 Enoch, 2-3 Baruch, 4 Ezra, Testaments of Twelve Patriarchs, Sibyline Oracles, Assumption of Moses, 2 Esdras Additions to, and completions of, canonical books: 1 Baruch, Epistle of Jeremy, Prayer of Manasses, Prayer of Azariah, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, Esther, Books of Adam and Eve, Martyrdom of Isaiah, etc. Psalms: Psalms of Solomon Wisdom Literature: Ben Sira, Wisdom of Solomon, 4 Maccabees, Story of Ahikar

I know no form-critical work on the literature, so categorization of books and not smaller pericopae must suffice. O f these types of books, only the last is pertinent to our comparisons of types and forms. W e may say that the rabbinic traditions about the Pharisees before 70 contain no types of pericopae congruent even to the broad categories listed by Charles, except for item 6, let alone whole books or extended discussions comparable with any one of them. As to Wisdom Litera­ ture, 4 Maccabees is a philosophical treatise on inspired reason, and nothing like it occurs in the Pharisaic-rabbinic tradition. The story of Ahikar "is a tale of ingratitude and its just judgment, much in the same ethical manner as Tobit is a tale of a grateful ghost." It contains parallels to Proverbs, Ben Sira, Psalms, Daniel, etc. Following Syriac version A, we may observe that the narrative setting for Wisdom sentences is without parallel in the Pharisaic-rabbinic tradition; at best we find a few sentences setting the stage for a saying, but nothing equivalent to the long, personal, first-person setting of Ahikar. The 2 0

1 9

R. H. Charles, The Apocrypha (Oxford, 1 9 1 3 ) . 20 Ibid., p. 7 1 5 .

and Pseudepigrapha

of the Old

Testament

TYPES AND FORMS IN ANCIENT JEWISH LITERATURE

111

direct address of the wise sayings, "My son, lift not up thy eyes," has no parallel, for the Pharisaic moral sayings normally are not in direct discourse, generally do not use imperatives, and are not addres­ sed to "my son" or to anyone else. The "hearer" is always anony­ mous. The Wisdom of Solomon, unlike, for example, M. Avot 1:1-18, is not merely a random stringing together of triplets of wise sayings but a sustained essay. It attends to philosophical and theological questions that lie far beyond the ken of the Pharisaic-rabbinic sayings. The theme of the Pharisaic sayings is generally practical: appropriate conduct for disciples, masters, judges, worshippers. The theme of the Wisdom of Solomon is theological and philosophical, that is, the re­ morse of the ungodly at judgment; the bliss of the righteous and miserable fate of the ungodly; the hypostatization of wisdom, her attributes and value; the work of Wisdom in history from Adam to Moses, and the like—nothing like the everyday, practical interest of the Pharisees' moral sayings. Ben Sira in both type and form stands closer to Job, Proverbs, Qohelet, and the Wisdom of Solomon than to the Pharisaic-rabbinic moral sayings. The Pharisaic masters' wise sayings have little in common with Proverbs. Ben Sira, by contrast, in style and spirit is a close continuator. The careful parallel of the parts of a saying, such as Be not a dog in thy house / rebuking and fearful in thy works, is not like the contrasting elements of the Pharisaic saying which tend simply to reverse the antecedent saying, as in a legal contract: / / all scatter, you gather, if all gather, you scatter. While Ben Sira is quoted in rabbinic literature, the form of the sayings of Ben Sira exerted no more influence on Pharisaic sayings than did that of Proverbs. A substantial sample of Qumran Scriptures, sufficient for our rapid survey of forms and types of ancient Jewish literature, derives from Dupont-Sommer, who assembles all the nonbiblical Scrolls and Scroll fragments published up to I 9 6 0 . Our interest is in categorizing by type the larger units of the Qumran writings and to compare, where pertinent, the forms of Qumranian materials of a type common to the rabbinic traditions about the pharisees. These naturally are chiefly in the legal pericopae. 2 1

2 1

A. Dupont-Sommer, The Essene Writings from Qumran, trans. Geza Vermes

(Cleveland and New York,

1967).

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LITERATURE

1. Scroll of the Rule (Manual of Discipline). No formal comparison to a Mishnaic tractate or collection; no authorities mentioned; con­ centrates on doctrine; not law: the two spirits and their struggle. Rule of the community has no Pharisaic equivalent, in substance or in form. The penal code specifies punishments, while we rarely find specification of penalties in Pharisaic-rabbinic legal pericopae, merely guilty/not guilty. Similarly, we find no description of Pharisaic in­ stitutions similar to the "council of the community." 2. Damascus Documents. Divided into "admonition" and "laws." The former has no Pharisaic equivalent. The laws concern the oath, witnesses, the order of judges, water purification, the Sabbath, the overseer, etc. The style is unlike that of Pharisaic purification and Sabbath laws reviewed above. The imperative is used throughout, for example, 3

D

3

L YTHR rather than L YTHR, or Y N MTHRYN

The Sabbath laws likewise use imperatives throughout, as in the biblical laws. The law against employing gentiles occurs as follows: 3

C

3

>L YSLH T BN HNKR L SWT T HPSW BYWM HsBT ( X I : 2 5 ) (Let him not send a gentile to do his will on the Sabbath Day.) The similar Pharisaic rule concerns selling, etc.: The House of Shammai say: 3

C

C

3

°YN MWKRYN LNKRY W Y N TW NYN MW W Y N C

MGBYHYN LYW (M. Shab. 1:7). (They do not sell to an alien or bear a load with him or lift up on him.) —that is, descriptive, present-tense participles of continuous action versus imperatives in the future tense, as in biblical laws. Similarly, the prohibition of selling animals that will be used in transgression: 3

3

C

C

L YMKR Y S BHMH W WP THWRYM LGWYM B BWR L° YZBHWM ( X I I : 4 7 )

(Let none sell a clean ox or bird to gentiles so that they shall not sacrifice them.) The House of Shammai say: 3

3

L° YMKR LW [LGWY B RS WLYSR L BHWSH L'RS, from c

preceding] PRH HHWRsT BsBY YT, (He should not sell to him ... a ploughing ox in the Seventh Year.)

TYPES AND FORMS IN ANCIENT JEWISH LITERATURE

113

3

W B Y T HLL M T Y R Y N M P N Y S H W Y K L LSHTH. M W K R L W P R W T P Y L W B S T HZR , etc. (M. Shev. 5:8) 3

C

C

(And the House of Hillel permit, because he can slaughter it, etc.) 3

W e see the same differences: °L for L ; adding °Y§ where no subject is specified in M. Shev.; B B W R in place of M P N Y ; and the specifica­ tion of the reason for the rule, normally absent in Pharisaic-rabbinic rules. No authorities are named by the non-Pharisaic law. That the substance of the laws often differs from equivalent Pharisaic-rabbinic rulings is of no consequence for our inquiry. For us the simple formal differences in the same type of traditions are of central interest. 3. The Scroll of the War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness. No equivalent in type or form. S R K does not occur in Pharisaic-rabbinic traditions. 4. The Hymn Scroll. No equivalent in type or form; nothing similar to " I " prayers and meditations. 5. Biblical commentaries. PSR does not occur in Pharisaic-rabbinic materials, and no exegesis or scriptural citation contains an explanation of the "hidden significance, a revelation of the secrets concealed in the divine books, which only inspired commentators, prophets, or initiates were able to discover" (p. 2 5 5 ) . So while the type is roughly similar, the forms are quite unrelated. The form is: citation of text— then PSR of this is that ... or ... of this word concerns—completely unlike the forms of Pharisaic-rabbinic Midrash. Moreover, while the Qumran commentaries are sustained and organized by biblical books, we cannot reconstruct an equivalent Pharisaic-rabbinic sequential com­ mentary on a single chapter, let alone on a whole biblical book. The scriptural comments of Pharisaic attribution are all episodic and dis­ crete, not sustained; comments on Scriptures in Habakkuk, Micah, Zephaniah, Psalms, Hosea, and Nahum are few and far-between. Only the overall type is common to the two groups—as to all sects in ancient Judaism, for none fails to refer to Scriptures. But different­ iated types, all the more so forms, simply do not correspond to one another. Nor do Qumran materials summarized by Dupont-Sommer include comments on pentateuchal law codes. As to Genesis, the stories of Lamech, Enoch, and Abraham elicit no Pharisaic-rabbinic comments at all. By contrast, Jubilees and the Genesis Apocryphon exhibit impor­ tant affinities; Dupont-Sommer observes that "the two stories are C

114

LITERATURE

often closely parallel, even to the point of using the same terms" (p. 2 8 1 ) . The "law concerning the Sabbatical year" (pp. 308-9) has nothing in common with Hillel's comment on Deut. 15:1-3. Nor are there equivalents in the Pharisaic-rabbinic corpus to the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Daniel, Prayer of Nabonidus, Book of Mysteries, Angelic Liturgy, prayer for the Feast of Weeks, and other fragments sum­ marized by Dupont-Sommer (pp. 320 ff.). The remarkable thing is the independence of the sects from one another. While apocryphal and pseudepigraphic writings and the Qumran materials exhibit many of the same types (fragments of the former are found among the latter), the Pharisaic-rabbinic pericopae scarcely correspond to either in form or in type. The most striking formal difference is the persistent attribution to living, immediate authorities of the bulk of Pharisaic-rabbinic tradi­ tion, and the consistent failure of the Qumranian writers to do the same. Furthermore, we find a great deal of dialogue in the former, very little in the latter. While Pharisaic-rabbinic biographical and historical stories are told openly and explicitly, the equivalent materials, for example, about the Teacher of Righteousness or relations to Mac­ cabean rulers, are told indirectly, through hints and mysterious allu­ sions, more like the historiography of Daniel than that of Josephus. Pharisaic-rabbinic traditions contain few, if any, parables (these are all late); no predictions of the future; no psalms, horoscopes, prayers (except Honi's for rain, which hardly compares), and related litur­ gies; no references to angels, except Gabriel in the Yannai-trial con­ clusion; few allusions to the resurrection of the dead, the last days, the end of time, and other important eschatological issues. While Qumranian, apocryphal, and pseudepigraphic writers attempt to imi­ tate biblical literary types and forms, the Pharisaic-rabbinic writers ignore those types and forms, as I said. In formulating laws, for example, the other groups, like biblical writers, rely primarily on imperatives, while Pharisaic-rabbinic laws seldom use the imperative for laws, and only in M. Avot 1:1-18 do we find the imperative in moral sayings. To be sure, the three-things redactional formula occurs, for example in Ben Sira 25:1, but that is not a very important shared trait. The modes of midrashic exegesis characteristic of the two groups 2 2

2 3

2 4

22 Tos. Pe'ah 4:10. 23 M. Ta. 3:8. 24 B . Sanh. 19b.

TYPES AND FORMS IN ANCIENT JEWISH LITERATURE

115

have nothing whatever in common, either in relationship to specific Scriptures or in the construction of whole collections of exegeses, of which, for the Pharisees, we have none. Pharisaic-rabbinic traditions exhibit little interest in philosophical questions such as why there is sin and misery in the world; they present no comprehensive historical vision and relate no divine plan for the world. They tell stories, but not history; provide moral sayings, but no set of moral generalizations; lay down descriptions of how things are done, but no imperatives. The social and theological agendum of the one group has virtually nothing to do with that of the other, and this is reflected in the literary epiphenomena we have examined. Hillel

and Jesus—Types

and Forms in

Common

The work of comparing forms and types of Pharisaic-rabbinic peri­ copae with those of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels is made possible by Bultmann. & I do not mean to neglect Dibelius, but his forms— sermons, paradigms, tales, legends—are too general for our purposes. W e follow Bultmann item by item. Some of the types of pericopae Bultmann sets forth do correspond to the types found here, so the comparison is greatly facilitated. He distinguishes between sayings and stories. Included among sayings are units sayings of Jesus in a brief context, which Bultmann calls apophthegms. Other sayings are not in a "particular framework.'' Conflict sayings, for example Mark 3:1-6, Luke 13:10-17, are similar in type to Pharisaic legal debates, but do not always follow the debate form. The conflict sayings develop the setting in great detail, and while the exchange of legal or theological principles takes place much as in the Pharisaic debate form, the narrative framework is much more carefully worked out, so that the two forms do not closely compare with one another. Jesus gets both the first and the last lemma, as does the House of Shammai in the debate form. The opposition is allowed only a single argument, then is overwhelmed. No effort is made to balance the arguments of the two parties. More­ over, the Pharisaic-rabbinic debates only occasionally make use of proof texts. These then are carefully balanced. Mark 12:18-27 is a good example of the formal differences. The Sadducees ask about 2

2 5

2 6

Rudolf Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition, trans. John Marsh (Oxford, 1 9 6 3 ) . All page numbers refer to this edition. Martin Dibelius, From Tradition to Gospel, trans. Bertram Lee Woolf (New York, 1 9 3 5 ) . 2 6

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LITERATURE

an absurd case. Jesus answers that the case is pertinent. In the Pharisaic-rabbinic collections we should have characterized this as an "inauthentic" debate. W e may conclude that the type is common to both traditions, but the form tends to be separate in each. An important exception is Mark 10:2-10, on divorce: the Houses debate appropriate grounds for divorce (M. Gittin 9 : 1 0 ) . Jesus here is tested by the Pharisees. The narrative introduction is appropriately brief: the Pharisees came up and asked, Is it lawful ... He answered them ... They said ... But Jesus said to them ...—then a long speech. The argument rests on the assumption common to both parties that scriptural rules do apply: one may write a certificate of divorce and put her away. Jesus is then constrained to explain the agreed-upon principle, and this he does through further scriptural exegesis. Form­ ally, the dispute differs in no significant respect from a standard House-debate. Here, therefore, the type and the form seem to be identical in both traditions. It is noteworthy, therefore, that Bultmann remarks about the artifi­ ciality of the pericope. He observes that the counterquestion is in no sense a counterargument, and the scriptural reference does not really answer the opponents, but is subject to their criticism (p. 2 7 ) . But in the Pharisaic debate form we expect the second party to the debate to accept the premises of the first, then to build a case upon the shared premises. Naturally, therefore, the Scriptures will be cited in common, only to be interpreted differently. Other biographical apophthegms include Mark 9:34-40 and Luke 5:1-6. The former supplies a brief narrative setting for two sayings: first, to be first, one must be last; second, receiving children is the same as receiving Jesus, and receiving Jesus is receiving him who sent Jesus. The latter is the sort of secondary development, common in Pharisaic sayings, in which a condition will be reversed or fully spelled out. The sayings "could have circulated without any frame­ work,' ' and this is not infrequently the case with the Pharisaic-rabbinic apophthegmatic and other sayings as well. Bultmann argues (p. 3 0 ) that Luke 11:27-8, the blessing of Mary, follows a formula, blessed be the breasts blessed is the hour and the like; if so we have a formulaic saying similar to the Pharisaic worthy sayings ( K D Y or R ' W Y , as in B . Yoma 35b, Y . Bes. 2 : 2 ) . W e hardly need to review all the pericopae analyzed by Bultmann to affirm that common to the Synoptic Gospels and the Pharisaicrabbinic tradition is the development of a saying into a biographical

TYPES AND FORMS IN ANCIENT JEWISH LITERATURE

117

apophthegm, in which the saying is given a fully articulated narrative setting. The only noteworthy difference is that the phenomenon is less common and less important among the Pharisaic materials than in the Synoptic Gospels. But the history of the synoptic apophthegms is difficult to compare with that of the Pharisaic ones. Bultmann assigns the starting point of a controversy dialogue to "some action or attitude which is seized on by the opponent and used in an attack by accusation or by question." The Pharisaic debate form is not closely equivalent. Sometimes, to be sure, it relies upon a precedent held in common, but, more commonly, it begins, not in a particular action or saying, rather in the alleged agreement of both sides on a particular principle ("Do you not agree . . . " ) . On both sides the debate situation is imaginary, and the Pharisaic debate form may be described, just as Bultmann says, as "constructions giving lively expression to some idea," though not "in a concrete event." In general the "event" is merely "they said to them." In what life situation do the Pharisaic-rabbinic debates begin? The obvious answer is in later schools' analyses of the reasons to be assigned to the Houses for their opinions and in the effort to examine and spell out the underlying principles at issue. The concentration upon reasons, to the near-exclusion of the "historical" or narrative setting more commonly supplied in the Synoptic Gospels, may be accounted for by the quite different life situation in which the debate pericopae were shaped. Unfortunately, Bultmann's catalog of rabbinic controversy and "scholastic dialogues" (p. 4 2 ) treats both sorts of materials together; his examples primarily are dialogues between masters and disciples, for example, Hillel and the bath (Lev. R. 3 4 : 3 ) ; but these have nothing to do with debates. I do not find among Bultmann's ten rabbinic examples a single genuine debate. He has been misled by combining debates with scholastic dialogues, which are in both form and type entirely separate, and he therefore has not recognized the more appropriate equivalents. His conclusion is sound, however: one finds somewhat similar kinds of arguments among the rabbinic materials as in the synoptic controversy dialogues. Likewise, Bultmann's analysis of scriptural quotations in "rabbinical discussion" 27 ignores appropriate comparable materials and concen­ trates on inappropriate ones.

27 Rudolf Bultmann, Rabbinendisput: in Die Geschichte der synoptischen tion, (Gottingen, 1 9 6 7 ) , p. 47, trans. John Marsh—a bad translation.

Tradi­

118

LITERATURE

Bultmann alleges that "the origin of this rabbinic style is to be found not only in the discussion of the schools ... It is also mani­ festly influenced by the oriental way of talking and discussing and by the primitive art forms such as the fairy-tale has preserved and developed.'' W e may observe that that "oriental way" seems not to have made much impression on the biblical, Qumranian, apocryphal, and pseudepigraphic writers! Bultmann observes that the decisive saying in controversy dialogues would go back to Jesus, if anything does. On the Pharisaic side we may reliably conclude that all debate materials depend upon antecedent dispute pericopae (except for the aggadic ones, which are inconsequential). But whether the disputes historically derive from the Houses is not a simple question. A further difference is the NT's tendency to develop debates or controversy dialogues. Bultmann observes (p. 51) that there is a tendency to develop materials in the form of controversy dialogues. It seems to me that tendency is not pronounced in the Pharisaic-rabbinic pericopae, which produce disproportionately few debates out of the substantial dispute materials available for that purpose. As to scholastic dialogues, in which someone asks the master for information and he replies, we have only a few equivalents. Gamaliel and Agenitos (or, Yohanan b. Zakkai, Sifre Deut. 351) is one; and the attribution is not firm. I find no other, similar stories, for the testing of Hillel/Shammai materials (b. Shabbat 30b-31a) are not of the same order. Still / / the pericopae began in some sort of antecedent, separate accounts of Hillel and the proselyte ("Master, tell me the whole Torah while standing on one foot"), then those antecedent units would be comparable. The larger corpus of scholastic dialogues (even among those cited by Bultmann) belong to Gamaliel II, Joshua, Yohanan b. Zakkai, and other Yavneans. The Pharisaic masters are not given that sort of material; I do not know why. Biographical apophthegms (pp. 55 ff.) introduce a Jesus saying with biographical narrative; the saying and setting express the point together. An example is Mark 6:1-6: Jesus is not well received in his own country, so he says, "A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country." The Pharisaic-rabbinic equivalent is not exactly bio­ graphical stories, which are not always built around a pithy saying, but rather, and chiefly, around a moral lesson to be derived from the story as a whole. A closer parallel is in the pericope which extends an exegesis into a fable with the Scripture serving as the equivalent to the Jesus saying. For example: y. Ber. 9:3, I f you hear an outcry,

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you say Ps. 112:7; then, in b. Ber. 60b, Hillel once heard an outcry, and concerning him Ps. 112:7 is said. But this is not close to the bio­ graphical apophthegms. Indeed it is difficult to locate something more than roughly similar. Brief biographical references to Pharisaic masters have little in common, since they do not rest upon the basis of a fixed saying. Bultmann's parallels in rabbinic stories ("in profusion," p. 57) mostly pertain to post-70 masters. He refers, however, to the Hillel bathing stories; but these are not built out of If the statutes of kings are scoured and washed.... Perhaps more pertinent is Lev. R. 34:3B, "Is not the poor soul a guest in the body." But the details of the story do not pertain to the saying. The drowning apophthegm is the one immediately comparable exemplum: Hillel saw a skull in the water and said a drowning saying ("Because they drowned you"). Hanina and the lizard is another, which, Bultmann observes, was constructed out of the proverb and is a secondary expansion of the passage (p. 5 9 ) . These are the only close equivalents to the Gospels' biographical apophthegms; here type and form coincide in both traditions. The apophthegm, Bultmann observes (pp. 61 ff.) has a tendency to generate new materials, just as does the dispute. In this respect, also, the Pharisaic-rabbinic data tend to differ. Numerous moral sayings do not produce apophthegmatic narrative settings. More striking still, the "moral" of the moral sayings very often is not spelled out or given a brief and pithy form. As I said, Woe to the lizard and Because you drowned others do not typify a great many biographical pericopae. Bultmann notes that the apophthegms produce variations of motif; here we discern no equivalent phenomenon at all. Bultmann observes further literary traits also commonplace in Pharisaic-rabbinic narratives. Situations of apophthegms are very eco­ nomically and briefly described; few apophthegms contain specific references to place. These are noteworthy throughout Pharisaic-rabbinic narratives. In some longer narratives one may take for granted that the narrator assumed events took place in Jerusalem (e.g., Yannai's banquets), but in most we have no clear notion of when, where, or why an event took place (e.g., where was the stream where Hillel saw the skull?). Actions similarly are described only so far as necessary to produce the dialogue (Bultmann, p. 6 6 ) , and this is a common­ place narrative trait in Pharisaic-rabbinic stories. Personal character­ istics are sparingly referred to, if at all. Bultmann observes, "This is where the development begins. As soon as the apophthegm is affected by an interest in history or developed story telling we meet with more

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precise statements." In the case of the entire corpus of Pharisaic aggadic stories, it is difficult to locate such interest and development. By contrast, some legal stories begin anonymously, then produce charact­ ers and a proliferation of details, for example, Simeon b. Shetah and Judah b. Tabbai on the anomalies of the laws of testimony. 8 Further, while in the Gospels' controversy dialogues the questioners originally were unspecified persons, in the Pharisaic debates there is no development at all. No particular person of the House of Shammai or Hillel ever stands forward to carry on the debate in a later version. I think the difference between the two is in the history of artificial construction behind the Pharisaic debates. Once built, these are not apt to change, though the arguments themselves may be further elaborated. Bultmann divides Jesus' dominical sayings (pp. 69 ff.)—not sayings which constitute an essential part of the story as direct speech—into three parts: Wisdom sayings, prophetic and apocalyptic sayings, and laws and community regulations (for which division he supplies a charming midrash on Jer. 18:18, counsel from the wise, a word from the prophet, and law [Torah] from the priest). For all sayings he discerns three basic forms: declaratory (principles), imperative (ex­ hortations), and questions. As to the principles, he discerns impersonal formulation, that is, some material thing is the subject; personal formulas', and blessings, arguments a maiore ad minor. Bultmann correctly notes that "the rabbis" offer relatively few proverbs of im­ personal formulation. Nor do we find blessings. Sayings built on the qol vahomer are typified by Hillel's wash-the-body story, and there are many others. Exhortations, using the imperative, seldom appear in the Pharisaic collections, apart from M. Avot 1:1-18. As to questions, we find a few, but generally the interrogative element is not the base of the saying. For example, Hillel the Elder: " I f I am here, everyone is here. And if I am not here, who is here?" The latter clause could have been, "No one is here." The question intensifies the force of the saying, but to begin with has not shaped it, by pointing to some ab­ surdity. The Y . Suk. 5:4 version, " I f we are here, who is here?" more closely corresponds. And Hillel's, " I f I am not for myself, who is for me?" is an exact example of the question form. The Pharisaic sayings not in narrative setting do not seem to follow the model of Proverbs or Ben Sira. They derive primarily from a single document, 2

2 8

Mekhilta deR. Ishmael, Kaspa, ed. Lauterbach, III, 31-41.

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and that cannot be very early; and they do not exhibit the rich varia­ tions and full expression of the equivalent logia of Jesus. The redactional history is another matter. Bultmann observes that there is a tendency to combine different but similar sayings, as in Mark 8:34-7 which combines three sayings originally certain to have been separate (p. 8 2 ) , and this, of course, is transparently the tendency of rabbinic redactors of some pericopae. But most of the rabbinic sayings cited by Bultmann which admittedly are similar to the forms of Jesus sayings derive from later strata, or are attributed to later masters, many of them Babylonian. It therefore has not produced such striking similarities as the debate/dispute form. I think it not insignificant that Bultmann's most striking successes in the analysis of Wisdom sayings depend upon Ben Sira and not upon Pharisaic materials (e.g., pp. 97 f . ) . W e have no Pharisaic-rabbinic equivalents to the prophetic and apocalyptic sayings of Jesus; no preaching of salvation; no minatory sayings (the Abba Yosi b. Hanan woe saying is not pertinent; it is woe to me because of, not woe on them because of, as in Luke 1 1 : 43 ff./Matt. 23:13 f f . ) ; no admonitions; no apocalyptic predictions. As to legal sayings and church rules, a good pericope for analysis of a type common to Pharisaic-rabbinic traditions and the Synoptic Gospels is Matt. 6:1-34. The first thing we notice is the use of imperative in successive pericopae: beware of practicing ... when you give alms, sound no trumpet ... and when you pray, you must not be like ... and in praying, do not heap up ... and when you fast, do not look dismal ... do not lay up for yourselves.... The eye is the lamp of the body ... do not be anxious about your life. Some of these logia may not be regarded as equivalent to legal sayings of Pharisaic masters at all. But if they are so regarded, then the use of the imperative, the interpolation or development of metaphors ("the eye is the lamp"), the extended explanations ("No one can serve ... for either he will hate ... or he will be devoted"), the development of rules into whole homiletical explanations ("lilies of the field"), and other literary traits set the whole pericope quite apart from the forms of all Pharisaic legal pericopae. Likewise the use of rhetorical questions, "Why do you see.... How can you say" (Matt. 7:3-4) is unfamiliar. The use of antithetical forms is familiar from Pharisaic-rabbinic wise sayings, but not from laws, which generally are simple declarative sentences, 2 9

29 B . Pes. 57a.

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and use present-tense participles. The / / ... then form of Matt. 18: 15-17 has no parallel. The style is biblical, not Pharisaic-rabbinic. In this instance, therefore the type is the same, but the forms exhibit no close relationship to one another. Bultmann's general conclusion, that there was a stock of dominical sayings which was reshaped by editing, seems to me pertinent to the rabbinic sayings. These generally were attributed to Hillel, just as Christian redactors naturally assigned to Jesus pretty much everything worth remembering. But the development of legal sayings into a cate­ chism, which, on the Pharisaic-rabbinic side, would be a little collection of legal sayings, has no exact equivalent for the moral logia, except for M. Avot 1:1-18. The Pharisaic "I" sayings diverge in form and spirit from the Jesus equivalents. What Bultmann means by an "I" saying is not found in Pharisaic-rabbinic materials. There is no equivalent in either form ("I say to you") or type, that is, sayings about "I" as judge, Messiah, one who was sent, his personal history, hopes, or intentions. In this respect the difference between the two religious communities accounts for the obvious difference in the forms and type of the two groups of "I" sayings. As to similitudes and similar forms, we find no equivalent. To be sure, we do see the use of paradox in some apoph­ thegms, such as Hanina/lizard\ but paradox is not a dominant charact­ eristic of the Pharisaic-rabbinic sayings and does not occur in stories as the primary vehicle for narrative. Hyperbole and metaphors are not common. As to such similitudes as master/servant, tower/war, lost sheep/lost coin, the thief, faithful servant, children at play, leaven, seed growing of itself, treasure in the field, pearl of great price, fish net, house builder, fig tree, returning householder, prodigal son, unjust steward, two sons, and the like—we have nothing of the same sort. It is true that later rabbinic materials make use of similitudes. But the Pharisaic stratum is notably lacking in them. Bultmann's rab­ binic parallels are all from masters after 70. He quite properly dif­ ferentiates between allegorical features of rabbinic similitudes and customary metaphors (e.g., for God, for man); but the issue to which he addresses himself (pp. 198 ff.) has nothing to do with the Pharisaic stratum. Bultmann categorizes narrative material as follows: miracle of healing, only with reference to Hanina b. Dosa and Gamaliel's son (and, in the same place, Yohanan b. Zakkai's); nature miracles 30

30 B . Ber. 34a.

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come only with regard to Honi's rain making (and the others assigned to his grandson, etc.). These do not play nearly so important a role in the Pharisaic-rabbinic tradition as do the equivalent stories in the Jesus narratives. W e find no reference to demons or exorcisms (except Hanina and Igrath—Babylonian and late), to lepers or paralytics, to healing of the deaf, dumb, and blind, to issues of blood, to stilling of storms (excluding Hanina's, "Not for this sort of rain have I prayed," which is hardly comparable); no walking on water; no feeding miracles; no accursed fig trees. And the sheqel in the fish's mouth (Matt. 17:24-27) cannot be compared with the stories either of Yosi's nephew or of Simeon b. Shetah's pearl on the ass. Honi and Hanina stand outside of the legal tradition; to neither is attributed legal logia, scriptural exegeses, or wisdom sayings. Bultmann's observation (p. 219) is completely sound: "They are not told just as remarkable occur­ rences, but as miracles of Jesus." Here by contrast we have merely remarkable events. The Honi and Hanina stories do not verify other teachings of miracle workers, but merely testify to heaven's ability to recognize and reward merit—even to disregard merit where it so chooses ( " I f you were not Honi . . . " ) . No faith in the masters is sup­ posed to be elicited. The various Honi stories are given a good con­ clusion, particularly the Abba Hilqiah corpus, by contrast to the Jesus miracle stories, which lack a conclusion (p. 2 2 0 ) . Among the characteristic aspects of the style of miracle stories pointed out by Bultmann, we find no striking counterparts: no refer­ ences to the length of the sickness, to the dreadful character of the disease, to the ineffective treatment of physicians, to the contemptuous treatment of the healer; no disciples; no reference to the difficulty of the healing or of making rain; no reference to gestures by touch or miracle-working words—just prayers. W e do find healings at a distance (Mark 7:29, Matt. 8:13, John 4:50, like Hanina, b. Ber. 3 4 b ) . No crowd is present at either miracle, though there is, to be sure, an audience in the background—the people of Jerusalem, or Gamaliel. Nor do we find any resurrections of the dead. Except for Honi's rain making, all the rabbinic nature miracles referred to by Bultmann (pp. 234 f.) pertain to later masters. W e may safely conclude that this type of narrative constitutes an inconsequential part of the Pharisaicrabbinic tradition; the particular literary traits associated with it in the Gospels are absent. Historical legends are so described because "instead of being hist­ orical in character [they] are religious and edifying" (p. 2 4 4 ) . The

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stories with a moral would seem an appropriate counterpart. Bultmann observes that the historical legends in the Synoptic Gospels often in­ clude something miraculous; this is not normally the case in the storieswith-a-moral listed above. Bultmann is unwilling to separate historical stories from legends, for "the historical stories are so much dominated by the legends that they can only be treated along with them," a judg­ ment that applies without qualification to he Pharisaic-rabbinic bio­ graphical and historical narratives. As to the primary narrative technique, we may observe that Matt. 4:1-11 (Luke 4 : 1 - 1 2 ) , the Temptation, tells the story primarily through dialogue: Jesus was led to the wilderness, fasted, the tempter came and said to him.... But he answered (citing Scriptures); then the devil took him . . . and said to him.... Jesus said to him.... Again the devil took him . . . and said to him.... Then Jesus said to him.... Then the devil left him. Thus a story relies on dialogue to make its important points, no different in this regard from the Pharisaicrabbinic storytelling form. Mark 9:2-8, the Transfiguration, makes use of considerably more description, since a miracle is involved; then Peter speaks to Jesus, and a voice comes from the cloud—a story in which dialogue is subordinate to the narrative and descriptive mate­ rials. Mark 11:1-10, the Triumphal Entry, falls somewhere in between. Jesus is first of all located, then sends out his disciples and tells them to do certain things, which they do; then Jesus enters the city and the people salute him and cry out. This recalls the gesture part of the story of Abba Hilqiah and his wife (b. Ta. 23b-24a); he comes home and does various gestures. But the interpretation section is missing, presumably because Zech. 9 is meant to supply the appropriate inter­ pretation. The Passion narratives cannot be appropriately compared with any­ thing in the Pharisaic-rabbinic tradition; nothing is so fully, dramatic­ ally, and carefully developed, related to various cultic and mythic aspects of synagogue life, and embellished in later versions. The dramatic intensity, the attention to feelings and emotions, the "height­ ened reality" of the Passion narratives have no counterpart. I suppose no single event in Pharisaic-rabbinic history played nearly so important a role in later rabbinic theology and law. This obviously accounts for the formal difference. I can think of no story that originates in the worship of the synagogue or the cult. Liturgical, dogmatic, and novelistic motifs are not commonplace in the Pharisaic-rabbinic narratives, which either tell about the origins of a law or illustrate its application,

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on the one hand, or tell a story for the sake of making a moral point, on the other. As to storytelling techniques, Bultmann further observes (p. 307) that stories tend to be very concise, just as in the apophthegm; none covers more than two days' activity (unlike that about Joshua b. Perahiah in Alexandria). The same observation generally, but not always, pertains to Pharisaic-rabbinic stores. Second, the "law of scenic duality" operates; that is, while many people may appear on the scene, only Jesus and the interlocutor share the significant action. The same may be said of all rabbinic stories, which may be constructed out of he said to him ...he said to him, no matter how many people are involved in the background—for example, Simeon b. Shetah and Yannai. Groups are treated as a unity—the Pharisees, the Disciples; and the same trait characterizes some of the stories before us—the "Persian Embassy" said to him, "the rabbis" present at Yannai's trial all do the same thing. In the history of popular tradition, Bultmann observes, there is a tendency to differentiation and individualization; in the Pharisaicrabbinic materials we find such a tendency only occasionally because we do not have significant amounts of materials available for com­ parisons. Synoptic studies of the versions of Pharisaic stories make clear how and where these processes take place. They tend to be less pronounced than in the Synoptic Gospels. What we find instead is a tendency on the part of baraita editors to add new elements to a story, as in Judah b. Tabbai's weeping, Hillel's not finding a slave to run before the pauper, and so forth. This is a different sort of pheno­ menon, but points toward the same tendency, namely, to embellish what is in hand. The use of direct speech (pp. 190 f., 312 f.) of course is extremely common in the Pharisaic-rabbinic narrative. In general, Bultmann says, indirect speech is put into direct discourse, though the contrary also happens. In Pharisaic materials it is difficult to find indirect discourse to begin with (except M. Hag. 2 : 2 ) . Numbers play a special part in popular storytelling (p. 3 1 4 ) , for example, three temptations of Jesus (Matt. 4 : 1 - 1 1 ) , three denials of Peter; this seems to me not a dominant characteristic in the Pharisaic-rabbinic story form. To be sure, the Simeon b. Shetah banquet narrative has three elements. But numerous stories do not rely upon triads of action. Nor can we say that the number two is of special importance. These observations on types and forms of the pericopae of the Synoptic Gospels are meant primarily to point out one fact: While the rabbinic traditions of the Pharisees exhibit only two types in com-

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mon with biblical, Qumranian, apocryphal and pseudepigraphic litera­ ture, namely, laws and moral sayings, and have no form in common at all, the Pharisaic traditions manifest both types and forms in com­ mon with the Synoptic Gospels. They are indeed so close at some few points as to present a remarkable congruence: conflict sayings or de­ bates, a type shared between the two bodies of tradition, sometimes make use of the same form; the narrative "form," or style, has much in common; biographical apophthegms are identical types using iden­ tical form, though the materials are not abundant on the Pharisaicrabbinic side. W e find short biographical references, biographical and historical stories, sayings not in a narrative setting, apophthegms in a narrative setting, numerous references to Scriptures, exegeses, eise­ geses, and proof texts: practically the whole repertoire of types of Pharisaic-rabbinic aggadic materials finds a counterpart in the Synoptic Gospels. This seems to me the firm result of this brief inquiry. History of Forms Our problem here is to speculate on the history of forms charac­ teristic of numbers of pericopae. The first, and unique, characteristic of rabbinic traditions about the pre-70 Pharisees is attribution to named, historical authorities or to the Houses of Shammai and Hillel. As we have seen, other sects attribute pericopae to biblical heroes, but not to known, named masters of the sects themselves—men who lived at a particular time and place, bore a particular name (not "teacher of righteousness"), and lived pretty much like other ordinary men, not miracle workers (excluding Honi, Hanina), visionaries, or prophets. Two exceptions require specification. First, the whole of the Church tradition in the Synoptic Gospels is assigned to Jesus; in this respect, Pharisaic and moral sayings exhibit a measure of similarity in giving most such sayings to Hillel. But the comparison of the whole of the Pharisaic tradition with the whole of the Gospels tradition shows the exception to be unimportant, for Hillel merely receives more attribu­ tions of one kind of logia than other masters; he is hardly the sole significant authority. Second, named authorities supposedly stand behind larger units of traditions (e.g., Gospels, Epistles). But in this respect the rabbinic tradition does not differ, for the larger collections (for instance, Mish­ nah, Tosefta) are likewise assigned to specific masters (for the Mish­ nah—Judah the Patriarch). The traditions of authorship on the rab­ binic side persisted outside of the form and structure of the collection

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so assigned. No passage in the Mishnah corresponds to Luke 1:1-4 or John 21:24-5—but these too do not refer to Luke or John. The attributions of the Church to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and of the rabbinical movement to Judah the Patriarch, Yohanan, the schools of Aqiba, Ishmael, and other compilers, have common beginnings in the mind of later continuators, who naturally wondered how the books of whose authority they were so acutely conscious actually took shape. Attributions of authorship depended upon the continued existence of the Church and the rabbinical movement. Apart from the N T passages specified, the larger compilations are no more articulate about their authors than are the Manual of Discipline and Genesis. What sepa­ rates the Christian and rabbinic compilations from the others is the later, historical continuation of their respective movements. By con­ trast, the circles responsible for the Qumranian writings died out or were killed off; those responsible for composing and preserving im­ portant apocryphal and pseudepigraphic writings probably were assi­ milated into early Christianity and then blotted out in the mass of other Christians; and, of course, the continuators of the circles responsible for various biblical books even earlier passed from the scene or were assimilated into later movements, circles, or institutions. W e may there­ fore affirm without significant reservation that the formal practice of assigning logia, traditions, and even whole pericopae to specific, hist­ orical authorities is the unique characteristic of the rabbinic traditions about the Pharisees. The problem of when that practice began is not difficult to solve. On the one hand, the first internal attestations of the existence of materials, for instance, in which a master refers to a tradition available from an earlier stratum, come at Yavneh (A.D. 7 0 ) . No Pharisaic master refers to the saying of another Pharisaic master, except in the same pericope. While the Houses address themselves to one another's opinions, no Houses-logion refers to a teaching of, for example, Simeon b. Shetah or Yose b. Yo ezer. Indeed, it is often difficult to see how legal issues important in one set of pericopae ever elicited discussion among other, later Pharisaic masters. The Houses never refer to legal opinions of anyone before Shammai or Hillel, nor do legal issues important to, say, Yohanan the High Priest, Judah b. Tabbai, Joshua b. Perahiah, or even Shema iah-Abtalion, ever provoke explicit reference on the part of Gamaliel I, or Simeon b. Gamaliel. By contrast, Gamaliel II does refer to teachings and practices of Gama­ liel I; Eliezer, Joshua, Tarfon, Aqiba, and other Yavneans (except c

c

c

c

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Yohanan b. Zakkai) do refer to Houses materials, and while they (Joshua, Eliezer) may in fact be the Houses in some pericopae, in many others, such as Tarfon and the Shema , it is clear that a later authority makes reference to an extant, earlier teaching for which he does not bear responsibility, and to the authority of which he is subject. That sort of attestation is strikingly absent in pre-70 materials. W e may therefore conclude that assignment of traditions to named authorities certainly took place by, and perhaps slightly before, Yavnean times. It seems to me not unreasonable to push back the terminus ante quern to the times of the Houses, that is mid-first century, / / we assume that the Houses did indeed assign their traditions to the named authorities standing behind them, Shammai and Hillel. That assumption is not necessarily beyond doubt, for the Houses lemmas never include, "So have we received from Shammai/Hillel'' or other references to named authorities before their time, though they do include references to precedents established by named masters. It is not Yohanan HaHorani said—though he obviously was an authority of importance—but Yoha­ nan HaHorani sat. From attributing logia to the named Houses it was natural to proceed to assign them to named masters, and that was, as we observed, a practice important to Yavnean tradents. But what of a terminus a quo! It cannot come before Yose b. Yo ezer and Yose b. Yohanan, for that is the point at which the named traditions begin. But the evidences on masters before Shammai and Hillel are not substantial and hardly demand much attention. More significant still, the occurrences of named authority + says/said—not merely talked about—are few and far between for the whole preShammai/Hillelite tradition, as follows: c

c

1. X says to l a y / Y says not to lay (M. Hag. 2 : 2 ) . The basis is the lay/not lay dispute, on which are hung the names of the authori­ ties up to Shammai/Hillel. The construction may be early on the principle that indirect discourse tends to come before direct discourse. 2. (Rabbi) Simeon the Just said (Sifre Num. 2 2 ) . Simeon's name stands behind the story, told in the first person. In every way this is an anomalous pericope. 3. Yose b. Yo ezer of Seredah testified concerning ... (M. Ed. 8:4). 4. Joshua b. Perahiah says, Wheat that comes from Alexandria ... (Tos. Maksh. 3 : 4 ) . 5. Joshua b. Perahiah said, At first, whoever says to me, Go up ... ( B . Men. 109b). c

c

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6. Rabbi Simeon b. Shetah said, May I not see consolation ... ( B . Sanh. 3 7 b ) . In Mekhilta, this is dialogue, part*of the narrative, not an independent lemma; and it contains no legal tradition or moral lemma, but is much like item 1 above. 7. Shema iah says/Abtalion says, The faith ... (Mekh. Beshallah IV, 5 8 - 6 0 ) . c

This is not a considerable list; excluding item 1, only 3 and 4 are standard, or nearly standard, in form and contain legal materials. The contrast to the many hundreds of sayings of the Houses and the scores of Shammai and Hillel is self-evident. As to Gamaliel I, Simeon b. Gamaliel, and others after Shammai and Hillel and not assigned to their Houses, we have the fololwing: 1. Rabban Gamaliel says (Sifre Deut. 1 1 ) . 2. Yo ezer of the Birah asked Gamaliel, and he said, It never renders ... (M. Orl. 2 : 1 2 ) . 3. Rabban Gamaliel said, I approve ... (M. Ket. 13:3-5). 4. Rabbi Simeon b. Gamaliel said, By this Temple! I shall not . . . (Sifra Tazri a 3 : 7 ) . 5. Hananiah Prefect of the Priests says (Sifra Sav 1:9). c

c

c

The picture now is clear. The use of Authority say/says/said pertains primarily to, and therefore surely derives from tradents of, the Houses of Shammai and Hillel. Nearly all other materials are stories told about, or references made to, masters and their deeds. Sometime between ca. 40-50 and ca. 80-90, the form X says was established for the transmission of legal materials; I imagine early Yavneh is the most plausible point, for then the preservation of the pre-Destruction ma­ terials required considerable attention, and perhaps the need to do so led to the development of standard procedures for fixing the old traditions. The form therefore is easy to locate. It is harder to discover the origins of the practice of telling stories about, and assigning sayings to, named masters instead of Jeremiah, Enoch, and other biblical heroes, or allowing sayings to stand without attribution at all, as in Ben Sira, the legal pericopae in the Scrolls, and other pertinent materials. Here the decisive evidence is the availability of the names themselves, whether in chains or otherwise. At that point at which the names of particular masters were preserved, the foundations of the literary convention were laid. The chains obviously were shaped after

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Shammai/Hillel, but were presumably made up out of existing mate­ rials—the names themselves. But the problem is not merely literary and formal. What charact­ erized Pharisees and Christians but no others is the view that postbiblical authorities were worthy of serious consideration as named, individual, historical authorities. It is a strange anomaly that while others had heavenly visions, made laws, gave revelations, wrote psalms, and composed prayers to be said by others, only the Pharisees, in behalf of whom the rabbis made no such claims of heavenly revelations or of ability to see visions and work wonders, produced masters whose names, deeds, and teachings were preserved openly, explicitly, and articulately. In this regard Jesus may be seen as an intermediate figure, like an important rabbi in form but not in substance, and like the Teacher of Righteousness in substance but not in form. The nameless Teacher of Righteousness, the visionaries who signed the names of Enoch or the patriarchs to their writings, who added to the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezra, who composed psalms and moral treatises —all of these spiritually gifted authorities remained anonymous. Spiritual gifts imposed on them a loss of individuality. The Yose's Simeon b. Shetah and Judah b. Tabbai, and others in behalf of whom was claimed not heavenly authentication through miracles but merely accurate knowledge of the Torah of Moses, should have been set forth as uniform, anonymous links in a long chain of tradition. But they were made the multiform subjects of sayings, and the different­ iated objects of stories. Obviously, characteristic reference to named authorities begins with the beginnings of the Pharisaic movement itself, so far as the rabbinic traditions portray it; but that tradition by itself cannot be called to testify about more than its own contents. Other writings attributed to, and testimonies concerning, Pharisaism must be taken into account. The history of the debate form has already been alluded to. While the form itself is first attested in the Synoptic Gospels' dispute peri­ copae (Mark 10:2-10), its use in Pharisaic-rabbinic materials depends upon, and must follow, the Houses-disputes, to which it is confined, and for which it supplies elaboration and extension. Since those dis­ putes derive from about the time of Yavneh, the debates come from the same period. This is virtually certain, for both Aqiban and Joshuan materials are later transmuted into the form of Houses debates. Debates are further developed in the second century and afterward. Testimony form, while not unique to M. Ed., seems to derive c

c

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primarily from the circle(s) responsible for the form of that tractate. That circle's work is explained (Tos. Ed. 1:1) by the theory that the redaction of materials took place "on that day" on which Gamaliel II was deposed—probative evidence that the process of redaction was completed long afterward and required historical explanation in terms of events no one knew much about. My guess is that the testimony form, and with it M. Ed., ought to be located sometime in the late second century, certainly not much earlier, for much of the material of M. Ed. consists of completed pericopae of Aqiban disciples. Per­ haps the roots of individual units go back to Usha. The form of the epistles is clear, but the paucity of exempla— merely two letters—makes it difficult to analyze them from a formhistorical viewpoint. Obviously, epistolary form in these instances is hardly unique to Pharisaism. Perhaps the fact that the letters pertain to the exercise of the duties of the patriarch, and possibly derive from patriarchal archives, may be significant. It may have been a standard form which any scribe, like Nahum, would have followed. It is certainly not limited to Pharisaism. The ordinance form did not fit all materials on which it was im­ posed. The incongruity of the claim that at first matters were suchand-such, then Hillel ordained a change in the law is striking in Hillelite ordinances. By contrast, in Yavnean times the ordinance form invariably made good sense; at first, meaning in Temple times, matters were conducted in such-and-such a way, but "now that the Temple is destroyed," Yohanan b. Zakkai ordained an appropriate alteration in earlier procedures. Yohanan's ordinances pertain primarily to Temple and other ritual and liturgical matters. It seems to me likely, therefore, that the form appropriately originated in Yavneh, and was awkwardly applied to—or actually produced the proliferation of—"ordinances" of Hillel, Simeon b. Shetah, and Joshua b. Gamala. Gamaliel I's ordinances (in M. Git. 4:2-3) do exhibit the same difficulties as Hillel's. But his ordinance about the witnesses (M. R.H. 2:5) is not much different from Yohanan b. Zakkai's decree on the same subject. At first the witnesses did so and so; Gamaliel decreed otherwise. Here the legal change is minor and credible. Ga­ maliel allegedly participated in the Temple council, so he might have done what the tradition said. If so, the form and the substance are congruent to one another. What is missing is the occasion for the development of the form itself—and that occasion can be supplied only by the destruction and Yavnean reconstruction. It seems probable c

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LITERATURE

that the report of Gamaliel's ordinance in M. R.H. 2:5 has been set by the redactor into the Yavnean form predominant in the ordinances of Yohanan b. Zakkai in M. R.H. 2:1-4. I f the Gamaliel ordinance comes from before Yavneh, then one may set back the first use of the form by about thirty years. But, as I said, it seems more likely that the Gamaliel rule of M. R.H. 2:5 has been reshaped and set into ordinance form by the redactor of the composite pericope, perhaps shortly after Yohanan b. Zakkai's time. The chains and lists of cleanness decrees all end with Shammai/ Hillel, so must be assigned to the middle of the first century. The Houses may be held responsible, but whether the occasion was Yavneh or earlier times cannot be decided with much certainty. The form of precedents is a far more difficult problem. Ma aseh b f- / — S or W certainly are all redactional materials, for they come and go, even in the same pericope, in later versions. What is left is a simple sentence: subject, verb, object/apodosis. It was because of the consistent junction of such sentences that I regarded them as some­ thing like a fixed form. But, standing by itself, a simple declarative sentence cannot be set forth as a well-defined form. So the problem is: When do such sentences begin to junction in a highly specialized way as precedents for legal discussion? The terminus ante quern obviously is the Houses-stratum, where they occur in some quantity. The Shema iah-Abtalion precedent with Kharkemit may push the date back by a decade, to Shammai/Hillel. Before that point we cannot venture. But that merely means no simple sentences referring to masters before Shema iah and Abtalion are made to junction as precedents in legal discussions presented by pre-70 rabbinic traditions of Pharisees— hardly a significant literary fact. The significance is for the study of the history of legal traditions, and especially, of the importance ac­ corded to various authorities. Shema iah and Abtalion are impor­ tant because they are followed by, and claimed as masters for, Hillel. Once again, therefore, the line starts with Hillel/Shammai. First-person sayings and stories, illustrations and proofs and other stories pertinent to law, short biographical references, biographical and historical stories, long and short, told through dialogue or narra­ tive—none of these sorts of pericopae follows, or constitutes, a clearcut jorm, in the same sense that standard, or ordinance, pericopae represent well-defined forms. What seemed to me characteristic traits were primarily techniques of storytelling, and these are not susceptible of assignment to particular situations or groups. c

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TYPES AND FORMS IN ANCIENT JEWISH LITERATURE

133

The process of developing an exegesis into a story about a named master pertains only to Shammai and, chiefly, Hillel materials. Sayings not in a narrative setting, apart from M. Avot, are mostly Hillel's. Apophthegms given a narrative saying, except those that make explicit the moral of a story but are not integral to the story (apophthegms in narrative setting), are chiefly Hillel's, all but Hanina/lizard. The forms of random citations of Scriptures, as glosses, interpola­ tions, and proof texts, seem to me difficult to assign to particular circles or specific times. Since citations of Scriptures tend to proli­ ferate (for instance, Simeon b. Gamaliel is given a scriptural proof for his M. Avot 1:18 saying, which stands without one), we should regard the phenomenon as a mark of a pericope in the later stages of its development. Further, the history of the forms of scriptural cita­ tion as proofs, illustrations, or embellishments, cannot be separated from the redactional conventions of various compilations and there­ fore begins long after the period under study. While one sort of collection (e.g., Sifra, Sifre) cites a Scripture, then comments on its elements, and finally tacks on a saying attributed to a named master, other compilations or strata (e.g., baraitas) will tie the same Scripture to the same story with L Y W H K T W B W M R , SNPMR, K K T W B , and other redactional formulas. The purposes of scriptural citation other than merely as glosses or interpolations, clearly differ from those of Qumranian writings, as we have already observed. Scriptural pericopae are those in which Scriptures are not merely glosses or interpolations, but integral in the formation of the materials. W e shall first specify groups and forms of scriptural pericopae, then offer a theory as to their history. The first, and best defined form of a scriptural pericope is the exegesis-to-fable, in which a Scripture is cited and commented on, then a story is told about a named master in terms of the substance, and sometimes even of the exact words, of the comment. These derive primarily from the Hillel materials. A second form is the tendency to supply historical settings, even narratives, to autonomous exegetical materials, as in the anonymous materials to which the subscription is added, on this account Hillel came up from Babylonia, or as in the extensive proofs about the Passover offering on the Sabbath which are set into a very elaborate debate framework about Hillel and then, later on, the Bene Bathyra (Tos. Pisha 4 : 1 3 ) . T o a much smaller extent, Shammai materials exhibit the same characteristics (e.g., Sifre Deut. 2 0 3 ) . No other named C

3

134

LITERATURE

masters are similarly treated, with the possible exception of Gamaliel, Mekh. deR. Simeon to Ex. 20:5, Sifre Deut. 61, 351, // this is our Gamaliel. The third formal category, closely related to the foregoing is the formulation of a historical narrative around, but not out of the sub­ stance of, an exegesis. This is represented by the Simeon b. ShetahJudah b. Tabbai story about the unacceptability of circumstantial evi­ dence and the requirement that there be two perjured witnesses. The difference from the first and second forms is that the center of the story is not the scriptural comments but rather their legal conse­ quences. At the same time, the Scripture is important to the story, unlike Sifre Num. 22, Simeon the Just and the Nazir, in which the Scripture is tacked on the end, concerning you is fulfilled Num. 6:2; B. Ber. 19a, Simeon and Honi, in whch Prov. 23:25 is said of Honi; and B. Sanh. 19a-b, where Ex. 21:29 explains the law cited by the rabbis in calling Yannai to court. Along the same lines is Sifra Behuqotai 1:1, an historical "illustration" of Jer. 5:25; here however Simeon b. Shetah is not integral to the story. By contrast, the references to Is. 26:20, Qoh. 7:12, and Ben Sifa 11:1 (or, in Babylonian versions, Prov. 4 : 8 ) , have not provoked the Yannai-Simeon b. Shetah banquet story, but are subordinated to it. Proof of their peripheral nature is the ability of later narrators to use other Scriptures than those origin­ ally specified. In this pericope, the Scriptures are not mere embellish­ ments, but also are not formative and central. The same may be said of Qoh. 10:20, Ex. 22:27, Prov. 6:23, and Is. 2:2, in B. B.B. 4a, Baba and Herod. Fourth, some Hillel sayings are in fact elaborations of Scriptures, especially Tos. Ber. 2:21, 6:24, where Qoh. 3:3-4 and Ps. 119:126 are spelled out in terms of laughing/crying, scattering/gathering, etc. By contrast, Ex. 20:24, in Tos. Suk. 4:3, is merely an interpolation, neither integral to, nor formative of, the saying. Fifth, standard dispute form—X says/Y says—applies only to Shema iah-Abtalion, Mekh. Beshallah IV, 58-60. The standard form, X says, is used in Sifre Num. 42 for Hananiah, Prefect of the Priests, with reference to Num. 6:26, Amos 4:13, and Is. 45:7. In each in­ stance, a Scripture is cited, then explained by Hananiah; also we find standard form with Shammai in Mekh. deR. Simeon to Ex. 20:8, part A. 3 1

c

31 Mekhilta Kaspa, III, 31-41.

TYPES AND FORMS IN ANCIENT JEWISH LITERATURE

135

As to the exegetical principles involved in the rabbinic traditions of the Pharisees, Aqibans contribute supporting exegetical materials for Hillelite opinions, and even formulate in the names of the Houses disagreements on Aqiban principles, for example, the meaning of K . The pericopae obviously cannot date before Nahum of GimzuAqiba, and it would seem to me they come considerably afterward; others, in which the exegesis is supplementary, may not be quite so late. A striking characteristic of the Hillel-rise-to-power materials is the specification of the types of exegetical devices used by Hillel to prove his case, which has no equivalent in the other bodies of tradition we have considered. These specifications, unique in the rabbinic tradi­ tions about the Pharisees, come after the fact and are unrelated to it, since to Hillel are attributed exegetical principles which nowhere appear in Hillel pericopae. The striking fact, therefore, is that where we do have a well-defined form for scriptural pericopae, it applies primarily to Hillel materials. To be sure, Shammai is sometimes the object of the same form, and we noticed Hillel-like forms in the name of Ben He He, who is asso­ ciated with the Hillel tradition in such instances. Exegeses for legal purposes reveal a remarkable preponderance of materials of Hillel, Shammai, and the Houses, thirty-three of the thirty-five; of aggadic "exegeses and eisegeses," we have few for masters not associated with Hillel traitions; three are in the name of Gamaliel in Mekh. deR. Simeon and Sifre; two in the name of Hananiah, Prefect of the Priests, and the rest are Ben He He, Shema iah-Abtalion, and the Houses; proof texts integral, or closely related, to sayings of masters are all Hillel's, except two for Simeon b. Gamaliel, one a gloss in M. Avot 1:18, the other a later proof text for Simeon's saying. 3 2 Clearcut forms for scriptural materials thus primarily pertain to Hillel tradi­ tions. Masters before his time have no scriptural pericopae at all. Those after him are similarly unimportant in the attribution of scripturally centered pericopae. As noted, the larger part of the legal exegeses derives from Aqibans. The point at which other scriptural Houses pericopae were worked out is very likely to have been early Yavneh. O f the aggadic scriptural pericopae we can be less certain. They obviously cannot come before the first third of the first century, assuming Hillel's death at ca. A.D. 20. I have no terminus ante quern, though Yavneh seems possible. It was then that the Hillelites came c

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32 Y . T a . 4 : 2 .

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LITERATURE

to power, and interest in Hillel himself was therefore keen. On that basis we may tentatively conjecture that the development of the specified forms for scriptural pericopae was related to the larger effort of Yavneans to work out the traditions of pre-70 Pharisaism in such a way as to set Hillel into the center of things. The effort was a com­ plete success in this regard as in others; Hillel was made the single prominent figure in the formation of scriptural pericopae. Conclusion. — Both the reference to a limited number of types of materials pertaining to pre-70 Pharisaism and the imposition on them of a few clearcut forms thus characterize Yavnean tradents. Since the Synoptic Gospels, which make reference to the same types (among others) of stories and sayings, make use of much the same welldefined forms and develop stories according to the same techniques of storytelling, come from approximately the same period—assuming Mark at 60, the rest not much later—we notice an interesting fact. The Christian and rabbinic tradents around the time of the destruction of Jerusalem exhibit much the same literary and formal tendencies. What the former did for Jesus, the latter did for Hillel. The forma­ tion of the intermediate units of the respective traditions was carried out in not entirely dissimilar ways. ABBREVIATIONS ARN b. B. B.B. B.M. B.Q. Ber. Bes Deut. Ed. Eruv. Ex. Gen. Hag. Is. Ket. Lev. M. M.S. Maksh. c

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Avot deRabbi Natan Ben Babylonian Talmud Bava Batra Bava Mesi a° Bava Qamma Berakhot Besah Deuteronomy Eduyyot Eruvin Exodus Genesis Hagigah Isaiah Ketuvot Leviticus Mishnah Ma aser Sheni Makshirin c

c

c

Mekh. Men. Ned. Nez. Num. Orl. Par. Pes. Qoh. R. R. R.H. Sanh. Shab. Sot. Ta. Tos. Y. c

c

Yev.

= Mekhilta = Menahot = Nedarim = Nezirot = Numbers = Orlah = Parah = Pesahim = Qohelet = Rabbah = Rabbi = Rosh Hashanah = Sanhedrin = Shabbat = Sotah = Ta anit = Tosefta «= Palestinian Talmud (Yerushalmi) = Yevamot c

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PART THREE ART Glosses on Goodenough's

Jewish

Symbols

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE DEMISE OF "NORMATIVE JUDAISM' A [Judaism,

Review-Essay X V , 1966, pp. 230-240.]

The history of scholarship, like the waves, moves in inexorable tides, advancing, receding, and, for a few moments, standing poised in seeming indecision or confusion. Studies on Judaism in late antiquity are presently so poised, for the old directions, methods, questions, and certainties no longer conform to the state of our knowledge, and yet it is not all clear what is to happen next. Scientific studies on "Tal­ mudic Judaism," which began about a century ago, led eventually to the grand syntheses of Moore, Schechter, and in their path, Ginzberg, Kadushin, and Finkelstein—syntheses which rested on the presuppo­ sition that Talmudic literature might by itself yield a whole and accurate view of Judaism in the early centuries of the Common Era. Aware of the existence of sources which did not quite fit into the picture that emerged from Talmudic literature as it was understood in these years or which did not serve the partly apologetic purposes of their studies, Moore and others posited the existence of "normative Judaism," which is to be described by reference to Talmudic literature and distinguished from "heretical" or "sectarian" or simply "non-norm­ ative" Judaism of "fringe sects." Normative Judaism, exposited so systematically and with such certainty in Moore's Judaism, found no place in its structure for mysticism (except "normal mysticism"), magic, salvational or eschatological themes except within a rigidly reasonable and mainly ethical framework; nor did Judaism as these scholars understood it make use of the religious symbolism or ideas of the Hellenistic world, in which it existed essentially apart and at variance. Today no sophisticated student of Judaism in late antiquity works within the framework of such a synthesis, for this old way is no longer open. It was closed by a number of scholars and by the infusion of new attitudes, the former working in isolation from one another, and the latter barely articulated and yet informing the thought of recent

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ART 1

scholars. That Talmudic literature evolved in creative symbiosis in the Hellenistic-Roman world was proved in a most masterful manner by Saul Lieberman, who, following the early researches of S. Krauss and others, demonstrated in great detail and with astonishing eru­ dition how deeply imbedded in late Hellenism were the methods and vocabulary of the Rabbis. But Lieberman went much further. In an essay, "Pleasures and Fears/' the full significance of which has not been widely appreciated, Lieberman stated: 2

The wisdom of the East [in this context, astrology] could not be entirely ignored. A learned and cultured man of those times could not 1

This is not the place to spell out all of the attitudes which characterize the historical researches of the recent scholars, though, for a beginning, one should study the late Renee Bloch's "Note Methodologique pour l'etude de la litterature rabbinique," Recherches de Science Religieuse, 43, 1955, pp. 194-225—see how G. Vermes spells out Bloch's methodological proposals in his superb Scripture and Tradition in Judaism (Leiden, 1961)—and compare the profound remarks of Brevard S. Childs at the end of his "Interpretation in Faith," Interpretation, A Journal of Bible and Theology, X V I I I , Oct., 1964, pp. 432-49. The issue is not merely a broadening of the focus of interpretation, however. A graver problem is whether we know as much as we think we know. The former generation of historians working with Talmudic literature, for example, treated that literature as if descriptions of events were written by a stenographer for the use of a newspaper reporter; as if, in other words, Talmudic sources provide an adequate, critical description of events. The great issue was to establish an accurate text. If they had such a text, the former historians thought that all their problems were solved, and that they knew fairly well exactly what had happened, what had been said, what had been done, even though the interpretation of events might still have posed problems. When one realizes the fact that critical history is a modern conception, and that no one in late antiquity, least of all Jewish chroniclers, wrote without a very clearcut didactic purpose, and that in any case the Talmudic accounts we have of events pertaining to the Jews and Judaism are by no means word for word transcriptions of what, if anything, observers saw and heard, then matters become much more complicated. An example of the literalism, not to say historiographical fundamentalism, of the greatest of Talmudic historians may be seen in G. Alon's discussions of R. Yohanan ben Zakkai's escape to Yavneh, cited and criticized in my Life of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai (Leiden, 1 9 6 2 ) , pp. 104128, 147-171. Alon offers an exegesis of what R. Yohanan said and did not say in his encounter with Vespasian which, to my way of thinking, ignores the nature of the sources available for such exegesis. There are numerous lessons still to be learned by students of this period from New Testament scholarship, the very first of them being the need to take a hard-headed ("higher-critical") view of what in fact we know, and how we know it. I have tried to do so in my Life and History of the Jews in Babylonia. Y . Liver's Toldot Bet David (Jerusalem, 1 9 5 9 ) and Y . Heinemann's HaTefila biTekufat HaTannaim veHaAmoraim (Jerusalem, 1 9 6 4 ) are excellent examples of needed historical criticism and form criticism respectively. But much of the new research ignores the most fundamental critical problems and there­ fore is disappointing, if not completely useless. Liver and Heinemann are still exceptional. 2

Greek pp. 98-9.

in Jewish

Palestine

( N . Y . , 1 9 4 2 ) , pp. 115-143. Passage cited is on

THE DEMISE O F "NORMATIVE JUDAISM"

141

reject the science of Astrology, a science recognized and acknowledged by all the civilized ancient world. To deny at that time the efficacy of Astrology would mean to deny a well established fact, to discredit a "science" accepted by both Hellenes and Barbarians.... Lieberman goes on to trace the attitude of the Rabbis toward astrology, and to show how they mediated between it and Judaism, concluding: "The power of Astrology is not denied, but it is confined to the Gentiles only, having no influence on Israel." What is important here is Lieberman's willingness to take seriously the challenges of Hellen­ istic science, magic, and religion not merely in the faith of "assimi­ lated" Jews nor in the practices of the "ignorant masses" but in the bastions of the faith and their guardians. Here we find no effort to explain away embarrassing and irritating contradictions to the pre­ vailing view of a rationalistic and antiseptic this-worldly faith but rather a penetrating and, I think, clearly realistic effort to take all evidence seriously. Nor does Lieberman stand alone. Gershom Scholem's researches on Jewish mysticism in late antiquity have demonstrated, again in wonderfully erudite and penetrating ways, how both Talmudic and extra-Talmudic literature point toward the existence of Hellenistic themes, motifs, and symbols deep within the circles of "pious" Jews. Furthermore, the late Erwin R. Goodenough, studying archaeolog­ ical remains and Hellenistic literature, but barely literate in Hebrew and Aramaic sources, came to very much the same conclusions on the nature of Judaism, at least among the circles in which the arti­ facts bearing pagan symbols, or symbols bearing Jewish values differ­ ent from those associated with their original pagan setting, were used. Finally, one must point out the still unappreciated contribution of A. J . Heschel to the radical reinterpretation of the theology within Talmudic literature itself. Heschel demonstrates not merely the pres­ ence of theological attitudes at least as self-consistent and rigorous as the legal ones, but he shows, even though he never makes this explicit, that some of these motifs must be seen against the back­ ground of theological inquiries among contemporary Gentiles who 3

4

5

3

Besides the well-known Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, see Jewish Gnosti­ cism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition ( N . Y . , I 9 6 0 ) , and the relevant parts of On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism ( N . Y . , 1 9 5 5 ) . Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period ( N . Y . , 1953 et seq.), vols. I-XII. See his Theology of Ancient Judaism [Hebrew: Torah Min HaShamayim beAspaklaria shel HaDorot], (London and New York) I, 1962, and II, 1965. A third volume is in press. My review of vol. II is in Conservative Judaism, X X , 3 spring, 1966. 4

5

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ART

thought about the questions of transcendentalism and immanentalism in ways not wholly unlike the Jews'. It was Morton Smith, one of the very few scholars adequately trained not only in history and philology but, most important, in the history of religions in antiquity, who first pointed out the striking convergence of scholarly results, based upon disparate sources and pro­ duced by men who were, though aware of one another's work, laboring mainly alone. Smith stated: ... it is amazing how the evidence from quite diverse bodies of materials, studied independently by scholars of quite different back­ grounds and temperaments, yields uniform conclusions which agree with the plain sense of these discredited passages. Scholem's study of the materials in the hekhalot tradition, for instance, has just led us to conclusions amazingly close to those reached by Goodenough from his study of the archaeological remains: to wit, the Hellenistic period saw the development of a Judaism profoundly shaped by Greco-Oriental thought, in which mystical and magical ... elements were very import­ ant. From this common background such elements were derived inde­ pendently by the magical papyri, Gnosticism, Christianity, and Hellen­ istic and Rabbinic Judaism.... 6 Most recently, M. Margoliot succeeded in piecing together the Sefer HaRaztm, which constitutes still another example of a Jewish magical papyrus, this time in Hebrew, illustrating once again the kind of Judaism strikingly different from that which the earlier scholars had led us to expect. Naturally, efforts continue to be made to retain the old one-di­ mensional and rationalistic synthesis, to explain new evidence in terms of old hypotheses. One cannot hope to convince the proponents of the old view that we must reconsider matters in a fundamental way. But such efforts to explain away the evidence will produce less and less insight. Among them is the strikingly unconvincing view of E. E. Urbach, who states: These finds from Beth She'arim [of scenes from pagan mythology in the sarcophagi of the rabbis] put an end to all the theories based on making a clear distinction between the private world of the Sages, as reflected in the talmudic and mishnaic laws about idolatry, and the other world that existed outside theirs.... 7

6

"Observations on Hekhalot Rabbati," pp. 153-4, in Biblical and Other Studies, ed. Alexander Altmann (Cambridge, 1 9 6 3 ) , pp. 142-160. "The Rabbinical Laws of Idolatry in the Second and Third Centuries in the Light of Archaeological and Historical Facts," Israel Exploration Journal, 9, 3-4, 1959, pp. 149-165, 229-245. Passage cited p. 153. 7

143

THE DEMISE O F "NORMATIVE JUDAISM"

Urbach prefers to "explain" the evidence in a way calculated to rule out any genuine confrontation with Hellenism. Jewish artisans, he says, were employed in making statues and images for pagans. They some­ times sold their products to Jews without making any change in their design of conventional patterns for idol-worshipping Gentile custom­ ers. In any event, even the pagans, Urbach says, used idols and images for decorative purposes only. If these paintings and adornments were introduced into private houses for aesthetic reasons, it is not surprising that they should have found their way into synagogues and cemeteries. Why is it not surprising? It seems that, for all his erudition, Urbach has not paid serious attention to how surprising such phen­ omena would have been in an earlier period (before 70 A.D.), as the archaeological evidence reveals, and in the period after they were very rigidly excluded (in the 5th and 6th centuries A.D.). If Jewish crafts­ men did not, as Urbach says, consider it a sin to make use of pagan motifs in their work, still how liberal must the rabbis of Beth She arim have been to accept such artifacts into their burial caves! I cannot regard his explanation, in any case, as wholly congruent to the phen­ omena to be explained, as relevant to all situations in which they are found and to all issues posed by their form and explanation. A more intelligent way of approaching matters is provided by Morton Smith in his "Image of God: Notes on the Hellenization of Judaism, with Especial Reference to Goodenough's Work on Jewish Symbols," which needs to be carefully studied both for its content and for the methodology demonstrated within it. These remarks are meant to place into context two recent books relevant to Judaism in late antiquity—Palestinian Judaism in the Time of Jesus Christ, by Joseph Bonsirven (translated from the French by IFilliam Wolf; Holt, Hinehart and Winston, 1 9 6 4 ) ; and Gnosticism and Early Christianity, by R. M. Grant (Columbia University Press, 1 9 6 4 ) . The first embodies the inadequacies of the systematic-theol­ ogical approach to a limited body of isolated evidence, the second bears some of the rich promise of new questions and new approaches which are at hand. 8

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9

II Joseph Bonsirven, S.J. was professor of New Testament at the Pon­ tifical Biblical Institute in Rome until his death in 1958. His Palestin8 Ibid. p. 237. 0 Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, X L , 2, March, 1958, pp. 473-512.

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ART

ian Judaism was originally published in France in 1950, and the English translation was prepared on the basis of that edition. However, some­ one has brought his bibliography "up-to-date" by adding the names of a few books published since 1950, indeed since Bonsirven's death. But a bibliography which omits, on Philo for example, any reference to Goodenough, or on the history of the Jews in the Tannaitic period a single reference to G. Alon, can hardly be regarded as a serious effort. What is gained by adding a book list not wholly the author's I simply do not know. What is lost, obviously, is a clear notion of what the writer did and did not see. (Instead of "improving" the bibliography, someone should have provided the book with an index. It is not ex­ pensive to prepare one, and the usefulness of a book is greatly dimin­ ished without it.) The chief question I feel obliged to raise concerning the publica­ tion of this book, however, is why it was necessary to bring out a book which is out-of-date on the day it appears. Bonsirven made no use of the newly-discovered literature of the Jewish communes in the Dead Sea area and elsewhere, and any description of first-century Palestinian Judaism which does not do this is woefully incomplete. Some scholars have challenged the dating of these Scrolls, and perhaps Bonsirven agreed with them. But I do not find reference to the problem of the Scrolls anywhere. It may be argued that Bonsirven's chief interest was in Pharisaism, but if that were the case one wonders why he makes such extensive use of Philo, Apocryphal, and Pseudepigraphical books which reflect little or nothing of the Pharisaic part of Judaism. Thus the book is as useful as a chemistry text based on the phlogiston theory! Bonsirven's book contributes little to the knowledge of its sub­ ject, and in no way can I find significant grounds for favorable com­ parison with Moore's Judaism or Schechter's Aspects of Rabbinic Theology. Its chief advantage over the former is brevity and over the latter ( i f any) its greater catholicity. Bonsirven treats the following subjects: God, angels, Israel and the nations, the Torah, man and gen­ eral ethics, religious life, special ethics (justice, charity, relations with Gentiles, individual perfection), life after death, Messianism, and general eschatology. On each theme the author gives a brief synopsis of Jewish thought and quotes from some relevant Talmudic sources. While Bonsirven does find many virtues in "Palestinian Judaism," his interest in it is motivated by his existential concern as a Christian.

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This he never lets the reader forget. For example, in discussing ideas about God he writes: In Christianity the mystery of the Holy Trinity provides us at once and correlatively with two benefits, a more profound knowledge of God's nature and the most intimate possible divine presence and im­ manence.... (p. 25). I have no objection at all to the inclusion of such a statement (and it is one among many) in this book, but I do think it should be made clear that the reader is not confronted with a (mere) statement of scholarship but rather with a statement of faith operating through scholarship. I might have been possible for the author to put all his apologetical remarks in one chapter or in some other way to separate a straight-forward presentation of Judaism from the religious polemic, however nicely phrased, which is attached to it. It would have been interesting, in fact, for Bonsirven to write a comparison of Judaism and Christianity, as have other scholars, both Jewish and Christian. These writings have offered considerable illumin­ ation for the understanding of both faiths, and one need only consult the essays of Leo Baeck, H. J . Schoeps, A. H. Silver, on the Jewish side, and (most recently) W . D . Davies on the Christian, to be aware of how much is to be gained in such an enterprise. But I fail to see how religions are "compared," how understanding is to be gained, by constant asides to reassure the reader, at appropriate intervals, of the superiority of Christianity, and, more specifically, of Roman Catholic Christianity, over all religions, even so elevated and noble ones as the one at hand. I should emphasize that my objection is not to Bonsirven's frequent, and generally fair-minded, criticism of Judaism. I object only to his having made a study of Judaism into the occasion for Christian apologetics. Bonsirven offers numerous generalizations which may puzzle stu­ dents of Talmudic literature. For example, he states (p. 4 6 ) that the Rabbinical writings speak very rarely about the Covenant (berit). He might have found reason to change his opinion in Bab. Talmud Shab­ bat 130a-137b, among other places. His interpretation of the difficult passage (Bab. Talmud Bava Batra 10b) on the alms of the nations would have been more convincing if he had seen the parallel passages His discussion of the lack of Jewish proselytism (by contrast with the apostle Paul) suffers from his disinterest in the mundane reason for the cessation of that effort, specifically the decrees of the first Christian

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emperors. His discussion of the limited Jewish success in this regard, compared with that of Christianity, disregards the tragic history of the Jewish people under Rome in the first and second centuries. His inter­ pretation of the passage (Pesikta de Rav Kahana 40a-b) in which R. Yohanan ben Zakkai says, "The dead body does not render unclean nor does the water purify ... but it is the decree of the Holy One is quite wrong: Bonsirven thinks that it opposes the rational tendency of Alexandrian Judaism to try to find reasons for the laws. R. Yohanan ben Zakkai was famed (at least among students of Rabbinic literature) for his homer exegeses, which have exact parallels in Philonic writings. What we have here, rather, is a statement of acceptance despite the lack of rational explanation, and, underneath, a confession of skepti­ cism. He is even more wrong when he says that Pharisaism "did not escape the conviction that one can satisfy one's duties to God by ful­ filling external rituals, which may easily be emptied of all love," as has been made abundantly clear by many better-qualified scholars of Tannaitic Judaism than Bonsirven. Bonsirven's concluding discussion raises the question of whether Israel's refusal to accept Jesus as Christ may have been the consequence of another "more secret* and prolonged infidelity, an infidelity to the spirit, or even to the letter, of the revelation of which Israel was the trustee and the missionary." Bonsirven is kind enough to absolve Juda­ ism of "fundamental disloyalty." Rather, he says, it was guilty of a "dis­ tortion which was gradual and not realized for a long time." The result was that the Pharisees "tightened the static elements," in defend­ ing the faith against Hellenism, "in a protective conservatism meant to slow down external dynamic factors." That this was simply not true cannot be argued here, but it can, at least, be said that Bonsirven offers no evidence that it was true. I cannot therefore recommend this book. It is neither thorough nor original, contains errors of interpretation of Jewish sources, and questionable conclusions about those same sources. The author ignored a great body of new evidence, and by no means exhausted the informa­ tion available in the old. His piety is admirable, and his honest respect for Judaism may represent a position unusual in his circumstance. One need not, however, express admiration or happy astonishment just be­ cause a book on first-century Judaism refrains from the commonplace, out-and-out anti-Semitism of so many Christian scholars of that subject. Bonsirven's book ought, in fact, to be measured not by academic, objec­ tive scholarly standards but rather by its effectiveness as a tract on

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Christian sacred history written from the perspective of Christian, par­ ticularly Roman Catholic, theology. Ill In order fully to appreciate the religious alternative facing Jews in the Tannaitic period, one must enter the complicated subject of Gnostic religion. Grant's book renders that subject accessible. It is informative, lucid, and interesting. One comes away from it enriched by the author's vast fund of facts and enlightened by his perspective. Grant's thesis is that Gnosticism grew up in the ruins of Jeru­ salem, a weed sprouting amid the shattered stones. It was the natural consequence of earlier apocalyptic thought, which had tried to interpret events in the light of the final destination of history. With the destruc­ tion of the Temple, disheartened Jews rejected the world and its Creator, both of which they regarded as demonic, in favor of an un­ known God, represented in this world by a savior who, descending into the worldly hell, himself needed to be saved. The activities of this savior are recognized by those who "know," who possess saving knowledge (gnosis), which transcends mere belief. Grant's definition of Gnosticism is based on one borrowed from the Valentinians: "Who we were and what we have become, where we were and where we have been made to fall, whether we are hasten­ ing, whence we are being redeemed, what birth is and what rebirth is...." He who knoivs the answers to these questions is a Gnostic, though he who asks them is not necessarily so. Gnostics know that they were "originally spiritual beings who have come to live in souls and bodies.... Now thanks to their self-knowledge, they are hastening back above, having been redeemed from this world below." Thus, Grant tells us, the Gnostic is a Gnostic because he knows by revelation who his true self is. The central issue of Grant's study is, what is the origin of Gnosti­ cism? In the past it has been traced to Hellenistic philosophy, Oriental religion (chiefly Iranian), Christianity, or heterodox Judaism, and Grant argues for the fourth. His argument is stated as follows (p. 3 4 ) : 1 0

Not only apocalyptic enthusiasts, but Jews in general must have had their faith shaken. The temple services had come to an end, what 1 0

Grant's thesis has found considerable favor with Professor Gilles Quispel. Similarly Professor Gershom G. Scholem states, "Although separate, both of these phenomena, heretical Judaism and esoteric Judaism, had very real influence on the development of Gnosticism."

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were priests and Levites to do? With the temple destroyed, how could pious Pharisees continue to obey the law of Moses? With the failure of the apocalyptic vision, how could it be maintained by either Essenes or Zealots ? The law and the prophets remained, but how were they to be interpreted ? As to Grant's thesis, I find it wanting for four reasons. First, his definition of Gnosticism is too broad and imprecise. By it, practically anyone in this period would be in some way "Gnostic." including Pharisaic Jews, who also possessed knowledge which they regarded as of transcendent value. Second, while I find it entirely plausible that the impact of the events of 70 and 135 on Judaism was cata­ strophic, and may well have disheartened many Jews and led them by diverse paths out of this world, it is impossible to see how all these phenomena associated with the word "Gnostic" emerged so rapidly and universally uniquely from the Jewish situation. Simon Magus was a Gnostic. Yet he was alleged to have lived in the last century before the destruction of the Temple. Likewise, many sayings in Paul's letters have been regarded as Gnostic, or as said to Gnostics, like the well-known passages in Corinthians and Colossians. These have nothing to do with the chronology Grant requires. Third, whoever speaks of "knowledge" is not necessarily "Gnostic." Grant, and many others (most brilliantly, of course, Hans Jonas in The Gnostic Religion) speak of "Gnosticism" as a "religion." Yet where do we find it? Was there a "Gnostic church"? Was there a "Gnostic community"? Bultmann, Reitzenstein, Jonas and Grant speak as if Gnosticism were a concrete phenomenon, from which were derived not only many specific sets but also substantial elements in early Christianity. Yet if that were the case, where do we find it outside of Mandaean and Manichaean circles? I prefer to follow Arthur D . Nock, who in Early Gentile Christianity and Its Hellenistic Back­ ground says (p. xiv) : I must continue to hold that in the environment of early Christianity there were materials which could be built in Gnostic systems, but no Gnostic system; that there was an appropriate mythopoeic faculty—but no specific myth; that there was a "Gnostic" state of mind—but no crystallized formulation of that state of mind and no community or communities clinging to that formulation. Nock thus insists that as historians we must persevere as extreme nom­ inalists, describing phenomena as they become clear, but avoiding the temptation to reify, to describe as real a construction of all phenomena

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into one neat "system," however much we may be attracted by the theological possibilities inherent in such an orderly system. Finally, I think Grant focuses on the wrong question to begin with. He wants to know the "origins" of Gnosticism, and, having asked the question, is willy-nilly faced with a limited number of possibilities and a circumscribed frame of investigation. Do we really need to know the origins of a phenomenon before we can begin to understand and ana­ lyze it? Is this not a question which may in some studies be usefully postponed? In the case of Gnosticism, a clear definition of the phenom­ enon ought to precede, by a great deal, an effort to uncover its origins. A definition should both include and exclude, and should permit the simplest common denominator to emerge and be rigorously applied. Since so much is called "Gnostic," from within the heartland of Juda­ ism to most distant Gaul on the west and Iran on the east, we clearly have no very helpful definition before us. To debate the old issues is sterile, therefore, particularly because so much remains to be done in publishing semi-Gnostic texts (in particular the 1945 find at NagHammadi). I think we may find in Professor Carsten Colpe's Religionsgeschichtliche Schule (Gottingen 1961) a useful, more precise definition. Gnosticism, Colpe proposes, is a religion, or theology, characterized by a focus on a saved savior, salvator salvandus. It seems to me this narrow definition which is lucidly and brilliantly argued by Colpe in the final chapter of his book, is congruent to all the phenomena clearly identifiable as "Gnostic" according to all opinions and all sources. It would, moreover, exclude the possibility of speaking further of "Jewish Gnosticism," and I think that is a substantial step forward in history of religion. A theology which, like other kinds of Gnostic theology, con­ demns the Creator God and calls the Law an instrument of the demonic and a source of sin can hardly be regarded, by the broadest historical definition and the lowest common denominator, as at all Jewish. Or, to put it differently, if "Gnosticism" may find a place within "Ju­ daism," then "Judaism" is emptied of any phenomenological meaning whatever. 1 1

1 1

n my History, II. The Early Sasanian Period, Chapter Five pp. 180-188, I have argued that Rav followed the Gnostic style of telling Creation myths, but that he resurrected monotheist-Jewish ones, based upon the Scriptures which preserved an ancient Israelite cosmogony. Rav's "theology in the Gnostic manner" produced not a rejection of law, nor, all the more so, of the Lawgiver. Thus for him, the Gnostic style characterized the rejection of Gnostic doctrine.

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The issues I have raised here ought not to be construed as criticism of Grant's book. It is, as I said at the outset, wonderfully informative and challenging, and should find an enthusiastic audience among all students of Talmudic, particularly Tannaitic, Judaism. IV The contrast between the two books is illuminating. Bonsirven's anachronistic work ignores vast bodies of evidence, obscures important sources on the nature of first-century Judaism in Palestine, and in the end at best yields merely a repetition of what one can learn from Moore, with minor variations, and in a far less palatable context. Grant, on the other hand, has raised a major challenge by bringing to bear his very deep knowledge of Gnosticism upon the issue of the character of Palestine Judaism after 70. In doing so, he has enriched our own understanding of the problems facing Jews in that age, and of alternatives explored by some of them. I f I have raised some doubts about Grant's thesis, I do not want to leave the impression that I find it in the end entirely unacceptable. It is clear, for one thing, that some specific historical circumstances require further elucidation; the exact meaning of the word "Gnosticism" demands more precise deno­ tation after Nock (and here Scholem's work may prove decisive in offering a definition of what we can understand by "Jewish Gnosti­ cism"); but such a precise definition will, in the end, not necessarily exclude the possibility that "Gnosticism in the Jewish idiom" was, as Grant argues, born in the crucible of the national disasters of 70 and 132-135, even though it is quite clear that Gnosticism quickly took forms which would not have proven comprehensible within the great and varied world of the Judaism of this period. Grant's work offers still another thesis, which I think in the end we shall have to understand and evaluate in the light of Smith's judg­ ment: 1 2

Of all these four bodies of evidence—the works of the Biblical tradition, the Jewish literature of pagan style, the testimonia concerning Jews, and the archaeological material—no one is complete by itself. Each must be constantly supplemented by reference to all the others. And each carries with it a reminder that the preserved material ... 1 2

And I confess that the criterion of comprehensibility is a highly subjective and imprecise one. W e do not really know what Jews would or would not have understood to be "Jewishly comprehensible." It is wholly a value-judgment, and one I ought not to offer as a serious conceptual instrument. For history of religions, it is probably out of place.

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represents only a small part of what once existed.... Yet even this preserved material ... testifies consistently to the hellenization of ancient Judaism. 1 3 In such a light, Grant's thesis does not appear so distant or incompre­ hensible, even though in time it may be useful to refine it further. In the end, the old way leads directly into apologetics—whether for a "pure" and "un-Hellenized" Judaism among the Jewish scholars, or for a praeparatio evangelica of a particularly noble sort for the Christians. The former synthesis cannot illumine new evidence, but requires its distortion, or necessitates that it be explained away. As in the last epoch of Ptolemaic astronomy, the epicycles multiply with each new observation, and the time seems near when the system will collapse of its own weighty complexity. W e must remember that Coper­ nicus did not prove that the world was not stationary while the sun, moon and stars move humbly above and around it; he simply offered a new hypothesis, a new synthesis which explained existing knowledge in a manner more reasonable, more efficient, and more fruitful than the old way. W e await the formation of such a new synthesis. 13 "Image of God," pp. 486-7.

CHAPTER E I G H T N O T E S O N GOODENOUGH'S JEWISH SYMBOLS, I-VIII [Conservative

Judaism, X V I I , 3-4, 1963, pp. 77-92.]

A work of such vast erudition as this should properly be reviewed by men whose skills and competence equal the author's. There are not many scholars so qualified. Furthermore, fully to understand Pro­ fessor Erwin Goodenough's work one must not only share his erudi­ tion, but also his profound spiritual capacity, and such men are even rarer. Hence the essay that follows is not in any sense a "review," but rather, an effort to do the following: first, to indicate why these volumes are important and should be read; second, to offer some extended comments on specific and, from the viewpoint of the vol­ umes themselves, relatively tangential questions, based on my perspec­ tive as a student of the history of Judaism in the classical age; and, finally, briefly to suggest what I believe to be the scholarly contribu­ tion made by Goodenough up to this point. I In every generation, a few scholars emerge, whose work exemplifies for students and colleagues alike the purpose of the scholarly enter­ prise. Concerning such work one does not decide whether it is "right" or "wrong," any more than the passengers of an ocean liner assure the helmsman who chooses a course in the unknown ocean, "You direct us rightly." They ask only, "Is this the course to the distant shore?" and hopefully examine the signs and omens of the voyage. From the perspective of the history of Judaism, Goodenough's work stands on that same elevated plateau as that of Ezekiel Kaufman, Gershom Scholem, and their equals. Indeed, truly to understand the challenge of Goodenough, one must have in mind Kaufman's great and utterly contrary thesis. Kaufman's History of Israelite Faith at­ tempts to demonstrate historically the essential uniqueness of Israelite monotheism, its final and irrevocable singularity in ancient civiliza­ tion. For Kaufman, Israelite faith represents the uncompromising re­ jection of ancient paganism. It is the effort to transform the common

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raw material of ancient culture in the crucible of the Israelite world view. Kaufman claims that the Israelite segment of the human enter­ prise of the age was utterly different from its setting, so wholly other that the world about it can neither explain it nor be explained by it. Goodenough's view is that Israel was, in the epoch he studied, pro­ foundly integrated into its age and setting, and that it consistently appropriated the advanced and sophisticated elements of that age for its own specific, but not necessarily existentially unique, purposes. Goodenough's thesis is that Israel formed a part of the cultural con­ tinuum of its environment. Ideology must follow, not precede scholarship. It would, therefore, be of no value to say that "the truth lies somewhere in between," for as much as some contemporary Jews would like to agree, perhaps not at the same instant, with both Kaufman and Goodenough, the claim of each is to a proposition diametrically opposite to the other's. Rather one must examine the evidence brought and interpreted by each scholar, and come to conclusions founded on the most detached critical canons at one's disposal. The basis of conclusion must be history, evidence, sound and broad understanding, especially, evalua­ tion of method and not a priori predilection. W e must regret the fact that while among learned Jews Kaufman is widely discussed, the work of Goodenough and its implications for the age it discusses are almost ignored. Goodenough's vast volumes have been praised but not read, mentioned but not studied. Those who are disciples of Kaufman complain about the offhand, inadequate and superficial "reviews" of Moshe Greenberg's fine condensation of his books. But it is regrettable that they themselves have given such little attention to Goodenough's suggestive studies. The reason for this lamentable situation is twofold. First, Gooden­ ough's work has appeared only relatively recently, and it takes time for novel ideas to find a willing audience, particularly when these ideas contradict widespread assumptions upon which not a few rest their faith. Second, the sheer volume of Goodenough's publications tends to discourage the more casual reader. I should say, at the outset that my brief comments upon a few salient ideas will convey next to nothing of the impression that Jewish Symbols must make. A personal reference may be in order. I was at first deeply shocked by the artifacts Goodenough discusses; so much so that I wished we could bury them again, for good. As the weight of evidence piled up, however, I began to realize that my former

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image of an aniconic and opaque faith represented nothing more than a superficial and unreal view of what must have been a very wide­ spread and profound use of religious symbolism by ancient Jewry. As an historian, I became impelled to take seriously the relics and anti­ quities of ancient Jewry and to try to envisage them and the realities that lie behind the arcane shards and remnants of the Talmudic age. At the end, I understood and shared the evocative thought of Gooden­ ough: "As I worked out the historic associations of these symbolic forms ... they gradually came to register their wordless beauty and power within me. Ultimately I have written rather to convey that power and beauty than to explain it or prove it" (VIII, p. 2 2 0 ) . When I began, Goodenough's main thesis on the existence of a former Judaism quite different from that represented by the extant literature of the period seemed utterly preposterous; but at the end of months of reading, such a thesis has come to appear entirely con­ servative and sound to me, the only issues remaining being how to revise the historical consensus to reckon with it. II Vol. I. Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period: The Evidence from Palestine (N.Y., Pantheon, 1 9 5 3 ) .

Archaeological

Vol. II. Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period: The Archae­ ological Evidence from the Diaspora (N.Y., Pantheon, 1 9 5 3 ) . Vol. III. Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period: Illustrations (N.Y., Pantheon, 1953, $ 25 for the set of three volumes). The first three volumes collect the Jewish realia uncovered in the past by archaeologists working in various parts of the Mediterranean basin. Goodenough's interest in these artifacts began, he reports, with the question of how it was possible, within so brief a span as fifty years, that the teachings of Jesus could have been accommodated so completely to the Hellenistic world. Not only central ideas, but even widespread symbols of early Christianity appear in retrospect to have been appropriated from an environment alien to Jewish Palestine. "For Judaism and Christianity to keep their integrity, any appropriations from paganism had to be very gradual" (I, p. 4 ) . Yet within half a century of Jesus' death, Christian churches were well established in Hellenistic cities, and Christian teachings were within the realm of discourse of their citizens. I f the "fusion" with Hellenistic culture

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occurred as quickly as it did, then it seems best explained by reference to an antecedent and concurrent form of Hellenistic Judaism that had successfully and naturally achieved a comfortable accommodation with Hellenism. Was there such a Jewish appropriation of Hellenism that remained at the same moment part of Judaism? The writings of Philo indicate that a few highly educated and advanced Judaists did attempt such a fusion. (One need not enter into the question of whether Philo's Hellenism was a mere veneer covering ideas essentially identical with those of rabbinic Judaism, or was, as Goodenough contends in By Light Light, rather a Judaic formulation of a mystic gospel compre­ hensible to any who spoke the idiom of Hellenistic religions. In either instance, none disagree that Philo does represent an effort to talk about Judaism in the Hellenistic idiom, and that is all that matters for the present.) But Goodenough argues Philo was not unique, for we have access to a larger group of writings addressed to Hellenized Judaists, such as the Wisdom of Solomon, the Letter of Aristeas, the Jewish Sybilline Books, and so forth. What was the extent of these groups? This question cannot be answered definitively, for we do not know how many readers these books had and where. The failure of later, allegedly "normative." Jewish literature to preserve evidences of such groups proves nothing but that the editors of this literature did not choose to perpetuate writings with which they disagreed or regarded as inauthentic. The allegedly widespread authority of the Tannaitic sages and their doctrines cannot be demonstrated convincingly from the extant sources, Goodenough points out. However great the moral influence of the sages and the Nasi may have been, there is little to show "that in practice, except in problems of the calendar, this extended to actual supervision of Jewish thought" (I, p. 1 2 ) . (The well-known "institu­ tion" of the apostolate could not have exercised widespread super­ vision, unless the institution was far more elaborate than the evidence suggests.) In any case, Goodenough concludes, " W e cannot a priori fill with rabbinism the silence of the Judaism of the Roman diaspora in this period" (I, p. 1 3 ) . Goodenough considers the rabbis, there­ fore, as a group who "aspired to much power in regulating the lives of Jews, and eventually got it, but who for centuries even in Palestine fought a hard battle for popular prestige and support" (I, p. 1 6 ) . Unfortunately, Goodenough's hardheadedness and strict adherence to sources do not sustain him when he attempts a description of

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"normative Judaism." He writes sympathetically but non-developmentally, and repeats the propositions about Pharisaic-Rabbinic-Talmudic Judaism that, in the pages of Moore and others, imply a temporal and intellectual unity not found in the sources themselves. These proposi­ tions have become part of a linear and monolithic Heilsgeschichte, which in itself makes them suspect. Following expositions of "Tannaitic/Rabbinic/Talmudic Judaism," Goodenough says, "Believing activ­ ely in a God who made men that they might live a certain type of life ... the business of a devotee was to study the tradition in which that way of life had been revealed, and to try ... to live according to it" (I, p. 1 8 ) . But one asks two questions, not of Goodenough but of the authorities he cites. First, what was the inner quality of the way of life so achieved? Was it so opaque and one-dimensional that mere performance of the requisite action, and study about it, rendered the devotee oblivious to further meaning or reference? Every group in ancient Judaism had its halakhah, as Goodenough points out in volume VIII. Was the halakhah recorded in Talmudic literature unique in con­ taining within and beyond itself no vital spiritual experience? Yet Goodenough would look in vain for a statement of the inner quality of the "life according to the law" prevailing in this period, unless he turns, as he does, to the writings of Scholem and others, expounding a very different body of theology (and law). This is not to suggest that the "halakhic" Jews were also in some sense "mystics" (I, p. 1 9 ) ; they were also not automatons. Second, is the so-called "normative Judaism" to be derived from study of Talmudic literature so wholly divorced from historical devel­ opment that one may cite, as equally representative and authoritative, anyone who himself is cited in this vast literature, without regard for when he lived, or where, or how? Did the rabbinical literature of this age represent a consensus so all-embracing and authoritative that the attributes of growth, change, controversy, and dialectic are ulti­ mately irrelevant? Did the tumultuous age from Ezra to Rav Ashi affect nothing and change nothing? I f so, one may discuss the "clas­ sical" ideas about God or revelation or the Torah, and Goodenough's sense that a dichotomy existed between "rabbis" and the "Hellenistic Jews" conforms to historical reality. I f not, however, the division between the normative Jews represented in Talmudic literature and those represented by the monuments becomes a mirage. One may one day, therefore, hope to move between the one and the other, and look for the religious and cultural continuum within which both, apparently,

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thrived. This is in no sense a criticism of the Judaism of the age (I, p. 1 9 ) , but rather an effort to illuminate aspects of it. Goodenough's main point, however, stands: "While rabbinical Ju­ daism can adjust itself to mystic rites ... it would never have originated them." W e should look vainly for the origins of the various symbols and ideas of Hellenistic Judaism in the circles among whom Talmudic literature developed. Hence Goodenough's view of "normative Ju­ daism" is correct so far as it needs to be: if we should uncover—as we shall—evidences of the use of the pagan inheritance of ancient civili­ zation for specifically Jewish purposes, we shall most likely be con­ fronted by Jews whose legacy is not recorded in the pages of the Talmud. E. E. Urbach's paper, "The Rabbinical Laws of Idolatry in the Second and Third Centuries in the Light of Archaeological and Historical Facts," (Israel Exploration Journal, I X , 3, 1959, pp. 149165; 229-245) attempts to reconcile the existence of various pagan motifs in Jewish venues with the prohibition of graven images. Urbach denies that such non-rabbinic groups existed, because in the burial ground of the sages at Beth Shearim, marble fragments of reliefs portraying scenes from pagan mythology have been uncovered. From this Urbach concludes, "These finds from Beth Shearim put an end to all the theories based on making a clear distinction between the private world of the Sages, as reflected in the talmudic and mishnaic laws about idolatry, and the other real world that existed outside theirs." Urbach holds (p. 165) that the sarcophagi at Beth Shearim also appear to have come from Jewish workshops, and "it is possible that some of them were originally made after conventional patterns for idol-worshipping gentile customers and subsequently sold to Jews without any change being made in their design." This taxes one's credulity far more than the thesis that there were several kinds of Jews and Judaism in second and third century Galilee. Urbach is apparently prepared to assume that these symbols were of mere orna­ mental value (and in this he is not alone). Be that as it may, is it conceivable that the Jews were so utterly indifferent to their coffins and to ornaments inscribed on them that they thoughtlessly made use of pagan sarcophagi? I f so, one can only conclude that all of the laws on the subject of idolatry were indeed irrelevant, a point Urbach repeatedly denies. One does not have to conclude that symbols were more than ornamental to stand in astonishment before allegedly Jewish use of unmodified and purely pagan images anywhere, let alone

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on sarcophagi and synagogues. Thus the choice is apparently between admitting that some Jews were not responsive to some aspects of Jewish laws, in particular, about not rendering images or formal symbols of any kind, and that all Jews were indifferent to these same laws, at least as they apply to proper vessels for burial. Unless it can be demonstrated that the halakhah of the Galilean sages would permit such images to be engraved on sarcophagi for Jewish use, whether de novo or de facto, the very finds at Beth Shearim prove that there must have been several understandings of what is a permissible symbol in Judaism. Professor Boaz Cohen's article, "Art in Jewish Law," (Judaism, vol. I l l , 1954, pp. 165-176; see also Goodenough's "The Rabbis and Jewish Art in the Greco-Roman Period," Hebrew Union College Annual, X X X I I , 1 9 6 1 , pp. 269-279) suggests that such a halakhah as is needed to harmonize the various coffins in Beth Shearim with extant laws will not, in truth, be found; one looks forward to Professor Cohen's longer study of the same question. The above digression was intended to illustrate a representative criticism leveled at Goodenough's thesis about non-rabbinic Jews and Judaism throughout the Greco-Roman world, including Palestine, and to indicate the necessary next step in Goodenough's argument. If, as he contends, not all Jews (perhaps, not even many Jews) were under the hegemony of the aniconic rabbis of the Talmud, then what shall we think if we discover substantial, identifiably Jewish, and fully re­ presentational remains? What, in addition, shall we think if these remains indicate the use by Jews and for apparently Jewish purposes (whatever that might mean) of forms we should expect to uncover not in a Jewish but rather in a pagan setting? To these two questions the eight volumes are devoted, for very substantial, identifiably Jewish iconic remains have been uncovered from Tunisia to Dura, from Rome to the Galilee, and at many places in between, and these remains are, from the viewpoint of Talmudic law, shocking! One conclusion would render these finds insignificant and irrele­ vant: that while illegal, symbolic representations of lions, eagles, masks, and so forth were made for merely ornamental purposes, "the rabbis" may not have approved of them, but had to "reckon with reality" and "accepted" them. Goodenough repeats litanously, symbol by symbol and volume by volume, (see I, p. 108) that it is difficult to agree that the handful of symbolic objects so carefully chosen from a great variety of available symbols, so frequently repeated at Dura, Randanini, Bet Alpha, Hammam Lif and elsewhere to the exclusion of many other

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symbols, and so sloppily drawn that no ornamental artist could have done them, was merely decoration. Furthermore, it begs the question to say that these symbols were "merely" ornamental: why specifically these symbols and no others'? Why in these settings? One need not hold that a "symbol" is perpetually symbolic, retaining its emotive value forever and everywhere, in order to deny that symbols (in this sense, representations of parts of reality) are in a given context never more than "mere" ornament. I should add, moreover, that it would be illuminating to know precisely what is meant by "mere ornament," in the historical context; and to know what other instances may be cited of wholly meaningless decoration attached to other places of worship and burial, which in antiquity were normally adorned, with meaningful and evocative designs. Goodenough attempts, therefore, to uncover the meaning of various symbols discovered in substantial quantities throughout the Jewish world of antiquity. His procedure is, first, to present the finds in situ, second (and quite briefly), to expound a method capable of making sense out of them, and, third, to study each extant symbol with the guidance of this method. Goodenough begins (I, ch. 2 ) by citing the literary evidence for the religion of the Jews in the Roman world, drawn from pagan, Christian, and various categories of Jewish sources (rabbinic, apocalyptic, and Hellenistic), presenting mainly the testimony of the pagans and Chris­ tians. While his hesitation in presenting the Jewish sources is entirely comprehensible (it would have entailed at least eight more volumes), I do think it regrettable that he has not taken sufficient note of the deeply Hellenized character of Palestinian Pharisaic Judaism before and in the period at hand, not because such a study would have ma­ terially altered his conclusions, but because he might have shed con­ siderable light on Pharisaism itself; and might also have read the Talmudic sources he does cite from a rather less monistic perspective. Seeing the Pharisees and their heirs as themselves the product of a long process of Hellenization, Goodenough might have found it less surprising to confront equally Hellenized but quite different Jews; and his contrast between the Talmudic and the mystic groups would have been far subtler than it is. The issue was not, I think, Hellenization, but rather how to appropriate and accommodate oneself to Hellenizations; this was a very ancient issue indeed, certainly faced from the time of Simeon the Righteous if not long, long before. Thus Goodenough might have seen both the mystic groups and the rabbinic

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groups as modulations of Jewish Hellenism, as they may, after further research, appear to have been; and the nuances of this Jewish Hellen­ ism will become clearer. In any case, I looked in vain for references to the work of Yohanan Levi, E. Bickerman, I. Levi (La Legende Grec de Pythagore en Palestine, Paris, 1 9 2 4 ) , and others. I do not know what, if anything, the evidence brought by these scholars might have suggested to Goodenough, but I cannot believe that they are entirely irrelevant to his work. Goodenough presents a majestic array of photographs and discus­ sion, presenting in one place for the first time a portrait of Jewish art in antiquity which is perhaps as magnificent as will ever appear. One must never underestimate either the effort or the achievement involved in the first three volumes. He begins with the art of the Jewish tombs in Palestine and of their contents, studying the remains by chronological periods, and thus indicating the great changes in funerary art that developed after 70 A.D. He is consistently cautious in dating and discussion; if an item is possibly attributable to pagans, he does not accept it as evidence. Further, while his reviewers who specialize in classics and history of art have advanced a number of specific technical criticisms, none has cared to demonstrate a general technical "incompetence." Rather, the numerous points of difference advanced by some reviewers serve to reassure the outsider of a very broad area of agreement with Goodenough's treatment of the artifacts. Goodenough proceeds (I, ch. 5 ) to the synagogues of Palestine, their inscriptions and contents, describing (sometimes briefly) more than four dozen sites. He concludes (I, p. 2 6 4 ) : In these synagogues certainly was a type of ornament, using animals, human figures, and even pagan deities, in the round, in deep relief, or in mosaic, which was in sharp distinction to what was proper for Judaism ... The ornament we are studying is an interim ornament, used only after the fall of Jerusalem and before the completion or reception of the Talmud. The return to the old standards, apparently a return to the halakhic Judaism that the rabbis advocated, is drama­ tically attested by the destruction, obviously by Jews themselves, of the decorative abominations, and only of the abominations, in these syna­ gogues. Only when a synagogue was abandoned as at Dura ... are the original effects preserved or the devastations indiscriminate. (I may note, parenthetically, that the decoration in these synagogues must have seemed more than merely decorative to those who destroyed them so discriminatingly.) Goodenough turns ( I I , chs. 1-5) to the archaeological evidence from

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the diaspora. Here he presents the remains of the Roman Jewish cata­ combs, as well as symbols used with burials outside Rome, synagogues of the diaspora, small objects such as lamps and glass remnants, the evidence of the inscriptions, and charms and amulets. Every student of the Talmud is aware, of course, that amulets and charms were part of the setting of rabbinic Judaism as well, but most are prepared to dismiss such matters as evidence of the superstition of the ignorant masses. Kaufman consistently treats references in the prophetic litera­ ture to such syncretistic practices as examples of the folk fetishism of the masses, which do not give evidence that the masses themselves fully accepted these same fetishes as they were understood by pagans. Goodenough argues that the distinction between fetishistic magic and religion is generally subjective, and imposed from without by the embarrassed investigator. He points out (II, p. 156) that magical characteristics, such as the effort to achieve material benefits by funda­ mentally compulsive devices are common (whether we recognize them as such or not) in the "higher" religions. It is certainly difficult to point to any religious group before the present time that did not quite openly expect religion to produce some beneficial consequence, and if that consequence was to take place after death, it was no less real. Hence Goodenough concludes that "magic is a term of judgment," and thus the relevance of charms and amulets is secured. Goodenough summarizes the consequences of his evidence as fol­ lows ( I I , p. 2 9 5 ) : The picture we have got of this Judaism is that of a group still intensely loyal to Yao Sabaoth, a group which buried its dead and built its synagogues with a marked sense that it was a peculiar people in the eyes of God, but which accepted the best of paganism (including its most potent charms) as focusing in, finding its meaning in, the supreme Yao Sabaoth. In contrast to this, the Judaism of the rabbis was a Judaism which rejected all of the pagan religious world (all that it could) ... Theirs was the method of exclusion, not inclusion ... The problem is then how to establish a methodology by which material amassed in the first three volumes may be studied and interpreted. Ill Vol. I V , Part 1, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period: The Pro­ blem of Method (N.Y., Pantheon, 1954, $ 7 . 5 0 ) . The simplest method Goodenough might have used would have been to interpret the archaeological evidence on the basis of written docu-

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merits of the period, but it is obvious that the written documents, particularly the Talmudic ones, will hardly suffice to interpret symbols so utterly alien to their spirit, and in any case, so rarely discussed in them. Furthermore, even where some of the same symbols are men­ tioned in the Bible or Talmud and inscribed on graves or synagogues, it is not always obvious that the biblical antecedents or Talmudic referen­ ces engage the mind of the artist, particularly when it is so clear that he is following the conventions of Hellenistic art, and not only Hellen­ istic art, but the conventions of the artists who decorated cultic objects and places. Goodenough reviews other efforts to interpret this material, for he is not the first to see it. Reading the summaries of the inter­ pretations of those scholars who are willing to take the material seriously, I wondered why no one had used the old fundamentalist argument that some malevolent angel had scattered these objects about to challenge our faith in the ubiquity and normative character of Talmudic Judaism, indeed, in the monolithic and linear character of Jewish religion. Watzinger, for instance, suggested that the synagogues may have been gifts to the Jews from the Roman governors, and had to be accepted "ready-made." Goodenough asks, however, for a general theory to make sense of all the evidence, something no one gives, and asks ( I V , p. 1 0 ) , "Where are we to find the moving cause in the taking over of images, and with what objective were they taken over? It seems to me that the motive for borrowing pagan art and integrating it into Judaism throughout the Roman world can be discovered only by analyzing the art itself." And for this, an interpretive method needs to be devised. Goodenough succinctly defines this method: The first step ... must be to assemble ... the great body of evidence available ... which, when viewed as a whole, demands interpretation as a whole since it is so amazingly homogeneous for all parts of the Empire. The second step is to recognize that we must first determine what this art means in itself, before we begin to apply to it as proof texts any possible unrelated statements of the Bible or the Talmud. That these artifacts are unrelated to proof texts is a statement which one can no more make at the outset than one can begin with the assumption of most of my predecessors, that if the symbols had meaning for Jews, that meaning must be found by correlating them with Talmudic and biblical phrases ... The art has rarely, and then only in details, been studied for its possible meaning in itself: this is the task of these volumes.

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I should want to add a possible way to consider the relationship of this body of evidence to biblical literature. While Goodenough does pay close attention to the possible biblical antecedents of many of the symbols he discusses, it would have been interesting if he had dis­ cussed, also, the great corpus of biblical images (in words or from the relics of the period) from which the Hellenistic Jews might have borrowed, comparing that group to the much smaller body of images that they did in fact borrow. Such a procedure might reveal at least as convincingly a reference to the pagan understandings, in various periods, of these same images, a clear-cut and integrated criterion for selection of a few particularly relevant and meaningful symbols from a great body of available symbols. Thus he might demonstrate further the existence of a precise and well-defined myth which underlay the various manifestations in the remains. O f a given collection of biblical symbols, only a few survive in the Hellenistic Jewish remains. Why these few? Goodenough argues case by case that these images preserved or conveyed particular meanings or values held in common, but under­ stood quite differently, by pagans, Jews and Christians, respectively. Hence, if a given image does appear in Scripture as well as in pagan­ ism, Goodenough frequently interprets it by reference to its pagan and mystic, rather than its (more opaque) Scriptural value. This method could, as I have said, be further substantiated by showing the symbols, equally available, that were not appropriated from biblical literature for Hellenistic Jewish purposes, for one would be led to conclude that an exclusion represented a choice, and that grounds of this choice might be delineated by uncovering the common quality of all such choices and exclusions. The common quality of the choice would probably emerge as their usage in mystery cults (possibly, as well as in the Temple), and the common quality of those excluded may very likely be that in Hellenistic times, none appears in paganism, in particular, in the pagan art of the mystery cults, and hence was useless for the purposeful appropriation of the Jewish mystics. Conversely, it would be interesting to consider those symbols avail­ able to the Jews from the world of pagan religions which never appear in Jewish remains, a second possible indication that those which do appear were quite consciously appropriated for Jewish purposes. In general such symbols that do not appear relate to the actual worship of pagan gods revered at that time; such would obviously have been unacceptable in Jewish art. I f future discoveries should add to the wealth of information on symbols used by Jews, it seems unlikely that

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the fundamental principles of selection manifested up to now would be greatly modified. Since biblical images presently not extant from the Greco-Roman period, or pagan images which according to our present thesis on the religion of these mystic groups would have been useless to them may turn up in identifiably Jewish settings, Goodenough hesitates to pursue this line of argument. After all, according to all earlier understanding of Judaism in the classical age, we should not have found a synagogue like that at Dura-Europos! Nonetheless, this is a means of testing the thesis and proving its soundness which is available, if only temporarily. Goodenough does consider the relevance of rabbinic evidence, and concludes, "Even if some rabbis tolerated such an image, the implication is that they were far from taking the initiative in introducing anything of this kind," ( I V , p. 1 5 ) , a point that must be kept in mind through­ out. At best it can be shown that a few rabbis "did not forbid" or "did not hinder" such art as is under consideration; there may indeed have been some pressure to accept this or that item. But the materials at hand were used widely and evidently intentionally; they apparently reflect a creative purpose, and not mere "compromise" with an alien, attractive culture. Goodenough's method, presented in volume IV, ch. 2, is clearly articulated in advance, and used throughout. He always comes to a conclusion through explicit statement of his reasoning, a quality of real courage considering how easily one may then quibble at this point or that. His method is never obscure, though the consequences occasion­ ally represent thinking other than fully rational; and if the succeeding volumes exhibit a monotonous quality, as one symbol after another comes under discussion and produces an interpretation very close to that to follow, the reason is neither Goodenough's lack of ingenuity (on the contrary, some of his reviewers think he is too ingenious) or of scholarly imagination, but rather his tenacious use of a method clearly thought through, clearly articulated and clearly applied through­ out. What is this "method"? Above I have quoted its steps. The problem here is to explain step two, namely, how Goodenough determines what this art means in itself, a very difficult undertaking for him at the outset, and for me now. Goodenough begins by asking ( I V , p. 2 7 ) : Admitting that the Jews would not have remained Jews if they had used these images in pagan ways and with pagan explanations, do the

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remains indicate a symbolic adaptation of pagan figures to Judaism or merely an urge to decoration? He defines a symbol as "an image or design with a significance to one who uses it quite beyond its manifest content ... an object or a pattern which, whatever the reason may be, operates upon men and causes effect in the viewer beyond mere recognition of what is literally pre­ sented in the given form." Recent philosophy, in particular that repre­ sented by the name of Suzanne Langer, has suggested that "to project feelings into outer objects is the first way of symbolizing and thus of conceiving those feelings," and hence, before conception, may well come "pure feeling." Goodenough emphasizes that most important thought is in "this world of the suggestive connotative meaning of words, objects, sounds, and forms . . . " He adds ( I V , p. 33) that in religion, a symbol conveys not only meaning, but also "power or value." Further, some symbols move from religion to religion, preserving the same "value" while acquiring a new explanation. Here we may note that for the Jewish reader, this is an entirely comprehensible process, for we are witnesses to the capacity of religious "symbols" in the form of actions or prohibitions to endure through many, varied settings, acquiring new explanations and discarding old ones, and all the time retaining religious "force" or value or (in more modern terms) "mean­ ing." A cursory examination, for instance, of I. Heinemann's Ta'amey HaMitzvot beSifrut Yisrael will suggest, first, for how many varied reasons Jews have kept "the commandments," and yet, second, how abiding are the values that may be discerned through each intellectual age and nuance. Hence, the Jewish reader will understand what Gooddenough refers to when he writes ( I V , p. 3 6 ) : Indeed when the religious symbols borrowed by Jews in those years are put together, it becomes clear that the ensemble is not merely a 'picture book without text,' but reflect a lingua franca that had been taken into most of the religions of the day, for the same symbols were used in association with Dionysius, Mithra, Osiris, the Etruscan gods, Sabazisus, Attis, and a host of others, as well as by Christianity later. It was a symbolic language, a direct language of values, however, not a language of denotation. Goodenough is far from suggesting the presence of a pervasive syn­ cretism, but rather, of pervasive religious values applied quite paro­ chially by various groups, including some Jews, to the worship of their particular "Most High God." These values, while connotative and not denotative, may, nonetheless, be recovered and articulated in some

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measure by the historian who makes use of the insights of recent students of psychology and symbolism: The hypothesis on which I am working ... is that in taking over the symbols, while discarding the myths and explanations of the pagans, Jews and Christians admitted, indeed confirmed, a continuity of reli­ gious experience which it is most important to be able to identify ... for an understanding of man, the phenomenon of a continuity of religious experience or values would have much more significance than that of discontinuous explanations (IV, p. 4 2 ) . At this point Goodenough argues that the symbols under consideration were more than merely space-fillers; first, because they were all living symbols in surrounding cultures; second, because the vocabulary of symbols is extremely limited, on all the artifacts not more than a score of designs appearing in sum, and thus highly selected; third, the reason alluded to above, namely, that the symbols were frequently not the work of an ornamental artist at all; fourth, that the Jewish and "pagan" symbols are mixed on the same graves, so that if the menorah is accepted as "having value" then the peacock or wreath of victory ought also to have "had value"; and finally, that the symbols are found in highly public places, such as synagogues and cemeteries, and not merely on the private and personal possessions of individuals, such as amulets or charms. From here, Goodenough's method becomes clear and irrevocable: he must state carefully where and how each symbol occurs, thus estab­ lishing its commonplace quality; he must then show the meaning that the symbol may have had universally, indicating its specific denotative value in the respective cultures which used it. He considers its broader connotative value, as it recurs in each culture, because a symbol evokes in man, not only among specific groups of men, a broader, psycholo­ gically oriented meaning. Naturally, this last step will be difficult for many to take, particularly because some religious people are loathe to consider the sexual aspect of evocative religious symbolism as psycholo­ gists have expounded it. Others will not be prepared to accept the psychological unity of mankind, or at least, of that part of mankind that responds to religion. Goodenough cannot ever convince such people that he is right, nor they him that he is wrong; these are cate­ gories that, as I said at the outset, cannot apply here. Interpretation of symbols is not at a sufficiently sophisticated stage that one can "prove" the rightness or wrongness of an interpretation. Furthermore, Goodenough's statement on the nature of religious psychology will

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appeal to a specific kind of religious mind, that prepared to contem­ plate the unity of the human spirit with the divine being, while the more prosaic will insist that it is all beyond proof, if not, indeed, beyond relevance. Goodenough's psychology of religion recognizes "a profound urge to life, to the realization, expansion and perpetuation of life," and holds that man attempts to escape the inevitability of personal annihi­ lation through death by achieving a union with the enduring life-force, represented frequently by sexually grounded symbols: This psychology of religion ... centers upon the phenomenon of a great life urge, a drive to self-fulfillment which may express itself in a desire for mystic union with the Mother-Father or for security through obedience to the Father. The basic value of the religious symbols in pagan—and Jewish Hellen­ istic—antiquity was erotic. The alternate way in religion, the way of obedience ( in the case of Judaism) to Torah and commandments is "the way of the Father," which alleviates the sense of guilt while it still "accentuates the duality of Father and devotee. It is in religions centering not in obedience but in the birth and death and resurrection of the god or his son that mystical assimilation of the devotee with the Mother, or FatherMother, is the objective . . . " ( I V , p. 5 9 ) . Further, Goodenough adds, the formal state religions of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem, had a quite different basis, and had little (if any) use for the symbols at hand. These symbols, he holds, were of use "only in religions that engendered deep emotion, ecstasy, religions directly and consciously centered in the renewing of life and the granting of immortality, in the giving to the devotee of a portion of the divine spirit or life substance." At the end we shall see that these symbols appear to indicate a type of Judaism in which, as in Philonic Judaism, the basic elements of 'mystery' were superimposed upon Jewish legalism. The Judaism of the rabbis has always offered essentially a path through this present life, the Father's code of instructions as to how we may please him while we are alive. To this, the symbols seem to say, was now added from the mystery religions, or from Gnosticism, the burning desire to leave this life altogether, to renounce the flesh and go up into the richness of divine existence, to appropriate God's life to oneself. These ideas have as little place in normative, rabbinic Judaism as do the pictures and symbols and gods that Jews borrowed to suggest them.... That such ideas were borrowed by Jews was no surprise to me after years of studying Philo.... What is perplexing is the problem of

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how Jews fitted such conceptions into, or harmonized them with, the teachings of the Bible. IV W e turn, finally, to a brief review of the contents of the last sections. Vol. IV, Part II, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period: from the Jewish Cult (N.Y., Pantheon, 1954, $ 7 . 5 0 ) .

Symbols

Vols. V and V I , Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period: Fish, Bread, and Wine (N.Y., Pantheon, 1956, $ 15 the set of two volumes.) Vols. V I I and VIII, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period: Pagan Symbols in Judaism (N.Y., Pantheon, 1958, $ 15 the set of two volumes). In these volumes, Goodenough turns back to the symbols whose exist­ ence he reported in Volumes I-III, and attempts a systematic inter­ pretation of them according to the method outlined in Volume IV, part I. I shall merely summarize the items discussed, because, as I noted earlier, and as Goodenough himself notes in Volume IV, part I, the conclusions are astonishingly uniform throughout. In his discussion of symbols from the Jewish cult, Goodenough attempts to explain what these symbols may have meant when repro­ duced in the noncultic settings of synagogue and grave, specifically, the Menorah, the Torah shrine, lulab and etrog, shofar, and incense shovel. These symbols are, of course, definitely Jewish, and yet seem to have been transformed into symbols ( I V , p. 6 7 ) , "used in devotion, to have taken on personal, direct value," to mean not simply that the deceased was a Jew but to express a "meaning in connection with the death and life of those buried behind them." It would be simple to assign the meaning of these symbols to their biblical or cultic origins, except for the fact that they are often represented with less obviously Jewish, or biblical symbols, such as birds eating grapes and the like. Rather, Goodenough holds that these devices may be of some direct help in achieving immortality for the deceased, specifically "the men­ orah seems to have become a symbol of God, of his streaming light and Law ... the astral path to God. The lulab and ethrog carried on the association of Tabernacles as a festival of rain and light, but took on mystical overtones, to become a eucharist to escape from evil and of the passing into justice as the immaterial Light comes to man . . . " He concludes:

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They could take a host of pagan symbols which appeared to them to have in paganism the values they wanted from their Judaism and blend them with Jewish symbols as freely as Philo blended the language of Greek metaphysics with the language of the Bible.... In Fish, Bread and Wine, Goodenough begins by discussing the Jewish and pagan representations of creatures of the sea, in the latter section reviewing these usages in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Syria, Greece, and Rome (a recurrent inquiry), then turns to the symbolic value of the fish in Judaism, and finally, to bread. The representations of "bread" often look merely like "round objects" however, and if it were not for the occasional representation of baskets of bread, one should be scarcely convinced that these "round objects" signify any­ thing in particular. The section on wine is the high point of these volumes, both for its daring and for its comprehensive treatment of the "divine fluid" and all sorts of effulgences from the godhead, from Babylonia and Assyria, Egypt (in various periods), Greece, Dionysiac cults in Syria and Egypt, as well as in the late syncretistic reli­ gions. Goodenough finds considerable evidence in Jewish cult and observance, but insists that fish, bread and wine rites came into Jewish practice during and not before the Hellenistic period, and hence must be explained by contemporary ideas. Wine, in particular, was widely regarded as a source of fertility, but its mystic value was as an expres­ sion of the "craving for sacramental access to Life." Pagan symbols used in Jewish contexts include the bull, lion, tree, crown, various rosettes and other wheels (demonstrably not used in paganism for purely decorative purposes), masks, the gorgoneum, cupids, birds, sheep, hares, shells, cornucopias, centaurs, psychopomps, and astronomical symbols. Goodenough treats this body of symbols last because, while some may have had biblical referents, the symbolic value of all these forms seems to him to be discovered in the later period. O f the collection, Goodenough writes (VIII, p. 2 2 0 ) : They have all turned into life symbols, and could have been, as I believe they were, interpreted in a great many ways. For those who believed in immortality they could point to immortality, give man specific hopes. To those who found the larger life in a mysticism that looked, through death, to a final dissolution of the individual into the All ... these symbols could have given great power and a vivid sense of appropriation.... The invasion of pagan symbols into either Judaism or Christianity ... involved a modification of the original faith but by no means its abandonment. Symbolism is itself a language, and affected the original faith much as does adopting a new language in which to

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express its tenets. Both Christians and Jews in these years read their Scriptures, and prayed in words that had been consecrated to pagan deities. The very idea o f a God, discussion of the values of the Christian or Jewish God, could be conveyed only by using the old pagan theos; salvation by the word soteria; immortality by athanasia. The eagle, the crown, the zodiac, and the like spoke just as direct, just as complicated a language. The Christian or Jew had by no means the same conception of heaven or immortality as the pagan, but all had enough in common to make the same symbols, as well as the same words, expressive and meaningful. Yet the words and the symbols borrowed did bring in something new.... Goodenough continues (VIII, p. 2 2 4 ) : When Jews adopted the same lingua franca of symbols they must ... have taken over the constant values in the symbols. not of "Jewish pagans" but rather Hellenized Jews. Otherwise, Goodenough repeatedly argues, the Jews would have lost their connection with Judaism; but the Hellenized Jews bore as great a scorn for "paganism" as the rabbis or the church fathers. That is surely not to argue that Philo is the one literary source able to bring meaning to these artifacts, however, but only that Philo, Paul, John and others all addressed themselves, in varying ways, to a Hellenized audience in a Hellenized idiom. Thus Jewish Hellenism represented a conglo­ merate of "Hellenistic Judaisms" to be distinguished carefully and systematically: The uniformity of Jewish symbolism ... seems to me to reflect not a basic document of mysticism or metaphysics, like the writings of Philo, but a body of common hopes—hopes that found better expression in Greek figures of speech (for Philo) or in Greek plastic forms (for the groups under consideration) than in traditional Jewish formulations because these hopes had come into Judaism from paganism ... (VIII, p. 226). Finally, Goodenough reviews the lessons of the evidence. From the cultic objects we learn that the Jews used images of their cultic objects in a new way, in the pagan manner, for just as the pagans were putting the mythological and cultic emblems of their religions on their tombs to show their hope in the world to come, so too did the Jews. From fish, bread and wine, we learn that the Jews were thus partaking of immortal nature. In reference to the symbols that had no cultic origins ( V I I and V I I I ) and, on the face of it, slight Jewish origins (apart from the bull, tree, lion, and possibly crown, which

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served in biblical times) Goodenough proposes that the value of these objects, though not their verbal explanations, were borrowed because some Jews found in them "new depths for his ideas of ... his own Jewish deity, and his hope of salvation or immortality...." V Goodenough's work has thus far been discussed from somewhat tangential viewpoints. In the extended commentary above, the books have been necessarily misrepresented, for the emphases of my discus­ sion are not the emphases of Goodenough, and the questions and sug­ gestions advanced above touch points of far more interest to students of Judaism in this period than to students of Jewish symbolism and mysticism, chief among them, of course, Goodenough himself. Hence, the question should be answered: What is the essential contribution made by Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period? Why are these books so important? And why should they be studied carefully? First, a great deficiency in earlier scholarship on the archaeology of this period has been the failure of most investigators to reckon openmindedly with the implications for classical Judaism of the relics of a supposedly aniconic faith, consistently using plastic symbols of all shapes, sizes and significations. Whether one holds that decoration is "mere ornament" or not, one cannot lightly and unconcernedly dismiss the astonishing appearance of pagan ornament in Jewish settings, as many have done. Such offhand dismissal represents an act of faith in prevailing presuppositions that no scholar can afford to make. The eagle, the vine, the human and divine figures, including the head of Zeus, the wreath, etc., all warrant serious consideration in the context of the art in which they generally were found, namely pagan art, as well as in the unexpected places in which they turned up, on Jewish synagogues and ossuaries. By simply reviewing the finds in such a way, Goodenough has forced a reconsideration of their mean­ ing. By proposing an explanation of them, he has forced the scholarly world to reconsider its consensus and to come to a thoughful reapprai­ sal of its earlier position: and he has rightly insisted that if his theses are rejected, others must be proposed in their place. In all this, a deficiency in earlier treatment of Jewish symbols in the Greco-Roman period has been removed. Second, Goodenough's essential contribution is, in my opinion, to be measured by evaluating not his "proof" of any of his theses,

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but rather his method and its cumulative consequences. Goodenough does not claim to "prove" anything, for if by proof one means certain and final establishment of a fact, there can be no proof in the context of evidence such as this. The stones are silent; Goodenough has tried to listen to what they say. He reports what he understands about them, attempting to accomplish what the evidence as it now stands permits; the gradual accumulation of likely and recurrent explanations derived from systematic study of a mass of evidence, and the growing awar­ eness that these explanations point to a highly probable conclusion. That is not a "demonstration" in the sense that a geometrical proposi­ tion can be demonstrated, and for good reason are the strictly literal (and, therefore, philological) scholars uncomfortable at Goodenough's results. But all who have worked as historians even with literary evidence must share Goodenough's underlying assumption, that nothing in the endeavor to recover historical truth is in the end truly demon­ strable or positive, but nonetheless significant statements about history may be made. Third, Goodenough has clearly indicated a substantial probability that recurrently emerges from this mass of evidence. I f the cumulative evidence is inspected as cautiously as possible, it can hardly yield a statement other than the following: At the period between the first and sixth centuries, the manifestations of the Jewish religion were varied and complex, far more varied, indeed, than the extant Talmudic literature would have led us to believe. Besides the groups known from this literature, we have evidence that "there were widespread groups of loyal Jews who built synagogues and buried their dead in a manner strikingly different from that which the men represented by extant literature would have probably approved, and, in a manner motivated by myths other than those held by these men." The content of these myths may never be known with any great precision, but comprehended a Hellenistic-Jewish mystic mythology far closer to the Qabbalah than to Talmudic Judaism. In a fairly limited time before the advent of Islam, these groups dissolved. This is the plain sense of the evidence brought by Goodenough, not a summary in any sense of his discoveries, hypotheses, suggestions, or reconstruction of the evidence into an historical statement. Such a summary would not be possible, since Goodenough's central interest is the material and the method by which it may be dealt with, grave by grave, and symbol by symbol. But such a summary does indicate, I think, a very substantial contribution to scholarship indeed,

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the great significance of which should impel many readers to turn to the evidence itself for closer study. Goodenough certainly describes a religion that does not conform to post-Haskalah conceptions of what Judaism should be, and I may add, it is likely that Talmudic Judaism (and early Christianity) con­ formed just as little to the antiseptic vision of the eighteenth and nine­ teenth century Maskilim, philosophers and founders of Jewish Science. If he offers an explanation of the artifacts and a general theory to account for them, this is a demonstration not only of imaginative scholarship and learning, but also of courage and character, courage to question both prevailing assumptions and widespread indifference, and character to persist for so many, many years at a task now only half-completed. At such a splendid achievement, the rabbis of the Talmud instruct their loyal children to say: "Blessed is He Who has given of His Wisdom to flesh and blood."

CHAPTER N I N E J E W I S H U S E O F P A G A N S Y M B O L S A F T E R 70 [Journal

of Religion, X L I I I , 4, pp. 285-294.]

That various forms of religious mysticism permeated Judaism in the Talmudic age has become increasingly clear in recent years. Scholars studying entirely disparate bodies of evidence have reached the same conclusion, that Judaism in that period probable exhibited greater varieties of "hidden knowledge" than had previously been realized. Thus Gershom G. Scholem has demonstrated the antiquity of merkavah and shiur qomah speculation, and shown evidences of mystical doctrine in tannaitic Judaism; Abraham J . Heschel has examined the theological affinities of several important Tannaim for mysticism; and Erwin Goodenough has interpreted the archeological remains of Ju­ daism throughout the Greco-Roman period to demonstrate widespread influence of Greco-Roman mysticism on Judaism from the second through the sixth centuries. Here I shall deal with the problem of the historical interpretation of the phenomena observed by these scholars, and propose a thesis to explain the relationship between the Jewish groups known to us from archeological remains and those known through Talmudic and other literary sources. 1

Goodenough's

Historical

Postulate

Goodenough postulates that before the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E., the aniconic Pharisees wielded tremendous influence in Jewish Palestine, and their opposition effectively prevented wide­ spread use of plastic religious symbols. Afterward, says Goodenough, 1

See G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York, 1 9 5 4 ) , pp. 44-50; and esp. his Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Tulmudic Tradition (New York, I 9 6 0 ) ; Abraham L . Heschel, Torah Min HaShamayim beAspaklaria shel haDorot [in Hebrew; English title: Theology of Ancient Judaism] (London and New York, 1 9 6 2 ) ; Max Kadushin, Organic Thinking (New York, 1 9 3 8 ) and The Rabbinic Mind (New York, 1 9 5 2 ) ; and Erwin Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period (New York, 1953 et seq., Vols. I-VIII). Compare the view of L. Baeck, that "hidden knowledge" was suspect in Israel's "normative" religious life (The Pharisees and Other Essays [New York, 1 9 4 7 ] , pp. 9 9 - 1 0 1 ) , and L. Ginzberg, "Some Observations on the Attitude of the Synagogue towards the ApocalypticEschatological Writings," Journal of Biblical Literature, X L I ( 1 9 2 2 ) , 115-37.

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their influence diminished, and therefore we find employed symbols which were formerly prohibited. This view was criticized most recently by E. E. Urbach. Goodenough's statement of the historical postulate is as follows: The literary and archaeological records agree entirely in showing that the Jews were during this period [before 70] so much under the domination of Pharisaic or rabbinic leadership that images were com­ pletely avoided. Apparently as long as the Temple stood, and hundreds of thousands of Jews went to it annually, the point of view of the rabbis of Palestine registered through Jewry, in matters of observance if not of interpretation. So far all of Philo's Hellenization, he was a carefully observant Jew, presumably as aniconic as any Pharisee. A great change appears to have set in with the fall of Jerusalem. A century and a half later, the cemetery of Sheikh Ibreiq [Beth Shearim] and the synagogues of Dura and Galilee were being constructed. Their orna­ ment seems to indicate that rabbinic control had lapsed, for the rabbis went on with their total denunciation of images for some time, in spite of what the Jews were actually doing. 2 It seems the most natural thing in the world that in the centuries after the fall of Jerusalem, when the Jews were without a national center or, because of their loss of Aramaic, a single unifying language, and when there was no Talmud to control their interpretations of the Old Testament, or of the law, many of them should thus have accepted the mystic ideas of Hellenism, and fused these with their Jewish traditions. 3 A representative criticism of this view is that of Professor Ephraim E. Urbach of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He writes: Nor indeed is it necessary to dwell at length on the inner contradiction in a theory which asserts that in the days of the later Hasmoneans, the Pharisees and sages wielded an almost absolute spiritual domination over the people; and on the other hand, that in the period when Yavneh and Usha were the centers of Jewish life, the Patriarchs and sages had no authority at all. ... Such a theory flies in the face of all that we know about the social status and spiritual authority of the sages in both of these periods. 4 It is obvious that Urbach has grossly exaggerated the contrast which Goodenough proposed. All Goodenough said was that before the fall of Jerusalem, the influence of Pharisaic thought seemed sufficient to 2

Goodenough, op. cit., IV, 12. 3 Ibid., pp. 61-62. E . E . Urbach, "The Rabbinical Laws of Idolatry in the Second and Third Centuries in the Light of Archaeological and Historical Facts," Israel Exploration Journal, I X , No. 3 ( 1 9 5 9 ) , 150-51. 4

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discourage the borrowing of pagan art forms, and that afterward the rabbinic influence was not sufficient to stop it. Certainly this is a reasonable view of Pharisaic influence (though not necessarily political authority) before 70, in the light, for example, of Josephus' saying (War II, 162) that "the Pharisees ... are considered the most accurate interpreters of the laws, and hold the position of the leading sect." Furthermore, the central position of the Pharisees in the synoptic tra­ ditions would hardly suggest that Goodenough's opinion "flies in the face of all that we know about the social status and spiritual authority" of the first-century Pharisees. That in the earlier stage the Pharisees exerted "absolute control," and later "had no authority at all' obviously distorts the suggestion in a way which Urbach found it easy to refute. Goodenough's suggestion in its original form remains to be considered. The facts must be distinguished from any explanation. The first fact is that, so far as we know, very little pagan ornament was used by the Jews before the fall of Jerusalem and that, by a century after­ ward, pagan symbols of various kinds were apparently widespread in Jewish public buildings and graves. For example, in first-century Jerusalem, Jews allegedly so hated the pagan eagle that they rioted when Roman troops carried the symbol with them into the city. Yet a century later it was commonplace to put eagles over synagogue door­ ways, "the place where the distinctive device of a cult was usually carved," as evidenced by the remains of Capernaum, ed-Dikkeh, erRafid, Umm el-Kanatir, Dura, and Sheikh Ibreiq. It is not unreason­ able to suppose that some changes had taken place in Judaism, either, according to Goodenough, in the effectiveness of the authority of groups opposing these symbols, or, as we shall suggest, in the nature of Judaism itself. The second fact is that the rabbis, with a few grud­ ging exceptions based on "toleration," persisted in forbidding the use by Jews of any such ornament. A few rabbis allowed Jewish craftsmen to make objects with such ornament for pagan use only, but none, to our knowledge, would have approved so great a variety of objects, both incised and otherwise, for Jewish use. Goodenough has suggested that the people who most specifically condemned Jewish use of bor­ rowed pagan figures had less influence at the later time when Jews did use them than earlier when they did not. He is hardly prepared to specify who such people were, either in the early period or later, though it seems reasonable to him to assume that at the later time they 5

5

Goodenough, op. cit., VIII, 121-42.

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were indeed represented by the Tannaim and Amoraim of Talmudic literature. But he did not remotely suggest that the Pharisees either had complete control, or that their opinions did not register at all, in the periods in question. It is certainly easier to disagree with Goodenough when one exaggerates his opinion than when one discusses his cautious proposals with a measure of probity. An Alternative

Historical

Interpretation

"Normative" Talmudic Judaism cannot be said to have existed at all, any more than one can isolate, in the same period, a widespread and normative faith called "Zoroastrianism." In the latter case, we have several phenomena, all to be understood against the background of the Mazdean "religious idiom." One finds priests and cult, authori­ tative books and teachers; but side by side, one notes also the existence of Mazdean heresies, such as Zurvanism and Manichaeism, and modu­ lations of "Iranian religion," such as Mithraism and various kinds of gnosticism. Further, the religion of the masses was not necessarily congruent to what the priest Kartir might have regarded as normative. One may, therefore, more accurately speak of "generalized Mazdeanism" which, in specific instances, yielded such phenomena as sophisticated court-religion, represented in the Pahlavi books, popular folk-religion, and heretical movements comprehensible only in the context of Iranian religion. Likewise in the case of Judaism in the Talmudic period, we can no longer accurately describe a "normative" religion which was charact­ eristic of all but a few isolated heretics. The very meaning of "nor­ mative Judaism" is called into question by evidence that there were very numerous and widespread groups of Jews who were obviously in some respects not "normative" at all and, indeed, the existence of which we should not have remotely suspected from the so-called norma­ tive literature of Talmudic Judaism. Obviously, Jews throughout the Greco-Roman and Iranian worlds shared much in common; there is no reasonable ground to doubt that the main elements of law and doctrine were widespread. There is considerable reason to suppose, however, that local variations and modulations of ideas, emphases, and interpretations of law and doctrine were far more substantial than we have hitherto supposed. In attempting to understand the varied pheno­ mena of Judaism in this period, therefore, we must regard all sources of information as equally relevant, and, in such a context, equally "normative."

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My hypothesis is that groups known from archeological evidence to have diverged from Talmudic norms were following policies and practices of some of the Talmudic rabbis themselves to a degree of which, as far as we know, those Tannaim would not have approved. Specifically, the precise limits set by the Tannaim to experimentation with mystical lore were greatly exceeded by such groups or communi­ ties, who carried to far greater lengths than did the Tannaim mystical practices or speculations of some of the rabbis themselves. Such groups would not have been outside the area of growing Tannaitic influence, but merely beyond the precise limits of these authorities. Thus one may recognize that both within and without Tannaitic circles and among the groups and communities responsive to their authority some Jews had recourse to mystical speculation. Such mystical speculations were in a tradition rooted for a century in the Pharisaic-Tannaitic tradition itself. But groups or communities outside the sphere of Tan­ naitic influence carried these speculations to an extreme the Tannaim would have opposed, by utilizing relevant and spiritually appropriate pagan symbols that conveyed, perhaps more meaningfully than any available to Jews from their historical resources, meanings and exper­ iences important for the new age. The Pharisaic-Tannaitic and Hel­ lenistic-Jewish-mystical groups occupied places within the same con­ tinuum, namely, that of a deeply Hellenized Judaism, characteristic both of the Diaspora and of Palestine. No need exists, therefore, to argue that the influence of the Pharisee-Tannaim diminished after 70, or that their success in acquiring political, legal, religious, and social authority over the Jewish people during the next century and a half was more limited than we had thought. The very nature of their authority was, on the whole, dif­ ferent from the kind of authority that would have been necessary thoroughly to obliterate practices of which they disapproved. In Pale­ stine, the Tannaim around Rabbi Judah the Prince did, it is true, have the support of Roman political and military force. But so far as we can tell, that support did not necessarily extend to the minutiae of village affairs, and the Tannaitic autonomous institution was, so far as we know, neither so efficient or effective, nor so widely recognized that the wishes of the rabbis could be enforced everywhere. In the Diaspora, moreover, Tannaitic authority was effective only where the local Jewish communities were willing to accept it, or where local Tannaim were influential enough to enforce it. Babylonian Jewry, specifically, had its own autonomous government in the Tannaitic

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period, which, under an exilarch, governed Jews with the official recognition of the Parthian government. The exilarch was never sub­ ordinate, in theory or in practice, to the Palestinian patriarch. In the Greco-Roman cities, moreover, the Jewish communities did not neces­ sarily accept either the authority or the policies of the Palestinian Tan­ naim on every issue. I f the Palestinians retained sole jurisdiction over the liturgical calendar, they did not thereby control the life of the synagogues. In Dura, for example, we may be sure that the Tannaitic liturgy of grace was not followed. Finally we may note that the kind of institution that would have been necessary to enforce Tannaitic legislation over the entire Jewish people is nowhere in evidence in Tannaitic literature itself. W e know that the patriarch sent out apos­ tles from time to time; and we know, also, that the wishes of the apostles were defied from time to time. In any case, in order to exert day-to-day authority over Jews from Spain to Afghanistan, the patriarch would have needed an international political institution of enormous size with vast funds and enjoying widespread recognition. The apostolate we know about was not congruent to such needs. The change which was specifically manifested in Jewish use of formerly ignored pagan symbols was generally characteristic of all of Judaism, and must be understood phenomenologically and not merely institutionally. W e shall indicate this by consideration of two issues: first, the narrow question of use of Temple symbolism, and second, the broad issue of the extent of mystical speculation. W e know that a large number of images were borrowed from Temple symbolism and employed in private and public religious structures after 70 A.D., contrary to the teaching of Talmudic law. W e know also that it was the policy of the rabbis at Yavneh during the regime of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai in particular to appro­ priate for the use of the synagogue as much of the Temple's liturgy as they could. They borrowed a number of rites, particularly those connected with Rosh Hashanah, Sukkoth, and the priestly benediction, and established a series of memorials to the devastated sanctuary. At the same time, certain symbols, such as the seven-branched candelabra, were specifically prohibited. Yet we know that some prohibited sym6

7

8

6

See C. H. Kraeling, The Synagogue: The Excavations at Dura-Europos, Final Report, VIII, Vol. I (New Haven, Conn., 1 9 5 6 ) , p. 2 5 9 . See Goodenough's critique of earlier assessments of apostolic influence (op. cit. I, 1 4 - 1 7 ) . See my Life of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai (Leiden, 1 9 6 2 ) , pp. 155-64, on Rabban Yohanan's policy at Yavneh with regard to Temple symbolism. 7

}

8

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bols were used widely in synagogue buildings. What we have before us, therefore, is evidence that the limits set by the Tannaim to the exploitation of Temple symbolism were exceeded by some groups or communities. These communities were not thereby necessarily defying Tannaitic or patriarchal authority on all issues or questions, but merely proceeding in one particular instance beyond Tannaitic law but in a manner congruent to Tannaitic policy. We know of such Jews. Called "mourners for Zion" they exceeded Tannaitic instructions about how properly to mourn for the Temple, and it is certainly not unreason­ able to see in the use of prohibited symbols a parallel tendency of groups on the fringe, from the viewpoint of Tannaitic Judaism, to carry to greater lengths than they would have approved policies and practices of the Tannaim themselves. Thus after 70 A.D. the Tannaitic policy of preserving the memory of the Temple, and keeping alive some of its symbols, was characteristic of most of Judaism, while the specific program to carry out that policy was not. With this in mind, we may turn to the more difficult question of why some Jews apparently began to use symbols of mystical signifi­ cance borrowed from entirely pagan sources, and how such usage was congruent with the policies of the Tannaim. Here again my argument is that such groups acted in a manner congruent to Tannaitic policy but not to Tannaitic law. Two facts help explain why all Jews exhibited renewed interest in soteriological issues after 7 0 : first, the tremendous impact upon Jewish religion of the destruction of the Temple, and second, the religious usefulness of the symbols themselves. The Temple's destruction greatly intensified the Jewish concentration on religious inwardness and personal sal­ vation that had become increasingly widespread in the first century. The writings of IV Ezra and Baruch indicate that the ancient concern with the unreasonable suffering of the Jews occupied the consciousness of the new age, and concomitantly, the question of when and how both nation and individual would find salvation, or release from an age of suffering, took on new immediacy. One genuinely useful way of contemplating these issues lay in the apocalyptic-eschatological tra­ dition, and in the esoteric speculations of Jewish mysticism. That the mystical tradition represented in later literature flourished in Tannaitic Judaism in the first century has been amply demonstrated by Scholem. 9

9

See Bavli Bava Batra 60b, and esp. Gerson D . Cohen, "Zion in Rabbinic Litera­ ture," in A. S. Halkin (ed.), Zion in Jewish Literature (New York, 1 9 6 1 ) , pp. 52-54, and p. 63, nn. 63-66 (see also Life of Rabban Yohanan, pp. 145-46). Above, p. 47.

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The evidences that from Jonathan ben Uzziel, Hillel's student, through Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai to Rabbi Aqiba, an accepted and appa­ rently quasi-official mystic doctrine existed among the Pharisees are well known. Further, this tradition, contrary to widespread opinion, continued to flourish among the later Tannaim (as well as among the Amoraim) in both Palestine and Babylonia, and in the court of Rabbi Judah the Prince. W e know, for example, that Rabbi Judah's colleague, Rabbi Hiyya, participated in such a mystical tradition: 1 0

Mishnah: Nor may the Works of the Chariot be taught in the presence of one. Gemara: Rabbi Hiyya taught, But the headings of the chapters may be transmitted to him. n Here is clear evidence that the Merkavah tradition, well known at Rabban Yohanan's academy a century earlier, continued to be dis­ cussed long after the death of Rabbi Aqiba, when the mystical tradi­ tion was allegedly prohibited or abandoned by the Tannaim. This was, moreover, more than merely theoretical discussion of extant but in­ operative laws about teaching the Merkavah tradition, for soteriological power was ascribed to Rabbi Hiyya himself: Elijah used to frequent Rabbi's academy. One day—it was the New Moon—he was waiting for him, but he [Elijah] failed to come. Said he [R. Judah] to him, Why did you delay? He replied, [I waited] until I awoke Abraham, washed his hands, and he prayed, and I put him to rest again, and did the same for Isaac and Jacob. But why not waken them together? I feared that they would wax strong in prayer, and bring the Messiah before his time. And is their like to be found in this world? he asked. There are Rabbi Hiyya and his sons. There­ upon Rabbi proclaimed a fast, and Rabbi Hiyya and his sons were bidden to descend [to lead the prayers]. As he [Hiyya] exclaimed, "He causes a wind to blow," a wind blew; "the rain to descend," and rain descended. When he was about to say "He quickens the dead," the universe trembled, and in heaven it was asked, Who has revealed our secret to the world? Elijah, they replied.... 12 From this story, which is not unique, it is clear that some kind of esoteric, mystical speculation was carried on by a high official at the court of Rabbi Judah the Prince, and that merkavah mysticism con1 0

See Scholem, Major Trends, pp. 42-43; my Life, pp. 97-103; and L. Finkelstein, Akiba (Philadelphia, 1 9 6 2 ) , pp. 195-214. 11 Bab. Talmud Hagigah I3a-l4b. See also Yerushalmi Hagigah 2.1, Tosefta Hagigah 2.2, Bavli Berakhot 6lb, etc. 12 Bab. Talmud Bava M e s i a 85£. c

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tinued to provide a source for Tannaitic religious speculation. The appearance of the merkavah tradition indicates the persistence of an ancient body of mystical speculation, the central image of which was the Divine Chariot which had borne the indwelling presence of God (shekhinah) out of the Temple in Ezekiel's day, and, presumably, in 70 A.D. also, before the pagan conquest. It is important to emphasize the continuity of this tradition through the end of the second century at the very bastion of Tannaitic Judaism, where, at the same time, the Mishnah was being edited, because it is commonly assumed that the later Tannaim set themselves in opposition to mysticism in all its forms. This was certainly not the case. The rabbis may have opposed specific forms of mysticism, and prohibited specific mystical symbols which were incongruent to Judaism as they understood it; but some of them, at least, participated in mystical phenomena. With this in mind, it is considerably less difficult to confront pagan symbols of mystical significance in Jewish archeological remains. If Jews even within the allegedly "rationalistic" partiarchal court were engaged in mystical speculation and practice, one may well expect to find that others went beyond the limits observed by the Tannaim. That these others used pagan symbols, which the rabbis quite obviously forbade, in their soteriological speculations is less important than the fact that the rabbis themselves were likewise involved in that kind of religious experience. Guided by Goodenough's explanations of the wider meaning that the particular pagan symbols used in Jewish set­ tings had in pagan settings, we may conclude that the salvational values implying immediate prospect of personal redemption, or union with the Godhead, were increasingly important for some Jews. The symbols were a means of expressing hope for a fully realized mystical exper­ ience, in which the communicant would be able to overcome the barrier between himself and the divinity, and hence emerge from the dilem­ mas imposed by the disaster of the Temple both upon the Godhead and upon the Jew. If the fate of the private person and that of the nation had been inextricably intertwined, from earlier days, with that of the divinity, then the forms of mystical speculation known from Jewish literary sources and the pagan, symbolic resources known from archeology to have been used by some Jews share a common quality, namely, particular relevance to the new situation of Judaism after 70. Here, therefore, as in the case of Jewish usage of formerly pro­ hibited Temple symbols, we have before us evidence that the Tannaitic laws were ignored, but their policies were, in fact, characteristic of

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the Judaism of large numbers of Jews outside their immediate circles. That mystical speculations were far more characteristic of Judaism in this period than has been supposed can, moreover, be demonstrated. The Babylonian Jews have been described as a truly "normative" com­ munity, where mysticism was not known until the coming of Rav in the early third century. Kraeling has argued, for example, that Hellen­ istic influence in Palestine and Mesopotamian Jewry was less effective than in Alexandria and Antioch, and that the influence of Hellenistic mysticism was less important in the east: "Neoplatonic speculation which meanwhile had so profoundly affected the main stream of Christian theology registered its impression on Judaism only in the esoteric traditions that came to expresion ultimately in the Kabbalah... Philonic theology and mysticism were disappearing from the Jewish sphere of interest." Rather, he holds, Babylonian Jewry was oriented mainly toward Talmudic Judaism. Yet there is some evidence that before the third century, or in its first two decades at the latest, the shiur qoma and merkavah mystical traditions were studied in Baby­ lonian academies, and that the leading Babylonian Tannaim were in­ volved in such speculations. First, we know that a Babylonian Jewish exegete, Rabbi Hamnuna the Scribe of Babylonia, commented on a verse with eschatological significance, Ezek. 7:16, "But they that shall at all escape from them shall be on the mountains, like doves of the valley, all of them moan­ ing," the extant exegesis being that "Just he scattered them like doves, so shall he bring them back like doves" (cf. Isaiah 6 0 : 8 ) . Second, and more important, we have already noted the interest of the Babylonian, Rabbi Hiyya, in merkavah mysticism. Third, we know that a preacher-apostle, Levi ben Sisi, preached on Scriptures related to the merkavah tradition in the Babylonian city of Nehardea: 1 3

a s

1 4

R. Berekiah and R. Jeremiah b. R. Hiyya b. Abba said: R. Levi ben Sisi gave the following exposition at Nehardea, "It says 'And they saw the God of Israel, and there was under his feet the like of a brick­ work of sapphire stone' (Exod. 24:10). This was the case before they had been redeemed, but when they had been redeemed, the brickwork was placed where the brick was generally kept." 15 1 3

Kraeling, op. cit., p. 324-26. Cf. also Goodenough, op. cit., I, 13-14. 1* See Pal. Talmud Ta anit 4.2, Ecclesiastes Rabbah 7.7, and cf. Mekhilta Beshallah, chap, vi, ed. Lauterbach, I, 240, line 110. Here the verse is given the eschatological force suggested in the text. Cf. Tanhuma Beshallah, para. 24, Yalkut, I, 235. Leviticus Rabbah 23.8 (cf. ed. M. Margoliot [New York, I 9 6 0 ] , p. 5 3 7 ) . c

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R. Levi b. Sisi expounded the Text, "Thou hast also played the harlot with the Egyptians ..." (Ezek. 16:26), etc. 16 R. Berekiah, R. Jeremiah in the name of R. Hiyya b. Ba, Levi b. Sisi preached in Nehardea ... [as above]. R. Miasha said, Concerning Babylonia it was written [Ezek. 1:26, "And above the firmament over their heads there was the likeness of a throne in appearance like a sapphire (R.S.V. = lapis lazuli), and seated above the likeness of a throne was a likeness as it were of a human form"] "In appearance like lapis lazuli," and concerning Egypt it was written, "like a sapphire stone," to teach you that just as the stone is harder than brick, so the subjugation to Babylonia was more oppressive than that to Egypt. 17 In the light of Rabbi Miasha's comment, we conclude that Levi's ser­ mon on Exodus 24:10 was related to Ezekiel's vision. Two further sources are noteworthy, first, the following echo of Ezekiel's vision (1:24: "And when they went, I heard the sound of their wings like the sound of many waters, like the thunder of the Almighty, a sound of tumult like the sound of a host"): The Father of Samuel and Levi were sitting in the synagogue "which moved and settled" in Nehardea. The Shekhinah came, and they heard a sound of tumult and went out. 18 The following saying of Levi is a direct citation of the tradition:

shiur-qomah

As Levi said, From the earth to the firmament in a distance of 500 years, and from one firmament to the next, 500 years, and the thickness of a firmament is 500 years, and so for every firmament. 19 That this is part of a shiur-qoma formula is clear from the saying of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, "But the distance from the earth to the firmament is a journey of 500 years." W e know, moreover, that an esoteric tradition existed in Babylonia well before the time of Levi ben Sisi, Hiyya, and Samuel's Father (ca. 2 0 0 ) , and is represented possibly by sayings of Hillel but cer2 0

2 1

Parallels in Pal. Talmud Sukkah 4.3, Song of Songs Rabbah 4.3.1, 25.7. There is no question that this is a verse used for mystical as well as as eschatological purposes. Lev. R. 25.7. This merely shows interest in Ezekiel, but no special mystical exegesis is elsewhere attached to the verse. Pal. Talmud Sukkah 4.3. See the comment on Exod. 24:10, n. 15 above. Bab. Talmud Megillah 29a. See also n. 23 below. ! 9 Pal. Talmud Berahot 9.1. See W . Bacher, Agadot HaTannaim (Berlin, 1 9 2 2 ) , IV, 189-90. Bab. Talmud, Hagigah l$a; see also Pesahim S>4a-b, and my Life, pp. 98-100. This is the view of Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, p. 80. But we do not know whether Hillel acquired these sayings in Babylonia or in Palestine. 1 6

1 7

1 8

2 0

2 1

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tainly by the following saying of Rabbi Hananiah, the nephew of Rabbi Joshua (ca. 9 0 - 1 6 0 ) : There are rivers of fire which pass before the Shekhinah like streams of water mingled with fire. 2 2

Since Rabbi Hananiah lived most of his life in Babylonia, it is not at all unlikely that Levi's mystical sayings were part of a tradition culti­ vated there from the first century, and transmitted to the generation of Rabbi Hiyya, Rav and Levi ben Sisi. At the very least, it is clear that Babylonian Jews studied the Book of Ezekiel, cited shiur-qoma formulae, and were interested in merkavah mysticism, commenting specifically on verses in Ezekiel which were part of the merkavah exe­ getical tradition. W e see therefore that in the supposedly unhellenized Babylonian Jewish community, some evidence points to the existence of the mystical traditions which, we know, were studied in Palestine at the same time. Yet we should note that the synagogue frequented by Levi, Samuel's Father, and others of this generation contained a statue of a man: 2 3

Was there not a synagogue "which moved and settled" in the Nehar­ dea, and in it was a statue, and Rav and Samuel and the Father of Samuel used to go in there to pray, and were not afraid of arousing suspicion? 2 4 These rabbis could surely not have approved the erection of a statue in the synagogue of Nehardea, yet they preached and prayed there. I f their authority was so limited, should one be surprised to find that Jews in many places went far beyond limits set by the rabbis? And as a parallel, if some of the Tannaim themselves were deeply immersed in mystical speculation, should one be surprised that others outside of 22 Cited by Scholem, ibid., p. 56. 23 Actually there is no reason why Babylonian Jews could not, if they wanted, have, studied Hellenistic language and thought in Babylonia itself. Parthian Babylonia was not a Jewish state but had enormous and highly cultured Greek and Macedonian populations from the time of the Seleucids. Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, a Greek city, con­ tained a Jewish population, and Nehardea, the center of Jewish settlement, was near Seleucia-Ctesiphon. Greek schools were maintained in Seleucia, as well as in Susa, Charax-Spasinu, and in many other places. The Arsacids themselves encouraged Greek letters, and Greek drama was performed at their court. They employed Greek scribes, and used Greek in their chancery and on their coins. For a good survey see Victor Chapot, "Les Destinees de l'hellenisme au dela de TEuphrate," Memoires de la Societe nationale des Antiquires de France, LXIII, 7th ser., Vol. Ill, pp. 207-96. See also W . W . Tarn, Greeks in Bactria and India (Cambridge, 1 9 5 1 ) , I, 39-40. 24 Rosh Hashanah 24b. See the comment of Goodenough, op. cit., IV, 13.

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their immediate circles should be equally involved in mystical specu­ lation and symbolism, moving in directions avoided by the Tannaim and prohibited by them, yet toward a goal similar to that of the Tannaim? Summary I have assumed that the interpretation offered by Goodenough for the meaning of pagan symbols widely appropriated for Jewish syna­ gogues and sarcophagi is substantially beyond question. Some have argued that these symbols were not "symbolic," or were not always symbolic; others have argued that they implied for Jews different myths or meanings from those normally associated with them in the pagan world; and others have held that they were, in any case, mere ornament. One can hardly do justice to the monumental quality of Goodenough's research by proposing to answer his critics' arguments without reference to the artifacts and his explanations of them. I find it impossible, in any event, to believe that Talmudic law can be inter­ preted, however cleverly, to approve the use of a vast variety of sym­ bols drawn directly from paganism, whether they were symbolically meaningful or not. I find it equally impossible, along with Goodenough, to uncover in the Talmudic circles the motivation meaning­ fully to appropriate these symbols. One need not argue that every time a symbol appears it represents the intent of the person using it to express symbolically some deeply felt need. But some of the time it probably does. It seems, nonetheless, that the evidence may hardly be explained by a thesis radically different from Goodenough's when the evidence is considered as a whole. In any event, that the pagan symbols were employed by Jews as mere ornament begs the question. Ornament is normally drawn carefully, and not haphazardly; yet in many instances, pagan ornaments drawn on Jewish sarcophagi (in Beth Shearim, for example) do not manifest the hand of a skilled artist but that of an unskilled person who is not merely decorating a stone but incising a meaningful mark upon it; to him the point was surely not merely aesthetic. As to the possibility that all the symbols meant something to the Jews that was substantially different from their meaning to pagans, this remains to be demonstrated. W e are faced, therefore, with the problem of explaining why the corpus of pagan symbols, most of which were related in some way to the salvation of man and his achievement of unity with the Godhead, was appropriated by Jews for Jewish religious purposes. I have sug-

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gested that the impact of the catastrophic events of 70 and 132-35 A.D. is reflected in new concern for personal, as well as cosmic, sal­ vation; and that this concern was expressed by some of the rabbis of the Talmud, as well as by other Jews far outside their circles, through devotion to mystical lore, without attempting to delineate precisely what elements of this lore were exploited, and with what results. I have therefore interpreted the use by Jews of such relevant pagan symbols as part of a much more widespread Jewish devotion to mysticism. This was phenomenologically as normal a characteristic of Judaism in that age as was study of the law, though the users of pagan symbols may not have been very avid students of the law.

CHAPTER T E N

JUDAISM A T DURA-EUROPOS [History of Religions. An International Journal for Comparative Historical IV, 1, pp. 81-102.]

Studies,

When the painted walls of the synagogue at Dura-Europos emerged into the light of day in November, 1932, the modern perspective on the character of Judaism in Greco-Roman times had to be radically refocused. Until that time, it was possible to ignore the growing evidence, turned up for decades by archaeologists, of a kind of Judaism substantially different from that described in Jewish literary remains of the period. Those remains specifically contained in the Talmud and Midrash were understood to describe an aniconic, ethically, and socially oriented religion, in which the ideas of Hellenistic religions, particularly mystery religions, played little or no part. Talmudic Ju­ daism had, by then, been authoritatively described in such works as George Foot Moore's Judaism, and no one had reason to expect that within what was called "normative Judaism" one would uncover phe­ nomena he might, in other settings, have interpreted as "gnostic" or mystical or eschatological in orientation. It is true that archaeological discoveries had long before revealed in the synagogues and graves of Jews in the Hellenistic worlds substantial evidences of religious syncretism, and of the use of pagan symbols in identifiably Jewish settings. But before the Dura synagogue these evidences remained discrete and made slight impact. They were not explained; they were explained away. After the preliminary report, the Dura synagogue was widely dis­ cussed, and a considerable literature, mostly on specific problems of art but partly on the interpretation of the art, developed; in the main, the Dura synagogue was studied by art historians, and not, with notable exceptions, by historians of religion or of Judaism. When, in 1956, Carl H. Kraeling published The Synagogue, it seemed that 1

1

A. R. Bellinger, F. E. Brown, A. Perkins, and C. B . Welles (eds.), The Excava­ tions at Dura Europos Conducted by Yale University and the French Academy of Inscriptions and Letters, Final Report, Vol. VIII, Pt. 1: The Synagogue by Carl H. Kraeling, with contributions by C. C. Torrey, C. B . Welles, and B . Geiger (New Haven, 1 9 5 6 ) .

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no substantial revision of earlier ideas on Judaism at this period would be required. Kraeling argued that the paintings might be inter­ preted for the most part by reference to the so-called rabbinic literature of the period, and impressively used the Talmudic, Midrashic, and Targumic writings for that purpose. He writes (pp. 353, 3 5 4 ) : The Haggadic tradition embodied in the Dura synagogue paintings was, broadly speaking, distinct from the one that was normative for Philo and for that part of the ancient Jewish world that he represents. ... This particular cycle [of paintings] as it is known to us at Dura moves within a definable orbit of the Haggadic tradition, ... this orbit has Palestinian-Babylonian rather than Egyptian relations. Kraeling's method and conclusions are re-examined, and a wholly different method, leading to quite other conclusions, is proposed by Erwin R. Goodenough in the newest volumes of Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, which have just appeared. My purpose here is, first, to contrast the findings of Kraeling and Goodenough on a number of specific, suggestive problems; second, to summarize the general picture of Dura Judaism described by each; and, finally, to offer a historian's judgment on the issues at hand. 2

The Problem

of

Method

While an argument in abstract terms can yield at best only imprecise insights, Kraeling and Goodenough disagree so diametrically on the basic issue of how to interpret the art that at the outset one may usefully articulate their differences. Kraeling argues that the biblical references of the Dura paintings are so obvious that one may begin by reading the Bible, and proceed by reading the paintings in the light of the Bible and its Midrashic interpretation in the Talmudic period. He says (p. 3 5 1 ) : Any community decorating its House of Assembly with material so chosen and so orientated cannot be said to have regarded itself ... remote from religious life and observance of the Judaism that we know from the Bible and the Mishnah.... It would appear [p. 352] that there is a considerable number of instances in which Targum and Midrash have influenced the pictures. Kraeling provides numerous examples of such influence. He qualifies his argument, however, by saying that the use of Midrashic and Tar­ gumic material is "illustrative rather than definitive." While he makes reference, from time to time, to comparative materials, Kraeling does 2

Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, Vols. I X , X , X I : Symbolism in the Dura Synagogue (New York, 1 9 6 3 ) .

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not in the main feel it necessary to examine the broad iconographic traditions operating in Dura in general, and most manifestly in the synagogue art, for he holds that whatever conventions of pagan art may appear, the meaning of the synagogue art is wholly separated from such conventions and can best, probably only, be understood within the context of the Judaism known to us from literary sources. Goodenough's argument, repeated in the newest volumes from the earlier ones, is that literary traditions would not have led us to expect any such art as this. W e may find statements in Talmudic literature which are relevant to the art, but we must in any case after assembling the material determine what this art means in itself, before we begin to apply to it as proof texts any possible unrelated statements of the Bible or the Talmud. That these artifacts are unrelated to proof texts is a statement which one can no more make at the outset than one can begin with the assumption of most of my predecessors that if the symbols had meaning for Jews, that meaning must be found by correlating them with Talmudic and biblical phrases [IV, 10]. Goodenough argues, therefore, that Talmudic literature would not lead us to expect the appearance of this kind of art at all. W e should search in vain in its pages for the origin of creative exploitation of the kinds of pagan imagery widespread in Jewish synagogues and sarcophagi and, now, additionally, in the Dura synagogue. The rabbis of the Talmud may have tolerated certain limited exemplars of pagan art; but they would not have initiated its use, and in their literature, one may, therefore, hardly find the interpretive principles which illumined the mind of those Jews who did use it. On the other hand, archaeological remains from other places, if carefully examined, would most certainly have led us to less astonishment than exhibited when Dura was uncovered, and than has continually been displayed wherever and whenever archaeologists unfamiliar with the great corpus of Jewish use of pagan conventions have uncovered pagan art in Jewish settings. Goodenough therefore denies at the outset that literary explanations may be attached to this, or any other Jewish art in antiquity, unless those explanations take into account what the particular symbols meant within the context of other cultures from which they were obviously borrowed. Goodenough's argument against the use of "proof texts" is sup­ ported by Morton Smith in "The Image of God." Smith points out, 3

3

"The Image of God: Notes on the Hellenization of Judaism, with Especial

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Discussions of the hellenization of ancient Judaism often take for granted that, any material for which precedent can be found in the Old Testament is therefore independent of Hellenistic influence. This sup­ position neglects the fact that rabbinic literature is almost entirely homiletic and legal. Preachers and lawyers must find proof-texts in certain books which are authoritative for their purposes. But they do not necessarily get their ideas from those books to which they must go for their proof-texts.... Of course, proof-texts sometimes do happen to contain the ideas attributed to them. But even when they do, the taking up and development of ideas by later writers may be evidence of outside influence.... In such instances as these, the preacher who comes to the Bible looking for a proof-text happens to find a good one, one which really says what he wants said. But this does not alter the fact that he finds it because he looks for it, and he looks for it because of the practices or ideas which have become important in the world around him. Therefore when we discuss the influences at work on a religion we must look first of all to the world around it, its immediate environment [pp. 473, 474, 481]. Thus, even though the art of the Dura synagogue may at the first glance seem to be related to Midrashic ideas, even found in a few cases to reflect Midrashic accounts of biblical events, nonetheless one is still not freed from the obligation to consider what that art meant to a contemporary Jew, pagan, or Christian who was familiar with other art of the age. Since both the architectural and and the artistic con­ ventions of the Dura synagogue are demonstrably those of the place and age, and not in any way borrowed from pre-existent "rabbinic" artistic conventions—because there weren't any!—one must give serious thought to the meaning and value, or the content, of those conven­ tions elsewhere and assess, so far as one can, how nearly that value and meaning were preserved in the Jewish setting. Both Kraeling and Goodenough agree that there was a plan to the art of the synagogue, and that biblical scenes are portrayed not only as mere ornament or decoration but as a means of conveying important religious ideas, so that the walls of the sanctuary might, in truth, yield sermons. Before considering the content of those "sermons," we may usefully turn to specific points of disagreement in interpretation so that we may, in the whole, recognize the more concrete role of the interpretation of the parts. Reference to Goodenough's Work on Jewish Symbols," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, X L , No. 2 ( 1 9 5 8 ) , pp. 473-512.

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Specific Points of

Difference

The methodological difference between Goodenough and Kraeling on how to interpret the art may be best illustrated by considering specific cases. Here we shall consider three examples. What will be­ come clear, it seems to me, is that Goodenough demands explanation for a far greater number and variety of details; he sees more in the art and asks more about it. Kraeling uses, in the main, a single body of literature, while Goodenough ranges far and wide in his search for ideas and artistic conventions relevant to Dura synagogue art. Whether we are better off on that account or not may only be decided on the basis of the results. My purpose here is to summarize a very small part of their respective treatments. The reader will, if his interest is aroused, need to turn to the works of the two scholars and, most of all, to the art itself. Orpheus/David Across the middle of the reredos on the west wall of the synagogue is painted a figure of Orpheus playing to the animals. Both Goodenough and Kraeling call the figure "David," although the kinds of animals surrounding him are in dispute. Goodenough ( I X , 93-94) turns, therefore, to the figure of Orpheus, and asks what it was about the pagan Orpheus which prompted Jews (and Christians) to borrow the figure. The figure of Orpheus repre­ sented the power of divine song to quiet human savagery. Kraeling (224-25) agrees; There can be no doubt that Orpheus has served the artist in part at least as the model of the representation.... The question whether an allusion to Orpheus charming the beasts was intended ... can be answered properly only in the light of the purpose the artist had in mind introducing the figure of the musician.... The lyre-player must be David, the classic historical representative of the "kings ... in the house of Judah." ... In view of the uncertainties about many of the details of the area, the only inference that can safely be drawn from the upper part of the Lower Center Panel about the influence of the Orpheus tradition upon the Synagogue paintings is that the artist fell back upon the best-known and most appropriate of the many cliches for musicians as a happy device for portraying David in the role assigned to him by II Sam. 2 2 . Goodenough goes on, however, to raise questions Kraeling does not raise ( I X , 9 4 ) :

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Primarily why did the artist want to put David as the tamer just here? We have seen that the original vine or tree growing from a vase was changed to make more explicit the symbolic and ritualistic implica­ tions of the vase.... Granted that Orpheus was thought to be David, what did David mean to the congregation that with his animals he could have been put thus in the center of the tree? To answer this question, Goodenough turns, as he does frequently in Volumes I X - X , to the writings of Hellenistic Judaism, and to Philo in particular. He finds that Philo regarded David as a thespios man, which means "one who is superhuman to the point of being divine." Goodenough, however, holds that the figure of the mystic musician was primary and his identification with David secondary. He points out that the design as a whole denotes nothing historically or biblically objective. David alone could have been designated very clearly, as other figures such as Aaron are, by writing his name by the drawing. This was not done, and it is reasonable to suggest that David the singer in this setting and according to these conventions may be illuminated by references from other besides Jewish literature. Goodenough cites Hellenistic Jewish writings in which Orpheus was regarded as having drawn his mystery entirely from Moses and shows that Orphic material was prized among Jews. He alludes also to the merkavah mysticism (which, we shall see, was probably a characteristic of Babylonian Ju­ daism at this period) and holds that the reredos painting represents ( I X , 1 0 3 ) an adumbration of the merkavah vision: David, who as Orpheus, plays his music and tames birds and beasts in the great tree-vine that leads up to the Throne of the Three.... It must be obvious to the reader that he cannot decide, on the basis of this brief summary, "who is right." But it must be equally obvious that two wholly different perspectives have come to bear on the figure of David-Orpheus, one unwilling to pursue the meaning, if any, behind the use of the conventions of pagan art, and the other eager to do so. Moses, Moses

Aphrodite,

and the Nymphs/Pharaoh

and the Infancy

of

In register C of the west wall, numbered by Kraeling W C 4 , is a painting of the discovery of the infant Moses. Goodenough's and Kraeling's descriptive titles of the panel are given above. The female figures in this panel are identified by Kraeling (p. 1 7 3 ) with the two midwives of the Exodus narrative, and the third woman

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represents Jochebed, the mother of Moses (p. 1 7 4 ) depositing her infant son in the ark. I f correct it implies that the artist has acted quite drastically and fearlessly in placing in two planes two consecutive scenes whose actions clash so violently with each other; the one showing the Pharaoh issuing the orders for the destruction of the Hebrew infants, the other showing Moses' mother saving her child from Pharaoh's anger ... the resultant composition is not without an element of irony in exhibiting futility of the king's efforts. The upper portion of the scene portrays the princess' attendants, three in number. They carry the princess' toilet accessories, a small gold jug, a bowl, and a paneled ivory casket. In the foreground the scene shows the "daughter of Pharaoh" finding the child Moses in the ark. She stands up to her thighs in the water. Princess and child are both nude. Of course, Kraeling points out (p. 177) that it was the handmaid of Pharaoh's daughter who fetched the child, but, he says, It can be explained ... by assuming that the artist depended upon the Targumic version for his inspiration, for in the Targum Onkelos the statement "she sent her handmaid to fetch it" it rendered "she stretched out her arm and seized it." In the panel, however, the daughter of Pharaoh, actually standing in the water, does not appear to have "stretched out her arm"; she is actually holding the baby while standing in the water, the baby being "cradled" in her outstretched arm. The intent of the Targum would seem to me to be that the woman, kneeling on the bank, stretched out her arm to receive the child so as not to get into the water; in any case, the Targum does not imply that she got into the water. Here, one is struck first by the fact that she is standing in the water and that her position there is not accounted for by desire to fetch the child, whom she holds. Goodenough's discussion ( I , 198-226) of the discovery of Moses begins with the assertion that the "princess" of Kraeling is in fact a divine figure, and that the representations of the goddess Anahita with her female attendants are so similar that one may clearly identify the woman who finds and extracts the baby with that divinity. This assertion is in no way tendentious; Goodenough cites numerous instan­ ces of paintings of Anahita in which important details of the painting before us are found. Anahita was, Goodenough adds, no mere iconographic cliche, but one of the most popular deities of the period in Iran. She was associated by the Greeks with the Great Mother and

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Aphrodite; further, Goodenough points out, the female in the Nile is very much the Aphrodite type: Not only in general Sasanian tradition ... but in a house practically adjacent to the synagogue we have a figure of Aphrodite-Anahita who in general outline, hair, and the position of her hands startlingly resembles the figure who takes the baby from the ark. The baby himself "just as startlingly resembles the Eros beside Aphro­ dite in the position of his hands." Goodenough argues, therefore, that a contemporary observer could not have missed the resemblance. The three maids, moreover, are in fact nymphs, and "present so striking an invasion of a pagan element into the biblical scene that we must stop to go thoroughly into the matter to demonstrate that these actually are the nymphs, and to ascertain what their presence would have implied for the interpretation of the biblibal incident." As always, Goodenough then amasses a majestic array of compara­ tive material and shows that the nymphs who wash a baby, in both pagan and Christian usage, "indicate that the baby was a god in the pagan sense." On this basis, Goodenough concludes: the master designer at Dura introduced the Nymphs deliberately and skilfully into the scene of the infant Moses and did so in order to intensify the notion that Anahita-Aphrodite was drawing from the water a Wunderkind with royal nature at least "hedged" with divinity. Goodenough says, in this instance as in numerous others, that what we have before us is an example of the adoption of Greek and Iranian conventions "only to show that Judaism, when properly understood, presents all religious values, even the pagan values, better than the pagans themselves." Goodenough then expounds the view of Moses held by Hellenistic Judaism, as exemplified by Philo in particular and shows that, in Philo, Moses emerges as a supreme, royal character and, at birth, was a divine child: The evidence seems to lead to the following conclusion: In Hellenized Jewish tradition the great biblical heroes began as Wunderkinder, extraordinary in their conception, effulgence, beauty, and precocity. These perquisites of the Wunderkinder were given them by the Nymphs or Graces, the flowing Grace of God.... In Hellenistic tradition a Wunderkind becomes normally a god or king or both, and the symbolic tradition for representing this was by having him washed by the spirit-filled water of the Nymphs. The tradition went over into the Hellenized Jewish art, where it was used for both Moses and David, and later adopted by Christians for the births of Mary and Christ. The same tradition explicitly appears in the Dura painting of the infancy of

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Moses, though adopted more skillfully to the biblical narrative than in the Octateuchs. Thus the painting portrays a Hellenized Jewish idea, that Moses was a Wunderkind, of royal nature, and as such he could go to Sinai, get the Law, and give it to the people. "Nothing in pictorial design could have proclaimed his character more specifically than to have him drawn from water by Aphrodite and presented by her to the nymphs, and finally, held up for adoration in his own right." There can be no more concrete example of the contrast between Goodenough's and Kraeling's approaches. I f Kraeling had considered and refuted the kinds of evidences Goodenough regards as relevant, one might be in a clearer position to evaluate his explanation. But where Goodenough provides an abundance of comparative material, both artistic and literary, on the basis of which to evaluate his inter­ pretations, Kraeling provides only a single verse of the Targum, and that, to my way of reading it, by no means conclusive. One may continually say that the use of pagan art is wholly conventional, just as the critics of Goodenough's earlier interpretations repeat that the symbols from graves and synagogues were "mere ornament" and imply nothing more than a desire to decorate (none surely can say this of Dura, and no one has, for the meaningful character of Dura syna­ gogue art is so self-evident as to obviate the need to argue i t ) . But having asserted that pagan art has lost its value and become, in a Jewish setting, wholly conventional, is one better off? Does one therefore understand why pagan conventions were useful for decora­ tion? Is the matter to be reduced to a mere accident of taste? I f so, one would have to take far less seriously than Kraeling does the phenomena of Dura synagogue art. The Staff of Moses/Club

of

Heracles

When Moses led Israel out of Egypt, he carried, as everyone knows, a staff. In Dura, however, the staff is portrayed as no shep­ herd's staff ever was; it is a club. This is on the west wall, Kraeling's listing as Panel W A 3 . That this is Moses is indicated by a titulus between the legs of the first figure of Moses, "Moses when he went out from Egypt and cleft the sea." The figure of Moses standing ready to strike the sea Goodenough ( X , 119-25) associates with Heracles, and he examines the value of the figure of Heracles in contemporary religion and provides an inter-

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pretation of what that figure, identified with Moses, would have meant to Dura Jewry. The identification of Moses' "rod" with the club of Heracles is established by Goodenough first, by pointing out that it is not a wand, as it is portrayed elsewhere, but a club, and second, by showing that only two characters, Theseus and Heracles, ever carry a club: There can be do doubt ... that this identification of Moses* rod with the club of Theseus and Heracles was intentional, and so strange an identification seems to indicate that Moses was the Jewish TheseusHeracles.... The knobby club especially marked these heroes, and since they alone of all mythological figures carry or use it, the artist could have put it into Moses' hands only because of its immediate symbolic reference to their special characters and to his. Actually, the "club" appears in other Jewish remains. Heracles, for his part, was very popular in the East, being worshiped widely and associated with numerous other hero-gods. Moses, Goodenough holds, was the Ares-Heracles of Judaism, and his function and nature "were properly characterized by showing him with the club in this setting." Further, Philo's interpretation of the migration, which har­ monizes with the painting, is as a "renunciation of the flesh and pleasure ... the agon with their own lower natures. ... It is interesting to see that Philo knew also the appropriateness of Heracles to symbolize this struggle." I am unable to find that Kraeling says more about the rod/club than (p. 8 1 ) that Moses carries a "long, knobby staff." The second and third cases which we have considered suggest to Goodenough that Moses was more than a merely human figure to the Jews of Dura-Europos. I f one begins with the widespread assump­ tion that "Jewish artists ... reveal themselves as immune to all intru­ sions of Hellenistic god-man ideas, although the Jews were willing to thank the kings as protectors in a charismatic sense," then one must reject out of hand the kind of conclusions to which Goodenough comes. However, it seems to me that this statement is based not on a close, detailed, and careful reading of the Jewish artifacts, but on a philosophical, and anachronistic view of what "normative" and mono­ lithic Judaism seemed to its examiners in much later ages to have been. If the Jews represented some of their heroes in garb normally reserved, conventionally, to pagan gods when in pagan settings, one must at 4

4

F . Taeger, Charisma (Stuttgart, 1 9 5 3 ) , I, 304.

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least be open to the possibility that the Jewish heroes were believed, by the Jews, to have divine qualities. No one has argued, least of all Goodenough, that the Jews were pagans in a Jewish idiom. But it seems reasonable to accept the possibility that the Jews learned some­ thing from pagans and that, when they borrowed the artistic and religious conventions of their neighbors, the value, though obviously not the verbal explanation, these conventions bore for the pagan con­ tinued to retain meaning for Jews. It is true in the case of Moses that in talmudic literature Moses is belittled. But it is equally true, as Smith showed in "Images of God," that the divine-human idea was most certainly found in Jewish art and in talmudic literature-, for example, that "the saint (the perfect man) is the image of God, and that the cosmos, also perfect, is the image of God, and that the Menorah, the image of God, was also the image of both saint and cosmos" (p. 5 0 8 ) . W e know that in the burial place of some rabbis, Bet Shearim, the figure of a man with a menorah on his head is found, and one can hardly interpret such iconographic evidence rightly if one assumes at the very outset that the divine-human man, or a symbol that the divinity may rest on man, will never be found in Jewish remains "because the Jews were 'immune to all such intrusions of Hellenistic god-man ideas"! I f one is open to the possibility that Moses may appear in a more than human dimension, then Gooden­ ough's interpretations of the birth scene and the club/rod do not greatly contradict other information we have; are based, in fact, upon widespread and well-attested conventions; and from the evidence of the general plausibility of a Jewish man-god figure uncovered by Smith in talmudic literary evidences, appear to be at least as plausible ex­ planations as we are likely to come by. All this, moreover, ignores the facts of Hellenistic Jewish literature, in which, Goodenough shows, Moses does appear as a god-man figure. Judaism at Dura: General Points of

Difference

If we had begun with a statement of Kraeling's and Goodenough's views of Dura Judaism, without a preliminary examination of some specific problems of interpretation, it seems to me wholly likely that Kraeling's view, and not Goodenough's, would have prevailed. Having seen in three specific instances, however, adumbrations of the very solid basis upon which Goodenough bases his general assertions (in fact, the specific analysis of the art far outweighs the generalizations in both Kraeling's and Goodenough's studies), the reader will be more likely to take seriously a radical reinterpretation of the whole.

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Here I shall let the scholars speak for themselves, first, on the general meaning which emerges from the paintings as a whole and, second, on the nature of Judaism at Dura. While both scholars interpret the pictures in detail, each provides a summary of the meaning of the art as a whole. Kraeling's is as follows (pp. 3 5 0 - 5 1 ) : A closer examination of the treatment of Israel's sacred history as presented in the Synagogue painting leads to a number of inferences that will help to appraise the community's religious outlook.... These include the following: a. There is a very real sense in which the paintings testify to an interest in the actual continuity of the historical process to which the sacred record testifies. This is evidenced by the fact that they do not illustrate interest in the Covenant relationship by a combination of scenes chosen from some one segment of sacred history, but provide instead a well-organized progression of scenes from the period of the Patriarchs and Moses and Aaron, from the early days of the monarchy, through the prophetic period, the exile, the post-exile period, to the expected Messianic age as visualized by prophecy.... b. There is a very real sense in which the history portrayed in the paintings involves not only certain individuals, but concretely the nation as a whole, and in which the course of events in time and space are for the individuals and the nation a full and completely satisfactory expression of their religious aspirations and ideals.... c. There is a very real sense in which the piety exhibited in, and inculcated by, the paintings finds a full expression in the literal observance of the Law. This comes to light in the effort to provide the historical documentation for the origin of the religious festivals ... in the attention paid to the cult and its sacra, including the sacrifices: and in the opposition to idolatry. d. Because they have this interest in the historical process, in the people of Israel, and in the literal observance of the Law, the paintings can and do properly include scenes showing how those nations and individuals that oppose God's purposes and His people are set at naught or destroyed.... In other words, the religious problem which the synagogue paintings reflect is not that of the individual's search for participation in true being by the escape of the rational soul from the irrational desires to a higher level of mystical experience, but rather that of faithful participa­ tion in the nation's inherited Covenant responsibilities as a means of meriting the fulfillment of the divine promises and of making explicit in history its divinely determined purpose. Goodenough's interpretation of the whole west wall follows ( X , 137-38):

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The west wall of the synagogue as a whole is indeed coming to express a profoundly consistent Judaism. On the left side a miraculous baby is given by Elijah, but he ties in with the temporal hopes of Israel, exemplified when Persian rulership was humiliated by Esther and Mordecai. Divine intervention brings this about, but here brought only this. Above is the cosmic interpretation of the Temple sacrifice of Aaron, and Moses making the twelve tribes into the zodiac itself. On the right, just as consistently, the immaterial, metaphysical values of Judaism are presented. Moses is the divine baby here, with the three nymphs and Anahita-Aphrodite. Kingship, as shown in the anointing of David by Samuel, is not temporal royalty, but initiation into the hieratic seven. Above these, the gods of local paganism collapse before the Ark of the Covenant, the symbol of metaphysical reality in Judaism, which the three men beside the ark also represented, while that reality is presented in a temple with seven walls and closed inner sanctuary, and with symbols from the Creation myth of Iran. At the top, Moses leads the people out to true spiritual victory. In the four portraits, an incident from the life of Moses is made the culmination of each of these progressions. He goes out as the cosmic leader to the heavenly bodies alongside the cosmic worship of Aaron, the menorah, and the zodiac. He reads the mystic law like the priest of Isis alongside the closed Temple and the all-conquering Ark. He receives the Law from God on Sinai beside a Solomon scene which we cannot reconstruct: but he stands at the Burning Bush, receiving the supreme revelation of God as Being, beside the migrating Israelites, who move ... to a comparable, if not the same, goal. The reader must be struck by the obvious fact that, in the main, both scholars agree on the substance of the paintings, though they disagree on both their interpretation and their implications for the kind of religion characteristic of this particular synagogue. Concerning Dura Judaism, Kraeling argues that the Jews of Dura had fallen back "visibly'' upon the biblical sources of religious life (p. 3 5 1 ) . Kraeling says throughout that the Jews in Dura were, for the most part, good, "normative," rabbinic Jews: If our understanding of the pictures is correct, they reveal on the part of those who commissioned them an intense, well-informed devo­ tion to the established traditions of Judaism, close contact with both the Palestinian and the Babylonian centers of Jewish religious thought, and a very real understanding of the peculiar problems and needs of a community living in a strongly competitive religious environment, and in an exposed political position [p. 335]. Goodenough, in his description of Judaism at Dura ( X , 196-209), holds that these were not participants in the "established traditions of Judaism," and that they did not have close contact with Babylonian

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of Palestinian Judaism (he follows the general view of Babylonian Judaism as "rabbinic," which I shall question below). The walls of the synagogue are not, he argues, representations of biblical scenes, but allegorizations of them (as in the specific instances cited above). The biblical scenes show an acceptance of mystic ideas which the symbolic vocabulary of Jews elsewhere in the Greco-Roman world, studied in the first eight volumes, suggested. He says (p. 2 0 5 ) : While the theme of the synagogue as a whole might be called the celebration of the glory and power of Judaism and its God, and was conceived and planned by men intensely loyal to the Torah, those people who designed it did not understand the Torah as did the rabbis in general. Scraps stand here which also appear in rabbinic haggadah, to be sure.... But in general the artist seems to have chosen biblical scenes not to represent them but, by allegorizing them, to make them say much not remotely implicit in the texts.... On the other hand, the paintings can by no means be spelled out from the pages of Philo's allegories, for especially in glorifying temporal Israel they often depart from him altogether. Kraeling astutely indicated ... that we have no trace of the creation stories, or indeed of any biblical passages before the sacrifice of Isaac, sections of the Bible to which Philo paid almost major attention. This must not blind us, however, to the fact that the artist, like Philo, presumed that the Old Testament text is to be understood not only through its Greek translation, but through its reevaluation in terms of Greek philosophy and religion. Again, unlike Philo in detail but like him in spirit, the artists have interpreted biblical tradition by using Iranian costumes and such scenes as the duel between the white and black horsemen.... The Jews here, while utterly devoted to their traditions and Torah, had to express what this meant to them in a building designed to copy the inner shrine of a pagan temple, filled with images of human beings and Greek and Iranian divinities, and carefully designed to interpret the Torah in a way profoundly mystical. Judaism in Parthian

Babylonia

I have mostly refrained from offering an opinion on either the technical or the interpretive issues at hand. I am not qualified to do so. However, having given considerable attention to the Jews in Parthian Babylonia, I am qualified to describe what we know—which is very little—of their religious life and to suggest, in the light of this, why I believe that this evidence lends greater support to the approach of Goodenough than to that of Kraeling. Both Goodenough and Kraeling accept the conventional view of Babylonian Judaism. It is normally portrayed as a wholly isolated legalistic and law-abiding religion, deeply engaged by its own interests

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and traditional concerns, and wholly divorced from the surrounding culture. Goodenough describes Babylonian Jewry as an island, a cultural ghetto ( I X , 8-10), where the Jews occupied themselves in the study of the law in its most halakhic sense, while the Dura community, "engulfed" by the pagan world, was far more deeply influenced by pagan culture. Kraeling, likewise, views Babylonian Jewry as living in towns predominantly Jewish (p. 325) and generally loyal to the halakhah as it was later recorded. The conventional view is based on a conflation of all information, early or late, into a static and one-dimensional portrait. What we know about the Jews in Babylonia before 226 does not support this view. It contradicts it. The evidence is, to the contrary, that the Jews in Babylonian lived in relatively close contact, both physical and cultural, with their neighbors. Their main center, Nehardea, was not far from the great Hellenistic city, Seleucia on the Tigris; and in any case, Greeks, Babylonians, Pagan Semites, Jews, and Parthians all inhabited the narrow strip of fertile land around the Royal Canal which later historians so generously assigned to the Jews alone. W e know, for example, that in the first century, when the Jewish barony of Anileus and Asineus was established, the local Greeks and Babylonians opposed it and eventually succeeded in gaining Parthian support to destroy it, but that, for a time, the two brothers ruled both Jewish and Hellenistic and Babylonian populations, all in a relatively small area around, but apparently not including, Nehardea itself. (And there were Greeks in Nehardea.) It should be emphasized, therefore, that the Jews were only one minority in the region, and, so far as one may guess, they were not the most numerous. Furthermore, the Greek city of Seleucia contained a Hellenized Jewish population. Not only were Babylonian Jews in the Parthian period not physically isolated from others in the region, but there is evidence that some Jews significantly participated in Parthian political and economic life. For example, in the first century B.C., Zamaris, a Jew from Babylonia who had mastered the Parthian shot, fled to the west and settled in Palestine. According to Josephus* account, Zamaris was a feudal lord in Parthia and fled on account of an unhappy turn in local politics. He was, moreover, not the only Jew to master Parthian military tactics. A century and a half later, we have some evidence that Jews took Parthian names, one, Arta/Arda, being a good Parthian translation of the Hebrew Zadoq, the other Pylybarys, meaning possibly "elephant rider"; they wore Parthian noble garb; and exerted influence with the

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government and were probably, therefore, also familiar with the lang­ uage of the court. Moreover, we know that at least one Tanna from Babylonia, R. Hiyya, visited the Parthian court; and that a Parthian governmental title, P H T Y , meaning satrap, was applied by him, at the very least as a term of endearment (though I think more) to his nephew Rav. W e may, moreover, be fairly certain that good "norma­ tive" Jews, in particular R. Hiyya, participated in the international silk trade, which was closely supervised by the Parthian government and hence must have had commercial dealings with that government. W e know that a Jewish civil authority, the exilarch, was recognized by the Parthian government and exerted de jure authority over Jews in the second century, if not before; and we know that he was given, as an insignia of office, the right to wear the kamara, a belt which signified governmental recognition. Thus the evidence, very briefly summarized here, points to extensive Jewish participation in Parthian affairs. Participation in political, commercial, and possibly military affairs could not have been carried on by people "wholly isolated" from the culture of the government. One should expect to find among them substantial marks of knowledge of surrounding culture. Not the least of the contacts of the Jewish masses with that culture would have been through the coinage, which certainly yielded some informa­ tion on the pagan religion of the Iranian Empire, and on the local Semitic and Hellenistic cults as well. It is too much to conclude that political, commercial, and military contacts had led to the utter assi­ milation of Babylonian Jewry into Parthian culture; and I do not for one instant believe that Babylonian Jewry in the mass had done so. But one ought not to be surprised to find traces of Parthian (and hence Parthian-Hellenistic) influence on Babylonian Jewry. I should expect to see similar influences in Dura, a town held by Parthia until circa 160 A.D. and should be astonished to find no knowledge of Iranian culture half a century later in such a place. It is frequently asserted, moreover, that Babylonian Jewry was dominated at this period by Palestinian Judaism. This cannot be de­ monstrated. The evidence is this. Before the Bar Kokhba war, there were two or three Tannaim in all of Mesopotamia, one Judah b. Bathyra in Nisibis, another, Hananiah, the nephew of R. Joshua in the south, in Nehardea. This same Hananiah, moreover, engaged in an action which, if successful, would have resulted in the freedom of Babylonia Jews from Palestinian domination of the sacred calendar, one of the chief means by which the Palestinian patriarch exerted

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influence in the diaspora. I f "normative" Tannaitic Judaism was other­ wise represented in the east, we have absolutely no record of it. ( W e shall see below evidences of something quite different.) At the time, and as a direct consequence of the Bar Kokhba war, some Palestinian Tannaim fled to Mesopotamia. The students of R. Aqiba settled in the north, in Nisibis, while those of R. Ishmael settled in Huzal, so far as I can tell a town hear Nehardea, in the south. The former returned to Palestine, probably by 145 A.D., but the latter remained in Baby­ lonia and trained students such as R. Ahai, Issi b. Judah, Hiyya and Rav, who later achieved distinction in the Palestinian academies. Thus only in 135 at the very earliest do we have a well-established Tan­ naitic academy across the Euphrates; and before that time there was, so far as we can tell, no means by which Pharisaic-Tannaitic traditions might be transmitted in the east in a systematic, orderly, continuing way. I have contended that the basis of certain sections of the Mekhilta was laid in Huzal between 135 and 150; but this is the only record we have, if that, indeed, is accepted, of production of Tannaitic lite­ rature in Babylonia. I fail utterly, therefore, to see how Babylonian or Mesopotamian Judaism was under Palestinian religious and cultural hegemony. So far as we know, Babylonian Jewry was not dominated by Pharisaic Judaism. In fact, we have some reason to believe that Babylonian Jewry had an indigenous tradition of its own. W e know very, very little about pre-Amoraic Babylonian Judaism. But what we know points to a kind of Judaism deeply affected by Ezekiel and probably also engaged (at least in the sophisticated centers) by the merkavah tradition. These points cannot be overemphasized. The bottom register of the north wall of the Dura synagogue was covered by an Ezekiel cycle. Goodenough has argued, moreover, that elements of merkavah mysticism may be discerned in the reredos and elsewhere (see X , 70-71, 87, 178 [on the Ezekiel cycle] and elsewhere). It seems to me entirely natural that Ezekiel, and the kind of mysticism based upon his prophecies, should have been well represented through Babylonia, where he alle­ gedly prophesied, and where his traditions were, in any case, probably cultivated from the earliest times as those of a local and indigenous prophet. The evidence that Ezekiel studies, including the merkavah aspect of them, were important in the Babylonian academies is, like every other kind of evidence on Babylonian Judaism in Parthian times, very slender. Yet the fact is that most of what we know about the kinds of midrash agadah pursued in these academies concerns the c

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book of Ezekiel, merkavah mysticism, or verses from other books which were related to merkavah mysticism. W e do not, as I said, know very much; but all that we do know relates to this single prophet, except for the evidences in Mekhilta, and the sayings of men such as R. Nathan and the Ishmaelites, who were trained in Palestine as well as in Baby­ lonia. For example, we have one teaching of R. Hammuna the Scribe of Babylonia. A student of his, R. Hanina b. Hama, corrected the reading of R. Judah, the prince, of Ezekiel 7:16, and that particular verse had eschatological significance in the midrashic tradition. By itself this proves nothing. But we also know that when Levi b. Sisi preached in Babylonia, he preached on Ezekiel. When R. Hiyya, a Babylonian, was in Palestine, he pursued esoteric lore based on Ezekiel I, the merkavah vision. A saying of Levi relates, also, to the Shiur Qoma tradition (to which Goodenough makes reference, if only tenta­ tively). Furthermore, Scholem cites a saying of the above-mentioned R. Hananiah, the nephew of R. Joshua, which indicates familiarity with Jewish mystical tradition. Finally, it is well known that the firstcentury Tanna, Hillel, a Babylonian, transmitted a mystical tradition in his academy. (His disciple, R. Yohanan ben Zakkai, was a leading exponent of the merkavah tradition in the decades before and after the destruction of Jerusalem.) When Rav came to Babylonia at the beginning of the third century, he brought further elements of Jewish mystical tradition. When the father of Samuel and Levi experienced the Shekhinah in the synagogue in Nehardea, that experience was described in terms used by Ezekiel. This much is therefore beyond question: In the light of the findings of Scholem and others, on the existence of a mystical tradition as evidenced by Hillel the Babylonian, and in the early second century by Hananiah the nephew of R. Joshua (and possibly Yose of Huzal, but this involves variant readings in the Mishnah), and in the light of the later second- and early third-century evidence alluded to above, there can be no doubt that the curriculum of Babylonian Jewish academies at the beginning of the third century included some kind of mystical tradition, and that speculation, specific­ ally, on Ezekiel's vision was carried on. With this in mind, I find it very difficult to question the import­ ance ascribed by Goodenough to mysticism in Dura. I do not argue that his interpretations are, in detail, correct, for I am not competent to make a judgment on that question. But I do think that the import5

5

See G. Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, Mevkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic ( N . Y . , I 9 6 0 ) , p. 56.

Tradition

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ance of Ezekiel in Dura, and the details, if correctly discerned, of various kinds of traditional mystical speculation, which Goodenough finds on the walls of Dura synagogue, are both wholly congruent to what we know of Babylonian Judaism before circa 220 A.D. One should not be surprised to find some kind of syncretistic, mystical tradition in Jewish Dura. Considering the situation of the Jews there, and considering what we know of the religious culture of the Jews in Babylonia, who probably exerted some influence there, and who may have, in the beginning, provided the first Jewish settlers in Dura, one should have expected to find something approximating the Ju­ daism discerned by Goodenough, specifically a kind of Judaism in which Ezekiel plays a very important role and in which the mystical speculations associated in part with his writings are represented, just as they were in the academies to the south. Goodenough and Namenyi ( I X , 9 ) hold that "Dura would have represented Babylonian Judaism before the halakhic reform.'' I cannot doubt that Dura largely as interpreted by Goodenough would be at least a fair approximation of Babylonian Judaism before the great expansion of Pharisaic-Tannaitic-Amoraic Judaism in the period after Rav's coming. What, exactly, happened after Rav's coming I cannot say. But since Rav was a mystic, I am fairly certain that it did not involve the suppression of earlier mystical traditions but, more likely, their refinement and cultivation. Rav brought with him from Pale­ stine (assuming that his mystical sayings were not acquired before his migration to R. Judah's court) a considerable body of mysticism. Even if Rav had wanted to suppress mysticism, moreover, whether he could have done so in Dura-Europos before the time of the paintings in the middle of the fifth decade may be questioned. He allegedly came circa 226. When he came, he found observance of the law abysmal and founded an academy to stand alongside of Samuel's as an exemplar of how the law should be observed, and to send forth teachers of the law to effect a reform throughout Babylonian and (one assumes) Mesopotamian Jewry. It is difficult to believe that in two decades his influence would have reached Dura, or that if it had, it would have worked to destroy mysticism there! It is difficult, there­ fore, to follow Kraeling in believing that a wholly ethically centered, and wholly "biblically and historically" centered Judaism prevailed in Dura. One must, in any event, wonder how much influence the antimystical Pharisaic-Tannaitic-Amoraic attitude actually had in Dura. So

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far as we know, that community would have been influenced by it, if at all, only through the sermons of itinerant apostles of the patriarch­ ate. Yet, as we noted above, one of the few sermons we know about was Levi ben Sisi's, and this concerned mysticism. I f the Palestinian antimystical tradition was to influence Dura Judaism, that influence could only have been exerted after circa 160 A.D., when the city fell into Roman hands. Before that time, Dura was under Parthian rule. The Parthians did not allow Roman government officials, such as the Palestinian patriarch, to govern their minority groups. They were, on the contrary, careful to establish their own minority representatives where needed, as in the case of the exilarchate. One is reduced, there­ fore, to the necessity of arguing that between 160 and 240, the ante­ cedent Judaism of Mesopotamia was obliterated at Dura and that in its place a one-dimensional, opaque religion was substituted. I should not be convinced by such an argument. How then may we understand the great redecoration of the Dura synagogue, which took place circa A.D. 245? In my opinion, one must see it in the context of the state of religions generally in early Sasanid Iran. The redecoration of the synagogue represents, according to both Kraeling and Goodenough, an act of tremendous religious creativity as the response o f an extraordinary mind to the Jewish tradi­ tion, whether (Kraeling) to the rabbinic tradition alone or (Gooden­ ough) to the tradition as modulated by current ideas and attitudes. No era in the history of religions was more diverse or creative than the early middle third century, and no place ever exhibited greater variety or vitality than Mesopotamia. When we consider the mael­ strom of religious activity in this brief period, we may see extraordinary signs of creativity and vitality. In the small region, a parallelogram of no more than 200 miles in length and 50 in breadth, we find the following: first, and most important, the resurgence of a conquering, proselytizing Mazdeism, propagated by the state under Ardashir, and established ( i f in a tolerant manner) as the state religion under Shahpuhr with its exponent, Kartir; second, the development of an Iranian gnostic syncretism by the prophet Mani, who, at the time of the redecoration of the Dura synagogue, proclaimed a new religion and in the next decades attracted a wide following in Iran and in the Roman Empire as well; third, the advance of Christianity (Mani's father was probably a Christian, and Jesus played a part in his theol­ ogy) into the Mesopotamian valley from Edessa, where, by 2 0 1 , it had become well established; fourth, the great expansion of cults

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within the Iranian idiom, in particular Mithraism, in both Iran and the Roman Empire, to the point where Mithraism was perhaps the single most popular religion on the Roman side of the frontier; fifth, and by no means least, the beginings of a revolution in Babylonian Ju­ daism, which transformed the earlier indigenous religion into a fair representation of the ideas of the Palestinian Tannaim (this much we may say, but obviously no more), and which must have created a tremendous upheaval in Babylonian Jewry. These events, each of them of lasting importance in the religious life of Mesopotamia, took place within a brief period; one may say that from circa 220 to circa 250 in Babylonia Manichaeism, Rabbinic Judaism and Mazdeism were all taking form. T o such events, Dura's Jewish philosopher might well have responded, as Goodenough says he did, by a series of symbolic comments on the religions of the day and on Judaism's superiority to all of them. Furthermore it seems wholly unlikely that an intense, well-informed devotion to the established traditions of Judaism in Dura, or for that matter anywhere in Babylonia, precluded very thoughtful and serious consideration of the religious ideas of the other ethnic groups in the region and town. I find no evidences of particularly close contact between Babylonian and Palestinian Judaism before 200, except in the academies established about 135 by the emigres in Huzal and perhaps elsewhere. The influence of these academies over the next three-quar­ ters of a century could not have been very widespread if Rav, upon his return, found things as "decadent" as he did. I find no reason, finally, to assume that Dura Jewry had either close contact with Babylonia or none at all, but I do find it significant that the substantial attention given to Ezekiel is approximately similar to that given to him in the southern academies according to the little we know about them; more than this I cannot say.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

GOODENOUGH ON PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION [Review

of Religious Research, VI, 1965, pp. 137-142.]

Underlying Professor Erwin R. Goodenough's monumental study, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period ( N . Y . 1953 et seq., vols. I - X I ) , is a highly developed view of the nature of religious symbolism. Goodenough's view ought to prove interesting to contemporary stu­ dents of the psychology of religion, for it suggests radically new perspectives from which to consider the phenomenology of religious symbolism and its interpretation. Further, Goodenough offers a means of understanding the value of symbols which recur, accompanied by varying verbal explanations, in divergent cultures, and thus he offers a new source of evidence on the centrality and unifying capacity of such symbolism. All too frequently, social scientists do not fully exploit the materials made available by historians, just as historians neglect the methodological insights of the social sciences. Here I present a brief statement of parts of Goodenough's thesis and suggest a few questions for further consideration, in the hope that specialists in the study of psychology of religion may turn to Goodenough's studies for further consideration of his thesis and methodology. The

Thesis

After reviewing the archaeological evidences that Jews in late anti­ quity had appropriated for their supposedly aniconic religion a wide variety of symbols normally associated with pagan cults, in particular salvational symbols bearing the promise of conquest of death through the apothesis of the devotee, Goodenough seeks a means to understand what such symbols meant, if anything, in the mind of the monotheist. He asks, Admitting that the Jews would not have remained Jews if they had used these images in pagan ways and with pagan explanations, do the remains indicate a symbolic adaptation of pagan figures to Judaism or merely an urge to decoration? Goodenough defines a symbol as "an image or design with a signifi­ cance to the one who uses it quite beyond its manifest content," and

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thus holds that a symbol, to be symbolic, must operate in a realm of values, must convey significance quite apart from the verbal expla­ nation associated with it. Recent philosophy, in particular that asso­ ciated with the name of Suzanne Langer, holds that to project feelings into outer objects is the first way of symbolizing and thus of conceiving those feelings, and hence before conceptions comes "pure feeling' (cited by Goodenough I V p. 3 0 - 3 3 ) . And Goodenough holds this view, emphasizing that most important thought is in the world of the "sug­ gestive, connotative meaning of words, objects, sounds, and forms." (IV, 3 8 ) . He regards the function of a religious symbol as conveying not only meaning but also "power or value." Further, he demonstrates that symbols do move from one religion to the next. He holds, how­ ever, that when this happens, these symbols preserve the same value as they acquire a new explanation. Thus when the Jews borrowed religious symbols normally associated with pagan mystery cults, as they did in great abundance between ca. 70 and A.D. 500, they acquired also the religious values implicit in those symbols. Goodenough holds (Vol. IV, p. 3 6 ) : Indeed when the religious symbols borrowed by Jews in those years are put together, it becomes clear that the ensemble is not merely a 'picture book without text', but reflects a lingua franca that had been taken into most of the religions of the day, for the same symbols were used in association with Dionysus, Mithra, Osiris, the Etruscan gods, Sabazios, Attis, and a host of others, as well as by Christianity later. It was a symbolic language, a direct language of values, however, not a language of denotation. Goodenough is far from suggesting that the Jews had 'assimilated' into their pagan surroundings, but rather, holds that pervasive reli­ gious values applied quite parochially by various groups, including some Jews, to the worship of their particular "Most High God" characterized all of religion in late antiquity. These values are quite obviously connotative and not denotative, but they may nonetheless be recovered and articulated by the historian of religion who makes use of the insights of recent students of psychology and symbolism. Goodenough's thesis is as follows (Vol. IV, p. 4 2 ) ; In taking over the symbols, while discarding the myths and explana­ tions of the pagans, Jews and Christians admitted, indeed confirmed a continuity of religious experience which it is most important to be able to identify ... for an understanding of man the phenomenon of a continuity of religious experience or values would have much more significance than that of discontinuous explanations.

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Goodenough argues that the symbols under study were more than merely spacefilled, though many more traditional students of Jewish art have held that the pagan symbols were used as "mere ornament.'' Goodenough argues that the symbols bore tremendous meaning and vigor in surrounding cultures, and as living symbols could not have been employed by Jews without some awareness that they were, in other settings, something more than mere ornament. Second, he holds that the vocabulary of symbols in Jewish settings is extremely limited; on all artifacts not more than a score of designs appear at all, and thus they appear to have been carefully selected by those Jews who did use them. Thirdly, the symbols were frequently poorly drawn, and were not the work of an ornamental artist at all, which suggests that some­ thing more than a desire to fill up space is at work (in particular in the sarcophagi where the symbols were frequently inaccessible, or barely so). Fourth, Jewish and pagan symbols are mixed on the same graves, so that if the menorah is accepted by the modern interpreter as 'having value' then the peacock, or 'wreath of Victory' ought also to have 'had value'. Finally, the symbols must relate to a communal conviction for they are found not merely on amulets and cameos, but in synagogues where all might see them. Goodenough works very systematically through the limited range of symbols, in each instance defining the form, indicating where and how often it occurs in the archaeological sites, and so he shows that it was commonplace and not unusual. He then finds out the meaning that each symbol had universally, indicating its specific denotative value in the respective cultures which used it, as well as its broader connotative value emerging in all cultures. Such symbols evoke in man, not merely among specific groups of men, a broader, psycholo­ gically oriented meaning. This is the final step, and it has proven dif­ ficult for many of Goodenough's fellow scholars to take. Indeed, the reaction to his writings, frequently enough stronger than merely in­ tellectual factors would have normally indicated, proves that some scholars in the field of history of religions are simply unwilling to consider the sexual aspect of evocative religious symbolism as psy­ chologists have expounded it. Others were not prepared to entertain the idea that mankind may exhibit a psychological unity. The former group found his interpretations scandalous, and the latter simply could not understand them. Goodenough could never have convinced his opposition that he is 'right,' nor they him that he is 'wrong.' Interpretation of symbolism

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is simply not at a sufficiently sophisticated stage so that one can 'prove' the rightness or wrongness of an interpretation. Further, his statement on the nature of religious psychology appeals to a specific religious mind, that prepared to participate in, or at least to acknow­ ledge, the unity of the human spirit with the World Soul (there are other ways of alluding to the same quality of spirit), while the more earthbound have insisted that it is all beyond proof, if not irrelevant to begin with. Goodenough's psychology of religion rests upon the recognition of "a profound urge to life, to the realization, expansion, and perpetua­ tion of life" ( I V , 49f.)> and holds that man attempts to escape the inevitability of personal annihilation through death by achieving a union with the enduring life-force, most frequently represented by sexually-oriented symbols: y

This psychology of religion ... centers upon the phenomenon of a great life urge, a drive to self-fulfillment which may express itself in a desire for mystic union with the Mother-Father or for security through obedience to the Father. (IV, 54). The basic value of the religious symbolism in both pagan and JewishHellenistic antiquity was sexual, and, Goodenough holds, the funda­ mental images of mysticism were entirely erotic. The alternate way in religion, that of the way of obedience (in the case of Judaism) to the will of the Father expressed in revelation and to the command­ ments, alleviates the sense of guilt but it still "accentuates the duality of Father and devotee. It is in religions centering not in obedience [as the central religious category] but in the birth and death and resur­ rection of the god or his son that mystical assimilation of the devotee with the Father, or Father-Mother, is the objective" (Volume IV, p. 5 9 ) . Goodenough notes that the formal state religions of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem had an entirely non-psychological basis, and therefore had little if any use for the symbols he considers. Even symbols asso­ ciated, for example, with the Temple cult were profoundly trans­ formed in the settings he describes, and acquired wholly new meanings or values. Since he demonstrates, in volumes I-III, that the Jews began to make use of the symbols formerly associated with paganism only after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in A.D. 70, this is particularly convincing. The Temple's destruction greatly intensified Jewish concentration on religious inwardness and personal salvation. The question of how to find salvation from an age of suffering took

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on new immediacy. One genuinely useful way of contemplating that question lay in the apocalyptic-eschatological tradition of mysticism. Salvational values, implying immediate prospect of personal redemp­ tion, or union with the Godhead were increasingly important for some Jews. The symbols were a means of expressing hope for a fully realized mystical experience, in which the communicant would be able to over­ come the barrier between himself and the divinity and thus to emerge from the dilemma posed by the disaster of the Temple both to the Godhead and to the private person. In the catastrophes of 70 and A.D. 132-135 was born a new concern for personal salvation. Goodenough holds that the symbols increasingly employed during and after these years were of use "only in religions that engendered deep emotion, ecstasy, religions directly and consciously centered in the renewing of life and the granting of immortality, in the giving to the devotee of a portion of the divine spirit or life substance" (II, 5 9 ) . Many Jews were particularly susceptible to such symbolism, as the corporate cult lost its power to assure them a measure of spiritual security, and they were thrown in upon their own resources. Goodenough thus concludes: At the end we shall see that these symbols appear to indicate a type of Judaism in which, as in Philonic Judaism, the basic elements of 'mystery' were superimposed upon Jewish legalism. The Judaism of the rabbis has always offered essentially a path through this present life, the Father's code of instructions as to how we may please him while we are alive. To this the symbols seem to say was now added from the mystery religions, or from Gnosticism, the burning desire to leave this life altogether, to renounce the flesh and go up into the richness of divine existence, to appropriate God's life to oneself. These ideas have as little place in normative, rabbinic Judaism as do the pictures and symbols and gods that Jews borrowed to suggest them. That such ideas were borrowed by Jews was no surprise to me after years of studying Philo.... What is perplexing is the problem of how Jews fitted such conceptions into, or harmonized them with, the teachings of the Bible (IV 60-62). In his volumes ( I X - X I ) on the Dura synagogue, Goodenough treats this question at great length. Questions for Further

Consideration

One wonders, first of all, whether we may have here too onesidedly a psychological interpretation of religion, particularly for this period. For all the personally-regenerative values of the mystery cults,

214

ART

they invariably came to constitute religious communities of one kind or another. Indeed the most common form of religion in this period was either the commune, or, more commonly, the cultic community in the anomic city. One need only consider the early history of Chris­ tianity to realize that however personally-oriented the faith, the com­ municants of the mystery forthwith formed a religious community. Therefore one should inquire into the personal values which the social experience of religion may make available. What social values, if any, did these same pagan symbols make available? How were these values, apparently perceptible among large communities, modulated by the group experience of them? How did the experience of religion within the group differ from the private response of the individual? Even though a symbol was mainly relevant to the private person, it seems reasonable to suppose that it acquired additional value in the context of the community, as an expression of the group consciousness. I do not think it begs the question to ask of psychology of religion questions about the religious consequences of socially-oriented spiritual exper­ ience, for in the end what is at issue is not psychology, but how religion may best be understood. Few, and not among them Goodenough, maintain a position of psychological reductionism, and few hold that religion is quite adequately understood within the dimen­ sions of the solipsistic psychological experience of a private person. If so, then one must consider further the sociological implications of religious psychology. One wonders, concomitantly, what the mystics of this age conceived to be the pattern of history as a source for the revelation of God's will. Was the religion of the mystics entirely divorced from history, and directed away from an eschaton or a messianic time, and uniquely toward the immediate, personal redemption of the private person? Was there no response in mystic circles to historical realities? Goodenough shows, in his studies of the Dura synagogue's symbolism, very substantial mystic concern with historical realities, and one should want to know more about the relationships between the mystic symbols and the events of the hour, so far as they can be known. Most important, one asks how the Talmudic Jews, who were con­ cerned with the social, ethical, and legal tradition, met the same existential issues, posed by death to life and solved by mysticism. It would be interesting to examine the contrast between the psychology of the mystic Jews and that of the Talmudic ones. The rabbinic Jews were also held in the thrall of death, and faced with personal extinction

GOODENOUGH ON PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION

215

if not somehow assisted by their faith to overcome it. Goodenough emphasizes that rabbinic Judaism offered a path 'through the present life', and this seems to most observers to be true. But that path, like the mystic way, led also either to death or to a triumph over death. Is a psychologically valid explanation available for how the nonmystic Jew prevailed over the grave? The superficial parallels, for example, between the apostle Paul's discussion of bodily resurrection of the dead and that of Rabbi Meir and other Tannaim ought to sug­ gest an area awaiting the same kind of psychological study given to the meaning of the symbols. W e know that one of the recurring themes of rabbinic thought was the life of the world to come, by which was meant not only the messianic era, but also the world to be achieved by each individual after death. The images of the Garden of Eden, the 'heavenly academy' and the personally redemptive potentialities of the study of the Torah itself, upon which the rabbis laid such great emphasis, are surely as commonplace in literary sources as those of similar value in utterly different plastic form! One may want therefore to give further thought to the psychological commonalities that unite mystic and rabbinic Judaism, for I find it difficult to see how they differ on this central issue except in the actual utilization of symbols, whether graphic or verbal, to express a common value. Further, one wonders whether a similar contrast between the 'way of the Father' and the mystic way may be discovered in other cultures and societies, in particular among groups which were in the end as close to one another in daily affairs as the mystics and the rabbinic Jews seem to have been. These questions for further consideration are offered to indicate how fruitful and provocative Goodenough's studies are for the student of the history of religions in late antiquity. It seems to me that students of psychology of religion may likewise find that considerable atten­ tion to Goodenough's Jewish Symbols should yield illumination for the modern age, as it does for that gone by.

I N D E X T O BIBLICAL AND TALMUDIC R E F E R E N C E S * BIBLE Acts 5:34 23:9

43 67

Amos 4:13 5:2

134 106

34:27 34:37

77 77

Ezekiel 7:16 16:26

183, 205 184

II Ezra Baruch 2:6 3:10-12 4:17-18 4:23 4:25 4:28-30

37 37 38 38 38 38

3:14 4:10-11 4:10-26 5:4-5 6:55-56 8:26

36 37 37 37 37 37

Hosea II Baruch 10:6-7 10:9-12 11:6-7

6:6 38 38 38

I Corinthians 3:16-17

42

47

Isaiah 2:2 26:20 45:7 50:1 60:8

134 134 134 107 183

Deuteronomy Jeremiah 5:12-15 15:1-3 24:1

109 114 107

Ephesians 2:18ff

42

184 109 109 134 134 134 183-84 109 109

107 134

9:16

106

18:18

120

John 4:50 21:24-25

Exodus 1:24 16:22-30 20:8 20:34 21:29 22:27 24:10 31:12-17 34:21

3:8 5:25

123 127

Leviticus 11:33 20:11 23:24

8, 13 109 54

Luke 1:1-4

127

* The indexes were prepared by Mr. Arthur Woodman, Canaan, New Hampshire.

INDEX TO BIBLICAL AND TALMUDIC REFERENCES

4:1-12 5:1-6 5:30 11:27-28 ll:43ff 13:10-17

124 116 67 116 121 115

Mark 2:16 3:1-6 6:1-6 7:1 7:4 7:5 7:29 8:31 8:34-37 9:2-8 9:34-40 10:2-10 10:33 11:1-10 11:18 12:18-27 14:1 14:43 1453 151 15:31 27

67 115 118 67 82 67 123 67 121 124 116 116, 130 67 124 67 115 67 67 67 67 67 67

17:24-27 18:15-17 20:18 21:15 23:2 23:13ff 27 27:41

217 123 122 67 67 67 121 67 67

Numbers 6:2 6:26 19:Hff 19:11-12 19:11-22 19:14-16

134 134 14, 19, 27, 31 13 27 27

Proverbs 4:8 6:23 8:21 10:1 23:25

134 134 106 106 134

Psalms 25:14 112:7 119:126

84 119 134

I Samuel Matthew 2:4 4:1-11 5:20 6:1-34 7:3-4 8:13 12:38 13ff 15:1 15:2 16:21 17:24-27

67 124-25 67 121 121 123 67 67 67 82 67 123

7:2-8:22 10:17-27

108 108

II Samuel l:17ff 22

106 192

Song 8:7

103

Zechariah 9

124

MISHNAH Berakhot

Avot 1:1-18 1:18 2:1

106, 111, 114, 120, 122 133, 135 64

1:1 1:1 1:2

97 97 94, 97

218 1:3 1:4 1:5 3:1 3:2 3:4 3:5 3:6 5:1 5:2 5:3-5 5:5 6:1 6:6 7:1 7:2 7:3 8:1-5 8:6 8:7

INDEX TO BIBLICAL AND TALMUDIC REFERENCES 94 94 94 94 94 94 94 94 94 95 95 103 95 95 95 95 95 96-97 95 97

Ketuvot 13:1 13:2 13:3-5

Niddah 4:2

1:1 1:1-3 1:5 5:1-4 5:5-7 6:1 6:1-2 6:3ff 6:6 7:2 7:3 9:1-14

53

9:16

Demai 5:15 c

c

10:1-7 11:1 11:2-3 13:lff 16:2 18:10 18:2-4

107

Eduyyot 1:3 8:3 8:4 8:7

83 57, 84 128 57, 84

Eruvin 6:2

82

Gittin 4:2-3 9:10

131 116

Hagigah 2:2 2:7

81, 125, 128 82

Kelim 2:1 2:2 8:1 15:1 17:16 18:1

93 57, 93 24-25 16 57 16

82

Ohalot

Besah 1:1

57, 66 57 129

c

20 14, 27 27 24 24 25 24-25 22 22 22 20 24 24 23 16

25 26 14 27 19

Orlah 2:12 16:1-2

129 21

Parah 1:1 3:5 3:7

85 104 82

Rosh Hashanah 1:1 2:1-4 2:5 4:4

57 132 131-32 57

Sanhedrin 5:2

57

I N D E X T O BIBLICAL A N D

T A L M U D I C REFERENCES

219

Sukkah

Shabbat 16:7 22:3

57 57

2:5

57

c

Ta anit

Sheqalim 1:4

57

3:8

104

c

Shevi it Yadaim 4:2B

53

Sotah 1:1 5:2

52 5, 84

4:3 4:6 4:7 4:8

58, 84 58, 82 82 82

TOSEFTA Bava

3

Qamma

8:13

c

Mo ed Qatan

3

104

Berakhot 2:21 6:24 c

134 134

2:9

55

Nezirot 1:1

103

Eduyyot 1:1

131

Hagigah

Ohalot

11:1

2:9 2:11

16

104 104 Sotah

Kelim B. Q. 6:3-4

25

Ketuvot 4:9

107

13:3 13:7 Sukkah 4:3 4:4

103, 106 104, 107 134 103

Yevamot

Makshirin 3:4

128

1:13-15

107

PALESTINIAN T A L M U D Bava

3

c

Mesi a

2:5

Besah

3

102

116

Hagigah

Berakhot 7:2 9:3 9:5

2:2

2:2 80, 102, 108 103, 118 106

104

c

Ma aser Sheni 5:5

107

220

INDEX TO BIBLICAL AND TALMUDIC REFERENCES

Sanhedrin

Yoma

1:1

104

5:2

103

Sukkah 5:4

120 BABYLONIAN

3

Bava Batra 4a 10b 60b 133b

103, 134 145 39 102

19a-b 37b 107b

104, 108, 134 127, 129, 132, 134-35 104

Shabbat

Berakhot 19a 29a 34b 55a 60b

TALMUD Sanhedrin

3

134 102 103, 123 45 119

17a 30b-31 130a-137b

101 81, 103, 118 145

Sotah c

Eruvin 13b 54b

103 76, 85, 86-87

21a 33a 47a

103 103 104

Gittin c

Ta anit 60b

77

Menahot 109b

104, 128

23a-b 23b 23b-24a

108 102 124

c

Mo ed Qatan 20a

55

Nedarim 66b

14b

77

103 Yoma

Pesahim 57a 64b

Temurah

103, 105 104

35b 69a 71b

103, 116 104 102

JOSEPHUS Against Apion 1:290 2:206

68 14

Antiquities 6:120

68

7:110 7:219 7:293 7:364 9:164 10:55 10:94f

68 68 68 68 68 68 68

221

INDEX TO BIBLICAL AND TALMUDIC REFERENCES

10:149 11:22 11:26 11:29 11:128 11:248 11:250 11:272 11:287 12:142 13:171-73 13:277-78 13:293ff 16:319 17:152 18:11-17

68 68 68 68 68 68 68 68 68 68 81 81 81 68 68 68

18:12-15 20:208f

81 68

Life 2 38 197-98

81 81 67

War 1:107-14 1:579 l:648ff II 2:162-63 5:532

68 68 68 162, 176 81 68

MEKHILTA Mekhilta deR. Simon to

Mekh. Beshallah IV 58-60

Ex. 20:5 Ex. 20:8

129, 134

134 134

Mekhilta de Ishmael to Ex. 21:1

85

SIFRE Deuteronomy 11 61 351

Numbers 22 42 123

129 134 76, 81, 118, 134

102, 128, 134 134 57

SIFRA Shemini

Behuqotai 1:1

104

Emor 16:9

7:12 c

Tazri a 57

57 3

3:7

129

Sav 1:9

129 A V O T DE R. N A T H A N

Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 12

103 47 103

Genesis Rabbah 65:27

102

Leviticus Rabbah 13:5 34:3

103 103, 117,

119

222

INDEX TO BIBLICAL AND TALMUDIC REFERENCES ZADOKITE DOCUMENTS

C D . 12:16-18

14

1

B E N S1RA 11:1

134 | 25:1 M A N U A L OF DISCIPLINE

9:3ff

40

1

PESIKTA DE RAV K A H A N A 40a-b

146

1

PHILO, SPECIAL LAWS 3:206-207

16

1

114

GENERAL INDEX Aaron, Dura-Europos Judaism, 193, 199- j Ben Sira, 65-66; literary forms, 106, 121, 200 129 Abba Hanan, 105 Bentzen, Aage, 105-07 Abba Hilqiah, 102, 108, 123-24 Ben Zoma, 52 Abba Saul, 55 Berekiah R., 183-84 Abba Yosi b. Hanan, 121 Beth Shearim, 157-58, 175-76, 186, 198 Abtalion, 8 3 ; literary forms, 127, 129, Bickerman, E., 160 132, 134-35 Black, Matthew, 42 Agenitos, 81 Blessings, written tradition, 90-99 Agricultural taboos, 44-45; "PharisaicBonsirven, Joseph, 143-46, 150 Rabbinic" Judaism, 51-53, 56-59 Boyce, Mary, 79-80 Ahai, R., 204 Bruce, F. F., 42 Ahikar, 110-11 Briill, Jacob, 4-5 Alexander, 103 Bultmann, Rudolf, 115-25, 148 Alon, G., 144 Caligula, 35 Anahita, 193-96, 200 Capernaum, 176 Aniconism, 174-75; psychology of reli­ Chariot, Divine Chariot, 182 gion, 209-15 Charles, B. H., 110 Anileus, 202 Christianity, 144-47, 150-51; and Second Antigonus of Sokho, 103, 118 Temple, 35, 40-49 Aphrodite, 193-96, 200 Civil and criminal law, 54, 56-58 Apocalyptic writers and Second Temple, Cohen, Boaz, 158 36 Colpe, Carsten, 149 Aqiba, 52-55, 181, 204; literary forms, Colson, F. H., 16 127, 131, 135; Oral Torah, 6, 10-11, Corpse-uncleanness, 13-33 17, 20-22, 24, 26; Rabbinic traditions, Damascus Documents, 112 76-78, 83, 85-89; written traditions, Daniel, 114 91, 93, 95 David, 68, 200; and Orpheus, 192-93 Ardashir, 207 Davies, W . D., 145 Aristeas, Letter Of, 155 Dead Sea Sect. 144; literary forms, 111Aristeus, 68 14, 118, 126-27, 133; and Second Tem­ Arta/Arda, 202 ple, 35-42, 44-46, 48-49 Ashi, Rav, 156 Dibelius, Martin, 115 Asineus, 202 Dionysius, 165, 210 Attis, 165, 210 Diophantus, 68 Baba, 134 Divorce, 116 Baba b. Buta, 103 Douglas, Mary, 30-31 Babylonia, Judaism in Parthian Baby­ Dupont-Sommer, A., I l l , 113-14 lonia, 201-208 Dura-Europos, 164; Judaism at DuraBaeck, Leo, 145 Europos, 188-208; pagan symbols, 175Bar Kokhba, 35, 70, 88 76, 179; psychology of religion, 213-14 Bar Kokhba W a r , 48 Eagle, 176 Baruch, 68, 180; vision and Second ed-Dikkeh, 176 Temple, 36-37 Eissfeldt, 107 TI Baruch, 38 Eleazar, 103 Ben Azzai, 52 Eleazar b. Arakh, 64 Bene Bathyra, 133 Eleazar b. Azariah, 94, 52, 54-55 Ben He He, 135 Eleazar b. R. Saddoq, 53-54 c

c

c

c

224

GENERAL INDEX

Eleazar b. R. Simeon, 55 Eliezer, R., 76-77, 84-86; literary forms, 105, 127-28; Oral Torah, 6, 10-11, 18, 22, 24-25; written traditions, 9 1 , 93-96 Eliezer b. Hyrcanus, 83, 85, 9 0 ; as a Pharisee, 51-65, 69 Elijah, 108, 200 Enoch, 129-30 er-Rafid, 176 Essenes, 7 Esther, 200 Etruscan gods, 210 Ezekiel, 204-06, 208 Ezra, 156; Apocalypse and Second Tem­ ple, 36-37 IV Ezra, 180 Family law, 55-58 Finkelstein, Louis, 139 Frankel, Zechariah, 4-5 Galilee synagogue, 175 Gamaliel, 6, 4 3 ; literary forms, 103-04, 118, 122-23, 127, 129, 131-32, 134-35; oral transmission, 76, 80-81; written traditions, 93-94, 9 6 Gamaliel II, 43, 85, 90; literary forms, 118, 127, 131; Pharisaic-Rabbinic Ju­ daism, 53-55, 58, 62, 70 Gartner, Bertil, 40-41 Gaston, Lloyd, 42 Gerhardsson, Birger, 77-79, 82-83 Ginzberg, Louis, 139 Gnosticism, 147 Goodenough, Erwin R., 141-42, 144; Dura-Europos Judaism, 189-202, 204208; pagan symbols, 174-76, 182, 186; on psychology of religion, 209-15; sym­ bols, 152-73 Grace of God, Nymphs, Moses, 193-96 Grant, R. M., 143, 147-51 Grave-area, 19-20 Greenberg, Moshe, 153 Gunkel, H., 102 Hamnuna, the Scribe, R., 183, 205 Hanina b. Hama, R., 205 Hananiah, R., 53, 185, 203-05 Hananiah Prefect of the Priests, 129, 13435 Hanina, R., 103, 119, 122-23, 126, 133 Hanina b. Dosa, R., 107, 122 Hebrew, Letter, 42 Heinemann, I., 165 Heracles, club of, 196-98

Herod, 35, 43, 48, 68, 134 Heschel, Abraham J . , 141-42, 174 Hillel, 43, 48, 51, 2 0 5 ; Jesus, common forms, 115-26; literary forms, 100, 10304, 106-07, 109, 119, 126-36; Oral Torah, 6, 10, 23; oral transmission, 73-74, 79, 81, 83, 87; pagan symbols, 181, 184; written traditions, 9 1 , 96-97 Hive, 16, 24-25 Hiyya, R., Dura-Europos Judaism, 203-05; pagan symbols, 11, 183, 185 Hiyya b. Ba, R., 184 Honi the Circler, rain, 104, 108, 114, 123, 126, 134 Igrath, 123 Ilai, 53 Inheritances, 55, 57-58 Iranian religion, 177 Isaac, 201 Ishmael, R., 54, 95, 127, 204 Issi b. Judah, R., 204 Jeremiah, 37, 68, 129 Jeremiah b. R. Hiyya b. Abba, R., 183 Jerusalem, Second Temple, four responses to the destruction, 33-49 Jesus, 64, 80, 83, 98, 146, 154, 207; forms compared, 104, 126, 130, 136; Hillel common forms, 115-26; Second Temple, 41-42, 49 Joab, 68 Jochebed, 194 John, 170 John Hyrcanus, 81 Jonas, Hans, 148 Jonathan b. Batyra, 54 Jonathan ben Uzziel, 181 Josephus, 97, 176, 202; literary forms, 108, 114; oral transmission, 80-82, 89; Pharisaic-Rabbinic Judaism, 58, 67-68; Second Temple, 35, 43, 46 Joshua, R., 85-86; Dura-Europos, 203, 205; literary forms, 105, 118, 127-28; Oral Torah, 6, 22; Pharisaic-Rabbinic Judaism, 50, 54, 63; Second Temple, 38-39; written tradition, 90, 94 Joshua b. Gamala, 131 Joshua ben Hananiah, 46-47, 107; oral transmission, 83, 8 5 ; Pharisaic-Rabbinic Judaism, 52, 54-55, 64 Joshua b. Perahiah, 125, 127-28 Judah, R., 53, 76-77, 181; Dura-Europos, 205-06; Oral Torah, 6, 16, 26 Judah b. Bathyra R., 84, 203

GENERAL INDEX

Judah b. Ilai, 76, 85, 91, 95 Judah b. Nahmani, 77 Judah b. Sepphoraeus, 68 Judah b. Tabbai, 120, 125, 127, 130, 134 Judah the Patriarch, 78, 87, 126-27 Judah the Prince, 178, 181 Judaism, and pagan symbols, 174-87; Parthian Babylonia, 201-08 Kadushin, Max, 139 Kartir, 177, 207 Kaufman, Ezekiel, 152-53, 161 Kelim, Oral Torah, its meaning, 3-33 Kraeling, Carl H., 183; Dura-Europos Judaism, 188-89, 191-202, 206-07 Krauss, S., 140 Langer, Suzanne, 165, 210 Lauterbach, J . 2 . , 85-86 Levi, I., 160 Levi, Yohanan, 160 Levi b. Sisi, 205, 207; pagan symbols, 183-85 Leviticus, 44 Lieberman, Saul, 140-41 Literature, forms compared, 100-36; oral transmission, 73-89; written tradition, 90-99 Liturgy, 54, 57-58 Luke-Acts, 58 Maccabees, 39, 43, 48 Mani, 207 Manichaeism, 177, 207-08 Manual of Discipline, 112, 127 Marcus, Ralph, 81 Margoliot, M., 142 Matthew, 49 Matthias b. Margalus, 68 Mazdeism, 177, 207-08 Meir, R., 6, 16, 53, 215 Miasha R., 184 Mithra, 165, 210 Mithraism, 177, 208 Moore, George Foot, 139, 144, 150, 156, 188 Mordecai, 200 Moses, infancy, 193-96; staff of, 196-98 Mysticism, Judaism and pagan symbols, 174-87; psychology of religion, 212-15; symbols at Dura-Europos, 188-208 Nahum, 131, 135 Namenyi, 206 Nathan, R., 205 Nazir, 60 Nehemiah, 66

225

Nock, Arthur D., 148-50 Nymphs, Moses, 193-96 Ohalot, Oral Torah, its meaning, 3-33 Onias, Temple of, 104 Oral transmission, problems of, 73-899 Orpheus and David, 192-93 Osiris, 165, 210 Paganism, Judaism and pagan symbols, 174-87; psychology of religion, 209-15; symbols at Dura-Europos, 188-208 Paul the Apostle, 42-43, 145, 148, 170, 215 Peter, 124-25 Pharisaism, 144, 146, 148; forms com­ pared, 100-36; "Pharisaic-Rabbinic" Ju­ daism, 50-70; religious symbols, 17478; and Second Temple, 36, 41, 43-48; written tradition, 90-99 Pharaoh, infancy of Moses, 193-96 Philo, 16-18, 35, 97, 144, 146, 213; Aniconism, 175, 183; Dura-Europos Judaism, 189, 193, 195, 197, 201; symbols, 155, 170 Phritobeuates, 68 Psychology of religion, 209-15 Purity, Oral Torah, its meaning, 3-33 Pylybarys, 202 Qumran Sect, 144; literary forms, 111-14, 118, 126-27, 133; and Second Temple, 35-42, 44-46, 48-49; written tradition, 98-99 Rabin, Chaim, 14 Rain, power of, 94-95 Rav, Dura-Europos Judaism, 203-06; pa­ gan symbols, 183, 185 Red heifer ceremony, 61, 104 Reitzenstein, 148 Ritual purity, 43-44, 51 Roman Catholicism, 145, 147 Roman Eagle, 176 Rowley, H. H., 42 Sabazios, 165, 210 Sabbath and Festivals, "Pharisaic-Rab­ binic" Judaism, 51-52, 56-60 Sacchias, 68 Samuel, 200, 205 Samuel the Small, 106 Sapha, 68 Schechter, 139, 144 Schoeps, H. J . , 145 Scholem, Gershom G., 141-42, 150, 152, 156, 205; pagan symbols, 174, 180 Schiirer, E., 67

226

GENERAL INDEX

Scribism, 64-69 Second Temple, four responses to the destruction, 34-49 Seisa, 68 Semelios, 68 Shahpuhr, 207 Shammai, 43, 51; literary forms, 100, 109, 112, 115, 118, 120, 126-30, 13235; Oral orah, 6, 23; oral transmis­ sion, 73-74, 81, 87; written tradition, 91, 96-97 Shebna, 103 Sheikh Ibreiq (Beth Shearim), 157-58, 175-76, 186, 198 Shema , 94-96, 128 Shemaiah-Abtalion, 83, 127, 129, 132, 134-35 Silver, A. H., 145 Simeon, 6, 22, 103 Simeon b. Gamaliel, 16; literary forms, 127, 129, 133, 135; oral transmission, 73, 80, 84; Pharisaic-Rabbinic Judaism, 58, 70 Simeon b. Laqish, R., 77 Simeon b. Nathaniel, 64 Simeon b. Shetah, 80; literary forms, 102, 104, 108, 120, 123, 125, 127, 129-30, 134 Simeon the Just, 102-04, 107, 128, 134 Simeon the Righteous, 159 Simon Magus, 148 Smith, Morton, 142-43, 150; Dura-Europos Judaism, 190-91, 198; oral trans­ mission, 78, 82 Sybilline Books, 155 Symbols, Erwin, Goodenough, 152-73; at Dura-Europos, 188-208; pagan sym­ bols, 174-87; psychology of religion, 209-15 Tarfon, R., 26, 85; literary forms, 12728; Pharisaic-Rabbinic Judaism, 52, 54-55 Temple Cult, four responses to the des­ truction, 33-49; Pharisaic-Rabbinic Ju­ daism, 50-70 c

Tent and uncleanness, 13-33 Theseus, 197 Tithing, 44-45, 107; Pharisaic-Rabbinic Judaism, 51-53, 56-60, 62, 64 Torah, Oral Torah, its meaning, 3-33 Trajan, 35 Umm el-Kanatir, 176 Uncleanness, 7-33, 93; Pharisaic-Rabbinic Judaism, 54, 56-59, 64 Urbach, E. E., 142-43, 157-58; pagan symbols, 175-76 Utensils, uncleanness, 7-33 Vows, 60 Watzinger, 162 Wisdom literature, 106, 110-11, 120-21 Wisdom of Solomon, 155 Wolf, William, 143 Yadin, Yigael, 39 Yannai, 80; literary forms, 102, 104, 108, 114, 119, 125, 134 Yavneh, Pharisaic-Rabbinic Judaism, 50-70 Yo ezer of the Birah, 129 Yohanan, R., 77, 107, 127 Yohanan HaHorani, 128 Yohanan, High Priest, 102-03, 107, 127 Yohanan b. Nuri, 25 Yohanan ben Zakkai, R., 146, 205; lite­ rary forms, 104-05, 118, 122, 128, 13132; oral transmission, 81, 83-86; pagan symbols, 179, 181, 184; as Pharisee, 51, 57-58, 62-64, 66, 69; and Second Temple, 38, 43, 46-48; written tradi­ tions 90, 93 Yose the Galilean, 95 Yose, R., 6, 22, 64, 82, 84 Yose b. Yo ezer, 54; literary forms, 12728, 130 Yose b. Yohanan, 128, 130 Zaddok, 39-40 Zadoq, 202 Zalman, Elijah ben Solomon, 25 Zamaris, 202 Zoroastrianism, 177 Zurvanism, 177 c

c