21. The Rise of the Rabbis (Jewish History Lab)

It's time now for us to just take a step back away from the political and military and, to a certain degree, social history of the era of the Hashmonaim, and I'd like to look a little bit more at intellectual history. In order to do that, we're going to have to expand the chronological scope of the period I'd like to cover. I'd like to take a look at the Second Temple Period, which extends in the conventional chronology from the years 539, when the exiles returned from Babylonia under the decree of Cyrus that we described a little while ago, and began to rebuild the Temple until the year 70 of the Common Era, which is a date normally associated with the destruction of the Temple by the Romans. We're actually going to squeeze a little bit past that up to the year 200. So we're talking about a fairly large period of time right now, and I'd like to speak about some of the most important trends and two of the most important intellectual products of the Jewish people at this time, specifically the Midrash in next lecture, and then the Mishnah in the lecture after that. So let's think a little bit, though, about what's happening intellectually and spiritually in the Jewish population after the turn from exile. We have a period of time now which is moving from a locus of authority in Revelation—you know, the high period of the great prophets that we described a while ago—and their direct access to godly intent, which then they would share with people, whether or not the people would like it. And now we're moving into a period in which a lot of that text has been now recorded and is now in circulation, and this on top of the text of the Torah itself, the first five books of Moses. And now the locus of authority shifts from those people who are somehow immediately receiving the word of God, which then they, you know, distribute as instructions to the people, or as rebuke, and now it has to do with people who can interpret the existing texts that slowly become canonized in this period. This is a very important shift. It takes many hundreds of years, but it represents the rise of the rabbinic class, a whole different group of people who are not necessarily known for their somehow innate ability to receive divine inspiration, as the prophets were, but rather they are known for their ability to intuit the meaning of those words and to provide guidance based on text. Now, a lot to say here. There's a lot of theology mixed in with history as well. I'm going to try and deal with both of these things in such a way that we can appreciate history as it develops on a human level, and at the same time understand a little bit about the way in which Jews understood these events on a religious level. Perhaps I should point out right now a beautiful passage that's in Shia Cohen's wonderful work, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, which covers the period that we're talking about today. He asks a great question there of, what is Judaism? Is Judaism like an ideal aspirational set of beliefs, and in particular practices, and the closer that a person adheres to that, that is normative Jewish behavior? Or do we say that Judaism is what Jews do, whether or not it is connected to this aspirational ideal? The former question is answered best by a rabbi, which, by the way, I am not. The latter question is addressed more by a historian, and we will kind of be dancing between these two poles from time to time as trying to understand both what Jews ideally wanted for themselves, and in particular how the rabbis articulated what they wanted for the Jewish people, and on the other hand, we'll try to understand what Jews themselves were doing. In today's lecture, however, and the two that follow, we're going to be focusing more on the aspirational way of understanding what is Judaism and what do Jews do. Okay, enough introduction. Let's go straight to the material here. So, one of the most important institutions that develops at this time is something called the Great Assembly, the Knesset Haggadolah, the Great Assembly. The name Knesset in modern Israeli pronunciation is, of course, the prime deliberating body of the Israeli government, and it takes its name from this original institution. It had 120 seats in it, just like today's Knesset and so on. Now, the roots of the Great Assembly are lost in the mists of time. One might assume that perhaps this Great Assembly was created first under Ezra, that he is named, in fact, in some of the later literature as the leader of the Great Assembly, and we know in particular that Shimon HaTzadik, the Shimon the Righteous One, was the last of the Great Assembly. That's a reference right there in the first opening paragraph of Pirkei Avot, one of the greatest statements of rabbinic philosophy in the ancient period. So, it's hard to date precisely when Shimon HaTzadik lived. There are different opinions as to which Shimon the high priest that was. The Talmud places him in the late 4th century with the advent of Alexander into the region, but it's also not impossible that this could be a Shimon that lived a little bit later, actually in the period of the Hashmonaim, although that would make the Talmudic reading problematic. At any rate, the actual membership of the Anshei Knesset Sagedola was apparently high-level rabbis, as we shall see exactly what that title means, and also some of the latest prophets were included in there. Chagai, Zechariah, Malachi, for example, were included in this body, this deliberative body that was also a legislative body. It's a great mystery what exactly was it, you know, how did they convene, who was involved in it, but for the time being, we have to posit that this body did produce a significant amount of religious legislation. When we begin to see the development of a new title, Rabbi, which is really not used in prior texts with any amount of frequency, the term Rabbi is derived from the Hebrew term rav, which means great or large. In a sense, you would address someone, you know, your highness, I guess in English, your greatness. And in Israel, the term used in late antiquity was Rebi, that's the actual pronunciation, which means my greatness, my largeness, which is translated to be my teacher. That's more colloquial and more accurate in that regard, but it's not exactly what the term means, literally. In Babylonia, the term rav alone is preferred. The term Rabbi, with that pronunciation, it's actually kind of nonsensical. In Hebrew, you don't actually have that word pronounced that way in Hebrew, but that's the way it came down to us in English. In Russian, for example, it would be rabin, you know, all kinds of different ways to pronounce it, but it means my teacher. Now, in the context, this is not a prophet. This is not a king. This is not a priest. This is someone new. This is like an expert information worker. It's a class of people that rise to prominence in this Second Temple period, and in particular in the last century before the Common Era and the first century of the Common Era. That's the golden age of the rabbis in many ways. That's the period in which we get a lot of the great writings. We'll talk about two major sections of them in the next two lectures. And I want to just make one last point before we go on to the next level. One of the things that you see happening in a lot of popular histories, particularly those written for, you know, theologically inclined audiences, is this idea of writing history backwards, of trying to imagine what ancient history was, and looking at that aspirational ideal, even of today, but certainly of, let's say, late antiquity, late first century, early second century, and positing it backwards. The problem is we don't have contemporary texts that will allow us to really get a good look at what it meant to be a rabbi, let's say, in the year 500 before the Common Era, or 800 before the Common Era. We don't really have a text. We do have texts from much, much later, like, let's say, 100 before the Common Era, that will tell us about something that's 500 years earlier. But that, of course, is from a historical point of view, not as ideal as a contemporary period text. By the time we get to, though, that weird year zero, there was no year zero, but you know what I'm talking about, we will have lots of interesting texts that are written from outside the rabbinic perspective, that also give us some great ideas to what it was like socially, but for now, we have to kind of work with the texts that we have and project backwards as conservatively as possible to try and understand history as it actually unfolded. Here's a beautiful image from Jean Fouquet, the construction of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. It apparently looked nothing like this, but what an amazing kind of inspirational image this must have been. At any rate, the reason why I illustrated this particular slide with the artwork of Fouquet is because we should recall that around this time, there is a big shift in the center of authority, meaning who you go to for religious instruction, for religious inspiration. In the pre-Ezra period, or let's say the first temple period, that would certainly be the priest, the Kohen. The Kohen would be responsible to be connected to Jerusalem, to the temple rituals, to the sacrificial cult. That really was the main locus of Judaism. We have scattered, tiny, interesting references in various biblical books to types of prayer, which were almost always done at the sanctuary in Jerusalem, or like Chana, for example, at the beginning of the book of Samuel, at the tabernacle when it was in a traveling mode. But we don't have a lot of really great data about, you know, who would you go to if you lived in, I don't know, Sfat, or if you lived in Alexandria? Where would you get religious instruction in this early second temple period? There seems to be a shifting to away from the temple itself, although it retains the center, but it becomes more diffuse as people seek out religious instruction, and it becomes to move towards people who are masters of the Messorah, of the tradition, which, as we shall see, involves a lot more than just textual familiarity with the text that would become canonized and form the Tanakh, but really masters a much larger amount of information, which is enclosed in something we call the Oral Torah. The people who inherited this new mantle of authority and would ultimately become much more significant once the temple is destroyed in the first century are, of course, the rabbis. They're the ones who are able to take the portable tradition and implant it in the diaspora and nourish it not only so that it thrives, but in fact it flourishes. And at this point, we should try to understand, what do we mean by the Tanakh? What do we mean by the Bible, to use a Greek term? There's no question that the biblical texts were circulating at this time of the second temple, and through a process which is not at all clear, they eventually become canonized. This is a Christian term which is used to kind of imply what is closed, what is now a book that is accepted as having the authority of divine approval. And this eventually forms the tripartite Bible, the Torah, the first five books, Nevi'im, which are most of the prophets, and then finally Ketuvim, or writings, which includes some kind of miscellaneous works like Psalms, which are more like prayers, the wisdom literature like the book of Proverbs, some other books which seem like they belong in prophets like Chronicles, and some fascinating miscellany like Song of Songs, for example. Now, there's no question that these texts are circulating in the second century, but we don't know exactly the process by which they were exactly canonized. The Talmud definitely mentions a specific number of the texts, but nowhere does it actually list all of the individual texts of the Bible. It's just kind of accepted by the first century, it's just a known thing. Yeah, this is what's included, these are the things which are not included. Now, there are a few passages in the Talmud which speak about whether or not this or that book should be included. Some decisions are made regarding, for example, Song of Songs and regarding Ecclesiastes, and other decisions are made regarding books which are definitely out, books like Bensira. We talked about the book of the Maccabees, for example. Those texts are excluded. The people who earn mastery not only of these texts that become the Bible, but also earn mastery of the interpretation of these texts, those are the rabbis. And we should also point out one last detail here. They have different rules of interpretation depending on which book it is. The five books of Moses, the Torah, that is considered sacrosanct on the highest possible level. There are no accepted errors, there are no typos, other than obviously scribal ones, which would render a Torah scroll invalid for use. And there's a whole series of hermeneutic rules as to actually how does one interpret the written text of the Torah. What we're looking at, by the way, is the oldest existing text of Nevi'im and Ketuvim. Unfortunately, the Torah section was lost. It is the Aleppo Codex, which dates from the 10th century. And as you can see, there are a lot of Masoretic markings on the inside, which specifically indicate, for example, how the text is to be pronounced and so on. We'll talk more about this when we get to the Masoretic movement later. Oh my gosh, but so much stuff going on. That's kind of like an introduction to the rise of this new information class of the rabbis. Let's look at two of their major occupations, which was the recording of something called the Midrash and something else called the Mishnah, in the next two lectures.