Rabbinic Literature

Stories portraying heretics (’minim’) in rabbinic literature are a central site of rabbinic engagement with the ‘other’. These stories typically involve a conflict over the interpretation of a biblical verse in which the rabbinic figure emerges victorious in the face of a challenge presented by the heretic. In this book, Michal Bar-Asher Siegal focuses on heretic narratives of the Babylonian Talmud that share a common literary structure, strong polemical language and the formula, ‘Fool, look to the end of the verse’. She marshals previously untapped Christian materials to arrive at new interpretations of familiar texts and illuminate the complex relationship between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity. Bar-Asher Siegal argues that these Talmudic literary creations must be seen as part of a boundary-creating discourse that clearly distinguishes the rabbinic position from that of contemporaneous Christians and adds to a growing understanding of the rabbinic authors' familiarity with Christian traditions.

Animal studies has its origins in philosophy but extends to all fields of the humanities, especially literature, history, and anthropology. The central concern of animal studies is how human beings perceive other species and themselves as one among them. Animal studies in ancient Judaism has generally not been undertaken in a critical mode, with notable and increasing exceptions. This essay covers work from the past decade (2009-2019) that deals centrally with animals, from ancient Israel to late antiquity, spanning the Hebrew Bible, apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, library of Qumran, rabbinic literature, and material culture. Topics addressed are animal sacrifice and consumption; literary depictions of animals; studies of individual animal species; archaeology and art featuring animals; animal ethics, theology, and law; and critical theoretical approaches to species difference. The conclusion considers future directions for animal studies in ancient Judaism.

In the last two decades several important studies have been published that focus on ritual in rabbinic literature, and consider ritual to be a critically important conceptual and analytical category in approaching rabbinic texts and rabbinic culture. This article provides an account of the intersection of Ritual Studies with the study of rabbinic literature, surveys key works and significant developments and shifts in the field, and identifies the central challenges in and benefits of examining rabbinic texts through ritual lenses. The article pays special attention to the complex relations between texts about rituals and ritual performances, as well as to the blurry boundaries between law and ritual in the realm of rabbinic halakhah.

Contemporary scholarship often treats classical rabbinic allusions to “reading” the Bible as evidence that late antique rabbinic culture valorized the written word as a source of religious knowledge and authority. However, the early rabbinic practice that we commonly refer to as “reading” actually consisted of reciting a precise oral formula from memory—with (or more often without) reference to a written text. When a rabbinic Jew “read” the Bible according to this practice, he did not extract words or meaning from written signs but rather pulled words and formulas from memory which could then be correlated with a written text for ritual performances. In contrast, classical rabbinic traditions treat the practices associated with acquiring information from written texts as an alien, even illicit, mode of engaging with written text and a locus of spiritual and social dangers.

https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfw073

https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/doi/10.1093/jaarel/lfw073/2965619/The-Dangers-of-Reading-As-We-Know-It-Sight-Reading#.WJNncaddSk0.email

The paper argues that the pesaḥ is a ritual with no origins in the literature we have, from the earliest recoverable fragment, through the first revision that introduces as many problems as it aims to solve, to subsequent extensions in multiple directions, with no arc, no trajectory, no telos, but recurrent hermeneutic expressive engagement.

Contemporary Western legal systems allow any individual to serve as a witness and to testify in court. However, in legal regimes from late antiquity we find strict limitations on the eligibility of certain types of people to serve as witnesses. Some of the lists of disqualified witnesses are very particular, thus inviting explanation of the reasons for the specific rules of disqualification. Such is the case regarding both Jewish and Roman rules of disqualification, which are the topic of this paper.
Tannaitic halakha, composed in Roman Palestine between the first and third centuries CE, includes a list of four characters disqualified from giving testimony, which has long defied interpretation: “a dice player, a usurer, pigeon flyers, and traders in Seventh Year produce”. This paper offers a novel approach to the study of this list, suggesting that the rabbis drew on the Roman legal institution of infamia when constructing their own laws regarding disqualified witnesses. Beyond solving a puzzle relating to Jewish law, the paper also sheds light on the inner logic of Roman law, maintaining that Jewish and Roman rules of disqualified witnesses are commonly grounded in an ethics of self-control. By drawing attention to this previously unnoted theoretical subtext, the paper contributes to a missing chapter in the global history of evidence admissibility rules.

Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalisher’s messianic innovations asserted the centrality of a renewal of offerings on the altar to the creation of a linear path to redemption. Despite the common convention, his ideas were not disregarded by his peers and followers. In fact, while his ideas did not predetermine the rabbinic discourse, halakhic questions concerning the rebuilding of the Temple and its laws became quite popular and common. Surprisingly, lay figures, as well as several Talmudic scholars, kept this messianic idea alive. Indeed, from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, such figures published numerous works calling for concrete efforts to rebuild the Temple and renew the offerings. These findings shed light on the renewed religious Zionist interest in this method of reconnecting with God and promoting the final redemption, which is neither new, nor does it deviate from known and publicly articulated ideas.

This article investigates the reading dynamics of the rewritten Bible or the exegetical narrative in rabbinic literature of late antiquity. The exegetical narrative is composed of a story which simultaneously represents and interprets its biblical counterpart. Its singularity resides precisely in this synergy of narrative and exegesis. As exegesis, it creates new meanings from the biblical verses, and as narrative, it dramatizes those meanings by means of the biblical story world. The concurrent presence of two distinct voices, biblical and rabbinic, as well as two distinct types of discourse, narrative and exegetical, that navigate between these voices, creates a unique type of reading dynamic that I call dialogical reading. It is this dynamic that enables the midrashic text to create new meanings from old and highlights the challenge this genre presents to the theory of reading.

This essay presents an analysis of a particular rabbinic parable tradition, in an attempt to chart its diachronic development as a literary form in traditional Jewish lore. The parables under consideration belong to the grouping identified as "Parables of the King." These are stories with a royal hero. In the examples discussed here, ridiculous conditions are presented as prerequisites for participation in a royal banquet. This motif derives from a pronounced eschatological context; however, new narrative elements were added at different chronological stages to the parallel versions of the parable, changing significantly its original theological setting. This paper is a study of this literary tradition, in light of a corresponding NT parabolic tradition and of its link to a tradition known from the apocryphal Apocryphon of Ezekiel. The article aims to establish the mode of evolution of the literary form of the parable from the hypothetical ancient Jewish homiletic tradition, as preserved in the NT, to its manifestation in rabbinic literature. At the same time, the article tracks the history of the eschatological idea behind the parable.

Ascetic systems commonly exhibit some sort of conflict
between spiritual pursuits and mundane needs. This article contextualizes the particular rabbinic dilemma of study versus sustenance within the broader context of the Zoroastrian tradition and its critique of the Manichaean Elect. The rabbis shared with their Zoroastrian contemporaries
not only the perception of a religious tension between
agriculture and the pursuit of religious studies, but also a multifaceted array of possible solutions that attempt to harmonize, mitigate, or otherwise resolve this theological and practical tension. While the basic conflict between study and sustenance is already formulated in tannaitic works, it is argued that the unique perspective offered by the Babylonian
Talmud engages, and perhaps reacts to, the Iranian tradition.

Although at first glance ṣîṣîṯ meet the definitional criteria of an amulet, there are just three passages in the early rabbinic literature which only indirectly suggest such interpretation. Yet, as it turns out, the tassels feature strong connections with the priestly clothes and given the protective role played by the latter inside the Tabernacle, ṣîṣîṯ can be interpreted as a lay functional equivalent of the sacerdotal garment. The present paper has three main purposes: first, to scrutinize the passages from bMenahot (41a, 43b and 44a) which are often taken as witnessing to the apotropaic function of fringes; second, to contextualize tassels in the network of the priestly objects: teḵēlęṯ, šaʻaṭnēz and ṣîṣ; third, to advance a careful hypothesis in regards with the implicit apotropaic potential of ṣîṣîṯ.

This is the pre-peer-reviewed version of the paper accepted for publication in “Review of Rabbinic Judaism”. Please cite the following:
Wojciech Kosior, “Like a Throne of Glory”. The Apotropaic Potential of Ṣîṣîṯ in the Hebrew Bible and the Early Rabbinic Literature, “Review of Rabbinic Judaism”, 21.2/2018.

This essay explores Maimonides’ explanation of the Bible’s rationale behind the ritual sacrifices, namely to help wean the Jews away from idolatrous rites. After clearly elucidating Maimonides’ stance on the topic, this essay examines his view from different angles with various possible precedents in earlier rabbinic literature for such an understanding. The essay also shows why various other Jewish commentators objected to Maimonides’ understanding and how Maimonides might respond to those critiques. Additionally, this essay also situates Maimonides’ view on sacrifices within his broader worldview of the Bible’s commandments in general as serving as a counterweight to idolatrous rituals.

Religious legalism encompasses a wide range of attitudes that assign religious meaning to legal content or to legal compliance. The phenomenology of religious legalism is assuming a significant role in various contemporary debates about legal pluralism, accommodation of religious minorities, religious freedom, and so forth. This article revises this conception and the commonplace equation of Judaism and legalism. It suggests that we ought to regard both as part of the economy of religious differences by which religious identities are expressed and defined as alternatives. The common ascription of religious legalism to Judaism (and Islam) is criticized here through a historical analysis of the law-religion-identity matrix in three cultural settings: late ancient Judeo-Hellenic, medieval Judeo–Arabic, and post-Reformation Europe.

Rabbinic wisdom materials betray the influence of Israelite and Greco-Roman wisdom on the one hand and the rabbinic system of law and values on the other. This chapter considers both the familiar and distinctive dimensions of rabbinic wisdom and focuses particularly on the place of wisdom within, and its contribution to, a rabbinic worldview. In addressing this issue, the chapter surveys the major wisdom works in rabbinic literature, the definition and scope of "wisdom" in the rabbinic corpus, and the reception of important earlier wisdom compositions in rabbinic literature.

This article examines the dynamics of the exodus story in shaping collective identity in early rabbinic literature (c. 200CE - 550CE), which was redacted in the centuries following the second Jewish revolt against Rome and contains literary responses to that violent episode and the ensuing exile. Many rabbinic texts utilize the powerful and compelling exodus narrative to respond to pressing social and political situations of their day. Depictions of national suffering and divine recompense, in particular, give meaning to the brutal subjugation of Judea by Rome and provide an opportunity to indulge in fantasies of divine retribution safely projected onto a hapless Pharaoh and the Egyptian army. Furthermore, the appropriation and repurposing of traditional stories about ancient hostilities serves to foster collective unity and solidarity in the present; exodus becomes meaningful for late antique Jews because of how it functions for the community telling the story not because of what it teaches about the biblical past. Rabbinic midrashim (expansions and interpretations) of Exodus operate as resistance literature; they undermine the authority and hegemony of Rome through a hidden discourse of its demise. These narratives of divinely mandated violence thus serve a dual purpose—providing meaning in the wake of disaster and hope for vindication in the face of bitter oppression—but also foster national cohesion and solidarity against dispersion and assimilation.

Rabbinic halakhah encompasses numerous areas wherein determination of the facts pertinent to the law appears to demand something like professional expertise.  Cases of this sort introduce a dialectical dynamic of interest to the sociology of law.  On the one hand, such cases can be construed as rabbinic assertions of authority over the relevant professional field.  On the other hand, rabbis undermine their authority insofar as they expose themselves to dependence upon non-rabbinic experts, unless they can either produce experts from within their own ranks, or so frame the relevant laws as to somehow render complex determination of fact less necessary.  In this article I take up the relationship between rabbis and butchers, or between rabbinic law and the production and sale of meat.  The most significant intersections, real and conceptual, between rabbis and butchers in the classical rabbinic corpus occur around the law of the “torn” animal, the terefah.  The article therefore focuses on it, but not to the exclusion of other relevant bodies of law.  In part one, I attempt to explain the origins of the innovations in tannaitic terefah law that distinguish it from its biblical and Second Temple predecessors.  I suggest that these innovations represent, at least in part, analogical extensions of the law of blemishes.  One consequence of the elaboration of terefah law and related bodies of law is rabbinic dependence on a range of professional experts, first and foremost butchers, for determination of relevant facts, and even for clarification of obscure legal terms.  Such dependence, and related features of terefah law that arise from the complexity of its factual basis, are the subject of part two.  Dependence is one movement in the dynamic described above.  The opposite movement is control, in this case over meat production.  Whether or not a desire to extend rabbinic control motivated the expansion of terefah law—this question is impossible to answer—we do frequently find rabbis and butchers coming into conflict over terefah law and related areas of law.  I offer some brief reflections on such conflicts in part three.  An appendix takes up the case of the hunter and the fowler, who are to the domain of undomesticated animals what the butcher is to that of domestic animals.

This article challenges the scholarly opinion that, with regard to inherited guilt, the rabbis conformed to the early Christian position. By examining the rabbinic interpretations to intergenerational punishment (Exodus 20:5) with early Christian interpretations, I show, more generally, that unlike early Christian exegetes who openly valorize the ethical dimension as a hermeneutical-theological tool, the rabbis refuse to grant moral sensibilities explicit significance in their exegetical-theological project. This difference exposes a larger contrast: In early Christianity, the moral hermeneutic is presented as an unchanging exegetical principle; by contrast, for the rabbis, the moral dimension only reaches the level of exegetical impulse.

It has often been noted that Mishnah Avot is heir to aspects of the biblical tradition of Wisdom. A further element of this inheritance is studied here: the tradition of ending a Wisdom book with a self referential coda, commenting on the value of the text just completed. A philological study of the end of Avot opens this study, and the results of that study allow us to situate the coda to Avot in the context of other codas in the Mishnah, especially tractates Neziqin and Kelim. The paper then moves to situate the conclusion to Avot in the heritage of the conclusions of earlier Jewish books of Wisdom – Ben Sira, Qohelet, and Proverbs, as well as other biblical books that show the imprint of Wisdom, such as Hosea. Moving backwards a further step, then, the tradition of self-referential codas is traced in Wisdom literature prior to biblical times and outside the biblical tradition. Here the Egyptian Wisdom tradition looks largest, especially the Late Egyptian texts such as the Wisdom of Amenemope. It has been known since the beginning of the twentieth century that there are close connections between Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Israelite Wisdom literature. This paper argues that the connections between Egyptian and biblical wisdom, on the one hand, and biblical and rabbinic wisdom, on the other hand, were tenacious enough that the history of at least one literary feature, the self-referential coda, can be traced from New Kingdom Egypt into the Mishnah. It is also argued that rather than showing contacts that ceased long ago, Wisdom in the Hellenistic and Roman times was still a cosmopolitan and international endeavor, and therefore the later traditions in Egypt, such as Ankhsheshonqy and P. Insinger, and in Israel, such as Ben Sira, continued to show mutual influences and commonalities.

The volume "New Directions in Spiritual Kinship: Sacred Ties Across the Abrahamic Religions," edited by Todne Thomas, Asiya Malik and Rose Wellman, undertakes a comparative analysis of "spiritual kinship" (such as God-parenthood) in Christianity, Judaism and Islam. My chapter, "Kinship as Ethical Relation," starts by questioning the usefulness of spiritual kinship as a category for the understanding of Judaism and expands that critique into an alternate model that might be more useful for comparative purposes. I argue that the idea of "Spiritual Kinship" emerges precisely from an a set of Christian taxonomies that are often implicitly or explicitly anti-Jewish (kinship of the flesh vs. kinship of the spirit, the letter and the spirit of the law, etc.) which makes it unsuitable as an "Abrahamic" category. Moreover, the specific ways in which it is unsuitable for comparative purposes actually demonstrate the importance of this category for understanding of Christianity and of the anthropological kinship categories (affinal, consanguineal and fictive)  that were in large measure adapted from European Christian sources. Viewing kinship as a set of ethical relations, by contrast, does indeed allow for useful comparison across these religious divides and makes better sense of the ethnographic and textual data. Examples are brought from both modern and medieval Jewish life.

Although miqwa’ot and chalkstone vessels have been found throughout Israel, the unparalleled number of such finds at Jerusalem has conventionally been explained in terms of the special demands of the Temple cult and of the city’s priestly residents. In light of a growing number of archaeological discoveries from the past number of years, however, the conception that Jerusalem and its Temple served as focal points of ritual purity observance deserves to be significantly reevaluated. The new data indicate that regular, widespread use of ritual baths and chalkstone vessels was not at all unique to Jerusalem or the priesthood, but rather was commonplace to a comparable degree in Jewish society throughout early Roman Judea. Jews everywhere throughout the country strove on a regular basis to maintain the purity of their bodies, clothing, utensils, food, and drink, and there is no reason to suppose that in doing so they somehow had the Temple in mind. Most Jews living at this time would probably have understood the pentateuchal purity regulations as prescribing that ritual purity be maintained on a regular basis in ordinary, everyday life – without specific regard to the Temple or its cult. This new understanding encourages us to reinterpret the archaeological finds from Jerusalem as reflecting an important facet of prevailing common culture rather than as stemming from the unique sanctity of Jerusalem, the Temple, or its priests.

The Hellenistic Judaean historian known as Eupolemos embedded four fanciful epistles in his history of the kings of Judaea: two letters from Solomon to the kings of Egypt and Tyre, and the two responses of those kings. The letters to and from the king of Tyre are closely modeled on an exchange between Solomon and Hiram of Tyre in 1 Kings and 2 Chronicles. The letters involving the Egyptian king, however, are Eupolemos’s invention. This paper will show through a close reading of Eupolemos vis-à-vis its sources, and in light of contemporaneous Greek letters, that the author used Hellenistic epistolary conventions as a medium for rewriting the traditional history of Solomon’s reign. It will be argued that he did so apologetically in order to characterize the foreign kings as ‘friends,’ that is subordinate vassals, of the Judaean king. The historical context reflected in this epistolary re-characterization reflects political conditions in Hasmonean Judaea in the late second century BCE, and thereby is offered as evidence against the consensus date of Eupolemos (158/57 BCE) and the related assumption that this author can be identified as the ambassador Eupolemos mentioned in 1 Macc 8.17 and 2 Macc 4.11.

In this article I advance our understanding of the compositional logic behind the Matthean antitheses by arguing that the juxtaposition of themes underlying the last three antitheses parallels a related grouping of topics in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Testament of Gad and rabbinic sources.  I suggest that just as Matthew 5:33-48 links a discussion of oaths to a reworked interpretative tradition on Lev. 19:17-18, so too the Damascus Document, Testament of Gad, and later rabbinic works juxtapose the topic of oaths and these biblical verses.  Although the various sources employ divergent rationales for linking these topics, the persistent presence of a connection between them speaks to a shared tradition that may have informed the order and organization of the Matthean antitheses.

This article explores the role that emotion plays in rabbinic interpretations of the law of the captive woman. Discrete “emotional communities” establish “feeling rules” through which they broadcast their ideal emotional world and the values associated with it. Different midrashim, employing rich metaphors, agree that the feeling rule in the law of the captive seeks to elicit disgust from the captor. That emotion emphasizes the otherness of its object and thereby affects the power relations that obtain between subject and object. Midrashic sources disagree, however, over whether the captor’s disgust response will motivate him to jettison the captive. At issue is the identity of the powerful party confronting the captor: a gentile plot that disgust could help him neutralize or an evil inclination which it could not. If the captor marries his captive, he will experience hate, an emotion that will confirm the otherness that he earlier failed to recognize.

The formulation and application of rabbinic Halakhah often depends on the determination of facts that belong, to one degree or another, to the province of professional experts. The resulting structural tension is analogous to that posed by the prominence of the expert witness in the modern American court, or the active role of private industry in administrative law. This article examines the relationship in the classical rabbinic corpus from Palestine between rabbis and farmers, or between rabbinic and agricultural expertise. It considers whether agriculture would have been conceived of in this context as a specialized or technical body of knowledge, and, if so, whether and how agricultural Halakhah accommodates itself to this fact.

Because the royal ideology of ancient Israel was largely identical to that of the broader ancient Near East, the points of divergence are the more remarkable. In particular, the legal corpus of Deuteronomy conceptualizes the king in a way that rejects all prevailing models of monarchic power, both Israelite and Near Eastern. Deuteronomy submits a utopian manifesto for a constitutional monarchy that sharply delimits the power of the king. This redefinition of royal authority takes place as part of a larger program (Deut. xvi 18-xviii 22) whereby the authors of Deuteronomy redefine the jurisdiction of each branch of public office (local and central judicial administration, kingship, priesthood, and prophecy). Each is subordinated, first, to the requirements of cultic centralization, and, second, to the textual authority of deuteronomic Torah. This utopian delimitation of royal power never passed from constitutional vision into historical implementation: it represented such a radical departure from precedent that the Deuteronomistic Historian, precisely while seeming to implement deuteronomic law, pointedly reversed the deuteronomic program and restored to the monarch all that Deuteronomy had withheld.

Keywords:
Law of King Deuteronomy 17:14-20; Deut 17:14-20; Dtn 17, 14-20; Kingship, Deuteronomy, Deuteronomistic History, Ämtergesetze; constitutional theory, democracy, Deut 16:18-18:22; Ezekiel 37; democratic kingship; Greek ideology of kingship; constitutional monarchy; Elyon, Psalm 1, royal psalms, Laws of Public Officials.

This is the first article-length treatment of the famous rabbinic dictum "These and those are the words of the living God, but the Law always follows Beit Hillel." The statement's significance lies in the innovative manner in which it negotiates the monistic and pluralistic tendencies within the rabbinic tradition. "These and those …" first emerged in the late tannaitic or early amoraic period as a reworking of an earlier Tosefta text. The Yerushalmi, consistent with its overall monistic tendencies, cited this text only for its ruling in favor of Beit Hillel, marginalizing its affirmation that the teachings of Beit Shammai represent "the words of the living God." The Bavli embraced both the pluralistic and monistic stances of "These and those …" and further placed the declaration in a wider narrative context, imbuing it with social and ethical significance.

Gravestones with Hebrew inscriptions are the most common class of Jewish monuments still present in such regions as Ukraine or Belarus. Epitaphs are related to various Biblical, Rabbinical, and liturgical texts. Despite that, the genre of Hebrew epitaphs seldom becomes an object of cultural or literary studies. In this paper, I show that a function of Hebrew epitaphs is to connect the ideal world of Hebrew sacred texts to the world of everyday life of a Jewish community. This is achieved at several levels. First, the necessary elements of an epitaph – name, date, and location marker – place the deceased person into a specific absolute context. Second, the epitaphs quote Biblical verses with the name of the person thus stressing his/her similarity to a Biblical character. Third, there is Hebrew/Yiddish orthography code-switching between the concepts found in the sacred books and those from the everyday world. Fourth, the epitaphs occupy an intermediate position between the professional and folk literature. Fifth, the epitaphs are also in between the canonical and folk religion. I analyze complex hermeneutic mechanisms of indirect quotations in the epitaphs and show that the methods of actualization of the sacred texts are similar to those of the Rabbinical literature. Furthermore, the dichotomy between the sacred and profane in the epitaphs is based upon the Rabbinical concept of the " Internal Jewish Bilingualism " (Hebrew/Aramaic or Hebrew/Yiddish), which is parallel to the juxtaposition of the Written and Oral Torah.

The introduction of non-halakhic material into a halakhic section of a classical rabbinic work is a redactional choice that can substantially affect the interpretation of both kinds of material. Understanding the relationship between the non-halakhic material and the surrounding halakhic material can affect one's assessment of the redactor's activity. Conversely, assumptions concerning the redactor's activity can affect the interpretation of the non-halakhic material.

Distributive justice assumes a morally critical judgment of nature, which typically contradicts providential conceptions. Hence, simple conceptions of divine Providence cannot support distributive justice. This essay analyzes and develops a complex strand of theorizing about Providence within Jewish philosophy that is compatible with distributive justice. According to this conception, the actions of divine Providence express different and mutually exclusive considerations of justice. Therefore, the moral value of outcomes is intransitive between the situations of different people. And while each providential action is justified from an ethical perspective, the total outcome is distinct from God's ultimate desire. Human ethics responds to this disparity by redistribution. This conception of Providence also contributes to the additional issue of inter-generational justice through the concomitant idea of life missions. The classical rendering of missions creates problems, however, for distributive justice. I conclude by formulating a conception of life missions that is compatible with both distributive and intergenerational justice.