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The preceding chapters show that rabbinic thought is intertwined with the nature of its texts, with rabbinic textuality. In the absence of a compelling textual Gestalt, the formal self sufficiency and independence of the single statement allows it to enter into many diverse relationships with other statements, so that it can be difficult to determine its exact scope and import. Direct knowledge of the halakhic practice of a text's own time and place, which would resolve many such ambiguities, is mostly not available. Nevertheless, the absence of a sentence-connecting Gestalt is not a mere lack. It is, like all sustained text formation, an achievement and a contrivance: Gestalt of another order. Several factors are discussed in detail, which contribute to this outcome in various measure.

This chapter examines an array of rabbinic sources concerning the temple, including Mishnah, Midrash, and Talmud, drawing a number of contrasts with Qumran literature in particular. The Rabbis seem to agree with the sectarians that the temple was flawed, recalling instances of priestly greed, theft, and even murder. But the rabbis downplay the moral defilement of the temple and deny to the end that the temple was ritually defiled to any significant degree before its destruction by Romans in 70 CE. Unlike the sectarians, the rabbis took a stance toward the temple and its purity that was less idealistic, but more practical and permissive.

This chapter examines if and how rabbinic literature constitutes a unified historical phenomenon. A number of observations supporting such a unity are presented. A crucial role is ascribed to the hermeneutic assumption of such a unity. This assumption is supported by the aggregate nature of rabbinic works. Some of the effects of the juxtaposition of individual statements are illustrated, and the unreliability of rabbinic general principles is emphasized. An account is given of the role which the assumption of an oral tradition might play in accounting for the aggregate nature of the texts.

This chapter examines the methodologies, new approaches, and challenges in the use of rabbinic literature to study the history of Judaism in late antiquity. It provides some examples that demonstrate some of the issues concerning the applicability of rabbinic literature to the study of Judaism in late-Roman Palestine. It concludes that rabbinic literature can serve as a historical source, especially when read indirectly and through the lens of well-defined theoretical frameworks, and when perceived as a rabbinic cultural product that reflects delicate, sophisticated and hardly recoverable relationships between text and reality.

This introductory chapter lays out the theoretical foundations of the book. Topics discussed include Judiasm and Christianity between Persia and eastern Roman provinces during the 4th century, Babylonian rabbis between Persia and Roman Palestine, dating and interpreting rabbinic traditions, and competing theories of the character of the Bavli.

This chapter explains the main categories by which rabbinic documents can be sorted into groups. It introduces thirteen key small forms which make up the bulk of rabbinic literature. Also it presents five main arrangement principles according to which the small forms are put together in extended texts. An artificial synthesis of rabbinic ideas about God, the Torah, and Israel is developed, and why such syntheses have no direct evidence to support them, is also explained.

This chapter analyzes two distinct symbolic understandings of the Jerusalem temple and its rituals. It finds evidence for a belief in the temple as representing the cosmos in Josephus, Philo and rabbinic literature, and evidence for a belief that the earthly temple represents a heavenly sanctuary in the Pseudepigrapha, Dead Sea Scrolls, and other rabbinic sources. It attempts to identify one or another of these two symbolic understandings as the precursor of the other are rejected.

This chapter further exemplifies the claim regarding the Bavli's tendency to depict the most powerful groups and the major institutions of the distant past as controlled by rabbis, as opposed to the tendency of Palestinian rabbis to acknowledge the prominent role played by nonrabbis. It also supports the claim that the nonrabbinic Jewish world penetrated the walls of the Babylonian rabbinic study house in the form of literary traditions deriving from Roman Palestine, and perhaps from elsewhere in the Roman provincial world. It is shown that the rabbis domesticated these traditions by supplying them with a rabbinic veneer that transformed them into fit objects of Torah study. Several pre- and nonrabbinic traditions have been incorporated into the Tosefta, the Yerushalmi, and the Bavli, and all have been subjected to varying degrees of editorial revision and distortion. Palestinian rabbis emended these stories less radically than Babylonian rabbis, for reasons discussed in the previous chapter. This finding is significant, since it means that if we are able to correct for the distortions, rabbinic literature is a fruitful repository of nonrabbinic thought, belief, behavior, and gossip.

This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the application of rabbinic literature in studying the history of late-Roman Palestine. It has been demonstrated that a great deal of evidence preserved within the rabbinic tradition in medieval manuscripts originated in the Roman provinces of Palestine between c.200 and c.700 CE. It was also shown that rabbinic texts, even at their most reliable, can only provide a very partial glimpse of late-Roman Palestine. This chapter also highlights the inherent problems using rabbinic texts as historical source and suggests ways to overcome them.

This chapter explains the importance of Scripture for the rabbinic world-view, using the analogy of modern sciences. The presence of the idea of ‘canon’ in rabbinic writings is discussed, and how cutting Scripture down to segments makes it possible to appropriate biblical words for rabbinic themes is explained. It is suggested that the segments are treated as if they constituted the divine response in a conversation with the rabbis. Some common techniques of rabbinic Bible interpretation are listed.

This chapter examines the fact that many individual statements occurring in rabbinic texts are quoted as direct speech by named rabbis. Speech reports are interpreted as minimal narratives which provide the form, but not the contents, of a ‘history’ of rabbinic texts. Concentrating on the Mishnah, the anonymous voice which does the quoting is distinguished from the named voices which are quoted. Attention is drawn to the importance of disputes, where the two types of voices become mixed.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of rabbinic texts. Rabbinic texts constitute a scholarly discourse in that their statements are concerned with halakhic norms, or linguistic meaning in Scripture. And they are presented in a framework of arguments, and often contested. An overview of the chapters included in this volume is also presented. Thirteen small literary forms are described, which constitute apparently self-sufficient units of meaning and some of them occur in most rabbinic works. How the small forms are combined to build larger documents of various types is explained. Typical features of selected rabbinic genres are considered, including the Mishnah; Midrashic Bible commentaries and homilies; and the Babylonian Gemara.

This chapter examines problems concerning the use of rabbinic literature as a resource for studying the history of late-Roman Palestine. It discusses the rabbinic corpus, the composition and transmission of the texts, the language and the genres of rabbinic literature. It concludes that rabbinic literature requires very heavy processing before its potential as a historical source can be realised and it states that the extent to which scholars engaged with this literature have done the preliminary work remains patchy.

This chapter reexamines New Testament traditions concerning the Last Supper and Jesus’ overturning the tables in the Jerusalem temple. It argues that the last supper can be understood as a symbolic act seeking to emulate the temple, affirming its efficacy and meaning. The temple incident is understood as a development of earlier prophetic notions concerning the rejection of stolen sacrifices. In his concern for the poor — and in line with his communitarian social message — Jesus overturned the tables in the temple because he rejected the idea that the poor should be charged at all for their sacrifices. The differing rabbinic perspective on this question is also explored. The chapter concludes with brief survey of anti-temple polemics found in Acts, Hebrews, and Revelation.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about rabbinic texts of late antiquity and their application in the study of the history of late-Roman Palestine. It investigates whether these rabbinic texts existed in anything like their present form in late antiquity and examines the differing status as historical evidence for late antiquity of different sorts of rabbinic literature. It provides a series of thematic studies of historical topics for which rabbinic evidence has been considered as useful evidence and denied such a role by others.

This chapter introduces the book’s thesis that death penalty discourse helped both Rabbis and Christians to invent themselves in the first centuries of the common era. It reviews recent historiography of the early rabbinic movement, presents the book’s approach to reading rabbinic literature, and surveys the culture-critical concerns at the heart of the book: the politics of punishment, the politics of ritual, and the politics of imperialism. It addresses questions readers may bring to the subject, such as the historical reality of Jewish execution in antiquity, and the question of whether the classical Rabbis were for or against the death penalty. It also gives the plan of the book and describes the texts that the book will analyze.

This chapter examines the thematic discourse as it occurs in key rabbinic books on religious obligation: halakhah. Three main ways in which neighbouring statements can interact with each other in such works as the Mishnah and the Tosefta are described. It is shown that the individual halakhic statement is not as self-suffcient as it may seem, and yet its role within a larger whole is usually undefined. The resulting ambiguities are often fundamental, affecting the historical reconstruction of rabbinic Judaism, or Judaisms.

This chapter aims to define to state of investigation of research into rabbinic literature. It describes the most important approaches in research on the basis of which rabbinic literature has been and is being studied. These include the traditional halakhic approach, the exploitative-apologetic approach, and the thematic approach. This chapter concludes that the questioning of the redactional identity of the individual works of rabbinic literature inevitably also disavows the research approach to the work at the level of the final redaction.

This chapter examines the literary features in the Babylonian Talmud. The Gemara's use of earlier rabbinic voices appears partly carefully orchestrated and partly merely accumulative. The lemmatic division which defines the Gemara as a commentary of sorts on the Mishnah is described, the dialectical conversation which gives it its ‘talmudic’ flavour is analyzed, and some recurrent drills by which the Gemara interprets the Mishnah are listed. The way in which the Gemara suggests that the statements it quotes were historically connected, while presenting itself in an unbounded diversity of form and contents, is discussed.