The Oxford History of the Biblical World (103 page)

Although it is commonplace to refer to “the rabbis” and to “rabbinic Judaism,” each of these terms subsumes significant diversity. Not only do each of the foundation documents of rabbinic Judaism, completed between the third and seventh centuries, preserve diverse opinions on a given topic, but each document has its distinctive concerns, perspectives, and methods.

The earliest rabbinic writing, the Mishnah, was completed about 200
CE
. Later rabbinic works attribute its editing to Rabbi Judah the Patriarch, although the Mishnah makes no mention of this. The Mishnah is arranged by topic. It consists of six divisions or orders:
Zera’im
/Seeds (agricultural laws),
Mo’ed/
Appointed Times (festivals), Nashim/Women (marriage law), Neziqin/Damages (civil law, contracts, torts),
Qodashim/
Holy Things (sacrifices), and Toharot/Purities (sources of impurity, means of purification). The orders are divided further into sixty-three tractates. With the exception of the tractate
Pirqei
Abot/Sayings of the Fathers, which may slightly postdate the remainder of the Mishnah, the latter is a kind of book of laws, albeit one that preserves diverse and often contradictory opinions on a given topic.

The degree to which the contents of the Mishnah reflect or are rooted in the life of third-century Palestine varies. Much of the Mishnah concerns Temple ritual, although at the time of the Mishnah’s promulgation the Temple had been absent for more than a century. The Mishnah is also striking in that it rarely endeavors to justify its positions through scriptural citations. This would be left to the two Talmuds—the Palestinian Talmud, also referred to as the Jerusalem Talmud or the Talmud of the Land of Israel, and the Babylonian Talmud. The former was completed around 400
CE
, whereas the latter, the product of the rabbinical academies of the Sassanian empire, dates from a century or so later. Both are essentially commentaries on the Mishnah and consist of mishnaic passages followed by elucidations of the Mishnah passage. The Talmuds include not only legal or halakic material but also haggadic texts, which are narratives of nonobligatory material, often presented in the form of didactic stories.

In addition to the Mishnah and its commentaries, the rabbis of the first seven centuries also produced compilations of scriptural exegesis known as Midrashim. The process of
midrash,
or inquiry, and its outcome in the form of exegetical collections, were the vehicle by which the rabbis explored the meanings of various books of the Hebrew Bible.

During the same period in which the formative documents of rabbinic Judaism were produced, the rabbis developed the belief that their teachings, embodied in these documents, had the same authority as scripture. The rabbis even went a step further to articulate the central distinctive tenet of rabbinic Judaism—that is, the Torah itself consisted of both the oral Torah and the written Torah. According to rabbinic belief, at Mount Sinai God had revealed the dual Torah to Moses. But whereas the written Torah had been revealed to all of Israel, the oral Torah had been transmitted from one generation of sages to the next, by means of memorization and recitation, in a chain of tradition that linked the revelation at Sinai to the rabbis of the Mishnah, the foundation document of the oral Torah.

For the rabbis, a scholarly elite of Late Antique holy men, the most worthwhile activity was the study of Torah, a holiness-producing activity. Insofar as one could know God or imitate God, it was through the study of his Torah. Through the mastery of Torah, the rabbi came to embody Torah. His activities on earth echoed the activities in heaven, where not only Moses but also God studied Torah.

With the exception of the religious systems of such groups as the Jews of Ethiopia and the Samaritans and Karaites (the latter two having been treated at times as part of, and at other times as separate from, the Jewish community), all the varieties of
modern Judaism are forms of rabbinic Judaism. But during the formative centuries of rabbinic Judaism, it is unclear how much authority the rabbis exercised outside their own circles, especially over the Jewish communities of the Roman Diaspora. As the historian Shaye Cohen has aptly summarized, the Diaspora communities probably celebrated the Sabbath, followed Jewish dietary laws, and worshiped God quite independently of the rabbis.

In Palestine, the rabbinic presence and rabbinic authority seem to have increased significantly from the second to the seventh centuries. The major arena of rabbinic authority was probably the rabbinic court. But whereas rabbinic literature provides some information concerning the kinds of cases that may have been adjudicated, it yields little information about who, when, where, and at whose bidding Jewish men and women resorted to those courts, whether in place of or in addition to the Roman courts. The situation in Sassanian Babylonia was similar, although the rabbinic presence there begins slightly later than in Palestine, where the movement emerged. Eventually, the Babylonian rabbinic academies surpassed the Palestinian academies in importance, and the Babylonian Talmud became the foundation document for succeeding centuries of Jewish learning.

Whereas the office of rabbi survived and evolved, imperial legislation provides evidence that the patriarchate had ceased by 429. The reasons for this cessation are unknown, but it may have been abolished by the Roman government. Still, both rabbinic literature and Roman law reveal the growing authority of the patriarchate as it developed from the second through the close of the fourth centuries. The patriarch (Hebrew
nasi)
functioned initially as the head of the major rabbinic academy and of the Sanhedrin in Palestine, but by the late fourth century Roman law had granted the patriarch jurisdiction over all of the empire’s Jewish communities, including the right to collect taxes. Most of the increase in power occurred under Christian rule. During the reign of Theodosius (379–95), Roman law granted the patriarch the titles of
clarissimus
and
illustris,
typically bestowed on the highest magistrates and on members of the senatorial order. The letters of Libanius include correspondence, dating from 388 to 393, between him and the patriarch Gamaliel V, suggesting that Gamaliel, like Libanius himself and the Christian bishops, was part of the cultured and powerful elite described above.

Although Gamaliel was typical neither of the rabbis nor of the larger Jewish population, he reminds us that the Jewish communities of Late Antique Palestine did not exist in isolation from a larger eastern Mediterranean Greco-Roman culture. Literary sources, as well as regional surveys and excavations, especially in lower Galilee, suggest that even the predominantly Jewish cities had mixed populations and were linked by trading patterns and the Roman road system to the predominantly non-Jewish cities of the coastal area and elsewhere.

Until recently most studies of Jewish women in the Roman Empire were confined to their depictions in the formative documents of rabbinic Judaism. Rabbinic literature, however, reveals much more about the roles of women in the intellectual landscape of the rabbis than it does about the opportunities and restrictions of the flesh-and-blood women of late antiquity.

As Jacob Neusner has demonstrated, rabbinic interest in women focused on such aspects as marriage and divorce (which necessitated transfer of the woman and her property) and on women as purveyors of uncleanliness because of menstruation—aspects that threatened the rabbis’ constructions of an ordered and sanctified world. Analogously to the depictions of women in the writings of the roughly contemporary church fathers, the rabbis bestowed honor and praise on the mother, wife, and daughter who functioned within the framework of rabbinic law. Outside its constraints, the female was a source of chaos and disorder.

Rabbinic literature, of course, is largely interested in the activities of the rabbis, for whom holiness was acquired through the study of Torah and the performance of the commandments preserved in the dual Torah. In general, rabbinic law exempted women from the study of Torah and from the performance of commandments that were positive and time-bound. Nevertheless, the rabbis did not treat women as a seamless group. The Mishnah and Talmuds distinguish between dependent and autonomous women, the latter including unmarried adult daughters, widows, and divorcees. Unlike their dependent counterparts, they could arrange their own marriages, as well as control and dispose of their property. Thus rabbinic literature provides the framework in which some women could amass wealth and power.

The existence of such women has been confirmed by the pioneering studies of Ross Kraemer and Bernadette Brooten. Their examination of inscriptions, almost all of which are from the Roman Diaspora, indicate that at least some women served as synagogue officials and as donors, participating in the system of benefactions discussed earlier. To be sure, these women, like their pagan and Christian counterparts, were exceptional. The majority of women lived in poverty and labored from sunup to sundown in child care and the production of food and clothing. But the inscriptions suggest that high socioeconomic status may have been a more decisive factor in determining the opportunities and restrictions of the empire’s women than was religious identity and, at times, even gender.

The nonrabbinic evidence for Palestinian Jewish women is frustratingly small. One can only speculate, for example, about the range of options that women exercised in seeking a divorce. Whereas Roman law allowed both men and women to initiate divorces, rabbinic law limited this to males—although mechanisms were devised to persuade recalcitrant husbands, under some circumstances, to grant divorces to their wives. Did such women turn to the Roman courts? The second-century
CE
archive of Babata, a cache of thirty-five legal documents found in the Judean desert and belonging to a young and wealthy widow, suggests that at least some women made use of the Roman courts in their legal affairs.

The cache, which consists of documents in Greek, Nabatean, and Aramaic, includes property deeds, documents concerning lawsuits brought by and against Babata, and marriage contracts. Many of these documents conform to Roman law. We cannot determine the degree to which Babata was representative of Palestinian Jewish women of her era, a time when the rabbinic movement was still in its infancy. However, the Babata archive raises again the questions concerning the degree to which Palestinian Jews participated in the larger Greco-Roman culture of which they were part and from which, at least in some ways, they were distinct.

Not only Palestine but the entire Roman east as well would be shaken by the resumption of the perennial warfare between Byzantium and Sassanian Persia during the latter half of the sixth and the early seventh centuries. Perhaps exhausted by warfare, the Byzantine emperor Maurice (582–602) and the Persian king Chosroes II (590–628) made an “eternal” pact of peace. The peace lasted approximately a decade, but was shattered when Maurice was murdered by the usurper Phocas. In 614 Chosroes conquered Jerusalem, from which he is said to have taken the true cross and transported it to Persia. Persian rule was shortlived. The Byzantine emperor Heraclius (610–41) left Constantinople in 622 to launch a major counterattack, triumphantly returning the cross to Jerusalem eight years later.

Weakened, however, by decades of conflict, neither the Sassanian nor the Byzantine armies were any match for the forces of Islam, which between 634 and 644 would conquer the Sassanian empire and much of Byzantium as well. In 638, under the leadership of Umar, the second caliph, Muslim forces peacefully entered Jerusalem, following the surrender of the city by the Christian patriarch Sophronius. With the exception of the periods of Crusader rule (1089–1187,1229–44), Jerusalem would remain in Muslim hands until 1917.

At about the same time that Chosroes II was invading Byzantine territory, Islam holds that the prophet Muhammad was beginning to receive revelations from God, mediated by the angel Gabriel and eventually embodied in the Quran. Islam understands Muhammad as the seal of the prophets, bringing to humankind a final and perfect form of monotheism. In this sense, Islam can be understood as a continuation of and a correction of the older monotheistic traditions of Judaism and Christianity. Like Judaism and Christianity, Islam views Abraham as the ancestral figure and as the perfect man of faith.

To be sure, historians disagree over the precise nature of the relationship between early Islam and contemporary Judaism and Christianity. It is clear, however, that Jerusalem, identified as the city of the prophets and the site of Solomon’s Temple, occupied a place of profound importance in emerging Islam. For a brief period, before Muhammad’s
hijra,
or emigration, from Mecca to Medina in 622, the direction of prayer was toward Jerusalem; the Quran notes the change in the direction of prayer to Mecca.

Unlike many earlier conquerors of the Holy City, Umar’s forces would neither massacre its inhabitants nor destroy the religious monuments of the vanquished. Later sources describe Umar’s interest in the Temple Mount, the “Noble Sanctuary” (Arabic
Haram al-Sharif).
Horrified by the state of ruin and filth in which the Byzantine Christians had kept the Temple Mount, thereby testifying to the victory of the “new Israel” over the “old,” Umar ordered that it be cleaned in its entirety. Sometime thereafter a modest mosque was built at the southern end of the old Herodian platform.

In 691/692 the magnificent Dome of the Rock, a rotunda on an octagonal base built by the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik, was completed. The Dome, which dominates the Haram today, affirmed the triumph of Islam in the Christian showplace
of Jerusalem. Early Muslim authorities would identify Jerusalem as the destination of the prophet Muhammad’s “night journey,” and the rock as the place from where he ascended to heaven, thus strengthening for Islam the sanctity and significance of Jerusalem. So, too, as in Judaism and Christianity, Jerusalem would assume an important role in Muslim beliefs concerning the end time.