A Life of Rabban Yoḥanan ben Zakkai (ca. 1-80 C.E.) 9789004509214, 9004509216

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STUDIA POST-BIBLICA VOLUMEN SEXTUM

STUDIA POST-BIBLICA ADIUVANTIBUS

J.

BOWMAN' J. HOFTIJZER . T. JANSMA' H. KOSMALA K. H. RENGSTORF . J. COERT RIJLAARSDAM G. SEVENSTER . D. WINTON THOMAS G. VAJDA . G. VERMES EDIDIT

P. A. H. DE BOER VOLUMEN SEXTUM

LEIDEN E. J. BRILL 1970

A LIFE OF YOHANAN BEN ZAKKAI Ca.

1-80

C. E.

BY

JACOB NEUSNER Professor of Religious Studies Brown University

Second Edition, Completely Revised

LEIDEN E. J. BRILL 1970

First Edition 1962

Copyright 1970 by E.]. Brill, Leiden, Netherlands All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduce or translated in anyform, by print,photoprint, microfilm, microfiche or any other means without written permission from the publisher PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS

In memory of Samuel Neusner Psalm 91.11

and Mildred Rabinowitz Richter Proverbs 31.28

TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

Preface to the Second Edition Abbreviations

• . . . . . .

PROLOGUE: "I WAS ASKING THE GODS FOR YOU". . . . . . .

XI XIX

1

PART ONE CHAOS AND ROUTINE 1.

II.

7 7 10 12

FAITHFUL CITY, FAITHFUL PEOPLE. i. The Temple ii. "Because of Their Sins" iii. Zakkai iv. Herod v. Economic Life vi. Education. vii. Social Classes viii. The Sects: Essenes. Sadducees, Pharisees. ix. Conversion x. Self-Government xi. Conclusion.

14 18 19 20 24 26 28

FILLING THEIR TREASURIES. i. The Obscure Years . ii. Shammai and Hillel . iii. Hillel's Disciple iv. "0 Galilee, Galilee!" v. Zaccheus jZakkai vi. Conclusion.

31 31 33 40 47 53 56

13

TABLE

VIII

III.

OF

CONTENTS

MIGHTY HAMMER. i. Return to Jerusalem. ii. The Priests and the Pharisees. iii. The Jerusalem Pharisees . iv. Y ol).anan and the Sons of the High Priests v. Yol).anan and the Temple Councillor vi. Y ol).anan and the Sadducees vii. The Priests' Response to Y ol).anan viii. Y ol).anan and the Cult . ix. Conclusion. PART

59 59 61 66 70 74 75 86 89 92

TWO

SOCIETY AND SCRIPTURE IV.

V.

FATHER OF WISDOM: THE DISCIPLES i. Introduction . ii. Study of Torah as a Life-Style iii. Torah and Fellowship. iv. The Disciples v. Conclusion.

97 97 98 103 106 116

THE SPLENDOR OF WISDOM: THE MASTER The Content of "Torah" . ii. Between Two Revolutions . iii. Parables. iv. Analogical Exegesis . v. Mystical Exegesis . vi. Conclusion.

118 118 120 122 124 134 141

1.

PART

THREE

DEATH AND REBIRTH VI.

LIGHT OF THE WORLD. i. Introduction . ii. Counsels of Caution iii. Vespasian and Jerusalem iv. The Escape v. Rome and the Pharisees vi. Conclusion.

145 145 147 152 157 166 171

TABLE OF VII.

CONTENTS

"HAPPY ARE YOU, 0 ISRAEL" i. Introduction . ii. Theological Challenge. iii. Y ol).anan's Response iv. "F or I Desire Mercy, Not Sacrifice" . v. Conclusion.

IX

174 174 177 183 188 193

VIII. TALL PILLAR . Introduction . i. ii. The Other Sects iii. Advantages of the Pharisees iv. Post-War Palestine v. Yol).anan's Enactments at.Yavneh. vi. Yol).anan's Policy at Yavneh vii. Opposition viii. Defender of the Faith . ix. Conclusion.

196 196 196 198 199 203 210 215 218 225

EPILOGUE: FATHER OF THE FUTURE

227

ApPENDICES I.

The Letters of Y ol).anan ben Zakkai and Simeon ben Gamaliel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237

II.

"Let Your Garments Be Always White"

239

III.

Kemin Homer. Philo and Y ol).anan

240

IV.

Allon on Yavneh. . . . . . .

243

V.

"Righteousness Exalteth a Nation"

246

Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . .

250

Index of Biblical and Talmudic Citations.

265

General Index . . . . . . . . . . . .

274

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION Coming to maturity at one of the great turning points in the history of Judaism, Rabban Yol).anan ben Zakkai set the course followed by subsequent generations for many centuries. While the faith ofIsrael undoubtedly has been enriched by many other figures from biblical times to our own day, none apart from Moses and Jeremiah held such extraordinary responsibility. Second to these two alone, unendowed with prophetic gifts, therefore without the assurance afforded to the prophet by the Divine word, Y ol).anan guided both the faith and the people of Israel beyond the disaster of the destruction of the second temple and then laid foundations which have endured to this very day. We know only a few of the barest facts about him. We do not know what he looked like or how he lived from day to day. We do not even know what he thought about many of the great issues of his day. Had he lived in some less interesting time, he would have been unknown in life, forgotten afterward. His kind of sober, irenic wisdom in politics, combined with intense religious concern, does not usually produce a broad reputation or vivid memories. We know for certain only this, that when everyone else had given up hope, Y o1).anan found reason to persevere. A man who overcomes despair in a time of disaster and keeps his eye upon the important matters in a day of confusion-does it count that we know a little of what he said, but not what he looked like? In the first century men generally regarded religion as an irreducible historical reality. They for the most part did not try to explain it as a consequence of economic, social, or psychological causes. For Jews, Scripture embodied the record of man's genuine religious experience. They therefore looked into its ancient literature to find paradigmatic instruction on the nature of religion. They did so through the medium of disciplined exegesis, called midrash (from darash, to search). "The word of God is like fire," the Jewish sages taught, "and like the hammer that breaks the rock into pieces." No word of Scripture could therefore fail to yield a particular nuance of light, and, properly understood, none was irrelevant to events at hand. l Some 1

Jet.

23 :29, b. Sanh. 34a.

XII

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

men were prepared to give their lives for Scriptural imperatives. If today men die for nation or class, one legitimately turns to study the sources of nationalism or class loyalty. In the first century men died for faith. What was the content and direction of that faith? How did Jews mediate between the unchanging word of Scriptural religion and the inconstant world in which they lived? We turn to the lives of those who best exemplified the religion of their time, for from the perspective of a later day, a few men appear to have embodied major elements of Scriptural faith and experience, providing a living midrash of Scripture by re-enacting a part of the biblical drama in their own age and idiom. Y ol;anan was one such man. His direct religious experience drew, in part, on the Scriptural symbols provided by Ezekiel's vision of the chariot. His social and political thought finds significant parallel in the teachings of Jeremiah at the fall of the first temple in 586 B.C. His response to the destruction of the second temple in 70 A.D. recalls the capacity to seize upon disaster to transform the religious understanding which was exhibited by Hosea before the fall of Samaria and by Second Isaiah in the J udean Exile in Babylon. His constructive activity at Yavneh bears comparison to that of Ezra in Jerusalem. Yol;anan thus provides an interesting example of the structure of a Scripturally-centered religious experience. He moreover was one of the leaders of the Pharisaic community in Jerusalem before the destruction of the Temple, and afterward he undertook the work of reconstruction. 1 This book does not offer a full-length portrait of Y ol;anan ben Zakkai. Such a portrait is not possible, for, as I said, the sources do not provide us with adequate information. We moreover have not yet found a convincing way of isolating earlier from later traditions about him except in a few instances, and we have no way of determining their historical accuracy. As Professor Judah Goldin writes: ... not only do the primary sources disappoint us deeply in the amount of reliable historical detail they provide, but even as regards 1 Aside from brief articles in encyclopedias, three longer monographs have been written on Y oh-anan ben Zakkai: M. Landau, "Bilder aus dem leben und Wirken der Rabbiner: Rabbi Jochanan ben Sakkai," MGW], 1. 1852, pp. 163-176, 283-295, 323-335; ]. Spitz, Rabban ]ochanan ben Sakkai (Berlin, 1883), and A. Schlatter, "Jochanan ben Zakkai, der Zeitgenosse der Apostel" (Gutersloh, 1899) in Beitrage zur Fijrderung christlicher Theologie, III, 4. Schlatter's article should be read in the light of L. Blau's critical review, "J ochanan ben Zakkai in christlicher Beleuchtung," MGW] VII (1899), pp. 548-561. Articles on particular aspects of Yoh-anan ben Zakkai's career are cited below.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

XIII

the opinions and teachings of the Sages, one is left to guess at what is early and what is late. In short, there is practically no way to get at development ... 1

Goldin rightly stresses that such a work as this is filled with speculation. It is useful mainly as a collection of sources about a specific sage. I have tried to organize the extant data, all of which are quoted or cited in the pages that follow, by historical and sociological principles. According to the first I have grouped the stories dealing with various periods of Yol).anan's life in the temporal sequence I believe obviously appropriate, even though these stories certainly did not originate in such an orderly, historical way. Chapters Two, Three, Six, Seven and Eight provide a chronological narrative of Yol).anan's education, early career in Galilee, years in Jerusalem, activities during the war of 66-73, and leadership at Yavneh afterward. According to the second, I have analyzed Yol).anan's religious ideas according to Max Weber's insights concerning the tension between charisma and routine within religious life. As I see it, Y ol).anan encountered a highly spontaneous kind of Judaism in his Galilee years and a thoroughly routinized faith in Jerusalem afterward. The Pharisaic religion of "Torah," represented by Yol).anan ben Zakkai, constitutes a synthesis between the two polar principles. Routine is imposed by the requirement regularly to study a given text. Spontaneity and charisma emerge in two ways: first, in the very content of the biblical text, which embodies the highly charismatic experiences of earlier ages; second, in the unexpected and unpredictable response of the sage to the text. This synthesis is described in Chapter Three. Its social consequences are treated in Chapter Four, and the hermeneutical and mystical aspects in Chapter Five. The last four chapters provide a view of how the religion of "Torah" guided Yol).anan's thought and action in response to great historical events, theological issues, and social problems. By forming the historical material into such a paradigmatic structure for religious-sociological investigation, I have probably forced it to conform to a much too neat ideal-type. But this has provided the possibility of reaching more useful insights into the history of first-century Judaism than are to be gained from a mere rehearsal of texts. The reader however is warned that it is I who see Y ol).anan's 1 In Charles J. Adams, ed., A Reader's Guide to the Great Religions (N.Y., 1965), p. 223. I have discussed the issue more fully in "In Quest of the Historical Rabban Yol).anan ben Zakkai," HTR, 59 (1966), pp. 391-413.

XIV

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

Galilee and Jerusalem years as encounters with antithetical principles in religious life, and his subsequent career in teaching and leadership as a synthesis of them. My interpretation of the literary data has imposed this structure. For me, and I hope for the reader, it brings a measure of order out of chaos. That interpretation offers an opportunity to use a fruitful sociological theory in studying otherwise unrelated stories and sayings. But we cannot confuse interpretation of texts not yet subjected to careful form-critical studies with sound, positive history. An historical evaluation of what Y ol).anan "really" said and did must await the results of other kinds of inquiry than are represented in this book. In the 1962 edition, studies for which started in 1959, I presented the sources and scholarly discussion as I then comprehended matters. Since that time, I have continued to pursue researches on Y ol).anan, to correct errors critics have generously called to my attention, and to add to my work the recent insights of others. The results of nearly a decade of study and, especially, of further reflection are included here. I have paid much attention to Y ol).anan's thoughts and feelings at the great turning points of his life and to why he was able to do what he did. Obviously my conclusions are merely conjectural, subjective, and, despite my best efforts at self-criticism, probably in the main anachronistic. I therefore offer them with considerable hesitation. I have thus concentrated here on providing a completely revised and expanded account of Yol).anan's life. Ina companion studyl I plan to present an analysis of the sources and to study how the traditions on Y ol).anan seem to have taken shape, the relationships between various exempla of his sayings, and other form-critical and literary problems. At first I thought these two sorts of inquiries belonged together. Further consideration suggested they are entirely separate and had best stand, if interrelated, by themselves, for they answer different questions, depend on different methods, and are addressed to different audiences. The questions of primary concern for this biography derive from the history of religions. My interest here is in the ways rabbinical Judaism perceived and, at the same time, shaped reality. No figure in the history of Judaism more clearly reveals the form of rabbinical faith. None more decisively affected the history of Jewry and of Judaism by means of that faith. It suffices for our present study to note that the sayings and stories 1

Development of a Legend: Studies on the Traditions concerning Yof;;anan ben Zakkai,

in press.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

xv

about Y ol).anan ben Zakkai were transmitted in a long process of literary tradition. We do not know whether this tradition was at first primarily oral or written, but this is not relevant to a biography of Y ol).anan ben Zakkai. What is relevant is that the tradition has drastically reshaped the stories of Yol).anan's life and imposed on them forms which the stories probably did not exhibit to begin with. Striking examples of these forms include the recension of Yol).anan's disputes with the Sadducees and his various conversations with his students. Study of the way in which biographical materials have been shaped by the process of tradition has had striking success in scholarship on the Gospels. One would expect, therefore, that such criticism of the forms of recension might throw light on the way in which material on Y ol).anan ben Zakkai has been shaped and developed or diminished by the process of tradition. Rabbinic literature certainly has a precise set of forms in which material is cast. These forms are clearly marked, for instance, in various sections of the Mishnah, and material is manifestly bent to fit the forms. Study of forms and of the way in which material has been adapted to them and discovery of the traces of adaptation might help in estimating more accurately the historical reliability and the original content of the stories about Y ol).anan ben Zakkai. Such a study requires, however, more fundamental research on the historical processes and forms of transmitting rabbinic traditions than has been done to date. A biography of Y ol).anan ben Zakkai is the wrong frame of reference for such form-criticism, and I have not here undertaken it. Further critical evaluation of the traditions must await the definition and historical elucidation of the forms of recension applying to rabbinic traditions. 1 1 See especially Vincent Taylor, Formation of the Gospel Tradition (London, 1953), pp. 207-8. I have found few points of explanatory or inferential character added to earlier accounts; slight tendency, in spite of additions, for the accounts to become shorter; no place where direct speech is replaced by indirect; and no evidence that the form of later versions became perceptibly rounded and less detailed. While all these processes of recension may have taken place, there is no specific and obvious evidence in the sources on Y o1;tanan ben Zakkai that they have taken place. Y o1;tanan's teachings were clearly transmitted by those who heard them, for example Mishnah Ed. 8.7, b. Sot. 5. (cf. y. Sot. 5.6); b. Ket. 14a; b. Hag. 3b (Mishnah Yad. 4.3, Tos. Yad. 2.16); Tos. Hag. 3.36; Sifra Shemini 7.12 (Weiss ed., 54a), etc. In such instances, Yo1;tanan's teachings were transmitted directly by, and for the purposes of, the next generation, and not by means of an edited collection of sayings. For evidences that some of Yo1;tanan's sayings were edited and transmitted in very particular forms, see Louis Finkelstein, Mavo LeMasekhet Avot veAvot de Rabbi Natan [Introduction to Tractate Avot and Avot de Rabbi Nathan] (N.Y., 1950),

XVI

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

Perhaps a personal word may not be out of order. Many years ago, when I began my studies of Y ol;1anan ben Zakkai, I was drawn to him out of the deepening gloom of the Cold War. Day by day one looked to the skies, fearful of sighting that single plane bearing a single bomb to end the life of the city. What struck me then was the challenge of 'the next day,' the 10th of Av in Yavneh, or who knew what date the stars then would designate. He who had passed through that awful time would bear witness that life could go on, in new forms to be sure, and that men confidently might look beyond disaster. Now again men stand at a crossroads, but the ways come from other pp. 38-43, 60-61; Y. N. Epstein, Mavo'ot LeSifrut Ha Tannaim [Introductions to Tannaitic Literature] (Jerusalem, 1957), pp. 40-41, 295-6, 339-401 (on Mishnah Sot. 8-9). By the time of Abba Shaul, the material in Avot and Avot de Rabbi Natan relating to Yol;1anan's conversations with his students was certainly edited in its final form, for Abba Shaul presents traditions directly contradictory to those in the texts. Certainly in the lifetime of Eleazar ben Arakh, and possibly even before the death of Yol;1anan ben Zakkai, Y ol;1anan's high praise of Eleazar must have been written down or given a final form for oral transmission, for it is doubtful that he could have been so praised after he had separated from the Yavneh consistory. It is doubtful that the confusion between Eliezer ben Hyrcanus and Eleazar ben Arakh could have persisted if Eleazar's days of great learning had passed. Other consistent markings of traditions about Y ol;1anan include the following forms: 'amru