Jewish Studies on Premodern Periods: A Handbook [1 ed.] 9783110419399, 9783110418873, 9783110418989, 2022944282

Citation preview

Jewish Studies on Premodern Periods

Jewish Studies on Premodern Periods A Handbook Edited by Carl S. Ehrlich and Sara R. Horowitz Assistant Editor — Rabbinic & Medieval Periods: Yedida C. Eisenstat

ISBN 978-3-11-041939-9 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-041887-3 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-041898-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2022944282 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: A reconstruction of the Second Temple from a model of Herodian Jerusalem that was formerly at the Holyland Hotel and is currently at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Israel. Photo by Carl S. Ehrlich. Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. www.degruyter.com

In honor of Sydney Eisen z”l and Michael Brown Founders & Builders of Jewish Studies at York University

Figure 1: The first five directors of the (Israel and Golda Koschitzky) Centre for Jewish Studies at York University celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary. From left to right: Michael Brown, Martin I. Lockshin, Sydney Eisen z”l, Sara R. Horowitz, and Carl S. Ehrlich. Photo by Gary Beechey, courtesy of the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies.

Acknowledgements This volume developed from a symposium on The State of Jewish Studies: Perspectives on Premodern Periods convened at the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University on December 7–8, 2014. The editors are grateful to the participants in that symposium, as well as to the chairs of the five panels that were the centerpiece of the symposium. Special thanks to Jonathan D. Sarna of Brandeis University and to Michael Brown of York University, who gave public plenary lectures during the symposium that are not part of this volume but inform its spirit. The preparation of this volume has taken much longer than anticipated. As the volume took shape, we felt the need to reach beyond the essays contributed by conference participants to give it the breadth and depth that the field of Jewish studies demands. We are most grateful to those who met tight deadlines to cover needed areas. We regret that time constraints did not allow for the essay we envisioned on the history of the Rabbinic Period to be included in this volume. The time that elapsed between the first and last submissions to the volume means that the essays reflect a range of years of preparation. While all of the authors were given the opportunity to update their contributions to reflect newly published work in the field, other commitments meant that some of the authors only managed to update their bibliographies but not the substance of their essays themselves. Others were able to do more extensive revisions. We are grateful to De Gruyter Press for accepting this volume for publication and wish to extend our thanks to our contacts at the Press, who have shown exemplary patience with us and with whom it has been a delight to work: Sabina Dabrowski, Dr. Albrecht Döhnert, Alice Meroz, Katrin Mittmann, and Dr. Sophie Wagenhofer. A special word of thanks to our former colleague Dr. Yedida C. Eisenstat, who lent her expertise in helping to edit the contributions relating to the Rabbinic and Medieval periods. For her meticulous copyediting, we are most grateful to Andrea Knight, and, for his excellent indexing, we are very grateful to Stephen Ullstrom both of whose work on this volume was supported by a generous grant from the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies. The director of the German Protestant Institute of Archaeology in Jerusalem (Deutsches Evangelisches Institut or DEI), Dieter Vieweger, generously provided us with high-quality photos to illustrate one of this volume’s chapters at very short notice. Both the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University generously supported the original symposium out of which this volume grew. While both of these institutions provided financial support, the latter also provided all the logistical support needed for the efficient running of a symposium. Also providing financial support for the symposium were the following units at

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110418873-202

VIII

Acknowledgements

York University: the Department of History, the Department of Humanities, the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, and the Graduate Program in Interdisciplinary Studies. In addition, we gratefully acknowledge those individuals whose support and assistance were vital to the 2014 symposium. Our faculty’s outstanding Research Officer, Janet Friskney, provided invaluable help in shepherding us through the application for a SSHRC grant. For his invaluable help in the grant application and for overseeing the logistics of all aspects of this symposium, we are most grateful to our colleague Randal Schnoor, who was serving as the Koschitzky Centre’s Research Associate at the time. In addition, we were most ably aided in the logistics and planning by our former Graduate Research Assistant, Francine Buchner, to whom we would also like to express our deepest gratitude. No one knows more about the workings of York University and navigating one’s way through its labyrinthine administrative structures than does our administrative staff. Our thanks go, therefore, to both Merle Lightman, our long-serving (and now retired) Centre Coordinator, and to Christine Vivaldo, her replacement while she was recuperating from knee replacement surgery. According to the famous rabbinic dictum ‫( אם אין קמח אין תורה‬without food there is no scholarship),1 and so we are grateful to Alona Tamsout and her crew for seeing to our culinary desires in a delicious manner during the symposium. Nourishment for the soul was provided by Judith Cohen and Demetrios Petsalakis, who performed Sephardic music for the symposium participants. We are most grateful to them for sharing their musical talents. And a special shout-out of thanks to our student helpers, who made sure that we all managed to get where we had to get and that everything there was set up correctly. Most importantly, our heartfelt thanks to all the participants in the symposium, who helped to make the symposium a truly memorable and productive event, and to all the excellent contributors to this volume. Sadly, one of the contributors to both the symposium and to this volume has passed away in the interim. Vivian B. Mann was a wonderful scholar and human being. May her memory be a blessing! In light of this sad situation, we gratefully acknowledge the invaluable contribution of Vivian’s former Research Associate, Gabriel Goldstein, who was kind enough to proofread her contribution to this volume. In the planning of the symposium and the production of this volume, we are grateful as always for the encouragement and support of our respective spouses, Michal Shekel and Jonathan Richler, who are always there for us with a ready ear and whose influence on our academic careers is immeasurable. Finally, we dedicate this volume to the two people to whom Jewish Studies at York University owes its existence: Sydney Eisen, who worked to establish Jewish studies at York as an integral field of humanistic inquiry, and Michael Brown, who

 m. Avot 3:21.

Acknowledgements

IX

developed the field of Jewish studies in Canada and led the Centre during its formative years. We owe these two foundational figures an immeasurable debt. Alas, Sydney Eisen (1929–2022), one of our dedicatees, passed away as we were going to press. Syd’s death was preceded only a few days earlier by that of Julia Koschitzky (1939–2022), one of the world’s leading supporters of Jewish education at all levels, whose engagement with our Centre inspired us and helped Jewish studies flourish at York University. May the memory of the righteous be a blessing (‫)זכר צדיקים לברכה‬. Carl S. Ehrlich & Sara R. Horowitz Shushan Purim 5782

While this volume was in press one year after the above words were written, we received the sad news that our other dedicatee, Michael Brown (1938–2023), had also passed away. May his memory be a blessing (‫)יהי זכרו ברוך‬.

X

Acknowledgements

Figure 2: The late Vivian B. Mann z”l, preparing for her lecture at the symposium on “The State of Jewish Studies: Perspectives on Premodern Periods” at York University in December 2014. Photo by Gary Beechey, courtesy of the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies.

Contents Acknowledgements Carl S. Ehrlich Introduction

VII

1

Section 1: The First Temple Period Mary Joan Winn Leith Biblical Israel: History and Historiography to 586 BCE

13

Konrad Schmid Hebrew Writings and Literary Works from the First Temple Period (Until the Sixth Century BCE) 27 Beth Alpert Nakhai Revisiting Iron Age Israel: New Archaeological Approaches

37

Ronald Hendel Religion, Theology, and Thought in the First Temple Period: The Great and Little Traditions 63

Section 2: The Second Temple Period Steve Mason Second Temple Studies: The Past, Present, and Future of the Ioudaioi Eileen Schuller Second Temple Literature and Texts

79

109

Benjamin D. Gordon The Archaeology of the Second Temple Period in Judea: New Discoveries and Research 123 Angela Kim Harkins Changes in the Study of the Religion, Theology, and Thought in the Second Temple Period: A Reappraisal of the Teacher of Righteousness 149

XII

Contents

Section 3: The Rabbinic Period Robert Brody The Study of Classical Rabbinic Literature in the Last Quarter-Century

165

Steven Fine Rabbi Akiba in 3D: Artifact, Text, and the Recent History of Judaism in Late Antiquity 183 David Kraemer Rabbinic Religion and Thought

199

Section 4: The Medieval Period Judith R. Baskin Medieval Jewish Social History: Three Areas of Gender-Conscious Research 215 Martin I. Lockshin A Retrospective Look at the Modern Study of Medieval Jewish Bible Commentaries 241 Vivian B. Mann The New in Medieval Jewish Art and Architecture

257

Eric Lawee Scholarship in Recent Decades on Jewish Religion and Thought in Medieval and Early Modern Times: Changing Paradigms, New Perspectives, Future Prospects 275 Sara R. Horowitz Afterword 293 Contributors

299

Author Index

303

Subject Index

309

Primary Sources Index

321

Carl S. Ehrlich

Introduction Jewish Studies: Why Now and How? Our world changed in 1989. The Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union imploded. I remember turning to my wife and remarking to her that the binary East/West or capitalist/communist world in which we had grown up would not be the world that our children would know and eventually inherit. Their global perceptions would be different from ours. On the other hand, as I do a final edit on these words in March 2022, Russia has invaded Ukraine. Maybe the world my grandchildren will inherit will not be so different from the one in which my generation grew up after all. And yet, unbeknownst to us at the time, another event took place that year that was to have as great an impact on our lives – if not a greater personal impact – than the dramatic fall of the Eastern Bloc. It was an event that would ultimately cause us to uproot our family and move from our native New England to Toronto, a city geographically situated in the Midwest but intellectually still a part of the east-coast world we had abandoned. This event, which turned us from Yankees into Canucks, did not have the global impact of the parting of the Iron Curtain nor the drama of the parting of the Red Sea as interpreted by Hollywood.1 Indeed, this event – the founding of York University’s Centre for Jewish Studies (later to be known, thanks to the generosity of the Koschitzky family, as the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies) – has served as the catalyst for the present volume and the symposium on which the latter is based. However, it wasn’t until I had begun my eighteenth year of employment at York that I even became aware that this additional event had taken place in 1989. When I was appointed director of the Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University in 2013, a position I held until 2021, I had occasion to read my way through a number of supporting documents that served to orient me in my new position. It was in this manner that I learned that York’s Centre for Jewish Studies had been founded in 1989, a fact that surprised me at the time, since I knew that the first appointments in Jewish studies here had already been made in 1968. In that year, Michael Brown and the late Sol Tanenzapf were hired to teach the field at Sydney Eisen’s initiative, marking York as one of the trendsetters in the establishment of Jewish studies as an academic discipline in the non-sectarian North American university. Indeed, when my late father, Leonard H. Ehrlich, and a handful of his colleagues at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst set about establishing their own Judaic

 See, most famously, the two versions of The Ten Commandments directed by Cecil B. DeMille in 1923 and 1956. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110418873-001

2

Carl S. Ehrlich

Studies Program (now the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies) in the early 1970s, one of the institutions they turned to for advice was York University. Besides being somewhat surprised by this historical datum, I was struck by a numerical coincidence that seemed to leap off the page I was reading, namely that we would be celebrating our twenty-fifth anniversary in a few months and no one had realized it! What to do? I found my answer in the immortal words of . . . no, not the Bible, which is my field of specialization, but of The Little Rascals (if memory serves me right): “Let’s put on a show!” But what type of show could an academic like me possibly put on? Like Puccini’s nefarious Baron Scarpia, Non so trarre accordi di chitarra, né oròscopo di fior (I don’t know how to conjure chords from a guitar, nor horoscopes from flowers).2 Therefore, the inescapable answer to my question was obviously to put on a conference or a symposium that would include a celebration of our Centre’s silver anniversary. We thus had the structure, but what about the content of the event? Two possibilities occurred to me. One would have been to mount a conference about some aspect of my specific field of biblical studies; but, as the director of a center for Jewish studies, I felt that this would be too narrow a focus to represent the Centre, its mission, and its interests to the broader academic and non-academic communities. Hence my thoughts turned to the central subject of our institutional existence, namely Jewish studies as a discipline, and I developed the idea of devoting a symposium to some collaborative self-reflection on the state of the field, how it has developed over the quarter-century of the Centre’s existence, and what its prospects are for the future. The initial plan was for a three-day conference encompassing as much of the broad interdisciplinary field of Jewish studies as possible. However, on the advice of Janet Friskney, our home faculty’s outstanding Research Support Officer at the time, we made the decision to divide the subject in two. In this manner, the originally planned conference on The State of Jewish Studies morphed into two symposia dedicated respectively to Perspectives on Premodern Periods and to Modernity and Methodology, the first of which took place on December 7–8, 2014, with the latter scheduled for a later date. The publications emerging from these symposia, of which this volume is the first, reflect this temporal bifurcation. The aim of the first symposium, and of this volume, was to bring into conversation scholars who deal with diverse periods of Jewish studies on the basis of various methodological frameworks. While older generations of scholars, such as the teachers of many of the contributors to this volume, were trained as generalists who encompassed vast temporal and methodological perspectives, over the course of the years the torrential proliferation of knowledge has forced us into ever-narrower areas of specialization. Oftentimes we attend conferences dedicated to these tightly defined themes. Or, when we attend conferences of a more general nature, such as

 Giacomo Puccini, Tosca, Act II: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH1xDRIH824.

Introduction

3

the Association for Jewish Studies Annual Conference, we naturally gravitate to the sessions that deal with our little corners of the academic world. While I wouldn’t disparage the deep-knowledge approach that this represents, there is also something to be said for an engagement with broader views in order to gain a greater sense of perspective. This symposium was, therefore, structured to allow for both synchronic discussions, with each panel dedicated to a specific era, and diachronic debates that addressed the same four overarching themes in each panel across the temporal divide. This attempt to allow for both synchronic (coetaneous) and diachronic (thematic) approaches to the field has also been central to the conceptualization and organization of the present volume, which is structured to allow for both ways of engaging with the field of Jewish studies. Human history, as we know, is not neat; it is a messy proposition that is resistant to our puny attempts to impose order on it. Nonetheless, in our attempt to understand and make sense of it, we try to categorize it and place it within our somewhat subjective little boxes; so, too, were we faced with the question of how to divide up Jewish studies into neat temporal categories. The designations for eras were relatively easy to choose owing to their wide diffusion in the discipline: First Temple, Second Temple, Rabbinic, Medieval, and Early Modern.3 Unsurprisingly, the temporal parameters proved to be a bit more of a bugaboo. I had originally wanted to leave this question open. But, when my colleague and coeditor, Sara R. Horowitz, asked me what I was thinking of, I quickly jotted down some approximate dates. Notwithstanding the problems inherent to assigning names and dates to eras, these categories eventually became the parameters for this volume. There are obvious problems in defining all of these eras. The First Temple wasn’t built – supposedly – until the reign of Solomon (nor presumably in one day), which would, by a strict definition, mean that everything dating before this time shouldn’t be encompassed by the term First Temple. So, what do we do with Moses and David, among other foundational biblical figures, and where do we group them? The First Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, but the Second Temple wasn’t dedicated until 515. So, where does that leave the intervening seventy years of first Babylonian and then Persian domination? Does the Second Temple period end with its destruction by the Romans in 70 CE? Where do we then put the Bar Kochba Revolt of 132–135 CE? Although it postdates the destruction of the Second Temple, this revolt represents the last gasp of the Jewish or Judean nationalism that was characteristic of the Second Temple rather than of the Rabbinic period. And can we truly speak of a Jewish people or religion before the rise of the rabbis? According to rabbinic literature, the archetypal rabbis Hillel and Shammai lived about a century before the destruction of the Temple, thus indicating an overlap

 Although the Early Modern period was included in the original symposium, the decision was made to save its published treatment for the planned second volume of this series.

4

Carl S. Ehrlich

between the late Second Temple and early Rabbinic periods, as the archaeological and inscriptional evidence also indicates.4 Where does one draw the line? Or does one not do so? For the sake of this volume, we defined the Rabbinic period as lasting until the Muslim conquests of the early seventh century, about a hundred years after the completion of the compilation of the Babylonian Talmud. But did this truly represent a caesura in Jewish history or thought? After all, rabbinic literature did not stop being written at that time, and the rabbis continued to hold sway over Jewish life. And what about the amorphous Jewish Middle Ages? If we take Jacob Rader Marcus’s maximalist perspective, as expressed in his seminal collection of documents The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book, 315–1791,5 these lasted from the rise of Roman Christianity and its attendant restriction of Jewish rights in the fourth century CE until the legal emancipation of the Jews at the time of the French Revolution in 1791, thus putting a Eurocentric spin on the temporal definition. However, at the front end, rabbinicists would object that this would collapse the vast formative era of all subsequent Judaisms into a mere couple of centuries. And at the back end, political and intellectual historians may argue for an end to the Medieval period at the time of the rise of the Renaissance, the fall of Byzantium, the Age of Exploration, the discovery of the New World, the expulsion from Spain, the Enlightenment, the age of Spinoza, or the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. The four thematic areas chosen for each temporal period represent three traditional discourses within Jewish studies and one more recent addition. The traditional discourses include History and Society, the social scientific approach; Texts and Literature, the literary and literary-critical approaches; and Religion, Theology, and Thought, the religious studies approach. The more recent discourse is Art, Architecture, and Archaeology, the visual or material approach. The centrality of this latter discourse for Jewish studies, so often relegated to the sidelines in the past, no longer needs to be defended and complements the historically more traditional disciplines of history, literature, and religion. What apparently does need to be defended is the very enterprise around which this volume revolves. In the year of the symposium, Jewish studies as a discipline came under vociferous attack by Aaron Hughes, most (in)famously in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education that bore the provocative title “Jewish Studies Is Too Jewish,”6 itself based on his book on The Study of Judaism: Identity, Authenticity,

 Eric M. Meyers and Mark A. Chancey, From Alexander to Constantine, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible 3 (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2012), 203–217.  Jacob Rader Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book, 315–1791 (Cincinnati: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1938). This work has been reprinted multiple times and has most recently been extensively revised and republished as Jacob Rader Marcus and Marc Saperstein, The Jews in Christian Europe: A Source Book, 315–1791 (n.p.: Hebrew Union College Press, 2015).  Aaron W. Hughes, “Jewish Studies Is Too Jewish,” The Chronicle of Higher Education 60/28 (March 28, 2014).

Introduction

5

Scholarship.7 In this article, as in his book, Hughes condemns Jewish studies for being parochial, focused on identity politics, and of little interest to anyone outside of the Jewish community. Certainly, much of his critique of the field is valid, even if he does engage in inflammatory hyperbole. There are too few non-Jews in the field and it has on occasion been difficult for them to get Jewish studies positions. But this is not a problem unique to Jewish studies. Without defending it, one may observe that this is a problem endemic to all area or ethnic studies, in which identity politics oftentimes come into play when making hiring decisions, particularly in this era of enforced equity, diversity, and inclusion. One could turn the tables, however, and ask where Hughes has been these last twenty-five years or so. Contrary to the impression conveyed by his article, scholars of Jewish studies have become much more engaged academically with the world outside the confines of the allegedly narrow interests of the Jewish community, which oftentimes engenders conflicts between donors and the recipients of their largesse.8 Hughes ignores the trend that has developed within Jewish studies to engage with the scholarship, study, and methodologies of the non-Jewish world in order to situate Jewish studies within a broader cultural, historical, and theoretical context. In addition, in his short presentation Hughes leaves out of consideration the fact that Jewish studies intersects with and is of interest to other fields of scholarship. In the same manner in which women’s studies and gender studies have shifted the focus from the traditionally dominant male population to take note of the contributions and lives of those historically marginalized, so too does Jewish studies oftentimes help shift the focus from the dominant culture to minority populations living in and interacting with it. While it cannot be gainsaid that there are certain areas of Jewish studies that are more likely to attract the attention of nonJewish scholars, such as biblical studies and Second Temple studies, on account of their importance for the genesis of Christianity, or Holocaust studies, whether owing to their paradigmatic nature in genocide studies or in the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to grips with the past), Hughes sets up a somewhat artificial us-versus-them dichotomy that is neither truly reflective of the field nor reflective of many of the students involved in Jewish studies. Indeed, to paraphrase  Aaron W. Hughes, The Study of Judaism: Identity, Authenticity, Scholarship (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2013).  See, for example, Nina Shapiro, “UW returns $5M to donor after disagreement over professor’s views on Israel,” The Seattle Times (March 5, 2022) https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/uwreturns-5m-to-israel-studies-donor-unhappy-with-professors-views/; Francie Diep, “‘It’s Outrageous’: 2 Donor Conflicts Reveal Tensions for Jewish-Studies Scholars,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (March 10, 2022) https://www.chronicle.com/article/its-outrageous-2-donor-conflicts-reveal-fraughttensions-for-jewish-studies-scholars; Lila Corwin Berman, “When Gifts Come with Strings Attached: Philanthropic Coercion Strikes Jewish Studies – and the Academy at Large,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (March 15, 2022) https://www.chronicle.com/article/when-gifts-come-with-stringsattached.

6

Carl S. Ehrlich

a famous ad campaign from the past, “You don’t have to be Jewish . . . to study Jewish studies.”9 As a matter of fact, you don’t have to have studied Jewish studies or even view yourself as a Jewish studies scholar in order to make a contribution to one or more of the subfields that comprise Jewish studies. In addition to the work of Hughes discussed above, an unscientific examination of my personal library reveals only a handful of volumes that combine the words “Jewish” and “study/studies” in some sort of permutation, which should make the necessity for a reflective volume on the state of the field, such as the present one, evident. Jewish studies is a relatively young field, which has not yet had sufficient opportunities to take stock of its rapid development and the changes in methodology that older and more established fields have had. Shaye Cohen and Edward Greenstein’s The State of Jewish Studies10 provided the most immediate inspiration for the present one. Based on a symposium held at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1987, The State of Jewish Studies includes a number of essays surveying the state of – and important discussions in the field of – Jewish studies from biblical studies to ancient and medieval Judaism, to modern Jewish history, literature, and thought, and from Jewish art to education. Each essay is complemented by a response, which gives some sense of the discussion that the original presentations provoked. In all, this collection of essays provides a valuable benchmark of the state of the field in the late 1980s. Jewish Studies at the Turn of the 20th Century, edited by Judit Targarona Borrás and Angel Sáenz-Badillos, is a two-volume collection of papers – including some by contributors to the present volume – from the 6th Congress of the European Association for Jewish Studies.11 While the volumes include many significant works of scholarship, the volumes themselves are just a collection of miscellaneous narrowly focused academic papers delivered in Toledo, Spain, in 1998 and have no overarching thematic structure other than that they all fall within the field of Jewish studies. Zev Garber’s edited collection on Academic Approaches to Teaching Jewish Studies,12 a follow-up to and partial reprint of his 1986 Methodology in the Academic

 Cf. the slogan of Levy’s Real Jewish Rye Bread: “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s real Jewish rye.” See also Andrew Silverstein, “It was the most successful Jewish ad campaign of all time – but who was the model?,” Forward (February 14, 2022) https://forward.com/culture/482193/ levys-jewish-rye-you-dont-have-to-be-jewish-model-joseph-attean-native/.  Shaye J.D. Cohen and Edward L. Greenstein, eds., The State of Jewish Studies (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990).  Judit Targarona Borrás and Angel Sáenz-Badillos, eds., Jewish Studies at the Turn of the 20th Century: Proceedings of the 6th EAJS Congress, Toledo 1998, 2 vols. (Leiden/Boston/ Köln: Brill, 1999).  Zev Garber, ed., Academic Approaches to Teaching Jewish Studies (Lanham/New York/Oxford: University Press of America, 2000).

Introduction

7

Teaching of Judaism,13 addresses the field of Jewish studies. However, the perspective is not on the field per se but on how to teach it within an academic context. The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, edited by Martin Goodman,14 which weighs in at over one thousand pages, is the most ambitious volume to attempt to do what we are doing in this volume. Indeed, it is an indispensable reference work. And yet, leaving aside the fact that it is by now two decades old, the logic of its subjective allocation of the volume’s thirty-nine chapters is not always self-evident. While the first half of the Oxford Handbook is arranged temporally and the second thematically, the relative space devoted to the various topics, particularly in the first half, seems to privilege some periods and subjects to the detriment of others. Thus, there is one chapter devoted to the Biblical period, two to the Second Temple period, two to the Rabbinic period, six to the Medieval period, two to the Early Modern period (defined as 1492–1750), two to the Modern period (defined as 1750 to the Holocaust), and then one each on the Holocaust, Israel, and American Jewry, leaving aside the more thematically oriented second half of the volume, which skews the results even more toward certain periods. And as for the material aspect that plays such a central role in the current volume, there is but one chapter of limited scope devoted to it. Moving to the second decade of the twenty-first century, Melanie Wright’s posthumously published Studying Judaism: The Critical Issues combines the two terms under consideration but is to be understood more as an introductory text to the study of Judaism than it is a critical engagement with Jewish studies.15 Aaron Hughes’s The Study of Judaism: Identity, Authenticity, Scholarship has been alluded to above in his criticism of the field of Jewish studies. More comprehensive are The Bloomsbury Companion to Jewish Studies edited by Dean Phillip Bell (2013)16 and the Handbuch Jüdische Studien edited by Christina von Braun and Micha Brumlik (2018).17 Both of these works attempt to survey the field of Jewish studies and to point it in new directions. The former work, the Bloomsbury Companion, is divided into three sections of unequal length. The first, comprising seven contributions filling close to two-hundred pages, is devoted to “Judaism and Jewish Society from the Bible to Modernity.” The second part comprises five chapters totalling close to 150 pages and is entitled “Reorienting Jewry and Jewish Studies.” The brief final section consists of five “Resources,” including a glossary, maps, a timeline, a select bibliography, and an index. It thus presents a  Zev Garber, ed., Methodology in the Academic Teaching of Judaism (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986).  Martin Goodman, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).  Melanie J. Wright, Studying Judaism: The Critical Issues (Studying World Religions Series; London/New York: Continuum, 2012).  Dean Phillip Bell, ed., The Bloomsbury Companion to Jewish Studies (London/New Delhi/ New York/Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2013; 2015).  Christina von Braun and Micha Brumlik, eds., Handbuch Jüdische Studien (UTB 8712; Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau, 2018).

8

Carl S. Ehrlich

comprehensive chronological overview of the field, deals with a handful of contemporary methodological issues, and provides basic resources of value for the student of the field. The approach of the Handbuch Jüdische Studien is both deeper and narrower than that of the Bloomsbury Companion. Eschewing a comprehensive chronological presentation of the field, this volume emphasizes modernity and thought. Like the Bloomsbury Companion, the Handbuch Jüdische Studien has a tripartite arrangement. The first section is devoted to basic questions (Grundsatzfragen), the second to theology, and the third to culture and modernity. The essays are heavily weighted toward Jewish thought, culture, and modernity, reflecting the interests of the volume’s editors. The Biblical or Israelite period finds only incidental mention, while the Second Temple period is of interest only insofar as it allows a discussion of the origins of Judaism, which in the presentation of the volume is equated with rabbinic Judaism and its offshoots. Other works dealing with the discipline of Jewish studies include Andrew Bush’s theoretical introduction to the field,18 which is more a theoretical reflection on the state of Jewish studies in the modern world. Quite consciously following in his footsteps, Adam Zachary Newton deals with the intellectual history and literary place of Jewish studies as a discipline as of the nineteenth century.19 Somewhat older is Lynn Davidman’s and Shelly Tenenbaum’s edited collection of essays on Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies.20 Comprising essays that cover the full temporal range of Jewish studies, this volume’s authors include many of the foundational figures engaged in Jewish studies from a feminist perspective. Finally, the fiftieth anniversary issue of AJS Perspectives is devoted to “New Vistas in Jewish Studies” and includes essays on various aspects of Jewish studies written by scholars who had received their PhDs during the decade before this issue’s publication in 2018.21 More self-consciously than the above works, through its diachronic and synchronic organization, the present volume offers an approach that allows for both synchronic and diachronic analyses and should serve as a valuable reference work in establishing the current state of the field and in laying the foundation for its future development. Although we are according more or less equal space to every period of Jewish studies touched upon, which is something that rarely happens in the field, when combined with the anticipated volume on “Modernity and Methodology,” the inevitable impression gained will be of one that slightly favors the more modern periods.

 Andrew Bush, Jewish Studies: A Theoretical Introduction (Key Words in Jewish Studies; New Brunswick, NJ/London: Rutgers University Press, 2011).  Adam Zachary Newton, Jewish Studies as Counterlife: A Report to the Academy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019).  Lynn Davidman and Shelly Tenenbaum, eds., Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1994).  Jonathan M. Hess and Laura S. Lieber, eds., AJS Perspectives: The Magazine of the Association for Jewish Studies, The 50th Anniversary Issue: New Vistas in Jewish Studies (Fall 2018).

Introduction

9

If Jewish studies at one time conjured up images of rabbinic scholars poring over their dusty tomes, today the growth industry in the field is in modernity, whether the subject of study be the Holocaust, Israel, hyphenated Jewish identities, oftentimes of a national character, or cultural studies of various types. These will be the subject of the second volume. The structure of the current volume is quite simple. There are four temporal sections, devoted respectively to the First Temple, Second Temple, Rabbinic, and Medieval periods. Within each section are chapters devoted to history, literature, religion, and material culture.22 This structure allows both for the synchronic examination of particular periods and for the diachronic investigation of particular themes/approaches across different periods, with the exception of the history of the Rabbinic period. In the planning of the original symposium and in the preparation of its ensuing volume, I have been aided by many of my colleagues at York University’s Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies, in some cases probably more than they would have liked, and in others less. My main sounding board and partner in this enterprise has been Sara R. Horowitz, my much more experienced predecessor as director of the Koschitzky Centre. Owing to her term as president of the Association for Jewish Studies, an organization heartily critiqued by Hughes, and to her experience in organizing conferences and symposia, I have had to lean on her for constant support. Her knowledge of the people in the field has been particularly helpful, although it has been supplemented by input from additional colleagues at York and elsewhere. When I started studying this field more than four decades ago, it was possible to know who all the major players in Jewish studies were. Now, however, the field has grown so vast and intersects with so many other academic disciplines that it is impossible for one person to have a complete grasp of who’s who in the field and what the current debates are. Hence, I have had to rely on the kindness of my colleagues to help put together a list of people to invite to the original symposium and to fill in the gaps in the volume. Looking now at the contributors assembled in this volume, we can take great pride in having gathered together la crème de la crème in our respective fields, encompassing both established and emergent scholars. In an unintended but serendipitous rebuke to Hughes, our collegium includes both Jewish and nonJewish scholars. Another point of pride is the gender mix of the contributors, which is reflective of the development not only of Jewish studies but of the humanities as a whole over the course of the last generation or so. Ultimately, this volume is part of an ongoing discussion. The hope is that it will help guide it into the future.

 The one exception to this rule is the section on the Rabbinic period, where we were unable to find anyone to submit a chapter on the history of that time.

Section 1: The First Temple Period

Mary Joan Winn Leith

Biblical Israel: History and Historiography to 586 BCE 1 Introduction Designating the endpoint, what historians call the terminus ante quem, for a history of the biblical First Temple period is easy.1 On Tisha b’Av in the summer of 586 BCE the Babylonians under King Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed Jerusalem and its temple and sent the surviving elite Judeans to exile in Babylon. The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament,2 ancient nonbiblical texts, and archaeology all converge tidily around this chronological marker. On the other hand, defining a starting point poses numerous challenges. One might take the term “First Temple” literally and begin with the First Temple, the structure that, according to 1 Kings 6–7, King Solomon built in the late tenth century BCE. Outside of the Bible, however, there are no extant ancient written sources that can prove Solomon or a tenth-century temple even existed. The problem is the same for the ancestors in Genesis, for the exodus from Egypt, for the delivery of the Torah at Mt. Sinai, for Joshua’s conquest of the Promised Land of Canaan, for the pre-monarchic period of the judges, and for King Saul. David comes next in the biblical narrative, and with David a faint light at last glimmers on the historical horizon. This is significant because in the 1990s a group of biblical scholars began to promote the theory that David had been the invention of post-exilic Jewish elites rather than an actual tenth-century BCE king of Israel.3 The proposal stemmed from their idea that the Bible had been composed in the Persian period, after the exile to Babylon.4 According to this theory, Jews who had returned home from Babylon created the story of David to support their claim against rival Jewish groups to be the legitimate colonial administrators of the Persian province of Yehud/Judea. In 1993, however, at the site of Tel Dan in the far north of Israel,  For comprehensive biblical histories, see Michael D. Coogan, ed., The Oxford History of the Biblical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); and J. M. Miller and J. H. Hayes, A History of Israel and Judah, 2nd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2006).  Unless otherwise indicated, “Bible” in this chapter refers to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.  Representative works of the so-called minimalists include Philip R. Davies, In Search of “Ancient Israel” (London/New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1995); and Keith W. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel (London: Routledge, 1996). Although unnecessarily polemical (his definition of “postmodern” amounts to a caricature), William G. Dever’s “Excursus 1.1” in Beyond the Texts: An Archaeological Portrait of Ancient Israel and Judah (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2017), 45–58 outlines the controversies.  In Syro-Palestine, the Persian Period (Iron Age III) begins in 539 BCE, when Cyrus allowed peoples exiled by Babylon to return home, and ends in 332 BCE, when Alexander the Great captured the east coast of the Mediterranean and Egypt. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110418873-002

14

Mary Joan Winn Leith

archaeologist Avraham Biran unearthed a fragmentary Aramaic inscription dated to the late ninth or early eighth century that mentions a “king of Israel” as well as a “house of David” (bet David) (Figure 1). “House” in this case means “dynasty” and most likely refers to the ruling family of the southern kingdom of Judah.

Figure 1: Tel Dan Stele. Fragments of a ninth-century Aramaic inscription discovered in 1993 and 1994 during excavations at Tel Dan, northern Israel. According to the reconstructed text accepted by most biblical scholars, a king of Damascus (perhaps Hazael; cf. Kings 8:15) claims to have “[killed Jeho]ram son [of Ahab] king of Israel” and “[Ahaz]iahu son of [Jehoram kin-]g of the House of David [bet David].” This is the only nonbiblical reference to David – albeit to David’s dynasty and not David himself – contemporary with events in the Hebrew Bible. Israel Museum, KAI 310;Photo by Oren Rosen, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:JRSLM_300116_Tel_Dan_Stele_01.jpg This file is licensed under the Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Does this prove the existence of King David? At the very least, a ninth- or eighthcentury textual reference to the “House of David” from a secure archaeological context means that David could not be a late sixth-century invention. It also implies that Judah’s kings did indeed trace their lineage back to someone named David. But contrary to History Channel hype, this is not a case where “archaeology proves the Bible.” The inscription certainly adds to the body of indirect evidence for the existence of David, but in fact, archaeology – or rather, the paucity of archaeological evidence – has generated more doubt than certainty regarding the biblical David, not to mention his son Solomon and a tenth-century Israelite empire.5 Not only is there no extra-

 Compare, for example, “Was There a King David? Extrabiblical Sources,” Chapter 1 of Steven L. McKenzie, King David: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 9–24; on the textual

Biblical Israel: History and Historiography to 586 BCE

15

biblical textual evidence; there is no good archaeological evidence for the existence of Kings David and Solomon or the First Temple in the tenth century BCE. Despite decades of excavation in Jerusalem, tenth-century remains are still meager and/or ambiguous. For example, the claim first made in 2006 by archaeologist Eilat Mazar to have identified the walls of King David’s palace is disputed by a majority of archaeologists who date the structure to the time of the Judges (Iron I, i.e., 1200–1000 BCE), before David’s capture of Jerusalem, although, David perhaps put the pre-existing building to some use.6 Another example is a luxury item, a thumbsized ivory (actually, hippopotamus bone) pomegranate with a paleo-Hebrew inscription that mentions the “house of Yahweh” – here “house” means temple – that appeared on the antiquities market and for which the Israel Museum paid half a million dollars in 1988.7 The ivory comes from the fourteenth or thirteenth century BCE, too early for Solomon, but the eighth-century form of the letters indicate the inscription was added later, maybe in the First Temple period; but serious doubts persist that it is a forgery, doubts that would not arise had it been found in an archaeological excavation.8 Even were the pomegranate genuine, nothing requires that it came from Jerusalem rather than from a contemporary shrine of Yahweh elsewhere, a possibility sanctioned by the biblical text itself.9 Another type of archaeological uncertainty arises with regard to 1 Kings 9:15, which reports that in addition to the walls of Jerusalem – for which there are no material traces from Solomon’s time10 – Solomon also fortified the cities of Hazor, Gezer, and Megiddo, where almost identical ashlar (cut side, Lester Grabbe, Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It? rev. ed. (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017),138–146 argues that apologetic rhetoric in 1–2 Samuel’s account of David’s career point to a real-life David.  Avraham Faust, “Did Eilat Mazar Find David’s Palace?” Biblical Archaeology Review 38/5 (2012): 47–52, 70.  For images, a Google search for “ivory pomegranate” suffices. Eran Arie assembles clear evidence that the inscription was forged in “Pomegranate and Poppy-Capsule Headings from Ivory and Bone in the Late Bronze and Iron Ages: Putting the Famous Inscribed Ivory Pomegranate in Context,” Israel Museum Studies in Archaeology 9 (2018–2019) 2–39. A tiny uninscribed ivory pomegranate topped by a bird was recovered from a late-ninth-century fill by excavators: see Ronny Reich, Eli Shukron, and Omri Lernau, “Recent Discoveries in the City of David, Jerusalem,” Israel Exploration Journal 47 (2007): 160–161.  Andrew G. Vaughn and Christopher A. Rollston, “The Antiquities Market, Sensationalized Textual Data, and Modern Forgeries,” Near East Archaeology 68(1/2) (2005): 61–65; Shmuel Ahituv, Aaron Demsky, Yuval Goren, and André Lemaire, “The Inscribed Pomegranate from the Israel Museum Examined Again,” Israel Exploration Journal 57/1 (2007): 87–95.  Diana Edelman, “Cultic Sites and Complexes Beyond the Jerusalem Temple,” in Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah, Francesca Stavrakopoulou and John Barton, eds. (London: T&T Clark, 2010): 82–103. In 2012 a temple complex was excavated at Tel Motza near Jerusalem, apparently contemporary with Solomon’s temple: Shua Kisilevitz and Oded Lipschits, “Another Temple in Judah!” Biblical Archaeology Review 46/1 (2020): 40–49.  Ezekiel 40:10’s description of Jerusalem’s gates matches the excavated gates of Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer, but Ezekiel, writing in the sixth century BCE, was not contemporary with Solomon.

16

Mary Joan Winn Leith

stone) gates all of the same period were indeed discovered. The old consensus that these gates demonstrated Solomonic central planning has given way before thus-far intractable stratigraphic uncertainty. The gates might be tenth-century Solomonic, or they could be ninth-century.11 Lacking solid archaeological or nonbiblical textual evidence that Jerusalem was a city substantial enough to be the capital of a tenth-century polity of any size, the question of Jerusalem and the United Monarchy is a flashpoint for biblical maximalists and minimalists; in a simplified nutshell of the charges and countercharges, maximalists are accused of believing everything in the Bible, minimalists of believing that nothing in the Bible has any basis in fact. Most biblical scholars and archaeologists fall somewhere on a spectrum between these two ideological extremes. (The minimalists should nevertheless be credited with stimulating greater rigor in biblical studies.) Among other problems with their arguments, minimalists don’t believe the Hebrew language preserved in the Bible can be accurately dated and some even dismiss the evidence of pre-exilic excavated inscriptions. Here I resort to the usual comparison of the Bible to an archaeological tell: an artificial hill composed of the layered remains of a city built and rebuilt over centuries in the same location. The Bible is similarly layered with texts from different periods. Some of it, like Exodus 15 or Judges 5, contain passages of archaic Hebrew. To draw another analogy, compared to other parts of the Bible, these passages read like Chaucer beside the English of The New York Times,12 and there’s plenty of eighth- to early sixthcentury Hebrew in the Bible that is easily distinguished from the later Hebrew found in Chronicles.13 Over the last two decades, methodological refinements in dating biblical Hebrew have not succeeded in dismantling the general premise that early Hebrew can be distinguished from late.14 Many minimalists also have seemed to ignore or at best barely condescend to consider archaeological evidence, although in recent years some have taken the archaeology seriously and adjusted their views commensurately.15 So, where are we with Jerusalem and David and Solomon and the temple? Historiographically, we enter the realm of the “art of doing history” and the “philosophy of

 Joshua J. Bodine, “Gates, Dates, and Debates: A Review of Megiddo’s Monumental Gate and the Debates over Archaeology and Chronology in Iron Age Palestine,” Studia Antiqua 8 (Spring 2010): 5–23.  Avi Hurvitz, “The Historical Quest for ‘Ancient Israel’ and the Linguistic Evidence of the Hebrew Bible: Some Methodological Observations,” Vetus Testamentum 47 (1997): 301–315; and Ziony Zevit, “What a Difference a Year Makes: Can Biblical Texts Be Dated Linguistically?” Hebrew Studies 47 (2006): 83–91.  Ronald Hendel, How Old is the Hebrew Bible? A Linguistic, Textual, and Historical Study (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).  Aaron Hornkohl, “Characteristically Late Spellings in the Hebrew Bible: With Special Reference to the Plene Spelling of the O-vowel in the Qal Infinitive Construct,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 134 (2014): 643–671.  Compare, for example, Grabbe, Ancient Israel.

Biblical Israel: History and Historiography to 586 BCE

17

history.” For example, does lack of written and material evidence require a negative judgment? What constitutes evidence? How much does circumstantial evidence count? Just because something is mentioned in the Bible doesn’t mean it has no relation to history. There are plenty of instances where the Bible preserves an authentic historical memory, as it does for the Neo-Assyrian devastation of Judah at the end of the eighth century.16 Excavations show a pattern of destruction for this period at relevant sites in southern Judah and 2 Kings 18:13 reports, “In the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah, King Sennacherib of Assyria came up against all the fortified cities of Judah and captured them.” King Sennacherib chose his victory over Judean Lachish to exult over in the famous reliefs that covered the walls of a large hall in his palace in Nineveh (Figure 2). The ruins of Lachish itself reveal striking archaeological evidence of the Assyrian siege and the city’s failed defense.

Figure 2: Lachish Relief. Part of a monumental series of reliefs, King Sennacherib of Assyria sits on his throne, supervising his army’s attack on the city of Lachish in 701 BCE (cf. 2 Kings 18:13). Like a cartoon bubble, the cuneiform text reads in part, “I give permission for its slaughter.” Located today in the British Museum, the reliefs decorated the walls of Room XXXVI in Sennacherib’s palace in Nineveh, Iraq. Photo:https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lachish_inscription.jpeg Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Again, this evidence doesn’t prove the Bible; rather, 2 Kings 18’s account of Sennacherib’s invasion is one item of evidence for reconstructing a viable historical narrative about the Assyrians in the southern Levant at the end of the eighth century.17  See Mordechai Cogan, The Raging Torrent: Historical Inscriptions from Assyria and Babylonia Relating to Ancient Israel, 2nd ed. (Jerusalem: Carta, 2015).  K. L. Noll, Canaan and Israel in Antiquity: A Textbook on History and Religion, 2nd ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 40–42.

18

Mary Joan Winn Leith

Archaeology can also mislead. Sometimes, what excavators don’t find may be contradicted by other, more compelling data. Without the fourteenth-century Amarna letters,18 no one would have deduced from archaeological remains that Jerusalem at that time was not only an armed and fortified Canaanite city-state (if a modest one), but that its leader commanded a scribal bureaucracy that kept him in regular contact with the Pharaoh.19 It was only recently that Mazar reported the excavation of two fragmentary “Amarna-like” cuneiform tablets in Jerusalem, supplying physical evidence from the city itself for what the Amarna letters had indicated.20 Given the centuries of building and rebuilding in Jerusalem, where the bedrock is already high, preserved pockets of tenth-century remains may yet turn up, even if the Holy Grail of Jerusalem archaeology – the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif – remains off-limits. Thus far, the much-publicized Temple Mount Sifting Project has turned up only a few small items and sherds from the period.21 Fortuitously, in 2007 near Jerusalem’s Gihon Spring, Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron found a cache of previously unattested late ninth-century sherds along with ten fragmentary seals and scarabs and some 170 bullae (clay seal impressions) bearing the imprints of the papyrus documents or containers they sealed.22 It is possible that the ninth-century authors of all the long-lost documents once sealed by these bullae were heirs to a scribal tradition in Jerusalem with links all the way back to the fourteenth-century Amarna period.23 Michael Coogan argues that the growing number of inscriptions from tenth-century contexts at settlements outside Jerusalem such as Khirbet Qeiyafa, Beth Shemesh, and Tel Zayit makes

 William M. Moran, The Amarna Letters (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1992); and Anson Rainey, et al., The El-Amarna Correspondence (Leiden: Brill, 2015).  Michael D. Coogan, “Assessing David and Solomon,” Review of Israel Finkelstein and NeilAsher Silberman, David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition in Biblical Archaeology Review 32/4 (2006): 56–60; see also Nadav Na’aman, “Does Archaeology Deserve the Status of a ‘High Court’ in Biblical Historical Research?” in Bob Becking and Lester L. Grabbe, eds., Between Evidence and Ideology: Essays on the History of Ancient Israel (Leiden: Brill, 2011): 165–183.  Eilat Mazar, Wayne Horowitz, and Takayoshi Oshima, “A Cuneiform Tablet from the Ophel in Jerusalem,” Israel Exploration Journal 60 (2010): 4–21; Eilat Mazar, Yuval Goren, Wayne Horowitz, and Takayoshi Oshima, “Jerusalem 2: A Fragment of a Cuneiform Tablet from the Ophel Excavations,” Israel Exploration Journal 64 (2014): 129–139.  Temple Mount Sifting Project, “Rare 3,000-Year-Old Seal Discovered within Earth Discarded from Temple Mount,” Sept. 25, 2015, http://tmsifting.org/en/2015/09/24/special-media-release-rare-3000year-old-seal-discovered-within-earth-discarded-from-temple-mount/ (accessed Jan. 16, 2018).  Reich, Shukron, and Lernau, “Recent Discoveries,” 156–157, 161–163.  Alan R. Millard dates an alphabetic jar inscription from Jerusalem to the eleventh century in “The New Jerusalem Inscription – So What?” Biblical Archaeology Review 40(3) (2014): 49–53, which further diminishes the writing gap between Amarna and Iron II Jerusalem. See also Matthieu Richelle, “Elusive Scrolls: Could Any Hebrew Literature Have Been Written Prior to the Eighth Century BCE?” Vetus Testamentum 66(4) (2016): 555–594.

Biblical Israel: History and Historiography to 586 BCE

19

a scribal bureaucracy in tenth-century Jerusalem increasingly likely.24 He also finds compelling data in the names of scribal officials that appear in what he plausibly reasons are genuine lists of tenth-century royal functionaries in 2 Samuel 8:16–18; 20:23–26, and 1 Kings 4:1–6; as he points out: The first two lists are for David’s reign, but these two different lists make little sense in a fictional creation of a later time: One would have been sufficient if the writer simply wanted to give the impression of a royal bureaucracy. An alternate explanation, then, is that the three lists are what they appear to be: genuine archives from the tenth century B.C.E.25

To summarize, in the reasonable words of Lester Grabbe: The biblical text should not be rejected just because it is part of a theological/religious document – nor should it be accepted for the same reasons. It has to be evaluated, carefully and critically, in each individual situation. A case needs to be made for whatever position one takes, and the case needs to be made for each individual text. Generalized judgments, whether pro or con, will not do.26

I would, then, provisionally submit that in the tenth century, Jerusalem was a modest (perhaps twelve-acre) city with about one thousand inhabitants. There, a king named Solomon, son of David, built a temple – or embellished an already-existing temple. In the Ancient Near East, temple-building – including temple-expanding or face-lifting – was what you did if you were a king. We must be content with maybes and probabilities. As humans, we are meaning-makers and recoil from uncertainty, but in the case of history, we have to be content with the provisional nature of all conclusions.

2 New Evidence, New Methods and New Questions Beyond the greater rigor with which the biblical text is now scrutinized, the two biggest game changers over the last quarter-century in what could be called “the biblical story historically examined” are first, that before the exile Israelites were not monotheists, and second, that the identity of “Israel” before the sixth-century

 Yosef Garfinkel, Mitka R. Golub, Haggai Misgav, and Saar Ganor, in “The ʾIšbaʿal Inscription from Khirbet Qeiyafa,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 20 (2015): 217–218, note that “Since 2008, six inscriptions dated to the [Iron IIA] late 11th–10th centuries have become known: three from Khirbet Qeiyafa and three from various sites in the [Judah] region: Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi [Gath], Beth Shemesh, and Jerusalem. They are all on pottery, either written in ink or incised.”  Coogan, “Assessing David and Solomon,” 58–59.  Lester L. Grabbe, “‘The Exile’ under the Theodolite: Historiography as Triangulation,” in Lester L. Grabbe, ed., Leading Captivity Captive: “The Exile” as History and Ideology (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998): 80–100.

20

Mary Joan Winn Leith

exile to Babylon is exceedingly complex. In both cases, archaeological discoveries provided a strong incentive to re-examine the biblical text. With regard to both these issues the “minimalists” deserve credit for bringing postmodern skepticism to the study of the Bible. At its most basic and jargon-free, postmodernism does not mean that a text has no “meaning.” Rather, it is an approach that requires readers to stay alert to the ideological perspective of a text. By reading with a hermeneutic of suspicion, asking cui bono (who stands to benefit?), one may read “against the grain” and bring to the text a sensitivity to who is being left out. The reader asks what assumptions are made by the writer that reveal biases in the text. The Bible is, after all, the product of elite men in a patriarchal society. We can, however, look and listen carefully to catch the echo of other voices and even intuit the perspectives of other Israelites: male and female, rich and poor, slave and free. This realization enables readers to delve much more deeply than ever before into what the Bible can reveal about ancient Israelite history and society. For example, if, in Jeremiah 44, the prophet fulminates at Judean women-exiles for worshiping the Queen of Heaven, one can deduce that the text likely provides a window onto a religious activity commonly practiced by pre-exilic Judean women. References in 2 Kings 21:6–7 and Ezekiel 8:14 reinforce this. In other words, Jeremiah’s point of view is not something we are compelled to accept as normative among his fellow Judean refugees; his could easily be a minority perspective for the time.27

3 Monotheism Past certainties about pre-exilic Israelite monotheism were seriously challenged by the discovery in the 1970s of eighth-century inscriptions linking Yahweh and Asherah.28 These inscriptions were located in both northern Israelite and southern Judean contexts and they sent scholars back to the Bible, where, aided also by new sensitivity to feminist perspectives, they found what only outlier scholars had perceived before:29 namely, evidence of what may well have been customary goddess-worship in Israel. Additional archaeological evidence pointing to a female divine figure in pre-exilic Israel is found in the so-called pillar figurines (also called Judean pillar figurines); these clay statuettes date to the eighth to sixth century and depict women clutching their nude breasts. They have been found by the thousands in a wide range of archaeological  See Steven L. McKenzie and John Kaltner, eds., New Meanings for Ancient Texts: Recent Approaches to Biblical Criticisms and Their Applications (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2013).  William G. Dever, Did God Have a Wife? Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). For a cautious assessment of the evidence for a goddess, see John J. Collins, The Bible After Babel: Historical Criticism in a Postmodern Age (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 75–98.  Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess (New York: Ktav, 1968).

Biblical Israel: History and Historiography to 586 BCE

21

contexts (domestic, burial, cultic) in Judah and especially Jerusalem.30 Their nudity likely indicates supra-human status on the basis of comparison with ancient Near Eastern goddess imagery and consequent association with some aspect of divine power. More numerous than pillar figures and still enigmatic are clay figurines of a horse and rider; the evidence now suggests they also continued in use in Jerusalem after the exile.31 As Erin Darby has shown, the Decalogue’s prohibition of “idols” was not comprehensive, nor was it consistent.32 All of these discoveries open a window onto the piety of everyday Israelites; they also raise important questions about official versus popular or domestic versus public religious praxis. At the same time, it is important to note that scholars have grown wary of using binary categories like “official” versus “popular,” recognizing that they create their own distortions by not allowing for more fluid and nuanced understandings.33 Thus, divine beings such as the “sons of God” in Psalm 29:1 or the “sons of Elyon” in Psalm 82:6 have merited renewed attention, as have appeals to divine and/or ancestral intercessors, child sacrifice, and traditions formerly dismissed as “magic,” such as divination and necromancy. Israelite household religion, where women exercised greater authority, has moved to the forefront of scholarship.34 The consequences of these discoveries for our understanding of ancient Israelite religion and history are potentially enormous.35

4 “Israel” As for the complexities of the name “Israel” in biblical and non-biblical texts, here again new archaeological data and new approaches have problematized (postmodern for “made more complicated”) long-held assumptions. In the Bible, “Israel” can

 Erin Darby, Interpreting Judean Pillar Figurines: Gender and Empire in Judean Apotropaic Ritual (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014); and Aaron Greener, “What are Clay Female Figures Doing in Judah during the Biblical Period?” The Torah.com, August 16, 2016: http://thetorah.com/what-areclay-female-figurines-doing-in-judah-during-the-biblical-period/ (accessed Jan. 23, 2018).  Isaak J. de Hulster, Figurines in Achaemenid Period Yehud: Jerusalem’s History of Religion and Coroplastics in the Monotheism Debate (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017).  Darby, Interpreting Judean Pillar Figurines, 259–300.  Saul Olyan, “Family Religion in Israel and the Wider Levant of the First Millennium BCE,” in John Bodel and Saul Olyan, eds., Household and Family Religion in Antiquity (Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 113–126.  Carol Meyers, Rediscovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); see also Beth Alpert Nakhai elsewhere in this volume and her “The Household as Sacred Space,” in Rainer Albertz, Beth Alpert Nakhai, Saul M. Olyan, and Rüdiger Schmitt, eds., Family and Household Religion (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2014), 53–72.  Francesca Stavrakopoulou and John Barton, eds., Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah (London: T&T Clark, 2010).

22

Mary Joan Winn Leith

refer to the eponymous ancestor Jacob-Israel, to a collection of tribal groups variously aligned with each other, “to a kingdom in the northern highlands of Canaan or a kingdom in the central highlands, or even a substitute label for the kingdom of Judah and the city of Jerusalem.”36 What is difficult to determine is how any of the social groups called “Israel” in the Bible would have identified themselves and, conversely, what these groups might have looked like at any one period in the centuries before the exile (or after the exile, for that matter). Equally tricky is determining to what extent biblical writers have retrojected their own ideas about what Israel means into narratives of their past. Potential answers to these questions are related but not the same. Studies of ethnicity, in particular, have demonstrated that socio-ethnic self-definition is remarkably fluid.37 For example, Israeli archaeologist Aren Maeir calls for a fuller appreciation of the contextual basis of expressions of ethnic identity. He stresses that within any group, understandings of identity can have highly variable modes of self-presentation. This can be in marked contrast to an external view, in which the group is seen as a homogeneous unit by an outside observer.38 A case in point: more nuanced perspectives on Israelite identity might resolve ongoing debates over whether the late-tenth-century site of Khirbet Qeiyafa was Israelite or not.39 In all periods, Israel, like other social groups, was what political scientist Benedict Anderson has designated an “imagined community” embedded in a mesh of memory, tradition, and sometimes contentious power-relationships, whose nature can shift according to time and circumstance.40 Ron Hendel’s Remembering Abraham contemplates precisely these issues.41 By the Persian period – the era in which the Bible was approaching its final form – the different socio-religious perspectives reflected in the books of Ezra, Nehemiah, Chronicles, Jonah, and Ruth make it clear that various groups were contesting the right to be called Israel, so potent had the name become. Contention over “Israel” continued not only in Samaritan and Christian claims to be the “true Israel,” but in contemporary debates in the State of Israel.

 K. L. Noll, Canaan and Israel in Antiquity: A Textbook on History and Religion, 2nd ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 10–11.  Geoff Emberling, “Ethnicity in Complex Societies: Archaeological Perspectives,” Journal of Archaeological Research 5/4 (1997): 295–344; and Naose MacSweeney, “Beyond Ethnicity: The Overlooked Diversity of Group Identity,” Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 22 (2009): 101–126.  Aren M. Maeir, review of Avraham Faust, The Archaeology of Israelite Society in Iron Age II (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2012) in Review of Biblical Literature (09/2013): https://www.bookre views.org/pdf/8631_9464.pdf.  Yosef Garfinkel, Michael Hasel, and Martin Klingbeil, “An Ending and a Beginning,” Biblical Archaeology Review 39/6 (2013): 44–51; and Nadav Na’aman, “Was Khirbet Qeiyafa a Judahite City? The Case Against It,” Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 17 (2017): 1–40.  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2016).  Ronald Hendel, Remembering Abraham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Biblical Israel: History and Historiography to 586 BCE

23

Careful scrutiny of the term “Israel” in the written record over time bears out this complexity. A people called “Israel” first materializes on history’s stage on the Merneptah Stele in a list of Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 BCE) Canaanite groups reportedly defeated by Pharaoh Merneptah around 1204 BCE. In the ensuing Iron I period modest new settlements appeared in the previously unoccupied central hill country of Canaan, more or less where people, later identifiable through the Bible and Iron II (i.e., 1000–586 BCE) inscriptions as Israelites, lived. However, it now appears that much of the material culture (such as pottery) of these settlers is in a direct continuum with Late Bronze lowland population centers of Canaan. Even the supposedly distinctive aspects of these central highland dwellers, such as collar-rim jars and the four-room house, are attested outside this core area, including in Transjordan.42 Most recently, the absence of pig bones, formerly all but canonical as an indication of Israelite identity, now appears to reflect environmental factors – i.e., whether the local ecosystem could support pig breeding – rather than ethno-religious boundarybuilding.43 Even Philistines, who may have imported the first pigs to Syro-Palestine, 44 did not breed pigs when they settled the northern Negev.45 Not only the archaeology but also the fact that Israelite religion developed out of a Canaanite matrix46 indicate that the Israelites essentially began as Canaanites, in direct contradiction of dominant biblical rhetoric. Most Israelites (or, rather, the people who settled in the areas that became the kingdoms of Israel and Judah) were likely not immigrants from any farther away than the Canaanite lowlands, while perhaps including, as Avraham Faust and others suggest, the semi-nomadic Shasu.47 The Merneptah Stele antedates the hill country settlements, so the “Israel” that Merneptah supposedly

 Benjamin Porter, Complex Communities: The Archaeology of Early Iron Age West-Central Jordan (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013): 90–96, 143.  Lidar Sapir-Hen, Meirav Meiri, and Israel Finkelstein, “Iron Age Pigs: New Evidence on their Origin and Role in Forming Identity Boundaries,” Radiocarbon, 57/2 (2015): 307–315; and the popular version: Lidar Sapir-Hen, “Pigs as an Ethnic Marker? You Are What You Eat,” Biblical Archaeology Review 42/6 (2016): 41–43, 70.  Meirav Meiri, Philipp W. Stockhammer, Nimrod Marom, Guy Bar-Oz, Lidar Sapir-Hen et al., “Eastern Mediterranean Mobility in the Bronze and Early Iron Ages: Inferences from Ancient DNA of Pigs and Cattle,” Scientific Reports 7/701, April 6, 2017, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598017-00701-y (accessed Jan. 25, 2018).  Lidar Sapir-Hen, Guy Bar-Oz, Yuval Gadot, and Israel Finkelstein, “Pig Husbandry in Iron Age Israel and Judah New Insights Regarding the Origin of the ‘Taboo,’” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 129/1 (2013): 1; see also Aren M. Maeir, Louise A. Hitchcock, and Liora Kolska Horwitz, “On the Constitution and Transformation of Philistine Identity,” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 32/1 (2013): 5–6.]  Michael D. Coogan, “Canaanite Origins and Lineage: Reflections on the Religion of Ancient Israel,” in Patrick D. Miller and Paul D. Hanson, eds., Ancient Israelite Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 115–125.  Avraham Faust, Israel’s Ethnogenesis: Settlement, Interaction, Expansion and Resistance (London: Equinox, 2007). See also the RBL review by Kenton Sparks (7/2008). Faust draws too sharp a line

24

Mary Joan Winn Leith

defeated in Canaan lived somewhere other than the hill country. It is worth remembering that the divine element preserved in the name, Israel, is the name of the head of the Canaanite pantheon, El, and not Yahweh. One textual tradition may preserve a memory of El-worship: the Priestly source represents Yahweh’s name as an innovation, revealed to Moses in Exodus 6. Furthermore, in the archaeological record not the smallest trace has turned up to link the Iron Age I hill country population with Egypt, raising new questions about the source and development of the exodus traditions. It has certainly struck biblical historians that the Bible’s narratives of the conquest and the era of the judges seem to be ignoring what was, so to speak, a huge elephant in the room: Egypt. The Egyptian imperial presence in Canaan may have been on the wane, but Egypt was still the foremost “fact on the ground” in Late Bronze and Early Iron Age Canaan, the time of the putative conquest and the judges. This is a real conundrum: the Bible’s exodus tradition has no clear connection to historical and archaeological evidence, while demonstrated historical and archaeological facts about the Egyptian presence in Late Bronze/Iron I Canaan make no appearance in the biblical text. Yet, in the words of Ann Killebrew,48 “the ethnogenesis of Israel can be understood only within the framework of the political and economic decline of Egyptian influence in Canaan in the Twentieth Dynasty.” It now appears that the biblical exodus tradition developed from a variety of historical experiences including indigenous Canaanite memories of resistance to Egyptian domination in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages.49 Another point: since few people had to be displaced for the new Iron I hill country settlements, there was little call for concerted military campaigns to conquer it. Most biblical historians now propose that most of the Joshua conquest account dates to the later seventh century, composed to serve the propaganda program of King Josiah – the similarity between “Joshua” and “Josiah” is likely no coincidence – in his bid to consolidate his authority and annex the territory of the Northern Kingdom in the wake of the Assyrian imperial collapse.50 King Josiah’s propaganda efforts exemplify the contested construction of Israelite identity, since in his case a king of Judah is conceivably co-opting the identity, name, and prestige (not to mention the territory) of Israel, its former rival state. In fact, one of the newest areas of historical inquiry these days addresses the meaning of Israel vis-à-vis Judah and aims at disentangling the history and tradition of Israel, the northern kingdom, from the Judah-centric rhetoric of the biblical text.

between urban and rural or sedentary and pastoral Canaanites in positing the source of the hill country occupation. Many Canaanites would have moved back and forth between these circumstances.  Ann Killebrew, Biblical Peoples and Ethnicity (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005), 22.  Nadav Na’aman, “The Exodus Story: Between Historical Memory and Historiographical Composition,” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 11 (2011): 39–69.  Lori Rowlett, Joshua and the Rhetoric of Violence: A New Historicist Analysis, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 226 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996).

Biblical Israel: History and Historiography to 586 BCE

25

Daniel Fleming is one of the scholars who is trying to tease out strands of northern Israelite traditions by source analysis based on political grounds. He identifies distinctly different power structures that obtained in Israel over against those of Judah and comes to the intriguing conclusion that “All primary phases of the Bible’s account of the past before David originate in Israel (the north) and reflect Israel’s political perspective.”51 My own work has focused on restoring the Israelite identity of the northern territories after 722 BCE from the all-but inescapable negative impression – thanks to the Judah-curated account of the conquest of Samaria in 2 Kings 17 – that “northerners post 722 were at best corrupt Yahwists on the way to becoming Samaritans.”52 On the contrary, there are good indications that traditional Iron Age Israelite religious practices and self-definition survived after 722’s defeat to a remarkable degree, and they were still a vital tradition in the Persian period when Judeans returned from exile to rebuild the temple.53 This brief historiographical survey has brought us back to where I began: the end of the First Temple period. I have indicated here and there how important the study and recovery of the Bible’s development in the Second Temple period has become to our understanding of what the Bible has to say about pre-exilic Israel, but this is a topic to which a later chapter of this volume is dedicated.

For Further Reading Albertz, Rainer and Rüdiger Schmitt. Family and Household Religion. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2014. Bodine, Joshua J. “Gates, Dates, and Debates: A Review of Megiddo’s Monumental Gate and the Debates over Archaeology and Chronology in Iron Age Palestine.” Studia Antiqua 8/1 (2010): 5–23. Cogan, Mordechai. The Raging Torrent: Historical Inscriptions from Assyria and Babylonia Relating to Ancient Israel, 2nd ed. Jerusalem: Carta, 2015. Collins, John J. The Bible After Babel: Historical Criticism in a Postmodern Age. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005. Coogan, Michael D., ed. The Oxford History of the Biblical World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

 Daniel E. Fleming, The Legacy of Israel in Judah’s Bible: History, Politics, and the Reinscribing of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 28.  Mary Joan Winn Leith, “Religious Continuity in Samaria/Israel: Numismatic Evidence,” in Christian Frevel, Katharina Pyschny, and Izak Cornelius, eds., A “Religious Revolution” in Yehûd? The Material Culture of the Persian Period as a Test Case; Orbis biblicus et orientalis 267 (Fribourg: Academic Press/Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 268–269, 275.  Gary R. Knoppers, Jews and Samaritans: The Origins and History of Their Early Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). The “Ten Lost Tribes” tradition does not appear until after the end of the Second Temple period; see Pamela Barmash, “At the Nexus of History and Memory: The Ten Lost Tribes,” AJS Review 29 (2005): 207–236.

26

Mary Joan Winn Leith

Dever, William G. Beyond the Texts: An Archaeological Portrait of Ancient Israel and Judah. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2017. Ehrlich, Carl S., ed. From an Antique Land: An Introduction to Ancient Near Eastern Literature. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011. Grabbe, Lester L. Ancient Israel What Do We Know and How Do We Know It? Rev. ed. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017. Greener, Aaron. “What are Clay Female Figures Doing in Judah during the Biblical Period?” The Torah.com, August 16, 2016: http://thetorah.com/what-are-clay-female-figurines-doing-injudah-during-the-biblical-period/ (accessed Jan. 23, 2018). Hendel, Ronald. Remembering Abraham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Killebrew, Ann E. Biblical Peoples and Ethnicity. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005. King, Philip J. and Lawrence E. Stager. Life in Biblical Israel. Louisville/London: Westminster John Knox, 2001. Knoppers, Gary R. Jews and Samaritans: The Origins and History of Their Early Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. McKenzie, Steven L. King David: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. McKenzie, Steven L. and John Kaltner, eds. New Meanings for Ancient Texts: Recent Approaches to Biblical Criticisms and Their Applications. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2013. Meyers, Carol. Rediscovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Miller, J. M. and J. H. Hayes. A History of Israel and Judah. 2nd ed. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2006. Rollston, Christopher. “Scribal Curriculum During the First Temple Period: Epigraphic Hebrew and Biblical Evidence.” In Brian B. Schmidt, ed. Contextualizing Israel’s Sacred Writings: Ancient Literacy, Orality, and Literary Production, 71–102. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2015. Schneider, Thomas and William H. C. Propp, eds. Israel’s Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective: Text, Archaeology, Culture and Geoscience (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2015). Smith, Mark S. The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2001; paperback edition, 2003. Stavrakopoulou, Francesca and John Barton, eds. Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah. London: T&T Clark, 2010.

Konrad Schmid

Hebrew Writings and Literary Works from the First Temple Period (Until the Sixth Century BCE) 1 Introduction and Overview The most important texts of ancient Hebrew literature that stem from the First Temple period are preserved in the Hebrew Bible but only as copies of copies. The earliest manuscript that includes the full text of the Hebrew Bible is Codex B 19 A from St. Petersburg, which dates to 1000 CE. Some 5 to 10 percent of the biblical text is attested in the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls.1 The Hebrew Bible itself is a library including twenty-four different books – according to the Jewish reckoning – that are usually, but not always, composite literary units that have grown over some time through the hands of many different authors and redactors.2 They were written between the tenth and second centuries BCE, though oral pre-stages may date to even earlier periods. In their present literary and theological shape, the books of the Hebrew Bible reflect the Second Temple period more than the First Temple period. In other words, it is likely that all the books of the Hebrew Bible in our possession received their current shape during the Second Temple period. Yet many of them contain not only memories but also literary precursors that date back to the First Temple period. Other ancient Hebrew texts have survived in epigraphical form and are thus fragmentary in nature. However, the total literary production of monarchic Israel and Judah may have been even more comprehensive since the Hebrew Bible only includes texts that, on the basis of selection and/or reinterpretation, have become “biblical.” There are even references within the Bible that indicate that other literary works existed in ancient Israel and Judah, but they are now lost and we know nothing further about them. Taken together, it is the the pre-exilic layers of the Hebrew Bible and the epigraphical writings that constitute the Hebrew literature from the First Temple period.

 See Eugene Ulrich, The Biblical Qumran Scrolls: Transcriptions and Textual Variants, Vetus Testamentum Supplements 134 (Leiden: Brill, 2010).  See in detail Konrad Schmid, The Old Testament: A Literary History, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012); and Konrad Schmid and Jens Schröter, The Making of the Bible: From the First Fragments to Sacred Scripture, trans. Peter Lewis (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2021). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110418873-003

28

Konrad Schmid

2 Epigraphy It is helpful to start with the epigraphical materials since they provide some external evidence for understanding Hebrew writing/texts at the very beginning of their literary history. These epigraphical remains are not representative of ancient Israel and Judah’s literature, but they nevertheless provide insight into basic developments regarding language, style, and script. They, in turn, help provide an important point of comparison for assessing reconstructions of potentially monarchic text elements in the Hebrew Bible.3 Firstly, it is important to note that the epigraphical finds datable to the tenth century BCE – e.g., the Gezer calendar, the Qeiyafa inscription – are clearly not Hebrew in language or script. The most plausible explanation for this is that an identifiable Hebrew language did not yet exist. One can observe different local languages like Israelite, Judahite, Moabite, and Ammonite written in kindred yet slightly different scripts, each of which developed from the Phoenician alphabet. Some scholars ask whether these languages should be viewed as dialects instead, but this is a difficult and blurred differentiation that in the end is not very important. Epigraphy from the ninth century is puzzling as well. The most extensive literary texts in the region are the Mesha stele, which is a Moabite inscription, and the Balaam inscription from Tell Deir ‘Alla, which is an Aramaic text.4 Beginning only in the eighth century do we have literary texts from Israel and Judah, such as the Khirbet el-Qom texts and the Siloam inscription.5 From this time

 A very helpful evaluation of Hebrew epigraphy in ancient Israel and Judah is provided by Christopher Rollston, Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2010). The epigraphical material is presented, for example, in Frederick W. Dobbs-Allsopp et al., Hebrew Inscriptions: Texts from the Biblical Period of the Monarchy with Concordance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). See also Ron E. Tappy and P. Kyle McCarter, Literate Culture and Tenth-Century Canaan: The Tel Zayit Abecedary in Context (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2008); Matthieu Richelle, “Elusive Scrolls: Could Any Hebrew Literature Have Been Written Prior to the Eighth Century BCE?” Vetus Testamentum 66 (2016): 556–594; Omer Sergi, “On Scribal Tradition in Israel and Judah and the Antiquity of the Historiographical Narratives in the Hebrew Bible,” in Joachim J. Krause et al, ed., Eigensinn und Entstehung der Hebräischen Bibel: Erhard Blum zum siebzigsten Geburtstag, Forschungen zum Alten Testament 136 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020), 275–299; Israel Finkelstein, “The Emergence and Dissemination of Writing in Judah,” Semitica et Classica 13 (2020), 269–282.  See John Andrew Dearman, ed., Studies in the Mesha Inscription and Moab, Atlanta: SBL, 1989; Erhard Blum, “Die altaramäischen Wandinschriften aus Tell Deir ̕Alla und ihr institutioneller Kontext,” in Friedrich-Emanuel Focken and Michael Ott, eds., Meta-Texte. Erzählungen von schrifttragenden Artefakten in der alttestamentlichen und mittelalterlichen Literatur; Materiale Textkulturen 15 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016), 21–52.  See Silvia Schroer and Stefan Münger, eds., Khirbet Qeiyafa in the Shephelah: Papers Presented at a Colloquium of the Swiss Society for Ancient Near Eastern Studies Held at the University of Bern, September 6, 2014, Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 282 (Fribourg: Academic Press/Göttingen:

Hebrew Writings and Literary Works from the First Temple Period

29

onward, there is a significant increase in the amount of epigraphic material. At the same time, Israel and Judah were perceived as politically relevant entities by the Mesopotamian empires. The earliest mentions of the kings of Israel and Judah are from the time of Shalmaneser III., who reigned from 859–824 BCE. King Jehu of Israel is not only mentioned in inscriptions but also portrayed iconographically in the famous Black Obelisk from Niniveh, which is the earliest known portrait of an Israelite.6 What can one deduce from these observations? First, in the eighth century BCE there seems to be significant development in both the possibilities and extent of Hebrew writing. The numbers of texts increase significantly; there is a clear standardization of language and script; and the states of Israel and Judah are perceived as such by their neighbors. These points are all relevant hints at the development of a scribal culture. With regard to the biblical traditions, it may be assumed that, while they may reach back to earlier times, their earliest literary forms likewise took shape in the eighth century (or at least not much earlier). The earliest period in ancient Israel and Judah when extensive texts become possible is apparently the time of Amos, Hosea, Micah, and Isaiah in the latter part of the eighth century. This also seems to be the reason why there are “books” of Amos or Isaiah, but no equivelant “books” of Elijah, Elisha, or other earlier prophetic figures mentioned in the books of Samuel and Kings. Again, this is not to say that no biblical text predates the eighth century BCE – especially if one accounts for oral pre-stages or memories that have been reworked and included in the texts as they now stand. But the eighth century seems to mark a caesura regarding the evolution of Israelite and Judahite scribal culture and, therefore, also of its literature.

3 Biblical Texts From the First Temple Period What biblical texts might reach back into the First Temple period and how can they be identified? To consider this question, a very basic distinction needs to be introduced: the differentiation between the biblical and the historical Israel.7

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017); Martin Leuenberger, Segen und Segenstheologien im Alten Israel: Untersuchungen zu ihren religions- und theologiegeschichtlichen Konstellationen und Transformationen, Abhandlungen zur Theologie des Alten und Neuen Testaments 90 (Zürich: TVZ, 2008), 138–149; and Ernst Axel Knauf, “Hezekiah or Manasseh? A Reconsideration of the Siloam Tunnel and Inscription,” Tel Aviv 28 (2001): 281–287.  See Othmar Keel and Christoph Uehlinger, “Der Assyrerkönig Salmanassar III. und Jehu von Israel auf dem Schwarzen Obelisken,” Zeitschrift für Katholische Theologie 116 (1994): 391–420.  See Reinhard G. Kratz, Historical and Biblical Israel: The History, Tradition, and Archives of Israel and Judah, trans. Paul Michael Kurtz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

30

Konrad Schmid

According to the biblical perspective, most texts of the Hebrew Bible date to the First Temple period or even earlier. All sixty-six chapters of the book of Isaiah were written by the prophet Isaiah in the eighth century; the books of Ecclesiastes (Qohelet) and Song of Songs (Shir ha-Shirim) are of Solomonic origin; and the Pentateuch was already known at the time of Joshua. These assignments are very traditional, but they nonetheless highlight the noteworthy point that the Hebrew Bible develops its own perspective on its literary history: not everything in the Bible goes back to the same origin. The biblical writings instead stem from different periods, even according to the Bible itself. This also has repercussions in the famous table of authorship in the Babylonian Talmud in Bava Batra 15a. Nevertheless, since the rise of historical-critical scholarship in the late eighteenth century, it has become apparent that the biblical perspective on the Bible’s literary history is not identical with the historical one. What the Bible presents as the oldest material is in fact not necessarily the earliest, but rather the most important. The biblical authors seem to have anchored basic normative elements of Judaism from later centuries – e.g., legal and cultic material in the books from Exodus through Deuteronomy – in Israel’s prehistory during the exodus from Egypt. The reason is the fundamental significance of these events. What comes first is what matters most, not what dates to the earliest times. Accordingly, it is also conspicuous that the Torah is not the founding charter for a monarchic Israel in its own land. Instead, the Torah largely takes place outside the land and seems to address an audience acquainted with life in the diaspora. As David J. A. Clines once put it: “The Torah is an exilic document in terms of its content, regardless of how one dates its texts.”8 In order to identify and evaluate biblical texts that might go back to the First Temple period, there are three criteria for gaining methodologically controlled results. However, each one is fraught with some difficulty and uncertainty. Such are the limits within which historical research must always be carried out. Nevertheless, by combining these three considerations, a quite reliable picture of the period’s literature is attainable.9 The first criterion is the relation of a specific text to Deuteronomy, and this has been of tremendous significance in the history of scholarship. As early as 1805, Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette argued that the literary core of Deuteronomy constituted a relatively fixed point in the history of the literary growth of the Hebrew Bible.10 He dated it to the time of Josiah’s reform, a proposal that had already been

 David J. A. Clines, The Theme of the Pentateuch, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 10 (2nd edition; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 103–104.  A detailed and very helpful assessment can be found in John Day’s In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel, The Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 406 (New York: Continuum, 2004).  See his Dissertatio critica qua Deuteronomium a prioribus Pentateuchi libris diversum, alius cujusdam recentioris auctoris opus esse monstratur (1805), published and translated in Hans-Peter

Hebrew Writings and Literary Works from the First Temple Period

31

made earlier by Jerome and Thomas Hobbes.11 The arguments that de Wette articulated two centuries ago have been refined and, to a certain extent, replaced by others – especially the Neo-Assyrian background of Deuteronomy. Despite these changes, Deuteronomy, with its programmatic cult centralization and theology of intolerant monolatry, is a comparably safe reference point in the late First Temple period, i.e., the late seventh century BCE. It therefore provides a good starting point for identifying First Temple period texts. Julius Wellhausen carried out his analysis on the basis of this criterion with regard to the pentateuchal Priestly texts, which he allocated to the post-Deuteronomic period because they presuppose Deuteronomy’s program of cult centralization.12 On the other hand, if Jacob in Genesis 28:20–22 vows to tithe a tenth to his god in Bethel, then such a text most likely originated before the centralization of the cult advocated by Deuteronomy at the end of the seventh century.13 By the same token, if clear allusions to the Deuteronomic ideology are detectable in books like Amos or Jeremiah (e.g., Am 1:1, 9–12; 2:4–5; 2:10–12; 3:1, 7; 5:25–26; Jer 5:19; 2:5b; 7:1–8:3; 8:19), but the alluding passages seem to be redactional expansions of pre-existing material, then it is fair to assume that these books go back to a pre-Deuteronomic core. For the Torah, it is therefore reasonable to assume that the non-Priestly parts of the ancestor stories in Genesis 12–36 are basically pre-Deuteronomic. They are aware of and accept different sanctuaries and altars in the land of Israel. By contrast, the Priestly narrative, especially in Exodus 25–40, Leviticus, and Numbers, is basically Mathys, “Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wettes Dissertatio critico-exegetica von 1805,” in Martin Kessler and Martin Wallraff, eds., Biblische Theologie und historisches Denken: Wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Studien aus Anlass der 50. Wiederkehr der Basler Promotion von R. Smend, Studien zur Geschichte der Wissenschaften in Basel Neue Folge 5 (Basel: Schwabe, 2008): 171–211, particularly 182–211.  See further Hans-Peter Mathys, “Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wettes Dissertatio criticoexegetica von 1805,” 176–181. On Josiah’s reform, see Michael Pietsch, Die Kultreform Josias. Studien zur Religionsgeschichte Israels in der späten Königszeit, Forschungen zum Alten Testament 86 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013). For the date of Deuteronomy, see the discussion in Juha Pakkala, “The Date of the Oldest Edition of Deuteronomy,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 121 (2009): 388–401. Pakkala’s article is in line with Reinhard G. Kratz, “Der literarische Ort des Deuteronomiums,” in Reinhard G. Kratz and Hermann Spieckermann, eds., Liebe und Gebot: Studien zum Deuteronomium. Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag von Lothar Perlitt, Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments 190 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000): 101–120. See further Nathan MacDonald, “Issues in the Dating of Deuteronomy: A Response to Juha Pakkala,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 122 (2010): 431–35; and Juha Pakkala, “The Dating of Deuteronomy: A Response to Nathan MacDonald,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 123 (2011): 431–436.  Julius Wellhasuen, Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (Berlin: G. Reimer, 61927). For the English translation, see Julius Wellhasuen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994).  See Konrad Schmid, “Shifting Political Theologies in the Literary Development of Jacob Cycle,” in Benedikt Hensel et al., eds., The History of the Jacob Cycle (Genesis 25–35), Archaeology and Bible 4 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021), 11–34.

32

Konrad Schmid

post-Deuteronomic. It presupposes one central albeit mobile sanctuary. However, its traditional legal material may well reach back into the First Temple period. The second criterion investigates the historical or archaeological realities presupposed by a text that points to the First Temple period. Here are a few examples: the story of David in Gath (1 Samuel 27) likely presupposes a still-existing city in Gath, which the Arameans destroyed in the late ninth century. The story could have been set elsewhere. Indeed, the setting in Gath seems like a random choice because it bears no specific rhetorical significance within the story. It is, therefore, reasonable to conclude that these tales about David in Gath reach back to the time of the historical Gath. Furthermore, the historicity of David himself in the tenth century BCE is nearly undisputed in current scholarship because the Tel Dan inscription attests to a “house of David” in the ninth century, which is certainly no invention of its authors.14 True, this is not direct evidence for a historical David in the tenth century, but the evidence for his dynasty in the ninth century presupposes such a figure at an earlier date. In addition to its pre-Deuteronomic shape, the pre-exilic date of the core of the Jacob cycle can also be corroborated by the prominence of the Bethel sanctuary in these texts. Bethel existed as an operating sanctuary only until the end of the eighth century, as Israel Finkelstein and Lily Singer-Avitz have shown.15 It is hardly imaginible that the Jacob texts, with their strong affiliation with Bethel, were written after the sanctuary had been abandoned. A final example can be found in the historical situation assumed by Isaiah 6–8. Aram and Israel’s threatening of Judah is a very specific political conflict (the SyroEphraimite war) that took place in the last third of the eighth century BCE. The texts in Isaiah 6–8 do not explain this situation; they just presuppose it. The literary core of Isaiah 6–8 is apparently more or less contemporaneous with this situation. This theory also finds support by the reception of Assyrian propaganda in these chapters, as Peter Machinist demonstrated as early as 1983.16 The third criterion involves attending to specific religious-historical traits of some texts that may indicate an origin in the First Temple period. For example, in Isaiah 6, the prophet Isaiah encounters God in the sanctuary. Only the seams of God’s garments are perceived in the temple itself because God himself is presumably much  See George Athas, The Tel Dan Inscription: A Reappraisal and a New Interpretation, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 360 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003).  Israel Finkelstein and Lily Singer-Avitz, “Reevaluating Bethel,” Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins 125 (2009): 33–48; but see also Oded Lipschits, “Bethel Revisited,” in Yuval Gadot, Oded Lipschits, and Matthew J Adams, eds., Rethinking Israel: Studies in the History and Archaeology of Ancient Israel in Honor of Israel Finkelstein (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2017), 233–246.  Peter Machinist, “Assyria and Its Image in the First Isaiah,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 103 (1983): 719–737; see also Konrad Schmid, “Theological Interpretation of Assyrian Propaganda in the Book of Isaiah,” in Jacob Stromberg and J. Todd Hibbard, eds., The History of Isaiah, Forschungen zum Alten Testament 150 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021), 493–502.

Hebrew Writings and Literary Works from the First Temple Period

33

greater, probably conceived of as towering up into the heavens. Be that as it may, according to Isaiah 6, God dwells in the temple. In a number of texts from the Second Temple period, we find instead the notion of God as the God of heaven who dwells exclusively in heaven.17 Some examples are 2 Chr 36:23/Ezra 1:2; Ezra 5:12; 6:9–10; 7:21, 23; Neh 1:4–5; 2:4, 20; Jonah 1:9; Dan 2:18, 37, 44; Jub. 12:7; 20:7; 22:19; and 1QS 11:5–9. One could also mention the Elephantine texts in this connection. To be sure, God also covers the heavenly realm in texts like Isaiah 6, but his presence is grounded in the temple. With the loss of the temple, however, God’s dwelling place seems to have moved completely into the heavens. One may, therefore, assume that texts not yet presupposing this move belong to the First Temple period. This is especially important with regard to Psalms (such as Psalm 46 or 48) that speak of God’s presence in Jerusalem, be it in the temple or even the city. Another approach to dating biblical texts to the First Temple period needs to be mentioned, namely linguistic dating. Since the seminal work of Wilhem Gesenius,18 the project of linguistic dating is based on differentiating between Classical Biblical Hebrew (CBH) on the one hand and Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH) on the other. Classical Biblical Hebrew is usually seen as pre-exilic, Late Biblical Hebrew as postexilic.19 If applied in this way to the Hebrew Bible, then the biblical perspective of the literary history of the Bible would basically be corroborated, as most of the biblical books playing out in the pre-exilic period, especially all of Genesis through Kings, is written in Classical Biblical Hebrew. According to scholars such as Avi Hurvitz, Ron Hendel, Jan Joosten, and William Schniedewind, these books emerged in the First Temple period, essentially as they appear today, with only occasional later additions.20 However, the debate over the conclusiveness of historical-linguistic arguments is only in its early stages. At this time, some reservations are justified about too narrowly handling the historical-linguistic evaluation of the Bible, which often coalesces with an overall pre-exilic dating of all CBH texts. This approach is inconclusive for a variety of reasons.

 See Christoph Koch, Gottes himmlische Wohnstatt: Transformationen im Verhältnis von Gott und Himmel in tempeltheologischen Entwürfen des Alten Testaments in der Exilszeit, Forschungen zum Alten Testament 119 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018).  Wilhelm Gesenius, Geschichte der hebräischen Sprache und Schrift (Leipzig: Vogel, 1815).  See Dong-Hyuk Kim, Early Biblical Hebrew, Late Biblical Hebrew, and Linguistic Variability: A Sociolinguistic Evaluation of the Linguistic Dating of Biblical Texts, Vetus Testamentum Supplements 156 (Leiden: Brill, 2013); Claudia Miller-Naudé and Ziony Zevit, eds., Diachrony in Biblical Hebrew, Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic 8 (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2012).  See Avi Hurvitz, A Concise Lexicon of Late Biblical Hebrew: Linguistic Innovations in the Writings of the Second Temple Period, Vetus Testamentum Supplements 160 (Leiden: Brill, 2014); Ronald Hendel and Jan Joosten, How Old Is the Hebrew Bible? A Linguistic, Textual, and Historical Study (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018); and William M. Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a. Book: The Textualization of Ancient Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

34

Konrad Schmid

First, the fact that a text is written in Classical Biblical Hebrew and not Late Biblical Hebrew informs us primarily about its theological perspective within the biblical tradition and not, or at least not directly, about its historical date. To oversimplify for a moment: CBH texts are mainly Torah-oriented, whereas LBH texts are not, or not to the same extent. Second, there is a significant gap in the external, non-biblical corpora for Hebrew between the sixth and second centuries BCE. There are many inscriptions from that period, but they are in Aramaic rather than in Hebrew. Therefore, it is not possible to define a clear terminus ante quem for CBH from the external evidence. This terminus ante quem could be in the sixth century, but it could also be later. And third, there is a basic asymmetry between the linguists’ methods for dating CBH texts on the one hand and LBH texts on the other. In their estimation, biblical texts written in CBH belong to the timeframe of the eighth to sixth centuries because the external evidence dates to that period. The external evidence for LBH is mainly found in the texts from the Dead Sea from the second and first centuries BCE, but the biblical texts and books written in LBH, like Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Daniel, and Esther, are dated by the linguists much earlier because they are, at least in part and for a variety of reasons, obviously older than the second or first century. Hence, the arguments regarding LBH show at least that a multitude of perspectives should be considered when dating biblical texts and what seems fair for LBH should also be accepted for CBH. Therefore, linguistic dating should not be an exclusive methodology for dating issues.21 It should be employed in conjunction with other data and perspectives, such as theological profiles, intertextual links, and geographic and archaeological information. There is still insufficient interaction between Hebraists and biblical scholars, which often means that these different, even conflicting, methods and results end up insulated from one other. At any rate, the fact that a text is written in CBH does not necessarily place it in the First Temple period. To sum up, if one applies these three criteria to the Bible, which texts or text portions are likely to stem from the First Temple period? In the Pentateuch, mention should especially be made of the ancestor narratives, the literary core of the exodus story, and the Deuteronomic law. In the Former Prophets, a pre-exilic composition of the Deuteronomistic history legitimating Josiah’s reform can be discerned. In the Latter Prophets, the literary cores of the books of Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah need to be taken into account, as well as the beginnings of the book of Jeremiah. The core of the Ketuvim (“Writings”), the book of Psalms, certainly includes preexilic texts, though individual psalms are by nature very difficult to date. It seems as if the older Psalms are gathered toward the beginning of the book, especially

 See in more detail Konrad Schmid, “How Old Is the Hebrew Bible? A Response to Ronald Hendel and Jan Joosten,” Zeitschrift fur die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 132 (2020): 622–631.

Hebrew Writings and Literary Works from the First Temple Period

35

Psalms 2–72, whereas the later ones are grouped at the end of the book. Evidence for this assumption can be adduced from the differing political theology between the former and the latter parts of the book. In Psalms 2–72, there is clear emphasis on the king as the sovereign power, whereas later on the book of Psalms develops a disctinct notion of theocracy and no longer mentions an earthly king. Regarding wisdom literature, the core of Proverbs, in Proverbs 10–29 in particular, seems to go back to the First Temple period. These chapters stand at the beginning of the intellectual history of wisdom theology, not yet incorporating the dissonance between ideology and experience that is witnessed, for instance, in the books of Job or Qoheleth. True, the books of the Hebrew Bible play out mostly in the First Temple period or even before. This is the world of the texts, but the world of its authors is often a different one. Some of them still belong to the First Temple period, as shown above, but many do not. What are all of these First Temple period texts about? It is of course impossible to subsume them into one single category, but it is noteworthy that the most prominent text complexes are political in nature. This is especially true for the first edition of the Deuteronomistic History in Samuel-Kings, whose climax occurs in the reign of Josiah. It is also true for the ancestor narratives and the exodus account, which are foundation myths for both ancient Israel and Judah. Also, the Psalms mentioned above are political in nature: they praise and legitimize the king as God’s chosen one to rule over his people. Even the various laments of the individual might have been texts that were originally conceived for the king. He was the central figure in the cult, as some of the political connotations in the sayings about his foes suggest. To be sure, this political outlook may have resulted especially out of a later selection process of determining what was and was not to be included in the Hebrew Bible. However, it might also reflect the localization of the scribal tradition in state sanctuaries like Dan, Samaria, and Bethel in the North or Jerusalem in the South.

For Further Reading Carr, David. The Formation of the Hebrew Bible: A New Reconstruction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Day, John. In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel. The Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 406. New York: Continuum, 2004. Dobbs-Allsopp, F. W., J. J. M.Roberts, C. L. Seow, and R. E. Whitaker. Hebrew Inscriptions: Texts from the Biblical Period of the Monarchy with Concordance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Ehrlich, Carl S. “Hebrew/Israelite Literature.” In Carl S. Ehrlich, ed., From an Antique Land: An Introduction to Ancient Near Eastern Literature, 313–391. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009.

36

Konrad Schmid

Gertz, Jan Christian, Angelika Berlejung, Konrad Schmid, and Markus Witte. T&T Clark Handbook of the Old Testament: An Introduction to the Literature, Religion and History of the Old Testament. New York: T&T Clark, 2012. Kim, Dong-Hyuk. Early Biblical Hebrew, Late Biblical Hebrew, and Linguistic Variability. A Sociolinguistic Evaluation of the Linguistic Dating of Biblical Texts. Vetus Testamentum Supplements 156. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Kratz, Reinhard G. “The Growth of the Old Testament.” In John W. Rogerson and Judith M. Lieu, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies, 459–488. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Kratz, Reinhard G. Historical and Biblical Israel: The History, Tradition, and Archives of Israel and Judah, trans. Paul Michael Kurtz. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Levin, Christoph. The Old Testament: A Brief Introduction, trans. Margaret Kohl. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Rollston, Christopher. Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2010. Römer, Thomas. The So-Called Deuteronomistic History: A Sociological, Historical and Literary Introduction. London/New York: Continuum, 2005. Schmid, Konrad and Jens Schröter, The Making of the Bible: From the First Fragments to Sacred Scripture, trans. Peter Lewis. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. Schmid, Konrad. The Old Testament: A Literary History. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012.

Beth Alpert Nakhai

Revisiting Iron Age Israel: New Archaeological Approaches Our archaeological world is significantly different from that of our forebears, who arrived at their excavation sites by ship, train, or even four-legged animals.1 Mail went by courier. Exciting discoveries were telegraphed to hometown newspapers. Field garb might include a spyglass and a martini glass. Broken pottery was immediately discarded, while the “nice” finds were shipped home. Times have changed, of course, and nowadays histories of Near Eastern archaeology offer a periodization of the field (the nineteenth century; before World War I; between the wars; the postwar era, and the like).2 There are, as well, many new approaches to studying the past; under consideration here are some of the newer archaeological frameworks used to reconstruct Israel in the Iron Age (1200–587 BCE). More specifically, the focus is on half a dozen

 I would like to thank Prof. Carl S. Ehrlich, who honored me by inviting me to speak at the 2014 symposium celebrating the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University, Toronto. My thanks, as well, to Prof. Sara R. Horowitz, also of the Koschitzky Centre at York University. This paper was completed in 2015 and has not been updated. In addition, I would like to extend my thanks to Prof. Dr. Dieter Vieweger, Director, German Protestant Institute for Archaeology, Amman, and Jerusalem, for kindly supplying the images used in this article.  For a sampling of the literature that focuses on North Americans working in Palestine and Israel, see Neil A. Silberman, Digging for God and Country: Exploration, Archaeology and the Secret Struggle for the Holy Land, 1799–1917 (New York: Knopf, 1982); Neil A. Silberman, “Power, Politics and the Past: The Social Construction of Antiquity in the Holy Land,” in Thomas E. Levy, ed., The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land (London: Leicester University Press, 1995), 9–20; Neil A. Silberman, “Whose Game Is It Anyway? The Political and Social Transformations of American Biblical Archaeology,” in Lynn Meskell, ed., Archaeology under Fire: Nationalism, Politics and Heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East (New York: Routledge, 1998), 175–88; Philip J. King, American Archaeology in the Mideast: A History of the American Schools of Oriental Research (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1983); Mark Elliot, “Archaeology, Bible and Interpretation: 1900–1930” (PhD diss., University of Arizona, 1998); Joseph D. Seger, ed., An ASOR Mosaic: A Centennial History of the American Schools of Oriental Research 1900–2000 (Boston: ASOR, 2001); Thomas W. Davis, Shifting Sands: The Rise and Fall of Biblical Archaeology (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Rachel Hallote, Bible, Map, and Spade: The American Palestine Exploration Society, Frederick Jones Bliss, and the Forgotten Story of Early American Archaeology (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2006); and references therein. For changes in the field and visions for the future, see essays in Thomas E. Levy, ed., Historical Biblical Archaeology and the Future: The New Pragmatism (London / Oakville, CT: Equinox, 2010), and especially William G. Dever, “Does ‘Biblical Archaeology’ Have a Future?” in Levy, ed., Historical Biblical Archaeology and the Future, 349–360; Alexander H. Joffe, “The Changing Place of Biblical Archaeology: Exceptionalism or Normal Science?” in Levy, ed., Historical Biblical Archaeology and the Future, 328–348; Thomas E. Levy, “The New Pragmatism: Integrating Anthropological, Digital, and Historical Biblical Archaeologies,” in Levy, ed., Historical Biblical Archaeology and the Future, 3–42. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110418873-004

38

Beth Alpert Nakhai

topics that might seem commonplace nowadays, but which were not, until the last three or four decades, part of standard discourse in this field. They are: (1) the archaeology of the Israelite village; (2) the archaeology of Israelite ethnogenesis, ethnicity, and acculturation; (3) the archaeology of housing and the household; (4) the archaeology of women, families, and gender;3 (5) the archaeology of daily life; and (6) the archaeology of household or domestic religion. Several factors have driven these changes in the study of Iron Age Israel. They include: (1) Israel’s altered geopolitical landscape subsequent to the 1967 Six Day War;4 (2) Processual or “New” Archaeology, which emphasized anthropological goals and scientific methods;5 (3) a myriad of new scientific techniques for analyzing archaeological remains;6 and (4) the social and intellectual revolution fueled by feminist scholarship.7 The confluence of these factors has facilitated – even inspired – a sea change in Iron Age archaeology.8 Rather than dwelling on these factors, though,

 Children are emerging as an important category of investigation. See, among others, Kristine H. Garroway, Children in the Ancient Near Eastern Household, Explorations in Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations 3 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2014).  For a history of excavations, see Israel Finkelstein, The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement, trans. Daniela Saltz (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1988), 15–21.  See Gordon R. Willey and Philip Phillips, Method and Theory in American Archaeology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); Lewis R. Binford, “Archaeology as Anthropology,” American Antiquity 28/2 (1962): 217–25; William G. Dever, “The Impact of the ‘New Archaeology’ on SyroPalestinian Archaeology,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 242 (1981): 15–29; Robert W. Preucel, ed., Processual and Postprocessual Archaeologies: Multiple Ways of Knowing the Past, Occasional Paper No. 10 (Carbondale, IL: Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University, 1991); Michael J. O’Brien, R. Lee Lyman, and Michael B. Schiffer, Archaeology as a Process: Processualism and Its Progeny (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005); Levy, ed., Historical Biblical Archaeology and the Future; and references therein.  For the relationship between scientific analysis and the archaeology of Iron Age Israel, see, among others, Ilan Sharon, Ayelet Gilboa, and Elisabetta Boaretto, “The Iron Age Chronology of the Levant: The State-of-Research at The 14C Dating Project, Spring 2006,” in Lester L. Grabbe, ed., Israel in Transition: From Late Bronze II to Iron IIa (c. 1250–850 BCE), Vol. 1: The Archaeology, Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 491; European Seminar in Historical Methodology 7 (London: Continuum, 2008), 177–92; Daniel A. Frese and Thomas E. Levy, “The Four Pillars of the Iron Age Low Chronology,” in Thomas E. Levy, ed., Historical Biblical Archaeology and the Future, 187–202; Thomas E. Levy and Thomas Higham, eds., The Bible and Radiocarbon Dating: Archaeology, Text and Science (London/Oakville, CT: Equinox, 2005); and references therein.  Beth Alpert Nakhai, “Gender and Archaeology in Israelite Religion,” Compass Religion 1/5 (2007): 512–528; Beth Alpert Nakhai, “Women in Israelite Religion: The State of Research Is All New Research,” in Avraham Faust, ed., Archaeology and Israelite Religion (Basel: MDPI), 63–73 (doi:10.3390/ rel10020122).  At the same time, their impact has been hindered, to some extent, by (1) restricted access to the monies needed to fund scientific research; (2) continuing reliance on traditional models for social reconstruction; (3) the infamously slow process of archaeological publication; (4) an academic job market that privileges older, more traditional models of scholarship; and (5) changes in the sociopolitical environment of the Middle East. See Hershel Shanks, ed., Archaeology’s Publication

Revisiting Iron Age Israel: New Archaeological Approaches

39

this discussion turns specifically to those changes within Iron Age archaeology that have taken place within the past few decades. A brief consideration of the state of scholarship near the end of the twentieth century helps to highlight these changes. Virtually all the archaeological analyses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries emphasized historical reconstruction, that is, the integration of material culture into political and military histories gleaned from the Bible and from other Near Eastern texts.9 What mattered to scholars was the meta-narrative – the lives of gods, kings, priests, and prophets – in short, the lives of elite men (Figure 1).10 That this meta-narrative was itself developed and expounded by elite men, academics who had often trained as clergy, is by no means coincidental. As they channeled the ancient authors of the Bible and other Near Eastern texts, these modern scholars rarely considered the ‘am ha’aretz, “the people of the land,”11 and when they did, it was men and not women whom they considered their subjects. Our field is by no means unique in this regard. A few examples, well-regarded synthetic overviews used for research and training, illuminate this point. Each incorporates some blend of archaeology and biblical studies. The work of William Foxwell Albright, the oft-proclaimed doyen of “biblical archaeology,” active from the 1930s until his death in 1971, stands out. His seminal

Problem (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1996); Raz Kletter and Alon De Groot, “Excavating to Excess? Implications of the Last Decade of Archaeology in Israel,” Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 14/1 (2001): 76–85; Alexander H. Joffe, “The Changing Place of Biblical Archaeology: Exceptionalism or Normal Science?” in Thomas E. Levy, ed., Historical Biblical Archaeology and the Future, 328–348; Beth Alpert Nakhai, “Factors Complicating the Reconstruction of Women’s Lives in Iron Age Israel (1200–587 BCE),” in Saana Svärd and Agnès Garcia-Ventura, eds., Studying Gender in the Ancient Near East (State College, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2018), 289–313; and references therein.  Two exceptions to this are Johannes Pedersen, Israel: Its Life and Culture, Vol. 1, South Florida Studies in the History of Judaism 28 (Atlanta: Scholars, 1991); and, Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions, trans. J. McHugh, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), 65–90. For a discussion of historicist tendencies among American archaeologists working in the eastern Mediterranean prior to World War I, see Thomas C. Patterson, “Who Did Archaeology in the United States Before There Were Archaeologists and Why? Preprofessional Archaeologies of the Nineteenth Century,” in Preucel, ed., Processual and Postprocessual Archaeologies, 242–250.  A comment by Catherine Morland, the protagonist of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey: “I read it [history] a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all – it is very tiresome . . .” (New York: New American Library, 1965, 91–92; completed 1803 and first published 1817).  For Israel’s social groups and discussions thereof, see Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel, 65–90; Victor H. Matthews and Don C. Benjamin, Social World of Ancient Israel: 1250–587 BCE (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1993); Hanoch Reviv, The Elders in Ancient Israel: A Study of a Biblical Institution (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1993); William G. Dever, “Social Structure in Palestine in the Iron II Period on the Eve of Destruction,” in Thomas E. Levy, ed., The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land, New Approaches in Anthropological Archaeology (London: Leicester University, 1995), 416–430.

40

Beth Alpert Nakhai

Figure 1: Six-chambered gate at Gezer. ©Katja Soennecken.

From the Stone Age to Christianity: Monotheism and the Historical Process, published in 1940, treated neither women nor the ‘am ha’aretz; rather, it offered an overview structured by periodization, the pinnacle of which was Christianity or, as Albright termed it, “The Fullness of Time.”12 His student George Ernest Wright’s Biblical Archaeology, published in 1957, delivered a similarly structured overview, culminating in chapters entitled “Palestine in the Time of Christ” and “The Church in the World.”13 Later, others eliminated the Christian bias but continued to ignore the lives of those whom William G. Dever recently called “ordinary people.”14 That Dever,  William F. Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity: Monotheism and the Historical Process (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1940).  George E. Wright, Biblical Archaeology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1957). According to de Vaux: “The institutions of the Chosen People prepare the way for, and indeed foreshadow, the institutions of the community of the [Christian] elect” (Ancient Israel, ix).  See, for example, English-language publications including J. M. Miller and J. H. Hayes’ classic A History of Ancient Israel and Judah (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1986; 2nd ed. 2006). This traditional perspective was not limited to North Americans, as can be seen in Archaeology in the Holy Land by British archaeologist Kathleen M. Kenyon (London: E. Benn, 1960, 4th ed. 1979); Israel’s History and the History of Israel by Italian archaeologist Mario Liverani (London / Oakville, CT: Equinox, 2005); Archaeology of the Land of the Bible by Israeli archaeologist Amihai Mazar (New York: Doubleday, 1990); and, The Archaeology of Ancient Israel by Israeli archaeologist Amnon Ben-Tor (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). More recently, see the co-authored The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts by Israeli Israel Finkelstein and American Neil Asher Silverman (New York: Free Press, 2001). Some recent encyclopedias of the ancient world focused exclusively on sites and eras. See Michael AviYonah and Ephraim Stern, eds., Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land

Revisiting Iron Age Israel: New Archaeological Approaches

41

himself a protégé of Wright, has written about such people in his 2012 The Lives of Ordinary People in Ancient Israel is a mark of changing trends in scholarship; such changes are also reflected in his attention to ethnicity and popular or folk religion.15 In his 1995 edited volume, The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land, Thomas E. Levy argued for an anthropological approach to the study of antiquity, and this is reflected in the book’s three articles on Iron Age Israel and Judah, written by Israel Finkelstein, John S. Holladay, Jr., and William G. Dever. These articles share a “long term diachronic perspective,” an attention to social sciences and social structure, and a commitment to privileging material culture (environmental, archaeological, and so forth) over text.16 To some extent, each scholar considered non-elites – even though none addressed the lives of women. While Levy’s book did not single-handedly change our field – such change was being forced by other dynamics, as well – it certainly signaled the fact that change was afoot. In brief, then, until rather late in the last millennium, scholarship in the field of Iron Age archaeology emphasized male elites in their historic, social, and religious settings. However, the groundwork was being laid for new approaches that would facilitate important developments in the study of Iron Age Israel.

(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975–1978); Ephraim Stern, ed., The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1993); Stern, ed., The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land: 1993–2008, Supplemental Volume; Avraham Negev, ed. Archaeological Encyclopedia of the Holy Land (Englewood, NJ: SBS Publications, 1980); Avraham Negev and Shimon Gibson, eds., Archaeological Encyclopedia of the Holy Land, revised and updated (New York: Continuum, 2001). Several others include entries relating to personal life (for example, clothing, cosmetics, personal hygiene, houses, jewelry, private life, social class) – although not topics such as gender or family structure. See Jack M. Sasson, ed., Civilizations of the Ancient Near East (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995); and Eric M. Meyers, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Most recently, Daniel M. Master, ed., the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Archaeology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) includes entries on society and culture, such as dress, music and dance, literacy, education, royal and domestic religion, economy, cooking, diet, gender, life stages and life events, subsistence production, and more.  William G. Dever, The Lives of Ordinary People in Ancient Israel (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012); William G. Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003); William G. Dever, Did God Have a Wife?: Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005).  Thomas E. Levy, “Preface,” in Levy, ed., The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land, xii. Further, see William G. Dever, “Social Structure in Palestine in the Iron II Period on the Eve of Destruction;” Israel Finkelstein, “The Great Transformation: The ‘Conquest’ of the Highlands Frontiers and the Rise of the Territorial States,” in Levy, ed., The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land (London: Leicester University Press, 1995), 349–363; and John S. Holladay, Jr., “The Kingdoms of Israel and Judah: Political and Economic Centralization in the Iron IIA–B (ca. 1000–750 BCE),” in Thomas E. Levy, ed., The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land, 368–398.

42

Beth Alpert Nakhai

1 The Israelite Village It was the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War that provided the material within Israel and in the territories that would become the Palestinian Authority that made it possible to consider village life, and with that, a number of other avenues of research became possible as well. Prior to this point, it had been rare for archaeologists to focus on rural life in Iron Age Israel or elsewhere throughout the Near East.17 Few Iron Age villages had been explored; for the most part, archaeologists had focused on towns and cities such as Megiddo, Tell en-Nasbeh, Hazor, Lachish, Tell Beit Mirsim, Shechem, Samaria, Gezer, Tell el-Far‘ah (N), and, insofar as was possible, Jerusalem. After the Six Day War, ancient Israel’s rural heartland suddenly became accessible and archaeologists undertook extensive surveys in the Central Highlands (Figure 2). There they identified hundreds of villages that had been founded in the Iron Age I (1200–1000 BCE), the era of Israelite Settlement. Their discoveries revolutionized our understanding of village life and of the process of Israelite ethnogenesis.18  For further discussion, see Lawrence E. Stager, “The Archaeology of the Family in Ancient Israel,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 260 (1985): 1–35; Steven E. Falconer, “The Village Economy and Society in the Jordan Valley: A Study of Bronze Age Rural Complexity,” in Glenn M. Schwartz and Steven E. Falconer, eds., Archaeological Views from the Countryside: Village Communities in Early Complex Societies (Washington, DC/London: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1994), 121–142; Glenn M. Schwartz and Steven E. Falconer, “Rural Approaches to Social Complexity,” in Schwartz and Falconer, eds., Archaeological Views from the Countryside, 1994), 1–9; Brian Hayden, “Village Approaches to Complex Societies,” in Schwartz and Falconer, eds., Archaeological Views from the Countryside, 198–206; Carol Kramer, “Scale, Organization, and Function in Village and Town,” in Schwartz and Falconer, eds., Archaeological Views from the Countryside, 207–212; J. P. Dessel, “Tell `Ein Zippori and the Lower Galilee in the Late Bronze and Iron Ages: A Village Perspective,” in Eric Meyers, ed., Galilee Through the Centuries: Confluence of Cultures, Proceedings of the Second International Conference in Galilee (Raleigh, NC: North Carolina Museum of Art and Duke University Press, 1999), 1–32; Mario Liverani, “The Role of the Village in Shaping the Ancient Near Eastern Rural Landscape,” in Lucio Milano, Stephano de Martino, F. Mario Fales, and Giovanni B. Lanfranchi, eds., Landscapes: Territories, Frontiers and Horizons in the Ancient Near East, Papers presented to the XLIV Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Venezia, 7–11 July 1997, Part 1: Invited Lectures, History of the Ancient Near East Monographs III/1 (Padova: Sargon, 1999), 37–47; Beth Alpert Nakhai, “Contextualizing Village Life in the Iron Age I,” in Grabbe, ed., Israel in Transition; European Seminar in Historical Methodology 7 (London: Continuum, 2008), 121–137; and references therein.  For a history of previous explorations, a summary of post-1967 surveys, and a discussion of Israelite settlements in the Central Highlands, see Israel Finkelstein, Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement; Israel Finkelstein and Nadav Na’aman, eds., From Nomadism to Monarchy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early Israel (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi and Israel Exploration Society/Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1994); Israel Finkelstein, “The Great Transformation;” Lawrence E. Stager, “Forging an Identity: The Emergence of Ancient Israel,” in Michael D. Coogan, ed., The Oxford History of the Biblical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 90–131; Beth Alpert Nakhai and Elizabeth Bloch-Smith, “A Landscape Comes to Life: The Iron I Period,” Near Eastern Archaeology 62/2 (1999): 62–92, 101–27; Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites?; Beth Alpert Nakhai,

Revisiting Iron Age Israel: New Archaeological Approaches

43

It now became possible to discuss in detail the settings in which small groups of people built mountaintop hamlets and villages, living side-by-side as they cleared slopes, constructed terracing, farmed valleys, pastured livestock, produced the tools and utensils of their daily lives, engaged in limited trade, defended themselves from enemies, and worshipped both in their villages and at a few pilgrimage sites. It is this Highlands setting that is at the heart of the book of Judges, as Israel Finkelstein made clear with the Hebrew title of his 1988 The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement: Arkhe’ologyah shel tekufat ha-hitnahalut veha-shoftim, (“Archaeology of the Period of the Settlement and the Judges”). The villages excavated outside the Highlands core, whether in the Jezreel and Beth Shean Valleys, the Galilee, the Shephelah, or the northern Negev, revealed different occupational histories.19

Figure 2: Aerial view of the Hill Country. ©Katja Soennecken.

An additional component of this focus on life outside the major cities is that archaeologists are now better able to define and quantify the non-urban experience in the Iron Age II (1000–587 BCE). During these centuries, which saw the growth and development “Israel on the Horizon: The Galilee in the Iron I,” in Beth Alpert Nakhai, ed., The Near East in the Southwest: Essays in Honor of William G. Dever, Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 58 (Atlanta: ASOR, 2003): 131–151; and references therein.  The Galilee, for example, retained its Canaanite core well into the Iron Age I, as seen at sites including Tell el-Wawiyat and Tel Zippori. See J. P. Dessel, “Tell `Ein Zippori and the Lower Galilee in the Late Bronze and Iron Ages: A Village Perspective;” Nakhai, “Israel on the Horizon;” Nakhai and BlochSmith, “A Landscape Comes to Life;” Nakhai, “Contextualizing Village Life in the Iron Age I;” Amihai Mazar, “From 1200 to 850 BCE: Remarks on Some Selected Archaeological Issues,” in Grabbe, ed., Israel in Transition, Vol. 1; European Seminar in Historical Methodology 7 (London: Continuum, 2008) 86–120; and references therein.

44

Beth Alpert Nakhai

of Israelite and Judaean cities and the eventual destruction of so many of them, a significant component of the population lived in the countryside. This means that life was neither an urban phenomenon nor a rural one, but rather reflected the complex interplay among residents of the cities and those living in the countryside. Such interplay involved not only location, proximity, and scale of settlement, but also social class, kinship networks, safety and security, ideology, and more. Recent studies of settlement patterns and subsistence strategies now contribute to fuller and more accurate reconstructions of Iron Age Israel and Judah.20

2 Israelite Ethnogenesis, Ethnicity, and Acculturation Two factors in particular have advanced the study of ethnogenesis, ethnicity, and acculturation over the course of the last few decades.21 One, particularly helpful in the consideration of ethnogenesis, is the above-mentioned attention to Israel’s foundational villages. The other is the exploration of communities at Israel’s borders. These include the Philistines and the peoples of Transjordan; closer to home, the ethnicity of Israelites – in contrast to that of Judaeans – is also being discussed. The ability to identify distinct corpora of material culture assemblages, which might also be defined by biblical narratives and extrabiblical texts that clarify site names and ethnicities, makes it possible to examine contemporary yet distinct peoples living in proximity one to the other. The extent to which housing, pottery, tools, places of worship, cultic implements, and so forth, either differed from or resembled each other – or originally differed from and eventually came to resemble each other – provides stellar opportunities to investigate the true nature of ethnic identity, differentiation, and acculturation, freed from the overlay of biblical stereotypes. Included among the elements of material

 Avraham Faust, The Archaeology of Israelite Society in Iron Age II (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2012).  Several recent books and a number of articles treat the topic of ethnicity for Israel and its neighbors. See, most extensively, William G. Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites?; William G. Dever, “Ethnicity and the Archaeological Record: The Case of Early Israel” in Douglas R. Edwards and C. Thomas McCollough, eds., The Archaeology of Difference: Gender, Ethnicity, Class and the “Other” in Antiquity, Studies in Honor of Eric M. Meyers, Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 60/61 (Boston: ASOR, 2007), 46–66; Ann E. Killebrew, Biblical Peoples and Ethnicity: An Archaeological Study of Egyptians, Canaanites, Philistines, and Early Israel, 1300–1100 BCE (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005); Avraham Faust, Israel’s Ethnogenesis. For a treatment of Israelite ethnicity as expressed in the Hebrew Bible, see Kenton L. Sparks, Ethnicity and Identity in Ancient Israel: Prolegomena to the Study of Ethnic Sentiments and Their Expressions in the Hebrew Bible (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1998). For a foundational work on ethnicity, see Fredrik Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1969).

Revisiting Iron Age Israel: New Archaeological Approaches

45

culture that serve as ethnic markers are the four-room house, the Judaean pillar figurine, and foodways. Investigating such markers facilitates the examination of Israelites and Judaeans, and the comparison between them and other ethnic communities. Israelite housing is defined by the four-room house, which was found almost exclusively in Israelite (or soon to be Israelite) settlements from the beginning of the Iron Age I to the end of the Iron Age II. Virtually without exception, such houses do not predate the Iron Age, nor were they used in other nations, nor did Judaeans use them subsequent to the Babylonian destruction of 587 BCE (for further discussion of Israelite housing, see below). The four-room house, then, represents an example of material culture that has, in the last decades, been recognized as an ethnic marker (Figure 3).22 Judaean pillar figurines (JPFs; also called Astarte, Asherah, or dea nutrix figurines) can be considered another marker of identity, although distinguishing between religious affiliation and ethnic identity, which are not by definition coterminous, is important. JPFs were used extensively in Judah, almost exclusively in the ninth to seventh centuries BCE.23 While there are significant commonalities among female figurines across western Asia, this particular form did not appear in the lands bordering Judah,

 For the four-room house as a marker of Israelite ethnicity, see Yigal Shiloh, “The Four-Room House: Its Situation and Function in the Israelite City,” Israel Exploration Journal 20/3–4 (1970): 180–190; John S. Holladay, Jr., “House, Israel,” in David Noel Freedman, ed., The Anchor Bible Dictionary, Vol. 3 (New York: Doubleday, 1992) 308–318; Ehud Netzer, “Domestic Architecture in the Iron Age,” in Aharon Kempinski and Ronny Reich, eds., The Architecture of Ancient Israel: From the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1992), 193–201; Shlomo Bunimovitz and Avraham Faust, “Building Identity: The Four-Room House and the Israelite Mind,” in William G. Dever and Seymour Gitin, eds., Symbiosis, Symbolism, and the Power of the Past: Canaan, Ancient Israel, and Their Neighbors from the Late Bronze Age through Roman Palaestina (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003) 411–423; and Faust, Israel’s Ethnogenesis, 70–84. For the four-room house in Ammon, see P. M. Michèle Daviau, “Domestic Architecture in Iron Age Ammon: Building Materials, Construction Techniques, and Room Arrangement,” in Burton MacDonald and Randall W. Younker, eds., Ancient Ammon (Leiden: Brill, 1999) 113–136; Larry G. Herr, “The House of the Father at Iron I Tall al-‘Umayri, Jordan,” in J. David Schloen, ed., Exploring the Longue Durée: Essays in Honor of Lawrence E. Stager (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2009) 191–198; and references therein.  Raz Kletter, The Judean Pillar Figurines and the Archaeology of Asherah, BAR International Series (Oxford: Tempus Reparatum, 1996), 636; Raz Kletter, “Pots and Polities: Material Remains of Late Iron Age Judah in Relation to Its Political Borders,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 314 (1999): 19–54; Erin Darby, Interpreting Judean Pillar Figurines: Gender and Empire in Judean Apotropaic Ritual, Forschungen zum Alten Testament 2/69 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 367–397; William G. Dever, “The Judean ‘Pillar-Base Figurines,’” in Rainer Albertz, Beth Alpert Nakhai, Saul M. Olyan, and Rüdiger Schmitt, eds., Household Religion: Toward a Synthesis of Old Testament Studies, Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Cultural Studies in Proceedings of the International Conference at Westfälisches Wilhelms-Universität Münster, April 1st–3rd, 2009 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2014), 129–141.

46

Beth Alpert Nakhai

Figure 3: Reconstruction of a typical four-room house. ©Dieter Vieweger/drawing: Ernst Brückelmann.

some earlier examples in Israel notwithstanding.24 As such, it can be considered a marker of Judaean (and perhaps – but less so – of Israelite) identity in the Iron Age II (Figure 4).25

 Peter Roger Stuart Moorey, Idols of the People: Miniature Images of Clay in the Ancient Near East (Oxford: British Academy, 2003); Beth Alpert Nakhai, “Mother-and-Child Figurines in the Late Bronze – Persian Period Levant,” in John R. Spencer, Robert A. Mullins, and Aaron J. Brody, eds., Material Culture Matters: Essays on the Archaeology of the Southern Levant in Honor of Seymour Gitin (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2014), 165–198.  Circumcision is studied as a means of ascertaining Israelite religious and ethnic affiliations, and of differentiating Israelites from their neighbors, using criteria that range from presence/absence to differences in surgical technique. See Jack M. Sasson,“Circumcision in the Ancient Near East,” Journal of Biblical Literature 85 (1966): 473–476; Philip J. King, “Gezer and Circumcision,” in Seymour Gitin, J. Edward Wright, and J. P. Dessel, eds., Confronting the Past: Archaeological and Historical Essays on Ancient Israel in Honor of William G. Dever (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2006), 333–340; Nick Wyatt, “Circumcision and Circumstance: Male Genital Mutilation in Ancient Israel and Ugarit,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 33/4 (2009): 405–431; Avraham Faust, “The Bible, Archaeology, and the Practice of Circumcision in Israelite and Philistine Societies,” Journal of Biblical Literature 134/2 (2015): 273–290; and references therein.

Revisiting Iron Age Israel: New Archaeological Approaches

47

Figure 4: Head (left) and torso (right) of pillar-base figurines. ©DEI.

Food preparation, consumption, and avoidance offer important insights into ethnic identification, differentiation, and acculturation. For example, faunal analysis focusing on swine has been a popular tool in the discussion of Israelite and Philistine ethnicity. Pig bones have been identified at Philistine sites in the Iron I; their virtual absence at contemporary sites in the Central Highlands correlates with biblical expectations (Lev 11:7; Deut 14:8), which emphasize the prohibition of pig bones for the people of Israel. In the Iron Age II, the dynamic changed; while there were significantly fewer pig bones at Philistine sites, they were now found at sites in the northern nation of Israel.26 That is to say, over time Judah came to have an ethnic identity of its own, perhaps as distinct from that of its northern neighbor, Israel, with whom its

 Brian Hesse and Paula Wapnish, “Can Pig Remains Be Used for Ethnic Diagnosis in the Ancient Near East?” in Neil A. Silberman and David B. Small, eds., The Archaeology of Israel: Constructing the Past, Interpreting the Present, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 237 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1997), 237–270; Killebrew, Biblical Peoples and Ethnicity, 35–40; Joe Uziel, “The Development Process of Philistine Material Culture: Assimilation, Acculturation and Everything in between,” Levant 39 (2007): 165–173; Shlomo Bunimovitz and Zvi Lederman, “A Border Case: BethShemesh and the Rise of Ancient Israel,” in Grabbe, ed., Israel in Transition, Vol. 1; European Seminar in Historical Methodology 7 (London: Continuum, 2008), 21–31; Lidar Sapir-Hen et al., “Pig Husbandry in Iron Age Israel and Judah: New Insights Regarding the Origin of the ‘Taboo,’” Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins 129/1 (2013): 1–20.

48

Beth Alpert Nakhai

relationship was more often than not acrimonious, as it was from its Philistine neighbors to the west.27 Another recent means of exploring ethnic identification, differentiation, and acculturation is the study of methods of food preparation and cooking, and vessels used for cooking, especially among Philistines and Israelites.28 These data illuminate the shifting dynamics of ethnicity, acculturation, and cultural distinction, even as they complicate our understanding of Israelite ethnicity.29 Comparisons between Israelites and the peoples of Transjordan are also instructive. Some elements of the material culture of Transjordan resemble those of Israel and Judah, while others must be considered uniquely Transjordanian. For example, a four-room house in Iron Age I Tall al-‘Umayri, located in what would become the nation of Ammon, closely resembled contemporary houses in the Central Highlands, as well as those of later Israelites.30 In addition, it contained the kind of cultic paraphernalia, including a maṣṣebah (standing stone)-and-altar installation, which would be

 For a discussion of the religious differences among Israelites that looks at the Israelites of the north (Israel), the south (Judah), and the east (Transjordan), see Jeremy M. Hutton, “Southern, Northern and Transjordanian Perspectives,” in Francesca Stavrakopoulou and John Barton, eds., Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 149–174.  For Judah, Carol L. Meyers, “From Field Crops to Food: Attributing Gender and Meaning to Bread Production in Iron Age Israel,” in Douglas R. Edwards and C. Thomas McCollough, eds., The Archaeology of Difference: Gender, Ethnicity, Class and the “Other” in Antiquity – Studies in Honor of Eric M. Meyers, Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 60/61(Boston: ASOR, 2007) 67–84; Cynthia Schafer- Elliott, Food in Ancient Judah: Domestic Cooking in the Time of the Hebrew Bible (Sheffield, UK/Bristol, CT: Equinox, 2013); for an emphasis on Philistines, see David BenShlomo, Itzhaq Shai, Alexander Zukerman, and Aren M. Maier, “Cooking Identities: Aegean-Style Cooking Jugs and Cultural Interaction in Iron Age Philistia and Neighboring Regions,” American Journal of Archaeology 112/2 (2008): 225–246; Laura B. Mazow, “Competing Material Culture: Philistine Settlement at Tel Miqne-Ekron in the Early Iron Age,” in Spencer, Mullins, and Brody, eds., Material Culture Matters, 144–152; and references therein.  For further discussion of Israelites and Philistines, see, among others, Joe Uziel, “Development Process of Philistine Material Culture;” Bunimovitz and Lederman, “A Border Case”; Yuval Gadot, “Houses and Households in Settlements along the Yarkon River, Israel, during the Iron Age I: Society, Economy, and Identity,” in Asaf Yasur-Landau, Jennie R. Ebeling, and Laura B. Mazow, eds., Household Archaeology in Ancient Israel and Beyond, Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 50 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 155–181. For Israelites, Philistines, and Canaanites, see Joe Uziel, “Development Process of Philistine Material Culture;” Asaf Yasur-Landau, “Under the Shadow of the Four-Room House,” in Levy, ed., Historical Biblical Archaeology and the Future, 142–155.  Larry G. Herr, “An Early Iron Age I House with a Cultic Corner at Tall al-‘Umayri, Jordan,” in Seymour Gitin, J. Edward Wright, and J. P. Dessel, eds., Confronting the Past: Archaeological and Historical Essays on Ancient Israel in Honor of William G. Dever (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2006), 61–73; Larry G. Herr, “The House of the Father at Iron I Tall al-‘Umayri,” in Schloen, ed., Exploring the Longue Durée, 191–198. See also P. M. Michèle Daviau, “Domestic Architecture in Iron Age Ammon: Building Materials, Construction Techniques, and Room Arrangement,” in Burton MacDonald and Randall W. Younker, eds., Ancient Ammon (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 113–136.

Revisiting Iron Age Israel: New Archaeological Approaches

49

at home in Iron Age II Israel or Judah.31 In the Iron II, however, Transjordanian cultic objects diverged from those of neighbors to the west and can be identified as Moabite, Ammonite, and Edomite.32 What seems of particular importance are the shifting social dynamics that become visible through the study of ethnicity, inasmuch as it focuses on relationships among the various elements of Israelite, Judaean, Transjordanian, and Philistine domestic and cultic material culture.33 Whether these elements are initially distinct and come to bear more resemblance one to the other, or are initially similar and eventually become distinct, is in itself significant. Even more significant, though, are the insights about human relationships to which these changes bear material witness. Given the intimate nature of many signifiers of ethnicity (food choices, cooking utensils, methods of food preparation, circumcision and other bodily modifications, housing arrangements, domestic rituals, burial customs, dress, music, and more), explorations of the roles that women played in defining, transmitting, and transforming ethnic affiliations offer a promising direction for further investigation.34

 Herr, “Early Iron Age I House,” in Gitin, Wright, and Dessel, eds.,Confronting the Past; Herr, “House of the Father,” in Schloen, ed., Exploring the Longue Durée.  P. M. Michèle Daviau, “Family Religion: Evidence for the Paraphernalia of the Domestic Cult,” in P. M. Michèle Daviau, John W. Wevers, and Michael Weigl, eds., The World of the Aramaeans II: Studies in History and Archaeology, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 325 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2001), 199–229; P. M. Michèle Daviau “Diversity in the Cultic Setting: Temples and Shrines in Central Jordan and the Negev,” in Jens Kamlah, ed., Temple Building and Temple Cult: Architecture and Cultic Paraphernalia of Temples in the Levant (2.–1. Mill. BCE), Abhandlungen des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 41 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2012) 435–458; Chang-Ho Ji, “The Early Iron Age II Temple at Hirbet Atarus and Its Architecture and Selected Cultic Objects,” in Jens Kamlah, ed., Temple Building and Temple Cult: Architecture and Cultic Paraphernalia of Temples in the Levant (2.–1. Mill. B.C.E.), Abhandlungen des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 41 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2012), 203–221.  Shifting ethnic alliances stand separate from foreign influences. See, for example, Seymour Gitin’s discussion of Philistine religious worship and ways in which it was impacted by international relations with Phoenicia and Assyria, in Seymour Gitin, “Temple Complex 650 at Ekron: The Impact of Multi-Cultural Influences on Philistine Cult in the Late Iron Age,” in Jens Kamlah, ed., Temple Building and Temple Cult: Architecture and Cultic Paraphernalia of Temples in the Levant (2.–1. Mill. BCE), Abhandlungen des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 41 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2012), 223–256. See also Bryan J. Stone, “The Philistines and Acculturation: Culture Change and Ethnic Continuity in the Iron Age,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 298 (1995): 7–32.  For a discussion of relations among Canaanite and Egyptian women and their impact on religious worship in Late Bronze II, see Beth Alpert Nakhai, “Plaque and Recumbent Figurines of the Late Bronze II,” in Susan Ackerman, Charles Carter, and Beth Alpert Nakhai, eds., Celebrate Her for the Fruit of Her Hands: Studies in Honor of Carol L. Meyers (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2015), 327–356.

50

Beth Alpert Nakhai

3 Housing and the Household For the Near East, as for elsewhere in the world, the study of household or domestic archaeology is relatively new.35 As noted above, the investigation of the four-room house has added a critical component to the study of Israelite ethnicity by identifying it as a marker of Israelite identity. What this means is that the four-room house is seen as more than an architectural preference; delineating its essential structural and functional components reveals aspects of Israelite social structure, lifestyle, and mores.36 The congruence between biblical terms representing elements of Israel’s social structure (including bet ’av and mishpaha) and both four-room houses and larger housing compounds underscores the connection between community and built space.37 Such insights provide scholars with new tools for reconstructing the lifeways of ancient Israelites. Some, as noted above, have focused on the structures themselves, while others (see below) look to the various activities that took place within them.38 These include activities both quotidian39 and ritual, inasmuch  François Braemer, L’architecture domestique du Levant á l’âge du fer (Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les civilisations, 1982); Richard E. Blanton, Houses and Households: A Comparative Study (New York: Plenum, 1994); James W. Hardin, “Understanding Houses, Households, and the Levantine Archaeological Record,” in Yasur-Landau, Ebeling, and Mazow, eds., Household Archaeology in Ancient Israel and Beyond, 9–25.  Philip J. King and Lawrence E. Stager, Life in Biblical Israel, Library of Ancient Israel (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 28–40; Shlomo Bunimovitz and Avraham Faust, “Building Identity: The Four-Room House and the Israelite Mind,” in Dever and Gitin, eds., Symbiosis, Symbolism, and the Power of the Past, 411–423; Faust, Israel’s Ethnogenesis, 71–84. For housing and the use of domestic space in the Canaanite Middle-Late Bronze Ages, see P. M. Michèle Daviau, Housing and Their Furnishings in Bronze Age Palestine: Domestic Activity Areas and Artifacts Distribution in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament/American Schools of Oriental Research Monograph Series 8 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993).  Stager, “Archaeology of the Family in Ancient Israel;” J. David Schloen, The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East, Studies in the Archaeology and History of the Levant 2 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2001), 135–183.  See, among others, James W. Hardin, Lahav II: Households and the Use of Domestic Space at Iron II Tell Halif: An Archaeology of Destruction, Reports of the Lahav Research Project Excavations at Tell Halif, Israel 2 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2010); Yasur-Landau, Ebeling, and Mazow, eds., Household Archaeology in Ancient Israel and Beyond.  See, among others, Nimrod Marom and Sharon Zuckerman, “Domestic Contexts: A Case Study From the Lower City of Hazor,” in Asaf Yasur-Landau, Jennie R. Ebeling, and Laura B. Mazow, eds., Household Archaeology in Ancient Israel and Beyond, Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 50 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 37–54; Nava Panitz-Cohen, “A Tale of Two Houses: The Role of Pottery in Reconstructing Household Wealth and Composition,” in Yasur-Landau, Ebeling, and Mazow, eds., Household Archaeology in Ancient Israel and Beyond, 85–105; David Ilan, “Household Gleanings from Iron I Tel Dan,” in Yasur-Landau, Ebeling, and Mazow, eds., Household Archaeology in Ancient Israel and Beyond, 133–154; Aaron J. Brody, “‘Those Who Add House to House’: Household Archaeology and the Use of Domestic Space in an Iron II Residential Compound at Tell en-Nasbeh,” in Schloen, ed., Exploring the Longue Durée, 45–56. Aaron J. Brody, “The Archaeology of the Extended

Revisiting Iron Age Israel: New Archaeological Approaches

51

as secular space could – and often was – transformed into sacred space.40 All this has prompted – and facilitated – a newfound attention to the ‘am ha’aretz, to women and children, to the challenges of daily activities and of survival in a subsistence economy, to familial and personal religion, to communal responsibilities, and even to the material correlates of personal decision-making.

4 Women, Families, and Gender It is not an overstatement to suggest that the scholarly discovery of women in ancient Israel can be dated only to the last decades of the twentieth century. Consider, for example, de Vaux’s epic Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions, which devoted less than 5 percent of its nearly six hundred pages to women and considered them only within biblically determined social categories such as wife, divorcée, widow, and slave.41 The first modern research that made Israelite women its subject, and which incorporated archaeology as a primary resource, dates to late in the 1980s.42 Carol Meyers’s Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context utilized insights drawn from the disciplines of anthropology and archaeology, as well as from biblical

Family: A Household Compound from Iron II Tell en-Nasbeh,” in Yasur-Landau, Ebeling, and Mazow, eds., Household Archaeology in Ancient Israel and Beyond, 237–254; Lily Singer-Avitz, “Household Activities at Beersheba,” Eretz-Israel 25 (1996): 166–174; Lily Singer-Avitz, “Household Activities at Tel Beersheba,” in Yasur-Landau, Ebeling, and Mazow, eds., Household Archaeology in Ancient Israel and Beyond, 275–301.  See, among others, Carol L. Meyers, Households and Holiness: The Religious Culture of Israelite Women, (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005); Beth Alpert Nakhai, “Varieties of Religious Expression in the Domestic Setting,” in Yasur-Landau, Ebeling, and Mazow, eds., Household Archaeology in Ancient Israel and Beyond, 347–60; Beth Alpert Nakhai, “The Household as Sacred Space,” in Albertz, Nakhai, Olyan, and Schmitt, eds., Household Religion, 53–71; Beth Alpert Nakhai, “Where to Worship? Religion in Iron II Israel and Judah,” in Nicola Laneri, ed., Defining the Sacred: Approaches to the Archaeology of Religion in the Near East (Oxford, UK: Oxbow Books, 2015), 90–101.  Little had changed by the end of the twentieth century, even with books that were structured topically rather than chronologically. Benedikt S. J. Isserlin’s The Israelites (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998) devoted less than one of its 304 pages, and King and Stager’s Life in Biblical Israel, only nine of its 440 pages, to women’s roles in society.  For the initial discussion of archaeology as a tool for reconstructing women’s lives, see Margaret W. Conkey and Janet D. Spector, “Archaeology and the Study of Gender,” in Michael Schiffer, ed., Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory, Vol. 7 (New York: Academic Press, 1984), 1–38. See also, among others, Joan M. Gero and Margaret W. Conkey, eds., Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Brian Boyd, “The Power of Gender Archaeology,” in Jenny Moore and Eleanor Scott, eds., Invisible People and Processes: Writing Gender and Childhood into European Archaeology (London: Leicester University Press, 1997), 25–30; Julia A. Hendon, “The Engendered Household,” in Sarah M. Nelson, ed., Handbook of Gender in Archaeology (Berkeley: AltaMira, 2006), 171–198.

52

Beth Alpert Nakhai

studies.43 While its contemporary, Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel, contained articles based upon textual (mostly biblical) resources, the book’s two-part bibliography, which included references drawn from the fields of biblical studies, anthropology, feminist studies, method and theory, and non-biblically based text studies, similarly reflected new approaches to the study of women.44 Of all these

 Carol L. Meyers, Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context (New York / Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).  Peggy L. Day, ed., Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989). A number of subsequent books have focused on women, families, gender, and social structure in Iron Age Israel. For some, Scripture (Hebrew Bible, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, New Testament) has been the primary resource. For Israel and Ugarit, see, among others, Phyllis A. Bird, “The Place of Women in the Israelite Cultus,” in Patrick D. Miller, Jr., Paul D. Hanson, and S. Dean McBride, eds., Ancient Israelite Religion: Essays in Honor of Frank Moore Cross (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), 397–419; Phyllis A. Bird, “Women’s Religion in Ancient Israel,” in Barbara S. Lesko, ed., Women’s Earliest Records from Ancient Egypt and Western Asia, Proceedings of the Conference on Women in the Ancient Near East, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, November 5–7, 1987 (Atlanta: Scholars, 1989), 283–298; Phyllis A. Bird, “Israelite Religion and the Faith of Israel’s Daughters: Reflections on Gender and Religious Definition,” in David Jobling, Peggy L. Day, and Gerald T. Sheppard, eds., The Bible and the Politics of Exegesis (Cleveland: Pilgrim, 1991), 97–108; Phyllis A. Bird, Missing Persons and Mistaken Identities: Women and Gender in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997); Carol A. Newsom, Sharon H. Ringe, and Jacqueline E. Lapsley, eds., The Women’s Bible Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1992; rev. ed. 2012); Carol L. Meyers, Toni Craven, and Ross S. Kraemer, eds., Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, and the New Testament (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999); Hennie J. Marsman, Women in Ugarit and Israel: Their Social and Religious Position in the Context of the Ancient Near East, Oudtestamentische Studiën 49 (Atlanta: SBL / Leiden: Brill, 2003); and the multi-volume series entitled Feminist Companion to the Bible, beginning with Athalya Brenner, ed., A Feminist Companion to the Song of Songs, Feminist Companion to the Bible 1 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1993). For others, archaeology and anthropology provide additional important resources. See, among others, Victor H. Matthews and Don C. Benjamin, Social World of Ancient Israel: 1250–587 BCE (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1993); Leo G. Perdue, Joseph Blenkinsopp, John J. Collins, and Carol Meyers, Families in Ancient Israel, The Family, Religion, and Culture (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1997); Beth Alpert Nakhai, “Female Infanticide in Iron II Israel and Judah,” in Shawna Dolansky, ed., Sacred History, Sacred Literature: Essays on Ancient Israel, the Bible and Religion in Honor of R. E. Friedman on His 60th Birthday (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2008), 245–260; Beth Alpert Nakhai, ed., The World of Women in the Ancient and Classical Near East (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008); Jennie R. Ebeling, “The Problematic Portrayal of Ancient Daily Life in Early Excavation Reports,” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 2010; Jennie R. Ebeling, “Infancy, Childhood, Adulthood, Old Age, Bronze and Iron Age,” in Daniel M. Master, ed., Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Archaeology, Vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 541–555; Jennie R. Ebeling, “Puberty, Marriage, Sex, Reproduction, and Divorce, Bronze and Iron Age,” in Master, ed., Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Archaeology, Vol. 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 190–201; Mayer I. Gruber, “Gender, Bronze and Iron Age,” in Master, ed., Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Archaeology, Vol. 1, 453–460; Garroway, Children in the Ancient Near Eastern Household.

Revisiting Iron Age Israel: New Archaeological Approaches

53

bibliographic references though, only one, “Asherah, Consort of Yahweh? New Evidence from Kuntillet ’Ajrud,”45 engaged with material culture and it did so in quest of the divine rather than the human. Indeed, the study of Asherah and the ever-popular Judaean pillar figurine has often substituted for the study of actual Israelite women.46 Even as archaeologists continue to engage with already-published materials, new excavation strategies and advances in modes of scientific analysis are furthering the study of Iron Age women. In 2014, for example, Nava Panitz-Cohen and Robert A. Mullins introduced what they called the “gender agenda” into their excavation of Tel Abel-Beth-Maacah, on Israel’s northern border. With its focus on domestic archaeology, the gender agenda ensures that the contents of homes, including pottery, tools, and workspaces, are studied in detail. Floor surfaces, vessel contents, areas for cooking and weaving, and the like are subjected to microbiological and other scientific analyses in order to determine the use and function of every nook and cranny.47 Ethnographic studies and ethnoarchaeological fieldwork have become important resources for identifying the material correlates of those endeavors necessary for the sustenance of family and community, and for considering the ramifications of such endeavors for the lives of Israelite women and their families. Incorporating ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological data into the study of antiquity is complicated, given the vast chronological, religious, and cultural gulf between the Iron Age and the present (Figure 5). Cautions are necessary, even when utilizing something as deceptively simple as old photographic archives that depict Palestinian women engaged

 William G. Dever, “Asherah, Consort of Yahweh? New Evidence from Kuntillet ’Ajrud,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 255 (1984): 12–37.  The traditional approach to women conflated women with goddesses and sought to reconstruct the role of Asherah in Israelite religion, or the function of the JPF (then called the dea nutrix [“nursing goddess”] or Astarte figurine), as ways of discussing real-life women. For example, in the late 1990s, I reviewed all the papers presented at the annual meetings of the American Schools of Oriental Research over the course of the previous two decades. I discovered a number of papers on goddesses and figurines (and on pigs) but no papers on real-life women. This was, to some extent, rectified by my 1999 introduction of an ASOR session on women and gender. This session, now entitled “Gender in the Ancient Near East,” provides a venue for important discussions of women, men, and children, and of gender in antiquity (Beth Alpert Nakhai, “Introduction: The World of Women in the Ancient and Classical Near East,” in Nakhai, ed., The World of Women in the Ancient and Classical Near East, ix–xvi. Even now, however, few papers on topics relating to women are presented in other sessions at ASOR’s annual meetings.  Nava Panitz-Cohen and Robert A. Mullins, “The ‘Gender Agenda’ at Tel Abel Beth Maacah: From Classroom to Field in Search of Ancient Women,” Tel Abel Beth Maacah Excavations, last modified 2014, http://www.abel-beth-maacah.org/index.php/12-seasons/2013-season/78-gender-agenda. See also, among others, Ruth Shahack-Gross, “Household Archaeology in Israel: Looking into the Microscopic Record,” in Yasur-Landau, Ebeling, and Mazow, eds., Household Archaeology in Ancient Israel and Beyond, 27–35.

54

Beth Alpert Nakhai

Figure 5: Shepherds and their flock on the way to Ein Kerem. From the Gustav Dalman Collection at the DEI Jerusalem. ©DEI.

in domestic or agricultural tasks.48 This is because photographers often posed their subjects in order to mimic what they thought the lives of their subjects’ forebears would have been like in biblical times.49 Still, investigations into traditional methods of pottery and textile production, the preparation of food and drink, building and construction, and more remain fruitful.50  Among others, Palestine Exploration Fund, n/d, https://www.flickr.com/photos/palestineex plorationfund/with/5226286805/; G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection at the US Library of Congress, n/d: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/matpc/; Harvard College Library, n/d: http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/finearts/collections/semitic_photo.cfm.  Sarah Graham-Brown, Palestinians and Their Society 1880–1946: A Photographic Essay (London: Quartet Books, 1980); Sarah Graham-Brown, Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in Photography of the Middle East 1860–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Suad Amiry and Vera Tamari, The Palestinian Village Home (London: British Museum, 1989); Jennie R. Ebeling, “The Problematic Portrayal of Ancient Daily Life in Early Excavation Reports,” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 2010; Jennie R. Ebeling, “The Presentation of Women’s Lives in Antiquity in Museums in Israel and Jordan,” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 2011; Beth Alpert Nakhai, “Factors Complicating the Reconstruction of Women’s Lives in Iron Age Israel (1200–587 BCE)”; and references therein.  For Ottoman- and Mandate-era Palestine, see, among others, Elihu Grant, The People of Palestine: An Enlarged Edition of the Peasantry of Palestine, Life, Manners, and Customs of the Village (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1921); Hilma N. Granqvist, Marriage Conditions in a Palestinian Village

Revisiting Iron Age Israel: New Archaeological Approaches

55

The many insights gained from such research are all the more compelling because they can be situated within accurately defined homes and social settings. The cumulative weight of this attention to a population group hitherto virtually ignored allows for a fuller understanding not only of women’s lives, but also of the lives of men, of children, and of families as a whole.

5 Daily Life Daily life, a topic mentioned only in passing in earlier literature,51 is a coverall for myriad quotidian tasks, whether at home, in the fields, or with flocks. Contemporary researchers have begun to systematically address the cultivation of food and

(Helsingfors: Akademische Buchhandlung, 1931); Hilma N. Granqvist, Birth and Childhood among the Arabs: Studies in a Muhammadan Village in Palestine (Helsingfors: Söderström, 1947); Tawfiq Canaan, “The Palestinian Arab House: Its Architecture and Folklore, Part 2,” Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 7 (1933): 159–186. For Palestine, see Shelagh Weir, Spinning and Weaving in Palestine (London: British Museum, 1970). For Jordan, see Hilma N. Granqvist, Child Problems Among the Arabs: Studies in a Muhammadan Village in Palestine (Helsingfors: Söderström, 1950); Hilma N. Granqvist, “Muslim Death and Burial Customs in Bethlehem Village,” Muslim World 49/4 (1959): 287–295; Eveline J. van der Steen, “Judha, Masos and Hayil: The Importance of Ethnohistory and Oral Traditions,” in Thomas E. Levy, ed., Historical Biblical Archaeology and the Future, 168–186; Nabil Ali, “The Human Aspect of Technology: An Ethnoarchaeology Study of Cooking Ware from Jordan,” Near Eastern Archaeology 78/2 (2015): 80–87. For Jordan and Egypt, see Alysia Fischer, “The Lives of Glass-Workers at Sepphoris,” in Edwards and McCollough, eds., The Archaeology of Difference, 301–310. For Israel, see Joseph Ginat, Women in Muslim Rural Society: Status and Role in Family and Community (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1982); Susan Starr Sered, “Toward an Anthropology of Jewish Women: Sacred Texts and the Religious World of Elderly, Middle-Eastern Women in Jerusalem,” in Maurie Sacks, ed., Active Voices: Women in Jewish Culture (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 203–218. For Iran, see Carol Kramer, “An Archaeological View of a Contemporary Kurdish Village: Domestic Architecture, Household Size, and Wealth,” in Carol Kramer, ed., Ethnoarchaeology: Implications of Ethnography for Archaeology (New York: Columbia University, 1979), 139–163; Erika Friedl, “Islam and Tribal Women in a Village in Iran,” in Nancy A. Falk and Rita M. Gross, eds., Unspoken Worlds: Women’s Religious Lives in Non-Western Cultures (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980), 159–173; Erika Friedl, The Women of Deh Koh: Lives in an Iranian Village (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1989). For Iraq, see Elizabeth W. Fernea, Guests of the Sheik (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965). For Cyprus, see Gloria London, “Continuity and Change in Cypriot Pottery Production,” Near Eastern Archaeology 63/2 (2000): 102–110; Gloria London, “Ethnoarchaeology and Interpretations of the Past,” Near Eastern Archaeology 63/1 (2000): 2–8; Gloria London, Women Potters of Cyprus (videorecording), Nicosia: Tetraktys Film Productions, 2000; and Diane Bolger, “Were They All Women? Gender and Pottery Production in Prehistoric Cyprus,” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 2010.  For a rare exception, see Eric W. Heaton, Everyday Life in Old Testament Times (London: B. T. Batsford, 1956).

56

Beth Alpert Nakhai

animal resources for domestic and commercial purposes; the preparation of food, beer, wine, and olive oil for domestic consumption and commercial purposes; and the production of textiles for domestic use and commercial purposes. These scholars utilize varied approaches, including archaeological fieldwork, lab work, ethnographic research, and studies that incorporate the Hebrew Bible and Egyptian and Mesopotamian comparanda (Figure 6).

Figure 6: Handheld Iron Age grinding stone. ©Katja Soennecken.

Several overviews have consolidated this vast body of information, in order to reconstruct daily life for Iron Age Israelites.52 Women, however, who performed so many of those tasks essential for sustaining the lives of their families and of themselves hardly factor into them.53 More recently, books by Jennie Ebeling54 and Carol Meyers55 engage with daily life from the perspective of women; Dever56 incorporates women into his study of “ordinary people” and daily life. Many scholars now focus on specialized

 King and Stager, Life in Biblical Israel,; Oded Borowski, Daily Life in Biblical Times, Archaeology and Biblical Studies 5 (Atlanta: Society for Biblical Literature, 2003).  Beth Alpert Nakhai, “Daily Life in the Ancient Near East: New Thoughts on an Old Topic,” Religious Studies Review: A Quarterly Review of Publications in the Field of Religion and Related Disciplines 31/3–4 (2005): 147–153.  Jennie R. Ebeling, Women’s Lives in Biblical Times (London: T&T Clark, 2010).  Carol L. Meyers, Rediscovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).  William G. Dever, “Religion and Cult, Bronze and Iron Age,” in Master, ed., Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Archaeology, Vol. 2, 285–295.

Revisiting Iron Age Israel: New Archaeological Approaches

57

topics such as animal husbandry,57 agriculture,58 food and cooking,59 wine, beer, and olive oil;60 textiles, clothing, and jewelry;61 ceramic production;62 and even manners and etiquette.63 A particularly interesting project was the construction of a four-room house undertaken by members of the Madaba Plains Project in Jordan. Overseen by Douglas R. Clark, this project clarified the enormous human effort required to build that most basic of Iron Age housing units and underscored the huge impact on the natural

 Oded Borowski, Every Living Thing: Daily Use of Animals in Ancient Israel (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 1998); Aharon Sasson, Animal Husbandry in Ancient Israel: A Zooarchaeological Perspective on Livestock Exploitation, Herd Management and Economic Strategies, Approaches to Anthropological Archaeology (Sheffield, UK/Bristol, CT: Equinox, 2010); Edward G. Maher, “Animal Husbandry,” in Master, ed., Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Archaeology, Vol. 1, 21–28.  David C. Hopkins, The Highlands of Canaan: Agricultural Life in the Early Iron Age (Sheffield: Almond, 1985); Oded Borowski, Agriculture in Iron Age Israel, rev. ed. (Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research, 2002); Oded Borowski, “Agriculture,” in Daniel M. Master, ed., Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Archaeology, Vol. 1, 13–21.  Jennie R. Ebeling, “Bread Making as Women’s Technology in Ancient Israel,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 2002; Carol L. Meyers, “From Field Crops to Food: Attributing Gender and Meaning to Bread Production in Iron Age Israel,” in Edwards and McCollough, eds., The Archaeology of Differenc, 67–84; Aubrey Baadsgard, “A Taste of Women’s Sociality: Cooking as Cooperative Labor in Iron Age Syro-Palestine,” in Nakhai, ed., The World of Women in the Ancient and Classical Near East, 13–44. Nathan MacDonald, What Did the Ancient Israelites Eat? Diet in Biblical Times (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008); Peter Altmann, “Diet, Bronze and Iron Age,” in Master, ed., Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Archaeology, Vol. 1, 286–296; Cynthia Schafer-Elliott, Food in Ancient Judah: Domestic Cooking in the Time of the Hebrew Bible (Sheffield, UK/Bristol, CT: Equinox, 2013).  Carey E. Walsh, The Fruit of the Vine: Viticulture in Ancient Israel and the Hebrew Bible, Harvard Semitic Monographs 60 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1996); Jennie R. Ebeling and Michael M. Homan, “Baking and Brewing Beer in the Israelite Household: A Study of Women’s Cooking Technology,” in Nakhai, ed., The World of Women in the Ancient and Classical Near East, 45–62; Rafi Frankel, Wine and Oil Production in Antiquity in Israel and Other Mediterranean Countries (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999); Rafi Frankel, “Corn, Oil, and Wine Production,” in Master, ed., Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Archaeology, Vol. 1, 233–244.  Deborah Cassuto, “Bringing Home the Artifacts: A Social Interpretation of Loom Weights in Context,” in Nakhai, ed., The World of Women in the Ancient and Classical Near East, 63–77; Abigail S. Limmer, “Dress, Bronze and Iron Age,” in Master, ed., Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Archaeology, Vol. 1, 318–328.  Bryant Wood, The Sociology of Pottery in Ancient Palestine: The Ceramic Industry and the Diffusion of Ceramic Style in the Bronze and Iron Ages, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament/American Schools of Oriental Research Monograph Series 4, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 103 (Sheffield, UK: JSOT Press for ASOR, 1990); Gloria London, “Ceramic Production, Bronze and Iron Age,” in Master, ed., Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Archaeology, Vol. 1, 198–203; Nabil Ali, “The Human Aspect of Technology: An Ethnoarchaeology Study of Cooking Ware from Jordan,” Near Eastern Archaeology 78/2 (2015): 80–87.  Victor H. Matthews, “Everyday Life (Customs, Manners, and Laws),” in Suzanne Richard, ed., Near Eastern Archaeology: A Reader (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 157–163.

58

Beth Alpert Nakhai

environment that its construction entailed.64 Work such as this, which exposes the gritty details of everyday life, contributes to a nuanced understanding of what life was like in Iron Age Israel – of life’s achievements and obstacles, and of the consequences of human behavior.

6 Household or Family Religion The final area that has undergone enormous change over the last few decades is the study of Israelite and Judaean religion. Until the last decades of the twentieth century, scholars engaged with what they considered normative; that is, Jerusalem-based, palace-based, temple-based religion. Reading the Bible as a more-or-less accurate descriptor of Israel’s religion, they understood this hegemonic product of an elite male community to represent Israel’s single legitimate mode of belief and practice. In harmony with the biblical position, archaeological evidence for cultic practices in Jerusalem and elsewhere – whether figurines, stone and ceramic altars, offering stands, votive vessels, inscriptions, model shrines, or even actual sanctuaries – was viewed (and dismissed) as the vestige of Israel’s pagan Canaanite past. As such, the many ritual artifacts and installations uncovered on excavations were considered evidence for religious violations rather than valid components within the complex fabric of Israelite and Judaean religion. Over the past few decades, however, scholars have developed new ways of understanding these religious beliefs and behaviors, thereby affirming the authenticity of non-temple religion.65 Here, two approaches have prevailed. The first distinguishes between what is commonly called state and popular religion; the second focuses on religious practice within the domestic setting. The first approach queries popular assumptions about Israelite religion. In his article “Religion in Israel and Judah under the Monarchy: An Explicitly Archaeological Approach,” John S. Holladay argued for privileging material culture over the

 Douglas R. Clark, “Bricks, Sweat and Tears: The Human Investment in Constructing a ‘FourRoom’ House,” Near Eastern Archaeology 66 (2003): 34–43.  John S. Holladay, Jr., “Religion in Israel and Judah under the Monarchy: An Explicitly Archaeological Approach,” in Patrick D. Miller, Jr., Paul D. Hanson, and S. Dean McBride, eds., Ancient Israelite Religion: Essays in Honor of Frank Moore Cross (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), 249–299; William G. Dever, “The Contribution of Archaeology to the Study of Canaanite and Early Israelite Religion,” in Miller Hanson, and McBride, eds., Ancient Israelite Religion: Essays in Honor of Frank Moore Cross, 209–247; William G. Dever, “Religion and Cult, Bronze and Iron Age,” in Master, ed., Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Archaeology, Vol. 2, 285–295; Beth Alpert Nakhai, Archaeology and the Religions of Canaan and Israel (Atlanta: ASOR, 2001); for an overview, see Richard S. Hess, Israelite Religions: An Archaeological and Biblical Survey (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 43–80.

Revisiting Iron Age Israel: New Archaeological Approaches

59

biblical text, in order to illuminate the religion of the common person.66 This was addressed, as well, in my Archaeology and the Religions of Canaan and Israel.67 In his A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period, Vol. I: From the Beginnings to the End of the Monarchy, Rainer Albertz distinguished between “state cult” and “personal piety.”68 Dever’s study of 2 Kings 23 utilized excavated materials to illuminate the Josianic reforms of the late seventh century, thereby delineating fundamental aspects of popular religion in Judah.69 Ongoing research by Albertz, Dever, and many others has nuanced our understanding of Iron Age religion by integrating popular religion, that is, the beliefs and ritual practices of the population at large, with that of the so-called state, which is to say, the urban elite.70 The second approach looks at the religion of households and even of individuals, especially women. Continuing research into the lives of Iron Age women and into the four-room house is essential to this work; conversely, contributions to the study of household religion inform our understanding of women’s lives and of the domestic sphere. Karel van der Toorn’s From Her Cradle to Her Grave: The Role of Religion in the Life of the Israelite and Babylonian Woman and his Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria, and Israel: Continuity and Change in the Forms of Religious Life71 were both instrumental in focusing attention on religious belief and practice within households and among women. Ongoing research by archaeologists and by scholars working with ancient texts contributes to identifying religion’s personal dimension.72 As

 John S. Holladay, “Religion in Israel and Judah under the Monarchy: An Explicitly Archaeological Approach,” in Patrick D. Miller, Jr., Paul D. Hanson, and S. Dean McBride, eds., Ancient Israelite Religion: Essays in Honor of Frank Moore Cross (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987).  Nakhai, Archaeology and the Religions of Canaan and Israel.  Rainer Albertz, A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period, Vol. 1: From the Beginnings to the End of the Monarchy, trans. John Bowden (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1994).  William G. Dever, “The Silence of the Text: An Archaeological Commentary on 2 Kings 23,” in Michael D. Coogan, J. Cheryl Exum, and Lawrence E. Stager, eds., Scripture and Other Artifacts: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Honor of Philip J. King (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1994), 213–238.  See, among others, Ora Negbi, “Israelite Cult Elements in Secular Contexts of the 10th Century BCE,” in Avraham Biran and Joseph Aviram, eds., Biblical Archaeology Today, 1990, Proceedings of the Second International Congress on Biblical Archaeology (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1993), 221–230; Ziony Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel: A Synthesis of Parallactic Approaches (London/New York: Continuum, 2001); William G. Dever, Did God Have a Wife?; Francesca Stavrakopoulou and John Barton, eds., Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah (London: T&T Clark, 2010).  Karel van der Toorn, From Her Cradle to Her Grave: The Role of Religion in the Life of the Israelite and the Babylonian Woman (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1994); Karel van der Toorn, Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria, and Israel: Continuity and Change in the Forms of Religious Life, Studies in the History and Culture of the Ancient Near East 7 (Leiden: Brill, 1996).  Elizabeth A. R. Willett, “Women and Household Shrines in Ancient Israel” (PhD diss., University of Arizona, 1999); Elizabeth A. R. Willett, “Infant Mortality and Women’s Religion in the Biblical Periods” in Beth Alpert Nakhai, ed., The World of Women in the Ancient and Classical Near East (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 77–96; Ziony Zevit, The Religions of

60

Beth Alpert Nakhai

practiced at home, it focused on the maintenance of the domestic unit, which might include rituals devoted to Asherah or Yahweh, rituals of thanksgiving and blessing, and rituals invoking healing, successful childbirth, healthy children, bountiful harvests, and plentiful flocks. What is gained by these new approaches to Israelite and Judaean religion? For one, they have transformed the once-traditional perspective that favored the male community that created the Hebrew Bible.73 Perhaps even more important, they have introduced the average human being, whether female or male, into the discussion. Just as Jeremiah 44:15–19 transmits the voice of Judaean commoners exiled to Egypt as they recollect their day-to-day religious practices when they lived in Judah, this scholarship offers us the opportunity to enter homes and see what it was that people did – and believed – as they went about their daily lives.

Ancient Israel: A Synthesis of Parallactic Approaches (London/New York: Continuum, 2001); Susan Ackerman, “At Home with the Goddess,” in Dever and Gitin, eds., Symbiosis, Symbolism, and the Power of the Past, 455–468; Susan Ackerman, “Women and the Worship of Yahweh in Ancient Israel,” in Seymour Gitin, J. Edward Wright, and J. P. Dessel, eds., Confronting the Past: Archaeological and Historical Essays on Ancient Israel in Honor of William G. Dever (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2006), 189–197; Susan Ackerman, “Household Religion, Family Religion, and Women’s Religion in Ancient Israel,” in John Bodel and Saul M. Olyan, eds., Household and Family Religion in Antiquity (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 127–158; Carol L. Meyers, Households and Holiness: The Religious Culture of Israelite Women (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005); Beth Alpert Nakhai, “Gender and Archaeology;” Nakhai, “Varieties of Religious Expression in the Domestic Setting;” Nakhai, “The Household as Sacred Space,” in Albertz, Nakhai, Olyan, and Schmitt, eds., Household Religion, 53–71; Nakhai, “Where to Worship? Religion in Iron II Israel and Judah, in Albertz, Nakhai, Olyan, and Schmitt, eds., Household Religion;” Rainer Albertz, “Family Religion in Israel and Its Surroundings,” in Bodel and Olyan eds., Household and Family Religion in Antiquity, 89–112; Rainer Albertz and Rüdiger Schmitt, Family and Household Religion in Ancient Israel and the Levant (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2012); Albertz, Nakhai, Olyan, and Schmitt, eds., Household Religion: Toward a Synthesis of Old Testament Studies; Bodel and Olyan, eds., Household and Family Religion in Antiquity; Saul M. Olyan, “Family Religion in Israel and the Wider Levant of the First Millennium BCE,” in Bodel and Olyan eds., Household and Family Religion in Antiquity, 113–26; Saul M. Olyan,“What Do We Really Know about Women’s Rites in the Israelite Family Context?” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 10/1 (2010): 55–57; Rüdiger Schmitt, “Household Religion, Bronze and Iron Age,” in Master, ed., Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Archaeology, Vol. 1, 519–526; P. M. Michèle Daviau, “Family Religion: Evidence for the Paraphernalia of the Domestic Cult,” in P. M. Michèle Daviau, John W. Wevers, and Michael Weigl, eds., The World of the Aramaeans II: Studies in History and Archaeology, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 325 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2001), 199–229.  Beth Alpert Nakhai, “Gender and Archaeology,” in Albertz, Nakhai, Olyan, and Schmitt, eds., Household Religion.

Revisiting Iron Age Israel: New Archaeological Approaches

61

7 Conclusion How best to summarize these myriad, critically important changes to our knowledge of Israel and Judah in the Iron Age? Writ large, the shift has been from the macro to the micro, from urban to rural, from palace to four-room house, from the world of men to a world also inclusive of women and children. It acknowledges the reality of Israel as a family- and clan-based society and moves from a model that asserts religious hegemony to one that acknowledges religious diversity. We are, now, better able to focus on specifics, whether they are markers of ethnicity, or gender, or religion, or village life, or workspaces and living spaces within and around average homes. In short, individuals are finally in sight.

For Further Reading Albertz, Rainer, Beth Alpert Nakhai, Saul M. Olyan, and Rüdiger Schmitt, eds. Household Religion: Toward a Synthesis of Old Testament Studies, Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Cultural Studies. Proceedings of the International Conference at Westfälisches Wilhelms-Universität Münster, April 1st-3rd, 2009. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2014. Bird, Phyllis A. Missing Persons and Mistaken Identities: Women and Gender in Ancient Israel. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997. Bodel, John and Saul M. Olyan, eds. Household and Family Religion in Antiquity. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008. Conkey, Margaret W., and Janet D. Spector. “Archaeology and the Study of Gender.” In Michael Schiffer, ed., Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory, Vol. 7, 1–38. New York: Academic Press, 1984. Dever, William G. The Lives of Ordinary People in Ancient Israel. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012. Dever, William G. Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003. Ebeling, Jennie R. Women’s Lives in Biblical Times. London: T&T Clark, 2010b. Faust, Avraham. The Archaeology of Israelite Society in Iron Age II. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2012. Garroway, Kristine H. Children in the Ancient Near Eastern Household. Explorations in Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations 3. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2014. King, Philip J. and Lawrence E. Stager. Life in Biblical Israel. Library of Ancient Israel. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001. Master, Daniel M., ed. Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Archaeology. New York: Oxford University, 2013. Meyers, Carol L. Rediscovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context. New York: Oxford University, 2013 (orig. Discovering Eve, 1988). Meyers, Carol L., Toni Craven, and Ross S. Kraemer, eds. Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, and the New Testament. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Nakhai, Beth Alpert, “Factors Complicating the Reconstruction of Women’s Lives in Iron Age Israel (1200–587 BCE).” In Saana Svärd and Agnès Garcia-Ventura, eds., Studying Gender in the Ancient Near East, 289–313. State College, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2018.

62

Beth Alpert Nakhai

Nakhai, Beth Alpert, “Women in Israelite Religion: The State of Research Is All New Research.” In Avraham Faust, ed., Archaeology and Israelite Religion, 63–73. Basel: MDPI, 2019/2020 (doi:10.3390/rel10020122). Nakhai, Beth Alpert, ed. The World of Women in the Ancient and Classical Near East. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. Newsom, Carol A., Sharon H. Ringe, and Jacqueline E. Lapsley, eds. The Women’s Bible Commentary. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1992, rev. ed. 2012. Yasur-Landau, Asaf, Jennie R. Ebeling, and Laura B. Mazow, eds. Household Archaeology in Ancient Israel and Beyond. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 50. Leiden: Brill, 2011.

Ronald Hendel

Religion, Theology, and Thought in the First Temple Period: The Great and Little Traditions 1 Introduction The most important advance in the study of ancient Israelite religion in recent decades is our increased understanding of what Rainer Albertz calls its “internal religious pluralism” (Religionsinterner Pluralismus), referring primarily to the differences between family and state religion during the First Temple period.1 His focus on this topic was stimulated by studies of personal piety in the Psalms and other writings, and by surprising archaeological discoveries, most notably the inscriptions and drawings from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud including blessings by “Yahweh and his Asherah” and pictures of the Egyptian protective god Bes.2 The new data and research have opened our eyes to previously obscure practices and concepts in Israelite religion of this period. The burgeoning scholarship in this area has produced many new ideas, some ephemeral, others building a new foundation for future scholarship. I will explore some of these issues by examining our analytical categories and presenting a case study to show how our perceptions of Israelite religion have changed. I turn first to the concept of “internal religious pluralism,” which designates “a structural pluralism that is related to the substructures of society.”3 The pluralism is primarily dual, between (a) family and household religion and (b) official or state religion. Albertz defines the former as “the domestic cult and all other ritual and cultic activities wherever they are performed by the family group – whether, for example, a commemorative meal at the tombs of the ancestors or a sacrificial meal in a local or even state sanctuary.”4 Family and household religion thus includes religious practices inside and outside the home, including rites at local shrines and other familycentered practices. Official or state religion is promulgated by “state institutions [. . .] [and] religion that claimed to be valid for the entire society. Therefore, not only the

 Rainer Albertz and Rüdiger Schmitt, Family and Household Religion in Ancient Israel and the Levant (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2012), 52–56 and throughout. Albertz introduced this term in Persönliche Frömmigkeit und offizielle Religion (Stuttgart: Calwer, 1978), 3.  See now Ze’ev Meshel, Kuntillet ʻAjrud (Ḥorvat Teman): An Iron Age II Religious Site on the JudahSinai Border (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2012). On the likelihood that the inscriptions were scribal exercises by literate soldiers, see William M. Schniedewind, “Understanding Scribal Education in Ancient Israel: A View from Kuntillet ʿAjrud,” Maarav 21 (2014): 271–293.  Albertz and Schmitt, Family and Household Religion, 53.  Albertz and Schmitt, Family and Household Religion, 54. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110418873-005

64

Ronald Hendel

state religion of kings and priests but also the opposing preaching of the prophets.”5 An intermediate category, local religion, is sometimes included between family and state religion, but if we construe “family” to include the clan (mišpāḥ â, lit. “family”), then this additional layer seems dispensable.6 These two layers of religion are distinguished by their social locations. Family and household religion has its locus in the home or other sites of family practice, and its principal agents are family authorities – mothers, fathers, and elders. Official or state religion takes place primarily in the public square, and its principal agents are authorized by institutional hierarchies (e.g., priesthood, kingship, royal or cultic prophetic guilds) or other support groups (e.g., charismatic prophets). There is a different temporal quality: family and household religion tends to change at glacial speed; it pertains to the longue durée of social time. Official or state religion can change rapidly due to historical contingencies, e.g., royal decree or foreign conquest. The evidence for family religion comes primarily from archaeology, supplemented with rare biblical descriptions of domestic rites (e.g., rites of passage, rites of healing, vows, pilgrimages, and local sacrifices). The evidence for official and state religion comes primarily from the Bible, including royal psalms and histories, priestly law, and prophetic writings. Recent scholarship has explored these areas thoroughly, with particular accents on gender, mortuary cults, and magic.7 One unresolved problem is how best to understand the relationship between family religion and official religion. Albertz emphasizes the distinction between family and official religion, although he grants that these can be nested categories, i.e., the same person can be a royal official and a member of a household. In his criticism of Albertz’s sharp contrast between these categories, Saul Olyan points to practices that show them to be interrelated, whether by omission, allusion, or shared features. Evidence suggests that family religion in Israel stands in a complex relationship with the official cult, departing from its rites (e.g., lack of domestic animal sacrifice), alluding to them

 Albertz and Schmitt, Family and Household Religion, 55.  See Karel van der Toorn, Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria and Israel: Continuity and Change in the Forms of Religious Life (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 3; Albertz and Schmitt are ambivalent about this category since local religion is “not as clearly able to be described as the other two” (Family and Household Religion, 53).  Among the massive bibliography, see in particular Albertz and Schmitt, Family and Household Religion; van der Toorn, Family Religion; Ziony Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel: A Synthesis of Parallactic Approaches (New York: Continuum, 2001); Rüdiger Schmitt, Magie im Alten Testament (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2004); Carol Meyers, Households and Holiness: The Religious Culture of Israelite Women (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005); John Bodel and Saul M. Olyan, eds., Household and Family Religion in Antiquity (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008); Francesca Stavrakopoulou and John Barton, eds., Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah (London: T&T Clark, 2010); and Rainer Albertz, Beth Alpert Nakhai, Saul M. Olyan, and Rüdiger Schmitt, eds., Family and Household Religion: Toward a Synthesis of Old Testament Studies, Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Cultural Studies (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2014).

Religion, Theology, and Thought in the First Temple Period

65

(e.g., modeling the processing of sacrificial meat through the presence of miniature cooking pots in domestic shrines) and probably sharing some of them (e.g., libations, incense offerings in the home).8

This is an issue that calls for further clarification. I suggest that we can refine our understanding by drawing more deeply on the anthropological study of peasant society and by focusing on archaeological and textual evidence that may illuminate these relationships. The study of cultures with rural peasantry and urban elites has been an ongoing concern in anthropology. In his classic book Peasant Society and Culture, Robert Redfield describes such cultures as consisting of two interpenetrating layers, one the local culture of the peasantry, and the other the national or feudal culture of the ruling elite. These two layers constitute “a developed larger social system in which there are two cultures within one culture.”9 In such cultures, “the content of knowledge comes to be double, one content for the layman, another for the hierarchy.”10 The higher-status elite regards its religion as the “great tradition,” while the peasantry preserves the “little tradition,” which often has a lower status even in the eyes of its practitioners. These two traditions have different social locations: “The great tradition is cultivated in schools or temples; the little tradition works itself out and keeps itself going in the lives of [. . .] village communities.”11 Redfield emphasizes that the two traditions are always in contact and draw in various measures from each other: “The two traditions are interdependent [. . .] Great and little tradition can be thought of as two currents of thought and action, distinguishable, yet ever flowing into and out of each other.”12 This model of the interdependence of “two cultures within one culture” has obvious relevance for ancient Israel, which was a peasant society with a ruling urban elite. I submit that the relationship between official and family religion in ancient Israel can be clarified by Redfield’s model. I emphasize, however, that there are multiple streams within each layer of tradition, such that there is internal religious pluralism in the great tradition and in the little tradition.13 Albertz’s comment that official religion includes “not only the state religion of kings and priests but also the opposing preaching of the

 Saul M. Olyan, “Family Religion in Israel and the Wider Levant of the First Millennium BCE,” in Bodel and Olyan, eds., Household and Family Religion, 121.  Robert Redfield, Peasant Society and Culture: An Anthropological Approach to Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 65; see further Clifford Wilcox, Robert Redfield and the Development of American Anthropology (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2004), 148–157.  Redfield, Peasant Society, 74.  Redfield, Peasant Society, 70.  Redfield, Peasant Society, 71–72.  This qualification responds to the criticism that Redfield’s model presents each tradition as relatively homogenous; see Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 3rd ed. (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 49–56.

66

Ronald Hendel

prophets” illustrates the pluralism within the great tradition.14 We should also acknowledge the likelihood of local differences in the little tradition, influenced by ecology, economy, and custom. Moreover, as Albertz indicates, the same people who promulgated the great tradition participated in the little tradition in family contexts. The two traditions correspond to different social locations, but many individuals moved between them, negotiating their boundaries as citizens of both cultures. Contact between the two traditions, therefore, was a constant, as people moved between them in their daily habits. This contact – like language contact – make possible a relationship of hybridity and dialectical influence between the traditions. In order to illustrate the aptness of this model of the great and little traditions15 – “distinguishable, yet ever flowing into and out of each other” – I will explore the case of the priestly blessing discovered at Ketef Hinnom, a burial cave on the outskirts of Jerusalem. The implications of this find illustrate the interconnections between the great and little traditions of Israelite religion in the latter years of the First Temple period.16

2 The Priestly Blessing at Ketef Hinnom Two tiny silver amulets dating to the seventh-sixth century BCE were discovered in 1979 in a repository of grave gifts in a burial cave in the Hinnom Valley, southwest of biblical Jerusalem.17 The rich finds in the repository indicate that the tomb belonged  Above, n. 5.  On the utility of this model for Levantine archaeology, see Øystein S. LaBianca, “Great and Little Traditions: A Framework for Studying Cultural Interaction through the Ages in Jordan,” Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan 9 (2007): 275–289.  The relevance of these amulets for this topic has been often noted, e.g., Albertz and Schmitt, Family and Household Religion, 412: “The existence of this blessing, originally associated with ritual actions performed in the Temple, (. . .) reveals the convergence between family and official religion.” My discussion develops this topic more fully.  Gabriel Barkay, Marilyn J. Lundberg, Andrew G. Vaughn, and Bruce Zuckerman, “The Amulets from Ketef Hinnom: A New Edition and Evaluation,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 334 (2004), 41–71. On the archaeological context, see Gabriel Barkay “Excavations at Ketef Hinnom in Jerusalem,” in Hillel Geva, ed., Ancient Jerusalem Revealed (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1994): 85–106. On the date see Barkay, Lundberg, Vaughn, and Zuckerman, “The Amulets from Ketef Hinnom,” 52 (“seventh-sixth century”); Ada Yardeni, “Remarks on the Priestly Blessing on Two Ancient Amulets from Jerusalem,” Vetus Testamentum 41 (1991), 180 (“early sixth century”); and Frank Moore Cross, Leaves from an Epigrapher’s Notebook: Collected Papers in Hebrew and West Semitic Palaeography and Epigraphy (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 353 n. 24 (“mid- to late sixth century”). Valuable treatments include Jeremy D. Smoak, The Priestly Blessing in Inscription and Scripture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Angelika Berlejung; “Der gesegnete Mensch: Text und Kontext von Num 6, 22–27 und den Silberamuletten von Ketef Hinnom,”

Religion, Theology, and Thought in the First Temple Period

67

to a wealthy Jerusalem family.18 Alongside the two silver amulets, the grave gifts include a large quantity of jewelry, painted pottery, carved ivory, Egyptian amulets – including images of Bastet and the Eye of Horus – and a glass pendant with a grotesque male head (Bes or a similar god).19 These amulets and pendants, which protected against demons and other malevolent influences, are a common type of grave gift in family tombs throughout the biblical period.20 These grave gifts show what counted as valuable goods, useful for paying homage to the dead and – perhaps – to aid them in their transition to postmortem existence. The family practice of “care for the dead,” Rüdiger Schmitt suggests, was “indicative of ongoing social relationships between the living and the dead.”21 Some grave gifts – like amulets – may have been intended to protect the dead during “a liminal phase, during which the spirit of the deceased was still thought to be present in the grave.”22 The two silver amulets with inscriptions were found among the burial gifts (figures 1 and 2). They may have belonged to the deceased during their lives – probably worn on a cord around the neck – and placed in the grave for honor or protection. As the editors of the inscription observe, “the amulets offer God’s protection from Evil through the invocation of his holy name and the text of his most solemn of protective blessings.”23 The inscriptions read as follows (with the priestly blessing in italics, and restorations in brackets):24 Yahwe[h . . . ] grea[t . . . ] the covenant, and [. . .] steadfast love for those who love [. . .] and who keep [ . . . f]or ever [. . .] blessing from any [tra]p and from evil. For in him is deliverance.

in Angelika Berlejung and Raik Heckl, eds., Mensch und König: Studien zur Anthropologie des Alten Testaments. Rüdiger Lux zum 60. Geburtstag (Freiburg: Herder, 2008): 37–62; Martin Leuenberger, Segen und Segenstheologien im alten Israel: Untersuchungen zu ihren religions- und theologiegeschichtlichen Konstellationen und Transformationen (Zurich: Theologischer-Verlag, 2008), 155–178; Brian B. Schmidt, The Materiality of Power: Explorations in the Social History of Early Israelite Magic, Forschungen zum Alten Testament 105 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), 123–142.  Gabriel Barkay, “The Priestly Benediction on Silver Plaques from Ketef Hinnom in Jerusalem,” Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University 19/2 (1992): 147–148, published online: 19 Jul 2013 at https://doi.org/10.1179/tav.1992.1992.2.139.  See Barkay, “Excavations at Ketef Hinnom,” 97–100; Christian Hermann, Ägyptische Amulette aus Palästina/Israel, Vol. 1, Orbis Biblicum et Orientalis 138 (Freiburg: Universitätsverlag, 1994), nos. 180 (Bastet), 1208 (Eye of Horus), and 1342 (grotesque head).  Elizabeth Bloch-Smith, Judahite Burial Practices and Beliefs about the Dead, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament: Supplement Series 7; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1992), 81–86; Albertz and Schmitt, Family and Household Religion, 454.  Albertz and Schmitt, Family and Household Religion, 456.  Albertz and Schmitt, Family and Household Religion, 457.  Albertz and Schmitt, Family and Household Religion, 68.  My translation, adapted from Barkay, Lundberg, Vaughn, and Zuckerman, “The Amulets from Ketef Hinnom,” 61, 68.

68

Ronald Hendel

Figures 1 and 2: Ketef Hinnom amulets 1 and 2. Photographs by Bruce and Kenneth Zuckerman, West Semitic Research. Courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority. Drawing of Amulet 1 by Marilyn Lundberg, West Semitic Research; Amulet 2 by Bruce Zuckerman, West Semitic Research.

Religion, Theology, and Thought in the First Temple Period

69

For Yahweh is our restorer [and] rock. May Yahweh bless you [and] protect you. Many Yahweh make [his] face [sh]ine [. . .] (Ketef Hinnom 1) May [X] be blessed by Yahwe[h], the helper and the rebuker of [e]vil. May Yahweh bless you and protect you. May Yah[w]eh make his face shine [upo]n you and grant you p[ea]ce. (Ketef Hinnom 2)

The italicized portion is clearly related to the priestly blessing, which God assigns to the Aaronide priests in Numbers 6: Yahweh spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to Aaron and his sons, saying, ‘Thus you shall bless the children of Israel. Say to them: “May Yahweh bless you and protect you. May Yahweh make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. May Yahweh lift up his face to you and grant you peace.”’ Thus they will place my name on the children of Israel, and I will bless them.” (Numbers 6:22–27)25

The blessings in Numbers and Ketef Hinnom differ textually by a single sequence. Two clauses in Numbers 6:25b-26a – “and be gracious to you. May Yahweh lift up his face to you” – are lacking in the second amulet (the first amulet is broken at this point). This difference is attributable to one of three causes: 1. A scribal error: eye-skip (homoioteleuton) between identical words in Ketef Hinnom 2, either ‫ אליך‬to ‫“( אליך‬to you”), or ‫ פניו‬to ‫“( פניו‬his face”). Either would produce the text of Ketef Hinnom 2. 2. A deliberate abbreviation of the text in Ketef Hinnom 2, leaving out two clauses for reasons of space (the silver amulets are tiny). 3. An expansion of the blessing in Numbers 6 by adding the two clauses. Scholars have argued for each of these possibilities.26 I regard the first possibility as the simplest, but this issue not decidable. The remarkable fact is that Numbers and the amulets have near-verbatim quotations of the same blessing.27 But the resonances of the blessing differ considerably in the respective textual and ritual contexts in the great and little traditions. Let us consider the resonances of the blessing in the amulets. Much of the textual context has a protective (apotropaic) sense, particularly these sequences: “[. . .]  This passage seems to correspond, as a retrospective supplement, to Leviticus 9:22–23: “Aaron lifted his hands to the people and he blessed them . . . They came out and they blessed the people, and the Glory of Yahweh appeared to all the people.” See Baruch A. Levine, Numbers 1–20, Anchor Bible 4 (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 216; Reinhard Achenbach, Die Vollendung der Tora: Studien zur Redaktionsgeschichte des Numeribuches im Kontext von Hexateuch und Pentateuch (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 2003), 511–512.  See, for example, Levine, Numbers, 240; Berlejung, “Mensch,” 41–43; Smoak, Priestly Blessing, 68–70, and references.  There is another minor variant: the amulets read ybrk where Num 6:24 reads ybrkk (“may [Yahweh] bless you”). This is either a simplified spelling or an omission of the pronominal suffix; see previous note.

70

Ronald Hendel

blessing from any [tra]p and from evil. For in him is deliverance” (amulet 1) and “May [X] be blessed by Yahwe[h], the helper and the rebuker of [e]vil” (amulet 2). In both amulets, Yahweh’s blessing is framed as a protection from evil (rāʿ). The first part of the shared blessing, “May Yahweh bless you and protect you,” is taken in a particular sense as protection from demons and malevolent spirits. This instrumental use of ritual language is common in other ancient Near Eastern and later Jewish amulets and incantations. Indeed, the priestly blessing was used in Jewish incantation texts to ward off evil.28 The textual context of the priestly blessing in the Ketef Hinnom amulets activates an implicit meaning of the blessing of divine protection, which is then particularized and embodied in a precious metal text placed over the worshiper’s heart. Notably, in Hebrew the heart is the center of mind and body. The first preserved line in one of the amulets provides another kind of context. As scholars have noted, it is very close to the language of Deuteronomy 7:9, which itself is related to the language of the Decalogue: Yahwe[h . . . ] grea[t . . . ] the covenant, and [. . .] steadfast love for those who love [. . .] and who keep [ . . . f]or ever. (Ketef Hinnom 1) Yahweh (. . .) who keeps the covenant, and steadfast love for those who love him and who keep his commandments, to the thousandth generation. (Deuteronomy 7:9) Showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation for those who love me and who keep my commandments. (Exodus 20:6 = Deuteronomy 5:10)

In sum, the amulets use Priestly and Deuteronomic language. This combination indicates that these discourses from the great tradition – whether oral or textual – were in circulation at the time of the composition of the amulets. A scribe or scribes incorporated the language of the great tradition into the little tradition. This situation is easy to imagine, since the locus of the great tradition in Jerusalem – the temple, the palace, and other elite settings – were a stone’s throw from the burial cave. And the wealthy family to whom the burial cave belonged would naturally have access to the great tradition. Redfield uses the term “parochialization” (after the work of McKim Marriott) to describes the characteristic effect of the appropriation of material from the great tradition by the little tradition.29 In our case, Deuteronomic and Priestly language from the great tradition has been appropriated into magical amulets in the little tradition. This may be seen as a parochialization of the Deuteronomic and Priestly

 See Barkay, “Priestly Benediction,” 186; Joseph Naveh and Shaul Shaked, Amulets and Magic Bowls: Aramaic Incantations of Late Antiquity (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1985), 238; see also Levine, Numbers, 242–243.  Redfield, Peasant Society, 96; see McKim Marriott, “Little Communities in an Indigenous Civilization,” in McKim Marriott, ed., Village India: Studies in the Little Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 191–202.

Religion, Theology, and Thought in the First Temple Period

71

language, a way of instrumentalizing elite discourse for the practical needs of family and household. The conceptual distance between Numbers 6 and Deuteronomy 7 (or their oral antecedents) and Ketef Hinnom 1–2 may be captured by this idea of the parochialization of elite tradition. The priestly blessing, which, as Angelika Berlejung writes, evokes “the classical temple cult and its theology of presence,”30 is reproduced as an instrumental discourse to ward off evil demons and malefic influences, and worn around the neck – and placed in a burial repository – as a protective talisman. The parochialization of the great tradition may also have other resonances, which can contest or complement the great tradition. In our case, the use of the amulets as grave gifts seems to suggest that Yahweh’s blessing will protect the dead from evil in their transition to postmortem existence. This contradicts the great tradition’s usual theme that the dead are outside the domain of Yahweh’s blessing since Yahweh is (in the words of Matthew 22:32 and parallels) the god of the living. Psalm 30:10 is a classic expression of this concept: “What is the benefit in my blood? / In my descent to the pit? / Will dust praise you? / Will it proclaim your truth?” The dead are mere shadows, dust turned to dust. Similarly, in Psalm 88:5–6 the psalmist laments, “I was reckoned among those who go down to the pit (. . .) [those who] lie in the grave, whom you remember no more, they are cut off from your hand.” But the amulets suggest otherwise. In their use as grave gifts, they indicate that Yahweh’s blessing does cover the dead, protecting them from evil in the attenuated existence of the grave. This parochialization of the great tradition eventually is taken up into the great tradition, when concepts of a beatific afterlife and the resurrection of the dead are taken up in some streams of official religion in the era of Hellenistic Judaism (for example, Daniel 12:2–3).31 When we turn to the resonances of the priestly blessing in Numbers 6, we can detect other kinds of interaction between the great and little traditions. We now know that the first line of the blessing – “May Yahweh bless you and protect you” – could be a separate blessing used as a greeting formula. A letter exercise on a large pot from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud (ca. 800 BCE), has this same sequence: ‫“( יברכך וישמרך‬May [Yahweh] bless you and protect you”).32 The priestly blessing seems to be an expansion and elaboration of this simpler greeting blessing.

 Berlejung, “Der gesegnete Mensch,” 45.  On the range of concepts about life and death in ancient Israel, see Angelika Berlejung and Bernd Janowski, eds., Tod und Jenseits im alten Israel und in seiner Umwelt: Theologische, religionsgeschichtliche, archäologische und ikonographische Aspecte, Forschungen zum Alten Testament 64 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009); on the exegetical transformations in Daniel 12:1–4, see Ronald Hendel, “Isaiah and the Transition from Prophecy to Apocalyptic,” in Chaim Cohen, Victor A. Hurowitz, Avi Hurvitz, Yochanan Muffs, Baruch J. Schwartz, and Jeffrey H. Tigay, eds., Birkat Shalom: Studies in the Bible, Ancient Near Eastern Literature, and Postbiblical Judaism Presented to Shalom M. Paul (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2008): 269–274.  Barkay, Lundberg, Vaughn, and Zuckerman, “The Amulets from Ketef Hinnom,” 64; on this inscription as an epistolary formula, see Schniedewind, “Understanding Scribal Education in Ancient Israel,” 287–289. Note the same spelling of ybrk as in Ketef Hinnom.

72

Ronald Hendel

“May Yahweh bless you and protect you” is, in the letter formula, a polite salutation, which was probably used in everyday discourse. Some of the other clauses in the priestly blessing may also derive from polite salutations in the little tradition. When Joseph meets his brother Benjamin, he says, “May God be gracious to you” (‫אלהים יחנך‬, Genesis 43:29), using the same formula as the priestly blessing: “May he be gracious to you” (‫ויחנך‬, Numbers 6:25). Joseph comforts his brothers with the phrase “Peace be with you” (‫שלום לכם‬, Gen 43:23), like the priestly blessing: “May he grant you peace.” More distant parallels are found in Ugaritic letter formulae, including the greeting: “May the gods protect you (tǵrk) and bring you peace/well-being (tšlmk).”33 In a Ugaritic letter from ʿAzziʾiltu to his sister, the greeting is expansive: “[May] the gods bring (you) well-being. May they protect you. May they [keep] you [wh]ole.”34 These conventional greeting formulae seem to lie in the background of the priestly blessing, which gathers up these phrases and adds the luminous blessing of Yahweh’s face: “May Yahweh make his face shine upon you” and “May Yahweh lift up his face to you.”35 Another clue of the background of these blessings in the little tradition may be the use of the third person singular “you,” even though the priestly blessing is directed to a collective “you.” This grammatical detail may be a trace of the little tradition, now redirected to the collectivity of the children of Israel. The new composite blessing in the great tradition, directed toward the collectivity of the children of Israel, is a masterpiece of religious liturgy. With its artful rhythms – threefold repetition of the divine name, sixfold repetition of “you,” and alliteration (e.g., yiśśaʾ . . . yāśēm . . . šālôm) – it lifts the tropes of greeting to a higher register, backed by the potency of Yahweh’s presence and the mediation of the priestly voice. Redfield describes the characteristic effect of the appropriation of elements from the little tradition by the great tradition as “universalization.”36 In this case, the transposition of blessings from greeting formulae into the priestly blessing does effect a transformation of the conventional phrases, expanding its colloquial sense into a “universalizing” register. The effect of appropriating the conventional formulae into the priestly blessing is to spiritualize the colloquial, to make the everyday into the sublime. It also, on a political level, communicates the higher status of the great tradition, with the priests as the mediating agents of Yahweh’s blessing to the people.

 Levine, Numbers, 237.  Theodore J. Lewis, “Family, Household, and Local Religion at Late Bronze Age Ugarit,” in Bodel and Olyan, eds., Household and Family Religion, 67.  On these phrases, see Mark S. Smith, “‘Seeing God’ in the Psalms: The Background to the Beatific Vision in the Hebrew Bible,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 50 (1988): 171–183 and Simeon Chavel, “The Face of God and the Etiquette of Eye-Contact: Visitation, Pilgrimage, and Prophetic Vision in Ancient Israelite and Early Jewish Imagination,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 19 (2012): 15–22.  Redfield, Peasant Society, 95; see Marriott, “Little Communities,” 191–202.

Religion, Theology, and Thought in the First Temple Period

73

The textual frame of the priestly blessing in Numbers 6 adds another twist to this universalizing of the little tradition. Yahweh adds his own interpretive gloss to the blessing in verse 27, addressing Moses: “Thus they will place my name on the children of Israel, and I will bless them.” As scholars have noted, the construction “place my name on” (‫)ושמו את שמי על‬, draws on the language of placing a thing on someone’s body, which, in the present context, evokes the practice of placing an amulet with Yahweh’s name on a body.37 As with the colloquial backdrop of some of the blessing formulae, this seems like a transformation of the little tradition by the great tradition, an uplift of colloquial practice into a higher register. In this universalization of the little tradition, Yahweh’s blessing is metaphorically placed on the collective body of the people of Israel.38 The concrete particularity of the material amulet becomes an abstraction, as Yahweh’s name is placed upon the body public.

3 Conclusions: The Circular Paths of the Great and Little Traditions All religions are characterized by a blend of coherence and inconsistency. Pierre Bourdieu describes this as the logic of practice: a pragmatic and unsystematic logic where contradictions are expected: “symbolic systems [. . . have] practical coherence – that is, on the one hand, their unity and their regularities, and on the other, their ‘fuzziness’ and their irregularities and even incoherences, which are both equally necessary.”39 Religion is, by turns, consistent and contradictory because it responds to a variety of problems and circumstances. Among these are two major forms of social life, which can have an uneasy relationship: (a) the family and (b) extrafamilial hierarchies and institutions. Religion must be at least double in order to have practical efficacy in each of these spheres. Hence religions are characterized by internal pluralism, and any given symbol or practice may be vested with varied and inconsistent meanings across different spheres of life.

 See Smoak, Priestly Blessing, 73–76 and references there.  The same process of metaphorizing the wearing of amulets seems to occur in Proverbs 6:20–21 (“Tie them [viz., your father and mother’s teaching] over your heart always, bind them around your throat”) and Deuteronomy 6:6–9 (“they [viz., God’s commandments] will be on [‫ ]על‬your heart”); see Michael V. Fox, Proverbs 1–9, Anchor Bible 18A (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 228–229; André Lemaire, “Deuteronomy 6:6, 9 in the Light of Northwest Semitic Inscriptions,” in Cohen, Hurowitz, Hurvitz, Muffs, Schwartz, and Tigay, eds., Birkat Shalom, 525–530; Barkay, “Priestly Benediction on Silver Paques,” 183–185; Smoak, Priestly Blessing, 39–42.  Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 86; see further Ronald Hendel, “Other Edens,” in David Schloen, ed., Exploring the Longue Durée: Essays in Honor of Lawrence E. Stager (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2008): 185–89.

74

Ronald Hendel

In a peasant society like ancient Israel, the official religion may have been at a greater remove from family religion than in modern industrialized societies. Nonetheless, these two religious forms, which we may describe, after Redfield, as the great and little traditions, are in some sense versions of each other, with overlapping and complementary features. Charles Stewart aptly describes the relationship between the great and little traditions in modern Greece: “At the social and political level great and little traditions assert their presence through a dialectical interaction, while at the level of symbol and cosmology this relation amounts to one of complementarity.”40 While they operate in different spheres of social life, they interact through a circulation of symbolic goods and a dialectic of parochialization and universalization. By apprehending religious symbols and practices in different configurations, they reflect each other, even if at different levels of practice and belief. The case of the priestly blessing in the amulets of Ketef Hinnom illustrates the dialectical and complementary relationship between the little and great traditions in the latter part of the First Temple period. The tomb belonged to a wealthy family who, we may infer, moved back and forth in everyday life between the great tradition of the Jerusalem cult and the little tradition of the family. The amulets are material expressions of the dialectic between the great and little traditions. The priestly blessing, framed with a mixture of Deuteronomic language, is parochialized into a protective spell worn on an individual’s body and metonymically linked (in the tomb repository) to a dead body. Here we see the dialectical transformation of the great tradition in the little tradition. The sublime liturgy of the great tradition, expressing the Jerusalem temple’s theology of presence – the transcendent face of God, divine protection from evil, a life of blessing – is transposed into the little tradition of amulets and mortuary ritual, providing Yahweh’s protection against evil spirits in everyday life and in the transition to postmortem existence. The family tomb is, as Olyan observes, “a central locus of family religion.”41 The Jerusalem temple is a locus of official religion. In Numbers 6, the priestly blessing takes place at the sanctuary, a proleptic symbol of the Jerusalem temple. Yet even in its biblical setting, the blessing has a dialectical relationship with the little tradition of the protective amulet. Yahweh describes the purpose of the priestly blessing to “place my name on the children of Israel.” This is a metaphorization of the practice of wearing protective amulets, which universalizes and abstracts this feature of the little tradition. In so doing, the great tradition implicitly acknowledges the efficacy of the little tradition. This complicated resonance illustrates the complementarity of the two traditions, even as they operate in incommensurate domains. Just as the amulet moves

 Charles Stewart, Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 248.  Olyan, “Family Religion,” in Bodel and Olyan, eds., Household and Family Religion, 118.

Religion, Theology, and Thought in the First Temple Period

75

the blessing into the domain of death, the Numbers text moves the potency of the amulet into the priestly performance. The temple and the tomb are opposite poles of Israelite religion; one is the holy space and the other is a source of impurity (through corpse-pollution) that prevents entry into the holy space.42 In each antithetical space, the priestly blessing is configured differently, each according to its needs, yet each draws symbolic resources from the other. There is also a complementarity in the agents of the blessing. In the great tradition, the priests are the dispensers of the blessing. But because they are initiated into a state of holiness, priests are severely restricted in their proximity to death. According to Leviticus 21:1–4, priests are prohibited from participating in mortuary rites for all but their closest kin. Hence, the mortuary rites are presided over by family authorities, not priests. The agent of the priestly blessing in the little tradition is the amulet, through its tiny script and through its ritual interment. The amulet and the priestly voice have a dialectical relationship in the little and great traditions, where one takes the place of the other in their respective spheres. The amulets may seem to contest or usurp the priest’s authority, but in another sense they complement it, extending the priestly voice into a domain where priests may not trespass. The different resonances of the priestly blessing in the two contexts illustrate the circular paths of the great and little traditions in the First Temple period. They appropriate each other, in turns parochializing and universalizing, contesting and complementing each other. Operating with a practical coherence, entailing a fuzzy logic of practice, these streams of tradition resist easy systematization. Where the priestly blessing in Numbers expresses the ideal state of life in the presence of Yahweh at the holy temple, the priestly blessing in the Ketef Hinnom amulets brings its performance to death, casting peace over suffering, mortality, and loss.

For Further Reading Albertz, Rainer. A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period, trans. John Bowden. 2 vols. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1994. Albertz, Rainer and Rüdiger Schmitt. Family and Household Religion in Ancient Israel and the Levant. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2012. Albertz, Rainer, Beth Alpert Nakhai, Saul M. Olyan, and Rüdiger Schmitt, eds. Family and Household Religion: Toward a Synthesis of Old Testament Studies, Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Cultural Studies. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2014. Bodel, John and Saul M. Olyan, eds. Household and Family Religion in Antiquity. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.

 See Saul M. Olyan, Biblical Mourning: Ritual and Social Dimensions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 37: “the sanctuary and all other sanctified places are clearly out of bounds to those who mourn the dead, since mourners are typically polluted as a result of corpse impurity.”

76

Ronald Hendel

Meyers, Carol. Households and Holiness: The Religious Culture of Israelite Women. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005. Miller, Patrick D. The Religion of Ancient Israel. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2000. Niditch, Susan. Ancient Israelite Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Stavrakopoulou, Francesca and John Barton, eds. Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah. London: T&T Clark, 2010.

Section 2: The Second Temple Period

Steve Mason

Second Temple Studies: The Past, Present, and Future of the Ioudaioi 1 Introduction In the past thirty years, the study of Second Temple Judaism has become increasingly visible inside and outside academia. Projects, conferences, collected-essay volumes, doctoral seminars, and dissertations have proliferated, buttressed by archaeological excavation. If that much is obvious, it is not so clear where the growing field best fits in the university. Not only is it handled differently in different jurisdictions, but ongoing realignments in the humanities are generating ever-new marriage proposals. Before surveying and probing these developments, I must clarify my terminology. Taken literally, “Second Temple” covers the six centuries from the late 500s BCE to 70 CE. But that brief would include most of biblical studies, the early Persian period, and the slightly evidenced centuries from 400 to 200 BCE. The first two are handled by experts in this volume, while the dark years have left too few survivals to shape a field of study. I shall use Second Temple Judaism in its most common meaning for the latter half of this period: between the arrival of Seleucid rule in Coele-Syria (ca. 200 BCE) and the aftermath of the Bar-Kokhba Revolt (post-135 CE). I have three related tasks: first, to offer an impressionistic survey of the thriving field; second, to pursue a question made more acute by such success, namely, where Second Temple studies fit in the university, descriptively and ideally; third, to address an academic debate that has spilled into the public square, concerning the English rendering of Ioudaioi (Greek), Iudaei (Latin), and Yehudim (Hebrew). In a popular 2014 article called “The Vanishing Jews of Antiquity: How Should One Translate the Greek Ioudaios?”1 esteemed Canadian colleague Adele Reinhartz made an impassioned plea for the traditional rendering Jews because it suited virtually all purposes, in her view, and because the alternative, Judaeans, which I and others were proposing in certain contexts,2 risked erasing the Jewish presence from antiquity. Stepping back to consider

 In Marginalia, June 24, 2014: http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/vanishing-jews-antiquityadele-reinhartz/.  Steve Mason, “Jews, Judaeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 38/4 (2007): 457–512. For the scholarly discussion, see David S. Miller, “The Meaning of Ioudaios and Its Relationship to Other Group Labels in Ancient ‘Judaism,’” Currents in Biblical Research 9/1 (2010): 98–126; David S. Miller, “Ethnicity Comes of Age: An Overview of Twentieth-Century Terms for Ioudaios,” Currents in Biblical Research 10/2 (2012): 293–311; David S. Miller, “Ethnicity, Religion and the Meaning of Ioudaios in Ancient ‘Judaism,’” Currents in Biblical Research 12/2 (2014): 216–265. I am endorsing neither his analysis nor his synthesis, which in spite of evident diligence misses crucial points, but this trilogy is perhaps the best survey. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110418873-006

80

Steve Mason

the place of Second Temple Judaism in the university creates another perspective on that question, clarifying the possible stakes.3

2 The Strength of Second Temple Studies Today The autumn of 1989 saw the release of Apple Computer’s first portable computer (weight: 17 lbs.; cost: $6,500), the first issue of the Studia Philonica Annual, and my first classes at York University. I was thrilled about my new post, envious of those who could afford Macintoshes, impressed that Philo was getting a journal, and about to discover superb colleagues in the Centre for Jewish Studies – as also in York’s Classics program. In the intervening years, the world’s population has grown by 40 percent from 5.23 to 7.8 billion.4 The expanded constituency for every pursuit, from astronomy to UFOlogy, the ceaseless digital revolutions, the arrival of lowcost communication, and the possibilities for cheap travel have combined to increase the number of collaborative projects, conferences, and publication outlets in Second Temple studies, as in most fields of study. I am not suggesting, then, that Second Temple studies is unique in flourishing over these decades. Nor are they special in benefitting from massive digital databases, in this case of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Aramaic texts, inscriptions, papyri, and coins. Any field that had not shown growth in this period would have something wrong with it. Nevertheless, since the prospect that Jews might “vanish” from study of the ancient world has been put on the table, it is worth observing that Second Temple studies is burgeoning. Indeed, the field punches above its weight in many respects. Many of us know from daily experience the unusual bond that our field has with the broader public. The large readership of the glossy Biblical Archaeology Review and the numbers who attend its packed regional and national seminars, not to mention cruises, are just a few indicators of the enormous public interest. As for academia: Figures 1 through 8 represent the steady increase in the publication of books, articles, and dissertations dealing with Philo, Josephus, and the Qumran Scrolls. Other telling signs are the numerous research projects underway, most visibly on all things Qumran.5 New critical editions of inscriptions and commentaries on  While editing this essay, coincidentally, I was interviewed by Marilyn Cooper for her article “But Is It Good for the Judeans?” in Moment (April 25, 2015), https://momentmag.com/jewish-word-judeans/.  See https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/ (accessed August 20, 2020).  The Orion site at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (http://orion.mscc.huji.ac.il/resources/djd. shtml) monitors relevant publications. Critical editions of record, also of scrolls from sites other than Qumran, appear in the forty-volume series Discoveries in the Judaean Desert (Oxford: Oxford University

81

Second Temple Studies: The Past, Present, and Future of the Ioudaioi

1600

1200

800

400

0 1945–1954 1955–1964 1965–1974 1975–1984 1985–1994 1995–2004 2005–2014 Figure 1: Articles mentioning Qumran from 1945 to 2014, ATLA Religion Database (https://www. atla.com/products/catalog/Pages/rdb-db.aspx).

800

600

400

200

0 1945–1954

1965–1974

1985–1994

2005–2014

Figure 2: Articles mentioning Philo from 1945 to 2014, ATLA Religion Database (https://www.atla. com/products/catalog/Pages/rdb-db.aspx).

Press, 1955–) under a succession of editors-in-chief: Roland de Vaux, Pierre Benoit, John Strugnell, and Emanuel Tov. For the complicated history of the series, see Tov’s overview in Discoveries in the Judaean Desert 39, Introduction and Indices (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1–27.

82

Steve Mason

600

450

300

150

0 1945–1954 1955–1964 1965–1974 1975–1984 1985–1994 1995–2004 2005–2014 Figure 3: Articles mentioning Josephus from 1945 to 2014, ATLA Religion Database (https://www. atla.com/products/catalog/Pages/rdb-db.aspx).

1800

1350

900

450

0 Figure 4: Dissertations mentioning Qumran by decade from the 1950s to the 2000s, ProQuest Database (http://www.proquest.com).

the large corpora by Philo and Josephus, accompanied by translations in various languages, further attest the unprecedented vigor of the field.6 Companion volumes

 For example, William Horbury and David Noy, eds., Jewish Inscriptions of Graeco-Roman Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); David Noy, ed., Jewish Inscriptions of Western

83

Second Temple Studies: The Past, Present, and Future of the Ioudaioi

2200

1650

1100

550

0 Figure 5: Dissertations mentioning Philo of Alexandria by decade from the 1940s to the 2000s, ProQuest Database (http://www.proquest.com).

1000

750

500

250

0 Figure 6: Dissertations mentioning Flavius Josephus by decade from the 1940s to the 2000s, ProQuest Database (http://www.proquest.com).

Europe, 2 Vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993–1995); Walter Ameling, David Noy, Alexander Panayotov, and Hanswulf Bloedhorn, eds., Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientis (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004); Walter Ameling et al., eds., Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae: A Multi-Lingual Corpus of the Inscriptions from Alexander to Muhammad, 8 Vols. (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 2010–); Gregory E. Sterling, ed., Philo of Alexandria Commentary Series (Leiden: Brill, 2001–); Steve Mason, ed., Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 2000–). Space limits prevent me from listing German, French, Italian, Japanese, and other projects.

84

1945 1950

Steve Mason

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

2010

2014

Figure 7: Frequency graph of books with Philo (of Alexandria) in the title in the University of Oxford Libraries catalogue SOLO (solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk). Each stroke represents one book.

1945 1950

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

2010

2014

Figure 8: Frequency graph of books with (Flavius) Josephus in the title in the University of Oxford Libraries catalogue SOLO (solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk). Each stroke represents one book.

and introductions to the Scrolls, the apocrypha, Philo, and Josephus continue to appear in various languages.7 As for academic journals, those for biblical studies, Jewish studies, religion, and theology had always made space for the occasional piece on the Second Temple, but the growth of the field has meant specialization.8 During the 1980s and 1990s, the Society of Biblical Literature’s program units, around two hundred–strong, came to include Hellenistic Judaism, Greek Bible (LXX), Qumran and the Scrolls, the Jewish pseudepigrapha, Jewish wisdom and apocalyptic literature, Philo of Alexandria, Flavius Josephus, Paul and Judaism, and early Jewish-Christian relations, among others of relevance to our theme. Though still a small proportion of the whole list, they represent the research interests of hundreds of SBL members. The appearance of the Journal of Ancient Judaism in 2010 (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht and Brill) and the online Ancient Jew Review from November 2014 are signs of steadily growing strength.9

 For example, Adam Kamesar, ed., Cambridge Companion to Philo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); George J. Brooke and Charlotte Hempel, eds., T&T Clark Companion to the Dead Sea Scrolls (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); Honora H. Chapman and Zuleika Rodgers, eds., A Companion to Josephus (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).  After the Revue de Qumran in 1958 came Brill’s Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman Period (1970), Turin’s Henoch (1979), Sheffield’s Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha (1987), and the Studia Philonica Annual (1989).  https://www.ancientjewreview.com.

Second Temple Studies: The Past, Present, and Future of the Ioudaioi

85

What does all this growth mean? The most interesting questions for humanists are not about the numbers as such, but about the ideas and outlooks behind them: who is doing this research and in what frameworks? These questions are especially pertinent because of the role that Second Temple studies has usually played, from the first through the twentieth Christian centuries, as background music to “the greatest story ever told” – that of Jesus and his various consequences.10 Not long ago, outside the small circle of talmudic and rabbinical schools, a phenomenon called Late Judaism (Spätjudentum), by which was meant the dregs of a malformed prophetic heritage, alienated from God’s presence, which had grudgingly yielded the baton of salvationhistory to Christianity, was investigated in Europe’s great universities as a pre-gospel amalgam.11 Impatiently read rabbinic literature furnished proof, if proof were needed, of Judaism’s abject decline, first after the exile and then decisively after the destruction of Jerusalem with its temple in 70 CE.12 For the pre-70 period the apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, supplemented from about 1950 by the Scrolls, were mined for the study of “Jewish messianic expectations” and comparison with Christianity. Philo was always something of an outlier, a lighthouse in Alexandria anticipating Christian speculative theology; in modern scholarship, a meeting ground for scholars of various background interested in Hellenistic Judaism and mysticism.13 The renowned lickspittle Josephus drove the caboose, his allegedly cowardly and despicable character imagined to embody that of Jesus’ Pharisee opponents. Still, if only because he copied good sources, he was credited with accidentally producing the best ever Companion to the New Testament.14 The old model of the German Institutum Judaicum provides a

 The Greatest Story Ever Told was a United Artist’s film (1965), long in the making and the telling. In a similar vein was MGM’s King of Kings (1961).  Although Julius Wellhausen did not use the word in his Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1878), he did not need to because this highly influential book presented (das nachexilische/spätere) Judentum altogether as so clearly in decline from the prophetic vitality of ancient Israel. The term developed soon afterward and remained in vogue until quite recent times.  Eminent New Testament scholar B. F. Westcott (“B. F. Dunelm” as Bishop of Durham) wrote in his introduction to W. Knight, The Arch of Titus and the Spoils of the Temple [2nd ed.] (London: Religious Tract Society, 1896), 9–10: “It is no exaggeration to say that the Fall of Jerusalem is the most significant national event in the history of the world (. . .) That which had been in the past the shrine of the Presence of God among His people was necessarily doomed to final desolation when ‘the more perfect Tabernacle’ [Jesus] had been faithlessly and fatally violated (. . . .)”.  Erwin R. Goodenough, An Introduction to Philo Judaeus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940); Goodenough, By Light, Light: The Mystic Gospel of Hellenistic Judaism (Amsterdam: Philo Press, 1969); Samuel Sandmel, Philo’s Place in Judaism: A Study of Conceptions of Abraham in Jewish literature (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1956); Sandmel, Philo of Alexandria: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).  For our purposes, the overview by George Foote Moore, “Christian Writers on Judaism,” Harvard Theological Review 14 (1921): 197–254 (221–254 on the century preceding), with disheartening updates half a century later by E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), 1–12, 33–59, will suffice.

86

Steve Mason

clear example of the theological framework in which both rabbinic literature and earlier Jewish texts were approached. Educated Christians used to study these texts with the aim of proselytizing.15 This is what has changed dramatically: a dawning recognition from all sides that this large collection of material still awaits careful study as Jewish literature and history, with experts of all background collaborating to understand it. Second Temple literature had not played much of a role in the curriculum of traditional Judaism, which skirted Greek sources in moving from Hebrew Bible to halakha and aggada. Nor did it find a place among classicists, who focused on the high culture of Athens and Rome. Although most Second Temple Jewish texts were in Greek and some were copious, classicists happily ceded this apparently un-Hellenic literature to theologians, who eagerly claimed it for New Testament background study. After the Emancipation of Europe’s Jews, the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement of the late nineteenth century began to use this literature more fully, but the lines between Jewish and Christian or secular scholarship remained fairly sharp. As a new cultural awareness after World War II (and the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam) permeated the West and helped spawn secular departments of religion, especially following the US Supreme Court decision of 1963 permitting the study of religions in state institutions without Christian bias,16 the demand for authenticity in general and post-Holocaust trauma made it no longer seemly for such a treasure to remain the preserve of Christian scholarship. The use of Philo, Josephus, and the pseudepigrapha as praeparatio evangelica would soon characterize only parochial scholarship; these rich texts would be reclaimed for the study of a vibrant ancient Jewish identity recognized by all parties.17 This point became ever clearer as programs and centers in Jewish/Judaic studies took shape and integrated the critical

 Halle’s Instititum Judaicum et Muhammedicum functioned from 1728–1791 and continued in the later Francke institutes. Leipzig’s Institutum Judaicum (later Delitzschianum) began in 1886, was closed by the Nazis in 1935, and was finally reopened in Münster, where it retains a church connection today. Tübingen’s Institutum Judaicum (founded in 1957), which flourished under Otto Michel and Martin Hengel, was created after World War II to foster dialogue with and learning from Jewish scholars, though it was based in a missionary theology; the name and mission continue to evolve: http://www.ev-theologie.uni-tuebingen.de/lehrstuehle-und-institute/religionswissenschaftund-judaistik/religionswissenschaft-und-judaistik/home.html. See Otto Michel, “Das Instititum Judaicum der Universität Tübingen,” Attempto 22 (1967): 18–23; Paul G. Aring, Christen und Juden heute – und die “Judenmission”? Geschichte und Theologie protestantischer Judenmission in Deutschland (Frankfurt: Haag & Herchen, 1987); http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_ 0002_0009_0_09547.html.  See Aaron W. Hughes, Jacob Neusner: An American Jewish Iconoclast (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 56–59.  Josephus had only a refracted popularity in Jewish circles via the Sefer Yosippon, a tenthcentury reworking of a fourth-century Christian reworking of the Greek author’s copious work. See Martin Goodman, Josephus’s The Jewish War: A Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).

Second Temple Studies: The Past, Present, and Future of the Ioudaioi

87

study of the Jewish experience across the curriculum. Second Temple studies, where available, would have an important place in that curriculum. At the same time, the more intensive investigation of this varied collection of texts and material remains began to produce a new emphasis on the diversity of ancient Judaism – so much so that some scholars insisted on speaking of ancient Judaisms or Judaic “systems.”18 What has changed most interestingly, then, is the nature of respectable interest in the Second Temple period. The shift is captured on Brill’s website for their Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum series (CRINT, “Surveys of Jewish matters relevant to the New Testament”). The publishers explain that, though the series was “designed in the 1960s as a structured set of handbooks on ‘matters Jewish’ illuminating the origins of Christianity” (my emphasis), it “has evolved into a series of monographs and collective works on the history and literature of Jews and Christians under Roman rule.”19 Indeed, the evolution is no longer detectable. The very first volumes, edited by Shmuel Safrai and Menachem Stern, were valued as indispensable studies of Second Temple Judaism, period.20 A similar oddity of vestigial nomenclature attends the revision of Emil Schürer’s History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ by an Oxford-based team (1973–1987). Now stripped of the original author’s “purely polemical material,” as the editors put it, this too was obviously a handbook for the history, literature, and institutions of Second Temple Judaism, in spite of its preserved title.21 The oddity of these names has impressed me in part because the early CRINT volumes and the “new Schürer” formed the heart of my reading list for my doctoral comprehensive exam in “Judaism from 200 BCE to 200 CE,” supervised by Albert Baumgarten.

 See the watershed essays in Robert A. Kraft and George W. E. Nickelsburg, eds., Early Judaism and its Modern Interpreters (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986). One topical example of the new emphasis on diversity was Jacob Neusner, William Scott Green, and Ernest S. Frerichs, eds., Judaisms and Their Messiahs at the Turn of the Christian Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).  From http://www.brill.com/publications/compendia-rerum-iudaicarum-ad-novum-testamentum.  Shmuel Safrai and Menahem Stern, The Jewish People in the First Century, Vols. 1–2 (Assen: Van Gorcum/Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974, 1976). The series has continued with several volumes, edited by Safrai and later others, on The Literature of the Jewish People in the Period of the Second Temple and the Talmud. Noting humbly that their volumes “can be read as works in their own right [i.e., not serving New Testament interests], describing the realia of Jewish life” (Jewish People, Vol. 2, v), Safrai and Stern also welcome the new Schürer’s first volume (next note) as “an indispensable tool for all historians of Second Temple Judaism” (my emphasis), which overlaps much with their project.  Emil Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, eds. Geza Vermes, Fergus Millar et al.; 3 vols. in 4 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1973–1987), quotation from page vi. The editors explain that they needed to let the famous work pass into oblivion (a waste), allow it to remain in widespread use as it was (leading to error), or rewrite it for the late twentieth century. In choosing the last option, they thought it only fair to acknowledge Schürer’s basic work, hence keeping his title.

88

Steve Mason

A basic task in the liberation of Second Temple studies was the subjection of its two traditional gateways, rabbinic literature for Jews and the New Testament for Christians, to a critical reckoning. This was the work, respectively, of Jacob Neusner and E. P. Sanders. In a succession of heavy monographs, Sanders pried each finger off the New Testament’s grip on ancient Judaism. Earlier assaults had been made, even before World War II, but without lasting effects. Sanders’ Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977) came when the time was ripe. He compared a wide range of Jewish texts in search of what lay beneath them – an admirable, election-based covenantal nomism, he thought, rather than the legalism imagined by Christian theologians. He argued that Paul’s key concept came from his mystical experiences and were completely misunderstood if taken as critiques of Judaism. Though igniting debates that continue today, Sanders’ work decisively closed, for anyone who was paying attention, the well-trodden path to Second Temple Judaism via the gospels or Paul.22 Everyone interested in the subject would need to study all the relevant sources. Neusner began from a different place. Playing Leopold von Ranke to Sanders’ G. W. F. Hegel, one might crudely put it, he insisted that we begin with each distinct literary corpus and understand it in its uniqueness, indefinitely postponing speculations about any unifying conception or spirit, any grand picture of Judaism of the kind that Sanders proposed. Jewish researchers had always studied rabbinic literature sympathetically, in the preceding century often as a continuation of the Pharisees’ humane progressivism, whereas Christian scholars (to the extent that they read it) had tended to treat this massive corpus as evidence of a rampant legalism.23 By requiring that one understand each corpus for itself – Mishnah in its context being different from the Mekilta, Sifra, Sifre, Tosefta, or the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds – before using any of their imagined data for Second Temple times, Neusner dammed both streams. These corpora were not mere collections of useful data to be mined, Neusner argued, but intelligent compositions answering specific, time-bound needs. Every pericope, micro-structure, formula, and device in them was devised to support the overall agenda and was not a free-standing vestige of earlier times. The Mishnah, for example, was not a mere collection of tannatic traditions arranged by subject, but a systemic

 E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia, Fortress, 1985); Sanders, Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah: Five Studies (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990).  Examples of the former include J. Z. Lauterbach, “The Pharisees and their Teachings,” Hebrew Union College Annual 6 (1929): 69–139; Louis Finkelstein, The Pharisees: The Sociological Background of their Faith, 2 Vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1938); the most famous example of the latter is perhaps H. L. Strack and P. Billerbeck, Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch, 4 Vols. (Munich: Beck, 1922). For the very different way of doing things post-Neusner, see Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton, eds., In Quest of the Historical Pharisees (Waco: Baylor University Press).

Second Temple Studies: The Past, Present, and Future of the Ioudaioi

89

statement of Jewish philosophy using Aristotelian categories.24 Unsurprisingly, Neusner devoted much of his career to producing translations of rabbinic texts with commentary and synthetic studies. He also published studies that spelled out the consequences for pre-70 history, which were largely negative.25 This material could not easily be used, as Sanders had used it, to illuminate a first-century Jewish mentality. His differences from Sanders led to well-publicized clashes.26 Neusner’s and Sanders’ dismantling of the two traditional gateways to the Second Temple period, rabbinic literature and the New Testament, stoked the fires of energetic questioning that was building in the field from other stimuli: archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, and new kinds of research on the Qumran and other scrolls, Philo, Josephus, broadly conceived “Enochic” works, and the long-familiar but newly interesting categories of apocalypse and apocalypticism.27 It was becoming obvious that each site, text, and corpus from the Second Temple period would require fresh and patient analysis: no longer as evidence for grand schemes as in the long traditions of Jewish or Christian scholarship. The possibilities seemed practically infinite. I have mentioned the energy contributed by archaeology, especially in Israel/ Palestine. European teams had been digging in the Holy Land since the late Ottoman period, but when much of ancient Coele-Syria became available to Israeli archaeologists from 1967, the study of material remains began to generate a vast library of both technical reports and popular syntheses.28 Research in the literary texts that have

 Jacob Neunser, The Mishnah: Social Perspectives (Leiden: Brill, 2002), vii–xviii, introduces this summary volume from his dozens of earlier books in this direction.  Most notable is Jacob Neusner, The Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees Before 70, 3 Vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1971). A clear statement of his method with this earliest corpus is Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah (Atlanta: Scholars, 1988).  For example, Neusner’s Judaic Law from Jesus to the Mishnah (Atlanta: Scholars, 1993) was a pointed response to Sanders’ Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah; see “Mr. Sanders’s Pharisees and Mine,” Bulletin for Biblical Research 2 (1992): 143–169, which includes this point of principle (146): “Looking at the evidence in its own terms (. . .) requires us to classify our documents and analyze them, only afterward turning to the issues of special concern to us.”  As a manifesto for rethinking ancient Judaism and earliest Christianity, as mislabeled outgrowths of Enochic (grace-based, apocalyptic) over against covenantal Judaism, Gabriele Boccaccini’s Middle Judaism: Jewish Thought 300 BCE to 200 CE (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991) has not decisively shaped the field. But many scholars (if not I) would now agree that first-century Christianity was Jewish. Boccaccini’s broadly conceived Enoch Seminar (http://www.enochseminar.org/drupal/) and related projects (4Enoch: The Online Encyclopedia of Second Temple Judaism: http://www.4enoch.org/wiki3/ index.php?title=Main_Page) are important ongoing contributions. On apocalypticism see John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination (New York: Crossroad, 1987) and Collins, ed., The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism (London: Continuum, 1998); for application to modern cults, see James D. Tabor and Eugene V. Gallagher, Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).  The most important repository is the Israel Antiquities Authority (http://www.antiquities.org.il/ shop_eng.asp?cat_id=8), though countless other stakeholders carry significant research.

90

Steve Mason

survived is becoming increasingly integrated with the study of material remains, aided by new editions of coins and inscriptions from ancient Judaea and environs.29 Larger currents in the humanities – the linguistic, rhetorical, social, cultural, and literary “turns,” and the contextual interests of a new historicism – undoubtedly furnished good company for these developments. But the surge of research and interest in our field is not merely an expression of these changing times and fashions across disciplines. Most importantly, it reflects a historic change in the academic position of Second Temple Judaism. This huge library, though it has existed from ancient times, partly known and partly buried, is only now stepping out from the shadows of the New Testament and rabbinic literature, ready to be “tasted again for the first time” as Jewish literature of a bygone Hellenistic-Roman era.30 What has the new kind of study wrought? For the mother-city Jerusalem and the Judaean homeland, it is requiring that synthetic treatments of Jews under Roman rule and the movement to war against Rome, for example, or aspects of Jewish thought such as “messianism,” be sensitive to difference and specific context in our sources. From all quarters, 2 we see new levels of critical questioning, growing interest in layers of meaning and ironic possibilities of texts, orality, and scribal practice, book production in ancient social contexts, and audience competencies. We have an ever-growing awareness of the problems with using disparate texts in historical constructions, an awareness that precludes the grand schemes of old.31 Whether we study groups known  Of countless examples, I suggest the lively debates about the nature of the Qumran site and its relationship to Philo’s and Josephus’ Essenes, evidenced in dozens of easily accessible publications, the long list of books and articles about first-century Galilee, and for Josephus’ Masada story the methodological clinic by Shaye J. D. Cohen in “Masada: Literary Tradition, Archaeological Remains, and the Credibility of Josephus,” Journal of Jewish Studies 33 (1982): 385–405. For inscriptions, see H. M. Cotton et al., Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae, 6 Vols. (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 2010–2018). For coins, see, for example: Ya’akov Meshorer, A Treasury of Jewish Coins from the Persian Period to Bar-Kokhba (Jerusalem: Yad ben-Zvi, 2001).  Lawrence H. Schiffman’s Who Was a Jew? Rabbinic and Halakhic Perspectives on the Jewish Christian Schism (Hoboken: Ktav, 1985) captured the spirit of informing modern discussions with ancient evidence, though he focuses on rabbinic literature and Christian-Jewish relations.  For example, William R. Farmer, Maccabees, Zealots, and Josephus (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956 [1973]) and Martin Hengel, The Zealots: Investigations into the Jewish Freedom Movement in the Period from Herod I until 70 AD, trans. David Smith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989 [German original 1961]), who separately worked against Josephus to find a biblical-theological foundation in rebel ideology; David M. Rhoads, Israel in Revolution, 6–74 CE: A Political History Based on the Writings of Josephus (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), who rejected the isolation of “religion” and insisted on the integration of social, political, and economic factors; and Martin Goodman, The Ruling Class of Judea: The Origins of the Jewish Revolt Against Rome AD 66–70 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (London: Penguin, 2007); and James S. McLaren, Turbulent Times? Josephus and Scholarship on Judaea in the First Century CE (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998). Jonathan Price, Jerusalem under Siege: The Collapse of the Jewish State, 66–70 CE (Leiden: Brill, 1992) subjected Josephus’ account of the final phase of the war to an exacting critique.

Second Temple Studies: The Past, Present, and Future of the Ioudaioi

91

since the first century, such as Pharisees and Essenes,32 or probe obvious but neglected questions about the Jewish family, women, slavery, and literacy,33 everything is newly up for grabs because open to more exacting scrutiny than we imagined possible before the integration of ancient Judaism with other disciplines. With respect to the diaspora, scholars have thrown aside the traditional Jewish and especially Christian picture of a forced dispersion, of Jews abroad pining in unison for the homeland. Researchers now insist on investigating each particular location, and in each period or decade, reading each author and text in their unique situations. They bring to the table an array of sociologically informed questions and insights from renowned studies of orientalism and postcolonialism.34 At the same time, the very category “diaspora” has come under scrutiny: where was it, and did its occupants know they belonged to it?35 Since Josephus research illustrates well the nexus between quantitative growth and the appearance of new questions and methods, I close this section with Josephusrelated markers of change. When I began dissertation research in the early 1980s, international experts reflexively directed me to Gustav Hölscher’s Pauly-Wissowa article (1916) and Henry St.-John Thackeray’s lectures (1929) as the still-defining reference points.36 Research for my history of scholarship was mainly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There was promise of new philological insight, however, with the completion of Rengstorf’s Complete Concordance just as I was finishing comprehensive exams in 1983.37 Then, the late 1970s to early 1980s, a few scholars were beginning to show an unprecedented interest in Josephus as an intelligent author.38

 Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton, eds., In Quest of the Historical Pharisees (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007).  Catherine Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001); and Hezser, Jewish Slavery in Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).  Louis H. Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); John Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora: From Alexander to Trajan (323 BCE – 117 CE) (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996); Miriam Pucci ben Zeev, Jewish Rights in the Roman World: The Greek and Roman Documents Quoted by Josephus Flavius (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998); Erich S. Gruen, Diaspora: Jews Amidst Greeks and Romans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).  Steve Mason, “Eretz-Israel and Diaspora: Variations on the Category Blues,” in Livia Capponi, ed., Tra Politica e Religione: I Giudei nel mondo greco-romano. Studi in onore di Lucio Troiani (Milan: Jouvence, 2019), 225–246.  Gustav Hölscher, “Josephus,” PW 18: 1934–2000; Henry St.-John Thackeray, Josephus: The Man and the Historian (New York: Jewish Institute of Religion, 1929).  Karl H. Rengstorf et al., eds., A Complete Concordance to Flavius Josephus, 4 Vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1973–1983).  Notably Shaye Cohen, Josephus in Galilee and Rome: His Vita and Development as a Historian (Leiden: Brill, 1979); Tessa Rajak, Josephus: The Historian and His Society (London, Duckworth, 1983); Per Bilde, Flavius Josephus between Jerusalem and Rome: His Life, His Works and Their Importance (Sheffield: JSOT, 1988).

92

Steve Mason

The first international colloquium on Josephus, funded by a bequest of Morton Smith and a mission to gather the whole planet’s researchers on Josephus, convened 1,900 years after Josephus laid down his stylus, in San Miniato (1992). There were about twenty of us. This inspired a series of annual colloquia in Europe and Israel in the years following, with steadily expanding constituencies. Where were all these Josephus scholars coming from? After decades of lying fallow, the field was exploding with new methods, tools, and perspectives. In this atmosphere were born the Brill Josephus Project (Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary, from 1997) and the Josephus Seminar in the Society of Biblical Literature (from 1999), both of which continue today. The ferment since the turn of the millennium in doctoral seminars, dissertations, articles, monographs, collected-essay volumes, grant-funded projects, and online tools, not to mention an apparently growing public interest, is truly formidable, keeping us all on our toes. We must anticipate continued exponential growth. To summarize: Second Temple studies is in rude health. This is not merely because of the natural causes that have nourished all disciplines. The decisive factor has been the liberation of the field from traditional study, so that this period is no longer read through the lens of either the New Testament or rabbinic literature. These changes have made available a huge and complex library as though it had been newly discovered. Archaeology provides much of the fuel – a non-renewable resource, but with many rich veins still awaiting exploration. Other factors have played their part: the rise in secularism, which tends to stimulate academic-historical rather than traditional-confessional interest; the State of Israel and its stakes in the Judaean past; and the rapid maturing of scholarship in the young state. I am hardly competent to analyze all of those factors.

3 But What Was That Address . . . ? As Second Temple studies began to assert its autonomy as a field, it became an open question where it fit in the modern university. Centers for Jewish/Judaic studies blossomed, but they tended to be interdisciplinary programs rather than hiring units. One might think that the situation in Israel would have been more straightforward. Not sharing the legacy of Christian theological dominance, universities there would be free to locate Second Temple studies by a simple disciplinary logic. The issue there, however, is the embarrassment of riches and the unique possibilities of refinement in research. Some texts are congenial to classicists, others to scholars of Jewish philosophy, others to specialists in comparative religion or Jewish history (or simply history), while high-prestige archaeology goes its way. My colleagues in Israel are found across all these units, not in a Department of Second Temple Judaism.

Second Temple Studies: The Past, Present, and Future of the Ioudaioi

93

Elsewhere, we find similar compromises between institutional cultures and intellectual rationales, without Israel’s breadth and depth. It might seem that secular universities would naturally group all ancient studies together with classics. But classicists have traditionally seen their portfolio as the high culture of Greece and Rome, at most broadening their scope to include silver and bronze aftereffects. That field has changed dramatically in the past three decades, as we shall see. But 1Enoch, 2Esdras, and the Wisdom of Solomon are not the kinds of works that classicists cherish. In Europe, the problem has not been acute because theology has been so keen on these texts. Given that the New Testament corpus itself is pocket-sized and massively oversubscribed, NT scholars conduct their research largely in the Umwelt: in Jesus’ Galilee and Jerusalem or the varieties of Judaism, in which a Paul or Stephen might fit, and in the Hellenistic-Roman environment. Indeed, it can be difficult to make a clean distinction between Jewish and Christian texts of the first two centuries, given their complex interactions, gradual separation, and Christian transmission and scribal intervention in the case of the pseudepigrapha. These considerations – along with the small Jewish populations in much of Europe today – help to explain the striking differences between European and North American universities in handling ancient Jewish literature. In Germany, Scandinavia, and Britain, most research on Qumran Scrolls, Josephus, Philo, and the diaspora is conducted in faculties of Christian Theology/New Testament. Historic alignments between church and state mean that state universities train clergy and teachers of religious education. Although undergraduate and clergy-training constituencies may be shrinking, the configuration can remain fairly strong at the graduate and professional levels, in part because of the numbers of North American students seeking British or continental doctorates. Further, the teachability of (Christian) religion in state-funded schools helps to keep biblical studies in the Christian sense – New Testament and its “Jewish environment” – prosperous as a university subject. The humanities are under severe pressure in Europe as elsewhere, however, and changing demographics and financial models are forcing constant re-evaluation of these structures. Other local factors play a part. Vatican-affiliated and other Catholic universities increasingly teach Judaism of all periods from a pressing concern for Jewish-Christian dialogue. The collaborative study of Second Temple Judaism by scholars of Jewish and Christian-Catholic background can help with trust-building.39 That is true also in

 The Cardinal Bea Centre for Judaic Studies in the Pontifical Gregorian University is the clearest example. It was led for some years by Joseph Sievers, whose influential research has been in the Hasmonean period and Josephus. The centre describes itself as “dedicated to the promotion of a theological knowledge and understanding of Judaism – from both a Jewish and a Christian perspective – as well as the teaching, research and academic exchanges between Christians and Jews, in order to foster a mutually enriching relationship” (http://www.unigre.it/struttura_didattica/Ju daic_studies/index_en.php). My impression of the value of Second Temple studies as a meeting ground is shaped by guest lectures there and also in American Catholic universities with centers of

94

Steve Mason

North American Catholic universities, which often house centers for Jewish-Christian dialogue. Catholic and Protestant institutes of different vintage in Israel, by contrast, tend still to focus on the Second Temple period as the environment of the New Testament. Their scholars have nevertheless made signal contributions to literary and archaeological research.40 European universities are far from monolithic, of course, and there are plenty of exceptions to the association of Second Temple studies with theology and New Testament. In France, Italy, and the Netherlands, where theology is either excluded or fading from public university curricula, ancient Judaism often fits in unique niches created by individual professors.41 Oxford is distinctive in the way it integrates the Second Temple in both the Oriental Institute and the Faculty of Classics – the most wide-ranging in the world. The University of Southampton’s history department, partly under the stimulus of the Parkes Centre for Jewish/Non-Jewish Dialogue and given the absence of theology as a subject, hosts Second Temple along with other periods of Jewish history. American and Canadian public universities are in a very different place politically, socially, demographically, and financially. No doubt the United States has the largest and most vigorously Christian (Catholic, liberal-Protestant, evangelical, sectarian) presence in higher education, which means that the familiar teaching of ancient Judaism as the environment of the New Testament remains common. But that is in the country’s many private and church-funded colleges, universities, and seminaries, which find accreditation through regional or national associations. In Canada, until recently, a university required a provincial government charter and in granting this the legislature would be guided by the established universities, which tended to be allergic to theology – or even to academic “religion” if it suggested any aura of soft navel-gazing. Canadian universities typically have a markedly secular and public character. That hard

Jewish-Christian dialogue. I remember my terror when, after accepting the honor of giving the opening lecture in a Josephus conference at the Gregorian, a parade of dignitaries (a cardinal, the chief rabbi, and the Israeli ambassador) filed in, along with what seemed the cream of Roman society. Ancient subjects are pivotal for Jewish-Christian dialogue.  The New Testament connection is clear from the titles of the long-established Studium Biblicum Franciscanum and École biblique et archéologique, which were involved in major excavations, including Qumran in the latter case.  Bruno Chiesa in Turin, whose chair is in Hebrew Language and Literature, has directed many students of Josephus. Katell Berthelot, from a base in the Centre Paul-Albert Février (for texts and documents on the ancient and medieval Mediterranean) in Aix-en-Provence, has a major project underway on Jews in the Roman Period. Monette Bohrmann did her research on Josephus as a specialist in Slavic Studies with CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique). Mireille HadasLebel, who has written extensively on ancient Judaism and Josephus, is a historian in the Sorbonne. Sylvie Anne Goldberg, author of a commentary on Josephus’ Against Apion, researches long-span Jewish history in Paris’ graduate centre for the social sciences (École des hautes études en sciences sociales, or EHESS) and Centre de recherches historiques.

Second Temple Studies: The Past, Present, and Future of the Ioudaioi

95

edge is shared in principle by American state universities and many private institutions, though in both countries regional differences bring compromises. With the growing suspicion of academic theology since World War II and the rise of a more respectful interest in other cultures, particularly in Judaism after the Holocaust, the natural home for the academic study of ancient Judaism in North American was in the departments of religious studies that began to sprout in baby-boom universities, especially after the Supreme Court decision mentioned above and the founding of the American Academy of Religion in 1964. Most of these departments were resolutely secular. Individual professors were allowed their private commitments, of course, but they were private. All human religious phenomena were to be studied on an equal footing with no assumption of theism, let alone claims to special revelation. The tools of research were social-scientific, historical, and philological, applied to religion as to other aspects of human experience in other departments. As religion departments took shape in the 1960s, and the world’s great traditions were assembled for synchronic study through their rituals, history, and texts, Second Temple belonged with the religion of Judaism. Textbooks designed for courses in the study of religions, at both high school and university level, included this ancient period as an indispensable chapter in Judaism’s long story. When I arrived as a student in McMaster University’s religious studies department, its twenty-two faculty members were evenly split between East and West, driving home the non-theological nature of the discipline. Western traditions were studied in horizontal strata according to period, so that my field was “Judaism and early Christianity.” The underlying principle was that, although the study of vertical religious traditions was entirely valid, it was also important to understand texts in their distinctive historical contexts. We therefore studied ancient Jews and Christians in the alien world of the Roman Empire. These ancient forebears, no less than the Chinese and Indian figures we also studied, had values, assumptions, and linguistic frameworks that were very different from ours. This approach helped to free research from normative assumptions or “transcendental narcissism.”42 Although countervailing movements toward an identity politics rooted in vertical traditions have asserted themselves in the meantime, historically sensitive research continues to stress the horizontal strata. Berlin’s TOPOI and Groningen’s CRASIS groups,43 for example, include all scholars who study ancient texts and artefacts, irrespective of departmental home. Demolishing disciplinary walls is the trend also in North American public universities. Classics and ancient history departments are

 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. Alan M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 203.  For TOPOI (devoted to ‘the formation and transformation of space and knowledge in ancient civilizations), see https://www.topoi.org. For CRASIS (‘Culture, Religion, and Society – Ancient Studies), see https://www.rug.nl/research/centre-for-religious-studies/crasis/?lang=en. Accessed August 20, 2020.

96

Steve Mason

broadening their reach to include Egypt, Judaea, and points farther east, while graduate programs in the study of antiquity draw faculty from several departments. Subjects now include Greco-Roman Judaea and sometimes even Christian origins, though the latter often pays for its long hegemony (in association with theology) in the lingering mistrust of other ancient historians and classicists.44 I close this section again with an example from Josephus that illustrates these trends. The Jerusalemite priest and historian Flavius Josephus (37–ca. 100 CE) composed his thirty-volume corpus in Greek, as a new citizen living in Rome after Jerusalem’s destruction. That sentence already suggests that his work is one of the most extensive Greek corpora to have survived from antiquity, and that he is one of the most prolific extant Roman authors. Both statements are true. His writing, often in a high literary register, shows extensive debts to Greek historiography, tragedy, and rhetoric. His complex program of cultural accommodation and quiet correction or challenge to Rome ought to make his work of central interest for the theme “Greek elites under Roman rule.” Yet, despite a flood of studies on that theme, as also in books on Greek and Roman historiography, classicists mostly ignored Josephus until a quarter century ago. He was assumed to be neither similar enough to Greek authors such as Plutarch and Dio Chrysostom nor sufficiently Roman to be included with either Greek or Roman literature. He was, in short, too Jewish.45

 See Minnesota’s Classics and Near Eastern Studies, Pennsylvania State University’s Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, University of Michigan’s comprehensive History Department, the Classics, Near Eastern, and Religious Studies at the University of British Columbia, and the University of California, Irvine’s Classics Program. At the graduate level: Princeton’s Program in the Ancient World (four departments collaborating), Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the extraordinarily wide-ranging Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in New York. From the late 1990s at York University, Jonathan Edmondson led the way in establishing both a graduate program in ancient history, even broader in vision than Toronto’s Ancient Studies Collaborative Program (http://groups.chass.utoronto.ca/fine_arts/asp), and an interinstitutional collaborative program across all areas of ancient history with the University of Toronto’s Classics (https://sgs.calendar.utoronto.ca/collaborative/Ancient-Greek-and-Roman-History).  For Josephus’ historiographical debts, see Arthur M. Eckstein, “Josephus and Polybius: A Reconsideration,” Classical Antiquity 9 (1990): 175–208; Gottfried Mader, Josephus and the Politics of Historiography: Apologetic and Impression Management in the Bellum Judaicum (Leiden: Brill, 2000); Yuval Shahar, Josephus Geographicus: The Classical Context of Geography in Josephus (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004). For his absence from the Greek and Roman horizons in scholarship, however, see such comprehensive studies as Simon Swain, Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, AD 50–250 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) and Elaine Fantham, Roman Literary Culture: From Cicero to Apuleius (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). It is fair to note Fantham’s omission because she is not concerned with Latin literature but with the social context in Rome: “So a recurring feature of this ‘social history’ will be the issue of bilingualism and the role played by living Greeks in the Roman literary world” (xiii).

Second Temple Studies: The Past, Present, and Future of the Ioudaioi

97

Ewen Bowie’s programmatic essay on Greeks under Roman rule (1970) gave the standard rationale:46 The first century A.D. has left no contemporary history by a Greek until Plutarch’s imperial biographies, although the existence of works on the civil wars of 69 is attested by Josephus. (whom I exclude as a Jewish writer outside the main Greek tradition)

It is true that Josephus rhetorically sets himself against “the main Greek tradition.” But his painstakingly Atticizing Greek, à la mode, his debts to Greek epic, tragedy, historiography, rhetoric, and moral philosophy, and his provision of the fullest example of a classic historiographical proem (BJ 1.1–30), show that he was writing also from within the Greco-Roman historiographical tradition – as Bowie largely concedes in a footnote. As for Roman affairs, it is curious that Bowie mentions just one remark by Josephus, concerning other works on the Roman civil war of 69, given that Josephus makes contemporary Roman politics a thematic counterpoint to his Judaean history (BJ 1.4). He has a great deal to say about Roman leaders in the first century BCE (through BJ 1), at the time of Gaius’ death and Claudius’ accession (an entire volume) in 41, and during the post-Neronian civil war (68–69), while providing invaluable information about Roman provincial administration and military procedures.47 Given that Bowie includes discussion of minor and fragmentary Greek authors from the Levant,48 his exclusion of Josephus is striking. The bias here is not anti-Jewish. It has to do with disciplinary conceptions, with what counts as Greek and Roman. Erich Gruen’s 1992 presidential address to the American Philological Association exposed this general anomaly in Classics, with Gruen’s typical verve.49 How things have changed! John Marincola’s 1997 monograph on ancient historiography was the first of its kind to give significant space to Josephus, and his experiment has paid huge dividends. Marincola’s index shows him using Josephus to illustrate Graeco-Roman historiography at least as often as he cites Livy, Tacitus, or Thucydides. Even Josephus’s rare eyewitness account of a Roman triumph had been neglected in studies of that subject until the eminent Roman historian Mary Beard

 Ewen L. Bowie, “The Greeks and Their Past in the Second Sophistic,” Past and Present 46 (1970): 3–41 (15).  See, for example, T. Peter Wiseman, Death of an Emperor: Flavius Josephus (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1991); Steve Mason, “Of Audience and Meaning: Reading Josephus’ Bellum Judaicum in the Context of a Flavian Audience,” in Joseph Sievers and Gaia Lembi, eds., Josephus and Jewish History in Flavian Rome and Beyond (Leiden: Brill, 2005): 70–100; 92–98 on Roman affairs; and Mason, “Flavius Josephus and Flavian Rome: Reading On and Between the Lines,” in Anthony J. Boyle and William J. Dominik, eds., Flavian Rome: Image, Culture, Text (Leiden: Brill, 2003): 559–589.  Bowie, “Greeks and Their Past,” 16–22.  http://apaclassics.org/sites/default/files/documents/gruen.pdf (thanks to Jacob Feeley for the pointer).

98

Steve Mason

insisted (2003) that it was precious material for exploitation.50 As a “Josephus scholar” I have found myself invited with increasing frequency to join projects or serve on editorial boards for series on Greco-Roman historiography. The Jerusalemite priest Josephus, no longer seen as so forbiddingly alien, has finally won a seat at the classicists’ table. Other survivals from Second Temple Judaism are likewise finding a warmer welcome in Greco-Roman history. Studies of provincial administration, frontiers, ethnicity, client kingship, military history, and philosophy are likely to feature evidence from Josephus, 1Maccabees, or Philo, and certainly from archaeological work in Masada, Gamla, Iotapata, or Caesarea, with closer attention to Josephus’ relevant narratives. Another barometer is the Bryn Mawr Classical Review (founded 1990), which reaches the inbox of nearly every classicist and ancient historian. Since about 2000, it has been steadily expanding its remit to include larger swaths of ancient Judaism and even early Christianity.51 That some of the world’s most eminent Hellenistic-Roman historians, after making their names in central areas of Greco-Roman history, have moved into the study of Second Temple Judaea and its diaspora confirms the seismic shifts. Several figures could be mentioned, but Erich Gruen of Berkeley, Fergus Millar of Oxford, and Werner Eck of Cologne have brought ancient Judaea and its expatriate communities into the mainstream of ancient history.52

 Mary Beard, “The Triumph of Flavius Josephus,” in A. J. Boyle and W. J. Dominik, eds., Flavian Rome: Image, Culture, Text (Leiden: Brill, 2003): 543–558. E. Künzl was exceptional in Der römische Triumph: Siegesfeiern im antiken Rom (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988). He opened this semi-popular study with a complete quotation of Josephus’ triumph account, presenting it, however, as the regime’s more or less factual account (9, 14–15).  Of 265 hits for “Josephus” in the archive, only twenty-seven come from the journal’s first decade, mainly in incidental references; since 2000 there has been much more discussion along with the reviews of books on Josephus. Perusal of http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/archive.html shows that hardly any books on ancient Judaism (if not as part of ancient religion/history) were reviewed before 2000. When James O’Donnell began Bryn Mawr Classical Review (BMCR), I began IOUDAIOS and (with David Reimer) the IOUDAIOS-REVIEW – for Jews and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World. The common assumption that these were separate fields has now largely collapsed in principle and IOUDAIOS-REVIEW has disappeared because books in the field were well covered elsewhere.  Gruen moved from The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome, 2 Vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), and The Last Generation of the Roman Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) to Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Millar has often moved between the Roman center (The Emperor in the Roman World, 31 BC–AD 337 [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977], The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998]) and periphery (for example, The Roman Near East 31 BC–AD 337 [Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1993]), so was well positioned to coedit the new Schürer (above). Eck wrote Senatoren von Vespasian bis Hadrian (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1970) and Die Statthalter der germanischen Provinzen vom 1–3. Jahrhundert (Cologne: Rheinland/R. Habelt, 1985) before becoming deeply involved in Judaean history, especially epigraphy: Rom und Judaea: Fünf Vorträge zur römischen Herrschaft in Palaestina (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007) and Judäa–Syria Palästina (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014).

Second Temple Studies: The Past, Present, and Future of the Ioudaioi

99

4 Jews and Judaeans: How to Talk Past Each Other With this overview of the field’s vital signs in hand, we return to the question of English possibilities for Ioudaios/Iudaeus. As I noted at the outset, Adele Reinhartz has proposed that using Judaean rather than the customary translation Jew runs the risk of erasing Jews from antiquity. I cite her article only as the most pointed and widely read article expressing an anxiety shared by many colleagues.53 It will now be clear why such anxiety seems to me not a pressing issue. Momentum is overwhelmingly toward giving Jews and Judaism a much larger and more secure place in ancient history. Given the growing entanglement of Second Temple studies in ancient history and the demolition of the old artificial barriers, that change looks irreversible. How to render Ioudaioi when translating Philo or Josephus takes nothing away from the growing awareness these are the greatest surviving Jewish authors in Greek from the Roman period. Any inference from my proposals about Ioudaios that the priest Josephus, who celebrates everywhere the laws of Moses, was a Judaean and therefore not a Jew would show a misunderstanding. No doubt there are people in the corners of the internet who imagine that some scholars’ use of “Judaean” supports their perverse agenda, as there are some who consider the world flat and the moon landings faked. But for the purposes of historical research we may ignore them. Let us focus instead on the academic merits of any particular translation – or transliteration – in ancient contexts. In this last section I want to advance two propositions. The first is that translation depends on the scholar’s particular task and context. There is no right translation for all purposes. Only the translator immersed in a project and set of contexts, with consistent criteria in hand, is in a position to find the most suitable words and phrases. Colleagues always challenge and debate each other’s choices; that is normal. Although there are incorrect translations (a yad is not a fried egg), there are no single correct ones, and the notion that we “should” all translate one way runs against every principle of historical and linguistic research.54 Compare any two translations of the Iliad or Odyssey, Tacitus or Josephus, and you will find considerable variety.

 See for example, Daniel R. Schwartz, “‘Judaean’ Or ‘Jew’? How Should We Translate Ioudaios in Josephus?” in Jörg Frey, Daniel R. Schwartz, and Stephanie Gripentrog, eds., Jewish Identity in the Greco-Roman World (Leiden: Brill, 2007): 3–27; Karel van der Toorn, Becoming Diaspora Jews: Behind the Story of Elephantine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019): 15–18.  This may seem a disingenuous claim, given that my 2007 article (“Jews, Judaeans”) has become controversial and is Reinhartz’s main target. Was I not trying to fix the translation of Ioudaios? No. When the Brill commentary team began discussing our principles (late 1990s), it emerged that Ioudaioi was one of many terms on which we would differ, even while agreeing to many basic criteria. So, after explaining our approach in the series Preface, which has accompanied each volume as of 2000, I stressed that “uniformity is not among our goals. (. . .) We have striven rather for an appropriate balance between overall coherence [in the series] and individual scholarly insight – the animating principle of humanistic scholarship. The simple Greek word Ioudaios affords an example ( . . . .)

100

Steve Mason

Second, the gradual welcoming of Second Temple studies in ancient history is creating new dynamics, which must be reckoned with. The price of admission is a willingness to meet other historians halfway. This means coming to terms with a deliberately historical (rather than the traditional literary, theological, or religioussynchronic) method. Working in ancient history keeps one’s attention on the horizontal stratum of Greek and Latin discourse. The translation of any single word is a trivial and debatable issue. But a historically oriented translation will suggest options that a translation designed for ease of reading, which stresses the familiar and the comfortable (as in Church-oriented translations of the New Testament), would not. I am not suggesting that rendering Ioudaioi as Judaeans necessarily follows from a historical approach. Classicists and ancient historians overwhelmingly favor Jews, and that seems likely to remain the case.55 This does not bother me. But most ancient historians focus their research on questions between the poles of Fernand Braudel’s famous dialectic: the history of events – wars, institutional, legal, and regime changes, prosopography – on one end, and that of longue-durée social conditions – families, groups, resources, food, demographics, trade, and economics – on the other. Relatively few spend much time exploring ancient discourse, though that happens to be one of my interests. For anyone who does work in this area, the two ancient categories that seem to jump out from every Greek page are ethnos and polis. The fourth-century BCE travelogue by Pseudo-Scylax, though comprising barely 114 paragraphs, has these words 369 times.56 Nearer to Josephus’ time, Diodorus Siculus has them 3,368 times; Strabo 1,913; Philo of Alexandria (not especially interested in human geography), 911; Plutarch 3,774; Dio of Prusa 878; Josephus 2,416 times.57 The numbers mean little except that they are big. That is because ethnos and polis were the default categories ancient writers used to communicate about peoples and places:

Some of us have opted for ‘Judean’ (. . .); some use both terms (. . .); and others use ‘Jew’ ( . . . .).” Because I assumed that specialists understood the different preferences, I offered only a brief explanation at my first use of “Judean” (in Louis H. Feldman, Judean Antiquities 1–4, Vol. 3 of Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary [Leiden: Brill, 2000], xiii), to let general readers know that this was the same word as “Jew” and indicate contextual reasons for my translation. Unexpectedly intense criticism in the following years, much of it private, prompted me to write the 2007 article, using the mild challenge of a published review as my departure point. Even there, however, I tried to embed the Ioudaios question in a larger discussion of ancient discourse, though further criticism has doggedly isolated this word as though it were an end in itself.  A search of the BMCR archive (http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/archive.html) produces just twentyone hits for Jud(a)eans against 562 for Jews.  See Graham Shipley, Pseudo-Skylax’s Periplous: The Circumnavigation of the Inhabited World. Text, Translation and Commentary (Exeter: Bristol Phoenix, 2011). This short work has ἔθνος (ethnos) eighty-five times and πόλις (polis) 283 times.  My search (tlg.uci.edu) was limited to πόλις (polis), πολίτης (politēs), πολιτεία (politeia), μητρόπολις (metropolis); ἔθνος (ethnos), ἐθνικός (ethnikos), ὁμόεθνης (homoethnēs), ἀλλόεθνης (alloethnēs).

Second Temple Studies: The Past, Present, and Future of the Ioudaioi

101

Syrians, Egyptians, and Spartans to Ioudaioi, and population centers from Rome, Alexandria, coastal Caesarea, and Sparta to Jerusalem. What did the words mean? Rather than plunge into abstract methodological questions, I propose to focus on examples of usage. These illustrate the close connections that ancient writers found between peoples and places. For our question this matters because there was a famous place called Ioudaia (Judaea) and people called Ioudaioi (Judaeans). The relationship between the two is much like that between Canada and Canadians, or Italy and Italians. We do not translate such names or debate their meaning, but simply recognize them as cognates and transliterate both. That connection remains clear in ancient texts generally. Therefore, although I have no difficulty speaking of ancient Jews when speaking about the field or addressing larger audiences, when I am translating ancient texts, where my goal is to capture what ancient readers saw in the original languages, I prefer to use the same kinds of transliterations that we always use for peoples and places: Egypt and Egyptians, Syria and Syrians, Idumaea and Idumaeans. The word forms here are the same as for Judaea and Judaeans. Consider some examples. Josephus describes the citizens of Antioch trying to expel Ioudaioi they have accused of mischief, just after Jerusalem’s war with Rome. Titus responds to the citizens’ demands: “But their own patris (homeland), to which they – being Ioudaioi – ought to be expelled [i.e., Ioudaia], has been destroyed. And no other place would welcome them.”58 Jerusalem’s hinterland Ioudaia is the place where Ioudaioi belong, in classical thinking, as the homeland where their laws and customs hold sway. Elsewhere they (like all others away from home poleis) are resident aliens, vulnerable to majority populations no matter how many generations they have lived there. Only in Jerusalem and Judaea, which Ioudaioi around the world continued to support with donations and pilgrimage trips,59 are Judaean laws, sacrificial cult, and customs normative and secure. Judaea is the Judaeans’ homeland. Is Ioudaioi is better rendered Judaeans or Jews? It does not matter – unless one is interested in ancient ways of thinking and speaking. It matters to me as an ancient historian because other big issues – for example, Roman provincial administration, the strategies of Roman commanders when dealing with unrest, the scandal of attraction to the laws and customs of a foreign ethnos, the inter-ethnic strife that led to war in southern Syria,60 struggles over coastal Caesarea’s ethnic identity, Claudius’ letter to the Alexandrians in 41 CE, Jewish-Christian relations to the fourth century (which

 BJ 7.40–62, 100–115 (108).  See Strabo: 1.2.33 and 16.2.22 on the rivalry between Tyre and Sidon for status of Phoenician mētropolis; 7.4.4 on the Bosporians’ Panticapaeus); 10.4.6 on Doris of the Dorians; 11.11.1–3 on Bactrian Bactra; 12.2.7 on Mazaka as mētropolis of “the ethnos” of Cappadocian Cilicians; 16.2.28 on Judaean Jerusalem; 4.21 on Nabataean Petra; with Josephus, Ant. 1.127 on Cilician Tarsus; 4.82 on Arabian Petra; 11.159 on Persian Susa; 11.60 on Judaean Jerusalem.  Steve Mason, A History of the Jewish War of A.D. 66–74 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

102

Steve Mason

were not between two religions), the emperor Julian’s effort to restore the Ioudaioi to Jerusalem – are easier for me to understand if I bear in mind the Ioudaia-Ioudaios (Judaea-Judaean) connection. Here is another example of the potential stakes. In Ant. 20.17–96 Josephus gives a detailed account of the royal family of Adiabene, a petty kingdom in the Parthian empire (northern Iraq), key members of which become enamored of Judaean law. In scholarship, this episode is nearly always treated as the best example of “conversion to Judaism” in the first century. Scholars ask what it might say about procedures of conversion and correspondence with later rabbinic norms.61 In particular, since the story highlights the question of Prince Izates’ circumcision (Will he or won’t he be circumcised?), they discuss whether a male could “convert” without circumcision at the time and whether there were differing halakhic views about this. The Loeb translation by Louis Feldman (1965) supports this approach by opening the passage: “At the same time Helena, queen of Adiabene, and her son Izates became converts to Judaism” (20.17). We then read of Izates’ discovery that his mother “was very much pleased with the Jewish religion” (20.38), and that he wished “to be a devoted adherent of Judaism” (20.41, my emphasis). In keeping with the Loeb series’ purposes and ethos (see Thackeray above), Feldman’s translation choices are perfectly understandable. They are comfortable and familiar, accommodating Josephus’ Greek to modern categories. They are not wrong. They do not, however, invite the reader into the alien world of Josephus. A more literal – and alienating – translation would go something like this: Queen Helena and her son “changed/transformed/reoriented their life toward the customs of the Ioudaioi” (20.17). There is no Juda-ism in the Greek; the language reflects ancient assumptions about ethnē with their distinctive laws and customs. There is no perfect modern translation because we have no equivalents: an ethnos is not a country or a state, though it comes close to some definitions of a nation. Likewise, the Greek relates that Izates learns that his mother “was taking great joy in the customs of the Ioudaioi” (20.38) – not in Jewish religion – and he also resolved “to emulate the ancestral customs of the Ioudaioi” (20.41). If we are willing to forego easy assimilation to our categories, to take up the challenge of trying to think in ancient

 Jacob Neusner, “The Conversion of Adiabene to Judaism,” Journal of Biblical Literature 83 (1964): 60–66; Abraham Schalit, “Evidence of an Aramaic Source in Josephus’ ‘Antiquities of the Jews,’” Annual of the Swedish Theological Institute 4 (1975): 163–88; John J. Collins, “A Symbol of Otherness: Circumcision and Salvation in the First Century,” in Jacob Neusner and Ernest S. Frerichs, eds., “To See Ourselves as Others See Us”: Christians, Jews, “Others” in Late Antiquity (Chico, CA: Scholars, 1985): 177–180; Lawrence H. Schiffman, “The Conversion of the Royal House of Adiabene in Josephus and Rabbinic Sources,” in Louis H. Feldman and Gohei Hata, eds., Josephus, Judaism, and Christianity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987): 293–312; Alan F. Segal, Paul the Apostle: The Apostalate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 99–101.

Second Temple Studies: The Past, Present, and Future of the Ioudaioi

103

terms, we might discover valuable insights. We cannot do that if we choose only what is familiar to us. In this story, namely, Josephus’ emphasis is on the foreign character of Judaean customs. This is not another religion, for which ancient Greek had no term. Rather, foreignness is the problem and danger: Adiabenian versus Judaean law, custom, and cult. The noblemen of Adiabene, whose identities are naturally invested in their ancestral ways, are mortified at this betrayal, which is tantamount to treason, by their royal family. If we imagine an American president wearing an Indian kurta and sporting a tilak mark on the forehead, or wearing a keffiyeh, we might begin to sense the issue. It is the danger of assassination for betraying the ethnos identity, and not questions of halakha, that creates the problem of Izates’ circumcision. If he proceeds, he is warned, he will truly become a foreigner. His nobles will not tolerate being ruled by a Ioudaios, who follows customs “foreign and alien” to them (20.38–40). They will kill him. The prince’s mother, though sharing his attraction to Judaean ways, warns him that their subjects “would not tolerate being ruled by a man who was a devotee of other customs” (20.47). The nobles think that he “has shown hatred for their customs” (20.77). Such language is about ethnos identity, and words involving “emulation/devotion” were typically used in such contexts, when discussing attractive foreign constitutions such as Sparta’s.62 The tension is not between two religions, but between Adiabenian and Judaean identity. This ethno-political framework remains clear in the consequences. The Adiabenian royals physically become patrons of the Judaean mother-polis, Jerusalem, and identify with it as proud new citizens. They provide famine relief for Judaea, build palaces and civic structures in Jerusalem, and send their sons to be educated there. They will be buried there, in monumental tombs still visible today.63 Most strikingly, Adiabenians will take prominent roles in the coming conflict with Rome.64 The closest modern parallel is migration and change of citizenship, to take on the whole identity and set of commitments that go with it – not religious conversion. The Adiabenian story helps to explain Josephus’ remarks in Against Apion concerning the unique Judaean approach to polis-belonging (politeia, citizenship). He contrasts Jerusalem’s openness to foreigners who are willing to accept the discipline of their laws with Greek poleis’ jealous protectiveness of their citizenship.65 Philo makes a comparable statement, in similar language (Virt. 102–103):

 Compare Plato (Prot. 342e–343b) on the Seven Sages, who were “devotees of the Spartan educational system,” with Josephus (BJ 7.357; Apion 1.166; 2.280, 282) and Dio (37.17.1) on foreign emulation of the Judaean legal system, and Ptolemy, Diff. verb. 395 on the word group.  Ant. 20.49–51, 71, 92–96; Pausanias 8.16.4–5.  BJ 2.520; 4.567; 5.55, 119, 252–53; 6.343, 357.  Apion 2.255–86.

104

Steve Mason

Having legislated for fellow-members of the ethnos, Moses holds also that newcomers must be deemed worthy of every right – because they have left behind ties of blood, homeland, customs, sacred rites, and shrines of the Gods (. . .) having set out on an excellent migration. (. . .) Certainly, he directs those of the ethnos [i.e., the Ioudaioi] to love the newcomers, not only as friends and relatives but as their very selves, in both body and soul.

Whereas Philo and Josephus welcomed foreigners to join the Judaean ethnos and polis Jerusalem, such realignment was viewed with contempt by the donor cultures, as betrayal. At bottom was the proper love of one’s own homeland and laws as the best of all.66 Herodotus relates tales of Scythian royals who, returning home from travels in the Greek world and enticed by foreign ways, were quickly murdered by their unhappy compatriots. The Adiabenian story fits within this framework. In Rome, too, the attraction of Egyptian and Judaean customs caused complaint – because they were foreign and so risked “infecting” the populace, weakening commitment to ancient Roman ways (mos maiorum). I close this section with a brief sampling of other passages, from the first century BCE to the third century CE, which include the word Ioudaioi. Given the discussion above, I invite readers to consider the translations most revealing of the ancient values and categories we have discussed. Once again, I would never suggest that “Judaeans” is the only possible rendering, or the right one for all occasions. 4.1. The early first-century historian and geographer Strabo reports (Geog. 16.2.2): Some divide up Syria as a whole into Coele-Syrians, Syrians, and Phoenicians, and claim that four ethnē are mixed in with these: Ioudaioi, Idumaeans, Gazaeans, and Azotians.

Strabo continues (16.2.34): “The Idumaeans are Nabataeans, but because of civil strife they were driven out from there, went over to the Ioudaioi and began to share in their laws/customs.” He goes on: Overall and in particular places [the area] is settled by mixed tribes of the Egyptian, Arabian, and Phoenician ethnē. (. . .) So in this general mish-mash the prevailing opinion concerning the temple in Jerusalem – of the credible ones – shows that the ancestors of those now called Ioudaioi were Egyptians. For a certain Moses, one of the Egyptian priests. . . .

Since the whole framework is ethnographic, and the various ethnos labels share the same form, and we translate all the others accordingly, Judaeans is the consistent choice here. Rendering as “Jews” is the more common choice, but it breaks with normal practice in rendering such ancient words and does not invite curiosity about the author’s underlying values or categories. 4.2. The Idumaeans (Idoumaioi) present a particularly interesting case because of their forced adoption (contrast the Adiabenians’ voluntary embrace) of Judaean law

 Tacitus, Hist. 5.5; Juvenal, Sat. 5. 14.96–106; Suetonius, Tib. 36; Cassius Dio 57.18.5a; 60.6.6; 67.14.2; 68.1.2.

Second Temple Studies: The Past, Present, and Future of the Ioudaioi

105

under the Hasmonean John Hyrcanus. No one seems to have a problem transliterating their name as Idumaeans. Says Josephus (Ant.13.257): Hyrcanus also captured the poleis of Adora and Marisa, and when he had taken all the Idoumaioi in hand he let them stay in the territory [chōra] if they would circumcise their genitals and if they were willing to live with the laws of the Ioudaioi. Because of their yearning for their ancestral land, they patiently submitted to circumcision and to practicing the very same regimen of life in other respects as the Ioudaioi. (. . .) From that time onward they were Ioudaioi.

Again, the interplay between these two ethnē, whose names have identical forms, recommends Judaeans for Ioudaioi just as Idumaeans for Idoumaioi. 4.3. This very similarity of form is picked up by later grammarians, such as the second-century (?) Ammonius. He includes the Ioudaios/Idoumaios pair in a catalogue of more than five hundred similar-sounding words that might cause confusion. He explains: Ioudaioi and Idoumaioi differ (. . .), for whereas Ioudaioi are such naturally by origin, Idoumaioi are in origin not, but are rather Phoenicians and Syrians. But having been overpowered by them [by the Ioudaioi], and having been forced to undergo circumcision, to pay taxes to the ethnos, and to follow the same legal ordinances, they were called Ioudaioi.

Although I would criticize no one for translating “Jews” here, that choice would obscure the point of the comparison. If one is interested in what Ammonius is saying, the point requires transliterating Idumaeans, Phoenicians, Syrians, and Judaeans in comparable ways. 4.4. The same framework is assumed by the second-century philosopher Celsus, when he writes against the Christians (in Origen, C. Cels. 5.25): When the Ioudaioi, having become a distinct ethnos [from the Egyptians] and having fixed laws in keeping with their local environment, carefully maintain these even until now and pursue their sort of worship, which is anyway ancestral, they guard their rites just as other folks do [i.e., other ethnē]. For all of them take great care with whatever ancestral traditions they may have, if they are established.

4.5. The third-century senator and historian Cassius Dio (37.16/17) describes the time of Pompey the Great’s conquest (63 BCE): This, then, is what happened in Palaestina – for such is the entire ethnos that reaches from Phoenicia to Egypt beside the Internal Sea. They also have another name they have picked up, for the territory is named Ioudaia and the people themselves Ioudaioi.

Again, I do not see how to capture Dio’s connection of Ioudaioi with Ioudaia (Judaea) in Greek without the translation Judaeans. Wherever there is an Egypt, Syria, or Idumaea, there must be Egyptians, Syrians, and Idumaeans. So too, if there is a Judaea, there must be Judaeans. But there was a Judaea, and so there were Judaeans: the people originating from there, who followed their homeland’s ancestral laws and customs.

106

Steve Mason

If our interest is in understanding ancient discourse for itself, I do not see why we should avoid this ancient framework. 4.6. When Porphyry (third century CE) admired the disciplined life and diet of the Ioudaioi, he included them in the ethnē section of his De Abstinentia (4.5), shortly after his admired Spartans. The Judaeans are an ethnos “until even now,” he says, in spite of having lost their mother-polis and temple. From much the same neo-Platonist perspective, which placed ever greater stress on the world’s ethnē and poleis, their different constitutions and cults being protected by tutelary deities, the emperor Julian (360s CE) would criticize Christians in his reconstructed work Against the Galileans. Whereas the Ioudaioi are an ancient and established ethnos with a famous polis and temple, he complains, the worshipers of the crucified Jesus have no place in the classical world. They should either return to the laws and customs of the poleis whence they originated and become good citizens again, or adopt the laws and customs of the Ioudaioi (Judaeans), which are at least old and respected.67 He knows of no category such as religion that would accommodate Judaism and Christianity as comparable species.

5 Conclusions There is no danger that Second Temple Jews will vanish from the study of ancient history. All evidence, and it is overwhelming, points in the opposite direction. This has nothing to do with the choices of translators as they try to bring ancient texts to life: some with a focus on the modern reader, some concerned mainly with ancient ways of life and thinking. In this essay I have advanced three propositions. First, the strength of Second Temple studies is due chiefly to a paradigm shift. Freed from Christian domination or refraction through rabbinic literature, this extraordinary period in the Western past appears to us now a virtually untouched field, with sources long known and newly discovered bursting with illumination as we apply new methods and contexts to their interpretation. Second, this vitality opens the question of Second Temple Judaism’s optimal place in the academy. Universities increasingly include it in the broadening study of ancient history, itself liberated from long prejudice that admitted only Greek and Roman classics. Third, as the roots of Second Temple Judaism intertwine more securely with other components of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world, we must reckon with a new, horizontal dimension to our research, over against both traditional study within Judaism and Christianity and the external or social-scientific analysis of traditions in religious studies.

 C. Gal. 42e–43b, 49a–c, 96c–e, 100e–106e, 194d–202a, 253a–e, 305d, 306a, 314c–e, 319d–20c, 343c–58e.

Second Temple Studies: The Past, Present, and Future of the Ioudaioi

107

This diachronic dimension brings ancient ethnos-polis discourse to the fore, with its attendant values and assumptions. It should surprise no one if some historians prefer to transliterate Ioudaioi as Judaeans when doing their historical work of understanding Ioudaioi in ancient context. I was first prodded to consider these questions while teaching alongside ancient historians in York’s classics program. Exhilarating discussions with colleagues led me to think that Greek and Latin audiences would have heard these terms as ethnica, the related Hebrew and Aramaic terms (Yehudim, ‘am) being different but consonant. There is no reason to see translation choices as a threat. Quite the opposite. Everyone is happy with Israelites and Hebrews for the most ancient periods of the Jewish story, and Judahites for the post-exilic period cause no ructions. Why should Judaeans not continue the same line for the Greco-Roman world, helping to remind us of a time when Judaea and its mother-polis Jerusalem, temple, laws, and customs were famous in the Greco-Roman world? Insisting that one always call Israelites, Hebrews, Judahites, and Judaeans Jews, from a modern concern to combat ahistorical political agendas, would conceal the truth that the uniquely ancient Jewish past has survived many changes of context, category, and nomenclature.

For Further Reading Brooke, George J. and Charlotte Hempel, eds. T&T Clark Companion to the Dead Sea Scrolls. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Chapman, Honora H. and Zuleika Rodgers, eds. A Companion to Josephus. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. Fine, Steven. Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World: Toward a New Jewish Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Grabbe, Lester L. Judaic Religion in the Second Temple Period: Belief and Practice from the Exile to Yavneh. London: Routledge, 2000. Grabbe, Lester L. A History of the Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period. London: T&T Clark, 2004. Henze, Matthias, and Rodney A. Werline, eds. Early Judaism and Its Modern Interpreters, 2nd edition. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2020. Ilan, Tal. Integrating Women into Second Temple History. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009. Kamesar, Adam, ed. Cambridge Companion to Philo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Mason, Steve, ed. Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary. Leiden: Brill, 2000–. Mason, Steve. A History of the Jewish War, AD 66–74. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Miller, David S. “The Meaning of Ioudaios and Its Relationship to Other Group Labels in Ancient ‘Judaism.’” Currents in Biblical Research 9/1 (2010): 98–126. Neusner, Jacob and Bruce Chilton, eds. In Quest of the Historical Pharisees. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007. Sanders, E. P. Judaism, Practice and Belief, 63 BCE – 66 CE. London: SCM, 1992. Sterling, Gregory E., ed. Philo of Alexandria Commentary Series. Leiden: Brill, 2001–.

Eileen Schuller

Second Temple Literature and Texts 1 Introduction In assessing how the study of Second Temple literature has changed over the course of a generation, I begin with a brief autobiographical reflection. When I started my doctoral studies in 1977, I had been teaching for a few years in a small Catholic seminary in western Canada where we followed the typical seminary curriculum (and the same could be found, with slight variations, in many religious studies departments): Old Testament in the first term and New Testament in the second. The Old Testament course concentrated on beginnings (Abraham, Exodus, Conquest), themes (covenant, election), the “great” prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel), the history of the monarchy down to the time of the Babylonian conquest – by any account, a great deal of material to cover in ten to twelve weeks. What came after the Babylonian exile regularly got squashed into the last one or two classes of the term. These were, after all, the “dark ages,” centuries for which we had few sources except for a narrow window into the mid-second century BCE provided by the books of Maccabees with all their tedious battle accounts. Ironically, although the Catholic Bible included considerably more “late” books than would have been in the canon had I been teaching in a Protestant seminary, in reality most of these (Tobit, Judith, Ben Sira, Wisdom, even Maccabees) were passed over “for the sake of time.” After the Christmas break, the students moved on to the New Testament course, where the first lecture standardly covered “background,” often designated the “Intertestamental period,” with a focus on the political world of the Greco-Roman empires, and then on to the New Testament books themselves. When I explored doctoral programs, both in Christian seminaries and in religious studies departments, I quickly discovered that the same basic division ruled: applicants had to choose to specialize in either Old Testament or New Testament.1 Somehow I stumbled upon a subprogram in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC) at Harvard that gave the possibility of mixing and matching elements in the standard program: Syriac and Ethiopic instead of Akkadian; courses in Hebrew Bible  Lest I give a misleading impression, I should note that there were a few doctoral programs that were beginning to reconfigure the field and eliminate the Old Testament/New Testament dichotomy; of note were programs at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and at McMaster University in Hamilton, which emphasized the study of both Judaism and Christianity in the Greco-Roman era. Note: I am grateful for having been invited to participate in this symposium. The occasion was a welcome opportunity to offer congratulations to the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies on their twenty-fifty anniversary from their neighbor, the Department of Religious Studies at McMaster University. The more informal and personal nature of that event is maintained in this written paper. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110418873-007

110

Eileen Schuller

and Semitic linguistics at NELC, Philo and Hellenistic Jewish authors in Greek at the Harvard Divinity School. All seemed promising – until I arrived the first day to register and was told that that program had been discontinued and an ad hoc program would have to be put together to meet my non-standard research interests. As we examine how Jewish studies has changed over the past decades, for the so-called Second Temple period we observe how an academic field of study came into existence within our own generation. What we now take for granted – that there will be panels on the Second Temple period at academic conferences – is relatively new. No wonder that there is much ongoing debate about nomenclature, temporal and other boundaries, and methodologies. It is generally recognized that the corpus of preserved textual material from the Second Temple period is substantial and impressive in terms of both quantity and diversity. And what has survived is, of course, only an incomplete and random sampling of what must have been a still much larger literary output. In this short essay, I will not attempt to list and comment on individual compositions; standard introductory monographs can do that best, whether they include the full texts themselves, selected excerpts, or just a descriptive summary.2 Rather, I will look at the various ways we might delimit, organize, and categorize this vast and disparate literature. By the date of composition? By language? Genre? Relationship to the biblical canon – and which canon? According to the community behind the text? Most introductions and surveys of Second Temple period literature have standard chapters on Apocrypha, pseudepigrapha, Dead Sea Scrolls, diaspora literature, works of Philo, and works of Josephus. Yet, virtually every chapter begins with a pro forma acknowledgement that these traditional categories are problematic and imprecise. But no new and comprehensive paradigm has gained acceptance, and this in itself indicates that this is a relative youthful field of study, still finding its bearings. Each approach to categorization carries complex implications. The questions that we choose to ask and the way we organize this vast amount of material necessarily shape our understanding of this period and its significance.

2 A Chronological Framework At first glance it might seem simple, obvious, and objective to adopt a chronological approach to the texts that have survived from the Second Temple period, that is, to begin with compositions composed during the Persian period, then those written in the centuries under the Ptolemies and Seleucids, perhaps with a subcategory for texts written under the Hasmonean kingdom (129–63 BCE), and finally those composed

 The bibliography attached to this essay includes a selection of recent book that provide introductions to and collections of this literature.

Second Temple Literature and Texts

111

when the Romans ruled Judaea between 63 BCE and the destruction of the temple in 70 CE. But the problems of adopting a strictly chronological arrangement are immediately apparent and not easily resolved. Although there are some books with precise dating formulae (for example, the oracles of Haggai and Zechariah) and exact historical references (for example, to Seleucid kings and generals in 1 and 2Maccabees, and to the thirty-eighth year of the reign of Euergetes in the prologue to Ben Sira) such precision is by far the exception. For the vast majority of works, the date of composition is not given and is often a matter of intense and ongoing scholarly debate that has little hope of ever arriving at a definitive answer. The type of evidence that would allow a precise dating is simply lacking. Even assignment to the Second Temple versus the First Temple period is disputed for certain books (for example, the book of Ruth). Second Temple period literature is a literary corpus defined by two historical events: the building of the Second Temple ca. 520 BCE and its destruction in 70 CE. But it has been traditional – and logical – to include under the general umbrella of Second Temple period literature works such as 4Ezra and 2Baruch that were composed some decades after the destruction of the temple, as well as the corpus of Josephus’ works from the last third of the first century CE. Indeed whether, or in what sense, the date of 70 CE and the event of the destruction of the temple are a helpful and viable boundary marker is a matter of increasing scholarly debate from many different perspectives.3 From a strictly literary perspective, a more logical dividing point might be the composition of the Mishnah in approximately 220 CE. The authors of a recent collection of pseudepigrapha make the case for grouping together all materials composed before the rise of Islam in the early seventh century CE, and this, of course, brings many more and often relatively obscure texts into dialogue with what has been the traditional corpus.4 Although it is impossible to arrange all the individual texts in a strictly chronological order and make this the primary basis for study, yet a schematic and fluid chronological awareness and sensitivity is important. In the second edition of his comprehensive introduction, Jewish Literature Between the Bible and the Mishnah, George Nickelsburg acknowledges the limitations and risks of a chronological arrangement but justifies the structuring of his book in a historical sequence: “my conviction that texts are historical artifacts and not timeless entities leads me to run the risk.”5 Even when other classifying principles are given precedence, the basic information about whether a text is from the Persian era, the Greek era, or the

 Daniel Schwartz and Zeev Weiss, eds., Was 70 CE a Watershed in Jewish History? On Jews and Judaism Before and After the Destruction of the Second Temple (Leiden: Brill, 2012).  Richard Bauckham, James R. Davila, and Alexander Panayotov, Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2018), xxviii.  George W. E. Nickelsburg, “Preface,” in George W. E. Nickelsburg, ed., Jewish Literature Between the Bible and the Mishnah [2nd edition] (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005): xii.

112

Eileen Schuller

Roman era will inevitably be a factor in interpretation, especially in tracing the development of ideas and genres.

3 The Languages of Second Temple Literature The literature of the Second Temple period was composed in three languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Hebrew continued to be used as a literary language throughout the whole Second Temple period. It is often assumed that all works written in Hebrew were composed in the land of Israel, although this is difficult to prove. All the books from the Second Temple period that were eventually included in the canon that was fixed by the Jewish community post-70 CE (see discussion below) were written in Hebrew (for example, Haggai, Zechariah, Ezra [except for some interpolated official documents in Aramaic], Nehemiah, Joel, Ecclesiastes, Daniel [except for chapters 2–7]). In the prologue of the book of Ben Sira, we have one of the most explicit discussions of language, describing how the book was written in Hebrew in Jerusalem and then translated into Greek by the author’s grandson in Egypt “for those living abroad who wished to gain learning.” The fragments of Jubilees in Hebrew in the fourteen copies preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls resolve the question of the original language of this book. No Hebrew text of 1Maccabees has been preserved, but a strong case can be made for a Hebrew original;6 less certain and still much debated is whether the book of Judith was written originally in Greek or Hebrew.7 Works continued to be composed in Hebrew into the late Second Temple period, as evidenced by the Biblical Antiquities of Pseudo-Philo (although it has survived only in Latin translation, it is generally agreed that the original was in Hebrew); 4Ezra and 2Baruch may have been written in Hebrew or possibly Aramaic. The corpus of Hebrew literature was vastly expanded with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. All of the “sectarian” compositions, that is, the works that reflect a specific theology, community structure, and vocabulary of a specific group (whether they are to be identified exactly with the Essenes of the classical authors Philo, Josephus, and Pliny or not) were in Hebrew. This is a significant expansion of the surviving Hebrew corpus both in number and in kind to include rules (Rule of the Community, Damascus Document, War Scroll), biblical commentaries (the pesharim), legal collections (Ordinances, Tohorot),

 Guy Darshan, “The Original Language of 1 Maccabees: A Reexamination,” Biblische Notizen 182 (2019): 91–110.  A recent examination of the evidence concludes judiciously: “It is possible, then, that the Book of Judith was composed originally in Greek, but we have by no means eliminated the alternative view, that it was translated from the Hebrew” (Deborah Levine Gera, Judith, Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014], 9l).

Second Temple Literature and Texts

113

and prayers, hymns, and blessings (the Thanksgiving Psalms, Barkhi Nafshi, Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice). At one time the literature available in Aramaic was limited largely to chapters 2–7 of the book of Daniel. One of most fascinating retrievals in recent decades is the rich cache of Aramaic literature found in the Dead Sea Scrolls manuscripts.8 Now for the first time we have – at least in fragmentary bits – the Aramaic originals of works such as 1Enoch and Tobit, books that had been known previously only in Greek or Ethiopic translations, and of the Aramaic Levi Document that was in some way a source for the Greek Testament of Levi. Of even more interest was the appearance of Aramaic works that had previously been lost completely: the Genesis Apocryphon, the Visions of Amram, the Testament of Qahat, the Book of the Giants, the Words of Michael, the Four Kingdoms, the Prayer of Nabonidus, the so-called pseudoDaniel texts, to name only a few. All in all, among the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are about 130 Aramaic manuscripts, nearly 15 percent of the overall Scrolls corpus, containing about thirty distinctive literary compositions. The Aramaic corpus is distinctive for the frequency of dream-visions wherein a seer receives a revelation of hidden divine knowledge, for tales of Jews at the royal court, for learned scientific, calendric, and mathematical sections, and for wisdom and ethical discourses. This Aramaic literature seems to represent the literary achievement of a highly learned, well-trained group of priests living and working in Judea from the fourth to mid-second centuries BCE, writing in Aramaic for Jewish communities both in the land and in the diaspora.9 The third major corpus of Second Temple period literature is that written in Greek. This corpus, too, is rich and diverse. Many more works were likely lost with the destruction of the Jewish community in Egypt at the beginning of the second century CE; often only names and titles or small excerpts are preserved because they were quoted by Church Fathers (for example, selections from Aristobulus, Eupolemus, and Artapanus). This literature is associated with and provides a window into Jewish life in the diaspora primarily, though not exclusively, in Alexandria; some works may have been composed in the land of Israel or in other major centers such as Antioch (for example, 4Maccabees) or Cyrene (for example, the lost fivevolume history of Jason mentioned in 2Maccabees 2:23). The Greek manuscripts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls are translations of canonical books (for example,

 For many complex reasons, much of the Aramaic materials were among the last of the Scrolls to be completely published, and hence, the extent of the corpus was not fully appreciated until the publication by Émile Puech of Qumran Grotte 4.XXVII Textes en Araméen, deuxième partie, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert 37 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2009).  For the argument that the Aramaic materials are a coherent and priestly corpus, see Daniel Machiela, “Situating the Aramaic Texts from Qumran: Reconsidering Their Language and SocioHistorical Settings,” in Sidnie White Crawford and Cecilia Wassén, eds., Apocalyptic Thinking in Early Judaism: Engaging with John Collins’ The Apocalyptic Imagination, Journal for the Study of Judaism Supplement Series 182 (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 88–109.

114

Eileen Schuller

Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy) plus a small fragment from the Epistle of Jeremiah (pap7QEpJer gr) and possibly remnants of a Greek translation of Enoch in cave 7; a number of the Greek fragments have not been identified with any known work, but they are so small that it cannot be said that we have recovered any previously unknown Greek compositions. Considering the literature according to the language in which it was written draws attention to the linguistic heterogeneity of Jews in the Second Temple period. However, a focus on language can overshadow common features of genre, theological ideas, ethical values, and exegetical traditions, which are shared by works in all three languages, and it may reinforce an outdated and artificial division between Palestinian Judaism (writing in Hebrew or Aramaic) and “Diaspora Judaism” (writing in Greek).

4 The Influence of Canon Certainly one of the major, but sometimes less acknowledged, influences on how Second Temple literature has been approached comes from how we understand the concept of canon and the reconstruction of the process of establishing a fixed canon. Canon itself is a slippery term that is used in different ways within both scholarly and religious circles. An oft-quoted definition proposed by Eugene Ulrich has proven helpful: “the definitive list of inspired, authoritative books which constitute the recognized and accepted body of sacred scripture, forming the rule of faith of a major religious group, that definitive list being the result of inclusive and exclusive decisions after serious deliberation.”10 That is, canon involves a decision that some books are “in” and some are “out.” Hence the demarcation implicit in a title like “Second Temple Literature Outside the Canon.”11 This inside/outside distinction is emphasized in the title of a recent three-volume collection of Second Temple period literature, Outside the Bible.12 But if it is now regularly said that “the first statement to make about the Bible (. . .) is that we should probably not think of a ‘Bible’ in the first century BCE or the first century CE.”13 – that is, if in the Second Temple period there was not yet a fixed canon – then the term Bible itself is at best anachronistic, if not actually misleading, as we try to think about the interrelationships of this literature.

 Eugene Ulrich, “The Motion and Definition of Canon,” in Lee Martin McDonald and James A. Sanders, eds., The Canon Debate (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002), 21–35, esp. 29.  Martha Himmelfarb, “Second Temple Literature outside the Canon,” in Frederick E. Greenspahn, ed., Early Judaism: New Insights and Scholarship (New York: New York University Press, 2018): 29–51.  Louis H. Feldman, James L. Kugel, and Lawrence H. Schiffman, eds., Outside the Bible: Ancient Jewish Writings Related to Scripture, 3 Vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society/Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013).  Eugene Ulrich, “The Bible in the Making: The Scriptures at Qumran,” in Eugene Ulrich, ed., The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999): 17.

Second Temple Literature and Texts

115

On the basis of canon considerations, those books that came to be included in both the Tanakh in the Jewish tradition and the Bible in the Christian tradition are studied today as part of the field or discipline of biblical studies. Thus, they are effectively isolated from other literature of the same time and place that did not “make it” into the canon. For instance, the book of Daniel is usually treated separately from the other Aramaic literature discussed above, although it shares many of the same literary characteristics and terminology. Much of the non-canonical Second Temple period literature (except for the works of Philo and Josephus) has standardly been slotted into the two categories of Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha. There is a general scholarly acknowledgement that both the terms themselves and the division are problematic and artificial for dealing with the complexity and diversity of this literature – yet they continue to be used in the absence of any better alternatives. The first of these, the category of Apocrypha, is very much shaped by controversy over canon, up to and including debates between Catholics and Protestants at the time of the Reformation. The designation Apocrypha, literally “hidden books,” has been traditionally applied to seven works that appear in the major Greek codices but not in the Hebrew canon: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Ben Sira, 1 and 2Maccabees, and the additions to the books of Daniel and Esther. But in the last decades, the category has been expanded to include more books found in Greek and Slavonic biblical codices, books such as 1Esdras, the Prayer of Manasseh, Psalm 151, 3 and 4Maccabees, 2Esdras.14 Thus a standard reference work like the Oxford Bible Commentary: The Apocrypha treats a disparate collection of books that would not have been read together before the 1950s.15 If the category of Apocrypha is shaped by issues of canon, the category of pseudepigrapha has also been influenced by canon considerations but in addition has a certain literary justification. Literally “false/falsely attributed writings,” this is a term applied to pseudonymous works written in the name of a great figure of the past. Though some of the biblical books are written pseudepigraphically (for example, Deuteronomy, 1Peter), the term has traditionally been limited to non-biblical works.16 In the strict sense, these are books written in the name of Enoch (1Enoch, 2Enoch), Ezra (4Ezra) Abraham (Testament of Abraham), Moses (Testament of Moses), Baruch (1Baruch, 2Baruch), and occasionally in the diaspora works attributed to non-biblical figures such as Phocylides (Pseudo-Phocylides) or the Sibyl (Sibylline Oracles). But

 The New Revised Standard Version, published by the National Council of Churches in 1989, has been very influential both in establishing and in popularizing the “Expanded Apocrypha.”  Martin Goodman, ed., The Apocrypha, The Oxford Bible Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Goodman explains that “the books discussed in the Commentary are those commonly found in those Protestant English Bibles in which the Apocrypha is printed” (1).  For a survey of the origin, use, and history of the term, see Annette Yoshiko Reed, “The Modern Invention of ‘Old Testament Pseudepigrapha,’” Journal of Theological Studies New Series 60 (2009): 403–436.

116

Eileen Schuller

the category is regularly expanded to include numerous other Second Temple period works that were not written under an assumed name. There is no fixed list of books, and “the word has become almost a catch-all for whatever is left after one eliminates the books of the Bible, the writings of Philo and Josephus, and the Dead Sea Scrolls.”17 The publication of The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, edited by James Charlesworth in 1983–1985, has been remarkably influential for the past generation in the Englishspeaking, North American world in establishing a corpus, almost a “canon,” of some forty-eight complete texts, plus some sixteen or so known only in quotations or fragments.18 The recent 2013 publication of Old Testament Pseudepigraph: More Noncanonical Scriptures adds about forty texts, with the promise of a second volume still to come.19 Clearly now, the term pseudepigrapha is being used in a very broad sense; the jury is still out about how far the category can be expanded before it loses all meaning and coherence.

5 The Genres of Second Temple Literature Another way to put some order into this disparate body of Second Temple period literature is to arrange and categorize according to genre. This is the approach taken by Susan Docherty in a recent monograph, The Jewish Pseudepigrapha: An Introduction to the Literature of the Second Temple Period, and advocated as “the most practical and logical.”20 Docherty divides Second Temple period literature into five genres: rewritten Bible; para-biblical literature or biblical expansions; poems, hymns and drama; testaments; and apocalypses. But she immediately acknowledges difficulties with this approach since “many of the Pseudepigrapha exhibit features of more than one literary form.”21 Furthermore, there is little agreement among scholars on how to define and even how to name many of the genres, much less on precisely what works should be assigned to each genre. And the problems only multiply if we look beyond the books traditionally classed as pseudepigrapha to take into account the totality of Second Temple period literature. However, when we think about this literature in terms of genre, certain features do stand out. There is continuity with the genres that were already well-established in the First Temple period, especially the Psalter and the book of Proverbs, and yet there

 James C. Vanderkam, An Introduction to Early Judaism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 58.  James H. Charlesworth, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983–1985).  Richard Bauckham, James R. Davila, and Alexander Panayotov, eds., Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013).  Susan Docherty, The Jewish Pseudepigrapha: An Introduction to the Literature of the Second Temple Period (London: SPCK, 2014).  Docherty, The Jewish Pseudepigrapha, 9.

Second Temple Literature and Texts

117

are significant changes and developments. In texts like 4QInstruction (4Q416–418) and the Book of Mysteries (4Q299–301), traditional wisdom themes as well as proverbial and admonitory passages are combined with reflection on “the mystery that is to be” (raz nihyeh) and an apocalyptic worldview that emphasizes the eschatological judgment; other wisdom texts such as Ben Sira and Beatitudes (4Q525) bring together wisdom and Torah in an innovative merging of covenantal and sapiential traditions. The more than thirty Hodayot (Thanksgiving Psalms), preserved in different collections in the six manuscripts, share features of form and vocabulary with the thanksgiving psalms of the biblical Psalter but add distinctive elements of sustained reflection on the human condition and predestination, and praise with the angels, all within an eschatological worldview. Some genres appear for the first time in Second Temple period literature. Most significant and pervasive is the emergence of a new and distinctive genre, the apocalypse (literally “revelation”) with roots in both the prophetic and wisdom traditions. A Society of Biblical Literature study group in 1979 developed a definition that has become standard: “a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial, insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.”22 Although writers in this genre were prolific and highly creative, as demonstrated by the popularity and the diversity of major apocalypses such as the Book of the Watchers, the Apocalypse of Weeks, 4Ezra, and 2Baruch, to name only a few, it is to be noted that no books in this genre were accepted into the Jewish canon with the exception of Daniel; the sectarian writers in the community associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls, though thoroughly eschatological and apocalyptic in their worldview, did not take up the literary form of apocalypse to express these ideas. Some genres are distinctive of specific groups or communities within Second Temple Judaism. Rule books (serakim) – works such as the Community Rule, Rule of the Congregation, Damascus Rule, and War Rule, which brought together in a single composition didactic teaching and sustained theological reflection, lists of legal regulations, and liturgical materials (prayers and hymns) – came from the community associated with Qumran. Likewise, this group developed a specific type of biblical commentary, the pesharim, wherein the quotation of a biblical lemma was followed by the exposition of a contemporizing interpretation that read biblical prophecy as expounding events that found fulfillment in the end time in which they were living. Greek diaspora literature, likewise, explored new genres such as epic poetry (Philo the Epic Poet) or tragedy (Ezekiel the Tragedian on the exodus).

 John J. Collins “Introduction: Towards the Morphology of a Genre,” in John J. Collins, ed., Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre, Semeia 14 (1979): 1–20.

118

Eileen Schuller

One of the most distinctive and pervasive features of a large segment of Second Temple period literature is the fact that it so often interacts with and reworks figures, texts, and ideas from the collection that we now know as the Hebrew Bible. Unlike the lemmatic commentaries described above, many other works take as their starting point a known text and then proceed by way of additions, omissions, paraphrases, rearrangements, and rewordings to produce a genuinely new composition. The purpose may be to resolve interpretive questions raised by the text and solve perceived problems, to harmonize discrepancies and eliminate repetition, to establish the authority of a new law or interpretation, even simply to entertain. There is ongoing debate both about what to call this type of literature and what to include under this umbrella. The term “Rewritten Bible,” coined by Geza Vermes in 1961,23 is now often replaced by “Rewritten Scripture” or by “Para-biblical” or “Biblical Expansions.” While there is a generally accepted core of texts that are considered under this rubric – Vermes had named Jubilees, the Genesis Apocryphon, the Biblical Antiquities of Pseudo-Philo, Josephus’s Antiquities – the corpus is now often expanded to include narrative works such as the Testament of Job, Joseph and Aseneth, and the Life of Adam and Eve, which are much more expansive and independent, and to include halakhic works such as the Temple Scroll; even the vast Enochic literature can be seen as a development of complex traditions in some way related to Genesis 6:1–4. Sometimes it is the very elements that were not emphasized in the base text that were taken up and expanded in the Second Temple period, for instance, the focus of much of the Aramaic literature on the priestly ancestors (Levi, Amran, and Qahat) instead of the traditional patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), or the way the short reference to the beauty of Sarah in Genesis becomes expanded to a full-length poem in the Genesis Apocryphon. Whether we adopt a more strict and limited definition of “Rewritten Bible,” or whether we follow the lead of those who would want to make this a meta-genre and include virtually all of Second Temple period literature under its rubric, the appearance of this type of literature is one of the most creative and innovative literary developments in the Second Temple period.

6 The Communities behind the Literature Given that it is impossible to recover the identity of an individual author for most Second Temple period texts, some scholars have explored whether efforts might be more effectively directed to situating Second Temple period works in terms of the community/communities that produced them. For R. H. Charles, in his classic 1913 collection of Old Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, this meant seeing many texts as

 Geza Vermes, Scripture and Tradition in Judaism: Haggadic Studies, Studia Post-biblica 4 (Leiden: Brill, 1973), 95.

Second Temple Literature and Texts

119

coming from the Pharisees, a few from the Sadducees, and even fewer from the mysterious Essenes.24 Today, few scholars would try to make such specific and simplistic alignments, recognizing that Second Temple Judaism was much more diverse and variegated than the three-sects division taken from Josephus. The categorization of texts according to the community that produced them took a new turn with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In the early years, when the first Scrolls were published, and indeed well into the 1980s, when only a portion of the Scrolls had been made available, the tendency was to assume that all previously unknown works had been composed by the particular type/sect of Judaism that had its center at Qumran. As more scrolls were published in the later 1980s, and the full corpus in the 1990s, some 260 compositions in all, it became clear that only about 30 percent could be classified as “sectarian” on the basic of distinctive theology, vocabulary, dualistic worldview, references to the Teacher of Righteousness, and to a set community structure. At least 35 percent of the Scrolls, many of them prayers, wisdom instruction, biblical rewritings, and including the Aramaic corpus (discussed earlier), do not contain such terminology, style, and ideas and are labeled as nonsectarian; within this, some scholars would further delineate a subgroup of intermediary texts without sectarian terminology but with affinity to sectarian ideas (for example, Jubilees).25 Thus, rather than giving us only the literary output of an isolated or esoteric sect, the scrolls from the Qumran caves have proven to be a “library” containing a broad spectrum of Second Temple period literature.26 On the other hand, the uncertain origin of a number of Second Temple period texts has been greatly emphasized in recent scholarship. That is, for some books there is no consensus about whether or not they were authored by Jews or Christians.27 In the past, the a priori assumption, especially for books about key figures of the Hebrew Bible, was that these were Jewish compositions, although they had clearly been transmitted by Christian scribes and contained some secondary Christian interpolations

 R. H. Charles, Old Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, 2 Vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913).  These figures are those proposed by Devorah Dimant, in a revision of an earlier compilation, in “The Qumran Manuscripts: Contents and Significance,” in Devorah Dimant, ed., History, Ideology and Bible Interpretation in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Collected Studies (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014): 27–56, especially page 37.  For the concept and implications of a library, see the collection of essays in Sidnie White Crawford and Cecilia Wassén, eds., The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Concept of a Library, Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 116 (Leiden: Brill, 2016).  One of the major changes between the first (1981) and second (2005) edition of George E. Nickelsburg’s Jewish Literature Between the Bible and the Mishnah is the addition of a final chapter on “Texts of Disputed Provenance,” 301–344; in the first edition, these books had all been treated without question as Jewish works under the heading “The Exposition of Israel’s Scriptures.” See also James R. Davila, The Provenance of the Pseudepigrapha: Jewish, Christian or Other? (Leiden: Brill, 2005).

120

Eileen Schuller

that it was assumed could be readily recognized and detached. Now, it often seems that the pendulum has shifted, so that the burden of proof is on those who claim a Jewish origin for works such as the Testament of Twelve Patriarchs, Joseph and Aseneth, 3Baruch, and the Life of Adam and Eve, to name a few of the most disputed books. The implications of this debate are more than literary. As Martha Himmelfarb has pointed out, if some or all of these are actually Christian compositions, not only are major works excluded from the corpus of Second Temple period literature, but “it becomes more difficult to argue for the kind of Judaism that many scholars have seen as the context for the emergence of Christianity – because the works that provided the evidence for that Judaism are now understood as Christian compositions or Jewish compositions thoroughly reworked by Christians.”28 Finally, at least some note should be made of a recent trend in New Testament scholarship that relates directly to the question of what is to be included in the corpus of Second Temple period literature. This is the claim that many of the books of the New Testament should be read as Jewish literature.29 This is related to, but somewhat distinct from, the longer-standing discussion of the “Jewish Jesus” or “Paul as a Jew.” The claim is that all four Gospels, the letters of Paul, James, and Revelation are Jewish works and are to be read “within Judaism,” not simply against the background of Judaism or in light of their Jewish roots. That is, there is another corpus of material to be included in Second Temple period literature. Most of the discussion to this point has been conducted within the framework of New Testament studies, but the implications of this approach are equally significant for the study of Second Temple Judaism and its literature.

7 Conclusion As the Second Temple period has evolved over the past generation into a recognized and flourishing subarea within Jewish studies, the study of the literature of the period

 Himmelfarb, “Second Temple Literature,” 46.  A sample of scholars who make this claim includes Anders Runesson, Divine Wrath and Salvation in Matthew: The Narrative World of the First Gospel (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016); Isaac W. Oliver, Torah Praxis after 70 CE: Reading Matthew and Luke–Acts as Jewish Texts, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2/355 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013); John W. Marshall, Parables of War: Reading John’s Jewish Apocalypse (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001); and recent dissertations such as John R. Van Maaren, “The Gospel of Mark within Judaism: Reading the Second Gospel in its Ethnic Landscape,” (PhD dissertation, McMaster University, 2019) and Wally V. Cirafesi, “John within Judaism: Religion, Ethnicity, and the Shaping of Jesus-Oriented Jewishness in the Fourth Gospel” (ThD dissertation, the University of Oslo, 2018), the latter now published as John within Judaism: Religion, Ethnicity and the Shaping of Jesus-Oriented Jewishness in the Fourth Gospel, Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity 112 (Leiden: Brill, 2021).

Second Temple Literature and Texts

121

has also evolved. Certainly, a major impetus came with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the recovery of a whole body of literature that had been previously completely unknown. This in turn sparked a renewed attention to literature that had been long known but relegated to the periphery of Jewish studies, because it had not been adopted by the rabbis of the Talmud and had been transmitted only through Christian circles. As we look to the future, there is still much to be done. A significant number of works still lack a modern critical edition that incorporates all of the manuscript evidence, some of it still being gathered and collated. Commentaries on individual books continue to be written, some as independent monographs and some as part of ongoing and planned series.30 This is a particular desideratum for some of the major texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls (such as the Rule of the Community, the War Scroll, and the Hodayot) where the existing commentaries, written in the 1960s, need to be redone in the light of the publication of the complete manuscript evidence, advances in photography and digital reconstruction techniques, and the rethinking of basic paradigms about the origins, history, and structure of the group that generated this literature. Once the foundational textual work is done by those who have the requisite technical, philological, and linguistic skills, and once scholarly but accessible commentaries on individual works are readily available, it becomes easier for others, both within the field and from other disciplines, to bring new and different methodologies and approaches to the study of this literature. Many Second Temple period works still await the type of interdisciplinary study that can bring to bear tools and perspectives such as narrative criticism, socio-historical criticism, rhetorical criticism, and feminist criticism, to name only a few examples.31 As we look to the future, it may be the time to adopt a more integrated approach to this literature: to break down the long-established separation of biblical and non-biblical, to abandon the artificial categories of Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, to read across the linguistic spectrum of Greek/Hebrew/Aramaic, to integrate, rather than isolate, the writings of Philo and Josephus. There is still much to be done as we continue to explore the fascinating and diverse literature that has come to us from the Second Temple period.

 The series in process, Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature, published by De Gruyter, is planned to include fifty-eight volumes. The Fortress Press Hermeneia series has published major commentaries on key works such as Enoch, 4Ezra, and Jubilees, and will, in the future, include commentaries on a number of major Qumran texts.  Certainly, some of these approaches have already produced significant results. A model of how literary and rhetorical criticism can help us to read key Dead Sea Scrolls texts such as the Rule of the Community and the Hodayot is Carol Newsom’s monograph, The Self as Symbolic Space: Constructing Identity and Community at Qumran, Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 42 (Leiden: Brill, 2004). An exploration of the use of feminist and gender criticism is Early Jewish Writings, The Bible and Women: An Encyclopedia of Exegesis and Cultural History 3.1, edited by Eileen Schuller and Marie-Theres Wacker (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 2017).

122

Eileen Schuller

For Further Reading Bauckham, Richard, James R. Davila, and Alexander Panayotov, eds. Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013. Brooke, George J. and Charlotte Hempel, eds. T&T Clark Companion to the Dead Sea Scrolls. London: T&T Clark, Bloomsbury, 2019. Charlesworth, James H. The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. 2 Vols. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983–1985. Collins, John J. “The Literature of the Second Temple Period.” In The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies. Edited by Martin Goodman, 53–76. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Collins, John J. The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Davila, James R. The Provenance of the Pseudepigrapha: Jewish, Christian or Other? Journal for the Study of Judaism Supplement Series 105. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Docherty, Susan. The Jewish Pseudepigrapha: An Introduction to the Literature of the Second Temple Period. London: SPCK, 2014. Embry, Brad, Ronald Herms, and Archie T. Wright, eds. Early Jewish Literature: An Anthology. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2018. Feldman, Louis H., James L. Kugel, and Lawrence H. Schiffman, eds. Outside the Bible: Ancient Jewish Writings Related to Scripture. 3 Vols. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society/Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. Goodman, Martin, ed. The Apocrypha. The Oxford Bible Commentary Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Himmelfarb, Martha. “Second Temple Literature outside the Canon.” In Early Judaism: New Insights and Scholarship, 29–51. Edited by Frederick E. Greenspahn. New York: New York University Press, 2018. Nickelsburg, George E. Jewish Literature Between the Bible and the Mishnah: A Historical and Literary Introduction. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005. Vermes, Geza. The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English. 7th ed. London: Penguin Classics, 2012.

Benjamin D. Gordon

The Archaeology of the Second Temple Period in Judea: New Discoveries and Research 1 Introduction The Second Temple era (516 BCE–70 CE) in Judea has left no shortage of archaeological remains, yet the finds are marked by a certain preservation bias. Remains of the Persian and Hellenistic periods are not nearly as well-represented in the material record as those of the early Roman period. The reasons for the preservation bias have to do somewhat with chronology – for the probability of site preservation naturally declines with age – and with the circumstances that marked the end of the early Roman period, namely the Judean war with Rome. That war left several sites in the region, particularly in Jerusalem, with unmistakable signs of destruction and an abundance of associated finds. The bias also reflects an unevenness in the size and strength of the local economy across time. Judea remained a relatively small backwater for centuries until it experienced pronounced territorial growth in the second and first centuries BCE. This process was set in motion by the successful revolt against Greek colonizers but peaked in the period of Herodian rule (37 BCE–70 CE). On the eve of the Judean war with Rome, Jerusalem had become a world-renowned pilgrimage center and a regional juggernaut. Its economic production had increased significantly, as had its population size and sphere of cultural influence. All of this finds expression in the material record. Modern geopolitical factors have also played a role. Setting Jerusalem and its immediate environs aside, the political realities in what was the core of the Judean hinterland – namely, the highlands in the southern half of the West Bank – can be prohibitive to university-sponsored expeditions, pushing most digs into the western Judean lowlands, the Mediterranean coast, the Jezreel Valley, the Galilee, and the Negev. Furthermore, what does survive from the core of Judea can often get lost in books with more eye-catching artifacts to present from the entire region of IsraelPalestine (Eretz Israel, in the Hebrew parlance). The scholarly norm in Israel is to treat that region as a distinct geographic entity worthy of investigation as such, even with its numerous ancient cultures and subregions, the Judean highlands among them. Yet, its cities along the Mediterranean coast, for example, were more vibrant and commercially active than those in the landlocked hill country. This obtains, of course, to the period before Judea grew into a regional power under late Hasmonean and especially Herodian auspices, assuming control over some of those lucrative Mediterranean ports. Notwithstanding this unevenness in the archaeological record, the past few decades have seen sustained and successful investigations into Persian Judea, in https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110418873-008

124

Benjamin D. Gordon

no small part due to growing interest in the period from the side of Hebrew Bible scholarship. As will be discussed below, its archaeological investigation is characterized by a preponderance of studies on the imperial administration and demographics of the province. Work on the material culture of Hellenistic Judea, whose texts and remains are relatively abundant when compared to other Near Eastern regions of the Hellenistic world, has taken place against the backdrop of pronounced scholarly interest in the dynamics of Western colonialization and local responses to it. With regard to early Roman Judea, the past few decades have been marked by the rise of “Herodian archaeology” as a full-fledged subfield. Its maturation is due in part to accelerated archaeological activity in the wake of the Six Day War, but also to the unique vision and prolific fieldwork of one scholar, Ehud Netzer. The ruins of Herod the Great’s palaces are the most sensational of the subperiod, yet it also has intriguing finds relevant to early Jewish practice and belief, the rise of the Jesus movement, and the library of texts from the Qumran caves. Each of these topics in its own way has helped reshape text-driven historical narratives.

2 State Formation and Imperial Administration in Persian Judea Archaeological investigation into Judea in the Persian period has taken place against the backdrop of a pronounced rise in Achaemenid studies as a subfield of Iranology and ancient Near Eastern history. The publication of Pierre Briant’s From Cyrus to Alexander, which was translated into English in 2002, was a pathbreaker for scholars in adjacent fields.1 Meanwhile, scholarship on Greek colonialization of the East has grown to appreciate the extent to which the Hellenistic kingdoms following Alexander the Great’s conquests appropriated power structures set in place by their Persian imperial predecessors. The Achaemenid reliance on local semi-autonomous regimes, particularly in Egypt but also in provincial backwaters such as Judea, has become increasingly obvious, while older totalitarian models of Near Eastern governance are now viewed as possibly too indebted to a twentieth-century preoccupation with big government.2

 Pierre Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire, trans. Peter T. Daniels (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2002); see also John Curtis and Nigel Tallis, eds., Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Matthew W. Waters, Ancient Persia: A Concise History of the Achaemenid Empire, 550–330 BCE (New York/Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).  Ian Morris and J. G. Manning, “The Economic Sociology of the Ancient Mediterranean World,” in Neil J. Smelser and Richard Swedberg, eds., The Handbook of Economic Sociology (Princeton/ New York: Princeton University Press/Russell Sage Foundation, 2005): 131–159, esp. 149–150;

The Archaeology of the Second Temple Period in Judea: New Discoveries and Research

125

For reasons related in part to this scholarly bent of mind and in part to the nature of the meager evidence at hand, archaeological investigation into the Persian province of Judea has focused on what can be described as elements of imperial control: ruling urban centers, border fortresses, official seals stamped on storage jars for purposes of taxation and redistribution, and coinage. Nearly absent from the shelf of scholarship on the Judean material culture of the Persian period are studies of daily life, in contrast to the steady growth of such studies for Iron Age Israelite culture or for Judean culture of the late Second Temple period.3 This is largely a reflection of the archaeological record. For example, Ephraim Stern’s comprehensive survey of the “Land of the Bible” in the Persian period is far more instructive on coastal cities such as Akko, Dor, Ashkelon, and Gaza than on inland sites within the borders of the province of Judea.4 Stern’s own scholarly interests centered on the Levantine coast, but coastal centers have simply yielded much more than inland sites. This is particularly evident in Stern’s discussion of household implements such as furniture, cosmetic vessels, jewelry, and religious paraphernalia. The coastal cities were more economically vibrant centers in the Persian period, exploiting more commercial ties throughout the Mediterranean basin than the Judean highland towns did. They also appear to have rebounded more rapidly from the devastation of the Babylonian wars of the early sixth century BCE.5 As far as the temple-city of Jerusalem is concerned, so little of its Persian stratum has come to light in its excavated areas – even as those areas continue to be Gerassimos George Aperghis, The Seleukid Royal Economy: The Finances and Financial Administration of the Seleukid Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. 263–267; Joseph Gilbert Manning, Land and Power in Ptolemaic Egypt: The Structure of Land Tenure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. 3–9.  For the Iron Age, see William G. Dever, The Lives of Ordinary People in Ancient Israel: Where Archaeology and the Bible Intersect (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2012); and Avraham Faust, The Archaeology of Israelite Society in Iron Age II (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2012). For the late Second Temple period, see Jodi Magness, Stone and Dung, Oil and Spit: Jewish Daily Life in the Time of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2011); and Eric M. Meyers and Mark A. Chancey, Alexander to Constantine: Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, Vol. 3, The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).  Ephraim Stern, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, Vol. 2: The Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian Periods, 732–332 BCE (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 353–582; see also Stern, Material Culture of the Land of the Bible in the Persian Period, 538–332 BC (Warminster/Jerusalem: Aris & Phillips/Israel Exploration Society, 1982).  Stern, Material Culture, 580–582; on the extent of the devastation left by the Babylonian wars, see Avraham Faust, Judah in the Neo-Babylonian Period: The Archaeology of Desolation, Society of Biblical Literature, Archaeology and Biblical Studies 18 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012). For a discussion of the borders of Judea in the Persian period, which included the Judean highlands, lowlands, and desert (but not the Mediterranean coast or Samarian highlands), see Charles E. Carter, The Emergence of Yehud in the Persian Period: A Social and Demographic Study, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 294 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), 75–100.

126

Benjamin D. Gordon

explored in earnest – that scholars have begun to reduce significantly demographic estimates for the city, which was limited to the narrow summit of the southeastern hill. Israel Finkelstein has posited a population as low as four hundred to five hundred individuals for the Persian period city, a minimalist estimate that has prompted emendations; the number of 1,000–1,200 total inhabitants is agreed upon by a number of scholars for the end of the period.6 The priests and other literati in Jerusalem may have worked to preserve and propagate the old national histories, prophetic corpora, and liturgical texts while continuing to produce new scrolls on the writings of the prophets and on other stories. Jerusalem’s closest parallel would be Mount Gerizim, the other Yahwistic cultic center in the region’s highlands and at the center of the Persian province of Samaria. That site has also been subject to extensive archaeological inquiry; the Israeli expedition that dug the site concluded its major work there in 2003.7 There, too, we have evidence of a small residential quarter hugging the slopes next to a temple precinct. A group of priests probably inhabited this quarter too. The excavator Yitzhak Magen has noted the similarity in appearance between the Persian period sanctuary at Gerizim, for example, and that described in the Temple Vision of the Book of Ezekiel (chapters 40–48).8 The lowered demographic estimates for Jerusalem are relevant to a paradigm shift in Hebrew Bible studies. Nowadays scholars of that field more actively blur the boundary between redactor and author for biblical sources in the Persian period and are more likely to characterize the period as one of prolific literary production rather than of mere collection and entrenchment of older sources.9 In one renowned

 Israel Finkelstein, “The Territorial Extent and Demography of Yehud/Judea in the Persian and Early Hellenistic Periods,” Revue Biblique 117/1 (2010): 39–54. On the 1,000–1,200 estimate, see Oded Lipschits, “Persian Period Finds from Jerusalem: Facts and Interpretations,” Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 9 (2009): 2–30; and Hillel Geva, “Jerusalem’s Population in Antiquity: A Minimalist View,” Tel Aviv 41/2 (2014): 131–160, esp. 141–143.  Yitzhak Magen, Mount Gerizim Excavations, Vol. 2: A Temple City, Judea and Samaria Publications 8 (Jerusalem: Staff Officer for Archaeology–Civil Administration of Judea and Samaria, 2008); and see also Yitzhak Magen, Haggai Misgav, and Levana Tsfania, Mount Gerizim Excavations, Vol. 1: The Aramaic, Hebrew and Samaritan Inscriptions, Judea and Samaria Publications 2 (Jerusalem: Staff Officer of Archaeology–Civil Administration of Judea and Samaria, 2004).  Magen, Misgav, and Tsfania, Mount Gerizim Excavations, Vol. 2, 141–151.  Rainer Albertz, A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period, Vol. 2: From the Exile to the Maccabees (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), 437–443; Megan Bishop Moore and Brad E. Kelle, Biblical History and Israel’s Past: The Changing Study of the Bible and History (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2011), 396–463. The shift has also touched on our understanding of the works of the great prophets of Israel, which are now viewed by some as pseudepigraphical books penned by scribal guilds based in the Yahwistic provincial centers of the Persian empire, particularly Jerusalem; see Ehud Ben Zvi, “The Concept of Prophetic Books and Its Historical Setting,” in Diana V. Edelman and Ehud Ben Zvi, eds. The Production of Prophecy: Constructing Prophecy and Prophets in Yehud (London/Oakville, CT: Equinox, 2009), 73–95.

The Archaeology of the Second Temple Period in Judea: New Discoveries and Research

127

theory explaining the authorship of the Torah, imperial administrators from Persia are said to have called for a kind of local constitution to be created to regulate everyday life in the Yahwistic provinces of Judea and Samaria.10 Whether the modest cultic centers of Persian Jerusalem and Gerizim, with their attendant literati, could be responsible for as many documents as some minimalist Bible scholars have suggested will continue to be a matter of debate.11 In any case, there is a greater appreciation now for the extent to which Yahwistic priests and other members of the urban elite used scripture as a rhetorical tool to shape society in the Persian period and did so with the backing of the imperial government.12 Judea and Samaria as “temple states” – theocratic regimes, in essence, with high priests assuming great political authority but answering finally to the imperial governor – has provided essential background to the study of their archaeological remains. The center of Persian imperial operations in Judea, for example, was not situated in the heart of Jerusalem but rather at a distance of four kilometers to its south. The site in question is located next to the Israeli kibbutz Ramat Rachel and promises to be of vital importance to our understanding of the period. The IsraeliGerman excavations at Ramat Rachel in 2004–2010 have shown that the palatial complex at the site was the uninterrupted center of foreign administration in Judea from the Neo-Assyrian period through to the early fourth century BCE.13 It was the home of the Persian governor – Nehemiah himself, for example, may have lived there – and it was a center for tax collection in kind. The latter is evidenced by the staggering number of stamped jar handles found at the site bearing the provincial name Yehud (Judea) and commonly understood to have been part of vessels used for the transfer of taxed liquids and foodstuffs (Figure 1).14 There was a lavish palatial garden on the premises. Israeli scientists hypothesized that pollen from the garden could have found its way into the wall plaster of the palace before it had dried. Indeed, careful plaster analysis revealed embedded traces of pollen from Persian

 Peter Frei, “Persian Imperial Authorization: A Summary,” in James W. Watts, ed., Persia and Torah: The Theory of Imperial Authorization of the Pentateuch, SBL Symposium Series 17 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2001): 5–40. For an evaluation of the theory, see Jean Louis Ska, Introduction to Reading the Pentateuch (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2006), 217–227.  Eric M. Meyers, “The Rise of Scripture in a Minimalist Demographic Context,” in Peter Dubovský and Federico Giuntoli, eds., Stones, Tables, and Scrolls: Periods of the Formation of the Bible (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020): 379–392.  Jon L. Berquist, Judaism in Persia’s Shadow: A Social and Historical Approach (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 131–146; James C. VanderKam, From Joshua to Caiaphas: High Priests after the Exile (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 99–111.  Oded Lipschits, Yuval Gadot, and Dafna Langgut, “The Riddle of Ramat Raḥel: The Archaeology of a Royal Persian Period Edifice,” Transeuphratène 21 (2012): 57–79, esp. 69–73.  Oded Lipschits and David S. Vanderhooft, The Yehud Stamp Impressions: A Corpus of Inscribed Impressions from the Persian and Hellenistic Periods in Judah (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011), esp. 31–41.

128

Benjamin D. Gordon

walnut trees, cedars of Lebanon, birch, and – most notably – citron (etrog), the earliest attested evidence of this Sukkot-fruit in the southern Levant. It was apparently brought to the region by Persian gardeners commissioned with adorning the Judean governor’s palace with aromatic plants and fruit trees.15

Figure 1: A stamped jar handle of the Persian period from Ramat Rachel. The stamp reads, “Yehud, Yeho‘ezer, the governor.” See Oded Lipschits and David S. Vanderhooft, The Yehud Stamp Impressions, 192–201 (Type 7); photo by Mariana Salzberger, courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

The physical separation of the Persian administrative center from the cultic center of Jerusalem may reflect a laissez-faire management policy characterized by a heavy reliance on local officials based in Jerusalem. Yet the Persians naturally had an interest in the health and prosperity of the Judean provincial capital. When Jerusalem was floundering in the 440s BCE, some eighty years after the rededication of its temple, they appointed Nehemiah as provincial governor. He was an ethnic Judean brought westward to his homeland to help improve the region’s situation, as depicted in the biblical book bearing his name. According to that book, Nehemiah carried out repairs to the Jerusalem city walls (3:1–38), stimulated the region’s hinterland by virtue of a largescale debt release for its farmers (5:1–13), reformed the Jerusalem temple’s administration and revenue stream (13:10–14), and promoted ethnic collectivization through new laws forbidding intermarriage (13:1–3, 23–27).16

 Dafna Langgut, Yuval Gadot, and Oded Lipschits, “‘Fruit of Goodly Trees’: The Beginning of Citron Cultivation in Israel and Its Penetration into Jewish Tradition and Culture,” Beit Mikra 59/1 (2014): 38–55, esp. 42–47 [Hebrew].  For more on the Persian policy of non-involvement in provincial politics, particularly with regard to Nehemiah’s mission, see Michael Heltzer, “The Social and Fiscal Reforms of Nehemia in Judah and the Attitude of the Achaemenid Kings to Internal Affairs of the Autonomous Provinces,” Apollinaris 62 (1989): 335–355; republished in Heltzer, The Province Judah and Jews in Persian Times

The Archaeology of the Second Temple Period in Judea: New Discoveries and Research

129

The biblical descriptions of these reforms have had a major impact on modern historiography of the period, archaeology-based studies included. The middle of the fifth century BCE emerges time and again in studies of the past couple of decades as a decisive turning point for Judea. Kenneth Hoglund theorized that Persian attempts to tighten control over the Levant led to the militarization of the region in the middle of the fifth century BCE, with a network of imperial forts and roads constructed and city walls repaired, as at Jerusalem.17 Charles Carter has expanded on the theory to argue for a major chronological division at 450 BCE, with the earlier Persian I period marked by a struggling economy and harsh poverty, and the later Persian II period characterized by substantial growth and the opening of trade networks.18 Ephraim Stern has gone so far as to suggest that the middle of the fifth century witnessed the establishment of the “Judean state” as such – the very province itself founded anew only then, despite the rededication of the Jerusalem sanctuary much earlier in 516 BCE.19 Finally, Eilat Mazar reassigned the so-called Northern Tower, in the Silwan neighborhood of Jerusalem (the City of David Visitors’ Center area), to the Persian period and associated it with Nehemiah’s refortification efforts. The redating is based on Persian-period finds from a stratum underlying the tower.20 These theories have been challenged on a number of fronts. Regarding Mazar’s identification of Nehemiah’s Wall, it has been pointed out that the key fifth-century BCE deposit stratified below the fortification provides only a terminus post quem for its construction. As a result, the traditional date in the Hasmonean period for the Northern Tower and its fortification line cannot be ruled out.21 Perhaps not coincidentally, the opposition to Mazar’s theory has come from scholars at Tel Aviv University, an institution whose archaeologists have long exhibited a widespread allergy to methodologies perceived to be in line with Albrightean “biblical archaeology,” which is an older approach to digging in the region characterized by a relatively positivist stance toward

(Some Connected Questions of the Persian Empire) (Tel Aviv: Archaeological Center Publication, 2008), 71–94.  Hoglund, Achaemenid Imperial Administration in Syria-Palestine and the Missions of Ezra and Nehemiah, Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series 125 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992), 165–205, 241–247.  Carter, Emergence of Yehud, in various places, esp. 220–233.  Stern, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 580–582.  The excavations were carried out in 2005–2007 on behalf of the Shalem Center and the Ir David Foundation under the academic auspices of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Eilat Mazar, The Palace of King David: Excavations at the Summit of the City of David, Preliminary Report of Seasons 2005–2007 (Jerusalem/New York: Shoham Academic Research and Publication, 2009), 72–79; Mazar, “The Wall that Nehemiah Built,” Biblical Archaeology Review 35/2 (2009): 24–33, 66.  Israel Finkelstein, “Persian Period Jerusalem and Yehud: A Rejoinder,” Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 9 (2009): 2–13, esp. 6–7; David Ussishkin, “On Nehemiah’s City Wall and the Size of Jerusalem during the Persian Period: An Archaeologist’s View,” in Isaac Kalimi, ed., New Perspectives on Ezra-Nehemiah: History and Historiography, Text, Literature, and Interpretation (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2012): 101–130, esp. 117–118.

130

Benjamin D. Gordon

the biblical corpus as a source of historical information.22 Mazar may have struck a nerve with those in her field still working to police the boundary between text-driven and archaeology-driven historical narratives. One wonders if that boundary still needs such careful policing, particularly for the Persian period in Judea with its sparse remains. As for the subdivision between Persian I and II periods at around 450 BCE, as well as the idea that Persian interests in Judea intensified around that time, Oded Lipschits has called both into question.23 Lipschits interprets the evidence of the militarization of the region, especially at Lachish and the northern Negev, against the backdrop of the full independence Egypt achieved from Persia at the very end of the fifth or the beginning of the fourth century BCE, rather than during the time of Nehemiah a half-century earlier. Combined with the equivocal evidence for any remains of his activity in Jerusalem, we are currently left with a muddled picture regarding whether the middle of the fifth century was in fact a significant turning point at all. It bears pointing out, of course, that regardless of the circumstances behind, and the effectiveness of, Persian efforts to stimulate growth in Judea during the governorship of Nehemiah, the archaeological remains show that the demographic situation in Jerusalem was not altered in any significant way as a result. On the eve of the Greek takeover of the region, the city and its hinterland appear to have remained mere shadows of their former selves prior to the Babylonian war.

3 Acculturation, Social Resistance, and Judaization in the Hellenistic Period The debunking of the classic model of Hellenization – that is, of an enlightened European civilization bestowing upon a provincial backwater its cultural accoutrements, a model rife with colonialist overtones – has impacted archaeological interpretation throughout the Mediterranean basin. For Judea, as elsewhere, the emphasis is now more commonly on a confluence of, rather than a clash of, cultures in the period of Greek and later Roman rule.24 Nonetheless, the acculturation question still enjoys a  Burke O. Long, Planting and Reaping Albright: Politics, Ideology, and Interpreting the Bible (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 111–148; Thomas W. Davis, Shifting Sands: The Rise and Fall of Biblical Archaeology (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 123–156; Raz Kletter, Just Past? The Making of Israeli Archaeology (London/Oakville, CT: Equinox, 2006), 310–320.  Oded Lipschits, “Achaemenid Imperial Policy, Settlement Processes in Palestine, and the Status of Jerusalem in the Middle of the Fifth Century BCE,” in Oded Lipschitz and Manfred Oeming, eds., Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2006): 19–53, esp. 35–40.  Lee I. Levine, Judaism and Hellenism in Antiquity: Conflict or Confluence? (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), esp. 6–32. Erich S. Gruen has articulated this point of view in a number of

The Archaeology of the Second Temple Period in Judea: New Discoveries and Research

131

kind of hegemony as the primary framework for understanding the rise of Jewish sectarianism and the outbreak of the Jewish wars. The arrival of Greek colonists following Alexander is traditionally viewed as the catalyst behind a relatively swift cultural change and a major turning point in Jewish history. Martin Hengel’s widely read tome, Hellenism and Judaism, argued the case most forcefully and has likely influenced the field most broadly.25 While Hengel approached the subject matter from the perspective of a German Protestant scholar of the New Testament, progressive Jewish thinkers as well displayed a certain eagerness to prove that their ancient forebears willingly adopted Greek ideas and cultural norms.26 Given the tendency of archaeologists to focus on the longue durée, it is perhaps no surprise that the major archaeological study of the Hellenistic period in Palestine by the Israeli scholar Oren Tal has problematized these assumptions.27 On a number

works; see, for example, “Greeks and Non-Greeks,” in Glenn R. Bugh, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Hellenistic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006): 295–314; Gruen, Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). One reflection of the paradigm shift is the embrace of Mediterraneanism as a culturally and economically significant category and a unifier in conceiving of the region’s past, as in the landmark study of Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford/ Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000); see esp. their introductory discussion on pages 9–49.  Levine, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine During the Early Hellenistic Period (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974). Hellenization is presented there as a kind of praeparatio evangelicum, a period of intellectual creativity and a burgeoning interest in Western philosophy, temporarily stifled by the religious policies of the Hasmonean priest-kings but picked up in earnest with the rise of the Jesus movement; see esp. 310–314. For a critical response from a historian’s perspective, see John J. Collins, “Cult and Culture: The Limits of Hellenization in Judea,” in John J. Collins and Gregory E. Sterling, eds., Hellenism in the Land of Israel (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2001), 38–61.  Levine, Judaism and Hellenism in Antiquity, 3–6. Elias Bickerman and Arnaldo Momigliano, both Jewish scholars of classical antiquity who wrote about the ancient Jewish experience, are significant in this regard; see Albert I. Baumgarten, “Hellenism and Judaism Before and After World War II: Two Case Studies–A. D. Momigliano and E. J. Bickerman,” in Zeev Weiss, Oded Irshai, Jodi Magness, and Seth Schwartz, eds., ‘Follow the Wise’: Studies in Jewish History and Culture in Honor of Lee I. Levine (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2010): 3–23. Bickerman stirred up controversy with his theory on the origins of the Maccabean revolt, namely that Antiochus IV’s decrees were the initiative of a Hellenizing group of Jerusalemite Jews who wished to rid their ethnos of some of its more strange and objectionable cultural practices, syncretize their cult with that of Zeus, and encourage the promulgation of Greek ideas in the region. See Bickerman, The God of the Maccabees: Studies on the Meaning and Origin of the Maccabean Revolt, Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity 32 (Leiden: Brill, 1979), 76–92. Momigliano was one of the first scholars of the Hellenistic world to assert the multiculturalism of Hellenistic society, countering the claim that the ancient Greeks held “alien wisdom” – that is, the Eastern cultural sphere – in contempt or were entirely baffled by it. See Momogliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), esp. 87–96.  Oren Tal, The Archaeology of Hellenistic Palestine: Between Tradition and Renewal [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute, 2007). The book focuses on the Ptolemaic and Seleucid periods (third century and first half of the second BCE), up to the rise of the Hasmoneans. It fills a gap in

132

Benjamin D. Gordon

of fronts, Tal argues for traditionalism and continuity in the local material culture. Assimilation toward Hellenic customs is primarily evidenced, according to Tal, in the realms of government administration, with a local elite residing primarily in the urban centers and becoming familiar with Greek cultural institutions. Otherwise, the populace is seen as having continued to live the way they had long before the beginning of Greek influence. Tal’s point-of-view comes into sharpest relief in his lengthy discussion of funerary architecture. Subterranean burial complexes with individual internment niches (loculi) are usually seen as a classic case of Hellenization, underscoring a new belief in the importance of maintaining individual identity in death and standing in contrast to the Judean communal burials of the Iron Age.28 Moreover, Ptolemaic Alexandria is usually pointed to as the source of inspiration for loculi tombs throughout Palestine, whether at the culturally Idumean necropolis of Maresha or the culturally Judean necropolis of Jerusalem.29 Tal argues that the loculi tombs mimic the courtyardtype house, creating as such a kind of eternal home for the dead. In this regard, he points to continuity with Iron Age Judah. He ascribes the shift from communal to individual burial niches to Phoenician rather than to Ptolemaic influence.30 This too can be read as an attempt to keep the origins of local Palestinian practices closer to home on the Levantine coast. In addition to a sustained interest in Western acculturation, another feature of the archaeology of Hellenistic Judea is a relative dearth of evidence for the highlands proper as compared with that from coastal cities and neighboring regions.31 The situation recalls that of the Persian period discussed above. A rare exception from the hill country is the site of Modi‘in (Umm el-‘Umdan) – home village of the Maccabee family. The site was excavated in 2000–2003, prior to the construction of a new road, and may in fact include the remains of the village that the Maccabean patriarch Mattathias and his sons would have known. The remains include a Jewish

scholarship. Previously, a lengthy article by Andrea Berlin was the most comprehensive survey of the archaeology of the period; see Andrea Berlin “Between Large Forces: Palestine in the Hellenistic Period,” Biblical Archaeologist 60/1 (1997): 2–51.  Meyers and Chancey, Alexander to Constantine, 25.  Amos Kloner and Boaz Zissu, The Necropolis of Jerusalem in the Second Temple Period, Interdisciplinary Studies in Ancient Culture and Religion 8 (Leuven/Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2007), 76–79.  Tal, Archaeology of Hellenistic Palestine, 263–269, 331–332; Tal, “On the Origin and Concept of the Loculi Tombs of Hellenistic Palestine,” Ancient West and East 2 (2003): 288–307.  Tal, Archaeology of Hellenistic Palestine, 329. Nevertheless, with Judea’s relative abundance in textual remains of the period, its historians are better equipped than those of adjacent regions, such as Arabia, Idumea, Iturea, and Phoenicia; see Fergus Millar, “The Problem of Hellenistic Syria,” in Amélie Kuhrt and Susan M. Sherwin-White, eds., Hellenism in the East: Interaction of Greek and Non-Greek Civilizations from Syria to Central Asia after Alexander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 110–133.

The Archaeology of the Second Temple Period in Judea: New Discoveries and Research

133

ritual bath (miqveh) and a pillared structure identified as a synagogue, dating to as early as the second century BCE and built over a structure even earlier.32 Another noteworthy site of the period is the Samaritan sacred precinct and surrounding village on Mount Gerizim. Samaria is a neighbor to Judea, of course, and a close parallel in terms of culture and heritage. Excavations at Mount Gerizim revealed not only exceedingly well-preserved domestic architecture of the period but also a remarkable corpus of several hundred lapidary inscriptions of the third–second centuries BCE. They are primarily dedicatory inscriptions, commemorating offerings to the God of Israel and asking for the “good remembrance” of individuals in whose names the offerings were made.33 The inscriptions would likely have stood in conspicuous locations within the sacred precinct. One can assume that similar inscriptions commemorated gifts to the Jerusalem sanctuary as well, though none survive in the archaeological record. The financial situation of the sanctuary is relevant to the so-called Heliodorus stele of 178 BCE, an extraordinary discovery.34 The base of the stele was recovered at Maresha in 2005–2006, while its main segment was purchased off the antiquities market in 2007 by Michael Steinhardt. The stele is a correspondence between King Seleucus IV (187–175 BCE) and his minister Heliodorus regarding the financial affairs of temples in the Seleucid provincial areas of Phoenicia and Syria. Judea would have fallen in the latter category, though it and its temple at Jerusalem are never explicitly mentioned in the inscription. Heliodorus is told to inspect the temples to see that they are suited to the needs of the population and their gods. Heliodorus sends the letter on to “his brother” Dorymenes, who in turn writes to one

 Alexander Onn and Shlomit Weksler-Bdolah, “Umm el-‘Umdan, Khirbet (Modi‘in),” in Ephraim Stern, ed., The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, Vol. 5: Supplementary Volume (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2008): 2061–2063.  The inscriptions typically follow the formula ‫די הקרב‬, “[The unnamed donation] that X offered . . . .” Joseph Naveh and Yitzhak Magen reconstruct ‫“( שורה דנה‬this wall”) as the subject, based on the assumption that these inscriptions would have been viewed from conspicuous places within the sacred precinct, perhaps on the barrier cordoning off the priestly court; see “Aramaic and Hebrew Inscriptions of the Second-Century BCE at Mount Gerizim,” ‘Atiqot 32 (1997): 13*; Magen, Misgav, and Tsfania, Mount Gerizim Excavations, Vol. 1, 16–20. In her study of the corpus, Anne Katrine de Hemmer Gudme writes, “To be remembered by the deity is desirable, equal to blessing, and expected to be beneficent both for the person remembered and her or his dependents and relatives. Furthermore, the desired ‘good remembrance’ can be obtained by offering gifts and worship to the deity”; de Hemmer Gudme, Before the God in This Place for Good Remembrance: A Comparative Analysis of the Aramaic Votive Inscriptions from Mount Gerizim, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 441 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2013), 147. On the domestic architecture, see Magen, Mount Gerizim Excavations, Vol. 2, 3–93.  Hannah M. Cotton and Michael Wörrle, “Seleukos IV to Heliodoros. A New Dossier of Royal Correspondence from Israel,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 159 (2007): 191–205; Anathea Portier-Young, Apocalypse against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2011), 80–91.

134

Benjamin D. Gordon

Diophanes, telling him, “You will do well to take care that everything is carried out according to the instructions.” The nature of the instructions and the involvement of a certain Heliodorus recall a miraculous story told in 2Maccabees 3:4–40.35 This kind of periodic inspection of temple treasuries – often the largest repositories of cash wealth and valuables in a region – would have been a matter of routine for imperial regimes, who commissioned officials to oversee sanctuary finances, encourage productivity, ensure the full collection of revenue due to the empire, and, in certain cases, offer financial support.36 The 2Maccabees account mentions a local by the name of Simon, who seems to have been tasked with the duty of overseeing the Jerusalem temple’s finances (2Macc 3:4). Otherwise, as the Heliodorus stele attests, direct Seleucid involvement in temple administration appears to have been sporadic and ad hoc. Moving forward to the period of Hasmonean rule (ca. 140–37 BCE), the latest archaeological research has helped clarify aspects of the administration of this autonomous Judean regime while refining earlier conceptions of its cultural disposition. When Jerusalem came under Hasmonean control, it became the Judean center for the collection and redistribution of taxes. This development finds expression archaeologically in a late type of Judean seal impression on storage jars. The seal consists of a five-pointed star and the inscribed word yršlm (“Jerusalem”) in PaleoHebrew script. Hillel Geva has secured a second century BCE date for the type, demonstrating that it replaced the long series of seal types bearing various formulations of the name Yehud and dating back into the Persian period.37 It is difficult to know how revenues from the goods carried in these sealed jars were apportioned within the government. It has been suggested the Hasmoneans began to take a tithe of Judean agricultural yields to fund military exploits and other civic matters, while their territorial expansion appears to have been paid for by a tax called the dekate, a holdover of older imperial tribute payments.38 The Jerusalem-type seal impressions may be related to these reforms.

 In that account, King Seleucus sends his chief minister Heliodorus into the temple to rob its treasury. Heliodorus is confronted by a golden rider on a warlike horse, beaten to the ground by two golden boys, and dragged out barely conscious. According to the tale, he would eventually come to respect the Jewish God and offer sacrifice to him. The historicity of at least a visit to the temple by a Seleucid official is supported by this recently discovered stele, with the actual figure who entered the temple having been, in this case, Diophanes rather than Heliodorus.  Aperghis, Seleukid Royal Economy, 287–88; Manning, Land and Power, 163.  “A Chronological Reevalution of Yehud Stamp Impressions in Palaeo-Hebrew Script, Based on Finds from Excavations in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem,” Tel Aviv 34/1 (2007): 98–101. On the earlier types, see the above discussion of Ramat Rachel.  Bezalel Bar-Kochva, “Manpower, Economics, and Internal Strife in the Hasmonean State,” in André Chastagnol, Claude Nicolet, and Henri van Effenterre, eds., Armées et fiscalité dans le monde antique: [colloque] Paris 14–16 octobre 1976, Colloques nationaux du Centre national de la recherche scientifique 939 (Paris: CNRS, 1977): 167–196, esp. 185–191. Bar-Kochva seeks to temper in part the earlier view of Shimon Applebaum, who had reconstructed an imposition by the Hasmoneans of a

The Archaeology of the Second Temple Period in Judea: New Discoveries and Research

135

Furthermore, archaeologists have complicated the simple dichotomy between Hellenism and what is typically seen as a Hasmonean brand of Torah-observant Judaism.39 Curiously, the Hasmonean coin issues bear Greek royal titles alongside Hebrew ones, signaling a desire of the Judean priestly dynasty to be internationally recognized and accepted in the broader Hellenistic world. Their monumental burial complex at Modi‘in draws on the iconography of Greek founding myths and employs visual elements, such as ships and military armor, taken directly from the Greek sphere. Their palaces, as at the desert oasis of Jericho, are exemplars of palatial Hellenistic architecture and presumably would have signaled to foreign guests and dignitaries their willingness to participate in the larger cultural milieu (Figure 2).40 Nevertheless, among the corpus of Hellenistic art of Palestine discussed in a volume by Adi Erlich, there is just a smattering of examples of major or minor art from Hasmonean Judea, and no single specimen of three-dimensional art.41 The examples include designs on the aforementioned Hasmonean coins, graffiti on the socalled Tomb of Jason in Jerusalem, and a few design elements in the Hasmonean palaces at Jericho.42 Needless to say, there is no evidence of a major school of art in the region. According to Erlich, the Judean embrace of art would begin only with Herod, that Romanophile Judean client-king who overthrew the Hasmoneans.43 The artistic remains ostensibly create a tension with regard to the historical conceptualization of the Hasmoneans. Were they Hellenizers or anti-Hellenizers?

considerably increased taxation burden on the rural areas, the confiscation of tracts around cities settled by Greeks, and the rise of large estates owned by the Jerusalem aristocracy. See Shimon Applebaum, “The Hasmoneans–Logistics, Taxation, Constitution,” in Shimon Applebaum, ed., Judaea in Hellenistic and Roman Times: Historical and Archaeological Essays, Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity 40 (Leiden/New York: Brill, 1989): 9–29.  Most noteworthy is Oren Tal, “Hellenism in Transition from Empire to Kingdom: Changes in the Material Culture of Hellenistic Palestine,” in Lee I. Levine and Daniel R. Schwartz, eds., Jewish Identities in Antiquity: Studies in Memory of Menahem Stern, Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentum 130 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009): 55–73. See also Meyers and Chancey, Alexander to Constantine, 44–46; Gruen, Heritage and Hellenism, xiii–xix; Levine, Judaism and Hellenism in Antiquity, 6–32, with copious references to earlier scholarship; and Sylvie Honigman, Tales of High Priests and Taxes: The Books of the Maccabees and the Judean Rebellion against Antiochus IV (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2014), 51–64.  Ehud Netzer, The Palaces of the Hasmoneans and Herod the Great (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press/Israel Exploration Society, 2001), 13–39.  Adi Erlich, The Art of Hellenistic Palestine, BAR International Series 2010 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2009), in various places, esp. 110–112, 119–120.  Erlich, The Art of Hellenistic Palestine, 90–91, 96; Jodi Magness, The Archaeology of the Holy Land: From the Destruction of Solomon’s Temple to the Muslim Conquest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 98–100, Figs. 5.2–5.3.  Erlich, Art of Hellenistic Palestine, 112.

136

Benjamin D. Gordon

Figure 2: An artistic reconstruction of the Hasmonean palatial complex at Jericho, which was excavated by Ehud Netzer. See Netzer, Palaces of the Hasmoneans and Herod the Great, 26–39; drawing by Balage Balogh.

A recent treatment of the regime by Eyal Regev seeks to resolve the tension through his category of “power through piety.”44 According to Regev, the Hasmoneans’ self-representation was in touch with the norms of Hellenistic ruling classes, whether in terms of iconography on coins and tombs, or of decorative elements in their living spaces. Their alliances with great powers were important. However, they were also pious priests. Schooled in biblical religion, they fashioned themselves as following in the footsteps of the great Israelite kings and war heroes but built residences that reflect a certain populism, as Regev suggests.45 Their rise to power correlates with the beginning of a society-wide shift towards a more scrupulous observance of Jewish ritual-purity laws, if not religious conservatism in general, in the home.

 Eyal Regev, The Hasmoneans: Ideology, Archaeology, Identity, Journal of Ancient Judaism Supplements 10 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 293–296.  Regev, The Hasmoneans, 263–265, 295.

The Archaeology of the Second Temple Period in Judea: New Discoveries and Research

137

4 The Maturation of “Herodian Archaeology” and Its Subfields The past few decades have been witness to the burgeoning of Herodian archaeology as a full-fledged subfield, its leading visionary having been Ehud Netzer, who died tragically from a fall at his own excavation site at Herodium in 2010. His work from the 1970s onward at Herod’s palatial complexes have cast the reign of the ambitious and at times tyrannical king in a more positive light. The excavated remains at Masada, Caesarea-Maritima, Herodium, and elsewhere reveal Herod to have been an avid patron of the arts, a skilled host and entertainer, an aficionado of Roman cuisine, and an oenophile. As Netzer’s archaeological investigations made abundantly clear, he was also a prolific builder, benefactor, and client to architects utilizing innovative and bold designs. Among Herod’s Italian architectural imports to Judea are the theater and amphitheater, the prostyle imperial cult temple, the bathhouse caldarium with Campanian-style hypocaust, and the artificial concrete harbor. The Roman cultural institutions he introduced to the region catered to a more cosmopolitan population than was tolerated under his Hasmonean predecessors. This is a picture of Herod the multiculturalist.46 In addition to his connections with Rome, much of Judea remained within the sphere and influence of Alexandria in Egypt, the nearest metropolis and an important trade partner with Herod’s port city of Caesarea-Maritima, which was extensively excavated in the 1990s.47 Underwater excavations investigated the quays of its artificial harbor, shown to have been built using casted volcanic concrete shipped in from Italy. The concrete casts were floated in the sea and sunk once the concrete was poured. Facing the harbor was the monumental temple to Rome and Augustus. A staircase led

 For general overviews, see Ehud Netzer, The Architecture of Herod: The Great Builder, Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 117 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006); Duane W. Roller, The Building Program of Herod the Great (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Meyers and Chancey, Alexander to Constantine, 50–82; Magness, Archaeology of the Holy Land, 133–143, 170–191, 204–215; Peter Richardson, Building Jewish in the Roman East (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2004), 225–308. On Herod’s palaces specifically, see Netzer, Palaces of the Hasmoneans and Herod the Great, 40–137. On his entertainment facilities, see Zeev Weiss, Public Spectacles in Roman and Late Antique Palestine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 11–55. On his cosmopolitanism in décor and banqueting practices, see Andrea M. Berlin, “Herod the Tastemaker,” Near Eastern Archaeology 77/2 (2014): 108–119; Avner Ecker, “Dining with Herod,” in Silvia Rozenberg and David Mevorah, eds., Herod the Great: The King’s Final Journey (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 2013): 66–79.  Joseph Patrich, “Herodian Caesarea: The Urban Space,” in Nikos Kokkinos, ed., The World of the Herods, Vol. 1 of the International Conference, The World of the Herods and Nabataeans, Held at the British Museum, 17–19 April 2001, Oriens et Occidens 14 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007): 93–129; Joseph Patrich, A Walk to Caesarea: A Historical-Archaeological Perspective, Treasures of the Past: The David and Jemima Jeselsohn Library (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society; Yad Itzhak Ben-Zvi, 2018).

138

Benjamin D. Gordon

directly from the waterside to the temple precinct, an elevated esplanade measuring 100 by 90 meters, with two arms reaching westward toward the sea, as if to frame the staircase leading up to the precinct and conceptually link the temple with the harbor.48 Further north is Herod’s main entertainment facility for the city, a versatile and adaptable stadium used for chariot races, athletics, hunting events, and gladiatorial contests. The Jerusalem games inaugurated by Herod in 28 BCE are said to have included these particularly brutal contests as well.49 Herod’s palaces take advantage of their natural topographic settings and even shape them in audacious ways. Especially striking is his residence at CaesareaMaritima. The palace is built on two terraces on a promontory jutting into the sea. The lower terrace consists of a large peristyle court surrounding a pool, a triclinium and adjacent bath on the eastern side of the court, and a semicircular porch looking out from the terrace onto the sea. The upper terrace was a more public terrace of the palace, consisting of a large peristyle court and a hall with a heated platform on its northern side. In the wake of Herod’s death in 4 BCE, and after the establishment of Provincia Judaea in 6 CE, the governor of the province lived in the palace. It is likely here – specifically in the hall of the upper terrace – that Paul was put on trial, as told in Acts 23:23–35. There are resonances to the Caesarea-Maritima palace in Herod’s precipitously terraced cliffside palace and symposium hall at Masada; or in his sprawling third winter palace at Jericho, perched on the banks of Wadi Qelt, with a domed entertainment wing and bathing suite accessible by footbridge; or in his hilltop palace at Herodium, a stronghold commanding over a pool complex and town below.50 The discovery in 2007 of what appears to be Herod’s mausoleum on the slopes of the Herodium hill was a capstone in the career of Netzer.51 The tomb had a round tholos-like second story over a square podium, the roof of the structure having been in the shape of a concave cone, with architectural imitations of bulbous funerary urns adorning the top side of the upper entablature. This is among the finest ancient

 Avner Raban, “A History of Caesarea’s Harbors,” Qadmoniot 127 (2004): 2–22 [Hebrew]; Netzer, Architecture of Herod, 99–101, Fig. 22; Kenneth G. Holum, “The Gods of Sebastos: King Herod’s Harbor Temple at Caesarea Maritima,” in Zeev Weiss, ed., Eretz-Israel 31, (Ehud Netzer Volume) (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2015): 51–68.  Weiss, Public Spectacles, 16–19, 24–28, 40.  Kathryn L. Gleason, “The Landscape Palaces of Herod the Great,” Near Eastern Archaeology 77/ 2 (2014): 76–97; Netzer, Architecture of Herod, 27–35 (Masada, northern palace); 54–72 (Jericho, third palace); 106–112 (Caesarea, promontory palace).  Roi Porat, Rachel Chachy, and Yakov Kalman, eds. Herodium: Final Reports of the 1972–2010 Excavations Directed by Ehud Netzer, Vol. 1: Herod’s Tomb Precinct (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society; Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2015). The discovery of the tomb prompted a popular exhibit on Herod at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 2013; see the eyeopening publication accompanying that exhibit: Silvia Rozenberg and David Mevorah, eds., Herod the Great: The King’s Final Journey (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 2013).

The Archaeology of the Second Temple Period in Judea: New Discoveries and Research

139

masonry work ever recovered from Judea. Despite its location and exceptional workmanship, not all scholars agree that it was the tomb of Herod.52 Now onto Herod’s greatest achievement: his massive expansion of the Jerusalem sacred precinct beginning around 20 BCE, a project which included the total rebuilding of the temple itself, resulting in a sacred precinct (temenos) with a circumference at 1,557 meters, nearly one mile long. Three recent studies of the sacred precinct are worthy of mention. The first is an ambitious photo-documentation project carried out by a team led by Eilat Mazar and seeking to image every remaining stone of the enclosure walls of the precinct.53 The best known of these is, of course, the Western Wall, though remains of the northern, eastern, and southern enclosure walls survive as well and are overlain by later courses of stones from various periods of the precinct’s occupation as a Christian and later Muslim pilgrimage site. The documentation team photographed all phases of the walls; stitched the photographs together digitally into continuous images for each wall, correcting for distortion issues; and had those images converted into detailed drawings to scale by Balage Balogh. The second important study relevant to the Herodian Temple Mount, by Orit Peleg-Barkat, involves the dozens of decorative stone fragments, primarily from the Royal Stoa on the southern end of the Temple Mount, and now argued by Peleg-Barkat to have been the handiwork of a local school of Judean masons.54 Finally, an ambitious new study by Joseph Patrich on the chronological development of the Second Temple is based in large part on the location and dimensions of ancient cisterns within the Muslim sanctuary complex. Ample water supply was a sine qua non of Jewish ritual sacrifice and the extant cisterns may hint at the positioning of the overlying architecture.55 The basic architectural form of Herod’s sacred precinct is witnessed elsewhere in greater Judea and in the ancient world, though on a much smaller scale. The pagan temples to the Roman imperial cult, founded by Herod at Samaria-Sebaste and

 See Joseph Patrich and Benjamin Arubas, “‘Herod’s Tomb’ Reexamined: Guidelines for a Discussion and Conclusions,” in Guy D. Stiebel, Orit Peleg-Barkat, Doron Ben-Ami, Shlomit WekslerBdolah, and Yuval Gadot, eds., New Studies in the Archaeology of Jerusalem and Its Region, Collected Papers, Vol. VII (Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority, 2013) [Hebrew]: 287–300. Since no epitaph survives, it remains possible that it is of another member of the ruling elite.  Eilat Mazar, The Walls of the Temple Mount (Jerusalem: Shoham, 2011).  Orit Peleg-Barkat, “Fit for a King: Architectural Decor in Judaea and Herod as Trendsetter,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 371 (2014): 141–161, esp. 151; Peleg-Barkat, The Temple Mount Excavations in Jerusalem, 1968–1978, Directed by Benjamin Mazar, Final Reports, Vol. 5: Herodian Architectural Decoration and King Herod’s Royal Portico, Qedem 57 (Jerusalem: Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2017).  Joseph Patrich, “The Location of the Second Temple and the Layout of Its Court’s Gates and Chambers: A New Proposal,” in Katharina Galor and Gideon Avni, eds., The Jerusalem Perspective: 150 Years of Archaeological Research (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011): 207–233; see also Joseph Patrich and Marcos Edelcopp, “Four Stages in the Evolution of the Temple Mount,” Revue Biblique 120/3 (2013): 321–361.

140

Benjamin D. Gordon

Caesarea-Maritima, are also marked by a sacred enclosure built within in the city but physically removed from it, situated as they are on high spots. Their use of a colonnaded temenos was newly fashionable in the first century BCE, particularly for buildings housing the imperial cult.56 And their position at the end of a main thoroughfare for foot traffic – a via sacra of sorts – recurs throughout pilgrimage cities of the Near East.57 In Jerusalem, one can reconstruct processional routes leading to the temple from the north through the upper Tyropoeon Valley and from the west through the Transversal Valley. At Samaria-Sebaste and Caesarea-Maritima, the remains allow for the reconstruction of similar kinds of thoroughfares leading toward their temples.58 A recently excavated temple complex at Horvat Omrit in the northern Huleh Valley, two kilometers southwest of Banias, may include among its several phases another imperial cult shrine dedicated to Augustus by Herod.59 The economy of Jerusalem and its larger region benefitted tremendously from the influx of pilgrims to the city on Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot. Herod’s construction in Jerusalem of a theater, hippodrome, and sprawling royal palace all helped transform the city into an international attraction, further opening it up culturally to the larger milieu.60 At the center of operations in Jerusalem was a sizeable priesthood, which enjoyed a prominent role in the civil and judicial spheres of Judean life, serving not only as the officers of the cult but also as judges, scribes, and bureaucrats. By the end of the twentieth century, assumptions of broad Pharisaic – which is to say, non-priestly and proto-rabbinic – authority in Judean society in the century before 70 CE had been seriously undermined by a growing awareness of

 Richardson, Building Jewish, 271–298; Netzer, Architecture of Herod, 270–276; Gideon Foerster, “Art and Architecture in Palestine,” in Shemuel Safrai, Menahem Stern, David Flusser, and W. C. van Unnik, eds., The Jewish People in the First Century: Historical Geography, Political History, Social, Cultural and Religious Life and Institutions, Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum 2 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1976): 980.  One is reminded of the via sacra of Petra, leading to the Qasr el-Bint; of Palmyra, leading to the temple of Bel; and of Jerash, leading to the temple of Jupiter. On these sacred processional thoroughfares, see Warwick Ball, Rome in the East: The Transformation of an Empire (London/New York: Routledge, 2000), 256–261.  The Sebaste via sacra, if one existed at all, would have been the street running north of the Augusteum, between it and the temple complex to the north (dedicated to Serapis/Isis and later to Kore); see Netzer, Architecture of Herod, 82–84. At Caesarea, Joseph Patrich has hypothesized that a diagonal via sacra may have run toward the temple from the east; see Patrich, Studies in the Archaeology and History of Caesarea Maritima: Caput Judaeae, Metropolis Palaestinae, Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity 77 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 38–39.  Gabi Mazor, “The Temple at Omrit: A Study in Architectural and Political Iconography,” in J. Andrew Overman and Daniel N. Schowalter, eds., The Roman Temple Complex at Horvat Omrit: An Interim Report, BAR International Series 2205 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2011): 19–25.  Meyers and Chancey, Alexander to Constantine, 53–62; Magness, Archaeology of the Holy Land, 133–169.

The Archaeology of the Second Temple Period in Judea: New Discoveries and Research

141

sustained priestly dominance in matters of legislation, scribal education, and the local economy.61 Modern archaeological inquiry has demonstrated the extent to which priestly purity requirements were widely practiced among non-priests throughout Judean society, including in the finest domiciles known to date from pre-70 CE Jerusalem.62 This is reflected foremost in hundreds of private domestic ritual baths (miqva’ot) – Ronny Reich’s long-awaited study of them appearing in Hebrew in 2013 – but also in the preference for chalkstone table vessels and storage vessels (Figure 3).63 Stone, unlike pottery, is impervious to ritual defilement according to Tannaitic law. Its use could have communicated attentiveness to Jewish custom, if not ethnic pride, among those who used it.64 A curious corpus of stone weights used to measure goods on a weight scale were all produced using the local Jerusalem limestone and are understood by Ronny Reich as relating to the levying and redistribution of tithes, heave-offerings, and other dues paid to Judean priests and Levites.65 The choice of stone over against metal – the more common material for ancient scale-weights – may hark back to the First Temple period, when a similar class of limestone scale-weights was used. The half dozen or so pre-70 CE synagogues that have emerged from archaeological excavations in the region are understood primarily as places for communal assembly and readings of the Torah.66 A carved stone block that may have been a table

 Benjamin D. Gordon, Land and Temple: Field Sacralization and the Agrarian Priesthood of Second Temple Judaism, Studia Judaica 87 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2020), 2–7; David M. Goodblatt, Elements of Ancient Jewish Nationalism (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 75–87; Martha Himmelfarb, A Kingdom of Priests: Ancestry and Merit in Ancient Judaism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), in various places, esp. 1–10.  For a general discussion of the quarter, see Nahman Avigad, Discovering Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Shikmona, 1980), 83–204. For a discussion of one such domicile, recently published and widely visited by the public, see Hillel Geva, “Stratigraphy and Architecture,” in Hillel Geva, ed., Jewish Quarter Excavations in the Old City of Jerusalem Conducted by Nahman Avigad, 1969–1982, Vol. 4: The Burnt House of Area B and Other Studies, Final Report (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society/ Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2010): 62–69.  Ronny Reich, Miqwa’ot (Jewish Ritual Baths) in the Second Temple, Mishnaic and Talmudic Periods (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi/Israel Exploration Society, 2013) [Hebrew]; Yitzhak Magen, The Stone Vessel Industry in the Second Temple Period: Excavations at Hizma and the Jerusalem Temple Mount, Judea and Samaria Publications 1 (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2002); Yonatan Adler, “Tosefta Shabbat 1:14, ‘Come See the Extent to Which Purity Had Spread.’ An Archaeological Perspective on the Historical Background to a Late Tannaitic Passage,” in Steven Fine and Aaron J. Koller, eds., Talmuda de-Eretz Israel: Archaeology and the Rabbis in Late Antique Palestine; Studia Judaica 73 (Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2014), 63–82.  Andrea M. Berlin, “Jewish Life Before the Revolt: The Archaeological Evidence,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 36/4 (2005): 429–434.  Ronny Reich, Stone Scale-Weights of the Late Second Temple Period (Jerusalem: Zinman Institute of Archaeology, University of Haifa/Israel Exploration Society, 2015), 235–239.  Rachel Hachlili, Ancient Synagogues – Archaeology and Art: New Discoveries and Current Research, Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section 1: Ancient Near East 104 (Boston: Brill, 2013), 23–54;

142

Benjamin D. Gordon

Figure 3: A chalkstone “measuring cup” from the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem. See Hillel Geva, “Stone Artifacts from Areas J and N,” in Hillel Geva, ed., Jewish Quarter Excavations in the Old City of Jerusalem, Vol. 4: The Burnt House of Area B and Other Studies, Final Report (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society/Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2010) 4.5:6; photo by Mariana Salzberger, courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

for the Torah during its public reading was found at the synagogue of Magdala, a recently excavated town on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.67 The enigmatic stone bears in relief what appear to be allusions to the Jerusalem temple, such as the menorah on its front or the horn-like protrusions in its top four corners, which recall the horns of sacrificial altars. The piece’s importance lies foremost in its ability to connect the rather generic architectural form of the late Second Temple period building-type that has long been identified as a synagogue with activity befitting of that identification. Spaces fitted with a prominent Torah shrine, clear orientation to Jerusalem, and the full panoply of Jewish symbolic decoration begin to appear in the archaeological record only in the post-Second Temple era. The synagogue at Magdala can thus help prove the religious character of the earlier building form. It is also significant in being the earliest synagogue ever revealed in the Galilee.68

Lee I. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2005), 21–173.  Mordechai Aviam and Richard Bauckham, “The Synagogue Stone,” in Richard Bauckham, ed., Magdala of Galilee: A Jewish City in the Hellenistic and Roman Period (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2018): 135–159; Hachlili, Ancient Synagogues, 33–34, 37, Figs. II-8, II-11, II-13.  But see Mordechai Aviam, Hisao Kuwabara, Shuichi Hasegawa, and Yitzhak Paz, “A 1st–2nd Century CE Assembly Room (Synagogue?) in a Jewish Estate at Tel Rekhesh, Lower Galilee,” Tel Aviv 46/1 (2019): 128–142.

The Archaeology of the Second Temple Period in Judea: New Discoveries and Research

143

In fact, the extent to which the Galilee and Judea possessed distinct regional cultures has been at the center of the quest for the historical Jesus of Nazareth, another important facet of the archaeology of the Herodian period. The last quarter of the twentieth century has seen a rising interest in Galilean regionalism – an attempt to define the region culturally, chart its social and economic history, and provide context to the life of Jesus and the movement he inspired.69 When compared to the cultural disposition of the nearby Decapolis cities, for instance, the Galilee seems less acculturated to Western mores. Its cultural remains from the period of Jesus’s life and ministry bear a very close affinity to those of the Judean hill country to the south, calling into question the extent to which one can speak of distinct Galilean and Judean material cultures.70 Excavations from the 1980s onward at the Galilean urban center of Sepphoris, for example, revealed a crowded residential quarter of the early Roman period, with ritual baths, chalkstone vessels, and local ceramic repertoires not unlike those of Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter (Figure 4).71 The main

 See, for example, Eric M. Meyers, “Galilean Regionalism: A Reappraisal,” in William Scott, ed., Approaches to Ancient Judaism, Vol. 5: Studies in Judaism and Its Greco-Roman Context, Brown Judaic Studies 32 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985), 115–131; Sean Freyne, Jesus, a Jewish Galilean: A New Reading of the Jesus Story (London: T&T Clark, 2004); Freyne, “Archaeology and the Historical Jesus,” in James H. Charlesworth, ed., Jesus and Archaeology (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2006): 64–83; Jonathan Reed, Archaeology and the Galilean Jesus (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000), esp. 23–61; Mark A. Chancey, Greco-Roman Culture and the Galilee of Jesus, Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 134 (Cambridge / New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). See also the various studies in Eric M. Meyers, ed., Galilee through the Centuries: Confluence of Cultures, Duke Judaic Studies Series 1 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1999). Uzi Leibner’s comprehensive survey of the eastern Galilee in the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods is largely based on ceramic forms and argues, among other things, for large-scale migration northward of Judeans in the Hasmonean period; see Uzi Leibner, Settlement and History in Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Galilee: An Archaeological Survey of the Eastern Galilee, Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 127 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), esp. 315–345. Mention can also be made of David AdanBayewitz, Common Pottery in Roman Galilee: A Study of Local Trade, Bar-Ilan Studies in Near Eastern Languages and Culture (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1993), which correlated known ceramic types with rabbinic terminology and charted the main ceramic production centers in the Galilee beginning in the Herodian period.  For a summary of research into the distinction between Galilean Jewry and Judean Jewry, and its eventual breakdown, see Mark A. Chancey, The Myth of a Gentile Galilee, Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 118 (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11–27. The category of a “Common Judaism,” relevant not only to Judea and Galilee in the Herodian period, but also to much of the Jewish diaspora, was developed by E. P. Sanders in Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE–66 CE (London: SCM Press, 1992). Archaeologically, the commonalities between Judea and Galilee have been underscored forcefully in Berlin, “Jewish Life Before the Revolt,” 417–470. Berlin advocates for the cross-regional category of “household Judaism,” characterized by similar, locally manufactured ceramics and stone vessels, among other features.  Eric M. Meyers, Carol L. Meyers, and Benjamin D. Gordon, eds. The Architecture, Stratigraphy, and Artifacts of the Western Summit of Sepphoris (University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns), 2018.

144

Benjamin D. Gordon

difference between the two quarters seems to involve economic standing rather than regional distinctions: the Sepphoreans appear to have been generally less affluent than the inhabitants of the excavated quarter at Jerusalem.

Figure 4: A view of the excavations on the western summit of Sepphoris, where the remains of a crowded residential quarter of the early Roman period were discovered, looking west. See Gordon, “Units Ia, Ib, and Ic: Buildings in the Eastern Part of the Excavated Areas.” In Meyers, Meyers, and Gordon, eds., The Architecture, Stratigraphy, and Artifacts of the Western Summit of Sepphoris (see n. 71) photo 4.2; photo courtesy of Eric Meyers and Carol Meyers, Duke University.

The absence of elaborate façade tombs in Galilee in the Herodian period, when Jerusalem was dotted with them, can also be explained along economic lines. These façade tombs, which have intriguing parallels in the Nabatean city of Petra in modern-day Jordan, were extraordinarily expensive to carve out and can be understood as markers of a very high status in Judean society. Andrea Berlin has suggested that the aristocracy of Galilee did not share with its Jerusalem counterparts a belief that

The Archaeology of the Second Temple Period in Judea: New Discoveries and Research

145

funerals were an appropriate occasion to display family wealth and status.72 The regional distinction could also reflect the popularity of the Jerusalem necropolis among the most wealthy, Galileans among them. Incidentally, a high-profile new theory regarding the burial of Jesus and his family has at least one Jewish Galilean family interned in a tomb in the Jerusalem region. A rock-cut burial complex in the Talpiyot neighborhood of the modern city was excavated in 1980; later analysis of the contents of the tomb showed that it contained several ossuaries bearing the names Jesus and of other members of his family.73 The theory that this could be Jesus’s family tomb remains highly controversial in academic circles, not in the least because such a tomb would probably have been too expensive for a family of modest means such as that of Jesus.74 Another subfield within Herodian archaeology that tends to attract sensational theories, as well as outsize interest among laypeople and scholars alike, is Qumran studies. The settlement on the Qumran plateau – a stone’s throw from the caves in which most of the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered – continues to puzzle scholars, even if its main excavation took place in the 1950s. Hardly visited prior to the late 1980s, the site is now a regular tourist stop on Christian pilgrimage tours to the Holy Land, probably due in no small part to perceived similarities between the Jesus movement and the early Jewish sect called the Essenes, which is thought to have inhabited the site.75 In fact, there is still no definitive proof that the Qumran scrolls were produced by those who lived on the plateau. As a result, some scholars have diverged from the majority view and argued that the remains on the plateau have nothing to do with the Essenes or with the scrolls. Some hold that it was simply a typical Judean farmstead or estate.76

 Berlin, “Jewish Life Before the Revolt,” 467–468.  Simcha Jacobovici and Charles R. Pellegrino, The Jesus Family Tomb: The Discovery, the Investigation, and the Evidence That Could Change History (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007). See also the various contributions in James H. Charlesworth, ed., The Tomb of Jesus and His Family? Exploring Ancient Jewish Tombs near Jerusalem’s Walls: The Fourth Princeton Symposium on Judaism and Christian Origins (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2013).  Magness, Archaeology of the Holy Land, 251–252.  For a general presentation of the archaeological remains at the site, see Jodi Magness, The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans, 2002); for a discussion of whether Jesus or John the Baptist were Essenes or had any relationship to the Dead Sea Scrolls, see George J. Brooke, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005), 19–26; Magness, Archaeology of the Holy Land, 126–127.  For a summary of the views, see Meyers and Chancey, Alexander to Constantine, 92–100. For a sustained argument favoring the villa position and identifying a modest site above En Gedi as Essene in nature, see Yizhar Hirschfeld, Qumran in Context: Reassessing the Archaeological Evidence (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2004), esp. 211–243.

146

Benjamin D. Gordon

Jodi Magness has been at the forefront of a majority view linking the site with the Essenes.77 She points out the site’s idiosyncratic features, including a relative plethora of abnormally large ritual baths and of animal bone deposits found buried in jars outside of the buildings. There is also a striking absence of imported ceramics, architectural ornament, luxury items, and other features associated with wealth and status. In other words, the archaeological remains at Qumran suit the ritual behavior and asceticism of the Essene sect, who had rejected the priestly establishment of Jerusalem. Where the occupants of the site slept is not clear from the archaeological remains, nor is the extent to which they interacted with the outside world. Some 55 kilometers south along the Dead Sea shore is Masada, a popular tourist attraction and the subject of research by Nachman Ben-Yehuda on the intersection of archaeology and nationalism.78 The story in the writings of Josephus of a mass suicide at Masada during the First Jewish War with Rome has deep resonance in modern Israel, and the site has become a symbol of Jewish heroism and national self-determination, serving among other things as a kind of pilgrimage stop for Israeli soldiers as part of their initiation into the army. As Ben Yehuda has argued, Masada’s renowned excavator in 1963–1965, Yigael Yadin, contributed to the mythologizing of the site by identifying material evidence of the suicide. To be sure, that evidence is far from clear-cut; nor should one take Josephus’s story at face value.79 Perhaps the more illuminating narrative is not of antiquity but of modernity, when archaeology at sites like Masada contributed to the formation of a national Israeli identity.

5 Conclusion The dialog between archaeology and text has always been central to the study of Second Temple Judea’s material remains, though a number of factors may be inhibiting true interdisciplinary research. The impact in the second half of the twentieth century of a more scientific approach to archaeology, with its positivist embrace of the empirical method and its tendency toward description and typology, still resonates strongly within scholarship on the region. The hallmark traits of processual archaeology have

 Magness, Archaeology of Qumran, 73–100, 147–158; Magness, Debating Qumran: Collected Essays on Its Archaeology, Interdisciplinary Studies in Ancient Culture and Religion 4 (Leuven: Peeters, 2004), 17–41.  Nachman Ben-Yehuda, “Excavating Masada: The Politics-Archaeology Connection at Work,” in Philip L. Kohl, Mara Kozelsky, and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, eds., Selective Remembrances: Archaeology in the Construction, Commemoration, and Consecration of National Pasts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007): 247–276; Ben-Yehuda, The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.)  See also Jodi Magness, Masada: From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 192–200.

The Archaeology of the Second Temple Period in Judea: New Discoveries and Research

147

yet to be challenged in any significant way by a robust and theoretically sophisticated reframing of the enterprise, perhaps in part because the field is still catching its breath after a spate of excavations in recent decades, many of which are still unpublished or only partially published. Moreover, accelerated economic development in modern Israel, which has resulted in a stream of data pouring in from salvage excavations, may be a contributing factor. The ethnographic and theoretical traditions that are increasingly applied to the archaeology of other contexts in the ancient world, including SyroPalestine in the Bronze and Iron Ages, have only sporadically impacted that of Second Temple Judea. Formal analysis of artifacts and architecture predominates. The embrace of science has also led to a tendency toward hyper-specialization, whether in terms of artifact type, chronological period, or geographic region. Though scholarship on the Hebrew Bible, early Jewish literature, and the New Testament has always loomed large in archaeological studies of the region – and not always in productive ways – one wonders if the specialization of the field has swung too far away from text-based narratives. In the case of the Judean past, the next generation of archaeologists interested in the Second Temple period runs the risk of ceding any sweeping cultural-historical account to experts in textual studies. The archaeology of Second Temple Judea has always been studied in a fragmented manner, despite the fact that the region remained a distinct polity ruled from a centralized place of sacrificial worship and fostered a shared set of markers in its biblical heritage and material culture. The Persian province of Judea naturally falls under the purview of Near Eastern archaeology, its special relevance to the formation of the Hebrew Bible further drawing from a cadre of scholars whose interests are oriented eastward. The Hellenistic and early Roman periods in Judea, on the other hand, are traditionally studied by those focused on the Western cultural spheres of the ancient world. The situation has persisted even as voices within the academy have begun to challenge the traditional divide between East and West in the study of Mediterranean antiquity, and as models of colonialization and acculturation have been rethought in a manner stressing the long-term continuity of local cultures in micro-regions such as Judea. As recalled, there is also unevenness in the archaeological record across subperiods of the era. Remains of the Herodian period predominate; those of earlier periods are relatively scarce. It must be stressed, however, that when compared to political entities of a similar nature, Judea has left behind a relatively large body of evidence, whether material, documentary, or textual. The great “temple states” of Asia Minor, for example, are not nearly as well understood. The adjacent regions of Idumea, Nabatea, Phoenicia, and Arabia benefit neither from a robust collection of ancient texts nor from a legacy of scholastic interest that has driven continued excavation in the heart of the Jewish and Christian “Holy Land.” Indeed, the contribution of archaeology into the current generation of research promises to be long-lasting. The implications of a demographically small and economically challenged Judea in the Persian period have resonated throughout the field of

148

Benjamin D. Gordon

Hebrew Bible, calling into question among other things the degree to which Persian Judea should be pointed to as the main locus for Hebrew-scripture formation. The province’s manner of administration under Persian auspices is also becoming clearer, as is the nature and position of its closest parallel – the Samaritan sanctuary to the God of Israel on Mount Gerizim. As for the period of Greco-Roman influence in Judea, archaeology has contributed in meaningful ways to questions of acculturation and the ensuing modes of social resistance among the local populace. Recent archaeological work has questioned the reach of Hellenization, particularly into daily life, and complicated older models for understanding the Hasmonean response to it. It has revealed the lavishness of Herod’s building projects throughout the region, their influence on broader society, and their reflection of a Judean economy that was growing by leaps and bounds. Remains of the Herodian period, up through 70 CE, far outshine those of the preceding periods of Second Temple Judea and could possibly have the most lasting impact on its historiography.

For Further Reading Berlin, Andrea M. “Jewish Life Before the Revolt: The Archaeological Evidence.” Journal for the Study of Judaism 36/4 (2005): 417–470. Erlich, Adi. The Art of Hellenistic Palestine. BAR International Series 2010. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2009. Hachlili, Rachel. Ancient Synagogues – Archaeology and Art: New Discoveries and Current Research. Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section 1: Ancient Near East 104. Boston: Brill, 2013: 23–54. Levine, Lee I. Jerusalem: Portrait of the City in the Second Temple Period (538 BCE–70 CE). Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2002. Magness, Jodi. The Archaeology of the Holy Land: From the Destruction of Solomon’s Temple to the Muslim Conquest, 46–255. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Magness, Jodi. Stone and Dung, Oil and Spit: Jewish Daily Life in the Time of Jesus. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2011. Meyers, Eric M. and Mark A. Chancey. Alexander to Constantine: Archaeology of the Land of the Bible. Vol. 3, 1–180. The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. Meyers, Eric M. “Jewish Culture in Greco-Roman Palestine.” In Cultures of the Jews: A New History, 135–179. Edited by David Biale. New York: Schocken Books, 2002:. Netzer, Ehud. The Architecture of Herod, The Great Builder. Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 117. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006. Stern, Ephraim. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible. Vol. 2: The Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian Periods, 732–332 BCE. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007: 353–582. Tal, Oren. The Archaeology of Hellenistic Palestine: Between Tradition and Renewal. Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute, 2007 [Hebrew].

Angela Kim Harkins

Changes in the Study of the Religion, Theology, and Thought in the Second Temple Period: A Reappraisal of the Teacher of Righteousness 1 Introduction The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 effectively transformed our understanding of the ancient religious worlds of Judaism in the region known as Judea, later Roman Palestine, and also influenced how we think of Judaism outside the land, without the temple, in the diaspora communities throughout the Greek-speaking Mediterranean. Since the discovery of the Scrolls, scholars have been interested in this period, often referred to as the “Second Temple Period,” an area of study that was not even a recognizable field one hundred years ago. Along with a renewed interest in this time period came a revitalization of the study of early Jewish prayer and ritual. Today, a clearer sense of the impact of the discovery of the Scrolls can be assessed.1 Approximately one-fifth of the texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls fit under the broad category of “prayer” texts (that is to say, prayers, blessings, psalms, and liturgical texts).2 Now more than seventy years after their discovery, we can certainly say that one decisive change that the discovery of these scrolls from the Judean Desert has made to the field of Second Temple studies is a serious inquiry into early Jewish prayers. The Second Temple period, which bridges classical Israel and the beginnings of Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism, experienced a major revitalization since the 1980s, going from the staid and arcane assessments put forth in classic texts such as Julius Wellhausen’s Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel to being recognized as a  At the time of the symposium from which this volume emerged, the author held a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Birmingham, England (2014–2016). The research in this essay was conducted with the generous funding provided by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme under the grant agreement number 627536 RelExDSS FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IFF. The author is grateful to the symposium organizers, Carl S. Ehrlich and Sara R. Horowitz, for the privilege of being a part of the anniversary celebration of the Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York. This essay provides a summary discussion that resembles what was presented at the symposium. A fuller discussion of this topic is available in Angela Kim Harkins, “How Should We Feel about the Teacher of Righteousness?” in Ariel Feldman, Maria Cioata, and Charlotte Hempel, ed., Is There a Text in This Cave? Studies in the Textuality of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Honour of George J. Brookes. (Leiden: Brill, 2017): 493–514  Judith H. Newman, “Scribal Bodies as Liturgical Bodies: The Formation of Scriptures in Early Judaism,” in Feldman, Cioata, and Hempel, eds., Is there a Text in this Cave?, 87–88. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110418873-009

150

Angela Kim Harkins

dynamic and vibrant period.3 Methodologically, the discovery of the Scrolls reoriented scholarly focus from the study of origins – classical Israel’s origins, of course – to the study of the emergence of Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism, a time period that was largely neglected by classical historical critics. Prior to the discovery of the Scrolls, biblical scholars, dominated by historical criticism and the history-of-religion approach, had little interest in prayer at all, with most studies based solely on the biblical psalter.4 They were also consumed with a desire to understand the historical period and sought to use these newly discovered hymns, prayers, and psalms for historical reconstruction. A major scroll that was discovered at Qumran and published early on was the collection of hymns known as the Cave 1 Hodayot. Eliezer Sukenik made a preliminary assessment that these hymns were the autobiographical musings of the founder of the community: the enigmatic Teacher of Righteousness mentioned in other Cave 1 texts such as the reasonably well-preserved Pesher Habakkuk.5 From the beginning, prayers have played a complicated and deeply problematic role in the historical reconstructions of the Qumran community. For much of the twentieth century, scholarly understandings of the religion at Qumran were built upon early understandings of the Teacher, which were themselves based on a limited range of texts that had been hastily published soon after the original discoveries. On the basis of this partial evidence, scholars created an early and popular portrait of the Teacher as a religious and political figure who established the community of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the face of fierce opposition. Scholars insisted that the study of the Teacher could not be separated from the study of the enemies who opposed him, personalities who were referenced through ciphers like the Wicked Priest.6 Much of the scholarship on the Teacher of Righteousness has pursued a historical line of inquiry, with some scholars even identifying this enigmatic individual by name.7

 Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, with a reprint of the article “Israel” from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, preface by W. Robertson Smith, forward to the Scholars Press edition by Douglas A. Knight (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994, repr. 1885).  Samuel E. Balentine, Prayer in the Hebrew Bible: The Drama of Divine-Human Dialogue (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1993), 225–233.  Eliezer Sukenik, The Dead Sea Scrolls of the Hebrew University (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1955), 39.  Gert Jeremias, Der Lehrer der Gerechtigkeit, Studien zur Umwelt des Neuen Testaments 2 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1963), 9. Subsequent studies of the Teacher and Wicked Priest followed Jeremias’s reasoning: Adam S. van der Woude, “Wicked Priest or Wicked Priests? Reflections on the Identification of the Wicked Priest in the Habakkuk Commentary,” Journal of Jewish Studies 33 (1982): 349–359; Florentino García Martínez, “Qumran Origins and Early History: A Groningen Hypothesis,” Folia Orientalia 25 (1988): 113–136; Timothy H. Lim, “The Wicked Priests of the Groningen Hypothesis,” Journal of Biblical Literature 112 (1993): 415–425.  Michael O. Wise, “Dating the Teacher of Righteousness and the Floruit of his Movement,” Journal of Biblical Literature 122 (2003): 53–87; Wise, The First Messiah: Investigating the Savior before Jesus (New York: Harper Collins, 1999).

Changes in the Study of the Religion, Theology, and Thought

151

Now that the entirety of the Scrolls corpus is published, it is overwhelmingly clear that an abundant number of them has not corroborated the centrality of this figure who looms so very large in both modern scholarship and the popular imagination. The texts that were crucial for the early portrait of the Teacher were those from Cave 1, the Pesher Habakkuk (1QpHab), certain hymns from the Qumran Hodayot (1QH), and the Damascus Document (CD), copies of which had been discovered in the Cairo Geniza at the end of the nineteenth century. While there are some interesting parallels to be found between the Damascus Document and Serek ha-Yahad (1QS), it is significant that the texts thought to be the closest to the communities of the Scrolls, those known as the Serek ha-Yahad, make no mention of the Teacher of Righteousness. The time is ripe to reassess what we know historically about the Teacher of Righteousness and the religion of the Scrolls, more than seventy years after their discovery. In light of the theme of the volume, this essay discusses changes in how scholars understand the theology and thought of the religion of the Dead Sea Scrolls, as it is understood through this figure, with a special focus on changes in our understanding of the Scrolls and also changes in the study of religion that have taken place in the last thirty years. The bulk of the early scholarship on the Scrolls had as its aim a historical reconstruction of the founder of the religion – the Teacher. Interest in recovering the historical figure who stood behind the enigmatic title reflects the presumption that, in order to understand the texts, it was crucial first to know and understand their author. In other words, the presumption was that a text’s creativity and dynamism directly reflected the creativity and dynamism of the author who produced it; the two resemble one another like a child resembles his or her parent.8 Such reasoning sounds outdated to us today, given the shift precipitated by the scholars of New Criticism and, in a more extreme way, by Stanley Fish in the late twentieth century,9 but this Romantic notion of authors and texts well describes the attitude that Scrolls scholars held in the early generations.10 The earnest quest to recover the historical Teacher reflects this assumption that we need to know the Teacher in order to understand fully the Scrolls that have been found. This agenda has far outstripped scholarly consideration of how texts that reference this figure may have functioned within a religious experiential system, although to be certain, the concern with historicity and community origins may have  For a fuller discussion of these critical issues concerning authorship and romantic ideas of the author, see Angela Kim Harkins, “Who is the Teacher of the Teacher Hymns? Re-examining the Teacher Hymns Hypothesis Fifty Years Later,” in Eric F. Mason et al, eds., A Teacher for All Generations: Essays in Honor of James C. VanderKam, Vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2012): 449–467.  Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).  Perhaps contemporary to the Scrolls scholars would be the reactionary literary critic associated with Intentionalist Criticism, Eric D. Hirsch, Jr., The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), who reacted against the New Criticism and Deconstructionism. Hirsch is known for upholding the notion that authorial intention is determinative of a text’s meaning.

152

Angela Kim Harkins

been an indirect consequence of the types of texts that were published early on, since the constitutional texts naturally lend themselves to a historical inquiry into community formation and origins.

2 Cave 4 Publications It is not only for the sake of this volume’s theme that I wish to highlight the ways in which the 1980s mark a watershed decade in Scrolls scholarship. After all, the 1980s marked a time when the Cave 4 manuscripts first started to appear in the public eye. Throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, the manuscripts that came from the biggest and most plentiful deposit, namely Cave 4, were edited and published. They were the most difficult to work with given their extremely fragmentary state. They have contributed much to how Scrolls scholarship has changed in the last twenty-five years. Especially important in this regard has been the discovery of the new text known as 4QMMT; Cave 4 manuscripts of the Hodayot; and the Cave 4 manuscripts of the Serek ha-Yahad and the Damascus Document. These rule texts from Cave 4 have significantly transformed the traditional older model of a single monolithic community of the Scrolls into a more nuanced image of multiple communities of the Scrolls.11 These Cave 4 texts would go on to contribute a great deal to the scholarly understanding of the religion of these communities of the Scrolls by giving a rich indication of the role of angelic and otherworldly phenomena, and by challenging earlier longstanding views of the Scrolls. The publication of the Cave 4 manuscripts of the Hodayot highlight one way in which the early scholarly approaches to the religion of the Scrolls based largely on Cave 1 texts and motivated by the quest for the founder and founding of the community tended toward a flatfooted reading of these hymns that sought to account for their authorial and historical details while overlooking the rich religious images and themes of these writings. One example where the Cave 4 manuscripts has influenced how scholars have reread classic texts from Cave 1 is the Hodayot. The publication of the Cave 4 manuscripts in the 1980s and 1990s included an extraordinary composition that Esther Eshel named the “Self-Glorification Hymn” (SGH). This text, I think, seriously reorients the reader’s attention to a religious and heavenly culminating experience in the Hodayot. The mystical composition known as the Self-Glorification Hymn from Cave 4 was published in the 1990s.While this remarkable hymn was discovered within the larger literary context of the Hodayot, the majority of studies of the SGH

 Alison Schofield, From Qumran to the Yahad: A New Paradigm of Textual Development for the Community Rule (Leiden: Brill, 2008); John J. Collins, “Beyond the Qumran Community: Social Organization in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Dead Sea Discoveries 16 (2009): 351–369. This discussion was published in full form in Collins, Beyond the Qumran Community: The Sectarian Movement of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010).

Changes in the Study of the Religion, Theology, and Thought

153

have treated it in isolation from the Hodayot collection.12 In 2012, I examined how the Teacher Hymns of the Hodayot (cols. 9–18 of 1QH) could be understood not as autobiographical reports but as first-person highly affective scripts that bring a reader through various spatial realms.13 The practice of reading and praying with an eye to reenacting the emotional and spatial experiences found in these hymns could be said to cultivate a predisposition and a receptivity to experiencing the things that are described in the scroll, without, of course, predetermining that such an experience will happen. The religious practitioner is guided through the scripted experiences as the reader moves from the scroll, from beginning to end, as a scroll apparatus is designed to do.14 Within such a reading, the strong arousal of affect in the dramatic Teacher Hymns would move a reader toward the crescendo of the Self-Glorification Hymn, which was situated very near the end of the scroll. Another Cave 4 text that emerged in the mid-1980s is the controversial, hitherto unknown, halakhic letter known as 4QMMT (Miqṣat Ma‘aśê ha-Torah), found in as many as six different copies in Cave 4. This text was edited by John Strugnell and Elisha Qimron in Discoveries in the Judean Desert 10.15 In 1984, Qimron and Strugnell offered the bold hypothesis that this was a personal letter written by the Teacher himself to the Wicked Priest and his colleagues, in which he outlines a number of halakhic disputes. At that time and even now, many scholars are skeptical about this overly optimistic historical identification of the author(s) and of the recipients of 4QMMT, arguing that it is simply not possible to identify with certainty who the author(s) and addressees were. Like no other controversy, the debate over the authorship of 4QMMT marks a significant shift in optimism in the quest for historical origins in general. Scholarship after this point reflects a move away from a consensus model of the community’s origins and toward a greater suspicion of the ability to recover a full-blown

 Philip Alexander, The Mystical Texts, The Library of Second Temple Studies (Sheffield: T&T Clark, 2006); Alexander, “Qumran and the Genealogy of Western Mysticism,” in Esther G. Chazon and Betsy Halpern-Amaru, eds., New Perspectives on Old Texts, Proceedings of the Tenth International Symposium of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature, 9–11 January 2005, Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 88 (Leiden: Brill, 2010): 215–235.  Angela Kim Harkins, Reading with an “I” to the Heavens: Looking at the Qumran Hodayot Through the Lens of Visionary Traditions (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012).  Harkins, Reading with an “I” to the Heavens, 11–16.  Elisha Qimron and John Strugnell, Qumran Cave 4, Vol. 5: Miqsat Ma’ase ha-Torah, Discoveries in the Judean Desert 10 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994). See Qimron and Strugnell, “An Unpublished Halakhic Letter from Qumran,” in Janet Amitai, ed., Biblical Archaeology Today, Proceedings of the International Congress on Biblical Archaeology, Jerusalem, April 1984 (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1985): 400–407; and Qimron and Strugnell, “An Unpublished Halakhic Letter from Qumran,” Israel Museum Journal 4 (1985): 9–12. See the critical review of these early studies of 4QMMT by Hanne von Weissenberg, 4QMMT: Reevaluating the Text, the Function and the Meaning of the Epilogue, Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 82 (Leiden: Brill, 2009).

154

Angela Kim Harkins

historical context for the Scrolls; or at least marks a move toward greater skepticism in adopting the scholarly claims put forth about the historical Teacher and his contemporaries.16 Another significant shift in the understanding of the Scrolls within the last ten years has been in the examination of the Cave 4 manuscripts of the Serek ha-Yahad and of the Damascus Document. The analysis of these texts has shown that the singularity of experience that early scholars presumed about the Scrolls and the archaeological site known as Khirbet Qumran was an oversimplification. Synthesizing publications about the multiplicity of the communities of the Scrolls have only recently appeared.17 These studies, based on the Cave 4 data, offer a much more complex understanding of the historical context of the Scrolls than was previously imagined by the early scholars of these texts. So, too, the second century dating for the Teacher has been seriously challenged in more recent years by Jody Magness’s fresh examination of the Qumran site.18 Instead of the second-century dating, Magness has argued well for a first-century dating of the site, which has forced scholars to reexamine the longstanding theories about the dating and identification of the Teacher, the Wicked Priest, and the founding of the Qumran community that seemingly arose from conflict.19

3 Disciplinary Changes in Religious Studies and Other Disciplines Here, it is worthwhile to look more broadly at disciplinary changes that have taken place since the 1980s. While my focus for this volume is on religion, theology, and thought, it is worth noting that considerable changes in the field of religious studies have signaled a shift away from the long-established prioritization of religious thought and theology toward religious practices. During this time, anthropology has also moved away from large systemic models, which tended to overdetermine human experiences, to phenomenological and ethnographic studies that highlighted the experiences of individuals within society.20

 Charlotte Hempel, The Qumran Rule Texts in Context (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 4–7.  Schofield, From Qumran to the Yahad; and Collins, “Beyond the Qumran Community.” On changing understandings of the Damascus Document, see Maxine L. Grossman, Reading for History in the Damascus Document (Leiden: Brill, 2002); Hempel, The Qumran Rule Texts in Context.  Jody Magness, The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002).  Magness, The Archaeology of Qumran, 65.  Robert Desjarlais and C. Jason Throop, “Phenomenological Approaches in Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (2011): 87–102.

Changes in the Study of the Religion, Theology, and Thought

155

In the field of religious studies, the 1980s and 1990s marked a time of considerable growth in the understanding of the body and embodied experiences, the relationship between texts and practices, and new understandings of subjectivity. These shifts in religious studies reflect changes taking place in other social science and humanities fields, for example, anthropology and feminist studies. Ritual theorists and anthropologists have long observed how the undue prioritization of thought or belief, oftentimes the verbal or textual aspects of religion, has resulted in an inadequate attention to the study of how bodily practices are generative of meaning. As early as 1993, Talal Asad famously critiqued Clifford Geertz for prioritizing “belief” or “thought” aspects of religion at the expense of other elements.21 Through the 1990s, religious studies scholars have sought to recover the role of the body and materiality in religion and to understand it anew as embedded within a complex of political and social forces. The move away from a scholarly bifurcation of the mind and body, a split that is thought to be a prevailing concern of Christian theology,22 is expressed in the work of Catherine Bell, Roy Rappaport, and others, who have argued that the ritualization of the body are meaning-making actions and are generative of religious thought and belief.23 The 1994 publication of Antonio Damasio’s popular book, Descartes’ Error, further propelled this shift away from the priority of thought over the body by demonstrating from a neuroscience perspective the extent to which the body’s sensory perceptions and emotions are intimately involved in cognitive and decision-making processes.24 The move toward an integrated embodied experience of religion in antiquity can bring to light details that have been overlooked by strictly literary and historical approaches. The traditional prioritization of religious thought and along with it the desire to recover the historical origins of the Teacher have undergone significant changes in the last twenty-five years that move away from the quest for origins. Furthermore, in recent years, a closer look at individual experiences has brought new questions about the role of the embodied mind and the role of the imagination in religious contemplation and understandings of the self. Along with this, modern reflections in the field of religious studies that consider the ways in which new technologies influence how texts are experienced today in digital media formats or other material forms25

 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993).  Constance Furey, “Body, Society, and Subjectivity in Religious Studies,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80 (2012): 7–33.  Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Roy Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).  Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994).  See, for example, the discussion of digital images and modern media on religious visions in contemporary Islam by Amira Mittermaier, Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011): 201–231; or the role of videogaming on conceptualizations

156

Angela Kim Harkins

raise important questions about how texts would have been experienced in the ancient world. The apparatus of a scroll demands that a reader move through a text in a linear fashion, while a codex allows for random access and a non-linear reading of a text. These shifts that consider the materiality of religion in the field of religious studies have brought new questions to the study of prayer in the Second Temple period. While earlier anthropological approaches shied away from the study of individual embodied experiences, focusing instead on larger institutional structures of social life that could be more easily examined, it became clear that doing so neglected the very experiences that were constitutive of identity and self-understanding.26

4 Moving Away From a Quest for Origins In her recent monograph, Charlotte Hempel has referred to this shift away from a quest for origins with the sharply contrasting images of the Teacher as a cowboy, specifically John Wayne as he gallops onto the scene to rescue a community in distress, and the Teacher as the more obscure Wizard of Oz, whose persona looms larger than his actual reality.27 As her work on the Community Rule texts has shown, one of the biggest areas of development in the understanding of the Qumran Community/communities is the realization that the Scrolls do not reflect the unmediated concerns of a single group in the distant past; in this way, they cannot be used as the equivalent of footage or reality TV reports of events as they happened. Instead, the Scrolls are to be understood as offering highly mediated understandings of multiple communities and experiences over time. Today, the historical identification of the Teacher has reached a scholarly impasse. The identification of this figure, a religious and political leader of contested authority, has not been decisively demonstrated, and it may be that the evidence itself, as mediated texts about the Teacher, does not allow for such historical judgments. Maxine Grossman describes historical arguments about the identity of the Teacher as a failure.28 Her discussion uses postmodern thought, according to which the various writings about the Teacher succeed in generating a figure of the Teacher that is an illusory effect and not necessarily evidence of an actual historical author. Alternatively, Loren Stuckenbruck has raised the question: how was the idea of the

of religious systems in the work of Rachel Wagner, Godwired: Religion, Ritual and Virtual Reality (New York: Routledge, 2012).  Desjarlais and Throop, “Phenomenological Approaches in Anthropology,” 87–102.  Hempel, The Qumran Rule Texts in Context, 8.  Maxine L. Grossman, “Roland Barthes and the Teacher of Righteousness: The Death of the Author of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in Timothy H. Lim and John J. Collins, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010): 709–722.

Changes in the Study of the Religion, Theology, and Thought

157

Teacher used by the communities that retained his memory?29 Such an inquiry engages larger theoretical questions of meaning and mechanisms for religion’s persistence in antiquity. Perhaps we can no longer speak of a historical Teacher, but we can speak of the historical religious communities who retained and preserved his significance through ritual readings and through texts. The recovery of how the memory of the Teacher was experienced does not seek to identify him historically but rather seeks to illuminate his influence and function within a believing community. While scholars have been unable to reconstruct a coherent master narrative of the origins of the communities that stand behind the Scrolls, it may still be possible to gain insights into how the memory of the Teacher functioned experientially within such systems.

5 Beyond the Quest for the Historical Teacher An inquiry into the phenomenological experience of religion at Qumran can, I think, offer different perspectives on the scholarly understanding of the Teacher that allow us to move beyond the quest for origins and authorship. Notably, the texts associated with the Teacher in the Pesher Habakkuk and also the Damascus Document have strong affective contours. In these writings, the Teacher is presented in such a way as to strategically arouse emotion within the Second Temple reader. The admonition section of the Damascus Document presents the Teacher within a context of guilt and longing. In the case of the Pesher Habakkuk, the literary presentation is that of a highly charged emotional conflict. Instead of a maximal reconstruction of the historical context, a new question can be raised: how did the mediated understandings of the Teacher found in these texts function in the ongoing experience of religion for the communities of the Scrolls? While we may not be able to recover the historical events that lie behind a community’s origins and the key figures who were involved in it from the texts that have survived, we can perhaps say something about how these texts were read and received by actual communities.

 Loren Stuckenbruck, “The Teacher of Righteousness Remembered: From Fragmentary Sources to Collective Memory in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in Stephen C. Barton, Loren T. Stuckenbruck, and Benjamin G. Wold, eds., Memory in the Bible and Antiquity, The Fifth Durham-Tübingen Research Symposium, Durham, September 2004, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 212 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007): 75–94. A more expanded and detailed discussion may be found in L. T. Stuckenbruck, “The Legacy of the Teacher of Righteousness in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in Chazon and Halpern-Amaru, eds., New Perspectives on Old Texts, 23–49. Travis B. Williams, in History and Memory in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Remembering the Teacher of Righteousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), has made a recent and significant contribution to the inquiry into the Teacher of Righteousness, using memory theory to inform his historical reconstruction and developing what he calls a mnemonic-historical approach.

158

Angela Kim Harkins

Today more and more is known about emotional processes and the ways in which these cognitive experiences contribute to pro-sociality and entitativity. Research by evolutionary anthropologists and neuropsychologists about group identity and the formation of religious communities asks the kind of questions that can well illuminate a historical understanding of community formation. Here the study of emotions can serve as a useful point of entry into a new conversation that is taking place among humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences scholars that is attentive to the bodily dimensions of religious experience. One clear benefit of this move toward an integrative look at human experience is a new perspective on how practices and discursive traditions can be said to assist religious communities in innovative and transformative changes that allow them to endure and persist over time in changing, and sometimes adverse, circumstances.30 According to neuropsychologists, emotions have the capacity to generate perceptions of events that have the vividness of lived experience, even though they were not had at firsthand.31 Fragments of past events and emotions are intimately connected in complex processes that reconstitute memories into coherent experiences. Neuroscience highlights the plasticity of cognitive processes during the reinvigoration of memories that allows for adaptive modifications during their reconsolidation and ensures the ongoing relevance of these memories.32 The Scrolls give us partial glimpses of vivid scenarios of conflict that involve the Teacher, and they elicit strong arousals of affect. The reenactment of affect during the remembering of the past can give community members a way of re-experiencing foundational events that are long gone. In the case of the texts from Qumran, the reenactment of affect could be used to connect community members emotionally to the experiences of the fictive figure of the Teacher. Stuckenbruck writes: The memory of the Wicked Priest is also one that “remains alive” more than just a record of what happened in the past – it is activated through biblical interpretation as a way of coming to terms with what is happening in the present and what will, in consequence, happen in the future.33

The reenactment of the emotions related to the betrayal of the Teacher can play an instrumental role in helping the community to make sense of their present and future situation, as Stuckenbruck suggests. In the case of the Pesher Habakkuk, the

 Armin W. Geertz, “Global Perspectives on Methodology in the Study of Religion,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 12 (2000): 49–73; Geertz, “Brain, Body and Culture: A Biocultural Theory of Religion,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 22 (2010): 304–321.  Elizabeth A. Kensinger, “Remembering Emotional Experiences: The Contribution of Valence and Arousal,” Reviews in the Neurosciences 15 (2004): 241–253.  Joff Lee, “Reconsolidation: Maintaining Memory Relevance,” Trends in Neuroscience 32 (2009): 413–420.  Stuckenbruck, “The Legacy of the Teacher of Righteousness,” 44.

Changes in the Study of the Religion, Theology, and Thought

159

portrait of the figure is presented in such a way as to enflame the sympathies of the reader and the conflict between the Teacher and his unnamed rivals (Man of the Lie, Spouter of the Lie, Wicked Priest) portray the Teacher as a victim of injustice. This serves to elicit strong emotions of empathy within a community that is sympathetic to him. In such a scenario, the Teacher and the events related to him do not need to be understood as a historically accurate report for subsequent readers to be affected by the text. Emotion allows for the ready, empathetic engagement and personalization of the events that are described. These pesharim about the Teacher are commentaries that actualized the prophetic texts, including the psalms, by interpreting them in light of what were thought to be contemporary events of the interpreter. The interpretations constructed dramatic narratives of conflict that involved the Teacher and various opponents, who were named only by ciphers. While their vivid literary style was appealing to scholars, their highly stylized presentation of events made them difficult source material for historical reconstructions of the past.34 Nevertheless, these illusory accounts are extremely compelling. The theological pattern that these narratives express becomes actualized through affect and memory reconstruction in distinct ways so as to demonstrate the cultural relevance of these narrative patterns for living communities in Second Temple times. Furthermore, research into cognitive and emotional processes can shed light on why texts associated with this time period are organized in the way that they are. Integrative studies can help us to imagine a rationale for why the admonition section is situated prior to the legal material in the Damascus Document, thus shedding further light on the experience of religion at Qumran.35 In the admonition, foundational events and cultural memories from Israel’s past, in the form of the narratives about disobedience, punishment, and declension of the group that remains, are creatively re-appropriated into new narratives that retain all of the emotional impact of the old identity-forming stories. And, in this sense, we might say that the admonition section serves a pro-social aim. The performative reenactment of the emotions that appear in the historical narrative portions of the admonitions (theological pattern of treachery, punishment, and the declension of the group) creates a highly charged sequence of episodic vignettes within which each community member could imagine him- or herself. These episodic memories play a crucial role in the mind’s ability to anticipate future events, including the divine punishments that result unfailingly as a result of treachery. Thus, even community members who have never committed open treason against the group can imagine experientially

 Jutta Jokiranta, “Qumran – The Prototypical Teacher in the Qumran Pesharim: A Social-Identity Approach,” in Philip F. Esler, ed., Ancient Israel: The Old Testament in Its Social Context (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006): 254–263.  Angela Kim Harkins, “The Emotional Re-Experiencing of the Hortatory Narratives Found in the Admonition of the Damascus Document,” Dead Sea Discoveries 22 (2015): 285–307.

160

Angela Kim Harkins

the consequences of disobedience. Such an experience can well prepare readers of the admonition section for the legal material that follows by shaping their decisionmaking processes. In this manner, they can become predisposed to obeying the laws that they are about to receive, without predetermining their obedience. The arousal of these emotions can also serve to heighten receptivity to experiences of encounter or to enhance the feeling of commitment among the members.36 The dramatization of a dissenting group led by these rivals participates in this staging of affect for the communities of this text, insofar as the flagrant offenses by these thoroughly vilified people arouse qualities of vividness, thus making the episode more easily imagined in the mind’s eye, and thereby generating experiences of deeper commitment to the group. Moreover, the staging of affect can be understood phenomenologically as providing the occasion for the transcendent invisible God to be perceived experientially by the people in the here and now. The certainty and decisiveness with which punishment is decreed can also dynamically make accessible the invisible deity, who is said to act either providentially or punitively in these texts, viscerally experiential. The diminution of the self that the Admonition passages arouse helps to recreate the sensations of smallness that would otherwise arise naturally in the moment of encounter with the sovereign deity. The laws in the second half of the Damascus Document can then be received as sanctified and revelatory because the experience of reception imitates the experience at Sinai where the Torah was received within a personal encounter that was highly charged with emotions.

6 Conclusion The Dead Sea Scrolls have given scholars unprecedented access to the literary heritage of an ancient Jewish movement. These manuscripts have dramatically transformed how scholars understand the era that is critical for what would later become Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, a time known as the Second Temple period. The manuscripts that were discovered in 1947 became the purview of an elite group of highly specialized scholars who were skilled in ancient texts and palaeography and quickly became experts in ancient manuscript reconstruction. Now that the many manuscripts found among the caves at Qumran are finally edited and accessible to the general public, many assumptions that early scholars had about the Scrolls have been critiqued and challenged in the past thirty years.

 Pascal Boyer, “What is Memory For? Functions of Recall in Cognition and Culture,” in Pascal Boyer and James V. Wertsch, eds., Memory in Mind and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009): 3–28; Daniel L. Schacter and Donna Rose Addis, “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Constructive Memory: Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 362 (2007): 773–786.

Changes in the Study of the Religion, Theology, and Thought

161

While early understandings of the Teacher of Righteousness were marked by an optimism over what could be known about the history of this time period, today, scholars increasingly find that such a recovery of origins is not possible. The move from seeing hymns, prayers, and psalms as strictly historical data to recognizing them as religious data about a living community has only just taken place in recent years. The shift to integrative social science methods used by religious studies scholars can better equip Scrolls scholars to use the data from the discovery to consider basic questions about the religion of the Qumran movement and the role the Teacher had within the lives of the people who preserved some memory of him in their writings.

For Further Reading Brooke, George J. and Charlotte Hempel, eds. T&T Clark Companion to the Dead Sea Scrolls. London: T&T Clark, 2019. Collins, John J. Beyond the Qumran Community: The Sectarian Movement of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010. Collins, John J. and Daniel Harlow, eds. Dictionary of Early Judaism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010. Crawford, Sidnie White. Scribes and Scrolls at Qumran. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2019. DiTommaso, Lorenzo and Matthew Goff, eds. Re-Imagining Apocalypticism: Apocalypses, Apocalyptic Literature, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Atlanta: SBL, 2023. Feldman, Louis H., James L. Kugel, and Lawrence Schiffman, eds. Outside the Bible: Ancient Jewish Writings Related to Scripture. 3 Vols. The Jewish Publication Society/University of Nebraska Press, 2013. Grossman, Maxine L., ed. Rediscovering the Dead Sea Scrolls: An Assessment of Old and New Approaches and Methods. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010. Grossman, Maxine L. “Roland Barthes and the Teacher of Righteousness: The Death of the Author of the Dead Sea Scrolls.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 709–722. Edited by Timothy H. Lim and John J. Collins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Gurtner, Daniel and Loren Stuckenbruck. T&T Clark Encyclopedia of Second Temple Judaism. Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2019. Harkins, Angela Kim. Reading with an “I” to the Heavens: Looking at the Qumran Hodayot Through the Lens of Visionary Traditions. Ekstasis 3. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012. Harkins, Angela Kim. “How Should We Feel about the Teacher of Righteousness?” In Is There a Text in This Cave? Studies in the Textuality of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Honour of George J. Brooke, 493–514. Edited by Ariel Feldman, Maria Cioata, and Charlotte Hempel. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Harkins, Angela Kim. Experiencing Presence in the Second Temple Period: Revised and Updated Essays. Contributions to Biblical Exegesis and Theology 111. Leuven: Peeters Press, 2022. Hempel, Charlotte. The Qumran Rule Texts in Context. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013. Henze, Matthias and Rodney Werline, eds. Early Judaism and Its Modern Interpreters. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2020. Jokiranta, Jutta. “Qumran – The Prototypical Teacher in the Qumran Pesharim: A Social-Identity Approach.” In Ancient Israel: The Old Testament in Its Social Context, 254–263. Edited by Philip F. Esler. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006.

162

Angela Kim Harkins

Krause, Andrew, Carmen Palmer, Eileen M. Schuller, and John Screnock, eds. The Dead Sea Scrolls, Revise and Repeat: New Methods and Perspectives on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2021. Newman, Judith. Before the Bible: The Liturgical Body and the Formation of Scriptures in Early Judaism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pajunen, Mika S. and Jeremy Penner, eds. Functions of Psalms and Prayers in the Late Second Temple Period. BZAW 486. Berlin: de Gruyter Press, 2017. Stuckenbruck, Loren T. “The Legacy of the Teacher of Righteousness in the Dead Sea Scrolls.” In New Perspectives on Old Texts. Proceedings of the Tenth International Symposium of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature, 9–11 January 2005, 23–49. Edited by Esther G. Chazon and Betsy Halpern-Amaru. Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 88. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Tov, Emanuel. Scribal Practices and Approaches Reflected in the Texts found in the Judean Desert. Leiden: Brill, 2004. Ulrich, Eugene. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999. VanderKam, James. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012. Williams, Travis B. History and Memory in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Remembering the Teacher of Righteousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Zahn, Molly. Genres of Rewriting in Second Temple Judaism: Scribal Composition and Transmission. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Section 3: The Rabbinic Period

Robert Brody

The Study of Classical Rabbinic Literature in the Last Quarter-Century 1 Introduction: Two sides of a divide Any overview of classical rabbinic literature must take into account the near-total division of the field between two geographically and culturally distinct poles – the United States, on the one hand, and Israel, on the other. Much smaller groups of scholars working on classical rabbinic literature in Canada and a few European countries may be said to occupy intermediate positions between the two poles. By “classical rabbinic literature” I mean the works generally described as tannaitic (the Mishnah, the Tosefta, the halakhic midrashim, etc.) and amoraic (the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds and the earliest aggadic midrashim), even though the redaction of most if not all tannaitic works was completed in the early third century CE, after the end of the tannaitic period, and the redaction of the Babylonian Talmud, at least, was completed after the end of the amoraic period, approximately 500 CE. Of course, as I have already suggested by speaking of a “near-total division,” the split is not absolute, but there is a very high degree of correlation between the locations and the approaches of various scholars working in the field. At the risk of over-simplification, I would characterize Israeli scholars as devoting most of their energies to philological work in the classical sense, with particular emphasis on textual criticism and on tracing the connections between sources, while American scholars tend to concentrate on the sorts of questions asked in the fields of religious or cultural studies. It might be quite interesting to speculate on the possible causes of this bifurcation, including the historical roots of universities in the two countries and the difference between studying the culture of a national majority and of a fairly small minority, but I will not enter into this question. Instead, I will have a few words to say about the consequences of this divide. At the risk again of over-simplifying, it would be fair to say that American scholars tend to raise questions of broader interest, while Israeli scholars focus mostly on narrower questions, which, however, have the corresponding advantage of being more tightly controlled and appearing to be more amenable to definitive solutions. Though few practitioners would express themselves publicly in quite this way, I suspect many American scholars feel that their Israeli colleagues while away their time in pursuit of uninteresting and ultimately unimportant objectives, just as many Israelis would accuse their American counterparts of pursuing an agenda dictated by outside interests and of conducting their research in a sloppy and irresponsible fashion. There is some truth in each of these positions. On the one hand, I am troubled by the tendency of some of my Israeli colleagues to lose sight of the fact that philology https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110418873-010

166

Robert Brody

is meant to be a means to an end and that, ultimately, we should be striving to understand the messages conveyed by the texts we study and not merely the textual and linguistic garb in which they are conveyed. On the other hand, the validity of the more-or-less interesting theoretical discussions conducted by American colleagues is frequently undermined by rather elementary philological errors committed by scholars who either lack the tools to treat the texts more responsibly or consider it beneath their dignity to devote significant resources of time and energy to the philological underpinnings of their theses. In the end, the best scholars attempt to straddle this divide and treat significant questions without sacrificing textual rigor, and the best academic departments and programs endeavor to do the same. The situation I have described goes back considerably further than the last quarter-century; in some ways the gap between Israel and the United States has become more pronounced over the last twenty-five years, while in others it has narrowed. In particular, we should note the sharply declining influence of Jacob Neusner and his students, who dominated English-language scholarship in the field of classical rabbinics during the 1970s and 1980s. Neusner’s longer-term influence on the field is apparent primarily in scholars’ increased skepticism with regard to the reliability of the attributions of statements found in rabbinic texts, although there are great differences among individual scholars in this regard, and some important work has shown that Neusner’s wholesale rejection of these attributions goes much too far.1 No one, as far as I know, has followed his misguided attempts to reduce the purported messages of vast and complex rabbinic works such as the Mishnah or the Babylonian Talmud to one-sentence sound bites. I will return later to some of the trends that have been most influential over the last twenty-five years; meanwhile, I will turn to some of the specific accomplishments of this period.

2 Advances in the Infrastructure of Research A number of recent technological advances have greatly facilitated research in this area. Printed concordances have been superseded for most purposes by easily accessible online concordances of central rabbinic texts including the Mishnah, the Tosefta and the two Talmuds.2 Powerful tools for identifying and accessing textual

 See especially David C. Kraemer, The Mind of the Talmud: An Intellectual History of the Bavli (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 20–42. This has been a recurring (and sometimes implicit) theme in Richard Kalmin’s work. See, for example, Richard L. Kalmin, Jewish Babylonia Between Persia and Roman Palestine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 12–17, 149–167; Kalmin, Migrating Tales: The Talmud’s Narratives and Their Historical Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 11–12.  A free online concordance based on the vulgate printed editions is accessible at http://kodesh. snunit.k12.il. These texts and many others, inserted on the basis of selected manuscripts as part of

The Study of Classical Rabbinic Literature in the Last Quarter-Century

167

witnesses are available and others are under development. These include the longawaited Sussmann catalogue of manuscripts and (especially) manuscript fragments of the central works of classical rabbinic literature, finally published in 2012, and several websites that provide either images or transcriptions of various textual witnesses. A site that will provide collations of witnesses to the text of the Babylonian Talmud is in an advanced state of preparation as part of the Friedberg Jewish Manuscript Society.3 In addition, a database assembled by the Lieberman Institute provides an index to hundreds of works of medieval and modern scholarship dealing with specific rabbinic texts.4 There have been important advances of a less technological sort with regard to lexicography: Michael Sokoloff’s dictionaries of Palestinian and Babylonian Jewish Aramaic, published in 1990 and 2002 respectively, are of a much higher standard, although in some ways more restricted in scope, than previous dictionaries devoted to Talmudic literature; Daniel Sperber and others have made important contributions to the study of Greek and Latin loanwords in rabbinic literature; while Shaul Shaked in particular has advanced the study of Persian loanwords.5

3 Methodological Issues I would now like to turn from these developments in the infrastructure available for Talmudic studies to the course of Talmudic research per se in the last twenty-five years. Before discussing research on specific works of classical rabbinic literature, I will describe several overarching – and in my opinion quite problematic – trends. the long-term project to produce a historical dictionary of the Hebrew language, may also be searched at http://maagarim.hebrew-academy.org.il/. The Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds are also included in the database of the Bar-Ilan Responsa Project, available online by subscription.  Transcriptions of manuscripts of tannaitic texts may be found at www.biu.ac.il/JS/tannaim/, and of witnesses to the text of the Babylonian Talmud at http://www.lieberman-institute.com/. Images of many manuscripts of the Mishnah, the Tosefta, and the Babylonian Talmud are available at http:// www.jnul.huji.ac.il/dl/Talmud/. The portal http://www.jewishmanuscripts.org/ provides access to the Sussmann catalogue and to images of the great majority of Cairo Genizah fragments (not only those of Talmudic literature), as well as to the synoptic program that is now under development. (The latter has now been superseded by http://fjms.genizah.org/ which includes the synoptic program.)  See http://lieberman-index.org.  See especially: Michael Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic of the Byzantine Period2 (Ramat Gan / Baltimore: Bar-Ilan University Press/Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic of the Talmudic and Geonic Periods (Ramat Gan/Baltimore: Bar-Ilan University Press/Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Daniel Sperber, Greek in Talmudic Palestine (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2012); Shaul Shaked, “Between Iranian and Aramaic: Iranian Words Concerning Food in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, with some Notes on the Aramaic Heterograms in Iranian,” in Shaul Shaked, ed., Irano-Judaica V (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 2003), 120–137; Shaked, “Items of Dress and other Objects in Common Use: Iranian Loanwords in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic,” in Shaul Shaked, ed., Irano-Judaica III (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 1994), 106–117.

168

Robert Brody

Two related theories that have gained numerous adherents in the last several decades concern the relationship between classical rabbinic literature and historical reality. Both of these theories may be seen as reactions against earlier approaches that viewed rabbinic literature as providing straightforward and unambiguous historical evidence, both for the rabbis’ own historical setting and for the later Second Temple period. Some adherents of these earlier approaches went so far as to elide the difference between prescription and description and simply assume that rabbinic prescriptions were more or less universally observed by contemporary Jews. The first theory to which I referred arises from justified criticism of much earlier writing on these topics, but I believe it has overreacted by presenting the Palestinian rabbis of the first centuries of the Common Era as an insignificant sliver of the contemporaneous Jewish population of Palestine; some adherents of this school of thought go so far as to assert that the rabbis not only had little or no influence on other Jews but had no interest in influencing them. Other scholars, especially Stuart Miller with his model of “common complex Judaism,” according to which the rabbis and the bulk of the Jewish population shared many biblically derived and non-biblical practices and values, have offered what I believe to be more nuanced and convincing portrayals of the likely place of these rabbis and their students within the Jewish society of their time.6 In a related development – the second theory to which I referred – several recent works of scholarship have attempted to overturn the assumption that had prevailed since the nineteenth century that sections of the Mishnah and other tannaitic works, which purported to describe ceremonies performed in or connected with the Temple, were among the earliest parts of the Mishnah and could generally be taken to preserve accurate historical memories of the later Second Temple period. Those who accepted the earlier assumption, of course, realized that such sections of the Mishnah often contained later comments as well but were generally optimistic about the feasibility of isolating later additions and arriving at an early core. However, a number of recent scholars see these texts as fundamentally later productions of an academic nature of nugatory historical value. In some cases – as in Rosen-Zvi’s treatment of the procedures for testing a wife suspected of adultery described in tractate Sotah – the case for late production is cogently argued, even if the arguments offered may

 The most influential spokesman for the theory of the rabbis’ marginality has been Seth Schwartz, beginning with Seth Schwartz, Imperialism in Jewish Society: 200 BCE to 640 CE (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). For the contrary view, see Stuart S. Miller, Sages and Commoners in Late Antique Erez Israel: A Philological Inquiry into Local Traditions in Talmud Yerushalmi (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006); Miller, At the Intersection of Texts and Material Finds: Stepped Pools, Stone Vessels, and Ritual Purity Among the Jews of Roman Galilee (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015); and my essay “‘Rabbinic’ and ‘Nonrabbinic’ Jews in Mishnah and Tosefta,” in Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, Christine Hayes and Tzi Novick, eds., The Faces of Torah: Studies in the Texts and Contexts of Ancient Judaism in Honor of Steven Fraade, Supplements to the Journal of Ancient Judaism (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2017), 275–293, with additional bibliography.

The Study of Classical Rabbinic Literature in the Last Quarter-Century

169

not be ultimately convincing, while others seem almost to take this sort of position for granted.7 Another problematic trend has less to do (at least directly) with the historical setting of rabbinic literature and more to do with the understanding of this literature per se, and in particular with the relationships between its various components. There has been a powerful tendency to rank various works of the classical rabbinic corpus in a presumed hierarchy, taking it for granted that in any comparison of parallel materials the Babylonian Talmud presents the least original version, while any version preserved in a collection ostensibly dedicated entirely to tannaitic material (for example, the Tosefta or the halachic midrashim) preserves an earlier and more pristine version than either the Babylonian or the Palestinian Talmud. Numerous scholars, in my opinion, prejudge these questions rather than investigating each case on its merits and this produces some very problematic analyses.8 There is no reason to assume a priori that the “tannaitic” collections were immune to errors or even to reworking when they were transmitted independently of the Talmuds.9 Even the Mishnah, the text of which was probably treated with greater care than that of any other work of rabbinic literature, absorbed additions, some of which have infiltrated

 See Ishay Rosen-Zvi, The Mishnaic Sotah Ritual: Temple, Gender and Midrash, trans. Orr Scharf (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Naftali S. Cohn, The Memory of the Temple and the Making of the Rabbis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Cohn disposes of this question in a single note (133 n. 7), relying in part on Rosen-Zvi, and his entire book is dedicated to analyzing the Mishnaic Order of Kodashim in terms of rabbinic strategies for asserting and acquiring power.  See for example Moulie Vidas, Tradition and the Formation of the Talmud (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 143: “Given that these baraitot do not appear in compilations from the Tannaitic period itself, it is possible that this attribution (sc. as ‘recited sources’) is deliberately ironic.” The most explicit statement of this methodological position I have found is by two of Shamma Friedman’s disciples, in Joshua Kulp and Jason Rogoff, Reconstructing the Talmud: An Introduction to the Academic Study of Rabbinic Literature (New York: Mechon Hadar, 2014), 23: “In such cases, our assumption is that since the Tosefta as a corpus is earlier than the Bavli, so too the individual halakhah is found in the Tosefta in an earlier and thus more original form.” I would agree instead with Kalmin, Migrating Tales (n. 1 above), xiv: “[. . .] Tannaitic statements (or ‘Baraitot’) found in the Talmud do not necessarily reflect a later stage of development of traditions than those found in Tannaitic compilations. While they are often later, this should not be assumed to be so uncritically, and every case needs to be examined on its own merits.”  Advocates for the preferential treatment of these collections often argue that because these collections were less studied than the Babylonian Talmud they were less exposed to the depredations of copyists and “correctors”; but the other side of the coin is that their textual traditions depended on a much smaller number of tradents or manuscripts and were consequently more fragile. In the case of the Tosefta, for example, I believe I have shown that all the major textual witnesses derive from a single manuscript, which was already removed by at least two steps from the putative original. See Robert Brody, Mishnah and Tosefta Ketubbot: Text, Exegesis and Redaction (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2015), 14–20.

170

Robert Brody

all strands of the manuscript tradition.10 Other major tannaitic compilations, such as the Tosefta and the halachic midrashim, were almost certainly redacted later than the Mishnah and enjoyed less prestige. It would therefore seem not surprising if we were to find that the Babylonian Talmud or the Palestinian Talmud or both had preserved a more pristine form of a particular source than one of these tannaitic collections, and I believe that there are in fact good examples of this phenomenon.11 To some extent I think the tendency I have described may be attributed to the influence of Shamma Friedman’s extremely popular writings on a variety of important issues. Friedman’s work betrays, in my opinion, a regrettable tendency to seek blackand-white or across-the-board answers to extremely complex questions, which are then taken for granted and used as the basis for further research and analysis. For example, in a lengthy article, Friedman attempted to prove that whenever the Babylonian Talmud cites a Baraita that has a parallel in the Tosefta, the Talmudic version is secondary, and he devoted an entire book to analyzing parallels between the Mishnah and the Tosefta in (half of) tractate Pesahim, invariably coming to the conclusion that the Tosefta preserved the earlier version of sources that had been reworked in the Mishnah. In my view, not only is there no prima facie reason to expect an across-theboard answer to questions regarding the relationship between two corpora (see below), but when one considers in detail Friedman’s arguments in these and similar studies,12 they are persuasive only in a minority of cases, while in most of the cases he considers, one could equally well argue for the primacy, for example, of the Mishnah version over the Tosefta version or for some more complicated relationship between the two; and in

 The manuscripts of the Mishnah may be divided, as demonstrated by David Rosenthal and Yaakov Sussmann, into two branches: manuscripts that contain the text of the Mishnah alone and those that contain the text of (portions of) the Mishnah along with the corresponding Babylonian Talmud. These are often referred to in the secondary literature as the Palestinian and Babylonian branches, respectively, but these designations are inaccurate for reasons I have explained elsewhere (see Robert Brody, Mishnah and Tosefta Studies [Jerusalem: Magnes, 2014], 5–9). Each branch of the tradition contains errors (see Brody, Mishnah and Tosefta Studies, 11–12, 21–24), and there are also secondary readings shared by both branches (see Brody, Mishnah and Tosefta Studies, 13–14, 16–18; Jacob N. Epstein, Introduction to the Text of the Mishnah [Hebrew], [Jerusalem: Magnes, 1948], 946–958).  See note 13 below.  The studies mentioned in the text are Shamma Y. Friedman, “The Baraitot in the Babylonian Talmud and their Relationship to their Parallels in the Tosefta,” [Hebrew] in Daniel Boyarin et al, eds., Atara le-Ḥayyim, H. Z. Dimitrovsky Jubilee Volume (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2000), 163–201; and Friedman, Tosefta Atiqta Pesah Rishon: Synoptic Parallels of Mishna and Tosefta Analyzed with a Methodological Introduction [Hebrew] (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2002). Compare his analyses of the textual traditions of the Tosefta (Tosefta Atiqta, 79–86) and of tractate Bava Metzi’a in the Babylonian Talmud: for example, Friedman, Talmud Arukh BT Bava Mezi’a VI: Critical Edition with Comprehensive Commentary [Hebrew], Vols. 1–2 (New York/Jerusalem: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1996), Text Volume, 25–55.

The Study of Classical Rabbinic Literature in the Last Quarter-Century

171

another group of cases, the preponderance of the evidence favors such an alternative explanation.13 Similarly, much recent scholarship takes it almost for granted that discussions in the Babylonian Talmud rework related discussions in the Palestinian Talmud; a few scholars have gone so far as to attempt to revive the position held by medieval scholars such as Rabbi Isaac Alfasi, according to which the authors of the Babylonian Talmud were familiar with the Palestinian Talmud more or less as we know it.14 If this were an established fact, it would, of course, have a profound effect on any analysis of overlapping or otherwise related discussions in the two Talmuds. But I believe this position is untenable and the specific analyses based on the presumption of the Babylonian Talmud’s dependence on its Palestinian counterpart are often convoluted and unconvincing.15 As a rule, I believe that comparisons between parallels within the classical rabbinic corpus should be undertaken at the micro level and only in rare and exceptional cases may we be in a position to establish relationships that prevail over larger textual units.16 The prehistory of almost all works in the classical rabbinic corpus is so complex, and our ability to recreate it is so limited, that we cannot safely assume that the conduits through which the elements of a given passage were transmitted and the transformations that they underwent in the course of time are similar to those of the preceding or succeeding passage.

 See Brody, Mishnah and Tosefta Studies, 141–145, 150–154; and compare, Brody, Mishnah and Tosefta Studies, 119–139. In my opinion, Friedman applies Occam’s razor incorrectly when he asserts in various contexts that it is methodologically preferable to propose reconstructions in which the extant sources depend on one another rather than positing the existence of other relevant sources that have been lost – the complexity of a given hypothesis must be measured not merely in terms of the number of sources it involves but also of the nature of the hypothetical processes connecting them.  See especially Alyssa M. Gray, A Talmud in Exile: The Influence of Yerushalmi Avodah Zarah on the Formation of Bavli Avodah Zarah (Providence: Brown University Press, 2005).  Among other reasons I think this theory is implausible in the extreme is the existence of numerous cases in which one would have expected the Babylonian Talmud to make use of materials found in the Palestinian Talmud, if its editors had known this Talmud, including cases in which the Babylonian Talmud leaves unresolved problems or issues that could have been settled by reference to the Palestinian Talmud. For some examples of problematic analyses based on this assumption, see Vidas, Tradition 62–69, 85–92; and Kulp and Rogoff, Reconstructing the Talmud, in various places. Kulp and Rogoff enunciate this assumption as a methodological principle on page 29: “When analyzing any parallel between these two compositions, our a priori assumption is that the literary format of the material in the Yerushalmi predates that of the Bavli. This is true even if the statements are attributed to Babylonian rabbis.”  For discussion of the issues involved and an attempt to demonstrate dependence in an exceptional case, see Chaim Milikowsky, “Seder Olam and the Tosefta” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 49 (1980): 246–263.

172

Robert Brody

4 Research on Tannaitic Literature The most important developments of the last twenty-five years with regard to specific works in the classical rabbinic corpus follow in approximate chronological order. The field of tannaitic literature has seen some very impressive accomplishments, especially in the form of two magisterial critical editions: Menahem Kahana’s edition of Sifre Numbers and Chaim Milikowky’s edition of Seder Olam.17 Both of these have replaced editions produced in the first half of the twentieth century and demonstrate the tremendous methodological progress made in the field and the greatly improved understanding of the classical texts that this progress makes possible. Although there are undeniable differences between the approaches of the two editors, there is much more common ground; these works immediately achieved classic status and will undoubtedly occupy central positions in the field for many decades at the least.18 In contrast to these areas of tannaitic literature, it is both remarkable and deeply regrettable how little progress has been made in critically editing two other works of tannaitic literature that are arguably even more central to the corpus of classical Talmudic literature, namely the Mishnah and Tosefta. To the best of my knowledge, no critical editions of any tractates of these works have appeared since Abraham Goldberg’s edition of Mishnah Eruvin was published in 1986 and the posthumous publication of the last volumes of Saul Lieberman’s Tosefta and Tosefta ki-Peshutah in 1988.19 Furthermore, there has been very little discussion of the textual traditions of these two works in the intervening years – Sussmann’s and Rosenthal’s conclusions with regard to the “Palestinian” and “Babylonian” traditions of the Mishnah, and Lieberman’s

 Menahem I. Kahana, Sifre on Numbers: An Annotated Edition [Hebrew], Vols. 1–5 (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2011–2015); Chaim Milikowsky, Seder Olam: Critical Edition, Commentary and Introduction [Hebrew], Vols. 1–2 (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 2013). Kahana has made many other important contributions to the study of halachic midrashim; especially noteworthy are Manuscripts of the Halakhic Midrashim: An Annotated Catalogue [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences, 1995); Genizah Fragments of Halakhic Midrashim [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2005); and Sifre Zuta on Deuteronomy: Citations from a New Tannaitic Midrash [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2002).  Both editors have conducted thorough investigations of the relationships between the various textual witnesses and each presents a text based on a selected witness (in Milikowsky’s case, because of the fragmentary nature of the best manuscripts, the base text switches between several witnesses), occasionally corrected but never on the basis of conjectural emendation. Milikowsky places greater stress on stemmatic analysis, while Kahana is willing to adopt the readings of indirect witnesses on rare occasions. There are also some differences with regard to the ways in which departures from the base text are marked and the comprehensiveness of the listing of variant readings. For details see Kahana, Sifre on Numbers, xx–xxv and Milikowsky, Seder Olam, 208–209.  I should, however, take note of the ongoing publication of an edition of the Mishnah by various members of the Safrai family (Mishnah Eretz Yisra’el, the first volume of which appeared in 2008), that presents the text according to the edition princeps and MS Kaufmann in parallel columns. The only real exception of which I am aware is David Pialkoff’s privately published 2013 edition of Tosefta Zevaḥim.

The Study of Classical Rabbinic Literature in the Last Quarter-Century

173

with regard to the traditions of the Tosefta, have been accepted almost without debate and may be said to have achieved the status of unquestioned assumptions. I have lately entered this fray with two books arguing that Sussmann’s and Rosenthal’s results, while essentially valid, have been interpreted as implying far more than they really do, and that Lieberman’s views with regard to the textual history of the Tosefta require fundamental revision.20 The aspect of Mishnah and Tosefta studies that has attracted considerably more scholarly attention over the last quarter-century is the interrelationship between these two works. According to the accepted scholarly account prior to this time, the Mishnah is the earlier work and the Tosefta may be seen as a slightly later work that responds to the Mishnah in a variety of ways, including explicating obscure passages, adducing additional opinions on topics discussed in the Mishnah, and introducing discussion of topics omitted for one reason or another in the Mishnah. More recently a number of scholars, most prominently Judith Hauptman and Shamma Friedman, have attempted to turn this portrayal on its head – to a greater or lesser extent – and to argue that the Mishnah often represents a reworking of materials that are preserved in more pristine form in the Tosefta; Hauptman goes so far as to claim that the Mishnah was actually published after the Tosefta.21 I think these scholars both overstate the innovative nature of their theories – it is virtually undeniable, and has been remarked upon by many others, that the Tosefta contains materials that predate the publication of the Mishnah – and press their claims much too far. The relationships governing pairs of passages in the Mishnah and the Tosefta vary considerably from one case to another and need to be examined on an individual basis (as do parallels between other works of classical rabbinic literature, as I have noted above); there is no reason to expect one sort of relationship to prevail across the board, and in my opinion the evidence clearly demonstrates that it does not.22 Work with a less narrowly philological bent has been pursued on a number of fronts. The internal history of rabbinic law has been investigated perhaps most prominently by David Henshke, while connections and contrasts with pre-rabbinic (especially Qumranic) law and literature have been the subject of studies by Joseph Baumgarten and Yaakov Sussmann, and more recently by Steven Fraade, Aharon Shemesh, and Vered Noam.23 A number of younger scholars, mostly North American, have produced  Robert Brody, Mishnah and Tosefta Studies, especially 1–61; Brody, Mishnah and Tosefta Ketubbot, esp. 1–40.  Friedman has presented his position on this issue in a number of publications, most elaborately in Tosefta Atiqta; for Hauptman’s position, see especially Judith Hauptman, Rereading the Mishnah: A New Approach to Ancient Jewish Texts (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005).  See Brody, Mishnah and Tosefta Studies, 111–154; Brody, Mishnah and Tosefta Ketubbot, 41–48.  See David Henshke, The First Mishnah in the Talmud of the Last Tannaim: Topics in the Laws of Bailees [Hebrew] (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1997); Henshke, Festival Joy in Tannaitic Discourse [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2007); Joseph Baumgarten, ed., The Damascus Document (4 Q 266–273) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996); Baumgarten, Halakhic Texts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), as

174

Robert Brody

studies devoted to particular tractates of the Mishnah or particular aspects of this work. Among them are Moshe Simon-Shoshan, who has discussed narrativity in the Mishnah with special reference to the stories it includes; Avraham Walfish, whose investigations of literary features of the Mishnah represent a counterweight to the diachronic emphasis of a great deal of Mishnah research that emphasizes source criticism; and Yair Furstenberg, whose work integrates source criticism and close attention to literary features. Elizabeth Shanks Alexander has attempted to analyze the relationship between the Mishnah and Tosefta of tractate Shevu’ot through the prism of orality theory; and Beth Berkowitz has studied “death penalty discourse” in tractate Sanhedrin. Zvi Novick’s work is worthy of separate notice as one of the few significant ventures into the field of rabbinic theology.24

5 Research on Amoraic Literature Turning to the study of amoraic literature, we will first consider Palestinian literature, namely the Palestinian Talmud and the earliest of the so-called aggadic midrashim. There have been several important achievements in the philological study of the Palestinian Talmud, beginning with the publication of a new edition of this Talmud by

well as numerous studies collected in Ruth A. Clemens and Daniel R. Schwartz, eds., Studies in Jewish Law and Thought (Leiden: Brill, 2022); Yaakov Sussmann, “The History of Halakha and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Preliminary Observations on Miqşat Ma’ase Ha-Torah (4 Q MMT),” Tarbiz 59 (1990): 11–76; Steven D. Fraade, Legal Fictions: Studies of Law and Narrative in the Discursive Worlds of Ancient Jewish Sectarians and Sages (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Aharon Shemesh, Halakhah in the Making: The Development of Law from Qumran to the Rabbis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Vered Noam, From Qumran to the Rabbinic Revolution: Conceptions of Impurity [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 2010).  See Moshe Simon-Shoshan, Stories of the Law: Narrative Discourse and the Construction of Authority in the Mishnah (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Avraham Walfish, “Approaching the Text and Approaching God: The Redaction of Mishnah and Tosefta Berakhot,” Jewish Studies 43 (2005–2006): 21–79; Yair Furstenberg, “Early Redactions of Purities: Re-examination of Mishnah Source-Criticism,” Tarbiz 80 (2012): 507–537; Elizabeth Shanks Alexander, Transmitting Mishnah: The Shaping Influence of Oral Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Beth A. Berkowitz, Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), to which compare Aharon Shemesh, Punishments and Crimes: From the Bible to Rabbinic Literature [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2003); Tzvi Novick, What is Good, and What God Demands: Normative Structures in Tannaitic Literature (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2010). There is much material concerning rabbinic theology in the writings of Menahem Kahana and Chaim Milikowsky; other book-length studies that deserve mention here are Chaya T. Halberstam, Law and Truth in Biblical and Rabbinic Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010) and Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Demonic Desires: Yetzer Hara and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

The Study of Classical Rabbinic Literature in the Last Quarter-Century

175

the Academy of the Hebrew Language in 2001.25 The basis of this edition is Binyamin Elizur’s extremely careful and scrupulous collation of the Leiden manuscript, the only manuscript that contains the text of most of the Palestinian Talmud and on which previous printed editions were also based. The new edition contains some corrected readings but is primarily noteworthy for distinguishing between the base text of the manuscript and the many corrections and emendations, from several hands, which it contains. In addition, other manuscripts of the Talmud, all much more fragmentary, are partially collated, and editorial symbols indicate textually suspect readings and passages. Unfortunately, no details are provided as to the nature of these suspicions and suggested remedies, and very few details are given as to the other manuscripts consulted.26 Elizur is currently engaged in producing a companion volume intended to correct these shortcomings.27 The other major advance in this area has been the publication of two large-scale studies devoted to the terminology of the Palestinian Talmud.28 Leib Moscovitz’s volume analyzes a limited number of technical terms in great depth, while Moshe Assis’ multivolume work treats a much larger number of terms and cites all the occurrences of most of them but analyzes their meanings and nuances less thoroughly.29 The leading contributor to the philological study of the earlier aggadic midrashim over the last quarter-century has been Chaim Milikowsky, whose online synopsis of manuscripts of Leviticus Rabbah and studies on the interrelationships of Genesis Rabbah, Leviticus Rabbah, Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana, and the Palestinian Talmud  Talmud Yerushalmi . . . according to MS Scaliger 3 . . . with introduction by Yaakov Sussmann [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Academy of the Hebrew Language, 2001).  For an assessment of this edition, see Shlomo Naeh, “Talmud Yerushalmi of the Academy of the Hebrew Language” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 71 (2002): 569–603.  The synoptic edition Synopse zum Talmud Yerushalmi, edited by Peter Schäfer and Hans-Jürgen Becker, 4 volumes in 7 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1991–2001), is of very little value because all printed editions depend on the editio princeps, which in turn depends on the Leiden manuscript transcribed in the Academy of the Hebrew Language edition described above. Several more-or-less academic translations of the Palestinian Talmud have also appeared during the period of our survey: Jacob Neusner (and others), The Talmud of the Land of Israel: A Preliminary Translation and Explanation, 1–35 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982–1994); Heinrich W. Guggenheimer, The Jerusalem Talmud: Edition, Translation, and Commentary, 4 volumes in 17 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999–2015); Martin Hengel, Jacob Neusner, and Peter Schäfer, Übersetzung des Talmud Yerushalmi (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck), with 30 volumes published between 1975 and 2011, is still incomplete.  Leib Moscovitz, The Terminology of the Yerushalmi: The Principal Terms [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2009); Moshe Assis, A Concordance of Amoraic Terms Expressions and Phrases in the Yerushalmi [Hebrew], 1–3 (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2010).  Other significant contributions to the study of the Palestinian Talmud during the period of our survey include: Moshe Assis, “More on the Question of the Redaction of Yerushalmi Neziqin” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 81 (2013): 191–294; Nurit Be’eri, Exploring Ta’aniyot: Yerushalmi, Tractate Ta’aniyot – Forming and Redacting the Traditions [Hebrew] (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2009); and the essays collected in Peter Schäfer, ed., The Talmud Yerushalmi and Graeco-Roman Culture, Vols. 1–3 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998–2002).

176

Robert Brody

are particularly noteworthy. Menahem Kahana has also made significant contributions in this area and a number of scholars have done important work on somewhat later midrashim that lie outside the scope of this survey.30 A variety of literary approaches to the study of midrash have been pursued by scholars during this period, beginning with the immensely influential work of Yonah Fraenkel, especially with regard to the interpretation of rabbinic stories; some sense of the range of literary approaches taken by other scholars may be obtained from the collection edited by Carol Bakhos.31 James Kugel and Menahem Kister have played a leading role in demonstrating that many midrashic interpretations of biblical passages have pre-rabbinic origins and in tracing the complex evolutionary trajectories of some of these.32 The academic study of the Babylonian Talmud during this period has to a large extent been dominated by what might be termed the Halivni-Friedman school. In the context of this brief survey, I cannot discuss the finer points of the positions maintained by David Weiss Halivni and Shamma Friedman nor their development over time; the common denominator of their work on the Babylonian Talmud is the belief that the vast majority of the anonymous material in this Talmud should be assigned a post-amoraic date (roughly speaking sixth to seventh centuries). This widely accepted position has far-reaching implications both for Talmudic exegesis and for any attempt to trace the development of rabbinic thinking in general or on any particular issue. I have on several occasions argued against the wholesale nature of this approach – while it is clear that anonymous dicta that appear at first glance to underlie attributed statements are often actually later than these named statements, I believe that this cannot be asserted as a general rule and that attempting to impose such a rule on the sources leads, in a substantial number of cases, to forced and implausible readings.33

 See: Menahem Kahana, “Genesis Rabba MS Vatican 60 and its Parallels” [Hebrew], Teudah 11 (1996): 17–60; Kahana, “Spun Linen: The Redaction of the Portion ‘In the Beginning’ in the Midrash Genesis Rabbah,” in Joshua Levinson, Jacob Elbaum, and Galit Hasan-Rokem, eds., Higayon l’Yonah: New Aspects in the Study of Midrash, Aggadah and Piyut in Honor of Professor Yona Fraenkel [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2006), 347–376. Milikowsky’s synopsis of Leviticus Rabbah may be accessed at www.biu.ac.il/JS/midrash/VR/editionData.htm; of his many articles on the topics described I will mention only one in English: “On the Formation and Transmission of Bereshit Rabbah and the Yerushalmi: Questions of Redaction, Text-Criticism and Literary Relationships,” Jewish Quarterly Review 92 (2002): 521–567.  The jubilee volume mentioned in the previous note contains a bibliography of Fraenkel’s writings. See Carol Bakhos, ed., Current Trends in the Study of Midrash, Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 106 (Leiden: Brill, 2006).  This theme runs through many of Kugel’s book-length and shorter studies (see especially James L. Kugel, The Bible as It Was [Cambridge: Belknap, 1997]) and Kister’s articles, of which we may mention “Metamorphoses of Aggadic Tradition” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 60 (1991): 179–224.  For Friedman’s and Halivni’s major works on the dating of the anonymous portions of the Babylonian Talmud from the period of this survey, see especially Shamma Friedman, Talmud Arukh BT Bava Mezi`a VI: Critical Edition with Comprehensive Commentary [Hebrew], 1–2 . (New York and Jerusalem: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1996) and Friedman, Talmudic Studies: Investigating

The Study of Classical Rabbinic Literature in the Last Quarter-Century

177

Another trend that has had considerable influence in recent years has been to emphasize the Iranian cultural milieu in which the Babylonian Talmud was produced as a central key to its interpretation. A number of mostly younger scholars have followed the lead of Yaakov Elman, who has produced a series of Irano-Talmudic studies over the last fifteen years; this area of research has recently been the subject of a book-length introduction by Shai Secunda.34 As I have discussed at length elsewhere, the extent of Iranian influence – especially in the domain of law – has been overstated and much of the work done in this field is vitiated by poor philology and other methodological flaws.35 There has been almost no progress in the critical editing of the Babylonian Talmud, aside from the appearance from time to time of additional volumes of the variorum edition produced by the Institute for the Complete Israeli Talmud (part of Yad Ha-Rav Herzog).36 A number of studies have treated aspects of the textual criticism of particular chapters or tractates, with particular attention directed to the vexed question of the significance of the Yemenite manuscripts.37 Progress in publishing

the Sugya, Variant Readings and Aggada (New York and Jerusalem: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2010); for Halivni see The Formation of the Babylonian Talmud, trans. Jeffrey L. Rubenstein (New York: Oxford University, 2013) and the four volumes of Sources and Traditions: A Source Critical Commentary on the Talmud [Hebrew] published by Magnes (Jerusalem), 1993–2012. For my articles on this subject see “The Anonymous Talmud and the Words of the Amoraim” [Hebrew] in Baruch J. Schwartz, Avraham Melamed and Aaron Shemesh, eds., Iggud: Selected Essays in Jewish Studies, Vol. 1, 213–232 (Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 2008); “On Dating the Anonymous Portions of the Babylonian Talmud,” [Hebrew], Sidra 25 (2010): 71–81; and “The Contribution of the Palestinian Talmud to Dating the Anonymous Portions of the Babylonian Talmud” [Hebrew], in Aaron Amit and Aharon Shemesh, eds., Melekhet Maḥshevet: Studies in the Redaction and Development of Talmudic Literature (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 2011), Hebrew section, 27–37; I deal with it again in my forthcoming commentary on tractate Ketubbot of the Babylonian Talmud. For Friedman’s response to my arguments, see Shamma Friedman, Talmudic Studies: Investigating the Sugya, Variant Readings and Aggada (New York/Jerusalem: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2010), 73–116.  Shai Secunda, The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in Its Sasanian Context (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), includes a historical survey of research in this field and an extensive bibliography.  R. Brody, “Irano-Talmudica: The New Parallelomania?” Jewish Quarterly Review 106 (2016): 209–232; see also my review of Secunda’s book (Zion 79 [2014]: 435–437) and the perhaps overly harsh review by Geoffrey Herman (Association for Jewish Studies Review 39 [2015]: 170–173).  To date, these volumes cover the bulk of the Order Nashim of the Babylonian Talmud as well as the Order Zeraim of the Mishnah. For an assessment of this edition (along with an argument that it should be replaced by online synoptic editions), see Shamma Friedman, “Variant Readings in the Babylonian Talmud – A Methodological Study Marking the Appearance of 13 Volumes of the Institute for the Complete Israeli Talmud’s Edition” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 68 (1998): 129–162.  For positive assessments of the Yemenite manuscripts, see Mordechai Sabato, A Yemenite Manuscript of Tractate Sanhedrin (Bavli) and Its Place in the Textual Tradition [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, Institute of Jewish Studies, 1998) and Rabin Shushtri, “The Text of Tractate Sukka in the Babylonian Talmud” [Hebrew], Ph.D. diss., Ramat Gan 2009; for negative assessments see

178

Robert Brody

commentaries has also been disappointing: Shamma Friedman, in addition to publishing an edition of and commentary on the sixth chapter of tractate Bava Mezi’a, has founded a series devoted to the publication of critical commentaries on chapters of the Talmud, of which six have appeared to date.38 Unfortunately, the quality of these volumes is quite uneven; those written by Moshe Benovitz, in particular, will repay careful study.39 Aside from these commentaries on entire chapters, I would like to mention Eliezer Segal’s multivolume commentary on a large section of the first chapter of tractate Megillah devoted to midrashic exegesis of the book of Esther and Christine Hayes’ book comparing the tractates of Avodah Zarah in the Palestinian and the Babylonian Talmuds, which contains many important methodological observations.40 Quite a bit of work has been done on the aggadic or non-legal portions of the Talmud. Most of the leading contributors to this field have worked, with varying emphases, on Talmudic stories. Prominent among them are Richard Kalmin, whose studies have focused on delineating cultural and social differences between Babylonian and Palestinian amoraim and on the eastward migration of various types of traditions, especially in the fourth century; Jeffrey Rubenstein, who has studied such aspects of Babylonian rabbinic culture as competitiveness and shame on the basis of Talmudic narratives that he sees as reflecting the “stammaitic” society of the sixth and seventh centuries; and Shulamit Valler, who has written on stories concerning women and femininity and on emotions such as grief and distress. Legal stories or case reports have attracted the attention of Eliezer Segal at the beginning of our period and of Barry Wimpfheimer towards its end. Wimpfheimer’s work is noteworthy for its attempt to deconstruct the generally accepted dichotomy between halakhah and aggadah by emphasizing the liminal character of legal stories.41

Stephen G. Wald, BT Pesahim III: Critical Edition with Comprehensive Commentary [Hebrew], (Jerusalem/New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2000), 269–354 (esp. 269–283) and Aaron Amit, “The Place of the Yemenite Manuscripts in the Textual Tradition of Bavli Pesahim,” Hebrew Union College Annual 73 (2002): Hebrew section, 31–77. I cannot enter here into the arguments on both sides. Other important studies on textual matters include Friedman’s various writings on tractate Bava Metzi’a, including the one mentioned in note 12 above, and Yoav Rosenthal, “Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Kareitot,” Ph.D. diss., Jerusalem 2003.  For the first volume mentioned see note 12 above. Details concerning the Igud HaTalmud organization and its publications may be found at www.talmudha-igud.org.il.  The same is true of his earlier book: Moshe Benovitz, BT Shevu’ot III: Critical Edition with Comprehensive Commentary [Hebrew] (New York/Jerusalem: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2003).  Christine E. Hayes, Between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds: Accounting for Halakhic Difference in Selected Sugyot from Tractate Avodah Zarah (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Eliezer Segal, The Babylonian Esther Midrash: A Critical Commentary, ols. 1–3 (Atlanta: Scholars, 1994).  For the first three authors mentioned see especially Kalmin, Sages, Stories, Authors and Editors in Rabbinic Babylonia (Atlanta: Scholars, 1994); Kalmin, Jewish Babylonia between Persia and Roman Palestine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Kalmin, Migrating Tales: The Talmud’s Narratives and their Historical Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); Rubenstein, Talmudic

The Study of Classical Rabbinic Literature in the Last Quarter-Century

179

6 Studies of Rabbinic Culture Finally, several important studies have been published over the last twenty-five years that deal with rabbinic literature or culture more broadly rather than with a particular work in the classical rabbinic corpus. None of these studies have the broad sweep of Ephraim Urbach’s studies, most notably The Sages: Their Beliefs and Opinions, or of even earlier studies such as George Foot Moore’s Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era: The Age of the Tannaim,42 but what they have lost in breadth they have gained in methodological sophistication, especially in their sensitivity to the very considerable range of attitudes on many questions in classical rabbinic literature and in their refusal to homogenize differing opinions in order to present a putative rabbinic worldview. Daniel Boyarin has produced numerous studies on a variety of central topics in rabbinic culture, although many of them stretch the boundaries of the discipline of rabbinics. Alongside studies devoted to subjects such as rabbinic attitudes towards masculinity and martyrdom, he has written extensively on (parts of) the Talmud from the viewpoint of contemporary literary theory, especially of Bakhtin, discussing such questions as whether the Babylonian Talmud is truly or only ostensibly dialogical and whether it may be assigned to the category of Menippean satire. A central concern in his writing has been the attempt to show that the “parting of the ways” between Judaism and Christianity was considerably less clear-cut and more gradual than is commonly assumed.43 Rabbinic attitudes toward sexuality, the focus of one of Boyarin’s earlier books, have attracted other scholars, notably Michael Satlow and Naomi Koltun-Fromm. Rabbinic attitudes to gender issues have attracted scholars, including Miriam Peskowitz and Mira Balberg, and in recent years a multivolume feminist commentary on

Stories: Narrative Art, Composition, and Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Rubenstein, The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Rubenstein, Stories of the Babylonian Talmud (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Shulamit Valler, Women and Femininity in Talmudic Stories [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Ha-Kibbutz Ha-Meuhad, 1996); Valler, Sorrow and Distress in Talmudic Stories [Hebrew] (Bene Berak: Ha-Kibbutz Ha-Meuhad, 2012). For the legal stories, see Eliezer Segal, Case Citation in the Babylonian Talmud: The Evidence of Tractate Neziqin (Atlanta: Scholars, 1990); Barry S. Wimpfheimer, Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).  George Foot Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era: The Age of the Tannaim, 1–3 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927–1930); Ephraim Elimelech Urbach, The Sages: Their Beliefs and Opinions2 [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1978).  Some of the most important of Boyarin’s many volumes are Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); and Socrates and the Fat Rabbis (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

180

Robert Brody

the Talmud has begun to appear.44 Marc Hirshman and Azzan Yadin have attempted to isolate ideological trends within tannaitic literature that have been largely obscured by other more influential schools of thought.45 Rabbinic attitudes towards Jewish identity and towards purity have also been the subject of important studies by scholars including Christine Hayes and Ishay Rosen-Zvi, while authors including David Kramer and Leib Moscovitz have attempted to trace the development of rabbinic thought over time with less emphasis on its specific contents and more on its increasing structural sophistication.46 I hope this necessarily brief survey has given some sense of the shape of the field over the last twenty-five years, including some of its major achievements and some of its more neglected aspects, both of which may serve to stimulate and challenge its practitioners in the years to come.

For Further Reading Albeck, Hanoch. Ha-Derashot be-Yisrael ve-Hishtalshelutan ha-Historit (revised translation of Leopold Zunz, Gottdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden: historisch entwickelt). Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1947. Albeck, Hanoch. Introduction to the Mishna [Hebrew]. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute and Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1959. Albeck, Hanoch. Introduction to the Talmud, Babli and Yerushalmi. [Hebrew] Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1969. Brody, Robert. Mishnah and Tosefta Studies. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2014. Epstein, Jacob N. Mavo le-Nusaḥ ha-Mishnah. Jerusalem: Magnes Press and Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1948.

 Michael Satlow, Tasting the Dish: Rabbinic Rhetorics of Sexuality (Atlanta: Scholars, 1995); Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Naomi KoltunFromm, Hermeneutics and Holiness: Ancient Jewish and Christian Notions of Sexuality and Religious Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Miriam B. Peskowitz, Spinning Fantasies: Rabbis, Gender and History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Mira Balberg, Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). For the Feminist Commentary on the Babylonian Talmud see http://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/judaistik/ Forschung/talmudbavli/.  Marc Hirshman, Torah for All the World’s People: A Universalistic Current in Tannaitic Literature and Its Relationship to the Wisdom of the Nations [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1999); Azzan Yadin, Scripture as Logos: Rabbi Ishmael and the Origins of Midrash (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Yadin, Scripture and Tradition: Rabbi Akiva and the Triumph of Midrash (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).  Christine E. Hayes, Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities: Intermarriage and Conversion from the Bible to the Talmud (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Ishay Rosen-Zvi, “The Birth of the Goy in Rabbinic Literature,” in Gideon Bohak, Ron Margolin and Ishay Rosen-Zvi, eds., Myth, Ritual and Mysticism: Studies in Honor of Professor Ithamar Gruenwald [Hebrew], Te’uda 26 (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 2014), 361–438; Kraemer, The Mind of the Talmud; Leib Moscovitz, Talmudic Reasoning: From Casuistics to Conceptualiztion (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002).

The Study of Classical Rabbinic Literature in the Last Quarter-Century

181

Fraade, Steven D. From Tradition to Commentary: Torah and its Interpretation in the Midrash Sifre to Deuteronomy. Albany: SUNY Press, 1991. Frankel, Yonah. Darkhei ha-Aggadah veha-Midrash, I-II. Givatayim: Yas la-Talmud, 1991. Frankel, Zechariah. Introductio ad Talmud Hierosolymitanum. [Hebrew]. Breslau: Schletter, 1870. Liebermann, Shaul. Tosefta ki-Peshutah, I–X. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1955–1988. Moscovitz, Leib. Talmudic Reasoning: From Casuistics to Conceptualiztion. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002. Safrai, Shmuel, ed. The Literature of the Sages, I–II. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1987–2006. Weiss, Abraham. The Talmud in Its Development. [Hebrew]. New York: Philipp Feldheim, 1954. Zlotnick, Dov. The Iron Pillar – Mishnah: Redaction, Form and Intent. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1988.

Steven Fine

Rabbi Akiba in 3D: Artifact, Text, and the Recent History of Judaism in Late Antiquity 1 Introduction The bridge between text and artifact is a precarious one.1 Creating relationships between things that we can see and touch and things that we can read and hear requires an open-ended hermeneutic that allows each variety of evidence to “speak” for itself – with the hope of creating some sort of interaction not unlike that formed by the disparate instruments of a symphony.2 Such scholarship requires equal training in the deep complexities of philology, historical method, and art history, the skills of a close reader of texts and of one who is completely comfortable exploring the complexities of the visual world. In this project, as I imagine it, neither the text nor the artifact is the ultimate goal of inquiry. Both are the raw materials from which human history may be teased and imagined. The jump to history is a project that requires a deeply informed interpreter willing to make a methodically informed leap, often best done by teams of scholars. Nowhere is this type of scholarship more precarious than in the study of ancient history. The few sources at our disposal all but preclude the writing of many kinds of history and incline us toward others. Scholars of late antique Judaism, that is, the “Period of the Mishnah and the Talmud,” must rely upon sources that are often uninterested in anything like historical research – even as practiced by the likes of Polybius, Flavius Josephus, Lucian, or even Procopius. Jewish literary sources, the products of rabbinic circles in Palestine and Babylonia, reflect the lives of the rabbis and the larger community – even as their setting is the shared structures of daily life in late antiquity. Our knowledge of Jews in Parthian and Sasanian Persia is derived almost exclusively from a single (albeit huge) corpus, the Babylonian Talmud. Western communities, from Spain in the west to Dura Europos in the east, are known principally from archaeological evidence – with a smattering of Roman legal texts, patristic and rabbinic sources. We know more about Roman Palestine, the focus of this essay, because archaeological remains are so rich and thanks to the great variety of sources available – tan-

 This essay is dedicated in memory of Rachel Hachlili ‫ז״ל‬.  I discuss these issues more fully in my “Archaeology and the Interpretation of Midrash,” in M. Kraus, ed., How Should Late Antique Rabbinic Literature Be Read in the Modern World? Hermeneutical Limits and Possibilities (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006): 199–217. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110418873-011

184

Steven Fine

naitic and amoraic, homiletical, legal, liturgical, and magical. This body of knowledge has expanded exponentially with the discovery and publication of documents from the Cairo Genizah, coupled with riches “unearthed” in European libraries.3 It is not an overstatement to suggest that Genizah discoveries – coupled with archaeological discoveries – have pulled back a curtain and made the period of Christian and early Islamic domination of the Holy Land visible, often for the first time. The literary products of rabbis, Samaritan sages, church fathers, and Roman jurists – all elite literati of different sorts – may be profitably placed in communication with archaeological sources that express a range of cultural contexts – from urban elites in Sardis and Hammath Tiberias to peasants and near-peasants in the Golan Heights, Samaria, and the Judean Shephelah, the literate and the less literate and the non-literate. These sources, visual and literary, tell us much about the lived culture of Jewish communities in the Land of Israel. Political or military history is hard to come by, and women and non-elite men hardly ever speak for themselves. Bridges between the surviving sources are tough to forge. All of this is to set the context for the larger goal of this essay: to explore some of the ways that artifacts and texts are used together in some recent studies in the history of Judaism in late Roman antiquity, roughly from the mid-second century and continuing past the Islamic conquest of 636 CE. I call this “Rabbi Akiba in 3-D,” both to assert the centrality of rabbinic literature to this project and my aspiration to view this material synthetically. In this sense I am instinctively a “lumper” rather than a “divider” – often a difficult position to maintain due to real paucity of sources that is endemic to the study of ancient history.4 Then again, those who assert more minimal approaches often fill the spaces between our sources with other grouting compounds and make broad claims based upon lack of evidence.

 I deal with the methodological issues occasioned by the dearth of evidence for western diaspora communities and the differing tool sets and assumptions brought to this material by classicists, New Testament and Jewish historians in my “‘For the Glory of the Holy House’: The Sardis Synagogue and the History of Judaism in Roman Antiquity,” in Andrew Seager, ed., The Synagogue at Sardis, Sardis Report 9 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, forthcoming).  Paula Fredriksen, “It Looks like a Duck, and It Quacks like a Duck . . .: On Not Giving Up the Godfearers,” in Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Nathaniel DesRosiers, Shira L. Lander, Jacqueline Z. Pastis, and Daniel Ullucci, eds., A Most Reliable Witness: Essays in Honor of Ross Shepard Kraemer (Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2015), 25–54.

Rabbi Akiba in 3D: Artifact, Text, and the Recent History of Judaism in Late Antiquity

185

2 Significant Discoveries and Archaeological Projects Historians functioning at the matrix of text and archaeology are always hungry for “new” sources and ravenous in their consumption of new publications. Recent decades have not disappointed. Excavation and discovery across the Mediterranean basin have enriched our knowledge in profound ways. Jewish remains in Asia Minor and the Balkans have been particularly significant, including synagogue discoveries in Bova Marina in Italy,5 Sardona in Albania,6 Plovdiv in Bulgaria,7 and Antalya in Turkey, as well as the reinvestigation of the Priene synagogue and significant smaller finds in Nicaea, Lymra, and Laodicaea.8 Synagogue discoveries and publication in Israel have been most significant: mosaics from Sepphoris in the lower Galilee,9 Wadi Hamam,10 and now Huqoq,11 Khirbet Kur12 near the northern Sea of Galilee, and a wide variety of discoveries in the Golan Heights. The synagogue at En-Gedi, discovered in 1970, was published by a multigenerational team in 2022.13 Most spectacular of these projects is the synagogue at Umm al-Qanatir, partially reconstructed,

 Liliana Costamagna, “La sinagoga di Bova Marina (secc. IV–VI),” in Mauro Perani, ed., I beni culturali ebraici in Italia: situazione attuale, problemi, prospettive e progetti per il futuro (Ravenna: Longo editore, 2003), 93–118.  Gideon Foerster, “Una sinagoga e chiesa di IV–VI secolo a Saranda, nell’Albania meridionale, e la sua identificazione: risultati degli scavi preliminari,” in Mariapina Mascolo and Mauro Perani, eds., Ketav, Sefer, Miktav: la cultura ebraica scritta tra Basilicata e Puglia (Bari: Edizioni di pagina, 2014): 121–133.  Christian Koranda, “Menora-Darstellungen auf spätantiken Mosaikpavimenten: Untersuchungen zur neugefundenen Synagoge in Plovdiv,” Kairos: Zeitschrift für Judaistik und Religionswissenschaft 30–31 (1988–1989): 218–239.  On synagogues in Asia Minor, see Mark Wilson, “The Ancient Synagogues of Asia Minor and Greece,” in Steven Fine, ed., Jewish Religious Architecture: From Biblical Israel to Modern Judaism (Boston: Brill, 2019): 122–133.  Ze’ev Weiss, The Sepphoris Synagogue: Deciphering an Ancient Message Through Its Archaeological and Socio-Historical Contexts (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2005).  Uzi Leibner, Khirbet Wadi Haman: A Roman-Period Village and Synagogue in the Lower Galilee (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2018).  Jodi Magness, et. al., “The Huqoq Excavation Project: 2014–2017 Interim Report,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 380 (2018): 61–131.  J. K. Zangenberg, “A Basalt Stone Table from the Byzantine Synagogue at Ḥorvat Kur, Galilee: Publication and Preliminary Interpretation,” in Joseph Patrich, Orit Peleg-Barkat, Erez Ben-Yosef, eds., Arise, Walk Through the Land; Studies in the Archaeology and History of the Land of Israel in Memory of Yizhar Hirschfeld on the Tenth Anniversary of His Demise (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2016), 61–78.  Yosef Porath, ed. The Synagogue at En-Gedi. Qedem 64 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2021).

186

Steven Fine

stone by stone, using computer scanning and mapping technology.14 Less glamorous, but no less significant, has been the excavation and interpretation of the urban and village contexts in which many of these monumental buildings flourished, including at En Gedi,15 Qasrin,16 and Sikhnin, to mention just a few.17 Specifically Jewish discoveries within these contexts, particularly stepped pools, have evinced particular interest, as scholars have struggled with terminology in describing these pools as miqva’ot, ritual baths – or not.18 Progress has also been made in the discovery and publication of funerary sites, including the necropolis of Beit Guvrin19 and the cemetery at Ghor as-Safi, that is, biblical Zoar.20 The synagogue and the upper city of Sepphoris,21 Nabratein,22 the En Gedi village and synagogue,23 and Wadi Hamam have merited monographic publications.24 Other sites that are still in progress have received periodic updates as their teams work toward completion of their work and final publication. Discoveries of spectacular illustrated floor mosaics at Huqoq have merited preliminary publication, which is quite heartening.25

 Yehoshua Dray, Ilana Gonen, and Chaim Ben David, “The Synagogue of Umm el-Qanatir: Preliminary Report,” Israel Exploration Journal 67/2 (2017), 209–231.  Yizhar Hirschfeld, En-Gedi Excavation II (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2007).  Ann Killebrew and Steven Fine, “The Talmudic Village of Qatzrin,” Biblical Archaeology Review 17/3 (April, 1991): 44–56; Ann E. Killebrew, Billy J. Grantham, and Steven Fine, “The Qasrin ‘Talmudic’ House: On the Use of Domestic Space During the Byzantine Period,” Near Eastern Archaeology, 66/1–2 (2003): 59–72.  James Riley Strange, “Kefar Shiknin,” in David A Fiensy and James Riley Strange, eds., Galilee in the Late Second Temple and Mishnaic Periods, Vol. 2: The Archaeological Record from Cities, Towns, and Villages (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2015): 88–108. This volume discusses other significant sites not mentioned here.  Stuart S. Miller, At the Intersection of Texts and Material Finds: Stepped Pools, Stone Vessels, and Ritual Purity among the Jews of Roman Galilee (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019) and the bibliography there.  Gideon Avni, Uzi Dahari, and Amos Kloner, “Jews, Pagans and Christians in Bet Guvrin,” in Gideon Avni, Uzi Dahari, and Amos Kloner, eds., The Necropolis of Bet Guvrin-Eleutheropolis (Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority, 2008): 217–218.  Giannis E. Meïmaris, Kalliopi Kritikakou-Nikolaropoulou, and Sebastian P. Brock, The Jewish Aramaic Inscriptions from Ghor Es-Safi (Byzantine Zoora) (Athens: National Hellenic Research Foundation, 2016).  Weiss, The Sepphoris Synagogue; Thomas R. W. Longstaff and Dennis E. Groh, Excavations at Sepphoris: University of Florida Probes in the Citadel and Villa, Vol. 1 (Boston: Brill. 2006); Eric M. Meyers, Carol L. Meyers, and Benjamin D. Gordon. The Architecture, Stratigraphy, and Artifacts of the Western Summit of Sepphoris 1 (University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2018).  Eric M. Meyers and Carol L. Meyers. Excavations at Ancient Nabratein: Synagogue and Environs (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2009).  Yizhar Hirschfeld, En-gedi Excavation II (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2007).  Leibner, Khirbet Wadi Haman.  See n. 11, above.

Rabbi Akiba in 3D: Artifact, Text, and the Recent History of Judaism in Late Antiquity

187

No less important than discovery has been publication and the assembly of corpora of related artifacts. Rachel Hachlili was dogged in cataloging remains of “Jewish art” from the Land of Israel and diaspora communities, providing easy access to obscure artifacts and bibliography. Corpora created by Hachlili, principally her Jewish Art and Archaeology in the Land of Israel (Leiden: Brill, 1987), Jewish Art and Archaeology in the Diaspora (Leiden: Brill, 1989), and most recently Ancient SynagoguesArchaeology and Art: New Discoveries and Current Research (Leiden: Brill, 2014), but also her studies of the menorah have made remains of ancient synagogues and other sites widely available.26 Taken together with Zvi Ilan’s Batei Knesset Qedumim beEretz Yisrael,27 Marilyn Chiat’s Handbook of Synagogue Architecture (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1982) and Steven H. Werlin’s Ancient Synagogues of Southern Palestine, 300–800 CE: Living on the Edge (Boston: Brill, 2018)28 are important access points to the archaeological corpora. Finally, The Bornblum Eretz Yisrael Synagogues Website of Kinneret College promises a handy source for the study of ancient synagogues.29 The Bezalel Narkiss Index of Jewish Art of the Center for Jewish Art provides access to many of the most important monuments.30 Finally, Ronnie Reich’s 2021 Hebrew edition of Heinrich Kohl and Carl Watzinger’s magnificent Antike Synagogen in Galiläa (Leipzig, 1916) gives new life to this most significant classic.31 Publication of epigraphic evidence has continued abreast. Joseph Naveh edited synagogue inscriptions in Hebrew and Aramaic, and Lea Roth-Gerson did the same for inscriptions in Greek.32 Sebastian Brock’s corpus of Jewish tombstones from Zoar is particularly welcome, especially as it is part of a larger corpus of Christian tombstones, allowing for local comparison.33 Publication and republication of diaspora evidence began with William Horbury and David Noy’s Jewish Inscriptions of Graeco-Roman Egypt: With an Index of the Jewish Inscriptions of Egypt and Cyrenaica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), David Noy’s Jewish Inscriptions of Western Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

 Rachel Hachlili, The Menorah: Evolving into the Most Important Jewish Symbol (Boston: Brill, 2018).  Zvi Ilan, Bate-keneset ḳedumim be-Erets-Yiśraʼel (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense, 1991).  Steven H. Werlin, Ancient Synagogues of Southern Palestine, 300–800 CE: Living on the Edge (Leiden: Brill, 2015).  http://synagogues.kinneret.ac.il/.  http://cja.huji.ac.il/browser.php?mode=main.  Heinrich Kohl and Carl Watzinger, Batei Knesset Atiqum be-Galil, translated. and edited by Ronny Reich (Modi’in, Israel: Ronny Reich, 2021).  Joseph Naveh, On Mosaic and Stone: The Aramaic and Hebrew Inscriptions from Ancient Synagogues [Hebrew] (Israel: Maariv, 1978); Lea Roth-Gerson, Greek Synagogue Inscriptions in the Land of Israel [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 1987).  Yiannis E. Meimaris and Kalliope I. Kritikakou-Nikolaropoulou, in collaboration with Sebastian P. Brock, Inscriptions from Palaestina Tertia, Volume Ic: The Jewish Aramaic Inscriptions from Ghor Es-Safi (Byzantine Zoora) (Athens: National Hellenic Research Foundation, 2016).

188

Steven Fine

1993, 1995), and the parallel Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientalis, with volumes on Eastern Europe, edited by D. Noy, A. Panayotov, and H. Bloedhorn (2004), Asia Minor, edited by W. Ameling (2004), and Syria and Cyprus, edited by D. Noy and H. Bloedhorn (2004).34 In addition, Leah Roth-Gerson published The Jews of Syria as Reflected in the Greek Inscriptions [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Shazar, 2001), and the final report of the Sardis synagogue inscriptions was published by Georg Petzl (2019).35 Alas, a number of earlier excavations await publication. These include the publications of the Sardis synagogue, which is in advanced stages of completion, and of the Rehov synagogue inscriptions, and of the Qasrin village. Text scholars have made equally great strides during the generation. Amnon Linder’s The Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987) assembled and fully contextualized these dispersed sources. New editions of rabbinic sources are most welcome, especially Rivka Ulmer’s Pesiqta Rabbati (1997),36 Chaim Milikowsky’s Seder Olam Rabba (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute, 2013); Berachyahu Lifshitz’s Midrash Shmuel (2009), Joseph Tabory and Arnon Atzmon’s Esther Rabba (2014), Marc Hirshman’s Kohelet Rabba, Ch.1–6 (2016), and Reuven Kiperwasser’s Midrash Kohelet Rabbah 7–12 (2021) – all published by the Schechter Institute, Jerusalem. The most significant work, however, has been in the area of piyyut, liturgical poetry. Publication of late antique Palestinian piyyut has exploded, growing from a few volumes into a significant library. These comprise fully annotated critical editions of Hebrew poems, including Joseph Yahalom’s Az beAin Kol, Priestly Palestinian Poetry: A Narrative Liturgy for the Day of Atonement (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1996) and liturgical cycles by Yannai,37 Shimon ben Megas,38 Yehuda,39 Pinhas,40 many poems from Qallir’s vast oeuvre,41

 A project of De Gruyter Publishers, Berlin.  Georg Petzl, Sardis: Greek and Latin Inscriptions, Part II: Finds from 1958–2017, Archaeological Exploration of Sardis Monograph 14 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 135–68, mounted at: http://sardisexpedition.org/en/publications?filter=monograph.  Rivka Ulmer, Pesiqta Rabbati: A Synoptic Edition of Pesiqta Rabbati Based Upon All Available Manuscripts (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1997).  Z. M. Rabinovitz, ed., The Liturgical Poetry of Rabbi Yannai, Vol. 1 [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1985–1987).  Joseph Yahalom, ed. Liturgical Poems of Simon bar Megas [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1984).  Wouter J. Bekkum, ed., Hebrew Poetry from Late Antiquity: Liturgical Poems of Yehudah (Leiden: Brill, 1998).  Shulamit Elizur, ed., The Liturgical Poems of Rabbi Pinhas ha-Cohen [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2004).  This is an ongoing project of Shulamit Elizur, which includes: Be-toda ve-Shir: Shivʿatot Le-Arba ha-Parshiyot Le-Rabbi Elʿazar Bi-Rabbi Qallir (Jerusalem, Reuven Mass, 1990); Sod Meshalshe Ḳodesh: Ha-kedushta Merashita Vʻad Yemei Rabi El’azar B’rabi Kalir (Israel, 2019), and others.

Rabbi Akiba in 3D: Artifact, Text, and the Recent History of Judaism in Late Antiquity

189

poems for fast days,42 and a corpus of far more earthy Aramaic poetry.43 These poems are beginning to be noticed beyond the Hebrew-reading community thanks to translations of Az beEin Kol by Joseph Yahalom and Michael Swartz,44 and of Yannai on Genesis (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College, 2010) and Aramaic poetry by Laura Lieber.45 This treasure has transformed our knowledge of Judaism in Palestine. Online resources for the study of rabbinic sources have proliferated and transformed access to once rarely seen manuscripts and early printed editions. Among these I highlight the Friedberg Genizah Project,46 now of the National Library of Israel, and Ma’agarim: The Historical Dictionary Project of the Academy of the Hebrew Language with its rich database of texts of all periods.47

3 History and Transformations Great progress has been made on the task of contextualizing archaeological remains in terms of literary texts. Many scholars have taken their cue from the “Talmudic Archaeology” approach championed by Samuel Krauss,48 Joshua Brand,49 and others during the first half of the twentieth century, interpreting general Roman archaeology through the lenses of Jewish literature of late antiquity, in search of distinctly Jewish or rabbinic views of artifacts and architecture in the general culture.50 Recent work has been closely associated with Daniel Sperber. His student Karen Kirshenbaum’s

 Shulamit Elizur, ed., Wherefore Have We Fasted? Megilat Ta’anit Batra and Similar Lists of Fasts [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 2007).  Joseph Yahalom and Michael Sokoloff, Jewish Palestinian Aramaic Poetry from Late Antiquity [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1999).  Michael D. Swartz, and Joseph Yahalom, Avodah: An Anthology of Ancient Poetry for Yom Kippur (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005).  Laura Suzanne Lieber, Jewish Aramaic Poetry from Late Antiquity: Translations and Commentaries (Boston: Brill, 2018).  https://fjms.genizah.org.  https://maagarim.hebrew-academy.org.il/Pages/PMain.aspx.  Samuel Krauss, Talmudische Archäologie (Leipzig: Gustav Fock, 1911).  Joshua Brand, Klei Haḥeres Besifrut Hatalmud (Jerusalem: Rav Kook Institute, 1953).  See the comments of Saul Lieberman, “Grain Mills and Those Who Work with Them,” Tarbiz 50 (1981): 128 [Hebrew]; Daniel Sperber, Material Culture in Eretz-Israel during the Talmudic Period [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi Press and Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 1993), 3–23; Yonatan Adler, “Toward an ‘Archaeology of Halakhah’: Prospects and Pitfalls of Reading Early Jewish Ritual Law into the Ancient Material Record,” Archaeology and Text; A Journal for the Integration of Material Culture with Written Documents in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East 1 (2017): 27–38. I discuss the historiography of this discipline in some detail in my Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World: Toward a New Jewish Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, rev. ed. 2010), 1–52. Yaron Z. Eliav, “From Realia to Material Culture: The Reception of Samuel Krauss’ Talmudische Archäologie,” in Joseph Patrich, Orit Peleg-Barkat, and Erez Ben-Yosef, eds.,

190

Steven Fine

Furniture of the Home in the Mishnah [Hebrew] (Ramat-Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2013) exemplifies the “Talmudic realia” approach developed by Sperber, looking out from rabbinic literature toward the material contexts of these texts. Similarly, but beginning with the material, David Adan-Bayewitz’s Common Pottery in Roman Galilee: A Study of Local Trade (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1993) models a sophisticated use of rabbinic sources within a thoroughly archaeological study. This search for a more holistic understanding animated Yizhar Hirschfeld’s path-breaking The Palestinian Dwelling in the Roman-Byzantine Period (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1995). Earlier than others, Hirschfeld employed ethnographic study, archaeological survey, and rabbinic sources to interpret Jewish housing in late antiquity. Yonatan Adler and David Amit reconsidered cisterns at Beth She’arim, identifying them as miqva’ot, with real significance for understanding Jewish rites within this complex,51 and Ze’ev Weiss has interpreted the remains at this site through comparison with rabbinic sources.52 Archaeology has had a surprisingly large place in debates that go to the essence of both ancient and modern identity. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, questions of rabbinic authority and of the status of rabbis in Jewish communal life dominated American historians of Judaism in late antiquity. Two New Testament scholars, Erwin R. Goodenough and Morton Smith, adopted archaeology as a window into Judaism beyond the rabbis in their attempt to a broad non-clerical interpretation. This work is consistent with the approach of Smith’s teacher Gershom Scholem in his deployment of Jewish mysticism as a counter-voice to that of the rabbis. Goodenough’s Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period (Princeton, 1954–67) both assembled what was known of Jewish visual culture to that date and asserted the existence an empire-wide Jewish mystery religion on the basis of this corpus. Widely criticized for his overemphasis on Philo for interpreting Palestinian remains, his lack of capacity in Hebrew and Aramaic sources, his lack of the complexity that comes with art historical training, or firsthand knowledge of his artifacts, and most of all his commitment to Jungian psychology as the singular key to unlocking meaning, Goodenough’s work was tempered to conform to Smith’s somewhat more nuanced approach by Smith’s former doctoral student, Jacob Neusner. The mantle was picked up by others of Smith’s students. Among these, the most prominent is Lee I. Levine, a social historian with archaeological interests, who developed a synthesis rooted in the

Arise, Walk Through the Land; Studies in the Archaeology and History of the Land of Israel in Memory of Yizhar Hirschfeld on the Tenth Anniversary of His Demise (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2016): 17✶–27✶, treads many of the same byways discussed here, with considerable overlap.  David Amit and Yonatan Adler, “‘Miqwa’ot’ in the Necropolis of Beth She’arim,” Israel Exploration Journal 60/1 (2010): 72–88.  Ze’ev Weiss, “Social Aspects of Burial in Beth She’arim: Archaeological Finds and Talmudic Sources,” in Lee I. Levine, ed., The Galilee in Late Antiquity sp. (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1992): 357–371.

Rabbi Akiba in 3D: Artifact, Text, and the Recent History of Judaism in Late Antiquity

191

approach developed by Goodenough and Smith.53 Levine sought a bridge between literary and archaeological sources, with the fundamental purpose of discovering a moderately “Hellenized” mix of “Judaism and Hellenism” that was both friendly to the rabbis and, once again, sought out evidence beyond the rabbinic community (whom he calls a “rabbinic class”).54 Levine’s The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2005) synthesizes secondary literature to 2005 and exemplifies his approach. His earlier Ancient Synagogues Revealed (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1981) and his programmatic conference published as The Synagogue in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: ASOR and New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1987) were of pivotal importance for the renewed study of ancient synagogues. Astonishingly, this was just one of three conference volumes on the synagogue to appear between 1987 and 1989.55 During the late eighties and early nineties, study of ancient synagogues flourished, largely as recent discoveries were processed and interpreted by scholars. These volumes heralded major new developments in the study of Jewish material culture in relation to literary sources. Synagogue mosaics evoked considerable interest during this period, as scholars from various fields interpreted mosaic pavements in the Land of Israel in light of their specific interests and concerns. Zodiac panels from Hammath Tiberias, Sepphoris, Na’aran, and Beth Alpha have been particularly well-studied. Following the Goodenough/Smith paradigm, Levine saw these floors as premiere examples of “nonRabbinic Judaism.” His cautious social-historical method focuses sharply on this question, particularly on the synagogue of Hammath Tiberias and the Beth She’arim catacombs, both with associations with the Patriarchate.56 Others have asserted far more detailed programs of meaning for these floors. Jodi Magness, for example, has interpreted zodiac mosaics in terms of specific highly selective choices of rabbinic sources that skew toward Goodenough’s mystical focus.57 Ze’ev Weiss has projected a totalizing interpretation upon the Sepphoris synagogue mosaic (discovered in 1996) that imagines homiletical movement from divine “promise” to “redemption” that deploys well-chosen rabbinic sources and leads from the synagogue entrance forward to

 Fine, Art and Judaism, 35–46.  See especially Lee I. Levine, The Rabbinic Class of Roman Palestine in Late Antiquity (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary/Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 1989); Levine, Judaism and Hellenism in Antiquity: Conflict or Confluence? (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1999).  Aryeh Kasher, Aharon Oppenheimer, and Uriel Rappaport, eds., Ancient Synagogues: Studies (Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 1988); Rachel Hachlili, ed., Ancient Synagogues in Israel: Third-Seventh Century CE, Proceedings of a symposium, University of Haifa, May 1987 (Oxford: BAR, 1989).  Lee I. Levine, “The Finds from Beth She’arim and Their Importance for the Study of the Talmudic Period,” Eretz Israel 18 (1985): 277–281 [Hebrew].  Jodi Magness, “Helios and the Zodiac Cycle in Ancient Palestinian Synagogues,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 59 (2005): 1–52.

192

Steven Fine

the Torah shrine.58 Interpretation of the recently discovered Huqoq synagogue mosaic, with its images of the zodiac, the crossing of the Red Sea, the Spies, the Tower of Babel, Jonah, the four creatures of Daniel and the table of the showbread, is just beginning.59 Preliminary interpretations by Magness and, particularly, Ra’anan Boustan and Karen Britt of a scene that Magness interprets as Alexander and the High Priest and Boustan and Britt as Antiochus VI, however, are unconvincing in their deployment of Second Temple and rabbinic sources to identify unlabeled scenes in this pavement.60 Uzi Leibner, by contrast, has taken a far lighter touch in interpreting the Wadi Hamam mosaics, placing this discovery in the context of both rabbinic sources and other narrative art.61 Related is the “Epigraphical Rabbis” question inaugurated by Smith student Shaye J. D. Cohen in a 1981 article and still alive among current scholars. Scholars of the Smith school, particularly Hayim Lapin, have followed Cohen in asserting that rabbis who appear in inscriptions are likely not related to the rabbinic community.62 A more centrist approach taken by Stuart Miller, Benzion Rosenfeld, and myself asserts far more overlap between these epigraphical rabbis and textual rabbis than is allowed by the Smith students.63 At heart, this is a debate over the larger influence of the rabbis, the issue that separates the Smith school with its minimalist disposition from more mainline scholars. A subset of this discussion focuses upon miqva’ot and the degree to which the presence of Jewish ritual baths reflects distinctly rabbinic “influence.”64  Weiss, The Sepphoris Synagogue.  Jodi Magness et. al., “The Huqoq Excavation Project: 2014–2017 Interim Report,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 380 (2018): 61–131.  Karen Britt and Ra’anan S. Boustan, The Elephant Mosaic Panel in the Synagogue at Huqoq: Official Publication and Initial Interpretations (Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series, 2017).  Leibner, Wadi Hamam.  Shaye J. D. Cohen, “Epigraphical Rabbis,” Jewish Quarterly Review 72 (1981): 1–17; Hayim Lapin, “Epigraphical Rabbis: A Reconsideration,” Jewish Quarterly Review 101 (2011): 311–346. See most recently Jonathan J. Price, “‘Epigraphical Rabbis’ in their Epigraphical Contexts,” in M. Satlow, ed., Strength to Strength: Essays in Appreciation of Shaye J. D. Cohen (Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Series, 2018): 491–509.  Stuart S. Miller, “The Rabbis and the Non-Existent Monolithic Synagogue,” in S. Fine, ed., Jews, Christians and Polytheists in the Ancient Synagogue: Cultural Interaction During the Greco-Roman Period (London: Routledge, 1999): 57–70; Miller, “Epigraphical” Rabbis, Helios and Psalm 19: Were the Synagogues of Archaeology and the Synagogues of the Sages One and the Same?” Jewish Quarterly Review 94 (2004): 27–76; Miller, Sages and Commoners in Late Antique Ereẓ Israel: A Philological Inquiry into Local Traditions in Talmud Yerushalmi (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006): 427–445; Miller, “Real Sages or Nothing More than Donors and Honored Deceased?––Epigraphical Rabbis Yet Again,” in Steven Fine and Aaron J. Koller, eds., Talmuda de-Eretz Israel: Archaeology and the Rabbis in Late Antique Palestine (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014); Benzion Rosenfeld, “The Title ‘Rabbi’ in Third- to Seventh-Century Inscriptions in Palestine Revisited,” Journal of Jewish Studies 61/2 (2010): 234–256.  Miller, At the Intersection of Texts and Material Finds.

Rabbi Akiba in 3D: Artifact, Text, and the Recent History of Judaism in Late Antiquity

193

Miller has written the most incisive studies of this phenomenon, arguing correctly that miqva’ot were built by Jews across the religious spectrum and rabbis as literati wrote about them. The fact that Samaritans also chose this mode of piety broadens the boundaries of this pan-Israelite phenomenon still farther. Samaritan sources provide an important Israelite counterpoint and comparison to Jewish sources that have been underutilized in the rush to find Christian parallels and influence that has been characteristic of scholarship during this period. Joseph Yahalom introduced piyyut as an essential literature for interpreting both synagogue floors and dedicatory inscriptions. His approach is detailed in Poetry and Society in Jewish Galilee of Late Antiquity (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1999 [Hebrew]). The value in this corpus is not just in the single authorship of piyyutim (as opposed to the anonymous corporate authorship of other genres of rabbinic literature). Piyyutim are more easily dated to the period between the close of canonical rabbinic sources (by 500 CE) and the Tanhuma-Yelamdenu literature during the early Islamic period. Yose Ben Yose, Yannai, and Qallir are thus contemporaneous with the extant synagogue carpet mosaics. Piyyut scholarship spawned yet another diagnostic for the discovery of “non-Rabbinic Jews” through the interpretation of archaeological remains. As early as 1921, Nahum Slouschz – an avid Freemason – asserted that a stone menorah discovered at Hammath Tiberias was reflective of a priestly presence exclusive of the rabbis in this fifth century synagogue.65 This approach was also taken up by Samuel Klein and Menachem Zulay, who, interpreting poems dealing with the twenty-four priestly courses, sought to discover independent priestly power in the Galilee during late antiquity. Yahalom and Michael Swartz,66 and then Oded Ir Shai,67 further expanded on this approach and suggest possible patristic evidence for this position. Yahalom and Swartz suggested as well that the image of Aaron before the Tabernacle at Sepphoris was proof of “priestly influence.” Matthew Grey argued strenuously in support of this proposition in his 2011 dissertation “Jewish Priests and the Social History of post-70 Palestine.”68 This assertion has been strongly criticized by Stuart Miller, Ze’ev Weiss, and me.69 Priestly themes need not

 Steven Fine, “Between Liturgy and Social History: Priestly Power in Late Antique Palestinian Synagogues?” Journal of Jewish Studies, 56/1 (2005): 1–9, updated in Fine, Art, History and the Historiography, 181–194. On Zulay, see Joseph Yahalom, Poetry and Society in Jewish Galilee of Late Antiquity (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1999 [Hebrew]), 56–57 (182–185).  Swartz and Yahalom, Avodah, 15.  Oded Ir Shai, “The Role of the Priesthood in the Jewish Community in Late Antiquity: A Christian Model?” in Christoph Cluse and Alfred Haverkamp, eds., Jüdische Gemeinden und ihr christlicher Kontext in kulturräumlich vergleichender Betrachtung, von der Spätantike bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Hannover: Hahn, 2003): 75–85.  Matthew J. Grey, “Jewish Priests and the Social History of post-70 Palestine” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina Press, 2011).  Steven Fine, “Between Liturgy and Social History”; Stuart S. Miller, “Priests, Purities, and the Jews of Galilee,” in J. Zangenberg, H.W. Attridge, and D. Martin, eds., Religion, Ethnicity, and

194

Steven Fine

reflect priestly social power, but rather reflect the great significance of Temple themes in Jewish literature generally. Building upon Yahalom’s insights, I have embraced piyyut as an essential tool for interpreting synagogue remains. My own work has focused on the deep historiographic and communal backgrounds of previous scholarship and on newer approaches from cognate disciplines. Three of these new approaches were in their infancies or nonexistent at the start the period under discussion. I contextualized the search for “non-Rabbinic Judaism” within larger anticlerical trends in mainly Protestant scholarship. Beginning near the turn of the century, Kalman Bland and Margaret Olin identified an entrenched Western trope that asserted that the Jews are a “nation without art” and Judaism “artless.”70 Aware that evidence for ancient Jewish art had been discovered in Palestine, at Dura Europos in Syria, and elsewhere, Goodenough, Smith, and his students treated “artlessness” as a fundamental characteristic of rabbis. Thus, “Hellenized Jews” created the art of the ancient synagogues, while people who were close to the Sages did not. The presence of “art” thus became a diagnostic of “nonRabbinic Judaism.” Beyond the search for parallels between literary sources and archaeology and the construction of “non-Rabbinic Judaism,” my studies during this period responded to the “anthropological turn” in history, which includes under its umbrella the “visual culture” and “material culture” conversations.71 Within “late antique” (that is, late Roman, early Byzantine) studies, the “anthropological turn” was applied early on by historian Peter L. Brown and art historian Thomas Mathews.72 These scholars sought to interpret late antique churches as liturgical spaces, the art and liturgies

Identity in Ancient Galilee: A Region in Transition (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007): 375–402; Ze’ev Weiss, “Were Priests Communal Leaders in Late Antique Palestine? The Archaeological Evidence,” in Daniel R. Schwartz and Zeev Weiss, eds., Was 70 CE a Watershed in Jewish History? On Jews and Judaism Before and After the Destruction of the Second Temple (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2012): 91–111.  Kalman P. Bland, The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Margaret Olin, The Nation Without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).  Within this larger turn, my inclinations as an art historian and historian of religion turned cultural historian has been toward visual culture (cofounding Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture in 2007), which is an outgrowth of art history within the “anthropological turn.” Eliav, a social historian with more specifically textual and archaeological interest, by comparison, gravitated toward the parallel material culture movement that is preferred mainly by textually oriented scholars. See his “From Realia to Material Culture,” 22✶–23✶.  Peter L. Brown, “Art and Society in Late Antiquity,” in Kurt Weitzmann, ed., The Age of Spirituality: A Symposium (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980): 17–28; Thomas F. Mathews, The Early Churches of Constantinople: Architecture and Liturgy (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971); Matthews, Byzantium from Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York: Abrams, 1991).

Rabbi Akiba in 3D: Artifact, Text, and the Recent History of Judaism in Late Antiquity

195

as interrelated elements in the construction of the church environment and of sensory experience. This holistic approach, at first disparaged by traditional text scholars and art historians, has gained considerable traction in recent years. My own work is part of this project, beginning with my This Holy Place: On the Sanctity of the Synagogue during the Greco-Roman Period (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1997) that took as its interpretive cue inscriptions that refer to the synagogue as a “holy place.” Museum exhibition has been an important interpretive and presentation environment for scholarship during this period. Predecessors, notably Kurt Weitzmann’s 1973 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition The Age of Spirituality: Late Antique and Early Christian Art, Third to Seventh Century and Uza Zevulun and Yael Olenik’s Function and Design in the Talmudic Period (Tel Aviv: Haaretz Museum, 1979) set the tone for exhibition during our period; the first for its largeness (it even included a section dedicated to Jewish art) and the second for its specific focus. The holistic use of text and artifact presented by Olenik and Zevulun to imagine ancient Judaism inspired my work as interpreter of the “Talmudic Village” in Qasrin on the Golan Heights73 and deeply influenced my Sacred Realm: The Emergence of the Synagogue in the Ancient World (New York: Yeshiva University Museum, 1996) – whose catalog was modeled upon The Age of Spirituality. Significant exhibitions during this period included The Jewish Presence in Ancient Rome (Bible Lands Museum, Jerusalem, 1995), The Realm of the Stars (Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 2001),74 the reinstallation of the Israel Museum collection (2001), Printing the Talmud: From Bomberg To Schottenstein (Yeshiva University Museum, New York, 2006),75 Ein Gedi: A Very Large Village of Jews (Hecht Museum, Haifa, 200676), Edge of Empires: Pagans, Jews, and Christians at Roman Dura-Europos Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York, 2012), Out of the Blue: From the Depth of the Sea to the National Flag (Bible Lands Museum, Jerusalem, 2018), and The Samaritans: A Biblical People (Museum of the Bible 1922). The end of the first decade of this century witnessed three attempts to assess the state of scholarship in this field. Two conferences, which were convened in the United States, fixed a spotlight directly upon the interplay of text and archaeology. The first, convened at Princeton University in 2008, assembled a wide range of archaeologists and text scholars to bridge and engage text and artifact, particularly as part of the larger project of assessing the status of the rabbis – mainly in Palestine.77

 Killebrew and Fine, “The Talmudic Village of Qatzrin”; Killebrew, Grantham, and Fine, “The Qasrin ‘Talmudic’ House.”  Iris Fishoff, ed., The Realm of the Stars (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 2001).  Sharon L. Mintz and Gabriel M. Goldstein, eds., Printing the Talmud: From Bomberg to Schottenstein (New York: ed.)  Catalog Yizhar Hertzfeld.  Conference on Rabbinic Literature and the Material Culture of Roman Palestine, Princeton University, November 2008.

196

Steven Fine

This was followed in 2011 by a conference called “Talmuda de-Eretz Israel: Archaeology and the Rabbis in Late Antique Palestine” that I organized at Yeshiva University. This conference sought to set aside the question of rabbinic power that dominated American scholarship for a generation and to engage other questions. Focusing specifically on ways that our understandings of rabbinic texts are improved and enriched through engagement with archaeological remains, a group of mainly text scholars presented specific case studies ranging from Tannaitic sources to Byzantine period piyyutim. Pointing to the balance that I sought to achieve, the conference volume was dedicated jointly to Talmudist Daniel Sperber and to archaeologist Eric Meyers.78 Catherine Hezser’s edited volume, The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Daily Life in Roman Palestine (2010) is a useful window on the state of this field as it has developed.79 Hezser’s volume begins with a broad methodological introduction – called “Correlating Literary, Epigraphic, and Archaeological Sources” – in which she surveys, from the perspective of a text scholar with archaeological interest, many of the issues that I have surveyed thus far. The volume itself assembles most of the thenactive scholars whose research straddles the matrix of text and archaeology. The subsections range from broader questions such as “Life in a Roman Province” to six general areas of “daily life”: “City and Countryside,” “Labor and Trade,” “Family Life,” “Education and Literacy,” “Religion and Magic,” “Entertainment and Leisure-Time Activities.” These broad categories embrace the work of both scholars with a textual focus and scholars with mainly an object focus, as well as the few who routinely straddle the balance. Bringing together this virtual symposium, Hezser has curated an important statement of research and provided an ecosystem for many of the scholars I have mentioned thus far. While most of the articles deal with either texts or artifacts, a few attempt to integrate both. For their focus upon both text and artifact, I note the contributions of Uzi Lieber on “Arts, Crafts and Manufacture”; Dafna Shlezinger-Katzman on “Clothing”; Katharina Galor on “Domestic Architecture”; Yaron Z. Eliav on “Bathhouses as Places of Social and Cultural Interaction”; Ze’ev Weiss on “Theatres, Hippodromes, Amphitheatres and Performances”; Joshua Schwartz on “Play and Games”; and my own on “Death, Burial and the Afterlife.” This volume contains two articles on jewelry, one by historian Tziona Grossmank and a second by archaeologist Katharina Galor. Polychromy has developed as a major subject of interest in the general academy, first in the study of classical art and then spreading in all chronological and geographic directions. This new focus has real implications for the study of Jewish contexts as well. I have marshalled generally forgotten evidence of color and  Steven Fine and Aaron J. Koller, eds., Talmuda de-Eretz Israel: Archaeology and the Rabbis in Late Antique Palestine (Berlin/Boston: Walter De Gruyter, 2014).  Catherine Hezser, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Daily Life in Roman Palestine (Oxford/ New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

Rabbi Akiba in 3D: Artifact, Text, and the Recent History of Judaism in Late Antiquity

197

textual discussions of polychrome to imagine the interior decoration of synagogues, and suggested ways that seeing Roman art in polychrome helps to better interpret the range of rabbinic responses to it.80 A search for a more holistic understanding of late antique Jews animates Karen B. Stern’s Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity (2018).81 Framed as a continuation of the search for Judaism “beyond the rabbis,” the value of this work is its focus on often ignored graffiti scratched and painted on the walls of tombs, synagogues, and towns by Jews whose thoughts are otherwise drowned out by more impressive elements of buildings, by literary sources, and by the sound of silence that generally envelopes this period.

4 What’s Next? We are still processing the mass of discoveries during the last fifty years and more finds are surely in the offing. It would have been impossible, for example, to imagine the lush imagery of the Huqoq mosaic and the team there still has much to uncover. The great discoveries of Samaritan culture that have paralleled Jewish discoveries and the integration of Jewish material into the larger history of late antiquity have great promise for future studies. In addition, research on the period from Muhammad to the Crusades, previously considered a dark age, is beginning to reveal shadows and we can expect that our understanding of this period will increase significantly over time. In future years, questions relating to women and children, smell and hearing are sure to achieve greater prominence as scholarship focuses more on those questions. Bridging the chasm separating text from artifact in Roman antiquity is no easy matter. This work requires the textual acuity of a philologist, the visual capacities of an art historian, and the synthetic imagination of a historian. Much progress has been made in recent decades, facilitated by important discoveries and even more importantly by publication projects. As in all fields, much awaits to be done. The study of ancient Judaism has been particularly tumultuous owing to larger trends in the continuing life of the Jewish community and to the ways that history inevitably affects and is affected by contemporary issues. Still, we are now closer than ever to imagining “Rabbi Akiba in 3-D” and with him the polychrome world of late antiquity.

 Fine, “Menorahs in Color: On the Study of Polychromy in Jewish Visual Culture of Roman Antiquity,” Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture 6 (2013): 3–24.  Karen B. Stern, Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).

198

Steven Fine

For Further Reading Adler, Yonatan. “Toward an ‘Archaeology of Halakhah’: Prospects and Pitfalls of Reading Early Jewish Ritual Law into the Ancient Material Record.” Archaeology and Text; A Journal for the Integration of Material Culture with Written Documents in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East 1 (2017): 27–38. Fine, Steven. Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World: Toward a New Jewish Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Fine, Steven. “Menorahs in Color: On the Study of Polychromy in Jewish Visual Culture of Roman Antiquity.” Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture 6 (2013): 3–24. Hachlili, Rachel. Ancient Synagogues – Archaeology and Art: New Discoveries and Current Research. Boston: Brill, 2014. Hezser, Catherine. The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Daily Life in Roman Palestine, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Hirschfeld, Yizhar. Ein Gedi: “A Very Large Village of Jews.” Haifa: Hecht Museum, University of Haifa, 2006. Levine, Lee I. Ancient Synagogues Revealed. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1982. Levine, Lee I. The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Lieber, Laura S. Yannai on Genesis. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College, 2010. Meïmaris, Giannis E. Kalliopi Kritikakou-Nikolaropoulou, and Sebastian P. Brock. The Jewish Aramaic Inscriptions from Ghor Es-Safi (Byzantine Zoora). Athens: National Hellenic Research Foundation, 2016. Stuart S.Miller, Sages and Commoners in Late Antique Ereẓ Israel: A Philological Inquiry into Local Traditions in Talmud Yerushalmi. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006. Stern, Karen B. Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Late Antiquity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.

David Kraemer

Rabbinic Religion and Thought Rabbinic theology and thought have been a subject of deliberation for critical scholars of Judaism since the beginnings of the critical study of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums) in the nineteenth century. But the immediate background to the developments of recent decades is the work of mid-twentieth-century scholars Max Kadushin,1 Abraham Joshua Heschel,2 and Ephraim E. Urbach.3 Each had his own approach to organizing the evidence – the former constructing largely synthetic and artificial categories that he imposed upon “the Rabbinic Mind,” and the latter two preserving more “native” rabbinic categories in the sense that they respected classical rabbinic labels. Nevertheless, all three, along with others, agreed on one fundamental matter: the classical rabbis formed a single, unified estate with an essentially unified worldview and fundamental agreement on principles across the centuries (first-sixth), regardless of the rabbinic document one consulted. They also agreed in their assumption that rabbinic documents offered an accurate record (accounting for manuscript variants, of course) of the beliefs and opinions of the sages whose teachings they claimed to preserve. In these respects, these scholars reflected the common approach of scholarship “before” (before what, I will indicate immediately); and Urbach, in particular, was extremely influential in the generation of his students who pursued studies of rabbinic thought, history, and culture. Kadushin and Heschel, who were not viewed as scholars of the same caliber, were less influential in their day, though each enjoyed a later revival. Then, with the appearance of Jacob Neusner’s Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah in 1981, everything changed. Neusner’s work began with a simple, cogent question or critique regarding the scholarship that came before him: Why should we assume that the claims of the final documents regarding the origin and details of the teachings they record are reliable? This is simply not a defensible scholarly position. The essential, most basic scholarly question should always be cui bono? – regarding with skepticism those teachings that most benefit the authorship of the document at hand – and until we have applied that skeptical standard, we have no justification for believing what is on the page in front of us. This is particularly so for a self-styled oral culture, where traditions are inevitably fluid from one repetition to the next without the repeater even recognizing the changes he may have introduced, and rabbinic tradition claims of itself, probably accurately, that its record

 Max Kadushin, The Rabbinic Mind (New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1952).  Abraham Joshua Heschel, Torah min hashamayim be’aspeklariah shel hadorot (Theology of Ancient Judaism), Vols. 1 and 2 (London and New York: The Soncino Press, 1962 and 1965).  Ephraim E. Urbach, The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1969). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110418873-012

200

David Kraemer

was, during its formative period at least, oral. In response to these critical insights, Neusner argued that the generational construct of rabbinic documents could not be relied upon for writing histories of any kind. Instead, he insisted on examining the expression of the final documents alone, which he saw as a construction and expression of each document’s “Judaism.” Now, on the one hand, Neusner’s critique was, as we have said, directed toward using rabbinic texts to write history, which he claimed could not be responsibly done (needless to say, historians of Jews in late antiquity have been attacking Neusner’s conclusions ever since4). On the other hand, his method effectively provided access to a new corpus for study: that is, to the sequential “Judaisms” of rabbinic documents, early to late, and the history of religious developments they recorded. Accordingly, his departmental home in the university, as well as for his many studies incorporating the approach just described, was the Department of Religious Studies. It must be said that it has more recently become a matter of question whether “religion” is the right word or category for the rites and beliefs of Jews in Late Antiquity (as well as in other times), and even the use of the term “Judaism” – a religious “-ism” – has been critiqued.5 But if we grant the difference between “religion” as a descriptor for latter-day Christianity and the way we would have to apply it to ancient Judaisms, and furthermore allow for some imprecision in the definition of the term, we may use the term productively, if problematically. We can argue over what we call the practices and beliefs of this ancient people, but we may still describe their different stages and manifestations. Briefly, in the earliest of Neusner’s documentary work – his work on what he (and many others) understood as the earliest of the finished rabbinic documents, the Mishnah (ca. 200 CE)6 – he concluded that the Mishnah is a work with unexpectedly priestly prejudices (despite the fact that it was composed approximately 130 years after the Temple’s destruction) and with philosophical leanings. The former quality is evident in the Mishnah’s abundant concern for the Temple and its sacrificial system, in its repeated focus on matters of purity and impurity, and in its anxieties over forbidden mixtures. Its philosophical quality is found in its compulsion for categorization – a

 Neusner conveniently collected some of the early debates his work precipitated in the second, augmented edition of his Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah (Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press, 1988), 435–458.  See Daniel Boyarin, Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019), 7–12 and in various places throughout.  Dissent concerning the chronological priority of the Mishnah has been expressed by Judith Hauptman and Shamma Friedman, both of whom argue for the priority of the Tosefta, at least on certain occasions. See Hauptman, Rereading the Mishnah: A New Approach to Ancient Jewish Texts (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), and Friedman, “Tosefta ’Atikta” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 62 (1993): 313–338.

Rabbinic Religion and Thought

201

habit similar to that of Aristotle7 – and in its privileging of the human will in the formation and assignment of categories. The Mishnah is not, Neusner claimed, a common law code (despite appearances), but a more utopian document, one that imagines a perfected “Torah-world” in which the present world (as Neusner repeatedly reminds us, the world after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by Rome) participates partially.8 Extending his method to chronologically later rabbinic documents (the midrashim of the Land of Israel, the Talmud of the Land of Israel [the Yerushalmi], and the Talmud of Babylonia [the Bavli]), Neusner planted the seeds of his grand narrative of the history of rabbinic religion, which he saw as an arc leading from philosophy, through religion, to theology.9 This scheme never found widespread assent. Suffice it to say that the Mishnah, though it may have some philosophical qualities, looks nothing like any ancient philosophical writing; nor does the Bavli – theological though it may be, at least in part – exhibit any obvious likeness to proper theological writing. But having mapped new, more critical methods and new territories for analysis, Neusner deserves considerable credit for bringing about a paradigm-shift in the study of rabbinic religion and thought. Subsequent scholarship challenged the discreteness of documentary expressions, looking for connections and seeking to find real history in the preserved traditions of the documents. Where one lands with respect to the merit of these different approaches makes little difference, though, for there is no question that examining the discrete documents produced by the rabbis of Late Antiquity yields useful results. To illustrate the value of focusing on discrete documents for purposes of uncovering their underlying ideologies, let me briefly describe my own work on the Bavli and the Yerushalmi. In my earliest monograph, The Mind of the Talmud (1990),10 I maintained the position, against Neusner, that broad samples of teachings attributed to particular sages could be relied upon to formulate a traditions-history of the talmudic rabbis, known as the amoraim. My reasoning was that even if individual traditions were misattributed, in the context of hundreds or thousands of attributed traditions, the fictional or mistaken ones would be unimportant. On the basis of a form-analysis of sequential generations of sages, I described a meaningful shift from the third to the fourth century and beyond in the epistemology of talmudic sages with respect to human reasoning, revelation, and received tradition. These developments achieved

 Instructively, Aristotle’s treatises on logic, Organon, commences with his work on Categories. See Richard McKeon brief comments in his introduction to The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1941), xvi–xvii.  Others would interpret the Mishnah differently, of course. See my discussion in A History of the Talmud (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 58–81.  A good synthesis of this thesis is Jacob Neusner, The Transformation of Judaism: From Philosophy to Religion (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992).  David Kraemer, The Mind of the Talmud (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

202

David Kraemer

their summit in the finished document, the Bavli (probably sixth century CE), which can be considered apart from the history of the traditions it preserves for present purposes. In the Bavli, argumentation, which flows primarily from the exercise and application of human reason by different parties, takes center stage. In fact, when a talmudic deliberation begins with a dispute between sages concerning the correct halakha or interpretation, the Bavli will analyze and defend each opinion in turn, test each against the other, and generally uphold both opinions without deciding in favor of one of them. The same applies both to legal positions and to interpretations of scripture. Perhaps even more significantly, the Bavli signals that opinions may be defended equally by reference to reason or to scripture (= revelation), thereby admitting that human reason is always open to different approaches and that scripture is always susceptible to differing interpretations. In other words, scripture and reason stand, for purposes of talmudic argument, on more-or-less equal ground. Further, since neither reason nor interpretation of scripture leads to necessary conclusions, decided law (halakha) is decidedly secondary in talmudic deliberations. The Bavli’s interest is not primarily in deciding the law but in exploring the reasoning that supports different positions regarding the law. What is the meaning of these phenomena, which characterize the document as a whole? In my interpretation, these qualities of the Bavli bespeak both a theology and an epistemology. The Bavli’s foregrounding of human reason is accompanied by a recognition that anything human – including human reason – is imperfect. But human reason, including human interpretation, is our only path toward God’s truth, as preserved in scripture and, however imperfectly, in tradition. Since these human capacities are, by definition, imperfect, we cannot actually know God’s truth; the best we can do is pursue it, study it, and perhaps approach it. As I wrote elsewhere, “the Bavli’s is a theology of approach, not of arrival, of recognition of human limits when the divine calls. The Bavli is an exercise in theological modesty.”11 While others have offered different interpretations, which I will present below, at present I am merely offering an example of the value of comparing document to document. In contrast with the Bavli, the Yerushalmi (the earlier Talmud, probably fifth century CE) displays a penchant for straightforward questions, brief deliberations, and clear answers. It resists taking the next logical step in an argument and prefers conclusions. In its view, conclusions grounded in tradition are superior to those flowing from human reason. Unlike the Bavli, it doesn’t programmatically explain different sides of a dispute, let alone justify them, and it privileges deciding halakha above exploring the logic of the matter. Stated simply, the Yerushalmi is a traditionalist text –

 David C. Kraemer, A History of the Talmud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 173.

Rabbinic Religion and Thought

203

suspicious of the destabilizing consequences of the play of human reason or interpretation while preferring the relative certainty and stability of reliable tradition.12 If we may describe the positions of the two documents in the language of medieval scholastic philosophers, the Yerushalmi sees truth as emerging from reliable tradition while the Bavli privileges the product of human reason, all while recognizing – unlike its medieval successors – that reason is an imperfect source of truth. For the Bavli, therefore, there is no actual need to reconcile revelation and reason (a task at the center of the medieval enterprise), as neither is knowable with sufficient confidence that we actually confront a contradiction in need of resolution. Since scripture is, in effect, infinitely malleable at the hands of human interpretation, apparent “contradictions” are easily disposed of, and the Bavli undertakes this exercise with great regularity. Now, none of this is stated, in the Talmuds, in the language of philosophy, nor, explicitly, in any other language. Still, it seems to me, the implications of the methods of each are no less philosophical on account of that difference. But even if my interpretation is “wrong” – and others, to be considered immediately below, will suggest different interpretations – this illustrates the value of considering rabbinic thought and/or theology as expressed at the level of the discrete rabbinic document. This is so even if one rejects Neusner’s insistence that this is the only defensible level of analysis. Supporting, in broad terms, my characterization of the Bavli, though with different emphasis, is Menachem Fisch. Fisch sees the Bavli’s privileging of reason above received tradition as evidence of its antitraditional character. Simply put, he believes the Bavli to be an antitraditional work. How does he arrive at this conclusion? A traditionalist person or document will respect and, all things being equal, accept the authority of received tradition. The more ancient the reliable tradition, the more authoritative it will be. But this is not the way the Bavli receives ancient traditions. Quite the contrary, any, if not every, tradition in the Bavli is subject to critical analysis and reconsideration and later traditions are generally upheld, despite their being in tension with earlier traditions, through reframing, reinterpretation, or reformulation of received traditions. All of these habits are, in Fisch’s words, “the very mark of antitraditionalism”13 – a characterization I would not dispute. Sergey Dolgopolski locates the origins of the Bavli’s acceptance of multiple, even contradictory opinions, along with its evident support of the conclusion that truth is undecidable, in the fallibility of human memory, which he sees as central to this Talmud’s epistemology. The Talmud is, in his account, a book filled with

 See Kraemer, “Concerning the Theological Assumptions of the Yerushalmi,” in Peter Schäfer, ed., The Talmud Yerushalmi and Graeco-Roman Culture, Vol. 3 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 355–368.  Menachem Fisch, Rational Rabbis: Science and Talmudic Culture (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 130.

204

David Kraemer

traditions, but those traditions can only be known through human memory. Human memory is, of course, infinitely fallible, but the Bavli embraces this reality, testing and refining recalled traditions “through refutation and invention,” the outcome of which is the (re-) constructed truth as it can best be known. This means that the tradition as encountered is, in the Bavli’s view, profoundly human, however it may have originated.14 Moulie Vidas offers another understanding of the Bavli’s treatment of the traditions it cites and analyzes. In Vidas’ view, the Bavli’s abundant quotation of traditions is a rhetorical posture, a posture that is readily evident. How so? In the Bavli, no received tradition is offered to us “straight.” Traditions are presented only in a latterday framework that has been constructed by the Bavli’s authors. Those authors ask us to understand the traditions as they – and only they – interpret them, while at the same time refusing to elide the gap – presumably a chronological one, at least – between the tradition and their reframing and reinterpretation of it. Offering, again and again, a new setting for the received tradition, the Bavli’s untraditional stance becomes evident to all.15 Vidas agrees with Fisch: the document seeks not to preserve a tradition but to appropriate it and reframe it in the service of its own conclusions. Barry Wimpfheimer picks up on another of the Bavli’s characteristic moves in support of a similar conclusion. Wimpfheimer focuses on the fact that the Bavli, which to some extent poses as a commentary on the Mishnah, actually undermines the Mishnah by erasing its canonical boundaries and resisting the authority of its legal decisions. The Mishnah, which lies at the foundation of the Talmud’s discussions, excluded many contemporary teachings (known as baraitot) while often – though certainly not always – deciding the law. The Talmud, in response, recovers many baraitot excluded by the Mishnah’s author while rejecting, when it sees fit, the Mishnah’s determination of the law in favor of an alternative preserved in a baraita (singular of baraitot) or even in the opinion of a later sage. In light of these tendencies, Wimpfheimer writes that “it would be easy to characterize the Talmud as an anticode;”16 if the tradition is embodied in a code, then an anticode is at the same time antitraditional.17

 Sergey Dolgopolski, The Open Past: Subjectivity and Remembering in the Talmud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 7.  Moulie Vidas, Tradition and the Formation of the Talmud (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014), 203.  Barry Wimpfheimer, Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 10.  In his most recent extended statement on the Bavli, Daniel Boyarin notices many of the same qualities of the document but takes them to point to essentially opposite conclusions. So, in his words, “by insisting that all sides in the debate are correct, it completely vitiates the power of genuine debate and dissent.” “The actual practice of the halakhic dialectic of the Talmud [is] anything but dialogical.” He sees the difference of opinion as representing “distinctions that make no difference,” adding that “the point is not so much that no one is ever right (and that, therefore, a genuine

Rabbinic Religion and Thought

205

What all of these scholars demonstrate and admit is that the Bavli – arguably the crown jewel of the rabbinic estate in late antiquity – is worth interpreting as such, for it articulates, both explicitly and through its method, a philosophy/theology/epistemology/idea that is important in-and-of-itself, as the final summative statement. Other rabbinic documents are worthy of similar consideration, and the Mishnah, in particular, has attracted considerable attention from this perspective. Furthermore – and this is crucial – even if a scholar focuses on a particular idea, category, or theme, parsing the expression of that idea according to a sequential documentary map will always yield interesting results, even if there is overlap between the earliest rabbinic expression of an idea and its latest. Following a path that focuses on key concepts or theological categories while respecting the documentary setting for the relevant teachings are, to begin with, many works by Neusner. Representative of the value of this approach are his Messiah in Context: Israel’s History and Destiny in Formative Judaism and Torah: From Scroll to Symbol in Formative Judaism.18 The former shows how notions of redemption and the figure of the messiah changed from early Rabbinic Judaism to late, while the latter does the same with “Torah.” The latter, in particular, is important for subsequent work in rabbinic thought, as scholars previously19 (and some subsequently20) represented Rabbinic Judaism as having been founded on the notion of “Oral Torah,” an unwritten Torah revealed to Moses at Sinai at the same time as the

pluralism of opinion is imagined), but that no one is ever wrong, as long as he (sic) is in the right institution.” See Daniel Boyarin, Socrates and the Fat Rabbis (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 147 and 152.  Neusner, Messiah in Context: Israel’s History and Destiny in Formative Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984) and Neusner, Torah: From Scroll to Symbol in Formative Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985).  The factuality of this claim – one repeated by post-classical rabbinic scholars generation after generation – was so taken for granted that it required no proof. A modern scholarly argument on behalf of the antiquity of Oral Torah was offered by Hanoch Albeck, Introduction to the Mishnah [Hebrew] (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Bialik Institute and Dvir, 1959), 3–39. Albeck’s error was to equate parallels to rabbinic tradition found in earlier records (such as apocryphal texts) with “evidence” of an ancient “Oral Torah.” No one doubts that there were isolated traditions from earlier times that the rabbis inherited, but this is far from a comprehensive tradition identified as Oral Torah.  See, for example, Marc Hirshman, “Torah in Rabbinic Thought: The Theology of Learning,” in Steven T. Katz, ed., The Cambridge History of Judaism, Vol. 4: The Late Roman-Rabbinic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 899–907. Hirshman ignores Neusner’s advice to consider the documentary setting of a teaching, combining statements from earlier and later texts in the same lists of “proofs” (see page 900). He also reads “Oral Torah” into teachings where the term doesn’t appear, simply assuming that “the words of the sages” = “Oral Torah” (see page 900, example #3, and his quotation of M. Hag. 1.8 on page 901).

206

David Kraemer

Written Torah.21 Laying out teachings concerning Torah chronologically shows that the notion of Oral Torah developed considerably from early Rabbinic Judaism to late, and that the idea was barely present at the earliest stages of this development, let alone foundational. Rabbinic Judaism wasn’t born as the Judaism of Oral Torah; it became that, in the fullest sense, only as it matured. Of particular import for the present discussion are Neusner’s publications on the theology – that is, the “God-talk” – of Rabbinic Judaism. In one compilation of this material, The Foundations of the Theology of Judaism, Volume 1: God, Neusner illustrates abundantly the degree to which the rabbis, from the Mishnah through the Bavli, viewed God “as a person, in whose model the human being had been made.”22 This God has “feelings and emotions and desires correspond[ing] to those of humanity.”23 The parallels go further, and even extend to God’s body; as Neusner shows, especially by reference to some of the later works of the classical rabbinic canon, the view of the rabbis “was that God and humanity are indistinguishable in their physical traits.”24 Though many have understood such rabbinic teachings as metaphorical expressions – assuming that the classical rabbis could not have ascribed an actual physical body to God – Neusner doesn’t see such a necessity. In light of Benjamin Sommer’s more recent work on “The Bodies of God”25 in the Hebrew Bible, and in recognition of the fact that the rabbis were certainly as close, conceptually as well as chronologically, to the Tanakh as they were to rationalist medieval Jewish philosophers such as Maimonides, Neusner’s understanding of the rabbis’ opinions is not unreasonable. David Stern, in his Parables in Midrash, rejects a literal reading of such rabbinic expressions, arguing that “expressions likening God to man are used in a positive, constructive form in order to personalize God and to affirm His presence.” He continues, “To consider anthropomorphism from this perspective is to view it as trope and figure . . . anthropomorphism is less a matter of metaphysics or semantics than a construction of divinity: the intentional, conscious use of language to represent God’s character.”26 Ironically, though he also explicitly rejects Neusner’s documentary approach, Stern devotes his attentions in this book primarily to the midrash Lamentations Rabbah, with productive theological consequences. More than anything, the  I should add that claims for rabbinic beliefs concerning the revelation of the Written Torah are also often incorrect; see b. Gittin 60a. For a fuller analysis of this text, arguably the boldest rabbinic expression regarding Oral Torah, see my discussion in Reading the Rabbis: The Talmud as Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 20–32.  Neusner, The Foundations of the Theology of Judaism, Vol. 1: God (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc., 1991), 50.  Neusner, The Foundations, Vol. 1, 70.  Neusner, The Foundations, Vol. 1, 137 and see illustrations on pages 137–145.  Benjamin D. Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).  David Stern, Parables in Midrash (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 98.

Rabbinic Religion and Thought

207

parables Stern examines provide a vehicle for rabbinic complaints against God following the destruction of the Temple and other sufferings, allowing them to portray God as a “vain, somewhat fumbling and unlucky king whose eventual expression of regret at his vanity is, perhaps, his most sympathetic feature.” While offering such a portrayal, they were “little . . . troubled by the anthropomorphization of God.”27 These are, theologically speaking, not insignificant observations. A theology that permits describing a vain, fumbling God in highly anthropomorphic terms is far from the theology of a medieval rationalist. I followed Neusner’s methodological path in two of my books, the first – Responses to Suffering in Classical Rabbinic Literature (1995) – focusing on suffering, theodicy, and related theological issues, and the second – The Meanings of Death in Rabbinic Judaism (2000) – on the development of ideas of death, “life after death,” the survival of the soul, and so forth.28 The former, in particular, reinforces the value of this method, showing how rabbinic grappling with questions of divine justice moved from what we might call “traditional” to bold – with Palestinian rabbinic documents, from the Mishnah to the Yerushalmi, affirming God’s justice while insisting that those who suffer accept their fate with complete faith, and the last classical rabbinic statement, the Bavli, accepting and even promoting protest and rejection of perceived injustice. This shift was unseen by earlier work in the field (such as that of Urbach), as those scholars didn’t yet see rabbinic thought as differentiated and developing from one document to another. An important contribution to scholarship on rabbinic thought – in this case, a matter inarguably central to rabbinic concerns, that is, their theory of law – is Christine Hayes’ What’s Divine about Divine Law?29 Hayes begins by exploring the degree to which the rabbis’ approach to law was characterized by “realism” or “nominalism,” where the former “maximize[s] appeals to what it perceives to be a mindindependent, objective reality,” minimizes the subjective, and resists “legal fictions and contrary to fact presumptions,” while the latter takes the contrary approach to each of these.30 Her analysis shows that both approaches are in evidence in rabbinic discussion, but her “claim is that the rabbinic legal orientation is highly (but not exclusively) nominalist.”31 Though she recognizes that this orientation may be understood to have theological implications, she avoids taking this step, declaring, “I

 Stern, Parables in Midrash, 147–148.  Kraemer, Responses to Suffering in Classical Rabbinic Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) and The Meanings of Death in Rabbinic Judaism (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).  Christine Hayes, What’s Divine about Divine Law? Early Perspectives (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015).  Hayes, What’s Divine about Divine Law?, 198.  Hayes, What’s Divine about Divine Law?, 199.

208

David Kraemer

make no claims regarding a rabbinic metaphysics.”32 Even still, she does acknowledge that, by taking this approach, “the rabbis divorce truth from divine law,” and she even argues that “the rabbinic conception of divine law in which law and truth are divorced was a self-aware choice.”33 Building on this foundation, in the next chapter (Chapter 6) Hayes analyzes a series of texts to argue that the rabbis did not assert the essential rationality of divine law. She then argues that, for the rabbis, divine law was not “invariable and immutable.”34 Finally, she rejects the claim, made by some before her,35 that the rabbis assumed and accepted the notion of “natural law,” insisting that even the so-called “Noahide Laws” do not, for the rabbis, constitute such a system. In her analyses, Hayes sometimes seems to accept the validity of Neusner’s method, distinguishing the views of the Yerushalmi and Bavli with respect to “the flexibility of Torah” (Chapter 7), for example. At other times, though, she simply characterizes the opinions of “the rabbis,” mixing teachings from various times and places – even citing a teaching from Exodus Rabbah, which she admits to be a “late midrashic work,” without justifying its inclusion in a discussion of classical rabbinic sources.36 The student of her work must judge which approach is valid. Other writings on rabbinic thought or theology have been important or influential, though less rigorous in their method. Of note is the work of David Weiss Halivni, whose scholarly career turned from source-critical work on the Talmud to distinctly theological matters as it advanced. His book Revelation Restored (1997)37 addressed questions of revelation, built on recognition of the fact that scripture is often internally contradictory, as both traditional and critical scholarship readily admit. Halivni’s personal resolution of the tension is partially grounded in his earlier work, Peshat and Derash,38 which, focused as it is on the rabbinic canon, is far more relevant to the current discussion.

 Hayes, What’s Divine about Divine Law?, 198.  Hayes, What’s Divine about Divine Law?, 244. In this conclusion, Hayes agrees with or approximates others before her. In his Peshat and Drash: Plain and Applied Meaning in Rabbinic Exegesis (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), David Weiss Halivni devotes an extended discussion to what he describes as “the dichotomy between practice and intellect” (101–125). Halivni’s distinction maps onto the “halakha vs. truth” dichotomy that others recognize, but he refuses to admit the possibility of such a division, positing, instead, a “double-verity,” essentially the truth of revelation and the truth of practice. In The Mind of the Talmud, I argue for the separation of truth and practice (see Chapter 6), a separation of which the rabbis of the Bavli, at least, were fully aware.  Hayes, What’s Divine about Divine Law?, 327.  For citation of the relevant literature, see Hayes, What’s Divine about Divine Law?, 354, n.37.  Hayes, What’s Divine about Divine Law?, 334.  David Weiss Halivni, Revelation Restored: Divine Writ and Critical Responses (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997).  Halivni, Peshat and Derash: Plain and Applied Meaning in Rabbinic Exegesis (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

Rabbinic Religion and Thought

209

The first half of Peshat and Derash, labeled “On Matters of Exegesis,” is devoted to sketching the history of biblical interpretation in post-biblical Judaism; its particular interest is in the frequent deviation of rabbinic exegesis from the simple meaning of the biblical text. The second half of the book, “On Matters of Theology,” then considers the theological consequences of this deviation. The question, for the religious Jew, is how rabbinic interpretations that so clearly deviate from any conceivable “simple” meaning of the Torah can be the foundation of halakha, meaning that halakha and apparent “truth,” as recorded in the words of scripture, don’t correspond. Halivni reviews several approaches to revelation that might solve this problem, in the end proposing the solution that works for him: subsequent to the original divine revelation, the sins of ancient Israel led to the corruption of the biblical text. Beginning with Ezra and the scroll he brought with him from exile, the task of rehabilitation of the text commenced, but only with the rabbis was that repair completed. In Halivni’s words, “rabbinic derash [exegesis] actually restores the original meaning of the scriptural verse, recovering its divine authorial intention.”39 This piece of theology, while based upon rabbinic stories, is Halivni’s alone. It is not scholarship on the actual theology of the rabbis of late antiquity, but it does pay heed to a “shocking” feature of rabbinic exegesis that all such scholarship must ultimately address. Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Heavenly Torah, published first, in Hebrew (Torah min hashamayim . . . ), in 1962–1990, has gained renewed attention and influence thanks to its translation into English by Gordon Tucker, published in 2005. The book is a massive compilation of rabbinic teachings, with analysis, dedicated to laying out purported differences between Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Ishmael and their “schools” in their approaches to reading Torah. Obviously, we would not expect Heschel, who died in 1972, to account, in his work, for the critical insights of Neusner and others. But it is fair to say that Heschel was not, in his discipline or inclinations, a critical scholar of the earlier generation either. He accepts the assumption, inherited from the tradition, that there were such schools – a question that has been litigated repeatedly in modern scholarship – and he goes about fitting scattered theological teachings into his pre-set notion of what those schools allegedly stood for. For example, one of the differences in their approaches, according to Heschel, is Akiba’s magnification of miracles, which stand in contrast to Ishmael’s more quotidian explanations. To illustrate this, he offers a case where a student of Akiba suggests that, when Moses died, God Godself transported Moses four miles to bury him, whereas Ishmael insists that Moses “buried himself.”40 Now, there is obviously a difference in these opinions, but I do not know which one is a greater miracle. In recognition of the

 Halivni, Peshat and Derash, 132.  Heschel, Torah min hashamayim (London and New York: The Soncino Press, 1962), 25. This particular example is omitted from Tucker’s edited translation.

210

David Kraemer

problems represented by the many cases such as this, it is fair to conclude that there is much to be gleaned from the theologically significant teachings Heschel gathers, but one must examine them through one’s own critical eye, not Heschel’s. The reader would not be wrong to observe that this sketch of recent (= the last three decades) developments in the study of rabbinic religion and thought is relatively brief. This is because scholarship on the rabbis and their worlds has overwhelmingly concentrated, over the course of these years, on the history of the “rabbinic period” and its literature – with the latter often read primarily to inform the former. Work on the history of Jews in late antiquity has been abundant and extremely productive over the course of this period, with scholars contributing to this field too numerous to name here. Prominent among those concentrating on rabbinic literature are Richard Kalmin and Jeffrey Rubenstein – with Kalmin primarily interested in the connections of the literature and history (real lives on the ground)41 and Rubinstein more devoted to the literature as such, though not without an interest in its historical associations and implications.42 This is all rather ironic, as there are serious methodological problems with recovering “rabbinic” - let alone Jewish – history from rabbinic documents, while the history of rabbinic religion and thought is far less plagued by such obstacles. As Seth Schwartz has repeatedly insisted – in my view, rightly – the available evidence regarding the Roman (and, we might add, Persian) Near East hardly supports a picture of the Jewish world that conforms with what one finds in the self-interested record of rabbinic literature. On the contrary, without surviving rabbinic literature, one would hardly know that the classical rabbis existed at all, at least until the sixth century. Moreover, even if one insists on using rabbinic literature as evidence for history, one must first overcome the challenges of its self-serving qualities, its originally oral status, the chronological distance of the world it “represents” and the record we preserve, and so forth. These obstacles are not easy to overcome and cautious historians will be hesitant before drawing conclusions. At the same time, rabbinic religion and thought are arguably embodied in the very documents we preserve. If by a religious system we mean a system of beliefs and practices devoted to the service of its adherents’ God or gods, then much of what we would mean by “rabbinic religion” is preserved in the documents we have referenced. There may be a gap between what the text prescribes and what the rabbis and their followers practiced, but this gap cannot be as large as that between the record of Jewish conduct in rabbinic documents and the conduct of Jews-in-general in the real world. Besides, even if conduct prescribed in rabbinic documents is idealized, it still represents rabbinic religion as the rabbis sought to construct it, whatever the reality.  See for example Richard Kalmin, Migrating Tales: The Talmud’s Narratives and Their Historical Context (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014).  See for example Jeffrey Rubinstein, Talmudic Stories: Narrative Art, Composition, and Culture (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

Rabbinic Religion and Thought

211

When we turn to rabbinic beliefs or “philosophy,” we may assert with confidence that there can be no better record of these in late antiquity than the documents the rabbis produced. Sure, individual rabbis had their individual beliefs, which may have diverged from “official” rabbinic belief. But the authoritative statement of the rabbinic estate is embodied in classical rabbinic documents. We may or may not be able to reduce a history of these matters to generations, each distinguished from the one before, depending upon the position one accepts with respect to Neusner’s critique. But at the very least, we may responsibly recreate a sequential history of rabbinic thought that correlates with the completion of each document or corpus, and, as we saw earlier, this approach yields notable insights.

For Further Reading Fisch, Menachem. Rational Rabbis: Science and Talmudic Culture. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997. Halivni, David. Peshat and Derash: Plain and Applied Meaning in Rabbinic Exegesis. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Hayes, Christine. What’s Divine about Divine Law? Early Perspectives. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015. Heschel, Abraham Joshua. Torah min hashamayim be’aspaklariah shel hadorot [Hebrew]. London and New York: The Soncino Press, 1962–1990. Published as Heavenly Torah: As Refracted through the Generations. Trans. Gordon Tucker. New York: Continuum, 2005. Kraemer, David. The Meanings of Death in Rabbinic Judaism. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Kraemer, David. The Mind of the Talmud. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Kraemer, David. Responses to Suffering in Classical Rabbinic Literature. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Neusner, Jacob. Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Neusner, Jacob. Messiah in Context: Israel’s History and Destiny in Formative Judaism. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984. Neusner, Jacob. The Foundations of the Theology of Judaism, Vol. I: God. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc., 1991. Neusner, Jacob. Torah: From Scroll to Symbol in Formative Judaism. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985. Neusner, Jacob. The Transformation of Judaism: From Philosophy to Religion. University of Illinois Press, 1992. Urbach, Ephraim E. The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs [Hebrew]. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1969. Urbach, Ephraim E. The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs. Trans. Israel Abrams. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1975.

Section 4: The Medieval Period

Judith R. Baskin

Medieval Jewish Social History: Three Areas of Gender-Conscious Research 1 Introduction In recent decades, the study of medieval Jewry has been enriched by a variety of new research questions and innovative approaches. These include the use of gender as a category of inquiry, an increased interest in the social, economic, and religious lives of ordinary Jews, and investigations of Jews who subsisted on the margins of their communities. Some scholars have demonstrated the impact of Muslim and Christian practices on Jewish daily life and family law, while others have discussed changing representations of women in a variety of literary and historical writings. In many cases, these late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century explorations of the past have been facilitated by online resources of various kinds,1 as well as by evidence from material culture.2 In what follows, I review recent research in three areas: Jewish gender relations as reflected in Cairo Geniza documents, the lives of Jewish women in Ashkenaz, and new readings of portrayals of women in martyrological chronicles and poetry

 Examples of electronic resources for the study of medieval Jews and Jewish life include the Bar Ilan Responsa Project, a database that includes the Hebrew Bible and its principal commentaries, the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds with commentaries, Midrash collections, the Zohar, legal codes, as well as a large collection of Responsa literature. Electronic resources focused on Cairo Geniza documents include, among others, The Princeton Geniza Lab, Princeton University; the Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection, Cambridge University Library; the Friedberg Genizah Project, The Association for the Study of Jewish Manuscripts, Toronto, Ontario; and the Rylands Cairo Genizah Collection, the University of Manchester Library. The Princeton University Sefer Hasidim Database (PUSHD) comprises fourteen manuscripts and manuscript fragments of different versions of Sefer Ḥasidim.  See Ephraim Shoham-Steiner, “The Sources,” and Katrin Kogman-Appel, “Material Culture and Art,” both in Robert Chazan, ed., The Cambridge History of Judaism, Vol. 6: The Middle Ages: The Christian World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018): 307–354, and 860–888; and Vivian Mann’s chapter in this volume. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110418873-013

216

Judith R. Baskin

from northern Europe.3 My focus throughout is on analyses that illuminate the roles of women and gender in medieval Jewish governance and practice.4

2 Cairo Geniza Studies of Cairo Geniza5 writings continue to expand knowledge of medieval Jewish life and institutions under Islam; writings from this voluminous treasury, unique in its documentation of a medieval Jewish community over a number of centuries, offer considerable insight into its larger political and social setting, as well.6 Recent generations of scholars have built on the numerous themes and texts delineated in Shlomo Dov Goitein’s monumental multi-volume compendium, A Mediterranean Society. Their investigations, based on close readings of primary documents, expand and complicate knowledge of family affairs and the lives of women in detailed ways that Goitein’s comprehensive approach did not allow. As Eve Krakowski has written, Goitein’s pioneering endeavor is “both a necessary starting point for new work on almost any subject in Geniza women’s or family history, and a constant

 Given the constraints of space, I am unable to address scholarship on Spain or Southern France (Occitania). Recent research on these locales includes Elka Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power in Medieval Barcelona (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006); Elka Klein, “Public Activities of Catalan Jewish Women,” Medieval Encounters 12/1 (2006): 48–61; Renée Levine Melammed, Heretics or Daughters of Israel? The Crypto-Jewish Women of Castile (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Rebecca Lynn Winer, Women, Wealth and Community in Perpignan, c. 1250–1300: Christians, Jews And Enslaved Muslims in a Medieval Mediterranean Town (London: Ashgate, 2006); and see also, Renée Levine Melammed and Rebecca Lynn Winer, “Jewish Women and Gender in Iberia (Sepharad) and Beyond: From Medieval to Early Modern,” in Federica Francesconi and Rebecca Winer, eds., Jewish Women’s History from Antiquity to the Present (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2021): 97–119.  For two recent overviews, see Judith R. Baskin, “Jewish Traditions About Women and Gender Roles: From Rabbinic Teachings to Medieval Practice,” and Elisheva Baumgarten, “Gender and Daily Life in Jewish Communities,” both in Judith Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 35–51, 213–228.  The Cairo Geniza contained over 200,000 documents written mostly in Hebrew characters in languages including Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic. See Shlomo Dov Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 6 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967–1993); and Stefan C. Reif, A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo: The History of Cambridge University’s Genizah Collection (New York: Routledge, 2000). “Documentary Geniza Research in the Twenty-First Century,” edited by Jessica L. Goldberg and Eve Krakowski, Special Issue of Jewish History 32/2–4 (2019), gathers thirty-nine articles reflecting recent Geniza scholarship.  See, for example, Marina Rustow, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).

Medieval Jewish Social History: Three Areas of Gender-Conscious Research

217

point of return, whose details gain new meanings and pose new challenges, the more fresh evidence one can gather to test against them.”7 Among areas of expanded research are the mechanics of marriage and how the formation and dissolution of matrimonial pairings reveal Jewish survival strategies in a mostly Muslim environment. In her monograph investigating Jewish female adolescence, Krakowski shows that “the norms through which Geniza Jews managed and understood an unmarried young women’s property, labor, and support . . . resembled those held by their Muslim (and probably Christian) neighbors,”8 rather than following rabbinic legal models. Thus, she notes that Geniza custom did not favor betrothing a daughter while she was still a minor (before the age of twelve and a half) as advised in rabbinic law; rather, girls remained under the close care of parents or guardians until they married in their late teens or early twenties. Krakowski sees this as an example of the ways in which Geniza Jews outwardly honored the legal forms of Rabbinic Judaism while interpreting its rulings broadly enough to fit their own social needs.9 Goitein observed that marriages were often arranged within the extended family, a strategy intended to conserve wealth while also offering security and familiarity to a young bride.10 Geniza documents make clear that most women did not wish to leave their extended families and risk the perils of travel and the possible hardships they might incur in following their husbands to a foreign country.11 However, marrying outside the family and across distance was an opportunity both for the learned elite and for merchant families to establish valuable connections. The Geniza preserves many records of such unions. As Krakowski notes, “new wives often became conduits for people on both sides of this extended network, especially between their husbands and their fathers and brothers,”12 thus enabling the formation of new male patronage alliances. Gauging how women themselves felt about these long-distance marriages is difficult, although letters found in the Geniza express significant distress from young women who married into households far from home, where they had to deal with demanding mothers-in-law and older husbands who were not sympathetic to their

 Eve Krakowski, “The Geniza and Family History,” Jewish History 32/2–4 (2019): 175–197, 185.  Eve Krakowski, Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Female Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 180.  Krakowski, Coming of Age, 113–141, 240.  On endogamous marriages, see Goitein, Mediterranean Society 3:55–56; and Krakowski, Coming of Age, 213–224.  Goitein, Mediterranean Society 3:177, 198–99, 202. Joel Kraemer, “Women Speak for Themselves,” in Reif, ed., The Cambridge Genizah Collections: 178–216, 196–198, describes letters by and concerning women who refused to accompany their husbands, either because they wished to remain close to their own extended families or because they were comfortable in their present environments and feared the risks of settling elsewhere.  Krakowski, Coming of Age, 264.

218

Judith R. Baskin

loneliness or homesickness, as well as pleas to be brought back home from impoverished widows in far-off places.13 Krakowski states that marriage ended a young woman’s social subordination as a dependent adolescent and launched her into new relationships beyond her natal family circle, as well as providing her a degree of autonomy within and beyond her marital household. However, she also points out that marriages were not always lasting and “did little to ensure a woman’s economic or social stability throughout the rest of her life.”14 A woman was always most dependent on those related to her by blood. Krakowski’s findings on the centrality of kinship ties in determining a woman’s primary allegiances and sources of support reinforces and refines Goitein’s observations of marital instability and frequent divorce in Cairo’s Jewish community.15 Divorced women who could depend on wealthy and well-connected family members were able to remarry without difficulty.16 Moreover, dissolution of marriage at a woman’s behest was enabled by a takkana (legislative corrective) of the geonic era. According to this enactment, which originated in mid-seventh-century Iraq, a Jewish court could force a husband to grant his wife an immediate divorce if she claimed that she could not bear to live with him, on the condition that she relinquish all or most of the financial privileges ordinarily due to a divorcée. This ruling, the takkana of the moredet (rebellious wife), enabled what came to be known as a ransom-divorce. It diverged from halakha in bypassing the requirement of a year’s hiatus before a divorce compelled by a rabbinical court took effect. As scholars have shown, the geonic motivation for this takkana was to prevent unhappy wives from seeking divorces in Muslim courts and possibly converting to Islam. It preserved the authority of Jewish legal venues and demonstrates a pragmatic adaptation to the customs of the larger environment.17 We can see this takkana in action

 Goitein, Mediterranean Society 3:56–60. For discussions of marriages across distance, see Judith R. Baskin, “Marriage and Mobility in Two Medieval Jewish Societies,” Jewish History 22/1–2 (2008): 223–243; and Oded Zinger, “‘When the one who is with me is not with me’: Long Distance Marriages in the Cairo Genizah” [Hebrew], Pe’amim: Studies in Oriental Jewry 121 (2009): 7–66.  Krakowski, Coming of Age, 294.  Goitein, Mediterranean Society 3:263.  Goitein, Mediterranean Society 3:272.  Mordechai A. Friedman, “The Ransom-Divorce: Divorce Proceedings Initiated by the Wife in Medieval Jewish Practice,” Israel Oriental Studies 6 (1976): 288–307; and see Elimelech Westreich, “The Rise and Decline of the Law of the Rebellious Wife in Medieval Jewish Law,” in Hillel Gamoran, ed., The Zutphen Conference Volume, Jewish Law Association Studies 12 (2002): 207–218, for a discussion of the extent to which various medieval authorities, including Moses Maimonides, attempted to find Talmudic precedent for the takkana of the moredet. See also Robert Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 62–63; Gideon Libson, “The Age of the Geonim,” in Neil S. Hecht, Bernard S. Jackson, Stephen M. Passamaneck, et al., eds., An Introduction to the History and Sources of Jewish Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996): 234–238; Goitein, Mediterranean Society 3:267; and Judith R. Baskin, “The Taqqanah of the Moredet in the Middle Ages,” in Jeremy Brown and Marc Herman, eds., Accounting for the

Medieval Jewish Social History: Three Areas of Gender-Conscious Research

219

in the responsa of Moses Maimonides (1138–1204) to queries from both a wife and a husband about a marital dispute. In this case, a female teacher complained that her absent spouse had reappeared after many years and demanded that she either give up her occupation or allow him to marry a second wife. Maimonides recommended a ransom-divorce as an exit strategy should the wife wish to retain her occupation and her independence.18 Not all divorces were initiated by women of means and many unfortunate divorcées were left in want. They joined the considerable number of other outcast females, including impoverished widows and deserted wives, who, along with indigent men, wandered from place to place dependent on public charity.19 Mark R. Cohen, who has studied the petitions of the impoverished and how Jewish communal organizations allotted charitable support, writes that unlike men, who “showed no reluctance to appeal to individuals, women, it seems, were more accustomed to turn to Jewish officialdom or to the community,” presumably to avoid unwanted exposure to a man outside the family circle and because the court was seen as the “father of orphans and judge of widows.”20 According to halakhic norms, Jewish marriages were established by a contract (ketubba) stating the economic terms of the union and the obligations of each spouse. Jewish grooms contributed a marriage gift (mohar); part was paid to the bride’s father at marriage and a portion was reserved for the bride in case of a divorce or her husband’s death. Similarly, the bride brought a dowry, which was to be returned to her should the marriage end. As Goitein, and more recently Amir Ashur, have demonstrated, some ketubbot found in the Geniza also mandate protections for the wife beyond the standard contract; these additions attempted to obviate Jewish laws and practices that were unfavorable to women. Such prenuptial agreements could include guarantees that if the union dissolved the husband would immediately produce a get (divorce document); and that he would not beat his wife; separate her against her will from her parents; or travel anywhere without her consent. Increasingly frequently, beginning in the early twelfth century, such clauses might also stipulate that the husband would not marry another wife without his first wife’s consent or acquire a

Commandments in Medieval Judaism: New Studies in Law, Philosophy, Pietism, and Mysticism (Leiden: Brill, 2021): 45–57.  Renée Levine Melammed, “He Said, She Said: The Case of a Woman Teacher in Maimonides’ Twelfth Century Cairo,” Association for Jewish Studies Review 22/1 (1997): 19–36.  Goitein, Mediterranean Society 3:324; Mark R. Cohen, Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Cairo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Mark R. Cohen, The Voice of the Poor in the Middle Ages: An Anthology of Documents from the Cairo Genizah (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).  Cohen, Voice of the Poor, 68–69. See also, Miriam Frenkel, “Pilgrimage and Charity in the Geniza Society,” in Arnold F. Franklin, Roxani E. Margariti, Marina Rustow, and Uri Simonsohn, eds., Jews, Christians and Muslims in Medieval and Early Modern Times: A Festschrift in Honor of Mark R. Cohen (Leiden: Brill, 2014): 59–66.

220

Judith R. Baskin

female slave of whom she disapproved.21 The interrelated issues of polygyny and relationships between male members of households and maidservants have received increased scrutiny in recent scholarship. Mordechai A. Friedman has studied the frequency of polygyny as indicated in Geniza documents.22 He concludes that while the majority of marriages were monogamous, polygyny, which was an accepted feature of Muslim social life, was relatively frequent.23 Given the expense of maintaining several spouses and their children, such marriages were most often found in wealthy families.24 Polygyny might also occur when a first wife appeared to be infertile after a decade of marriage or was disabled in some way, and in cases of levirate marriage.25 Friedman believes that Jewish mandates for equal treatment of co-wives, found in Geniza documents, reflect Muslim influence since there are no parallel discussions in the Babylonian Talmud.26 Slave girls were found in many Jewish households and were often listed as part of a wealthy young woman’s dowry. Friedman explains that “[while] Jewish law strictly prohibits any contact with a slave girl, Islam permits concubinage with slaves,” and he states that it is evident that many Jewish men engaged in such illicit affairs.”27 Craig Perry, who has investigated Jewish involvement in slavery in the Geniza era,28 has also addressed the topic of slave girls in Jewish households. Geniza documents that he has gathered and translated, including responsa, petitions to communal officials, and court testimonies, affirm and expand Friedman’s finding that Jewish men purchased women for sexual purposes and that they also sexually exploited enslaved  Goitein, Mediterranean Society 3:114; Amir Ashur, “Protecting the Wife’s Rights in Marriage as Reflected in Pre-Nuptials and Marriage Contracts from the Cairo Genizah and Parallel Arabic Sources,” Religion Compass 6/8 (2012): 381–389; and Amir Ashur, “Legal Documents: How to Identify Prenuptial Agreements,” Jewish History 32/2–4 (2019): 441–449.  See Mordechai A. Friedman, “Polygyny in Jewish Tradition and Practice: New Sources from the Cairo Geniza,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 49 (1982): 33–68; Mordechai A. Friedman, Jewish Polygyny in the Middle Ages [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 1986); and Mordechai A. Friedman, “Marriage as an Institution: Jewry under Islam,” in David Kraemer, ed., The Jewish Family: Metaphor and Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989): 31–45.  Friedman, “Polygyny in Jewish Tradition and Practice,” 68.  Friedman, “Polygyny in Jewish Tradition and Practice,” 35.  Friedman, “Polygyny in Jewish Tradition and Practice,” 39.  Friedman, “Polygyny in Jewish Tradition and Practice,” 68.  Friedman, “Polygyny in Jewish Tradition and Practice,” 55.  On non-Jewish slaves in Jewish homes, see Craig Perry, “An Aramaic Bill of Sale for the Enslaved Nubian Woman Na’im,” Jewish History 32/2–4 (2019): 451–461; Craig Perry, “Conversion as an Aspect of Master-Slave Relations in the Medieval Egyptian Jewish Community,” in Y. Fox and Y. Yisraeli, eds., Contesting Inter-Religious Conversion in the Medieval World (Abingdon, U. K.: Routledge Press, 2017): 135–159; Ophira Gamliel, “Asu the Convert: A Slave Girl or a Nāyar Land Owner,” in Entangled Relations 6 (2018): 201–246; and Moshe Yagur, “Captives, Converts and Concubines: Gendered Aspects of Conversion to Judaism in the Medieval Near East,” in Zvi Stampfer and Amir Ashur, eds., Language, Gender and Law in the Judaeo-Islamic Milieu (Leiden: Brill, 2020): 88–109.

Medieval Jewish Social History: Three Areas of Gender-Conscious Research

221

household servants. Perry suggests that “male competition over who had the power and authority to control enslaved women was one domain in which Jewish men constituted masculinity in a political and social environment in which they were subordinate to Muslims.”29 Geniza documents demonstrate that Jewish women were active participants in a range of familial legal disputes; these included disagreements within marriages, terms of divorces, and battles over contested wills and inheritances. Women sometimes took their cases to gentile courts since Muslim inheritance provisions for wives or daughters were more generous than those in Jewish law. Renée Levine Melammed and Oded Zinger have discussed numerous instances recorded in Geniza documents where Jewish women resorted or threatened to resort to Muslim judges in cases where they believed the ruling would benefit them. As Melammed points out, “the fact that women were utilizing or threatening to utilize Muslim law and courts means that they were aware of the options available to them,”30 an indication that they were informed about differences in Jewish and Islamic law in areas that affected their lives. Zinger notes that even though Jewish communal authorities employed a variety of measures to deter them from doing so, Jewish women turned to Muslim courts far more than Jewish men. He suggests that this was because Muslim legal forums offered them a way of resisting the pressures they often faced in Jewish communal institutions and at home.31 He writes that “Women felt secure approaching a variety of Islamic legal institutions, which they accessed either by themselves or through their male relatives, Muslim neighbors, or wives of Muslim officials. For Jewish women, Muslim legal institutions were not frightening spaces in which they encountered pressures to convert, but places where they could secure their monetary rights and find redress of wrongs.”32 Zinger speculates that Muslim courts may have been sympathetic to the claims of Jewish women because such cases provided “Muslim officials an occasion to perform their authority over Jewish men,” and he goes on to conjecture that Muslim judges who helped Jewish women “who felt wronged by their male relatives or by Jewish

 Craig Perry, “‘No One Sees and Every Man Does as He Sees Fit’: Slavery and Masculinity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt.” Website: “Teaching Medieval Slavery and Captivity,” http://medievalslavery.org/middle-east-and-north-africa/source-no-one-sees-and-every-man-doesas-he-sees-fit-slavery-and-masculinity-in-the-jewish-community-of-medieval-egypt/.  Renée Levine Melammed, “A Look at Medieval Egyptian Jewry: Challenges and Coping Mechanisms Discerned in the Cairo Genizah Documents,” in Federica Francesconi, Stanley Mirvis, and Brian M. Smollett, eds., From Catalonia to the Caribbean: The Sephardic Orbit from Medieval to Modern Times. Essays in Honor of Jane S. Gerber (Leiden: Brill, 2018): 100–116, 107; Oded Zinger, “‘She Aims to Harass Him’: Jewish Women in Muslim Legal Venues in Medieval Egypt,” Association for Jewish Studies Review 42 (2018): 159–192; and Oded Zinger, “Jewish Women in Muslim Legal Venues in Medieval Egypt – Seven Legal Documents from the Cairo Geniza,” in Language, Gender and Law in the Judaeo-Islamic Milieu, Cambridge Genizah Studies 10 (2020): 38–87.  Zinger, “‘She Aims to Harass Him,’” 164, 172–173, 177.  Zinger, “‘She Aims to Harass Him,’” 184.

222

Judith R. Baskin

communal institutions” may have believed that they were demonstrating the superiority of Islamic justice over that of the Jews.33 Women’s disputes and grievances also emerge in their letters, the only Geniza documents that can be attributed to female authorship. Some of these numerous epistles were studied by the late Joel Kraemer,34 and this project is being carried on by Renée Levine Melammed.35 Melammed notes that women generally dictated their letters to relatives or professional scribes and they tended to use colloquial language, avoiding the elevated discourse found in letters and petitions written by men.36 Women’s letters, which come from every socioeconomic level of Geniza society, were most often to other family members, especially sons or brothers. Some were updates on personal affairs, but others were desperate requests for funds, aid in finding a missing husband or son, or assistance of other kinds. As Melammed writes, “Life was unpredictable, illness and death often unexpected and love was strained by distance.”37 These letters are vital windows into the diverse circumstances and intimate concerns of Jewish women in the Mediterranean sphere.

3 Women’s Lives in Medieval Ashkenaz Research on various aspects of Jewish women’s lives in medieval northern Europe has expanded significantly in the past thirty years. My 1991 chapter surveying medieval Jewish women’s lives in both Muslim and Christian orbits was among early efforts to introduce questions about gender into scholarship on the Jewish Middle Ages.38 In  Zinger, “‘She Aims to Harass Him,’” 186.  Joel Kraemer, “Spanish Ladies from the Cairo Geniza,” Mediterranean Historical Review 6 (1991): 237–267; Joel Kraemer “Women Speak for Themselves,” in Stefan C. Reif, ed., The Cambridge Genizah Collections: Their Contents and Significance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002):178–216.  Renée Levine Melammed, “A Look at Women’s Lives in Cairo Geniza Society,” in Shmuel Shepkaru and Alan T. Levenson, eds., Festschrift Darkhei Noam: The Jews of Arab Lands (Leiden: Brill, 2015): 64–85; Renée Levine Melammed, “Witnesses from Medieval Mediterranean Society: The Reliability of Jewish Women’s Narratives from the Cairo Genizah,” in Susan A. Harvey, Nathaniel DesRosiers, Shira L. Lander, Jacqueline Z. Pastis, and Daniel Ullucci, eds., A Most Reliable Witness: Essays in Honor of Ross Shepard Kraemer (Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2015): 213–222; Renée Levine Melammed “A Look at Medieval Egyptian Jewry: Challenges and Coping Mechanisms Discerned in the Cairo Genizah Documents,” in Francesconi, Mirvis, and Smollett, eds., From Catalonia to the Caribbean: 100–116; Renée Levine Melammed, “The Challenge of Reading Women’s Letters from the Cairo Genizah,” in Zvi Stampfer and Amir Ashur, eds., Language, Gender and Law in the Judaeo-Islamic Milieu (Leiden: Brill, 2020): 14–17; and Renée Levine Melammed and Uri Melammed, “Epistolary Exchanges with Women,” Jewish History 32/2–4 (2019): 411–418.  Melammed and Melammed, “Epistolary Exchanges,” 411–412.  Melammed, “A Look at Women’s Lives in Cairo Geniza Society,” 81.  Judith R. Baskin, “Jewish Women in the Middle Ages,” in Judith R. Baskin, ed., Jewish Women in Historical Perspective (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press,1991; 2nd ed., 1998): 94–113. For

Medieval Jewish Social History: Three Areas of Gender-Conscious Research

223

the same year, my essay comparing the educations of medieval Jewish and Christian women in the Middle Ages was published, and my articles on the representation of women in Sefer Hasidim (the twelfth century Book of the Pious) appeared in 1994 and 1995.39 Cheryl Tallan’s work on Jewish widows and their business enterprises also were published in this era.40 More recently, Avraham Grossman,41 Elisheva Baumgarten,42 and Martha Keil43 have been influential in amplifying knowledge of medieval Jewish women and their activities in the home, the synagogue, communal affairs, and business enterprises. By focusing on specific cases from medieval Ashkenazic responsa literature, Rachel Furst has illuminated the difficulties of applying legal principles to complicated human behaviors.44 Prior to 1000 CE, few Jews lived in Germany and northern France; their numbers increased as Jews moved to Ashkenaz, mainly from southern Europe, in response to

an updated version, see Judith R. Baskin, “Medieval Jewish Women in Muslim and Christian Milieus,” in Francesconi and Winer, eds., Jewish Women’s History from Antiquity to the Present: 75–95.  Judith R. Baskin, “Some Parallels in the Education of Medieval Jewish and Christian Women,” Jewish History 5/1 (1991): 41–51; Judith R. Baskin “Images of Women in Sefer Hasidim,” in Karl E. Grözinger and Joseph Dan, eds., Mysticism, Magic and Kabbalah in Ashkenazi Judaism, Studia Judaica 13 (1995): 93–105; and Judith R. Baskin, “From Separation to Displacement: The Problem of Women in Sefer Hasidim,” Association for Jewish Studies Review 19 (1994): 1–18.  Cheryl Tallan, “Medieval Jewish Widows: Their Control of Resources,” Jewish History 5/1 (1991): 63–74; Cheryl Tallan, “Opportunities for Medieval Northern-European Jewish Widows in the Public and Domestic Spheres,” in Louise Mirrer, ed., Upon My Husband’s Death: Widows in the Literature and Histories of Medieval Europe (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992): 115–127.  Avraham Grossman, Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe, trans. Jonathan Chipman (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2004).  Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Elisheva Baumgarten, Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz: Men, Women, and Everyday Religious Observance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Elisheva Baumgarten, “Annual Cycle and Life Cycle,” and “The Family,” in Robert Chazan, ed., The Cambridge History of Judaism, Vol. 6: The Middle Ages: The Christian World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018): 416–439, 440–462.  Martha Keil, “‘She Supplied Provisions for her Household’: Jewish Business Women in Late Medieval Ashkenaz,” in The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages (Speyer: Historisches Museum der Pfalz, 2004): 83–89; Martha Keil, “Public Roles of Jewish Women in Fourteenth and Fifteenth-Centuries Ashkenaz: Business, Community, and Ritual,” in Christoph Cluse, ed., The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages: Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004): 317–330; and Martha Keil, “Rituals of Repentance and Testimonies at Rabbinical Courts in the 15th Century,” in Gerhard Jaritz and Michael Richter, eds., Oral History of the Middle Ages: The Spoken Word in Context (Krems and Budapest: Central European University Press, 2001): 164–176.  Rachel Furst, “A Return to Credibility? The Rehabilitation of Repentant Apostates in Medieval Ashkenaz,” in Nina Caputo and Mitchell B. Hart, eds., On the Word of a Jew: Religion, Reliability, and the Dynamics of Trust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019): 201–221; Rachel Furst, “Marriage Before the Bench: Divorce Law and Litigation Strategies in Thirteenth-Century Ashkenaz,” Jewish History 31/1–2 (2017): 7–30; Rachel Furst, “Captivity, Conversion, and Communal Identity: Sexual Angst and Religious Crisis in Frankfurt, 1241,” Jewish History 22/1–2 (2008): 179–221.

224

Judith R. Baskin

new economic opportunities. Jews, essentially the only minority religious community in northern Christian Europe, presented ideological and practical problems to religious and secular rulers, even as they were perceived as bringing economic benefits to a developing urban mercantile culture. As the Middle Ages progressed and ongoing hostilities with the Muslim world led to an increasing xenophobia, Jews became subject to outbreaks of popular violence. At the same time, the growth of the European economy and widespread exclusion of Jews from international trade in the aftermath of the first four Crusades (1096–1204) led many to concentrate their economic energies on moneylending, a denigrated and dangerous but essential occupation. Moreover, Jews were subject to ever-increasing taxation and legal disabilities, and were required to wear distinctive clothing and badges. Grossman notes the paucity of sources on the situation of Jewish women in the fourteenth century due to the deteriorating conditions of Jewish life. The significant loss of life and the destruction of communities due to plague and persecution during the Black Death (1346–1353) not only significantly weakened the political situation of the Jews but also undermined the status of Jewish women.45 By the end of the fifteenth century, Jews had been expelled altogether from areas where they had long lived, including England (1290), France (over the course of the fourteenth century), and Spain (1492), although communities remained in German-speaking Europe.46 During the High Middle Ages, between 1000 and 1250, Jewish women played vital and often autonomous roles in their family’s economic lives, as merchants, moneylenders, and financial brokers, positions requiring some degree of literacy in the vernacular language, as well as numerical skills. This success led to unprecedented female power in Jewish private and communal life. At the same time, family norms were considerably influenced by the practices of the majority culture. One example is the eleventh century takkana forbidding polygyny for Jews in Christian countries. This legal alteration is attributed to Rabbi Gershom ben Judah (c. 960–1028), the first rabbinic authority of Ashkenazi Jewry; he is also credited with the pronouncement that no woman could be divorced against her will, a striking change in Jewish law and practice. Women’s status was enhanced by the large dowries they brought into their marriages.47 According to halakha, the dowry of a deceased childless wife legally  Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 7.  On Jews in Christian Europe, see Robert Chazan, The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom, 1000–1500 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and the essays in Robert Chazan, ed., The Cambridge History of Judaism, Vol. 6: The Middle Ages: The Christian World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018).  On marriages and their formation in Ashkenaz, see Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 68–101; and Ephraim Kanarfogel, “Rabbinic Conceptions of Marriage and Matchmaking in Christian Europe,” in Elisheva Baumgarten, Ruth Mazo Karras, and Katelyn Mesler, eds., Entangled Histories: Knowledge, Authority, and Jewish Culture in the Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017): 23–37, who compares social practices connected with marriage in Ashkenaz with those of Sepharad (the Iberian peninsula).

Medieval Jewish Social History: Three Areas of Gender-Conscious Research

225

belonged to her husband; however, a twelfth-century enactment attributed to R. Jacob ben Meir Tam (known as Rabbenu Tam, 1100–1171) made it returnable to the father should his daughter die without offspring in the first year of marriage. This ruling was likely intended to encourage fathers to endow their daughters generously; if a woman died childless in the second year of marriage, one half was returned.48 Women’s maternal roles were central to their families and communities. Elisheva Baumgarten has shown that medieval Jewish writers assumed that mothers bore the primary responsibility for childcare and that the requisite love and compassion were considered natural and particular to them. In cases of divorce, boys remained with their mothers until the age of six, when their formal education began, while girls stayed with mothers until marriage.49 Mothers educated their daughters in household and business skills and the laws of Judaism applicable to home and marriage, including dietary strictures, domestic observance of the Sabbath and festivals, and the commandments relevant to marital relations.50 Baumgarten has demonstrated how women modeled acts of personal piety for their children through prayer, acts of charity, fasting as a performance of atonement, and sometimes taking on time-bound commandments for which they were not halakhically obligated.51 She also points out the impact of Christian religious practices on Jewish traditions and rituals.52 Baumgarten’s recent research explores the ways in which biblical women became models of piety for ordinary Jews in Ashkenaz; her evidence includes cemetery headstone epitaphs and other examples of material culture.53 Positive Jewish attitudes towards marriage and conjugal sexuality were at odds with the Christian requirement of celibacy for those who took religious vows and with church teachings that sexual activity within marriage should be limited to procreation. The church also forbade divorce, frowned on remarriage after the death of a spouse, and had strict rules on consanguinity, according to which many Jewish marriages among relatives (such as first cousins) were deemed incestuous. As Kenneth R. Stow has written, it is not surprising that Christian writers criticized Jewish marital patterns and sexual behavior, real and imagined, nor that Jews were often

 Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 150; Avraham (Rami) Reiner, “Rabbenu Tam’s Ordinance for the Return of the Dowry: Between Talmudic Exegesis and an Ordinance that Contradicts the Talmud,” Diné Israel: An Annual of Jewish Law and Israeli Family Law 33 (2019): 71–98.  Baumgarten, Mothers and Children, 22–24, 158–59.  Judith R. Baskin, “Some Parallels in the Education of Medieval Jewish and Christian Women,” Jewish History 5/1 (1991): 41–51; Judith R. Baskin, “The Education of Jewish Girls in the Middle Ages in Muslim and Christian Milieus” [Hebrew], Pe’amim: Studies in Oriental Jewry 82 (2000): 1–17.  Baumgarten, Practicing Piety, 138–171.  Baumgarten, Practicing Piety, 172–194.  Baumgarten, Biblical Women and Jewish Daily Life in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022).

226

Judith R. Baskin

perplexed by Christian teachings.54 I have argued that influence from the larger environment accounts for the anxiety about sexuality characteristic of the Ḥasidei Ashkenaz, the German-Jewish pietists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, whose writings, such as Sefer Ḥasidim (Book of the Pious), express a deep consciousness of sexual temptations and a profound ambivalence about the joys of licensed sexual activities.55 Despite the importance placed on marriage in medieval Ashkenaz, Grossman has demonstrated that divorce was frequent. He reports that there was little stigma attached to an unsuccessful union; women’s strong economic status and the support of their parents provided plentiful opportunities for remarriage.56 In the Muslim world, as discussed above, the takkana of the moredet enabled a woman to initiate divorce if she stated to a rabbinic court that her husband was repugnant to her and that she was prepared to relinquish all or most of her marriage portion. Most medieval sages in Ashkenaz, the scholars known as the Rishonim, did not accept this claim as grounds for a coerced divorce. Instead, women employed another talmudic option to exit unhappy marriages: rebellion by refusing sexual relations (b. Ketub. 63b). This was accomplished by a woman’s refusal to immerse in the ritual bath (mikveh) following her state of nidda (menstrual impurity). In becoming a rebel (moredet), the estranged wife would lose her ketubba over time, based on daily fines; when the dowry was exhausted, the court would compel her husband to divorce her.57 Rabbinic leaders, especially Rabbenu Tam, vehemently attacked the frequency of such divorces, and R. Meir of Rothenburg (1215–1293) attempted to combat the problem by ruling that a moredet not only had to give up her ketubba but all her personal property and the wealth she had inherited or acquired through her business undertakings. As Grossman points out, these efforts indicate that a major social crisis was underway and that the rabbinic leadership was all but helpless in stopping it.58 Only in the  Kenneth R. Stow, Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 207–209.  Judith R. Baskin, “From Separation to Displacement: The Problem of Women in Sefer Hasidim,” Association for Jewish Studies Review 19 (1994): 1–18.  Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 251–252.  Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 240. Women’s timely immersions played a central role in both medieval Jewish piety and in the marital politics of this milieu; see Judith R. Baskin, “Women and Ritual Immersion in Medieval Ashkenaz: The Sexual Politics of Piety,” in Lawrence Fine, ed., Judaism in Practice: From the Middle Ages Through the Early Modern Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001): 131–142; Judith R. Baskin, “Male Piety, Female Bodies: Men, Women, and Ritual Immersion in Medieval Ashkenaz,” Studies in Medieval Halakhah, Journal of Jewish Law 17 (2007): 11–30; and Elisheva Baumgarten, “‘And they do nicely’: A Reappraisal of Women’s Refusal to Enter the Sanctuary in Medieval Ashkenaz,” in Avraham (Rami) Reiner, Joseph R. Hacker, Moshe Halbertal, Moshe Idel, Ephraim Kanarfogel, and Elhanan Reiner, eds., Ta-Shma: Studies in Judaica in Memory of Israel M. Ta-Shma, 2 Vols. (Alon Shvut: Tevunot Press, 2011), 1: 85–104.  Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 244–246; 249. See Rachel Furst, “Marriage Before the Bench: Divorce Law and Litigation Strategies in Thirteenth-Century Ashkenaz,” Jewish History 31 (2017): 7–30,

Medieval Jewish Social History: Three Areas of Gender-Conscious Research

227

fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, he reports – as hostile political pressures increased, Jewish prosperity declined, and women began to lose their social and economic standing – was rabbinic authority gradually reasserted. At the same time, rabbinic leaders increasingly opposed the takkana of the moredet, not only in Ashkenaz but in Spain, North Africa, and ultimately the rest of the Jewish world.59 By the mid-sixteenth century this mechanism for a woman to leave an unhappy marriage had disappeared entirely from normative Jewish practice.60 Jewish women were involved in a range of commercial operations and occupations, including moneylending.61 Study of extant records in various European archives indicates that Jewish women acting alone or at the head of business consortia were responsible for one-half of all loans in northern France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and one-third in German and Austrian communities between 1350 and 1500; moreover, these figures do not take into account women partnered with their husbands or a male relative.62 Although most women dealt in small loans to other women, a small number–usually widows–were active in major business transactions with nobility and rulers. These included the twelfth-century Pulcellina of Blois, discussed in more detail below, who had close financial dealings with Count Thibault (or Theobald) V and his court, and the thirteenth-century Licoricia of Winchester, who undertook transactions with the King Henry III of England. As Suzanne Bartlett notes in her monograph on Licoricia and her context, her five sons, who described themselves as “sons of Licoricia,” were also moneylenders, continuing their mother’s business after her murder in 1277.63 As women thrived in business, some submitted their financial cases to nonJewish courts and took oaths, despite rabbinic objections. Swearing oaths was essential in business agreements and usually men validated the oath by touching the

for a case in which a man produced evidence of his wife’s refusal to observe nidda regulations in an effort to engineer a divorce against her will while keeping her marriage portion (ketubba).  Elimelech Westreich, “The Rise and Decline of the Law of the Rebellious Wife in Medieval Jewish Law,” in Hillel Gamoran, ed., The Zutphen Conference Volume, Jewish Law Association Studies 12 (2002): 207–218.  The takkana of the moredet does not appear in the Shulhan Arukh (Set Table), the legal code compiled in 1563 by the Sephardi scholar Joseph Karo (1488–1575); this work, with the Mappah (Tablecloth), a super-commentary by the Ashkenazi authority Moses Isserles (1530–1572), became the authoritative guide for Jewish practice.  Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 117–121; William C. Jordan, “Jews on Top: Women and the Availability of Consumption Loans in Northern France in the Mid-Thirteenth Century,” Journal of Jewish Studies 29 (1978): 39–56; Tallan, “Medieval Jewish Widows”; Tallan, “Opportunities for Medieval Northern-European Jewish Widows.”  Keil, “‘She Supplied Provisions,’” 84.  Suzanne Bartlett, Licoricia of Winchester: Marriage, Motherhood, and Murder in the Medieval Anglo-Jewish Community (Edgware, UK: Vallentine Mitchell, 2009), and see also Richard Barrie Dobson, “The Role of Jewish Women in Medieval England (Presidential Address),” in Diane Wood, ed., Christianity and Judaism, Studies in Church History 29 (1992), 145–168.

228

Judith R. Baskin

Torah scroll. Martha Keil notes that since women were discouraged from entering the sanctuary, fifteenth-century rabbis compromised by placing the Torah in the arms of the woman taking the oath at the entrance to the synagogue.”64 In a few cases, Jewish women became leaders in the communal realm. Due to her high tax contributions, at least one woman, Selda, gained administrative power as a tax collector in Austria in 1338.65 In 1354, Kändlein of Regensburg was the chief of her community’s five leaders (parnassim), apparently on the basis of her economic standing and significant contributions to the community tax assessment. Twenty years later, a woman named Josephine was elected to Regensburg’s eleven-member community administrative council (kehillah). The lives of such independent Jewish businesswomen were not without risk; Kändlein, like Licoricia of Winchester and Dolce of Worms,66 was murdered in her home during a robbery, while Pulcellina of Blois was martyred with other Jews as the result of a ritual murder libel in 1171.67 Women’s elevated status in Ashkenaz, based on their economic success, is reflected in their religious practices. From the eleventh century into the thirteenth, Grossman writes, some women performed rituals for which they were not obligated by halakha. These included reciting blessings for the lulav and sukka, participating in the grace after meals, reclining at the Passover seder, and taking a more significant place in synagogue worship. In twelfth-century Germany and northern France, some women reportedly donned tefillin (phylacteries) and fringed garments, generally only worn by men, and women made and affixed tzizit (fringes) to these garments.68 Most rabbinic authorities did not object and, in fact, honored the piety of women who took on these obligations voluntarily and permitted them to recite the requisite blessings.69 The twelfth-century scholars known as Tosaphists designated all Jewish women in Ashkenaz as “important,” in order to establish a halakhic justification for the existing practice of women reclining during the Passover seder. There are strong indications that prominent women, often from elite families, whose financial support was necessary to their communities’ survival, insisted on these privileges; and it is evident that rabbinic authorities felt powerless to prevent them. Grossman has suggested that Jewish women may have been inspired by a contemporaneous Christian

 Keil, “Rituals of Repentance and Testimonies at Rabbinical Courts in the 15th Century,” in Jaritz and Richter, eds., Oral History of the Middle Ages, 164–176.  Keil, “‘She Supplied Provisions,’” 85–86.  On Dolce, wife of R. Eleazar ben Judah of Worms (known as the Rokeah, 1160–1238), see Judith R. Baskin, “Women Saints in Judaism: Dolce of Worms,” in Arvind Sharma, ed., Women Saints in World Religions (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), 39–69; and Baskin, “Dolce of Worms: The Lives and Deaths of an Exemplary Medieval Jewish Woman and her Daughters,” in Fine, ed., Judaism in Practice, 429–437, and see below, 237–238.  For further discussion of Pulcellina, see below, 235–236.  On this general topic, see Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 174–197; and Baumgarten, Practicing Piety,138–169.  Baumgarten, Practicing Piety, 144–146.

Medieval Jewish Social History: Three Areas of Gender-Conscious Research

229

religious revival in thirteenth century in which women were influential in shaping communal worship.70 In both communities, however, male tolerance of female autonomy waned over time; women’s faith and piety were questioned and religious authorities attempted to quell their perceived presumption and arrogance. Baumgarten relates that, “The sanctions and suspicions of the Christian hierarchy differed little from the rabbis’ concerns.”71 Concern over female insistence on taking on male rituals is evident in a responsum of R. Meir of Rothenburg (known as the Maharam, 1215–1293), who vehemently, if unsuccessfully, objected to the practice of prominent Jewish women serving as a godmother (sandeka’it), which entailed holding a son or grandson during his circumcision in the synagogue. He wrote, “It is not a seemly custom for a woman to enter all bedecked among the men and before the Divine Presence.”72 His students were also unable to prevent this “phenomenon of ‘godmothers,’” since “there is no one who takes heed,” and the custom continued until the beginning of the 1400s.73 By then, rabbinic leaders had succeeded in eliminating women from the main synagogue sanctuary. Rabbi Jacob ha-Levi Moelin (known as the Maharil, 1365–1427), who lived in the Rhineland, wrote of this exclusion: “all that increases the separation [of men and women] is praiseworthy.”74 As Baumgarten writes, “The trend toward presenting men and women as increasingly different was a deliberate choice. Ultimately, an integral explanation of gender differences relating to women qua women surfaced toward the late thirteenth century and emerged more starkly over time.”75 Martha Keil has similarly suggested that the construction of special synagogue spaces for women in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was another demonstration of the rabbinic desire to distance women from the sanctuary containing the Torah scrolls. These women’s synagogues, which were built in Worms in 1212 and Speyer in 1230, among other cities, were separated from the main sanctuary by a wall with very narrow windows; women could barely see or hear male worship and they could not be heard by the men.76 As Keil writes, “Because they had their own room now, the women were absolutely prohibited from entering the place of public honor,

 Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 178–79; Baumgarten, Practicing Piety, 170.  Baumgarten, Practicing Piety, 170.  Cited in Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 185–186.  Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 185. Grossman suggests a connection between this custom and the participation of Christian women in the baptism ceremony, a topic also discussed by Baumgarten, Mothers and Children, 55–89.  Sefer Maharil: Minhagim; “B’rit Milah”, no. 22, 487.  Baumgarten, Practicing Piety, 165.  Keil, “Public Roles of Jewish Women,” 325. On recent reconstructions of these synagogues and related objects, see Matthew Preissler, The Shum Cities of the Rhine (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2012).

230

Judith R. Baskin

something which had not been the case in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.”77 Jewish women conducted their own services in these spaces, led by a learned woman; such prayer leaders included the thirteenth century Urania of Worms, whose headstone epitaph commemorates her as “the daughter of the chief of the synagogue singers . . . she, too, with sweet tunefulness officiated before the women to whom she sang the hymnal portions.”78 It is evident that efforts to curtail women’s incursion into male worship and ritual practice were strongly motivated by concerns about women’s potential to transmit ritual impurity. R. Meir of Rothenburg was far from alone in his concerns when he ruled that women were forbidden to wear tefillin because they cannot maintain their physical purity.79 Indeed, many modern scholars have noted that Jewish customary practices concerning the menstruating woman (nidda) became increasingly exclusionary in medieval Ashkenaz in the late Middle Ages. Based on the highly influential Baraita de Nidda,80 a book probably from the geonic period, the nidda was forbidden to enter a synagogue, to come into contact with sacred books, to pray, or to recite God’s name. These customs were followed in many locales during the medieval and early modern eras, although they have no basis in halakha, and they were generally endorsed by rabbinic authorities who praised compliant women for their piety.81 Jewish women, in general, had significantly less access than men to various aspects of spiritual and communal life. However, the status of women who adhered to rabbinic norms was higher than that of various individuals who lived on the edges of medieval Jewish society due to their personal choices or situations. Ephraim Kanarfogel, Paola Tartakoff, and Rachel Furst are among scholars who have recently written about the complexities of Jewish conversion to Christianity and the challenges of returning to the Jewish community.82 Tartakoff notes that the majority of

 Keil, “Public Roles of Jewish Women,” 328; Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 180–182; Baumgarten, “Praying Separately: Gender in Medieval Ashkenazi Synagogues (Thirteenth–Fourteenth Centuries),” Clio: Women, Gender, History 44/2 (2016): 43–62.  On female prayer leaders, see Emily Taitz, “Women’s Voices, Women’s Prayers: Women in the European Synagogue of the Middle Ages,” in Susan Grossman and Rivka Haut, eds., Daughters of the King: Women and the Synagogue (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1992): 59–71; on Urania, see 64.  Baumgarten, Practicing Piety, 166.  Evyatar Marienberg, La Baraita de-Niddah: Un texte juif pseudo-talmudique sur les lois religieuses relatives à la menstruation. La Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Sciences religieuses, Vol. 157 (Brepols: Turnhout, 2012).  See Baskin, “Women and Ritual Immersion in Medieval Ashkenaz”; Baskin, “Male Piety, Female Bodies, 11–30; Baumgarten, Practicing Piety, 24–50; and Baumgarten, “‘And they do nicely.’”.  Ephraim Kanarfogel, Brothers from Afar: Rabbinic Approaches to Apostasy and Reversion in Medieval Europe (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2020); Paola Tartakoff, Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020); Rachel Furst, “A Return to Credibility? The Rehabilitation of Repentant Apostates in Medieval Ashkenaz,” in Caputo and Hart, eds., On the Word of a Jew, 201–221; Rachel Furst, “Captivity,

Medieval Jewish Social History: Three Areas of Gender-Conscious Research

231

conversions to Christianity “were undertaken by marginalized Jews who sought relief from personal predicaments,”83 and points out how “difficult it was for a Jew to come to be widely perceived as a bona fide Christian and for a repentant Jewish apostate to come to be widely re-embraced as a Jew.” She suggests that the “tensions that were inherent in Jewish-Christian relations across Western Christendom decisively shaped converts’ fates, exposing the rigidity of boundaries between religious communities and identities even in local contexts of peaceful coexistence and cultural exchange.”84 Ephraim Shoham-Steiner has investigated other categories of sidelined Jews in his study of portrayals of leprosy, madness, and other disabilities in European Jewish sources and in his monograph on medieval Jewish involvement in crime.85

4 Rereading Martyrdom Documents from Northern Europe In recent decades, nuanced literary readings of Jewish accounts of martyrdoms, which appear in chronicles and poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, have demonstrated how evocations of typological models from biblical and late ancient texts reshaped narratives of historical events. Similarly, attention to gender dynamics has enabled researchers to discover and explain the evolving ways in which individual women and their activities were transformed to fit the preconceptions of various writers and scholars.86

Conversion, and Communal Identity: Sexual Angst and Religious Crisis in Frankfurt, 1241,” Jewish History 22/ 1–2 (2008): 179–221.  Paola Tartakoff, “Testing Boundaries: Jewish Conversion and Cultural Fluidity in Medieval Europe, c. 1200–1391,” Speculum 90/3 (2015), 760.  Tartakoff, “Testing Boundaries,” 760, 732. Other recent publications on this topic include Avraham (Rami) Reiner, “On the Attitude towards Converts in Ashkenaz and France in the Eleventh and Thirteenth Centuries,” in Reiner, Hacker, Halbertal, Idel, Kanarfogel, and Reiner, eds., Ta-Shma: Studies in Judaica in Memory of Israel M. Ta-Shma. 2 Vols. (Alon Shvut: Tevunot Press, 2011), 2:747–770; and see Shalem Yahalom, “Apostasy, Conversion and Marriage: Rabbeinu Tam’s Ruling Permitting the Marriage of a Female Apostate,” Jewish History 33/ 3–4 (2020): 299–324.  Ephraim Steiner-Shoham, Jews and Crime in Medieval Europe (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2020); Ephraim Steiner-Shoham, On the Margins of a Minority: Leprosy, Madness, and Disability among the Jews of Medieval Europe (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2014)  On women martyrs in Jewish tradition, see Judith R. Baskin, “Female Martyrdom,” Shalvi/ Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, 23 June 2021, Jewish Women’s Archive. .(Viewed on December 6, 2021).

232

Judith R. Baskin

All three of the extant Hebrew chronicles describing attacks on Jewish communities in northern France and Germany during the First Crusade of 109687 extol female martyrs, many of whom are mentioned by name, and depict them as active exemplars of devotion under ultimate stress.88 As Avraham Grossman has written of these documents, “There is no other genre in the medieval Jewish world in which women occupy such an important and central place, and are portrayed in such a sympathetic and admiring manner.”89 Jewish women are also mentioned by Christian chroniclers as in the forefront of those who chose death over forced conversion and who urged their husbands to do the same.90 These extraordinary performances of female piety include young women who are said to have drowned themselves, rather than convert and marry gentile men of high rank. The chroniclers also portrayed mothers who killed their children in order to save them from the greater evil of conversion, as well as independent businesswomen who remained true to their faith despite Christian encouragements to convert and save their lives.91 Contemporary scholars disagree about the degree of historicity in these chronicles and also dispute the actual number of Jews who chose conversion over martyrdom. Robert Chazan, among others, believes that the chroniclers’ accuracy is fairly high, particularly because the occurrences they describe “represent departures from prior modes of Christian and Jewish behavior and thought.”92 Other researchers, including Ivan Marcus93 and Jeremy Cohen,94 do not deny that there were horrific attacks on Jews in various locales that resulted in significant loss of life, but they suggest that some of the martyrs’ actions described in the chronicles may be imaginative reconstructions that were intended to evoke biblical and rabbinic models. These exemplars include the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22 (the akeda), Esther’s approach to Ahashuerus (Esther 4–5), and references to the temple cult and its

 On these texts, see Robert Chazan, In the Year 1096: The First Crusade and the Jews (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1996); Robert Chazan, God, Humanity, and History: The Hebrew First Crusade Chronicles (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000).  On representations of women in these documents, see Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 198–121; David Malkiel, “The Underclass in the First Crusade: A Historiographical Trend,” Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002): 169–197, 171–183.  Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 198.  Robert Chazan, “Christian and Jewish Perceptions of 1096: A Case Study of Trier,” Journal of Jewish History 13/2 (1999): 9–22, 11, 15; Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 202–203; Malkiel, “The Underclass in the First Crusade,” 174–175.  Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 198–211; Malkiel, “The Underclass in the First Crusade,” 171–183.  Robert Chazan, In the Year 1096, 49.  Ivan Marcus, “From Politics to Martyrdom: Shifting Paradigms in the Hebrew Narratives of the 1096 Crusade Riots,” Prooftexts 2 (1982): 40–52.  Jeremy Cohen, Sanctifying the Name of God: Jewish Martyrs and Jewish Memories of the First Crusade (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

Medieval Jewish Social History: Three Areas of Gender-Conscious Research

233

messianic restoration,95 as well as midrashic traditions connected with the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jerusalem temples.96 These authors argue that the prevalence of comparisons to martyrdoms and other tragedies from biblical and late ancient traditions demonstrate that the authors of the crusade chronicles reshaped actual events to conform to models from the Jewish past and to provide inspiring and didactic exemplars for future generations. Scholars have also emphasized that the medieval Jewish literature of martyrdom, which glorifies “beautiful deaths” and sometimes introduces miraculous elements into martyrdom narratives,97 was produced in a Christian society where sacrificial death and veneration of martyrs were central components of religious piety. In his detailed deconstruction of the multilayered traditions underlying the representation of Rachel of Mainz, a woman whose slaughter of her four children is described in graphic detail in several crusade chronicles, Jeremy Cohen argues that Christian symbols and visual images played a significant role in shaping Jewish images of female martyrs. In addition to the biblical Rachel of the Genesis narratives and Jeremiah 31:15, Cohen writes that the chroniclers’ depictions of Rachel of Mainz, “lamenting the dead children on her lap,” cannot but evoke Christian representations of the Virgin Mary cradling the body of her crucified son. This portrayal “demonstrates just how well-immersed medieval Jews were in the culture of the Christian majority surrounding them, even in Northern Europe and even in times of violent conflict.”98 Similarly, in his historiographical discussion of the representations of Jewish women in both Hebrew and Latin accounts of the First Crusade, David Malkiel suggests that women were placed in prominent roles by the chroniclers in order to stress that martyrdom was an option for all Jews. Moreover, the centrality of women’s acts of selfsacrifice emphasizes “the spiritual triumph of Judaism over Christianity,” since “having women foil the enemy places the crusaders (and by extension Christianity) in a humiliating position, bolstering the morale of a Jewish audience.”99 As Grossman writes, “All of these factors reinforce the doubts about the reliability of the detailed depictions of the roles played by women in the persecutions of 1096. One is almost certainly speaking of tendentious, highly exaggerated writing.”100 Nevertheless, Grossman goes on to say, it seems likely that women did take an active part in acts of martyrdom (kiddush ha-Shem), whatever the details. He concludes that “the very willingness to describe the  On these allusions, see Marcus, “From Politics to Martyrdom,” 44–49; and see also, Shalom Spiegel, The Last Trial: On the Legends and Lore of the Commandment to Abraham to Offer Isaac as a Sacrifice (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967).  Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 200–201; Cohen, Sanctifying the Name of God, 54, 88–89, 96–97, 104.  Susan Einbinder, Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 52–57, 64.  Cohen, Sanctifying the Name of God, 127.  Malkiel, “The Underclass in the First Crusade,” 179.  Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 201.

234

Judith R. Baskin

women with such an aura of sanctity is very important for understanding their image and status in society.”101 Emphasis on female actions in Hebrew crusade writings may also have had a legal dimension. Malkiel discusses the halakhic questionability of the performance of martyrdom, especially the killing of spouses and children. He points out that some historians have suggested that attributing leadership roles to women, “who were typically uneducated, and hence ignorant of talmudic law,” was one way around this highly problematic issue for the chroniclers. They could be depicted as acting “spontaneously, out of inner conviction or religious intuition, and did not imagine that they were committing a grave transgression.”102 Grossman offers another explanation of the women’s fervor, as expressed by Victor von Karben, a fifteenth-century Jewish convert to Christianity. Writing at a time when Jewish women had lost many of the rights and privileges of earlier centuries, he claimed that “the intense devotion of Jewish women to their religion and the decisive role they played in martyrdom originated specifically in their feeling of deprivation and inferiority. In his opinion, as they were not commanded regarding circumcision, they did not merit eternal life. Their great zeal came to appease God and to atone for their inferiority.”103 Witnesses to female martyrdoms in the twelfth century include Sefer Zekhira (Book of Remembrance) by Ephraim of Bonn (1132–1196), a chronicle that details persecutions of Jews in England, France, and Germany between 1146 and 1196, many of them in connection with ritual murder accusations, and a large corpus of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Hebrew poetry.104 Susan L. Einbinder, a preeminent scholar of these liturgical laments and penitential hymns, writes that the complex literary qualities of many of these works operated on several levels for diverse audiences. She points out that their poets emerged from the Tosafist schools of northern France and Germany and aimed their poetry at an audience of students and scholars.105 However, the poems were also performed, perhaps with musical accompaniment, for wider audiences in particular liturgical contexts.106 In both cases, the poems had didactic purposes in demonstrating the demands of faith and the ways in which female and male Jews, both learned and unlearned, had answered them. Einbinder emphasizes that these martyrological poems represent a form of cultural resistance against the intense pressures on French Jews, especially young men, to convert.107  Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 201.  Malkiel, “The Underclass in the First Crusade,” 180.  Cited in Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 281.  Einbinder, Beautiful Death; Susan L. Einbinder, “Jewish Women Martyrs: Changing Models of Representation,” Exemplaria 12/1 (2000): 105–127; Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 209–211. Einbinder writes (Beautiful Death, 22) that all the poems are in Hebrew with the exception of one elegy in Old French, which was written about the martyrs of Troyes (1288).  Einbinder, Beautiful Death, 7–9.  Einbinder, Beautiful Death, 9, 79, 108, 111.  Einbinder, Beautiful Death, 19, 59, 71–72.

Medieval Jewish Social History: Three Areas of Gender-Conscious Research

235

In these laments and hymns, Einbinder argues, portrayals of female martyrs differ from the active female protagonists depicted in the First Crusade chronicles. Instead, the emphasis is on female passivity and the vulnerability of women’s bodies to male assault. While these depictions may reflect the formulaic conventions of the poetic genre, Einbinder believes that they also indicate the steady deterioration of women’s economic and social status in Ashkenaz during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. By representing women as “defenseless and violated,” or as individuals defined by their sexuality rather than their economic power, male authors rejected female agency and emphasized the patriarchal sanctity of familial bonds and religious authority.108 Einbinder’s analyses are compelling, particularly since, as discussed above, efforts to diminish female autonomy and to limit women’s social, economic, and ritual activities are evident in contemporaneous Jewish legal writings. Einbinder has also made a significant contribution to the study of Jewish female martyrs through her rereading of the documents relating to the twelfth-century moneylender Pulcellina (or Pucellina) of Blois, who was murdered along with as many as thirty other Jews as a result of the first ritual murder libel in continental Europe in 1171.109 Hebrew documents related to this tragedy include a series of five letters written by various French Jewish communities in its immediate aftermath; a report in the chronicle of Ephraim of Bonn; two memorial lists naming the martyrs; and eight liturgical poems.110 This unusually plentiful literary output testifies to the profound impact of this mass martyrdom on the Jews of northern France and Germany. The earliest account of the events, a letter written by the leaders of the nearby Jewish community of Orléans and circulated among other northern European Jewish polities, relates how a Christian servant claimed he observed a Jew throw a boy’s body into the river. The servant’s employer is said to have seen an opportunity to cause trouble for a woman he hated who had long retained the favor of the count, Thibault (or Theobald) V. In this letter, Pulcellina, who is not named, is described as a powerful and arrogant woman who dealt “heavily with all who came to her,” including “the countess and her nutrix [companion/mentor]”; nevertheless, “the count loved/favored [ohav] her.”111 Nothing is known about the actual Pulcellina beyond this initial account. She was likely a widow who conducted her own moneylending business, probably with the assistance of her two daughters. There is no mention in any of the prose accounts of a husband or sons, nor is it possible to know the nature

 Einbinder, “Jewish Women Martyrs,” 127.  Susan L. Einbinder, “Pucellina of Blois,” Jewish History 12/1 (1998): 29–46.  Robert Chazan, “The Blois Incident of 1171: A Study in Jewish Intercommunal Organization,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research (1968): 13–31; Einbinder, “Pucellina of Blois”; Einbinder, Beautiful Death, 45–48.  Einbinder, “Pucellina of Blois,” 34–35, states that ohav, here, implies “a quasi-feudal oath of patronage.”

236

Judith R. Baskin

of Pulcellina’s connection with Thibault beyond the fact that some kind of cordial association existed, likely based on shared profits from her economic transactions.112 Einbinder reveals how Jewish literary representations of Pulcellina’s privileged position, downfall, and the attendant consequences for her community evolved over time. While Pulcellina is initially described in terms of her economic role in the highest circles of Blois, she was reduced, in later Jewish accounts, to an object of desire who was said to have had a sexual liaison with a powerful gentile ruler. In Sefer Zekhira, Ephraim of Bonn used various forms of the verb ahav to describe Thibault’s feelings for Pulcellina, writing that she encouraged the other imprisoned Jews, “for she trusted in the Count’s love (ahavat ha-shilton) since he had loved her (ohavah) greatly until now.”113 Many subsequent readers of the chronicle understood Ephraim to be referring to a sexual relationship between Pulcellina and the count. Ephraim also adds the new element of Countess Alix, characterized as “Jezebel”; it is her hatred of Pulcellina, supported by the machinations of an Augustinian churchman, that is said to cause the moneylender’s downfall.114 Thus, Pulcellina was recast as a religious and romantic heroine, “who exhorts her people like the biblical Esther and strives to intercede on their behalf.”115 In Emek Ha-Bakha (The Valley of Tears), Joseph Ha-Kohen (1496–c. 1575), who spent most of his life in Italy, presented Pulcellina as a “woman of valor” who was involved in a romantic relationship with Count Thibaut. When the Jews of Blois were accused of killing a child, the count arrested all of them.116 As in earlier versions, Thibaut’s servants prevented Pulcellina from speaking to Thibaut; this denial of an effective appeal to the ruler, as occurred in the book of Esther, dooms the Jews of Blois.117 Einbinder details subsequent portrayals of Pulcellina as a romantic figure in Jewish literary and historical writing, observing that, “Modern historians, too, have been more than willing to accept Pulcellina’s role as a woman foolishly enmeshed in a futile and ultimately fatal relationship with Count Thibault.”118

 For the account of these events in Sefer Zekhira, see “Ephraim of Bonn, ‘The Ritual Murder Accusation at Blois, 1171,’” in Jacob Rader Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Sourcebook: 315–1791, Revised edition with introduction and revised bibliography by Marc Saperstein (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 1999 [originally New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1938]), 127–130; and Judith R. Baskin, “Pulcellina of Blois” Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women. 23 June 2021. Jewish Women’s Archive, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/pul cellina-of-blois. (Viewed on December 6, 2021).  Einbinder, “Pucellina of Blois,” 33–35.  Einbinder, “Pucellina of Blois,” 34–35.  Einbinder, “Pucellina of Blois,” 36. Einbinder, Beautiful Death, 48, writes that in Sefer Zekhira, Ephraim of Bonn eliminated most of the negative references to Pulcellina that appear in the Orléans letter, “reshaping this problematic figure while minimizing her political importance.”  Einbinder, “Pucellina of Blois,” 37–38.  Einbinder, “Pucellina of Blois,” 36.  Einbinder, “Pucellina of Blois,” 39.

Medieval Jewish Social History: Three Areas of Gender-Conscious Research

237

These later sexualized representations of Pulcellina, Einbinder writes, are typical of how Jewish prose and poetry romanticized real individuals into “idealized figurations” of martyrdom. They also explain why male writers and scholars found it preferable to transform an apparently shrewd and powerful businesswoman into a sexual object, excluding other “potentially stronger readings”119 of an independent woman and her activities. A similar alteration occurred over time in accounts of the death of Dolce of Worms and her daughters in 1196. In his eyewitness description of her murder, her husband, R. Eleazar of Worms, known as the Rokeaḥ (1176–1238), related that two intruders120 entered their home, where the entire household was gathered, having just listened to R. Eleazar’s discourse on the Torah portion of the week. When the intruders began attacking those present, killing the Rokeaḥ’s two daughters and wounding others, it was Dolce who ran into the street to call for help; the villains followed her and murdered her there while her husband locked the door of the house to secure those within. A later version of these events appears in the seventeenth-century Ma’ase Nissim (1670), a collection of tales and short stories in Judaeo-German based on legends about the city of Worms and its distinguished figures.121 The book is attributed to R. Juspe Shammash (1604–1678). This narrative changes the story in telling ways. The villains (now transformed to marauding youths) kill Dolce and her daughters while R. Eleazar and his students are studying in another part of the house. Hearing the uproar, it is the men who act. The Rokeaḥ is wounded in pursuit of the  Einbinder, “Pucellina of Blois,” 39–40. The great historian of the Geniza, Shlomo Dov Goitein, was among those who took an interest in Pulcellina. As Elliot Horowitz wrote in “Dangerous Liaisons: Modern Scholars and Medieval Relations Between Jews and Christians,” Jewish Review of Books 17 (Spring, 2014), in 1927 Goitein wrote a play in Hebrew entitled Pulzelinah. He depicted Pulcellina as a formidable businesswoman and a model of piety who led prayers for other women; highly attractive to men, she virtuously rejected their advances.  The Rokeaḥ’s prose description of the events is extant in two versions in the Bodleian Library, Oxford University (Hebrew MS Michael 448, folio 30, and Hebrew MS Oppenheim 757, folios 25–27); they are listed in Adolf Neubauer, ed., Catalogue of the Hebrew Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library and in the College Libraries of Oxford (Oxford, UK: 1886–1906), 762, 798. In his account, R. Eleazar describes the attackers as “marked men.” This description has led many scholars, beginning with Leopold Zunz and followed by Heinrich Graetz, to write that the men were crusaders. Thus, the attack was understood for decades as part of a larger crusader onslaught on the Jews of Worms. In fact, there was no crusader activity in Worms or, indeed, in Germany at this time. The attack was specifically directed at the home of R. Eleazar, almost certainly because of Dolce’s financial activities, which made her an attractive target for robbery. In line with the royal protection of Jewish lenders, at least one of the attackers was caught by the secular authorities within a week and executed. See Judith R. Baskin, “Women Saints in Judaism,” for discussion of the manuscripts, modern transcriptions, and later traditions about the attack; and Baskin, “Dolce of Worms,” for a translation of the prose document and the accompanying poetic elegy.  The anecdote from Ma’ase Nissim appears in Shlomo Eidelberg, R. Juspa, Shammash of Warmaisa (Worms): Jewish Life in Seventeenth Century Worms (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1991), 64–65 (in English), and 66 (in Hebrew).

238

Judith R. Baskin

aggressors, while the students hurry into the street to call for help. In this rendition, Dolce’s centrality is erased, apparently because reporting her actions might have caused discomfort from the perspective of appropriate gender behaviors. Dolce and her daughters were removed from a setting in which study was taking place and her role in defending her family was eliminated. Meanwhile, her scholarly husband is portrayed in heroic terms. As in the case of Pulcellina and later depictions of women in Jewish martyrological narratives and poetry, this diminishment of female achievement to the point of invisibility, or worse, demonstrates significant discomfort in the later Middle Ages and Early Modern era with able women acting vigorously and independently, even when their actions were on behalf of their families or the larger community. Elisheva Baumgarten is also among historians using methods of text criticism to garner historical information from literary works as a way to gain insight into aspects of social history. As she has observed in her historical epilogue to a new scholarly edition of Sefer ha-Ma’asim, a collection of tales from thirteenth-century Champagne, stories are not reliable historical records of actual events, but they are important because they convey “the norms, anxieties, tensions, and popular concepts of the time.”122 The tales in Sefer ha-Ma’asim, which deal with piety, marriage, martyrdom, and Jewish relations with Christian rulers and Christian society, were meant to educate and to entertain. As such, they illuminate everyday lives by revealing popular convictions and concerns, including perceptions of appropriate gender performances and transgressions.

5 Conclusion Elisheva Baumgarten is currently overseeing a large project entitled “Beyond the Elite: Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe,” funded by the European Research Council. This is an international endeavor focused on gender-conscious understandings of social history based on Jewish and Christian writings and evidence from material culture. Similarly, a new generation of scholars and students are focused on Geniza research that brings the role of gender into close readings of primary documents against the background of the complex Muslim world. Studying the lives of non-elite Jews, particularly women and other marginalized groups, within larger gentile contexts, is an exciting and fruitful contemporary approach to medieval Jewish social history. Equally importantly, using gender as an analytic tool to reread old texts with new eyes yields, and will continue to yield, novel and restorative understandings of the past.

 Baumgarten, “Epilogue: Tales in Context–A Historical Perspective,” in Rella Kushelevsky, Tales in Context: Sefer ha-Ma’asim in Medieval Northern France (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2017), 687–722, 691.

Medieval Jewish Social History: Three Areas of Gender-Conscious Research

239

For Further Reading Baskin, Judith R. “Medieval Jewish Women in Muslim and Christian Milieus.” In Federica Francesconi and Rebecca Winer, eds. Jewish Women’s History from Antiquity to the Present, 75–95. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2021. Baskin, Judith R. “The Taqqanah of the Moredet in the Middle Ages.” In Jeremy Brown and Marc Herman, eds. Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism: New Studies in Law, Philosophy, Pietism, and Mysticism, 45–57. Leiden: Brill, 2021. Baumgarten, Elisheva. Biblical Women and Jewish Daily Life in the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. Baumgarten, Elisheva. Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Baumgarten, Elisheva. Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz: Men, Women, and Everyday Religious Observance. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Chazan, Robert. God, Humanity, and History: The Hebrew First Crusade Chronicles. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000. Cohen, Jeremy. Sanctifying the Name of God: Jewish Martyrs and Jewish Memories of the First Crusade. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Cohen,Mark R. Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Cairo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Einbinder, Susan L. Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Einbinder, Susan L. “Pucellina of Blois: Romantic Myths and Narrative Conventions.” Jewish History 12/1 (1998): 29–46. Friedman, Mordechai A. “Polygyny in Jewish Tradition and Practice: New Sources from the Cairo Geniza.” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 49 (1982): 33–68. Goitein, Shlomo Dov. A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza. 6 Vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967–1993. Grossman, Avraham. Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe, trans. Jonathan Chipman. Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2004. Keil, Martha. “Public Roles of Jewish Women in Fourteenth and Fifteenth-Centuries Ashkenaz: Business, Community, and Ritual.” In Christoph Cluse, ed. The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages (Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries), 317–330. Turnhout: Brepols, 2004. Krakowski, Eve. Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Female Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. Melammed, Renée Levine. “He Said, She Said: The Case of a Woman Teacher in Maimonides’ Twelfth Century Cairo.” Association for Jewish Studies Review 22/1 (1997): 19–36.

Martin I. Lockshin

A Retrospective Look at the Modern Study of Medieval Jewish Bible Commentaries 1 Introduction The scholarly study of medieval Jewish Bible commentaries originated with the “Science of Judaism” (Wissenschaft des Judentums) movement in the nineteenth century. Leading scholars included Abraham Geiger,1 Avraham Berliner,2 David Rosin,3 and Adolf Posnanski.4 They and others made significant contributions to the field, publishing texts of commentaries in the best editions that they could and writing valuable essays on the medieval exegetes and their works. Many of these essays are still worth reading today.

2 The Field in the Middle of the Twentieth Century In the middle of the twentieth century, interest seems to have waned, but a few scholars occasionally wrote about medieval Jewish Bible commentaries. The field was perhaps perceived as too religious for many scholars who were more interested in biblical criticism, yet too secular for those traditional Jews who read these works synchronically, as eternally valid and meaningful. In 1949 the Jewish historian, Yitzhak Baer, published an important Hebrew article about Rashi (1040–1105), one of the earliest, most prolific, and certainly the most famous Jewish Bible commentator in medieval Christian Europe. In “Rashi and the Historical Reality of His Time,”5 Baer identified various allusions in Rashi’s many works, including some references in his Bible commentaries, to events in his lifetime, including the First Crusade. By doing this, Baer set the stage for later studies about Jewish Bible commentaries, their historical roots, and their possible role in polemics. Still, in the middle of the twentieth century, it was rare to find university-based scholars who took an active interest in medieval Jewish Bible commentaries. Students

 See, for example, Abraham Geiger, Sefer Parshandata: ‘al hakhmei Tzorfat mefarshei ha-miqra (Leipzig: H. L. Shnuis Press, 1857).  See, for example, Avraham Berliner’s edition of Rashi’s Torah commentary (Berlin: Levant, 1866).  See, for example, David Rosin, R. Samuel ben Meir als Schrifterklärer (Breslau: F. W. Jungfer, 1880).  See, for example, Adolf Posnanski, Schiloh: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Messiaslehre (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1894).  Yitzhak Baer, “Rashi and the Historical Reality of His Time,” Tarbiz 20 (1949) [Hebrew], 320–332. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110418873-014

242

Martin I. Lockshin

who wished to enter this field had no obvious addresses to turn to in North America or Europe, and very few in Israel. Much of the revived scholarly interest in this field in recent years may be directly traced to Nehama Leibowitz (1905–1997), a masterful teacher and prolific writer about medieval Jewish Bible commentaries.6 Although Leibowitz taught in more than one Israeli university, most of her writings were meant for a general audience and most of her teaching was in Israeli non-academic and teacher-training institutions. Leibowitz moved the study of traditional Jewish Bible commentaries to center stage in the eyes of many traditional and some non-traditional Jews. She taught the rigorous reading of these texts with a keen sensitivity to literary issues. She was less interested in placing the medieval Bible commentators in their historical context. But a generation of university scholars, myself included, see ourselves as students of hers, whether directly or indirectly. A seven-hundred-page scholarly Hebrew volume published in her memory contains twenty-seven essays: twenty-one by scholars appointed to Israeli universities and four by scholars from Israeli teacher-training institutions.7

3 The Field in the Last Forty Years and Its Appropriate “Home” These earlier scholars paved the way for the current situation: the academic study of medieval Jewish Bible commentaries exists and is thriving. But where it belongs within the larger units of academia is still unresolved. Should it be in the hands of biblicists or medievalists? To research the biblical exegesis of Rashi or of his grandson, Rashbam (ca. 1080–ca. 1165), is it more useful to know Ugaritic and biblical criticism, or Latin and medieval Christian texts? To work on the Bible commentaries of Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1164), is it better to train in Syriac or in medieval Judeo-Arabic? An optimal training would include all of these and expertise in rabbinics, too! In Jerusalem in 2013, at the World Congress for Jewish Studies, and at previous ones, sessions about Jewish Bible commentaries such as “Rashi and Rashbam” or “Literary Aspects of Medieval Bible Commentaries in Ashkenaz” were not listed in the medieval division. They were placed under “The Bible and Its World,” together with such sessions as “The Assyrian Impact on Israel and the Bible” or “Convergence and Divergence in Pentateuchal Theory.” Many important articles about medieval

 On her career, see Yael Unterman, Nehama Leibowitz: Teacher and Bible Scholar (Jerusalem: Urim, 2009) and Hayuta Deutsch, Nehama: The Life of Nehama Leibowitz [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Chemed, 2008).  Moshe Ahrend, Ruth Ben-Meir, and Gabriel Cohen, eds., Pirkei Nechama: Prof. Nechama Leibowitz Memorial Volume [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Jewish Agency, 2001).

A Retrospective Look at the Modern Study of Medieval Jewish Bible Commentaries

243

Jewish Bible commentaries appear in Israel in the journal Shnaton: An Annual for Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies.8 But at the North American conference, the Association for Jewish Studies, sessions about medieval Jewish Bible commentaries are listed twice, both under “Bible & the History of Biblical Interpretation” and under “Medieval and Early Modern Jewish History, Literature, and Culture,” and most scholars who speak at such sessions define themselves as medievalists, not biblicists. In general, with a few notable exceptions, research in the field of medieval Jewish Bible commentaries is carried out in Israel by scholars from Bible departments, and in the diaspora by scholars who identify as medievalists. The reasons for this division are beyond the scope of this paper. It is unclear how long this will last, considering the extensive cross-fertilization between scholars on the two sides of the ocean. I was personally introduced to this categorization issue in the mid-1970s when I began my own graduate studies at Brandeis University. As I was interested in concentrating my studies and research on medieval Jewish Bible commentaries, my department took a Solomonic approach and assigned me two co-supervisors, one biblicist (Nahum Sarna) and one medieval intellectual historian (Marvin Fox). A few years later, I was hired at York University when the university decided to expand its Jewish studies offerings by hiring two new scholars: one in Bible and one in rabbinics/medieval. I, with my specialization in medieval Jewish Bible commentaries, was hired for the second slot, not the first. In the 1970s, a prolonged scholarly dispute took place between two respected scholars at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Sara Japhet, a professor from the Bible department, first published a number of articles and subsequently a book that contained what she identified as Rashbam’s commentary on the biblical book of Ecclesiastes. Japhet’s colleague from the history department, Avraham Grossman, a medieval Jewish historian, challenged the attribution of this commentary to Rashbam.9 These two scholars published a series of refutations and refutations of refutations in the pages of the journal Tarbiz for a while, and then the journal called an end to the exchange, announcing that no more submissions on this topic would be accepted.10 Since then Japhet has published two more Bible commentaries that she attributes to

 A recent issue, Vol. 22, contains three articles about the ancient Near East and three about medieval Jewish rabbinical works.  The manuscript of the Ecclesiastes commentary on which this book is based was known in the nineteenth century, and scholars even then disputed whether to attribute the commentary to Rashbam. See David Rosin’s introduction to his edition of Rashbam’s commentary on the Torah (Breslau: Solomon Schottlander Press, 1882), xxii.  See Sara Japhet and Robert Salters, The Commentary of R. Samuel ben Meir Rashbam on Qoheleth: A Critical Edition with an Introduction [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1985). The introduction to this book contains a lengthy description of the history of the dispute about the attribution. See especially 19–20, where the arguments of Grossman and Japhet are summarized and precise references to the dispute in Tarbiz are found.

244

Martin I. Lockshin

Rashbam, commentaries on Job and on Song of Songs, and these attributions have also been challenged.11 At least in part, the dispute may be territorial: who has the right to attribute a Bible commentary to a twelfth-century rabbi, a scholar of the Bible or a scholar of twelfth-century Jewish history? I see the study of medieval Jewish Bible commentaries more as part of medieval Jewish studies. In the symposium that led to this volume, medieval commentaries were not discussed on the Bible panel but were discussed in more than one presentation in the medieval panel. Still, both arguments have merit. An example of the exegesis of a passage in the book of Exodus illustrates some of the issues.

4 How Modern Biblical Scholarship Can Shed Light on Medieval Commentaries According to the Bible, before the exodus from Egypt, God instructed the Israelites, through Moses, to “borrow” gold and silver ornaments from the Egyptians.12 The morality of that action, “borrowing” with no intention of returning, has challenged Jewish thinkers and Bible exegetes over the years and led some early non-Jewish thinkers (including some Christians) to call this an example of the alleged moral inferiority of Israelites/Jews.13 In the middle ages, Rashbam “solved” the problem by arguing that the Hebrew verb sha’al does not mean “to borrow” in this context, but rather “to request that the items be given bematanah gemurah va-halutah, i.e. as an outright gift.” He correctly pointed out that “ask for” or “request” is also one of the meanings of the verb sha’al in biblical Hebrew, not just “borrow.” Rashbam said of his own explanation: “zehu ‘iqar peshuto uteshuvah la-minim, this is the true peshat [plain meaning of the biblical text], and [it is also a useful explanation for] refuting the claims of the Christians.” The nineteenth-century Italian Jewish scholar and Bible commentator Samuel David Luzzatto (1800–1865) dismissed Rashbam’s

 Sara Japhet, The Commentary of Rabbi Samuel ben Meir (Rashbam) on the Book of Job [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2000); and Japhet, The Commentary of Rabbi Samuel ben Meir (Rashbam) on the Song of Songs [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 2008). And see Martin Lockshin, “‘Rashbam’ on Job: A Reconsideration,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 8 (2001): 80–104; Jason Kalman, “When What You See is Not What You Get: Rashbam’s Commentary on Job and the Methodological Challenges of Studying Northern French Jewish Biblical Exegesis,” Religion Compass 2 (2008): 844–861; Jair Haas, “Rashbam on the Song of Songs: A Reconsideration” [Hebrew], Jewish Studies Internet Journal 7 (2008): 127–146. https://jewish-faculty.biu.ac.il/files/jewish-faculty/shared/JSIJ5/ haas.pdf.  See Exod 3:21–22; 11:2–3; and 12:35–36.  The criticism of the Israelites’ morality for this “borrowing” preceded Christianity but continued to appear in some Christian writings. See Joel Allen, The Despoliation of Egypt: In Pre-Rabbinic, Rabbinic and Patristic Traditions (Leiden: Brill, 2008).

A Retrospective Look at the Modern Study of Medieval Jewish Bible Commentaries

245

explanation as apologetics, even though in general Luzzatto admired Rashbam’s methodology.14 Avraham Grossman, the Israeli medievalist mentioned above, argued in 1986 that, even for a dedicated supporter of peshat exegesis like Rashbam, the anti-Christian agenda was so crucial that he felt compelled to offer a farfetched and implausible interpretation of the verse.15 Both Luzzatto and Grossman believed that Rashbam’s interpretation was farfetched. But was it? Modern Bible scholars disagree about the issue. Both Grossman’s colleague from the Bible department at the Hebrew University, Moshe Greenberg,16 and my own professor of Bible, Nahum Sarna,17 have written that sha’al in the verse in Exodus does indeed mean to ask for as a gift or to request. Even the classic scholarly biblical dictionary (BDB) wrote in the entry on the verb sha’al that “it is not clear that there was any pretext of mere temporary use” when the Israelites approached the Egyptians and “asked” them for their items of gold and silver.18 This is not to say that Grossman and Luzzatto were definitely wrong and that Rashbam, BDB, Greenberg, and Sarna were definitely right. But before attributing an extrinsic polemical motive to a medieval Jewish exegete, we should seriously consider the possibility that he offered what he considered the most solid interpretation of the text. Thus, a background in biblical studies serves the modern scholar of medieval Jewish Bible commentaries well.

5 Finding Historical Roots in Bible Commentaries As we have seen, the few mid-twentieth-century studies of medieval Jewish Bible commentaries that we have, together with those of the nineteenth century, established the legitimacy and value of reading these commentaries as originating in a specific time and place in history, and as being best understood when read as such.

 Commentary to Exod 3:22. In the eighteenth-century, Moses Mendelssohn, in his commentary to Exod 11:2, also took issue with Rashbam, although in his commentary to Exod 3:22 it appears that he agreed with Rashbam.  Avraham Grossman, “The Jewish Christian Polemic and Jewish Biblical Exegesis in TwelfthCentury France” [Hebrew], Zion 51 (1986): 53–54.  Moshe Greenberg, Understanding Exodus (New York: Behrman House, 1969).  Nahum Sarna, The JPS Torah Commentary: Exodus (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1991), 19.  Francis Brown, Samuel Rolles Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, eds., Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, reprinted 1974), 981.

246

Martin I. Lockshin

5.1 Rashi’s Bible Commentary as an Example: Historically Rooted? To return to Yitzhak Baer’s identification of allusions in Rashi’s works to events in his lifetime, not too many years after Baer the suggestion was made that even Rashi’s opening comment on the Torah was connected to those events.19 Rashi’s comment provides a good example of the questions we must ask when scholars claim to have found historical allusions in a commentary text. On Genesis 1:1, Rashi wrote: Rabbi Isaac taught: It would have been appropriate to begin the Torah with “This month shall mark for you the beginning of the months,” (Exodus 12:2) the first commandment given to the Jewish people. Why did the Bible begin, “When God began to create” (Genesis 1:1)? Because “He [= God] revealed to His people His powerful works in order to give them the heritage of nations” (Psalms 111:9). If the nations of the world say to the Israelites, “You are thieves for you stole the land of the seven nations,” they may answer, “The entire world belongs to the Blessed Holy One, who created it and assigned it to whomever He pleased. God’s will was to assign it to them and then to take it away from them and assign it to us.”20

Rashi’s argument – that the only reason that the Torah begins with cosmology and narrative, and not with the laws that appear only sixty-two chapters later, was to defend the Jewish territorial claim to the Land of Israel – seems forced. Accordingly, these scholars proposed that Rashi was reacting to the First Crusade. While Muslims and Christians were killing each other over control of the Land of Israel, Rashi reminded his Jewish audience two thousand miles away from there in northern France that the land of Israel actually belonged to the people of Israel. (It’s hard to imagine that Rashi considered the idea that one day he would have gentile readers, although we now know that his works were studied by some Christians not so many years after he wrote them.21) Since the First Crusade took place in 1096, this theory requires that Rashi, who died in 1105, wrote or at least significantly modified his Torah commentary in the last nine years of his life.22 (Despite all the advances in the study of medieval

 See Elazar Touitou, Exegesis in Perpetual Motion: Studies in the Pentateuchal Commentary of Rabbi Samuel ben Meir [Hebrew] (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2003), 41. In note 39, he traces this theory to D. Louys, “En lisant Rachi,” Vav-Revue du dialogue (Paris, 1969), 22–24. Touitou also writes that the theory was broadly hinted at in 1957 by Rabbi Shimon Languer.  Rashi’s commentary to Gen 1:1: ‫ שהיא מצוה‬,‫אמר רבי יצחק לא היה צריך להתחיל ]את[ התורה אלא מהחודש הזה לכם‬ ‫ משום כח מעשיו הגיד לעמו לתת להם נחלת גויים שאם יאמרו אומות העולם‬,‫ ומה טעם פתח בבראשית‬,‫ראשונה שנצטוו ]בה[ ישראל‬ ‫ הוא בראה ונתנה לאשר‬,‫ הם אומרים להם כל הארץ של הקדוש ברוך הוא היא‬,‫ שכבשתם ארצות שבעה גוים‬,‫לישראל לסטים אתם‬ ‫ ברצונו נתנה להם וברצונו נטלה מהם ונתנה לנו‬,‫ישר בעיניו‬. All translations in this article are my own.  See, for example, Herman Hailperin, Rashi and the Christian Scholars (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963).  See the brief criticism of this theory in Shaye J. D. Cohen, “Does Rashi’s Torah Commentary Respond to Christianity? A Comparison of Rashi with Rashbam and Bekhor Shor,” in Hindy Najman and Judith H. Newman, eds., The Idea of Biblical Interpretation: Essays in Honor of James L. Kugel (Leiden: Brill, 2004): 449–472, especially n.58 on page 468.

A Retrospective Look at the Modern Study of Medieval Jewish Bible Commentaries

247

Jewish Bible commentaries in the last few decades, we still have very little idea when Rashi wrote his various works.23) Rashi’s comment on this verse is simply the combination and very minor reworking of two old midrashic comments. In Midrash Tanhuma, dating perhaps to two centuries before Rashi (and well before the Crusades), we find: Rabbi Isaac taught: The Torah did not have to record anything before “This month shall mark for you the beginning of the months” (Exodus 12:2). Why then did it record [everything beginning] from “When God began to create” (Genesis 1:1)? It was to teach us His courageous strength, as it is written, “He [= God] revealed to His people His powerful works in order to give them the heritage of nations”. (Psalms 111:9)24

The rest of Rashi’s comment comes from an even earlier midrashic source, Genesis Rabbah: Rabbi Joshua of Sikhnin, in the name of Rabbi Levi, began [his discourse by quoting the verse,] “He [= God] revealed to His people His powerful works in order to give them the heritage of nations” (Psalms 111:9). Why did God tell the Israelites what was created on the first, second, and third days? Because of the nations of the world, so that they would not be able to insult the Israelites, saying, “Aren’t you a nation of thieves?” Israel can reply to them: “(. . .) The entire world belongs to God. When He so willed it, He gave it [the land of Israel] to you. When He willed it, He took it from you and gave it to us.” As it is written, “in order to give them the heritage of the nations.” [That is why God] “revealed to His people His powerful works.” He revealed to them the beginning, “When God began to create ( . . . .)”25

Rashi’s two major sources throughout his Genesis commentary are Tanhuma and Genesis Rabbah, and so it is not surprising that he included this midrash in his commentary on this verse, even if it seems forced.26

 See Avraham Grossman, The Early Sages of France [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1995), 216–228 and especially n.280 on 218. On the question of the dates of Rashi’s works, see also other sources, cited in my Rashbam’s Commentary on Leviticus and Numbers: An Annotated Translation (Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2001), n.21 on 103–104. See also Cohen, “Does Rashi’s Torah Commentary Respond to Christianity?”.  Salomon Buber, ed., Midrasch Tanchuma: Ein aggadischer Commentar zum Pentateuch (Vilna: Romm, 1885) Bereshit 11 (p7): ,‫ ולמה כתב מבראשית‬,‫אמר ר’ יצחק לא היה צריך לכתוב את התורה אלא מהחדש הזה לכם‬ ‫ שנאמר כח מעשיו הגיד לעמו לתת להם נחלת גוים‬,‫להודיע כח גבורתו‬.  Genesis Rabbah 1, Theodor-Albeck edition (reprint edition Jerusalem: Shalem, 1996), 4–5: ’‫ר‬ ‫ מה טעם גילה הקדוש ברוך הוא לישראל‬,(‫יהושע דסכנין בשם ר’ לוי פתח כח מעשיו הגיד לעמו לתת להם נחלת וגו’ )תהלים קיא ו‬ ,‫ מפני אומות העולם שלא יהו מונים את ישראל ואומ’ להם הלא אומה שלבזזות אתם אתמהא‬,’‫מה שנברא ביום ראשון וביום ב’ וג‬ ‫ כשרצה נתנו לכם וכשרצה נטלו מכם ונתנו לנו הדא היא דכת‘ ’לתת להם‬,‫ העולם ומלאו שלהקב”ה הוא‬. . . ‫וישראל משיבין להם‬ ‫ ’כח מעשיו הגיד לעמו‘ הגיד להם את הבראשית בראשית ברא אלהים וגו‬.‘‫נחלת גוים‬.  Rashi’s tendency to use a different midrashic text as his main source for each of the books of the Torah was first written about by Abraham Bokrat five hundred years ago. See the discussion in my Rashbam’s Commentary on Deuteronomy: An Annotated Translation (Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2004), 11 and the sources cited there in the notes.

248

Martin I. Lockshin

Perhaps it may be argued that Rashi had dozens of midrashic interpretations at his disposal that he could have cited in his commentary to the first verse of the Bible, and that he was attracted to these specific comments because of the Crusades. This cannot be ruled out. But careful analysis of Rashi’s Torah commentary shows that he had a consistent educational agenda in the choice of the midrashim that he cited in his opening comment to each of the five books of the Torah. For each of these opening verses, Rashi found a midrash that promoted the special connection of the Jewish people to God.27 This was a greater challenge for Rashi when he commented on Genesis than on the other four books since the opening chapters of Genesis have nothing to do with the Israelites. Thus, he did not have that many choices available to him when he wished to “discover” in the first verse of Genesis the idea that the Israelites had a unique relationship with God. Furthermore, Rashi may have been attracted to these specific midrashim as they also emphasized the primacy of law over narrative, a theme that Rashi, whose main life’s work was dedicated to the interpretation of Jewish law, also happily promoted in the first line of his Torah commentary.28 The challenge of deciding between internal Jewish educational reasons and historicized reasons for any particular comment of any commentator remains one of the central issues in this academic area.

6 Finding Polemical Agendas in Bible Commentaries This example leads naturally into the major current methodological issue in this field: how often should scholars impute anti-Christian motives to the Jewish exegetes who lived in Christendom? In the previous example from Exodus 3, Rashbam himself noted the usefulness of his interpretation for Jews who wish to or were forced to refute Christian polemical claims. But how often should we attribute a polemical motive to an author who did not mention it explicitly? For medieval Ashkenazic rabbis, defending the Jewish faith against the perceived intellectual onslaughts of Christianity was a crucial task and a sacred duty. A century or two after the heyday of medieval Jewish Bible commentaries, some Jews in

 Nehama Leibowitz and Moshe Ahrend, Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah: Studies in His Method [Hebrew], Vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Open University, 1990), 523. See also Robert Harris, “Rashi’s Introductions to His Biblical Commentaries,” in Moshe Bar-Asher, Dalit Rom-Shiloni, Emanuel Tov, and Nili Wazana, eds., Shai Le-Sara Japhet: Studies in the Bible, Its Exegesis and Its Language (Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute, 2007), 219✶–241✶.  His motivation for making this point could be anti-Christian polemical, as proposed by Touitou, Exegesis in Perpetual Motion. But it may equally have been for internal Jewish reasons.

A Retrospective Look at the Modern Study of Medieval Jewish Bible Commentaries

249

Christendom were writing primers to help Jews who needed to polemicize against Christians.29 These primers included many Jewish Bible interpretations.30 In theory, then, the claim that the earlier great Bible commentators were also polemicizing against Christianity makes sense. But they had other religious and intellectual agendas, too. Some scholars even claim that the entire Jewish movement towards peshat that arose in Christian countries at the end of the eleventh century and flourished during the twelfth may have been a direct result of rabbis striving to develop polemical arguments and use them. As David Berger has taught,31 when medieval Jews and Christians argued about the meaning of a biblical verse, a Jew could not effectively cite the Talmud or midrash, nor could a Christian effectively cite the New Testament or one of the Church Fathers. The playing field was level only if the discussion centered on peshat. Thus, an interest in religious polemics could have been a factor that attracted both medieval Jews and Christians to the enterprise of peshat. I have written against this theory, and I will not rehearse my arguments here.32 Suffice it to say that in the last decade or two, a growing number of scholars have seen Jewish and Christian Bible exegetes as being in conversation with each other instead of seeing their relationship as polemical.33 Jewish studies scholars today tend to understand the twelfth-century Renaissance as influencing both Jewish and Christian Bible exegetes to adopt new ways of reading texts. The scholars of the northern French Christian school of St. Victor, with its heavy emphasis on the plain meaning of Scripture, rarely or perhaps never used the plain meaning as a way to attack the Jewish reading. Whether or not the movement towards peshat was motivated by polemics, when looking at any one specific explanation of a verse we can legitimately ask whether it may have had a polemical motive. But when we do this, we need to beware of impressionistic labels. David Berger sums up the problem: “In matters of

 See Daniel J. Lasker, “Joseph ben Nathan’s Sefer Yosef Ha-Mekanné and the Medieval Jewish Critique of Christianity,” in Elisheva Baumgarten and Judah Galinsky, eds., Jews and Christians in Thirteenth-Century France (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015): 113–122.  See, for example, the edition of Nitstsahon yashan (“The Old Book of Polemic”) published by David Berger in The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1979). Large parts of this polemical work are structured as a running commentary on the Bible.  Oral communication when I studied with him in the 1970s.  See my Rabbi Samuel ben Meir’s Commentary on Genesis: An Annotated Translation (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1989), 13–15; Lockshin, Rashbam’s Commentary on Deuteronomy, 19–22; and Lockshin, Perush ha-Rashbam al ha-Torah (Jerusalem: Horeb, 2009), 25–29.  See, recently, Montse Leyra Curia, In Hebreo: The Victorine Exegesis of the Bible in the Light of Its Northern French Jewish Sources (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017).

250

Martin I. Lockshin

exegetical detail, polemical motives are occasionally obvious, occasionally likely, and occasionally asserted implausibly.”34

6.1 Rashi’s Bible Commentary as an Example: Polemical? Rashi’s Bible commentaries have served lately as an arena for scholars to impute polemical motives to the commentator or to dispute them.35 Scholars such as Elazar Touitou and Avraham Grossman have claimed that polemics were a crucial motivating factor in medieval Jewish Bible exegesis in Christendom and specifically in the exegesis of Rashi. Shaye Cohen was the first to raise serious doubts about this approach. Comparing Rashi’s commentary on the Torah with the commentaries of his grandson Rashbam and with those of Rashbam’s younger contemporary, Joseph Bekhor Shor (dates unclear; middle or late twelfth century), Cohen argued that Rashi’s Torah commentary does not reflect polemical concerns. Cohen repeated, however, the generally accepted notion that the “anti-Christian polemic in the [= Rashi’s] Psalms Commentary is unmistakable and unambiguous.”36 Daniel Lasker argued further that polemics was not a decisive, motivating factor in any of Rashi’s exegetical works. Lasker compared Rashi’s Psalms commentary with explicitly polemical Jewish works, concluding that “a comparison between Rashi’s commentary on Psalms and the polemical literature will show that Rashi was neither deeply concerned with Christian exegesis nor very conversant with Christian theology.”37

6.1.1 Rashi on Genesis 4:1 Cohen discussed a number of comments from Rashi’s Torah commentary that other scholars had labeled anti-Christian polemics. He dismissed almost all of them. One such comment of Rashi, on Genesis 4:1, which some scholars consider an antiChristian polemic, he labelled “the most convincing” example.38 There Rashi insists that Adam and Eve had sexual relations before being expelled from the garden of Eden. Even though the end of Genesis 3 describes the expulsion from the garden  David Berger, Persecution, Polemic and Dialogue (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2010), 46.  See, recently, Yedida Eisenstadt, “Does Rashi’s Torah Commentary Respond to Christianity?” TheTorah.com (2018). https://www.thetorah.com/article/does-rashis-torah-commentary-respondto-christianity; and Lockshin, “Rashi on the Torah: What Kind of Commentary Is It?” TheTorah.com (2019). https://www.thetorah.com/article/rashi-on-the-torah-what-kind-of-commentary-is-it.  Cohen, “Does Rashi’s Torah Commentary Respond to Christianity?” 449–472.  Daniel J. Lasker, “Rashi and Maimonides on Christianity,” in Ephraim Kanarfogel and Moshe Sokolow, eds., Between Rashi and Maimonides: Themes in Medieval Jewish Thought, Literature, and Exegesis, (New York: Michael Scharf Publication Trust of the Yeshiva University Press, 2010): 3–21.  Cohen, “Does Rashi’s Torah Commentary Respond to Christianity?” 467.

A Retrospective Look at the Modern Study of Medieval Jewish Bible Commentaries

251

and then chapter 4 begins with the verse “Adam knew (ve-ha-adam yada‘) his wife Eve,” Rashi writes there: Veha-adam yada‘: [He had known her] already before the previous story, before he sinned and was expelled from the garden. So, also, the pregnancy and the birth [all took place while still in the garden]. Had the text read va-yeda‘ adam [instead of ve-ha-adam yada‘] then it would have meant that he had children after he was expelled [from the garden].

The argument for considering this text polemical seems attractive. Christian theologians often taught that sexual relations were a result of the fall and were thus inherently sinful.39 Rashi’s repetitious language here “before the previous story, before he sinned and was expelled from the garden,” creates the impression that he was arguing against a position that bothered him. And so, perhaps, it makes sense to say that this particular comment was polemical, even though Rashi did not say so explicitly. Ultimately, Cohen did not accept the polemical understanding of this text, either, writing that “there can be no certainty” that Rashi was reacting to Christianity.40 There are several reasons to take Cohen’s argument even farther. First, the end of Rashi’s comment does not read “then it would have meant that he had sexual relations after he was expelled,” but rather “then it would have meant that he had children after he was expelled.” In other words, although the first phrase of the verse is referring to sexual activity, Rashi applies his comment on the chronology more widely, saying that the sexual activity, the pregnancy, and the birth all took place in the garden. No polemical explanation would justify that wider contention. Second, it is hard to prove either that Rashi knew that Christians considered sexuality to be a result of sin or that he would be ideologically opposed to such a position. Rashi’s own comment on the biblical verse, “Indeed I was born ba‘avon (in sin? through sin?), with sin my mother conceived me” (Ps 51:7) leads us to think that he may also have seen sexuality as inherently sinful.41 Consider also the position of two Jewish Bible commentators who lived just a few years after Rashi, Joseph Bekhor Shor and David Kimhi (1160–1235). They were both very active in polemics against Christians, certainly more active than Rashi. Both of them had a deeper acquaintance with Christianity than Rashi did, and both of them surely knew Rashi’s commentary on the Torah. Yet, neither one of them felt the need to claim that Adam and Eve were sexually active before their expulsion from the garden. To the contrary, they saw the events of Genesis 4:1, “Adam ‘knew’ Eve,” as taking place after the expulsion from

 See, for example, Jerome, Against Jovinianus 1:29 and 1:37.  See n.58 on 467–468 of Cohen’s “Does Rashi’s Torah Commentary Respond to Christianity?” and the sources he cites there.  Rashi’s comment there: “And how could I not sin, when I was, in essence, created through copulation, the source of many sins” (‫)ואיך לא אחטא ועיקר יצירתי על ידי תשמיש שכמה עונות באים על ידו‬.

252

Martin I. Lockshin

the garden.42 In other words, even commentators who we know were involved in Jewish polemics were not attracted to Rashi’s explanation of Genesis 4:1. Third, Rashi underpinned his explanation of this verse with a solid grammatical excursus on the use of tenses in biblical Hebrew. Rashi cared deeply about Hebrew grammar and syntax; he may simply have been teaching his readers how to relate to a narrative where the expected biblical Hebrew pattern of tense use is broken. Each of the last five verses of Genesis 3 begins with a verb form on the same model, the vav-consecutive form: va-yiqra ha-adam (Adam named), va-ya‘as YHWH (the LORD made), va-yomer YHWH (The LORD said), va-yeshallehehu YHWH (the LORD banished him), and va-yegaresh (He expelled). Such a pattern of repeated verb forms is common and indicates that the narrative is proceeding in chronological order, one verse after the other. But then, in the first words of chapter 4, the pattern is broken and a simple perfect verb form (yada‘) is used. As Rashi pointed out, the verse does not say va-yeda‘ ha-adam. Had it said that, he would have interpreted the verb in 4:1 as continuing the chronology begun in the previous verses. But Rashi believed the pattern was broken to show that the verb that begins chapter 4 conveys a pluperfect sense (“Adam had known”) and thus the first events of chapter 4 do not follow the last events of chapter 3.43 Finally, Rashi’s attraction to this explanation of Gen 4:1 likely had nothing to do with his alleged dedication to polemics and little to do with his undoubted commitment to teaching grammar. The main reason was doubtless Rashi’s strong (though not exclusive) commitment to preserving many of the midrashic explanations found in the Talmud.44 The Talmud taught that: The day [of the creation of Adam] was twelve hours long. In the first hour, the dust [from which he was formed] was gathered together (. . .) in the fifth hour he stood up on his feet, in the sixth he called the animals names, in the seventh he was matched with Eve, in the eighth

 See Kimhi’s commentary to Gen 4:1 and Bekhor Shor’s commentary to Gen 3:15. See also Kimhi’s commentary to Ps 51:7. This comment shows that Kimhi, more than Rashi, was trying to avoid saying that sexuality is inherently sinful. Still, he had no problem saying that the events of Genesis 4 took place after the events of Genesis 3.  Hebrew has no grammatical form for a pluperfect. Similar to our verse, see, for example, Gen 31:34. There too a string of vav-consecutive verb forms in the preceding verses is interrupted by a simple perfect form veRahel laqehah, which most translations (including the New Jewish Publication Society translation, the Revised Standard Version, and the King James Version) render as “Rachel had taken.” On this syntactical phenomenon, see E. Kautzsch and A. E. Cowley, eds., Gesenius’s Hebrew Grammar (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), section 106 and following, 310–311.  Rashi stated more than once that he was committed to peshat exegesis, but the evidence demonstrates that he was also very interested in midrash. See the discussion in the introductory essay to my Rashbam’s Commentary on Deuteronomy, 3–15. See also Yedida Eisenstat, “Rashi’s Midrashic Anthology: The Torah Commentary Re-Examined,” PhD diss., Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2014.

A Retrospective Look at the Modern Study of Medieval Jewish Bible Commentaries

253

the two of them climbed into bed and four emerged from the bed,45 in the ninth he was commanded not to eat the fruit [of the tree of knowledge], in the tenth he sinned, in the eleventh he was tried and in the twelfth he was expelled and he left.46

It would be hard to find an anti-Christian polemical motivation in this Talmudic passage. Accordingly, Rashi’s agenda in his comment to Genesis 4:1 seems to be more connected to grammar and midrash than to polemics.

6.1.2 Rashi on “Wisdom” To cite another example, in a recent article Avraham Grossman argued that “Rashi’s commentaries to Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Job 28 evince a striking, tendentious commitment to understand ‘wisdom’ (hokhmah) as Torah. This is the case (. . .) even though the plain meaning generally points to straightforward human wisdom.”47 Grossman offered two explanations for what he saw as an anomaly in Rashi’s exegesis. His preferred explanation is “that Christians, at a time when polemics had reached one of its peaks, were beginning to use arguments from reason in their exchanges with Jews, and Rashi wanted to keep Jews away from an enterprise that could lead them to religious doubts.”48 David Berger, while calling Grossman “a paradigm of caution and sober judgment,”49 gently took issue with his approach. Berger articulated common sense rules to use when evaluating a thesis proposing an extraneous motive for a particular exegetical position: First, how compelling is the argument for seeking such a motive? Put differently can the exegetical argument be accounted for without undue strain by straightforward considerations emerging out of the exegete’s culture and approach to the text? Second, how persuasive is the

 That is, two children were miraculously born immediately after the parents’ sexual activity.  B. Sanhedrin 38b: ‫ ששית קרא‬,‫ חמישית עמד על רגליו‬. . . ‫ שעה ראשונה הוצבר עפרו‬,‫שתים עשרה שעות הוי היום‬ , ‫ ע ש י ר ית ס ר ח‬,‫ ת ש י ע ית נ צ ט ו ו ה ש ל א ל א כ ו ל מן ה א י לן‬, ‫ ש מ י נ ית ע ל ו ל מ ט ה ש ני ם וי ר ד ו א ר ב ע ה‬, ‫ ש ב י ע ית נ ז ד ו ו ג ה ל ו ח ו ה‬,‫ש מ ו ת‬ ‫ שתים עשרה נטרד והלך לו‬,‫אחת עשרה נידון‬. Versions of this midrash are also found in many other sources that Rashi drew from. See Genesis Rabbah 18:6 (168 in the Theodor-Albeck edition) and 22:2 (205 in the Theodor-Albeck edition), Pirqei de-Rabbi Eliezer 11, and Avot de-Rabbi Natan 81. See analysis of this midrash in Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 196–202.  This quotation is David Berger’s summary of Grossman’s argument in Berger’s Cultures in Collision and Conversation: Essays in the Intellectual History of the Jews (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011), 158. Grossman’s article, “The Tension Between Torah and Hokhmah (Wisdom) in Rashi’s Commentary on the Bible” [Hebrew], appeared in Moshe Bar-Asher, Noah Hakham, and Yosef Ofer, eds., Teshurah Le‘Amos: Collected Studies in Biblical Exegesis Presented to Amos Hakham (Alon Shevut: Tvunot, 2007), 13–28.  Berger, Cultures in Collision and Conversation, 158.  Berger, Cultures in Collision and Conversation, 160.

254

Martin I. Lockshin

extraneous motive? These considerations work in tandem. If the proposed motive is highly plausible, we may entertain it seriously even if there is little reason to seek it. If it is not particularly persuasive, we may decide that internal considerations suffice.50

Dealing with the specific example – Rashi’s repeated insistence that hokhmah is Torah – Berger concluded that neither factor was at play. Typically for Rashi, as we have seen, his interpretation drew on extremely popular midrashim and exegetical works that had preceded him. Furthermore, Berger wrote, “the evidence that the recent introduction [of ratio, reason] into the lexicon of Christian polemicists had come to Rashi’s attention is tenuous at best.”51

6.2 Diaspora and Israeli Scholarship – Differing Attitudes to Polemical Motives Again, it seems that the split in the world of scholarship about medieval Jewish Bible commentaries is largely geographical. With notable exceptions,52 Israeli scholars attribute anti-Christian polemical motives to the medieval exegetes more often than do North American scholars.

7 Progress in the Field Scholars in the field of medieval Jewish Bible commentaries can be proud of the progress made in the last twenty-five years. We now have many more good critical editions, translations, and monographs to help us understand the world of medieval Jewish Bible commentaries.53 Exciting work is being done now in the analysis of longignored exegetical works: Bible commentaries from eastern locales, like Byzantium,54

 Berger, Cultures in Collision and Conversation, 160.  Berger, Cultures in Collision and Conversation, 160–163. Regarding another work of Grossman’s, his excellent biography of Rashi, I too have expressed concerns about the exaggerated attribution of polemical motives to Rashi. See Lockshin, “Review of Avraham Grossman, Rashi.” H-Judaic, H-Net Reviews. March 2013. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=37358.  One such exception is the Israeli scholar Daniel Lasker (whose upbringing and education were, albeit, American).  For a further discussion of recent progress in the field, see Jason Kalman, “Medieval Jewish Bible Commentaries and the State of Parshanut Studies,” Religion Compass 2/5 (2008): 819–843.  See, for example, Richard Steiner, “A Jewish Theory of Biblical Redaction from Byzantium: Its Rabbinic Roots, Its Diffusion and Its Encounter with the Muslim Doctrine of Falsification,” Jewish Studies Internet Journal 2 (2003): 123–167 (https://jewish-faculty.biu.ac.il/files/jewish-faculty/shared/ JSIJ2/steiner.pdf).

A Retrospective Look at the Modern Study of Medieval Jewish Bible Commentaries

255

commentaries of Karaite Jews,55 commentaries of rabbanite Jews written in JudeoArabic,56 philosophically oriented commentaries,57 literary approaches to the Bible in medieval exegetical texts,58 and the world of super-commentaries.59 Some websites now make the best critical texts of commentaries available to scholars and others.60 Happily a current prospective graduate student interested in medieval Bible commentaries does not have to wander around looking for a home – he or she can choose from quite a few graduate schools and methodological approaches both in Israel and in North America.61

For Further Reading Cohen, Shaye J. D. “Does Rashi’s Torah Commentary Respond to Christianity? A Comparison of Rashi with Rashbam and Bekhor Shor.” In Hindy Najman and Judith H. Newman, eds., The Idea of Biblical Interpretation: Essays in Honor of James L. Kugel, 449–472. Leiden: Brill, 2004. Eisenstat, Yedida. Rashi’s Midrashic Anthology: The Torah Commentary Re-Examined. PhD. dissertation, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2014. Grossman, Avraham. Rashi, trans. Joel A. Linsider. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2012. Kalman, Jason. “Medieval Jewish Bible Commentaries and the State of Parshanut Studies.” Religion Compass 2/5 (2008): 819–843. Kamin, Sarah. Jews and Christians Interpret the Bible. Jerusalem: Magnes, 2008. Lawee, Eric. Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah: Canonization and Resistance in the Reception of a Jewish Classic. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Leibowitz, Nehama. Studies in Bereshit (Genesis) in the Context of Ancient and Modern Jewish Bible Commentary, trans. Aryeh Newman. Jerusalem: Joint Authority for Jewish Zionist Education, 1993. Leyra Curia, Montse. In Hebreo: The Victorine Exegesis of the Bible in the Light of Its Northern French Jewish Sources. Turnhout: Brepols, 2017.

 See, for example, Meira Polliack, “The Emergence of Karaite Bible Exegesis,” [Hebrew] Sefunot 7 (1999): 299–311.  See, for example, Maaravi Peretz, The Commentary of Yehudah ibn Balam on Ezekiel [JudeoArabic and Hebrew] (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2000).  See, for example, Robert Eisen, Gersonides on Providence, Covenant, and the Chosen People: A Study in Medieval Jewish Philosophy and Biblical Commentary (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995).  See, for example, Michelle J. Levine, Nahmanides on Genesis: The Art of Biblical Portraiture (Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2009).  See, for example, Eric Lawee, Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah: Canonization and Resistance in the Reception of a Jewish Classic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).  See, for example, the excellent Mikraot Gedolot website of Hillel and Neima Novetsky: https:// mg.alhatorah.org/.  In Europe, the field is small but growing. In my assessment, in Europe the influence of Israel is felt more strongly than the influence of North America.

256

Martin I. Lockshin

Lockshin, Martin I. “Peshat or Polemics: The Case of Genesis 36.” In Elisheva Carlebach and J.J. Schachter, eds., New Perspectives in Jewish-Christian Relations (in Honor of David Berger), 437–453. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Lockshin, Martin I. “Lonely Man of Peshat.” Jewish Quarterly Review 99/2 (2009): 291–300. Saebø, Magne, ed. Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. The History of Its Interpretation. 3 vols. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprech, 1996–2015. Unterman, Yael. Nehama Leibowitz: Teacher and Bible Scholar. Jerusalem: Urim, 2009.

Vivian B. Mann

The New in Medieval Jewish Art and Architecture 1 Introduction: The Study of Jewish Art The academic study of Jewish art in the United States did not exist a generation ago. The major achievement in the field is that there is now a field of Jewish studies known as Jewish art and visual culture. In 1995, the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) created an MA degree that would allow interested students to concentrate on the subject of Jewish art. The shape of the master’s program was conceived by a blue-ribbon panel of academics and museum curators whose meetings in 1984–1985 were funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.1 Meyer Shapiro, Richard Brilliant, Leo Steinberg, Walter Cahn, Ismar Schorsch (then provost of JTS), Shaye Cohen, Menahem Schmelzer, and Joan Rosenbaum (then director of the Jewish Museum) were among the participants. After a year of meetings, the advisory panel concluded that the new master’s degree should place Jewish art within the dual contexts of Jewish studies and general art history. It was also designed to take advantage of the presence of collections of Jewish art in the museums of New York City. The hope of its founders was that a new corps of trained curators and museum professionals would emerge from the JTS MA program and raise the level of preparedness and scholarship of those caring for collections of Jewish art. Since 1997, when the first students graduated, the JTS MA program has awarded degrees to forty-seven students who now work in Jewish museums, in secular museums, and in arts organizations all across the United States and in Israel. A further effort at educating curators targeted those working for secular museums whose collections include Judaica. With a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, the Seminary sponsored the Institute of Jewish Art from 2004–2006, which included an intensive course in Jewish customs coupled with a course in the history of Jewish ceremonial art. The curators who attended came from major museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and from smaller regional museums such as the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester. Among the outcomes was a new program of exhibiting medieval Hebrew manuscripts at the Metropolitan, a significant purchase of German Judaica by the Memorial Art

 Vivian B. Mann and Gordon Tucker, eds., The Seminar in Jewish Art. January–September 1984: Proceedings (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary and Jewish Museum, 1985). Note: Sadly, Vivian B. Mann (1943–2019), a great scholar and mensch, passed away before the publication of this volume. With the exception of a few minor editorial changes, her essay is presented here in the form in which she submitted it in mid-2015. May her memory be a blessing! – the editors. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110418873-015

258

Vivian B. Mann

Gallery that became the nucleus of a new collection, and the transformation of the Museum of Biblical Art in Dallas from a museum of Christian art to one that is more inclusive and incorporates both Jewish and Christian art in its collection and exhibitions. The attention now paid to the field of Jewish art is evident in the recent establishment of a second MA program at George Washington University in Jewish cultural studies, the publication of a new Israeli journal, Ars Judaica, by Bar-Ilan University,2 and the inauguration in 2007 of the first American scholarly journal in the field, namely, Images: A Journal of Jewish Art & Visual Culture.3 Issues of Images range from collections of individual articles to thematic volumes on such subjects as modern artistic responses to the eruv (the traditional means of transforming a public space into a privately-held area for the purpose of carrying on the Sabbath) and on the history and materiality of the Jewish book. Articles in Images are based on cutting-edge approaches to the history of art, and its publication symbolizes the new maturation of the field in the United States.

2 The Study of Medieval Jewish Art and Architecture In considering Jewish art and architecture of the Middle Ages and the transformation of its study in the last thirty years, my emphasis will be on European material since most of the medieval ceremonial art and communal architecture in countries ruled by Muslims has been lost, with the exception of manuscripts. Although Near Eastern communities survived into the mid-twentieth century, early works and buildings were repeatedly replaced by later examples. Some of the Jewish cultural heritage of North African and Central Asian communities has been destroyed or repurposed as the communities that built and sustained them emigrated or died out. The one exception is Morocco, whose Jewish community may predate the Roman conquest. Because most of the Jewish population of Morocco has emigrated, Muslim university students and others formed Mimouna in 2000, an organization whose purpose is the preservation of Jewish heritage sites, in recognition of the important role of Jewish traditions in the formation of Moroccan culture. Prior to 1990, the known corpus of medieval Jewish art consisted largely of manuscripts scattered in libraries in the Middle East, in Europe, and in America. Their small number relative to what must have once existed is apparent from the thousands of text fragments found in the Cairo Geniza and those recently extracted from book bindings in Spanish and Italian archives and libraries.4 The study of

 https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/journals/id/56/.  https://brill.com/view/journals/ima/ima-overview.xml.  See Mauro Perani, ed., Fragments from the “Italian Genizah” (exhibit catalogue; Jerusalem: Jewish National and University Library, 1999–2000) for an account of the efforts to recover Jewish texts

The New in Medieval Jewish Art and Architecture

259

Hebrew manuscripts remains the most commonly studied genre in the field of medieval Jewish art. Despite its long history – the field of Hebrew manuscript studies began with the publication of the Sarajevo Haggadah by Heinrich Müller, Jules Schlosser, and David Oppenheim in 18985 – it is not without methodological problems (Figure 1). There is a tendency among students and scholars who are wellversed in Hebrew texts to consider an artist’s rendering of an iconographic theme as primarily based on biblical, rabbinic, or mystical writings. The role of visual models and the contractual nature of artistic production during the Middle Ages are secondary to a methodology that sees manuscript illuminations as text-based, created by artists working on their own in some medieval equivalent of New York’s Greenwich Village. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consider the specificity of this contract between the Jewish community of Arles and Robin Asard, a silversmith in Avignon: On 24 March 1439, the (. . .) heads of the synagogue of the Jews of Arles ordered from Master Robin Asard, silversmith of Avignon, a crown for the Scroll of the Law (. . . .) According to this agreement, Master Robin was engaged to make a silver crown of hexagonal form, having a square frame of copper as the interior armature, whose [materials] were to be completely furnished by the Jews. [The crown] will have six towers with pillars at the angles and a portal between the pillars made like a masonry edifice. The upper border of the crown will be decorated (. . .) with crenellations and loopholes (. . . .) All the other surfaces will be worked and ornamented with leaves (. . .) appropriately gilt. On each of the pillars, there will be the head of a lion from which a silver chain will emerge. This chain will terminate in three tips, each furnished with a small round silver bell (. . .).6

Or this contract between Abraham de Salinas, a Jewish painter, and Bernart de Alfajarin, sub-sacristan of the Cathedral of Saragossa, dated May 27, 1393, just two years after the worst pogroms in Spanish history:7 I, Bernart de Alfajarin, cleric, perpetual beneficiary in Santa Seo of the city of Saragossa (. . .) again grant business and a task to you, Abram de Salinas the Jewish painter living in this city, to make an altarpiece of pine, with the [following] conditions and agreements. It should be ten palms in all of its dimensions (. . . .) It should be your work on the history of the Annunciation to Santa Maria and include in that work the six stories of the history of the Annunciation and

from the bindings in Italian archives, and http://xac.gencat.cat/en/llista_arxius_comarcals/gi rones/manuscrits_hebreus/consulta/ for the recovery efforts in Catalunya.  David Heinrich Muller and Julius von Schlosser, with David Kaufmann, Die Haggadah von Sarajevo: Eine spanisch-jüdische Bilderhandschrift des Mittelalters (Vienna: A. Hölder, 1898).  Georges Stenne (Georges Schornstein), Collection de M. Strauss: Description des objets d’art religieux hebräiques (Poissy: Lejay, 1878), vii–viii.  For the original text of the entire contract, see Béatrice Leroy, “Dans les ville de Tudela et de Saragossa à la fin du XIVe siècle: Les juifs et les seigneurs,” Miscelànea de estudios árabes y hebraicos (Universidad de Granada) 32 (1983): 92–93. For a different interpretation of the subject matter, see Asunción Blasco Martínez, “Pintores y Orfebres Judíos en Zaragoza (Siglo IV),” Aragón en la Edad Media 8 (1989): 116, n. 20.

260

Vivian B. Mann

Figure 1: Members of the Household Leaving the Synagogue, Sarajevo Haggadah, second quarter of the fourteenth century (Sarajevo: National Library). their requirements. It should be your work with good and fine gold and good and fine pigments like the colors on the two altarpieces you made in the Church of Saint Philip (. . .) one of Matthew and the other of Saint John the Evangelist (. . .)8

Documentary evidence – such as the contracts for the Torah crown and the altarpiece – together with rabbinic responsa and archival documents supplement what may be learned from the limited extant examples of ceremonial art and synagogues that date to the Middle Ages.9 Some Spanish synagogues survived because they were re-consecrated as churches; Santa María La Blanca and El Tránsito in Toledo are but two examples. Still, the

 I wish to thank Professor Benjamin Gampel for his help with this translation.  See Vivian B. Mann, Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) for examples of responsa whose texts include information on the visual arts.

The New in Medieval Jewish Art and Architecture

261

number of extant synagogues cannot compare with the actual number that once existed. José Luis Lacave published a history of medieval Spanish synagogues based on archival and archaeological evidence, his 1992 Juderías y Sinagogas Españolas.10 In all, he found that there was at least one synagogue in 118 Spanish cities and some cities had more. Saragossa had seven and there were ten in Toledo, home to the largest Jewish community in medieval Spain. The documentation Lacave and other researchers have found is often fragmentary. We know the location of only two of the seven medieval synagogues in Saragossa and two of the four (or more) medieval synagogues in Palma de Majorca. The most interesting documents are those that describe synagogues. Consider this description of the smallest of the three synagogues in Huesca, the second most important Jewish community in Aragón. In 1482–1483, Pedro Garcias wrote that “the synagogue [La Pequeño was] of reduced size, rectangular in plan, preceded by an atrium from which one reached the women’s gallery on the second floor, and had two entrances, one in the southern part and one in the north.”11 The men of the congregation sat in seats with painted backs that were arranged in rows parallel to the walls, an arrangement that became common in later synagogues built in the Sephardi diaspora. Structural and decorative elements from former synagogues are also extant. The nave arcades of the synagogue in Seville known as Santa Cruz still stand in the plaza of the same name,12 and there are fragments of fourteenth-century stucco from the synagogue in Cuenca.13 Most Ashkenazi synagogues were destroyed or transformed for other purposes by the late Middle Ages. The synagogue in Worms (as it was prior to Kristallnacht 1938), the Altneuschul in Prague, and the Stara Synagogue in Kasimierz, on the other hand, are examples of synagogues that remained in their medieval state. In the last few decades, several others, as well as ritual baths, have become the focus of archaeological investigations, for example, the medieval synagogues in Speyer, Regensburg, and Cologne.14 Similarly, works of Judaica survived as the result of their reuse in medieval churches. The most well-known is a pair of thirteenth-fourteenth-century Torah finials

 José Luis Lacave, Juderías y Sinagogas Españolas (Madrid: Mateu Cromo Artes Gráficas, 1992).  Antonio Durán Guidíol, La Judería de Huesca (Saragossa: Guara Editorial, 1984), 46.  On the Santa Cruz synagogue, see Rafael Cómez Ramoz, “La Antigua Sinagoga del Barrio de Santa Cruz, en Sevilla,” Madrider Mitteilungen 33 (1991): 184–195, pl. 28.  For the Cuenca stucco, see Isidro G. Bango Torviso, ed., Memoria de Sefarad (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal para la Accíon Cultural Exterior, 2002), 252–253.  On the Speyer synagogue, see Monika Porsche, “Speyer the Medieval Synagogue,” in Christoph Cluse, ed., The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages (Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries), Proceedings of the International Symposium Held at Speyer, 20–25 October 2002 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004): 420–434. For the Regensburg synagogue, see Silvia Codreanu-Windauer, “Regensburg: The Archaeology of the Medieval Jewish Quarter,” in Cluse, ed., The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages, 391–415 (and the older literature there). For the Cologne synagogue, see Sven Schütte and Marianne Gechter, Von der Ausgrabung zum Museum – Kölner Archäologie zwischen Rathaus und Praetorium: Ergebnisse und Materialien 2006–2012, 2nd ed. (Cologne: Stadt Köln, 2012), 93–282.

262

Vivian B. Mann

once owned by a synagogue in Cammarata (Sicily) that were sold to a merchant from Majorca at the time of the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian peninsula in 1492, when Sicily was subject to the rule of Aragón.15 The similarity of these Torah finials to those made for episcopal staves of the same date allowed for their reuse in the church. They are now part of the cathedral treasury in Palma de Majorca (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Torah Finials, Sicily, 13th–14th century (Palma de Majorca: Cathedral Treasury).

3 The Last Thirty Years During the last three decades, a larger corpus of medieval Judaica has emerged. The corpus was first transformed by the integration of works previously known only to specialists in medieval art, a process that began in the 1980s.16 One instance is a double cup and its leather case or futteral dated to the second quarter of the

 Nicolò Bucaria, Michele Luzzati, and Angela Tarantino, Ebrei e Sicilia (Palermo: Flaccovio Editore, 2002), Cat. no. IX.  Vivian B. Mann, “‘New’ Examples of Jewish Ceremonial Art from Medieval Ashkenaz,” Artibus et Historiae 17 (1988): 13–24; Hiltrud Westermann-Angerhausen, “Die Bronzeampel im Erfurter Dom: Technische Aspekte und kunsthistorischer Kontext eines Bronzegusses aus dem 12. Jahrhundert,”

The New in Medieval Jewish Art and Architecture

263

fifteenth century that belonged to the archbishop of Mainz (Figure 3). When the enameled plaques with the archbishop’s coats of arms were removed during a restoration in 1939, the original plaques were revealed. They indicated that the cup had been made for “Isaac, son of the noble Zekhariah zatsal,”17 whose name forms a circular frame around an engraved deer, a composition common on medieval Hebrew seals. The Nazi-era publication of the restoration was titled “Das Geheimnis um den Schenkenbecher von Erbach” [“The Secret of the Goblet of Erbach” – ed.].18 Another example is a stone Torah ark from the synagogue in Agira (Sicily) that was published only in 1996, although its inscription indicates a date of 1454, and it formed part of an oratorio in the Church of Santa Croce in that city since the expulsion.19 There are still other works that have been recently discovered and are about to be published. One is a futteral for a kiddush cup found in the silver storeroom of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London that belonged to one Yitzh͎ak bar Yaakov.

Figure 3: Double Cup and Case of Isaac ben Zekhariah, second quarter of the 15th century (Erbach).

Erfurter Schriften zur jüdischen Geschichte, Vol. 3: Zu Bild und Text im jüdisch-christlichen Kontext im Mittelalter (Erfurt: n. p., 2014): 168–183.  Zatsal is an abbreviation for zekher tsaddik livrakhah (“for the memory of the righteous is a blessing”), which indicates that Isaac’s father had died.  A. Feigel, “Das Geheimnis um den Schenkenbecher von Erbach,” in Aus Dom und Diözese zum Mainz. Fesgtabe Prof. Georg Lenhart (Mainz: Schmidt, 1939): 120.  N. Bucaria, Sicilia Judaica (Palermo: Flaccovio Editore, 1996), 20–31; Bucaria, Luzzati, and Tarantino, Ebrei e Sicilia, Cat. no. VIII.

264

Vivian B. Mann

The most significant developments for the history of medieval art and architecture commissioned by Jews have resulted from excavations, some planned and others the outcome of accidental discoveries. In the 1980s, the government of the region of Aragón in Spain excavated the medieval Jewish quarter of Teruel, as well as its Jewish cemetery. Teruel was a center for the production of ceramics. Most of the examples found in the Jewish quarter are similar in form and decoration to those used by Christians, but two distinctively Jewish forms were recovered: a plate with five cups that was probably a Seder plate (Figure 4) and a fragment of a Hanukkah lamp.20

Figure 4: Seder Plate, Teruel, 15th century (Barcelona, Museu de Ceràmica).

Similar lamp fragments have been found in other Spanish cities suggesting that ceramic hanukkiyot (Hanukkah lamps) were the most common and least expensive type used in medieval Spain (Figure 5). The finds in the Jewish cemetery of Teruel were even more remarkable.21 They included various types of jewelry, such as rings, as well as silver and gold “buttons” used to fasten garments. The other significant excavation in Spain began by chance in 1999. During the building of a hotel outside Lorca, a small city on the border between Castile and Andalusia, workers unearthed a medieval wall. An archaeological dig ensued that revealed a fourteenth-century synagogue, the base of its bimah, or reader’s desk, the steps

 Vivian B. Mann, Thomas F. Glick, and Jerrilynn D. Dodds, eds., Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain (New York: George Braziller, 1992), Cat. nos. 75–86 (and the older literature there).  For the jewelry and clothes fasteners from Teruel, see Bango Torviso, Memoria de Sefarad, 122–125.

The New in Medieval Jewish Art and Architecture

265

Figure 5: Fragment of a Hanukkah Lamp, 15th century (Teruel, Museo de Teruel).

leading to the Torah ark, as well as the benches around the walls.22 On the wall nearest the steps to the raised bimah is a cathedra, or throne, similar to those that have been found in a few ancient synagogues both in the Land of Israel and the diaspora.23 Its placement near the bimah suggests it was used by the congregant holding the Torah scroll before or after its reading; it may also have been used as the chair for the sandak (the person who holds the infant) during circumcisions. The decoration of the Lorca synagogue is a mix of Islamic and Gothic forms and style. As in other medieval Spanish synagogues, the walls were covered with stucco inscriptions and webs of diamond-shaped frames, but at Lorca the enclosed forms are Gothic lilies.24 The most remarkable discovery in the synagogue was a cache of broken glass beneath the reader’s desk, the largest corpus of medieval glass ever found in Spain.25 Forty lamps once used to illuminate the synagogue were reconstructed from the fragments, including the type known as a “mosque” lamp that appears in the synagogue scenes of fourteenth-century Spanish haggadot. In addition, since the discovery of the synagogue in 1999, more than twenty homes of the adjacent judería or Jewish quarter have been excavated.26 Since the excavations at Lorca (Figure 6) began,

 On the Lorca synagogue, see Ángel Iniesta Sanmartín, Andrés Martínez Rodríguez, and Juana Ponce García, eds., Lorca: Luces de Sefarad (Murcia: Editociones Tres Fronteras Libecrom, 2009).  For example, cathedra have been found in the synagogues of Delos (second century BCE–first century CE); Chorazin (middle of the third century CE), and H͎ ammat Tiberias (fourth century CE).  Manuel Pérez Asensio, Frederike Koch, Eva Moreno León, and Paula Sánchez Gómez, “Las Yeserías de la Sinagoga del Castillo de Lorca, Murcia,” in Iniesta Sanmartin, et al, Lorca: Luces de Sefarad, 222–257.  Juan García Sandoval, “En Resplandor de las Lámparas de Vidro de la Sinagoga de Lorca: Estudio Tipológico,” in Iniesta Sanmartin, et al, Lorca: Luces de Sefarad, 260–303.  Juan Gallardo Carrillo and José Ángell González Ballesteros, “La Judería del Castillo de Lorca a partir de las Evidencias Arqueológicas,” in Iniesta Sanmartin, et al, Lorca: Luces de Sefarad, 182–202.

266

Vivian B. Mann

Figure 6: Synagogue at Lorca, 14th century, aerial view.

only one other medieval synagogue has been found in its original setting among homes owned by Jews and that is the synagogue of Cologne, whose exploration in 2007 was part of an extensive program focused on the area surrounding the city hall. One of three chronicles recounting the attacks on the Jewish communities of Mainz, Worms, and Speyer during the First Crusade of 1096 was written by Solomon ben Samson of Mainz between 1140 and 1146. He described Cologne as “the lovely city, which had hosted the ingathered flock [that is, the Jewish community] (. . . .) From there radiated life and sustenance and judgment to all our brethren scattered everywhere (. . .).”27 Solomon ben Samson then remarked that “Cologne was a center of Jewish studies and of commerce to which [members of] all the communities came (. . .) for the fairs three times a year.” The excavations in Cologne revealed that the synagogue was in use for a much longer span of time than the one in Lorca and became the center of a complex of buildings belonging to the Jewish community (Figure 7).28 Between 1135 and 1152, the community acquired two parcels of land west of the synagogue: one was incorporated into the forecourt, enlarging it, and the other became the site of the mikveh in the fourth quarter of the twelfth century. A women’s section was added at the northeast

 Matthias Schmandt, “Cologne, Jewish Centre on the Lower Rhine,” in Cluse, ed., The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages, 367.  Schütte and Gechter, Von der Ausgrabung zum Museum, 93–142.

The New in Medieval Jewish Art and Architecture

267

Figure 7: Plan of the Medieval Jewish Quarter, Cologne.

corner of the men’s prayer hall around 1200. Around 1280, during a period of prosperity for the community, the bimah, or reader’s desk, in the men’s synagogue was rebuilt with carved stones made by the same workshop that furnished sculpture for the cathedral, one instance of the Jewish community’s ability to engage artists who worked on important Christian commissions (Figure 8). The reader’s desk was surrounded by a Gothic arcade of pointed arches supported by paired columns. The crowning element of the structure – with its curved elements and projecting finials – resembles the roof decorations on large shrines of architectural form made for the churches of Cologne in the late twelfth-thirteenth century.29 A similar bimah enclosure existed in the synagogue of Regensburg, as is known from an engraving of Albrecht Altdorfer, who was commissioned in 1519 by the city council to record the appearance of the building prior to its destruction and the expulsion of the Jews from that city.30

 For the Saint Simon Shrine, see Jacques Stiennon and Rita Lejeune, eds., Rhin-Meuse: Art et Civilisation 800–1400 (Bruxelles: Ministère de la Culture française Cologne, 1972), 348.  For the Altdorfer engravings, see J. M. Minty, “Judengasse to Christian Quarter: The Phenomenon of the Converted Synagogue in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Holy Roman Empire,” in

268

Vivian B. Mann

Figure 8: Reconstruction of the Reader’s Desk, Cologne Synagogue, ca. 1280.

In addition to the chronicles, both Christian and Jewish, that describe Jewish life in medieval Cologne, there is an important written source with broad implications for Jewish artistic patronage, a responsum by Eliakim ben Joseph of Mainz, who was born ca. 1170 and was the teacher of Isaac ben Moses of Vienna, who recorded the teshuvah (“responsum”) of his teacher in his own work, Or Zarua.31 In the years between 1140 and 1150, Rabbi Eliakim heard that the Jews of Cologne drew images of lions and snakes in the windows of the north wall of the synagogue, which was the wall that included the portal and, therefore, served as the façade. In his words: The [Jews of Cologne] changed an ancient custom, which the early sages were not accustomed to [do] in all the places of their exile (. . .) as it is written “You shall not make for yourself a sculpted image” (Exodus 20:4) (. . . .) The forms of the sun and the moon and the dragon are prohibited because they are cult images, as is the serpent which is (. . .) similar to the forbidden dragon (. . . .) The[se images] are also prohibited because they [distract from the spiritual state required] for prayer and because it would appear that the worshipper bows to images.

Bob Scribner and Trevor Johnson, eds., Popular Religion in Germany and Central Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996): 59–60.  Isaac ben Moses of Vienna, Or Zarua (Jerusalem: Aaron Freimann, 1887), Avodah Zarah, par. 203, trans. E. Diamond.

The New in Medieval Jewish Art and Architecture

269

Figure 9: Stained Glass Fragment, Façade of Cologne Synagogue, 12th century.

Fragments of grisaille-stained glass with vegetal forms were found during the excavation of the Cologne synagogue (Figure 9). The specific subjects cited by Eliakim of Mainz have not been found, although they appear in early German stainedglass with biblical scenes, for example, the transformation of Moses’ staff into a serpent in a window dated ca. 1100 from the abbey of Arnstein an der Lahn. According to Lucas, Bishop of Tuy, writing around 1230: “The forms of animals, birds, and serpents and other things depicted in the church are only for ornament and beauty.”32 In other words they had no symbolic significance. The golden age of church building in medieval Cologne lasted from the middle of the twelfth century until the middle of the thirteenth. New churches were built in this period; others were enlarged or rebuilt, transforming Cologne into a terra sancta. Many of the churches were decorated with stained glass, which must have inspired the Jewish community to install similar glass in the windows of the facade of their synagogue. Rabbi Eliakim’s demand that the windows be removed was based on his assumption that the Jews of Cologne had made the windows themselves. Although Jewish law forbids the making of three-dimensional idols or images of them, it allows the use of twodimensional images made by others, for example textiles woven with animal and human figures. Both Eliakim and later rabbis who cited his opinion overlooked the possibility that the words “that they drew” (she-tsaru) may be understood in the sense of a commission, that is, they “had drawn” or “caused to be drawn” the images in glass. The inscriptions on works of art created under the patronage of Bishop Bernward of Hildesheim between 993 and 1022 sometimes include the words Bernwardus (. . .)

 Creighton Gilbert, “A Statement of Aesthetic Attitude ca. 1230,” Hebrew University Studies in Literature and the Arts 13/2 (1985): 151.

270

Vivian B. Mann

fecit.33 To imagine that Bernward was expert in creating all the art forms on which this phrase is inscribed – from manuscripts to metalwork – and had the time to create them, seems impossible. It is similarly impossible to imagine that the Jews of Cologne established their own workshop to make three small windows at a time when ateliers existed able to furnish Cologne’s churches with stained glass.34 What emerges from this discussion is that the Jews of medieval Cologne, who refurbished and enlarged its synagogue in the mid-twelfth century, patronized the same artists and ateliers working for the church. That the same is true for other synagogues, such as those of Worms and Speyer – built in 1034 and 1104 respectively, is based on stylistic comparisons with carved stones from contemporaneous churches in those two cities.

4 Jewish Patronage in Medieval Ashkenaz The many instances of Jewish patronage of Christian artists – and there are instances of private commissions as well – leads to the question of what the conditions were in medieval Ashkenaz that allowed for this artistic cross-fertilization. There are various answers, some of them applicable to more than one city. First is the fact that Jews and Christians lived in mixed neighborhoods and were not confined to a closed quarter, neither in Cologne nor in Speyer. In Cologne, the real estate transactions of both Christians and Jews dated from the 1130s until the mid-thirteenth century were kept in the Church of St. Lawrence.35 What is striking about these records is that Jews and Christians alternated as residents of the same property and that, at times, Jews lived adjacent to churches. In respect to their residences, Cologne’s Jews were integrated into the larger population. We can suppose that the Jews of Cologne knew the interior of churches and their furnishings from living near them, from needing to register their real estate transactions in the Church of St. Lawrence, and also from disputations. Ca. 1130, Judah of Cologne, who engaged in a disputation with Rupert of Deutz, wrote this description of the art in a church:

 For the phrase Bernwardus fecit on works from the treasury at Hildesheim, see Peter Barnet, Michael Brandt, and Gerhard Lutz, Medieval Treasures from Hildesheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), Cat. no. 10. The covers of the Precious Gospels of Bernward are engraved with a phrase having the same meaning: HOC OPV[S] EXIMIV[M]/ BERNVVARDI P[RE]SVLIS ARTE FACTV[M] (Cat. no. 32).  Werner Schafke, Kölns romanische Kirchen: Architektur, Ausstattung, Geschichte, 2nd ed. (Cologne: Dumont, 1985), 17.  Matthias Schmandt, Judei, cives et incole: Studien zur jüdischen Geschichte Kölns im Mittalalter (Hanover: Hahn, 2002), 18–21.

The New in Medieval Jewish Art and Architecture

271

Most eagerly examining everything there, I see, among the skillfully wrought varieties of carvings and pictures, a certain monstrous idol. I discern, indeed one and the same man humiliated and exalted, despised and raised up, ignominious and glorious. Below he is miserably hanging from a cross. Above, in a deceiving painting, he is seated and most handsome, as if deified (. . .).36

Jews also knew church silver and vestments because they were used as security for loans made to Christians. Both the church and the rabbis tried to discourage this practice. In 1258, Pope Alexander IV wrote: “We (. . .) order you to command each one of the clergy in your dioceses, never to dare, under pain of excommunication and the loss of office and benefice, to pledge vestments, ornaments, and vessels with Jews (. . .).”37 The pope’s pronouncement presumes that Jews were already accepting such pawns. Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg (1215–1293) forbade using the fabric from a vestment that a priest wears when he enters the house of idolatry to fashion an article used for fulfilling a commandment.38

5 The Recovery of Ceremonial Art Despite the loss of Judaica used in the synagogue due to medieval pogroms and expulsions, the accidental find of hoards of coins, jewelry, and objets d’art has enlarged the corpus of Jewish ceremonial art used in the home. During the excavation of a Gothic house in Erfurt in 1998, the largest hoard buried by Jews at the time of persecutions due to the Black Death brought renewed attention to other hoards found since the 1820s (Figure 10).39 The coins found in many of the hoards date to 1348 or earlier, fixing their burials to the years when the plague raged across Europe by owners who never returned to retrieve them. The first was found in Weissenfels in 1826. In addition to coins, the hoard contained five rings, one of which bears a house-formed bezel inscribed with the words mazal tov, which must have been a Jewish marriage ring. A second such ring was found in Colmar in 1863, along with coins, jewelry, silver belts, clothing ornaments, and one double cup. In their diversity, the Colmar finds are closest to the largest coin and jewelry hoard found in Erfurt. In 1969, another

 Translation from Sara Lipton, Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), 98.  Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century, ed. Kenneth R. Stow (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 62–63.  Meir of Rothenburg, Responsa Maharam II: Pesakim uMinhagim, ed. I. Z. Kahan (Jerusalem: Mossad haRav Kook, 1960), No. 123.  On the Erfurt hoard, see Maria Stürzbecher, “Der Schatzfund aus der Michaelisstrasse in Erfurt,” in Sven Ostriz, ed., Die Mittelalterliche jüdische Kultur in Erfurt. Vol. 1 (Weimar: Thüringisches Landesamt für Denkmalpflege und Archäologie, 2010): 65–146. For similar hoards, see Ostriz, 158–302.

272

Vivian B. Mann

Figure 10: The Erfurt Treasure.

hoard was found in Lingenfeld near Speyer, which included a set of cups in graded sizes that is very similar to a set found in Kuttenberg (now Kutna Hora in Czechia) that was a center for silver mining. The coats of arms within these cups indicate they were made for a queen named Rixa Elizabeth, who died in 1335. Later, the Hebrew name Ze’ev was added to the largest cup, thereby asserting their ownership by a Jew who probably used them for kiddush (the sanctification of wine).40 Similar sets were found in the Lingenfeld and Erfurt hoards, expanding the corpus of medieval Judaica. As more cities engage in excavating their historic centers, we may expect the discovery of additional synagogues, mikva’ot (ritual baths), and medieval ceremonial art.

For Further Reading Bango Torviso, Isidro G., ed., Memoria de Sefarad. Madrid: Sociedad Estatal para la Accíon Cultural Exterior, 2002. Cluse, Christoph, ed. The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages (Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries): Proceedings of the International Symposium held at Speyer, 20–25 October 2002. Turnhout: Brepols, 2004. Iniesta Sanmartín, Ángel, Andrés Martínez Rodríguez, and Juana Ponce García, eds., Lorca: Luces de Sefarad. Murcia: Ediciones Tres Fronteras Libecrom, 2009. Lacave, José Luis. Juderías y Sinagogas Españolas. Madrid: Mateu Cromo Artes Gráficas, 1992.

 Mann, “‘New’ Examples of Jewish Ceremonial Art from Medieval Ashkenaz,” 17.

The New in Medieval Jewish Art and Architecture

273

Mann, Vivian B. “‘New’ Examples of Jewish Ceremonial Art from Medieval Ashkenaz.” Artibus et Historiae 17 (1988): 13–24. Mann, Vivian B. Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Ostritz, Sven, ed. Die Mittelalterliche jüdische Kultur in Erfurt, Vol. 1. Weimar: Thüringisches Landesamt für Denkmalpflege und Archäologie, 2010. Schütte, Sven and Marianne Gechter. Von der Ausgrabung zum Museum – Kölner Archäologie zwischen Rathaus und Praetorium: Ergebnisse und Materialien 2006–2012, 2nd ed. Cologne: Stadt Köln, 2012.

Eric Lawee

Scholarship in Recent Decades on Jewish Religion and Thought in Medieval and Early Modern Times: Changing Paradigms, New Perspectives, Future Prospects The following essay provides an aerial view of selected key developments in recent academic explorations of Jewish religion, theology, and thought in medieval through incipient modern times.1 To provide an integrating perspective for so broad an overview in so brief a compass, I append to my already bulky title a further specification: “with emphasis on the ‘cultural turn.’”2 Even with this as a focal point, comprehensive coverage is obviously out of the question. Still, we can evoke high points, note a few conspicuous patterns and new departures, and venture a brief assessment of the state of the field (such as it is one) and its prospects.

1 Problematics of Periodization: The Discovery of Jewish Early Modernity One place to begin a retrospective of this sort is with the often vexing issue of periodization, an operation of interpretation less in vogue in Jewish studies than it once was, in part due to patterns in the larger academy, even if ones that have themselves been subject to critique. Yet, periodization points towards themes that still exercise students of post-talmudic Judaism, including a determination of the imprecise border dividing premodern from modern Judaism and how solidly that border should be  The presentation is as substantially completed in 2015, with the exception mostly of a few added references. I wish to acknowledge very helpful suggestions put at my disposal by two senior mentors, Daniel J. Lasker and Moshe Rosman. Responsibility for shortcomings remains mine. The references in what follows focus on studies available in English.  Still useful is Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). In terms of the many subjects scanted here, the most glaring is Jewish religion and thought “under the crescent” – on which see Mark R. Cohen, “Medieval Jewry in the World of Islam,” in Martin Goodman, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 193–218. For its contexts, see Marina Rustow, “Jews and the Islamic World: Transition from Rabbinic to Medieval Contexts,” in Dean Phillip Bell, ed., The Bloomsbury Companion to Jewish Studies (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 90–120. For the claim that the Middle Ages begins, for purposes of Jewish history, with the “early Moslem-Arab conquests,” see Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, ed., A History of the Jewish People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 485. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110418873-016

276

Eric Lawee

drawn.3 In this area, recent decades have seen elements of continuity, but even more novelty in the way post-talmudic Judaism’s crossing points are demarcated. Nobody has called into serious question the notion of a Jewish Middle Ages; hence, the term “medieval” continues to be applied to religion and thought, even though its origins lie in a tripartite mainly humanist (Christian) conception (Antiquity-Middle AgesModern) imposed on Jewish history.4 The novelty involves abandonment of the label “medieval” to cover something like a millennium of Jewish thought and religious expression, as was common at the beginning of the period of scholarship surveyed here. A key bringer of change was European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750, a 1985 book by Jonathan Israel that carved out in its title an interval in Jewish history that Israel depicted as post-medieval on the one hand, but not yet modern on the other. With shifts here and there in beginning and end points, this period has since come to be designated as Jewish “early modern” times. True, Israel’s approach had been anticipated (just how much is a matter of dispute) in Jacob Katz’s 1957 study Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages. That landmark work treated the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries as a discrete phase while retaining, terminologically and in other ways, the longstanding periodization that cast these centuries as still belonging to the Middle Ages.5 Still, the widespread acceptance of a Jewish “early modern period” marks a change that, among other things, has synchronized Jewish and general European historiography. This synchronization has been abetted

 Elliott Horowitz, “How Early Did We Become Modern?” The Jewish Quarterly Review 104 (2014): 259–262. For evolving attitudes towards periodization, see Moshe Rosman, “Defining the Postmodern Period in Jewish History,” in Eli Lederhendler and Jack Wertheimer, eds., Text and Context: Essays in Modern Jewish History and Historiography in Honor of Ismar Schorsch (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary, 2005), 95–104. For larger developments, see Lawrence Besserman, “The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives,” in Lawrence Besserman, ed., The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (New York: Garland Publishers, 1996), 3–28.  For the longstanding threefold (Eurocentric Christian) division of human history as applied by general historians and thence scholars of Jewish history, see Joseph Hacker, “Ha-’umnam ‘ha-‘et ha-ḥadashah ha-muqdemet’ hi’ tequfah be-toldot yisra’el?” in Emanuel Etkes, David Assaf, and Yosef Kaplan, eds.,’Avnei derekh: masot u-meḥqarim ba-hisṭoryah shel ‘am yisra’el, shai li-Ṣevi (Quti) Yequti’el (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2016), 165–166.  Jonathan I. Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). The book was revised in 1989 and revised and updated in 1998 (London/Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization). As noted, Katz’s contribution on this score is debated. Michael Brenner opines that he “restored an early modern period to Jewish history” (Prophets of the Past: Interpreters of Jewish History, trans. Steven Rendall [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010], 190), but Horowitz implies (“How Early,” 261) that the notion dawned on Katz only late in life. Yosef Kaplan essentially denies that Katz harbored this conception. See “Ha-‘et ha-ḥadashah ha-muqdemet bi-yṣirato ha-hisṭoriografit shel Ya’aqov Kaṣ,” in Israel Bartal and Shmuel Feiner, eds., Hisṭoriografyah be-mivḥan: ‘iyyun meḥudash be-mishnato shel Ya’aqov Kaṣ (Jerusalem: Mercaz Zalman Shazar, 2008), 19–35.

Scholarship on Religion and Thought in Medieval and Early Modern Times

277

by the tendency of “general” historians to shed periodizing labels with clear roots in the world of European Christendom such as “Renaissance” and “Reformation.”6 The most avid proponent of Jewish early modernity, David Ruderman, first began to sketch his view of the period’s contours in groundbreaking studies of Jewish responses to the scientific discoveries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.7 Since then, he has greatly broadened his field of vision, as reflected in his learned and readable synthesis Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History. Departing from Israel’s predilection to view Jewish society and culture as a mirror of its larger Christian environment, Ruderman adopts what he calls a combination of “external and internal perspectives.”8 More specifically, he organizes his study around his “intuitive sense” of five defining features of Jewish early modernity: migrations and mobility, communal cohesion, the explosion of knowledge, the crisis of rabbinic authority, and, perhaps most salient in the current context, a “blurring of religious identities.” His examples of such blurring include the conversos and boundary crossings of Sabbateans between Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.9 In treating the period thus, Ruderman largely retained, if by implication, the thematic rubric developed by Katz of “tradition and crisis,” casting increasingly porous borders between Jew and gentile and Jewish openness to gentile society as hallmarks of a period that yielded a crisis for traditional Judaism. As one might expect, Ruderman’s spirited effort to conceive Jewish early modern times has not gone unquestioned. Joseph Hacker observes that the five characteristics evoked as defining features for the period in Ruderman’s account were “not relevant” to the demographically dominant centers of Jewish life in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century eastern European and Ottoman lands. Moshe Rosman raises the interesting possibility that Ruderman’s paradigm may “fit our own era better than any earlier one,” calling to mind “our ultra-mobile world, with its hyper-organized Jewish community; web-powered knowledge explosion; ubiquitous challenges to authority; and accelerated mixing of identities.”10

 Wolfgang Reinhardt, “The Idea of Early Modern History,” in Michael Bentley, ed., Companion to Historiography (London: Routledge, 1997), 281–292. Apart from Christian inflections, another reason “Renaissance” and “Reformation” labels fell out of favor was the exclusively high culture that they appeared to summon. See Randolph Starn, “The Early Modern Muddle,” Journal of Early Modern History 6 (2002): 296–307.  Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001). The first edition of this book appeared in 1995.  David B. Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 8–11 (9 for the cited passage). Ruderman’s “early modern” includes nearly the totality of the eighteenth century in a manner that fits with the designation as used in wider historiography (Reinhardt, “The Idea,” 283).  Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry, 14–17.  Hacker, “Ha-’umnam,” 175; Rosman, “Early Modern Mingling,” The Jewish Review of Books (Fall 2010): 32.

278

Eric Lawee

Rival approaches to Ruderman have also appeared, with one laying stress less on the confusion of religious identities that Ruderman takes to be so defining a feature of the period and more on a combative attempt to build conceptual walls designed to forestall Jewish integration into the gentile world. As described by David Sorotzkin, this reactionary trend finds its most profound expression in writings of the leading early-modern Ashkenazic theologian, Judah Loew of Prague. Based on what Noah Efron calls an “either-or” ontology11 and what Sorotzkin calls a “theology of the separate,” Loew developed teachings that could ensure Jewish spiritual sequestration from the ostensibly barren, but possibly quite alluring, vistas of the broader gentile (natural) world.12 On this reading, Jewish early modernity presages what came to be called “orthodoxy,” the defining aim of which was to guard Jewish faith and practice from external encroachments while also keeping secularist alternatives at bay.

2 Cultural, Cross-Cultural, Syncretistic Beyond promoting the new “early modern” periodization, Ruderman’s scholarship exemplifies other trends in more recent study of premodern Jewish religion and thought. First, in an older dispensation reflected in such classic tomes as Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism or Julius Gutmann’s Philosophies of Judaism, the focus was on types of thinking understood to develop organically within their own genres, with philosophers speaking mainly to other philosophers and kabbalists to other kabbalists, whether within the Jewish fold or, at times, beyond. By contrast, Ruderman is drawn to writings in which a variety of speculative trends intermingle.13 Second, Ruderman takes as his focus what he calls “cultural formation” rather than “pure” intellectual developments, a term that, to his credit, he takes the trouble to define, as other scholars who ubiquitously invoke “culture” as a key  Noah J. Efron, Judaism and Science: A Historical Introduction (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 104.  For the argument in brief, see David Sorotzkin, “The Counter-Political Theory of Maharal of Prague and the Formation of Modern Orthodox Judaism,” in Meir Seidler, ed., Rabbinic Theology and Jewish Intellectual History: The Great Rabbi Loew of Prague (London: Routledge, 2013), 204. For his critique of Ruderman, see Sorotzkin, “Yesodoteha shel ha-ḥiloniyut ha-yehudit,” Te’oryah u-viqoret 42 (2014): 301–304. An untitled review by Michael Heyd of a Hebrew book in which Sorotzkin sets forth his view at greatest length suggests that Sorotzkin underestimates the gulf dividing early modernity from the Enlightenment (Zehuyot 4 [2013]:131). On Maharal, see now the nearly two dozen articles in Elchanan Reiner, ed., Maharal: ’aqdamot – pirqei ḥayav, mishnah, hashpa’ah (Jerusalem: Mercaz Zalman Shazar, 2015); Dov Schwartz, Tevunah neged ‘aṣmah: tavniyot u-defusim be-haguto shel Maharal mi-prag (Tel Aviv: Idra, 2019).  Moshe Idel, “Foreword,” in Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), xi, whose observation also applies to Ruderman’s Early Modern Jewry.

Scholarship on Religion and Thought in Medieval and Early Modern Times

279

category of analysis often do not.14 His is a definition that allows for the existence of genuine intellectual achievements by autonomous minds, but focuses scholarly investigation of these achievements on their interconnections with “the political, social, and technological conditions shaping Jewish life.”15 If we seek to characterize the impact of the heightened cultural orientation on the study of religion and thought, we may say, following Moshe Rosman, that while Wissenschaft des Judentums scholarship concentrated on what were taken to be products of the Jewish spirit, students of Jewish culture seek to determine what that spirit was.16 This focus presumably reflects sensibilities abroad in our own age. Deeply distrustful of rational thought as the species-defining and hence “highest” form of human activity, scholars view with skepticism a belief in the autonomy of the mind’s productions and the power of those productions to act as irreducible causes.17 At all events, a major effect of what I am calling the cultural turn is a significant demotion for religion, thought, and theology that, once taken to be the core of medieval and early modern Jewish studies, now are treated more and more as aspects thereof.18 Beyond invigorating efforts to place intellectual developments in an amalgam of larger political, technological, and socio-historical settings, the new emphasis on “culture” has also had an egalitarian effect. As Roger Chartier notes, “culture” bears an important ambiguity, designating both the “works and the acts that lend themselves to aesthetic or intellectual appreciation in any given society” and the sphere of “ordinary, banal practices that express the way in which a community – on any scale – experiences and conceives of its relationship with the world, with others, and with itself.”19 In

 The editors of a volume of collected essays state that a major challenge of Jewish studies in the twenty-first century is to rethink “governing categories of inquiry and their relationship to the historical phenomena they are meant to capture.” See “Introduction: Anthropology, History, and the Remaking of Jewish Studies,” in Ra’anan S. Boustan, Oren Kosansky, and Marina Rustow, eds., Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History: Authority, Diaspora, Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 1. On “culture” as one of the two or three “most complicated words in the English language,” see Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 76.  Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry, 15.  “A Prolegomenon to the Study of Jewish Cultural History,” Jewish Studies Internet Journal 1 (2002): 109–127 (127 for the formulation paraphrased here).  Drawing on John E. Toews, “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience,” The American Historical Review 92 (1987): 879; Leon Wieseltier, “Jewish Bodies, Jewish Minds,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 95 (2005): 435.  Compare, for example, Allan Arkush, “[Biale, Cultures of the Jews] Part Three: The Rest and the West,” Jewish Quarterly Review 95 (2005): 142.  Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), ix. A comment of Leo Strauss sharply captures the tension in this dual usage: “If we contrast the present-day usage of ‘culture’ with the original meaning, it is as if someone would say that the cultivation of a garden may consist of the garden’s being littered with empty tin cans and whisky

280

Eric Lawee

recent decades, the discipline of Jewish studies has raised culture, understood in the second sense, much higher on its list of priorities, and students of the millennium under consideration here have followed suit – indeed, at times have led the way. The result has been greater attention paid to any number of previously underdeveloped subjects such as women, children, everyday religious observance, popular piety, and, occasionally, what Robert Bonfil called “structures of Jewish mentality,” including time, space, sounds, silence, colors, tastes, and odors.20 The insights resulting from the use of the more egalitarian and quotidian lenses have at times proved fascinating. Consider Ivan Marcus’s 1996 Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe,21 a book that did a great deal to usher cultural anthropology into medieval Jewish studies. In it, Marcus investigated a ceremony through which young boys were introduced to Torah study through the eating of honeyed cakes – an initiation rite he understood as a creative adaptation of practices known to Jews from Christian society. Returning to Ruderman’s stress on cross-cultural intermingling, it, too, represents a tendency that, as we shall see, can make tempers flare. Counterposed to this approach is an older approach that tended to see Jewish religion and literature in terms of what were sometimes called “immanent” factors, even as earlier scholars obviously recognized stimuli to Jewish intellectual creativity emanating from one or another larger gentile milieu. Nowhere were such factors presumed to shape religious life, habits of mind, and curricular priorities more than in the medieval northern European centers of Jewish life that came to be called Ashkenaz, and thence in their early modern eastern European satellites. In this understanding, Sephardic Jewry, especially in its intellectual attainments “under the crescent,” stood as a stark contrast case, creating in Muslim Spain nothing less than a “golden age.” It saw great poetry, philosophy, and the like produced on the basis of stimuli decisively born of a larger Arabophone or “Islamicate” milieu.22 By contrast, medieval Franco-German Jewish religious and bottles and used papers of various descriptions thrown around the garden at random.” See “What Is Liberal Education?” in Leo Strauss, Liberalism, Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 4.  Robert Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, trans. Anthony Oldcorn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 215–246. Elisheva Baumgarten observes that even pioneers of Jewish social history like Jacob Katz and Salo Baron took adult males as a near exclusive focus in terms of “societal representatives.” See Elisheva Baumgarten, Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz: Men, Women, and Everyday Religious Observance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 9.  Ivan Marcus, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).  For the coinage “Islamicate,” see Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 1:59, who used it to refer to matters not pertaining to religion per se but to a social and cultural complex associated with Islam found even among non-Muslims. To be sure, when it came to Jewish life “under the cross,” Salo Baron issued a dissent from “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history” – a dissent he applied to the Middle Ages in particular. See David Engel, “Crisis and Lachrymosity: On Salo Baron, Neobaronianism, and the Study of Modern European Jewish History,” Jewish History 20

Scholarship on Religion and Thought in Medieval and Early Modern Times

281

intellectual life was taken to be insular, unfolding against a backdrop of largely unremitting interreligious hostility. The last several decades have seen a major revision in this picture, at least for Ashkenazic Jewry’s creative high medieval phase. As noted, the longstanding vision was gloomy, with cross-cultural intellectual fructification or shared religious foundations nary in sight. In contrast stands Marcus’s aforementioned book and his entry in Cultures of the Jews: A New History, a 2002 collection edited by David Biale. The title of that entry, “A Jewish-Christian Symbiosis: The Culture of Early Ashkenaz,” would have occasioned astonishment a few decades ago, not least in its (I assume studied) use of “symbiosis,” a metaphor denoting a mutually beneficial relationship that had been reserved to characterize the nature of Jewish culture in various Islamic domains.23

3 The Jewish Minority: Boundary Crossings, Multiculturalism, Agency With new awareness abroad of the prospect of intellectual interchange between northern European Jews and their surrounding societies, older questions have been submitted to fresh arbitration. At times, such scholarship enters serious methodological thickets and even fastidious attempts by the best-informed scholars to reach clarity can meet with apparently ineradicable elements of indeterminacy. Did posttalmudic Judaism’s most influential writer, Rashi, possess an informed understanding of Christianity that routinely provoked his polemical response? The answer turns on, among other things, the legitimacy of inferring implicit polemic where

(2006): 243–264. For Baron’s impact, see Robert Chazan, Reassessing Jewish Life in Medieval Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), xiii–xix.  Ivan G. Marcus, “A Jewish-Christian Symbiosis: The Culture of Early Ashkenaz,” in David Biale, ed., Cultures of the Jews: A New History (New York: Schocken, 2002), 449–516. For “symbiosis,” see Steven D. Wasserstrom, Between Muslim and Jew: The Problem of Symbiosis under Early Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). It is worth noting that new scholarly techniques are not always the ones to generate significant revisions. See, for example, for the sphere of Ashkenaz, the much broader picture of Ashkenazic rabbinic culture largely painted on the basis of “oldfashioned” painstaking investigation of manuscript evidence in Ephraim Kanarfogel, The Intellectual History and Rabbinic Culture of Medieval Ashkenaz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013). As an aside, note that the radically revised view of Ashkenaz has been accompanied by less romanticized interpretations of interfaith relations in Jewish centers of life and learning under Muslim rule. See Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Menahem Ben-Sasson, “Al-Andalus: The So-Called ‘Golden Age’ of Spanish Jewry – a Critical View,” in Christoph Cluse, ed., The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages (Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries) (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2004), 123–137.

282

Eric Lawee

explicit polemic is absent, a topic about which there are understandably differing views.24 Staying with nuance of method, a recent study of the main circle of Jewish theologians in medieval northern Europe, the German Pietists, raises the prospect that their invocation of “internal” Jewish traditions was motivated by contemporary “external” stimuli.25 Beyond inviting skepticism, attempts to advance new understandings of the religious outlook of premodern Jews can unleash fierce debates. A notorious example is an article by Yisrael Yuval bearing the expressly provocative title “Vengeance and Damnation, Blood and Defamation: From Jewish Martyrdom to Blood Libel Accusations.” It argues that, beyond being passive victims of murderous assaults at the time of the First Crusade, Ashkenazic martyrs in 1096 harbored messianic hopes for divine revenge on their Christian enemies, with their acts of martyrdom conceived of as a way to advance this process. More controversially, it suggests that the fact that Ashkenazic Jews were willing to make martyrs of their own children ought to be linked to the later Christian suspicions about Jews’ willingness to kill Christian children that informed the blood libel. The article generated such controversy that the Israeli journal in which it appeared devoted a double issue to responses, many filled with opprobrious rhetoric, followed by Yuval’s caustic rejoinder.26 That virulent exchanges regarding an evidently

 As regards Rashi’s foremost work of biblical scholarship, Shaye Cohen offers the categorical stipulation that in the absence of explicit polemic “there is no methodological basis for positing the existence of implicit polemic.” It yields the conclusion that “Rashi’s Torah commentary is not a response to Christianity.” See Shaye J. D. Cohen, “Does Rashi’s Torah Commentary Respond to Christianity? A Comparison of Rashi with Rashbam and Bekhor Shor,” in Hindy Najman and Judith H. Newman, eds., The Idea of Biblical Interpretation: Essays in Honor of James L. Kugel (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 451. Yet, Avraham Grossman argues in favor of Rashi’s considerable polemical animus as an exegete. His view is summarized, and disputed, in Daniel J. Lasker, “Rashi and Maimonides on Christianity,” in Ephraim Kanarfogel and Moshe Sokolow, eds., Between Rashi and Maimonides: Themes in Medieval Jewish Thought, Literature and Exegesis (Jersey City, NJ: Ktav, 2010), 3–21. Here is the place to mention Grossman’s many valuable studies on Rashi, including Rashi, trans. Joel Linsider (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2012) and, for polemic in particular, Rashi ve-ha-polmos ha-yehudi-ha-noṣri (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2021).  David I. Shyovitz, “Beauty and the Bestiary: Animals, Wonder, and Polemic in Medieval Ashkenaz,” in Jonathan Adams and Jussi Hanska, eds. The Jewish-Christian Encounter in Medieval Preaching (New York: Routledge, 2015), 215–239.  Hannah R. Johnson, Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation at the Limit of Jewish History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 91–128. A characteristically judicious assessment is David Berger, “From Crusades to Blood Libels to Expulsions: Some New Approaches to Medieval Antisemitism,” Second Annual Lecture of the Victor J. Selmanowitz Chair of Jewish History, Touro College Graduate School of Jewish Studies, 1997, 16–22. Yet another exemplification of the intense rhetoric that contentious readings of medieval Jewish-Christian relations can evoke is David Nirenberg’s review of Jonathan Elukin’s Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages (“Hope’s Mistakes,” The New Republic 238/4 [2008]: 46–50). Noting that the anti-lachrymose approach it adopts, far from being revolutionary, has by now become “establishment,” Nirenberg suggests that this truth means that historians eager for novelty are forced to

Scholarship on Religion and Thought in Medieval and Early Modern Times

283

sensitive topic took place in Israel is in part traceable to the degree to which powerful emotions and profound political commitments can ride on retellings of the Jewish past.27 The aforementioned Cultures of the Jews edited by Biale features leading scholars on the period here under consideration. It also embodies, in varying measure depending on the essay, several trends mentioned earlier. It therefore invites and repays close scrutiny, both in terms of its stated aims and critical responses that it generated to its historiographic presuppositions and thrust. As its title indicates, the volume takes “culture” – or rather, “cultures” in the plural – as its architectonic category. In pursuit of this theme, Biale emphasizes interactions between the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds as the key to an understanding of Jewish identities over the ages. “The present work,” says Biale, “is also the product of a particular time,” a “self-conscious age,” when “we raise questions about old ideologies and ‘master’ narratives” – this, after having declared that “for all that Jews had their own autonomous traditions” their “very identities throughout their history were inseparable” from those of their gentile neighbors.28 In short, the volume places strong emphasis on “integrative elements such as syntheses and symbioses.”29 For some, the frame of reference in the volume edited by Biale was too narrow to encompass Jewish culture in all its richness while for others the entries were, almost to a one, wrongheaded. Commenting on the heavy cross-cultural focus, David Malkiel observed that such interaction was merely one part of the history of Jewish culture, “although admittedly a fundamental one.” The other part, “the engagement of every generation with its Jewish heritage, is every bit as integral and vital, if not more so.”30 Far more severe was David Roskies. Addressing one of the few chapters that he liked, he observed that it “resoundingly confirms the value of approaching Jewish history the old-fashioned way, by looking closely at great men, great texts, and great ideas” and that from it emerged “an entire world of great religious personalities who created a Jewish culture notable for its spiritual autonomy

“scale new heights so imprudent that they are as likely to produce nausea as shock” and proclaims the “extreme pressure” of the book’s “presuppositions,” when applied to medieval Christian violence against Jews, “unbearable.” For an extremely marginal case that ignited a great furor (again centering on the accusation of ritual murder), see Sabina Loriga, “The Controversies over the Publication of Ariel Toaff’s ‘Bloody Passovers,’” Journal of the Historical Society 8 (2008): 469–502.  See Daniel J. Lasker, “Mi-qorban le-roṣe’aḥ: yaḥasei yehudim-noṣerim bi-ymei ha-benayim – historiografyah be-re’i medinat yisra’el,” Zion 74 (2009): 95–108; Michael Brenner, The Same History Is Not the Same Story: Jewish History and Jewish Politics, The 2005 Paul Lecture (Bloomington: Robert and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program, Indiana University, 2006).  David Biale, “Preface,” in David Biale, ed., Cultures of the Jews: A New History (New York: Schocken, 2002), xxx, xxiii respectively.  Brenner, Prophets, 208.  David Malkiel, “[Biale, Cultures of the Jews] Part Two: Vision and Realization,” Jewish Quarterly Review 95 (2005): 133.

284

Eric Lawee

and its sublime aspiration.” Ironically, he added, Biale’s approach marked a return to a view in which “Jews have had little or nothing to say for themselves.”31 Or as Michael Brenner characterizes this critique, Roskies cast Biale’s quest for a new paradigm as one that actually reinscribed an older one, with all the emphasis on “hybridity” and “boundary crossing” yielding a view in which Jews were not subjects but objects of history.32 Roskies conclusion was harsh: it is with “a real thud” that one descended from the heights of the great religious personalities and their teachings to the “listless ‘boundary crossings’” that beguiled Biale.33

4 Tools of Theory Needless to say, at the root of many clashes, including those aired above, lie basic disagreements about fundaments of the scholarly enterprise as debated by historians, philosophers, and literary theorists. While such deliberations have found their way into a growing array of studies in medieval and early modern Judaism, it seems safe to say that the field as a whole still skews conservative on theoretical models that contemporary humanities and social sciences find most alluring: gender studies, phenomenology, postcolonialism, and so forth.34 Time-honored virtues like philological rigor generally remain prized, especially in Israel, where one can even find redoubts of a more or less pure positivist outlook. At the same time, the rare volume will trumpet its use of a wide range of the theoretical approaches including the “postcolonial, Foucauldian, Freudian, ethical, feminist or gender-conscious, historicist, narratological/Barthesian.”35 For all the general awareness of theory, few medievalists and early modernists have been galvanized to reflect broadly in writing on the challenges posed by the postmodern academy to their fields or on the opportunities that new theoretical approaches might confer. An exception is Moshe Rosman, who made it a project to ponder these subjects in a series of essays subsequently united in a volume bearing the  David Roskies, “Border Crossings,” Commentary 115/2 (2003): 66 (emphasis in original).  Brenner, Prophets, 214–215.  Roskies, “Border Crossings,” 66.  Several years on from the composition of this assertion, I might revise it in at least some measure, even as the field remains free, for the more part, of voguish jargon (for example, the subaltern, hegemony). With rare exceptions, its pages are not marred by the ubiquitous scare quotes that stand as one easily recognizable (and at times positively garish) signature of postmodern scholarship. There are (almost parodic) exceptions. See, for example, Gil Anidjar, “Jewish Mysticism Alterable and Unalterable: On Orienting Kabbalah Studies and the ‘Zohar of Christian Spain,’” Jewish Social Studies (New Series) 3 (1996): 89–157, where jargon, scare quotes, and italics (that underscore the author’s debt to Edward Said) appear already in the title!  Sheila Delany, “Introduction,” in Sheila Delany, ed., Turn It Again: Jewish Medieval Studies and Literary Theory (Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 2004), 3.

Scholarship on Religion and Thought in Medieval and Early Modern Times

285

fetching title How Jewish Is Jewish History? In this reflective tome, he addressed claims that regional Jewries and their circumstances were too distinct to allow one to speak of Jewish history writ large. In so doing, he advanced an original metaphor to capture the complex ways in which Jewish and non-Jewish cultures intermingled, speaking of “an environment full of chemical reagents that are constantly reacting with each other: sometimes mixing, sometimes making new compounds, sometimes inertly bouncing off each other.”36 If one seeks a subfield in which medievalists and early modernists have very often skillfully deployed models like phenomenology and gender theory, a candidate that immediately suggests itself is Kabbalah studies. One thinks, from the beginning of the period surveyed here, of Kabbalah: New Perspectives.37 In it, Moshe Idel counterposed what he called the “ideology of textology,” characteristic of Gershom Scholem and his school with its focus on doctrinal and speculative dimensions of Jewish mysticism as found in texts, with his own “phenomenological” approach. Though he does not define it, it was, among other things, more open to experiential and even unconscious elements. Situating the debate, Hava Tirosh-Samuelson observed that much of Idel’s critique of Scholem could be construed as a dialogue between post–World War II France and pre–World War I Germany, with Idel taking inspiration from such French theorists as Foucault and Ricoeur.38 What of scholarship on philosophy, the other great speculative stream within medieval (and, in considerably diminished form, early modern) Judaism? In this field, we find less work touched by the theoretical revolutions mentioned above, though elements of boundary-crossing of a different and generally mild sort are in evidence. A case in point is a 1997 History of Jewish Philosophy, the largest section of which is devoted to what it calls “medieval Jewish philosophy.” While retaining “philosophy” in its title, this volume’s coverage of the period between 700 and 1700 readily blurred lines between philosophy, theology, Kabbalah, and much else.39 In so doing, it situated itself within a broader subject area, perhaps born of departments in Israeli universities, bearing the name “Jewish thought.”40 In many of these departments,

 Moshe Rosman, How Jewish Is Jewish History? (Portland, OR: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2007), 46. For a survey of the postmodern turn in Jewish historiography, see Brenner, Prophets, 197–216.  Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).  Hava Tirosh-Rothschild, “Continuity and Revision in the Study of Kabbalah,” AJS Review 16 (1991): 174. The most prolific of North American Kabbalah scholars, Elliott Wolfson, also counts phenomenology, gender studies, and comparative religion as parts of his almost endlessly ramified theoretical toolkit. One title must suffice to concretize the point: Circle in the Square: Studies in the Use of Gender in Kabbalistic Symbolism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).  Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman, eds., History of Jewish Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1997), 83–573.  The first such department involved a cross-disciplinary merger of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Department of Hebrew Philosophy and Kabbalah, Department of the History of Jewish

286

Eric Lawee

scholarship shifted away from medieval philosophy, previously at the heart of the discipline, to at once more modern and less philosophic areas, although one abidingly popular area of medieval thought, Maimonidean studies, flourishes, perhaps as never before. The subtitle of one of the countless works devoted to Maimonides, Joel Kraemer’s magisterial Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds, stands as a rebuke to conceptions that fail to do justice to the greatness of superior figures like Maimonides in the history of Jewish (or, as Kraemer would have it, human) thought.41

5 New Departures: Fleeting Samples There is obviously much more to say about authoritative syntheses, new perspectives, and revisionist approaches devoted to familiar themes, figures, and issues of methodology. At this point, however, it is well to register a few new emphases, some assimilable to the cultural turn already discussed. One is “reception history,” a field long venerable in other areas of the academy, reflecting interest in the ways earlier works have been sifted, adapted, revised, and formulated afresh for deployment in new historical circumstances. Emblematic titles are “The Reception of the Shulḥan ‘Arukh and the Formation of Ashkenazic Jewish Identity”; Maimonides and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon; and Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah: Canonization and Resistance in the Reception of a Jewish Classic.42 Pioneering was Adam

Thought, and part of the Department of Hebrew Literature. See Warren Zev Harvey, “Jewish Philosophy Tomorrow: Post-Messianic and Post-Lachrymose,” in Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes, eds., Jewish Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century: Personal Reflections (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 124.  Joel Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds (New York: Doubleday, 2008). Over a decade ago, Joseph Dan suggested that while such things are inherently hard to measure, it may be that Maimonides is the most studied single figure in Jewish history. See Joseph Dan, “The Narratives of Medieval Jewish History,” in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, 146 n.11. If anything, this pattern has accelerated, in part due to 2004 commemorations marking eight centuries since Maimonides’s death. The ongoing efflorescence of writings on Maimonides can be culled from the more than eighty-page bibliography for Kraemer’s book (http://www.random house.com/crown/maimonides/bibliography). Many volumes, a good number by senior scholars, have appeared since. In the case of Menachem Kellner, some of these, while retaining a scholarly approach, put aspects of the Maimonidean legacy in the service of efforts to refute repellent ideas abroad in segments of contemporary Jewry. See, e.g., Gam hem qeruyim ’adam: ha-nokhri be-‘enei harambam (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2016).  Joseph Davis, “The Reception of the Shulḥan ‘Arukh and the Formation of Ashkenazic Jewish Identity,” AJS Review 26 (2002): 251–276; James Diamond, Maimonides and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Eric Lawee, Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah: Canonization and Resistance in the Reception of a Jewish Classic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

Scholarship on Religion and Thought in Medieval and Early Modern Times

287

Shear’s investigation of the shaping influence on Jewish identity exercised over the longue durée by Judah Halevi’s Kuzari.43 Moving from reception of ideas and works to different modes of their diffusion, medievalists and early modernists have taken a more “embodied” approach to dynamics of knowledge transmission (in both the chirographic and print eras) and engaged in critical investigations of matters of genre. We find the Hebrew book as a focal point for exploration of the circulation of ideas, both among elites and “ordinary” layers of Jewish society, and a conjoint interest in the material history of writing.44 Both trends fit snugly with ones in the academy at large as manifested in any number of fields. Much attention has been lavished on the advent of movable print, a medium that, by most indications, Jews embraced with a sense of mission, and even as a divinely wrought dispensation.45 Mechanical reproduction proved especially consequential in central and eastern Europe, where a decrease in the price of the production of written works and their easier dissemination were two ingredients in a revolution that left no aspect of early modern Ashkenazi literature untouched.46 Decisive was a massive influx of Sephardic thought, theology, and exegesis. It bestirred interest in novel bodies of learning and created new audiences for them, depriving the traditional Franco-German library of its long-standing exclusivity.47 Some impute to print and its cognates, most notably censorship of Hebrew books, repercussions so decisive as to justify new thinking about the question of periodization with which we began.48 In the case of studies centered on genre, they, like explorations of the history of the book, also bring into sharp focus the text/reader relationship, not to mention questions about the varied audiences to which different types of religious or scholarly discourse were directed. Genre-based approaches have also supplied new paradigms for scholarly investigation. Thus, the editors of a collection on the diverse literary

 Adam Shear, The Kuzari and the Shaping of Jewish Identity, 1167–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).  For example, Micha Perry, Masoret ve-shinui: mesirat yeda‘ be-qerev yehudei ma’arav ’eropah bi-ymei ha-benayim (Tel-Aviv: HaKibbutz HaMeuhad, 2010); Javier del Barco, ed., The Late Medieval Hebrew Book in the Western Mediterranean: Hebrew Manuscripts and Incunabula in Context (Leiden: Brill, 2015).  Pavel Sládek, “The Printed Book in 15th- and 16th-Century Jewish Culture,” in Olga Sixtová, ed., Hebrew Printing in Bohemia and Moravia (Prague: Jewish Museum/Academia, 2012), 9–30.  Elchanan Reiner, “The Attitude of Ashkenazi Society to the New Science in the Sixteenth Century,” Science in Context 10 (2010): 598–599.  Moshe Rosman, “Innovative Tradition: Jewish Culture in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,” in Biale, ed., Cultures of the Jews, 532–541.  Witness the title of an article by Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin: “Law, Messianism and Censure: The Printing of the Shulkhan Aruch as the Commencement of Jewish Modernity” (“Ḥaqiqah, meshiḥiyut ve-ṣenzurah: hadpasat ha-shulḥan ‘arukh ke-reshit ha-moderniyut,” in Elisheva Baumgarten, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, and Roni Weinstein, eds., Tov ‘elem: zikaron, kehilah u-migdar ba-ḥaverot yehudiyot bi-ymei ha-benayim uv-reshit ha-‘et ha-ḥadashah: ma’amarim li-khvodo shel Re’uven Bonfil [Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik/The Mandel Institute of Jewish Studies, 2011], 306–335).

288

Eric Lawee

forms used to communicate medieval philosophy (dialogues, poetry, epistles, and so forth) observed that “a renewed attention to genre shows us to what extent medieval thinkers made connections between the literary, the exegetical, the philosophical, and the mystical” spheres that, they contend, the earlier Wissenschaft des Judentums approach to the field unjustly “tore asunder” and made into separate subdisciplines.49 Here, as in the history-of-the-book approach and elsewhere, some of the more recent advances in medieval and early modern Jewish studies join in, and have much to contribute to, any number of larger cutting-edge conversations.

6 Present State, Future Prospects In his The Study of Judaism: Authenticity, Identity, Scholarship, Aaron Hughes laments the “rather insular nature” of Jewish studies. He claims that the field is “too introspective, too ethnic, too navel-gazing, and too willing to reify or essentialize data that is not unproblematically constructs as ‘Jewish.’” He also holds up an “emphasis on cultural studies” as a cure for this insularity – one that will allow Jewish studies to break free of its self-imposed disabilities and offer a good deal to “cognate areas within the humanities.” The aim is to replace the (allegedly) currently regnant too-often essentialist, apologetic approach with one that yields a proper “construction of Jewish data.”50 Obviously, the current forum is not the place for a full-blown audit of Hughes’ critique or vision, which hardly lacks a Tendenz of its own,51 but a few points seem worth making in the context of our current survey. First, it is hard to recognize the scholarly literature we have just surveyed in Hughes’ description of the field.

 “[Editors’] Introduction” to Aaron W. Hughes and James T. Robinson, eds., Medieval Jewish Philosophy and Its Literary Forms (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 3.  Aaron W. Hughes, The Study of Judaism: Authenticity, Identity, Scholarship (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 3, 23, 31–33. Another aim, it would seem, is to ensure that Jewish studies scholars are in no way complicit in the actions of Israeli “right-wing politicians” (2) and to make space (now apparently lacking) for the type of scholar who might “even be a vociferous critic of Israel and its right-wing policies” (30). (In Hughes’ “construction,” Israeli politics and policies invariably have only a single wing.)  Take as an example Hughes’ extended critique of David Gelernter’s Judaism: A Way of Being (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). Hughes describes it as a “neoconservative screed for a particular version of Judaism.” But, even if this book is a “good example of the reification and essentialization of Judaism,” it is, for the purposes of Hughes’ argument, also a good example of a perfect straw man since a product of academic Jewish studies this book is not. Indeed, as Hughes himself says, its author, a professor of computer science, has “no academic training in either religious studies or Jewish studies.” This being so, it is hard to see how his book can exemplify “all that is wrong with Jewish studies at this particular moment,” even if it was published by an academic press (Hughes, Study of Judaism, 21–23).

Scholarship on Religion and Thought in Medieval and Early Modern Times

289

Whatever one’s reservations about Cultures of the Jews, to cite a prominent example discussed above, it is hugely wide of the mark (indeed, outlandish) to say of those responsible for its coverage of things medieval and early modern (Ivan Marcus, Benjamin Gampel, Elliott Horowitz, Moshe Rosman, and others) that they “imagine Judaism as a container with fixed boundaries that is full of something (presumably ‘Jewishness’)”; are oblivious to the “various ‘thick’ contexts wherein cultural meanings are produced, deployed, and contested”; are stuck in a world of “traditional signifiers” such as “tolerance,” “intolerance,” “heroism,” and “victimhood”; or are incapable of switching their foci “from centers to margins.” It would certainly be bizarre to classify such scholars as zealous apologists marking Judaism’s borders in the manner of ancient heresiologists.52 Second, it might be argued that there are times when subdisciplines of medieval and early modern Jewish studies pay an exorbitant price for their own tilt away from the “insular.” As a test case, we may return to some of the best that this tilt has yielded, the volume by David Ruderman with which we began. Let us consider its references to Joseph Karo, whom Ruderman calls “perhaps the greatest luminary of his age.”53 Ruderman’s Karo comes to light initially as one of the many peripatetic members of the Sephardic exilic community “who clearly left their enduring mark on Jewish culture” and, in particular, as one who “illustrates the high degree of mobility in the pursuit of rabbinic and kabbalistic study on the part of perhaps the greatest luminary of the age.” Thus does he exemplify the first feature of Ruderman’s Jewish early modernity: migrations and mobility or “Jews on the Move.”54 Karo appears again as part of a conjecture that his legal compendium, Shulḥan ‘Arukh, may have been meant to “address the change and disruption caused by migratory upheaval.”55 The code attains top billing once more in a chapter on the third trait of early modernity, “Knowledge Explosion.” Recounting its inception, Ruderman notes that the code’s rapid spread following its supplementation by the great Polish sage Moses Isserles turned it

 Hughes, Study of Judaism, 24–25, 133. It is bemusing to see Hughes hold up Daniel Boyarin as “of course” a provisioner of the sort of “critical discourses” (Hughes, Study of Judaism, 100) that Jewish studies so desperately needs to break free of its boundless parochialism. Boyarin is not only far removed from the sort of disinterested scholarship Hughes urges, but denies its possibility (for example, Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997], 356). Then too, if Boyarin’s work is free from charges of essentialism, it is subject to, if anything, heavier charges, like abuse of history in furtherance of ideological goals – the very sin for which contemporary Jewish studies must, on Hughes’ view, seek remission. See Allan Arkush, “Antiheroic Mock Heroics: Daniel Boyarin versus Theodor Herzl and His Legacy,” Journal of Jewish Studies 4 (1998): 65–95. See further Menachem Kellner, “Daniel Boyarin and the Herd of Independent Minds,” in Edward Alexander and Paul Bogdanor, eds., The Jewish Divide over Israel: Accusers and Defenders (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2006), 167–176.  Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry, 44.  Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry, 23–43 (43–44 for the cited passages).  Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry, 55.

290

Eric Lawee

into a “lasting icon that a unified culture fusing Sephardic law with Ashkenazic custom was emerging among early modern Jews” – a development made possible “through the new invention of the printed book and its circulation.”56 Such novel perspectives on Karo are all well and good and, given Ruderman’s cultural orientation, the ways in which Karo appears in his book make sense. And yet, how much does use of a purely cultural lens occlude from view! Seen thus, one can hardly savor Karo’s towering virtuosity as a legist or contributions to Maimonidean commentary or, for that matter, the revelations that this supremely influential halakhist claimed to have received from a celestial messenger. Ruderman’s enthusiasm is reserved for figures of a very different sort such as Leon Modena, Simone Luzzatto, and Joseph Delmedigo, three rabbis whose lives and careers, in their ensemble, provide what Ruderman calls a “wonderful example of the richly textured complexity of Jewish cultural life in early modern Europe.”57 Indeed, this troika does handsomely illustrate the syncretic side of that life. Viewed from a cultural perspective, one must grant that these three are far more amenable to a lively presentation than the comparatively arcane feats of halakhic dissection performed by Karo. Still, one familiar with the impact of Karo’s code, that great embodiment of law that “Jewish history has proclaimed supreme,”58 cannot but feel terribly deflated. Something crucial has obviously been lost in the “formation of culture” approach, which militates against consideration of the no less richly textured, if certainly less syncretic, spiritual complexion that Karo presents – nay, which militates, it would seem, against the study of rabbinic literature more or less tout court.59 As regards future prospects, nothing in principle prevents these from being bright, or should stop Jewish studies medievalists and early modernists from continuing to produce thoughtful, challenging, broadening, and at times provocative insights of the sort surveyed all too partially above. A vast evidentiary base awaits students in the field, much of it as yet undiscovered, let alone published, with at least as large a

 Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry, 99–100 (100 for the cited passage).  Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry, 1–5.  Isadore Twersky, “The Shulḥan ‘Aruk: Enduring Code of Jewish Law,” in Twersky, Studies in Jewish Law and Philosophy (New York: Ktav, 1982), 145. Introducing a volume of essays on sixteenth-century Jewish thought, Twersky insisted that scholars must “recognize the historical as well as phenomenological centrality of Halakhah and its indispensability for the balanced, judicious study of Judaism and Jewish history.” (Bernard Dov Cooperman, ed., Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983], xv.)  Granted, the breadth aimed for by Ruderman in his synthetic volume must be considered when observing the many smaller brushstrokes it omits. In discussion of this paper, another point came to the fore: the need to “market” Jewish studies figures and topics in ways that speak to the larger academy. That discussion may have put its finger on a real tension in the field. In short, while Jewish studies must treat its subject matter responsibly and proportionately, it also understandably aims to remain viable in the modern academy, where interest in intricacies of Jewish law and its foremost preceptors can be difficult to generate.

Scholarship on Religion and Thought in Medieval and Early Modern Times

291

treasure trove already available to open a window on the rich and alluringly perplexing world of medieval and early modern Jews and Judaism in their astonishing diversity. For all this potential, in practice the outlook may seem a bit grim. The main concern is considerable shrinkage in the plentiful centers that once trained students to undertake the sort of textual scholarship that stands at the base of the discipline. Perhaps as a consequence of this decline, or maybe as a symptom, the centrality of medieval and early modern studies, and religion and thought in particular, within Jewish studies seems diminished.60 Still, taking a measure of the strengths registered in the foregoing survey, one has cause to hope that vibrant days full of fresh discoveries lie ahead – ones that will not only throw light on important aspects of the Jewish past but also on crucial features of the Jewish present, even as they may help to shape the Jewish future.

For Further Reading Biale, David, ed. Cultures of the Jews: A New History. New York: Schocken, 2002. Articles on “Diversities of Diaspora.” Chazan, Robert. Reassessing Jewish Life in Medieval Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Goodman, Martin, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Chapters 7–14, 26–28, 30. Grossman, Avraham. Rashi. Translated by Joel Linsider. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2012. Hacker, Joseph. “Ha-’umnam ‘ha-‘et ha-ḥadashah ha-muqdemet’ hi’ tequfah be-toldot yisra’el?” Emanuel Etkes, David Assaf, and Yosef Kaplan, eds. ’Avnei derekh: masot u-meḥqarim bahisṭoryah shel ‘am yisra’el, shai li-Ṣevi (Quti) Yequti’el (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2016). Hughes, Aaron W. and James T. Robinson, eds. Medieval Jewish Philosophy and Its Literary Forms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. Idel, Moshe. Kabbalah: New Perspectives. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. Israel, Jonathan I. European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. Kaplan, Debra. “Jews in Early Modern Europe: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” History Compass 10 (2012): 191–206. Kraemer, Joel L. Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds. New York: Doubleday, 2008.

 This assessment is obviously impressionistic, but I believe it might be borne out by, say, a study of evolving course offerings in many universities or a longitudinal survey of the programs from the annual meetings of the Association for Jewish Studies, which currently bills itself as “the largest learned society and professional organization representing Jewish Studies scholars worldwide.” The dominance of medieval and early modern topics attested in the first program available on the AJS website (from the fifth annual conference held in 1973) is certainly striking – and by now very much a thing of the past. See http://bjpa.org/Publications/downloadFile.cfm?FileID=11564.

292

Eric Lawee

Lawee, Eric. Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah: Canonization and Resistance in the Reception of a Jewish Classic. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Marcus, Ivan G. Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Rosman, Moshe. How Jewish Is Jewish History? Portland, OR: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2007. Ruderman, David B. Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.

Sara R. Horowitz

Afterword For twenty years Adiel Amzeh worked on his history of the great city of Gumlidata, the pride of mighty nations until it was reduced to dust and ashes by the Gothic hordes and its people enslaved. After he had gathered all his researches together, examined and tested them, sorted, edited, and arranged them, he decided that his work was finally ready for publication and he sat down and wrote the book he had planned for so many years. He took the book and made the rounds of the publishers but without success. . . . Many years of painstaking research had made him a slave to his work from dawn till night, neglectful of all worldly cares. When he left his bed in the morning, his feet would carry him to the desk, his hands would pick up pen and paper, and his eyes, if not pursuing some obscure vision, would plunge into a book or into maps and sketches of the city and its great battles; and when he lay down to sleep he would go over his notebooks again, sometimes consciously, sometimes hardly realizing what he was doing. Years passed and his book remained unpublished. You know, a scholar who is unable to publish his work often benefits from the delay, since he can re-examine his assumptions and correct his errors, testing those hypotheses that may seem far from historical reality and truth.

So begins ‘Ad Olam, “Forevermore,” a 1954 short story by the magisterial Hebrew fiction writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon, about Adiel Amzeh, a fastidious if pedantic scholar.1 Amzeh has dedicated his life to writing the definitive history of the ancient walled city Gumlidata. Agnon’s prescient story traces the reconfiguration of Amzeh’s project from obsessive pedantry to creativity, insight, and meaningfulness. After working on the Gumlidata project for years in solitude and poverty, Amzeh finds a benefactor willing to underwrite the publication of his account of the siege and destruction of Gumlidata, replete with colored maps on fine quality paper. But just before sealing the deal with his patron, Amzeh learns of an artifact that will change his theories about the past. It seems that, against all odds, the chronicler of Gumlidata survived the sacking of his city. Seriously wounded and abandoned for dead by the Gothic hordes, the chronicler was rescued by a group of lepers who brought him to their enclave. Because of the medical conventions of the time, once in contact with the lepers, he can never go elsewhere. Even more amazingly, the chronicler left behind a written firsthand account, preserved by generations of lepers and lost to history until now. When he learns of this ancient book, Amzeh is torn: should he take advantage of the opportunity that his benefactor offers to get his book out (finally), or should he delay publication until he reads this important document. The catch, of course, is that the book of chronicles of Gumlidata is in the Jerusalem leper hospital, having

 S. Y. Agnon, “‘Ad ‘Olam,” Ha-Esh ve-ha-Etsim (Jerusalem: Schocken,1957); “Forevermore,” trans. Joel Blocker, Commentary (August 1961): 114–123. The story was also interpolated in an early draft of Agnon’s novel, Shira. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110418873-017

294

Sara R. Horowitz

been read and caressed by generations of lepers. To access it, he must enter the leper hospital, and there he must remain. Agnon’s depiction of a historian struggling to reconstruct a lost world, to attain some elusive certainty about a long-ago past, and to know that his research matters, resonates with some of the themes that run through the essays in this volume about the state of Jewish studies today. The fine essays in this book contemplate how particular areas in Jewish studies have developed and changed over the past quarter century or so. Although they cover a range of periods, perspectives, and methodologies, there are common threads running through them. Similar issues and concerns cross temporal, geographic, and disciplinary lines. The evolutions and paradigm shifts that the essays track reveal Jewish studies as a dynamic, intellectually robust cluster of areas that encompass diverse approaches and contents, and whose methodologies continue to develop. The trajectories mapped in these essays also offer a portal to imagining how Jewish studies might further evolve in the twenty-first century. As a field or a nexus of fields, Jewish studies is affected by the developments, refinements, and radical shifts in methodology, critical practices, and theoretical rubrics that characterize academic work more broadly. As researchers and scholars, all of us are in conversation not only with others in Jewish studies, but with developments and with colleagues in cognate fields. As the essays in this book show, Jewish studies has felt, for example, the effect of literary theory in our understanding of cultural and textual production. We recognize the influence of postmodernism even on work focused on the ancient world. Postmodernism is at once a literary and philosophical discourse developed in late twentieth century and a set of critical practices. It has profoundly shaped the way we read texts, cultures, and histories of all periods, unraveling what we think we know, revealing the constructedness not only of the past but of all narratives, and the provisional nature of our best assumptions. Similarly, women’s studies and gender theory are twentieth and twenty-first century developments that have brought a sea change to the work we do. Although Jewish studies was relatively late in absorbing these discourses – more resistant perhaps than most other academic fields – it is safe to say that it would be unthinkable today for any area of Jewish studies, ancient to contemporary, to ignore their insights. Gender studies has brought a concomitant interest in material culture, in the place of the body, bodily practices, and the embodiment of memory – in short, the sensorium of human experience. Under the influence of these and other shifts in the academy, many of us turn from the construction of an overarching master-narrative to weaving together a variegated tapestry of narratives, encompassing daily life, domestic experience, and the practices of everyday folk. In different ways, we engage in what literature departments have called the canon wars, vexing our relationships not only with authoritative texts, but often with the very idea of authority. At the same time, we insist on rigor, on the necessity of honing reading skills, language skills, and critical practices.

Afterword

295

Not only theoretical approaches but also technology has influenced the development of Jewish studies. Digitization, for example, has had a profound effect on our work. Certain kinds of text analyses that were once laborious and time-consuming can now be crunched quickly. Like everyone else, we can produce more and more “data.” But we have just begun to learn how to mine the overwhelming flow of information we can gather, bearing in mind Walter Benjamin’s warning that information is “dangerous.” Digitization affects us in other ways, too. We disseminate our work not only in traditional print venues, not only in online journals, but on a range of other platforms. Increasingly, the material we study and analyze is available through online portals. This material ranges from 3-D views of archaeological finds and modern architectural models to medieval manuscripts and modern photographs, sacred texts and their translations, museum exhibitions, podcasts, and videotaped testimonies. We are poised on new technologies that will change the way we come to know things in ways we cannot yet fully imagine. The ways in which our work evolves is driven from within – driven by our own intellectual curiosity, our passions, our drive to make or to debunk meaning. It is also pushed from without. Depending on the stage of one’s career and one’s institution, one shapes one’s work to be in accordance with the system of metrics governing tenure and promotion. Funding, too, has come to play an increasingly influential and complex role in shaping Jewish studies on the individual and institutional levels. In Canada, for example, the home of the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies, our universities are public. Canadian provinces have taken to setting priorities that encourage certain areas of academic work. Conforming to these priorities is encouraged through the allocation of funding to universities, and through the adjudications of government-funding granting bodies. Private foundations, too, encourage certain kinds of research in Jewish studies that reflect the political, religious, or other agendas of the foundation. There are great opportunities here, but also pitfalls. Jewish studies scholars whose work meshes with the priorities of governmental and private granting bodies can use this funding to accelerate and enrich their research projects, to mount symposia and conferences that nourish their subfields or approaches – and the field as a whole benefits. At the same, the influx of funding to support projects that dovetail with priorities set by the granting bodies can skew the field in ways that do not emerge solely from the free intellectual inquiry of the researchers. Jewish studies is positioned to speak in important ways and to shape and critique conversation about issues on the forefront of the contemporary academy – such as transnationalism, migration, multiple and hybrid identities, memory. We bring the critical thinking of Jewish studies to bear on many contemporary issues beyond the academy: medical ethics, end-of-life questions, personal and communal relations, the complexities of such things as identity, citizenship, family, and belonging. We often associate innovation in Jewish studies with the fresh perspectives brought by new scholars entering their respective fields. For Jewish studies, there is the additional phenomenon of people who have built academic careers in other

296

Sara R. Horowitz

areas pivoting in mid- or late career to Jewish studies – an intense shift of interest that catches them by surprise and fertilizes the field. The result has been a rapid expansion of the fields, areas, and topics that now come under the compass of Jewish studies. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, the best work in Jewish studies is governed by intellectual excellence and academic rigor. At the same time – like Agnon’s Amzeh – our work is driven by personal commitment and passion. We debate with one another; we sometimes debate with ourselves, testing our hypotheses and analyses, because we strive for excellence and because our work matters to us. Indeed, the reflections of many in the field of Jewish studies point to the personal stake in professional work. Early in the millennium, AJS Perspectives – the quarterly magazine published by the Association for Jewish Studies – asked a number of scholars in different areas of Jewish studies to reflect upon why they had chosen to work in the field.2 The responses were varied, fascinating, sometimes unexpected. Here is a sampling: One respondent explained that Jewish studies is “what I know and where I come from.” Another mused, “I didn’t go into Jewish studies. I landed there.” A scholar with Jewish familial roots who had grown up in postwar Germany was attracted to academic Jewish studies while searching for a Jewish past and a Judaism that “went beyond concentration camps.” Another turned to Jewish studies to explore the great humanistic questions, to think about otherness. Yet another gave up a successful career in the corporate work to pursue a fascination with Hellenistic and early rabbinic Judaism. A distinguished German historian in her fifties was “captured and captivated” in ways she never anticipated by Jewish studies, picking up hitherto neglected threads in her research. One scholar who recollects “having no particular interest in Jewish studies” remembers being drawn in by a professor who was a “gifted, inspiring mentor.” Yet another was drawn away from rabbinical school by the pull of literary theory, finding in Jewish studies a different way to fulfill a “commitment to the Jewish people.” For one scholar, Jewish studies addressed part of a profound interest in the Jewish past that began as far back as the scholar can remember; for another, the field enabled her to work on things that “mattered a great deal to me, personally.” Sometimes an academic interest in Jewish studies was impelled by experience as a faculty member. That was the case for the for the professor who embarked on a project investigating non-Jewish perceptions of Jews while teaching at a university in a region where few Jewish people resided, where colleagues and neighbors expressed “not anti-Semitism exactly, but a kind of benign obliviousness to the history of non-Jewish rhetoric.” Another scholar recollects entering the field “by the back door” as a means to address matters that seemed most pressing to her.

 AJS Perspectives (Spring 2002).

Afterword

297

Let us return to the protagonist of Agnon’s “Forevermore,” Adiel Amzeh, whom we left in the Jerusalem leper hospital with the book of chronicles of Gumlidata. Amzeh turns to the book to resolve a question that has vexed all historians of the city: how did the Goths manage to penetrate the city’s walls of defense? The book of chronicles yields the answer, giving Amzeh a coup. In unraveling that issue, the chronicler’s account also serves as a portal to other issues – such as the city’s religious and cultic practices, the sights and smells of its daily life, the treatment of women, the treatment of outsiders, the regulation of sexuality – issues that the essays in this volume have identified with contemporary Jewish studies. As Agnon describes it, the book of chronicles is at once an artifact of the past, a piece of material culture, and a living relic. It connotes a sensorium that evokes not only the massacre of Gumlidata and the suffering of its survivor, but also the anguish of the lepers who have guarded the book for centuries. It was “almost as if it were not written on parchment, but on the skin of a leper, and not ink but pus had been used to inscribe the words” and it holds “the tears that every reader of the book shed on its pages after reading the awful tales it contains.” Amzeh’s encounter with this living relic transforms him. Early in the story Agnon emphasizes Amzeh’s pedantry, and the sterility of his academic project. But the book of chronicles plunges him into a profound and embodied encounter with the past, and his writing becomes inspired – one might even say transcendent. He shares his findings with the lepers and adds his own marginalia to the chronicles of Gumlidata. In this unlikely place, Amzeh becomes what Agnon calls a “true writer” – producing not merely knowledge but meaning – human meaning created not only in the encounter with text and artifact, but also with audience. As in our own work, both knowledge and meaning are provisional, constantly revised and reconfigured. But they are important, nonetheless. Like Amzeh, our academic projects are impelled by our passions and by our contexts. In Agnon’s final image of his protagonist, he offers a vision of scholarship and the scholar that resonate for so many of us in Jewish studies. learning bestows a special blessing on those who are not put off so easily. Yes, Adiel Amzeh would ask himself for what and for whom he was working. But the Goddess of Wisdom herself would take hold of him and whisper: “Sit, my love, sit and do not leave me.” So he would sit and discover new things. . . .

Contributors Judith R. Baskin, who received her Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from Yale University, is the Philip H. Knight Professor of Humanities Emerita at the University of Oregon. A past president of the Association for Jewish Studies, her authored and edited books include Pharaoh’s Counsellors: Job, Jethro, and Balaam in Rabbinic and Patristic Tradition; Midrashic Women: Formations of the Feminine in Rabbinic Literature; Jewish Women in Historical Perspective; Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing; The Cambridge Dictionary of Judaism and Jewish Culture; and the co-edited Cambridge Guide to Jewish Religion, History, and Culture, a 2011 National Jewish Book Award winner. Robert Brody is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Talmud and Halacha at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of numerous works in the field of Geonic literature including The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture (second edition 2012) and editions of The Responsa of Natronai b. Hilai Gaon (third edition 2018) and Halachic Works of Saadia Gaon (2015). His published works in Talmudic studies include Mishnah and Tosefta Studies (2014), Mishnah and Tosefta Ketubbot: Text, Exegesis and Redaction (Hebrew, 2015), and a multi-volume commentary on tractate Ketubbot of the Babylonian Talmud (2022). Carl S. Ehrlich is University Professor of History and Humanities and former Director of the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University. His publications include the monographs The Philistines in Transition (1996), Understanding Judaism (2004), and Bibel und Judentum (2004) as well as the (co-)edited collections Saul in Story and Tradition (2006), From an Antique Land (2009), Purity, Holiness, and Identity in Judaism and Christianity (2013), and Israel and the Diaspora (2022). He has held multiple guest professorships in Germany, Switzerland, and the USA. Most recently he has served as Educational and Cultural Affairs Annual Professor at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, Israel. Yedida C. Eisenstat holds a doctorate in Midrash and Scriptural Interpretation from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. She was Visiting Assistant Professor at York University’s Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies and Colgate University’s Department of Religion. Currently, she is an Affiliated Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University and Editorial Associate at the Posen Library of Jewish Civilization and Culture. Her publications include “Taking Stock of the Text(s) of Rashi’s Torah Commentary: Some 21st Century Considerations” and “Sanctification and Shame: Bialik’s In the City of Slaughter in Light of Leviticus and Ezekiel.” Her current research is on Rashi’s use of midrash. Steven Fine is a cultural historian, specializing in the Jewish experience during Roman antiquity. He focuses upon the literature, art, and archaeology of ancient Judaism (and more recently also of Samaritanism), and the ways that moderns have interpreted and formed Jewish antiquity. His books include Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World: Toward a New Jewish Archaeology (Cambridge, 2005, second edition 2010) and The Menorah: From the Bible to Modern Israel (Harvard UP, 2016). Fine is the Churgin Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University, and the director of the YU Center for Israel Studies, the YU Arch of Titus Project and the YU Israelite Samaritans Project. Benjamin D. Gordon is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Rosenberg-Perlow Fellow of Classical Judaism at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Land and Temple: Field Sacralization and the Agrarian Priesthood of Second Temple Judaism (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110418873-018

300

Contributors

2020) and coeditor with Eric Meyers and Carol Meyers of The Architecture, Stratigraphy, and Artifacts of the Western Summit of Sepphoris (2 vols.; University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2018). He has published articles and chapters on topics related to Second Temple Judaism, the archaeology of Israel-Palestine, and the history of Jerusalem, and is the codirector of the “ReligYinz: Mapping Religious Pittsburgh” digital humanities project at the University of Pittsburgh. Angela Kim Harkins is Associate Professor of New Testament at Boston College STM. She has published widely on Second Temple Judaism and Christian origins, with a special focus on prayers from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Harkins is the author of Experiencing Presence in the Second Temple Period (2022), Reading with an “I” to the Heavens: Reading the Qumran Hodayot through the Lens of Visionary Traditions (2012), and the co-editor of six volumes, the most recent of which are Experiencing the Shepherd of Hermas (2022) and Selected Studies in Deuterocanonical Prayers (2021). In 2014, she held a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship at the University of Birmingham, England. Ronald Hendel is the Norma and Sam Dabby Professor in Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His publications include Remembering Abraham: Culture, Memory, and History in the Hebrew Bible (2005), The Book of Genesis: A Biography (2013); and Steps to a New Edition of the Hebrew Bible (2016). He is general editor of The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition and is a recipient of the Frank Moore Cross Publication Award by the American Schools of Oriental Research. Sara R. Horowitz is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities and former Director of the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University. Her authored and edited books include Shadows in the City of Light: Paris in Post-War French Jewish Writing; Hans Günther Adler: Life, Literature, Legacy, and Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction. She served as president of the Association for Jewish Studies, member of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and founding co-editor of the Azrieli Series of Holocaust Memoirs and of the journal KEREM. David Kraemer is Joseph J. and Dora Abbell Librarian, and Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics, at The Jewish Theological Seminary. As Librarian, Prof. Kraemer is at the helm of the most extensive collection of Judaica in the Western hemisphere. Prof. Kraemer is a prolific author and commentator. His books include The Mind of the Talmud (1990), Responses to Suffering in Classical Rabbinic Literature (1995), The Meanings of Death in Rabbinic Judaism (2000), and Jewish Eating and Identity Through the Ages (2007), among others. His most recent book is A History of the Talmud (2019). He is presently completing a history of Jewish understandings of Exile/Diaspora. Eric Lawee is a full professor in the Department of Bible at Bar-Ilan University, where he teaches the history of Jewish biblical scholarship. His Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah: Canonization and Resistance in the Reception of a Jewish Classic won the 2019 Jewish Book Award in the category of Scholarship of the Jewish Book Council. It was also the 2021 finalist for a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in the category of Medieval and Early Modern Jewish History and Culture of the Association for Jewish Studies. Lawee holds the Rabbi Asher Weiser Chair for Medieval Biblical Commentary Research and directs Bar-Ilan’s Institute for Jewish Bible Interpretation. Mary Joan Winn Leith is Professor of Religious Studies and Theology at Stonehill College. Trained as an archaeologist, her research and publishing centers on two disparate areas: the archaeology and history of Persian-Achaemenid (i.e., post-exilic) Israel, especially the history of Samaria, and

Contributors

301

on themes in early Christian art. She is the author of The Wadi Daliyeh Seal Impressions in the Discoveries in the Judean Desert series and of articles relating to questions of Samarian/Israelite identity. Her most recent book is The Virgin Mary in the Oxford Very Short Introduction series. Martin I. Lockshin is University Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Hebrew, former Chair of the Department of Humanities, and former Director of the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University. His publications include a four-volume annotated translation into English of the Torah commentary of the twelfth-century northern French rabbi, Samuel ben Meir (Rashbam), the grandson of Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaqi (Rashi), and a two-volume annotated Hebrew edition of the same commentary. He now lives in Jerusalem and teaches in the Bible program of the Givat Washington Academic College of Education. Vivian B. Mann z”l (1943–2019), the doyenne of Jewish art historians in North America, was Professor of Jewish Art History and Visual Culture at The Jewish Theological Seminary of America and Morris and Eva Feld Chair of Judaica at The Jewish Museum in New York City. In the former capacity, she directed the graduate program in Jewish Art and Visual Culture; and in the latter, she curated many ground-breaking exhibitions on Jewish material culture throughout the world. A recipient of many awards and a prolific scholar, she wrote numerous articles, exhibition catalogs, and monographs, including Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts (2000) and Art and Ceremony in Jewish Life (2005). Steve Mason, a former Canada Research Chair at York University, is Emeritus Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Religions and Cultures, University of Groningen. He has held guest professorships in All Souls College Oxford, Trinity College Dublin, Konstanz, Berlin’s Humboldt University, Paris-EHESS, and the Pontifical Biblical Institute. He edits the series Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary (2000–), for which he has prepared Life of Josephus (2001), Judean War 2 (2008), and Judean War 4 (2022). His monographs include Flavius Josephus on the Pharisees (1991), Josephus and the New Testament (2003), A History of the Jewish War, A.D. 66–74 (2016), and Orientation to the History of Roman Judaea (2016). Beth Alpert Nakhai is an associate professor in the Arizona Center for Judaic Studies at University of Arizona. She received her M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from University of Arizona. Her research focuses on Canaanite and Israelite religion and on the lives of women in antiquity. Her books include Archaeology and the Religions of Canaan and Israel, and several edited volumes. She is writing a book about women in Near Eastern archaeology. Nakhai served on the Board of Directors of ASOR and chairs its Initiative on the Status of Women. She is a Board officer for the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research. Konrad Schmid is Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Judaism at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. He was a fellow of the Israel Institute of Advanced Studies in Jerusalem (2012–2013), the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2017), and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2020–2021). From 2019 to 2022, he served as the 24th president of the International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament. His main publications include Genesis and the Moses Story (2010); The Old Testament: A Literary History (2012); A Historical Theology of the Hebrew Bible (2019), and, together with Jens Schröter, The Making of the Bible (2021). Eileen Schuller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Religious Studies at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada, where she held the Senator William McMaster Chair. She edited the Cave 4 Hodayot manuscripts from the Dead Sea Scrolls for the Discoveries in the Judean Desert series

302

Contributors

(1999) and, with Hartmut Stegemann, the re-edition of the Cave l Hodayot manuscript (2009). She was recipient of an Alexander van Humboldt Research Prize at Georg-August University, Göttingen (2005–2006) and a Lady Davis Visiting Professorship at Hebrew University, Jerusalem (2013). She served as president of the Catholic Biblical Association and was elected to the Royal Society of Canada (2015).

Author Index Adan-Bayewitz, David – Common Pottery in Roman Galilee 190 Adler, Yonatan 190 Agnon, Shmuel Yosef – “‘Ad ‘Olam” (“Forevermore”) 293–294, 297 Albeck, Hanoch 205n19 Albertz, Rainer 59, 63, 64, 64n6, 65–66 Albright, William Foxwell 39–40 – From the Stone Age to Christianity 40 Alexander, Elizabeth Shanks 174 Ameling, W. 188 Amit, David 190 Anderson, Benedict 22 Applebaum, Shimon 134n38 Arie, Eran 15n7 Asad, Talal 155 Ashur, Amir 219 Assis, Moshe – A Concordance of Amoraic Terms Expressions and Phrases in the Yerushalmi 175 Atzmon, Arnon – Esther Rabba (with Tabory) 188 Baer, Yitzhak 241, 246 Bakhos, Carol 176 Balberg, Mira 179 Balogh, Balage 139 Bar-Kochva, Bezalel 134n38 Baron, Salo 280n20, 280n22 Bartlett, Suzanne 227 Bauckham, Richard – Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (with Davila and Panayotov) 116 Baumgarten, Albert 87 Baumgarten, Elisheva 223, 225, 229, 238, 280n20 Baumgarten, Joseph 173 Beard, Mary 97–98 Becker, Hans-Jürgen – Synopse zum Talmud Yerushalmi (with Schäfer) 175n27 Bell, Catherine 155 Bell, Dean Phillip – The Bloomsbury Companion to Jewish Studies 7–8 Benjamin, Walter 295

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110418873-019

Benovitz, Moshe 178 Ben-Yehuda, Nachman 146 Berger, David 249–250, 253–254, 282n26 Berkowitz, Beth 174 Berlejung, Angelika 71 Berlin, Andrea 131n27, 143n70, 144 Berliner, Avraham 241 Berthelot, Katell 94n41 Biale, David – Cultures of the Jews 281, 283–284, 289 Bickerman, Elias 131n26 Biran, Avraham 14 Bland, Kalman 194 Bloedhorn, Hanswulf 188 Boccaccini, Gabriele 89n27 Bohrmann, Monette 94n41 Bonfil, Robert 280 Bourdieu, Pierre 73 Boustan, Ra’anan S. 192 Bowie, Ewen 97 Boyarin, Daniel 179, 204n17, 289n52 Brand, Joshua 189 Braudel, Fernand 100 Braun, Christina von – Handbuch Jüdische Studien (with Brumlik) 7, 8 Brenner, Michael 276n5, 284 Briant, Pierre – From Cyrus to Alexander 124 Britt, Karen 192 Brock, Sebastian 187 Brown, Michael 1 Brown, Peter L. 194 Brumlik, Micha – Handbuch Jüdische Studien (with von Braun) 7, 8 Bush, Andrew – Jewish Studies 8 Carter, Charles 129 Charles, R. H. 118–119 Charlesworth, James – The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha 116 Chartier, Roger 279 Chazan, Robert 232 Chiat, Marilyn – Handbook of Synagogue Architecture 187

304

Author Index

Chiesa, Bruno 94n41 Clark, Douglas R. 57 Clines, David J. A. 30 Cohen, Jeremy 232, 233 Cohen, Mark R. 219 Cohen, Shaye J. D. 192, 250–251, 257, 282n24 – The State of Jewish Studies (with Greenstein) 6 Cohn, Naftali S. 169n7 Coogan, Michael D. 18–19 Damasio, Antonio – Descartes’ Error 155 Dan, Joseph 286n41 Darby, Erin 21 Davidman, Lynn – Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies (with Tenenbaum) 8 Davila, James R. – Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (with Bauckham and Panayotov) 116 Davis, Joseph 286 Day, Peggy L. – Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel 52 Dever, William G. 40–41, 53, 56, 59 Diamond, James – Maimonides and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon 286 Docherty, Susan – The Jewish Pseudepigrapha 116 Dolgopolski, Sergey 203–204 Ebeling, Jennie 56 Eck, Werner 98, 98n52 Edmondson, Jonathan C. 96n44 Efron, Noah 278 Ehrlich, Leonard H. 1–2 Einbinder, Susan L. 234–235, 236, 236n115, 237 Eisen, Sydney 1 Eliav, Yaron Z. 194n71, 196 Elizur, Binyamin 175 Elman, Yaakov 177 Erlich, Adi 135 Eshel, Esther 152 Fantham, Elaine 96n45 Faust, Avraham 23n47 Feldman, Louis H. 102

– Outside the Bible (with Kugel and Schiffman) 114 Fine, Steven 194, 195, 196–197 Finkelstein, Israel 32, 41, 43, 126 Fisch, Menachem 203 Fish, Stanley 151 Fleming, Daniel 25 Fox, Marvin 243 Fraade, Steven 173 Fraenkel, Yonah 176 Frank, Daniel H. – History of Jewish Philosophy (with Leaman) 285 Friedman, Mordechai A. 220 Friedman, Shamma 169n8, 170, 171n13, 173, 173n21, 176, 178, 200n6 Furst, Rachel 223, 230 Furstenberg, Yair 174 Galor, Katharina 196 Gampel, Benjamin 289 Garber, Zev – Academic Approaches to Teaching Jewish Studies 6–7 Geertz, Clifford 155 Geiger, Abraham 241 Gelernter, David – Judaism 288n51 Gesenius, Wilhelm 33 Geva, Hillel 134 Goitein, Shlomo Dov 216–217, 218, 219, 237n119 – A Mediterranean Society 216–217 Goldberg, Abraham 172 Goldberg, Sylvie Anne 94n41 Goodenough, Erwin R. 190, 194 – Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period 190 Goodman, Martin 115n15 – The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies 7 Grabbe, Lester 14n5, 19 Graetz, Heinrich 237n120 Greenberg, Moshe 245 Greenstein, Edward – The State of Jewish Studies (with Cohen) 6 Grey, Matthew 193 Grossman, Avraham – on divorce 226–227 – on female martyrs 232, 233–234

Author Index

– on medieval Jewish women 223, 224, 228–229, 229n73 – Rashbam disputes and 243, 245 – on Rashi and polemics 250, 253, 282n24 Grossman, Maxine 156 Grossmank, Tziona 196 Gruen, Erich 97, 98, 98n52 Gutmann, Julius – Philosophies of Judaism 278 Hachlili, Rachel 187 Hacker, Joseph 277 Hadas-Lebel, Mireille 94n41 Halivni, David Weiss 176, 208–209 – Peshat and Derash 208–209, 208n33 – Revelation Restored 208 Hauptman, Judith 173, 200n6 Hayes, Christine 178, 180 – What’s Divine about Divine Law? 207–208, 208n33 Hemmer Gudme, Anne Katrine de 133n33 Hempel, Charlotte 156 Hendel, Ron 33 – Remembering Abraham 22 Hengel, Martin 86n15 – Hellenism and Judaism 131 Henshke, David 173 Heschel, Abraham Joshua 199 – Heavenly Torah 209–210 Heyd, Michael 278n12 Hezser, Catherine – The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Daily Life in Roman Palestine 196 Himmelfarb, Martha 120 Hirsch, Eric. D, Jr. 151n10 Hirschfeld, Yizhar – The Palestinian Dwelling in the RomanByzantine Period 190 Hirshman, Marc 180, 205n20 Hobbes, Thomas 31 Hoglund, Kenneth 129 Holladay, John S., Jr. 41, 58–59 Hölscher, Gustav 91 Horbury, William – Jewish Inscriptions of Graeco-Roman Egypt (with Noy) 187 Horowitz, Elliot 237n119, 276n5, 289 Hughes, Aaron 4–5, 288n51, 289n52 – The Study of Judaism 4–5, 7, 288, 288n50

305

Hurvitz, Avi 33 Idel, Moshe – Kabbalah 285 Ilan, Zvi – Batei Knesset Qedumim be-Eretz Yisrael 187 Ir Shai, Oded 193 Israel, Jonathan – European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750 276 Japhet, Sara 243–244 Joosten, Jan 33 Kadushin, Max 199 Kahana, Menahem I. 176 – Sifre on Numbers 172, 172n18 Kalmin, Richard 166n1, 169n8, 178, 210 Kanarfogel, Ephraim 230 Kaplan, Yosef 276n5 Katz, Jacob 277, 280n20 – Tradition and Crisis 276, 276n5 Keil, Martha 223, 228, 229–230 Kellner, Menachem 286n41 Killebrew, Ann 24 Kiperwasser, Reuven – Midrash Kohelet Rabbah 7–12 188 Kirshenbaum, Karen – Furniture of the Home in the Mishnah 190 Kister, Menahem 176, 176n32 Klein, Samuel 193 Kohl, Heinrich – Antike Synagogen in Galiläa (with Watzinger) 187 Koltun-Fromm, Naomi 179 Kraemer, David 180 – The Meanings of Death in Rabbinic Judaism 207 – The Mind of the Talmud 201–203, 208n33 – Responses to Suffering in Classical Rabbinic Literature 207 Kraemer, Joel 217n11, 222 – Maimonides 286 Krakowski, Eve 216–218 Krauss, Samuel 189 Kugel, James L. 176, 176n32 – Outside the Bible (with Feldman and Schiffman) 114 Kulp, Joshua 169n8, 171n15

306

Author Index

Künzl, Ernst – Der römische Triumph 98n50 Lacave, José Luis – Juderías y Sinagogas Españolas 261 Languer, Shimon 246n19 Lapin, Hayim 192 Lasker, Daniel J. 250, 254n52, 282n24 Lawee, Eric – Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah 286 Leaman, Oliver – History of Jewish Philosophy (with Frank) 285 Leibner, Uzi 192 Leibowitz, Nehama 242 Leith, Mary Joan Winn 25 Levine, Lee I. 190–191 – The Ancient Synagogue 191 – Ancient Synagogues Revealed 191 – Judaism and Hellenism 131n25 Levy, Thomas E. – The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land 41 Lieber, Laura 189 Lieber, Uzi 196 Lieberman, Saul 172–173 Lifshitz, Berachyahu – Midrash Shmuel 188 Linder, Amnon – The Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation 188 Lipschits, Oded 130 Loew, Judah 278 Louys, D. 246n19 Luzzatto, Samuel David 244–245 Machinist, Peter 32 Maeir, Aren 22 Magen, Yitzhak 126 Magness, Jodi 146, 154, 191, 192 Malkiel, David 233, 234, 283 Marcus, Ivan 232, 281, 289 – Rituals of Childhood 280 Marcus, Jacob Rader 4 Marincola, John 97 Marriott, McKim 70 Mathews, Thomas 194 Mazar, Eilat 15, 18, 129–130, 139 Melammed, Renée Levine 221, 222 Mendelssohn, Moses 245n14

Meyers, Carol 56 – Discovering Eve 51–52 Meyers, Eric 196 Michel, Otto 86n15 Milikowsky, Chaim 175–176 – Seder Olam Rabba 172, 172n18, 188 Millar, Fergus 98, 98n52 Millard, Alan R. 18n23 Miller, Stuart 168, 192, 193 Momigliano, Arnaldo 131n26 Moore, George Foot – Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era 179 Moscovitz, Leib 180 – The Terminology of the Yerushalmi 175 Müller, Heinrich 259 Mullins, Robert A. 53 Naveh, Joseph 187 Netzer, Ehud 124, 137, 138 Neusner, Jacob 88–89, 89n26, 166, 190, 199–201, 205–206, 207, 208, 211 – The Foundations of the Theology of Judaism, Vol. 1: God 206 – Judaism 199–200, 200n4 – Messiah in Context 205 – Torah 205–206 Newsom, Carol – The Self as Symbolic Space 121n31 Newton, Adam Zachary – Jewish Studies as Counterlife 8 Nickelsburg, George 111 – Jewish Literature Between the Bible and the Mishnah 119n27 Nirenberg, David 282n26 Noam, Vered 173 Novick, Tzvi 174 Noy, David – Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientalis 188 – Jewish Inscriptions of Graeco-Roman Egypt (with Horbury) 187 – Jewish Inscriptions of Western Europe 187 O’Donnell, James 98n51 Olenik, Yael 195 Olin, Margaret 194 Olyan, Saul 64–65, 74, 75n42 Oppenheim, David 259

Author Index

Panayotov, Alexander 188 – Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (with Bauckham and Davila) 116 Panitz-Cohen, Nava 53 Patrich, Joseph 139, 140n58 Peleg-Barkat, Orit 139 Perry, Craig 220–221 Peskowitz, Miriam 179 Petzl, Georg 188 Pialkoff, David 172n19 Posnanski, Adolf 241 Qimron, Elisha 153 Rappaport, Roy 155 Redfield, Robert 65, 70, 72, 74 Regev, Eyal 136 Reich, Ronny 18, 141, 187 Reimer, David 98n51 Reinhartz, Adele 79, 99 Rengstorf, Karl H. – A Complete Concordance to Flavius Josephus 91 Rogoff, Jason 169n8, 171n15 Rosenbaum, Joan 257 Rosenfeld, Benzion 192 Rosenthal, David 170n10, 172–173 Rosen-Zvi, Ishay 168, 180 Rosin, David 241 Roskies, David 283–284 Rosman, Moshe 277, 279, 289 – How Jewish Is Jewish History? 284–285 Roth-Gerson, Lea 187 – The Jews of Syria as Reflected in the Greek Inscriptions 188 Rubenstein, Jeffrey 178, 210 Ruderman, David 277, 277n8, 278–279, 280, 289–290, 290n59 – Early Modern Jewry 277 Sáenz-Badillos, Angel – Jewish Studies at the Turn of the 20th Century (withTargarona Borrás) 6 Safrai, Shmuel 87, 87n20 Sanders, E. P. 88, 89 – Judaism 143n70 – Paul and Palestinian Judaism 88 Sarna, Nahum 243, 245 Satlow, Michael 179

Schäfer, Peter – Synopse zum Talmud Yerushalmi (with Becker) 175n27 Schiffman, Lawrence H. 90n30 – Outside the Bible (with Feldman and Kugel) 114 Schlosser, Jules 259 Schmelzer, Menahem 257 Schmitt, Rüdiger 64n6, 67 Schniedewind, William M. 33 Scholem, Gershom 190, 285 – Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism 278 Schürer, Emil – History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ 87, 87n21 Schwartz, Joshua 196 Schwartz, Seth 210 Secunda, Shai 177 Segal, Eliezer 178 Shaked, Shaul 167 Shapiro, Meyer 257 Shear, Adam 286–287 Shemesh, Aharon 173 Shlezinger-Katzman, Dafna 196 Shoham-Steiner, Ephraim 231 Shukron, Eli 18 Sievers, Joseph 93n39 Simon-Shoshan, Moshe 174 Singer-Avitz, Lily 32 Slouschz, Nahum 193 Smith, Morton 190, 194 Sokoloff, Michael 167 Sommer, Benjamin 206 Sorotzkin, David 278, 278n12 Sperber, Daniel 167, 190, 196 Stern, David – Parables in Midrash 206–207 Stern, Ephraim 125, 129 Stern, Karen B. – Writing on the Wall 197 Stern, Menachem 87, 87n20 Stewart, Charles 74 Stow, Kenneth R. 225–226 Strauss, Leo 279n19 Strugnell, John 153 Stuckenbruck, Loren 156–157, 158 Sukenik, Eliezer 150 Sussmann, Yaakov 170n10, 172–173 Swartz, Michael 189, 193

307

308

Author Index

Tabory, Joseph – Esther Rabba (with Atzmon) 188 Tal, Oren 131–132 – The Archaeology of Hellenistic Palestine 131n27 Tallan, Cheryl 223 Tanenzapf, Sol 1 Targarona Borrás, Judit – Jewish Studies at the Turn of the 20th Century (with Sáenz-Badillos) 6 Tartakoff, Paola 230–231 Tenenbaum, Shelly – Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies (with Davidman) 8 Thackeray, Henry St.-John 91 Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava 285 Touitou, Elazar 246n19, 248n28, 250 Tucker, Gordon 209 Twersky, Isadore 290n58 Ulmer, Rivka – Pesiqta Rabbati 188 Ulrich, Eugene 114 Urbach, Ephraim E. 179, 199, 207 Valler, Shulamit 178 van der Toorn, Karel – Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria, and Israel 59 – From Her Cradle to Her Grave 59 Vaux, Roland de – Ancient Israel 40n13, 51 Vermes, Geza 118 Vidas, Moulie 169n8, 204

Walfish, Avraham 174 Watzinger, Carl – Antike Synagogen in Galiläa (with Kohl) 187 Weiss, Ze’ev 190, 191, 193, 196 Weitzmann, Kurt 195 Wellhausen, Julius 31, 85n11 – Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel 149 Werlin, Steven H. – Ancient Synagogues of Southern Palestine, 300–800 CE 187 Westcott, B. F. 85n12 Wette, Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de 30–31 Williams, Travis B. 157n29 Wimpfheimer, Barry 178, 204 Wolfson, Elliott 285n38 Wright, George Ernest – Biblical Archaeology 40 Wright, Melanie – Studying Judaism 7 Yadin, Azzan 180 Yadin, Yigael 146 Yahalom, Joseph 193 – Az beAin Kol, Priestly Palestinian Poetry 188 Yuval, Yisrael 282 Zevulun, Uza 195 Zinger, Oded 221–222 Zulay, Menachem 193 Zunz, Leopold 237n120

Subject Index Note: This index covers all of the subject matter within this book. This includes premodern authors and people discussed, while modern authors and scholars can be found in the Author Index. Similarly, discussions of ancient, biblical, rabbinic, and medieval sources can be found in this index, while citations of specific books can be found in the Primary Sources Index. Abraham, Testament of 115 acculturation 44–49, 130–132, 143, 148 Achaemenid studies 124 See also Persian period Adam and Eve 118, 120, 250–253 affect and emotion 153, 157–160 aggadic midrashim 165, 175–176, 178 Agira (Sicily) 263 AJS Perspectives (journal) 8, 296 Akiba, Rabbi 209 See also late antique Judaism Alexander IV (pope) 271 Alexandria (Egypt) 113, 132, 137 Alfajarin, Bernart de 259 Alfasi, Isaac 171 Altdorfer, Albrecht 267 Amarna period and letters 18, 18n23 ‘am ha’aretz (people of the land) 39–41, 51 Ammonius 105 amoraic literature 165, 174–178 See also Babylonian Talmud; Palestinian Talmud Amos (book) 29, 31, 34 Ancient Jew Review 84 Antalya (Turkey) 185 anthropological turn 194–195 anthropology 51–52, 65, 154–155 Apocalypse of Weeks 117 apocalyptic literature 89, 117 Apocrypha 115, 115nn14–15 Arabia 132n31, 147 Aramaic literature 112, 113, 113n8, 118, 119, 189 archaeology – Biblical Israel 14–16, 17–19 – late antiquity Judaism (Roman Palestine) 185–188 – medieval hoards 271–272, 272fig.10 – medieval Spain 264–265, 264fig.4, 265fig.5, 266fig.6 – non-Rabbinic approach in late antique Judaism 190–191, 193–194 – processual approach 146–147 – Talmudic Archaeology 189–190 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110418873-020

– HERODIAN 137–146 – introduction 124, 148 – Galilee 143–145 – Herod the Great’s achievements 137–140 – Jerusalem 139, 140–141 – Masada 146 – Qumran studies 145–146 – religious practices 141–142 – IRON AGE ISRAEL – introduction 37–39, 38n8, 61 – daily life 55–58 – ethnogenesis, ethnicity, and acculturation 44–49 – ethnographic material and 53–54, 54fig.5 – housing and the household 45, 46fig.3, 50–51 – Israelite villages 42–44 – religious practices 58–60 – scholarship overview 39–41 – women, families, and gender 51–55, 53n46 – SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD – introduction 123–124, 146–148 – Hellenistic period 130–136, 131nn25–26, 132n31, 147, 148 – Herodian archaeology 124, 137–146, 148 – hyper-specialization 147 – impacts of archaeology on Second Temple studies 89–90, 92 – Persian period 124–130, 147–148 Aristobulus 113 Aristotle 201, 201n7 Arles (France) 259 Ars Judaica (journal) 258 art, Jewish 135, 187, 194, 257–258 See also medieval Jewish art and architecture Artapanus 113 artifact, and text 183 Asard, Robin 259 Asherah 20, 53, 53n46 See also Judaean pillar figurines

310

Subject Index

Ashkenazic Jews – background 223–224 – cross-cultural intermingling 280–281 – divorce 224, 226–227 – dowries 224–225 – female commercial and leadership roles 227–228 – female religious roles 228–230 – marginalization among 230–231 – marriage and sexuality 224, 225–226 – martyrdom 231–238, 282–283 – maternal roles 225 – movable print and 287 – women’s lives 222–223, 224–230 Association for Jewish Studies 243, 291n60 Association for the Study of Jewish Manuscripts – Friedberg Genizah Project 215n1 Assyrians, Neo- 17, 17fig.2, 24, 31, 32, 127 Avodah Zarah (tractate) 178 Babylonian Talmud (Bavli) – historical knowledge from 183 – methodological issues and 169–170, 171, 171n15 – polygyny and 220 – redaction of 165 – research and scholarship on 176–178, 179, 201–202, 203–205, 204n17 – research infrastructure, advances in 166n2, 167 – on suffering and theodicy 207 Balaam inscription 28 Baraita de Nidda 230 Bar-Ilan Responsa Project 166n2, 215n1 Barkhi Nafshi 113 Bar Kochba Revolt 3 1Baruch 115 2Baruch 111, 112, 115, 117 3Baruch 120 Bava Mezi’a (tractate) 178 Bavli. See Babylonian Talmud Beatitudes (4Q525) 117 Beit Guvrin 186 Ben Sira 111, 112, 115, 117 Beth Alpha 191 Bethel 31, 32, 35 Beth She’arim 190, 191 Beth Shemesh 18–19, 19n24

Bezalel Narkiss Index of Jewish Art of the Center for Jewish Art 187 Bible. See Hebrew Bible; medieval Jewish Bible commentaries Bible Lands Museum (Jerusalem) – The Jewish Presence in Ancient Rome exhibition 195 – Out of the Blue exhibition 195 Biblical Israel – archaeology and 14–16, 17–19 – David and Solomon 13–16, 14n5, 19, 32 – “Israel,” problematized 21–25 – Jerusalem 15–16, 18–19, 18n23, 19n24 – lack of extant ancient sources 13 – maximalist vs. minimalist approaches 16 – new evidence and methods 19–20 – religious practices 20–21 – Tel Dan Stele 13–14, 14fig.1 Black Obelisk (Nineveh) 29 body, and religion 155 Bokrat, Abraham 247n26 Book of Mysteries (4Q299–301) 117 Book of the Giants 113 Book of the Watchers 117 Bornblum Eretz Yisrael Synagogues Website 187 Bova Marina (Italy) 185 Bryn Mawr Classical Review 98, 98n51 burial gifts 66–67 See also funerary architecture; mortuary rites Caesarea-Maritima 137–138, 140, 140n58 Cairo Geniza 216–222 – introduction 216–217, 216n5, 238 – Damascus Document and 151 – on familial legal disputes 221–222 – on marriage 217–218, 217n11, 219–220 – on polygyny 220 – significance of 184 – on slave girls 220–221 – on women’s disputes and grievances 222 Cambridge University Library – Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection 215n1 Canaanites 23–24, 23n47, 58 Canadian universities 94–95, 295 canon, and Second Temple literature 114–116 Cardinal Bea Centre for Judaic Studies 93n39 Cassius Dio 105

Subject Index

Catholic universities 93–94 Cave 1 Hodayot 150 Celsus 105 ceramics 57, 143n69, 264 chalkstone vessels 141, 142fig.3 children, study of 38n3 Christianity – conversion to 230–231, 232 – Jewish-Christian dialogue 93–94, 93n39 – Jewish patronage of Christian artists 270–271 Chronicles (book) 16, 22, 34 circumcision 46n25, 102, 103, 229, 234, 265 Colmar (Germany) 271 Cologne (Germany) 261, 266–267, 267fig.7, 268–270, 268fig.8, 269fig.9, 270–271 Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature series 121n30 common complex Judaism 168 Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum (CRINT) series 87, 87n20 contracts, marriage (ketubba) 219–220, 226 CRASIS (Groningen) 95 culture 278–281, 279n14, 279n19 cup, double, and its case 262–263, 263fig.3 daily life 55–58 Damascus Document (CD) 112, 117, 151, 152, 154, 157, 159–160 Daniel (book) 34, 112, 113, 115, 117 David (king) 13–15, 14n5, 32 Dead Sea Scrolls (Qumran Scrolls) See also Qumran studies; Teacher of Righteousness – introduction 149–150, 160–161 – affect and emotions in 157–160 – apocalyptic literature and 117 – Aramaic literature in 113, 113n8 – article and dissertation mentions 80, 81fig.1, 82fig.4 – Cave 4 publications 152–154 – early scholarship on 151–152 – future research prospects 121, 121n31 – genres within 117, 119, 149 – Greek literature in 113–114 – Hebrew Bible and literature in 27, 112–113 – quest for origins, move away from 156–157 – Society of Biblical Literature and 84

311

death 207 Decalogue 21, 70 Delmedigo, Joseph 290 Deuteronomy 30–32, 114, 115 diaspora 30, 91, 113–114, 117 digitalization 295 Diodorus Siculus 100 Dio of Prusa 100 Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series 80n5 divorce 218–219, 224, 226–227 Dolce of Worms 237–238 double cup and its case 262–263, 263fig.3 dowry 224–225 early modern period, Jewish 276–278, 276n5, 277n8 Ecclesiastes (Qohelet) 30, 35, 112 École biblique et archéologique 94n40 Egypt 24 See also Alexandria Eleazar of Worms (Rokeaḥ) 237–238, 237n120 Eliakim ben Joseph of Mainz 268–269 Emek Ha-Bakha (The Valley of Tears) 236 emotion and affect 153, 157–160 En Gedi 185, 186 1Enoch 93, 113, 114, 115 2Enoch 115 Enochic literature 89, 89n27, 118 Ephraim of Bonn – Sefer Zekhira (Book of Remembrace) 234, 236, 236n115 “Epigraphical Rabbis” question 192–193 epigraphy 28–29 Epistle of Jeremiah 114 Erfurt (Germany) 271, 272, 272fig.10 1Esdras 115 2Esdras 93, 115 Essenes 112, 119, 145–146 Esther (book) 34, 115, 178, 232, 236 ethnic identity 22 ethnogenesis, Israelite 24, 44–49 ethnos-polis discourse 100–106, 107 Eupolemus 113 Eve and Adam 118, 120, 250–253 exodus, from Egypt 24, 244–245 Exodus Rabbah 208 Ezekiel the Tragedian 117 Ezra (book) 22, 34, 112 4Ezra 111, 112, 115, 117

312

Subject Index

First Temple period 3, 9, 13 See also archaeology—Iron Age Israel; Biblical Israel; epigraphy; Hebrew Bible food 47–48 Four Kingdoms 113 four-room houses 45, 46fig.3, 48–49, 50, 57–58, 59 Friedberg Genizah Project 189, 215n1 Friedberg Jewish Manuscript Society 167 funding, academic 295 funerary architecture 132, 138–139, 145, 186 See also grave gifts; mortuary rites Galilee 43n19, 93, 142, 143–145, 143n70, 185, 193 Garcias, Pedro 261 Gath (Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi) 19n24, 32 gender – as analytic tool 5, 238, 294 – archaeological study of Iron Age women 51–55, 53n46, 56, 59 – Ashkenazic women 222–223, 224–230 – Cairo Geniza and 216–222 – divorce 218–219, 224, 226–227 – dowry 224–225 – ethnic affiliation and 49 – familial legal disputes and 221–222 – female commercial and leadership roles 227–228 – female religious roles 228–230 – marriage and marriage contracts 217–218, 217n11, 219–220, 225–226 – martyrdom in Northern Europe and 231–238 – maternal roles 225 – polygyny and 219–220, 224 – slave girls and 220–221 – women’s disputes and grievances in Cairo Geniza 222 Genesis Apocryphon 113, 118 Genesis Rabbah 175, 247 George Washington University 258 Gershom ben Judah 224 Gezer 15, 15n10, 40fig.1, 42 Gezer calendar 28 Ghor as-Safi 186 glass, medieval 265 goddess-worship 20–21 See also Asherah; Judaean pillar figurines

God-talk, in Rabbinic Judaism 206–207 grave gifts 66–67 See also funerary architecture; mortuary rites The Greatest Story Ever Told (film) 85n10 Greek influence. See Hellenistic period Greek literature, Second Temple period 113–114 grinding stone, handheld Iron Age 56fig.6 Haaretz Museum (Tel Aviv) – Function and Design in the Talmudic Period exhibition 195 Haggai (book) 111, 112 Ha-Kohen, Joseph – Emek Ha-Bakha (The Valley of Tears) 236 halachic midrashim 165, 169–170 Halevi, Judah – Kuzari 287 Hammath Tiberias 191, 193 Hanukkah lamps (hanukkiyot) 264, 265fig.5 Harvard University 109–110 Ḥasidei Ashkenaz 226 Hasmonean period 110, 134–136, 134n38, 136fig.2 Hazor 15, 15n10, 42 Hebrew Bible 29–35 See also medieval Jewish Bible commentaries – introduction 27 – biblical vs. historical Israel 29–30 – comparison to archaeological and historical realities 32 – Deuteronomy as reference point 30–32 – linguistic dating 33–34 – maximalist vs. minimalist approaches 16 – Persian period and 126–127, 126n9 – political themes 35 – portions from First Temple period 34–35 – postmodern approach to 20 – religious-historical traits, dating using 32–33 – reworked in Second Temple literature 118 Hebrew literature, First Temple period. See epigraphy; Hebrew Bible Hebrew literature, Second Temple period 112–113 Hebrew manuscripts, medieval 258–259 Hebrew Union College 109n1 Hebrew University of Jerusalem 285n40

Subject Index

– Orion Center 80n5 Hecht Museum (Haifa) – Ein Gedi (En Gedi) exhibition 195 Heliodorus stele 133–134, 134n35 Hellenistic period 130–136, 131nn25–26, 132n31, 147, 148 Henoch (journal) 84n8 Hermeneia series 121n30 Herodian archaeology. See under archaeology Herodium 137, 138 Herodotus 104 Herod the Great 124, 137–140 hill country 23–24, 43fig.2, 123, 132–133, 143 Hillel, Rabbi 3–4 hoards, medieval 271–272 Hodayot (Thanksgiving Psalms, 1QH) 113, 117, 121, 121n31, 151, 152 Horvat Omrit 140 Hosea (book) 29, 34 household archaeology 50–51 houses, four-room 45, 46fig.3, 48–49, 50, 57–58, 59 Huesca (Spain) 261 Huqoq 185, 186, 192, 197 ibn Ezra, Abraham 242 Idumea 132, 132n31, 147 Images (journal) 194n71, 258 Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientalis series 188 Instititum Judaicum et Muhammedicum (Halle) 86n15 Institute for the Complete Israeli Talmud 177 Institute for the Study of the Ancient World – Edge of Empires exhibition 195 Institute of Jewish Art 257–258 Institutum Judaicum (Tübingen) 86n15 Institutum Judaicum Delitzschianum (Munster) 86n15 Intentionalist Criticism 151n10 internal religious pluralism 63, 65–66 IOUDAIOS (listserv) 98n51 IOUDAIOS REVIEW (listserv) 98n51 Iron Age Israel. See under archaeology Isaac ben Moses of Vienna – Or Zarua 268 Isaac ben Zekhariah, double cup and case of 262–263, 263fig.3 Isaiah (book) 29, 30, 34 Ishmael, Rabbi 209

313

Islamicate, use of term 280n22 Israel – See also archaeology; Biblical Israel; First Temple period; late antique Judaism; Rabbinic period; Second Temple period – ethnogenesis 24, 44–49 – problematized 21–25 Israel (kingdom) 24–25, 29, 47–48 Israel Museum (Jerusalem) 15, 138n51 – The Realm of Stars exhibition 195 Isserles, Moses 289–290 – Mappah (Tablecloth) 227n60 Iturea 132n31 ivory pomegranate 15, 15n7 Jacob 31, 32 Jacob ben Meir Tam (Rabbenu Tam) 225, 226 Jehu (king) 29 Jeremiah 20 Jeremiah (book) 31, 34 Jericho 135, 136fig.2, 138 Jerome 31 Jerusalem – archaeological focus on 42 – Biblical Israel period 15–16, 18–19, 18n23, 19n24 – early Roman period 123 – Hasmonean period 134 – Herod the Great and 139, 140–141 – Persian period 125–126, 128 Jerusalem Talmud. See Palestinian Talmud Jesus of Nazareth 143, 145 Jewish-Christian dialogue 93–94, 93n39 Jewish early modern period 276–278, 276n5, 277n8 Jewish Middle Ages (Medieval period) 4, 9, 215–216, 238, 276 See also Ashkenazic Jews; Cairo Geniza; martyrdom, in Northern Europe; medieval Jewish art and architecture; medieval Jewish Bible commentaries Jewish studies – approach to 2–3, 8–9, 294, 297 – culture and 278–281 – future prospects 290–291, 291n60 – Hughes’ critique of 4–6, 288, 288n50 – influences on 294–296 – methodological approaches 284–286 – new areas of study 286–288

314

Subject Index

– present state 288–290 – reasons for working within 296 – scholarly debate and controversy 281–284 – scholarship on 6–8 – temporal eras, challenges designating 3–4 – thematic areas within 4 – at York University 1–2 Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) 257 Jews, vs. Judaeans 79–80, 99–106, 106–107 Job 35 Job, Testament of 118 Joel (book) 112 Jonah (book) 22 Joseph 72 Joseph and Aseneth (book) 118, 120 Josephus, Flavius – article, dissertation, and scholarship mentions 80, 82, 82fig.3, 83fig.6, 84fig.8 – ethnos-polis discourse and 100 – Jews vs. Judaeans terminology and 99, 101, 102–103, 104, 105 – on Masada 146 – Rewritten Bible and 118 – scholarship history 85, 86, 86n17, 91–92, 96–98 – within Second Temple literature 111, 115, 121 Joshua conquest account 24 Josiah (king) 24, 34, 35 Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period 84n8 Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 84n8 Journal of Ancient Judaism 84 Jubilees 112, 118, 119 Judaean pillar figurines 20–21, 45–46, 47fig.4, 53 Judaeans, vs. Jews 79–80, 99–106, 106–107 Judah (kingdom) 14, 17, 24–25, 29, 32, 47–48 Judah of Cologne 270–271 Judaism, use of term 200 Judean war, with Rome 123 Judges (book) 43 Judith (book) 112, 112n7, 115 Julian – Against the Galileans 106 Kabbalah studies 285 Kändlein of Regensburg 228 Karben, Victor von 234

Karo, Joseph 289–290 – Shulhan Arukh (Set Table) 227n60, 289 Kasimierz (Poland) – Stara Synagogue 261 Ketef Hinnom – grave gifts 66–67 – silver amulets with priestly blessing 67, 68fig.1–2, 69–73, 69n27, 74–75 Khirbet el-Qom texts 28 Khirbet Kur 185 Khirbet Qeiyafa 18–19, 19n24, 22 Kimhi, David 251, 252n42 King of Kings (film) 85n10 Kinneret College – Bornblum Eretz Yisrael Synagogues Website 187 Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies 1–2 Kuntillet ‘Ajrud 53, 63, 71 Kuttenberg (Kutna Hora, Czechia) 272 Lachish 17, 42, 130 Lachish Relief 17fig.2 Lamentations Rabbah 206–207 Laodicaea 185 late antique Judaism (Roman Palestine) – introduction 183–184 – anthropological turn and 194–195 – archaeological discoveries 185–188 – “Epigraphical Rabbis” question 192–193 – future prospects 197 – museum exhibitions 195 – non-Rabbinic approach 190–191, 193–194 – polychromy 196–197 – rabbinic and piyyut scholarship 188–189, 193–194 – scholarship, attempts to assess 195–196 – synagogue mosaics 191–192 – Talmudic Archaeology approach 189–190 Late Judaism (Spätjudentum) 85–86, 85n11 law 207–208, 221–222 Levi Document 113 Leviticus 31–32, 114 Leviticus Rabbah 175 Licoricia of Winchester 227 Lieberman Institute 167 Life of Adam and Eve 118, 120 Lingenfeld (Germany) 272 linguistic dating 33–34 literary theory 179, 294

Subject Index

Lorca (Spain) 264–265, 266fig.6 Lucas, Bishop of Tuy 269 Luzzatto, Simone 290 Lymra 185 Ma’agarim project 189 Ma’ase Nissim 237 1Maccabees 98, 111, 112, 115 2Maccabees 111, 115 3Maccabees 115 4Maccabees 113, 115 Madaba Plains Project 57–58 Magdala synagogue 142 Maharam (Meir of Rothenburg) 226, 229, 230, 271 Maharil (Jacob ha-Levi Moelin) 229 Maimonides, Moses 206, 219, 286, 286n41 Mappah (Tablecloth) 227n60 marriage and marriage contracts 217–218, 217n11, 219–220, 225–226 martyrdom, in Northern Europe 231–238 – introduction 231 – Dolce and Eleazar (Rokeaḥ) of Worms 237–238, 237n120 – female martyrs 232, 233–235, 238 – historicity concerns 232–233 – Pulcellina of Blois 235–237, 236n115, 237n119 – scholarly controversy over 282–283, 282n26 Masada 137, 138, 146 McMaster University 95, 109n1 medieval Jewish art and architecture – Cologne synagogue 266–270, 268fig.8, 268fig.9 – contracts and visual models 259–260 – Hebrew manuscripts 258–259 – Jewish patronage of Christian artists 270–271 – Judaica discoveries 262–263 – medieval hoards 271–272, 272fig.10 – in Near East and North Africa 258 – reuse in medieval churches 260–262 – Spanish archaeological discoveries 264–265, 264fig.4, 265fig.5, 266fig.6 medieval Jewish Bible commentaries – introduction 241 – academia, place within 242–244

315

– current scholarship 254–255, 255n61 – historical roots approach 245 – mid-twentieth century scholarship 241–242 – modern biblical scholarship and 244–245 – polemical agendas, finding 248–250, 254 – Rashi example, historical roots 246–248, 247n26, 248n28 – Rashi example, polemics 250–254, 254n51, 281–282, 282n24 Medieval period (Jewish Middle Ages) 4, 9, 215–216, 238, 276 See also Ashkenazic Jews; Cairo Geniza; martyrdom, in Northern Europe; medieval Jewish art and architecture; medieval Jewish Bible commentaries Megiddo 15, 15n10, 42 Megillah (tractate) 178 Meir of Rothenburg (Maharam) 226, 229, 230, 271 Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester 257–258 Merneptah Stele 23–24 Mesha stele 28 messiah 205 Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) 257 – The Age of Spirituality exhibition 195 Micah (book) 29, 34 midrash – aggadic midrashim 165, 175–176, 178 – halachic midrashim 165, 169–170 – Rashi and 247–248, 247n26, 252–253 – specific works – Exodus Rabbah 208 – Genesis Rabbah 175, 247 – Lamentations Rabbah 206–207 – Leviticus Rabbah 175 – Midrash Tanhuma 247 – Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana 175 – Seder Olam Rabba 172, 188 – Sifre Numbers 172 mikveh/miqva’ot (ritual baths) 141, 186, 190, 192–193, 226, 226n57 Mimouna 258 Miqṣat Ma‘aśê ha-Torah (4QMMT) 152, 153–154 Mishnah – Babylonian Talmud (Bavli) and 204 – manuscripts of 170n10 – methodological issues and 168–170

316

Subject Index

– Neusner on 88–89, 200–201 – online concordance 166 – research on 172–174, 172n19, 200n6, 205 – Second Temple literature, dating of, and 111 – on suffering and theodicy 207 Modena, Leon 290 modernity 8–9 modern period, Jewish early 276–278, 276n5, 277n8 Modi‘in (Umm el-‘Umdan) 132–133, 135 Moelin, Jacob ha-Levi (Maharil) 229 moneylending 227 monotheism, challenges to 20–21 Morocco 258 mortuary rites 75 See also funerary architecture; grave gifts mosaics, synagogue 191–192 Moses 73, 115, 205, 209, 244 Mount Gerizim 126, 133, 133n33, 148 movable print 287 museum exhibitions 195 Museum of Biblical Art (Dallas) 258 Museum of the Bible (Washington, DC) – The Samaritans exhibition 195 Na’aran 191 Nabatea 147 Nabratein 186 Nehemiah 127, 128 Nehemiah (book) 22, 34, 112 Neo-Assyrians 17, 17fig.2, 24, 31, 32, 127 New Criticism 151 New Testament studies 88–89, 93–94, 94n40, 109, 120 Nicaea 185 Numbers 31–32, 114 oaths, swearing 227–228 Oral Torah 205–206, 205nn19–20 Ordinances 112 Orion Center 80n5 Oxford University 94 Palestinian Talmud (Yerushalmi) – Bar-Ilan Responsa Project and 166n2 – Kraemer on 202–203 – methodological issues and 169–170, 171, 171n15 – Neusner on 201

– research on 174–175, 175n27, 178 – on suffering and theodicy 207 Palma de Majorca (Spain) 261, 262, 262fig.2 parochialization 70–71, 74 patronage, of Christian artists 270–271 Paul 88, 138 Pentateuch 30, 34 periodization 275–278 Persian period 13, 13n4, 22, 25, 124–130, 147–148 Pesahim (tractate) 170 pesharim 112, 117, 159 Pesher Habakkuk (1QpHab) 150, 151, 157, 158–159 Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana 175 Petra 144 Pharisees 85, 88, 119, 140 Philistines 23, 44, 47–48 Philo of Alexandria – article, dissertation, and scholarship mentions 80, 81fig.2, 82, 83fig.5, 84fig.7 – ethnos-polis discourse and 100 – Jews vs. Judaeans terminology and 103–104 – scholarship history 85, 86 – within Second Temple literature 115, 121 philosophy 285–286 Philo the Epic Poet 117 Phoenicia 105, 132, 132n31, 147 pigs 23, 47 pillar figurines, Judaean 20–21, 45–46, 47fig.4, 53 piyyut 188–189, 193–194 Plovdiv (Bulgaria) 185 Plutarch 100 polemics – medieval Jewish Bible commentaries and 248–250 – Rashi and 250–254, 254n51, 281–282, 282n24 polis-ethnos discourse 100–106, 107 polychromy 196–197 polygyny 219–220, 224 Pontifical Gregorian University – Cardinal Bea Centre for Judaic Studies 93n39 Porphyry 106 postmodernism 20, 156, 294 Prague – Altneuschul 261 Prayer of Manasseh 115

Subject Index

Prayer of Nabonidus 113 Priene synagogue 185 priestly blessing, and Ketef Hinnom silver amulets 67, 68fig.1–2, 69–73, 74–75 Princeton University 195 – Princeton Geniza Lab 215n1 – Princeton University Sefer Hasidim Database (PUSHD) 215n1 print technology 287 Proverbs 35, 116 Psalm 151 115 Psalms 33, 34–35, 116 pseudepigrapha 85, 86, 115–116 pseudo-Daniel texts 113 Pseudo-Philo – Biblical Antiquities 112, 118 Pseudo-Phocylides 115 Pseudo-Scylax 100 Pulcellina of Blois 227, 228, 235–237, 236n115, 237n119 1QH (Hodayot, Thanksgiving Psalms) 113, 117, 121, 121n31, 151, 152 1QpHab (Pesher Habakkuk) 150, 151, 157, 158–159 1QS (Serek ha-Yahad, Rule of the Community) 112, 117, 121, 121n31, 151, 152, 154 4Q299–301 (Book of Mysteries) 117 4Q416–418 (4QInstruction) 117 4Q525 (Beatitudes) 117 4QMMT (Miqṣat Ma‘aśê ha-Torah) 152, 153–154 Qasrin 186, 188, 195 Qeiyafa inscription 28 Qohelet (Ecclesiastes) 30, 35, 112 Qumran studies 81fig.1, 82fig.4, 145–146, 154 See also Dead Sea Scrolls; Teacher of Righteousness Rabbenu Tam (Jacob ben Meir Tam) 225, 226 rabbinic literature and thought – See also Babylonian Talmud; midrash; Mishnah; Palestinian Talmud; Tosefta; tractates – amoraic literature 165, 174–178 – definition 165 – early scholarship on 199 – God-talk and 206–207 – Halivni on 208–209

317

– Hayes on 207–208 – Heschel on 199, 209–210 – Israeli vs. US scholarship 165–166 – Kraemer on 201–203, 207 – law and 207–208 – messiah and 205 – methodological issues 167–171, 169nn8–9, 171n15, 210 – Neusner’s approach 88–89, 166, 199–201, 205–206, 207, 208, 211 – rabbinic culture, studies of 179–180, 210–211 – research infrastructure, advances in 166–167, 166n2, 188 – revelation and 208–209 – scholarship development 210 – Stern on 206–207 – suffering and theodicy and 207 – tannaitic literature 165, 169–170, 169nn8–9, 172–174, 180 – Torah and 205–206, 205nn19–20, 206n21 rabbinic period 3–4, 9, 9n22 See also late antique Judaism; rabbinic literature and thought Rachel of Mainz 233 Ramat Rachel 127–128, 128fig.1 ransom-divorce 218–219 Rashbam 242, 243–244, 243n9, 244–245, 245n14, 248, 250 Rashi – Baer on 241 – historical roots and 246–248, 247n26, 248n28 – midrash and 247–248, 252–253, 252n44 – place within academia 242 – polemics and 250–254, 254n51, 281–282, 282n24 – on sexuality 251, 251n41 reception history 286–287 Reformation, use of term 277, 277n6 Regensburg (Germany) 228, 261, 267 Rehov synagogue 188 religion – See also rabbinic literature and thought; synagogues – family/household religion vs. official/state religion 63–65, 64n6 – grave gifts 66–67 – great and little traditions 65–66, 74–75

318

Subject Index

– internal religious pluralism 65–66, 73 – Iron Age Israel 58–60 – pre-exilic Israelites 20–21 – priestly blessing on Ketef Hinnom silver amulets 67, 68fig.1–2, 69–73, 69n27, 74–75 religious studies 95, 109, 154–156, 161 Renaissance 249, 277, 277n6 revelation 208–209 Rewritten Bible 118 Rishonim 226 Rokeaḥ (Eleazar of Worms) 237–238, 237n120 Roman Palestine. See late antique Judaism rule books (serakim) 117 Rule of the Community (Serek ha-Yahad, 1QS) 112, 117, 121, 121n31, 151, 152, 154 Rule of the Congregation 117 Ruth (book) 22, 111 Rylands Cairo Genizah Collection 215n1 Sadducees 119 Salinas, Abraham de 259 Samaria (Samaritans) 25, 35, 42, 126, 127, 133, 133n33, 193, 197 Samaria-Sebaste 139–140, 140n58 Sanhedrin (tractate) 174 Saragossa (Spain) 259–260, 261 Sarajevo Haggadah 259, 260fig.1 Sardis synagogue 188 Sardona (Albania) 185 scribal culture 18–19, 29, 35 seal, Jerusalem-type 134 Second Temple literature – See also Dead Sea Scrolls – introduction 109–110, 120–121 – canon and 114–116 – chronological framework 110–112 – communities behind 118–120 – future prospects 121 – genres of 116–118 – Hebrew Bible as 27 – languages of 112–114 – New Testament and 120 Second Temple period 3, 9, 79 See also archaeology; Second Temple literature; Second Temple studies Second Temple studies – introduction 79–80, 106–107 – archaeology and 89–90, 92

– critical reckoning with rabbinic literature and New Testament 88–89 – development of 85–87, 90–91, 110, 149–150 – Jew and Judaean terms 79–80, 99–106, 106–107 – Josephus studies 82fig.3, 83fig.6, 84fig.8, 85, 86, 91–92, 96–98 – Philo studies 81fig.2, 83fig.5, 84fig.7, 85, 86 – placement with universities 92–96, 106 – Qumran studies 81fig.1, 82fig.4 – strength of, indications 80–84 Seder Olam Rabba 172, 188 seder plate (Teruel, 15th century) 264fig.4 Sefer ha-Ma’asim 238 Sefer Hasidim (Book of the Pious) 223, 226 Sefer Yosippon 86n17 Sefer Zekhira (Book of Remembrace) 234, 236, 236n115 Self-Glorification Hymn (SGH) 152–153 Sennacherib 17, 17fig.2 Sephardic Jews 261, 280, 280n22, 281, 281n23, 287, 289–290 Sepphoris 143–144, 144fig.4, 185, 186, 191, 193 serakim (rule books) 117 Serek ha-Yahad (Rule of the Community, 1QS) 112, 117, 121, 121n31, 151, 152, 154 Seville (Spain) 261 Shalmaneser III 29 Shammai, Rabbi 3–4 Shammash, Juspe – Ma’ase Nissim 237 Shechem 42 Shevu’ot (tractate) 174 Shir ha-Shirim (Song of Songs) 30 Shnaton (journal) 243, 243n8 Shor, Joseph Bekhor 250, 251 Shulhan Arukh (Set Table) 227n60, 289 Sibylline Oracles 115 Sifre Numbers 172 Sikhnin 186 Siloam inscription 28 Six Day War (1967) 42, 124 slave girls 220–221 Society of Biblical Literature 84, 92, 117 Solomon (king) 14–16, 19 Solomon ben Samson 266 Song of Songs (Shir ha-Shirim) 30 Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice 113

Subject Index

Sotah (tractate) 168 Spain 259–261, 264–266 Speyer (Germany) 229, 261, 270 stone 141 Strabo 100, 104 Studia Philonica Annual (journal) 80, 84n8 Studium Biblicum Franciscanum 94n40 suffering 207 symbiosis 281 synagogues – in Cologne 266–270, 268fig.8, 269fig.9 – in Lorca 264–265, 266fig.6 – mosaics 191–192 – piyyut and 193–194 – in Regensburg 267 – Second Temple and late antique periods 141–142, 185–186, 187, 188, 191 – for women 229–230 Tall al-‘Umayri 48–49 “Talmuda de-Eretz Israel” conference 196 Talmudic Archaeology 189–190 tannaitic literature 165, 169–170, 169nn8–9, 172–174, 180 See also Mishnah; Tosefta Tarbiz (journal) 243 Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection 215n1 Teacher Hymns (1QH, cols. 9–18) 153 Teacher of Righteousness – introduction 150–151, 161 – 4QMMT (Miqṣat Ma‘aśê ha-Torah) and 153 – affective contours of 157, 158–159 – dating of 154 – identification of 156–157, 157n29 Tel Abel-Beth-Maacah 53 Tel Aviv University 129 Tel Dan Stele 13–14, 14fig.1, 32 Tell Beit Mirsim 42 Tell Deir ‘Alla 28 Tell el-Far’ah 42 Tell el-Wawiyat 43n19 Tell en-Nasbeh 42 Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi (Gath) 19n24, 32 Tel Motza 15n9 Tel Zayit 18–19 Tel Zippori 43n19 Temple Mount Sifting Project 18 Temple Scroll 118 “Ten Lost Tribes” tradition 25n53 Teruel (Spain) 264

319

Testament of Abraham 115 Testament of Job 118 Testament of Levi 113 Testament of Moses 115 Testament of Qahat 113 Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs 120 text, and artifact 183 Thanksgiving Psalms (Hodayot, 1QH) 113, 117, 121, 121n31, 151, 152 theodicy 207 Tobit (book) 109, 113, 115 Tohorot 112 Toledo (Spain) 260–261 Tomb of Jason 135 TOPOI (Berlin) 95 Torah 30, 31–32, 205–206, 205nn19–20, 206n21 Torah finials 261–262, 262fig.2 Tosaphists 228, 234 Tosefta 166, 169–170, 169nn8–9, 172–173, 172n19, 174, 200n6 tractates – Avodah Zarah 178 – Bava Mezi’a 178 – Megillah 178 – Pesahim 170 – Sanhedrin 174 – Shevu’ot 174 – Sotah 168 Transjordan, peoples of 23, 44, 48–49 translation 99 Ugaritic letter formulae 72 Umm al-Qanatir 185–186 United States of America, universities 94 universalization 72–73, 74 University of Manchester Library – Rylands Cairo Genizah Collection 215n1 University of Massachusetts at Amherst 1–2 University of Southampton 94 Urania of Worms 230 villages, Israelite 42–44 Visions of Amram 113 Wadi Hamam 185, 186, 192 War Scroll 112, 117, 121 Weissenfels (Germany) 271 wisdom literature 35, 117 Wisdom of Solomon 93, 115

320

Subject Index

Wissenschaft des Judentums movement 86, 199, 241, 279, 288 women’s studies 5, 294 See also gender Words of Michael 113 World Congress for Jewish Studies 242 Worms (Germany) 229, 237–238, 237n120, 261, 270 Yahweh 20, 24, 71, 73, 74 Yerushalmi. See Palestinian Talmud

Yeshiva University 196 Yeshiva University Museum – Printing the Talmud exhibition 195 – Sacred Realm exhibition 195 York University 1–2, 96n44 Zechariah (book) 111, 112 Zoar 186, 187

Primary Sources Index Hebrew Bible Genesis – 1:1 246, 247 – 4:1 250–253, 252n42 – 6:1–4 118 – 12–36 31 – 22 232 – 28:20–22 31 – 31:34 252n43 – 43:23 72 – 43:29 72

Exodus – 3:21–22 244n12 – 6 24 – 11:2–3 244n12 – 12:2 246, 247 – 12:35–36 244n12 – 15 16 – 20:6 70 – 25–40 31–32

Leviticus – 9:22–23 69n25 – 21:1–4 75

Numbers – 6:22–27 69, 71, 74, 75 – 6:24 69n27 – 6:25 72 – 6:27 73

– 21:6–7 20 – 23 59

Isaiah – 6 32–33 – 6–8 32

Jeremiah – 2:5b 31 – 5:19 31 – 7:1–8 31 – 8:19 31 – 31:15 233 – 44 20 – 44:15–19 60

Ezekiel – 8:14 20 – 40–48 126 – 40:10 15n10

Amos – 1:1 31 – 1:9–12 31 – 2:4–5 31 – 2:10–12 31 – 3:1 31 – 3:7 31 – 5:25–26 31

Jonah – 1:9 33

Deuteronomy

Psalms

– 5:10 70 – 6:6–9 73n38 – 7:9 70, 71

– 2–72 35 – 29:1 21 – 30:10 71 – 46 33 – 48 33 – 51:7 251 – 82:6 21 – 88:5–6 71 – 111:9 246, 247

Judges – 5 16

1 Samuel – 27 32

2 Samuel – 8:16–18 19 – 20:23–26 19

1 Kings – 4:1–6 19 – 6–7 13 – 9:15 15

Proverbs – 6:20–21 73n38 – 10–29 35

Esther – 4–5 232

2 Kings

Daniel

– 17 25 – 18:13 17

– 2:18 33 – 2:37 33

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110418873-021

322

Primary Sources Index

– 2:44 33 – 12:2–3 71

Ezra – 1:2 33 – 5:12 33 – 6:9–10 33 – 7:21 33 – 7:23 33

Nehemiah – 1:4–5 33 – 2:4 33 – 2:20 33

2 Chronicles – 36:23 33

Apocrypha 2Maccabees – 2:23 113 – 3:4 134 – 3:4–40 134, 134n35

Pseudepigrapha Jubilees

– 6.343 103n64 – 6.357 103n64 – 7.40–62 101n58 – 7.100–115 101n58 – 7.357 103n62 – 41 97 – 68–69 97 – Jewish Antiquities – 1.127 101n59 – 4.82 101n59 – 11.60 101n59 – 11.159 101n59 – 13.257 105 – 20.17 102 – 20.17–96 102 – 20.38 102 – 20.38–40 103 – 20.41 102 – 20.47 103 – 20.49–51 103n63 – 20.71 103n63 – 20.77 103 – 20.92–96 103n63

– 12:7 33 – 20:7 33 – 22:19 33

Philo of Alexandria

Dead Sea Scrolls 1QS (Serek ha-Yahad, Rule of the Community)

Rabbinic Works Babylonian Talmud

– 11:5–9 33

Ancient Jewish Writers Josephus, Flavius – Against Apion – 1.166 103n62 – 2.255–86 103n65 – 2.280 103n62 – 2.282 103n62 – Bellum judaicum – 1 97 – 1.1–30 97 – 1.4 97 – 2.520 103n64 – 4.567 103n64 – 5.55 103n64 – 5.119 103n64 – 5.252–53 103n64

– De virtutibus – 102–103 103–104

– Bava Batra – 15a 30 – Ketubbot – 63b 226

New Testament Matthew – 22:32 71

Acts – 23:23–35 138

Greek and Latin Works Cassius Dio – 37.16/17 105 – 37.17.1 103n62 – 57.18.5a 104n66 – 60.6.6 104n66 – 67.14.2 104n66 – 68.1.2 104n66

Primary Sources Index

Jerome

Plato

– Against Jovinianus – 1:29 251n39 – 1:37 251n39

– Protagoras – 342e–343b 103n62

Julian

– De Abstinentia – 4.5 106

– Against the Galileans – 42e–43b 106n67 – 49a–c 106n67 – 96c–e 106n67 – 100e–106e 106n67 – 194d–202a 106n67 – 253a–e 106n67 – 305d 106n67 – 306a 106n67 – 314c–e 106n67 – 319d–20c 106n67 – 343c–58e 106n67

Juvenal – Satirae – 5.14.96–106 104n66

Origen

Porphyry

Ptolemy of Ascalon – De differentia vocabulorum – 395 103n62

Strabo – Geographica – 1.2.33 101n59 – 4.21 101n59 – 7.4.4 101n59 – 10.4.6 101n59 – 11.11.1–3 101n59 – 12.2.7 101n59 – 16.2.2 104 – 16.2.22 101n59 – 16.2.28 101n59 – 16.2.34 104

– Contra Celsum – 5.25 105

Suetonius

Pausanias

Tacitus

– 8.16.4–5 103n63

– Historiae – 5.5 104n66

– Tiberius 104n66

323