The Memory of the Temple and the Making of the Rabbis

The Memory of the Temple and the Making of the Rabbis

DIVINATIONS: REREADING LATE ANCIENT RELIGION

Series Editors: Daniel Boyarin, Virginia Burrus, Derek Krueger

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

The Memory of the Temple and the Making of the Rabbis

Naftali S. Cohn

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cohn, Naftali S.

The memory of the Temple and the making of the rabbis / Naftali S. Cohn. — 1st ed.

      p. cm. — (Divinations: rereading late ancient religion)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4457-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Temple of Jerusalem (Jerusalem)—In rabbinical literature. 2. Mishnah—Criticism, interpretation, etc. 3. Rabbis—Office. 4. Judaism—History—Talmudic period, 10–425. I. Title. II. Series: Divinations

BM509.T46C64 2013

296.4'91—dc23

2012014283

For Zehava

Contents

Notes on Usage

Introduction: The Narration of Temple Ritual as Rabbinic Memory in the Late Second or Early Third Century

Chapter 1. Rabbis as Jurists of Judaean Ritual Law and Competing Claims for Authority

Chapter 2. The Temple, the Great Court, and the Rabbinic Invention of the Past

Chapter 3. Narrative Form and Rabbinic Authority

Chapter 4. Constructing Sacred Space

Chapter 5. The Mishnah in the Context of a Wider Judaean, Christian, and Roman Temple Discourse

Conclusion: The Memory of the Temple and the Making of the Rabbis

Appendix A: The Mishnah’s Temple Ritual Narratives and Court-Centered Ritual Narratives

Appendix B: Mishnaic Narratives in Which a Rabbi or Rabbis Issue an Opinion with Respect to a Case

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes on Usage

On Translation and Transliteration

At times throughout the book, I refer to words or passages that are Hebrew or Greek. Whenever knowledge of the original Hebrew adds to an understanding of my point, I quote it in Hebrew and also translate it. At other times, I may provide only translation or transliteration, depending on what is most appropriate for the context. If I would like the Hebrew term itself accessible to all readers, I transliterate it, sometimes in addition to providing the original Hebrew. For the most part, I provide the Greek only in translation or transliteration—though occasionally, when it is most pertinent, I provide the original as well. Greek transliteration follows The SBL Handbook of Style. Hebrew transliteration attempts to follow the scholarly practice of rendering consonants uniquely and conveying additional information about vocalization. At the same time, I wish to present the transliterations such that they can be read following the convention of modern Hebrew pronunciation (which, it must be noted, is merely a convention). To these ends, I have built upon both The SBL Handbook academic style and general-purpose style to create my own transliteration system, which is detailed below. Please note that this is not a full scholarly system. In order to read the transliterated Hebrew words according to conventional pronunciation, simply ignore the diacritical marks (excluding the underdot beneath the h, which indicates the guttural ḥet). The only exception to these pronunciation rules is the letter ו (waw), which is rendered with a w, though conventionally pronounced as a v. As a further general exception to the transliteration rules detailed below, certain common words in Hebrew and Aramaic (including many personal and place names) have at times been rendered according to general usage (or largely according to general usage). Transliterations of vowels in mishnaic passages are based on a combination of the vocalization in MS Parma, MS Kaufmann, and the Albeck edition of the Mishnah (vocalized by Yalon; most frequently, I follow MS Kaufmann). In translating passages of the Mishnah and Tosefta, I follow the standard scholarly practice of rendering fairly literally, and I use square brackets to indicate glosses (and, at times, to indicate corrections or glosses in the manuscript).

On the Manuscripts Used

Against the scholarly consensus, I have decided to make MS Parma (de Rossi 138) the base text for quoting and translating. Scholars have shown convincingly that the alternative, MS Kaufmann, preserves forms not preserved anywhere else (see Bar-Asher, The Different Traditions, and the earlier work he cites). They have shown that this scribe seems to have copied words or forms that would not quite have made sense. At the same time, the scribe of MS Parma seems to have been aware of the different forms and consciously chose those most standard. Feintuch, On the Parma Manuscript, shows that this scribe will fill the end of a line with a shortening of the archaic form of a word, but when commencing the next line with the complete word, he will use the more standard form. Despite these arguments, I have chosen to make MS Parma primary for two reasons. First, the minor differences in linguistic form have no impact on my argument. Indeed, the two manuscripts are nearly identical in every single narrative considered. That MS Kaufmann may be somehow closer to the original linguistic form of the Mishnah (an argument that can be called into question) is irrelevant here. Second, Krupp (On the Relationship) and others have marshaled significant evidence that MS Parma of the Mishnah was part of the same manuscript as MS Vatican 31 of the Sifra, which is an eleventh-century manuscript. Arguments for the greater antiquity of MS Kaufmann (for instance, in Rosenthal, Mishna Aboda Zara) are not convincing. Thus there is evidence that MS Parma is the oldest extant Mishnah manuscript. Because MS Kaufmann is also a very important manuscript, I have always consulted it as well, and recorded any noteworthy variations—none of which, however, has any bearing on the arguments I make. For the most part, variations between MS Kaufmann and MS Parma are minor. On these manuscripts, see also Krupp, Manuscripts of the Mishnah, 253; and Strack and Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, 141. These manuscripts have been accessed online at http://jnul.huji.ac.il/dl/talmud/mishna/selectmi.asp as well as http://kaufmann.mtak.hu/en/ms50/ms50-coll1.htm.

Hebrew Transliteration Guide

Dāgēsh ḥāzāḳ—doubling of consonant (with exceptions)

Tractate and order names are based on The SBL Handbook of Style, with consonants modified to fit these transliterations.

Introduction

The Narration of Temple Ritual as Rabbinic Memory in the Late Second or Early Third Century

When Roman military forces conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple in the year 70, life changed for Judaeans living in the province of Judaea.¹ Aside from the direct consequences of war—the extensive casualties, the imperial appropriation of property, and the greater Roman political domination—Judaeans, or Israelites in rabbinic sources, must have also felt the absence of the Temple. Many Judaeans had regularly visited the Temple in order to participate in its ritual. But now there was no Temple, and the people could no longer make pilgrimage to perform the Temple’s rituals. Priests, whose authority was tied to the Temple, had been powerful figures, but now their power base was gone. In the aftermath of the war of 66–70 CE and the subsequent revolt of 133–35 CE, the structure of Judaean society necessarily changed.²

By the late second and early third century, when members of the early rabbinic group created the Mishnah, the Temple had been destroyed for over a century.³ There was no one still alive who had directly experienced the destruction and concomitant change in ritual life. More than a century after the destruction of the Temple, the normal rhythms of life must have long since resumed for members of the people of Israel living in the Roman province of Syria Palaestina. Post-destruction forms of ritual life had by now taken hold, and the new shape of society had become entrenched.⁴

Despite the passage of time and the disconnection from the physical Temple and its rituals, the early rabbis gave special prominence to Temple ritual when creating the Mishnah.⁵ The Temple and its ritual are indeed one of the Mishnah’s main topics. Of the six orders (that is, large sections, composed of tractates) of the Mishnah, almost the entire order of Ḳodashim (sacred offerings), significant portions of Mo‘ed (sacred time, or daily and festival ritual) and Zera‘im (seeds, or agricultural rules), and portions of the other three orders relate laws of how ritual ought to be done in the Temple and narratives about how it was done. The sheer volume of Temple material—including a significant amount that was no longer applicable after the destruction—shows how central the Temple was for the rabbis.

If Temple ritual was no longer relevant in the daily life of Judaeans because, for the most part, it could not be performed, why did the rabbis who created the Mishnah in the late second and early third centuries devote so much of this text to cataloging Temple ritual in detail? A number of answers to this important question have been suggested. Some scholars have held that in presenting narrative descriptions of how rituals used to be performed in the Temple, the rabbis of the Mishnah were simply preserving earlier traditions dating back to Temple times.⁶ This explanation is insufficient, however, especially since—as other scholars have shown—the rabbis have demonstrably invented details of their accounts, small and large. Moreover, numerous legal opinions about how rituals were done or ought to be done are explicitly attributed to rabbis. Even if they inherited earlier traditions, like authors of all texts, they have thoroughly shaped the material and made it their own.⁷

Another possible explanation is that the laws and narratives about Temple ritual are part of the larger rabbinic project of creating and recording the details of an all-encompassing biblically derived legal system. Temple ritual is part of this system, so the rabbis may have been developing their own and perhaps even earlier traditions based on legal reasoning and exegesis. Aside from simply engaging in traditional legal exegesis and a larger project of legal creation, they may have focused specifically on the Temple to preserve and develop Temple ritual practices for the future, when the Temple would be rebuilt—a hope that they themselves express in the Mishnah.⁸

While these explanations may be partly true, they are not overly convincing, especially in the case of the Mishnah’s narrative accounts that do not simply record how rituals ought to be performed. A very different and far more compelling approach was taken by Jacob Neusner in his work on the Mishnah. According to Neusner, the extensive focus on the Temple in the Mishnah was a rabbinic reaction to the destruction. The loss of the Temple was still felt keenly, and the rabbis responded to the social disaster of its absence by insisting that nothing has changed—that the entire system of sacrifice and sanctuary centered on the Temple and described in the Mishnah remained intact.⁹ This explanation may be true in part, too, yet it ignores the long time that passed since the Temple had been destroyed. By the time the Mishnah was created, all Judaeans surely must have assimilated the changes that the destruction wrought.

In contrast to these earlier explanations, I argue that the most compelling and fruitful explanation for why the rabbis who created the Mishnah focused to such a great extent on the Temple in the Mishnah is that the Temple and its ritual were useful to them in their own time, in the late second and early third centuries. Having been born into a Temple-less world, these rabbis were not reacting to the loss of the Temple and the changes in society that resulted from this loss. Nor were they merely preserving traditions or developing the law.¹⁰ My contention is that in writing or talking about the Temple and its rituals, the rabbis who created the Mishnah were arguing for their own authority over post-destruction Judaean law and ritual practice. They were asserting that their own tradition was correct and that all Judaeans should follow their dictates.

According to the evidence of the Mishnah, the rabbis fashioned themselves as legal experts with erudition in and authority over traditional Judaean law. These rabbis claimed to be the authentic purveyors of Judaean tradition and the traditional Judaean way of life, and they believed that all Judaeans should follow their teachings and rulings, especially in ritual practice.¹¹ Within the larger Roman society and within the Judaean subsociety, however, the rabbis who produced the Mishnah were not particularly powerful. Cultural, political, and legal institutions were controlled by Romans, and the rabbis had neither place nor power within the Roman system. Even among Judaeans, the rabbis were not especially important or powerful. Martin Goodman showed nearly three decades ago that in the Mishnah itself it is admitted that the Jews did not heed rabbinic directives.¹² The rabbis were not, in this interpretation, a powerful group with authority over the Jews of Roman Palestine; but they hoped to be.¹³

Within this setting, what the rabbis said and wrote about the Temple in the Mishnah, especially in narrative form, helped make an argument for their own authenticity and authority. This argument was thoroughly bound up with their social and cultural realities and with the way they understood themselves as a group. Their memory of past Temple ritual was shaped by the place they hoped to attain for themselves and their traditions, which was itself partly a response to the context of Roman domination. Because the Temple continued to be important outside of rabbinic circles, the rabbis seized on the Temple to argue for their own importance within society, particularly among the multiple overlapping subgroups of Judaeans living in Roman Syria Palaestina at the time.¹⁴

Reading Mishnaic Accounts of Temple Ritual

When recording the details of Temple ritual, the rabbis who created the Mishnah often used a distinct form, what I call the Temple ritual narrative, to repeatedly recount how Temple ritual had been performed in the past. In these narratives about past Temple ritual, the rabbinic authors consciously looked back at the past in a way that is distinctive in the Mishnah. As scholars who study representations of the past—sometimes termed collective memory—have suggested, past representations such as these are invariably shaped by their authors’ present realities and tend to serve a function in the present, expressing a group sense of self, giving meaning to the present and, in many cases, arguing for the group’s legitimacy and power.¹⁵ The Mishnah’s Temple ritual narratives, differentiated from the rest of the Mishnah, form a discrete interrelated body of Temple material consciously retelling the past; they thus point toward the ways in which the rabbis shaped the past in order to argue for authority in the present. For the rest of this book, these narratives will be the sole focus.

To illustrate the nature of these texts, I consider one example, the narrative of how the first fruits were brought to the Temple by pilgrims from locales in the Land of Israel, in Mishnah Bikkurim 3:2–8:¹⁶

ב’ כיצד מעלים את הביכורים כל העיירות שבמעמד מתכנסות לעירו

שלמעמד ולנים ברחובה שלעיר ולא היו נכנסים לבתים ולמשכים היה

ג’ הקרובים מביאין תאינים ¹⁷הממונה אומ’ קומו ונעלה ציון אל ייי אלהנו

וקרניו ¹⁸וענבים והרחוקים מביאין גרוגרות וצימוקים השור הולך לפניהם

מצופות זהב ועטרה שלזית בראשו החליל מכה לפניהם עד שמגיעים קרוב

לירושלם הגיעו קרוב לירושלם שלחו לפניהם ועיטרו את ביכוריהם ד’

הפחות הסגנים והגיזברים יוצאים לקראתם ולפי כבוד הנכנסין היו

יוצאין וכל בעלי אומניות שבירושלם עומדין לפניהם ושואלין בשלומם

אחינו אנשי מקום פלוני באתם בשלום ה’ החליל מכה לפניהם עד

שמגיעים להר הבית הגיעו להר הבית אפילו אגריפס המלך נוטל הסל

על כתיפו ונכנס עד שמגיע לעזרה הגיע לעזרה ודברו הלוים בשיר

ארוממך ייי כי דליתני ולא שמ’ אויבי לי הגוזלות שעל גבי הסלים

היו עולות ומה שבידן ניתנין לכהנים ו’ עודיהו הסל על כתיפו קורא

מהגדתי היום לייי אלהיך עד שהוא גומר כל הפרשה ר’ יהוד’ או’ עד

ארמי אובד אבי הגיע לארמי אובד אבי מוריד הסל מן כתיפו ואוחזו

בשפתותיו וכהן מניח ידו תחתיו ומניפו וקורא מארמי אובד אבי עד שהוא

גומר כל הפרשה ומניחו בצד המזבח והשתחוה ויצא ז’ בראשונה כל מי

שהוא יודע לקרות קורא וכל מי שאינו יודע לקרוא מקרין אתו נמנעו

מלהביא התקינו שיהו מקרין את מי שהוא יודע ואת מי שאינו יודע ח’

העשירים מביאין את ביכוריהן בקלתות של כסף ושלזהב והעניים מביאין

אותן בסלי נצרים שלערבה קלופה והסלים והביכורים ניתנים לכהנים

(3:2) How do they bring up the first fruits (to the Temple)?

All the towns in the district [ma‘ămād] gather in the main town of the district [‘irō shelma‘ămād] and sleep in the town square. And they did not used to enter the houses. And to those who arose early, the appointed one used to say, Arise, and let us go up to Zion, to the Lord our God (Jer. 31:6).

(3:3) Those who live near [from the Temple] bring figs and grapes, and those who live far bring dried figs and raisins.

And the ox goes before¹⁹ them with its horns covered in gold and an olive wreath on its head. The flute [ḥālil] plays before them until they reach near Jerusalem.

When they reached near Jerusalem, they sent out [messengers] ahead of them and wreathed their first fruits.²⁰

(3:4) The officers, chiefs, and treasurers [of the Temple] go out to greet them, and they used to go in accordance with the status of those entering. And all the artisans in Jerusalem rise before [those entering] and greet them, Our brothers from such-and-such place, you have come in peace.

(3:5) The flute plays before them until they reach the Temple Mount. When they reached the Temple Mount, even King Agrippa takes the basket on his shoulder and enters. [And the pilgrim continues] until he reaches the Temple courtyard. When he reached the Temple courtyard, the Levites joined in song, I will exalt You, Lord, for You have raised me up and not allowed my enemies to rejoice over me (Ps. 30:1).

The pigeons that were on top of the baskets were offered as burnt offerings, and those that were in their hands were given to the priests.

(3:6) While the basket was still on his shoulder, he recites from I proclaim today to the Lord your God … (Deut. 26:3) until he completes the entire passage [to Deut. 26:11, or perhaps to the end of the prescribed recitation, mid-26:10].

Rabbi Yehudah [Judah] says: Until My father was a wandering Aramean [Deut. 26:5, or perhaps to earlier in the biblical text, until the end of the prescribed recitation in 26:3].

When he reached My father was a wandering Aramean, he takes the basket down from his shoulder, grasps it by its lip, and the priest places his hands beneath [the Israelite’s hands]. And he ritually waves them and recites from My father was a wandering Aramean … until he finishes the entire passage. And he places it down at the side of the altar, and he bowed and exited.

(3:7) Originally anyone who knew how to recite [in Hebrew] would recite, and anyone who did not know how to recite would be prompted with the words [in Hebrew]. They stopped bringing [first fruits], and they decreed that they should prompt with the words both the one who knows and the one who does not.

(3:8) The wealthy bring their first fruits in silver and gold baskets [ḳĕlātōt], and the poor bring them in wicker baskets [sallei nĕtsārim] made from peeled willow. And the baskets [sallim] and the first fruits were given to the priests.

In the way it is presented, this passage recounts in a detailed manner how, in Temple times, the people of a district would gather together, bring their fruits to Jerusalem, and offer them in the Temple.

A puzzling feature of this and similar narratives, one with which any interpreter of these passages must grapple, is the way that verbs of different tenses are used at the same time. In the opening paragraph, for instance, 3:2, there are five verbs: three are participles—which can function as the present tense and are translated as such here (bring up, gather, sleep)—and two are in a compound tense typically called the iterative past, which describes an action done repeatedly and regularly in the past (used to enter, used to say). Later in the narrative, the perfect tense, which seems to function as a simple past, appears as well (reached, wreathed [3:3]; bowed, exited [3:6]). As Yochanan Breuer points out in his seminal article on the tense usage in this type of mishnaic narrative, two fundamental questions are: Why are multiple tenses used? And why are they mixed together in a seemingly arbitrary fashion?²¹ Breuer attempts to read the passages so that the tenses are not mixed arbitrarily; yet I prefer Albeck’s earlier understanding that the tenses vary somewhat arbitrarily. I believe that this mixing was deemed acceptable and natural. In fact, the extensive mixing of the three different tenses, unique to this type of passage, blends the subtle nuances of each tense, giving the sense that these events took place in the past and that they took place regularly, adding a feeling of immanence, and implying that what took place was the law, in an abstract sense.²²

The most significant nuance of the combined use of tenses is the implication of the iterative past, the tense that compounds verbs such as was (to be, perfect tense) plus saying (participle) and which means, in this case, used to say, that is, would say every year when the ritual was performed (Bikkurim 3:2). Especially when taken together with the perfect verbs, this usage implies that all the actions described in the narrative took place in the past and that they took place repeatedly and regularly. The participles, too, though they do not have any inherent implication of the past, may take on the meaning of the iterative past. According to the mishnaic grammarian Mordechay Mishor, the participle, particularly when used in a passage together with the iterative past, may be equivalent to it, implying that the events took place regularly in the past.²³ Thus, the opening paragraph of the first-fruits narrative, Bikkurim 3:2, could be translated: How did they used to bring up the first fruits? All the towns in the district used to gather in the main town of the district and used to sleep in the town square. And they did not used to enter the houses. And to those who arose early, the appointed one used to say, ‘Arise, and let us go up to the Lord our God’ (Jer. 31:6).

Alternatively, the participle, as historical present tense, may be used to give a sense of immanence to the narrative, to make it easier to imagine the events happening, or to give a sense that these events are timeless.²⁴ The participle is used most often in the Mishnah as modal, saying what ought to be done; so these verbs could be intended to convey the law. In context, these are not simply hypothetical laws; so, as I and others have suggested, the ambiguity of the participle adds that these events that happened in the past are also what the law is, what ought to be done in the Temple.²⁵ Overall, the shifting between tenses seems to give multiple shadings to the narrative as a whole: that the ritual occurred regularly and repeatedly in the past; that it is timeless; and that it should or must be performed in a certain way. It may even make the telling more engaging.

Regardless of the precise way that one interprets the mixing of tenses, it is undeniable that the passage refers to events of the past. The rabbinic authors, living long after the destruction, are consciously looking back and saying what used to occur in the Temple in the past. In addition to looking back at the past through the combined use of verbs, four more elements tend to mark Temple ritual narratives as distinct from the rest of the Mishnah and link them to one another into a unique body of mishnaic material.²⁶ These are: 1) their content—rituals done in the past in the Temple or near the Temple, or in the Court; 2) their form—narratives (according to some definitions of the term) describing a series of interconnected actions that together form a whole; 3) recurring conventional phrases or plot elements; and 4) in many cases, the use of an introductory formula that introduces the narrative and contains the word כיצד (kēitsad, how so?). The first of these characteristics is relatively obvious. The first-fruits narrative—like the narratives about the Passover offering or the daily sacrifice in the Temple, the narrative about the Day of Atonement ritual, and the narrative about the cutting and offering of the barley grain ‘ōmer—focuses on the details of a particular ritual that once took place in the Temple.²⁷

The second feature, the narrative nature of the passages, is less obvious and somewhat controversial. Some would hesitate to call these texts narratives because, by their very nature, they are not about specific one-time occurrences that happened to particular individuals, and so cause and effect play almost no role. The characters are relatively flat because, for the most part, they are generic roles such as Israelite, Temple officials, and priest. Yet, as Moshe Simon-Shoshan has forcefully argued, though these may differ from some types of narratives in that they lack what he calls specificity, they do have a second fundamental feature of narrative, what he calls dynamism. Having dynamism, in his view, means that they describe transition, transformation, and change … rather than stasis.²⁸ Many narrative theorists break down this feature of narrative even further, to a more fundamental level. As H. Porter Abbott writes: Simply put, narrative is the representation of an event or a series of events.²⁹ Narratives describe something or a number of things that happen. This, however, may be too basic a definition, so others offer a slightly more expansive definition: narratives tell of a succession of events that unfold chronologically in time.³⁰ Gerald Prince adds further key characteristics that are linked to a narrative’s dynamism: in a ‘true’ narrative as opposed to the mere recounting of a random series of changes of state, these situations and events also make up a whole, a sequence the first and last major terms of which are partial repetitions of each other, a structure having—to use Aristotle’s terminology—a beginning, a middle, and an end.³¹

Though the Temple ritual narratives lack the specificity of many narratives, they have these other key elements of narrative. The various details of the first-fruits ritual, in our example, form a series of interrelated events that unfold in time and together make a whole. The narrative begins in the town with the pilgrims gathering together and concludes in the Temple, once the fruits have been given. In the view of many contemporary narrative theorists, this is sufficient to call them narratives.

The purpose of defining these passages as narrative is not merely to apply an essentialist narrative label, which would not be especially interesting. Rather, by identifying the narrative characteristics that these texts possess—their narrativity—we can see how the particular way in which the Mishnah describes Temple ritual tends to link these passages to one another intertextually and distinguish them from other passages in the Mishnah.³² As Simon-Shoshan argues, almost all segments of Mishnah can be differentiated by their degree of narrativity. In his view, this means the degree to which they possess specificity and dynamism. Building on this, and drawing on more recent theoretical work on the concept, I suggest that narrativity is not merely a product of two narrative characteristics, but of the degree to which a text has or does not have a whole range of narrative features.³³ Most