This volume is the long-delayed completion of the Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum, a multivolume, multiauthored research guide to the study of what was still called, when the first volume was published in 1974, the “Second Temple (or Hellenistic) Jewish background to early Christianity.”
The project as a whole is published in three sections. The titles of the sections and their incorporated volumes give a good sense of the scope of the whole. After the initial volume, by Shmuel Safrai and M. Stern (in cooperation with D. Flusser and W. C. van Unnik), titled The Jewish People in the First Century. Historical Geography, Political History, Social, Cultural and Religious Life and Institutions (1974–76), the series moves on to “Section Two: The Literature of the Jewish People in the Period of the Second Temple and the Talmud.” Volumes include Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period: Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, Qumran Sectarian Writings, Philo, Josephus, edited by Michael E. Stone (1984); The Literature of the Sages. First Part: Oral Tora, Halakha, Mishna, Tosefta, Talmud, External Tractates, edited by Shmuel Safrai (1987); and Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, edited by Martin Jan Mulder (1988). The present volume rounds out this second section of the whole.
The third section, apparently still open to new contributions (there should be, one thinks, a volume devoted to the liturgical collection, Constitutiones Apostolorum), is titled “Jewish Traditions in Early Christian Literature” and includes at this writing the following: Paul and the Jewish Law: Halakha in the Letters of the Apostle to the Gentiles, by Peter J. Tomson (1990); Jewish Historiography and Iconography in Early and Medieval Christianity, edited by Heinz Schreckenberg and Kurt Schubert (1992); Philo in Early Christian Literature: A Survey, by David T. Runia (1993); and The Didache: Its Jewish Sources and Its Place in Early Judaism and Christianity, edited by Huburtus W. M. van de Sandt and David Flusser (2002).
The long delay between the original conception of the project and the completion, at least, of the rabbinics volume was attributable, in part, to the untimely death of Shmuel Safrai in 2003. This throws into relief an issue that the editors of the present volume address at some length in their introduction: The current shape of studies on the mutual impact of early Judaism and the formative Christian traditions has shifted its contour rather dramatically in the three decades since the work was conceived. Under the influence of a variety of scholars, the so-called parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity is viewed less often as a cataclysmic break in the first or second Christian century, but rather as a slow and often unconscious disambiguation, not fully realized by those calling themselves Jews and Christians until perhaps the fifth or sixth century in some quarters.Footnote 1
The result for the present volume is that relatively few of the entries show much interest in the stated agenda of the volumes of the Compendia in dealing with the “literature of the Sages”—using Jewish texts of the second through the seventh century to illumine “the Palestinian Jewish background” of first-century Christianity. In this sense, the essays are entirely in the mainstream of current discourse in the field. But little in this collection notices or addresses the currently ascendant paradigm clearly enough to ask how developments in Eastern Christianity in Syria and Mesopotamia, or developments in Sasanian-Zoroastrian religious culture, may have left echoes in the rabbinic literature of the fifth and sixth centuries. Whereas the original project sought to invite scholars of Christianity to learn how rabbinic texts might illumine the first and second Christian century, it now reaches completion in an emerging climate of opinion in which Eastern Christianity and, especially, the Zoroastrian religiocultural traditions of Persia are viewed as the context for developments in contemporary Judaism.Footnote 2 So, to a certain extent, the volume is a major contribution to a research paradigm whose inspirational springs have begun to dry up, at least in the way that Safrai and Flusser, major shapers of Israeli scholarship on ancient Judaism and Christianity, drew upon them for inspiration.
There is a sense, then, in which the volume as a whole reminds one of a traveler who has packed for Alaska and mistakenly boarded a flight to the Bahamas. The wardrobe is excellent and well made, but not quite appropriate to the climate. This, in fact, may be the saving grace of the project. The contributions are so well done in their own right, and the volume's supervising editors are so skilled in their work, that they have produced a volume that transcends the original editorial agenda that commissioned it. While scholars of early Christianity in the Roman Empire will certainly find much of interest here, I suspect that the volume's most grateful audience will be found among scholars who are centrally interested in rabbinic literature primarily for what it tells us about rabbinic culture in both its elite and more popular reflections during the centuries in which Western Christian, Eastern Christian, and Zoroastrian traditions were the sages' primary cultural interlocutors.
There are no fewer than twenty contributions by as many authors. “Section One: Midrash and Targum” includes essays by Menahem Kahana (“The Halakhic Midrashim”), Marc Hirschman (“Aggadic Midrash”), Myron B. Lerner (“The Works of Aggadic Midrash and The Esther Midrashim”), Chaim Milikowsky (“Seder Olam”), and Zeev Safrai (“The Targums as Part of Rabbinic Literature”). These essays are all classic examples of Wissenschaft des Judentums offered by some of the finest practitioners in the contemporary Israeli academy. Indeed, Kahana's book-length essay on halakhic midrashim is perhaps the most comprehensive treatment of the topic in English since Lauterbach's monumental contribution on the topic in the 1903 Jewish Encyclopaedia. The contributions of Hirschman, Lerner, Milikowsky, and Safrai—though briefer—are equally comprehensive in their attention to the questions of the venue, compilation, and transmission history of the textual reservoirs in which rabbinic culture of antiquity stored its knowledge of the meaning of its scriptures.
The setting of the second section shifts to prayer texts, religious poetry, and the esoteric practices normally labeled as “mysticism.” Broadly speaking, the shift is from rabbinic law and theology—products of the bet midrash per se—to the liturgical imagination that surfaces in and at the edges of the rabbinic synagogue. Contributors are Joseph Tabory (“Prayers and Berakhot” and “The Passover Haggada”), Vered Noam (“Megillat Taanit”), Ezra Fleischer (“Piyyut”), Joseph Yahalom (“Ancient Jewish Poetry in Aramaic and Hebrew”), and Michael D. Swartz (“Mystical Texts”). With the exception of Swartz, who has written most of his major studies in English, the other contributors are distinguished Israeli scholars who are virtually unknown to readers without Hebrew. Their well-documented discussions here, replete with ample bibliographical references, make these essays important contributions to English-language scholarship on the texts they address. Tabory's study of the Haggadah and Noam's on Megillat Ta'anit provide important new perspectives on texts that last received comprehensive treatment in English many decades ago. Fleischer, Yahalom, and Swartz—each a master of the subject at hand—offer useful summaries of their views that will guide studies in these materials for the next generation.
The third section is somewhat of a catchall, justified primarily by the fact that the catches are in themselves fascinating. But this section reveals most clearly the gap between the original commission of the volume and the contemporary shape of the field it enters. Contributors include Mordechai A. Friedman (“Contracts: Rabbinic Literature and Ancient Jewish Documents”), Jonathan J. Price and Haggai Misgav (“Jewish Inscriptions and Their Use”), Samuel S. Kottek (“Medical Interest in Ancient Rabbinic Literature”), Zeev Safrai (“Geography and Cosmography in Talmudic Literature”), Abraham Ofir Shemesh (“Biology in Rabbinic Literature”), and Yuval Harari (“The Sages and the Occult”). The bulk of Friedman's essay focuses on Second Temple and early post-Temple “subliterary” and “documentary” texts that illumine textual problems in the talmudic literature and are relevant as well to the shaping of early Christian traditions. Price and Misgav offer a fascinating introduction to the historical methodologies that are appropriate to the study of Jewish epigraphy and explain the value of epigraphic remains for the study of rabbinic culture. The contributions of Kottek, Ofir Shemesh, and Harari revisit and redefine the ways in which rabbinic texts preserve and transform regnant “cultural knowledge” in such areas as ancient science and demonology. Readers who may last have considered these topics in the antiquated studies of wissenschaftliche pioneers such as Löw, Preuss, Krauss, and Blau will find that much has been going on that is well worth noting. Lacking, unfortunately, is an integrative treatment that teases out the interconnections of the latter material with “mystical” material highlighted by Swartz and the “mainstream rabbinism” of the elite literary tradition of the sages.
The fourth section completes the collection with sorely needed up-to-date discussions of the rabbinic linguistic environment: Moshe Bar-Asher (“Mishnaic Hebrew”), Yohanan Breuer (“Aramaic of the Talmudic Period”), and Daniel Sperber (“Rabbinic Knowledge of Greek”).
A review of this compass is no place to summarize individual essays or to critique them in any detail. Suffice it to say that even those who regard the larger editorial vision of this volume as passé will benefit from virtually every essay included here. Thus, the editors are to be congratulated on gathering excellent scholarship together, organizing it coherently and intelligently, rolling with punches that could have knocked the project out, and producing a volume that fully justifies the long delay in its appearance. Graduate students and researchers in all areas of classical rabbinic Judaism (and even some primarily interested in early Jewish–Christian “dialogue”) will learn much from these essays and owe a debt of gratitude to the editors and contributors alike.
