The Anthology in Jewish Literature

The Anthology in Jewish Literature

David Stern, Editor

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

The Anthology in Jewish Literature

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The Anthology in Jewish Literature

Edited by David Stern

1 2004

1 Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Sa˜o Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto

Copyright 䉷 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The anthology in Jewish literature / edited by David Stern. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. Contents: Ancient Israel and classical Judaism, Anthology in the Torah and the question of Deuteronomy / Jeffrey Tigay—Wisdom and the anthological temper / James Kugel—Order, sequence, and selection: the Mishnah’s anthological choices / Yaakov Elman—Anthological dimensions of the Babylonian Talmud / Eliezer Segal— Anthology and polysemy in classical midrash / David Stern—The Middle Ages. The prayerbook (siddur) as an anthology of Judaism / Joseph Tabory—Yalqut Shim
oni and the medieval midrashic anthology / Jacob Elbaum— The Hebrew narrative in the Middle Ages / Eli Yassif—Midrash rabbah and the medieval collector mentality / Marc Bregman—The modern period. Homo anthologicus: Micha Joseph Berdyczewski and the anthological genre / Zipora Kagan—Sefer haaggadah: creating a classic anthology / Mark Kiel—The ingathering of traditions: Zionism’s anthology project / Israel Bartal—Gender and the anthological tradition in modern Yiddish poetry / Kathryn Hellerstein—Our poetry is like an orange grove: anthologies of Hebrew poetry in Eretz-Yisrael / Hannan Hever— Anthologizing the vernacular: collections of Yiddish literature in English translation / Jeffrey Shandler— Textualizing the tales of the People of the Book: folk narrative anthologies and national identity in modern Israel / Galit Hasan-Rokem—The Holocaust according to its anthologists / David Roskies. ISBN 0-19-513751-5 1. Jewish literature—History and criticism. 2. Anthologies. 3. Rabbinical literature—History and criticism. 4. Judaism—Literary collections—History. 5. Jews—Literary collections—History. I. Stern, David, 1949– PN842 .A58 2004 808.8'98924—dc22. 2003061137 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Acknowledgments

his book began as a workshop entitled, “The Anthological Ontology in Hebrew

TLiterature,” held in May 1995 under the auspices of the Porter Institute of Tel Aviv University and with the special encouragement of its director at the time,

Ziva ben Porat. Some of the papers from that workshop along with numerous others appeared as three special issues of the journal Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History (17:1 [January 1997], 17:2 [May 1997], and 19:1 [January 1999]). I especially want to thank Alan Mintz and David Roskies, the editors of Prooftexts, for lending the journal’s support and resources to the topic. A special acknowledgment of gratitude goes to Cynthia Read, our editor at Oxford, for both her support and her patience; to Robert Milks and Theo Calderara for overseeing a complicated process of publication; and to Patricia Wright for her extremely discerning eye for detail. Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude that even an anthology of thanks could not convey to Kathryn Hellerstein, my beloved, and to our children, Rebecca and Jonah, for their constant inspiration and for allowing me occasionally to use the computer.

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Contents

Contributors ix 1. The Anthology in Jewish Literature: An Introduction

3

David Stern

I. ANCIENT ISRAEL AND CLASSICAL JUDAISM 2.

Anthology in the Torah and the Question of Deuteronomy

15

Jeffrey H. Tigay

3.

Wisdom and the Anthological Temper

32

James Kugel

4.

Order, Sequence, and Selection: The Mishnah’s Anthological Choices 53

5.

Anthological Dimensions of the Babylonian Talmud

Yaakov Elman

81

Eliezer Segal

6.

Anthology and Polysemy in Classical Midrash

108

David Stern

II. THE MIDDLE AGES 7.

The Prayerbook (Siddur) as an Anthology of Judaism

143

Joseph Tabory

8.

Yalqut Shim
oni and the Medieval Midrashic Anthology

159

Jacob Elbaum

9.

The Hebrew Narrative Anthology in the Middle Ages

176

Eli Yassif

10.

Midrash Rabbah and the Medieval Collector Mentality Marc Bregman

vii

196

viii Contents

III. THE MODERN PERIOD 11.

Homo Anthologicus: Micha Joseph Berdyczewski and the Anthological Genre 211

12.

Sefer Haaggadah: Creating a Classic Anthology 226

13.

The Ingathering of Traditions: Zionism’s Anthology Projects

Zipora Kagan Mark W. Kiel

244

Israel Bartal

14.

Gender and the Anthological Tradition in Modern Yiddish Poetry 259

15.

“Our Poetry Is Like an Orange Grove”: Anthologies of Hebrew Poetry in Eretz Yisrael 281

16.

Anthologizing the Vernacular: Collections of Yiddish Literature in English Translation 304

17.

Textualizing the Tales of the People of the Book: Folk Narrative Anthologies and National Identity in Modern Israel 324

18.

The Holocaust According to Its Anthologists 335

Kathryn Hellerstein

Hannan Hever

Jeffrey Shandler

Galit Hasan-Rokem David G. Roskies

Contributors

Israel Bartal is Avraham Harman Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Marc Bregman is Professor of Rabbinic Literature, Hebrew Union College, Jewish Institute of Religion, Jerusalem, Israel. Jacob Elbaum is Professor of Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Yaakov Elman is Associate Professor of Judaic Studies in the Bernard Revel Graduate School, Yeshiva University. James Kugel is Meisler Professor of Bible at Bar Ilan University. Galit Hasan-Rokem is Max and Margarethe Grunwald Professor of Folklore at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Kathryn Hellerstein is Ruth Meltzer Senior Lecturer in Yiddish Language and Literature and Jewish Studies at the University of Pennslyvania. Hannan Hever is Professor of Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Zipora Kagan is Professor of Hebrew Literature Emeritus at Haifa University. Mark W. Kiel is Rabbi at Congregation Bnai Israel in Emerson, New Jersey. David G. Roskies is Sol and Evelyn Henkind Professor of Yiddish Literature at The Jewish Theological Seminary. Eliezer Segal is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Calgary, Canada. Jeffrey Shandler is an assistant professor in the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University.

ix

x Contributors David Stern is Ruth Meltzer Professor of Classical Hebrew Literature at the University of Pennslyvania. Joseph Tabory is a professor in the Talmud Department of Bar Ilan, incumbent of the Zoltan and Lya Gaspar Chair for Talmudic Studies. Jeffrey H. Tigay is A. M. Ellis Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania. Eli Yassif is professor of Hebrew Literature at Tel-Aviv University.

The Anthology in Jewish Literature

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1 david stern

The Anthology in Jewish Literature An Introduction

rom the Talmud to the latest collection of contemporary American Jewish

Fwriters in your local bookstore window, the anthology has been a pervasive, ubiquitous presence in Jewish literature throughout its history. The anthology may also be its oldest literary genre—if, that is, one accepts the documentary hypothesis, according to which the Pentateuch is a collection from different literary sources. Even if one does not accept the thesis, it is clear that many biblical books either are themselves collections, such as the books of Psalms or Proverbs, or tend to exhibit what might be called the “anthological habit”—that is, the tendency of gathering together discrete, sometimes conflicting retellings of stories or traditions (e.g., the two versions of the creation of woman, or analogous lists of unrelated commandments and miscellaneous laws) and preserving them side by side as though there were no difference, conflict, or ambiguity between them. Eventually, of course, this tendency assumes its full shape in the many explicit anthologies, or anthology-like works, that populate later Jewish literature. Among these are almost all the canonical texts of the rabbinic period, including the Mishnah and the Tosefta, the classical midrash collections, the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds, and the siddur (prayerbook) and its offshoots, including the Passover Haggadah. Subsequently, in the Middle Ages the anthology continues to hold its prominent position in the literary spectrum. In addition to the many summae of the classical rabbinic heritage that are compiled throughout the medieval period, the anthology becomes a primary medium for the recording of stories, poems, and interpretations of classical texts original to the period. Finally, in the modern age the anthological genre is transformed into a decisive instrument for cultural retrieval and re-creation, not only in such classic works as Sefer Haaggadah and Mimekor Yisrael but also in innumerable works of the early Zionist project and in modern Yiddish literature. No less important, the anthology has played an indispensable role in the creation of significant fields of research in Jewish studies, including midrash, Hebrew poetry, folklore, and popular culture. And yet, despite the ubiquity of the anthological presence in Jewish literature 3

4 The Anthology in Jewish Literature

and its centrality to that tradition, the genre has hardly been recognized, let alone studied or analyzed. As a literary form, the anthology has typically been shrugged off as the slightest of genres, “a hodgepodge of this and that,” as one well-spoken scholar in the field has put it. This neglect of the genre is not unique to Jewish literary studies. In general literary studies, the anthology has hardly been noted, at least until recently, and even today, when it has become a subject of some critical discussion, that is almost exclusively for its significance for canon formation. This volume hopes to redress this neglect by presenting essays that treat exemplary anthologies in Jewish literature throughout its history and significant moments in the evolution and development of the genre. Among the works treated here are many of the classical foundational texts of Jewish literature. Alongside these canonical works, however, are a number of lesser-known but no less significant works that equally, and sometimes even more revealingly, show how the anthology has played a formative role in the history of Jewish literature and culture. In selecting the primary texts to be treated in these essays under the anthological rubric, I have more or less kept to the dictionary definition of the term as “a collection of choice literary extracts,” although one might quibble with the use of the word “choice,” and I have not limited myself in any way to conventionally literary—that is, belletristic—sources. Surely one of the more striking signs of the genre’s significance in Jewish literature is the fact that, at one point or another, there has been an anthological composition for virtually every discipline and field in the Jewish intellectual and literary heritage. But as the essays in this volume demonstrate, the definition of the form is hardly settled; what is called an anthology is still open to redefinition. In addition to conventional anthologies, I have included such works as the Talmud—even though it may resemble an encyclopedia more than an anthology—precisely because it was a collaborative project that programmatically preserved and systematically collated the traditions of earlier generations. In fact, for such works as the Talmud, which are generically “problematic” precisely because they do not fit neatly into any of the familiar literary genres, the category of the anthology provides an extraordinarily useful heuristic tool for defining literary identity. I have not, in any case, allowed the strict definition of the term to delimit or discourage exploration of the anthology’s generic possibilities. As the essays in this volume repeatedly show, the Jewish anthology has taken numerous forms and played many different roles; all in all, it has shown itself to be far richer and more flexible than anyone might initially suppose. Furthermore, precisely because its features may appear so antithetical to many of our usual assumptions about literary form, authorship, and genre formation, the anthology offers a splendid opportunity to test and expose the boundaries of our conceptions about literature. Although it is customary in an introduction of this sort for the editor to offer a kind of summary of the essays that follow, it may be more worthwhile here— because of the absence of an existing “theory” of the anthology—to offer some prefatory remarks on significant theoretical issues that are raised by the subject of the anthology in Jewish literature.1 Of these, there are at least five worth mentioning.

An Introduction 5

The first is the anthology’s own literary form. Although this would seem to be an obvious fact, it is important to acknowledge that not all anthologies collect and organize their contents identically. One needs to distinguish, for example, between compilations in which the editor or compiler chooses relatively small units of preexisting material and then recombines and revises them to create essentially new compositions, and anthologies that consist of larger blocks of material that the editors have not tampered with but simply combined with other large blocks, sometimes even with entire works so as to form what are in effect small libraries.2 (In contrast, the Hebrew Bible, which analogously combines whole books, is a large library.) This is a useful distinction, but it is not entirely adequate, since even anthologies that simply present texts “as they really are” (to paraphrase Ranke) can radically alter and shape their readers’ reception and understanding of their contents according to how they are placed within the anthological context. For example, a poem by Bialik juxtaposed with a Rabbinic aggadah will have a different meaning than when it is juxtaposed with another poem by Tchernichowsky. Unlike beauty, which lies in the eyes of its beholder, the meaning of an anthologized text always lies in the mind of its compiler. Or to put the same point in more jargon-laden terms, there is no anthological organization devoid of an ideological orientation. In the anthology, literary form, organization, even sequence, are all ideological subjects.3 A second distinction one might make in regard to literary form is that between “explicit” and “implicit” anthologies—that is, works that present themselves overtly as collections of preexisting sources and traditions, like the classical midrashic collections, and those that don’t, like certain books in the Bible or the Talmud or some medieval collections of narratives or even a modern work like Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews, a monument of twentieth-century Jewish scholarship that retells the biblical narrative by reweaving nearly every strand of extrabiblical lore its author could gather into a single narrative cloth.4 Whether to consider these last examples under the formal rubric of the anthology is less crucial than to recognize those elements in them that have been shaped by the collecting-andpreserving needs of the anthological habit. The “explicit” anthologies, on the other hand, may profitably be viewed as forming a kind of continuum along whose trajectory we might characterize different works by the strength of their principle of selection. Accordingly, one might distinguish between an “archive,” which claims to have no significant principle of selection except for the wish to preserve material; a “collection,” which is determined by a clear and acknowledged principle of selection although the sheer desire for preservation still remains its primary motivation; and an “anthology proper,” in which a very strong principle of selection regardless of desire for preservation is the operative criterion of inclusion. These gradations in anthological “strength” are only a small indication of the varieties of anthologies, and of the different kinds of choices and decisions that stand behind the historical genre. But what, then, are the primary principles of selection that have historically determined the genre? Is it possible to discern explicit, or even implicit, conventions according to which anthologists have dealt with their materials? Do these conventions or principles themselves form a tradi-

6

The Anthology in Jewish Literature

tion that is in any way continuous? And how has the anthology as a literary genre changed, and to what extent have those changes been shaped by the gentile, nonJewish host cultures in the many lands of the Diaspora in which nearly all Jewish anthologies were composed until the Zionist renaissance in the modern period? The study of the anthology as a literary genre leads to the second issue raised by the genre, namely, the study of the “anthologist” and “editor” or “redactor” as a literary agent and persona in his own right, and the mechanics of anthologizing. How have anthologies actually been produced? What have been their compositional and publication histories? What causes and motives have led their authors to compile them, and how have the editors looked upon what they have done? How have the processes of their production related to the nature of the material collected, that is, the politics of anthologizing? Have Jewish anthologies in different cultural centers and historical periods been influenced by comparable models or processes in the non-Jewish host culture? In responding to these questions, scholarship in other areas of Jewish studies and related fields often proves helpful. For example, Bible scholarship has long concerned itself with the processes of redaction, and some of it has touched upon questions related to the anthologizing process.5 In a different vein, contemporary scholarship on Jewish manuscript culture in the Middle Ages and on the history of the Jewish book in the early age of printing has demonstrated the often highly creative and formative role that scribes, correctors, and early printers played not only in silently transmitting Jewish texts and their traditions as passive agents of intellectual commerce, but in actively shaping the contents and forms of those texts and traditions and thereby determining the ways in which they were read and disseminated.6 The editors and anthologists of Jewish literature were no less creative and formative; indeed, even such seemingly passive acts as the decision to copy several discrete texts within a single codex—which may be considered a rudimentary form of the anthology— may have given shape to a major moment of literary history, as we are just now beginning to understand. What, then, can we learn from our anthologies about their often anonymous creators, and what can such knowledge about anthologizers and editors teach us about Jewish literary culture? The question of the anthologist/editor brings us to the third issue of interest raised by the genre of the anthology, namely, its function. Surely the most (and often the only) discussed aspect of the anthology has been its role as a medium of canonization, its service in authorizing, sacralizing, and legitimating certain works and in marginalizing, delegitimating, and anathemizing others. Some of these canonical questions have been raised by contemporary critics in respect to modern Hebrew and Yiddish literary anthologies, but outside this specific area the topic has hardly been treated.7 Even when the subject has been treated, little attention has been paid to the special valence that the concept of canon possesses in Jewish tradition and the different natively Jewish ways in which the act of canonization has historically been exercised in traditional Jewish literature (such as through the composition of authoritative interpretations and commentaries). But how has the canonizing process changed as it moved from the classical sacred tradition to the modern, more secularized realm? How do certain anthologies not

An Introduction 7

only canonize and authorize the traditions they choose to preserve, but become themselves canonical documents? The fourth area of theoretical interest is perhaps the most singular Jewish trait of the anthology: its role in serving as a medium for the transmission, preservation, and creation of tradition. In his seminal essay “Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism” (published in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays), Gershom Scholem demonstrated how the commentary genre has served as a medium for innovation in Jewish religious tradition precisely by pretending merely to present the “original” meaning of earlier, more ancient, and typically canonical texts when, in fact, the commentary has regularly presented some of the most radically new ideas in Jewish thought. A similar argument can be made for the anthology that pretends merely to present, quote, and select sources from earlier authoritative works. In fact, the very act of selection can be a powerful instrument for innovation; juxtaposition and recombination of discrete passages in new contexts and combinations can radically alter their original meaning. This is certainly the case with implicit anthologies—the Talmud is easily the best example—but it is also true of explicit anthologies in classical, medieval, and modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature. In modern Jewish culture, the anthology has also explicitly served an additional function. This is the fifth and final area of special interest: the anthology’s role as an agent in the creation, or re-creation, of Jewish culture and community. Not only has the anthology functioned as a medium for retrieving and re-creating tradition—the most famous case is Bialik and Ravnitzky’s Sefer Haaggadah—but it has also served as a figurative, idealized space for imagining new communities of readers and audiences, for transforming the past into a new entity through conscious fragmentation, literary montage, and collage. In these works, political and cultural ideology takes on material form in the shape of the anthology, and inevitably these examples of the literary form most insistently raise the question of the relation between ideology and literary production. Whether we are talking about early Zionist anthologies or more recent attempts to anthologize the Holocaust, it is in their writing that the anthology as a genre meets history. While the seventeen essays in this volume do not cover every aspect of the anthology in Jewish literature, let alone every anthology, they touch upon most of the major topics I have just delineated.8 The essays are arranged chronologically in three sections, devoted to Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism (through Late Antiquity), the Middle Ages, and the Modern Period. The five essays in the first section, on anthological compositions in the Bible and in the classical literature of the Rabbinic period, together constitute a powerful argument for the anthology as perhaps the single most important literary genre in early Jewish literature. By making this argument, of course, the authors in this section are using the term “anthology” broadly. As Jeffrey Tigay suggests in his essay on Deuteronomy and anthology in the Torah, the anthological dimension is partly to be found in how we imagine the redactor thought; on the other hand, Tigay also makes a strong case for viewing anthologization as a compositional device in putting together even a “single” passage like Moses’ first speech. In his

8 The Anthology in Jewish Literature

essay on Proverbs and the wisdom literature, James Kugel follows an analogously double-pronged approach to what he calls “the anthological temper.” As Kugel argues, the anthological form of this literature is intrinsically connected to its basic assumption: that there exists a divine plan behind human reality in all its chaos. Further, it is understood that even if a sage might never know everything, it is still possible for him to compile a collection of what he does know, and that is decidedly not—as the collections demonstrate—an idle activity. Kugel’s insight about the cultural value of the anthologizing activity in the ancient world finds direct application in the three essays devoted to the anthology during the classical Rabbinic period—Yaakov Elman’s study of the Mishnah, Eliezer Segal’s essay on the Babylonian Talmud, and my own exploration of the subject in relation to the various midrashic collections. As all three essays acknowledge, the literary works they focus upon are all sui generis—that is, each is difficult to define independently in ordinary generic terms. To give only the most obvious example: What is the Mishnah? Is it a law code, study collection, or textbook? Or a gathering of lecture notes, or a philosophical work? Different scholars have proposed each of these possibilities. By focusing upon its anthological dimension, it is possible for one to avoid the necessity for a monolithic or single answer to the question of the Mishnah’s identity; it is also easier to isolate its “ungeneric” features and thereby to identify its salient features. The same is true of other Rabbinic texts. Even if in the end it is impossible to arrive at a satisfactory or conclusive definition for the documents, the anthological approach helps us articulate “how little these generic categories help us in defining the singularity of a work like the Mishnah,” as Elman writes. Eliezer Segal comes to an even more radical conclusion in his study of the Babylonian Talmud: the final editors / redactor of the BT sought to make their text more than an anthology, that is, more than a mere collection. For Segal, the Talmud challenges our notions of anthology itself, demanding an even more dynamic notion of the genre if it is to prove useful in describing works like the Talmud. Finally, in my own essay on midrash, I use the anthological genre as an avenue for appreciating both the elementary forms of midrashic discourse and the nature of the larger collections, but the very nature of the latter as anthologies also leads me to the conclusion that these were not commentaries to be studied by ordinary readers but essentially source books for professionals. The four essays on the anthology in the Middle Ages begin to show even more dramatically how the genre is a category of cultural as well as literary significance—indeed, how literature and culture are inseparably linked through the medium of anthology. Thus the prayerbook, in its multiple and variegated designs, has historically reflected different communal identities, as Joseph Tabory conclusively demonstrates in his article on the literature of liturgy, and its very anthological dimension points to an inherently communal function. So, too, in his fascinating study of medieval Hebrew story collections, Eli Yassif shows how Eleazar Halevi’s habits of anthologizing in Sefer Hazikhronot, especially his repetitions of the same material, seem to reflect an attempt to present a pluralistic account of the Jewish historical narrative that would appeal to different audiences of readers and thereby link them. Jacob Elbaum’s investigation of late midrashic collections

An Introduction 9

such as Yalqut Shim
oni raises the additional question of the “originality” of anthologies. Anthologies are typically conceived as inherently secondary and lacking in originality, but, as Elbaum shows, it is often impossible to distinguish between early and late collections of traditional material and to know precisely how the editors of “late” anthologies like Yalqut Shim
oni viewed their work in relation to that of their predecessors. The real question Elbaum’s essay raises is the role of the anthologizer or editor: How active is his (or her) intervention in the act of anthologizing? This question is implicitly advanced in Marc Bregman’s groundbreaking study of the compilation and publication history of Midrash Rabbah, which was, as Bregman shows, essentially the creation of a printer who joined a number of disparate midrashic collections together to make a more marketable commodity, thereby creating a new community of readers as well. Bregman’s study transports us out of the Middle Ages and into the Early Modern period, but he also shows how the abiding problematics of the earlier period survive into the later one. Fittingly, the final section, devoted to the Modern Period, is also the lengthiest. The first three essays—Zipora Kagan’s study of Berdyczewski and his many anthologies, Mark Kiel’s treatment of Bialik’s Sefer Haaggadah, and Israel Bartal’s essay on the Zionist kinnus anthologies—all vividly demonstrate the multiple functions of the anthology in modern Hebrew literature: on the one hand as a primary medium for the retrieval and transmission of past tradition, and on the other as a force of cultural consolidation and community building. In all three cases the very act of anthologizing and anthology making comes to possess a virtually ontological status. The next two essays in the section—Kathryn Hellerstein’s survey of Ezra Korman’s anthology of Yiddish women’s poetry against the backdrop of other Yiddish poetry anthologies, and Hannan Hever’s treatment of modern Hebrew poetry anthologies—both demonstrate unequivocally the power of anthologies as canonizing labors. Hellerstein’s study connects the act of canonization to the politics of gender, Hever’s to the politics of Zionism. The final three essays in the section extend the cultural reach of anthologies in modern Jewish culture in three very different directions. Jeffrey Shandler shows vividly how anthologies of Yiddish literature in translation essentially saved and transmitted different visions of Yiddish culture for English-speaking, primarily American, audiences. Galit Hasan-Rokem’s study of Dov Noy and the Israel Folklore Archive shows how the act of anthologizing played a formative role in creating both notions of modern Israeli identity (by, paradoxically, reflecting the diversity of Israeli society) and (perhaps less wittingly) the scholarly discipline of Jewish folklore—and how these two were inseparably connected as well. Finally, David Roskies’s treatment of various Holocaust anthologies offers a compelling demonstration of the abiding power of anthologies to shape contemporary Jewish culture in its own self-understanding by presenting and authorizing different ideological visions of the most horrible trauma in Jewish history and its impact. If nothing else, this collection of essays should show readers that, to paraphrase Horatio, there exist more types of anthologies in Jewish literature than you have ever dreamt of. One of the more famous literary adages of our age proclaims: “The meaning of a literary work is always another literary work.” The anthology, perhaps

10 The Anthology in Jewish Literature

more literally than any other literary work, realizes the truth of this formulation through its very existence. Yet the same recognition has also enabled us to appreciate the anthology as a literary form and to make it such an invaluable key for unlocking the enigmatic identities of so many classic, foundational Jewish texts. More than being simply a subject of literary interest and value, the anthology as a form and genre seems to touch upon essential aspects of the Jewish imagination: its desire always to incorporate opposites, to preserve multiplicities of traditions, to incorporate parallel traditions rather than impose orthodoxy by accepting one version and excluding the other. These aspects, along with the anonymity and collective nature of the genre, its fragmentary yet collage-like effect, and above all, its utopian dream to gather in the dispersed sparks of Jewish literary creativity, all make the subject of the anthology a uniquely fitting vehicle for broaching new questions about the meaning and shaping of Jewishness. By reinserting the anthology into the Jewish literary tradition, it is hoped that this anthology of essays on the Jewish anthology will stimulate such questions.

Notes This essay was adapted from Prooftexts 17 (1997):1–7 and Prooftexts 19 (1999):83–86, by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1. While there is as yet no definitive book on the theory of the anthology, see pro temp Anne Ferry, Tradition and the Individual Poem: An Inquiry into Anthologies (Stanford, Conn.: 2001); cf. The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany, ed. Stephen G. Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996), esp. Barbara A. Shailor, “A Cataloger’s View,” pp. 153–67, and James J. O’Donnell, “Retractations,” pp. 169–73. The classic work on the medieval anthology remains Richard A. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, Preachers, Florilegia and Sermons: Studies on the Manipulus florum of Thomas of Ireland (Toronto: 1979), esp. pp. 3–92. 2. On compilations, see Sara Japhet, “The Nature and Distribution of Medieval Compilatory Commentaries in the Light of Rabbi Joseph Kara’s Commentary on the Book of Job,” in The Midrashic Imagination: Jewish Exegesis, Thought and History, ed. Michael Fishbane (Albany, N.Y., 1993), pp. 98–130. I want to thank Marc Bregman for calling my attention to this essay as well as the one in the next note. 3. Lucia Re, “(De)Constructing the Canon: The Agon of the Anthologies on the Scene of Modern Italian Poetry,” Modern Language Review 87 (1992):585–602. 4. On Ginzberg, see my introduction to the new edition of the Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia, 2003). 5. See Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism, ed. Jeffrey H. Tigay (Philadelphia, 1985), esp. Tigay’s introduction, pp. 1–20; and his essay, “Conflation as a Redactional Technique,” pp. 53–96. 6. For a good survey of the current state of scholarship in this emerging field of Jewish scholarship, see the proceedings of the conference “Artefact and Text: The Re-creation of Jewish Literature in Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts,” published as a special issue of the Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 75, no. 3 (autumn 1993), esp. the essays of Israel M. Ta-Shma, Malachi Beit-Arie, and Stefan C. Reif.

An Introduction 11 7. See, for example, Abraham Novershtem, “Yiddish Poetry in a New Context,” Prooftexts 8 (1988):355–63; Kathryn Hellerstein, “A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish,” in Handbook of Jewish-American Literature: An Analytic Guide to Themes and Sources, ed. Lewis Fried (New York, 1988), pp. 195–237; “Canon and Gender: Women Poets in Two Modern Yiddish Anthologies,” Shofar 9 (1991):9–23, reprinted in Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing, ed. Judith Baskin (Detroit, 1995), pp. 136–52; and Hellerstein’s essay in this volume. See also James Kugel’s review essay of T. Carmi’s Penguin Anthology of Hebrew Verse in Prooftexts 2 (1982):209–26; and David G. Roskies, “The Treasures of Howe and Greenberg,” Prooftexts 3 (1983):109–14. The reader may also find relevant a number of the essays in the special issue of Prooftexts 15 (January 1995), “The Role of Periodicals in the Formation of Modern Jewish Identity,” esp. Alan Mintz’s insightful introduction, “The Many Rather Than the One: On the Critical Study of Jewish Periodicals,” pp. 1–4. 8. I would like to mention two important essays that appeared in Prooftexts (19, no. 1 [January 1999]) and that, for reasons of space, could not be reprinted here: Marjorie Lehman, “The
Ein Ya
aqov: A Collection of Aggadah in Transition,” and Boaz Huss, “The Anthological Interpretation: The Emergence of Anthologies of Zohar Commentaries in the Seventeenth Century.” The reader interested in additional aspects of the Jewish anthology will find much of significance in both essays.

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i

ANCIENT ISRAEL AND CLASSICAL JUDAISM

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2 jeffrey h. tigay

Anthology in the Torah and the Question of Deuteronomy

nthologies go back to the oldest stage in Jewish literature.1 The Bible consists

of twenty-four distinct books according to the Jewish count, and the very term A “Bible,” though singular in English, goes back to the Greek plural ta biblia, “the

books.” The original separateness of the Bible’s components was manifest in the fact that prior to the adoption of the codex (by Christians in the second and following centuries and by Jews after the talmudic period) it was, physically, a group of scrolls rather than a single volume.2 Accordingly, early writers had no name for the collection as a whole and could use only descriptive phrases such as “the Law, the Prophets, and the other books” (Prologue to the Greek of Ben Sira [Ecclesiasticus]) and “the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms” (Luke 24:44). Several of the names eventually adopted also reflect the Bible’s anthological character: not only rabbinic haSefarim, “the books” (cf. Daniel 9:2) and Kitvei haKodesh, “the sacred writings,” but the names used in the Middle Ages even after the codex was adopted:
Esrim ve-arb
ah or Kaf-dalet, “the twenty-four (books),” and Tanakh, the acronym for Torah, Neviim uKetuvim, “the Torah, Prophets, and Writings.” Note as well Bibliothe¯ca, “collection of books,” used by Jerome and others.3 In this sense the Bible as a whole is what David Stern calls an explicit anthology.4 The same is true of certain of its individual books, which explicitly contain the works of different writers, such as Psalms, Proverbs, and Trei
Asar, “the Twelve” (i.e., the Minor Prophets, which were written on a single scroll).5 The term “anthology” also refers to a collection of the works of a single author. This sense applies to most of the individual books of the prophets, which consist of the collected speeches of the prophets whose names they bear. Other books are implicitly anthological, combining materials from originally separate sources without explicitly saying so.6 A few prophetic books seem to contain the speeches of two or three different prophets, such as Isaiah, Hosea, Micah,7 and Zechariah. The best-known implicit anthology in the Bible is the Torah, as 15

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its composition is understood in modern scholarship. In the next section we look more closely at its composition.

The Torah The Torah presents a running narrative of Israel’s early history composed of materials from originally separate sources. Its evolution was a process of composition followed by conflation. That is, three variant narratives of early Israelite history (called J, E, and P by scholars) were each created by the combination of originally separate materials; they are each, in other words, composite. Subsequently, these three variants were interwoven, or conflated, with each other, and a fourth source (D) was added, thus creating the Torah essentially as we know it today. Sources A typical view would summarize the process of composition more or less as follows.8 The original literary units underlying the Torah were narratives about the early Hebrew tribes and their leaders. Such narratives were for the most part created, and at first transmitted, orally, some think in poetic form. In the course of time some of them were gathered into cycles dealing with various individuals (e.g., Abraham, Jacob) or other common subjects (e.g., the Egyptian bondage, the Exodus); the cycles were later linked together into lengthier narrative series (such as the patriarchal period), and, later still, these series were linked into comprehensive historical epics (such as the history of Israel from the patriarchs through the death of Moses or the conquest, or later). Apparently from one such epic (what Martin Noth termed “G,” for gemeinsame Grundlage, the “common basis”) there branched off separate versions which then in the course of transmission developed their own unique characteristics in terminology, style, ideology, and content. These versions are called the Yahwistic, Elohistic, and Priestly sources, or J (from German Jahwistisch), E, and P, respectively.9 By this stage the narrative was in prose. Whether G itself was written is debated, but in the view of most critics, J, E, and P were. By this time certain older written documents had also been incorporated into the narratives, such as the book of the Covenant (Exod. 21–23) and quotations from “the Book of the Wars of YHWH” (Num. 21:14). Other traditions about early Israelite history were omitted from these written sources. Some disappeared forever while others survived, either orally or in other written forms, for centuries and in some cases were picked up in postbiblical literature. When the old narratives about early Israelite history were gathered into larger complexes, they were organized by the itineraries and genealogical links of the patriarchs and the Exodus generation and held together by the theme of the divine promise to the patriarchs of land, progeny, and protection. This promise was probably an original part of at least some of the old traditions. In any case, many of the original narratives had nothing to do with this theme; each had a meaning and function of its own. Once drawn together, however, these narratives were transformed into episodes on the way to, or threatening, the fulfillment of the

Anthology in the Torah and the Question of Deuteronomy 17

promises. Literary topoi were pressed into service to this end: for example, the promise was threatened by the repeated barrenness of the patriarchs’ wives, and the future deliverer, Moses, was endangered and hidden in infancy and saved in a basket in a river. The smaller cycles within the larger complex also have their own subthemes. The biography of Abraham, for example, appears as a story of personal growth from loyalty to God based on an expected reward to loyalty even when that reward is threatened. This theme, too, is not present in all the individual narratives, but it is imparted by the literary frame (note how Genesis 12:1–4 is echoed in 22:1–3) and the recurrent promises appearing in the narratives. Redaction After developing independently for a time, the two main offshoots of G (J and E) were ultimately conflated into a single running narrative, one serving as the basis of the new narrative, with selections from the other supplementing it. Later, two other elements were added to this complex. One was the P source, which was now spliced into the combined JE much as J and E had been joined. The fourth element, D, was placed near the end of the account of the desert period because for the most part it was not a variant account of the earlier history, parallel to J, E, and P, but dealt with Moses’ last days. The relative order in which P and D were composed is debated. Most scholars have considered P the latest element, while a minority regard P as roughly contemporary with or earlier than D and think that P and D were joined to JE simultaneously. Recently a new approach has been suggested: the author(s) of the “Holiness Document” (H)—which was previously thought to be an older source embedded in P—represent a separate priestly school later than P; it was he / they who edited and rewrote P and blended it with the other sources, producing the Torah as a whole.10 By the time these documents were to be joined, their texts had become largely fixed, and the redactors did not have, or at least did not exercise, much freedom to revise them. Rather than rewrite the sources in their own words, they strove to incorporate them essentially as they found them, using the documents’ own wording, making only such modifications as were necessary for fitting the various extracts together, or for other purposes they hoped to achieve with the new version. Where the two versions extensively duplicated each other, one version would be dropped, except for significant variants which were maintained alongside the other version. Depending on the nature of the materials or the redactors’ intentions, the separate versions of the same episode might be interwoven to present what was taken as a more complete account of it (e.g., the account of the flood, where the doublets are presented as different moments in the unfolding sequence of events),11 or left apart and treated either as separate events (as in the case of the three stories in which a patriarch presents his wife as his sister) or as a main account and a partial recapitulation with greater detail (as in the two creation accounts in Genesis 1–2). The redactors added their own connective and transitional phrases between the passages and often achieved fine artistic effects simply

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by skillful arrangement of the material. Somewhere in this lengthy process, material deemed objectionable or not suitable for the traditionists’ purposes was omitted, but on the whole they seem to have preserved as much as they could. This summary is far from encompassing the complete range of opinion on the subject, but it gives a fair impression of the kinds of processes that most critical scholars think were involved in the evolution of the Torah. While the role of these processes in the case of the Torah is hypothetical, inferred from contradictions, doublets, and other phenomena identified by reading between the lines of the text, it can be documented, by the comparison of older and younger versions of many ancient texts that such processes regularly operated in the development of ancient literature.12 The Redactors’ Thinking That the redactors who combined the Torah’s source documents preserved so much of the sources’ original wording and contents, even when doing so caused inconsistency or redundancy, appears to be due to the status of the sources when they received them. The comparison of older and younger copies of certain ancient texts shows that in the earlier stages of a work’s development, when it was not yet considered classical or sacred, editors felt free to rewrite almost at will, and early revisions of a work show very few inconsistencies even when new matter has been added to them. But once a work acquired sacred or classical status, it became increasingly difficult for editors to revise it even in order to remove inconsistencies. The inconsistencies in the Torah are due to the fact its source documents were combined at a time when they already had a quasi-canonical status, and the compilers did not feel free to do much more than juxtapose or interweave the sources and add some transitional phrases. Probably they resolved the inconsistencies exegetically in their own minds but did not feel free to add their explanations to the text.13 Some of the harmonistic interpretations of the Rabbis may well be similar to those of the editors. It is hard to be certain exactly what the redactors thought made their sources almost inviolable even when they were inconsistent with each other. It could have been the authority of their respective authors. Talmudic and post-talmudic literature records numerous instances of liturgical texts created by combining the wording proposed by different rabbis because the authorities refused to choose between the differing views.14 Their thinking seems nicely expressed by a latter-day authority, Rabbi Jacob Emden, who explained how he resolved the disagreement over which version of Kol Nidrei to recite, the older one, which nullifies vows made from last year to this, or Rabbenu Tam’s version, which refers to vows made from this year to the next: The statements of the ancients of blessed memory, that the wording was formulated with reference to the past, are convincing, and I have no doubt at all about that. Nevertheless, in deference to the statement of Rabbenu Tam, since it comes from the mouth of that tzaddik, my custom is to say it in both formulations and to conflate the wording: “[vows] that we vowed and will vow, swore and will swear, with which we bound ourselves or will bind ourselves, etc. from last Yom

Anthology in the Torah and the Question of Deuteronomy 19 Kippur [to this and] from this Yom Kippur to [the next], etc.” so as to satisfy both views.15

But it could also have been the redactors’ belief that elu veelu divrei  Elohim hayyim, “these and those are the words of the living God,” that all of their sources were divinely revealed and hence were all valid, or at least potentially so. This phrase, in which the Talmud characterizes conflicting opinions of different sages,16 may be applicable as well to the redactors’ evaluation of their sources. In either case, the redactors seem to have felt that no one version of the past, of a law, or of a belief necessarily preserved the whole truth, and where they felt unable to decide, they preserved what they had received, harmonized inconsistencies as well as they could, and left the rest to posterity. As one nineteenth-century scholar observed, “It is this way of writing that makes the Bible history so vivid and interesting,” for no book written by the modern technique of digesting and rewriting the sources “could have preserved so much of the genuine life of antique times.”17 By not imposing unity and consistency on the sources, the compilers preserved the variety and richness of ancient Israelite belief, tradition, law, and literature.

Deuteronomy Deuteronomy, on the explicit level, is an anthology of speeches by Moses, connected by brief narrative passages. The speeches are the three main discourses (1:6– 4:40; 5:1–28:68; 29–30) and the poem and blessing of Moses (Ha’azinu in 32 and Ve-zo’t haBerakhah in 33).18 Deuteronomy is also anthological on the implicit level. First of all, it contains some material from the non-Deuteronomic sources, JE and P as well as other sources independent of those, including the two poems just mentioned.19 Further, even some of the Deuteronomic narrative material seems to come from different hands within the Deuteronomic “school.”20 But here I wish to raise the question of whether one may also view Moses’ first two discourses as implicitly anthological, that is, whether each of them consists of shorter, originally separate speeches. The Analogy of Prophetic Literature Before turning to these speeches, it is worth looking more closely at prophetic literature, which is analogous to Deuteronomy because it, too, consists of speeches. As was noted, most of the books of the classical prophets are clearly anthological. They consist of speeches by the prophets, and since most of them were active for many years (as is indicated in their headings), their books consist of different speeches uttered on different occasions during their careers (whether they also include interpolated matter not written by the prophets will not concern us here). The book of Jeremiah (36:2) says explicitly that God had him dictate to Baruch Ben Neriah “all the words that I have spoken to you . . . from the time I first spoke to you in the days of Josiah [the thirteenth year of Josiah, 627 b.c.e., according to Jer. 1:2] to this day” (in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, 605), and Jeremiah remained

20 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism

active until after the exile began in 586. Many of his speeches, and those of other prophets, contain headings, often dated, indicating that they are separate speeches. Moreover—and this is why the subject is pertinent for present purposes—many scholars believe that these “speeches” are actually not single speeches, publicly delivered in their present form, but “literary speeches,”21 collections of shorter oracles, uttered on different occasions, that have been secondarily gathered together in the larger entities of which they now form parts.22 The demarcation of the putatively independent units is based on such criteria as introductory and concluding formulas, changes of subject, grammatical person or number or literary genre, different function, abrupt shifts, completeness and independence of thoughts, and above all, the obliviousness of one unit to another. This approach is controversial because the testimony of such criteria is not always unequivocal, and some scholars deny the validity of at least some of them. We cannot be certain that what we perceive as logically unconnected would have been perceived the same way in antiquity.23 The approach is especially problematic if one becomes so “programmed a priori to discover small separate units” that one ignores the units’ present context (regarding it as both chronologically and qualitatively secondary) and the meaning that it imparts to them, effectively ignoring the character of the prophetic book qua book.24 Increasingly, scholars have shown that the prophecies are arranged in ways that show careful design, being grouped into complexes that share common subjects or extrinsic similarities (such as key words) and arranged in esthetic patterns (such as chiasmus) and framed by similar opening and closing verses, and that have meaning as wholes.25 These groupings may sometimes be secondary, but after one reads the books over repeatedly in light of such studies, it can become increasingly difficult to be sure that these groupings are secondary.26 On the other hand, ignoring the possibility of original separateness brings its own dangers, particularly the likelihood of forced interpretations and rationalizations that can be no less subjective than the criteria used for identifying separateness. Those criteria at least have the heuristic value of focusing attention on each unit’s potential discreteness and forcing the attentive reader to ask how it fits into its present context, a question that can stimulate one to discover the design of the context as a whole. Furthermore, even though separateness may be difficult or impossible to prove, it is also difficult or impossible to disprove, and as a historical question it is worth considering the possibility of original separateness and secondary arrangement as a working hypothesis to see how much clarity it brings to our understanding of a literary work. The Units Underlying the Homiletic Speeches in Deuteronomy Returning to Deuteronomy,27 we can observe that in some places the homiletic speeches in 1:6–4:40 (the first discourse) and 5–11 (the nonlegal prologue and preamble to the second discourse) look as if they have incorporated brief sermons or teachings, or pre´cis of such, that were originally composed for oral delivery28 and at least some of which were originally separate from each other (whether

Anthology in the Torah and the Question of Deuteronomy 21

composed by the same author or different ones).29 More important, many of the smaller sections within these speeches have no inherent connection to each other and are largely oblivious of each other. They could easily be moved elsewhere without the reader feeling that something is missing from their present context or that they are extraneous in their new context. Frequently, after a few verses the text seems to have reached a conclusion and then changes topics, sometimes without any transition. All of these phenomena are illustrated by Deuteronomy 4:1–8.30 Note first that although all of vv. 1–40 are a discrete unit within the first discourse of Deuteronomy, both vv. 1 and 5 have introductory formulas (“Hear” in v. 1 and “See” in v. 5; similarly, introductory formulas appear four times in chaps. 5–11, though they are presently part of a single discourse: “Hear” in 5:1; 6:4; and 9:1; “See” in 11:26). Vv. 1–4 read as follows: And now, O Israel, give heed to [lit. “hear”] the laws and rules that I am instructing you to observe, so that you may live to enter and occupy the land that the Lord, the God of your fathers, is giving you. You shall not add anything to what I command you or take anything away from it, but keep the commandments of the Lord your God that I enjoin upon you. You saw with your own eyes what the Lord did in the matter of Baal-peor, that the Lord your God wiped out from among you every person who followed Baal-peor; while you, who held fast to the Lord your God, are all alive today.

In this paragraph the consequences of the Baal Peor incident demonstrate that observing the laws, particularly the law prohibiting worship of other gods, is essential so that Israel may live to enter the Promised Land. Then in the next paragraph (vv. 5–8), the argument that observance is a matter of life and death is dropped and replaced by the argument that Israel should observe the laws because they are uniquely just and uniquely effective in securing God’s closeness, hence following them will demonstrate Israel’s wisdom to the nations. See, I have imparted to you laws and rules, as the Lord my God has commanded me, for you to abide by in the land that you are about to enter and occupy. Observe them faithfully, for that will be proof of your wisdom and discernment to other peoples, who on hearing of all these laws will say, “Surely, that great nation is a wise and discerning people.” For what great nation is there that has a god so close at hand as is the Lord our God whenever we call upon Him? Or what great nation has laws and rules as perfect as all this Teaching that I set before you this day?

The two arguments are of very different character. The first, rooted in an experience in which gentiles lured Israelites to sin (Num. 25), is historical and is focused on a specific law. The second, unrelated to the first, refers to all the laws. It appeals to national pride and sounds almost contemporary in its contention that the Torah is uniquely just and will win Israel the respect of the gentiles, who are portrayed positively as appreciating justice and prepared to give Israel credit. Logically this argument has nothing to do with vv. 1–4 or the following verses (9–31) and, if moved elsewhere, would not be missed. In fact, vv. 5–8 would fit very nicely in chapter 6, before or after vv. 4–9 or 20–25. Finally, the arguments in 4:1–4 and 5–8

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are brief and virtually beg for elaboration, suggesting that they are outlines or pre´cis of longer speeches. As in the prophetic books, in Deuteronomy units such as these appear as parts of larger groups that share common subjects, vocabulary, and themes and are arranged in esthetic patterns and framed by similar opening and closing verses (see below). It is these arrangements that may be secondary. Again, as in the case of the prophetic books, the original separateness of these units is difficult to prove. They are not overtly contradictory, inconsistent, or characterized by a different worldview, style, or vocabulary the way that J, E, and P are. If they were originally separate from each other, they may still have come from one writer or school of writers who shared the same worldview, style, and vocabulary.31 But the occasion of viewing the Bible through the conceptual prism of anthologies suggests that we give this theory a try and see how much this perspective clarifies. 1. Deuteronomy 6:4–25. This passage (beginning with the introductory formula shema
) is divided by the traditional parashah breaks into four units, (A) vv. 4–9, (B) 10–15, (C) 16–19, and (D) 20–25. A calls for exclusive love and loyalty toward YHWH, taking His instructions to heart and teaching them to future generations. B warns Israel, after they take possession of the Promised Land and its infrastructure, not to forget YHWH and turn to other gods, lest he wipe Israel out. C warns not to try the Lord but to do what is right and good in order to thrive and capture the land from the Canaanites. D calls on people to answer their children’s inquiries about the meaning of God’s commandments by telling about the Exodus and explaining how observing the commandments will bring merit. Although these four paragraphs share certain themes, they are themes common to much of Deuteronomy; they do not bespeak a closer connection between these paragraphs than between any one of them and many others in the book. The later paragraphs in the chapter do not build on the earlier ones, and they show no particular awareness of them. In fact, paragraph B seems to put the cart before the horse: its perspective is after Israel has already conquered the land, while paragraph C states that loyalty to YHWH is a precondition for successfully doing so. Furthermore not “try[ing] YHWH . . . as you did at Massah” in paragraph C refers to an incident when Israel lacked water (Exod. 17:1–7), a warning that fits oddly after paragraph B, which refers to the time when Israel will settle in a land full of bounty, including cisterns, vineyards, and olive trees. Not only could these four paragraphs appear separately in many other places in the book without seeming out of context or being difficult to understand, but in view of the incongruities between paragraphs B and C, some other locations might make those paragraphs easier to understand. Notwithstanding the seeming disparateness of its components, however, as a unit 6:4–25 can also be shown to possess a chiastic, symmetrical structure and certain shared themes well suited to its location in Deuteronomy. Paragraphs A and D mirror each other in referring to teaching God’s words and instructions to one’s children; paragraph B refers to God’s providence and C warns against testing His ability to provide. B’s warning not to forget God can be seen as continuing A’s exhortation to recite and teach His words constantly. In addition, C and D, emphasizing the rewards for obedience and the role of the laws in expressing and

Anthology in the Torah and the Question of Deuteronomy 23

inculcating reverence for God, echo the first paragraph of chapter 6, vv. 1–3, which, depending on the perspective from which it is viewed, can be seen as the concluding section of the previous masoretic parashah, 5:19–6:3, or as the introduction to the preamble to the laws given in Moab starting in 6:4.32 Deuteronomy 6:4–25 also suits its location following the Decalogue because allusions to the Decalogue, especially the first commandment, appear throughout the chapter. Vv. 4 and 14 restate the first commandment, “you shall have no other gods beside Me,” and vv. 12, 21, and 23 echo its introduction, “I the Lord am your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.” In v. 15 the injunction against worshiping other gods is backed with a warning about God’s jealousy, just as we find after the first two commandments. The exhortations to love God and keep His commandments in vv. 5 and 17 echo the Decalogue’s description of God as showing kindness to “those who love Me and keep My commandments.” V. 18 echoes the reward promised for observing the fifth commandment, “that it may go well with you” (vv. 2–3 also echo both rewards promised in that commandment). In light of these allusions, the exhortations to love God, to remember Him, to teach children about His words and deeds, and all the other themes of chapter 6 can be regarded as a sermonic reflection on the first commandment, explaining what must be done to carry it out. Thus, although the individual units of 6:4–25 do not relate directly to each other, they all relate in some way to the Decalogue of the preceding chapter. 2. Deuteronomy 11:1–25. This passage consists of three self-contained arguments for obedience to God’s commandments: (A) vv. 1–9 (which are a natural continuation of 10:12–22),33 (B) 10–21, and (C) 22–25. Like 6:4–25, they share certain common Deuteronomic themes34 but have no inherent connection to each other. In A Moses argues from history that Israel should obey God’s commands because, having witnessed His punitive acts against Egypt and rebellious Israelites, which he enumerates, this generation is able to understand better than any future generation that success, both in conquering the land and in remaining in it, depends on obedience. In B he argues for obedience on the basis of nature and topography: the mountainous Promised Land, unlike Egypt, depends on rain, without which Israel would perish, and God will dispense the rain only if Israel is loyal and obedient. In C he urges obedience on the strength of a promise: if Israel is loyal and obedient, God Himself will dislodge the Canaanites for them. These arguments for obedience are independent of each other. A and C refer to military success while B refers to avoidance of starving. The three paragraphs make distinct points and none refer to each other or build on each other. Nevertheless, these three paragraphs share many features and complement one another. Each calls for “loving the Lord your God” (vv. 1, 13, 22) and “keeping/ obeying the commandment(s) which I command you (this day)” (vv. 1, 8, 13, 22; the verbs shamar, “keep,” and shama
, “obey,” sound alike). The first two paragraphs share the themes of “the land which you are about to cross into/invade and occupy” (vv. 8, 10, 11)35 and “enduring long upon the soil which the Lord swore to your fathers to give to them” (vv. 9, 21). They complement each other in that the first and third section deal with God’s power as manifested in historical events, while the second deals with His governance of nature.36 In context, B and C

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explain the two conclusions of A (success in conquering the land and in surviving in it) in reverse order. All three paragraphs fit nicely as a sequel to 10:12–22. In the latter, having reviewed the Israelites’ history of faithlessness during the wilderness wanderings, Moses summed up God’s demand for loyalty and obedience, the central theme of Deuteronomy (10:12–22). In 11:1–25 he seeks to persuade Israel that its future depends on compliance with this demand. He frequently refers to it, urging Israel “to walk in all His ways,” “to love Him,” “to serve Him with all your heart and soul,” “to keep/obey all His commandment(s) which I enjoin upon you this day,” and “to hold fast to Him” (11:1, 8, 13, 22), echoing the same phrases in 10:12–13 and 20. 3. Deuteronomy 4:1–40. This speech, part of which has already been discussed, consists of four main sections, each arguing in its own way for obeying God’s laws and rules: (A) vv. 1–4, (B) 5–8, (C) 9–31, and (D) 32–40. Section A calls for obedience, prohibits adding to or subtracting from the commandments, and backs up the prohibition by a reference to the worship of Baal Peor and its disastrous consequences. B appeals for obedience on the ground that it will earn Israel the admiration of its neighbors, who will perceive the justice of the laws and the nearness of God that Israel enjoys because of obeying them. C is a lengthy argument for obeying the prohibition of idols. It shows that this prohibition is based on the Exodus and particularly the encounter with God at Horeb, and it backs up the prohibition with the threat of exile. D argues on the basis of the Exodus and Horeb experiences that there is no other God but the Lord (YHWH) and that His laws should therefore be obeyed. Logically each of these sections is self-contained. They do not refer to each other or rely on each other for their effectiveness and, in fact, any of them could be removed without the others losing any of their force. They are very different in character. A and B are short and skeletal, each appealing for obedience to all the commandments and briefly stating a reason for it. They read like pre´cis rather than speeches or even parts of a speech. Unlike the others, B is based not on history but on the justice and effectiveness of the laws. C is a lengthy argument for the commandment against worshiping idols and heavenly bodies, based on a somewhat detailed narrative and warning of the long-range consequences of disobedience. D is an appeal, of intermediate length, to consider history and realize the truth of monotheism, followed by an appeal to obey all the commandments. In context these four sections are held together by a frame in which Moses urges obedience to God’s laws so that Israel may live to occupy the land and remain in it indefinitely (vv. 1, 40). This message is underscored within the chapter by a warning that failure to observe the law against idols will lead to banishment from the land (vv. 23–28). The four units of the chapter have numerous features in common, both thematic and verbal, which reflect the sermonic, didactic character of Deuteronomy. In all of them Moses refers to the laws he is teaching or commanding and to the land Israel is about to enter.37 In three of the units Moses bases his argument on history. In A he argues that history shows the consequences of obeying or disobeying the commandments. In C he argues that history justifies the prohibition of images. In D he argues that history proves that the Lord is the only true God. Each unit opens with an appeal to the mind: “hear,” “see,” “do

Anthology in the Torah and the Question of Deuteronomy 25

not forget,” and “inquire” (vv. 1, 5, 9, 32). The themes of seeing and hearing— the senses through which Israel experienced history—are mentioned throughout,38 as are teaching and learning (l-m-d),39 knowing and making known (y-d-
),40 forgetting,41 wisdom and understanding.42 In each unit Moses lends immediacy to his words by referring to ha-yom (“today,” “this day,” “as is now the case”).43 B and D show that Israel and its laws are unparalleled among the nations and the Lord is unparalleled among the gods.44 C and D refer to the theophany at Horeb and the Exodus, and both speak of heaven and earth.45 The four units of the chapter are arranged in reverse chronological order, based on their allusions to the past: A alludes to the recent incident at Peor (v. 3), C to the theophany at Horeb, the Exodus, and the division of nations (vv. 10–14, 19–20), and D to the creation and the patriarchs as well as the Exodus and Horeb (vv. 32–34, 36–37) (the order within each unit is not chronological).46 Unlike 6:4–25 and 11:1–25, 4:1–40 as a whole doesn’t have many similarities to the preceding chapters. Its first unit, referring to the Baal Peor incident, does connect nicely with 3:22, which locates Israel at Peor. But the other events in the chapter have nothing to do with that incident, and although chapters 1–3 revolve around the issue of obedience and disobedience, the point of 1–3 is the importance of obeying God’s orders about conquering the Promised Land, whereas the emphasis of 4:1–40—and the rest of Deuteronomy—is obedience to God’s laws as a way of life in the land, not to ad hoc orders. Hence the transitional “And now” in 4:1 looks like an editorial link, and despite the many similarities and connections between these two sections, they may have had separate authors.47 I do not believe that phenomena that lend unity and design to each of the three sections described are strong enough to argue that the units comprising them were originally composed to stand with the others as they now do. These phenomena consist primarily of simple patterns of arrangement (chiasmus, frames, reverse chronological order) that are not integral to the contents of the units, and common Deuteronomic themes and formulas. They do not overcome the disjointed impression that these sections make on the reader. For the sake of contrast, consider how different these sections are from chapters 7, 8, and 9–10. Each of these sections develops a single theme, and when another theme is introduced, it develops naturally from the main theme. Chapter 7, for example,48 is concerned with the conquest. Its first section (vv. 1–6) states the requirement to eradicate the Canaanites and their religious artifacts, and its final section concludes with that theme (vv. 17–26). Since v. 1 refers to the Canaanites as more numerous than the Israelites, the second section (vv. 7–16) uses this statement as the occasion to warn Israel against delusions of numerical importance (v. 7) but promises that if Israel obeys God’s commandments, God will increase its numbers (v. 13). The last section urges Israel not to be discouraged by the Canaanites’ numerical superiority (v. 17), since God will defeat them. The surface unity of the chapter is supported by the fact that it is based on the covenant documents in Exodus 23:20–33 and 34: 11–16 and that allusions to those documents are found throughout the chapter.49 In view of this contrast between smooth-reading sections such as chapter 7 on the one hand and more disjointed sections such as 4:1–40, 6:4–25, and 11:1–25, a

26 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism

plausible case can be made that the latter consist of originally separate units, many of them sermon pre´cis, brought together by a compiler who arranged them in their present patterns. If this is indeed the case, it represents another sense in which Deuteronomy is anthological. Whether the smooth-reading chapters 7, 8, and 9–10 should also be seen as originally distinct works is a question that will have to be left to another occasion.

Conclusion We have seen multifaceted aspects of explicit and implicit anthologies in the Bible, with special attention to the Torah, and to Deuteronomy in particular. Anthology is not only a literary phenomenon but an intellectual one as well. As David Stern has written, the anthology as a form and genre seems to touch upon essential aspects of the Jewish imagination: its desire always to incorporate opposites, to preserve multiplicities of traditions, to incorporate parallel traditions rather than impose orthodoxy by accepting one version and excluding the other.50

The viewpoints of the various books gathered together in the Bible vary widely. The four main sources of the Torah not only have different views about the details of Israelite history and law, but—particularly Deuteronomy and the priestly materials—markedly different ideologies on such matters as God, sacrifice, the Temple, and holiness.51 Even within the priestly materials, recent scholarship has shown pronounced differences between H (the Holiness Document) and the rest of P.52 Similarly, Chronicles covers much the same ground as Samuel and Kings from the perspective of very different interests and ideology.53 On key issues, such as eschatology and the relative status of ritual and morality, the classical prophets see things differently than the Torah and the Former Prophets do.54 Wisdom literature differs from the Torah and prophecy regarding “the source, the ground, and the bearers of moral responsibility,”55 while at the same time within wisdom literature Job and Ecclesiastes see the question of reward and punishment very differently than Proverbs, and the prose framework of Job has a different approach to that question than do the poetic sections of the book. The Bible’s “anthological habit” set the pattern for subsequent Jewish thought about the Bible, as it did for many other aspects of Judaism, as is manifest in every chapter of this volume. The midrashic works of talmudic and later times bring together the teachings and sermons (or pre´cis thereof) of numerous sages, both named and unnamed, along with the explicit and implicit views of their redactors.56 A more recent case is the Mikraot Gedolot, in which separate commentaries “of diverse authorship, provenance, dating and exegetical approaches, often mutually incompatible and contradictory . . . coexist within the confines of a single page, all accommodated within the framework of a single tradition” (N. M. Sarna).57 Ever since the Second Rabbinic Bible of 1524, no Rabbinic Bible has ever contained a biblical book accompanied by only one commentary, and different editions vie with each other to claim the largest number of commentaries on

Anthology in the Torah and the Question of Deuteronomy 27

their title pages (e.g., 32, 50, and even 120 commentaries).58 As B. Barry Levy has observed, this practice is a forceful statement about the multi-dimensional approach to Scripture put forth by the collective rabbinic tradition and the limitations inherent in approaching the text through the eyes of a single commentator.59

The conviction that “these and those are the words of the living God” has thus followed both the composition and the interpretation of Scripture throughout history.

Notes 1. The vast majority of biblical books are anthologies, composed, according to M. Haran, to preserve the remnants of ancient Israelite literature and with the aim of becoming “canonical” or “scriptural.” See M. Haran, HaAsupah HaMikrait (The Biblical Collection) (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute and Magnes Press, 1996), pp. 5, 7, 39–40, 92, 308 (Hebrew). 2. See N. M. Sarna, “The Order of the Books,” in C. Berlin, ed., Studies in Jewish Bibliography, History and Literature (New York: Ktav, 1971), pp. 407–8. 3. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Bible,” etymological section. 4. David Stern, introduction to this book, p. 5. Stern observes, by the way, that “in the anthology, literary form, organization, even sequence, are all ideological subjects” (p. 3). Although this is not always the case (the components of an anthology can also be ordered by mechanical criteria, e.g., chronologically, by length, by similarity of phraseology or theme, etc.), it is nicely applicable to the differing organizations of the Hebrew Bible in the Jewish and Christian canons. The order described in b. Baba Bathra 14b ends with Chronicles, indicating that “for Jews, the canon of Scripture ends with a narration of the return of the Jewish community to its homeland” (M. Signer, “How the Bible Has Been Interpreted in Jewish Tradition,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible, ed. L. Keck et al. [Nashville: Abingdon, 1994], 1:65; essentially the same effect is achieved by ending with Ezra– Nehemiah, as in St. Petersburg [Leningrad] Codex b19A and related manuscripts). Christian Bibles, on the other hand, follow the order of the Septuagint, which places the prophets last so that they immediately precede the Gospels, thereby reflecting the Christian view that the primary significance of the “Old Testament” is found in its prophecies of the Messiah. 5. N. M. Sarna, Ancient Libraries and the Ordering of Biblical Books (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1989), pp. 9–10. 6. It is not clear whether and how the various royal chronicles and prophetic writings cited in Kings and Chronicles were used by the authors of those books. The text does not identify them as sources but as places where further information is found, but it is conceivable that the writers extracted information from them and perhaps even incorporated parts of them in their own texts. For a recent discussion see M. Haran, “The Books of the Chronicles ‘of the Kings of Judah’ and ‘of the Kings of Israel’: What Sort of Books Were They?” Vetus Testamentum 49 (1999):156–64. 7. The cases of Isaiah and Zechariah are well known and discussed in the standard biblical introductions and encyclopedias. On Hosea see Y. Kaufmann, Toledot ha Emunah haYisreelit (Jerusalem/Tel Aviv: Mosad Bialik/Dvir, 1955), 3:93–107, 319 (Eng. trans. by M. Greenberg, The Religion of Israel [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960], pp. 368–

28 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism 77); H. L. Ginsberg, “Hosea, Book of,” EJ 8:1010–22. On Micah see Ginsberg, The Israelian Heritage in Judaism (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1982), pp. 25–30. 8. The following several paragraphs are drawn from my “The Evolution of the Pentateuchal Narratives in the Light of the Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic,” pp. 22–25, in Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism, ed. J. Tigay (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985). Interested readers will find fuller documentation there. 9. The names Yahwistic and Elohistic are based on the fact that in the J source the divine name YHWH is known to humans throughout the patriarchal period, whereas in the E source it is first revealed to Moses and until then God is called
Elohim. The Priestly source is so called because it includes extensive cultic rules and even its narratives reflect the concepts and terminology found in those rules. Some scholars think that the priestly material was not a fully developed source document but rather a redactional strand produced by a priestly writer or school that edited JE and supplemented it with extensive priestly lore. For bibliography on, and a refutation of, that view see B. J. Schwartz, “The Priestly Account of the Theophany and Lawgiving at Sinai,” pp. 103–134 in M. V. Fox et al., Texts, Temples and Traditions. A Tribute to Menahem Haran (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1996). It has long been recognized that the priestly materials are also not all of one cloth. The “Holiness Code,” or H (Lev. 17–26 and some related passages), is generally thought to constitute a distinctive work; both it and P seem internally composite as well. The relationship of H and P is debated; see n. 10. 10. I. Knohl, The Sanctuary of Silence: The Priestly Torah and the Holiness School (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995). See further H. T. C. Sun, “Holiness Code,” Anchor Bible Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 3:254–56; J. Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16 (New York: Doubleday, 1991), pp. 1, 13–42. 11. See Tigay, “Conflation as a Redactional Technique,” in Empirical Models, pp. 53– 89 and the comments of M. Greenberg cited there, p. 54. 12. See Tigay, Empirical Models. 13. Cf. Tigay, “Evolution,” in Empirical Models, pp. 44f., and the comments of Greenberg cited there. 14. Tigay, “Conflation,” in Empirical Models, pp. 84–85. See also D. Sperber, Minhagei Yisrael (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1989—), 1:39–45; 2:23–75, 203. Examples include various blessings, including the different versions of Modim Anahnu Lakh, the different answers to the Four Questions in the Haggadah shel Pesah (that is, the answers of Samuel and Rab, respectively—namely,
Avadim Hayyinu and Mitehfi illah
Ovedei
Avodah Zarah, b. Pesahim 116a), and Ahavah Rabbah vs. Ahavat
Olam. Not only what is recited, but physical practices as well are sometimes “anthological,” combining different versions of what a practice ought to be, sometimes intentionally trying to satisfy multiple opinions; one well-known example is the practice of wearing two different sets of tefillin, each made in accordance with a different view of how the texts in them should be arranged. See further Tigay, The JPS Torah Commentary: Deuteronomy (Devarim) (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996), p. 241, comment to Deuteronomy. 26:10. As Sperber notes, some Jewish practices are conflate because they are based on books of customs that are anthological. 15. Sheelat Ya
avetz, no. 145, cited by Y. Weingarten, HaMahfi zor HaMeforash, Yom Kippur, Nusahfi Ashkenaz (Jerusalem: Gefen, 5747 / 1986–87), Introduction, p. 25. 16. B.
Eruv. 13b; Git. 6b. See D. Weiss Halivni, Peshat and Derash (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 116–19; A. J. Heschel, Torah Min Hashamayim 3 (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1990), esp. chap. 4. While the issue in
Eruvin is halakhic, that in Gittin deals with the interpretation of a biblical narrative and provides an

Anthology in the Torah and the Question of Deuteronomy 29 instructive example of exegetical harmonization. R. Abiathar (a third-century Palestinian Amora) and R. Jonathan debated the reason why the Levite’s concubine deserted him (Judg. 19:1–2). The former held that it was because the Levite had become angry at finding a fly in his food, while the latter held that he had found a hair. R. Abiathar met Elijah and asked him what God thought of the matter, and Elijah answered that God had quoted both opinions. When R. Abiathar questioned whether God could have doubts, Elijah answered that both opinions are the words of the living God and went on to explain (harmonistically) that the Levite first found a fly but had not become angry, but later found a hair and did. By indicating that both opinions reflected different moments in the same episode, God had removed any conflict between them and enabled them to coexist, exactly as redactors do in arranging conflicting details of the same event (see earlier, text to n. 11, and “Conflation,” in Empirical Models, p. 76). 17. W. Robertson Smith, The Old Testament in the Jewish Church, 3d ed. (New York: Appleton, 1892), pp. 328–29. For the evidence see Tigay, ed., Empirical Models, chap. 1. 18. See Tigay, Deuteronomy, p. xii. 19. See Tigay, Deuteronomy, pp. xxiv–xxvi, 494–97, 502–07, 510–13, 518–21, 522–24. 20. Tigay, Deuteronomy, p. 504. 21. This phrase is modeled on “literary homily,” a phrase used by J. Heinemann to describe the final stage in the redaction of homiletic midrashim, as he understood the process (J. Heinemann, “Profile of a Midrash: The Art of Composition in Leviticus Rabba,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 39 [1971]:141–50; “The Art of Composition in Midrash Vayikra Rabbah,” HaSifrut 2 [1971]:808–34). 22. The existence of short oracles does not depend on the now discredited evolutionary assumption that prophecy originally consisted of short oracles and only later of longer ones. Short oracles are actually attested, both early and late. See, for example, J. B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. 3d ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 624, texts e, f, and g (note the contemporaneous longer prophecies on pp. 623, 625–26); 1 Kings 20:13; 22:11, 17; Jonah 3:4; Josephus, War, 6.301, 304, 309. 23. Cf. M. Greenberg, Ezekiel 1–20 (Anchor Bible 22; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983), pp. 5–6. 24. A. Berlin, Zephaniah (Anchor Bible 25A. New York: Doubleday, 1994), pp. 17–23 (the quoted phrase is from p. 21). 25. See, for example, Greenberg, Ezekiel, Berlin, Zephaniah, and S. Paul, Amos (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 11–15; M. Haran, “Amos, Book of Amos,” Entsyklopedia Mikrait 5, cols. 275–76. 26. The difficulty is nicely expressed in Steven Fraade’s description of a similar problem in analyzing the composition of midrashic compositions: Do the apparently disjunctive way in which individual traditions have been combined and the internal incongruities reflect the conscious creativity of the “storyteller” or rhetor who works such tensions into his narrative so as to hold his audience in suspense, or the haste of a collector/preserver of traditions who does not get to ironing out all such “seams”? . . . At what point does relative formal and thematic unity such as we have witnessed cease to reflect the redactor’s conscious intent and begin to be simply the text’s effect on the mind of its reader/ listener? Here the line between the relatively objective literary criteria and more subjective impressions becomes blurred and our task of describing and evaluating the redactional activity which produced such a midrash meets its limits. For the more we read and reread this kind of text and it becomes lodged in our minds,

30 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism the better its pieces seem to fit together, the more its language seems to echo, and the more its messages seem to coalesce. The historian must be careful to recognize the limits of such inquiries into midrashic redaction, distinguishing always between controlled analysis and intuitive impressions. It is all too easy when searching for a consistent “mind” behind such a collective text to find it, but only after having read too much between the lines. Steven D. Fraade, “Sifre Deuteronomy 26 (ad Deut. 3:23): How Conscious the Composition?” HUCA 54 (1983):292–93. 27. Much of the following is drawn from the pertinent sections of J. Tigay, Deuteronomy, where interested readers can find fuller documentation. 28. Cf. C. Brekelmans, “Wisdom Influence on Deuteronomy,” in D. L. Christiansen, ed., A Song of Power and the Power of Song (Winona Lake, Ind: Eisenbraun’s, 1993), pp. 125– 27. 29. The tannaitic chronological work Seder
Olam Rabbah implies that the five main speeches of Deuteronomy actually consist of several shorter speeches. The Seder
Olam says that Moses expounded (peresh) the entire Torah—that is, delivered the speeches of Deuteronomy (ending at 31:14, hen qarevu yameikha lamut, “the time is drawing near for you to die”)—over a period of 36 days, from 1 Shevat through 6 Adar. See Seder
Olam Rabbah 10 (ed. Ratner, p. 41, re: Deut. 1:3). This implies that Deuteronomy contains 36 days’ worth of speeches, in other words that it consisted of units that were smaller and more numerous than what is implied by the headings in the book. This view leaves room for the possibility that the present arrangement is secondary and not in the order in which the speeches were originally given (ein muqdam umeuhfi ar baTorah). 30. The translation that follows is based on Tanakh, The Holy Scriptures (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985) (slightly modified). 31. See M. Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972). 32. See Tigay, Deuteronomy, p. 74. 33. Together, 10:12–11:9 are printed in siddurim as Parashat haYir’ah. 34. See Tigay, Deuteronomy, p. 109. 35. Yarash, “occupy,” is also echoed in the third paragraph, where it and its derivative are rendered “dislodge” and “dispossess” (v. 23), and in the assonant noun tirosh, “wine” (v. 14). 36. For the juxtaposition of these two themes, see Tigay, Deuteronomy, pp. 237–38. 37. Vv. 1, 5, 14, 21, 26, 40. 38. What Israel saw, or did not see, with its own eyes (vv. 3, 9, 12, 15, 34–36); the impression observance will make in the eyes of the nations (v. 6; see also 5, 19, 28); hearing (vv. 1, 6, 10, 12, 28, 30, 32, 33, 36). 39. Vv. 1, 5, 10, 14. 40. Vv. 9, 35, 39. 41. Vv. 9, 23, 31. 42. V. 6. 43. Vv. 4, 8, 20, 38–40. 44. Vv. 7–8, 33–34. Both of these units refer to “great” things (vv. 6–8, 32, 38). 45. See vv. 10–12, 26, 32–33, 36, 39. 46. This arrangement contrasts with that in Deuteronomy. 1:6–3:29, which begins with the departure from Horeb and progresses chronologically up to the encampment at Peor (see 1:6; 3:29) (N. Lohfink, cited by J. Levenson, “Who Inserted the Book of the Torah?” HTR 68 [1975]:203, 204). 47. See M. Noth, The Deuteronomistic History (Sheffield, England: Sheffield University, 1981), pp. 13–14, 33–34.

Anthology in the Torah and the Question of Deuteronomy 31 48. Chapters 8 and 9–10 display similar integrity. See Tigay, Deuteronomy, pp. 91–92, 96–97. 49. See A. Rofe´, The Belief in Angels in the Bible and in Early Israel (Jerusalem: Makor, 1979), pp. 289–97; Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School, pp. 34, 46. 50. Stern, “Introduction” to The Anthological Imagination in Jewish Literature, Prooftexts 17, no. 1 (January, 1997):6. 51. Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School, pp. 179–319; “Theological Currents in Pentateuchal Literature,” in Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, 1969, 117–39. 52. I. Knohl, The Sanctuary of Silence: The Priestly Torah and the Holiness School (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995). 53. S. Japhet, The Ideology of the Book of Chronicles and Its Place in Biblical Thought (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997). 54. Kaufmann, Toledot 1:23–44 (Eng. trans., The Religion of Israel, pp. 157–66). 55. Kaufmann, Toledot 3:557–87 (Eng. trans. The Religion of Israel, pp. 316–27). 56. The redactional techniques of the midrashim are the subject of lively discussion. See, for example, Heinemann, “Profile of a Midrash”; R. Hammer, “Section 38 of Sifre Deuteronomy: An Example of the Use of Independent Sources to Create a Literary Unit,” Hebrew Union College Annual 50 (1979):165–78; R. Hammer, “Complex Forms of Aggadah and Their Influence on Content,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 48 (1981):183–206; Steven D. Fraade, “Sifre Deuteronomy 26 (ad Deut. 3:23): How Conscious the Composition?” Hebrew Union College Annual 54 (1983):245–301; J. Neusner, Judaism and Scripture. The Evidence of Leviticus Rabbah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Deuteronomy has more in common with midrash than its anthological character. Its argumentation resembles that of midrash in that it builds its arguments on specific premises much as midrash uses biblical verses as the premises of its arguments. In Deuteronomy the “texts” that serve as the premises of arguments are not verses of sacred writ but historical events (such as the Exodus, Horeb, the manna, the Golden Calf and Baal Peor incidents), the topography of the Promised Land, the justice of God’s laws, and other phenomena; these play a role analogous to that of biblical verses in midrash. When historical events are mentioned, for example, they are not narrated in full or for their own sake as they are in Exodus and Numbers, but in order to prove a sermonic point: the Exodus and Horeb events are cited to show that the Lord is the only true God and that Israel should therefore obey His laws and shun idols (4:9–20, 32–40); the journey from Horeb to the Promised Land is cited to point out that Israel’s faithlessness caused an entire generation to perish in the wilderness (1:1–46); when the manna is mentioned, it is to show that God controls nature and can make anything He chooses nourishing, for which reason Israel should always obey Him (8:1–6). In this way Deuteronomy can be seen as a kind of forerunner of the homiletic exposition of biblical verses in the midrashim. 57. N. M. Sarna, Studies in Biblical Interpretation (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2000), pp. 69, 258–59. 58. See Mikraot Gedolot
im l″b peirushim (New York: Pardes, 1951); H fi umash q″k peirushim (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, n.d.); Sefer Keter HaTorah. Ha″Taj″ HaGadol . . . kolel hfi amishim mefarshim . . . , ed. Y. H fi asid (Jerusalem, 5730/1970). 59. B. Barry Levy, “Rabbinic Bibles, Mikra’ot Gedolot, and Other Great Books,” Tradition 25 (1991):69.

3 james kugel

Wisdom and the Anthological Temper

here existed in ancient Israel a particular notion, “wisdom,” which uniquely

Tfavored the anthology genre; the biblical books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes present the clearest examples of the anthological character of wisdom within the Jewish canon. Indeed, wisdom was an international pursuit, and wisdom anthologies are found elsewhere as well in the ancient Near East, constituting among the oldest surviving literary texts from that region.1 Before examining how these anthologies emerged in Israel, however, it will be necessary to explain what it is about wisdom that is inherently anthological. The word “wisdom” (Hebrew hfi okhmah) does not generally designate in the Bible a person’s capacity for understanding or insight, though it can sometimes be used in this sense. Principally, however, “wisdom” designates a body of knowledge. So, for example, the Bible’s assertion that Solomon’s wisdom “was greater than the wisdom of the people of the east, and all the wisdom of Egypt” (I Kings 5:10 [some books, 4:30]) does not seek to compare his power of understanding with that of the sages of other nations, but refers to the greater body of learning that he had acquired. (For this reason, indeed, the text goes on to specify what that body of learning consisted of: 3,000 proverbs, 1,005 songs, plus a knowledge of plants, animals, birds, reptiles, and fish [I Kings 5:12–13].) So similarly, when Qohelet, the author of Ecclesiastes, speaks of acquiring wisdom, it is clear that he does not mean increasing his potential for understanding, but coming to possess some actual body of learning: “I had gotten more and greater wisdom than all who ever ruled before me over Jerusalem, and my mind had come to know much wisdom and knowledge” (Eccles. 1:16). Wisdom usually designated things known. Those things, however, were neither infinite nor random, for in the ancient world, knowledge was conceived to be an altogether static thing: whatever a person might come to know belonged to a defined corpus of things; it was this finite body that “wisdom” designated. This defined corpus of insights was deemed to play a special role in the world: it underlay all of reality, constituting the great set of 32

Wisdom and the Anthological Temper 33

master plans by which the world—the natural world, of course, but also human society—was governed. In biblical Israel, as indeed elsewhere in the ancient Near East, this meant that wisdom had a divine character.2 Wisdom was, in an oft-stated biblical view, the set of plans with which God had created and continued to run the world: By wisdom the Lord founded the earth, by understanding He established the heavens. Prov. 3:19 How great are your works, Lord, you made them all with wisdom, the world is full of your creations. Ps. 104:24 How great are your works, O Lord, deep indeed are your plans. One who is a fool cannot know this, nor a boor understand it. Ps. 92:6–7

God, in other words, had established a set of highly detailed rules by which His world would be governed: the sun would rise in the east and set in the west, precious metals would be hidden inside rocks and extracted therefrom with fire, storks would roost in fir trees, and so on. Such rules as these three were obvious enough. Other parts of the divine plan, however, were hidden; however finite, the totality of wisdom, of the divine plan, was somehow beyond the grasp of any human being. In alluding to this circumstance, the Bible offers various explanations for it. One, certainly, was that God had intentionally hidden the rules by which the world worked, leaving it up to this or that sage to discover individual pieces of the puzzle: It is the glory of God to conceal things, and the glory of kings to find them out. Prov. 25:2 If only God would speak, if only He would open His lips to you, then He would tell you the secrets of wisdom, [reveal] understanding twice over; Yea, God would make you forget your suffering! But can you grasp God’s insights? Can you probe to the Almighty’s limit? Job 11:5–7 But where does wisdom come from? And where is the place of understanding? She [⫽ wisdom, understanding] is hidden from the sight of all the living, and concealed [even] from the birds of the sky . . . God [alone] knows the path to her, yea, He knows her place. Job 28:20–23

On the other hand, how could a mere human being even hope to discover all of wisdom? After all, the paltriness of human life was a byword among Israel’s sages:

34 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism Since his [mankind’s] time is apportioned, numbered by You [God] down to the months, who have set his portion irrevocably, Leave him alone, desist, and let him finish out his day like a hired hand. Job 14:5 The time of our lives is but seventy years, or if mightily [doled out], then eighty, and most of them [are consumed in] toil and fatigue. . . . Ps. 90:10

It is only toward the very end of life that human beings can begin to grasp God’s ways: Wisdom is with the aged, and understanding in length of days. With [God] are wisdom and might; He has counsel and understanding. Job 12:12–13

And so, finite though it might be, the corpus of knowledge underlying the world could hardly be mastered in a single human lifetime. For we are from yesterday, and [therefore] know nothing, our time on earth is a fleeting shadow. Job 8:9

Indeed, sometimes the two motifs—God’s hiding of wisdom, and man’s brevity on earth—were combined to explain human ignorance: [God] creates everyone nicely in His time, but He puts something hidden in their hearts, so that man cannot find out what God has created from beginning to end. Eccles. 2:11

Given these fundamental circumstances, what indeed could a human being hope to discover of the great rules governing life on earth? It is here that wisdom literature comes in. For if human beings could not discover the whole of the divine plan underlying reality, surely parts of it were indeed given to discovery. Already mentioned were those elements of the natural world—sunrise and sunset, the phases of the moon and movements of the stars, plus the ways of animals and birds and plants—that could be understood through careful observation. If it is true that observations such as these scarcely had a place as such in biblical wisdom literature, well, this is in itself an important datum (to which we shall return). But it is nonetheless the case that such “scientific” matters certainly formed part of the theoretical corpus of wisdom known to biblical sages, as the above-mentioned passage detailing Solomon’s wisdom (I Kings 5:10 ff) attests on one end of the biblical time line. On the other, there is the figure of the biblical sage Enoch, to whom is attributed, in a section of the relatively late (third century b.c.e. and later) treatise bearing his name, observations about the length of the solar year as opposed to the lunar year and other complex astronomical and me-

Wisdom and the Anthological Temper 35

teorological calculations (I Enoch 72–82). So what we think of as science was certainly part of the ancient sage’s domain. But it was only part; the other part had to do with human affairs, with how people behaved with one another and how God (sometimes in consequence) treated human beings. In the wisdom mentality, such matters were, no less than the path of the stars, subject to careful observation and formulation—and so these too were, from ancient times, set down, formulated, fixed. The manner in which such insights were formulated was itself fixed. For while the “wisdom mentality” infuses all manner of different compositions and genres within (and outside of) the biblical world—from the biblical narrative of Joseph to the prophecies of Amos to a good number of biblical psalms—wisdom itself was typically imparted through one literary form alone, the mashal, or proverb. A biblical mashal is a brief sentence consisting of two parts, A and B. This two-part construction is hardly an incidental detail: it is the very genius of the form, for the relationship between A and B is often quite subtle. A good example might be a biblical mashal whose subject is, as a matter of fact, meshalim (that is, the plural of mashal): A thistle got stuck in a drunkard’s hand, and a proverb [mashal] in the mouth of a fool. Prov. 26:9

Drunkards in the Bible are known not particularly for their boisterousness or meanness or insensitivity to pain, but for their lack of balance: they are often depicted as “staggering” and falling to the ground (Isa. 19:14, 24:20; Ps. 107:27; Job 12:25, etc.). So, apparently, the drunkard in this proverb: he must have fallen to the ground and, in groping around, thrust his hand into some sort of thornbush or briar and so gained possession, as it were, of a thistle or thorn: it got stuck in his hand. The event described in part B, the proverbist asserts, is of a similar character: a fool may quote proverbs, but this does not mean that he has purposely set about learning them, nor that he truly understands, or lives by, their wisdom. Like the drunkard’s thorn, the fool’s proverb has been acquired quite by accident. Part B, as is usually the case, is thus the whole point of the mashal here, and part A, as frequently, is an image or specific case to which B is being compared. But of course, to say only that is to pass over the little details, the poetry, of the comparison. Certainly it is important that the fool of part B is being compared to an utterly senseless drunk in part A, and still more that the proverb mentioned in part B is implicitly compared to something sharp and prickly in part A—since, in the biblical world, proverbs were proverbially sharp (Eccles. 12:11, also Deut. 28: 37, I Kings 9:7, etc.).3 The aptness, the associatedness, of likeness and likened in both cases seems to confirm the truth of the mashal well beyond the matter of accidental acquisition, which is its overt common term. And so, yes, a proverb in a fool’s mouth is indeed just like a thistle in a drunkard’s hand—isn’t it obvious once you think about it? It is noteworthy that the comparison in this proverb is not formally stated: the mere juxtaposition of two assertions is sufficient for us to understand that one is being compared to another. So similarly:

36 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism Gold ring in a pig’s snout, a beautiful woman of errant sense. Prov. 11:22

Here, too, the genius is all in the details—the fact that, in this proverb’s syntax, we first glimpse the gold ring and only afterward its repugnant setting, so to speak, is meant precisely to duplicate the onlooker’s experience of glimpsing first the woman’s beauty and only later that beauty’s unfortunate, larger context. What is more, the proverb’s assertion that the “beautiful woman of errant sense” is fundamentally inappropriate, conjoining two things that don’t, or at least shouldn’t, go together, does not mean that they are opposite equals. On the contrary, the woman’s physical beauty ends up being submerged and overwhelmed by something much bigger, a dirty, sloppy, wallowing: it becomes a small detail, an insignificant little glint of gold quite lost in or dwarfed by her piggish behavior. Proverbs like these were certainly pondered, studied. I do not mean to imply that biblical sages were literary critics, or that they would have formulated their thoughts precisely as I have above; but if a proverb was to be truly understood (and not simply picked up like a thorn), it had to be savored for its full implications. Better is a name than scented oil, and the day of death than the day of one’s birth. Eccles. 7:1

Part A seems quite indisputable: one’s name, one’s reputation, is better than any material possession, better even than the precious oils that, in biblical times, were scented with rare spices and imported from distant regions at great cost. Valuable as such oils might be, they could, in the world of biblical wisdom, scarcely match in value the worth of a person’s own name. Indeed, the truth of part A is only driven home by the near-perfect chiasmus of its sound, bwj !mXm ~X bwj. But what about the second half of the proverb: how is the day of death better than the day of one’s birth? Birth is almost always a happy occasion and death almost always a sad one; in what sense can the day of one’s death be “better”? More overtly than most, this mashal is a riddle. Yet a biblical sage would probably say that every mashal is a riddle in that it needs pondering in order to reveal its full sense. Here the precious oil mentioned in the first half of the proverb provides the clue. Such oil was valuable, so valuable that it was usually kept stoppered in little vials to protect it. In such vials it could survive for some time. Even so, precious oils could, would, eventually go bad. As Ecclesiastes itself later mentions, “flies of decay,” tiny fruit flies, can get into the oil and become the proverbial “fly in the ointment,” causing it suddenly to turn and go bad (Eccles. 10:1). And if it were not such a fruit fly, then the mere passage of time would eventually do the same thing; no matter how valuable the oil, sooner or later it would turn, and what was worth hundreds of dollars one day would be quite worthless the next. So is it with the human being, or at least the human body. Sooner or later our physical existence gives out; this does not necessarily happen all at once, but eventually what had once been vigorous and full of strength begins to deteriorate,

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and the way of all flesh leads to the grave. Quite the opposite, says Ecclesiastes, is a person’s name (by which he means, I think, not only a person’s reputation— what other people know about him or her—but rather, more abstractly, the sum total of a person’s accomplishments, what can be said afterward, a kind of condensation of everything that he or she has done). A name, in this sense, is not acquired at birth: the newborn baby quite literally has no name, and even after it has lived for a time, it has no name in the sage’s sense: that name begins to be acquired only as the person does things on earth, starts to show the world what he or she is made of. The more a person lives and does, the more that name grows and becomes more detailed and specific. Quite unlike the body, a person’s “name” in this sense is altogether immune to the inroads of time. A name—in this abstract sense of the sum total of all a person’s deeds—is immutable, so that eventually that name is all that remains of our earthly existence; years, centuries after our death, the name—in this abstract sense—is what we are, what our life has amounted to. For this reason, the proverbist says, the day of a person’s death may be a sad day, but it is indeed better in the sense that the process of building that name, which only began on the day of birth, is now at last complete. Just as you concede, says Ecclesiastes, that a good name is better than precious oil in the sense that the precious oil is bound to go bad but the name is immune to decay, so you must also admit that the day of death, although the precious substance of the body has at last gone, is nonetheless better than the day of birth, for on this day the person’s “name” is now complete and set for eternity. Similar sentiments are found in the Book of Proverbs: In the goodness of the righteous a city rejoices, and when the wicked disappear there is gladness. Prov. 11:10

At first one might think that this proverb simply presents a straightforward contrast: a city rejoices in the life of its righteous citizens and in the death of its wicked ones. But that is not quite the point: if such had been the Hebrew sage’s intentions, I think he would have written something more like: In the lives of the righteous [and not in their “goodness”] the city rejoices, and when the wicked die [and not “disappear,” which is not precisely a synonym of death] there is gladness.

The fact that the proverbist avoided this obvious, and rather simple-minded, bit of parallelism, writing instead goodness and disappear, suggests a different interpretation. As a matter of fact, everyone in this proverb is already dead. The proverb’s claim is that, even after their deaths, the righteous leave a legacy of goodness to the world, a goodness (in biblical Hebrew the word can, in fact, mean “abundance” or “wealth”) from which people will continue to benefit long afterward, whereas the wicked, however harmful they may be during their lifetime, do not merely perish at the end but disappear without a trace: they leave no legacy. In other words, this proverb’s sentiment is quite the opposite of Marc Antony’s

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in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The evil that men do, it says, can scarcely outlive them: as soon as they die they are powerless to harm us. The good that people do, on the contrary, lives on after them, so that generations not yet born will reap the benefits of that good. The city that rejoices, in this proverb, thus stands for all our fellow human beings: our true achievement is in what we are able to leave to them, whereas wickedness (which in Proverbs is often a synonym for selfindulgence or even foolishness) simply spends itself out and leaves nothing. The mashal form, , . A B was thus the basic building block of wisdom. True wisdom, that is, any true insight into the great divine plan underlying all of reality, could be, and was, packaged in this two-part sentence. This form was, in fact, used for many things other than wisdom: from earliest times all manner of laws, prophecies, songs, and other carefully constructed pronouncements had been put into pithy, two-part utterances like this. It is important, therefore, to distinguish the wisdom mashal from its close cousins, namely, most of the rest of what has been called the “poetry” of the Bible (all the more so because the spirit of wisdom truly does inform much of the Book of Psalms, a good part of the prophets, and even some legal sections of the Bible). The wisdom mashal is essentially an independent insight, a great general rule about the way the world works, packaged in a two-part sentence of the type seen here. It stands on its own, a one-line poem, and invites our contemplation. Despite their modular form, these individual insights were, from earliest times, gathered into collections. The reason is not hard to find. As was already mentioned, the sage was one who had acquired wisdom—the wisdom set down in proverbs—and acquiring wisdom meant, quite literally, coming to possess (whether orally or in writing) a large stock of proverbs.4 So it was altogether natural that sages themselves would assemble such collections and pass them on to their pupils. Indeed, here and there within the biblical corpus are clear signs of the anthologist at work. Sometimes meshalim are organized within an individual book according to some mechanical principle, like the bwj sayings of Ecclesiastes 7:1– 18, with their recurrent “Better X than Y. . . .” Often individual meshalim are juxtaposed in the Bible because they deal with the same or related subjects. It is clear, for example, that chapter 26 of Proverbs methodically deals first with the subject of fools (vv. 1–12), then that of lazy men (13–16), then that of quarrels: One who grabs a dog by the ears, a passerby who meddles in a dispute not his own.5 Like a jester6 who shoots [real] firebrands, arrows, and death, so is one who cheated his fellow and said, “I was just joking.” Without wood the fire goes out, and without [third-party] slanderers, the quarrel is quieted. Charcoal to embers and wood to fire, a quarrelsome man to a heated dispute. The words of a slanderer are gulped up fast, but they end up in one’s guts. Prov. 26:17–22

Wisdom and the Anthological Temper 39

Such thematic organization notwithstanding, it seems likely that these proverbs originated independently, or at least were composed as individual units rather than as continuous discourse. Indeed, the anthologist of the just quoted passage is scarcely bothered by the repetition of images (wood added to fire) or specific terms (the roots for “slander” and “quarrel”) in it, precisely because each verse is an independent unit; each can, and probably did, travel on its own before being anthologized here. So it is no accident, for example, that the last mashal of the passage appears elsewhere in the same book, Proverbs 18:8. The tendency to bring together meshalim of similar subject or importance is still more pronounced in the late wisdom collection of Ben Sira (early second century b.c.e.), which consists principally of miniature treatises, each made up of individual meshalim dealing with such subjects as friendship, honoring of parents, or divine providence. Beyond this phenomenon are passages of what is called biblical “wisdom literature,” which are only formally meshalim but which in fact present a continuous, developing argument. Even a unit as large as chapters 1–9 of Proverbs, it has been argued, may be a consciously composed whole, however much it may here and there appear to be a collection of individual proverbs.7 Whether or not one accepts this particular argument for chapters 1–9, it is certainly beyond dispute that, for example, chapter 7 is a narrative, though written in the two-part, mashal form: And now a woman meets him, dressed as a harlot, wily of heart. She is loud and wayward, her feet do not stay at home; one step outside, then a step to the market, and at every corner she lies in wait. She seizes him and kisses him, and with impudent face she says. . . . Prov. 7:10–13

But again, that is just the point: so much was the one-line mashal the vehicle of wisdom, the accepted form by which wisdom insights were expressed, that this author, in wishing to dramatize the dangers of a smooth seductress (herself, apparently, representative of “foreign wisdom”), had little choice but to tell his story in two-part bursts, adopting the familar rhythms of wisdom-speak to narrate his young hero’s downfall.8 Wisdom meant the mashal. The anthological character of wisdom in the ancient Near East thus derives directly from the various considerations just outlined. It begins with the belief that nothing that happens in the world is random: everything occurs in keeping with a highly detailed set of (divinely established) rules, divine “wisdom.” No single human being can hope to discover or master the whole of the divine rule book, for God has hidden at least part of His plans far beyond human discovery, and, in any case, human life is much too short to allow a single sage, no matter how discerning, to understand everything. But parts of the divine plan have been grasped by sages past, and they have formulated their insights and set them down for later generations. Their understanding, packaged in individual meshalim, might best be compared to sets of coordinates on a graph. While the detailed totality of the graph is beyond human ken, a number of specific insights—forty-seven squares

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to the right, five squares up, or again seventeen units to the left, three units down— had already been established for all time. One who wished to know at least some wisdom had thus to master these fixed points on the graph, master meshalim, and in so doing one could gain, in addition to the specific insights, a feel for the existence of the divine plan in its entirety. But these meshalim, the encapsulation of divine wisdom, hardly constituted a single individual’s, or even an individual nation’s, undertaking. Some points on the wisdom graph, like stars in the stratosphere, had been glimpsed only once, by this or that sage in a distant land ages past. Charting wisdom was thus inevitably a collective, international enterprise, and one who wished to acquire wisdom had willy-nilly to learn from all true sages everywhere. (It is thus scarcely surprising that Sumerian proverbs were translated into Akkadian,9 or Egyptian ones into Hebrew,10 nor yet that the Hebrew Bible can unashamedly speak, as we have seen, of the “wisdom of the people of the east, and all the wisdom of Egypt” [I Kings 5:10].) By the same token, one who wished to transmit wisdom to one’s students would be foolish to limit them to one’s own insights. However much he may have reformulated old truths in his own idiom, however much the individual sage weighed and studied and made many proverbs Eccles. 12:9

his stock-in-trade consisted of the timeless, collective insights of all sages everywhere. By definition, then, any sage was an anthologist, any wisdom book a bouquet de pense´es gathered from here and there.11 One might think it unlikely, given the anthological character of wisdom literature, that it would end up possessing a particular character or espousing a particular point of view: after all, it had been assembled from here and there, formulated by sages of every nation and ideology. But, of course, any student of anthologizing knows better. Anthologies are often, and quite consciously, tendentious, the hand of the anthologizer visible in every act of inclusion or exclusion. And even when such conscious Tendenz is not apparent, there are the “rules of the game” observed by all players, sometimes quite unconsciously; in our case, the common background and training and literary experience of all those who contributed to the wisdom undertaking could not but make itself felt in what they had to say. It might thus be appropriate, at this point, to say something about the overall character of biblical wisdom and, in particular, the ideology that stands behind the Bible’s wisdom collections. The first element of that ideology has already been mentioned, the belief in a great set of divine plans underlying all reality. To those trained to read the Bible through the lens of later Judaism or Christianity, the idea of such a set of plans might seem to be pan-biblical: is not God’s control of all of reality everywhere assumed? It is necessary, therefore, to be precise: it is not merely God’s control of reality that this ideology postulates (though even that idea is hardly attested universally in the Bible), but the existence of the great, preestablished pattern. In a sense, God Himself is subject to that pattern (though He is, of course, frequently

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presented as its author), since everything that He does or will do must obey its general stipulations. This is hardly an assumption shared by every biblical writer. Indeed, the author of Hannah’s song of celebration in I Samuel 2 seems to glory in just the opposite notion, that God breaks all the rules: The bow of the mighty goes slack, but the ones who were weak now triumph. Those who had plenty are hired out for food, while the formerly hungry are feasting. A barren woman gives birth to seven, and she who had many is left alone. The Lord can kill and bring back to life, send down to Sheol and lift up again. The Lord can make poor and make rich, humiliate or exalt. He picks the needy up from the dust, lifts the destitute out of the scrapheap, Yea, sets them up next to princes, grants them a glorious throne. I Sam. 2:4–8

Not so in the world of wisdom: here everything is regular, and almost everything is predictable. It was remarked earlier that the wisdom included in the Hebrew Bible contains very little of what we would call “science”: the materiae of the natural world may be alluded to in catalogs such as Job 28, but the setting forth of such learning is decidedly not the purpose of biblical wisdom literature. This, too, seems to be an ideological statement: biblical wisdom is not so much out to educate as to inculcate. Not startling new facts, but timeless old verities, is what the biblical sage wishes to pass on, and his clever formulations stand in contrast to the obvious character of what he has to say: tread the straight and narrow, resist all excess, be good, wait for your reward. That is why inculcating—pounding, grinding, the ideas in—is what he is all about: his point needs to be driven home again precisely because it has been heard, and ignored, so often in the past. It should be observed in this connection what an abstract, spiritual world is that of biblical wisdom: it is a place of essences and ideal states. The previously cited Proverbs 11:10 could not be more eloquent in this regard. Shakespeare, who lived nowhere but on this earth, knew all too well about the power of the wicked to continue to affect our lives long after their own demise; they rarely just “disappear.” Perhaps the biblical proverbist knew this too. But if so, he chose nevertheless to maintain the opposite, for that is the way things ought to be, that is what would suit the great divine plan underlying all events. Indeed, it is this same otherworldly, abstract sense of things that caused wisdom writers to divide all of humanity into the two groups mentioned in Proverbs 11:10 (and almost everywhere else in wisdom writings), the “righteous” and the “wicked”—though “good” and “bad” might be a better translation, providing at least a feel for how these paired opposites usually function. Anyone who inhabits terra firma knows full well that few human beings belong entirely to one category or another; why, then, does wisdom literature insist on assigning all of us to one of these two groups? It is, I think, because in that severe eternity of spiritual essences, there really is no room for, no point in, nuance and shadow: the great

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choices are made in the depths of the human soul, far from the sunlight. In this sense, the world of biblical wisdom is very much akin to that of medieval European painting or medieval and Renaissance allegory: here is no attempt to render realistically the human form or the ordinary events of this world, since that reality is, in any case, trivial. What counts is what is underneath, the true significance of ordinary things, and so everything turns into heraldry and symbolism; life happens in slow motion. For the same reason, the mentality of biblical wisdom could never be translated into, for example, ordinary cinema; but animated cartoons—there is a medium suitable for its spirituality. In that domain of primary colors, there are no shadows, and if the sun is seen at all, it is as a big yellow circle with squiggly rays shooting out of it. Only such a medium can capture the inside events of the soul, such as the time when the (wicked) cat, out to trick the (righteous) mouse, quickly sketches a picture of a tunnel and tacks it up onto a brick wall. Along comes the mouse on his motorcycle, heads straight for the picture, and drives on through it—it is a tunnel! Then the cat, in hot pursuit, heads his motorcycle toward the same spot, but craaash! It is back to being a picture of a tunnel tacked to a brick wall. This is wisdom’s world as well, in which the testimony of the senses is by definition suspect and treacherous, and everything that happens obeys a set of higher moral laws. Indeed, the human being depicted by orthodox wisdom is not so much man as little man, that small, sometimes laughable little fellow glimpsed from above, as if from the divine perspective.12 This is how the poor fool of Proverbs 7 first appears: For at the window of my house, through my lattice, I looked down. There, among the foolish ones, I glimpsed amidst the boys a senseless lad, passing in the street next to her corner, now striding up toward her house. Prov. 7:6–8

It is from this same perspective that a wisdom-imbued psalmist could assert: From the heavens the Lord looks out, seeing all of humanity. From the place of His dwelling He looks down on all of earth’s inhabitants. He who made the hearts of all of them [likewise] perceives their every deed. No king will escape through force of arms, no mighty man through power. The cavalry’s useless for victory, no matter its force, it will not be saved. But the Lord’s eye is turned to those who fear Him, who trust in His beneficence. Ps. 33:13–18

Just as little man’s vaunted powers are as nothing before God, so his little plans are meaningless in the presence of the Great Plan, the underlying “wisdom” that guides all the world’s affairs. This same psalmist likewise asserts: The Lord overthrows the nations’ plans, undoes the peoples’ designs. The Lord’s plan stands forever, the designs of His heart for every age. Ps. 33:10–11

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Similarly: The Lord knows human designs—that they are a breath [i.e., passing, futile]. Ps. 94:10 A man’s mind may plan his path, but it is the Lord who will determine his steps. Prov. 16:9 Many are the designs in a man’s mind, but the Lord’s plan—that is what will stand. Prov. 19:21

The divine plan is not, however, indifferent to little man, for all his smallness. On the contrary, what happens in human affairs, no less than the great cataclysms of nature, is determined by God’s underlying set of rules. So it is that the theme of reward and punishment is also a crucial one in wisdom literature. As orthodox wisdom would have it, the righteous will inevitably be rewarded for their goodness, while the wicked will just as inevitably be punished. Indeed, one might call this— beyond the very existence of the divine plan—the great theme of wisdom writings: since the world is fundamentally divided into the righteous and the wicked, there can be no doubt that their Maker will, in the course of events, apportion to each group its just deserts. Here, however, reality intrudes. The author of Ecclesiastes was certainly not the first to observe that Sometimes the righteous receive what befits the deeds of the wicked, while the wicked sometimes receive what befits the deeds of the righteous.13 Eccles. 8:14

Even in the ideal world of wisdom, one could not hide from the fact that boorish fat cats drive around town in limousines while wellborn professors must take the bus (Eccles. 10:6–7). So it is that patience is the cardinal virtue of the sage: since he knows that all happens according to the divine plan, the apparent triumph of the wicked must be only temporary. In the end, right will win out, so it is necessary simply to wait. What one waits for is not the world to come or a reward after death, but something in this world: eventually, right here on earth, the wicked of each generation will get what is coming to them, and so will the just. Therefore, patience meant not just waiting for the divine equilibrium to be established, but waiting patiently: Better is the end of a thing than its beginning; better is patience than a haughty spirit. Eccles. 7:8

Once again, a mashal’s coordinated assertions really stand in the relation of “Just as A, so B,” or “You agree with A, now therefore admit B.” The wisdom of A here is indeed undeniable. Anyone would concur that something completed is far better than something that is merely in the planning stage, its final outcome far from

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sure; the difference is that between unarguable fact and laudable intentions. Just as this is so, says the sage, so patience, a willingness to take the long view, is better than haughtiness. For if you are not willing to hold off until the thing is completed, your “I will not allow this to happen” or even “How can this happen to me?” will always be off the mark, a reaction to something-in-potential rather than something that really is. There is only one of Israel’s ancestors who is described as “wise,” and that is Joseph (Gen. 41:39); not only is he so described, but he does precisely those things—interpreting dreams, advising the king—that were typical of the ancient Near Eastern sage.14 So it is hardly surprising that the cardinal virtue of patience characterizes this wise hero’s action at every turn. Sold as a slave by his brothers, he does not despair but soon rises to the top of Potiphar’s household staff; even his next reversal—when he is cast down into a dreary dungeon because of a false accusation by his master’s wife—does not break Joseph, because, like any sage, he knows that righteousness in the end will win out. And so it does: he becomes, through a series of divinely manipulated events, viceroy of Egypt. The divine plan is thus not only something Joseph believes in; it is something that his whole life story demonstrates. For everything here had indeed been plotted in advance, the seven years of plenty followed by the seven years of famine; God in fact communicates this plan to Joseph, using Pharaoh as a mere conduit to the true sage’s powers of understanding. Then, set in his justly deserved place of honor, Joseph never seeks to repay his brothers the ill that they caused him—since, in any case, all has happened according to the Great Plan. As Joseph himself tells them, “You are not the ones who sent me down here, but God” (Gen. 44:8), and later, “As for you, you planned evil against me, but God planned it for the good, so as to keep alive a mass of people, as indeed has happened” (Gen. 50:20). Being patient is related, in Latin as in Hebrew, to bearing and suffering. The ancient Near Eastern sage’s patience included, prominently, his ability to suffer, to take it, knowing as he knew that his pains were either the just punishment for some sin he had committed, or part of some divinely instituted test; in either case, if the divine plan means that the righteous will ultimately be rewarded, what harm could there be in a few bumps along the way? “Are your sufferings pleasing to you?” asks one exponent of Rabbinic Judaism—the most direct heir of the biblical wisdom tradition in postbiblical times—to another (b. Ber. 5b). It is a reasonable question if you believe, as he did, that human suffering is ultimately a way of setting things right again between the sufferer and God—indeed, a down payment for future rewards. But if a toothache is always the true test of one’s philosophy, then Israel could scarcely be said to have passed that test with distinction. However much patient suffering was part of the ancient Near Eastern sage’s ideology, it is hardly the dominant note sounded in Hebrew Scripture, and surely it is indicative that even of the three biblical wisdom books mentioned, only one—Proverbs—might be said to subscribe to the rigors of “orthodox” wisdom in this crucial regard. The Book of Job, as is well known, is actually an Israelite’s own view of what he considers this strange, eastern philosophy. Even Job himself, who speaks for

Wisdom and the Anthological Temper 45

the book’s author, is not an Israelite, but one from the land of Uz, and all his comforters are similarly identified as foreign sages, graduates of the elite academies of wisdom far from the Israelite west coast. So when Job is struck down, these easterners come up with the pat wisdom answer: everything goes according to the divine plan, therefore your sufferings must be deserved. Indeed, their words are not so much intended to “comfort” Job (though this is a common misunderstanding of the book) as to bring him to the state called, in mishnaic Hebrew, !ydh qwdyc, that is, the acceptance of the justice of God’s unfavorable decree. The ritual of repeatedly refusing to accept the assertion of friends and loved ones that the world makes sense despite the pain, that God’s decree must have been fair—a ritual called “refusing to be comforted” (Gen. 37:35)–was part of the mourning process; “accepting comfort” (!ymwxnt tlbq in mishnaic Hebrew) meant finally giving in. But Job will not. Despite his years of training and mastery of the wisdom idiom, he will not stand by (or rather, sit, since that is what mourners did) and allow black to be called white. The comforters’ words are full of high sentence and a bit obtuse, but behind them it is not hard to glimpse an Israelite author of, probably, the exilic or early postexilic period who, for all his own fascination with wisdom, cannot quite make his peace with patient suffering. Nor, of course, would it be correct to call his book a “wisdom anthology.” It is more like a drama written by someone who can sound like a sage—indeed, who peppers his speech with just enough recherche´, usually foreign, words and roots so as to give it an altogether alien flavor—but who is actually rather short on meshalim. His point is to sound like a sage in order to protest the flawless simplicity of the sagely view of suffering. If, paradoxically, he himself ends up justifying God’s decrees in rather classical wisdom fashion—hence justifying, in no uncertain way, wisdom itself— well, the paradox is the point: he wants wisdom to be true but cannot stand the smugness of its orthodox exponents. The Book of Ecclesiastes presents a rather more complicated situation. Many early wisdom collections from the ancient Near East had taken the form of, for example, a master’s instructions to his pupil, or a father’s words to his son15 —but these were by and large a literary fiction for the anthologist, a framing device. In Ecclesiastes the literary fiction has become fact, to the point that it compromises the very abstract, ideal world of wisdom that it seeks to inhabit. Ecclesiastes is apparently a real person. The name Qohelet (“Ecclesiastes” is but a misguided attempt to render this name in Greek)16 comes from a relatively rare root qhl, which means “argue” or “harangue,”17 and it probably was indeed the man’s real (by)name or, possibly, a very thin persona through which a real man spoke. A sage of probably the fifth or fourth century b.c.e., he was a wealthy Jerusalemite who apparently served for a time as governor of the Jews there, an office he describes, perhaps a bit grandiloquently, as “king” (Eccles. 1:12).18 The very fact that we know these things about him, the fact that he recounts at length (Eccles. 1:12–2:11) his youthful pursuit of self-indulgence (“all for the sake of science, of course,” Eccles. 2:3) and details further stages of his life, is indicative of how far this book is from the idealizing, inner spirituality of Proverbs. Qohelet is a man of this world, and his particular time and place intrude into the world of

46 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism

wisdom he constructs like a ray of afternoon sunlight seeping in under the screening-room door. Indeed, one phrase that he repeats and repeats, a linguistic tic that reveals his true frame of mind, is “under the sun” or “under the heavens” (Eccles. 1:3, 9, 12, 14, etc.); he is down here, out here, making deals, bemoaning the cruelties of fate, growing older. He is a sage, irredeemably so, yet he frequently holds the received wisdom of sages up to the light and finds it wanting. This he reports without joy, since, as he has discovered, there is no alternative to the path of wisdom. If only things were different! But how can you maintain that a person’s “name” is imperishable (Eccles. 7:1) when you know perfectly well that those of former times have no remembrance and even those who live in time to come will have no remembrance with those that come after them. Eccles. 1:11

His discontent is reflected in the very style of the book. Gone are the seamless, measured niceties of the mashal: there are meshalim, of course, plenty of them, but they are interrupted here and there by bits of autobiography, transitional sentences, sidelong glances. What Qohelet particularly likes is to quote an established mashal and then argue with it, or merely comment, “This also is unfair” (Eccles. 6:9; in the same sense, Eccles. 2:15, 21, 23, 26; 4:4, 8, 16, etc.). He takes a perfectly good mashal such as Two are better than one, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken

and, instead of just citing it, interrupts it with a long, prosy parade of illustrations: Two are better than one, since they will surely profit from their work. For if they should fall, one of them will pick up the other, but if there were only one and he fell, the second would not be there to pick him up. Likewise, if two people lie down together, they will keep warm, but one person alone cannot stay warm. And if one of them is attacked, the two will be able to withstand it; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken. Eccles. 4:9–12

It is almost as if Qohelet cannot stand the symmetry, the poetry, of wisdom.19 It would be inexact to call this brief book an “intellectual autobiography,” but the little intrusions of Qohelet’s life represent a clever strategy on the anthologistauthor’s part. At the beginning of his composition, Qohelet is young, vigorous, planting gardens, building himself a pleasure palace without equal: he tells us, in the language of wisdom’s eternal verities, how the world looked to him then (Eccles. 1–2). But time passes and he reaches new conclusions: “Then I turned to consider” (Eccles. 2:11), “I understood [or “saw, considered”]” (Eccles. 2:13, 14; 3: 10, 14, 16; 4:4, 15; 6:1; 9:1, 13, etc.), “I thought to myself” (Eccles. 1:16; 2:1; 3:17, 18, etc.), “I returned and saw [that is, “I reconsidered”]” (Eccles. 4:1, 7; 9:11, etc.), “Here is what I myself have seen” (Eccles. 5:17), “Here is what I have found out” (Eccles. 7:27, 29), and so forth. These personal references are not merely little reminders of the man behind the mashal, but a way of encompassing a host of

Wisdom and the Anthological Temper 47

different, sometimes jangling, bits of wisdom in one book. What was obvious back at the beginning, when the sage was relatively young, no longer holds by the end, when he is old. Names may be forgotten, but a name is nonetheless all that remains; woman may be all traps and snares (Eccles. 7:26–28), but “enjoy life with the woman whom you love” (Eccles. 9:9); sages and fools may meet the same end, “so why should I be wise?” (Eccles. 2:15), but still, “a sage’s mind is his right hand, a fool’s his left” (Eccles. 10:2), “there is nothing better for a man than that he eat and drink and enjoy what he has gotten” (Eccles. 2:24); nonetheless, “know that God will bring you to judgment concerning all these things” (Eccles. 11:9). To Qohelet well applies the French barb, Il se contredit pour avoir tout dit (“He contradicts himself in order to have said everything”). An anthologist could scarcely aim higher. The wisdom tradition in Hebrew hardly ends with Qohelet: after him follow Ben Sira, the anonymous author of 1 Baruch, and a host of apocryphal and pseudepigraphic writers of the Second Temple period, culminating in the anthologized wisdom sayings of the mishnaic tractate Abot. But Abot is something of a selfconscious throwback, an attempt to resurrect one last time the old wisdom anthology genre at a time when the very nature of wisdom in Israel had changed radically, and with it the whole role of the anthology in Jewish writings. What changed was that, sometime before the start of the second century b.c.e., “wisdom” came to include Torah. It is a striking fact that nowhere among the wise sayings of Proverbs, Job, or Ecclesiastes is there the slightest reference to anything from the Bible—not a mention of Israel’s illustrious ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, nor of Moses or the great Sinai revelation, nothing! One could scarcely doubt that relatively late sages like Qohelet or the author(s) of at least the later sections of Proverbs were keenly aware of Israel’s glorious past, nay, knew parts of its sacred library of texts by heart; yet they give not the slightest evidence of such knowledge in their own writings. The reason is not hard to discover: references to biblical Israel or to individual figures or events in its history surely must have seemed to violate the international, eternally valid character of wisdom. Abraham or Jerusalem were far too particular, too earthly, too historical; wisdom’s domain was the general and ethereal and eternal. As time went on, however, Jewish sages began to view things differently: the Torah was not merely a single people’s book, a record of that people’s past history and laws, but a divine guidebook, the text in which the Great Plan finds its most complete expression. Thus, after having praised the figure of wisdom very much in the fashion of earlier sages, Ben Sira (a wise man of the early second century b.c.e.) relates that at a certain point she (wisdom) left heaven in order to dwell among men: [Wisdom says:] “Then the Creator of all things gave me a commandment, and the One who made me assigned a place for my tent. He said: ‘Make your dwelling in Jacob, and in Israel receive your inherited property.’ ” Sir. 24:8

48 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism

Wisdom’s coming to dwell in Israel’s midst is no idle boast on Ben Sira’s part. What he means is that the Torah, Israel’s sacred book, is nothing less than eternal wisdom come down to the human realm: All this [wisdom] is the book of the covenant of the Most High, the Torah that Moses commanded us as an inheritance to the congregation of Jacob. Sir. 24:23 (cf. Deut. 33:4)

In the same fashion, another Jewish sage some decades later could assert about wisdom:20 He [God] found the whole way to knowledge, and gave her to Jacob His servant, and to Israel whom He loved. She is the book of the commandments of God, and the law that endures forever. Bar. 3:36–4:1.

It is important to spell out the consequences of the change heralded by such pronouncements. For where wisdom had previously consisted of contemplating the natural world and the social order and deducing from them the general plan by which God conducts the world, it was now more and more Scripture that was to be contemplated in order to understand God’s ways. And so the sage, who had previously walked about the world or stood at his window looking out, now sat down at his table and opened the Book. The Book, even more than the world, was the place in which God’s will and God’s ways were expressed—but it required much thought and contemplation in order to understand fully the sacred messages contained therein. Thus, starting in the early second century b.c.e. (or conceivably still earlier), sages began to add to their repertoire of ancient proverbs and sayings other texts, biblical laws and narratives and prophecies, which likewise embodied discrete formulations of the Great Plan. Not surprisingly, however, their approach to analyzing texts remained basically unchanged. That is, schooled in the ways of meshalim, in the careful comparison of part A with part B and the search for all the hidden nuances, these sages quite naturally applied the same techniques to the rest of Israel’s literary heritage. Were not its other words just as likely to be cryptic, esoteric, in need of sustained contemplation in order to be fully understood? Likewise, the very conception of Scripture as a great corpus of divine instruction whose lessons, therefore, are relevant to every age—a notion that underlies all of ancient biblical interpretation—was not this also merely a projection of the sage’s assumptions about wisdom literature onto all of Israel’s variegated corpus of ancient writings? The treatment of various biblical figures as examples, models of proper conduct, is similarly a sagely construct. Indeed, it is certainly significant, in light of wisdom literature’s polarized division of humanity into the righteous and the wicked, the wise and the foolish, that a similar polarization takes place in ancient exegesis: biblical heroes are altogether good, with any fault airbrushed away, whereas figures like Esau or Balaam are altogether demonized—as if their neithergood-nor-evil status in the Bible itself is somehow intolerable.21 (The most convincing instances of such polarization occur with figures like Lot or Enosh, si-

Wisdom and the Anthological Temper 49

multaneously demonized by one group of interpreters while pronounced altogether righteous by another. Apparently they could go one way or another, but not remain in the intolerable ambiguity of the middle.) Thus the ancient sages of Israel’s past now became interpreters of Scripture. This is quite literally true of Ben Sira, who devoted not a little of his book to the elucidation of biblical laws and narratives, and who concluded it with an extensive—six chapters long!—review of Israel’s biblical heroes, replete with allusions to well-known biblical phrases and a considerable body of interpretive material. The anonymous sage who authored the Wisdom of Solomon (first century b.c.e.) did no less, devoting chapter 10 of that work to a similar catalog, and a good deal of the remaining chapters to exploring the wisdom contained in, specifically, the Exodus and desert-wandering narratives of the Pentateuch. This author did not simply retell Scripture, but included the fruits of interpretive research, his own and that of earlier sages, in its every word. Thus, in retelling the events of the Exodus, he observed: She [wisdom] gave to holy men the reward of their labors; she guided them along a marvelous path, and became a shelter to them by day and a starry flame through the night. She brought them over the Red Sea and led them through the deep waters; but she drowned their enemies and cast them up from the depth of the sea. Wisd. 10:17–18

Quite a bit in these two sentences testifies to the advanced state of biblical interpretation at this time. For example, the biblical account presents the Israelites as having borrowed silver, gold, and other precious items from the Egyptians before leaving, and so having “despoiled” them (Exod. 12:36). Wisdom of Solomon is quick to explain that this was not thievery or even deception, but “the reward of their labors”; that is, it was only fair of the Israelites to take these items in recompense for all the years of slavery in which they had served the Egyptians without being paid. As for the pillar of cloud and pillar of fire that accompanied the Israelites on their way out of Egypt (Exod. 13:21), Wisdom of Solomon here explains what the book of Exodus somehow had not, that while the nighttime pillar was made of fire in order to guide them in the dark, the purpose of the daytime pillar of cloud was to give shelter to the Israelites from the sun—hence two pillars were necessary. Moreover, this same author specifies that, after drowning Israel’s enemies, Wisdom “cast them up from the depth of the sea.” This is no gratuitous flourish, but an attempt to resolve an apparent contradiction in the Exodus account, which at one point specifies that the Egyptians “were drowned in the Red Sea, the floods covered them, they went down into the depths like a stone” (Exod. 15:4–5) but on the other hand says that the Israelites “saw the Egyptians dead upon the seashore” (Exod. 14:30). Where were they, on the seashore or at the bottom of the sea? This author’s answer is that they at first sank to the bottom of the sea but then were “cast up” to the shore again to be seen by the Israelites. In short, wisdom’s course took a sharp new turn in Israel at this time. Henceforth the sage would be a Schriftgelehrte before all else, and his stock-in-trade would

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include most prominently the Torah itself, written by the greatest of sages, Mosesour-teacher. It is thus no exaggeration to state that the true Rabbinic continuation of the biblical wisdom tradition is not so much Mishnah Abot as the Mekhilta deR. Ishmael or Genesis Rabbah, those anthologies of pithy explanations of individual, isolated verses from Scripture. Surely there is no mystery in the fact that these and so many other midrashic collections of the opening centuries of the Common Era are anonymous anthologies rather than authored commentaries (such as appeared among Christians in the same period). The Jewish sages (called, in fact, hfi akhamim, “sages”) responsible for these early midrashic works were, consciously or otherwise, continuing an anthological tradition of wisdom that stretched back centuries and centuries into the distant past, back to the time when humans had first concluded that, while no one can know all that is worth knowing, a sage, mastering a thousand discrete insights handed down from here and there, can nevertheless assemble them into a single book and so pass on to future generations something of the great divine order by which the world is run. Notes Prooftexts 17 (1997):9–32. Reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1. From Old Kingdom Egypt (third millennium b.c.e.) come such collections as the “Instruction of Ptah-hotep” and the “Instructions from Kagemni”; see R. O. Faulkner, E. F. Wente, and W. K. Simpson, The Literature of Ancient Egypt (New Haven, Conn., 1972). Old Sumerian proverbs survive from early in the second millennium b.c.e.: S. N. Kramer, History Begins at Sumer (New York, 1959), pp. 119–26. 2. As has been frequently pointed out, this notion of wisdom is to be connected with the Egyptian concept of ma
at, the divine order; see A. Volten, “Der Begriff der Maat in den a¨gyptischen Weisheitstexten,” in Les sagesses du Proche-Orient ancien (Paris, 1963), pp. 72–102; E. Wu¨rtwein, “Egyptian Wisdom and the Old Testament,” in J. Crenshaw, Studies in Ancient Israelite Wisdom (New York, 1976), pp. 113–33. 3. This subject is developed further in my Idea of Biblical Poetry (New Haven, Conn., 1981), pp. 11–12. 4. For this reason Ecclesiastes complains, in a famous phrase that is almost always mistranslated, “there is no end to the collecting of books, and much study wearies a person” (Eccles. 12:12). On
s´h in the sense of “collect” or “gather” in Ecclesiastes (parallels Phoenician p
l): J. Kugel, “Qohelet and Money,” Catholic Bible Quarterly 51 (1989):34–35n. 5. The point, of course, is that the dog will end up biting the hand that grabs him— that is, one cannot remain an uninvolved, or uninjured, meddler. But beyond this obvious lesson, it seems that the proverbist takes delight in the fact that, while the passerby begins with the dog’s ears—namely, speaking to the ears of the disputants—he ends up getting it from their mouths. 6. Reading, conjecturally, mithalhel. 7. On the subject of larger compositional units in Proverbs there is a substantial scholarly literature, some of it quite delirious: see P. Skehan, “The Seven Columns of Wisdom’s House,” “A Single Editor for the Whole Book of Proverbs,” and “Wisdom’s House,” all collected in his Studies in Israelite Poetry and Wisdom (CBQ MS 1) (Washington, D.C., 1971), pp. 9–45; Christa Kayatz, Studien zu Proverbien 1–9: Eine form- und motivgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1966); G. E. Bryce, “Another Wisdom-Book in

Wisdom and the Anthological Temper 51 Proverbs,” JBL 91 (1972): 145–57; B. Lang, Die weisheitliche Lehrrede: Eine Untersuchung von Spru¨che 1–7 (Stuttgart, 1972); B. Lang, Wisdom and the Book of Proverbs: An Israelite Goddess Redefined (New York, 1986); T. Hildebrandt, “Proverbial Pairs: Compositional Units in Proverbs 10–29,” JBL 107 (1988):207–24; Daniel Snell, Twice-Told Proverbs and the Composition of the Book of Proverbs (Winona Lake, Ind., 1993); J. Goldingay, “The Arrangement of Sayings in Proverbs 10–15,” JSOT 61 (1994):75–83. On the same question with regard to Qohelet: W. Zimmerli, “Das Buch Qohelet: Traktat oder Sentenzensammlung?” VT 24 (1974):221–30; S. Glender, “Ecclesiastes—a Collection of ‘Diverse’ Sayings or a Unified Worldview?” Beit Miqra 26 (1981):15–23. 8. The same thing may be said of the Book of Job, another wisdom composition with a story to tell. True, the mise-en-sce`ne here has been entrusted to normal, straight, narrative style (chapters 1–2 as well as the conclusion, 42:7–17). But what occurs in the middle is not so much an exchange of individual insights as an argument framed in the idiom of wisdom sages, a kind of drama in mashal form; see later. 9. J.J.A. van Dijk, La Sagesse sume´ro-accadienne (Leiden, 1953); W. G. Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature (Oxford, 1960). 10. The Egyptian origin of Proverbs 22:17–24:34 was first argued by A. Erman, “Das Weisheitsbuch des Amen-em-ope,” Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 27 (1924):241–52; see also J. M. Plumley, “The Teaching of Amenemope” in Winston Thomas, Documents from Old Testament Times (London; 1958), pp. 172–86; R. J. Williams, “The Alleged Semitic Original of the Wisdom of Amenemope,” JE 47 (1961):100–106; and Diethard Romheld, Wege der Weisheit: die Lehren Amenopes und Proverbien 22:17–24:22 (Berlin, 1989). Further on Egyptian and biblical wisdom: B. Gemser, “The Instructions of
Onchsheshonqi and Biblical Literature,” Vetus Testamentum Congress Volume, Vetus Testamentum Supplements 8 (1960): 102–28; Kayatz, Studien zu Proverbien 1–9; F.-J. Steiert, Die Weisheit Israels (Freiburg; 1990); Nili Shupak, “Where Can Wisdom Be Found?” The Sage’s Language in the Bible and Ancient Egyptian Literature (Go¨ttingen; 1993). 11. To be sure, some collections of wisdom in the ancient Near East were presented as the Teachings of X, So-and-so’s words to his son, etc. This format is found very early in Egypt: “The Instruction of Ptah-hotep,” “The Instruction of Amen-em-he´t for His Son Sesostris I,” “The Instruction of the Scribe Cheti,” etc.; see Gemser, “The Instructions of
Onchsheshonqi,” pp. 103–4. Nevertheless, it is clear that these are collections of individual proverbs, anthologies. 12. Such is, of course, also the effect achieved by depicting human beings as talking animals, whether in animated cartoons or Aesop’s fables or the reasoned moralities of Marie de France or La Fontaine. 13. Jeremiah, for example, asked the same question: Jer. 12:1–2. 14. This was discussed by G. von Rad in his “Josephsgeschichte und a¨ltere Chokhma,” Vetus Testamentum Congress Volume, Vetus Testamentum Supplements 1 (1953):120–27. I do not believe that the foundations of his argument have been undermined by more recent examinations; see G. W. Coats, “The Joseph Story and Ancient Wisdom: A Reappraisal,” Catholic Bible Quarterly 35 (1973):285–97. 15. See n. 11. 16. “Man of the assembly,” as if the Hebrew were derived from qahal, “assembly.” Later, of course, the Greek ekklesia became the Christian “assembly,” the Church, whereupon Ecclesiastes became “the preacher.” 17. See Nehemiah 5:7, and the Arabic and Syriac cognates of qhl—all of which were pointed out by E. Ullendorf, “The Meaning of Qohelet,” Vetus Testamentum 12 (1962):215. To these examples might be added Numbers 16:3, 17:7, and Job 30:28, where the word clearly means “complain.”

52 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism 18. Kugel, “Qohelet and Money,” pp. 47–48. 19. A different view of this passage (and of the phenomenon it represents): R. Gordis, “Quotation in Wisdom Literature,” in Crenshaw, Studies, pp. 220–44. 20. Note in the same connection a wisdom text from Qumran that asserts that God has granted wisdom “to Israel, He gives her as a gracious gift,” (4Q185) Sapentiential Work 2:10. 21. Particularly suggestive in connection with this topic is B. Otzen, “Old Testament Wisdom Literature and Dualistic Thinking,” VTS 28 (1974):146–57. “Dualistic thinking” in his definition includes the polarization of humanity not only into good and evil or wise and foolish, but as well such dualisms as the “sons of light/sons of darkness” and “two spirits” found at Qumran. See also such texts as Ben Sirah 15:14–20; Testament of Asher 1: 3–5; Philo of Alexandria, The Worse Attacks the Better, pp. 82–84; as well as R. A. Baer, Philo’s Use of the Categories Male and Female (Leiden; 1970).

4 yaakov elman

Order, Sequence, and Selection The Mishnah’s Anthological Choices

n the tenth century, nearly 800 years after the Mishnah’s “publication,” R. She-

Irira Gaon described how Rabbi Judah the Prince, the Mishnah’s editor, “compiled . . . and added to it what was in his time, and reconciled it[s difficulties] properly.”1 In reconstructing the Mishnah’s formation, R. Sherira repeatedly emphasized Rabbi’s faithfulness to his sources—primarily the earlier compilation of R. Meir—and the faithfulness of the latter to his sources. “And not in his own words [lit., “from his [own] heart”] did Rabbi compile them,” or, “nothing was omitted or added but for a few places”—this theme recurs in his description of the process, along with a detailed series of proofs for his contention.2 The motive for this emphasis is clear: the anti-Karaite polemic which underlies R. Sherira’s history of the Oral Torah. Whatever may be its historical value today, Sherira’s monograph was the first to seek to understand Rabbi Judah’s motives and methods.3 This investigation has been renewed each time the authority or authenticity of the Oral Torah has been called into question and, with the emergence of the modern critical study of Rabbinic literature, has gained particular force since the middle of the nineteenth century down to our own time.4 R. Sherira employs four verbs to describe the process of compiling the Mishnah: liqqet, tereiz, osif, and hibber—“collect,” “solve [its difficulties],” “add,” and “formulate,” respectively.5 R. Sherira emphasizes that, before Rabbi’s time, the existence of differences of opinion made it impossible “to recite it with one voice and in one formulation.”6 The implication would seem to be that Rabbi’s intention was to produce a code of Rabbinic halakhah as it existed in his time. A few lines further on he adds that “the words of the Mishnah were like [those that] Moses enunciated from the mouth of the Most High.” Rabbi’s code was based on earlier sources, in particular the views of R. Akiva and his disciples, as formulated by R. Meir. In responding to the implicit question of why minority opinions were cited as well, R. Sherira quotes the view of R. Judah b. Ilai, that this was done “in order 53

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to invalidate them” should a person wish to decide a dispute in favor of the minority view.7 The Mishnah is thus both authentic and authoritative, a conclusion that the polemic needs of his time—that is, the Karaite challenge—required. Less than a century before Sherira, another of the gaonim, R. Saadiah, dated the beginning of the redaction of the Mishnah to the early years of the Second Temple period. His motives were the same: in order to assert the antiquity, authenticity, and authority of the Oral Torah against Karaite claims to the contrary.8 R. Sherira, however, was the first to devote a monograph to the subject and, in doing so, to set the agenda for the discussion of such matters for the next millennium.9 The debate surrounding Rabbi’s motives and the purpose for which the Mishnah was composed has continued into our own time. As Eliezer Segal writes elsewhere in this volume, “a long-standing dispute has focused on whether the Mishnah was intended to serve as a normative codex or corpus iuris, or as a digest or encyclopedia of sources for theoretical instruction.”10 In fact, many more theories of the Mishnah’s genre have been proposed in the last century and a half, and many of them reflect the religious polemic of the nineteenth century.11 And nearly all of these theories relate to David Stern’s second area of concern in regard to anthologizing: the question of its genre, and the distinctions he draws between an “archive,” a “collection,” and an “anthology proper.”12 In regard to the Mishnah’s genre, we can begin by saying that no one argues that the Mishnah was composed de novo.13 The Mishnah is clearly an anthology of some sort, a collection of previously existing sources. The question is the purpose of this collection. Among the many definitions that have been proposed for its genre we may single out five: (1) a code, (2) a collection of halakhic sources for study, (3) an introductory textbook of halakhah, (4) Rabbi’s lecture notes, and (5) a philosophical work. Let us briefly consider each one separately and then return to the problems raised by each definition. The first two views of the Mishnah—that it is a code or a source collection— have a long history. Both views assume that the Mishnah was intended from the beginning to be authoritative. As we have already seen, R. Sherira considered the Mishnah to be an authoritative collection of halakhic sources, that is, a code. So too did Maimonides, the Codifier par excellence. In the introduction to his Commentary on the Mishnah and elsewhere, he accounts for a number of its features in terms of that assumption. The third view—that of the Mishnah as a “textbook of halakha”—is of more recent invention and was proposed by Abraham Goldberg. The precise meaning of the term “textbook” is somewhat ambiguous. A legal textbook is authoritative, but only in the pedagogical sense, not in the legal sense: it is not meant to be a code, or even an immediate source for working lawyers. The fourth view—that the Mishnah was “Rabbi’s lecture notes”—was a popular notion in the nineteenth century, when Maimonidean ideas of order and arrangement were taken as all but normative even by “enlightened” scholars, and it has more recently been revived by Abraham Weiss. This view attempts to explain the Mishnah’s anthological features; it does not directly address the question of

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authoritativeness, although it could be used as an argument for the Mishnah’s authority despite its somewhat disordered state. On the other hand, this argument is something of a double-edged sword; it could as easily be employed against such a view. Finally, there is Jacob Neusner’s view of the Mishnah as a philosophical work. The critical term here, of course, is the word “philosophical,” which Neusner uses in his own, somewhat idiosyncratic way. We shall examine his view in greater detail, but in light of the thumbnail historiographical sketch, the apologetic thrust of this view should be sufficiently clear. None of the views just set forth can dispense with a consideration of the Mishnah’s structure and contents. All views of the Mishnah as a code or as an authoritative legal work must deal with at least three problems: (1) its lack of cohesiveness and particularly its inner contradictions and unresolved disputes; (2) its lack of comprehensiveness, namely, the areas of tannaitic halakhah that it does not cover; and (3) its shortcomings in organization, particularly its duplications and its noncontextual arrangement of material. Thus, some sections are famously heterogenous, like Megillah 1:4–11, Pesahim 4, and all of Eduyot. Usually these problematic sections are explained as having resulted from oral transmission and are used as evidence for the view that Rabbi did not or hardly altered his sources. This view, however, is the opposite to Maimonides’, at least according to the account of Isadore Twersky. According to Twersky, Maimonides glowingly praises the Mishnah’s “comprehensive scope, muscular method, apodictic form, brief yet mellifluous style,” and Rabbi’s “nearly perfect wisdom, unexceptionable piety, personal austerity . . . , unrivaled mastery of Hebrew.”14 Nothing of its arrangement was left to chance—least of all, its contents and the order of its tractates. Whether or not Maimonides was correct in this view, his discussion essentially set the terms of the modern debate over the Mishnah’s form and structure, and permutations of his views make their appearance in virtually every theory that has been proposed to date. Two aspects of the Mishnah’s form—its arrangements and its omissions—were of particular interest to Maimonides, both for what they told him about the Mishnah’s place in the history of the Oral Torah and for his own codificatory efforts. Because of the systematic cast of his thought, Maimonides preferred philosophical/theological explanations to literary or historical ones. This preference is no more apparent than in his discussion of the Mishnah’s arrangement which, as we shall see, is closely tied to the question of its genre. Consider, for example, Maimonides’ explanation for the order of the different tractates in Seder Moed, the Order of Appointed Times. The Order begins with Shabbat, the tractate dealing with the Sabbath, because of the latter’s “precedence in sanctity; the fact that it recurs every seven days and so occurs frequently in the course of time; and that Scripture begins with it in its list of festivals (in Lev. 23: 3).” Maimonides thus explains the placement of the tractate in separate theological, sociological/personal, and scriptural terms. Eruvin comes next in the Order because of its obvious thematic relationship to Shabbat. Pesahim follows “because it was the first mitzvah the Israelites were commanded by Moses, and also because it is adjacent to the Sabbath in the [scriptural] section on festivals.” To explain the placement of the next tractate, Sheqalim, Maimonides again turns to scriptural

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order as the reason, but in this case he shifts the focus to another part of Scripture, Exodus 30:11–16, which follows the exposition of the Passover laws in Exodus 12. To do so, however, he skips over the mention of all the pilgrimage festivals in Exodus 23, aside from shifting back from Leviticus 23. Thus, because a theological/ philosophical explanation will not serve in all cases, Maimonides must fall back on scriptural order, even when that “order” is itself not “orderly”! Yoma then follows because, according to Maimonides, the scriptural description of the service of the Day of Atonement occurs in Leviticus 16—although he again ignores the passages in Leviticus 23:23–27, where the order is different. Indeed, were the Mishnah to have followed the order of Leviticus 23, all the Pentateuchal festivals would have been presented in the order in which they occur through the year. Maimonides’ explanation for the order of tractates is also not the only possible explanation. The Babylonian Talmud itself uses scriptural order to explain the order of mishnayot within a tractate15 but in some cases attributes the arrangement of tractates to the amount of material to be covered (and related matters).16 In other cases, it explains their order on the basis of a law’s derivation (e.g., from Rabbinic exegesis),17 and in one case it even raises the possibility that tractates could follow a causal, quasi-midrashic rationale. Thus, R. Judah explains that the reason the scriptural passages detailing the laws of the Sotah precede those of the nazirirte (Num. 4:11–5:21) is that “one who sees a suspected adulteress in her degradation will withhold himself from wine [by becoming a nazirite]”—a homiletic explanation. In the Mishnah, however, the order of tractates relating these two laws is reversed. In response to why this is so, the Talmud explains: Since the Tana taught [Tractate] Ketubot [Marriage Settlements] and taught [the laws governing] “one who imposes a vow upon his wife,” he next teaches [Tractate] Nedarim [Vows]; and since he taught [Tractate] Nedarim, he proceeded to teach [Tractate] Nazir, which is analogous to Nedarim [because a Nazirite undertakes a vow to observe the Nazirite prohibitions], and then [the Mishnah] continues with the Tractate Sotah for the reason given by Rabbi.18

The reason for their sequence, in other words, is partly thematic and partly the result of causal connections. Over a century ago Abraham Geiger suggested still another reason for the order of tractates within an Order of Mishnah. In Abraham Goldberg’s summary of Geiger’s argument: The logic of the arrangement is purely external: it is according to the size of the tractates, the largest being first and the smallest last. . . . The only exception to this principle of arrangement is the first Order, according to its traditional sequence. Yet even here certain manuscripts preserve a more basic arrangement, as does the Vienna MS of the Tosefta. Here the arrangement is as follows: Berakhot (9 chaps.), Pea (8), Demai (7), Terumot (11), Sheviit (10), Kilayim (9), Maasrot (5), Maaser Sheni (5), Halla (4), Orla (3) and Bikkurim (3). In this arrangement there are two distinct frames with a descending order, the second starting with Terumot. What we really have, then, are two sub-orders. Indeed, the first three tractates are a unit by themselves, differing from the rest of the Order which deals either with hallowed or with prohibited agricultural products. As the

Order, Sequence, and Selection 57 first three tractates could hardly make up an order by themselves, they were placed with no change in their own sequence together with the tractates making up the other “sub-order.”19

The logic of the order, then, was neither thematic nor scriptural but virtually “material,” that is, based on the actual size of the tractate. In his own Code, Maimonides followed still another logic in arranging its topics—a logic which, as Isadore Twersky showed, Maimonides chose while fully aware of the other options, including that of the Mishnah, that were available to him.20 As Maimonides wrote in a letter, “I follow neither the order of the Talmud nor the order of the Mishnah, but I have collected all the laws, wherever they have been formulated, relating to every subject.”21 While Maimonides used some of the Mishnah’s principles in arranging topics in the Mishneh Torah itself, his avowed rejection of the Mishnah’s principles of order is noteworthy. Maimonides seems to be saying, as Twersky writes, that “even if my explanatory insights [of the Mishnah’s order] are correct and valid, the [Mishnah’s] scheme itself has too many conceptual lapses and superficial links.”22 In rectifying these lapses, Maimonides subdivided and rearranged the Mishnah’s ordering and sequence; the result is a reclassification of the Mishnah’s six orders into fourteen books. Thus, the Mishnaic Orders of Seeds, Appointed Times, Women, and Purities find their equivalents in the Maimonidean books of Seeds (with the exception of Berakhot), Times, and Women. Damages is subdivided into Damages, Acquisition, Statutes, and Judges, while Holy Things is divided between the Temple Service and Sacrifices. But Maimonides also created several new classifications. Sanctity (Qedushah) included laws regarding the sanctity of marriage and food; Hafla’ah covered laws that in the Mishnah were divided between Nedarim (vows) in Seder Nashim and Shevu
ot (oaths) in Seder Neziqin. Finally, Maimonides created an introductory book which had no precedent in any order or even tractate in the Mishnah: Fundamentals of the Torah. This book included both theological principles and fundamental laws: rules relating to human behavior and the laws pertaining to idolatry and blasphemy. The Book of Love (Ahavah) deals with liturgy, including prayers and blessings, and thus replaces the mishnaic tractate Berakhot, but it also includes the laws of circumcision, which have no formal place in the Mishnah.23 Thus, Maimonides’ code differs from the Mishnah not because of its certain codificatory intent as against the Mishnah’s possibly anthological one, for the subject of each work is legal exposition; Maimonides’ Code differs from the Mishnah in omitting disputes, and in its introduction, which lays out a programmatic theological/historical foundation for the entire work. In essence, though, both are legal expositions, and the arrangement of rules, rituals, and laws in the Mishnah is not dependent on whether it was composed as a code or as a collection; in either case, pedagogical or expository needs take precedence. The question of what constitutes a code relates more to the manner of presentation than to its arrangement. Generally speaking, we expect a collection to contain divergent opinions, whereas a code does not (or ought not to). The fact that the Mishnah does contain many such divergent opinions is problematic. Indeed, the very fact that the Mishnah seems to contain an attempt to explain why

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it preserves divergent opinions (in Mishnah Eduyot 1:5) seems to indicate that the Mishnah’s redactor himself felt that the practice had to be explained.

The Question of Codification The question of the Mishnah’s intended genre is closely bound up with the question of its purpose. Here the matter is somewhat clearer, since the Mishnah’s concentration on legal material limits the choices to essentially two. Was it intended to be an authoritative collection, that is, a code, or “merely” a guide or textbook?24 These seemingly simple alternatives, however, mask a far more difficult and ambiguous question, since both codes and textbooks can take different forms that may even meld into one another, as the appropriation of Gaius’s Institutes as a prologue to Justinian’s Code illustrates—a case to which I will return. Still, a code is by definition legally authoritative, whereas other genres of legal material, whatever prestige or authority they may possess, are not authoritative in the same sense. It is thus no wonder that much of the debate over the presumed function of the Mishnah has centered around the question of whether it was intended as a code. Several features of the Mishnah seem to belie codificatory intent. First is its scope: it is manifestly incomplete, as we shall see. Moreover, it contains alternate views of important matters and does not explicitly decide between them. If we assume that opinions cited anonymously are meant to be authoritative, we must ask why an anonymous opinion in one place is disputed in another. In this respect and in others, the Mishnah seems to contain contradictory material, surely not the mark of an authoritative code. Numerous scholars have dealt with these questions, but because modern Rabbinic scholarship began in the nineteenth century, there has been an unfortunate tendency to transmute these essentially literary questions into historical/sourcecritical ones, chiefly the question of the Mishnah’s sources. Yet because the Mishnah is also the earliest surviving collection of Rabbinic material, it was impossible for scholars to pursue comparative work in the usual sense. Instead, Mishnah scholars based their work mainly on internal evidence in the Mishnah, aside from occasional talmudic obiter dicta that assumed historical importance far out of proportion to their actual significance. Thus, Zechariah Frankel, in his Darkei haMishnah, claimed that Rabbi had “critically reviewed” the Mishnah he had produced. This claim was based on Frankel’s understanding of a talmudic statement that R. Ashi, the presumed redactor of the Babylonian Talmud, had produced two editions of his work, a statement that Frankel assumed was also true of Rabbi Judah, even though there is no textual support whatsoever for it!25 Nonetheless, Frankel used this rationale to explain the existence of contradictions in the Mishnah which, he argued, resulted from R. Judah’s change of mind over time. And in order to explain why Rabbi himself did not eliminate these contradictions, Frankel proposed that he could not because the Mishnah had already begun to circulate in oral form. From this one example, one can see how certain sourcecritical assumptions, once accepted, generated wide-ranging conclusions about the nature of the Mishnah without, however, much evidence to back them up.

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The classic period for the adoption of source-critical methods in researching the Mishnah was the generation before World War II. Hanokh Albeck and Y. N. Epstein exemplified this trend, the former in his early volume Untersuchungen ueber die Redaktion der Mischna,26 the latter in the lecture notes that were edited and published by E. Z. Melamed as Mevo’ot le-Sifrut ha-Tanna’im.27 Albeck and Epstein had virtually opposite understandings of the Mishnah’s redaction. According to Albeck, Rabbi Judah did not alter his sources in the least; according to Epstein, he did. Albeck based his view on the twin facts that the Mishnah contains duplications, contradictions, and differences in style, all manifestations of a collection built on earlier sources. He explains that the duplications are sometimes identical as a result of Rabbi’s policy of not changing or modifying his sources. On the other hand, when duplications occur in different formulations, Albeck explained, the reason is that they stem from different schools, while contradictions were to be seen as representing the views of different authorities.28 Similarly, Albeck used the large blocks of texts that deviate from the Mishnah’s order by subject matter— mini-collections of diverse, unrelated laws all attributed to a single early authority,29 or passages in which disparate laws share identical literary formulations such as “no less than . . . nor more than. . . . ,”30 or “the only difference between. . . .”31 —to prove that these passages were incorporated from earlier collections without change. The Mishnah’s manifest incompleteness, however, was more of a problem for Albeck to explain. Why, for example, does the Mishnah omit views cited in the parallel Tosefta passage? Albeck argued that Rabbi’s Mishnah began to circulate among his disciples before it was complete and, as a result, Rabbi had not been able to include certain views as yet. This explanation is hardly sufficient to explain the absence of a specific rule that was the subject of a tannaitic dispute. This is especially so in cases (which are not uncommon, as in M. Sheviit 3:2 and T. Sheviit 2:14) where R. Meir’s view is omitted. After all, according to Albeck, R. Meir was the author of the putative version of the Mishnah which is said to have played a part in Rabbi’s redaction.32 Further, and more seriously, Albeck’s explanation of premature circulation did not explain why a number of important matters never receive systematic treatment in the Mishnah; indeed, some are missing almost entirely. Among these are discussions of ritual objects like phylacteries and ritual fringes, and systematic expositions of the laws and history of the festival of Hanukkah. Although Albeck tried to argue that these omissions were also due to the premature circulation of the Mishnah,33 it is difficult to imagine that Rabbi would have sanctioned the release of his work without these matters being treated at some point, either then or later. Albeck’s explanation also does not account for another of the Mishnah’s signal characteristics, namely, its tendency to devote great attention to subjects that were not practically relevant in Rabbi’s own time; indeed, probably more than half the Mishnah is devoted to laws dealing with either the Temple service or ritual purity (which was truly relevant only to priests actively involved in the Temple service) and to the laws of agricultural tithes (although some of these were still being

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collected after the destruction of the Temple, at least in the land of Israel). How could Rabbi treat these matters in exquisite detail and leave out systematic expositions of tefillin, tzitzit, and Hanukkah? What, in other words, was Rabbi’s plan for his work, his purpose in carrying it forward? Maimonides, in his introduction to his Commentary on the Mishnah, suggested that the Shavuot festival was not treated in the Mishnah because its observance did not involve any rituals peculiar to it,34 and so the exposition of the general laws of festivals in Tractate Betza were sufficient. This explanation, however, does not explain why the laws of Hanukkah never made it into the Mishnah. In contrast to Albeck, Epstein attempted to show that Rabbi had, in fact, altered and edited his sources. Whereas Albeck, to prove his point (that Rabbi had not altered his sources), pointed to duplicate mishnah-sections in which no alterations were made, Epstein, in good source-critical style, seized on infelicities of expression which, he explained, were the result of Rabbi’s editing. Similarly, Epstein claimed that the anonymous opinions in the Mishnah were anonymous because Rabbi preferred those opinions, not because they were really anonymous.35 Albeck, in contrast, insisted that these opinions had come down to Rabbi anonymously. To capture the flavor of the debate between the two scholars, it is worth citing some of Albeck’s arguments in his own words. (Epstein’s side does not survive in his own words.) Albeck describes in exemplary fashion the ways in which the Mishnah’s structure and style lend themselves to a source-critical analysis, and how this explains the Mishnah’s repetitions, contradictions, changes of style, and so on. Albeck emphasizes the importance of his contention that Rabbi did not edit his sources and ends on a distinctly apologetic note.36 According to current concepts (lit., “in our own generation”) we must admit that had Rabbi not proceeded in this manner, but would have changed his sources according to his own judgment, his production would have been deficient (hayah be-ma
asehu pegam), and it would have been said that he “traduced” the traditions, that he did not say things in the name of the one who said them— and not only that, but that he put words in the mouths of people who did not say them but never thought of them—as those who attribute to Rabbi changes, omissions, and additions. . . . How was he permitted to choose what seemed plausible in his eyes and to reject early views or change them according to his own judgment? On the contrary! His entire goal in the redaction of the Mishnah was to preserve their words with exactitude so that they would not be forgotten, and to mention even the opinion of a single individual [who differed] with the majority in case “a court sees the words of the individual it may rely on him” (Eduyot 1:5).37

Mavo la-Mishnah was published in 1959, two years after the publication of Epstein’s lecture notes on these matters by E. Z. Melamed,38 and it is difficult not to see Albeck’s harsh words as a reference to Epstein, Albeck’s erstwhile colleague. It is revealing that Albeck rejected Epstein’s conclusion on ultimately apologetic grounds rather than on scholarly ones. According to Albeck, Epstein had in some sense impugned the Sages by asserting that Rabbi had changed his sources and had thus undermined the authority of the Mishnah, the foundation of halakhah.

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Recently Shamma Friedman has attempted to demonstrate that the origins of certain difficult texts and of problems in the arrangement of the Mishnah may at times be traced to Rabbi’s desire for concision.39 Consider, for example, Mishnah Shabbat 16:1 and its parallel in Tosefta Shabbat 13:1–2. In the Mishnah, which is much shorter than the formally parallel toseftan passage,40 the order of exposition begins with the requirement to save scrolls of scriptural texts from a fire that has broken out on the Sabbath, even though such activity (i.e., taking objects out of one’s personal domain into the public domain) is generally forbidden on the Sabbath. Appended to this general rule are two other laws. The first is the stipulation that these scrolls must be saved whether or not they are used as texts for the public reading of the Torah, and the second is that even though the scrolls may be written in languages other than Hebrew, they still must be stored away in a respectful manner. This mishnah text then concludes with a somewhat gnomic explanation for why such texts are not read: “Why are they not read? Because of the neglect of the study hall.” As Friedman notes, the parallel Tosefta is more topically arranged, beginning with various rules regarding the reading of scriptural texts in 13:1 and continuing with an exposition of the rules of storing them away in 13:2. The two passages are joined by the term kitvei qodesh, “holy writings,” which is deployed in two different ways. In Tosefta Shabbat 13:1, as in Mishnah Shabbat 16:1, the term refers to Scripture in general, “the holy writings,” but the last clause of the mishnah refers to kitvei qodesh (without mentioning them explictly) in the sense of Hagiographa— those writings that may be not be read on the Sabbath at the time that the legal and ritual expositions are presented in the synagogue. The purpose of this rule is to discourage people from staying home to read the stories in the Hagiographa rather than attend these study sessions. Friedman continues: The redactor of our mishnah, that is, Rabbi, taught the text regarding the saving [of scriptural scrolls] (Shabbat 13: 1–7). If [these] early mishnayot, which were recited before Rabbi, were formulated in the style of the halakhot before us in the Tosefta, it is clear that Rabbi wanted, on the one hand, to include some reference to the halakhah that one may not read sacred writings [⫽ Hagiographa] on the Sabbath. On the other hand, he did not want to leave it as an isolated addendum unto itself in his new compilation without building it into the flow of the chapter. In order not to relinquish this halakhah, and also in order to retain the tight structure [of the new Mishnah], he combined this halakhah with the primary one, by interleaving their cases one within the other.41

Friedman thus attributes the lack of clarity in the rule to the impact of these conflicting desires on Rabbi’s part. The assumption underlying this chain of reasoning is that Rabbi had before him not only the halakhot that now appear in Mishnah Shabbat 16:1, but also those in Tosefta Shabbat 13:1–2. Friedman’s claim, however, is somewhat problematic, since even the synoptic chart of these halakhot that he provides shows hardly any overlap between the two groups of laws, except in the most general way. Moreover, if Rabbi’s desire for concision led to the lack of clarity which Friedman rightly laments, what may we say of Rabbi’s redactional

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skills? Even if the process of oral transmission generally leads to such condensation,42 conscious editing on the part of a careful redactor can hardly be the cause for such a result. Nonetheless, Friedman opens up what is potentially a highly fruitful method of gauging Rabbi’s intentions and purposes, for if the Tosefta is the compilation from which Rabbi worked, the differences between it and the Mishnah must be a result of his planning. However, Friedman’s argument cannot be fully evaluated until he has presented a far larger number of examples in which the two texts are parallel. In this case, as his own synoptic table shows, there is hardly any overlap except in general subject matter. Still, the argument that Rabbi consciously edited the Tosefta to produce his Mishnah bespeaks his desire to produce a concise text. The question is whether concision is more the mark of a code or of an anthology. For the present moment, this question must remain moot. In either case, there is no question that concision would have been looked upon with favor in the world of late antiquity however the Mishnah was transmitted, orally or in written form. This last point brings us, in turn, to a question that Friedman’s source-critical predecessors hardly ever considered: the cultural context within which the redactional activities that produced the Mishnah took place. The long-time debate over whether the Mishnah was originally redacted from written or oral sources, and whether it was intended to be transmitted in written or oral form, is too involved for us to enter here.43 In passing, it is worth noting only that oral transmission somewhat more adequately accounts for the existence of texts whose brevity makes them difficult for us to understand. In any case, it is a better explanation for the Mishnah’s recurrent obscurity than the alternative— namely, that their editor was incompetent. Albeck and Epstein carried on their debate over whether the Mishnah was intended as a code or an anthology, but now that debate has subsided, perhaps because most contemporary scholars have felt that neither Albeck nor Epstein produced a decisive argument for his position. Scholars today seem to assume a priori that the Mishnah is one or the other but without considering the other possibility. For Abraham Goldberg, the Mishnah is a textbook anthology; for Dov Zlotnick and David Weiss Halivni, the Mishnah was intended as a code.

The Mishnah as Pedagogical Text As was noted earlier, two theories have sought to show that the Mishnah was originally composed as a pedagogical text of one sort or another. According to Avraham Weiss, the Mishnah represents the material that Rabbi employed in his lectures, a collection of his “lecture notes,” in other words. In this way Weiss attempts to explain, or explain away, the various problems of the Mishnah’s order. In the nature of the matter, a lecturer does not present the material, or the variants, which serve as the basis for the lecture. On the other hand, it may occur that in one circumstance or another he will present a particular source in one version, and in another circumstance, when discussing another issue, he will cite

Order, Sequence, and Selection 63 this material in another version. Likewise, he will present not only the material that fits his position. It is probable that he will present that material in the form it is in [even when he disagrees with it—Y. E.], and his own position he will enunciate during his analysis. . . . In essence, the selection of material and its form of presentation will certainly demonstrate the trend of his own thought and his own position. From here [we can understand how] the early amoraic theory [could] see in the Mishnah, as it were, a collection of Rabbi’s legal decisions, that could be relied on for legal decisions, [and this] even though in essence the Mishnah is really only a collection of sources used as the subject of analysis in [Rabbi’s] lectures [italics added].44

More recently, Avraham Goldberg has argued a similar theory, but to the exact opposite effect. Goldberg, who has produced detailed commentaries on a number of the Mishnah’s tractates,45 proposes that the redactor had a precise set of pedagogical rules according to which he presented the opinions in the Mishnah. The Mishnah, according to Goldberg, more than being simply a collection of halakhic opinions, is a “textbook of the Halakha.”46 Where Weiss sees disorder in its structure, Goldberg sees order, with a strong pedagogical intent. The Mishna consists of several layers of legal teaching corresponding to consecutive generations of teachers. Later layers often are a presentation of possible interpretations to unspecified teachings given in an earlier layer. The chief aim of the final editor was to present the gamut of possible interpretations, and not to compile a definitive, canonical code of Pharasaic law. In particular, as we shall see, the editor is interested in presenting the teachings of R. Akiva as they become reflected in the interpretive teachings of his prime pupils.47 In essence, Goldberg’s theory is not so very different from Weiss’s view that the Mishnah is a set of Rabbi’s lecture notes, except that he goes much further than Weiss does in investigating the means by which the pedagogical goal was reached. According to Goldberg, the Mishnah’s editor employed the following principles in arranging his textbook: 1. The anonymous opinion is usually that which comes closest to the generalized teaching of R. Akiva. 2. In an extended discussion, different points of view will be introduced in the course of the discussion. 3. Ease of presentation determines the place where a certain opinion will be introduced. 4. A single point of view will be taught where it serves most easily as a starting point from which differing points of view may be apprehended. 5. Topical arrangement of subject matter often calls for a selection from a variety of sources. This last principle applies even if the differing points of view mentioned in number 4 are not represented in the Mishnah itself but in Tosefta, as he suggests in discussing this principle.48 What then becomes of the Mishnah as a “study book of the Halakha”? Did the editor expect students of the halakhah to resort to Tosefta as a supplementary resource? Given the vastly larger size of the Tosefta, and the

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material independent of the Mishnah that it contains, this would be a cumbersome enterprise. The editor should have incorporated the relevant toseftan material into the Mishnah in accordance with the principles that Goldberg himself has laid down! Indeed, the final principle (number 5) makes precisely this point, and thus it conflicts somewhat with the preceding three principles. The essential problem with Goldberg’s view of the Mishnah is that he views the Mishnah in two different, not entirely consistent ways: first as a “textbook,” and apparently an elementary one, of tannaitic halakhah; and second as a record of the teaching of four successive generations beginning with the generation of the Yavneans, who are responsible for “the primary, but very shortest layer of the Mishnah . . . , comprising late Second Temple teachings as formulated by the first Yavneh generation.”49 These separate views of the Mishnah conflict, because historical survey and effective pedagogy do not necessarily coalesce. Thus, at one point Goldberg states, “the truth is that the Mishnah can be properly understood and interpreted only when the relationship between each layer remains clearly recognizable. . . .”50 Elsewhere, however, he writes that, for pedagogical reasons, “the editor will obviously seek the most striking opinion,” in accordance with principle number 4, and from this Goldberg asserts that “differing views will not be hard to fathom.”51 These separate conclusions are not entirely consistent. Perhaps even more difficult to determine is how “the” editor managed to juggle these principles, synchronic, diachronic, and pedagogical, all at once. It is little wonder that Goldberg concedes that “it is very hard to find a single mishna with all four [generational] layers”52 and that most often only two opinions or layers are presented. How then is the range of opinion to be fathomed, especially when it is often a representative position that is given pride of place and not, say, two extreme positions? Indeed, given the problem of coordinating these various conflicting goals and editorial principles, one wonders if one overriding intention guided the redactional activity that went into the Mishnah’s formation. Do these conflicting goals represent the work of different compilers or redactional circles? Did the final editor intend the Mishnah to be no more than a compilation of sources, as Albeck suggested, without the active editorial intervention that Goldberg assumes took place? Goldberg himself attempted to resolve some of these problems by adverting to the historical context in which the Mishnah was composed to explain its literary nature. [The] contemporary Hellenistic climate where systematic and well-thought-out programs and theories of education played important roles. On the other hand, some of them may seem quite modern. Thus a good textbook of necessity needs to be selective in the presentation of the material, in order to offer the student a maximum of information in a minimum of text. Moreover, it would not have a stereotyped approach to every issue, but rather employ a variety of patterns of presentation, each in that context where it would be most effective.53

Goldberg never demonstrates how all this all fits into Hellenistic theories of pedagogy. But if the features Goldberg cites—like stratification and the various pedagogical principles he lists—can be said to fit the Mishnah as we now have it,

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something else must have been at work that melded history and pedagogy. This may have been something like Neusner’s scheme of halakhic evolution, since such a scheme would allow for a development from simple to complex, as may be required for pedagogical purposes. Goldberg, by insisting that R. Akiva’s disciples were merely interpreting his views and not recasting or altering them, seems to reject this approach. In a large sense, Goldberg’s scheme is merely an adaptation of R. Yohanan’s principle that the major tannaitic compilations, as he and we know them, were “all according to the opinion of R. Akiva.”54 Whether the solution works as an explanation of the Mishnah’s purpose and arrangement is another question. Thus, for a number of reasons, Goldberg’s scheme is unconvincing. But the other “pedagogical” theory—that of Weiss, who argues that the Mishnah was constituted from Rabbi’s “lecture notes”—is no less problematic. For one thing, Weiss, by attempting to use the lecture-note theory to explain the Mishnah’s disordered structure, makes it more difficult for himself to explain those not insignificant instances of order that he himself finds in the Mishnah. Furthermore, Weiss at times contradicts his own view of the Mishnah’s disorder by explaining difficulties as the result not of a lack of order but of the combination of two differing and well-conceived “proto-tractates.” For example, he argues that the differing amoraic views of the meaning of the word mav
eh—one of “the fathers of damages” and a major category of the Rabbinic tort system—was the result of the inclusion of two large blocks of material now found together in Bava Qamma but originally separate collections of categories of damages, one made up of what is now BQ1:4–3:5 and the other BQ3:8–6:6. Each of these blocks had a separate view of the meaning of the word mav
eh, and each, according to Weiss, was systematic and orderly in itself.55 The two collections are, in Weiss’s opinion, parallel in their exposition of the four “fathers of damages,” except that the first interprets the opaque category, mav
eh, as referring to the damages done by a human being, while the second collection interprets it as shen, “tooth.” If so, the ambiguity in 1:1 is built in, so to speak, or rather we may say that the ambiguity gave rise to two complete “prototractates” that were then combined. If one were to accept this type of explanation in many cases, the difference between Albeck’s position and Weiss’s would be minimal, while, in contrast, Goldberg seems to envision Rabbi as a far more active redactor than does either Albeck or Weiss.

Roman, Persian, and Syriac Parallels As we have seen, Goldberg suggests in passing that Hellenistic ideas of education served as the Mishnah’s—that is, Rabbi’s—model.56 Unfortunately, he offers few details about his suggestion, and there are both cultural and historical reasons to question whether such influence or connection was possible. In the first place, Hellenistic education was literary and cultural in the general sense, philosophical in some sense, but not legal.57 For legal parallels one must look to Roman law, and, in particular, to its classical period, which is, however, slightly earlier than the mishnaic. Gaius’ Institutes, which was intended as an introductory textbook of Roman law and eventually served as the preface to Justinian’s Code, was pub-

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lished about 160 c.e., a generation before Rabbi edited the Mishnah. Further, the actual impact of Gaius’s work is uncertain. Roman jurisconsults, certainly those who were Rabbi’s contemporaries, resisted the systematization of Roman law58 and, in his own time, Gaius was not particularly celebrated; while Justinian called him Gaius nostra, we do not even know his patronymic. Further, Gaius lived and taught in Rome, and although he may have had provincial connections (perhaps to Asia Minor), it is not clear how the Rabbis would have known of his work. Nevertheless, his approach to systematization of Roman law resembles at least some tendencies manifested in the Mishnah; he and Rabbi lived approximately at the same time and both were, generally speaking, members of the same cultural world. As a result, a comparison of the Institutes and the Mishnah is not without grounds. Even so, we must bear in mind that Gaius was concerned only with civil and criminal law and not at all with religion or ritual per se. But this is true of most law books that have survived from late antiquity, including the Syriac law books produced by various Nestorian ecclesiastics of the seventh and eighth centuries, such as those of the patriarchs Henanisho Mar Abba, and especially that of the Persian archbishops Jesuboht and Simon. Jesuboht’s “Corpus Juris” actually provides the closest parallel to the Mishnah, since it is not restricted to one subject (e.g., inheritance or marriage law) as are the others. It contains sections on marriage, inheritance and contracts and obligations, as well as an introductory “Institutiones.”59 This is true as well of the Sasanian law collection, Madayan i Hazar Dadestan (“The Book of a Thousand Decisions”) of Farroxmard i Wahraman, which dates to the beginning of the seventh century but clearly contains extracts from earlier works.60 A number of scholars have recently investigated the connection between the Rabbinic corpus and various Hellenistic late antique legal compositions. Lee Levine offers an admirably balanced summary of the current consensus: The timing of certain developments within rabbinic society, especially with regard to internal organization and compilation of various corpora, both aggadic and halakhic, has interesting parallels with what was transpiring at the time in Roman and later Byzantine society. Is it coincidental, for instance, that the earliest Pharasaic schools of Hillel and Shammai crystallized at the time of Augustus, when legal training was becoming formalized in Rome in the early Roman law schools founded by Labeo and Capito? Or that R.
Akiva and his colleagues began collecting and organizing rabbinic traditions under Hadrian, when Julianus, Celsus Pomponius, and others were actively involved in making similar compilations in Rome? Or that Rabbi Judah the Prince compiled and edited his Mishnah, and tannaitic midrashim were collected under the Severans, at a time when Gaius, Papinianus, Paulus, and Ulpianus were likewise compiling codices and responsa of Roman law and commenting on earlier material? The argument that these recurring parallel activities in Roman and Jewish societies might be related is more compelling when we realize that both Roman jurists and the rabbis centered their activities in schools of higher learning, and that at least one of the most famous Roman schools was located in Berytus, not far from the center of rabbinic activity in the Galilee.61

Whether or not we posit any direct connection or influence between the Rabbinic and the classical Roman legal enterprises,62 the synchronic juxtaposition of these

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two phenomena is tantalizing. And still more important for our purposes is the usefulness of the Roman, Syriac, and Persian law collections of late antiquity in setting out the parameters of what an ancient or Late Antique legal genre would consist of.63 We begin with the following lengthy excerpt from Gaius’s description of Roman marriage: 108. Now let us examine those persons who are subordinate to us in marriage. This also is a right peculiar to Roman citizens. 109. While it is customary for both men and women to be in power, only women fall into marital subordination. 110. Formerly there used to be three methods by which they fell into subordination: by usage, by sharing of bread, and by contrived sale. 111. A woman used to fall into marital subordination by usage if she remained in the married state for a continuous period of one year: for she was, as it were, usucapted by a year’s possession and would pass into her husband’s kin in the relationship of a daughter. The Twelve Tables therefore provided that if any woman did not wish to become subordinate to her husband in this way, she should each year absent herself for a period of three nights, and in this way interrupt the usage of each year. But this whole legal state was in part repealed by statute, in part blotted out through simple disuse. 112. Women fall into marital subordination through a certain sacrifice made to Jupiter of the Grain, for which reason it is also called the sharing of the bread. . . . This legal state is still found in our own times; for the higher priests, that is the priests of Jupiter, of Mars, and of Quirinus, as also the Sacred Kings, are chosen only if they have been born in marriage made by the sharing of bread, and they themselves cannot hold priestly office without being married by the sharing of the bread. 113. Women fall into marital subordination though contrived sale, on the other hand, by means of mancipation, that is, by a sort of imaginary sale; for in the presence of not less than five adult Roman citizens as witnesses, and also a scaleholder, the man to whom the woman becomes subordinate ‘buys’ her. . . . 115a. Formerly a contrived sale used also to take place for the purpose of making a will; for at one time women, with certain exceptions, had no right to make a will unless they had made a contrived sale and been remancipated and manumitted. But on the proposal of the Emperor Hadrian, the Senate remitted this requirement of making a contrived sale. . . . 116. It remains for us to describe what persons are in bondage. 117. All children, whether male or female, who are in the power of their father can be mancipated by him in the same way as slaves can. 118. The same rule applies to persons in marital subordination; for women can be mancipated by the other parties to the contrived sale in the same way as children by their father.64

Gaius continues by providing us with a detailed description of mancipation, bronze scales and all. Now while Gaius certainly used sources in compiling his Institutes—in this short passage he refers to the Twelve Tables, to legislation of Hadrian, and to

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senatorial decisions—he presents a summary of these sources rather than citing the original texts themselves. In this respect his Institutes is really a textbook rather than an anthology. Again, while he refers to, and even describes, practices that have fallen into disuse, these do not take up a large part of the work. Compare, however, the opening sections of Tractate Qiddushin in the Mishnah: 1. A woman is acquired [in marriage] in three ways and acquires herself in two. She is acquired by money, by deed, or by intercourse. “By money”: Beth Shammai maintain, a denar or the worth of a denar; Beth Hillel say, a perutah or the worth of a perutah. And how much is a perutah? An eighth of an Italian isar. And she acquires herself by divorce or by her husband’s death. A yevamah (i.e., a childless widow subject to levirate marriage) is acquired by intercourse, and acquires herself by [the ceremony] of halitzah (as mandated in Deut 25:7–10) or by the levir’s death. 2. A Hebrew slave is acquired by money and by deed, and acquires himself by years (i.e., after six years of service, as mandated by Exod. 21:2), by the jubilee, and by deduction from the purchase price. A Hebrew maidservant [is more privileged] in that she acquires herself by signs [of puberty]. [A slave] whose ear is bored (i.e., one who refuses freedom at the end of six years of servitude; see Exod. 21:5–6) is acquired by boring, and acquires himself by the jubilee or his master’s death. 3. A heathen slave is acquired by money, deed, or by hazaqah (i.e., taking possession, by ordering him to do the master some personal service), and acquires himself by money through the agency of others, and by deed. . . . 4. Large cattle are acquired by “pulling”; small cattle by lifting: this is the opinion of R. Meir and R. Eliezer, but the sages rule: small cattle are acquired by “pulling.” 5. Property which offers security (i.e., real estate) is acquired by money, by deed or by hazaqah. [Property] which does not offer security (i.e., moveables) may be acquired in conjunction with property which provides security by money, deed, or hazaqah, and it obligates the property which provides security, to take an oath concerning them.

There is no reference here to ancient practices or to the history of the Mishnah’s laws. If the texts in the Mishnah derive from earlier sources, the editor does not identify or even refer to them. A more exact parallel to Gaius’s practice would be those mishnayot in which obsolete practices or decisions of early courts are briefly described. These include, most famously, the mishnayot that begin with the formulaic “at first” (of which the Mishnah contains nearly two dozen65) and other forms as well.66 We do not know if the reasons that motivated Gaius and Rabbi to include such references to earlier practices were similar. The eternal character of a divine law might naturally lead a compiler to include such matters so as to better define the interplay of divine law and human legislation, whereas Gaius’ excursions may involve nothing more than a certain antiquarian temperament on the part of the author. Even so, a cursory comparison of the two passages indicates that whereas Gaius takes pains to define and describe the practices he reviews (e.g., usage, sharing of bread,

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mancipation, etc.)—presumably for the benefit of the student using the Institutes as a textbook—the Mishnah assumes a level of legal knowledge that Gaius does not (even if it is also concerned to define areas of dispute or minimum requirements). The number of bracketed comments appended to the translation gives an indication of how much knowledge the Mishnah assumes on the part of its reader. The Mishnah cannot, and did not, stand on its own as a “textbook of the Halakha,” and it clearly was not meant as an introduction to the field for students of Rabbinic law. On the other hand, even though he occasionally notes that the two schools are in dispute on an issue, Gaius seldom refers to disputes among the jurists. 196. Guardianship ends for boys when they reach puberty. Sabinus, Cassius and others of our teachers certainly think that a boy shows he has reached puberty by physical development: that is, he is capable of begetting. However, in the case of those who cannot reach puberty such as eunuchs, regard must be had to the age at which puberty is normally reached. The authorities of the other school think that puberty should be reckoned in years: that is, they judge anyone who has reached the age of fourteen as having reached puberty.67

Gaius clearly identifies himself as a Sabinian, and in opposition to the Proculians, whom he calls “the authorities of the other school.” In contrast, the Mishnah contains an infinitely greater number of disputes, but nowhere does its editor explicitly identify his allegiance; indeed, this objective stance is maintained even when the debates between the Pharisees and the Sadducees are reported, as in Yadayim 8. Roman law preserves several genres of legal collections that may be pertinent to categorizing the Mishnah: textbooks such as the Institutes of Gaius, codes such as Justinian’s, early collections such as the Twelve Tables, and responsa literature. Sasanian law preserves one important survival; the Madayan i Hazar Dadestan, which, while certainly not a code, is nonetheless a large collection of laws (comprising some fifty chapters in its two parts) on major areas of civil law.68 Yet none of these contains the wealth of disputational material that the Mishnah does, even if their authors register conflicting opinions and sometimes present a short history of the law on a particular point. Other ancient collections, such as the ninthcentury Zoroastrian encyclopedia, the Denkard (“Acts of Religion”), contain—like the Mishnah and even more like the Talmud—a variety of material, history and legend, ritual, and a smidgen of civil law, but also do not contain disputational material. Likewise, the Videvdat and the Pahlavi Vendidad (“Law Against Demons”)69 —the part of the Avesta that deals with purity laws—does not contain such material. As we have seen, it is unlikely that a code would have been composed in this way, and all these other ancient codes and legal books are testimony to that fact. That the Mishnah was eventually viewed as authoritative does not mean that it was originally intended to be a code, since, as far as we can tell, it never was looked upon as the last word in legal decision making. Nor, as we have seen, does it serve particularly well as a textbook. On the other hand, all of this may be a matter of degree. The Mishnah contains a registry of disputes but not all that much disputational material, espe-

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cially compared with the talmuds or the midreshei halakhah. On the other hand, Gaius, Justinian, and the Madayan i Hazar Dadestan do contain varying but not insignificant amounts of divergent opinions—the reason being, perhaps, as Macuch notes in her introduction to the first volume of the Madayan,70 that The author of the lawbook was not interested to explain simple relationships, nor to provide some sort of definition for the legal terms he employs. Apparently, he conceived of the work as a sort of aid to decision making for jurists, for he assumes an exact knowledge of all of these legal institutions.71

There is, however, another significant difference between these works and the Mishnah. All the other works have introductions. Justinian, as we have seen, appropriated Gaius, and Jesuboht, in the thirteen chapters of Book One, provides his law collection with an introduction reminiscent of Gaius that provides a framework for understanding the means and purposes of law, both in a legal and religious context, and the place of law within an eschatological context, and that contrasts human law with nomos, the ideal law. Possibly Jesuboht provided this introduction in order to provide his flock with an understanding of the place of “rendering up to Caesar what is Caesar’s,” on the one hand; he may also have been influenced by Justinian’s appropriation of Gaius. Farroxmard also provides something of an eschatological and doxological introduction to Madayan, but one that does not take up any legal issues whatsoever. Generally, he does not discuss basic rules or simple cases (although such rules or cases can be extracted from the precedents he does provide). Nevertheless, as Macuch makes clear in her introduction, the Madayan was certainly a collection of legal decsions that was compiled for the guidance of jurists who were obligated to enforce the laws. Historians of Roman law have emphasized the unique and unusual nature of Gaius’s Institutiones. Roman jurists were not legal theorists in the larger sense nor particularly interested in generalizations. As has been noted, Gaius was a not particularly successful law professor in his own time. It is therefore noteworthy that Justinian’s committee chose precisely his textbook as a prologue to its own code. It may be that the lack of alternatives forced this choice on them; there were not many other such overviews of the law. Ironically, the uniqueness of Gaius’s work makes the absence of such a prologue in the Mishnah, along with the paucity of definitions of legal terms in it, more in line with general Roman practice and less problematic in its own terms. In any case, it is clear that the inclusion of divergent views and the lack of clear definitions are irrelevant to the question of whether a particular work was intended as a code. Gaius composed a textbook, not necessarily meant for legal decision making in the proximate sense, which was later appropriated into a code. Farroxmard compiled a collection (not unlike the Mishnah’s), which was intended to be authoritative. Justinian’s Code, also intended as authoritative, contained elements of both the authoritative code and the textbook. Given the absence of a real parallel to Gaius’ Institutiones in Rabbinic literature, or, for that matter, in Roman or Sasanian law, we may conclude that there is no reason not to believe that Rabbi wished to provide a collection that could be used for both study and decision making.

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The Mishnah as Philosophy The fifth and final view of the Mishnah that has been proposed by modern scholars is as a philosophical treatise. The foremost proponent of this view has been Jacob Neusner, who has also pursued what is certainly the most extensive contemporary attempt to view the Mishnah in its own right and to define its characteristic traits in their own context. That is, he avoids viewing the Mishnah through the lens of other ancient Rabbinic (and non-Rabbinic) documents. By comparing the Mishnah’s and the Tosefta’s respective treatments of Seder Tohorot (Purities), Neusner has carried out an exhaustive study of the forms and formulary patterns of that Seder and its redaction. He summarizes his findings as follows: Tosefta to Mishnah Seder Tohorot both correlates with, and presents a striking contrast to, Mishnah. . . . Tosefta’s cognitive units (⫽ Mishnah-sections) are formulated out of phase with [the] formal patterns characteristic of Mishnah. In particular they ignore Mishnah’s stress on highly patterned syntactical formulations, carefully grouped units of threes and fives, and disciplined declarative sentences, one following the next in large-scale blocks of formal and conceptual intermediate divisions (⫽ roughly, chapters). Indeed, it is in Tosefta that the redactional formulations become fully apparent. Here, in the document generated by Mishnah, we see little of Mishnah’s interest in imposing structure upon intermediate units and formal patterns upon small ones. . . . When we eliminate Tosefta’s cognitive units and intermediate divisions which cite or gloss Mishnah, we are left with intermediate divisions and cognitive units which in the main form a mass of mutually indistinguishable, generally unbalanced and unpatterned declarative sentences.72

From this uniformity of language and style Neusner concludes that the Mishnah was redacted by a small group of people over a short period of time; a longer duration or a more heterogeneous group or groups of redactors could not sustain such uniformity.73 “Despite its socially diverse foundations and categories of interest, the Mishnah expresses itself in one mode of thought and expression and through one manner of speaking.”74 Moreover, there is very little “history” to the Mishnah’s own composition. History itself plays almost no role in the Mishnah. From the fact that its rules are formulated in the present tense, Neusner concludes that “after all, what the Mishnah really wants is for nothing to happen. . . . It portrays a world fully perfected and so fully at rest. . . . There is room only for a description of how things are: the present tense, the sequence of completed statements and static problems.”75 And again: “The whole corpus of prophecy and history is neglected by the Mishnah. . . . When the philosophers [of the Mishnah] confronted the sizable heritage of Israel and made the choice to ignore most of what had been done since the formation of the Mosaic codes . . . , they made a stunning comment. . . . Their judgment was that nothing of worth had happened from the time of Moses to their own day.”76 Partly because of this lack of concern with history, Neusner speaks of the

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Mishnah’s authors as “philosophers” and defines the Mishnah as “philosophy.” As E. P. Sanders puts it in a trenchant review of Neusner’s work on the Mishnah, Neusner proposes that the authors were philosophers and intended to construct a metaphysical and anti-historical world view. . . . He makes the fundamental assumption that the contents of the Mishnah tell us all that the authors want to say “about their view of the world as they see it or as they want to see it” (p. 15). . . . Since he assumes that the Mishnah is metaphysical philosophy, Neusner marvels at the things which are not there and which would be there if it were ordinary metaphysics. . . . But the things that are not there . . . are not there because they are not subject to legal discussion.77

In other words, the Mishnah’s genre cannot of course be determined by a formcritical study of its language. As Sanders points out, use of the present tense is generally characteristic of legal and semi-legal writing, as is neglect of historical data. Likewise, this accounts for its relative neglect of theology.78 Along the same line, Sanders argues, “laws characteristically do not give historical preambles and eschatological conclusions. Prophecy is entirely missing.” As an example of what the British Highway Code does not contain, he suggests the following: “Once upon a time Britain had no Motorways, until the great minister . . . arose, who built the M1, at which time there was only one. And now we look forward to the time when all Britain will be paved and, besides Motorways, there will only be slip roads.”79 Nevertheless, the inclusion in the Mishnah of large bodies of material—Qodashim and Toharot—that were all but completely inapplicable in Rabbi’s time points to its utopian character. G. Stemberger, in his revised edition of Strack’s Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, concludes his discussion of this issue with the following suggestion: Given today’s knowledge, it is no longer possible unequivocally to determine whether M[ishnah] was originally conceived as a collection, a teaching manual or a law code. Indeed, this alternative probably arises only for modern readers; what is more, it fails to account sufficiently for the utopianism of M[ishnah], its idealized order of the perfect harmony of heaven and earth, and the underlying philosophy. For in principle the ancient tradition is of course regarded as law which must be transmitted in teaching—and thus the three concepts almost coincide.80

Both Sanders and Stemberger are essentially correct, but even their characterizations of the Mishnah are not entirely accurate. Pace Stemberger, the Mishnah is hardly unique in containing elements of a code, a collection, and a teaching manual. Further, some law codes do contain historical summaries, as we have seen with Gaius, Justinian, and Madayan. As to the last of these, we may illustrate its historiographical dimension with an example from its very beginning: It is said: Until the reign of Wahram people were considered slaves whose fathers were slaves, (and) not those whose mother was;81 in contrast, Soshans said: “The child belongs to the father,” and now we say: “The mother.”82

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Any number of parallels from the Mishnah come to mind,83 as do examples from Gaius84 and Justinian.85 It should also be noted that any reference to an earlier authority—a practice common to all these collections—is in a sense historical. Sanders’s assumption that a philosophical work will not contain historical references is itself something of a non sequitur. Such historical references are not necessarily inappropriate in a law collection, a ritual text, or even a philosophical work. The same is true of eschatological conclusions. In Farroxmard’s somewhat rambling and repetitive introduction to Madayan, preserved in one manuscript which at this point has suffered losses in transmission, we find the following assertions. Because of the lacunae in the manuscript, and the loose syntax, it is difficult to follow the arguments exactly, but the general drift is clear. In the name of Ohrmazd, the lord of spiritual and earthly being [ . . . the Good Religion] of Mazdanaysians. This book is [called] the Book of a Thousand Decisions, in that it [shows] the greatness, goodness, and worth of people, aside from the qualities which they by their [own] effort [as well as] the gift of the gods, achieve in their own essence. The book is that instrument [of] efficacious power that the creator, in [his] omniscience, in order to ordain the destruction of the Lie, and the restoration to one’s own [domain], to ordain the organization of creation, the non-opposition [to the good], the undying bliss, the ever-enduring light, and to ordain [his] total sovereignty in the [eschatological] end of time, that has endured to such an extent as an essential [ability]. For the sake of the existence of that nature of mankind is that achievement praiseworthy, on account of which God created man. In the era of the [eschatological] end of time was the “preservation of the existence” of wisdom, insight, power of discernment, and understanding (perceived, taken advantage of?). . . . As one may come to perceive, from the religion of the gods, through searching and asking, to make one’s own person free of sin [is] the way to the realization of one’s own proper function, of [Good] Thinking, Speech and business dealings, keeping oneself [ritually] pure through integrity, I, Farrohmard i Wahraman, . . . this highest well-being. . . .86

Whether this introductory statement (which, it should be noted, appears as a separate section after chapter 32 of 50) was intended by the compiler as part of his work, or whether its placement is due to the vagaries of transmission, is not clear. As it stands, however, it may argue against Sanders’s point that legal works do not normally contain eschatological or philosophical discussions. The essential question is the definition of “philosophical” in this context. Neusner himself concedes that “the Mishnah’s is a philosophy in an odd and peculiar idiom to be sure.” He goes on to assert, however, that, properly studied, “it will emerge as a work of systematic thought on a sustaining program of issues that, in the Mishnah’s authorship’s time and place, other philosophers addressed and people in general [addressed] as philosophical.” When Neusner details his somewhat idiosyncratic use of the term “philosophical,” however, it becomes much less vulnerable (at least in part) to the criticism that Sanders mounts against it. He writes that the philosophical issues addressed in the Mishnah include the rules of classification and generalization, the issues of mixtures, the resolution of doubts, the relationship of the actual to the potential (chicken, egg), the role

74 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism of attitude or intention in the assessment of an action and its consequences . . . and the like—these abstract issues of general intelligibility turn out to form the intellectual program of considerable portions of the Mishnah as well.87

Neusner insists that these concerns take the Mishnah beyond the usual range of the term “philosophy of law” because they involve two additional criteria: First, they are principles that can apply to a considerable range of specific topics. Second, they are subject to generalization (“generalizable”) even beyond the limits of the law, for instance, in matters of metaphysics or physics (as with mixtures and connection), in matters of ethics (as with intentionality), in matters of the fundaments of philosophical inquiry (as with the interplay of potential and actual, which meant so much to Aristotle).88

Thus defined and circumscribed, Neusner may have a point, though if intentionality is a criterion, we may say that Farroxmard’s work also meets that requirement, as would most law books. Implicit in nearly all manuals of ritual are principles that parallel the Mishnah’s concern with mixtures and connection (e.g., sympathetic magic) without being the least bit “philosophical.” To this last point, Neusner would probably respond that what differentiates the Mishnah from nonphilosophical works is also its methodology, as in the matter of resolving issues of doubt.89 On this point, too, however, jurisprudential systems have their own “rules of statutory construction.” The real problem with Neusner’s philosophical approach to the Mishnah is that, in the end, categorizing the Mishnah as a philosophical work does not assist us in understanding its immediate, social purpose, or its redactional history and intent. It has always been read as a legal work of some type. No one, until Neusner, ever thought of reading it as a philosophical work—not even Maimonides! But can the form-critical differences that Neusner noted between the Mishnah and the Tosefta aid us in defining the Mishnah nonetheless? Sanders’s critique of Neusner on precisely that point appears sound. The matters of style that Neusner adduced as characteristic of the Mishnah as a philosophical work are typical of Tosefta as well. There may, however, be other differences which would help us in defining the nature of the Mishnah more precisely. Among these differences is the Tosefta’s inclusion of prooftexts to a far greater degree than in the Mishnah, an observation that even a cursory examination of both collections will confirm. This also accords with the much greater quantity of nonlegal material incorporated into the Tosefta than within the Mishnah. Tosefta’s redactor(s) clearly had a broader purpose in mind than did those of the Mishnah. This point is also reflected in the comparative sizes of the two works: Tosefta is about three times the size of the Mishnah. Its focus is also somewhat different—for example, it contains a number of very detailed expositions of the parameters of various ritual obligations, reminiscent of Maimonidean style, but even more of Sefer Hahinnukh. In this respect, then, Tosefta resembles a code more than does the Mishnah! Perhaps most telling, however, is the fact that Tosefta does not systematically make good on the Mishnah’s omissions. There is no tractate in the Tosefta on

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phylacteries, on ritual fringes, on the laws of Hanukkah or Shavuot, nor does Tosefta contain a detailed exposition of the Jewish calendar. To some extent, it may be that omissions of this type mirror the difficulties of describing in words rituals that are more easily transmitted mimetically. Nevertheless, one must inquire as to why the Mishnah (and the Tosefta) concentrate on some matters and not on others. To the extent that a clear rule cannot be formulated, we must accept the possibility, at least as a working hypothesis, that, as Albeck insisted, the Mishnah was not complete. In turn, since it now exists as a commentary on the Mishnah, Tosefta too must be incomplete. Both characteristics of the Mishnah—its excurses, on the one hand, and its omissions on the other—detract from its usefulness as a code. But an incomplete legal anthology also loses something of the usefulness of a complete register of sources, perhaps even more so since we expect greater “coverage” in an anthology than in a code, which should omit divergent sources. Even Albeck, who rejects the view of the Mishnah as a code and instead considers it as an anthology of sources, nevertheless feels compelled to explain its deficiencies as an anthology as being a consequence of its premature circulation. Still, we expect more of a code than from a collection of sources. A religious code that for some reason fails to cover matters of daily ritual can hardly be said to have fulfilled its purpose. In the end, therefore, the Mishnah’s manifest incompleteness remains a puzzle, whether we consider its redactors’ intention as having been to produce a code or an anthology. Nevertheless, our examination of parallel collections in other literatures of late antiquity has demonstrated that the division between a code or an anthology was not as great as nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars imagined. Nor was the division between a formal legal work—code or anthology—and a study text. The difficulty in categorizing the Mishnah as one or the other is a powerful example of how little these generic categories help us in defining the singularity of a work like the Mishnah. Notes 1. Iggeret Rav Sherira Gaon, ed. B. M. Lewin (Haifa: n.p., 1921, repr. Jerusalem, Makor, 1972), p. 29. The translation follows both the “Spanish” and the “French” versions, without one addition in the French version. See Margarete Schlueter, Auf Welche Weise wurde die Mischna geschrieben? (Tuebingen: J. C. Mohr, 1993), p. 97, nn. 2 and 3. Most MSS have leqateih, but O2198 has neqateih, “he took it,” which may have influenced Schlueter’s preference for nahm R(abbi) sie auf as opposed to sammelte in translating the former. On the question of the two versions, see Schlueter, pp. 24–30, and the literature there cited, and on the various words R. Sherira employs to describe the process, my discussion in the following paragraphs. In this essay, “Rabbi” and “Rabbi Judah the Prince” are terms used to signify the redactor or redactors of the Mishnah, without necessarily identifying the historical Rabbi Judah as the sole or even necessarily the primary redactor. Even R. Sherira, who like his contemporaries and successors, saw redaction in personal terms of nearer to modern ideas of authorship than of selection and editing, describes his effort as the culmination of a three-generations-long process, beginning with R. Akiva, continuing with R. Meir, and

76 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism ending (more or less) with Rabbi. I use brackets within ancient quoted material to indicate restorations and parentheses to indicate explanations, other editorial interpolations, and original language. 2. See Lewin, Iggeret Rav Sherira, pp. 23, 29; the second phrase occurs on p. 29. 3. See Schlueter, Auf Welche, pp. 376–372, and my comments in my review essay in AJS Review 20 (1995):180–85. 4. On the matter of historicity, see Schlueter, Auf Welche, pp. 360–66, and see my review in AJS Review 20 (1995): 180–85, and D. Goodblatt, Rabbinic Instruction in Sasanian Babylonia (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975), pp. 35–43, Y. Gafni, Yehudei Bavel bi-Tqufat haTalmud (Jerusalem: Merkaz Shazar, 1990), pp. 239–45, and “Le-heqer ha-Khronologia haTalmudit be-Iggeret Rav Sherira Gaon,” Zion 52 (5747), pp. 1–24. 5. For habber as “formulate, fix,” see Shraga Abramson, “Ketivat ha-Mishnah (Al Da
at Geonim ve-Rishonim),” in Tarbut ve-Hevrah be-Toledot Yisrael bi-Ymei ha-Benayyim: Qovetz Maamarim le-Zikhro shel Hayyim Hillel Ben-Sason, ed. R. Bonfil, et al. (Jerusalem: Merkaz Shazar, 1989), pp. 27–52, but compare M. Friedman, “Al Terumat ha-Genizah leHeqer ha-Halakhah,” Mada
ei ha-Yahadut 38 (1993): 277–301. On the whole issue, see Robert Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 156–61. On the question of the exact relation of some of these terms to the vexed question of whether Rabbi actually produced a written text, see most recently my “Orality and the Redaction of the Babylonian Talmud,” Oral Tradition 14/1 (1999): 52–99, and in particular, pp. 65–67, and see S. Lieberman, “The Publication of the Mishnah,” Hellenism in Jewish Palestine (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1950), pp. 83–99; B. Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity (Copenhagen: C.W.K. Gleerup and Ejnar Munksgaard, 1961 (repr. by W. B. Eerdman’s, 1998, with a foreword by Jacob Neusner); J. Neusner, The Memorized Torah: The Mnemonic System of the Mishnah (Chico, Cal: Scholars Press, 1985); and J. Neusner, Oral Tradition in Judaism: The Case of the Mishnah (New York: Garland, 1987), among many other contributions. See Martin S. Jaffee, “Oral Tradition in the Writings of Rabbinic Oral Torah: On Theorizing Rabbinic Orality,” Oral Tradition 14 (1999): 3–32, as well as Elizabeth Shanks Alexander, “The Fixing of the Oral Mishnah and the Displacement of Meaning,” in the same issue, and Jaffee’s new book, Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200– 400 CE (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), esp. pp. 55–83. 6. Lewin, Iggeret Rav Sherira, p. 23. 7. Lewin, p. 30, based on the statement in mEd 1:5. 8. S. Schechter, ed., Saadyana: Geniza Fragments of Writings of R. Saadya Gaon and Others (Cambridge: Deighton and Bell, 1903), p. 5. 9. On the relation of R. Sherira’s Epistle to Seder Tannaim va-Amoraim, written about a century earlier, see Brody, The Geonim, p. 278. 10. Eliezer Segal, “Anthological Dimensions of the Babylonian Talmud,” Prooftexts 17 (1997): 33–61; the quote appears on p. 34. 11. This shows up in large and small ways; see my comments in “Nahmanides and the Search for Omnisignificance,” Torah Umadda Journal 4 (1993):6–7, esp. n. 32. 12. See Stern’s introduction to this volume, p. 5. 13. Jacob Neusner’s rejection of source-critical methodologies should not be taken as a rejection of the existence of “sources” in Rabbinic documents; his avoidance of such methods is heuristic, since, as he often puts it, “we do not know what we cannot show.” See, for example, his discussion of the redaction of Mishnah and Tosefta in The Tosefta: Its Structure and Its Sources, Brown Judaic Studies 112 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986), pp. 1– 8.

Order, Sequence, and Selection 77 14. Isadore Twersky, Introduction to the Code of Maimonides (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 238. 15. Thus, bBer 2a accounts for the placement of the rules dealing with the evening Shema before those of the morning Shema because of their respective placement in Deuteronomy 6:7. 16. See, for example, bNaz 2b. 17. See bYev 2b, 3a; B.Q. 17b; B.B. 108b; Zev 48a. 18. bSot 2a. 19. See Abraham Goldberg, “The Mishnah—A Study Book of Halakha,” in Shmuel Safrai, ed., The Literature of the Sages, First Part (Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum), Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987, pp. 211–252; the observation quoted is on pp. 233–234. 20. See Isadore Twersky, Introduction to the Code of Maimonides (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), chap. 4, “Classification,” pp. 238–320. See most recently Haym Soloveitchik, “Hirhurim al Miyyuno shel ha-Rambam be-Mishneh Torah: Be
yot Amitiyyot u-Medummot,” Maimonidean Studies 4 (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 2000), pp. 107–15 (Hebrew numbering). 21. Kovetz Teshuvot ha-Rambam ve-Iggerotav, ed. A. Lichtenberg (Leipzig, 1859), p. 26a, quoted in Twersky, Introduction, p. 242, n. 8. 22. Twersky, Introduction, p. 243–44. 23. Twersky, Introduction, p. 286. 24. From this point of view, Avraham Weiss’s view (at least at one stage in his life) of the Mishnah as Rabbi’s “lecture notes” is a variation on the latter theme; it differs from the view of the Mishnah as a collection chiefly in that it attempts to explain the Mishnah’s lack of strict order, as will be discussed. 25. See Zechariah Frankel, Darkei ha-Mishnah (1859; repr. Tel Aviv, Sinai, 1959), p. 228, esp. n. 6; the Bavli’s remark about R. Ashi is found at bB. B. 157b. Modern scholarship does not interpret the comment in this way; see Avraham Weiss, Hithavvut haTalmud bi-Shelemuto (New York: Kohut, 1943), pp. 245–46. 26. Hanokh Albeck, Untersuchungen ueber die Redaktion der Mischna (Berlin: C. A. Schweitschke & Sohn, 1923); a pale reflection of this work appears as part of his Mavo laMishnah. 27. J. N. Epstein, Mevo’ot le-Safrut ha-Tanna
im: Mishnah, Tosefta u-MidresheiHalakhah, ed. E. Z. Melamed (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1957). 28. See Albeck, Untersuchungen, pp. 14–61, for dozens of examples. 29. Albeck points, inter alia, to the enactments of Rabban Yohanan b. Zakkai in mR.H. 4:1–4, or those of Yohanan the High Priest in mSot 9:6 and mM.S. 5:15. 30. mAr 2:1–6. 31. mMeg 1:4–11. Albeck, Mavo la-Mishnah (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 5727), pp. 88– 89, assembles a large number of such examples. 32. See his Mavo la-Mishnah, pp. 99–101. 33. See his discussion of this matter in his Mehqarim ba-Baraita ve-Tosefta ve-Yahasan la-Talmud (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1969), pp. 180–84. 34. See Y. Kafih’s translation, Mishnah im Perush Rabbenu Moshe ben Maimon (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 5729), vol. I, c. 14b. 35. So the Bavli’s use of the phrase satam lan Tanna . . . at Bez 2a, Yeb 11b, Ket 43b [satam lan Tanna ke-Rabbi], Qid 54b, Sanh 27b, Bek 11a, Tem 34a. 36. Albeck’s arguments are to be found in two places: in the chapter devoted to the question of the sources of the Mishnah in his Mavo la-Mishnah, pp. 88–98, and in his Untersuchungen, esp. pp. 78–88.

78 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism 37. Albeck, Untersuchungen, pp. 107–8. 38. Epstein, Mevo’ot. It may not be without significance that Magnes, which ultimately published not only Epstein’s lecture notes but also three volumes of his collected papers (Mehqarim be-Safrut ha-Talmud uvi-Lshonot Shemiyot, also edited by E. Z. Melamed [1983– 1988], and which reprinted (along with Devir) his Perush ha-Geonim le-Seder Toharot (1981/ 2), did not reprint this article in the three-volume collection. 39. See his article, “Tosefta Atiqta,” Tarbiz 62 (1993): 314–38. 40. I say “formally parallel” because Tosefta is generally arranged according to the order of the Mishnah, and in this case the topics are roughly parallel. It is the discordance between them that draws Friedman’s attention. 41. “Tosefta Atiqta,” pp. 320–21. The translation is mine. 42. See my Authority and Tradition (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1994), pp. 83– 86. 43. See the literature cited in n. 5. 44. Avraham Weiss, Diyyunim be-Bava Qamma (New York: Feldheim, 1966), pp. 29– 30. 45. See his commentaries on Mishnah Shabbat and Eruvin, Perush la-Mishnah: Masekhet Shabbat (Jerusalem: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1976), and Perush la-Mishnah: Masekhet Eruvin (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1986). 46. See n. 19 for the volume; the article, “Ve-kulhu aliba deRabbi Aqiva,” Tarbiz 38 (1968/9): 231–54. Another article, Goldberg, “Darko shel R. Yehudah ha-Nasi be-Hibbur haMishnah,” Tarbiz 28 (1958/9):260–69 is also relevant. 47. “Ve-kulhu,” p. 214. 48. Ibid., p. 225. 49. Ibid., p. 216. 50. Ibid., p. 219. 51. Ibid., p. 226. 52. Ibid., p. 219. 53. Ibid., p. 223. 54. bSanh 86a, cited by Goldberg, p. 223; indeed, the title of his Tarbiz 38 article is simply a reprise of this statement. 55. See A. Weiss, Al Hamishnah: [Osef Maamarim], (Ramat Gan: Bar Urian, n.d)., pp. 1–15, esp. pp. 4–6, originally published as “Ha-Palugta be-Ferush ha-Millah Mav
eh beMishnah, ba-Bavli, uvi-Yrushalmi,” Hatzofeh le-Hokhmat Yisrael (Budapest, 1926), pp. 144– 58. 56. Goldberg sees the fourth and final layer of the Mishnah as having been “formulated under the aegis of R. Yehudah the Patriarch” (“Ve-kulhu,” p. 217). 57. See Martin Goodman, The Roman World: 44 BC–AD 180 (London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 149–56. Note in particular the following, from p. 154: “A cultured Greek speaker [by the time of Augustus] would be expected to know Homer well and the plays of the great tragedians, which ensured familiarity with the Greek myths. He or she could be expected to have some acquaintance with Herodotus and Thucydides, and with the greatest of the orators, such as Demosthenes and Aeschines.” 58. See Alan Watson, The Spirit of Roman Law (Athens, Ga: University of Georgia Press, 1995), pp. 1–9, 201–03, 181–93, 117–45, and O. F. Robinson, The Sources of Roman Law (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 102–27. 59. See Eduard Sachau, Syrische Rechtsbuecher, 3 vols. (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1907– 1914). Jesuboht’s Corpus constitutes the largest section of the third volume and covers a hundred pages of Syriac text. 60. See now the comprehensive edition of Maria Macuch, Rechtskasuistik und

Order, Sequence, and Selection 79 Gerichtspraxis zu Beginn des siebenten Jahrhunderts in Iran: Die Rechtssammlung des Farrohmard i Wahraman (Iranica 1) (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrossowitz, 1993) and Macuch, Das Sasanidische Rechtsbuch “Matakdan i Hazar Datistan (Teil II) (Wiesbaden: Deutsche Morgenlaendische Gesellschaft-Franz Steiner, 1981). For a recent translation of the Russian edition of A. G. Perikhanian, see Perikhanian, The Book of a Thousand Judgements (A Sasanian Law-Book) (Costa Mesa, Cal: Mazda Publishers, 1997). 61. Lee I. Levine, Judaism & Hellenism in Antiquity: Conflict or Confluence? The Samuel & Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), pp. 134–35; see also the article on education and the appended bibliography by Robert Kaster in G. W. Bowersock et al., Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 421–24. For the later period, see Catherine Hezser, “The Codification of Legal Knowledge in Antiquity: The Talmud Yerushalmi and Roman Law Codes,” in Peter Schaefer, The Talmud Yerushalmi and Graeco-Roman Culture, vol. II (Tuebingen: Mohr-Siebeck 1998), pp. 581–641. For the earlier period, see Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981), pp. 83–86. Lest I be accused of an unheeding parallelomania, see Levine’s measured cautions on pp. 112–13, though for a very different view on this point, see Louis H. Feldman, Jew & Gentile in the Ancient World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). 62. Or whether we may posit any connection, however remote, between that of the redaction of the Bavli and various Sasanian law books, for that matter. 63. It is perhaps not inappropriate to note here Jacob Neusner as far back as 1969 called for the study of Madayan i hazar dadestan as “at least as interesting for comparative purposes as Justinian’s Code.” See his History of the Jews in Babylonia, IV. The Age of Shapur II (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1969), p. 432. 64. The Institutes of Gaius, trans. with an introduction by W. M. Gordon and O. F. Robinson, with the Latin text of Seckel and Kuebler (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 75, 77. 65. mShevi 4:1; M.S. 5:8; Bik 3:7; Sheq 1:2, 7:5; Yom 2:1; Suk 3:12; R.H. 2:1, 2:2, 2:5, 4:3, 4:4, 4:9; Ned 9:6, 11:12 (twice); Git 4:2 (twice), 6:5; Bek 1:7; Ar 9:4; Nid 10:6; T.Y. 4:5 (twice). It is perhaps noteworthy that the orders of Qodashim and Toharot, which might be expected to contain a great deal of such material, contain nearly no such reports. 66. Thus, see mShab 1:4–8 or Yad 4:1–4. Sot 5:2–5, which are described as occurring bo ba-yom, “on that day” that R. Gamaliel was deposed from being patriarch. 67. See Gordon and Robinson, Institutes, p. 121. 68. Judging from other collections, including the Syriac law books edited by Sachau and the tenth-century Rivayat i Hemit Ashavahishtan, no major area of law is omitted from the Madayan i Hazar Dadestan. However, this impression may be due to the paucity of our sources. For a discussion of the sources of Farroxmard’s collection, see Macuch, Rechtskasuistik, pp. 11–15. It is noteworthy, however, that only the Dadestan Namag would seem to have been comprehensive in this regard. The other works Macuch lists on p. 14 are clearly partial, along the lines of the praetorian edicts of Roman law. 69. See Shaul Shaked, Wisdom of the Sasanian Sages (Denkard VI), Persian Heritage Series 34 (Boulder, Col.: Westview, 1979), and for an old and not altogether reliable translation, see Dinkard, ed. and trans. P. B. and D. P. Sanjara, 19 vols. (Bombay, completed in 1928). 70. That is, the most recently published volume. 71. Macuch, Rechtskasuistik, p. 2. 72. Jacob Neusner, The Tosefta, p. 201. This was first published in vol. 21 of his A History of the Mishnaic Law of Purities: Volume 21: The Redaction and Formulation of the

80 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism Order of Purities in Mishnah and Tosefta (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977), p. 235. See my reviews of his work in “The Judaism of the Mishna: What Evidence?” Judaica Book News 12, no. 2 (1982): 17–25, and “Neusner’s Tosefta,” Jewish Quarterly Review 78, no. 1 (July 1987):130– 36. 73. J. Neusner, Purities, vol. 21, p. xiii. 74. J. Neusner, Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah (Chicago