it's time now for us to just take a step back away from the uh political and military and to
a certain degree social history of the era of the hashmonaem and i'd like to look a little bit more
at intellectual history in order to do that we're going to have to expand the chronological scope
of the period i'd like to cover i'd like to take a look at the second temple period which extends
in the conventional chronology from the years 5 39 when the exiles returned from babylonia under the
decree of cyrus that we described a little while ago and began to rebuild the temple until the
year 70 of the common era which is a date normally associated with the destruction of the temple by
the romans we're actually going to squeeze a little bit past that up to the year 200. so we're
talking about a fairly large period of time right now and i'd like to speak about some of the most
important trends and two of the most important intellectual products of the jewish people at
this time specifically the midrash in next lecture and then the mishnah in the lecture after that so
let's think a little bit though about what's happening intellectually and spiritually
in the jewish population after the turn from exile we have a period of time now which is moving from
a locus of authority in revelation you know the high period of the great prophets that
we described a while ago and their direct access to godly intent which then they would share with
the people whether or not the people would like it and now we're moving into a period in which
a lot of that text has been now recorded and is now in circulation and this on top of the text
of the torah itself the first five books of moses and now the locus of authority shifts from those
people who are somehow immediately receiving the word of god which then they you know distribute
as instruction to the people uh or as rebuke and now it has to do with people who can interpret
the existing texts that slowly become canonized in this period this is a very important shift
it takes many hundreds of years but it represents the rise of the rabbinic class a whole different
group of people who are not necessarily known for their somehow innate ability to receive
divine inspiration as the prophets were but rather they are known for their ability to
intuit the meaning of those words and to provide guidance based on texts now a lot to say here
there's a lot of theology mixed in with history as well i'm going to try and deal with both of
these things in such a way that we can appreciate history as it develops on a human level and at the
same time understand a little bit about the uh the way in which jews understood these events
on a religious level perhaps i should point out right now a beautiful passage that's in
shaia cohen's wonderful work from the maccabees to the mishnah which covers the period that we're
talking about today he asked a great question there of what is judaism is judaism like an ideal
aspirational set of beliefs and in particular practices and the closer that a person adheres
to that that is normative jewish behavior or do we say that judaism is what jews do whether or not
is connected to this aspirational ideal the former question is answered best by a rabbi which by
the way i am not the latter question is addressed more by a historian and we will kind of be dancing
between these two polls from time to time as trying to understand both what jews ideally wanted
for themselves and in particular how the rabbis articulated what they wanted for the jewish people
and on the other hand we'll try to understand what jews themselves were doing in today's lecture
however and the two that follow we're going to be focusing more on the aspirational eye way of
understanding what is judaism and what do jews do okay enough introduction let's go straight to the
material here so one of the most important institutions that develops at this time is
something called the great assembly the canesa sagadola the great assembly the name knesset
in modern israeli pronunciation is of course the prime deliberating body of the israeli government
and it takes its name from this original institution had 120 seats in it just like
today's knesset and so on now the roots of the great assembly are lost in the mists of time one
might assume that perhaps this great assembly was created first under ezra that he is named in fact
in some of the later literature as the leader of the great assembly and we know in particular
that shimon hat sadik the shim and the righteous one was the last of the great assembly
that's a reference right there in the first opening paragraph of pirkei about one of the
greatest statements of rabbinic philosophy in the ancient period so it's hard to date precisely when
shimanatzadek lived there are different opinions as to which shimon the high priest that was
the talmud places him in the late 4th century with the advent of alexander into the region but it's
also not impossible that this could be a shim that lived a little bit later actually in the period of
the hashman although that would make the talmudic reading problematic at any rate the actual
membership of the ancestors agola was apparently uh you know high level rabbis as we shall see
exactly what that title means and also some of the latest prophets were included in there
uh malachi for example were included in the uh this this body this deliberative body that was
also a legislative body it's a great mystery what exactly was it you know how did they convene who
was involved in it but for the time being we have to pause it that this body did produce
a significant amount of religious legislation we begin to see the development of a new title
rabbi which is really not used in prior texts with any amount of frequency the term rabbi
is derived from the hebrew term rav which means great or large in the sense you would
address someone you know your highness i guess in english your greatness um and uh in israel the the
term used in late antiquity was rebbe that's the actual pronunciation which means my greatness my
largeness which is translated to be my teacher that's more colloquial and more
accurate in that regard but it's not exactly what the term means literally
in babylonia the term rav alone is preferred the term rabbi with that pronunciation it's actually
kind of nonsensical in hebrew you don't actually have that word pronounced that way in hebrew but
that's the way it came down to us in english uh in russian for example it would be rabbin you know
there all kinds of different ways to pronounce it but it means my teacher now in the context this
is not a prophet this is not a king this is not a priest this is someone new this is like an expert
information worker it's a class of people that rise to prominence in this second temple period
and in particular in the last century before the common era and the first century of the
common era that's the golden age of the rabbis in many ways that's the period in which we get
a lot of the great writings we'll talk about two major sections of them in the next two lectures
and i want to just make one last point before we go on to the next level
one of the things that you see happening in a lot of popular histories particularly those written
for you know theologically inclined audiences is this idea of writing history backwards of
trying to imagine uh what ancient history was and looking at that aspirational ideal even of today
but certainly of let's say late antiquity late first century early
second century and positing it backwards the problem is we don't have contemporary
texts that will allow us to really get a good look at what it meant to be a rabbi let's say in the
year 500 before the common era or 800 before the common era we don't really have a text we do have
texts from much much later like let's say 100 before the common era that will tell us about
something that's 500 years earlier but that of course is from a historical point of view not
as ideal as a contemporary period text by the time we get to though that weird year zero there was no
year zero but you know what i'm talking about we will have lots of uh interesting texts that are
written from outside the rabbinic perspective that also give us some great ideas to what it
was like socially but for now we have to kind of work with the text that we have and project
backwards as conservatively as possible uh to try and understand history as it actually unfolded
here's a beautiful image from jean-phuket the construction of the temple of solomon in jerusalem
it apparently looked nothing like this but what an amazing kind of inspirational image this must
have been at any rate the reason why i illustrated this particular slide with the the artwork of 4k
is because we should recall that around this time there is a big shift in the center of authority
meaning who do you go to for religious instruction for religious inspiration uh in the uh pre-ezra
period or let's say the first temple period that would certainly be the priest the cohen
the kohen would be responsible to be connected to jerusalem to the temple rituals to the sacrificial
cult that really was the main locus of judaism we have scattered tiny interesting references
in various biblical books to types of prayer which were almost always done at the sanctuary
in jerusalem or like chana for example at the beginning of the book of samuel at the
tabernacle when it was in a traveling mode but we don't have a lot of really great data about
you know who would you go to if you lived in i don't know spot or if you lived in alexandria or
would you get religious instruction in this early second temple period there seems to be a shifting
to away from the temple itself although it retains the center but it becomes more diffuse as people
seek out religious instruction and it becomes to move towards people who are masters of the messora
of the tradition which as we shall see involves a lot more than just textual familiarity with the
the texts that would become canonized and form the tanakh but really masters a much larger amount
of information which is enclosed in something we call the oral torah the people who inherited this
new mantle of authority and would ultimately become much more significant once the temple is
destroyed in the first century are of course the rabbis they're the ones who are able to take the
portable tradition and implant it in the diaspora and nourish it not only so that it thrives but
in fact it flourishes and at this point we should try to understand what do we mean by
the tanakh what do we mean by the bible to use a greek term there's no question that
the biblical texts were circulating at this time of the second temple and through a process which
is not at all clear they eventually become canonized this is a christian term which is
used to kind of imply what is closed what is now a book that is accepted as having the authority of
divine approval and this eventually forms the tripartite bible the torah the first five books
niveam which are most of the prophets and then finally ketuvim or writings which includes
some kind of miscellaneous works like psalms which are more like prayers the
wisdom literature like the book of proverbs some other books which seem like they belong in
prophets like chronicles and some fascinating miscellany like uh song of songs for example
now the there's no question that these texts are circulating in second century but we don't
know exactly the process by which they were exactly canonized the talmud definitely mentions
a specific number of the texts but nowhere does it actually list all of the individual
texts uh of the bible it's just kind of accepted by the first century it's just a known thing yeah
this is what's included this is what these are the things which are not included now there are a few
passages in the talmud which speak about whether or not this or that book should be included
some decisions are made regarding for example song of songs and regarding ecclesiastes
and other decisions are made regarding books which are definitely out books like ben sira we talked
about the the book of the maccabees for example those texts are excluded the people who earn
mastery not only of these texts that become the bible but also earn mastery of the interpretation
of these texts those are the rabbis and we should also point out one last detail here they are they
have different rules of interpretation depending on which book it is the five books of moses the
torah that is considered sacrosanct on the highest possible level there are no accepted
errors there are no typos other than obviously scribal ones which would render a taurus scroll
invalid for use and there's a whole series of herman unic rules as actually how does
one interpret the written text of the torah what we're looking at by the way is the oldest
existing text of niveam and ketuvim unfortunately the taurus section was lost it is the aleppo codex
which dates from the 10th century and as you can see there are a lot of masoretic markings on the
inside which uh specifically indicate for example how the text is to be pronounced and so on we'll
talk more about this when we get to the masoretic movement later oh my gosh but so much stuff going
on uh that's kind of like an introduction to the rise of this new information class of the rabbis
let's look at two of their major occupations which was the recording of something called
the midrash and something else called the mishnah in the next two lectures