the period after the destruction of the temple in the year 70 and then the second roman jewish
war under bark ba in the 130s is an incredibly important period in the development of jewish
history in general this is primarily because the jewish people had to learn how to adapt themselves
to a radically new environment without the temple the fulcrum of their relationship
between themselves and their god had disappeared and they had to articulate a new way of centering
that fundamental religious identity secondly on a political level there was no question that after
two disastrous revolts the jews would not be able to budge the roman empire from their land and so
they had to find ways of organizing themselves in order to maintain group integrity in order
to maintain their identity and in fact they were quite successful at doing so many historians have
described this period as the transition between the tanayim and the amurayim very
important terms they're technical in nature they refer really to periods in intellectual history
the tanayim are the main teachers from the first century before the common era up until the early
third century of the common era and their main activity was memorizing and teaching the mishnah
that is the oral tradition that we discussed a few lectures ago what exactly is the mishna but these
are the teachers who would play an incredibly important role in uh focusing jewish energies on
their continued spiritual life which would of course be related very closely to their
communal life their identity and their ultimately their political life as well the amo raim or the
speakers tanay means teachers amari means speakers these people are especially associated with the
development of the talmud and there are amoreim in israel and also more importantly in babylonia
where the babylonian talmud would be developed so the period of the time basically comes to a close
at the beginning of the third century the amoraim pick it up from there with their development of
the talmud although the function of the tanayim in terms of memorizing the mishna is still very
relevant for centuries but they will primarily be subservient to the amoreim intellectually
in that they will be the repositories of all this memorized knowledge even when it is in a
written form there's still tremendous utility for people to have a a massive intellectual storehouse
of it and the mri will then be exploring and discussing it as i hope to discuss
in the uh two lectures from now at any rate let's look at this period in a little more detail
so at the end of the destruction of the temple perhaps the most important city after jerusalem
was a small town close to the coast called yavneh and as you may recall there's a famous
passage that we discussed earlier in the talmud in which the offenhen benzakai appeals to vespasian
the future emperor of rome tenley yavnev give me yavna and its sages there's some dispute over
the historicity of that particular incident and there's some interesting reflections on what role
berenice may have had in protecting yavna but what we know for certain is that yavna itself
became a major center for concentration of sages at first under the leadership of rabbi yochanan
and ben zakai later under rabban gamlil and many others fascinating stories i'd like to look at
one specific episode that occurred in yavna that has some fascinating implications and illustrate
for our purposes the sense of what's happening in terms of the uh intellectual refocus
that's happening among the jewish people at this time this is a passage that occurs in the talmud
tractate bhavamita 59b the babylonian talmud the dispute is centers on the status of a particular
oven called the oven of it's a particular design and the rabbis are arguing as to whether or not it
retains its ritual purity under certain circumstances basically it boils down to two main
sides of the argument rabbi eliezer hagado the great sage who tends to follow the teachings of
shamai or perhaps i should just make an interlude at this point uh shamai and hilal are two of the
greatest of the uh zugot the the generation that preceded the tanayim and their teachings which are
by now like 200 years old have created two large schools the school of shamai beijamai
and the school of hilal the school of hilla and up until the destruction of the temple you know
it seems that whether one followed hillel or shamai was largely a matter of personal choice
you would associate yourself with a particular school and you would consistently follow the
dictates of that school in terms of personal conduct and they got along fairly well overall
they had tremendous amount of disputes over the law but those disputes were famously
solved quite amicably things changed after the destruction of the temple however as there is
a consolidation of thought primarily around the opinion of hillary at any rate on the one side
we have rabbi eliezer haggado very important rabbi who tends to follow teaching of shamai and on the
other side the growing consensus the majority vote is following hillel's opinion uh regarding
how to deal with this oven that is the house of hill they're agreeing with bait hillel hillel has
passed away uh quite for a long time now now what ends up happening is really remarkable the talmud
says that rabbi eliezer says if the law follows my opinion let this river reverse course and
the river does and the rabbis say doesn't matter we follow uh the argument of logic
and you can bring as many supernatural proofs as you like that's not how we decide things here so
then rabbi eliezer says if the law follows my opinion let these carob trees be uprooted and
be sent along the road and uh the rabbi and that actually happens and then the rabbis say
doesn't matter the uh you know the torah is uh something that we debate amongst ourselves and
majority rules and then uh finally he says if the law follows my opinion let the walls of the
basement rush be crumble and they they crumble then at one point one of the rabbis says what
to the walls what are you doing why should you be involved in this and so the walls they don't
collapse completely they sort of like stay in a leaning place and then finally you know the same
argument goes on and on rabbi eliaser says then if the law follows me let the heavens proclaim
it and a booming voice comes out from the sky and says the law follows the opinion of rabbi eliezer
and this looks like a slam dunk right you've got all these supernatural phenomenons supporting
rapiel yes sir but the rabbis say you can bring as many proofs as you want but lo basham he the law
is not in heaven the law is on earth and on earth we follow majority rule so reviews opinion is not
followed the dominant opinion which is page hillel is followed in this particular case of this oven
two reasons why this is really important let me start with perhaps the less important but very
interesting reason and that is associated with the tsunami so i had this great opportunity i got
a call from national geographic about a year ago and they said they want to talk to me which i was
really honored about the research of dr beverly goodman who is a geo-archaeologist working at the
university of haifa dr goodman has looked a lot of fascinating historical data and has determined
that the earthquake which is described for example as far away as antioch in the year 115 probably
destroyed ports along the coastline of israel and she argued and this is why national geographic
wanted to ask me for my opinion i don't know why me specifically but it was really cool to get the
call is it possible that the passage described in bhava matsiya is actually reflecting a historical
event a geological event specifically at tsunami hitting the region of yavneh in the year 115.
wow and it's so interesting because all of the phenomena that are described there beginning with
the river running backwards the carob trees flying away the uh the walls of the bay midrash beginning
to crumble and then later there's a discussion of huge storms at sea they all make sense with this
particular event now how to place that within the overall context of um you know the discussion in
the gemara is is a fascinating question you can have a look at the podcast if you want
to hear the interview or what we did go back and forth on what this might mean but what is really
significant that's the kind of cool point but the most important point is that the rabbis in yavna
perhaps with the divine assistance of this tsunami uh make a clear distinction that this is how we
are going to go forward we are no longer going to be able to rely on sort of like everybody decides
what they want am i going to be base halo am i going to be based am i now it's time especially
with the loss of the temple that we have to come together for sure around our rabbinic leaders
the rabbinic leaders are deciding we're going to follow bait hillel and so the development of this
majoritarian consensus rule after debate becomes an exceptionally important element in the way
that jewish communities will organize themselves for the next two thousand years just to be clear
the tsunami and all of the possible impact it had on the discussion that's recorded in bhavamitsiya
does not affect the central thrust of the meaning of that passage which is to say that lo bashamayim
he that torah is not in heaven that the torah is here on the planet earth and human beings will
debate it bringing a supernatural proof to advance your particular interpretation of jewish law
is not considered a valid uh argument and therefore the rabbis will continue to maintain
their standards and this is a very important starting point for the organization of jewry
from there on after but it's still very cool to think that a tsunami was happening at that time
there were two institutions that were especially important for the survival of the jews after yavna
you can see in this map here that the sages from yavna which is you can see sort of on the lower
left there they've all spread out primarily to the north where the majority of the jewish population
is going to be living after bark ba but also some development in the south as well the two
institutions that they will ultimately coalesce around are the sanhedrin and the patriarchate
the sanhedrin is the jewish court that continued to function after the destruction of the temple
although it could not function in jerusalem itself because jews were forbidden to live there for a
period of time it moved as you can see from these white arrows here out to yavneh and then up to the
north where it was located in a few different places until it finally settled in tiberias a
relatively new city but a very important center of jewish activity for the period that we're
discussing today related to the sanhedrin and sometimes overlapping in its leadership is the
so-called patriarchate or nisiyut in hebrew the patriarchate is essentially the government of the
jews which is led by a single individual the nasi we don't have really good sense of exactly how it
functioned we also don't have a really good sense of the extent of its authority we don't have a
good sense of exactly how it related to the roman government there are some tantalizing elements of
this relationship in particular in the figure of one of the greatest of the niseim rabbi yehuda
hanasi rabbi judah the princess is sometimes related rabbi yehuda hanasi was the prime figure
organizing the codification of the mishna which up until this point as we mentioned has been an oral
document that has been transmitted by these tanayim he organized its codification into
its textual form its written form which we have to this day this happened around the year 200 perhaps
220 of the common era and this is really the line that separates the tanayim from the amaraim after
the mission is confirmed in writing its primary exponents will be known as the amaraym and the
documents that they will eventually produce are known as the talmuds one of them was produced in
israel actually primarily in the northern region to a certain degree on the coast although it tends
to be called the yerushalmi or jerusalem talmud sometimes the palestinian talmud both of those
terms are kind of inaccurate or misleading in one way or another but there is a talmud perform that
a talmud created first in israel and then a later one much larger one in babylonia which will be the
subject of the next two lectures one of the challenges of studying this period is that
we are essentially locked into rabbinic documents to a certain degree we have some roman government
documents we have some church historians but most of our really juicy sources are rabbinic in nature
and so the rabbis are primarily not interested in giving us history they want to tell us about law
about religion about faith about philosophy those are the things that are you know the primary uh
energies of the uh the rabbis at this time we we do have some chronologists like the seder
olam which is uh the order of the world one of the earliest chronologies compiled by the
rabbis we also have megillah tynett we have a few ancient sources but they're not really
histories they are kind of like on this date this happened on this date this happened without really
analyzing and fleshing out why things happened and so on so when we look at other sources we have for
example the babatha archaeology which we discussed a little bit when we talked about barcock this
is the archive of some 30 documents primarily personal legal documents that were collected by
a woman who was hiding with the barcaka rebels in the cave of letters and what we can see from her
archive is that while it's hard to generalize from one woman we have another source also a woman that
comes from around this time as well it seems that jews were not hesitant to use non-jewish courts
which suggests some limitation of the rabbi's authority obviously they frowned
on the abandonment of jewish courts for roman courts or in this case nabataean and other courts
so perhaps there's a whole existence of jews who are simply doing their own thing
following the dominant authority which in this case would be the romans instead of listening
to the rabbis this would not be surprising we just don't know the extent of it we also have
to realize that the jews have a very problematic relationship with the romans on the one hand
heavily resenting the romans for the depredation in their society and on the other hand the romans
who have by this time by the way established two legions in israel which is a remarkably
large number of people about 10 000 soldiers and they are cash heavy meaning that they get paid in
coin and so they're extremely important for the local economy they are resented by the
population the rabbinical sources give us a lot of uh descriptions of the abuse of the population by
the romans but on the other hand they're really essential to the economic realities of israel
the romans as we shall discuss in a later lecture a lot also extending certain privileges to certain
classes of jews makes a very big difference and they're building roads they're doing all
kinds of infrastructure things that are useful for them as soldiers but also useful for the
economy as a whole so there's a complex dynamic going on here that we don't know a lot about
we also get the sense however that even though we don't know for sure how extensive the authority of
the rabbis are there's no question that they have a phenomenal pull that that judaism is
a very competitive ideology at this time just for one example have a look at helena of adiaba
who was a queen of this small kingdom you can see out here on the upper tigress river and josephus
tells us a lot about it she also appears in the talmud as hilny hamalka that is helene the queen
and she actually converts with her sons to judaism and she makes several trips to jerusalem
you know she's known for her tremendous generosity she gives to a lot of charity and she chooses to
be buried in israel with this magnificent tomb was for a long time associated with someone else
until they realized it was in fact helena's tomb her sarcophagus was retrieved and is on display
in the israel museum so the thought that a very important powerful political woman like helena
bene would convert to judaism is just a sense of how even during these very difficult times
in the first century and onward judaism is still you know quite appealing to the outside population
okay i'm going to leave it here let's go on in the next lecture to look at
the development of the babylonian center in particular thank you very much for watching
you