9781472905949_txt_app_IndexReference_024711_IDs

The origins of the Talmud

Rabbi Ila’i said: ‘By three things may a person’s character be determined: By his drinking and spending habits and by his anger.’ Some say: ‘Also by his laughter.’1

The destruction of the Temple

The struggle for religious power between the Pharisees and Sadducees continued until the year 70 ce. By this time the military situation in the land had completely deteriorated. Guerrilla groups were launching attacks on the Romans on a daily basis; the mighty Roman legions had suffered considerable setbacks.

The Empire decided it was time to flex its muscles. Roman forces besieged Jerusalem, starved the population into submission then burnt down the city and destroyed the Temple. It is hard for us, two thousand years and as many miles away, to grasp the full impact of this event.

It was far more than the mere demolition of a building. It was more even than the razing of a city and the destruction of its population, horrendous as that was. The Temple was not only the centre of the Israelite religion, it housed the legislature and the judiciary. It was the commercial centre. The destruction of the Temple threatened to herald the end, not just of the religion, but even of the last vestiges of Israelite autonomy. Like so many before them, the Israelite nation was threatened with extinction.

Desperate times tend to produce remarkable people. The rebuilding of Judaism, and the emergence of Christianity, which was taking place in the same place at exactly the same time, can be directly attributed to the vision and skill of two people; Paul for the Christians and Yohanan ben Zakkai for the Jews.

Paul’s story is well known. Ben Zakkai’s less so. The legend 2 is that when the situation inside besieged Jerusalem became absolutely desperate, disease and famine having already decimated the population, ben Zakkai pleaded with the militants guarding the city gates to allow him to leave and negotiate a surrender. The militants would have none of it. Ben Zakkai was the leader of the peace camp, and the confrontational militants were diametrically opposed to everything he stood for.

However the leader of the militants, a man called Abba Sikra, or Red Father,3 just happened to be ben Zakkai’s nephew. He vowed to help his uncle slip past the gatekeepers and reach the Roman camp. Abba Sikra told the rabbi to climb into a coffin, play dead and get his students to carry him out of the city on the pretence that he was being taken for burial. Abba Sikra then made sure that guards let the coffin through with the appropriate amount of respect.

Once outside the city walls, ben Zakkai climbed out of the coffin and went to see the Roman commander, probably Titus (although the legend says it was his father, Vespasian). According to the legend ben Zakkai, knowing that the city would fall, performed some minor miracles which endeared him to the Roman commander and allowed him to negotiate the safe passage of the Pharisee rabbis and their students out of Jerusalem. Titus granted him a refuge in Yavneh, a small town in the south-west of the country.

The Roman authorities probably didn’t think much about this. They couldn’t imagine that giving a refuge to Yohanan ben Zakkai, his colleagues and students would be of any great consequence. After all, a bunch of holy men and scholars could hardly present a threat to the rampant Roman Empire. Had they thought it through though, the Romans could have saved themselves a century or more of trouble. If they’d only realized what ben Zakkai and his colleagues were about to do for the national morale, and the faith of the Jews.

The destruction of the Temple was a tragedy for the nation but for the Pharisees some good came out of it. The Sadducees no longer had their power base and their priestly allies had virtually no role at all, since the whole of their religious mission had been to conduct the services in the Temple.

In Yavneh the Pharisees were faced with a stark reality. Unless they could find a way to save the religion that now lacked its Temple and sacrificial cult, their civilization would disappear. The proud, independent Israelite culture with its rich biblical and prophetic heritage would be eradicated, their people would become just another subjugated nation under the Roman thumb.

The tools the Pharisees had at their disposal were the written Torah, the oral traditions and their perfect faith. That was enough. Under Yohanan ben Zakkai’s leadership the Pharisees were about to set in place a process that would eventually result in the composition of the Talmud and two thousand years of unbroken study.

The vineyard at Yavneh

The academy that Yohanan ben Zakkai established at Yavneh was known as the Vineyard. It’s not clear why. It’s possible that the discussions took place in a field amongst grapevines, or that whatever buildings they had were erected on the site of an old vineyard. One theory, however, has it that the scholars sat in rows, planted and fruitful, just like grapevines.4

According to Chapters of the Fathers, after the Men of the Great Assembly received the Oral Law from the prophets they passed it to a pair of scholars, who passed it on to another pair, and so on, for five generations.5 The names of the fifth pair were Hillel and Shammai, and although they were long dead by the time the Vineyard was established, their respective students would have been amongst those who sat in rows in the academy.

It is said of Shammai that a non-Jew approached him and offered to convert to Judaism if he could be taught the whole of the Torah while he stood on one leg. Obviously it was an impossible request and Shammai angrily drove him away. The man then approached Hillel and made the same proposal. Hillel replied, ‘That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. The rest is commentary. Go and learn.6’ Shammai, who is also credited with saying ‘Greet everyone cheerfully’7 was no doubt having a bad day.

Hillel and Shammai held differing views on many issues. But the things they disagreed about are less important than the fact that they disagreed. Indeed, their disagreements were considered by the scholars in the Vineyard to be not just valid, but essential.

For three years there was a dispute between Hillel’s students and Shammai’s students, the former asserting, ‘The law is in agreement with our views,’ and the latter claiming, ‘The law is in agreement with our views.’ Then a voice from heaven announced, ‘These and these are the words of the Living God.’8

Nothing illustrates the process of Talmudic debate better than the fact that different opinions can each be ‘the words of the Living God’. Even though the Talmud is concerned with laws, behaviours and beliefs, it’s less interested in reaching conclusions than in presenting different ways of looking at a problem. It’s not so much the final decision that counts as the process which leads to it.

The discussions in the Vineyard were not recorded in writing and anything we know about them comes from sources written long after. It’s clear that the immediate priority for Yohanan ben Zakkai and his colleagues was to make sure that their knowledge of the Torah and its oral interpretation didn’t get lost in all the national turmoil and upheaval. The Vineyard was the forum for transmitting their knowledge to the next generation of scholars.

But the Vineyard wasn’t just a school or an academy. Sure, it contained young students who learned at the feet of older, venerated scholars. But rather than delivering lessons according to a curriculum, it seems that the method of teaching was for the students to sit in on the discussions of the older scholars, who were collaborating to collect and clarify the entire body of Jewish law; creating a belief system and legal code that no future group of dissenters, whether Sadducee or anyone else, could come along and challenge.

The discussions would start with a senior scholar stating their memory of how a particular ritual had been performed, or legal matter handled. Others might disagree, if they had different memories. Someone might quote an earlier authority; to support their own view, or to challenge another. Whatever opinions were put forward had to be in line with the text of the written Torah; if the law that Moses had written in the wilderness couldn’t be interpreted in such a way as to underpin a point of view; it wasn’t accepted.

A key topic was how to deal with rituals that used to be performed in the Temple. Animal sacrifices had been abolished altogether; the Torah had confined the offering of them to the Temple. But many rituals had not involved sacrifices and the Pharisees believed in making the religion open to everyone. So wherever they could Yohanan ben Zakkai and his colleagues instituted new procedures that allowed ordinary people to perform those rituals that had once been in the exclusive domain of the Temple.9

But the most important task of all for the rabbis in the Vineyard was to inspire, enthuse and motivate their demoralized and traumatized nation; to encourage people to reconnect with a faith which seemed to have failed them so badly. In doing this they demonstrated a remarkable aptitude for creativity. Just as Moses’s Torah had woven together stories, laws and grand ideas, so too the Yavneh scholars engaged in flights of imagination, illustrating their ideas with parables, folk tales and imagery.

On that day Rabbi Eliezer brought forward every imaginable argument but the other scholars did not accept them. He said: ‘If the law agrees with me, let this carob-tree prove it!’ Thereupon the carob-tree was torn a hundred cubits out of its place. ‘No proof can be brought from a carob-tree,’ they retorted. Again he said to them: ‘If the law agrees with me, let the stream of water prove it!’ Whereupon the stream of water flowed backwards — ‘No proof can be brought from a stream of water,’ they rejoined. Again he urged: ‘If the law agrees with me, let the walls of the study house prove it,’ whereupon the walls began to incline.

But Rabbi Joshua rebuked the walls, saying: ‘When scholars are engaged in a legal dispute, what right have you to interfere?’ So they did not fall, in honour of Rabbi Joshua, nor did they resume the upright, in honour of Rabbi Eliezer; and they are still leaning to this day.

Again he said to them: ‘If the law agrees with me, let it be proved from Heaven!’ Whereupon a Heavenly Voice cried out: ‘Why do you dispute with Rabbi Eliezer, seeing that in all matters the law agrees with him!’ But Rabbi Joshua arose and exclaimed: ‘The Torah is not in heaven!’

What did he mean by this? — Said Rabbi Jeremiah: That once the Torah had already been given at Mount Sinai; we pay no attention to a Heavenly Voice, because it also says in the Torah, You shall follow the majority view.10

Recording the Oral Law

The following century was amongst the most tumultuous in Israelite history. A series of rebellions by the Jews led to harsh reprisals by the Romans. The fighting reached a head in 132 ce when a band of guerrillas under the leadership of Bar Koziba staged a successful revolt, put the Romans to flight and declared an independent Jewish state.

It didn’t last long though. Three years later the revolution was over and the Jews were subjugated once again. A harsh period of intense religious and personal persecution orchestrated by the Roman emperor Hadrian began.

Traumatic social and political conditions make it difficult to preserve oral traditions. People move around, communication becomes difficult, things get forgotten or misrepresented. At the same time the Vineyard had expanded far beyond its original borders, it had spawned a generation of major scholars, who were now dotted all over the country, teaching when they could but mainly in hiding from the Romans. The sheer volume of material that had been taught since the opening of the Vineyard, and the difficult conditions under which it was now being disseminated meant that the oral tradition was tottering.

The rabbis began to realize that they would need to commit their teachings to writing. If they didn’t, the teachings would be lost. So gradually, written codifications of the Oral Law began to emerge.

We don’t know who started the process of writing down the Oral Law. One theory is that its recording began on the day that Eleazar ben Azariah was appointed as head of the Academy, in place of the hereditary leader Rabban Gamaliel II, the great-grandson of Hillel and grandson of Paul’s teacher Gamaliel I.11

Gamaliel had inherited the title of Nasi from his father. Literally meaning ‘prince’, the Nasi was the leader of the rabbinic community. Hillel had been the first Nasi, the title was granted to him in recognition of his scholarship. The title was hereditary, which reflected the fact that the Nasi could trace his descent back to King David, but although he was called a prince, and had formal contacts with the Roman authorities, he didn’t have a royal lifestyle in the sense we would think of it today.

Gamaliel II was a severe, but probably quite insecure leader. Like many weak men he tried to impose his will even at times when it would have been politic for him to hold back. He often found himself in conflict with the other senior rabbis, notably Rabbi Joshua. On one notable occasion he publicly humiliated Joshua by ordering him to remain on his feet whilst he sat and taught. The other rabbis, who’d had enough of his autocratic behaviour took the unprecedented decision to depose him, and appointed Eleazar ben Azariah in his place.12

On the day that Eleazar was appointed, according the Talmudic account, the gates of the academy were thrown open and up to 700 new students, who had not matched up to Gamaliel’s strict admission criteria, were admitted. Any law about which there was a doubt was apparently discussed on that day, clarified and codified in a collection known as Eduyyot, or Testimonies.

Eduyyot, which was later absorbed into the Mishnah, contains a vast number of laws, and it is probably an exaggeration to say that that they were all clarified on one day. But the deposing of Rabban Gamaliel II towards the end of the first century seems to have heralded a sea change which not only expanded the Academy but also began the process of crystallizing and recording legal decisions.

Gamaliel’s office was held in high respect by the scholars. They did not want to depose him permanently. But he could not be reinstated until he apologized to Rabbi Joshua. This he agreed to do.

As he entered Joshua’s hovel – no more than a simple clay brick structure with an earthen floor and timber strewn roof, he saw that the walls were black. ‘It seems to me,’ said Gamaliel, ‘that you are a charcoal burner.’ Joshua, no doubt raising his eyes to heaven replied, ‘Alas for the generation of which you are the leader, seeing that you know nothing of the troubles of the scholars, their struggles to support and sustain themselves.’13

Even after he had apologized it wasn’t easy to restore Gamaliel to his office. Many of the scholars objected, not just because they didn’t want Gamaliel back but also because of the slight they thought this would cast on Eleazar ben Azariah, who had succeeded him. It fell to a younger colleague, Rabbi Akiva to propose a solution through which they would share the office.

Akiva is the best known and most highly regarded of all the rabbis. Legends and stories about him abound. Unfortunately this makes it hard to know his true life history, which is concealed somewhere beneath layers of folklore and fable.

We do know that he was amongst the first to systematically compile and classify the Oral Law. We know this because in a small number of places the Mishnah itself quotes an earlier work which it either calls the ‘Mishnah of Rabbi Akiva’14 or ‘The First Mishnah’.15

Akiva is said to have started life as a shepherd, with no education. He worked for a very wealthy man and fell in love with his daughter Rachel. Her father was resolutely opposed to the match but Rachel was willing to run away with Akiva on the condition that he immediately went off to get himself an education. Akiva jumped at her suggestion and went to the Vineyard, or one of its offshoots, for twelve years. On his return he overheard an old man asking his wife how long she would endure the life of a widow. ‘If I had my way’, she replied, ‘he would stay for twelve more years.’ Akiva promptly turned around and went back. When he finally came home, according to this tale, he was accompanied by twenty four thousand students.16

Although Akiva’s life story is cloaked by legend and hyperbole, we get a good idea of his character and intellect from his teachings and legal rulings. As his twentieth-century biographer puts it:

Akiva ranks in depth of intellect, breadth of sympathy and clarity of vision with the foremost personalities of the Hebrew tradition, Moses and Isaiah amongst the prophets, Maimonides, Crescas and Spinoza amongst the philosophers. He dominates the whole scene of Jewish history from the period of the Second Isaiah, about 540 bce until the rise of the Spanish school of philosophers, about 1100 ce.17

Akiva never forgot his humble origins. Time and again his interpretation of the Oral Law reflects a concern for the poor and needy; for example, upholding the rights of impoverished farmers to inherit tiny parcels of land which his wealthier colleagues considered too small for the law to concern itself with.18 When the Temple had stood and the Levites were unable to earn a living because of their official duties, they had been compensated by a system of tithes, each farmer giving a tenth of his crop. Now that the Temple had been destroyed and small farmers were struggling to survive Akiva put in place measures which effectively abolished the system, obliging the Levites to become economically independent.19 On another occasion he limited the exclusive rights of priests to eat the flesh of a first-born lamb that was unfit to be sacrificed, ruling that anyone, Israelite or not, may eat of it.20

But he did not allow his sympathy for the poor to override his belief in the integrity of the law. When his colleague Tarfon, a wealthy olive farmer, tried to introduce a humanitarian solution to a dispute between various creditors over who could seize the land of someone who had died, Akiva protested. Tarfon had wanted to give the land to the poorest claimant. ‘No’, argued Akiva, ‘the law is not charity. The land must be given to the deceased’s heirs.’21

In similar vein, if two people found themselves stranded in a desert with only enough water for one of them to survive, Akiva argued that they shouldn’t share it, otherwise they would just watch each other die. Saving life is important, but it is not right to sacrifice two lives when one can be saved. Nor should the owner of the water sacrifice his life for his companion. Akiva quoted Leviticus 25.36, ‘that thy brother shall live with you’, emphasizing the word ‘with’ to infer that in such a case your life takes precedence over your companion’s.22

Akiva found himself caught up in the ongoing struggle against Rome. His involvement began round about the year 95 ce when a distinguished Roman and member of the emperor’s family, Flavius Clemens, converted to Judaism. This so enraged the emperor that he planned a series of punitive measures against the Jews. Akiva joined a diplomatic mission to Rome, along with Gamaliel, Joshua and Eleazar ben Azariah, to try to assuage the emperor’s wrath.

As relations with Rome worsened, Akiva declared his support for the Jewish rebel, Shimon bar Koziba. When bar Koziba won his improbable and short-lived victory, Akiva proclaimed him to be the Messiah.23 This was a rare lapse of judgement on Akiva’s part, as he realized when the rebel state was ultimately defeated and a period of merciless brutality, which history would name the Hadrianic Persecutions, began. The practice of the Jewish faith was banned and Akiva, whose whole life had been dedicated to Torah study, found himself at the head of a religious resistance movement.

When a colleague, Pappus, castigated him for teaching Torah in public, Akiva responded with a parable. He told of the fox who tried to persuade a fish that he could be saved from the fishermen’s nets if he would only come and live with him on the dry land. The fish replied that if he could not be safe in his natural environment, he would certainly not be safe in an unnatural space. ‘So it is with us’, said Akiva, ‘if we are not safe in the Torah, which is our natural condition, how can we be safe elsewhere?’24

Shortly afterwards Akiva was captured and imprisoned by the Romans. He was put to death in the year 135 ce, defiantly proclaiming the words of the Shema, the Jewish declaration of faith, whilst the Romans tore his flesh from him with iron combs.

The Mishnah

Akiva may have been dead but his reputation and authority lived on through his students. Led by his pupil Meir, they continued his work of recording the Oral Law, compiling collections of laws and arranging them in topics, almost certainly using the same arrangement that Akiva used for his earlier Mishnah.

If Meir had followed the style of the Five Books of Moses, and simply written down the laws, albeit in greater detail, the Talmud would never have been conceived. He would have created a rule book and nothing more. But it was Meir’s great genius to preserve the fluidity of the oral tradition by recording not only the official, majority rulings but also the views of those who disagreed. Today, when several judges sit together on a case it is usual for each of them to give their opinion, even if they disagree with the majority verdict. Meir’s Mishnah did the same thing, except the opinions were condensed into three or four words, not paragraphs or pages.

Meir’s was the work of a lifetime. It fell to one of his younger colleagues, a descendant of Hillel and Gamaliel to undertake the final stage in the creation of the Mishnah. Rabbi Judah the Nasi, often known just as Rabbi, collated and edited the Mishnahs of Akiva and Meir. He adopted a practice introduced by Meir of using anonymous opinions to indicate his teacher’s view. Meir had expressed Akiva’s opinions anonymously, in Judah’s Mishnah the anonymous voice belonged to Meir, not Akiva. However, in most cases Judah only gave Meir’s view anonymously if it was generally accepted as the authoritative ruling. Otherwise he would state clearly that it was Meir’s opinion.

The opening chapter of Rabbi Judah’s Mishnah gives a good illustration of how this worked. The Torah had ordained that a passage known as the Shema, which declares God’s unity, should be read ‘when you lie down and when you rise up’. But it is also to be said ‘when you sit in your house and when you walk down the road’. Unless they had clearer guidelines as to when they should say it, people would be reciting the Shema all day long. The Mishnah rules that the Shema should be said twice a day, and wants to know how this operates in practice.

From what time can one read the Shema in the morning? From the time that one can distinguish between blue and white. Rabbi Eliezer said, between blue and green and until sunrise. Rabbi Joshua said until the third hour, for it is the practice of kings to arise at the third hour.25

This passage contains three opinions. The first one ‘From the time that one can distinguish between blue and white’ is anonymous, the others are attributed to Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Joshua. The anonymous opinion reflects Rabbi Meir’s view, based on what he learnt from his teacher Akiva. By giving it anonymously Rabbi Judah the Nasi is flagging up that this is the view to follow.

When Judah finished his Mishnah, the process of recording the Oral Law was nearly at an end. The Mishnah became accepted as authentic, comprehensive and authoritative. Indeed in some circles studying Rabbi’s Mishnah was so holy a task it became an acceptable substitute for the now defunct sacrifices.26

Although the Mishnah that has come down to us today is Rabbi Judah’s work, it contains the names of several people who lived after him.27 It even mentions his death.28 Clearly some editing work was done to Judah’s Mishnah, even after he had finished. Indeed, Rabbi Hiyya, one of his pupils, is said to have had a secret scroll which contained emendations to the Mishnah.29

The prevailing view today is that it took some time for the Mishnah to become accepted as authoritative. It seems that once the Mishnah was complete, people in different parts of the Jewish world deliberately edited the text to fit in with a tradition they believed was more authentic.30 This explains why there is more than one version of the Mishnah (even though the differences between the versions are very slight). It was only gradually, as the authority of the Mishnah became established, that people fiddled with the text less.

When he compiled the Mishnah, Judah had to decide what to include and what to omit. Much of what he left out was collected together in a compendium called the Tosefta. Thought to have been compiled by Rabbi Hiyya, Judah’s student who kept the secret scroll, the Tosefta is structured in the same way as the Mishnah. Although the Talmud is a commentary on the Mishnah it often quotes from the Tosefta, as well as from other collections of material dating from the same period.31

The Mishnah is a stand-alone work that’s often read independently of the Talmud. It’s systematic, terse and direct in its language. Although, as we have seen, it offers different points of view as to what the law may be, unlike the Talmud it does not create debates or conversations. It simply records facts and moves on.

But laws, beliefs and rituals are complex things. There is plenty of opportunity to explore and interpret the principles that lie behind the bare rulings that the Mishnah states. And just as Moses’ Torah became an object of study and interpretation, so did the Mishnah. In fact it wasn’t until the Mishnah was finished, and was being circulated amongst the study houses in Israel and Babylon, that the story of the Talmud really began.

Notes

1 Eruvin 65b.

2 Gittin 56a, Echa Rabba 1.

3 It has also been conjectured that his name meant ‘Father of the Sicarii’, one of the militant, anti-Roman gangs then active in Israel, who took their name from their trademark curved dagger or Sicarius.

4 J. Berachot 4.1 7d.

9 The best-known examples of these are the blowing of the shofar (the sounding of musical notes using a ram’s horn) at New Year, the waving of palm branches at the festival of Tabernacles and the festive meal at Passover, all of which were originally Temple rites.

10 Bava Metzia 59b. I have based all translations from the Talmud on Epstein, 1935–1952, with occasional amendments.

11 Acts of the Apostles 22.3. Despite his strong Pharisaic credentials Gamaliel I was canonized by the Roman Church.