RABBINIC JUDAISM covers the period from the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70 CE to the beginning of the Arab conquest of Palestine in the first half of the seventh century. It was a time of major upheaval, with the loss of sovereignty, which had already been increasingly restricted, the loss of the Temple, the ultimate transition from a Temple cult to a Torah-centered religion of the book and thus from the priests to the rabbis as the sole guardians of a life agreeable to God.
This epoch was greatly shaped by the literature of Palestinian and Babylonian Judaism, with the Mishnah and Tosefta as the first two systematic collections of binding legal norms, the Midrashim as the large-scale commentaries of almost all books of the Bible, and the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds as the comprehensive compendiums of scholarship in the two most significant centers of late antique Judaism. Also emerging during this period (with offshoots into the early Middle Ages) was the literature of early Jewish mysticism, the so-called Hekhalot literature, which began in Palestine and reached its pinnacle in Babylonia. In contrast to the bulk of the pertinent secondary literature, I will treat Hekhalot literature on equal terms with classical rabbinic literature.