Among the philosophers of the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition, the Mishnah’s Judaic system can have been perceived as philosophical not merely in method but also in message. The Mishnah’s method of hierarchical classification in important ways is like that of the natural history of Aristotle,5 and the central component of its message, congruent to that of neo-Platonism. Specifically, the Mishnah’s Judaic system sets forth in stupefying detail a version of one critical proposition of neo-Platonism, demonstrated through a standard Aristotelian method.6 The repeated proof through the Aristotelian method of hierarchical classification demonstrates in detail that many things—done enough times, all things—really form a single thing, many species, a single genus, many genera, an encompassing and well-crafted, cogent whole. Every time we speciate,—and the Mishnah is a mass of speciated lists—we affirm that position; each successful labor of forming relationships among species, e.g., making them into a genus, or identifying the hierarchy of the species, proves it again.
Not only so, but when we can show that many things are really one, or that one thing yields many (the reverse and confirmation of the former), we state in a fresh way a single immutable truth, the one of this philosophy concerning the unity of all being in an orderly composition of all things within a single taxon. Accordingly, this Judaism’s initial system, the Mishnah’s, finds its natural place within philosophy because it appeals to the Aristotelian methods and medium of natural philosophy—classification, comparison and contrast, expressed in the forms of Listenwissenschaft—to register its position, which is an important one in Middle Platonism and later (close to a century after the closure of the Mishnah) would come to profound expression in Plotinus.7
I characterize the method as Listenwissenschaft and maintain that, in the Mishnaic form, that ancient mode of thought, in the Near East conventional from Sumerian times, in the Mishnah’s version corresponds to Aristotle’s method of natural philosophy. So let me quickly define what I mean by Listenwissenschaft. It is the presentation of a proposition, e.g., a rule, through a catalogue of facts formed by appeal to common indicative traits. The list then is so composed that, through the recurring regularities traits of the entries, it will yield a proposition common to them all.
Further still, the list will produce a generalization to items not on the list altogether, hence serving a syllogistic purpose. A list will therefore be made up of parallel items that all together point to a simple conclusion; in the Mishnah the proposed general conclusion may or may not be given at the end of the catalogue; but the catalogue—by definition—is pointed. All of the catalogued facts moreover are taken to bear self-evident connections to one another, established by those pertinent shared traits implicit in the composition of the list. They therefore also bear meaning and point through the weight of evidence to an inescapable conclusion.
Let us dwell on the philosophical classification of the Mishnah’s mode of thought. The Mishnah’s method of inquiry is that of natural history, corresponding point by point with that method of natural history characteristic of Aristotle. I do not claim that our sages of blessed memory read, or could have read, Aristotle or any other Greek philosopher. Aristotle’s work on natural history, his reflections on scientific method, e.g., the Posterior Analytics8—these works speak in their own language to their own problems, and the Mishnah’s authorship has written in a different language about incomparable problems. But when we compare our philosophers’ method with that of Aristotle, who also, as a matter of fact, set forth a system that, in part, appealed to the right ordering of things through classification by correct rules9 the simple fact becomes inescapable. Before us are different people, talking about different things, but in the same way.
A brief account, based upon the standard textbook picture, of the taxonomic method of Aristotle permits us to compare the philosophical method of the philosophy of Judaism with that of the methodologically-paramount natural philosophy of the Greco-Roman world.10 We begin with the simple observation that the distinction between genus and species lies at the foundation of all knowledge. Adkins states the matter in the most accessible way, “Aristotle, a systematic biologist, uses his method of classification by genera and species, itself developed from the classificatory interests of the later Plato, to place man among other animals . . . The classification must be based on the final development of the creature . . . .”11 But to classify, we have to take as our premise that things are subject to classification, and that means that they have traits that are essential and indicative, on the one side, but also shared with other things, on the other. The point of direct contact and intersection between the Judaism’s philosophy of hierarchical classification and the natural philosophy of Aristotle lies in the shared, and critical, conviction concerning the true nature or character of things. Both parties concur that there is such a true definition—a commonplace for philosophers, generative of interesting problems, e.g., about Ideas, or Form and Substance, Actual and Potential, and the like—of what things really are.12
But how are we to know which are the essential traits, the ones that allow us to define the true character of, e.g., classifying, things? This is the point at which our comparison becomes particular. There are between Aristotle’s and Judaism’s philosophies not only shared convictions about the genus and the species but quite concrete conceptions as to how these are to be identified and organized.13 The basic convictions on both sides is this: objects are not random but fall into classes and so may be described, analyzed, and explained. This is done by appeal to general traits or rules that permit their regularization and ordering in classes. The generative point of comparison is the taxonomic interest in defining through classification.
This definitive trait of natural philosophy is what we find in common between Aristotle’s and the Mishnah’s philosophical method. The points in common prove far more compelling than those yielded by the general observation that both systems appeal to the identification of genera out of species. In fact, what philosophers call the dialectical approach in Aristotle turns out to be the same approach to the discovery or demonstration of truth as the one that we find in the Mishnah. Like Aristotle, the Mishnah’s philosophers compose their taxonomy by appeal to the indicative traits of things, rather than to extrinsic considerations of imposed classification, e.g., by reference to Scripture.14 The philosophers whose system is set forth in the Mishnah appeal to the traits of things, deriving their genera from the comparison and contrast of those inherent or intrinsic traits.
These rather general observations require illustration, since my entire thesis rests upon the characterization of the initial system as philosophical, the successor-one not. To show why I maintain that the modes of thought and argument of the Mishnah fall into the same class as Aristotle’s method, let me now give one case in point, that is, my claim that the framers of the Mishnah present their propositions through a labor of classification through comparison and contrast of persons, actions, conditions, matter of status, and the like, and, to do so, they appeal solely to the traits of things. The logical basis of coherent speech and discourse in the Mishnah derives from Listenwissenschaft which accords with the method of natural history presented by Aristotle. That mode of thought defines way of proving propositions through classification, so establishing a set of shared traits that form a rule which compels us to reach a given conclusion.
Probative facts derive from the classification of data, all of which point in one direction and not in another. A catalogue of facts, for example, may be so composed that, through the regularities and indicative traits of the entries, the catalogue yields a proposition. A list of parallel items all together point to a simple conclusion; the conclusion may or may not be given at the end of the catalogue, but the catalogue—by definition—is pointed. All of the catalogued facts are taken to bear self-evident connections to one another, established by those pertinent shared traits implicit in the composition of the list, therefore also bearing meaning and pointing through the weight of evidence to an inescapable conclusion. The discrete facts then join together because of some trait common to them all. This is a mode of classification of facts to lead to an identification of what the facts have in common and—it goes without saying, a hierarchical explanation of their meaning.
When, therefore, an author of a passage in the Mishnah wished to make a point, he would appeal to the hierarchical ordering of things. By classifying discrete data, then by hierarchizing the order of the classes of the data, he would both reach, and as a matter of fact, set forth, a proposition and at the same time demonstrate that proposition. A very simple case in point derives from Mishnah-tractate Sanhedrin. There we see in a brief, concrete case precisely how facts are classified and also hierarchized, yielding important general propositions, in the present instance of a political character. In the following passage, drawn from Mishnah-tractate Sanhedrin Chapter Two, the authorship wishes to say that Israel has two heads, one of state, the other of cult, the king and the high priest, respectively, and that these two offices are nearly wholly congruent with one another, with a few differences based on the particular traits of each. Broadly speaking, therefore, our exercise is one of setting forth the genus and the species. The genus is head of holy Israel. The species are king and high priest. Here are the traits in common and those not shared, and the exercise is fully exposed for what it is, an inquiry into the rules that govern, the points of regularity and order, in this minor matter, of political structure.
My outline, imposed in bold-face type, makes the point important in this setting. We deal with Mishnah-tractate Sanhedrin Chapter Two, paragraphs one and two, hence 2:1, 2:2. The letters, supplied by me, distinguish one whole thought from others fore and aft. The bold-face generalizations are my insertions, meant to guide the reader through the exposition:
The proposition that forms the conclusion concerns the essential likeness of the two offices, except where they are different. The subterranean premise is that we can explain both likeness and difference by appeal to a principle of fundamental order and unity—that is, hierarchical classification. The important contrast comes at the outset. The high priest and king fall into a single genus, but speciation, based on traits particular to the king, then distinguishes the one from the other. All of this exercise is conducted essentially independently of Scripture; the classifications derive from the system, are viewed as autonomous constructs; traits of things define classifications and dictate what is like and what is unlike. The Mishnah’s rhetoric makes possible free-standing compositions: propositions and their proofs, entirely syllogistic in inner structure. Its logic of cogent discourse establishes propositions that rest upon philosophical bases, e.g., through the proposal of a thesis and the composition of a list of facts that (e.g., through shared traits of a taxonomic order) prove the thesis. The Mishnah presents rules and treats stories (inclusive of history) as incidental and of merely taxonomic interest. Its logic is propositional, and its intellect does its work through a vast labor of classification, comparison and contrast generating governing rules and generalizations.
The philosophical cast of mind therefore is amply revealed in this essay, which in concrete terms effects a taxonomy, a study of the genus, national leader, and its two species, [1] king, [2] high priest: how are they alike, how are they not alike, and what accounts for the differences? The premise is that national leaders are alike and follow the same rule, except where they differ and follow the opposite rule from one another. But that premise also is subject to the proof effected by the survey of the data consisting of concrete rules, those systemically inert facts that here come to life for the purposes of establishing a proposition. By itself, the fact that, e.g., others may not ride on his horse, bears the burden of no systemic proposition. In the context of an argument constructed for nomothetic, taxonomic purposes, the same fact is active and weighty. The whole depends upon four premises: [1] the importance of comparison and contrast, with the supposition that [2] like follows the like, and [3] the unlike follows the opposite rule; and [4] when we classify, we also hierarchize, which yields the argument from hierarchical classification: if this, which is the lesser, follows rule X, then that, which is the greater, surely should follow rule X. And that is the whole sum and substance of the logic of Listenwissenschaft as the Mishnah applies that logic in a practical way.15
Let me now generalize on what I conceive to be the philosophical character of the whole. If I had to specify a single mode of thought that within the Aristotelian method establishes connections between one fact and another, it is in that of natural history, classification by means of the search for points in common and therefore also points of contrast. We seek connection between fact and fact, sentence and sentence in the subtle and balanced rhetoric of the Mishnah, by comparing and contrasting two things that are like and not alike. At the logical level, too, the Mishnah falls into the category of familiar philosophical thought: once we seek regularities, we propose rules. What is like another thing falls under its rule, and what is not like the other falls under the opposite rule. Accordingly, as to the species of the genus, so far as they are alike, they share the same rule. So far as they are not alike, each follows a rule contrary to that governing the other. That accounts for the rhetoric of list-making and the logic of Listenwissenschaft that predominate in the Mishnah. List-making places on display the data of the like and the unlike and (ordinarily only implicitly) conveys the rule. It is this resort to list-making that accounts for the rhetorical stress on groups of examples of a common principle, three or five for instance. Once a series is established, the authorship assumes, the governing rule will be perceived. That explains why, in exposing the interior logic of its authorship’s intellect, the Mishnah had to be a book of lists, with the implicit order, the nomothetic traits of a monothetic order, dictating the ordinarily unstated general and encompassing rule. In method, therefore the Mishnah presents a profoundly philosophical system, in that it employs numerous cases, analyzed through modes of hierarchical classification such as are commonplace in the philosophy, particularly the natural history of Aristotle, to make a single general point.
But what about the message? In the context of the Greco-Roman philosophy of Middle Platonism, the Mishnah’s is philosophical,16 because the single, characteristically-philosophical proposition that the Mishnah repeats in innumerable cases is concerns the unity of all being. Specifically, the Mishnah demonstrates over and over again that all things are one, complex things yield uniform and similar components, and, rightly understood, there is a hierarchy of being, to be discovered through the proper classification of all things. In the Mishnah, many things are teleologically hierarchized in these two contrary propositions: [1] many things join together by their nature into one thing, and [2] one thing yields many things. These propositions of course complement each other, because, in forming matched opposites, the two set forth an ontological judgment. It is that all things are not only orderly, but, in their deepest traits of being, so are ordered that many things fall into one classification, and one thing may hold together many things of a single classification. For this philosophy then rationality consists in the hierarchy of the order of things, a rationality tested and proved, time and again, by the possibility always of effecting the hierarchical classification of all things. The ontological proposition that is the Mishnah’s then is a theory of the right ordering of each thing in its taxon, all taxa in correct sequence, from least to greatest. And showing that all things can be ordered, and that all orders can be set into relationship with one another, we transform the ontological message into its components of proposition, argument, and demonstration.
The Mishnah’s authorship’s sustained effort therefore is to demonstrate how many classes of things—actions, relationships, circumstances, persons, places—really form one class. This work of classification then explores the potentialities of chaos en route to explicit order. It is classification transformed from the how of intellection to the why and the what for and, above all, the what does it all mean of philosophical conviction. Recognition that one thing may fall into several categories and many things into a single one comes to expression, for the authorship of the Mishnah in a simple way. The authorship shows over and over again that diversity in species or diversification in actions follows orderly lines, thus confirming the claim that there is that single point from which many lines come forth. Carried out in proper order [1] the many form one thing, [2] one thing yields many, the demonstration then leaves no doubt as to the truth of the matter.
The upshot may be stated very simply. The species point to the genus, the classes to one class, all taxa properly hierarchized then rise to the top of the structure and the system forming one taxon. So all things ascend to and reach one thing. All that remains is for the philosopher to define that one thing: God. But that is a step that the philosophers of the Mishnah did not take. Perhaps—and I assume it as fact—the reason was that they did not think they had to make such an obvious point. But I think there is a further, and different reason altogether. It is because, as a matter of fact, they were philosophers who were not theologians at all. The document they produced pursues issues of natural history, never working out a proposition of a theological character—not in a single line! And to philosophers while God17 serves as premise and principle, the system does not derive its generative problematic from that fact. It is not that on which the system-builders propose to work. For philosophy in this context served not to demonstrate principles or to explore premises, but to analyze the unknown, to answer important questions about what now we do not know but wish to find out. In extension of my argument I appeal once more to the exemplary case of Aristotle, who asked his analytical questions about natural history, the nature of things, extending his interest from nature to society. What important answers to these questions come from the premise or fact of God (or the gods)? For the natural historian, none.
And that observation on the system-builders of the Mishnah as philosophers, not religious thinkers let alone theologians, returns us to the question of the philosophical classification of the Mishnah’s single and paramount proposition: the hierarchical unity of being, so that all things rise to form one thing, and all things descend from one thing. The Mishnah’s Judaic system—logic and topic alike—corresponds in its search for the one in the many and the many in the one to the Christian and pagan systems of the same type. This is shown in the comparison of the Judaic, Christian, and pagan philosophical systems within Middle Platonism, as we see in the statement of A. H. Armstrong:
The difference here between pagans and Christians . . . is a difference about the degree of religious relevance of the material cosmos, and, closely connected with this, about the relative importance of general, natural, and special, supernatural, divine self-manifestation and self-communication. On the one side, the pagan, there is the conviction that a multiple self-communication and self-revelation of divinity takes place always and everywhere in the world, and that good and wise men everywhere . . . have been able to find the way to God and the truth about God in and through rational reflection on themselves and on the world, not only the heavens but the earth, and the living unity of the whole. On the other side, the Christian, there is indeed a readiness to see the goodness and beauty of the visible cosmos as a testimony to God’s creation . . . but the religious emphasis lies elsewhere. Saving truth and the self-communication of the life of God come through the Incarnation of God as a man and through the human . . . society of which the God-Man is the head, the Church . . . It is only in the Church that material things become means of revelation and salvation through being understood in the light of Scripture and Church tradition and used by God’s human ministers in the celebration of the Church’s sacraments. It is the ecclesiastical cosmos, not the natural cosmos, which appears to be of primary religious importance for the Christian.18
If God is revealed in the artifacts of the world, then, so pagans in general considered, God must be multiple. No, the philosophy of Judaism is here seen to respond. Here we find a Judaic argument, within the premises of paganism, against paganism. To state with emphasis what I conceive to be that argument: the very artifacts that appear multiple in fact form classes of things, and, moreover, these classes themselves are subject to a reasoned ordering, by appeal to this-worldly characteristics signified by properties and indicative traits. Monotheism hence is to be demonstrated by appeal to those very same data that for paganism prove the opposite.
It follows that the medium of hierarchical classification, which is Aristotle’s, conveys the message of the unity of being19 which is that of Middle Platonism, all expressed in the this-worldly mode of discourse formed by the framers of the Mishnah. The way to one God, ground of being and ontological unity of the world, lies through “rational reflection on themselves and on the world,” this world, which yields a living unity encompassing the whole. That claim, conducted in an argument covering overwhelming detail in the Mishnah, directly faces the issue as framed by paganism. Immanent in its medium, it is transcendent in its message. And I hardly need spell out the simple reasons, self-evident in Armstrong’s words, for dismissing as irrelevant to their interests the Christian reading of the cosmos. To the Mishnah’s sages, it is not (merely) wrong, it is insufficient.
And yet, that is not the whole story. For the Mishnah’s sages reach into Scripture for their generative categories, and, in doing so, they address head-on a Christianity that Armstrong centers, with entire soundness, upon the life of the Church of Jesus Christ, God-Man.20 We do well here to review Armstrong’s language: “It is only in the Church that material things become means of revelation and salvation through being understood in the light of Scripture and Church tradition and used by God’s human ministers in the celebration of the Church’s sacraments.”
The framers of the Mishnah will have responded, “It is in the Torah that material things are identified and set forth as a means of revelation.”
Again Armstrong: “It is the ecclesiastical cosmos, not the natural cosmos, which appears to be of primary religious importance for the Christian.”
To this the philosophers of Judaism reply, “It is the scriptural account of the cosmos that forms our generative categories, which, by the power of intellect, we show to constitute an ordered, hierarchical unity of being.”
So the power of this identification of “the ecclesiastical cosmos” is revealed when we frame the cosmos of the Mishnah by appeal to its persistent response to the classifications and categories of Scripture. If the Church as Armstrong portrays matters worked out an ecclesiastical cosmos, only later on producing the Bible as it did, for its part the philosophy of Judaism framed a scriptural cosmos,—and then read it philosophically in the way in which I have explained matters. We may therefore identify three distinct positions on the reading of the natural world: the pagan, the Christian, and the Judaic. The one reads nature as a source of revelation. The other two insist on a medium of mediation between nature and intellect. For Christianity it is, as Armstrong says, ecclesiastical, and, as I claim, for Judaism, the medium of mediation of nature lies through revelation, the Torah.
Why the difference? There is a philosophical reason, which I deem paramount, and which explains my insistence that this Judaism is, by the criterion of its Greco-Roman context, a philosophy,—a philosophy, not a theology—in its message and its mode of thought. It is that by not merely appealing to the authority of Scripture, but by themselves analyzing the traits of the created world, read of course in the context of the revealed truths of Scripture, that the intellects at hand accomplished their purposes. By themselves showing the order and unity inherent within Scripture’s list of topics, the philosophers on their own power meant to penetrate into the ground of being as God has revealed matters. This they did by working their way back from the epiphenomena of creation to the phenomenon of Creation—then to the numinous, that is, the Creator. That self-assigned challenge forms an intellectual vocation worthy of a particular kind of philosopher, an Israelite one. And, in my view, it explains also why in the Mishnah philosophers produced their philosophy in the form that they chose.
For the form, so superficially unphilosophical in its crabbed and obsessive mode of discourse, proves in the end to form a philosophy. Judaism in the system of the Mishnah is philosophical in medium, method, and message. But then philosophy also is represented as, and within, the Torah in topic and authority. The union of the Torah’s classifications and topics, philosophy’s modes of thought and propositions marks the system as not only philosophical but also Judaic, distinctively so. That marriage produced as its firstfruits a philosophical Judaism, a Judaic philosophy: the Torah as Moses would have written it at God’s instructions, were Moses a philosopher. But the offspring of the happy marriage was not to live long, and the philosophy of Judaism would soon give way to the theology of Judaism: theology, not philosophy, dictated the future for a thousand years. Now to the successor-system.
I have at some length dwelt on this matter of the philosophical character of both the Mishnah’s method and also its topical program and system, because, now that we have grasped what characterizes as philosophical the logic and rhetoric of the Mishnah, we may very easily discern the different traits of the logic and rhetoric of the successor-documents. These matters of logic and rhetoric lie right on the surface of a piece of writing, and no subjective judgment on their character is required. And when we understand how the authorships of the successor-documents formulated and expressed their ideas, we shall find ourselves ready to discern the remarkable shift in the character of the system to which those authorships attest. To characterize the modes of thought that generated the successor-system in comparison to those of the initial one, we have first of all to compare them with the philosophical ones.21
The single most striking difference, in literary terms, between the Mishnah and both the Talmud of the Land of Israel and the Midrash-compilations, Genesis Rabbah and Leviticus Rabbah and Pesiqta deRab Kahana, is that the former is free-standing, while the latter take the form of commentaries, the Talmud, on successive paragraphs of the Mishnah, the Midrash-compilations, on verses of Scripture. In the most fundamental aspect, therefore, while the Mishnah’s categories derive from its framers’ perceptions of the principal classes of actions, objects, and relationships, the successor-writings take over the categories of prior documents, the Mishnah, Scripture, respectively. And, it follows, while the subcategories of each of the Mishnah’s categories, quite consistent with the initial taxonomy, are framed by appeal to taxic indicators inherent in those actions, objects, or relationships, the subcategories of the successor-documents are not formed in that way at all. So the Mishnah’s system sets forth an account of the nature of things, as we have seen, while the successor-writings’ categories, by definition, are contingent and dependent upon those of received, and authoritative documents.
What this means is that the Mishnah’s organization, and therefore selection, of data for analysis derives from nature, that is, from the traits of things, and the indicative traits are revealed by the things in themselves, as they are. The Talmud’s and Midrash-compilations’ organization, also selection, of data for analysis by contrast come from the structure of the Mishnah and Scripture. They are, by definition, not free-standing but contingent in form. Then the logic of cogent discourse will be defined by the nature of things. In the case of the Mishnah, as we already have noted at some length, connections are made between and among things by appeal to the principles of taxonomy deriving from natural history, and propositions fully spelled out (which we should call “paragraphs”) are formed into large-scale compositions (which we should call “chapters”) by a process of propositional and syllogistic reasoning. But the logic of cogent discourse—the joining of compositions into composites—in both the Talmud of the Land of Israel and the two Midrash-compilations under detailed study here is quite different. And the difference marks the successor-writings as simply not philosophical.
According to the prevailing logic in the successor-writings, one thing may join something else only because both things refer in common to a third thing, not because each things relates to the other of the pair. A fixed association to a received text, which supplies the rules of order in which topics are addressed as well as of the connection between topic and topic, rather than intrinsic traits of order and connection in the propositions themselves, respectively, governs. What this means is that sentence A has nothing to do with sentences B, C, D, and E, except that all the five sentences refer to a common verse of Scripture, on the one side, or sentence of the Mishnah, on the other. In our sample, presented shortly, we shall see precisely how this logic of fixed association joins A to B, B to C, and so on, even though A and B together are not otherwise connected in content and also do not otherwise form a proposition in syllogistic logic, e.g., if A, then B, if not A, then not B, therefore. . . . However we classify this logic of fixed association, we may not call it philosophical.
It is the simple fact, therefore, that in the making of connections, the drawing of conclusions, and the intelligible representation, in cogent discourse, of those conclusions, the Mishnah is philosophical and the successor-writings are different from the Mishnah and as a matter of fact are not philosophical but something else. That fact, standing by itself, does not tell us that a fundamental shift in modes of thought has taken place. A very brief example of the shift, however, will show what is at stake, first in the Talmud of the Land of Israel, then in a Midrash-compilation. It is now necessary to analyze particular texts, not only to make concrete these rather abstract characterizations, but also to make possible the next step in the argument of this chapter.
Given the claims I have made concerning the profound shift in the character of the rhetoric and logic of the Yerushalmi and its companions, the reader will wish to see, first of all, how an already-familiar passage is treated in the successor-document. Here is how the Yerushalmi’s authorship proposes to treat the passage about the comparison of the king and the high priest. I give the Mishnah-paragraph—now familiar to us—in bold face type.
MISHNAH-TRACTATE SANHEDRIN 2.3
A. |
The king does not judge, and [others] do not judge him; |
B. |
does not give testimony, and [others] do not give testimony about him; |
C. |
does not perform the rite of removing the shoe, and others do not perform the rite of removing the shoe with his wife; |
D. |
does not enter into levirate marriage, not [do his brothers] enter levirate marriage with his wife. |
E. |
R. Judah says, “If he wanted to perform the rite of removing the shoe or to enter into levirate marriage, his memory is a blessing.” |
F. |
They said to him, “They pay no attention to him if he expressed the wish to do so.” |
G. |
[Others] do not marry his widow. |
H. |
R. Judah says, “A king may marry the widow of a king. |
I. |
“For so we find in the case of David, that he married the widow of Saul, |
J. |
“For it is said, ‘And I gave you your master’s house and your master’s wives into your embrace’ (2 Sam. 12:8).” |
Here is how the Talmud of the Land of Israel reads the foregoing paragraph of the Mishnah. The Yerushalmi gives us a composite of four distinct compositions, signified by Roman numerals; these address the Mishnah-passage and clarify it in one way or the other.
I
II
A. |
And [others] do not judge him [M. San. 2:3A]. This is in line with the verse [in the Psalm of David], “From thee [alone] let my vindication come!” (Ps. 17:2). |
B. |
R. Isaac in the name of rabbi: “King and people are judged before Him every day, as it is said, ‘. . . and may he do justice for his servant and justice for his people Israel, as each day requires’ (1 King 8:59).” |
III
A. |
R. Judah says, “If he wanted to perform the rite of removing the shoe or to enter into levirate marriage, his memory is a blessing” [M. San. 2:3E]. |
B. |
They said to him, “If you rule in this way, you turn out to diminish the honor owing to the king.” |
IV
A. |
Others do not marry the widow of [M. San. 2:3G] or the woman divorced by a king. |
B. |
This is by reason of that which is said: “So [David’s concubines] were shut up until the day of their death, living as if in widowhood” (2 Sam. 20:3). |
C. |
R. Yudah bar Pazzi in the name of R. Pazzi in the name of R. Yohanan: “This teaches that David [treating them as forbidden though in law they were not], would have them dressed and adorned and brought before him every day, and he would say to his libido, ‘Do you lust after something forbidden to you?’ By your life! I shall now make you lust for something which is permitted to you.” |
D. |
Rabbis of Caesarea say, “They were in fact forbidden [20b] to hand [and it was not merely that he treated the women whom Absalom had raped as forbidden to him, but the law deemed them prohibited]. |
E. |
“For if a utensil belonging to an ordinary man used by an ordinary man is prohibited for use of a king, a utensil belonging to a king which was used by an ordinary man—is not an argument a fortiori that the king should be forbidden to make use of it?” |
What the framers do not do is, they do not address the main point that emerges from the entirety of the Mishnah-composition, the priority of monarch over priesthood. They do not take up generalizations; these they affirm by dealing only with details, as if to underline the authority of the main point. Then what do the framers propose to contribute? First, their task is to compare what we find in the Mishnah, the oral Torah, with what they find in Scripture, the written Torah, and that yields a contradiction to be harmonized at I. Second, they wish not only to harmonize but also to adduce proof-texts from Scripture in support of the Mishnah, and that is done at II. They proceed to amplify the language of the Mishnah-passage, supplying Judah’s opposition with a response, III. And IV presents no surprises. So if I had to specify the problem pressing on their minds, spelled out to be sure only in detail, it is the relationship between a rule of the Mishnah and the law of the Scripture. Then, clearly, the framers bring their own program of inquiry to the Mishnah, rather than simply continuing, in some manner, the Mishnah’s program.
That fact explains the obvious differences, as to rhetoric and logic, that separate the Mishnah from the Yerushalmi. The rhetoric of the Yerushalmi has nothing in common with that of the Mishnah. The former is balanced, highly formalized, the latter loose and not formalized at all. The former is coherent in addressing a single encompassing proposition. The later is made up of compositions that are unrelated to one another, but only to the passage on which they comment. That is to say, the units before us, I-IV, are discrete compositions, formed into a composite only through their interest in consecutive sentences of the same paragraph of the Mishnah. Self-evidently, our composite is a commentary to the Mishnah, not a free-standing proposal of a fresh proposition or viewpoint; the whole is secondary, derivative, and episodic, by contrast to the Mishnah’s autonomous and well-composed, carefully-crafted discourse.
The same mode of expression—rhetoric, logic—serves a variety of types of passages of the Mishnah, not only the narrowly-topical legal ones. If we turn to a theological discussion, one that invites generalization, expansion, elaboration, proof, and the like, we find precisely the same traits. So there are no distinctions as to genre of material; the Yerushalmi’s voice is single and uniform throughout, just as22 is the Mishnah’s. But it is a very different voice indeed. To show that the case just now given is exemplary, imposing upon the reader’s indulgence to work through one more passage. Here too the Mishnah-paragraph forms the Talmud’s occasion for discourse, and the initial task is to amplify and clarify that paragraph. The passage at hand is Mishnah-tractate Sanhedrin 10:1, again in bold-face type, which is as follows:
MISHNAH-TRACTATE SANHEDRIN 10:1
All Israelites have a share in the world to come, as it is said, “Your people also shall be all righteous; they shall inherit the land forever, the branch of my planting, the work of my hands, that I may be glorified” (Is. 60:21).
And these are the ones who have no portion in the world to come:
(1) He who says, the resurrection of the dead is a teaching which does not derive from the Torah, (2) and the Torah does not come from Heaven; and (3) an Epicurean.
R. Aqiba says, “Also: He who reads in heretical books, “and he who whispers over a wound and says, ‘I will put none of the diseases upon you which I have put on the Egyptians; for I am the Lord who heals you’” (Ex. 15:26).
Abba Saul says, “Also: He who pronounces the divine Name as it is spelled out.”
On this passage, the Talmud of the Land of Israel tractate Sanhedrin 10:1.X and XI23 give the following, commencing with a citation of a clause of the Mishnah:
X. A. |
He who whispers over a wound and says, “I will put none of the diseases upon you which [28b] I have put on the Egyptians; for I am the Lord who heals you” (Ex. 15:26). |
B. |
Rab said, “But this [statement is prohibited] only if the one who says it then spits.” |
C. |
R. Joshua b. Levi said, “Even if one has said, ‘When a man has on the skin of his body a swelling or an eruption or a spot, and it turns into a leprous disease on the skin of his body’ (Lev. 13:2), and then has spat—he has no portion in the world to come.” |
XI. A. |
Abba Saul says, “Also: he who pronounces the divine Name as it is spelled out” [M. San. 10:1G]. |
B. |
R. Mana said, “For example, the Cuthaeans, who take an oath thereby.” |
C. |
R. Jacob bar Aha said, “It is written YH[WH] and pronounced AD[onai].” |
There are no changes in the prevailing rhetoric or logic in the second sample. My remarks on the modes of coherence and cogency show how these two paragraphs are made up. What joins the proposition of XI to X? It is not a proposition that is advanced by the movement from the one to the next; there is no order that is required, and that therefore explains to us why XI must follow X and X must precede XI—except for one. That is, as I said, both X and XI refer to a text in common, and the order of the one prior and the other posterior is dictated by that fixed text with which both compositions are associated. Hence the logic of intelligible discourse that forms of two compositions (here: paragraphs) a single composite is that of fixed association.
And—by this point in the exposition, I hardly need to underline—whatever the logic, it is simply not philosophical, by the criteria now established concerning the manner in which philosophical discourse was carried on in this time and place. But within each composition, the logic indeed is propositional, since the several authorities address the same topic and make points pertinent to the same proposition. Stating their views in a paragraph, we could establish that one party takes this position, the other, that position, upon the same matter of common concern—a dialogue, and one of a philosophical order. So the compositions appeal to a propositional, and indeed, syllogistic logic, while the composite (and most of the composites of the Yerushalmi, as a matter of fact), appeal to a quite different logic, that of fixed association.24 The rhetorical forms of a commentary to a text therefore adumbrate an other-than-philosophical mode of thought.
Now if we ask ourselves, what do we have, and what do we not have, the answer is very simple: we have a contingent and dependent discourse, in which the Talmud of the Land of Israel clarifies and amplifies a prior document but in no way sets forth its own propositions, in its own terms, and for its own purposes. That pattern recurs twice over, at X and at XI. Were we to calculate how, in the Talmud overall, the document carries on its program of thought, we should find by far the greater part made up of precisely the kind of discourse exemplified here. The Midrash-compilations follow suit,25 reading Scripture as the Talmud’s framers read the Mishnah.26
To generalize on the exemplary materials in hand, let me now ask, How precisely was the Mishnah studied in the Talmud?27 It was, first, through line by line, word by word. The modes of study were mainly three. Sages asked about the meanings of words and phrases. Then they worked on the comparison of one set of laws or propositions with another, finding the underlying principles of each and comparing, and harmonizing, those principles. In the case of Genesis Rabbah, the task of harmonizing the goodness of creation with evil in creation is a case in point. So they formed of the rather episodic rules a tight and large fabric. I provide a brief sample of a passage in Genesis Rabbah, which shows how the modes of making connections and drawing conclusions of the Midrash-compilation before us run parallel to those of the Talmud of the Land of Israel. Here a verse of Scripture is cited and then amplified. The verse that is treated is Genesis 1:3: “And God said, ‘Let there be light.’” The discussion is made up of three distinct, well-composed thoughts, which I have numbered with Arabic numerals. To underline how the logic of coherent discourse runs parallel to that of the Mishnah, I give the citations of verses of Scripture in bold face type.
GENESIS RABBAH III:VIII
What joins Nos. 1, 2, and 3 is solely the appeal to the common verse, Gen. 1:3. No single proposition appeals for demonstration, let alone argument, to the three compositions. No. 1 complements the syllogism that God made the world perfect and without blemish with the necessary corollary. Where there are marks of imperfection, they will be removed at the end of days. God knew what he was doing from the beginning, creating both good and evil, as the story of creation makes clear. When will the perfection of creation come to full realization? On that “one day,” the day of judgment.
The basic reading of the creation-story repeatedly uncovers this single point. It is a stunning mode of argument, based on a text all parties claim to contain the truth. Here Gen. 1:3 serves as a proof text in making a point quite distinct from the verse at hand. No. 2 (carrying in its wake No. 3) reverts to the exposition of our verse and explains, in particular, the meaning of the word “one,” that is, not ordinal but cardinal. The possible meanings of that verse then are related to God’s situation in the world at the end of the first day. The negative polemic addresses those who say God was not alone in creating the world. So at each point the exegetes address positions contrary to their own, and the compositors have selected what we must find to be cogent and coherent. The upshot is that the logic of fixed association joins two compositions, No. 1, and Nos. 2-3. We therefore see that the joining-logic is the same as the Yerushalmi’s in reference to Mishnah-commentary.
Third, they moved beyond the narrow limits of the Mishnah or of Scripture into still broader and more speculative areas of thought. The whole, it is clear, is now traditional and not free-standing; the Mishnah on the one side, Scripture on the other dictate the program and its problematic.
Is that to suggest that philosophy cannot conduct its discussions through receiving and reworking a tradition of thought? Of course not. To the contrary, philosophical, as much as religious and theological, systems may, and very often do, take over a tradition and rework it, so expressing the essentially new within the framework and discipline of the received. A philosophical system may easily be set forth in a traditional form, such a commentary upon a received text. That is a convention of medieval philosophers’ response to Aristotle, for instance. Part of the aesthetic challenge to the framer of a new system requires the re-formation of the new within the rhetorical givens of the old. So the formal change from a free-standing to an exegetical representation of thought, broadly characterized as rhetorical, by itself, does not demonstrate a shift in mode of thought from philosophical to some other.
What does show that shift is something much more profoundly embedded in a system, namely, the mode of thought. This is in two aspects, first, how people made connections between one thing and something else, which is to say, the media of cogent thought that produced conclusions of one sort, rather than some other; second, how people expressed their ideas in a manner calculated to be understood by others, which is to say, how they conducted intelligible discourse. That is where the shift from system to system, such as I posit, is instantiated and exemplified at the deepest layers of intellect. Accordingly, when we grasp how the Mishnah’s thinkers conduct their mental experiments, not only how they express the result as part of the spinning out of a received tradition, we see very clearly that the rules that governed thought have changed, and then we may draw accurate and well-founded conclusions on the nature of the shift, which I wish to characterize as one that leaves philosophy behind.
A final point requires clarification. In describing the movement from the Mishnah to the successor-documents, do I mean to suggest that a system formerly philosophical and not (“really”) religious became religious? Not at all. The Mishnah’s philosophical system is a philosophy of religion, of what we now know as Judaism. The successor-system inherits the literature and the system of the Mishnah. Our sample leaves no doubt of that. But the successor-system makes its statement now not in a philosophical idiom and for philosophical purposes, but rather, in a different medium and to deliver a message of a different character. That shift takes place in three ways.
First, the inherited categories are expanded and reshaped.
Second, the received structure of categories is recast, so that, alongside the received ones, quite fresh categories, characteristically religious ones, are introduced.
Third, the consequence structure of the system is itself vastly transformed from what it had been in the representation of the initial document.
The character of the shift I claim to discern becomes pellucid when we realize that the philosophical proposition also yields in philosophical form a religious one. It is, as our encounter with the Middle Platonic philosophical world showed us, the representation of the belief in one and singular God, from whom all being comes. In the Mishnah’s massive and detailed account of the realm of nature, the rules that govern the ordering of all things in a cogent, ascending structure rise to the affirmation of one God. But philosophy can attend to religious questions without turning itself into an essentially religious statement and expression.
And now the difference between the Mishnah’s system and the coming one becomes clear, In the case of the Mishnah, the focus of the document is upon a philosophical proof of a philosophical proposition. That judgment is easily validated: the place of God in the system is classified as philosophical deism;28 at no point in the entire writing does someone announce the conclusion, Q.E.D. all existence points to a single source, One God. Implicit in proposition and infusing the method of hierarchical classification, that doctrine is nowhere to be seen. Accordingly, the Mishnah is to be characterized in proposition and in method as a philosophical Judaism. The contrary, indicative traits of a religious Judaism will show us the contrast.29
So while profoundly Israelite in implicit proposition concerning the unity of being in creation by one, unique God, still, the Mishnah is everywhere systematic and philosophical and only rarely, and then episodically, religious (let alone theological). Two-thirds of all tractates focus upon issues critical to philosophy, problems of hierarchical classification in particular, while, outside of liturgical settings, scarcely a line of the Mishnah invokes the word “God” or—more to the point—calls upon the active presence of God. The data derive not only from philological evidence, e.g., whether the name of God is invoked or not, whether the immediate activity of God is invited (though of course in every prayer it is). More to the point is the shape of the topical program, which attests to the categorical transformation, not merely modification, effected by the successor-documents. The Mishnah’s agenda never encompass—even in philosophical terms to be sure—such characteristically-theological questions as the meaning and end of history, the nature of prophecy, nature and supernature, the being of God, miracles, and the like.30 Issues that are made compelling by a source of truth in revelation, not in the observation of this world, do not arise.
True, answers to these questions as much as to those of natural history assuredly lie at, or even lay, the foundations for the philosophical structure. But the system and structure represented by the Mishnah in point of fact ask the questions philosophers ask concerning the nature of things, and answer them in the way the philosophers answer them. That is through orderly sifting of data in the taxonomic process of natural philosophy. The only point of difference is subject-matter, but, after all, philosophers in the great tradition took up multiple questions; some worked on this, some on the other thing, and no single question predominated.
What in its authorship’s fundamental traits of intellect therefore marks the Mishnah’s system as essentially philosophical is its focus upon not merely their propositions on how things are, but their explanation,—implicit in their modes of thought,—of why they are the way they are. The authorship of the Mishnah explains, by appeal to this-worldly data and rules susceptible to this-worldly demonstration, what it means that things are this way, rather than some other. I underline the this-worldly character of not only the data but also the identification of indicative traits, because, in the successor-systems, which I classify as religious, the data derive not only from the observed experience of humanity and the perceived characteristics of the natural world but also from revelation, the Torah in particular.
The identification of a source of classification and of fact alike that is not limited to the world of sense-observation and experience but extends to the supernatural world, on the one side, and the experience of transcendence, on the other, differentiates its successor-writings from the Mishnah. For, as we now have seen in examining their logic of cogent discourse and rhetoric, they appeal to revelation, in the form of the Torah (written in Scripture, hence serving the Midrash-compilations, oral in the Mishnah,31 hence serving the Talmud of the Land of Israel), as the source for taxa and therefore structure and order. So, once more, the Mishnah falls comfortably within the classification of philosophy.
To conclude: The Mishnah’s systemic statement, its representation of a Judaic system, a Judaism, as philosophy, demonstrates that all things in place, in proper rank and position in the hierarchy of being, point to, stand for, one thing. The Mishnah’s philosophical method accords with the method of natural history of Aristotle, and its propositional program aims at the hierarchical classification of all things leading to the one that was found critical by Middle Platonism, so the Mishnah’s system is a philosophical Judaism.32
By contrast the successor-documents’ traits of rhetoric and logic, while in theory serviceable for philosophical thinking, bear no meaningful relationship with the modes of discourse characteristic of the counterpart philosophies; certainly, the fixed-associative logic coherent thought and cogent presentation characteristic of the successor-documents would have found no comprehension whatever in so orderly an intellect as Aristotle’s.
So we have now seen that if the Mishnah in its fundamental traits of program and argument is philosophical, as it is, then the successor-documents, however they are to be categories, assuredly were something other than philosophical. That point, now attained, permits us in due course to turn to define and classify the result of the movement from philosophical to other-than-philosophical movements of thought, with special attention to the topical initiatives surfacing only later on, for instance, to topics that require classification as religious and not as philosophical.
But first, to underline the fundamentally philosophical character of the Mishnah’s system and to show that, in the successor-documents, that system was undergoing revision through categorical reformation, not merely modification, we proceed to economics, represented in the Mishnah in a manner entirely congruent with philosophical economics, but recapitulated,33 as the framers of the new system worked out not expansions and revisions of the received categories, but counterpart categories, entirely fresh and unprecedented, in which data hitherto neglected are collected and evaluated so as to yield propositions hitherto not considered in a sustained way if at all.34 To signal the direction in which we are moving, what happens in the successor-system is not so much the effort to treat new subjects in the old way but rather to encompass altogether other things than those to which economics attends.35 The new system comes to expression not in how it receives the old, but rather in how it invents the new; it is not continuous with what has gone before.
1Do I mean to suggest that our sages of blessed memory hiked down from their Galilean hill-towns to Caesarea on the coast and listened to the public speeches of the masters of the Second Sophistic, who, throughout the Near Easter, reached a considerable public? Obviously not. We cannot show, and we do not know, that the Mishnah’s sages ever heard a single word of a philosophical address or read a line of a single treatise, and I think it highly unlikely that they did or could have done so. Then how does it happen that the Mishnah emerges in its method and message as congruent to philosophical writings long available in the Middle East such as Aristotle’s? How can I explain the obvious parallels in modes of thought, logic and proof, between the Mishnah and the natural philosophy associated with the name of Aristotle in particular? I have no explanation, nor can I think of any. I have to work from the evidence in hand, and what we see time and again are fundamental points of congruence; we then classify things that bear important traits in common within a single taxon. Parallel lines do not meet, and diffusionism seems to me not an interesting mode of explaining anything. But we have to note that, merely because not a single philosophical term of any consequence occurs in the Mishnah and related writings, therefore the authorship of the Mishnah cannot be classified as philosophical, we confuse mere philology with the history of ideas. The real issues, as I stress in a moment, are traits of writing, traits of rhetoric, traits of argument—the indicative modes of thought. And these are not philosophical in any merely-general sense. They are philosophical in very specific and particular texts. I hasten to emphasize that much more work on the philosophicality of the writings of our sages of blessed memory needs to be done. And when it is done, it will address not only Aristotle and the Mishnah, but also Augustine and the late fourth and early fifth century sages who produced the Talmud of the Land of Israel, Genesis Rabbah, and Leviticus Rabbah, such as I do in Part Three of this book. So I mean here and in the associated works on the Mishnah as philosophy in method and message, economics and politics, only to open questions. In my view it is no longer possible to read these documents in complete isolation from other writings of their class that were produced in antiquity; or to regard the sages of the oral Torah as sui generis in their context in late antiquity; or to deem their Judaism to be utterly beyond comparison and contrast with any other religious system of their time and place. The comparison of Augustine’s and our sages’ theories of history obviously opens a road, but completes no journey. But once such a comparison is drawn, it cannot be pretended, any longer, that all we have to learn from the Fathers of Christianity is points of philological or exegetical interest and that we can simply ignore, for the study of the formative history of Judaism, the entirety of the intellectual heritage of Christianity. It also cannot be pretended that, beyond the first century, scholars of Christianity have nothing to learn from Judaism.
2My estimate for the Talmud of the Land of Israel, in the tractates I probed, is that, in volume, as much as 90% of the Talmud serves to amplify passages of the Mishnah, and not much more than 10% contains intellectual initiatives that are fundamentally fresh and unrelated to anything in the Mishnah-passage under discussion, see my Talmud of the Land of Israel. XXXV. Introduction. Taxonomy (Chicago, 1983: The University of Chicago Press). Then my Judaism in Society. The Evidence of the Yerushalmi. Toward the Natural History of a Religion (Chicago, 1983) aims to show that even the passages that (merely) clarify words or phrases of the Mishnah in fact set forth a considerable, autonomous program of their own, cf. especially pp. 73-112. But what is clearly distinct from the Mishnah is set forth on pp. 113-254.
3This term is meant to take account of the collective and social character of much of the literary enterprise. Not a single authoritative book of Judaism in late antiquity bears the name of an identified author, and the literary traits of not a single piece of writing may securely be imputed to a private person. The means for gaining acceptance was anonymity, and the medium of authority lay in recapitulating collective conventions of rhetoric and logic, not to mention proposition. To speak of “authors” in this context is confusing, and hence the resort to the word at hand.
4These statements summarize the results of the following books of mine: Judaism as Philosophy. The Method and Message of the Mishnah (Columbia, 1991: University of South Carolina Press); The Economics of the Mishnah (Chicago, 1990: The University of Chicago Press); The Politics of Judaism: The Initial Structure and System (Chicago, 1992: The University of Chicago Press). Judaism as Philosophy is supplemented by The Philosophical Mishnah. I. The Initial Probe; II. The Tractates’ Agenda. From Abodah Zarah to Moed Qatan; III. The Tractates’ Agenda. From Nazir to Zebahim; and IV. The Repertoire (Atlanta, 1989: Scholars Press for Brown Judaic Studies).
5But a great deal of further study must show in all specificity how the Mishnah’s method of hierarchical classification compares in detail with that of Aristotle. My observations are only the beginning of the matter.
6And I need hardly add that the very eclecticism of the philosophy of Judaism places it squarely within the philosophical mode of its time. See J. M. Dillon and A. A. Long, eds., The Question of “Eclecticism.” Studies in Later Greek Philosophy (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988: University of California Press). But these are only general observations, not meant to suggest direct connection or even to imply that an explanation drawn from “what was floating in the air” seems to me to pertain; I have no explanation.
7That proposition, on the essential unity of the hierarchical nature of all being forms one important, generative premise of neo-Platonism, as we shall see in a moment. So we find a philosophical method used to establish a philosophical proposition. That, sum and substance, is what I claim to demonstrate.
8I consulted Jonathan Barnes, Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics (Oxford, 1975: Clarendon Press).
9And, as to proposition about the hierarchical ordering of all things in a single way, the unity of all being in right order, while we cannot show and surely do not know that the Mishnah’s philosophers knew anything about Plato, let alone Plotinus’s neo-Platonism (which came to expression only in the century after the closure of the Mishnah!), we can compare our philosophers’ proposition with that of neo-Platonism. For that philosophy, as we shall see, did seek to give full and rich expression to the proposition that all things emerge from one thing, and one thing encompasses all things, and that constitutes the single proposition that animates the system as a whole.
10That is not to suggest Aristotle was an influential figure in the philosophy done in the same time and place as sages; nothing in these observations about a shared method requires us to postulate contact, intersection, or even diffusion of ideas. For this matter of Aristotle’s philosophical method, I relied only on standard textbook descriptions, including the following:
Adkins, A. W. H., From the Many to the One. A Study of Personality and Views of Human Nature in the Context of Ancient Greek Society, Values, and Beliefs (Ithaca, 1970: Cornell University Press).
Allan, D. J., The Philosophy of Aristotle (London, New York, Toronto, 1952: Oxford University Press/Geoffrey Cumberlege).
Armstrong, A. H., “Platonism and Neoplatonism,” Encyclopaedia Britannica (Chicago, 1975) 14:539-545
Armstrong, A. H., “Plotinus,” Encyclopaedia Britannica (Chicago, 1975) 14:573-4
Bréhier, Émile, The History of Philosophy. The Hellenistic and Roman Age (Chicago and London, 1965: The University of Chicago Press). Translated by Wade Baskin.
Cherniss, Harold, Selected Papers (Leiden, 1977: E. J. Brill). Edited by Leonardo Taran.
Feldman, Louis H., “Philo,” Encyclopaedia Britannica (Chicago, 1975) 14:245-247
Goodenough, Erwin R., An Introduction to Philo Judaeus. Second Edition (Lanham, 1986: University Press of America Brown Classics in Judaica).
Merlan, P., “Greek Philosophy from Plato to Plotinus,” in A. H. Armstrong, ed., The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge, 1967: Cambridge University Press), pp. 14-136.
Minio-Paluello, Lorenzo, “Aristotelianism,” Encyclopaedia Britannica 1:1155-1161.
Owens, Joseph, A History of Ancient Western Philosophy (N.Y., 1959: Appleton, Century, Crofts Inc.)
Parker, G. F., A Short History of Greek Philosophy from Thales to Epicurus (London, 1967: Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd.)
Reale, Giovanni, A History of Ancient Philosophy. III. The Systems of the Hellenistic Age (Albany, 1985: State University of New York Press). Edited and translated from the third Italian edition by John R. Catan.
11A. W. H. Adkins, From the Many to the One. A Study of Personality and Views of Human Nature in the Context of Ancient Greek Society, Values, and Beliefs (Ithaca, 1970: Cornell University Press)., pp. 170-171.
12But only Aristotle and the Mishnah carry into the material details of economics that conviction about the true character or essence of definition of things. The economics of the Mishnah and the economics of Aristotle begin in the conception of “true value,” and the distributive economics proposed by each philosophy then develops that fundamental notion. The principle is so fundamental to each system that comparison of one system to the other in those terms alone is justified. This is a matter to which we return in Chapter Two.
13If the parallels in method are clear, where do we find the difference between Aristotle’s system and the Mishnah’s? It is that the goal of Aristotle’s system, the teleological argument in favor of the unmoved mover, and the goal of Judaism’s system, the demonstration of the unity of being, are essentially contradictory, marking utterly opposed positions on the fundamental character of God and the traits of the created world that carries us upward to God. So we establish the philosophical character of the method of the Mishnah’s system, only at the cost of uncovering a major contradiction: the proposition that animates the one system stands in direct opposition, as to its premises, implications, and explicit results, with the results of the other. Aristotle’s God attained through teleological demonstration accomplished through the right classification of all things and the Mishnah’s God, whose workings in the world derive from the demonstration of the ontological unity of all things, cannot recognize one another. And that is the case even though they are assuredly one. Accordingly, we must ask ourselves, cui bono? Or more precisely, not to whose advantage, but rather, against whose position, did the Judaic philosophical system propose to argue? When we realize that at stake is a particular means for demonstrating the unity of God, we readily identify as the principal focus the pagan reading of the revealed world of the here and the now, and, it must follow, Judaism as a philosophy stood over against the pagan philosophy of the world of its time and place. The fundamental argument in favor of the unity of God in the philosophy of Judaism is by showing the hierarchical order, therefore the unity, of the world. The world therefore is made to testify to the unity of being, and—to say the obvious with very heavy emphasis—the power of the philosophy derives from its capacity for hierarchical classification. When we compare the pagan and the Christian philosophical ontology of God, we see that it is the pagan position, and not the Christian one, that forms the target of this system. The Christian position is simply not perceived and not considered.
14And for that decision they are criticized by all their successors, chief among them, the authorship of Sifra. See my Uniting the Dual Torah: Sifra and the Problem of the Mishnah (Cambridge, 1990: Cambridge University Press).
15Any claim that the document at hand merely reorganizes information available from Scripture and simply depends for all important traits (and propositions!) on Scripture, by the way, is shown here to be null. The subordination of Scripture to the classification-scheme is self-evident. Scripture supplies facts. The traits of things—kings, high priests—dictate classification-categories on their own, without Scripture’s dictate.
16I cannot take seriously the preoccupation with whether or not the authorship of the Mishnah not only was philosophical but knew (“self-consciously”) that it was philosophical. There is no evidence on the basis of which to address that peculiarly modern question of pseudopsychology, and, anyhow, I do not see much at stake in the answer. I suppose one might argue from the case of the duck: the authorship of the Mishnah quacks like philosophers and waddles like philosophers, so, whether or not they knew it, they were philosophers. But that does not seem to me to yield an important analytical datum. Nor do I find myself responsible to explain how the medieval Judaic Aristotelians missed the Aristotelian character of Mishnaic thought completely, as they did. It is the simple fact that they did; specialists in the study of, e.g., Gersonides, can worry about why. My guess is that, to begin with, they studied the Mishnah in bits and pieces, as episodic problems of exegesis, rather than seeing the document as a set of well-crafted demonstrations of propositions. The reason, then, would lie in the character of the Talmud of Babylonia and its reading of the Mishnah, which left no possibility of grasping the Mishnah as a statement on its own, appealing to its own method to set forth its own statement. Among the medieval Mishnah-commentators, only Maimonides read the document as a free-standing and autonomous statement, but in addressing the Mishnah, his interests were in law, not in philosophy; and he did not imagine that the law contained philosophy, I suppose, because his intent was to set the law into perspective, not highlight it, so as to make a place for philosophy in its own, abstract terms. If that accounts for his error, then it was indeed a formidable one.
17And whether or not it is one God or many gods, a unique being or a being that finds a place in a class of similar beings hardly is germane!
18“Man in the Cosmos,” A. Hilary Armstrong, Plotinian and Christian Studies (London, 1979: Variorum Reprints) No. XVII, p. 11,
19which is Plato’s and Plotinus’s
20That judgment does not contradict the argument of my Uniting the Dual Torah: Sifra and the Problem of the Mishnah (Cambridge, 1990: Cambridge University Press) concerning the Sifra’s authorship’s critique of the Mishnah’s philosophers’ stress upon classification through intrinsic traits of things as against through classes set forth solely by the Torah. I mean only to stress the contrast between appeal to Scripture and to nature, which I find in the philosophy of Judaism, and appeal to the eccleisial cosmos. This point registers immediately.
21To be sure, modes of thought that are not to be classified as philosophical do not on that account fall into the category of religious, so our second task—in many ways the easier of the two—will be to demonstrate that they were fundamentally religious. In the literary evidence for the successor-system, the two propositions—not philosophical but religious—flow together in a way in which, in abstract proposition, they do not. For, as we shall see in the rest of this part of the book, in framing their systemic writings, the authorships representative of the successor-system rejected philosophical in favor of religious modes of perceiving and organizing matters.
22with few exceptions of consequence, specifically, Eduyyot and Abot.
23This is by my numbering system for the Talmud of the Land of Israel. I preserve the received numbering system of the Mishnah, with which each Talmud-passage commences, thus the chapter is the chapter of the Mishnah, the paragraph likewise, and then the subsequence discussion is the Talmud’s amplification thereof. The Mishnah-reference then is 10:1, meaning, Mishnah-tractate Sanhedrin Chapter Ten Paragraph One. I have then subdivided the Talmud between 10:1 and 10:2 into completed units of thought, and these bear Roman numerals. I further have subdivided the components of these compositions or completed units of thought, marking each component by a letter. The letter then indicates the smallest whole unit of thought; subdividing a lettered passage (in general, a sentence) would yield no intelligible group of words at all. That is the theory behind the representation in my translations. There is no other system of marking that permits us to distinguish one thing from anything else except by page-reference, as in p. 93b, which means the obverse side of a Talmud-folio; in the Yerushalmi editions, we have Mishnah-numbers, as indicated, and also page-references, which may then be four, a, b, c, d. All of this is very helpful except if we are asking analytical questions and have to signify and refer to what we think are the individual sentences and paragraphs. But all description yielding analysis must start with the smallest whole units of material that are subject to analysis. Understanding the analytical system I have made up is fundamental to grasping the analysis that follows from it.
24I hasten to qualify that judgment. There is an argument to be made that in the Midrash-compilations, the logic of Listenwissenschaft takes over, so that in the (“another matter . . . another matter”) we have multiple restatements of what is in fact the same matter. That rhetoric then proves expressive of the logic of list-making in the service of propositional presentation and demonstration. But that logic of framing composites out of diverse compositions is not in play in the Yerushalmi, as even the tiny snippet before us shows. It does serve in important ways in the two Midrash-compilations we are considering, being fundamental to Leviticus Rabbah. While the Yerushalmi therefore works with two logics, one for composites, the other for compositions, the Midrash-compilations tend to appeal to syllogistic demonstration of propositions for large-scale composites. Differentiating them from the Mishnah and showing they are religious rather than philosophical will take a different tack from the present one. I expand, in a preliminary way, on these points in my From Literature to Theology: Three Preliminary Experiments (Atlanta, 1989: Scholars Press for Brown Judaic Studies). But, for reasons obvious to the readers of this book, the theological inquiry must await the results of the next phase of the work, which will in due course attend to the third and final phase in the formation of Judaism, that attested by the Talmud of Babylonia and related documents.
25To ease the burden on the reader, I give my example as Appendix One.
26But that statement requires the caveat just now introduced in note 20.
27And Scripture in the Midrash-compilations represented by Genesis Rabbah.
28I have expanded on this point in my The Incarnation of God: The Character of Divinity in Formative Judaism. Philadelphia, 1988: Fortress Press. See also my Foundations of the Theology of Judaism. I. God (Northvale, 1991: Jason Aronson, Inc.)
29But presentation of these traits will require protracted discussion, and in this chapter our interest is only in the rhetorical and logical differences between system and system, not in the topical, let alone the propositional ones. These will come in due course.
30The suspicious attitude toward miracles, expressed at M. Ta. 3:8 in the famous story about Honi the Circle-drawer, forms a very minor footnote. Silences testify farmore eloquently than occasional observations or pointed stories.
31The representation of the Mishnah as (part of) the oral Torah appears for the first time in the canonical sequence in the Talmud of the Land of Israel. This is spelled out at some length in my Foundations of Judaism. II. Torah. From Scroll to Symbol in Formative Judaism (Atlanta, 1988: Scholars Press for Brown Judaic Studies).
32What makes the philosophy a philosophical system of (a) Judaism in particular is, of course, defined by the context of Scripture, with its insistence that Israel’s God is one and unique, we may identify as distinctively Judaic the premise defined by that fundamental and ancient affirmation of Israel.
33As we see in Chapter Two.
34As we see in Chapter Five.
35In the revision of what we mean by scarce resources, we shall see how a philosophical system is turned into a religious one. The justification for calling the successor system not philosophical but religious emerges in the result of the transformation of categories, not merely in their extension and expansion. That is my argument in Part Two.