In the Mishnah’s system “Torah” served as a taxic indicator, that is, the status of Torah as distinct from another (lower) status, thus concretely Torah-teaching in contra-distinction to scribal-teaching.7 The category-formation attested in the Mishnah’s successor-documents, by contrast, conceived that what the sage said was in the status of the Torah It moreover was Torah because the sage was Torah incarnate. Knowledge of the Torah yields power over this world and the next, capacity to coerce to the sage’s will the natural and supernatural worlds alike. The Torah is thus transformed from a philosophical enterprise of the sifting and classification of the facts of this world into a Gnostic process of changing persons through knowledge. It is on that basis that in the Yerushalmi and related writings I find in the Torah the counterpart-category to philosophy in the Mishnah.
Now we deal with a new intellectual category: Torah, meaning, religious learning in place of philosophical learning. What is the difference between the one and the other?
First comes appeal to revealed truth as against perceived facts of nature and their regularities,
second, the conception of an other-worldly source of explanation and the development of a propositional program focused upon not nature but Scripture, not the nations in general but Israel in particular,
and third, the gnosticization of knowledge in the conception that knowing works salvation.
The philosophical modes of thought characteristic of the Mishnah, with list-making as a medium for discovering the rules of classification of data yielding the hierarchical classification of all things, also characterize the logical and even rhetorical program of the documents that set forth the successor-system. What was to change, therefore, was not the mode of thought. Listenwissenschaft, after all, had characterized intellectual life in the Near and Middle East for three thousand years, reaching its apex with Aristotle’s natural philosophy.8 What was new, rather, was the propositions to be demonstrated philosophically, and what made these propositions new was the focus of interest, on the one side, and data assembled by way of demonstrating them, on the other. From a philosophical proposition within the framework of free-standing philosophy of religion and metaphysics that, we saw, the Mishnah’s system aimed to establish, we move to religious and even theological propositions within the setting of contingent exegesis of Scripture.
Then how do we know that what was changing was not merely topical and propositional but categorical in character? The answer lies in the symbolic vocabulary that would be commonly used in the late fourth and fifth century writings but not at all, or not in the same way, in the late second century ones. When people select data not formerly taken into account and represent the data by appeal to symbols not formerly found evocative or expressive, or not utilized in the way in which they later on were used, then—so I claim—we are justified in raising questions about category-formation and the development of new categories alongside, or instead, of the received ones. In the case at hand, the character of the transformation we witness is shown by the formation of a symbol serving to represent a category. And that is not a matter of subjective judgment, for we shall find right on the surface the explicit substitution of one category for another category, symbol for symbol.
To signal what is to come, we shall find the quite bald statement that, in the weighing of the comparative value of capital, which in this time and place meant land or real property, and Torah, Torah measured intrinsic value, and land did not. On the basis of that quite explicit symbolic comparison I speak of transformation—symbolic and therefore categorical transformation,—not merely thematic shifts in emphasis or even propositional change. And that is why I hold that we witness in the successor-writings the formation of a system connected with, but asymmetrical to, the initial, philosophical one. Then for the world-view of the transformed Judaism, the counterpart-category to philosophy is formulated by appeal to the symbolic medium for the theological message, and it is the category, the Torah, expressed, as a matter of fact, by the symbol of Torah.9
Let us deal first with what continued, since the continuities justify our interpretation of phenomena as transformation of a received system and structure, not invention of a new system altogether. That the later documents, the Yerushalmi, Genesis Rabbah, Leviticus Rabbah, and Pesiqta deRab Kahana carried forward and maintained connections with the initial ones, the Mishnah and the Tosefta, is shown not merely by the literary character of the later writings, framed as they were as commentaries on earlier ones. Much more important, connection is established by the paramount role of philosophical modes of thought in them. The successor-documents, specifically, continued the work of the comparison and contrast of species in quest of the genus and the rule governing that genus. But their inquiry led them in directions not contemplated by the framers of the system portrayed in part by the Mishnah—at least, so far as the Mishnah, their end-product, tells us. It moreover produced results concerning a set of issues not considered in the Mishnah and its related writings. The persistence of list-making shows us how the intellects whose system is adumbrated in the Yerushalmi, Genesis Rabbah, Leviticus Rabbah, and Pesiqta deRab Kahana, remained well within the received modes of thought.10 But what they learned about how to think did not dictate to them the program for reflection. The propositions of their documents, shown in particular in the Midrash-compilations, will lead us to the conclusion that the formation of a category counterpart to the philosophical one had gotten underway.
Proceeding from modes of thought to message and only then to the categorical formation at hand, we start with the matter of list-making. List-making, which places on display the data of the like and the unlike and implicitly (ordinarily not explicitly) then conveys the rule. 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. The purpose of list-making in the Mishnah is in order to make a single statement, endless times over, and to repeat in a mass of tangled detail precisely the same fundamental judgment. To form their lists, the framers of the Mishnah appeal solely to the traits of things. Establishing a set of shared traits that form a rule which compels us to reach a given conclusion, Mishnaic list-making assembled probative facts to derive from the classification of data whatever conclusion they reached.
Taking Leviticus Rabbah as our example of the mode of thought characteristic of the writings of the successor-system, we find argument in behalf of a given proposition through a syllogism set forth by a sequence of examples. These examples, drawn from Scripture, form the counterpart to the facts concerning the natural world that yield, in the Mishnah, the propositions of hierarchical classification ascending toward the One [God] that dominate in the Mishnah. Lists of examples, deriving from Scripture, provide an entirely logical, because factual, demonstration. The proposition is a simple one: if X, then Y; if not X, then not Y. If Israel carries out its obligations, then God will redeem Israel; if not, then God will not redeem but will punish Israel. That simple commonplace is given numerous illustrations.
An example of the syllogism demonstrated by example is that Israel in times past repented, so God saved them. Israel in times past sinned, so God punished them. Another proposition is that God loves the humble and despises the haughty. Therefore God saves the humble and punishes the haughty. Let me give one example of the way in which, in the Midrash-compilations of the late fourth and fifth centuries, the mode of compiling lists of data that bear shared taxonomic traits serves to demonstrate propositions. What we wish to prove in the following composition is that the third day marks the salvific occasion, with the further implication that salvation comes in the end of a series of three. The mode of argument, which is what is pertinent here, is the familiar one of presenting a variety of facts that point to the same conclusion, and, in context, only to that conclusion.
GENESIS RABBAH LVI:I
1. A. |
“On the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place afar off” (Gen. 22:4): |
B. |
“After two days he will revive us, on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live in his presence” (Hos.16:2). |
C. |
On the third day of the tribes: “And Joseph said to them on the third day, ‘This do and live’” (Gen. 42:18). |
D. |
On the third day of the giving of the Torah: “And it came to pass on the third day when it was morning” (Ex. 19:16). |
E. |
On the third day of the spies: “And hide yourselves there for three days” (Josh 2:16). |
F. |
On the third day of Jonah: “And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights” (Jonah 2:1). |
G. |
On the third day of the return from the Exile: “And we abode there three days” (Ezra 8:32). |
H. |
On the third day of the resurrection of the dead: “After two days he will revive us, on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live in his presence” (Hos. 16:2). |
I. |
On the third day of Esther: “Now it came to pass on the third day that Esther put on her royal apparel” (Est. 5:1). |
J. |
She put on the monarchy of the house of her fathers. |
K. |
On account of what sort of merit? |
L. |
Rabbis say, “On account of the third day of the giving of the Torah.” |
M. |
R. Levi said, “It is on account of the merit of the third day of Abraham: ‘On the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place afar off’ (Gen. 22:4).” |
2. A. |
“. . . lifted up his eyes and saw the place afar off” (Gen. 22:4): |
B. |
What did he see? He saw a cloud attached to the mountain. He said, “It would appear that that is the place concerning which the Holy One, blessed be he, told me to offer up my son.” |
The third day marks the fulfillment of the promise, at the end of time of the resurrection of the dead, and, at appropriate moments, of Israel’s redemption. The reference to the third day at Gen. 22:2 then invokes the entire panoply of Israel’s history.
Another commonplace mode of argument may be noted. If one condition is met, the other will come about. This too is set forth with its corpus of examples, which, in context, form demonstrations. And the whole is given the form of the list, that is, example after example of a single proposition. The thirty-seven parashiyyot of Leviticus Rabbah then form the counterpart to the making of lists that defined the labor of the philosophers of the Mishnah. A nomothetic definitive trait then serves to demonstrate the rules that apply throughout. True, in the present instance, the rules concern the social life, rather than the natural world upon which so much of the Mishnah (for example, the Division of Purities) concentrates. But the mode of thought is consistent. That shared method, for the Midrash-compilations, appeals to the rhetoric of joining distinct examples by the use of “another matter” (in Hebrew, davar-aher, hence, the davar-aher-construction). Sequences of comments on the same verse, joined by “another matter,” mean to establish compositions of taxically-joined facts, that is to say, lists. And, as is now clear, as soon as we recognize that obvious fact, we are drawn back to the Mishnah’s method, which is that of list-making as well.
Now, it is clear, that mode of thought common to both the Mishnah and the Midrash-compilations later on hardly leads us to anticipate the formation of a counterpart-category, one quite different in not only message and medium but also in its symbolic formulation, from the philosophical category that the Mishnah sets forth. And as a matter of fact, evidence for the formation of that counterpart-category comes, to begin with, from vast differences in propositional program; only at the end shall we turn out attention to the symbolic formulation of the counterpart category. The results of learning accomplished through list-making, that is, Listenwissenschaft, in the philosophical setting of the Mishnah vastly differ from those of the same method of learning worked out in the theological setting of the Midrash-compilations of the fourth and fifth centuries. So let us now ask how, in the successor-documents, familiar methods yielded a new message. And, not forgetting our thesis, on what basis do I characterize that new message as not philosophical but religious?
In the Mishnah, philosophy sets forth a system concerning the orderly classification of things, while in the Midrash-compilations the same philosophical modes of thought yields propositions of fixed truth about God and God’s relationship with Israel. However diverse the language and however original the arrangement of the data, drawn from Scripture rather than nature, that convey that message, the message is uniform throughout, and the articulation is essentially through the repetition in marginally different theological “things” of the same thing: davar-aher really does stand for “another matter” that is in fact the same matter. So the same method of learning is used for different purposes, the one philosophical, systematizing the evidence of nature, the other religious in substance, if not theological in structure,11 recapitulating the evidence of supernature revealed by God in the Torah.12
The propositional programs of Leviticus Rabbah, Genesis Rabbah, and Pesiqta deRab Kahana set forth on the basis of the facts of not nature but Scripture propositions of a religious, rather than a philosophical, character. Why the difference? Philosophy generalizes and aims at classification of all data in a single way, accounting to be sure for exceptions, but only by appeal to appropriate rules to explain exceptions. But religion—at least in the present case—concerns itself with integrating the traits of a single category, e.g., a unique social entity, a holy, therefore separate and different, way of life, a revealed world view not to be discovered within the facts of nature but only through the data of supernature, supernaturally revealed (in the case of a Judaism). Accordingly, these not philosophical and general but religious and particular propositions deal with not the nature of things but the special traits of Israel, setting forth not how humanity in general conducts itself or how nature in general is structured but the rules particular to the holy people in its holy way of life. The world-view that emerges then pertains to only the theologically-identified social entity, Israel, and it follows, Israel now stands for not a taxic indicator that distinguishes diverse species of a common genus, but as a social entity that is simply sui generis.13 Let me now rapidly survey the propositions that a synthetic reading of the several documents may yield.
Philosophy sought the generalizations that cases might yield. So too did religion (and, in due course, theology would too). But the range of generalization vastly differed. Philosophy spoke of the nature of things, as I said, while theology represented the special nature of Israel in particular. Philosophy then appealed to the traits of things, while theology to the special indicative qualities of Israel. In Leviticus Rabbah, for example, the framers systematically adopted for themselves and adapted to their own circumstance the reality of the Scripture, its history and doctrines. They transformed that history from a sequence of one-time events, leading from one place to some other, into the fixtures of the enduring tableau of an ever-present mythic world. That is what I mean by generalizing on the basis of particular cases. Thus persons who lived once now operate forever; events take on that trait of recurrence, circularity, or replicability, that allows them to happen again and again, every day. That is because events now are seen to yield rules, and the rules apply throughout: philosophical mode of thought, but religious proposition.
No longer was there one Moses, one David, one set of happenings of a distinctive and never-to-be-repeated character. Now whatever happens, of which the thinkers propose to take account, must enter and be absorbed into that established and ubiquitous pattern and structure founded in Scripture. One-time history is therefore transformed into all-time social structure. It is not that biblical history repeats itself or is turned from a one-way path to a cyclical system. Rather, biblical history no longer constitutes history as a story of things that happened once, long ago, and pointed to some one moment in the future. Rather it becomes an account of things that happen every day—hence, an ever-present mythic world, or, in anachronistic terms, history is turned into social science.
The organizing rhetoric carries the same message. The verses that are quoted ordinarily shift from the meanings they convey to the implications they contain, speaking about something, anything, other than what they seem to be saying. What the sages of the system adumbrated by Leviticus Rabbah now proposed was a reconstruction of existence along the lines of the ancient design—the social rules—of Scripture as they read it. What that meant was that, from a sequence of one-time and linear events, everything that happened was turned into a repetition of known and already experienced paradigms, hence, once more, a mythic being. The source and core of the myth, of course, derive from Scripture—Scripture reread, renewed, reconstructed along with the society that revered Scripture. In an exact sense, they were engaged in a labor of natural history: classification of data, formation of species and reformation of species into genera. Counterpart to the natural philosophy of the Mishnah, the successor-system produced a kind of natural history, by treating history as social science. That explained the movement to Scripture as the organizing structure, for Scripture was history and dictated the contents of history, laying forth the structures of time, the rules that prevailed and were made known in events.
A category requires structure and order. Can we identify the lines of structure of the counterpart-category in process? The principal lines of structure flow along the borders with the world beyond: Israel’s relationships with others. These are horizontal, with the nations, and vertical, with God. But, from the viewpoint of the framers of the document, the relationships form a single, seamless web, for Israel’s vertical relationships dictate the horizontals as well; when God wishes to punish Israel, the nations come to do the work. When we contrast philosophy, with its concern for generalization and classification of everything in some one way and its reading of “Israel” as a taxic indicator, with religion, with its interest in the distinctive, the specific, and the special, this is precisely the result we should anticipate: the turning from a horizontal perspective on everybody in the same way to a vertical vision of Israel seen from above, all by itself.
The relationships that define Israel, moreover, prove dynamic, not static, in that they respond to the movement of the Torah through Israel’s history. When the Torah governs, then the vertical relationship is stable and felicitous, the horizontal one secure, and, when not, God obeys the rules and the nations obey God. So the first and paramount, category takes shape within the themes associated with the national life of Israel. The principal lines of structure flow along the fringe, Israel’s relationships with others. The relationships form a single, seamless web, for Israel’s vertical relationships dictate the horizontals as well; when God wishes to punish Israel, the nations come to do the work. The relationships that define Israel, moreover, prove dynamic, not static, in that they respond to the movement of the Torah through Israel’s history. When the Torah governs, then the vertical relationship is stable and felicitous, the horizontal one secure, and, when not, God obeys the rules and the nations obey God.
What of the propositional program that the document sets forth? The philosophical proposition of the Mishnah demonstrated from the facts—the traits of things—the hierarchical order of all being, with the obvious if merely implicit proposition that God stands at the head of the social order. The religious propositions of the successor-documents speak in other words of other things, having simply nothing in common with the propositional program of the Mishnah’s philosophy. For Leviticus Rabbah, for example, the principal propositions are these: God loves Israel, so gave them the Torah, which defines their life and governs their welfare. Israel is alone in its category (sui generis), so what is a virtue to Israel is a vice to the nation, life-giving to Israel, poison to the gentiles. True, Israel sins, but God forgives that sin, having punished the nation on account of it. Such a process has yet to come to an end, but it will culminate in Israel’s complete regeneration.
Meanwhile, Israel’s assurance of God’s love lies in the many expressions of special concern, for even the humblest and most ordinary aspects of the national life: the food the nation eats, the sexual practices by which it procreates. These life-sustaining, life-transmitting activities draw God’s special interest, as a mark of his general love for Israel. Israel then is supposed to achieve its life in conformity with the marks of God’s love. These indications moreover signify also the character of Israel’s difficulty, namely, subordination to the nations in general, but to the fourth kingdom, Rome, in particular. Both food laws and skin diseases stand for the nations. There is yet another category of sin, also collective and generative of collective punishment, and that is social. The moral character of Israel’s life, the treatment of people by one another, the practice of gossip and small-scale thuggery—these too draw down divine penalty. The nation’s fate therefore corresponds to its moral condition. The moral condition, however, emerges not only from the current generation. Israel’s richest hope lies in the merit of the ancestors, thus in the Scriptural record of the merits attained by the founders of the nation, those who originally brought it into being and gave it life.
The world to come is so portrayed as to restate these same propositions. Merit overcomes sin, and doing religious duties or supererogatory acts of kindness will win merit for the nation that does them. Israel will be saved at the end of time, and the age, or world, to follow will be exactly the opposite of this one. Much that we find in the account of Israel’s national life, worked out through the definition of the liminal relationships, recurs in slightly altered form in the picture of the world to come. The world to come will right all presently unbalanced relationships. What is good will go forward, what is bad will come to an end. The simple message is that the things people revere, the cult and its majestic course through the year, will go on; Jerusalem will come back, so too the Temple, in all their glory. Israel will be saved through the merit of the ancestors, atonement, study of Torah, practice of religious duties. The prevalence of the eschatological dimension at the formal structures, with its messianic and other expressions, here finds its counterpart in the repetition of the same few symbols in the expression of doctrine. The theme of the moral life of Israel produces propositions concerning not only the individual but, more important, the social virtues that the community as a whole must exhibit.
This brings us to the laws of society for Israel’s holy community as the authorship of Leviticus Rabbah sets forth those laws. The document favors humility as against arrogance, obedience as against sin, constant concern not to follow one’s natural inclination to do evil or to overcome the natural limitations of the human condition. Israel must accept its fate, obey and rely on the merits accrued through the ages and God’s special love. The individual must conform, in ordinary affairs, to this same paradigm of patience and submission. Great men and women, that is, individual heroes within the established paradigm, conform to that same pattern, exemplifying the national virtues. Among these, of course, Moses stands out; he has no equal. The special position of the humble Moses is complemented by the patriarchs and by David, all of whom knew how to please God and left as an inheritance to Israel the merit they had thereby attained.
We find, furthermore, an exercise in Listenwissenschaft, such as the Mishnah has led us to anticipate. But what is listed is not a taxonomy of traits of the natural world. Rather the list catalogues events in Israel’s history, meaning, in this context, Israel’s history solely in scriptural times, down through the return to Zion. The one-time events of the generation of the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the patriarchs and the sojourn in Egypt, the exodus, the revelation of the Torah at Sinai, the golden calf, the Davidic monarchy and the building of the Temple, Sennacherib, Hezekiah, and the destruction of northern Israel, Nebuchadnezzar and the destruction of the Temple in 586 B. C., the life of Israel in Babylonian captivity, Daniel and his associates, Mordecai and Haman—these events occur over and over again. They turn out to serve as paradigms of sin and atonement, steadfastness and divine intervention, and equivalent lessons. We find, in fact, a fairly standard repertoire of scriptural heroes or villains, on the one side, and conventional lists of Israel’s enemies and their actions and downfall, on the other. The boastful, for instance, include the generation of the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, Pharaoh, Sisera, Sennacherib, Nebuchadnezzar, the wicked empire (Rome)—contrasted to Israel, “despised and humble in this world.” The four kingdoms recur again and again, always ending, of course, with Rome, with the repeated message that after Rome will come Israel. But Israel has to make this happen through its faith and submission to God’s will. Lists of enemies repeatedly refer to Cain, the Sodomites, Pharaoh, Sennacherib, Nebuchadnezzar, Haman.
Accordingly, the mode of thought brought to bear upon the theme of history remains exactly the same as before: list making, with data exhibiting similar taxonomic traits drawn together into lists based on common monothetic traits or definitions. In the Mishnah Listenwissenschaft yielded a composition of natural philosophy; in the successor-documents, one of natural history. For these lists in Leviticus Rabbah, our exemplary case, then through the power of repetition make a single enormous point. They prove a social law of history. The catalogues of exemplary heroes and historical events serve a further purpose. They provide a model of how contemporary events are to be absorbed into the biblical paradigm. Since biblical events exemplify recurrent happenings, sin and redemption, forgiveness and atonement, they lose their one-time character. At the same time and in the same way, current events find a place within the ancient, but eternally present, paradigmatic scheme. So no new historical events, other than exemplary episodes in lives of heroes, demand narration because, through what is said about the past, what was happening in the times of the framers of Leviticus Rabbah would also come under consideration. This mode of dealing with biblical history and contemporary events produces two reciprocal effects. The first is the mythicization of biblical stories, their removal from the framework of ongoing, unique patterns of history and sequences of events and their transformation into accounts of things that happen all the time. The second is that contemporary events too lose all of their specificity and enter the paradigmatic framework of established mythic existence. So (1) the Scripture’s myth happens every day, and (2) every day produces reenactment of the Scripture’s myth.
Israel is God’s special love. That love is shown in a simple way. Israel’s present condition of subordination derives from its own deeds. It follows that God cares, so Israel may look forward to redemption on God’s part in response to Israel’s own regeneration through repentance. When the exegetes proceeded to open the scroll of Leviticus, they found numerous occasions to state that proposition in concrete terms and specific contexts. The sinner brings on his own sickness. But God heals through that very ailment. The nations of the world govern in heavy succession, but Israel’s lack of faith guaranteed their rule and its moment of renewal will end it. Israel’s leaders—priests, prophets, kings—fall into an entirely different category from those of the nations, as much as does Israel. In these and other concrete allegations, the same classical message comes forth. Accordingly, at the foundations of the pretense lies the long-standing biblical-Jewish insistence that Israel’s sorry condition in no way testifies to Israel’s true worth—the grandest pretense of all. All of the little evasions of the primary sense in favor of some other testify to this, the great denial that what is, is what counts. Leviticus Rabbah makes that statement with art and imagination. But it is never subtle about saying so.
Salvation and sanctification join together in Leviticus Rabbah. The laws of the book of Leviticus, focused as they are on the sanctification of the nation through its cult, in Leviticus Rabbah indicate the rules of salvation as well. The message of Leviticus Rabbah attaches itself to the book of Leviticus, as if that book had come from prophecy and addressed the issue of the meaning of history and Israel’s salvation. But the book of Leviticus came from the priesthood and spoke of sanctification. The paradoxical syllogism—the as-if reading, the opposite of how things seem—of the composers of Leviticus Rabbah therefore reaches simple formulation. In the very setting of sanctification we find the promise of salvation. In the topics of the cult and the priesthood we uncover the national and social issues of the moral life and redemptive hope of Israel. The repeated comparison and contrast of priesthood and prophecy, sanctification and salvation, turn out to produce a complement, which comes to most perfect union in the text at hand.
The focus of Leviticus Rabbah and its laws of history is upon the society of Israel, its national fate and moral condition. Indeed, nearly all of the parashiyyot of Leviticus Rabbah turn out to deal with the national, social condition of Israel, and this in three contexts: (1) Israel’s setting in the history of the nations, (2) the sanctified character of the inner life of Israel itself, (3) the future, salvific history of Israel. So the biblical book that deals with the holy Temple now is shown to address the holy people. Leviticus really discusses not the consecration of the cult but the sanctification of the nation—its conformity to God’s will laid forth in the Torah, and God’s rules. So when we review the document as a whole and ask what is that something else that the base text is supposed to address, it turns out that the sanctification of the cult stands for the salvation of the nation. So the nation now is like the cult then, the ordinary Israelite now like the priest then. The holy way of life lived now, through acts to which merit accrues, corresponds to the holy rites then.
The process of metamorphosis is full, rich, complete. When everything stands for something else, the something else repeatedly turns out to be the nation. This is what Leviticus Rabbah spells out in exquisite detail, yet never missing the main point. It is in the context of that highly cogent message that we shall ask whether Sifra sets forth any propositions, let alone a cogent and stunning judgment so powerfully laid out in Leviticus Rabbah. But first we shall have to make certain that the treatment of the book of Leviticus by the authorship of Leviticus Rabbah is particular and significant, not simply a repetition of generally prevailing propositions in a singular context.
Lest readers suppose I present them with a series of one, I have now to ask, what of the other documents that point toward the shape and structure of the successor-system, Genesis Rabbah and Pesiqta deRab Kahana? The mode of thought paramount in Leviticus Rabbah proves entirely congruent with the manner of reflection characteristic of Genesis Rabbah, and the propositions concerning history and the social laws of Israel are the same. If I had to point to the single most important proposition of Genesis Rabbah, it is that, in the story of the beginnings of creation, humanity, and Israel, we find the message of the meaning and end of the life of the Jewish people. This appeal to not history but rule-making precedent runs parallel to the equivalent interest in regularities in Leviticus Rabbah. Where the authorship of Genesis Rabbah differs is the choice of the paradigm, which is now the age of beginnings; but that choice leads to quite distinctive propositions, which, to be sure, prove quite congruent to those important in Leviticus Rabbah.
As the rules of Leviticus set forth the social laws of Israel’s history in Leviticus Rabbah, so the particular tales of Genesis are turned into paradigms of social laws in Genesis Rabbah.14 The deeds of the founders supply signals for the children about what is going to come in the future. So the biography of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob also constitutes the paradigm by which to interpret the history of Israel later on. If the sages could announce a single syllogism and argue it systematically, that is the proposition on which they would insist. The sages understood that stories about the progenitors, presented in the book of Genesis, define the human condition and proper conduct for their children, Israel in time to come. Accordingly, they systematically asked Scripture to tell them how they were supposed to conduct themselves at the critical turnings of life. In a few words let me restate what I conceive to be the conviction of the framers of Genesis Rabbah about the message and meaning of the book of Genesis:
“We now know what will be in the future. How do we know it? Just as Jacob had told his sons what would happen in time to come, just as Moses told the tribes their future, so we may understand the laws of history if we study the Torah. And in the Torah, we turn to beginnings: the rules as they were laid out at the very start of human history. These we find in the book of Genesis, the story of the origins of the world and of Israel. The Torah tells us not only what happened but why. The Torah permits us to discover the laws of history. Once we know those laws, we may also peer into the future and come to an assessment of what is going to happen to us—and, especially, of how we shall be saved from our present existence. Because everything exists under the aspect of a timeless will, God’s will, and all things express one thing, God’s program and plan, in the Torah we uncover the workings of God’s will. Our task as Israel is to accept, endure, submit, and celebrate.”
In Genesis Rabbah the entire narrative of Genesis is so formed as to point toward the sacred history of Israel, the Jewish people: its slavery and redemption; its coming Temple in Jerusalem; its exile and salvation at the end of time. The powerful message of Genesis in Genesis Rabbah proclaims that the world’s creation commenced a single, straight line of events, leading in the end to the salvation of Israel and through Israel all humanity. Israel’s history constitutes the counterpart of creation, and the laws of Israel’s salvation form the foundation of creation. Therefore a given story out of Genesis, about creation, events from Adam to Noah and Noah to Abraham, the domestic affairs of the patriarchs, or Joseph, will bear a deeper message about what it means to be Israel, on the one side, and what in the end of days will happen to Israel, on the other.
So the persistent program of religious inquiry into God’s place in Israel’s history requires sages’ to search in Scripture for meaning for their own circumstance and for the condition of their people. In the story of the beginnings of creation, humanity, and Israel, we find the message of the meaning and end of the life of the Jewish people. The deeds of the founders supply signals for the children about what is going to come in the future. The biography of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob also constitutes a protracted account of the history of Israel later on. If the sages could announce a single syllogism and argue it systematically, that is the proposition upon which they would insist. Sages read the book of Genesis as if it portrayed the history of Israel and Rome. Why Rome in the form it takes in Genesis Rabbah? And how come the obsessive character of sages disposition of the theme of Rome?
Were their picture merely of Rome as tyrant and destroyer of the Temple, we should have no reason to link the text to the problems of the age of redaction and closure. But now it is Rome as Israel’s brother, counterpart, and nemesis, Rome as the one thing standing in the way of Israel’s, and the world’s, ultimate salvation. So the stakes are different, and much higher. It is not a political Rome but a Christian and messianic Rome that is at issue: Rome as surrogate for Israel, Rome as obstacle to Israel. Why? It is because Rome now confronts Israel with a crisis, and, I argue, the program of Genesis Rabbah constitutes a response to that crisis. Rome in the fourth century became Christian. Sages respond by facing that fact quite squarely and saying, “Indeed, it is as you say, a kind of Israel, an heir of Abraham as your texts explicitly claim. But we remain the sole legitimate Israel, the bearer of the birthright—we and not you. So you are our brother: Esau, Ishmael, Edom.” And the rest follows.
The authorship of Genesis Rabbah focuses its discourse on the proposition that the book of Genesis speaks to the life and historical condition of Israel, the Jewish people. The entire narrative of Genesis is so formed as to point toward the sacred history of Israel, the Jewish people: its slavery and redemption; its coming Temple in Jerusalem; its exile and salvation at the end of time. The powerful message of Genesis in the pages of Genesis Rabbah proclaims that the world’s creation commenced a single, straight line of events, leading in the end to the salvation of Israel and through Israel all humanity. Therefore a given story will bear a deeper message about what it means to be Israel, on the one side, and what in the end of days will happen to Israel, on the other. And that is precisely the proposition endlessly represented by the authorship of Leviticus Rabbah. The subjects change, the point remains the same. The third compilation of Midrash-exegeses adduced as evidence of the successor-system, Pesiqta deRab Kahana, now requires inclusion into this account of the propositional program subject to development by our system-builders.
Closely related to Leviticus Rabbah in that its authorship has borrowed five parashiyyot from the earlier writing, the framers of Pesiqta deRab Kahana moved beyond the appeal to scriptural history (as in Genesis Rabbah) or to scriptural case-law (as in Leviticus Rabbah). Rather they set forth propositions entirely independent of the received Scripture and so produced the most sustainedly theological compilation, worked out in the modes of argument of philosophy and in the idiom of scriptural exegesis, of midrash-exegeses that derives from late antiquity. In Pesiqta deRab Kahana I see three propositions, all of them religious, none of them philosophical within the definitions now set forth.
The first is that God loves Israel, that love is unconditional, and Israel’s response to God must be obedience to the religious duties that God has assigned, which will produce merit. Much of the argument for this proposition draws upon the proof of history as laid out in Scripture and appeals to history transformed into paradigm. Israel’s obedience to God is what will save Israel. That means doing the religious duties as required by the Torah, which is the mark of God’s love for—and regeneration of—Israel. The tabernacle symbolizes the union of Israel and God. When Israel does what God asks above, Israel will prosper down below. If Israel remembers Amalek down below, God will remember Amalek up above and will wipe him out. A mark of Israel’s loyalty to God is remembering Amalek. God does not require the animals that are sacrificed, since man could never match God’s appetite, if that were the issue. But the savor pleases God [as a mark of Israel’s loyalty and obedience]. The first sheaf returns to God God’s fair share of the gifts that God bestows on Israel, and those who give it benefit, while those who hold it back suffer. Observing religious duties, typified by the rites of The Festival, brings a great reward of that merit that ultimately leads to redemption. God’s ways are just, righteous and merciful, as shown by God’s concern that the offspring remain with the mother for seven days. God’s love for Israel is so intense that he wants to hold them back for an extra day after The Festival in order to spend more time with them, because, unlike the nations of the world, Israel knows how to please God. This is a mark of God’s love for Israel.
The second proposition moves us from the ontology to the history of that sui generis social entity that is Israel. It is that God is reasonable and when Israel has been punished, it is in accord with God’s rules. God forgives penitent Israel and is abundant in mercy. The good and the wicked die in exactly the same circumstance or condition. Laughter is vain because it is mixed with grief. A wise person will not expect too much joy. But when people suffer, there ordinarily is a good reason for it. That is only one sign that God is reasonable and God never did anything lawless and wrong to Israel or made unreasonable demands, and there was, therefore, no reason for Israel to lose confidence in God or to abandon him. God punished Israel to be sure. But this was done with reason. Nothing happened to Israel of which God did not give fair warning in advance, and Israel’s failure to heed the prophets brought about her fall. And God will forgive a faithful Israel. Even though the Israelites sinned by making the golden calf, God forgave them and raised them up. On the New Year, God executes justice, but the justice is tempered with mercy. The rites of the New Year bring about divine judgment and also forgiveness because of the merit of the fathers. Israel must repent and return to the Lord, who is merciful and will forgive them for their sins. The penitential season of the New Year and Day of Atonement is the right time for confession and penitence, and God is sure to accept penitence. By exercising his power of mercy, the already-merciful God grows still stronger in mercy.
The third proposition is that God will save Israel personally at a time and circumstance of his own choosing. While I take for granted that the hope for future redemption animates the other compilations, we look in vain in some of them, Sifra for a prime example, for an equivalent obsession with messianic questions. Israel may know what the future redemption will be like, because of the redemption from Egypt. The paradox of the red cow, that what imparts uncleanness, namely touching the ashes of the red cow, produces cleanness is part of God’s ineffable wisdom, which man cannot fathom. Only God can know the precise moment of Israel’s redemption. That is something man cannot find out on his own. But God will certainly fulfil the predictions of the prophets about Israel’s coming redemption. The Exodus from Egypt is the paradigm of the coming redemption. Israel has lost Eden—but can come home, and, with God’s help, will. God’s unique power is shown through Israel’s unique suffering. In God’s own time, he will redeem Israel.
The lunar calendar, particular to Israel, marks Israel as favored by God, for the new moon signals the coming of Israel’s redemption, and the particular new moon that will mark the actual event is that of Nisan. When God chooses to redeem Israel, Israel’s enemies will have no power to stop him, because God will force Israel’s enemies to serve Israel, because of Israel’s purity and loyalty to God. Israel’s enemies are punished, and what they propose to do to Israel, God does to them. Both directly and through the prophets, God is the source of true comfort, which he will bring to Israel. Israel thinks that God has forsaken them. But it is Israel who forsook God, God’s love has never failed, and will never fail. Even though he has been angry, his mercy still is near and God has the power and will to save Israel. God has designated the godly for himself and has already promised to redeem them. He will assuredly do so. God personally is the one who will comfort Israel. While Israel says there is no comfort, in fact, God will comfort Israel. Zion/Israel is like a barren woman, but Zion will bring forth children, and Israel will be comforted. Both God and Israel will bring light to Zion, which will give light to the world. The rebuilding of Zion will be a source of joy for the entire world, not for Israel alone. God will rejoice in Israel, Israel in God, like bride and groom.
There is a profoundly cogent statement made through the composition of this document, and this is the message of Pesiqta deRab Kahana: God loves Israel, that love is unconditional, and Israel’s response to God must be obedience to the religious duties that God has assigned, which will produce merit. God is reasonable and when Israel has been punished, it is in accord with God’s rules. God forgives penitent Israel and is abundant in mercy. God will save Israel personally at a time and circumstance of his own choosing. Israel may know what the future redemption will be like, because of the redemption from Egypt.
Pesiqta deRab Kahana therefore has been so assembled as to exhibit a viewpoint, a purpose of its particular authorship, one that is quite distinctive, in its own context (if not in a single one of its propositions!) to its framers or collectors and arrangers. Why the authorship of Leviticus Rabbah will not have concurred in a general way I cannot say. But I also cannot find these propositions in Leviticus Rabbah, which as we have seen presents its own points.15 And when these particular propositions do make an appearance in Leviticus Rabbah or in Genesis Rabbah, they do not receive that emphasis that characterizes Pesiqta deRab Kahana’s authorships presentation of them. Both documents address issues of salvation, but I find Pesiqta deRab Kahana’s message of salvation couched in explicitly messianic terms, which is not the case in Leviticus Rabbah. And, as we move toward Sifré to Deuteronomy, Sifré to Numbers, and Sifra, we shall find noteworthy the centrality in the Rabbah-compilations of historical-salvific issues, for, in the other family of midrash-compilations, people focus upon other matters entirely.
Enough has been said to show how the three Midrash-compilations present propositions that, while surely consistent with the range of positions and attitudes of the Mishnah and the Tosefta, simply play no role whatsoever in those expressions of the initial system. And by appeal to our initial definition of the difference between a philosophical and a religious system,16 we may bypass extensive reiteration of an obvious point. It is that the successor-writings concern themselves with not natural philosophy yielding philosophy of religion but revealed truths, appealing to Scripture in particular, yielding a religious account of the social order. It suffices to say simply that the single definitive point of difference between the philosophical system adumbrated by the Mishnah and the religious system to which the Midrash-compilations before us attest lies in the rhetorical form, constant appeal to Scripture, and the propositional result, rules that derive not from the nature of things and apply without differentiation to all of nature, but laws that derive from the history of Israel and pertain solely to Israel. Now my claim concerning the formation of a counterpart-category, one that serves to portray a world-view just as philosophy does, but that forms a category essentially different from the philosophical one, requires sustained attention.
If I ask the Mishnah for a verbal symbol for philosophy, the document remains dumb. Philosophy for the Mishnah serves as source of method and taxon of proposition. But the Mishnah’s framers have no word for philosophy, nor for natural science, nor for learning, nor for system, nor for any of my other analytical categories.17 Nor, despite their formidable powers of abstraction in thought and expression do they even set forth the abstract proposition concerning the hierarchical unity of being that in point of fact is their principal result. Certainly, in the Mishnah the symbol, Torah, like “Israel,” serves as a taxic indicator and does not convey more than it expresses; “Torah”, with or without the definite article, with or without a capital T, serves no symbolic functions; bears no symbolic valence. And there is, in the Mishnah, no other. Whatever single symbol captures the entirety of the Mishnah’s message in the Mishnah’s own language, it is not the symbol of Torah.18
By contrast, if I ask the Midrash-compilations associated with the Yerushalmi to express, in a single word, the medium and the message that constitute their world-view, they have that word and use it constantly, and it is the word, Torah. It is the Torah that conveys the generative facts of learning; it is Torah, losing its definite article, that defines the range of truth. When we grasp the representation of Torah, and of the Torah, in the successor-writings, we can follow the outlines of the counterpart category that serves in the new system to set forth the world-view in the way in which, in the received one, philosophy today. The very symbolization of learning, of philosophy, in the word Torah (and in such visual symbols as the Torah can have generated in context) alerts us to the formation of the new category, or, in slightly different language, the categorical formation and reformation that is taking place.
Let me give a single example of the generative symbol, Torah, and its concretization in the Torah, that characterizes the successor-system. In what follows, the Torah turns out to form not the post facto description of the facts of the world, but the design of the world that God followed in creation. The Torah comes prior to reality, that of nature as much as that of history, and its rules prove descriptive of how later on things were made—a stunning reversal of the order of nature and a clear and decisive proof that a categorical reformation is before us. The Mishnah’s source of truth was nature, the successor-documents’ source of truth, the Torah: clear evidence for the formation of a counterpart category indeed! The following expresses this the proposition of the priority of the Torah:
GENESIS RABBAH I:I.L.
The list before us—the initial proposition, then “another matter”—makes the simple point that the Torah comes prior to creation and reveals the plan of creation. If people appeal to the facts of nature, therefore, they err, because it is in the Torah, not in natural philosophy, that we find out how things are meant to be and actually are. Now we see the link between the Torah and Israel, which explains why the special rules governing Israel derive from the Torah in particular.
There are then two sets of facts, those of nature pertaining to the world in general, those of Scripture, dealing with Israel in particular.
GENESIS RABBAH I:IV.1
The power of the exposition is to forge a link between the natural world of creation and the historical world of Israel, its life and salvation. The world was created because of Israel. That simple proposition lays down a judgment that will lead the exegete to join details of creation and of the stories of the patriarchs to details of the history of Israel, with the gross effect of showing the correspondence between Israel’s salvific existence and the natural order of the world. We have a set piece exposition of the opening proposition, that is, the six things preceding the creation of the world. That topic, and not the exposition of Gen. 1:1, explains the composition at hand. We begin with the necessary catalogue of the six things and proceed at No. 2 to a secondary exposition of the same matter. Then we introduce creation for the sake of the Torah, followed by a complementary proposition on other things for the sake of which the world was created. Here is the point at which Gen. 1:1 serves as a proof-text.
This protracted representation of matters through abstracts should not obscure the simple point the citations are meant to make. Let me state the point with emphasis:
the Torah now defines the category, world-view.
As a symbol, the Torah no longer denotes a particular book, let alone the contents of such a book. In the Talmud of the Land of Israel and its associated writings, as a matter of fact, the Torah, with or without its definite article, and, as I said, with or without a capital t, connotes a broad range of clearly distinct categories of noun and verb, concrete fact and abstract relationship alike.19 “Torah” stands for a kind of human being. It connotes a social status and a sort of social group. It refers to a type of social relationship. It further denotes a legal status and differentiates among legal norms. As symbolic abstraction, the word encompasses things and persons, actions and status, points of social differentiation and legal and normative standing, as well as “revealed truth.”
The main points of insistence of the whole of Israel’s life and history come to full symbolic expression in that single word. If people wanted to explain how they would be saved, they would use the word Torah. If they wished to sort out their parlous relationships with gentiles, they would use the world Torah. Torah stood for salvation and accounted for Israel’s this-worldly condition and the hope, for both individual and national alike, of life in the world to come. For the successor-system, therefore, the word Torah stood for everything. The Torah symbolized the whole, at once and entire. There is no counterpart in the Mishnah, a symbol that captures in itself the entire sense of “world-view,” the whole weight of what we must now categorize as “knowledge,” “learning,” and “science” in the broadest sense. The generative symbol, the total, exhaustive expression of the system as a whole, the Torah stood for these things then: knowledge, learning, and science.
A brief catalogue of the senses of the word Torah suffices for the present purpose. When the Torah refers to a particular thing, it is to a scroll containing divinely revealed words. The Torah may further refer to revelation, not as an object but as a corpus of doctrine. When one “does Torah” the disciple “studies” or “learns,” and the master “teaches,” Torah. Hence while the word Torah never appears as a verb, it does refer to an act. The word also bears a quite separate sense, torah as category or classification or corpus of rules, e.g., “the torah of driving a car” is a usage entirely acceptable to some documents. This generic usage of the word does occur. The word Torah very commonly refers to a status, distinct from and above another status, as “teachings of Torah” as against “teachings of scribes.” For the two Talmuds that distinction is absolutely critical to the entire hermeneutic enterprise. But it is important even in the Mishnah. Finally, the word Torah refers to a source of salvation, often fully worked out in stories about how the individual and the nation will be saved through Torah. In general, the sense of the word “salvation” is not complicated. It is simply salvation in the way in which Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomist historians understand it: kings who do what God wants win battles, those who do not, lose. So too here, people who study and do Torah are saved from sickness and death, and the way Israel can save itself from its condition of degradation also is through Torah.
This range of meanings imputed to Torah, the word now made into a symbol, vastly exceeds the limits of the word, not treated as a symbol, in the Mishnah. What is critical to the symbol, Torah, as worked out in the successor-symbol is the literary definition of Torah as encompassing an oral component beginning with the Mishnah. And to show the categorical novelty of Torah, we may simply note that the framers of the Mishnah nowhere claim, implicitly or explicitly, that what they have written forms part of the Torah, enjoys the status of God’s revelation to Moses at Sinai, or even systematically carries forward secondary exposition and application of what Moses wrote down in the wilderness. But the symbol of Torah takes on mythic expression, by contrast, with the position of the Yerushalmi that God’s revelation of the Torah at Sinai encompassed the Mishnah as much as Scripture. Second, the Mishnah was handed on through oral formulation and oral transmission from Sinai to the framers of the document as we have it. These two convictions, fully exposed in the ninth-century letter of Sherira, in fact emerge from the references of both Talmuds to the dual Torah. One part is in writing. The other was oral and now is in the Mishnah.
Proof that the Mishnah and its associated writings know nothing of the symbol—therefore the category—of Torah as it would take shape in the successor-system is readily adduced. The Mishnah contains not a hint that anyone has heard any such a myth. The earliest apologists for the Mishnah, represented in Abot and the Tosefta alike, know nothing of the fully realized myth of the dual Torah of Sinai of which the Mishnah as a document forms a principal component The Yerushalmi marks the change.
True, the Mishnah places a high value upon studying the Torah and upon the status of the sage. A “mamzer—disciple of a sage takes priority over a high-priest-am-haares,” as at M. Hor. 3:8. So the rights of caste-position are set aside—but the caste-status is unchanged. But that judgment, distinctive though it is, cannot settle the question. All it shows is that the Mishnah pays due honor to the sage. But if the Mishnah does not claim to constitute part of the Torah, then what makes a sage a sage is not mastery of the Mishnah in particular. What we have in hand merely continues the established and familiar position of the wisdom writers of old. Wisdom is important. Knowledge of the Torah is definitive. But to maintain that position, one need hardly profess the fully articulated Torah-myth of rabbinic Judaism. Proof of that fact, after all, is the character of the entire wisdom literature prior to the Mishnah itself.
Abot draws into the orbit of Torah-talk the names of authorities of the Mishnah. But Abot does not claim that the Mishnah forms part of the Torah. Nor, obviously, does the tractate know the doctrine of the two Torahs. Only in the Talmuds do we begin to find clear and ample evidence of that doctrine. Abot, moreover, does not understand by the word Torah much more than the framers of the Mishnah do. Not only does the established classification scheme remain intact, but the sense essentially replicates already familiar usages, producing no innovation. On the contrary, I find a diminution in the range of meanings.20 In Abot, Torah is instrumental. The figure of the sage, his ideals and conduct, forms the goal, focus and center. To state matters simply: Abot regards study of Torah as what a sage does. The substance of Torah is what a sage says. That is so whether or not the saying relates to scriptural revelation. The content of the sayings attributed to sages endows those sayings with self-validating status. The sages usually do not quote verses of Scripture and explain them, nor do they speak in God’s name. Yet, it is clear, sages talk Torah. If a sage says something, what he says is Torah. More accurately, what he says falls into the classification of Torah. “Torah” then forms a taxic indicator, as much as it does in the Mishnah.
The Yerushalmi is the first document in the canon of the Judaism of the dual Torah to represent the Mishnah as equivalent to Scripture (Y. Hor. 3:5). And once the Mishnah entered the status of Scripture, it would take but a short step to a theory of the Mishnah as part of the revelation at Sinai—hence, oral Torah. Here we find the first glimmerings of an effort to theorize in general, not merely in detail, about how specific teachings of Mishnah relate to specific teachings of Scripture. The citing of scriptural proof-texts for Mishnah propositions would not have caused much surprise to the framers of the Mishnah; they themselves included such passages, though not often. But what conception of the Torah underlies such initiatives, and how to Yerushalmi sages propose to explain the phenomenon of the Mishnah as a whole? The following passage gives us one statement. Y. Hagigah 1:7 refers to the assertion at M. Hag. 1:8D that the laws on cultic cleanness presented in the Mishnah rest on deep and solid foundations in the Scripture.
[B] R. Zeira in the name of R. Yohanan: “If a law comes to hand and you do not know its nature, do not discard it for another one, for lo, many laws were stated to Moses at Sinai, and all of them have been embedded in the Mishnah.”
The Mishnah now is claimed to contain statements made by God to Moses. Just how these statements found their way into the Mishnah, and which passages of the Mishnah contain them, we do not know. That is hardly important, given the fundamental assertion at hand. The passage proceeds to a further, and far more consequential, proposition. It asserts that part of the Torah was written down, and part was preserved in memory and transmitted orally. In context, moreover, that distinction must encompass the Mishnah, thus explaining its origin as part of the Torah. Here is a clear and unmistakable expression of the distinction between two forms in which a single Torah was revealed and handed on at Mount Sinai, part in writing, part orally.
Short of explicit allusion to Torah-in-writing and Torah-by-memory, which (so far as I am able to discern) we find mainly in the Talmud of Babylonia, the ultimate theory of Torah of formative Judaism is at hand in what follows:
YERUSHALMI HAGIGAH 1:7.V
[D] R. Zeirah in the name of R. Eleazar: “‘Were I to write for him my laws by ten thousands, they would be regarded as a strange thing’ (Hos. 8:12). Now is the greater part of the Torah written down? [Surely not. The oral part is much greater.] But more abundant are the matters which are derived by exegesis from the written [Torah] than those derived by exegesis from the oral [Torah].”
[E] And is that so?
[F] But more cherished are those matters which rest upon the written [Torah] than those which rest upon the oral [Torah]. . . .
[J] R. Haggai in the name of R. Samuel bar Nahman, “Some teachings were handed on orally, and some things were handed on in writing, and we do not know which of them is the more precious. But on the basis of that which is written, “And the Lord said to Moses, Write these words; in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel’ (Ex. 34:27), [we conclude] that the ones which are handed on orally are the more precious.”
[K] R. Yohanan and R. Yudan b. R. Simeon—One said, “If you have kept what is preserved orally and also kept what is in writing, I shall make a covenant with you, and if not, I shall not make a covenant with you.”
[L] The other said, “If you have kept what is preserved orally and you have kept what is preserved in writing, you shall receive a reward, and if not, you shall not receive a reward.”
[M] [With reference to Deut. 9:10: “And on them was written according to all the words which the Lord spoke with you in the mount,”] said R. Joshua b. Levi, “He could have written, ‘On them,’ but wrote, ‘And on them.’ He could have written, ‘All,’ but wrote, ‘According to all.’ He could have written, ‘Words,’ but wrote ‘The words.’ [These then serve as three encompassing clauses, serving to include] Scripture, Mishnah, Talmud, laws, and lore. Even what an experienced student in the future is going to teach before his master already has been stated to Moses at Sinai.”
[N] What is the Scriptural basis for this view?
[O] “There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to happen among those who come after” (Qoh. 1:11).
[P] If someone says, “See, this is a new thing,” his fellow will answer him, saying to him, “this has been around before us for a long time.”
Here we have absolutely explicit evidence that people believed part of the Torah had been preserved not in writing but orally. Linking that part to the Mishnah remains a matter of implication. But it surely comes fairly close to the surface, when we are told that the Mishnah contains Torah-traditions revealed at Sinai. From that view it requires only a small step to the allegation that the Mishnah is part of the Torah, the oral part.
I adduce as evidence of a categorical transformation—that is, in this context, the formation of a counterpart-category—the representation of the worldview as Torah, through the symbol of Torah because the Torah is now represented as a source of salvation.21 That is a profoundly fresh conception, without consequential antecedent22 in the Mishnah and related writings. There (the) Torah forms a taxic indicator. True, knowing the Torah by itself—without caste-status commensurate, without wealth either—imparts status to the one who knows it. But in no way does knowledge—mere knowledge—constitute the source of salvation. That profoundly gnostic conception of knowledge, by contrast, in which (merely) knowing something (“the truth”) changes the one who knows, comes to the surface time and again in the successor-documents. This power of personal transformation through knowledge of the Torah is a matter to which we shall return in Chapter Seven.
In the canonical documents up to the Yerushalmi and its companions, we look in vain for sayings or stories that fall into such a category. True, we may take for granted that everyone always believed that, in general, Israel would be saved by obedience to the Torah. That claim surely would not have surprised any Israelite writer from the Deuteronomist of the seventh century B.C. down through the final redactors of the Pentateuch in the time of Ezra and onward through the next seven hundred years. But, in the rabbinical corpus from the Mishnah forward, the specific and concrete assertion that by taking up the scroll of the Torah and standing on the roof of one’s house,23 confronting God in heaven, a sage in particular could take action against the expected invasion—that kind of claim is not located, so far as I know, in any prior composition.24
The shift is points not merely toward a revision of a received category, philosophy, but toward the formation of a new category altogether. That is the definition of the counterpart category to philosophy formed by (the) Torah.
The new category, conveyed by the symbol, Torah, treated the knowledge represented by the Torah (whether scroll, contents, or act of study) as source and guarantor of salvation. Accordingly, category denoted by the word, Torah, encompasses the centerpiece of a theory of Israel’s history, on the one side, and an account of the teleology of the entire system, on the other. Torah indeed has ceased to constitute a specific thing or even a category or classification when stories about studying the Torah yield not a judgment as to status (i.e., praise for the learned man) but promise for supernatural blessing now and salvation in time to come. And the new category, corresponding to philosophy in its mode of thought, counterpart to philosophy in its message, must be classed as a fundamentally religious category, in that knowledge now formed the medium of salvation: knowing the Torah changed the one who knows it, in a way in which, in the Mishnah and related writings, knowing the hierarchical structure and order of things, pointing toward the unity of the natural order, in no way led to the transformation of the one who knew the facts that yielded that knowledge. No wonder then, that, in the Yerushalmi, mastery of Torah transformed the man engaged in Torah-learning into a supernatural figure, who could do things ordinary folk could not do.
So, in all, the transformation of the Judaic worldview encompassed new subjects, a new source of truth, and a new program of learning. How that new program of learning redefined scarce resources and reformed the institutions that carried out the legitimate exercise of violence remains to be seen. We now are prepared to reconsider a simple but fundamental representation of the successor-system, one in which the symbolic transaction is quite concrete: scarce resources, valued things, are now other than they were.
1None of these points intersects with either relativism or functionalism; the issues are wholly other. At stake in systemic description, analysis, and interpretation, after all, ultimately is the comparative study of rationalities. But this conclusion carries us far beyond the argument of this part of the book—and indeed of the book as a whole.
2I underline that fact, since all that follows on the transvaluation of values through the formation of what I have invented as “counterpart-categories” appeals to explicit statements, not a very general, post facto observation on my part.
3That fact is demonstrated in my Talmud of the Land of Israel. A Preliminary Translation and Explanation. 35. Introduction. Taxonomy (Chicago, 1983: The University of Chicago Press). There I show that when Mishnah-exegesis is concluded, a quite separate agendum takes center stage, the emphases of which find no counterpart in the Mishnah. That seems to me to justify the consideration of counterpart-categories, such as I introduce here.
4As with the sages of Judaism, so with the first important Christian economics, it was the encounter with Aristotle (and not with Scripture) that made urgent the formation of a Christianity encompassing, for the way of life of its social order, elaborate attention to the expression of theological truth in economics and rules for the Christian management and preservation of scarce resources, defined in the conventional sense of philosophical economics.
5I of course allude to the great conception of Max Weber in his studies of China, India, and ancient Israel. In asking why capitalism here, not there, he founded the comparative study of rationalities. Many present themselves as his successors, some with more reason than others, but, in the aggregate, I have not found a rich theoretical literature vastly to revise Weber’s definition of issues. In this regard philosophy has gone far beyond the limits of theory in social science.
6Would I extend the matter to, let us say, medicine, technology, city-planning, mathematics, the provision of a water-supply, a department of defense, or any of the other diverse components of the social order and its culture, whether intellectual or institutional? At this moment, I should have to decline an invitation to descend into such unbounded relativism, for then everything is the equivalent of something, and nothing is to be defined in itself. So for the moment I leave matters at the basic components of any and all social orders, as I have identified them.
7In the present matter I see Abot as an intermediate document, but not as a mediating or transitional one. In Abot the Torah indicated who was a sage and who was not. Accordingly, the apology of Abot for the Mishnah was that the Mishnah contained things sages had said. What sages said formed a chain of tradition extending back to Sinai. Hence it was equivalent to the Torah. The upshot is that words of sages enjoyed the status of the Torah. The small step beyond, I think, was to claim that what sages said was Torah, as much as what Scripture said was Torah. And, a further small step (and the steps need not have been taken separately or in the order here suggested) moved matters to the position that there were two forms in which the Torah reached Israel: one [Torah] in writing, the other [Torah] handed on orally, that is, in memory.
8I repeat what I have already emphasized, lest my proposition be misinterpreted. The intellectuals whose system(s) we here analyze did not live in the great metropolitan centers of intellectual life and cannot be expected, in the back country, fundamentally to have rethought the very processes of thought that were the givens of intellect from Sumerian times onward. Among them was no one who, like Kant, could address in the abstract the most abstract questions of intellect. Such utter independence of mind, moreover, lay beyond the social circumstances of clerks and petty administrators. Quite to the contrary, I find genuinely awesome the capacity of these rather minor figures to undertake the world-construction that we are now going to examine. The category-formation they inherited, with all its prestige and force of mind, did not inhibit their own enterprise of category-reformation—or even very much influence it. That power of independent thought seems to me to form a counterpart to Kant’s.
9Much that is said here alludes to the results of my Torah: From Scroll to Symbol in Formative Judaism (Philadelphia, 1985: Fortress; second printing: Atlanta, 1989: Scholars Press for Brown Judaic Studies).
10But list-making would change in form and I think in character; I do not mean to take for granted Listenwissenschaft beginning to end was everywhere and always pretty much the same thing. In my treatment of “another matter,” I show both that Listenwissenschaft defined the method of the late Midrash-compilations and also that that method underwent considerable revision for the purposes of the compilers of those documents. I refer specifically to From Literature to Theology in Formative Judaism. Three Preliminary Studies. Atlanta, 1989: Scholars Press for Brown Judaic Studies.
11The distinction made here will form the problematic of the study of the transformation of a religious into a theological system.
12I have vastly elaborated on this conception of The Torah in my Uniting the Dual Torah: Sifra and the Problem of the Mishnah (Cambridge, 1989: Cambridge University Press). There is no need to recapitulate that argument here.
13In my Judaism and its Social Metaphors (Cambridge and New York, 1989: Cambridge University Press) I have set forth the standing of “Israel” in the Mishnah as a taxic indicator, by contrast to the uses of “Israel” in the successor-documents as referring to a genus with no counterpart, Israel as sui generis in one of two ways: a family different from all other families and unrelated to them; or a holy society bearing no points in common with any other society, being in fact of a different genus from societies in general. That is the basis for the statement made here.
14The parallel mode of thought in Sifré to Deuteronomy and in Sifra is the exercise of inclusion and exclusion, which turns a case or an example into a law with clear-cut application or exclusion. That mode of generalizing law forms the counterpart to the interest in generalizing laws from incidents or anecdotes that is characteristic of Genesis Rabbah. In both cases we observe the move from an ad hoc and episodic mode of thinking to a philosophical and scientific one. The profound interest in generalization, rather than merely precedent or ad hoc observation, characteristic of the authorships of Sifra and Sifré to Deuteronomy, for law, and of Leviticus Rabbah and Genesis Rabbah, for history, seems to me one of the deepest and most indicative traits of mind of the Judaism of the dual Torah in its intellectual origin and marks that Judaism as deeply philosophical. No student of the writings of the Church fathers can find that fact surprising, even though the idiom of the formative intellects of the Judaism of the dual Torah is less accessible, within the philosophical mode, than that of the formative intellects of Christianity, particularly Catholic (not Gnostic) Christianity. But the gnostic side to the successor-system will presently emerge as a principal characteristic.
15I immediately qualify that there are chapters of Pesiqta deRab Kahana which originate in Leviticus Rabbah. In form and in polemic, in plan and in program, the materials assembled in Pesiqta deRab Kahana cohere, to such a degree that on the basis of traits of cogency we can differentiate materials in Pesiqta deRab Kahana that are original to Leviticus Rabbah from those distinctive to Pesiqta deRab Kahana.
16Above
17And that fact has rightly impressed those who have not recognized the philosophical character of the document; there is no philological evidence that suggests knowledge of any concrete philosophical modes of thought, let alone propositions.
18The truth is, I can think of no single symbol that serves the entirety of the Mishnah as a medium of expressing the whole or evoking it. Surely, in tractate Avot, fifty years or so later, we may readily point to “Torah” as that symbol, referring to not a document but a status, but vividly so and not merely (as with the Mishnah) as a medium of taxonomic thought. That is to say, in tractate Avot we can point to the object, Torah, speak of words of Torah, identify the status of a person or a gesture or action within the classification of Torah, and so in a single symbol speak of the whole and state the message of the whole. In the Mishnah, by contrast, I find no such symbolic centerpiece. I could make the case that the symbolic system of the Mishnah comes to expression not pictorially or visually or verbally (as with the object “Torah”) but rather in what is as recurrent in the Mishnah as Torah is in tractate Avot, and that is, the deepest structures of syntax, the orderly formation of thought in well-patterned language. But if I can find in any few sentences of the Mishnah the whole of the Mishnah in its syntactic structure (and, I have claimed, also its message as well, as in my A History of the Mishnaic Law of Purities. (Leiden, 1977: Brill) XXI. The Redaction and Formulation of the Order of Purities in the Mishnah and Tosefta., that does not seem to me to be the same thing as a symbol of the order of Torah or The Torah. But then, it seems fair to claim, philosophers in that context did not convey their messages through symbolic but rather through verbal discourse and argument, and the Mishnah’s very philosophicality explains its failure to give us in a single way a medium for saying many things. Then, to take a step further, the formation of the counterpart-category for world-view, Torah, which is religious, for philosophy, in medium and message alike, is signaled by the symbolic transaction represented by the word Torah.
19The basis of these statements again is in my Torah: From Scroll to Symbol in Formative Judaism.
20Yet Abot in the aggregate does differ from the Mishnah. The difference has to do with the topic at hand. The other sixty-two tractates of the Mishnah contain Torah-sayings here and there. But they do not fall within the framework of Torah-discourse. They speak about other matters entirely. The consideration of the status of Torah rarely pertains to that speech. Abot, by contrast, says a great deal about Torah-study. The claim that Torah-study produces direct encounter with God forms part of Abot’s thesis about the Torah.
21The counterpart-category in Part III will be shown to constitute on its own an utterly fresh statement. The conception of knowledge as not merely illuminating but salvific transforms what is at stake in the category, world-view, from philosophical into religious truth.
22Given the state of manuscript evidence for all ancient Judaic documents, we cannot claim as decisive the fact that a word or a phrase appears or does not appear in some one piece of writing. The manuscript evidence is too sparse to appeal to the occurrence or absence of a word or a phrase, or to count up the number of occurrences and draw consequences from the result. We can work with large-scale and well-attested aggregates, e.g., the simple fact that all manuscripts of a given document concur on the basic topical program and organization, rhetorical preferences, logical principles of coherent discourse; these do vary from one document to another, and they do represent the choices of the initial authorship of a given document. That is why, as a matter of fact, the state of the evidence does allow us to characterize the fundamental literary structure and intellectual system of documents, since that characterization rests not on details but on the entire evidence in hand. One would have to claim that the Mishnah, for example, yields such diverse manuscript evidence that we can say nothing about its generative conceptions and fixed and formal traits. But it is the simple fact, proven decades ago by Y. N. Epstein in his Introduction to the Text of the Mishnah (Jerusalem, 1957), that manuscript variations affect words and phrases. That means the basic structures as to form and topical program are secure. My characterization rests on not details of the non-appearance of a word here or there but rather on the large-scale and secure characteristics of the several documents as a whole. Hence I stress the systemic infrastructure, and the place of a given word or phrase in that infrastructure. If the word “Torah” occurs in a salvific sense, e.g., in the Mishnah, that singleton bears no systemic weight whatsoever in the Mishnah overall. This distinction between the mere appearance or absence of a given word in a document and the systemic importance accorded to the concept represented by that same word in a document is worked out for zekhut in Chapter Eight. There we see that zekhut in the sense important later on does occur in documents generally held to have reached closure prior to the Yerushalmi and related Midrash-compilations. But when used earlier, the concept of zekhut is systemically inert, not active and indicative, and this we know because we can identify, in these prior appearances, no systemic burden carried by the word, or concept, of zekhut. In the appearances in the later documents, by contrast, zekhut proves to stand at the very center of discourse, a judgment concerning not the number of times the word occurs, but the place of the concept in the systemic structure. Justification for characterizing the usage in a systemically active and not inert way will be set forth in context. But even here I must underline that, even though the salvific value accorded to Torah, e.g., Torah-study, may appear episodically in some document prior to the ones deemed critical in this book, the place of that concept in the earlier system is not established by an ad hoc usage. That can have been an addition of a later scribe; and it also can have been present in the original version of the document (as it can have been in the mind of this one or that one in the circles of sages, and probably was), without making an impact upon the shape and structure of the system attested by the document containing that episodic usage.
23This story is cited verbatim at the outset of Chapter Seven.
24Precisely what I claim in this “canonical history” of ideas must be made explicit. It is that we deal with a symbolic transaction portrayed in the succession of usages of a given word or symbol as we move from one document to the next. Our survey concerns the description, analysis, and interpretation of successive systems, which I claim were not successor systems. My argument is that knowledge—the intellectual integument of the world-view—in the Mishnah is not Torah and is not salvific, while knowledge in the Yerushalmi and associated writings is Torah and is salvific. I do not know what others, not represented by these writings, were thinking; I cannot even say that systems other than those represented by the successive groups of writings existed. I surely do not claim that the belief that the Torah in the hands of the sage constituted a source of magical, supernatural, and hence salvific power, did not flourish prior, let us say, to ca. 400 C.E. We cannot show it, hence we do not know it (and anyhow, I very much doubt it). All we can say with assurance is that no stories containing such a viewpoint appear in any rabbinical document associated with the Mishnah. So what is critical here is not the generalized category—the genus—of conviction that the Torah serves as the source of Israel’s salvation. It is the concrete assertion—the speciation of the genus—that in the hands of the sage and under conditions specified, the Torah may be utilized in pressing circumstances as Levi, his disciple, and the disciple of his disciple, used it. That is what is new and in my judgment forms decisive evidence for a categorical reformation—in my language, the formation of a counterpart-category)—effected by the system-builders whose views are attested in the documents under study.