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The interplay of "Wisdom" and "Torah" and the methodological aspects can hardly be limited to the literature of the Second Temple period. This chapter summarizes some arguments that framed the structure of the book Wisdom and Torah: The Reception of 'Torah' in the Wisdom Literature of the Second Temple Period and to place them within the history of research. Before proceeding, two points need further explanation: first, the inclusion of the book of Deuteronomy in an anthology on "Wisdom and Torah" and second, the presentation of the articles without subdivisions under rubrics such as 'biblical', 'nonbiblical' or 'parabiblical'. This argument is developed in the "Afterword" to mark, on the one hand, the point of departure in terms of the history of research, and to highlight, on the other, insights and questions for further research. Keywords: Deuteronomy; Second Temple period; Torah; Wisdom

Rabbinic Judaism represents the understanding that after the destruction of the Second Temple at A.D. 70, the disappearance of religious approaches and practices related to the Temple, and to replace them the Tanah and its interpretation. Therefore, the Tanah and its interpretation constitutes the basis of Rabbinic Judaism. According to Rabbinic Judaism, on Mount Sinai God has revealed Torah and its interpretation and the rules which rabbis interprets Torah depending on those rules. Therefore, interpretations made by the rabbis are a part of divine revelation. However, these interpretations were made according to certain rules. Some application examples of these rules are situated in Tanah. In Rabbinic Judaism, seven interpretation rules (Middot) which attributed to Hillel are the first step in its field, and the basis and pioneer the other rules which developed after them.

Feminist Jewish studies scholars have frequently focused on images of women in rabbinic literature. Miriam Peskowitz's essay raises provocative questions about this approach. Although I appreciate efforts to render the "marginalization and/or invisibilization of women and gender intellectually impossible" in Jewish studies scholarship, I believe that such efforts cannot fully overcome literary constructions of gender embedded within ancient Jewish texts. It is sometimes possible to read canonical Jewish texts in new ways and "against the grain" to tease out evidence of women 44 struggling within and against patriarchal culture." However, finding evidence of struggle should not obscure the evidence of patriarchy. I will argue that scholarship that explores " images of" women in classical Jewish texts also tells us important things about the marginalization of women in much of rabbinic thinking. Rabbinic discourse is far from monolithic in the views and attitudes it expresses. It includes a variety of competing interpretations and opinions. Given this multivocality it is not surprising that rabbinic literature expresses a diversity of attitudes towards women. What unites these views, however, is the conviction that "women are a separate

The literature of classical rabbinic Judaism is usually said to have been “redacted” from around 300 CE until about 700 CE in the Palestinian and Mesopotamian centers of rabbinic settlement. Rabbinic literature itself assumes that the traditions that stand behind the written texts were transmitted orally for at least several generations (and in some views, centuries) prior to the compilation of the written manuscripts that are known from the Middle Ages. The formulaic and stylistic traits of the rabbinic writings also suggest a firm basis in orally transmitted material in at least two senses. First, the strong mnemonic traits of the medieval manuscripts suggest that the documents preserved by them were formulated by people for whom oral textual performance was a common experience. Secondly, the written texts as we have them seem to have emerged in a milieu in which written versions of texts were shaped by prior orally-managed material, even as written texts then shaped the outlines of further oral performances based upon them as mnemonic aids. To sum up, oral tradition in the context of rabbinic studies is the complex of legal, theological, and exegetical material transmitted by rabbinic sages of antiquity in the context of oral-performative instruction and preserved in a host of manuscript exemplars that reflect in varying degrees the presence of oral-traditional stylistic traits. The most important recent work in rabbinic oral traditional studies concerns the relationship of the surviving manuscript materials to their primary oral-traditional milieu, either in the original formation of the earliest rabbinic oral traditions in the first centuries CE or in the consolidation of the extant texts in the transition from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages. A comprehensive discussion of the history of ancient rabbinic oral tradition, and particularly, the ideological formulation of oral tradition as part of an oral revelation to Moses parallel to the Torah, has recently been offered by Martin S. Jaffee (2001). Important studies of the ways in which rabbinic compilations of biblical exegesis reflect and, in some senses, create an oral traditional milieu include Fraade (1991) and Nelson (1999). A fresh look at ways in which the oral transmission of the Mishnah, regarded as the

The Palestinian Talmud (also known as the Jerusalem Talmud, ca. 400 ce) and the Babylonian Talmud (ca. 600 ce) are ostensibly legal corpora, structured as commentaries on the earliest rabbinic legal corpus, the Mishnah (ca. 225 ce). Keywords: archives and documents; Judaism; manuscripts; religious history

Moses is the central figure of the Torah with the books Exodus to Deuteronomy being also to some extent his biography. The Torah presents Moses as a unique prophet of Israel, as a mediator in direct contact with God (Deut 34:10–12), but prohibited from entering the promised land. Keywords: anti-Semitism; folkore and mythology; Judaism

This paper will briefly underscore how deliverance is achieved according to the book of Ezra and in I Maccabees 1-4. The study will compare the different modes each book offers and explain how the historical context can account for their differences. This work will then seek to explain the meaning behind the concepts and phenomena called: (the end of) Prophecy, Mishnah, Oral Torah, loss of respect for priestly status, Pharisees, and Hellenization.

This chapter traces how modern interpreters construct Maimonides by reenacting, in a new way, how Maimonides constructs the “ancient” Talmud as a merely rhetorical form of thinking, as opposed to a rational, philosophical mode of thought, and redeems the content of the Talmud in a new, more philosophical-rationalist form, that of a legal code. It then shows how, in the works of Maimonides’ modern interpreters, Maimonides becomes a figure of transition from the “medieval” subject position to the “modern” subject position of post-Kantian transcendental philosopher. Maimonides constructs the Talmud as an object of criticism in his comprehensive legal code of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah (MT). The Brisker Rav both clarifies and reinvents the subject position from which Maimonides undertook the construction of the Talmud as “ancient.”. Keywords:Brisker Rav; Jewish law; Maimonides; Mishneh Torah (MT); Talmud

This investigation is to be distinguished from the recent attempts to understand the rhetorical nature of this same literature in studies such as those of Carol Newsom and Maxine Grossman. Within Judaism of the Second Temple era, we know that “Torah” was important when talking about communal structure, identity, and ethics. Moses as the sole authority able to disclose (and interpret?) the divine word. The re-presentation of Sinai motif is well-established by the time that we leave the Pentateuch. The figure of Moses at Sinai keeps that event from being idealized or glorified. The Sinai event itself is then foundational rather than ideal. It is from Sinai that we look ahead to Jerusalem in the Second Temple period as it is represented in the Qumran texts discussed here; not that we glance backward from Jerusalem to Sinai. Keywords:Carol Newsom; Maxine Grossman; Moses; Pentateuch; Qumran; Second Temple period; Sinai motif; Torah

This is the introductory chapter of the book, which addresses the overarching issue of whether 70 CE should be considered a watershed in Jewish history. The issue has been the object of discussion for more than a century and a half, but the results are still far from unambiguous. The book address three stages in the modern understanding of the relationship between priestly Judaism and rabbinic Judaism in antiquity - for the authors point of departure is Abraham Geiger's discovery, and popularization in his Urschrift (1857), of the fundamental distinction in ancient Judaism between priestly Judaism and Pharisaic/rabbinic Judaism, a distinction which has proven itself to be quite basic and meaningful, a fruitful key to the understanding of much of what we can see in the Jewish world of the Second Temple period. Keywords:Jewish history; rabbinic Judaism; Second Temple period

Literature is written for the sake only of those who are in the process of development, and of that in each of us which is still developing. Hebrew, knowing no word for "reading" that does not mean "learning" as well, has given this, the secret of all literature away. For it is a secret, though a quite open one, to these times of ours-obsessed and suffocated as they are by education-that books exist only to transmit that which has been achieved to those who are still developing. [FRANZ ROSENZWEIG]'

This chapter examines the rabbinic Judaism from the Palestinian context. It suggests that it is not possible to provide any unambiguous framework which will offer clues to the context, or contexts, in which the extraordinary corpus of rabbinic works was composed. It concludes that the composition of the rabbinic literature could only take place in a society marked by a complex interplay of beliefs, ethnic identities and languages and identifies the most common points of reference in Jewish religious writing.

Since the system of law at Qumran finds its most ample and apt analogue in the system of rabbinic law, comparisons between the two, both in their specifics and their general contours, are inevitable. Our earliest and most extensive ancient interpretation of the biblical law of the king is found in the Temple Scroll from Cave 11 at Qumran. The Temple Scroll begins its section on the king by citing fairly verbatim from the scriptural text of Deut 17:14-20, with the equivalent of vv. 19-20 missing since they would have filled the top of col. LVII, which is not preserved. Both the Qumran sectaries and the early rabbinic sages were deeply-and redemptively-engaged in the ongoing construction of nomian worlds of Torah discourse and practice.Keywords: Qumran; rabbinic law; Temple Scroll; Torah

The Dead Sea sect denied the sanctity of the Temple of their time, perceiving the "Council of the Community," as a spiritual substitute for the Temple in Jerusalem. The discovery of a Diasporan notion among a group living in Judea in Second Temple period makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the historical continuity of the manner in which the reality of the absence of the Temple was confronted. This chapter presents the development of this historical continuity, from its biblical beginnings to its later manifestations in rabbinic literature. According to the author, this perception must also be examined diachronically, namely as an inner progression of Diasporan Judaism. He focuses on two witnesses representing such a stance: one appearing in Hellenistic Jewish literature, and the other in rabbinic literature, and examines the content and meaning of the testimony within this continuity. Keywords:Christianity; Dead Sea sect; Diaspora Judaism; Hellenistic Jewish literature; rabbinic literature; Shekhinah; Temple

New Testament scholars have largely inherited Lightfoot's program, his attitude to rabbinic theology and the limitations of the literature which is available. A. Edersheim's works can be regarded as a useful popular reformulation of Lightfoot's findings. The pursuit for a theology of Judaism has proved much more difficult than working out the laws and practices of Judaism, because classical rabbinic literature contains so little theology. Halakhic literature is concerned with the interpretation and application of the laws of the Torah. The history of the development of rabbinic rulings suggests that the discussions of the Sabbath in the gospels can be regarded as criticisms of the developing Oral Law, not a rejection of the Sabbath law in the written Torah. The Mishnah, too, demonstrates the assumption that even non-pious individuals carry out the stipulations of the Written Torah, though not necessarily the Pharisaic Oral Torah. Keywords:gospel; Halakhic tradition; Jesus; Judaism; Mishnah; New Testament; rabbinic Writings; Sabbath; Torah

Religion is one of the cultural systems that attempts to deal with human puzzlement. This paper uses the metaphor of the puzzle to make sense of what has always been a disconcerting feature of rabbinic Judaism, namely, the rabbis' (200-600 C.E.) blatantly ad hoc manner of interpreting Scripture. The rabbis seem to know in advance what a verse must mean and go to great lengths to find a legitimation of that reading in the verse in question. Typically this ad hoc quality of rabbinic interpretation is explained as a means whereby the rabbis provide 'prooftexts' for new practices without Scriptural warrants. But what from one perspective appears as an attempt to find prooftexts is from another perspective an attempt to solve a puzzle. Conceptually speaking, solving a puzzle and finding prooftexts are worlds apart. This paper treats the rabbis as an inter-generational community of puzzle solvers involved in the quest to discover how the oral Torah is already contained in the written Torah. Like all matching puzzles, this one is necessarily ad hoc. The intellectual seeks in various ways, the casuistry of which extends into infinity, to endow his life with a pervasive meaning, and thus to find unity within himself, with his fellow men, and with the cosmos (Weber 192.5, 1978 p. 506). Analysis into parts is not really so important in these societies as is the periodic construction or reconstruction of the whole. The whole is what is truly edifying, and its reconstruction is a purpose which puzzlement can subtly serve (Fernandez, 1986, p. 179).

Introducing Tosefta: Textual, Intratextual and Intertextual StudiesThe papers collected in this volume came out of a conference on Tosefta held at the University of Toronto in April 1993. Although the Conference was held on the tenth anniversary of the death of Saul Lieberman, whose Tosefta Kifshuta is a landmark in the study of this document, virtually no mention of this scholar or his work appears in the volume. Instead, the volume is dedicated to the memory of Menachem Rotman, a local Toronto personality, an excerpt of whose memoir opens the volume.The Tosefta has always been something of a puzzle to scholars of classical Rabbinic literature. On the one hand it is very similar to the Mishnah in style, language and overall theme, while on the other hand, it is clearly not Mishnah but a different and distinct compilation. Again, on the one hand, it and its materials are cited often in both Talmuds, the Jerusalem and the Babylonian, while on the other, the citations are often different from what appears in our Tosefta. And so arguments have swirled around the nature of this document, its relation to Mishnah, the date and reason for its publication, its connection to the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds, and beyond these questions, to the broader issue of the very nature of the Tannaitic world and the Oral Torah it produced.The essays collected here are written by some of the most prominent names in the field: Harry Fox, Jacob Neusner, Reena Zeidman, Shamma Friedman, Yaakov Elman, Tirzah Meacham, Judith Hauptman, Herbert Basser, and Paul Heger. Given the subtitle of the volume, one would have hoped that a common theme or approach would emerge from the symposium to illuminate a new, perhaps post-modern, direction for answering questions about the origin, nature, and purpose of the Tosefta. This hope is frustrated. What we find instead is that each essay approaches the document with its own questions and with its own method. No common discourse, or even set of assumptions, is apparent. The result is that the collection says pretty much everything and its opposite about the document. For those readers looking for an overview of what it is possible to say about the Tosefta, this is the perfect book.The collection opens with a long and rambling essay by Harry Fox. Despite its farreaching argumentation and massive footnoting, it comes to surprisingly tame conclusions: the Mishnah and Tosefta do not have to be approached as oral texts (p. 21) or that these are related texts but the details of that relationship are still not known (p. 23). The essay ends on the rather strange metaphor, picked up only somewhat near the end of the collection, that the Mishnah and other documents are like buckets of water pulled from the sea of Torah and then frozen in one form or the other.Neusner's essay follows, arguing that the Tosefta is in fact the first attempt at creating a Gemara. Using a set of exemplary texts, Neusner demonstrates that like the later gemaras, the Tosefta cites the mishnaic text and then comments upon and develops it. The presentation of the Neusnerian model is followed immediately by Zeidman's essay, which argues strenuously, with its own set of examples, that the Tosefta is not just a commentary on the Mishnah at all, but an independent work that interacts vigorously with the Mishnah, the two documents having come into being in conversation with each other. …

This book contains pioneering research on aspects of society, culture and geography of rabbinic Torah centers in Palestine 70–400 CE. It surveys the history of the centers in their geographic and social context in chronological order.

Food often defines societies and even civilizations. Through particular commensality restrictions, groups form distinct identities: those with whom 'we' eat ('us') and those with whom 'we' cannot eat ('them'). This identity is enacted daily, turning the biological need to eat into a culturally significant activity. In this book, Jordan D. Rosenblum explores how food regulations and practices helped to construct the identity of early rabbinic Judaism. Bringing together the scholarship of rabbinics with that of food studies, this volume first examines the historical reality of food production and consumption in Roman-era Palestine. It then explores how early rabbinic food regulations created a distinct Jewish, male, and rabbinic identity. Rosenblum's work demonstrates how rabbinic food practices constructed an edible identity.

The [European Jews'] encounter with food in America in the context of novelty and abundance also subverted a culture built around food taboos. Food, so central to the Judaic sacred system and the promise of America, got caught up in a complicated set of internal Jewish fights about class, immigrant status, religion, generation, and gender. Because they venerated food, and because so much about their food world changed in America, it became a locus of contestations and conflict. In the epigraph to this chapter, Hasia Diner discusses how various factors contribute to food becoming a “locus of contestations and conflict” between European Jews who immigrated to America. This is by no means a modern phenomenon. Just as the Tannaim use culinary and commensal practices to establish distinct Jewish and male identities, so too did these practices serve to establish a Jewish, male, and rabbinic identity. In fact, the Tannaim devote more attention to parsing how their culinary and commensal practices distinguish themselves from other Jews than they do to any other “Other.” The Tannaim construct their Jewish, male, rabbinic identity in part by way of four food practices. First, they develop the notion that there is a distinctive cuisine that comprises the diet and foodway of (and, thus, marks the socially constructed identity of) a rabbinic Jew. (Throughout this book, the term “rabbinic Jew” refers to a Jew who chooses to follow the prescriptions of rabbinic Judaism, as opposed to a nonrabbinic Jew, who, although unquestionably Jewish even in the eyes of rabbinic Judaism, has chosen not to adhere to rabbinic practice.)

This index presents a list of references related to the exemplary Torah student in Psalm 119. The conception of Torah in Ps 119 is not merely the five books of Moses. Torah includes rules that govern the universe; the justice that God will eventually visit upon the wicked; and any instruction from God for humanity.Keywords: Psalm 119; Torah

Nehemiah 8 depicts Ezra's public reading of Mosaic Torah, and the simultaneous public explanation of Mosaic Torah by the mebinim, the authorized interpreters. Authority was inextricably linked to Moses and ancient tradition of Mosaic Torah in Second Temple period. Ezra's legal innovations were pseudonymously attributed to Torah of Moses. This chapter considers two examples of pseudonymous attribution to Moses in the writings of Ezra-Nehemiah. These examples illustrate how it was possible to inscribe innovations into a culture that recognized only old and established law as main source of authority that had survived the exile. But it is notable that the important association between authority and writing was already in place long before the return. Only in light of the gradual emergence of authoritative sacred writing it can be understood how Mosaic Torah could have come to replace the prophet and claim authority once accorded to the priest and the king.Keywords: Ezra-Nehemiah; pseudonymous attribution; sacred writings; Second Temple period; Torah of Moses

Lawrence H. Schiffman is Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University's Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures. He is also a member of the University's Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and serves as Director of Graduate Studies for the Skirball Department. In 1992/3 he will be a Fellow at the Annenberg Institute in Philadelphia where he will be part of a research team working on the unpublished scrolls. His most recent book is From Text to Tradition, A History of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism (Ktav, 1991).

The focus of this paper is oppositional trends in early Judaism. First, the author presents historical circumstances, namely the end of the Second Temple, and the diaspora and emerging Rabbinic Judaism. The traditional macro-structure of Israel in the rabbinic society was a crucial precondition for rival groups. According to tradition, the whole of Israel was divided into three groups of descent in the following order of rank: priests as “sons of Aaron”, Levites and Israel in the sense of “laics”. Those persons and groups who did not follow orthodoxy or orthopraxy were accused of apostasy and were stigmatized by the rabbis as heretics. Among those groups were Samaritans, the Zadduqim and Bethusim, the Minim.

For all Jews in this period, in both diaspora and homeland, the Jerusalem Temple was the central religious institution. The wide dispersal of Jews prevented many from regular participation in Temple worship, but no religious Jew seem to have ignored the significance of the sacrificial and other offerings in Jerusalem. The second pillar of common Judaism was the Torah. It was during these centuries that the biblical text took a form resembling that of the present day and acquired something close to its later authority. Most of the debate about the relation of Jews to the surrounding culture has concentrated on the Hellenization of Judaism. The motivation of Christian scholars for investigating the relationship of Judaism and Hellenism has naturally been very different and more concerned with the origins of ideas found in the early Church.

Classical rabbinic literature comprises all those ancient Jewish literary compilations which transmit the traditions of tannaitic (70–200 ce) and amoraic (third-to fifth-century ce) rabbis in Palestine and Babylonia: the Mishnah, the Tosefta, the Palestinian and the Babylonian Talmud, and various midrashim. Accordingly, rabbinic literature must be seen as a collective rather than an authorial literature, transmitting a wide variety of partly divergent and contradictory views and teachings rather than providing a linear systematic outline of a particular individual's point of view. The critical study of rabbinic literature began in the nineteenth century with the so-called Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism), whose representatives began to apply to rabbinic texts historical and philological methods which were also used in other fields of the humanities. The application of methods and theories from related fields such as literary theory allows one to see the texts from a new perspective.

Strictly speaking, the Second Temple period extends from the construction of the temple at the end of the sixth century bce to its destruction by the Romans in 70 ce. Some scholars would now argue that the entire biblical corpus belongs in this period. Even if one accepts the more traditional dating of biblical sources, the final edition of the Torah must be placed after the Exile. This article deals with this literature. The literature may be divided into three categories, based on provenance more than on literary genre, although each category has its own characteristics. These are the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha; the Dead Sea scrolls; and the literature of the Greek-speaking diaspora. The first and third categories were preserved by Christians, the second was only recently recovered from the caves by the Dead Sea.

Early Christianity and rabbinic Judaism are the outgrowth of complex socioreligious and political developments in the Jewish world of the first century. Studying Matthew in comparison with rabbinic sources has become standard practice. It is on the level of community documents that a comparison is worthwhile, i.e. between Matthews gospel as written for a specific community on the one hand, and Tractate Avoth and its counterparts, expressing nascent rabbinic Judaism, on the other hand. This chapter focuses on a case where commentaries adduce parallels without discussing the nature of their relationship: the parable of the builder of the house (Matt 7:2427). It first discusses the notion of learning and practising in Matthew and Avoth. Then the modes of interaction as suggested in research are discussed. Finally, it analyses the parable of Matthew and its rabbinic counterparts and evaluates the findings from the point of view of the proposed theories. Keywords: early Christianity; Jewish world; Matthew 7:2427; rabbinic Judaism; Tractate Avoth

The Talmud (Hebrew; Learning) is a veritable encyclopedia of Jewish law, literature and science. It encompasses an entire antique civilization, extending from the third century B.C.E. to the fifth century C.E. There are two Talmudim and the Babylonian (ca. 300 B.C.E.-500 C.E.). Of the two, the Babylonian is fuller and more systematic. Inasmuch as the Torah (Pentateuch) contains both explicit and implicit laws, often presented in concise fashion, these laws were subject to interpretation and elucidation. This chapter illustrates something of the character of Talmudic controversy. It is further illustrative of that character to remark that, despite the emphasis on the rule of the majority, an exception is allowed in one important area. The chapter provides an outline of the intellectual setting for economic analysis in the Talmud, with reference to the formation of the work, its methodology and some related subjects basic to free inquiry.Keywords: Babylonian; Hebrew; Jewish law; Talmud; Torah

Introduction Part I: 1. Rabbinic authorship as a collective enterprise Martin S. Jaffee 2. The orality of Rabbinic writing Elizabeth Shanks Alexander 3. Social and institutional settings of Rabbinic literature Jeffrey L. Rubenstein 4. The political geography of Rabbinic texts Seth Schwartz Part II: 5. Rabbinic Midrash and ancient Jewish biblical interpretation Steven D. Fraade 6. The Judaean legal tradition and the Halakhah of the Mishnah Shaye J. D. Cohen 7. Roman law and Rabbinic legal composition Catherine Hezser 8. Middle Persian culture and Babylonian sages: accommodation and resistance in the shaping of Rabbinic legal tradition Yaakov Elman 9. Jewish visionary tradition in Rabbinic literature Michael D. Swartz 10. The almost invisible presence of the other: multi-lingual puns in Rabbinic literature Galit Hasan-Rokem Park III: 11. The 'other' in Rabbinic literature Christine Hayes 12. Regulating the human body: Rabbinic legal discourse and the making of Jewish gender Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert 13. Rabbinic historiography and representations of the past Isaiah Gafni 14. Rabbinic ethical formational and the formation of Rabbinic ethical compilations Jonathan Wyn Schofer 15. Hellenism in Jewish Babylonia Daniel Boyarin.

Oral teaching and transmission of literary compositions of various degrees of textual fluidity played a prominent role in the shaping of rabbinic culture. Throughout the period leading up to the emergence of the rabbinic movement, both scribal and oral technologies were used in complementary fashion to transmit Jewish tradition. In certain ways, the rabbis were typical of their day in their reliance on oral transmissional techniques. It is noteworthy, however, that though other Jewish groups in antiquity had developed bodies of oral tradition, only the rabbis attributed significance to the fact that they transmitted tradition orally. They alone claimed that the traditional teachings under their guardianship originated in an oral revelation, which had, ever since, been transmitted exclusively by word of mouth. The rabbis highlighted the oral aspect of their teachings by calling it “Oral Torah.” For the rabbis, then, oral instruction was not merely a technology of transmission. Through the concept of Oral Torah (and its partner concept, Written Torah), technologies of transmission took on ideological coloration. This article seeks an understanding of what was at stake for the rabbis when they highlighted the oral, as opposed to written, modes of transmission used in the conveyance of their teachings. As the rabbis understood the matter, God's revelation to Moses at Mt. Sinai had two components. The written revelation, or Written Torah, had a fixed literary form and was handed down in the formof the twenty two books of the biblical canon. The oral revelation, or Oral Torah, was an interpretive supplement to the written scriptures.

This index section describes list of ancient literature that occur in this book Judaism in the Roman World. The book analyses a series of issues important in the development of Judaism in this period: the role of the Temple and pilgrimage in the first century CE; the attitude of Jews to the physical texts of the Torah and to the scribes who produced them; the extent of variety and change within Judaism before and after 70 CE and the nature of the evidence for particular types of Judaism; the role of synagogues and images in Jewish worship; and relations between Jews and Christians in the early centuries.Keywords: Christians; Judaism; Roman World

This chapter analyzes the behavior of the Israelite soldier as presented in the Pentateuch (Torah) and in early rabbinic law. Within society, the functions of prevalent ritual and symbol which were closest to the individual in his social environment received the greatest attention. Pollution and the associated danger resulting from trans-boundary contact had to be rectified through ritual. The Torah demands physical cleanliness and bodily purification from the soldier, as well as his personal security, would be endangered. Edited in Palestine around 200 CE, the Mishnah is a study of the world of the Temple cult and the Temple state. Even though Torah and Mishnah were two separate works of literature, both had the same goal: implicitly and explicitly they sought through laws and rituals to retain the social system and hierarchy headed by the religious leadership - priestly in the former, Rabbinic in the latter.Keywords: Israelite soldier; Mishnah; Rabbinic law; temple state; Torah