The Mishnah in Contemporary Perspective

235 Pages·2009·0.98 MB·English

The Mishnah in Contemporary Perspective
HANDBOOK OF ORIENTAL STUDIES
SECTION ONE
THE NEAR AND MIDDLE EAST
EDITED BY
H. ALTENMÜLLER • B. HROUDA • B. A. LEVINE • R. S. O’FAHEY
K. R. VEENHOF • C. H. M. VERSTEEGH
VOLUME EIGHTY-SEVEN
The Mishnah in Contemporary
Perspective
Volume Two
Edited by
Alan J. Avery-Peck and Jacob Neusner
BRILL
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2006
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
is available on http://catalog.loc.gov
DiTommaso, Lorenzo.
The book of Daniel and the apocryphal Daniel literature/by Lorenzo DiTommaso.
p. cm. — (Studia in Veteris Testamenti pseudepigrapha, ISSN 0169-8125;v.20)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 90-04-14412-9 (alk. paper)
1. Bible. O.T. Daniel—Criticism, interpretation, etc. 2. Bible. O.T. Apocrypha.
History of Susanna—Criticism, interpretation, etc. 3. Bible. O.T. Apocrypha. Bel
and the Dragon—Criticism, interpretation, etc. 4. Daniel-Diegese—Criticism, inter-
pretation, etc. 5. Syriac apocalypse of Daniel—Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title.
II. Series.
BS1700.S78 vol. 20
[BS1555.52]
229’.91 s—dc22
[224’.506] 2005042079
ISSN 0169-9423
ISBN-10 90 04 15220 2
ISBN-13 978 90 04 15220 5
© Copyright 2006 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill Academic Publishers,
Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, and VSP.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior
written permission from the publisher.
Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted
by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to
The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910,
Danvers, MA 01923, USA.
Fees are subject to change.
printed in the netherlands
CONTENTS
Preface .............................................................................................. vii
Anecdotal Evidence: The Yavneh Conundrum, Birkat Hamminim,
and the Problem of Talmudic Historiography ............................ 1
Daniel Boyarin
University of California, Berkeley
On the Quality of the Rabbinic Text: The Opening of the
Mishnah .......................................................................................... 36
Dalia Hoshen
University of Manchester
The Construction of Households in the Mishnah ...................... 55
Hayim Lapin
University of Maryland
The Mishnah in Historical and Religious Context .................... 81
Jacob Neusner
Bard College
The Structure and Implicit Message of Mishnah
Tractate Nazir ................................................................................ 110
Simcha Fishbane
Touro College
Archaeology and the Mishnah’s Halakhic Tradition:
The Case of Stone Vessels and Ritual Baths .............................. 136
Eyal Regev
Bar-Ilan University
The Poetics of the Mishnah .......................................................... 153
Avraham Walfish
Herzog Teachers Academy
vi contents
Why We Cannot Assume the Historical Reliability of
Attributions: The Case of the Houses in Mishnah-Tosefta
Makhshirin ...................................................................................... 190
Jacob Neusner
Bard College
Subject Index .................................................................................. 213
PREFACE
In this second of our two-part project on the Mishnah in contempo-
rary study, the editors place on display a broad selection of approaches
to the study of the Mishnah in the contemporary academy. The work
derives from Israel, North America, and Europe and shows the intel-
lectual vitality of scholarship in all three centers of learning. What we
prove in diverse ways is that the Mishnah forms a critical focus of the
study of Judaism.
Why from the beginning has Mishnah-study formed the center of
the curriculum of Judaism? The reason is that the document has earned
its place. In the entire history of civilization, only a few traditions of
learning set forth in singular documents have for more than a brief
time sustained the life of a society. But the Mishnah has defined the
life of Israel, the Jewish people throughout the world, from the time
it was promulgated, at the end of the second century, to the present
day. To find parallels to the astonishing power of that book to define
the meaning of the life of the society to which it speaks, we should
have to point, in India, to the Vedas, in Iran and India, to the Zoroastrian
Scriptures, in Islam, to the Quran, and, in the Christian West, to the
Bible, that is, the Old and New Testaments as Christianity put them
together. The Quran, the Vedas, the Zoroastrian Avesta, above all, the
Bible—these few writings still enjoy a paramount place. But among all
the many other writings that have told entire societies what it meant
to live in community, we cannot count very many that still deliver the
same message, with the same authority, to the same world that they
originally addressed. And among the enduring, world-defining docu-
ments that humanity has known, the Mishnah is surely the one of
which fewest people have heard.
The Vedas, Quran, and Bible form part of common culture. So too,
everyone knows the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament of Christianity.
They are easy to enter. But, even if it is known as the first document
of the Oral part of the Torah of Sinai, the Mishnah is hardly accessible.
Falling into the hands of someone who has never seen it before, the
Mishnah must cause puzzlement. It provides naked information—contents
out of context. It presents disputes about facts scarcely explained, facts
hardly urgent outside of a circle of faceless disputants. The opening
viii preface
lines (famous among the students of the document) suffice to make the
point (M. Ber. 1:1):
A. From what time do they recite the Shema in the evening?
B. From the hour that the priests [who had immersed after unclean-
ness and awaited sunset to complete the process of purification]
enter [a state of cleanness, the sun having set, so as] to eat their
heave offering—
C. “until the end of the first watch,” the words of R. Eliezer.
D. And sages say, “Until midnight.”
E. Rabban Gamaliel says, “Until the rise of dawn.”
It would require many paragraphs to explain the meaning of these sev-
enty-five words, and it would take many more to place the whole into
its theological and religious context. Here is a fine example of the
Mishnah’s opacity, how its radical assumption that its audience brings
to the document a vast corpus of learning shapes its discourse. On its
own, out of all context, that well-known passage is simply incompre-
hensible, taking for granted, as it does, a considerable body of infor-
mation. The issues and the argument presuppose modes of thought and
analysis in no way articulated; nor is what is at stake self-evident.
Consequently, we start with the impression that we join a conversa-
tion already long under way about topics we can never grasp anyhow.
No one can take for granted that what is before us makes sense in
any context but the Mishnah’s own, inaccessible world. The Mishnah
in many tractates does not discuss topics of common interest. For before
us is a remarkable statement of concerns for matters not only wholly
remote from our own world, but, in the main, alien to the world of
the people who made the Mishnah itself. It is as if people set out to
write letters about things they had never seen, to people they did not
know—letters from an unknown city to an undefined and unimagined
world: the Mishnah is a letter, written on blank paper, from no one
special, located in utopia, to whom it may concern, at an indetermi-
nate time and no where in particular. Perhaps its very power to speak
from deep to deep is its lack of locative specificity. But internal evi-
dence within the Mishnah certainly proves mute about all questions of
authorship: where, when, why, for what purpose, to which audience?
We have no answers to such basic questions as these.
Equally surprising, the Mishnah is a book without an author. No
where in its pages does it identify its authorities or sponsorship.
preface ix
It permits only slight variations, if any, in its authorities’ patterns of
language and speech, so there is no place for individual characteristics
of expression. It nowhere tells us when it speaks. It does not address
a particular place or time and rarely speaks of events in its own day.
It never identifies its prospective audience. In the entire mass of say-
ings and rules, there is scarcely an “I” or a “you.” The Mishnah begins
nowhere. It ends abruptly. There is no predicting where it will com-
mence or explaining why it is done. Where, when, why the document
is laid out and set forth are questions not deemed urgent and not
answered.
While the Mishnah clearly addresses Israel, the Jewish people, it is
remarkably indifferent to the Hebrew Scriptures. It makes no effort at
imitating the Hebrew of the Hebrew Bible, as do the writers of the
Dead Sea Scrolls. It does not attribute its sayings to biblical heroes,
prophets, or holy men, as do the writings of the pseudepigraphs of the
Hebrew Scriptures. It does not claim to emerge from a fresh encounter
with God through revelation, as is not uncommon in Israelite writings
of the preceding four hundred years; the Holy Spirit is not alleged to
speak here. So all the devices by which other Israelite writers gain cre-
dence for their messages are ignored. Perhaps the authority of the
Mishnah was self-evident to its authors. But, self-evident or not, they
in no way take the trouble to explain to their audience why people
should conform to the descriptive statements contained in their holy
book.
If we turn to the contents of the document, we are helped not at
all in determining the place of the Mishnah’s origination, the purpose
of its formation, the reasons for its anonymous and collective plane of
discourse and monotonous tone of voice. For the Mishnah covers a
carefully defined program of topics. But it never tells us why one topic
is introduced and another is omitted or what the agglutination of these
particular topics is meant to accomplish in the formation of a system
or imaginative construction. Discourse on a theme begins and ends as
if all things are self-evident—including, as we said, the reason for begin-
ning at one point and ending at some other.
One might imagine upon first glance that the Mishnah is a simple
rulebook. It appears on the surface to lack all traces of eloquence and
style, revealing no evidence of system and reflection. First glance indi-
cates that in hand is yet another shard from remote antiquity—no
different from king-lists inscribed on ancient shards, the random catalogue