Unit 9 · The Rabbis and Their World

In 332 BCE Alexander the Great marched through the region historians call Judea, the land around Jerusalem. After his death, Greek-speaking kings ruled it, first from Egypt and then from Syria. Greek became the language of trade and government. Many Jews learned it. Some also took Greek names and customs.

In 167 BCE the Syrian king Antiochus IV outlawed Jewish practice and put a foreign altar in the Temple in Jerusalem. A family of priests, the Maccabees, led a revolt. By 164 BCE they had retaken the Temple. Jewish tradition remembers that moment each year at Hanukkah. For about a century, Judea had its own kings.

Then Rome arrived. In 63 BCE the Roman general Pompey entered Jerusalem. From that point Judea was under Roman power, sometimes through a local king like Herod, sometimes through a Roman governor. Rome collected taxes and kept soldiers in the land. This is the world in which the first rabbis of the Talmud lived.

The Jewish historian Josephus, writing in the 1st century CE, describes three main groups among the Jews of his day. He calls them the Pharisees, the Sadducees and the Essenes. They agreed on the Torah. They disagreed about how to read it, who should lead, and what happens after death.

The Pharisees, Josephus says, followed traditions handed down from their teachers alongside the written Torah. Rabbinic tradition later called those traditions the Oral Torah and traced the rabbis back to the Pharisees. The Sadducees were linked to the priests and the Temple. They accepted the written Torah and rejected the Pharisees’ added traditions. The Mishnah records arguments between the two groups.

The Essenes lived in tight communities, shared property and kept strict rules of purity. In 1947 shepherds found ancient scrolls in caves near Qumran by the Dead Sea. Many scholars think the people who kept those scrolls were Essenes or a group like them, though this is still debated.

When the Temple fell in 70 CE, the Sadducees lost their center, and the Essene communities disappear from the record. The Pharisees’ way of study survived. The Talmud does not use the word Pharisee often; it speaks of sages. But historians see a clear line from the Pharisees to the rabbis.

Two teachers stand at the start of nearly every list of rabbis: Hillel and Shammai. Tradition places them in Jerusalem in about the 1st century BCE, in the days of King Herod. Hillel, tradition says, came from Babylon and was poor. Shammai was a builder. Each had students, and the students formed two schools, the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai.

The Mishnah records more than three hundred disagreements between the two houses. The House of Shammai often read a rule strictly. The House of Hillel often read it more leniently. The Gemara in tractate Eruvin (page 13) says a heavenly voice declared that both are the words of the living God, but that the law follows the House of Hillel, because they were humble and taught the other side’s view first.

The best-known Hillel story is in tractate Shabbat (page 31). A stranger asks to be taught the whole Torah while standing on one foot. Shammai sends him away. Hillel answers: what is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow; that is the whole Torah, the rest is explanation, go and learn. In Pirkei Avot (1:14) Hillel asks: if I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?

In 66 CE Jews in Judea rose against Roman rule. High taxes, cruel governors and clashes between Jews and Greeks in the cities all fed the anger. Rome sent its general Vespasian with legions. When Vespasian became emperor in 69, his son Titus took over the war. In the spring of 70, Titus laid siege to Jerusalem.

Josephus, who first fought against Rome and then surrendered and joined the Roman side, wrote the fullest account in his book The Jewish War. He describes hunger inside the walls, fighting between Jewish factions, and the fire that destroyed the Temple in the summer of 70. Jewish tradition marks that day as the ninth of the month of Av and fasts on it.

In Rome the emperor’s family built a stone arch to celebrate. The Arch of Titus still stands, and its carving shows soldiers carrying the Temple’s menorah, the seven-branched lamp, through the streets of Rome. For historians it is one of the clearest pieces of evidence for the event.

The Talmud tells the war differently, as a lesson. In tractate Gittin (pages 55–56) the Gemara says Jerusalem fell because of a dinner party gone wrong: a host embarrassed a guest named Bar Kamtza in front of the sages, and no one stopped him. The rabbis read the disaster as a warning about baseless hatred among Jews, not only about Roman armies.

Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai was, by tradition, the youngest student of Hillel and the leading sage in Jerusalem during the war. The title Rabban, our master, marks him as head of the sages. The Gemara in Gittin 56a–b tells how he had himself carried out of the city in a coffin, because the rebels let no one leave alive.

Outside the walls he greeted Vespasian as emperor. The Roman said he was not emperor. Then a messenger arrived from Rome with the news that he was. Impressed, Vespasian offered a request. Yochanan asked for Yavneh and its sages, for the family of Rabban Gamliel to be spared, and for a doctor for Rabbi Tzadok, who had fasted for years.

The Gemara does not simply praise him. It quotes Rabbi Yosef, or some say Rabbi Akiva, applying a verse to Yochanan: God turns wise men backward. He should have asked Vespasian to spare Jerusalem, the objection goes. The Gemara answers that Yochanan feared asking too much and getting nothing. This is a sugya about a choice, with both sides kept.

Historians note that a similar story of a Jewish leader predicting Vespasian’s rise is told by Josephus about himself. They cannot confirm the coffin or the meeting. What they can see is the result: within a generation, Yavneh had a court and a school, and the sages there began reshaping Jewish life without a Temple.

For centuries Jewish worship had centered on the Temple. Priests offered animals, grain and incense on the altar each day and on festivals. Jews traveled to Jerusalem for Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot. With the Temple gone, the biggest question was practical: how does one serve God now?

A rabbinic text called Avot de-Rabbi Natan (chapter 4) gives Yochanan ben Zakkai’s answer. Walking past the ruins with his student Rabbi Yehoshua, who mourns that the place of atonement is destroyed, Yochanan says: do not grieve, we have another atonement as good, acts of loving-kindness. He quotes the prophet Hosea: I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.

The sages at Yavneh also gave prayer a fixed shape. The Gemara in Berakhot 28b says that a sage named Shimon HaPakuli arranged the eighteen blessings in order before Rabban Gamliel at Yavneh. That prayer, the Amidah, is still the center of Jewish daily services. Rabbinic tradition holds that its times match the times of the daily Temple offerings.

Study itself became a kind of service. The Talmud often says that one who studies the laws of the offerings is counted as if he had brought them. Historians see this shift as the birth of rabbinic Judaism: a religion of synagogue, study house and home, which could survive anywhere.

After Yochanan ben Zakkai, leadership at Yavneh passed to Rabban Gamliel II, grandson of the Gamliel mentioned in the New Testament as Paul’s teacher. The sages there acted as a court. They fixed which month the new moon began, which set the dates of every festival for Jews everywhere. They decided which of the disputed rulings of Hillel and Shammai to follow.

The Talmud shows Gamliel as a strong, sometimes harsh leader. In Rosh Hashanah 25a he orders Rabbi Yehoshua, who calculated a different date for Yom Kippur, to appear before him on that date carrying his staff and money, to show that the court’s ruling stands even if it is wrong. Rabbi Yehoshua obeys. The Gemara praises his humility and the court’s authority together.

In Berakhot 27b–28a the sages remove Gamliel from office after he shames Rabbi Yehoshua once too often. They appoint Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah, who opens the doors of the study house to everyone. Gamliel goes to apologize, and is restored, sharing the post. The story keeps both values in view: respect for leaders and limits on their power.

Historians treat these accounts carefully. They were written down generations later, and some details may be shaped for teaching. But the picture of Yavneh as a working court with a patriarch, called the Nasi, at its head matches what later Roman law says about a Jewish patriarch in the Land of Israel.

Sixty years after the Temple burned, Judea rose again. Its leader was Shimon bar Kosiba, whom followers called Bar Kokhba, son of a star. The revolt lasted from 132 to 135 CE under the emperor Hadrian. For a time the rebels held much of Judea and struck their own coins. Then Rome crushed them, and Hadrian renamed the province Syria Palaestina.

The Jerusalem Talmud, in tractate Ta’anit (chapter 4), reports that Rabbi Akiva saw Bar Kokhba and applied to him a verse about a star rising from Jacob, calling him the king Messiah. Another sage answered that grass would grow from Akiva’s cheeks before the Messiah came. The same passage later calls the leader Bar Koziba, son of a lie. Tradition kept both the hope and the bitterness.

Akiva had come to study late, the Talmud says, after years as a shepherd. By the time of the revolt he was the leading sage of his generation. Rome outlawed teaching Torah. Akiva kept teaching. Berakhot 61b tells that he was arrested and executed, and that as he died he recited the Shema, the declaration that God is one, drawing out the word one until his breath ended.

In 1960 archaeologists led by Yigael Yadin found letters signed by Shimon bar Kosiba in caves in the Judean desert, along with the belongings of rebels who hid there. For historians these letters are rare direct evidence from the revolt. They show a commander giving orders about supplies and festival branches, not the star or the lie of later memory.

Rome’s victory in 135 emptied much of Judea of Jews and, for a time, banned teaching. The sages who survived regrouped in the north, in the Galilee. Rabbinic tradition names Usha as their first meeting place, then Shefaram, Beit She’arim, Sepphoris and finally Tiberias. Each move is remembered in a list in Rosh Hashanah 31a–b.

The leader of the next generations was Rabbi Judah the Prince, called in the Talmud simply Rabbi, or Rabbeinu HaKadosh, our holy teacher. He held the office of Nasi, was wealthy, and, tradition says, was on friendly terms with a Roman ruler the Talmud calls Antoninus. Historians cannot identify that ruler with certainty.

In about 200 CE Judah the Prince completed the Mishnah, the collected teachings of the sages from Hillel to his own day, arranged by subject in six orders. It is written in Hebrew, in short, clear statements, and it records minority opinions alongside the majority. Rabbinic tradition holds that he wrote down what had been passed on orally; historians debate how much was already written.

Judah the Prince was buried at Beit She’arim, where archaeologists have uncovered a large Jewish cemetery with carved tombs and inscriptions in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. The Mishnah is the base of both Talmuds. The Gemara of the next three centuries is a conversation about it.

Two kinds of sources tell us about the years from 63 BCE to 200 CE. The first were written at the time or close to it: Josephus, Roman historians like Tacitus, the New Testament, inscriptions and coins. The second is the rabbinic literature, the Mishnah and the two Talmuds, whose stories about this period were written down between 200 and 600 CE.

Historians ask of any story: who told it, when, and why? A rabbi’s story recorded four hundred years after the event may preserve true memory. It may also be shaped to teach a lesson, such as the danger of shaming a guest. The coffin story about Yochanan ben Zakkai appears in several versions, and each version tells the request a little differently. That is a sign, historians say, of a story that grew in the telling.

Archaeology gives evidence no one wrote for us. The Arch of Titus confirms the Temple’s treasures were carried to Rome. Bar Kokhba’s coins, stamped with the words for the freedom of Israel, confirm his rebels ran a government. The tombs at Beit She’arim confirm a wealthy, Greek-speaking Jewish community around the Nasi.

The Talmud and the historians do not compete. They answer different questions. Historians ask what happened. The Talmud asks what it means and what a Jew should do about it. A good student of this period keeps both questions open and says which one a given text is answering.

Look at the beginning and the end of this chapter. In 63 BCE the center of Jewish life was a building, the Temple, and the men who served in it, the priests. In 200 CE the center was a book, the Mishnah, and the men who studied it, the sages. No emperor ordered that change. It happened one ruling and one school at a time.

Historians name three steps. First, the Pharisees had already taught that Torah could be studied and practiced anywhere, not only through the Temple. Second, Yavneh gave those teachers a court and a calendar. Third, the Galilee gave them a generation of peace under Judah the Prince, long enough to write it all down.

The Mishnah itself shows the shift. Whole orders deal with Temple offerings and purity, described in the present tense as if the Temple still stood. Rabbinic tradition holds that study of those laws keeps them alive until, in Jewish hope, the Temple is rebuilt. Other tractates deal with blessings, courts, damages and marriage, the daily life of a people without a Temple.

The next chapter follows the sages who read the Mishnah for three hundred more years, in the Galilee and in Babylon. Their conversation is the Gemara. Mishnah and Gemara together are the Talmud. Everything the Talmud says about Hillel, Yochanan and Akiva reaches us through that conversation.

Open the Mishnah and you meet names like Hillel, Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Meir. The rabbis called these teachers Tannaim. One teacher is a tanna. The word comes from an Aramaic root meaning to repeat or to teach. Students learned by repeating their teachers’ words out loud.

The Tannaim lived from about the time of Hillel to about 220 CE. Their era ends with Rabbi Judah the Prince. Rabbinic tradition holds that he gathered their teachings into the Mishnah around 200 CE. Scholars group the Tannaim into generations, like a family tree of teachers and students.

Tannaim also appear in another kind of text. A baraita is a teaching from the time of the Tannaim that was left out of the Mishnah. The Gemara often quotes a baraita to prove a point or to raise an objection. So the voices of the Tannaim echo all through the Talmud.

After the Mishnah was finished, teachers kept studying it. They asked what each line meant and why. The rabbis called these teachers Amoraim. One is an amora, from an Aramaic word meaning to say or to speak. Their discussions became the Gemara.

Amoraim worked in two lands. Some taught in the Land of Israel, mostly in the Galilee. Others taught in Babylonia, the land of today’s Iraq. Scholars often count about five generations of Amoraim in the Land of Israel and about seven or eight in Babylonia.

An amora treated the Mishnah with great respect. He did not usually overrule a tanna. Instead he explained, compared and asked questions. When an amora seemed to disagree with a tanna, the Gemara would ask how he could do so. That habit of careful questioning shapes every page.

Read a line of Gemara and you meet a chain of names. "Rav Yehudah said in the name of Rav." That line tells you two things. Rav Yehudah is speaking, and he is passing on a teaching of his teacher Rav. The Talmud cares who said what.

Titles help too. A sage from the Land of Israel is often called Rabbi. A sage from Babylonia is often called Rav. Rabbi Yochanan taught in Tiberias. Rav Ashi taught in Sura. The title can hint at where a teacher lived.

Why keep all these names? The rabbis taught that repeating a saying in its speaker’s name matters. Pirkei Avot praises the one who does so. Names also let a reader weigh a teaching. A later teacher may know an earlier one’s reasoning and build on it.

Tiberias sits on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. In the 200s CE it became the leading center of Jewish learning in the Land of Israel. Rabbi Yochanan taught there for many years. He died c. 279 CE, and the Gemara quotes him again and again.

Caesarea was a Roman port city on the Mediterranean coast. It was the seat of the Roman governor. Jews, Christians and pagans all lived there. Rabbi Abbahu taught in Caesarea, and the Talmud tells of his dealings with Roman officials.

The discussions in these schools became the Jerusalem Talmud. The name is a bit misleading. Jews were mostly barred from Jerusalem at this time. The work was made in the Galilee and nearby cities. Historians date its closing to c. 400 CE.

Babylonia had a large Jewish community for centuries before the Talmud. In the early 200s CE its learning grew fast. Tradition says Rav returned from studying with Rabbi Judah the Prince and founded an academy at Sura. His colleague Shmuel led the school at Nehardea.

In 259 CE an army from Palmyra, a desert kingdom, destroyed Nehardea. Many of its scholars moved to Pumbedita. Rav Yehudah, a student of both Rav and Shmuel, built the school there. Sura and Pumbedita stayed the two great academies for hundreds of years.

Life in these schools followed the farm year. Twice a year, in the months of Adar and Elul, students gathered for a study month called a kallah. Many were farmers and workers who studied at home the rest of the year. Then they came to learn one tractate together.

Each land made its own Talmud. Each one sets its Gemara around the same Mishnah. The Jerusalem Talmud closed c. 400 CE, in a time of hardship under Rome. Scholars often describe it as shorter and less polished.

The Babylonian Talmud had about another century to grow. It is much longer. It is mostly in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, with Hebrew for the Mishnah and older teachings. Over time it became the Talmud most Jews studied. When people say "the Talmud" today, they usually mean this one.

The two works know each other. Scholars traveled between the lands, and the Babylonian Talmud often reports what "they say in the West," meaning the Land of Israel. Readers today, in yeshivas and universities alike, compare the two to see how a teaching changed as it moved.

Rav and Shmuel lived in the early 200s CE. They are one of the Talmud’s famous pairs. Page after page begins, "Rav said this, and Shmuel said that." Rav had studied in the Land of Israel. Shmuel was known as a doctor and a student of the stars.

The Gemara gives a rule for their arguments. In matters of what is forbidden or allowed, the law follows Rav. In matters of money and property, it follows Shmuel. Each is trusted where his strength lies.

Shmuel also taught a famous principle: "the law of the kingdom is the law." It means Jews must follow a fair law of the government where they live, such as its taxes. Jewish legal writers have debated its limits ever since, and it still comes up in discussions of Jewish life in modern countries.

Rabbi Yochanan led the school in Tiberias. Shimon ben Lakish, called Resh Lakish, had lived a very different life. The Talmud says he was once a bandit. It tells how Rabbi Yochanan saw his strength and urged him to use it for Torah. Resh Lakish became a great scholar.

The two studied as partners. The Talmud says Resh Lakish would raise objection after objection to each point. Rabbi Yochanan answered each one. Through that back-and-forth, the law became clear. This is chavruta, learning in pairs.

The story ends sadly. After a sharp quarrel, Resh Lakish fell ill and died. A new student only agreed with Rabbi Yochanan. The Talmud says Rabbi Yochanan cried out for his old partner, whose questions had made him understand. Readers take from it that a good argument partner is a gift.

Abaye and Rava lived in the early 300s CE. They studied together as young men. Abaye later headed the academy at Pumbedita. Rava taught in the town of Mechoza. Their debates fill hundreds of pages. Students often speak of "the arguments of Abaye and Rava" as the heart of the Talmud.

The Gemara gives a rule for their cases too. The law follows Rava, except in six cases. Students remember those six with a memory word, "Ya’al Kegam," made of the first letters of the cases.

The rule does not make Abaye’s view useless. The Talmud keeps it in full. Students learn his reasoning, because it sharpens Rava’s. Here the Gemara keeps a minority opinion in view, as it does again and again.

In the Land of Israel, Jews lived under Rome. In the 300s CE the Roman Empire became Christian. Laws on Jews grew harsher. The office of the Jewish Patriarch, the leader recognized by Rome, ended c. 425 CE. These pressures help explain why the Jerusalem Talmud closed early.

Babylonia lay in a different empire. From 224 CE it was ruled by the Sasanian Persians. The Persian kings recognized a Jewish leader called the Exilarch. In Aramaic his title is Resh Galuta, "head of the exile." Tradition held that Exilarchs came from King David’s family.

The Exilarch collected taxes, appointed judges and dealt with the king’s court. The rabbis worked with him and sometimes argued with him. The Talmud even tells of Shmuel speaking with the Persian king Shapur. Jewish life under Persia had hard times too, but it often gave room to study.

Who put the Babylonian Talmud together? The Gemara itself gives a hint. It says Rav Ashi and Ravina are "the end of instruction." Tradition reads this to mean they closed the Talmud. Rav Ashi headed Sura and died c. 427 CE. Ravina, the last great amora, died c. 499 CE.

After them came the Savoraim, from an Aramaic word for reasoning. They worked c. 500–600 CE. They added explanations and smoothed the text. Some scholars think the opening passages of certain tractates come from them.

Modern historians see the work as the labor of many hands over many years. Many think unnamed editors shaped much of the give-and-take on each page. Traditional students and academic scholars ask different questions here. Both study the same page closely.

From c. 589 CE the heads of Sura and Pumbedita took the title Gaon, meaning "pride" or "excellence." The Geonim led for over four centuries. Jews in North Africa, Spain and beyond sent them questions about the Talmud.

The Geonim wrote back. These answers are called responsa, or teshuvot. Through them the Babylonian Talmud became the guide for Jewish law far from Babylonia. That is one reason it, and not the Jerusalem Talmud, became the one most studied.

In 987 CE, Rav Sherira Gaon wrote a famous letter to the Jews of Kairouan, in North Africa. They had asked how the Mishnah and Talmud were written. His answer gives many of the dates historians still use. The era of the Geonim is often said to end with his son, Rav Hai Gaon, who died in 1038.