The Reception of the Bible in Rabbinic Judaism: A Study in Complexity

I do not mean to make any claim here regarding the relationship of the “Jewish” and “Christian” communities in the first centuries of the Common Era, and certainly not to claim that the “Christian” community was not Jewish; these questions are and will continue to be the subjects of debate among scholars. I only mean to say that the habits of reading scripture in the early Christian (-Jewish) and Rabbinic (-Jewish) communities were different, and these differences had profound impact on later formations of both Judaism and Christianity.

For an important insight into the differences, see Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 8–9.

The Karaites were (and, in small numbers, still are) Jews who rejected rabbinic authority and claimed to adhere to the authority and simple meaning of scripture alone. Among recent important contributions to scholarship on the Karaites and their relationship to Jews following rabbinic practice, an outstanding example is Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2008).

Albany: State University of New York Press.

Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.

The methodological error described in this paragraph was first highlighted by Jacob Neusner, whose critique changed the direction of virtually everything that was being done in the scholarship of rabbinic literature. An extended, though sometimes polemical, expression of his critique and alternative approach will be found in Making the Classics in Judaism: The Three Stages of Literary Formation (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1989).

Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism 200 BCE-400 CE (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

See Jaffee, pp. 84–99 and Jacob Neusner, Torah: From Scroll to Symbol in Formative Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985).

See b. Gittin 60b and my discussion in Reading the Rabbis: The Talmud as Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 20–32.

For a catalogue of hermeutic techniques employed in the Mishnah, see Alexander Samely, Rabbinic Interpretation of Scripture in the Mishnah (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

And see Jacob Neusner’s analysis, which essentially reiterates the Mishnah’s typology, in Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 221–2.

Neusner’s formulation is this: “To state matters simply: all of Scripture is authoritative. But only some of Scripture is relevant.” (Neusner 1981), 223.

For a fuller discussion of this case and others, see David Kraemer, “The Mishnah,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, v. 4, The Late Roman-Rabbinic Period, ed. Steven T. Katz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 306–8.

David Weiss Halivni, Peshat and Derash: Plain and Applied Meaning in Rabbinic Exegesis (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 8.

See J. Neusner, with William Scott Green, Writing with Scripture: The Authority and Uses of the Hebrew Bible in the Torah of Formative Judaism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989).

For a fuller discussion, see David Kraemer, The Mind of the Talmud (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 146–8.

For a fuller account of the following discussion, see The Mind of the Talmud, 146–56.