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Introduction

The Narration of Temple Ritual as Rabbinic Memory in the Late Second or Early Third Century

When Roman military forces conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple in the year 70, life changed for Judaeans living in the province of Judaea.¹ Aside from the direct consequences of war—the extensive casualties, the imperial appropriation of property, and the greater Roman political domination—Judaeans, or Israelites in rabbinic sources, must have also felt the absence of the Temple. Many Judaeans had regularly visited the Temple in order to participate in its ritual. But now there was no Temple, and the people could no longer make pilgrimage to perform the Temple’s rituals. Priests, whose authority was tied to the Temple, had been powerful figures, but now their power base was gone. In the aftermath of the war of 66–70 CE and the subsequent revolt of 133–35 CE, the structure of Judaean society necessarily changed.²

By the late second and early third century, when members of the early rabbinic group created the Mishnah, the Temple had been destroyed for over a century.³ There was no one still alive who had directly experienced the destruction and concomitant change in ritual life. More than a century after the destruction of the Temple, the normal rhythms of life must have long since resumed for members of the people of Israel living in the Roman province of Syria Palaestina. Post-destruction forms of ritual life had by now taken hold, and the new shape of society had become entrenched.⁴

Despite the passage of time and the disconnection from the physical Temple and its rituals, the early rabbis gave special prominence to Temple ritual when creating the Mishnah.⁵ The Temple and its ritual are indeed one of the Mishnah’s main topics. Of the six “orders” (that is, large sections, composed of “tractates”) of the Mishnah, almost the entire order of Ḳodashim (“sacred offerings”), significant portions of Mo‘ed (“sacred time,” or “daily and festival ritual”) and Zera‘im (“seeds,” or “agricultural rules”), and portions of the other three orders relate laws of how ritual ought to be done in the Temple and narratives about how it was done. The sheer volume of Temple material—including a significant amount that was no longer applicable after the destruction—shows how central the Temple was for the rabbis.

If Temple ritual was no longer relevant in the daily life of Judaeans because, for the most part, it could not be performed, why did the rabbis who created the Mishnah in the late second and early third centuries devote so much of this text to cataloging Temple ritual in detail? A number of answers to this important question have been suggested. Some scholars have held that in presenting narrative descriptions of how rituals used to be performed in the Temple, the rabbis of the Mishnah were simply preserving earlier traditions dating back to Temple times.⁶ This explanation is insufficient, however, especially since—as other scholars have shown—the rabbis have demonstrably invented details of their accounts, small and large. Moreover, numerous legal opinions about how rituals were done or ought to be done are explicitly attributed to rabbis. Even if they inherited earlier traditions, like authors of all texts, they have thoroughly shaped the material and made it their own.⁷

Another possible explanation is that the laws and narratives about Temple ritual are part of the larger rabbinic project of creating and recording the details of an all-encompassing biblically derived legal system. Temple ritual is part of this system, so the rabbis may have been developing their own and perhaps even earlier traditions based on legal reasoning and exegesis. Aside from simply engaging in traditional legal exegesis and a larger project of legal creation, they may have focused specifically on the Temple to preserve and develop Temple ritual practices for the future, when the Temple would be rebuilt—a hope that they themselves express in the Mishnah.⁸

While these explanations may be partly true, they are not overly convincing, especially in the case of the Mishnah’s narrative accounts that do not simply record how rituals ought to be performed. A very different and far more compelling approach was taken by Jacob Neusner in his work on the Mishnah. According to Neusner, the extensive focus on the Temple in the Mishnah was a rabbinic “reaction” to the destruction. The loss of the Temple was still felt keenly, and the rabbis responded to the social disaster of its absence by insisting that “nothing has changed”—that the entire “system of sacrifice and sanctuary” centered on the Temple and described in the Mishnah remained intact.⁹ This explanation may be true in part, too, yet it ignores the long time that passed since the Temple had been destroyed. By the time the Mishnah was created, all Judaeans surely must have assimilated the changes that the destruction wrought.

In contrast to these earlier explanations, I argue that the most compelling and fruitful explanation for why the rabbis who created the Mishnah focused to such a great extent on the Temple in the Mishnah is that the Temple and its ritual were useful to them in their own time, in the late second and early third centuries. Having been born into a Temple-less world, these rabbis were not reacting to the loss of the Temple and the changes in society that resulted from this loss. Nor were they merely preserving traditions or developing the law.¹⁰ My contention is that in writing or talking about the Temple and its rituals, the rabbis who created the Mishnah were arguing for their own authority over post-destruction Judaean law and ritual practice. They were asserting that their own tradition was correct and that all Judaeans should follow their dictates.

According to the evidence of the Mishnah, the rabbis fashioned themselves as legal experts with erudition in and authority over traditional Judaean law. These rabbis claimed to be the authentic purveyors of Judaean tradition and the traditional Judaean way of life, and they believed that all Judaeans should follow their teachings and rulings, especially in ritual practice.¹¹ Within the larger Roman society and within the Judaean subsociety, however, the rabbis who produced the Mishnah were not particularly powerful. Cultural, political, and legal institutions were controlled by Romans, and the rabbis had neither place nor power within the Roman system. Even among Judaeans, the rabbis were not especially important or powerful. Martin Goodman showed nearly three decades ago that in the Mishnah itself it is admitted that the “Jews” did not heed rabbinic directives.¹² The rabbis were not, in this interpretation, a powerful group with authority over the Jews of Roman Palestine; but they hoped to be.¹³

Within this setting, what the rabbis said and wrote about the Temple in the Mishnah, especially in narrative form, helped make an argument for their own authenticity and authority. This argument was thoroughly bound up with their social and cultural realities and with the way they understood themselves as a group. Their memory of past Temple ritual was shaped by the place they hoped to attain for themselves and their traditions, which was itself partly a response to the context of Roman domination. Because the Temple continued to be important outside of rabbinic circles, the rabbis seized on the Temple to argue for their own importance within society, particularly among the multiple overlapping subgroups of Judaeans living in Roman Syria Palaestina at the time.¹⁴

Reading Mishnaic Accounts of Temple Ritual

When recording the details of Temple ritual, the rabbis who created the Mishnah often used a distinct form, what I call the “Temple ritual narrative,” to repeatedly recount how Temple ritual had been performed in the past. In these narratives about past Temple ritual, the rabbinic authors consciously looked back at the past in a way that is distinctive in the Mishnah. As scholars who study representations of the past—sometimes termed “collective memory”—have suggested, past representations such as these are invariably shaped by their authors’ present realities and tend to serve a function in the present, expressing a group sense of self, giving meaning to the present and, in many cases, arguing for the group’s legitimacy and power.¹⁵ The Mishnah’s Temple ritual narratives, differentiated from the rest of the Mishnah, form a discrete interrelated body of Temple material consciously retelling the past; they thus point toward the ways in which the rabbis shaped the past in order to argue for authority in the present. For the rest of this book, these narratives will be the sole focus.

To illustrate the nature of these texts, I consider one example, the narrative of how the first fruits were brought to the Temple by pilgrims from locales in the Land of Israel, in Mishnah Bikkurim 3:2–8:¹⁶

ב’ כיצד מעלים את הביכורים כל העיירות שבמעמד מתכנסות לעירו

שלמעמד ולנים ברחובה שלעיר ולא היו נכנסים לבתים ולמשכים היה

ג’ הקרובים מביאין תאינים ¹⁷הממונה אומ’ קומו ונעלה ציון אל ייי אלהנו

וקרניו ¹⁸וענבים והרחוקים מביאין גרוגרות וצימוקים השור הולך לפניהם

מצופות זהב ועטרה שלזית בראשו החליל מכה לפניהם עד שמגיעים קרוב

לירושלם הגיעו קרוב לירושלם שלחו לפניהם ועיטרו את ביכוריהם ד’

הפחות הסגנים והגיזברים יוצאים לקראתם ולפי כבוד הנכנסין היו

יוצאין וכל בעלי אומניות שבירושלם עומדין לפניהם ושואלין בשלומם

אחינו אנשי מקום פלוני באתם בשלום ה’ החליל מכה לפניהם עד

שמגיעים להר הבית הגיעו להר הבית אפילו אגריפס המלך נוטל הסל

על כתיפו ונכנס עד שמגיע לעזרה הגיע לעזרה ודברו הלוים בשיר

ארוממך ייי כי דליתני ולא שמ’ אויבי לי הגוזלות שעל גבי הסלים

היו עולות ומה שבידן ניתנין לכהנים ו’ עודיהו הסל על כתיפו קורא

מהגדתי היום לייי אלהיך עד שהוא גומר כל הפרשה ר’ יהוד’ או’ עד

ארמי אובד אבי הגיע לארמי אובד אבי מוריד הסל מן כתיפו ואוחזו

בשפתותיו וכהן מניח ידו תחתיו ומניפו וקורא מארמי אובד אבי עד שהוא

גומר כל הפרשה ומניחו בצד המזבח והשתחוה ויצא ז’ בראשונה כל מי

שהוא יודע לקרות קורא וכל מי שאינו יודע לקרוא מקרין אתו נמנעו

מלהביא התקינו שיהו מקרין את מי שהוא יודע ואת מי שאינו יודע ח’

העשירים מביאין את ביכוריהן בקלתות של כסף ושלזהב והעניים מביאין

אותן בסלי נצרים שלערבה קלופה והסלים והביכורים ניתנים לכהנים

(3:2) How do they bring up the first fruits (to the Temple)?

All the towns in the district [ma‘ămād] gather in the main town of the district [‘irō shelma‘ămād] and sleep in the town square. And they did not used to enter the houses. And to those who arose early, the appointed one used to say, “Arise, and let us go up to Zion, to the Lord our God” (Jer. 31:6).

(3:3) Those who live near [from the Temple] bring figs and grapes, and those who live far bring dried figs and raisins.

And the ox goes before¹⁹ them with its horns covered in gold and an olive wreath on its head. The flute [ḥālil] plays before them until they reach near Jerusalem.

When they reached near Jerusalem, they sent out [messengers] ahead of them and wreathed their first fruits.²⁰

(3:4) The officers, chiefs, and treasurers [of the Temple] go out to greet them, and they used to go in accordance with the status of those entering. And all the artisans in Jerusalem rise before [those entering] and greet them, “Our brothers from such-and-such place, you have come in peace.”

(3:5) The flute plays before them until they reach the Temple Mount. When they reached the Temple Mount, even King Agrippa takes the basket on his shoulder and enters. [And the pilgrim continues] until he reaches the Temple courtyard. When he reached the Temple courtyard, the Levites joined in song, “I will exalt You, Lord, for You have raised me up and not allowed my enemies to rejoice over me” (Ps. 30:1).

The pigeons that were on top of the baskets were offered as burnt offerings, and those that were in their hands were given to the priests.

(3:6) While the basket was still on his shoulder, he recites from “I proclaim today to the Lord your God …” (Deut. 26:3) until he completes the entire passage [to Deut. 26:11, or perhaps to the end of the prescribed recitation, mid-26:10].

Rabbi Yehudah [Judah] says: Until “My father was a wandering Aramean” [Deut. 26:5, or perhaps to earlier in the biblical text, until the end of the prescribed recitation in 26:3].

When he reached “My father was a wandering Aramean,” he takes the basket down from his shoulder, grasps it by its lip, and the priest places his hands beneath [the Israelite’s hands]. And he ritually waves them and recites from “My father was a wandering Aramean …” until he finishes the entire passage. And he places it down at the side of the altar, and he bowed and exited.

(3:7) Originally anyone who knew how to recite [in Hebrew] would recite, and anyone who did not know how to recite would be prompted with the words [in Hebrew]. They stopped bringing [first fruits], and they decreed that they should prompt with the words both the one who knows and the one who does not.

(3:8) The wealthy bring their first fruits in silver and gold baskets [ḳĕlātōt], and the poor bring them in wicker baskets [sallei nĕtsārim] made from peeled willow. And the baskets [sallim] and the first fruits were given to the priests.

In the way it is presented, this passage recounts in a detailed manner how, in Temple times, the people of a district would gather together, bring their fruits to Jerusalem, and offer them in the Temple.

A puzzling feature of this and similar narratives, one with which any interpreter of these passages must grapple, is the way that verbs of different tenses are used at the same time. In the opening paragraph, for instance, 3:2, there are five verbs: three are participles—which can function as the present tense and are translated as such here (bring up, gather, sleep)—and two are in a compound tense typically called the “iterative past,” which describes an action done repeatedly and regularly in the past (“used to enter,” “used to say”). Later in the narrative, the perfect tense, which seems to function as a simple past, appears as well (“reached,” “wreathed” [3:3]; “bowed,” “exited” [3:6]). As Yochanan Breuer points out in his seminal article on the tense usage in this type of mishnaic narrative, two fundamental questions are: Why are multiple tenses used? And why are they mixed together in a seemingly arbitrary fashion?²¹ Breuer attempts to read the passages so that the tenses are not mixed arbitrarily; yet I prefer Albeck’s earlier understanding that the tenses vary somewhat arbitrarily. I believe that this mixing was deemed acceptable and natural. In fact, the extensive mixing of the three different tenses, unique to this type of passage, blends the subtle nuances of each tense, giving the sense that these events took place in the past and that they took place regularly, adding a feeling of immanence, and implying that what took place was the law, in an abstract sense.²²

The most significant nuance of the combined use of tenses is the implication of the iterative past, the tense that compounds verbs such as “was” (“to be,” perfect tense) plus “saying” (participle) and which means, in this case, “used to say,” that is, would say every year when the ritual was performed (Bikkurim 3:2). Especially when taken together with the perfect verbs, this usage implies that all the actions described in the narrative took place in the past and that they took place repeatedly and regularly. The participles, too, though they do not have any inherent implication of the past, may take on the meaning of the iterative past. According to the mishnaic grammarian Mordechay Mishor, the participle, particularly when used in a passage together with the iterative past, may be equivalent to it, implying that the events took place regularly in the past.²³ Thus, the opening paragraph of the first-fruits narrative, Bikkurim 3:2, could be translated: “How did they used to bring up the first fruits? All the towns in the district used to gather in the main town of the district and used to sleep in the town square. And they did not used to enter the houses. And to those who arose early, the appointed one used to say, ‘Arise, and let us go up to the Lord our God’” (Jer. 31:6).

Alternatively, the participle, as historical present tense, may be used to give a sense of immanence to the narrative, to make it easier to imagine the events happening, or to give a sense that these events are timeless.²⁴ The participle is used most often in the Mishnah as modal, saying what ought to be done; so these verbs could be intended to convey the law. In context, these are not simply hypothetical laws; so, as I and others have suggested, the ambiguity of the participle adds that these events that happened in the past are also what the law is, what ought to be done in the Temple.²⁵ Overall, the shifting between tenses seems to give multiple shadings to the narrative as a whole: that the ritual occurred regularly and repeatedly in the past; that it is timeless; and that it should or must be performed in a certain way. It may even make the telling more engaging.

Regardless of the precise way that one interprets the mixing of tenses, it is undeniable that the passage refers to events of the past. The rabbinic authors, living long after the destruction, are consciously looking back and saying what used to occur in the Temple in the past. In addition to looking back at the past through the combined use of verbs, four more elements tend to mark Temple ritual narratives as distinct from the rest of the Mishnah and link them to one another into a unique body of mishnaic material.²⁶ These are: 1) their content—rituals done in the past in the Temple or near the Temple, or in the Court; 2) their form—narratives (according to some definitions of the term) describing a series of interconnected actions that together form a whole; 3) recurring conventional phrases or plot elements; and 4) in many cases, the use of an introductory formula that introduces the narrative and contains the word כיצד (kēitsad, “how so?”). The first of these characteristics is relatively obvious. The first-fruits narrative—like the narratives about the Passover offering or the daily sacrifice in the Temple, the narrative about the Day of Atonement ritual, and the narrative about the cutting and offering of the barley grain ‘ōmer—focuses on the details of a particular ritual that once took place in the Temple.²⁷

The second feature, the narrative nature of the passages, is less obvious and somewhat controversial. Some would hesitate to call these texts narratives because, by their very nature, they are not about specific one-time occurrences that happened to particular individuals, and so cause and effect play almost no role. The characters are relatively flat because, for the most part, they are generic roles such as Israelite, Temple officials, and priest. Yet, as Moshe Simon-Shoshan has forcefully argued, though these may differ from some types of narratives in that they lack what he calls “specificity,” they do have a second fundamental feature of narrative, what he calls “dynamism.” Having dynamism, in his view, means that they describe “transition, transformation, and change … rather than stasis.”²⁸ Many narrative theorists break down this feature of narrative even further, to a more fundamental level. As H. Porter Abbott writes: “Simply put, narrative is the representation of an event or a series of events.”²⁹ Narratives describe something or a number of things that happen. This, however, may be too basic a definition, so others offer a slightly more expansive definition: narratives tell of a “succession of events” that unfold chronologically in time.³⁰ Gerald Prince adds further key characteristics that are linked to a narrative’s “dynamism”: “in a ‘true’ narrative as opposed to the mere recounting of a random series of changes of state, these situations and events also make up a whole, a sequence the first and last major terms of which are partial repetitions of each other, a structure having—to use Aristotle’s terminology—a beginning, a middle, and an end.”³¹

Though the Temple ritual narratives lack the specificity of many narratives, they have these other key elements of narrative. The various details of the first-fruits ritual, in our example, form a series of interrelated events that unfold in time and together make a whole. The narrative begins in the town with the pilgrims gathering together and concludes in the Temple, once the fruits have been given. In the view of many contemporary narrative theorists, this is sufficient to call them narratives.

The purpose of defining these passages as narrative is not merely to apply an essentialist narrative label, which would not be especially interesting. Rather, by identifying the narrative characteristics that these texts possess—their narrativity—we can see how the particular way in which the Mishnah describes Temple ritual tends to link these passages to one another intertextually and distinguish them from other passages in the Mishnah.³² As Simon-Shoshan argues, almost all segments of Mishnah can be differentiated by their degree of narrativity. In his view, this means the degree to which they possess specificity and dynamism. Building on this, and drawing on more recent theoretical work on the concept, I suggest that narrativity is not merely a product of two narrative characteristics, but of the degree to which a text has or does not have a whole range of narrative features.³³ Most prominent among the Temple ritual narratives’ features are the fundamental telling of a sequential, chronologically unfolding series of events with a beginning, middle, and end, and the unique combining of the three different verb tenses to recount events that took place regularly and repeatedly in the past, as I have described.³⁴

The third feature of the Temple ritual narratives that makes them distinct is the use of conventional words or phrases. In the first-fruits narrative, the phrase השתחוה ויצא, “he bowed down and exited” (3:6), is a stock phrase that appears frequently in the long narrative of the daily offering in Tamid. Similarly, the character King Agrippa (3:5) appears in the narrative in Soṭah. 7:8—and nowhere else in the Mishnah. In other narratives, the expression תקעו הריעו ותקעו, “they blew a tĕḳi‘āh blast, a tĕru‘āh blast, and a tĕḳi‘āh blast [on trumpets]” appears even more regularly (Pesaḥim 5:5; Sukkah 4:5, 4:9, and 5:4; Tamid 7:3; and a related phrasing in Ta‘anit 2:5). Aside from the recurring words or phrases that appear only in Temple ritual narratives, there are characters, objects, and places that are also conventional elements of the genre. These include Israelites, priests, various Temple officials, “the appointed one” (ממונה), the Temple Mount, the altar, gold implements, sacrificial animals, and musical instruments.³⁵ Recurring characters, places, and objects help create the imagined narrative world shared by the various passages, one in which the Temple still exists and its rituals are still carried out.

The fourth key distinguishing feature of Temple ritual narratives is the use of an introductory formula containing the word כיצד (kēitsad), “how so?” This feature does not appear consistently in these passages nor is it unique to the genre, yet it marks many of the Temple ritual narratives as distinct from and embedded in the surrounding text by announcing the topic of the narrative that follows in a manner that is technically unnecessary.³⁶ In this way, it makes the Temple ritual narrative similar to other mishnaic forms, particularly the list and the ma‘ăśeh, the “happening,” or brief story about something that occurred involving a rabbi.³⁷ In both these cases, the textual pericope (passage) is marked as a distinct unit of text by an introductory formula: in the case of the list, by the words אלו (elu) or יש (yesh), meaning “these are …” or “there are …”; and in the example of the ma‘ăśeh, by the word מעשה (ma‘ăśeh)—usually followed by the particles ב (bē-), ש (she-) or ו (wē-), which indicate the person or people involved and the events or actions that happened. In each of these different forms, the use of typical introductory formulas suggests that the rabbinic authors consciously saw the ma‘ăśeh, the list, and the Temple ritual narrative as distinct subgenres within the Mishnah. Without additional evidence outside of the passages themselves, it is difficult to be certain, though, whether the rabbis understood these passages as forming a “genre,” especially in the case of the Temple ritual narrative, where the formula is applied less consistently and where the key formulaic word is also used for other purposes.

Regardless of whether the rabbinic authors consciously treat the Temple ritual narratives as a genre, the four features common to these narratives, which I have outlined, show that these passages are related to one another, are different from the other types of passages in the Mishnah, and are distinct from and thus embedded in the Mishnah’s running legal discourse. These passages, in other words, function as a genre.³⁸ Together, the passages of this genre form a discrete body of interrelated Temple material that consciously represents Temple ritual procedures as events of the past.

Temple Ritual Narratives as Collective Memory

Because Temple ritual narratives look back at the past, it is appropriate to think of these texts as rabbinic collective memories of past events—or, more accurately, literary representations of rabbinic collective memory—which argue for the importance and authority of rabbis. In drawing on the theoretical study of collective memory, I do not intend to import a foreign concept to an ancient text but, as Jeffrey Olick puts it, to use this theory “as a starting point for inquiry” that opens up interpretive possibilities.³⁹ The term itself, “collective memory” (and variations), refers to the notion that a group of people can share a common conception of what occurred in the past.⁴⁰ Like individuals, who can look back and recollect events that they have experienced in the past or even the events that have been conveyed to them by others, groups can also—in a figurative sense—remember, or “reconstruct a shared past.”⁴¹ And as Maurice Halbwachs originally observed, groups tend to shape and construct this shared conception of the past in accordance with the present needs and realities of the group.⁴²

One important implication of Halbwachs’s insight is that groups do not invent the past for insidious reasons, merely to aggrandize themselves or push their own ideology or agenda. Sometimes groups consciously engage in such propaganda; yet, for the most part, group memory is like individual memory. It is fallible and necessarily selective. Groups shape the past because this is in the nature of looking back and relating to the events of the past. And their motivations in usefully shaping the past are largely unconscious.⁴³

Perhaps more important, the concept of memory laid out by Halbwachs implies that there is a direct relationship between a group’s present circumstances and the way in which it shapes the past. The past, as Barry Schwartz puts it, is a “mirror” or a “model” of the group in that it reflects the group’s “needs, problems, fears, mentality, or aspirations” or, more generally, its “social reality.”⁴⁴ The group’s construction of the past is fundamentally shaped by these components of its present and so reflects them. The past, however, is not merely reflective of the present; it also serves a function for the group in the present. A group’s memory gives meaning to the past because that past leads teleologically to the group’s present and gives meaning to the present because the present is so thoroughly rooted in the past.⁴⁵ In its collective memory of the past, a group expresses its shared identity and—in a subtle manner—its claim for power.⁴⁶ This approach to “memory” that I have described provides a useful interpretive paradigm that highlights the choices that the rabbis have made in recounting the ritual of the past; and it stresses that these choices help lay a rabbinic claim for power.

Temple Ritual Narratives as Discourse

Another theoretical framework driving my contention that the Mishnah’s ritual narratives argue for rabbinic authority is the concept of “discourse” set out by Michel Foucault and developed in a number of ways by subsequent theorists. According to Foucault and his scholarly followers, groups (or larger societies) produce “discourses”—coherent bodies of writing, speech, and practices pertaining to a given topic (such as mental illness, sexuality, femininity)—that can have a real impact on the ways in which people think and act.⁴⁷ Undergirded by “discursive frameworks”—rules or “structures which make those statements make sense and give them their force”—discourses help form what Foucault calls “knowledge” or particular ways of thinking about the given topic; they shape individuals’ understanding of what is true and what is not; and they have concrete effects on behavior and social relations.⁴⁸ It is the last of these consequences that are of particular interest in this book, for it is here that discourses have “effects of power.”⁴⁹ As Foucault puts it, “relations of power which permeate, characterise, and constitute the social body” are “established, consolidated, [and] implemented [through] the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of discourse.”⁵⁰ Discourse, paradoxically, both shapes power relations and is shaped by them. Moreover, discourse—or perhaps competing, interrelated discourses—may be the site of resistance to and contestation for power. As feminist and postcolonial theorists have shown, those at the margins of power may employ discourse as a strategy of asserting their own agency. Discourse, therefore, can function as a means of negotiating power relations.⁵¹

In the Mishnah, the sheer abundance of Temple material shows that the rabbis were heavily invested in speaking or writing about the Temple—in other words, that they were creating discourse about the Temple. Building on Foucault and those in his tradition, I suggest that the production of this discourse was part of a rabbinic desire to establish and negotiate relations of power, namely, to assert their authority over other members of the people of Israel, or Judaeans, living in Roman Palestine. It is not clear to what extent the text of the Mishnah, whether in written or oral form and whether conveyed precisely or filtered somehow through the process of communication, was conveyed to those outside of the rabbinic group. Yet even if parts of the Mishnah—and the Temple discourse they contain—circulated only in limited ways, the very existence of rabbinic Temple discourse reveals a desire on the part of the rabbis to create such “effects of power” for themselves.

Rabbinic Temple Memory/Discourse in the Context of Competing Temple Memories/Discourses

At the same time that the rabbis were looking back at the Temple ritual of the past and creating “Temple discourse,” other groups in the Roman Empire were producing discourse about the Jerusalem Temple that similarly expressed their own identities, argued for the legitimacy and primacy of their own ideas and practices, and expressed unique and competing claims for power. The very difference between each way of talking about the Temple points to the ways in which each group shaped the memory of the Temple and to the relationship between the particular ways of discussing the Temple and each group’s unique place in society. The rabbis, in producing their own Temple discourse and in remembering the Temple and its ritual in their own way, were laying a claim for legitimacy and authority among many competing claims.

Since the Temple and its ritual were a focal point for the competing claims of a variety of Judaeans, Christians, and Romans (as well as others who cannot be classified so easily) living in the Roman Empire in the second and early third centuries, they provide a fruitful lens for scrutinizing the cultural negotiation that was taking place between these different groups. They show, moreover, the complex and dynamic nature of this larger society.

Within this social and cultural landscape, the rabbis attempted to carve out their own particular niche, believing that their authority and their understanding of Judaean tradition should be recognized by all. When they looked back at the Temple and its ritual, the rabbis of the Mishnah remembered it in a way that reflected how they understood themselves and their place in society and in a way that argued for the centrality of rabbinic legal opinion and the rabbinic version of the Judaean way of life.

Plan of the Book

In Chapter 1 of this book, I establish the context for reading Temple ritual narratives as memory and discourse. I argue that the rabbis asserted for themselves a legal role within Judaean society, one fashioned in the image of the Roman jurist and shaped by the political realities of Roman Syria Palaestina. By portraying themselves as jurists of Judaean ritual law, the rabbis asserted authority over traditional practices and the traditional way of life—against the competing claims of leaders or authorities to whom other groups of Judaeans would likely have turned.

Within this political and social context, and in light of the way the rabbis portrayed themselves and imagined their role in society, I set out to demonstrate three ways in which the Mishnah’s Temple ritual narratives make specific claims for rabbinic authority. In Chapter 2, I show that the rabbis refashioned the earlier institution of the council into a powerful Court to which they gave ultimate authority over Temple ritual. They constructed this Court and its members as their predecessors from Temple times from whom they inherited their tradition and authority. Imagining the past in a way that mirrored the present (or the desired present), the rabbis essentially invented this Court, giving it a hybrid legal-ritual authority something like the power that they wished to have themselves. The invented Court of the past thus helped justify and authorize the hybrid legal-ritual role that they claimed for themselves in the present.

In Chapter 3, I argue that the narratives buttress rabbinic authority not only in content but also in form. The narrative form, in the specific ways that it conveys the chronologically unfolding “events” of Temple rituals, helps support the narratives’ truth claims as well as the authoritativeness of the rabbis over the past. The narratives’ verisimilitude, iterativity, and cohesiveness, as well as the seemingly intrusive rabbinic comments throughout the narratives, further the authority claims embedded in the rabbinic memory of Temple ritual at the level of the telling.

In Chapter 4, I contend that an additional way in which Temple ritual narratives argue for rabbinic authority is by constructing the Temple’s sacred space. By repeatedly imagining ritualized entry into and exit from the Temple—which constructs the Temple’s boundaries within the narrative world and in the minds of those who read or heard the narrative—and by creating a map of the Temple in the architectural description of Middot, the rabbis assert the centrality of their own version of Temple ritual practice, of their predecessors, the Court, and ultimately of themselves.

Chapter 5 returns to the social and cultural context of Roman Palestine and the larger Roman world. The rabbinic discourse about the Temple was not the only one. Other groups, including non-rabbinic Judaeans, Romans, and Christians, also continued to talk about the Temple (or, more abstractly, Jerusalem or Judaea) long after its destruction. The rabbis, in remembering the Temple in their unique way, were asserting the primacy of their version of what it means to be Judaean, the authority of their version of the traditional way of life, and the power to determine how all Judaeans would follow the traditional way of life.

Together, the chapters of this book argue that the memory of the Temple and its ritual and the discourse about Temple ritual put forth a claim for rabbinic power and authority. Moreover, the ways in which this memory—in the Temple ritual narrative genre—make an argument for the rabbis are firmly bound up with the social and cultural realities of the time and with the way the rabbis situated themselves within the larger Roman and Judaean societies. The Temple and the past were useful for the rabbis, and they exert a good deal of creative energy imagining the Temple in ways that ultimately argue for a Judaean society remade in their own image.