Whence the Rabbis? From coherent description to fragmented reconstructions

Abstract

Much of the contemporary scholarship on the origins of the earliest rabbinic movement and of its literature is hampered by a problematic circularity: conceptual and methodological constructs closely derived from what the ancient evidence itself says about the origins of Rabbinism and its documents become the basis for analyses of the very same evidence. Appropriately constructed theoretical approaches and related methodologies should provide the basis for elucidating more than one body of evidence, or they have no elucidating power at all. However, since any theoretical construct will highlight some aspects of the phenomenon under study at the expense of others, the use of any one approach will necessarily provide an incomplete account of the community studied. With these limitations in mind, this article elaborates a socio-rhetorical approach to the study of the Mishnah, the earliest extant document of the nascent rabbinic guild, in an effort to elucidate the character and origins of the early rabbinic guild. The article views the literary traits of Mishnah as a socially legitimated and authoritative rhetoric, reflecting and modelling a guild expertise core to the social formation of the early rabbinic guild. In broaching the question of whence such guild expertise in second- and early third-century Judea and Galilee, the work suggests that the immediate institutional origins are in the bureaucracy of the national and cultic administration of the Jerusalem Temple and of its High Priesthood, institutions eliminated by the Romans in 70 C.E.