Too often the issue of the historicity of ancient rabbinic stories is assumed to be “yes or no”: either they are historically accurate or they are not. For me, however, the issue is never all or nothing, but rather of differing degrees of probability. When are these sources more likely to yield usable historical information and when are they less likely? And since it is extremely unlikely that we can accept any Talmudic narrative’s recounting of events as wholly accurate, are we permitted to translate the narrative’s distortions into reliable history, and if so, how?
Despite the claims of Yonah Fraenkel, the historian need not wait until the literary critic has completed his or her work to begin their analysis.[1] Most frequently, the historian and the literary critic should proceed simultaneously, and the tools of literary criticism and historical analysis mutually reinforce one another. A story in b. Baba Batra supports this claim:
Herod was the slave of the house of the Hasmoneans. He lusted after a Hasmonean girl.
One day he heard a voice say, “Every slave that rebels now will succeed.”
Herod killed all of his masters but left [alive; Hebrew: shi’arah] the girl.
When the girl saw that Herod wanted to marry her [Hebrew: le-minsevah, literally, “to take her”],
she went up to the roof and cried out. She said, “Whoever says ‘I am descended from the
Hasmonean house’ is a slave, for I am the only Hasmonean left and I am about to fall from the roof
to the ground.”
Herod hid her for seven years in honey. Some say he had sex with her, others say he didn’t have sex
with her. Those who say he had sex with her think he hid her to satisfy himself sexually. Those who
say he didn’t have sex with her think he hid her so that people would say he married
[nasav, literally, he “took”] a princess.
Herod said, “Who interprets, ‘Be sure to set as king over yourselves one of your people’ (Deut
17:15), thereby excluding me? The rabbis.”
Herod killed all of the rabbis. He left [alive; shi’arei] Baba ben Buta to take [lemisav] counsel from
him. He crowned him with a garland of lizards and put out his eyes. One day Herod, in disguise,
came and sat before Baba.
Herod said to Baba, “Did you see what that evil slave did?”
Baba said to Herod, “What shall I do to him?”
Herod said to Baba, “Curse him.”
Baba said to Herod, “It is written, ‘Even in your thoughts don’t curse a king’” (Eccles 10:20).
Herod said to Baba, “He is not a king.”
Baba said to Herod, “Even if he is only a rich man, it is written, ‘and do not curse the rich man in
private’” (Eccles 10:20).
Herod said to Baba, “And if he is a prince it is written, ‘Do not curse a prince of your people’ (Exod
22:27), this refers to a prince who behaves like one of your people, and Herod does not behave like
one of your people.”
Baba said to Herod, “I am afraid of him.”
Herod said to Baba, “No one will tell Herod, for you and I sit here alone.”
Baba said to Herod, “It is written, ‘For a bird of the air may carry the utterance, and a winged
creature may repeat the word’” (Eccles 10:20).
Herod said to Baba, “I am he. Had I known that the rabbis were so discreet, I would not have
killed them. What is my solution?”
Baba said to Herod, “You extinguished the light of the world, the rabbis, as it is written, ‘For
commandment is a lamp and the Torah is light’ (Prov 6:23), go and busy yourself with the light
of the world, the Temple, as it is written, ‘And all the nations shall be illuminated by the Temple’”
(Isa 2:2).
Herod said to Baba, “I am afraid of the government.”
Baba said to Herod, “Send a messenger to the government. The messenger will travel for a year,
tarry for a year, and return for a year. In the meantime you can tear down the Temple and build it
up again.”
Herod did this.
The Romans sent to him, “If you haven’t torn it down already, don’t tear it down. And if you have
already torn it down, don’t rebuild it. And if you have already torn it down and rebuilt it, those who
who do evil, after they do they seek counsel. If your weapons are upon you, your genealogical scroll
is here. Herod, slave, your free country becomes a colony.”
This narrative is of interest to me not because I think it precisely reflects historical reality, but because it is susceptible to literary and historical analysis. It contains two vivid scenes: the first dealing with Herod and the Hasmoneans and the second with Herod and the rabbis. These two scenes in several respects repeat one another, and I will attempt to show that this twin narrative structure is an important key to the story’s message. The first scene has some striking features in common with Josephus’s account of the death of Mariamme, Herod’s Hasmonean wife, suggesting that at least portions of the scene are very early (at least first century CE), non-rabbinic, and Palestinian (or “western” vis-à-vis Babylonia, i.e., deriving from somewhere in the Roman Empire). Supporting this claim is the fact that an undefined but apparently well-known sexual perversion referred to as “the act of Herod” is attested in diverse contexts in Tannaitic literature, and echoes of it are also recorded by Josephus.
The second scene, between Herod and the rabbis, recapitulates the first in several ways. Herod’s actions against the Hasmoneans parallel those he takes against the rabbis, a connection strengthened by linguistic parallels. In both scenes, Herod “arises and kills” all those who stand in his way. In the first scene “he leaves [shi’arah]” one survivor (the girl), and in the second scene “he leaves [shi’arei]” one survivor, Baba ben Buta. In both instances, Herod needs to establish a close, personal relationship with the lone survivor to strengthen his claim to the throne. In the first scene, Herod wants to “take her in marriage [leminsevah],” and in the second scene Herod wants to “take counsel [lemisav ezah],” with the sage. The narrative parallels the plight of a woman facing an unwanted marriage to a tyrant, a nauseatingly close relationship with a man who murdered her entire family but who needs her to prop up his claim to the throne or to satisfy his sexual needs, with the predicament of a rabbi asked to serve as personal counselor to the same tyrant, to consort with a miscreant who murdered his colleagues, and who keeps him alive to exploit his wisdom and support his claim to the throne.
Further strengthening the connection between rabbi and girl, Baba is blind and therefore physically vulnerable, and Herod quite literally pierces Baba, putting out his eyes and thereby feminizing him. In addition, Baba and the rabbis are described as discreet, zanitu, a word typically used to describe the rabbinic ideal of behavior in a woman.
Given these striking commonalities, the differences between the two scenes stand out all the more sharply. The girl publicly declares Herod’s slave status from the rooftops; Baba refuses to curse Herod even in his thoughts. Baba allows Herod to take counsel with him, and the result is the building of the Temple and the Romans’ public proclamation of Herod’s slave status. In contrast, the Hasmonean girl refuses to have anything to do with Herod, and instead climbs up to the roof and announces to the world that Herod is an illegitimate pretender to the throne. She throws herself to the ground, committing suicide rather than be taken marriage by the despicable slave.
If the story ended with the girl’s suicide, we would have a standard tale of a hero who kills himself or herself in order to escape sexual violation at the hands of a terrible villain. These tales arouse our sympathy for the unfortunate victim and our admiration for his or her courageous choice of a noble death in preference to a degraded life. Our story does not end with the girl’s heroic death, however. Her suicide does not lead to her canonization as hero, but to Herod’s realization that he must take further action to prop up his flimsy claim to the throne. He does so by dishonoring the Hasmonean maiden in death and murdering the rabbis. The audience’s expectations are reversed. The trope of the courageous suicide does not yield the expected results, since the noble suicide ends in disaster.
For the Hasmonean girl and the rabbi, the natural response is to run away in disgust, which is in essence what the girl hopes to do by committing suicide. In the end she cannot run away, and the story teaches that a distastefully close relationship with a horrible but powerful ruler is preferable to a dignified death.
In addition to the story’s susceptibility to literary interpretation, it merits historical analysis. The story claims that a rabbi, Baba ben Buta, bests the murderous, sexually perverted King Herod, convincing him to repair the Temple and manipulating events so that Herod’s Roman sponsors reduce Judaea to the status of a colony, effectively stripping Herod of his status as a king. This detail corresponds to what we know about Rome’s eventual decision to force the Herodians to step down in favor of Roman-appointed governors. The story also relates that the Hasmoneans, kings and priests, spectacularly fail on both counts. On the one hand, the Hasmoneans are Herod’s innocent victims and they therefore seem deserving of sympathy; on the other, they lack the wherewithal to foil the wicked usurper, Herod, and to trick him into doing their will, which only the rabbis accomplish. The Hasmonean dynasty comes to an end, leaving Herod stronger and more murderous than ever. The story accurately depicts Herod seizing control from the Hasmonean dynasty, and propping up his claim to the throne by taking in marriage a Hasmonean princess, although the Talmud exaggerates Herod’s depravity by depicting her as dead at the time of his “marriage” to her.
This story was most likely not propaganda addressed by rabbis to non-rabbis. Rather, the story was designed to strengthen the conviction of the rabbis and their students that rabbis were best suited to lead the Jewish people; and/or an expression of Babylonian rabbis’ extreme myopia, their penchant for visualizing the past through the prism of their own experience. These are all historical facts, not history as it “actually happened,” but accounts of events filtered through distorted lenses, that rabbis and their students wished had happened, or of events that yielded a message about the past that the rabbis wished to impart. Information about attitudes, no less than depiction of events as they actually happened, is the stuff of history, although the type of historical conclusions we draw will obviously be very different depending on whether we interpret the evidence as information about attitudes or a depiction of events as they actually happened.
Other historical information preserved in the story includes its characterization of Herod as a slave, reflecting the fact that, according to Josephus, Herod descended from Edomites, who the rabbis regarded as unfit for marriage to Jews. In addition, the story depicts Herod as a murderous tyrant, which corresponds to Josephus’s depiction of him, and the story’s portrayal of Herod’s sick fascination with the Hasmonean maiden after her death corresponds to Josephus’s portrayal of Herod’s morbid sexual preoccupation with Mariamme, a Hasmonean princess, after he murdered her. And the story’s depiction of Herod’s role in repairing the Temple also corresponds to Josephus’s portrayal of him.
In addition, several Babylonian rabbinic traditions express disapproval of Hasmoneans, a dynasty that came to an end in first century CE Palestine, and the story analyzed above is one example of this hostility. This leads to the question of why Babylonian rabbis, operating from a substantial chronological and geographical remove, cared enough about the Hasmoneans to polemicize against them.
A story from b. Kiddushin 70a-b illuminates this point. A Nehardean man visiting Pumbedita insults Rav Yehudah, in response to which Rav Yehudah has him publicly declared a slave. The case comes before Rav Nahman in Nehardea, where the Nehardean man protests that he can hardly be considered a slave since he is of royal Hasmonean descent. Rav Yehudah responds by citing a tradition that states explicitly that anyone claiming Hasmonean descent in this day and age is actually a slave. Rav Nahman upholds Rav Yehudah’s ruling regarding the man’s slave status, and as a result, “several marriage contracts are torn up in Nehardea” by people who thought they were marrying into a royal family but were actually marrying slaves, rendering their offspring genealogically tainted.
The story portrays an attempt by rabbis to discredit self-proclaimed Hasmoneans in Amoraic Babylonia. While certainty on this issue is not possible, this portrayal appears to reflect social reality, given the anti-Hasmonean sources we find elsewhere in the Bavli, in contrast to the pro-Hasmonean or neutral sources we find in Palestinian rabbinic traditions. The story reflects the fact that some Jews in Babylonia, hundreds of years after the Hasmonean dynasty came to an end, claimed descent from Hasmonean royalty and used this claim to enhance their position in Babylonian Jewish society. Babylonian rabbis opposed this claim, although it is doubtful they did so with the complete public success depicted by the story in b. Kiddushin 70a-b. Instead, this story probably reflects a healthy amount of rabbinic wishful thinking, rather than an accurate portrayal of popular response to the rabbis’ efforts to discredit their enemies.
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Given my interest in narratives and in history, it will be helpful to examine what literary and historical questions remain to be answered in the study of the rabbis of late antiquity. One critically important contribution of my work is its detailed description of one feature of Sasanian Persia appropriated by Babylonian rabbis: their openness to traditions and literary motifs from outside Persia, including many traditions deriving from the eastern provinces of the Roman empire. In addition, the ensuing discussion describes another way in which Babylonian rabbinic society appropriated a prominent feature of Persian society: Babylonian Jewish society, like Persian society, was strictly hierarchical, with relatively little contact between diverse groups.
Babylonian rabbis, for example, are depicted in the Talmud as having very little informal contact with Jews who were below them in status. With Jews who were above them in status they are depicted as seeking out contact, since such contact could serve to enhance their positions in society. They are also depicted as seeking out contact with non-Jews who could enhance their social status, such as Persian government officials.
By the term “informal contact,” I refer to chance encounters between rabbis and non-rabbis along the road, situations in which rabbis and non-rabbis attend one another’s parties and wedding celebrations, and have dinner together in casual encounters at one another’s homes. Formal contact, however, which we do encounter in narratives about Babylonian rabbis and non-rabbis, routinely depicts interaction between them when rabbis deliver public lectures and non-rabbis are described as in attendance, and when rabbis act as judges and non-rabbis come before them for judgment.
In Palestinian rabbinic compilations, in contrast, rabbis are depicted as engaging in both formal and informal contact with non-rabbis. Babylonian rabbinic compilations likewise portray Palestinian rabbis engaging in informal contact with non-rabbinic Jews. Many scholars argue that all or virtually all traditions in the Bavli reflect a Babylonian perspective. My own research, in contrast, yields a significantly different conclusion: while it is undeniable that many traditions in the Bavli that purport to derive from Palestine actually reflect a Babylonian perspective, other purportedly Palestinian traditions in the Bavli, either in whole or in part, reflect a Palestinian perspective.
This distinction between Palestinian and Babylonian traditions is important for my purposes because the inward-looking character of Babylonian rabbis—the greater tendency of Babylonian rabbis to interact only with others of their own social stratum—is linked to the tendency of Persian society to be characterized by relatively rigid divisions between classes and relatively strict hierarchical divisions between diverse groups. In contrast, the greater tendency of Palestinian rabbis to interact with non-rabbis, even non-rabbis from whom they had nothing to gain socially or economically, corresponds to the tendency of Roman society to be relatively porous, both upwardly and downwardly, and for interaction between groups of different status to be relatively common.
We see, therefore, a very concrete way in which Babylonian rabbis were affected by their position in Sasanian Persian society, along with a very concrete way in which Palestinian rabbis were affected by their position in Roman society.
Interestingly, we see a marked change in the portrayal of Babylonian rabbis beginning in the fourth century CE. At this time, some Babylonian rabbis continue to be portrayed as socially aloof, as keeping apart from non-rabbinic Jews from whom they had nothing to gain, but we also find them portrayed as socially integrated with non-rabbis, just as Palestinian rabbis had been portrayed throughout the third century CE. One possible reason for this change is the mid-third-century incursions of King Shapur I deep into Roman territory. Shapur I seized pagan, Christian, and Jewish prisoners of war and settled them in eastern Syria, Mesopotamia, and western Persia. These prisoners brought with them the culture, literature, and modes of behavior of eastern Roman provincials and transplanted it into the homeland of the Babylonian rabbis. These cultural phenomena began to achieve literary expression in Babylonian rabbinic literature in the fourth century CE, and this pattern of conquest, imprisonment, and resettlement in the Persian west and the Syrian east repeated itself several times over the next two or three centuries, such that the Bavli continued to depict Babylonian rabbis according to what had earlier been Palestinian rabbinic patterns. This is actually the continuation of a pattern discernible for centuries prior to the Sasanian period, practiced already by Assyrian and Babylonian kings for millennia.
Perhaps it will be objected that I myself documented several detailed cases in which Babylonian rabbis are depicted as deeply embedded in the surrounding cultural milieu. How, then, can I reconcile that fact with the research described in detail above, according to which Babylonian rabbis are depicted as aloof from Jewish society when this society has nothing to offer them? In other words, my research into the analysis of stories yields a picture of Babylonian rabbis and the people that surrounded them: Aramaic speaking Palestinian rabbis, pagans, and Christians, and Syriac speaking Christians and pagans as inhabiting a common cultural sphere, as indicated by the fact that they cite many of the same traditions, motifs, catch phrases, stereotypical literary phrases, and polemically criticize one another or the fundamentals of one another’s beliefs, or occasionally support one another or respond to one another’s critiques, and use one another as a “tool to think with.” How do we explain the significant amount of evidence pointing to the deeply embedded nature of the Babylonian rabbis in their surrounding culture, versus the no less substantial evidence of the separation of the Babylonian rabbis from their surrounding cultures?
I believe the answer lies in the fact that the non-integrative nature of the Babylonian rabbis is due to their tendency, noted above, to avoid informal contact with Babylonian Jews who were below them in status and who therefore had nothing to offer them socially or economically. The (seemingly) opposing tendency of Babylonian rabbis to exhibit integration into their surroundings in other cases was due to the fact that in those other cases, non-rabbinic Jewish, or even non-Jewish, traditions might have impressed the rabbis with their loftier pedigree. We know very little about the channels through which traditions and motifs that originated in the Roman East and in other literatures and cultures surrounding the Babylonian rabbis made their way to Mesopotamia and were incorporated into the Babylonian Talmud. Apparently the rabbis sometimes know that these traditions originated in non-Jewish sources, such that we have an example of the esteem in which Babylonian rabbis sometimes held non-Jewish culture.
In other words, the non-integrative character of the Babylonian rabbis is demonstrated by proofs based on one set of sources, namely (1) narratives that depict Babylonian rabbis interacting with Babylonian non-rabbis in one fashion and Palestinian rabbis interacting with Palestinian non-rabbis in a clearly different fashion, as opposed to proofs based on a different set of sources: (2) Babylonian rabbinic narratives with clear parallels in Christian, pagan, and non-rabbinic Jewish sources from Mesopotamia and the eastern Roman provinces. The channels through which the Bavli appropriated the latter sources, therefore, were different from the channels through which the Bavli appropriated the former sources, and perhaps the Babylonian rabbis knew enough about the latter sources to conclude that they derived from circles that had something to offer the rabbis socially or economically, and carried with them a special cultural cachet.
The stories examined above, therefore, are not disinterested reports of actual events. There were several similarities between the rabbinic accounts and what we know from historical sources, most notably Josephus—although Josephus himself is often unreliable and simply noting a similarity between Josephus and the rabbis does not establish the historicity of either account. The issue once again is not whether or not the Talmud is a useful source of historical study, but how we can most effectively mine it for the abundant historical information it undoubtedly contains.
Our understanding of the precise relationship between the culture of the Babylonian rabbis and that of surrounding cultures is based on detailed analysis of an extremely small number of parallel traditions. It is premature to draw firm conclusions based on such a small number of traditions, but we should not fall victim to the temptation to accept as parallels traditions whose similarities to one another are only superficial. There is no substitute for the patient gathering of powerfully similar texts, even if the result is painfully deferred gratifications, or even no satisfactory conclusion whatsoever.
Richard Kalmin is the Theodore R. Racoosin Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at The Jewish Theological Seminary
[1] Yonah Fraenkel, Darkhei ha-Aggadah ve-ha-Midrash (Givatayim: Yad la-Talmud, 1991).