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’
