Berkowitz demonstrates, rabbinic mimicry also involved resistance to the dominant Roman culture and its power. In modeling themselves on Roman jurists, the rabbis were not merely appropriating a Roman cultural model to advance their own cause; they were also resisting Roman dominance by asserting the importance of Judaean tradition and their own version of this tradition. Law, the rabbis insist, includes ritual practice and is not limited to civil and criminal law, as it largely is in the Roman legal system of the time.92 The inclusion of ritual law signals, moreover, that at the heart of the law is the Torah, in which law encompasses all these realms. The true law, in other words, stems from the Torah. By claiming to be jurists of Judaean ritual law, the rabbis are imagining themselves in a Roman mold, but they are also asserting the primacy of their ancestral tradition. This is precisely what distinguishes them from Romans. Because they claim to be purveyors of the authentic interpretation of the ancestral tradition, this is also what establishes their authority among Judaeans.93 The rabbis, then, are not simply borrowing from the dominant culture; rather, they are negotiating multiple cultural models in order to carve out their own niche that is at the same time uniquely Jewish, uniquely Roman, and uniquely rabbinic.94
Chapter 2
The Temple, the Great Court, and the Rabbinic Invention of the Past
The makeup of society in Roman Palestine at the time the Mishnah was written and the place the rabbis claim for themselves within that society provide an important context for understanding how the rabbis remember the past and how the past they remember is shaped by and functions within the present. In this and the following two chapters, I take up three key ways in which the mishnaic Temple ritual narratives, as memories and as Temple discourse, make a powerful claim for the authority of the rabbis, one small group within the larger complex social landscape of Roman Syria Palaestina. These three aspects of the rabbinic narration of the Temple ritual of the past help the rabbis assert their own primacy as legal interpreters and the primacy of their version of the traditional way of life—as against the various alternative versions that existed among competing subgroups within society.
In this chapter, I discuss one key component of the rabbinic memory of the Temple in the Mishnah’s Temple ritual narratives—an aspect of this memory that is fundamentally bound up with the place the rabbis assert for themselves in post-destruction society, the largely made-up “character” within these narratives: the Great Court. On multiple occasions in these narratives, the rabbis invent a key role in the performance of Temple ritual for the Great Court, and they portray the Great Court as an institution with ultimate authority over the way Temple rituals were carried out. The rabbis construct the Court and its members as their predecessors in Temple times, so the past in these accounts functions as a mirror on the present, reflecting the image of the rabbis as they see themselves. And the memory of the past, in which the rabbinic predecessors are legal-ritual authorities, makes an argument for rabbinic legal-ritual authority in post-Temple times. By inserting the Court into the past, the rabbis are asserting the antiquity of and providing a myth of origins for the role they claim for themselves within society.
The Great Court and the Rituals of the Temple
Throughout the Mishnah, not just in Temple ritual narratives, the court appears numerous times in an abstract sense, as a legal body that hears and adjudicates cases (or the location where this judicial institution engages in its activities), as well as in the concrete historical sense, as a legal institution existing in the time of the Temple. When referring to the purportedly historical Court of the Second Temple era, the Mishnah uses a number of different terms: בית דין (bēit din, Court), בית דין הגדול שבירושלים (bēit din haggadōl shebiyĕrushālayim, the Great Court in Jerusalem), and סנהדרין/סנהדרים (sanhedrin/sanhedrim = synedrion [council, court]).1 Members of this court are called זקן or זקנים (zākēn or zĕkēnim, elder or elders). In the Mishnah’s narratives about events from Temple times—and, to an extent, throughout the Mishnah—the terms are essentially interchangeable, and each of these terms seems to refer to the institution of a central, authoritative court and its members.2
The Mishnah’s historical Court from Temple times is an adjudicatory body, as can be seen in the Mishnah’s accounts of how the Court carried out its judicial procedures—which I will call “judicial” or “court-centered” ritual narratives. Perhaps the most famous rabbinic text of this type is the narrative in Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:3–7:1, about how the Great Court would adjudicate capital cases and mete out the death penalty. In this and similar narratives describing how the Court used to carry out its functions—including adjudication in financial disputes—the Court carries out characteristically judicial tasks.3 It hears testimony, adjudicates the case, renders a verdict, metes out punishment, and delivers speeches meant to instill fear in the witnesses, a process called איום (’iyyum).4
These particular Court functions are not surprising because courts in numerous societies and cultures, including those in the Roman Empire in classical to late antiquity, have performed and do perform many of these functions. What is striking about the appearance of the Court in the Mishnah’s narratives about ritual in Temple times is that it is said to have been intimately involved in a variety of Temple rituals and, more important, to have had ultimate authority over these rituals. The Mishnah’s insistence that the Court is important in the realm of Temple ritual may explain why the single mishnaic subgenre, the Temple ritual narrative, includes descriptions of both Temple ritual and purely judicial ritual (which I call “court-centered ritual narratives”). As Martin Jaffee has pointed out, the genre focuses on “the most important institutions in ancient Palestinian Jewish society: the Jerusalem Temple and the Sanhedrin.”5 The reason for this dual focus seems to be that in the Mishnah, the two institutions are not distinct but are intertwined. The Court, according to the narratives about Temple-era ritual, is an authoritative body in the domain of the judicial and the domain of the Temple and its ritual.
The Court’s Role in Temple Ritual
There are three ways in which Temple ritual narratives establish the authority of the Court to determine Temple ritual practice: by asserting that the court was involved in and had control over the ritual procedure; by recounting sectarian resistance to the correct ritual procedure established by the Court; and by narrating the Court’s changes to ritual procedure when ritual fails. The first way, inserting the Court into the ritual and giving it authority over the procedure, can be seen most clearly in two examples: parts of the Day of Atonement narrative in Mishnah Yoma 1:1–7:4; and parts of the red-heifer narrative in Mishnah Parah 3:1–11. In both these biblically mandated rituals, most of the ritual performance is done by a priest—the high priest in the case of the Day of Atonement narrative, and the “priest who burns the cow” in the red-heifer narrative.6 Yet at a certain point in each of the rituals, a group of “elders” (זקנים) become involved in the procedure. The Court and its members in these examples seem almost to intrude on the otherwise exclusively priestly affair.
According to the narrative in Mishnah Yoma, the Day of Atonement (יום הכיפורים) ritual begins “seven days before the Day of Atonement”:
שבעת ימים קודם ליום הכיפורים מפרישים כהן גדול מביתו ללישכת
פרהדרין
Seven days before the Day of Atonement, they separate the high priest from his house [and bring him] to the Parhedrin chamber [lishkāh] [in the Temple]. (Yoma 1:1)
The first chapter of Mishnah Yoma proceeds to describe what can be called preparations before the Day of Atonement, which take place during this entire week and during the day and night before the Day of Atonement.
