Hebrew Literature

C

Law

The biblical story, in the Book of Exodus, leads to the revelation of the Torah (Law) to the Israelite people at Mount Sinai. The revelation represents the formal offering and acceptance of the covenant, whose terms are set out as a set of divinely ordained commandments. God’s protection of Israel within the vicissitudes of history is made dependent upon faithfulness to these commandments.

The legal material is presented not only as legislation but also as a means of communicating values. The goal of the law is not obedience for its own sake but the leading of a life of holiness that imitates God’s holiness. As a practical guide to behavior in both ritual and moral spheres, the legal portions of the Hebrew Bible became the focus of close examination and interpretations by later generations, who sought to apply the law to new situations and conditions.

D

Prophecy and Wisdom

The role of prophet is the true calling in the Hebrew Bible. The prophet is chosen by God to be the vehicle, often involuntary, for God’s word. This burden is difficult, and often anguished and dangerous. The prophet has the gift of moral vision, which comprehends the relationship between the present actions of the nation and the terms of the covenant. In addition, the prophet alone understands that the corruption he sees will inevitably result in God’s abandonment of Israel and its destruction. The challenge becomes how to communicate this unpopular message. The prophet performs symbolic acts to draw attention to it, but in the end must rely upon words of persuasion, employing such means as hyperbole (exaggeration), parable (literary illustration), ridicule, figures of speech, and dramatization.

The biblical books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job, along with parts of Psalms, emphasize the general types and values of experience, reasoning, and morality. The focus of this literature, which is associated with the Hebrew word for “wisdom” (hokhmah), is on the individual in social relationships. Through aphorisms (sayings) and reflections, the wisdom texts describe a life that strives to achieve a right order and equilibrium in all things.

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III

Rabbinic Period

Changed historical circumstances, including subjugation of the Jews by the Romans and others, created a need for further developments in Hebrew law and religious ideas in the first centuries of the 1st millennium ad. After the completion of the Hebrew Bible and the end of prophecy, God’s will could be discovered only through the interpretation of the written record of what had already been revealed. A new class of religious leaders called rabbis (“teachers”) arose to teach the law and apply it to current conditions. The rabbinic period lasted for about the first 500 years of the Christian Era.

Rabbis derived their authority from mastery of the oral Torah. This they conceived of as a body of law and interpretations, which was revealed to Moses along with the written Torah and subsequently passed down by word of mouth from teacher to disciple. The two main types of the oral Torah are Halakhah and Haggada. Halakhah consists of statements about practical legal matters and obligations, whereas the Haggada comprises legends and lore that surround the law.

A

Mishnah

The Mishnah, which was compiled in Palestine around ad 200, is a brief legal code that summarizes the decisions of the oral Torah under six headings: agriculture, festivals, civil law, women, ritual purity, and sacrifices. Like biblical law, the Mishnah does not simply record the law but also offers a map of an ideal sacred world.

The immense authority of the Mishnah and the extreme economy of its formulations gave rise to an ongoing enterprise of interpretation in the scholarly academies of Palestine and Babylonia over the several centuries after its compilation. Procedures for interpretation were developed, and all the statements of the Mishnah were submitted to intense investigation, often in the form of dialectical exchanges among conflicting opinions.

B

Talmud

The discussions about the Mishnah were compiled and edited into the Talmud. The Palestinian Talmud was completed about ad 500 and the Babylonian Talmud about ad 600. Unlike the Mishnah, which is a code organized around topics, the Talmud, a document of vastly greater length, is a commentary that seeks to reconstruct and understand the reasoning behind the Mishnah’s concise rulings. The Babylonian Talmud became the universally accepted authoritative text of world Jewry and the chief object of scholarly study until the modern period of Hebrew literature.

In addition to legal matters, the Babylonian Talmud includes many interpretations of biblical verses, homilies, folktales, and anecdotes from the lives of the rabbis. In Palestine, this material was compiled into separate collections of Midrash, interpretations arranged either according to biblical books or according to sermons given on festivals and special occasions. Midrash is a unique kind of literature that encourages an imaginative manipulation of biblical texts through the techniques of wordplay, punning, analogy, and added narrative. Unlike the law, in which there must be a single final ruling, in Midrash multiple interpretations are not only possible but desirable. Midrash further serves as a mechanism through which later ideas, such as the afterlife, the messiah, and God’s pathos, can be shown to be grounded in the words of scripture.

Other Hebrew literary works of the ancient period include the Dead Sea Scrolls, attributed to Jewish monastic communities of the Essene type; the writings of the philosopher Philo Judaeus; and the writings of the historian Flavius Josephus.

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