The Jerusalem Talmud

Palestinians and Babylonians each answered the Mishnah in their own way. The Palestinian answer is the Talmud of the Land of Israel, also called the Palestinian or Jerusalem Talmud, finished in the fourth or early fifth century; despite the name, probably not in Jerusalem but in Tiberias, in Galilee, which ended up as the seat of rabbinic activity in Palestine. The Babylonian answer is the Babylonian Talmud, finished in the sixth or seventh century.1

The Palestinian Talmud mixes Hebrew with the Aramaic spoken in Galilee and is full of words taken over from Greek and Latin, a sign of a Hellenized, Roman Palestine; scholars also sense in it far more hostility toward Rome than the Babylonian Talmud shows toward the Sasanians. It comments on just over half the Mishnah's tractates and mixes biblical interpretation, stories and other material loosely tied to the passage at hand, which gives it an unfinished air. Judging it by the Babylonian Talmud's standard, however, is anachronistic; what matters is that it shows the Mishnah already treated as a quasi-scripture, to be explained, harmonized and mined for legal conclusions.2

In the Tannaitic period in Palestine, works interpreting the legal parts of the Torah were also composed: the Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael (Exodus), Sifra (Leviticus), Sifre Be-Midbar (Numbers) and Sifre Devarim (Deuteronomy).5

Many of the Mishnah's laws were, as it says itself, 'mountains hanging by a hair', with little support in the text of the Torah. Some early sages sought their biblical origins through midrash; others held that this tradition was an inheritance independent of the Torah.6

The Mishnah outlived the patriarchate. The rabbis kept some independence and over time took over powers of the patriarch, such as regulating the calendar and ordaining rabbis. And the Mishnah itself, a new scripture authorizing laws beyond the Torah, gave its experts an authority that depended on no office or geographic center.7

Though Palestine was becoming Christian, Jewish culture there, rabbinic culture included, flourished in certain places. Besides the Palestinian Talmud and many works of biblical interpretation, that milieu produced Aramaic translations of the Bible (targum) that added a good deal to the text, liturgical poems (piyyut, from the Greek for 'poetry'), magical texts and Hekhalot literature, the oldest Jewish mystical writings.3

At the start of late antiquity most Jews in the Near East spoke Aramaic, a Semitic language close to Hebrew. Already in the Persian period Aramaic changed Hebrew itself: the Canaanite script was replaced by the Aramaic square script. The need for Aramaic translations of the Bible (targumim) appears as early as the Dead Sea Scrolls; the most important targum, Onkelos, is Babylonian. Today Aramaic survives among Kurdish Jews and in texts such as the Zohar, the ketubah and the Kaddish.8

From the seventh century on the Masoretes were at work, scribes based at first in Tiberias who sought to fix the correct form of the Hebrew Bible's text and secure its pronunciation and chanting in the synagogue. To do so they devised dozens of vowel and punctuation marks placed above and below the consonants: on the first word alone, bereshit, they added 14, and they gave the same care to each of the Bible's roughly half million words. Whether they were rabbinic Jews is uncertain (some may have opposed the rabbis), but they came out of the same milieu, and their work reveals a vigorous intellectual life in a Christian-dominated setting.9

In the Second Temple period the priesthood was at its height: until the Herodians rose, the high priest was in practice Judea's ruler, and even afterward the upper priestly ranks stayed at the top of the elite, wealthy and influential. The Temple's destruction removed its main reason for being, offering sacrifices and guarding the sanctuary's holiness. Even so, priests neither vanished nor lost their prestige, and in late antique Palestine they may have regained some weight as a cultural elite.10

One sign of this comeback is the piyyutim, elaborate and allusive synagogue poems, usually in Hebrew, made to accompany the Torah reading on the Sabbath, at festivals and on other occasions. Some were written by Galilean priests, such as one Yohanan the Priest, or by people close to the priestly families that settled there after the destruction. The poems speak of the Temple, long for its rebuilding, name the 24 priestly courses and glorify the Yom Kippur sacrifice; a Yom Kippur liturgy still in use today rests on them.11

Priests may also have produced Hekhalot literature, an offshoot of apocalyptic, whose descriptions of the heavens and angelic worship are modeled on the Temple cult ('hekhalot' are the chambers of this heavenly Temple).12

The priests never restored the cult or fully recovered their power; by the time these genres were composed, they may already have been absorbed into the rabbinic movement. To this day the priests' privileges in worship (being called first to the Torah, reciting the priestly blessing) are set by rabbinic law, a sign of their subordination to rabbinic authority.13