the following sketches do not offer biography in the usual sense of the term, because they cannot be grounded in careful analysis of available source material. Rabbinic literature cannot easily be used for biography for the same reason that biblical narratives cannot easily be used as sources of history (see Chapter 1). Like biblical narratives, the stories provided in rabbinic literature receive no corroboration from any other body of material. They can be read as distillations of rabbinic memory, that is, as stories about distinguished predecessors that later rabbis preserved and told. But they must be read as stories, not archival records of historical incidents. Stories change in the retelling. Stories are preserved because later narrators find them interesting or useful or valuable, but later narrators' interests and values affect the way they are told. Surely there is historical information lurking in these narratives, but that information may less concern the people described in the stories than the later narrators who preserved them, and modern readers will not always be able to trace the path that led from the former to the latter. All this, as noted, can be said about the narratives of scripture as well.

However, with rabbinic narrative a further complication arises as well: very often different rabbinic documents, or even different passages in the same document, contain parallel versions of a single story, versions that may differ in numerous significant details or even in the basic presentation of the episode they appear to describe.

when bar kokhba's rebellion was over, judaea was once again a conquered territory under military occupation. In Roman eyes the inhabitants were defeated enemies with no rights at all, and the victors could have treated the defeated Judaeans in any fashion that they wished: mass exile, total enslavement, even (had the Romans seen any point in this) outright extermination. None of these terrible things occurred, but the situation was dire just the same. Many lives had been lost, and many Judaeans had been captured for the slave market. For the last few years of Hadrian's reign a terrible suppression of Judaism raged in the old homeland. Those who engaged in public teaching of Torah were put to death, often barbarously – the most famous martyr was the venerable sage Akiba ben Joseph – and other traditional Jewish practices were banned as well. The emperor died after a short while, in 138 CE, and his successor quickly ended the persecution, but the memory of this oppressive time lasted for generations.

As stability returned, however, the Romans prepared yet again to restore some form of Jewish self-government in the subdued territory. The Romans were probably guided by the awareness that the Jews remained numerous and were famous everywhere for their determination to follow the Laws of Moses. Such a people could not easily live under direct foreign control: no outsider could understand the Torah and its ways in the necessary depth; any outsider would eventually do something that offended them and begin a new cycle of resentment and violence.

the jewish religion (judaism) emerged out of the writings of the Hebrew Bible, but it is not actually to be found in those writings. Judaism is a religion that worships God through words – prayer, sermons, the reading of scripture, and the like – in buildings called synagogues under the leadership of learned rabbis. The Bible knows something of prayer but nothing of the rest: the Bible portrays a religion centered on a single building commonly called the Temple and led by hereditary priests who worship through actions – elaborate sacrificial rites and other ceremonies of purification and atonement. The transition from that earlier religion to one that modern people would recognize is the story line of this book.

Almost all our information about the early parts of this story comes from the pages of the Bible (see “What Is in the Bible?”). The Bible is actually not a single book; it is an anthology of materials that were written over a span of many centuries – perhaps as much as 1,000 years – in two different languages and in at least two different countries. Not surprisingly, its writings show a variety of styles and a variety of outlooks on many important questions (see Chapter 2). This diversity of content allowed later readers to find many different messages in its pages and to apply those messages to the great variety of situations that they faced.

a few centuries after the rabbis began their work, the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as its official religion. This huge transformation did not occur overnight, but nevertheless it was shocking. The Jews had been one ethno-religious group among a great many, each worshiping its own collection of divinities (of course, the Jews' “collection” was smaller than the others); now everyone worshiped the same God (in fact, they said it was the Jewish God!), and the Jews alone remained outside the new consensus. Over the fourth and fifth centuries, the evermore powerful Church put an end to all other forms of worship, the ancient religions of Greece and of imperial Rome itself among them: only Judaism remained. A religion claiming to be the very fulfillment of Judaism had swept the world, and only the Jews themselves refused to acknowledge its claims. The people of Israel had become the only non-Christian minority in a newly Christian world.

To understand the background of this development, it is necessary to look back to the beginnings of Christianity. If Christianity began as a movement among Jewish followers of Jesus, how did it become a religion in its own right, with a largely non-Jewish membership? This development, wholly unexpected from the Jews' point of view, was largely the product of one man's teaching. At its earliest beginning, the movement was fiercely opposed by a man with the biblical name Saul, by his own description a dedicated Pharisee who could not abide the teachings or the practices associated with the followers of Jesus.

the following pages present three extended passages from the Babylonian Talmud. These extracts were not placed in boxes within the text because they are too long, but they should be read in connection with the description of the Talmud to be found in Chapter 9. These texts were chosen because each represents an important feature of the talmudic enterprise: interpreting older texts, establishing the law, using narrative to explore theology. Each translation is followed by a brief commentary in italics indicating some characteristic features of the text.

BERAKHOT 2A–3A

mishnah: From when [may people] recite the evening Sh'ma? From the hour that the priests come in to eat of their teruma-offering, until the end of the first watch; [these are] R. Eliezer's words, but the sages say, Until midnight. Rabban Gamaliel says, Until the first light of dawn….

gemara:… The Master said: “From the hour the priests come in to eat of their teruma-offering.” Now when do priests eat teruma-offering? From the hour the stars come out. So let him [straightforwardly] teach “from the hour the stars come out”! [By teaching the law obliquely] he teaches us something extra by the way: Priests eat teruma-offering from the hour the stars come out.

And this teaches us [in turn] that [need for] an expiation-sacrifice does not disqualify [a priest from eating teruma], as it is taught: “And when the sun sets he shall be clean” (Leviticus 22:7).

the preceding chapters have relied heavily on information found in the Bible, but the Bible itself, the book now in our hands, has not yet appeared in the story. What is the Bible? How did Judaism and then Christianity come to be based on this book? What does it mean for any religion to be based on a book? Other ancient religions were not grounded in books at all; why did Judaism go down a different path?

As before, it will help to begin with certain narratives. A report in 2 Kings 23 describes an incident that took place in Jerusalem during the reign of King Josiah (640–609 BCE): in the course of a major renovation of the Temple building, a book was found that caused a revolution in the life of the nation (see “King Josiah's Book”). The book contained (or was said to contain) teachings of Moses himself, the founder of Israel's religion, and the people saw they had been living in violation of those teachings for untold generations. King Josiah set out to enforce these previously unknown teachings and placed them at the foundation of national life; for this act he was remembered as a king who “returned to YHWH with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might, according to all the teaching of Moses; there was never another like him” (2 Kings 23:25).

one of the most important institutions of jewish life throughout the ages, the Sabbath and the seven-day week have appeared in almost every chapter of this book. In order to give a focused picture of one aspect of ancient Judaism in its historical development, this appendix gathers those discussions into a single portrait. Similar portraits could have been offered of other important features of the tradition – the use of scripture, for example, or prayer, or family life and community structure – but this one case will serve as a model for those others as well.

Biblical Evidence

Modern writers have linked the seven-day week to certain features of the ancient Babylonian calendar, but these links are not convincing. At a later time, astrologers developed a seven-day cycle of days corresponding to the seven “planets” (the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, in that order), and this cycle can still be detected in the names that some modern European languages use for the days of the week. But the Israelite Sabbath cannot be connected to any of those developments, and the Bible simply takes the seven-day cycle for granted.

The Bible does provide two explanations for the seven-day week, but only one can be called historical: that is the connection established in the second Decalogue between the Israelite's obligation to allow his servants and animals to rest and the Israelite's own opportunity to rest thanks to God's having rescued the nation from bondage in Egypt (Deuteronomy 5:15).

around the year 200 ce, rabbi judah the patriarch changed forever the character of rabbinic teaching and learning by compiling the Mishnah, the oldest book of rabbinic teaching that survives to modern times. This text, divided into six Orders and subdivided into a total of sixty-three tractates, is half again as big as the Jewish Bible (see “The Contents of the Mishnah”). Each tractate contains a collection of rabbinic teachings on a specific theme, usually a topic of Jewish law. Some of these topics are obviously religious, as modern readers use that term (prayer, festival observances, sacrificial rituals, etc.), others concern ordinary material life (property and damage law, rules of testimony, etc.), and some straddle the boundary between these two realms (marriage, divorce, oaths and vows). The Mishnah did not quite embrace every imaginable aspect of Jewish life, but anyone who had mastered its contents was ready to become a teacher of Torah.

The Mishnah is overwhelmingly concerned with details of Jewish law, but it cannot easily be viewed as a legal code. As “the First Chapter of the Mishnah” shows, there is too much material that a code should not contain: unresolved disputes that give no clear indication of the actual law, stories and interpretations of scripture that have no clear legal point, and so on. It is more likely that the Mishnah was intended to accomplish what it accomplished in fact: the Mishnah became the first known standard training text for rabbinic disciples.

the persians governed the near east for almost exactly 200 years: they conquered Babylon in 539 BCE, and they held power until a rapid series of spectacular defeats at the hands of Alexander the Great, King of Macedonia, from 333 to 331 BCE. After that, the Greek language and varieties of Greek culture dominated the eastern Mediterranean for almost 1,000 years, until the equally spectacular arrival of the Arabs and Islam in the seventh century CE.

Alexander kept the Persian system of dividing his kingdom into regions or satrapies and placing a trusted subordinate in charge of each; once active warfare had ended, many of his generals were appointed to these positions. He did take steps to implant Greek culture throughout the kingdom – he established settlements of active or retired soldiers in key locations, and he encouraged (or forced) his officers to marry high-ranking native women – but he may have been more concerned with maintaining stability and control than with starting a cultural revolution.

King Alexander made no move to interfere with the inner life of the Jewish (or any other) population now under his rule, but he did encourage large-scale immigration to the new city of Alexandria in Egypt. This new city soon became a royal capital, the largest city in the Greek world, home to the largest Jewish community anywhere. Here and elsewhere a Greek-speaking Judaism developed, flourished, and then almost completely disappeared; see Chapter 6 for further details.

this book tells the story of the emergence of judaism out of its biblical roots, a story that took well over a thousand years to run its course. When this book begins there is no “Judaism” and there is no “Jewish people.” By the end, the Jews and Judaism are everywhere in the Roman Empire and beyond, more or less adjusted to the rise of Christianity and ready to absorb the sudden appearance of yet another new religion called Islam.

It may be useful to provide a few words of introduction about the name Judaism itself. This book will begin with the religious beliefs and practices of a set of ancient tribes that eventually combined to form a nation called the Children of Israel. Each tribe lived in a territory that was called by its tribal name: the land of Benjamin, the land of Judah, and so on. According to the biblical narrative, these tribes organized and maintained a unified kingdom for most of the tenth century BCE, but then the single tribe of Judah was separated from the others in a kingdom of its own, called the Kingdom of Judah (in Hebrew yehudah) to distinguish it from the larger Kingdom of Israel to its north. Thus the name Israel was essentially a national or ethnic designation, while the name Judah simultaneously meant a smaller ethnic entity, included within the larger one, and the land where that group dwelt for hundreds of years.

when the roman conqueror pompey abolished the Hasmonaean kingdom in 63 BCE, the national culture (Ioudaismos, the way Judaeans do things) remained, and the nation's way of life began to replace the monarchy as the visible focus of national identity and pride. Much remained in place. The Torah could still be studied and obeyed, the festivals could still be celebrated, the priests in the Temple could still offer the required sacrifices. Pompey allowed the manageable Hyrcanus II to remain in office, not as king but as high priest and official head (ethnarch) of the Judaean nation. The defeated Aristoboulus was eventually brought as prisoner to Rome, where he nursed his pride and plotted recovery, but in many important respects the Roman conquest seemed to allow the people of Judaea to go on living as they had done before.

This arrangement lasted until the year 40 BCE, when Antigonus, son of Aristoboulus, returned to Judaea with a Parthian army and expelled the Romans from the land. The unlucky Hyrcanus was carted off to Parthia, where his ear was sliced off, while Antigonus took over the priesthood more than twenty years after his father had been forced to abandon it. The Romans were stunned by this disaster and turned for rescue to a political newcomer, a man named Herod. Herod's father, Antipater, was an Idumaean, from a territory south of Judaea proper that had been absorbed into the kingdom during its years of expansion, one of the many who had been forced to take on the Jewish way of life as a result of that expansion.

the great religions of western civilization, judaism and those that followed, are all monotheistic: they claim that the God they worship is the only god there is. The Bible is an important source of this conception, but the scriptures of ancient Israel actually offer a more complicated picture.

That picture can begin with an intriguing diplomatic exchange said to have taken place around 1100 BCE. The people of Israel and the neighboring people of Ammon were locked in dispute over a certain border territory. This territory had previously belonged to neither group, but the Israelites had seized the land from the original Amorite inhabitants in the process of conquering the Promised Land. The Ammonites (a different people with a regrettably similar name!) wanted this land as well, on the ground that the Amorites had previously stolen it from them, but the Israelite leader Jephthah rejected this claim:

In this brief response Jephthah expresses a view that was widely held at his time. According to this view, every nation has its own guardian deity that watches over it in a land it has received as an inheritance.

How should we live? What kind of people should we be? What is it good or bad, necessary or right, sweet, absurd or impossible to do? Who decides for us, and on what grounds? These are fundamental human questions, and few people or societies pass a day without asking them. For a historian or an anthropologist, the question is framed in slightly different terms: what role does morality play in helping any group of people to create or maintain a society?

This book takes as its premise that morality matters. Like political, social and economic behaviour, moral behaviour is endemic in human societies. Like them, it helps groups to organize themselves, to negotiate their inevitable differences and to survive. Like them, it has a grammar, a structure, which is as distinctive of the group as is its language or religion. Unlike them, however, it is often overlooked as a constituent of history.

The focus of this study is what I shall call the popular morality of the Roman Empire in, roughly, the first two centuries of the common era. The early Empire has a number of attractions for a historian of ethics. More of the Greek and Roman world was then united (at least nominally) under one ruler than at any other time, giving us a vast field in which to work while remaining within the boundaries of one state.