Covenant and Community in Early Rabbinic Literature

Abstract This article concerns the role of covenant in early rabbinic literature in relation to biblical and especially Second Temple-era predecessors. The first part establishes that the Qumran sectarians and earlier circles were drawn to the concept of covenant because it represented, especially through the mechanism of covenant renewal, a powerful tool for defining and supporting group identity. The second part shows that for the rabbis, the importance of covenant lay chiefly, instead, in its capacity to conceptualize the notion of Israel as a collective body defined by corporate responsibility. The third part suggests that this novel deployment of covenant arose in part to counter the individuating force of halakah as law, another innovation of the rabbis.

A people, says Grotius, can give itself to a king.According to Grotius, a people is therefore a people before it gives itself to a king.This gift itself is a civil act; it presupposes a public deliberation.Therefore, before examining the act by which a people elects a king, it would be well to examine the act by which a people becomes a people.For this act, being necessarily prior to the other, is the true basis of society.
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1  Introduction E. P. Sanders famously coined the term "covenantal nomism" to describe what he understood to be the basic conceptualization of Israel's relationship with God for a very broad swath of Jews in the Second Temple period and the rabbinic era.The noun "nomism" indicates the centrality of the law, dictated by God and carrying the expectation of obedience, along with the threat of punishment for disobedience.The qualifier "covenantal" indicates that the relationship between Israel and God is not exhausted by the law.The law exists, rather, in a covenantal framework, and God is committed to maintaining this covenantal relationship even in the face of transgression of the law, through mechanisms of atonement and an inclination to forgive.Sanders was responding to Christian scholarship that had branded rabbinic theology as marked by a fall from the covenantal grace of the Bible into a rigid legalism. 2Not so, said Sanders: the covenant is just as central for the rabbis as for their forbears, and this is the case even though the term "covenant" ‫)ברית(‬ figures relatively rarely in rabbinic theological discourse."The covenant was presupposed, and the Rabbinic discussions were largely directed toward the question of how to fulfill the covenantal obligations." 3n an overview of the place of covenant in Jewish thought of the Second Temple period, Lester Grabbe takes issue with Sanders's focus on covenant.It is clear that most of the Jewish groups surveyed by Sanders believed that God cultivates a special relationship with Israel that moderates judgment for violation of the law.But only a few of these groups assigned any particular importance to the notion of covenant in 1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, with Geneva Manuscript and Political Economy (ed.Roger D. Masters; trans.Judith R. Masters; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978) 52. 2 The beginning of the fall into legalism could be dated, in most accounts, to later strata of the Hebrew Bible itself.See Bernard M. Levinson, "Revisiting the 'And' in Law and Covenant in the Hebrew Bible: What the Evidence from Tell Taniyat Suggests about the Relationship Between Law and Religion in the Ancient Near East," Maarav 24 (2020) 27-43.
3 E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Minneapolis:  Fortress, 1977) 421.Alan J. Avery-Peck's recent encyclopedia entry, "Covenant," in Charisma -Czaczkes (ed.Constance M. Furey, et al.; vol. 5 of EBR; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012) 5:897-933, esp.915-19 ("Covenant-Judaism-Rabbinic Judaism"), retains Sanders's insistence, contra "some Christian scholars and theologians," on the importance of covenant for the rabbis as a locus of divine mercy (916).Echoing the above quotation from Sanders's book, Avery-Peck offers that "the concept of covenant as a theoretical construct is less a concern to the rabbis than the specific contents of the law through which the covenant is upheld.The rabbis' primary focus, that is, is upon the substance of the law, not its meaning" (915).conceptualizing this relationship; other groups gravitated toward different images and metaphors.Grabbe writes: "Sanders could with similar justification have coined the term 'elective nomism,' in light of texts that speak of God electing or choosing Israel, or 'parental nomism,' given the prevalent characterization of God as father." 4 This article revisits the place of covenant in rabbinic literature, with a particular focus on Tannaitic literature in relation to its biblical and especially Second Temple background.My argument runs as follows.The first part, elaborating on Grabbe's claims, establishes that the Qumran sectarians and their forbears were drawn to the concept of covenant not because this was the default theological framework for Second Temple Judaism broadly, but because it represented, especially through the possibility of covenant renewal, a powerful tool for defining and supporting group identity.I focus in particular on the Qumran sect's approach to Deut 29, an especially important passage in the reception of biblical covenant theology.In the second part, I pivot to the role of covenant in rabbinic thought through detailed study of rabbinic interpretation of Deut 29 and related passages.I show that the rabbis engage with covenant not to define the relationship between God and Israel, or to distinguish their group from others, but to conceptualize the notion of a corporate Israel bound together as a community of mutual responsibility.Part three identifies an important background aspect to this development.I suggest that the rise of halakah as law in rabbinic circles exerted an individuating force that problematized the notion of corporate responsibility; covenant came to serve as a solution.
 Covenant in Biblical, Proto-Sectarian, and Sectarian Literature I do not attempt here a comprehensive summary of where and how covenant appears in biblical and Second Temple literature. 5Rather, this part surfaces an interrelated set of functions that the concept serves for certain parts of these corpora.The biblical book in which covenant looms largest is Deuteronomy.The earliest edition of Deuteronomy may have begun with Deut 4:45, identifying the book as containing ‫עדת‬ "treaty stipulations," and ended with Deut 28:69, which characterizes it as ‫דברי‬ ‫הברית‬ "the words of the covenant" that God commanded Moses to enact with Israel 4 Lester L. Grabbe, "Did All Jews Think Alike?'Covenant' in Philo and Josephus in the Context of Second Temple Judaic Religion," in The Concept of the Covenant in the Second Temple Period (ed.Stanley E. Porter and Jacqueline C. R. de Roo; Leiden: Brill, 2003) 251-66, at 265.Jacqueline C. R. de Roo's contribution to the same volume also nuances Sanders's framework by highlighting the prominence of ancestral merit as a source of divine grace in literature from the Second Temple period.See Jacqueline C. R. de Roo, "God's Covenant with the Forefathers," in The Concept of Covenant, 191-202.But, perhaps bound by the constraints of the volume, de Roo does not go far enough.She highlights Sir 44:19-21, which links Abraham's merit to God's covenant with Abraham, and, on this basis, she offers that "[the patriarchs'] role in God's plan of salvation is directly related to the idea of covenant" (202), but in fact reference to covenant is very rare among the passages on patriarchal merit that de Roo takes up.
5 See, generally, The Concept of the Covenant (ed.Porter and de Roo); Covenant in the Persian Period: From Genesis to Chronicles (ed.Richard J. Bautch and Gary N. Knoppers; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2015); and the review essays dedicated to the latter in JHS 18 (2018).
in Moab, "in addition to the covenant that He had made with them at Horeb."The "book of the covenant" discovered in the temple and read aloud by Josiah to the people in the ceremony described in 2 Kgs 23 could represent this early edition of Deuteronomy. 6The centrality of covenant in the book of Deuteronomy is bound up with covenant renewal in two ways.The book itself enacts a renewal of the Sinai covenant, and it served, in its historical context, as an occasion for covenant renewal under Josiah.
Covenant also figures importantly in the book of Jeremiah, which coalesced in circles connected with the book of Deuteronomy.In Jer 11, God calls upon Israel, through the mouth of Jeremiah, to "hear the words of this covenant."The words are said to have been commanded to Israel "on the day that I took them out of the land of Egypt," but the near deictic "this" suggests a contemporaneous manifestation of covenant, perhaps the Josianic covenant renewal. 7In Jer 34, Jeremiah condemns the people because, having committed to setting free their Hebrew slaves, they once again enslaved them.Jeremiah characterizes this commitment as a covenant (Jer 34:15) that represented a return to the covenant that God formed with Israel "on the day that I took them out of the land of Egypt" (34:13). 8In Jeremiah, as in Deuteronomy and 2 Kings, the invocation of covenant occurs in connection with covenant renewal.
Covenant renewal offers the opportunity to define community in three senses. 9First, it surfaces the community's membership: the members are those who participate in the renewal ceremony.Second, it enables modification of the terms of the covenant because the renewal framework can introduce differences in substance or at least in emphasis from previously accepted practice.Third, it offers a framework for historical review, or the construction of a usable past.These features of covenant renewal become especially visible in postexilic literature.All three of them are present in Neh 9-10, an extended passage that describes a pact ‫)אמנה(‬ entered into by the community of returnees from the exile "under oath and sanction, to follow the teaching of God, given through Moses the servant of God" (Neh 10:30).The ceremony begins with an extended summary of Israelite history that highlights God's mercies and Israel's sins (9:6-37).The pact takes the form of a written document that includes the names of the signatories, and thus of the covenantal community (10:1-30).Beyond the general commitment to follow the torah of Moses, it names specific undertakings, for example, forswearing intermarriage and abstaining from commerce on the Sabbath (10:31-40).
Ari Mermelstein has observed that the Nehemiah passage is the first among a number of covenantal texts in the Second Temple period that invoke as chief precedent not the covenant at Sinai but the covenant with Abraham: "You are the Lord God, who chose Abram, who brought him out of Ur of the Chaldeans. . . .Finding his heart true ‫)נאמן(‬ to you, you made a covenant with him to give him the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, . .." (Neh 9:7-8).Multiple considerations can motivate reliance on the Abrahamic covenant.In the case of Nehemiah, the prominence of inheritance of the land in the Abrahamic covenant offered an important orientation point for a community immediately concerned with the dynamic of exile and return. 10Later sectarian and proto-sectarian texts, some of which we will turn to below, hearken back to Abraham because, as God's only associate, an island of righteousness in a sea of sin, he furnishes a model for the authoring communities' conception of themselves as a lonely bastion. 11or our purposes, a related feature of the Abrahamic covenant stands out as particularly important: Abraham is a single individual. 12For the rabbis, as I have intimated, and as we will see below, a central function of covenant is to conceptualize the interrelationships among Israelites as a corporate body.Given that Abraham is not, of course, a corporate body, the fact that the Abrahamic covenant is paradigmatic for the covenanters of Nehemiah and for sectarians in the Second Temple period is evidence that covenant does not do the same theological work for them as for the rabbis. 13ovenant plays an organizing role in the book of Jubilees.Jacques van Ruiten counts some twenty-seven instances of the Ethiopic equivalent (kidān) and notes that the book recounts God's entrance into a covenantal relationship with Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Israel. 14The most extended and important reflection on covenant in Jubilees comes in the context of the first covenant, between God and Noah, in Jub.6:1-38.Here, the speaking angel tells Moses that the covenant that he is to enter into at Sinai follows from God's covenant with Noah (6:11).The angel reveals, moreover, that the covenant is to be renewed annually: "For this reason it has been ordained on the heavenly tablets that they should celebrate the Festival of Weeks during this month-once a year-to renew the covenant each and every year" (6:17). 15It is presumably not a coincidence that Abraham celebrates the Festival of Weeks in connection with the renewal of the Noahide covenant (14:1, 19-20). 16he Qumranites, who treasured Jubilees, also situated covenant at the center of their ideological world.The Damascus Document indicates that the sect understood itself as having originated through a moment of covenant renewal.Like Neh 9-10, but with a wider scope, the Damascus Document reviews the history of transgression, from the heavenly Watchers forward, and God's just punishment in the form of destruction and exile (CD ii 16-iii 12).In the wake of these events, a righteous remnant emerged:17 "And with those who remained from among them who held to the commandments of God, God established his covenant ‫)בריתו(‬ with Israel forever, to reveal to them concealed things ‫)נסתרות(‬ in which all Israel had erred."This covenantal relationship is not altogether new; it is the very same "covenant with Israel" from the past.But only the sect remains within the covenant, and the renewal of the covenant does involve innovation, in the form of the revelation of "concealed things." The progression in the Damascus Document follows, in outline, the sequence in Deut 29:9-28, where Moses, concluding the covenant renewal on the plains of Moab, envisions future transgression of the covenant, followed by exile.The chapter concludes with a declaration in Deut 29:28 that the "concealed things" belong to God and the "revealed things" to "us."The chart below summarizes the common terminology between the chapter in Deuteronomy and the historical review in the Damascus Document. "In their following their own willful heart . . .They followed their own willful heart . . .and they tracked after their willful heart."(CD ii  17-18; iii 5, 11-12)   "I follow my own willful heart" (Deut 29:18) "His anger was fierce against them . . .And God's anger burned fiercely."(CD ii 21; iii 8) "In his fierce anger . . . the great ferocity of anger" (Deut 29:22-23) "In their abandoning the covenant of God" (CD iii 11) "They abandoned the covenant of the Lord, the God of their fathers" (Deut 29:24) "To reveal to them concealed things" (CD iii 13-14) "The concealed things belong to the Lord, our God, and the revealed things to us" (Deut 29 :28)   The sect evidently took the declaration at the end of the chapter as an indication of a postexilic moment in which God's "concealed things," understood as new teachings concerning the religious laws, would be revealed. 18s the sect's origin lay, according to its own self-understanding, in a moment of covenant renewal, so the sect envisions an annual covenant renewal ceremony, which, according to a fragment from a version of the Damascus Document recovered from Qumran (4Q266 11 17), is to take place "in the third month," presumably during the Feast of Weeks.The ceremony is described in detail in the Community Rule (1QS i 18-ii 19).Like the ceremony in Neh 9-10 and the historical review in the Damascus Document, the sect's covenant renewal ceremony involves the recitation of Israel's transgressions and God's mercies. 19he passage in the Community Rule also mirrors the Damascus Document in drawing heavily on Deut 29.To describe entrance into the covenant, it employs the construction ‫ב-‬ ‫עבר‬ (1QS i 18 ‫בברית‬ ‫בעוברם‬ "when they enter into the covenant").As Martin Abegg notes, this construction otherwise occurs only in Deut 29:11. 20 More substantially, one of the curses in the covenant renewal ceremony rewrites Deut 29:17-20.The passage from Deuteronomy describes one who, having heard the oaths that seal the covenant, resolves nevertheless to worship other gods.Moses assures Israel that God's anger will burn against such a person.The Community Rule, incorporating this passage into the imprecations that accompany the renewal of the covenant, has the priests and Levites curse one who enters into the covenant but has "idols of his heart" ‫לבו(‬ ‫)גלולי‬ and "sets his stumbling block of transgression before himself" (1QS ii 11-12).These characterizations are drawn from Ezek 14:2-8, where Ezekiel condemns those who seek the word of the Lord from the prophet but remain attached to foreign gods.The Community Rule's merger of Deut 29:17-20 and Ezek 14:2-8 occurs elsewhere in the sectarian corpus and depends on a number of verbal overlaps between them. 21For our purposes, most importantly, it confirms the centrality of revelation in the sect's conception of covenant: the covenant renewal ceremony involves seeking the prophetic word.
The above survey of the role of covenant in Second Temple Jewish thought indicates the centrality therein of covenant renewal and, in turn, the perception of substantial continuity between the present covenanting community and the biblical past.The covenantal rites that were performed in the past can be undertaken again in the present; the prophetic word continues to speak, enabling new commitments to be incorporated into the covenantal framework; and the covenanting community can be identified with Israel of the past within a seamless penitential narrative. 22Covenant in Rabbinic Literature How, against this background, can we assess the role of covenant in rabbinic literature?The relative importance of a particular concept within a conceptual network is a difficult thing to measure.In a recent article on the question of the rabbis' perspective on the land of Israel, Alon Goshen-Gottstein reflects on this methodological problem.It is altogether possible-it is in fact the case, he claimsthat "despite the existence of tens or even hundreds of statements in the areas of halakah and haggadah concerning the land of Israel, the land of Israel does not occupy a central place in the economy of the sages' thought." 23To evaluate the importance of a concept, one must consider not only the number of passages in 21 See CD xx 1-10; 1QH xii, esp.ll.13-16.On the latter passage, see Carol A. Newsom, The Self as Symbolic Space: Constructing Identity and Community at Qumran (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2004) 312-25.The verbal overlaps: Deut 29:16 refers to ‫גלליהם‬ "their idols," one of only two instances of the word in the Torah; there are two references in Deut 29:17-18 to the sinner's heart ‫;)לב(‬ and, perhaps most importantly, just as Moses says that "the Lord's anger and jealousy will smolder against that man ‫ההוא(‬ ‫")באיש‬ (Deut 29:19), and (per Deut 29:21-27) that God will make him into a sign for later generations, so Ezek 14:8 has God say, "I will set my face against that man ‫ההוא(‬ ‫,)באיש‬ and make him a signal and byword." 22 On some elements of this conception of continuity, see Christopher S. Atkins, "The Yahad as the Locus of Divine Presence: On 4QFlorilegium's Divinatory Hermeneutics," RevQ 31 (2019) 209-38, and the literature cited there.
23 Alon Goshen-Gottstein, "The Land of Israel in the Economy of Jewish Thought," Daat 86 (2018) 211-58, at 211 (Hebrew; my translation).My thanks to Yair Furstenberg for drawing my attention to Goshen-Gottstein's article.which it appears.One must also consider, among other things, how the concept's role in rabbinic literature compares to that in the Bible (or, we may add, in Second Temple literature); the concept's relationship to other concepts within rabbinic thought; and to what degree rabbis do innovative work with the concept. 24oshen-Gottstein himself suggests in passing that covenant, like the land of Israel, occupies a more marginal place in rabbinic than in biblical thought. 25A comprehensive evaluation of the significance and signification of covenant in rabbinic literature is not possible within the confines of an article. 26Here, I offer only some framing reflections on the question of significance and one focused argument with respect to signification.
Evidence for the marginality of covenant as an organizing category for the rabbis might be adduced from cases in which Tannaitic literature incorporates origin stories for the rabbis that rework or typologically resemble some of the above biblical and Second Temple period sources, but stripped of the covenantal elements.Thus, many sources allude to the gathering in Neh 9-10, but in rabbinic memory it is "the great assembly" ‫הגדולה(‬ ‫:)כנסת‬ a turning point in the canonization and transmission of Torah, and a font of liturgical innovation (or recovery), but with no link to covenant formation or renewal. 27Again, a set of interrelated rabbinic texts associates the Yavneh assembly with the problem of forgetting.The rabbis' work, and the goal of their students after them, was to order and thus enable the 24 Ibid., 212. 25 Ibid., 214-15. 26For an attempt to gauge the role of covenant in rabbinic literature in comparison with the Dead Sea Scrolls, see Lawrence Schiffman, "The Concept of Covenant in the Qumran Scrolls and Rabbinic Literature," in The Idea of Biblical Interpretation: Essays in Honor of James L. Kugel (ed.Hindy Najman and Judith H. Newman; Leiden: Brill, 2004) 257-78.Schiffman says little on methodology, offering that he can "let the ancient texts speak for themselves.What did they consider the notion of covenant in the context of their specific approach to Judaism?" (258).In practice, he lets the Qumran material define the comparison as he works through different covenantal elements therein-the covenants of Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Sinai, and Levi and Aaron; the covenant of the Qumran sect itself; covenant renewal; and the renewed covenant-and looks (but not, oddly, in the case of covenant renewal) for relevant material on them in rabbinic literature.Schiffman's conclusion is that "there is a large degree of incongruity between the concepts of covenant described in the sectarian and rabbinic corpora" (276), but he does not attempt a general formulation of the nature of this incongruity.Of the passages of main interest in this article, Schiffman treats only one, in a footnote (267-68 n. 40).
27 For a convenient review of older scholarship on the "great assembly," see Daniel Sperber, "Synagogue, The Great," Encyclopaedia Judaica (ed.memorization and preservation of a jumble of legal traditions. 28This account hovers close to the framework of forgetting and recovery that we find in the story of Josiah and in echoes thereof, but the rabbinic framework silences the elements of penitence and covenant renewal and instead focuses on scholastic practices of study and mnemonics. Support for the impression of the marginality of covenant can come from appreciation for conceptual interrelationships that provisionally explain such marginality.Thus, if, as I have argued above, the importance of covenant in many biblical and Second Temple sources is connected with the notion of covenant renewal and, more fundamentally, with a sense of continuity with the biblical past, then one can perceive the marginality of covenant in rabbinic thought as bound up with a perception of discontinuity, of a break from the biblical past.From this perspective, the displacement of exegesis via rewriting ("rewritten Bible") by exegesis via commentary ("midrash") in the transition from Second Temple literature to rabbinic literature bears on the intellectual history of covenant.Rewritten Bible reflects a sense of continuity with the biblical past: it processes the Bible as a transparent text to be compositionally imitated.Rewritten Bible can be associated directly with covenant renewal, as in the case of Deuteronomy, an early instance of rewritten Bible that is set in a moment of covenant renewal (in Moab) and that was performed in the context of covenant renewal (under Josiah).Commentary, instead, processes the Bible as something exotic and opaque, and it is performed, paradigmatically, in a scholastic context, not in a ritual context.One might put this point more pithily: canon consciousness, which is one of the fulcrums between rewritten Bible and commentary, is closely tied to consciousness of the cessation of prophecy and thus, in turn, to the marginalizing of covenant as an organizing category. 29o be sure, rabbis do invoke the covenant, as in the Bible, to justify the obligation to observe God's law. 30Various passages use the designation "member (lit., son) of the covenant" ‫ברית(‬ ‫,)בן‬ apparently to indicate that the law in question applies only to an Israelite. 31Circumcision is said to be the subject of no less than thirteen covenants; it is quintessentially "the covenant of Abraham our father," and its role as a marker of Israelite identity receives extensive attention among the rabbis. 32To the extent, then, that covenant figures less importantly for the rabbis than for the above works from the Bible and the Second Temple period, it is not a matter of the absence of relevant terms, but of the fact that it does not serve to organize rabbinic theology; it is no more than one category, or set of categories, among others.
Leaving aside these tentative suggestions concerning the significance of covenant in rabbinic thought, I turn to the main task of this section, to establish that one important role that covenant does play in rabbinic thought is substantially different from the one that it plays in the texts analyzed above: the rabbis use covenant to think through the notion of Israel as a corporate body composed of individual members.This interest becomes visible in a sustained interpretive approach to Deut 29 among some rabbis. 33The following passage, from Mek. R. Ish.baḥodesh 5 (Horovitz-Rabin ed., 219), occurs in a comment on the beginning of the Decalogue in Exod 20. 34 Rabbi says: It 35 comes to convey Israel's praises, that when they all stood together before Mount Sinai to receive the Torah, they made their hearts as one ‫)והשוו(‬ 36 to receive the kingdom of God with joy.And moreover, they made themselves collateral, one against the other.And moreover ‫עוד(‬ ‫,)ולא‬ 37 diss., Yeshiva University, 2019 33 For a point of continuity between rabbinic and Qumranic interpretation of Deut 29:28, see Shemesh and Werman, "Hidden Things," 415-17. 34For the Hebrew text, I cite the Munich 95 manuscript. 35The antecedent of "It"-i.e., the specific lemma to which this comment attaches-is unclear.On the redactional character of attributions to Rabbi Judah the Patriarch in Tannaitic midrashim, see Menahem Kahana, "Foreign Bodies from 'the House of Rabbi' in the Halakhic Midrashim," in Studies in Bible and Talmud: Proceedings of the Conference Held on the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Institute for Jewish Studies (ed.Sara Japhet; Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press, 1987) 69-85 (Hebrew).
36 I understand the copula before ‫והשוו‬ to be an error.In Oxford 151, the copyist accidentally skipped from the first ‫לקבל‬ to the second, omitting everything in between.
37 The text at this point has suffered some corruption in most witnesses.The best medieval manuscript, Oxford 151, has ‫שלכך‬ ‫ולא‬ instead of ‫עוד‬ ‫,ולא‬ and the Genizah fragment has ‫שלך‬ ‫.ולא‬I presume that something like Oxford 151 and the Genizah fragment, as the lectio difficilior, is original, and that ‫עוד‬ ‫,ולא‬ attested in the Munich manuscript and other medieval witnesses, is secondary, but the meaning of the original is unclear to me.
the Holiness, blessed be He, revealed himself to covenant with them concerning the concealed things ‫,)נסתרות(‬ as it is written (Deut 29:28), "The concealed things are for the Lord our God. . .."They said to him: Concerning the revealed things we covenant with you, but we do not covenant with you concerning the concealed things, so that it should not be that one person sins in concealment and the congregation should be taken as collateral ‫.)מתמסכין (‬ 38 According to this comment, attributed to Rabbi (R. Judah the Patriarch), Sinai was an occasion for national unity, not only in spirit but as a matter of law: the Israelites pledged themselves as collateral one to the other, allowing God to exact "payment" (punishment) from one Israelite on account of the sin of another.Deuteronomy 29:28 describes a limit to this pledge, perhaps articulated at Sinai, or perhaps in Moab: Israel accepted collective responsibility only for revealed or witnessed sins, not for sins committed in secret. 39he thread of Rabbi's teaching is picked up by the amora Resh Laqish in the Palestinian Talmud, in a comment on the story of Akhan at the beginning of the book of Joshua.Some background is necessary.According to Josh 7, Akhan took from the spoils of Jericho, which were under a ban, and as a result, some thirtysix Israelites fell in the next battle, against the city of Ai.The biblical author is singularly attentive to the implications of this story for the relationship between the individual and the collective. 40The chapter begins by shifting back and forth between these two registers: "And the Israelites violated the ban, and Akhan . . . 38For ‫מתמסכין‬ I understand ‫,מתמשכן‬ as in the editio princeps. 39Medieval interpreters and modern scholars alike have supposed, not unreasonably, that this approach to Deut 29:28 emerges from a reading of earlier sections of the chapter.See Rashi ad 29:28; Shemesh and Werman, "Hidden Things," 415 n. 15.In Deut 29:17-18, as noted above, an individual among Israel secretly expresses his intention to worship other gods, despite the covenantal oaths.But the consequence in the continuation is not only punishment of that individual (29:19-20)  but the destruction of the land and exile (29:21-27).R. Judah the Patriarch solves the tension by construing 29:28 as a reflection on corporate responsibility: the nation suffers for the sin of the individual.(An additional inspiration for this approach to 29:28 comes from the covenantal curses in 27:15-26, which seem to focus on concealed ‫]בסתר[‬ transgressions.See Rashbam ad 27:15.Finally, the first person plural prepositional phrase ‫לנו‬ "for us" in 29:28 is strongly linked to character speech, especially by a group, and especially in a ritual context.See, most proximately, 26:3, 9, 15; 30:12-13.These associations would have encouraged the rabbis to construe 29:28 as speech by collective Israel during the covenant rite.)Biblical scholars, sensitive to this tension, have offered source-critical solutions; it may be, for example, that 29:21-27 represents a secondary interpolation.See Joel S. Kaminsky, Corporate Responsibility in the Hebrew Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1995) 133-35.More likely, there is no real tension.While Deut 29:17-18 focuses on the treachery of an individual Israelite, it also envisions the possibility that the guilty party is a "family or tribe" (29:17), and the description of widespread destruction and exile in 29:21-27 evidently assumes a case in which the rot is widespread.On this approach, 29:28 is simply a concluding exhortation akin to the one found in the next chapter, in Deut 30:11-14 took from the ban, and the Lord was angry with the Israelites" (Josh 7:1).The opening words, "And the Israelites violated the ban," assign the sin to Israel as a whole, with all of the authority of the narrator's voice.Only in the continuation of the verse do we learn that the attribution of the sin to Israel is a constructive legal description, that in fact only a single Israelite took from the ban.When God alerts Joshua to the crime that led to the defeat at Ai, God, like the narrator, attributes the crime to Israel, with mainly plural verbs: "Israel has sinned.They have transgressed the covenant that I commanded them, they have taken from the ban. . .." (7:11).
The book of Joshua returns to the story of Akhan as a source of reflection on the relationship between the individual and the collective in the story of the altar that the tribes of Reuben, Gad, and Manasseh build in the trans-Jordan (Josh 22).The delegation led by Phineas warns these tribes that their actions will have consequences for all of Israel: "When Akhan son of Zerah violated the ban, was there not anger against all the congregation of Israel?He was not the only one who perished for that transgression" (22:20). 41or the purpose of contrast with the rabbinic approach to Deut 29:28 and, as we will see below, to the story of Akhan, let us note how Josh 7 conceptualizes the logic of corporate responsibility.Unlike in Rabbi's comment above, corporate responsibility in Josh 7 does not rest on a notion of Israelite consent in the formation of the covenant.God does make reference to violation of the covenant in Josh 7:11, but the covenant serves as background only to Akhan's transgression itself; it does not explain why Akhan's transgression should be imputed to Israel as a whole.The story makes sense of this imputation only implicitly, and in two ways.The first is through the logic of divine anger, referenced in Josh 7:1 and described, in accordance with the biblical convention, as burning.We are presumably supposed to understand that God's anger spreads like a fire from the source-Akhan's transgression-across the body politic. 42The second and more distinctive way in which the story implicitly explains Israel's corporate responsibility occurs in God's directive to Joshua in 7:12-13: "I will not be with you anymore unless you destroy the ban from your midst ‫.)מקרבכם(‬ Rise and purify the people.Order them: Purify yourselves for tomorrow, for thus says the Lord, God of Israel: A ban is in your midst ‫,)בקרבכם(‬ O Israel.You will not be able to stand up to your enemies until you remove the ban from your midst ‫".)מקרבכם(‬The repeated word ‫קרב‬ "midst" constructs Israel as a body with an interior, such that what is inside that interior implicates the entire body that encloses it. In the rabbis' treatment of the story of Akhan we find a different calibration of the relationship between the individual and the collective.Before turning to Resh Laqish's comment in the Palestinian Talmud, I take note of a passage introduced as a Tannaitic teaching in b.Sanh.43b. 43"When the Holy One, blessed be He, said to Joshua, 'Israel has sinned' ‫ישראל(‬ ‫)חטא‬ (Josh 7:11), he said before him: Master of the world, who sinned?He said to him: Am I a denouncer?Go and cast lots." The exegetical narrative here depends on reading the word ‫ישראל‬ in God's pronouncement, ‫ישראל‬ ‫,חטא‬ not according to the biblical sense, where it indicates a collective (thus: "Israel has sinned"), but according to the rabbinic sense, where it indicates an individual Israelite (thus: "an Israelite has sinned").As Adi Ophir and Ishay Rosen-Zvi have shown, a landmark transformation of the term ‫גוי‬ occurs between biblical and rabbinic literature, from signifying a nation to signifying an individual gentile. 44The same transformation occurs in the term ‫.ישראל‬ 45 This transformation reflects the rabbis' reconceptualization of the relationship between the individual and the collective.
We have already seen, in Rabbi's comment on the Sinai event, that covenant plays an important role in this reconceptualization.Its importance becomes evident further in Resh Laqish's comment on the Akhan story.The immediate literary context for Resh Laqish's comment is an exegetical tradition, preserved in t.Soṭah 8, concerning the Israelites' crossing of the Jordan River in Josh 3. The biblical text (Josh 3:16) tells that when the Jordan stopped flowing to allow the Israelites to cross, the waters flowing downstream toward the crossing point piled up to a great height.The Tosefta (t.Soṭ.8:3) records a debate between two rabbis about the precise height of the pile.According to the continuation of the Tosefta, Joshua took advantage of this looming mass to confirm the people's commitment to war.
They were yet on the other side of the Jordan.Joshua said to them: On this condition are you entering the land, that you dispossess its inhabitants, as it is written, "And you shall dispossess [all] the inhabitants of the land; you shall destroy. . . .But if you do not dispossess . . .then what I planned to do to them, I will do to you." (Num 33:52, 55-56) And if you do not accept, the waters will come and flood you. 4643 For the Hebrew I rely on MS Yad HaRav Herzog, as transcribed in Maagarim.See the citation from this passage in b.Sanh.11a. 44Adi Ophir and Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Goy: Israel's Multiple Others and the Birth of the Gentile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
45 See Ayelet Hoffmann Libson, "Commandments and the Community of the Law in Tosefta Berakhot," JQR 111 (2021) 155-84, at 170-71, and the scholarship cited there. 46For the Hebrew text I rely on MS Vienna.Rashi ad b.Soṭah 34a clarifies the exegetical basis linking Num 33:52-56 to the crossing of the Jordan.First, in the introduction to the speech in Num 33:51, God tells Moses: "Speak to the Israelite people and say to them: When you cross ‫אתם(‬ ‫כי‬ ‫)עברים‬ the Jordan into the land of Canaan, you shall dispossess. . .."The Tosefta supposes that the words "when you cross the Jordan into the land of Canaan" mark not (as I have translated them) the beginning of the speech that Moses is to address to Israel, but an adverbial phrase modifying the imperative "Speak," so that God is telling Moses: You (or whoever is leading Israel at the time) should speak to Israel when you are crossing the Jordan, etc. Thus the speech is supposed to occur in the Jordan River.The influence of Num 33:51 is probably detectable in the fact that MS Vienna begins with the words ‫הירדן‬ ‫בעבר‬ ‫,עודם‬ echoing the verb at the beginning of the verse; the story Resh Laqish, in the Palestinian Talmud (y.Soṭah 7:5 [22a]), shifts the topic of interest for Joshua."Said R. Shimon b.Laqish: In the Jordan they accepted upon themselves the concealed things ‫.)הנסתרות(‬ Said to them Joshua: If you do not accept upon yourselves the concealed things, the waters will come and flood you."According to Resh Laqish's revision, Joshua in the Jordan compelled Israel under pain of death to accept that which, according to R. Judah the Patriarch, they refused to accept at Sinai: communal responsibility for concealed transgressions.The Talmud continues with the proof for Resh Laqish's view from the aforementioned case of Akhan."Said R. Simon bar Zavda: And it is reasonable.Know that it is so, for behold, Akhan sinned and a majority of the Sanhedrin fell at Ai." 47 Thus, if in the first stage of Israel's covenantal history, at Sinai, the people accept responsibility only for sins committed openly, in the second stage, upon entering the land of Israel, they are made to accept responsibility also for concealed sins.But the continuation of the passage in the Yerushalmi indicates that this new state of affairs does not endure forever."Said R. Levi: At Yavneh, the strap was unknotted.An echo came forth and said: You should have no truck with concealed things ‫".)נסתרות(‬The strap is that which inflicts lashes, and for it to be unknotted is for it to be laid aside, so that there is no punishment for the crime in question. 48R. Levi asserts on the basis of an "echo"-though the words in fact come from the book of Ben Sira-that, at Yavneh, God frees Israel from responsibility for covert sins. 49R. Levi's claim follows from that of Resh Laqish: if it is as a self-governing people on its land that Israel must assume responsibility for concealed transgressions, then such responsibility comes to an end with the destruction of the temple and the dawn of a new, exilic era at Yavneh.seems in fact to require, as in MS Erfurt ‫בירדן(‬ ‫עודן‬ "when they were yet in the Jordan"), that the Israelites be already in the Jordan.Second, Josh 4:10 speaks of the priests remaining in the river "until all the words that the Lord had ordered Joshua to convey to the people had been completed, according to all that Moses had commanded Joshua."The reference cannot (for the rabbinic exegete) be to the command to retrieve stones from the Jordan or to set up stones in the Jordan, as the preceding verses already address these matters; moreover, Moses never makes any reference in the Pentateuch to retrieving stones from or placing stones in the Jordan.The reference must therefore be to something else that Moses commanded to be done in the river, namely, the issuance of the threat in Num 33:52-56. 47The great Sanhedrin consists of seventy people, and thirty-six Israelites died at Ai.The reference to the Sanhedrin may be intended to imply that the source of Israel's collective responsibility lay in its failure to punish Akhan for his transgression. 48For this expression, see also Lev.Rab.28:1 (Midrash Wayyikra Rabbah: A Critical Edition Based on Manuscripts and Genizah Fragments with Variants and Notes [ed.Mordecai Margulies; New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1993] 448), observing that one might infer from statements in Ecclesiastes that "there is no judgement and no Judge; the strap has been unknotted."See likewise y.Bik.1:5 (64a). 49The words from Ben Sira occur in Sir 3:22.Cf. the quotation of this verse with the attribution to Ben Sira in y.Ḥag.2:1 (73c).As correctly understood in y.Ḥag.2:1, the "concealed things" of Sir 3:22 are in fact the concealed ways of God, divine mysteries, not concealed transgressions; see the similar expression in Aramaic in b.Ber.10a.On the two meanings of ‫-נסתר‬concealed knowledge and concealed transgressions-see Shemesh and Werman, "Hidden Things."I note briefly one other Tannaitic text that is unrelated to the above exegetical trajectory but that likewise invokes Deut 29, with other covenantal passages from the Bible, to undergird the notion of collective responsibility. 50The Tosefta (t.Soṭah 7:2-6) describes in detail the rite whereby judges impose an oath on a litigant in a civil case who insists on his innocence despite the evidence against him. 51According to this description, first the judges attempt to persuade him to concede guilt and only adjure him if he refuses. 521a.One who owes an oath to another party, they (i.e., the judges) say to him: Know that all the world shook on the day on which it was said, "You shall not swear falsely by the name of the Lord your God[, for the Lord will not clear one who swears falsely by His name]" (Exod 20:7).
1b.All transgressions in the Torah, it is written concerning them, "clearing" (Exod 34:7), but this one, it is written concerning it, "He will not clear" (ibid.;Exod 20:7). 53All transgressions in the Torah, punishment is exacted from him, but this one, from him and from the whole world, and the transgression of the entire world is suspended on him, as it is said, "Curse and dishonesty, . . .for that, the earth is withered" (Hos 4:2-3).All transgressions in the 50 For a third case, but not involving Deut 29, see Sifra ṣav 3:3 (Sifra' De-Ve Rav [Torat Kohanim] [ed.I. H. Weiss; Vienna: J. Schlossberg, 1861/2] 32a), where R. Shimon interprets Lev 6:15 so that the verse indicates that the post mortem meal offering of the high priest comes ‫שלו‬ ‫שהברית‬ ‫ממי‬ "from the one to whom belongs the covenant," i.e., from the congregation of Israel, presumably to exclude the notion that an individual Israelite might fund it.There is much that is unclear about this passage.The comment, "from the one to whom belongs the covenant," occurs in Sifra emor 13:2 (104b), interpreting the words ‫עולם‬ ‫ברית‬ "eternal covenant" in Lev 24:8, whereas in Lev 6:15, the lemma is ‫עולם‬ ‫חוק‬ "eternal statute," and there is no reference to the covenant.See also the version of R. Shimon's comment in b.Menaḥ.51b, with no reference to the covenant.In any case, I note that on the Sifra's version, R. Shimon appears to invoke the category of covenant to single out the congregation in contrast with individuals. 51On this oath see now also Tzvi Novick, "The Rabbinic Courtroom Oath in its Roman Context," Zutot 20 (2023) 1-11. 52For the Hebrew text I rely on the editio princeps.What survives in MS Vienna is largely the same.Major differences in MS Erfurt are noted in the footnotes below; they are substantial but not important for my purposes.The parallel material in the baraita quoted in b.Šeb.39a is substantially the same as the editio princeps of the Tosefta. 53In Exod 34:7, God says that he "will not altogether clear ‫ינקה(‬ ‫לא‬ ‫,)נקה‬ but visits the iniquity of parents upon children and children's children, upon the third and fourth generation."The exegesis in the above passage depends, first, on the typical rabbinic tactic of construing the absolute infinitive ‫)נקה(‬ separately from the conjugated form ‫ינקה(‬ ‫)לא‬ as describing a different scenario.On this approach, God represents himself as fundamentally prepared to clear, or forgive.And in what circumstance does he not clear but visits the sin upon subsequent generations?The answer is supplied by 20:7, according to which God "will not clear" one who swears falsely by God's name.The exegesis may also be supported by the fact that the notion of God exacting punishment from "the third and fourth generation," the manifestation of "not clearing" in 34:7, occurs in 20:5b-6.These verses can (and according to the plain sense should) be construed as an appendix to the commandment concerning worship of other gods (20:1-5a), but our exegete may take them to be a prelude to the commandment concerning false oaths (20:7).This exegesis is connected with the boundary role of the commandment concerning false oaths in the division of penitence in Mek.R. Ish.ba-ḥodesh 7 (229); t.Yoma 4:5; cf. the commentary of Nahmanides and Ritba ad b.Šeb.39a.Torah, punishment is exacted from him, but this one, from him and from his relatives, as it is said, "Don't let your mouth bring disfavor on your flesh" (Eccl 5:5), and his flesh is none other than his relative, as it is said, "and not to ignore your own flesh" (Isa 58 :7).All transgressions in the Torah, there is suspending for him for two or three generations, but this one is immediate, as it is said, "I have sent [the curse] forth, declares the Lord of Hosts" (Zech 5:4); immediately, "and it shall enter the house of the thief" (ibid.), this being the one who adjures falsely, knowing that [the one being adjured] does not have it, and thus he steals the minds of people; "and the house of one who swears falsely by my name" (ibid.), which is just as it means.All transgressions in the Torah, [the punishment is assessed] in his property, and this one, in his property and in his body, as it is said, "and it shall lodge [inside his house and shall utterly consume him, and his wood and his stones]" (ibid.).Come and see that things that the fire does not consume, a false oath utterly consumes. 54 If he says: I will not swear, they dismiss him immediately.If he says: I will swear, they say to each other, "turn aside from the tents of these wicked men [. . .lest you be swept up in all their sins]" (Num 16:26).
3. They adjure him with the oath that is said in the Torah, as it is said, "And I adjure you by the Lord, the God of the heavens and the God of the earth" (Gen 24:3).4. They say to him: Know that it is not subject to a condition in your heart that we adjure you, but subject to a condition in our heart.And so we find that when Moses55 adjured Israel on the Plains of Moab, he said to them: Know that it is not subject to a condition in your heart that I adjure you, but subject to a condition in my heart, as it is said, "And it is not with you alone [that I make this covenant, with its curses,] but both with him who is here [with us, standing today before the Lord our God, and him who is not here with us today]" (Deut 29:13-14).56I have only the commandments that Israel was commanded at Mount Sinai.Whence to include the reading of the scroll [of Esther]?Hence it says: "[The Jews] undertook and accepted, etc., irrevocably" (Esth 9:27).
The rite features two major sections, both of which begin with "know that": the initial attempt at dissuading the litigant from taking the oath (section 1) and the qualifications that the court attaches to the oath (section 4).In between comes the crux itself: the litigant is either persuaded and declines to swear, or he persists and takes the oath (sections 2 and 3). 57 covenantal framework encloses the entire rite.The judges begin by recalling the pronunciation of the Decalogue at Sinai (section 1) and end by referring to the covenant at the Plains of Moab and its aftermath around the festival of Purim (section 4). 58The exegeses in section 1 are linked by the root ‫,נק"י‬ which occurs in Exod 20:7, 34:7, and Zech 5:3, and by the word "curse" ‫)אלה(‬ which occurs in Hos 4:2 and Zech 5:3. 59This word evokes the curse that seals the covenantal oath, and it is introduced again in section 4 through the quotation of Deut 29:13.The covenantal framework drives the notion of collective responsibility that is the major (though not the exclusive) theme of section 1.This theme takes center stage again when the litigant insists on swearing, in section 2: the verse that the judges quote, Num 16:26, voices the concern that the punishment of the oath-taker will radiate outward and sweep away those around him. 60Thus, as in the exegetical trajectory around Deut 29:28, so this passage makes use of covenant in order to give expression to the notion of collective responsibility. 61It is notable that the corporate bodies explicitly identified in section 1 are the family and the world, not Israel.Nevertheless, Israel does occur in section 4. 57 There are clear points of contact with two judicial rites in the Mishnah: the attempt to dissuade the suspected adulteress from carrying forward the ordeal process in m.Soṭah 1:4, and the intimidation of witnesses in capital cases in m.Sanh.4:5.There is reason to think that the Tosefta passage depends on the two Mishnah passages.The last exegesis in section 1, concerning the property and body of the oath-taker, is somewhat strained and is probably best construed as a nod to the judges' speech in m.Sanh.4:5, which dwells on the greater severity of cases where life is at stake over cases where only property is at stake.Likewise, the insistence (with only a slim exegetical basis) that punishment in the case of the false oath is not "suspended" until later but administered immediately seems designed to evoke the context of the soṭah, where much attention is devoted (m.Soṭah 3:4) to the possibility of punishment being suspended; see also the occurrence of "suspension" in the exegesis of Hos 4:2-3 in section 1. 58 The language of covenantal oath-taking is reflected in Esth 9:27, quoted in section 4, both through the terminology of "undertaking" ‫;קימו(‬ cf.Aram.‫קימא‬ "covenant, oath") and of "accepting upon oneself." 59The oath that the soṭah swears is also characterized by the word ‫אלה‬ in Num 5:21.Cf. t.Soṭah 1:4, introducing 1 Kgs 8:31, featuring the same word, to locate the soṭah's ordeal. 60Num 16:26 is arguably connected with Lev 26:37, the locus classicus for the notion that each Israelite is guarantor (i.e., can be called upon to pay the penalty) for the sins of other Israelites; see Sifra beḥuqotai 2:5 (Weiss ed., 112b).According to Num 16:34, describing the event following Moses's warning in Num 16:26, "all Israel around them fled at the sound of them ‫לקלם(‬ ‫",)נסו‬ while Lev 26:36 imagines Israel as "fleeing" ‫)ונסו(‬ from the "sound" ‫)קול(‬ of a driven leaf. 61 Contrast the intimidation of witnesses in the case of a capital crime (m.Sanh.4:5), where responsibility propagates vertically rather than horizontally: The judges insist that a witness whose false testimony leads to the execution of the defendant has on his hands the blood of the descendants who would have come from the defendant.paradigmatic bearer of rights and obligations.The community as a corporate body enters into the framework of the law only as the exception. 66ne example of this predilection of the law comes from the case of the ‫הנדחת‬ ‫,עיר‬ the city turned toward idolatry.The Bible (Deut 13:14-19) demands that, after careful investigation to ascertain the facts, the city should be subjected to the rule of ḥerem, i.e., the killing of all of the city's inhabitants and the destruction of their property.As scholars have observed, the rule of the turned city merges the institutions of warfare and of justice. 67The fact-finding is judicial, but the punishment belongs to the realm of warfare, especially in the rule's refusal to distinguish between the guilty and the innocent: the collective punishment is grounded in the logic of friend and foe that defines war, rather than in the logic of innocence and guilt that defines justice and law.The main line of rabbinic interpretation advances the judicial or legal element at the expense of the warfare element and insists that inhabitants who did not worship foreign gods are not, in fact, subject to execution.The rabbis preserve the collective element of the law only with respect to property, and even then, only with the support of geography: though innocent inhabitants are spared, property of theirs that is situated inside the city, but not outside the city, is subject to the ḥerem.
The challenge of processing the corporate body in legal terms emerges especially clearly in the context of liturgy.The Tosefta (t.Roš.Haš.2:18) reports a debate between Rabban Gamaliel and the sages.Rabban Gamaliel takes the view that the Amidah prayer by the emissary of the congregation exempts individuals from their prayer obligation.The Sages disagree and insist that each individual must "exempt himself," i.e., must pray the Amidah individually.Rabban Gamaliel's response-"if so, why do we have [the emissary of the congregation] descend before the ark?"-is to the point and supports the supposition, advanced by Gerald Blidstein among others, that the practice for which he advocates is original: the emissary of the congregation served genuinely as emissary, and he alone prayed the Amidah. 68Nor, most likely, did he offer this prayer to "exempt" individuals from their obligation to pray (and in this respect, even Rabban Gamaliel's position departs from the original practice); rather, the prayer was imagined as in the first place the collective work of the congregation, not as an obligation incumbent on each individual member of the congregation. 69his latter notion, which finds fullest expression in the sages' position, represents a secondary development: it came to be understood that each individual is obligated to pray the Amidah and ought ideally to carry out this obligation himself.Blidstein attributes this development to an alleged crisis of confidence about communal institutions following upon the destruction of the temple, and a consequent rise in the individual as the locus of praxis.I think it more likely that the cause lies with the rise of halakah as law, addressed paradigmatically to the individual.
A similar development occurs in the Shema liturgy.The history of this liturgy, which traces to the Second Temple period, is complex and uncertain, and a full account of its development lies far beyond the scope of this article, but the key transformations for our purposes were most likely as follows.In the Second Temple period, a daily morning liturgy at the temple involved the recitation of the Decalogue, followed by the three units of the Shema familiar from contemporary practice (Deut 6:4-9; 11:13-21;  Num 15:37-41).This liturgy appears to have been colored by a notion of covenant renewal, evoking the Sinai covenant through the Decalogue, and beginning (Exod 20:2) and ending (Num 15:41) with the declaration of the Lord as Israel's God and savior.Alongside this rite there is evidence for a practice of individual recitation of the first two paragraphs of the Shema (Deut 6:4-11; 11:13-21), either specifically in the evening, for apotropaic purposes, or perhaps in both the morning and the evening, for apotropaic purposes or as an act of Torah piety.The rabbis, or the circles whose practice they affirm, merge these practices, dropping the Decalogue from the temple rite and surrounding the Shema with blessings.In the Tannaitic period, the liturgy is still in flux: the evening Shema still does not, for some, include the third paragraph (m.Ber.1:5), and there is a form of communal recitation of the morning Shema that recalls its (partial) origin in a public rite (m.Meg.4:3).But the development occurs in a way that suppresses the dimension of covenant renewal.The sovereignty of God emerges as an alternative thematic center, and the distinctive communal recitation falls into desuetude. 70Among the factors that motivated these developments, we may return to the considerations identified above: a hesitation about covenant renewal, and the emergence of a legalistic framework that processes obligation, including ritual obligation, as inhering first and foremost in the individual. 7170 The above account summarizes, synthesizes, supplements, and nuances the posited reconstructions in Reuven Kimelman, "The Shema' and Its Rhetoric: The Case for the Shema' Being More than Creation, Revelation, Redemption," Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 2 (1992) 111-56; idem, "Rabbinic Prayer in Late Antiquity," in The Late Roman-Rabbinic Period (vol. 4 of The Cambridge History of Judaism; ed.Steven Katz; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 573-611; and especially Aharon Shemesh, "The Origins of the Reading of the Shema," in Ke-Tavor Be-Harim: Studies in Rabbinic Literature Presented to Joseph Tabory (ed.Arnon Atzmon and Tzur  Shafir; Alon Shevut: Tevunot Press, 2013) 125-38 (Hebrew).See also Sarit Kattan Gribetz, "The Shema in the Second Temple Period: A Reconsideration," JAJ 6 (2015) 58-84. 71See also Mira Balberg, Blood for Thought: The Reinvention of Sacrifice in Early Rabbinic Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017) 108-41, on the congregational offering.The insistence that each Israelite must acquire a share in congregational offerings though the contribution of a half-shekel should probably be linked to the same development.

 Conclusion
The emergence and dominance within the rabbinic movement of halakah-law in a recognizably modern sense and in the ancient Roman sense-meant also the rise of the individual within this legal framework and the problematization of collective bodies like the congregation, the city, and the people Israel.I have shown that, unlike their Second Temple predecessors, rabbinic interest in covenant-and, in particular, a key covenantal text, Deut 29-centers not on the relationship between the covenantal partners, God and Israel, and not on defining who counts and who does not count as Israel, but on the problem of Israel as a collective body, bound in mutual responsibility.I suggest that these two developments are connected: the rabbis found the concept of covenant a helpful framework to think through a notion of corporate Israel that had been problematized by the rise of halakah.This conclusion is ironically but only superficially close to E. P. Sanders's notion of covenantal nomism.In his formulation, too, covenant responds to or qualifies a certain tendency within nomism, but in the view that I have defended, it supplies not grace, but community.
: God does not demand of the Israelites that they seek out heavenly matters, concealed things; they need only heed what God has already revealed to them.The intervening verses, Deut 30:1-10, likely represent a secondary interpolation; see Alexander Rofé, "Redressing the Calamity in the Transmission of the Bible," Tarbiz 82 (2014) 221-29, at 222-23 (Hebrew).