The Rise of Talmud

The rabbinic sages of late antiquity are known for their sophisticated and creative reading of Scripture, but rabbinic literature also includes elaborate commentary on another kind of text: the sages’ own teachings. This book argues that the development of this commentary, later called Talmud, transformed the sages’ self-perception and intellectual world. By studying the first collection of commentary on rabbinic teachings, the often neglected and difficult Talmud Yerushalmi, and comparing it with earlier rabbinic texts, this study shows how ancient Talmudic scholars presented a new understanding of these teachings: they saw them as the products of individual sages and as resulting from problem-fraught processes of composition and transmission. To examine these aspects, these ancient scholars introduced new types of arguments and reading strategies, such as attribution analysis and textual criticism, into the study of Torah. The result was not only a new understanding of rabbinic teachings, but also a body of scholarship that was decidedly different from rabbinic scholarship on Scripture, since it engaged precisely the type of critical inquiries that rabbinic readings of Scripture avoided. This new perspective on the first Talmud allows us not only to paint a richer picture of rabbinic hermeneutics and interpretive practices, but also to situate ancient Talmudic scholarship among other scholarly traditions of the Greco-Roman world and examine the ways that different ideas, aims, and contexts shape textual scholarship—including our own.