Simeon the Righteous in Rabbinic Literature Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity
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Simeon the Righteous in Rabbinic Literature Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judentums und des Urchristentums Founding Editor Martin Hengel† (Tübingen) Executive Editors Cilliers Breytenbach (Berlin) Martin Goodman (Oxford) Editorial Board Friedrich Avemarie† (Marburg), John Barclay (Durham), Pieter W. van der Horst (Utrecht), Tal Ilan (Berlin), Tessa Rajak (Reading and Oxford), Daniel R. Schwartz (Jerusalem), Seth Schwartz (New York) VOLUME 84 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ajec Simeon the Righteous in Rabbinic Literature A Legend Reinvented By Amram Tropper LEIDEN • BOSTON 2013 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tropper, Amram D. Simeon the Righteous in rabbinic literature : a legend reinvented / by Amram Tropper. pages cm. – (Ancient Judaism and early Christianity, ISSN 1871-6636 ; volume 84) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-24498-6 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-90-04-24502-0 (e-book : alk. paper) 1. Simeon, the Just–In rabbinical literature. 2. Rabbinical literature–History and criticism. I. Title. BM496.9.S56T76 2013 296.1'20092–dc23 2012045780 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1871-6636 ISBN 978-90-04-24498-6 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-24502-0 (e-book) Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. לאהוביי צופיה, עדין, חגי, בניהו, תכלת וכנה, ”אל תקרי ’בניך‘ אלא ’בוניך.‘“ (בבלי ברכות סד ע”א) CONTENTS Introduction . 1 1. The Rabbinic Traditions . 11 2. Simeon the Righteous, the Great Assembly of Avot and the Rabbinization of Early Second Temple Judaism . 23 3. Simeon the Righteous and the Origins of the World’s Three Pillars . 69 4. Simeon the Righteous and the Narcissistic Nazirite. 81 5. Simeon the Righteous and Alexander the Great . 113 6. Simeon the Righteous and the Temple of Onias . 157 7. Simeon the Righteous in Second Temple Chronology . 199 Conclusion . 213 Select Bibliography . 217 Index of Subjects . 241 Index of Sources . 243 INTRODUCTION If you should visit Jerusalem and walk northwards of the Old City towards Mt. Scopus, you will likely pass through a street named after Simeon the Righteous: Rehov Shimʿon ha-Zadik. The street is adjacent to a burial cave from the Roman-Byzantine period that was probably already in use during Second Temple times and this burial cave, according to a medieval Jewish tradition, is the final resting place of Simeon the Righteous. Due to its medieval identification, the ancient burial cave became a holy site for Jews in both medieval and modern times and Jewish pilgrims continue to visit it year in year out. Thus, for example, the site remains a popular location for the Hasidic “halaqah” ritual, the ceremonial first haircut of three year old boys often performed on the thirty third day of the ʿOmer (shortly before the festival of Shavuot). As a well known holy Jewish site the burial cave inspired not only the name of the adjacent street but also the names of two adjoining neighborhoods that were established in 1891–1892: Shimʿon ha-Zadik and Nahalat Shimʿon. Thus, the medieval Jewish tradition which identified the burial cave as the final resting place of Simeon the Righteous influenced the naming of two neighborhoods in modern Jerusalem and transformed the burial cave into a pilgrimage site sacred in the eyes of myriads of Jews from the Middle Ages to the present.1 If you should expand your purview and make an excursion to southern Jerusalem as well, you might visit the St. Simeon Monastery, a Greek Ortho- dox monastery at the heart of the San Simon neighborhood whose name it 1 See Ben-Arieh (1986) 21–23, 188–191; Ben Eliyahu (1996) 64; Kloner and Zissu (2000) 97–98; Kloner and Zissu (2003) 137. Not far from the burial cave associated with Simeon the Righteous is another burial cave identified, since medieval times, as the burial cave of the large Sanhedrin of Second Temple Jerusalem. Thus, according to medieval tradition, Simeon the Righteous, a final remnant of the Great Assembly (see Chapter 2 below), was buried near the burial place of the heirs to the Great Assembly in rabbinic eyes, i.e. the members of the Sanhedrin. A relatively recent Jewish tradition identifies a burial cave adjacent to the cave associated with Simeon the Righteous as the final resting place of the small Sanhedrin presumably because of its proximity to the caves associated with the large Sanhedrin and Simeon the Righteous (Zissu and Kloner (2000) 100). The “halaqah” ceremony is famously performed on the thirty third day of the ʿOmer alongside Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai’s grave in Meron and Eyal ben Eliyahu has suggested to me that perhaps the ceremony was transferred to Jerusalem by Jerusalemites who did not feel like making the long trek all the way to the Galilee and hence decided that the grave of another famous “Simeon” could function in lieu of Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai’s distant grave. 2 introduction inspired. Built in the nineteenth century on top of the remains of an eleventh century monastery, the St. Simeon Monastery was named after the “δίκαιος καὶ εὐλαβὴς,” the “righteous and devout” Simeon, who recognized the child Jesus as the future Messiah according to the Gospel of Luke.2 This righteous Simeon was identified as a Second Temple high priest in later Christian liter- ature3 and the monastery named after him was founded at the very site of his house and grave according to a Christian tradition from Byzantine times.4 Of course, the Simeon in Luke after whom the St. Simeon monastery was named is not Simeon the Righteous of Jewish tradition yet a synagogue named after Simeon the Righteous stands at the edge of the San Simon park in which the monastery stands today. When the Simeon the Righteous syn- agogue was erected in the late twentieth century, its founders were appar- ently inspired by the name of the monastery (and that of the surrounding neighborhood) to name their holy site with a parallel name from the Jew- ish tradition. The monastery named after a righteous Second Temple high priest called Simeon (in Christian tradition) apparently prompted its Jewish neighbors to name their synagogue as well after a righteous Second Temple high priest called Simeon, i.e. Simeon the Righteous.5 The burial cave of Simeon the Righteous, the two Jerusalem neighbor- hoods named after him and the St. Simeon/Simeon the Righteous complex in the San Simon neighborhood all attest to the potent force of Simeon the Righteous’s name in modern Jerusalem. In truth, however, the image of Simeon the Righteous, the hallowed portrait of a wise and saintly Sec- ond Temple high priest, is well known to Jews the world over. In traditional and religious Jewish communities, Simeon the Righteous’s wisdom saying in Avot is highly familiar to adults and is already taught to children at a very young age. Hence, Simeon the Righteous is not a forgotten figure of the dis- tant past but rather an ancient luminary whose image lives on in the cultural and religious landscape of contemporary Jewry. Simeon the Righteous’s prominent place in medieval and modern Jewish culture is due primarily to the traditions about him in rabbinic literature and not to the writings of his contemporaries in the third century bce or later Second Temple authors. In the post-talmudic era, Second Temple Jewish literature (not included in the Bible) exerted only a marginal influence on Jewish society and culture while rabbinic literature became a central and 2 See Luke 2, 25–35. See also Schiller (1992) 257. 3 See Protevangelium Iacobi 24, 4. See also Bovon (2002) 100 n. 24. 4 See Ben-Arieh (1986) 306; Veksler (1996) 300–301. 5 Cf. Reiner (1998) 268–269. introduction 3 formative force in Jewish life. Consequently, the standard image of Simeon the Righteous, shared by medieval and modern Jews alike, is the rabbinic image of Simeon the Righteous. While Jews traditionally have viewed rabbinic literature as a unified whole and accordingly synthesized the rabbinic traditions about Simeon the Righteous into an integrated biography,6 Simeon’s image is not uniform and unchanging across rabbinic literature. In fact, Simeon the Righteous’s image varies from tradition to tradition and while one tradition highlights certain facets of his literary persona, a second highlights others. These variegated traditions, the very traditions which were integrated into the standard Jewish depiction of Simeon the Righteous, are the subject matter of this study. In exploring the rabbinic traditions about Simeon the Righteous my goal is twofold. First, I offer a close reading of the traditions in an attempt to determine how they would have resonated in ancient times. With the help of a historically and culturally contextualized literary analysis, I seek to situate the traditions about Simeon the Righteous within the cultural setting of late antiquity.