A Late Antique Babylonian Rabbinic Treatise on Astrology Richard

A LATE ANTIQUE BABYLONIAN RABBINIC TREATISE ON ASTROLOGY Richard Kalmin This study supports my claim in earlier research that the fourth century CE is an important turning point in Babylonian Jewish history, a time when texts, attitudes, literary motifs, and modes of behavior deriving from the west, particularly the eastern Roman provinces, achieved literary expression in the Babylonian Talmud (BT), often for the first time.1 Also, this study supports my claim that (a) Babylonia increasingly became part of the Mediterranean world in late antiquity and/or that (b) Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia increasingly became a cultural unity during this period, particularly beginning in the fourth century. I am certainly not suggesting that there was no exchange between Mesopotamia and the Roman Empire, or between Syria and Palestine on the one hand and Mesopotamia on the other, prior to the fourth century. Rather, my claim, articulated in much greater detail in earlier research, is that events of the mid-third century led to a period of vigorous west- ernization of Mesopotamia, which first achieves literary expression in Jewish and Christian sources of the fourth century, and that the exchange between the regions was largely one way, from west to east, during most of this period.2 Many modern scholars have discussed ancient rabbinic attitudes toward astrology. Scholarly discussions have been hampered, however, by a lack of familiarity with the latest tools of modern critical scholarship on rabbinic literature,3 and at times an inability to understand rabbinic 1 Richard Kalmin, Jewish Babylonia Between Persia and Roman Palestine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); and idem, “The Miracle of the Septuagint,” in The Lee Levine Jubilee Volume (ed. Zeev Weiss et al.; Eisenbrauns: Winona Lakes, IN: 2010), 239–51. 2 See Fergus Millar, The Roman Near East, 31 BC–AD 337 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 510. See also pages 516–17 and Kalmin, Jewish Babylonia, 186. 3 To give just one example, see Kocku von Stuckrad, Das Ringen um die Astrologie: Jüdische und Christliche Beiträge zum Antiken Zeitverständnis (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 496–97, who quotes bSuk 29a incompletely without the crucial statement that when Israel does the will of God it has no need to worry about the power of the luminaries. Von Stuckrad maintains incorrectly that the text supports the idea that astrology works for everyone, Jew and non-Jew alike. See also pages 476–77, where he fails to distinguish 166 richard kalmin texts on their most basic level.4 A fresh look at the evidence is therefore a desideratum. I confine the discussion to cases in which it is clear that the rabbis (a) divine God’s will or the future based on the movements or appearance of heavenly bodies or (b) acknowledge that heavenly bodies influence the course of events on earth. The Hebrew and Aramaic words mazal and mazla⁠ʾ are conventionally translated as “planet,” “constellation,” “heavenly body,” “fortune,” and even “guardian angel.”5 Since it is impossible to capture all of these nuances with a single English word, I generally leave these words untranslated, relying on context to convey the meaning or accompanying them with an explanation. 1. bShabbat 156a–b: An Astrological Miscellany My mode of entry into these issues will be a close reading of a lengthy discussion in bShab 156a–b6 that features mid-fourth century and later Babylonian rabbis responding to western, primarily (although not exclu- sively) Palestinian traditions about astrology. This discussion begins with two crucially important astrological statements attributed to Palestinian amoraim.7 Their Palestinian provenance is corroborated by the fact that between the Hebrew statement attributed to Rav in bShab 156a (paralleled in Gen Rabbah 44:12 [ J. Theodor and Ch. Albeck, eds., Midrasch Bereschit Rabba mit kritischem Apparat und Kommentar {Berlin, 1903–1929; 2d ed.; Jerusalem: Wahrmann Books, 1965}], 432) and the anonymous editorial give and take (in Aramaic) based on Rav’s statement, without parallel in any Palestinian compilation. 4 Von Stuckrad, Das Ringen, 460. In addition, von Stuckrad, ibid., 452, uses ancient and medieval rabbinic compilations indiscriminately, leading to distortions in his accounts of the late antique rabbinic views. 5 See Michael Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Babylonian Jewish Aramaic (Ramat-Gan, Israel: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2002), 653–54. Compare idem, A Dictionary of Palestinian Jewish Aramaic (Ramat-Gan, Israel: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1992), 298. 6 Compare Solomon Gandz, “The Origin of the Planetary Week or the Planetary Week in Hebrew Literature,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research 18 (1948– 49): 213–67 (repr. Studies in Hebrew Astronomy and Mathematics [New York: Ktav, 1970], 169–210); Von Stuckrad, Das Ringen, 460–80; and Gregg Gardner, “Astrology in the Talmud: An Analysis of Bavli Shabbat 156,” in Heresy and Identity in Late Antiquity, (ed. Holger Zellentin and Eduard Iricinschi; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 314–38. My thanks to Professor Zellentin for making the page proofs available to me prior to publication. Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, “Talmudic Astrology: Bavli Šabbat 156a–b,” Hebrew Union College Annual 78 (2007): 109–48, reached me too late to incorporate into this article. 7 bShab 156a (R. Yehoshua ben Levi and R. Hanina). .

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