Social History of the Jews in Antiquity
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Social History of the Jews in Antiquity Studies in Dialogue with Albert Baumgarten edited by Michal Bar-Asher Siegal and Jonathan Ben-Dov Mohr Siebeck Digital copy – for author's private use only – © Mohr Siebeck 2021 Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, born 1979. A scholar of rabbinic Judaism. Her work focuses on aspects of Jewish-Christian interactions in the ancient world, and compares between Early Christian and rabbinic sources. She is an associate professor at The Goldstein-Goren Depart- ment of Jewish Thought, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She was an elected member of the Israel Young Academy of Sciences; Harry Starr Fellow at Harvard university and visiting professor at Yale University. Jonathan Ben-Dov, born 1971. Associate professor at the department of Bible, Tel Aviv Uni- versity, formerly at the University of Haifa. He has been a research fellow at New York Uni- versity (ISAW), The University of Durham (UK) and the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies (Jerusalem). His research involves The Dead Sea Scrolls and apocalyptic literature, history of the biblical Text, and time reckoning in the ancient world. orcid.org/0000-0002-5346-6950 ISBN 978-3-16-160694-6 / eISBN 978-3-16-160708-0 DOI 10.1628/978-3-16-160708-0 ISSN 0721-8753 / eISSN 2568-9525 (Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism) Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data are available at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2021 by Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, Germany. www.mohrsiebeck.com This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that permitted by copyright law) without the publisher’s written permission. This applies particularly to reproduc- tions, translations and storage and processing in electronic systems. The book was typeset by Martin Fischer in Tübingen, printed by Gulde Druck in Tübingen on non-aging paper and bound by Buchbinderei Spinner in Ottersweier. Printed in Germany. Digital copy – for author's private use only – © Mohr Siebeck 2021 Table of Contents Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, Jonathan Ben-Dov, and Eyal Regev Albert Baumgarten: Contextualizing the Ancient Jewish Experience . IX I. Second Temple Studies Gabriele Boccaccini Jewish Scholarship on the Second Temple Period from the Renaissance to Albert I. Baumgarten ........................................ 3 Martin Goodman Philo’s Extreme Allegorists Revisited . 21 Maxine L. Grossman The Dead Sea Sectarians. Breaking the Boundaries of an Essene-Shaped Space . 31 Charlotte Hempel Self-Fashioning in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Thickening the Description of What Rule Texts Do . 49 Sylvie Honigman Social and Economic Upheavals and the “De-Traditionalization” of Judean Society in Hellenistic Times. The Background to Sectarianism ... 67 Steve Mason John of Gischala and Simon bar Giora from Gerasa. A National Revolt? . 87 Eyal Regev The Practice of Piety. The Puritans and Qumran . 109 Daniel R. Schwartz Who Brought on Antiochus’s Decrees? On the Chaotic and “Worthless” Prehistory of Bickerman’s Gott der Makkabäer ..................... 127 Digital copy – for author's private use only – © Mohr Siebeck 2021 VI Table of Contents Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra The Place of 4QMMT in the Corpus of Qumran Manuscripts. Beyond the Sussmann-Schiffman Dichotomy . 147 II. Rabbinics and Early Christianity Michal Bar-Asher Siegal Public Confession in the Babylonian Talmud and in Contemporary Christian Sources . 165 Jonathan Ben-Dov Rabbi Yehuda Hanasi and the Roman Year ......................... 189 Shaye J. D. Cohen Are Women and Gentiles “Persons” (Adam, Benei Adam) in the Eyes of the Mishnah? . 205 Steven D. Fraade “Reading Leads to Translating” in a Multilingual Context. The View from Early Rabbinic Texts (and Beyond) .................. 217 Maren R. Niehoff Celsus’s Jew in Third-Century Caesarea. Tracing Hellenistic Judaism in Origen’s Contra Celsum ..................................... 233 Adele Reinhartz The Fourth Gospel and the First Century Outreach Campaign to the Gentiles ............................................... 251 Adiel Schremer How Can Rabbinic Narratives Talk History? ....................... 267 III. Sociological Models and Ancient Judaism Former Students in Dialogue Stéphanie E. Binder Contre Apion I. 183–205; II. 43. Quelle audience pour les passages attribués à Hécatée? . 299 Digital copy – for author's private use only – © Mohr Siebeck 2021 Table of Contents VII Shlomit Kendi-Harel Yom Hakippurim. Day, Year, or Eschatological Jubilee? .............. 317 Hillel Newman Religious Conviction (Religion) and Ethical Practice (Morality) in a Jewish Group in Antiquity. Strengthening a Sociological Approach .. 341 Samuele Rocca The Jews among the Middle Ruling Class of Roman Italy? An Elaboration of a Thesis by Paul Veyne ......................... 361 V. Epilogue Elisheva, Shoshana, Margalit, and Naama Baumgarten Remembering it Well. In Lieu of a Retrospective .................... 381 Contributors . 385 Indices ..................................................... 387 Digital copy – for author's private use only – © Mohr Siebeck 2021 Digital copy – for author's private use only – © Mohr Siebeck 2021 “Reading Leads to Translating” in a Multilingual Context The View from Early Rabbinic Texts (and Beyond) Steven D. Fraade1 “In the beginning was the word” (John 1:1). Or we might say, from the Hebrew biblical perspective, that the world is created and sustained through words, that is, a pre-existent language, or according to some ancient interpreters, languages. For according to one view, the first human, Adam, spoke and understood sev- enty human languages (not counting those of the animals), the full panoply of semantic meaning, even before there were seventy nations (as listed in Gen 10).2 According to this view, what happened at Babel (Gen 11) was not a splintering of one language into seventy, but a linguistic dispersion, a loss of the originary ability of the speakers of seventy languages to understand one another, that is, to be fully multilingual, a condition only to be restored in messianic days.3 In- 1 It is a pleasure to offer this article as a tribute to Al Baumgarten, who, within a wide range of important subjects, has contributed to our appreciation of the bilingual context of scriptural translation: Albert I. Baumgarten, “Bilingual Jews and the Greek Bible,” in Shem in the Tents of Japhet: Essays on the Encounter of Judaism and Hellenism, ed. James L. Kugel, JSJSup 74 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 13–30. In what follows, I have benefited from comments on earlier versions from Philip Alexander, Yair Asulin, Harold Augenbraum, Peter Cole, Noam Mizrahi, Hindy Najman, and Tessa Rajak. Needless to say, its shortcomings are mine alone. 2 For broader discussion of “seventy languages,” see Steven D. Fraade, “Moses and Adam as Polyglots,” in Envisioning Judaism: Studies in Honor of Peter Schäfer on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Ra’anan S. Boustan, Klaus Hermann, Reimund Leicht, Annette Yoshiko Reed, and Giuseppe Veltri, with the collaboration of Alex Ramos, 2 vols. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 1:185–194; idem, “Before and After Babel: Linguistic Exceptionalism and Pluralism in Early Rabbinic Literature,” Diné Israel 28 (2011): 31–68, esp. 39–45, 49–55; idem, “The Torah Inscribed/Transcribed in Seventy Languages,” in Hebrew Between Jews and Christians, ed. Daniel Stein Kokin, Studia Judaica (Berlin: de Gruyter, forthcoming). For broad- er studies on multilingualism in ancient Judaism and Jewish societies, see Steven D. Fraade, “Language Mix and Multilingualism in Ancient Palestine: Literary and Inscriptional Evidence,” Leshonenu 73 (2011): 273–307 (Hebrew); idem, “Language Mix and Multilingualism in Ancient Palestine: Literary and Inscriptional Evidence,” Jewish Studies 48 (2012): 1–40 (English ver- sion of previous). 3 For an association between nation and language already before Babel, see Gen 10:31. Gen 11:7 could be read similarly. For the rabbinic view that humans spoke seventy languages even before Babel, based on Gen 11:1, see y. Meg. 1:11 (71b) (ed. Academy of the Hebrew Language, 748), discussed by Fraade, “Before and After Babel,” 42–43. For the same idea in Arabic Mus- lim sources, especially the tenth-century grammarian Ibn Jinni, see Abdelfattah Kilito, The Digital copy – for author's private use only – © Mohr Siebeck 2021 218 Steven D. Fraade creasingly, theorists (and practitioners) of translation recognize that the model of translation as a bilingual mediation between a self-contained monolingual source culture on one side and another self-contained monolingual target culture on the other, between which translation seeks to transfer information, does not sufficiently take into account the extent to which all societies are, at some level, multilingual and to which each contains a variety of languages and dialects in a variety of modes of contact with one another. In this view, “internal” translation or code-switching within a single culture is at least as prevalent as “external” translation across cultures and nationalities.4 This is certainly the case for the ancient cultures of the eastern Mediterranean, to one of which I will now turn my attention. In what follows I wish to examine a cluster of ancient rabbinic sources of the early first millennium ce, for which the very act of reading (and understanding) entails translation by the same, presumably bilingual (Hebrew and Aramaic, at the very least) individual subject.5 1. The King’s Torah6 Deut 17:14–20 legislates a set of rules that mandate (or allow)