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EAECKM; H -\ 1' Wag LIB-H 303 H A L A d H A H A N D A G G A,D A H_‘ LAW AND LORE IN JUDAISM Qh‘~ ‘. ”'€.; ' J ° hn D ' Ra 3m er “30 a EAECKM; h -\ 1' wag LIB-h" I ~N‘J. ~ . v? hqerythtng that exists is either green or not green. That self-evidént if Less Ii , . no? momentous truth is generalised in symbolic logic into the proposition that A and non—A exhaust the universe. Likewise, we are told, whatever is not Halachah is £252 £3232 Aggadah. If so, Halachah and Aggadah exhaust the uni- verse, and the subject I have been asked to talk about is a little on the big side! In fact, it is of course limited by its context, which is the literature of Judaism, and more specifically Rabbinic Judaism. 2&5; is the universe which Halachah and Aggafiah exhaust. Butiihgggh it is finite, it is stiil vast, and there}ore I can onli.ifivite you to SEcompany me on.a space-rocke;;5peed tour of it, and to-le£ me'act as your hitch-hiker's guide to the galaxy. Let us start in the 2nd century before the Christian era, the century which saw the Haccabean Rebellion, the emergence sects such as the Pharisees, gtirgiy Sadducees and Essenes, the completion of theLBible, and the beginnings of a new, miscellaneous literature which Christians call 'Intertestamental' and which is to be found in such collections as the Apocrypha and the Dead Sea Scrolls. More importantly for our purpose, it saw the inception, or perhaps resumptiqn and infensification, of another activity which did not produce any literary results until much later. This activity, in which the Pharisaic teachers specialised, concerned what they called Egggh she—b'al Egg, the 'Oral Torah', that is, a large and growing body of traditions, partly interpreting the 'Written Torah' and partly supplementing it, which was handed down by word of mouth. ' More precisely, it was a twofold activity. On the one hand, the interpretation of Scripture. That was called Midrash, which means 'seeking out', énd wofild pormally prpceed chapter by chapter, verse by verse. On the other hand, the svggtgering,~ sitting, clarifying and elaborating of specifically legal traditions ~~~~-fi& broad 'legal' ~ 3 very senge of the word which we shallfidiécuSS'presently -‘ yifih ér without Scriptural proof-texts. That was calle§?M13hnéh, which means ‘teaching', and would normally proceed topic -‘.” by tepic. r Which came first, Midrash or Mishnah, is the subject 9f 8 fafious essay by Jakob Z. Lauterbach ('Midrash and Mishnah', in Rabbinic Essazs). Briefly, his theory is that Midrash is the older method, that it was employed already by ~ ~ Atyi‘Soferim (Scribes), but that their activity ceased with the death of the ‘ a‘fifst Simon the Just in to be resumed on;y-iv‘ * 270 B.C.E., ~ ? ~gQ.E. by a new 4.34.: H , 1 . “iklegis}ative~ body comprising priestly and lay elements,sobn in’cbnflict with ~~ ~~3N§nbther. The Conflict was particularly about new préétféeé tch had grown ~ déying the 80-year interrggnum. These were generally faGoured by the lay 'vpeoplé, who became the Pharisaic party, but opposed by the priests, who became >the Sadducees. To justify them, the Phariéees woqld normally resort to Scripture interpretation, but because in many instances that was no longer possible in a convincing manner, they adopted the Mishnah method as well, simply asserting that the laws in question were part of the sacred oral tradition. That is one theory. According to Professor Ellis Rivkin, however, the Soferim were not expounders of Scripture but writers of a literature, such as Wisdom literature, independent of Scripture. The'very concept of an Oral Torah was a creation of the Pharisees which served their purpose of asserting the rights of the laity (it is significant that-the 'chqin of tradition' ih {he Opening pafagraph of the_Ethics of the Fathers is not a priestly one, running through Aaron and his descendants, but proceeds from Moses to Joshua, the Elders, the Prephets and the Men of the Great Assembly - all lay people); and it is therefore likely that Midrash and Mishnah alike were innovations of the Pharisees in the V 2nd century B.C.E. Héwever that may be, the twofold activity was continued after the year 79 C.E., when the Temple was destroyed and Pharisaisfi became normative and its teachers, previously known by such names as chachamim, 'Sages', came to be called Rabbis. In the narrower sense, therefore, this is the starting point of Rabbinic Judaism. Chronologically, its classical period divides into two, of which the first ex— tends from 70 till about 200 C.E. ‘It 15 known as the Tannaitic Period because the five generations of Rabbis who flourished in Palestine during it are referred £0 as Tannaim, from an Aramaic verb corresponding to the Hebrew verb underlying ~ 'ord ~~~~ Miahnah. ‘Tannaim could therefore be translated Mishnah-teachers. But ii that, as I have said, the Tannaim employed both method - Mishnah and Midrash. NE ~ j»9mployed both, that is, in their academies. In thé? lggogues it was of ~~ 'uréé always Midrash that was the relevant one, for in ~~~~ jgagogues the Ihé Scriptures were publicly read and éxpounded. They were,,~~ way, also orally translated into the vernacular Aramaic, and since every translation is to some extent an interpretation, that was itself a kind of Midrash. _ 3 - It was tbuards the end of the Tannaitic period that this twofold activity, 'géidudted orally since the days of the Pharisees, ceased to be purely oral. ' ~ hg material had become too vast in quantity to be safely gagiusted to memory ~~ qlone, and so it, or much of it, was finally committed f0 ufiting. The Midrash ' ~ gaethbd produced collections of Bible interpretations on the.books of Exodus, ~~ 'Leyificus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. (Significantly, these are the books that contain legislation, which shows that the interpretation of lgg'was the chief, though not the only concern, of the Tannaim.) Each collection is called a‘ Midrash. The term is, in fact, used in three ways: for the process of inter- pretation, for an individual interpretation so produced, and for a whole collect- ion of such interpretations. The Aramaic translation of the Bible was also committed to writing at this time, and became known as Targum Onkeloé, targum meaning 'translation' and Onkelos being the name of the supposed editor., The Mishnah method, on the other hand, produced in course of time a topically 'arranged compendium of laws consisting of 60 tractates grouped into six sections. It went through several stages but was finally redacted by Rabbi Judah the Prince and his disciples round about 200 C.E. This is called 'ggg Mishnah' to dis- tiyguish it from a parallel but more discursive and less authoritative collection celled Tosefta, 'Supplement'. Therefore, exactly like the word Midrash, so the word Mishnah is used in three senses: for the topic-by-topic method of teaching legal traditions, for an individual law so taught, and for a whole compendium of such laws, pre-eminently Judah the Prince's- There you have a sketch of Tannaitic Literéture, and it is in this literature that the terms Halachah and Aggadah first appear. Both, of course, are related to good Biblical words -‘halach, to walk, and hi id, to tell - but neither. as a noun, occurs in the Bible. Let us take them one by one. >The word Halachah is probably a Hebraisation of an Aramaic word, hil-ch'ta, which occurs quité frequently in Targum Onkeloa as a translation of such words (fig miahpgt (judgment or ordinance or law) and which may or may not be reléted r $9 an even earliér word, halach, to be found in the Aramaic part of the book ~~ ~ fjggra (#:13), where it seems to refer to some kind of a land-tax. At any ._ 1 ~~'V§§¥6;:in“Tannaitic sources the word Halachah refers, firstfof all, to an individ- hal lav, particularly one taught by the Mishnah method éfid without reference to its Scriptural proof-text, if any, and therefore also td a; ifidividual paragraph of Judah the Prince's Mishnah, for which the terms Mishnah and Halachah are used _ 4 - interchangeably. Secondly, like Midrash and Mishnah, the word Halachah came if? be used also as a collective noun, for the whole body of individual Halachot ;hich came to be accepted as authoritative. ,. ~. "%hé word Aggadah, according to Wilhelm Bacher,who is-the great authority on ~~hese matters of terminology (Die Exegetische Terminologié der Juedischen ‘gA:Traditionsliteratur),~ derives from the technical expression maggid ha-katuv, "The Scriptural verse tells us...", which was used particularly by the School of Ishmael (2nd century) in the interpretation of Scripture and could, once again, be used either individually, for a singlg such interpretation, or collect- ively, for the whoie 53232. Incidentally, the form Aggadah, which shows Aramaic influence, was used in Palestine whereas, paradoxically, the purer Hebrew form I Haggadah was used in Babylonia. (See Bacher. gg $22.) What tranSpires, therefore, is that the words Halachah and Aggadah correspond very closely to Miahnah and Hidrash respectively. The distinction, when it is made, is this: that a Mishnah may be taught with or without reference to its Scriptural proof-text, whereas a Halachah is characteristically taught on its own; and that a Midrash may be a legal or non-legal Scripture interpretation, whereas an Aggadah is characteristically a non-legal one. Now let me give you just one instance of the hse of these terms in senses that~were evidently re- garded as distinctive. It comes from the Tannaitic Midrash to the book of Deuteronomy, where we are told that the Roman Governfient sent two spies to Rabban Gamaliel to find out all about Judaism by studying with him under the pretence of wishing to convert, and then it says: 335:3 g3 ha-mikra v'shanu £3 ha-mishnah, midrash, halachot v'aggadot, "théy studied Scripture and learnt Mishnah as well as Midrash, Halachot and Aggadot“ (Sifrey to Deut.
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