EXEGETICAL CULTURES 2 | 175duced works which, once codified (rather earlier in the case of the rabbis),
were massive, were inchoate yet harmonizing, were derivative yet inventive,
and eventually became (whether or not this was originally intended) norma-
tive for their respective societies, with semiencyclopedic status.^56 They bear
broad comparison—not least for their essentially nontheological character.
But while the rabbis cannot have been completely ignorant of Roman law,
while Roman legislators were certainly not unaware of the Jews, direct debts
are hard to pin down. The Mishnah and Talmud are no less deficient in impe-
rial law (and sponsorship) than the Digest (based on jurists’ law and therefore
the only directly comparable part of the Corpus of civil law) is in rules con-
cerning cultic ritual. As for the Gospel, its spirit went plain against the legal-
ism of the Torah, so there could be no Christian equivalent to rabbinics, and
the Church contented itself with Christianizing Roman law.^57 Not surpris-
ingly, rabbinic Judaism has often been represented as a world unto itself, not
least by Zionist scholars seeking in the rabbinate a distillation of the Jewish
national will. Nonetheless, rabbinics has of late benefited, especially in the
United States, from a contextualizing historical approach, and incorporation
into study of late Antiquity.^58 This has led to a realization that, while intimate
interaction with Roman law or patristics is not to be expected, there was a
more general cultural atmosphere that linked the Talmudic milieu with de-
velopments within the Church.
Here, the prophecy- scripture- exegesis analysis offers a securer base for
comparison than in the case of Roman law. First came divine revelation to
Moses in the Torah; then the rest of the Jewish Bible; and finally rabbinic
tradition, exegesis not scripture and, in the case of the Mishnah, thematically
arranged rather than following the Torah’s divisions. Nevertheless, the rab-
bis’ purpose was unmistakably exegesis of a scriptural canon, whose expres-
sion, precisely because fixed, was diverging more and more from current
modes, and had to be recaptured by the efforts of a scholarly elite. At least,
that is our academic way of seeing the process, and not just in Judaism.^59 But
the rabbis themselves—especially those of Babylon as distinct from their
56 D. Stern, “On canonization in rabbinic Judaism,” in M. Finkelberg and G. G. Stroumsa (eds),
Homer, the Bible, and beyond (Leiden 2003) 227–52; C. Hezser, “The codification of legal knowledge in
late Antiquity: The Talmud yerushalmi and Roman law codes,” in Schäfer (ed.), Talmud Yerushalmi
[6:53] 1.581–641. If Middle Persian legal texts were more accessible to comparative scholarship, this
would be the place to compare them with the Babylonian Talmud: cf. S. Secunda, “The Sasanian “Stam”:
Orality and the composition of Babylonian rabbinic and Zoroastrian legal literature,” in Bakhos and
Shayegan (eds), Talmud in its Iranian context [4:64] 140–60.
57 Early Muslims could be quite puzzled by the absence of systematic law from the gospels: A. Pa-
paconstantinou, “Between umma and dhimma,” Annales islamologiques 42 (2008) 148–49.
58 S. Schwartz, “The political geography of rabbinic texts,” in C. E. Fonrobert and M. S. Jaffee (eds),
The Cambridge companion to the Talmud and rabbinic literature (Cambridge 2007) 80–93; Bakhos and
Shayegan (eds), Talmud in its Iranian context [4: 64].
59 J. Børtnes, “Canon formation and canon interpretation,” in E. Thomassen (ed.), Canon and can-
onicity (Copenhagen 2010) 189–91, 197–98, invoking Jan Assmann.