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cousins of Palestine—were inclined to see the whole tradition as Torah, and
themselves rather as its culmination than its tail end.^60 An often- quoted
story has Moses encounter God attaching little crowns to the letters of the
alphabet. God explains that there will come a man destined to “expound
upon each crownlet heaps and heaps of laws.” Moses asks to see this para-
gon, and God tells him to turn round. He finds himself sitting in the back
row of Rabbi Akiva’s classroom—a notoriously imaginative exegete who
died c. 135. Moses cannot understand what is being said. He feels weak, but
then
the disciples said to him [sc. Rabbi Akiva], “Rabbi, how do you know
this?” He replied, “It is a law given to Moses at Sinai.” And Moses was
comforted.^61
In other words the so- called “oral Torah” of the rabbis, which was eventu-
ally also written down, is in direct but unrecognizably evolved line of descent
from God’s revelation at Sinai. It covers the whole spectrum from revelation
to exegesis, from curt mountain- top commands to involuted school- room
hermeneutics. While ordinary Jews knew only the written Torah, the five
books of the Pentateuch, the rabbis had their own Torah that was likewise
revealed, but contained elements of human ratiocination, and indeed diver-
sity and divergence of opinion, and therefore innovated in relation to the
Sinaitic revelation, as Justinian pointed out. That meant multiple possible
truths (or at least levels of truth, depending on each student’s abilities), which
is not what we associate with monotheist traditions.^62 It also meant an open-
ended canon, unlike in Christianity, and constant debate aimed at a more
refined understanding of God’s word, analogous to the rationalist technique
of the modern scientist who strives for ever closer approximation to truth
rather than for exact truth, which is beyond human grasp.^63 The Babylonian
Talmud codified this outlook, which was passed on to the newer Jewish com-
munities in North Africa and Europe, and defined them until the rise of lib-
eral, secularizing, and assimilationist forces in the nineteenth century.^64
We must not overemphasize, then, the common denominators of our ex-
egetical cultures. Like Christianity, rabbinic Judaism was a product mainly of
60 I. Gafni, “Rabbinic historiography and representations of the past,” in Fonrobert and Jaffee
(eds), Talmud and rabbinic literature [6:58] 303–4; D. Kraemer, “Fictions and formulations: The Talmud
and the construction of Jewish identity,” in H. Liss and M. Oeming (eds), Literary construction of identity
in the ancient world (Winona Lake, Ind. 2010) 237–38.
61 Babylonian Talmud, Menahot 29b, quoted and discussed by E. S. Alexander, “The orality of
rabbinic writing,” and D. Boyarin, “Hellenism in Jewish Babylonia,” in Fonrobert and Jaffee (eds), Talmud
and rabbinic literature [6:58] 42–43, 348–49.
62 Cf. J. Howland, Plato and the Talmud (Cambridge 2011) 45–49.
63 Cf. M. Fisch, Rational rabbis: Science and Talmudic culture (Bloomington, Ind. 1997), discuss-
ing Menahot 29b at 192–96.
64 G. Stemberger, Der Talmud (Munich 1994^3 ) 286–316.