the limits of variety 163
women from [the families of] the House of Hillel, nor [the men of] the
House of Hillel from marrying women from [the families of] the House of
Shammai; and despite all the disputes about what is clean and unclean,
wherein these declare clean what the others declare unclean, neither
scrupled to use aught that pertained to the others in matters concerned
with cleanness.^4
Each House could, and evidently did, try to change the mind of the
others, occasionally with success – the Mishnah records a series of issues
on which ‘the House of Hillel changed their opinion and taught accord-
ing to the opinion of the House of Shammai’. The differing opinions of
the Houses somehow coexisted with the notion that the opinion of the
majority is to be followed, so that the real intention of the Torah can be
decided by a vote of scholars. It was quite possible for that vote to agree
with neither Shammai nor Hillel, as in determining the time from which
women may be deemed unclean from a menstrual flow:
Shammai says, ‘For all women it is enough for them [that they be deemed
unclean only from] their time [of suffering a flow].’ Hillel says, ‘[A woman
is deemed to have been unclean] from [the previous] examination to [the
present] examination, even if [the interval is of] many days.’ And the Sages
say, ‘It is not according to the opinion of either.’In much later centuries rabbis were to be troubled by the apparent tol-
erance by these sages of views with which they disagreed, culminating
in a tradition in the Palestinian Talmud, which dates to the fourth cen-
tury ce or later, that eventually a divine utterance (bat kol ) fixed that
‘practice always follows the school of Hillel, and everyone who trans-
gresses the rulings of the school of Hillel merits death.’ But this clarity
contrasts all the more strikingly with the apparent acceptance of differ-
ence by the Houses themselves.^5
The disputes between the Houses mentioned in the tannaitic sources
relate mainly to religious dues, the keeping of the Sabbath and festivals,
marriage laws and laws of purity. But the Houses may have had other
interests too – we do not know whether the anonymous editor of the
Mishnah in c. 200 ce – traditionally reckoned to be R. Judah haNasi –
could, or wished to, record everything taught by sages from two
centuries earlier. What made the sages different was not their focus on
any specific issues, since these were all topics discussed widely by Jews
in the last years of the Second Temple, but their devotion to discussion
and debate about the minutiae of such issues in fraternities in which the