rabbis in the east (70 to 1000 ce) 263
Talmud is the longest literary work produced in late antiquity: the most
commonly used modern edition, first published in Vilna in Lithuania in
the nineteenth century, is printed on more than 6,200 pages.
Among the other rabbinic compilations from this period, the Pales-
tinian Talmud (probably from the fourth century) has content and
structure similar to the Babylonian Talmud but in less polished form
and with less dialectic. Some of the discursive biblical commentaries
(midrashim ), from Palestine in the fourth and sixth centuries, were
probably designed for synagogue sermons. The rabbis also preserved a
number of mystical texts. The Hekhalot (‘heavenly Temple’) literature
contains accounts of the ascent of mystics through the seven heavens
and heavenly places to God’s throne. The Alphabet of Akiva, a mid-
rashic work from the seventh to ninth centuries, contains mystical and
eschatological speculation on the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Differ-
ent versions of the Shiur Komah (‘The Measure of the Body’), probably
from the same period as the Alphabet of Akiva, try to convey the maj-
esty of God by describing his dimensions in impossible hyperbole: ‘The
soles of His feet fill the entire universe, as it is stated [in scripture]:
“Thus said the Lord ... the earth is My footstool.” The height ... of His
soles is 30,000,000 [parasangs].’^2
From the last centuries of the millennium are preserved also collec-
tions of responsa by the heads of the Babylonian rabbinic academies
and a collection of homiletic questions and answers attributed to Rav
Aha’ of Shabha in the eighth century. Halakhot Gedolot, a compilation
of legal responsa by a wide range of rabbis from the mid- sixth century
up to the time of the compiler, dates to the ninth century. The prayer
book of Amram bar Sheshna, containing both liturgical texts and
halakhic (that is, legal) instructions, belongs to the same period. The
works of Sherira Gaon a century later include a remarkable letter which
he sent in 986– 7 to the Jews of Kairouan to explain the origins of the
numerous rabbinic texts to which his contemporaries across the Jewish
world had come to turn for authoritative teaching.^3
By the time Sherira Gaon wrote this letter to the Jews of Kairouan,
the works to which he referred all existed in written form, but in the third
century ce rabbis referred explicitly to their teachings as ‘Torah of the
mouth’ in contrast to the written Torah of scripture, and this strong trad-
ition of oral transmission within the rabbinic movement discouraged the
writing down of texts for many centuries. As a result, almost all our
knowledge of these works survives now through manuscripts copied in
Europe after 1000 ce. The earliest complete manuscripts of the