- A document’s rhetorical or formal traits affect the level of social differ-
entiation that it will introduce. In moving from one text to another
within the same geographical-historical community, one should try to
be sensitive to this fact before ascribing significantly different socio-
religious perspectives to the texts, their authors, or their community.
In practice, what does this mean? For one thing, a document from a par-
ticular geographical-historical group may appear to say, “Jews ought to
have nothing to do with pagans.” Another document from the same group
may appear to reflect quite a different view, such as: “In this array of activ-
ities, Jews ought to have nothing to do with pagans; but in these other
activities, they may.” Our first proposition urges us to look at statements
about inter-religious relations within the larger context of how groups map
or differentiate the social world. Even if a text does not give us much in the
way of describing that greater degree of social differentiation, we ought not
to assume that its author (or the author’s community) failed to make such
distinctions in the real world. Rather, we ought first to try to make a judg-
ment about how the rhetorical or formal features of the text either promote
or inhibit the introduction of these distinctions into the textual world. The
distinctive views of two texts may have more to do with their different
rhetorical-formal constraints than with any real difference or evolution of
social perspective or policy. This, in turn, is a reflection of the second and
third propositions working together.
The tractate Avodah Zarah,in both the Mishnahand the Tosefta,assumes
the authority of the biblical prohibitions against idolatry: Israelites may
not worship gods other than Yahweh; they may not use in the worship of
Yahweh anything previously used in the worship of any other god; they may
not marry persons who (continue to) worship other gods (see Deut. 5–13).
I leave aside, for now, the proposition that these severely mapped bound-
aries between other gods and their worshippers, on one side, and Yahweh
and Israelites, on the other, represented only a minority perspective until
mid- or late-fifth-century (BCE) Judean society. Even if this proposal was
known to the early rabbis, they would simply have ignored it (see Lightstone
1988, chapter 2).
The biblical prohibitions about co-participation in the worship of other
gods, whether undertaken by Israelites on their own or together with those
other gods’ worshippers, is simply axiomatic for the Mishnaic and Tosef-
tan authors. Therefore, m. Avodah Zarahstartsin medias res,as is so often the
case in Mishnaic rhetoric. Indeed, the (implicit) demands of Mishnaic
rhetoric tend to bias its authors against the specification of axioms, even
when these assumed perspectives are second- or third-stage developments