Epilogue
The main actors in the documents from the Judaean desert were all Jews;
what is more, the documents illustrate in detail not only how their affairs
were conducted under Roman rule, but also, as indicated above, how and
under what system of law they were conducted under two successive in-
dependent Jewish regimes, in..–/ (see above) and..–. As
mentioned earlier, the range of documents, written in Greek, Hebrew, and
Jewish Aramaic, along with some in Nabataean Aramaic from the last years
of the Nabataean kingdom which was suppressed in , is considerable, and
quite sufficient to throw a flood of light on the workings of Jewish society.
These remarks do no more than recall the existence of this material without
claiming to explore the complex issues which arise from it.
Contrasting with this documentary material, we have a much larger mass
of Jewish texts deriving from medieval manuscripts, some of them (as it
seems) composed or compiled in Roman Palestine: most notably the Mish-
nah of perhaps around.., or the ‘‘Palestinian’’ or ‘‘Jerusalem’’ Talmud,
whose date is profoundly uncertain but is perhaps as early as the fourth cen-
tury. Along with these there is the much larger Babylonian Talmud, which
has formed the basis for rabbinic learning ever since. But, while it is clear that
this work was indeed originally compiled in Babylonia,^23 both the date of
that process and the wider social context within which the Babylonian Jewish
community lived are extremely obscure. It may well be that it did not reach
its canonical form until after the Islamic conquests of the seventh century;
at any rate the manuscripts on which modern printed editions are based are
significantly later again and were written in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries.
All this vast material is directed to the elucidation of the appropriate rules
of Jewish life, and to the interpretation of biblical texts, and reflects the ac-
tivity of generations of religious experts or scholars who are referred to by
the honorific appellation ‘‘rabbi’’ (literally ‘‘my master’’ or ‘‘my lord’’). To a
very striking degree, the various possible approaches to this material can be
set out as being quite closely comparable to those applicable to the corpus
of Roman law. Firstly, it is perfectly legitimate in this case also to treat this
as a body of significant text, taken as being embodied in whatever modern
printed editions are available, and open to analysis as a source of doctrine
or of religious rules. Secondly, it would be equally legitimate to work back
from the available manuscripts to earlier forms of the transmission of the
text, and then to an analysis of the original process of composition, if that
. For the representation of the local, or regional, background which can be drawn
from it, see A. Oppenheimer et al.,Babylonica Judaica in the Talmudic Period().