164 A History of Judaism
study of the Torah was valued for its own sake. The process of learning
by the pupils was through question and answer and logical reasoning by
the teacher. The duty of the student was to remember faithfully what he
had heard, and powers of memory were much prized.^6
The Mishnah preserves the names (or nicknames, such as Ben Bag-
Bag or Ben He- He) of fifty or so sages whose teaching can be dated
between c. 200 bce and 70 ce, but about many of these sages no more
is known than a maxim; for instance, to Ben He- He is attributed the
saying that ‘according to the suffering, so is the reward.’ Since, as we
have seen in the disputes of the Houses, authority does not appear to
have rested automatically with one teacher rather than another, there
seems to have been no interest in the tannaitic period in the biographies
of sages (in marked contrast to early Christian focus on the life of Jesus),
and very little can be said with any certainty about their lives. Scrupu-
lous ascription of a teaching to a particular teacher, which in turn can
be contrasted with the anonymity of the legal rulings in the Community
Rule and the Damascus Document used by the Qumran Yahad, seems
to have fulfilled a more general function in explaining the process of
transmission from teacher to pupil on which the sages based their trad-
ition as a whole.^7
Within the community of sages, the greeting ‘rabbi’ (‘my lord’ or ‘my
master’) was widely found as a term of respect. By the end of the first cen-
tury ce it was being used also as a title attached to the names of individual
sages. The title ‘Rabban’ (‘our teacher’) is rare in the tannaitic sources and
is employed primarily to designate either Rabban Gamaliel or his descend-
ants, evidently as a mark of honour. We have seen in the last chapter that
Gamaliel was a leading Pharisee, and his special title demonstrates that it
was possible to be at the forefront of the scholarly community of sages
while also being a Pharisee. But the differences between the sages and the
Pharisees are clear. The Pharisees, it will be recalled, interpreted the Torah
in light of ancestral custom as observed in practice. The sages were equally
conservative, accepting such notions as the Sabbath limit for travel, or the
sharing of a courtyard space on a Sabbath through the legal fiction of
temporary shared ownership, but they did so on the basis of spoken trad-
itions handed down from teacher to pupil.^8
We do not know how many sages were to be found in the century
before 70 ce but everything points to a small elite group. They seem to
have been concentrated in Jerusalem, or at least Judaea. Stories about
their discussions suggest quite a small group, and it is significant that
they apparently did not come to the attention either of Josephus or