Handbook of Jewish Literature from Late Antiquity, 135–700 CE. By Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, Yehudah Cohn, and Fergus Millar.

Abstract

The idea for the Handbook of Jewish Literature from Late Antiquity arose out of a conversation between its authors at the conference ‘Rabbinic Texts and the History of Late-Roman Palestine’ at the British Academy in 2008, where the need for a comprehensive and brief reference book was felt. This need was met five years later with the publication of the Handbook that is, according to its editors, ideally to be read in combination with the conference volume edited by M. Goodman and P. Alexander, and published under the conference title by Oxford University Press in 2010. The Handbook is mostly arranged as a bibliographical reference work on all the relevant modern editions, translations, commentaries, and secondary literature related to the different text corpora that are included. In addition to this arrangement, the individual sections on the various sources address questions of content, date, and language. The authors are mainly concerned with Hebrew and Aramaic works from the period given in the book title, to which they consign ‘the central place in the formation of Judaism’ (p. 1). Therefore, Greek and Latin Jewish sources from the same period have been left out, except for a Shabbat Amidah in Greek (pp. 138–9). The authors of the Handbook followed the proverb ‘brevity is the soul of wit’, which allowed them to include many texts that cannot be found in other reference works or introductions to Late Antique Jewish literature. Thus, the authors offer their intended audience of students of ancient history, theology, and of course Jewish literary and cultural history a notion of the wide range of literary and documentary evidence from Late Antiquity. The temporal classification as ‘literature of late antiquity’ from 135 to 700 ce, however, seems rather misleading for the layman. None of the texts under discussion dates back to the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 ce. Some of them nevertheless contain traditions from that period, and even earlier ones from the late Second Temple period. Thus, one might question the terminus a quo of 135 ce as both too early and too late. Since the work primarily aims at introducing Jewish literary works from the Eastern Mediterranean and Babylon, while excluding a detailed description of the political history of Palestine, it would have been more convenient to take the redaction of the Mishnah around 200 ce as a starting point—the earliest completed rabbinic work, whose redaction by R. Yehudah HaNasi is not disputed among scholars of Rabbinic Judaism. In addition, some of the texts such as Qohelet Rabbah and Kallah may even be post-talmudic and thus belong to the early Middle Ages. Moreover, the authors themselves justifiably raise awareness of the problems related to some of the rabbinic texts included: they are best characterized as open-ended products of school discourses that are likely to contain not only ancient traditions but also medieval accretions, due to the fact that the oldest attainable manuscripts originate in the Middle Ages (p. xi). For this reason, a more open time-frame from Antiquity to the early Middle Ages might have better matched the character of the texts, while at the same time not questioning the relevance of both the Handbook and the sources for the study of Late Antiquity.