Discussing Cultural Influences: Text, Context, and Non-Text in Rabbinic Judaism.

• Author: Van Bekkum, Wout Jac.
• Position: Book review

Discussing Cultural Influences: Text, Context, and Non-Text in Rabbinic Judaism. Edited by RIVKA ULMER. Studies in Judaism. Lanham, Maryland: UNIVERSITY PRESS OF AMERICA, 2007. Pp. viii + 248 (paper).

The title of this volume implies that a common perspective unites the essays presented in this book: they are jointly defined as "contextualizing Rabbinic Judaism by emphasizing that the framers of Rabbinic thought were in conversation with cultures different from their own and with their own tradition." The book's major drawback, however, is that it is primarily a compilation of individual essays, and does not include any clarification regarding their interdisciplinarity and methodology. It is probably for this reason that the editor has not contributed an introductory or concluding chapter devoting special attention to relevant issues of present-day rabbinic scholarship concerning the (cross-)cultural and/or literary factors underlying the sources. Therefore, the book cannot even be reviewed as a comparative study; comparisons with other cultures are rarely included, with the piece by Yaakov Elman being the sole clear exception.

In "Legal Texts and Codification in the Dead Sea Scrolls," Lawrence Schiffman provides an overview of the Qumran regulations and codifications and argues that they are closely connected with rabbinic law. His essay is primarily relevant as a survey of the various texts forming the legal corpus of the Dead Sea Scrolls and as a contrastive study of the different types of Jewish legal literature. Schiffman concludes that the Qumran documents bear witness to the existence of what he has termed "the mishnaic and midrashic modes for formulating post-biblical law." Additionally, he explicitly states the following: "It is hoped that this study has not been guilty of the sin of harmonization in its understanding of the two genres of Qumran halakhah ['biblically based' or 'more abstract'] as parallel to the rabbinic. Indeed, the Pharisaic sages shared in some of the intellectual currents of the day and. de-spile the chronological gaps between tannaitic texts and the scrolls, and taking into consideration the different ideologies of law they reflect, there nonetheless exists a commonality of form" (p. 39 n. 132).

In "The Term Midrash in Tannaitic Literature," Mayer I. Gruber reevaluates the definition of mid-rash in a sequence of selected Rabbinic writings without putting forth any lucid or surprising conclusions, as he himself...