The Rabbinic Imagination

Rabbinic texts are packed with stories about the Second Temple period, although the rabbis weren’t trying to be historians. “First we have to appreciate that we’re reading literature,” explains Amram Tropper, Associate Professor in the Department of Jewish History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. “When you pick up a major work of literature, you understand that it’s literature even if it has a historical setting or is rewriting historical events. It has an aesthetic, and a message – if you treat it as pure history, you may be missing the point.”

Tropper’s lecture series, “The Second Temple through Rabbinic Eyes,” spotlighted the rabbis’ literary creativity by examining four fascinating narratives: Alexander the Great’s meeting with the high priest, the Hasmonean civil war, King Herod’s deathbed plot, and Yohanan ben Zakkai’s escape from Jerusalem. Each story reveals how the rabbis took earlier traditions and transformed them into something entirely new, inserting their own perspectives and values into familiar historical events.

Take the story of Alexander the Great meeting the Jewish high priest Jaddua in 332 BCE. Josephus tells one version of this encounter, but the rabbis describe something quite different. In their version, the story echoes the Book of Esther. “For the rabbis the Samaritans assume the role of Haman here,” Tropper explains, “within the framework of a political ideology that believes we can get along with the gentile powers, whether Rome or Persia, and there is no essential incompatibility. If something goes wrong, there’s someone to blame – like Haman or the Samaritans.” It’s a strikingly accommodationist stance. The problem, according to the rabbis, isn’t Jews living under foreign law, but specific troublemakers (in this case, the Samaritans), who cause problems that would otherwise not exist.

The story of the Hasmonean civil war demonstrates another dimension of rabbinic literary creativity: how stories travelled and transformed across time and space. The civil war between the Hasmonean brothers around 65 BCE appears in Josephus, but by the time the story is rewritten by the rabbinic sages in Babylonia, it had acquired many new details not found in the earlier account, including the character of “the old traitor” who uses Greek wisdom to disrupt the daily service in the temple so that Jerusalem can be conquered.

“Some scholars said this was a historical element that’s part of the story,” Tropper recounts. “But you have to expand your purview when you look at earlier materials.” The key, it turns out, lies in the Jerusalem Talmud, which contains a different story about the Bar Kochba Revolt that also features an “old traitor” who disrupts a daily prayer service so that Betar can be conquered. “Babylonian rabbis took a later story about Bar Kochba and projected it back to the Hasmonean period,” Tropper concludes. This was a deliberate literary composition that took elements that worked in one narrative and redeployed them in another.

The story of King Herod’s deathbed plot offers another example of rabbinic adaptation. According to Josephus, as Herod neared his gruesome end, he worried that people would celebrate his demise, so he secretly ordered trusted relatives to execute a large group of elders on the day he died, ensuring that there would be mourning instead of celebration. In the rabbinic version, though, the evil king is Alexander Jannaeus – “another evil Second Temple king in rabbinic eyes, perhaps even worse than Herod,” Tropper explains.

“In general, Herod comes off poorly in both Josephus’s version and rabbinic literature,” Tropper notes. “The rabbis appreciate the rebuilding of the Temple, but Herod is by no means a positive figure.” By contrast, Josephus’s account suggests a more complex reality even if it is never explicitly stated. During Herod’s reign there were no wars, he maintained good relations with Rome, and he oversaw significant economic development and building projects. “Perhaps the average person living then was happy with the peace and prosperity of the time,” Tropper intuits, “but this is never actually stated in any of other sources.”

An entirely different message

The most famous story Tropper tells in his series is how Yohanan ben Zakkai escaped besieged Jerusalem, met the Roman emperor Vespasian, and received permission to establish a rabbinic center in Yavneh. This story became a foundation myth for the rabbinic movement but is conspicuously absent from earlier sources. “The earlier texts didn’t include it because it didn’t exist,” Tropper states bluntly. “It doesn’t appear in any Tannaitic or early Amoraic sources.”

Many scholars read this story as a clash-of-civilizations narrative, with brave Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai outsmarting the Romans to preserve Judaism. But Tropper argues for a close reading that reveals “an entirely different message.” In his analysis, ben Zakkai agrees with Vespasian and surrenders. He adopts the cooperative approach, while the extremist rebels insist on fighting. “In the Alexander the Great story the rabbis blame the Samaritans; in this case they blame Jewish rebels. The message is that with leaders like ben Zakkai we can get on fine with the Romans.”

The story draws on multiple sources, most importantly Josephus, but it is historically anachronistic, because in reality Vespasian’s son Titus was the general who besieged Jerusalem – Vespasian had already become emperor by that time. But the underlying model is the biblical prophet Jeremiah, a spiritual leader in the besieged Jerusalem (in Jeremiah’s case, besieged by the Babylonians) like Yohanan. Jeremiah too opposed the war, attempted to leave the city, and managed to survive. Without understanding this context, ben Zakkai might have been seen as a coward or even a traitor. “In rabbinic eyes he’s the link between the First and Second Temples and a link to the future,” Tropper explains.

What does all this rabbinic literary creativity reveal about their relationship to power? The answer is more nuanced than we might expect. On the one hand, the rabbis imagined themselves as key political figures in Jewish history, even inserting rabbinic and proto-rabbinic characters into events where they played no historical role. Yohanan ben Zakkai isn’t mentioned by Josephus, but the rabbis portray him as a key leader in the Second Temple times.

On the other hand, the rabbis also took responsibility for catastrophic failures. In the famous Bar Kamsa story, they’re at fault for the destruction of the Temple. In a Talmudic story about the origins of Christianity, a figure named Joshua ben Perachiah is too harsh with his student Jesus of Nazareth, driving him to start a new religion. “The rabbis take the blame,” Tropper explains. “There’s a power move here but it’s a surprising one, because they take responsibility for things they had nothing to do with.”

Letting the stories speak on their own terms

So how should contemporary readers engage with these stories? “Knowing the difference between literary creation and history is the first step,” Tropper says. He points to the contradictory stories about Rabbi Akiva’s rise to greatness – in one version he’s single, in another his son is with him, while different stories give him different wives. “You’re dealing with stories about historical figures that may contain historical information, but the rabbis were not historians in ancient terms, and even ancient historians were very unlike modern historians.”

The real work, Tropper suggests, is learning to read carefully and letting the stories speak on their own terms. “One of the challenges is to try to quieten as much as we can our own desires and expectations and to try and hear what the story is saying. If I pay careful attention to the plot and structure and language, maybe I’ll see it’s saying something different to what I had previously thought.”

When we recognize a character traveling from the Bar Kochba story to the Hasmonean story, identify Jeremiah lurking behind the tale of ben Zakkai, or hear echoes of Esther in the Alexander narrative – that’s when these ancient texts come alive. “It’s fascinating to see how the ‘old traitor’ moved from the Yerushalmi story about Bar Kochba to the Babylonian story about the Hasmoneans,” Tropper says. “If Jeremiah is behind the story of ben Zakkai, that adds a lot of color to what the story is trying to do.”

The rabbis weren’t historians but were religious figures working with inherited traditions to create stories that mattered to their audiences. Reading them as literature rather than history doesn’t diminish their value; instead it reveals their sophistication and allows us to receive the messages they were trying to send.

For more, see Prof. Amram Tropper’s series at BAC, “Words Tell: The History of Hebrew Through Etymology” (in English).

Main Photo: Herodes o Grande, which translates: "Herod the Great"\ Wikipedia