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jackPossibly we should talk about what what was divinely revealed to all these people who went to heaven and then wrote a book about it, but instead, I realised I really needed to know what was going on in history at the same time all this religious teaching was being written down.
You've probably read some of the Christian gospels and have some idea what Judea looks like in 1AD. But this comes after 500 years of being conquered, the temple destroyed, being taken away, and let go, and conquered again, and rebelling, and being conquered by someone else, etc, etc. The first bit about the being taken away to Babylon and then a generation later let go is described in the book of Daniel which also describes a bunch of visions about heaven the end of the world. Esther describes Esther marrying a Persian emperor (probably a fictionalised version of the historical one) c.f. Purim. Maccabees describes yet another revolt celebrated by Hannukah.
By 1AD Judea is under Roman occupation. Life of Brian gives a pretty good idea here. Tax collectors were *collaborators* with an occupying regime, which ruled somewhat impartially but also needed to extract a steady supply of money or wheat or something, or else. Promises of some sort of miraculous deliverance flew around. Dozens of different strands of religious of varying levels of mysticism, learning, centralisation, etc, vied for recognition. People accused each other of collaborating too much with the occupying forces.
This is the situation Jesus was living in, and promising reform, and preaching nonviolence both as laudable, but also a tool of passive resistance. But all that simmering tension didn't go away, there were plenty more people claiming to be a messiah of some form, and plenty more revolts.
In 70AD, the population revolted -- almost successfully. Formed an army, got rid of the romans, ambushed the legion coming to reconquer them and (according to wikipedia) slaughtered 6,000 of them. This was simmering since before Jesus' time, it wasn't theoretical, armed revolt was likely. But then the Romans sent in Vespasian with four legions, who reconquered the area, destroyed the temple AGAIN, and killed or enslaved large numbers of leaders. I feel really silly saying it, but I never heard anything about what happened in Judea *after* Jesus and this is like reading the second half of a story I'd never thought to look for.
But the Romans kept doing things like putting statues of Jupiter at the Temple, and after that there were MORE revolts, nearby. In 130s CE, the Bar Kokhba revolt again raised most of Judea, and was crushed, and now the population was suppressed even more harshly, large areas were depopulated, and anyone Jewish (or Christian) was forbidden from Jerusalem entirely.
This is the background all this mysticism and all these religious writings were happening in. Rabbi Akiva grew up as an uneducated shepherd, while the country was fighting the roman empire. And then went to amazing lengths to learn Torah and become a great scholar, while suppression of teaching this religion was slowly mounting up. And Akiva pronounced Bar Kokhba the Messiah, and dubbed him that name which means "son of a Star" after a prophecy, and was himself executed after the revolt.
So this mysticism we discuss before, and all this about "should we write these teachings down" aren't just theoretical debates, it's very political, is this something safe to write down? Is so-and-so a messiah? Will we be executed by romans if we say that? But I know nothing about how to interpret any specifics, just that it's important.
There's a lot of famous Rabbis who are famous for their legal and theological teachings all recorded in the Talmud, but also a lot of mysticism. Rabbi Akiva learned and later taught at a large academy, which probably existed physically and hadn't yet been banned. But his teacher, Eliezer, is the one who was famous for great but strict teachings and lost a theological argument about the validity of divine revelation and went off in a huff and blew up a whole landscape by looking at it(https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/693611.html), which may not be as historically precise. The validity of divine revelation was also very political, when some people claimed to interpret God's law as it had been passed down faithfully ever since Mt Sinai, and others claimed to have seen version 2.0 in a vision.
Akiva's students included the other Rabbis who went into the "garden" with him and saw heaven and became a warning of what could happen to great scholars who looked too far into dangerous learning. In this case, Akiva was said to be unscathed, and his students Ben Zoma and Ben Azzai came off badly, and Elisha ben Abuya became so heretical people are still talking about it 2000 years later. *Another* student was Shimon bar Yochai who went off to hide in a cave and wrote the Zohar, single-handedly founding Kabbalah. There was a lot of mysticism about, is what I'm saying.
And (according to wikipedia) a lot of other stuff. He travels to Rome. He teaches, or is friends with, most other famous Rabbis from this time. There are ongoing arguments about, now there's no temple, should everyone write down the learning to create a new centre of Judaism of a new type? Now or later these teachings flow back and forth between Judea, and surrounding areas and Babylon where some Jews never left, and get recorded. Babylon is the most recognisable centre after Judea is suppressed (the most common version of the Talmud is the "Babylonian Talmud") but there's never a single centre again.
In terms of the story of Pardes explained in the earlier post, the version that mentions the four Rabbis going into a garden and no more detail is written down during Akiva's lifetime or sometime later, and codified into "the" Talmud around 200CE. The fuller explanation that "Aher trampled the stalks" means "he saw Metatron, claimed Metatron was God, and Metatron was punished for it" was written down several hundred years after that. When presumably the Rabbis had been teaching the full story in some form since, but quite removed from the early points of roman occupation before the big revolts when Judea was a sea of competing Jewish sects, Christians, and whatever Elisha Ben Abuya was.
But this is part of the time through which Boyarin demonstrates that if you look at the *content* of the divine revelation ("apocalypse") when they are recorded and carefully compare them, you can trace traditions that stretch from before to afterwards.
You've probably read some of the Christian gospels and have some idea what Judea looks like in 1AD. But this comes after 500 years of being conquered, the temple destroyed, being taken away, and let go, and conquered again, and rebelling, and being conquered by someone else, etc, etc. The first bit about the being taken away to Babylon and then a generation later let go is described in the book of Daniel which also describes a bunch of visions about heaven the end of the world. Esther describes Esther marrying a Persian emperor (probably a fictionalised version of the historical one) c.f. Purim. Maccabees describes yet another revolt celebrated by Hannukah.
By 1AD Judea is under Roman occupation. Life of Brian gives a pretty good idea here. Tax collectors were *collaborators* with an occupying regime, which ruled somewhat impartially but also needed to extract a steady supply of money or wheat or something, or else. Promises of some sort of miraculous deliverance flew around. Dozens of different strands of religious of varying levels of mysticism, learning, centralisation, etc, vied for recognition. People accused each other of collaborating too much with the occupying forces.
This is the situation Jesus was living in, and promising reform, and preaching nonviolence both as laudable, but also a tool of passive resistance. But all that simmering tension didn't go away, there were plenty more people claiming to be a messiah of some form, and plenty more revolts.
In 70AD, the population revolted -- almost successfully. Formed an army, got rid of the romans, ambushed the legion coming to reconquer them and (according to wikipedia) slaughtered 6,000 of them. This was simmering since before Jesus' time, it wasn't theoretical, armed revolt was likely. But then the Romans sent in Vespasian with four legions, who reconquered the area, destroyed the temple AGAIN, and killed or enslaved large numbers of leaders. I feel really silly saying it, but I never heard anything about what happened in Judea *after* Jesus and this is like reading the second half of a story I'd never thought to look for.
But the Romans kept doing things like putting statues of Jupiter at the Temple, and after that there were MORE revolts, nearby. In 130s CE, the Bar Kokhba revolt again raised most of Judea, and was crushed, and now the population was suppressed even more harshly, large areas were depopulated, and anyone Jewish (or Christian) was forbidden from Jerusalem entirely.
This is the background all this mysticism and all these religious writings were happening in. Rabbi Akiva grew up as an uneducated shepherd, while the country was fighting the roman empire. And then went to amazing lengths to learn Torah and become a great scholar, while suppression of teaching this religion was slowly mounting up. And Akiva pronounced Bar Kokhba the Messiah, and dubbed him that name which means "son of a Star" after a prophecy, and was himself executed after the revolt.
So this mysticism we discuss before, and all this about "should we write these teachings down" aren't just theoretical debates, it's very political, is this something safe to write down? Is so-and-so a messiah? Will we be executed by romans if we say that? But I know nothing about how to interpret any specifics, just that it's important.
There's a lot of famous Rabbis who are famous for their legal and theological teachings all recorded in the Talmud, but also a lot of mysticism. Rabbi Akiva learned and later taught at a large academy, which probably existed physically and hadn't yet been banned. But his teacher, Eliezer, is the one who was famous for great but strict teachings and lost a theological argument about the validity of divine revelation and went off in a huff and blew up a whole landscape by looking at it(https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/693611.html), which may not be as historically precise. The validity of divine revelation was also very political, when some people claimed to interpret God's law as it had been passed down faithfully ever since Mt Sinai, and others claimed to have seen version 2.0 in a vision.
Akiva's students included the other Rabbis who went into the "garden" with him and saw heaven and became a warning of what could happen to great scholars who looked too far into dangerous learning. In this case, Akiva was said to be unscathed, and his students Ben Zoma and Ben Azzai came off badly, and Elisha ben Abuya became so heretical people are still talking about it 2000 years later. *Another* student was Shimon bar Yochai who went off to hide in a cave and wrote the Zohar, single-handedly founding Kabbalah. There was a lot of mysticism about, is what I'm saying.
And (according to wikipedia) a lot of other stuff. He travels to Rome. He teaches, or is friends with, most other famous Rabbis from this time. There are ongoing arguments about, now there's no temple, should everyone write down the learning to create a new centre of Judaism of a new type? Now or later these teachings flow back and forth between Judea, and surrounding areas and Babylon where some Jews never left, and get recorded. Babylon is the most recognisable centre after Judea is suppressed (the most common version of the Talmud is the "Babylonian Talmud") but there's never a single centre again.
In terms of the story of Pardes explained in the earlier post, the version that mentions the four Rabbis going into a garden and no more detail is written down during Akiva's lifetime or sometime later, and codified into "the" Talmud around 200CE. The fuller explanation that "Aher trampled the stalks" means "he saw Metatron, claimed Metatron was God, and Metatron was punished for it" was written down several hundred years after that. When presumably the Rabbis had been teaching the full story in some form since, but quite removed from the early points of roman occupation before the big revolts when Judea was a sea of competing Jewish sects, Christians, and whatever Elisha Ben Abuya was.
But this is part of the time through which Boyarin demonstrates that if you look at the *content* of the divine revelation ("apocalypse") when they are recorded and carefully compare them, you can trace traditions that stretch from before to afterwards.
no subject
Date: 2020-06-23 03:53 pm (UTC)