Introduction

      The Narration of Temple Ritual as Rabbinic Memory in the Late Second or Early Third Century

      When Roman military forces conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple in the year 70, life changed for Judaeans living in the province of Judaea.¹ Aside from the direct consequences of war—the extensive casualties, the imperial appropriation of property, and the greater Roman political domination—Judaeans, or Israelites in rabbinic sources, must have also felt the absence of the Temple. Many Judaeans had regularly visited the Temple in order to participate in its ritual. But now there was no Temple, and the people could no longer make pilgrimage to perform the Temple’s rituals. Priests, whose authority was tied to the Temple, had been powerful figures, but now their power base was gone. In the aftermath of the war of 66–70 CE and the subsequent revolt of 133–35 CE, the structure of Judaean society necessarily changed.²

      By the late second and early third century, when members of the early rabbinic group created the Mishnah, the Temple had been destroyed for over a century.³ There was no one still alive who had directly experienced the destruction and concomitant change in ritual life. More than a century after the destruction of the Temple, the normal rhythms of life must have long since resumed for members of the people of Israel living in the Roman province of Syria Palaestina. Post-destruction forms of ritual life had by now taken hold, and the new shape of society had become entrenched.⁴

      Despite the passage of time and the disconnection from the physical Temple and its rituals, the early rabbis gave special prominence to Temple ritual when creating the Mishnah.⁵ The Temple and its ritual are indeed one of the Mishnah’s main topics. Of the six “orders” (that is, large sections, composed of “tractates”) of the Mishnah, almost the entire order of Ḳodashim (“sacred offerings”), significant portions of Mo‘ed (“sacred time,” or “daily and festival ritual”) and Zera‘im (“seeds,” or “agricultural rules”), and portions of the other three orders relate laws of how ritual ought to be done in the Temple and narratives about how it was done. The sheer volume of Temple material—including a significant amount that was no longer applicable after the destruction—shows how central the Temple was for the rabbis.

      If Temple ritual was no longer relevant in the daily life of Judaeans because, for the most part, it could not be performed, why did the rabbis who created the Mishnah in the late second and early third centuries devote so much of this text to cataloging Temple ritual in detail? A number of answers to this important question have been suggested. Some scholars have held that in presenting narrative descriptions of how rituals used to be performed in the Temple, the rabbis of the Mishnah were simply preserving earlier traditions dating back to Temple times.⁶ This explanation is insufficient, however, especially since—as other scholars have shown—the rabbis have demonstrably invented details of their accounts, small and large. Moreover, numerous legal opinions about how rituals were done or ought to be done are explicitly attributed