The Meanings of Death in Rabbinic Judaism

David Kraemer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134616527
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

There are many books devoted to explicating Jewish laws and customs relating to death and mourning and a wealth of studies addressing the significance of death practices around the world. However, never before has there been a study of the death and mourning practices of the founders of Judaism - the Rabbis of late antiquity. The Meanings of Death in Rabbinic Judaism fills that gap.
The author examines the earliest canonical texts - the Mishnah, the Tosefta, the Midrashim and the Talmud of the Land of Israel. He outlines the rituals described in these texts, from preparation for death to reburial of bones and the end of mourning. David Kraemer explores the relationships between the texts and interprets the rituals to uncover the beliefs which informed their foundation. He discusses the material evidence preserved in the largest Jewish burial complex in antiquity - the catacombs at Beth Shearim. Finally, the author offers an interpretation of the Rabbis' interpretations of death rituals - those recorded in the Babylonian Talmud.
The Meanings of Death in Rabbinic Judaism provides a comprehensive and illuminating introduction to the formation, practice and significance of death rituals in Rabbinic Judaism.

1
THE PRESENCE OF DEATH

Introduction

Death is a universal human experience, an unavoidable fact of every life. But the ways death is experienced differ significantly, even radically, from one place and time to another. This, too, is a fact, but one we often forget.

In modern Western societies death is largely hidden from common experience. This is, first, because death before advanced age is today far less common than it once was. Infant and child mortality is relatively low. Sudden, unexpected death occurs with relative infrequency. Instead, those who are fatally ill are hospitalized. Death, therefore, most often occurs in hospitals, seldom at home. This is true even of deaths of the elderly. Furthermore, death is deemed an acute and even unnatural condition, to be fought as long as possible, often by any means possible. Thus, the intensive care ward, with its limited hours and access, is the arena of death. Those who incline toward death are most often hidden from the view of all but their closest relatives and a few select medical professionals.

The cloistering of death in our society extends beyond death itself. Those who pass away are immediately stored in special places, usually the mortuaries of hospitals and funeral homes. There they remain until the funeral. And funerals, too, take place in specialized, private locations. Memorial services are personal affairs, rarely open to a broader public. Funeral processions may be seen only in transit; we identify them by the line of cars with headlights on in broad daylight. Cemeteries are usually distant from people’s homes, and only family and close friends generally attend the burial itself. From the decline toward death to interment, our society isolates death from common experience.

This was not so in the ancient world, where death was ever-present. In the world that will concern us in this book, that of Jews in the Roman and Persian empires, early death was shockingly common. Women often died in childbirth, babies when they were born. Scholars now believe that fewer than half of all children survived their fifth birthdays (van der Horst 1991: 75). And though those who lived past this milestone were relatively more likely to live out their natural years, premature death at all ages, from any variety of causes, was far more frequent than it is today.

The evidence of Jews in the Roman age powerfully supports this picture. As evidenced by Jewish epitaphs from the entire Roman world, the life expectancy of Jews during this period was 28.4 years. Even though the epitaphs represent only a minute proportion of the Jewish population from these centuries, there is no reason to believe that this number is significantly skewed in one direction or the other (van der Horst 1991: ch. 5). Life expectancy was, from a modern perspective, shockingly low.

Jewish testimony from this period sheds light on the ancient experience of death in another way as well. The Jewish literary record suggests that Jews expected their lives to exceed their “life expectancy” by several decades. Psalm 90 – difficult to date but certainly more ancient than the period which concerns us here – suggests that “the days of our years are seventy, or if by great strength eighty years” (v. 10). An addition to Mishnah tractate Avot, at the end of chapter 5,¹ affirms these numbers, remarking that “at sixty, one is elderly; at seventy, one has white hair; at eighty, one has achieved special strength; at ninety, one is bent over; at one hundred, one is as though dead”. And a Talmudic tradition attributed to Rabbah, of the late second and early third centuries, remarks that “if one dies between his fiftieth and sixtieth year, this is a death of ‘excision’” (karet = spiritual death, death at the hand of heaven). Excision was a serious punishment, directed by the Torah against those who sinned in particularly grievous ways. Thus, to say that such a death is a “death of excision” is to declare it unusual and especially lamentable. For this reason, when R. Yosef reached his sixtieth birthday, he celebrated, saying “I have emerged from [the danger of] excision!” Death at fifty-to-sixty was still thought an early death. Death at seventy was a death in old age, death at eighty (= “special strength”) a “kiss of God.” R. Hisda, according to the Talmudic record, lived ninety-two years (all b. Mo‘ed Qatan 28a).

How are we to understand this literary record, one which so contradicts the inscriptional evidence? The rabbinic testimonies remind us that “life expectancy” is only a statistical, not an experienced, reality. Life expectancy tells us not of the progress of aging but of the presence of death. In other words, the lower the life expectancy statistic the more common is death in infancy and youth. So the statistical reality supports what we have already suggested: that death in ancient Jewish society – as in Roman society in general – was ever-present. Inevitably, therefore, death-practices were also central presences in this society – lived expressions of some of the society’s most fundamental beliefs.

Death was a constant presence in common experience not only because of high mortality rates but because, when people died, they tended to do so at home. Or, if they did not actually die at home, they were nevertheless laid there until the funeral. Furthermore, both in Roman society in general and in Jewish society in particular, transport to the grave was a public affair. In fact, the rituals of funerals assured that the population would be aware of the goings-on.² People commonly experienced death and saw those who had deceased. None of this was hidden. Death was ever-present.

Because of the presence of death, and because of its unknown and even frightening qualities, one of the first tasks of religion was (and is) to make sense of death. Peter Berger expresses the need in this way:

The confrontation with death . . . constitutes what is probably the most important marginal situation . . . Death radically puts in question the taken-for-granted, “business-as-usual” attitude in which one exists in everyday life. Here, everything in the daytime world of existence is massively threatened with “irreality” . . . Insofar as the knowledge of death cannot be avoided in any society, legitimations of the reality of the social world in the face of death are decisive requirements in any society. The importance of religions in such legitimations is obvious.

(Berger 1967: 43–4)

Religions make sense of life by making sense of death. This struggle with the meaning of death is central to the purpose of any religious community, from the mists of antiquity until the present day.

Commentaries on the meaning of death are preserved in a community’s texts and rituals. Sometimes these commentaries are explicit, although, in the realm of ritual at least, they are more often implied. Either way, through careful interpretation of its teachings and practices relating to death, we may discover some of the most fundamental beliefs of any religion. Moreover, since, as Metcalf and Huntington write, “the moment of death is related not only to the process of afterlife, but also to the process of living, aging, and producing progeny,” we cannot but admit that “life becomes transparent against the background of death” (Metcalf and Huntington 1972: 108, 25). If we understand a religious community’s beliefs concerning death, we will gain a far better understanding of its valuation of life.

The Focus of This Book

In this book, I explore the death-practices and beliefs of the “inventors” of Judaism – the rabbis of the first several centuries of the common era. My interest in these visionary religious leaders is a function of their pivotal place in the history of Judaism. It was they who, on the foundation of traditions inherited from Jewish communities of the late Second Temple period, defined the forms of what would be known simply as “Judaism” from late antiquity until the modern era. Though the Judaism of the rabbis would exhibit important continuities with the Judaisms of Jewish communities before them, it would also be different in significant and distinctive ways. One familiar with “Biblical Religion” or the religion of the Maccabees, for example, would have a hard time recognizing many of the particular expressions of rabbinic Judaism. One familiar with the religion of the Talmud, however, would have no problem recognizing it as the same “species” (though perhaps a different “breed”) of Judaism as that practiced by Maimonides in the twelfth century. To state matters as simply as possible, to understand Judaism, one must understand the religion of the classical rabbis.³ It is for this reason that I focus my inquiry on their world.

Previous scholarship on the rituals and practices of rabbinic Jewish tradition is extremely meager, and the limited work which has been done is flawed in methodological and other respects. To be sure, one will have no problem finding books on the halakhot (accepted Jewish laws and customs) of death and mourning. But these offer only instruction in latterday Jewish practice, mostly Orthodox. Their authors are uninterested in earlier Jewish practices or in the development of present customs. In fact, for the most part they seem not to know that Jewish practices relating to death even have a history beyond their initial record in the canonical “oral Torah.”

In a more scholarly vein, Nisan Rubin has written (in Hebrew) on Jewish death-practices during the rabbinic period, mostly as reflected in the literature of the rabbis but with reference to archaeological finds.⁴ A doctoral dissertation, written by Byron McCane under the direction of Eric Meyers, surveys archaeological reports to detail Jewish and Christian burial customs in Palestine during the first several centuries of the common era, using contemporary religious writings to illumine the beliefs of these respective communities (McCane 1992). There are also scattered articles, including a particularly important piece by Saul Lieberman on rabbinic beliefs regarding the afterlife (Lieberman 1965). Recent books by Simcha Paull Raphael and Neil Gillman describe the history of the same topic, including chapters on the rabbinic period (Raphael 1994 and Gillman 1997). Finally, archaeological studies of ancient Jewish burial sites are voluminous, and many include reference to contemporary rabbinic opinions.⁵ But none of these studies addresses the literature of the rabbis except to illumine the “reality on the ground,” and all are, like the literary scholarship on which they depend, incomplete and methodologically flawed, as I will explain below. A comprehensive study, informed by recent developments in rabbinic scholarship and related fields, has not, until now, been written.

How To write such a history: questions of method

Evidence for classical rabbinic practices and beliefs is almost exclusively the literature produced by the rabbis themselves. But this literature obviously cannot be interpreted in a vacuum. How we understand what the rabbis did or did not do, did or did not believe, will in part be a function of what others around them did and believed.

In fact, there is considerable evidence, of various sorts, for the world in which the rabbis lived. For the earliest years of this period we have other literatures, including the New Testament, the writings of Josephus and various apocryphal works. As importantly, deathpractices leave an enduring material record. Burial is typically done in or under the ground, which itself endures and, in addition, tends to protect what is contained in it. Bodies or bones may be laid to rest in coffins or sarcophagi constructed from durable materials. Monuments and grave markers are manufactured from similarly durable substance. The graves, sarcophagi and markers are often inscribed, meaning that beliefs relating to the dead are not only symbolized in the means of burial itself, but are also expressed in written words. Of all ancient religious and social practices, death customs leave perhaps the richest permanent record.

Though we preserve substantial evidence concerning death-practices from this period, the task of interpretation is not easy, and earlier writers have tripped over a variety of obstacles along the interpretive road. The literature is subject to (at least) the same interpretive difficulties as any literature, particularly from an ancient, foreign culture. The bulk of the literary record is, as I said, rabbinic, and, in recent decades, scholars have only begun to appreciate the challenges of interpreting this literature for historical purposes. To begin with, there is a tradition of reading the Talmud and other rabbinic works that extends back for 1500 years and more. This tradition is tied strongly to the traditions of practice from the same centuries, centuries during which rabbinic authorities exercised hegemony over most common Jewish practice. But, historians have now come to realize, the rabbis were, from the years following the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in CE 70 to the end of late antiquity, a small, elite group, controlling the practices of relatively few. This means that, contrary to the practice of many historians (including virtually all who have written on Jewish death-practices during this age), we may not assume that the rabbinic record represents common Jewish practice. So, if we discover burial practices that might be illuminated by rabbinic teachings, we should not assume a necessary or immediate connection. It is our obligation to consider alternative explanations of the same practices as well. By the same token, if we discover practices which seem to contradict rabbinic prescriptions, we should not conclude that these practices are heterodox. We do not know whether rabbinic teachings reflect any lived reality (as I shall explain below), let alone that of Jews beyond rabbinic circles.

Even when we recognize that rabbinic documents speak only for an elite group of religious masters and their disciples, we still have barely begun to overcome the obstacles which confront the interpreter of this literature. The more primary question, perhaps, is that of the relationship between the written record we preserve and the “original” teachings on which the record is based. Rabbinic tradition claims of itself that it was oral, passed from master to disciple by word of mouth. If we admit the fundamental orality of the society in which this tradition was produced – as we indeed must⁶ – then we must ask about the reliability of transmission in oral cultures. Those who have studied such cultures notice a great degree of fluidity in the repetition of traditions. This is true even of recitations of the same person from one repetition to the next, even when the speaker claims that he has repeated the tradition or story in a form that is identical with the previous recitation.⁷ Where training (memorization) begins early and traditions are chanted or sung, success is greater, but even such repeaters “make changes . . . of which they are unaware” (Ong 1982: 63). The many variations in “the same” rabbinic teachings from one record to another are evidence of the reality just described. It is in the nature of an oral tradition that teachings change from one recitation to the next, mostly unnoticed.

The unsensed changes that typify all oral traditions are often a function of the habits, assumptions, beliefs and prejudices of the context in which any given tradition is repeated. Again, examples in the rabbinic corpus are abundant. I cite just one: When we compare the responses of R. Yohanan and his colleagues to suffering as recorded in the Babylonian Talmud (Berakhot 5a) to those preserved in Midrash Song of Songs Rabbah (2, 35), we find that, in the former version, sufferings are rejected whereas in the latter acceptance of suffering is recommended. These and other differences in these teachings conform completely to approaches to suffering which unmistakably typify the Babylonian and Palestinian rabbinic traditions (Kraemer 1995). The rabbinic repeaters may not have been aware of the changes they were introducing into their teachings, but change them they did, under the inexorable pressures of the settings in which they were living.

The next problem with the rabbinic evidence, as we preserve it, lies in the difference between the forms of its original expression and the form of the later record. The formulation of a “literature” in an oral-literate society like that of the rabbis is extremely complex. On the one hand, there can be no question of the centrality and importance of written documents in ancient Judaism. Scripture – the Torah and the rest of the Hebrew Bible – was authoritative throughout Israel, and the study of these books was clearly a central act of rabbinic piety. On the other hand, because of the scarcity of written scrolls and widespread illiteracy, the experience of these books of most ancient Jews, including rabbis, was oral; they would listen to the scroll as it was read by a designated reader. In such a society, there is not, as has typically but wrongly been assumed, a unidirectional model for how literatures are produced (the false models are these: either oral production is later recorded in writing or written composition may be memorized by selected readers or disciples). Rather, there is always a complex interplay between orality and literacy, what Susan Niditch, following Ruth Finnegan, has characterized as a “continuum” between one mode and the other (Niditch 1996). So a teaching, originally spoken by the master, might be recorded for recollection by a disciple. The disciple might then recite the teaching based upon his abbreviated mnemonic record, changing or expanding the teaching in unknown and unsensed ways.⁸ As we noted earlier, oral teachings might be similarly changed. Crucially, “the writing down may preserve a snapshot or moment in what continues as a lively oral tradition. The writing down of material need not necessarily signal the end of the production of oral versions of such works” (Niditch 1996: 118–19). In such a society, any writing down is a “snapshot” of the developing life of a tradition. In the rabbinic context, the version recorded in the Palestinian Talmud may be one “snapshot,” the different version recorded in the Babylonian Talmud another. Neither may be “original,” though the version in the Palestinian Talmud is indisputably earlier (more on this below).

Still another difficulty with the extant rabbinic evidence lies in the fact that teachings that were once given oral expression, by and before living, authoritative masters of the tradition, are now (more or less) “frozen” in writing. Oral and written expressions differ in significant ways, and if “the medium is the message” then the reduction of oral rabbinic teachings to the written form will change them radically. I can barely improve on Martin Jaffee’s articulation of the consequences of this change in form:

the passage of a literary work from exclusively oral to written/oral transmission is profoundly transformative. What was once present as direct address and shaped inevitably to suit the needs of the moment as these took shape in the interaction of speaker and audience is now deprived of the fluid form which constitutes its social reality. A tradition, once reformulated and changed with each performance, is now stabilized and objectified in a form which exerts a powerful control over future performances or readings. What was formerly “authored” at each recitation must now be reproduced “as it is written.”

(Jaffee 1992: 66)⁹

I would modify Jaffee’s description only slightly, insisting that unofficial writings were surely part of the earliest life of rabbinic teachings and noting that what we now preserve, even if memorized by some students of the tradition with imprecision, is effectively frozen in writing. But the point, and the consequences, are the same.¹⁰ As Walter Ong writes, “Written words are isolated from the fuller context in which spoken words come into being. Spoken words are always modifications of a total situation which is more than verbal . . . In oral speech, a word must have one or another intonation or tone of voice – lively, excited, quiet, incensed, resigned, or whatever.” Context, tone, a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Glossary
• Abbreviations
• 1 The Presence of Death
• 2 Jewish Death Customs before the Rabbis
• 3 Early Rabbinic Death-Practices
• 4 Early Expansions and Commentaries
• 5 Jewish Death-Practices in Reality
• 6 Jewish Death-Practices in Early Byzantine Palestine
• 7 Law as Commentary
• 8 The Bavli Interprets the Mourner
• 9 Post-Talmudic Developments in Jewish Death-Practice
• 10 A Personal Theological Postscript
• Notes
• References