The Talmud in Late-Antiquity

It wouldn't be a Talmud without mutual arguments, so - Noah Benjamin Bickart versus Monika Amsler, on the Bavli / Iraqi compilation. Bickart seems less prickly than (say) Jacob Neusner.

Current Talmud scholarly-consensus is that Bavli is mostly Sasanian, with some sprinkles of post-Islam; much like that Iliad consensus that this epic-poem is mostly Archaic, with a few chapters spliced in later like book 10. (We're not here to argue Iliad.)

Bickart points out that if the Iraqi Jews had the Talmud, they weren't using it. Hey, much like Yonatan Adler is arguing for the Torah itself, under the Ptolemies! Although, I'd add to Bickart (I haven't read Amsler): the Talmudists were drawing from the same interpretive-tradition and popular-culture, as we see in Iraqi divination-bowls and ostraca.

Some of the pericopae are constructed according to Aristotelian norms, even Cicero. I didn't know they had Cicero or Seneca or other Latins in the 'Iraq. It is well known that the Syriac world had Aristotle in Edessene Syriac, which along with its Hatrene predecessor was intelligible to Iraqi Jews. Admittedly our copies come from Qenneshre which was the region around Antioch, the westernmost reach of Syriac and Miaphysite at that. But the political limes had been erased by then if not the religious ones.

These Jews also had medical texts. The Qinnashrin Christians had Galen in translation; Masarjawayh was an Iraqi Jew who had Ahrun's Pandects, from Egypt. Amsler dares reconstruct a medical text from its excerpts in Talmud.

This blog has long argued for crisis, as motive, for the Jewish sages to compile what "Judaism" even meant anymore. Much like those Zoroastrian texts, among the Aryans. It's just that we've pinned it on the AD 530s-40s solar blackout. Amsler would have me pull back the clock by a century, before the middle of the fifth century. This Talmud was done after the Jerusalem Talmud; Amsler says, in response.

That means: before Yazdegird II. A writing around the time of Yazdegird I would put it alongside the Christian synod of 410 which brought the Church of the East in full communion with the Roman Church (until Theodosius II and Pulcheria ruined everything). So the "crisis" would simply be competition.

If fifthcentury maybe that's exactly why Iraqi Jews didn't at first accept it. They deemed it a me-too and an exercise in scribal hometown-spirit. A work of vanity, in effect.

Of interest (to me) is the Talmud's arrangement of text by keyword. The same phenomenon Neil Robinson has noted in the Quran, sura-internally and across suwar throughout the "'Uthmanic" text. Thus the McDowell-ish arguments to which Raymond Farrin has subjected us, and to a less-annoying extent Michel Cuypers. I've argued keywording holds for Ibn Mas'ûd and Ubay as well, also the Sana' 1; which suffices to refute such apologetics, but remains a valid observation and technique, as Robinson had intended in the first place. Were the Jerusalem Talmudists doing the same?

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