Y Taanit 11
X J The oracle concerning Dumah. One is calling to me from Seir, 'Watchman, what of the night Watchman, what of the night ' Isa. 21 11 . K The Israelites said to Isaiah, O our Rabbi, Isaiah, what will come for us out of this night L He said to them, Wait for me, until I can present the question. M Once he had asked the question, he came back to them. N They said to him, Watchman, what of the night What did the Guardian of the ages tell you O He said to them, The watchman says 'Morning comes...
Tosefta Shabbat 135
A. The books of the Evangelists and the books of the minim they do not save from a fire on the Sabbath , They are allowed to burn up where they are, they and even the references to the Divine Name that are in them. . . . B. Said R. Tarfon, May I bury my sons if such things come into my hands and I do not burn them, and even the references to the Divine Name which are in them. And if someone was running after me, I should escape into a temple of idolatry, but I should not go into their houses of...
Y Taanit 45
X G R. Simeon b. Yohai taught, Aqiba, my master, would interpret the following verse 'A star kokhab shall come forth out of Jacob' Num. 24 17 A disappointment Kozeba shal come forth out of Jacob.' H R. Aqiba, when he saw Bar Kozeba, said, This is the King Messiah. I R. Yohanan ben Toreta said to him, Aqiba Grass will grow on your cheeks before the Messiah will come The important point is not only that Aqiba had been proved wrong. It is that the very verse of Scripture adduced in behalf of his...
Epilogue The Shape of the Initial Encounter and the Enduring Confrontation
Sages' Success in the Initial Encounter Judaism endured in the West for two reasons. First, Christianity permitted it to endure, and, second, Israel, the Jewish people, wanted it to. The fate of paganism in the fourth century shows the importance of the first of the two factors Geffcken 1978, 115-222 . We see, in particular, that it was not the intellectual power of sages alone that secured the long-term triumph of Judaism. It also was the character of the Christian emperors' policy toward...
Leviticus Rabbah and Israels National Crisis
Israel remains Israel, the Jewish people, after the flesh, because Israel today continues the family begun by Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and the other tribal founders, and bears the heritage bequeathed by them. That conviction they were Israel never required articulation. The contrary possibility fell wholly outside of sages' and all Jews' imagination. To state matters negatively, the people could no more conceive that they were not the daughters and sons of their fathers and mothers than...
Eusebius and the Beginnings of Christian Historiography
If Eusebius lived today in an American university, he would occupy professorships in departments of political science, sociology, history, religious and theological studies, and, of course, classics. But I think his particular department would be political science. For Eusebius, though the founder of Christian historiography, confronted an essentially political problem and organized his thought in response to it. He turned to history for the same reason that people today study history to...
The Jews in the Land of Israel in the Fourth Century
The crisis of the age and there assuredly was a crisis for Jews began in politics but extended to matters of the mind psychology, theology, and myth gone wrong, most of all. For what happened was something that Jews did not anticipate, the rise to power of the Christian faith, seen by Jews until then as a mere aberration and a heresy. What Jews did anticipate was never to come to pass in the enormous shift of history and politics, the opportunity to rebuild the Temple came and went. These two...
Aphrahat and the People Which Is No People
To see how a fourth-century Christian theologian addressed the question of who is Israel in the light of the salvation of Jesus Christ, we turn to Aphrahat, a Christian monk in the western satrapy of the Iranian empire we know as Mesopotamia, ca. 300-350, who wrote, in Syriac, a sustained treatise on the relationship of Christianity and Judaism. His demonstrations, written in 337-44, take up issues facing the Syriac-speaking Church in the Iranian empire, enemy of Christian Rome. The relevance...