Pirke Avot

Context

In 63 BCE, Israel became part of the Roman Empire. At the beginning of the Roman era, most Jews still lived in the Land of Israel (which was part of the larger area known as Palestina in Greek and Roman times). Judaism as we know it today took shape in the first centuries CE, at the same time as Christianity, which originated as a Jewish sect. Of major importance for the development of Judaism was the destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE by the Romans, following an anti-Roman rebellion of the Jewish population of Israel. In 135 CE, a second Jewish rebellion known as the Bar Kochba Revolt occurred; this, too, was put down by the Romans. Thereafter, Jews were banned from Jerusalem and the surrounding areas.

Before the fall of the Temple, the Israelite religion, described in the Hebrew Bible, was centered on the Temple in Jerusalem. In fact, there had been two temples: The first, erected by King Solomon in the tenth century BCE, was destroyed in 586 BCE by the Babylonians, followed by the so-called Babylonian Exile, in which many Israelites were deported to Babylon (present-day Iraq). After their return to Israel from exile, the Jews rebuilt the Temple. Therefore, the latter period is known as the Second Temple Period. Most sages mentioned in chapter 1 of Pirke Avot lived in the Second Temple Period. The sages mentioned in later chapters constitute the early rabbinic generations. Pirke Avot is thus a unique testimony to a crucial period in Jewish history, at the transition between the Second Temple Period and the Rabbinic Period, in which the Jewish religion as we now know it (as distinct from the biblical or Israelite religion) took shape.

All rabbinic literature, starting with the Mishnah and including Pirke Avot, originated from an impulse to preserve Jewish traditions and reorganize the Jewish religion after the disasters of the loss of the Temple and of Jerusalem in the first two centuries CE. In the wake of these disasters came a change in the religious leadership of the Jews: The priests and their “party,” the Sadducees, long at the top of the religious hierarchy, no longer filled that position. In the last decades before the destruction of the Temple, another religious party, the Pharisees, had started to win the popularity of the common people. Whereas the Sadducees were concerned mainly with the sacrifices in the Temple, the Pharisees started to shift the focus of religious attention toward the study of ancestral traditions, which they called Oral Torah. Under their influence, synagogues and study centers were established, nurturing a different kind of religious devotion as an alternative to the Temple service.

After the fall of the Temple, the priests and Sadducees ceased to play any influential role in Judaism, whereas the legacy of the Pharisees became very important. After 70 CE, however, the name Pharisees was no longer used, but the rabbinic sages identified themselves as the direct successors of the Pharisees. This is evident in the text of Pirke Avot, where famous Pharisees like Hillel and Shammai are linked in a direct line to the first rabbinic sages. The rabbis managed to give the Jewish religion a new form, with the study of the Torah taking center stage. Beneath this fixation on the study of ancestral traditions was a fear that they would be lost and forgotten in the political and social turmoil surrounding the wars with the Romans. In order to preserve these traditions, the rabbis started to organize and collect them, first in oral form and eventually also in written form. The Mishnah was the direct result of these collection efforts. From an ideological point of view, it is obvious that the rabbis wanted to establish themselves and their predecessors, the Pharisees, as the winners of the religious battle with the Sadducees and priests. The “chain of traditions” in Pirke Avot 1:1 features very few priests: Aaron—Moses’ brother and the prototypical biblical priest—is noticeably absent.