Amoraim
AMORAIM. The Aramaic word amoraʾim (sg., amoraʾ), meaning "speakers," generally refers to those masters who in explaining and applying the earlier teachings of the Palestinian tannaim (c. 70–200 CE) contained in the Mishnah (and in its related collections, such as the Tosefta), made rabbinic Judaism into a wider social movement. Occasionally the term may denote the individual who repeated a rabbi's statement. The significance of the amoraim lies in what they accomplished in their own day and in the impact on later generations of Jews of the collection of their teachings in the gemaraʾ (which combined with the Mishnah is the Talmud) and in the Midrash.
The amoraim are conventionally divided into generations demarcated by the life span of several prominent teachers: three to five generations of Babylonian and Palestinian masters (c. 220–375) and two or three longer additional Babylonian generations (375–460/500). Recently scholars have suggested that Ashi (375–424/7) should be considered the last of the amoraim proper, after whom (to 500) flourished those authorities who generally taught anonymously. Following the enumeration of Moshe Beer (Amoraʾei Bavel, Ramat Gan, 1974), the amoraim cited in the two Talmuds number 773 masters: 371 in Palestine and 402 in Babylonia, or 74 masters per generation in Palestine and 57 in Babylonia with a generation spanning approximately thirty-one to thirty-five years. Hardly a mass movement in their own right, they formed an elite group that was able to influence Jewry at large.
According to Jacob Neusner (1966–1970) and David M. Goodblatt (1975), the amoraim, aided by a band of students, eventually transformed Jewish society by presenting the ideal that all should become rabbis, masters of God's Torah, which contains the key to health and happiness. Their devotion to Torah study brought them great respect, and since they were believed to be able to help the common folk and intercede with God, they were seen as holy men. Their influence was reinforced by their roles as judges and community administrators, especially in Babylonia, as collectors of charity, and as teachers who were responsive, for example, to the social and economic crisis that affected the third-century eastern Mediterranean Roman world.
The amoraim continued as a group longer in Babylonia than in Palestine, expanding and redacting the Babylonian gemaraʾ into the fifth century, at a time when their rabbinical colleagues in Palestine, where the Jerusalem Talmud was already closed, were apparently primarily engaged in transmitting and redacting Midrashic teachings and possibly developing practical halakhic guides. Thus the amoraim creatively applied the scriptural and tannaitic tradition to differing Babylonian and Palestinian post-Mishnaic contexts—one a pagan Persian world and the other a pagan and then Christian Roman world, the one in the Diaspora and the other in the Holy Land. Although still valuing cultic notions, amoraim in both lands were able to dissociate ideas and institutions from the Temple; for example, separating features of the Passover evening celebration from its origins as a sacrificial ritual meal, they emphasized the symbolic significance of the protocol especially in terms of freedom and liberation. A comparable variation is discernible in the attempts to bolster the practice of saying blessings before eating food with the argument that the omission of a blessing constitutes a sin. While the tannaim, by drawing on the idea of trespass against the Temple cult, suggested that the individual would be performing the sin of sacrilege against the Lord, the amoraim first defined the terms so that they might be meaningful to those who had not experienced the Temple cult and then revised the metaphors, speaking of robbing the Holy One and the congregation of Israel (B.T., Ber. 35a–b). Responsive to the nation's political situation, the amoraim amplified traditional redemptive motifs, though they held that these hopes for divine intervention were contingent on human deeds. They thus asserted that the divine redemption celebrated during Passover took place because the people had merited it and thereby taught contemporary Jews awaiting an eventual redemption that they too must become worthy.
The emphasis on the study of Torah and on the importance of personal action and fulfillment of the commandments caused the amoraim to stress love of one's neighbor and the importance of law, order, and justice. Likewise, in responding to contemporary intellectual challenges, they drew on, yet transformed, many Hellenistic ideas, such as those concerning astrology and notions of an afterlife, and customs, such as in popular modes of taking oaths and vows. To be sure, rabbis differed on small and sometimes larger matters, but since rabbinic teachings were constantly revised in the process of transmission to make them address more directly whatever contemporary issue seemed most pressing, their original nuances often became obfuscated. Because the teachings were given a literary framework when woven together and fashioned into the larger whole of the gemaraʾ, they appeared to form part of a collective effort.
The advances in the efforts of Talmudic criticism to unravel what happened to the teachings during the processes of transmission and redaction (e.g., of David Weiss Halivni) should enable a more accurate recognition of the fundamental form of a teaching and the meanings it gained in subsequent generations. This should further enable scholars to analyze the distinct amoraic approaches and thus surpass the important though highly selective earlier work of scholars from Wilhelm Bacher to E. E. Urbach.
The amoraic heritage came to be transmitted through the text of the Talmud: because the Talmud became the central book of study in later Judaism, its literary and methodological traits rival its substantive content in importance. The Talmud's process of inquiry inculcates a critical intellectual approach that uses the mind to evaluate the significance and appropriateness of ideas. This outlook characterizes Torah study as an encounter with the divine—an act of ongoing revelation—so that reason, reflection, and rational discourse are the means both to approach life and to imitate God, hence to become holy. Amoraic biblical exposition, or midrash, which makes use of the imaginative faculty, also inculcates these traits, for even interpretations and homilies are grounded in scripture and must often withstand a process of questioning and challenge. Both the Talmudic and the Midrashic literature inculcated later generations with the value of study and critical thinking, supplementing the substantive rabbinic teachings on human action, social order, compassion, and justice.
Abbahu; Abbaye; Ashi; Elʿazar Ben Pedat; Hunaʾ; Midrash and Aggadah; Rabbah Bar Nahmani; Rabbinic Judaism in Late Antiquity; Rav; Ravaʾ; Shemuʾel the Amora; Shimʿon Ben Laqish; Talmud; Yehoshuʿa Ben Levi; Yehudah Bar Yeḥezqeʾl; Yoḥanan Bar Nappahaʾ.
Bibliography
Analytical bibliographic information can be found in my article "An Annotated Bibliographical Guide to the Palestinian Talmud" and David M. Goodblatt's "The Babylonian Talmud," both in Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, vol. 2.19.2 (Berlin and New York, 1979), pp. 139–256, 257–336, and both reprinted in The Study of Ancient Judaism, edited by Jacob Neusner, vol. 2, The Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds (New York, 1981). Note in particular Saul Lieberman's Greek in Jewish Palestine, 2d ed. (New York, 1965), and Texts and Studies (New York, 1974); Jacob Neusner's A History of the Jews in Babylonia, 5 vols. (Leiden, 1966–1970), which treats comprehensively the rabbinic sources from the perspective of their late antique social, religious, and historical context; E. E. Urbach's The Sages, 2 vols., 2d enl. ed. (Jerusalem, 1979), which remains useful despite its insufficient differentiation between sources; and David M. Goodblatt's Rabbinic Instruction in Sasanian Babylonia (Leiden, 1975), a model study on the institutions of teaching. See also Jacob Neusner's Judaism in Society (Chicago, 1984), a study of the self-images of Palestinian amoraim; my The Origins of the Seder (Berkeley, Calif., 1984); and David Weiss Halivni's Midrash, Mishnah, and Gemara (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).
New Sources
Bader, Gershom. The Encyclopedia of Talmudic Sages. Translated by Solomon Katz. Northvale, N.J., 1988.
Berger, Michael S. Rabbinic Authority. New York, 1998.
Breuer, Yohanan. "On the Hebrew Dialect of the 'Amoraʾim' in the Babylonian Talmud." Scripta Hierosolymitana 37 (1998): 129–150.
Kalmin, Richard Lee. Sages, Stories, Authors, and Editors in Rabbinic Babylonia. Brown Judaic studies, no. 300. Atlanta, 1994.
Kalmin, Richard Lee. The Sage in Jewish Society in Late Antiquity. New York, 1999.
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