| This dissertation is a study of rabbinic criminal execution, its purpose to understand the counterintuitive interpretations made by the Classical Rabbis of the first and second centuries C.E.—the Tannaim—to the biblical laws. By looking at innovations not previously considered-innovations to the characters who participate in execution, the ritualization of execution, and inversions of Roman execution-this dissertation shows that the rabbinic death penalty represents an argument for rabbinic authority. In this argument, the Tannaim counter traditional claims to authority made by the individual, the community, and the family, as well as claims to authority of the Roman imperial regime. This dimension of the rabbinic death penalty has been missed by the tradition of scholarship, which emphasizes rabbinic opposition to the death penalty. This approach was generated by specific cultural, political, and religious concerns of the last century: attacks on the Talmud by Christianity and Reform Judaism; accusations that talmudic criminal law is responsible for the execution of Jesus; the privatization of punishment in the modern West and controversies over the death penalty. While this dissertation considers how the rabbinic laws of criminal execution construct rabbinic authority, it also considers how they read the Bible. This dissertation thus represents an attempt to engage the tension between peshat, the “plain” meaning of the Bible, and derash, rabbinic exegesis, offering a model for reading rabbinic texts as multidimensional, as products and agents of history at the same time and in so far as they are interpretations of Torah. |
