Moses received Torah from Sinai and passed it on to Joshua; Joshua to the elders, the elders to the prophets and the prophets passed it on to the Members of the Great Assembly. They said three things: Be moderate in judgement, Create many students, and Make a fence around the Torah.
until we arrive at the time of the Members of the Great Assembly. They are: Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, Azariah, Ezra the Scribe, Nehemiah ben-Hakaliah, Mordechai, and Zerubabel ben-Shealtiel; these prophets were accompanied by [other sages] to a total of one hundred and twenty elders.
However, this is mostly imagination. It is an attempt to create around the central figure of Ezra a Bet Din, a court, of supreme authority. The idea is that at the culmination of the biblical period an assembly of prophets and sages assumed the mantle of supreme authority in
Torah she-b'al-peh (the oral tradition). The list contains some names which are probably fiction or are possibly fiction (Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, Azariah, Mordechai) and the chronology is hopelessly out: the prophets Haggai and Zechariah and the political leader Zerubabel are more or less contemporaries and can be dated to 6th century BCE; Ezra and Nehemiah must be dated to a century later, mid 5th century BCE; the time of the prophet Malachi is not absolutely clear – it is probably best to place him at a guess around the end of the 5th century or the beginning of the 4th century BCE. Even if all these personalities were definitely historical figures they did not all live at the same time! Rambam is presumably basing himself on the
Seder Olam of Rabbi Yosé ben-Ĥalafta, which, as we have already noted in a previous shiur, was hopelessly unreliable as regards events before the hellenistic period:
Seder Olam squeezes the whole of the period of Persian domination of the Middle East (539 – 332 BCE) into a mere 52 years! It is generally accepted that there was a Great Assembly, but neither its time nor its membership is as described by Rambam.
To be continued.
Benjamin Fleischer writes:
I was rereading Milton Steinberg's "As A Driven Leaf" and wondered if the following quote from Chapter 10 could be accurate. Could Avot or parts of it have been used in the semikhah (ordination) ceremony?
"Gamliel's hands rested heavily on Elisha's bowed head. His great voice boomed over him in the ancient formula of ordination: 'Moses received the Law at Sinai from the Holy One, Blessed be He. He transmitted it to Joshua; Joshua to the Judges; the Judges unto the Prophets; the Prophets unto the men of the Great Synagogue. . .' …. The voice of Gamliel went on, intoning the formula to its end: 'In accordance with the will of God and with the authority vested in me by the Sanhedrin, I endow Elisha, the son of Abuyah, with the title of Elder and with membership in this body. I declare him a Rabbi in Israel. I name him Companion to all the Scholars and Sages. From this moment forth he is authorized and declared competent to adjudge matters of ritual law. He may try cases, civil and criminal… Henceforth he shall be called by the title Rabbi, by the title Companion, by the title Sage, by the title Elder. These shall be the terms of reverence by which he shall be addressed in Israel, and may God prosper him in all his ways. Even as it is written in the words of David, 'And may the pleasantness of the Lord his God be upon him, and mayest Thou establish the work of his hands, yea the work of his hands, establish Thou it.'"
Is there a source for this?
I respond:
There is no source known to me that would suggest that the first mishnah of Avot was ever a part of an ordination ceremony in Talmudic times. So that part at least is (legitimately) the product of the author's imagination. There is no Talmudic source that suggests that there was a 'traditional' ceremony of ordination. Historically speaking, at the time of Elisha ben-Avuyah each sage ordained his own pupils at his own discretion, and presumably in his own manner; it was only later that the agreement of the President and the Sanhedrin was required. So the fact that Steinberg has Rabban Gamli'el, in his capacity of President of the Sanhedrin, ordaining Elisha is anachronistic. Where Steinberg is historically correct is in the phrase "Gamliel's hands rested heavily on Elisha's bowed head." The imposition of hands was the physical sign of ordination in Eretz-Israel and it was this that entitled the subject to be called rabbi. The sages of Babylon did not have this important element in their ordination so they were called rav and not rabbi. The only source that we have that relates to an ordination 'ceremony' in any real sense is a short conversation [Sanhedrin 5a] between Rabbi Ĥiyya and Rabbi (Yehudah the President of the Sanhedrin) concerning the ordination of the nephew of the former. The scraps of phrases that appear there are used today in documents of orthodox ordination. Steinberg uses the phrase "he shall be called by the title Rabbi, by the title Companion, by the title Sage, by the title Elder", which, in a slightly different form is used in the ordination document issued by the Jewish Theological Seminary today, as far as I know.
