Schlomo Zuckier: The Ordering of Knowledge in Rabbinic Literature

A quick perusal of rabbinic literature reveals the rabbis’ distinct interest in ordering and creating hierarchies of knowledge throughout the corpus. This may be true more than anywhere in the area of sacrifice, where the rabbinic “map” might be seen as one that, lacking the “territory” of physical sacrifice taking place, becomes all the more important for its value as categorization.For example, one chapter in Mishnah Zevahim (the primary tractate treating sacrifice) orders the various sacrifices based on their level of ritual holiness as expressed in the details of their attendant laws. Other passages distinguish the various sacrifices from one another by imposing upon them both qualitative and quantitative categories: “fully burnt” vs. “brought for atonement”; “holy of holies” vs. “lesser holy things”.This phenomenon in rabbinic literature has parallels in both the Roman Empire’s “compilatory aesthetic” (Konig & Whitmarsh) and in contemporaneous Christian modes of systematizing and organizing information in a range of areas – textual, theological, and ritual. The Greco-Roman philosophical tradition thus joins biblical priestly texts as relevant precursors for recovering the context in which these rabbinic ordering techniques came to such prominence.This paper examines the rabbinic systematizing tendency in the context of sacrifice, illustrating various examples of hierarchy inscribed onto the offering categories s and considering what conclusions are drawn from this ordering of knowledge. It will consider these methods of organizing knowledge both diachronic and synchronically, tracing rabbinic connections to both the rabbis’ Hebrew Bible heritage and to their rabbis’ Greco-Roman and Christian contemporaries.