Taking account of a wide range of literary evidence and the most recent scholarship on the
nature of education in Rabbinic Judaism of late antiquity these studies examine new and varied
aspects of the scriptural and intellectual infrastructure of the educational ethos the tension
between oral tradition and literary practice and the central role of the rabbinic sage as
pedagogical innovator and model. They also study the underlying influence of social and
economic factors the evolution of teaching techniques and frameworks and the formative role
of both midrashic mentality and mythopoetic currents. With an eye on the broader contexts of
Greco-Roman culture and emergent Christianity these essays follow the development of rabbinic
ideas and institutions from the first centuries of the Common Era in Palestine through the
flowering of centers of learning centuries later in Babylonia.
