Exploring Mishnah's World(s): Social

Scientific Approaches 1st ed. Edition

Simcha Fishbane
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/exploring-mishnahs-worlds-social-scientific-approach
es-1st-ed-edition-simcha-fishbane/
Exploring
Mishnah’s World(s)
Social Scientific Approaches

Simcha Fishbane · Calvin Goldscheider ·

Jack N. Lightstone
Exploring Mishnah’s World(s)
Simcha Fishbane • Calvin Goldscheider
Jack N. Lightstone

Exploring Mishnah’s
World(s)
Social Scientific Approaches
Simcha Fishbane Calvin Goldscheider
Graduate School of Jewish Studies Maxcy Hall
Touro College & University System Brown University
New York, NY, USA Providence, RI, USA

Jack N. Lightstone
Brock University
St. Catharines, ON, Canada

ISBN 978-3-030-53570-4    ISBN 978-3-030-53571-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53571-1

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect
to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Preface

This volume offers a collection of essays, all of which take (or advocate
taking) social science approaches—sociological or social-anthropological
perspectives, to be specific—to the study of the evidence of the Mishnah.
While the authors wrote their contributions as individual stand-alone
pieces, the impetus to bring them together in this volume stems from the
authors’ participation in a thematic research unit hosted between 2015
and 2018 by the European Association of Biblical Studies (EABS). A
number of scholars participated in the meetings. All made valuable contri-
butions to the research unit’s work; some of their contributions have been
revised and published in several issues of the journal, Studies in Judaism,
the Humanities and Social Sciences. However, the authors whose essays
appear in this volume were frequent participants in the EABS-sponsored
research unit over its four-year period of operation and as such have had
greater opportunity to dialogue with one another. Moreover, all three
authors have spent substantial parts of their lengthy academic careers mar-
rying their interest in social science approaches with their curiosity about
the evidence from and about Jews and Judaism. These factors provided
the motivation for the three of us to draw together this particular collec-
tion of our essays in one volume.
How these essays, with their range and scope, speak to one another will
occupy the latter half of this Preface. However, first, these prefatory
remarks broach anterior matters: Why this volume’s focus is on the
Mishnah, and why these authors’ commitment to promote and apply
social science perspectives to its evidence? To some degree, Lightstone’s

v
vi PREFACE

methodologically oriented essay appearing as Chap. 1 in this volume

addresses these questions. That said, let us deal with these questions here,
upfront, and directly.

Why Mishnah? And Why Promote Social Science

Approaches to the Study of Its Evidence?
Why Mishnah? First, Mishnah (composed circa 200 CE) is the only surviv-
ing literary oeuvre1 written by Jews for Jews in Roman Palestine in the
aftermath of the failed Bar Kokhba rebellion. The defeat by Rome of Bar
Kokhba’s militia functioned as a capstone to the events of the failed “Great
Rebellion” of the Jews in the Land of Israel against their Roman rulers
between 66 and 71 CE. The pacification of the Great Rebellion by Roman
forces resulted in the destruction in 70 CE of Jerusalem and its Temple.
With the latter’s demise, many of the principal practices of “Biblical
Judaism” as enjoined in the Hebrew Bible ceased, as did the social, cul-
tural, and administrative influence and authority of Temple institutions,
leadership, and personnel in the Land of Israel and beyond. The defeat
about 65 years later of the rebels led by Simon Bar Kokhba meant that no
imminent restoration of Jerusalem and its Temple-based institutions and
cult would be in the offing. Moreover, Rome’s policy in Judea after this
second rebellion was (understandably) more repressive, resulting in a sig-
nificant movement of Jews out of the Judean heartland to the coastal plain
and the Galilee (and beyond).
These upheavals of Palestinian Jewish society also affected a subset of
homeland Jews that identified themselves as followers of Jesus. There can
be little doubt that until the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple,
however far the fledgling Jesus movement had spread in the Middle East
and Mediterranean Lands, Christian leadership was based in Jerusalem.
For this early Jesus movement, the two failed rebellions were also a crisis—
not just a social, institutional, and cultural one, but equally a crisis of

1
The choice of the wording “literary oeuvre” is deliberate; since one may legitimately dif-
ferentiate a literary composition, such as Mishnah, from inscriptions, letters, or transactional
records, such as the Bar Kokhba Letters or the Babatha documents from the Cave of Letters
in the Judean Desert. The use of “surviving” (in parentheses) hints at another caveat. We
cannot know, as some scholars have suggested, whether our Mishnah is based on a proto-one
no longer extant. Moreover, some early rabbinic traditions speak of other rabbis’ “mish-
nahs,” specifically, the mishnah of Rabbi Akiva. We cannot know what is meant by such
references.
 PREFACE vii

meaning, just as it was for other Judah-ists. After all much of the early
Jesus movement’s bible (the same bible as that revered by other Jews) was
also rendered moot.
The upshot of the foregoing is this. The latter half of the second cen-
tury CE and the beginning of the third in the Land of Israel was a time of
recovery and redefinition on many social, cultural, and economic planes in
the aftermath of crisis and dislocation. And leaving aside early Christian
authors of this period, the Mishnah is, as has been stated, the only extant
written oeuvre produced exclusively by and for Jews in the Land of Israel
in this period.
Second, Mishnah is the earliest surviving literary oeuvre composed by
and for members of the early rabbinic movement, group, guild, and/or
class (whatever the most appropriate social descriptor might be) in its for-
mative period. The early rabbinic movement underwent significant social
formation, consolidation, or institutionalization in Roman Palestine near
the latter part of the second century CE and the early decades of the third,
precisely the time of Mishnah’s creation and promulgation. We do not
know whether this early rabbinic movement exercised much power or
authority in Roman-ruled Palestine in the third or several subsequent cen-
turies. But over the next half-millennium or so, the vicissitudes of history
gave the rabbis that power and authority in the Jewish communities of the
Middle East and Mediterranean Lands.
Mishnah was not only the early rabbis’ foundational document. It was
also the early rabbinic group’s privileged object of study (after the Hebrew
Bible) for some 400 years, from circa 200 CE to about 600 CE, as
explained and documented in Lightstone’s essays in this volume. Culturally
and socially, how can 400 years of the devoted study of a particular docu-
ment as a central, core activity of a group not have significantly influenced
that group’s social formation and shared identity?
Third, Mishnah, a document whose subject matter is legal and norma-
tive in nature, is what social scientists would call a “thick” document. That
is, it is replete with details of social, religious, administrative, juridical, and
cultural phenomena for which its authors proffer rulings (or in many
instances alternative rulings) in accordance with what they understand to
be the demands of Torah, God’s revealed norms for Jewish life and society.
Social historians and social scientists crave “thick” evidence. “Thick” social
and cultural evidence is laborious to gather and, in the case of societies
long past, difficult to come by altogether. So, Mishnah is a treasure trove
of evidence.
viii PREFACE

That said, Mishnah’s thick evidence is not without its problems. Since
a significant proportion of Mishnah’s content is predicated on a function-
ing Judaic Temple in Jerusalem, and since no such institution had existed
for some 130 years when Mishnah was authored c. 200 CE, it is difficult
to discern precisely what in Mishnah is based on memory and what on
imagination. Moreover, it is one thing to say that Mishnah was authored
c. 200 CE. It is another to say that its content or the language of its bits
and pieces is datable to c. 200 CE. Only professional scholarship in tradi-
tion history, literary history, and redaction history can sort out such things.
So, the opportunities for research provided by Mishnah must be taken
with full appreciation of the methodological hurdles attending the use of
Mishnah’s evidence. Such an appreciation may mean qualifying one’s
claims or shying away from some questions altogether, when “discretion is
the better part of valour” (to quote “the bard”). These difficulties and
cautions are more fully spelled out in Chap. 1’s methodological exposition.
Fourth, it is reasonable to claim that Mishnah’s evidence represents the
thinking of its circle of authors—as stated, rabbis working near the turn of
the third century in Roman-ruled Galilee. What are the implications of
such a claim? One, these authors, at least, believed that what appears in
Mishnah belongs together as some sort of “whole cloth,” even if we may
also suppose that these authors worked with antecedent sources and tradi-
tions. Two, it is clear that Mishnah’s framers refashioned these sources to
fit together, using literary forms and conventions that were normative for
the authors. In other words, when working with the evidence of Mishnah,
one can, in some meaningful sense, argue that the evidence is not just, or
is not intended to be read as, an eclectic hodgepodge. This is important
for the social historian as much as it is for the social scientist. In the past,
many modern scholars of Early Judaism or of Early Rabbinism have taken
overly eclectic approaches to mustering their evidence, as if a piece of evi-
dence appearing in Mishnah may be meaningfully collated with evidence
that first appears, let us say, in the Babylonian Talmud edited some
400 years later. The first rule of golf is “play the ball as it lies”; all of
Mishnah’s evidence lies within a single document’s literary bounds,
authored or brought together and reframed by one group in a particular
place and time.
Let us now turn to the second question posed above. Why produce a
collection of essays that calls for and models various social scientific studies
of aspects of Mishnah’s evidence? Some of the answers to this question are
already implicit in the responses to the first question, Why Mishnah?
 PREFACE ix

First, since Mishnah’s content is legal in nature, and since that content
spans many aspects of a people living a religiously informed life together
under a specified social-authority structure, Mishnah’s content is highly
amenable to the types of studies that sociologists and social anthropolo-
gists would routinely undertake. As already noted, Mishnah’s evidence is
socially “thick,” which is (or ought to) be catnip to social scientists. To be
sure, methodological challenges abound in using this evidence, but quali-
fying one’s claims and carefully choosing what to do and what not to
attempt will deal with these methodological issues, as intimated earlier.
Second, if one were to compare the mass of historical, literary-­historical,
theological, and philological studies of Mishnaic evidence (or indeed of
early Rabbinic literature generally) with the volume of studies driven pri-
marily by social science questions and approaches to Mishnah’s content,
the amount of the former would far outweigh that of the latter. In other
words, there is, relatively speaking, a significant dearth of studies under-
taken primarily through the lens of social science approaches. It is worth-
while to redress that dearth.
Why, then, has this not already happened? For a number of reasons,
in our estimation. One, most social scientists work with contemporary
evidence or evidence of the recent past, largely because it is more abun-
dant and its value is easier to assess. Two, studying Mishnah requires
skills and knowledge that few social scientists possess. One must com-
mand Middle Hebrew (and some early rabbinic Aramaic) to work with
Mishnah in its original language. But even if one were content to work
with modern translations of Mishnah, other hurdles must be sur-
mounted. To make sense of Mishnah requires knowledge of a rather
arcane system of ancient Judaic law that everywhere underlies Mishnah’s
content. In addition, Mishnah’s language is crafted to be highly laconic,
demanding that the reader conceptually interpolate missing bits essential
to the interpretation of Mishnah passages. Three, matters of critical liter-
ary history, as noted, significantly affect the study of Mishnah’s evidence;
at the very least, the social scientist needs to be aware (or constantly
reminded) of these in order not to fall into methodological potholes. In
sum, social science approaches to Mishnaic evidence require that its
practitioners have had a “dual” schooling, or work collaboratively with
those who have been schooled, in matters of critical literary history of
early rabbinic texts and in matters of ancient Judaic law systems. (The
three authors of this volume have bridged these scholarly divides either
x PREFACE

by reason of the range of their individual professional training or by rea-

son of their conversations with one another.)
Third, there is great value in understanding the range of human social
experience across time and geography. For more than a century, anthro-
pologists have studied so-called primitive societies—all of them more
complex and sophisticated than the word “primitive” implies. When these
societies flourished in the ancient past, physical anthropology and archae-
ology have combined to reveal matters. And, of course, social science
approaches to the study of contemporary societies (whether “primitive” or
“modern”) abound for reasons already articulated. Fewer career social sci-
entists work with evidence from the “middle ground,” that is, from ancient
societies that have left us evidence in their literatures. The reasons for this
have already been spelled out. But one must state unequivocally that this
state of affairs is unfortunate. And, moreover, it is a state of affairs that
belies the very founding of modern social science theory and method.
After all, Max Weber, one of the founders of modern sociology, developed
his “ideal typology” of forms of social authority on the foundations of his
reading of biblical literature. It is the authors’ hope that this collection of
essays dealing with the evidence of Mishnah, a late second-/early third-­
century rabbinic legal text, will entice more scholars of a social-science
bent to enter this “middle ground” of research.

The Range and Scope of This Volume’s Essays

and the Authors’ Conversation

As stated, this volume reflects a project to encourage, and to propose and

model conceptual and methodological frames for, social science approaches
to the study the Mishnah. That framing is one that takes account of the
historical and literary-historical issues that impinge upon the use of
Mishnah for any scholarly purpose beyond philological study, including
social scientific examination of Mishnaic materials. Based on that framing,
articulated principally in Chap. 1, each subsequent chapter pursues, with
appropriate methodological caveats, an avenue or avenues of inquiry open
to the social scientist, providing examples of how to bring to bear on the
evidence of Mishnah social scientific questions and modes of inquiry.
The chapters authored by Fishbane and Goldscheider bring typical
sociological and social-anthropological categories to bear on Mishnah’s
“ideal vision for” a Jewish social world articulated via Mishnah’s legal
 PREFACE xi

prescriptions and proscriptions. To understand what these chapters under-

take, one must appreciate the methodological import and implications of
describing Mishnah’s content as founded upon an “ideal” social vision.
This Preface will return to precisely this issue later.
The chapters authored by Lightstone model a very different type of
social scientific approach to the evidence of the Mishnah, by focusing on
Mishnah as a highly valued cultural object; that value was socially enacted
in devotion to Mishnah study as a core, socially formative group activity
among early rabbinic circles. In these chapters, the concepts and methods
of socio-rhetorical analysis are brought to bear on the evidence, and the
chapters’ interests lie in uncovering elements contributing to shaping the
social formation, social identity, and normative skills of the early rabbinic
group as a self-defining, self-promoting, quasi-professional elite within
Palestinian and Babylonian Jewish societies.
While the foregoing summarizes the scope and content of this volume’s
chapters, it does not suggest how to read them. There are three ways of
reading this volume’s essays from Chap. 2 through to the volume’s
conclusion.
One, these chapters may be read as a set of thematically linked, inde-
pendent studies that may each be taken on its own as an example of what
it might mean to approach the evidence of the Mishnah with a social sci-
ence lens. In such a reading of this volume, Chap. 1 may be viewed as
having elicited ten discrete contributions.
Two, in the remaining chapters, each of the three authors, Fishbane,
Goldscheider, and Lightstone, have canted their approaches to the evi-
dence of the Mishnah differently. And it is useful to read this book in that
light. For instance, Goldscheider’s recent studies (some presented in this
volume and others presented elsewhere) on Mishnah have tended to adopt
social-analytic categories that find some correspondence in Mishnah’s own
topical divisions—Mishnah’s thematic “orders” and topical “tractates.”
One can, and perhaps should, read this as a methodological choice made
by Goldscheider, since in social science research one is always faced with
the prospect of whether one is inappropriately imposing interpretive cate-
gories on the evidence rather than allowing those categories to emerge
from the evidence. There is, in principle, room for both in social scientific
inquiry, but there are prices to pay for leaning too far in one direction or
another. If categories are simply those articulated by the evidence itself,
then one risks engaging in (mere) description with little analytic and con-
ceptual power to view that evidence in light of analyses of other groups
xii PREFACE

and cultures in order better to understand what it has meant for humans
to be social beings who socially construct worlds for themselves. At the
opposite extreme, the imposition of overly “foreign” interpretive or ana-
lytic categories on the evidence of a group risks obscuring the nature of
their social order and world—in seriously misrepresenting them.
Goldscheider’s work on Mishnah, then, tends to capitalize on the fact that
Mishnah’s own categories for ordering and developing its legal materials
often closely correspond to typical interpretative and analytic categories of
sociologists such as himself.
What now of Fishbane’s chapters? His work on Mishnah (again, pre-
sented here and elsewhere) also has used normative sociological and
anthropological interpretive and analytic categories in examining
Mishnah’s evidence, but in so doing he has not restricted himself by stay-
ing within the lines drawn by Mishnah’s own literary thematic and topical
divisions and subdivisions. Rather, Fishbane explores themes of sociologi-
cal or anthropological import, for which there is evidence in Mishnah,
even if this evidence may be dispersed across several of Mishnah’s tractates.
Nonetheless, he can often justify his enterprise methodologically by
appealing to the fact that Mishnah frequently uses standard nomenclature,
used across the Mishnah’s topical and thematic divisions for these socially
relevant notions and values. So, for Fishbane, it is legitimate to study the
range of uses of Mishnah’s own appeal to such notions. He may ask about
how they are used across the expanse of Mishnah’s tractates.
Lightstone has opted not to conduct sociological or anthropological
analysis of Mishnah’s ideal world. Rather, he examines Mishnah as an
important social and cultural artifact of the early rabbinic movement, in
light of the fact that the devoted study of Mishnah was a core activity
within early rabbinic circles. Therefore, in his view, Mishnah’s dominant
traits, confronted regularly by the devoted Mishnah student, may tell us
something of the core values, expected profile, core skills, and shared
identity of this nascent quasi-professional movement in the Roman and
early Byzantine periods. His justification for so using the evidence of the
Mishnah is based on three claims. First, Mishnah is the first literary oeuvre
both authored by and promulgated as authoritative in the early rabbinic
group. Second, in addition to the Hebrew Scriptures themselves, Mishnah
remained the primary object of devoted rabbinic study undertaken as a
core activity that defined one as a member of the rabbinic group or guild
for nearly 400 years. Third, a number of subsequent early rabbinic literary
oeuvres produced during that 400-year period may be read (in part) as
 PREFACE xiii

models for (if not reflections of) ways of studying Mishnah and therefore
tell us something about both the continuity and development of core
aspects of shared rabbinic identity and expected competencies. As stated
earlier, Lightstone’s methods are adapted versions of socio-rhetorical anal-
ysis—that is, adapted by him for use in the examination of early rabbinic
legal texts.
Three, and in light of (and following from) the foregoing paragraphs,
the studies of this volume may be read as a dialogue of sorts between
Fishbane, Goldscheider, and Lightstone, sparked and conditioned by pro-
legomena proffered in Chap. 1 by Lightstone. Mishnah is replete with
evidence of a social nature because (1) it is primarily legal in content and
(2) it encompasses norms for social, organizational/administrative, and
ritual life—realms that were not as highly differentiated in premodern
societies as they are today. But as Lightstone has pointed out in Chap. 1,
it is difficult to discern when Mishnah’s evidence reflects (1) contempo-
rary social norms, practice, and values of late second-century Jewish soci-
ety in the Land of Israel, (2) more or less accurate cultural memories of
Jewish society in the Land of Israel in the period or periods preceding the
late second century, or (3) Mishnah’s vision of an “ideal” Jewish society
founded on early rabbis’ understanding of the norms of the life lived
together with others in accordance with the demands of the Torah. There
is little doubt that there are elements of the first two in Mishnah, all con-
tained within an encompassing frame of material that represents the third,
the ideal vision of Mishnah’s early rabbinic framers. Sorting out what pre-
cisely in Mishnah may be assigned to each of these three rubrics is, one,
difficult, and, two, not a task for which social scientists per se are equipped.
It is, rather, a task for social historians and literary historians. As noted
earlier in this Preface, some scholars have the training and expertise that
span these disciplines and the social sciences. Most do not bridge these
divides. Alternatively, social scientists may work closely with social histori-
ans and literary historians with expertise in rabbinic texts and in the study
of Early Judaism and Jews. But as Chap. 1 points out, even bridging these
disciplinary divides is not enough, because social historians and literary
historians themselves have not yet come to a consensus view on what
materials in Mishnah fall into which of the aforementioned three categories.
For these reasons, Chap. 1 outlines three different, broadly defined
options for the social scientific study of Mishnah’s evidence: (1) the study
of late second-century Jewish society in the Land of Israel; (2) the study
of the “ideal” society underlying Mishnah’s legal content; (3) the study of
xiv PREFACE

Mishnaic evidence to shed light on aspects of the sociology or anthropol-

ogy of the early rabbinic group itself. Chap. 1 points out that each of the
three avenues requires attention to different methodological strictures and
challenges. The first necessitates sorting out what in Mishnah are more or
less accurate reflections of contemporary late second-century society, what
are more or less accurate historical and cultural memories, and what is
ideal construct. The second approach takes Mishnah’s “ideal” frame as the
methodological fulcrum; if everything is framed within the rabbis’ ideal
vision, let us examine the ideal as social scientists. This second approach
allows one to sidestep or finesse the historical issues attending to the first
approach. The third approach lies somewhere in between. It invites the
social scientific study of a “real” group, the early rabbis who produced the
Mishnah and were devoted to its study; as such the approach avoids some
but not all of the historical challenges imposed upon those adopting the
first avenue.
In this volume, Fishbane and Goldscheider, notwithstanding their dif-
ferent cants, have followed the second avenue. In fact, in their conversa-
tions together, the authors needed to continuously remind one another
that they were not adopting the first avenue and needed to avoid making
claims that might appear to the reader that they were. Lightstone has
opted for the third avenue, using the methods and concepts of socio-­
rhetorical analysis to do so. This has allowed him to deal with certain
aspects of the sociology of the early rabbinic group. (Bracketing other
aspects that might have drawn him into the constraints of avenue one; for
instance, had Lightstone sought to examine the role of the rabbinic group
or its members in contemporary Jewish society he would have been tred-
ding along the first avenue.) In the end, none of the authors had the
temerity (this time) to adopt avenue one.
The underlying dialogue between and among these chapters, then, has
not only to do with choosing categories for social analysis that are neither
too close nor too far from the evidence to serve an analytic purpose.
Fishbane, Goldscheider, and Lightstone are also in dialogue about whether,
or to what degree, to ensnarl their social scientific inquiry in historical and
literary-historical questions. Some social scientific questions posed to
Mishnah’s evidence require delving into the latter more than others.

New York, NY, USA Simcha Fishbane

Providence, RI, USA Calvin Goldscheider
St. Catharines, ON, Canada Jack N. Lightstone
 Acknowledgments

This volume would not have been written without the European
Association of Biblical Studies agreeing to host the research unit,
“Sociological and Anthropological Approaches to the Study of the
Evidence of the Mishnah” at the EABS’ annual meetings from 2015 to
2018. The authors thank the EABS and all participants in the research group.
Earlier versions of some of our essays, and those of other participants in
the EABS research group, were published in several issues of the journal,
Studies in Judaism, the Humanities, and Social Sciences. We are grateful for
the journal’s support and for their permission to bring some of these essays
together in revised form in this volume.
During the period in which Lightstone composed the initial essays that
underlie his four chapters in this volume, he was also involved in writing
an introductory guide to early rabbinic legal rhetoric and literary conven-
tions. Since his approach in this volume relies on socio-rhetorical analysis
of Mishnah and its post-Mishnaic legal literature, it is understandable that
his work for this volume and for the other are parallel enterprises with
mutually informing moments. In particular, the studies revised for publi-
cation here as Chaps. 7, 8, and 9 substantially inform the content and
language of the concluding chapter of the other book, In the Seat of Moses:
An Introductory Guide to Early Rabbinic Legal Rhetoric and Literary
Conventions (Eugene, OR: Cascade/Wipf & Stock and the Westar
Institute, 2020), even though the two volumes are very different in orien-
tation, purpose, and intended readership. We are grateful for both books’
publishers, Palgrave Macmillan and Cascade/Wipf & Stock/Westar, for
allowing and facilitating this cross-­fertilization of the two volumes.

xv
xvi Acknowledgments

Finally, we are greatly indebted to Palgrave Macmillan for support and

professionalism in bringing this volume to press. Our thanks go especially
to Phil Getz in their US office for shepherding us through the process and
believing in the value of this volume’s studies to a scholarly and reading
audience.
The authors of this volume have in some cases known each other for
many years and in other instances have forged a relationship only since
2015. This is our first co-authorship of a volume, and we celebrate our
partnership. “The three-stranded rope is not quickly broken” (Eccl. 4:12).1

1
Simcha Fishbane would like to acknowledge and thank Professor Herb Basser and Dr.
Lynn Visson for their assistance and valuable input in preparing my chapters. I would like to
thank Academic Studies Press for sponsoring four editions of the journal Studies in Judaism,
Humanities, and the Social Sciences of which I am the editor and chief and where many of
the chapters have been published. The authors all would like to acknowledge Ms. JoAnn
Kestin, Mrs. Carrie Goodstein, and Yosef Robinson for their assistance in bringing this book
to Press.
 Contents

1 Introduction: Challenges and Opportunities in the Social

Scientific Study of the Evidence of the Mishnah  1
Jack N. Lightstone
Outline of Our Programmatic Introduction   3
Why Is It Important to Seek to Know More About Palestinian
Jewish Society and Culture in the Latter Half of the Second
Century and Early Third Century CE?   5
Why Turn to the Evidence of the Mishnah?   9
Mishnah’s Most Pervasive Rhetorical and Literary Traits, the
Basis for Methodological Challenges and Choices in the Use of Its
Evidence  12
Three Potentially Compelling Topical Directions of Inquiry in the
Sociological and Anthropological Study of Mishnah’s Evidence  20

2 Dignity or Debasement: The Destitute in the World of

Mishnah 25
Simcha Fishbane
Introduction  25
The Support of the Poor  30
The Status of the Poor Person  30
Giver or Receiver? The Focus of Mishnah Peah  36
Care and Compassion  38
Personality Traits of Mishnah’s Poor  49
Concluding Remarks  56

xvii
xviii Contents

3 “The Land of Israel Is Holier Than All Lands”: Diaspora

in Mishnah’s Cosmos—The Message 63
Simcha Fishbane
Introduction  63
Mishnah  64
The Sociology of Space  66
The Land of Israel in Mishnah  68
Diaspora  72
Summary  76
Summary  87
Summary  92
Concluding Remarks: The Message  92

4 Marginal Person and/or Marginal Situation: The Convert

in Mishnah 95
Simcha Fishbane
Introduction  95
Theoretical Framework  96
Mishnah  99
The Convert’s Status and Literacy in Mishnah  99
From Gentile to Jew: A Transitional Situation 102
Concern and Compassion 106
Inheritance 108
Preserving the Holy Seed 110
Past Culture or Stigma 112
Principles of Halakhah and Biblical Marginality 114
Concluding Remarks 116

5 Religious Authority in the Mishnah: Social Science

Perspectives on the Emerging Role of Scholars119
Calvin Goldscheider
Searching the Mishnah for Evidence 120
Core Questions 122
Social Science Guidelines 124
The Identification of Rabbis/Scholars in the Status Hierarchy 126
Legitimating Rabbinic Authority 130
Multiple Paths to Legitimacy 131
The Emergence of Disputes and Disagreements Among the
Rabbinic Elite 133
 Contents  xix

Generational Transmission of Authority 136

Consequences of Scholarly Disputes 138
The Power of Local Custom and Memory of Temple Practices 141
Concluding Thoughts 143

6 Family Structure, Kinship, and Life Course Transitions:

Social Science Explorations of the Mishnah147
Calvin Goldscheider
Family Themes: Preliminaries 149
Family Formation: Marriage and Kiddushin 155
Yibum, Generational Continuity, and Kinship Relationships 157
Reproduction 160
Intermarriage and Marriage Regulations 161
Age Variation for Defining Girls (Women) 165
Marital Obligations and Rights 167
Rights of Widows and Stepchildren/Stepparents 170
Control over Daughters 172
Sotah 173
Divorce: The Dissolution of Marriage 176
Concluding Thoughts 178

7 Study as a Socially Formative Activity: The Case of

Mishnah Study in the Early Rabbinic Group181
Jack N. Lightstone
Contextual Elements: Text, Study, and Occupational Groups in
Ancient Judaic Societies 185
Contextual Elements: Sage and Scribal “Classes” in Middle
Eastern and Eastern Mediterranean Societies of the
Greco-Roman Period 189
Mishnah Study and Early Rabbinic Social Formation, a Case
Study 192
Extra-Mishnaic, Early Rabbinic Evidence for the Centrality
of Mishnah Study to the Inner-­Group Life of the Early Rabbinic
Social Formation 193
Intra-Mishnaic Evidence and the Nature of Inner-­Group,
Normative Traits Modeled and Re-enforced by Mishnah Study 197
Macro-Literary Traits: Mishnah’s Topical Agenda and Scripture 198
Micro-Rhetorical Traits: Inculcating “High-Grid”
Taxonomical Vision 204
Conclusions 214
xx Contents

8 When Tosefta Was Read in Service of Mishnah Study: What

Pervasive Literary-­Rhetorical Traits of Toseftan Materials
Divulge About the Evolution of Early Rabbinic Group
Identity on the Heels of Mishnah’s Promulgation217
Introduction: The Question at Hand 217
Recalling Conclusions Based on the Evidence of Mishnah 217
The Task at Hand: The Evidence from Tosefta and the First
Developments of a Post-Mishnaic Social Identity Within the
Early Rabbinic Social Formation 222
Underlying Historical Premises for This Study’s Approach 225
What the Toseftan Evidence, Considered In Situ, Shows:
Prefiguring This Study’s Findings 228
Tosefta’s Literary-Rhetorical Traits as a Model of/for Mishnah
Study 230
Tosefta’s Macro Traits: Agenda and Organization 230
Tosefta’s Intermediate Level, Literary-Rhetorical Traits 235
Tosefta’s Micro-Level Literary-Rhetorical Traits 244
Concluding Observations 254

9 Studying Mishnah “Talmudic-ly”: What the Basic Literary-

Rhetorical Features of the Talmuds’ Legal Compositions
and Composite “Essays” Tell Us About Mishnah Study as
an Identity-Informing Activity Within Rabbinic Groups
at the End of Late Antiquity259
Introduction: Questions and Targeting a Specific Type of
Evidence in Response 259
Some Core, Pervasive Literary-Rhetorical Traits of the
Yerushalmi’s and Bavli’s Legal Compositions 268
The Literary-Rhetorical “Interrogative Drivers” of Compositions
in Yerushalmi and Bavli 274
Take, for Example, These Two “Parallel” Composite Essays from
the Yerushalmi and Bavli 279
What Has Happened to Mishnah Study in Studying It
“Talmudic-ly” as an Identify-Forming Activity Within the
Rabbinic Movement? Some Observations and Proposals 300

Index307
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Challenges and Opportunities

in the Social Scientific Study of the Evidence
of the Mishnah

Jack N. Lightstone

This chapter1 is intended to be a call to renew the scholarly study of the

evidence of the Mishnah, but from decidedly social scientific perspectives.
The call, roughly in this form, was first issued in 2015 at the meetings of

1
This paper is a (lightly) revised version of my article entitled: Jack N. Lightstone,
“Sociological and Anthropological Approaches to the Study of the Evidence of the Mishnah:
A Call to Scholarly Action and a Programmatic Introduction,” Studies in Judaism, the
Humanities and the Social Sciences 2 (2019): 1–16. It is published here in this version with a
new title and with the permission of the journal, to whom I am grateful. The journal article,
as do most published journal articles, stands among those of other authors’ works on diverse
topics falling within the journal’s broad mandate. In this version, the essay, newly titled,
appears once more among contributions with which it shares a common theme. My use of
the language “once more” requires some explanation. This volume’s essays share a common
origin and inspiration, the work of a research group hosted by the European Association of
Biblical Studies (EABS) between 2015 and 2018, bearing the moniker, Sociological and
Anthropological Approaches to the Study of the Evidence of the Mishnah. And the current
paper, or rather the earlier journal article that bore the title of the EABS research group, was
the first paper presented to the research group in 2015, offering, as it were, a mandate for

J. N. Lightstone (*)
Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada

© The Author(s) 2020 1

S. Fishbane et al., Exploring Mishnah’s World(s),
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53571-1_1
2 J. N. LIGHTSTONE

the European Association of Biblical Studies (EABS). And most of the

studies in this volume have a common origin; they are a subset of the
papers presented between 2015 and 2018 at the EABS in direct response
to that call. In their current versions they illustrate the variety of approaches
and topics that may come under the umbrella of social scientific approaches
to the study of Mishnah’s evidence, but by no means even begin to exhaust
the range or boundaries of such work.
The modern study of ancient Judaism has always shown a sustained
interest in Mishnah,2 the first authoritative text produced and promul-
gated by the early rabbinic movement near or soon after the turn of the
third century CE. Mishnah, on its own, or together with other early rab-
binic texts, has been the object of literary-critical and historical analysis,3
with much debate having ensued around fundamental and difficult

participants and as a call to others who might wish to join us. Perhaps it will play a similar
role yet again in its new venue in this thematic volume.
I wish to express my thanks to the EABS for its sponsorship of the research group, in par-
ticular to Prof. Ehud Ben-Zvi, who persuaded me to form the group and soon thereafter as
president of the EABS continued to encourage its work. I also wish to thank the co-chair of
the group Prof. Simcha Fishbane, as well as its most stalwart participants, including Profs.
Calvin Goldscheider, Shaye J.D. Cohen, Tirzah Meacham, Harry Fox, Michael Satlow, Eyal
Baruch, Lennart Lenhaus, and Naomi Silmann.
2
Abraham Geiger’s work on Mishnah in the mid-nineteenth century represents one of the
earliest such efforts. His “Lehr-und Lesebuch zur Sprache der Mischnah” was published in
1845 in the journal, Jüdische Zeitschrift für Wissenschaft und Leben, that he himself edited.
See David Weiss Halivni, “Abraham Geiger and Talmud Criticism,” in New Perspectives on
Abraham Geiger, ed. Jacob J. Petuchowski (New York: Hebrew Union College-Jewish
Institute of Religion, 1975), 31–41. Similarly, Zachariah Frankel founded the academic jour-
nal Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthum in 1871, and among his
major works are Darkhey HaMishnah, first published in 1859, and reprinted as Darkhey
Ha-Mishnah, Ha-Tosefta, Mekhilta, Ve-Sifre (Tel Aviv: Sinai, 1959). Geiger and Frankel, and
others like them, straddled the worlds of religious community and academic study; their
academic work was undertaken within a context of reforming and modernizing traditional
rabbinic Judaism, because they largely shared the conviction that rigorous historical study
would legitimize and underpin this modernization against the inertial counterforce of
tradition.
3
For example, exemplary of literary-historical criticism of Mishnah is the classic master-
piece of J.N. Epstein, Mavo le-Nusah haMishnah, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: press not specified,
1948), to which one should add his equally influential, posthumously published, Mavo le-
Sifrut ha-Tannaim (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1957), and Mavo le-Sifrut ha-Amoraim
(Jerusalem, Magnes Press, 1962), both of the latter two works edited by E.Z. Melammed from
Epstein’s manuscripts. As to the use of Mishnah’s evidence, on its own or in combination
with that from other early rabbinic documents, I shall have more to say later in this paper.
 1 INTRODUCTION: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN THE SOCIAL… 3

methodological issues. Social scientific, and specifically sociological and

anthropological, inquiries and approaches to Mishnah’s evidence have
been, relatively speaking, less pursued. This paper both invites such inqui-
ries and suggests three broad topical rubrics for further scholarship, after
surveying some of the commonly discussed methodological challenges
that will impinge upon such work.

Outline of Our Programmatic Introduction

It is expected that those who have responded, or will respond, to this
chapter’s call share a “hunch” that is not yet a well-supported conclu-
sion—namely, that the early Palestinian Rabbinic document called the
Mishnah proffers important, but still underutilized, evidence for the
understanding of Palestinian Jewish society and culture in the latter half of
the second century CE and the first half of the third century. Consequently,
an anticipated aspect of the scholarship for which this chapter provides
prolegomena is to explore that hunch in order to (1) indicate whether,
how, and to what degree the hunch warrants being restated as a strong,
well-supported claim and (2) provide, where appropriate, cogent exam-
ples of reconstructing social and cultural aspects of Palestinian Jewish life,
and social and cultural constructs representative of the era under scrutiny
on the basis of Mishnaic evidence (taken on its own or, when appropriate
methodologically, in conjunction with cognate evidence).
But is it not strange that a document, the Mishnah, which has been
extant for about 1800 years, that has been studied continuously within
Rabbinic-Jewish circles since its production, and that has also been ana-
lyzed within early modern and modern academic circles since the 1840s4
should be deemed in the second decade of this twenty-first century to be
still-underutilized, albeit important, evidence for the society and culture
within which it first emerged? How can this be? The answer to the first
question is: Not so strange as one might think, when one has a flavor for
the answer to the second question, which will come to light as I proceed
through this paper.
What, therefore, this essay seeks to achieve is several-fold.
First, it strives to provide some preliminary indication of why one might
come to share the hunch that Mishnah’s evidence ought to be plumbed to

4
See especially the articles in Jacob Neusner, eds., The Modern Study of the Mishnah
(Leiden: Brill, 1972).
4 J. N. LIGHTSTONE

learn more about Palestinian Jewish society and culture in the period that
Mishnah was produced, plus or minus 50 (to 100) years. There are two
subtopics related to this first task. One is to give some heuristic indication
that knowing more about this period in Palestinian Jewish society and
culture is something that ought to be of greater scholarly interest—not
only for those who specialize in the academic study of this place and time,
but also for scholars with cognate interests and areas of specialty. The
other is to give some indication as to why scholars should turn to Mishnah.
Second, this chapter rehearses some of the more overarching (and by
now, often recognized) challenges encountered in using Mishnaic evi-
dence for the purposes indicated. This second undertaking aims to pro-
vide at least a general understanding of why the evidence of Mishnah will
have remained underutilized to date. That is, it provides a preliminary
answer to the earlier question, “How can this be?” Again, two subtopics
will be addressed. I provide a very brief survey of Mishnah’s most perva-
sive literary and substantive traits, since it is these that underlie the chal-
lenges faced when using Mishnaic evidence for our purposes. The chapter
then spells out some of those challenges, by way of example. The interface
between these two subtopics has much to do with how one chooses to
account historically for how and why Mishnah came to be produced and
to have the most pervasive traits that we observe.
Third, this chapter will outline in broad terms the three potentially
most compelling questions or topical directions of inquiry for the study of
Mishnah’s evidence called for in this programmatic chapter. Perhaps, it
would be more accurate to say that there are three logical avenues or topi-
cal directions that one might take. They are:

1. to try to use the evidence of Mishnah to tell us more about Palestinian

Jewish social and cultural constructs generally in the era in question
(roughly, the second and early third centuries CE);
2. to analyze Mishnah to understand the social and cultural dynamics of
the specific Palestinian group that produced, and thereafter studied,
Mishnah as an authoritative text, namely the early Palestinian Rabbinic
group; and
3. to study Mishnah’s evidence in order to describe the social and cultural
“world” that is imaginatively created by, and within, the document by
its framers, but which may describe no historical Jewish society
and culture.
 1 INTRODUCTION: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN THE SOCIAL… 5

All three of these avenues of inquiry should bear fruit; each will provide
important insights about Palestinian Jewish society, culture, or social
“visioning” in the Roman imperial period. But it is not the case that they
are, or will be, equally fruitful. Why? Because they are not all equally fraught
with methodological and conceptual challenges, as I shall indicate. In the
final analysis, only from the work of those who respond to this chapter’s
call will it become clearer which avenue, relatively speaking, bears more
fruit, and with what level of significant qualifications and caveats. Moreover,
one outcome will be to highlight that scholars legitimately differ with
respect to how fruitful each of these avenues of inquiry are, because, first,
they disagree concerning the levels at which the qualifications and caveats
should be set on the “dial” of the “warning meter,” and, second, they will
differ about the kind and degree of mitigation strategies that may be used
to reduce such methodological difficulties.
Such is the outline of this introductory chapter. Now to the task at hand.

Why Is It Important to Seek to Know More About

Palestinian Jewish Society and Culture in the Latter
Half of the Second Century and Early Third
Century CE?
Arguably, it is a historically cogent hypothesis that Jews in Palestine imme-
diately prior to the era in question experienced significant social and cul-
tural (including religious) dissolution and dislocation. Let me “play off
of” the influential work of Seth Schwartz at several junctures in the argu-
ments that follow. Schwartz5 in particular has argued that the first two-­
thirds of the first century CE represent the slow decline into ever more
pronounced social and political chaos in Roman Palestine, especially for
the Jews of Palestine, in the aftermath of Herod’s reign. With Herod’s
kingdom divided in three, and distribution of authority spread across mul-
tiple players (e.g., local Roman authorities, the vestiges of Herodian-­
Hasmonean royals, local aristocratic families that emerged during the
Hasmonean and Herodian periods, authorities in and associated with the

5
Seth Schwartz, The Ancient Jews: From Alexander to Muhammad (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014), chapters 3, 4, and 5; see also Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish
Society, 200 BCE to 640 CE (New Haven: Princeton University Press, 2001).
6 J. N. LIGHTSTONE

Jerusalem Temple, and the nearby more highly ranked Roman governor
of Syria) and with growing tension between Jews, Greeks, and Syrians in
the Land of Israel, matters went from bad to worse, Schwartz argues.
Then, as is well known and widely acknowledged, the years from 66 CE
to 135 CE brought multiple, catastrophic upheavals. In the Land of Israel,
the Great Revolt (66–71) and the Bar Kokhba Rebellion (132–135) were
disastrous for the Jews of Palestine. In the second decade of the second
century CE, the malaise resulting from the failed Diaspora Rebellion of
Jews in Egypt, adjacent North Africa, and Cyprus (and probably indepen-
dently and to a more limited extent in Syria) may also have spilled over
into Palestine to some degree. The more pronounced social and cultural
shock to the well-established Jewish communities of the Roman Diaspora
seems to have been primarily limited to Jewish communities in Egypt and
immediately adjacent North Africa, which did not recover, according to
Seth Schwartz, until the fourth century.
The remainder of the Jewish Diaspora seems largely to have ticked
along reasonably well. Not so in the Land of Israel, and especially Judea.
The Jewish population of Judea was significantly “thinned” in the after-
math of the failed Bar Kokhba Rebellion. What remained of Jewish life,
society, and culture to be rehabilitated in the Land of Israel was concen-
trated on the coastal plain and the Galilee. How long and how steep the
incline that had to be mounted to recovery depends on how deep one
thinks the hole was dug.6
Yet for all of this, if one takes the very “long view,” the developments
within Judaism and Jewish society of Roman Palestine during the second
and third (and fourth) centuries CE ultimately proved to be among the
more seminal in the subsequent history of Judaism and of the Jewish com-
munities in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, through Late
Antiquity and the Medieval Periods, indeed into the modern period itself.
There and then, in the several centuries following the destruction of
Jerusalem Temple and the two failed revolts against Roman hegemony,
the early rabbinic movement coalesced correlatively with the establish-
ment—or perhaps “recognition” is the more appropriate term—by Roman
authorities of the Jewish Patriarchate in the Roman Levant.7

Seth Schwartz sees it as far more profound than some others might.
6

See Lee I. Levine, “The Jewish Patriarch (Nasi) in Third Century Palestine,” Aufstieg
7

und Niedergang der roemischen Welt, II, 19.2, ed. H. Temporini and W. Haase (Berlin and
New York: de Gruyter, 1979), 649–688; “The Status of the Patriarchate in the Third and
 1 INTRODUCTION: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN THE SOCIAL… 7

One general, historically defensible scenario for the development of the

early rabbinic movement is this: from what in all likelihood was a state of
relative insignificance at its earliest inception—sometime between 70 CE
(the Destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and of its “national” adminis-
tration) and 135 CE (the failed Bar Kokhba Rebellion and the Hadrianic
Persecutions)—the early rabbinic movement developed and institutional-
ized to the point, sometime in the latter decades of the second century
and the first half of the third century CE, of aspiring to provide, probably
in competition with other administrative literati, a cadre of retainers for
the Jewish Patriarch’s administration.8 Within another 100–150 years, the
rabbis, or some rabbis, were likely among the cadre of scribal-­administrative
personnel providing the same service for the government of the Jewish
Exilarch in Persian Babylonia.9 And within 200 years of the mid-seventh-­
century Muslim conquest of the Middle East, the rabbis were increasingly
recognized as chief legal and religious authorities in the Jewish communi-
ties of the lands that ringed the Mediterranean.
Another scenario outlines a similar trajectory, but with a later start. It
places the prominence of the Palestinian Jewish Patriarchate and the emer-
gence of (aspiring?) rabbinic retainership in the Patriarch’s administration
in the latter half of the third century, reaching its apex only in the fourth
century.10
Whether one scenario or another is better supported, the upshot is the
same. Social and cultural developments among the members of an early
rabbinic movement or guild, emerging in the Land of Israel in the latter
half of the second and early third centuries from a battered social and

Fourth Centuries: Sources and Methodology,” Journal of Jewish Studies 47 (1996): 1–32.
See also Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud (Baltimore and
London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 95–97. See also Martin Goodman, “The
Roman State and the Jewish Patriarch,” in The Galilee in Late Antiquity, ed. Lee I. Levine
(New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1992), 127–39; Lee I. Levine, The Rabbinic Class
of Roman Palestine in Late Antiquity (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi and New York: Jewish
Theological Seminary, 1989).
8
See Levine, The Rabbinic Class.
9
See Jacob Neusner, A History of the Jews in Babylonia, 5 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1966–69);
see especially vols. 4 and 5. To date, Neusner’s five-volume work on the Jews and Rabbinism
in pre-Muslim, Persian Babylonia is still the most ambitiously comprehensive.
10
This is the view promoted by Seth Schwartz in Ancient Jews. In his view, rabbinic stories
about the prestige of the Palestinian Jewish Patriarchate are anachronistically placed in the
second century in order to bolster the institution’s legitimacy and to bolster rabbinic legiti-
macy as a result.
8 J. N. LIGHTSTONE

cultural landscape, ultimately (sometime after the early spread of Islam),

exerted a major steering force in later centuries across every Jewish com-
munity in the Mediterranean, European, and Middle Eastern lands. Permit
me to clarify, but also to qualify, that claim.
Elsewhere, I have vigorously rejected the thesis that the rabbis “saved”
Judaism in the aftermath of the events of 70 CE by their creation of “a
Judaism without a Jerusalem Temple.” There can be no doubt that vital
forms of Judaism and Jewish life had developed apart from the Temple-
based religious, political, and social systems both before the advent of the
rabbis, and subsequently apart from and in parallel with the rabbinic
movement’s early development, particularly in the many significant
Diaspora communities of the Middle East and Mediterranean basin during
the Roman and Byzantine periods.11 By the first century CE, some of
these “diaspora Jewish” institutions were well established in the Land of
Israel.12 However, that said, in gradually acquiring positions of increasing
authority and legitimacy—first in Roman Palestine, and subsequently in
Persian Babylonia and beyond—over the course of 500 to 850 years, the
members of the rabbinic movement, “the rabbis,” came to influence,
reshape, or codify substantially the legal, organizational, ideological, and
liturgical-ritual framework of what were in many instances, before rabbinic
hegemony, already longstanding and well-defined institutions of Judaism,
of Jewish community organization, and of the daily life of Jews and their
households in the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern world.13
11
J.N. Lightstone, “Roman Diaspora Judaism,” in A Companion to Roman Religion.
Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World, Vol. 9, ed. Jörg Rüpke (Oxford: Blackwell,
2007), 345–77. See also J.N. Lightstone, “Is it meaningful to talk of a Greco-Roman
Diaspora Judaism? A case study in taxonomical issues in the study of Ancient Judaism,” in
Introducing Religion: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z. Smith, eds. W. Braun and R. McCutcheon
(London: Equinox Publishers, 2008), 267–81. See also J.N. Lightstone, The Commerce of
the Sacred: Mediation of the Divine among the Jews in the Greco-Roman Diaspora (Chico, CA:
Scholars Press, l984). Second Edition, with a foreword by Willi Braun and updated bibliog-
raphy by Herbert Basser (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
12
See, for example, Lee I. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue, the First Thousand Years (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005).
13
Indicative of this centuries-long trend is the Epistle of Rav Sherira Gaon. Writing in the
ninth century, Sherira’s monumental attempt to (re)construct a history of the rabbinic move-
ment and of its principal texts is fashioned as a response to questions posed by the elders of
the Jewish community of Kairouan. In the latter community, rabbinic authority was being
challenged by its detractors, and Sherira’s history affected a defense of rabbinic authority by
establishing its pedigree and the pedigree of early rabbinic literature. The challenge only
makes sense in a context that the rabbis had achieved a position of dominant legal and reli-
 1 INTRODUCTION: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN THE SOCIAL… 9

But I am getting too far ahead of myself and beyond the topic at hand,
the crucible of Palestinian Jewish society and the early rabbinic movement
in the second and third centuries CE. My point is simply this: what hap-
pened in that crucible had, over considerable time, long-lasting and sub-
stantial effects. We would do well to understand better the social and
cultural dynamics and developments within the crucible. So, what is the
evidentiary basis for such an understanding, such that we would give spe-
cial attention to the evidence of the Mishnah?

Why Turn to the Evidence of the Mishnah?

The problem at hand is this: while we have many reasons to surmise that
the second and early third centuries in Roman Palestine were seminal for
subsequent social, cultural, and religious development of Palestinian
Jewish communities (and later of Jewish life beyond the boundaries of
Roman Palestine), it has been and remains a difficult task historically to
reconstruct the sociology and anthropology of Palestinian Jewish com-
munities and groups of this important transitional period. What do we
know of the social and cultural developments and dynamics among Jews
of Roman Palestine generally, or of the early rabbinic movement specifi-
cally, in the last six decades or so of the second century and the first five
decades or so of the third century? More importantly, on what basis do we
think we know it? Obviously, as the title of this chapter signals, I am advo-
cating a focused and sustained look at the evidence of the Mishnah in
response to these questions. But to understand why, permit me briefly to
rehearse the other types and sources of evidence available to us.
In the face of such questions, one may point to important archaeologi-
cal evidence for the Land of Israel (and immediately adjacent locales) for
the years preceding, during, and subsequent to the time period of interest
to us. However, two points are critical to our assessment of the value of
this evidence. One has to do with the most general pattern of extant evi-
dence: for what years do we have what types of material remains? The
other point is an overriding methodological consideration.

gious authority in North Africa, with eyes turned to the major rabbinic academies of the
Babylonian plain for superior, authoritative pronouncements. To give added weight to his
response, Sherira explicitly states that he consulted the major luminaries associated with the
academy that he led, attesting, thereby, to an established and well-recognized authority
structure within the institution.
10 J. N. LIGHTSTONE

Archeological evidence is arguably much more abundant for the period

subsequent to the 100–150 or so years that is our focus. So much so that
we are often left to speculate about whether institutions well documented
in, let us say, the fourth or fifth century had the same shape and texture in
the second and early third centuries.14
Then there are writings that proffer claims about Palestinian Jewish life,
institutions, and belief systems in our period of interest. These writings are
both from contemporary authors and from works of the latter half of the
third century and later. The contemporary works are from non-Jews, both
Roman and especially Christian authors. In the former instance, the sub-
stance is much too thin to help us much in our specific task. In the latter
instance, the writings of Christians, writings usually are narrowly focused
and understandably highly tendentious, as Christianity struggles for legiti-
macy and self-definition against the backdrop of Jews and Judaism. What
we certainly do not have is a contemporary Palestinian, or even a non-­
Palestinian, Jew writing a Josephus-like history. Josephus’ historical narra-
tives end with accounts of events in the several years immediately following
the destruction of Jerusalem. Leaving rabbis aside, we have no philosophi-
cal, legal, or “religious” text from a Palestinian (or non-Palestinian) Jew
for this period that proffers an account of the social and cultural situation
of Roman Palestinian Jews of last half of the second and the first half of the
third centuries. The only literary evidence in our possession from and
about Palestinian Jewish life of the period (or more accurately immediately
before our period) are a few letters and documentary fragments, such as
those from the Judean desert’s “Cave of Letters,” most notably the
Babatha papyri, and the Bar Kokhba letters.15 These are very important
and interesting sources, but still thin gruel.
If we consider non-contemporaneous, later writings, again we have sev-
eral distinct classes. We have writings from non-Jewish authors, increas-
ingly Christian and some Greco-Roman authors, with overly limited focus
and propagandistic purposes. Or we have the extensive writings of later

14
Again, the archaeological remains of ancient synagogues rank among the most abundant
material evidence for Jewish life in Roman and Byzantine Palestine. See Levine, The Ancient
Synagogue.
15
Judean Desert Studies, 3 vols. (1963, 1989, 2002); See Emanuel Tov, Discoveries in the
Judean Desert, vol. 39: Introduction and Indices (London: Clarendon Press, 2002); Benjamin
Isaac “The Babatha Archive: A Review Article,” Israel Exploration Journal 42 (1992):
62–75. See also Philip F. Esler, Babatha’s Orchard: The Yadin Papyri and an Ancient Jewish
Family Tale Retold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
 1 INTRODUCTION: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN THE SOCIAL… 11

Palestinian and Babylonian rabbis. These documents speak much about

Palestinian Jews, Judaism, and Jewish life in our period of interest. But
their evidence must be carefully assessed for creative anachronisms and
speculative re-creations as concerns the social and cultural texture of
Palestinian Jewish life in the latter half of the second and the earlier decades
of the third centuries. Again, even for this period subsequent to that under
investigation, we have no Jewish chronicler to which to turn, no Jewish
version of what Eusebius does for the early Church16 to enlighten us about
Jewish life in the Roman Palestine in 200 CE, plus or minus 50 years.
There is, however (or perhaps, one might say, obviously), one major
document that is (1) widely held to be contemporary with the period and
place that is our focus, (2) written by Palestinian Jews, and (3) thick with
evidence covering a vast array of topics that would be grist for the mills of
sociologists and anthropologists (as well as social historians). It is the
Mishnah, produced by the early rabbinic movement toward the end of the
second century or in the first decades of the third.
The Mishnah is the first magnum opus of the early rabbinic movement.
And for the subsequent 400 years or so, the Mishnah was the most authorita-
tive document (after the biblical scriptures themselves) within rabbinic circles.
Mishnah is a legal “study” based on biblical law spanning 6 broad topical
“Orders” and (depending on how one counts them) comprised of 63 indi-
vidual tractates—62 without tractate Avot, likely a later addition—covering:

• agricultural gifts to (a now defunct) Temple, and prayer/blessings;

• festival and Sabbath law;
• family law;
• damages, torts, and judicial proceedings;
• sacrificial practice (again for a defunct Temple), slaughter for non-­
sacrificial consumption; and
• purity law (much of which also requires Temple-based purifica-
tion rites).

The mastery of Mishnah and its life-long study, in correlation with

other biblical and, afterward, subsequent rabbinic literature, made one a
rabbi. This remained the case until, centuries later, the Babylonian Talmud

16
Megillat Ta’anit, if it is a type of chronicle at all, is an exception that proves the rule. And
one certainly does not want to turn to the ninth-century epistle of Sherira for these purposes.
12 J. N. LIGHTSTONE

displaced Mishnah at the apex of the rabbinic curriculum.17 As a result,

there survives a rich body of post-Mishnaic rabbinic literature from the
third and subsequent centuries that serve to elucidate Mishnah (although
often anachronistically).
Consequently, despite the considerable methodological and conceptual
challenges that must be addressed, the sociological and anthropological
treatment of the evidence of the Mishnah—both of its value and definitive
clarification of its limitations as evidence—would undoubtedly make a
major contribution to the understanding of the social and cultural land-
scape of Jewish society and/or of the early rabbinic movement in Roman
Palestine during the decades just before and after the turn of the third
century. But to ascertain precisely how and to what extent, one must first
understand the basis for the methodological and conceptual challenges
one confronts. That basis lies in the most pervasive literary and rhetorical
traits of Mishnah, and in the hard lessons learned from trying to use
Mishnaic evidence for historiographical purposes, something that sociolo-
gists and anthropologists may not be well attuned to. To that end, the
next section of this paper will serve those who would take up the socio-
logical and anthropological analysis of Mishnah’s evidence by helping
them first situate themselves within the historiographical debates concern-
ing the use of early rabbinic texts.

Mishnah’s Most Pervasive Rhetorical and Literary

Traits, the Basis for Methodological Challenges
and Choices in the Use of Its Evidence

Permit me to use, and take liberties with, Seth Schwartz’s turn of phrase;
he describes the range in “socio-historical” scholarship using Mishnah’s
evidence as spanning “minimalist” and “maximalist” notions of the value
of the text for historical purposes.18 I will take liberties with the use of his
language by inserting my own substance into Schwartz’s terms. For the
sake of argument, I characterize (even caricature) the extremes of a con-
tinuum at the ends of which are pure “minimalists” and pure “maximal-
ists.” Even if these characterizations are largely fictional, there is something
important to be learned by indulging in the fiction. Afterward, I retreat

17
See Jack N. Lightstone, “Textual Study and Social Formation: The Case of Mishnah,”
Studies in Judaism, Humanities and the Social Sciences 1 (2017): 23–44.
18
See the discussion in Seth Schwartz, The Ancient Jews, spanning his chapters 3, 4, and 5.
 1 INTRODUCTION: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN THE SOCIAL… 13

from the continuum’s ends and say more of the middle grounds of the
range, along which actual scholars are positioned.
Minimalists, at the extreme, would take the view that the text tells us
virtually nothing of historical value about society and events “outside” the
text. That is to say, the “world” of the Mishnah is a self-referential world
representing in “legal terms,” almost to the exclusion of all else, the ideas
and vision of the mind(s) of its producer(s), and, at that, only in so far as
concerned their work on Mishnah. In short, Mishnah, in extreme mini-
malist formulations, would be understood to reflect a utopian fantasy of its
authors. Apart from, and outside of, their work on Mishnah, these edi-
tors/authors may have had other notions of society than are reflected in
Mishnah. Indeed, under the extreme minimalist views, the editors/authors
of Mishnah would have had to have had other, complementary notions of
Jewish society, religion, and culture than those reflected in Mishnah.
Otherwise, they would have had to have been social hermits, operating
their own Temple, sacrificial cult, and priestly centered government at the
end of the second century, a historical phenomenon for which we have no
evidence in Palestine.
Minimalists, at the extreme, would tend to eschew using the evidence
from other early rabbinic writings, such as Tosefta, the Halakhic Midrashim,
and the Palestinian Talmud, in order to shed light on the “historical” soci-
ety and culture of Late Roman Palestine, for much the same reasons that
they would be very hesitant to use Mishnah’s. Moreover, mutatis mutan-
dis, they would also enjoin caution in using these other early rabbinic
writings to shed light on the “minds” of the framers of Mishnah—this
because they tend to see each of these latter rabbinic documents as reflect-
ing almost exclusively the minds of their own respective authors/editors,
even while these documents are organized to greater or lesser extents in
order to appear to be commentaries elucidating Mishnah.
Maximalists, on the other extreme, would largely see Mishnah as a
repository, expressed in normative legal terms, of “historical” traditions
and memories organized topically. In such a maximalist formulation, for
each topical treatment in Mishnah, one would perceive in Mishnah a
mélange of such traditions and memories, the origins of which range from
several centuries prior to Mishnah’s production to immediately prior to
the work of Mishnah’s authors/editors. The scholarly challenge, as
extreme maximalists might put it, would be to order the content histori-
cally so as to more accurately uncover historical development of Jewish
society, religion, and culture through these several centuries. In this
14 J. N. LIGHTSTONE

exercise, while recognizing that a majority of Mishnah’s content bears no

attributions to named authorities, such attributions would be viewed as
probative, because the generational ordering of the authorities would be
understood to provide a basis for historically sequencing that which is
preserved in Mishnah. Let me be clear, extreme maximalists would not
only tend to claim that the legal “topics” or “issues” can be so sequenced
historically, but also that the actual legal positions and rulings on these
issues can be historically aligned and assigned to various decades prior to
Mishnah’s production. (I will return to this distinction a little later in this
section of the chapter.)
As regards our hypothetical extreme maximalists, there is a corollary
that bears articulation. Just as Mishnah would be largely seen to be a
repository, so too would other “early” rabbinic documents, again Tosefta,
the Halakhic Midrashim, and the Palestinian Talmud specifically.
Therefore, for extreme maximalists, the content of these immediately
post-Mishnaic documents may be usefully correlated with the evidence
from the Mishnah as complementary bodies of historical evidence.
The differences between my hypothetical minimalists and maximalists
at the extremes of the continuum would not be a matter of caprice, con-
viction, or ideology. Rather their divergent views would reflect their
respective views—whether conclusions or assumptions, I will not specify at
this point—of how the Mishnah came to be and what role the ultimate or
penultimate editors/authors played in the production of the extant
Mishnah.
Extreme maximalists would read the literary evidence of the Mishnah as
preserving much of the pre-Mishnaic language of Mishnah’s sources,
whether oral or written. They would point to numerous examples in which
this seems to be the case. Minimalists would tend to point to the incursion
of the hand of the authors/editors into the wording not only of the fram-
ing and joining bits of Mishnah’s clumps of passages, but also of the very
language at the heart of the substance of Mishnah passage after Mishnah
passage. They would conclude from such evidence that even if Mishnah’s
authors/editors worked from pre-existent sources, virtually nothing
remains of the original language of those sources. Consequently, they
would maintain that such extensive refashioning of language has affected
the content, changing the meaning in subtle or substantial ways. Extreme
minimalists would also point to another literary feature of Mishnah. They
would see in many Mishnah passages the generation of hypothetical
“cases” to serve the agenda and rhetorical patterning of the larger sections
 1 INTRODUCTION: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN THE SOCIAL… 15

of which the individual “case” forms a literary part.19 They would argue
that many of these hypothetical cases are so inherently unlikely occur-
rences in reality that, outside of the context of the larger literary composi-
tion of which they are, rhetorically speaking, an integral part, these “cases”
should not be interpreted as residue of traditions of actual historical cir-
cumstances and associated rulings—a kind of case law.
It is easy to see why and how extreme minimalists and maximalists
would very differently undertake to use the evidence of Mishnah in a soci-
ological or anthropological perspective. For the maximalist, the preferred
task is recovering the historical social and cultural systems and dynamics of
Palestinian Jewish society in the centuries preceding the production of
Mishnah. For the minimalist, the only exercise that is defensible is probing
the social and cultural vision of the minds of the Mishnah’s authors/edi-
tors. And there is yet another lesson to be learned from our contemplation
of the positions of our hypothetical extreme maximalists and minimalists.
Anthropologists and sociologists who wish to use the evidence of Mishnah
(or for that matter, of any early rabbinic text) cannot do so without being
sensitive to fundamental literary-historical matters about what these texts
are and how they came to be. Their work must self-consciously take a stand,
or adopt someone else’s stand, on some of these fundamental literary-­
historical issues, otherwise they are unconsciously doing so.
Today, very few, if any, contemporary academic scholars can be justifi-
ably located at either extreme, as I have characterized them. But scholars
do tend to align to one side or another of the center of the continuum,
and sometimes significantly so. There just is too much evidence of late that
draws one away from the extremes.
Let us consider an example. Even a minimalist-leaning scholar will
have come to recognize that Halakhic documents discovered at Qumran
give credence to the claim that religious-legal experts who authored
4QMMT, 130 or more years before Mishnah, are sometimes dealing with
the same ritual-legal issues that Mishnah attributes to late first-century
proto-rabbis like R. Yohanan b. Zakkai or to “the Pharisees” (perushim).
4QMMT represents the legal positions that Mishnah rejects.20 If this
19
Jack N. Lightstone, Mishnah and the Social Formation of the Early Rabbinic Guild: A
Socio-Rhetorical Approach (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press), 33–78.
20
See, for example, L.H. Schiffman, “The New Halakhic Letter (4QMMT) and the
Origins of the Dead Sea Sect,” Biblical Archaeology 53 (1990): 64–73; L.H. Schiffman, “The
Place of 4QMMT in the Corpus of Qumran Manuscripts,” in Reading 4QMMT: New
Perspectives on Qumran Law and History, eds. J. Kampen and M.J. Bernstein (Atlanta:
16 J. N. LIGHTSTONE

were observed once or twice, it might be said to be insignificant. If, how-

ever, one observes this to be a pattern, then we are dealing either with a
deliberate stance of Mishnah’s editors in opposition to some antecedent
faction and/or with a reflection of opposing factions among legal virtuosi
operating in Palestinian Jewish society well before the composition of
Mishnah. That is, in the latter case, both Mishnah (or rather, Mishnah’s
source traditions) and 4QMMT reflect either side of a contemporary rit-
ual-legal disagreement predating the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple
in 70 CE. As such, Mishnah in these passages at least could be read as
providing corroborating evidence about an aspect of cultural/cultic pre-­
occupations of some groups of mid-first-century (or earlier) Jewish
Levantine society.
Still other evidence about Mishnah can be adduced to draw one away
from the extreme minimalist’s view. As early as the end of the 1970s and
beginning of the 1980s, Jacob Neusner, whom many would characterize
as one of the leaders of the minimalist camp,21 argued that the issues dealt
with within Mishnah’s tractates can be shown to be amenable to “logical”
sequencing that corresponds to historical layers of developing legal think-
ing within rabbinic circles over the decades preceding the production of
Mishnah.22 That is, Mishnah’s legal content can be re-arranged such that
ruling x, which applies in circumstance y, must be logically prior to ruling

Scholars Press, 1996), 81–98; see also L.H. Schiffman, Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls: The
History of Judaism, the Background of Christianity, the Lost Library of Qumran (Philadelphia
and Jerusalem: Jewish Publication Society, 1994); J.N. Lightstone, “The Pharisees and the
Sadducees in the Earliest Rabbinic Documents,” in In Quest of the Historical Pharisees, ed.
Jacob Neusner and Bruce D. Chilton (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007), 255–296.
21
Indeed, relatively speaking, in the 1970s, Neusner emerged as situated well to the mini-
malist side of other scholars using early rabbinic evidence for social and historical reconstruc-
tion of Judaism and Jewish society in the Greco-Roman Period. For example, adopting
minimalist-like positions (as articulated earlier in this essay), Neusner critiqued, among oth-
ers, the work of George Foote Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era, 3
vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), as well as that of his contemporary
Ephraim Urbach, The Sages: Their Beliefs and Opinions (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1977) (a
translation of the original work in Hebrew, Hazal). Aside from his review articles about
works like those by Moore and Urbach, Neusner wrote a monograph with the challenging
title, Reading and Believing: Ancient Judaism and Contemporary Gullibility (Atlanta:
Scholars Press, 1986), 30–31, 48–50. These works extended and lengthened the range of the
active continuum at the time between what I have called minimalists and maximalists.
22
Jacob Neusner, Judaism, the Evidence of the Mishnah (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1981). Neusner’s first major articulation of this historical-logico-deductive sequencing
of Mishnah law may be found in his History of the Mishnaic Law of Purities, Part 22 (Leiden:
 1 INTRODUCTION: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN THE SOCIAL… 17

a, which applies to circumstance b. For example, hypothetically speaking,

one must have established that there is a daily evening prayer before asking
whether the recitation of biblical verses associated with the Shema Yisrael
(“Hear Oh Israel”) declaration of faith are part of the evening prayer ser-
vice (see m. Bekhorot, chapter 1). Neusner demonstrated that where topi-
cally related rulings in Mishnah are attributed to named pre-Mishnaic
rabbinic authorities, their generational order parallels the logical order of
the rulings attributed to them. Neusner uses this finding not to argue that
these rabbinic authorities actually said what (or something like what) is
attributed to them, but rather to say that the preponderance of probability
indicates that there seems to have been a historical unfolding through
time of the legal issues dealt with in Mishnah—that “generation a” (how-
ever that is conceived) was concerned with one set of issues, while “gen-
eration b” seemed concerned with a second, logically derivative set of
questions. While other explanations of what Neusner has observed are
possible—for example, that what we see is the clever hand of the final
authors/editors making matters appear this way, an argument akin to the
early anti-­evolutionists arguing that God put the fossils in the ground—
the preponderance of probability suggests otherwise, namely that
Mishnah’s evidence does preserve some indication of a historical sequence
of the unfolding of early rabbinic legal positions on a number of issues.
Even minimalists, then, must put water in their minimalist wine.
Evidence also clearly draws us away from the maximalist end of the
continuum. Here I would adduce evidence stemming from what appears
to be the massive reformulation of language, style, and rhetoric that the
final or penultimate authors/editors of Mishnah’s intermediate units
(“chapters”) imposed on even Mishnah’s smallest logical units (as opposed
to the preponderant use of joining language that would be characteristic
of less intrusive authors and editors). As Neusner, Green, and I have vari-
ously demonstrated,23 the very language and literary-rhetorical traits that
characterize a Mishnah “chapter” (a kind of topical essay within a tractate)
are often imposed on the “chapter,” its constituent pericopae (mishnayot),

Brill, 1977). See also J. Neusner, “History and Structure: The Case of Mishnah,” Journal of
the American Academy of Religion 45 (1977): 161–92.
23
Jacob Neusner, Purities, Part 21 (Leiden: Brill, 1977); Jack N. Lightstone, Mishnah and
the Social Formation of the Early Rabbinic Guild: A Socio-Rhetorical Approach (Waterloo:
Wilfrid Laurier University Press), pp. 33–78; William S. Green, “What’s in a Name? The
Question of Rabbinic Biography,” in Approaches to the Study of Ancient Judaism, vol. 1, ed.
William S. Green (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1978), 77–96.
18 J. N. LIGHTSTONE

and, indeed, on the very protases that define the legal circumstances that
are ruled upon within the pericopae. And when, furthermore, the regis-
tered ruling (whether anonymous or attributed to a named authority)
appears in language as sparse as “clean” or “unclean,” “permitted” or
“forbidden” (to admittedly point to the more extremely truncated formu-
lations), little of anything can be said to have come from some antecedent
source or tradition. The “original case,” if there was one at all, is now
obscured by the chapter’s literary (re)formulations, and the original ruling
is now so laconic as to be no one’s language. One is reduced to saying that
if rabbi x (or an anonymous authority) ruled on a case like this, we no
longer have in hand the antecedent language that defined the substance of
the case or the language of the ruling.
That said, there are also few who would describe themselves, or would
be described by others, to be at the center, midway between maximalist
and minimalist ends, of the continuum. The center is too hard to occupy
in practical terms, for much the same reason that it is hard to occupy the
extreme ends. Just as it is difficult to maintain the extreme positions—
namely, that either the work of the authors/editors is so extensive that it
has effaced any and every remnant of the content of earlier sources or the
editors/authors have contributed virtually nothing themselves and only
acted to compile and order things they received—so too is it difficult to
maintain that the authors/editors did both in equal measure. One tends
to lean in one direction or another based on the evidence that seems most
cogent to one.
I avow that I sit on the minimalist side of center. But the studies written
as a result of this call to examine Mishnah’s evidence through anthropo-
logical and sociological lenses will undoubtedly reflect a range of positions
on the continuum. What, then, is the upshot of the foregoing for those of
us participating in this joint project? Simply put, the type of sociological
and anthropological questions individual participants ask, for which
Mishnah’s evidence will be adduced in answer, should be (pre)conditioned
by, and drag in their wake, methodological issues derived from each schol-
ar’s reasoned, self-conscious, and declared assessment of where he or she
sits on the maximalist-maximalist continuum. These methodological issues
will be more or less difficult to address, depending upon one’s self-­
designated position. But none of us will be free of one or another type of
methodological difficulty.
If one’s reasoned position places one on the minimalist side of center,
then one encounters fewer methodological difficulties if one focuses on
 1 INTRODUCTION: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN THE SOCIAL… 19

the authors’/editors’ perhaps utopian views of an ideal Israelite society.

Such scholars may understandably shy away from posing questions of
Mishnah’s evidence to reconstruct elements of Palestinian Jewish society
and culture of 50 or 100 or 150 years before the production and promul-
gation of Mishnah at the end of the second or beginning of the third
century CE. Given their views of how, on balance, Mishnah came into
existence, that approach is the more methodologically sound one, because
it is the more cautious. But the approach still does not completely clear
important methodological hurdles in their path. They must still provide
warrant for why we should consider Mishnah’s editors/authors to have
one, unitary, coherent, and self-consistent understanding of that utopia.
After all, that unity and coherence cannot be presupposed. Or, if such
unity is not presupposed or cannot be demonstrated, they must tell us why
their inquiry is nonetheless worth doing from a methodological and con-
ceptual perspective. So, what some may adopt as the (apparently) more
cautious approach is hardly problem-free.
What now of those who lean to the maximalist side of center? These
scholars, in my view and from my vantage point on the minimalist-­
maximalist continuum, face difficult methodological problems on at least
three principal fronts: these concern the “more precisely what,” “who,”
and “when” of matters. That is, given the degree to which, in my opinion,
the language, formalized style, and rhetoric stemming from the Mishnah’s
(pen)ultimate authors/editors have imposed themselves on both the pro-
tases (case descriptions) and apodases (rulings) of so many of Mishnah’s
individual literary units, how much specific content of any antecedent,
earlier source material is recoverable above and beyond general legal
themes? Moreover, how do we assign substance to a period, or to a person
or circle of persons, again in anything beyond the most general terms?
Scholars have worked out methodological approaches to deal with some
of these questions. Earlier, I noted that Neusner, a minimalist-leaning
scholar, provides one example. On the other hand, scholars to the maxi-
malist side of center are not as vexed with the methodological issue of
whether Mishnah represents a unitary system. Why? They rightly expect
that they may uncover in Mishnah’s substance evidence of factions and
periods proffering different visions of Israelite society, real or imagined,
with perhaps a glimpse of the social-historical winners and losers along the
way. But whether one takes one’s vantage from the maximalist or minimal-
ist side of center, I should like to know that one does and why.
20 J. N. LIGHTSTONE

Moreover, whether one is on one side of center or the other, there is a

general methodological challenge that all scholars face. This stems from
the high degree to which Mishnah has ordered and systematically thema-
tized its content. By so doing, Mishnah’s editors/authors have provided
sociologists and anthropologists with what can too easily be accepted at
face value as “analytic” categories: such as production (Agriculture); cult
(Sacrifices/Holy Things); calendar (Festivals); family and kinship
(Women); and so on. This begs the question of whether these are the
“right” or “best” analytic categories for those interested in sociological
and anthropological analysis of Palestinian Jewish society and culture, or
even of Mishnah’s utopian system for a fictive Palestinian Jewish society
and culture. To accept or depart from Mishnah’s categories is consequen-
tial. It is a methodological choice that ought to bespeak of a conceptual
and theoretical framework explicitly adopted for good reason. To stick
closely to Mishnah’s thematization of matters may be tantamount to opt-
ing for a more descriptive exercise, where what is described in large part is
the classification of matters in accordance with Mishnah’s editors’ percep-
tions of their (ideal?) world. But departing from Mishnah’s own themati-
zation will allow one to adopt a categorization of the evidence permitting
a comparison of Mishnah’s social and cultural system(s) to those of other
human communities, and to do so within a larger conceptual and theoreti-
cal framework. Such a choice may offer greater analytic purchase on the
evidence, even if it comes with a compensatory cost: namely, the subjects
(here Mishnah’s authors and editors) might no longer recognize their
own social and cultural system.

Three Potentially Compelling Topical Directions

of Inquiry in the Sociological and Anthropological
Study of Mishnah’s Evidence
As stated at the outset of this essay (and as befits its conclusion), in taking
sociological and anthropological approaches to the study of the evidence
of the Mishnah, those who respond to this call to engage in a renewed
scholarly effort, will likely pursue one or another of (or at times some
combination of) the three lines of inquiry:
 1 INTRODUCTION: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN THE SOCIAL… 21

1. the use of Mishnaic evidence to understand better the social and

cultural patterns of contemporary and/or immediately antecedent
Palestinian Judaism and Jewish society;
2. the use of Mishnaic evidence to reconstruct major aspects of the
sociology and culture of the early rabbinic movement itself, within
which Mishnah was produced and seemingly immediately revered
and studied as authoritative;
3. the use of Mishnaic evidence to understand the sociology and cul-
ture of the world defined by and in Mishnah’s substance, even if that
world does not mirror with precision (or perhaps at all) any contem-
porary Palestinian Jewish community’s world.

Each one of these three lines of inquiry has intrinsic value as contribu-
tions to the sociological and anthropological understanding of human
communities in the Levant during the Roman Period. Moreover, any one
of the three demonstrates how literary evidence from centuries past may
be used for sociological and anthropological ends. This in itself is not
trivial, because it is a significant academic contribution from and for those
whose intellectual roots lie in classical sociological and anthropological
inquiry, in which subjects can be observed and questioned, and literary
evidence can be complemented and supplemented by observation and
querying of members of the living community.24
It should also be clear from our earlier discussion that the choice of one
or another of (or of some combination of) these three lines of inquiry
aligns with explicit or implicit positions about the historical and literary
processes that brought Mishnah into being. One’s position on the latter
issue will tend to make one or another of the three avenues of inquiry
more or less fraught with methodological hurdles to be addressed and
overcome.
The lighter the hands of the editors on the production of Mishnah, in
one’s considered view, the greater the possibility of observing in Mishnah’s
evidence valuable glimpses of Palestinian Jewish life and culture “outside
of” and “prior to” the minds of Mishnah’s producers. The heavier the
hands of the editors/authors, the more likely that it is the “world” of the
minds of Mishnah’s producers that we glimpse, and we must offer war-
rants for extending what we observe to others or to circles beyond the

24
It is ironic that one of the founders of modern sociology, Max Weber, chose to analyze
ancient Israel, and the biblical evidence, as a major object of sociological inquiry.
22 J. N. LIGHTSTONE

immediate group, late second-century Palestinian rabbis, from which

Mishnah’s producers came, and for whom they intended their Mishnah.
And who can say, without appropriate research, whether the hands of the
editors/authors of Mishnah are equally heavy or light throughout all
Mishnah?
Moreover, even if one were to take the position that Mishnah’s evi-
dence overwhelmingly conveys a utopian fantasy of its producers due to
the “heavy” hands of its editors/authors, we may still rightly conclude
that there are limits to their imagination. We may at times surmise that in
articulating their fantasy they are telling us things about the social and
cultural world that they or their parents and grandparents lived. To give a
simplistic example, the producers of Mishnah do not imagine the tilling of
fields with diesel-powered tractors, or the harvesting of crops with motor-
ized combines. Rather in treating the system of agricultural gifts to the
poor and to the Priests and Levites grounded in biblical law, they are “by
the way” likely telling us something of agricultural modes of production
and the social organization these entail in second-century Palestine, even
if we might surmise that the system of agricultural gifts per se enjoined in
Mishnah is a utopian formulation. So too Mishnah speaks of towns in
Roman Palestine that are primarily inhabited by Jews, others that are pri-
marily inhabited by Gentiles, and others with large Jewish and Gentile
populations. These are incidental facts in Mishnah that are assumed back-
ground realities of the “utopian fantasies” that the Mishnah’s authors
weave. A similar conclusion may be drawn from Mishnah’s treatment of
Sabbath restrictions. Mishnah’s treatment “assumes” as commonplace
certain patterns of the physical organization of households, neighbor-
hoods, and towns. Are these too fantasies? Or do they bespeak of actual
systems of urban geography and organization Mishnah’s producers take
for granted in formulating their ideal Sabbath laws? There are plausible
arguments to be made for the latter position.25
What behooves all of us who respond to this call is, however, to some
meaningful degree, (1) to be explicit about our choices regarding the lines
of inquiry adopted, (2) to define and defend the methodological and

25
I have just such an argument—more for Tosefta, but also for Mishnah—in J. Lightstone,
“Urban (Re-)Organization in Late Roman Palestine and the Early Rabbinic Guild: What
Toseftan Evidence Indicates about the City and Its Institutions as an Emerging Salient
Category in the Early Rabbinic Legal (Re-)Classification of Space,” Studies in Religion/
Sciences Religieuses 36 (2007): 421–425.
 1 INTRODUCTION: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN THE SOCIAL… 23

conceptual bases for the choice, (3) to articulate how and to what degree
ensuing methodological difficulties deriving from our choices can be over-
come, (4) to demonstrate what can be derived from the evidence, and (5)
to specify what level of confidence we would assign to the results.
The result of such a collective effort, even in multiple volumes, cannot
hope to exhaust the subject on any of the three lines of inquiry, let alone
on all of them. What will emerge is clarity about the use of Mishnah’s
evidence for anthropological and sociological study, as well as many valu-
able and informative examples of such use. These will provide sound tem-
plates for others to further the work.
 CHAPTER 2

Dignity or Debasement: The Destitute

in the World of Mishnah

Simcha Fishbane

Introduction
In a recent series of lectures on the topic of the “weak individual” in
Judaism, the Rabbi of Kibbutz Alumim argued that this group of indi-
viduals that includes the society’s destitute1 is strong enough to disrupt
the solidarity2 and stability of the community.3 Stability in a society is
maintained at the expense of the individual in favor of the group. In the
case of the pauper, it is the emphasis on the individual that becomes the

1
In this essay, I interchangeably use the terms poor, needy, pauper, and destitute. I define
the term poor below.
2
See Gregg E. Gardner, The Origins of Organized Charity in Rabbinic Judaism (n.p.:
Cambridge University Press, 2015), 3–4, who discusses the relationship between social soli-
darity and the poor.
3
I thank my son and daughter-in-law, Gilad and Noa, for this information.

S. Fishbane (*)
Graduate School of Jewish Studies, Touro College & University System,
New York, NY, USA
e-mail: fishbane@touro.edu

© The Author(s) 2020 25

S. Fishbane et al., Exploring Mishnah’s World(s),
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53571-1_2
26 S. FISHBANE ET AL.

focus4 and thus the vulnerability of the social structure. Simmel5 explains,
“Amidst all the positive differences, the commonality of the purely nega-
tive still had to bring the solidarity to the consciousness of a cultural circle
transcending the individual state.” The redactors of Mishnah6 were cogni-
zant of the dangers and threat from what we can classify as a “social
category,”7 the poor individuals. They were a threat to the rabbis’ ideal
world of Mishnah. Simmel8 develops this concept of the poor as a social
category: “The social meaning of the ‘poor’ as opposed to the individual
one, first allows the poor to unite into a kind of status group or unified
layer within society. … One may take up a gradually changed position
within the society because of poverty, but the individuals who find them-
selves in different statuses and occupations at this stage are in no way
united into a special social unit outside the boundaries of their home stra-
tum.” Simmel continues, “Admittedly this group is not held together by
interaction among its members but by the collective attitude that society
as a whole takes up towards it.”
Whenever the welfare of the social whole necessitates the care of the
poor, whether it is a social or legal requirement, the redactors of Mishnah
do not permit the pauper to become an active, dangerous enemy of
society.9
This essay will focus upon the status, role, and characteristics of the
pauper in the world of Mishnah.10 The areas that I will explore will include

4
See Mary Douglas, Cultural Bias (Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and
Ireland, 1979), who discusses this issue within her grid-group theory.
5
Georg Simmel, Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms (Leiden, Boston:
Brill, 2009), 245.
6
Mishnah, the first redacted rabbinic document at approximately at the end of the third
century.
7
I cannot classify the poor as a group for they lack interaction, a component necessary to
be identified as a group. I thank Professor Nissan Rubin for this clarification.
8
Simmel, Sociology, 440.
9
Ibid., 412.
10
Scholarly works that deal with poverty in the Tannaitic period include: Leonard
J. Greenspoon, “The Bible, the Economy, and the Poor.” Journal of Religion and Society
Supplement, no. 10 (2014), 147–63; Gregg E. Gardner, The Origins of Organized Charity
in Rabbinic Judaism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Gardner, “Charity
Wounds: Gifts to the Poor in Early Rabbinic Judaism” in The Gift in Antiquity, M. L. Satlow,
ed. (n.p.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 173–88; Gardner, “Concerning Poverty: Mishnah Peah,
Tosefta Peah, and the Reimagination of Society in Late Antiquity” in Envisioning Judaism:
Studies in Honor of Peter Schafer on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, R. S. Boustan,
K. Herrmann, R. Leicht, A. Y. Reed, and G. Veltri, eds. (n.p.: Mohr Siebeck, 2013),
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
every summer without a single drowning. Parents may feel perfectly safe in
allowing their boys to spend a term at such well protected camps.”
“I shall never hear three blasts from a whistle again,” said Mr. Holwell,
“but that I shall think of this time up here.”
“Indeed, sir,” continued Mr. Rowland, “I understand that some of the
young volunteer life-savers on returning to the city after a summer in the
woods, confess to having a shock whenever they hear a whistle. When the
emergency call sounds, no matter whether in the midst of the swimming
hour or at dead of night, the rule is to drop everything and run.”
Dick had noticed that Asa Gardner seemed to be enjoying himself
greatly when in the water. He was turning out to be a clever swimmer.
Evidently, the boy had included this in his programme when he decided to
take all the open air exercise he could. Dick mentioned the fact to Peg while
they were dressing as fast as they could, urged on to speed by the odor of
breakfast that was in the air.
“Why, yes,” the other boy remarked, immediately, “that fellow acts as if
he had sprung from a fish family.”
“What makes you say that?” demanded Dick, smiling at the same time
on account of the queer way Peg had of describing things.
“Oh! only that he seems to go fairly wild when he gets in the lake,” was
the reply. “Eddie Grant says he really believes Asa can stay under water
longer than any fellow he ever knew. And did you see him dive off that high
tree stump overhanging the edge of the deep hole? He turned a complete
somersault in the air, and struck the water as clean as a knife. Mr. Rowland
complimented him on his feat, though he also cautioned Asa to be careful
not to overdo it.”
“Yes, Asa is improving right along,” confessed Dick. At the same time
he could not help wondering deep down in his mind whether the strange
boy could be as successful in overcoming his one terrible fault as he seemed
to be in regaining his health. For somehow Dick could not quite forget
about the shadowy figure that had vanished from his sight on the preceding
night, not far from the tent where he knew Asa had been quartered.
“I never thought he had it in him,” admitted Peg; “but I’m ready to say
Asa is beginning to pick up considerably, and show the stuff he’s made of.”
 It was kind of Peg to say that, for, truth to tell, as Dick well knew, the
other had had good reasons in the past for looking on the lonely boy with
anything but friendly feelings. But then Peg could never hold anything
against another who showed signs of being sorry for faults. Peg believed in
giving every one a second, yes, even a third, chance to make amends.
After finishing his dressing and coming outside again, Dick looked
toward the tent which Mr. Holwell occupied. He knew the minister must be
dressing, for he had seen him peer out once. Perhaps he was shaving, for he
had laughingly said on the previous night that he hoped they did not have
any iron-bound rules in the camp prohibiting brushing the hair, or using a
razor during the whole stay, such as he had heard was the case with some
outing parties.
Just then Dan came along, and stopped to exchange a few words with
Dick.
“To-morrow being Sunday, I expect we’ll be pretty quiet up here,” he
observed; “so we ought to do all we can to-day. The fellows who go fishing
will have to try to get a double quantity, if we think to have a course dinner
to-morrow. I’m one of the six selected by Mr. Bartlett to go over to that
farm we heard about. If we can buy a few chickens or ducks or anything in
that line, don’t you think we’d better go prepared to dicker?”
“Not a bad scheme, Dan,” Dick told him. “And don’t forget that while
there are just twenty-one of us all told, besides Mr. Holwell, Mr. Bartlett
and our physical director, we’ve got the storage capacity of twice that
number.”
“Oh! we’ll take on all the supplies we can stagger under, make up your
mind to that, Dick. But here comes Mr. Holwell straight this way, and, tell
me, doesn’t he look kind of queer? I wonder if anything could have
happened to him in the night.”
Dick almost held his breath as the minister hurriedly drew near them.
“A ridiculous thing has happened to me, Dick,” remarked the minister,
as he reached them. “The very first night I’m in camp I have been guilty of
the fault of carelessness. To tell you the truth, I am unable to find my gold
watch this morning, though Harry Bartlett thinks I wound it up as usual, and
hung my vest upon a nail driven part way into the tent pole.”
 Dick felt as though a cold hand had clutched his heart. He and Peg
exchanged anxious looks, but before either of them could say a word Mr.
Holwell went on.
“I wouldn’t care so much, you understand, boys, only it was presented
to me years ago by my people in a church of which I formerly had charge,
and consequently I value it many times over its intrinsic worth. But, of
course, I have mislaid it. I’ll go back once more and turn things over. The
chances are I’ll find it where I placed it. On account of my strange quarters
and having no regular spot for it, I must have dropped it down at random
and don’t know just where.”
 CHAPTER XIV
TRYING TO FIGURE IT OUT

Dick knew it would not come out that way. He seemed to “feel it in his
bones” as he told Leslie afterwards, that the terrible mystery with which
they had been confronted on their first night in camp, was closing around
them with even a tighter grip.
When Mr. Holwell had left them to hasten back to his tent Dick and Dan
looked at one another with blank expressions on their faces.
“Whew!” gasped the latter. “Say, Dick, this is what I call piling it on
thick.”
“It begins to look like a bad business I must admit,” returned the other,
trying to grasp the situation fully.
“All these things couldn’t just happen by accident, you see,” continued
Dan, as if arguing with himself. “Mr. Holwell is a careful man, and
wouldn’t be guilty of leaving so valuable a watch around loose, so it could
be mixed up with the bed clothes in his tent. I tell you we’re up against a
real old-fashioned mystery, and no mistake.”
“There’s something queer going on around this camp, for a fact,” said
Dick, and taking advantage of the fact that they were alone for a brief time
he confided to Dan what he had seen during the night on coming suddenly
out of his tent.
The other was deeply impressed by the story. His eyes grew round with
wonder and curiosity.
“Let’s go over to Mr. Holwell’s tent and see if we can help him hunt,”
he proposed presently. “I used to be a master-hand at finding lost things,
and mebbe my luck may hold good in this case.”
“I certainly hope it will, Dan. Nothing would tickle me more than to
have you unearth that watch somewhere in his tent. All the same I don’t
believe it can be done.”
 “Well, there’s no use crying over spilt milk, anyhow,” said Dan with
philosophy.
When the two boys reached the minister’s tent they met Mr. Holwell,
accompanied by Mr. Bartlett and Mr. Rowland, coming out. The minister
looked a little grave and deeply puzzled, though on seeing the expression of
anxiety on the faces of the two lads he smiled encouragingly.
“We haven’t been able to find it so far, boys,” he remarked. “Suppose
you step in and root around a bit. Young eyes are sharper than older ones. I
hope it turns up, because I should very much dislike to lose anything that
was endeared to me by so many precious memories.”
Although Dick and Dan turned everything upside-down, they failed to
discover any sign of the lost watch. Breakfast was soon announced and they
were forced to abandon the search.
Some of the other boys had noticed that something unusual had
happened. The doings of Dick and Dan had struck them as suspicious,
especially after their previous experience.
Accordingly, Harry Bartlett, knowing that there was no use of trying to
keep things secret, announced the new catastrophe that had befallen
Russabaga Camp. It came like a thunderbolt upon the assembled boys, who
exchanged puzzled and anxious looks, as though a great fear had fallen
upon them.
Conversation languished after that. It was as though a wet blanket had
been suddenly cast upon them. Every one was busy with his own thoughts,
wondering if it could be possible that the dreadful finger of suspicion
pointed anywhere in his direction.
Mr. Holwell it was after all who, laughing as though he did not have a
care in the world, started to raise their spirits.
“Come, this will never do,” he told them. “You look as if you had lost
all interest in life. We mustn’t let a thing like this spoil the whole outing.
Doubtless in good time the mystery will be cleared up. And now let’s talk
of all our good friends here, Mr. Bartlett and Mr. Rowland, have planned to
do to-day.”
 By degrees he had the boys looking much more cheerful, though when
they got together in clumps after the meal, the conversation was naturally
almost wholly of the last strange happening.
Nat and his two cronies were seen talking earnestly. Some of the others
could hazard a pretty good guess as to what must be troubling the trio. This
was a time when a person’s past reputation was going to come back to
haunt him. Nat, aided and abetted by Dit and Alonzo, had engineered
numerous dubious enterprises in times that were gone, some of them of a
questionable nature. And now being reproached by their consciences, they
felt that the others must of a certainty be eyeing them with suspicion.
Alonzo showed signs of wanting to desert the camp at once, being only
restrained from doing so by the stronger wills of his companions, who
realized that this action would look too much like guilt.
Altogether it was not a very happy lot that proceeded to take up the
various duties laid out for that morning, and in doing which they had
expected to enjoy themselves hugely.
After the excitement had died down the six who had been selected to
visit the farm went off in one of the two boats. And while the chosen
fishermen were making deft use of the mosquito-net seine in order to secure
minnows for bait, Dick found an opportunity to have a little talk with Mr.
Holwell.
Eddie Grant, Ban Jansen and Cub Mannis, with tin pails in their hands,
hurried past, looking as though they meant business.
“We have found where the blueberries are as thick as clover in a field,”
called Ban. “It’ll be an easy job filling these pails by noon. Never saw such
big berries as there are on this island. It’ll be a picnic getting stacks and
stacks of ’em, and we can pay our way easily as we go.”
Mr. Holwell looked at Dick on hearing this, as though he did not quite
understand. Accordingly, the boy hastened to explain that Mr. Nocker had
proposed that boys belonging to the association who wanted to go on the
camping trip and could not spare the ready money to pay for their share of
the expenses should earn enough while on the island by picking the
blueberries that found a ready market in Cliffwood.
 “That’s a very good scheme,” declared the minister, smiling. “And it
shows that our friend, Mr. Nocker, knows more about boys than some of us
gave him credit for. Of course he could have offered to pay the way of
Eddie and the rest, but after all it’s the wise thing to do to make boys feel
that they have earned things, and are not objects of charity.”
“Of course,” Dick went on to explain, “that sort of thing is unusual, and
will break in on some of the customary rules that govern all Y. M. C. A.
camps. But Mr. Bartlett says that after all this is only a beginning, and on
that account we can’t expect to do everything with perfect regularity.”
“Another year,” said Mr. Holwell, “it may perhaps be different. We will
find some way whereby a score or two of the mill hands can spend a week
or two up at a regularly organized camp. And when we get things to
working smoothly, such an outing is bound to be of great benefit to
everybody concerned. I’m in it heart and soul, and so is Mr. Nocker.”
“I want to talk with you a little more, sir,” said Dick, boldly, “about this
queer disappearance of your watch. I wish now I had gone to Mr. Nocker
and asked him to explain what he meant when just before leaving the
meeting that night he warned us to beware of the thief up here in Bass
Island.”
“Did he say that?” demanded Mr. Holwell, quickly. “Then there must
have been a reason for it. Others who have camped here, fishing parties,
perhaps, have lost things. And Dick, what you have told me actually raises
my spirits considerably, even if it does not promise to bring back my
missing property.”
Dick could understand. The kind-hearted minister must have been
oppressed by some of the same dreadful thoughts that ever since the first
raid had been tugging at his own heart-strings. He feared that one of the
boys might be guilty, and the very suspicion caused him unhappiness. It
would be so much easier to bear if in the end the culprit proved to be some
outside person, possibly a crazy man who had escaped from his keepers, as
Peg had suggested.
Long and earnestly did the minister and Dick converse while sitting
there. Dick found much encouragement from what the gentleman told him.
He even took occasion to mention the suspicions that had oppressed him
concerning Asa Gardner; but Mr. Holwell shook his head as though
determined not to harbor such himself.
“I have studied boy-nature for many years, Dick,” he said, with feeling;
“and I know how hard a fight poor Asa is doubtless putting up against the
strange weakness that used to dominate him. The memory of his dead
mother will cause him to be victorious in the struggle, I fully believe; and
just now he needs all the encouragement he can get. And you are the one
best fitted to stand by him as a faithful friend.”
“I’ll willingly do everything I can to help him along,” said Dick, with a
look of determination on his young face. “I’ve known times myself when I
needed a friendly hand to help me along, but never one half so much as he
does. There go Nat and his two chums into the woods. Mr. Bartlett must
have given them permission to explore the island.”
“I wonder if they are thinking of hunting up Eddie’s crowd, and helping
pick berries,” remarked Mr. Holwell. “It would be a kindly thing if some of
the other boys would lend a helping hand. The berry pickers will find it no
easy task to collect enough at a few cents a quart to pay their expenses.”
Although Dick did not say so, he was of the opinion that Nat and his
cronies were hardly the kind of boys to be anxious about anything
excepting their own welfare.
 CHAPTER XV
DAN TELLS SOME WHOLESOME TRUTHS

“How is Humbert Loft getting on with the rest of the boys?” asked Mr.
Holwell, glancing over to where the lad in question was talking earnestly
with Dan, who had changed his mind about going with the “foraging party,”
on account of a bruised heel, caused by a shoe that chafed him.
Dick shook his head as though he rather despaired of weaning the
nephew of the town librarian from his stilted and unpleasant ways.
“He’s been well drilled at his home, sir, I’m afraid,” he went on to say,
“by that uncle of his who knows about as much about real boys as he does
of Egyptian mummies, and perhaps a good deal less. I’ve talked with him a
number of times, but everything he says is just an echo of what Mr. Loft has
been telling us right along.”
“Then you don’t really believe these lofty ideas are his own, but
acquired from association with older people?” asked the minister, looking
amused, for he personally had no sympathy with the principles of the
pedantic librarian.
“Why, Mr. Holwell, it’s impossible for a boy to think as he claims to do,
unless he was brought up among a lot of stuffy people who filled him with
their ideas. A boy to be natural is just bound to want to read stories that are
full of action. We all think that the writer who can give us healthy
adventure, and perhaps put some good, strong traits into his characters, is
doing us all the good we’ll stand for.”
“My opinion exactly,” said the minister, heartily.
“Still,” went on Dick, “Humbert has waked up some and is taking to the
water and to swimming like a fish; so, you see, there may be hope for him
in other things as well.”
“Let us hope so,” the minister said with a smile.
“I hope you have told Mr. Loft how we boys feel about our reading, sir,”
ventured Dick, boldly.
 “Oh! many times when we have been warmly discussing these same
matters,” came the reply. “But it seems as useless as water dropping on a
stone. In the course of ages it may wear the stone away, but neither of us is
likely to live to see the day. Mr. Loft is very bigoted, and has a false idea
concerning boys and what they ought to read.”
“Still, he seems to be more civil to us nowadays,” observed Dick, with a
gleam of amusement in his eye as he spoke.
“H’m! for a very good reason,” laughed Mr. Holwell. “Since you and
your comrades started the Boys’ Library, with a select list of books, all
approved by myself, Mr. Henry Fenwick, and several other gentlemen who
love boys, Mr. Loft has been reading the handwriting on the wall. He begins
to fear that if he keeps on thrusting his classical ideas of boys’ literature
upon the patrons of the town library he may lose his job. So he believes it
good policy to quiet down.”
“Let’s wander over a little closer to where Dan and Humbert are sitting,
sir,” suggested Dick. “I’d just like to hear what they are saying, because
from the way Dan is laying the law down I expect it’s about books and Mr.
Loft’s ideas for boys. Dan, you know, is head and heels interested in that
library of ours; and he fairly despises Mr. Loft. I’ve heard him call him a
‘human icicle’ many a time.”
“Just as you say, Dick,” consented Mr. Holwell, smiling at the apt
designation given by Dan, for, regardless of the librarian’s intellectual gifts,
it seemed to fit him.
When the two sauntered near the place where the boys were talking,
Dan was getting up as though to leave. He did not notice the presence of
Mr. Holwell, but was shaking his forefinger in Humbert’s face. That
individual looked worried, as though he felt the crushing force of the
arguments Dan had been heaping up before him.
“I tell you, Humbert Loft,” they heard Dan say with emphasis, “boys
can’t be treated as if they were machines. Boys have feelings, and they
know what kind of reading they want every time. Their books have got to
have a certain amount of good, lively, healthy adventure in ’em, or else
nobody’s going to bother spending his time over ’em.”
 “But my uncle says——” began Humbert feebly, when Dan interrupted
him.
“Oh! what does your uncle know about boys, tell me? I guess when he
was a baby they must have fed him on Latin verbs and Greek nouns. All he
thinks of is stuffing us boys with ‘standard literature,’ as he calls it, when
we’re just shouting for things that appeal to our boy natures.”
“But what he wants boys to read are the books that all cultivated people
consider the finest fruits of human endeavor!” urged Humbert, desperately.
“Who says they ain’t?” demanded Dan, with a reckless disregard for all
rules of grammar that must have chilled the other boy’s heart. “But they
never were meant for boys’ consumption. When we get older we’ll
gradually drop reading boys’ stories, and some of us may take up the
classics, while others will get out in the busy world and go to work.”
“I don’t know—I’m only telling you what my uncle thinks about it,”
pleaded Humbert, weakly.
“Stop and think for a minute, will you?” continued Dan, still waving
that threatening forefinger back and forth. “If every boy in Cliffwood were
built on the same model as you, Humbert Loft, what a terrible desolation
there would be in that poor town. Why, with not a single boy playing ball,
or giving a shout when he felt real good, the people would think the end of
the world had come. Isn’t that so, Humbert?”
Humbert smiled in a sickly fashion.
“Why, I guess it would seem pretty queer,” he admitted, slowly.
“And another thing, Humbert,” finished Dan as a clincher, “since
you’ve been up here with us I’ve noticed that you begin to show some
interest in our doings. I really believe you’re beginning to find your real
self, and that when we go back to Cliffwood you’ll be a different sort of
fellow. Think it over, won’t you, and just join in with the rest of us in our
fun? Forget your uncle, and remember that you’re a living, breathing boy,
not a mummified classic.”
With that Dan tore away to do something he had in mind. Mr. Holwell
touched Dick on the arm, and the two of them retreated without Humbert’s
being aware that his heart-to-heart talk with Dan had been overheard.
 “See him shaking his head, and then smiling, sir,” said Dick, with
considerable interest. “I really do believe those sledge-hammer blows Dan
gave him have made an impression on Humbert. Given a week or ten days
up here, and he may throw off the heavy load he’s been carrying so long,
and act like a regular boy for once.”
“We’ll hope so, Dick,” returned Mr. Holwell. “But while Humbert is
growing less pedantic and dropping some of his foolish pose, I trust the rest
of you will pick up a genuine love of books. The love of good books is
always a joy and sometimes a solace when other things fail one.”
The morning passed away, and those in the camp found many things to
do under the supervision of Mr. Bartlett and the athletic instructor.
It must have been all of half-past eleven when Dick heard the sound of
hasty footsteps in the woods near by. Then several figures burst into sight,
hurrying toward the camp, and making extravagant gestures as they
stumbled along. At the same time they cast frightened looks over their
shoulders, and Dick heard Nat Silmore cry:
“This here island’s no place for our camp, fellers. There’s a terrible wild
man loose on the same, and he roared at us something fierce. We’d better
get away from here while the going’s good, I tell you! Wow! I’m nearly all
in.”
 CHAPTER XVI
WAS IT A WILD MAN OF THE WOODS?

“What’s all this you are telling us, Nat?” asked Mr. Bartlett, with a show
of interest, while the boys of the camp crowded around the trio of
newcomers, and Mr. Holwell and Mr. Rowland stood listening not far to
one side.
Dit and Alonzo seemed pretty well exhausted. They sank down on a
log, panting as if they could hardly catch their breath. Despite the color in
their flushed faces they looked alarmed, as well as sheepish on account of
having given way to their fears.
“Why, we certain sure did see something, Mr. Bartlett!” urged Nat, with
emphasis. “The woods happened to be kind o’ gloomy right there, so we
couldn’t be dead sure what it was, but he made a horrible drumming sound,
and waved his arms above his head. Ugh! did we run? Well, to say we tore
along’d be hitting it closer.”
“And I reckon the wild man chased after us for a little, too,” Dit
Hennesy managed to say between his gasps. “Leastwise I could hear
something comin’ back of us, and it made me smash into a tree, I was that
worried.”
He put a hand up to his forehead, where they could see that a lump had
made its appearance. This at least was evidence that the boys were not
trying to play one of Nat’s customary practical jokes. Bumps like that have
a way of telling a story of their own. Bumps seldom lie.
“What makes you think it was a wild man?” asked Harry Bartlett, trying
to get all the information possible from the boys.
“Oh! well,” replied Nat, slowly, “he just seemed to act wild, I reckon.
When we glimpsed him he was squatting down, and as soon as Dit here let
out a whoop he commenced growling at us something fierce.”
“Yes, sir,” said Alonzo, thinking he ought to add the weight of his
testimony to that given by his two companions, “it was a wild man as sure
as anything. And right away, sir, there were three wild boys tearing through
the woods like fun. As luck would have it we came in the right direction,
and didn’t get lost. Whew! I’d hate to spend a night alone on this island
with that thing roaming around loose!”
The camp director and Mr. Holwell walked aside, Dick going with
them.
“What do you think about it, Mr. Holwell?” asked the boy.
“They evidently did see something that frightened them,” admitted the
gentleman. “But whether it was an animal or a crazy human being remains
to be found out later. When boys are suddenly thrown into a bad scare they
can easily mistake a hog, or even a harmless calf, for a monster.”
“But if there is some sort of strange creature loose on Bass Island,”
pursued Dick, eagerly, “mightn’t that explain the thefts that have been
taking place?”
“True enough, Dick,” answered Harry Bartlett, “and for one I earnestly
hope that may turn out to be the case. It gives me a heartache to think of
suspecting any boy among us of being a thief.”
Several other boys joined them just then. They were all trying to figure
out how much dependence could be placed on the story told by Nat and his
cronies. In times past they had cried “wolf” so often that now no one felt
like believing them, though, in fact, there might be real cause for alarm.
“Huh!” said Dan, skeptically, “like as not they were looking to see what
the chances were to leave the island when they could hook one of the boats,
and then got scared at their own shadows. It’s nearly always the way with
bullies like Nat.”
“But why should they want to desert us, Dan?” asked Mr. Holwell.
The other shrugged his shoulders in a way that stood for a great deal.
“Oh! well, sir,” he went on to say, “I don’t want to accuse any one, you
understand, and right now I’m not hinting that Nat had a hand in those
thefts; but you see they think we suspect them, and that makes it
disagreeable here for them.”
“To tell the truth,” said Elmer Jones, “I never thought they’d tag along
with us up here, in a regularly organized Y. M. C. A. camp, because they’re
always in fear of being lectured on account of their ways. But they came,
and now they feel uneasy when this queer mystery is afoot.”
“We mustn’t make them feel that they are suspected,” said the minister.
“So far they seem to have behaved themselves fairly well, and I have been
allowing myself to hope that by degrees those boys may see that it pays to
be decent. I would like to show them that there’s more genuine fun to be
gotten out of the clean method of living than in the way they’ve usually
carried on. Besides, we mustn’t forget that none of those boys has the best
of home influences back of him.”
“There comes the boat with the bass fishermen!” called Dan just then,
as a shout was heard from the water.
“They act as if they had met with at least fair success,” said Mr.
Holwell, who could read boys like the printed page of a book, though for all
that he confessed that he found something new every day to study in their
make-up.
“And unless my eyes are deceiving me,” remarked Harry Bartlett,
“there’s the other boat pushing out from the shore across the lake.”
“Just what it is,” added Clint Babbett, who possessed keen vision. “And
say! let me tell you they’ve got a load of stuff along with them. Must have
about cleaned that farmer out of eatables.”
There was more or less excitement as the boats came in, one after the
other. The fishermen had succeeded beyond their most ardent expectations,
and showed a splendid catch of bass, several of which exceeded in weight
the largest taken on the preceding day.
When those from the second boat landed they proudly exhibited the
results of their visit to the farm. There was butter, beautiful golden in color,
and many dozens of eggs, some of them from ducks, though it was pretty
late in the summer for these fowls to be laying, Mr. Holwell observed.
“And here’s six of the finest spring chickens you ever saw,” said Phil
Harkness, one of the foragers, exultantly. “They had just fixed them for
market, and were only too glad to sell them to us.”
“The farmer’s wife treated us to all the buttermilk we could swallow,”
observed Fred Bonnicastle, another of the returned pilgrims. “She said we
could have gallons of it if only we had some way of carrying it back with
us, which we didn’t—only in us.”
Lunch was prepared with the customary breezy accessories in the way
of directions called back and forth. Mr. Holwell seemed just the same as
usual. If he felt his late loss keenly he knew how to hide his feelings, so that
he might not cause the spirits of his boys to droop.
One lad, however, said nothing. This was Asa Gardner. Dick could not
help noticing that the boy heaved a deep sigh every little while, when he
thought no one was noticing him.
“He certainly looks unhappy,” Dick told himself, as once more
suspicions began to force themselves into his mind, though he hurriedly put
them aside, remembering the promise he had made to Mr. Holwell to
believe in Asa and help him all he possibly could.
The three berry pickers had returned with full buckets. They reported
the supply of berries as literally inexhaustible. Still it could be seen that
they were beginning to wonder where the fun of their outing was to come in
if they had to spend most of their time in doing this sort of work.
“On Monday,” Dick told Mr. Holwell and Mr. Bartlett, “I’ll give some
of the fellows a tip, and see if many hands won’t make light work. We’d all
like to pick berries for a while, I expect, and every quart will count so much
to their score. And I’ve an idea Mr. Nocker means to see that they get a
price for those berries that no one ever had before.”
“That’s the right spirit to show,” Mr. Holwell remarked as he placed a
hand affectionately on Dick’s shoulder.
It happened that a little while after lunch Dick wandered down to the
landing to take a look at one of the boats which had been reported as
leaking again. He believed he knew of a way in which it could be mended
so as to stay dry and serviceable.
He turned the boat upside-down; and, while stooping over examining
the bottom of the flat craft, he heard some one coming. Turning his head he
saw it was Asa Gardner. Like a flash it struck Dick that the other wanted to
say something to him in secret, and was taking this chance when no one
else was near.
 A chill gripped Dick’s heart. He seemed to feel that something dreadful
was coming, though he could not guess its nature as yet.
Asa drew alongside.
“Dick,” he said, and the other boy noticed how his voice trembled.
“Yes, what is it, Asa?”
“I’ve been waiting to catch you alone, because I’ve got something to
say to you that I wouldn’t like anybody else to hear, especially Mr.
Holwell.”
Dick felt the chilly sensation again; but he looked up smilingly.
“All right, Asa,” he said, cheerily, “here’s your chance to tell me what’s
bothering you. If I can do anything to make you feel easier just make up
your mind I want to help you. Now, what’s gone wrong?”
Asa’s eyes were growing wet, and evidently he labored under great
emotion.
“It’s just this, Dick,” he said, weakly, “I never should have dared come
along with a bunch of decent fellows like your crowd. I ought to have
known I just couldn’t keep from falling back into my old ways, that have
got such a terrible grip on me. And Dick, there’s only one thing to be done
—send me home right away!”
 CHAPTER XVII
DICK’S PROMISE

Dick could hardly believe his own ears when he heard Asa make this
terrible confession. He gripped the other boy by the shoulder almost
fiercely.
“Look here, Asa Gardner, do you mean to tell me that it was you who
took those things in the night—Dan’s watch, the aluminum frying-pan, and
last of all the gold watch which your best friend Mr. Holwell thinks so
much of?”
Asa groaned, and drooped pitifully in his grasp.
“I don’t know for sure, Dick, but I’m awfully afraid I did,” he said,
huskily.
“That’s a queer way to put it,” Dick told him, sternly. “Anybody ought
to know if he were guilty of doing such a mean thing as that. You’ll have to
explain yourself, Asa. Do you remember taking those things?”
“No, no, that’s the strangest part of it, you see, Dick,” pleaded the boy.
“But they disappeared, and I was in the camp both nights.”
Dick began to breathe a little easier.
“But that isn’t any proof at all, Asa, that I can see,” he hurriedly
remarked. “How could you take them, and not know it, tell me?”
“I wish I could, Dick, but then nobody else here would be low enough
to steal except me, and so I’ve figured it out that I must have done it in my
sleep, just because the old habit was so strong. While I was awake I could
fight it off, but you see once I lost my senses my grip was broken, and I
must have done it. Oh, I must!”
“Well, that’s a funny thing to tell me, I must say,” Dick replied. “You
haven’t the least remembrance of doing it, yet you’re ready to take all the
blame on your shoulders because once on a time you had a weakness that
way. Brace up, Asa; you never took Mr. Holwell’s watch, I tell you.”
 It was wonderful to see how new hope seemed to come immediately
into the heart of the erring boy. The look of misery began to die out of his
face, and through the tears gathering in his eyes Dick could see a new
sparkle—that of hope.
“Oh! it’s kind of you to say that to me, Dick!” he exclaimed between his
sobs, for he was completely aroused and could not control himself, though
he tried hard to do so. “Tell me who did take the watch, then, that Mr.
Holwell, the finest man on this whole earth, thought so much of?”
Dick laughed breezily, more to cheer the poor fellow up than because he
considered it a joke.
“I wish I could tell you, Asa,” he said, quickly. “But so far it’s a mystery
that has yet to be solved. But I’m dead sure you hadn’t a thing to do with
the robbery, if that’s what you mean.”
“There was one favor I meant to ask you, Dick, if you thought I hadn’t
better leave the camp,” continued Asa, presently, when he could master his
emotion.
“All right, let’s hear it,” he was told encouragingly.
“To-night, and every night after this I want you to let me sleep next to
you in your tent. Yes, and Dick, if only you’d fix it with a cord of some
kind so that I couldn’t move about without your knowing it I’d feel easier.
Then if another robbery was committed I’d begin to understand that I
couldn’t be doing these terrible things in my sleep.”
“I’ll think it over, Asa,” the other told him. “Though I’m sure nothing
like that is going to be needed to prove your innocence. Besides, since
we’ve heard of Nat and the other fellows meeting with some sort of strange
man in the woods, Mr. Holwell, Mr. Bartlett and Mr. Rowland begin to
believe the secret of the robberies will be solved when we run across the
wild man.”
Asa winked hard to clear his eyes from the tears.
“You’ve made me feel a whole lot easier, I tell you, Dick,” he said, and
he persisted in squeezing the other’s unwilling hand with boyish fervor. “I
hope and pray that it may come out that way. I’m trying as hard as I can to
keep my promise to my mother, and she knows that it would nearly kill me
if I found that I was going back to those old ways in my sleep.”
“Cheer up, Asa, and don’t let any of the other fellows see you looking
as if you had lost your last friend. Mr. Holwell believes in you, and so does
Harry Bartlett, and so do I. You’re going to be all right and as good as the
next one. Sure! you can sleep alongside of me if you feel like it. But about
that cord you mentioned, I hardly think it’ll be necessary.”
Asa wandered off until such time as he could recover from his emotion
and Dick continued his examination of the boat’s bottom. After all, he was
glad the other had spoken as he had, because somehow it seemed to clear
the air.
“And,” he told himself, humorously, “I’m beginning to get a hunch that
before a great while we’ll find some way of explaining this mystery. If that
was a wild man Nat and the others saw, surely he must be a lunatic who’s
escaped from some asylum. We may be the means of capturing him, and
restoring him to his quarters. He’ll be frozen to death if he has to stay on
Bass Island all winter.”
The idea pleased Dick exceedingly, and when he once more joined the
others by the fire some of the boys wondered what could have happened to
make him appear so cheerful again.
He took the first favorable opportunity that arose to get Mr. Holwell
aside. Asa had not yet returned to the camp, though they could see him
sitting on the end of a fallen tree that jutted out over the water, possibly a
hundred yards further along the shore of the island.
“I had a pretty bad scare a short time ago, sir,” was what Dick started to
say, which caused the gentleman to start, and look at him strangely.
“Have you been seeing things too, Dick?” he asked. “Would the wild
man become so bold as to approach our camp in broad daylight?”
“No, but I’ve been hearing things that gave me a bad turn at first,
though it came around all right pretty soon,” and with that Dick repeated
what Asa had said to him near the boat landing when they were alone.
Mr. Holwell was of course stunned at first, but as Dick went on with his
story his eyes grew moist, and he shook his head as though he felt
exceedingly sorry for the boy whose past haunted him so persistently.
“Poor Asa,” he said, later on, when he had heard all, “it must be terrible
to feel as he does, and be compelled to fight so desperately to keep from
doing things that other boys have no fear they will be tempted to do. I give
him all credit for his gallant fight, and if he wins, as I firmly believe will be
the case, I shall be proud of him. You must continue to help him in every
way you can, my boy.”
“I certainly will, sir,” declared Dick, with a strong remembrance of the
moist eyes Asa had turned on him when he made that humiliating
confession that after all had proved to be only a dreadful suspicion, and not
a reality.
That was a busy afternoon, all things considered. Some of those who
had been out fishing in the morning decided they had had enough angling
for one day. Besides, they knew very well that others were desirous of
testing their skill against the game qualities of the black bass of Lake
Russabaga.
So it came about that Dick Horner had a chance to be a member of the
quartette that left camp with dark designs against the finny inhabitants of
the inland sea. They carried a goodly number of live bait in a pail
constructed for that purpose, and also some artificial minnows, as well as
trolling spoons to fall back on in case the other supplies were exhausted.
Mr. Holwell had entered into the work with almost as much enthusiasm
as any of the boys.
“To-morrow being Sunday,” he explained as he worked, “we will do
just as little manual labor as possible. My flock in town will have a supply
in the pulpit, for they have given me a little holiday. And if you boys care to
hear it I expect to give you a sermon I wrote for some lads of my
acquaintance many years ago, though it touches on truths that are just as
pertinent to-day as when it was first delivered.”
Dan had not gone off with any of the others, but at the same time he
failed to mingle with those in the camp. They could hear him pottering
away close by, now hammering, and again coming back for bits of stout
twine or rope. Nobody but Mr. Bartlett knew what Dan was about.
 All this naturally aroused something akin to curiosity among the boys,
and as the afternoon wore on many guesses were indulged in as to what
Dan Fenwick could be doing. Finally, one of his companions, more daring
than the rest, sauntered over his way to ask him pointblank what it was he
kept working on so industriously. Andy Hale, for it was he who had
approached Dan, presently came hurrying back, with a half grin on his face,
at the same time laboring under partly repressed excitement.
“Hey! would you believe it?” he announced as he arrived near the fire.
“Dan up and told me he was building a cage to trap that wild man Nat saw
in the woods.”
 CHAPTER XVIII
SETTING THE TRAP

Of course when Andy made this surprising report the rest of the boys
were of a mind to rush over in a body to joke Dan, and perhaps make fun of
his labors. Mr. Holwell, however, dissuaded them.
“Better leave Dan to finish his trap, boys,” he told them. “He’s a busy
fellow these days it seems, and deserves success if anybody does. If he
needs any help you’ll hear him call for it. In the meanwhile don’t thrust
yourselves where evidently you’re not wanted.”
Accordingly, all dropped back into their comfortable seats, and took it
out in speculating as to what the worker could have in mind when his
ambition led him to want to trap a real wild man of the woods.
Dan did not show up in time to take part in the customary preparations
for dinner. There were plenty of recruits, however, for with hunger urging
them on the campers showed an eagerness to hasten the getting of the
evening meal. Sunny Jim grinned more broadly than ever when he found
his tasks so cheerfully lightened.
They managed to hold themselves in check until Mr. Holwell had asked
the customary blessing. Somehow this influence for good was felt even by
those lads who had never known such a custom in their own homes. It
seemed especially well suited to the leafy canopy overhead, the gurgling
waters lapping the shore near by, and the sense of freedom around that
brought them closer to nature and to God.
Dan made his appearance about the time they were half through, and the
twilight shadows were stealing timidly out of the recesses of the mysterious
woods.
Many curious looks were cast in his direction, but somewhat to his
surprise no one ventured to joke him about his ambitious labors. Dan
himself, when the edge had been taken from his appetite, introduced the
topic voluntarily.
 “Course you fellows are wondering what I’m up to,” he said, with a
grin. “Well, I got a little idea into my cranium, and have been working the
same out, with the aid of a hatchet, a hammer and some nails. In fact, I’ve
set a trap hoping to coax the escaped lunatic to go in, after which it’ll drop
and hold him for us.”
“But what will you bait it with, Dan?” demanded Peg, with seeming
innocence, “because you know my aluminum frying-pan is gone, and we
haven’t got another shiny watch in the camp nowadays.”
“Oh! that’s easy,” said Dan, carelessly. “I reckon now that even a crazy
man is liable to get hungry right along. I’m going to bait the trap with some
sort of food that I think ought to draw him on. Just wait and see, that’s all.”
The evening passed in the usual occupations. Some of the boys busied
themselves in one way and some in another. Some had writing to do; some
worked with pictures they had taken during the day, and which were to be
developed at night time.
Already the keen spirit of rivalry had taken complete possession of the
campers. The prizes that had been offered to those coming in with the best
flashlight photograph, the cleanest score in nature study, the highest marks
in knowledge of woodcraft, and numerous other courses laid out by Mr.
Rowland, may have had something to do with their perseverance.
There was more, however, than this desire for gain urging the boys on.
Most of them really yearned to improve themselves along certain lines, and
to be adjudged first in their class would be considered proof that they had
met with success.
So there was hardly a boy in the camp aside from Nat and his two
sombre cronies, Dit Hennesy and Alonzo Crane, but found himself entering
into the spirited rivalry that would act as a spur to achievement.
When finally “taps” was sounded on Mr. Bartlett’s cornet, Asa was
given a place next to Dick, Andy Hale being transferred to another tent,
though no one thought to ask why this was done. If the boys talked it over
at all they must have reached the conclusion that Asa was growing nervous
about sleeping in a tent further removed from the fire at a time when there
was a creature of an unknown species prowling about on Bass Island.
 By degrees the camp fell into an utter silence, though occasionally some
one, who may have been lying on his back, would begin to breathe louder
than his mates liked, whereupon he was punched in the ribs, and made to
roll over.
It must have been well on toward midnight when the sleepers were
suddenly aroused by a tremendous crash not far away; and immediately an
exodus from the several shelters began. Boys, clad in various patterns of
pajamas, all looking a bit frightened, gathered about in groups.
 CHAPTER XIX
A DAY OF REST

“It’s a terrible storm coming, like as not!” Elmer Jones was exclaiming,
as he started to unwrap a rainproof coat he had been thoughtful enough to
provide for such occasions.
“Sounded more like a house falling down to me!” called Clint Babbett.
“I was dreaming of two railroad trains coming together, just when that
smash came,” announced Leslie Capes.
“And I was heading straight for the falls of Niagara, and could hear the
water roaring like everything,” confessed Nat Silmore.
Dan had not said a word up to then, and Dick, glancing toward him,
could see a proud look beginning to take possession of the other’s face.
“You’re all wrong, fellows!” exclaimed Dan, unable to hold in any
longer. “You’ve got another guess coming, I tell you. Don’t you remember
that it was over there that I set my trap? Well, she worked all right, and
mebbe I’ve got our wild man safely caged at this very minute!”
The announcement created great excitement.
“Hey! let’s hurry and get some duds on, so we can go and see!” called
Peg, who was hopping about on one foot, as he had stubbed a toe in the
haste with which he rushed forth from his sleeping quarters.
“How about that, Mr. Bartlett?” asked Dick, seeing the camp director
among them, he having hurriedly slipped on a bath robe before making his
appearance.
“We ought to get there with as little waste of time as possible,” replied
Harry Bartlett, looking interested. “If it should turn out that the trap has
done what Dan intended, the poor fellow may be hurt in some way, and it
would be cruel for us to wait until morning to investigate.”
“Whew! from the racket I should say something fierce had happened!”
declared Phil Harkness, as he hastened back to where his clothes hung
suspended from nails driven into the pole of sleeping tent Number Three.
There was some hurried work done about that time, as every lad wanted
to get himself in readiness as quickly as possible. Many hands quivered
with excitement, and buttons were much more difficult to fasten than
ordinarily.
One by one the boys assembled by the resurrected fire, some still
hurriedly fastening their garments. It was an excited group that collected
around Mr. Holwell, Mr. Bartlett, the physical director and Dick, as camp
leaders.
“Hadn’t we better take something along with us, to defend ourselves in
case he turns out to be ugly?” asked Dick.
“Yes, I suppose that would be only a wise provision,” returned Mr.
Holwell, “for one never knows what a crazy person may do. They are also
possessed of enormous strength as a usual thing. Get any sort of club you
can find, boys.”
There was an immediate hustling around on the part of the half-dressed
campers. Some managed to find suitable cudgels. Others picked up
anything they could see that promised to prove useful in an emergency. Peg
appropriated the camp hatchet, Ban Jansen the axe, while Andy Hale, in lieu
of anything better, armed himself with the stout iron rod which they used
across the fire when hanging a pot over the blaze.
Mr. Rowland had lighted the lantern. Others found blazing brands from
the fire, which they made into serviceable torches by whirling them swiftly
around their heads.
“Now come along,” said the camp director, smiling as he glanced
around and noted the unique character of the procession ready to trail after
him.
“I’d give a dollar, sure I would, to have a snap-shot of this bunch right
now,” declared Clint Babbett, who was becoming quite an expert
photographer, and aspired to win a prize by taking flashlight pictures at
night time of little wild animals in their native haunts.
Indeed, they certainly did look comical as they passed from the camp
and headed toward the spot where Dan had set his great trap. He bravely
acted as pilot of the expedition, since none but he knew just where they
were going.
Presently, from his cautious actions, the rest understood that they were
very close to their destination.
“Can you glimpse the trap yet, Dan?” asked Peg, eagerly, lowering his
voice as if afraid lest he start the prisoner into making new and desperate
efforts to escape from the toils.
“And is he inside?” inquired Fred Bonnicastle, with a gasp that told of
his interest.
“I can just begin to see the thing,” announced Dan, slowly, and Dick
thought he could detect the first shade of growing disappointment in the
other’s voice.
A few more steps, and then Dan spoke again.
“Hey! what does this mean?” he grumbled.
“Didn’t the trap work after all, Dan?” asked Peg, in a grieved tone.
“Work!” snorted Dan, huskily. “I should say it did. Only the maniac was
too much for me after all. He’s gone and busted my trap to flinders.”
Groans of disappointment welled up from numerous throats, and there
was a quickening of footsteps as all drew closer to the spot where the wreck
of the clumsy contrivance lay scattered around.
They stood and stared at the ruin. Dan shook his head, and drew in his
breath with a faint whistle that expressed intense astonishment.
“Say, he must have been a buster of a man!” he finally exclaimed,
bending down to examine some stout limbs that had been actually broken in
two as though by a mighty force. “He just got as mad as hops when it
dropped around him, and smashed things right and left. But, fellows, he
carried off the bait all right, I notice.”
“That shows he has an appetite after all,” remarked Mr. Holwell,
considerably amused at the happening, though at the same time feeling that
the situation bordered on a grave one, with such a terrible denizen of the
woods visiting their camp so frequently.
 “After this he’ll be feeling kind of peeved at us for hurting him, I
guess,” ventured Peg.
“Well, if it comes to the worst,” Phil remarked, “we can some of us sit
up each night, and stand our turn on guard.”
“That sounds pleasant, I must say,” observed Elmer, with a half laugh.
The party once more returned to camp, and Mr. Bartlett told them not to
sit around talking matters over, but to get back to their blankets. Indeed, the
night air felt rather chilly, and the boys were not loath to take this advice.
“Plenty of time to talk it all over in the morning,” the camp director told
them. “Perhaps by that time we may run across some sort of clue that will
put us on the track of the poor fellow. It strikes me we ought to do our best
to make him a prisoner while up here. If, as we suspect, he turns out to be a
lunatic, it would be little short of a crime to leave him here to freeze in the
winter time.”
One thing Dick noticed, and this was that while most of the boys
thought the visit from the wild man almost a tragedy one of their number
seemed to be particularly pleased over it.
This was Asa Gardner, who, from the time they first gathered after the
alarm was given, had been smiling contentedly. Dick could give a pretty
good guess why.
“Asa knows now,” Dick told himself, “that it couldn’t have been his
fault those things disappeared from our camp. He was lying beside me
sound asleep when the alarm came. So he figures that after all it must have
been this strange being who crept into our camp and stole the bright things
that caught his attention. Well, I’m glad for Asa’s sake, that’s all.”
Some of the boys were nervous as they lay down. They half anticipated
a further visit from the unknown. The remainder of the night passed,
however, without further annoyance.
Sunday morning found the boys up early, and taking their cold plunge.
Mr. Holwell joined them, for from boyhood days a dip in the water on a fine
summer morning had always been a delicious treat for the minister. The
usual morning exercises were dispensed with, for Sunday is always
conducted on strictly religious lines in every genuine Y. M. C. A. camp.
 After breakfast had been eaten and everything cleaned up about the
camp, the campers assembled to enjoy a little song service, after which Mr.
Holwell had promised to deliver his famous “boys’ sermon.”
Asa Gardner sought out Dick. Plainly the sensitive boy was feeling
much better than when he had had his last interview with his friend, Dick, a
fact the latter was pleased to note.
“You’re coming around to my way of thinking, I guess, Asa?” he
remarked.
Asa turned his eyes up toward Dick.
“Yes,” he said, softly, “I believe it’s going to come out all right now,
Dick, for my dear mother came to me in my dreams last night, and she told
me I would win the fight! Oh! I’m so glad, so glad, and I owe a heap to you,
that’s right!”