In his essay “The Dormition of Miriam in Rabbinic Literature, “Michael Rosenberg, commenting on tractate Bava Batra, folio 17a, noted that it
describes the death of the biblical Miriam as
miraculous and her lifeless body as untouched by decay or worms. I argue that
the passage reflects rabbinic participation in a discourse in which
contemporaneous Christian traditions about the Dormition of Mary arose. Both
rabbinic and Christian circles display a marked increase in creativity
regarding the deaths of these similarly named women in late antiquity,
especially beginning in roughly the late fourth/early fifth centuries CE.
(Michael Rosenberg, "The Dormition of Miriam in Rabbinic Literature,"
in Rediscovering the Marys: Maria, Mariamne, Miriam, ed. Mary Ann Beavis
and Ally Kateusz [Scriptural Traces: Critical Perspectives on the Reception and
Influence of the Bible 22; Library of New Testament Studies 620; London:
T&T Clark, 2020], 173, emphasis added)
This is reiterated in his
conclusion:
The
increased rabbinic interest in Miriam’s death beginning in the year 400 CE,
and especially in the rabbinic center in Sasanian Persia, marks this
literature as participating in a discourse shared with Christians. Earlier
rabbinic texts already reveal a nascent interest in elaborating on the biblical
depiction of Miriam’s death. But only in post-tannaitic texts, written in the
years when interest in the Virgin Mary was on the rise, does this early
interest expand in ways that suggest awareness of and, indeed, attraction to
those Marian traditions. It may well be, then, that rabbinic literature, and the
Babylonian Talmud in particular, is an untapped resource for studying the
growth of Marian traditions in late antiquity. (Ibid., 183, emphasis added)
One should read the essay in full,
but this is another witness that belief in the dormition and bodily assumption
of Mary is not apostolic in origin, but instead, is a later man-made
tradition.
