Thursday, September 7, 2023

Some notes from Michael Rosenberg, "The Dormition of Miriam in Rabbinic Literature"

 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.