Material Culture, Experimentation, and Household Lighting in Early Rabbinic Judaism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines how the materiality of lighting influenced the development of ancient rabbinic teachings that would later become the foundations of Jewish law. Drawing on ideas and frameworks from scholarship on material religion, I bring together archaeological finds, experimental archaeology, and references to objects in classical rabbinic literature to argue that the ways that lighting was used provided the earliest rabbis with tools and fodder for developing new expressions of piety that could be performed in one’s household. How lamps, oils, and wicks were used in Roman-era Palestine (second-third century CE) played an influential role in the development of rabbinic Judaism. I show this through rabbinic prescriptions on lighting lamps on Friday evening to mark the onset of the Sabbath, as the different wicks and oils created opportunities for one to choose to perform the custom in rabbinically-prescribed ways. I next demonstrate how the rabbis drew on common lighting practices to reinterpret biblical laws on the now-destroyed Jerusalem Temple cult into expressions of piety that can be performed in households throughout Roman Palestine. In this way, the materiality of light contributed towards the ancient rabbis’ role in transforming Judaism in the post-Temple age.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".