Hidden in Plain Sight: Reworked Priestly-Sectarian Traditions in Rabbinic Literature

46th Annual Carolyn L. Drucker Memorial Lecture

As a new Jewish culture, the rabbinic edifice conspicuously differs in content and scope from the preceding postbiblical Jewish library. Indeed, the rabbis almost entirely ignored, and consistently silenced, the extensive Second Temple-period literature created in the land of Israel and the Diaspora. On the other hand, no set of values, nor any literary work, emerges in a vacuum. Like religious civilizations in general, rabbinic literature shares overt and covert connections with previous traditions. Using several examples of pre- and non-rabbinic concepts and texts that infiltrated rabbinic literature, including material from the Dead Sea Scrolls, this lecture shows how priestly-sectarian traditions were censored, adapted, and “rabbinized” in their new ideological context.

Vered Noam is full professor of Talmud at the Department of Jewish Philosophy and Talmud at Tel Aviv University, and since 2025, the Senior Academic Advisor of the National Library of Israel.

Noam received her PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She served as the chair of the Chaim Rosenberg School of Jewish Studies and Archaeology, as a member of the Board of Directors, and currently as a member of the Senior Appointments Committee, Tel Aviv University. She won The Michael Bruno Memorial Award, the Rothschild Foundation, in 2010, and was the recipient of the Israel Prize in Talmud in 2020.

Noam studies rabbinic literature and the writings of the Second Temple period, focusing in particular on the development of halakhic and aggadic traditions as they moved from Second Temple sources into the rabbinic corpus. Her work pays special attention to religious law in the Dead Sea Scrolls and its tannaitic parallels, as well as to parallel traditions preserved in the works of Flavius Josephus and in rabbinic literature. In addition, she investigates questions concerning textual variants of the Babylonian Talmud and teaches Talmud both at the university and in broader nonacademic settings.