Rabbinic Texts and the History of Late-Roman Palestine

Hekhalot Literature and the Origins of Jewish Mysticism

Rabbinic Texts and the History of Late-Roman Palestine January 13, 2011 Peter Schäfer

This chapter examines the origins of Jewish mysticism and the Hekhalot liteature. The findings do not confirm the trend in modern scholarship which locates the origins of Jewish mysticism in the Qumran literature and wishes to see an unbroken chain of distinctly mystical ideas leading from Qumran through rabbinic Judaism to the Hekhalot literature. The result also suggests that the category of...