The rab­binic sages of antiq­ui­ty are known for their sophis­ti­cat­ed and cre­ative read­ing of Scrip­ture. But begin­ning in the third cen­tu­ry CE, these sages also took on exten­sive com­men­tary on anoth­er kind of text: the sages’ own teach­ings. Focus­ing on the first col­lec­tion attest­ing to this branch of schol­ar­ship, the oft-neglect­ed Tal­mud Yerushal­mi, The Rise of Tal­mud argues that this new project pre­sent­ed a wide-rang­ing trans­for­ma­tion of the sages’ schol­ar­ly prac­tice and self-per­cep­tion. On the one hand, it engaged premis­es and meth­ods dis­tinct from those the sages applied to Scrip­ture, such as tex­tu­al crit­i­cism and the inter­pre­ta­tion of texts in light of the indi­vid­u­als to whom they were attrib­uted. On the oth­er hand, this book shows, this dis­tinct approach did not stem from pre­ex­ist­ing dif­fer­ences in the con­cep­tions of Scrip­ture and rab­binic teach­ings: it reflect­ed a broad recon­cep­tu­al­iza­tion of the tra­di­tion, diverg­ing from how these teach­ings were con­strued by ear­li­er gen­er­a­tions. Rec­og­niz­ing these unique aspects of ancient Tal­mu­dic schol­ar­ship cen­ters its devel­op­ment as a piv­otal moment in Jew­ish intel­lec­tu­al his­to­ry and offers a rich­er pic­ture of rab­binic hermeneu­tics; it also allows us to sit­u­ate it bet­ter among oth­er schol­ar­ly tra­di­tions of the Gre­co-Roman world and to exam­ine how dif­fer­ent ideas, aims, and con­texts shape tex­tu­al schol­ar­ship – includ­ing our own.