Lawrence H. Schiffman, From Text to Tradition, Ktav Publishing House, Hoboken, NJ, 1991.

Besides marriage and the attendant aspects of ritual purity, birth, puberty, and death were also dealt with in the halakhic system. From biblical times on the newborn Jewish boy was ushered into the Jewish people through the covenant of circumcision at the age of eight days. This rite distinguished the Jews in the Greco-Roman world, according to numerous pagan sources. Accordingly it was a requirement for conversion to Judaism. The detailed laws regarding the performance of circumcision are spelled out in tannaitic and amoraic sources. They are designed to ensure the procedure’s safety and its performance in accord with the legal requirements. Circumcision is a commandment which the father is obligated to perform for his son. By tannaitic times, specially trained personnel were performing the ritual, but this development may have taken place earlier. Circumcisions were accompanied by festive parties and special benedictions. In Seleucid and again in Roman times, when circumcision was briefly outlawed for anti-Semitic reasons, Jews risked their lives to fulfill this commandment.

Although Second Temple sources indicate that twenty was the age of majority among some groups, the tannaim selected the onset of puberty, which they took to be twelve years and a day for girls (bat mitzvah, literally “daughter of the commandment”) and thirteen and a day for boys (bar mitzvah, “son of the commandment”), as the minimum age for the obligation to perform the commandments. From this point on the child was obligated to observe all the commandments. According to the tannaim, a small number of commandments were obligatory even for children, but the amoraim saw these as involving the parent’s obligation to educate the child. The celebrations associated with reaching the age of religious majority did not exist until much later.

Tannaitic Judaism also sought to codify the various aspects of the end of life in this world. Although the Bible provides little direct legislation in this area, the tannaim were able to glean certain details, no doubt with the help of ancient customs. They required that the body be washed and buried within three days. There were two forms of burial. In one, the body was laid to rest in a hollowed-out niche where it remained for the first year. Thereafter, the bones were gathered and reinterred in an ossuary. This procedure gave rise to the celebration of the anniversary of the passing of close relatives. The second method was direct burial in an ossuary. From the Bible the rabbis learned of seven-day and thirty-day mourning periods. The tannaim ruled that a seven-day period of intense mourning and a thirty-day period of lesser mourning must be observed following the death of one’s parent, sibling, or child. A full year of mourning was required for parents. Amoraic sources clarify many details of these rites, but their basis clearly rests in the tannaitic period. From the amoraim we learn that Jewish tradition regarded the human body as the repository of a God-given soul, and hence as possessing great sanctity. Over and over the rabbis speak of the burial of the dead and the comforting of the mourners as among the greatest of commandments.