It is written in Pirkei Avot (Treatise of the Fathers) 1:1: “Moses received the Torah on Mount Sinai and transmitted it to Yehoshua. He transmitted it to the elders of the people, who in turn passed it on to the prophets, who passed it on to the Men of the Great Assembly.”

The “Men of the Great Assembly,” in Hebrew “Anshei Knesset Haggeddolah,” were, according to Jewish tradition, a group of 120 scribes, sages, and prophets who lived from the final period of the biblical prophets, corresponding to the beginning of the Second Temple period, to the early Hellenistic period, the beginning of rabbinic Judaism. This was between 539 and 332 BCE, when the Land of Israel was under Persian rule.

Many of the foundations that shaped Judaism were established by them. They were the ones who established the canon of the Jewish Bible, deciding which books would be included in it. Tradition attributes to them the writing of the Books of Ezekiel, Daniel, Esther, and the Twelve Minor Prophets. They were also the ones who established the festival of Purim and composed the Amidah prayer that we recited daily to this day. They also introduced the classification of the Oral Torah into the three major groups that comprise it: the midrashim, the halakhot, and the agadot.

History tells us that the members of the Knesset Haggedolah were Jews who had returned from exile in Babylon, along with Ezra and Nehemiah, who were also part of the group. They opened the study of the Torah to all Jews without distinction, thanks to Ezra’s weekly readings, a tradition that endures to this day. The canonization of the Jewish Bible made it the central authority around which Jewish life began to be structured, in part thanks to the «Men of the Great Assembly» who created the method of «midrash halacha,» in which they derived a halakhic rule from a biblical verse. They also created new halakhot to address the new requirements of the time, in addition to developing the Jewish calendar. They are generally mentioned in rabbinic literature as the authors of the ideas, rules, and prayers that began to shape the Judaism we know and practice.

The exact nature of the Great Assembly is unclear; it may have been a permanent institution with legislative and executive powers or simply a generic name for all the sages of that period. Although the names of some of its members are known, such as the prophets Hagay, Zechariah, Malachi, Mordechai, Nehemiah, and the priests Yehoshua and Shimon Hatzadik, the Great Assembly was decisive in defining the spiritual and cultural framework of Judaism, a framework that has survived through the centuries. It was the first Jewish parliament.

By Marcos Gojman.

Bibliography: “The Essential Talmud” by Adin Steinsaltz and other sources.