As epitomised by 'Avot 1:1, early rabbinic historiography eventually became entrenched as the normative version of the Jewish constitutional record. All others, even when acknowledged to have once existed, had by the fifth century been banished to the sectarian margins of the national ethos.

Only if we restrict our reading solely to avowedly rabbinic texts of the post-Destruction era do matters always seem to have been thus. Quite the contrary impression is conveyed by what has survived of earlier writings, pre-rabbinic and non-Pharisaic. For all their own divergences, none substantiate the rabbinic claim that the keter torah had throughout the second Commonwealth been universally considered superior to the other two clusters of Jewish government. If anything, the rabbinic formulation might have seemed less coherent and creditable than the rival doctrines already formulated on behalf of the keter malkhut and (with even greater force) the keter kehunah.

The purpose of the present chapter is to review those various projections and, by reconstructing their own hierarchy of the three ketarim, to demonstrate the adversarial backcloth to the rabbinic version of Israel's past and vision of Jewry's future.

The keter malkhut: from Davidic to Herodian polemic

Literary comparisons which measure the polemical output of what are here referred to as the domains of the kehunah and malkhut are inherently disadvantageous to the latter. Principally, this is because pronouncements which explicitly proclaim the constitutional primacy of the keter malkhut are a remarkably late feature of second Commonwealth literature.