Title given primarily to the Bible scholars of Erets Israel of the pre-Mishnah, Mishnah, and Talmud periods. They are often referred to in Hebrew as Ḥazal, an acronym for the phrase, Ḥakhaménu Zikhronam li-Verakhah ("Our sages of blessed memory"). The term encompasses the scholars of both Erets Israel and Babylonia. The sages provided the spiritual leadership of the Jewish people during a crucial period when the nation shifted from a temporal power base to a spiritual focus following the loss of sovereignty and the destruction of the Temple.
Although little has been preserved of the discussions of the pre-Mishnah sages of the last two centuries BCE, some appear in various later collections, such as the Mishnah. The sages of the Mishnah period (to 200 CE), who taught in Erets Israel, are known as tanaim (see Tanna), while those of the Talmud period (to 500 CE) are known as amoraim (see Amora). The amoraim of Erets Israel were responsible for the Jerusalem Talmud (completed c. 400 CE) and those of Babylonia for the Babylonian Talmud (c. 500 CE), though there was a great deal of cross-pollination of ideas and rulings, and each Talmud quotes sages from both countries. Whereas other groups (such as the Sadducees) confined themselves to the Written Law, the sages (who belonged to the tradition of the Pharisees) believed in the Oral Law, which, by tradition, had been given at Sinai together with the Written Law. Therefore, they were willing, for example, to accept an entire corpus of laws relating to work on the Sabbath from a mere allusion in a verse, which, as they themselves admitted, amounted to "suspending a mountain on a hair" (@Hag. 1:8). The formulations of the sages became the mainstay of Halakhah.
