© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/157006311X586250 Journal for the Study of Judaism 42 (2011) 531-579 brill.nl/jsj Journal for the Study of Judaism Women’s Exemption from Shema and Tefillin and How hese Rituals Came to be Viewed as Torah Study 1 Elizabeth Shanks Alexander University of Virginia, Department of Religious Studies PO Box 400126, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4126, USA esa3p@virginia.edu Abstract his article argues that the rabbis exempted women from Shema and tefillin because the rabbis understood these rituals to be forms of Torah study, from which women were already known to be exempt. hough the dominant scholarly posi- tion regards the Shema as a liturgical affirmation of key doctrinal commitments, this article demonstrates that performance of these rituals was also a means of internalizing the biblical text. As such, these rituals had much in common with Torah study, which was also a means of internalizing the biblical text. he article makes this argument by examining Second Temple sources which cite, paraphrase, or allude to the Shema verses. Where Second Temple sources engage the verses of ritual instruction, they regard the rituals as a means of internalizing various com- mitments (justice, the nature of God, divine beneficence). Against this backdrop, it becomes clear that for the rabbis too these rituals were a means of internalizing something: biblical scripture. Keywords Shema, tefillin, women, exemption, Torah study 1) I would like to thank the following people who contributed to my research as presented in this article by studying ancient sources with me and by reading and commenting on various drafts: Rena May, Greg Goering, Yehudah Cohn, Judith Kovacs, Steven Fraade, Jonathan Schofer and Hershel Shanks. I also benefited from presenting this research in three public forums and I thank the participants in each of these venues for valuable feed- back: Seminar in Rabbinics at Yale University, Colloquium in Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity at the University of Virginia and the Workshop in “Religion and Culture in Late Antiquity” at the University of Tennessee. All errors and shortcomings that remain are the responsibility of the author.