The Sages and the World: Categorizing Culture in Early Rabbinic Law (original) (raw)
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Can “Law” Be Private? The Mixed Message of Rabbinic Oral Law
“Can ‘Law’ Be Private? The Mixed Message of Rabbinic Oral Law.” In Public And Private In Ancient Mediterranean Law And Religion, edited by Clifford Ando and Jörg Rüpke. Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten 65. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015.
A great deal of ink has been spilled on the question of early rabbinic literary culture and the rabbinic dedication to the development of an explicitly oral legal tradition. In this essay I will argue that given that the manifest content of early rabbinic discourse is law, it is productive to look to the very public practices of communication inscribed, literally and figuratively, in the Roman legal culture of the east. Within this context, the rabbinic legal project makes sense as a form of provincial shadowing of a dominant Roman legal culture. This paper will explore the paradoxical rabbinic deployment of the most public of Roman genres, law, in a manner explicitly coded as private. How does one make sense of the public aspirations of rabbinic law with its choice to remain unwritten and therefore largely invisible in the imperial landscape of the rabbinic city?
The Poetry of Law in Rabbinic Literature
In defining the topic to which this session is devoted, Moshe Lavee has focused attention on the issue of how assigning a work canonical status might impact on the way in which it is read. In the discussion we further discussed how the canonical status of a work often carries with it a presupposition of perfect and laconic language, laden with what scholars have termed " omnisignificance ". In this paper I would like to explore the other side of the coin – how the redactor of a work may facilitate its acceptance as a canonical text by composing it with great care and attention to the literary nuances and connotations of the language, to verbal associations and echoes and to literary structures. Put differently, the " omnisignificance " of a canonical document may often be seen as an integral feature of its arrangement and composition, serving as a factor in its acceptance as canonical, rather than as a hermeneutical presupposition resulting from such acceptance. The arrangement and structure of central legal documents of rabbinic literature, such as Mishnah, Tosefta, and the two Talmuds, has baffled and intrigued scholars. All of these texts are marked by abrupt shifts from topical to associative methods of arrangement, and not infrequently one associative connection begets another, to the point where the connection between a single literary unit and the larger unit in which it appears is tenuous at best. Not only is it often difficult to follow the inner logic govening the arrangement of these compositions, but scholars have had difficulty in determining what was the purpose of composing them. None of these documents has the consistent or even coherent arrangement we would expect to find in a legal code, and scholars have ranged far afield in seeking alternative explanations of the purpose and methods underlying their redaction. My approach to these issues is grounded in the surprising discovery that the materials of Mishnah and Tosefta yield themselves readily to the tools of literary analysis, including the use of different kinds of verbal associations, wordplays, and literary structures such as inclusios (envelope structures), and other kinds of strategically located verbal parallels. Recently I have discovered some striking examples of such phenomena in the Talmud Bavli, and I suspect that they may be found in the Yerushalmi as well. Discovery of these phenomena immediately raises the issue of their significance and purpose. Scholars of rabbinic literature may assume, with some reason, that these phenomena are characteristic of documents composed and transmitted orally; however, some of the phenomena resist such explanation, and moreover, mnemotechnical techniques of the pre-modern world were closely-linked to patterns of thought. Hence, I will argue that the literary structure of rabbinic legal documents can be adequately understood only by assuming that literary phenomena here play the same role which we would assign to them in any other context, namely that verbal associations are meant to convey associations of ideas and values. In this paper we will examine a chapter of Mishnah, together with parallel discussion in the Tosefta and a section of the related Bavli and Yerushalmi discussions. By analyzing the literary cues found in each of these documents, we will attempt to understand how their redactors gave expression to different, but interlocking, frameworks of religious ideas and spiritual values.
This paper deals with uses of exemplars and exempla to transmit religious law in rabbinic literature. After a general survey of the place of narrative in rabbinic legal literature, I explore the interpretive difficulties involved in deriving law from accounts of the deeds of great rabbis. The main section of the paper presents a reading of what we might call a meta-exemplum, a Talmudic narrative that not only records the opposing behaviors of two rabbis but also illustrates the difficulties involved in the transmission of law through exemplary actions. This text demonstrates that the rabbis were self-conscious about the ambiguity of this mode of transmission and of the potential for misinterpretation on the part of students. This very rabbinic self-consciousness is recommended by the text as the best way to ensure that one's deeds are properly understood. In the final section I discuss another set of Talmudic narratives that illustrate how this institution of self-conscious exemplar, if taken to an extreme, can have Orwellian implications for rabbis, placing them under constant and dehumanizing scrutiny from their students. Classical rabbinic literature is one of the few major Western legal corpora in which exempla, narratives about the day-today practices and deeds of great legal scholars, are given the force of precedent. This inclusion of exempla raises the status of these sages from mere interpreters and adju-dicators of the law to actual embodiments of the law, individuals whose very actions inevitably bear witness to the proper course of behavior as defined by the halakhah (the system of rabbinic law). In this article I will 4 4 6