The Talmud is one of the richest and most complicated works of literature the world has ever known. Since being composed around 1500 years ago it has inspired not only religious reverence but significant intellectual engagement. In this course learners will be introduced to the unique characteristics of this text and the challenges that inhere in studying it while studying a chapter of the Talmud. Students of the course can expect to develop an appreciation for how the Talmud works and why it continues to inspire religious and intellectual devotion. They will be challenged to employ critical reading skills and to analyze legal and historical concepts.
Video 23 Parallel Narratives
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The Talmud: A Methodological Introduction
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From the lesson
Narrative and History
The Talmud contains many stories that feature historical figures from the rabbinic period. In this module we will demonstrate the difficulty of reading these stories as history and model the use of literary tools for reading such materials.
Meet the Instructors
Barry Scott WimpfheimerAssociate Professor
Religious Studies
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All rabbinic texts were originally produced through a process
of oral transmission and compilation.
The ideas of the rabbis circulated independently before being selected and
embedded in texts that were transmitted orally and eventually written down.
It is not surprising then that rabbinic ideas, statements, and
even whole passages exist in parallel in more than one work of literature.
This parallelism helps to confirm the historical reliability of rabbinic ideas.
It also creates promising possibilities for comparative analysis.
It may be somewhat surprising to discover that many examples of parallelism
reflect the kind of copying of earlier text into later text that
we might assume to be a feature only of written texts.
The comparison of parallel versions of a text often help scholars put
together a historical chronology for how the ideas of oral texts come together.
Stories are frequently found in parallel.
Few stories, though, are found in as many places as the story of Shimon ben Shetah,
Judah ben Tabbai, and the false witness.
This story appears in four versions, Mehilta, Tosefta, and both Talmuds.
By comparing the versions, we can discover three important historical moments.
The moment of original composition, the first edit, and the second edit.
The earliest version is found in the Mehilta.
The first edit is reflected in the version shared by Tosefta in
the Palestinian Talmud.
The second edit is the version of the Babylonian Talmud.
The earliest version of the story is found in the [FOREIGN] Midrash Mehilta on
the book of Exodus.
In that version, Shimon ben Shetach kills a single false witness and
Judah ben Tabbai takes an oath declaring that this killing was the spilling
of innocent blood, because the Torah requires that there be two witnesses.
The simplest understanding of the story is that Shimon ben Shetach erred,
because the witness who testified was a single witness.
Another possible understanding of this earliest version of the story
might note that Shimon ben Shetach's error is in keeping with the language of
the Biblical verse in Deuteronomy 19.
Which talks about the false witness as a single witness.
And that it may reflect an early understanding of the verse and
the practice it implicates.
The second version of the story is a version found in Tosefta
in which Judah ben Tabbai uses oath-like language to boast
that he has killed a single false witness.
In order to undermine the sectarian view of the Sadducees
who asserted that a witness would only be executed if the defendant was executed.
Hearing this statement, Shimon ben Shetach uses oath-like language
to tell Judah ben Tabbai that Judah had spilled innocent blood.
Because the Torah requires that there be two witnesses.
The story ends with the declaration that at that moment Judah ben Tabbai declared
that he would only teach the law as explained by Shimon ben Shetach.
The first edit reverses the roles of the two rabbis and
creates a justification for the killing within sectarian polemics.
Judah ben Tabbai was quick to execute
because he needed to prove a point with the Sadducees.
The additional ending, that Judah ben Tabbai's legal confidence was shattered by
his guilt, is the text's way of communicating Judah ben Tabbai's sincere
realization of error and total remorse.
This would preclude a reading that assumed that Judah might disagree with Shimon ben
Shetach and maintain his position as a reading of Deuteronomy 19.
The version of the story found in Tosefta in the Palestinian Talmud is then expanded
upon in the second edit of the Babylonian Talmud, which adds a new ending.
All the days of Judah ben Tabbai's life, he would spread himself on the grave of
the executed dead witness, and a voice would be heard.
People who heard it thought it was the dead man's voice.
But Judah insisted, it is my voice.
He told the people he would prove it to them.
Since upon Judah's death there would be no voice.
So the Babylonian Talmud's second edit magnifies Judah ben Tabbai's regret.
Not only does it affect his legal confidence,
it manifests as a deep sense of remorse towards the dead person.
And an impossible attempt to gain forgiveness for his unatonable mistake.
While the story ends there, the Talmud cites a concluding note to the story.
Rav Aha, son of Rava, a Babylonian rabbi from the late 4th century,
is not convinced by Judah's proof that it was his voice and not the dead person's.
It is possible, Rav Aha says, that the voice was that of the dead witness.
But that he stopped speaking because he received justice in the afterlife.
Or because Judah appeased him in the afterlife.
Traditional readers of rabbinic literature have read stories for inspiration or
as folklore.
When modern Jewish historiography became robust in the 19th century,
historians used these stories to represent Jewish life during the Rabbinic Period.
Since the 1970s though, critical scholars have recognized great challenges in using
these stories to write history.
The parallel versions of the present story provide a great cautionary tale.
Since comparison makes it clear that the story was embellished over time,
one would be hard-pressed to accept all but the earliest and
most minimal version of the story as history.
Beyond the introduction of new facts and
scenes, the freedom with which the editors embellished the stories
communicate something to us about even the original version of the story.
That artfulness plays a role in the production.
For the past couple of decades, scholars have been shifting the lenses which they
employ from those of historians to those of literary critics.
That process has proved very productive as scholars have mined Rabbinic stories for
literary rather than historical lessons.
The Talmud's final edition, Rav Aha's rejection of Judah 's voice has an uncanny
quality insofar as Rav Aha is rejecting Judah's logical argumentation for
an arena of ghostly afterlife.
A literary critic might might argue that Rav Aha shares with the people
a strong investment in the ghostly afterlife of the victim
that almost perversely does not allow Judah to rest.
Rav Aha's commentary makes the voice from the cemetery something like the tell-tale
heart of Edgar Allen Poe's famous short story.
And one of the consequences of uncanny features,
like The Tell-Tale Heart, is that they are not easily explained or
resolved, which makes the reader uncomfortable.
What seems to be happening as the story evolves within the Rabbinic period
is that successive readers struggle with what is fundamentally most
problematic about the story.
That this scholastic hypothetical masked the death of a real person,
cloaking it in scholarly language.
The first edit thought it could mitigate this problem by making the death
meaningful.
It was part of a sectarian polemic and it caused a crisis of confidence.
The second edit wanted to bring the guilt to light by embodying
a prostrate Judah in the cemetery.
But that edit is also not satisfying.
Like the beating tell tale heart, the dead witness persists and
will not let Judah rest.
Even when Judah dies and it is only his logic that needs to rest,
Rav Aha will not let it rest.
The ghost of the dead witness survives long after everything else in the story.
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