The Poetry of Law in Rabbinic Literature By avraham walfish

https://www.academia.edu/23959558/The_Poetry_of_Law_in_Rabbinic_Literature?nav_from=c3782a5c-a61b-4cbe-80e9-05fe9613de89 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.