The Talmud

A Biography

Barry Scott Wimpfheimer

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781400890248
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

The life and times of an enduring work of Jewish spirituality The Babylonian Talmud, a postbiblical Jewish text that is part scripture and part commentary, is an unlikely bestseller. Written in a hybrid of Hebrew and Aramaic, it is often ambiguous to the point of incomprehension, and its subject matter reflects a narrow scholasticism that should hardly have broad appeal. Yet the Talmud has remained in print for centuries and is more popular today than ever. Barry Scott Wimpfheimer tells the remarkable story of this ancient Jewish book and explains why it has endured for almost two millennia.Providing a concise biography of this quintessential work of rabbinic Judaism, Wimpfheimer takes readers from the Talmud 's prehistory in biblical and second-temple Judaism to its present-day use as a source of religious ideology, a model of different modes of rationality, and a totem of cultural identity. He describes the book's origins and structure, its centrality to Jewish law, its mixed reception history, and its golden renaissance in modernity. He explains why reading the Talmud can feel like being swept up in a river or lost in a maze, and why the Talmud has come to be venerated--but also excoriated and maligned—in the centuries since it first appeared.An incomparable introduction to a work of literature that has lived a full and varied life, this accessible book shows why the Talmud is at once a received source of traditional teachings, a touchstone of cultural authority, and a powerful symbol of Jewishness for both supporters and critics.

Gestation and Birth

(ESSENTIAL TALMUD PART ONE)

CHAPTER 1

Talmud on Fire Liability

The Talmud is a commentary on an earlier law code, the Mishnah, which was published orally by the rabbis around the year 200 CE. Much like other ancient law codes (including the ones found in the Hebrew Bible) the Mishnah writes many of its laws as hypothetical scenarios. A farfetched hypothetical is grounds for a fascinating Talmudic discussion of the basis of liability for fire that damages a neighbor’s property. This brief foray into a Talmudic text introduces a passage about fire liability that this book will return to in greater depth in subsequent chapters.

Mishnah Baba Qamma 2:3b

A dog who took a cake [baking on top of hot coals] and went to a haystack; it ate the cake and set fire to the haystack:

on the cake [an owner] pays full damages, but on the haystack [an owner pays] half damages.¹

The owner pays the full value of the eaten cake and half of the value of the burnt haystack. Liability for the full value of the cake follows a basic principle of expectation: since animals can be expected to eat cake, one is responsible to watch them and ensure that they do not do so. For the haystack, the owner of the dog is liable for half of the damages. No rationale is offered in the Mishnah and a reader must work to produce an explanation. One common explanation is that the burning of a haystack is unexpected; since the owner could not have anticipated this form of damage, the owner is only liable for half of the damages. Another common explanation considers fire damage to be a form of secondarily causal damage such as when pebbles projected by an animal’s moving feet break a pane of glass.

The Talmud begins its discussion of this mishnah by citing a debate between two rabbis, R’ Yohanan and Resh Laqish, who lived in Palestine and were active in the first half of the third century.

Babylonian Talmud Baba Qamma 22a

It was said:² R’ Yohanan said, “his fire³ because [it is] his arrow.”

And Resh Laqish⁴ said, “his fire because [it is] his property.”

Though the Babylonian Talmud was produced in Babylonia, it preserves many texts that were first articulated by Palestinian rabbis. Each of the two rabbis explains fire liability by drawing a specific analogy. R’ Yohanan says that liability for fire is like liability for an arrow: just as one is liable for the distant damage caused by a launched arrow, one is also liable for the distant damage caused by kindled fire. Resh Laqish analogizes liability for fire to property liability: as one is liable for damage caused by property (such as one’s animal), one is also liable for damage caused by a set fire.

The Talmud’s anonymous voice teases out the differences between these two analogies by asking after the stakes for each individual rabbi.

Why did Resh Laqish not explain like R’ Yohanan?

(He would say to you,)⁵ “arrows move from his force, this [fire] did not move from his force.”

And why did R’ Yohanan not explain like Resh Laqish?

(He would say to you,)⁶ “property has tangibility, this [fire] does not have tangibility.”

Why does R’ Yohanan prefer the analogy to an arrow and Resh Laqish the analogy to property? Resh Laqish rejects the analogy to the arrow because the damage caused by the arrow is directly linked to the energy of the archer’s pulling the bow; while fire may share the feature of being able to cause distant damage, it does not share this direct connection between the energy of the person responsible and the damage. R’ Yohanan rejects the analogy to property because property is tangible while fire is not; though the two are similar since one is responsible for them, there is a fundamental difference between responsibility for tangible items and intangible ones.

The Talmudic passage continues by connecting this debate about fire liability to the mishnah cited above on which the entire Talmudic passage is something of a commentary. Drawing an inference, the Talmud asserts that the mishnah seems to support the view of R’ Yohanan that liability for fire is like liability for the damage of an arrow:

It was stated in the Mishnah, “A dog who took a cake, etc.”⁷

Granted that for [R’ Yohanan] who said (fire liability is)⁸ like an arrow, the arrow is of the dog⁹ [and for this reason the owner is not liable for full damages]. But for [Resh Laqish] who said (fire liability)¹⁰ is like property liability, (this fire)¹¹ is not the property of the dog’s owner?

A hungry dog eats a cake that was cooking on some coals. The cake is still attached to a coal and the dog transports the coal to a haystack, setting the stack on fire and burning it to the ground. The mishnah rules that the owner of the dog pays full damages for the cake and half damages for the haystack. The Talmud’s anonymous narrator seeks to determine whether this mishnah about a bizarre case of fire liability holds the clue to the conceptual debate regarding whether fire is like an arrow or like other property. Drawing attention to the idea of half damages for the haystack, the Talmud’s anonymous voice suggests that this scenario’s law reflects the arrow view more than the property view. For while one can understand a dog owner’s responsibility for the secondary effects of the dog as akin to the repercussions of shooting an arrow, the indirect nature of this tort makes any liability for the haystack hard to explain for someone who thinks of fire liability as based on liability for one’s property.

The anonymous voice of the Talmud does not concede that this bizarre case of the Mishnah supports R’ Yohanan. Rather, it modifies the narrative of the scenario to create space for Resh Laqish’s property-based notion of fire liability.

Here with what are we dealing? [With a scenario in which the dog] threw the coal. For the cake [the dog’s owner] pays full damages, for the site of the coal [the dog’s owner] pays¹² half damages and for the entire haystack [the dog’s owner] is exempt.

In this new version of the story, the dog threw the coal in the air and it landed on the haystack. The owner of the dog is liable for full damages for the cake, half damages for the initial landing spot of the coal and exempt from the damage to the rest of the haystack. By modifying the story such that the dog threw the cake/coal onto the haystack, the Talmud has created space within which to understand the mishnah as agreeing with the conceptual approach of Resh Laqish that fire liability is based on property liability.

The Talmud is replete with passages like this one that explore the intricacies of law (ritual, civil, criminal), metaphysics, and theology. The Talmudic method of drilling down into the underlying bedrock to uncover core doctrines involves a marriage of creative logical deduction with careful analysis of valued canonical texts. The specific way in which the Talmud attempts to maintain the validity of the mishnah as a core textual precedent alongside the conceptual possibility of fire liability as a subset of property liability is thorny, and became the basis for commentarial controversies in the enhanced Talmud. This book will return to further probe this Talmudic passage more extensively in the second chapter, and to unpack the controversies surrounding its interpretation in the third chapter. For now, though, this taste of the Talmud provokes a series of questions:

1.The passage opens with a legal dictum from the Mishnah. What is the Mishnah and in what ways is it central to the Talmud?

2.R’ Yohanan and Resh Laqish are two named rabbis whose debate structures the passage. Who were these rabbis, and what was the context in which they debated the conceptual character of fire liability?

3.The original debate is enriched through a seemingly unique idiosyncratic textual discourse. Where did this interesting rhetorical and exegetical project come from, and how did it come to be the quintessence of rabbinic religiosity?

4.The anonymous narrator thickens the respective conceptual approaches of the two named rabbis and draws their debate into conversation with the Mishnah’s strange hypothetical of the dog with the cake. Who is this anonymous narrator?

5.The passage about fire liability continues in the Talmud for a few pages in the standard print editions. As we will see in the next chapter, the Talmud uses different scenarios found in rabbinic legal precepts to prove that fire liability is more akin to an arrow than to property liability and each of these is explained away.¹³ Then a fourth-century Babylonian rabbi, Abaye, draws attention to a statutory scenario that works better with a property liability understanding and not as well with an arrow liability approach, and the Talmud works extremely hard to explain this problem away. The passage’s conclusion is that even those who think that liability for fire is akin to arrow liability must accept, at times, that one is liable for fire because it is one’s property. A reader who successfully follows the intricacies of this passage might justifiably wonder about its goals. Is the reader expected to land on a specific understanding of fire liability? If not, does this passage have a specific learning outcome? Do Talmudic passages have goals?

Who Were the Rabbis?

History: Continuity and Disruption

Among its many stories, the Talmud includes a legendary rabbinic origin tale.¹⁴

Abba Sikra, the head of the biryoni¹⁵ in Jerusalem, was the son of the sister of Rabban Yohanan b. Zakkai.

[R. Yohanan] sent (to him)¹⁶ saying, “Come visit me privately.”¹⁷

When [Abba Sikra] came, he said to him, “How long are you going to act this way and kill all the people with starvation?”

[Abba Sikra] replied: “What can I do? If I say something¹⁸ to them, they will kill me.”

[R. Yohanan] said: “Devise some plan for me to escape. Perhaps there will be a small salvation.”

[Abba Sikra] said to him: “Pretend to be ill, and let everyone come to inquire about you. Bring something evil smelling and put it by you so that they will say you are dead.¹⁹ Let then your disciples get under your bed, (but no others, so that they shall not notice that you are still light,)²⁰ since they know that a living being is lighter (than a corpse).”²¹

[R. Yohanan] did so, and R. Eliezer went [under the bier] from one side and R. Joshua from the other. When they reached the opening, [some of the people inside the walls] wanted to run a lance through [the bier].

[They]²² said to them: “Shall [the Romans] say. They have pierced their Master?”

They wanted to jostle it.

[They] said to them: “Shall they say that they pushed their Master?”

They opened a town gate²³ for him and (he got out).²⁴

When [R. Yohanan] reached [the Romans] he said, “Peace to you, O king, peace to you, O king.”

[Vespasian] said: “...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: The Talmud—Essential, Enhanced, and Emblematic
• Chapter 1: Gestation and Birth (Essential Talmud Part One)
• Chapter 2: Anatomy (Essential Talmud Part Two)
• Chapter 3: Election: How the Talmud’s Discourse Developed (Enhanced Talmud)
• Chapter 4: Rivals, Naysayers, Imitators, and Critics (Emblematic Talmud)
• Chapter 5: Golden Old Age: Talmud in Modernity—Three Stories
• Notes
• Index