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 20 Rabbis and Romans
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The Talmud: A Methodological Introduction
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Tosefta, Tannaitic Midrash and Palestinian Talmud
Rabbinic literature consists of multiple works in three genres—Midrash, Mishnah and Talmud. This module introduces each of these different genres with a comparative analysis of texts related to false testimony in works of each type.
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Barry Scott WimpfheimerAssociate Professor
Religious Studies
[MUSIC]
The Hellenization of the Jews began during the 4th century BCE.
Around the time that Alexander the Great conquered the Near East.
The story of Jewish Hellenization is often told as a story of resistance.
Jews clung to their traditions and
resisted the incursions of Greek philosophy, aesthetics, and athletics.
But the story of the encounter between the Jews and
Greco Roman culture is as much a story of attraction as it is one of repulsion.
By the time rabbinic texts were first produced in the 2nd century CE, the Jews
of Palestine had experienced 5 centuries of Greco Roman cultural influence.
Rabbinic society was surrounded by Roman architecture, politics, coinage, and
Greek language.
The rabbis did resist Hellenization and
they defined their ideology in contrast to the majority culture.
But the rabbis also imbibed Greek notions and they structured their schools,
the heart of rabbinic activity, along a Greek model.
Greek intellectual life featured a discipline known as rhetoric,
in which students were trained as speech makers or reachers.
This training took place through a tiered curriculum in which basic fluency in
classical text was followed by advanced logical argumentation, and
finally by the full use of rhetoric to make persuasive arguments in court.
The rabbi's who produced rabbinic literature are best thought of as
Jewish reachers.
Trained through a tiered curriculum of basic biblical fluency,
advanced production of Madreshic and Madraic materials, and
at the highest level, Talmudic argumentation.
Because of the creativity of rhetoric as a skill there's often a fine line
between a hypothetical rhetorical argument and complete absurdity.
This is the background needed to understand the next text and
it's flying camels.
The passage we will look at today is a Talmudic built around
four statements attributed to Rava, a 4th generation Amora,
who is the most active Rabbi in the Babylonian Talmud.
Rava uses four scenarios to evaluate the possible ramifications of the rabbinic
criteria for establishing false testimony.
In the first scenario, if a second set of witnesses challenges the first set
because the scene of the crime is on the opposite side of a building
in which the second set saw the first set, guilt is determined
based on whether one could see from one side of the building to the other.
Similarly, in the second scenario, if the second set of witnesses challenges
the first set because the crime allegedly took place on Sunday morning.
And the second set of witnesses saw the first set in a different city on Sunday at
sunset, guilt is determined based on whether it would be possible to travel
from one city to the other between morning and night.
In the third scenario, if the second set of witnesses undermines the presence of
the first set at the scene of the crime, but confirms that the alleged crime
happened on a different day, the first set of witnesses is still executed.
But if the first set testified not about the crime but
about the existence of a conviction, even if a second set finds them
not to have been present for the scene of the conviction, they are not executed,
because the defendant is already considered dead in the eyes of the law.
Fourthly and finally, if the second set of witnesses undermines the presence of
the first set at the scene of a crime that generates a financial penalty, but
confirms that the alleged crime happened on a different day,
the first set of witnesses nonetheless has to pay.
But if the first set testified not about the crime, but
about the conviction, even if a second set finds them to not have been present for
the conviction, they would not pay the penalty because the defendant is
already considered a debtor in the eyes of the law.
In these four statements Rava plays with the scenario of false testimony
to imagine hypothetical ramifications.
Elsewhere in the Talmud,
Rava is quoted as saying that the very notion of establishing a set of witnesses
as false on the basis of another set of witnesses is an irrational innovation,
since there is no basis for relying on the second set over the first.
In our text, Rava pokes around the edges of the rabbinic understanding
of establishing a false witness on the basis of a second set of witnesses.
On one level, Rava's first two statements seem obvious.
If the new testimony does not unequivocally contradict the first set of
witnesses account of the time and
place of the crime, one can not be certain that the first witness has lied.
But on another level, Rava's first two cases demonstrate that
the ideal rabbinic scenario of determining false witnesses will take into account
problems of subjective judgment and a weighing of the competing claims.
The third and fourth statements,
both highlight apparent miscarriages of justice.
One could construct a case in which witnesses testify against a defendant,
who is actually guilty of the alleged offense, but the witnesses are fined or
killed anyway, based on the technical rules of establishing false witnesses.
One can imagine Rava's articulation of these cases as a rhetorical
reductio ad absurdum,
a way of demonstrating the problem of the case by virtue of an extreme example.
Even in the second half of each of these cases, when justice is served and
the first set of witnesses is not punished,
their exoneration is not a function of the rules of false testimony, but of other
legal rules that establish the defendant as already dead or already indebted.
Thus far, I have been reading Rava's statements on their own,
out of the context of the passage in which they appear.
In the Talmud though, Rava's statements are framed and
interrupted by the anonymous editor, the stum.
Who has a set of assumptions that force a new understanding of Rava.
The stam assumes that every Rabbinic statement
must contribute something novel to our legal understanding.
Otherwise it would not have been made.
The Stam is unwilling to accept that an amaraic statement is just a working out of
ramifications of a prior idea.
So after citing each of Rava 's first two statements.
The stam interrupts with the objection this is simple.
This objection appears frequently in the Talmud to convey the idea
that there seems to be no novelty to a statement.
The implication of this objection however is that this appearance of simplicity or
obviousness is misleading.
Thus, the objection is frequently followed by an explanation of why the statement,
in fact, does add something important to the discussion.
Specifically, a rejection of something a student might have erroneously thought.
Likewise, here, in order to find novelty in Rava's statements, the Stam produces
outrageous hypotheticals which Rava's statements supposedly disprove.
For the first case, the one about the opposite sides of the building,
the Stam suggests that if not for Rava, one might have worried about disparities
in vision that could allow the witnesses to see more than the average viewer.
Rava's statement comes to teach us that the law
is not concerned enough to legislate against this possibility.
For the second case, the one about the distant cities,
the Stam suggests that if not for Rava one might have worried about flying camels
that could transport one faster than the average traveler.
Again, Rava's statement teaches that the law does not worry about
such a possibility.
There is an inherent ridiculousness to the flying camel
that makes the entire passage seem absurd.
But this is in fact better understood as a matter of rhetoric.
The flying camel is not actually something that ever would have bothered anyone.
Rather it was produced to make Rava's case seem novel.
The Stam interrupts Rava's third case with a better question.
In the first half of the third case, both the defendant and the first set of
witnesses are killed based on the testimony of a second set of witnesses.
It seems that Rava is pointing to the absurd miscarriage of justice
against the first set of witnesses.
If the testimony of a second set of witnesses proved that the defendant was
guilty, why punish the first set?
The problem raised by the Stam is that this question is not new.
A Mishnah in the first chapter discusses a case in which two sets of witnesses
watch a crime through separate windows and do not see each other.
That scenario could also lead to the execution of the defendant and
of one set of witnesses but not the other.
Thus, Rava's scenario does not appear to contain any novelty,
since a similar scenario was already addressed by the Mishnah.
To answer its own question, the Stam claims that the novelty of cases three and
four is their second half, the notion that one who testifies about a conviction
cannot be punished as a false witness.
This is a good answer for the Stam, for whom the major issue is Ravah's novelty or
lack there of.
But it is not so helpful for understanding Ravah's reductio ad absurdum argument.
Why couldn't it be the case that Ravah reads the line in the Mishnah as
similarly producing a reductio ad absurdum argument?
The Stam is focused only on the task of finding novelties in Ravah's scenarios.
But it is not particularly concerned with clarifying his actual argument.
The Stam is not a bad reader, or a wrong reader, but
a reader with a set of assumptions that may not be identical to the earlier
authors of statements in the Talmud.
This can sometimes create absurd outcomes, like a flying camel, hypothetical.
And other times, the assumptions can create excellent questions.
But these questions are sometimes better than the Stam's own answers.
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