Practical Wisdom, not Conceptualization and Associative Thought: Discovering the law Pedagogy of Hellenistic–Roman Palestine and Sassanian Babylonia via the Varied Openings to tractate Berakhot

• In Event: Cultural Comparison with Roman and Sasanian Contexts

Abstract

Past through current academic (and yeshiva) scholarship identifies Tannaitic through Saboraic reasoning with exceedingly-narrow deductive argumentation, wherein conceptualization either take greater priority to real life wisdom or is manipulated for the sake of eliding the law for the sake of real-life agendas. At best, Hidary has turned to parallel cultures but has examined only the upper-class professional literature and has identified Talmudic arguments as lessons in both being able to cleverly offer competing arguments and being able to identify the falsehood of clever rhetoric. Worse, current scholarship's only solutions for the problem that the rabbinic legal texts seemingly veer off-topic are the poor choices of speculatively reconstructing urtexts that had to be left intact in later documents, despite including irrelevant material, and of identifying (layers of) rabbinic thinking as associative. In short, we have a scholarship of the other as strange. And as Wittgenstein noted, "If the Other is strange, I am the stranger."
This paper presents an alternative paradigm. It shows how most problems arise because both academic and yeshiva assume that texts can be read syntactically and grammatically, rather than semantically and pragmatically. Building off my previous work on Biblical law through Second-Temple through Tannaitic to Amoraic literature, and even pericopes of Saboraic material, alongside post-Talmudic legal sources, this paper illustrates an alternative paradigm for resolving these problems. Based on how law was taught in the Near East, rather than rhetoric and philosophy, one can recognize that these rabbinic texts are meant to teach students, who were budding judges and religious guides, how to address life in ways that the masses of common people find sagacious – rather than clever or conceptually rigorous.
Iansmuch as this approach can be illustrated from any topic/law/texts in the Misha, Tosefta, Yerushalmi, and Bavli, this paper illustrates the paradigm via the beginning of tractate Berakhot

Author

• Elisha Ancselovits, Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies