Misunderstanding Sources as a Factor in Shaping Bavli SUGYOT

• In Event: Reading the Bavli

Abstract

Recent scholarship has sought to describe the relationship between passages in the Babylonian Talmud and their source material – how the editors were guided by those sources and how they revised or reinterpreted them in line with their own beliefs and methods. Some changes seem to reflect the beliefs or social position of Babylonian rabbis, while others seem driven by a range of literary or stylistic concerns. The distinction is significant in helping to identify when such changes offer glimpses into the beliefs of the anonymous editors and when they have other, often simpler explanations.
Nonetheless, there is often resistance to considering the possibility that in some cases, a Bavli passage has been influenced by simple errors in either the transmission or the understanding of its sources, both of which I believe happen with some frequency. The editors tended to work with sources or groups of sources as received and try to make sense of them, especially those whose meaning is obscure or conflicts with established principles, without access to source critical analysis. But scholars and traditional readers alike tend to assume that they knew their sources fully and that changes reflect choices about how to use them, and it is difficult to demonstrate clearly in any given case that error played a significant role.
I will present two passages in the Bavli that come to logically convoluted conclusions that, I argue, can only be explained by these types of errors. Each has direct antecedents in the PT, but departs from them in seemingly strange ways. And in each one, there are specific problems in their understanding or their version of a source that created logical problems that the Bavli passage attempts to resolve, logical problems that are not present in the sources themselves. I hope to see whether my reading of these texts and my larger claim about the role of transmission error in shaping the Bavli are convincing, and if so how that fits in with our larger understanding of the role and methods of its editors.

Author

• Joshua Cahan