I would like to thank Michael Carrasik, Charlotte Fonrobert, and an anonymous reviewer for their very helpful comments on this essay. This is a much-improved version due to their efforts.

1. Derrida, Jacques, “Adieu,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 1 (August 1996): 1.Google Scholar

2. Cohen, Aryeh, Rereading Talmud: Gender, Law and the Poetics of Sugyot (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), chasp. 5.Google Scholar

3. Ariel (“lion of God”) is a rabbinic name for the Temple. Mishnah Middot 4:7.

4. The halakhic, or legal, midrash on Leviticus.

5. By way of illustrating the other possible way that “before” could have been understood. Tosafot ad loc., s.v. ve 'eino, understands “before” in terms of the halakhic category of onen, which is the time until the burial and has nothing to do with physical distance. Tosafot illustrates this with a story about Rabbenu Tarn, who was in another city when his sister died. Since she had a husband to bury her, he ate meat and drank wine. Tosafot stresses that it was only because she had a husband, not because he was in a different city.

6. Ed. Higger, 180.

7. Reciting the Shema, wearing phylacteries, and saying the Tefillah, according to R. Yohanan. b Ber. 14b.

8. The prohibited mixing of plants in the same field or of wool and linen in the same web (sha 'atnez).

9. See Brown-Driver-Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon, 344, s.v. “forsaken among the dead.” Septuagint, “thrown in a sleeping state in the grave” (errimmenoi katheudontes en taphōi)

10. It should be understood that “R. Yohanan” means R. Yohanan as the literary representation in this exchange without any necessary implications for any historical R. Yohanan.

11. An argument can be made, based on the Toseftan version of this beraita, that there is an “intentional ambiguifying.” The Toseftan version is as follows: And R. Simeon b. Lazar would also say: Even a living one-day-old baby-one violates. And even a dead David, King of Israel-one may not violate the Sabbath for him (in case of danger to life). For as long as a person is alive, he engages in the performance of mi’vot, therefore one violates the Sabbath for him. When he dies he is idle (batel) from [performing the] mi’vot, therefore one does not violate the Sabbath for him. The Bavli's version of this beraita is far more ambiguous, because it uses the phrase “since a man is dead, he is voided from the mi’vot (keyvan shemet adam batel min hami’vot)” as a reason for not violating the Sabbath to save the dead King David. The rationale (“since a man …”) in this syntactic context focuses upon the “one [who] does not violate the Sabbath,” just as in the preceding line it focused on the “one [who] violated the Sabbath.”

12. A different reading of R. Yoḥanan's statement and the whole discussion is found in b Shabbat 30a: This that David said, “The dead will not praise God” (Ps. 115:17), this is what he said: A man should always engage in Torah and [the performance of] the commandments before he dies, for once he dies he is idle (batel) from Torah and from [the performance of] the commandments, and God receives no praised from him. And this is [that] which R. Yoḥanan said, What is it that is written “Among the dead I am free"? When a person dies he becomes free of the mi’vot.

13. Flusser points out that the term Paul uses here, paidagōgos, is used in Bereishit Rabbah 1:1 to refer to Torah. See Flusser, David, Jewish Sources in Ancient Christianity (Hebrew), 4th ed. (Jerusalem: Sifriyat Poalim, 1979), p. 376.Google Scholar

14. See the discussion in Betz, Hans Dieter, Galatians (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979), pp. 121–126,161–180. The issue of Paul's relation to halakhah is also very much in contention. See Flusser, Jewish Sources in Early Christianity,, pp. 359–380;Google ScholarTomson, Peter J., Paul and the Jewish Law: Halakha in the Letters of the Apostle to the Gentiles (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), pp. 222–230, 259–281;Google Scholar and the more recent discussion in Boyarin, Daniel, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 130–143. Boyarin also reviews the earlier scholarship.Google Scholar

15. Cf. Gal. 3:20.

16. Rashi's comment is actually on the verse from Kohelet in line 43, but the midrashic move is the same in both cases.

17. The identification of the poor with God occurs also in b B.B. 10a through a midrashic reading of the same verse. There it is read that one who gives money to the poor will be paid back by God, who incurs the debt.

18. The way that strolling in a cemetery is represented as unproblematic or at least by itself unexceptionable supports Phillipe Aries's claim that a new attitude toward death “appears clearly around the fifth century A.D., which was very different from the centuries that preceded h…. It begins with the rapprochement between the living and the dead, the invasion of the towns and villages by cemeteries, which were henceforth surrounded by the habitations of men.” Aries, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), p. 29.

19. Fraenkel, Jonah has a somewhat different reading of the midrashic move here. See Darkhei Ha'agadah VeHamidrash ([Israel]: Yad Latalmud, 1991), pp. 150–151, and 'Iyyunim Be'olamo Haruhani Shel Sippur Ha'agadah (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1981), pp. 44–45. On Fraenkel's methodology and my critique of it, see my Rereading Talmud: Gender, Law and the Poetics ofSugyot (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), chap. 4:1.Google Scholar

20. It is unclear what the phrase ariel moav means. The Septuagint has duos 'uois oriel, following which the Revised Standard Version has “the two sons of Moab.” “Sons” is not in the Masoretic Text, though it has been suggested that this is a scribal error caused by its orthographic similarity to the word “two.” Cf. Brown-Driver-Briggs 72, s.v.

21. Cf. M Middot 4:7. Rashi ad loc. suggests that Ariel refers to the Temple based on Isaiah 29:1, in which the word Ariel appears twice and is identified as the place where David camped.

22. If the midrash was reading the phrase as in the Septuagint, “two sons of Ariel, it holds together somewhat better. Though the word moab is still “unmidrashable.”

23. The halakhic, or legal, midrash on Leviticus.

24. This move is found earlier in b Ber 3b-4b, where King David is transposed midrashically from a warrior king to a humble sage.

25. Cf. esp. M Yoma 3:4, 6; 7:3.

26. Here, Pes. 3b, Bezah 9b, Yeb. 105, B.B. 88b, Nidah 24a.

27. Here, Bezah 9b, Nidah 24a.

28. So in the better manuscripts; ed princeps: ityaqer, and cf. Rashi ad loc.

29. Derrida, “Adieu,” p. 5.

30. Lines 96,104, 134.

31. See, e.g., b Ber. 3b–4b, where King David is described as a ḥasid because of his strict fulfillment of mi’vot.

32. On the stereotype, see b Temurah 16a: “Just as this donkey, when he has no food in his trough he immediately screams, so too a woman, when she has no wheat in her house, she immediately screams.” Cf. b Yeb. 63b.

33. The latter reading is supported by the fact that in line 91 she also picks a fight with the mother of the young girl.

34. Lowy, S. refers to this as “cemetery sorcery” in “The Motivation of Fasting in Talmudic Literature,” Journal of Jewish Studies 9 (1958): 33–34. Moshe Idel understands cemetery visits as anomian mystical techniques (i.e., forms of mystical activity that did not involve halakhic practice) either alone or with weeping. According to Idel's notion that the medium informs the mode of the vision, it is unclear why the ḥasid in our story hears everything. Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35. E.g., Hagigah 3b. R. Yehoshua in M Sotah 3:4 rants against a foolish ḥasid.

36. E.g., b Ned. 20a, b Ber. 3a.

37. One of the angel-like characteristics of shedim is that they can hear the future “from behind the curtain” (b Hag. 15a).

38. In this sense it occurs also in Midrash Psalms 11:6, where the structure of a “courtyard of death” is described.

39. In the description of the ḥa’ar hamavet in Midrash Psalms 11:6, it is just such a place: “A courtyard of the spirits of dead people, and it is a place like a house and a yard surrounded by a fence, and in front of the fence is a river, and in front of the river a field, and every day Dume takes the spirits out, and they eat [the grass of the] field and drink the [water from the] river.”

40. Cf. Gen. 23:17, “the field and the cave that is in it”; b B.B. 101b, the description of the courtyard of a grave.

41. “Select Demonstrations, Demonstration XXII: Of Death and the Latter Time,” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 13 (reprint ed., Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1995), pp. 405–406.

42. I am not arguing that our sugya was written as a polemical text, but rather that the “logical” ramifications of the construction of the body in the Rabbinic Judaism represented in the Bavli and in early Christianity as represented in Aphrahat's writings are here in evidence. The question of whether there was an actual polemic between the Babylonian (i.e., Sassanian Persian) Jewish community and Aphrahat's community is still open. For a recent review of the literature, see Koltun-Fromm, Naomi, “A Jewish-Christian Conversation in Fourth-Century Persian Mesopotamia,” Journal of Jewish Studies 47, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 45–63. Koltun-Fromm's own conclusion is that “one can sense from Aphrahat's concerned answers that some people in his community had experienced encounters with Jews that had included informal religious discussions or debates” (p. 62).Google Scholar

43. See the wonderful story of the “summoning” of Rabbah bar Naḥmani to the Academy of Heaven (Rabbah bar Naḥmani nitbakesh leyeshivah shel ma 'alah)

44. Cf. Boyarin, Daniel, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).Google Scholar

45. I say returns because Galatians 3:28, “there is neither male nor female” (ouk eni arsen kai thelu) is alluding to Genesis 1:27, “male and female he created them” (Septuagint: arsen kai thelu epoieisen autous). This present eschatology of Paul, which is the undoing of the separation and materiality of creation, is transferred by Aphrahat to the description of the existence after death. Cf. Krister Stendahl, The Bible and the Role of Women: A Case Study in Hermeneutics (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966): 32.