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Rabbinic Polysemy: A Response to Steven Fraade

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 May 2014

Azzan Yadin-Israel
Azzan Yadin-Israel*
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey
*
azzan@rutgers.edu
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Extract

Much has been written on rabbinic polysemy over the past two decades, and yet the precise nature and dating of this phenomenon remain a matter of controversy. This note, which aims to help clarify the issue, is a response to Steven Fraade's essay, “Rabbinic Polysemy and Pluralism Revisited: Between Praxis and Thematization,” published in this journal. Surveys of the history of the polysemy debates are readily available; my present concern is with Fraade's position, and the positions to which he is responding, chief among them Daniel Boyarin's claim that rabbinic polysemy is a relatively late, post-tannaitic, phenomenon. Fraade sets out to refute this claim, and his essay provides a dozen passages that serve as “countertexts to [Boyarin's] arguments” (5). The aim of this response is to show that the rabbinic sources in question are not countertexts, and that polysemy is, in fact, a post-tannaitic phenomenon.

Type
Research Article
Information
AJS Review , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , April 2014 , pp. 129 - 141
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 2014 

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References

1. Fraade, Steven, “Rabbinic Polysemy and Pluralism Revisited: Between Praxis and Thematization,” AJS Review 31 (2007): 1–40Google Scholar. I refer to Fraade's essay with parenthetic page numbers in the body of the article.

2. Fraade (1–3, and the secondary literature cited therein); Hidary, Richard, Dispute for the Sake of Heaven: Legal Pluralism in the Talmud (Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2010), 17–31.Google Scholar

3. Boyarin, Daniel, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004)Google Scholar, 155. Though Fraade's polemics are aimed primarily at Boyarin, he also criticizes my “The Hammer on the Rock: Polysemy and the School of Rabbi Ishmael,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 10 (2003): 1–17Google Scholar. Full disclosure: Daniel Boyarin was my doctoral advisor.

4. This is the meaning of “legal pluralism” in rabbinic scholarship. In legal studies this phrase refers to the existence of multiple legal systems within a single geographic framework.

5. Fraade acknowledges that “[R]abbinic disagreement as to the ritual purity status of an object (tameiɔ or tahor) need not necessarily derive from differences of scriptural interpretation and may just as well be based on differences of logical argumentation or received tradition without direct reference to scripture” (3–4), but throughout the essay he yokes pluralism and polysemy together.

6. Boyarin, Border Lines, 189.

7. Stern, David, Midrash and Theory: Ancient Jewish Exegesis and Contemporary Literary Studies (Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, 18.

8. Midrash Tehillim, pis. 12:4 to Psalms 12:7 (ed. Buber, p. 107–8), discussed in “Rabbinic Polysemy and Pluralism Revisited,” 16–17, and see the list of parallels at 16 n. 44; Pesikta de-Rav Kahana, Ba-ḥodesh ha-shelshi, pis.12:25 to Exodus 20:2 (ed. Mandelbaum, p. 1:223–24), discussed in “Rabbinic Polysemy and Pluralism Revisited,” 25–26.

9. See, e.g., the inventions of Elisha ben Abuya's apostasy, as discussed by Goshen-Gottstein, Alon, The Sinner and the Amnesiac: The Rabbinic Invention of Elisha ben Abuya and Eleazar ben Arach (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, and of youth, Rabbi Akiva's, Yadin, Azzan, “Rabbi Akiva's Youth,” Jewish Quarterly Review 100 (2010): 573–597.Google Scholar

10. Yadin, “Hammer on the Rock”; Boyarin, Border Lines, 182–189.

11. Unless otherwise noted, I have used Fraade's translations of the rabbinic sources.

12. Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, par. Nezikin 2, to Exodus 21:6 (ed. Horovitz-Rabin, 253).

13. Though Fraade does not comment on this, the midrash is obscure, citing Exodus 20:15 (“You shall not steal”) as the relevant prooftext. See Horovitz's comments, ad loc..

14. This is an outstanding example of the non-scriptural nature of rulings described as “Halakhah to Moses from Sinai.” See the discussion in Hayes, Christine, “Halakhah leMoshe mi-Sinai in Rabbinic Sources: A Methodological Case Study,” in The Synoptic Problem in Rabbinic Literature, ed. Cohen, Shaye J. D. (Providence, R.I: Brown Judaic Studies, 2000), 61–117Google Scholar, and especially pages 66–77. Other passages that distinguish between Halakhah and Torah (or midrash) include T. cEruvin 8:23, 8:24; T. Ḥagigah 1:9; M. Nedarim 4:3; T. Berakhot 2:12; T. Sotah 7:21; and T. Sanhedrin 7:7.

15. Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, par. Ba-ḥodesh 5 to Exodus 20:2 (ed. Horovitz-Rabin, 222), and see Fraade's textual discussion at 10 n. 24.

16. This part has nothing to do with multiple opinions: the man in question simply travels (“wanders”) to find an answer to his question.

17. Naeh, Shlomo, “The Craft of Memory and Structures of the Text,” (Hebrew) in Meḥkerei talmud (Talmud Studies Dedicated to the Memory of Professor Ephraim E. Urbach), ed. Sussman, Yaakov and Rosenthal, David (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2005)Google Scholar, 3:564.

18. Note that while these derashot thematize the multiplicity of legal positions insofar as they set this as the theme of their discussion, they do not “thematize” in Fraade's sense of endorsing or theologically justifying this multiplicity. The same holds true of the quote from Jerome at 14–15 n. 39, who calls upon the reader to recognize the existence of various opinions, but then reach a decision in favor of one and against the other and, “like a good banker, reject the money from a spurious mint.”

19. I have departed from Fraade's translation here. He renders לבטלן “(only) for them to be nullified,” understanding the nun as an accusative suffix—לבטל אותן. I think it is preferable on syntactic grounds to read the nun as an adverbial suffix corresponding to the nunation in Arabic and mimation in Biblical Hebrew, analogous to להלן and לקמן. My argument in unaltered on Fraade's translation.

20. Halbertal, Moshe, People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997)Google Scholar, 52.

21. Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, par. Ba-ḥodesh 9 to Exodus 20:15 (ed. Horovitz-Rabin, 235), and see Fraade's textual discussion at 24 n. 75.

22. Hidary, Dispute for the Sake of Heaven, 20 n. 71.

23. On the linguistic and textual difficulties of the plural “voices” in the MT see Yadin, Azzan, “קול as Hypostasis in the Hebrew Bible,” Journal of Biblical Literature 122 (2003): 601–626Google Scholar, and especially 620–623.

24. Sifre Deuteronomy, Haʾ azinu, pis. 313 to Deuteronomy 32:10 (ed. Finkelstein, p. 355), and see Fraade's textual discussion at 27 n. 83.

25. Boyarin, Border Lines, 189–190, quoted in “Rabbinic Polysemy and Pluralism Revisited,” 27–28.

26. Sifre Deuteronomy, Vezoʾ t ha-berakhah, pis. 343 to Deuteronomy 33:2 (ed. Finkelstein, p. 395), and see Fraade's textual discussion at 30 n. 98.

27. This last issue also bears on Fraade's critique of my argument in “Hammer on the Rock”: “I should note that the two examples from the Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael ... that Yadin cites in his attempt to deny polysemy to the midrashim attributed to Rabbi Ishmael appear to support such an idea: ‘The Holy One, blessed be He, speaks two things/commandments (devarim) in a single utterance (dibbur)’” (28 n. 91). But as I stated explicitly in the article, the Mekhilta uses the image of the hammer creating multiple sparks “to explain a unique crux in the Bible” (Yadin, “Hammer on the Rock,” 13), namely the two reports of the Sabbath commandment in Exodus and Deuteronomy. “Remember (zakhor) the Sabbath day, and keep it holy” in Exodus 20:8, versus “Observe (shamor) the Sabbath day and keep it holy” in Deuteronomy 5:12. This is a much stronger example for Fraade's argument than the same statement in four languages, but as I showed there, “[i]t is not, by any means, a statement about the polysemic nature of the biblical text as such. Indeed, it suggests an underlying non-polysemic understanding of the Torah, since in a thoroughgoing polysemic context the dual speech of the Fourth Commandment spoken at Sinai could be held up as a particular instance of the general principle (Yadin, “Hammer on the Rock,” 13–14), but is not.

28. Naeh, Shlomo, “A Heart of Many Rooms: On the Rabbinic Approach to Controversies in Halakhic Literature,” in Renewing Jewish Commitment: The Work and Thought of David Hartman, ed. Sagi, Avi and Zohar, Zvi (Jerusalem: Shalom Hartman Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2001), 851–875.Google Scholar