In recent decades, talmudic studies, along with other disciplines devoted to the study of texts, have experienced numerous paradigm shifts regarding both methods and goals. The naive presupposition that a text provides reliable information about historically situated characters, whether those described in the text or those who authored the text, has been vigorously challenged on many counts and from many angles. Responses to the challenge have ranged from sophisticated attempts to recover hermeneutical stability, whether rooted in authorial intention, in textually grounded meaning, or in some form of dialogue between the reader and the author or text, to the panoply of deconstructive approaches and other forms of postmodern recontextualization.