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Recent Literary Approaches to the Mishnah

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2008

Elizabeth Shanks Alexander
Elizabeth Shanks Alexander
Affiliation:
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia
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Extract

Literary approaches to rabbinic literature entered the field through biblical studies, in which scholars from different quarters and different points of reference were using them to make sense of the biblical text as it has come down to us. The literary approach took umbrage at the way in which the historical source-critical approach dissects the Bible into its constituent sources. The literary approach was an overt attempt to overcome the fractures that historical criticism had introduced into the surface of the biblical text. It proposed instead to read the text—with all of its surface irregularities, gaps, and hiatuses—as coherent and meaningful.

Type
Research Article
Information
AJS Review , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , November 2008 , pp. 225 - 234
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 2008

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References

1. Leading scholars in the new approach to biblical studies include Meir Sternberg, Robert Alter, and Adele Berlin. The full range of their scholarship exemplifies the literary approach, but see especially their pioneering works: Sternberg, Meir, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Alter, Robert, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic, 1981)Google Scholar; and Berlin, Adele, Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative (Sheffield: Almond Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

2. Boyarin, Daniel, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

3. Kugel, James L., “Two Introductions to Midrash,” in Midrash and Literature, ed. Hartman, Geoffrey H. and Budick, Sandford (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 77–103Google Scholar; and idem, In Potiphar's House: The Interpretive Life of Biblical Texts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

4. Fraenkel, Yonah, Darkhei Ha'agadah Vehamidrash (Masada: Yad Letalmud, 1991)Google Scholar; and Stern, David, Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

5. Meir, Ofra, The Poetics of Rabbinic Stories (Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Po‘alim, 1993)Google Scholar; and Rubenstein, Jeffrey L., Talmudic Stories: Narrative Art, Composition, and Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

6. Fraade, Steven D., From Tradition to Commentary: Torah and Its Interpretation in the Midrash Sifre to Deuteronomy (Albany: State University of New York, 1991), 123–62Google Scholar; and Cohen, Aryeh, Rereading Talmud: Gender, Law and the Poetics of Sugyot (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1998)Google Scholar. See also Kraemer, David, Reading the Rabbis: The Talmud as Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

7. Walfish, Avraham, “Shitat Ha‘arikhah Hasifrutit Bamishnah al-pi Massekhet Ro'sh Hashanah” [The Literary Method of Redaction in the Mishnah Based on Tractate Ro'sh Hashanah] (PhD diss., Hebrew University, 2001)Google Scholar.

8. The work of Natan Margalit focuses on discerning literary patterns within chapters of the Mishnah. See “‘Not by Her Mouth Do we Live’: A Literary Anthropological Reading of Gender in Mishnah Ketubbot, Chapter 1,” Prooftexts 20, no. 1–2 (2000): 61–86; and “Priestly Men and Invisible Women: Male Appropriation of the Feminine and the Exemption of Women from Positive Time-Bound Commandments,” AJS Review 28, no. 2 (2004): 297–316.

9. The full dissertation title is “Halachah Lema‘aseh: Narrative and Legal Discourse in the Mishnah.” It was completed in 2005 at the University of Pennsylvania.

10. Alexander, Elizabeth Shanks, Transmitting Mishnah: The Shaping Influence of Oral Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 117–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Alexander, Transmitting Mishnah, 77–116.

12. See Lanham, Richard A, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)Google Scholar, 10. See also Walfish's discussion of the mishnaic display of this literary phenomenon: Walfish, “The Literary Method of Redaction,” 12, 343–51.

13. Ibid., 108–10.

14. Ibid., 118–49, esp. 127, 133, 146, 147–49.

15. Ibid., 337–432.

16. Ibid., 85–88.

17. Ibid., 89–92.

18. Ibid., 99–101.

19. Ibid., 21–23, 367–84.

20. Ibid., 8–9.

21. This tradition is exemplified in T. Sukkah 3:18; Sifrei Bamidbar, Pinḥas, pis. 150, to Numbers 29:35 (ed. Horowitz, p. 196; and Y. Ro'sh Hashanah 1:3 (57b).

22. This tradition is exemplified in Sifrei Bamidbar, Nas‘o, pis. 57, to Numbers 7:88 (ed. Horowitz, p. 55).

23. Walfish attributes this observation to G. Alon. See Walfish, “The Literary Method of Redaction,” 53–54.

24. Ibid., 55, 57–58, 67.

25. See Hauptman, Judith, Rereading the Mishnah: A New Approach to Ancient Jewish Texts (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006)Google Scholar; and Friedman, Shamma, Tosefta’ ‘Atikta: Masekhet Pesaḥ R'ishon (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

26. See the discussion in Hauptman, Rereading the Mishnah, 14–16.

27. Friedman, Shamma, “The Primacy of Tosefta to Mishna in Synoptic Parallels,” in Introducing Tosefta: Textual, Intratextual, and Intertextual Studies, ed. Meacham, Tirzah, Fox, Harry, and Kriger, Diane (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1999), 103–105Google Scholar.

28. Walfish, “The Literary Method of Redaction,” 367–84.

29. Rubenstein, Talmudic Stories, 15–26.

30. Ibid., 268–82.

31. Levine, Lee I., The Rabbinic Class of Roman Palestine in Late Antiquity (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Hezser, Catherine, The Social Structure of the Rabbinic Movement in Roman Palestine (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997)Google Scholar; and Schwartz, Seth, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E to 640 C.E. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 100–76Google Scholar.

32. Berkowitz, Beth A., Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Halberstam, Chaya, “Rabbinic Responsibility for Evil: Evidence and Uncertainty” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2004)Google Scholar; Rosen-Zvi, Ishay, “Tekes hasotah basifrut hatanna'it: ‘iyunnim textualiyim uteoretiyim” (PhD diss., Tel Aviv University, 2004)Google Scholar; and Peskowitz, Miriam B., Spinning Fantasies: Rabbis, Gender, and History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

33. Walfish sets forth this method of validating his literary readings in “The Literary Method of Redaction,” 9–10.

34. See initially Neusner, Jacob, The Modern Study of the Mishnah (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1973)Google Scholar, and then later, Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

35. See Rosen-Zvi, “Tekes hasotah basifrut hatanna'it,” who examines tannaitic representations of a ritual tied to the Temple; Berkowitz, Execution and Invention, who examines tannaitic representations of the death penalty; and Cohen, Shaye, “The Judean Legal Tradition and the Halakhah of the Mishnah,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, ed. Fonrobert, Charlotte Elisheva and Jaffee, Martin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 121–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who examines the areas of overlap between Second Temple and tannaitic laws concerning the Sabbath.

36. I would put the work of Moshe Simon-Shoshan, Avraham Walfish, and Natan Margalit into this category.