While scholarship over recent decades has complicated the traditional classification of the Bavlis texts into the field has still maintained a model of two separate, though fundamentally interrelated, discourses. According to this model, the Bavli consists of a normative, non-narrative, legal discourse alongside an antinomian, narrativized discourse of stories. Through close readings of passages that address legal topics, this dissertation complicates that model by revealing the narrative elements that are inherent in even what might seem like the most technical legal sugyot (passages). This insight, along with a historical contextualization of the Bavlias shift towards increased narrativity during the rise of scholastic academies in Sassanian Persia, reveals new insights into the nature of the Bavliâs legal texts and of the Rabbinic legal project more broadly.', 'The three chapters of the dissertation demonstrate that legal sugyot exhibit specific literary elements: plot; characterization; and a complex engagement with narration, including the use of unreliable narrators. Close readings of these passages show that narrative elements at times dictate the focus of sugyot more than legal concerns do. In fact, this narrative drive comes to take precedence over legal aims such as the solution of logical problems or the production of useable rules.', 'The dissertation also reveals a correspondence between increased narrativity and increased redactorial activity. Scholars have argued that much of the Bavli’s redaction occurred contemporaneously with the growth of scholastic culture, and have also demonstrated a connection between scholasticism and narrativity in both exegetical and lengthy narrative passages. The increasingly narrativized nature of the Bavlias legal texts must likewise be situated in the context of the rise of scholasticism.', 'This dissertation suggests that the increased narrative richness of the Bavlias legal passages helped to create a new kind of interpretive community, inviting the readers engagement with legal concepts through the creation of compelling imaginary worlds, as well as encouraging the readers identification with the characters of the rabbis whose legal discussions are dramatized. The legal passages heightened narrativity is thus shown to be an essential component of the formation of a robust text-centered community of Rabbinic Jews.

Last modified

• 11/19/2019

Creator

• Sarah Wolf

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-pmcw-zg39

Subject

• Religious Studies

Keyword

• Rabbinics
• Scholasticism
• Talmud
• law and Literature
• Late Antiquity

Date created

• 2018-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright