The Talmud (6 page)

The Jewish settlements in Babylon were located in an area bordered by the Rivers Euphrates and Tigris, the mythical site of the Garden of Eden. Genesis identifies one of the four rivers in that utopian land as the Euphrates and an ancient Bible tradition renders another as Tigris.
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The area forms part of the Fertile Crescent, which stretches north from the Persian Gulf, through Iraq to the southern border of Turkey, then turns to follow the Mediterranean coast across Syria, Lebanon and Israel to the Nile Delta and Valley.

The two Babylonian rivers were connected by a network of tributaries and canals. Water flowed in abundance. A statement by Rav in the Talmud suggests that the land was so well irrigated that even when the rains failed its harvests were secure.
23

The rivers played an important part in daily life. Dotted with towns along their length, the watercourses functioned as modern highways, transporting people and goods. Inundations could be sudden and unpredictable, rivers might
change their course, swallowing up agricultural land,
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there are even instances of barren fields becoming fertile through the sudden deposit of alluvial soils.
25
The Talmud discusses questions such as water disputes and the ownership of items washed up by floods.

Most people lived modest lives but owning a small amount of land, typically one or two fields, seems to have been quite common. When a couple married, the husband was obliged to make provision for his wife in the event of his death. The Talmud discusses how a widow is to collect her money in a case when her husband has made out his will in favour of his children from a previous marriage. The solution is for her to distrain upon the children’s landed property, but not upon their chattels. This could only work if most people owned land; the solution would have been pointless if they didn’t.

The ownership of the little land they had was not absolute. One of the two principal taxes that the Sassanian rulers levied on their subjects was the
taska
, a form of ground rent. When they paid the
taska
people effectively had the right of ownership of their land. If they did not pay they would be evicted.

Owning land doesn’t seem to have been a big deal in most people’s eyes. It appears to have been a completely natural state of affairs. We can see this in context if we compare the Talmud with the Roman law code, Justinian’s Digest or its Sassanian equivalent, the Book of a Thousand Judgements. Only two of the Talmud’s five hundred and thirty chapters deal with questions of land inheritance. The other works each devote more than a third of their content to the same
subject.
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Most people who lived off the land were smallholders or tenant farmers, mainly growing dates, grains and rice, or rearing sheep and goats. But even though they lived in the idealized land which gave rise to the myth of the Garden of Eden we shouldn’t picture a pastoral scene in which everyone tilled their own fields, with crops growing in abundance. Poverty seems to have been rife; ‘Ten measures of poverty descended into the world, nine of them were taken by Babylon’.
27

Still, despite the poverty it was possible to advance economically. Not everyone farmed a smallholding. The Talmud frequently introduces us to tanners, weavers,
tailors,
cobblers, blood letters and even camel drivers, although the latter seem to have been less prominent than in Israel; the camel which, in the gospels, cannot pass through the eye of a needle, is an elephant in the Babylonian Talmud’s
proverbs.
28

Not everyone was poor. Large estates were owned by families who had been settled in the area for generations, long before the tide of immigrants began to swell. The family of the exilarch owned tremendous estates, much of which they rented out to tenants. The trading city of Mahoza, situated on a caravan route on the Tigris, in the centre of the area of settlement, was fabled for its good living
29
and its wealth; it was rumoured that whilst in the whole city of Nehardea only twenty four women possessed a golden coronet, eighteen such owners could be found in a single alley in Mahoza.
30

Unlike their colleagues in Israel, who often eked out a living as workmen or artisans, many of the scholars in Babylon were of independent means, typically owning larger than average land holdings. Not having to worry too much about earning a living gave them the freedom to study, but it could also lead to divisions with working people. The rabbinic elite was only a small segment of the overall population.
31
Richard Kalmin argues that the Babylonian scholars, at least in the early part of the Talmudic period, were much more detached from the general population than their counterparts in Israel, who were integrated into the general community.
32
He puts this down to differences between Persian and Roman society, but wealth would have played a part as well. Kalmin suggests that Babylonian scholars were internally focused, avoiding contact and marriage with non-rabbinic Jews, and reluctant to admit them into the scholarly environment. He likens them to monks who ‘managed to be both dissociated from and part of the world, detached from society in certain contexts and capable of exercising a leadership role in others’.
33

But at least the rabbis seem to have been aware of their aloofness. In a discussion about why so few scholars produced children who became learned
men we find four different but equally revealing opinions. Rav Yosef said it was so that the scholarly classes could not claim to have a hereditary right to the Torah. Rav Shisha said it was so that scholars would not have an arrogant attitude towards the community. Mar Zutra said it was because they acted high-handedly against ordinary folk, whilst Rav Ashi said it was because they called people asses.
34

Standoffish they may have been but the Babylonian rabbis didn’t live in a cultural vacuum. They didn’t just study religion and law. Ancient Babylon was renowned for its mathematical and astronomical knowledge and its complex systems of magic and demonology. The Talmud is replete with passages on these subjects, from calculations of the size of the earth and the thickness of the sky
35
to legends about demons
36
and medicinal cures.
37
Although mention of mythical creatures can be found in many branches of ancient Jewish literature, the Babylonian Talmud, under the influence of the local culture, takes a particular interest in them.
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We also find formulae for spells and incantations in the Talmud, the wording of which is often similar to the inscriptions found on ‘magic bowls’, a uniquely Babylonian practice in which earthenware vessels inscribed with enchantments were placed in the earth to guard against demons. The similarity of language suggests that Jews were involved in the production of these bowls, perhaps for their own use, or because the local Persian population considered the Jews as particularly skilled in getting rid of demons.
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Zoroastrian superstitions also account for a passage in the Talmud which urges the burying of cut fingernails, or at very least burning them and not simply throwing them away. This must be avoided ‘lest a pregnant woman steps over them and miscarries’.
40

But spells and magic, astronomy and mathematics were probably light relief for the Babylonian rabbis. They were known as the ‘condiments of wisdom’,
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tasty appetisers but a bit of a luxury. The real hard work, the essential curriculum in the Babylonian academies, was the detailed analysis of the minutiae of the law. Everything else was simply icing on the cake.

Notes

1
Horayot 12a.

2
Jeremiah 29.5–7.

3
Deuteronomy 17.16, 28.68.

4
Lewin, 1921. Gafni, 1986 argues for the existence of some sort of chronological record that was available to Sherira but it seems clear that much of the historical narrative in the Letter is derived from Talmudic anecdotes and independent, unverifiable traditions.

5
J. Ketubot. 12.3, 35a.

6
Gafni, 2006.

7
Schwartz, 2007. Yaakov Ellman makes a similar point – ‘our data is restricted to the Bavli (=Babylonian Talmud) … and we are thus at the mercy of the redactors of that compilation and the rabbinic classes they represent’, Ellman, 2007b, p. 190.

8
Marcus, 1982.

9
Mélanges syriens offerts à monsieur René Dussaud: secrétaire perpétuel de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres
, Ernst F. Weidner, Geuthner, Paris, 1939, II.

10
See, for example, Bava Metzia 60a–b, 61b.

11
M. Rosh Hashanah 2.1–4.

12
Yoma 35b.

13
M. Yevamot 16.7.

14
The title Rabbi could only be conferred in Israel, and only by another rabbi. It represented a continuous chain of tradition stretching back to the time when Moses ordained Joshua as his successor by placing his hands on his head. Scholars outside Israel who could not be ordained were given the title Rav.

15
According to other documents from the ninth or tenth centuries;
Seder Tannaim V’Amoraim and Seder Olam Zuta
the first academies were not founded until after Rav’s death (Katz, 2006).

16
Rav Papa the Elder quoting Rav in Kiddushin 71b.

17
Nedarim 81a.

18
Jacobs, 1957.

19
E.g. Shabbat 45a, Gittin 16b–17a, Beitzah 6a,

20
Gafni, 2006.

21
Sukkah 53a, Avodah Zarah 76b, Moed Katan 26a.

22
Genesis 2.14, Targum Onkelos and Targum Pseudo Jonathan ibid.

23
Taanit 10a.

24
E.g. Gittin 41a.

25
E.g. Bava Batra 124a.

26
Ellman, 2007b.

27
Kiddushin 49b. Louis Jacobs points out that this
baraita
in the Talmud predates the Sassanian Empire and refers to the entire population, not just the Jewish community (Jacobs, 1957).

28
Berachot 55b: A man is shown in a dream only what is suggested by his own thoughts … Raba said: This is proved by the fact that a man is never shown in a dream a date palm of gold, or an elephant going through the eye of a needle.

Bava Metzia 38b: ‘Perhaps you are from Pumbeditha’ he retorted, ‘where they draw an elephant through the eye of a needle.’

29
Taanit 26a, Shabbat 109a.

30
Shabbat 59b.

31
Gafni, 2006.

32
Kalmin, 2006a.

33
Kalmin, 2006a, p. 9.

34
Nedarim 81a.

35
E.g. Pesachim 94a–94b.

36
E.g. Gittin 68a–68b.

37
E.g. Shabbat 108b–111b.

38
E.g. this passage in Berachot 6a: Abba Benjamin says, If the eye had the power to see them, no creature could endure the demons. Abaye says: They are more numerous than we are and they surround us like the ridge round a field. R. Huna says: Every one among us has a thousand on his left hand and ten thousand on his right hand. Raba says: The crushing in the Kallah lectures comes from them. Fatigue in the knees comes from them. The wearing out of the clothes of the scholars is due to their rubbing against them. The bruising of the feet comes from them. If one wants to discover them, let him take sifted ashes and sprinkle around his bed, and in the morning he will see something like the footprints of a cock. If one wishes to see them, let him take the after-birth of a black she-cat, the offspring of a black she-cat, the first-born of a first-born, let him roast it in fire and grind it to powder, and then let him put some into his eye, and he will see them. Let him also pour it into an iron tube and seal it with an iron signet that they should not steal it from him. Let him also close his mouth, lest he come to harm. R. Bibi b. Abaye did so, saw them and came to harm. The scholars, however, prayed for him and he recovered.

39
Gafni, 2006.

40
Moed Katan 18a, Daiches contends that the root of this custom (and also that of looking at one’s nails at the close of the Sabbath) derive from an ancient Babylonian practice of ‘thumb nail magic’ by which the future could be divined through the reflections of spirits which appear when gazing into in the thumb nail (Daiches, 1913).

41
Mishnah Avot 3.23.

4

The compilation of the Talmud

Rabbi Tarfon said, The day is short and there is much work, the workman are lazy but the wages are high, and the master of the house is pressing.
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The academies in Babylon

The starting point for every discussion in the Babylonian academies was the Mishnah, a structured work which is arranged systematically under six main headings, each one containing many sub categories. But we can assume that the discussions in the academies rarely remained on topic; it is highly likely that they would digress, often wildly. To appreciate this we can think of a class of school students discussing, let’s say,
A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream
with an enlightened teacher. On the face of it the task of the class is to analyse the text in front of them, but their observations might easily become a launching pad for discussions about love, fairy lore, theatre, ancient society, magical potions, loss of personal identity and much else. The play itself would simply be the place they started.

We find a similar thing happening over and again in the Talmud. There is a passage in the Mishnah that deals with the water-drawing ceremony in the Temple, a spectacular public ceremony during the Tabernacles festival.
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The Talmud starts its discussion of this subject logically enough with a description of the Temple where the ceremony took place, but then rapidly digresses into an excursion which surveys a basilica synagogue in Alexandria, discusses the
Messiah, considers the nature of evil, strong men and demonology, before turning to juggling, world peace and the physical depth of the earth.
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However, unlike our fictional classroom discussion on
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, the four densely printed pages of Talmudic text which discuss the water-drawing ceremony do not record the deliberations of a single academy session. The printed discussion didn’t even take place in a single generation or in one location. It contains contributions from people who lived a century or more apart, who taught in different academies, even in different countries; the lands of Babylon and Israel. This is because the Talmud is a literary construction in which debates, opinions, proofs and rulings that took place over nearly three hundred years are woven together by later editors into a coherent whole.
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And we can assume that the individual discussions in the academy were equally varied in their scope because, if they had been rigidly focused on a single subject, it is highly unlikely that their structure would have been broken up and recorded for posterity in such a wide-ranging and discursive manner.

The formal sessions in an academy, or
yeshiva,
took place in a large hall. The head of the academy would sit at the front, on a pile of cushions or a settle and the students would sit in rows in front of him. The number of rows wasn’t fixed; in one place we read of an academy with seventeen rows
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but the preferred number seems to have been seven, with ten people in each; mirroring the numbers and seating pattern in the ancient Sanhedrin.
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As we have already seen, the Vineyard at Yavneh may have been called that because the scholars sat there in rows, like vines.

The term students is a little misleading because many of the participants in the
yeshiva
sessions were distinguished scholars in their own right, even if they were subordinate to the head of the academy. The most senior scholars would sit in the front row, the younger participants to the rear. As students progressed in their studies they would gradually be brought towards the front. It was a bit like the arrangement in old schoolrooms where pupils sat at the front, middle or back of the class depending on their ability.

The academy head would have a memory man alongside him. Known as a
tanna
he was a scholar who could be called on at any moment to recite a passage
by heart, usually from the Mishnah but occasionally from the
Tosefta
which, as we saw earlier, Rabbi Hiyya had compiled out of material which hadn’t been included in the Mishnah. The
tanna’s
prodigious memory also contained a mental database of biblical commentaries dating from the same, early period. All this material, which was not in the Mishnah but had emanated from the same schools, was known as
baraita
, which means ‘external’.

The passages that the
tanna
would be asked to search his memory for played a central part in the argument that the academy head was presenting and the
tanna
was the closest he could get in the ancient world to having a database of references at his fingertips.

In a large gathering the head of the
yeshiva
would also have someone, known as an
amora
, who acted as his mouthpiece, declaiming his words loudly so that everyone could hear. The terminology is confusing because the scholars of the Talmudic period are also known as
amoraim
. A similar confusion exists with the term
tanna
which refers both to rabbis of the Mishnaic period as well as to memory men of the Talmudic era.

The participants in each session would have prepared the material to be discussed in advance. Frequently the head of the academy would be challenged by one of the students and a debate would ensue in which the protagonists would make their points either by logic, by appeal to a biblical verse or by calling upon the
tanna
to recite a passage from the earlier literature that they hoped would clinch the argument for them.

These study sessions weren’t always as dry and formal as they sound. A weird account in the Talmud tells the story of Rav Kahana, an experienced Babylonian scholar who had been forced to flee from the Sassanian authorities after taking it into his own hands to impose the death penalty on an informer. His teacher, Rav, advised him to go to Israel, to Rabbi Yohanan’s academy in Tiberias. Rav counselled him to keep his head down and not challenge Yohanan’s authority. Unfortunately Kahana found it difficult to blend into the background. The first time he attended a session he kept raising objections to assertions that Yohanan made. Yohanan, as befitting the head of the academy was sitting at the front, on seven cushions. Every time Kahana scored a point against him in the debate, a cushion was pulled from under Yohanan, until eventually he was sitting on the ground. At this point Yohanan was so enraged that he pronounced a curse upon Kahana, who dropped dead. Some days later Yohanan, full of remorse, went to Kahana’s tomb. It was guarded by a snake, Yohanan had to pronounce three separate charms on the animal before he could enter. Once inside Yohanan
sought Kahana’s forgiveness and prayed that he would be brought back to life. His unfortunate victim only agreed to be revived on condition that Yohanan promised that the same thing would not happen again should Kahana happen to best him in a future debate.
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This odd story has been subjected to considerable analysis by both ancient and modern scholars. Nobody argues that we should take it literally and several academics have argued that it is in fact a polemic which weaves together Persian motifs and stories from different periods including a boast about the superiority of the Babylonian scholars over those in Israel.
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But it needn’t be as complicated as this. Babylon was a place of mystery and magic; it could just have been a story that was told and retold, because people believed it was true.

Twice a year, the academies would put on a major, public event. During the months preceding the spring and autumn harvests, when there was little else to do but wait for the crops to grow, hundreds of teachers, lay scholars and graduates of other
yeshivot
would leave their homes and travel to their nearest academy. These month-long study sessions, known as
kallah,
were carefully orchestrated; everyone knew what subject was to be studied and should have spent the weeks since the previous session memorizing the material and coming to grips with its meaning.

As the years passed the discussions held by one generation of scholars would become material to be studied by the next. In the time of Rav and Shmuel, the only material available to be studied was the Mishnah, and other works dating from the same period. Succeeding generations would have included Rav and Shmuel’s analyses in their curriculum, and their discussions would in turn be pulled apart in due course by succeeding cohorts.

The style of material changed from one generation to another. David Weiss Halivni points out that the earliest teachings were not unlike the terse style of the Mishnah, laying down absolute rulings on the law. As time elapsed and the quantity of material grew, the later Babylonian
amoraim
grew more interested in why, rather than what; they wanted to know the rationale that lay behind those rulings.
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They were rigidly logical in their analysis, they had no patience with incoherent thinking. When Rav Nahman, who lived half a century after Rav and Shmuel, heard a ruling from the Mishnah that a guarantor for a loan
cannot be forced to pay up, it made no sense to him; if that was the case, what would have been the point of guaranteeing the loan? He complained that it was ‘like a law of the Persians who don’t give reasons for their decisions’.
10
As Weiss Halivni puts it, the Talmud prefers law that is ‘expressly reasonable, that seeks to win the hearts of those to whom the laws are addressed’.
11

But the Talmud knows that that not everyone cares about reasons, they just want to know how to act. We find a similar conflict amongst the Greeks. In response to Plato’s argument that laws had to be explained so that they wouldn’t just be ‘brusque injunctions’
12
Seneca had responded ‘Tell me what I have to do. I do not want to learn. I want to obey’
13
. The Talmud gives its version of this dilemma in a story about the Israelites at Mount Sinai. When Moses tells them that they are to receive the Ten Commandments they say, ‘We will do and we will listen’.
14
This means, says the Talmud, that they pledged their obedience even before they understood what was involved. As a reward for their trusting loyalty, six hundred thousand angels descended from heaven and gave them each two crowns, one for their promise to do and the other for their promise to listen. A few weeks later, when Moses had failed to return from the mountain top on the day they expected him, they assumed he was dead. They lost their faith in God and made themselves a Golden Calf. And when Moses did return and found that their reasoning had got the better of their loyalty, twice as many angels came down and took the crowns away.
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Words and deeds

People might have thought them aloof, and they probably were detached from mainstream society, but the heads of the academies and their leading students didn’t spend their whole lives in ivory towers. They were called upon to intercede in local disputes and some were appointed by the exilarchs as judges for their town.

Of course the Sassanian authorities were the ultimate arbiters of the law and there was always the possibility that the demands of the Empire might come into conflict with the Oral Law. To keep such differences to a minimum Shmuel introduced a landmark ruling known as
dina malchuta dina
, that in all areas of civil and monetary law, the law of the state is the law. This applied in every arena of life other than religious law; if Jewish civil law came into conflict with Sassanian law, Sassanian law prevailed. Minorities throughout history with their own customs and traditions have established similar principles; it is a necessary pre-condition for preserving cultural identity and a degree of autonomy.

The rabbinic courts heard cases on matters of religious and family law and adjudicated in disputes, usually concerning land, money or contracts. They had the power to levy fines, to act as legal guardians for orphans, to rule on ownership of disputed items and to dispose of expropriated property. They also had the power to ostracize or excommunicate offenders although this was an extreme sanction, rarely applied. But although biblical law permitted capital punishment in certain cases, the rabbinic courts did not have this power. Not out of deference to Sassanian jurisprudence but because according to Jewish religious law the sanction to condemn someone to death was only available to the Sanhedrin when the Temple stood.

Despite their twin roles as judges and interpreters of the Oral Law, the scholars in the academy rarely saw themselves as law makers. As we have seen, academic debate focused on the arguments underpinning the law, but the scholars weren’t much bothered about its practical application.
16
Indeed this disconnect between theory and practice is stated clearly in the Jerusalem Talmud in Shmuel’s name; practical laws can’t be learnt from the outcome of debates in the academy.
17
If anything, the reverse was true; the practical law was established by the way the judges acted.

On one occasion Rav Assi, a Babylonian scholar who’d gone to study in Rabbi Yohanan’s academy in Israel, heard a
tanna
recite. ‘The law may not be derived from a theoretical conclusion unless one has been told that it is to be taken as a rule for practical decisions.’ So Assi asked his teacher, ‘When you tell us that
something is the law, may we act on it accordingly?’ ‘No,’ replied Yohanan, ‘you cannot, unless I say that it is a law that can be acted upon.’
18

On the other hand a ruling by a court can be used to support a theoretical argument. In a discussion about how much space there needs to be between a group of trees for their purchaser to also automatically acquire the land they stand on, one rabbi builds a case by quoting from the Mishnah. His colleague overrules him by citing a court decision. ‘But the outcome is the same’, complains the first rabbi. ‘Yes,’ comes the answer, ‘but a real life example is preferable.’
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