Name: Video 14 How Redactors Built a Talmudic Passage
Uploaded: 2016-04-18T04:17:28.527Z
Duration: 7 min 52 s

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You may have noticed by now that although some of

the statements in the Talmud are made by named Rabbis,

others are made anonymously without attribution to a particular speaker.

Who is this anonymous voice of the Talmud?

In the 20th century, scholars realized that the Talmud is not merely a historical

record of discussions exactly as they transpired in the study hall, but

actually underwent significant editing.

Evidence of this editing, also called redaction,

can be seen in the complex literary structuring of textual units,

which could not simply reflect an actual historical dialogue.

Scholars generally identify the anonymous voice of the Talmud known as the Stam or

the in pleural with the editor or editors of the Talmud.

The anonymous commentary of the Stam can frame discussions,

suggest potential responses to arguments, or

attempt to provide explanations of Aramaic statements.

The Stam has been characterized both as a harmonizer and

as a generator of arguments.

At times, the Stam seems to present potentially contradictory statements

as part of the same conceptual framework.

But the Stam also frequently arranges different opinions that

don't necessarily conflict as though they are a part of an explicit disagreement.

Or extends pre-existing arguments

by imagining how each party might have continued to respond to the other.

The Stam also plays an important role in a ranging pre-existing material

in the Talmud.

Scholars have discovered complex literary structures in the Talmud

that bear the imprint of a thoughtful editorial hand.

Whether complex or

not, the basic literary structure of the Talmud is known as a sugya.

Since scholars realized the extensive role played by the Stam in forming sugyot,

the plural of sugya, one important task for

academics has been reconstructing the way sugyot were created.

What were the original building blocks of the sugya,

such as and statements by earlier rabbis?

And how were they rearranged and edited,

to produce the passage as it appears in our version of the Talmud today?

This project is important not just to satisfy scholarly

curiosity about the history of a text but

to resolve other questions one might have about the text, as well.

For example, if a sugya appears to contain serious discrepancies or logical flaws,

sometimes the best way to explain these flaws or discrepancies is to see them as

the seams where editorial work did not do a perfect job of smoothing over

the links between the different textural pieces brought together in that sugya.

It can also be useful to understand that there can be multiple conflicting

aims within a passage.

For example, it could be that a statement by an taken

out of the context of the sugya clearly means one thing but

within the sugya has been framed as though it means something entirely different.

We saw something like this in a previous video in which statement likely was

produced to justify the rabbinic classic scenario of Edim Zomemim, while the Talmud

had used it to explain why certain false witnesses receive a punishment of lashes.

How do scholars reconstruct the creation of a sugya?

One method is simply a combination of careful and creative close reading,

looking for logical gaps, parallels in other parts of the Talmud and

other literary clues that could point to the direction of editorial work for

that passage.

However, scholars also have another tool at their disposal,

textual witnesses of the Talmud.

By textual witnesses, I mean manuscripts and early print editions of the Talmud.

The texts of these different prints and

handwritten copies of the Talmud are not identical.

Scholars can try to determine what may have been a late change by a redactor

based on these textual variations since the Talmud was not distributed in

written form until long after its oral redaction.

If a change made it into certain manuscripts but not others, or

if different manuscripts have significantly different versions of

a passage, that may indicate that it was a product of later editors.

Manuscripts, in particular, can also provide

scholars with more information about how our text came to look the way it does.

Talmud scholars, just like scholars of other medieval texts,

learn how to identify scribal errors.

These are changes that were not the result of an intentional editor but ones that

came about much later during the process of copying over manuscripts of the Talmud.

For example, a scribe might mistake two letters that look similar and

misspell a word.

A scribe might insert a word that appears to be missing from a sentence.

Or in a passage that repeats many of the same words or phrases,

a scribe might accidentally jump ahead to the wrong instance of that word but

leave out some of the material in between.

This particular scribal error is one of the most frequent in Talmud manuscripts

and is known as a homeoteleuton from the Greek meaning like ending.

Let's see what we can discover by looking at manuscripts of a sugya we've

already examined.

Besides the print edition,

we'll look at the three other textual witnesses of this passage.

Manuscripts are generally referred to by their full library call numbers.

For our purposes though, we will call them simply Munich, Venice and Herzog.

In order to compare manuscripts and

see where they differ, scholars will create a synopsis like this one

that enables them to see the text of each textual witness side by side.

We can see that although Herzog and

Venice contain this particular line, the Munich manuscript does not.

Why might that be?

This could be an instance of exactly the sort of scribal error I just mentioned,

a homeoteleuton.

The scribe who was copying down this manuscript wrote down the word Rava.

But instead of writing down the next word after Rava's name here,

his eyes skipped down the page and he wrote down the next word here instead.

It is interesting to note, however, that the passage

still makes just as much sense without the phrase that the Munich manuscript omits.

Could the objection by Rava, and

the corrected version of Rav Hamnuna's statement, have been a later

insertion that therefore was transmitted in some manuscripts, but not others?

The tools that scholars have developed to determine historical truth,

according to the greatest statistical likelihood,

say that this is unlikely, that this is just a case of mechanical scribal error.

In truth though, there is no way to know for

certain, and conjecture remains a possibility.

A prominent Talmud scholar,

Shamma Friedman, has observed that instability in the textual witnesses,

disagreement between the versions is often a good sign of a sticky point in the text.

Many of these sticky points involved the Stam's massaging of earlier materials

into a coherent sugya.

The editors of the Talmud did a masterful job building this edifice out of many and

varied prior materials.

When the corners do not properly line up correctly or

easily, the Stam sometimes had to work hard to fix it.

Sometimes the fix is not entirely up to the task and later scribes or

learners tried to patch the fix to make it stronger.

This is the activity we see in the textual witnesses and

that is why variation among the textual witnesses is

sometimes the best indicator of editorial activity.

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Video 14 How Redactors Built a Talmudic Passage

The Talmud: A Methodological Introduction

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