Collapsing Structures: Discourse and the Destruction of the Temple in the Babylonian Talmud

The paper suggests that by paying attention to discursive dynamics of word-image play rather than to it to overt thematic appearances in rabbinic texts - the intricate imprints of the destruction of the temple can be better appreciated. The first part of the paper focuses on the analogies of houses and ruined structures as they operate in one given sugya in bKet 61b-63a. Women as houses, houses of study and “the” house constitute a semantic network in the sugya, which is in turn associated with two anecdotes of sages facing collapsing structures (houses). The second part relates these anecdotes to a recognized trope which appears elsewhere (most notably in bTa'an 20b-21a). Finally, the analogy between collapsing structures and the destruction of the temple is shown to appear explicitly in two other narratives in the Babylonian Talmud (bBer 58b, bBer 3a).

The paper argues that informed by the destruction of the temple as a paradigmatic discursive event, rabbinic Babylonian discourse, and through that rabbinic identity, embodies that event, reproducing the image of the ruined house as a complex, multi-faceted and generative model in its discursive practices. In the Babylonian rabbinic discourse it serves as a meta-discursive marker that both binds and disrupts an array of analogically constituted cultural domains. The linguistic representation of a ruined structure - the temple - constitutes a discursive evocation of both presence and absence.