Between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds: Accounting for Halakhic Difference in Selected Sugyot from Tractate Avodah Zarah (review)

Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 362 Reviews certainly lies in the mental gymnastics necessary to conjecture what the Rabbis are arguing about and how they carried on these arguments. Neusner in subsequent works to this one has involved himself with the theology and substance of talmudic discourse and left his earlier works to sing the praises of the Talmud for all time. Just how far one can justifiably draw comparisons between works of rational analysis which are rooted in disparate cultures remains an open question. Tabnud is a religious work involved in the processing of unassailable revelations and authoritative teachings in the light of equally legitimate received oral tradition, folk-lore and cultural practices. Classical philosophy would analyze the traits of nature and ethics from the viewpoint of observed and universally accepted axioms of the West. H there can be any useful comparisons, they most certainly lie in the idiom and rhetoric of specific debates, tight relationships (if any) which Neusner has glossed over. Neusner is not interested in finding rigorous correspondences or any type of fine comparisons ~tween Rabbis and philosophers. The value of the book lies in Neusner's enthusiasm to express the sense of awe at the perfection of talmudic argument as he would understand it. By its very nature talmudic argument does not translate well into modem idiom. The book should be read as an exercise in delving into the unique mindset of one who wants to pioneer new ways to gain a hearing for Talmud in the annals of Westem intellectual history. The book is well written and has a certain charm in its cogent progression to one very simple thesis: the Babylonian Talmud deserves to be recognized alongside the greatest classics of the West, and its heroes have a right to be seen as philosophers in their own right and masters of their own modes of analytic argumentation. Reena Zeidman Queen's University Kingston, Ontario, Canada rzl@post.queensu.ca BETWEEN THE BABYLONIAN AND PALESTINIAN TALMUDS: ACCOUNTING FOR HALAKHIC DIFFERENCE IN SELECTED SUGYOT FROM TRACTATE AVODAH ZARAH. By Christine Elizabeth Hayes. Pp. xvii + 270. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997. Cloth, $49.95. This is a book whose title says most of it. Hayes frames her book as an argument against two types of reductionist understandings of some halakhic differences between the Bavli's and Yerushalmi's discussions of idolatry in Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 363 Reviews the tractate Avodah Zarah. Her primary argument is with the "external or historical approach" which "presupposes the capacity of this material to yield historical information in a relatively transparent manner" (p. 8, original emphasis). On the other side are those who remove the Talmuds from history, treating them as "purely independent and ideologically driven discussions superimposed upon the Mishnah" (p. 7). She instead seeks to fmd the middle ground, an approach "which recognizes the important role of the editors in the transformation of earlier source materials yet maintains the possibility of identifying and analyzing in historical terms some of the sources that comprise rabbinic texts" (p. 11). The book has three parts. Part 1, which contains one long chapter entitled "Textual Causes:' advances five reasons for long-noted divergence between the Yerushalmi"s and Bavli's texts of the Mishnah on Avodah Zarah. Part TI, which explains halakhic differences as the result of internal hermeneutical causes, is the heart of the book. Chapter 2 argues that ambiguities (of many different types) in the Mishnah frequently generated different halakhic understandings. Chapter 3 demonstrates that the Bavli's "rigorous pursual" of a theory of verbal economy-an assumption that the language of the halakhic traditions conveys "the maximum information in the minimum terms" (p. 93)-generates different kinds of halakhic differences . In Chapter 4, Hayes identifies "dialectical strategies of interpretation and redaction" as a third hermeneutical cause of halakhic difference. Both Talmuds read different, sometimes seemingly unrelated, tannaitic texts against each other, but such readings occur more frequently in the Bavli. "The greater frequency and complexity of textual juxtapositions in the Bavli can lead to halakhic difference between the Talmuds, for the faster and more furious the co-citation of texts, the faster and more furious the generation of...