Stories of the Law: Narrative Discourse and the Constr uction of Authority in the Mishnah by Moshe Simon-Shoshan (review)

Moshe Simon-Shoshan's Stories of the Law: Narrative Discourse and the Construction of Authority in the Mishnah is a rich, innovative and thoughtful book. In a wonderful and rare blend of theoretical sophistication, nuanced textual readings, and philological sensitivity, Simon-Shoshan creates a new lens through which to read the Mishnah, a lens which seeks to reveal the underlying jurisprudential presuppositions of the Mishnah via the analysis of its narrativity.

Stories of the Law is divided into two parts. Part 1 opens in chapter 2 with Simon-Shoshan's definition of narrativity. According to Simon-Shoshan, narrativity refers to two textual attributes: the dynamic portrayal of change in a text and the reference in a text to a specific time, place, event, individual or object. His definition of narrativity rejects the traditional dichotomy between law and narrative (and, similarly, that between halakhah and aggadah) since, according to his definition, all texts exist on a narrativity spectrum where a text's measure of narrativity is determined by the number and prominence of its narrative attributes. Through the lens of narrativity, Simon-Shoshan proposes a new approach to the study of legal stories and legal texts more generally.

In chapter 3, Simon-Shoshan presents a nonexhaustive typology of the numerous forms of narrativity in the Mishnah. From low-level narrative literary forms such as apodictic statements and speech acts to full-fledged stories, such as case stories and exempla, Simon-Shoshan surveys a wide range of literary forms on the narrativity continuum. Then, in chapter 4, he illustrates how his typology enables one to map out the narrative topography of the Mishnah, that is, he demonstrates how his classifications can be used to separate the flowing Mishnaic text into distinct strata defined by their measure of narrativity. In chapter 5, Simon-Shoshan goes on to contextualize the Mishnah's narrative topography, arguing that, as a whole, the Mishnah embodies a relatively high level of narrativity that is in line with that of roughly contemporary Roman legal traditions and far greater than that of biblical, Qumranic, or Near Eastern legal texts.

A narrative theorist might be interested in the narrative topography of the Mishnah for its own sake or, perhaps, for stylistic or aesthetic reasons, but Simon-Shoshan has a different goal. For him, the ultimate object of mishnaic study is the meanings we can elicit from the text, and therefore he seeks to show in chapter 4 how Mishnaic topography can enrich our readings of the Mishnah. In order accomplish this goal, Simon-Shoshan posits the idea that "the varying degrees of narrativity in the Mishnah reflect the Mishnah's rhetorical and ideological complexities." This assumption rests on a Bakhtinian literary approach which seeks to delineate the distinct voices or "dialects" of a text and avers that each dialect reflects a different worldview. For Simon-Shoshan, the different levels of narrativity in the Mishnah are akin to Bakhtin's dialects and reflect distinct and contrasting worldviews. In other words, he suggests that the Mishnah "presents an open ended dialog between a series of different forms" (of varying degrees of narrativity) "and the worldviews they represent."

What distinct worldviews are reflected in the various literary forms outlined in chapter 3? Simon-Shoshan suggests in chapter 4 that narrative legal texts lean towards a narrative conception of the law and narrative theory of jurisprudence, while apodictic legal texts favor an apodictic approach to the law and apodictic theory of jurisprudence. "Apodictic views of law see law as a 'thing,' a body of norms that exist independently of any individual or community. In such a system a judge is 'an authority' . . . In contrast, a narrative view of law see(s) law more as an 'activity,' which has no existence outside of the individuals and communities that practice it . . . In this view, a judge is not 'an...