Wimpfheimer_ Is it not so.pdf

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``But It Is Not So'': Toward a Poetics
of Legal Narrative in the Talmud
BARRY WIMPFHEIMER
❙ 51
The past two decades have witnessed an increased interest in talmudic
narrative. Beginning with the seminal work of Yonah Fraenkel, Talmudists
®rst set out to analyze talmudic stories in relation to such literary features as
stylistic and structural patterns as well as with regard to their special force as
narratives communicating the religious and existential struggles of the Rabbis.¹ The
increasingly sophisticated methods of source criticism developed by David Weiss
Halivni and Shamma Friedman have been applied in turn by scholars such as
Friedman and Je²rey Rubenstein to various narratives in order to identify their
di²erent layers (as well as the di²erences between parallels in the Bavli and
Yerushalmi) and to use these layers as guides to their meaning.² Daniel Boyarin has
combined these techniques with various post-structuralist and postmodernist
hermeneutical approaches in order both to provide historical context for literary
readings, and to use rabbinic narratives as the stu² out of which to write cultural
history.³
If one thing uni®es all of these prior studies, it is their focus on rabbinic nonlegal
narrativesÐthose that are usually categorized as aggadah. By turning to focus
on narratives categorized as halakhah, I aim to engage a central dynamic of talmudic
discourse, namely, the interplay of law and literature.
In the space of an article, it is impossible to construct a poetics of talmudic
narrative or even to de®ne fully the character of what I will call ``legal narratives.''
What I want to do is concentrate upon two such narratives and their use of one
PROOFTEXTS 24 (2004): 51±86. Copyright © 2004 by Prooftexts Ltd.