Wimpfheimer_ Is it not so.pdf

Toward a Poetics of Legal Narrative in the Talmud ❙ 85
69 There are six examples of the formula Iykhsif lesof igla¥i milta (He was ashamed; eventually
it was ascertained . . .) in the Babylonian Talmud: Gittin 29b and 77b; Bava
Metsi¦a 81a, 81b, and 97a; and ¦Avodah Zarah 22a. One of the cases (Bava Metsi¦a
81a) is the cognate of this story repeated with Rav Pappa, Rava's student, as the
hero. (The closeness of the two scholars determines that some Rava statements
should be attributed to Rav Pappa. The Talmud is itself aware of this on Bava
Kamma 67b). The other ®ve cases refer to Rava. This may suggest that the language
of Iykhsif is not terribly uncommon for Rava narratives.
Shamma Friedman, Perush, 273, claims that the Rav Pappa parallel to our passage on
Bava Metsi¦a 81a±b was formulated to re¯ect the story of Rava. In light of the
inconsistent legality of our passage and its relationship with the prior passage, we
can perhaps suggest the opposite. The story told in our passage is a retelling of
Rav Pappa's tale in a manner that creates a mirror e²ect between the two narratives,
as I will suggest below. The attribution of the passage to Rava is a literary
necessity, given the appearance of Rava in the previous narrative.
70 The traditional way of reading this story assumes that the undoing of Rava's shame is
a historical account of the courtroom proceedings (S. Friedman, Perush, 274
n. 42). I am suggesting that this undoing is a literary device that empowers the
anonymous narrator to resurrect the reputation of a distinguished scholar. Rather
than rewrite the original story, the narrator performs the process of encountering
the fallen scholar and resurrecting him. Despite the inclination to salvage Rava,
though, the narrator preserves the court-presented facts to maintain the drama of
Rava's shame. (¦Avodah Zarah 22a explicitly questions the historical veracity of a
similar legal shame narrative, and the redactor concludes that the shame incident
never occurred.)
71 From this point on, the ``narrator'' is a signi®cant player. I am distinguishing the narrator
here from the stam whom I identi®ed in the earlier passage. It is my
contention that the narrator in this story predates the stam because there is later
material in this section. In the ®rst narrative, the material until vela hi is entirely
the work of a narrator who is not the stam. The di²erence is that in the second
narrative it is the narrator who is responsible for Rava's ultimate salvation, while in
the ®rst narrative it is the stam who is responsible for his ultimate condemnation.
For an opinion that would turn the narrator into the stam see further n. 75.
72 There is a possibility that the narrator does not mis-narrate, but uses an ambiguous
term, ledaluyei, which was translated above as ``to load.'' Though this form of the
term always has the meaning we used in our translation, there is a form of the verb
that means ``to remove.'' Perhaps the narrator ®nds refuge in the ambiguity of language;
where originally we translated the term as ``to load,'' we must now translate
it as ``to remove.''