Introduction Contemporary books are familiar. A patron selecting a recently published volume in a bookstore instantly knows its kind. Bright cover colors and cheap construction indicate a beach or plane read. Footnotes and endnotes announce scholarly work. My three-year-old son identifies his books by their glossy dust jackets and large illustrations. The familiarity of contemporary books derives from one''s experience of similar ones. Today''s books classify themselves. Classification is helpful for library cataloging or gift purchasing alike; it is also important in directing readers toward particular ways of reading.

One does not expect scholarly conclusions from a children''s picture book or entertainment from a dry academic tome. One knows to compare a John Grisham book to its oeuvre and not to a Toni Morrison novel. The familiarity of contemporary books often masks the importance of a reader''s assumptions in approaching a work of literature. The Babylonian Talmud (henceforth Talmud), by contrast, is quite unfamiliar. From its composition in two ancient languages--Hebrew and Aramaic--to the way it floats from topic to topic without much justification to its equal interest in theology, ethics, magic, law, medicine, history, and biblical interpretation, the Talmud is an unusual text. Though it is a religious text, it rarely feels particularly spiritual. Often described as a commentary, the Talmud is unlike other commentaries in its easy distraction from the commentarial task. Were there not two of them--the Palestinian (or Jerusalem [Yerushalmi]) and Babylonian (Bavli)--one could say that the Talmud is sui generis .

The existence of two Talmuds marks neither as familiar. One might have expected that the Talmud--as an unusual text--would languish unread on a musty library bookshelf or have a small group of devotees. But the Talmud has been one of the best read works of all world literature. Since coming into being, the Talmud has been the proving ground of the rabbinic elite, who rigorously analyze its every word with monastic devotion. The magnetic pull of this text has remained strong enough that all contemporary denominations of Judaism expend significant resources learning and teaching it. Even as the Talmud has been well studied for more than a millennium, its readers have generally pursued a cherry-picking approach that allows them to focus on small passages, ignoring those that are irrelevant for the respective reader''s concern. In this way, readers do not need a full set of assumptions about the way the Talmud works as a whole. This explains how the Talmud is both the primary source of elaborations on biblical narrative cited in synagogue sermons and the forum for discussing pressing matters of Jewish law.

The foremost division of the Talmud into usable smaller parts is the dichotomy of Halakhah (law) and Aggadah (everything nonlegal), a binary that explains how the Talmud is father both to Maimonides'' Mishneh Torah and to the literature of Sholem Aleichem and H. N. Bialik. This book teaches how to read the Talmud, not by detailing the mechanics of talmudic logic, but by describing how the Talmud functions as a work of literature. At its most basic structural level, the Talmud is a commentary on the Mishnah, a second-century code of Jewish law. It is misleading to call the Talmud a commentary since talmudic passages are only loosely predicated upon individual Mishnaic statutes. The smallest literary units of the Talmud, known as sugyot (plural of sugya ), present themselves to the reader as literary versions of recorded rabbinic conversation. The sense that the Talmud is a rabbinic conversational archive is furthered by the Talmud''s practice of attributing assertions, rationales, stories, and other parts of talmudic discourse to named rabbis in a manner that puts elements of the text in dialogue with one another.

The attributions give the Talmud the feel of a screenplay; one could stage a passage of Talmud by distributing different rabbinic parts. This book attempts to describe the Talmud by targeting a small subset of its writing--talmudic legal stories. Though only a small subset of talmudic text, talmudic legal stories are perfectly situated to represent the entirety of the Talmud for these comprise some of the messiest bits of an already untidy work of literature. The combination of their story form and legal content makes it difficult to catalog talmudic legal narratives within the division of Halakhah (law) and Aggadah (non-legal material). This book argues for a mode of reading that refuses to resolve the Talmud''s incongruities by division. Rather, the book suggests that the untidiness of talmudic legal narratives--and the Talmud as a whole--mimics the messiness of life itself. By introducing a way to read the Talmud that embraces such complexity, this book produces rich readings of rabbinic literature and history and invites readers to meaningfully connect rabbinic lives with their own. In the millennium since its composition, the Talmud has come to occupy a central position as the canonical text of Jewish law.

All discussions of Jewish law, whether theoretical or practical, are conducted within a rubric that begins in the Talmud. Even though codes like the twelfth-century Mishneh Torah or the sixteenth-century Shulhan Arukh are often the public address of Jewish law, their statutes remain in force only inasmuch as these reflect compelling readings of the Talmud; innovations within Jewish law are executed through a process of return to the canonical Talmud and its rabbinic conversation. The heretofore dominant mode of studying talmudic law privileges the statute as a genre of writing. While this is clearest within the work of those talmudic readers who produce legal codes, it is true of other talmudic commentators who signal their privilege by evaluating all legal texts on the basis of their ability to cohere with one another. This privilege is evident in the attempt, ubiquitous within both the Talmud and its commentarial literature, to challenge all legal texts that appear incoherent because their statutory content is in conflict with other such texts. As a result of the privileging of code and statute, talmudic legal narratives are regularly misread by traditional and critical readers. In the course of producing statutory coherence, the dominant mode of reading (sometimes already within the Talmud itself) forces legal narratives into statutory form and suppresses that part of the narrative that is inexpressible in statutory form. The transformation of narrative into statute erases some of narrative''s distinguishing features--such as temporality, plurality, and affect.

In addition to these seemingly ancillary erasures, the dominant mode of talmudic reading must often work to suppress the basic legal message of a talmudic legal narrative because the very dramatic twist that makes a story interesting is often inconsistent with the cultural expectations preserved in normative statutes. This book both encourages and models a new way of reading talmudic legal narratives. Rather than working within an understanding of law as a statute book to which legal narratives must conform, this book uses the opportunity of legal narrative to reimagine law. Law is a cultural discourse or a language through which a culture makes meaning. The two primary advantages to defining law as discourse are escaping the sense that law is synonymous with prescription and recognizing the ways in which law works alongside other discourses both to control behavior and to constitute cultural meaning. In framing law as discourse, this work resists the tendency (common among practitioners and theorists in Jewish and other legal contexts) to presume the dominance of legal norms. The notion of law as discourse is one that emerges if we use legal narratives to represent law. It makes sense, then, to follow the narrative''s own construction of law as discourse in order to create the framework of reading.

The new reading practice described and implemented in this volume enables a novel understanding of talmudic law as a site for cultural investigation. This work is in conversation with a small cadre of legal scholars (working in American and European law) who resist the temptation to work within law as an operative practice and instead explore law as a locus of cultural meaning. Law is thus a field of the humanities rather than the arm of the state. This is not to say that this book shies away from treating law as a mechanism for control and social discipline. On the contrary, this volume targets rabbinic power at the levels of the depicted characters, the depicting authors, and the interpreting readers. The book uses talmudic legal narratives as a location to examine rabbinic power within the multiple discourses of culture, appreciating both the legal and nonlegal discourses through which such power is constituted and negotiated. It is in this vein that, though this volume makes little attempt to intervene in contemporary Jewish law, its argument is relevant for that practice. By focusing on legal narrative to put Jewish law in conversation with other cultural discourses, this book highlights the choices halakhic interpreters have made and continue to make while hinting at ways in which contemporary halakhic thinkers could reimagine the relationship between Halakhah and evolving contemporary mores.

Talmudic legal narratives are themselves part of the talmudic legal discourse that has structured a millennium of Jewish law. In seeking to revisit these texts and resist the dominant hermeneutics of that legal discourse, this volume subverts from within, calling attention to the ways authoritative texts are sometimes marginalized through interpretation. This effort is akin to attempts within American legal scholarsh.