Review of Shoshan, Stories of the Law

H-JUDAIC BOOK REVIEW:

Moshe Simon-Shoshan. Stories of the Law: Narrative Discourse and the Construction of Authority in the Mishnah. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. xv + 287 pp. $74.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-977373-2.

Reviewed by Jordan Rosenblum (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
Published on H-Judaic (January, 2013)
Commissioned by Jason Kalman

Telling Tales and Making Law

In recent years, scholars have begun to question the traditional binary between halakhah and aggadah, that is, between texts that investigate legal matters (halakhah) and everything else, especially stories (aggadah). This reassessment has done more than just remove aggadah from the bookshelf, where it traditionally sat due to the relative importance of halakhah in traditional Judaism (one is reminded of the many yeshivot where rabbis would instruct their students to skip a Talmud page since it is “just” aggadah). Beyond raising the status of the academic study of aggadah, this trend has also resulted in the blurring of the lines between these categories. For example, though the famous story of the Oven of Akhnai (b. Bava Metzi‘ah 59a-b) begins with a matter of halakhah regarding the purity of an oven, it quickly transitions to a fascinating and complex story of rabbinic authority and proper decorum.

[...]