From Tiberias to Meḥoza: Redactorial and Editorial Processes in Amoraic Babylonia

Abstract

The literary history of amoraic material-its formulation, editing, and transmission from one amoraic academy to the other-is a central issue in talmudic research. These processes are highlighted in amoraic dialogue segments, which are generally longer and more involved than apodictic material. Amoraic dialogue material from the Land of Israel as presented in the Babylonian Talmud constitutes the best sample for study of these editorial phenomena, since their inclusion in the Babylonian corpus required special editorial processes. The Bavli contains thirty-three sugyot of disputation dialogue between R. Yoḥanan ben Nafḥa and R. Shimʿon b. Laqish, set in the format of [inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="01i" /] which form the single largest body of amoraic dialogue material from the Land of Israel in the Babylonian Talmud. Clearly, these segments have been edited for inclusion in the Bavli, since the editorial terminology [inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="02i" /] is Babylonian Aramaic. Previous scholarly research has pointed to a special relationship between the teachings of R. Yoḥanan and the Amoraim of Meḥoza, especially Rava bar Yosef bar Ḥama. In this article, the author studies the Babylonian editing of the R. Yoḥanan-R. Shimʿon b. Laqish dialogue segments in the [inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="03i" /] format in light of their parallels in the Yerushalmi, and identifies Rava and his fourth and fifth generation colleagues in Meḥoza as the primary editors, to whom the terminology [inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="04i" /] can be attributed