Love and Law: The Dialogical Nature of Talmudic Legal Narrative

Abstract

This paper argues that talmudic legal narrative, as a fundamentally dialogical mode of writing, resists interpretive moves that attempt to frame it exclusively in legal terms. Prior scholarship has applied Bakhtin's notion of the dialogical to rabbinic texts, claiming that they celebrate the polysemy of textual interpretation by offering multiple opinions and refusing to speak in one voice. This characterization overlooks the fact that at the heart of Bakhtin's claims is an insistence that a text is not dialogical because it contains a dialogue, but because it constructs meaning by appealing simultaneously to multiple discourses. Rabbinic legal discourse is constituted through binary debates over purity or impurity, guilt or innocence, legality or illegality. Participants within these debates do not move outside the discourse of law. By contrast, talmudic legal narrative constructs law dialogically by interweaving legal discourse with other extra-legal narratives, such as politics, psychology, science, ethics, and medicine. Invoking Bakhtin's distinction in precise terms, this paper highlights the role of dialogic discourse within rabbinic narrative through a specific example at Sanhedrin 75a. The Talmud there recounts the story of a man whose lovesickness for a specific woman is killing him. Doctors prescribe several sexual cures for his ailment. When the rabbis are consulted to authorize these cures they reject each one, brazenly declaring that the man should die rather than perform any of them. Several generations of scholars within the Talmud itself struggle to justify the rabbis' position as a matter of law. This paper examines these treatments, and proposes that their attempts to transform a dialogical narrative celebrating rabbinic authority into a monological legal text can never succeed, highlighting the degree to which the tale is fundamentally not about the law, but about the dialogical construction of rabbinic authority.