The “Halakhic Kernel” as a Criterion for Dating Babylonian Aggadah: Bavli Ḥullin 110a–b and Parallels

Abstract

Contemporary scholarship no longer seeks to identify what was once termed “the historical kernel” of stories in the Bavli. According to scholarly consensus these longer narratives in the Bavli were formulated more or less while the Bavli as a whole was being redacted and, as Jeffrey Rubenstein has argued, reflect later Babylonian rabbinic culture. Regarding the building blocks of these stories, literary analysis at times indicates that what the historian once believed to be primitive exaggeration is in fact the earliest element of the story. With this in mind, Shamma Friedman coined the term “literary kernel” to replace the former “historical kernel.” The advantage of the term “literary kernel” is that it can be defined in a fairly objective way as the common storyline that can be identified by comparing the Bavli narrative with the story as it appears in aggadic sources in the Yerushalmi or other Palestinian traditions.