Michael L. Satlow

In the Babylonian Talmud, authority comes in variety of flavors.  Sometimes a tradition, heard from and cited in the name of a teacher, carries the day.  At other times, logic wins.  The behavior of a rabbi, the opinion of an expert, or the common practice of a community sometimes drive a discussion about law or ethics.  But the trump, as anyone who has spent any time with the Bavli knows, is the Bible, especially the Torah.  While it is certainly true that rabbis often turn and twist biblical verses as origami masters might, it is always better to have a verse on one’s side.

How, though, did the rabbis of late antiquity “know” the Bible?  Did they have the whole thing memorized?  Did they consult scrolls?  Did their versions look like ours?  Did they gravitate toward certain verses or sections, or steer clear of others?  If so, why?

For me, these questions arose quite incidentally about a year ago in the context of an informal Talmud reading group.  I figured that at least the empirical questions were easy to answer.  Somebody, somewhere, must have compiled a list of the biblical verses in the Talmud and counted them up in various ways.

If such a study exists, though, I still cannot locate it.  There are tools that indicate where in the Talmud a particular verse is discussed, but no charts, tables, and graphs that I could find helped very much when it came to quantifying the Talmud’s use of the Bible.  So as a side project I began to assemble the data.

This turned into a more involved undertaking than I anticipated, but it is very close to completion.  My crack research team – my son Dani Satlow and Elijah Petzold, a very talented Brown undergraduate – has now logged every biblical verse cited in the Bavli in a spreadsheet.  The method for doing this was not perfect: we went copied the indices of each of the tractates published in the Schottenstein edition of the Talmud.  We corrected obvious errors (mainly typos) as we went, but I suspect that the indices contain additional mistakes that are now incorporated into our spreadsheet (while undoubtedly introducing new ones of our own).  Nevertheless, given the mainly quantitative goals of the project and the large numbers present, these errors should not significantly distort the results.

My next step is to figure out good ways to use this data (which I will make freely accessible, probably by the end of the semester), and here I welcome your advice.  The three top questions on my list are:

• What is the most commonly cited verse in the Talmud?
• Are there verses, chapters, or books that the Talmud never cites?
• What is the density of biblical citations per tractate?

What would you like to know?

I generated the above image using Wordle, with random text from the beginning of the Talmud.  Wordle might itself be useful for research; perhaps a future post on that.

I have now added two new syllabi: “Faith and Violence“, a first-year seminar, and “The Talmud.”

I am happy to announce a new article that I have just published on pedagogy.  Here is the abstract:

During my career, I have regularly taught a survey course on the history of Jews and Judaism in the Persian, Greek, and early Roman periods (ca. 520 BCE – 70 CE). Student performance in the course has long concerned and puzzled me. By the end of the course students demonstrated familiarity with the narratives and concepts we covered, but most did not really “think historically.” They had great difficulties using and applying the historical tools they learned to new situations and evidence. In 2006 and again in 2010 I overhauled the course not only to improve it, but also to figure out how my students learned history. Using a wiki exercise, I traced how students learned and then applied these insights the next time I taught the course. In this essay I report on what I learned.

The article can now be accessed for free here.

I am presently reading Daniel Kahneman’s engaging book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.  Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize in Economics (!) for his collaborative work with Amos Tversky that helped to develop the field of behavioral economics, gained notice primarily for his work on understanding the kind of biased (and often incorrect) decisions toward which we gravitate.  In this book he draws a more synthetic and accessible picture of how we think.

In sum, he simplifies our thinking processes into two “systems.”  System 1 is our default, intuitive system – it allows us to make decisions with little or no effort.  System 2 is our more deliberate, focused way of thinking, which we consciously engage in order to solve problems too difficult for System 1.  This is certainly a simplification of thinking, but it is not entirely a heuristic.  When System 2 is engaged, there are measurable physiological changes, including a rise in pulse and dilation of the pupils.    The book describes these two systems but, more importantly, elaborates on how they work and their ramifications.

I will most likely write a few posts on this book, but I am now thinking about how  educators in higher education might maximally exploit these findings in a classroom in order to fool increase student learning.  Right now I am intrigued by the possibility of using a pre-class audio/visual presentation.  That is, students walk into the classroom and encounter a loop of a series of slides and background music.  The purpose, of course, is to put them “in the mood” to learn.

This, though, is where it gets interesting.  Because System 1 is lazy and works with the information that is easily at hand, it is very susceptible to “priming.”  A slide show thus might include technical vocabulary.  When we actually discuss that vocabulary later in class, there should be some increased degree of recognition.  A well-designed set of slides could thus prime students for the learning to come.

In addition to priming, the music sets the mood.  My classroom is generally discussion centered; it is a System 2 kind of place.  For discussions to work, students must be thinking rigorously, but they must also feel comfortable.  Here, then, is my conundrum.  Dissonance activates System 2.  Nice, easy, listening is System 1 music: “all is fine around me, there is no need to think too hard about anything.”  On the other hand, I am sure that if I were to open class with a track from Metallica, it would leave many students (but certainly me) grumpy and combative.  So here is where I turn to you, reader: What music in particular would you suggest that I play in my classes (now entirely putting aside the actual subject of those classes) to achieve these goals?

From the Bible's Buried Secrets (PBS)

I have been struggling recently with the biblical account of Jacob’s last testament to his sons and their descendents, found in Genesis 49:1-27.  I am hardly the first.  As many commentators have already noted, this is one of the most obscure passages in the Pentateuch.  The Hebrew is difficult and at times almost unintelligible; the text keeps mixing metaphors; and the word-plays that it makes on the names of Jacob’s sons seem to be in tension with the derivations of the names given earlier in Genesis.  The testament is also nakedly political.  Most of the tribes are lightly brushed aside in a verse, and the two tribes that receive extended blessings are Judah and Joseph, the tribes that not coincidentally at all are associated respectively with the southern and northern kingdoms, formed after the death of Solomon in the tenth century.  The “blessings” of Reuven, Simon, and Levi – the three oldest brothers – are hardly blessings, and seem intended to malign them in order to set the stage for Judah’s ascendency.  That is, as the fourth son, Judah would gain power only because his three older brothers forfeited their right to it due to their bad behavior.

What is a plausible historical context for such a text?  What is particularly peculiar to me is the dual blessing of Judah and Joseph.  The blessing of Judah clearly assumes that the tribe of Judah holds supreme power; I cannot see how it can be dated prior to the fall of the northern kingdom (Israel) to Assyria in 722 BCE.  Yet the blessing of Joseph assumes that his tribe – Israel – has withstood attacks and is flourishing.  It is hard to imagine how a scribe writing in Judah/Jerusalem after 722 BCE could have written this.  How can we make sense these two blessings appearing together?

Here’s my preliminary solution, following, to some extent, John Skinner’s suggestions in his volume in The International Critical Commentary on the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments (pp. 507-25).  The bulk of this testament, including the blessing of Joseph, was produced in Israel (the northern kingdom) prior to 722 BCE.  After Israel’s fall, it was part of the literature that exiled scribes brought to Jerusalem.  Some time later, being revised by a scribe in Judah, the testament was updated to include the strong statement about Judah’s leadership.  By that time Israel was no threat, so Joseph’s blessing was left unchanged.

If this solution works, then we have here an excellent example of the ways in which the scribes of Judah revised the texts that they received from their brethren from the north.

The program for the “Ancient Religion, Modern Technology” workshop is now posted. Please join us!

http://tinyurl.com/3jpeun9

I recently had the opportunity to to see the Dead Sea scrolls exhibit at the Discovery Center in New York.  The exhibit is being advertised heavily (it seemed like there was a poster on every other block in Manhattan) and has been extensively reviewed.  The reviews have been generally positive, if at times puzzled.  In The New York Times review, for example, Edward Rothstein calls the exhibit “understated” and asserts that it describes an historical arc, even if (in my reading at least) it is difficult to locate the shape of the arc.

The exhibit is essentially two exhibits.  The first floor contains artifacts relating to the biblical period (ca. 500 BCE and earlier).  Then one descends to the second floor, where in addition to a collection of scrolls there are some artifacts from Qumran (an inhabited settlement near where the scrolls were found) and Jerusalem more generally.  There are also side exhibits on Masada, the Ten Commandments (where the second-oldest manuscript of them will be displayed for a short period of time), and the origins of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

First, the positive:  The scrolls are always fun to see, even if most of the ones on display, in terms of importance, would be on the “B list” for scroll scholars.  (For those unable to get to the Discovery Center, the Google digitization project offers another, albeit virtual, way to access the scrolls.)  The objects on the first floor give a nice overview of issues in biblical archaeology, even if they don’t break any new ground.  The objects on the second floor – composed primarily, as on the first floor, of a lot of pottery – also add some context to the scrolls.

There is much that we still don’t know about Qumran and the scrolls, and the exhibit does a good, “understated” job not sensationalizing or drawing unwarranted conclusions.  The result, though, is vaguely unsatisfying.  I was left with a feeling that the curators themselves did not know how to link these objects.  In fact, I strongly suspect that they could not acquire enough objects to mount a respectable exhibition on the Dead Sea scrolls themselves, so they acquired other tangentially related objects to fill out the show and then didn’t quite know what to do with them all.  The exhibit had a failure of nerves.

Yet this raises a very interesting question: Given all that we do not know, and if one had access to any and all objects, what might a successful exhibit look like?  How do you make a narrative when we don’t have one?

One suggestion is to organize the exhibit according to the history of scholarship.  Here is my whimsical and schematic first stab on how such an exhibit might look:

1. Cairo Geniza: The discovery of the Damascus Document and the research that led scholars to link it to an early Jewish group.  Here we might also include information/artifacts on the early scholars of the literature that became known as the Pseudepigrapha (e.g., Jubilees);
2. Josephus and his history of the time, including discussion of the Jewish “sects”;
3. Discovery of the Scrolls, with the necessary story of the Bedouin shepherd and the Wall St. journal ad;
4. The earliest explanations of the scrolls, with the emphasis on eschatology;
5. The excavations of Qumran and the understanding of the community as a kind of “proto-Christian” monastery;
6. The work on and reconstruction of the scrolls;
7.  The Six Day war and the legal issues of scroll possession;
8. Evolving emphasis in the 1970′s on the place of religious law in the scrolls;
9. The struggle over and eventual publication of MMT, and the new insights that it gives us to the group’s origins;
10. Purity practices;
11. Food;
12. Prayer and angels;
13. Canonization and the developing sense of sacred literature, and the link to later Jewish and Christian canons;
14. New archaeological research on Qumran and the graveyard, and what it reveals;
15. Daily life for a member of the group

I feel like there should be a last exhibit that refers back to 1, but I can’t think right now of what that might be.

My point is that a thematically based exhibit with a (somewhat contrived) narrative thread might be the most effective mode of organization, while at the same time not speculating overmuch.

Andrea del Sarto, Madonna and Child, 1525

We have dragged our children to art museums most of their lives, and perhaps only because they didn’t know any better they have been remarkably tolerant.  We would, of course, try to help them to stay engaged through tours, audio guides, bribes of candy forthcoming, and, of course, the many wonderful activities that museums create for families.  These activities often include counting – how many paintings with sphinxes can you find?  That kind of thing.

My children need fewer incentives these days (although a well-timed bribe still works wonders), but lost deep within the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, recalling these museum activities, I asked them to count all the paintings that contain the Madonna and Child.  It was, of course, a joke – it would have been far easier to count the paintings that didn’t.  For students of the Madonna and Child, we had found the mother lode.

Room after room of such paintings bear powerful witness to the common assertion that during the Italian Renaissance painters increasingly turned to realism, or at least to realistic portrayals of idealized beauty.  We can watch the Madonna evolve from a wooden-looking stock figure to, well, a pretty attractive young woman.

This, though, raises a provocative question.  Most of this art was commissioned for religious settings.  What would it have meant to have had a portrait of a beautiful Madonna nursing her child above the altar?  And this in an environment that at least artistically and fashionably seems to have been well on its way to eroticizing the female breast.  That is, was the display of such art meant actually to produce sexual desire?

I am currently teaching an undergraduate class on “Religion and Sexuality,” and the intersection of religion and desire happens to be much on my mind.  There are strong notions in many religions that “desire” is a human force that produced without regard for its eventual target.  First, we “desire” – only then do we figure out what it is that we desire.  Hence, in these religions, sexual desire and desire for God exist in a very uneasy tension; they are two sides of the same coin.  Some religious thinkers deal with this tension by carefully separating human sexual desire from desire for God, as, for example, the book of Leviticus does by decreeing that contact with sexual fluids renders a person ritually impure.  Other thinkers, though, work to channel desire toward God, as, for example, the Jews and Christians who read the Song of Songs as an allegory of love between God and God’s people.  Many medieval mystical texts flirt productively with this tension.

So back to our sexy Madonna.  (This is not to exclude the possibility, by the way, that the same applies to a newly sexualized adult Jesus.)  It is possible that the inclusion of such erotic imagery in a sacred space was an aberration, an unintended byproduct of when changing artistic sensibilities outpace modes of art procurement and display.  I do not know if more conservative religious thinkers ever explicitly noticed this change in fashion and attempted to dial it back, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they did.  It is also possible, though, that there was some intentionality behind it.  Such art would help to produce more desire, which in turn could now be channeled to enhance religious experience.

If this was an experiment, it appears to have failed.  Much of this art was removed from its original religious context and sequestered to museums.  Sex, once again, is safely insulated from the sacred.

My friend Horace Taft, in his comment to a previous post, drew my attention to this TED video.  In it, Liz Coleman, the president of Bennington College, eloquently defends the value of the liberal arts.  She begins with a largely conventional critique of where the liberal arts (really the humanities) has taken a wrong turn and devotes the second half of the talk to explaining what Bennington is doing to restore the humanities to their central place in the curriculum.

Her critique is spot on.  Knowledge is so specialized and fragmented that the Academy is more concerned with creating experts (which, of course, is almost impossible to do within the four years of an undergraduate curriculum) than an educated generalist.  When we stop reading literature with an eye toward its exploration of the human condition and instead only deconstruct it with a highly specialized theoretical structure, she suggests, we lose something, not to mention our students and many of our readers.  We, the members of the academy, mostly have ourselves to blame for the mess we created.

It is at this point that I wonder if Professor Coleman takes a wrong turn, and Bennington with her.  The value of the liberal arts, she claims, is that it is a force for civic engagement and for good.  Leaning on Thomas Jefferson for support, she says that a healthy and thriving democracy depends on an educated citizenry.  Bennington, in turn, has created a program that explicitly weds study of the humanities to civic engagement and service.  The goal is to make a good citizen – albeit in the highly particular way that Bennington imagines such a person.

There is certainly nothing wrong with the Bennington model, although it is not for everyone.  What struck me was the general claim linking study of the humanities to civic society.  Does it hold water?  If everybody had a liberal arts education, would the world be a freer, happier, more peaceful and prosperous place?

I doubt it.  Despite the truly touching anecdote she tells at the beginning of emissaries from the former Soviet Union visiting her to learn more about how more robust liberal arts there could support their fledgling democracy, when not linked to a specific set of values – which someone has to determine – study of the humanities by itself does not lead to “good citizenry.”  In fact, it often leads to very clever, well educated charlatans and demagogues.

When the Greeks began thinking about this, their understanding of the “examined life” was hardly meant to be applied universally.  It was an elite activity.  Similarly, I think, the Renaissance humanists would have been mystified by the idea that links study to civic virtue.  Men of leisure had the ability to study the humanities in order to cultivate their own selves and enhance their own lives.

Study of the liberal arts is not for everyone, and if everyone in our society received such an education we would hardly be the better as a society for it.  The value of such an education, rather, is to be sought in the personal and (ironically) practical — it prepares individuals for high-value careers through inculcating certain habits of mind.  These and other habits of mind add value also to an individual’s experience of the world, but this is not to say (as, in fact, the traditional defenders of the humanities largely do) that life without a humanities education is impoverished.

I support civic virtue and service to the community.  Linking these activities to a liberal arts education, though, strikes me as both elitist and empirically unsupportable.