From Sermon to Commentary: Expounding the Bible in Talmudic Babylonia

Jay Newman is a professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph. His
books include Inauthentic Culture and Its Philosophical Critics and
Biblical Religion and Family Values.

Rabbinics specialist Eliezer Segal teaches religious studies at the
University of Calgary. This scholarly monograph is intended primarily
for readers familiar with the interpretations of Hebrew scripture to be
found in the Babylonian Talmud. To most readers, many of these
interpretations seem exceedingly strange, sometimes comically so; and
Segal offers some ideas as to how they came to take their curious form.
Segal characterizes his methods and objectives as “unabashedly
historical,” mainly to distance himself from the exotic agendas of
postmodernist scholars. His theory is that the Jewish scholars in
Babylonia included material in their Talmud that had originated in the
Land of Israel in a specifically homiletical context. Since this
material was understood and employed by the Babylonian scholars with
regard to its academic rather than its sermonic significance, it became
separated from contextual material in which it would have made
considerably more sense to subsequent generations. Segal defends this
thesis by comparing passages in the Babylonian Talmud to relevant
passages in other ancient rabbinic literature. He focuses on a
particular pattern of midrashic interpretation in the Talmud, one
involving disagreements between Rav and Samuel. For each passage of this
type, Segal tries to show how the passage would make more sense to
modern readers if we could appreciate its original homiletical context.
Segal does this mainly by matching up each passage with similar passages
in Palestinian midrash.

The results of this methodology vary in impressiveness from case to
case, and Segal recognizes that his theory remains speculative. Still,
Segal gives us a fresh perspective on the relations of Babylonian
midrash to other rabbinic literature and offers insight into why the
Babylonian midrash has a form that now strikes many of us as strange.
Segal concludes the monograph by raising a number of interesting issues,
including the importance of recognizing the dangers of blurring the
borders between exegesis and homiletics. These conclusions require
further development; and although Segal enhances our understanding of
the Babylonian Talmud, he indirectly contributes to the repository of
arguments used by those who are skeptical regarding the Babylonian
Talmud’s contemporary relevance.