Scripture and Tradition: Rabbi Akiva and the Triumph of Midrash

By Azzan Yadin-Israel

The earliest rabbinic commentary to the Book of Leviticus, the Sifra, is generally considered an exemplum of Rabbi Akiva's intensely scriptural school of interpretation. But, Azzan Yadin-Israel contends, the Sifra commentary exhibits two distinct layers of interpretation that bring dramatically different assumptions to bear on the biblical text: earlier interpretations accord with the hermeneutic principles associated with Rabbi Ishmael, the other major school of early rabbinic midrash, while later additions subtly alter hermeneutic terminology and formulas, resulting in an engagement with Scripture that is not interpretive at all. Rather, the midrashic terminology in the Sifra's anonymous passages is part of what Yadin-Israel calls "a hermeneutic of camouflage," aimed at presenting oral traditions as though they were Scripture-based injunctions.

Scripture and Tradition offers a radical rereading of the Sifra and its authorship, with far-reaching ramifications for our understanding of rabbinic literature as a whole. Using this new understanding of the Sifra as his starting point, Yadin-Israel demonstrates a two fold break in the portrayal of Rabbi Akiva: hermeneutically, the sober midrashist who appeared in earlier rabbinic sources is transformed into an inspired, oracular interpreter of Scripture in the Babylonian Talmud; while the biographically unremarkable sage is recast as a youthful ignoramus who came to Torah study late in life. The dual transformations of Rabbi Akiva—like the Sifra's hermeneutic of camouflage—are motivated by an ideological shift toward a greater emphasis on scriptural authority and away from received traditions, an insight that sheds new light on the vexing question of midrash and oral tradition in rabbinic sources. Through this close examination of a notoriously difficult text, Scripture and Tradition recovers a vital piece of the history of Jewish thought.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Dec 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9780812290431

Azzan Yadin-Israel

Azzan Yadin-Israel is professor of Jewish Studies and Classics at Rutgers University. He is the author of two monographs on early rabbinic biblical interpretation and dozens of articles. His book Intuitive Vocabulary: German is also available through Lingua Press. His scholarly publications are available on academia.edu.

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Scripture and Tradition

DIVINATIONS:

REREADING LATE ANCIENT RELIGION

Series Editors

Daniel Boyarin, Virginia Burrus, Derek Krueger

SCRIPTURE AND TRADITION

Rabbi Akiva and the Triumph of Midrash

AZZAN YADIN-ISRAEL

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-0-8122-4643-8

To Hilit. Always.

CONTENTS

Introduction

PART I. A HERMENEUTIC OF CAMOUFLAGE

Chapter 1. The Sifra as Midrash: Hermeneutic Markedness

Chapter 2. The Sifra as Midrash: Vacuity and Semantic Discontinuity

Chapter 3. Terminological Identity and the Hermeneutics of Camouflage

Chapter 4. On the Basis of This, They Said (Mikan ʾAmru) and the Role of Scripture

PART II. THE CURIOUS CAREER OF RABBI AKIVA

Chapter 5. Rabbi Akiva the Interpreter: From the Mishnah to the Talmud

Chapter 6: Rabbi Akiva, the Anonymous Sifra, and the Hermeneutics of Camouflage

Chapter 7. Rabbi Akiva’s Biographical Transformation

PART III. MIDRASH AND HALAKHOT: A REEVALUATION

Chapter 8. The Anomaly of Tannaitic Literature: Interpretation, Revelation, and Mysteries

Excursus. Oral Tradition as the Site of Esotericism

Chapter 9. Midrash and Extra-Scriptural Tradition: A Synchronic Model

Conclusion: Rabbi Akiva and the Ironic Triumph of Midrash

Appendix: Hebrew Sources

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index of Classical Sources

General Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The Sifra

The present work is, to a great extent, a companion to my study on the legal hermeneutics of the Rabbi Ishmael school¹ and, like it, is situated within the scholarly tradition that recognizes a division between the approaches of Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael in the halakhic midrashim.² The Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael (to Exodus) and the Sifre Numbers make up the subgroup associated with Rabbi Ishmael, and the Sifra (to Leviticus) and Sifre Deuteronomy make up the subgroup associated with Rabbi Akiva. The school division,³ initially based on the different terminology and interpretive canons of the works, has been adopted by broad swaths of the scholarly community—most notably, J. N. Epstein and his students (and their students)—and has recently found expression in Menahem Kahana’s authoritative survey of the legal midrashim.⁴ A number of scholars have challenged the Rabbi Akiva–Rabbi Ishmael division,⁵ but recent scholarship has tended to affirm Hoffmann’s original insight, often moving beyond matters of terminology or interpretive methods. I have in mind Tzvi Novick’s suggestive analysis of the two schools’ different assumptions regarding Scripture’s relationship with the world,⁶ Marc Hirshman’s discussion of the characterization of non-Jews in the two schools,⁷ and Ishay Rosen-Zvi’s analysis of yetzer ha-raʿ (the evil inclination).⁸ Hewing to the philological assumptions of this approach, the present study examines those sections of the Sifra identified as part of the Rabbi Akiva corpus, to the exclusion of a number of lengthy passages foreign to the Sifra in terminology, interpretive methods, and sages cited:⁹

i.   The treatise on the thirteen hermeneutic rules (middot) that opens the Sifra

ii.  The Mekhilta de-Miluʾim on the dedication of the Tabernacle (Lev. 8:1–10:7)

iii. The Mekhilta de-ʿArayot on illicit sexual relations (Lev. 18:7–23 and 20:10–21)

There is no complete critical edition of the Sifra. Louis Finkelstein began a critical edition of the Sifra, but it covers only the first two sections (dibburaʾ de-Nedavah and dibburaʾ de-ḥovah).¹⁰ Also incomplete is Avraham Shoshana’s edition, of which three volumes have appeared, covering the treatise on the middot and, again, dibburaʾ de-Nedavah and dibburaʾ de-ʾovah.¹¹ Absent a critical edition, I cite Isaac Hirsch Weiss’s edition (by page and column)¹² as well as what is widely considered the finest Sifra manuscript, MS Assemani 66 (also known as Vatican 66), a facsimile edition of which was published by Finkelstein under the name Torat Kohanim.¹³ Thus, Tzav pereq 17.5, Weiss 40b; TK 177 includes the standard citation (tractate Tzav pereq 17, halakhah 5), the location in Weiss’s edition (page 40, column b), and in Torat Kohanim, here abbreviated as TK (page 177). Manuscript comparison of the Sifra, and of all tannaitic literature, has been immeasurably facilitated by the online publication of searchable transcriptions of the major manuscripts, under the guidance of Professor Shamma Friedman.¹⁴

Throughout the present study, I have benefited from the insights of the Sifra’s classical commentators, foremost among them Hillel ben Eliakim, known as Rabbenu Hillel, an eleventh- and twelfth-century sage who lived in a Greek-speaking country, about whom little else is known. The standard edition of his commentary is that of Shachne Koleditzky.¹⁵ Other important commentaries are those of pseudo-Rabad (attributed to Rabbi Abraham ben David of Posquieres),¹⁶ Rabbenu Vidal Serfaty (sixteenth-century Fez, Morocco),¹⁷ pseudo-Sens (attributed to Rabbi Samson of Sens, twelfth- and thirteenth-century France),¹⁸ and Rabbi Meir Leibush ben Jehiel Michel Weiser, better known as Malbim (nineteenth-century Poland and elsewhere).¹⁹

There is currently no satisfactory English translation of the entire Sifra. Jacob Neusner has translated the work,²⁰ but the results are unreliable.²¹ A far superior translation is currently being produced by Rabbi Howard L. Apothaker—though to date, only one volume (covering the pericopes Behar and Beḥuqotai) has appeared.²² I have benefited from Rabbi Apothaker’s translation, even when I have chosen another route in my own. The Hebrew sources drawn from the Sifra (and the Mishnah, when the two are juxtaposed) are appended to this book. These sources are marked in the body of the book and in the appendix with the section symbol (§) and numbered by chapter and source number: for example, §4.3 refers to the third source in Chapter 4. This allows readers who wish to examine the Hebrew texts of the Sifra to refer to the appendix at the corresponding number. The Hebrew sources in the appendix are based on MS Assemani 66 and represent a simplified version of the transcription found in the Maʾagarim database.²³

The modern study of the Sifra has been ably summarized by Apothaker.²⁴ To the works listed there, I add Ronen Reichman’s study of Mishnah and Sifra parallels, which I discuss in Chapter 9,²⁵ and Yonatan Sagiv’s dissertation, with its important findings regarding the named and anonymous Sifra passages.²⁶ In the opening of his thesis, Sagiv maps out the Sifra’s interpretation, matching every derashah to the word that it interprets, and finds that the Sifra interprets 69 percent of the words in Leviticus. That number increases significantly if we discount from the ranks of the uninterpreted such recurring phrases as the LORD spoke to Moses, saying and repeated themes interpreted in one section but not others. Sagiv concludes that the Sifra interprets almost every word in Leviticus and certainly every verse.²⁷ A very different picture emerges if we distinguish named derashot—interpretations cited in the name of a particular sage—from their anonymous counterparts. In terms of quantity, named derashot exist for only 13 percent of the words in Leviticus, while the anonymous Sifra interprets 63 percent of the words. Equally significant is the variance in distribution, with the anonymous derashot distributed relatively evenly but the named passages congregating around a number of key verses. For example, clusters of named derashot are tied to Leviticus 23:15 ("And from the day after the shabbat … you shall count for yourselves seven sabbath-weeks) and 23:40 (On the first day you shall take for yourselves the boughs of majestic trees: fronds of palms, branches of leafy trees, and willows of the brook)—both verses that were the focus of vigorous debate in Second Temple and post-70 Jewish literature.²⁸ Sagiv concludes that the tannaim, as best as we can ascertain, did not produce a systematic interpretation of the Book of Leviticus in its entirety, but rather focused on a narrowly delimited interpretation of select words and themes."²⁹ The Sifra, then, is made up of a relatively small number of tannaitic interpretations concentrated around a limited group of verses, embedded in a much larger and more uniformly distributed set of anonymous derashot. The significance of these findings will be discussed later in this study.

A Note on Terminology

The reader of the Sifra must grapple with two sets of technical terminology: the Sifra’s and that of Leviticus. For the latter, I have relied on the work of Jacob Milgrom, whose Anchor Bible translation of Leviticus provides the Sifra prooftexts.³⁰ Some key terms in Milgrom’s translation are:³¹

shelamim: well-being offerings (others: peace offerings)

ḥaṭaʾt: purification offering (others: sin offering)

ʾasham: reparation offering (others: guilt offering)

tenufah: elevation (others: wave offering)

terumah: contribution (others: heave offering)

ʿolah: burnt offering

qamatz: scoop a handful

bikkurim: first-processed offering

qodashim: sacred donations

The main hermeneutic terms of the Sifra are:

ribbui: inclusion

miʿuṭ: exclusion

peraṭ: except

lehaviʾ: introduce

lehotziʾ: preclude

minayin: whence

yakhol: might it be

talmud lomar: Scripture teaches, saying³²

shomeʿaʾani: I might understand

The Argument of This Book

Upon hearing that I was working on the Sifra, a colleague confided that he had taught a seminar on the book but couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on there. One argument of this book is that the Sifra is indeed a confusing book—not only in the confusion that it can elicit from some readers but in the etymological sense of confundere, to pour together, admix, commingle. For it is an admixture of two different and not easily reconciled approaches to the biblical text and its interpretation. One of its constituent components, attested primarily in the derashot of the Sifra attributed to tannaitic figures, recognizes the authority of extra-scriptural traditions and, in a number of cases, represents midrash as an ancillary support to them. The other, prominent in the Sifra’s anonymous derashot, is prima facie committed to a more scripturalist approach; however, deeper investigation reveals much of the midrashic terminology to be merely superficial, an effort to camouflage oral-traditional halakhot as though anchored in Scripture. This argument is set forth in Part I of this book.

It is, of course, problematic to claim that many of the named derashot in the Sifra—the midrashic work most closely associated with Rabbi Akiva—understand midrash to be ancillary to extra-scriptural traditions and even explicitly assert the primacy of the latter, while Rabbi Akiva is generally considered the greatest of all rabbinic interpreters. Part II addresses this apparent paradox, examining the ways in which different rabbinic sources portray Rabbi Akiva. The first two chapters (Chapters 5 and 6) trace a transformation in the portrayal of Rabbi Akiva as an interpreter: from a sober midrashist in tannaitic sources to charismatic interpreter of Torah secrets in later strata; and from a champion of extra-scriptural halakhot in named Sifra derashot to the implied author (or, at least, hermeneutic inspiration) of passages that seek to efface such halakhot. Chapter 7 presents a third transformation, this one in the biographical representation of Rabbi Akiva.

Part III situates the conclusions of Parts I and II within the broader context of rabbinic literature. Chapter 8 expands on the shift, outlined in Chapter 5, toward understanding Scripture as a repository of secrets and interpretation as their revelation. Chapter 9 addresses the claims made in Chapter 6 regarding the relationship between scriptural interpretation and received tradition—between midrash and extra-scriptural traditions. In 2006, I wrote of a shift from tannaitic to post-tannaitic views of midrash, a shift that is not ‘natural’ or self-evident. It is rather the outcome of a struggle among different groups within what eventually came to be considered early rabbinic Judaism. The story of this struggle remains to be told.³³ This book attempts to tell that story.

PART I

A Hermeneutic of Camouflage

CHAPTER 1

The Sifra as Midrash: Hermeneutic Markedness

Chaim Tchernowitz (Rav Tzaʿir) recounts that his town apikoros (heretic or nonbeliever), one Abraham Hirschel, used to argue as follows:

Moses knew that the Jews are sharp thinkers and tend to misinterpret Scripture to produce meanings not present in the plain sense of the verse, and that they would try to interpret the phrase [you shall not boil] a kid in its mother’s milk as though it need not apply to this specific situation and suggest that it applies to milk and meat in general. So he repeated the statement explicitly—a kid in its mother’s milk—instructing that we are dealing specifically with a kid and specifically with its own mother’s milk. And just in case two statements do not suffice, he repeated it a third time, a kid in its mother’s milk, and not milk and meat as such. What did Rabbi Ishmael¹ do? He interpreted the repetition as referring to milk and meat generally: one statement prohibits cooking, the second prohibits eating, and the third prohibits deriving benefit (from the mixture).²

The joke—as so often in the early modern engagement of midrash halakhah—involves a good deal of anxiety regarding the legitimacy, and even the intelligibility, of rabbinic interpretation. According to Hirschel, Scripture’s linguistic sensibilities are fundamentally similar to our own, and the repetition against boiling a kid in its mother’s milk³ emphasizes that the prohibition must be observed as stated, a preemptive move aimed at countering rabbinic sophistry (Jews are sharp thinkers). Ironically, it is the very repetition that Moses wields to warn off later interpreters that the rabbis cite in justification of their far-reaching (and, according to the town apikoros, utterly baseless) interpretation.

But anxiety is a poor guide to understanding a text, and merely identifying derashot that strike the contemporary reader as insufficiently grounded will not get us very far. Since the Sifra follows Leviticus verse by verse, formulating its legal conclusions as an engagement of Scripture, the principle of charity dictates that we begin by taking the Sifra at its word and treat it as an investigation into the meaning of the biblical text.

Hermeneutic Markedness

Abraham Hirschel is concerned with the textual elements that the rabbis use to justify their intervention—in this case, the thrice-stated prohibition against boiling a kid in its mother’s milk. Hirschel argues that God actually sought to emphasize the narrow scope of the prohibition: once, twice, and a third time, God refers to the case of the kid in its mother’s milk. The apikoros’s concern, then, is whether the rabbis are right to count this repetition as a warrant for interpreting the biblical phrase a kid in its mother’s milk.

In Scripture as Logos, I argued that hermeneutic markedness is an important component of the Rabbi Ishmael midrashim’s interpretive approach, according to which textual markers generate an opposition between ‘hermeneutically marked’ and ‘hermeneutically unmarked’ verses and that a textual unit must be ‘marked’ to be legitimately interpretable.⁴ In keeping with this view, the Mekhilta and the Sifre Numbers scrupulously establish the markedness of a word or a phrase before interpreting it—generally, by identifying a textual element as irregular or by casting it as part of an effort to rectify potential misunderstandings.⁵ Since hermeneutic (or any) markedness derives its meaning from opposition to unmarked elements, the Rabbi Ishmael midrashim recognize instances in which a biblical word cannot be legitimately interpreted. This is most evident in two formulas: lehafsiq ha-ʿinyan (divide the account) and ʾein dorshin teḥilot (preliminary statements are not interpreted). In both, biblical repetitions unreflectively assumed to be redundant are shown to be necessary to the understanding of the verse and therefore unmarked. In the case of lehafsiq ha-ʿinyan, the repeated word clarifies the syntax of the verse, while ʾein dorshin teḥilot makes the principled claim that repetition authorizes interpretation only from the second instance of the word onward; the first occurrence introduces the subject matter and so cannot count as extraneous. Derashot offered on the basis of syntactically sanctioned repetition—repetitions that do not entail redundancy—are disqualified, and the biblical words remain uninterpreted.⁶

The Sifra too appears to employ hermeneutic markedness, as it repeatedly refers to biblical lexemes that justify midrashic intervention:

§1.1 "ʾOtah and hiʾ are markers of exclusion [miʿuṭim]." (Shemini pereq 1.5, Weiss 47a; TK 200)

§1.2 "‘[If his offering for a burnt offering is] from [min] the flock, or of [min] sheep or of [min] goats’ (Lev. 1:10): ‘From the flock’ and ‘Of sheep’ and ‘Of goats’—behold these are markers of exclusion." (Nedavah parashah 5.2, Weiss 7c; TK 27)

§1.3 "Scripture teaches, saying: ‘This is [zoʾt hiʾ] the ritual of the burnt offering’—behold these are markers of exclusion." (Tzav pereq 1.8, Weiss 29b; TK 129)

Rabbinic sources themselves identify hermeneutic markers as a bone of contention between Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael. Thus, Numbers 15:31 states that a person who "acts defiantly and reviles the LORD that person shall surely be cut off [hikaret tikaret] from among his people." Rabbi Akiva takes the repetition of the root k-r-t as an inclusion: "‘Hikaret’ refers to this world, ‘tikaret’ to the world to come."⁷ But Rabbi Ishmael derides this argument. Invoking the occurrence of the same root in the previous verse, he asks: "Since it says: ‘That person shall be cut off [ve-nikhreta]’ (Num. 15:30), should I infer, then, that the three instances of karet correspond to three worlds?" According to this derashah, Rabbi Ishmael critiques the proposed markedness of the repetition by noting the reductio ad absurdum that would result if this approach were implemented consistently. Later rabbinic collections contain additional exchanges in the same spirit, as we see in the amoraic midrash Genesis Rabbah:

Rabbi Ishmael asked Rabbi Akiva: "Since you were a disciple of Nahum of Gamzu for twenty-two years, ‘buts’ and ‘onlys’ [ʾakin ve-raqin] are excluding markers [miʿuṭim], accusative particles and ‘alsos’ [ʾetim ve-gamin] are inclusion markers [ribbuyim], this accusative particle [in Gen. 1:1]—what is its nature?"⁸

And the Babylonian Talmud:

"And the daughter [u-vat] of a priest, when she desecrates herself by harlotry … she shall be burned by fire (Lev. 21:9): Rabbi Akiva says: The betrothed woman no less than the married woman is to be burned … Rabbi Ishmael said to him, But if below the word neʿarah refers to a betrothed woman, so, too, here neʿarah refers to a betrothed woman. Rabbi Akiva responded, Ishmael, my brother, I am explicating on the basis of [the difference between] bat [‘daughter’] and u-vat [‘and the daughter’]. He said to him, "Because you interpret bat and u-vat [the opening vav of the verse], we are to send her off to be burned?"⁹

In light of these sources, many scholars plausibly assert that the Rabbi Ishmael midrashim and the Rabbi Akiva midrashim are engaged in a fundamentally similar enterprise, but each corpus sanctions a different set of hermeneutic markers. Epstein summarizes the hermeneutic markers characteristic of the Rabbi Akiva midrashim:¹⁰

i.   Sequences in which the infinitive absolute is followed by a finite form of the same verb (for example, hikaret tikaret)

ii.  The preposition min (of, from) as an independent lexeme or in prefix form (mi- or me-)

iii.  A vav that opens a verse

iv.  Pronouns and pronominal suffixes

v.  The accusative particle ʾet

vi. Conjunctions such as gam and raq

Epstein’s list is drawn from the Sifra’s (and Sifre Deuteronomy’s) interpretive practices, so the identity of these markers cannot be too terribly controversial. Still, problems arise once we try to determine how the Sifra employs them.

Glosses

The Sifra often glosses the biblical verse with little or no indication of what motivates the gloss.

§1.4 For I have taken the breast of the elevation offering and the thigh of the contribution from the Israelites, from their sacrifices of well-being, and have assigned them to Aaron the priest and to his sons as a due from the Israelites for all time (Lev. 7:34): Breast—this is the breast; of elevation—this refers to the elevation of the basket; thigh—this is the thigh; of contribution—this is the contribution of the thanksgiving offering. (Tzav pereq 17.5, Weiss 40b; TK 177; parallel at Shemini pereq 1.9, Weiss 47a; TK 201)

The first thing to note about this derashah is its staccato rhythm, as it juxtaposes biblical elements and glosses with no discussion or justification: A is B, C is D, and so forth. This is not to say that the glosses are necessarily unmotivated; it is possible that these derashot represent the visible tip of a vast interpretive iceberg, most of which lies submerged beneath the reader’s line of vision. Perhaps; but, all the same, the reader is not granted access to the interpretive process.

This approach stands in contrast to the (rare) staccato midrashim in the Rabbi Ishmael collections. In Exodus 12:13, God instructs the Israelites to place blood on the doorposts of their houses to distinguish them from the houses of the Egyptians, for "when I see the blood I will p-s-ḥ over you, which the Mekhilta glosses: Pesiḥah means nothing other than to spare, as it states ‘like birds hovering overhead, so the LORD of Hosts will protect Jerusalem; He will protect and deliver it, He will spare [pasoaḥ] and rescue it (Isa. 31:5)’" (Mekhilta Pisḥa 7, Horovitz-Rabin, 24; Lauterbach 1:56). Or when the Mekhilta explicates the two rare terms in Exodus 21:10’s instruction that a man who takes a second wife not diminish the sheʾer, the kesut, or the ʿonah of the first wife.

"Her sheʾer—this refers to her food, and similarly it states [Listen, you heads of Jacob] … who eat the sheʾer [NRSV: flesh] of my people (Mic. 3:1–3), and it is written [He rained down on them manna to eat] … he rained sheʾer [NRSV: flesh] upon them like dust (Ps. 78:24–27). Her kesut—in its plain sense [of clothing]. And her ʿonah—this refers to sexual intercourse, as it states [when Shechem … saw her, he seized her] and lay with her and yaʿaneha." (Gen. 34:3) (Mekhilta Neziqin 3, Horovitz-Rabin, 259; Lauterbach 3:27–28)

These derashot do not identify a marked element in the verse, but that is only because such identification is superfluous; lexical glosses are introduced only when the meaning of the term is unclear or in dispute. Moreover, the Mekhilta derashot provide scriptural support for their claim, cross-referencing the obscure forms to verses in which their meaning is arguably clearer.¹¹

Aside from the absence of markedness, the Sifra’s interpretation raises several difficulties. Leviticus 7:34 refers to two offerings: the breast of elevation and the thigh of contribution, phrases that also appear in the description of the consecration of the Tabernacle.¹² Grammatically, the Hebrew construct form indicates that the second nouns are adjectival: ḥazeh ha-tenufah and shoq ha-terumah mean the breast characterized by the act of elevation and the thigh given as a contribution, respectively. The Sifra, however, disjoins the constructs and treats them as cases of asyndetic coordination. Not "breast of elevation and the thigh of contribution but rather two independent elements. Breast is the breast; of elevation is the elevation of the basket; thigh is the thigh; of contribution is the contribution of the thanksgiving offering. The glosses of the first elements are tautologies (‘Breast’ this is the breast … ‘thigh’ this is the thigh")—what do they mean?¹³ Certainly, tautology cannot be discounted as a legitimate interpretive technique. In a cultural milieu in which far-reaching interpretation is the norm, an affirmation of the plain sense of a word can constitute a forceful argument. Freud’s famous (and evidently defensive) quip that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar is funny only because the interpretation of the cigar as a phallus is so compelling (the psychoanalytic peshat, so to speak). Glossing breast as a breast and thigh as a thigh could be meaningful if a compelling alternative reading were thereby rejected. But the Sifra does not claim this, and, absent some reason to think that the sacrificial portions ought be understood figuratively, the tautological affirmations appear trivial.

The opposite is true of the second element of the construct phrases. Having pried them from the compound, the Sifra asserts that of elevation refers to the elevation of the basket and of contribution to the thanksgiving offering. But which basket and which thanksgiving? Consensus is lacking among the Sifra’s commentators. Rabbenu Hillel identifies the basket in both the Tzav and the Shemini pericopes as the basket that is part of the ritual marking the end of a Nazirite’s period of consecration (Num. 6:13–20) and the thanksgiving as the part of the well-being offerings that deal with thanksgiving (Lev. 7:12–15). Pseudo-Rabad distinguishes between the passages. Like Rabbenu Hillel, he identifies the Tzav contribution with Leviticus 7:12–15 but holds that the Tzav basket appears to refer to the elevation of the bread in the basket and not to the bread that accompanies the ram of the Nazirite or the ram of the consecration of the Tabernacle.¹⁴ But referring to the same passage in Shemini, he writes: Not that there is a basket here or a thanksgiving offering, but rather the repetition of the biblical verse teaches us that the elevated breads of the basket of the Nazirite and of the Tabernacle consecration, and the contribution of the bread of the thanksgiving and that which is elevated from it, all these were eaten throughout Jerusalem as it is written, ‘you may eat in any pure place’ (Lev. 10:14).¹⁵

Controversy is a hallmark of rabbinic literature, so divergence among the Sifra’s commentators may not appear remarkable at first glance, but I believe it to be, given the nature and function of glosses. Briefly stated, glosses explicate the meaning of a term by positing a correspondence between it and another term that is usually, but not necessarily, drawn from outside the text. Glosses can be the vehicle for a philological insight, as when a difficult word is glossed with a more familiar one (as with the Mekhilta’s interpretation of Exodus 21:10, above) but can also posit further-reaching correspondences. When the author of 4QMMT writes, Because Jeru[sa]l[em] is the holy camp, it is the place which He has chosen from among all the tribes of Israel (4QMMT 2.11–3.1), the equation of the biblical phrase holy camp with the city of Jerusalem is nontrivial. And when Philo writes that the Mind in us—call it Adam—having met with outward Sense, called Eve, the source, we hold, of life to all living bodies, approaches her for their mutual intercourse,¹⁶ he assumes a complex relationship between the biblical text and the philosophical truths that his allegorical glosses posit therein. But even when introducing contested theological or philosophical issues, the rhetorical economy of the gloss (A is B) assumes that readers recognize the term being explicated and are familiar with the glossing term (the source term and the target term, as it were), so that they can proceed directly to the merits of the gloss. Readers of 4QMMT are expected to recognize both the phrase holy camp and Jerusalem, and Philo’s readers are to recognize Adam and Eve as well as the terms mind and senses, respectively. This is not to say that readers must accept the logic of the gloss; they may well not. But disputes will center on the assertion that the two elements are identical—this, after all, is where the interpretive work of the gloss takes place—and not on the identity of each element. Not so in the Sifra, whose most dedicated and thoughtful readers, its traditional commentators, cannot agree on the referential identity of the gloss’s discrete elements and whether they are the same in each of the parallel derashot. The particular opacity of these glosses is therefore remarkable: the gloss is, ultimately, nothing other than the introduction of a B element, yet later readers cannot securely identify it.¹⁷ A similar admixture of tautological and interpretive glosses is found in the Sifra’s discussion of Leviticus 16:33:

§1.5 "He shall purge the holiest part of the sanctuary [miqdash ha-qodesh], and he shall effect purgation for the Tent of Meeting and the altar; for the priests and for all the people of the congregation he shall effect purgation (Lev. 16:33): He shall purge the holiest part of the sanctuary"—this is the Holy of Holies [lifnei lefanim]; Tent of Meeting—this is the [Temple] hall; the altar—this is the altar; he shall effect purgation—to the Temple courts as well; the priests—these are the priests; all the people of the congregation—these are Israel; he shall effect purgation—to the Levites as well. (Aḥare Mot pereq 8.8, Weiss 83b; TK 356)

Leviticus 16:33 is an appendix to the scapegoat ritual and the yom kippur (Day of Purgation) sacrifices, a summary statement of the purgation duties of the priest. As was the case in §1.4, the glosses differ in their engagement of the biblical source. In some cases, an interpretive argument can be readily (if hypothetically) reconstructed. The phrase miqdash ha-qodesh (the holiest part of the sanctuary) is a hapax legomenon and thus hermeneutically marked, and there is a clear linguistic similarity between it and qodesh ha-qodashim, the biblical term for Holy of Holies and counterpart to the rabbinic lifnei lefanim. Other glosses are similarly straightforward: all the people of the congregation (another hapax) refers to Israel, and Tent of Meeting corresponds to the Temple. Others are less clear. What in the verb yekapper (he shall effect purgation) is marked? And what justifies interpreting it twice? Whether the reader can furnish a plausible reconstruction of the relevant hermeneutic marker is secondary to the fact that the succinct concatenation of biblical terms and their glosses structurally precludes detailed justification of each gloss. The Sifra does not feel compelled to communicate to its readers even the most basic principles guiding it—namely, its justification for interpreting a particular verse or term. Allowing, for now, the possibility of an underlying hermeneutic (the iceberg theory), it remains the case that the Sifra is not committed to a rhetoric of hermeneutic markedness.

The Accusative Particle (ʾEt)

What of the derashot that do offer explicit guidance with regard to their interpretive practices? We saw above that according to Genesis Rabbah, ʾet is one of Rabbi Akiva’s inclusion markers. The standard account of ʾet as a hermeneutic marker involves its inconsistent employment in the Bible, as when Genesis states that "Abraham took the wood [ʾet ha-ʿetz] for the burnt offering (Gen. 22:6) and two verses later, Abraham tells Isaac that God will show us [sans ʾet] the lamb for the burnt offering" (Gen. 22:8). If so, goes the argument, the accusative particle is syntactically superfluous and, as such, hermeneutically marked.¹⁸ Other scholars argue that Rabbi Akiva understood these words to be suffused with meaning, as when Moshe Halbertal writes: "Exposition of prepositions and conjunctions such as et and gam, which are attributed to Rabbi Akiba and his school, are an expression of the semantic fullness of the text."¹⁹

But for all its post-tannaitic fame, ʾet’s role in the Sifra is far from clear. For one thing, the Sifra often ignores ʾet altogether:

i.   "He shall burn [ʾet] the fabric, or [ʾet] the warp, or [ʾet] the woof, whether in wool or linen." (Lev. 13:52)

ii.  "He shall demolish [ʾet] the house, and [ʾet] its stones, and [ʾet] its timber, and [ʾet] all the mortar of the house." (Lev. 14:45)

These are but two of many verses that contain ʾet that the Sifra discusses at length,²⁰ with no mention of the accusative particle.

While there are a number of derashot whose prooftext includes ʾet, it is never clear that the accusative particle is the relevant element. Some commentators argue that the Sifra interprets the ʾet in Leviticus 2:8:

§1.6 "If you bring to the LORD [ʾet] a cereal offering prepared in any of these ways, it shall be presented to the priest, who shall deliver it to the altar (Lev. 2:8): Might it be that only the handful [of sacrificial cereal offering] requires presentation to the priest? Whence do we include the cereal offering? Scripture teaches, saying a cereal offering. Whence do we include all cereal offerings? Scripture teaches, saying ʾet a cereal offering." (Nedavah parashah 11.1, Weiss 11a–b; TK 46)

Here the Sifra learns that Leviticus 2:8 refers to all types of cereal offerings from the accusative particle in "ʾet a cereal offering." However, in Assemani 66, ʾet is preceded by the letter vav. This is a difficult reading if the derashah originated at Leviticus 2:8, since the vav is not attested in the Masoretic text of this verse. However, it is possible that the derashah was originally associated with a verse that reads "ve-ʾet a cereal offering" (for example, Lev. 14:20), and was later moved to Leviticus 2:8, a common occurrence in rabbinic literature.²¹ Other derashot do interpret ve-ʾet:

§1.7 "And all of [ve-ʾet kol] the suet of the bull" (Lev. 4:8): To include the suet of the bull of yom ha-kippurim [the Day of Purgation] concerning the suet that covers the two kidneys and the caudate lobe on the liver. (Ḥovah pereq 4.1, Weiss 18c; TK 78)

§1.8 Whence that the blood of the reparation offering that became mixed with the blood of a well-being offering is to be dashed? Scripture teaches, saying, "he shall dash its blood [ve-ʾet ha-dam] [against all sides of the altar]" (Lev. 7:1–2). (Tzav parashah 4.2, Weiss 33c; TK 148)

Each derashah offers other candidates as the basis for ribbui. In §1.7, the opening vav or the word kol, all, might generate the inclusion gloss; in §1.8, the opening vav or, more remotely, the phrase qodesh qodashim that occurs earlier in the verse. A similar situation holds in the Sifra’s interpretation of Leviticus 25:14:

§1.9 "[When you make a sale to your neighbor or buy from your neighbor,] no man [ʾish] shall cheat [ʾet] his brother (Lev. 25:14): From this I know only regarding a man cheating a man. Whence regarding a man cheating a woman or a woman cheating a man or a woman cheating a woman? Scripture teaches, saying ʾet his brother"—in any