Legal Precedent and Strategies of Non-Compliance in Bavli Adjudicatory Narratives

• In Event: Legal Resistance and Non-Compliance in Babylonian Talmudic Sources

Abstract

Brief narratives of legal adjudication in the Bavli have been overlooked by scholars of Talmudic narrative because of their brevity and apparent lack of dramatic features that distinguish them from casuistic law or legal hypotheticals. They begin with “a certain man/woman/object,” include relevant details and conclude with “[someone] came before Rabbi X” and the rabbi’s ruling. While the thousands of such stories in the Bavli are mostly formulaic and lack distinguishing features, approximately three hundred include dramatic tension. Half of those feature male and female non-rabbinic Jewish litigants. This paper presents twelve such narratives that stand out because a non-rabbi litigant avoids complying with the judgement of a rabbi whose legal opinion was sought. The stories dramatize the rabbinic storytellers’ views on their litigants and on the challenges and paradoxes of legal authority. They also portray litigants’ ambivalent relations with rabbinic adjudicators. The inclusion of the petitioners’ resistance in these stories also complicates the narrative’s role as legal precedent. These stories emphasize the need to analyze the narrative techniques and cultural significance of adjudicatory narratives, just as scholars already analyze longer aggadot. They reflect how rabbinic storytellers understood their relations with non-rabbinic Jews, and how these adjudicatory encounters could by turns buttress and challenge their authority.

The paper presents a formal structure of adjudicatory narratives. The five-part structure is: (A) Introduction of Legal Subject; (B) Verb; (C) Appearance before a Judge; (D) Description of the Judge’s Action and (E) Responses. The final element is the location of narrative drama in these narratives. The narrative may present the litigants’ reactions to the ruling – dismay, verbal responses, refusals to comply, or even expressions of emotion, which seem to jump out from among the more surface-level descriptions in narratives that end at the judge’s actions. Rarely, the rabbi himself shows emotion, or goes beyond his judging role toward legal advising. These features deserve greater attention for their human qualities, interrupting the reduction of life events to what is relevant to legal judgment.

Author

• Lynn Kaye, Brandeis University