A Tale of Two Women: Standing at the Center of the Talmud
Close Read
Jane Kanarek
Jane Kanarek is Dean of Faculty and Professor of Rabbinics at Hebrew College.
Credit: Kurt Hoffman
About two years ago, I taught an adult education class called “Reading the Talmud Through Feminist Eyes.” We studied ten different passages from the Talmud that feature women as central characters. At the end of this one-session class, a student said something like, “I know we just studied these passages, but are women really there in the Talmud? Didn’t you just choose these sections because they are the few that have women in them? Women aren’t really in the Talmud.” I answered “yes” to this student’s questions. Yes, women are present in the Talmud. Yes, I did handpick these sections. And yes, there are many more passages like these in the Talmud.
Over the years that I have been teaching Talmud, I have heard many similar versions of these questions from my students. Whether teaching at a summer camp, in an adult education course, or in a school, I face skepticism about female presence in the Talmud. Absence, invisibility, and marginal status are the default assumptions about these ancient women. While I might once have agreed with these statements about women’s absence, I no longer do. The more I read, write, and teach, the more I have been startled by and convinced of women’s presence in the Talmud. Equally, I have become convinced of the centrality of women to the ancient rabbinic culture that the Talmud, at least partially, portrays. Rather than assume and emphasize women’s invisibility, absence, and marginalization, I now teach from an assumption of visibility, presence, and centering. I resist my students’ comments that women are not present in the Talmud or that I have found a few exceptions to a general rule of absence from and marginality to rabbinic culture. If we, as contemporary women, understand and know ourselves to be deeply present as shapers of our own cultures, then surely ancient women also shaped the world in which they lived.
What possibilities might open, I query my students, when we shift our lens to assuming and beginning with female presence rather than absence? Who and what might we notice that we might otherwise have overlooked? What questions might we consider that we might otherwise have left unasked?
Shifting our focus to females requires both acknowledging and resisting the multiplicity of other characters, topics, and themes we might center in a Talmudic passage. To provide one brief example: tractate Kiddushin tells a story about a woman who sells belts. A man comes and grabs a belt from her. She tells this man to return the belt. He says, “If I give it to you, will you be betrothed to me?” She takes the belt and is silent (bKiddushin 13a). Talmudic law requires a woman to accept an object of at least minimal value from a man in order to be betrothed, and the Talmud uses this story to debate a number of questions about the process of betrothal. Yet rather than follow the Talmud’s debate to focus on the man’s betrothal proposal via theft, we can shift our lens to notice a woman engaged in commerce who orders a customer to return stolen merchandise and snatches it back from him. We can posit that this depiction of a confident female merchant hints at yet more women involved in commerce. We can also notice that this woman sells belts and wonder at what other items women might have sold.
I have noticed that this practice of shifting our lens to notice women is more difficult than it might seem. For not only are other characters, topics, and themes fascinating, but we have also been taught repeatedly to turn our focus away from women. Considerable attention—by scholars, rabbis, teachers, and students—has been directed elsewhere. In my experience, all of us—scholars, rabbis, teachers, and students—need practice in this shifting of lens and focus.
Centering women requires us to utilize a mode of reading that is grounded in details and is simultaneously imaginative. It requires comfort with play, gaps, and indeterminacy rather than total certainty. Centering women requires us to work in contexts that are small and specific as well as large and general. In the case of the Talmud, centering women also requires us to utilize common scholarly methods, but always with the intent of shifting our lenses to notice women and imagine them into presence. We might begin with a line in a story, take a step back to the story as a whole, and then to the larger Talmudic passage or sugya, then to the Talmudic chapter in which the story is embedded, and even to the tractate itself. We might also consult manuscript versions of the sugya, that is, older and handwritten versions of the now-printed text, as well as medieval commentary. We might utilize the tools and work of contemporary historians, literary critics, and cultural theorists. We can and might also draw on our own experiences, while being careful not to conflate them with the ancient world of the Talmud. We should resist forgetting the work that has been done by our predecessors, an act that I have found all-too-often endemic when it comes to the study of women.
This list of practices requires some amount of expertise in the Talmudic text and in the conventions of scholarship. Yet I do not want to limit this practice of reading Talmud with an assumption of female presence to a scholarly elite. Indeed, to read with an assumption of women standing at the center rather than the margins is a stance, a place to begin one’s study instead of an endpoint. Although I write here about women, we may also apply this assumption and model of presence to any person or group that we might typically term marginal. Again, a goal of such a stance is to see what this assumption of presence opens rather than shuts down. I do not mean to overlook or deny the Talmud’s androcentrism and its part in building and sustaining a patriarchal culture. But I do want us to resist those as descriptive and determinative of female absence and marginality.
Two Women Talking: A Case Study
We can use a short story found in tractate Sotah as a case study for this method of reading that shifts our focus to women. In addition to two unnamed women, the story includes four men: two sages—Rabbi Abahu and Rabbi Abba—and two speakers (אמורא; amora). Speakers played a significant role in rabbinic culture: when a sage was delivering a lecture to an audience, a speaker repeated the sage’s words to ensure they could be heard. As is common in the Talmud, this story uses terse language. Here, I have divided it into five sections and put a limited amount of clarifying information in brackets.
A. And said Rabbi Abahu: “At first, I would say that I was humble. When I saw Rabbi Abba from Acco, that he said one reason and his speaker said one reason and he [Rabbi Abba] was not angry, I said, ‘I am not humble.’”
B. And what was the humility of Rabbi Abahu?
C. That the wife of Rabbi Abahu’s speaker said to the wife of Rabbi Abahu: “Behold! This one of ours does not need yours [my husband does not need your husband]. And that he [the speaker] bends down and stands up before him [Rabbi Abahu] is merely to do him honor.”
D. His [Rabbi Abahu’s] wife went and told Rabbi Abahu.
E. He [Rabbi Abahu] said to her [his wife]: “What do you derive from her [the speaker’s wife]? Through me and through him [the speaker] the Most High will be praised.” (bSotah 40a)
Opening the interpretive possibilities offered by the women in this tale requires us first to spend a bit of time with its sages and speakers. The story begins with Rabbi Abahu’s declaration that another sage, Rabbi Abba from Acco, is humbler than him. Rabbi Abahu knows this because Rabbi Abba was not upset when his speaker altered his reasoning as he repeated his public lecture. Rabbi Abba would give one reason, and his speaker would give a different reason rather than repeating what he said (A). The story then asks for an example of Rabbi Abahu’s humility (B). To do so, the story introduces two new characters: the wife of Rabbi Abahu’s speaker and Rabbi Abahu’s own wife. The wife of Rabbi Abahu’s speaker informs Rabbi Abahu’s wife that her husband does not need Rabbi Abahu. This is a way of informing Rabbi Abahu’s wife that the speaker does not convey the sage’s words to the audience but instead conveys his own. When the speaker bends down to listen to Rabbi Abahu and then stands up to speak, he does so only to show respect to Rabbi Abahu. Instead of transmitting what he heard from the sage to the audience, he expresses his own ideas (C). Rabbi Abahu’s wife then goes to her husband (D) and tells her husband about what the speaker’s wife said. Rabbi Abahu tells his wife not to pay attention to the speaker’s wife. In his opinion, whether the audience hears the words of a sage or a speaker is immaterial, as the words of sage and speaker both praise God (E).
There are certainly many lessons we might draw from this story with just this analysis. Yet rather than linger here with Rabbi Abba, Rabbi Abahu, and the speakers, let’s shift our attention to the two women in this tale, characters who are portrayed as having a stake in and knowledge of Torah’s creation, transmission, and reception. Both women claim the importance of public recognition for the creation and teaching of Torah to a wider audience; they want the audience hearing the lecture to correctly identify the author. Both women also know the physical conventions of this public transmission of knowledge: when a speaker leans down to a sage, he is listening to a sage’s words; when a speaker stands up, he is expected to be repeating those words to the audience. The speaker’s wife appears to have been present and attentive while at the sage’s lecture; she is able to describe her husband’s movements and how his words differ from those of Rabbi Abahu. As the speaker’s wife claims that her husband did not simply repeat the sage’s words but rather created and transmitted his own Torah—his own ideas and reasoning—to the audience, she questions and challenges the hierarchy of sage over speaker. Rabbi Abahu’s wife, by telling her husband about her conversation with the speaker’s wife, attempts to maintain and reinforce this hierarchy of sage over interpreter. These two women speak and compete with one another, arguing over social status, honor, and teaching Torah.
We may read these women’s conversation as reflecting a lack of female agency in Torah study. In other words, they compete over their respective husbands’ knowledge of Torah. However, we might also imagine that the speaker’s wife herself has some knowledge of Torah and perhaps has even helped her husband with his ideas. In her 2010 article, “A New View of Women and Torah Study in the Talmudic Period,” Judith Hauptman argues that because rabbinic study—at least in the tannaitic and amoraic periods (approximately 200-550 C.E.)—took place largely within the physical space of the household (homes, alleys, and courtyards), females were likely to overhear conversations and at times even to participate in them. Hauptman supports her point with a number of Talmudic passages in which women either challenge, modify, or clarify rabbinic traditions based on their own experiences. Most of these passages have to do with the kitchen and food preparation,domestic realms and activities in which it is easy to imagine women participating, but they nevertheless open the door for us to imagine wider realms of rabbinic traditions about which women might voice their opinions and ideas. Indeed, as the story is silent about the topic and timing of Rabbi Abahu’s lecture, let’s not discard the possibility that in the lecture the two wives are discussing, Rabbi Abahu might have spoken about the kitchen and food preparation, perhaps even before a festival. Whether or not this is the case, it is quite possible that the speaker’s wife is confident that her husband’s words differ from those of Rabbi Abahu as she discussed both lecture and new reasoning with him. This would be along the lines of the comment in too many book acknowledgements of old: “I would like to thank my wife for typing my manuscript.” This thank-you asks us to believe that the wife faithfully turned her husband’s written words into typed ones without any creative editing, discussion, or shaping of the final document. It erases the likelihood of the wife—or in this case, the speaker’s wife—as author.
As we consider the speaker’s wife as author, I also want us to value, or at least not denigrate, the experiences that the simpler reading of the story depicts. In this simpler reading, the two women primarily foster and support their respective husbands’ agency as scholars: the speaker’s wife tells Rabbi Abahu’s wife that the ideas are her husband’s, and Rabbi Abahu’s wife tells her husband what the speaker’s wife said. Yet Sarit Kattan Gribetz, in her 2018 article, “Consuming Texts: Women as Recipients and Transmitters of Ancient Texts,” argues that authority rests not only with those who actively transmit or produce texts and traditions, but also “with those who choose (or happen) to receive or consume a text or tradition.” In other words, without an audience that chooses to hear and remember a sage’s words, those words become meaningless. Similarly, these two women hear and care about others’ teachings.
In the translation above, I have used the words “the wife of” for the single Aramaic word deveithu (דביתהו). This word deveithu might also be translated as “the house of.” We can thus call these two women, “the house of Rabbi Abahu’s speaker,” and “the house of Rabbi Abahu.” A more straightforward reading notices and critiques the ways that the story tries to domesticate and so limit and denigrate these two women by calling them “wife-houses.” But we can also notice that the word “house” is used to describe officials of the House of the Exilarch (devei nesiah)—the political head of the Babylonian Jewish community—and royal officials (devei malka). Houses, whether smaller ones of an intimate family, or larger ones of a government entity, are sites of generative power. Even when wife-houses support and foster other people’s agency, they may do so in ways that create, shape, and sustain our larger culture. We need to think more expansively about ancient rabbinic culture, expanding our vision of its content and its creators far beyond the walls of the study house and the historical record contained in our written Talmud and Midrash.
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Manuscript Tales: Women Talking Amongst Themselves
The version of the story I cited above is taken from what is known as the Vilna Talmud, the edition of the Talmud printed in the 1880s by the Widow and Brothers Romm and used as the model for the standard layout and text of the Talmud commonly found on our bookshelves today. In this format, the Talmud text is printed in the middle of the page and surrounded by two medieval commentaries, one by Rashi and one by the group known as the Tosafists. When researching a particular passage, it is common practice for scholars to look at medieval manuscripts of the Talmud, which predate the Vilna Talmud. These older handwritten documents often contain variants of the text that differ in significant ways from the printed Vilna edition of the Talmud. From these variants, we can learn about the history of the Talmud’s textual transmission, scribal practices, and earlier wordings of a Talmudic passage.
In our case, the Vilna version includes the sentence, “His wife went and told Rabbi Abahu” (I labeled it above as “D”). This sentence shifts the scene from a conversation between two women to a conversation between wife and husband. However, this sentence does not appear in versions of the story in the extant medieval Talmudic manuscripts known as Munich 95 and Vatican 110. This variation in the text suggests another way of understanding the story. Let’s consider the version that appears in Munich 95. I’ve labeled the sections in line with the labels I used above for the Vilna version. The first section (A) also differs from the Vilna version.
A. Said Rabbi Abahu: “At first, I would say to them... When I saw them, Rabbi Abba from Akko who said one reason and his speaker said one reason and he was not angry, I said to them, ‘I am humble.’”
B. And what was the humility of Rabbi Abahu?
C. That the wife of R. [Abahu’s speaker] said to the wife of Rabbi Abahu: “This one of ours does not need this one of yours [my husband does not need your husband]. And that he [the speaker] bends down and stands up before him [Rabbi Abahu] is merely to do him honor.”
E. She [the wife of Rabbi Abahu] said to her (א“ל): “What do you derive? Through me, through you the Most High will be praised.”
In addition to the missing line D, the Munich 95 manuscript contains an ambiguous scribal abbreviation for direct speech (א”ל) in the final unit of the story (E), an abbreviation that means we can understand the conversation as taking place between two women rather than between a man and a woman. This abbreviation does not appear in the Vilna edition. Because of this abbreviation and because the text we find in Munich 95 does not include the sentence, “His wife went and told Rabbi Abahu,” this text suggests a conversation limited to two women. This means that rather than Rabbi Abahu telling his wife that it makes no difference whether the audience hears the speaker’s or the sage’s reasoning, now it is Rabbi Abahu’s wife who makes that claim. Even more, she tells the speaker’s wife that they—these two women—are a source of praise for God.
Commonly, scholars of the Talmud will try to adjudicate different manuscripts and whatever differences exist between the manuscripts and printed versions of a passage. They might declare one text to be the earlier and more original version of a passage, or one to have errors that were introduced when the passage was copied or typeset. These judgments are often informed by our assumptions about what was possible in the ancient world of the Talmud, whether or not those assumptions are correct. If we think that women were never part of conversations about Torah, we might too easily reject Munich 95’s version of the story where the two women continue talking with each other. It is possible that the Vilna edition already reflects this bias, and that the line about Rabbi Abahu’s wife going to speak with her husband was added as a result. (This line is also found in the first printed edition from Venice in 1520.) But regardless of why the editions differ, Munich 95 and Vatican 110 introduce the possibility of two women talking about interpretive authority and praise of God. Without checking these variations, we are more likely to assume that only rabbis debated these topics.
Wider Lenses: Jealousy and Language
The significance of reading this story as a conversation between two women grows if we consider it in its larger literary context. This tale appears in tractate Sotah, a section of the Talmud interrogating the sotah ritual. As first described in Numbers 5:11-31, the sotah ritual is a proceeding that may be initiated by a jealous husband who suspects his wife has had sexual intercourse with another man. In this proceeding, the husband brings his wife to the tabernacle. There the priest makes a special potion from sacred water and the tabernacle’s earth floor into which he erases the words of a curse, likely written on a scroll. The curse declares that if the woman is innocent, the water will not harm her, but if guilty, her belly will distend and her thigh sag—likely meaning miscarriage or uterine prolapse. The priest then forces the woman to drink this bitter water.
Inverting the male jealousy of the sotah ritual, our story does not depict a jealous husband competing with another man, but two jealous women competing over Torah. Noticing that this story is found in tractate Sotah suggests that we can read it as a challenge to a ritual that places men in control of female bodies and sexuality. In contrast to the sotah ritual, this story is a case of women taking charge of and appointing themselves arbiters of Torah. They talk directly with one another, and, possibly, claim the ability to praise God.
The specific place where this story appears within tractate Sotah—Chapter 7—further deepens its significance. This chapter is focused on the power of language, addressing which rituals may be recited in any language and which rituals must be recited in the holy tongue, that is, Hebrew. Our story does not address this particular linguistic dichotomy, but it does speak to other crucial questions about language: how language is used (whether to transmit Torah or to subvert or reinforce social hierarchies); who speaks to each other (sage through speaker; speaker to public; woman to woman; woman to man; or woman or man to God); and the conventions of public discourse (speaker for sage, bending down and straightening up). Indeed, the tale of these two women talking becomes a vehicle through which the Talmud exposes and probes some of the many cultural functions of spoken language.
Noticing Women, Law, and Narrative
Placing these two women at the center challenges us to better notice details in the longer passage, or sugya, in which this tale is found; this, in turn, allows a richer and more variegated conception of rabbinic culture than we would otherwise have. For example, we might consider what this story about two women can tell us about halakhah (law) and aggadah (narrative) that we do not already see in more widely considered rabbinic texts.
Rabbi Abahu, one of the characters from the story we have been discussing, can also be found in another story that appears elsewhere in the same sugya. This time, he is with Rabbi Hiyya the son of Rabbi Abba. This story uses the terms aggadah (narrative) and shema’ta (legal traditions, often conflated with halakhah), making it a common focus of analyses of the relationship between aggadah and halakhah in the Talmud:
A. Rabbi Abahu and Rabbi Hiyya the son of Rabbi Abba happened to come to a certain place.
B. Rabbi Abahu interpreted narrative [aggadah].
C. Rabbi Hiyya the son of Abba interpreted legal traditions [shema’ta].
D. Everyone left Rabbi Hiyya the son of Abba and went to Rabbi Abahu.
E. He [Rabbi Hiyya the son of Abba] became distressed.
F. He [Rabbi Abahu] said to him [Rabbi Hiyya the son of Abba]: I will tell you a parable. To what is this matter similar? To two men, one who sells precious stones and the other who sells types of tinsel (sidkit). To whom do people jump? Not to the one who sells types of tinsel?!
In this story, Rabbi Abahu and Rabbi Hiyya the son of Rabbi Abba arrive at some unnamed place (A). There, they each begin to teach Torah. While Rabbi Abahu teaches stories, Rabbi Hiyya the son of Abba teaches law (B-C). The audience leaves Rabbi Hiyya and goes to hear Rabbi Abahu (D). When Rabbi Hiyya becomes upset (E), Rabbi Abahu tries to comfort him with a parable comparing law to precious stones and narrative or stories to the much less precious tinsel. The audience, Rabbi Abahu implies, has left Rabbi Hiyya’s more important teaching of law (precious stones) for the less important and easier to understand stories that he offers (tinsel). (F).
On first reading, it appears that women are entirely absent from this story. Yet, the picture changes when we turn to Rashi’s commentary on the word “tinsel,” which he defines as: “Work implements of women and the poor such as spindles, needles, and hooks.” Rereading Rabbi Abahu’s attempt to comfort Rabbi Hiyya bar Abba in light of Rashi’s comment leads us to understand this story differently. Now we can see the story portraying the audience as listening to words that are like the work implements of women and the poor. I want to suggest that, like the ancient audience, we may choose to reject Rabbi Abahu’s judgment that this Torah of tinsel is less worthy. Instead, we may affirm the audience’s judgment and direct our attention to women’s Torah. We might even wonder if the distinction that this story draws between narrative and legal traditions is too stark and whether Torah that flows from work implements includes both law and narrative.
I want to acknowledge that Rashi’s comment is problematic. Although it does point us towards women as shapers of rabbinic culture, it simultaneously points us towards the patriarchal framework all too deeply embedded within that culture. Indeed, Rashi’s mention of the spindle suggests other rabbinic passages in which spindles appear, stories that are often used against women. I’ll cite two: one from tractate Sotah in the Mishnah and one from tractate Sotah in the Palestinian Talmud.
Describing what is necessary for a husband to accuse his wife of being a sotah, the Mishnah offers a two-step process. First, a husband must warn his wife in front of witnesses against secluding herself with a particular man; second, witnesses must see her secluding herself with this forbidden man. However, if the people who see these acts do not meet the normative requirements for witnesses, then the Mishnah offers an option that lies between undergoing the sotah ritual and remaining married: the husband must divorce his wife. In mSotah 1:6, Rabbi Yehoshua rules further that the gossip of women who spin together in the moonlight fits into this in-between scenario: it can provide enough evidence to require a husband to divorce his wife. As Miriam Peskowitz reminds us in her book Spinning Fantasies: Rabbis, Gender, and History (1997), this Mishnah casts these particular women—spinners—in the role of policing other women’s behavior—women accused of being a sotah.
In a similar vein, the Palestinian Talmud also connects the activity of spinning with negative ideas about women: Rabbi Eliezer declaims both that a woman’s wisdom lies only in the spindle and that the words of the Torah should be burnt rather than being sent to a woman (ySotah 3:4, 19a). We could linger here with these two examples, unpacking their wider literary and legal contexts, and, crucially, the damage done by them. But at least for the moment, I invite us instead to return once again to the two women in our original tale.
In my reading, the behavior of the women in our tale belies the derogatory statements of both Rabbi Yehoshua and Rabbi Eliezer. In our story, we see women talking about men’s behavior and informing on their misdeeds. Women attend public lectures, remain alone with one another, know rabbinic conventions, and create Torah. They subvert the expected social hierarchies. When we put this story in conversation with Rabbi Eliezer’s spinning women, we may even subvert his fanciful claim that a woman’s work lies only with the spindle. If we see women as central to the construction of rabbinic culture, we embed spindle and rabbinic Torah within one another. That is, we conceptualize women’s work as crucial to the creation of Torah in its most expansive sense.
In turn, if we put the story of our two women in conversation with the scene of people flocking to Rabbi Abahu’s teaching of trinkets, i.e., women’s implements, we may also posit more securely that Rabbi Abahu teaches the Torah he learned from his wife. This would suggest that if the wife of Rabbi Abahu functions as a sage, Rabbi Abahu is effectively her speaker. After all, in the Vilna edition of the story, Rabbi Abahu’s wife is the one most seriously concerned that teachings be correctly attributed! Rabbi Abahu may devalue her concern by terming her Torah “trinkets,” but we can designate the implements of spindle, needle, and hook as valuable tools and precious language. We may indeed flock to the Torah of women, no longer marginal but standing at the very center.
