Rereading the Story of the Oven of Akhnai: From Interpretive Rights to Interpretive Responsibilities
Close Read
Jon A. Levisohn
Jon A. Levisohn is the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Associate Professor of Jewish Educational Thought at Brandeis University, where he also directs the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education.
Credit: Kurt Hoffman
The story of the Oven of Akhnai—located in the middle of a sugya on folio 59b of Bava Metzia in the Babylonian Talmud—opens with a group of rabbis discussing whether a particular type of oven, the “Oven of Akhnai,” can be used, because of a question about its ritual purity. It does not really matter why the oven has this name. In fact, the details about ritual purity do not really matter either. The framing of the story suggests that the rabbis could be arguing about anything. What is important instead is how the argument proceeds.
The story of the Oven of Akhnai is typically read, in the dozens of scholarly treatments that it has received, as a declaration of rabbinic interpretive independence. The rabbis of the Talmud were committed to working things out for themselves, to defending their right to make their own moral decisions, and to protecting human agency. So, for example, the great Jewish historian Gershom Scholem, in “Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism” (1971), writes: “Nothing demonstrates… the authority of commentary over author more triumphantly than the story of the oven of Akhnai.” What he means is that this story makes the argument that the interpreter of a text has greater authority than the text itself.
Similarly, David Hartman writes in a comment on the story in The Jewish Political Tradition (2001) that, “when the Talmud announces [in the story of the Oven of Akhnai] that ‘It is not in heaven,’ human beings replace God and take responsibility for applying the law without need of further revelation.” For the literary critic Susan Handelman, likewise, in The Slayers of Moses (1982), the narrative demonstrates that “revelation [is] ongoing and mediated by interpreters.” Regardless of one’s theory of revelation, the text is saying it is, and must always be, human beings who interpret and apply laws. And this message is important to us as modern people because of our deep commitment to human autonomy. We want human beings to think for themselves. As important as it is to engage with the traditions that formed us and that contain essential wisdom and guidance, we moderns also demand a space for human interpreters, human commentators, and human decision-makers. The story of the Oven of Akhnai seems to capture and express these ideas exquisitely.
But this is not the only way to read the story. In fact, I want to show here that the story contains the seeds of another reading, not exactly contradictory but perhaps complementary, a reading that does not emphasize our right to interpret our sacred texts but rather emphasizes our responsibilities in how we do so. And I want to show it by reading the core narrative itself, rather than by examining the story in the context of the broader sugya as some other scholars such as Jeffrey Rubenstein (Talmudic Stories, 1999), Charlotte Fonrobert ( “When the Rabbi Weeps,” 2001) and Devora Steinmetz (“Agada Unbound,” 2005) have done with fascinating results—results that, in certain respects, align with my argument here.
In my reading of the story, its tone is more tragic than triumphant. And what emerges as most important is not our interpretive independence, but rather our interpretive inter-dependence. In this essay, I will begin with a first, close reading of the text as it is typically understood, as a story about the right to interpret. Then I’ll provide a second, closer reading of the text as a story about the responsibility of the interpreter.
Reading 1: The Oven of Akhnai and the Right to Interpret
B’oto ha-yom, “on that day,” Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus argues for his position regarding the permissibility of using the Oven of Akhnai. Again, the details of his position do not matter. What matters is that the other sages will not concede the point. The text says that he offers kol teshuvot she-ba-olam, “all the responses in the world,” v’lo kibelu hemenu, “yet, they did not receive [them] from him.” The stage is thus set with a protagonist, Rabbi Eliezer, and—like a Greek chorus—the unnamed group of rabbis who refuse to listen to him.
What do you do if your words are not sufficiently persuasive and you’re about to be outvoted? In most situations, we would hope that you would graciously accept defeat. But perhaps, if there’s enough at stake, or if you are more committed to the justice of your cause than the democratic spirit of debate, you might try to change the rules. You might try other, non-rhetorical tactics. That is what Rabbi Eliezer does. He proclaims, “If the halakhah is as I say it is, then let this carob tree prove it.” Immediately, a carob tree in the vicinity uproots itself and moves 100 cubits away.
The assembled sages, however, are not impressed, and from the edge of the stage, their chorus responds: “You do not bring a proof from a carob tree.” This is not how we play the interpretive game, they say. We present arguments. We do not produce miracles.
We can imagine Rabbi Eliezer’s frustration growing deeper. Adopting the exact same formula as before, he says, “If the halakhah is as I say it is, then let this stream of water prove it.” And immediately, the stream of water reverses course and runs backward. This is not just a one-time miracle, like the carob tree, something you might have missed if you weren’t looking at the right time. Rabbi Eliezer has accomplished a next-level miracle, a persistent change of direction that cannot be ignored.
The sages, however, are still not persuaded. From the edge of the stage, they respond again with the same formula: “You do not bring a proof from a stream of water.”
Rabbi Eliezer must be getting more and more frustrated. How can the sages not be impressed by a tree uprooting itself and marching 100 cubits down the road? How can they not be persuaded by a stream suddenly reversing course? Do they not have eyes to see? Rabbi Eliezer then raises the stakes even further. The only way to impress these people, to really make them sit up and take notice, he seems to think, is to make them fear for their lives. So, Rabbi Eliezer says, again using the same formula, “If the halakhah is as I say it is, then let the walls of the beit midrash, the house of study, prove it.” And immediately, the text tells us, “The walls of the beit midrash began to collapse.”
The formulaic language from both Rabbi Eliezer and the rabbinic chorus highlight the story’s structure. Each of the three stages so far—the wandering carob tree, the reversing river, and the collapsing walls—uses the exact same phrases. But along with repetition, we also see escalation, from the one-time miracle of the carob tree to the ongoing miracle of the river to the perilous miracle of the collapsing walls.
The third stage of Rabbi Eliezer’s miracles calls our attention to the physical structure within which this argument is taking place, the beit midrash, for the first time.
In another sense, we already knew about the existence of the beit midrash, because we knew from the start that Rabbi Eliezer and the sages shared a metaphorical space bounded by a shared set of rules regarding interpretation and argumentation. In this sense, as Charlotte Fonrobert and others have noted, the beit midrash in the story is not just a physical building; it is also a metaphorical structure for the rabbinic project.
By enacting this third miracle, Rabbi Eliezer is not just threatening the lives of the sages; he is destroying the entire edifice. He is attempting to collapse the walls of the physical beit midrash, just as he attempted to collapse the metaphorical space with his earlier miraculous interventions.
The walls obey Rabbi Eliezer’s command and begin to fall, just as the carob tree moved its location and just as the river reversed its course. But then, the story continues, ga’ar bahem Rabi Yehoshua, “Rabbi Joshua got angry with them.” For the first time in the story, a sage steps forward from the anonymous chorus, joining Rabbi Eliezer in the spotlight at center stage. If Rabbi Eliezer can talk to walls and command them to do his bidding, so too can Rabbi Joshua. He says to them, “When sages are arguing with each other about halakhic matters, mah tivkhem?” This last phrase is hard to interpret. In context, R. Joshua seems to be saying to the walls, what standing do you have in this matter? Or in other words: Mind your own business!
The walls now have a problem. One sage has told them to fall down, and the other sage has told them to stand back up. What should they do? The text tells us that, “Out of respect for Rabbi Joshua, the walls did not fall. But out of respect for Rabbi Eliezer, the walls did not return to their standing position.” They stayed in a kind of leaning position, offering a moment of comic relief. We feel sympathy for the poor walls, caught between the two rabbis, like a befuddled child caught between squabbling parents in a sitcom, just trying to do the right thing. We also notice that the walls apparently find a way to do what the rabbis themselves could not do. They accommodate both positions; they compromise.
But this compromise is not a true resolution. The walls, we are told in the next line, are leaning still, which is to say, they remain in an unstable condition.
Rabbi Eliezer then escalates the conflict even further. Using the same formula as before, he says, “If the halakhah is as I say it is, then let the heavens prove it.” And immediately, a bat kol, a heavenly voice, calls out and says, in effect, “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you know that Rabbi Eliezer is always right?” The issue, it would seem, is now settled. Unnatural events can perhaps be disputed, but now we have an explicit divine mandate.
But God does not get the last word. Instead, amad Rabi Yehoshua al raglav, “Rabbi Joshua stood up on his legs,” and recites a fragment of Deuteronomy (30:12): lo bashamayim hi, “[the Torah] is not in heaven.” And thus, the scene comes to a close. (As noted above, there is much more to the sugya, including appendices to this scene and entirely new scenes, but our focus here is on reading the core story itself as closely as we can.) If the Torah is not in heaven, there is no miraculous intervention that Rabbi Eliezer can perform to win the argument. If the Torah is not in heaven, then even God’s own opinion on the law in question has no standing. Human debate is all that counts. As Daniel Boyarin observes in Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (1990), the medium is the message, because in uttering these words as a prooftext, Rabbi Joshua employs his own creative interpretation of the verse in order to justify his and the sages’ right to interpret as they see fit.
Rabbi Joshua’s earlier rebuke of the collapsing walls of the beit midrash proves to have been just a dress rehearsal, a foreshadowing of this final scene. The text says, economically, that he got angry, and his intervention stopped the walls from falling. When the bat kol threatens to collapse the metaphorical beit midrash by undermining the rules that govern the space, Rabbi Joshua’s intervention again saves the day. But this time, in addition to reporting his words, the text takes care to describe Rabbi Joshua’s physical stance: He stands on his feet. He stands his ground. He stands unwavering, unlike the flowing waters of the river. He stands upright, unlike the leaning, precarious walls of the beit midrash. He remains rooted, unlike the carob tree, grounding himself in a principle more important than any argument and more fundamental than any miraculous evidence: The sages have the right to interpret, to debate among themselves, and to make their own decisions.
In this story, Rabbi Joshua represents solidity, substance, constancy. In contrast, Rabbi Eliezer’s miracles are all about movement, fluidity, change. We might also remember that Rabbi Joshua never told the walls to move. He simply rebuked them, stopping them in their tracks. He halted the disruptive movement, the chaos and disorder of Rabbi Eliezer’s collapsing walls. Miracles, while impressive, threaten the natural order of things—not just the orderliness of nature, but the solidity and substance of the rabbinic beit midrash. Rabbi Joshua’s rebuke of the divine voice settles the chaos, restoring the rabbinic order.
Jeffrey Rubenstein notices a further element of the literary artistry at work here—namely, the transition from a horizontal to a vertical direction. The story begins with people talking to people, along a horizontal plane. Then a tree moves horizontally, and a river changes its horizontal direction. The walls begin to fall, so we begin to see a bit of vertical movement, but they do not actually fall, so that movement functions only as a hint of what’s to come. But then, the direction of the climactic moments in the scene are entirely vertical. The bat kol comes down from heaven. Rabbi Joshua stands up, and he speaks towards the heavens. Words come down, and words go up. But ultimately, the content of his rebuke restores the horizontal dimension—the space of human interaction—as the natural order of things.
This first reading of the Oven of Akhnai story draws heavily upon what we might call the standard interpretation of the story, which emphasizes the human right to interpret even a revealed text. To be sure, the story may not be quite as democratic as many have read it; some have argued that the rabbis are focused on establishing and defending their own authority over other human interpreters. Still, most modern readers emphasize the story’s function as a defense of interpretive rights. I want to argue, however, that a closer examination of the story reveals quite a bit of ambivalence about this value.
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Reading 2: The Oven of Akhnai and Interpretive Responsibilities
Let’s return to the beginning.
B’oto ha-yom, on that day, Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus argues for his position, but the other sages will not concede the point. The text says that he offered kol teshuvot she-ba-olam, “all the responses in the world,” v’lo kibelu hemenu, “yet they did not receive [them] from him.”
On that day, in other words, Rabbi Eliezer begins by playing by the rules. Maybe he was a little over-excited; maybe he went on a bit too long in offering so many arguments; maybe he missed some of the social cues that would have told him that he was losing his audience. But we need to acknowledge that he was doing exactly what was expected, and indeed, exactly what we find on just about every page of the Talmud. In fact, the editor of the story seems to be winking at us, because we, the readers, know what it’s like when a sage seems to offer endless arguments. We’ve seen that happen countless times on countless other pages of Talmud. And we also know what is supposed to happen next: The antagonist, the opposing sage, is supposed to offer rebuttals to each argument. That’s how the shakla v’tarya, the give-and-take of rabbinic discourse, works.
In this instance, however, the sages do not offer rebuttals. They simply refuse to listen. They turn their backs on him. Rabbi Eliezer is playing the game the way it is supposed to be played; they are not. This is the first hint in the text that something else is going on here. Once we notice this dynamic, the emotional valence of the story shifts. It is hard not to feel bad for Rabbi Eliezer.
So then Rabbi Eliezer, stymied, casts about for a different way to get their attention, and starts making supernatural things happen. He says that the carob tree “will prove” that he is correct, and then the stream “will prove” it, and then the walls of the beit midrash “will prove” it. He is still pursuing the truth of his case, casting about for proofs after his attempt to use the accepted approach—the approach of rational argumentation—has been blocked. His methods are wrong, but his intentions are noble.
“You do not bring a proof from a carob tree.” “You do not bring a proof from a stream.” After all the arguments-in-the-world that Rabbi Eliezer produced, they now refuse to accept his evidence-from-beyond-the-world. Notice, now, how patronizing, how moralizing the rabbis sound. The Hebrew phrase, ein mevi’in re’aya, is translated above as, “You do not bring a proof,” but an equally good translation could be, “We do not bring a proof,” or “One does not bring a proof.” This is not what we do here, they sniff.
Because of the sages’ earlier obstinacy, their words now ring hollow. Perhaps if they had been willing to engage with Rabbi Eliezer’s arguments, he would not have had to resort to miracles. Perhaps if they had been willing to play the game the right way from the beginning, he would not have tried to change the rules. But they were not—and now they lecture him about the proper way to do things.
In our first reading of the story, Rabbi Eliezer seems like something of an unsympathetic buffoon, willing to bluster and bully to get his way. But as we pay closer attention, the sages are the bullies, unwilling to engage a minority opinion with the respect that it deserves.
What if Rabbi Eliezer is not at the center of the stage at all? What if the anonymous chorus of sages occupies that space, with Rabbi Eliezer at the margins, trying to get the attention and respect of the group, who won’t give him the time of day?
Even Rabbi Eliezer’s third miracle, with its threat of violent harm to the sages, is not quite as straightforward as it might appear. The obvious intertextual reference is Samson in Judges 16. Like Samson, if Rabbi Eliezer brings down the walls of the beit midrash upon his enemies, he will crush himself as well. This is the stuff of tragedy: One cannot use an extraordinary power without destroying it. Our text is surely not condoning Rabbi Eliezer’s actions, but it is also telling us, repeatedly, that Rabbi Eliezer is not simply a villain. This is not a morality tale of good triumphing over evil.
In our first reading of the story, Rabbi Eliezer’s anger and frustration threaten both the physical security and authority of the sages. In this second reading, Rabbi Eliezer brings down the walls of the beit midrash to call out the rabbis’ lack of integrity. When he employs all the arguments in the world to no apparent effect, when he produces evidence from beyond the world to no apparent effect, and now when the walls of the beit midrash are collapsing, Rabbi Eliezer is not attempting to overthrow the beit midrash’s system of deliberative interpretation. He is not causing its collapse. Instead, he is revealing the fact that it is already in a state of grave disrepair. Rabbi Eliezer is speaking truth to power.
Rabbi Eliezer’s truth is that interpretive rights are not absolute. The sages have the right to interpret, but not the right to reject interpretations for no good reason. The sages have the right to use their intellect, but not the right not to use their intellect. When they abuse these rights, the beit midrash loses its legitimate claim to produce knowledge, and the sages lose their authority. It is not Rabbi Eliezer who is destroying the beit midrash; the sages did that themselves, when they refused to engage with him in the first place. The sages’ claim that “you do not bring a proof from a carob tree” is surely correct, and rabbinic discourse demonstrates how arguments ought to proceed. But in this instance, they have shown that they no longer actually know how to deliberate; they just know how to ignore each other.
But if Rabbi Eliezer is not simply a villain in this story, is Rabbi Joshua still a hero? I believe he is, but again, the story is more complicated than it seems. Recall that, when the walls were about to collapse, ga’ar bahem Rabi Yehoshua, “Rabbi Joshua got angry with them.” Surely Rabbi Joshua should be angry with Rabbi Eliezer? No, Rabbi Joshua gets angry with the walls, the poor walls that are only doing Rabbi Eliezer’s bidding. This is another textual hint about the moral ambiguity of the story. As outrageous as Rabbi Eliezer’s actions have been, they are not entirely unjustified. Rabbi Joshua cannot even bring himself to rebuke Rabbi Eliezer directly.
Consider, too, that when Rabbi Joshua speaks to the walls, he asks them, “When sages are arguing with each other about halakhic matters, mah tivkhem?” He seems to be asking the walls, “What standing do you have in this matter?” But a closer and more literal translation of tivkhem yields something like, “What is your nature?” This is a curious thing to ask. What could Rabbi Joshua’s question mean?
The nature of a carob tree is to remain rooted in place, but the carob tree violated its nature by doing Rabbi Eliezer’s bidding. To that, Rabbi Joshua did not object. The nature of a stream is to flow down rather than up, but the stream violated its nature to do Rabbi Eliezer’s bidding. Again, Rabbi Joshua did not object. The nature of a wall, on the other hand, is much more ambiguous. It is certainly true that walls stand, most of the time. But walls can and do fall, especially over the longer term. And so, falling too is in their nature. By saying to the walls, mah tivkhem, Rabbi Joshua is employing a surprisingly weak line of attack. The text is hinting, yet again, at his lack of conviction, perhaps because the sages are not, in fact, “arguing with each other” as they ought to be doing.
We come, then, in our second reading, to the climactic moment of the story: The bat kol, the heavenly voice, calls out and asks, mah lakhem etzel Rabi Eliezer, she’halakhah kemoto bekhol makom, “why are you bothering Rabbi Eliezer, since the halakhah always follows him?” Once again, the language of the text is surprising, and not just because we don’t usually encounter divine intervention in scholarly debate. It is surprising because, if the bat kol were to be introduced as a kind of expert witness, we would expect it to say something about this particular case, to declare that the ruling about the oven in question ought to follow Rabbi Eliezer. That’s what the argument is about: Rabbi Eliezer is struggling to get the sages to listen to him about this particular case.
According to the sages, on the other hand, Rabbi Eliezer is not just wrong in his specific opinion about the Oven of Akhnai. He is wrong in his whole approach of introducing miracles into the argument, because, as they said, that is not how things are done. But now the sages, according to the bat kol, are not just wrong about their specific opinion on the Oven of Akhnai. They are wrong in their whole approach of objecting to Rabbi Eliezer in the first place! Halakhah kemoto bekhol makom, “the halakhah always follows him.” He is always right. The sages should never bother arguing with Rabbi Eliezer at all. The entire moral polarity of the situation has been reversed.
Let’s imagine how we might offer direction to an actor playing the role of Rabbi Eliezer in this story. He has just conjured a bat kol, a voice from heaven. That’s a neat trick. What should his expression be? On our first reading, we, as the directors, might recommend a smug, self-righteous look on his face. The bat kol has affirmed his view. He has apparently triumphed over his tormentors. The sages, who have successfully ignored all the arguments and all the evidence, who only ever spoke to him to tell him what he should not have done, cannot possibly ignore a heavenly voice. We can imagine R. Eliezer saying, or looking like he might say, “See? I told you so!”
But on our second reading, we need to consider that the bat kol has introduced a stance that Rabbi Eliezer himself never claimed. If Rabbi Eliezer is in fact correct in every instance, as the bat kol claimed, and if the sages should never object to him, as the bat kol claimed, then why did he bother producing every argument in the world in the first place? He was frustrated by their intransigence, to be sure. That frustration led to anger, which led to intemperate actions. But did he ever imagine that the bat kol would subvert the need for rabbinic debate altogether? Perhaps Rabbi Eliezer hears the bat kol that he himself conjured, prepared to be triumphant, but then is as horrified as we are at how far things have gone. Perhaps we can imagine his face shocked rather than smirking; dismayed, rather than gloating.
What about Rabbi Joshua? What direction should we give the actor playing Rabbi Joshua, in his climactic rebuke of the bat kol? On our first reading, we would recommend to the actor to shout his line to the heavens, drowning out the bat kol in wild and furious defiance. Then, after the triumphant moment, he should turn to his colleagues in the Greek chorus and accept their accolades, confident that the day has been won. The walls of the beit midrash have not fallen. Rabbi Eliezer has been vanquished. Even the bat kol has been shouted down. Rabbinic order has been re-established. Rabbi Joshua has defended the interpretive rights of the rabbis. The hero’s work is done.
But on our second reading, Rabbi Joshua is not quite as confident as he first appeared, and not quite as sanguine about the merits of the sages’ position. He has watched the sages ignore and belittle Rabbi Eliezer. He has expressed anger at the walls, but not at Rabbi Eliezer. He is attuned to the complexity of the situation, and alert to the dangers of simplistic moralizing. So perhaps, when he rises to his feet, he does so slowly, deliberately, with seriousness and more than a little sadness. Perhaps, when he offers his rebuttal to the bat kol, his climactic lo bashamayim hi, his voice is clear and confident, but not defiant, and with a tone of regret that things have gotten to this point. And after speaking the climactic line, perhaps he turns to the Greek chorus, not with a triumphant look but with a pained one, attuned to the tragedy of the moment—a moment when we ignore each other, when we celebrate only our own victories, when we perceive our colleagues as our enemies. We can imagine a look from Rabbi Joshua that say, “Nu, hevreh, friends, enough, it’s time to grow up.”
Lo bashamayim hi: the Torah is not in heaven. Texts, once launched into the world, never carry their interpretations along with them. We have no supernatural access to their meanings. We have to rely on our best interpretive judgements. This is all true. But on our second reading, Rabbi Joshua also knows that this foundational principle is itself incomplete or subject to abuse. Rabbi Joshua defends the right to interpret—but the numerous ambiguities of the text indicate that he is also concerned about interpretive responsibility. He defends rabbinic independence—but the text suggests, over and over, that he is also concerned about rabbinic interdependence.
Conclusion
By way of conclusion, we might look at a rabbinic text that is linked to the Oven of Akhnai by virtue of its shared prooftext. The Babylonian Talmud, in Eruvin 55a, shares a teaching in the name of Rava. What does the familiar phrase in Deuteronomy, lo bashamayim hi, mean? It means that the Torah is not to be found be’mi she’magbihah da’ato aleha kashamayim, “in one who elevates his own knowledge above it, like the sky.” He teaches, further, that “it is not across the sea” means that the Torah is not to be found be’mi she’marhiv da’ato aleha ka-yam, “in one who expands his own mind over it, like the sea.”
Rava is not making a claim about the plain sense of these phrases; he is making a moral point. Torah is not in heaven, but it is also not with the arrogant. The Torah is in our hearts, but only if our hearts are right, only if we are appropriately humble. When we deny external authority and defend individual autonomy, as we should, we open ourselves up to the particular pathologies that accompany the celebration of individual autonomy. The Torah can be ours only if we exercise interpretive responsibility along with interpretive rights, only if we subjugate our will to the Torah—not the p’shat of the Torah, not the literal sense, necessarily, but the higher truth of the Torah, as best as we can discern it.
We can think about this teaching in Eruvin as balancing the first reading of the story of the Oven of Akhnai, above, and echoing the second reading. Rava’s d’rash is an example of the rabbis’ efforts to promote not just their own interpretations, but also an ethic of interpretation. The Torah rests in human hands, to be sure. But that enormously important principle implies not merely the right to interpret, but the responsibility to interpret well. We must approach the work of interpretation not as an opportunity to display our brilliance or creativity, not as an exercise in power or domination over others, but ultimately, as an effort to find the truth of the Torah. After all, as Rav Hanina teaches in Shabbat 55a, hotamo shel hakadosh barukh hu emet, “the seal of the Holy Blessed One is truth.”
We should believe that God wants us to seek the truth, and that our interpretive efforts are our best shot at getting there. We should believe that interpretation is not only possible but necessary. But we should also affirm that interpretation is not only a matter of rights but also of responsibilities, that we must strive to interpret our texts as virtuously as we can, and that the interpretive process must include a genuine engagement across difference. We are very good at insisting on our own truths. We could use a little more practice at building up and expanding communities of shared truth, of bridging differences in order to participate in shared projects that are bolder and more aspirational than any we can pursue on our own.
