Refuting the Lion (article summary)
I’ve been getting a bit behind in posting article summaries, so this one is still from the end of Gittin (82a). You can now read the article in full here (flipdocs, HTML, paid Substack).
The lion in question is Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, who took a position that if a man divorces, saying “you’re permitted to everyone except Ploni”, that works. After his death, several Sages gather and attempt refutations of his position.
Some major ideas in my article:
(1) We should know the scholastic generations of the Sages of the Mishnah — should we place them around Rabbi Eliezer’s generation? And how do we do this in general?
(2) Here are the typical locations / scholastic generations of each of these arguing Sages. Talmudic biography is important here.
(3) By the way, his truest contemporary, Rabbi Yehoshua, who chastises the Sages, might still disagree and have his own “refutation”. But that isn’t mentioned in Yerushalmi. The brayta here is suspect, since it incorporates Aramaic (extremely rare, and for really early braytot), and happens to mostly parallel the language of a similar derasha on a different pasuk by Rabba in Nedarim 70a-b. Oh, and the Arras manuscript has the fact that it a brayta as an insertion / correction in the text, over the line.
Underlined in red is “and what is the pircha of Rabbi Yehoshua”? And above the line is כדתניא אמר רבי יהושע. So I’d suggest this is the Talmudic Narrator, channeling Rabba from Nedarim.
(4) Rava is characteristic in his saying “all these have refutations except for this one”. We see this pattern often and only for Rava.
(5) When much later, fifth-generation Rabbi Yossi says רוֹאֶה אֲנִי אֶת דִּבְרֵי רַבִּי אֶלְעָזָר בֶּן עֲזַרְיָה מִדִּבְרֵי כּוּלָּן, he is invoking a fun phrase we see in Pirkei Avot, which Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai applied to different Rabbi Eleazar, namely ben Arach. Then, an exploration of others who invoke the phrase for various Rabbi Eleazars.