The Kingdom of Rome (article summary)
This was the Jewish article from last week (HTML, flipdocs, paid Substack).
A brief overview of the points of the article.
First, Bava Kamma-related.
Describe the story in our sugya, of the Roman Empire sending officials to survey Jewish law and being impressed by it, except for the law under discussion, with inequity between Jews and gentiles when one’s ox gores the other’s ox.
Compare / contrast with the Yerushalmi parallel. We discover it it to Rabban Gamliel, other laws found unfair, how one such law was eased in response, and that the officials not only pledge to not tell but that they forget.
Censorship in our sugya, specifically in Vilna printing introducing the Roman Empire rather than the Evil Empire. Also Canaanite instead of Gentile. See first image.
Tie it in Chanukkah, with the Russian-printed siddur in the back of the Torah Temimah having malchus Antiochus harasha, thus avoiding Yavan Haresha’ah. Perhaps because Ivan (ee-van) was a common Russian name, or could be misunderstood to refer to Ivan the Terrible. See second image.
Then, Vayeshev related.
I argue that dibatam ra’ah refers to the grazing report, not a report of the brothers’ wicked deeds.
The common understanding is the latter, since dibah and dibatam ra’ah have negative implications elsewhere, since ra’ah implies evil, and since the brothers hate Yosef because of his words.
But the verses never spell out what the purported wicked deeds are, and are filled in midrashically via close reading. (Some commentators read the verse similarly closely, e.g. Ibn Ezra or Seforno. Did they do something interpret in how they treated the sons of the maidservants? By negligence in the watching the sheep?) What if there weren’t evil deeds?
Also, many meforshim other than Rashi interpret hating Yosef for his dreams and for his words as something other than him slandering them, which they wouldn’t have known about and which should have been mentioned prior to his dreams. It is bragging in his interpretation, or telling them his dreams even though they didn’t want to hear it. So not only is the slander not detailed, but it has zero impact on the story’s progression.
Meanwhile, רעה occurs elsewhere in the selfsame verse to mean grazing.
And, there are very few instances of dibbah in the Biblical corpus. Just because they appear describing negative things doesn’t force the word itself to intrinsically mean that, just like הגיד appears in that context but doesn’t intrinsically mean something bad. And motzi dibbah might differ from dibbah alone.
And, why modify dibbah with ra’ah if dibbah is intrinsically bad? That it repetitively redundant!
And, interpreting it as grazing it is a perfect foreshadowing and setup for the actual story. It establishes why Yosef was not with his brothers at the time, grazing, and why his father send him to find shelom achecha and shelom hatzon. That was his longstanding role.