X only means Y (article summary)

Over Shabbos, someone told me that when they saw this title in the Jewish Link, they tuned out, because it seemed like it was about math. But X and Y are intended as placeholders, such as “Na” only means “Please”.

You can read the article in full online (HTML, flipbooks, paid Substack).

Here is the bullet point version.

1. It is presumably Rabba bar bar Chana repeatedly quoting Rabbi Yochanan, rather than plain Rabba who is typically “bar Nachmani”. Manuscripts support this emendation.
   

2. We can often figure out words based on context. For reasons, Sefer Iyov happens to use a lot of obscure words, or even words we have seen elsewhere but with an obscure meaning. We figure out what a word means by its context in different environments. But, for Iyov, we might only encounter a word once, or maybe it will appear another time or two in Tanach. Further, the obscure words in Iyov are dense, so how do you use one obscure word to resolve the meaning of another obscure word?
   
   It’s a tough Job, but somebody’s got to do it.
   
   Part of that happens in the Leviathan midrashim on Bava Batra 75 is that, when interpreting Iyov 40, an Amora defines words, saying ein X ela Y, by pointing to another occurrence of this word.
   

3. This might be a matter of simple peshat, that this other context will help us understand the meaning. It might also be derash, that a word has multiple word senses, but I will tap the following obscure meaning because it is useful for the idea I am trying to present.
   
   So krh might indeed mean feast in that context of Elisha’s advise to present the captured invaders with a feast before returning them. But it also means to dig, ki yichreh ish bor, and it also means to trade. And trade in context may make more sense in peshat. The same for chabbarim, revocalized as chaveirim, meaning Torah scholars.
   

4. X only means Y is just a natural speech pattern or overstatement. It doesn’t mean that the only meaning of X is Y. Rather, in this particular instance, I think that the peshat is that the word sense is Y. Or that as derash, in this particular instance, I want to read it to mean Y. And I’ll base it on the following instance within the Biblical corpus: ______________
   
   The examples I presented in the article is that נא only means please, and מים only refers to water. The Torah forbids eating a korban pesach, paschal lamb, either raw — Na — or boiled in water — Mayim. That gave me the excuse to generate this picture, of a sheep being boiled with a Torah. Please don't eat!

   

5. Try to look for a pattern within Rabbi Yochanan of saying Ein X ela Y.
   

6. Then, this oldie, in a footnote:
   
   Why specifically the Leviathan for Torah scholars? After all, isn’t there also the Behemoth in the feast? The story goes that, in the feast in messianic times, the Torah scholars will come and ask who’s giving the hashgacha. They are told that it is Hashem / hashgacha pratit. To which they reply, “we’ll have the fish.” :)