Reading Talmudic Sources as Arguments: The Case of Water Used by a Baker

Abstract

By discussing a short sugya, this paper demonstrates how to read the components of a typical Talmudic discussion – Mishnah, Tosefta, Yerushalmi and Bavli – as arguments. In contrast to widely used academic approaches, I show that it is possible to ascribe disagreement to parallel sources without passing judgment either on their chronological order or on whether one of the sources is a direct response to the other. The appendix offers a new theoretical model for approaching the synoptic problem in rabbinic literature.