The Reception of Paradoxography in the Babylonian Talmud

This article demonstrates that the authors of the texts collected in the Babylonian Talmud, like their contemporaries, used nature miracles to think the unthinkable, to explore the biblical past and the world to come, or to unravel mysteries in the biblical text. Taking the Torah as the blueprint for creation, the rabbis see the text and the natural world as mirroring and explaining each other. To understand the mysteries in the blueprint and in the lands beyond their reach, the rabbis resort to the kind of knowledge that was systematized in collections of nature wonders, so-called paradoxographies. But the rabbis also add to the paradoxographic tradition by identifying nature wonders in the biblical text. The basis of the present analysis is a series of short stories that appear most prominently in tractate Baba Batra 73b-74b, but have cognates or parallels elsewhere in the Talmud. The stories imagine rabbinic sages on the high seas or in the desert and look through their eyes at the landscape described by the biblical text, which they read as a map. Earlier scholarship dismissed these stories mostly as tall tales and entertaining hyperbole. In contrast, building on recent work on ancient world making, this paper argues that the stories reflect a systematic inquiry into the natural world at the height of the science of their time, using natural curiosity as a driving force for analysis and discovery.