Talmudical hermeneutics

Compilations of such hermeneutic rules were made in the earliest times. The tannaitic tradition recognizes three such collections, (baraita at the beginning of Sifra; Avot of Rabbi Natan 37:10) • the 13 Rules of Rabbi Ishmael Those rules are traditionally studied and applied to the religious texts of some biblical canon, which were commonly believed to be inspired by God himself, through the words and the actions of human people. Therefore, those rules were related in coordination with the four independent level of biblical reading, as in the acronym pardes (). == Dates of the rules ==

All the hermeneutic rules scattered through the Talmudim and Midrashim have been collected by Malbim in Ayyelet HaShachar, the introduction to his commentary on the Sifra, and have been reckoned at 613, to correspond with the 613 commandments. The antiquity of the rules can be determined only by the dates of the authorities who quote them, meaning that they cannot safely be declared older than the tanna to whom they are first ascribed. It is certain, however, that the seven middot of Hillel and the 13 of Rabbi Ishmael are from earlier than the time of Hillel himself, who was the first to transmit them. In any event, he did not invent them, but merely collected them as current in his day, though he possibly amplified them. They were not immediately recognized by all as valid and binding. Different schools interpreted and modified them, restricting or expanding them, in various ways. The Talmud itself gives no information concerning the origin of the middot, although the Geonim regarded them as Sinaitic (הלכה למשה מסיני, "Law given to Moses at Mount Sinai"; comp. Rabbi Samson of Chinon in his Sefer HaKeritot). ==Rules of Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael==

Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael and their scholars especially contributed to the development or establishment of these rules. Rabbi Akiva devoted his attention particularly to the grammatical and exegetical rules, while Rabbi Ishmael developed the logical. The rules laid down by one school were frequently rejected by another because the principles which guided them in their respective formulations were essentially different. • לשונות רבויין הן (= "words are amplifications") and thus may have employed superfluous words and sounds; and forced values should not be assigned to them for the purpose of deducing new rules therefrom. It is unnecessary, therefore, to draw a new inference from every repetition. Thus, for instance, in Numbers 5:5-8 the Torah repeats the laws of Leviticus 5:20-26 for the purpose of teaching the new ruling that in certain cases recompense for sin shall be made directly to the priests. Akiva asserts, on the other hand, that "Everything that is said in a section so repeated must be interpreted", and that new deductions may be drawn from it. According to this view, in Numbers 5:5-8 a new meaning must be sought in the repetition of the Law. According to Ishmael, on the contrary, nothing may be inferred from the position of the individual sections, since it is not at all certain that every single portion now stands in its proper place. Many a paragraph which forms, strictly speaking, the beginning of a book and should stand in that position, has been transposed to the middle. Ishmael explains the occurrence of a section in a place where it does not properly belong (ולמה נכתב כאן) by declaring that "there is no first or last in the Scriptures", not as due to any special reason. Eliezer ben Jose expanded this rule in his baraita (Baraita on the Thirty-two Rules) and divided it into two parts (Nos. 31 and 32). Juxtaposition through "exemplification" or משל has recently been described by Talmudist Daniel Boyarin as the sine qua non of Talmudic hermeneutics (Boyarin 2003: 93), for "until Solomon invented the mashal, no one could understand Torah at all" (Song of Songs Rabba). The phenomenon has been compared to the more recent phenomenon of sampling in modern popular music, especially hip-hop. Fusion of methodologies The opposition between the schools of Ishmael and Akiva lessened gradually, and finally vanished altogether, so that the later tannaim apply the axioms of both indiscriminately, although the hermeneutics of Akiva predominated. == Detailed rules ==

Kal va-chomer (קל וחומר) The first rule of Hillel and of Rabbi Ishmael is "kal va-chomer" (), called also "din" (conclusion). This is the argument "a minori ad majus" or "a majori ad minus". In the Baraita on the Thirty-two Rules this rule is divided into two (Nos. 5 and 6), since a distinction is made between a course of reasoning carried to its logical conclusion in the Holy Scriptures themselves ("kal va-chomer meforash") and one merely suggested there ("kal va-chomer satum"). The completed argument is illustrated in ten examples given in Genesis Rabbah xcii. concludes, therefore, that the elaboration "from the neck" (in 5:8) is part of the concept of the word , and consequently that מלק means "to wring the head from the neck" in 1:15 also. In order to use this principle, one must first have a prior knowledge or notion about a certain thing (premise), from whence he wishes to apply the same notion or premise to something else that is currently unknown to him. In the Babylonian Talmud (Pesahim 66a), Hillel the elder made use of an argument by analogy when he wanted to show that it was permitted for a man to do labor on the Sabbath day when preparing his Passover offering on the eve of the Jewish holiday. Hillel observed that in two biblical verses appeared the words, "at its appointed time" (), the one in , for which there is some prior knowledge about its practice, viz. "Command the children of Israel... my [daily whole-burnt] offering...shall ye observe to offer unto me at its appointed time" (), whereas the other verse, in , states: "Let the children of Israel also keep the Passover at its appointed time" (). Just as the words "at its appointed time" (Num. 28:2), used here in connection with the daily whole-burnt offering, one is permitted to do labor on the Sabbath day pursuant to its preparation, so, too, the words "at its appointed time" (Num. 9:2), used in connection with the Passover and its requirements for that day (i.e. the Passover offering), one is permitted to do labor on the Sabbath day pursuant to its preparation. Even so, the slaughtering knife used in butchering the animal was carried by the animal in its fleece until it reached the Temple Mount, where it was then slaughtered. At a later period, however, the gezerah shavah emerged from these narrow bounds and inferred the identity of legal requirements from the identity of their terminology, even when such terminology occurred in many passages besides the two which formed the analogy. Thereby the gezerah shavah lost its inherent power of demonstration; for it is wholly unreasonable to attribute to a word a meaning which happens to be associated with it in a single passage, when various other passages connect ideas entirely different with the same word. Since, moreover, each individual teacher might choose which two expressions he would select for a gezerah shavah, contradictory conclusions might be drawn, which would each have the same claim to validity, since both were obtained by a gezerah shavah. Consequently, in order to be binding, a gezerah shavah was obliged to conform to two requirements which, on the one hand, greatly restricted its application, and, on the other, gave legal decisions thus obtained the value of those deduced from a superfluous word in the Holy Scriptures. Rashi (on the various passages) and many expositors who followed him explain this rule as implying that every gezerah shavah is assumed to have been handed down from Mount Sinai. Practically this rule stipulates that the use of this method of hermeneutics is to be permitted only to an entire board or council, and is to be employed only when its results agree with the traditional halakah, which thereby acquires the importance of a law implied in the Scriptures. In Yerushalmi this rule reads: אדם דן גזירה שוה לקיים תלמודו ואין אדם דן גזירה שוה לבטל תלמודו ("From a gezerah shavah conclusions may be deduced which support tradition, but not such as are opposed to tradition"; comp. Maimonides in the introduction to his Mishneh Torah). == See also ==