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“Like an Expert Sharecropper”: Agricultural Halakhah and Agricultural Science in Rabbinic Palestine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2014

Tzvi Novick
Tzvi Novick*
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana
*
novick.3@nd.edu

Abstract

The formulation and application of rabbinic Halakhah often depends on the determination of facts that belong, to one degree or another, to the province of professional experts. The resulting structural tension is analogous to that posed by the prominence of the expert witness in the modern American court, or the active role of private industry in administrative law. This article examines the relationship in the classical rabbinic corpus from Palestine between rabbis and farmers, or between rabbinic and agricultural expertise. It considers whether agriculture would have been conceived of in this context as a specialized or technical body of knowledge, and, if so, whether and how agricultural Halakhah accommodates itself to this fact.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
AJS Review , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , November 2014 , pp. 303 - 320
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 2014 

A legal system is relatively nominalist, on one understanding of this term, to the extent that its rules depend to a lesser degree than they might otherwise on facts of the matter, that is, on facts not produced by the legal system itself. In an earlier article centered on a story in the Babylonian Talmud (B. Sanhedrin 5a–b) about Rav and the herders, I argued that one impetus toward nominalism comes from the desire to disentangle law from complicated bodies of technical fact.Footnote 1 According to the story, Rabbi Judah the Patriarch denied Rav license to “permit” firstborn animals, that is, to determine that their blemishes are severe enough to render the animals profane. The stam insists that the patriarch's denial did not stem from any lack of familiarity on Rav's part with animal anatomy. Rav had in fact devoted eighteen months to studying the subject with herders. The problem, on the contrary, was that Rav had become too expert. Because the logic of his decisions would remain opaque to other licensed but less knowledgeable experts, and hence sow confusion, the patriarch excluded him from the circle of licensed experts. On the stam's explanation, the rabbinic law of permitting firstborns becomes nominalist by settling for, and indeed insisting upon, knowledge of animal anatomy that is less detailed than the knowledge of the professional herder.Footnote 2 Nominalism emerges, on this analysis, as the result, at least in part, of a problem in the sociology of knowledge.

The same article provides the framework for a broader inquiry into the relationship between rabbis and other professionals or quasi-professionals, or between rabbinic knowledge and bodies of technical knowledge that are analytically independent from rabbinic Halakhah, but to which Halakhah “speaks.”Footnote 3 This essay will consider the relationship between agricultural law and agricultural science, or, more loosely, between rabbis and farmers. Rabbinic texts speak of specialized agricultural tasks, and of an “expert farmer” (איכר אומן).Footnote 4 But do they recognize a corresponding body of technical farming knowledge that bears on agricultural law? If so, how do they treat it? Is there any evidence of a desire to disentangle agricultural law from agricultural fact, or, in other words, to construct agricultural law in nominalist terms?

Greco-Roman Background

The status of agriculture as a subject is a question that Greek and Roman writers debated across many centuries. In Xenophon's Oeconomicus, of the early fourth century bce, Isomachus manages to persuade Socrates that “farming is not troublesome to learn, like other arts (τέχνας), which the pupil must study till he is worn out before he can earn his keep by his work. Some things you can understand by watching men at work, others by just being told, well enough to teach another if you wish” (15.10).Footnote 5 Because one can pick up sufficient agricultural knowledge incidentally, through observation and casual inquiry, the qualities that ultimately separate the good farmer from the bad are care and diligence, not knowledge. “[T]he slothful cannot plead ignorance, as in other arts: land, as all men know, responds to good treatment. Husbandry is the clear accuser of the recreant soul” (20.14–15).

Antonius, a character in Cicero's first-century BCE dialogue, On the Orator, takes his cue from Xenophon's Isomachus. In arguing against Crassus that the art of the orator does not demand detailed study of the common law, Antonius compares rhetoric to agriculture.

For it is one thing to be a craftsman in a specific subject and art, and another to be no dullard or raw hand in social life and the general practices of mankind. Which of us may not survey his estate or go to see his rural concerns, whether in quest of profit or of amusement? Yet no one passes his days so bereft of sight and sense as to be wholly ignorant of the nature of sowing and reaping, or of lopping of trees and pruning of vines, or of the times of year for doing these things, or of how they are done. If then some one of us has occasion to look over his estate, or give some commission to his agent, or order to his bailiff, on details of husbandry, need he get by heart the volumes of Mago of Carthage? Or may we be satisfied with our own mother-wit? (1.58.248–49)

Antonius appears to accept that there is a technical science of agriculture, of the sort elucidated in Mago's treatise, which was translated from Punic into Latin with the sponsorship of the Roman Senate.Footnote 6 But Antonius denies that expert agricultural knowledge is relevant for estate management in the ordinary course of things.Footnote 7

Varro, a contemporary of Cicero, appears to respond to Antonius's position in his dialogue, On Agriculture, also from the first century BCE.Footnote 8 A character named Agrasius poses the question “whether the knowledge (scientia) of those things used in agriculture is an art (ars) or not” (1.3).Footnote 9 Scrofa, “who is esteemed the Roman most skilled (peritissimus) in agriculture” (1.2.10), responds: “[I]t is not only an art but an important and noble art. It is, as well, a science (scientia), which teaches what crops are to be planted in each kind of soil, and what operations are to be carried on, in order that the land may regularly produce the largest crops” (1.3). For Scrofa, the profitable farmer is one well versed in agricultural science. Two generations after Varro, Columella, at the beginning of his technical treatise On Agriculture, takes vigorous issue with “the common notion … that farming is … a business which has no need of direction or precept.” He, on the contrary, marvels at the subject's magnitude, “like the immensity of some great body,” and at “the minuteness of its several parts” (1.preface.21). Both Varro (through the mouths of his characters) and Columella recommend attentiveness to the agricultural wisdom of ancient and contemporary farmers, as well as personal experimentation.Footnote 10 Among those who recognize an agricultural science we may also count the Jewish philosopher-exegete Philo, who, in his On Husbandry, distinguishes between Noah the “husbandman” (γεωργὸς) and Cain the “worker of the ground.”Footnote 11 The latter is Xenophon's farmer, who merely expends effort, and “carries very heavy loads” (21). The former, by contrast, is proficient in the science of husbandry (τῆς γεωργικῆς τέχνης), not an “unprofessional” (ἰδιώτης, rabbinic Hebrew הדיוט) but a “skilled worker” (ἔμπειρος, the equivalent of the rabbinic אומן) (4).Footnote 12

Agriculture emerges in these sources as a contested area: the common knowledge of a farming society, for some, but for others, a technical science. In the sections that follow we turn to the rabbinic literature of Roman Palestine (especially the Mishnah, the Tosefta, and the Yerushalmi) for evidence of rabbinic views on agriculture and, most importantly, on the extent to which agricultural Halakhah depends on technical agricultural knowledge. In view of the wide scope of the relevant corpus—an entire order of the Mishnah is dedicated to laws bearing on agriculture, and discussions that implicate agriculture also occur throughout the other five orders of the Mishnah, and in related texts—and of the fact that the corpus only addresses these questions incidentally, the aim here is not to provide exhaustive answers, but to collect and explicate the most relevant texts and patterns.

“Like an Expert Sharecropper”

At the beginning of the fifth chapter of tractate Shevi‘it (Y. Shevi‘it 5:1 [35d]) the Yerushalmi probes the “one third” standard, that is, the rule that the fruits of a tree that have reached one third of their growth before the New Year belong to the previous year's crop for the purpose of tithing. The passage of immediate interest to us addresses the standard's apparent imprecision.

ר' בון בר חייא בעא קומי ר' זעירא מעתה שליש הראשון לשעבר ושליש השיני לבא אמ' ליה שליש הראשון קשה לבוא מכיון שהוא בא מיד הוא גדל אמ' ר' בא ב(!)אריס אומן ילף לה ר' זעירא שמואל אמ' שיתין יומין שו(!)תה עליי שיתא יומין שיתין עליי

R. Bun b. Ḥiyya asked before R. Zeira: On this basis, the first third should count for the previous one, and the second third for the coming one? He said to him: The first third comes with difficulty. Once it comes, it grows immediately. Said R. Ba: R. Zeira learned it like an expert sharecropper. Samuel said: Sixty days, six leaves; six days, sixty leaves.Footnote 13

R. Bun would have the year for tithing correspond precisely to growth. If the fruit completes one third of its growth by the New Year, then that one third should be tithed according to the previous year, while the other two thirds should be tithed according to the following year. R. Zeira offers a scientific defense of the one-third standard. The final two thirds of the fruit's growth are, as it were, contained in the first third, because it is in the first third of its growth that the fruit expends effort, while the final two thirds follow easily afterward. R. Zeira's claim is presumably connected to the view, which he himself assumes in a statement cited numerous times in the Yerushalmi, that the seed of a fruit that has attained one third of its growth is viable.Footnote 14 Samuel's statement confirms that the initial growth is the slowest.Footnote 15

What does R. Ba mean when he observes that R. Zeira has responded like an expert sharecropper? Is his tone condescending? Complimentary? Neutral?Footnote 16 It is worth noting that R. Zeira may well have been a sharecropper, or something like it. The Yerushalmi (Y. Bava Meẓi‘a 4:12 [9d]) reports that he worked in flax (עסק בהדא כיתנא). R. Zeira tells elsewhere (Y. Berakhot 1:1 [2d]) that he was conscripted into agricultural labor, which was often the fate of small landholders in the vicinity of imperial estates, who were given cultivation rights with the understanding that they would, in exchange, contribute their labor to those estates.Footnote 17 Be that as it may, R. Ba speaks directly not to R. Zeira's occupation, but to the social location of the information that he has invoked. R. Zeira answers R. Bun's question less as a rabbi than as a farmer well versed in agricultural science. R. Ba's statement acknowledges a difference between halakhic discourse (unmarked) and specialized farming discourse (marked).

The construction of agriculture as a distinct body of knowledge also emerges implicitly from a formula that occurs almost exclusively in the Tosefta and the Yerushalmi, and generally—in the Yerushalmi almost always—with reference to agriculture. After stating a law that implicates a finding of fact, the anonymous voice asks: How does one know (יודע), or, how does one determine (בודק)?Footnote 18 The following example is typical. The Mishnah (M. ‘Orlah 1:5) cites the anonymous view that in the case of a shoot of a vine that has been directed into the soil, so that it grows its own roots, the shoot does not have the status of an independent plant, and hence is not subject to the law of the “foreskin” (ערלה), which prohibits consumption of the fruit of a plant for three years after its planting. R. Meir contends that the shoot is only exempt if the shoot has been planted in poor soil. In the Yerushalmi (Y. ‘Orlah 1:5 [61a]), R. Abbahu, in the name of R. Yoḥanan and R. Ḥisda, contends that the debate between the anonymous view and R. Meir occurs only when one does not know whether the shoot is nourished (chiefly) from itself (“the youngling”) or from the vine (“the elder”), for if it is certain that the shoot is nourished from itself, all agree that it constitutes a new plant, and if from the elder, then all agree that it does not constitute a new plant. The Yerushalmi probes this position. How can one know the source of the shoot's nutrition? And if it is possible to know, then how can the situation of ignorance—the only situation subject to the debate in the Mishnah, according to R. Abbahu—ever arise?

כיצד הוא יודע ר' ביבי בשם ר' חנינה אם היו העלים הפוכין כלפי הילדה דבר בריא שהוא חי מכח הזקנה ואם היו העלים הפוכין כלפי הזקנה דבר בריא שהוא חי מכח הילדה אמר ר' יודן בר חנין סימנא דאכל מן חבריה בהית מסתכלא ביה אמר ר' יודן אבוי דר' מתנייה תיפתר שנשרו העלין

How does one know? R. Bibi in the name of R. Ḥaninah: If the leaves are turned toward the youngling, it is certain that it lives from the strength of the elder.Footnote 19 And if the leaves are turned toward the elder, it is certain that it lives from the strength of the youngling. Said R. Yudan b. Ḥanin: The mnemonic is, one who eats from his friend is embarrassed to look at him. Said R. Yudan father of R. Metanya: Resolve it as being when the leaves have fallen.

R. Bibi reports that one can use the orientation of the leaves on the youngling as an indicator of the source of its nutrition, for the leaves consistently point away from the source. What, then, is the case of uncertainty, where the Mishnah's debate arises? When there are no leaves.

This short sugya can be read as a kind of turn and counterturn around the problem of rabbinic law and technical fact. R. Abbahu's statement confines the debate in the Mishnah to the case of uncertainty, and thus relieves the law of the need to make a factual determination. It is precisely where no factual determination can be made that the law speaks. Relegation of the law to the case of uncertainty is a common move in rabbinic dialectic, but the exchange in the continuation of the sugya—the “how does one know” question and its aftermath—exposes this move as a strategic way of aligning law with the question of fact without directly engaging that question in any real detail. In this case, the sugya powers beyond this point, to delve precisely into the factual question. The existence of fixed formulae—“how does one know/determine?”—for such turns to (chiefly agricultural) fact marks them off as a distinct form of inquiry, which we may with good reason call that of the “expert sharecropper.”

The Minimum Vineyard

The Mishnah's overview of the laws of “mingled species of the vineyard” (כלאי הכרם) in tractate Kil'ayim (chapters 4–7) is almost wholly occupied with the question of whether a given formation of vines constitutes a vineyard. If it does, then the prohibition against planting another species holds for the entire area, and four cubits beyond it. If it does not, then the prohibition applies only to the six handbreadths around each vine. There is evidence that these vineyard formations, and the dimensions ascribed to them, served as the paradigm cases of linear measurement for early rabbinic authorities.Footnote 20

The foundational measurement is that of the minimum vineyard. According to M. Kil'ayim 4:6, the smallest vineyard is one that consists of two vines aligned across from two vines, with a third “protruding as a tail” (יוצא זנב). If, according to the anonymous view in M. Kil'ayim 5:1, the vines are planted in a jumble, rather than in rows, they constitute a vineyard only if it is possible to discern an arrangement of two opposite three. Contemporary Roman writers also recommend planting vines in units of five, but in their case, the five vines take the form of a quincunx, with two vines in opposite rows, and the fifth in between the two pairs, equidistant from all four vines. According to Varro's Scrofa, the quincunx is an innovation. “Our ancestors, on the same amount of land but not so well laid out, made less wine and grain than we do, and of a poorer quality” (1.7.2).Footnote 21 The Mishnah (M. Kil'ayim 4:6) is familiar with the quincunx arrangement, but denies it the status of a vineyard. Whether we are to see in this denial a traditionalist or a nativist or an anti-Roman sentiment is uncertain, but, as we will later observe, rabbis do recognize a link between their planting practices and their native soil.Footnote 22

Two pericopes, one in the Tosefta and one in the Yerushalmi, concern the rabbinic definition of the vineyard, and offer insight into the question of technical agricultural knowledge and its relationship to rabbinic agricultural law. The Tosefta (T. Kil'ayim 3:5) reports that the case of the jumbled vineyard came before R. Gamaliel. He instructs his interlocutors to go and ask a certain Yose b. Giali (Golai, according to the editio princeps), whom he characterizes as “one most well versed” (בר ובקי) in “the laws of the vineyard” (הלכות הכרם).Footnote 23 Yose provides the answer enshrined anonymously in M. Kil'ayim 5:1: If it is possible to discern an arrangement of four vines in two rows, plus a tail, then it is a vineyard.

Why does R. Gamaliel not know the law? Why is it known to Yose b. Giali? Is R. Gamaliel's ignorance connected with the fact that, as a large landholder who leased his estate to sharecroppers, he was less than familiar with matters pertaining to vineyards, and especially small ones?Footnote 24 Virtually nothing is known of Yose b. Giali outside of this source.Footnote 25 Nor can we be sure of the nature of the expertise attributed to him here. I have rendered the phrase הלכות הכרם as “the laws of the vineyard,” but in fact, outside of this case, the word הלכה occurs in tractate Kil'ayim (Mishnah and Tosefta) only in the phrase: “[a vine formation] planted in accord with its הלכה,” that is, its way (M. Kil'ayim 5:1; T. Kil'ayim 3:5–6). Thus, what Yose knows may be characterized less as law than as fact, and in particular, the conventions of viticulture. But just as the term הלכה itself spans is and ought, so Yose's knowledge bears directly on legal questions.Footnote 26

A set of three interrelated stories that also involve ignorance about matters connected to the laws of mingled species of the vineyard sheds some additional light on the varying levels of expertise in this body of law within rabbinic circles. One of the three stories, which occurs in the Bavli (B. ‘Eruvin 11b), makes explicit reference to such expertise.

הלך ר' יהושע אצל ר' יוחנן בן נורי ללמדו תורה אע"פ שבקי בהלכות כלאים ומצאו שיושב בין אילנות ומתח זמורה בין אילן לאילן ואמ' לו איבעא גפני' כאן מהו לזרוע אמ' לו בעשר מותר ביותר מעשר אסור

R. Joshua went to R. Yoḥanan b. Nuri that he might teach him Torah, even though he was well versed in the laws of mingled species. And he found him sitting among trees. And he extended a vine shoot from tree to tree and he said to him: If vines were here, could one seed [another species] there? He said to him: If the distance is ten, it is permissible, but if more than ten, it is forbidden.Footnote 27

The halakhic question is whether “the form of a doorframe” (צורת הפתח) constitutes a partition, whether for the Sabbath, so as to demarcate a property as private, or, in particular here, for the laws of mingled species, so as to allow one to plant vines on one side and another species on the other without leaving any additional space. In the above story, attributed to R. Yoḥanan, R. Joshua asks R. Yoḥanan b. Nuri about the status of a vine shoot stretched across two trees, so as to form the shape of a doorframe. R. Yoḥanan b. Nuri counts this quasi-doorframe as a partition, so long as the distance between the two trees is ten cubits or less.

What appears to be a different version of the same story occurs in the parallel sugya in the Yerushalmi (Y. ‘Eruvin 1:9 [19c] = Y. Kil'ayim 4:4 [29b] = Y. Sukkah 1:1 [52a]), again in the name of R. Yoḥanan.

מעשה שהלך ר' יהושע בן קרחה אצל ר' יוחנן בן נורי לנגנגד והראהו שדה אחת ובית חבירתה היתה נקראת והיו שם פרצות יותר מעשר והיה נוטל אעים וסותם דוקרנין וסותם עד שמיעטן פחות מעשר אמ' כזו כן מחיצת שבת

A story: R. Joshua b. Korḥah went to R. Yoḥanan b. Nuri to Ginegar, and he showed him a field that was called the white house (?), and there were breaches there larger than ten. And he took planks and sealed it, pitchforks and sealed it, until he had reduced them to less than ten. He said: Like this, so is the partition for the Sabbath.Footnote 28

While the traveler in the Bavli's version, R. Joshua, is presumptively R. Joshua b. Ḥananiah, the R. Joshua in the Yerushalmi's version is R. Joshua b. Korḥah. The details of the two rabbis’ interactions also vary.

A traditional commentator on the Yerushalmi, Ber Ratner ('Ahavat Ẓiyon ve-Yerushalayim, on Y. Kil'ayim 4:4) speaks for many when he argues in favor of the Yerushalmi's originality. “The version [in the Bavli] is puzzling, for R. Joshua b. Ḥananiah would not go to R. Yoḥanan b. Nuri.” It is more natural, on this view, that R. Joshua b. Korḥah, a third-generation Tanna, rather than R. Joshua b. Ḥananiah, an early second-generation Tanna, should have traveled to receive instruction from R. Yoḥanan b. Nuri, a late second-generation Tanna. But this view, even if correct, furnishes no grounds for emending the Bavli (against almost all witnesses) so that it, too, features R. Joshua b. Korḥah. On the contrary, the Bavli's apologetic qualifier, “even though he was well versed in the law of mingled species,” should be taken as evidence that the Bavli indeed takes its R. Joshua to be R. Joshua b. Ḥananiah. It is precisely because R. Joshua should not, in the Bavli's view, be going to his junior colleague for instruction in the laws of mingled species that the Bavli deems it necessary to insist on R. Joshua's competence in the area.

Moreover, the consideration that Ratner raises is far from dispositive. One tannaitic source (T. Ta‘anit 2:5) imagines R. Joshua (b. Ḥananiah) conceding to R. Yoḥanan b. Nuri in a debate. Even more pertinently, M. Kil'ayim 6:4 (paralleled in T. Kil'ayim 4:7) tells of R. Joshua (b. Ḥananiah) visiting another late second-generation Tanna, R. Ishmael, and engaging him, in the field, in a conversation about the laws of mingled species.

מעשה שהלך ר' יהושע אצל ר' ישמעא' לכפר עזיז והראהו גפן שהיא מודלה על מיקצת תאינה אמ' לו מה אני להביא זרע תחת המותר אמ' לו מותר והעלהו משם לבית המגנייא והראהו גפן שהוא מודלה על מקצת הקורא בתוך סדן שלשיקמה ובו קורות הרבה אמ' לו תחת הקורא זו אסור והשאר מותר

A story: R. Joshua went to R. Ishmael in Kefar Aziz, and he showed him a vine trained over part of a fig tree. He said to him: May I introduce seeds under the remainder [of the fig tree]? He said to him: It is permitted. He brought him from there to the house of Maganya and showed him a vine trained on part of a branching in the trunk of a sycamore, and in [the trunk] were many branchings. He said to him: Under this branching is forbidden, and the remainder is permissible.Footnote 29

It is not certain who asks whom in this exchange. In another exchange between R. Ishmael and R. Joshua (M. ‘Avodah Zarah 2:5), the two rabbis come off more or less as equals. Whichever way the conversation is construed, but especially if R. Joshua asks the questions, the story offers further evidence that R. Joshua b. Ḥananiah's seniority does not, in itself, compel us to identify R. Yoḥanan b. Nuri's visitor as R. Joshua b. Korḥah rather than R. Joshua b. Ḥananiah.Footnote 30

If the Bavli's story indeed represents a secondary version of the Yerushalmi's, the shift from R. Joshua b. Korḥah to R. Joshua (b. Ḥananiah), along with other details that distinguish it from the Yerushalmi's version (a question about the planting of “seeds”; the extending of a vine over a tree; a concluding statement distinguishing between the permissible and the forbidden), may have been influenced by the story of R. Joshua and R. Ishmael in M. Kil'ayim 6:4.Footnote 31 However we construe the relationship between the three stories, the Bavli's apology for R. Joshua—“even though he was well versed in the laws of mingled species”—is specific to the Bavli, and, as we have noted, likely reflects its own anxiety about the possibility of rabbinic ignorance, or perhaps, about the possibility that a junior colleague might know more than a senior one.Footnote 32

Together, the three stories reinforce the notion that some rabbis were more conversant in the laws of mingled species than others, but, at least in the two stories in Palestinian sources, relative ignorance is not a matter of anxiety. The stories also highlight a different dimension of the laws of mingled species that bears on our inquiry, namely, their visual character. In both the Mishnah and the Yerushalmi, the halakhic analysis originates in situ, in the act of pointing out (הראה) a feature of a vineyard or field. Laws that implicate complex visual details are often precisely those in which questions of expertise, and of the structuring of rabbinic knowledge vis-à-vis that of other professions, arise. Thus halakhic texts speak, for example, of “appearances of afflictions” (מראות נגעים; M. Nega‘im 1:1) and “seeing (i.e., diagnosing) afflictions” (רואין את הנגעים; T. Mo‘ed Katan 1:8); of and “showing” a firstborn animal to an expert in animal blemishes (הראהו למומחה; T. Bekhorot 3:2).Footnote 33 In the above stories, the laws of mingled species take their place, if a peripheral one, among these other, intensely visual bodies of law.Footnote 34

The second datum on the minimum vineyard that bears on our inquiry occurs in the Yerushalmi's commentary (Y. Kil'ayim 4:6 [29c]) on M. Kil'ayim 4:6, which specifies the number and arrangement of the vines in such a vineyard. The commentary on the Mishnah pericope begins with the following exchange.

ר' חייה בר בא בשם ר' חייא בר יוסף ארץ כנען לגבולותיה גבולות שבדו להם הכנעניים ר' אימי בעי ולמידין מן הכנעניים

R. Ḥiyya b. Ba in the name of R. Ḥiyya b. Yosef: “The land of Canaan according to its boundaries” [Numbers 34:2]. The boundaries that the Canaanites conceived. R. Immi asked: And do we learn from the Canaanites?

It is far from obvious that the quoted exegesis of Numbers 34:2, taken by itself, means to provide a basis for the Mishnah's definition of the minimum vineyard. We will return to this issue below. For now let us note that R. Immi's challenge takes the exegesis as an attempt to ground some sort of conclusion, probably the one in the Mishnah. This challenge is followed, in the Yerushalmi, by two statements about the minimum vineyard. While traditional commentaries (e.g., the Penei Moshe) suppose that these statements respond to and acknowledge R. Immi's challenge by offering different arguments for the logic of the minimum vineyard, it is possible that the statements are not intended as responses to R. Immi, but address a different question.Footnote 35

Another version of R. Ḥiyya b. Ba's teaching occurs in the Bavli (B. Shabbat 85a). The Mishnah pericope to which it attaches, M. Shabbat 9:2, offers a prooftext for a notion conveyed in M. Kil'ayim 3:1, that one can plant seeds of five distinct species in a bed that measures six handbreadths by six handbreadths in such a way that the seeds do not draw nourishment from each other, so that one does not run afoul of the laws of mingled species. The Bavli assumes that the prooftext by itself is insufficient. How, it asks, can the rabbis ultimately be sure that five seeds planted in such an arrangement do not intermingle?

דא”ר חייא בר אבא א“ר יוחנן לא תשיג גבול רעך אשר גבלו ראשונים גבו' שגבלו ראשונים לא תשיג ומאי גבול גבלו ראשונים א“ר שמואל בר נחמני א”ר יונתן אלה בני שעיר החרי יושבי הארץ אטו כליה (!) עלמא יושבי רקיע נינהו אלא שהיו בקיאי' בישיבה של ארץ [ישר'] שהיו או' מלא קנה זה לגפן מלא קנה זה לתאנה וחורי שמריחין את הארץ וחוי שהיו טועמין את הארץ כחיווי

For R. Ḥiyya b. Abba said in the name of R. Yoḥanan:Footnote 36 “You shall not move aside your countryman's boundaries, which the first ones bounded” [Deuteronomy 19:14]. The boundary that the first one bounded, do not move aside. And what is the boundary that the first ones bounded? Said R. Samuel b. Naḥmani in the name of R. Jonathan: “These are the children of Seir, the Horite, inhabitants of the land” [Genesis 36:20].” And are all others inhabitants of the firmament? Rather, they were expert in making the land habitable,Footnote 37 for they would say: The full length of this rod is [suitable] for vines, the full length of this rod is [suitable] for figs.Footnote 38 And “Horite” [ibid.]: that they would sniff the earth. And “Hivite” [Genesis 36:2]Footnote 39: that they would taste the earth like a snake.Footnote 40

In the Bavli passage, as in the Yerushalmi, the author of the statement about the boundary makers is R. Ḥiyya b. Ba. The second comment, which is introduced to elucidate the first, is also attributed to Palestinian Amoraim, R. Samuel b. Naḥmani and R. Jonathan.

The two versions of R. Ḥiyya b. Ba's teaching are attached to different aspects of the law of mingled species: in the Yerushalmi, to the law of minimum vineyard, and in the Bavli, to the law of five seeds in a bed. Is it possible to ascertain which context, if either, is original? Both versions depend on the word גבול (boundary). But only a bed is said, in rabbinic literature (M. Kil'ayim 3:1–2; B. Shabbat 85a), to be surrounded by a גבול. A vineyard is surrounded instead by a fence (גדר; e.g., M. Kil'ayim 4:2) or partition (מחיצה; e.g., T. Kil'ayim 3:2). If, then, we are to suppose a common origin for the two versions, then the more original context is more likely the bed.

Most likely the teaching was not originally offered in the context of the law of mingled species at all, and did not speak originally to the Canaanites' purported agricultural expertise. Rather, it constructs the Canaanites as surveyors, who established and marked the boundaries of the land that Israel would later conquer.Footnote 41 A likely tannaitic comment on Deuteronomy 19:14—the verse to which R. Ḥiyya b. Ba's teaching also attaches, in the Bavli—distinguishes between the boundaries that Joshua established, probably the tribal allotments within the land of Canaan, and those that the Canaanites established, probably the boundaries of the land of Canaan itself.Footnote 42 Against this background, the Yerushalmi's version of the tradition conveyed by R. Ḥiyya b. Ba can be understood as meaning to clarify that Numbers 34:2 introduces the external boundaries of the land, not its internal divisions.Footnote 43 On this reconstruction, the sugyot in their present form attest to the secondary transfer of R. Ḥiyya b. Ba's tradition from the realm of surveying to the planting of vineyards and the science of root nourishment.Footnote 44

The use of the word בדו in the Yerushalmi's version appears to strike a discordant note, for the root בד“י ordinarily conveys not simply invention but fabrication, or falsehood. It is possible, in immediate terms, that בדו is conditioned by the verse. The exegesis would depend on reading Biblical Hebrew גבול in light of Aramaic and Hebrew גב”ל “to make, form.”Footnote 45 More generally, the cultural framework implicit in R. Ḥiyya b. Ba's use of בדו is probably that of technological innovation, instances of which we have already encountered in connection with the quincunx and with the validation of experimentation in Varro and Columella.Footnote 46

The expertise that R. Samuel b. Naḥmani's statement attributes to the Horites—the ability to discern which soil is suitable for which crop—is of foundational importance in Greco-Roman agricultural writing. According to Xenophon's Isomachus (16.1), “the nature of the soil,” that is, “what the soil is capable of growing,” is what authors on agriculture call “the most complicated problem in agriculture,” and the “first” thing a farmer must know. In the definition of agricultural science proffered by Varro's Scrofa, reproduced at the very beginning of this article, the determination of the crop suitable for each soil likewise has pride of place.Footnote 47

It is tempting to see in the attribution of agricultural expertise to Canaanites an echo of the esteem for Carthaginian agricultural science in Roman literature. We have already made reference to the Carthaginian Mago's monumental treatise on the subject, deemed of such great importance that the Roman Senate sponsored its translation into Latin. The offhand way in which Varro's Antonius refers to it in the remark quoted above suggests that the name “Mago of Carthage” had achieved a cultural resonance beyond the province of technical writers on agriculture.Footnote 48 The fact that Columella not only makes use of Mago's treatise, but also cites a maxim about farm size in the name of “the Carthaginians, a very shrewd people” (1.3.9), is further evidence of the association of the Carthaginians with agricultural expertise. Rabbinic sources manifest a very explicit awareness of the connection between the ancient Canaanites and contemporary Phoenician colonies in North Africa, including Carthage.Footnote 49 Their construction of the Canaanites of old as expert farmers may build on this connection.

But it is more likely that the statements in the Yerushalmi and the Bavli simply develop the intuitive link between autochthony and agriculture. The Pentateuch itself, in a passage (Deuteronomy 6:11) on which various rabbinic interpreters dwell, speaks of the Israelites entering into a land already cultivated, with vineyards and olive trees.Footnote 50 A passage from the Mishnah (M. ‘Orlah 1:2) considers the legal status of plants that “our fathers” (אבותינו) found when they came to Canaan.Footnote 51 The talmudic sources analyzed above likewise presume agricultural continuity between Jews in Israel and their Canaanite predecessors.Footnote 52

The construction of agriculture as a Canaanite expertise recollects the category of “the ways of the Amorites” (דרכי האמורי), which likewise associates a particular set of practices, in this case superstitious or magical ones, with pre-Israelite inhabitants of the land. The close connection between superstition or magic and agriculture in the rabbinic worldview emerges from, inter alia, the fact that the paradigmatic instance of witchcraft for the Mishnah (M. Sanhedrin 7:11) is the magical harvesting of cucumbers.Footnote 53 Most strikingly, for our purposes, Canaanite agriculture and “the ways of the Amorites” occur, respectively, in the Akivan and Ishmaelian comments on the biblical prohibition (Leviticus 18:3) against “walking in the laws” of the Egyptians and the Canaanites. The Akivan comment excepts building and planting from this prohibition, while the Ishmaelian comment finds in the verse the source of the ban on “the ways of the Amorites.”Footnote 54 The sources that we have analyzed replicate the distinction that emerges from a comparison between the two schools' approaches by upholding Canaanite agricultural expertise as authoritative, despite the fact that the same Canaanites are recognized elsewhere as experts in another, not unrelated area of illicit superstition.

Conclusion

In rabbinic circles in Palestine, some rabbis were considered more knowledgeable than others in certain agricultural laws. On one occasion, a rabbi appears to defer to an individual who may not be a rabbi (Yose b. Giali), but there is no evidence for a general practice of the sort. Rabbinic sources do betray an awareness of technical agricultural facts as a distinct body of knowledge that bears on Halakhah. This body of knowledge is marked out by a formula, “how does one know/determine.” It is constructed as the province of the “expert sharecropper,” and of the ancient Canaanites. But the existence of such a body of knowledge does not appear to be a source of overt anxiety to rabbis of tannaitic and amoraic Palestine. They do not overtly recognize it as a problem for rabbinic authority, nor do they, in evident ways, construct agricultural Halakhah so as to make it less dependent on technical agricultural facts, or in other words, more nominalist.

References

1. “A Lot of Learning is a Dangerous Thing: On the Structure of Rabbinic Expertise in the Bavli,” HUCA 78 (2007): 91–107Google Scholar.

2. In the article I collect other passages in the Bavli, most famously the Akhnai story, that highlight the possibility of too much knowledge. To these we may perhaps add the Bavli texts that demonstrate a reluctance, in practice, to implement rabbinic “blood science,” according to the analysis in Samuel Israel Secunda, “‘Dashtana’—“ki derekh nashim li”'—A Study of the Babylonian Rabbinic Laws of Menstruation in Relation to Corresponding Zoroastrian Texts” (PhD diss., Yeshiva University, 2007), 61–152. Both in these texts and in the Rav story, a rarefied technical expertise that would distinguish the prohibited (sacred) from the permitted (profane) is excluded from halakhic practice, with the result that halakhic practice is more stringent than it need be. See also the story of the Harkinas brothers at B. Yevamot 16a, which echoes the Akhnai story and, more faintly, the story of Rav and the herders.

3. I treated one aspect of this inquiry in my lecture at the Association for Jewish Studies Annual Conference in 2010 (“Rabbis and Butchers”), which I plan to publish in revised form in the near future.

4. The phrase איכר אומן is probably more precisely translated (pace Alon, Gedaliah, The Jews in Their Land in the Talmudic Age [70–640 c.e.], trans. Levi, Gershon [Jerusalem: Magnes, 1980], 1.158–59)Google Scholar as “expert plowman.” On this figure see T. Bava Meẓi‘a 11:9, and implicitly T. Bava Meẓi‘a 7:5 (pace Lieberman, Saul, Tosefta Ki-fshutah: A Comprehensive Commentary on the Tosefta, 3rd ed. [New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2001], 9.249–50Google Scholar, and see Feliks, Jehuda, Agriculture in Palestine in the Period of the Mishna and Talmud [Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv: Magnes and Dvir, 1963]Google Scholar, 29); M. Bava Meẓi‘a 8:1; M. ‘Arakhin 6:3 (on which see Lapin, Hayim, Early Rabbinic Civil Law and the Social History of Roman Galilee: A Study of Mishnah Tractate Baba’ Meẓi‘a [Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995]Google Scholar, 204 n. 182). For the association of the איכר with plowing see also, e.g., Jeremiah 51:23; M. ’Ohalot 6:1; T. Yom Tov 4:6; Goldschmidt, Daniel, ed., Seder ha-kinnot le-tish‘a be-’av (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1972)Google Scholar, 148 l. 9 (שור אכרים, from a qerovah by Qillir); and cf. Syriac ’KR (pael). The terms בקר (baqqār) and תוור (tavvār) in the Talmuds (on which see Ayali, Meir, Workers and Artisans: Their Labor and Status in Rabbinic Literature [Givatayim: Yad la-Talmud, 1987]Google Scholar, 32) probably refer to the same expert plowman. We may venture that a farmer would hire such an individual, together with his oxen, for the first, more strenuous plowing. See Lucius Iunius Moderatus Columella, On Agriculture, trans. Boyd, Harrison, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940)Google Scholar, 2.2.24; Hamel, Gildas, Poverty and Charity in Roman Palestine, First Three Centuries C.E. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 114–15Google Scholar and nn. 114–15, 121–22. For the notion that the plowman (arator, bubulcus), unlike the common farm laborer, must have special physical characteristics, and in particular, that he be tall enough to intimidate the cattle, see Columella, On Agriculture, 1.9.3. On the fragmentation of Palestinian estates, which incentivized hiring rather than owning draught animals, see Sperber, Daniel, Roman Palestine 200–400: The Land: Crisis and Change in Agrarian Society as Reflected in Rabbinic Sources (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1978)Google Scholar, 207, and for a remark that appears to assume the general disadvantageousness of fragmentation see Avot de-Rabbi Natan, A:8 (ed. Schechter, p. 18b) and Avot de-Rabbi Natan, B:18 (ed. Schechter, p. 20a).

5. The translation is from Xenophon, Oeconomicus, trans. Marchant, Edgar C., Loeb Classical Library (1923; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

6. Columella, On Agriculture, 1.1.13.

7. On Cicero's personal stake in the Crassus-Antonius debate see van der Blom, Henrietta, Cicero's Role Models: The Political Strategy of a Newcomer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar, 174, 177–80, 226–30, 232, 251–54.

8. On the relationship between Cicero's On the Orator and Varro's On Agriculture see Martin, René, “Ars an quid aliud? La conception varronienne de l'agriculture,” RÉL 73 (1995): 80–91Google Scholar; Kronenberg, Leah, Allegories of Farming From Greece and Rome: Philosophical Satire in Xenophon, Varro, and Virgil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 76–85Google Scholar, and especially 82 n. 21.

9. The references are to Varro, Marcus Terrentius, On Agriculture, trans. Hooper, William Davis and Ash, Harrison Boyd, Loeb Classical Library (1934; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967)Google Scholar, from which the translation and text are drawn.

10. See, e.g., Varro, On Agriculture, 1.18.8; Columella, On Agriculture, 1.4.4.

11. Philo, On Husbandry, trans. Colson, Francis H. and Whitaker, George H., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1930)Google Scholar.

12. Etymologically, ἔμπειρος corresponds more precisely to the Hebrew בקי. For the contrast between הדיוט and אומן see, e.g., M. Mo‘ed Katan 1:8, 10. On points of contact between tannaitic literature and Roman agricultural treatises see Yair Furstenberg, “Eating in a State of Purity in the Tannaitic Period: Tractate Teharot and Its Historical and Cultural Contexts” (PhD diss.; Hebrew University, 2010), 163–64.

13. For this and other citations from the Yerushalmi I use the text of MS Leiden. According to Peter Schäfer and Hans-Jürgen Becker's synoptic edition (Synopse zum Talmud Yerushalmi [Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1991]Google Scholar), באריס is much better attested than כאריס, but the latter is undoubtedly the correct reading.

14. Y. Ḥallah. 1:3 (57d); Y. Ma‘aserot. 1:1 (48d); 1:3 (49a); Y. Shevi‘it 2:7 (34a). In the last instance, R. Zeira's statement is followed immediately by the very same question (but without attribution) that R. Bun b. Ḥiyya asks in the above passage. R. Yoḥanan responds to the question differently from R. Zeira, with exegesis rather than science. R. Yoḥanan's response also occurs, in his name, in B. Rosh ha-Shanah 12b. Interestingly, in the Bavli, R. Yoḥanan's response is given a naturalistic interpretation, perhaps—the back-and-forth is unclear—by R. Zeira himself. For another case in which a rabbinic measure—the maximum size of a freewill meal offering—is explained exegetically by one rabbi or school (R. Yehudah b. Ilai, on one version), and naturalistically by another (R. Shim‘on), see M. Menaḥot. 12:4 (variants: T. Menaḥot 12:8–9; B. Menaḥot 103b). Both R. Zeira in B. Rosh ha-Shanah 12b and R. Shimʿon in the meal offering exchange end up defending the naturalistic position, in almost identical words, by conceding that the measure's bright line is arbitrary, even though the measure does in fact track a natural phenomenon. R. Zeira's defense undoubtedly depends on R. Shimʿon's. It is possible that in B. Rosh ha-Shanah 12b, R. Shimʿon's position has been reinterpreted (by R. Zeira or the stam speaking through him) so that the point is not that rabbinic measures represent arbitrary cutoffs, but that the rabbis, in implementing bright-line measures, can in fact precisely track the underlying natural phenomenon.

15. The notion that a plant's rate of growth is variable occurs also in Plutarch's “How a Man May Become Aware of His Progress in Virtue,” 77 (in the first volume of his Moralia, trans. Babbitt, Frank Cole, Loeb Classical Library [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927]Google Scholar), albeit in this case with the fastest growth at the start: “We may compare a reed, the growth of which at its beginning has a very great impetus, which results in an even and continuous length, at first in long sections, since it meets with few obstacles and repulses, but later, as though for lack of breath as it gets higher up, it grows weak and weary, and is gathered up in the many frequent nodules, when the life-giving spirit meets with buffets and shocks.”

16. Neither traditional nor modern commentators (e.g., Feliks, Yehuda, Talmud Yerushalmi: Tractate Shevi'it, 2nd ed. [Jerusalem: Rubin Mass, 2000]Google Scholar, 316) hear any undertone in the remark. There is a certain structural analogy between R. Ba's comment about R. Zeira's response and the anonymous Yerushalmi's reflection on a comment by R. Zeira in Y. Terumot 11:3 (47d). On the latter passage see Furstenberg, “Eating,” 90–91.

17. Gil, Moshe, “The Decline of the Agrarian Economy in Palestine under Roman Rule,” JESHO 49 (2006): 286Google Scholar, 301. On land ownership in Roman Palestine see also Rosenfeld, Ben Zion and Perlmutter, Haim, “Landowners in Roman Palestine 100–330 C.E.: A Distinct Social Group,” JAJ 2 (2011): 327–51Google Scholar; Safrai, Ze'ev, “The Agrarian Structure in Palestine in the Time of the Second Temple, Mishnah and Talmud,” in The Rural Landscape of Ancient Israel, ed. Maier, Aren M. et al. (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2003), 105–26Google Scholar; and for the last part of the relevant period, the second chapter of Decker, Michael, Tilling the Hateful Earth: Agricultural Production and Trade in the Late Antique East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

18. For a list of the instances in the Yerushalmi see Assis, Moshe, A Concordance of Amoraic Terms, Expressions and Phrases in the Yerushalmi (Jerusalem: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2010)Google Scholar, 718. In the Tosefta, the “know” formula is consistently distinguished from the “determine” formula in the following ways: (1) only the question “how does one know” ends with “whether [x is the case] or not” (אם ... אם לאו); (2) the “know” question is always in the singular (יודע), and the “determine” question always in the plural (בודקין); and (3) the “know” formula occurs exclusively in agricultural contexts, and the “determine” formula exclusively in sacrificial and purity matters. These distinctions do not hold for the Yerushalmi. The “know” formula never ends with “whether [x is the case] or not”; the Yerushalmi uses the singular for both formulae; and both formulae occur, with very rare exceptions, exclusively in agricultural cases. Another difference between the Tosefta and the Yerushalmi is that in the Tosefta, the answer to the question is almost always anonymous, whereas in the Yerushalmi it is almost always attributed. For בדק with the sense of (scientific) investigation see also Y. Ḥallah 1:1 (57a), and note (per Murray, Robert, Symbols of Church and Kingdom: A Study in Early Syriac Tradition [Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2004]Google Scholar, 23) that the position of bādôqâ in the Christian school at Nisibis appears to describe a teacher of secular subjects. The question “how does one do (עושה)?” sometimes occurs in the Yerushalmi in contexts close to those in which the above formulae occur. See, e.g., Y. Shevi‘it 4:4 (35b); Y. Terumot 9:1 (46c); Y. Mo‘ed Katan 1:4 (80c); Y. ‘Avodah Zarah 2:3 (41b). One instance, in Y. Yevamot 8:2 (9b), is especially noteworthy, because it concerns knowledge that is very explicitly tagged as specialized. The Yerushalmi cites a tannaitic statement (paralleled in Sifrei Devarim, pis. 247 to Deuteronomy 23:2 [ed. Finkelstein, p. 276]) to the effect that the only difference between the priest with crushed testicles and the priest with a cut member is a matter of “medical practice” (הלכות רופאין), namely, that the former is treatable while the latter is not. The anonymous voice poses the question, “how does one do,” to which a named rabbi responds with a medical procedure that addresses the symptoms of the crushed testicle.

19. Elsewhere in the Yerushalmi the term “it is certain” (דבר בריא) occurs by itself, i.e., independent from the “how does one know/determine?” question, in contexts that likewise involve technical agricultural detail. See, e.g., Y. ‘Orlah 1:4 (61a).

20. Thus T. Kelim Bava Meẓi‘a 6:13 articulates a general rule concerning “the measurements that the sages spoke of with reference to the vineyard”—that is, the four vineyard formations listed in the Tosefta pericope, as well as in M. Kil'ayim 7:3—but in the continuation appears to apply this rule to all measurements, whether of the vineyard or not. Indeed, the parallel Mishnah pericope, M. Kelim 16:10, speaks of “all the cubits,” with no reference to the vineyard. Remarkably, the same variation occurs between M. Kil'ayim 6:6 and the Yerushalmi commentary thereon. The Mishnah states a rule (one that very closely resembles the rule in T. Kelim Bava Meẓi‘a 6:13) with reference to “the measurements that the sages spoke of with reference to the vineyard.” R. Yonah, in the Yerushalmi (Y. Kil'ayim 6:6 [30c]), challenges the restriction of the rule to the vineyard. The Yerushalmi offers various responses to R. Yonah's challenge, but none survives, so that in the Yerushalmi, as in M. Kelim 16:10, a measurement rule formulated for the vineyard extends to all objects.

21. On the quincunx see also Columella, On Agriculture, 3.13.3; 15.1–2; 16.2.

22. For a case where tannaitic literature reflects a view that Roman agricultural writers characterize as the traditional but misguided view of farmers, see Furstenberg, “Eating,” 175.

23. The text is from MS Vienna. On בר see Lieberman, Saul, Greek in Jewish Palestine (1942; New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of New York, 1994)Google Scholar, 51.

24. On R. Gamaliel's economic status see Cohen, Shaye, “The Rabbi in Second-Century Jewish Society,” in Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 3, The Early Roman Period, ed. Horbury, William et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)Google Scholar, 930 n. 33.

25. Saul Lieberman tentatively suggests (Tosefta Ki-fshutah, 2.626) that he is to be identified with Yose b. Dolgai, who reports (B. Yoma 39a) that his father's goats, though herded at some distance from Jerusalem, nevertheless bore the odor of the Temple incense.

26. On the connotations of הלכה see Novick, Tzvi, What is Good, and What God Demands: Normative Structures in Tannaitic Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 51–52Google Scholar. Cf. the phrase הלכות רופאין quoted in n. 18.

27. The text is from MS Munich 95.

28. The field is presumably not R. Yoḥanan b. Nuri's own. For another case in which R. Yoḥanan b. Nuri forcibly intervenes in response to a violation of the laws of mingled species of the vineyard in Ginegar, see Y. Kil'ayim 6:6 (30c). In M. Kil'ayim 6:6, he emphatically expresses his view on a matter related to the one at the center of the latter story.

29. The text is from MS Kaufmann.

30. It is worth noting that another story involving the visit of a Tanna (R. Eliezer) to his student is recorded only a few lines after the story of R. Joshua and R. Yoḥanan b. Nuri in B. ‘Eruvin 11b.

31. If the Bavli read the Yerushalmi's story against the background of the Mishnah's, it may have been led to do so not only because of the similarity of their general circumstances and the involvement in both of a R. Joshua, but also because both involve a field associated with a toponym consisting of a construct phrase governed by the word בית.

32. The words ללמדו תורה in the Bavli story could be read to indicate that R. Joshua traveled to teach R. Yoḥanan b. Nuri. All of the other extant witnesses in the Saul Lieberman Institute of Talmud Research database (version 5) have ללמוד תורה “to study Torah,” which makes far better sense—the student conventionally travels—and is almost certainly original. If the deviant formulation in MS Munich 95 in fact conveys that R. Joshua taught R. Yoḥanan b. Nuri, then it is most easily understood as a later and more radical response to the same discomfort that probably occasioned the “even though he was well versed in the laws of mingled species” qualifier.

33. I touched upon this topic in my lecture at the Association for Jewish Studies Annual Conference in 2010 (“Rabbis and Butchers”), and plan to return to it at greater length.

34. Though it is generally supposed that R. Yoḥanan b. Nuri and R. Ishmael lived, respectively, in the apparently small villages Ginegar and Kefar Aziz, the only evidence linking them to these locations is the above stories, and another in the Yerushalmi (Y. Kil'ayim 6:6 [30c]) in which R. Yoḥanan b. Nuri burns mingled species in Ginegar. Other sources firmly link R. Yoḥanan b. Nuri to Beth She‘arim, a larger center a few kilometers west of Ginegar. See Rosenfeld, Ben Zion, Torah Centers and Rabbinic Activity in Palestine, 70–400 ce: History and Geographic Distribution (Leiden: Brill, 2010)Google Scholar, 68, 127. The possibility must be entertained that these rabbis lived and/or taught not in the small villages associated with their names, but near them, and traveled to the villages to instruct in and enforce agricultural law. For apt reservations about Rosenfeld's methodology see Joshua Schwartz's review in Review of Biblical Literature 2012 (http://www.bookreviews.org).

35. For the latter possibility see, e.g., the translation of Guggenheimer, Heinrich W. (The Jerusalem Talmud, First Order: Zeraïm, Tractates Kilaim and Ševiït [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001], 160–61)Google Scholar.

36. I cite MS Munich 95. A minority of manuscripts (Oxford Opp. Add. fol. 23; JTS ENA 2069.26) mistakenly attribute the statement to R. Samuel b. Naḥmani in the name of R. Yoḥanan, the authors of the statement that follows afterward.

37. Instead of ישיבה other manuscripts have יישוב.

38. For קנה in connection with the demarcation of a plot of land see also Sifrei Deuteronomy, pis. 315 to Deuteronomy 32:12 (ed. Finkelstein, p. 357). For מלו הקנה “the full length of the measuring rod” see also Ezekiel 41:8, and cf. Ezekiel 40:8. The words מלא הקנה also occur in Sifrei Zuta to Numbers 19:15 (ed. Horovitz, p. 311), where a weaver is said to bore a hole through a wall to lay down a weaver's rod, evidently lengthwise.

39. On the identification of the verse see the Tosafot, ad loc., s.v. Ḥivi. In most manuscripts, this exegesis is attributed to R. Pappa.

40. Cf. Geoponika: Farm Work: A Modern Translation of the Roman and Byzantine Farming Handbook, trans. Dalby, Andrew (Devon: Prospect Books, 2011)Google Scholar, 80 (attributed to Anatolios): “Others, not satisfied with testing [the soil] by observation, devised a method using other senses. Having dug to a certain depth at the relevant place they extract some soil, and first of all evaluate it by smell. Not yet satisfied, they put it in a vessel, pour on drinking water and carry out an examination by taste.” See also n. 52 below. Discernment of the character of the soil by sight, smell, and taste has its parallel in—and, given the pervasive correlation of womanly and earthly, may even have served as the model for—the specialized rabbinic practice of examining vaginal blood not only visually but also by smell (per B. Niddah 20b, on which see Secunda, “‘Dashtana,’” 32–44, 118–19; and cf. B. Yevamot 60b) and taste (per Jerome, on which see Hillel Newman, “Jerome and the Jews” [PhD diss., Hebrew University, 1997], 41–42).

41. On the distinctive expertise of the surveyor see, e.g., Columella's complaint (On Agriculture, 1.preface.3) that few study or teach agriculture, whereas other subjects, including “the science of surveying and mathematics” (mensurarum et numerorum modum), enjoy robust recognition.

42. Midrash Tannaim to Deuteronomy 19:14 (ed. Hoffmann, p. 115). My thanks to Michal Bar-Asher Siegal for discussing this passage with me. For what appears to be the same distinction see Y. Pe'ah 2:1 (16d). (The Bavli version of the latter, at B. Bava Batra 56a, is different.)

43. The same verse, Numbers 34:2, is cited by the “children of Africa,” descendants of the Canaanites, as proof of their ownership of the land in the trial before Alexander the Great described in B. Sanhedrin 91a and in the scholion for the 25th of Sivan in the Fast Scroll (Noam, Vered, Megillat Ta‘anit: Versions, Interpretations, History, with a Critical Edition [Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2003], 198–205Google Scholar). The Bavli's version seems to me too vague to allow for determination of its original sense, but note that it is arguably in tension with the tannaitic comment that I have cited.

44. The entwinement of surveying and agriculture in the development of these talmudic passages is unsurprising, and attested elsewhere. Thus the second-century bce (?) Alexandrian (?) historian (?) Artapanus, immediately after crediting Joseph with dividing up the land of Egypt by means of boundaries, reports that he “made much barren land arable” (Collins, John J., “Artapanus,” in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. Charlesworth, James [New York: Doubleday, 1985]Google Scholar, 897 [fragment 2]). The Bavli reports (B. Bava Meẓi‘a 107b) that R. Judah exhorted R. Ada the surveyor: “Do not treat surveying lightly, for every little bit [of land] is fit for saffron.” Likewise, Mago, the Carthaginian author of the aforementioned famed agricultural treatise, is credited, perhaps incorrectly, as the source for a passage in the Corpus Agrimensorum Romanorum, an anthology of technical writings on surveying. See Campbell, Brian, The Writings of the Roman Land Surveyors: Introduction, Text, Translation and Commentary (London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 2000)Google Scholar, 255, 445 n. 13. The occasional expectation that the surveyor take into account the fertility of different areas in dividing plots—“The lands were allocated according to an evaluation of their fertility and the nature of the terrain” (ibid., 171)—represents a practical point of contact between the two praxes. Note that in the exegesis of Genesis 36:20 in the above Bavli passage itself, the areas suitable for the planting of figs and vines are indicated with reference to the surveyor's measuring rod (קנה).

45. Both Hebrew and Aramaic גב”ל (per, e.g., Sokoloff, Michael, A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic of the Byzantine Period, 2nd ed. [Ramat-Gan, Bar-Ilan University Press, 2002]Google Scholar, 119 [s.v. גבל], 829) and rabbinic Hebrew בד”י (per Lieberman, Tosefta Ki-fshutah, 4.485) belong to the semantic field of kneading (sourdough, mortar).

46. For the delineation of boundaries as a form of technological innovation cf. Artapanus's characterization of Joseph as “the first to divide the land [of Egypt] and distinguish it with boundaries” (Collins, “Artapanus,” 897). Artapanus indicates in the same context that Joseph “discovered measurements,” one of the foundations of the surveyor's science, per Columella's remark in n. 41 above. On Joseph and the other Jewish figures in Artapanus as Kulturbringer see Sterling, Gregory E., Historiography and Self-Definition: Josephos, Luke-Acts and Apologetic Historiography (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 175–76Google Scholar.

47. The cultural significance of crop location is conveyed by the Yerushalmi's story (Y. Ta‘anit 3:8 [66d]) about Honi, who falls into a deep sleep just prior to the destruction of the first temple, and awakes seventy years later, after the return from exile, to find “a changed world (עלמא מחלף): a place that was a vineyard was now an olive grove, and a place that was an olive grove was now a grain field.” (Amos 9:14 implies that after the return from the exile, vineyards will not be rebuilt in the same locations, but built anew in different ones.) The story presumes that it is the link between crop and location that orients human beings in the world, and indeed, that determines the identity of the world across time.

48. See also the reference to Mago in the Corpus Agrimensorum Romanorum (Campbell, Writings, 255).

49. See b. Sanhedrin 91, Noam, Megillat Ta‘anit, 198–205, and at length, Berthelot, Katell, “The Canaanites Who ‘Trusted in God’: An Original Interpretation of the Fate of the Canaanites in Rabbinic Literature,” JJS 62 (2011): 233–61Google Scholar.

50. In the story of the trial before Alexander the Great, on the version in b. Sanhedrin 91a and in the Parma MS of the scholion (Noam, Megillat Ta‘anit, 198–205), the “children of Africa” are said, oddly, to leave behind cultivated fields for the Jews when they flee, even though their home, in the present of the story, is not Israel, but North Africa. This motif likely depends on Deuteronomy 6:11.

51. The use of the first person in the voice of the anonymous Mishnah, especially in a purely halakhic context, is striking. The only other anonymous instances of אבותינו in the Mishnah occur in M. Ta‘anit 4:6, M. ’Avot 5:4–5, and M. ‘Arakhin 3:5, all more or less “aggadic” contexts. For two other inquiries concerning the halakhic status of crops grown by the Canaanites and seized by the Israelites see Y. Ḥallah 2:1 (58b).

52. Expertise in discernment of soil is attributed in another Palestinian source (Y. Ta‘anit 2:1 [65b]) to “the elders of Sepphoris, who, when the first rain fell, smelled the soil, and could say what the rains of the year would be.”

53. See also B. Sanhedrin 68a and especially Avot de-Rabbi Natan, A:25 (ed. Schechter, p. 41a). On this magical practice see Bohak, Gideon, Ancient Jewish Magic: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)Google Scholar, 360. The link between magic and agriculture is also reflected in, e.g., T. Shabbat 7:15 = T. Shevi‘it 1:10; Y. Shevi‘it 2:7 (34a); Y. Ma‘aser Sheni 5:13 (56d); Y. Sanhedrin 7:1 (25d); and cf. the practice of “chanting out crops” (fruges excantare), which the Twelve Tables proscribe, and to which Virgil refers at the end of his eighth Eclogue. On “the ways of the Amorites” see Bohak, Magic, 382–85 and Berkowitz, Beth A., “The Limits of ‘Their Laws’: Ancient Rabbinic Controversies about Jewishness (and Non-Jewishness),” JQR 99 (2009): 121–57Google Scholar.

54. Berkowitz, “Limits,” 125, 135–36.