Ayelet Libson's monograph Law and Self-Knowledge in the Talmud contributes to two overlapping conversations in rabbinics. The first of these deals with the question of reflexivity about the rabbis’ own approach to law, and the second addresses the extent to which rabbinic culture can be said to conceive of an internal self. Regarding the former, Libson adds to a growing body of scholarship in making the claim that later works of rabbinic literature are not only reflexive about their legal methods but in fact even express doubts about their own legal authority. Libson more explicitly positions her book in terms of debates about the self, and she aligns herself with Ishay Rosen-Zvi's response to works by Mira Balberg and Joshua Levinson, arguing that tannaitic sources present a relatively “flat” self that is more or less synonymous with legal categories. However, Libson's intervention here is her claim that later rabbinic sources, particularly the Bavli, portray a self that is idiosyncratic, distinct from the external world, and an important factor in legal discourse. Libson's portrayal of the self in the Bavli as it relates to rabbinic legal philosophy is in a sense the opposite of Mira Balberg's argument about tannaitic literature. Balberg has argued that the Mishnah's purity laws contribute to the construction of a rabbinic self with a specific kind of bodily and mental awareness; in other words, that the law forms the self. Libson, on the other hand, begins her book with the question, “Is law objective, or should it incorporate individuals’ personal experiences?” (1). Libson argues that the answers, at least for the Bavli, are no and yes, respectively; in other words, that a new amoraic and postamoraic notion of the self informs the law.

The first chapter presents a general overview of scholarship on the self in rabbinic literature and delineates Libson's diachronic argument, in which she contrasts a tannaitic inner world that serves merely as a “reflection” of the external world with what one might call an “amoraic mental revolution”—that is, an increased focus on mental categories in the Bavli's legal discourse. She provides several examples of legal areas in which the Bavli emphasizes or creates thought-related legal categories to an extent that the Mishnah does not: the return of lost objects (the assumed “despair” of the object's owner becomes definitive in determining whether the object must be returned); unintentional murder (the definition of unintentionality becomes more complex and narrowly defined); and Sabbath prohibitions (certain intentions may render permissible an otherwise forbidden act). Libson presents the legal subject's self as an entity that is external to the law, and whose distinctiveness exists in tension with rabbinic legal authority.

The next four chapters each explore a specific realm of law in which the Bavli can be said to create innovative legal approaches to account for individuals’ unpredictable internal states. In the second chapter, Libson argues that the Bavli's expansion of the concept of hargashah or “sensation”—the notion that an individual, either a menstruant or person experiencing a penile discharge, experiences awareness of the fluids emerging from their body—is a way of letting subjects speak back to the law's authority. Libson supports the claim that many of the rabbinic menstrual laws are not necessarily an attempt to subvert the authority of women in particular, but are rather part of “a broader quest to have rabbinic authority supersede individual self-knowledge,” regardless of sex (66). Libson also argues that the idea of “sensation” operates as a “counterdiscourse” to the law's attempt to essentialize and control. As she points out, the idea of “sensation” originally applied only to male-bodied experiences, but the Bavli makes the assumption that this concept applies to female-bodied as well as male-bodied people. The author suggests that while this extrapolation may make unjustified assumptions about shared experiences among different bodies, it may at the same time be an attempt to grant women legal agency as a response to anxiety about the rabbis’ own creation of a rabbinic taxonomy of blood. Libson's reading verges on suggesting that the rabbis did this not simply because of a new understanding of subjectivity, but rather on ethical grounds, as when she writes that the rabbis “recognized the problems inherent in the objectifiying trajectory of the Mishnah and sought to correct it by incorporating a subjective perspective into legal decision-making” (93). While much of Libson's argument in this chapter is compelling, this analysis comes across as unnecessarily and unconvincingly apologetic.

The third chapter addresses legal questions regarding the permissibility of breaking the Sabbath in order to attend to women in childbirth. Here, Libson argues that unlike the Mishnah, the Bavli allows parturient women to decide for themselves whether they do or do not need specific treatments. Libson demonstrates that the Bavli allows its hypothetical legal subject here to have a voice in the way that earlier rabbinic texts do not. Again, however, Libson implies that the Bavli does so out of possible protofeminist motivations, a desire to grant dignity or agency to the subject to whom it had previously been denied. Like the third chapter, the fourth chapter deals with the tension between a ritual obligation and an individual's bodily needs—in this case, the requirement to fast on the Day of Atonement when someone is ill and potentially unable to fast. Libson points out that the Bavli allows for the possibility of an individual's report about their own bodily needs to supersede a doctor's diagnosis that it is safe for that same person to fast. Finally, in the fifth chapter, Libson discusses the legal mechanism through which a woman may cause the end of her marriage by refusing to perform marital obligations for her husband, and in particular the Bavli's acknowledgement of the woman's subjective experience of repulsion towards her husband.

Libson makes a compelling case that the Bavli emphasizes individual autonomy and legal personhood in all of these legal realms, and that this may stem from doubts about its own interpretive authority. However, it is less clear whether Libson succeeds in demonstrating that these cases are examples of the development of what she calls “self-knowledge.” In the majority of the cases addressed in the book, legal subjects give testimony concerning their reactions to physical experiences: sensations of flux, feeling unwell as a result of childbirth or illness, or disgust (as opposed to, say, resentment, boredom, or hatred) provoked by one's spouse. While it is true that these are all instances of the Bavli's legal attention to subjective experiences, it is debatable whether these cases can be said to constitute “self-reflection.” Are these really instances of what Libson, referencing Joshua Levinson, calls “desires about desires,” or are they simply feelings—desires without the attendant metadesires? Furthermore, although Libson argues that the Bavli's attention to subjectivity is substantively different from the Mishnah's conception of a self that operates solely within legal frameworks, the Bavli also frequently legalizes its own discussions of subjective experience. The two texts thus may not be quite as distinct as Libson claims, and it is also worth considering whether some of the differences that do exist ought to be attributed to a completely new conception of the self rather than to a rise in narrativity in later rabbinic literature and an attendant emphasis on interiority. Nonetheless, Libson's monograph makes an important contribution to scholarship on both rabbinic legal methodologies and attitudes towards subjectivity, convincingly demonstrating the rise in importance of the individualized legal subject in the Bavli.