rabbis in the east (70 to 1000 ce) 275
‘If Fire Break Out’, etc. Why is this said? Even if it had not been said I
could have reasoned: Since he is liable for damage done by what is owned
by him, shall he not be liable for damage done by himself? If, then, I suc-
ceed in proving it by logical reasoning, what need is there of saying: ‘If fire
break out?’ Simply this: Scripture comes to declare that in all cases of liabil-
ity for damage mentioned in the Torah one acting under duress is regarded
as one acting of his own free will, one acting unintentionally is regarded as
one acting intentionally, and the woman is regarded like the man.For this purpose it was taken as entirely legitimate to wrest the meaning
of a word away from its original biblical context:
Does the Divine Law not say ‘Eye for eye’? Why not take this literally to
mean [putting out] the eye [of the offender]? – Let not this enter your
mind, since it has been taught: You might think that where he put out his
eye, the offender’s eye should be put out, or where he cut off his arm, the
offender’s arm should be cut off, or again where he broke his leg, the
offender’s leg should be broken. [Not so; for] it is laid down, ‘He that
smiteth any man .. .’ ‘And he that smiteth a beast .. .’ just as in the case of
smiting a beast compensation is to be paid, so also in the case of smiting a
man compensation is to be paid.
Such search for the ‘real’ meaning of the biblical text sometimes
prompted the rabbis to resort to deciphering the code of scripture to
establish the desired meaning through anagrams and abbreviations of
biblical words. At other times they appealed to gematria (from the
Greek geometria, ‘geometry’), which involved adding up the numerical
values of the letters in a word (since in Hebrew ‘aleph’ stands for ‘one’,
‘beth’ for ‘two’, and so on):
R. Simlai when preaching said: Six hundred and thirteen precepts were
communicated to Moses, three hundred and sixty- five negative precepts,
corresponding to the number of solar days [in the year], and two hundred
and forty- eight positive precepts, corresponding to the number of the
members of man’s body. Said R. Hamnuna: What is the text for this? It is,
‘Moses commanded us torah, an inheritance of the congregation of Jacob,’
‘torah’ being in letter- value, equal to six hundred and eleven; ‘I am’ and
‘Thou shalt have no [other Gods]’ [have to be added, because] we heard
them direct from the mouth of the Almighty [in the Ten Commandments].^16
By the use of such methods and intense scholarly debate over gener-
ations, the rabbis created a huge body of interpretation. When real cases