1. Kay, Devra, ed. and trans., Seyder Tkines: The Forgotten Book of Common Prayer for Jewish Women (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2004) 157–158Google Scholar.

2. Henceforward, ARN, when referring to both of its versions, or ARNA or ARNB when referring to one of the two. All citations of ARN are from Solomon Schechter's still unsurpassed, recently revised, classical critical edition: Schechter, Solomon, Abot de-rabbi natan: mahadurat shlomo zalman schechter; ʿim ẓiyunim la-makbilot beyn ha-nusaḥim u-latosafot shebe-mahadorot schechter (Vienna 1887); reprint (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1997)Google Scholar, introduction and notes by Menahem Kister. Text critical work has been substantially facilitated by Hans-Jürgen Becker's very useful recent synoptic edition of ARN manuscripts: Becker, Hans-Jürgen and Berner, Christoph, Avot de-Rabbi Natan: synoptische Edition beider Versionen (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006)Google Scholar. The painstaking work of Menahem Kister, focusing on the processes of redaction and textual transmission, has also been consulted: ‘Iyyunim be-Avot de-rabbi natan: nusaḥ, ‘arikhah u-farshanut (Jerusalem: Yad Izḥak ben-Tzvi, 1998)Google Scholar. All translations are my own; however, I have consulted the following translations of ARNA and ARNB respectively: Goldin, Judah, ed. and trans., The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan, Yale Judaica Series (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955)Google Scholar; and, Saldarini, Anthony J., ed. and trans., The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan: A Translation and Commentary (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. References to the text will indicate the page number in Schechter's edition.

3. For classic presentation of the purpose and challenges of feminist historiography, see: Plaskow, Judith, Standing Again at Sinai (San Francisco: Harper, 1990), 36–51Google Scholar.

4. Articulated in her methodological introduction to the first volume of the forthcoming series, of which she is the editor: Ilan, Tal, Massekhet Ta‘anit, A Feminist Commentary on the Babylonian Talmud Series Vol. 1 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 8Google Scholar.

5. For example: Baskin, Judith, Midrashic Women: Formation of the Feminine in Rabbinic Literature (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2002), 44–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “ ‘She Extinguished the Light of the World’: Justifications for Women's Disabilities in Abot de-Rabbi Nathan B,” in Current Trends in the Study of Midrash, ed. Bakhos, Carol, (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 277–298CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Boyarin, Daniel, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Rabbinic Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 77–106Google Scholar; Fonrobert, Charlotte, Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 29–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity, 229, n. 41, viewing ARNB as especially misogynist. However, the tradition she cites as from ARNB:9 (Menstrual Purity, 31) is actually the (probably) later Tanḥuma parallel (Tanḥuma Buber, Noah 1:14b). ARNB's formulation exhibits a significantly different reading. Although individual traditions in ARN are discussed in many publications on women and gender in rabbinic literature, no one has focused on the place of women and gender relations specifically in ARN. Jonathan Schofer makes some brief remarks about women and gender in his discussion of ARN's historical context in his recent monograph: The Making of a Sage: A Study in Rabbinic Ethics (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 37–38Google Scholar. Without a detailed study of the comparative material, he seems to have followed Fonrobert's assessment of ARN, especially ARNB, as especially misogynist: “…While much of this material has parallels in other rabbinic sources, Rabbi Nathan B has a misogynist bent that is notable” Schofer, Sage, 37, 200, n. 51.

7. Joshua Levinson, “Literary Approaches to Aggadah,” in Bakhos, Current Trends, 208.

8. For instance, the cognitive theoretical bases of religious practice posed by Victor Turner, Mary Douglas and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

9. See below, nn. 64 and 65.

10. The history of this school and the literature it has generated is too vast to reference here. For a recent overview, see Levinson, “Literary Approaches to Midrash.”

11. For instance, the comprehensive work of Fraenkel, Yonah, Darkhei ha-'aggadah veha-midrash (Givatayim, Israel: Masada, 1991)Google Scholar; Fraade, Steven, From Tradition to Commentary: Torah and its Interpretation in the Midrash Sifre to Deuteronomy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and Stern, David, Parables in Midrash (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

12. Among others, Yonah Fraenkel, Darkhei, 235–322 and Meir, Ofra, Ha-sippur ha-darshani bi-bereshit rabbah (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz ha-meuchad, 1987)Google Scholar.

13. Most recently, Wimpfheimer, Barry Scott, Narrating the Law: a Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. For instance, Rubenstein, Jeffrey L., Talmudic Stories: Narrative Art, Composition and Culture (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and the recent collection of essays in Creation and Composition: the Contribution of the Bavli Redactors (Stammaim) to the Aggada, ed. Rubenstein, Jeffrey L. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005)Google Scholar.

15. Although their analyses are not explicitly informed by such a poetics, it is assumed in the literary analyses of sugyot of the Bavli in Rubenstein, Talmudic Stories, and in many of the collected essays in Rubenstein, Creation and Composition, also in Wimpfheimer, Narrating the Law, and explicitly in Kraemer, David, Reading the Rabbis: The Talmud as Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. Joshua Levinson, “The Cultural Dignity of Narrative,” in Rubenstein, Creation and Composition, 361.

17. Roberts, Michael, The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

18. Levinson, “Cultural Dignity,” 361 citing Roberts, The Jeweled Style, 57.

19. That is, lists, maxims, or narratives may be read together even if separated by a significant amount of text if prompts to do so are embedded in the units. Dvora Steinmetz's work implicitly assumes this type of redactional poetics in “Agada Unbound: Inter-Agadic Characterization of Sages in the Bavli and Implications for Reading Agada,” in Rubenstein, Creation and Composition, 293–337; and in “Distancing and Bringing Near: A New Look at Mishnah Tractates Eduyyot and Avot,” HUCA 73 (2003): 49–96.

20. Also, for instance, the composite narrative of the Destruction of Jerusalem in ARNA:4/.ARNB:6–9.

21. Little archaeological evidence is available to reconstruct the everyday lives of Jews, let alone Jewish women, during the rabbinic period, especially in the geographical region of ancient Babylonia where there has been no major excavation of a site showing Jewish occupancy since the mid-19^th century. Dr. St. John Simpson, the chief curator of the Ancient Near Eastern collection at the British Museum, is currently working on archaeological evidence and the Babylonian Talmud (personal electronic communications, July 2010). For a classic study of archaeological evidence relating to the position of Jewish women in Palestine, see Brooten, Bernadette J., Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue: Inscriptional Evidence and Issues (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

22. Weissler, Chava, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 36–37Google Scholar, discusses this methodological distinction, here and in the rest of Ch. 3.

23. This literature is too vast to summarize here. Relating directly to the topic at hand, Judith Baskin's work exemplifies this approach: Baskin, Midrashic Women; and “ ‘She Extinguished the Light of the World.’ ”

24. Such scholarship attempts to reveal the ideological constructs implicit in halakhic rulings concerning women. For classic examples see Daniel Boyarin's pioneering deconstructionist analysis of rabbinic ideologies of gender and sexuality: Carnal Israel; and, Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity. And for different but equally interdisciplinary theoretical frames, see the work of Baker, Cynthia, Rebuilding the House of Israel: Architectures of Gender in Jewish Antiquity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar and Labovitz, Gail, Marriage and Metaphor: Constructions of Gender in Rabbinic Literature (New York: Lexington Books, 2009)Google Scholar.

25. Boyarin, Daniel, Socrates and the Fat Rabbis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 158CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Boyarin reads the narrative primarily as a discursive strategy to assert rabbinic control over competing cultural practices rather than reflecting actual women's practices, “[g]iven the paucity of evidence for actual women's power” in the world in which the Talmud was composed.

26. According to Boyarin, Socrates, 159, Jewish women wished to restrict the freedom of their husbands to engage in any position in sexual intercourse other than the “missionary” position, due to a popular “Jewish pietistic practice of sexual hygiene,” for fear of endangering the fetus. Whatever the cultural/historical reality behind this tradition, Boyarin fails to note that here women are essentialized as more modest and prudish than men.

27. Some examples include: Wegner, Judith Romney, Chattel or Person; the Status of Women in the Mishnah (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Baskin, Midrashic Women; Labovitz, Marriage and Metaphor.

28. For instance, Hauptman, Judith, Rereading the Rabbis: a Woman's Voice (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

29. For instance, Boyarin, Socrates, 132, and, Fonrobert's discussion of Yalta in Menstrual Purity, 118–128. For a recent critical summary of feminist scholarship viewing midrash aggadah as a mode of feminist resistance, see Charlotte Fonrobert, “The Handmaid, the Trickster and the Birth of the Messiah: a Critical Appraisal of the Feminist Valorization of Midrash Aggada,” in Bakhos, Current Trends, 245–297. Also, Rachel Elior's feminist analysis of the historical records of the phenomenon of spirit possession in Jewish communities in early modern Europe: Elior, Rachel, Dybbuks and Jewish Women in Social History, Mysticism and Folklore (New York: Urim Publications, 2008)Google Scholar.

30. Halberstam, Chaya, Law and Truth in Biblical and Rabbinic Literature (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), 127–129Google Scholar, has recently viewed this tradition as a tannaitic expression of the problematic way in which divine justice works in the world, noting the lack of proportion between the sin and the punishment in its formulation: “[T]he mishnah essentially sentences the woman to death… [S]he has merely, out of inattention, created a situation in which she might lead someone to sin unknowingly. And while casualness regarding divine ritual prohibitions need not be tolerated, it is difficult to imagine that they call for capital punishment.” Halberstam does not, however, recognize the mishnaic tradition's theodicean potential, perhaps because she did not consider its interpretative trajectory in later sources. Hence, while the mishnaic tradition read alone can clearly be understood as punitive, Halberstam may have missed the point; neither the mishnah, nor its rabbinic formulators, have the power to “sentence women to death” or to impose extreme suffering during childbirth. It is simply, then as now, a fact of nature that women suffer disproportionately in relation to men in the process of biological reproduction. Perhaps, rather than being unambiguously punitive, the mishnah is drawing attention to an inherently unjust world and rationalizing it with a halakhic solution, a rationalization developed in more depth by the later aggadic sources. Baskin, Midrashic Women, 72–73, notes, but does not elaborate on, the theodicean problem inherent in this mishnah. See also: Kraemer, David, Responses to Suffering in Classical Rabbinic Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 56Google Scholar.

31. The traditions of the three women's commandments assume a Jewish version of original sin; the guilt burden incurred by Eve's disobedience is inherited and must be expiated by subsequent generations of women to ensure successful biological reproduction. Further analysis of this gendered version of the doctrine of original sin is intriguing, but beyond the scope of this article. For more on the rabbinic sources illustrating this doctrine see Boyarin, Carnal Israel, 82–84. More recently, see Visotzky, Burt, “Will and Grace: Aspects of Judaising in Pelagianism in Light of Rabbinic and Patristic Exegesis of Genesis,” in The Exegetical Encounter between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity, ed. Grypeou, Emmanouela and Spurling, Helen (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 43–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Visotzky (56) cites ARN's Eve traditions to show the distinctiveness of the rabbinic view of primordial sin, considering it closer to the heretical Christian Pelagian, than the orthodox Augustinian, Christian doctrine. The ever present possibility for repentance distinguishes rabbinic doctrine from the Augustinian.

32. The most important scholarly study of the Teḥinos is Weissler's, Chava monograph, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998)Google Scholar. In an exemplary work of critical feminist historiography, Weissler situates the Teḥinos in general, and their treatment of the three women's commandments in particular, in the historical context of the early modern period, comparing their manifestation in different traditional genres of religious literature in Eastern and Western Europe. Many collections of Teḥinos have been edited, translated and published/republished in the past 20 years. For study of the early Teḥinos and musar literature see Framm, Edward, My Dear Daughter: Rabbi Benjamin Slonik and the Education of Jewish Women in Sixteenth Century Poland (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other studies and/or anthologies of Teḥinos are aimed at a popular rather than an academic audience, often targeting distinct denominational audiences. Of the following selective list, only Devra Kay's anthology has a thorough scholarly introduction: Cardin, Nina Beth, ed. and trans., Out of the Depths I Call to You: A Book of Prayers for the Married Jewish Woman (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1992)Google Scholar; Kay, Seyder Tkines; Klirs, Tracy, ed. and trans., The Merit of Our Mothers: A Bilingual Anthology of Jewish Women's Prayers (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tarnor, Norman, ed. and trans., A Book of Jewish Women's Prayers: Translations from the Yiddish (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1995)Google Scholar; Zakutinsky, Rivka, ed. and trans., Techinas: A Voice From the Heart: As Only a Woman Can Pray (Brooklyn, NY: Aura Press, 1992)Google Scholar. For a critical discussion of the recent interest in the Teḥinos in North America, see Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs, 149–171.

33. Most extant collections are in Yiddish; however, the 18^th century Italian Teḥinos published by Cardin, Out of the Depths, renders the prayers in Hebrew while the directions are in Italian, perhaps showing a higher rate of Hebrew literacy among Italian Jewish women at that time.

34. While some of the prayers in the Teḥinos collections are vernacular translations of traditional Hebrew prayers corresponding to the prayers in the Siddur, many are original liturgical compositions, reflecting women's specific needs and life experiences. Whether they were authored by men or women is an unresolved question. In general, while some of these prayers were written by men, consensus holds that some, if not most, of them, were written by women, whose names, in some cases, have been preserved. For a discussion of the issues involving gender and authorship, see Framm, My Dear Daughter, 66–69; Kay, Seyder Tkines, 10–11; Klirs, The Merit of Our Mothers, 3–4, 9; and, especially, Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs, 9–10, 22, 24–28, 110–133. Weissler (127) directly challenges the view of older critical scholarship that none of the Teḥinos were written by women, but were male-authored, maskilic fabrications.

35. Edward Framm, My Dear Daughter, vi, 66–68, succinctly and lucidly describes this process in his recent translation of Seder Mitzvot ha-Nashim, a 16^th century halakhic handbook of the three women's commandments, accompanied by a detailed and balanced historical overview of its printing and audience reception in early modern Poland and Italy. Describing the emergence of halakhic and liturgical literature aimed at a female, Jewish audience in the 16^th and early 17^th centuries, he remarks a shift in the attitude of Jewish authorities to women, in which education, rather than halakhic legislation, became the preferred way to teach women correct modes of Jewish observance. Framm acknowledges the limitations of his sources for reconstructing women's history in that almost all of the sources used for his study were written by men; indeed, he considers most, if not all, of the early Teḥinos to have been written by men, lacking specifically female concerns (by contrast to the later Teḥinos, which he feels unambiguously do so), although “…contemporary women seem to have embraced such prayers” as meaningful (Framm, 68, n. 158). Framm (69) implies a critique of Weissler's feminist historiographical approach when he says: “It may be expecting too much to find expressions of a women's personal ambitions in prayers written for women by men.”

36. For general discussion of the three women's commandments in the Teḥinos liturgy, see: Kay, Seyder Tkines, 22, 24; Klirs, Merit of Our Mothers, 6; Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs, 6, 31–35, 99–35, 66–75.

37. Cardin, Out of the Depths, 2–38; Kay, Seyder Tkines, 150–158; Klirs, Merit of Our Mothers, 12–24; Tarnor, Jewish Women's Prayers, 27–29, 43–48; Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs, 130–133; Zakutinsky, Voice From the Heart, 190–223. In Weissler's example, The Tkhine of the Three Gates by Sarah the daughter of Mordechai, dating from the late 17^th or early 18^th century, the three women's commandments are only one of the three gates; the other two gates are liturgy for the observance of Rosh Ḥodesh and Days of Awe.

38. Cardin, Out of the Depths, 74, 78, 104, 108; Kay, Seyder Tkines 157–158, 162, 195, 234; Klirs, Merit of Our Mothers, 22, 126; Tarnor, Jewish Women's Prayers, 48–49; Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs, 67–74; Zakutinsky, Voice From the Heart, 209. The precise connection between the performance of the three women's commandments and Eve's sin and its consequences varies substantially, from general statements about the events in the Garden of Eden to a very explicit connection. An explicit connection between the two, in which the performance of the commandments is a means of personal atonement for Eve's sin, is found in a Teḥina for a pregnant woman about to give birth cited by Klirs (126): “May the merits of the three mitsves which You have commanded every woman to keep—nide, khale, and hadlokes nyeres—protect me, that I may not—kholile—be punished for khave's sin, and may I not—kholile—suffer any great pain.” Weissler (73) also cites a passage from the Tsena-Urena, a scriptural commentary in Yiddish aimed at a female audience first published in the seventeenth century, in which reference to Eve's sin and women's consequent death in childbed is recited in a charm to get pregnant, while eating the tip of the Etrog. Interestingly, here the liturgy explicitly dissociates the practitioner from Eve's sin: “…And they pray to God to be protected from the sufferings of bearing the children they are carrying, that they may give birth easily. Had Eve not eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, each woman would give birth as easily as a hen lays an egg, without pain. The woman should pray and should say, ‘Lord of the world, because Eve ate of the apple, all of us women must suffer such great pangs as to die. Had I been there, I would not have derived any enjoyment (material benefit) from [it]. Just so, now I have not wanted to make the etrog [ritually] unfit during the whole seven days when it was used for a mitzvah. But now on Hoshanah Rabbah the commandment is no longer applicable….’ ” See also the recent popular discussion of this source in Faierstein, Morris M., “When Eve Ate the Etrog: A Passage from Tsena-Urena,” Jewish Review of Books 1:3 (2010), 49Google Scholar. Significantly for the study of gendered cultural production in pre-modern Europe, the Teḥina which most closely reflects the aggadic traditions to be discussed in this article (attributed to a Yankev ben Elyohu, cited in Kay, Seyder Tkines, 234) was written by a man, who probably was aware of the literary tradition in ARN or in the Tanḥuma: “God has said the same. The sin of Eve must be atoned. Therefore women go to the ritual bath, and light two candles or more, and separate the Khale dough; because women have precipitated death they must be punished and suffer hardship.” For Weissler's ambiguous evaluation of the connection between Eve's sin and the Teḥinos liturgy, see below, n. 40.

39. Discomfort with these traditions may also be informed by a pervasive apologetic agenda of modern forms of normative Judaism to distinguish themselves from Christianity. One proud distinction is that Judaism neither holds a doctrine of original sin nor holds Adam and Eve, and by extension all humans after them, to be inherently sinful. For an example of this type of apology, see Urbach, Ephraim, The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs, trans. Abrahams, Israel, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 421–429Google Scholar. Urbach rejects any idea of original sin in early Judaism without offering an exhaustive treatment of the matter, as noted by Framm, Dear Daughter, 44, n. 33. For discussion of Eve's distinctively sinful nature and Christian doctrine of original sin, see Norris, Pamela, Eve: a Biography (New York: New York University Press, 1999), Ch. 6, esp. 190–194Google Scholar, and, Phillips, John A., Eve: the History of an Idea (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984), Ch. 2, 3 and 6Google Scholar. For comparative discussion, see Boyarin, Carnal Israel, Ch. 3, esp. 82–84, and more recently Visotzky, “Will and Grace.”

40. Weissler's evaluation of their connection is unclear and self-contradicting. Comparing the Teḥinos to strictly male authored musar literature, she maintains (Voice of the Matriarchs, 71), “I have yet to discover a tkhine that links that three women's mitzvot to Eve's sin.” However, she immediately cites examples of Teḥinos that do, in fact, evoke Eve's sin (72).

41. Again, an ambiguous evaluation, since she holds (Voice of the Matriarchs, 71) they “…accept their punishment.” She notes that the theme of Eve's sin in the Teḥinos is theodicean, by contrast to the musar literature, in which it is understood as purely punitive. Overall, claims Weissler (71), the Teḥinos connect “…the observance of the three women's commandments…to fertility, rather than to penance.”

42. I am using the term “cosmos” to designate all of the factors making up an individual's subjective life experience, both material, ideal and affective: her material and social environments, her world as imagined and as experienced emotionally and cognitively, and the obscure but nevertheless real interface between the two.

43. Amply demonstrated by Weissler, Voice of the Matriarchs, 46, 74 and all of Ch. 4. The Italian Teḥinos are particularly anxious, meriting study in their particular cultural-historical context: Cardin, Out of the Depths, 54, 68–110.

44. For instance, Weissler, Voice of the Matriarchs, 72.

45. Indeed, perhaps such a repression is evident even in the early rabbinic material. Considering the size and scope of the two Talmuds, perhaps it is significant how few times women dying or experiencing pain in childbed are mentioned. Discursively speaking, the rabbis are far more concerned with women as objects of sexual temptation, than with female mortality due to the divine imperative to be fruitful and multiply, for which women are used as vessels for the fulfillment of a specifically male commandment. Talmudic sources which contrast the obligation to procreate for men and women include: B. Yevamot 65b, B. Gittin 43 b, Y. Megillah 1:4 70c, and Y. Yevamot 6:6 7b. In fact, to my knowledge, only one aggadic Talmudic tradition explicitly connects the pain and danger women suffer in childbed with the exemption of women from the commandment to procreate, the story of the wife of R. Ḥiyya in B. Yevamot 65b. A theodicean rationale for women's exemption from the commandment to procreate is notably absent. That is, how could God command women to procreate if in doing so they risk their lives? Obviously, arguments from silence are critically invalid; however, I venture that a process of repression of the brute biological fact of women's biological vulnerability in the process of reproduction is taking place. Perhaps the fact that women are put in the position of enduring great pain and risking their lives to enable Jewish men to fulfill their exclusively male covenantal obligation strengthens this repression. At any rate, a comprehensive study of death and extreme suffering in childbed and infant mortality in rabbinic halakhah and aggadah is a much recommended project.

46. To my knowledge, no research has been done comparing the theological rationalizations for women's pain and death in childbirth in Genesis with other ancient Near Eastern mythologies, or world mythologies for that matter. Certainly, in Genesis women's unequal burden in sexual reproduction is a theological problem and needs justification, hence the severity of God's curse. Frymer-Kensky, Tikva, In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth (New York: Free Press, 1992), 129Google Scholar, concurs, although she is particularly interested in women's social subordination within a biblical, patriarchal hierarchy.

47. Judith Baskin's discussion of the Eve traditions and the three women's commandments in ARNB and parallels (Midrashic Women, 74) recognizes their basic theodicean motivation, but ultimately judges them to be irredeemably misogynistic, since “…we do not see a similar construction of male obligations as burdens or punishments.” While I scarcely question the misogyny inherent in these traditions, their underlying stimulus is the vast disparity between the biological investment of men and women in the process of procreation, rather than a repressive legal or discursive problem of rabbinic origin. The rabbis may be rationalizing this disparity in a misogynist cultural discursive and legal idiom, but the latter are hardly the cause of human female biological vulnerability during pregnancy and childbirth.

48. Schofer, Making of a Sage, 7.

49. Although Becker's synoptic critical text should be used in conjunction with Schechter's critical edition. See n. 2 above.

50. See Schechter's introduction to the critical edition for citations from ARNA in medieval Jewish texts.

51. Lerner, M.B., “The External Tractates,” in The Literature of the Sages—The Literature of the Jewish People in the Period of the Second Temple and the Talmud, Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum, Section Two, Part I.3, ed. Safrai, S. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 367–409Google Scholar.

52. Finkelstein, Louis, Mavo' le-massekhtot ’avot ve-’avot de-rabbi natan (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1950), 4–5Google Scholar, even assumed that the received versions of ARN preserved authentic pre-70 oral materials. Other scholars who stress ARN's tannaitic core include Lerner, “External Tractates,” 376; Saldarini, Anthony, Scholastic Rabbinism (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982), 38–142Google Scholar; ARN, ed. Schechter, xxv–xxvi; Schofer, Making of a Sage, 7, 27–29 (with qualifications). Goldin, The Fathers, xxi, places the entire text no later than the early 5^th century based upon the internal evidence. However, Neusner, Jacob, The Development of a Legend: Studies on the Traditions Concerning Yohanan ben Zakkai (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1970), 226, 274–275CrossRefGoogle Scholar, recognized a later date for ARN's core more than forty years ago.

53. Following Schechter and the work of Judah Goldin, two of the three monographs devoted to the text over the past 30 years assume that the core of ARN is a more or less accurate picture of early rabbinic values and social relations within the context of a rabbinic school. Although their work is very different, both Saldarini (Scholastic Rabbinism) and Schofer (The Making of a Sage, 30–41) concur. Menahem Kister's ‘Iyunim focuses on ARN's redaction history and does not deal with its original Sitz im Leben. For Goldin's view that ARN reflects the Sitz im Leben of a rabbinic school, see Goldin, Judah, “A Philosophical Session in a Tannaite Academy,” Studies in Ancient and Medieval History, Thought and Religion 21 (1965), 1–22Google Scholar and “Several Sidelights of a Torah Education in Tannaite and Early Amorical Times,” in Ex Orbe Religionum Part I— Studia Geo. Widengren, History of Religions 21, ed. Bleeker, C.J. et al, (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1972), 176–191Google Scholar; reprinted, along with Goldin's other articles on ARN in Goldin, Judah, Studies in Midrash and Related Literature, ed. Eichler, Barry and Tigay, Jeffrey (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1988), 3–117Google Scholar.

54. “The origins of ADRN apparently lie in the end of the tannaitic period, but its extant versions could hardly be dated before the end of the amoraic period (at the very earliest!). On the basis of the dating of Geniza fragments and some other evidence, it is, however, difficult to date the versions later than the 8^th/9^th century.” See Kister, ‘Iyyunim, English summary, ix; also 5–7 and throughout.

55. ARN, ed. Schechter, xx–xxiv, especially xx. For Schechter this signified that ARNB preserved the more original text.

56. Kister, ‘Iyyunim, 5–7, 13–22, and throughout.

57. Indeed, its singularity is so self-evident that it has merited special editorial attention in the introduction to the recently published Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, ed. Fonrobert, Charlotte and Jaffee, Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 8: “One of the compilations that has best resisted all efforts to locate it in space, time and literary genre is the companion to Mishnah Avot itself, Avot de-Rabbi Nathan….” For a summary of earlier scholarship about the idiosyncrasy of ARN see Schechter's introduction to his critical edition, and Lerner, “The External Tractates,” 369–379.

58. ARNA:1 (ed. Schechter, 4–8), ARNA:4 (ed. Schechter, 21–25), ARNB:1 (ed. Schechter, 4–8), ARNB:8–9 (ed. Schechter, 22–25), with a few additional parallels found in ARNB:42 (ed. Schechter, 116–118). Recent work on these traditions includes Boyarin, Carnal Israel, 82–97, esp. 86–88. Boyarin is not interested in the ARN traditions proper, but in a general comparison of ideologies of gender and sexuality in early Judaism and Christianity. Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity, 29–32, discusses the ARN Eve traditions and parallels relating to the three women's commandments in her discussion of the midrashic rationale for the commandment of menstrual separation. Judith Baskin devotes substantial discussion to the ARN sources in “‘She Extinguished the Light of the World’” and to the ARN traditions and parallels in Midrashic Women, 44–87.

59. Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity, 229, n. 41. The parallels in other sources besides M. Shabbat 2:6 are: Bereshit Rabbah, ed. Theodor, J. and Albeck, Ch. (repr. Jerusalem: Wahrman, 1965) Vol. I, 160Google Scholar; Talmud Yeruhalmi: yotze le-or al-pi ketav yad skliger 3 (Or. 4720), ed. Sussman, Yaakov, (Jerusalem: The Academy of the Hebrew Language, 2005)Google ScholarY. Shabbat 2:6 (5b), 381; Tanḥuma Buber, Noah 1:14b. See below n. 76. Fonrobert compares these sources in some detail in Menstrual Purity 29–32. A loose parallel appears in B. Shabbat 32a–b, which follows a significantly different line of interpretation of M. Shabbat 2:6. See below n. 71.

60. Reflecting the normative biblical theology that performance of God's will, i.e., the commandments, accrues divine protection from sickness and death, while disobedience prompts their visitation as punishment.

61. Alexander, Elizabeth Shanks, “Recent Literary Approaches to the Mishnah,” AJS Review 32:2 (2008): 225–234; 225CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62. Clifford Geertz's work published in the 1960's and 70's has maintained its prominence due to the abiding stature and relevance of specific works which are considered “classical” pieces of theoretically informed ethnography, most notably those based on his early fieldwork in Indonesia and his comparative studies of world Islam. Examples include his classic “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz (U.S.: Basic Books, 1973), 412–453Google Scholar, first published in 1972 and based on field work conducted in 1958, and his comparative analysis of Islamic structures of religious authority in Morocco and Java entitled Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968)Google Scholar.

63. Bell, Catherine, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 197Google Scholar. Bell's thorough and sophisticated theorization and classification of religious ritual and its scholarly treatment is, perhaps, the best example of a deconstructionist theory of religious ritual focusing on its function as an instrument of the reification and negotiation of power relationships within social hierarchies. The basic power relationship assumed by the deconstructionist approach to ritual is how “…ritualization empowers those who control or regulate ritual practices” (Bell, 211). See also Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. Baskin's discussion of the three women's commandments (Midrashic Women, 70–87) and the Eve traditions assumes this theoretical frame.

64. Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs, 34. While Weissler (66–75) assumes a deconstructionist theoretical frame, showing how authoritative male religious control of women was maintained and/or negotiated through the publication and dissemination of the Teḥinos and musar literature composed for women, she also assumes that religious ritual has a specific cognitive function informing how the three women's commandments were religiously meaningful to the women who performed them.

65. Wimpfheimer, Narrating the Law, 16, 20 22, 85–86, 89, 92. Wimpfheimer appeals not to Geertz's theory of the function of religious ritual, as Weissler does, but uses his theoretical frame and methodology for analyzing the cultural significance of narrative.

66. Geertz, Clifford, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in Interpretation of Cultures, 87–125Google Scholar; 90, and subsequent elucidation.

67. In Geertz's famous, seemingly simplistic, theoretical statement (“Cultural System,” 93), religion is both a “model of” and a “model for” human reality. Geertz's cognitive model for the function of ritual includes, but does not isolate, its social functions, such as the maintenance and negotiation of internal and external hierarchies, for social hierarchies must be experienced as a coherent part of cosmological order for them to be maintained in a religious society. If they are not experienced as such, they will be transformed unless imposed strongly by external force. The transformation of the status of women and gays in liberal forms of Christianity and Judaism in our day is a case in point.

68. The absence of any interest in the problem of knowledge in our traditions is remarkable since the disobedience of Eve involved eating from the tree of knowledge. Perhaps its absence is due to the fact that God's curses in Genesis 3 all relate to the physical and social state of human and serpentine realities, not with the issue of their access to knowledge.

69. Geertz, “Cultural System,” 104.

70. Geertz, “Cultural System,” 112. Indeed, for Geertz, religious experience, whether individual or social, cannot exist without ritual enactment: “…[W]hatever role divine intervention may or may not play in the creation of faith… it is, primarily at least, out of concrete acts of religious observance that religious conviction emerges on the human plane” (112–113).

71. But not all of the rabbinic traditions about the three women's commandments connect them with punishment or atonement. A long sugya in B. Shabbat 32a–b develops M. Shabbat 2:6 by stressing an alternative rationale for women's pain and death in childbed. Rather than connecting them with Eve's sin, the sugya understands them to be gender-specific modes of punishment for women, complementary to modes of punishment for men for sins specific to the life experience of each (such as changing diapers inappropriately on the Sabbath, in the case of women). Through a series of folk proverbs, a common sense, naturalistic explanation is given, assuming that punishment for gender-specific sins is likely to occur in gender-specific dangerous real life situations, for instance, childbirth for women and the dangers of the road for men. This sugya does not see theodicy as a problem, nor appear to be bothered by the fact that women, and not men, suffer and die to replenish the human species. See discussion in Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity, 32–35.

72. However, the rabbinic ritual solution to women's death in childbed is quite different from Geertz's model in one critical respect. One of Geertz's goals as a contemporary anthropologist is to make a clear theoretical distinction between religious solutions and scientific and/or medical solutions to real life problems. Hence, he holds that “…as a religious problem, the problem of suffering is, paradoxically, not how to avoid suffering,” but how to deal with it cognitively (Geertz, “Cultural System,” 104). He thus is able to distinguish between the cultural function of religion and that of medical science, the primary goal of which is arguably practical, namely, preventing or curing human suffering, rather than rendering it cognitively coherent. Obviously, the pre-modern rabbinic world view of covenantal theology does not make this distinction. Arguably, pre-modern Jewish cosmologies consider the performance of religious ritual, indeed the observance of all of the commandments, to have a practical, positive, even prophylactic, effect on the conditions of actual human life as lived, since divine punishment is averted by enacting required rituals.

73. Although some feminists would disagree, namely, Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai, 25–28, and throughout. In Plaskow's extreme view of the exclusion of women from the covenant, ritual reenactment of the giving of the Torah is, for women, a ritual reenactment of their exclusion (26). For an inclusive view, see Shaye Cohen's recent article surveying talmudic traditions about the paradoxical status of women within the covenant: Cohen, Shaye J.D., “Are Women in the Covenant?” in A Feminist Commentary on the Babylonian Talmud: Introduction and Studies, ed. Ilan, Tal (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 25–42Google Scholar. Cohen concludes (42): “In the eyes of the sages Jewish women are included in the covenant of God with Israel, even if they are not exactly ‘Israel,’ and not exactly ‘Us.’ ”

74. For recent work on women's exemption from positive time bound commandments, see Alexander, Elizabeth Shanks, “From Whence the Phrase ‘Timebound, Positive Commandments’?” JQR 97:3 (2007): 317–346CrossRefGoogle Scholar and her “How Tefillin Became a Non-Timebound, Positive Commandment: The Yerushalmi and the Bavli on mEruvin 10:1,” in Ilan, A Feminist Commentary, 62–89.

75. ARNA:1 (ed. Schechter, 4–8), ARNA:4 (ed. Schechter, 21–25), ARNB:1 (ed. Schechter, 4–8), ARNB:8–9 (ed. Schechter, 22–25), with a few additional parallels found in ARNB:42 (ed. Schechter, 116–118).

76. While a full tradition-historical analysis of the sources is recommended, it is beyond the scope and immediate goals of this paper. Such an analysis may allow us to place sections of ARNA and ARNB in a more firm cultural-historical context, as their treatment of themes concerning women and gender might be shown to correspond to Zoroastrian, early Islamic or medieval Christian milieux. The scriptural narrative has probably been adopted from exegetical midrashim such as Bereshit Rabbah; the tradition of the three women's commandments, from Bereshit Rabbah and the Yerushalmi, see n. 59 above. For a full list of sources see Schechter's notes and Saldarini, The Fathers, 76, n.10. For redaction historical remarks on the ARN material and its sources see the work of Menahem Kister ‘Iyyunim, 82–83 (comments on the traditions in ARN:1), and his detailed article on ARN's traditions of the destruction of Jerusalem and the founding of Yavneh in Bi'urim be-‘aggadot ha-ḥurban be-Avot de rabbi natan, Tarbiz 67 (1998), 483–529, in which he explores the redactional process of ARNA:4/ARNB:8–9.

77. I am excluding incidental mention of women in the enumerated lists, such as “No woman ever miscarried [in the Temple] due to the smell of the meat” (M. Avot 5.5).

78. Significantly, the latter maxim does not appear in ARNA (perhaps edited out), and while it is cited in ARNB:31 (ed. Schechter, 67), it has attracted no commentary, illustrating ARNA's tendency to omit materials concerning women and gender relations in the direct commentary, as described in n. 79 below. While the entire chapter of ARNB:15 is devoted to “Don't talk to your wife more than necessary,” with three distinct units of commentary specifically involving women, the ARNA:7 parallel has a truncated version with only one unit of commentary.

79. While Schofer, The Making of a Sage, 37–38, notes different tendencies of the two versions regarding gender, reiterating Fonrobert's assertion that ARNB is especially misogynist, he does not execute a comparative study of the relevant materials. These distinctive patterns were presented in a paper delivered at the 2008 AJS Conference in Washington D. C. (“Patriarchal Stewardship: Women and Gender Relations in Avot de-Rabbi Natan Versions A and B”). While a detailed presentation of the data is impossible here, the following list summarizes provisional conclusions: (1) ARNA seems to have undergone a later editorial process, in which content concerning women and gender relations was suppressed from the sections of direct commentary on M. Avot, yet expanded in the many narratives it assimilated in the process of transmission, both rabbinic exempla and folk tales; (2) ARNB contains more content concerning women and gender relations in its direct commentary on M. Avot, both in the form of practical teaching about gender relations, as well as ideologically essentialist constructs; (3) there is far greater attention in ARNA to sexual anxiety and the dangers of sexual temptation. Common patterns discernible in both versions are: (1) a tendency to transform or suppress content concerning women and gender relations when incorporating traditions found in other sources; and (2) an overall ideological framework of an all-male system of cultural (as opposed to biological) reproduction.

80. Also noted by Schofer, The Making of a Sage, 37.

81. For recent scholarship assuming “the world making power” of a rabbinic text, reading the Mishnah as a projection of an “imaginative narrative world,” see Simon-Shoshan, Moshe, “Between Philology and Foucault: New Syntheses in Contemporary Mishnah Studies,” AJS Review 32:2 (2008): 251–262CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially 261. The notion that the Mishnah reflects an ideal rabbinic world, rather than an actual historical context, goes back to Neusner, Jacob, for instance Ancient Israel after Catastrophe: the Religious World View of the Mishnah (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

82. Indeed, according to Schofer, ARN's main concern is the maintenance and perpetuation of appropriate social and interpersonal relations of men with men, within a community organized around the ritual practice and ideologies of Torah study. He locates this community in an imprecise, but actual, historical context in antiquity: “Sages prescribe intense relationships among those inside the community: both horizontal relations among peers and vertical relations between students and their teachers. These relationships occur within a community that separates itself from a variety of others. This combination of internal fellowship and external exclusion conditions the distinct piety and ethics articulated in Rabbi Nathan for a particular movement of male religious elites among a nation colonized by a larger empire” (The Making of a Sage, 40). He identifies these “male religious elites” as actual rabbis, “…men with expertise in a particular way of speaking and writing who gradually attained religious and judicial leadership of Jewish communities” (18). My reading of ARN as a projection of a rabbinic community of the imagination radically changes its social function and target audience. Communal, and even individual, study of ARN would allow Jewish males who lacked the requirements of advanced rabbinic education to participate vicariously in this world.

83. Such as the women who represent the fall of the virgin Israel, i.e., the destruction of the Temple, in the three stories in ARNA: 17 (ed. Schechter, 65–66).

84. A comparison of how the concept is manifest in the two versions would make an interesting study of the cultural production of the rabbinic representation of women and gender. Moreover, such a study might help place the two versions of ARN in a more firm cultural/historical context if their tendencies reflect, for instance, early Muslim or Christian milieux. However, this project is beyond the scope and immediate goals of the present study. Here two examples must suffice: (1) In the direct commentary on the M. Avot maxim of Yosi ben Yoḥanan of Jerusalem, “Don't talk with your wife any more than necessary” (ARNA:7/ARNB:15. ed. Schechter, 33–35), the male head of household is exhorted to be responsible for maintaining his own moral integrity, and that of his wife and his rabbinic community, by avoiding unnecessary conversation, primarily with his wife, and by extension, with other women. The ARNB parallel includes the wife as meriting special didactic attention (showing its tendency to include more practical instruction relating to women and gender relations than ARNA); its didactic message, however, is not about gender relations but about maintaining moral order between male peers, namely, study companions. The male head of household is urged to maintain a separation between the realm of the all-male house of study and the domestic realm, co-inhabited by males and females, through careful speech. By contrast, ARNA:7's condensed, single unit of commentary does not dictate controlling a wife's behavior in the domestic realm; it does, however indicate that a wife will suffer the social consequences of her husband's inappropriate behavior in the all-male house of study: “If a man came to the house of study and was not treated with honor or if he fell out with his companion…[He] disgraces himself, his wife and his companion” (ed. Schechter, 35). (2) In ARNB's direct commentary on the maxim of Yosef ben Yoḥanan of Jerusalem, “May the poor be members of your household” (ARNA:7/ARNB:14, ed. Schechter, 33–34), the mood and consequent behavior of a man's wife, here within the home rather than without, is shown to be critical to a husband's ability to offer hospitality, and thus, to meet the maxim's ethical imperative. Here ARNA's commentary displays no content whatsoever concerning women, consistent with that version's tendency to omit materials concerning women and gender relations from its direct commentary. However, ARNB not only requires the male head of household to create an appropriate mood of mild comportment within the home, but explicitly includes the wife, and indeed, the entire household down to the family dog, in the ethical imperative to exhibit mild mannered, receptive behavior. Despite explicit attention to the domestic sphere, an androcentric emphasis is maintained by the focus on hospitality shown to male guests. Arguably, ARNB reflects the concerns of a cultural context in which the religious life of men was not monastic, while social relationships between men were of prime religious significance and had to be negotiated with domestic responsibilities to be maintained appropriately, perhaps reflecting an early Islamic cultural milieu.

85. A comparative tradition-historical analysis of this anthology, taking into account the parallel sources, shows an especially complex redaction process. Clearly ARNA's Destruction Cluster has been shortened and substantially reorganized, to the point where its hermeneutical stance towards the maxim is very different from that of ARNB. See the comparative analysis of this material in my unpublished PhD thesis: Natalie C. Polzer, Interpreting the Fathers: A Literary-Structural Analysis of Parallel Narratives in Avot de Rabbi Natan, Versions A and B, PhD thesis, Cambridge University, 1991, 68–97. For a detailed technical discussion of the redaction and transmission history of the Destruction Cluster, see Kister, “Bi'urim.” For historical studies of the anthology and parallels, see below n. 119.

86. Boyarin, Carnal Israel, 88, concurs about Adam's ultimate responsibility: “She got punished for her curiosity, but he alone is responsible for his malfeasance.”

87. The “hedge” Adam puts around his words is a negative, rather than a positive, illustration of the maxim, since it led Eve to sin. Thus, “hedging” your words is not always a commendable thing to do.

88. Unlike the Eve traditions relating to the three women's commandments, the parables place the burden of the blame for Eve's sin upon Adam, rather than Eve. In the first parable (attributed to Rabbi Shimon ben Eleazar) a man marries a proselyte but fails to teach her the precepts of Judaism, thus rendering her prone to sin. The second parable (attributed to Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai in ARNA and to Rabbi in ARNB) is a well known rabbinic parallel to the Greek myth of Pandora's Box. Here a man deliberately tempts his wife to disobedience by an arbitrary commandment: “He said to her, ‘Everything I have in my house is in your hands, except for this jar, which you must not touch at all” (ARNA:1, ed. Schechter, 6). See Boyarin's discussion, Carnal Israel, 80–88. For discussion of the parallel Greek sources, see Lieberman, Saul, Hellenism in Jewish Palestine (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1950), 136, n. 86Google Scholar. See also discussion in Saldarini, The Fathers, 36–37, n. 49 and n. 50. It has been suggested to me that the shift in blame from Eve to Adam may reflect early Islamic cultural influence; however the two parables appear to have a pre-Islamic, Palestinian provenance according to scholarly consensus, thus the question must be examined in more depth than possible here.

89. ARNB's greater attention to Eve is noted by Schofer (The Making of a Sage, 37), who interprets its greater attention to women as evidence of its relatively greater misogynistic stance: “The most explicitly disparaging remarks about women appear in Rabbi Nathan B and not in Rabbi Nathan A.” Illustrating its characteristic pattern, some of ARNB's independent traditions focus on practical aspects of gender behavior and relations, for instance the long list of characteristics distinguishing men and women, both cultural and biological, attributed to woman's creation from Adam's bone, presented as Scriptural commentary on Genesis 2:23, “bone of my bone”: “Why does a woman adorn herself and man not adorn himself?… Why does a woman's voice travel and not a man's voice… Why does the man deposit something with the woman and not the woman deposit something with the man?” (ARNB:9, ed. Schechter, 24). This tradition and its parallel in Bereshit Rabbah 17 (Theodor and Albeck, Vol. I, 158–159) are discussed by Boyarin, Carnal Israel, 88–89. A possible early Islamic parallel is significant for further study that might attempt to place the two versions of ARN in a compatible cultural-historical context. While not precisely parallel, six ahadith reported in the name of the notoriously misogynist (at least, according to the Moroccan feminist Fatima Mernissi) companion of Muhammed, Abu Huraira, similarly connect essentialist aspects of a woman's moral nature to her being created out of Adam's bone. Here, this “fact” establishes the responsibility of the male to control female behavior, as well as to treat women kindly, typical directives of patriarchal stewardship. For the ahadith, see Kahn, M. M., ed. and trans., Sahih Al-Bukhari (Lahore: Kazi Publications, 1971)Google Scholar, 80, 81, 346, and: Siddiqui, A. H., ed. and trans., Sahih Muslim Vol. 2 (Lahore: Shaikh Muhammad Ashraf, 1972), 752–753Google Scholar, cited in Hassan, Riffat, “Feminism in Islam,” in Feminism and World Religions, eds. Sharma, Arvind and Young, Katherine K. (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999), 255–256Google Scholar. For Abu Huraira's reputed misogyny, see Mernissi, Fatima, The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam, trans. Lakeland, Mary Jo (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 1991), 70–73, 78–81Google Scholar.

90. While many of ARNB's Eve traditions have no parallel in ARNA, the reverse is true in only one instance. Eve appears in ARNA (but not in ARNB) as an item in a list of the events that occurred in the first 12 hours of Adam's life: “During the eighth hour he was coupled with Eve” (ARNA:1, ed. Schechter, 5). The ARNB parallel reads: “During the eighth hour he was commanded” (ARNB:42, Schechter, 116).

91. A manuscript variant reads “in her mind” (בדעתה) for “in her heart” (בלבה). In either case, Eve's articulation is presented as internal, not as conversational, discourse. See Becker, Synoptische Edition, 16–17.

92. In ARNB's scriptural narratives, Eve speaks openly thrice. She speaks to the serpent: “She said to him, ‘We may eat fruit from all of the trees of the garden, but from the tree which is in the center of the garden we may not eat’” (ARNB:1, ed. Schechter, 5); and twice she voices rhetorical remarks to the world at large about her plight: “…After she had eaten the fruit of the tree she saw that she was as if uninjured and she said, ‘All of the things that my master commanded me are but lies…;’ ” “…She saw the angel of death coming towards her. She said, ‘I am like one who is departing from the world. Another woman may be created for Adam in my place. What should I do? I will make him eat the fruit with me’” (ARNB:1, ed. Schechter, 6).

93. Interestingly, the Yerushalmi version is assimilated to exegetical narrative and hence, is closer to ARNA; the Bereshit Rabbah tradition, which would be expected to have the generic features of exegetical narrative, does not and hence, is closer to ARNB.

94. I have included the Bereshit Rabbah and the Yerushalmi parallels for the purposes of comparison. For further discussion of these parallels and others, see Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity, 30–34, and above n. 59.

95. A discrepancy between the number organizing the list and the actual number of items it contains is a not uncommon feature of the enumeration list genre. See Towner, Wayne Sibley, The Rabbinic Enumeration of Scriptural Examples: A Study of a Rabbinic Pattern of Discourse with Special Reference to Mekhilta d'Rabbi Ishmael (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Saldarini, The Fathers, 219–220, n. 37.

96. As articulated by Biale, Rachel, Women in Jewish Law: The Essential Texts, Their Literary History and Their Relevance for Today (New York: Schocken Books, 1995 [1984])Google Scholar 125: “The curse on Eve may be understood as a symbolic formulation of the rabbis' view of female sexuality. Women were thought to have powerful sexual drives but to be temperamentally inhibited in initiating sex. Men do not share this inhibition and thus are commanded to initiate sex on their wives' behalf.” See also the general discussion, 121–126.

97. Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs, 68–70, notes a similar “mythical” use of Eve as a universalized, archetypal model in the musar literature on the three women's commandments, a feature she deems absent in the actual Teḥinos themselves, especially those authored by women.

98. A long unit of chapters devoted to enumeration lists of noteworthy phenomena, scriptural and otherwise, is comprised by ARNA:31–41 and ARNB:36–48.

99. Both of ARNA's lists (the three decrees against Eve; the ten curses with which Eve was cursed) have been formally assimilated into an exegetical context, namely, the anthology of scriptural narrative in ARNA:1 illustrating the fence that Adam made around his words. While they are formally organized as a list of three, each illustrating item is generated by the exegesis of Genesis 3:15, for example: “‘I will greatly increase your pain in childbearing’ (Genesis 3:15). When a woman experiences the first blood flow of her menstrual period, she feels pain” (ARNA:1, ed. Schechter, 7). Here ARNA's redactional impulse was to create scriptural narrative, assimilating the list genre into exegetical commentary by adding narrative formulae such as “at that time” (ARNA:1, ed. Schechter, 4).

100. In fact, ARNB's traditions show features of two distinct list genres: lists enumerating scriptural examples (all three), and lists distinguishing the differences between men and women (the longer, more developed list in ARNB:9 as well as the parallel in Bereshit Rabbah 17). For a recent discussion of the list genre illustrating the differences between men and women, see Alexander, “How Tefillin Became a Non-Timebound, Positive Commandment,” 62. Alexander remarks that this genre usually “…includes[s] language which specifically asks ‘what are the differences between a man and a woman?’” See Alexander, n. 4 for other examples of this genre.

101. Each part is introduced by a formulaic rhetorical question (“Why was the commandment of niddah given to women and not to men?”; “Why was the commandment of the dough offering given to women and not to men?….”) and ends with a statement of the power of the performance of each commandment to atone for Eve's sin (“The commandment of niddah was given to her in order that she atone for the blood she spilled.”).

102. Theodor and Albeck, Bereshit Rabbah 17, Vol. I, 158–160. Indeed, there are such close parallels between the sequence of traditions comprising ARNB:8–9 and this section of Bereshit Rabbah that it is reasonable to assume that the whole sequence of traditions was adapted from the latter and placed in ARNB as an entire unit.

103. Although assimilated into a narrative frame, the Bereshit Rabbah parallel belongs to the genre of lists itemizing essential differences between men and women (see n. 100 above); it is placed at the conclusion of a list of questions, here posed to Rabbi Joshua by his students, about what are understood as natural differences (many of which we would view as cultural) between men and women, each prefaced by “Why?”.

104. Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity, 33.

105. Which include “…the belated and secondary nature of female creation and its negative results, …women's inherent physical and moral disabilities, the divine punishments under which they labor, and the ‘curses’ that characterize their lot….” Baskin, “‘She Extinguished the Light of the World,’” 277–278. Baskin (278, n. 2) is not aware of the recent scholarship on ARN's date, hence considers it a “formative Palestinian text” of early composition.

106. Halberstam, Law and Truth, 127–129, views the mishnaic tradition as purely punitive; see n. 30 above. Likewise, Klawans, Jonathan, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 109CrossRefGoogle Scholar, claims: “M. Shabbat 2:6 threatens women who violate the menstrual impurity, claiming that they could suffer death in childbirth.” In my opinion, while the Mishnah may well be punitive, the aggadic traditions based upon it under discussion here are not necessarily so. It is nature that “unfairly sentences” women to suffering and death in childbed; the aggadic traditions, to different degrees, problematize this fact. However, while the Yerushalmi and the enumeration lists in ARNA present women's suffering and death in childbirth as difficult, they do not go so far as to consider them a theodicean problem. Interestingly, some of the traditions in B. Shabbat 32a–b developing M. Shabbat 2:6 are misogynistic and punitive, without citing Eve's sin as a rationale! For instance, one view holds that women are punished with death in childbed for cleaning their babies' excrement (i.e. changing diapers!) on the Sabbath and for calling the Torah Ark by the wrong term. This shows that women's death in childbed can be rationalized in a misogynistic way in the rabbinic sources, without any theological or religious connection. See above n. 71.

107. Baskin, Midrashic Women, 72–73, notes the theodicean drive behind the ARN traditions, but focuses almost exclusively on their essentializing misogyny, rather than their theological function: “A closer look at these texts also makes clear that they belong to a larger body of rabbinic theological speculation which attempts to demonstrate that divine justice is fully operative in the world….” Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs, 72, notes that the Teḥinos referring to Eve's sin are always concerned with theodicy, “…troubled by the relationship between Eve's sin and later women's suffering.” Rather than accepting death and suffering in childbed as a fact of destiny due to Eve's sin, the Teḥinos present them as consequences that can be avoided by halakhic observance and appropriate behavior (Weissler, 73–75).

108. The lists read as follows: menstruation, pregnancy, breast feeding, her husband rules over her, her husband is jealous if she speaks to another man (she is restricted socially), she ages quickly, she experiences menopause, she stays at home and doesn't earn a living, she covers her head in public, and finally, if she is righteous her husband will bury her (the enumeration list in ARNB:42); menstruation, the breaking of the hymen, the pain of pregnancy, a woman's ugliness during pregnancy, the pain of childbirth, her inability to show desire for her husband openly, her passivity before her husband's sexual demands (the two exegetical traditions in ARNA:1).

109. For a recent discussion of the law of retribution (talion), designated as middah ke-neged middah in rabbinic sources, in the context of biblical and rabbinic concepts of divine justice, see Halberstam, Law and Truth, 123–131.

110. The fact that Eve is “judaized,” represented, in a sense, as a primordial Jewish matriarch here is remarkable, but beyond the scope of this paper to explore. Adam, as well, is “judaized” in an exegetical list unique to ARNA which stipulates that he, along with other significant male biblical figures, was “born circumcised” (ARNA:2).

111. Visotzky, “Will and Grace,” 56, points out that in normative rabbinic theology, the consequences of the human propensity to sin can be averted through repentance and atonement, distinguishing it from the Christian Augustinian formulation of original sin.

112. In Bereshit Rabbah, three distinct metaphors represent Eve's one sin, the murder of Adam: “spilling his blood,” corresponding to the commandment of niddah; “spoiling the dough” (causing the body to putrefy), corresponding to the commandment of ḥallah; and, “extinguishing the light of the soul,” corresponding to the commandment of the Sabbath lights. This is noted by Saldarini, The Fathers, 83, n. 11. The version in the Yerushalmi is primarily exegetical, rather than metaphoric, citing verses to support the identification of Adam as “blood of the world” and the “pure dough of the world.” Here Eve's act of murder is explicit and not metaphoric; “Eve caused him to die” is repeated three times after each of the women's commandments.

113. See: B. Sanhedrin 74a for an early formulation of this list, stipulating that, in contrast to the performance of other commandments which may be violated to save life, one should die rather than violate these three. Schofer, The Making of a Sage, 219, n. 1, lists other rabbinic sources and secondary literature.

114. For a discussion of the conflation of the sins of idolatry and ḥillul ha-shem in aggadic, homiletical rabbinic sources, see Urbach, The Sages, 355–57. An attributed saying in the Yerushalmi (Y. Nedarim 3:11 [37c]; Sussman, Talmud Yerushalmi, 1024) goes so far as to claim that desecration of God's name is a sin worse than idolatry: “Idol worship is the most severe sin….Said Rabbi Judah bar Pazi, Ḥillul ha-Shem is the most severe sin of them all….” A study of the process of the assimilation of Ḥillul ha-Shem with the prohibition of idolatry in rabbinic and medieval aggadic and halakhic sources is recommended. For our purposes here, by the time of Maimonides' Mishneh Torah, a degree of assimilation between the sins of idolatry and Ḥillul ha-Shem is evident. See Maimonides' discussion of the three cardinal sins and kiddush/ḥillul ha-Shem in Maimonides, Moses, Mishneh Torah: The Book of Knowledge, ed. and trans. Hyamson, Moses, new corrected edition (New York: Feldheim, 1981), Chapter V, 40a – 41bGoogle Scholar. Here Maimonides understands Ḥillul ha-Shem in three ways, all of which designate a process of obliterating the presence of God in the world: (1) Ch. 5 – Sections V.1–5 (40a–40b) deal with denial of God's name in the circumstances when a Jew is forced to violate commandments, whether in public or in private, both under normal circumstances and in times of persecution; (2) Ch. 5 – Sections IX and XI (41a) define Ḥillul ha-Shem as inappropriate behavior outside the strict line of legal prohibition on the part of an individual known to be especially pious and learned, who “obliterates God from the world” by the bad public impression of Jews he creates; and (3) Ch. 6 – Section I (41b) defines the term as the physical obliterating, or erasing, of God's written name. Regarding the latter Maimonides makes explicit the overlap between the biblical prohibition of idolatry and the physical obliteration of a written name of God: “Whoever destroys any one of the holy and pure Names by which the Holy One, blessed be He, is called incurs according to scriptural enactment the punishment for idol worship, as it says, ‘And you shall destroy their names from this place. But thus you shall not do to the Lord your God’ (Deut. 12:3–4).”

115. As it clearly does in the Yerushalmi parallel, through the citation of Proverbs 27:2, “The light of God is the soul of man.”

116. See above n. 114; also Saldarini, The Fathers, 83, n. 11. While Saldarini does not identify Eve as having committed the three most severe sins, he notes that ARNB:9 renders Eve's sin extreme in that she is pictured as having, in some way, killed God Himself by extinguishing His light. This is communicated by the ambiguity of the referent of the pronominal suffix “him” (“she shed his blood,” “she extinguished him”). Saldarini notes that Eve could have murdered (“extinguished”) God Himself, by killing the first person created in his image.

117. As Fonrobert observes, Menstrual Purity, 32. In fact, the connection between the biological fact of women's disproportionate suffering during reproduction and the fact that men, and not women, are halakhically obligated to procreate, needs further exploration. Indeed, a minority opinion in the name of Rabbi Yoḥanan ben Beroka holding women obligated to procreate on the basis of Genesis 1:28 is cited and rejected in M. Yevamot 6:6, B. Shabbat 111a, B. Yevamot 65b, B. Gittin 43b, B. Kiddushin 35a, Y. Megillah 1:5.4 (70c) and Y. Yevamot 6:40.6 (7b).

The narrative of the wife of Rabbi Ḥiyya, (B. Yevamot 65b–66a) who imbibes a sterilizing poison rather than suffer through a second pregnancy and childbed, connects the theme of women's pain and danger during childbirth with their exemption from the obligation to procreate, but does not explore the theodicean theme. Generally speaking, the theodicean problem would be more severe if women were halakhically obligated to place themselves in physical danger in the process of procreation since this obligation is contrary to the spirit of the rabbinic understanding of “[you] …shall live by them” (Leviticus 18:5). For the latter, see, for instance, T. Shabbat 16:17, B. Yoma 85b, B. Sanhedrin 74a, B. Avodah Zarah 54a.

118. It was recently pointed out to me by a Chabad rabbi that Menachem Schneerson, the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, put great stress on the three women's commandments but with no connection whatsoever to Eve's sin or to avoiding death or pain in childbirth, focusing instead on what he held to be Jewish women's unique role in actualizing the messianic age (Rabbi Avrohom Litvin, oral communication, Louisville, KY, March 15, 2011). The transformation of the rationale for the performance of the three women's commandments in the 20^th century after the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth in developed countries would make an interesting study. Hypothetically speaking, once pregnancy and childbirth are annexed under the practical and discursive control of medical science, rather than theology, one would expect a corresponding discursive shift in their theological weight in male-authored, traditional religious discourse.

119. Kister, Bi'urim, presents a detailed analysis of the redaction and transmission history of these materials. There are many historical studies of the traditions in ARN's Destruction Cluster, since it is one of the main sources for the events of the destruction of the Second Temple, including the much discussed story of the flight of Yoḥanan ben Zakkai and the establishment of Yavneh. Among others, see Schäfer, Peter, “Die Flücht Johanan ben Zakkais aus Jerusalem und die Grunding des ‘Lehrhauses’ in Jabne,” in Aufsteig und Niedergang der Romischen Welt, Principat Religion 11.19.2, eds. Haase, W. and Temporini, H. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1977), 43–101Google Scholar; Alon, Gedalyahu, “Johanan ben Zakkai,” in Jews, Judaism and the Classical World: Studies in Jewish History in the Times of the Second Temple and Talmud, trans. Abraham, I. (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1977), 269–313Google Scholar; Herr, Moses David, “The Historical Significance of the Dialogues Between Jewish Sages and Roman Dignitaries,” in Studies in Aggadah and Folk Literature, eds. Heinemann, J. and Noy, Dov (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1971), 123–150Google Scholar. More recently see: Tropper's, Amram new-historicist discussion: “Yohanan Ben Zakkai, Amicus Caesaris: A Jewish Hero in Rabbinic Eyes,” JSIJ 4 (2005): 133–149Google Scholar.

120. Two other rabbinic sources evidence sustained units of Destruction traditions, many of which are parallel to units in ARN: B. Gittin 56a–b; Midrash Eikhah Rabbati 1:5 (Vilna 1.31) ed. S. Buber (Tel Aviv: photocopy, n.d. [Vilna: Romm, 1899]), 65–66.

121. To my knowledge, the only other place evidencing a similar juxtaposition is in the Avodah service in the Musaf of Yom Kippur, where the juxtaposition is between the creation and sins of Adam and Eve and the Temple service. While the Avodah liturgy assumes the Temple to have been destroyed, the fact of its destruction is rarely explicitly articulated, and certainly not described in detail, as in ARN. See High Holiday Prayer Book: Yom Kippur, ed. and trans. Birnbaum, Philip (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, 1980), 528–546Google Scholar.

122. It is well beyond the scope of this paper to discuss the literary and thematic complexity of ARN's Destruction Cluster. A comparative analysis of the literary structure and hermeneutical strategies of its two versions is found in my unpublished PhD thesis, Interpreting the Fathers, Ch. 3, where it is argued (97) that the position of the Destruction Cluster as commentary on the maxim of Shimon the Righteous implies a conscious contrast between “the workings of history behind the veil of eternity” on the part of the redactional impulse. That is, although Shimon's saying is not directly challenged by the commentary, the marked ironic juxtaposition of the unchanging, eternal reality presented in the maxim, and the catastrophic flux of history, presented in the Destruction Cluster, problematizes the static world view presented in the maxim itself. Ultimately, as shown here, historical continuity triumphs over catastrophic disruption, yet “the world” is only able to endure through ritual flexibility.

123. A detailed comparison of the composition of the Destruction Cluster in the two versions of ARN would show a correlation with their different patterns in issues concerning women and gender relations. Similar to the way in which explicit commentary concerning women and gender is absent in ARNA (see above n. 79), the anxious, urgent tone of ARNB's Destruction Cluster is absent in ARNA's much shorter redactional arrangement. ARNB's version is not only much longer, with additional narrative detail (such as the story of Titus' punishment for destroying the Temple by means of a mosquito consuming his brain from within, in ARNB:7), but also preserves a chronological narrative sequence, with the solution to the problem of the destruction of the Temple situated after the destruction and its consequences; by contrast, ARNA does not arrange its traditions chronologically. See below n. 125. The rhetorical result of these redactional differences is that ARNA's version engenders much less suspense and theological difficulty than ARNB's. See Polzer, Interpreting the Fathers, Ch. 3.

124. While this source is often read as showing the rabbis felt that sacrifice was superseded by other commandments such as prayer, Jonathan Klawans has recently challenged this assumption: “…[T]hese sources do not unquestionably claim that sacrifice has been superseded….[This]…can be seen first and foremost by context…[in] Avot de Rabbi Natan….” Klawans, Jonathan, Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple: Symbolism and Supercessionism in the Study of Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 209Google Scholar.

125. The traditions are situated in different positions in the two versions. ARNA proposes the two ritual solutions at the very beginning of the unit, in its commentary on the first part of Shimon's saying, “on the Torah,” before its version of the Destruction Cluster, while ARNB positions the tradition after the Destruction Cluster, following the chronological sequence of the event it describes in the commentary on the third part of the saying, “on acts of loving kindness.”

126. See above, nn. 89 and 100.

127. See above, nn. 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, and corresponding discussion.

128. See n. 126.

129. For a historical description of the halakhic and ethical parameters of the category, see Rabinowitz, Louis I., “Gemilut Ḥasadim,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition (New York: Keter, 2007) Vol. 7, 427–429Google Scholar.

130. This affective participation in someone else's performance of a social commandment is presented as a mode of imitation of God, as seen in the tradition attributed to Rabbi Shimon Menasia, where God's role in the marriage of Adam and Eve is the model for performing similar acts of loving kindness (III.a above).

131. Scholarly consensus assumes the long series of Adam and Eve traditions in ARNB:8–9 to be mostly irrelevant to their commentary context, inserted as a whole from another source, probably Bereshit Rabbah. See Saldarini, The Fathers, 76, n. 9; Kister, ‘Iyyunim, 82–83.

132. Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity, 229, n. 40, notes the expiatory, as opposed to the punitive, function of the three women's commandments assumed by the ARNB tradition. The identification of menstruation as a kind of an expiatory blood sacrifice is very provocative, both theoretically and theologically speaking, but its ramifications cannot be pursued here.

133. Appearing, to my knowledge, only seven times in rabbinic literature, according to a search on the Bar Ilan database. Three of the seven attestations of the term are connected with the practice of niddah. Besides ARNB, the term appears in Massekhet Soferim 13.11, Leviticus Rabbah 19.5, Lamentations Rabbah 5.7, Pesikta Rabbati 1.5, Yalkut Shimoni Meẓorah.

134. Most notably, Baker, “The Well-Ordered Bayit: Bodies, Houses, and Rabbis in Ancient Galiliee,” Ch. 2 in Rebuilding the House of Israel, 34–76; Fonrobert, “The Woman as House,” Ch. 2 in Menstrual Purity, 40–6; and, more recently, Labovitz, “My Wife I Called ‘My House’: Elaborating the Metaphor of Women as Property,” Ch. 3 in Marriage and Metaphor, 97–146.

135. Baker, Rebuilding the House, 52–53; Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity, 63–64; Labovitz, Marriage and Metaphor, 122–123.

136. Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity, 48–60, documents the conventional representation of female reproductive organs in rabbinic sources as the architectural plan of a house, with vestibule, hallway and inner room. Significantly, Baker, Rebuilding the House, 56, 59–60, notes that the house metaphor is never used in rabbinic sources to designate the virginal female body, but, rather, designates the wife's reproductive capacity under her husband's control. Labovitz, Marriage and Metaphor, 99, 116–117, also notes the intrinsic connection between the metaphoric representation of “woman as house” and her reproductive capacities, halakhically acquired by purchase and controlled by her husband.

137. While an association between a Jewish women's performance of the three women's commandments and the High Priest's ritual functions in the Temple is a trope familiar in the Teḥinos, ARNB's association between the Temple and the female reproductive body is unique. For the former, see Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs, 60–61. A few traditional sources do stipulate a parallel between the death of a wife and the destruction of the Temple. For instance, a baraita in B. Sanhedrin 22a hyperbolically likens the death of a man's first wife to the destruction of the Temple, in terms of the sorrow experienced by the bereaved husband. Citing this source in his early 17^th-century commentary, Kli Yakar, Ephraim of Lundshitz interprets Abraham's unusual mode of mourning Sarah's death in Genesis 23:2, as indicating his observance of ritualized mourning for the Temple (Sefer Kli Yakar ha-Shalem [Jerusalem: Orot Ḥayyim, 1961), Vol. I, 101. Neither source specifically concerns the death of a wife in childbed.

138. Typical of its overall pattern regarding reference to issues concerning women, ARNA's parallel unit evidences no homology between the Temple and Eve. First, its version of the story of Rabbi Yoḥanan calls the Temple by its usual designation, בית המקדשׁ. Second, none of the long string of traditions about Adam and Eve in ARNB:8–9 appear in ARNA; hence, there is no juxtaposition of the destruction of the Temple with the consequences of Eve's sin. Notably, the more androcentric ARNA:1 contains a tradition in which the Temple is homologized to Adam, rather than to Eve, in line with ARNA's general tendency to diminish textual references to women: “Another interpretation of ‘And you have placed your hand upon me’ (Psalms 139:5): When he [Adam] sinned, the Holy One, blessed be He, removed one [of the two faces he was originally created with]. From this we learn that both Adam and the Temple (בית המקדשׁ) were created with God's own two hands…” (ARNA:1, ed. Schechter, 8).

139. Visotzky, “Will and Grace,” 56, notes that according to the typical rabbinic view the potential for atonement renders Jews superior to Adam and Eve, who had no process of atonement in place. For an example of an early modern Teḥina in which women felt themselves at a moral advantage over Eve, see Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs, 73, 179–180.

140. I am assuming that the redactor of this section of ARNB lived well after the destruction of the Temple. The historical event of the destruction of the Temple, as well as its perceived threat to continuity, is being imaginatively reconstructed and imaginatively defused, through the valorization of acts of loving kindness and Torah study, which are transformed into a ritual solution to the absence of the Temple cult.

141. For recent work on women's contribution to salvation through the process of biological reproduction in the Bavli, see Dorothea M. Salzer, “Women's World in Massekhet Rosh ha-Shannah: Women and Creation in bRosh ha-Shanah 10b–11b,” in A Feminist Commentary on the Babylonian Talmud, 197–215. Salzer (213) bases her conclusions on a careful literary analysis of the content and structure of a long unit of associated traditions: “According to our sugya, pregnancy and motherhood are part of the ongoing process of creation…. This is clearly recognizable in the structuring of the text linking the topic of creation to the topics of conception and birth. Because of the formal pattern of our sugya, conception and birth are both parts of salvation.” However, Gwynn Kessler's recent study of the discursive representation of the fetus in rabbinic homiletical texts shows a different pattern; in the texts she examines, women disappear as active, significant agents in human reproduction. God Himself is the only active agent in the development of the fetus. Kessler, Gwynn, Conceiving Israel: the Fetus in Rabbinic Narratives (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 65, 94, 103Google Scholar.

142. See above n. 117.

143. Although Amram Tropper is commenting on its projection of history, rather than of gender, he too notes the “static” quality of M. Avot's Chain of Tradition. Tropper, Amram, Wisdom, Politics and Historiography: Tractate Avot in the Context of the Graeco-Roman Near East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 167–168Google Scholar.