Rabbinic Discourse on Divination in the Babylonian Talmud.

Abstract

Divination is a label given, both in the ancient and modern world, to a group of human-made interpretive techniques through which a client would expect to obtain hidden knowledge about past, present, or future events. This dissertation focuses on the rabbis’ discourse on the various manifestations of four different divinatory techniques which occur in the Babylonian Talmud (Bavli): oneiromancy (dream interpretation), bibliomancy (divination based on biblical verses), cledonomancy (divination based on chance utterances including the bat kol) and necromancy (divination by means of the dead). Using literary analysis and source criticism, I argue that the Babylonian rabbis legislate divination based on biblical precedent and that they employ similar exegetical techniques in both Midrash, the exegesis of biblical verses, and those methods of divination which they permit. The depiction of divinatory techniques, however, does not cohere with this legislation. Whether or not the practice is permitted or prohibited, they tend to positively (or at least neutrally) depict these forms of divination when they are performed by a rabbi who is not functioning as a professional diviner. The Babylonian rabbis, however, tend to negatively depict these forms of divination when they are either performed by a professional diviner or by a non-rabbi. Thus, the way that these various forms of divination are depicted, regardless of whether or not they are permitted or prohibited, serves to define one as an insider or an outsider vis-à-vis the Babylonian rabbis. By doing so, the rabbis delegitimize non-rabbinic diviners, while transforming other methods of divination into a form of study analogous to the Oral Torah. By making their discourse on divination particularly rabbinic, divination functioned as a means through which the rabbis legitimated and bounded off their knowledge and authority from the surrounding culture of Sasanian Babylonia.