The authority of the Babylonian Talmud: Analysis of its justifications and a proposal for a contemporary model

The Babylonian Talmud has held a distinctive place in the Jewish legal community since the early Middle Ages, serving as the basis for all legal discussion and decisions, as well as acting as a virtually limitless source of homiletic and aggadic inspiration. The voices contained in its hundreds of pages are those of scholars who flourished during the first five centuries of the Common Era, the Tannaim and the Amoraim. The redacted text of the Talmud synthesizes the comments, decisions, and insights of these sages into a seamless conversation which has occupied the energies of Jewish scholars for more than a thousand years.;The authoritativeness of this text was challenged in the Middle Ages by the Karaites who accepted only that which was of divine origin, rejecting anything of rabbinic pedigree. To defend the Talmud's stature, medieval scholars focussed largely on the authority of its authors, seeing in the Tannaim and Amoraim some measure of divine authority. These justifications largely took two forms: institutional authorization, whereby the Rabbis of the Talmud were the embodiment of some institution divinely authorized to interpret the revealed text of the Torah and legislate for the Jewish people. The other sort of defense centered on the personal qualities of the Rabbis, whether they be endowed with unsurpassed cognitive ability or actual divine guidance.;Upon close inspection, these theories are shown to be unable to account for the absolute authoritativeness of the Babylonian Talmud within the tradition. To retain the force of these theories, one is compelled to adopt a composite notion of the Rabbis' authority, reflecting their complex functions.;Alternately, a more contemporary notion of the authoritativeness of a text within a tradition is proposed, and upon examination, is seen not only to account, rather descriptively, for all the ways in which the text actually operates within the legal community, but to have normative implications as well. The consequences of such a theory are carefully studied, and are contrasted with the other, earlier theories to uncover the central axes of scope and force around which the discussion of sacred texts and legal authority revolve.