Our Objective

Method: Internal Parallel Sources

Regarding the words of Tanna’im and Amora’im as sources with a status independent of their context in the sugya in which they are cited underscores our need for locating and comparing parallel sources for those citations from other contexts. These may be sayings that appear in the Tosefta or in a classic Tannaitic midrash, or an Amoraic citation that appears in the Palestinian Talmud or an aggadah that appears in Genesis Rabbah or another Amoraic midrash collection.

Careful consideration and analysis of these parallel texts and their interrelationships can, at times, yield new interpretations that set them in their original historical context, before they took on the assumptions and meanings assigned to them in their later Talmudic context. This important dimension of Talmudic study—comparative analysis in light of extra-Talmudic parallels—was given a solid foundation and an impressive start in the monumental work of Rabbi Aryeh Leib Yellin, Yefeh ‘Einayim, composed for inclusion in the famous Vilna edition of the Babylonian Talmud. That work presents and analyzes materials from the Palestinian Talmud and other words of Talmudic literature outside the Babylonian Talmud itself. It exerted a great influence on Talmudic research, bringing to the fore Tannaitic works (Tosfta and halakhic midrashim) and the Palestinian Talmud—that is, the corpus of Talmudic literature from Eretz Yisrael—as sources that should be studied as part of one’s inquiry into a sugya in the Babylonian Talmud.