Talmud as Novel: Dialogic Discourse and the Feminine Voice in the Babylonian Talmud

This article presents a new approach to understanding the discourse of the Babylonian Talmud and the ways it generates meaning. This approach is rooted in Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism as explicated in his “Discourse in the Novel” and is based on a reevaluation of the literary and theoretical implications of the findings of the previous generation of textual philological Talmudic scholarship. The article challenges previous efforts by Daniel Boyarin and Barry Scott Wimpfheimer to apply Bakhtin’s thought to the Talmud. The final section presents a close reading of a Talmudic passage which demonstrates how this new approach sheds fresh light on the place of the feminine voice in the Talmud.