What Is Aggadata?

An introduction to the Talmud and its stories

1. Opening: two students, one teacher

Two students, Rabbi Ami and Rabbi Asi, sat before their teacher, Rabbi Yitzchak Nappacha. One said: "Teach us law." The other said: "Teach us a story." When he began the law, the second stopped him. When he began the story, the first stopped him.

The teacher said: "I am like the man with two wives, one young and one old. The young one pulled out his white hairs; the old one pulled out his black hairs. Between them he was left bald."

So he taught them one thing that was both. The Torah says: "When a fire breaks out and catches thorns... the one who kindled the fire shall surely pay."¹ The law: the verse opens with damage done by a man's property and closes with damage done by the man himself — so a fire you light counts as your own arrow. The story: the Holy One says, "I must pay for the fire I lit. I kindled a fire in Zion, and I will one day rebuild her with fire."²

That page holds the whole subject of this introduction. The Talmud has two voices. One argues the law. The other tells, consoles, warns, and wonders. The sages who made the book heard both as one Torah and wrote them down side by side. The second voice is what we call aggadata.

The essays that follow each take one such story and read it slowly. This introduction is for the reader who first wants to know what kind of text is coming: what the Talmud is, what its stories are called and why, why they sit next to the law, how the great readers of the past approached them, and whether they are meant literally. Before the stories, then, the book.

2. First, the Talmud

What it is

The Talmud has two layers.

The first is the Mishnah — a compact code of Jewish law in Hebrew, in six orders (sedarim) and sixty-three tractates, edited by Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi around the year 200 CE in the Land of Israel. Its teachers are the Tannaim, from the Aramaic tena, "to repeat," because they carried the tradition by heart and repeated it aloud.

The second is the Gemara — three centuries of discussion of the Mishnah, in Aramaic mixed with Hebrew, by teachers called the Amoraim, "speakers" or "explainers." The Gemara asks what the Mishnah means, where it comes from in Scripture, how it fits with other teachings, and how it applies. Along the way it records what the sages said about nearly everything else.

Mishnah and Gemara printed together are the Talmud. The name Shas is short for shisha sedarim, "six orders."

Why it is called "Talmud"

Talmud comes from the root ל-מ-ד, "to learn" and "to teach." In the Talmud's own vocabulary the word does not yet name a book. It names an activity: the reasoning that derives law from the Mishnah and from Scripture. "Divide your years in three: a third Scripture, a third Mishnah, a third talmud."³ The book took the name of the activity it records.

Gemara is Aramaic for "learning" or "completion." In printed editions it also became the everyday name for the whole work, partly because Christian censors in the sixteenth century banned the word "Talmud" from the title page.

There are two Talmuds

The Jerusalem Talmud (Yerushalmi), despite its name, was made in the Galilee — mainly Tiberias — and reached its final form around 350–400 CE. It is shorter, terser and less finished.
The Babylonian Talmud (Bavli) was made in the academies of Babylonia — Sura, Nehardea, Pumbedita, Mechoza — in what is now Iraq, and reached its final form around 500 CE. It is longer and more polished.

"The Talmud," without qualification, means the Bavli. It became the authoritative text for Jewish law and study everywhere. It runs to 2,711 double-sided folios in the standard Vilna printing; at one folio a day it takes about seven and a half years.

Who made it, and where

Jews had lived in Babylonia since the exile of 597 and 586 BCE. When Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi's Mishnah reached them in the 220s, two of his students, Rav and Shmuel, opened the academies of Sura and Nehardea, and three centuries of discussion began. The community lived under Persian rule, mostly at peace and free to study. That is the main reason the Bavli is longer and calmer than the Yerushalmi, whose sages worked under Rome in the years of its crises and its turn to Christianity.

The Talmud names its own end point: "Rav Ashi and Ravina are the end of instruction."⁴ Rav Ashi headed the academy of Sura for some sixty years, until his death in 427. Tradition — set down by Rav Sherira Gaon in his letter of 987, our earliest history of the Talmud — says Rav Ashi reviewed the whole body of teaching twice, tractate by tractate, over a lifetime.⁵ Ravina, a generation later, closed the work around 475–500. After them the Savoraim ("reasoners") added connecting words, arranged the give-and-take, and settled the text.

Modern scholars describe the same process in other words: a long oral growth, then a generation or more of anonymous editors who stitched the discussions into their present form. The two accounts agree on the essentials — many teachers over three centuries, in Babylonia, with a final editing at Sura around the year 500.

Why they wrote it down

They were not supposed to. "Words that are oral you may not set down in writing."⁶ The Oral Torah was meant to live in teachers and students, not on parchment. Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi broke that rule for the Mishnah, and Rav Ashi's generation broke it again for the Gemara, on the strength of one verse read as an emergency clause: "It is a time to act for the Lord; they have voided Your Torah."⁷ Better that one letter of the Torah be uprooted than that the Torah be forgotten.⁸

Rambam gives the plain reason. Rabbi saw that students were fewer, that persecutions kept coming, and that "Israel was scattering to the ends of the earth." Rav Ashi saw the same.⁹ A book is a poor substitute for a living teacher, but it outlives the teacher.

Note what this means for our subject. If the aim was to save the tradition from forgetting, the tradition included the stories. The editors could have saved only the law. They saved the whole conversation.

3. The two voices: shma'ata and aggadata

Open any page and you meet both.

Shma'ata (שְׁמַעְתָּא) comes from the root שמע, "to hear." A shma'ata is a legal teaching one has heard from a teacher — and, by extension, the whole legal give-and-take: question, answer, proof, objection, resolution. In the yeshiva today the word still means "the legal argument of the page."

Aggadata (אֲגַדְתָּא, also aggadeta; Hebrew aggadah or haggadah) is everything else: stories about the sages, readings of Scripture that teach faith or character, ethics, theology, prayer, dreams, medicine, history, parable, consolation. About a third of the Bavli is aggadah.

The name

In Hebrew higgid means "to tell." "And you shall tell your child on that day"¹⁰ — which is why the Passover text is called the Haggadah, "the Telling." Aggadah is the noun: a telling.

The Talmud itself adds a second meaning, from the Aramaic sense of the same root, "to draw, to pull." On the verse "And Moshe told the words of the people to the Lord,"¹¹ the Gemara says:

וַיַּגֵּד מֹשֶׁה — דְּבָרִים שֶׁמּוֹשְׁכִין לִבּוֹ שֶׁל אָדָם כְּאַגָּדָה

"'And Moshe told' — words that draw a person's heart, like aggadah."¹²

So the name carries both ideas. Aggadah is what is told, as opposed to what is ruled; and aggadah is what draws the heart, as opposed to what compels the mind. The oldest statement of its purpose says the same thing plainly:

רְצוֹנְךָ שֶׁתַּכִּיר אֶת מִי שֶׁאָמַר וְהָיָה הָעוֹלָם? לְמֹד הַגָּדָה, שֶׁמִּתּוֹךְ כָּךְ אַתָּה מַכִּיר אֶת הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא וּמִדַּבֵּק בִּדְרָכָיו

"Do you wish to know the One who spoke and the world came into being? Study aggadah, for through it you come to know the Holy One and cling to His ways."¹³

Law tells you what to do. Aggadah tells you Whom you are doing it for.

The pair is very old

The two terms are not a modern scholar's labels. The sages used them about themselves. Some were known as "masters of aggadah"; some avoided it. Rabbi Abbahu taught aggadah and Rabbi Chiyya bar Abba taught law in the same town, and the whole audience left Rabbi Chiyya for Rabbi Abbahu. To console his colleague, Rabbi Abbahu said: "Two merchants came to town. One sold precious stones; one sold small wares. To whom do people run? To the seller of small wares."¹⁴ A compliment — and, read twice, a quiet reminder that the crowd is not always wrong about what it needs.

The sages also drew a fence around the second voice: "One does not derive law from the aggadot."¹⁵ A story may teach anything; it may not decide a case.

4. Why put both in one book?

The Amoraim could have made two books. Their successors sometimes did: the Ein Yaakov (Salonica, 1516) collects the Bavli's aggadot alone and became one of the best-loved Jewish books ever printed. Yet the Talmud itself never separates them. Why?

1. Because that is what the study hall sounded like. The Gemara is not a code; it is a record of talk. The same teachers, in the same sessions, argued the law and told the stories. To edit out the aggadah would have been to invent a study hall that never existed.

2. Because law without its purpose goes blind. The Sifrei gives the order: know Whom you serve, then serve. The law of fire tells you who pays. The aggadah on the same verse tells you that God holds Himself to the same rule. Neither is complete alone, so the Talmud puts them on one page: no one studies the liability of an arsonist without hearing, in the next breath, about the fire in Zion.

3. Because the heart must be moved, not only informed. A ruling can be obeyed and forgotten. A story is remembered and repeated. The sages knew what the seller of small wares was selling, and they wanted both in every student's bag.

4. Because aggadah is the Talmud's theology, ethics and self-portrait, and it had nowhere else to go. The Talmud has no separate book of beliefs and no book of biography. What the sages thought about God, suffering, death, prayer, the Land, the nations, the world to come — and who Hillel, Shammai and Rabbi Akiva were as human beings — all of it lives in the aggadah, in the gaps between the rulings. Remove it and you have a law code with no author and no God.

5. Because a story can say what a ruling cannot. Some truths do not survive being stated as propositions. "Moshe went up on high and found the Holy One tying crowns to the letters"¹⁶ says something about revelation and interpretation that no direct sentence says as well. The sages used stories where stories were the precise instrument.

5. How the later masters read the aggadah

Every generation asked the same three questions. Is aggadah binding? Is it literal? Is it deep? The answers moved over a thousand years, and the movement is itself a lesson.

The Geonim (c. 600–1038): "we do not rely on aggadah"

The heads of the Babylonian academies after the Talmud were the first to be asked — by ordinary Jews and by hostile outsiders — whether the strange stories must be believed. Their answer was cautious and consistent. Rav Sherira Gaon wrote that the aggadot are "estimates" (umdana), a sage's own reading of a verse, and that one does not rely on them. His son Rav Hai Gaon wrote that words of aggadah are not like a received tradition — each sage expounded what came to his mind — and are accepted only where they agree with reason and Scripture.¹⁷ The Geonim, in short, widened the fence: not only "no law from aggadah," but "no dogma from aggadah either."

Rashi and Tosafot (11th–12th c.): read it as it stands

Rashi, whose commentary runs beside every line of the Bavli, explains the aggadot the way he explains everything else — plainly, at face value, supplying the missing words so that the story makes sense as a story. He seldom says whether to believe it. Tosafot, his successors, mostly leave the aggadah alone and argue the law. In the Franco-German schools the stories were loved and quoted, and not much theorized about.

Rambam (d. 1204): three kinds of reader

Rambam sorts the readers of aggadah into three groups.¹⁸

The first take every story literally and believe it. They think they honor the sages; in fact, says Rambam, they shame them, by making wise men sound like fools. This group is "the majority of those I have seen and whose books I have read."

The second take every story literally and mock it — and mock the sages with it. This group is worse, because it is arrogant.

The third group is small: those who understand that the sages, like all wise men, spoke in riddles and parables — "the words of the wise and their riddles"¹⁹ — and that a strange surface hides an inner meaning worth digging for. Rambam counts himself here, and his Guide of the Perplexed is an exercise in the digging.

His son, Rabbi Avraham, made the position explicit in a short essay printed at the front of later editions of the Ein Yaakov: we are not bound to accept a sage's non-legal statement on his authority alone; in matters of nature and medicine the sages spoke with the knowledge of their age; in matters of faith they spoke in parable. A statement is weighed on its merits, and truth is accepted from whoever says it.²⁰

Ramban and Rashba (13th c.): two Catalan answers

In 1263, at the forced disputation in Barcelona, the convert Pablo Christiani pressed Ramban with aggadot that seemed to concede Christian claims. Ramban replied: "We have three kinds of books. The Bible, which we all believe with perfect faith. The Talmud, which explains the commandments; we believe it too. And the third, called Midrash, that is, sermons — and this book, one who believes it, good; and one who does not believe it, no harm done."²¹ Some read this as a debating tactic, others as his real view. In his Torah commentary and in Sha'ar HaGemul the same Ramban treats aggadot with great seriousness and reads many of them kabbalistically. Both may be true: not binding, and not shallow.

His student Rashba drew that second line firmly. Against Christian polemicists and against Jewish rationalists who dismissed the stories, he wrote a commentary on the aggadot and several responsa arguing that the sages deliberately hid "great secrets" in strange forms, and that a reader who finds only nonsense has not read far enough.²²

The Kabbalists: the stories are garments

The Zohar, which itself speaks almost entirely in the form of aggadah, gives the classic image. The Torah's narratives are a garment; a fool looks at the garment and thinks it is the body; the wise look through the garment to the body, and through the body to the soul.²³ The kabbalists applied the same picture to the sages' aggadot: the strange story is the garment; the meaning is inside. From this school comes the fourfold reading — peshat (plain sense), remez (hint), derash (exposition), sod (secret) — whose initials spell PaRDeS, "orchard," after the four sages who entered the orchard.²⁴ On this reading no aggadah is only what it seems, and the stranger it looks, the deeper it likely goes.

Later kabbalists said so outright. Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto (Ramchal, d. 1746) wrote that the sages hid deep matters in the aggadot in strange dress on purpose — because that is how the wise of every nation write, and to keep the matter from readers not ready for it.²⁵ The Vilna Gaon (d. 1797), the sharpest legal mind of his century, wrote a kabbalistic commentary on the sea-tales of Rabbah bar bar Chana and taught that the aggadot are where the Torah's secrets are stored.²⁶

Maharal and Maharsha (16th–17th c.): a defense and a commentary

Rabbi Yehuda Loew of Prague, the Maharal (d. 1609), wrote the great defense, Be'er HaGolah, "The Well of the Exile."²⁷ It answers point by point the charges — some old, some fresh from Renaissance critics — that the aggadot are absurd, immoral or unscientific. His method is neither the Geonim's "we do not rely" nor the literalist's "it happened so." The sages, he says, speak of the inner nature of things, of causes and essences, not of physical surfaces; when they say a thing "is" so, they mean it is so at its root. Read that way, the strange stories become a precise language, and Maharal spent thousands of pages translating it. No one did more to convince students that aggadah rewards the same rigor as law.

His contemporary Rabbi Shmuel Eidels, the Maharsha (d. 1631), wrote a line-by-line commentary on the aggadot of the whole Bavli, printed at the back of every standard volume of the Talmud to this day.²⁸ He first published his notes on law and on aggadah as separate works, then regretted the split — it is all one Torah — and later printings put them together. His commentary assumes that every detail of every story was chosen on purpose, and asks why.

The Hasidic masters (18th c. on): the story is about you, now

Hasidism did not so much interpret aggadah as revive it as a living form. The Baal Shem Tov (d. 1760) taught through stories. The movement's first printed book, Rabbi Yaakov Yosef of Polnoye's Toldot Yaakov Yosef (1780), reads the Talmud's aggadot as instructions for the inner life of the reader: the characters are forces inside a person, the plot is the soul's work today. Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (d. 1810) built several lessons of Likutei Moharan on the tales of Rabbah bar bar Chana, and then told thirteen tales of his own, on the stated ground that some truths can only be told as stories.²⁹ Later masters — the Sfat Emet of Ger, Rabbi Tzadok of Lublin — treated a Talmudic story and a Talmudic ruling as equally weighty texts for a discourse. Hasidism kept the kabbalists' view that the stories are garments, and added a turn: the body inside the garment is not only a secret about God; it is a truth about the person reading.

6. Are the stories meant literally?

The honest answer: it depends on the story, and the tradition itself says so.

The Talmud's own hint

The Talmud says, in its own voice, that it exaggerates.

דִּבְּרָה תּוֹרָה לְשׁוֹן הֲבַאי, דִּבְּרוּ נְבִיאִים לְשׁוֹן הֲבַאי, דִּבְּרוּ חֲכָמִים לְשׁוֹן הֲבַאי

"The Torah spoke in the language of exaggeration; the Prophets spoke in the language of exaggeration; the Sages spoke in the language of exaggeration."³⁰

The Torah speaks of cities "fortified up to heaven."³¹ The Sages say the ash-heap on the altar held three hundred measures. Neither is a measurement; both are a way of speaking. A tradition that flags its own hyperbole inside a legal tractate is telling its readers how to read.

Three test cases

Rabbah bar bar Chana's tales.³² "I myself saw a bird standing ankle-deep in the sea, with its head reaching the sky." A wave the size of a mountain; a fish so large that sailors mistook it for an island; the dead of the wilderness lying on their backs, so tall that a rider with a raised spear passed under a knee. Introduced with "I saw," told with a straight face, and read for a thousand years — by the Geonim, Rashba, the Maharsha, the Vilna Gaon, Rabbi Nachman — as parable. Of the bird, the Gemara adds that the sailors wanted to bathe there, thinking the water shallow, until a voice warned: "Do not go down. A carpenter's axe fell in here seven years ago and has not reached bottom." The traditional readers heard a lesson about depths one cannot judge from the surface. Almost no one in the tradition reads these tales as zoology.

Choni the Circle-Maker.³³ Choni sees a man planting a carob tree that will bear only in seventy years, lies down, sleeps seventy years, wakes to find the tree bearing and no one who knows him, and prays for death: "either companionship or death." Is it a report? Perhaps. Is it a parable about a man out of his generation? Certainly. The story works either way, and the tradition never asked us to choose.

Moshe in Rabbi Akiva's classroom.³⁴ Moshe ascends and finds God tying crowns to the letters of the Torah. "Who holds You back?" "A man named Akiva will one day expound heaps of laws on every tip." Moshe asks to see him, sits in the back row of his academy, understands nothing, and is comforted only when Akiva says of one law, "It is a tradition from Moshe at Sinai." Then Moshe asks to see Akiva's reward, and is shown his flesh weighed out in the market. "Master of the world — this is Torah, and this its reward?" "Silence. So it arose in thought before Me." No one takes this as a page from Moshe's diary. Everyone takes it as true — about revelation and interpretation, about the sages' authority, and about the limit of what a person may ask. It is the case that shows why "did it happen?" is often not the interesting question.

The working rules the tradition converged on

Put together, the masters above hand down something like a method.

Some aggadot are history, and are meant so. The destruction of Jerusalem in Gittin — the subject of one essay in this collection — is told as event, and archaeology backs much of it. Rabbi Akiva really died under Rome; Rabban Yochanan really founded Yavneh.
Some are hyperbole, and the text says so.
Some are parable, and the strangeness is the signal. Rambam's third reader; the kabbalists' garment; Maharal's inner nature. When a story cannot be true on its surface, that is an invitation, not an error.
Statements about nature and medicine reflect the sages' era. Rav Sherira and Rabbi Avraham ben HaRambam said this openly, and no authority requires a reader to believe otherwise.
None of it decides law, and none of it is dogma on its own.
All of it was chosen on purpose. Maharsha's assumption, and the one that repays the most study: whatever the genre, ask why this detail, this verse, this order.

The tradition never issued one ruling — "literal" or "figurative" — for the whole aggadah, because the aggadah is not one kind of writing. It gave something better: a line of readers who each showed how to take a story seriously. The Geonim by not over-claiming; Rambam by looking for the parable; Maharal by looking for the essence; the kabbalists by looking through the garment; the Hasidim by looking in the mirror.

7. How the essays read an aggadah

Each essay in this collection follows roughly the same order. Knowing it in advance makes them easier to read, and it is a sound method for reading any aggadah on your own.

Read the whole unit — the verses it rests on, the story, and the law before and after it. The Talmud rarely tells a story for its own sake; the placement is part of the message.
Find the verse. Almost every aggadah is built on a verse or a word. Ask what the sages saw in it.
Ask the questions the text raises before reaching for answers. Why does the character say this? Why that detail? What is the strange part?
Ask what kind of story it is — report, exaggeration, parable, or a mix.
Only then draw the lesson, and check it against the text. A lesson the text does not support is the reader's, not the sages'.
Keep the fence. No law from a story, and no article of faith from a story alone.

That is the discipline the Talmud's own editors modeled when they set Rabbi Yitzchak Nappacha's two students on the same page — the law of fire and the fire in Zion, one verse, two voices, one Torah.

Notes

Exodus 22:5.
Bava Kamma 60b, citing Lamentations 4:11 and Zechariah 2:9.
Kiddushin 30a; see also Bava Metzia 33a.
Bava Metzia 86a.
Iggeret Rav Sherira Gaon; the Talmud itself speaks of Rav Ashi's "first edition" and "last edition," Bava Batra 157b.
Gittin 60b.
Psalms 119:126.
Temurah 14b.
Rambam, Introduction to Mishneh Torah.
Exodus 13:8, ve-higgadta.
Exodus 19:9, vayagged.
Shabbat 87a.
Sifrei Deuteronomy 49.
Sotah 40a.
Yerushalmi Peah 2:4.
Menachot 29b.
Responsa of Rav Sherira and Rav Hai Gaon in Otzar HaGeonim, Chagigah; Rav Shmuel ben Chofni took the same line.
Rambam, Introduction to Perek Chelek (Commentary on the Mishnah, Sanhedrin 10).
Proverbs 1:6.
Rabbi Avraham ben HaRambam, Ma'amar al Odot Derashot Chazal, printed with the Ein Yaakov.
Ramban, Vikuach (Disputation of Barcelona, 1263).
Rashba, Chiddushei Aggadot; Responsa I:9, I:418.
Zohar III 152a (Beha'alotcha).
Chagigah 14b.
Ramchal, Ma'amar al HaHaggadot.
Vilna Gaon, commentary on the aggadot of Rabbah bar bar Chana.
Maharal, Be'er HaGolah (Prague, 1598).
Maharsha, Chiddushei Aggadot.
Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, Likutei Moharan; Sippurei Ma'asiyot (1815).
Chullin 90b.
Deuteronomy 1:28.
Bava Batra 73a–74b.
Ta'anit 23a.
Menachot 29b.