Rabbinic Polysemy: A Response to Steven Fraade

Abstract

Much has been written on rabbinic polysemy over the past two decades, and yet the precise nature and dating of this phenomenon remain a matter of controversy. This note, which aims to help clarify the issue, is a response to Steven Fraade's essay, “Rabbinic Polysemy and Pluralism Revisited: Between Praxis and Thematization,” published in this journal. Surveys of the history of the polysemy debates are readily available; my present concern is with Fraade's position, and the positions to which he is responding, chief among them Daniel Boyarin's claim that rabbinic polysemy is a relatively late, post-tannaitic, phenomenon. Fraade sets out to refute this claim, and his essay provides a dozen passages that serve as “countertexts to [Boyarin's] arguments” (5). The aim of this response is to show that the rabbinic sources in question are not countertexts, and that polysemy is, in fact, a post-tannaitic phenomenon.

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