In Bava Batra 75a, Rabba thrice quotes Rabbi Yochanan about messianic times —- Hashem making a meal for the righteous from the Leviathan’s flesh; a sukkah for the righteous from its skin; and seven chuppot for each and every righteous person. Each aggadic explanation involves Scriptural interpretations, some of which we’ll examine momentarily.
Beforehand, let’s dispense with the strangeness of the third-generation Pumbeditan Amora, Rabba bar Nachmani, citing second-generation Tiberian Amora, Rabbi Yochanan. We never find that Rabba traveled to the Land of Israel. Indeed, while printings (Vilna, Venice, Pisaro) and some manuscripts (Munich 95, Fr. ebr. 420) feature the name Rabba, several others (Hamburg 156, Oxford 369, Paris 1337, Vatican 115b, JTS: ENA 3741/7) have the more expected Rabba bar bar Chana roughly throughout. In Vatican 115b, an initial Rabba bar bar Chana turns into a plain Rabba, perhaps as an obvious shorthand. Third-generation Rabba bar bar Chana was a Babylonian Amora who traveled back and forth between Bavel and Israel (one of those sages who were known as nechutei)), who studied from Rabbi Yochanan and often transmitted teachings in his name.
Understanding Obscure Words
Rabbi Yochanan’s statements involve interpreting phrases in Iyov. This book is filled with obscure words, so aside from its philosophical content, it is difficult to understand or translate it. We want to, since it’s part of the Biblical canon. That is, “it’s a tough Job, but somebody’s got to do it.”
J.R. Firth famously said, “You shall know a word by the company it keeps.” That is, if you encounter a word (“king”) in multiple contexts, you can look at each context (“queen,” “throne,” “scepter,” “rule,” “dungeon”) and arrive at a sense of its meaning. However, many words in Iyov are what are called hapax legomena, words that appear only once in the corpus. The reader is left to puzzle out what it means based only on the immediate context, and different meanings may be plausible. Other meanings may only rarely appear. When multiple obscure words appear closely together (as will be the case for one of the Iyov verses), it will be even harder to determine what each word means.
In our sugya, a few relatively obscure words or obscure word senses are given definitions based on their usage elsewhere in the Biblical corpus. This is expressed as “ain X ela (leshon) Y,” or ”The word X only has the connotation Y.”
We should realize that this is often an overstatement. Consider a famous phrase drawn from Berachot 9a, where Rabbi Yannai’s academy say, אין נא אלא לשון בקשה, “Na is only an expression of request.” It’s certainly not forbidden, in Shemot 12:9, to eat the Korban Pesach by request (na). Further, na may mean “please” in post-Biblical Hebrew, but in Biblical Hebrew, on a purely peshat level, it typically means “now,” which is why Onkelos consistently renders it כען. It may be a midrashic approach to reread the word as if it means please. So too with אין מים אלא תורה — of course, sometimes water means water, and the same pasuk in Shemot doesn’t forbid consumption of a Korban Pesach cooked in Torah. Rather, X only means Y conveys the idea that X sometimes connotes Y, either entirely or as a midrashic reading.
Ein Twitter Ela Y
In our sugya, Rabba bar bar Chana quotes Rabbi Yochanan in interpreting ״יִכְרוּ עָלָיו חַבָּרִים״, where two words are obscure. He says that כֵּרָה means a feast, pointing to II Kings 6:23, where the King of Israel follows Elisha’s advice and prepares a great feast for the blinded invading army of Aram, before sending them back to their master. So too, חֲבֵרִים, here a presumed revocalization of חַבָּרִים, means Torah scholars. Thus, Hashem will feed the Torah scholars a feast from the Leviathan.1 Note that Rashi on this verse translates chabbarim as charmers and yichru as digging. See also Gittin 17a, where Rabba bar bar Chana interacts with a chabbar, a Persian magus / priest, which is another meaning of this word.
The second half of that verse in Iyov continues: יֶחֱצוּהוּ בֵּין כְּנַעֲנִים. The word Canaanites typically refers to the residents of Canaan. Yet on a peshat level, does that make any sense? Why would the Leviathan be divided specifically among Canaanites? I understand that Lotan / Leviathan is a sea-monster in Canaanite mythology, but still it makes little sense.
Rabba bar bar Chana, quoting Rabbi Yochanan, explains that אֵין ״כְּנַעֲנִים״ אֶלָּא תַּגָּרִים, Canaanites only implies merchants, pointing to Hoshea 12:8, describing a Kena’an who holds the balances of deceit in his hand, or Yeshaya 23:8, which juxtaposes that סֹחֲרֶיהָ, her merchants are nobles, with כִּנְעָנֶ֖יהָ, her Kana’ans are world-honored.2 The way Biblical poetry often works is that two phrases with close synonyms are juxtaposed. Thus, כִּנְעָנֶ֖יהָ is the same essential idea as סֹחֲרֶיהָ.
On a peshat level, appealing to the principle of Biblical parallelism, we could look at this another way. Yes, כרה means feast, but in other pesukim, it means “dig,” e.g. “If a man digs (כִּֽי־יִכְרֶ֥ה) a pit,” (Shemot 21:38). It also means “buy, trade, bargain,” see Devarim 2:6, “and water you shall buy (תִּכְר֧וּ) from them with money, that you may drink,” or Hoshea 3:2, “then I hired her (וָאֶכְּרֶ֣הָ) for fifteen shekel of silver.” If chabbarim trade the Leviathan flesh in the first phrase, and Kana’ani / traders divide among themselves in the second phrase, then could the chabbarim be some merchant fellowship (chaveirim) with the trading and dividing being Biblical parallelism? I’m not sure Rabbi Yochanan is going for peshat so much as reviewing all possible meanings of each word and promoting every word-meaning combination that works as a derasha.
Rabba bar bar Chana continues channeling Rabbi Yochanan in the next verse, Iyov 31:31, that Hashem will use the Leviathan’s skin to make a sukkah for the righteous, interpreting the obscure בְשֻׂכּוֹת as the more common sukkah rather than barbed irons, without using ein X ela Y. Other words like צִלְצַל (harpoons) may also be interpreted as a kind of shade (tzel) covering, again without directly referring to ein X ela Y, though he could perhaps point to Yeshaya 18:1, a land covered (צִלְצַ֣ל) in the shadow of wings.
While Rabbi Yochanan isn’t the only one who applies this type of interpretation – we can point to braytot and sayings of other Amoraim– he is well represented in a collection of __ אין __ אלא לשון. These include Megillah 21a (about yeshiva), Sotah 10a (techina), 12b (halicha) and 13a / Chullin 92a (where he quotes Rabbi Shimon ben Yehotzadak about kira). Significantly, this takes the grave which Yaakov dug (כָּרִיתִי) and reinterprets it as a sale, mechira, based on language from an overseas country. He could have referred to the verses in Devarim or Hoshea above.
Rabbi Dr. Joshua Waxman teaches computer science at Stern College for Women, and his research includes programmatically finding scholars and scholastic relationships in the Babylonian Talmud.
1 Why specifically the Leviathan for Torah scholars? After all, isn’t there also the Behemoth in the feast? The story goes that in the feast in messianic times the Torah scholars will come and ask who’s giving the hashgacha. They are told that it is Hashem / hashgacha pratit. To which they reply, “We’ll have the fish.” 🙂
2 Similarly, וַחֲגוֹר נָתְנָה לַכְּנַעֲנִי in “Eishet Chayil”
