James Redfield, "Adventures of Rabah and Friends: The Talmud's Strange Tales and Their Readers" (Brown Judaic Studies, 2025)

Dec 14, 2025

James Adam Redfield, Associate Professor of Jewish Anthropology and Hermeneutics, explores the strange tales of the Talmud in his latest work. He discusses how these bizarre stories challenge traditional interpretations and reflect diverse cultural influences. Redfield examines the figure of Rabbah bar bar Chama, revealing layers of tension in rabbinic narratives. He critiques simplistic genre readings, emphasizing a reader-centered approach that traces the evolution of interpretive frameworks over time. Expect insights into cross-cultural ties and the creativity within Jewish exegesis!

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INSIGHT

Strange Tales As Interpretation Lab

The book treats Rava's strange tales as a laboratory for studying interpretation across time.
Their puzzling nature reveals how readers deploy diverse hermeneutic tools to make meaning.

ANECDOTE

The Giant Bones And The Missing Point

Rava recounts finding gigantic ancestral bones and cuts a piece of a tallit as a souvenir.
The academic audience dismisses the wonder and instead asks mundane technical questions about the fringe.

INSIGHT

Danger Of One-Size Genre Labels

Scholars often force these tales into single genres like 'tall tale' or 'apocalyptic', which flattens historical diversity.
Redfield argues for reconstructing how actual readers in each period understood the texts.

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Adventures of Rabbah & Friends offers a new reader-centered approach to some of the Talmud’s most challenging stories. The Talmud contains about two pages of some of the strangest tales in the rabbinic corpus. For centuries people have scratched their head over what they mean and why they are there.

In his new book, James Adam Redfield illustrates how these tales have interacted with diverse interpretive frameworks from ancient myth to modern mysticism. By reevaluating conventional assumptions about coherence, authority, and tradition, the book redefines how stories can function in the Talmud, reorients the study of rabbinic literature around practices of reading and reception, and opens pathways for connecting the Talmud with broader conversations in the study of literature. Redfield’s analysis of the vibrant dialogue between many voices in this literary tradition—storytellers, editors, performers, transmitters, commentators, anthologizers, and more—reveals their diverse and original contributions to the art of interpretation in Jewish culture. Rich appendixes revealing the stories’ reception in late ancient exegesis, medieval responsa, and early modern ethical and mystical commentaries make this volume a valuable specialist resource, while its lively prose is accessible for a wider audience of students and humanities scholars.

In this episode we discuss these themes and more.

James Adam Redfield is Associate Professor of Jewish Anthropology and Hermeneutics in the Department of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University and Visiting Associate Professor in Jewish Civilization and the History of European Civilization at the University of Chicago. He is the coeditor with Sergey Dolgopolski of Talmud /and/ Philosophy (2024) and the translator and editor of Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky’s Yiddish stories published in From a Distant Relation (2021).

Rabbi Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi of Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield NJ. He is the author of Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life (JPS)

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