“And Gabriel Kept on Writing” (Megilla 16a). Literary Features of Traditions Involving Supernatural Entities in the Babylonian Talmud according to the Elyonim veTachtonim Project

Abstract

“And Gabriel Kept on Writing” (Megilla 16a). Literary Features of Traditions Involving Supernatural Entities in the Babylonian Talmud according to the Elyonim veTachtonim Project In this paper, I explain the theoretical and pragmatic aspects of the annotation system of the literary features used in the Talmudic database developed within the Elyonim veTachtonim project. In the first section, I recapitulate the theses concerning the production of the Babylonian Talmud and operationalise the formal indicators (i.e., language and attribution) of its specific layers. In the second section, I review the scholarship on the Talmudic genres and propose a categorisation that adheres to the cross-cultural framework of the Elyonim veTachtonim project. In the final section, I offer an illustration: a qualitative scrutiny of a fragment from Berakhot 62a and a quantitative-qualitative analysis of the data gathered from the Talmudic inventory.