Description
The book deals with stories about the Yavneh sages on two subjects: visiting the sick and consoling mourners. Their analysis fully displays their artistic, esthetic and ideological splendor. The stories examine, through human suffering, the theological questions of how Divine justice works in governing the world. The stories are designed according to fixed narrative patterns, which serve as literary codes to shape a specific idea. The study reveals clear intertextual links between the stories that enable the definition of this group of stories as corpus. The corpus creates ideological super-confrontations, varying and enriching the ideological complexity, thereby expanding, to the furthest possible extent, the conceptual, polyphonic world of the Talmudic sages. This work illustrates the uniqueness of the Yavneh stories.