ABSTRACT
Due to the central role of the Bible in Christian practice, as well as the pervasive literacy of its practitioners, the study of written texts and hyper-literate informants is a basic constituent of the new focus of ethnographic study, and is of central importance for understanding Western Christianity. To generate a reading of even a small piece of rabbinic text requires immediate access to and engagement with the complex and expansive collection of rabbinic and scriptural traditions. Rabbinic argument assumes a vast amount of unstated knowledge and is characterized by frequent ellipses. Steven Fraade characterizes the text of the Sifre Devarim, a midrashic compilation on Deuteronomy, as the: literary face of an otherwise oral circulatory system of study and teaching by whose illocutionary force disciples became sages and sages became a class that could extend their teachings, practices, and view of the world into Jewish society more broadly.
