Divergent Tendencies and Their Literary Moulding in the Aggadah

Aggadah is literature and should be treated as such. Its significance lies in the meaning which it bestows upon the human situation contained in it; in the answer it gives to the problems it raises. All this is given within a literary framework, hence the necessity to examine both the conceptual and the artistic aspects of the Aggadah. Conceptual differences create artistic differences according to the maxim: “The contents represent the question, the form its answer” ¹ . Consequently two formulations of the same Aggadah constitute two creations different in their contents as well as in their form. The appearance of variants in the Aggadah ² derives from man's inherent need to give different expression to different view-points. Every variant expresses its own view of life—the outcome of a period, a society or a creative personality. Every variant of an Aggadah is an independent literary creation in is own right. Its significance is revaled in all aspects of the literary creation: in the characters, plot, structure and idea. The variants of the story about the early life of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus to be analysed in this article will serve as an example. We also hope to establish the chronology of these variants by textual and literary analysis. The criterion of the time when the various Midrashim where edited is not sufficient for our present purpose, both, because the inclusion of a certain Aggadah in an early Midrash and of its variant in a late Midrash is not enough in itself for establishing the respective times of composition, and because, as happens to be the case in our example, two variants belonging to different periods may appear in the very same Midrash. Let us therefore examine the literary aspects of the Aggadah: the fashioning of its characters, the development of the plot and the structure of the Aggadah, as regards its adherence to the historical truth on the one hand, and to the conceptual tendency on the other—all this in the light of the assumption that a different formulation expresses different orientation manifested both in contents and form.