B. Sotah 34b-35a and B. Arakhin 15a-16b contain extended sugyot on the topic of lashon ha-ra. While both B. Sotah and B. Arakhin depict the sin of the desert spies (Numbers 13-14) as lashon ha-ra, in B. Sotah lashon ha-ra results in national catastrophe. In contrast, B. Arakhin turns to exhortations cautioning the individual, rather than the nation, against the sin of lashon ha-ra. This paper makes two connected arguments: First, attention to the redactional context of these sugyot at the level of their respective tractates helps to explain the similarities and differences between these two passages. Second, similarities and differences between the two sugyot cannot be explained by simplistic chronological criteria of one sugya as earlier than and influencing the other. Rather, attention to the context of the tractate reveals a more complex and non-linear compositional process.
