In my dissertation research, I harness a basic insight from the philosophy of language: different ideas about how language means spring from differing assumptions about the mutual relationship between thought, spoken, and written word. These become thematic in areas of halakhah such as liturgical practice, vows, oaths, betrothal, divorce, and more, granting us access to conceptions implicitly held. Thorough contextualization leads me to conclude that the rabbis continue an older view once widely held in Mediterranean antiquity: a “material” view of language as corporeal traveler dispatched from the mouth. This view assumes full force in bBB 38a-39b, as Rava and his students advance a bold new vision of how information travels. They leave behind the model of shlihut, to promote a path of transmission through an unlimited chain of intermediaries. The message is now a public message, traveling as text. Starting from there, this paper critically investigates the potential of my findings for the study of rabbinic textuality. I focus on three aspects. 1) The utterance is out, once out, assuming a life of its own. 2) Transmission becomes incumbent on the collectivity, rather than on “I”s and “You”s. 3) Words as material stumbling blocks in a text.
