How did the rabbis of Roman and Byzantine times imagine the order of the world, and what registers of reality did they operate with? To answer this question, we won’t turn to cosmogonic narratives, as we might expect, but to legal texts from the Babylonian Talmud. Several passages are likely to provide us with elements of an answer, from which we have chosen two: on the one hand, the folios that regulate the construction of the roof of the ritual hut of Sukkot (beginning of tractate Sukka) and, on the other, the folios that seek to define the notion of soil and ground (Avoda Zara 45b-46a). In both cases, rabbinic discussions deconstruct notions that may seem intuitive but are only so in surface terms: this applies, for example, to objects such as mountains, pebbles, branches and trees, but also to boards and statues. This demonstrates that the rabbis of Late Antiquity were not interested in “sectorial” taxonomies, and did not conceive of general charts of plants, animals or stones. On the other hand, the rabbis of the Talmud were very sensitive to the natural-artificial distinction, since it was this distinction that guided the establishment of ritual practices and, more generally, legal decisions (halacha). In this way, based on an analysis of the above-mentioned passages, we will highlight the tripartite taxonomy of reality that characterizes rabbinic thought: a) the register of minerals and the living, b) the register of entities originating from second but non-human causes, c) the register of artifice.
