This paper analyzes “The Amazing Adventures of Rabbi Pinḥas ben Yair” (b. Ḥul. 7a-b), in which the stammaitic storytellers inherited a palestinian, amoraic collection of unconnected stories about Rabbi Pinḥas ben Yair—now appearing in y. Demai 1:3, 21d-22c— and strung together three of those episodes to create a coherent narrative. While the babylonian reworking of the collection has been previously analyzed by Ofra Meir, Leib Moscovitz, and Yonatan Feintuch, this paper adds to their studies by exploring how and why the stammaitic storytellers replaced the original palestinian, agricultural Halakhot with different halakhic material. Against the assumption that this replacement can be reduced to recontextualizing the story from y. Demai to b. Ḥullin and Babylonian desuetude, I argue that these changes were also a result of the stammaitic storytellers’ narrative artistry, as well as their desire to finish what they saw as an incomplete narrative.
