❙ 51 ***FILENAME***0002.bbt ``But It Is Not So'': Toward a Poetics of Legal Narrative in the Talmud BARRY WIMPFHEIMER T he past two decades have witnessed an increased interest in talmudic narrative. Beginning with the seminal work of Yonah Fraenkel, Talmudists ®rst set out to analyze talmudic stories in relation to such literary features as stylistic and structural patterns as well as with regard to their special force as narratives communicating the religious and existential struggles of the Rabbis.¹ The increasingly sophisticated methods of source criticism developed by David Weiss Halivni and Shamma Friedman have been applied in turn by scholars such as Friedman and Je²rey Rubenstein to various narratives in order to identify their di²erent layers (as well as the di²erences between parallels in the Bavli and Yerushalmi) and to use these layers as guides to their meaning.² Daniel Boyarin has combined these techniques with various post-structuralist and postmodernist hermeneutical approaches in order both to provide historical context for literary readings, and to use rabbinic narratives as the stu² out of which to write cultural history.³ If one thing uni®es all of these prior studies, it is their focus on rabbinic non- legal narratives Ð those that are usually categorized as aggadah. By turning to focus on narratives categorized as halakhah, I aim to engage a central dynamic of talmudic discourse, namely, the interplay of law and literature. In the space of an article, it is impossible to construct a poetics of talmudic narrative or even to de®ne fully the character of what I will call ``legal narratives.'' What I want to do is concentrate upon two such narratives and their use of one PROOFTEXTS 24 (2004): 51±86. Copyright  2004 by Prooftexts Ltd.