The Talmud's Strange Tales: Adventures in Interpretation with James Redfield

The Babylonian Talmud is usually imagined as a forbiddingly dense work of legal argument. But its digressions are no less typical – and often altogether different. A rabbi sets out on a journey where he encounters giant monsters and relics of the biblical past. What are stories like these doing in one of the foundational normative texts of Judaism?

In this talk, James Adam Redfield presents his book Adventures of Rabbah & Friends: The Talmud’s Strange Tales and Their Readers (2025) which explores a cluster of the Talmud’s most perplexing narratives—stories that have baffled readers for centuries. Medieval commentators treated them as cryptic allegories. Early modern scholars mined them for hidden philosophy. Modern academics have approached them as myth and folklore. Yet none of these approaches fully resolves the sense that something deliberately strange is happening in these tales.

Rather than trying to decode the stories once and for all, this talk asks another question: What happens when readers confront a text that refuses to behave as expected? Redfield traces a long history of wildly creative and fundamentally different attempts to interpret these narratives, showing how generations of readers have struggled with their oddness—and, in doing so, have produced their own original ways of traveling through the Talmud itself. At stake is not only how we understand these strange tales, but how we understand the very act of reading.

Co-sponsored with Religious Studies