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Academic achievement was prized in Babylonian rabbinic culture (fourth to sixth centuries CE). Yet alongside examples of scholarly ingenuity, the Babylonian Talmud records intellectual setbacks. How academic failure is constituted and the reactions to it within the talmudic text are key to understanding dynamics between sages and the cultural values of Babylonian rabbinic Judaism. Academic failure depends more on the social rank of the man than on the nature of his mistake. The modes of failure for sages in teaching positions differ from those for sages in lower-ranked social positions. Higher-status sages are treated more sympathetically, while lower-rank sages encounter derision within brief narratives and critique from the later editors. These exchanges demonstrate the high degree of expertise expected of participants in the scholastic culture, while normalizing scholastic failure (to a certain extent) as part of academic innovation. Analyzing brief narratives depicting scholastic failure in talmudic legal dialectic necessitates literary analysis of legal passages as a whole, emphasizing the continued importance of literary theory in the study of rabbinics.

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This article questions the utility of the term “sacred time.” In other words, it cautions against allowing sacred time to obscure how scholars study the dynamic relations between temporalities and sanctity in classical rabbinic texts (c. 200–550 CE). The achievement of recent Biblical and Jewish studies scholars who rejected characterizations of Hebrew or Jewish time as monolithic was their decoupling of the patterning or shape of events from what it means for time to be holy or for there to be a time for holiness. In the wake of such corrective efforts, scholars can now examine how rabbinic texts engage the quality of holiness as it pertains to durations, human activities, embodied temporal awareness, the time of exegesis, or to God’s time. This article distinguishes God’s time and human moments of recurrence and connection from eternity and sacred time through analysis of late antique Palestinian midrashim and presents directions for future study of holiness and time in classical rabbinic literature.

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