Avtalyon says: Sages, be careful what you say, lest you incur the penalty of exile and be exiled to a place of bad water and the scholars who come after you drink and die, and [thus] the Name of Heaven is profaned.
5:
In Avot045 I told how Herod forced his way into Jerusalem in the year 37 BCE, dislodged Antigonus, and began his reign in earnest. Josephus, again in his history, 'Antiquities of the Jews', tells us that it was Avtalyon who advised the Sanhedrin to open the gates of the city to Herod. Herod was grateful to Avtalyon for this and thereafter always treated the sage with great deference.
6:
We don't know all that much about the life of Avtalyon, but the few snippets that we get here and there do help us – perhaps – to understand the main thrust of his teaching as presented in our present mishnah. He was a pupil of both Yehudah ben Tabbai and Shim'on ben Shataĥ, the two leaders of the preceding generation. It seems that when Yehudah ben-Tabbai escaped to Egypt from the persecution of the Pharisees by Alexander Yannai, Avtalyon the student accompanied his teacher to Alexandria. [See Avot032 for details about the persecution, even though there the emphasis is on another sage, Yehoshu'a ben-Peraĥyah.]
7:
This could well be the historical background of the maxim attributed to Avtalyon in our present mishnah: an admonition to the sages to take care not to let slip an untoward word. During the reign of Herod, no less than than during the reign of Alexander Yannai they might well incur the penalty of exile if what they carelessly say incurs the wrath of a tyrant. Alexandria, the place where he spent his time of exile, was certainly a place where he would have met Greek ideas which he would have felt were truly a danger to the teachings of Judaism.
9:
The Gemara [Pesachim 70b] describes them as "the two greatest scholars of their generation, two great sages and great expositors". The term 'expositor' – darshan in Hebrew – is a neologism here, and the context makes clear that the 'exposition' referred to is the use of hermeneutics. It describes a process whereby novel ideas, not obvious in the biblical text, can be made to emerge from it; these new ideas are held to be already implicit in the text of the Torah and the hermeneutic process, midrash, only makes explicit, as it were, what was implicit in the text in any case. Once these derashot have been accepted they become part of the oral tradition itself and are handed down to the next generation together with the previously amassed material. (For further elaboration of the concept and development of Midrash see our General Introduction.
10:
Perhaps the most famous of their halakhic innovations, thus derived, was the teaching that the paschal lamb must be offered even when Passover falls on Shabbat [Pesaĥim 66a]. This innovation of theirs was used to great effect by their most famous student, Hillel, and we shall elaborate on it when we reach the story of that famous sage.
11:
In contrast to the historical slant which we have given to the teaching of Avtalyon in our present mishnah the great classical commentators treat it as being metaphorical. Rambam, for example, in his commentary on this mishnah says that
'bad water' is a metaphor for heretical thoughts [epikorsut]. He says that the sages must be careful of what they say when teaching publicly; they must leave no possibility that what they say can be misinterpreted, because people with heretical tendencies will interpret these words according to their own beliefs; but the students will already have heard [these wrong interpretations] and will think that this heresy is the true teaching, thus causing the Name of Heaven to be profaned. This is what happened to Antigonos [of Sokho] with Zadok and Boethos.
(See Avot024, explanation 18 for the story of Boethos.) Rabbi Ovadyah of Bertinoro, in his commentary on our mishnah, takes a tack similar to that taken by Rambam.
NOTICE:
Because of the incidence of Tish'ah b'Av, the next shiur will be on Wednesday 28th July. In the mean time you may care to read something that I wrote for this fast day.
