Deciding by Argument versus Proving by Miracle: The Myth-History of Talmudic Judaism's Coming of Age
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Miracles are not only not denied by the rabbis, but are taken and understood by them as divinely intended and significant. They are interpreted literally as heavenly signs and messages exceedingly louder, clearer, and simpler than God's spoken or written word. Divine miracles are by nature neither subtle nor understated. Their sheer unpredictability and jolting abruptness command the attention of those who witness them to the intervening immediacy of their message. And yet, while fully aware and cognizant of their significance and divine import, the rabbis are known to flatly reject miracles in ways they would never reject a verse. The classical example, to which this article is devoted is the widely cited rabbinic legend of the “oven of Akhnai”—a story that, I argue, holds a key to the Talmud's unique theological and religious enterprise. However, to understand it as such requires attending first to another widely cited Talmudic legend, on which, the article argues, the story of the oven builds, and with which it boldly contends—to the equally well-known account of the foundational dispute between the Houses of Hillel and Shammai, and their infamous heavenly resolution.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.056 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".