Elisha Ben Abuyah - Analysis of The Talmud's Account

Analysis of The Talmud's Account

The Jewish Encyclopedia suggests that Elisha had become a Sadducee. It bases this on the fact that the Jerusalem Talmud mentions Elisha's betrayal of Pharisees. The Jewish Encyclopedia thus suggests that the antipathy of Elisha was not directed against all forms of Jewish worship existing at that time, but only against Pharisaism, despite the fact the sages who redacted the Jerusalem Talmud were Pharisees and may have simply focused on the betrayal against their own community. The Jewish Encyclopedia also suggests that one of the reasons given for Elisha's apostasy is characteristic of a Sadducee perspective. Elisha is said to have seen a child lose his life while fulfilling two laws for which the observance of the Torah promised a "long life" - honoring one's father and mother, and sending away a mother bird. whereas a man who broke the same law was not hurt in the least. This encounter, as well as the frightful sufferings of Jewish martyrs during the Hadrianic persecutions, led Elisha to the conclusion that there was no reward for virtue in this life, though the Pharisee sages interpreted this passage as referring to life and reward in the next world. Thus, the Jewish Encyclopedia suggests that Elisha was a Sadducee, since belief that reward and punishment must occur on Earth and disbelief in an afterlife are part of Sadducee philosophy. However, his abandonment of Jewish practice after his troubling encounters seems to indicate that, whatever his earlier philosophy, Elisha abandoned any form of Jewish religion.

The Jerusalem Talmud is also the authority for the statement that Elisha played the part of an informer during the Hadrianic persecutions, when the Jews were ordered to violate the laws of the Torah. As evidence of this it is related that when the Jews were ordered to do work on Shabbat, they tried to perform it in a way which could be considered as not profaning the Sabbath. But Elisha betrayed the Pharisees to the Roman authorities.

In his book, The Sinner and the Amnesiac: The Rabbinic Invention of Elisha Ben Abuya and Eleazar Ben Arach (2000), Rabbi Alon Goshen-Gottstein argues that rabbinic stories should be read as literature rather than as history:

They construct stories that are then integrated into larger ideologically motivated literary units in such a way as to impart particular ideological messages. The sources do not necessarily relate the historical facts about the heroes but they do illustrate the cultural concerns that find expression in the stories told about them. ... All this leads to the realization that the significant unit for presentation is not the life of the sage; it is the stories about sages. These stories are not formulated in an attempt to tell the life of the sage. They are told because the sage, as part of the collective culture, has some bearing on the common cultural concerns. Various anecdotes are coupled into a larger story cycle.

Rabbinic Judaism was based on vigorous and often contentious debate over the meaning of the Torah and other sacred texts. One challenge facing the rabbis was to establish the degree of heterodoxy that was acceptable in debate. In this context, Elisha the heretic and Eleazar, who is said to have forgotten the Torah, represent two extremes in attitudes towards the Torah; actual rabbis and their arguments had to fit somewhere between these two limits.