THE OVEN OF ACHNAI RE-DECONSTRUCTED

The enigmatic narrative of the oven of Achnai incident (b. B. MeḤia 59b) has been explicated for its legalistic, historical, philosophical, theological, and mystical import. But it is also a very literary text, which can be read as a text in its literary context for its form, imagery, and allusions to other texts. The paper examines the signification of the narrative's constituent literary elements, motifs, and devices (symmetry, structure, parallelism, wordplay, oppositions, intertextuality, self-referentiality, allusion, and editorial framing) used to tell the story and create its meaning. The story has parallels as well as sequels about the aftermath and resolution in other Talmudic sources. Reading them as a composite whole reveals significant intertextual relationships and parallels