This project collects and examines instances of the a fortiori argument in two rabbinic works: the Mishna and the Mekhilta de R. Ishmael.

I myself am the initial target audience for this project, but I hope it will lead to development of a broader resource to support the growing interest in the study of ancient rabbinic texts, for both academic and non-academic readers.

The a fortiori argument is a logical deduction made from a weaker case to a stronger one (or sometimes vice versa). For example, Jesus’s statement in Matthew 7: 11, that:

IF the human parents he is addressing, who are flawed, give good gifts to their children, THEN how much more so will “your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him “.(Note:  the logic does not always work smoothly, and this subjectivity is sometimes part of the point of the instances in my dataset). 

This form of reasoning is common in rabbinic writings, in two major categories, which sometimes overlap: (1) interpretations of the Hebrew Bible and (2) legal debate. Both types of rabbinic texts transmit teachings in the names of particular sages, and they often record multiple opinions placed in a dialogue. The texts are highly self-reflective, and often flag their logical argumentation with technical terms. The most common expression for the a fortiori argument is qal va’homer, meaning “light and heavy.”  Since this term appears many dozens of times in the two works I chose for this project–the Mishna and the Mekhilta–I limited my dataset to less common expressions to keep the volume manageable:

• “for one, many times over”
• “is it not a logical deduction”
• “all the more so”

To begin collecting my data, I created an Excel spreadsheet in which to list the texts containing these expressions. I searched for the Hebrew forms of these terms in the open access online library, https://www.sefaria.org/ and pasted the citation references, the link, and excerpts of the passages in Hebrew and English. I jotted down observations about the texts and hoped for patterns to emerge, especially ones that would be suitable for quantitative analysis: e.g., with regard to the topics they relate to, the names of the rabbis they are attributed to; whether they appear with or without the more common term qal va’homer; and whether the arguments tend to be accepted or not.  Since I am especially interested in the terminology and the reasoning, the initial visualization I had in mind was to represent the distribution of the 3 different expressions in the 2 different works using a bar chart. The most interesting question revolves around the reception of the a fortiori argument: is the reasoning accepted, rejected, or treated in some other way?

I spent a lot of time on data collection, and did not have enough time to devote to the visualization before the pinup. Somehow, the group bravely and generously jumped into trying to make sense of what they could see, and even managed to give valuable advice.
I want to continue working on this visualization. And also the data collection and tidying. I am thinking about how to improve the evaluation of the textual responses to instances of a fortiori reasoning– sharper delineation of categories and clear criteria for assigning the instances to these categories. I want to try to set up categories of themes, and to think about how to handle cases that might involve multiple themes– reward and punishment is the most prominent that I noted, and tried to track; women seems to be another, but I only noticed this midway in my data collection, and did not track it.

Ultimately, I am interested in evaluating patterns of logical reasoning. I’d like to compile, classify, link, and annotate examples and metadata, including qualitative analytical evaluation of the reasoning. I had thought that a main obstacle to beginning such a project is my lack of technical proficiency, particularly for the compilation of the data and construction of the database. This assignment opened a path to a new conceptual approach: to begin collecting and interacting with data by identifying and classifying distributions of attributes applicable to occurrences of the different a fortiori expressions in different rabbinic corpora.