Eli Ungar Brown University
While everyone knows that legal discourse in the rabbinic canon produces firm decisions on what is true and what is false, many suppose that theological discourse is open-ended. Since the documents offer no clear signals of which, among the many, opinions is correct, and which not, people assume that the rabbinic canon, when it comes to theological subjects and propositions, is a mass of indeterminate opinion. Here I shall demonstrate that there is one clear formal construction that serves to convey accepted opinion: what is right and authoritative. That construction is the Davar-Aher form.
Throughout rabbinic literature, opinions bearing the name of an individual are considered the views of that one person, and are therefore susceptible to interrogation and possible refutation. Anonymous opinions, on the other hand, constitute the theological equivalent of higher law, principles beyond reproach and above scrutiny. Not merely the beliefs of one man, they represent a consensus of opinion on a given topic. By presenting certain views anonymously, the authorship invests the opinions with additional authority, and effectively removes them from debate.
In legal discourse, when the authorship wished to advance a proposition without subjecting it to debate, it created lists of anonymous interpretations that did not refute one another. We shall now see the same trait in theological-exegetical matters. Specifically, by conjoining seemingly different interpretations and demonstrating their mutual support of a single proposition, the authorship of an exegetical composite affirmed the unity of the theological propositions encased in those passages. To inform the reader of its intent, the authorship selected one literary device, Davar-Aher, and restricted its use to only those situations in which propositions central to the documents message appear. Davar-Aher, (translated another matter or another interpretation), is one literary device that formally separates different explications of the same scriptural verse. The form consists of the words Davar-Aher, citation of the verse under question, and an interpretation of that verse.
