Abaye’s mother or master? (1)

Text
One of the few Talmudic personalities concerned with medicine, as well as with magic, was Abaye, who lived from ca. 280 to 339 CE. Abaye, who himself suffered from dropsy (Shab. 33a), frequently claimed to have learned his considerable knowledge of magic and medicine from his mother; the usual rubric added to Abaye’s comments is, ‘my mother told me’. However, there is a problem with the credibility of this tradition, since it is also known that Abaye’s mother died in childbirth (see Kidd. 31b). Moreover, even if one considers his ‘mother’ to be a surrogate mother or nurse, it is unlikely that a woman would have had access to technical medical knowledge, with the possible exception of midwifery. We would suggest another possible interpretation to Abaye’s frequently repeated statement that his ‘mother told him’, that the word for mother (ˀm) in these contexts could have been an abbreviation for the word ‘expert’ (ˀwmnˀ), corresponding to Akkadian ummānu, ‘professor, expert, craftsman’, the schoolmaster of the scribal school. In general, however, the term ˀwmnˀ in Aramaic lacked the prestige of its Akkadian counterpart ummānu. Hence, Abaye’s phrase attributing his knowledge to his “mother” (ˀm) might have been an allusion to a secular, non-rabbinic expert of master, an ˀwmnˀ, but the redactors of the Talmud would have found this term unacceptable or incomprehensible and the tradition was altered. Such a suggested solution would explain why Abaye’s knowledge of Babylonian medicine seemed far superior to that of his contemporaries, and it resolves the thorny problem of explaining how a woman would have been in a position to impart such technical knowledge, which is unexpected in other sources.

Sources (list of abbreviations) (source links will open in a new browser window)
Babylonian Talmud, Kiddushin 31b
Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 33a

Bibliography

Mark Geller

URL for this entry: http://www.aakkl.helsinki.fi/melammu/database/gen_html/a0000927.php