“the poetics of the “study-hall” and pedagogy must contribute more to our understanding of orality”

What is significant for orality studies as well as the mutual understanding of the production of the Bavli and Pahlavi legal literature is that the discursive elements of these corpora do not appear to originate in the silence of the scriptorium, rather in the din of the rabbinic house of study and the Hērbedestān – the Zoroastrian school of priestly studies. While scholars have focused on the role of performance or dramatics in their research of oral transmission, this paper suggests that the poetics of the “study-hall” and pedagogy must contribute more to our understanding of orality.

Shai Secunda, “The Sasanian ‘<i>Stam</i>’: Orality and the Composition of Babylonian Rabbinic and Zoroastrian Legal Literature” in <i>The Talmud in Its Iranian Context</i>, eds. Carol Bakhos and M. Rahim Shayegan (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 160.

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