The Order of Things: b.Sanhedrin 49

My grad school journey was saturated with Foucault, who found his way to my dissertation as well. Criminologists tend to read Discipline and Punish, a book that identifies prison with modernity and with a shift in punishment from body to soul and from a central display of regal power to diffuse loci of power, and ultimately to having people exercise power upon themselves (which is why it is an important part of the setup for my book manuscript Behind Ancient Bars). Other books I got to pick up from the shelf quite often were Madness and Civilization, and History of Sexuality. Thing is, if I could help it, I tried to avoid The Order of Things as much as I could. Which is lamentable, because in many ways The Order of Things uncovers the mechanism that makes many of Foucault’s other works tick. He examines how different sciences and disciplines view things; in other words, the book is preoccupied with the creation of knowledge, which is a central factor in Foucault’s knowledge/power spiral.

The reason I bring up The Order of Things is that Sanhedrin 49b is very preoccupied with the production of lists and mnemonics. It is, in other words, a list of lists; a talmudic order of things, if you will. The excuse for this meta conversation is the issue of execution methods. The mishna lists four methods, but Rabbi Shim’on disputes the order:

מַתְנִי׳ אַרְבַּע מִיתוֹת נִמְסְרוּ לְבֵית דִּין: סְקִילָה, שְׂרֵיפָה, הֶרֶג, וָחֶנֶק. רַבִּי שִׁמְעוֹן אוֹמֵר: שְׂרֵיפָה, סְקִילָה, חֶנֶק, וָהֶרֶג. זוֹ מִצְוַת הַנִּסְקָלִין.

MISHNA:Four types of the death penalty were given over to the court, with which those who committed certain transgressions are executed. They are, in descending order of severity: Stoning, burning, killing by decapitation, and strangulation. Rabbi Shimon says: They are, in descending order of severity: Burning, stoning, strangulation, and killing. This execution, described in the previous chapter, is referring to the mitzva of those who are stoned, i.e., to the process of execution by stoning.

Which raises an interpretive question: When the halakha provides a list, does the order of the things on the list matter? Rava quotes Rav S’hora, who quotes Rav Huna as saying that, usually, the order is not important, but there are a few exceptions, where the order is crucial:

1. The investigatory list of substances to be applied to a stain found on a woman’s clothing, to investigate whether it is menstrual blood (and thus impure) is a sequence (think: chemistry test);
2. The aforementioned list of execution methods (deduced from the fact that there was a dispute, meaning that the parties to the dispute thought the order mattered);
3. The items on the order of service for Yom Kippur;
4. The order of the daily offering at the temple;
5. The sequence of events necessary for releasing a woman from the obligation to marry her late husband’s brother;
6. The order in which the temple priests put on their ritual garments.

Here, the sages return to the question of the order of executions, which will be discussed in the next page. But for now, let’s focus on the issue of putting things in order. One possibility with lists is that sometimes the order matters; one must put on their undergarments before their clothes and their outerwear. Another, as in the case of the tested stain, is that there is scientific logic in moving from step to step. And another is ritualistic: a ritual has flow, and there are usually good reasons for why certain prayers, songs, and actions were strung together into a religious service. But the statements that, other than these exceptional matters, things do not usually follow an order, make sense when one considers how often they are strung together into a mnemonic–not because the order matters, but because it is an easier way to memorize.

This reminded me of Foucault’s oft-quoted opening to The Order of Things, in which he quotes Borges, who seeks to show the arbitrariness of listmaking and categorization:

This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought — our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography — breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a “certain Chinese encyclopedia” in which it is written that “animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off” look like flies”. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.

As we’ll find out tomorrow, the sages are in a rush to show that there is much more method than that to their madness; we’ll embark on a series of classifications that could evoke in us modern readers “the stark impossibility of thinking that“, and yet they are hell-bent on coming up with a rationale for the classification of execution methods.