What are halakhic texts?

A halakhic text is a normative text of Jewish law, whose purpose is not to convey doctrine or theological narrative, but to regulate actual social and religious practices through precise case resolutions. From an EBBS perspective, a halakhic text is a particularly valuable source of indirect data, because its existence and content presuppose a specific factual situation to which the law must respond. Halakha does not create abstract problems but responds to observed practices, conflicts, and uses of texts. Therefore, even halakha's silence on the details of content, while simultaneously regulating their effects, allows for the inference of phenomena not explicitly expressed in narrative sources, while maintaining control over the scope of inference and an awareness of the limitations of evidence.

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Halakhic texts from the 1st–3rd centuries CE, encompassing early Tannaitic traditions later recorded in the Mishnah and Tosefta, are of particular importance in EBBS analysis, as they arise at the intersection of living religious practice and a changing textual landscape. Their task was to respond to new situations: the circulation of different versions of scriptures, the use of texts outside the canon, and contacts with borderline groups, including Judeo-Christians. From the perspective of indirect data, these sources are of high epistemic value, as they document the actual interpretative and textual issues of the era, even if they do not convey their content directly, enabling the careful reconstruction of practices not preserved in the manuscript material.