The Renaturalization of Rabbinic Thought and Ancient Jewish Science: Nonhuman Agency, Rabbinic Nosology and the Intransigence of the World

In order to begin to make sense of rabbinic preoccupations with the nonhuman world, in this article I argue that rabbinic thought should be understood as participating in the wider gamut of Late Antique knowledge production and as such should be theorized (at least partially) as ancient science, in its insistence on description, classification and understanding. I demonstrate this by interrogating a rabbinic nosology classification of disease (nosology) found in a story in the Babylonian Talmud that affords agency and subjectivity to diseases and the larger sugya it is part of, which describes God's world and its signification as intransigent and resistant to human intentions (Avodah Zarah 54b-55a). In exploring this story in the context of the larger talmudic discussion based on mAZ 4:7, I employ new materialism and science and technology studies to reexamine rabbinic epistemologies and ontologies of the nonhuman and human alike.