Civil Disputes and Tannaitic Literature

Peter Wyetzner

The settlement of disputes in Palestinian courts of the Second Temple period was an important source of the civil law preserved in Tannaitic legal literature. It is difficult, however, to determine the relative importance of disputes, compared with the interpretation of the Biblical text, in the making of a given law. This paper will therefore focus on the opinions of Tannaim in cases where the litigants disagreed about the facts of the case and there was no substantiating testimony. By looking at this material along with its Biblical precursors, it is possible to examine the making of law in situations where, because the case itself was unclear, the casuistic procedures outlined in the Torah could not be applied.

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