In an entry on paradoxography in the New Pauly, Otta Wenskus writes that, “although paradoxographical texts were used up until the Byzantine Period as material-collections (e.g. for the composition of novels, especially by Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus) and as reference works (as appears from their use by scholiasts and etymologists), their significance for post-classical Christian literature and visual arts was rather marginal, particularly in comparison to Physiologus’ treatise, which sometimes exhibits parallels with classical paradoxography as we know it.”1 The present paper will move beyond the notion that miracle collections or paradoxographies were used as reference works and argue that paradoxography served, in a fundamental way, to explore and test the possibilities of the physical world, that is, in rabbinic terms, creation. In other words, the paradoxes of nature helped to think “things” that had not been thought before. I do therefore not agree with Wenskus’ observation that the importance of paradoxographic knowledge declined in Late Antiquity. Neither in Christian nor in rabbinic texts, practice, or material culture did paradoxographical content lose its importance.2

Two recent studies help illustrate my point: Renaud Gagné’s Cosmography and the Idea of Hyperborea in Ancient Greece, and Karen ní Mheallaigh’s The Moon in the Greek and Roman Imagination.3 Both books explore how the ancients imagined inaccessible geographical spaces: a mythological place in the far north, Hyperborea, and the Moon. It is indeed a great challenge for the human mind to imagine a place, its conditions, and the creatures that thrive there, that is very different from the world we know. How do truly different, impossible landscapes, bodies, and societies look like, function, and interact? When it comes to imagining difference, we tend to fall back conveniently on the opposite of what we perceive as standard.4 Thus, the Hyperboreans are thought to be very long-lived; they know no disease and can choose their own time of death; they sow and harvest in a single day and sacrifice donkeys.5 Hyperborea becomes a platform for the projection of an altogether reversed universe.6 The ancient imagination of the people of the Moon also shows traits of inversion with regard to its inhabitants. Since they are said not to eat or excrete, they are associated with beings from other worlds, such as the gods or the dead.7

Imagining a truly different and not just opposite world is difficult because, as cognitive studies have shown, humans need a source of inspiration, a physical form, real or imagined, to provide a basis for metaphor and allusion drawing, which in turn are sources of invention.8 Hyperborea was a place known from mythology that eventually became entangled in discussions about the moral value of myth and was used by geographers and chorographers as a place to position themselves vis-à-vis tradition. Eventually, Hyperborea was cancelled from the map.9 The Moon, however, remains an object of scientific speculation to this day. Even though we now know with a high degree of certainty that there is no life on the Moon, the search for signs of life in space continues. To understand and develop theories about life in the most adverse (and non-earthly) circumstances, astrobiologists have turned to the simple organisms that thrive in the most inhospitable environments. These include spaces uninhabitable by humans, such as sulfuric volcanic caves, the anoxic deep dark sea, places exposed to high temperatures, or places almost devoid of nutrition.10 The same logic drove the ancient thinkers, ní Mheallaigh argues, when they turned to paradoxographic material to fantasize about life on the moon. Paradoxography enables “scientific imagination” by providing models of alien and alternative, and not just inverted, life forms.11

This scientific value, I argue, is precisely the reason why collections of nature paradoxes and wonders have been composed, transmitted, reorganized, and translated. More than anything else, the wonders of nature have the potential to provide the human mind with ideas, even facts, about the unthought, the unthinkable, and the seemingly impossible. Accounts of nature wonders allowed people to literally see new things.

The peoples, animals, and plants living under very different conditions and on the fringes of the inhabited world, described in paradoxographies, were valuable models for exploring what life might be like on the moon and other inaccessible places. While Plutarch turns to the sea and the desert to find templates for organisms that might fit the conditions of life on the moon, the rabbinic sages, as will be shown, turn to the sea and the desert to find things that belong to other worlds, such as the world to come or the underworld, to learn about the characteristics of primordial monsters, or to understand hapax legomena in the biblical text.12

The Enlightenment separated miracles from science.13 But miracles have not disappeared. Rather, the anomaly and the singular case persist as a constant threat to the statistical and mathematical knowledge that governs modern science, and which holds that while “wondering” can be a philosophical method, “the miracle” can never be a fact. Slowly, however, the tables seem to be turning, giving way to a new logic that also affects the sciences. Recently, the occasional spontaneous remission of cancer has been shown to hold important information for understanding the behavior of cancer cells,14 and “old wives’ tales” such as the use of a snail on a wart have been shown to be effective because the human body responds to disgust by activating its immune system.15 Moreover, the educational value of documentaries that focus on remote and inaccessible places and their incredible fauna, flora, and human communities is widely recognized.16

The time is ripe, then, to place these recent scientific and scholarly interactions with the paradoxical in conversation with stories from the Babylonian Talmud’s tractate Baba Batra 73b-74b. This passage offers several travel accounts in which rabbinic sages see extraordinary things in the sea and in the desert. Previous scholarship has discussed the stories in the context of belief and disbelief, faith, fiction, or tall tales reflecting the hyperbole and yet mythical truth of folktales.17 In his in-depth study of the Talmudic passage, James A. Redfield has recently provided a more nuanced classification. In his reader-centered literary analysis, he describes the stories as part of the paradoxographic project which produces “a catalogue of topoi on which tellers drew to craft characters and stories, and as a hybrid mode of inquiry, fusing natural science, ethnography, and geography, which mapped and made sense of paranormal phenomena at limits of the known world and the borders of literary genres.”18 Similarly, the present article will analyze the rabbinic testimony to extraordinary beings and events in the context of knowledge production understood as the process of gathering facts to enable orientation in the world, and science understood as the systematic study of the physical world through both scholarly tradition and observation.19 The latter may require some clarification: In ancient scientific texts, observations made in writing are considered no less empirical than those made in nature.20 Therefore, I will approach the aspect of autopsy—the wonders are often reported as having been seen—not with the general scholarly suspicion that this was meant to enhance the credibility of these stories, but rather as a way of zooming in on a subject and of seeing through someone else’s eyes.21 Rabbinic seeing, as Rafe Neis has shown, was also “being:” the sense of sight was intertwined with touch, physical experience, and material results.22 A similar double standard appears to be at play among modern historians when the absence of explanations in paradoxographies or stories drawing from paradoxographical knowledge is evaluated as a way of making the paradox look more credible or more miraculous.23 The idea that reason or cause (and, hence, science) resolves the miracle is inherently modern.24 Rabbinic reasoning revolves generally around individual cases that are approached with a distinct set of rules. Cases are associated with other cases until the cluster can be identified as falling under a certain rule of interpretation.25 In this system, knowledge proceeds from the case (or an exemplum) and its association with similar cases and rule-based interpretation, not from an explanation of the cause of the case.26 Paradoxography “minimizes its why” not because it wants to deter people from questioning the validity of the miracle, or because the explanation is not known, but because it is (generally) much less important than the “where, who, and what.”27 These questions are also those who validate legal documents such as contracts.

For rabbinic scholars of Roman Palestine and Sassanid Babylonia, a systematic study of the physical world was only worthwhile in dialogue with the Hebrew Bible, whose text was taken as the “blueprint for creation.”28 Creation mirrored the Torah, and the mysteries of creation found their counterparts in the mysteries of the biblical text. In this paradigm, miracles such as the parting of the Red Sea (Ex. 14), the survival of the three men in the oven (Dan. 3), or Jonah’s escape from the fish (Jonah 2) are already predetermined in creation.29 The rabbinic sages’ questions regarding miracles were therefore not so much about their possibility or impossibility as about their relationship to the text of the Hebrew Bible and their significance for Israel’s history, their raison d’être.

The parameters that make someone believe, that make someone take something as a “fact,” are culturally shaped. Today, academic knowledge qua science is informed by systematic observation, statistics, falsifiability, repeatability, and reproducibility. These methods and principles are also the basis of modern laws of nature. Rabbinic sages, like most of their contemporaries, used a different framework. Observation was a broader category. Seeing something written in a document, for example, was valid evidence, and if two people saw the same thing, it was considered a fact.30 Roman literary authority was dictated by the mos maiorum, the “custom of the ancestors,” and an important component in fact-making for both authors and readers. Roman intellectuals were generally convinced that “voices from the past possess more authority than those of the present,” and the attribution of knowledge to past authors became a hallmark of scholarship.31 This same principle permeated rabbinic literature. Not only must new rulings and opinions always confirm older mishnayot and baraitaot, but the virtue of having faith in a teacher’s words even without personally witnessing the evidence is exemplified in many stories.32 These principles often led to the production of facts that appear incredulous to modern scholars. However, seeing is never a neutral activity, and the way seeing is transmitted to and interlinked in the brain is an ongoing mystery.33 Modern science remains baffled by the fact that memory is a highly biased resource, influenced by all sorts of sensory, emotional, and bio-chemical predispositions.34 Observation thus needs to be “situated, understood, and processed, because that is where the world we perceive gets put together as a coherent whole.”35 These insights will be taken into account in the following analysis; claims of seeing will neither be taken as fraudulent truth claims nor as an indicator of exclusive visual perception. Rather, it will be asked why it was important that things were “seen” that could not possibly be seen.

Most of the texts under discussion here are found in a Talmudic commentary to a lemma from the Mishnah that reads ‘One who sells a ship’ (m. B. Batra 5:1). As I have argued elsewhere, it is likely that the composers of the Talmud crafted the commentaries on Mishnaic lemmas by assigning keywords to them before selecting previously classified texts according to these keywords.36 The keywords were based on the lemma from the Mishnah, but sometimes also on the Palestinian Talmud’s commentary on the same lemma. The text pieces returned by the keyword search were then organized into a commentary on the given word.37 The first texts of a commentary were often lexical and responded directly to the lemma, as in Baba Batra 73a, where the commentary begins with a translation from Mishnaic Hebrew into Aramaic of the technical terms used in the Mishnah to describe the different parts of a ship (e.g., mast, sail, anchor, oars). The lemma obviously suggested the keyword ship to the compilers, who additionally associated the keyword travel: the commentary continues to relate stories of rabbinic sages who explore the deep sea and the desert until the next Mishnaic lemma is discussed on folio 75b.38

The commentary of the Palestinian Talmud on the same Mishnaic lemma gives only one baraita about selling ships before, oddly enough, repeating its commentary on Kil’ayim 2:5, a text on the conditions of land use in the land of Israel. The Babylonian Talmud does not address this issue until Baba Batra 80b–82a. Therefore, the Babylonian Talmud receives little help from the Palestinian Talmud in selecting and organizing the ‘ship-commentary.’ Nevertheless, the influence of the Palestinians should not be easily dismissed. After all, the Babylonian Talmud uses the same baraita as the Palestinian Talmud, directly following the lexical beginning. Moreover, the Babylonian commentary becomes decidedly eschatological in the second half of its commentary on m. B. Batra 5:1, adding texts about Jerusalem in the world to come.39 Given the fact that the Mishnaic tractate Kil’ayim is concerned with the agricultural organization of the land of Israel—which, at the time of the Babylonian sages, was not only a geographical but also a political impossibility for Jews—the Palestinian Talmud’s repetition of the Kil’ayim commentary may have led the Babylonian compilers to the association of the “ship” with the “world to come” and the “time to come”: phrases that are repeatedly mentioned throughout the commentary.40 These features all suggest that the text was meticulously crafted from pieces of text that were pasted together with anonymous or attributed comments and objections.

The arrangement of the ‘ship-commentary’ may also have been guided by an additional hodological principle, generated by the composers’ concept of the structure of the world, their inner map. In their recent book, Rafe Neis observed that the rabbis seem to return time and again to the basic topographies known also from contemporary Greek and Latin sources: a distinction between settlement and wilderness (ישוב/οἰκουμένη and מדבר/ἔρημος), but also between the dry land (ישוב + מדבר = יבש) and the sea (ים/Οκεανός) that encircled the dry land. Within this geographic framework, “exotic and fabulous creatures” were often placed into distant lands and the deep sea.41 The same basic topography appears to underly the composition in Baba Batra 73a-75b, as James Redfield observed: “It begins with Ocean; moves east, to the homeland of its own audience; then west, to the river Jordan, which is a boundary of the Land of Israel; then south, to the Sinai Peninsula and the site of national origins; then it comes full circle to Ocean.”42 Granted, Redfield only has the first part of the commentary in mind (73b-74b) and notes the minor hiccup in the structure in 74b when another desert story is added after it came full circle to the Ocean. Yet, the rest of the commentary (74b-75b) takes the reader back to the Ocean, the tehom, and the Leviathan that roams it.

Of interest to this paper are only a few of these text pieces woven into the ‘ship-commentary,’ which, based on stylistic and material arguments, can be shown to have formed individual compositions before they were used independently and associatively in this commentary. Contextualized, these short compositions provide a better insight into the function of nature miracles and impossibilities in rabbinic thought than the entire commentary shaped by the constraints that arose from the process of creating a coherent commentary out of texts that were not originally written for this purpose.43

Three different textual compositions can be identified by their common vocabulary and especially their introductory formulas in Baba Batra 73b-74b. From a bibliographical point of view, these introductory formulas are more decisive than their attribution to certain rabbis, since the latter were often adapted by the compilers in the service of the associative flow or added to preserve the discursive mode of the Talmud. This “Talmudization,” as Redfield calls it, is another way of weighting and establishing connections between different knowledge-pieces and of involving the reader.44 In ancient documents, the beginnings of new textual units are often marked visually through color, signs or formulaic introductions.45 Especially in lists such linguistic markers indicated the beginning of a new item. In the Baba Batra commentary, three stories are introduced with ‘I myself saw’ (לדידי חזי לי), twelve stories with ‘One time it happened’ (הוה זימנא חדא), and four stories with ‘Come, I will show you’ (תא אחוי לך).

In what follows, I will discuss these stories together with others that seem to have belonged to the same short compositions based on the shared formulaic introduction, but that have been used in different places in the Talmud in the compilation process. When the reconstructed three compositions are placed in conversation with paradoxography, it quickly becomes clear that they share the same interest: disproportionately large animals, peculiar animal behavior, astonishing plant properties, curious ethnography, and the sighting of intermediate beings such as demons or angels. Apart from the last two, which represent a late antique addition to the canon of ‘possible impossibilities,’ these topics are all commonly associated with paradoxography.46

“One time” or “once” (זימנא חדא/זימנין) or “one day” (יומא חד) is an oft-used introductory phrase throughout the Talmud. The one translated here as “One time it happened” (זימנא חדא הוה), however, is only used to introduce nature paradoxes.47 It seems carefully chosen to mark an event on a processual timeline without actually marking it, as if these things happened on an alternate, paradoxical timeline.48 In total, the mini-composition “One time it happened” contains 19 stories: two stories confirm the behavior traditionally attributed to certain demons;49 five stories concern ethnographic knowledge or knowledge imparted by someone from another people (four concern a tayya’a, a member of a nomadic Arab tribe, while one is about the Persian king Izgadar);50 one story is about the miraculous properties of the herb dragon’s blood and of broom, and another one about the properties of stars;51 the majority of ten stories revolves around exceptional characteristics of animals, mostly fish.52

The natural history facts used in the stories can be traced back to paradoxographies. For example, a Syriac treatise on Natural Things going back to a late antique Greek paradoxography pseudepigraphically attributed to Aristotle lists the features of a huge Sea creature called kētos (κῆτος) in two separate entries.53 One entry relates what happens when this huge fish washes ashore: people gather and use its ribs as beams for roofs, and they salt the fish’s flesh. They take the fish’s eyes, melt them, and use the oil for burning in lamps.54 Another entry states that the kētos appears to sailors as an island and does not move unless they light a fire on the fish’s back or dig into it, in which case the fish dives.55 The rabbinic authors of the “One time it happened” stories were obviously aware of these puzzling characteristics of the kētos, for two stories closely parallel the paradoxographic tradition:

Some details are so similar—the oil from eyeballs, the salting, the roofing, the kindling of a fire, as well as the order in which the characteristics are discussed—that it is difficult not to suggest that an identical or at least very similar treatise circulated among the Jews in Babylonia. However, the stories may also have circulated independently, for example on tablets, or even orally, although in this case we would expect longer and more elaborate versions. In any case, the Syriac traditions concerning the kētos-fish may help us understand the reason for the existence of this story in rabbinic literature. In a letter to John the Stylite, Jacob of Edessa refers to the kētos, the most famous of the Greek mythological sea monsters and according to the Septuagint’s reading of Genesis 1:21 God’s creation, as another name for the Leviathan.59 This alignment allowed Jacob to learn about the nature of the Leviathan from non-biblical sources concerned with the kētos. The rabbis seem to have accepted the existence of such an enormous kwwra-fish (כוורא) but distinguished it from the biblical Leviathan.60

The next fish story in the “One time it happened” -series is very brief but adds a further detail about the Leviathan: it is big enough to swallow a 300-mile-long horned fish. Similarly, Jacob of Edessa states that kētos-fish can grow to over 300 miles in length.61 Jacob’s knowledge of the fish’s location is consistent with the Syriac paradoxography (due to their size, kētos-fish live in the Indian Red Sea and in the Okeanos beyond the inhabited world), but he adds the missing names to the deep seas and numbers indicating the length of the fish.62 Similarly, the rabbinic author gave the number of the towns destroyed and roofed by a dead kētos/kwwara (b. B. Bat. 73b, cited above). Paradoxographic accounts generally tended to gain numerical detail rather than lose it.63

Although the rabbinic sages maintained a linguistic distinction between the Leviathan and kētos/kwwra creatures, the Leviathan’s characteristics were clearly modeled after the kētos. For example, the kētos is said to emit a fragrant breath with which it lures food into its mouth, and the rabbis conclude from Job 41:23 ‘It [the Leviathan] makes the depths churn like a boiling caldron’64 that the Leviathan’s breath is boiling hot and that the creature obtains its food by boiling the surrounding waters.65 Moreover, the rabbis classify the Leviathan as one of the tanninim (per Gen 1:21) the creatures translated as kētē in the Septuagint.66

The selection of the nature paradoxes used in these short stories thus appear relevant for the study of the Leviathan and other tanninim, and the writers’ access to a diverse range of bookish knowledge must have been better and more sophisticated than previously assumed. The selective use of non-Jewish texts may not have been due to inaccessibility, but rather to the focus of the inquiry. As with the other compositions, the goal was to learn about the paradoxical animals of the Hebrew Bible, the blueprint of creation. This creation could also be found in the nature descriptions by gentiles.

The same scrutiny is at play in the other encounters with megafauna in this short composition:

The subscription (A), which may have been part of the original (reference) work from which this story was taken (or after which it was modeled), identifies the giant bird as the Zyz, one of the names given to the phoenix, as Maren Niehoff has shown.67 There are several mentions of the phoenix in rabbinic literature. Taken together, they repeat the characteristics of the phoenix as described in Greek sources, with one notable difference: in rabbinic interpretations, the phoenix is enormous, likely due to its ability to overshadow the sun.68 Like the Leviathan, the Zyz was given to the Jewish people to eat as compensation for the dietary restrictions on fish and fowl (Lev. R. 22.10), and like the Leviathan and the Behemot, the Zyz is destined to be eaten at the final “messianic symposium.”69

The composition “One time it happened” seems to be a carefully crafted and learned journey through the deep waters, a place normally avoided by sailors, and, in the rabbinic scientific-exegetic imagination a place where primordial and timeless creatures dwell and guard some precious items. Thus, as the journey continues, we see through the eyes of the rabbis a fish with eyes the size of two moons;70 a fish with inscribed horns; a basket of tekhelet-colored threads for the righteous in the world to come; and a battle between a gigantic tannina (Aramaic spelling) and a raven over a life-restoring gem. The deep sea is, in rabbinic geographic and cosmographic speculation, a place where the sky with its birds and the sea with its fish meet (all of them created on day five of the creation week, Gen 1:21), and where past and future converge:

While modern scientists use lenses to see things they would not normally see, late ancient scientists looked through the eyes of others, such as rabbinic sages.71 This is not a surprising development given that “ancient authors favored vision as the most reliable among the senses and posited an intimate relationship between sight and knowledge.”72

“One time it happened” stories are scientific in the sense that they bring together recherché facts that help to understand the dimensions of “deep creation” in which space and time collapse (akin to Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotopes). Thus, in the last three stories of this composition, the rabbinic sages are placed in the desert, another inhospitable space. This foreign space could only be fully understood by the equally foreign tayya’a, a nomadic Arab, who can even tell how far away the nearest source of water is just by looking at the sand. (B. Bat. 73b). After meeting these marvelous nomads, the rabbis also see fat geese reserved for the world to come, find herbs that heal wounds, and wood that turns into coals that still burn after twelve months in the paradoxical place that is the wilderness. The list of twelve “times that happened” ends with this reference to “twelve months” and another subtitle or reader’s note, possibly taken from the original paradoxographic list that identifies the herbs and the nature of the coals: “These herbs: dragon’s blood, and the coals: broom.”73

In Baba Batra 73a-75b, three stories introduced by the phrase “I myself saw” represent another case of seeing through, or rather with, someone else’s eyes. The phrase seems at first reminiscent of juridic formulaic language typical for eyewitnesses. But when all the instances in which it is used in the Talmud are considered, it seems to be used more often in connection with classical paradoxographic themes such as animals, plants, geography, ethnography, angels, and demons than in legal contexts.74 In fact, the phrase is predominantly used in connection with places. Eight reports of seeing a particular place contrast with four observations by tayya’a Arabs, three demon and one angel sightings, two accounts of giant animals, and one of Jonah’s tree (which grew over night).75

All these literal “site-seeings” exhibit a chorographic interest because they indicate the size of a particular place or river, or the distances between places. They include the last resting place of the Israelites before they entered Canaan (Num. 33: 49), the distance between Sodom and Zoar (Gen. 19:23), the height of a rock east of Jerusalem called Keren Ofel (cf. t. Ta’an 3,1), the distance between the village Ludim and Lod (Lydda), the size of the King’s Mountain of king Yannai (Alexander Jannaeus), and the size of the original Jerusalem.76 The dimensions of the stream of milk and honey (Ex. 3:8) are given twice and differently.77 Aside from Sodom and the flow of milk and honey, the list does not converge with the places “where miracles happened for Israel” and where thus a blessing must be said, or places where “idolatry was uprooted.”78 Rather, the list shows an interest in historically significant places, including those that were important to post-biblical Judaism. The list resembles the onomastic genre—lists of biblical place names with information about their locations and contemporary features. The Onomasticon of Eusebius of Caesarea, later translated into Latin by Jerome, is the main exponent of the genre, but the focus on the Old rather than the New Testament suggests that Eusebius may also have worked with Jewish precedents.79

It is not uncommon for a paradoxa to be very local phenomena, as was already briefly noted in the introduction. Not only are the listed miracles often tied to a specific place—sometimes a generic one (i.e., the sea, the forest, the north, “India”), sometimes a very specific one (i.e., Mount Tabor, the dome of the wall of Mahoza, the Sea of Tiberias)—but some paradoxographies even follow hodological principles in their structure.80 The Syriac Natural History mentioned above contains a section of nine entries on the characteristics of places as diverse as Spain and the Sea of Galilee.81 The presence of geographical material shows that the rabbinic authors of the “I myself saw” treatise continued the periegetic outlook of the paradoxographic genre. The itineration of the “I” in “I myself saw” further links the presence of miracles to the individual observer.82 By way of attribution, the seeing sage becomes a locus of the miracle. Whereas the (original) “I myself saw” list offered the possibility to become a locus of the miracle to every reader or listener, the Talmud forecloses this possibility by identifying the one who sees as a rabbi.83

The paradoxographic eyewitness accounts in this composition differ from those above in that they are more interested in providing orientation in this world than in the world to come. Yet they remain tied to the blueprint of creation, the Hebrew Bible, which they seem to treat as a map. The sages blur the lines between what is observed in the biblical text and what is observed in creation. This again shows that paradoxes of nature are not necessarily seen in nature, but also in texts. Ideas about the possibilities of creation are thereby mutually stimulated by the existence of miraculous things and beings, as demonstrated in paradoxographic texts and the text of the Hebrew Bible, as in the following example, which discusses the size of a young aurochs (אורזילא דרימא).

This account shows how information about distances and elevations was used in exegetical discussions and offering the specifics necessary to reconstruct certain events. The story appears also in tractate Zevachim in a discussion of how the aurochs survived the flood. Since the animal is so big, it is not feasible that Noah put two aurochs in the ark and the rabbis’ reason that he must have taken two calves and put only their heads in the ark. However, based on the size of the calves’ heads as inferred from the above information, even the heads were too large for the ark. Ultimately, the sages conclude that the calves merely placed their noses in the ark and tied to it by their horns. Since the discussion had previously concluded through similar minute exegesis that the waters of the Flood were hot, it is assumed that a miracle (nes) was performed for the aurochs and the water around the ark was cooler than the rest.84 Interestingly, although the aurochs is astonishing in its size, it is not considered a miracle by the rabbis, who define a miracle as a change in the order of creation.85 But the animal is considered part of that creation and deserves to be saved from the Flood.

Already the Hebrew Bible provides some information on the ‘aurochs’ (re’em), a term which is, in fact, highly conjectural.86 The animal is said to be strong (Num. 23:22//24:8), untamable (Job 39:9-10), and has horns big enough to ‘gore the nations, even those at the ends of the earth’ (Deut. 33:17).87 Psalm 29:6 states that God ‘makes Lebanon leap like a calf, Sirion (Mt. Hermon) like a young wild ox,’ a poetic parallelism which, if read literally, may be understood as the young wild ox being the size of Mt. Hermon.88 The enormous size of the aurochs can further be gleaned from Is. 34:7, according to which the fall of a wild ox will drench the land with blood. Again, the rabbinic authors who compiled information about the aurochs did not invent its characteristics, but saw the aurochs through careful study of the biblical text, supported by reports of giant animals in paradoxographic accounts, including Persian ones:

Scholars have argued that this account is best interpreted on the basis of Persian natural history with roots in mythology, but with the important detail that the serpent that swallowed the frog is the biblical sea serpent Tannin (Ex. 7:12, Jer. 51:34).89 A number of cultural, textual, and visual stimuli made the authors of the ‘I myself saw’ composition ‘see’ the things they described. Embodying these visions (as the I) allowed them to explore ‘deep creation’ the merging of time and space, past and future, above and below: scientific imagination.

Five stories are introduced with “Come I will show you” in the Talmud, four of them in the commentary on the ‘ship’ lemma in tractate Baba Batra. Genre-wise, the composition was associated, at least by the compilers of the Talmud (or a later copyist), with the “One time it happened” accounts, since one of the stories from Baba Batra has a parallel in Sanhedrin 110a, where it is additionally introduced with the latter formula.

Interestingly, the introductory formula “Come I will show you” is the one that can be most clearly linked to an eyewitness account. In a story in Baba Batra 46a, the phrase introduces the case of a man who reclaims his cloak from a tailor or laundryman. But the craftsman denies having received the cloak, and the owner counters that he has witnesses who have seen the cloak in the craftsman’s possession. The craftsman then claims that the cloak they saw belonged to someone else. When the owner asks to see the cloak, the craftsman refuses to show it to him. The formula thus introduces a story in which something is hidden from view, and only one party can decide who gets to see it. This is precisely the theme of the four stories in B. Bat. 73b-74a, and certainly not by accident. Rather, it is another example of the incredible minutiae of the rabbis’ bibliographical data management.

The ‘Come I will show you’ stories in the ‘ship’ lemma commentary feature again a tayya’a-Nomad who shows Rav bar bar Hanah four paradoxes in the desert: the giant bones of the Israelites who died in the desert (Num. 14); Mt. Sinai (Ex. 19), which he finds surrounded by white scorpions the size of donkeys; the chasm that swallowed Korah and his people (Num. 16); and the place where the earth touches the sky and where the “wheel of the sky” can be seen revolving.90 These places were not normally accessible because they have been hidden in the desert and in the custody of the tayya’a. In this desert, the past is buried in the sand next to a place where the passage of time can be observed. Like the deep sea and the desert, the past is also an inhospitable place, but there are guides.

The mental map that the little composition “Come, I will show you” depicts is revealing of the intellectual project underway here.91 This brief, paradoxical travelogue locates three dire biblical miracles in the dire space in which they happened. Although far away in an inhospitable place, they are still part of the known world. And just as the sun wheel comes and goes, so might history.

The semantic history of the term used for miracle in Mishnaic Hebrew, nes (נס, plural nissim), explains the rabbinic connection between miracles and places. In the Hebrew Bible the term nes is used exclusively in the sense of ‘standard,’ ‘pole,’ or ‘lag,’ that is, a sign that marks a place.92 In rabbinic texts, the term nes takes on the meaning of ‘miracle’ and is associated with historically significant places worthy of identification on the biblical map and of a visit (even if the journey remains imaginary or takes place on a decorated mosaic floor). In early Christian writings, the Greek term gnorisma (γνώρισμα) underwent comparable conceptual changes. The term originally referred to tokens identifying a legitimate but lost child (typically a god), a lost lover, or a wanted murderer.93 Although the term belongs to the semantic field of sēmeion, sign, it differs from the latter in that a gnorisma involves an emotional and somewhat “active” recognition.94 In Late Antiquity, Eusebius understood sites associated with the life of Jesus to be gnorismata—sites that are “encapsulating a specific meaning.”95 Compared to earlier literature, the term is exponentially more common in patristic texts.96 What emerges in late Antiquity is a geographical version of the medieval doctrine of signatures, which claimed “that some natural objects are ‘signed’ with indications of their hidden qualities.”97 Both rabbinic and patristic texts are involved in the project of identifying places where miracles took place, thereby indicating the often hidden properties of a place.

At a time when geographical knowledge and orientation were mostly a textual matter, and maps served not only navigational put also decorative and devotional purposes, the rabbinic notion that the Torah was the blueprint of creation was not (or not just) a metaphor.98 The rabbinic sages searched the Hebrew Bible for landmarks that could provide orientation or point to natural resources like a map or an itinerary. In the course of this process, the term for landmark, nes, became synonymous with miracle.

Paradoxography—gentile or biblical—becomes the convex or concave lens through which things can be seen that otherwise remain hidden or blurred. Nature miracles stimulate the scientific imagination about the unseen, which then becomes visible or, at least, plausibly imaginable. Paradoxography thus enables better guesses about the nature of other, and therefore likely paradoxical, worlds (such as the world to come, the primordial world, the antediluvian world, or the wilderness) than individual experience or imagination alone, which is rarely able of think beyond opposites when it comes to imagining ‘the other.’ At the same time, a physical presence is given to this imagination by the one (in the Talmud identified as a rabbinic sage) who sees these things and who becomes a locus of knowledge.

The use of verbal and textual descriptions instead of maps, a common practice in Late Antiquity, inevitably educated people’s graphic thinking and memorization, but also their meticulous perception of landscape. Every tree needed to be noted, every topographical peculiarity memorized. When the mind is trained in this way, it will study a text and note all the details, imagining them in such a way that they can be recognized spontaneously. If details are missing, this mind will work tirelessly to provide them. Late antique commonsense geography therefore provides mental rather than real maps. Moreover, mental maps of areas beyond (personal) cognitive reach are communal and cultural products.99 When the Talmudic episodes discussed in this article take their audience on a journey, when they force their audience to see, they create new mental landscapes and expand geographical, topographical, and ethnographic knowledge in a vivid and lasting way. Far from being tall tales, these stories are effective tools not only for modeling the inhabited world, but for creating paradigms that transcend the observable time and space. Scientific imagination is, then and now, nourished by possibility and irregularity rather than by predictability and regularity.