as the very antithesis of the light-minded and lascivious girl; indeed, she was interested from girlhood in the Torah and in wisdom. She is represented over and over as the embodiment of morality. When the time comes, she is also tested by R. Meir, but unlike her sister, she fails the test. The consequence of her exemplary life is ignominious suicide. Her story, only tantalizingly hinted at in the Talmud, and told only in its margins, is generated by simply reversing the polarity of every element in the sister's story that
is
told in the text of the Talmud itself. One sister becomes the exemplum of the proper behavior of a woman, because she had not studied Torah in accordance with Rabbi Eliezer and thus was not led into lewdness. The other sister dies a wanton, because she violated the taboo, submitted to temptation, and learned Torah.
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My theory is that Beruria's story is generated as the dark double of the story of her sister, out of the matrix of the Babylonian understanding of R. Eliezernamely, that there is an essential nexus between a woman studying Torah and the breakdown of the structure of monogamy, that a wife like Beruria could not possibly end up beloved and befriended by her husband, and that a husband like R. Meir who would love and befriend such a woman, must himself end up an exile. Taken together, the story of the two sisters forms one exemplum, one paradigm case that illustrates R. Eliezer's dictum as it was understood and experienced in the Babylonian Talmud's cultural field, a demonstration that there is an intrinsic and necessary connection between a scholarly woman and uncontrolled sexuality.
21
This point-for-point homology between the two narratives can be laid out as a series of structural oppositions.
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 | | 21. Laurie Davis has read the connection between the two sisters in a slightly different fashion. She emphasizes (following Goodblatt 1975) that it is
only
in our talmudic passage that the two women are identified as sisters. Disconnecting Beruria from the family of Rabbi Hananya ben Tradyon, she suggests that the daughter of the story here, before she is awarded Beruria as a sister, is identical to the learned daughter of the Tosefta. Then:
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| | Moreover, the life of the unnamed daughter is a mirror image of what Beruriah's life would become. These are parallel stories of righteous, morally upright, Torah-studying females who are "supplied" with a sexual crime that contradicts all other stories about their character. The parallel aspect of their lives can only be discerned after Rashi's story of Beruriah's seduction and death in the eleventh century.
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| | (Davis 1991)
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| | I would grant that this reading is as plausible as my suggestion but does not materially change the overall picture I am drawing. Rather than a structure of binary oppositions, we would have a doubling of the two women in each other.
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