The consequence of the Babylonian Talmud's approach is to render nearly incomprehensible Ben-Azzai's statement that a man should teach his daughter Torah against the eventuality that she may have to face the test. By the time the Talmud actually comes in its consecutive interpretation of the Mishna to the Ben-Azzai statement, it has nothing to say about it and simply skips over it. The Talmud begins by quoting the entire passage of the Mishna as a lemma for interpretation:
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 | | Mishna:
Ben-Azzai said, "A man is obligated to teach his daughter Torah, so that if she drinks [the bitter water], she will knowfor merit mitigates."
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| | Rabbi eliezer says, "Anyone who teaches his daughter Torah, teaches her lasciviousness."
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The Babylonian Talmud thus cites both views of the Mishna, but at this point it says nothing at all about Ben-Azzai and skips right over to interpreting Rabbi Eliezer's claim that one who teaches his daughter teaches her sexual impropriety:
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| | Talmud:
Does it indeed mean lasciviousness?! No, [he said that] it is
as if
he had taught her lasciviousness.
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I will return to the Talmud's interpretation of the view of R. Eliezer, but for the moment what concerns me is the treatment of Ben-Azzai. That is to say, what we have here is a quotation of the two opposing views as a text for interpretation, but the Talmud's interpretative discourse sharply marginalizes Ben-Azzai by simply ignoring his statement entirely and beginning immediately to interpret R. Eliezer. Modern scholarship repeats the gesture of the Talmud, when Brown also "erases" Ben-Azzai's view:
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| | In Judaism, rabbis were remembered to have declared that women had no place in the intense and intimate atmosphere in which male students studied the Law: to teach Torah to one's daughter was tantamount to teaching her immorality.
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| | (Brown 1988, 118)
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(footnote continued from the previous page)
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| | "merit mitigates." However, in discussing the view of the first speaker in the Mishna here that "merit mitigates," the Talmud, by dismissing entirely the interpretative possibility that it is the merit of Torah which stands for the woman, only emphasizes the more its total suppression of the dissident voice of Ben-Azzai. Even if one wishes to claim, therefore, that the Talmud, in interpreting the first speaker, is not making an explicit claim about the meaning of Ben-Azzai, such a claim is implied in the total silence that the Talmud maintains on Ben-Azzai as dissenting from this first speaker. Either they are ignoring his dissent or assimilating him to their interpretation of that first speaker; either way, his voice is effectively nullified.
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