Neither this brief summary of the plot nor my extended reading below can encompass the unencompassable body of this fat text. A complete translation is presented at the end of the discussion.
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Politics and the Grotesque
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At first glance, the text seems readable as a sort of social-political satire, an attack on certain Rabbis who were grotesquely fat in body and by implication undisciplined and gluttonous and who allowed themselves to be recruited by the Roman authorities to betray their fellow Jews:
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 | | They brought Rabbi El'azar the son of Rabbi Shim'on, and he began to catch thieves [and turn them over to the Romans]. He met Rabbi Yehoshua, the Bald, who said to him, "Vinegar son of Wine: How long will you persist in sending the people of our God to death?!" He [El'azar] said to him, "I am removing thorns from the vineyard." He [Yehoshua] said to him, "Let the Owner of the vineyard come and remove the thorns." One day a certain laundry man
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met him [El'azar], and called him, ''Vinegar son of Wine.'' He said, "Since he is so brazen, one can assume that he is wicked." He [El'azar] said, "Seize him." They seized him. After he [El'azar] settled down, he went in to release him, but he could not. He [El'azar] applied to him [the laundry man] the verse, "One who guards his mouth and his tongue, guards himself from troubles" (Proverbs 21:23).
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They hung him [the laundry man]. He [El'azar] stood under the hanged man and cried. Someone said to him, "Be not troubled; he and his son both had intercourse with an engaged girl on
Yom Kippur
." In that minute, he placed his hands on his guts, and said, "Be joyful, O my guts, be joyful! If it is thus when you are doubtful, when you are certain even more so. I am confident that rot and worms cannot prevail over you." But even so, he was not calmed. They gave him a sleeping potion and took him into a marble room and ripped
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| | 5. The clever laundry man, who often opposes the Rabbis and sometimes bests them, is a topos of talmudic legend. For a similar confrontation in Greek literature, one could cite the confrontation of Kleon by the "sausage maker" in Aristophanes's
Knights
87780, cited in Winkler (1989, 54).
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| | 6. Although on the surface the Rabbi is certainly applying the verse to the condemned man, who if he had not been so brazen would not have gotten into trouble, on another (ironic?) level the verse is applicable to Rabbi El'azar himself. He is certainly already experiencing a great deal of remorse at this point and will have considerable troubles later on in the story as a result of his not "guarding his mouth and tongue"his failure to keep silent and avoid condemning the laundry man to the Romans. According to one venerable manuscript (the Florence MS), the text reads that "he applied to
himself
the verse," thus openly activating this hermeneutic possibility.
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