Land and lost. He meant, on my reading: "I am of the spiritual seed of Joseph; just as he was beautiful of form and spirit and sat by the ritual bath and produced spiritual progeny, so also I." The beauty of Joseph and his ardent sexual purity were, of course, both topoi of the culture and would have been easily recognized in Rabbi Yohanan's claim. Rabbi Yohanan thus embodies the ideology of the classic.
29
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The story of Rabbi Yohanan and Resh Lakish continues the theme of gender, sex, and reproduction. The former is extraordinarily beautiful, nearly androgynous, beardless and so sexually attractive to the masculine Resh Lakish that the latter is willing to perform prodigious athletic feats to get to him. Moreover, compared to the other Rabbis, he had the smallest penis as well, in the Hellenistic world a signifier of male beauty.
30
Lest we miss the message, the narrator segues immediately into the story of Resh Lakish's misidentification of Rabbi Yohanan as a woman:
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 | | One day, Rabbi Yohanan was bathing in the Jordan. Resh Lakish saw him and thought he was a woman. He crossed the Jordan after him by placing his lance in the Jordan and vaulting to the other side. When Rabbi Yohanan saw Rabbi Shim'on the son of Lakish [= Resh Lakish], he said to him, "Your strength for Torah!" He replied, "Your beauty for women!" He said to him, "If you repent, I will give you my sister who is more beautiful than I am."
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As in the Greek
Paideia,
still enormously influential in late antiquity (Jaeger 1961), Rabbi Yohanan does manage to produce Resh Lakish as a spiritual copy of him, just as he wished to produce infants who would be physical copies of him. Just as he is effeminate or androgynous, he feminizes Resh Lakish also, and by doing so, reproduces him as a "great man":
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| | 29. Lest there be any misunderstanding, let me make it explicit that "Rabbi Yohanan" here means the character Rabbi Yohanan in this particular text. Thus, no claim is being made that the historical Rabbi Yohanan was more or less influenced by Greek culture than any other Rabbi but only that here he, as the representative
par excellence
of Palestinian rabbinism for the Babylonians, is a signifier of a certain cultural moment and cultural struggle. In other Babylonian stories about him, he is represented as grotesque in his person as well.
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| | 30. "The Greek aesthetic prefers discreet genitals, small in size" (Lissarrague 1990, 56 and texts cited there). For classical male beauty as being androgynous, see Paglia (1990, 99 ff.). In particular, for the small penis as a standard of male beauty, see Paglia (ibid., 11415). In truth, I am not certain that, given the size of a
kav,
Rabbi Yohanan's penis is actually represented as small, but there can be no doubt that the contrast of nine and seven versus three suggests just that. In any case, we should not misunderstand that the Rabbis considered themselves eunuched. Rabbi Yohanan does, after all, have a penis, one of at least normal size.
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