A Tale of Two Marys

 Hagigah 4b

 At the end of this daf we have a rather unusual, if not bizarre, story told by the angel of death to Rav Bibi bar Abbaye. In it he explains that he has confused two women named Miriam, taking one when he should have taken the other. The plot of the story may remind old movie afficianados of the great film Heaven Can Wait with Warren Beatty. Who knew the guys in Hollywood learned Daf Yomi?

Wikipedia

I will not attempt to explain this story but what caught my eye were the names of the two women, both of whom have the word מגדלא  in their surname. One is מרים מגדלא שיער נשיא, Miriam the women’s hairdresser, and the other is מרים מגדלא דרדקי , Miriam the nanny (literally, growing women’s hair and growing children, respectively).  These professions and the name Miriam are rather common, what is interesting is מגדלא   which could also mean from Migdal. The most famous Miriam from Migdal is the figure from the New Testament called Mary Magdalene. Could she be the one in this story?

A brief review of our Christian characters: Mary Magdalene appears in the Gospels (Matthew 28, Mark 16) as one of the women who goes to Jesus’ grave on the third day after he is buried and discovers that his body is not there. She brings the news that he has come back from the dead to Jesus’ disciples.  It seems she was a wealthy woman who helped support Jesus and his students and she lived in the prosperous town of Migdal, slightly north of Tiberias.

http://www.basarchive.org/sample/bswbBrowse.asp?PubID=BSBA&Volume=33&Issue=5&ArticleID=10

There have been archaeological excavations there over the years and the most recent one uncovered one of the earliest synagogues, from the first century BCE . The synagogue housed an unusual stone that no one has satisfactorily interpreted yet – not a bima, or an aron or a chair.

http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%9E%D7%92%D7%93%D7%9C%D7%90

A subject for another post. In any case, Mary from Migdal had the means and the desire to support Jesus and his disciples.

Is the Miriam in our story Mary Magdalene? The same name appears again in Shabbat 104b. In this text, censored in many editions, we find the story of Ben Stada who did strange magic. The Gemara wants to get to the root of who this Ben Stada is and explains that his mother was the same מרים מגדלא שער נשיא  and her husband was Pappos ben Yehuda. Some scholars have suggested that Ben Stada was Jesus. (Jewish sources often confused Mary the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene). Tosefot was aware of the historical difficulty in the story. He explains that Jesus lived in the time of Yehoshua ben Perahiah (based on a Gemara  in Sotah) and Pappos ben Yehuda lived in the time of Rabbi Akiva, two generations later. Therefore, Ben Stada could not be Jesus and Miriam could not be Mary in the Jesus story (either one).

So is it just a strange coincidence that the Miriams here are all named Magdala? Many of the names in the New Testament were very common Jewish names in the first century: Yeshua, Miriam, Yoseph, Yaakov (James). The same name does not necessarily mean the same person, as explained in this fascinating  post by Gil Student. http://www.angelfire.com/mt/talmud/jesusnarr.html  

However, it is not impossible that the Gemara is having a little fun with a well known Christian figure by putting her (and doubling her!) in a story about death, resurrection and living in limbo between the two.