Two More Folktales the Exempla Anthology Kept From Vanishing

The Exempla of the Rabbis, Moses Gaster's 1924 anthology, preserves two additional folktales that the medieval Jewish tradition wanted carried forward.

The first is a condensed retelling of the Solomon and Ashmedai cycle, focused on Solomon's exile to Ammon and his rise from kitchen scullion to royal cook to marriage. The second is a parable about a sheltered scholar's son who learns the world from his father's jealous students. Two tales from the wider Exempla corpus, each preserved because medieval Jewish readers found them useful.

Solomon Exiled, the Kitchen, the Princess

Exempla 404 retells the famous Gittin 68b cycle in compressed form. After the building of the Temple, Ashmedai persuades Solomon to hand over his signet ring under the pretext of showing him wonders. Ashmedai throws the ring into the sea, where a fish swallows it, and casts Solomon four hundred miles from Jerusalem.

The exemplum then narrates the king's wanderings. Solomon arrives at the city of the king of Ammon. The head cook recognizes the value of free labor and conscripts him to carry market goods home. Solomon assists in the kitchen. One day Solomon prepares a dish for the king. The king finds the dish so excellent that he appoints Solomon head cook on the spot.

Naamah, the king's daughter, falls in love with the new head cook. Her mother rebukes her in vain. Her father, observing the affair, expels both daughter and cook into the wilderness, where the cycle continues with the famous fish that contains Solomon's lost ring.

The Exempla's compressed retelling preserves the essential beats. The displacement. The kitchen. The princess. The eventual restoration. The medieval Jewish reader who knew the longer Talmudic cycle from Gittin would recognize the compression. The reader who did not would get, in this short exemplum, enough of the story to know that the Naamah-and-Solomon line, which would eventually produce Rehoboam, began in a kitchen in Ammon.

The Scholars Son and the Jealous Students

Exempla 440 tells a more domestic story. A great scholar, late in life, finally has a son. He keeps the boy in the house, devoting more and more of his time to the boy and less to his students. The students become jealous of the boy's monopoly on the father's attention.

One day the students take the boy out of the house and show him the world he has never seen. The boy returns and reproaches his father for the long sheltering. The father, recognizing the legitimacy of the reproach, begins taking the boy out himself and showing him everything.

The students used to travel each year to a distant country to trade, returning with enough profit to live the rest of the year. They persuade the now-worldly young man to go with them on the next trip. The father gives the son a thousand dinars and his blessing. The exemplum continues with the trip, which produces, in the longer version Gaster preserves, additional adventures and reversals.

The teaching is implicit. The scholar father, in trying to protect his late-life son, had actually deprived him. The students, jealous as they were, performed a corrective function. The boy needed the world. The father needed to release him into it. The Exempla preserves the story because the dynamic is recurrent. Sheltered children must eventually be released, and the people who do the releasing are not always the parents who intended to do it.

What the Sheltered-Son Story Was Really About

The Exempla's framing of the scholar-and-son tale leaves the moral implicit. The scholar father has spent his life producing students. The students, in this story, return the favor by completing the father's parental task. The dynamic is recurrent in Jewish folklore. Knowledge flows in directions the knowledge-bearer did not always intend. The students who learn from the master eventually become, in some respects, the people who finish raising the master's own children.

Why Both Were Worth Preserving

Read the two passages together and the editorial logic of Gaster's Exempla becomes legible. The anthology preserved tales that the medieval Jewish reader could use. A famous Talmudic cycle in condensed form, accessible to readers who lacked the full Talmud. A domestic parable about parental protection and necessary release. The Exempla, in this reading, was not a museum of curiosities. It was a working library of stories that a community needed within reach.