Migrating Tales

The Talmud's Narratives and Their Historical Context

Richard Kalmin

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780520277250
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520958999
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Migrating Tales situates the Babylonian Talmud, or Bavli, in its cultural context by reading several rich rabbinic stories against the background of Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Persian, and Mesopotamian literature of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, much of it Christian in origin. In this nuanced work, Richard Kalmin argues that non-Jewish literature deriving from the eastern Roman provinces is a crucially important key to interpreting Babylonian rabbinic literature, to a degree unimagined by earlier scholars. Kalmin demonstrates the extent to which rabbinic Babylonia was part of the Mediterranean world of late antiquity and part of the emerging but never fully realized cultural unity forming during this period in Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, and western Persia.

Kalmin recognizes that the Bavli contains remarkable diversity, incorporating motifs derived from the cultures of contemporaneous religious and social groups. Looking closely at the intimate relationship between narratives of the Bavli and of the Christian Roman Empire, Migrating Tales brings the history of Judaism and Jewish culture into the ambit of the ancient world as a whole.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Migrating Tales
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Manuscripts and Early Editions
• Introduction
• 1 “Manasseh Sawed Isaiah with a Saw of Wood”: An Ancient Legend in Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Persian Sources
• 2 R. Shimon bar Yohai Meets St. Bartholomew: Peripatetic Traditions in Late Antique Judaism and Christianity East of Syria
• 3 The Miracle of the Septuagint in Ancient Rabbinic and Christian Literature
• 4 The Demons in Solomon’s Temple
• 5 Zechariah and the Bubbling Blood: An Ancient Tradition in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Literature
• 6 Pharisees
• 7 Astrology
• 8 The Alexander Romance
• Summary and Conclusions
• Bibliography
• General Index
• Index of Primary Sources