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T H E J E W I S H Q U A R T E R LY R E V I E W , Vol. 106, No. 2 (Spring 2016) 242247

The Bavli, the Roman East, and

Mesopotamian Christianity
RICHARD KALMIN
Jewish Theological Seminary of America

S C H OL A R LY S TU D Y of the Persian nexus of the Bavli began approximately a century and a half ago, but this study has entered a new stage
of methodological rigor and sophistication during the past two decades.
In the tremendous enthusiasm for the study of Bavli in its Persian context, however, some scholars have forgotten the obvious point that it is
essential to use all of the cultural contexts at our disposal. The ensuing
discussion suggests a few areas where that study is already ongoing and
has yielded important results and would greatly benefit from additional
research.
One very promising area of comparative study of the Bavli is the literature of the Mesopotamian neighbors of the Babylonian rabbis, the Syriacspeaking Christians. Shlomo Naehs seminal 1997 essay on the Bavlis
use of Syriac Christian literature, Freedom and Celibacy,1 was a major
step forward in literary sensitivity, philological precision, and breadth of
scholarly learning. Naeh observed that the rabbinic protagonist of a story
in bKid 81b is trying to tame his evil impulse by abstaining from sex.
What is remarkable about this story is that the rabbis intent includes
abstention from sexual relations with his own wife. Naeh observed correctly that while no other character in classical rabbinic literature is
depicted in this fashion, it is a common motif in the literature of Syriac
Christian sources composed in Mesopotamia, in close proximity to the
Babylonian rabbis.2
1. Shlomo Naeh, Freedom and Celibacy: A Talmudic Variation on the Tales
of Temptation and Fall in Genesis and its Syrian Background, in The Book of
Genesis in Jewish and Oriental Christian Interpretation, ed. J. Frishman and L. van
Rompay (Leuven, 1997), 7389.
2. See Adam Becker, The Evil Inclination of the Jews: The Syriac Yatsra in
Narsais Metrical Homilies for Lent, JQR 106.2 (2016): this issue 179207.
The Jewish Quarterly Review (Spring 2016)
Copyright 2016 Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.
All rights reserved.

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Naeh draws particular attention to a line in the story in which the

protagonists wife poses as a prostitute and identifies herself. It reads: I
am H
. eruta and I have returned today. This line should be the pivotal
point in the narrative, but instead it appears to grind the story to a halt.
The primary difficulty, observes Naeh, is with the name H
. erutathe
prostitutes name has no significant parallel in rabbinic literature, a fact
that lead previous exegetes to glide past the passage. Since Syriac is the
language of the Babylonian rabbis Mesopotamian Christian neighbors,
and since it is a neighboring language Babylonian rabbis would most
likely have understood, Naeh turns to Syriac Christian literature for
help.3 In fact, Syriac is closer to Babylonian Jewish Aramaic, the language of the Babylonian rabbis, than is Palestinian Jewish Aramaic, the
language of the Palestinian rabbis, which Babylonian rabbis undoubtedly
understood.
The word h.eruta has a double meaning in Syriac, signifying both freedom in the sense of freedom from the passions, not enslaved to ones
baser instincts, but also freedom in the sense of free to indulge ones
passions, licentious. Naeh observes that the word h.eruta is Janusfaced, since it means both one thing and its opposite, and the two meanings hold the key to understanding the story. On the one hand the rabbinic protagonist wishes to be free from enslavement to his passions,
which is why he wants a celibate marriage, but on the other hand he
succumbs to his passions, propositioning a woman he thinks is a prostitute, thereby exposing himself, he believes, as an abject failure. His allor-nothing mentality makes it impossible for him to view himself as guilty
of a relatively minor infraction, and he sees no other alternative but to
die.
The fact that the talmudic story ventures outside the rabbinic lexicon
and chooses a Syriac Christian term is striking. And it turns out that the
phenomenon of celibate marriages was practiced and held up as an
ideal in the Syriac Christian communities of Mesopotamia. Aphrahat, for
example, a fourth-century Syriac Christian author, believes that it is best
for Christians to remain celibate, and, short of dwelling with fellow
monks in a monastery, the next best thing is to marry but remain celibate.4 Interestingly, Aphrahat claims that Jews criticized Christian prac3. See, for example, Adam Becker, The Comparative Study of Scholasticism
in Late Antique Mesopotamia: Rabbis and East Syrians, AJS Review 34.1 (2010):
9899.
4. J. Parisot, Aphraatis Sapientis Persae Demonstrationes (Paris, 1894), especially
Demonstration Seven. See the literature cited by Naeh, Freedom and Celibacy,
7782.

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JQR 106.2 (2016)

tices of celibacy, believing that sex within marriage was the best lifestyle.
The fact that the story in bKid depicts a rabbi in a celibate marriage and
takes the trouble to polemicize against the practice suggests that Mesopotamian rabbis as well as Christians engaged in it. The fact that the rabbis
looked to Christian literature to criticize the practice suggests that at least
on this one issue they were well acquainted with this literature.
Naeh thus establishes a cultural connection between Mesopotamian
Christianity and Babylonian rabbinic Judaism. However, this conclusion
leaves open the question of the frequency of celibate marriage in Jewish
Babylonia. A single case is significant, but it does not permit historical
conclusions about the precise, or even the approximate, extent of close
contact between the two cultures. Perhaps the rabbis were particularly
interested in the issue of celibate marriage because it was attractive to
Babylonian rabbis and was therefore perceived as a threat.5 Other features of Syriac Christian literature, however, were perhaps of less concern to Babylonian rabbis and therefore did not give rise to any
literatureit would be a mistake to generalize on the basis of a single
story about the phenomenon of celibate marriage.
In my recent book, Migrating Tales, I attempt to demonstrate the existence of other, comparable parallels between Mesopotamian Christian
and Jewish cultures,6 and scholars such as Peter Schafer, Geoffrey Herman, Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, and others have also made crucial contributions.7 The most striking case I discovered involved the famous story
of King Manassehs execution of the prophet Isaiah in bYev 49b50a.
The story describes Isaiah being gruesomely sawed in half, ostensibly for
the crime of contradicting the words of Moses. It turns out, however,
that God disapproves not of Isaiahs contradictions of Moses but of the
prophets harsh indictment of the Israelites, whom he criticizes as a people of unclean lips. God sees to it that Isaiah is punished measure for
measurehe does not die until the saw reaches his mouth. Having sinned
with the mouth (saying nasty things about the Israelites), Isaiahs punishment is therefore via the mouth. This case illustrates two important features of the contextualization of the Bavli. On the one hand, the basic
story of King Manassehs execution of Isaiah is found already in the late
5. See bKet 62b63a.
6. Richard Kalmin, Migrating Tales: The Talmuds Narratives and Their Historical
Context (Berkeley, Calif., 2014), passim.
7. Peter Schafer, Jesus in the Talmud (Princeton, N.J., 2007); Geoffrey Herman, A Prince without a Kingdom (Tubingen, 2012), 12332; Michal Bar-Asher
Siegal, Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonia Talmud (Cambridge,
2013), especially its survey of modern scholarly literature, 334.

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first- or early second-century C.E. Christian composition The Ascension of

Isaiah, apparently composed in Palestine or western Syria.8 In addition,
one, or possibly two, of the three charges leveled against Isaiah by King
Manasseh are identical in the Christian and Babylonian rabbinic
accounts, for example, that Isaiah claims to have seen God face to face,
in contradiction to Moses, who said that no person could see God and
live. Manasseh accuses Isaiah of claiming to be greater than Moses, and
therefore deserving of death. This parallel between the Christian tradition
from the Roman East and the geographically distant Babylonian Talmud
is one of many instances in which non-Jewish traditions from the Roman
East help to contextualize the Bavli, but relevant parallels are either
absent from or only partial in the geographically close Palestinian rabbinic compilations. This and several other examples can be marshaled to
show that, to a much greater degree than earlier scholars imagined, the
Bavli is culturally linked to the Mediterranean world and/or is part of the
emerging but never fully realized cultural unity that was in the process
of formation in Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, and western Persia in Late
Antiquity, until the seventh-century Arab conquests, which drastically
altered the political landscape of the Middle East.9
In addition, the story of the execution of Isaiah provides us with
another stunning indication that Mesopotamian Christianity and Babylonian rabbinic Judaism are culturally linked. The fourth- or fifth-century
Syriac Christian text The Acts of Sharbil, composed in the Mesopotamian
city of Edessa,10 describes the execution of Sharbil, a recent convert from
Zoroastrianism to Christianity. Sharbil is sawed in half for the crime of
stating publicly, I am a Christian, and his punishment is also measure
for measure, since he likewise dies when the saw reaches his mouth. The
Mesopotamian Jewish and Christian accounts are clearly related, though
we do not know the direction of transmission; minimally this example
shows that the Mesopotamian Christian and Jewish communities occupied a common cultural sphere. The extent of that commonality, however,
is still impossible to gauge.
8. Robert G. Hall, The Ascension of Isaiah: Community Situation, Date, and
Place in Early Christianity, Journal of Biblical Literature 109.2 (1990): 300306;
and Jan Dochhorn, Die Ascensio Isaiae, in Judische Schriften aus hellenistischromsicher Zeit, vol. 6, pt. 1, Unterweisung in erzahlender Form, ed. G. S. Oegema
(Gutersloh, 2005), 2728.
9. Many more examples can be found in Migrating Tales.
10. See H. J. W. Drijvers, Cults and Beliefs at Edessa (Leiden, 1980), 35, 40,
43, and 181; and Susan Ashbrook Harvey, The Edessan Martyrs and Ascetic
Tradition, in V Symposium Syriacum, 1988, ed. R. Lavenant (Rome, 1990), 197.

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It is likely, furthermore, that the Babylonian rabbinic text views the

prophet Isaiah as a stand-in for Jesus, since Jesus in the New Testament
and in the early Church Fathers frequently states that his actions fulfill
words spoken by the prophet Isaiah, and Isaiahs execution in the rabbinic story is effected with the aid of a tree. The rabbinic story likewise
insists that Moses is greater than the prophet Isaiah, in contrast to the
Ascension of Isaiah and to many (most?) Christians, who insisted that
Isaiah was Mosess superior. Isaiah, more than any other biblical prophet,
was a source for verses prophesying the advent of Christ, and Christians
often interpreted words formed from the letters yod, shin, ayin, the basic
components of Isaiahs name, as references to Jesus, whose name in
Hebrew was composed of the same basic letters. And if Isaiah is greater
than Moses, how much the more so was Jesus greater than Moses?11
I have discovered surprisingly strong and persistent links between the
Bavli and nonrabbinic and even non-Jewish literature from the eastern
provinces of the Roman Empire, and impressive, but less frequent, ties
between Mesopotamian Christian and Babylonian rabbinic literature. In
the admittedly limited sample of material I have studied, I found substantially more evidence of commonality between the Bavli and nonrabbinic
and non-Jewish literature from the Roman East than between the Bavli
and contemporaneous Persian literature.12
Pitfalls abound in the use of Sasanian sources to contextualize Babylonian rabbinic culture. Bear in mind that it is not sufficient to draw attention to the existence of a parallel between Babylonian rabbinic culture
and the culture of surrounding groups: we have to make sure, given the
specific nature of our interests (the Bavli and its diverse sources), that
the parallel derives from the centuries of Sasanian Persian rule, that is,
from the third to the seventh century C.E., and not from an earlier or later
period. For example, in studies emphasizing the importance of the Persian/Bavli connection, one all too frequently hears the claim that Persian
texts composed between the ninth and eleventh centuries contain much
11. See Kalmin, Migrating Tales, 2952.
12. See also Becker, Comparative Study of Scholasticism in Late Antique
Mesopotamia, 91113; Daniel Boyarin, Hellenism in Jewish Babylonia, in The
Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, ed. C. Fonrobert and
M. Jaffee (Cambridge, 2007), 33663; and Bar Asher Siegal, Monastic Literature
and the Babylonian Talmud. Compare Yaakov Elman, Middle Persian Culture and
Babylonian Sages: Accommodation and Resistance in the Shaping of Rabbinic
Legal Tradition, in Cambridge Companion, 169225; and Shai Secunda, The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in its Sasanian Context (Philadelphia, 2014), 1128
and the literature cited in 14862.

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older material. This Persian material, so the argument goes, is therefore

useful in contextualizing the Bavli, edited during the Sasanian Persian
period, despite the fact that the Persian traditions are found in compilations edited centuries later, during the period of Muslim domination.
I am in principle sympathetic to this approach, having made the same
argument about the layered nature of the Bavli many times over the
years. Conclusions drawn on the basis of the acceptance of the layered
nature of any text, however, are at best tentative in the absence of concrete proof that the text under discussion is composite, comprising material deriving from diverse time periods.13 Too rarely, however, does one
see a serious effort in discussions of the Persian context of the Bavli to
establish the likelihood that compilations composed during the Islamic
period contain much material from the Sasanian period.
The leading proponent of the theory of the centrality of Persian culture
in contextualizing the Bavli has been Yaakov Elman. Among the many
proofs cited by Elman in support of his position is the fact that his work
focuses on legal parallels, which he believes to be particularly strong evidence of cultural contact. Robert Brody, however, makes a convincing
case that Elmans claims regarding law are exaggerated, and, furthermore, I am not convinced by Elmans claim that ties in the realm of law
are more compelling evidence of cultural contacts than are narrative parallels. Rather, it is necessary to examine each case, whether legal or narrative, on its own merits.
To briefly summarize, it is indisputable that several scholars, led by
Yaakov Elman, have pushed the field of ancient Judaism in important
new directions by examining the Bavli in its Sasanian Persian context.
And in his essay in this issue of JQR, Robert Brody has performed an
invaluable service to the field by accumulating evidence indicating that
perhaps the pendulum has swung too far in one direction. We can hope
that other scholars will further contribute to the debate, since even Brody
admits that the study of the Bavli in its Persian context has yielded
numerous valuable insights, and future studies are certain to yield many
more. At the same time, it is essential to study the Bavli from multiple
contexts, to determine whether there is something special about a connection between Persia and the Bavli, or whether a commonality between
them is symptomatic of Late Antiquity in general, or of ancient religion
east of Byzantium, or the like.

13. See, for example, Richard Kalmin, Jewish Babylonia between Persia and
Roman Palestine (Oxford, 2006), passim.

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