Jewish-Christian Dialogues on Scripture in Late Antiquity: Heretic Narratives of the Babylonian Talmud

by Michal Bar-Asher Siegal

Stories portraying heretics ('minim') in rabbinic literature are a central site of rabbinic engagement with the 'other'. These stories typically involve a conflict over the interpretation of a biblical verse in which the rabbinic figure emerges victorious in the face of a challenge presented by the heretic. In this book, Michal Bar-Asher Siegal focuses on heretic narratives of the Babylonian Talmud that share a common literary structure, strong polemical language and the formula, 'Fool, look to the end of the verse'. She marshals previously untapped Christian materials to arrive at new interpretations of familiar texts and illuminate the complex relationship between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity. Bar-Asher Siegal argues that these Talmudic literary creations must be seen as part of a boundary-creating discourse that clearly distinguishes the rabbinic position from that of contemporaneous Christians and adds to a growing understanding of the rabbinic authors' familiarity with Christian traditions.

Genres: Judaism

236 pages, Hardcover

Published June 27, 2019

Reviews

[Scott Birnbaum · Rating 5 out of 5]

brilliant scholarship and lucid prose

Unlike many academics who are so wedded to the jargon of their field and indifferent to clear writing, Prof. Bar-Asher Siegal marshals her innovative arguments with refreshing clarity and the occasional sly wit. My only cavil is with the Kindle version of the monograph which scrambled every line of Hebrew and Aramaic text rendering them nearly a puzzle to decipher (no doubt a function of right-to-left block quotations in an otherwise left-to-right book).