Demons in the Details: Demonic Discourse and Rabbinic Culture in Late Antique Babylonia

by Sara Ronis

The Babylonian Talmud is full of stories of demonic encounters, and it also includes many laws that attempt to regulate such encounters. In this book, Sara Ronis takes the reader on a journey across the rabbinic canon, exploring how late antique rabbis imagined, feared, and controlled demons. Ronis contextualizes the Talmud's thought within the rich cultural matrix of Sasanian Babylonia, placing rabbinic thinking in conversation with Sumerian, Akkadian, Ugaritic, Syriac Christian, Zoroastrian, and Second Temple Jewish texts about demons to delve into the interactive communal context in which the rabbis created boundaries between the human and the supernatural, and between themselves and other religious communities.  Demons in the Details  explores the wide range of ways that the rabbis participated in broader discussions about beliefs and practices with their neighbors, out of which they created a profoundly Jewish demonology.

Genres: Nonfiction, Judaism

284 pages, Hardcover

Published August 9, 2022

About the author

Sara Ronis writes about the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud and the intellectual work they did innovating new ways of being Jewish in a world without a Temple in Jerusalem. She is the author of The Demons in the Details: Demonic Discourse and Rabbinic Culture in Late Antique Babylonia (University of California Press, 2022), which explores how late antique rabbis imagined, feared, and controlled demons, within the context of the rich cultural matrix of Sasanian Babylonia. She is an associate professor of Theology at St. Mary's University in San Antonio, TX.

Reviews

[Rachel]

Demons, gremlins, golems: for many contemporary Jews, these creatures belong to the realm of fairy tales. This was not true – at least, not in the case of demons – for the ancient rabbis who lived in Babylon. In her book “Demons in the Details: Demonic Discourse and Rabbinic Culture in Late Antique Babylonia” (University of California Press), Sara Ronis, associate professor of theology at St. Mary’s University, San Antonio, TX, shows how “the Babylonian Talmud is filled with stories about rabbinic encounters with demons as well as with the laws that regulate and integrate demons into the rabbinical intellectual system.”
See the rest of my review at https://www.thereportergroup.org/past...