The essays in Part I invite us to glimpse the experiences of ambitious sub-elites operating on the margins of Roman power in the high empire (especially second to fourth centuries). Whereas recent research on the Second Sophistic has taken the experience of the Greek exile as exemplary, we highlight rabbinic examples, rereading both Roman dynamics and Christian experiences in relation to them. In the process, the essays in Part I demonstrate how attention to specific settings and stories can disrupt regnant historiographies—in this case, by recovering the place of individual ambition and localized collective bricolage in the often paradoxical...

The contrast between Christian universalism and Jewish particularism, long the bedrock of popular perception and scholarly assessment, has been satisfyingly complicated by recent work on late antique foundations. Scholars of early Christianity have pointed to the significance of ethnic categories for the construction of early Christian identities.¹ While much early Christian rhetoric does indeed claim a universalizing transcendence of conventional categories of difference, Denise Buell and others have observed that the universalist strain is accompanied by an ethnicizing one and that Christian universalist language frequently relies on notions of ethnicity even when revising them. Since Christians could not easily claim...

Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History creates the impression that the history of the early church was mainly one of struggle and conflict: first with the Jews, then with heretics, and then with Rome. While that approach is of a piece with the triumphalism of the work, part of the story gets lost along the way. That includes Christians living to the east of the empire. This is regrettable because Christian interactions with centers of power there were sometimes less fraught than those with Rome.

One such place was Edessa, a Silk Road caravan city on the frontier between the Parthian and Roman...

The centrality of the law to antique and rabbinic Judaism is a commonplace so pervasive as to seem hardly worth mentioning. Many scholars presume that the halakhic edifice of rabbinic literature grows in some measure from the seeds of Second Temple legal precedent—and in substantial content areas, we know this to be true. Others emphasize rabbinic legal innovation.¹ But what do we mean when we speak of Jewish law? Does this mean some set or sets of laws? The specific practices of a given community or the collected practices of several? Biblical law? Hermeneutics? Composition? The function of this...

Mishnah Tractate Ketubot 7.6 provides a list of practices that mark wives as transgressing what is generally rendered “the law of Moses and the Jews.”¹ The specified transgressions relate primarily to public comportment. Taking this rabbinic passage as a starting point, this essay works through a group of texts that intersect with or comment on it. Two texts in the Tosefta deploy a list of practices that overlaps verbally with that in the Mishnah, each to a different end. In those texts, lapses in women’s public comportment are explicitly sexualized, and one of the versions of the Tosefta lists makes...

In part ii, we consider Romanization in relation to Christianization (especially in the fourth to sixth centuries). Part I pointed to the potential in the triangulation of Jewish, Roman, and Christian literary evidence. In Part II, we come to challenges of correlating different perspectives. Late antique Jewish sources are ahistorical in genre and horizon; indeed, after Josephus, there are no surviving Jewish-authored works of Jewish history until the Middle Ages. By contrast, the archive for Late Antiquity is rich in Christian histories and biographies, which can often chronicle events and figures in tantalizingly concrete terms. If scholars of late antique...

A tannaitic midrash from the mid-third century, in glossing Jer 3.19—“I gave you a desirable land, the fairest heritage of all the nations”—states that “just as they used to say in Rome that any king or governor who did not acquire a residence in Rome would say, ‘I have accomplished nothing,’ so now any king or governor who did not acquire a palace or a villa in Palestine says, ‘I have accomplished nothing’ ” (SifreDeut 37). In this text, rabbinic local patriotism reverses center and periphery by praising the attractions of Palestine in the eyes of foreign landlords....

Christianity generated new sites of the articulation of the boundary between the self-styled majority (the new Christian commonwealth) and its minorities, be they pagans, Jews, barbarians, heretics, or Samaritans. The process of domesticating a newly empowered creed involved the neutralization of other creeds and of other people.¹ To graft its rituals over the rich panoply of paganism and Judaism, late ancient Christianity spawned a political discourse that set minorities apart from the rest of humanity. The vision of a universal-imperial Christianity entailed the vanquishing, or at least the silencing, of the bearers of difference.

Heterogeneity, the hallmark of Roman history,...

The burgeoning violence that marked Christian culture during the fourth century, caused primarily by internal dogmatic strife, has aroused keen scholarly interest in recent years. The efforts of scholars such as Timothy Gregory, Friedhelm Winkelmann, Richard Lim, and, later, Johannes Hahn were essentially focused on describing the phenomenon.¹ Recently, however, the scholarly gaze has shifted to the increasing manifestations of ethnic and interreligious violence from the fourth into the fifth centuries—focusing on what precipitated this great transformation in collective Christian behavior from passive resistance to zealous aggression against heretics and nonbelievers, Jews and pagans alike.²

This essay attempts to...

The decline in animal offering in antiquity is associated ordinarily with the rise of new kinds of religiosity in general and prayer in particular.¹ Indeed, a transition from blood sacrifices to verbal liturgies occurred in the first centuries of the Common Era; yet we should acknowledge that sacrifice is not the opposite of prayer and that the theological and historical divide between the two is sometimes overemphasized in modern scholarship.² In his study of late antique Hebrew liturgical poetry, Michael Swartz touched upon these issues: “One way of addressing the problem of the absence of sacrifice in a system to...

In his astonishing description of the throne of Solomon in the imperial palace at Constantinople, the Ottonian ambassador Liudprand of Cremona (ca. 922–972 CE) bears witness to the transformation of this “scriptural object” into an actual physical manifestation of the Byzantine emperor’s claim to universal rule. Court ceremonial—and the objects and technologies through which it was enacted—had long played a crucial role in sustaining imperial power in the Roman world.² The deployment of the throne of Solomon in imperial discourse, however, encapsulates the striking rise of the figure of King Solomon to prominence in Byzantine political ideology...

The essays in Part III cover the entirety of the period encompassed by the volume, as seen from the perspective of different types of data: liturgical poetry, documentary papyri, iconography and religious architecture, and polemical literature and legislation. That different genres and corpora can open different perspectives on Jewish life under Roman rule is first demonstrated by Michael Swartz, who situates the transmission of tradition and authority depicted in the mishnaic tractate Avot 1 and the liturgical piyutim for the Day of Atonement in a broader Roman context shaped by competing claims to the emblems of continuity in Hellenistic mythology...

An important component of the rabbinic ideology of Torah is the idea of a “chain of tradition” by which God taught Torah to Moses, who then passed it down through a succession of biblical and Second Temple sages to present-day rabbis. This myth is expressed most famously in chapter 1 of the Mishnah tractate Avot: “Moses received Torah at Sinai and handed it down to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, the elders to the prophets, and the prophets handed it down to the Men of the Great Assembly” (mAvot 1.1–2.16). The Mishnah goes on to quote three sayings of...

This short study relies almost exclusively on the documentary evidence contained in four documents, all written in Greek. Two of them—P.Yadin 18 and 65—were written in Arabia in 128 and 131 CE, respectively.¹ The other two—P.Nessana 18 and 20—were written in Palaestina Tertia in 537 and 558 CE, respectively.² Palaestina Tertia included at the time those parts of Arabia and Judaea that in the early second century belonged to two different Roman provinces. Indeed, all four were written under Roman rule in the area.

The early two documents record marriage settlements entered into by Jews, as...

In Late Antiquity, the Tabernacle and the Jerusalem Temple served as archetypes for both the synagogue and the church, and through the liturgies of the two institutions, new interpretations were given to the ceremonies that had taken place there. Considering the points of commonality and contrast in this parallel development, this essay will discuss the symbolic significance of the decorative schemes of synagogues and churches in the Holy Land. It attempts to define Jewish and Christian representations of the Tabernacle, Temple, and sacrificial offerings in relation to different concepts of earthly and heavenly temples, as well as the historical and...

Christianity was born in an argument over how to understand Jewish texts. While the biblical traditions referred to by Jesus of Nazareth would most likely have been in Hebrew or Aramaic, the texts and the arguments that shaped Christianity’s future were in Greek. Greek did more than make the new movement available to a wider world, both Jewish and pagan. It also made those Hellenistic Jewish texts that most mattered to the movement—the Septuagint (LXX), Paul’s letters, various early gospels—interpretively compatible with three important traditions from pagan high culture: ethnographical stereotyping, forensic rhetoric, and philosophical paideia. From these...