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Rabbi Benaya said: One should always dwell deep in mishnayot. For if he knocks, they will reveal to him-if [on the door of] study, study; if [on the door of] Aggadah, Aggadah." 1 Mishnah Avodah Zarah discusses and describes the laws pertaining to relationships between Jews and the Gentile world that they inhabit. It is also studded with narrative, dialogue and homily: approximately 20 percent of the tractate belongs to at least one of these genres. The combination of legal and non-legal material in this tractate makes the tractate a perfect starting point for any discussion of the complex relationships the rabbis had with Others around them and the laws they shaped for dealing with them and their world. Within the tractate there are three dialogue-stories between rabbis and Gentiles or between rabbis about Gentiles. These stories share various formal textual traits. First, they are dialogues. Second, they all begin with the verb shaal, which in this context has the technical mean

For centuries, the legal rate of interest in the Roman Empire was “one-hundredth”: 1 percent of the principal of the loan was added to it each month. Although Christian leaders and writers in the Greek and Latin west did not approve of this practice, Syriac-speaking Christian communities in the eastern Roman Empire incorporated the rate of “one-hundredth” into canon law, and some grounded it in a novel interpretation of the Syriac Bible. In this paper, I describe the incorporation of Roman lending norms into the framework of the Syriac church and discuss an early document that both reflects and modifies these norms: a “circular letter” of Symeon Stylites (d. 459), in which he commands that interest rates be lowered by 50 percent as a temporary act of piety. That letter is preserved in a manuscript of Symeon’s Syriac Life, found today in the British Library (Add. 14,484, fols. 130b–133b). I situate the letter within that Syriac tradition, and I offer the possibility that Justinian’s law of 528, which also lowered interest rates by 50 percent (CJ 4.32.26), might have been the result of contacts with this Syriac tradition, and specifically with Symeon’s regulation. I also examine the reception of the Roman rate of “one-hundredth” in early Christian normative sources (“lawbooks” and “canons”) from the Church of the East, in the Sasanian Empire. These Christians received the Roman norm of “one-hundredth” differently and did not incorporate Symeon’s pious reduction of the interest rate, or Justinian’s imperial legislation to the same effect.

This article is a new reading of a Hebrew letter, Oxford MS Heb.d.69(P), written on papyrus and dated tentatively by scholars to the 6th century. The article begins with a new edition of the letter, first published in 1903, its first translation into English, a discussion of its language and epistolary conventions, including layout, script, and formulary. In the letter, written by the scribe Isi, the lender Lazar describes to Jacob the borrower the history of their contract, and the former’s attempts to collect, and demands payment. I discuss the currency mentioned in this description, the terms of the loan, and the rate of interest it reflects. The article ends with a discussion of the broader usefulness of this letter for the economic and social history of Jewish provincials in Byzantine Egypt.

A foundational text in the study of Tannaitic Midrash and Halakhah, Sifre Deuteronomy 122 is a list of places where Halakhah ̔qpt scripture. This word, ̔qpt , has long been understood to mean ‘circumvent’, ‘bypass’ or ‘belie’, and the pericope has been read as a list of places where ‘Halakhah circumvents scripture’, and thus a testament to the power of the accepted tradition to override the words of the Torah. Based on documentary and linguistic evidence, this article questions the interpretation of the word ̔qpt and suggests that it means not ‘circumvent’ but rather ‘multiply’. As it does so, it also suggests a new meaning for the list, as a declaration of the limits of the Midrashic method of the Tannaitic school of Rabbi Ishmael, committed both to accepted traditions and to its more restrictive and systematic method of reading scripture.