The Iranian Component in the Bible, Apocrypha, and Qumran: A Review of the Evidence

Winston, David

doi:10.1086/462522

Cited by 36 publications

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“…55b-56a: "Rava said: Know that this is so -a man is never shown a date palm of gold, or an elephant going through the eye of a needle." 74 Ravas statement serves as an elucidative reiteration of R. Yonatans principle that a man sees in his dreams only what he has thought. Ravas aphorism implies that a man would never dream about an elephant going through an eye of a needle, because he would never think of such a thing.…”

Section: Copyright Mohr Siebeckmentioning

confidence: 97%

Empire and Authority in Sasanian Babylonia: The Rabbis and King Shapur in Dialogue

Mokhtarian¹

2012

JSQ

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Copyright Mohr Siebeck rabbinic ideas in relation to unrabbinic ones, thereby enhancing the rabbis own prestige over against these others while simultaneously negotiating boundaries of self-identity through an "us-them" dialectic. Rabbinic texts typically do not discuss non-Jewish others with any ethnographic slant, 2 but rather employ them as characters, symbols or icons in self-reflective narratives that explicate Jewish traditions and rabbinic issues. 3 This inward tendency of course does not preclude the formative role that various historical and cultural contexts play in texts about "rabbis and others," since these texts rhetorical or ideological meanings are often informed by the non-Jewish socio-cultural systems in which they were produced. This interplay between text and context is particularly germane in dialogues in rabbinic literature between the sages and their "imperial others" in Rome and Persia, since such dialogues contain traditions and attitudes towards the imperial ruling classes who tacitly promoted their own political propaganda and religious ideologies within broader socio-cultural and political spheres of life in Roman Palestine and Sasanian Babylonia 4 to which the Jews were subject. In this article I explore these issues as they play out in three Babylonian talmudic texts that depict the sages in dialogue with a classic "Per-(2012) Empire and Authority in Sasanian Babylonia 4 This article adds to the recent increase of scholarly attention paid to the Sasanian context of the Talmud, a sub-field in rabbinics spawned largely by the research of Yaakov Elman; for a representative overview, see esp. Elman, "Middle Persian Culture and Babylonian Sages: Accommodation and Resistance in the Shaping of Rabbinic Legal Tradition," in Cambridge Companion to the Talmud, 165-97, and idem, "Talmud ii. Rabbinic Literature and Middle Persian texts," Encyclopaedia Iranica, online ed., 2010, at www.iranica.com/articles/talmud-ii, including bibliographies. For a recent collection of essays that demonstrate the diverse methods used in the field, see also Carol Bakhos and M. Rahim Shayegan, eds., The Talmud in Its Iranian Context

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