Having just published a book on Jews in the Sasanian Empire () and as I work on a chapter for my next book on the 614 episode, it seems worth emphasizing to "Slow Boring" hosts & friends that rushing to wiki for facile historical curios ain't the way.

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https://x.com/Simcha_Gross/status/1778801786549067778

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1779467910882136266

What happened in 614 is mired in serious debate, not bc we lack evidence – it's relatively ample – but bc it is unclear how to interpret that evidence

Horowitz's masterful survey shows how historians projected their presuppositions/biases/fantasies:

2jstor.org/stable/4467519

This 🧵 demonstrates the importance of key methodological trends in the past few decades that reconsider traditional narratives based on naive reliance on literary sources, & in particular, on Josephus Flavius, allowing for more textured, multicausal, & critical accounts.

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https://twitter.com/nonregemesse/status/1680147597518880768

The 🧵 is based around the account of Josephus, an elite Judean who liked to play up his importance both as a rebel & then as a member of the imperial entourage. Among his works are those defending himself from accusations of dishonesty.
He was controversial in his own lifetime!

In honor of Passover, which is just a few days away:

A fascinating recently published (2014) ostracon from Umm Balad, Egypt, dated to 96 CE, may tell us something about accommodations made by the Romans to a group of Jewish soldiers or workers.

1/ The ostracon was found in a site in which Roman troops appear to have overseen a local mining operation. It is one of 31 ostraca sent by Turrianius.

In this one, he refers to a quantity of what seems to be wheat to send to Jews.

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It is the middle of the festival of booths, or Sukkot.

The festival has 2 main practices associated with it: the building of a booth/Sukkah, & the shaking of four species (citron, palm, myrtle, & willow).

How did these become the main practices of the holiday?

Long🧵
1/25 In Exodus 23, the festival is called “the feast of ingathering (חג האסף)." It is an agricultural festival.

At this time, one was to “appear” before God, in some kind of pilgrimage, though God does not appear to be located in any single place.

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Thrilled that my article "Playing with Persecution: Parallel Jewish and Christian Memories of Late Antiquity in Early Islamic Iraq" was just published in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies!

A 🧵 on its main claims.

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journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/72… The article compares two early post-Islamic authors: the Syriac Christian John of Fenek (late 7th) and the Jewish Pirqoi ben Baboi (8th-early 9th).

It shows how both authors appealed to the late antique past in order to maintain intramural boundaries in the present.

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In 1601, Queen Elizabeth I learned that the steward of the Earl of Essex commissioned Shakespeare’s theatre company, the Chamberlain’s Men, to perform Richard II. Given the Earl’s well-known seditious intentions, the queen famously responded:“I am Richard II. Know ye not that?”
1 As Francis Bacon explained in his treatise indicting the Earl of Essex for treason, the Earl’s steward supported the production “to satisfy his eyes with the sight of that Tragedy, which he thought soon his Lord should bring from the Stage to the State.”

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The world of Jewish Studies, and especially the study of Rabbinic literature, lost a giant this week in Rabbi Dr. David Weiss Halivni.

An appreciation 🧵on his pathbreaking work on the Babylonian Talmud, & how the field has developed in light of & in response to his work.

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https://twitter.com/NLIsrael/status/1542449015241015297

Halivni's work, in content & form, bridged the traditional rabbinic commentarial tradition and scholarly methods.

He embodied traditional learning at its highest levels, possessing total-recall of the Talmud, and he taught at JTS & Columbia before moving to Israel.

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Gender separation at the Western Wall is again imposed by those brandishing "Tradition".

These neglect that when the temple stood, women entered it, & following its destruction, gender partitioning in prayer halls was not the norm, & women held positions of leadership.

🧵 1/15 Women regularly entered the Temple, of which the Western Wall is but an outer retaining wall.

Josephus says that both men & women could enter the outer courtyard, but only men could enter the more inner court. Both were on the temple mound, well past the Western Wall.

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Four manichaean Syriac script incantation bowls have nearly identical incantations invoking the legal & divorcing powers of Rabbi Joshua ben Perahya, a rabbi named in the Mishnah, identified in the Babylonian Talmud as Jesus' master, & regularly invoked in Jewish bowls.

1/6 One such bowl reads: Prepared is this bowl for the sealing of the house..of ḥwrmyzdwkt daughter of dwtʾy..The lot I cast & I take, magical act that was performed like when Rav Joshua bar Peraḥya sat (in court) & wrote against all of them a bill of divorce, demons & devils..."

In honor of Christmas, let's acknowledge what is the best attested Jewish sermon delivered during the life of Jesus..,

I am of course referring to the Sermon on the Mount, delivered by Jesus himself.

A 🧵 on the Sermon on the Mount (SotM) in its 1st century Jewish context.
1/13 The SotM is not a critique of "Judaism". It is a prescriptive articulation of a particular approach to Jewish practice.

Jesus is explicit: "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them." He means it!

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On the last day of Hanukkah, let's talk about the end of the Hasmonean dynasty.

This is typically dated to the end of the 1st BCE.

Herod married the Hasmonean Mariamne, had two children with her, but would come to kill all three.

Thus ended the dynasty.

Or did it...?

🧵1/13 In the 1st BCE, the Hasmonean dynasty devolved into deadly struggles for power.

Hyrcanus II is deposed by his younger brother Aristobulus II.

Hyrcanus, in turn, allied with the Nabataeans and with Antipater the Idumeaen, Herod the Great's father, to defeat his brother.

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In Jewish tradition, Hanukkah is most often associated with the victory of the Hasmoneans over the Seleucids.

Yet starting in the medieval period, another figure, not mentioned in the 2 books of Maccabees or any earlier Jewish works, is associated with Hanukkah: Judith!

🧵 1/13 The book of Judith is undoubtedly fictional.

Set in the first temple period, the chronology & geography are wonky, & the text explicitly refers to the destruction of the first temple and the return thereafter.

It's a later work set in the biblical past.

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Hanukkah is typically commemorated as a "clash of cultures".

It represents the battle between a clearly defined and largely monolithic "Judaism" against a clearly defined and largely monolithic "Hellenism".

This narrative is increasingly problematized in scholarship.

🧵 1/20 The Hasmonean revolt represents a standard example of changing historical methods.

Where earlier scholars largely accepted the literary sources - in this case 1 and 2 Maccabees - at face value, scholars are now highly sensitive to the ideologies and agendas that inform them.

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As Hanukkah begins this evening, a note on a fascinating scholarly discussion worth following.

It involves this magnificent mosaic panel discovered in a synagogue in Huqoq.

Upon discovery, many suggested that it is our earliest Jewish depiction of the events of Hanukkah.

🧵1 After all, the panel includes war motifs, elephants, men in Greek dress, what seems to be a family with a patriarch at its head!

Unfortunately, the interpretation does not quite perfectly account for all of the mosaic's details. For instance, Mattathias did not have 8 sons!

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Communities living in the Tigris-Euphrates basin faced periodic changes. One of these was the shifting courses of the rivers, the result of sedimentation/erosion & manmade efforts.

These changes had legal & economic ramifications & were imbued with spiritual significance.

🧵1/7 Sometimes rivers shifted when empires or locals altered the canal system, central to irrigation.

The Babylonian Talmud (Gittin 60b) reports a dispute caused by a town altering a canal to improve irrigation, thereby depleting water supply for others. A rabbi resolved the dispute.

Before the empire's Christianization, the local coins of Apamea in Phrygia, minted over the course of 5 emperors between the late 2nd-mid 3rd centuries, depict a surprising motif: the story of Noah's ark.

What is this story of Noah doing on these city coins at this time?

🧵
1/9 The coins depict 2 scenes: Noah & his wife in a square ark, with Noah's name in Greek on the ark, and then the 2 figures outside of the ark making the orans prayer gesture. There is a dove with olive branch above them. The obverse contains the image & name of the current emperor.

Jews used many surfaces to write incantations in late antiquity.

Two of the more well known & preserved kinds are earthenware bowls & metal amulets. In Babylonia, we only have evidence of the former.

However, other surfaces were used, like skulls and eggshells! 💀🥚

🧵 1/9 Five Jewish Babylonian Aramaic skull incantations are currently known, both male and female.

They have all been expertly examined and published by Dan Levene here:

academia.edu/3692177/Levene….

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The term "Talmudic" is used to label something as overly technical or focused on irrelevant details.

It problematically distorts the fascinating and, to our eyes, unusual text that is the Talmud (& indeed, both Talmuds!).

And it buttresses harmful stereotypes about Jews.

🧵

https://twitter.com/RaffiMagarik/status/1405736164884103168

Yes, the Talmud is dialectically intricate. It can ask questions akin to how many angels fit on the head of a needle (wait, that was christian..).

It drills into minutia, jumps between topics, does not differentiate clearly between law, narrative, medical recipes & much more.

Thrilled that the 1st piece I ever submitted is out at last!

It deconstructs the composition history of a Syriac martyr act of a Jewish boy who converts to Christianity, & what it teaches about the transmission of knowledge, scribal creativity, & the formation of a genre.

🧵 The article focuses on the History of the Slave of Christ (HoSoC). It stars Asher, a Jewish boy, who converts to Xtianity, changes his name to Slave of Christ, & is killed by his father on the Sabbath.

Aaron Butts & I published an edition, translation, & intro to this text.

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The festival of Shavuot/Pentecost begins tonight.

Nowadays, it commemorates the giving of the Torah and the Sinaitic revelation.

But like many other Jewish festivals, this is the product of a lengthy history of change and development.

Thread 🧵

1/9 In the bible, Pentecost is an agricultural festival with sacrificial rites.

The biblical names for the festival make this clear: Harvest Festival (Ex. 23:16) Festival of Weeks (Ex. 34:22; Deut. 16:10 - commemorating the agricultural count), and Day of First Fruits (Num. 28:26).

In light of the tragedy on Thursday night at the pilgrimage to Mount Meron in the Galilee, a 🧵about the site.

Today the pilgrimage is to the tomb of Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai, held on the 33rd day of the Omer count.

Like many sites/festivals, it has transformed over time.

1/11 While there are occasional refs to Jewish holy sites in antiquity, they become very prevalent in the middle ages, in conjunction with a similar rise in holy sites/pilgrimage in Islamic & Christian sources.

At this point, a substantial genre of Jewish travelogues develops.

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