Table Of ContentThe Archaeology and Material Culture of the Babylonian Talmud
IJS STUDIES IN JUDAICA
Conference Proceedings of the
Institute of Jewish Studies,
University College London
General Editors
Markham J. Geller
Ada Rapoport-Albert
François Guesnet
VOLUME 16
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ijs
The Archaeology and Material
Culture of the Babylonian Talmud
Edited by
Markham J. Geller
In memory of Joe Turner, who believed in ץרא ךרד םע הרות
LEIDEN | BOSTON
The archaeology and material culture of the Babylonian Talmud / edited by Markham J. Geller.
pages cm. — (IJS studies in Judaica, ISSN 1570–1581 ; volume 16)
Conference proceedings of the Institute of Jewish Studies, University College London.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-30488-8 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-30489-5 (e-book : alk. paper)
1. Judaism—History—Talmudic period, 10-425—Congresses. 2. Jews—Iraq—Babylonia—History—
Congresses. 3. Excavations (Archaeology)—Israel—Congresses. 4. Talmud—Evidences, authority, etc.—
Congresses. 5. Talmud—Criticism, interpretation, etc.—Congresses. I. Geller, Markham J., editor.
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
The Contributors viii
Introduction: The Archaeology and Material Culture
of the Babylonian Talmud 1
Markham J. Geller
1 The Land behind Ctesiphon: The Archaeology of Babylonia during the
Period of the Babylonian Talmud 6
St John Simpson
2 “Recycling Economies, When Efficient, are by Their Nature Invisible.”
A First Century Jewish Recycling Economy 39
Matthew Ponting and Dan Levene
3 The Cedar in Jewish Antiquity 66
Michael Stone
4 Since When Do Women Go to Miqveh? Archaeological and Rabbinic
Evidence 83
Tal Ilan
5 Rabbis in Incantation Bowls 97
Shaul Shaked
6 Divorcing a Demon: Incantation Bowls and BT Giṭṭin 85b 121
Siam Bhayro
7 Lilith’s Hair and Ashmedai’s Horns: Incantation Bowl Imagery
in the Light of Talmudic Descriptions 133
Naama Vilozny
8 The Material World of Babylonia as Seen from Roman Palestine: Some
Preliminary Observations 153
Yaron Z. Eliav
vi contents
9 Travel between Palestine and Mesopotamia during the Hellenistic and
Roman Periods: A Preliminary Study 186
Getzel Cohen (z’’l)
10 Shopping in Ctesiphon: A Lesson in Sasanian Commercial
Practice 225
Yaakov Elman
11 Substance and Fruit in the Sasanian Law of Property and the
Babylonian Talmud 245
Maria Macuch
12 Rabbinic, Christian, and Local Calendars in Late Antique Babylonia:
Influence and Shared Culture 260
Sacha Stern
13 ‘Manasseh Sawed Isaiah with a Saw of Wood:’ An Ancient Legend
in Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Persian Sources 289
Richard Kalmin
14 Biblical ‘Archaeology’ and Babylonian Rabbis: On the Self-Image
of Jews in Sasanian Babylonia 319
Isaiah Gafni
15 Loanwords in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic: Some Preliminary
Observations 333
Theodore Kwasman
16 The Gymnasium at Babylon and Jerusalem 387
Markham J. Geller and D.T. Potts
Index 397
Acknowledgements
The papers in the present volume were originally given as lectures at an
Institute of Jewish Studies Conference at UCL on ‘Talmudic Archaeology’,
22–24 June, 2009. The conference was supported by a gift from David and Aron
Turner in memory of their father, Joe Turner of London (Mordechai Yoseph
Ben Reb Moshe Yitzchak) who was a passionate believer in ץרא ךרד םע הרות.
Special mention must be made of the passing of our friend and colleague,
Getzel Cohen (z”l), who passed away before he could see the fruit of his labours.
The index was prepared by Tanja Hidde.
The Contributors
Siam Bhayro
Ph.D. (2000) in Semitic languages from University College London, is Senior
Lecturer in Early Jewish Studies in the Department of Theology and Religion,
University of Exeter, having previously worked at Cambridge, Sheffield,
University College London, and Yale. His research interests include the Bible,
Semitic languages, early Judaism, medicine in the Christian and Islamic orient,
and Jewish magic.
Getzel M. Cohen (z’’l)
was Professor of Classics and History at the University of Cincinnati. He was also
Director of the Tytus Visiting Scholars Program at the University of Cincinnati
and Director of the Institute for Mediterranean Studies. Prof. Cohen was the
Assistant Director of the University of Cincinnati Archaeological Excavation
on Kea, 1982–2005 and Founding Director of the University of Cincinnati
Archaeological Excavation at Troy, 1987–2003 (with Tübingen University). His
publications include The Seleucid Colonies (Wiesbaden, 1978); The Hellenistic
Settlements in Europe, the Islands and Asia Minor (Berkeley, 1995); The
Hellenistic Settlements in Syria, the Red Sea Basin and North Africa (Berkeley,
2006); The Hellenistic Settlements in the East from Armenia and Mesopotamia to
Bactria and India (Berkeley, 2013).
Yaron Eliav
is Associate Professor of Rabbinic literature and Jewish history of late antiquity
at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of God’s Mountain:
The Temple Mount in Time, Space, and Memory (Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2005; soft-cover 2008) and co-editor of various volumes including The
Sculptural Environment of the Roman Near East: Reflections on Culture, Ideology,
and Power (Leuven, 2008).
Yaakov Elman
holds the Herbert S. and Naomi Denenberg Chair in Talmudic Studies at Yeshiva
University. His interests and research range over various eras of rabbinic intel-
lectual history, from Talmudic times onward, and he has published dozens of
studies on particular facets of that history. His attention is now focused on
the influence of Zoroastrian and Middle Persian culture on the Babylonian
Talmud, of which the study in this volume is part.
The Contributors ix
Isaiah Gafni
holds the Sol Rosenbloom Chair of Jewish History at the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem. His interests focus primarily on Jews and Judaism in post-
biblical antiquity, and include Judaea and the Diaspora in the Hellenistic and
Roman Periods as well as Talmudic Babylonia. His books include The Jews of
Babylonia in the Talmudic Era—A Social and Cultural History (Jerusalem, 1990
[Hebrew]), and Land, Center and Diaspora—Jewish Constructs in Late Antiquity
(Sheffield, 1997).
Markham J. Geller
is Director of the Institute of the Institute of Jewish Studies, University College
London, and currently on secondment to the Freie Universität Berlin as
Professor für Wissensgeschichte.
Tal Ilan
is professor of Jewish Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. She studied
and wrote her PhD at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. She is interested in
onomastics of ancient Judaism, Talmud and gender. She heads the project
A Feminist Commentary on the Babylonian Talmud, of which 7 volumes have
been published to date, first among them her commentary on Taanit (FCBT
II/9; 2008). Among her major publications are her PhD, Jewish Women in
Greco-Roman Palestine (1995); Mine and Yours are Hers: Retrieving Women’s
History from Rabbinic Literature (1997); Integrating Women into Second Temple
History (1999); Silencing the Queen (2006); A Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late
Antiquity (4 volumes; 2002–2012).
Richard Kalmin
holds the Theodore R. Racoosin Chair of Rabbinic Literature at the Jewish
Theological Seminary, where he has taught since 1982. His publications
include Jewish Babylonia between Persia and Roman Palestine (Oxford, 2006),
Sages, Stories, Authors, and Editors in Rabbinic Babylonia (Atlanta, 1994), and
Migrating Tales: The Talmud’s Narratives and their Historical Context (University
of California Press, 2014). He has been a visiting professor at Hebrew Union
College, Union Theological Seminary, and Yale University, and a faculty fel-
low at the University of Michigan and the Institute of Advanced Studies at the
Hebrew University.
Theodore Kwasman
recently retired as Professor in the Martin-Buber-Institut für Judaistik,
Universität Köln.
x the contributors
Dan Levene
is Reader in Jewish History and Culture in the Department of History and
the Parkes Institute for the study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations of the
University of Southampton. His research interests include late antique Jewish
magic, Semitic languages, oriental and Ethiopian Orthodox Christianities and
archaeometallurgy.
Maria Macuch
has been Professor of Iranian Studies and head of the Institut für Iranistik of
the Freie Universität Berlin since 1995. She has been editor of the Series Iranica
since 1993, a member of the Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum since 2007 and
honorary member of the Ancient India and Iran Trust (Cambridge) since 2012.
Her main area of research is Iran in the pre-Islamic period, including lan-
guages, religion and literature with special focus on the Zoroastrian/Sasanian
legal system and its impact on other legal cultures, especially Christian, Jewish
and Islamic law.
Matthew Ponting
is Senior Lecturer in Archaeological Materials in the Department of
Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology at the University of Liverpool. His main
research interests are Roman silver coinage and the copper-alloys of the
Classical and early medieval periods in the Near East. He has just completed
work on a joint publication with Kevin Butcher, The Metallurgy of Roman Silver
Coinage: from the Reform of Nero to the Reform of Trajan, to be published by
Cambridge University Press in 2015.
D.T. Potts
is Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology and History at the Institute
for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University. He is a specialist in the
archaeology and early history of Iran, Mesopotamia and the Arabian peninsula
and has excavated widely in the region. His most recent book is Nomadism in
Iran: from Antiquity to the Modern Era (Oxford, 2014).
Shaul Shaked
is Schwarzmann University Professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem. He is currently working on magic texts in Hebrew and Aramaic in
Late Antiquity, Zoroastrianism, Early Judaeo-Persian texts. Recent publica-
tions include (with Joseph Naveh), Aramaic Documents from Ancient Bactria
(London, 2012); (with James Nathan Ford and Siam Bhayro) Aramaic Bowl
Spells. Jewish Aramaic Bowls, vol. 1 (Leiden & Boston, 2013).
