In her most recent project on Christianity in the Talmud, Michal Bar-Asher Siegal presents us with several layers of interlocking arguments—some of which resonate with her earlier work on the topic and some of which move far beyond previous claims.

At the broadest level, Jewish-Christian Dialogues on Scripture in Late Antiquity is a compelling contribution to the wide-ranging body of recent research that has sought to demonstrate that the Babylonian Talmud cannot be fully understood when read in isolation from intellectual and ritual trends in neighboring late antique communities. To this end, the book is structured as an extended contextual analysis of four talmudic dialogues between minim (translated in this volume as “heretics”) and rabbinic figures that are almost literally incomprehensible when read in isolation. As stand-alone vignettes, these interactions are so succinct as to be virtually unintelligible and “the heretic's argument looks at first sight a silly one,” to the point that it “makes one wonder what the point of these passages may be” (177).

Bar-Asher Siegal argues that these telegraphic passages can be illuminated by reconstructing the “hermeneutical dilemmas” posed as various authors grapple with a shared “interpretive matrix”—a matrix that often encompasses not only novel Jewish and Christian exegetical motifs but also the reception history of Second Temple traditions (141). In the fourth chapter of the monograph, coauthored with Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal, for instance, Bar-Asher Siegal argues that a B. Berakhot 10a dialogue between a min and Beruriah leverages a complex interpretive history (in which the term בעולה was rendered “virgin,” “barren,” or both simultaneously) to craft a pair of punning competitive exegeses in which a Christian and rabbinic interlocutor each argue for “the superiority of their religious group” (142).

In these contextual analyses, as elsewhere in the volume, Bar-Asher Siegal does not claim to identify direct genealogical echoes of any specific Christian orthodoxy or text but rather seeks to “identify contemporaneous ideas expressed in Christian sources and argue for rabbinic engagement with these ideas” (3). Thus, while the fourth chapter suggests that “Paul's words in the Epistle to the Galatians [4:21–31], and its later interpretations, are an example of an allegorical reading of [the term בעולה] in Isaiah 54:1 in late antique Jewish-Christian polemic” similar to that presented in B. Berakhot 10a, she assures us that “one need not imagine … the rabbis studied Paul's epistle” but rather that B. Berakhot 10a merely “suggests knowledge of a tradition similar to the one that appears in Paul's epistle” (139).

Thus far, Jewish-Christian Dialogues on Scripture in Late Antiquity differs methodologically from Bar-Asher Siegal's previous work only in subtle ways. This facet of the project seems to represent a direct continuation of the work she and collaborators have sought to encourage in a recent two-part special issue of the Jewish Studies Quarterly, which offers “a new look at the Talmud and Christianity” that seeks to “synergize important recent developments in the study of rabbinic Judaism” concerning “how closely both Talmuds respectively reflect the early Byzantine and Sasanian culture in which they evolved.”Footnote ¹ Many readers will also find the search for echoes and parallels in these two bodies of literature resonates with the method that they appreciated in Bar-Asher Siegal's first monograph, Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2013), although they will find that the body of Christian literature under consideration has expanded West in her more recent work, as the field of Jewish studies as a whole has increasingly acknowledged that “the cultural world in which the Talmud was created was far more connected to Western sources” (40) than previously acknowledged.

But where Early Christian Monastic Literature sought to reveal a shared cultural matrix with Christian sources in “Talmudic passages that bore no signs of overt literary connection to Christianity” (106), Jewish-Christian Dialogues looks to texts that “call our attention to the contact” and “place arguments with Christianity in broad daylight” (107). Indeed, the very question of whether these texts are explicit confrontations with Christianity represents the second layer of argument that structures the volume. For while the identity of the min in rabbinic literature has been hotly debated for more than a century, Bar-Asher Siegal argues at length in chapter 2 that the figure of the Christian min can be reliably identified in many rabbinic stories by stereotypical structures such as an exegetical claim about a biblical verse that is easily refuted by reference to the end of the verse (68) and by a semantic field shared with Second Temple and New Testament sources in which terms such as req/reqa (empty) and shaṭya/shoṭe (fool) “insinuat[e] one's opponents’ views are heretical” and particularly that “the target misunderstands scripture” (64).

The third claim that structures the work is the boldest and might be best identified as the overarching thesis of the work. Bar-Asher Siegal argues that these fictional Jewish-Christian dialogues are “literary creations rooted in historical realities” not of “historical Jewish-Christian polemic” but of “internal Christian discussions” (22). These literary debates between fictional Christians and Jews are thus read as the product of “rabbis looking at the biblical and theological discussions in the Christian world and imagining how they might participate in the conversation” (22). In chapter 3, for instance, the dialogue on B. Ḥullin 87a is read as weighing in on a fourth-century Trinitarian controversy in which Amos 4:13 was used “to prove the creation of the Holy Spirit and deny its divinity” (75) so that “the heretic advocates a reading of the verse that supports the creation of the Holy Spirit, and the end result is the ability of Rabbi to pull the rug from underneath one of the sides in the wider, non-Jewish discussion” (86). To produce such imaginary interventions in inner-Christian debates represents a more rarified form of heresiology, Bar-Asher Siegal argues, because instead of serving a boundary-marking function between rabbi and Christian writ large, it offers a “nuanced description of the relationship between rabbinic and some Christian views, and the recognition that some are enemies to the rabbinic position, but others may not be” (104).

A fourth and final layer of argument emerges from the use of sources in the book. On more than one occasion, Bar-Asher Siegal suggests that “the Septuagint's version of the biblical text … stand[s] in the background of the creation of the Talmudic passage” (159). Thus, in chapter 5, she argues that “b. ‘Eruvin 101a should be read in light of the Septuagint's version of Micah 7:4” and we should “read the rabbinic story as a depiction of this knowledge as a conflict between rabbi and a heretic over the interpretation of this verse for a very specific reason” (158–59). While the path of transmission remains uncharted, this allusion to Septuagint variants is a striking exception to the volume's broad avoidance of offering specific genealogies for particular motifs.

In light of ongoing contention in the subfield concerning many of the methodological questions taken on by Bar-Asher Siegal in this book, the complex and layered nature of this work productively allows a reader to suck the nectar on the issues on which she is willing to be convinced without having to accept all of the available arguments in order to do so. The chapters are constructed as continuous arguments, but not winner-take-all propositions. Each chapter is so richly layered with sources and claims that it is entirely possible to withhold judgment on some facet of the chapter and come away convinced on other matters.