Feasting Politics: Status, Shame, and the Late Antique Banquet

Bavli Gittin's sugya on destruction opens with a startling suggestion: Rabbi Yoḥanan claims that Rome's destruction of Jerusalem and violent response to the Bar Kokhba revolt came about through three tiny but tragic misunderstandings. When an anonymous host instructs his servant to invite a friend named Kamẓa to his feast, the servant instead brings Bar Kamẓa, his enemy—a mistake that sparks a disastrous chain of events that culminates in the destruction of the Temple. When the master finds the wrong man dining at his banquet, he refuses to play host to his enemy and throws Bar Kamẓa out of the feast. Seething with the shame of this public indignity, Bar Kamẓa resolves to turn informer, reports to Rome that the Jews are rebelling against the emperor, and then frames the Jews for sedition to provoke Caesar into an assault on Jerusalem. Bar Kamẓa prompts Caesar to send the Jews a calf to sacrifice as a test of their loyalty, but deliberately maims the animal so that it cannot be sacrificed according to rabbinic halakhah. As they are torn between the conflicting demands of appeasing the ruling kingdom and acting according to their own interpretation of the law, the rabbis' inaction provokes Rome's ire:

The Bavli's story dramatizes the far-reaching consequences of a mistaken banquet invitation. But while the feast is a critical element in the tale, the rabbinic account provides little discussion of the meal itself: food matters socially, not as sustenance.Footnote ⁴ The banquet serves as a space to contest the host's lavish generosity and portray the intense danger of public shame.

In the coveted social circles of late antiquity, banquets helped shape elites' awareness of their own cultured nobility, singling out the illustrious few from the plebian masses. Situating the narrative within elite Roman and Sasanian feasting practices illuminates the way the Bar Kamẓa story uses the visible space of the feast to communicate complex dynamics of friendship, loyalty, and hatred.Footnote ⁵ In elite Roman and Sasanian circles, banquets afforded hosts a privileged opportunity to display their largess and demonstrate their esteem for their invited guests. Hosting an elaborate banquet was a central strategy for representing oneself as a generous, urbane man.Footnote ⁶ Public generosity granted the host considerable power and generated social debt—at least until guests had the opportunity to reciprocate.Footnote ⁷ Analyzing the talmudic narrative in this context highlights the cultural significance of public feasting and heightens the significance of Bar Kamẓa's mistaken invitation. By inviting the wrong man to his master's banquet, the servant inadvertently forges a social bond between the host and his enemy. When the host sees Bar Kamẓa at the feast, he refuses to tolerate his enemy's presence. The host's abrupt command, “Get up and go!” reasserts control over the social space of the feast. But Bar Kamẓa resists. Threatened with public humiliation and facing the prospect of eviction from the coveted social space of the banquet, Bar Kamẓa negotiates for a chance to stay at the table. “Since I have come,” he says, “let me stay.” He offers to compensate the host for his own food and drink, thus relieving the host of the need to cover the cost of his own plate. When that offer is rejected, Bar Kamẓa offers to pay half the host's expenses and then to pay for the entire feast. But the host rejects Bar Kamẓa's bid, refusing to allow Bar Kamẓa to play generous provider to the other man's guests. Through the escalating negotiations, the Bavli reveals Bar Kamẓa's increasing desperation—his willingness to pay any price to avoid the stigma of forcible expulsion from the feast.

Many studies of rabbinic society have focused on the profound fear of shame within the intense study-house culture of rabbinic Babylonia.Footnote ⁸ Yet in elite late antique culture, banquets also evoked powerful fears about public shame. The cultural power of a banquet had a double edge: while elites could gain prestige through public attendance at the feast of a powerful patron, they also suffered scrutiny and risked considerable potential for shame. Public feasts made plain the realities of social status: guests' relative status was visible and on display through complex seating and serving hierarchies.Footnote ⁹ Classicist John D'Arms notes the widespread presence of Roman banquet anxieties in Roman sources, especially the fear of ridicule by the host or a more powerful guest. “At some banquets,” D'Arms writes, “feelings of inferior status left guests convinced that they had been placed under sinister surveillance [convivarum censura, in Seneca's phrase] by their hosts or by powerful members of their hosts' households; in effect, they felt themselves transformed from watchers to watched.”Footnote ¹⁰ Roman and Sasanian royals even used banquets to administer public punishment. After the late sixth-century Sasanian ruler Kosrow II regained his throne from a usurper, he brought the defeated general to a royal banquet in chains, to display his mutilated body before the jeers and mockery of guests, and then publically executed him. Another ruler, Kavadh I, rebuked a general for his failures on the battlefield by stripping him of his sash and other marks of favor at a royal banquet. Banquets were a potent space for expressing power through the use of public shame.Footnote ¹¹

Sabotage and Sacrifice: The Perils of Imperial Generosity

Upon his ejection from the banquet, Bar Kamẓa expresses immediate and vehement anger—not at the host, but at the rabbis who failed to intervene on his behalf. As Jeffery Rubenstein notes, the talmudic narrative includes no mention of rabbinic presence at the Bar Kamẓa banquet.Footnote ¹² Ironically, Bar Kamẓa's words evoke rabbinic authority in order to condemn the rabbis' inaction. His remark serves to rabbinize the story, bringing the elite banquet into the orbit of rabbinic culture and introducing a rabbinic presence in what originally appeared to be a nonrabbinic feast.Footnote ¹³ Bar Kamẓa's anger highlights the heightened stakes of rabbinic authority. It reveals the dramatic consequences of the original moment of rabbinic silence—and the rabbis' failure to respond decisively once Bar Kamẓa presents them with the sacrificial calf. Through this vivid portrayal of the terrible price of rabbinic inaction, the rabbis shoulder responsibility for the devastation that follows. In the rabbis' own accounting, their piety, prestige, and communal leadership obligate them to an exacting standard of behavior. Their flaws are magnified; their failures bear bitter fruit.Footnote ¹⁴

Because the rabbis did not protest his treatment, Bar Kamẓa resolves to inform upon them before the Roman emperor. The Bavli uses an idiomatic expression to describe the act of turning informer, describing Bar Kamẓa as going to “eat destruction” at the house of the king.Footnote ¹⁵ Denied satisfaction at the Jewish banquet, he aims to dine, at least symbolically, at the emperor's table.Footnote ¹⁶ But Bar Kamẓa not only partakes of imperial largess, he manipulates it. Once he shifts his allegiance to Rome, he persuades Caesar to send a barbed “gift” to his erstwhile compatriots, a calf for sacrifice that will serve as a test of Jewish loyalty to Rome. By convincing Caesar to send the Jews an animal for sacrifice, Bar Kamẓa accentuates long-standing tensions over Jewish loyalty that were expressed through the symbolic performance of sacrifice. Though many Roman subjects made sacrifices to the reigning Roman emperor, Jews were generally allowed to make a sacrifice to the God of Israel on the emperor's behalf—a complex negotiation of loyalties that aimed to allow Jews to express the exclusivity of their religious commitments, while still demonstrating political allegiance to Rome.Footnote ¹⁷ Because the rituals of sacrifice were sites of complex and contested political and theological meanings, sacrifice was often a flashpoint for controversy and revolt.Footnote ¹⁸ Bar Kamẓa forces the rabbis to accommodate Caesar's dangerous gift. Imperial generosity entangles the Jewish community in the fraught politics of sacrifice—and exposes them to the spurned emperor's deadly rage.

Patronage and Conspicuous Provision: Food, Famine, and Generosity in Wartime

Vespasian's siege of Jerusalem initiates the second cluster of food narratives in the Bavli Gittin sugya, which dramatize the political significance of food in the context of war. In the Roman world, famine was a deliberate strategy of war, not simply an inadvertent side effect of conflict.Footnote ¹⁹ Ancient accounts of cities under siege provide vivid portrayals of famine, often using depictions of cannibalism to dramatize the horrors and inhumanity of life within.Footnote ²⁰ The Bavli's discussion of Vespasian's siege highlights the political causes of famine, heightening the drama of the disaster by emphasizing that starvation was not inevitable:

In this scene, Bavli Gittin recounts how three wealthy men give provisions abundant enough to sustain Jerusalem for twenty-one years.Footnote ²² Unlike the anonymous host who refuses Bar Kamẓa a place at his table and thereby initiates the destruction of Jerusalem, this scene highlights three wealthy men whose patronage (could have) sustained Jerusalem.

The symbolic names of the three men exemplify aspects of idealized patronage: abundant generosity, great wealth, powerful social connections, and an intimacy with God that can bring about miraculous rescue. Ben Kalba Savuʿa satisfies everyone who enters his home, even though they arrive as ravenous as starving dogs. Unlike the anonymous host, Ben Kalba Savuʿa guarantees that all his guests leave satisfied. Ben Ẓiẓit Hakeset has powerful connections with Rome—his “seat” (keset) can be found among the Roman elite and his ẓiẓit dangle from his seat-cushion, visible markers of Jewish identity. In contrast to Bar Kamẓa, who breaks with the Jewish community in order to affiliate with Rome, Ben Ẓiẓit Hakeset maintains the ability to engage with Rome and remain loyal to Jerusalem. Nakdimon's name recalls a rain miracle which allows him to provide for festival pilgrims during a time of intense drought. While the Bavli Gittin narrative does not retell the full story of Nakdimon's name, the sugya references a talmudic legend that recounts Nakdimon's prowess as a bountiful provider and a man whose great intimacy with God allows him to call forth miracles.Footnote ²³ Yet despite their exemplary gifts and powerful connections, Jerusalem's patrons prove unable to protect the city. Famine occurs because “rebellious thugs” burn these gifts in a disastrous attempt to compel the people of Jerusalem to rise up and fight against the Roman army. Jerusalem starves because of rebels who refuse the rabbis' suggestion to negotiate peace, not because of the Roman siege and not because of God. The tragedy of famine becomes even more acute because of its political, profoundly human cause.

Marta bat Boethus: The Tragedy of Women in Famine

The next scene in the sugya contrasts the profound but ultimately fruitless generosity of three patrons of Jerusalem with the frivolous selfishness of Marta bat Boethus, a wealthy woman who starves to death on the streets of Jerusalem. Marta was a well-known figure for rabbinic audiences; several rabbinic texts mention her by name, always in the context of sumptuous wealth. In the tannaitic corpus, Marta bat Boethus appears as a paradigmatic example of a rich widow,Footnote ²⁴ as the wife of the high priest Joshua ben Gamla,Footnote ²⁵ and as the mother of two priests who brought private sacrifices to the Temple in a particularly distinctive manner that showcased their wealth and status.Footnote ²⁶ In later rabbinic texts, however, Marta appears primarily as a symbol of tragedy—exemplifying the dire straits that befall wealthy women in the midst of disaster. Bavli Gittin's Marta tale is one of many rabbinic stories that recount the poverty of once-illustrious daughters and use their desperate circumstances to exemplify the tragedy of destruction.Footnote ²⁷

Bavli Gittin recounts the tragic story of the last days of Marta bat Boethus, fashioning her into a symbol of pathos that embodies the misery and suffering of ruined Jerusalem:

The Bavli characterizes Marta as a frivolous and selfish aristocrat, a woman who refuses to moderate her high-class tastes even in times of crisis.Footnote ²⁹ Marta's request for “finest flour” stands out as a culturally significant claim of elite status, reflecting a common Mediterranean preference for white bread as a mark of high status.Footnote ³⁰ Rabbinic sources suggest that barley bread had particularly strong class associations—commonly treating it as food fit only for animals and for the poorest of the poor.Footnote ³¹ Through intensely patterned language that dramatizes the exchange between Marta and her agent over the declining quality of bread, the Bavli highlights Marta's unwillingness to relinquish her high-class status. She holds out for the richest food her agent can find and thereby forfeits her opportunity to purchase anything at all.

When Marta resolves to go out and search herself, the narrative emphasizes her elite “delicate” sensibilities, portraying her as physically unable to endure the harsh reality of besieged Jerusalem. Marta takes off her shoes—thereby fulfilling the curse articulated in Deuteronomy 28:56, which describes the downfall of a woman so tender and dainty that she would never let her bare feet touch the ground.Footnote ³² Other rabbinic texts use a similar association between wealthy women and protected feet to portray Marta as the ultimate aristocrat. Eikhah Rabbah describes Marta going to see her husband, the high priest, on the day of Yom Kippur.Footnote ³³ Even on the Day of Atonement, when one might expect an embrace of asceticism, Marta walks along carpets that were laid from the door of her house to the Temple, so that her feet never touch the ground. Bavli Gittin inverts this image of “pampered feet” to portray Marta's tragic end. Until the destruction of Jerusalem, Marta never exposes her bare, tender toes.

By taking off her shoes, Marta enters into a direct encounter with the misery of Jerusalem. According to one version of the story, she dies from the shock of stepping into excrement. Within rabbinic narrative, the association between once-wealthy daughters and dung dramatizes the bitter change in the circumstances of these aristocratic women. In Bavli Ketubot 66b–67a, for example, Rabbi Yoḥanan ben Zakkai laments seeing the daughter of Nakdimon ben Gurion scavenge barley from the dung in horses' hooves. When she sees him, she covers herself up with her hair and begs for food—a narrative the Bavli uses to teach the importance of charity and to rebuke Nakdimon ben Gurion for not giving away enough of his fortune.Footnote ³⁴ But unlike the more common motif of women who search for grains in dung, Bavli Gittin's Marta does not scavenge. Instead, the Bavli uses the excrement to highlight her delicacy and helplessness, emphasizing her inability to forage for food. She expires before she can seek out the nourishment that might be hidden in the midst of offal. Her tender flesh cannot withstand an unmediated encounter with feces on the streets of Jerusalem.

In the second version of her death, Marta does forage—attempting to sustain herself on the cast-off figs that Rabbi Ẓadok used to sustain himself during his lengthy fast, when he sought to prevent the destruction of Jerusalem. Marta and Ẓadok experience profoundly different perceptions of crisis: Marta is the pinnacle of unknowing, the woman whose obliviousness to the siege propels her into an arrogant, ignominious death. Ẓadok is the ultimate visionary, the one who fasted for forty years in anticipation of the crisis, long before others recognized the danger.Footnote ³⁵ Their divergent responses to the figs reveal a stark contrast between a rabbi fasting and a wealthy woman starving. Rabbinic fasts make deliberate use of a voluntarily weakened body to make visible the implicit threat of famine—revealing an awareness of human vulnerability and human culpability in the face of crisis.Footnote ³⁶ Rabbi Ẓadok's fasts script the looming catastrophe onto his flesh, rendering his body transparent; as the Bavli recounts, everything that goes inside him is visible from the outside. Despite the fast, his body remains profoundly resilient. Like many pious rabbinic rabbis and wonder-workers, Rabbi Ẓadok proves able to survive on meager nourishment.Footnote ³⁷ While his body is weakened, his ability to undertake the rigors of a forty-year fast signals a profound spiritual and physical discipline.Footnote ³⁸ While Rabbi Ẓadok is revivified by the juice of a few figs, Marta dies trying to draw sustenance from his husks.Footnote ³⁹ By contrast, the Bavli portrays Marta as highly sensitive—a vulnerable body that cannot bear contact with the grim reality of besieged Jerusalem. Marta's delicacy becomes her death sentence.

Frivolity and Danger: Women's Wealth in Bavli Gittin's Narrative of Destruction

Marta's story stands within a long history of representing crisis through womanhood, a tradition in which visual and textual images of women's bodies become icons of disaster.Footnote ⁴⁰ Marta's glorious wealth provides a backdrop against which the Bavli can narrate her spectacular fall. Anthony Saldarini suggests that the Babylonian Talmud uses Marta as a paradigm for the suffering and death among all Jerusalem's residents, positioning her as an extreme case that highlights the horror of the destruction. In Saldarini's view, Marta's wealth dramatizes the profundity of the crisis, revealing how the destruction brings suffering to all people, regardless of wealth.Footnote ⁴¹ Marta's story clearly underscores a theological premise that wealth will not save a person from suffering. The narrative concludes with a sharp denunciation of wealth via the evocation of Ezekiel 7:19, and Marta's final words explicitly proclaim the uselessness of her riches. But the Bavli portrays Marta's wealth in a particularly negative light, contrasting Marta's frivolity with the generosity of Jerusalem's patrons and emphasizing the way in which her own destruction came about because she failed to use her wealth well.

While Marta's final days are narrated in the context of famine, the Bavli emphasizes that the cause of her own death lies in her foolish unwillingness to relinquish her high-class desires. Marta begins the story in a position of considerable power, issuing precise instructions to her agent, setting the terms of her own purchase, and employing an agent to insulate herself from the risks of the market.Footnote ⁴² But as the tale unfolds, the Bavli strips her of agency, neutralizing the utility of her wealth. By emphasizing the foolishness of her instructions, the Bavli positions Marta as the architect of her own doom. Had she used her wealth judiciously at the start of the crisis or instructed her agent to purchase whatever food he could find, Marta might have escaped disaster. While Marta began the tale as a woman who does not need to go out because she has a servant to shop on her behalf, she becomes a woman who should not go out because she cannot survive on her own. The discourse of women's risk binds women's possibilities. Marta's death on the streets of Jerusalem reinscribes images of female dependency and vulnerability, underscoring the harsh costs that upper-class women pay when they are exposed to danger.

Through Marta's tale, the sugya crafts a striking contrast between a wealthy woman's frivolity and the patronage of three aristocratic men who seek to sustain Jerusalem. While each of these figures use wealth in a way that ultimately proves ineffective, the three men make a credible effort to deploy their riches for the good of the community. They provide consumable gifts of grain, oil, wine, and wood—with the Bavli quick to point out that “the rabbis praised the wood” as necessary for feeding the people. Patronage is not out of the question for Marta; wealthy women did serve as patrons in late antiquity. Josephus portrays Queen Helene of Adiabene as a major patron of Jerusalem, recounting how she sent her servants out to secure grain from Alexandria and figs from Cyprus in order to relieve a bitter famine.Footnote ⁴³ Bernadette Brooten has also demonstrated that women made significant financial contributions to Jewish synagogues, serving as patrons of Jewish religious life and community.Footnote ⁴⁴ But the Bavli situates Marta as the antithesis of patronage, contrasting her elite desire for securing her own luxurious bread with the generous giving of the men who sustained Jerusalem. Her wealth brings no benefit to the city or its populace. When she relinquishes her riches at the end of the tale, she throws silver and gold in the street. Even this final act of renunciation has no charitable purpose. With the bread gone from the market, what profit will her coins bring?

The Dangers of Privilege: Wealth, Servitude, and Unknowing in Bavli Gittin

Through the narrative of Marta bat Boethus, Bavli Gittin crystallizes a discourse of wealth as a physical and moral danger. By closing the tale with reference to Ezekiel 7:19, the Bavli uses Marta as fulfillment of a verse that prophesies a situation in which people will throw their silver into the streets, recognizing that wealth will neither save them from God's wrath nor fill their hungry bellies. But Ezekiel 7:19 does not simply condemn the uselessness of wealth, it situates wealth as an active source of danger: the people's riches “caused them to stumble into guilt.” By deploying this verse to conclude the Marta tale, Bavli Gittin emphasizes a link between wealth and moral danger. In purely sociological terms, the Bavli's connection between riches and risk is profoundly counterintuitive. Access to wealth provides immense material protection from the threat of famine. Poverty is a central factor in determining a person's likelihood of death through famine, and ancient sources testify to the disproportionate risks that disaster and famine bring to people living in poverty.Footnote ⁴⁵ But the sugya's representation of the relationship between the master or mistress and the lower-status men who serve them reveals a critical awareness of the “risks” of economic dominance—and may shed oblique light on the corrosive power of systems of servitude and slavery.Footnote ⁴⁶

Low-status, subordinate men play a critical role in driving the plot of the sugya. The Bar Kamẓa tale begins by attributing the destruction of the Temple to a servant's mistake, describing the disastrous chain of events that unfold when the host's servant (shamaʿeh) fetches his master's enemy instead of his friend. While the narrative gaze never returns to the servant's error, the entire plot is set in motion by his failure to follow precisely the master's instructions. In the Marta narrative, Bavli Gittin inverts the man's character flaw. As the tale recounts the obsessive back-and-forth from Marta's home to the market, the sugya places at least partial blame on the hyper-punctiliousness of her agent (shaluḥah). As Jeffrey Rubenstein notes, the confusion between Kamẓa and Bar Kamẓa stems from a servant's minute but disastrous deviation in his instructions—but Marta's death rests in part on her agent's unwillingness to compromise his charge.Footnote ⁴⁷

Marta's reliance on an agent also plays a critical role in fostering her own disastrous ignorance of besieged Jerusalem. Not only does extravagant wealth diminish Marta's physical capacity to grapple with the gritty realities of famine and war, her patrician status insulates her from an awareness of suffering in the streets of Jerusalem. While the Bavli makes no explicit critique of Marta's reliance upon an agent, the narrative dynamics suggest that her use of the agent veils her own awareness of the urgency of famine. Marta's use of the agent keeps her in the dark, obscures the realities of famine, and fosters the tragic obliviousness that leads to her downfall. By accentuating the perils of wealth and the dangers that high status poses to elites, the Bavli diverts attention from the risks born by the underclass. In the talmudic narrative, Marta's agent goes for her into the gritty streets of Jerusalem—the streets that proved toxic to Marta's tender flesh. Her agent bears the risk of this encounter, a danger that goes entirely unspoken by the text. This silence likely stems from the rabbis' intensely gendered discourse about women and danger in the marketplace.Footnote ⁴⁸ Yet it also underscores a common tendency to overlook the ways that slavery, servitude, and other economically stratified labor systems force subordinates to bear risk by exposing lower-class bodies to danger.Footnote ⁴⁹

Celebration and Oblivion: Feasting and Slaughter on the King's Mountain

Later in the sugya, the Bavli once again uses a feast narrative to draw critical attention to issues of opulence, danger, and oblivion to catastrophe. The story begins by evoking Rabbi Yoḥanan's original teaching that blames the destruction of Tur Malka (King's Mountain) on a rooster and a hen, once again recounting how a set of seemingly minor misunderstandings lead to disaster:

According to the Tur Malka story, Jewish custom calls for communities to parade a rooster and a hen before a bride and groom on their wedding day to bring the new couple fertility. In the midst of this celebration, a troop of Roman soldiers snatch up the birds. The Jewish wedding guests mob the soldiers, who report to Caesar that the Jews are rebelling against imperial authority. Like the Bar Kamẓa story that began the sugya, the Tur Malka narrative rests on a critical misunderstanding: the soldiers believe the Jews are rising up in revolt, but Jewish violence is actually a spontaneous response to the soldiers' desecration of a Jewish wedding custom. As with the rabbis' original refusal to sacrifice the blemished animal, the Bavli once again emphasizes that Roman elites see rebellion where none is intended. By framing the destruction as resulting from a tragic or foolish misunderstanding, the sugya provides what David Kraemer calls “a remarkably naturalistic explanation for the subsequent destructions.”Footnote ⁵¹

While Roman power is evident in both the destruction of the Temple and the brutal massacre on Tur Malka, the sugya also highlights Roman ignorance and the Roman emperor's vulnerability to misinformation. The Bar Kamẓa tale begins with a feast where a Jewish man is shamed by another Jew, turns informer, and then crafts an elaborate hoax with a blemished sacrifice that leads Caesar to think the Jews are rebelling against him. Caesar is vulnerable to Bar Kamẓa's machinations because he does not know the intricacies of Jewish sacrificial law or because he is duped by a treacherous informer. Set up by Bar Kamẓa's sabotage, Caesar regards the rabbis' unwillingness to sacrifice as an act of defiance and launches an unnecessary military campaign against the Jews. In the Tur Malka story, the feast is the final straw—not the first. Inverting the motif of the Jewish informer, the Tur Malka assault is first set in motion by Roman informants who give poor counsel because they fail to recognize their own culpability for causing violence. The soldiers' ignorance of Jewish customs leads them to mistake a wedding mob for an actual Jewish revolt and prompts another needless military action that nearly results in Caesar's destruction. Once again, subordinate men lead elites into error.

The narrative telescopes the conflict between Rome and the Jews to an engagement between two men: Bar Droma, the Jewish hero whose physical prowess allows him to kill the Roman forces; and Caesar, who pleads with God to avoid being subjected to the hand of this one man. The Bavli's account links Caesar's ultimate victory with his humble stance before God, while connecting Bar Droma's downfall with his blasphemous claim (via Psalm 60:12) that God has rejected the people of Israel and does not march with their armies. The Bavli describes Bar Droma's brutal and ignominious end, narrating how a snake came upon him while he was in the privy and tore out his intestines. Caesar interprets Bar Droma's death as a miracle performed on his behalf and decides to leave the Jews alone.Footnote ⁵² When Caesar withdraws, the Jews rejoice with a great feast—and the opulence of their celebration prompts Caesar to return and annihilate them. Through this image of the provocative feast, the Tur Malka story again dramatizes the dangerous repercussions of a banquet, linking the elaborate display of wealth with destructive emotions of anger or shame.

The final lines of the Tur Malka tale give haunting voice to the revelers' ignorance of the disaster unfolding just beyond their borders. Caught up in the extravagant celebration, half the people of Tur Malka feast in the midst of disaster—unaware of the brutal violence Caesar deploys on the other side of the mountain. With its description of the lavish lights that mark this feast, the Bavli once again emphasizes that wealth obscures the realities of war, famine, and crisis. The Bavli pays particular attention to the extravagance of the Jewish victory banquet, describing how “they ate and they drank and they lit lamps so abundant that the seal of a signet ring” could be seen at a great distance. Though the lights of the feast illuminate the seal by which an elite man might mark his identity, the same lamps veil the brutalities of suffering. Despite (or perhaps because of) those glorious torches with their exuberant light, nothing illuminates the murders beyond their sight lines. With their attention fixated on the luxuries of the feast, the partygoers never glimpse the violence on the other side of the mountain.

Through its tales of feasting and famine, Bavli Gittin's sugya on destruction calls attention to the ethical cost of elite status—highlighting the physical and moral dangers of social privilege. In the story of Bar Kamẓa, the Bavli casts a critical eye on the social politics of elite banquets, dramatizing how a host and guest's personal intrigues over status and shame endanger an entire community. By linking Bar Kamẓa's treachery with the public humiliation of his expulsion from the feast, the sugya casts negative light on the great lengths to which elites might go to preserve their own status or avenge its loss. Seething with the indignity of his exclusion from the host's banquet, Bar Kamẓa aligns himself with Roman power and turns informer for a taste of the emperor's bread. In the story of Marta bat Boethus, the Bavli portrays the tragic downfall of an aristocratic woman as a consequence of her foolish unwillingness to forgo her taste for luxury. By linking Marta's wealth with frivolous desire in the midst of crisis, the sugya suggests that social privilege insulates her from the reality of suffering, leaving her unable to accurately perceive the gravity of the situation. While the Bavli uses the Marta tale to articulate a gendered critique of elite women's frivolity that contrasts sharply with the generous provision of wealthy male patrons and visionary fasting rabbis, the sugya's final feasting tale extends the Bavli's concern more broadly to encompass the moral danger of extravagance. Through the tale of Tur Malka, the Bavli intertwines opulence with oblivion: the bright lights that illuminate the lavish feast black out the violence on the other side of the mountain, leaving the revelers unable to see the cost of luxury.