In his recent book, Seth Schwartz explores “[t]he tension between egalitarian solidarity and competitive reciprocity” in the late Second Temple period and in rabbinic Judaism.Footnote 1 As Schwartz's characterization of reciprocity implies, it stands at odds with egalitarianism because exchange, outside the boundaries of the market, is ordinarily structured by asymmetry, and thus by the hierarchical relationships of patronage and dependence.Footnote 2 For Schwartz, Judaism's “natural” proclivity, at least as enshrined in the Torah, is toward egalitarian solidarity. To obviate the need for the “dependence-generating gift,” the Torah mandates wealth transfer to the poor through charitable donation (leaving unharvested the corner of one's field, etc.). Charity, unlike the gift, does not generate the obligation to reciprocate: “[t]he pauper, like the priest, is meant to feel no gratitude—at least not toward the donor.”Footnote 3 Given this innate preference for solidarity, the problem for late antique Judaism in a patronage-dominated Mediterranean society lay specifically in “how to come to terms, Jewishly, with the practical inevitability of social institutions founded on reciprocal exchange.”Footnote 4
Taking a cue from Schwartz, this essay identifies and analyzes two oppositions in rabbinic discourse that rest upon and complicate the relationship between reciprocal exchange and charity. The first, to which the first part of the essay is devoted, has roots in Esth 9:22, which characterizes the festival of Purim as “an occasion for sending gifts to one another (
) and presents to the poor (
)” (njps). The opposition between these two kinds of conveyance on Purim plays a vanishingly small role in the rabbinic imaginaire, but provides a useful entry point into our topic precisely because of its small scale, and because it so clearly distinguishes reciprocal exchange and charity. This first part of the essay draws on sources from the Babylonian Talmud.
The second and longer part of the essay focuses on Palestinian, chiefly Tannaitic sources. It centers on the opposition, native to rabbinic literature itself, between 
(charity) and 
(literally “reciprocation of kindness,” but henceforth, due to the absence of a precise, idiomatic translation equivalent, GH). The thesis of this part is that the category of GH rhetorically draws standard Mediterranean modes of reciprocal exchange into the orbit of charity, and thus blunts their tendency to produce and consolidate social distinctions. The rhetoric of GH thus counts among the strategies that rabbinic Judaism employed to, in Schwartz's words, “come to terms, Jewishly,” with the institutions of reciprocal exchange with which it was, as part of a Mediterranean society, inextricably entwined.
Purim Transfers
Esther 9:22, partially reproduced above, distinguishes between two transfers in connection with the feast of Purim. Individuals send
to one another, and 
to the poor. The words 
and 
appear to be carefully chosen. In other biblical books, the 
is shared with one's family (1 Sam 1:4–5: sons, daughters, wives) or with an honored guest (1 Sam 9:23), while the 
is not so much shared as relinquished, whether to descendants (e.g., Gen 25:6), or, more commonly, to God or to God's priestly representative (e.g., Exod 28:38).Footnote 5
The description of the Purim feast in Esth 9:22 may be compared to Deut 16:11, according to which the celebrant at a pilgrimage festival should rejoice with “your son and daughter, your male and female slave, the Levite in your communities, and the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow in your midst” (njps). The list in Deut 16:11 incorporates the celebrant's household and the needy into a single, undifferentiated list. By contrast, Esth 9:22 categorically demarcates the household or social circle from the poor. Whether the difference between Deut 16:11 and Esth 9:22 speaks to a social or theological change from the Deuteronomic to the Persian context is unimportant here. What matters for our analysis is that Esth 9:22 bequeathed to rabbinic interpreters a transparent distinction between reciprocal exchange and charity.Footnote 6
The category of 
is mentioned only in one context in the Palestinian Talmud, and in a related discussion in the Babylonian Talmud, both to be analyzed below. The Bavli's discussion includes only one statement with any legal content, and the Yerushalmi's, none. By contrast, laws governing the collection and distribution of funds to the poor occur in the Mishnah (m. Meg. 1:3–4) and in the Tosefta (t. Meg. 1:4–5), as well as in the talmudic commentary thereon. The rabbis’ relative lack of interest in 
likely reflects its reciprocal character. Compared to charity, it belongs more to the social than to the legal realm.
The following is the one case in the Palestinian Talmud where 
occurs: 
R. Yudan the patriarch sent one thigh and one bottle of wine to R. Hoshaya the great. He sent to him, saying: You have fulfilled through us, “and presents to the poor” (Esth 9:22). He then sent him one calf and one jar of wine. He sent to him, saying: You have fulfilled through us, “and sending gifts to one another” (ibid.).Footnote 7
R. Yudan at first sends R. Hoshaya a meager Purim meal. R. Hoshaya needles him by characterizing it as “presents to the poor.” R. Yudan then sends a far more substantial meal, and R. Hoshaya credits him as having genuinely fulfilled the commandment of 
. This interchange should possibly be grouped with sources wherein rabbis and preachers critique R. Yudan's eagerness to accept or exact gifts from Jews.Footnote 8 Here, too, he seems to come across as overly attached to lucre.
Whatever the socio-political subtext, R. Hoshaya's remarks manipulate the boundary between 
and 
. The two categories are in any case close. Both describe transfers in connection with the Purim feast. A baraita reported by R. Yosef in the Bavli (b. Meg. 7a) defines 
as “two gifts to one person” and 
as “two presents to two people,” but there is no evidence that this baraita was known in Palestine, and the baraita itself, while preserving the distinction between 
and 
, ignores (at least rhetorically) that between 
and 
, and instead takes “people” (
) as the recipients of both transfers.Footnote 9 One source on the collection and distribution of funds for the poor on Purim (t. Meg. 1:5) suggests that, at least in some circles, the poor were provided directly with food.
The Purim collection is (exclusively) for Purim…. They are not particular about the Purim collection. Rather they take calves and they slaughter them and they eat them, and let there be no surplus that falls to the charity box.Footnote 10 R. Eliezer says: The poor man should not make of the Purim collection a lace for his sandal.
The pericope envisions the poor receiving their charity in the form of calf flesh (and its hide, from which, as R. Eliezer foresees, a poor recipient might wish to make a lace), precisely the fare that R. Yudan conveys to R. Hoshaya. R. Hoshaya fashions a rhetorical barb out of the thin line separating 
and 
. A meager gift is no gift at all, but charity, and, insofar as it constructs the recipient as poor, an insult. While the conferral of gifts in any context reflects and constructs status differentiation, Purim multiplies the semiotic permutations by juxtaposing reciprocal exchange and charity.
In the Bavli, the story of R. Yudan and R. Hoshaya occurs immediately after R. Yosef's baraita (b. Meg. 7a–b).Footnote 11 This story is followed by another that varies the setting—it occurs in Babylonia rather than Palestine—but likewise features a Purim exchange marred by accusations of impropriety.Footnote 12
Rabba sent to Mari bar Mar through Abbaye a basketful of qashba dates and a cupful of flour of roasted ears of grain. Said Abbaye: Now [Mari] will say, if a field worker should become a king, the basket is not lowered from his neck. Then that one sent a basketful of ginger and a cupful of long pepper. Said Abbaye: Now the master will say, I sent him sweet food and he sent me pungent food.
Rabba has by now become “king” (i.e., has ascended to the leadership of the Pumbedita yeshivah [b. Ber. 64a]). But he remains poor; b. Mo‘ed Qaṭ 28a reports that the bread in his home was of coarse flour, and even that was in short supply. Mari bar Mar, in contrast, is wealthy.Footnote 13 While this story does not rely, at least explicitly, on the proximity of 
and 
, it does portray the exchange of food on Purim as a site for the display and negotiation of status. What is particularly striking about the story is Abbaye's role. The barbs by Rabba and Mari do not in fact issue directly from them, but from the go-between, Abbaye, Rabba's disciple. His socialization into Babylonian rabbinic culture is reflected in his ability to “author” this status struggle.
On Seth Schwartz's account, Judaism in the Mediterranean world favored charity over reciprocity insofar as the latter, but not the former, occasions indebtedness of a kind that strains bonds of solidarity. The above discussion allows us to nuance this account of the relationship between charity and reciprocity, for it suggests that the very presence of charity (here, 
) as an alternative to reciprocity (
) can magnify the social tension implicit in reciprocal exchange. To give what the receiver perceives as too little is to treat the receiver like a pauper. It is difficult to say whether this effect is an important one in the rabbinic context, and whether the status conflict in the above exchange (constructed by Abbaye) between Rabba and Mari owes something to the implicit presence of charity as the alternative to reciprocal exchange on Purim. In any case, the Purim context sharply distinguishes charity and reciprocity as categories. In the next section, we turn to a very different, indeed almost an inverse permutation of the relationship between these two modes of transfer. I will argue that the categories of 
(GH) and 
correspond, in certain ways, to reciprocity and charity, respectively, but that in other ways, rabbinic texts construct GH in such a way that it blurs the line between reciprocity and charity, and thus reduces or neutralizes the socially divisive aspects of reciprocal exchange.
and
and 
The categories of charity (
) and GH (
) occur together in t. Pe’ah 4:19.Footnote 14
Charity and GH weigh as much as all the commandments in the Torah. But charity extends only to the living, and GH to the living and the dead;Footnote 15 charity to the poor, and GH to the poor and the rich; charity to one's money, and GH to one's money and one's body.
The grouping of charity with GH suggests that they are fundamentally similar. Charity might be understood, in the context of t. Pe’ah 4:19, as a species of GH. But insofar as GH is broader than charity, and, in particular, extends beyond assistance to the poor, it must rest on a distinctive theoretical basis. The discussion below surveys the representation of GH in other rabbinic texts with the ultimate aim of discerning its theoretical basis, and the nature of its relationship with charity.
What t. Pe’ah 4:19 pointedly elides in its statement of the differences between charity and GH is that the category of GH, unlike charity, often occurs within the framework of social reciprocity. I will take up the import of this elision below, after presenting evidence for the association between GH and reciprocity. Perhaps the clearest evidence for this association comes from m. B. Bat. 9:4.
Brothers, of whom some supplied wedding gifts in their father's lifetime—when the wedding gifts are reciprocated, they fall to all, because wedding gifts may be claimed in court. But one who sends his friend jars of wine or jars of oil, they may not be claimed in court, because they are GH.Footnote 16
This pericope contrasts GH with “wedding gifts” (
).Footnote 17 Wedding gifts—or at least, wedding gifts provided by one serving in the capacity of 
—must by law be reciprocated. Hence, one who provides such wedding gifts acquires a credit, one that he may bequeath to his children. But gifts conveyed outside the contours of this institution—presumably, whether for a wedding or otherwise—do not generate a legal debt; they are merely GH. The very need to distinguish GH from 
in this context indicates that GH too, unlike charity, gives rise to at least a social expectation of reciprocation.Footnote 18 This implication is reinforced by the occurrence immediately before and after the above text of two other typical manifestations of the economy of reciprocal exchange: euergetic expenditure and meal contributions.Footnote 19
Another pericope, t. Šeb. 7:9 (Lieberman ed., 1:196), brings both of the above comparates, charity and wedding gifts, to bear upon GH.
From the produce of the sabbatical year and from the second tithe alike, one may not repay a debt or an obligation, and one may not reciprocate beneficence (
), and one may not redeem captives, and one may not make of them wedding gifts, and one may not allocate charity from them. But one may send from them something of GH—but one must inform (the recipient of its status)—and one may give (from) it to a city councilor as a gratuity.Footnote 20
GH, on the evidence of the second half of the pericope (“But one may send from them something of GH”), is not obligatory in the same sense as or to the same degree that charity is; thus one may use the growth of the sabbatical year or the second tithe to fund GH, but not charity. The first half of the pericope confirms the connection between GH and reciprocation. If the expectation of reciprocation with respect to GH (
, rendered above with the words “reciprocate beneficence”) is not quite as strong as that associated with 
(so that, per m. B. Bat. 9:4, it does not give rise to an enforceable legal claim), it nevertheless remains robust enough that one may not use sabbatical year produce or the second tithe to satisfy this expectation.Footnote 21
That GH carries the expectation of reciprocation is further confirmed by the fact that rabbinic (primarily tannaitic) literature employs a different term to describe a conveyance with no strings attached: 
(“a free gift”). The free gift is contrasted with debt repayment in m. Šeb. 8:5, in a context closely connected to the above passage from t. Šeb. 7:9. The Tosefta's commentary on the notion of the free gift (t. ‘Abod. Zar. 3:14) is especially relevant.
And one sells to [Gentiles], but one does not give them free gifts. Concerning what is this said? Concerning a Gentile whom one does not know, or who was passing from one place to another. But if he was his neighbor or friend, lo, this is permissible, for it is like selling it to him.Footnote 22
The prohibition against giving Gentiles free gifts—traced in the continuation to Deut 7:2—is here restricted to a Gentile stranger, or a Gentile whom one will likely not encounter again. One may give a free gift to a Gentile friend or neighbor, because such a gift is not really free, for the recipient will inevitably reciprocate. This passage thus suggests that the truly free gift is an exceptional, almost artificial thing. In practical terms, the Tosefta, by narrowing the prohibition of Deut 7:2 to strangers and passersby, prevents it from interfering with the integration of Gentiles into rabbinic Jews’ reciprocation-based social networks.
Reciprocity occurs in connection with GH again in Gen. Rab. 38:3 (Theodor-Albeck, ed., 352), where R. Yoḥanan declares that if one “receives” (
) one's friend with lentils, and the other reciprocates with a meal comprised of meat, the second is still indebted to the first, because “he bestowed beneficence upon you (
) first.” This text's association of GH with hospitality echoes in an extended passage from Cant. Rab. ad Cant 2:5 where a group of rabbis, having enjoyed the shelter and hospitality of the inhabitants of Usha in their flight from persecution, bless them seriatim upon their departure. The rabbis emphasize especially the Ushans’ cheerful provision of food. Most pertinent is the valedictory of R. Shimon b. Yoḥai, in which he adverts to the woman of Zarephath (1 Kgs 17). The latter receives the reward of resurrection for her hospitality to Elijah even though the food that she provides him comes from his own miraculous intervention.
But because she received him cheerfully and served him, she merited to have her son revived. And you, our brothers, people of Usha, bestowers of beneficence (
), how much more so!Footnote 23
Hospitality as a locus of social reciprocation occurs, in a form especially familiar from the context of Roman patronage, in m. Beṣah 5:7 and the corresponding pericope in the Tosefta, t. Beṣah 4:10 (Lieberman, ed., 2.303). These texts speak of guests leaving the host's home with 
, or portions of food, the precise equivalent of the sportula. The Latin word literally signifies the little basket into which the food was placed, and this basket, too, occurs in the Tosefta, under the name 
.Footnote 24
While the manifestations of reciprocity that surround GH in the above texts reflect most immediately their Greco-Roman context, their origin lies deeper, in the very etymology of the root 
in biblical Hebrew. The root can signify any sort of action to the benefit or detriment of another, but it typically carries the connotation of interchange, or of a background relationship between the actor and the acted-upon, against which the immediate action acquires meaning. It is for this reason that the word gemul serves so regularly as the object of 
in the hiphil, “to turn back,” and 
in the piel, “to recompense.” The reciprocal aspect of the economy of 
becomes especially explicit in Obad 1:15: “As you did, so shall it be done to you; your conduct shall be requited (
)” (njps). The cognate verb in Akkadian, gamālu, can carry the sense of “to come to an agreement,” and the bēl gimilli is one who owes another a favor.Footnote 25 In like fashion, rabbinic law expresses concern about 
, individuals who game the halakhic system by performing (illicit) favors for each other.Footnote 26
If, in the above cases, GH describes the transfer of tangible goods in ordinary contexts of social reciprocity, more often in rabbinic literature, it refers to benevolent acts in the context of misfortune, and especially care of the dead. While this element of GH receives far greater attention in amoraic than in tannaitic literature, it is almost certainly implicit in t. Pe’ah 4:19, not only because this pericope imagines GH as extending to the dead and to the body, but also because it deems GH the equivalent of all the commandments. Such high praise for GH presumably envisions a category that encompasses more than mere hospitality and reciprocal gift-giving. Care of the dead, together with visiting the sick, occurs in connection with GH in a tannaitic source, an account of right conduct occasioned by Exod 18:20, where Jethro articulates his vision of Moses’ role as conduit between God and the people.
R. Eleazar of Modiin said: “And you shall inform them”: inform them of their life. “The way”: this is visiting the sick. “They should walk”: this is burial of the dead.Footnote 27 “In it”: this is GH. “And the deed”: this is the legal course. “That they should do”: this is beyond the legal course.Footnote 28
In light of t. Pe’ah 4:19, the Bavli's assumption (b. B. Meṣi‘a 30b) that visiting the sick and burying the dead are not different from GH, but rather instantiations thereof, should probably be understood to represent R. Eleazar's genuine intent.Footnote 29 Visiting the sick is elsewhere rarely identified, in so many words, as a species of GH, but a baraita cited in b. Ned. 39b, 
(there is no measure to visiting the sick), appears to depend on a tradition attested in m. Pe’ah 1:1 and t. Pe’ah 1:1, where the absence of measure is predicated of GH.Footnote 30
The association of GH as a category with care of the dead is much closer, to the point that 
(to bestow beneficence) upon someone can occur in amoraic sources as a metonym for attending on the deceased.Footnote 31 So, for example, Gen 23:10, which has Efron address “all the comers of his city's gate” (
), is interpreted thus by R. Pinḥas in Gen. Rab. 58:7 (Theodor-Albeck ed., 626):
This teaches that they locked all their doors and went to bestow beneficence upon Sarah.Footnote 32
“To bestow beneficence upon Sarah” is to make an appearance at her burial. Likewise, Ishmael is praised (Gen. Rab. 62 [Theodor-Albeck, ed., 677]) for having traveled from the very ends of the wilderness “to bestow beneficence upon his father” (
) upon the latter's death.Footnote 33 The paradigmatic quality of care of the dead for the category of GH is possibly also reflected in the tradition that attributes the institution of the fourth and final blessing of the grace after meals, the blessing identified in one tannaitic source (Mek. R. Ish. Pisḥa 16 [Horovitz-Rabin, ed., 60]) as 
(“who has bestowed upon us all good”) to the occasion of the burial of the Bethar dead.Footnote 34
There is a structural analogy between, on the one hand, the close connection between the category of GH and attendance on the dead, and, on the other, the preoccupation of contemporary Roman collegia with burial and commemoration of deceased members. While Mommsen's proposal that certain collegia devoted themselves exclusively to funerary functions finds little support today, such functions were nevertheless sometimes their raison d’être and in most cases their central preoccupation.Footnote 35 These collegia supported “an empire-wide rise in the ‘standard of dying’ during the first three centuries AD,” of which the rhetoric of GH in the above rabbinic texts seems to constitute a manifestation.Footnote 36 The same expectation of reciprocation that drives the burial practices of the collegia occurs in Gen. Rab. 96:3 (Theodor-Albeck, ed., 1237).
R. Meir said in the name of R. Akiva: What is meant by “[for this is the end of every person,] and a living one should take it to heart” (Eccl 7:2)? Do, that they may do. Eulogize, that they may eulogize. Accompany [the bier], that they may accompany. Bestow beneficence (
), that beneficence may be bestowed upon you.Footnote 37
It is unclear whether the engine of reciprocation is social—either in the context of a formal institution like a collegium (though this is less likely), or through informal social networks—or theological, via divine reward. As I will suggest below, precisely this ambiguity is characteristic of the rabbinic category of GH generally, insofar as it partially refashions reciprocal exchange on the model of charity, where the “return” comes not from the recipient, but from God.
Attending upon the dead and visiting the sick, among other benevolences, are predicated of God in a teaching attested both in the Palestinian targum tradition and in rabbinic literature. Thus, for example, R. Simlai opines (Gen. Rab. 8:13 [Theodor-Albeck, ed., 67]):
We find that the Holiness blesses grooms, adorns brides, visits the sick, and buries the dead. He blesses grooms: “And God blessed them” (Gen 1:28). He adorns brides: “And [the Lord] God built up the rib” (Gen 2:22).Footnote 38 He visits the sick: “And the Lord appeared to him by the terebinths of Mamreh” (Gen 18:1).Footnote 39 He buries the dead: “And he buried him in the valley” (Deut 34:6). R. Shmuel b. Naḥman says in the name of R. Yonatan: He also appears to the mourner, as it is written, “And God appeared to Jacob again as he came from Padan-Aram and he blessed him” (Gen 35:9).Footnote 40 With what blessing did he bless him? R. Aḥa in the name of R. Yonatan: He blessed him with the mourners’ blessing.Footnote 41
The reference to beneficence in connection with the wedding (blessing grooms, adorning brides) recollects the link, noted above, between GH and 
. Indeed, just prior to R. Simlai's statement, Genesis Rabbah conveys R. Yehuda b. R. Simon's claim that Michael and Gabriel served as Adam's 
, and elsewhere (e.g., b. Nid. 61a), God himself is said to fill this role.Footnote 42
It is striking, and consistent with the contrast between GH and charity set forth in t. Pe’ah 4:19, that in R. Simlai's statement and others like it, God is not said to model charity. The omission of charity in this tradition stands out particularly clearly in light of its inclusion in a late form of the tradition, in Tg. Ps.-J. ad Deut 34:6. Here, God teaches one to provide for the poor (
) insofar as he caused manna to descend for the Israelites in the wilderness. Pseudo-Jonathan also takes God's beneficence toward the first couple to lie not in his involvement with their “wedding” but in his provision of clothing to them, thus in charity.Footnote 43 Analogous blurring of the boundary between GH and charity occurs in many other rabbinic sources, especially in the post-tannaitic period. Thus, for example, ’Abot R. Nat. A 4 (Schechter, ed., 11a) reports that Daniel—much like the apocryphal Tobit, though the rabbinic interpreter does not, of course, observe the parallel—performed various kindnesses within the exilic community.
With what GH did he occupy himself? He would take care of the bride and cause her to rejoice, and he would accompany the dead, and would give a coin to the poor person, and would pray thrice per day, and his prayer would be favorably received, as it says, “When Daniel learned that it had been put in writing, he went to his house, in whose upper chamber he had had windows made facing Jerusalem, and three times a day he knelt down, prayed, and made confession to his God, as he had always done.” (Dan 6:11, njps).
This exegesis likely depends on an idiosyncratic rendering of the last part of the prooftext. The word 
(njps: “and made confession”) is taken to refer not to the act of prayer—after all (so the rabbinic interpreter would have supposed), the verse conveys sufficiently clearly through the word 
that Daniel prayed—but to God's response. The shade of meaning proper for the context is therefore not confession but concession, or consent.Footnote 44 Likewise, 
(njps: “to”; literally “before, in the presence”) becomes an indirect means of predicating agency, as in Dan 6:27: 
(“I hereby give an order,” njps).Footnote 45 The next clause explains why God “consented to” Daniel's prayer: “because”—so 
often functions elsewhere—“he had done before this”; that is, because Daniel had done kindness before he prayed.Footnote 46 For our purposes, what is important is that, together with adornment of brides and accompanying the dead (standard forms of GH in the sources that we have surveyed above), Daniel counts among his deeds the provision of money to the poor. Likewise, b. ‘Abod. Zar. 17a can claim that R. Ḥaninah b. Ṭeradion occupied himself with GH insofar as he served in the capacity of distributor of charity.Footnote 47
But such blurrings of GH and charity in fact merely take t. Pe’ah 4:19 a step further, for even as the latter pericope categorically distinguishes GH and charity, it implicitly assumes a fundamental underlying similarity.Footnote 48 Reflecting on the rabbinic texts surveyed above, which simultaneously center GH around reciprocal exchange and situate it next to, or even superimpose it upon, charity, we may suggest, in sum, that the category aims—I speak in teleological terms, or in terms of the category's rhetorical force, but it is difficult to suppose that the authors of these texts were blind to their effect—at blunting the elements of gift and hierarchy that arise around reciprocal exchange. GH as a category is unlike charity but like it. It encompasses ordinary social transfers, comparable though not identical to 
, and also benevolent acts for which God himself serves as model. The category inches the machinery of exchange away from the orbit of patronage and toward the orbit of charity, so that reciprocation no longer becomes the engine, or at least the sole engine, of benefaction.Footnote 49
The double facing of GH, toward both exchange and charity, is arguably reflected in the category's presence in both of the lists with which tractate Pe’ah in the Mishnah begins. The first list identifies things that have no “measure,” or upper limit: the corner of the field (designated for the poor), first fruits (for priests), pilgrimage offerings, GH, and Torah study. The second list, comprised of things that benefit one both in this world and the next, includes: honoring one's father and mother, GH, making peace between two people, and, the equivalent of all of them together, Torah study. If Torah study—unique not only because the second list characterizes it as the equivalent of all the other items therein, but also because it is the only activity on either list that is not constitutively interpersonal—may be bracketed, the only item that occurs in both lists is GH. The first list centers on recipients who do not reciprocate: the poor and priests.Footnote 50 The second list addresses interactive social contexts: children and parents, and conflicting parties. GH operates in both contexts, and thus, rhetorically, binds the two contexts together.Footnote 51
To appreciate the extent to which GH positions itself to do this rhetorical work, let us consider two alternative and roughly contemporaneous conceptualizations of beneficence. The first occurs in Jesus’ directive to a Pharisee leader with whom he is dining, according to Luke 14:12–14 (rsv).
When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your kinsmen or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return, and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.Footnote 52
The Pharisee is instructed to invite only those who cannot repay him. Rabbinic GH is not so radical: It extends, according to t. Pe’ah 4:19, to the wealthy as much as to the poor. If Luke's Jesus rejects the ordinary forms of social reciprocity, GH instead presses it, even in its most typical form, into the divine economy. When Abbaye explains the aforementioned baraita, according to which visiting the sick has no measure, to mean that the great should visit even the commoner (
) (b. Ned. 39b), he accurately conveys, if not the intended meaning of the tannaitic statement, then the basic rhetorical aim of the general category. It encompasses the radical vision of Luke 14:12–14, but only as an endpoint (
“even”), not to the exclusion of the ordinary patronage mechanisms.
The second useful comparison is to a category in rabbinic literature that is in many ways co-referential with GH: “good deeds”—in Hebrew 
(thus in some tannaitic and amoraic texts) or 
(thus primarily in amoraic literature).Footnote 53 If R. Eleazar of Modiin, in the tannaitic passage quoted above (Mek. R. Ish. Yitro 2 [Horovitz-Rabin, ed., 198]), reads the clauses of Exod 18:20 to refer to various forms of GH, R. Joshua, cited just prior, takes them to refer to Torah (i.e., study, and good deeds). The category of good deeds commonly pairs with study.Footnote 54 Because it carries no overtones of reciprocation, it easily stands for the field of praiseworthy conduct as a whole. GH cannot so easily fill this role, because it remains bound up with the dynamic of reciprocation.Footnote 55 But its participation in this dynamic allows GH to do the rhetorical work of bridging between the economy of reciprocal exchange and the economy of charity.
Conclusion
Both oppositions analyzed in this essay address the relationship between reciprocal exchange and charity. The first case, involving 
and 
, accepts the categorical distinction between these transfer structures, and suggests that in contexts like Purim that highlight this distinction, the presence of charity as an alternative to reciprocity amplifies what Seth Schwartz has identified as the anti-solidarity dimension of exchange. The second opposition, between GH and charity, gestures in the opposite direction. The category of GH suppresses the solidarity-fracturing consequences of reciprocal exchange by bringing it into relation, as exchange, with charity. If Jesus, on Luke's report, would reject reciprocal exchange outright, and if the category of 
altogether ignores the dynamic of reciprocation that in practice drives many of the behaviors it encompasses, GH represents a more measured approach that acknowledges but simultaneously suppresses the engines of patronage and indebtedness. The project of being Jewish in a Mediterranean society inspired not only institutional responses to the problem of reciprocity, but also, as in the case of GH, rhetorical ones.
) contrast with “one another” (
); they fall, constitutively, outside the boundaries of social intercourse. This aspect of charity will feature implicitly in the first part of the essay, but I have taken it up directly and at length elsewhere, in a paper presented at the Colloquium on Violence and Religion in the summer of 2010. I hope to publish a revised version of this paper in the near future. For now see Gregg Elliot Gardner, “Giving to the Poor in Early Rabbinic Judaism” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2009) 100–1, 117–18, 155.
below: “At the same time, these same rules regarding usury reflect the inevitability of the differential relationships between lender and borrower.”
are sent to one “who has nothing prepared” (
), probably a reference to the poor. The Old Greek version of Esth 9:22 does not give force to the distinction between 
and 
: “sending portions to their friends (
) and to the poor (
).” Friends and the poor remain distinct groups, but they serve together as recipients of the same “portions.”
) an animal thigh as a gift outside the context of Purim see m. Hul. 7:2; t. Hul. 7:3.
see n. 25 below.
(his beneficence with the living and with the dead); Sir 7:33 
(and even from the dead do not refrain from kindness) (
and GH instantiated in the story of the anointing of Jesus at Bethany (Matt 26:6–13 and parallels), where the oil is not sold and given to the poor, as the disciples would have preferred, but poured over Jesus’ body in anticipation of his burial, the New Testament also attests to a link between GH and the dead. This position is summarized and critiqued in Ulrich Luz, Matthew 21–28: A Commentary on Matthew 21–28 (trans. James E. Crouch; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005) 337–38.
, in Sefer Assaf (ed. Umberto Cassuto et al.; Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1953) 316–22.
, on which see Hanoch Albeck, Shisha Sidre Mishnah (6 vols.; Jerusalem: Bialik, 1952–1956) 4:438, and 
, on which see Lieberman, Tosefta Ki-Fshuṭa, 2:779, as well as t. B. Bat. 10:8, detailing the ways in which the obligation to reciprocate 
differs from the debt incurred by a loan.
) and the reciprocation (
). Compare Joel 4:4 
“Are you requiting Me for something I have done, or are you doing something for My benefit?” (
signaling the initial beneficence see also Gen. Rab. 38:3, cited below.
of both 
and 
suggests that homoioteleuton is to blame.
see Lieberman, Tosefta Ki-Fshutah, 5:1013–14. For the Roman context see, e.g., Juvenal, Satires, 1.95–96, making mocking reference to the paltry little basket (sportula… parva) to be taken by the client from the host's threshold. It is noteworthy that elsewhere in tannaitic literature, receptacles also give their names to charity institutions, e.g., the 
(literally a large bowl) and the 
(a larger basket). On this phenomenon see Gardner, “Giving to the Poor,” 43–52. The usage of the term 
in t. Beṣah 4:10 recollects the practice of 
analyzed in the first part of this essay, much as the escalation from lentils to meat envisioned by R. Yoḥanan in Gen. Rab. 38:3 calls to mind the exchange between Rabba and Mari bar Mar. Recollect that the gifts of food conveyed by Abbaye are contained in a basket (
) and a cup (
), comparable to the Tosefta's 
.
. Moshe Weinfeld suggests that the first attestation of the root 
with 
, in Isa 63:7, originates in a calque on Akkadian gimil dumqi. Weinfeld, Social Justice in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995) 19 n. 30. The earliest attestation of the idiom 
proper is Sir 37:11: 
(“[Do not consult] with a wicked man concerning GH”) (
, the semantic equivalent of 
, occurs thrice in Ben Sira. The first is Sir 3:31: “He who repays favors gives thought to what comes after” (
. However, in light of the pairing of forms of 
with forms of 
in the Hebrew Bible (Hos 10:12; Ps 36:11; 103:17; Prov 14:34; 21:21), the occurrence of 
(charity) in the previous verse, Sir 3:30 (“A blazing fire water will extinguish, and charity will atone for sins” [
represents the Hebrew original of Sir 3:30. In Sir 35:3, 
and 
again co-occur: “One who repays a kindness is one who offers the finest flour, and he who does an act of charity is one who makes a sacrifice of praise” 
and 
. The third occurrence of 
is in Sir 30:6: “Against enemies he has left behind an avenger, and one who repays a kindness to friends” (
corresponds to Hebrew 
, for in the Bible and at Qumran, 
regularly pairs with the root 
. See, e.g., Ps 94:2 (
); 1QS ii 4 (
). But the Sirach verse also highlights an emerging development: unlike biblical 
, the idiom 
parallels 
not synonymously but contrastively, to signify reciprocation of good. David A. deSilva situates Sir 30:6 within a cultural context where bonds of reciprocity extend over generations, and compares the verse to Isocrates, Demon. 2: “It is fitting that a son should inherit his father's friendships even as he inherits his estate.” DeSilva, Honor, Patronage, Kinship, & Purity: Unlocking New Testament Culture (Downers Grover, Ill.; InterVarsity Press, 2000) 97 n. 3. In connection with sons and fathers, see the discussion of the beginning of m. Pe’ah at nn. 50–51 below. The pairing of charity and benevolence recurs in Ben Sira at Sir 7:32–33, quoted in part in n. 15 above. In light of the persistent connection between charity and benevolence in Ben Sira, and the association of benevolence with the dead in Sir 7:33 (and in the sources discussed below), Sir 38:16 deserves further attention: 
(My son, shed a tear for the dead … and do not ignore their corpses). The last phrase may allude to Isa 58:7, which begins with an injunction to provide for the poor, and ends thus: 
(And do not ignore your flesh) (
occurs in 1QS i 21: 
.
may lie in the rhetorical emphasis in rabbinic burial discourse on the process of traveling to the burial site. Compare 
in Gen. Rab. 58:7, cited below.
)—and secondarily, of “beneficence” (
)—among the fourth-century Cappadocians, of which Gregory's oration is a shining example, see Brian E. Daley, “Building a New City: The Cappadocian Fathers and the Rhetoric of Philanthropy,” JECS 7 (1999) 431–61; Susan R. Holman, The Hungry Are Dying: Beggars and Bishops in Cappadocia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Libanius's characterization of the Jewish people in one of his letters to the Jewish patriarch illustrates the generality of the category of philanthropy. Requesting of the patriarch a favor typical to Greco-Roman reciprocation networks, he flatteringly observes: “For such people you are who belong to that nation, for it is your habit to help all, but most especially the best: taking care of all as human beings (
), but of the best as living a life of virtue.” Menahem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism (2 vols.; Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1980) 2:593, with minor differences. Insofar as philanthropy depends analytically on the category of humanity as such, and not, in a direct sense, on poverty, it resembles rabbinic GH. On the prominence of the body and of humanity as such in the rhetoric of GH see also n. 41 below.
(“healing of money”) and 
(“healing of the person/life”) in m. Ned. 4:4, which concerns visiting the sick, instantiate the notion in t. Pe’ah 4:19 that 
(“GH extends to one's money and one's body”). Like m. Ned. 4:4, other rabbinic texts state or imply that “visiting the sick” serves a direct therapeutic function. Indeed, “to visit the sick” (Aram. 
piel + 
) can be predicated not only of the lay visitor but also of the physician, as possibly in m. Ned. 4:4 itself. See unambiguously y. Beṣah 1:5 (60c), which tells of a certain doctor (
) who entered “to visit the sick on the Sabbath.” A tradition attested in multiple places (Mordecai Margulies, ed., Midrash Wayyikra Rabbah [New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1993] 772; b. Ned. 39b) asserts that each visitor to the sickbed alleviates one-sixtieth of the illness. The visit may also heal indirectly, by concentrating the visitor's attention on the victim and thus inspiring the visitor to pray for the victim's health. See b. Ned. 40a; b. Šabb. 12a–b; and see also b. Šabb. 67a, where the text supposes that the reason that the leper shouts out his impurity (per Lev 13:45), and that stricken trees are marked red, is to draw the attention and thus the prayers of passersby; b. Ḥul. 60a, where an alleged Roman custom of having lepers wind spindles in the marketplace is interpreted likewise as designed to encourage the intercession of piyting passersby; and Gen. Rab. 39:2 (Theodor-Albeck, ed., 376), where prayer over the sick and visiting the sick appear to interchange. On visiting the sick in Second Temple sources see Weinfeld, Social Justice, 226–27.
], descendants of bestowers of beneficence, etc.’”), with comforting mourners.
, and this name is the standard one in later sources. For the link between the fourth blessing and Bethar see, e.g., b. Ber. 48b; y. Ber. 1:5 (3d); and the brief treatment in Shulamit Elizur, ?
, in 
(1999) 425 n. 13. The presence of the GH motif in the fourth blessing of the grace after meals may contribute to the confusion in the sources concerning the integration of the mourner's blessings—the third of which, addressed to the comforters, unsurprisingly goes by the name of 
—into the grace after meals. On these sources see most recently Pinchas Mandel, 
, in Studies in Talmudic and Midrashic Literature in Memory of Tirzah Lifshitz (ed. M. Bar-Asher et al.; Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2005) 395–96.
), but he addresses the situation of a husband paying for his wife's burial. On m. Ketub. 4:4 and related sources see Nissan Rubin, The End of Life: Rites of Burial and Mourning in the Talmud and Midrash (Tel-Aviv: Hakkibutz Hameuchad, 1997) 194–95.
), the exegetical basis lies in Ps 41:4: “The Lord will sustain him (
) on his sick bed” (NJPS). The word 
is winkingly read as 
, and thus as an inflection of Babylonian Jewish Aramaic 
“to visit/heal,” as most pertinently in the phrase 
“to visit a sick person.” b. Ned. 40a, per Michael Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic of the Talmudic and Geonic Periods (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2002) 823 (s.v. 
). On this root see also (with caution) N. H. Torczyner, 
, Lešonenu 13 (1944) 105–11.
“and [God] appeared” and the technical term in rabbinic literature for the visit to the mourner, 
“to show face” (Aram. 
). On the biblical report, Rachel only dies in Gen 35:16–19 after God's appearance, but the assumption that the death occurs before Jacob's visit to Bethel at the beginning of Genesis 35 occurs elsewhere in rabbinic literature, e.g., Lev. Rab. 35:1 (Margulies, ed., 855) and parallels.
also finds reinforcement in the notion that God models GH; for philanthropy, too, is characteristic primarily of God (gods), and secondarily of people. See TDNT 9:107–12 (s.v. 
); Daley, “Building a New City,” 434–35.
with the sense of consent or agreement in rabbinic Hebrew see, e.g., m. ‘Ed. 2:6.
see most recently Jan Joosten, “L’araméen de Qumran entre l’araméen d’empire et les Targumim: L’emploi de la préposition <<devant>> pour exprimer le respect dû au roi et à Dieu,” in Aramaica Qumranica: Proceedings of the Conference on the Aramaic Texts from Qumran in Aix-en-Provence, 30 June–2 July 2008 (ed. Katell Bertholet and Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra; Leiden: Brill, 2010) 84, 86.
is as one who prays before God—with the implication, in light of the prooftext, from Job 22:28, that God responds to the “prayer”—see t. Ma‘aś. Š. 5:24.
), and b. Šabb. 104a, where it is observed that bestowers of beneficence customarily pursue the poor (
).
). They support the gentile poor and the Israelite poor, on account of ‘ways of peace.’ They eulogize and bury the gentile dead, on account of ‘ways of peace.’ They comfort gentile mourners, on account of ‘ways of peace.’ ”The Yerushalmi parallel, y. Demai 4:4 (21a) = y. ‘Abod. Zar. 1:3 (39c), omits the eulogizing but adds visiting the gentile sick and tending to lost vessels.
. To support the last claim, Sorek examines the usage of the word 
in the Hebrew Bible; its translation equivalents in the Septuagint; the usage of such translation equivalents in other Greek Jewish sources, especially Josephus; and, on occasion, rabbinic sources. While Sorek's use of rabbinic sources is very partial and methodologically problematic, the analysis in this essay dovetails with her findings. For additional discussion of the rendering of 
in the Septuagint, see Jan Joosten, “
‘bienveillance’ et 
“pitié”: réflexions sur une équivalence lexicale dans la Septante,” in “Car c’est l’amour qui me plait, non le sacrifice”: recherches sur Ósee 6:6 et son interprétation juive et chrétienne (ed. Eberhard Bons; Leiden: Brill, 2004) 25–42. I thank Gary Anderson for the latter reference.
) and the singular (
) in the semantically equivalent (and possibly genetically related) Greek phrase, found in Acts 9:36 (where it pairs with charity) and numerous times in the Pauline and Deutero-Pauline epistles (Rom 2:7; 13:3l; 2 Cor 9:8; Eph 2:10; Phil 1:6; Col 1:10; 1 Tim 2:10; 5:10; 2 Tim 2:21; 3:17; Titus 1:16; 3:1).
or 
) and deed (
, which might be taken as a metonym for 
; see the exegesis of Dan 6:11 above for the interpretation of 
, “he did,” the Aramaic equivalent of Heb. 
, as signaling the doing specifically of benevolent deeds; and the interchange of “works” and “good works” in Eph 2:9–10 and elsewhere), on which see Marc Hirshman, The Stabilization of Rabbinic Culture, 100 
