1. Walter Ameling, ed., Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientis, vol. 2, Kleinasien (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 414–422.  The inscription and an analysis of its implications for Jewish identity in Asia Minor are found in Harland, Peter A., “Acculturation and Identity in the Diaspora: A Jewish Family and ‘Pagan’ Guilds at Hierapolis,” JJS 57 (2006): 222–244CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The Jewish identity of the couple is presumed by most scholars, though the possibility remains that it was a gentile family affiliated with Jewish practices (similar to the God-fearers of Aphrodisias), because the inscription does not explicitly use the term Ioudaios (Harland, “Acculturation and Identity,” 228–230). Seth Schwartz has argued that participation of nonrabbinic Jews in Roman, and even specifically pagan, life seems to have been common, at least until the late third or early fourth century (Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001]).  The celebration of the Kalends by Jews in Hierapolis, therefore, is not particularly out of the ordinary.  In earlier periods, Jews also participated in the festivals of those among whom they lived, as is implied in 1 Maccabees 1:41–43.  On artistic depictions of the intersection between Jewish and Roman time in synagogue mosaics, see Rina Talgam, “Galgal ha-mazalot ve-helios be-veit ha-knesset: Beyn paganiyut le-naẓrut,” in “Follow the Wise”: Studies in Jewish History and Culture in Honor of Lee I. Levine, ed. Zeev Weiss et al. (New York: JTS, 2010), 63–80.

2. M. Avodah Zarah 1:1, 3; cf. T. Avodah Zarah 1:3. For a critical edition of the Hebrew text, see David Rosenthal, “Mishnah Avodah Zarah: Mahadurah bikortit ‘im ẓeruf mavo’” (PhD diss., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1980), 58–59. Translation with slight modification from The Babylonian Talmud: Seder Nezikin, trans. Isidore Epstein (London: Soncino, 1935), 4:36.

3. Cf. earlier anxieties: Jubilees 6:34–35, 4QPHosea II,15–17, Galatians 4:8–11.

4. The Mishnah's construction of its laws limiting commercial interactions between pagans and Jews before and after festivals draws on the practical reality that an integral component of festival celebrations was centered on commercial preparations (purchasing supplies, food, livestock) and transactions particular to certain named days of the Roman month (paying rent, repaying loans).  On the Kalends, for example, people paid interest on fixed loans, and rent and debts were due on the Ides; see H. H. Scullard, Festivals and Ceremonies of the Roman Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 43, and Jörg Rüpke, Religion of the Romans, trans. Richard Gordon (Malden, MA: Polity, 2007), 195. The first chapter of M. Avodah Zarah also details what can and cannot be sold.  On this phenomenon in the modern American context, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), and idem, Holy Fairs: Scotland and the Making of American Revivalism, 2^nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

5. Much has been written about this; e.g. Moshe Halbertal, “Coexisting with the Enemy: Jews and Pagans in the Mishnah,” in Tolerance and Intolerance in Early Judaism and Christianity, ed. Graham N. Stanton and Guy G. Stroumsa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 159–172.

6. Y. Avodah Zarah 1:3 (39c); on these passages, see Peter Schäfer, “Jews and Gentiles in Yerushalmi Avodah Zarah” and Fritz Graf, “Roman Festivals in Syria Palaestina,” in The Talmud Yerushalmi and Graeco-Roman Culture, vol. 3, ed. Peter Schäfer (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 336–352 and 135–151, and Emmanuel Friedheim, Rabbinisme et paganisme en Palestine romaine: Étude historique des Realia talmudiques (Ier-IVème siècles) (Leiden: Brill, 2006).

7. Mary Beard, “A Complex of Times: No More Sheep on Romulus' Birthday,” in Roman Religion, ed. Clifford Ando (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 273–288.

8. Beard, “Complex of Times,” 280.

9. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).  The hidden transcript is somewhat publicly shared through the rabbinic text, and yet the text's audience is still assumed to be composed exclusively of rabbinic insiders.

10. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 2.

11. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 4.

12. Within Jewish communit(ies), the rabbis were power holders to some degree, but within the broader Roman context we can understand them as the subordinate side in relation to the empire and its rule.

13. E.g. Natalie B. Dohrmann and Annette Yoshiko Reed, “Rethinking Romanness, Provincializing Christendom,” in Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire: The Poetics of Power in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Hayim Lapin, Rabbis as Romans: The Rabbinic Movement in Palestine, 100–400 CE (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Greg Woolf, Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Jeremy M. Schott, Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

14. On the Roman calendar as an embodiment of Roman identity, see Denis Feeney, Caesar's Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), and Ker, James, “Nundinae: The Culture of the Roman Week,” Phoenix 64, no. 3/4 (2010): 360–385CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, in A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion, ed. Michael Lambeck (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 34–49.  According to Durkheim, the abstract notion of time is impossible to imagine; it is social life—the recurrence of rites, festivals, and public ceremonies—that allows time to be fathomed as the differentiation of moments into measured divisions such as years, months, weeks, days, and hours.  Durkheim's theory has informed previous studies of the Jewish calendar, e.g. Sacha Stern, Calendar and Community: A History of the Jewish Calendar, Second Century BCE to Tenth Century CE (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Ezra, Daniel Stökl Ben, “An Ancient List of Christian Festivals in Toledot Yeshu: Polemics as Indication for Interaction,” Harvard Theological Review 102, no. 4 (2009): 481–496Google Scholar; Elisheva Carlebach, Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Baumgarten, Elisheva, “Shared and Contested Time: Jews and the Christian Ritual Calendar in the Late Thirteenth Century,” Viator 46, no. 2 (2015): 253–276Google Scholar.

16. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988).  I have also benefited from a helpful summary of Ricoeur's analysis of calendars in Bernard Dauenhauer and David Pellauer, “Paul Ricoeur,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/ricoeur/>.

17. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 104.

18. Maurice Halbwachs, “The Legendary Topography of the Gospels in the Holy Land,” in On Collective Memory, ed. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 223.  He continues: “The very manner in which memory distorts facts reflects the need to show that each one has a significance beyond the event itself, that it has a logical place in the complete history and that it is part of a chain of events which together culminate in an event comprising all of the others” (ibid.). See also Assmann, Jan, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique 65 (1995): 125–133CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19. Halbwachs, “Legendary Topography,” 223.

20. On this aspect of the Roman calendar, see Fritz Graf, Der Lauf des rollenden Jahres: Zeit und Kalender in Rom (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1997).

21. This phenomenon of reading one's own past into the histories of other peoples is a common cultural practice.  With regards to the Jews, for instance, Josephus imagines shared Abrahamic ancestry of Spartans and Jews (Jewish Antiquities 12.225–7, cf. 1 Maccabees 12:1–23, 14:16–23), and the Babylonian Talmud's account of Alexander the Great's travels puts rabbinic questions into the leader's mouth (B. Tamid 32a–b).  These examples do not relate to dates on the calendar, but to the general trend of reading a Jewish past into gentile history and myth, and imagining the Jews and their Torah at the center of watershed moments in Greek and Roman history.

22. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 5.  Yerushalmi, who described rabbinic narratives as filled with “rampant and seemingly unselfconscious anachronism,” writes that “the rabbis seem to play with Time as though with an accordion, expanding and collapsing it at will” (ibid., 6, 17).  Though Yerushalmi denies that the rabbis produced history, a position for which he has been widely criticized, he does argue that this temporal fluidity layered their rituals and liturgy with meaning, the purpose of which was to make the past ever present.  Holidays and their evocation of the past play a central role in this process. See also Myers, David N., “Remembering Zakhor: A Super-Commentary,” History and Memory 4, no. 2 (1992): 129–146Google Scholar; Chazan, Robert, “The Timebound and the Timeless: Medieval Jewish Narration of Events,” History and Memory 6, no. 1 (1994): 5–34Google Scholar; Gafni, Isaiah, “Concepts of Periodization and Causality in Talmudic Literature,” Jewish History 10, no. 1 (1996): 21–38Google Scholar, and Gafni, “Rabbinic Historiography and Representations of the Past,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, ed. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Martin S. Jaffee (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 295–312; Arnaldo Momigliano “Persian Historiography, Greek Historiography, and Jewish Historiography,” in The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Momigliano, “Time in Ancient Historiography,” in “History and the Concept of Time,” special issue, History and Theory 6 (1966): 1–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23. Rachel Greenblatt, To Tell Their Children: Jewish Communal Memory in Early Modern Prague (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), and Marcus, Ivan G., “History, Story and Collective Memory: Narrativity in Early Ashkenazic Culture,” Prooftexts 10 (1990): 365–388Google Scholar, both discuss Jewish tales about the central role that Jews played in the founding of several European cities and towns, or the important role that figures such as Charlemagne had in founding the Jewish communities in these cities, in part to justify Jewish presence—and acceptance—there. On the obsession with origins, see Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 24–31.

24. Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), and Funkenstein, , “Collective Memory and Historical Consciousness,” History and Memory 1, no. 1 (1989): 5–26Google Scholar. John J. Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 33 and 54 n. 9. “Integrated history” is my own term.

25. Feeney, Caesar's Calendar.

26. Friedheim, Emmanuel, “Le-she'elat tafkido shel ha-ẓava’ ha-romi be-hafaẓat ha-pulḥanim ha-paganiyim be-Yehudah u-be-Shomron le-'aḥar ḥurban bayit sheni,” Meḥkerei Yehudah ve-Shomron 9 (2000): 201–218Google Scholar.

27. On this list of festivals and its organization, see my doctoral dissertation, “Conceptions of Time and Rhythms of Daily Life, 200–600 C.E.” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2013), 44–59. The Kalends of January and Saturnalia also represent the beginning (1 January) and end (late December) of the Roman year. Cf. Tertullian, De idolatria 14.4–6, 14.6, Lucian's Saturnalia; Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.16.5–8; Graf, “Roman Festivals in Syria Palaestina,” 436–437, 440–443; Friedheim, Emmanuel, “Ha-ḥagim ha-ẓiburiyim she-be-mishnah ‘avodah zarah 1:2 ve-hameẓi'ut ha-tarbutit be-'Ereẓ Yisra'el u-svivoteyhah bi-yemei ha-mishnah ve-ha-talmud,” Bekhol Derakhekha Da‘ehu 14 (2004): 47–72Google Scholar; Nock, Arthur Darby, “The Roman Army and the Roman Religious Year,” Harvard Theological Review 45, no. 4 (1952): 187–252CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the popularity of Kalends of January and the Saturnalia, see Michel Meslin, La fête des kalendes de janvier dans l'empire romain (Brussels: Latmos, 1970), 51–93; Scullard, Festivals and Ceremonies of the Roman Republic, 51–58; Stephan Weinstock, “Saturnalien und Neujahrsfest in den Märtyrerakten,” in Mullus: Festschrift Theodor Klauser, ed. Alfred Stuiber (Münster: Aschendorff, 1964), 391–406; Fritz Graf, “Kalendae Ianuariae,” in Ansichten griechischer Rituale: Geburtstagssymposium für Walter Burkert (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1998), 199–216; Glen Warren Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar, eds., Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 532; on festivals related to the emperor cult see Urbach, Ephraim E., “The Rabbinical Laws of Idolatry in the Second and Third Centuries in the Light of Archaeological and Historical Facts,” Israel Exploration Journal 9, no. 4 (1959): 239–241Google Scholar; Monika Bernett, “Roman Imperial Cult in the Galilee: Structures, Functions, and Dynamics,” in Religion, Ethnicity, and Identity in Ancient Galilee: A Region in Transition, ed. Jürgen Zangenberg, Harold W. Attridge, and Dale B. Martin (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 337–356; Werner Eck, Rom und Judaea: Fünf Vorträge zur römischen Herrschaft in Palaestina (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007); on the celebration of birthdays of individuals, see Censorinus's De die natali liber. For a more comprehensive overview of previous scholarship on these festivals within rabbinic texts, see the appendix titled “Identification of the Festivals Quoted in the Mishnah Avodah Zarah I, 3,” in Stéphanie E. Binder, Tertullian, On Idolatry and Mishnah Avodah Zarah: Questioning the Parting of the Ways between Christians and Jews (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 221–223.

28. I follow the interpretations of Kratesis in Daniel Sperber, Dictionary of Greek and Latin Legal Terms in Rabbinic Literature (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1984), 195–196, and Graf, “Roman Festivals in Syria Palaestina,” 437–438. See also Binder, Tertullian, 223, who summarizes the findings of Hans Blaufuss and W. A. L. Elmslie (who understood that the Mishnah had in mind at least two festivals, one commemorating the start of the Principate and the second in honor of the current caesar's coronation day), Saul Lieberman and David Rosenthal (who suggest that the festivals commemorated the day on which Augustus captured Alexandria), Daniel Sperber (who assumed the day commemorated the conquest of eastern territories), and the most widely held view, based on the interpretations found in the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds, that the day celebrated Augustus's victory at Actium.

29. Y. Avodah Zarah 1:2 (39c), in Talmud Yerushalmi according to Ms. Or. 4720 (Scal. 3) of the Leiden University Library with Restorations and Corrections, ed. Yaakov Sussman (Jerusalem: Academy of the Hebrew Language, 2001), 1377–1378; and Y. Avodah Zarah 1, 2/7 in Synopse zum Talmud Yerushalmi, ed. Peter Schäfer and Hans-Jürgen Becker (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995), 4:259. Translation with modifications from Jacob Neusner, The Talmud of the Land of Israel: A Preliminary Translation and Explanation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 33:22–23. See the discussion of this passage, and its use of the biblical source texts, in Schäfer, “Jews and Gentiles in Yerushalmi Avodah Zarah,” 342. There are two partial parallels of this text in several manuscripts and printed editions of B. Shabbat 56b and B. Sanhedrin 21a, which contain significant variants (the passage is altogether absent in MS Jerusalem - Yad Harav Herzog 1 of B. Sanhedrin 21a). B. Sanhedrin 21b is a parallel to the first line of this narrative, in which Solomon's intermarriage causes an angel to stick a reed into the sea, which establishes the city of Rome, and B. Shabbat 56b also includes the second line, that Jeroboam's erection of the two golden calves caused the establishment of “Greek Italy” (i.e. Magna Graecia, which refers to the southern part of the Italian Peninsula; see Marcus Jastrow, Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli, and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature [Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2005], 47). Another interesting parallel appears in Midrash Shir Ha-shirim Rabbah 1:6, discussed in Feldman, Louis H., “Abba Kolon and the Founding of Rome,” JQR 81 (1990–1): 449–482Google Scholar. None of these parallels present the material in relation to a Roman festival, and the manuscript variants of the Babylonian Talmud parallels suggest that they are relatively late additions. The differences between the Yerushalmi and Bavli passages are mentioned when relevant below. I disagree with Feldman's assessment that linking Rome's founding to Solomon and Elijah serves as a compliment to Rome; on the contrary, the linkage to idolatry is meant to soil Rome's origins as a product primarily of Israelite sin.

30. 1 Kings 3:1. On Solomon's marriage to Pharaoh's daughter in biblical sources, see 1 Kings 3:1, 7:8, 9:16 and 24, 11:1–10, and 2 Chronicles 8:11; cf. Josephus's Jewish Antiquities 8.7.5, and later discussions in the Testament of Solomon 26:5–6, Dialogue of Timothy and Aquila 9:6–11, B. Yevamot 76a, B. Shabbat 56b, and B. Sanhedrin 21b. The specification of Pharaoh Necho in the Palestinian Talmud requires further investigation, as here the rabbis are either deliberately anachronistic in their recounting of Solomon's life, or they are simply wrong in their chronology. Only one Pharaoh Necho is mentioned in biblical sources, and he lived later than Solomon: 2 Kings 23:29 and 2 Chronicles 35:20–27 mention Pharaoh Necho II, who lived at the time of King Josiah, several generations after King Solomon. Schäfer identifies an aggadah that connects the Pharaoh of 1 Kings 3:1 with Pharaoh Shishak, who is then identified as Pharaoh Necho; see Schäfer, “Jews and Gentiles in Yerushalmi Avodah Zarah,” 342, who cites Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1968), 6:378 n. 123. Solomon is also associated with the angel Michael in various texts; see e.g. the scene in which Michael gives Solomon a signet ring in the Testament of Solomon 1:6–7.

31. Exogamy itself does not seem to have been the essence of the sin (e.g. Moses's marriage to a non-Israelite is condoned in biblical sources); it is the adoption of idolatrous practice that is problematic in biblical texts. See e.g. Exodus 34:15–17, which warns against marrying Amorite, Canaanite, Hittite, Perizzite, Hivite, and Jebusite women because doing so leads to idolatry: “And you will take wives from among their daughters for your sons, and their daughters who prostitute themselves to their gods will make your sons also prostitute themselves to their gods. You shall not make cast idols.” On the development of the prohibition of intermarriage from biblical through rabbinic times, see Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 241–262.

32. In the parallel to this line in B. Sanhedrin 21b and B. Shabbat 56, the passage is attributed to Rabbi Isaac and reads (with some variations in the manuscripts): “When Solomon married Pharaoh's daughter, Gabriel descended and struck a reed in the sea, from which alluvial land emerged, on which the great city of Rome was built.” In all versions in the Bavli parallels, it is the angel Gabriel, while in the Yerushalmi it is Michael.

33. Harold Mattingly et al., eds., Coins of the Roman Empire in the British Museum, vol. 2, Vespasian to Domitian (London: British Museum, 1930), 187, no. 774, cited in Brian Campbell, Rivers and the Power of Ancient Rome (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 13.

34. Campbell, Rivers, 153, referring to Harold Mattingly et al., eds., The Roman Imperial Coinage, vol. 3, Antoninus Pius to Commodus (London: Spink, 1930), 118, no. 707.

35. Sestertius (24.8g, 32mm, 12h), Rome mint, struck 140–144 CE. Obv.: ANTONINVS AVG PI - VS P P TR P COS III, laureate head right. Rev.: Tiber reclining left, resting right hand on prow and holding reed in left. Image and information accessed at http://www.forumancientcoins.com/gallery/displayimage.php?album=2338&pos=4

36. Campbell, Rivers, esp. 13–22, 153–157.

37. Philip Baldi, The Foundations of Latin (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002), 104–107.

38. See the entry for שלעטוט in Jastrow, Dictionary, 1587. In the partial parallels in B. Sanhedrin 21b and B. Shabbat 56b, a different term, שרטון, is used, which also means “alluvial land” or “sandbank,” and appears elsewhere in the Bavli as well (cf. B. Eruvin 8a, B. Berakhot 60a, B. Bava Batra 124a); Jastrow, Dictionary, 1629.

39. Jastrow, Dictionary, 440.

40. See e.g. Grank Heiken, Renato Funiciello, and Donatella de Rita, eds., The Seven Hills of Rome: A Geological Tour of the Eternal City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 106–108, 197–99, and Gregory S. Aldrete, Floods of the Tiber in Ancient Rome (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

41. Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.4.

42. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian Wars 2.102; Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica 3.3.2–3 (cf. 1.34.1); Herodotus 2.10. Thucydides describes the phenomenon as follows: “Opposite to Oeniadae lie most of the islands called Echinades, so close to the mouths of the Achelous that that powerful stream is constantly forming deposits against them, and has already joined some of the islands to the continent, and seems likely in no long while to do the same with the rest. For the current is strong, deep, and turbid, and the islands are so thick together that they serve to imprison the alluvial deposit and prevent its dispersing, lying, as they do, not in one line, but irregularly, so as to leave no direct passage for the water into the open sea” (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian Wars 2.102; Richard Crawley, trans., The History of the Peloponnesian War [London: J. M. Dent, 1910; repr. Digireads.com, 2009], 87). In Thucydides's description, the land created by these alluvial deposits is uninhabitable at first, until Alcmaeon flees to the series of islands and inhabits them as a punishment for killing his mother. The land is characterized as having been created recently, and only suited for one who is a murderer and a societal misfit whom society does not want to pollute other, more inhabitable lands. It is, in other words, a sliver of a no-man's-land on which one who killed his mother goes to live, rather than a glorious story of the founding of a city. In other sources, such as Diodorus, the description simply signals that the land had not always been inhabitable.

43. E.g. Letter of Aristeas 83–84, Jubilees 8:12–21, B. Yoma 54b. See also the collection of traditions in Zev Vilnay, Legends of Jerusalem, The Sacred Land (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1973), 1:5–10.

44. The date of Rome's foundation is 753 BCE, whereas the events during King Solomon's reign occurred 200–300 years earlier, so it might appear as though the story dates Rome's establishment earlier than it was generally regarded; but here what is at stake is not the foundation of the city itself (which came later), but the formation of the geological area on which the city would later be founded and built. On the antiquity of the idea of Rome as the “eternal city,” see Pratt, Kenneth J., “Rome as Eternal,” Journal of the History of Ideas 26, no. 1 (1965): 25–44Google Scholar.

45. E.g. M. Yoma 5:2, T. Yoma 2:12, Y. Yoma 5:4 (42c), Targum Yerushalmi I to Exodus 28:30, Y. Sanhedrin 10:2 (29a), B. Sukkah 53a–b. On these themes relating the tehom to Jerusalem, see Naomi Koltun-Fromm, “Rock over Water: Historic Rocks and Primordial Waters from Creation to Salvation in Jerusalem,” in Jewish and Christian Cosmogony in Late Antiquity, ed. Lance Jenott and Sarit Kattan Gribetz (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 239–254, and Yaron Eliav, God's Mountain: The Temple Mount in Time, Place and Memory (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2005), esp. 224–227.

46. Campbell, Rivers and the Power of Ancient Rome.

47. 1 Kings 12:25–33.

48. 1 Kings 13:33–34.

49. For the story of Remus and Romulus's competition and the founding of the city, see Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.4–10. Perhaps the calves also allude to the she-wolf who nursed the twin brothers in their mother's absence. It is interesting that the rabbinic text preserves the historically accurate order of the names (by birth order), in contrast to most other sources, in which the order of the names is usually reversed. It is also worthy of note that the text credits both brothers with founding the city, given that the traditional story only credits Romulus (Remus dies before the founding). On the origins of the myth, see H. H. Scullard, A History of the Roman World 753–146 BC (1935; repr. New York: Routledge, 2014), 42–50.

50. Y. Avodah Zarah 1:1 (39a); translations with modifications from Neusner, Talmud of the Land of Israel 33:8. I rely on Jastrow's translation of the final phrase (Dictionary, 377), which is a strange construction.

51. Y. Avodah Zarah 1:1 (39b).

52. Y. Avodah Zarah 1:1 (39b).

53. Y. Avodah Zarah 1:1 (39b); Neusner, Talmud of the Land of Israel, 33:12.

54. Neusner, Talmud of the Land of Israel, 33:12. The Yerushalmi interprets 1 Kings 12:33 as indicating that Jeroboam changed not only the date of this festival (assumed to be Sukkot, which fell on the seventh rather than the eighth month), but also the day of the Sabbath. This interpretation seems to be based on an intertext (Leviticus 23:38–39) that makes use of the word מלבד, which means “aside from” in Leviticus but is read as “of his own heart/inclination” in 1 Kings in the context of both Sabbaths and references the “festival of the seventh month” (Sukkot). The verses read: “These are the appointed times of God that you shall proclaim as holy convocations, to offer a fire-offering to God.… Aside from God's Sabbaths [מלבד שבתת יהוה], and aside from your gifts, aside from your vows, and aside from your free-will offerings, which you will present to God. But on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when you gather in the crop of the land, you shall celebrate God's festival [אך בחמשה עשר יום לחדש השביעי באספכם את תבואת הארץ תחגו את חג יהוה] for a seven-day period, the first day is a rest day and the eighth day is a rest day” (Leviticus 23:37–39). The text in the Yerushalmi reads: א"ר אבין בר כהנא אף שבתות וימים טובים מצינו שבדה להם ירבעם מלבו, and then offers its interpretation: בחדש אשר בדה מליבו מלבד כתיב כמה דאת אמר מלבד שבתות ה‘.

55. That is, even if the two sections can stand independently and were only placed together by a redactor, the connections between the two sets of references to Jeroboam within the tractate are highlighted once the chapter was arranged in this way. The Jeroboam references could also serve as the reason for the arrangement of the tractate in this way.

56. Elijah's disappearance is narrated in 2 Kings 2:1–12. The biblical passage cited in the Yerushalmi story (1 Kings 22:48, “There was no king in Edom, a deputy was king”) does not actually refer to Elijah's disappearance, which occurs later, but rather to Jehoshaphat, under whose leadership “the shrines did not cease to function and the people still sacrificed and offered at the shrines” (1 Kings 22:44).

57. 1 Kings 18:20–40.

58. 2 Kings 3:3.

59. 2 Kings 2:11 and 3:1–3.

60. E.g. Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.17–20. Cf. Plutarch's Life of Numa.

61. Plutarch, Life of Numa 2.1–2, emphasis added. Cf. 2 Maccabees 2:4–8, which connects Moses and Solomon with the Jerusalem temple via the imagery of a descending cloud.

62. Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.16.

63. E.g. Plutarch, Life of Numa 18.1–4; Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.13.1–3.

64. See Y. Ta‘anit 1:1 (64a) and Pesikta de-Rav Kahana, piska 7, section 11, to Exodus 12:29 (ed. Mandelbaum, 134). Edom becomes associated with Rome during the end of the tannaitic period and into the amoraic period, when homilies about Edom become applied to Rome and then also to Christianity. See Carol Bakhos, Ishmael on the Border: Rabbinic Portrayals of the First Arab (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 63–64, 79–80, and Gerson Cohen, “Esau as Symbol in Early Medieval Thought,” in Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. Alexander Altmann (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 19–48.

65. The three biblical moments that the text pairs with the various stages of Rome's origins all relate specifically to Israelite kings and their idolatrous behavior. These three examples could have been chosen because of these unifying features, and perhaps they served additionally as an implicit critique of contemporary political leadership. Another interesting literary pattern emerges in the rabbinic text: the first example, of the marriage of Solomon and the Pharaoh's daughter, represents a sexual encounter and is reciprocated by the phallic imagery of the angel Michael inserting a reed into the sea. The second example, of Jeroboam's creation of two golden beings, corresponds to the birth of Rome's founders. Finally, Elijah's disappearance is a form of death. The three examples, then, present a microcosm of life: procreation, birth, and death. That the text is ahistorical in its setting of the events is another way in which narrative time is playfully employed in a sophisticated way, conflating and expanding historical connections as it sees fit in order to articulate its argument most forcefully.

66. As has become clear, the rabbinic authors of this narrative were familiar with many aspects of Roman culture and it should not come as a surprise that they discuss Roman festivals, myths, and etymologies in sophisticated ways, even if not all of their information is accurate or attested in extant Roman sources. How the rabbis acquired this kind of knowledge is difficult to determine; while I do not think that rabbis sat and read Livy's History of Rome in Latin, they were likely familiar with the story of Roman origins that Livy tells. There were many ways for them to gain access to such information, at the marketplace, in conversations with others, in the bathhouse, and elsewhere. Again, the numismatic evidence from across the empire and through the fourth century is particularly persuasive. Regardless of how they learned these myths, they knew them well enough not only to make reference to them but also to build on and invert them in intricate ways.

67. B. Avodah Zarah 8b, which preserves a debate about whether earlier sources refer to one festival (Kratesis as the day on which Rome extended her dominion) or two festivals (Kratesis and the day on which Rome extended her dominion). The tension is resolved by suggesting that Rome actually expanded her reach twice, and thus it remains possible for Kratesis to be a festival that commemorates Rome's expansion in the East, and for there to be another festival in celebration of a second expansion of the empire. For my purposes here, whether the text originally refers to one or two festivals is not relevant.

68. Rav Dimi is frequently associated with bringing traditions from Palestine. Whether or not this source is actually from Palestine is impossible to know, as it appears only in a Babylonian source with no parallel in any Palestinian source. I treat it here as a source that reflects Babylonian rabbinic attitudes, as it was a Babylonian redactor who chose to include it, leaving open the possibility that it might also reflect sentiments from Palestine that differ from the dominant voices preserved in the Yerushalmi regarding the Roman festivals and their origins.

69. B. Avodah Zarah 8b; translation from Epstein, Babylonian Talmud, 39–40, with slight modification. The manuscript variants are not immediately relevant for our discussion here, though it is interesting to note that the narrative switches from Aramaic to Hebrew at the point in the story when the Romans begin asking the Greeks about the value of the Torah in comparison with other precious materials. It is possible that two independent passages, written in two different languages, were combined into the version currently extant in the Babylonian Talmud. Also interesting is the possibility that this story alludes to Job 28 or Proverbs 8, in which Wisdom is compared to a series of precious stones and metals and is always found to be superior. Though the rabbinic narrative does not use the same terminology (and thus does not reference these texts directly), it might subtly allude to these passages and connect—as do Ben Sira 24 and Bereshit Rabbah 1:1—Wisdom with Torah.

70. It is worth mentioning the more general relationship between war and the gods in Roman ideology. In his discussion of the battle of Actium, which is also the subject of this rabbinic passage, Virgil describes the heavenly battle between different gods that persisted alongside the earthly battle. Clifford Ando writes of Virgil's cosmic war: “The victory of Augustus and the West might therefore be understood as a victory of one set of gods—one set of anthropomorphic gods—over the bestial gods of their enemies.…” (Clifford Ando, The Matter of the Gods: Religion and the Roman Empire [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008], 122, referring to Virgil, Aeneid 8.698–700). Ando also quotes Tertullian, who stresses the relationship between war and divinity in the Roman context: “Wars and victories depend on the capture and generally the overthrow of cities. That business cannot take place without injury to the gods.… The sacrileges of the Romans are thus as many as their trophies; their triumphs over gods as many as those over nations; their booty as great as the number of surviving statues of captive gods.…” (Tertullian, Apology 25.14–16 in Ando, Matter of the Gods, 121–122).

71. 1 Maccabees 8:1–31 and Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 12.417–418, discussed in Mireille Hadas-Lebel, Jerusalem against Rome (Leuven: Peeters, 2005), 7–9. On the presence of historiographical details from Josephus in the Babylonian Talmud, see Richard Kalmin, Jewish Babylonia between Persia and Roman Palestine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 149–172. In fact, the narrative arc of this talmudic story parallels the text of 1 Maccabees / Josephus quite closely; while the rabbis in the Bavli could have known of the alliance between the Jews and Romans from elsewhere, it is quite possible that they were familiar with a version similar to the one preserved in 1 Maccabees / Josephus.

72. Y. Avodah Zarah 1:3 (39c); translation (with some modifications) and analysis in Schäfer, “Jews and Gentiles in Yerushalmi Avodah Zarah,” 340–341. See also Guiseppe Veltri, “Romische Religion an der Peripherie des Reiches: Ein Kapitel rabbinischer Rhetorik,” in The Talmud Yerushalmi and Graeco-Roman Culture, vol. 2, ed. Peter Schäfer and Catherine Hezser (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), 120–122.

73. Literally, they name the Kalends of January after their father—the Kalendae of January (Graf, “Roman Festivals in Syria Palaestina,” 438). Perhaps the text also plays with the Greek καλέω (to call) and the Latin calendae (a similar convergence of Greek and Latin appears in the passage that follows it).

74. This story is about Rome and its ascent to power; its inclusion in the Palestinian Talmud might be attributed to its somewhat unfavorable portrayal of the day—in addition to a day of celebration, it is followed by a day of mourning (Schäfer makes this observation in “Jews and Gentiles in Yerushalmi Avodah Zarah,” 340–341). As far as I can find, the origin of this story beyond rabbinic literature is unknown.

75. Philo, Legatio ad Gaium 143; Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 15.187–201, 16.160–173, 19.282–283, and Contra Apion 2.61. Maren Niehoff, Philo on Jewish Identity and Culture (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 118, 128–133.

76. Niehoff, Philo on Jewish Identity and Culture, 131.

77. Niehoff, Philo on Jewish Identity and Culture, 131–133.

78. Y. Avodah Zarah 1:3 (39c) and B. Avodah Zarah 8a; a discussion of these stories appears in Kattan Gribetz, “Conceptions of Time and Rhythms of Daily Life,” 68–70, 91–93.

79. On Artapanus, see Erich S. Gruen, Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 201–212; Holger M. Zellentin, “The End of Jewish Egypt: Artapanus and the Second Exodus,” in Antiquity in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Pasts in the Greco-Roman World, ed. Gregg Gardner and Kevin Osterloh (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 27–73; John J. Collins, “Artapanus Revisited,” in From Judaism to Christianity: Tradition and Transition: A Festschrift for Thomas H. Tobin, S.J., On the Occasion of His Sixty-fifth Birthday, ed. Patricia Walters (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 59–68; John M. G. Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora: From Alexander to Trajan 323 B.C.E. – 117 C.E. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996), 127–132. Artapanus's humor and irony, often noted by scholars, is not dissimilar to the playfulness of the rabbinic sources discussed here; similarly, Artapanus's simultaneous insistence on the violence at the Exodus mirrors rabbinic sensitivities to the destruction caused by the Romans even as they insert themselves into Roman history.

80. Artapanus 27.4–6, discussed in Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora, 130.

81. Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem, 33 and 54 n. 9.

82. I use the term and category “diasporic” cautiously. To be sure, the Jews of late antique Palestine also lived in a predominantly gentile context in which asserting their contribution to gentile society was important. And yet, it is telling that the Babylonian Talmud's presentation of the Jews' place in Roman history is reminiscent of the writings of Philo and Artapanus in a way that those preserved in the Palestinian Talmud are markedly not.

83. Jonathan Sarna, “The Mythical Jewish Columbus and the History of America's Jews,” in Religion in the Age of Exploration: The Case of Spain and New Spain, ed. Bryan F. Le Beau and Menachem Mor (Omaha: Creighton University Press, 1996), 81–95. Sarna writes: “The Great Mariner had evolved in the American mind into the embodiment of the national ideal, a symbol of American achievement, progress, and goodness. By associating themselves with him, Jews would symbolically take on these virtues, yoking together their Americanism and their Judaism, and demonstrating the historical indispensability of Jews to the whole American enterprise” (84). This came precisely at a time when anti-Semitism in America was on the rise and the need to present American Jews in the best light was stronger than it had been (ibid.). See also David Martin Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto-Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996; Albuquerque: New Mexico University Press, 2002), 54; Salvador de Madariaga, Christopher Columbus: Being the Life of the Very Magnificent Lord Don Cristóbal Cólón (New York: Macmillan, 1940); Meyer Kayserling, Christopher Columbus and the Participation of the Jews in the Spanish and Portuguese Discoveries, trans. Charles Gross (New York: Longmans, Green, 1894), who writes in his preface about Columbus's legacy that “in synagogues and temples his services in promoting the social and commercial intercourse of nations, and especially in advancing nautical and geographical science, have been recognized and lauded. In the just appreciation of his great services to mankind, all political, religious, and social differences have vanished” (vii–viii)—these lines sound similar to Artapanus's account of biblical figures in both content and tone.

84. Rachel Rubinstein, Members of the Tribe: Native America in the Jewish Imagination (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), and David S. Koffman, “The Jews' Indian: Native Americans in the Jewish Imagination and Experience, 1850–1950” (PhD diss., New York University, 2011).

85. Beth S. Wenger, History Lessons: The Creation of American Jewish Heritage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 66–69. Of the Puritans, one publication from the 1920s claims that “culturally they were Jews as much as non-Jews can possibly be” (cited in Wenger, History Lessons, 68). Oscar Solomon Straus quoted the British historian W. E. H. Lecky: “Hebrew mortar cemented the foundations of American democracy” (Sarna, “Mythical Jewish Columbus,” 83). See also Michael Hoberman, New Israel / New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011), and Fingerhut, Eugene R., “Were the Massachusetts Puritans Hebraic?” New England Quarterly 40 (1967): 521–531CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

86. Wenger, History Lessons, 66–67.

87. On this, see Dara Horn, “The Eicha Problem,” in Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon: Essays on Literature and Culture in Honor of Ruth R. Wisse, ed. Justin Daniel Cammy et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 687–700.

88. The Palestinian Talmud states: “Rabbi Ba in the name of Rav: [there are] three festivals in Babylon and three festivals in Media. Three festivals in Babylon: Mahuri, Kanauni, and Banauta. Three in Media: Nausardi, Tiriasqi, and Mahirkana [Nusardi, Triaski, and Moharneki]. Rabbi Huna in the name of Rabbi Naḥman ben Yaakov: Narus [Nauruz, which falls] on the second of Adar in Persia and on the twentieth of Adar in Media” (Y. Avodah Zarah 1:2 [4c], cf. Y. Avodah Zarah 1:3 [39c]). The Babylonian Talmud states: “Those are the Roman [annual festivals]. Which are the Persian ones? Mutardi, Turyaskai, Muharnekai, Muharin [Nauruz]. These then are those of the Romans and Persians, which are the Babylonian ones? Muharnekai, Aknayata, Bahnani and the Tenth of Adar” (B. Avodah Zarah 11b). While the Mishnah might have intended to limit the prohibited festival days by producing what it considered to be an exhaustive list, Rabbi Ba's statement in the Palestinian Talmud and the anonymous voice of the Babylonian Talmud both interpret the list more expansively. These brief parallel passages imply that the Mishnah's list of Roman festivals that Jews must avoid was not exhaustive but exemplary, a list of holidays from a particular historical and geographical context that must be expanded to include other non-Jewish festivals later and in new places. The names of the festivals in these lists are fairly corrupt; on these lists of festivals, especially their variants and proper names, see Kohut, Alexander, “The Talmudic Records of Persian and Babylonian Festivals Critically Illustrated,” The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures 14, no. 3 (1898): 183–194Google Scholar; Taqizadeh, S. H., “The Iranian Festivals Adopted by the Christians and Condemned by the Jews,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 10, no. 2 (1940): 637–639Google Scholar; Bokser, Baruch Micah, “Talmudic Names of the Iranian Festivals,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 95, no. 2 (1975): 261–262CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Jacob Neusner, Talmudic Judaism in Sasanian Babylonia: Essays and Studies (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 1:141–143.

89. There is a fascinating afterlife of this list in medieval and modern sources: see e.g. Maimonides's Laws of Idolatry 9:4, Commentary on the Mishnah: Avodah Zarah 1:3, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot ma'akhalot ’asurot (laws of forbidden foods) 11:7 and 13:11, and responsum #448 to Rabbi Obadiah the Proselyte in Teshuvot ha-Rambam, ed. Joshua Blau (Jerusalem: Mekiẓe Nirdamim, 1986), 2:726 and The North French Hebrew Miscellany: British Library Add. MS 11639 (London: Facsimile Editions, 2003), fol. 542v, and the discussions in Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (Springfield, NJ: Behrman House, 1961), 32–34; Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry, trans. Naomi Goldblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 210–213; Israel M. Ta-Shma, Halakhah, minhag, u-meẓi'ut be-'Ashkenaz, 1000–1350 (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1996), 241–50; Carlebach, Palaces of Time, 119–121; Baumgarten, “Shared and Contested Time,” 253–276.