Michal Bar-Asher Siegal
Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Dr. Michal Bar-Asher Siegal is a scholar of rabbinic Judaism. Her work focuses on aspects of Jewish-Christian interactions in the ancient world and compares early Christian and rabbinic sources. She is a faculty member at the Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and she was an elected member of the Israel Young Academy of Sciences. During the 2022-2023 academic year, she is the Horace Goldsmith Visiting Professor in Judaic Studies at Yale University. Her first book is Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2013; winner of the 2014 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award). Her second book is Jewish-Christian Dialogues on Scripture in Late Antiquity: Heretic Narratives of the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2019; finalist, National Jewish Book Award, 2019).
Paper Title: The Bat and the Rooster: On Jewish-Christian Literary Interactions in the Babylonian Talmud
Abstract: In a few famous pages, the Babylonian Talmud (redacted around the 7th century) discusses what will happen at the end of time, what will the days of the Messiah look like, when will they come, how long they will last, and more. The various views collected side by side are a dizzying array testifying to the diverse ways the people of late antiquity, those that are recorded in this rabbinic collection at least, imagined their end. Their anxieties, their hopes, their theology and even their self-awareness and humor are all revealed when the end is in sight. As part of this long section, I want to focus one of the stories, appearing in pages 98b-99a. I will suggest that this story if another example where the contextualization of rabbinic literature, as well as early Christian writings, helps illuminate the shared worlds in which they were created, and the literary dialogue they represent.
