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I’ve become increasingly uneasy about how students in our Introduction to the Study of World Religions course distance themselves, almost reflexively, from the traditions we study. On one hand, the...

THOUGH CLASSICAL JEWISH tradition and cuisine look meat-centered at first sight, there is a strong vegetarian undercurrent that stretches back to the garden, the Garden of Eden. Then, according to the Torah, human beings and animals coexisted harmoniously, and man had "eveiy seedbearing plant. . . upon the earth . . . and eveiy tree that has seed-bearing fruit ... all the green plants for food" (Gen 1.29-30). Only after the Flood did God grant to humans the right to consume meat: "eveiy creature that lives shall be yours to eat, as with the green grasses" (Gen 9.3).1 There has been a revival of interest in early dietaiy myth especially among contemporaiy Jewish activists concerned about the environment, food resources, social justice, and personal health (among them Richard Schwartz, Robert Kalechofsky, Arthur Green, and many of the contributors to the web blog The Jew and the Carrot).2 They advocate a modern Jewish vegetarianism, or an "eco-kashrut" that more or less subscribes to Michael Pollan's ecotarian mantra "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."3 Modem Jewish vegetarianism has its roots in the meatless utopian visions of a messianic future and Edenic past in the Bible, early and medieval rabbinic literature, and the first chief rabbi of Israel, Rav Kook.4 This longing to go "back to the garden" is also hinted at in several of the postbiblical interpretations of the "meal of vegetables" in Prov 15.17: "Better a meal of vegetables where there is love, than a fattened bull where there is hate." Thus, the medieval Spanish Jewish biblical exegete Rabbenu Bahya ben Asher infers from this verse that "it id human nature to want small and light portions of food, such as 'a meal of vegetables' or something similar in the company of friends, rather than fattened bulls in the company of enemies."5 Granted R. Bahya's main emphasis here is the contrast between meals in the company of friends versus those in the company of enemies, experiences of concord rather than discord. But, in the Garden of Eden before the Fall, when there was concord between man and woman, between human beings and God, and between human beings and animals, the diet of all God's creatures was "meals of vegetables." After the Fall, relations broke down between human beings and God, and even between human beings and animals. Permission to indulge in a new meat diet now characterized this discord-friends became food. If it is our human nature to be satisfied with vegetables, it is nature from which we have now fallen.What is the nature of the relationship between Proverbs' "meal of vegetables (yerakot)" and the company of one's friends? Taken in apposition to the syntactically parallel verse immediately preceding it: "Better a little with fear of the Lord, than great wealth with confusion" (Prov 15.16), it seems the small quantity of the "meal of vegetables" is contrasted to the substantial meal of "fattened bull." On the other hand, the term yerakot, literally, "greens," calls attention to their appearance-what they look like, and perhaps by implication, their taste, smell, and feel. According to Yehuda Feliks, a leading authority on plants in the Bible and rabbinic literature, the greens in Prov 15.17 probably refer to edible wild herbs gathered in the field, what the Mishnah later calls "field vegetables," as opposed to those cultivated in gardens ("garden vegetables").6 They might be mallow leaves (Heb., halamut), orach (Heb., maluoh, for its salty taste), rocket (Heb., orot), or maror (an edible weed that in Feliks's addendum to a modem commentaiy on the mishnaic order of Seeds \Zera'un\ looks like dandelion greens, as well as the generic term for any bitter herb suitable for the Passover rite).7 This reinforces the connotation of the "meal of greens" as a low-status food of poor people, since anyone can gather "field vegetables" freely in the wild, even in times of famine.8 That being said, the term yerakot could possibly evoke the taste and mythic historical associations of the yerakot required for dipping, discussing, and eating as bitter herbs for rabbinic and postrabbinic Jews familiar with the rabbinic Passover seder. …

The three of us began to study meals because we understood we could not address our questions concerning Early Judaism without such a perspective.1 We have now been writing on meals for quite some time and have experienced some very substantial breakthroughs in our accumulated work. The study of Jewish meals as a subdiscipline of Biblical Studies, Jewish Studies, or the emergent field of Food Studies existed, but scholarly attention to ancient Jewish meals tended to be incidental to “silo-ed” disciplinary focuses, with scholars interested in the origins of the Eucharist, the Last Supper, or the Passover Seder in a much less interdisciplinary age.2 The question of whether these iconic meals were more “Jewish” or “Greek” or an innovation of Jesus often dominated the discussion. Our work sought to take this foundational scholarship forward by employing more theory and engaging in a more interdisciplinary conversation.

In a fascinating chapter dealing with the “nature of eating” inShulhan shel Arba, a short thirteenth-century manual on rabbinic eating rituals, R. Bahya b. Asher suggests that Torah scholars alone are fit to eat meat, based on the following passage from the Talmud: “it is forbidden for an ignoramus [am ha-aretz] to eat meat, as it is written, ‘This is the torah of beast and fowl’ (Lev 11:46); for all who engage in Torah, it is permitted to eat the flesh of beast and fowl. This passage raises many questions, especially for a vegetarian! First, why would an intellectual or spiritual elite use meat-eating as a way to distinguish itself from the masses? The field of comparative religions offers many counter-examples to this tendency: the vegetarian diet of the Hindu Brahmin caste, of Buddhist priests and nuns, the ancient Pythagoreans, the Neoplatonist regimen advocated by Porphyry inOn Abstinence, or even contemporary eco-theologians, animal rights activists, and feminist vegetarians like Carol Adams.

A major achievement of our seminar has been the recognition that all formal banquets of the Greco-Roman period more or less assume and draw from the same set of conventions of Greco-Roman symposia. They differ in the different selection, emphasis, and combination of these conventions by the groups who perform the meals, and in the different meanings those groups attribute to their particular performances of them. In light of this, it seems increasingly clear that we need to focus more attention to myths, to the numinous “back stories” put into play at the Greco-Roman banquets we study, especially early Jewish and Christian meals. Through various ritual strategies, communal myths of identity and aspiration are evoked to encourage participants to experience their “ordinary meal” as somehow “enhanced,” as part of a broader, deeper social, historical, cosmic drama. We saw particularly striking examples of this in Philo’s account of the Therapeutai and Therapeutrides’s ritual reenactment of the crossing of the Red Sea through their antiphonal choral singing and dance.1 Whether or not really Therapeutae ever did this or they werea product of Philo’s fantasy, Philo was not alone among Greco-Roman Jews in recommending that certain specific passages from the Torah be recited, sung, taught, or explained over the dinner table.

When Philo says in On the Contemplative Life what I cite herein, he locates his work securely in the literary tradition of Greek and Roman symposia. For as Athenaeus’s similar type of remark in the second quotation suggests, it became a commonplace in Greek and Roman literary symposia to contrast one’s own symposium or favored banquet practices with those of Others. In this paper I show first that “contrasting banquets” is a commonplace of the Greek and Roman literary tradition to which Philo’s description of the meals of the Therapeutae belongs. Then I show how Philo chooses not to use perhaps the defining characteristic of the Greek and Roman literary symposia per se, the dramatic dialogue format, which represents characters conversing over a meal. Finally, I show why Philo eschews the sympotic dialogue format in his account of the Therapeutae’symposia in On the Contemplative Life. He wishes to play down the conflicts, especially over competing ideas, for which the sympotic dialogue form is especially well suited. Instead, Philo idealizes the harmoniousness and unity of the Therapeutae community at their meals, in contrast to the discord and drunkenness characteristic of Others’ banquets.

L'analyse critique des textes neo-testamentaires peut contribuer au renforcement d'un mythe juif liberal et moderne. Dans ce mythe, le judaisme apparait comme un courant non monolithique mais divers. Les Juifs ne sont pas un peuple a part mais sont une partie des systemes social et culturel plus larges. L'histoire juive n'est plus seulement celle des grands hommes juifs mais aussi celle des femmes et des autres individus marginalises parce que sectaires par la societe rabbinique. Cette perspective represente un defi aux conceptions universalistes et normatives chretiennes