Mika Ahuvia is the Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies and Assistant Professor of Classical Judaism at the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. Her forthcoming book, Angels in Late Antique Judaism, analyzes conceptions of angels among ancient Jews. She co‐edited the volume Placing Ancient Texts: the Rhetorical and Ritual Use of Space (Mohr Siebeck, 2018) and has published book chapters and articles on ancient ritual‐magic, gender and rabbinic literature, and late antique archaeology, among other areas of interest.

Elizabeth Shanks Alexander is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, where she has taught since 2000. She previously taught at Haverford College and Smith College. In addition to publishing numerous scholarly articles, she is the author of Gender and Timebound Commandments in Judaism (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Transmitting Mishnah: The Shaping Influence of Oral Tradition (Cambridge 2006). Most recently, she served as co‐editor of Religious Studies and Rabbinics: A Conversation (Routlege, 2018).

Cynthia M. Baker is Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Bates College. Her research explores the ancient history and modern historiography of Jews and Jewishness. She is the author of Rebuilding the House of Israel: Architectures of Gender in Jewish Antiquity (Stanford University Press, 2002) and of Jew in the Key Words in Jewish Studies series from Rutgers University Press (2016).

Michal Bar‐Asher Siegal is Associate Professor in The Goldstein‐Goren Department of Jewish Thought at the Ben‐Gurion University of the Negev, and an elected member of the Israel Young Academy of Sciences. She is a rabbinics scholar and her work focuses on aspects of Jewish–Christian interactions in the ancient world, especially in literary interactions found in the Babylonian Talmud. She is the author of Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Jewish–Christian Dialogues on Scripture in Late Antiquity: Heretic Narratives of the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Julia Watts Belser is an Associate Professor of Jewish Studies in the Theology Department at Georgetown University, with expertise in rabbinic literature and Jewish feminist ethics, with a focus on gender, sexuality, and disability studies. She is the author of Power, Ethics, and Ecology in Jewish Late Antiquity: Rabbinic Responses to Drought and Disaster (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Rabbinic Tales of Destruction: Gender, Sex, and Disability in the Ruins of Jerusalem (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Joshua Ezra Burns is Associate Dean for academic affairs in the Klingler College of Arts and Sciences and Associate Professor of Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity in the Department of Theology at Marquette University. He is the author of The Christian Schism in Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Federico Dal Bo holds a PhD in Translation Studies (2005, University of Bologna) and a PhD in Jewish Studies (2009, Free University of Berlin). He has worked as a Research Assistant at the University of Bologna and the Free University of Berlin. He is currently a Marie Curie post‐doctoral fellow at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in the international project “The Latin Talmud.” Personal website: http://www.federicodalbo.eu/.

Natalie B. Dohrmann is the Associate Director of the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also teaches in the departments of History, Classics, and Religious Studies. She has published widely on rabbinic legal culture in the Roman East, and has most recently coedited a volume with Katell Berthelot and Capucine Nemo‐Pekelman titled Legal Engagement: The Reception of Roman Tribunals and Law by Jews and Other Provincials of the Roman Empire (Paris, forthcoming).

Yair Furstenberg teaches in the Department of Talmud and Halakha at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His research interests include evolution of rabbinic movement, early rabbinic literature, composition of the Mishnah, Halakhah during the Second Temple period, the rabbis, and the Greco‐Roman world.

Alyssa M. Gray is the Emily S. and Rabbi Bernard H. Mehlman Chair in Rabbinics and Professor of Codes and Responsa Literature at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion. She is the author of A Talmud in Exile: The Influence of Yerushalmi Avodah Zarah on the Formation of Bavli Avodah Zarah (2005) and numerous shorter studies in late antique and medieval rabbinic literature.

Sarit Kattan Gribetz is Assistant Professor of Classical Judaism in the Theology Department at Fordham University. She works on Second Temple and rabbinic literature, the history of time, gender and sexuality, and Jewish‐Christian polemics. Her first book is titled Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism (Princeton University Press). She is currently working on her second book, Jerusalem: A Feminist History.

Sandy L. Haney received her PhD from Temple University in 2014. An independent scholar, her research focuses on the social history of ancient Christianity, particularly issues related to family, marriage, and celibacy.

Aaron W. Hughes is the Philip S. Bernstein Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of Religion and Classics at the University of Rochester.

Jane L. Kanarek is Associate Professor of Rabbinics at Hebrew College. She is the author of Biblical Narrative and the Formation of Rabbinic Law (Cambridge University Press, 2014). She is co‐editor of Learning to Read Talmud: What It Looks Like and How It Happens (Academic Studies Press, 2016) and Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2017).

Gwynn Kessler is an Associate Professor in the Religion Department at Swarthmore College. She has also chaired the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Swarthmore and is currently the Chair of Interdisciplinary Programs. She is author of Conceiving Israel: The Fetus in Rabbinic Narratives (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) and is currently working on her second monograph, The Crooked and the Straight: Queer Theory and Rabbinic Literature.

Jonathan Klawans is Professor of Religion at Boston University. His most recent book is Heresy, Forgery, Novelty: Condemning, Denying, and Asserting Innovation in Ancient Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). He is also co‐editor (with Lawrence M. Wills) of the forthcoming Jewish Annotated Apocrypha (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

Naomi Koltun‐Fromm is Associate Professor of Religion at Haverford College. She specializes in late ancient intellectual and social Jewish and early Christian histories, particularly where the two intersect in polemical and comparative theological discourse.

Ross S. Kraemer is Professor Emerita of Religious Studies and Judaic Studies and specializes in early Christianity and other religions of the Greco‐Roman Mediterranean, including early Judaism. She is most recently the author of The Mediterranean Diaspora in Late Antiquity: What Christianity Cost the Jews (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Shira L. Lander is the founding director of Jewish Studies at Southern Methodist University, where she holds a faculty position in the Religious Studies Department. She is the author of Ritual Sites and Religious Rivalries in Late Roman North Africa (Cambridge, 2017).

Laura S. Lieber is Professor of Religious Studies at Duke University, Smart Family Director of the Duke Center for Jewish Studies, and director of the Elizabeth A. Clark Center for Late Ancient Studies; she holds secondary appointments in Classics and at the Duke Divinity School. Her most recent monograph is Jewish Aramaic Poetry from Late Antiquity (Brill, 2018). Her current research focuses on performance and theatricality in Late Antiquity.

John Mandsager is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Jewish Studies at the University of South Carolina. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 2014. His research focuses on early rabbinic approaches to agricultural space, the interplay between rabbinic interpretation of biblical law and the practice of agriculture, as well as the visual aspects of Jewish ritual practice.

Jason Sion Mokhtarian is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, and author of the book Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests: The Culture of the Talmud in Ancient Iran (University of California Press, 2015). He has also published articles on the topic of the Sasanian context of the Talmud in various journals such as the Jewish Studies Quarterly, Harvard Theological Review, and Iranian Studies.

Eva Mroczek is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Davis. She studies the literary cultures of early Judaism, including the Hebrew Bible, Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, and Dead Sea Scrolls, and their place in modern intellectual history. Her first book, The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), discusses how early Jewish writers imagined their own sacred writing before the Bible existed as a book and a concept.

Sara Ronis is Assistant Professor of Theology at St. Mary’s University, Texas. Her interests include the Talmud in its Sasanian context, rabbinic hermeneutics and jurisprudence, gender and sexuality, and demons, magic, and non‐normative rituals.

Karen B. Stern is Associate Professor of History at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. Her research considers the material culture of Jews and their neighbors throughout the ancient Mediterranean. She is the author of Inscribing Devotion and Death: Archaeological Evidence for Jewish Populations in North Africa (Brill, 2008) and of Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 2018).

Meredith J.C. Warren is Senior Lecturer in Biblical and Religious Studies at the University of Sheffield. Her primary research interests lie in the cultural and theological interactions among the religions of ancient Mediterranean, especially early Judaism and Christianity. In particular, Warren is interested in how shared cultural understandings of food and eating play a role in ancient narratives, including the Pseudepigrapha, Hellenistic romance novels, and the Gospels.

Mira Beth Wasserman is Assistant Professor of Rabbinic Literature and Director of the Center for Jewish Ethics at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Wyncote, Pennsylvania. She is the author of Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals: The Talmud after the Humanities.

Cana Werman is a Professor in the department of Jewish History at the Ben‐Gurion University of the Negev. Her fields of research: Second Temple history, Second Temple literature, the development of Halakha, Messianic and Eschatological expectations.

Azzan Yadin‐Israel is a professor in the departments of Jewish Studies and Classics at Rutgers University. He earned his BA from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union. He has written extensively on rabbinic, biblical, and early Christian sources. He has published two monographs on early rabbinic biblical interpretation. His latest book is The Grace of God and the Grace of Man: The Theologies of Bruce Springsteen.

We would like to thank the editors at Wiley‐Blackwell for their patience as we slowly pulled this volume together. We thank our students, Emily Chazen, David King and Matan Arad‐Neeman, who assisted at various stages along the way. We wish to acknowledge the expert work Gordon Thompson brought to our maps. Finally, we especially want to thank our contributors who are the core of this project and who make us so proud to be your editors and collaborators. We dedicate this volume to Tobias Ezekiel and Isaiah Samuel, our children, who became classmates and b’nai mitzvah together while this volume neared completion.