Babylonian

This dissertation examines the ancient Iranian context of the Babylonian Talmud, the vast compendium of Jewish law and lore that the rabbis produced while living under the Persian Sasanian Empire (224–651 C.E. ) whose official religion was Zoroastrianism. While for decades schol…

Babylonian Poetic Accentuation (BPA) has been approached from a diachronic perspective. This dissertation, however, looks at BPA at one point in time, in one manuscript. Its concern is discovering what rules govern Early Babylonian accent placement. Working with the three major …

For over half a century, academic scholarship of the Babylonian Talmud (Bavli) has focused primarily on the dynamics of this work's internal textual (lower and higher criticism) and hermeneutical phenomena. This dissertation participates in a recent scholarly endeavor to conscio…