Tractate Avodah Zarah (in the Talmud)

Abstract

“Avodah Zarah” literally means “strange worship,” the worship of deities other than the God of Israel. The term has also been translated accurately (albeit nonliterally) as “forbidden worship” and “idolatry.” Avodah Zarah tractates are found in the Mishnah (c. 3rd century CE), Tosefta (2nd–3rd centuries CE), Palestinian Talmud (“Talmud Yerushalmi,” c. 5th century CE), and Babylonian Talmud (“Talmud Bavli,” c. 7th century CE). Tractate Avodah Zarah is the seventh tractate in the order Nezikin (“Damages”) of the Mishnah. The Avodah Zarah tractates in the Mishnah, Talmud Yerushalmi, and Talmud Bavli consist of five chapters, while that of the Tosefta consists of nine. The nine pericopes of Mishnah Avodah Zarah chapter 1 deal broadly with the topics of doing business with non-Jews on or around their festival days (1:1–4) and items that may or may not be sold or leased to non-Jews (1:5–9). Chapter 2 (seven pericopes) discusses prohibitions on secluding oneself or one’s animals with non-Jews and not assisting non-Jews as a midwife or wet-nurse (2:1), the related prohibition against utilizing the medical or barber services of a non-Jew (2:2), prohibited items of non-Jews from which a Jew may not (2:3–5) or may (2:6) derive some sort of ancillary benefit, and food items of non-Jews that are permissible to eat (2:7). Chapter 3 (10 pericopes) deals with whole or broken idolatrous images (3:1–3), the status of natural phenomena worshiped as deities (3:5, 8, 9, 10), houses built as, or beside, places of idolatrous worship (3:6–7), and an interesting fictitious dialogue between the sage R. Meir and a non-Jew (3:4). Chapter 4 discusses use by Jews of idolatrous spaces or items (including those abandoned despite having once been so used) and then pivots to a discussion of wine preparation (4:8–12), which is largely, but not entirely, the subject of the twelve pericopes in chapter 5. The portrayal of idolatry in the Avodah Zarah tractates reflects elements of traditional Roman religion refracted through the prism of rabbinic imagination. Christians and Christian beliefs are not identified explicitly, but they are not entirely absent. The Avodah Zarah tractates are fruitful sources for the study of rabbinic representations of economic and social relationships between Jews and non-Jews in Late Antiquity, the constructions by rabbis of Jewish identity and boundaries between Jews and “others,” Roman (and, to a lesser extent, Iranian) religion in Late Antiquity, overlapping discourses between rabbinic and late antique Christian interpretations of Torah, and rabbinic attitudes toward figural art. An interesting 21st-century development is the scholarly use of the Avodah Zarah tractates as tools with which to think through the theological implications of Jewish encounters with Eastern religions and, more broadly, to think through how human beings of all races and creeds are connected to each other, to sentient nonhuman life, and even to the inanimate objects of which our world is composed.