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Charity and Reciprocity: Structures of Benevolence in Rabbinic Literature*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2011

Tzvi Novick
Tzvi Novick*
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame
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Extract

In his recent book, Seth Schwartz explores “[t]he tension between egalitarian solidarity and competitive reciprocity” in the late Second Temple period and in rabbinic Judaism.1 As Schwartz's characterization of reciprocity implies, it stands at odds with egalitarianism because exchange, outside the boundaries of the market, is ordinarily structured by asymmetry, and thus by the hierarchical relationships of patronage and dependence.2 For Schwartz, Judaism's “natural” proclivity, at least as enshrined in the Torah, is toward egalitarian solidarity. To obviate the need for the “dependence-generating gift,” the Torah mandates wealth transfer to the poor through charitable donation (leaving unharvested the corner of one's field, etc.). Charity, unlike the gift, does not generate the obligation to reciprocate: “[t]he pauper, like the priest, is meant to feel no gratitude—at least not toward the donor.”3 Given this innate preference for solidarity, the problem for late antique Judaism in a patronage-dominated Mediterranean society lay specifically in “how to come to terms, Jewishly, with the practical inevitability of social institutions founded on reciprocal exchange.”4

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ARTICLES
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Harvard Theological Review , Volume 105 , Issue 1 , 21 December 2011 , pp. 33 - 52
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Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 2012

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References

1 Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society? Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010) 166.

2 To the solidarity/hierarchy binary compare Victor Turner's opposition between communitas and structure, on which see Éric Rebillard, The Care of the Dead in Late Antiquity (trans. Elizabeth Trapnell Rawlings and Jeanine Routier-Pucci; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009) 48. In the Roman context, the exchange of beneficia and officia occurs not only between patrons and clients but also between friends. Friendship (amicitia) thus represents, prima facie, a context of reciprocal exchange that averts hierarchy. But the exception “proves” the rule: in practice, reciprocal exchange in friendship does as much to undermine or destabilize the relationship as to create and perpetuate it. See Paul J. Burton, “Amicitia in Plautus: A Study of Roman Friendship Processes,” American Journal of Philology 125 (2004) 209–43, especially 212, 223 n. 37 and 228–35 (on asymmetric exchanges that rupture friendships); David Konstan, “Patrons and Friends,” Classical Philology 90 (1995) 328–36, and especially 337–41 (on Roman moralists who criticize addressees for failing to appreciate the difference—one that may matter only for the moralists themselves—between friend and client). For a seminal attempt to trace the complicated relationship between friendship and patronage among Romans see Richard Saller, “Patronage and Friendship in Early Imperial Rome,” in Patronage in Ancient Society (ed. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill; New York: Routledge, 1989) 49–62. On the same categories in the Palestinian Talmud see Catherine Hezser, “Rabbis and Other Friends: Friendship in the Talmud Yerushalmi and in Graeco-Roman Literature,” in The Talmud Yerushalmi and Graeco-Roman Culture II (ed. Peter Schäfer and Catherine Hezser; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000) 235–37.

3 Schwartz, Were the Jews, 18. Of course, charity undermines solidarity in its own way, insofar as it reifies the poor as a class of pure “receivers.” In Esth 9:22, cited below, the poor () contrast with “one another” (); they fall, constitutively, outside the boundaries of social intercourse. This aspect of charity will feature implicitly in the first part of the essay, but I have taken it up directly and at length elsewhere, in a paper presented at the Colloquium on Violence and Religion in the summer of 2010. I hope to publish a revised version of this paper in the near future. For now see Gregg Elliot Gardner, “Giving to the Poor in Early Rabbinic Judaism” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2009) 100–1, 117–18, 155.

4 Ibid., 166. See also Hayim Lapin, Early Rabbinic Civil Law and the Social History of Roman Galilee: A Study of Mishnah Tractate Baba’ Meṣi‘a’ (BJS 307; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995) 239: “This stress (of m. B. Meṣi‘a) on what is ostensibly an ‘egalitarian’ society… is most clear in the case of loans, since it is not only explicitly usurious loans that are prohibited but also those loans in which the borrower provides money or services as ‘gifts.’ Here the laws of usury seem to be constructed to avoid systems of patronage based on wealth and power.” Lapin qualifies this conclusion with an observation about rabbinic realism that will echo in our analysis of below: “At the same time, these same rules regarding usury reflect the inevitability of the differential relationships between lender and borrower.”

5 But see Neh 8:10, where are sent to one “who has nothing prepared” (), probably a reference to the poor. The Old Greek version of Esth 9:22 does not give force to the distinction between and : “sending portions to their friends () and to the poor ().” Friends and the poor remain distinct groups, but they serve together as recipients of the same “portions.”

6 Libanius draws a distinction within the category of reciprocal exchange between, on the one hand, exchanges among the powerful, and, on the other, exchanges between patrons and clients. “So, on the day before the [new year] festival, gifts are carried through the city, as many as would make a table splendid, some from the powerful honoring each other, others from the lower ranks to them and from them to the lower ranks, the latter attending to the former's power, the former sharing their luxury with their attendants” (Libanius’ Progymnasmata: Model Exercises in Greek Prose Composition and Rhetoric (trans. Craig A. Gibson; Atlanta, Ga.: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008), 439).

7 y. Meg. 1:4 (70d). The text is from ms Leiden. There are no important variants in the other witnesses. All translations of rabbinic texts in this essay are my own. The above pericope bears no relationship to the discussion that precedes it in the Yerushalmi, and appears to be inspired by the reference to gifts to the poor in m. Meg. 1:4, just as the parallel in the Bavli is attached to the reference to gifts to the poor in m. Meg. 1:5. On sending () an animal thigh as a gift outside the context of Purim see m. Hul. 7:2; t. Hul. 7:3.

8 See Midrash Bereshit Rabba: Critical Edition with Notes and Commentary (ed. Julius Theodor and Chanoch Albeck; Jerusalem: Wahrmann, 1965) 931–32, 950–93; y. Sanh. 2:6 (20c–d). On these passages, see Gedalyahu Alon, Jews, Judaism and the Classical World: Studies in Jewish History in the Times of the Second Temple and Talmud (trans. Israel Abrahams; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1977) 378 nn. 15–16; Moshe Beer, “Respect and Critique,” PAAJR 38–39 (1972) 55–57. In b. Ta‘an. 24b a certain Oshaya, “the smallest of the colleagues,” critiques the patriarchate, but he is probably not to be identified with R. Hoshaya.

9 All manuscripts agree on this point.

10 For other possible renderings of this line see Saul Lieberman, Tosefta Ki-Fshuṭah: A Comprehensive Commentary on the Tosefta (10 vols.; New York City: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2002) 5:1131.

11 The story is garbled in the printed edition and in many mss, in part due to homoioteleuton, and in part due to the influence of the subsequent story, which depicts an exchange of foods rather than, as in this case, two consecutive conveyances of food by a single party to a second party. Of the mss available through the Sol and Evelyn Henkind Talmud Text Databank, mss BL Harl. 5508 (400), Columbia X 893 T 141, and Oxford Opp. Add. fol. 23 preserve the story most accurately. According to the Bavli's version, R. Yudan first sends the thigh of a three-year-old calf and a jug of wine, and afterward sends an entire calf and three jugs of wine.

12 The text is from ms BL Harl. 5508 (400).

13 The contrast between Rabba's meager table and Mari bar Mar's opulent fare is also the subject of the next story in b. Meg. 7b. If, as some have suggested, Mari bar Mar is a member of the exilarchate's household, then the connection between this story and the previous one, involving the Palestinian patriarch, is closer still. On representations of the food at the exilarch's home see Geoffrey Herman, “The Babylonian Exilarchate in the Sasanian Period” (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University, 2005) 248–50. But Moshe Beer, The Babylonian Amoraim: Aspects of Economic Life (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 1974) 269 n. 38, casts doubt on the identification of Mari bar Mar with the patriarchate, presumably because, in his view (The Babylonian Exilarchate in the Arsacid and Sassanian Periods [Tel-Aviv: Dvir, 1976] 105, 223–24), the first four leaders of the Pumbedita yeshivah (among them Rabba and Abbaye) are never said to visit the exilarch. Indeed, for Beer, the strained relationship between the exilarchate and the Pumbedita yeshiva may have contributed to Rabba's untimely death. But the exchange depicted in b. Meg. 7b is hardly warm, so that the association of Mari bar Mar with the exilarchate need not put the story at odds with the existence of tension between the exilarchate and the Pumbeditan yeshivah.

14 Saul Lieberman, ed., Tosefta (4 vols.; New York City: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1955) 1:60–61. On the origins of the idiom see n. 25 below.

15 Compare Ruth 2:20 (his beneficence with the living and with the dead); Sir 7:33 (and even from the dead do not refrain from kindness) (ms A). On the latter verse see further n. 25 below. For scholars who find the Tosefta's constrast between and GH instantiated in the story of the anointing of Jesus at Bethany (Matt 26:6–13 and parallels), where the oil is not sold and given to the poor, as the disciples would have preferred, but poured over Jesus’ body in anticipation of his burial, the New Testament also attests to a link between GH and the dead. This position is summarized and critiqued in Ulrich Luz, Matthew 21–28: A Commentary on Matthew 21–28 (trans. James E. Crouch; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005) 337–38.

16 The text is from ms Kaufman. The parenthetical material reflects scribal error, while the brack-eted material represents my own corrections.

17 On this institution see N. H. Tur-Sinai, , in Sefer Assaf (ed. Umberto Cassuto et al.; Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1953) 316–22.

18 On the expectation of reciprocation vis-à-vis wedding gifts see, e.g., Eldon Jay Epp, “Humanitas in the Greco-Roman Papyri,” in Biblical and Humane: A Festschrift for John F. Priest (ed. Linda Bennett Elder et al.; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996) 203, citing PFlor 3.332 (second cent. c.e.): “At your wedding the wife of my brother Discas brought me 100 drachmae; and now that her son Nilus is about to marry, it is right that we should make a return gift, even if we have grievances against them still pending.”

19 In the Hebrew, respectively: , on which see Hanoch Albeck, Shisha Sidre Mishnah (6 vols.; Jerusalem: Bialik, 1952–1956) 4:438, and , on which see Lieberman, Tosefta Ki-Fshuṭa, 2:779, as well as t. B. Bat. 10:8, detailing the ways in which the obligation to reciprocate differs from the debt incurred by a loan.

20 More or less the same rule occurs in t. Pe’ah 4:16 (Lieberman ed., 1:59) with reference to the poor tithe (so in ms Erfurt, supported by Lieberman against ms Vienna, which speaks of the second tithe).

21 The Tosefta passage is compelled to distinguish between the initial beneficence () and the reciprocation (). Compare Joel 4:4 “Are you requiting Me for something I have done, or are you doing something for My benefit?” (njps). Possibly the two clauses in this verse distinguish between the initial beneficence (the second clause) and reciprocation (the first). For signaling the initial beneficence see also Gen. Rab. 38:3, cited below.

22 The text is from the Genizah fragment T-S Or.1080 13.69, accessed via http://www.biu.ac.il/JS/tannaim/ (cited 19 September 2010). Other manuscripts and the printed edition nonsensically omit the negation in the first line. The final of both and suggests that homoioteleuton is to blame.

23 The text is from ms Vatican 76 (per the online database of the Academy of the Hebrew Language, Maagarim, http://hebrew-treasures.huji.ac.il/, cited 9 June 2010). Receiving of guests is also joined to the category of GH in b. Šabb. 127a.

24 On the see Lieberman, Tosefta Ki-Fshutah, 5:1013–14. For the Roman context see, e.g., Juvenal, Satires, 1.95–96, making mocking reference to the paltry little basket (sportula… parva) to be taken by the client from the host's threshold. It is noteworthy that elsewhere in tannaitic literature, receptacles also give their names to charity institutions, e.g., the (literally a large bowl) and the (a larger basket). On this phenomenon see Gardner, “Giving to the Poor,” 43–52. The usage of the term in t. Beṣah 4:10 recollects the practice of analyzed in the first part of this essay, much as the escalation from lentils to meat envisioned by R. Yoḥanan in Gen. Rab. 38:3 calls to mind the exchange between Rabba and Mari bar Mar. Recollect that the gifts of food conveyed by Abbaye are contained in a basket () and a cup (), comparable to the Tosefta's .

25 CAD, “gamālu,” 5:21–23; CAD, “gimillu,” 5:73–75. The Akkadian expression gimilla turru (to return a beneficence, to wreak vengeance) (CAD, “gimillu,” 5:74) is the precise semantic equivalent of Hebrew . Moshe Weinfeld suggests that the first attestation of the root with , in Isa 63:7, originates in a calque on Akkadian gimil dumqi. Weinfeld, Social Justice in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995) 19 n. 30. The earliest attestation of the idiom proper is Sir 37:11: (“[Do not consult] with a wicked man concerning GH”) (ms B margin). On this passage see Weinfeld, Social Justice, 226. The Greek phrase , the semantic equivalent of , occurs thrice in Ben Sira. The first is Sir 3:31: “He who repays favors gives thought to what comes after” (nets). ms A renders this phrase with . However, in light of the pairing of forms of with forms of in the Hebrew Bible (Hos 10:12; Ps 36:11; 103:17; Prov 14:34; 21:21), the occurrence of (charity) in the previous verse, Sir 3:30 (“A blazing fire water will extinguish, and charity will atone for sins” [nets]), supports the possibility that represents the Hebrew original of Sir 3:30. In Sir 35:3, and again co-occur: “One who repays a kindness is one who offers the finest flour, and he who does an act of charity is one who makes a sacrifice of praise” (nets). In neither context does Ben Sira appear to draw a categorical distinction between and . The third occurrence of is in Sir 30:6: “Against enemies he has left behind an avenger, and one who repays a kindness to friends” (nets). The contrast between repaying kindness and avenging is a strong indicator that corresponds to Hebrew , for in the Bible and at Qumran, regularly pairs with the root . See, e.g., Ps 94:2 (); 1QS ii 4 (). But the Sirach verse also highlights an emerging development: unlike biblical , the idiom parallels not synonymously but contrastively, to signify reciprocation of good. David A. deSilva situates Sir 30:6 within a cultural context where bonds of reciprocity extend over generations, and compares the verse to Isocrates, Demon. 2: “It is fitting that a son should inherit his father's friendships even as he inherits his estate.” DeSilva, Honor, Patronage, Kinship, & Purity: Unlocking New Testament Culture (Downers Grover, Ill.; InterVarsity Press, 2000) 97 n. 3. In connection with sons and fathers, see the discussion of the beginning of m. Pe’ah at nn. 50–51 below. The pairing of charity and benevolence recurs in Ben Sira at Sir 7:32–33, quoted in part in n. 15 above. In light of the persistent connection between charity and benevolence in Ben Sira, and the association of benevolence with the dead in Sir 7:33 (and in the sources discussed below), Sir 38:16 deserves further attention: (My son, shed a tear for the dead … and do not ignore their corpses). The last phrase may allude to Isa 58:7, which begins with an injunction to provide for the poor, and ends thus: (And do not ignore your flesh) (ms B). Outside of Sirach, an approximation of the idiom occurs in 1QS i 21: .

26 See, e.g., m. Demai 4:6; b. Ketub. 35a.

27 The basis for this exegesis of may lie in the rhetorical emphasis in rabbinic burial discourse on the process of traveling to the burial site. Compare in Gen. Rab. 58:7, cited below.

28 Mek. R. Ish. Yitro 2 (Horovitz-Rabin, ed., 198). The text is from the Genizah fragment T-S C4.4.2 (Kahana, ed., 94). The bracketed material represents the copyist's corrections.

29 See also ’Abot R. Nat. A 30 (Schechter, ed., 45a), which identifies three things that bring good to the world: comforting mourners, visiting the sick, and GH. Azariah Beitner's book on comforting mourners and visiting the sick in stories about rabbis of Yavneh (Yavneh Stories: Visiting the Sick and Comforting Mourners [Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2011]) appeared too late for me to incorporate it into this essay. The emphasis on sickness and death in these texts and in the texts surveyed below suggests that the rabbinic category of GH rests in part on the rhetoric of the body/mortality. Especially noteworthy in this light is Gregory of Nazianzus's Oration 14, “On Love of the Poor,” where he encourages his audience to attend to the victims of a leprosy outbreak, not only to the poor (the widowed, orphaned, exiled and impoverished), but also, and especially, to the wealthy, for “those who suffer evil in a way that contradicts their dignity are even more wretched than those who are used to misfortune. Most especially, then, we must open our hearts to those infected by the ‘sacred disease’ [leprosy].” The translation is from Brian E. Daley, Gregory of Nazianzus (New York: Routledge, 2006) 78–79. (Gregory's remarks recollect the singling out of the “formerly wealthy poor” in rabbinic charity law, on which see Alyssa M. Gray, “The Formerly Wealthy Poor: From Empathy to Ambivalence in Rabbinic Literature of Late Antiquity,” AJS Review 33 [2009] 101–33.) It is precisely at this point in his oration, after shifting, on the pattern of GH in t. Pe’ah 4:19, from the poor alone to both the poor and the wealthy, that Gregory introduces the body. “They are being betrayed by this deceiving, wretched, faithless body! How I am connected to this body, I do not know, nor do I understand how I can be an image of God, and still be mingled with this filthy clay;… I long that it be dissolved, and yet I have no other helper to use in striving for what is best…. [B]rothers and sisters, we must care for what is part of our nature and shares in our slavery.” The body serves as a common denominator underlying differences in status and fortune. On the rhetoric of “philanthropy” ()—and secondarily, of “beneficence” ()—among the fourth-century Cappadocians, of which Gregory's oration is a shining example, see Brian E. Daley, “Building a New City: The Cappadocian Fathers and the Rhetoric of Philanthropy,” JECS 7 (1999) 431–61; Susan R. Holman, The Hungry Are Dying: Beggars and Bishops in Cappadocia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Libanius's characterization of the Jewish people in one of his letters to the Jewish patriarch illustrates the generality of the category of philanthropy. Requesting of the patriarch a favor typical to Greco-Roman reciprocation networks, he flatteringly observes: “For such people you are who belong to that nation, for it is your habit to help all, but most especially the best: taking care of all as human beings (), but of the best as living a life of virtue.” Menahem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism (2 vols.; Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1980) 2:593, with minor differences. Insofar as philanthropy depends analytically on the category of humanity as such, and not, in a direct sense, on poverty, it resembles rabbinic GH. On the prominence of the body and of humanity as such in the rhetoric of GH see also n. 41 below.

30 Nor is it impossible that the contrastive categories (“healing of money”) and (“healing of the person/life”) in m. Ned. 4:4, which concerns visiting the sick, instantiate the notion in t. Pe’ah 4:19 that (“GH extends to one's money and one's body”). Like m. Ned. 4:4, other rabbinic texts state or imply that “visiting the sick” serves a direct therapeutic function. Indeed, “to visit the sick” (Aram. piel + ) can be predicated not only of the lay visitor but also of the physician, as possibly in m. Ned. 4:4 itself. See unambiguously y. Beṣah 1:5 (60c), which tells of a certain doctor () who entered “to visit the sick on the Sabbath.” A tradition attested in multiple places (Mordecai Margulies, ed., Midrash Wayyikra Rabbah [New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1993] 772; b. Ned. 39b) asserts that each visitor to the sickbed alleviates one-sixtieth of the illness. The visit may also heal indirectly, by concentrating the visitor's attention on the victim and thus inspiring the visitor to pray for the victim's health. See b. Ned. 40a; b. Šabb. 12a–b; and see also b. Šabb. 67a, where the text supposes that the reason that the leper shouts out his impurity (per Lev 13:45), and that stricken trees are marked red, is to draw the attention and thus the prayers of passersby; b. Ḥul. 60a, where an alleged Roman custom of having lepers wind spindles in the marketplace is interpreted likewise as designed to encourage the intercession of piyting passersby; and Gen. Rab. 39:2 (Theodor-Albeck, ed., 376), where prayer over the sick and visiting the sick appear to interchange. On visiting the sick in Second Temple sources see Weinfeld, Social Justice, 226–27.

31 Recollect, too, the specific reference to the dead in the “definition” of GH in t. Pe’ah 4:19, and see nn. 15 and 25 above.

32 Attendance at Sarah's burial is characterized as GH again in Gen. Rab. 58:9 (Theodor-Albeck, ed., 629); 62:3 (Theodor-Albeck, ed., 675).

33 In y. Yoma 1:1 (38b) = y. Sotah 1:9 (17c) (“They sat and stitched together his eulogy and bestowed beneficence upon that righteous man”), GH is associated specifically with the eulogy; in Gen. Rab. 96:3 (Theodor-Albeck ed., 1237) (“The righteous one, who lives eternally, rewards every step that individuals step in GH”), with accompaniment of the corpse to the burial place; and in b. Ketub. 8b (“ ‘Rise and say something concerning the comforters of the mourners.’ He began and said, ‘Our brothers, bestowers of beneficence [], descendants of bestowers of beneficence, etc.’”), with comforting mourners.

34 In t. Ber. 6:1 (Lieberman, ed., 1:32), which parallels Mek. R. Ish. Pisḥa 16, the fourth blessing is called , and this name is the standard one in later sources. For the link between the fourth blessing and Bethar see, e.g., b. Ber. 48b; y. Ber. 1:5 (3d); and the brief treatment in Shulamit Elizur, ?, in (1999) 425 n. 13. The presence of the GH motif in the fourth blessing of the grace after meals may contribute to the confusion in the sources concerning the integration of the mourner's blessings—the third of which, addressed to the comforters, unsurprisingly goes by the name of —into the grace after meals. On these sources see most recently Pinchas Mandel, , in Studies in Talmudic and Midrashic Literature in Memory of Tirzah Lifshitz (ed. M. Bar-Asher et al.; Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2005) 395–96.

35 See Rebillard, Care of the Dead, 37–41; Omno M. Van Nijf, The Civic World of Professional Associations in the Roman East (Amsterdam: J.C. Gieben, 1997) 31 (“About one third of the total epigraphic production of Roman associations in the eastern provinces records funerary activities of some sort.”); Jinyu Liu, “The Economy of Endowments: The Case of the Roman Collegia,” in Pistoi dia Tèn Technèn: Bankers, Loans and Archives in the Ancient World, Studies in Honor of Raymond Bogaert (ed. Koenraad Verboven et al.; Leuven: Peeters, 2008) 240 (“Most endowments to collegia were meant to be used for commemorative rites.”); and the extensive bibliography in John Bodel, “From Columbaria to Catacombs: Collective Burial in Pagan and Christian Rome,” in Commemorating the Dead: Texts and Artifacts in Context (ed. Laurie Brink and Deborah Green; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008) 180–81 n. 7. On whether the Jewish synagogue itself functioned or was recognized as a collegium in the Roman context see Lee I. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years (2d ed.; New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005) 130–31.

36 The quotation is from Van Nijf, Civic World, 38. For burial on the public dole see the statement of the stam in b. Ketub. 48a. In the Mishnah pericope on which the stam comments, m. Ketub. 4:4, R. Yehudah speaks of a minimum standard (for “even a poor person in Israel”) of two flute-players and a professional lamenter (), but he addresses the situation of a husband paying for his wife's burial. On m. Ketub. 4:4 and related sources see Nissan Rubin, The End of Life: Rites of Burial and Mourning in the Talmud and Midrash (Tel-Aviv: Hakkibutz Hameuchad, 1997) 194–95.

37 ms Vatican 30 adds crying to the list. R. Akiva presumably reads “should take it to heart” (literally, “will give to his [own] heart”) to mean that what the living one does for the dead, he in fact does for himself (“to his heart”), because his GH will be reciprocated.

38 For the exegetical basis see Gen. Rab. 18:1 (Theodor-Albeck, ed., 161).

39 See also b. Ned. 40a and b. Šabb. 12b for the notion that the Shekhinah dwells above the head of the sick. As Rashi observes (b. Šabb. 12b s.v. ), the exegetical basis lies in Ps 41:4: “The Lord will sustain him () on his sick bed” (NJPS). The word is winkingly read as , and thus as an inflection of Babylonian Jewish Aramaic “to visit/heal,” as most pertinently in the phrase “to visit a sick person.” b. Ned. 40a, per Michael Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic of the Talmudic and Geonic Periods (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2002) 823 (s.v. ). On this root see also (with caution) N. H. Torczyner, , Lešonenu 13 (1944) 105–11.

40 The notion that God appears to Jacob qua mourner appears to emerge from the verbal link between “and [God] appeared” and the technical term in rabbinic literature for the visit to the mourner, “to show face” (Aram. ). On the biblical report, Rachel only dies in Gen 35:16–19 after God's appearance, but the assumption that the death occurs before Jacob's visit to Bethel at the beginning of Genesis 35 occurs elsewhere in rabbinic literature, e.g., Lev. Rab. 35:1 (Margulies, ed., 855) and parallels.

41 The text is from ms Vatican 60. Similar litanies occur in Tg. Neof. and Frg. Tg. ad Gen 35:9, on which see B. Barry Levy, Targum Neophyti 1: A Textual Study (Lanham, Md.: University of America Press, 1986) 212–19; Eccl. Rab. ad Eccl 7:2 (where the same actions are explicitly characterized as kindness); Yannai ad Gen 35:9 (Rabinovitz, ed., 1:216–17). For the notion of God as bestower of beneficence see also y. Ber. 9:2 (14a); b. Ber. 54b; b. Ketub. 8b; b. Soṭah 14a. The focus in this tradition on God's relationship to humanity as such—the targum passages and Yannai alike highlight God's “humility” in acting the human—reinforces the link, proposed in n. 29 above, between kindness and the rhetoric of the body, insofar as the human body is—for the rabbis as much as for Gregory, in the passage cited in n. 29—of its essence deficient, or needy. The resemblance, traced in the same note, of rabbinic GH to the Greek virtue of also finds reinforcement in the notion that God models GH; for philanthropy, too, is characteristic primarily of God (gods), and secondarily of people. See TDNT 9:107–12 (s.v. ); Daley, “Building a New City,” 434–35.

42 Stories of Palestinian rabbis interacting in connection with weddings, sickness, and death are collected in Hezser, “Rabbis and Other Friends,” 221–26. See also Hayim Lapin, “Rabbis and Cities: Some Aspects of the Rabbinic Movement in Its Graeco-Roman Environment,” in The Talmud Yerushalmi and Graeco-Roman Culture II (ed. Peter Schäfer and Catherine Hezser; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000) 68.

43 For the latter notion see also b. Soṭah 14a.

44 For with the sense of consent or agreement in rabbinic Hebrew see, e.g., m. ‘Ed. 2:6.

45 On this see most recently Jan Joosten, “L’araméen de Qumran entre l’araméen d’empire et les Targumim: L’emploi de la préposition <<devant>> pour exprimer le respect dû au roi et à Dieu,” in Aramaica Qumranica: Proceedings of the Conference on the Aramaic Texts from Qumran in Aix-en-Provence, 30 June–2 July 2008 (ed. Katell Bertholet and Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra; Leiden: Brill, 2010) 84, 86.

46 For a similar notion, that one who performs is as one who prays before God—with the implication, in light of the prooftext, from Job 22:28, that God responds to the “prayer”—see t. Ma‘aś. Š. 5:24.

47 See also, e.g., y. Pe’ah 8:8 (21b) (= y. Šeqal. 5:4 [49b]), where R. Eliezar b. Yaakov's efforts to solicit charity on behalf of a blind man win him praise as a bestower of beneficence (ms Leiden: ), and b. Šabb. 104a, where it is observed that bestowers of beneficence customarily pursue the poor (ms Munich 95: ).

48 In light of the above discussion of various forms of GH, we may also observe the same continuity between GH and charity in the following Tosefta passage (t. Giṭ 3:13): “In a city that contains Israelites and gentiles, the parnases collect from Israelites and gentiles, on account of ‘ways of peace’ (). They support the gentile poor and the Israelite poor, on account of ‘ways of peace.’ They eulogize and bury the gentile dead, on account of ‘ways of peace.’ They comfort gentile mourners, on account of ‘ways of peace.’ ”The Yerushalmi parallel, y. Demai 4:4 (21a) = y. ‘Abod. Zar. 1:3 (39c), omits the eulogizing but adds visiting the gentile sick and tending to lost vessels.

49 See also t. Pe’ah 4:18, where, according to Gardner's persuasive analysis (“Giving to the Poor,” 190–92), the Tosefta (mis?)interprets the euergetism of Munbaz as charity, furnished in the hope not of social recognition and reciprocation in this world, but of reward from God in the next. I am arguing that the rhetoric of GH in rabbinic (especially Palestinian, especially tannaitic) literature aims, in more systematic fashion, at an analogous deconstruction of the boundary between euergetism and charity. See also Sir 7:32–35.

50 On the connection between priests and the poor in Second Temple and rabbinic texts see Tzvi Novick, “Blessings over Miṣvot: The Origins of a Category,” HUCA (forthcoming); Gardner, “Giving to the Poor,” 19 (on m. Pe’ah 1:1 itself), 47.

51 Susan Sorek's book, Remembered for Good: A Jewish Benefaction System in Ancient Palestine (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2010), which appeared after I completed this essay, argues that Jews in late antiquity developed a benefaction system that resembled Mediterranean euergetism but differed in making God the sole patron, and thus limiting dependence on benefactors. The “motivational ideology” of this benefaction system was, Sorek claims, . To support the last claim, Sorek examines the usage of the word in the Hebrew Bible; its translation equivalents in the Septuagint; the usage of such translation equivalents in other Greek Jewish sources, especially Josephus; and, on occasion, rabbinic sources. While Sorek's use of rabbinic sources is very partial and methodologically problematic, the analysis in this essay dovetails with her findings. For additional discussion of the rendering of in the Septuagint, see Jan Joosten, “ ‘bienveillance’ et “pitié”: réflexions sur une équivalence lexicale dans la Septante,” in “Car c’est l’amour qui me plait, non le sacrifice”: recherches sur Ósee 6:6 et son interprétation juive et chrétienne (ed. Eberhard Bons; Leiden: Brill, 2004) 25–42. I thank Gary Anderson for the latter reference.

52 On patronage in Luke-Acts see Halvor Moxnes, “Patron-Client Relations and the New Community in Luke-Acts,” in The Social World of Luke-Acts: Models for Interpretation (ed. Jerome H. Neyrey; Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1991) 241–68.

53 See also the interchange between the plural () and the singular () in the semantically equivalent (and possibly genetically related) Greek phrase, found in Acts 9:36 (where it pairs with charity) and numerous times in the Pauline and Deutero-Pauline epistles (Rom 2:7; 13:3l; 2 Cor 9:8; Eph 2:10; Phil 1:6; Col 1:10; 1 Tim 2:10; 5:10; 2 Tim 2:21; 3:17; Titus 1:16; 3:1).

54 Shimon Sharvit, Language and Style of Tractate Avoth through the Ages (Beer-Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2006) 75–76. See, e.g., m. ’Abot 3:11; t. Soṭah 7:21 (Lieberman, ed., 3:200); y. Ber. 4:2 (7d) (in this case with “knowledge” rather than study). Note likewise the famous debate on the relative merits of study ( or ) and deed (, which might be taken as a metonym for ; see the exegesis of Dan 6:11 above for the interpretation of , “he did,” the Aramaic equivalent of Heb. , as signaling the doing specifically of benevolent deeds; and the interchange of “works” and “good works” in Eph 2:9–10 and elsewhere), on which see Marc Hirshman, The Stabilization of Rabbinic Culture, 100 c.e.–350 c.e.: Texts on Education and Their Late Antique Context (New York City: Oxford University Press, 2009) 32–39.

55 GH does pair with Torah in the Bavli (e.g., b. Ber. 5a; b. Yebam. 105a; b. B. Qam. 17a). This innovation—whose roots may lie, in part, in the lists in m. Pe’ah 1:1, where GH and Torah occur in succession—reflects the further blurring of GH and charity in amoraic literature, as observed above. Thus diluted of the element of reciprocation, GH can stand for the full gamut of praiseworthy conduct.