Chapter 8 is an account of music-making at Christian social meals over the course of the first four centuries of the Common Era. Topics include musical activities at community suppers, private Christian dinner parties, and martyr festivals, as well as ways in which certain Christian writers saw a parallel between singing by turns at Christian social meals and the customs of classical Greeks. The earliest form of Christian music was the self-composed song or hymn, whose setting was the community supper and private Christian dinner party. In time, biblical psalms were taken up as part of the individual Christian’s song repertoire for social meals and prayer gatherings. During the third and fourth centuries, personal hymnody was largely displaced by psalmody. Meanwhile, differing preferences and moral sensibilities among Christians, typically with overtones of class, troubled inner church relations over musical recreations in both church and nonchurch social settings.

Chapter 7 examines music in various Jewish meal-settings: elite Jewish banquets, rabbinic dinners, wedding feasts, public festivals, and the communal meals of the Jewish sects. Music and social dining were occasions for self-definition, personal and corporate, as Jewish elites sought to place themselves along a continuum from resistance to assimilation in relation to the prevailing non-Jewish culture in the Diaspora and foreign rule in Palestine. The occasions included upper-class Jewish dinner parties, as well as Jewish festivals, where national music helped define Jewish identity in settings that included private dinner parties and mass public dining. The Jewish festival was also an occasion for social interaction between Jews and non-Jews. A smattering of non-Jews attended Jewish festivals, and there is reason to believe that many Jews attended the public banquets of the gentiles. Moreover, upper-class Jews such as Philo, who had Hellenic educations, were interested not only in cultivating relationships with upper-class Greeks by dining with them but also in believing that their own people had music just as fine as that of the Greeks and just as ancient in its foundations.