This collection of Daniel Boyarin's previously uncollected essays on the Talmud represents the different methods and lines of inquiry that have animated his work on that text over the last four decades. Ranging and changing from linguistic work to work on sex and gender to the relations between formative Judaism and Christianity to the literary genres of the Talmud in the Hellenistic context, he gives an account of multiple questions and provocations to which that prodigious book gives stimulation, showing how the Talmud can contribute to all of these fields. The book opens up possibilities for study of the Talmud using historical, classical, philological, anthropological, cultural studies, gender, and literary theory and criticism. As a kind of intellectual autobiography, it is a record of the alarums and excursions of a life in the Talmud.

Born 1946; trained at the Jewish Theological Seminary and Columbia University before earning his doctoral degree at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America; has taught at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Bar-Ilan University, Yale, Harvard, and Yeshiva University; since 1990 holds Hermann P and Sophia Taubman Chair of Talmudic Culture at the University of California at Berkeley; 2016/17 fellowships at the Max Weber Kolleg in Erfurt and an Alexander von Humboldt senior fellowship at the Institute for Catholic Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin.