From Their Bread to Their Bed: Commensality, Intermarriage, and Idolatry in Tannaitic Literature

Abstract

In the tannaitic corpus, a novel innovation appears: sharing bread is understood to lead to sharing a bed. As such, the Tannaim problematise and marginalise commensal interactions between Jews and non-Jews. In several instances, commensality with non-Jews is equated with idolatry, the binary opposite of Jewishness in rabbinic literature. While this connection is absent from Hebrew Bible texts and, at best, inchoate in a handful of Second Temple period sources, it is explicit in later amoraic literature. This article explores the gap between these corpora: tannaitic literature, in which we first encounter the rabbinic connection between bread and bed.

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