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The first references to Hermes and his works in Arabic appear among the Iranian astrologers at the court of the ʿAbbāsid caliphs during the second half of the 8th century. These astrologers knew works of Hermes written in Middle Persian. This chapter investigates the existence of this pre-Islamic tradition of Hermetica in Arabic. First it verifies that Middle Persian Hermetica did indeed exist, although no Hermetic work survives in Middle Persian today. Then it investigates the extant accounts of how Hermetica came to be translated into Middle Persian in the Sasanian Empire. The chapter includes an extended discussion of precisely when these Middle Persian works were composed or translated from Greek. The extant sources suggest, albeit inconclusively, that Greek Hermetica were translated into Arabic already in the 3rd century. The pre-Islamic Persian Hermetic tradition provides a historical basis for understanding the origins of the Arabic Hermetica and the earliest Arabic accounts of Hermes’ identity.

This chapter draws from the field of comparative religion in order to map out the prospects and pitfalls of juxtaposing the Talmudic and Middle Persian corpora, a task beset with significant limitations. Building on the writings of Jonathan Z. Smith, this chapter argues that the best comparative approaches toward Talmudic and Middle Persian literatures are ones that seek a nuanced application of sameness and difference and avoid humanistic attempts at harmonization. Instead of forcing insular, exegetical Talmudic and Middle Persian texts into dialogue with one another through parallel taxonomies, this chapter explains why the rabbis are insular in a diverse social context and how comparativists can differentiate between (a) which types of data are phenomenological affinities between two ancient religions in contact, and (b) which are evidence of intercultural activity. After this theoretical discussion of comparison, the chapter goes on to provide readers with a sweeping overview of the Middle Persian (Pahlavi) corpus, highlighting the key differences between it and the Talmud, such as their dates and transmissional backgrounds, as well as those sources that prove most useful for Talmudic studies, such as the Book of a Thousand Judgments, the Zand-Avesta, and archaeological relics such as seals and inscriptions.

The Res Gestae Diυ‎i Saporis (RGDS) is an extraordinary inscriptional document, an account given by the Sasanian king Shāpūr I (240-271) of his empire, its extent and structure, of some of his exploits, mainly his wars against the Romans, and of some honours bestowed on distinguished members of the royal court, both living and dead. The name Res Gestae is therefore far from being an accurate description of the nature of this document, since it is appropriate only for one part of it, which by no means intends to cover the whole extent of the king’s exploits. The inscription was set up in three languages: Middle Persian (now much mutilated), Parthian, and Greek. This chapter examines who the Greek-reading destinees of Sasanian royal propaganda in the district of Stakhr were supposed to be and the implications of the use of the Greek language on a royal monument erected at a spot beyond the range of Greek civilisation.

The Talmud includes around two dozen passages about the Arsacid or Sasanian monarchs Ardawan IV, Shapur I, Shapur II, Yazdegird I, and Peroz. This chapter researches the Talmudic texts that describe the rabbis and Persian kings in dialogue with one another. Although the sage-king dialogues do not contain direct citations from Middle Persian sources, they nevertheless were influenced by the Sasanian Empire’s historiography and propaganda about the deeds of these monarchs. As this chapter shows, the Persian context affects the way in which the Talmud depicts the monarchs as symbols of authority.

This chapter shows how the Babylonian Jewish practice and Talmudic discourse of menstrual impurity developed within the space of the Sasanian Empire. It considers evidence of imperial persecutions that may have impinged on the observance of the Jewish menstrual rituals. The chapter then considers evidence of Babylonian Jewish awareness of the importance of menstrual impurity in neighboring, non-Jewish religious life, and how the shared similarity may have led to some tension. It surveys a series of Talmudic strategies for competing with the parallel Zoroastrian system. And it shows how the need to emphasize Jewish expertise may have led to the devolvement of the rabbinic diagnostic approach to bloody discharges.