Essays in this volume honor Richard L. Kalmin, one of the leading scholars of rabbinic literature. Volume contributors explore a variety of topics related to Kalmin’s wide-ranging work from the development of the Talmud to rabbinic storytelling, from the transmission of tales across geographic and cultural boundaries to ancient Jewish and Iranian interactions. Many of the essays reflect current trends in how scholars use ancient Jewish literary sources to address questions of historical import. Contributors include Carol Bakhos, Beth A. Berkowitz, Noah Bickart, Robert Brody, Joshua Cahan, Shaye J. D. Cohen, Steven D. Fraade, Shamma Friedman, Alyssa M. Gray, Judith Hauptman, Christine Hayes, Catherine Hezser, Marc Hirshman, David Kraemer, Marjorie Lehman, Kristen Lindbeck, Jonathan S. Milgram, Chaim Milikowsky, Michael L. Satlow, Marcus Mordecai Schwartz, Seth Schwartz, Burton L. Visotzky, and Sarah Wolf.

José Luis Melena Jiménez is a peerless scholar of editing the texts written in the Mycenaean writing system of the late second millennium BCE and explicating their linguistic and “historical” contents.

This volume takes up problems of script and language representation and textual interpretation, ranging from the use of punctuation markers and numbers in the Linear B tablets and the values of specific signs, to personal names and place names reflecting the ethnic composition of Mycenaean society and the dialects spoken during the proto-Homeric period of the late Bronze Age. New insights are offered into Mycenaean furniture, war chariots, pictorial vases, land cultivation, arboriculture, and shrine areas. Other papers discuss wealth finance, prestige goods, the ideology of obligatory payment, long-puzzling tax impositions, and the inevitable collapse of the palatial economic and political systems.