The bat and the rooster: on Jewish-Christian literary interactions in the Babylonian Talmud

This article explores a Talmudic passage (Sanhedrin 98b–99a) involving a
rooster and a bat as a metaphor for eschatological anticipation and religious iden-
tity. Through close literary analysis, I argue that this rabbinic narrative is a polemi-
cal response to contemporaneous Christian interpretations of the biblical verses in
Amos and Isaiah. Situating the dialogue between a rabbi and a min (heretic) within
a broader corpus of minim stories in the Babylonian Talmud, I suggest that the story
articulates a rabbinic argument subverting the biblical texts in a way that mirrors
Christian readings in patristic sources such as Origen and Chrysostom. The animal
fable genre, commonly used for moral or theological teaching, becomes here a
sophisticated mode of theological counter-argument. The Talmudic text participates
in a shared late antique discourse of light and darkness, salvation and judgment,
constructing an inner-rabbinic message with an eye toward external Christian
claims. Ultimately, this study shows that the Babylonian Talmud was not merely
aware of Christian eschatological motifs, but engaged them – creatively and criti-
cally – through narrative and intertextual strategies that shaped rabbinic identity.