The symposium was one of those peculiarly Greek institutions that the Jews seem to have adopted early, broadly and with little ostensible cultural anxiety. Like many such institutions, it had significant congeners in the Near East and the eastern Mediterranean outside Greek lands, a fact which eased its later domestication there. The royal banquet/drinking bout was a significant theme in art and literature far back into the Near Eastern Bronze Age, and the family or sacral feast – which might well include a party of what we could appropriately call xenoi and philoi, in addition to family members – a common scene in the Hebrew Bible, and possibly not uncommon in the life of ancient Israel. As is also true of many such institutions, its embrace by the Jews was far more fraught than the surface of the evidence implies. Philo of Alexandria, for example, the most ‘hellenised’ of Jewish writers, devoted half of his essay ‘on the contemplative life’ (40–91) to an invidious comparison of the symposium, with its drunkenness, violence, gluttony, luxury, vapid logoi and pederasty, and the solemn, sober, orderly, profound and silent feasts of a Jewish monastic sect called the Therapeutae – a (not always intentionally) hilarious satirical tour de force.

Nevertheless, symposium-like parties are mentioned, described, prescribed for, in a great many ancient Jewish texts.