“…both the Babylonian Talmud and Middle Persian literature are preoccupied with the preferred contours of the female body”

…it is noteworthy how, despite the differences in subject matter (Jewish marital law versus Iranian poetic descriptions of the female body), both the Babylonian Talmud and Middle Persian literature are preoccupied with the preferred contours of the female body. Together, they seem to develop a preference for a taut and more restrained bodily aesthetic. There is no reason to point to Iranian aesthetical preferences as directly influencing rabbinic conceptions. Instead, we seem to have analogous and apparently linked endeavors to depict the ideal female body in contemporaneous Sasanian rabbinic and Zoroastrian discourses.

Shai Secunda, “The Construction, Composition and Idealization of the Female Body in Rabbinic Literature and Parallel Iranian Texts: Three Excurses”, NASHIM: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Studies No. 23 (Spring-Fall 2012), 78.