Despite being constructed centuries apart, in different traditions, and for different purposes, the Babylonian Talmud and Arabic historical chronicles share striking structural similarities. Both texts are created from ur-texts that survive only in their recensions (the Jerusalem Talmud and the akhbar of earlier Arabic historical reports, respectively), and were compiled by a process of selective augmentation, omission, emendation, and alteration. In the Talmud, the work was done by the scholars known as the Amoraim and the (anonymous) Stammaim in the construction of the Talmud from earlier Tannaitic material, and by the historians themselves in the case of the chronicles. This structural similarity provides a usable common denominator for comparison. Although the historiographical traditions are fundamentally so different—the Jewish Talmudic tradition emerging amongst an educated elite of politically disempowered exiles, and the Arabic tradition emerging from a culturally, politically, and religiously confident global civilization—both ultimately had grapple with serious questions that emerged in the wake of communal catastrophes. The Babylonian Talmud was compiled in the wake the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem; Ibn al-Athir’s al-Kamil fi al-Ta’rikh was compiled with the Mongol invasions in process (with further conquests, including of his own territory, looming). Each of these calamities was potentially existentially threatening to those communities, and such calamities are particularly troubling to a Monotheistic survivor. Questions of God’s omnipotence and His favor naturally arose. Rather than question the fundamental assumptions that underpinned Judaism’s and Islam’s conceptions of the nature of God and their communal relationship to Him, the compilers of these works responded in strikingly similar ways: by inventing (or perhaps reviving) stories that explained these catastrophes as God’s logical punishment for the misdeeds of a small number of individuals—misdeeds that violated specific communal moral norms, rather than misdeeds that logically accounted for the calamity. The Talmud traces the destruction of the Second Temple to a mis-addressed party invitation and inhospitable behavior; Ibn al-Athir places the blame for the Mongol calamity on the shoulders of the Khwarazm-Shah, who provoked fitna by failing to give the bay’a to the Abbasid caliph al-Nasir. This paper will examine the narrative similarities of these accounts.