We urge evangelical Christian institutions to stand in the gap, to create academic programs and cooperate in field archaeology ("digs") and to promote the importance of biblical archaeology in our churches. This is an expensive, but necessary undertaking.

It is necessary because biblical archaeology has not only enlightened our reading of Scripture (the recently discovered Tel-Dan inscription, for example, illuminates the character of David's dynasty) but has often confirmed the Bible's historicity.

It is necessary because, over the past 10 to 15 years, Middle Eastern archaeology has shifted from interpretation of the evidence in the light of the written records (including Scripture) to a bias against giving Scripture the benefit of the doubt. [Archaeologist William] Dever himself bears responsibility for much of this secularization and has alienated the constituency most likely to cheer and financially support the archaeology of the Middle East: committed Jews and Christians. Believers must once again firmly grasp the task and conduct original research in a faith-friendly manner.

[...]

Evangelicals are committed to fostering a belief in the trustworthiness of Scripture. That requires both argument and evidence. And the evidence, buried in the tells of the Middle East, requires painstaking excavation and analysis. Who will provide the funds? Who will lead the way?

Preview tour of the upcoming exhibit "The Houses of Ancient Israel: Domestic, Royal, Divine" (opening Nov. 12) at 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. at the Semitic Museum, 6 Divinity Ave. The exhibit explores everyday life in Iron Age Israel (ca.1000-600 B.C.) and features a full-scale replica of a fully furnished, two-story village house. A tour of the "Nuzi and the Hurrians" Mesopotamian exhibit and "Ancient Cyprus" gallery is offered from 2:30 to 3:30 p.m. Founded in 1889, the Semitic Museum holds artifacts that comprise over 40,000 items, including pottery, cylinder seals, sculpture, coins, and cuneiform tablets, many from museum-sponsored excavations in Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Cyprus, and Tunisia.

Waiting for the Messiah of Eastern Parkway (New York Times)
By JONATHAN MAHLER

It looks almost like a rain dance, only instead of precipitation, these Lubavitchers are trying to hasten the arrival of the messiah. There's just one problem. The words of the accompanying song -- ''May our master, teacher and rabbi, the king messiah, live forever'' -- refer specifically to a man who died nine years ago: Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the grand rabbi and spiritual leader of the Lubavitch movement from 1951 until 1994. The Yechi, as it is known, is sung as a demonstration of faith that their beloved rebbe will be back soon -- rising from the great beyond in a manner more befitting Jesus Christ than the savior of the Jewish people.

So if Yechi -- ''May he live'' -- is a demonstration of faith to some, it borders on a profane outburst to others. A swath of Lubavitchers are not only unwilling to utter the Yechi; they also refuse to be present in synagogues or at gatherings where it is chanted. To understand the concern of these so-called anti-messianists, consider that only a few men in Jewish history have been revered as the messiah after their deaths. One was Jesus. Another was Sabbatai Zevi, who won hundreds of thousands of followers across Palestine and Eastern Europe after publicly declaring himself the messiah in 1665. (Zevi's death was, relatively speaking, a small challenge to his adherents, who had already chosen to stick by him after his conversion to Islam.)

For the anti-messianists, their messianic brethren present a public-relations disaster of epic proportions. They worry that their Hasidic movement, which is 300 years old and has survived pogroms, Communism and the Holocaust, will become confused with a cult. What's more, they can hardly ignore the obvious Christian overtones of messianism: what kind of Jews believe in a second coming?

[�]

What started as a fissure between the community's messianists and anti-messianists has gradually opened into a canyon, with each side insisting that it is the true heir to the rebbe's vision. Over the years, the conflict between the two factions has also become one of propaganda, with rival publishing houses, magazines and bookstores. There are also endless semantic distinctions between the two factions, the most common of which is that anti-messianists write ''Of Blessed Memory'' after the rebbe's name, while messianists insist on ''Long Live King Messiah.'' There is even a Lubavitch version of the school-prayer debate, over whether the yeshivas should encourage students to sing Yechi. (Some do, some don't.)

[�]

Thirty-five years old and skinny, with long kinky black hair and a Frank Zappa goatee, Baruch Thaler left the Lubavitch movement several years ago, but his mother, stepfather and five siblings are all still very much a part of it.

[�]

A promising student in the local yeshivas, he had been on track to spread the rebbe's teachings as a Lubavitch emissary when he found himself among the throngs outside 770 on the day after the rebbe's death. Forcing his way to the front of the crowd, Thaler, who was 25 at the time, managed to grab the rebbe's coffin as it was being carried out of the building and into the car that would transport it to a graveyard in Queens. Because Jewish law requires that corpses be returned to the earth and most New York cemeteries mandate that dead bodies be fully enclosed, some Jewish coffins are made with a thin wood panel on the bottom that slides out when they are lowered into the ground. Reaching up to lift the coffin, Thaler found himself pushing directly up into that layer of plywood. As he shuffled toward the street, he could feel the shifting weight of the dead rebbe pressing into his bare hands. ''Later, people would insist that the casket was empty,'' he says. ''But this was total reality -- physical-touch confirmation.''

After the rebbe was buried, Thaler pulled away from the movement.

The biggest difficulty in trying to figure out what the rebbe really wanted is that he, too, was aware of his movement's image and thus sent different signals to those inside and outside the community. This was more than a mere P.R. gesture. The rebbe seemed to believe that bringing secular Jews back into the fold was a critical part of the process of redemption and was thus understandably wary of scaring people off with messianic zealotry.

What does seem clear is that the rebbe was, for many years, eager to quell the tide of messianism when it began to rise. But as he grew older, he became more reluctant to do so. Among the messianists' abiding articles of faith are two videotapes of the rebbe in his later years. One shows him smiling as a crowd of Lubavitchers sing Yechi around him; in the other, he is accepting a petition signed by thousands that identifies him as the messiah.

In the late 80's and early 90's, the rebbe, no doubt increasingly aware of his approaching mortality as well as of his lack of progeny, began speaking more and more frequently about the messiah -- not explicitly nominating himself but nonetheless encouraging a messianic urgency among his followers and even occasionally hinting that the messianic era had already begun.

In this context, it's possible to see the rebbe as a postmodern religious leader, one who intended for his followers to make their own decisions about his identity as the messiah. This would be in keeping with the tradition of Hasidism, which itself began as a populist effort to wrest Judaism from the grip of an elite group of Talmudic scholars. ''I think the rebbe wanted to dismantle his movement in a way,'' Max [Kohanzad] says. ''He realized that in order for people to be redeemed, they have to redeem themselves. The current mess is part of the rebbe's attempt to empower people.''

Or maybe there's another way of looking at it. Perhaps the rebbe was trying to walk the fine line between discouraging cultlike fanaticism among his followers and wanting to avoid shattering their hopes for imminent redemption.

What Do the Stones Cry Out?
Beware of claims that archaeology disproves�or proves�the Bible is true.
By Christian M.M. Brady | posted 09/24/2003

At times archeology can even substantiate claims about the text itself. The Dead Sea Scrolls offer a good example. For over a hundred years prior to their discovery, it had become commonplace for some scholars to dismiss the integrity of the biblical text. The assumption was that preserving the precise wording of such a large and diverse group of texts as the Hebrew Bible (not even considering the New Testament at the moment) could not have been transmitted from scribe to scribe over the millennia without all manner of errors creeping in. The fact that our oldest complete manuscript of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, the Masoretic Text (MT), only dated to the 10th century A.D. did not offer much assurance to those who believed that traditional scribes were as precise as they had professed to be.

Then came the famous discovery of the Bedouin in 1947. Suddenly our oldest texts of the Bible pre-dated the advent of Jesus. Scholars have now dated most of the biblical texts found at Qumran to the 2nd or 1st century B.C. (All books of the Hebrew Bible except Esther are attested, in addition to many extrabiblical texts). In this instance, a fortuitous archaeological find has demonstrated that the scribes had done a remarkable job of preserving the text. The differences between the biblical texts at Qumran and those of the Masoretic tradition are important only to linguists and textual scholars and have no serious bearing upon the meaning and context of the text. The changes are relatively slight.

A glass fragment from the fourth century, one of the world's oldest Judaica exhibits, will go on show starting next week at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The fragment, which contains a gold leaf on which there are sketches from the Temple, was apparently the bottom of a cup. It was found in the catacombs of Rome and was kept in the basement at the Vatican.

The Luckiest Generation on Earth (PRWeb/eMediaWire)

Tel Aviv, Israel (PRWEB) September 23 2003 - For thousands of years, the secrets of the universe were passed down to a chosen few from generation to generation. Ours is the first generation on earth to have complete access to the sacred sources that explain every phenomena in the world.

[...]

According to the Israel-based Kabbalist Michael Laitman, a bio-cyberneticist by profession, Kabbalah is not about researching an ancient mystical body of knowledge, but is rather the most modern science closest to man. It is the science of the 21st century that researches the forces that we do not see, forces that govern our world and influence every moment of our lives. This is a science that will change the future of each and every individual, and all of mankind. The sources explain very clearly that once this process is underway, the entire world will gradually elevate itself to a higher state of being.

[...]

Since a Kabbalist is a person who has attained the spiritual realm, they are completely aware of the processes influencing our world. They essentially hold the key to safeguarding the future of the entire human race. Yet only people who have reached a certain stage of development will feel drawn to studying the construction of the universe, and are doing the work for the rest of humanity.

While it has been confirmed that Mel Gibson's controversial film, The Passion, will be released in Australia in March through Icon Film Distribution, the Aramaic-language feature has yet to secure a distribution deal in the US. Gibson co-owns Icon with Bruce Davey.

Tribe follows mix of customs
DNA: Genes support a tribe's belief that it migrated 2,500 years ago from the Holy Land. (Baltimore Sun)

By John Murphy
Sun Foreign Staff
Originally published September 25, 2003

TSHINO, South Africa - The Jewish community in this dusty mountain village has some unorthodox customs to mark the Jewish new year. They slaughter a cow, eat its intestines, take snuff to expel demons and then, during an all-night ceremony held inside a hut with a cow dung floor, they dance, drink and sing, summoning the spirits of their ancestors for guidance in the year ahead.

[�]

The 50,000 Lemba scattered among the foothills of the Soutpansberg Mountains in South Africa's Limpopo region have a number of traditions that have always set them apart from other African tribes.

They practice circumcision, they don't eat pork or mix milk with meat, as prescribed by Jewish dietary laws. They keep one day of the week holy, and they bury their dead with their heads facing north, toward Jerusalem.

According to Lemba oral traditions, the tribe was led from the Holy Land more than 2,500 years ago by a man named Buba, to a city in Yemen, and later crossed the Red Sea into East Africa, following a star that eventually brought it to present-day South Africa.

They say they adopted local customs during their journey, like other members of the Jewish diaspora. They intermarried with African tribes, embraced African rituals and forgot many Jewish rituals and scriptures. European colonizers later converted many of the Lemba to Christianity. The Lemba don't have rabbis, synagogues or copies of the Torah.

But their dietary laws and cultural practices, nearly identical to those in Jewish communities around the world, survived generation to generation, as did their belief that they share an ancestry with the Jewish people.

For years the outside world dismissed the Lemba's claims as sheer fantasy. That changed in 1999, when geneticists from the United States, Great Britain and Israel discovered some backing for the claims.

The researchers found that Lemba men carried a DNA signature on their Y chromosome that is believed unique to the relatively small number of Jews known as the Cohanim, who trace their ancestry to the priests of the ancient Jewish Temple and, ultimately, to Aaron, brother of Moses.

The genetic discovery might have had a greater impact on Jewish communities that had rejected the Lemba's claims than on the Lemba, who never doubted their ancestry.

[�]

"The tribe as a whole is pretty ambiguous about what it is," says Tudor Parfitt, director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. "Its identity is fractured. They don't have a language that is their own. They don't have any formal leadership. They are shaky when it comes to what they are."

[�]

Parfitt was the first historian to attempt to verify the Lemba's claims. At the urging of the Lemba's spiritual leader, Matshaya Mathiva, who died last year, Parfitt retraced their journey across Africa back to Yemen and discovered signs of the city where the Lemba claim their ancestors had lived.

Parfitt recounts his travels in his book, Journey to the Vanished City.

His research along with the DNA evidence have been key to helping the world understand the Lemba's origins. Still, he cautions, the question of whether the Lemba are Jewish has not been answered conclusively: "DNA itself doesn't make anybody Jewish. All it can do is say something about their ancestry."

[...]

Shimon Gibson spoke on "A First-Century Burial Shroud at Akeldama in Jerusalem, the Turin Shroud, and the So-Called 'James Ossuary.'" (See abstract at SBL site - see Saturday's last post for a link.) Read the abstract, but note the following additional items. Gibson reports that he has reason to believe that the "James Ossuary" was looted from this tomb in 1998. (Incidentally, I hear from more than one source that Mr. Golan, the owner, has been arrested.) He also reports that the shroud is quite different from the Shroud of Turin, but matches the description of Jesus' shroud in one of the Gospels (John, I think).

Bones of Contention
Why I still think the James bone box is likely to be authentic.

In late July the Israeli police arrested Oded Golan, the owner of the ossuary, on "suspicion" of forgery. They released him soon afterward and have yet to press formal charges. Clearly if he is a forger, they should prosecute him. But Andr� Lemaire says Golan does not have the knowledge or skill to be a forger. If the James ossuary is a forgery, then as Frank Moore Cross said in the Discovery Channel special, the forger is a genius, so skillful that he fooled the world's leading experts in various fields (paleographers, archaeologists, biblical scholars, and others). Furthermore, there is no evidence that Golan has made any money or attempted to make any money on the James ossuary or the Jehoash inscription (another artifact he brought to light, but one that is certainly not authentic). Yet making money is what forgery is all about.

This soap opera will continue to run for some time. Whatever happens with Golan, the authenticity of the James ossuary inscription does not stand or fall with him. That must be determined by the experts.

But until all the experts gain access to the IAA's data, I can affirm that Andr� Lemaire and the Toronto scholars and I have not yet found any smoking gun in the IAA's report. I am still convinced the inscription is likely to be genuine, and will be vindicated as even further study and testing is done. In the meantime, let the scholarly debate continue, and let no one think that the IAA report is anything like the definitive word on this issue. Only God has the last word.

The ossuary still cries out to us, as Jesus once said the stones of Jerusalem would do�and what it says is James, and what it says is Joseph, and best of all what it says is Jesus. The ossuary is just possibly the Word made visible.

"The members of the committee, I know some of them," Lemaire said. "They are not specialized in inscriptions; when you read their report carefully, they disagree between themselves. Their conclusion is not clear; it's not justified. It could have been cleaned. They just mention that possibility, then they forget it."

Settlers entrust security to geese (News.com.au)
From correspondents in Jerusalem
September 23, 2003

[...]

According to the Yediot Aharonot daily, the residents of Adei Ad in the West Bank were inspired by tale of how geese helped protect ancient Rome.

According to legend, when the Gauls invaded Rome a detachment clambered up the hill of the capitol so silently that they went unchallenged. But while striding over a rampart, they disturbed some sacred geese and awoke the garrison leading to their defeat.

Now, the residents of Adei Ad have posted their web-footed friends at the remotest areas of their settlement.

[...]

Gerd Ludemann, "The Life of Jesus : A Brief Assessment"

Fackenheim, a refugee from Nazi Germany, was most known for formulating a post-Holocaust "614th commandment" for Jewish survival that declared, "Thou shalt not award Hitler any posthumous victories." Behind that seemingly simple statement lay a lifetime of work examining how Judaism and Jewish existence could remain meaningful in the shadow of the death camps.

Even before recent controversy, Ten Commandments have history with country's legal system (Kansas City Star)
By JEFFREY WEISS
The Dallas Morning News

But what the Commandments actually say makes them an unlikely symbol for American jurisprudence.

Worship of idols or other deities, making false oaths in God's name, coveting your neighbor's wife or possessions -- neither Justice Moore nor his supporters would suggest those need to be punished by a trip to the hoosegow.

Even the old "blue laws' that limited Sunday shopping as a way to keep a Christian Sabbath have all but vanished.

Other parts of the Bible seem to have offered more concrete inspiration for the Founding Fathers. Deuteronomy 16, for instance, has instructions about how to appoint judges, and it tells the judges not to accept bribes.

Those Commandments that did make it into American law -- do not bear false witness, for example -- can be found in other ancient codes that don't depend on the Jewish or Christian deity.

The Code of Hammurabi, for example, was law in Babylon more than 3,800 years ago. It outlaws murder, theft, adultery and perjury -- and even suggests that honoring parents is a good thing.

[...]

Most American law is based on the English common law. Debates about the importance of religion -- and the Commandments -- in shaping that legal tradition are at least 1,000 years old, said Daniel Dreisbach, professor of justice law and society at American University.

"King Alfred said that common law started with the Ten Commandments," he said.

Many of the American colonies incorporated the Commandments directly into their early laws. The Massachusetts Bay Colony, for example, considered worship of other deities a capital offense, said Perkins of the Family Research Council.

Even the Constitution has one almost-invisible nod to the Commandment about the Sabbath: Article 1 gives the president 10 days to decide whether to sign a bill into law -- Sundays excepted.

Back in 1946, E.J. Ruegemer was a juvenile court judge in Minnesota. He told the Minneapolis Star Tribune recently that he had a delinquent boy come to his bench back then who didn't know what the Ten Commandments were.

Judge Ruegemer had the idea of printing up copies for courtrooms and classrooms. His project, taken up by an organization called the Fraternal Order of Eagles, eventually got the attention of director Cecil B. DeMille, whose epic "The Ten Commandments" hit the theaters in 1956.

The two men found Catholic, Jewish and Protestant scholars willing to come up with a new version of the Commandments that incorporated all three traditions. (The DeMille list appears to have 11 commandments, unless the edicts about honoring parents and keeping the Sabbath are combined as one.) About 4,000 granite slabs were placed in towns across America.

The stars of the movie, Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner and Martha Scott, attended many of the dedications, Ruegemer recalled.