Digging Back Toward Jesus
Biblical Archaeology Uncovering Evidence About Places and People's Lives in Gospel Times

By Bill Broadway
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 13, 2003; Page B09

Many Christians were upset when Israeli antiquities experts recently declared a 1st-century inscription bearing Jesus's name a fake, seemingly depriving them of the earliest archaeological proof of Jesus's existence.

Those who take such a view misunderstand the point of biblical archaeology, said Craig A. Evans, professor of New Testament at Acadia Divinity College in Nova Scotia and an expert on ossuaries, the small burial boxes like the one discovered last fall in which was carved in Aramaic: "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus."

"Archaeology isn't so much about proving the Bible," said Evans, an evangelical Christian who said he thinks the James inscription ultimately could be proved authentic. The importance of archaeology is that it "clarifies and contextualizes the story of the Bible."

What many people don't realize, Evans and other scholars said, is that archaeologists in recent years have been searching for -- and finding -- contextual clues to the world inhabited by Jesus and his followers.

"We don't even have much direct archaeological evidence that [Jesus] walked this earth," says Hershel Shanks, editor of Washington-based Biblical Archaeological Review and host of "An Archaeological Search for Jesus," a new five-part video/DVD series featuring more than 20 leading archaeologists and biblical scholars. "What we have is lots and lots of evidence about the world he lived in."

Some of the most notable discoveries have been in the northern part of Israel known as the Galilee, an agriculturally rich area where Jesus grew up and spent most of his three-year ministry.

That evidence shows, among other things, that Jesus was born, lived and died a Jew -- a perspective at odds with beliefs that Jesus rejected Judaism to form a new religion or taught a pagan-influenced humanist philosophy, Shanks and other scholars said. It also indicates that Jesus was a cultured sophisticate, not the peasant naif portrayed in many Sunday school texts.

Foremost have been excavations at Sepphoris, a magnificent 1st-century city four miles from Nazareth; at Capernaum, a fishing village on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee where Jesus's ministry was based; and at what may have been Bethsaida, home of three apostles and the third most-mentioned town in the Gospels.

Unsettled': So Was It Odd of God?
By JONATHAN ROSEN

Published: December 14, 2003

Melvin Konner is neither a conventional scholar of Judaism nor a historian -- two reasons, perhaps, why his sweeping study of the Jews feels so fresh and alive. And if he isn't quite an expert, he's hardly a novice. A practicing Orthodox Jew until 17, when he lost his faith and a measure of his interest, he began working his way back to Judaism (if not belief) in the 1980's, after his first child was born. Soon he was studying, traveling to Israel and creating a course at Emory, where he is a professor of anthropology, to synthesize his findings. ''Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews'' is, he tells us, the result of a personal as well as a scholarly journey.
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''Unsettled'' follows a roughly historical outline, from the earliest prebiblical days through the destruction of the First and Second Temples, the subsequent scattering of the Jews, the Holocaust, the establishment of the state of Israel and the Jewish encounter with America. It covers the golden ages in Spain and Poland and is equally zealous in tracking down Jewish communities in China, India and Afghanistan.

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But while Konner is attuned to the way external events helped shape the very essence of the religion, his historical accounts are shot through with a contemporary consciousness, so that the public readings of the Torah in the marketplace by Ezra the Scribe after the exiles from Babylonia returned are not so different from today's Torah service. Perhaps this is what Konner means by ''an anthropology,'' since he is not studying a fixed point in the past but a people who, for all the cultures they have lived in and generated, maintain a far-flung cohesion -- with the past and with one another. Konner finds this true even when comparing mountain Jews of Ethiopia sitting in darkness on the Sabbath and Ashkenazic Jews with an elaborate Talmudic culture unknown to their Ethiopian cousins.

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Asked what he has to say in response to the accusations he does not recognize the Jewish people's link to the land, Arafat said, "They are entirely untrue. My religion, Islam, obliges me to respect Judaism and Jewish history, whose prophets are revered in the holy Koran as God's messengers. While we insist that East Jerusalem be the capital of a Palestinian state, and that the Haram al-Sharif, on which are situated the two mosques, Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock, come under Palestinian sovereignty, we accept Jewish sovereignty over the Wailing Wall and over the Jewish quarter of the Old City. We accept this only because we recognize and respect the Jewish religion and the Jewish historical attachment to Palestine."

Man of the Book: Reading a Life of Salman Schocken

The Patron: A Life of Salman Schocken (1877-1959)
By Anthony David
Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt and Company), 352 pages, $30.



By MINDY ALOFF

You may have never heard of the publisher Salman Schocken, an intellectual's businessman as well as a businessman's intellectual; even some leading New York editors of the past 30 years know little about him. But if you've ever read "In Mr. Lublin's Shop" by S.Y. Agnon � a writer whom Schocken essentially discovered, supported and promoted for the Nobel Prize in Literature � you've encountered a portrait of him. And if you ever bought a paperback edition of the works of Franz Kafka or Gershom Scholem in the United States in the 1950s or 1960s, you were directly affected by Schocken's taste � at least, by a small dimension of it.

Schocken Books, the last of the publishing companies devoted to what is now called Judaica, was the comparatively reduced American outpost of Schocken's publishing enterprise, which began magisterially with a rich and risk-taking array of German books in Weimar Berlin and continued with an extensive Hebrew publishing program in pre-World War II Palestine, where Schocken also owned the daily newspaper Ha'aretz and served as the head of administration for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His English-language publishing venture was founded last, in 1947, when Schocken was 70. Based in New York City (where it was supported primarily by Schocken's luck in real-estate investment), its most important holdings were the copyrights to the complete works of Kafka. In the large map of New York publishing, though, Schocken Books has been considered a comparatively minor house, a niche or specialty publisher, and Schocken himself has rarely inspired curiosity outside a small circle of other Jewish �migr�s.

This is likely to change with the appearance of Anthony David's monumental new biography, "The Patron: A Life of Salman Schocken 1877-1959." David's absorbing chronicle covers not only Schocken's extensive mercantile, publishing, bibliophilic, philanthropic and scholarly achievements; his cultural and intellectual ideals; his several exiles (from Germany to Palestine and then from Israel to the United States) and restless travels; his amazing literary instincts and steely business acumen, and his 50-year marriage in which he fathered five children, all of whom led reasonably good lives, but also his numerous extramarital affairs and his decision, at age 73, to leave his loveless union with his wife, Lilly, saying, "Now, I am a free man."

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Bring Back the A-Word
Why conservatives shouldn't be shy about citing the 'abomination' Bible verse when objecting to gay marriage.
By David Klinghoffer

Just as homosexuality was once the love that dare not speak its name, there is a Bible verse that opponents of gay marriage rarely speak. It is Leviticus 18:22, which reads: �You shall not lie with a man as one lies with a woman, it is an abomination.� These ancient words, the Bible�s most direct statement on homosexuality, need to be rehabilitated. Why? Because American security and prosperity are linked with the sexual norms we sanction.

A rabbinic interpretive tradition (one which goes back at least to the fourth century C.E. and is found in the midrashic book Sifra) understands another verse in Leviticus 18 to mean that the locals in Canaan actually conducted same-sex marriages, among other forbidden sexual practices the Canaanite peoples had sanctioned. It was for this that God ejected them from the holy land: �Do not become contaminated through any of these [acts]; for through all of these the nations that I expel before you became contaminated. The land became contaminated and I recalled its iniquity upon it; and the land disgorged it inhabitants� (vv. 24-25). The Canaanites suffered national defeat, invasion, humiliation. Finally, they disappeared from history. (Did you ever meet a �Canaanite�?)

The Bible doesn't frown on gay sex uniquely. In the first five books of the Bible (the Torah), homosexual intercourse isn�t the only act called an �abomination.� The book of Deuteronomy applies the terms to certain unethical business practices, which in Leviticus are denounced as a �perversion� (see Deut. 25:16, Lev. 19:35).

But same-sex intimacy is unique (along with incest and sex with animals) in being pointed to as among the failings of a non-Jewish people, the Canaanites, that brought about that group�s final moral dissolution. I don�t know of another category of sin that, in the biblical context, is both a) explicitly made applicable to gentiles and b) is spoken of in such emphatic terms as leading to societal breakdown, whether the society in question is Jewish or not.

Basic moral principles apply not only to Jews, in other words, but to all people, even those that don't follow Jewish dietary laws. If any country defies them, it will suffer a fate akin to the Canaanites'. The men and women of Canaan were not held responsible for not observing the Jewish Sabbath--to pick another example of a practice asked only of Jews; but they were held responsible for rejecting the fundamental moral tenet that marriage is between a man and a woman.

24: "Do not defile yourselves by any of these things [in vv. 6-23], for by all these the nations I am casting out before you defiled themselves;
25: and the land became defiled, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants.
26: But you shall keep my statutes and my ordinances and do none of these abominations, either the native or the stranger who sojourns among you
27: (for all of these abominations the men of the land did, who were before you, so that the land became defiled);
28: lest the land vomit you out, when you defile it, as it vomited out the nation that was before you.
29: For whoever shall do any of these abominations, the persons that do them shall be cut off from among their people.

The message is clear: If the Bible possesses any real authority as a communication of God�s thoughts about man, then a country�s safety and stability are related to the kinds of sexual relationships it endorses.

This doesn't mean we have to stone gays or carry out any of the other penalties for misbehavior outlined in the Hebrew Bible. These are meant to be applied only in a Jewish commonwealth, and then only under very special conditions. (There needs to be a Temple in Jerusalem with a high-court, or Sanhedrin, sitting in judgment there on capital trials. Look for these when the Messiah comes, ushering in a new world full of the knowledge of God where the need for harsh justice will thus be exceedingly rare.)

There is no turning back the clock to biblical times. But conservatives have gotten into the habit of explaining our doubts about homosexual marriage in highly pragmatic, rationalistic terms having nothing to do with religion. Conservative pundits say you have to keep your arguments secular to reach the ideological middle.

To them, citing Leviticus would seem the grossest violation of good manners. But the advance of sanctioned gay marriage, creeping like ivy across the face of the American legal system, shows the futility of this strategy.

Let us consider telling the truth about what underlies the case against homosexual matrimony. After all, many Americans look to the Bible for their values. We live in a culture imbued, from the Pilgrims onward, with Old Testament values. That's who we are.

Any Bible-believer must agree that it�s God�s will, not man�s intellect, which decides profound moral questions. If conservatives started talking biblically about homosexual marriage, we would stand to energize those of our fellow citizens who share our traditional values.

After all, we are talking about laws of nature as God made it. An ancient rabbinic teaching says that in creating the world, He first looked in the Torah, Scripture�s first five books and their explanatory traditions. In other words, the Bible is not a set of arbitrarily imposed rules. It�s a blueprint of how the world works.

We Americans don�t live in a society governed by Mosaic law. However, neither did the Canaanites. When the Bible speaks of their moral failings in very specific ethical areas, and the consequent downfall of their civilization, there is a lesson not just for a Jewish society but for everyone. The way God sets things up, a society that institutionalizes same-sex unions will ultimately suffer tragic consequences--�disgorgement� from its place in the world. What, in very concrete terms, would that mean? Let�s hope we don�t have to find out.

One might wonder if Davila would make the same argument against Marxists or Republicans who base their political arguments on premises most people don't share or indeed anyone else.

Aren't all arguments made from presuppositions everyone in the polity doesn't share or else there would be no argument.

As for the application of parts of Mosaic law and not others (no on sodomy, yes on eating unclean animals) this is long established Christian Theology.

And unless one spends a lot of time attacking almost everyone for making stupid arguments based on personal assumptions,

to concentrate on religious believers suggests unwarranted discrimination. There is a thread of belief on the Left (which I don't know if Davila shares) holding that religious beliefs have little or no place in politics or governance. But they should actually be treated like any other beliefs.

Language of Lachish

Sandra Metzger writes to ask:

"Would you possibly know of an ancient battle that sounds like 'Lekesh' but is spelled differently? I read about it 20 years ago in a book on archaeology and the Bible, which was later stolen in Liverpool, England, when in transport back to America. A hole in my memory prevents me from remembering the spelling to look it up."

Liverpool must have had some very intellectual thieves. In any case, I am glad to be able to restore to Ms. Metzger the name of her lost battle, which was the battle of Lachish, pronounced "Lah-KHEESH.'"

What does this battle have to do with a language column? Quite a lot, actually, because in archaeological excavations conducted in the 1920s and 1930s at Lachish, a hilltop 10 miles west of Hebron near where the mountains of Judea meet the coastal plain, a number of fascinating and dramatic Hebrew ostraca � inscriptions written on shards of broken pottery � from the exact period in which the battle was fought were discovered. Many of these consisted of letters or fragments of them written by a Judean army officer named Hosha'yahu to his commander Ya'ush, who was stationed with his troops in Lachish while awaiting an attack from the forces of the Babylonian king Sennacherib in 701 BCE. They teach us some new Hebrew expressions from biblical times, cause us to rethink some old ones and occasion some reflections about what is and isn't known regarding the language of the Bible.

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All this makes one reflect that, as large and varied a book as the Bible is, its Hebrew represents only a part of the Hebrew spoken in biblical times, about which we need to avoid overly hard-and-fast assumptions. Readers of this column may remember, for instance, how, several months ago, in a discussion of an alleged eighth-century BCE inscription supposedly found on the Temple Mount, I argued that a Hebrew expression occurring in it, and used differently from the way it is used in biblical texts, might be authentic nonetheless. This contention was scoffed at by a number of biblical scholars and the inscription, indeed, has meanwhile been declared counterfeit by the Israel Anitiquities Department; but the example of the Lachish letters shows clearly, I think, that in principle I was right. There are several linguistic usages in these letters that, had suspicion been cast on the ostraca they were written on, could have been taken by the same scholars as proof that these ostraca were fake too.

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A Rabbi Reads the Psalms

2nd Edition

Jonathon Magonet

This second enlarged edition of Jonathon Magonet's 1994 introduction to the Jewish reading of the Psalms will be welcomed. It has become a staple of university reading lists and helped many take their first steps in understanding the poetry of the Hebrew Bible and offers an insight into the different kinds of spiritual understanding to be found in Jewish Tradition. Two new studies of Psalms 51 and 118 are included in this edition.

2nd Ed 0 334 02953 8 216x135mm�� 200pp �14.99 February�2004


A Rabbi Reads the Bible

2nd Edition

Jonathan Magonet

Since it's first appearance in 1991, Jonathan Magonet's introduction to the Jewish reading of Scripture has proved immensely popular. The informal style and wit open a wide range of scholarly issues to the general and specialist reader, and encourage a journey of discovery into unfamiliar tradition and modern Jewish approaches to the text of the Bible. Two new chapters add to the value of this stimulating book.

2nd Ed 0 334 02952 X 180pp 216x135mm �14.99 February 2004

Did Christians Write Old Testament Pseudepigrapha that Appear to be Jewish?

In recent years I and others have argued that the proper starting point for the study of Old Testament pseudepigrapha transmitted only by Christians is the earliest surviving manuscripts. We cannot assume that, if such works lack obviously Christian features (or contain only a few), they were written by Jews. It remains possible that they were written by Christians who, for whatever reason, omitted such elements.

This paper presents some lateral but positive evidence that Christians in fact did this. Christians wrote documents in the same genres as the Jewish pseudepigrapha (apocalypses, liturgies, oracles, rewritten scripture). They also attributed anonymous Old Testament pseudepigrapha without explicitly Christian features to named Christian authors, such as Tertullian, so ancient Christians themselves saw nothing implausible in the idea of a Christian writing such a work.

Moreover, in some cases texts (including hymns, sermons, and sections of biblical commentaries) on Old Testament themes by known Christian authors (e.g., John Chrysostom and Ephrem Syrus) contain either no explicitly Christian features or else very few and of a such nature that, had the works been transmitted anonymously as Old Testament pseudepigrapha, some modern scholars would excise these features as secondary and take the works to be Jewish pseudepigrapha. Sometimes these documents even include material (e.g., positive references to the Law or circumcision) which we would normally expect of Jewish authors.

Although these observations do not prove that Christians wrote pseudepigrapha that appear to be Jewish, they show that this possibility is entirely consonant with surviving evidence, and they reinforce the principle that for Old Testament pseudepigrapha transmitted by Christians the burden of proof is on anyone who asserts that the works are Jewish compositions. This is an important methodological filter for preventing extraneous sources from contaminating our understanding of ancient Judaism.

Gerald McDermott, having begun by making films of mythologies, consulted with the great Jungian scholar Joseph Campbell. From there he went to writing and painting prize-winning books, often traditional tales or trickster mythologies. This time McDermott says his story "Creation" (written and illustrated by Gerald McDermott; Dutton; n.p.; ages 7 and up; $16.99) is based "on Genesis 1:1 through 2:3 of the Hebrew Bible, with an eye toward its antecedents in the ancient Near East" as well as on 13th- and 14th-century French and Spanish accounts.

McDermott's stunning, exalted illustrations are on handmade mulberry-bark paper whose organic textures inspired the swirls and shadings of his gesso-and-fabric color paintings. He writes that he intends the book to be "an outer expression of the inner reality that connects every human soul." In that, it succeeds. It is an eloquent object of beauty, for any age, and necessary for our times.

JOHN VAN SETERS
An Ironic Circle: Wellhausen and the Rise of Redaction Criticism
Seiten 487�500
[pdf (60 kb)]

KARIN SCH�PFLIN
Jakob segnet seinen Sohn. Genesis 49,1�28 im Kontext von Josefs- und V�tergeschichte
Seiten 501�523
[pdf (98 kb)]

JEAN L�HOUR
L�Impur et le Saint dans le Premier Testament � partir du livre du L�vitique Partie I: L�Impur et le Pur
Seiten 524�537
[pdf (62 kb)]

ANSELM C. HAGEDORN
Deut 17,8�13. Procedure for Cases of Pollution?
Seiten 538�556
[pdf (112 kb)]

ROBERT COUFFIGNAL
De la b�te � l�ange: le Psaume 23, miroir de l�aventure spirituelle
Seiten 557�577
[pdf (101 kb)]

CORNELIUS B. HOUK
Syllable-Word Patterns in Esther
Seiten 578�585
[pdf (43 kb)]

ARMIN D. BAUM
Zu Funktion und Authentizit�tsanspruch der oratio recta. Hebr�ische und griechische Geschichtsschreibung im Vergleich
Seiten 586�607
[pdf (94 kb)]

Mitteilungen

GEORG FISCHER
Zur Lage der Pentateuchforschung
Seiten 608�616
[pdf (53 kb)]

ARON PINKER
Infertile Quartet of Flora / Symposium
Seiten 617�624
[pdf (63 kb)]

Public Statement by Ismail Serageldin
Alexandria, 4 December-The following statement is attributable to the Director of the Library of Alexandria, Dr. Ismail Serageldin:
"Recent press reports concerning the presence of the first Arabic translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in an exhibition in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina deserve a prompt and clear reply. Preliminary investigation determined that the book was briefly displayed in a showcase devoted to rotating samples of curiosities and unusual items in our collection. The book was never displayed alongside the Jewish Torah nor has it ever been stated that it is a holy book or the basis for a Jewish constitution. The book is a well-known 19th century fabrication to foment anti-Jewish feelings.
"The book was promptly withdrawn from public display, but its very inclusion showed bad judgment and insensitivity, and an internal administrative hearing is underway to determine whether further action is to be taken.
"The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is profoundly committed to its role as a center of learning and a place promoting tolerance, dialogue and understanding between peoples, cultures and civilizations. We are honored to work with distinguished international partners in promoting these universal ideals".

Dear Dr. Serageldin,

Thank you very much for this information. I commend you for your prompt and proper action regarding this unfortunate situation.

Would you please comment on the interview with Dr. Yousef Ziedan (who is named as the director of the manuscript museum at the Library of Alexandria) in Al Usbu', translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute and available online at http://www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD61903? According to this interview Dr. Ziedan said:

"When my eyes fell upon the rare copy of this dangerous book, I decided immediately to place it next to the Torah. Although it is not a monotheistic holy book, it has become one of the sacred [tenets] of the Jews, next to their first constitution, their religious law, [and] their way of life. In other words, it is not merely an ideological or theoretical book.

"Perhaps this book of the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' is more important to the Zionist Jews of the world than the Torah, because they conduct Zionist life according to it� It is only natural to place the book in the framework of an exhibit of Torah [scrolls]."

He is also quoted as having made sarcastic, bizarre, and inaccurate statements about the Holocaust in this interview. Are the quotations in the interview correct and, if so, what is your position as Director of the Library on his comments? If the quotations misrepresent what he said, what is the source of the error?

I am putting your statement below [it's above in this post] on my weblog, PaleoJudaica and, if you have no objection, I would like also to post there your reply to my queries above.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Biblical Studies in Israel is a year abroad program for Christian undergraduate students majoring in biblical studies or related fields. The BSI program is directed by Dr. Randall Buth in cooperation with the Rothberg International School of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. BSI is ideal for students who want to develop strong language skills along with introductions to the cultural and geographical backgrounds of the Bible. BSI immerses students into the language and ancient thought process, thereby, expanding their comprehension of the biblical world and its textual witnesses.

Egypt Library Removes Anti-Semitic Tract (The Guardian


Saturday December 6, 2003 10:01 PM

By NADIA ABOU EL-MAGD

Associated Press Writer

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - The Alexandria Library has withdrawn the first Arabic translation of the ``Protocols of the Elders of Zion'' from an exhibit after U.N. cultural officials questioned the display of the 19th century anti-Semitic tract.

In a statement faxed to The Associated Press on Saturday, library director Ismail Serageldin denied allegations that the book was displayed next to the Jewish holy book, the Torah.

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Youssef Ziedan, who as director of the library manuscript center made the decision to display the book, noted the exhibition including the book was only open to researchers doing postgraduate studies.

``My professional view is that it is a silly book,'' he said. ``Its only significance is that it is the first Arabic edition of the book that has influenced the Arab mentality to a great extent.''

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