A weblog on ancient Judaism and its context
E-mail: paleojudaica-at-talktalk-dot-net ("-at-" = "@", "-dot-" = ".")
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| PaleoJudaica.com A weblog on ancient Judaism and its context E-mail: paleojudaica-at-talktalk-dot-net ("-at-" = "@", "-dot-" = ".") |
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Friday, June 22, 2007 THE HOLY GRAIL is in the news. Science Daily has the following: Archeologist says Holy Grail is in RomeI'm in a hurry and and can't locate the Telegraph article right now. As for the Grail, I'll believe it when I see it. For earlier PaleoJudaica coverage of Holy Grail news, see here and here. posted by Jim Davila | 2:00 PM Thursday, June 21, 2007 THE JERUSALEM FORGERY CONFERENCE, convened by the Biblical Archaeology Society in January of this year, is the subject of a special report on the BAS website. There's also an audio file of the paper by Gabriel Barkay. (Via Joseph I. Lauer's list.) posted by Jim Davila | 12:17 PM HAPPY SUMMER SOLSTICE to all those celebrating. posted by Jim Davila | 12:10 PM Tuesday, June 19, 2007 AN EGYPTIAN JEWISH MUSEUM? An outfit I don't know called "AME Info" has the following interesting brief item: Egypt resisting Jewish museumIt's heartening that the idea of a Jewish museum seems at least to be under discussion. Certainly there would be ample material. There is the Ben Ezra Synagogue and attached Cairo Geniza; the excavated ruins at Elephantine and the Jewish Aramaic papyri discovered there (some of which are currently in the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities); many Jewish and biblical texts among the Oxyrhynchus papyri; legends about the translation of the Septuagint in association with the Library of Alexandria; lots of Jewish traditions associated with Alexandria, notably the works of the philosopher Philo. And so on and so on. (See also the material collected in this TourEgypt! article by one Jimmy Dunn [not the Durham NT scholar of the same name!].) I hope this concept of an Egyptian Jewish Museum gains some traction, although I don't doubt it will be resisted. On a related note, in the last few days I've been meaning to point out that Egypt Today had an article celbrating Egypt's rich religious heritage, but unfortunately the article would lead us to believe that these consist only of Islamic and Christian sites. The closest we come to Jewish sites is this, listed under Christian sites: If hiking’s your cup of tea, head to the Sinai and trek up Mount Sinai to watch the sunrise from the spot where it is believed the prophet Moses received the Ten Commandments from God. St. Catherine’s Monastery below shelters the Burning Bush of Old Testament fame, and an impressive collection of icons and jeweled crosses.It's also odd that the TourEgypt! website entry for Elephantine Island makes no mention of the Jewish garrison and Jewish papyri excavated there, although the other TourEgypt! piece cited above does mention them. posted by Jim Davila | 12:04 PM Monday, June 18, 2007 THIS WEEK I have to attend seven graduation ceremonies (plus a rehearsal), four lunches, and two dinners as Principal of St. Mary's College and Dean of the School of Divinity. Blogging, if any, is likely to be light! posted by Jim Davila | 1:06 PM Sunday, June 17, 2007 THE MODERN HISTORY OF THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS, with special reference to the controvery about access to them up to 1991, is surveyed in an article in the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. Surprisingly, it says nothing about the role of the Huntington Library in the controversy when it released its Scrolls microfilms in 1991. I think the piece is a little hard on the original Christian team, who did put a lot of effort into placing the Scrolls into their Jewish context, although they also were understandably quite interested in their Christian background and they did neglect (through lack of specialist knowledge) connections with Rabbinic literature. And I don't think that any of the team members argued that the "sectarians were proto-Christians," in the sense of their having some clear genetic connection with Christianity. That the form of Judaism represented by the Scrolls had some interesting overlaps with Christianity is hardly under debate. The article could also have mentioned that the original team spent ten years piecing together the bits of manuscripts that came from Cave Four. The Scrolls did not land in our hands in anything like complete manuscripts. I like to say that their reconstruction was like taking a thousand jigsaw puzzles, mixing them all together, throwing away most of the boxes, discarding 80-90% of the mixed pieces, then trying to reconstruct the puzzles. However much you want to criticize the original team for their policies on access, the collating of the scattered fragments into what was left of the individual manuscripts was a heroic piece of work that took up a large chunk of their careers and for which they rarely receive explicit credit. This article is a case in point. (Full disclosure: I was one of the postgraduates in the 1980s who received Scrolls from team members to publish in our doctoral dissertations. For the record, I did not turn down any requests from scholars to see the material I was working on, and as far as I know, none of those other postgrads did either.) posted by Jim Davila | 9:23 PM A DEAD SEA SCROLL and some other ancient manuscripts are on display next week at ACTS Bible College in Minnesota: A manuscript fragment in Hebrew on brown leather, the beginning of a scroll with characters in a Herodian Hebrew book script, dating from the late first century A.D.There's a photo of the scroll as well (click on it to enlarge). posted by Jim Davila | 9:49 AM SOME OF NEWTON'S THEOLOGICAL AND APOCALYPTIC WRITINGS are on display at the Hebrew University's National Library: Father of modern science calculated: World to end in 2060posted by Jim Davila | 9:37 AM |
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