Review of Dalton, How Rabbis Became Experts

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: How Rabbis Became Experts. New book explores rise of the rabbinic movement.

How Rabbis Became Experts
Social Circles and Donor Networks in Jewish Late Antiquity
By Krista N. Dalton
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2025), 264 pp.; $39.95 (hardback), $27.97 (eBook)

Reviewed by Elizabeth Shanks Alexander

... So, much like modern academics, ancient rabbis gained and maintained expertise not only by participating in intellectual exchange but also by embedding their intellectual prowess in a larger social performance supported by donor networks. That dependency brought its own set of complications. Though the precise content of rabbinic expertise (e.g., knowledge of Torah and halakhic rulings) may have remained inaccessible to the donor class, wealthy donors created the platform that produced rabbinic expertise. Ironically, the rabbis could not have achieved their authority without the support of wealthy, non-rabbinic donors who may have had little vested interest in the technical details of rabbinic teachings.

I noted the publication of the book and an essay on it by the author here.

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What does Jesus say in the Gospel of Thomas, and is it "gnostic?"

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: The Sayings of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas. Simon Gathercole examines the enigmatic Gospel of Thomas (Robin Ngo).

Is the Gospel of Thomas “Gnostic”? Were these sayings of Jesus attributed to a religious group—“the Gnostics”—who offered an alternate view of early Christianity?

This BHD essay summarizes and quotes from a 2015 article by Simon Gathercole, which remains behind the subscription wall.

As to the question "Is the Gospel of Thomas gnostic?"—It depends on what you mean by gnostic. As Prof. Gathercole points out, it does not promote the demiurgic myth—the idea that the God of the Bible is an imperfect emanation of the True God and that this imperfect god (the "demiurge" or "creator") made the imperfect world we live in. So in that sense, no.

At the same time, it does promote the idea that Jesus taught secret knowledge (gnosis—sayings 1-2, 49) reserved for his followers which gives them an already-realized immortality. In that sense it is gnostic, but a gnosticism closer to (for example) Hermetic gnosticism—with Jesus instead of Hermes as the teacher—than to the Christian demiurgic variety.

That's a broad generalization that specialists may want to pick apart, but I stand by it as a generalization.

This BHD essay has been around for a while, but it's just been reposted and this is my first link to it. Also reposted is a translation of the Gospel of Thomas, which I did link to already here.

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The first Hannibal movie

PUNIC WATCH MET CINEMA IN 1959: Hannibal (IMDB).

Denzel Washington's prospective Hannibal movie has been in the news for some time, but the project seems now to have been terminated. Too bad. But let's not forget that another Hannibal movie, with Victor Mature playing Hannibal, came out in 1959. You can watch the trailer at the link.

It was not a great hit. You can read more about it at the Wikipedia page. The full movie is available on YouTube, but I'm not sure of its copyright status.

Hannibal's romantic interest, Sylvia, is entirely fictional. Her supposed uncle, Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, was a real senator and general, who had significant involvement in the Second Punic War.

There are, of course, two other "Hannibal" films starring Anthony Hopkins. But they are about a different Hannibal.

Vin Diesel, looks like Hannibal Barca's cinematic fate is back in your hands.

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On John the Baptist and his priestly family

ALL ISRAEL NEWS has a new series on Real People of the New Covenant.

This article is part of Real People of the New Covenant: Lives Behind the Names, a new series by ALL ISRAEL NEWS contextualizing the historical figures of the biblical narrative. Exploring the history and archaeology of the Land offers an objective framework for reading the text, grounding distant figures within their concrete environment.

Two articles present a take on the historical and cultural background on John the Baptist and his family.

Zeḥaryah and Elisheva in the Book of Luke reveal Temple-era priestly life. Part One: The real people of the New Covenant: Lives behind the names (Anne Carter)

This installment focuses on Zeḥaryah and Elisheva (Zechariah and Elizabeth), a priestly couple introduced in the Gospel of Luke and positioned at the heart of Temple life in Jerusalem. Their story offers a window into the priestly order, daily Temple service, and the social and religious dynamics of Judea in the late Second Temple period, while also marking the opening moments of the New Testament narrative.

[...]

Yoḥanan the Baptist – the dissident of the priestly elite. Part Two: The real people of the New Covenant: Lives behind the names (Anne Carter)

Analyzing Yoḥanan within his authentic socio-cultural context shifts the understanding of his historical role. He was not a marginalized outsider with nothing to lose; he was an elite insider who voluntarily relinquished a life of physical comfort and institutional prestige in Jerusalem to operate on the geographic and political periphery.

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Byzantine-era city discovered in Egypt

EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY: Archaeologists uncover ancient Byzantine city in Egypt’s western desert. Well-preserved fourth-century quarters reveal details of daily life, urban development and economic activities (Nadeem Badshah, The Guardian).

Archaeologists in Egypt have uncovered a well-preserved Byzantine-era city in the western desert.

The fourth-century quarters had residential and religious structures, including a basilica-style church in the Dakhla oasis. Archaeologists also found coins, pottery fragments and tools.

Separately, 18 ancient tombs were discovered at Marina el-Alamein, near Alexandria, which includes rock-cut and limestone tombs, pottery and a granite sarcophagus.

[...]

The discoveries include Latin inscriptions and hundreds of inscribed ostraca, languague unspecified. This is the early Coptic period, but there is no specific mention of any Coptic writing. Several of the tombs contained mummies with golden tongues.

I look forward to hearing more about the findings.

Yet another lost city recovered in Egypt.

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Hannibal R.I.P.?

CINEMA AND PUNIC WATCH FAIL? Antoine Fuqua and Denzel Washington’s Netflix ‘Hannibal’ Epic Is “Dead” Due to $200M Budget Concerns (Jordan Ruimy, World of Reel).

Last month, Netflix had a change of heart when it came to Antoine Fuqua’s General Hannibal biopic starring Denzel Washington. Pre-production had been halted by the streamer. The film was scheduled to shoot this summer in Italy but was “put on pause” due to budget concerns—the rumored price tag for Fuqua’s film was over $200M.

Cinematographer Robert Richardson is telling The Playlist that the project is now “effectively dead.” ...

It's not a good sign when your cinematographer says that your film is "effectively dead." But did Richardson actually say that? If you click on the link in the quote above, you will see that the introduction to the Playlist interview says "Oh, and he also noted that the Antoine Fuqua “Hannibal” epic with Denzel Washington at Netflix he was meant to shoot is effectively dead ..." while linking to an earlier article on the film's pre-production being paused. However, the interview itself, which "has been edited for length and clarity," doesn't mention the Hannibal film, Washington, or Fuqua at all. Whatever he said or didn't say about wasn't important enough to keep in the final edit.

It doesn't look good for the film, but there is not yet a definitive announcement about its fate. We'll see.

Background here and links.

UPDATE (7 July): Deadline has published an interview with Mr. Richardson in which the subject of the Hannibal film comes up again:

DEADLINE: So, to bring us up to date, what are you working at the moment?

RICHARDSON: I just did Madden, with David O. Russell, and I was going to make Hannibal with Antoine and Denzel Washington for Netflix — Hannibal Barca being the general in Carthage — but it fell through just two weeks ago. I was on it for 10 or 12 weeks.

That sounds decisive. Hannibal R.I.P.

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Cover, Philo of Alexandria, On the Change of Names (SBL/Brill)

NEW PAPERBACK FROM SBL PRESS:

Philo of Alexandria, On the Change of Names: Introduction, Translation, and Commentary
Michael B. Cover

ISBN 9781628377972
Volume 8
Status Available
Publication Date February 2026

Paperback $95.00

In this eighth volume of the Philo of Alexandria Commentary Series, originally published by Brill in hardcover, Michael B. Cover translates and provides commentary on Philo of Alexandria’s treatise On the Change of Names. Taking a cue from Platonist interpreters of Homer’s Odyssey, Philo reads the story of Abraham as an account of the soul’s progress and perfection. Responding to contemporary critics who mocked Genesis 17 as uninspired, Philo finds instead a hidden philosophical reflection on the ineffability of the transcendent God, the transformation of souls that recognize their mortal nothingness, the possibility of human faith enabled by the peerless faithfulness of God, and the fruit of moral perfection: the joy divine, prefigured in the birth of Isaac.

As the blurb says, this volume was published by Brill (in 2024), but it looks like I missed it then.

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Independence Day 2026

HAPPY 250TH INDEPENDENCE DAY TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!

I can remember the Bicentennial celebrations. Wow.

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Knight-Messenger, The Place of Court Tales in the Hebrew Bible and Early Jewish Literature (T&T Clark)

NEW BOOK FROM BLOOMSBURY/T&T CLARK:

The Place of Court Tales in the Hebrew Bible and Early Jewish Literature

Form, Development, and Function

Andrew Knight-Messenger (Author)

Hardback
$120.00 $108.00

Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
$108.00 $86.40

Ebook (PDF)
$108.00 $86.40

Product details

Published May 14 2026
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Pages 240
ISBN 9781666980936 Imprint T&T Clark
Illustrations 12 tables
Dimensions 9 x 6 inches
Series The Library of Second Temple Studies
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

Description

A groundbreaking reassessment of the Jewish court tale, a genre that shaped Second Temple literature and theology. Andrew D. Knight-Messenger brings fresh insight to narratives featuring Jewish figures navigating foreign royal courts, from Daniel and Esther to lesser-known stories preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Far from being historical curiosities, these tales emerge as literary and theological responses to exile, exploring themes of divine sovereignty, identity, and restoration.

Knight-Messenger demonstrates how court tales challenge traditional views of exile as punishment, reframing it as a setting for divine action and renewal. His analysis uncovers links to apocalyptic motifs and the development of Jewish eschatology, situating these narratives within broader currents of ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean traditions.

Combining close literary reading with historical context, this volume traces the rise, evolution, and decline of the genre, offering comparative insights and revealing its enduring significance for understanding Jewish thought in the Second Temple period.

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Did Herod build a tomb in the Cave of Machpelah?

ARCHIVAL ARCHAEOLOGY: Herod built a secret tomb for himself inside the Cave of Machpelah, Israeli researchers reveal (Tamar Stein, Israel365 News).

The announcement came in a video interview posted to the C14 YouTube channel, featuring Chaim Shakolnik, district director of the COGAT Archaeology Unit, and Dr. Gershon Bar-Kochva, a researcher at Orot Israel College in Hebron. The two researchers said they came across previously unknown photographs — old images of sections of the underground system beneath the Machpelah structure — taken during the only scientific exploration of the caves to date, conducted in 1919. “We saw photographs that were not known until now,” Shakolnik said, “and we understood that they reveal part of the system that Herod planned and executed when he built this complex.”

The researchers drew on comparative architectual typology to conclude that the Machpelah structure is a burial complex. Reportedly, Carbon-14 tests have confirmed the Herodian date of the structure.

All very interesting, but let's see if it produces a peer-reviewed publication.

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Nora's western (Phoenician/Punic) necropolis reopens

PHOENICIAN AND PUNIC WATCH: Nora's western necropolis opens to the public after 90 years: "A historic day for the island, with centuries-old tombs discovered." Inside it are preserved fundamental testimonies for the reconstruction of the development of the ancient city (L'Unione Sarda.it).

An area previously inaccessible has been included in the Nora Archaeological Park 's visitor itineraries for the first time since 1936, or after 90 years, offering the public the opportunity to discover one of the most important Phoenician and Punic funerary contexts in the western Mediterranean.

[...]

I have said more about the Phoenicians at Nora, in Sardinia, here and links. The Phoenician Nora Stele inscription was also found at Nora, but in a secondary context, built into a later wall.

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Does the Bible prohibit intermarriage with non-Israelites?

DR. EVE LEVAVI FEINSTEIN: The Making of the Biblical Prohibition of Intermarriage (TheTorah.com).

Does the Bible prohibit intermarriage with non-Israelites? Not originally. Deuteronomy only prohibits intermarriage with the Canaanite nations. Faced with an intermarriage crisis in Persian Period Yehud, Ezra and Nehemiah reinterpret texts from Deuteronomy and Leviticus, thereby extending the prohibition of intermarriage to all the peoples of the land from their times.

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Turbo footnotes in the Victorian era

THE ANXIOUS BENCH: On Gnostics, Essenes, Footnotes, And The History Of Reading (Philip Jenkins).

I have been working on the discovery of alternative scriptures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the process, I have learned a lot more than I ever knew about ancient movements like the Gnostics, but some of my interesting “finds” have actually been about the era that was doing the discovery, and what we would consider the very different ways in which academics recorded and presented information. To put it simply, the Victorian scholarly book was a very different object from anything we might recognize today, and you might even need a user’s guide to get the best value out of any example that you might ever need for your research. Here is that guide. You’re welcome.

[...]

With marvelous examples from Lightfoot's commentary on Colossians and Philemon.

I wonder if in the Victorian era the pace of scholarship was slow enough that Lightfoot and his contemporaries just assumed scholars could read everything that was written. Or maybe they just wrote for themselves and it was their readers' problem to find what to take away.

Scholars do still produce turbo footnotes, if not as many as in the old days. But no one assumes that specialists read everything, and much current scholarship is scarcely read at all.

I think this AB post still counts, in a footnotey way, as a continuation of Professor Jenkins's Lost and Found Scriptues series. For earlier posts, see here and links.

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Did Joseph have a wife (wives?) before Mary?

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: The Question of Mary’s Perpetual Virginity. Considering the brothers and sisters of Jesus with Helen Bond (Lauren K. McCormick).

These two strands of evidence suggest a scenario where young Mary entered an existing household, perhaps helping to raise the eventual brothers and sisters of Jesus who were not her own biological kin, in a common circumstance of the ancient world. The Gospels plainly present Mary as a virgin at the time of Jesus’s conception, and centuries of later theology were built around the question of whether she remained a virgin perpetually. Mark 6:3 and Matthew 13:55–56 do not share that interest and instead focus on identifying the members of Jesus’s family.

This essay summarizes a BAR article by Helen Bond which is behind the subscription wall.

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The first complete French translation of the Talmud

TALMUD WATCH: The first complete French translation of the Talmud is complete. The complete translation project of the Talmud was launched at the residence of the President in the presence of President Herzog and businessman and philanthropist Patrick Drahi (i24News).

In a ceremony at the President's Residence in Jerusalem on Wednesday, Israel marked the completion and publication of the first full French translation of the Babylonian Talmud. The project is based on the landmark commentary of the late Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz and funded by the Patrick and Lina Drahi Foundation.

The date was not chosen by coincidence. The ceremony fell on the 9th of Tammuz, exactly 782 years after the Paris Disputation of 1242, which ended with King Louis IX ordering the burning of thousands of Talmud volumes and Jewish manuscripts in the city's public square. Marking the launch on that same date was a deliberate act of historical closure.

[...]

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More on the "Tracing Scribes and Scrolls" project

RESEARCH FUNDING: EU Funding Huge Project on the Origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Dead Sea Scrolls were written over centuries, and now fresh analysis may shed light on material origins. How does the Egyptian papyrus industry come into the story? (Ruth Schuster, Haaretz).

In short, the new analyses of papyrus, parchment and ink adding to the growing body of paleographic studies of handwriting, codicological analysis of the physical construction of the scrolls as well as linguistic and literary evidence will hopefully suss out the source of the material for the scrolls, and possibly unveil connections between remote centers of scribal activity.

I noted this project award a couple of days ago here. But this Haaretz article has lots of additional details.

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A new excavation at the Iron Age II eastern Ophel in Jerusalem

TEMPLE MOUNT (CORNER) WATCH: Why Excavate Area E on Jerusalem’s Ophel? The next opportunity to reveal Jerusalem’s royal quarter (BRENT NAGTEGAAL, Armstrong Institute of Biblical Archaeology).

And it is here at the eastern Ophel, just 20 meters (66 feet) from the southeast corner of the Temple Mount, that an incredible opportunity for excavation has opened up—an opportunity that those of us at the Armstrong Institute of Biblical Archaeology are excited to take advantage of this summer under the direction of Hebrew University professor Yosef Garfinkel.

Why are we so excited for the opening of this new area, and what do we expect from the upcoming excavation? ...

Putting all the facts together, the archaeological opportunity of Area E to yield findings from Jerusalem’s royal quarter of biblical lore is unmatched. Area E is a potential archaeological gold mine—a gem, largely untouched and undisturbed. Yet while the expectation is to find high preservation from the First Temple Period, there are always archaeological surprises along the way, and all periods will be treated with equal archaeological care.

The chance to excavate Area E is not an opportunity that comes along very often. This is a location just inside the fortification line of Jerusalem’s royal quarter, where kings of the Bible once roamed, along with priests and prophets. As we have learned over the past 60 years of on-and-off excavation, the Ophel, the First Temple Period remains further up the hill—near the crest—did not endure the throes of Jerusalem’s cycle of destruction and rebuilding. It is only here, in the very eastern Ophel, that the royal quarter from King Solomon and every king thereafter can be viewed. No wonder Eilat Mazar was excited to excavate there.

For archaeology nerds, this article covers Area E and its context in great detail.

For many PaleoJudaica posts on the Hezekiah and Isaiah bullae, start here and follow the links. Posts on some of the other discoveries at the late Prof. Mazar's Ophel exavation are collected here. A more recent Ophel discovery is noted here.

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Gardner, The Letters of Mani (OUP)

BIBLOGRAPHIA IRANICA: The Letters of Mani. Notice of a New Book: Gardner, Iain. 2026. The Letters of Mani. A Lost Scripture of the Late Antique World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

This is an important contribution, involving reassembling what's left of Mani's letters from fragmentary sources in many languages. Similar to our project of reconstructing the Book of Giants in MOTP2.

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