Ben-Gurion saw the IDF as a modern instantiation of Joshua’s military might. The Israeli writer and politician S. Yizhar, in contrast, asserted that we should discard Joshua because of the violence and wholesale slaughter recounted in the book. Contemporary Israeli teachers grapple with the question of how to teach students such a core story of Jewish history that is fraught with moral problems.
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Background here.
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For PaleoJudaica posts on Psalm 91, some interacting with earlier posts by Professor Jenkins, see here and links and here. And for some interaction with that post on Ezekiel, see here. Yes, I know the link has rotted.
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Teaching the Historical JesusThe book was published in 2015, but I missed it then. The recent paperback release provides a good excuse to note it.
Issues and ExegesisEdited By Zev Garber
Copyright Year 2015
Paperback
£29.59Hardback
£104.00eBook
£29.59ISBN 9780367738891
Published December 18, 2020 by Routledge
284 PagesBook Description
Teaching the Historical Jesus in his Jewish context to students of varied religious backgrounds presents instructors with not only challenges, but also opportunities to sustain interfaith dialogue and foster mutual understanding and respect. This new collection explores these challenges and opportunities, gathering together experiential lessons drawn from teaching Jesus in a wide variety of settings—from the public, secular two- or four-year college, to the Jesuit university, to the Rabbinic school or seminary, to the orthodox, religious Israeli university. A diverse group of Jewish and Christian scholars reflect on their own classroom experiences and explicates crucial issues for teaching Jesus in a way that encourages students at every level to enter into an encounter with the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament without paternalism, parochialism, or prejudice. This volume is a valuable resource for instructors and graduate students interested in an interfaith approach in the classroom, and provides practical case studies for scholars working on Jewish-Christian relations.
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“The device could have been made by one person or a team of up to ten specialists. A Hellenistic kingdom like Egypt under the Ptolemies would have had the vast resources to pay for a highly specialised team that would have included an astronomer, a mathematician and highly skilled craftsmen who would have been engineers in their own right,” said Mr Dacanalis. “There was a tradition of engineering in Alexandria under the Ptolemies who were patrons of the arts and who also funded research.”New Model of Ancient Astronomical Device Reveals a ‘Creation of Genius’ (George Dvorsky, Gizmodo)[...]
“No single culture had the means to make this device. This is the merging of two cultures – the marriage of Babylonian observations of the stars and the mathematical methods that they developed combined with Greek geometry and cosmological models.
By building a digital model of the Antikythera Mechanism, scientists may have finally exposed a key function of the ancient device, revealing a design that required some seriously advanced thinking.In addition Bryn Mayr Classical Review has just published a relevant review: Hellenistic astronomy: the science in its contexts[...]
“Solving this complex 3D puzzle reveals a creation of genius—combining cycles from Babylonian astronomy, mathematics from Plato’s Academy and ancient Greek astronomical theories,” wrote the authors, which included mechanical engineer Adam Wojcik, also from UCL.
Indeed, the ancient Babylonians chronicled the motions of the planets, while the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides developed a mathematical model to explain these movements.
Alan Bowen, Francesca Rochberg, Hellenistic astronomy: the science in its contexts. Brill's companions in classical studies. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2020. Pp. xxxii, 751. ISBN 9789004400566 €197,00.Babylonian, Greek, and Alexandrian astronomy, perhaps with Ptolemaic engineering, are at work in the Antikythera Mechanism. The book has many relevant articles, as well as a couple on ancient Jewish astronomy and astrology.Review by
Ulla Koch, Copenhagen University. aribu@protonmail.com
PaleoJudaica posts on the Antikythera Mechanism are collected here with comments. Ancient Enochic astronomy also drew on Hellenistic and Babylonian traditions.
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This is the second installment of a series on volume 2 of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures (MNTA 2). I noted the first essay here and the second here.
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The Syriac WorldChapter 26 is on "Syriac Medicine." I noted a review of the book when it came out in hardback in 2019.Edited By Daniel King
Copyright Year 2019
Paperback
£31.99Hardback
£152.00eBook
£31.99Open access content is available for this title.
ISBN 9780367732363
Published December 18, 2020 by Routledge
896 PagesBook Description
This volume surveys the 'Syriac world', the culture that grew up among the Syriac-speaking communities from the second century CE and which continues to exist and flourish today, both in its original homeland of Syria and Mesopotamia, and in the worldwide diaspora of Syriac-speaking communities. The five sections examine the religion; the material, visual, and literary cultures; the history and social structures of this diverse community; and Syriac interactions with their neighbours ancient and modern. There are also detailed appendices detailing the patriarchs of the different Syriac denominations, and another appendix listing useful online resources for students.
The Syriac World offers the first complete survey of Syriac culture and fills a significant gap in modern scholarship. This volume will be an invaluable resource to undergraduate and postgraduate students of Syriac and Middle Eastern culture from antiquity to the modern era.
Chapter 26 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://tandfbis.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781138899018_oachapter26.pdf
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Published in English. This collection brings together a wide range of essays on themes related to sexuality and gender, written by William R. G. Loader, who has published widely on attitudes towards sexuality in early Jewish and Christian literature. The essays explore connections and make comparisons among the ancient texts, seeking to understand them in the light of their religious and cultural contexts, providing summaries, and pursuing key themes, from subtle changes in the Septuagint, to the Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, and the New Testament.
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The free app—available for computer, mobile devices and virtual reality headsets—offers interactive, 360-degree views of 38 locations in the city, reports Robert McKelvey for Al Jazeera. Users can listen to expert audio commentary in Arabic, English, French or German and call up additional images and text for more information about specific spots. They can also toggle between seeing the buildings as they appear today and as they looked almost 2,000 years ago.A couple of recent PaleoJudaica posts on the site of Baalbek are here and here.
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Recently I noted that, surprisingly, Egypt is still producing important archaeological discoveries even in heavily explored areas like the Pyramid grounds. I wondered, "Who knows what important archaeological treasures remain to be found in Egypt and elsewhere?"
And now archaeologists have just noticed a misplaced city near the Valley of the Kings.
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Published in English.The essays are in English and German.
The present volume gives insights into the shape, life and claims of Jerusalem in Roman-Byzantine Times (2nd to 7th century). Regarding the history of religions and its impact on urbanistic issues, the city of Jerusalem is of special and paradigmatic interest. The coexistence and sometimes rivalry of Jewish, Hellenistic, Roman, Christian and later Islamic cults had an impact on urban planning. The city's importance as a centre of international pilgrimage and educational tourism affected demographic and institutional characteristics. Moreover, the rivalry between the various religious traditions at the holy places effected a plurivalent sacralisation of the urban area. To show transitions and transformations, coexistence and conflicts, seventeen articles by internationally distinguished researchers from different fields, such as archaeology, Christian theology, history, Jewish and Islamic studies, are brought together to constitute this collection of essays.
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Ross Shepard Kraemer, The Mediterranean diaspora in late antiquity: what Christianity cost the Jews. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 520. ISBN 9780190222277 $99.00.The review is in German. For more on the book, see here.Review by
Görge Hasselhoff, Technical University Dortmund. goerge.hasselhoff@udo.edu
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For PaleoJudaica posts on Hannibal and his remarkably military campaign against Rome, see here, here, here, and links. For posts on the Battle of Cannae, see here and links.
Now and then I link to this post, which explains why PaleoJudaica pays attention to the Phoenicians, the Phoenician language, the Carthaginians, and Punic and Neo-Punic.
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Important primary sources for the Greek conflicts with the Achaemenid Empire in the Persian Period.
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New Perspectives in Biblical and Rabbinic HebrewThat's right, there is a free PDF edition. For you, special deal!Aaron D. Hornkohl and Geoffrey Khan (eds)
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-80064-164-8 £24.95
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-80064-165-5 £34.95
PDF ISBN: 978-1-80064-166-2 £0.00Description
Most of the papers in this volume originated as presentations at the conference Biblical Hebrew and Rabbinic Hebrew: New Perspectives in Philology and Linguistics, which was held at the University of Cambridge, 8–10th July, 2019. The aim of the conference was to build bridges between various strands of research in the field of Hebrew language studies that rarely meet, namely philologists working on Biblical Hebrew, philologists working on Rabbinic Hebrew and theoretical linguists.
This volume is the published outcome of this initiative. It contains peer-reviewed papers in the fields of Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew that advance the field by the philological investigation of primary sources and the application of cutting-edge linguistic theory. These include contributions by established scholars and by students and early career researchers.
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Facebook posts claim the word “amen” is derived from the ancient Egyptian god Amun Ra. This is false; experts say the common ending to prayers has Hebrew origins -- not Egyptian.Yes. Silly Facebook.
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Edward Dabrowa, Camps, campaigns, colonies. Roman military presence in Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and the Near East: selected studies. Philippika. Altertumswissenschaftliche Abhandlungen, contributions to the study of ancient world cultures, 138. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2020. Pp. 216. ISBN 9783447113816 €54,00.Notable for PaleoJudaica:Review by
Andrea De Giorgi, Florida State University. adegiorgi@fsu.edu
The following two essays shift the focus to Judea and the long season of wars that culminated in the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. At issue are the mobilization of the legions, their intersection with local communities, and, lastly, a topography of siege operations.There is also an essay on the military camp at Dura-Europos and one on Roman conflicts with the Parthians/Arcasids.
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See also the interview with the excavators of Abel Beth Maacah, noted here.
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The story has received a lot of attention. The Daily Mail has coverage with some background on the earliest alphabetic Canaanite inscriptions, discovered in a turquoise mine in the Sinai: Has the 'missing link' in the history of the ALPHABET been discovered? Archaeologists find evidence of an early example in Israel from 1450 BC that could explain how the alphabet arrived in the Levant from Egypt (Jonathan Chadwick).
Both articles note the underlying open-access article in the journal Antiquity:
Early alphabetic writing in the ancient Near East: the ‘missing link’ from Tel LachishI noted the discovery of the other early inscribed ostracon at Lachish here in 2015. For posts on the earliest Hebrew and Hebrew-ish inscriptions, see the links collected here. Other relevant posts are here, here, here, and here.Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 April 2021
Felix Höflmayer, Haggai Misgav, Lyndelle Webster and Katharina Streit
Abstract
The origin of alphabetic script lies in second-millennium BC Bronze Age Levantine societies. A chronological gap, however, divides the earliest evidence from the Sinai and Egypt—dated to the nineteenth century BC—and from the thirteenth-century BC corpus in Palestine. Here, the authors report a newly discovered Late Bronze Age alphabetic inscription from Tel Lachish, Israel. Dating to the fifteenth century BC, this inscription is currently the oldest securely dated alphabetic inscription from the Southern Levant, and may therefore be regarded as the ‘missing link’. The proliferation of early alphabetic writing in the Southern Levant should be considered a product of Levantine-Egyptian interaction during the mid second millennium BC, rather than of later Egyptian domination.
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Why is partially infected skin impure but fully infected skin pure? Mary Douglas’ insight into the polluting power of anomalies helps us make sense of this counterintuitive rule.
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Such a complicated textual tradition is not altogether rare among apocryphal literature. In this sense, the Life of Judas is not idiosyncratic for its variant, fluid, and multilingual transmission history but representative of the types of issues encountered with many apocrypha, including some of those translated in the MNTA volumes. This case presents one intriguing example of a work that likely moved from Western Europe into Near Eastern contexts (rather than the reverse, as scholars often expect), but the afterlives of many apocrypha follow similarly complex cross-cultural paths.This is the second installment of a series on volume 2 of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures (MNTA 2). I noted the first essay here.
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Via Jack Sasson-Professor Avalos and I overlapped as NELC doctoral students at Harvard University in the late 1980s. Then in the mid-1990s we both taught in Iowa at different institutions.Hector Avalos, Professor of Religious Studies at Iowa State University, succumbed yesterday afternoon to a persistent illness.
Among other contributions, Hector did important work on health care and disability in the biblical and ancient worlds. His Wikipedia page is here. Just last weekend I linked to one of his essays here.
Requiescat in pace.
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The Torah allows the removal of vessels from a house before the priest quarantines it for tzaraʿat, understanding impurity here not as the result of physical reality but of a human declaration. This idea is developed further by the rabbis, who apply it to other areas of Jewish law.The purity status of the ceramic vessels is in a superpositioned state until the priest observes them.
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Semiramis (Shammuramat) was a real Neo-Assyrian queen who reigned in the late eighth century BCE. But in the Greek Fantasy Bablyon tradition she became the founder of the city of Babylon.
For PaleoJudaica posts on Semiramis, see here and links.
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Bronwen Neil, Kosta Simic, Memories of utopia: the revision of histories and landscapes in Late Antiquity. Routledge monographs in classical studies. London; New York: Routledge, 2019. Pp. 284. ISBN 9781138328679 $155.00.Notable for PaleoJudaica:Review by
Hope Williard, University of Lincoln. hwilliard@lincoln.ac.uk
Strickler’s chapter how the Christian and Jewish writers sought to explain the events and changes of the seventh century through apocalyptic discourse that frequently invoked visions of dystopia while remaining hopeful for a brighter future. An ideal but unrealized future characterizes utopian thinking, so this struck me as a productive and intriguing way to approaching late antique apocalypticism.11. Ryan W. Strickler, Paradise regained? Utopias of deliverance in seventh-century apocalyptic discourse, 171-188
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One detail: the Atrahasis Epic is in Akkadian, not Sumerian.
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