Introduction to Numismatic Terms and Methods

THE AWOL BLOG: Introduction to Numismatic Terms and Methods. A thorough introduction to the study of coins by the American Numismatic Society. Cross-file under Numismatics.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Beavis & Kateusz (eds.) Rediscovering the Marys (T&T Clark)

RECENT BOOK FROM BLOOMSBURY/T&T CLARK:

Rediscovering the Marys
Maria, Mariamne, Miriam

Mary Ann Beavis (Anthology Editor), Ally Kateusz (Anthology Editor)

Hardback
$115.00 $103.50

Ebook (PDF)
$35.95 $28.76

Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
$35.95 $28.76

Product details

Published Jan 23 2020
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Extent 288
ISBN 9780567683458
Imprint T&T Clark
Illustrations 50
Dimensions 9 x 6 inchesv Series Scriptural Traces
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

Description

This interdisciplinary volume of text and art offers new insights into various unsolved mysteries associated with Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, Mary the Mother of Jesus, and Miriam the sister of Moses. Mariamic traditions are often interconnected, as seen in the portrayal of these women as community leaders, prophets, apostles and priests. These traditions also are often inter-religious, echoing themes back to Miriam in the Hebrew Bible as well as forward to Maryam in the Qur'an. The chapters explore questions such as: which biblical Mary did the author of the Gospel of Mary intend to portray-Magdalene, Mother, or neither? Why did some writers depict Mary of Nazareth as a priest? Were extracanonical scriptures featuring Mary more influential than the canonical gospels on the depiction of Maryam in the Qur'an?

Contributors dig deep into literature, iconography, and archaeology to offer cutting edge research under three overarching topics. The first section examines the question of "which Mary?" and illustrates how some ancient authors (and contemporary scholars) may have conflated the biblical Marys. The second section focuses on Mary of Nazareth, and includes research related to the portrayal of Mary the Mother of Jesus as a Eucharistic priest. The final section, “Recovering Receptions of Mary in Art, Archeology, and Literature,” explores how artists and authors have engaged with one or more of the Marys, from the early Christian era through to medieval and modern times.

Coming out in paperback soon.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

How to end a line in Hebrew

THE ETC BLOG: Hebrew Scribes at the End of the Line (Anthony Ferguson).

Composing a text by hand demands an awareness of certain details that we can ignore when using a word processor. One of these details is if the next written word corresponds to the available space. At times, the space didn't for Hebrew scribes, and when this happened, they had several ways to navigate this situation. Let’s review some of these. ...

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Review of Mouton (ed.), Flesh and bones

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: Flesh and bones: the individual and his body in the ancient Mediterranean basin.

Alice Mouton, Flesh and bones: the individual and his body in the ancient Mediterranean basin. Semitica et Classica: Supplementa (SUPSEC), 2. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020. Pp. 240. ISBN 9782503590387 €65,00.

Review by
Julianne Burnett, Asbury University. julianne.burnett@asbury.edu

The volume includes essays on ancient Egyptian, Hittite, Akkadian, biblical Hebrew, and Greco-Roman literature.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Crouch, Israel and Judah Redefined (CUP)

NEW BOOK FROM CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS:

Israel and Judah Redefined
Migration, Trauma, and Empire in the Sixth Century BCE

Part of Society for Old Testament Study Monographs

AUTHOR: C. L. Crouch, Fuller Theological Seminary, California
DATE PUBLISHED: August 2021
AVAILABILITY: Available
FORMAT: Hardback
ISBN: 9781108473767

£ 75.00 Hardback

Description

In Israel and Judah Redefined, C. L. Crouch uses trauma studies, postcolonial theory, and social-scientific research on migration to analyse the impact of mass displacements and imperial power on Israelite and Judahite identity in the sixth century BCE. Crouch argues that the trauma of deportation affected Israelite identity differently depending on resettlement context. Deportees resettled in rural Babylonia took an isolationist approach to Israelite identity, whereas deportees resettled in urban contexts took a more integrationist approach. Crouch also emphasises the impact of mass displacement on identity concerns in the homeland, demonstrating that displacement and the experience of Babylonian imperial rule together facilitated major developments in Judahite identity. The diverse experiences of this period produced bitter conflict between Israelites and Judahites, as well as diverse attempts to resolve this conflict. Inspired by studies of forced migration and by postcolonial analyses of imperial domination, Crouch's book highlights the crucial contribution of this era to the story of Israel and Judah.

• Introduces social scientific research on diverse migration experiences to a biblical studies audience
• IIdentifies the significance of Israel and Judah to the identity debates in the sixth century BCE
• IIntegrates postcolonial theory, trauma studies, and social scientific research on migration to interpret ancient texts

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

The etrog, the citron, and Sukkot

DR. DAFNA LANGGUT: The Etrog: Celebrating Sukkot With a Persian Apple (TheTorah.com).

A luxury Persian import, famous for its medicinal qualities and lovely smell, the citron became Sukkot’s פְּרִי עֵץ הָדָר “fruit of a splendid tree” in the first century C.E.

PaleoJudaica posts on the etrog/citron, including ones on the Ramat Rachel garden, are collected here.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Schröter et al. (eds.), Jews and Christians – Parting Ways in the First Two Centuries CE? (De Gruyter)

NEW BOOK FROM DE GRUYTER:

Jews and Christians – Parting Ways in the First Two Centuries CE?
Reflections on the Gains and Losses of a Model

Edited by: Jens Schröter, Benjamin A. Edsall and Joseph Verheyden

Volume 253 in the series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110742213

eBook
Published: August 23, 2021
ISBN: 9783110742213

Hardcover
Published: August 23, 2021
ISBN: 9783110742138

About this book

The present volume is based on a conference held in October 2019 at the Faculty of Theology of Humboldt University Berlin as part of a common project of the Australian Catholic University, the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the Humboldt University Berlin. The aim is to discuss the relationships of “Jews” and “Christians” in the first two centuries CE against the background of recent debates which have called into question the image of “parting ways” for a description of the relationships of Judaism and Christianity in antiquity. One objection raised against this metaphor is that it accentuates differences at the expense of commonalities. Another critique is that this image looks from a later perspective at historical developments which can hardly be grasped with such a metaphor. It is more likely that distinctions between Jews, Christians, Jewish Christians, Christian Jews etc. are more blurred than the image of “parting ways” allows. In light of these considerations the contributions in this volume discuss the cogency of the “parting of the ways”-model with a look at prominent early Christian writers and places and suggest more appropriate metaphors to describe the relationships of Jews and Christians in the early period.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Zoomcast on ancient Jerusalem

ARCHAEOLOGY: What did biblical Jerusalem look like some 2,500 years ago? JPost One-on-One Zoomcast, Episode 34 - Rossella Tercatin and Prof. Yuval Gadot, archaeology and ancient near eastern cultures at Tel-Aviv University (Rossella Tercatin, Jerusalem Post).

“What we have uncovered is a level of wealth that we could not imagine before,” Prof. Yuval Gadot, the head Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures at Tel-Aviv University - and co-director of the excavations conducted by TAU and the Israeli Antiquities Authority at the City of David - said.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Interview with Sarah Parkhouse

COPTIC APOCRYPHA WATCH: Interview with Dr Sarah Parkhouse (University of Manchester).

Dr Sarah Parkhouse has recently joined the Centre for Biblical Studies as a British Academy postdoctoral fellow. We sat down to discuss her work and the research project she will be undertaking.

I have noted books by Dr. Parkhouse here and here.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

How do we know what ancient writers actually wrote?

THE ANTIGONE BLOG: WHERE DO THE CLASSICS COME FROM? OR, THE APPARATUS CRITICUS AND YOU (Max Hardy). HT Rogue Classicism.

To read a Classical text without an apparatus has been justly compared to the experience of sitting in the back of a car while another controls the wheel. In the fullness of time, come the development of the self-driving car, this simile may eventually lose its force; but the apparatus will certainly not have lost its relevance to those who are fascinated about what ancient writers actually wrote.

A lucid introduction to the science and art of textual criticism.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Eichler, The Ark and the Cherubim (Mohr Siebeck)

NEW BOOK FROM MOHR SIEBECK: Raanan Eichler. The Ark and the Cherubim. 2021. XV, 391 pages. Forschungen zum Alten Testament 146. 134,00 € including VAT. cloth ISBN 978-3-16-155432-2.

Published in English.
The most important objects in the Hebrew Bible are a wooden box, styled in English »the ark« or »the ark of the covenant«, and two statues of winged creatures, »the cherubim«, that surmount it. Raanan Eichler attempts to understand these objects using the full gamut of data and tools available to the modern scholar. The study features an abundance of visual comparative material, much of it in colour, with a particularly close examination of the finds from the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. The author proposes solutions to a number of unsolved puzzles, such as the question of what cherubim looked like, and offers a new explanation of the nature of the ark and the cherubim, rejecting the prevailing scholarly view of them as having constituted an »empty throne« and footstool for the God of Israel. Rather, he argues, they constituted an empty frame, a unique cultic focus that surpassed all known systems in the ancient Near East in the extent of the efforts it represented to prevent an anthropomorphic conception of the deity in a cultic context.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

AJR on Brown-deVost, Commentary and Authority in Mesopotamia and Qumran

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Book Note | Commentary and Authority in Mesopotamia and Qumran (Emily Branton).

Bronson Brown-deVost. Commentary and Authority in Mesopotamia and Qumran. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019.

I noted another review of the book here.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Was Sodom destroyed by a "cosmic airburst?"

I WAS EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM. AND I GOT ONE: Did the destruction of this Middle Bronze Age city inspire the story of Sodom? Archaeologists investigated the destruction of Tel el-Hammam and discovered an event similar to the description of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (ARIELLA MARSDEN, Jerusalem Post).

This story has been around since 2018. I noted it here. But now the technical article is published in Nature.

A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea

Ted E. Bunch, Malcolm A. LeCompte, A. Victor Adedeji, James H. Wittke, T. David Burleigh, Robert E. Hermes, Charles Mooney, Dale Batchelor, Wendy S. Wolbach, Joel Kathan, Gunther Kletetschka, Mark C. L. Patterson, Edward C. Swindel, Timothy Witwer, George A. Howard, Siddhartha Mitra, Christopher R. Moore, Kurt Langworthy, James P. Kennett, Allen West & Phillip J. Silvia Scientific Reports volume 11, Article number: 18632 (2021)

A Tunguska-sized airburst is a significant event: "The proposed airburst was larger than the 1908 explosion over Tunguska, Russia, where a ~ 50-m-wide bolide detonated with ~ 1000× more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb."

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

A.-J. Levine appointed to named chair at Hartford

CONGRATULATIONS TO PROFESSOR LEVINE: Dr. Amy-Jill Levine is named Hartford Seminary’s first Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor (Stacey Dresner, CT Jewish Ledger).

HARTFORD – Dr. Amy-Jill Levine, a foremost scholar in the study of Judaism, the Tanakh (Jewish scriptures), and the New Testament has been named the Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at The Hartford Seminary. The first person to fill this post, Levine arrives from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., where she is professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies Emerita and Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies Emerita.

[...]

The article includes an interview.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Gilgamesh dream tablet returing to Iraq

REPATRIATION IMMINENT: US to hand over 3,500-year-old 'Gilgamesh' tablet to Iraq (AFP via MSN). The tablet goes back to Iraq this week.

Background here and links.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Sukkot 2021

THE SEVEN-DAY FESTIVAL OF SUKKOT (BOOTHS, TABERNACLES) begins tonight at sundown. Best wishes to all those observing it.

Last year's Sukkot post was here. More recent relevant posts are here and here. For the biblical background to Sukkot, see here and here.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

The archaeology of Sukkot

ARCHITECTURE AND NUMISMATICS: How did Jews celebrate Sukkot 2,000 years ago? Archaeology offers answers. While no traces survive of the ancient booths Jews built to celebrate the holiday, archaeology provides important evidence of the centrality of Sukkot (Rossella Tercatin, Jerusalem Post).

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.