How ancient was the Jewish presence in Malta?

HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY: Malta Jewish Heritage. An interview with Stanley Cassar Darien (Moment Magazine, 2025 November/December).

Most of PaleoJudaica's coverage of Malta's history has involved Phoenician archaeology. But there are Jewish remains from at least late antiquity on. I didn't know that Abraham Abulafia did some of his late work on the island of Comino.

The evidence for a supposed Jewish presence at Gozo in the ninth century BCE is a dubious inscription found in 1912 in the Neolithic Ġgantija temple complex. I can't find a photo of the inscription or any specialist coverage. There are various claims and counter-claims about it online. The dating doesn't correspond to the Neolithic context. Granted, it could be a later graffito, but as it stands now, I am skeptical. If I can find out more, I will get back to you.

As I said, Malta has made many contributions to Phoenician and Punic archaeology. See the archives for details. Soem specific stories are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and lots of links.

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An Aramaic inscription in Türkiye

ARAMAIC WATCH: Ancient Aramaic inscription uncovered in rural Ardahan now under study at Kars Archaeology Museum (Türkiye Today).

An Aramaic inscription found in a rural village in Ardahan, northeastern Türkiye, has been moved to the Kars Archaeology and Ethnography Museum for detailed analysis, marking the first time such a text has been documented in the Kars–Ardahan region.

I think this inscription is new to me. On the content:

Specialists have begun creating a transcription to make the weathered text readable. Initial interpretations suggest that the name of King Artaksiad, associated with the Seleucid period, appears in the wording. Researchers point out that several rulers bore this name, yet the reference may correspond to the earliest known king with that title.

The inscription is believed to reflect political shifts in the region following the Seleucid defeat and the period when Roman authority began to shape local governance. Experts think the stone may contain hints of these transitions, although the full meaning will emerge only after the transcription has been completed.

They think it may be a boundary stone.

The stone does not look particularly weathered to me. There are a couple of clear photos of the inscription in the article. You epigraphers out there, this is your chance to have a go at a decipherment.

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Christian Apocrypha and Old Testament Pseudepigrapha at SBL

THE APOCRYPHICITY BLOG: Christian Apocrypha Books to Look for at SBL 2025 (Tony Burke).

The SBL Annual Meeting presents an ideal opportunity to check out new books on Christian apocrypha, and at substantial discounts. As you make your way through the publishers’ exhibition, keep an eye out for these publications. If there is a book missing in the list, please pass along the details.

Cross-file under New Testament Apocrypha Watch.

Also, if you are interested in biblical apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, go to the Eerdmans booth to check out:

Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 2: More Noncanonical Scriptures

For a sample chapter, see here.

There are many more posts on the latter volume in the archive. Some of the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha in it also count as Christian Apocrypha.

For those attending, have a good time in Boston at the SBL annual meeting!

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A Bronze Age ANE creation story?

ARCHAIC COSMOGNONIC ICONOGRAPHY: This story has been getting a lot of attention. For a brief overview:

World’s Oldest Cosmogony. Bronze Age goblet may feature earliest depiction of the cosmos (Nathan Steinmeyer, Bible History Daily).

The Ain Samiya goblet has been an enigma since it was first discovered in 1970, near the West Bank city of Nablus. Now, a study published in the Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society proposes that the goblet’s famous decorative relief is, in fact, the world’s oldest cosmogony—a story about the origins of the cosmos. According to the study’s authors, the goblet shows the chaos of the early cosmos followed by a scene of an ordered universe. Dating to the Intermediate Bronze Age (c. 2650–1950 BCE), this depiction of the ordering of the universe far predates the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation epic. It would be the earliest written or artistic representation of a cosmogony anywhere in the world.

[...]

The underlying JOEL article is readable online for free:

The Earliest Cosmological Depictions: Reconsidering the Imagery on the ˁAin Samiya Goblet

Zangger, Eberhard (Project leader); Sarlo, Daniel (Researcher); Haas Dantes, Fabienne (Researcher)

Description

The ˁAin Samiya goblet, an 8 cm tall silver goblet from the Intermediate Bronze Age (2650–1950 BCE), was discovered in the tomb of a high-ranking individual in the Judean Hills. Its unique decoration features two mythological scenes involving chimeras, snakes, and celestial symbols. This study challenges the prevailing interpretation linking these scenes to Enuma Elish. By comparing the goblet’s iconographic elements with known motifs from neighboring cultures, we propose that the goblet’s decoration represents the creation and maintenance of cosmic order, a recurring theme in ancient Near Eastern cosmology. The scenes depict a transition from chaos to a structured universe, protected from chaotic disturbances by deities. There is a particular focus on the birth of the sun deity and its subsequent journey through the cosmos, which in the context of the tomb may serve to facilitate the rebirth of the soul of the dead. Our interpretation is supported by another cosmological depiction that has not been published until now: the Lidar Höyük prism.

In addtion the authors have published a non-technical summary essay:

Lifting the Sky: The Cosmic Program on the ˁAin Samiya Goblet (Eberhard Zangger, Daniel Sarlo and Fabienne Haas Dantes, The Ancient Near East Today)

The ˁAin Samiya goblet is small enough to sit in the palm of a hand — barely eight centimeters tall — yet its imagery reaches for the architecture of the cosmos. Discovered in 1970 in a sealed shaft tomb of the Intermediate Bronze Age (c. 2650-1950 BCE) near the Palestinian town of Kafr Malik in the West Bank, the silver cup carries two compact scenes crowded with a chimera, snakes, rigid plants, and a radiant disk. For decades many readers linked these scenes to Enūma Eliš, the Babylonian creation epic. That neat solution turns out to be both too late and too narrow. What the goblet depicts, we argue, is the creation and maintenance of cosmic order – above all the birth of the sun and its daily journey – rendered in a visual language that traveled widely across the ancient Near East.

[...]

Also, in the Times of Israel, Rossella Tercatin covers the story with an interview with the project leader. That article also touches on a parallel with the Genesis 1 creation story:

Study: 4,300-year-old cup with oldest depiction of Creation features a ‘celestial ark.’ Study: 4,300-year-old cup with oldest depiction of Creation features a ‘celestial ark’

A 4,300-year-old silver goblet featuring the earliest depiction of the Creation narrative from the Near East tradition echoes the struggle between chaos and order from the book of Genesis, a new study published on Thursday suggests.

[...]

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The Carpenter's Son debuts in the USA

CINEMA MEETS NEW TESTAMENT APOCRYPHA WATCH: The Carpenter's Son is now out. Here are a couple of reviews:

The Carpenter’s Son (James McGrath, Religion Prof Blog).

The movie The Carpenter’s Son is the childhood of Jesus reenvisioned as a horror movie. It takes some inspiration from the apocryphal text known as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Although the opening sequence of the film mentions apocryphal extracanonical texts, the movie bears no close relationship to that or other ancient texts in terms of its contents.

[...]

A detailed review by a New Testament scholar. Informative. Has lots of spoilers, but flagged well in advance. If you want to see the movie, you should probably do that before you read the whole thing.

This Jesus horror movie could have used more heresy. Critics worried ‘The Carpenter’s Son’ would be blasphemous but it hews to orthodox interpretations (Mira Fox, The Forward).

Before the movie came out, many Christians passed around petitions and wrote blogs about the film’s blasphemy. But The Carpenter’s Son is not, in fact, subversive at all. First of all, Jesus is not a petulant toddler; he looks to be around 20. All the notable anecdotes from the apocrypha are missing: He hardly smites anyone, doesn’t animate his toys and never even blinds the neighbors. In fact, he repeatedly rejects temptation, death and evil. There’s even a cheesy CGI halo, the appearance of which made the audience snicker the night I saw the film.

A Jewish perspective on the film. By the way, Jesus is a child in the Infancy Gospel, but not a toddler.

There are also video interviews with the director and with the actor who played Jesus. Summarized in these articles, with links to the videos on YouTube.

Director Lotfy Nathan Shares Inspiration Behind R-Rated Jesus Film Starring Nicolas Cage—And Its Apocryphal Origin (Jesse Jackson, Church Leaders)

A longer summary: The Director of a Controversial Horror Movie About Jesus Insists It’s ‘Not as Evil as People Are Assuming’ (Barry Levitt, Time Magazine).

As Nathan researched, he was struck by how frightening a lot of what he read was. “A lot of the subject matter is pretty harrowing. A lot of the Bible is, in fact. That really inspired me to put a genre lean on it,” he says of The Carpenter’s Son. According to Nathan, the film could have been a great deal more controversial had he stuck closer to the Infancy Gospel. “It would be a lot more salacious,” he insists. “I think it presents a much more petulant and less redeemable story. I just took the essential idea of these lost years, and read between the lines in identifying a troubled dynamic between Joseph the carpenter and Jesus, and this parental feud. The inclusion of the stranger and where the story goes by the end, that’s all my invention.”

The Carpenter’s Son Interview: Noah Jupe & Lotfy Nathan on Darkness, Faith, and Humanity (John Nguyen, Nerd Reactor)

“I think it’s actually a good thing to be able to see what’s at stake,” he [Jupe] added. “But then there’s obviously the practical controversy of depicting Jesus as anything but divine, to imply that he had human frailty and vulnerability in his psyche, in his soul. A lot of Christians would disagree with that fundamentally, and that’s already like a non-starter. So I’m aware that it’s not for everybody, but to me, this was an honest effort in making a story that could be relatable to many different kinds of people.”

Apparently the film is only loosely inspired by the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.

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BAS 2025 Publication Awards

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: BAS 2025 Publication Awards Winners (Jennifer Drummond).

The categories are Best Book on the Hebrew Bible, Best Book on the New Testament, Best Scholarly Book on Archaeology, Best Popular Book on Archaeology, and Herschel Shanks Award for Best Dig Report. With honorable mentions for most of the categories.

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Wiggershaus, The Man of Opened Eye (Gorgias)

NEW BOOK FROM GORGIAS PRESS:

The Man of Opened Eye
Ancient Near Eastern Revelatory Convention and the Balaam Cycle

By B. Wiggershaus

Publisher: Gorgias Press LLC
Availability: In stock
SKU (ISBN): 978-1-4632-4845-1

Formats *
Hardback (In Print) ISBN 978-1-4632-4845-1
eBook PDF (In Print) ISBN 978-1-4632-4846-8 on Gorgias Mobile App (Glassboxx)

Publication Status: In Print
Series: Bulletin for Biblical Research Dissertation Series 2
Publication Date: Oct 9,2025
Interior Color: Black
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Page Count: 289
Languages: English
ISBN: 978-1-4632-4845-1
Price: $114.95 (USD)
Your price: $91.96 (USD)

Overview

Higher critical studies of the last century have raised important questions regarding the unity of Numbers 22–24. Balaam’s multifaceted profession, for example, is often considered a marker for blended traditions. This study proposes that the solutions to such issues lie in the comparative materials. Utilizing primary sources and recent studies, it highlights conventions of supernatural revelation that were common throughout the ancient Near East. Those conventions of prophecy and divination—of both practice and reporting—are then compared with the details of the Balaam Cycle, resulting in a cohesive reading of the story.

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Olivero, 1 Enoch: An Ethiopic Reader’s Edition (SBL)

NEW BOOK FROM SBL PRESS:

1 Enoch: An Ethiopic Reader’s Edition
Vladimir Olivero

ISBN 9781628377606
Volume RBS 110
Status Available
Price $50.00
Publication Date August 2025

eBook
$50.00
Paperback
$50.00
Hardback
$70.00

The book of 1 Enoch is one of the most remarkable literary products of Second Temple Judaism. Attributed to Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah, the text provides details about how some early Jews understood the cosmos, angels, the corruption of humanity, and coming judgment. Despite 1 Enoch’s importance for understanding early Jewish and Christian eschatology, its complicated textual history has left the work largely inaccessible in its original languages. With the tools provided in this volume, Vladimir Olivero takes intermediate students of Ethiopic through 1 Enoch in one of its primary languages, Ge‘ez. Students not only gain greater facility in language but prepare themselves for more advanced textual study of this important text across its various witnesses. Olivero parses all the verbs and provides English glosses for the verbs and nouns that appear in 1 Enoch. A convenient lexicon and concordance at the end of the volume provide the range of translations available for each word occurring in 1 Enoch and a list of passages in which the term occurs. This volume is perfect for independent learning, classroom settings, or as a refresher to Classical Ethiopic.

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Did the prophets have a plan?

JUST LIKE THE REST OF US: Prophets Figure It Out as They Go (Rabbi Peretz Rodman, TheTorah.com).

Samuel must piece together YHWH’s intention to anoint David. Elisha’s plan to save a widow and her sons unfolds in fits and starts.

Dovetails nicely with the AJR review series on Yosefa Raz's The Poetics of Prophecy.

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Review of Schroer & Wyssmann (eds.), Images in transition

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: Images in transition: the southern Levant and its imagery between Near Eastern and Greek traditions

Silvia Schroer, Patrick Wyssmann, Images in transition: the southern Levant and its imagery between Near Eastern and Greek traditions. Orbis biblicus et orientalis. Leuven: Peeters, 2024. Pp. xi, 272 pages. ISBN 9789042954410.

Review by
Noa Ranzer, Tel Aviv University. noarantz@gmail.com

This edited volume presents the proceedings of an international conference that took place in Bern, Switzerland, in 2017. The articles present a diversity of subjects, approaches, regions, periods, and scopes of case studies, briefly summarized by the editors in the introduction. All contributions examine the interconnectivity between various cultures in the southern Levant in the Persian and Hellenistic periods, with most studying pictorial depictions to better understand the processes of influence and interference between social agents. As such, this volume contributes to the study of visual culture in the Persian and Hellenistic periods, revealing a complex picture comprised of various ethnicities and religions of the peoples living in the southern Levant and beyond.

[...]

The focus is on Phoenicia, Israel, and the Levant in general, with some attention to Egypt.

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Dressing for justice in the Letter of James

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Public Trials in the Letter of James. Wardrobes and matters of justice (John Drummond).

In the article “Ancient Courts and the Letter of James” in the Fall 2025 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, Alicia J. Batten argues that the setting of James’s story was likely a court of law or perhaps a local synagogue where such legal disputes were also heard and discussed.

The BAR article is behind the subscription wall, but this essay summarizes it.

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Plato and the prophets?

BACK TO THE CLASSICS:

Beyond “Athens and Jerusalem”: Integrating Classical Philosophy into the Comparative Study of the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East

October 2025・Harvard Theological Review 118(3):381-406
DOI:10.1017/S0017816025100850
License・CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Authors Ethan Schwartz

Abstract

Biblical studies is currently seeing resurgent interest in comparing the Hebrew Bible and ancient Greek literature. However, classical philosophy has been underrepresented in this work. This article argues that this underrepresentation stems from historical-critical scholars’ suspicion of “Athens and Jerusalem,” the essentialization of classical philosophy and the Hebrew Bible as, respectively, “reason” and “revelation”—the “twin pillars of Western civilization.” Such essentialism violates the historical-critical principle of cultural continuity. Wariness of it is therefore justified. However, avoiding classical philosophy only exacerbates the problem. If Greek literature is a legitimate historical-critical comparandum for the Hebrew Bible, then classical philosophy should be as well. Through case studies in the biblical prophets and Plato, this article shows how this comparison may contribute on two levels: first-order comparison, in which classical philosophy provides new data for understanding the Hebrew Bible in its ancient context; and second-order comparison, in which scholarship on classical philosophy raises metacritical questions about biblical studies itself.

HT Rogue Classicism. This article is open access.

It happens that I have been re-reading Plato's and Xenophon's Socratic dialogues lately. I agree that they have potential for illuminating aspect of biblical studies (Hebrew Bible and New Testament). There has been some comparative work in recent years, but, perhaps surprisingly, there's more to be done.

By the way, yes, I said Xenophon's Socratic dialogues. The Greek general Xenephon is best known for his Anabasis, the account of his leading thousands Greek mercenaries back from Persia to Greece after their failed attempt to put Cyrus the Younger on the Persian throne.

But did you know that Xenophon was also a disciple of Socrates and he too published Socratic dialogues? They present a somewhat different Socrates than Plato's. It's surprising how many people don't know this.

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Raz's "weak prophecy" and secularization

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Weak Prophecy As A Critique of Just-So Secularization Stories (Raphael Magarik).

... Raz’s book takes aim at precisely Krista’s friend’s dichotomy, in which the ancient, religious source, which is understood to be authoritative, muscularly assertive, and second only to God is opposed to modern, secular poetry, characterized as self-conscious instead of self-assured and constantly hedging the bombastic claims of the primitive, prophetic original. As an alternative, Raz explores what she calls “weak prophecy,” emphasizing the ways in which biblical prophecy is tentative and confused, marred by failure and anxiety—hardly authoritative in any straightforward way.

This is the third AJR essay on Yosefa Raz's The Poetics of Prophecy. The earlier essays are noted here and here.

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Review of Grassi, Die semitischen Personennamen in den griechischen und lateinischen Inschriften aus Syrien und dem Libanon

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: Die semitischen Personennamen in den griechischen und lateinischen Inschriften aus Syrien und dem Libanon

Giulia Francesca Grassi, Die semitischen Personennamen in den griechischen und lateinischen Inschriften aus Syrien und dem Libanon. Etymologischer Kommentar zu IGLS I–VII, XI, XVII/1, sowie I. Tyr I und I. Tyr II. Fontes et subsidia ad bibliam pertinentes, 13. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024. Pp. x, 382. ISBN 9783111331058.

Review by
Yang Han, University of Chicago. pascalh@uchicago.edu

... In summary, the author is to be congratulated for this invaluable collection and analysis of Semitic names from the Greek and Latin inscriptions of Syria. It presents useful data to aramaicists, arabists and semiticists who might not be familiar with Greek epigraphy, and to classicists who might not be versed in comparative semitics. I hope that the author and their team can keep collecting and analyzing these fascinating onomastic data from the Greco-Roman Near East, and further expand the project to include data from papyri, curse tablets, and literary sources, both Classical and Christian. ...

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Fake French Phoenician

FORGED PHOENICIAN WATCH: The Glozel affair: A sensational archaeological hoax made science front-page news in 1920s France (Daniel J. Sherman, The Conversation).

Certain characteristics of the [Golzel tomb] site placed it in the Neolithic era, approximately 10,000 B.C.E. But [amateur archaeologist Antonin ] Morlet also unearthed artifact types thought to have been invented thousands of years later, notably pottery and, most surprisingly, tablets or bricks with what looked like alphabetic characters. Some scholars cried foul, including experts on the inscriptions of the Phoenicians, the people thought to have invented the Western alphabet no earlier than 2000 B.C.E.

Was Glozel a stunning find with the capacity to rewrite prehistory? Or was it an elaborate hoax?

Epigrapher René Dussaud concluded that "the so-called Glozel alphabet was a mishmash of previously known early alphabetic writing" and the archaeological commission that investigated concluded that "the site was 'not ancient.'"

Prof. Sherman has a New Book out with the University of Chicago Press which delves into the Glozel controversy:

Sensations
French Archaeology between Science and Spectacle, 1890–1940
Daniel J. Sherman

Delves into two controversies from the French archaeological world to illuminate the tension between the discipline’s scientific ambitions and its hunger for media attention.

For well over a century, from Heinrich Schliemann’s sensational discoveries at Troy in the 1880s, through the Tutankhamun excavations of the 1920s, to the recent LIDAR-aided uncovering of lost Maya cities, archaeology has made headlines. In this new history of archaeology and its archival traces, Daniel J. Sherman treats the friction between science and spectacle as constitutive of the field. By exploring two long-running controversies that roiled the French archaeological world and its wider public in the first third of the twentieth century, he gives the science/media relationship a unique place in the history of archaeology—and its present.

The first controversy involves a dispute over the conduct of excavations at Carthage in Tunisia, then under French colonial rule. In the second, accusations of forgery clouded what seemed to be a stunning Neolithic find at a hamlet called Glozel, in the Auvergne region in central France. The affair divided the scholarly community and attracted enormous media attention across Europe and North America. Both controversies occurred at a transitional moment between what has been called the heroic age of archaeology, dominated by explorers and adventurers with little specialized training, and the beginnings of its professionalization. As Sherman shows, the two affairs put the methods, procedures, and networks of archaeology in the spotlight and profoundly shaped its history.

Follow the link for purchasing details.

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Raz's modern broken(-)prophetic mirrors

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Modern Mirrors (Karma Ben-Johanan).

This essay was adapted from a book launch at the Hebrew University on May 22nd, 2024, and translated from the Hebrew by Amital Stern.

... In other words, while modernists believe that the mirror in which the prophets are reflected to them is obscure, stained, scratched, or even fragmented, these flaws exist not on the mirror at all, but on the prophets themselves, who are scratched, stained, or broken. On the contrary, not only modern readers, but also the great prophets themselves are to blame for these weaknesses that find their way into the nostalgic embrace between the two. This, then, is the middle ground between new and old, between post-Enlightenment poets and the ancient prophets who love them back – a sad, weak love based on loss. ...

This is the second AJR essay on Yosefa Raz's The Poetics of Prophecy. I noted the first here.

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Marble mask excavated at the Carthage Tophet

PUNIC WATCH:2,300-Year-Old Marble Mask Unearthed in Ancient Carthage, Tunisia (Nisha Zahid)

The mask, carved from fine marble, was found during excavation work at the temple complex dedicated to the god Baal Hammon and the goddess Tanit—two central deities of ancient Carthage. It portrays a woman with an elaborate Phoenician-style hairstyle, a hallmark of cultural and artistic influence that originated in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Experts date the artifact to the late 4th century BC and describe it as one of the most distinctive findings ever made at the site.

The article also gives some background on the new excavation at the Carthage Tophet.

I noted the discovery of gold coins at the site in 2023, mentioned in the article, here. For more on the Carthage Tophet and debate surrounding the evidence for child sacrifice there, see here and links.

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