Don't let this happen to you

STEVE CARUSO: How to Know When You Shouldn’t Publish Your Own “Translation.” Also a cautionary tale about Google Image searches. Cross-file under Aramaic Watch (sort of).

Jones on the ancient papyrus market

ASOR BLOG: Ancient Papyri Online and for Sale (Brice C. Jones).

Over the last decade, we have witnessed a growing fascination with ancient papyri from Egypt. By now, most people have heard of the Gospel of Judas, published in 2006, the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife, which made headlines in 2014, or, most recently, the controversial fragment of the Gospel of Mark that is reputed to have been extracted from Egyptian mummy cartonnage. What all of these manuscripts have in common is the material upon which their texts were inscribed: papyrus. What is this material? And where are all these manuscripts coming from?

[...]

More on and from Dr. Brice C. Jones is here and links. More on the Gospel of Jesus' Wife is also there and links. Ditto for the Gospel of Judas (also here and links) and the supposedly first-century manuscript of the Gospel of Mark (also here and links).

The oldest Hebrew Cairo Geniza fragment in Cambridge?

GENIZA FRAGMENT OF THE MONTH (NOVEMBER 2010): The oldest Hebrew fragment in the Collection? T-S NS 3.21.

... The scroll, of which two parts have been found in the T-S Collection, T-S NS 3.21 and a small piece T-S NS 4.3, contains only the book of Genesis, so it may have been a Genesis scroll rather than the whole Torah. Colette Sirat estimated that if it had contained the whole Torah, then it would have measured 40m long. The script is highly distinctive, when compared with that of most Bible fragments in the Collection, with an acutely-angled serif and what Ada Yardeni believes are some of the earliest regular examples of tagin, the ornamental 'crowns' that appear only in Torah scrolls (with a few exceptions). The hand is similar to that of the (very few) Hebrew and Aramaic papyri of the Byzantine period (300–700 CE).

Sirat also detects differences from the Masoretic Text (MT) in the division of paragraphs (paraša petuḥa and paraša setuma), though these are minor, and one consonantal difference from the MT at Genesis 17:1, where the scroll has שנה for the MT's plural שנים.
Genesis 17:1, showing the singular where MT has the plural

According to Sirat, the scroll is early, pre-Islamic, and dates from the fifth or sixth century. Although this is centuries earlier than the great majority of Genizah fragments, it would make it contemporaneous with some of the underscripts of the palimpsests in the Collection and its survival in the Genizah is therefore not at all impossible. Nothing is straightforward in dealing with undated manuscripts, however, and Ada Yardeni prefers to date it later, to the eighth or ninth century, still early, but not as spectacularly so. There appear to be sufficient grounds, however, to believe that an earlier dating is more likely, given the clear differences in hand, in particular, from most other Bible manuscripts found in the Genizah, and it is thrilling to think that this scroll may have been in use in synagogue services hundreds of years before being consigned to the Ben Ezra Genizah.

Tennesse and the pseudepigrapha

THE RECENT BILL BY THE TENNESEE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES which would make "the Holy Bible" the state book has been getting flack from a lot of people. Joel Hoffman has a HuffPo piece asking What Has Tennessee Done and What Holy Bible Have They Chosen? in which he invokes various deutero- and non-canoncial books related to the Old and New Testaments:

The mysterious Book of Enoch --- and its claim that God's world has gone awry -- is part of the Ethiopian Bible, but everyone else puts it in the category of books that fell to the Old Testament's cutting room floor in antiquity. Technically called the "pseudepigrapha," these books number in the hundreds, and include the second half of the Adam and Eve story, Abraham's early life, and much more.

Then there are the runners up to the New Testament, such as the Gnostic Gospels. Like most of the pseudepigrapha, these aren't in anyone's Bible.

All of this raises the question: What has Tennessee made into its state book? The Jewish Bible? The Catholic one? Greek Orthodox? Protestant? Ethiopian?

Even when we include all the fragments and titles of lost pseudepigrapha, I don't think we are quite up to "hundreds" of them, but I hope future discoveries change that. Beyond that, I'm not getting involved in this discussion, except to say that I'm always pleased to see the apocryphal and pseudepigraphic books get some media attention. As they say, all publicity is good publicity.

Cross-file under Old Testament Apocrypha Watch, New Testament Apocrypha Watch, Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Watch, and Politics.

Barkay to lecture in Kentucky

GABRIEL BARKAY: Biblical archaeologist to speak about Temple Mount Excavation.

Dr. Gabriel Barkay is one of the world’s most famous and leading archaeologists and is credited with the discovery of what are now called the silver scrolls. The silver scrolls are the oldest still-surviving text from the Old Testament dating to approximately 600 B.C. Today, Dr. Barkay is the archaeologist in charge of the Temple Mount Sifting Project where volunteers sift through earth excavated from Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.

The lecture will be on 30 April at the University of Pikeville in Kentucky. More on the Ketef Hinnom silver amulets is here and more on the Temple Mount Sifting Project is here, both with many links

Labour on Hebrew

BRITISH POLITICS: Labour pledge to safeguard Hebrew qualifications (Jewish News).

Hebrew would remain a part of the GCSE and A-Level curriculum under a Labour government, the party’s education spokesman Tristram Hunt has said.

The pledge comes amid uncertainty over the future of qualifications in modern and ancient Hebrew, which, along with several other languages including Polish, Bengali, Portugese and Turkish, are set to be axed by exam boards in 2017.

AQA will no longer offer Modern Hebrew at A-Level, and OCR is to discontinue its A-Level in Biblical Hebrew.

[...]

Good for Labour. I hope the idea catches on. And I'm pleased to see that Tristram Hunt and I do agree on something.

Septuagint studies prize

COMPETITION: The John William Wevers Prize in Septuagint Studies.

The International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies (IOSCS) offers an annual prize of $350 to be awarded to an outstanding paper in the field of Septuagint studies. The prize has been named in memory of John William Wevers to honor his many contributions to Septuagint studies.

The field of Septuagint studies is construed broadly, and a paper may focus on any aspect of the study of the Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures. The IOSCS wants to encourage the study of these translations by younger scholars, and eligibility is thus limited to advanced graduate students or recent Ph.D. recipients (4 years or less after receiving the degree).

Follow the link for further particulars. The deadline for submission this year is 15 August.

HT Jim West.

Mathematical angels in the DSS

ASOR BLOG: Zodiac Calendars and Angelic Teaching in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Helen R. Jacobus).

Nothing in these manuscripts indicates they are part of mythological books. When reconstructed it can be seen that they contain real astronomical calendars, and actual mathematical material. But angels are at the forefront.

Vermes lecture on the DSS

JAMES MCGRATH: Geza Vermes Lecture on the Dead Sea Scrolls. During his visit to Louisiana in 2009.

Schiffman on Pesah and the Second Temple

LAWRENCE H. SCHIFFMAN: Pesach and the Second Temple. With a link to his popular article in Ami Magazine.

Religion in the Roman Empire (RRE)

NEW JOURNAL FROM MOHR SIEBECK:

Religion in the Roman Empire (RRE)

Managing Editor: Jörg Rüpke (Erfurt)

Editors: Reinhard Feldmeier (Göttingen), Karen L. King (Harvard, MA), Rubina Raja (Aarhus), Annette Yoshiko Reed (Philadelphia, PA), Christoph Riedweg (Zürich), Jörg Rüpke (Erfurt), Seth Schwartz (New York, NY), Christopher Smith (Rome), Markus Vinzent (London)

Associate Editors: Nicole Belayche (Paris), Kimberly Bowes (Rome), Richard Gordon (Erfurt), Gesine Manuwald (London), Volker Menze (Budapest), Maren Niehoff (Jerusalem), George H. van Kooten (Groningen), Moulie Vidas (Princeton, NJ), Greg Woolf (St Andrews)

Religion in the Roman Empire (RRE) is bold in the sense that it intends to further and document new and integrative perspectives on religion in the Ancient World combining multidisciplinary methodologies. Starting from the notion of "lived religion" it will offer a space to take up recent, but still incipient, research to modify and cross the disciplinary boundaries of History of Religion, Archaeology, Anthropology, Classics, Ancient History, Jewish History, Rabbinics, New Testament, Early Christianity, Patristics, Coptic Studies, Gnostic and Manichean Studies, Late Antiquity and Oriental Languages. We hope to stimulate the development of new approaches that can encompass the local and global trajectories of the multidimensional pluralistic religions of antiquity.

Each volume will consist of three issues a year, each of approximately 130 pages in length. It will include an editorial, five to seven main articles, and book reviews. All articles and contributions that exceed 8 pages in length will be double-blind peer-reviewed. All articles and contributions will be in English.

The first issues will deal with "Lived Religion: Appropriations of Religion and Meanings in Situations," "Understanding Objects in Religious Contexts" and with "Practices and Groups," bringing together studies on textual and archaeological material from all areas of the Mediterranean.

The first issue is available at the link for free. For you, special deal!

Samaritan Pentateuch in Arabic

GENIZA FRAGMENT OF THE MONTH (NOVEMBER 2007): An Arabic Translation of the Samaritan Pentateuch (T-S Ar.1a.136).

Among the 192,844 folios of the Taylor-Schechter Collection, only three Samaritan texts written in Samaritan or Arabic script have been discovered so far. This is not surprising since the Genizah was part of the Ben-Ezra synagogue which belonged to the rabbanite Jewish community. Since both communities had their own synagogues and lived their lives separately from each other, Samaritan documents in the Genizah are somewhat an exotic discovery.

The fragment T-S Ar.1a.136 comprises the Arabic translation of Genesis 4:4–15. The text is carefully written in a beautiful Arabic script with sporadic vocalisation. The text of Genesis 4:9a (line 9 recto) is written in Samaritan square script.

[...]

Looking at the "Fragment of the Month" column of the Cambridge University Library's Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, I realized that there are a few interesting ones from past years which I have never highlighted on PaleoJudaica. I will post these as I get around to it.

The manuscripts of the Mar Behnam Monastery

ADAM MCCOLLUM: Notes on some manuscripts of the Mar Behnam Monastery. Regular readers will recall the very bad news of the recently reported destruction of the Mar Behnam Monastery in Iraq. At the time of the report I wrote, "Does that mean that the manuscripts themselves are now lost? I hope not." At the hmmlorientalia blog, Adam McCollum reports the good news that the 500+ manuscripts were digitized by the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library and the CNMO (Centre numérique des manuscrits orientaux). There is no word on what happened to the manuscripts themselves, and we should probably fear the worst, but at least we do have a photographic record of them.

And on another note, I sometimes wonder aloud whether such ancient monastic libraries include manuscripts of Old Testament pseudepigrapha in their collections. Sometimes I find out that they do. And so it is in this case. Adam has highlighted some manuscripts in this collection and among them I see two of Zosimus and the Story of the Rechabites in Garshuni. And there are also some New Testament Apocrypha and a manuscript of Susanna.

DSS lecture at Penn State

LECTURE TOMORROW: April 16 Research Unplugged to focus on Dead Sea Scrolls.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Daniel Falk, professor of classics and ancient Mediterranean studies and Chaiken Family Chair in Jewish studies, will present "Excavating the Bible: What the Dead Sea Scrolls Reveal About Biblical Stories" at 12:30 p.m. Thursday, April 16, at Schlow Centre Region Library as part of the Research Unplugged lecture series.

[...]

Persecution of Aramaic-speaking Christians in the Middle East

MODERN ARAMAIC WATCH: Christians who speak the language of Jesus being uprooted by Islamic State (Hugh Naylor, Washington Post). Excerpt:

Over the last decade, Assyrians have joined waves of Christians who have fled Syria and Iraq because of war and persecution by extremist Muslims. But the latest attacks have added to concerns that this unique Mesopotamian people are in danger of disappearing from the region.

Assyrians in Iraq and Syria belong to the last communities of significant size to speak the language of Jesus — Aramaic. Many of them are being forced to move outside the Middle East, where it becomes less likely the tongue will be maintained, said Eden Naby, a Middle East historian and expert on Assyrian culture.

Aramaic is the oldest continuously written and spoken language in the Middle East, she said. It was once also used by some other religious communities, including Jews. Now, “Assyrians remain the last Aramaic-speaking of people of the world. So the disappearance and displacement of these people pretty much spells the closing chapter of Aramaic use in the world,” Naby said.

Assyrians, also referred to as Chaldeans or Syriacs, consider themselves ethnically distinct from Arabs and Kurds, tracing back their roots in the region 6,500 years. They speak a modern dialect of what was the lingua franca of the Assyrian Empire.

Persian Empire, not Assyrian. But that aside, the danger is real and is part of ISIS's sustained and systematic assault on the past. In the words of "Habib Afram, head of the Syriac League in Lebanon, which represents regional Assyrian issues":

They don't want to just take your land or kick you out of your villages — they want to erase your past, your heritage,” he said.

Background on ISIS is here and many links. More on the persecution of Aramaic-speaking Christians in the Middle East is here, here, here, here, and many links.

Minister protests Waqf's new Temple Mount excavation

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: Construction minister: Stop unauthorized Temple Mount excavations (Yori Yalon, Israel HaYom).

Minister Uri Ariel warns that ongoing renovations at the Dome of the Rock, atop the ruins of the Second Temple, may inflict irreparable harm to Judaism's holiest site • Ariel says crews flouting the prohibition on operating heavy machinery in the area.

HT Joseph Lauer. Background here.

Emek Shaveh vs. Elad again

POLITICS: Biblical Jewish Ties to Jerusalem Under Attack by European-Backed NGO (Ahuva Balofsky, Breaking Israel News). The article — which is about Emek Shaveh's legal petition to have the management of the Western Wall Tunnel taken from Elad and taken over by the State — is not as hostile as the headline, although neither is particularly sympathetic to Emek Shaveh.

Background here.

The British Library's Greek manuscripts online

ETC: British Library: More manuscripts online (Peter M. Head).

The British Library Medieval Manuscripts blog reports that seventy-five more manuscripts are on-line. These seem to be the last group in the current project (hopefully they will get more funding to keep up the good progress). In this batch are a mountain of patristic and ecclesiastical manuscripts including homilies and such, and the following biblical ones. ...

Septuagint, New Testament, and related manuscripts.

Also, over at hmmlorientalia, Adam McCollum collects the British Library's Medieval Manuscripts Blog's posts on their online Greek manuscripts: Posts on the digitized BL Greek manuscripts.

A couple of related PaleoJudaica posts are here and here.

Journals, blogs, and YouTube comments

JAMES MCGRATH: Don’t Diss the Blog! Well no.

More Waqf excavation at Temple Mount?

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: Once Again: Waqf Illegally Digging Up Temple Mount. Jordanian Waqf digs up stone floor under mosque built on top of the sacred areas of the Holy Temples, says it's 'replacing carpets' (Hillel Fendel, Arutz Sheva).

Don't do that.

Marriage and sex in the Talmud

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: How Often Should Married Jewish Couples Have Sex? And other matters of conjugal bliss in this week’s Talmud study, including a woman’s right to sexual fulfillment.

How should a good Jew treat a waiter? At what age does an infant recognize its mother? How often should a married couple have sex? These are just a few of the practical and ethical questions that the rabbis addressed in chapter 5 of Tractate Ketubot, which Daf Yomi readers finished over the last two weeks. The subject of Ketubot is literally the marriage contract, and the first chapters were dedicated to various issues that arise when that contract is voided or dissolved—whether that means infidelity prior to marriage, or rape, or incest, or a financial dispute between bride and groom. But once the rabbis leave the obstacles to marriage behind and begin talking about marriage itself—what the parties owe each other, not just in terms of money but in affection and respect—the picture becomes a much happier one. In particular, the rabbis show that women do not only have obligations in marriage; they have rights as well.

[...]

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

Passover reading from AJR

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Passover Reading.

“We didn’t want to let this holiday season “passover” without providing a list of some important works on Passover, Easter, and the comparison and connections between the two. Happy holidays and happy reading!”

— AJR Editors

Posted at the end of Passover last week, but I've only gotten around to linking to it now. But you can get started early on your Passover reading for next year.

The Jubilees Palimpsest Project

TECHNOLOGY WATCH: Technology casts new light on old manuscripts (Todd R. Hanneken, San Antonio Express-News). The name sounds like a Robert Ludlum novel, but it's actually an exciting NEH-funded humanities project. Excerpt:

Today’s imaging technology exponentially improves the color range and resolution of the eye. Advanced processing of spectral signatures allows us to distinguish visually similar but different materials, such as brownish traces of ink on brownish discolored parchment. We can also capture high-resolution texture that allows us to see the corrosion of parchment where mildly acidic ink had once been.

Now scholars can read whole books from antiquity, whereas before one could barely tell there was erased text behind the visible writing.

What will we learn when this technology makes ancient writings freely available to scholars and enthusiasts around the world? As with past discoveries, it might teach us oddities of Jewish and Christian history and about the development of ideas that we now take for granted.

The St. Mary’s team is working on an erased manuscript, or palimpsest, of the book of Jubilees, originally written in Hebrew in the 150s BCE. It was eventually rejected by Judaism and most of Christianity, perhaps because of its fervent strictness.

The same erased manuscript also contains the only copy of what is likely the Testament of Moses, a Jewish text written around the time of Jesus describing some mysterious other Messianic figure. A third hidden text contains part of a commentary on the Gospel of Luke written by Christians who were eradicated as heretics because they believed that God the Son was younger than God the Father.

The project's website is here, where more details are available, such as:

The 144-page manuscript is often referred to as the “Jubilees” palimpsest in reference to its oldest text, eighty pages of a Latin translation of a Hebrew composition from the 150s BCE, fragments of which were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran. The codex also includes sixteen pages of a first-century CE Jewish work called the Assumption or Testament of Moses, and forty-eight pages of a fourth-century CE Arian commentary on the Gospel of Luke. All reflect major developments in Judaism and Christianity, and all were eventually suppressed. Jubilees was treated as scripture among those responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, and “Arians” represented a major form of Christianity in the fourth century. Scholars of Judaism and Christianity will be most interested in evaluating the images to determine the oldest form of the ancient texts, which are known best or only from this manuscript. The manuscript itself tells the story of the “erasure” of alternative views of the Law and Christ, and replacement with a view that retained dominance, namely an anthology of Augustine's writings.

This manuscript, now at the Ambrosiana Library (Biblioteca) in Milan, has not been thoroughly edited since 1828 (Commentary on Luke) and 1861 (Jubilees and the Assumption or Testament of Moses). ...

Bit by bit, a letter at a time, whatever it takes. Until we're done.

Cross-file under Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Watch.

UPDATE: Dead link now fixed. Sorry!

Omer offering reenactment

ANOTHER TEMPLE INSTITUTE REENACTMENT: WATCH: Historic Omer Barley Offering Brought Up in Jerusalem (Lea Speyer, Breaking Israel News). More on the offering of the Omer on the second day of Passover here. This was just a dress rehearsal, because there is no Temple in which actually to offer the Omer. Another recent Temple Institute re-creation was noted here and links with some commentary of my own. This event was jointly sponsored by another group that's called the Women on Behalf of the Holy Temple.

Emek Shaveh vs. Elad

POLITICS: Elad management of City of David tunnel challenged in court. European-funded group calls involvement of Ir David Foundation a "dangerous political act." (Jerusalem Post).

Emek Shaveh, an organization of archeologists and activists dedicated to the role of archeology in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, petitioned the High Court of Justice on Sunday for the state to take over management of a tunnel that connects Silwan and the Western Wall from a right-wing NGO.

The tunnel, which leads to the archeological site known as the Davidson Center and reaches the foundations of the Temple Mount, is managed by The Ir David Foundation (Elad), founded in the 1980s to acquire the former homes of Jewish families who fled Silwan after the 1936 riots.

[...]

More on Elad here and links. An earlier run in between Elad and the left-wing NGO Emek Shaveh was noted here. And more on Emek Shaveh with a link to their website is here.

Magness and Huqoq

ARCHAEOLOGIST: UNC professor finds treasures buried in Israel (Justin Quesinberry, WNCN News).

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. -

Half a world away, and centuries deep in history, Jodi Magness spends every summer digging into Israel's past.

"I always say an archeological dig is like summer camp for adults," Magness said.

The professor at the University of North Carolina has packed her bags, along with dozens of students and staff, and headed to Galilea each summer since 2011.

That's when they began excavating a Jewish village called “Huqoqa,” which dates back to the time of Jesus. Most recently it was abandoned since the 1940s.

[...]

PaleoJudaica has been following the discoveries of ancient mosaics at Huqoq for some time: background here and here and keep following the links back. In this article Prof. Magness also briefly discusses the social background of the ancient Huqoq being excavated:

The impact of religion is central to the questions Magness is asking.

She said the synagogue dates back to around the time Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.

So she wonders, what was the fate of Jewish villages like Huqoq under Christian rule?

“Because the historical view backwards is usually: well, the Jews must have been oppressed, right, by Christian rule, Christian rule was not friendly to the Jews, they must have suffered. And, what we're finding at Huqoq is just the opposite. Here, we have a village that clearly prospered,” she said.

Paul and “Judaizing”

FIRST THINGS: Paul and “Judaizing” (Peter J. Leithart). The ancient history of a Greek verb.

Two new SBL books

NEW BOOKS FROM THE SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE:

Meaning and Context in the Thanksgiving Hymns: Linguistic and Rhetorical Perspectives on a Collection of Prayers from Qumran

Trine Bjornung Hasselbalch

A new reading strategy for the Thanksgiving Hymns

Hasselbalch asserts that current theories about the social background of the Thanksgiving Hymns are unable to explain its heterogeneous character. Instead the author suggests a reading strategy that leaves presumptions about the underlying social contexts aside to instead consider the collection’s hybridity as a clue to understanding the collection as a whole.


Proverbs: An Eclectic Edition with Introduction and Textual Commentary

Michael V. Fox (Translator)

A new critical text for Proverbs drawing from many manuscripts

This first volume of The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition series features a critical text of Proverbs with extensive text-critical introductions and commentaries. This and future HBCE volumes bring together a scholar’s critical decisions into an eclectic text, drawing from many manuscripts or placing entirely variant texts side by side. A common approach for critical editions of other ancient books, including the New Testament, the eclectic approach and scope used in the HBCE is a first of its kind for the Hebrew Bible.

Follow the links for more details and ordering information.