Septuagint Studies Supervision (1)

WILLIAM ROSS: SUPERVISORS & PROGRAMS FOR SEPTUAGINT STUDIES – PART I. I am not a specialist in Septuagint studies but, like some on this list, I could (and would be happy to) supervise PhD students on related matters such as textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible.

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Women in 1 Cor 11:2-16

THE BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION:

Women and Worship in Paul’s Churches: Apostles, Prophets, and Teachers

I have now lost count of the number of times that I have read the work of a scholar on the topic of women in Paul’s churches who tells me that they find it easy or hard to ‘imagine’ a particular scenario in the early church and thus to reconstruct a scenario that seems to the writer to be the most ‘plausible’ based on the evidence before us. I imagine that they are assuming that I too will find these scenarios easy to ‘imagine’ as well, but this is not always the case.

See Also: Women and Worship at Corinth (Cascade Books, 2015).

By Lucy Peppiatt
Principal
Westminster Theological Centre

Past posts dealing with 1 Corinthians 11, coming at the subject from a somewhat different angle, are here and here.

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Hurtado on Kirk on memory and the Historical Jesus

LARRY HURTADO: Review/Critique of Ehrman, Bauckham and Bird on Memory and Jesus.

A newly-published article gives an incisive discussion of recent publications by Bart Ehrman, Richard Bauckham, and Michael Bird on memory, tradition and the historical Jesus: Alan Kirk, “Ehrman, Bauckham and Bird on Memory and the Jesus Tradition,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 15.1 (2017): 88-114.

[...]

A PaleoJudaica post that involves Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses is here.

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

Dabir 04

BIBLIOGRAPHIA IRANICA: "Issue 04 of DABIR (Digital Archive of Brief notes & Iran Review).Issue 04 of Dabir, an open access on-line journal for Iranian Studies, is out now. Dabir is published by the Jordan Center for Persian Studies."

As usual, there is nothing specific about ancient Judaism in this issue, but there are articles of background interest on matters such as Sogdian, Avestan, and the history of the Achamenid empire.

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

ZOA opposes return of Iraqi Jewish Archive to Iraq

THE ZIONIST ORGANIZATION OF AMERICA: ZOA Opposes Tillerson Decision to “Return” Jewish Artifacts to Iraq. The Jewish Press publishes a statement by ZOA president Morton A. Klein.

Background here, with many links going back to the recovery of the archive in 2003.

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

Cartagena's Punic festival

PUNIC WATCH: ROMANS AND CARTHAGINIAN, 15 – 24 September 2017 in Cartagena, Spain. The annual Punic festival in Cartagena begins today. Background and past posts on it are here and links. And more recent posts involving Cartagena and its Punic history are here and here.

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Berman on Inconsistency in the Torah

JOSHUA A. BERMAN IS INTERVIEWED by Shmuel Rosner in the Jewish Journal about Dr. Berman's recent book, Inconsistency in the Torah: Ancient Literary Convention and the Limits of Source Criticism (OUP, 2017). There are three posts:

The Inconsistency in the Torah exchange, part 1: How do we make sense of the Torah’s many contradictions?

The Inconsistency in the Torah exchange, part 2: Between biblical criticism and religious belief

The Inconsistency in the Torah exchange, part 3: ‘The Torah is a minefield of culturally dependent literary phenomena’

I recently noted an essay by Dr. Berman about his book here.

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Review of Kurshan, If All the Seas Were Ink

TALMUD WATCH: Memoir Provides Engaging Look at Talmudic Text (Marissa Stern, The Jewish Exponent).

If All the Seas Were Ink

Ilana Kurshan

$26.99, hardcover

St. Martin’s Press

Can you imagine what you’ll be doing seven-and-a- half years from now?

When Ilana Kurshan was coming off of a painful divorce, living in Jerusalem — she’d moved there from New York with her then-husband — a friend suggested she take up daf yomi, a practice in which you read one page of Babylonian Talmud a day.

[...]

PaleoJudaica and its readers have been following Adam Kirsch's column on the Daf Yomi cycle for the last five years.

UPDATE: Bad link fixed and attributions now filled in correctly. Sorry for the glitches.

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

The Historical Dictionary of the Hebrew Language

AT THE ACADEMY OF THE HEBREW LANGUAGE IN ISRAEL: Epic quest to document 'miracle' of Hebrew language (Mike Smith, AFP/PhysOrg). I noted the project here back in 2012.

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The Decline of Aramaic

ARAMAIC WATCH: Decline of a Lingua Franca (John McWhorter, The Atlantic, rprt. AINA).

If a Middle Eastern man from 2,500 years ago found himself on his home territory in 2015, he would be shocked by the modern innovations, and not just electricity, airplanes, and iPhones. Arabic as an official language in over two dozen countries would also seem as counterintuitive to him as if people had suddenly started keeping aardvarks as pets.

In our time-traveler's era, after all, Arabic was an also-ran tongue spoken by obscure nomads. The probability that he even spoke it would be low. There were countless other languages in the Middle East in his time that he'd be more likely to know. His idea of a "proper" language would have been Aramaic, which ruled what he knew as the world and served, between 600 and 200 B.C., as the lingua franca from Greece and Egypt, across Mesopotamia and Persia, all the way through to India. Yet today the language of Jesus Christ is hardly spoken anywhere, and indeed is likely to be extinct within the next century. Young people learn it ever less. Only about half a million people now speak Aramaic--compared to, for example, the five and a half million people who speak Albanian.

How does a language go from being so big to being on the verge of dying out entirely?

[...]

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On the cessation of miracles and women wearing trousers

PROF. ADMIEL KOSMAN: From Theology to Comedy: The Story of R. Adda bar Ahavah and Matun (TheGemara.com).

A talmudic discussion about why God no longer makes miracles ends with a surprising comedy of errors. What message is the Talmud trying to convey? And how is this story used in a 20th century halakhic responsum about women’s pants?

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Postdoc at HMML

ACADEMIC JOB: Post-Doctoral Fellow in Eastern Christian & Islamic Manuscript Cataloging (posted by David M. Calabro at the Hugoye List).

The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) at Saint John's University invites applications for the full-time, benefit-eligible position of Post-Doctoral Fellow in Eastern Christian and Islamic Manuscript Cataloging. This position will provide vital support for HMML's efforts to catalog recently digitized Eastern Christian manuscripts. Under the guidance of the Lead Cataloger of Eastern Christian Manuscripts, the Cataloging Fellow will undertake original cataloging of digital surrogates at HMML as well as revision of existing cataloging.

This is a grant funded position through June 30, 2018.

The manuscripts are in Arabic, Garshuni (Arabic written in Syriac script), and possibly in Syriac. Follow the link for further particulars. There is no specific closing date, but don't dawdle.

For some background on HMML, see this post on an earlier postdoc there.

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Review of DesRosiers and Vuong (eds.), Religious Competition in the Greco-Roman World

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: Nathaniel DesRosiers, Lily C. Vuong (ed.), Religious Competition in the Greco-Roman World. Writings from the Greco-Roman world Supplement series, 10. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2016. Pp. xviii, 326. ISBN 9781628371369. $44.95 (pb). Reviewed by Allan T. Georgia, Shaker Heights, OH (allan.georgia@gmail.com)

Tracing the role that competition played in the religious cultures of the Greco-Roman world is an enormous task. In a second volume exploring this theme, Nathaniel P. DesRosiers and Lily C. Vuong have collected essays that make important inroads in how religious subjects (of various kinds) competed and were subject to contest in the late ancient Mediterranean world.1 The collection is organized around four broad themes, with short essays introducing each section that tie the essays together. The collection is impressive and wide-ranging, which is appropriate to its purpose. This volume collects essay from a range of religious traditions, times and places under a unifying focus on how these traditions reflect competition—a concept whose commonality belies its highly complex dimensionality.

[...]

Ancient Judaism receives at least a little attention in this volume.

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

A legal analysis of the Golb-DSS impersonation case

SECOND CIRCUIT CRIMINAL LAW BLOG: Of Dead Sea Scrolls and Criminal Impersonation (Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP). Some might be interested in this detailed legal analysis of the Raphael Golb identity-theft case and its various appeals. The post concludes:

This decision is worth a read for those interested in a host of different subjects: the AEDPA, the constitutional limits of the New York forgery statute, and the controversy over the authorship of the Dead Sea Scrolls. From a legal perspective, the opinion of the Court may be most cited for its narrowing of the New York criminal forgery statute. As the Court noted, many people have used pseudonyms for legitimate purposes, and the Circuit’s decision makes clear that such use will not be punished with the criminal law. There must be more than intent to deceive; there must be intent to cheat, defraud, or deprive by deception. The absence of such intent in connection with some of the controversial emails at the heart of this appeal led to the reversal of certain counts of conviction.

Background here and many links.

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The backstory of the burials at Ofra

ARCHAEOLOGY, MEET POLITICS: A 2,000-year-old murder leads to an illicit burial in the heart of the West Bank. When archaeologists said 7 women and a youth found in caves were slain by Romans during the Great Revolt, settlers secretly stepped in to illegally pay their last respects (Amanda Borschel-Dan, Times of Israel).

It was a secret, illegal burial, planned and carried out by a Jewish Temple Mount activist who decades ago sat in jail for planning to blow up the Dome of the Rock. But the story of the seven women and one youth who were buried in the Jewish settlement of Ofra on February 6, 2017, is even more dramatic.

[...]

Background here and here.

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More on the emblem of the State of Israel

POLITICS AND ICONOGRAPHY: The National Emblem Of Israel (Saul Jay Singer, The Jewish Press). Last year I noted an article that also covered the ancient iconographic background of Israel's national emblem, with particular reference to the Arch of Titus. This article covers much of the same ground, but has an additional observation worth flagging:

Because the ultimate design does not seem to reflect religious practice or belief – no verses from the Torah, no reference to the God of Israel – many argue that the secularists/socialists prevailed over the religious/observant. In fact, however, the national emblem reflects one of the great mystical visions of the Prophet Zechariah, and the graphic combination of the menorah and olive branches has its genesis in Zechariah 4:1-3:

And the angel that spoke with me returned, and waked me, as a man that is wakened out of his sleep. And he said unto me: “What do you see?” And I said: “I have seen and, behold, a candlestick all of gold, with a bowl upon the top of it, and its seven lamps thereon; there are seven pipes, yes, seven, to the lamps, which are upon the top thereof, and two olive-trees by it, one upon the right side of the bowl, and the other upon the left side thereof.”

I don't know if that is right, but it sounds plausible.

For many past PaleoJudaica posts pertaining to the Arch of Titus, as well as to ancient menorahs and representations of menorahs, start here and follow the links.

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

The Talmud on capital punishment

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: On Capital Punishment. Talmudic rabbis pondered the most fundamental ethical questions—including the value of human life—in debating death sentences by hanging or stoning.

Over the last month, as this column has been on hiatus, Daf Yomi readers have explored some of the most dramatic and challenging material in the Talmud so far. That is because Chapters Four, Five, and Six of Tractate Sanhedrin focus on the most extreme punishment of which any legal system is capable: the death penalty. In setting out the justification, methods, and limits of capital punishment in Jewish law, the Rabbis find themselves facing some of the most fundamental ethical questions. What is a human life worth? What are our responsibilities to one another? Is it ever right to take satisfaction in the death of a fellow human being?
[...]

As Mr. Kirsch notes in the essay, the rabbinic discussions of capital punishment are entirely theoretical. Rabbinic courts did not have the authority to impose the death penalty.

Philologos has a recent essay on the saying "Whoever Saves a Life Saves the World," which I noted here. The phrase "from Israel" may be a secondary addition.

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

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The Iraqi Jewish archive is set to go back to Iraq in 2018

STATE DEPARTMENT ANNOUNCEMENT: U.S to Return Jewish Artifacts to Iraq, Despite Protests. The trove includes books, religious texts, photographs and personal documents looted during Saddam Hussein's regime, and then found by U.S. troops in 2003. (JTA via Haaretz).

A trove of Iraqi Jewish artifacts that lawmakers and Jewish groups have lobbied to keep in the U.S. will be returned to Iraq next year, a State Department official said.

A four-year extension to keep the Iraqi Jewish Archive in the U.S. is set to expire in September 2018, as is funding for maintaining and transporting the items. The materials will then be sent back to Iraq, spokesman Pablo Rodriguez said in a statement sent to JTA on Thursday.

Rodriguez said the State Department “is keenly aware of the interest in the status” of the archive.

[...]

As the headline indicates, response to the decision has been mixed, but generally not very positive. I have expressed my own thoughts on the matter here and here and I have nothing to add.

We'll see what actually happens. It isn't over until it's over.

Further background on the story is here with links going back to the recovery of the archive in 2003.

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The twelfth curse

RABBI UZI WEINGARTEN: “Cursed Is One Who Does Not Uphold the Words of This Torah”? (TheTorah.com).

The anomalous and paradoxical nature of the twelfth curse (Deuteronomy 27:26).

Rabbinic exegetes found the curse difficult, but the Apostle Paul put it to use for his own purposes.

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

Review of Hanan Eshel's collected essays

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Reading the Scrolls and Experiencing Qumran Archaeology with Hanan Eshel (Joshua Matson).

Hanan Eshel, Exploring the Dead Sea Scrolls: Archaeology and Literature of the Qumran Caves, edited by Barnea Selavan and Shani Tzoref. Journal of Ancient Judaism. Supplements, 18. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015.

The long, informative review concludes:

The volume itself is a testament to the legacy of Hanan Eshel in the field of Qumran studies and the history of the Qumran caves. Additionally, this volume serves as a gift from his closest friends and partners in scholarship to the world as a lens through which to view the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

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A refugee camp on Masada?

ARCHAEOLOGY: EXCLUSIVE: New Archaeology Shows ‘Refugee Camp,’ Not Just Rebels, Atop Masada (Ilan Ben Zion, The Forward).

Tour guides leading thousands of visitors to Masada each year follow a similar routine: Where Roman troops breached the walls, they retell Josephus Flavius’s account of how a group of obsessive, fanatical Jewish rebels refused to concede to servitude or slaughter, and committed suicide instead.

For decades, archaeology at the site has been calling the story of the suicide, so central to Israel’s national myth, into question. Now new discoveries may force a revision of the notion that the group atop the fort was much more diverse than the heroic band of brigands celebrated by the cherished story.

“We’re actually excavating a refugee camp,” said Guy Stiebel, the archaeologist leading excavations carried out earlier this year by Tel Aviv University. Masada’s inhabitants during the seven years of the revolt were “a sort of microcosm of Judaea back then,” comprised of refugees from Jerusalem and across Judaea, including priests, members of the enigmatic monastic group from Qumran that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, and at least one Samaritan.

[...]

Cutting edge archaeological techniques helped glean a more detailed picture of the past that would have been impossible during Yadin’s time. The picture emerging from these new data about Masada’s inhabitants is far more complex than previously assumed.

“It’s not one monolithic group,” Stiebel explained, describing the people living at Masada before its fall “very vibrant community of 50 shades of grey” of Judea.

“We have the opportunity to truly see the people, and this is very rare for an archaeologist,” he said. Among them are women and children, who are too often underrepresented in the archaeological record. Through archaeology, the study of the material culture found on Masada, architecture and a restudying of Josephus, he and his team can even pick out where different groups originated from before coming to Masada.

[...]

It sounds plausible that a range of refugees could have ended up seeking safety at Masada during and after the Great Revolt. The new and interesting thing about the current excavation is the use of sophisticated technology to squeeze vastly more information out of the material remains than was posssible in Yadin's day.

We will have to wait for the peer-review publications to find out exactly what the excavators have learned. It remains to be seen how much the new information will make us reconsider Josephus's account of the fall of Masada. It certainly was not without problems already.

The article also reports that some new Hebrew ostraca have been recovered.

For past posts on the history and archaeology of, and revisionist views on, Masada, start here and here and follow the links.

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

Review of Lied and Lundhaug (eds.), Snapshots of Evolving Traditions

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: Liv Ingeborg Lied, Hugo Lundhaug (ed.), Snapshots of Evolving Traditions: Jewish and Christian Manuscript Culture, Textual Fluidity, and New Philology. Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur 175. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2017. Pp. xviii, 366. ISBN 9783110344189. $137.99. Reviewed by Pieter W. van der Horst, Utrecht University (pwvdh@xs4all.nl).

The 13 essays in this volume aim to provide “a broad introductory exploration of the applicability of the perspective of New Philology to late-antique Christian and Jewish texts in their manuscript contexts” (vii). In the introductory chapter the editors clarify the idea of ‘New Philology’ by arguing that when scholars of early Christian and Jewish literature acknowledge the fact that our surviving textual witnesses constitute in fact only snapshots of a movie about a developing textual tradition and that such snapshots are not necessarily representative of the entire movie, “it is pertinent to approach the interpretation of these texts from a perspective inspired by New Philology, taking textual fluidity and manuscript culture fully into consideration” (1). This is meant as a corrective to the traditional approach in which manuscripts are used only, or mainly, in the service of the reconstruction of an Urtext and in which variant readings are regarded as ‘deviations’ from it. Manuscripts are rather testimonies to the ‘life’ of a text, and in most modern critical editions of ancient literature the text presented is usually “foreign to the pool of existing manuscripts and the texts presented there” (3). The ‘unruliness’ displayed by actual manuscripts is thus made invisible, much to the detriment of scholarship. Fluidity of the texts should not be regarded as textual ‘corruption’ because ‘living’ texts were altered in the course of transmission to suit new times and needs. By hiding variants in a critical apparatus one also hides the fact that in a manuscript culture texts are constantly in a process of change. “As an alternative way of dealing with medieval manuscript variance New Philology pinpoints the fact that a literary work does not exist independently of its material embodiment, and that this physical form is part of the meaning of the text” (6). A ‘finished’ text is an illusion, for the changes introduced to the text during its transmission are not corruptions but should be studied as important aspects of the life of the text.

[...]

I was pleased to see that the reviewer liked my essay on the Hekhalot literature, the last one in the volume.

Past posts on the book are here and links.

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

Exhausting guide to post-2002 DSS-like fragments

THE LYING PEN OF SCRIBES BLOG: Post-2002 Dead Sea Scrolls-like Fragments Online: A (Really Exhausting) Guide for the Perplexed (Årstein Justnes and Ludvik A. Kjeldsberg). Many PaleoJudaica posts are included.

HT the AWOL Blog. For more on the new Dead Sea Scrolls-like fragments, start here and follow the links.

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

Arch of Titus exhibition at YU

YESHIVA UNIVERSITY: The Arch of Titus – from Jerusalem to Rome, and Back.September 14, 2017 - January 14, 2018. Popper Gallery. Presented in partnership with the Yeshiva University Center for Israel Studies .

The Arch of Titus has undergone many physical changes over the course of its long history. Featured in the exhibition is a life-size carved replica of the existing Spoils of Jerusalem relief panel from the interior passageway of the Arch, based on three-dimensional and polychrome scanning conducted under the direction of Yeshiva University’s Arch of Titus Project in 2012. (The replica and projected reconstruction have been developed and produced by VIZIN: The Institute for the Visualization of History together with Neathawk Designs, of Williamstown, MA.)

Stretching from the Roman era to the present, The Arch of Titus – from Jerusalem to Rome, and Back explores the image and symbolism of the Arch from various vantage points – from emperors and popes to Jews and Christians, who re-interpreted the meaning of the Arch in modern times. Rare artifacts from collections in Italy, Israel and the United States illuminate the monument’s vibrant history, as the Arch itself went from monumentalizing victory to falling into ruination and, eventually, to being restored in the modern era.

An international conference presented in partnership with the Yeshiva University Center for Israel Studies will take place on October 29, 2017.

HT the Bible Places Blog. For more on the research behind this exhibition, see here and links.

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Externally verified persons in the NT

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: New Testament Political Figures: The Evidence. A web-exclusive supplement to Lawrence Mykytiuk's BAR article identifying real New Testament political figures. There are 23 externally verified political figures on this list, to go with Dr. Mykytiuk's 53 epigraphically verified persons in the Hebrew Bible.

You need a paid subscription to read the BAR article, but this supplement is quite thorough.

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Christian Apocrypha at SBL

APOCRYPHICITY BLOG: Christian Apocrypha at SBL 2017. Tony Burke gives us a preview.

Cross-file under New Testament Apocrypha Watch.

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John the Baptist and Luke-Acts

THE BIBLE PLACES BLOG: Luke & Acts (8): John the Baptist (Michael J. Caba). This continues the series that was formerly called "Historical Reliability of Luke-Acts."

Past PaleoJudaica posts on Machaerus are here and links. For a skeptical response to the claim that the bones of John the Baptist are in Bulgaria, see here.

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

Jechoniah’s uncle

ETC BLOG: Jechoniah’s Uncle and the Text of 2 Chron 36.10 (Peter Gurry). The discussion continues in the comments. I agree with John Meade that "brother," the more difficult reading of the Masoretic Text, is the more original reading.

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