Jones on reading the Book of Ruth

THE BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION:

The Book of Ruth: Origin and Purpose

As a last option for understanding Ruth, I would offer that Ruth does fit well when set against the background of the early post-exilic period. The literature on this time is vast and continues to grow, but it is safe to say that the small community in Judea in the late 500s to early 400s B.C.E. conflicted over various societal issues, one of which was how they should define the boundaries of their community. The prophet Zechariah believed that Jerusalem would throng with foreigners who would count as Yhwh’s people (Zech 2:15[EV 11]), but other persons from the Ezra-Nehemiah narrative feel that foreigners have no part in the community (Ezra 4:1-3; 9:1-4; Neh 13:1-3). This is not to say that Ruth reacts directly to the Ezra-Nehemiah text, nor should we read Ezra-Nehemiah uncritically as plain history, but it is reasonable to hold that community cohesion and in-group/out-group questions were live topics at the time. Within this debate, we can see how Ruth provides a counterfactual to a certain exclusivist perspective toward outsiders. The text is not so bold as to claim that all non-Israelites/Judeans should count as people of Yhwh, but it does demonstrate that there are cases where a foreigner can reasonably measure up to the standard of a true Israelite.

See Also: Reading Ruth in the Restoration Period (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016).

By E. Allen Jones III, PhD
Associate Professor of Bible
Corban University
November 2017

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Review of Muntz, Diodorus Siculus and the World of the Late Roman Republic

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: Charles E. Muntz, Diodorus Siculus and the World of the Late Roman Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xii, 284. ISBN 9780190498726. $85.00. Reviewed by Lisa Irene Hau, University of Glasgow (Lisa.hau@glasgow.ac.uk).

Diodorus Siculus and the World of the Late Roman Republic is part of the wave of scholarship which since the 1980s and ’90s has attempted to rehabilitate Diodorus as a thinker and/or as a historian. It accomplishes this purpose more successfully than many other publications of the same persuasion: Muntz applies careful and critical scholarship both to Diodorus’ own text and to control texts that were (probably) based on the same sources, and he reaches balanced and nuanced conclusions. His main goal throughout is to show that, although Diodorus undeniably based his work closely on written sources and took over ideas from other writers and—primarily—from current trends in his time, he moulded his material to reflect on the current issues of the Late Roman Republic even when writing about mythological times or far-away places. Overall, Muntz’s analysis and argument are convincing, and it is good to see such care and attention being paid to Diodorus’ text and its historical context rather than to preconceived ideas about its sources.

It is good to see Diodorus receiving so much attention lately. For past PaleoJudaica posts on Diodorus and the importance of his work for the history of Second Temple Judaism, start here and follow the links.

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Hunt on Hannibal

PUNIC WATCH: Archeologist Patrick Hunt traces Hannibal’s path (Skye Nguyen, Manitou Messenger).

A historian who looks at the human effect on climate change over the course of time. An author who wrote a book on Hannibal Barca, the ancient Carthaginian leader and enemy of Rome. An environmentalist who asks tough questions about our planet. Meet Dr. Patrick Hunt of Stanford University. Bringing his suitcase packed with experience and expertise from his many expeditions, Hunt paid a visit to St. Olaf College last Friday, Nov. 3 and talked about his new book “Hannibal” in Regents Hall of Natural Science.

[...]

I have more on Dr. Hunt's new book and his research here and links.

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Balberg, Blood for Thought

NEW BOOK FROM UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS:

Blood for Thought
The Reinvention of Sacrifice in Early Rabbinic Literature
Mira Balberg (Author)
Available worldwide

Hardcover, 304 pages
ISBN: 9780520295926
September 2017
$95.00, £79.95

Blood for Thought delves into a relatively unexplored area of rabbinic literature: the vast corpus of laws, regulations, and instructions pertaining to sacrificial rituals. Mira Balberg traces and analyzes the ways in which the early rabbis interpreted and conceived of biblical sacrifices, reinventing them as a site through which to negotiate intellectual, cultural, and religious trends and practices in their surrounding world. Rather than viewing the rabbinic project as an attempt to generate a nonsacrificial version of Judaism, she argues that the rabbis developed a new sacrificial Jewish tradition altogether, consisting of not merely substitutes to sacrifice but elaborate practical manuals that redefined the processes themselves, radically transforming the meanings of sacrifice, its efficacy, and its value.

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Bauckham event in St. Andrews

SLIGHTLY BELATEDLY, I want to mention that Richard Bauckham's book launch lecture in St. Andrews went well last week. He discussed some of the responses to his book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Eerdmans) over the last ten years. If you are interested, be sure to get a copy of the newly published second edition of the book. Here I am with Richard after the lecture:


(Photo courtesy of Sarah Whittle.)

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The stories of Sodom and the Flood

DR. BARUCH ALSTER: Why Does the Sodom Story Parallel the Flood Traditions? (TheTorah.com).

A closer look at the thematic and verbal parallels between the accounts of the flood and the destruction of Sodom, as well as comparison with other ANE flood/destruction stories, helps us better understand the genre and function of the Sodom story.

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Schäfer, Jesus im Talmud (3rd ed.)

NEW (REVISED AND TRANSLATED) BOOK FROM MOHR SIEBECK:

PETER SCHÄFER
Jesus im Talmud
Übers. a.d. Englischen v. Barbara Schäfer

[Jesus in the Talmud. 3rd revised edition.]
3rd revised and corrected edition 2017. XXI, 320 pages.

29,00 €
sewn paper
ISBN 978-3-16-155531-2

Published in German.
This is a thorough investigation of the passages about Jesus in the rabbinic literature, mainly in the Babylonian Talmud. In his lucid and accessible book, Peter Schäfer examines how the rabbis read and used the New Testament to assert Judaism's superiority over Christianity. The Talmudic texts focus on the virgin birth of Jesus, his behavior as a bad and frivolous disciple, his teachings, the healing capacities Jesus and his disciples possessed, the execution of Jesus and his disciples, and finally his punishment forever in hell. The center of this critique of Jesus and his fate was Babylonia under Sassanian rule, quite in contrast to Palestinian Judaism, which was increasingly threatened by the dominant power of Christianity.

I noted the publication of the original English edition here and here.

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Arch of Titus lecture

ICONOGRAPHY: Symbolism of Arch of Titus focus of Nov. 14 lecture (CARLO WOLFF, Cleveland Jewish News).

Professor Steven Fine, who has been researching this Arch for decades, will probe it and the various meanings it has spawned for some 2,000 years in “The Arch of Titus: From Jerusalem and Back,” at 6 p.m. Nov. 14 at the Maltz Performing Arts Center on the campus of Case Western Reserve University. Fine’s free talk is the annual Julius Lecture in Ancient Art, hosted by the CWRU Department of Art History and Art.

An exhibition of the same name as Fine’s lecture is on view through Jan. 14, 2018, at the Yeshiva University Museum in New York City.

More on that exhibition is here. And for much more on the Arch of Titus, follow the links there and here.

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More on Joshua and that eclipse

PHILOLOGOS: No, the Book of Joshua Does Not Tell of a Rare Solar Eclipse. Despite the claim of two recent scientific papers (Mosaic Magazine). PaleoJudaica is cited.

This is something that our British and Israeli scholars do not appear to have thought of. It’s not enough, in interpreting the Bible, to know Akkadian and astronomy. You also have to know how to read a simple story.

Yep.

Background here and here.

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Moss and Baden on Hobby Lobby

INTERVIEW: Investigating the Hobby Lobby Family: An Interview with Candida Moss and Joel S. Baden (Gordon Haber, Religion and Politics). For more on their new book, Bible Nation, see here and links. And follow the links there (and also here) for many other past posts on the Museum of the Bible, Hobby Lobby, and the Green Collection.

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AJR on PSCO 2017-18

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins (PSCO) 2017-2018.

AJR will be sharing highlights from the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins. This year's theme "science and the scientific" asks, "Does considering knowledge as practiced in the ancient world disrupt, modify, and nuance our understanding of the “scientific”?"

Looks like a good lineup.

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Zurawski and Boccaccini (eds.), Second Temple Jewish “Paideia” in Context

NEW BOOK FROM DE GRUYTER: Second Temple Jewish “Paideia” in Context. Ed. by Zurawski, Jason M. / Boccaccini, Gabriele. Series: Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 228.

Aims and Scope
Despite the impressive strides made in the past century in the understanding of Second Temple Jewish history and the strong scholarly interest in paideia within ancient Greek, Hellenistic, Roman, and late antique Christian cultures, the nature of Jewish paideia during the period has, until recently, received surprisingly little attention. The essays collected here were first offered for discussion at the Fifth Enoch Seminar Nangeroni Meeting, held in Naples, Italy, from June 30 – July 4, 2015, the purpose of which was to gain greater insight into the diversity of views of Jewish education during the period, both in Judea and Diaspora communities, by viewing them in light of their contemporary Greco-Roman backgrounds and Ancient Near Eastern influences. Together, they represent the broad array of approaches and specialties required to comprehend this complex and multi-faceted subject, and they demonstrate the fundamental importance of the topic for a fuller understanding of the period. The volume will be of particular interest to students and scholars of the history and culture of the Jewish people during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, ancient education, and Greek and Roman history.

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More on Christians in the late-antique Galilee

ARCHAEOLOGY: 1,600-year-old church mosaic puzzles out key role of women in early Christianity. Female donor memorialized in one of seven Greek inscriptions found recently in Byzantine village churches in the Galilee (Amanda Borschel-Dan, Times of Israel).

A newly uncovered mosaic in the western Galilee speaks to the relatively high status of women in the early Church. Dating to the 5th century, a Greek-language inscription memorializes one “Sausann” (or Shoshana) as a donor for the construction of a village church. It is one of seven inscriptions — including a massive five-meter long text — which were found in three Byzantine churches during this summer’s excavations by Kinneret College archaeologist Mordechai Aviam and historian Jacob Ashkenazi.

Unusual in a patriarchal society, the donor Sausann is credited in the inscription independently of any spouse or male guardian. This Sausann is thought to have been a woman of some standing, perhaps following in the footsteps of her presumed namesake, the female disciple Susannah, who was among the women named in Luke 8:3 who provided for Jesus “out of their resources.”

[...]

I noted another article on these finds a few days ago here. But this article has some more details and, unlike the Haaretz premium article, it will not vanish behind a subscription wall.

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Salvage archaeology in a West Bank military-fire zone

ARCHAEOLOGY: IDF combat soldiers make exciting archaeological discovery in West Bank military fire zone. Over the past nine days, hundreds of soldiers from the IDF's elite 'Duvdevan' unit participated in archeological excavations in a military fire zone in the West Bank. During their excavations, the soldiers uncovered an ancient and magnificent structure that was likely served as a palace during the Byzantine period (Jerusalem online). The site is called Horkania. The article reports that the salvage operation was undertaken because of heavy looting at the site.

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Günzburg Hebrew Collection going online

DIGITIZATION: Soon We'll Be Able to Look at a Treasure That the Russians Have Kept From Israel for 100 Years. The Günzburg collection contains over 14,000 items, including thousands of rare Hebrew books, as well as manuscripts in Hebrew and many other languages (Ofer Aderet, Haaretz).

The Günzburg Collection, one of the most important collections of Jewish books and manuscripts in the world, which is kept in the Russian State Library in Moscow, will be digitized and made accessible to the general public by the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem.

On Tuesday, a historic agreement will be signed between the National Library and its counterpart in Moscow. The agreement is a significant milestone in the contacts between the two institutions, which began exactly 100 years ago, when the National Library was still the Beit Hasfarim Haleumi.


[...]

The Günzburg collection is a rich and unique collection of books and manuscripts that contains over 14,000 items, including thousands of rare Hebrew books, as well as manuscripts in Hebrew and many other languages. It includes medieval works in science, philosophy and Jewish studies, midrashim, copies of the writings of Maimonides and the Rashba (Rabbi Shlomo ibn Aderet), biblical commentaries, books of Hebrew grammar and halakha (religious law), medieval poetry, Kabbalistic and medical texts.

[...]

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

Pajunen and Penner (eds.), Functions of Psalms and Prayers in the Late Second Temple Period

NEW BOOK FROM DE GRUYTER: Functions of Psalms and Prayers in the Late Second Temple Period.. Ed. by Pajunen, Mika S. / Penner, Jeremy. Series: Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 486.

Aims and Scope
When thinking about psalms and prayers in the Second Temple period, the Masoretic Psalter and its reception is often given priority because of modern academic or theological interests. This emphasis tends to skew our understanding of the corpus we call psalms and prayers and often dampens or mutes the lived context within which these texts were composed and used. This volume is comprised of a collection of articles that explore the diverse settings in which psalms and prayers were used and circulated in the late Second Temple period.

The book includes essays by experts in the Hebrew bible, the Dead Sea scrolls, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, and the New Testament, in which a wide variety of topics, approaches, and methods both old and new are utilized to explore the many functions of psalms and prayers in the late Second Temple period. Included in this volume are essays examining how psalms were read as prophecy, as history, as liturgy, and as literature. A variety methodologies are employed, and include the use of cognitive sciences and poetics, linguistic theory, psychology, redaction criticism, and literary theory.

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The Talmud, the Messiah, and the World to Come

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: Peeking Into the World to Come. In this week’s ‘Daf Yomi,’ Talmudic rabbis delve into the practical questions around the Jewish afterlife. Like: will it be here on Earth? Will the Messiah be there, or will we be led there by his arrival? And what does redemption look like? Also, is the food kosher there?

As we saw last week, the final chapter of Tractate Sanhedrin is concerned with the World to Come. But what exactly is the World to Come, olam haba? Is it heaven, or the afterlife, or the end of the world, or the resurrection of the dead, or the messianic era? Will we all get to see it, or does it require extraordinary spiritual merit? These are the kinds of questions the rabbis ask in Chapter 11 of Sanhedrin. At the center of their speculations is the figure of the Messiah, whom the rabbis refer to simply as the Son of David, ben David, since he will be a descendant of the biblical king. At some point in the future, the rabbis are sure, the Messiah will come to redeem the Jewish people. But what exactly will this involve, and when is it going to happen?

[...]

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

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Some useful links

THE BIBLICAL REVIEW BLOG: Weekly Digest (October 27, 2017). William Brown has collected some useful links, including to articles on Northwest Semitic epigraphy and a bibliography for ancient Jewish magic, posted on Academia.edu.

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Festschrift for Ross Shepard Kraemer

NEW BOOK FROM THE SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE:

A Most Reliable Witness: Essays in Honor of Ross Shepard Kraemer
Susan Ashbrook Harvey (Editor), Nathaniel Desrosiers (Editor), Shira L. Lander (Editor), Jacqueline Pastis (Editor), Daniel Ullucci (Editor)

ISBN 9781930675940
Status Available
Price: $59.95
Binding Hardback
Publication Date October 2015
Pages 324

Celebrate a trailblazer in the areas of women and religion, Jews and Judaism, and earliest Christianity in the ancient Mediterranean

Ross Kraemer is Professor Emerita in the Department of Religious Studies at Brown University. This volume of essays, conceived and produced by students, colleagues, and friends bears witness to the breadth of her own scholarly interests. Contributors include Theodore A. Bergren, Debra Bucher, Lynn Cohick, Mary Rose D’Angelo, Nathaniel P. DesRosiers, Robert Doran, Jennifer Eyl, Paula Fredriksen, John G. Gager, Maxine Grossman, Kim Haines-Eitzen, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Jordan Kraemer, Robert A. Kraft, Shira L. Lander, Amy-Jill Levine, Susan Marks, E. Ann Matter, Renee Levine Melammed, Susan Niditch, Elaine Pagels, Adele Reinhartz, Jordan Rosenblum, Sarah Schwarz, Karen B. Stern, Stanley K. Stowers, Daniel Ullucci, Arthur Urbano, Heidi Wendt, and Benjamin G. Wright.

Features:

• Articles that examine both ancient and modern texts in cross-cultural and trans-historical perspective
  
• Twenty-eight original essays on ancient Judaism, Christianity, and women in the Greco-Roman world

Congratulations to Professor Kraemer on this well-deserved honor.

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A Greek-Aramaic-Middle Persian text from the Cairo Geniza

BIBLIOGRAPHIA IRANICA: Trilingual Greek-Aramaic-Middle Persian Pharmaceutical Lexical List. This is a very early (9th-10th century) text from the Cairo Geniza. It is published in an article by Christa Müller-Kessler in the journal Le Muséon. It looks as though you need a paid subscription to access the whole article. I can't tell for sure, because I have a subscription automatically through the University of St. Andrews.

For many, many past posts on the Cairo Geniza, start here and follow the links.

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Late-antique chicken-shaped relic from the Sea of Galilee

DISCOVERY: Woman Goes Swimming in the Kinneret, Stumbles on Priceless 1,500-Year-Old Relic. The chicken-shaped object was probably used in early Christian funerary rituals (Liel Leibovitz, Tablet Magazine). Click through to the Hebrew article for some better photos of the object.

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Lion helmet from the Battle of the Egadi Islands

PUNIC WATCH: Diving Archaeologists Find Unique Lion Helmet From Punic Wars 2,300 Years Ago. Carthage fought the Roman Navy with ships captured from them in previous battle, but lost anyway, which explains why the Sicilian seafloor is littered with remains of ships built by the side that won (Philippe Bohstrom, Haaretz).

A unique bronze helmet discovered in the deep by marine archaeologists off the Sicilian coast, which they have dated to a sea battle of 241 B.C.E. may have been a precursor of the lion-themed helmets used by Rome's Praetorian Guards, the personal bodyguards of the Roman emperors.

The corps of the Praetorian Guards were established more than two centuries after that battle, by Emperor Augustus. Praetorian helmets also sported a lion-shaped relief, and were sometimes adorned with real lion skin.

The helmet's dating is based, among other things, on pottery jars and other debris discovered on the sea floor at the site.

Recovered from the site of the Battle of the Egadi Islands (Aegadian islands), northwest of Sicily, the helmet is a Montefortino, a Celtic style-helmet that had been worn across Europe, also popularly known as a "Roman helmet". These are easily identified: they look like half a watermelon with a knob on top and cheek flaps down the sides that tie at the chin. But this one had a difference: the lion decoration.

[...]

Cross-file under Marine Archaeology.

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Terahertz imaging

TECHNOLOGY WATCH: Examining Hidden Text in a New Light (Kendra Redmond, Physics Central).

Regular readers will be familiar with the X-ray technology used to read the Ein Gedi Leviticus scroll (on which more here and links). But the new terahertz imaging technology also sounds promising. It was recently used in an experiment to read the text on nine pages of stacked paper.

This technique is still being refined, but the team anticipates that it could be applied to ancient books too fragile to open and other artifacts as well. As technology improves so that we can measure smaller and smaller differences in the arrival time of terahertz pulses, the quality of the images should get better and better. This work was published in September 2016 in the journal Nature Communications.

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Lim (ed.), When Texts Are Canonized

NEW BOOK FROM THE SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE:
When Texts Are Canonized (Timothy H. Lim [Editor]).

ISBN 9781946527004
Status Available
Price: $29.95
Binding Paperback
Publication Date April 2017
Pages 200

How did canonization take place, and what difference does it make?

Essays in this collection probe the canonical process: Why were certain books, but not others, included in the canon? What criteria were used to select the books of the canon? Was canonization a divine fiat or human act? What was the nature of the authority of the laws and narratives of the Torah? How did prophecy come to be included in the canon? Others reflect on the consequences of canonization: What are the effects in elevating certain writings to the status of “Holy Scriptures”? What happens when a text is included in an official list? What theological and hermeneutical questions are at stake in the fact of the canon? Should the canon be unsealed or reopened to include other writings?

Features:

• Essays that contribute to our understanding of the complex processes of canonization
  
• Exploration of early concepts of canonicity
  
• Discussion of reopening the New Testament canon

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Christians in the late-antique Galilee

ARCHAEOLOGY: Pagans in Northern, late-Roman Palestine Embraced Christianity Early, Archaeologists Say. By the fifth century, some Galilean villages had at least one church with elaborate mosaics and a bishop, and at least one had a female donor (Nir Hasson and Ruth Schuster, Haaretz).

Excavations in western Galilee villages dating to about 1,600 years ago show that Christianity won over the pagan locals very fast, and strongly, archaeologists say.

A little more than a century after the Roman Empire converted from paganism to Christianity, each of the villages in the western Galilee explored so far had at least one church and its own bishop, excavator Mordechai Aviam told Haaretz.

Aviam and Jacob Ashkenazi, both of Kinneret College, uncovered a previously unknown church. That and two churches discovered earlier all had elaborate mosaic floors on which the two researchers found seven new inscriptions.

[...]

Many interesting finds.

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Hawass on that "void" in the Great Pyramid

TECHNOLOGY WATCH: Egypt archaeologist criticizes pyramid void ‘discovery.’ Zahi Hawass, who heads the ScanPyramids science committee overseeing the project, says the find is not new (AFP). I noted a possibly related story a couple of years ago here.

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Foreskin as defect?

DR. DAVID BERNAT: Circumcision: Interpreting the Foreskin as a Defect (TheTorah.com).

Genesis 17 states that circumcision will be a sign of the covenant, but is silent about the significance of the act itself. Some Jewish interpreters filled this gap by constructing orlah, possession of a foreskin, as a physical defect or disability, and circumcision as an act of healing or perfection.

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“Kadesh Shalem”

ART EXHIBITION: BETWEEN THE HOLY AND THE MYTHOLOGY. This year’s Bezalel prize winner for photography, Barak Rubin, presents his solo show that explores the creation of myths (SARAH LEVI, Jerusalem Post).

Barak Rubin, a Tel Aviv-based artist and photographer, is the latest recipient of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design’s prize for photography.

The prize is awarded annually and the winner receives a NIS 12,000 grant plus a solo show held in Bezalel’s photography department gallery.

Using the First Temple as his inspiration, Rubin’s show, “Kadesh Shalem,” which opened last week, is a part of an ongoing body of work that explores the creation of myths.

In this work, he delves into his own Jewish history and identity and attempts to take an unconventional and unbiased look at the artifacts of a time and place that no longer exists, and examines the remnants in a historical, archeological and religious framework.

[...]

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