Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
Of the estimated 900 documents that comprise the Dead Sea Scrolls, two remain unpublished—until now. ...Background here.
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Thanks to Lithodomos VR, who have generously provided the museum with a perpetual licence, the Jewish Museum of Australia is the first to display this fascinating content, transporting visitors back through an ancient and holy landscape.Background on the Lithodomos VR app for ancient Jerusalem is here and links.
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Of potentially even more interest than the beautifully formed images is a long inscription in ancient Greek. It was unfortunately damaged by the Byzantine building constructed on top of it, but is being studied now by epigrapher Dr. Leah Di Segni from the Hebrew University’s Institute of Archaeology.Many years ago Carol Newsom suggested (humorously) in an article that there was an angel whose job it was to damage the really interesting readings in the Dead Sea Scrolls. She named the angel Lacunael. It looks like Lacunael has been at work here.
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“Sadly, the inscription is very harmed [by the construction],” said Gendelman. While the team is still awaiting Di Segni’s expertise to decipher the ancient Greek text, he said that there are several visible letters of what appears to be a very long, multiword inscription.
Di Segni told The Times of Israel that she has sent a tentative reading to the excavators, but needs more information before making public any hypothetical reading.
“It is very hard to read the inscription, for lots of letters are missing and many of those that are not, are unclear,” said Di Segni.
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It’s not every day that scholars discover new Bible manuscripts from the ancient world. It’s even rarer to discover ones endowed with luxurious painted images. Yet this is precisely what has happened over the past decade thanks to groundbreaking research into three ancient codices from Ethiopia, the earliest surviving copies of the Gospels in Ethiopic.The book under review is:
The manuscripts, which were produced and are still housed at the Monastery of Abba Garima in Ethiopia’s northern highlands, were not completely unknown to experts before, having been published for the first time in the 1960s. But recent work by Judith McKenzie and Francis Watson—published in a spectacular new book—has led to a radical reassessment of their dates and significance. Through radio-carbon testing and fresh analysis of their iconography and texts, we now know that the three Abba Garima Gospels were copied not in the tenth or eleventh centuries, as once thought, but between the fifth and seventh centuries at the zenith of Ethiopia’s ancient Christian civilization. For anyone interested in the history of the Bible, late antiquity, or Ethiopia itself, this is very big news.
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Judith S. McKenzie and Francis Watson. The Garima Gospels: Early Illuminated Gospel Books from Ethiopia. Oxford: Manar al-Athar, 2016. ISBN: 978-0-9954946-0-2. £49.95For past PaleoJudaica on the Garima Gospels, see here, here, and here. For some past posts on ancient Ethiopic (Ge'ez), see here and links. And for past posts on the ancient Ethiopian Kingdom of Axum (Aksum) see the posts collected here.
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In the museum store, on the way to the exit, a boy about 6 years old sat on the floor and screamed: “I want a Bible! I want a Bible!” His mother mumbled something in an attempt to calm him down but he continued shouting, “I want a Bible! Nowwww!”For other past PaleoJudaica posts on the Museum of the Bible and related matters, including many reviews of the Museum, start here and follow the many links
Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
A rare 1,800-year-old Byzantine-era Roman mosaic from the 2nd-3rd centuries CE bearing an inscription in ancient Greek was recently discovered at Caesarea National Park, on the coast of Central Israel, the Israel Antiquities Authority said Thursday.There's a description of the mosaic, which was under a Byzantine-era building. The article gives no further details about the inscription. The video gives a drone's-eye-view of the excavation.
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Research specialization for this position is open, but candidates should be able to teach at least one course on modern Israel broadly defined. Preference will be given to candidates who can offer engaging undergraduate courses on various topics of Jewish history, religion, and/or foundational texts (Tanakh, Mishnah, and Talmud). The ideal candidate would also be able to teach courses that would be accessible to a broad range of undergraduate students (e.g., courses on modern Middle East, north Africa, greater Mediterranean, and so forth). Candidates must have PhD in hand at the time of appointment in August 2018.This is an open-rank, tenure-track position. The closing date for applications is 1 May 2018. Follow the link for further particulars.
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The professor of Christian origins and Second Temple Judaism and author of ‘What Did Jesus Look Like?’ on puzzles, a chance encounter with ‘Jesus the Jew’ and 1st-century fashionMore on Professor Taylor's new (publication date — today!) book, What Did Jesus Look Like?," is here/
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Christianity emerges in the second century as a family of warring sects comprised almost exclusively of ex-pagan gentiles. As they faced off against each other, each claiming to be the true community of revelation, these gentile sects derided their Christian rivals by accusing them of being “Jews,” of being “like the Jews,” or of being “worse than the Jews.”[i] It was in this period that “thinking with Jews” became hard-wired into Christian theology, thus Christian identity. The intra-Christian exchange of anti-Jewish insults became one of the drive wheels of patristic theology.
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DANIEL BOYARIN
The Talmud – A Personal Take
Selected Essays
Ed. by Tal Hever-Chybowski
[Der Talmud – eine persönliche Interpretation. Ausgewählte Aufsätze.]
2017. X, 499 pages.
Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 170
169,00 €
cloth
ISBN 978-3-16-152819-4
Published in English.
This collection of Daniel Boyarin's previously uncollected essays on the Talmud represents the different methods and lines of inquiry that have animated his work on that text over the last four decades. Ranging and changing from linguistic work to work on sex and gender to the relations between formative Judaism and Christianity to the literary genres of the Talmud in the Hellenistic context, he gives an account of multiple questions and provocations to which that prodigious book gives stimulation, showing how the Talmud can contribute to all of these fields. The book opens up possibilities for study of the Talmud using historical, classical, philological, anthropological, cultural studies, gender, and literary theory and criticism. As a kind of intellectual autobiography, it is a record of the alarums and excursions of a life in the Talmud.
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The Program in Jewish Studies and co-sponsors at CU Boulder welcome award-winning author and journalist Ariel Sabar, who will host a public lecture titled “Paradise Lost and Found,” focusing on his best-selling book My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq.The lecture is tomorrow, 8 February.
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Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
Things were very different in the Talmudic period, in the first centuries CE, when Jews were subject to terrible persecution by the Roman authorities. As Rabbi Chanina ben Teradyon is quoted as saying in Avoda Zara 18a, it was Rome that “destroyed God’s Temple, and burned His sanctuary, and killed His pious ones, and destroyed His best ones.” Yet somehow, “it still exists,” which suggested to Chanina that God must have “given reign” to Rome for inscrutable reasons of his own. This combination of resignation and resistance was dramatized this week in several stories about confrontations between Jewish sages and Roman power.Also, there is a rare reference to Jesus of Nazareth in this week's Talmudic reading.
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What did ancient Jews know? Well, they knew that according to Mishnah Avodah Zarah 2:2 “one may accept their [non-Jewish] healing related to one’s property/money, but not healing related to life/ soul.” In the third installment for PSCO 2017-8, Lennart Lehmhaus (Freie Universität Berlin) explored the category of Talmudic medicine through this passage and through rabbinic commentary on it. In the process, he invited us to take seriously the epistemological implications of discrete bits of data, especially on medicine, midwives, and healing experts, for our understanding of the context of Talmudic discourse.A summary of the lecture follows.
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Israel is developing archaeological and tourism sites to legitimise illegal settlements in Palestinian neighbourhoods of Jerusalem, European Union diplomats in the city have warned.The full text of the report has not bee released.
A leaked report acquired by the Guardian cited projects in parts of East Jerusalem – occupied by Israel since 1967 – that are being used “as a political tool to modify the historical narrative and to support, legitimise and expand settlements”.
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Museo delle Religioni “Raffaele Pettazzoni”Follow the link for further particulars. The deadline for paper proposals is 1 April 2018.
Religions and Medicine
From Antiquity to Contemporary Age
June 5-6-7-8-9, 2018
Velletri (Rome)
Call for Papers
In the contemporary Western world, medicine constitutes a specific branch of
knowledge, with its own characteristics and methods of cure and research, and it’s
tendentially autonomous, not linked with religious or folklore beliefs, even though
there are still some contacts, reciprocal influences and conflicts. In the past, however,
these spheres were more reciprocally interconnected than it appears to us nowadays.
The conference aims to investigate this interconnection in a multi-disciplinary
perspective, as regards both medical procedures and the definition of human body. ...
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Why did many languages only have a single word to designate both ‘green’ and ‘blue’? What does it mean when a language like Akkadian does not have an abstract word for the color ‘blue’? Could Akkadian-speakers nonetheless see and conceptualize ‘blueness’? Equally puzzling was the contrast between the ubiquitous use of colorful substances and objects and the relative dearth of terms or expressions for color. Ethnological data combined with research in cognitive sciences eventually demonstrated that color was a culturally determined and culturally constructed phenomenon. In many societies, words for things like luminosity, transparency, the contrast between wetness/desiccation, patterns and even psycho-emotional values are considered color terms. Different cultures make sense of color differently.PaleoJudaica has noted past articles on this subject here and here. This one gives lots of illustrated examples from the ancient Akkadian language.
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Last week, I posted on a small part of Origen's Hexapla in Job 24:25, and before writing further posts on the matter, readers should be aware of the modern editions of the Hexapla. There is a lot to say about the history of the Hexapla and research into its primary sources, but the greatest benefit to the student of the Bible is access to the modern editions and collections of its fragmentary remains.Immediate background here. Other past PaleoJudaica posts on Origen's Hexapla are here, here, here, and here.
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Traditional commentators endued certain Torah references with midrashic or esoteric purport in an effort to counteract those who mocked them. But in so doing, they were conceding the mockers’ evaluation of these texts as being, prima facie, inconsequential. Fortunately, source criticism helps us accept these texts without discomfort, obviating the compulsion to interpret them away.There is a fascinating history of midrashic discussion of the quotidian details in the Pentateuch.
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Type: Call for Papers
Date: July 30, 2018 to August 3, 2018
Location: Finland
Subject Fields: Cultural History / Studies, Digital Humanities, Jewish History / Studies
Dear Colleagues,
We are excited to present to you a new unit: The Biblical World and Cultural Evolution which is part of the joint conference of the Internations SBL and EABS taking place in Helsinki, Finland from July 30th until August 3rd this year
The definite deadline is Feb. 14th, so don’t hesitate...
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Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
In English, to covet means to desire (someone or something) obsessively, wrongfully, and/or without due regard for the rights/feelings of others. It is a strong emotion, to be avoided. But does “covet” capture the meaning of the Hebrew verb חמד?
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"When the Morning Stars Sang"
Essays in Honor of Choon Leong Seow on the Occasion of his Sixty-Fifth Birthday
Ed. by Jones, Scott C. / Yoder, Christine Roy
Series:Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 500
Aims and Scope
During a moment of exponential growth and change in the fields of biblical and ancient Near Eastern studies, it is an opportune time to take stock of the state wisdom and wisdom literature with twenty-three essays honoring the consummate Weisheitslehrer, Professor Choon Leong Seow, Vanderbilt, Buffington, Cupples Chair in Divinity and Distinguished Professor of Hebrew Bible at Vanderbilt University.
This Festschrift is tightly focused around wisdom themes, and all of the essays are written by senior scholars in the field. They represent not only the great diversity of approaches in the field of wisdom and wisdom literature, but also the remarkable range of interests and methods that have characterized Professor Seow's own work throughout the decades, including the theology of the wisdom literature, the social world of Ecclesiastes, the history of consequences of the book of Job, the poetry of the Psalms, and Northwest Semitic Inscriptions, just to name a few.
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Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
Citrus was first cultivated by humans at least four thousand years ago in Southeast Asia, and all cultivated species derive from a handful of wild ancestors. Several years ago I found the earliest archaeobotanical evidence of citrus within the Mediterranean in a royal Persian garden near Jerusalem dating to the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. In the course of research I traced the spread and diversification of citrus through a variety of historical information, including ancient texts, art, and artifacts such as wall paintings and coins, and by gathering all the available archaeobotanical remains: fossil pollen grains, charcoal, seeds, and other fruit remains.Background here and links.
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