Proud and happy. I was awarded the honor of "Cavaliere dell'Ordine della Stella d'Italia" (Knight of the Order of the Star of Italy) by Italy's President, Sergio Mattarella, for my contribution to the promotion of Italian culture abroad.As he adds:
An important acknowledgment not for me only, but also for the entire work of the Enoch Seminar.Well done, Professor Boccaccini!
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To celebrate the 25th Volume of Dead Sea Discoveries, 25 articles from the past 25 Volumes will be available for free downloading during 2018.Follow the first link above for links to the articles. The list is as follows:
The first 5 articles are now freely accessible until 15 April:
And congratulations to DSD for a quarter century of excellent publications!
- Prayers From Qumran and Their Historical Implications - Esther Glickler Chazon (Volume 1, No. 3)
- Rabbinic Literature as a Source for the History of Jewish Sectarianism in the Second Temple Period - Albert I. Baumgarten (Volume 2, No. 1)
- On the Testimony of Women in 1QSa - Philip R. Davies and Joan E. Taylor (Volume 3, No. 3)
- "The Holy Angels Are in Their Council": the Exclusion of Deformed Persons From Holy Places in Qumranic and Rabbinic Literature - Aharon Shemesh (Volume 4, No. 2)
- Lady Wisdom and Dame Folly At Qumran - Sidnie White Crawford (Volume 5, No. 3)
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On the 8th of March, International Women’s Day, the Centres of Excellence ANEE and CSTT co-organized a Wikipedia edit-a-thon with the theme “Women and the Ancient Near East”. The aim was to improve both the Wikipedia pages on female scholars of the ancient Near East and on women in the ancient sources. The event took place in a casual but inspiring atmosphere, and the Wikimedia volunteers provided some editing training for the ones not so familiar with Wikipedia content creating. The event gathered 15 participants, who created in total 4 new Wikipedia articles, edited 9 existing ones, and added 2540 words to Wikipedia.
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John R. “Jack” Miles, UCI Distinguished Professor emeritus of English and religious studies, has been appointed the 2018-19 Corcoran Visiting Chair in Christian-Jewish Relations at the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College.Congratulations to Professor Miles and to Boston College. I note with particular interest his current project:
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During his tenure as the Corcoran Chair, Miles will complete a book, The Greatest Translation of All Time, about the original translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew and Aramaic into Greek.
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For the sake of their preservation, the first 10 scrolls displayed in Denver will return to Israel after three months and will be replaced by 10 other scrolls, the IAA explains.These are the two scrolls that will go on public display for the first time ever:
Also among the Dead Sea Scrolls on exhibit in Denver in the two rounds are biblical, extra-biblical and sectarian scrolls found in Qumran.
Infectious impurityRead the article for more details about both and about the exhibition in general.
The scroll on rules of ritual purity and impurity, called Tohorot (Purities) A, dates from the late 1st century B.C.E., says the IAA.
Only the ritually purified were allowed to handle sacred matters. Purification included immersion in the ritual bath (mikveh) and in some cases, even isolation, if the spiritual blemish was caused by illness.
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Secret of existence
The other scroll going on display for the first time in Denver is called Musar Le'Mevin – to "he who understands" lectures on morality for learned disciples. It is also known as the Sapiental Work Scroll.
The messages are presented as information coming directly from God, conveyed through sages to their followers. It too dates to the late 1st century B.C.E. and is rather like an apocalyptic book of Proverbs.
The first round of display will feature scrolls that deal with ritual purity and impurity. The second round will feature part of the scroll called Musar lemevin, “Instructions to those who understand,” which contains apocalyptic prophecies.Background on the Denver exhibition is here and links. And there's more on the Dead Sea Scrolls in Denver here.
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A recent announcement by the Library of Congress regarding the purchase of a single Torah scroll sheet dating from approximately 1000 C.E. has generated great interest in the topic of old Torah scrolls. Just what are the world’s oldest Torah scrolls and where does the Library of Congress scroll fit in?This announcement is news to me, but good news.
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“Antiquities” contains two references to Jesus Christ, one in Book XX and one in Book XVIII. The latter is blatantly Christian and is believed by scholars to have been inserted into the work later. The reference in Book XX, however, is believed to have been written by Josephus himself. The mention is short, just one line, but it supports the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth “who was called Christ.”One of the apostles - James, Jesus' brother.
Josephus was not a Christian, yet he wrote about events that were incredibly important to Christians: the life and death of John the Baptist, the existence of Christ, the growth of early Christianity and the fate of some of the apostles. The descriptions of these events as written by an outsider show Christians a new perspective on familiar stories.
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Such scientific and philosophical enterprises were not new or surprising in Hypatia’s Alexandria, which already boasted a 700-year-old, international reputation for sophisticated scholarship. Founded in 331 B.C.E.9 by command of Alexander the Great, the city contained almost from its beginnings an institution that would remain of immense importance to the world for the next 2,300 years. Originally called the Mouseion, or Shrine of the Muses, this research center and library grew into “an institution that may be conceived of as a library in the modern sense—an organization with a staff headed by a librarian that acquires and arranges bibliographic material for the use of qualified readers.”10This long essay is the most fulsome account I have seen, short of a monograph, of the ancient Library of Alexandria and its influence.
Indeed, the Alexandria Library was much more. It “stimulated an intensive editorial program that spawned the development of critical editions, textual exegesis and such basic research tools as dictionaries, concordances and encyclopedias.”11 The library in fact developed into a huge research institution comparable to a modern university—containing a center for the collection of books, a museum for the preservation of scientific artifacts, residences and workrooms for scholars, lecture halls and a refectory. In building this magnificent institution, one modern writer has noted, the Alexandrian scholars “started from scratch”; their gift to civilization is that we never had to start from scratch again.
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Charles M. Stang. Our Divine Double. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Pp. 309. ISBN 9780674287198. $49.95.Excerpt:
Stang’s argument successfully and elegantly traces the motif of the divine double throughout these 2nd and 3rd century texts. He offers mostly close readings of these texts in ways that echo ancient Aristarchean criticism and “New Criticism,” and, as one can see in the introduction and the philosophical conclusion, he sees these texts in light of perennial questions of selfhood (77-78). The book, however, goes well beyond close reading, as Stang takes up numerous historical, cultural, and literary questions along the way, lightly wielding his masterful command of a formidable range of literature from Plato to contemporary continental philosophy.Past PaleoJudaica notices of the book (with some comments of my own on the divine double tradition) are here and here.
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In November last year, the popular press featured news of scholarly doubts about the authenticity of many of the numerous putative scroll fragments from the Dead Sea area that had come on the antiquities market in the last fifteen years or so: e.g., here, and here. Yesterday, I finally got around to perusing the published scholarly studies that generated these news stories. The key publications are two lengthy articles in the journal Dead Sea Discoveries, which I heartily recommend to anyone seriously interested in the topic: ...Background here and follow the links
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There are lost ancient texts hiding before our very eyes. Writers weren't always intending their words for long-term preservation, and the need to reuse precious resources, like animal hide, sometimes meant erasing an old text to make room for the new.The process is explained most clearly in a Live Science article by Rafi Letzter: Blasting This Old Book with X-Rays Could Reveal Greek Physician Galen's Ancient Words.
But modern technology can recover these secret texts, as research taking place this week at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL), an instrument housed at a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory in California, shows. The payoffs are worth it: a team began their analysis on Friday and have already identified a previously unreadable page as part of a preface.
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That's according to a news release emailed to Live Science yesterday (March 12). The earlier, sixth-century ink reacts a bit differently to X-ray light than the later, 11th-century ink. Under the extreme energies of the lab's Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL), those differences are significant enough that, according to the statement, the researchers hope to parse the remnants of the original text despite the scraping, the additional ink and the centuries of age.They are currently working on 26 pages of the manuscript.
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In this post, I give a few examples wherein Theodotion, Aquila, or Symmachus reflect a different vocalization of the consonantal text than what the later Masoretes recorded as the traditional reading. The issue is this: how closely do the Three (1–2 century Jewish revisers of the Greek Jewish Scriptures) mirror the Masoretic Text (9–10 century)?Dr. Meade continues his interesting series on Hexaplaric readings of the Septuagint.
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Project CEO Lea Malul told Walla news the park was envisioned as a Jewish “Magic Kingdom” — a reference to one of the four Disney World parks outside Orlando, Florida.My first thought was to check to see if the date of the article was April 1st. But no, this is a real project - although it doesn't seem to have any actual funding yet.
It is set to include 16 major rides. Plans include a water ride touching on the days of the week (with the Sabbath an island of tranquility in the hectic affair), a Jacob’s Ladder attraction and a roller coaster passing through gigantic tomes — representing Jews as the people of the book.
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A famed archaeologist well-known for discovering the sprawling 9,000-year-old settlement in Turkey called Çatalhöyük seems to have faked several of his ancient findings and may have run a "forger's workshop" of sorts, one researcher says.If all this is true and is verified, it looks as though the field of Luwian studies had a very close call.
James Mellaart, who died in 2012, created some of the "ancient" murals at Çatalhöyük that he supposedly discovered; he also forged documents recording inscriptions that were found at Beyköy, a village in Turkey, said geoarchaeologist Eberhard Zangger, president of the Luwian Studies Foundation. Zangger examined Mellaart's apartment in London between Feb. 24 and 27, finding "prototypes," as Zangger calls them, of murals and inscriptions that Mellaart had claimed were real.
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The 1995 letter to Zangger shows both the depth of Mellaart's historical knowledge and imagination. It provides a detailed description of what the Beyköy texts say, naming numerous ancient places, people and events. Mellaart created an elaborate backstory for the texts, getting around his false claim that he couldn't read Luwian by saying that the texts had been partially deciphered by other researchers who were all dead by 1995. "Fred Woudhuizen and I identified about 260 people and place names. It is much like a Harry Potter kind of world. The names are consistent and apparently make sense. Mellaart was evidently a genius in some ways. But he misused his talents, thereby causing tremendous damage to the field," Zangger said.If I understand the article correctly, some of the iconographic material that Mellaart published over the decades may have been forged too.
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Take statues, which today we tend to think of as merely art objects—the kind of thing you find in the Greek and Roman galleries of a museum. To the rabbis, however, these statues were not meant for aesthetic admiration; they were images of gods like Apollo or Jupiter, and so they were abominations. “All statues are forbidden,” says the Mishna in Avodah Zarah 40b, “because they are worshipped once a year”—presumably on the holy day of the god they represent. Still, the rabbis realized that many statues were meant for ornamental purposes, not religious ones, and so they try to find a rule of thumb to tell these categories apart. The Mishna goes on to say that, in fact, a statue is prohibited only if it “has in its hand a staff, a bird, or an orb.” The Gemara explains that these were typical attributes of gods, meant to express their power: “A bird represents dominion as the idol grasps … the entire world the way one grasps a bird.”Actually, statues are controversial again these days, but for other reasons.
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Published in English.
This volume comprises the conference proceedings of the international and interdisciplinary meeting held in Leipzig from November 9 to 11, 2015. Scholars from different research areas present masks from Egypt, Israel/Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Greece, mainly from the third to the first millennium BCE. The masks are analyzed from archaeological, iconographical, anthropological, philological, and theological perspectives. In many cases, the masks refer to gods, ancestors, spirits, and are used as a means to communicate between human beings and supernatural powers. Masks belong to the human condition and seem to be the international and intercultural answer to one of the most existential questions of human life. In addition, the volume includes an archaeological catalogue of the masks from Israel/Palestine of the Neolithic Age until the Persian Period.
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Schumer, Nathan Still. "The Memory of the Temple in Palestinian Rabbinic Literature." PhD diss., Columbia University, 2017.Excerpt:
The main intervention of my dissertation is to attempt to account for what rabbinic literature gets right about the past. It is just as historiographically significant that the rabbis are right about the Temple some of the time as it is that they are wrong. We need models that are able to account for both aspects of rabbinic literature.
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The political relations between Rome and Judaea are frequently studied, especially the first ties between the Jews and Rome, documented in 1 Macc 8,23-32. Zollschan is the first to write an entire book on the subject (some of her findings were published in earlier articles), and she presents her results in a clear, succinct way, never leaving any doubt about the line of thought she is pursuing.
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The parallels between the Tabernacle and ANE structures such as Rameses II’s military tent shed light on what the meaning and function of this ancient structure might have been.
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Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
NEW YORK – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened an exhibit at the United Nations on Thursday that presents historical evidence of the Jewish people’s presence in Jerusalem centuries before the Christian era.Dead Sea Scrolls too. And also the Tel Dan Stele.
Titled “3,000 Years of History: Jews in Jerusalem,” the exhibit was initiated by Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon and Jerusalem Affairs Minister Ze’ev Elkin.
Among the archeological finds on display at UN headquarters are a 1,700-year-old seal “belonging to the governor of the city” found in the Western Wall Plaza, a seal bearing the name of King Hezekiah from the eighth century BCE, and a seventh century BCE seal with the inscription “the fifth to Netanyahu, his sons and his relatives.”
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More than 5,300 pieces of Dunhuang manuscripts have been "returned" from France in digital form and are available online, according to the National Library of China.This manuscript hoard found near the Gobi Desert seems like an unlikely source for Jewish and Christian manuscripts, but some were found there. I hope some new and interesting things show up in these newly digitized fragments.
These digital resources are provided by France's national library, which holds more than 7,000 original copies of Dunhuang manuscripts.
The Dunhuang manuscripts are documents discovered in the Mogao Grottos in China's Gansu Province in the early 20th century. There are more than 50,000 of them, featuring history, linguistics, art and religious documents.
Dating from the 5th to 11th centuries, the majority are in Chinese, but some are represented in other languages such as Khotanese and Hebrew.
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Speaking to The Verge, professor Shlomo Argamon, a computational linguist at the Illinois Institute of Technology, concluded that “their method… gives them huge latitude in doing this sort of impressionistic interpretation. They take this decoded sentence, squint at it through thick eyeglasses, and say that’s good enough for us.” Nick Pelling, a Voynich expert who’s written several books on the mysterious document goes even further, saying that the paper’s likelihood of being correct is “So close to 0% as makes no practical difference.”Background here and here.
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In honor of the Purim custom of reading the Book of Esther, this episode features an excerpt from Ruth Calderon’s short story “A Bride for One Night”. It is the title story in her collection of Talmudic tales, published in Ilana Kushan’s English translation in 2014. Calderon has a doctorate in Talmud from Hebrew University and was elected to the Israeli Knesset in January 2013. She is founder and former director of Elul Beit Midrash in Jerusalem and founder and chair of Alma: Home for Hebrew Culture in Tel Aviv.More on MK Calderon and her book is here and links. Cross-file under Talmud Watch.
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