BHD on Papyrus Amherst 63

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Israelite Psalms in an Egyptian Papyrus? Papyrus Amherst 63 up close (Karel van der Toorn). As usual, this is a teaser for a BAR article behind the subscription wall: Karel van der Toorn, “Egyptian Papyrus Sheds New Light on Jewish History.” But it does include full translations of the three Israelite psalms.

Professor van der Toorn has recently published an edition of Papyrus Amherst 63.

Past PaleoJudaica posts on this remarkable manuscript, which contains Aramaic documents written in the late-Egyptian Demotic script, are here and links

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Hebron in the Bible and archaeology

PROF. DAVID BEN SHLOMO: The Ancient City of Hebron (TheTorah.com).

Hebron plays a central role in many biblical stories. It was the prominent city in the Judean highlands, with large fortifications in the Early Bronze, Middle Bronze, and Iron Ages. During the Second Temple period, Hebron was occupied by the Idumeans. Recent archaeological excavations have uncovered large mikvaot (ritual baths), indicating that the inhabitants embraced Judaism.

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Taylor Swift meets p-s-e-u-d-e-p-i-g-r-a-p-h-a

I KEEP SAYING YOU GOTTA KNOW THESE THINGS: Spelling Bee's Dr. Bailly quotes Taylor Swift (Nick Schwartz, USA Today).

Scripps National Spelling Bee pronouncer Jacques Bailly surprised 11-year-old Abhijay Kodali with his example sentence for the word pseudepigrapha by launching into Taylor Swift's 'Shake It Off."

"Pseudepigrapha is a plural noun. It means spurious words purporting to originate from biblical characters, as in 'Jasmine realized the speaker was spouting pseudepigrapha as soon as he quoted Moses saying 'Haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate, baby. I'm just gonna shake shake shake shake shake. Shake it off.'"

Abhijay Kodali spelled the word correctly. But another contestant won the competition with the correct spelling of ... wait for it ... "koinonia."

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On Pseudo-Phocylides

READING ACTS: Doing Justice in Pseudo-Phocylides. Another installment in Phil Long's current summer series on the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. Past posts in the series have been noted here and links. The material in his current post is mostly new.

For more on Pseudo-Phocylides, including some of my own thoughts and also mention of another post by Phil, see here.

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More on that C-14 dating recalibration

TECHNOLOGY WATCH: Upstart carbon dating study could force rewrite of Holy Land’s biblical timeline. Cornell University prof shows how archaeologists' data could be skewed by decades -- potentially disproving the narrative of David and Solomon's United Monarchy (Amanda Borschel-Dan, Times of Israel). I noted the Cornell study earlier this week and suggested that the proposed variation would usually not make much of a difference for biblical Israel and the Second-Temple-era, although sometimes it might. This article discusses one of the times it might:

If the paper’s findings are borne out, the historical timeline of the Holy Land would need to be rewritten.

Through a faulty calibration scale, the study argues, organic carbon-14 evidence linking archaeological sites to the Israelite period may have been given false early dates. This new proposed calculations would cause their “biblical” ties to be much less certain.

To be precise, the study’s findings indicate a discrepancy of only a few decades — but that is just dramatic enough to dispel much C-14-based “evidence” of a potential Davidic United Monarchy.

The first author of the paper, Professor Sturt Manning, explains:

“If you only have radiocarbon but have a good set of data and a known archaeological sequence (e.g. stratified layers at an archaeological site) then you can hope to get within a few decades or so – so high-precision dating,” he writes.

And here is the big catch: “If you have nothing but a few radiocarbon dates, then you are more looking at ca. 50-100 years or so precision,” he writes.

During the particularly sensitive early Iron Age in Israel, such a broad 50- to 100-year time frame can mean the difference between one archaeological or biblical era and another.

Do read the whole article. It's early days yet and the results of the study - which are based on analysis of early-modern materials - need to be replicated and extended to earlier periods. But the results may be significant for the chronology of first-Temple Israel and the question of the historicity of the United Monarchy.

Also, note the post on this study by Brent Nongbri at the Variant Readings Blog. He flags another recent study that gave similar results for material from early-modern Egypt.

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Review of Zissos (ed.), A Companion to the Flavian Age of Imperial Rome

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: Andrew Zissos (ed.), A Companion to the Flavian Age of Imperial Rome. Blackwell companions to the ancient world. Chichester; Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2016. Pp. xxi, 602. ISBN 9781444336009. $195.00. Reviewed by Lorenza Bennardo, University of Toronto (lorenza.bennardo@utoronto.ca).

Due to their historical and cultural density, the 27 years between 69 C.E. and Domitian’s assassination (96 C.E.) have claimed increasing scholarly attention in recent decades. However, precisely because the dynasty founded by Vespasian only ruled for a relatively short period, the very concept of a clearly defined (and clearly definable) “Flavian age” can be legitimately questioned. The volume edited by Zissos successfully demonstrates not only that the idea of a “Flavian age” is historically and culturally viable, but also that this age represents a crucial phase in the longer continuum of the early imperial history of Rome. Moreover, while it is true that our knowledge of Flavian Rome mainly derives from contemporary literary sources, this companion has the merit of moving beyond the focus on Flavian literature to “examine the Flavian age in a broader and more inclusive sense” (p. 2). Overall, the volume provides us with the economic, political, religious and cultural coordinates of a complex multicultural world, where the negotiation of racial identities plays an important role and where a new balance in the relationship between center and periphery begins to emerge.

[...]

There is a chapter on Flavian Judea. And Josephus comes up as well.

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Allegorical and magical manna

PROF. JOEL HECKER: Manna and Mystical Eating (TheTorah.com).

Ancient interpreters contemplated the substance of manna, a food that traverses the chasm between divine and mundane realms, falling from heaven to be consumed on earth. In kabbalistic thought, the Zohar presents manna as granting the desert generation an embodied experience of knowledge of God; such an opportunity is available to mystics in everyday eating and through birkat ha-mazon (Grace after Meals).

For some Talmudic exegesis on manna, see here.

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Reading Coptic in London in July

ALIN SUCIU: 5-day Reading Coptic Course in London. The course takes place on 2-6 July. It is on "early texts," including the works of the fourth/fifth-century abbot of the White Monastery, Shenoute, and one of the Nag Hammadi gospels.

Cross file under Coptic Watch.

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School kids excavate Byzantine-era coin at Kilodia

NUMISMATICS: Students on archaeology program unearth a 1,700-year-old coin.

JNS.org – Students from schools in the Lev Hasharon Regional Council helping on an archaeological dig on the Sharon plain have unearthed an ancient coin dating back to the year 300 C.E., among other finds.

[...]

I can find no other information about the coin. From the photo its surface looks almost completely abraded to me. I'm impressed that specialists could identify it.

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Multispectral imaging at Duke

TECHNOLOGY WATCH: Incredible 'Harry Potter' camera can reveal hidden texts on ancient parchment (Mollie Cahillane, Daily Mail).
• An imaging technique at Duke Libraries can make decayed texts visible again
• Multispectral imaging (MSI) captures images under different colors of light
• MSI shows details that are usually invisible to humans or a standard camera
• Particularly useful for historians, archivists, and conservators to fight decay

Examples include recovery of a crest on a manuscript of Pliny's Natural History and the recovery of illegible text on a page of a Hebrew manuscript containing Deuteronomy 4.

Some past PaleoJudaica posts on manuscripts and multispectral imaging are collected here.

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The Egypt Exploration Society on the Oxyrhynchus Mark fragment

LARRY HURTADO: Further Comment on the Mark Fragment and the Rumors. Professor Hurtado links to an updated statement by the Egypt Exploration Society on the no-longer-first-century Mark fragment. It gives some helpful information on the story behind the fragment.

Background here and links.

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4 Maccabees reprised

PHIL LONG'S OLD TESTAMENT PSEUDEPIGRAPHA SERIES continues at his Reading Acts Blog. There are three new posts on 4 Maccabees. These are all reposts from from 2017. Other posts in his current summer OTP series have been noted here and links.

What is Fourth Maccabees?

Fourth Maccabees and a Rational Faith

Fourth Maccabees and the Fourth Philosophy

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Kurshan and Tigay win Jewish literature prize

CONGRATULATIONS TO BOTH: Ilana Kurshan wins $100,000 Jewish Literature Sami Rohr Prize. American immigrant to Israel wins Jewish literature prize for memoir highlighting effect of Talmud study on her life (JTA via Arutz Sheva).

Ilana Kurshan has won the 2018 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for her book “If All the Seas Were Ink: A Memoir.”

Ms. Kurshan won first prize. For more on her book, see here and links. Chanan Tigay was one of three third-place finalists and he won $5,000.

Tigay, whose book “The Lost Book of Moses: The Hunt For The World’s Oldest Bible” is about the mystery surrounding a Dead Sea Scroll, is a former reporter for JTA.

The book is about the Shapira scroll, which is not exactly a Dead Sea Scroll. For more on his book, see here and links.

It's good to see this recognition of these two important books.

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On Philip Davies

THE BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION: Philip Davies (1945-2018).

By Thomas L. Thompson
Professor Emeritus
University of Copenhagen
May 2018

The death of my most dear friend Philip Davies on Friday, May 31, by cancer is a great loss to our entire field. He was not only a scholar of great talent and integrity, who interested himself in all that touched biblical studies. He was also ever a scholar of astonishing originality and discipline, whose impact on the field was immeasurable, not least because of the clarity of his arguments and his ability to focus on the rhetorical center of an issue. Who would have dreamt that such a simple distinction as that between the “biblical Israel”, the “ancient Israel” constructed by historians and the “Israel of the past”, which no longer exists, could have provoked a decade-long debate among biblical scholars, archaeologists, historians and theologians as Philip did in his 1992 essay, In Search of Ancient Israel?

[...]

A personal memoir. The Bible and Interpretation website currently also has a list of the essays they published by Professor Davies. Scroll down to "Remembering Philip Davies 1945-2018."

Background here.

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The Nephilim

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Who Are the Nephilim? The mysterious beings of Genesis 6 (Ellen White). This essay collects the biblical information on the Nephilim and related matters. It does not go into the connections with the Enochic literature.

The Nephilim have appeared fairly often at PaleoJudaica, much of the time in less credible contexts than above. For many past posts see here and links, and here, here, here, here, and here.

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Denver DSS rotation in progress

HAPPENING NOW: ‘Once In A Lifetime’ Display Of Dead Sea Scrolls To Be Replaced Soon (Karen Morfitt).

DENVER (CBS4) – The Denver Museum of Nature and Science is in the middle of replacing 10 Dead Sea Scrolls currently on display with 10 new ones.

[...]

With video. Background on the Denver exhibition is here and links. That link also gives more on Pnina Shor, who is overseeing the rotation.

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Archaeological survey by mole rat?

FAUNAL-ASSISTED ARCHAEOLOGY: Blind, bucktoothed mole-rats just might be archaeologists’ new best friends. Israeli researchers propose a revolutionary new methodology in the field: Analyzing the mounds of dirt created by the mightily ugly, burrowing Nannospalax ehrenbergi (Amanda Borschel-Dan, Times of Israel).

You could call them the ultimate excavators: Bulldozing dirt that’s 10 times their body weight, they can survive underground in thin oxygen, they work for literally peanuts, and, being remarkably resistant to cancer, they don’t even take sick days.

A team of Israeli archaeologists proposes that Middle East blind mole-rats, with their massive numbers and burrowing skills, be systematically harnessed for cheap labor. And in fact, analysis of their molehills just may constitute a revolution in archaeological best practices.

Instead of taking hours — or even days and weeks — to complete complicated and time-consuming surveys in search of hidden ancient sites, the Bar-Ilan University researchers propose systematically studying dirt from molehills, or other rodent dirt piles, to more efficiently and cheaply ascertain loci of human activity from the past.

[...]

This article is a follow-up to an earlier one on the archaeological use of mole-rat mounds at Tel ‘Eton. For more on faunal-assisted archaeology, see the links there.The proposal is to formalize the use of rodent mounds as part of archaeological surveys.

Commendably, the author resisted the temptation to include a joke about making mountains out of molehills.

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On the transmission of Jewish magic books

MAGIC AND MYSTICISM: ‘TOO HOLY TO PRINT’: THE FORBIDDEN BOOKS OF JEWISH MAGIC. Books fraught with danger—curses, secrets, marvelous cures, diviners, demons—caused political intrigue and censorship (J.H. Chajes, Tablet Magazine). This is a really interesting article on the transmission of Jewish magical works and practical Kabbalah from the Middle Ages to the present. It also touches on the hekhalot literate and the pulsa de-nura cursing rite. Although the material covered is medieval and later, some of it has older roots. For example a good part of the medieval magical work Sefer Raziel is based on the Talmudic-era magical tractate Sefer HaRazim. Regular readers will recall that I am currently finishing up a new English translation of the latter work.

The dateline of this article is February 2014. Apparently I didn't see it then. I did note a lecture series by the author a couple of years ago.

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The Talmud on inferential exegesis

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: Myth and Meaning. In this week’s ‘Daf Yomi’ Talmud study, the ancient rabbis take personal ownership of their Torah interpretations, as they map the spaces that separate the holy from the mundane.

In this week’s Daf Yomi reading, in Zevachim 48a, the Gemara introduced a concept that helps to illuminate the worldview of the rabbis. A certain teaching, we read, “is dear to the tanna”: he has a special attachment to a particular point of law. And the reason is that this point is “derived through interpretation”: that is, it is not stated explicitly in the Torah, but has to be worked out by the rabbis themselves. Evidently, the rabbis had a particular fondness for laws that they had to figure out on their own, and liked to teach such laws first, because they were “dear.” I found this a moving idea, since it shows how the rabbis invested their feelings (and their egos) in what might seem like an abstract or technical process of legal reasoning. A tanna who solved a problem must have felt a certain pride of ownership in it, the way a mathematician might feel about an especially difficult proof.

[...]

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

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Is C-14 dating miscalibrated for the southern Levant?

TECHNOLOGY WATCH: New radiocarbon cycle research may alter history (Daniel Aloi, Cornell Chronicle).

Archaeologist Sturt Manning and colleagues have revealed variations in the radiocarbon cycle at certain periods of time, affecting frequently cited standards used in archaeological and historical research relevant to the southern Levant region (Israel, southern Jordan and Egypt). These variations, or offsets, of up to 20 years in the calibration of precise radiocarbon dating could be related to climatic conditions.

For ancient Israel and Second Temple Judaism, twenty years one way or another usually won't make a significant difference for historical purposes. But sometimes it might. And for ancient Egypt, whose chronology is known more precisely, it could make a difference more often.

Another recent story dealing with a different effort to recalibrate radiocarbon dating was noted here. [UPDATE: bad link now corrected. Sorry about that!]

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Maggen on the conservation of the DSS etc.

LECTURE: Dead Sea Scrolls’ Conservation To Be Discussed in Santa Fe (Tom Trowbridge, KSFR FM).

As part of its year-long series, “Celebrating Israel at 70; A cultural perspective” Temple Beth Shalom in Santa Fe is offering a presentation titled, “Survival Against All Odds; The Conservation of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other Artifacts.” It takes place at eight-pm. The presenter is Michael Maggen, who is the head of the Paper and Parchment Conservation Laboratory at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

KSFR’s Tom Trowbridge spoke recently with Maggen.

If you missed the lecture, do listen to the audio interview. Maggen discussed the Dead Sea Scrolls and he gave a preview of the lecture, which involved the Genesis Apocryphon and the Aleppo Codex.

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The Baram Synagogue

ANCIENT ARCHITECTURE: Israeli attractions: Baram Synagogue. Close to the Lebanese border in the upper Galilee lies Baram National Park, home to the Baram synagogue, evidence of the continuous Jewish presence in Israel from ancient times to the present day (Ron Traub, Jewish News Syndicate). Nicely diagrammed.

Past PaleoJudaica posts on the Baram Synagogue are here and here.

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More on 3 Maccabees

PHIL LONG'S OLD TESTAMENT PSEUDEPIGRAPHA SERIES continues apace at his Reading Acts Blog. There are three new posts on 3 Maccabees. I believe these are all reposts from from 2017. Other posts in his current summer OTP series have been noted here and links.

Third Maccabees 2 – Have Mercy on the Downcast

Third Maccabees 3-6 – The Incident with the Elephants

Apostasy in Third Maccabees

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Biblical Studies Carnival 147

5 MINUTE BIBLE: May 2018: Biblical Studies Carnival 147 (Tim Bulkeley). With special attention this month to videos and podcasts.

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The pagan-themed synagogue mosaic at Hammat Tiberias

ATLAS OBSCURA: Zodiac Mosaic of Hammat Tiberias. The mosaic floor of a 4th-century synagogue features a pagan zodiac wheel alongside traditional images of a Torah ark and menorahs (Joel Cusumano).

What turns heads is the rest of the mosaic. In the center panel sits a magnificent zodiac wheel, featuring, among other pagan images, depictions of naked humans—including a conspicuously uncircumcised Libra. The wheel encircles a haloed Helios, the Greek sun god, mounted atop his chariot. Women representing each of the four seasons sit to the corners of the zodiac, with the accompanying Hebrew inscription of the names of the seasons.

A nice photo essay.

I have discussed the cultural background of this synagogue mosaic (and other similar ones) here. More recently, another zodiac mosaic featuring Helios in his chariot was found in the Huqoq Synagogue.

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Paleo-Hebrew DSS

THE AWOL BLOG: Paleo-Hebrew Dead Sea Scrolls. This website looks like a really useful resource for the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls written in the Paleo-Hebrew script.

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On Kuntillet ‘Ajrud and YHWH's Asherah

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Puzzling Finds from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud. A drawing of God labeled “Yahweh and his Asherah” or the Egyptian god Bes? Regular readers will be well familiar with the remarkable finds from this site, but this brief essay gives a convenient summary and it has links to other essays that fill that out.

The final report mentioned in the essay was published in 2012:

Meshel, Ze'ev, Kuntillet Ajrud (Horvat Teman): An Iron Age II Religious Site on the Judah-Sinai Border, ed. Liora Freud (Jerusalem, Israel Exploration Society, 2012).

Past PaleoJudaica posts on Kuntillet ‘Ajrud (Kuntillet Ajrud) and its finds are collected here.

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York NT Apocrypha course

NEW TESTAMENT APOCRYPHA WATCH: Over at his Apocryphicity Blog, Dr. Tony Burke has been posting updates on his 2018 course on the New Testament Apocrypha at York University. The ten weeks of the course are now completed. Due to circumstances he explains there, much of it was taught by video. You can watch the videos if you want to. You can also read the summary posts on each week's lecture. This is the course description from the syllabus:

The New Testament Apocrypha—or better: non-canonical early Christian literature—has had a great impact on western culture despite attempts by mainstream Christianity to suppress it. Stories and ideas from these texts appear in literature, art, church doctrine, and even modern fiction such as Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code. This course is designed to introduce students to a wide range of non-canonical Christian texts—from gospels, to acts of individual apostles, letters, and apocalypses. The goals will be to understand each text’s place in the development of Christian thought and to observe their use in modern scholarship. Particular emphasis will be placed on the work of the so-called “new school” in New Testament Studies that claims some of these texts may predate, and therefore may have influenced, the canonical gospels.

Good stuff.

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