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The narratives of Jesus’ conception and birth as presented in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke echo Jewish history and cite Jewish prophecy. In that sense, the Christmas story can be said to have Jewish origins.
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At the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature conference held in San Diego last month, Dr. Catherine Bonesho, an assistant professor in Early Judaism at UCLA, presented a paper on religious competition in the ancient world. In her research, Bonesho examined ancient traditions about Hanukkah preserved in the writings of rabbinic authors in order to see what ancient Jews thought the holiday was about. Bonesho told The Daily Beast that our traditions about Hanukkah started much later than most people know. After Josephus, “the ritual of lighting lamps does not appear in textual form until the Mishnah (200 CE), nor does the tradition of the miracle of oil appear until the Babylonian Talmud (edited between 5th-7th centuries CE),” Bonesho said.For more Hanukkah-related legends, see the immediately preceding post here.
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1 Maccabees recounts how Mattathias instigated a rebellion against the Greeks out of zealotry against Jewish idolatry. Later midrashim tell how Mattathias’ daughter Channah goaded her father and brothers into fighting the Greeks to protect her from being raped by the local governor.Mariamme, the Last Hasmonean Princess (Dr.Malka Zeiger Simkovich, TheTorah.com).
The Hasmonean princess Mariamme is best known today for her tempestuous and doomed marriage to Herod the Great. During her lifetime, however, Mariamme was a Jewish celebrity in her own right. As a descendant of the Hasmonean family on both her maternal and paternal sides, Mariamme was the closest thing that Jews had to royalty.For more on that disturbing legend involving Herod, his Hasmonean wife, and honey, see here, here, and here. And a couple of other posts involving the historical Mariamme (Mariamne, Marianne) are here and here.
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Vision, Narrative, and Wisdom in the Aramaic Texts from QumranI noted the CFP for the Copenhagen Symposium here. Cross-file under Aramaic Watch.
Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium, 14-15 August, 2017
Series:
Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah, Volume: 131
Editors: Mette Bundvad and Kasper Siegismund
The Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran have attracted increasing interest in recent years. These texts predate the “sectarian” Dead Sea scrolls, and they are contemporary with the youngest parts of the Hebrew Bible. They offer a unique glimpse into the situation before the biblical canons were closed. Their highly creative Jewish authors reshaped and rewrote biblical traditions to cope with the concerns of their own time. The essays in this volume examine this fascinating ancient literature from a variety of different perspectives. The book grew out of an international symposium held at the University of Copenhagen in August 2017.
Hardback: €99.00/$119.00
E-Book: Open Access
E-Book
Status: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-41373-3
Publication Date: 24 Sep 2019
Hardback
Status: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-41370-2
Publication Date: 26 Nov 2019
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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.
The Protevangelium of JamesCross-file under New Testament Apocrypha Watch.
BY Lily C. Vuong
About
The Protevangelium of James tells stories about the life of the Virgin Mary that are absent from the New Testament Gospels: her miraculous birth to Anna and Joachim, her upbringing in the temple, and her marriage at the age of twelve to the aged widower Joseph. The text also adds significant details to the well-known stories of Jesus’ conception, birth, and escape from the slaughter of innocents perpetrated by Herod the Great. Despite its noncanonical status, the Protevangelium of James was extremely influential in churches of the East, and since its publication in the West in the sixteenth-century has captured the imagination of readers all over the world. This study edition presents a fresh, new translation of the text with cross-references, notes, and commentary. The extensive introduction makes accessible the most recent scholarship in studies on Mary in Christian apocrypha, offers new insights into the text’s provenance and relationship to Judaism, and discusses the text’s contributions to art and literature.
The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and the Nativity of Mary
BY Brandon W. Hawk
About
The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew is one of the most important witnesses in Western Europe to apocryphal stories about the lives of Mary, Joseph, Jesus, and Mary’s parents, Anna and Joachim. This apocryphon was also used as the basis for another, the Nativity of Mary, which gained equal popularity. As bestsellers of medieval Christianity, these Latin apocrypha are major witnesses to the explosion of extra-biblical literature in the Western Middle Ages. Despite their apocryphal status, the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and the Nativity of Mary proved influential throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, as their popularity and influences may be traced in Christian literature, visual arts, liturgy, and theological perspectives still revered by Roman Catholic theologians. These apocrypha also remain significant works for considering the history of monasticism and the cult of the Virgin Mary. This book draws upon a range of manuscript sources to present comprehensive English translations of the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and the Nativity of Mary with full introductions and commentaries, as well as translations of related works with accompanying commentaries.
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It will not be necessary to once again sing the praise of the CIIP project as a whole; suffice it to point to the reviews of Volume I, II and III on this platform.1 However, Volume IV, covering Judea proper and Idumea, is exceptional even by CIIP standards: its 1580 pages require two separate books, and add more than 1300 items from 172 locations to the Corpus.For more on the Corpus inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae (CIIP), including reviews of earlier volumes, see here and follow the links
[...]
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Gershom ScholemFor other recent books and posts on Scholem, the renowned twentieth-century scholar of Kabbalah, see here (cf. here) and links.
Master of the Kabbalah
By: David Biale
Translation: Amotz Giladi
Synopsis
David Biale’s Gershom Scholem traces Scholem’s tumultumous life, tying together his scholarly studies with his political activism and cultural criticism. By mining a rich trove of diaries, letters and other writings, Biale shows how Scholem’s inner life must be understood as the necessary background to understanding his most important writings. Far from a dry, ivory-tower scholar, Scholem emerges as a passionately engaged man of his times, whose life encompassed the most significant events of the Jewish twentieth-century: World War I, the rise of Nazism, World War II and the Holocaust, and the creation of the state of Israel.
More details
Publisher: Magnes Press
Year: 2019
Catalog number: 45-531013
ISBN: 978-965-7008-31-7
Pages: 214
Language: Hebrew
Weight: 400 gr.
Cover: Paperback
Series: Bridges
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... Paul speaks of a glorified resurrected body, she succinctly summarizes, not a glorious one. Following Troels Engberg-Pedersen’s analysis of Stoic influences on Paul’s ideas, Moss agrees that Paul is talking of the (transformed) stuff of what resurrected bodies are made, not their qualities (p. 13). The script risks taking leave of the teachings of the apostle upon which it purports to rest: “Onto Paul’s assertion that the resurrected body will be heavenly, two thousand years of interpreters have mapped their own culturally informed values about bodily perfection” (p. 14). They have largely ignored what the New Testament sometimes does say about Jesus’ resurrected body as touchable, scarred, and perhaps hungry and thirsty. Moss seeks a complicated and non-systematic early Christian view of the resurrected body that attends to the hypothetical nature of early Christian speculation on the topic and its debt to larger currents of its cultural world.I noted another review of the book here.
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Candida R. Moss. Divine Bodies: Resurrecting Perfection in the New Testament and Early Christianity. Yale University Press, 2019.The conclusion:
This book raises an important question. If, according to Paul, resurrection involves transformation, and that transformation is for the better (at least for Christians), then by what standard—or, better, whose standard—is “better” defined? Moss does not argue that there can be no such standard beyond each individual’s own desires. Rather, she shows that, in the absence of a clear standard, the temptation to substitute culturally-conditioned standards that favor those high on cultural hierarchies, such as the wealthy and the able, is extremely powerful. This is an important caution.
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Published in German.
The motif of liturgical communion with angels appears in early Jewish and New Testament texts. Michael R. Jost offers the first exegetical analysis of all relevant passages from the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament and places them within traditio-historical developments from the Hebrew Bible to rabbinical and patristic texts. By giving special consideration to the respective performances of liturgical texts, the author reconstructs each groups' experience of angelic communion. In his analysis of the liturgical communion of the yaḥad, Jost presents new insights not only for Qumran researchbut also for New Testament scholarship and the understanding of the early Christian communities and communal liturgies.
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Archaeological excavations conducted by the IAA near Ashkelon uncovered an ancient industrial area with winepresses and rarely discovered installations for producing a popular fish sauce, the preparation of which involved strong odors.
(Communicated by the IAA Spokesperson)
Vats used to produce fish sauce (garum) that are among the few known in the Eastern Mediterranean, were recently uncovered by the Israel AntiquitiesAuthority in Ashkelon. The excavation, underwritten by the Municipality of Ashkelon and the Ashkelon Economic Co. in preparation for the establishment of the Eco-Sport Park, has revealed evidence of 2000-year old Roman and Byzantine culinary preferences. Youths of the Kibbutz Movement from Kibbutz Yad Mordecai and pupils from the Makif Vav middle school located next to the project participated in the excavation.
[...]
The Roman site was eventually abandoned but the conditions that favored viticulture remained and in the Byzantine period in the 5th c. CE a monastic community began to thrive there, making a living from wine production: three winepresses were built next to an elaborately decorated church. Little of the church has survived but architectural fragments found at the site show that it was decorated with impressive marble and mosaics. A large kiln complex was located nearby that produced wine jars. These appear to have been used for exporting wine, which was the primary income for the monastery.
[...]
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However, the future is not always certain, says [Professor of Assyriology Caroline] Waerzeggers when we are back in her office. "A discussion is raging about whether Dutch universities offer too many small degree programs. And Assyriology of all programs is often used as the proverbial example of this. It sometimes seems as though people think we're odd bods or übernerds with no relevance to society. But cuneiform isn't a curio. It was used for longer than the current era."A nice capsule history of Assyriology at Leiden University.
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M Adryael Tong. “Given as a Sign”: Circumcision and Bodily Discourse in Late Antique Judaism and Christianity. Ph.D. Dissertation, Fordham University, 2019The essay opens:
My dissertation argues that understanding circumcision as a bodily discourse, rather than exclusively as a bodily practice, illuminates a surprising number of similarities in early Christian and rabbinic Jewish texts, in addition to their often more obvious differences. Following an examination of circumcision discourse in Hebrew biblical and pre-rabbinic Jewish sources, I focus on three topics—genealogy, gender, and the composition of the body—wherein rabbinic and patristic authors discuss circumcision as a means to explore theological anthropology.
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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.
The contrast between Classical and Late Biblical Hebrew is best illustrated by juxtaposing two extracts of biblical prose narrative, one from each corpus.It is a challenge to make this case in a popular essay using very little Hebrew. But I think Hendel and Joosten do a pretty good job.
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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.
Paula Fredriksen. Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017I noted an earlier review of the book here.
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"The basilica that we have found is quite important," Harrower said. "There have been other fourth-century basilicas that are known, but most of them were discovered a long time ago and some of them just without a lot of artifacts or information to be had."Aksum (Axum) has a number of legendary and historical connections with ancient Judaism and early Christianity. I have summarized them here with links. More recent posts on Aksum are here and links.
In contrast, the early church at Beta Samati holds a trove of ancient artifacts, including early Christian religious artifacts, bronze coins, clay figurines and large pottery amphoras that were used to store either imported wine or olive oil.
"This is telling you that whoever is using this basilica has access to imported luxury trade goods and is quite interconnected into the ancient world and the trade networks," he said.
Some of the ancient bronze coins from the basilica confirmed its age: A coin from the early reign of Aksum's fourth-century King Ezana is decorated with a crescent moon symbolic of the southern Arabian god Almaqah, Harrower said.
One of the most striking finds is a black stone pendant, decorated with a Christian cross and the motto "venerable" in Ethiopia's ancient Ge'ez script. "This is about the size that you could hang around your neck," he said, "so maybe a priest would have worn this."The ancient Jewish books of 1 Enoch and Jubilees survive complete only in translations in the ancient Ethiopic language Ge'ez. I do not know Ge'ez, so I can't comment authoritatively. But I do know that a fourth-century inscription in Ge'ez is quite early. The earliest manuscripts in Ge'ez, the Garima Gospels, date from the fourth to seventh centuries. All other manuscripts in Ge'ez come from many centuries later.
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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.
Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife Hardcover – August 11, 2020Available for pre-order.
by Ariel Sabar (Author)
Kindle
$15.50
Hardcover
$29.95
From National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Ariel Sabar, the gripping true story of a sensational religious forgery and the scandal that engulfed Harvard.
In 2012, Dr. Karen King, a star professor at Harvard Divinity School, announced a blockbuster discovery at a scholarly conference just steps from the Vatican: She had found an ancient fragment of papyrus in which Jesus calls Mary Magdalene "my wife." The tattered manuscript made international headlines. If early Christians believed Jesus was married, it would upend the 2,000-year history of the world's predominant faith, threatening not just the celibate, all-male priesthood but sacred teachings on marriage, sex and women's leadership. Biblical scholars were in an uproar, but King had impeccable credentials as a world-renowned authority on female figures in the lost Christian texts from Egypt known as the Gnostic gospels. "The Gospel of Jesus's Wife"--as she provocatively titled her discovery--was both a crowning career achievement and powerful proof for her arguments that Christianity from its start embraced alternative, and far more inclusive, voices.
As debates over the manuscript's authenticity raged, award-winning journalist Ariel Sabar set out to investigate a baffling mystery: where did this tiny scrap of papyrus come from? His search for answers is an international detective story--leading from the factory districts of Berlin to the former headquarters of the East German Stasi before winding up in rural Florida, where he discovered an internet pornographer with a prophetess wife, a fascination with the Pharaohs and a tortured relationship with the Catholic Church.
VERITAS is a tale of fierce intellectual rivalries at the highest levels of academia, a piercing psychological portrait of a disillusioned college dropout whose life had reached a breaking point, and a tragedy about a brilliant scholar handed an ancient papyrus that appealed to her greatest hopes for Christianity--but forced a reckoning with fundamental questions about the nature of truth and the line between faith and reason.
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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.
Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
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Catherine Bonesho, “Foreign Holidays and Festivals as Representative of Identity in Rabbinic Literature” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 2018).Excerpt:
... I argue that rabbinic discussions of foreign holidays show three primary interests. First, interactions with non-Jews on foreign holidays were prohibited because of the prohibition against idolatry. Second, the rabbis allowed for some interactions with non-Jews in order to benefit from involvement in the imperial economy. Thirdly, and most prominently, through tales about the various origins of Roman holidays, the rabbis used holidays to simultaneously index the identities of Self and Other.
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The carvings of Wadi Rum are as diverse as the history of these rugged sandy crossroads between Arabia, the Mediterranean, and North Africa.For more on the ancient North Arabian dialects as well as on the Nabatean language, see here (cf. here) and follow the links.
Much of the art and inscriptions are in Thamudic, or Safaitic; the script, of Bedouin tribes who lived in northern Arabia over 3,000 years ago, a presumed precursor to Arabic and Aramaic.
Then came the Nabataeans, who built an empire from their third-century B.C. capital of Petra, and carved pictures and script in their own language that derived from Thamudic.
Cliff walls here also include messages and Koranic verses in Kufic – an early Arabic script. Then there are the primitive petroglyphs, stick men, women, animals and undecipherable symbols that predate all those civilizations by thousands of years.
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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.
When is a fetus not a fetus? That is the question the rabbis pursue, in graphic detail, in Chapter 3 of Tractate Nidda. As we have seen, a woman who has “an issue of her flesh in blood”—that is, a menstrual period—becomes ritually impure for seven days, during which time she can’t have sex with her husband. A woman also becomes ritually impure when she gives birth, for seven days if the child is a boy and 14 days if it’s a girl.For more on the tumtum, the person with ambiguous physical gender characteristics, see here and here. Transgender issues are not just a modern concern.
[...]
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The archaeological remains were found late last month in the village of Samahij, on the northern coast of Muharraq island. Samahij was probably the location of the episcopal seat of Meshmahig mentioned variously in historical sources between 410 and 647, and one of the centres of the country’s pearl trade.My emphasis. I am confused by this report. Pahlavi is Middle Persian (an Indo-European language), not Aramaic (a Semitic language). Psalter Pahlavi is a Pahlavi script named after the script in the Pahlavi Psalter. It is connected with the Nestorians, but it is not itself Aramaic or Syriac. If anyone knows more about this jar inscription from Samahij, please drop me a note.
Also found at the site were the remains of wine jars, glass goblets and pottery, which dates from the 7th century. One of the wine jars is inscribed in what is thought to be an Aramaic language called Psalter Pahlavi.
The work was led by Professor Insoll and Dr Rachel MacLean of the University of Exeter and Dr Salman Almahari of the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities, with additional input from Professor Robert Carter who studied the ceramics found.
The substantial building, measuring 17m x 10m, was probably part of a monastery or large house. The building was likely occupied in the 7th century just before the people converted to Islam. The building has several rooms and was decorated with carved plaster. A cross has been found carved onto a piece of stone and another cross was found painted on a pot sherd.
It is likely that the Christians who used the building were part of the Nestorian Church which flourished in the Gulf between the 4th/5th and 7th centuries.
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The Subversive Chronicler
Narrative Film Theory and Canon Criticism Refocus his Intention
Buyoung Son
In 1 and 2 Chronicles, commentators have long noted a pattern of retributive justice whereby kings who comply with Yahweh’s will are rewarded with long life and honourable burial, whereas those who do not are disgraced. However, another pattern significantly emerges from a group of kings whose careers display an unexpected reversal. No convincing consensus has yet emerged to explain this reversal pattern.
By exploring and adopting the insights of narrative film theory, particularly of cognitive film semiotics, into the effects of macro-repetition, Son uncovers the implications of these unexpected reversals. As the reversal pattern is interwoven with the retributive pattern, the narrative emerges as a falsifying narration, provoking a deep scepticism about the conventional view of retribution theology.
Deleuzian film theory offers a crucial insight into how this falsifying narration works. The reversal pattern has a destabilizing effect, which suggests that the Chronicler’s theological outlook is more nuanced than that of Samuel–Kings, or perhaps even frankly subversive of it. From a canonical perspective, furthermore, the presence of the Chronicler’s work in the Ketuvim points to its potential function as a subtle theological readjustment in the postexilic Jewish community.
The Subversive Chronicler is then a challenge to the Chronicler’s theology as it is commonly understood and also as a refocusing of its difference from the historiography of Samuel–Kings.
Buyoung Son is Senior Pastor at Chowol Sungshin Church and Instructor of Bible News Institute, South Korea.
Series: Hebrew Bible Monographs, 83
978-1-910928-59-2 hardback
Publication November 2019
viii + 248 pp.
£27.50 / $37.50 / €32.50
Scholar's Price
£55 / $75 / €65
List Price
Hardback
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Colorful remains of mosaics from a 3rd century synagogue in the ancient town of Majdulia are the earliest evidence of synagogue decoration in the Golan, according to a University of Haifa press release on Monday.The mosaics are very fragmentary, but important.
[...]
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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.
John Barton, Ethics in Ancient Israel. New York: Oxford, 2014. pp. xii + 317. ISBN 978-0-19-878517-0.Excerpt:
Barton’s work is thus meant not at offering clarity for believers as they try to live more “biblically,” but rather to argue that ancient Israelite thinkers deserve a seat at the table among other ethical thinkers throughout history.
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On a cold November night, dozens of visitors slowly file into an opening in the ancient stone walls of Jerusalem’s Old City.Sounds like a fun party. For past posts on Zedekiah's Cave and the cycle of legends around it, see here and links.
Walking down candlelit steps with wine glasses in their hands, they make their way through a large cavern as performance artists dance nearby and light projections illuminate the walls. Yet there are no magic lamps or genies inside this legendary space known as Zedekiah’s Cave; rather, the treasure these visitors seek is of the gastronomic variety.
[...]
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Matthew Chalmers, Representations of Samaritans in Late Antique Jewish and Christian Texts (University of Pennsylvania PhD Dissertation, 2019)
... My dissertation asked how representation of Samaritans in late antique Jewish and Christian texts can restructure the ways we approach religious identity and difference. ...
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Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
R. Rodríguez Reviews Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature (M. Warren)Excerpt:
Reviews of the Enoch Seminar 2019.11.10
Meredith J. C. Warren, Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature. Writings from the Greco-Roman World Supplement Series 14. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2019. ISBN: 9781628372380. Pp. xv + 189. $29.95. Paperback.
Rafael Rodríguez
Johnson University
Warren’s discussion of the half-dozen examples of hierophagy (as well as references to additional potential instances or relevant comparanda) is fascinating, well-written, and engaging. She intentionally brings together literary phenomena that transcend ideological/religious boundaries (Jew, Christian, Graeco-Roman) in order to situate her proposal within a broader ancient Mediterranean worldview. With references to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the Wachowski Brothers’s The Matrix, among others, she also proposes hierophagy as a significant research agenda across time as well as space. In every instance, her analyses are stimulating and suggestive for other narrative and textual moments.But the reviewer is skeptical that she has demonstrated the existence of an ancient genre of hierophagy.
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Justice for the Poor: The Principles of Welfare Regulations from Biblical Law to Rabbinic LiteratureExcerpt:
צדק דלים: עקרונות דיני הרווחה מן התורה לספרות חז״ל
Nevo Publishing; Sacher Institute; Israeli Democracy Institute, 2019. [hebrew]
This book is devoted to an examination of the theoretical conceptions that emerge from the welfare laws in the Bible and from the laws of charity that developed later in the rabbinic literature, i.e., by the mishnaic and talmudic Sages. The book reveals the underlying theoretical currents giving rise to these conceptions and those that arose in their wake.Cross-file under New Book.
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Separating Abram and Lot
The Narrative Role and Early Reception of Genesis 13
Series: Themes in Biblical Narrative, Volume: 26
€149.00/
$179.00
Author: Dan Rickett
In Separating Abram and Lot: The Narrative Role and Early Reception of Genesis 13, Dan Rickett presents a fresh analysis of two of Genesis’ most important characters. Many have understood Lot as Abram’s potential heir and as an ethical contrast to him. Here, Rickett explores whether these readings best reflect the focus of the story. In particular, he considers the origin of these readings and how a study of the early Jewish and Christian reception of Genesis 13 might help identify that origin. In turn, due attention is given to the overall purpose of Genesis 13, as well as how Lot and his function in the text should be understood.
E-Book
Status: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-41388-7
Publication Date: 01 Oct 2019
Hardback
Status: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-39989-1
Publication Date: 10 Oct 2019
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Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
Sources of the Sacred Song
Crossroads in Jewish Liturgical Poetry
By: Joseph Yahalom
Publisher: Magnes Press
Year: 2019
Catalog number: 45-541011
ISBN: 978-965-7008-41-6
Pages: 300
Language: Hebrew
Weight: 600 gr.
Cover: Paperback
Print $30
eBook for Magnes App $21
Synopsis
The book is concerned with the main trends in Jewish Liturgy during Late Antiquity and its connections and inter relations with Aramaic Targum, Midrash, mysticism, popular beliefs, structure and rhyme patterns as performed amid Late Antique Synagogues in Palestine, as well as the later spread of these fertile products to Southern Italy and then to the rest of Europe. The book discusses the different layers of poets and performers as presented in ancient manuscripts which were preserved in the Cairo Geniza collections and later in European Mahzorim, and the fascinating struggle of survival of the different liturgical cycles.
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Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
Ames on Ben-Eliyahu, 'Identity and Territory: Jewish Perceptions of Space in Antiquity'The review mentions that this book includes material from an earlier book by Ben-Eliyahu: Between Borders: The Boundaries of the Land of Israel in the Consciousness of the People of the Second Temple and the Roman-Byzantine Periods. For a review of it, see here.
Author: Eyal Ben-Eliyahu
Reviewer: Tracy Ames
Eyal Ben-Eliyahu. Identity and Territory: Jewish Perceptions of Space in Antiquity. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. 216 pp. $95.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-29360-1.
This volume examines changing ideas related to perceived territorial boundaries and ethno-national identity as reflected in Jewish literature from the Second Temple period to the Roman Byzantine period. Through close readings of biblical, Second Temple, and rabbinic literature, the book focuses on the reciprocal relationship between fluctuating notions of geographic borders and differing views of identity in postbiblical Jewish society. Eyal Ben-Eliyahu presents a pioneering approach to the literary sources he investigates with the application of the spatial theory of history, widely employed in the humanities and social sciences. The central arguments of the book are that identity influences territorial perceptions and that territory, itself, is one of the factors involved in shaping identity. In addition, the treatment of ancient sources related to deliberations about perceptions of status, scope, and the nature of territory among different groups demonstrates that these issues continue to be part of internal and external dialogue about the status of the territory of Israel.
[...]
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Vered Noam, Shifting Images of the Hasmoneans: Second Temple Legends and Their Reception in Josephus and Rabbinic Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Parallels between rabbinic literature and the writings of Josephus are a problem: how would the rabbis have known Josephus? On the one hand, we can assume that the rabbis knew Josephus in some form. Either they knew Greek and/or there was an Aramaic Josephus (a claim Josephus himself makes in Jewish War I, 3). Our other possibility is that the shared traditions come from a common storehouse, or “repository” of stories, traditions, and narratives: in its suggestion of an unknown source, this option bears a close resemblance to the famous “Q” document of New Testament criticism.[1] Where it differs is in the lack of an actual reconstruction of this putative text.
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Leviticus
A Commentary on Leueitikon in Codex Vaticanus
Series: Septuagint Commentary Series
€154.00/
$185.00
Author: Mark Awabdy
In Leviticus Awabdy offers the first commentary on the Greek version of Leviticus according to Codex Vaticanus (4th century CE), which binds the Old and New Testaments into a single volume as Christian scripture. Distinct from other LXX Leviticus commentaries that employ a critical edition and focus on translation technique, Greco-Roman context and reception, this study interprets a single Greek manuscript on its own terms in solidarity with its early Byzantine users unversed in Hebrew. With a formal-equivalence English translation of a new, uncorrected edition, Awabdy illuminates Leueitikon in B as an aesthetic composition that not only exhibits inherited Hebraic syntax and Koine lexical forms, but its own structure and theology, paragraph (outdented) divisions, syntax and pragmatics, intertextuality, solecisms and textual variants.
E-Book
Status: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-40983-5
Publication Date: 01 Oct 2019
Hardback
Status: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-40552-3
Publication Date: 10 Oct 2019
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Mysticism, Esotericism, and Gnosticism in AntiquityIn the event, neither Professor Stone nor I are able to make it to San Diego this year. Our contributions have been read in absentia. The session has just ended. As promised, I am now happy to share my review with you, my readers. Past PaleoJudaica posts on the book are here and links.
11/25/2019
9:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Room: Sapphire 400B (Fourth Level) - Hilton Bayfront
Theme: Esoteric Religious Groups in Antiquity
Joint session with the AAR Traditions of Eastern Late Antiquity.
April DeConick, Rice University, Presiding
Book Review: Michael Stone, Secret Groups in Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)
Kelley Coblentz Bautch, St. Edward's University, Panelist (10 min)
James Davila, University of St. Andrews, Panelist (10 min)
Written Reflections from Michael Stone
Discussion (15 min)
Michael Stone’s book, Secret Groups in Ancient Judaism (OUP, 2018), takes the study of religious groups in Judaism of the Second Temple era in a new and fruitful direction. Based on the anthropological study of secret societies, the book develops the insight that the foundational concept in such groups is that there is knowledge that must be kept hidden. This leads them to create organizations with a pyramidal hierarchy, each level of which controls a larger group of followers. With this understanding in mind, Stone finds that secret groups leave a social-structural “footprint” that points to their existence. This book sets out to follow the trail left by secret societies in the ancient Jewish world. Time constraints preclude a full survey of the book’s arguments and conclusions. I will limit myself to noting some points of special interest and some directions for further research.
The showpiece for an ancient Jewish secret society is the Qumran covenanters, who Stone, following the scholarly consensus, identifies more or less with the Essenes. The Therapeutae are another likely example. These are the two decisively identified such societies, but there are many other possible cases. Notably, there are hints at secret knowledge and the existence of secret organizations in the ancient Jewish apocalypses, which Stone regards as themselves probably exoteric literature.
Stone notes that the theological terminology found in the Qumran sectarian texts does not appear in antiquity or later (with the possible exception of Karaite literature) in other Jewish texts. The implication is that the Qumran covenanters were a secret group. They kept their secrets and we only have them now due to an extraordinary chance discovery. The use of cryptic scripts in some Qumran sectarian texts likewise implies that the sectarians reserved some knowledge to be revealed in graded stages. One of these texts is an address by the Maskil, the “Sage” — the apparent leader of the group, to some of his followers.
Stone tentatively reconstructs at least three or four graded ranks in the hierarchy of the Qumran community. The fundamental division was between the community and the rest of Israel. Within that community were gradations, notably between those who had full access to the pure food of the group and those who were transitioning toward such access. Above such gradations there may have been a leadership group, the council of the community, which consisted of three priests and twelve laymen. And over them all was the Maskil.
Alas, no ancient literature of the Therapeutae has come down to us! We have only the brief account of them by Philo of Alexandria. They are similar in many ways to the Essenes, but they included women in the group. They had secret books that used allegorical exegesis. They had dream revelations. And the group had a hierarchy that ranked a member according to his or her admission seniority to the group. In Stone’s judgment, both the Qumran covenanters/Essenes and the Therapeutae were secret societies.
The ancient Jewish apocalypses may also provide us with information about ancient Jewish secret societies. But Stone takes the evidence in them to be of an indirect nature. The apocalypses do claim to reveal esoteric knowledge. It is possibly that the original authors intended them as esoteric works, but they seem to have circulated fairly widely. Stone argues that they are "pseudo-esoteric" literature and that their explicit teachings were never intended to be secret.
Nevertheless, some of the revelations mentioned in the apocalypses are not part of their content. These may well be references to actual secret teachings that were found in esoteric documents (or perhaps oral traditions) which no longer survive. A prominent example is the lists of revealed things in the apocalypses, which notably refer to cosmological and cosmic secrets that contained temporal and eschatological elements. It is unclear whether or not some of these were also of a salvific nature. Another intriguing example is the reference in 4 Ezra 14 to the seventy esoteric books to which only the wise should have access. And then the story of the watchers involves angels instructing humans and their own giant offspring in culture-hero teachings and unspecified divinatory and magical techniques.
There is evidence in the apocalypses for groups with the tripartite social structure that is typical of secret societies. At the top is a single seer (Ezra in 4 Ezra, Baruch in 2 Baruch, Isaiah in the Ascension of Isaiah). Below the seer is an inner circle: the wise who receive the esoteric books from Ezra; Baruch’s core group of five followers whom he teaches in private; and Isaiah’s inner circle who witness his visionary trance. Below the inner circle are the people, followers who do not have access to the secret teachings. They receive only the exoteric books from Ezra; Baruch addresses them only in public; and they are sent away from Isaiah’s visionary séance. This hierarchical structure is also reminiscent of the structure of the Qumran community.
Stone argues that these apocalypses also function as “authentication machinery.” They give us indirect evidence of actual practices and such in Jewish secret societies. Notable is the reference in the Testament of Moses to the hiding of the teachings of Moses in a scroll jar, an obvious parallel to the scroll jars found at Qumran. And the Similitudes of Enoch, the Book of the Luminaries, and the Book of Daniel present their pseudo-esoteric teachings as sealed away and only to be unsealed to future generations.
I have learned a lot from this book. It has helped me to look at the ancient evidence in new ways. The analysis of the texts in terms of the structure and worldview of secret societies provides a valuable new filter for understanding aspects of ancient Judaism.
The book is also agenda setting. In addition to the points of special interest that I have noted above, Stone has assembled a great many leads in the ancient texts that may produce additional information on secret societies in ancient Judaism and later. He has also flagged a vast amount of both primary and secondary literature that may be relevant to the subject. His primary sources range from Mesopotamian cuneiform literature, to literary and archaeological sources for the Mystery Religions, to rabbinic and extra-rabbinic traditions.
I close by pointing to some of the leads noted in the book that may produce fruitful future research on secret groups in ancient and later Judaism.
In sum, Michael Stone’s book, Secret Groups in Ancient Judaism, is an important contribution to our understanding of groups in antiquity who valued, hoarded, and transmitted esoteric knowledge.
- Magicians and exorcists have left behind written spells and practical manuals for their crafts. To what degree did their transmission of their trade secrets amount to membership in secret societies?
- Were the teachings of the watchers alluded to in the Enochic literature entirely imaginary, or does their mention testify to an underground magical and divinatory tradition with ancient real practitioners?
- We might infer from first principles that the priesthood of the Jerusalem Temple had its own body of secret teachings relating to service in the Temple. Have any of these survived? The rabbinic sources claim to transmit some of this material. Likewise, Aramaic Levi claims to give regulations for sacrificial rites undertaken by its Levitical priesthood. Is it possible to reconstruct some of the teachings and social structures of the ancient Jewish priesthood?
- I have already mentioned that some of the sectarian terminology and ideas found in the Qumran scrolls also appear in the medieval Karaite literature. Are these similarities due to chance finds of scrolls in the Qumran caves, whose ideas were adopted by the Karaites? This seems plausible. But is it also possible that some sectarian ideas survived in post-destruction secret societies and only resurfaced in our Karaite sources?
- Considerable Hebrew and Aramaic literature survives from the rabbinic period outside the rabbinic canon. These include astrological, magical, medical, and liturgical materials. In many cases, elements of these may point in the direction of their being secret knowledge. These await clarification.
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What scholarly investigations of the goddess have not examined are non-textual data from Elephantine. The same excavations that found Aramaic papyri also uncovered a number of figurines. Some of them, hewn rather roughly from wood, picture a grotesque dwarf-god. Others made by placing clay into a mold feature a naked woman lying on a bed. One of these clay objects, a plaque, shows a naked woman standing between two pillars, with a smaller child by her side.Cross-file under Aramaic Watch and Decorative Art.
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The symposium is to highlight the successful fieldwork to date and to conserve ancient manuscripts up to 1500 years old with the support of the British council's cultural protection fundThe symposium is on 3 December this year.
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Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
Allison, Jr., Dale C.Cross-file under Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Watch.
4 Baruch
Paraleipomena Jeremiou
Series: Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature
89,95 € / $103.99 / £82.00*
Hardcover
Publication Date: October 2019
ISBN 978-3-11-026973-4
Aims and Scope
This is the first full-scale, verse-by-verse commentary on 4 Baruch. The pseudepigraphon, written in the second century, is in large measure an attempt to address the situation following the destruction of the temple in 70 CE by recounting legends about the first destruction of the temple, the Babylonian captivity, and the return from exile. 4 Bruch is notable for its tale about Jeremiah's companion, Abimelech, who sleeps through the entire exilic period. This tale lies behind the famous Christian legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus and is part of the genealogy of Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle." Allison's commentary draws upon an exceptionally broad range of ancient sources in an attempt to clarify 4 Baruch's original setting, compositional history, and meaning.
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The Glory of the Invisible GodThe advert lists it as forthcoming in December. But the author tells me that it will be on sale at the Bloomsbury booth at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, which begins this weekend. Go and check it out for yourselves.
Two Powers in Heaven Traditions and Early Christology
By: Andrei Orlov
Published: 12-26-2019
Format: Hardback
Edition: 1st
Extent: 240
ISBN: 9780567692238
Imprint: T&T Clark
Series: Jewish and Christian Texts
Volume: 31
Dimensions: 6 1/8" x 9 1/4"
List price: $120.00
Online price: $108.00
About The Glory of the Invisible God
Andrei Orlov examines early Christological developments in the light of rabbinic references to the “two powers” in heaven, tracing the impact of this concept through both canonical and non-canonical material.
Orlov begins by looking at imagery of the “two powers” in early Jewish literature, in particular the book of Daniel, and in pseudepigraphical writings. He then traces the concept through rabbinic literature and applies this directly to understanding of Christological debates. Orlov finally carries out a close examination of the “two powers” traditions in Christian literature, in particular accounts of the Transfiguration and the Baptism of Jesus. Including a comprehensive bibliography listing texts and translations, and secondary literature, this volume is a key resource in researching the development of Christology.
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The presence of the idol raised particular concern among Catholics, as it was erected nine days before the Amazon Synod and the subsequent scandal over the veneration of the Pachamama idol at the Vatican.I noted the exhibition here. I leave the debate about the statue to others. But I'll mention a few points of historical interest.
The statue of Moloch, worshipped by both the Canaanites and the Phoenicians, is part of an exhibit dedicated to Ancient Rome’s once-great rival, the city of Carthage. The large-scale exhibition, titled Carthago: The immortal myth, runs until March 29, 2020.
"A reconstruction of the terrible deity Moloch, linked to Phoenician and Carthaginian religions and featured in the 1914 film Cabiria (directed by Giovanni Pastore and written by Gabriele D’Annunzio) will be stationed at the entrance to the Colosseum to welcome visitors to the exhibition," stated a press release about the exhibit.It doesn't look ancient to me. It looks like something from a Lovecraft story.
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