Seen in the light of first-century cosmopolitan ideals, Paul’s declaration of unity thus takes on a distinctly ancient form. It does not proclaim the equality of all people, regardless of their social positions, as is sometimes assumed by readers today. Rather, it envisages a social ideal of harmony and connection, where those factors in society that create division and conflict have been removed.
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Amir Engel. Gershom Scholem: An Intellectual Biography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. xiv + 226 pp. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-42863-5; ISBN 978-0-226-42877-2.Excerpt:
Reviewed by Jay Howard Geller (Case Western Reserve University)
Published on H-Judaic (January, 2019)
Commissioned by Barbara Krawcowicz (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
Engel has written a fascinating study of this nearly incomparable modern Jewish thinker. He has excavated the implicit, making explicit the lines of connection between Scholem’s life and his work. Yet, it should be noted that many Scholem scholars will not regard the ties as clear as Engel does. Some will protest (and already have) that Scholem’s thinking either eludes such neat correlations or requires a holistic approach. Moreover, Engel’s mix of chronological and thematic ordering does not always work. ...I noted the publication of the book here. Follow the links there and see also here for other recent books about Scholem. And some other recent posts involving Scholem are here, here, and here.
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Did Moses Sing? Perspectives on Deuteronomy 32
Based on current knowledge of how scribes worked in the ancient Near East…[Nilsen] proposes that there were groups of scribes in Jerusalem that produced literature in the late sixth-early fifth century or so, amongst them one Deuteronomistic group and one Isaianic group. Texts could cross boundaries between the groups (cf. e.g. Isa 36-39 and 2 Kings 19-20). The poem in Deut 32 is so similar to Isaiah 1; 56-66 that it is probable that the Isaianic group was its author. The poem then crossed the boundary of scribal groups, and was inserted into what we now call Deuteronomy 32, where it took on the role of “the song of Moses.”
See Also: The Origins of Deuteronomy 32: Intertextuality, Memory, Identity (Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers, 2018).
By Tina Dykesteen Nilsen
VID Specialized University, Stavanger, Norway
January 2019
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It would seem I am the least qualified person in this forum about Maia Kotrosits’ book to speak to the quality of her Biblical scholarship, so this response will be dictated from a theory cave. ...Now I know there is a thing called "Affect Theory." It sounds like a slippery, but promising, concept.
A nation is a tangle of forces fused by the force of affect. There is, then, no pure nation, but instead only a slapdash set of parameters for feeling a nation into existence. This is the milieu within which ancient texts are created, and understanding their affective dimension is the avenue Kotrosits proposes to discern how they make meaning. In particular, Kotrosits uses the affect approach to displace a binary frame of Christian vs Jewish identity in ancient sources. ...This is another paper presented in the review panel on Maia Kotrosits’s Rethinking Early Christian Identity: Affect, Violence, and Belonging (Fortress, 2015) at the 2018 Construction of Christian Identities SBL seminar. Background here.
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This book has much to offer as a reference to the oil lamps of the Late Roman and Byzantine periods and for developing research questions with regard to regionalism and small finds. Sussman has produced a volume that will be a basis for further research; it is an indispensable addition for scholars studying the material culture of the Late Roman, Byzantine, and Early Islamic periods in ancient Palestine as there is no other oil lamp catalogue for these periods that is as comprehensive.
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At first glance, the inscription appears rather benign. But to those of us who study Jerusalem, its history, and especially the text of the Hebrew Bible and who pay particularly close attention to the spelling of key words, this inscription carries far more linguistic weight than that of the stone itself.I have also discussed the orthography and philology of the word "Jerusalem" in the inscription here. I go into somewhat more detail, but end up in more or less the same place.
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Hebrew letters that do not make up any sentence, prints on metals - and a Star of David everywhere: The National Library is flooded with appeals from "collectors" and antique dealers from Arab countries, who offer "historical manuscripts" that supposedly belonged to Jewish communities in Islamic countries.The Jordanian lead codices (on which much more here and links) get a mention, although I don't see any clearly lead-codex-like artifact among the photographs.
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“Koreans don’t have to emulate Jewish belief systems,” educational researcher Seol Dong-ju said, “but we do need to copy the way Jews teach their children.”Background here and here.
The result is dozens of private chavruta-themed academies, with busy branches in major cities throughout the country, catering to everyone from toddlers to adults. Some make use of Korean-language Talmudic texts, while others follow entirely secular curricula.
Kim Jung-wan, who directs one such academy — the Havruta Culture Association — explains that South Korea’s Jewish education quest is over 40 years old. It began in the mid-1970s, when Korean translations of Talmud-inspired stories by Rabbi Marvin Tokayer, an American military chaplain stationed in Japan, first arrived in Seoul bookstores.
Tokayer’s stories were a runaway success. The Talmud, the vast Hebrew and Aramic compendium of first millennium law and lore, effectively went viral in South Korea: In the decades since, hundreds of Korean versions of the Talmud have appeared, mostly deriving from English-language translations and commentaries. These range from picture story books for children to thicker, more ponderous volumes for adults.
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In 2018, the Construction of Christian Identities SBL seminar organized a review panel on Maia Kotrosits’s Rethinking Early Christian Identity: Affect, Violence, and Belonging (Fortress, 2015).
To open this forum and as a member of the steering committee of the Construction of Christian Identities SBL seminar, I want to begin with some reflection on what the goals of this seminar have been in order to bring Kotrosits’s work into discussion with our larger aims.
[...]
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A few years ago, in the Frankfurt airport on the way home from Greece, I bought a copy of Virginia Woolf’s “The Common Reader,” which includes her essay “On Not Knowing Greek.” I already had the book at home, but I was impressed that anything by Woolf was considered airport reading. When I was about ten years old, my father, a pragmatic man, had refused to let me study Latin, and for some reason I assumed that “On Not Knowing Greek” was about how Woolf’s father, too, had prevented his daughter from studying a dead language. I pictured young Virginia Stephen sulking in a room of her own, an indecipherable alphabet streaming through her consciousness, while her father and her brother, downstairs in the library, feasted on Plato and Aristotle.Of course she did. Sean Connery also makes a cameo appearance.
Well, apparently I had read only the title of the essay. Of course Virginia Woolf knew Greek. ...
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The conversation with [Dr. Oren] Gutfeld takes place at the entrance to the cave. In the two excavation seasons conducted in Cave 53, many non-scroll objects have been found, some of them valuable, some from prehistoric times and from the Second Temple era.This is a good, thorough article that strikes a reasonable balance between coverage of the so-far imaginary scrolls that archaeologists hope to find and the actual material culture that they have been uncovering in the caves.
I asked if somewhere inside he expects, every time he begins to explore a new cave, to find scrolls. He looks at me and considers for a moment. “We come to each new cave with zero expectations. We try to understand the daily lives of those who used it,” Gutfeld says – then admits, “Almost every night I dream of finding a scroll. If we get lucky and find even one written line, that would be the best.”
Albeit scroll-less, every day of digging in the Judean Desert caves reveals new things about the material culture of people of the “Yahad” community (the cult that operated here), he says. “Discovering a scroll would be the ultimate, but it’s just as important to find things that shed light on who they were.”
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“What we’re doing as botanists or as archaeologists is to come to these people’s homes and check their pantry,” says Prof. Ehud Weiss, head of the Archaeological Botany Lab in the Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology at Bar Ilan University. “That home existed 2,000 or 6,000 years ago, but then, as now, our pantry says a lot about who we are. The food we eat reflects our socioeconomic situation and is indicative of the society we live in and relations with the environment. A central question in archaeology is: Who were the people whose cultural remnants we uncover?Beer is involved. Ancient beer, that is. I don't know about modern.
“The information archaeological botany provides is fascinating, and relevant for understanding the human race. We are what we eat, and knowledge in our field has become so precise that we now have a high capability of classifying every plant we find in archaeological digs. With the aid of that information, it’s possible to reconstruct modes and customs of nutrition, economy, agriculture, religion and culture.”
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Last week, guest blogger, Anthony Ferguson, described his recently defended and completed dissertation on the 'Non-Aligned' Texts of Qumran and reported on its major conclusions. I asked Anthony to write another post on the texts preserving Psalms at Qumran, and he kindly obliged. Thank you, Anthony, for your labors, and we look forward to reading more of your work in these areas in the future.Background of Dr. Ferguson's PhD thesis on "non-aligned" biblical Dead Sea Scrolls is here and here.
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A new study of Jerusalem’s population in various periods has recently been published by one of Israel’s leading Jerusalem archaeologists, Hillel Geva of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Israel Exploration Society. Geva bases his estimates on “archaeological findings, rather than vague textual sources.” The result is what he calls a “minimalist view.”
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There is no known historical or textual evidence of Jewish pilgrimage to the site in ancient times, in Talmudic times, or even during the Second Temple period, according to Rehav Rubin, a professor of geography who specializes in maps and pilgrimages of the Holy Land.Despite the lack of historical precedent, the site is becoming a pilgrimage site for Jews in commemoration of the biblical story of the Israelites' crossing of the Jordan under Joshua. This only started when the site reopened in 2011.
“Jews never came to Qasr al Yahud in the past centuries as pilgrims, it’s only something just from the last decade,” said Lior Chen, a graduate student in anthropology at Hebrew University who is completing a dissertation and fieldwork on the site. In his research Chen has found that motivations of the Jewish visitors range from interest in the Bible to politics to simply getting a close-up view of the border with Jordan, which is just a few meters across the water from Qasr al Yahud, demarcated by a rope running down the middle of the river.
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Machaerus: Beyond the Beheading of John the Baptist. Explore the site with reconstructions of the Herodian palace.I also noted the first one when it came out in 2015. As usual, both essays are summaries of BAR articles that are behind the subscription wall.
Anastylosis at Machaerus, Where John the Baptist was Beheaded. Restoration work gives archaeological context to Biblical scene (Megan Sauter).
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Jonathan Cahana-Blum, Wrestling with Archons: Gnosticism as a Critical Theory of Culture. Lexington Books, 2018. Pages: 210 • Trim: 6 1/4 x 9Follow the link for details.
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A massive 8th century BCE man-made platform discovered at a Catholic convent in central Israel may have served as an ancient shrine to the Ark of the Covenant, said leading Tel Aviv University archaeologist Israel Finkelstein. Unearthed at Kiriath-Jearim, the shrine gives potential new insight into the political machinations of the sibling kingdoms of Judah and Israel.Okay, I think I have this straight. Professor Finkelstein thinks there wasn't an Ark of the Covenant; it's just a legend. Well, that could be right.
Remains of the monumental elevated podium have been unearthed on a Judean hilltop long associated with the location of biblical Kiriath-Jearim. According to the Hebrew Bible, the spot was the 20-year home of the legendary Ark of the Covenant until taken by King David and paraded to Jerusalem.
The joint expedition by Tel Aviv University and the College de France is not on the trail of the elusive ark, however. Indeed Finkelstein, the dig’s co-director, does not believe the Ark of the Covenant existed.
[...]
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The Hieroglyphic inscription was found on a fixed rock, near the Tayma oasis. It bears a royal signature (a double cartouche) of King Ramesses III. Several additional Aramaic, Thamudic and Nabataea inscriptions, as well as ancient illustrations of cattle, ostriches and snakes were discovered. King Ramses III is the most famous ruler of the 20th Dynasty known by the Greeks as Rampsinitus. He followed his father Ramses II's reign to embark on massive construction projects.(My bold-font emphasis.)
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Mira Balberg and Simeon Chavel, “The Polymorphous Pesah: Ritual Between Origins and Reenactment,” in Journal of Ancient Judaism 8 (2017), 292-343.William provides a summary and a link to the (long) full text at Academia.edu.
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From God’s first command to Moses, through the story of Israel’s escape, the demand for a three-day festival in the wilderness plays a prominent role in the plague narrative. Part of this ruse was Israel’s request to “borrow” Egyptian finery for the festival. Why does God want the Israelites to use deception?Spoiler: source criticism is involved.
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Marshall, Mary. The Portrayals of the Pharisees in the Gospels and Acts. FRLANT 254; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015. Hb; €89.99.Excerpt:
Too frequently it is assumed the Gospels and Acts have a uniform, negative view of Pharisees. On the contrary, Marshall contends the Gospels and Acts are complex and each writer has an individual view of the Pharisees. Her goal is not a “quest for the historical Pharisee,” but rather to fairly and accurately describe how each of the four Gospel author’s presented the Pharisee in the service of their own theological agendas.
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There are 4 main trails to reach the top of Masada. They vary greatly in length and difficulty, providing a solution for any taste and skill level.Pro tip: do not climb the Snake Path to Masada in July like I did.
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Alexander the GreatYou can read the Introduction to the book at the link.
From His Death to the Present Day
John Boardman
Editions
Hardcover 2019 29.95 24.00 ISBN9780691181752 176 pp. 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 8 page color + 36 b/w illus.
E-book ISBN9780691184043
An illustrious scholar presents an elegant, concise, and generously illustrated exploration of Alexander the Great’s representations in art and literature through the ages
John Boardman is one of the world’s leading authorities on ancient Greece, and his acclaimed books command a broad readership. In this book, he looks beyond the life of Alexander the Great in order to examine the astonishing range of Alexanders created by generations of authors, historians, and artists throughout the world—from Scotland to China.
Alexander’s defeat of the Persian Empire in 331 BC captured the popular imagination, inspiring an endless series of stories and representations that emerged shortly after his death and continues today. An art historian and archaeologist, Boardman draws on his deep knowledge of Alexander and the ancient world to reflect on the most interesting and emblematic depictions of this towering historical figure.
Some of the stories in this book relate to historical events associated with Alexander’s military career and some to the fantasy that has been woven around him, and Boardman relates each with his customary verve and erudition. From Alexander’s biographers in ancient Greece to the illustrated Alexander “Romances” of the Middle Ages to operas, films, and even modern cartoons, this generously illustrated volume takes readers on a fascinating cultural journey as it delivers a perfect pairing of subject and author.
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