On Cain

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY has posted some essays on the biblical character Cain:

Cain and Abel in the Bible..

Read Elie Wiesel’s essay on Cain and Abel in the Bible as it originally appeared in Bible Review, February 1998.—Ed.

What Happened to Cain in the Bible? Did Lamech kill Cain? (Megan Sauter). This one summarizes a 2014 BAR column by John Byron, which is behind the subscription wall.

The third one, "Who was Cain's Wife?" by Mary Joan Winn Leith, was published last year and I noted it here.

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Did Jesus really exist? Yes.

THE HISTORY CHANNEL: The Bible Says Jesus Was Real. What Other Proof Exists? Some argue that Jesus wasn't an actual man, but within a few decades of his lifetime, he was mentioned by Jewish and Roman historians (Christopher Klein). With interviews with Lawrence Mykytiuk and Bart Ehrman. There's nothing in this article which will be unfamiliar to regular PaleoJudaica readers, but it collects the main evidence conveniently in one place.

Past PaleoJudica posts on the subject are collected here and links.

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Review of Davies, The Bible for the Curious

BOOK REVIEW: The Bible for the Curious: A brief encounter, by Philip R. Davies. Anthony Phillips praises a scholar’s invitation to the reading of the Bible (Church Times). This is Professor Davies's final and posthumously-published book (Equinox).

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On the post-2002 DSS-like fragments

THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST TODAY: The Post-2002 Fragments and the Scholars Who Turned Them Into Dead Sea Scrolls (Årstein Justnes and Josephine Munch Rasmussen).

The most striking feature of the post-2002 Dead Sea Scrolls scandal is the pervading negligence. The trade in unprovenanced manuscripts is dependent on actors authenticating, introducing, marketing, facilitating sales, brokering, legitimizing dubious acquisition, defending illicit trade, lending professional authority, publishing, composing provenance narratives, and pumping up prices. Without scholarly involvement in these endeavors, the market in the post-2002 fragments would be unimaginable.

For the most part, I think the criticisms in this essay are fair. Some of them do involve seeing suspicious patterns in retrospect that would have been harder to see at the time.

It seems that many, perhaps most, of the unprovenanced, supposed, scroll fragments that surfaced during this period are fakes. But perhaps not all. For example, this apparent Bar Kokhba-era scroll was seized by the Israeli authorities in 2009. I've heard nothing about it since and Prof. Justnes does not mention it in his "Exhausting" Chronology. Is it genuine?

If there are genuine scrolls among the fakes, part of the conversation involves how to isolate them.

For some of my own thoughts on how to deal with unprovenanced antiquities, see here and links. For more on the subject see here and here and links.

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Halkin responds on Alter's Bible

MOSAIC MAGAZINE: The Necessary Bad Faith in Reading the Bible as Literature. For those who can’t say “I will obey,” but won’t say “I refuse to obey,” what other choice is there? (Hillel Halkin).

I thank Jon Levenson and Leonard Greenspoon for their kind responses to my essay on Robert Alter’s translation of the Hebrew Bible. I’ll address their pieces in the reverse order of their appearance in Mosaic.

[...]

I noted Halkins's earlier Mosaic essay and the two responses here. And follow the links from there for more posts on Alter's translation of the Bible.

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Tracing the survivors of Vesuvius

SCHOLARLY DETECTIVE WORK: Archaeologist Finds New Evidence Of The Romans Who Escaped Mt. Vesuvius (Kristina Killgrove, Forbes).

[Miami University Historian Steven]Tuck's combination of history and archaeology has produced strong evidence that it is possible to trace Vesuvian refugees. He finds that many refugees settled on the north side of the Bay of Naples, and that families tended to move together and then to marry within their refugee community. These people probably "represent either those who fled at the first sign of the eruption," Tuck says, "or those who were away from the cities when the eruption occurred." But while this method seems to work for identifying reasonably wealthy citizens, Tuck knows that it is limited because it cannot help him discover non-Romans, slaves, or migrants who escaped Vesuvius.

Limited or not, the correlation of evidence from so many disparate sources is impressive. I imagine a project this ambitious has only become practical in recent years as the evidence has gone into searchable digital databases.

As for how the refugees survived, note also that Pliny the Elder led a daring rescue mission into the eruption zone. He himself perished, but the rescue ships may have saved up to a couple of thousand refugees, perhaps cutting the death toll of the eruption by half.

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"Biblical Archaeology"

LIVE SCIENCE: Biblical Archaeology: The Study of Biblical Sites & Artifacts (Owen Jarus). A good overview of the use of this not uncontroversial term.

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Kratz et al., Hebräisches und aramäisches Wörterbuch zu den Texten vom Toten Meer, vol. 2

NEW BOOK FROM DE GRUYTER:

Multi-volumed work
Hebräisches und aramäisches Wörterbuch zu den Texten vom Toten Meer
Einschließlich der Manuskripte aus der Kairoer Geniza
Ed. by Kratz, Reinhard G. / Steudel, Annette / Kottsieper, Ingo

Band 2
Gimmel – Zajin

Ed. by Kratz, Reinhard G. / Steudel, Annette / Kottsieper, Ingo

Hardcover
Publication Date: December 2018
ISBN 978-3-11-060292-0

Aims and Scope
The manuscripts from Qumran and other sites offer unique insight into the Hebrew and Aramaic languages during the period of the Second Temple. For the first time, in the tradition of classical lexicology, this philological dictionary develops a non-Biblical lexicon from these sources (plus the Dead Sea scrolls and Cairo Geniza manuscripts), while also placing it in the context of the history of the Hebraic and Aramaic languages.

A couple of years ago I noted the publication of volume 1 here.

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Samaritan wine press and mosaic inscription excavated

SAMARITAN WATCH: Archaeologists Find Samaritan Lord’s Winepress in Central Israel. As the nearby mosaic says, in Greek: ‘Only God help the beautiful property of Master Adios, amen’ (Ruth Schuster, Haaretz). This is an exciting find. The article is also a good backgrounder on the Samaritans.

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New inscription found near tomb of Darius the Great

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Trilingual Inscription Surfaces Near Darius the Great’s Tomb (Megan Sauter). It pertains to a royal official whose name is lost. It is of some philological interest for Elamite, Old Persian, and Babylonian Akkadian.

As the article notes, the most famous trilingual inscription from Iran is the Behistun inscription, which (rather like the Rosetta Stone for Egyptian) was key to the decipherment of Akkadian. Past posts on it are here, here, here, here, and here.

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Creeping archaeological robotics?

TECHNOLOGY WATCH: Tel Aviv, EU researchers set sights on robots that creep like ivy. Collapsed buildings, archaeological digs, even Mars are places where a robot that can negotiate difficult terrain by anchoring itself and shooting off tendrils would be useful (Shoshanna Solomon, Times of Israel).

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Looting arrests in eastern Samaria

APPREHENDED: IDF ARREST SIX ANTIQUITIES THIEVES IN WEST BANK. The IDF and the police have arrested six antiquities thieves in the last two weeks at two separate sites in eastern Samaria (Tovah Lazaroff, Jerusalem Post).

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Using lead isotopes to track Phoenician expansion westward

PHOENICIAN WATCH: The Silver Rush: New Technologies Remap Phoenician Expansion in the Mediterranean. Israeli scientists analyze lead isotopes in Phoenician hoards and discover that westward expansion began earlier than was previously believed (Asaf Ronel, Haaretz).

A combination of scientific techniques from a number of fields now enables scientists to solve these historical and archaeological mysteries. A new study using rare samples of ancient Phoenician silver items found in archeological digs in Israel proposes a route for their spreading westward – and even strengthens the theory that it was the search for sources of metals that pushed them farther and farther from their original region. The study, “Lead isotopes in silver reveal the earliest Phoenician quest for metals in the west Mediterranean,” was published on Monday in the prestigious scientific journal PNAS by scientists from Haifa University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The study focuses on three large caches of Phoenician silver found in Israel, at Tel Dor, Acre and Ein Hofez. It attempts to answer the question of where they came from, because the precious metal is not found naturally in the Mediterranean region. The research was part of the doctorate research conducted by Tzilla Eshel, the lead author from the archeology department at Haifa University.

This reminds me of another recent story about using ice cores from Greenland to track the state of Punic coin minting via traces of lead pollution.

Cross-file under Technology Watch and Material Culture.

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Review of Scribbling through History: Graffiti (ed. Ragazzoli et al.)

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: Chloe Ragazzoli, Ömür Harmanşah, Chiara Salvador, Elizabeth Frood (ed.), Scribbling through History: Graffiti, Places and People from Antiquity to Modernity. London; New York: Bloomsbury, 2018. Pp. 244. ISBN 9781474288811. £73.44. Reviewed by Nikolaos Lazaridis, California State University, Sacramento (lazaridi@saclink.csus.edu).

This sounds like quite a comprehensive book that would make good reading alongside Karen Stern's work on ancient Jewish graffiti (on which more here and links). The volume under review includes an essay by her on that topic.

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More "Hebrew books" seized in Turkey

APPREHENDED: Police seize ancient handwritten Hebrew manuscripts in anti-smuggling op in southern Turkey (Daily Sabah).

Acting upon a tip-off, the provincial security directorate units carried out a raid on a minibus and seized three handwritten Hebrew manuscripts, nine coins and a small statue of a woman holding a water jug.

The anti-smuggling unit of the Turkish security forces has been working hard lately. These objects were seized from a group of Syrians, which perhaps points to an origin in Syria.

The twos photographs provide limited information, so I can't say much about the objects. None of the books are open, so we can't tell anything about their content. The two on the right are bound codices and possibly the pages are made of paper or parchment. The book on the left looks to me as though the pages are made of metal and it is held together with metal binding rings. Some fake metal codices were recovered in Turkey in 2017. This looks like another metal codex, although I don't recall seeing any before that have a heavy embossed design on the front cover like this one.

I have nothing interesting to say about the statuette or the coins.

Let's keep an eye on this one. I have yet to see any genuine ancient artifacts come out of these Turkish anti-smuggling operations, but I suppose there could always be a first time.

For other similar stories coming out of Turkey, see here and follow the many links. For my definitive (for now) evaluation of what we know about the metal codices recovered from Jordan and elsewhere, see here and links.

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The Gallio inscription

THE HOLY LAND PHOTOS' BLOG: NT Inscriptions — Gallio Proconsul of Achaia (Acts 18:12) (Carl Rasmussen). Gallio is mentioned in the Book of Acts chapter 18. This post has a couple of nice images of his inscription. The inscription helps to establish the chronology of the Apostle Paul's career according to Acts.

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Why did they build the Dome of the Rock?

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: Israeli Researcher Proposes New Explanation to Why Dome of Rock Was Built on Temple Mount. It has dominated the Jerusalem skyline for 1,300 years, but there is no single accepted explanation for why it was built (Nir Hasson, Haaretz premium).

Several researches say that the Umayyad caliph, Abdel Malek Ben Marwan, decided to build the dome out of a need for a religious focal point outside of Mecca. During the period of his reign, Mecca was ruled by his rival, Abd Allah Ibn al-Zubayr, who had revolted against the Umayyads and conquered that holy city. Other researchers say Abel Malek needed a structure to compete with the palatial churches the Christians had built in Jerusalem, in order to reinforce Muslim rule in the city.

A recent article by Dr. Milka Levy-Rubin in the Cathedra journal published by Yad Ben-Zvi, says the Dome of the Rock was built in order to restore Jerusalem’s place on the regional map of holy sites, not vis a vis Mecca, but rather as a rival to Constantinople, the Byzantine capital. This is why the Muslims depended on the Jewish traditions at the site.

This discussion is well outside my own expertise. I have no opinion about it. But I thought you would find it interesting.

By the way, there is an odd misstatement just before this quote. The Dome was not "erected 691 years ago." It was erected (or completed) around the year 691 C.E. This was something over 1,300 years ago, as stated correctly in the headline and the first paragraph.

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The Reader's Digest Latin Iliad in the Cairo Geniza?

GENIZA FRAGMENT OF THE MONTH (FEBRUARY 2019): The Latin Iliad in the Cairo Genizah (T-S Misc. 27.2 c-e) (Gideon Bohak and Serena Ammirati).

How did these fragments of a Crusader-period copy of a first century CE Latin reworking of a Greek poem of the eighth or seventh century BCE end up in the Cairo Genizah?

I've said it before. The Cairo Geniza is the philologist's gift that keeps on giving.

Past posts noting Cairo Geniza Fragments of the Month in the Cambridge University Library's Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit are here and links.

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Furstenberg on "Goy"

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Ethnic and Cultural Identities in the Rabbinic Goy Discourse (Yair Furstenberg).

This fascinating description of the novel rabbinic discourse leads to what is in my view one of the most significant contributions of the book to our understanding of Judaism in Antiquity: The rabbinic termination of separation technologies, so characteristic of pre-rabbinic Judaism.

Bold-font emphasis in the original.

Another installment in the AJR forum on Ophir and Rosen-Zvi, Goy, on which more here and here.

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Xeravits, From Qumran to the Synagogues

FORTHCOMING BOOK FROM DE GRUYTER:

Xeravits, Géza G.

From Qumran to the Synagogues
Selected Studies on Ancient Judaism

In collab. with Vér, Ádám

Series: Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Studies 43

Hardcover
Publication Date: 2019
To be published: March 2019
ISBN 978-3-11-061431-2

Aims and Scope
This volume collects papers written during the past two decades that explore various aspects of late Second Temple period Jewish literature and the figurative art of the Late Antique synagogues. Most of the papers have a special emphasis on the reinterpretation of biblical figures in early Judaism or demonstrate how various biblical traditions converged into early Jewish theologies. The structure of the volume reflects the main directions of the author’s scholarly interest, examining the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, and Late Antique synagogues. The book is edited for the interest of scholars of Second Temple Judaism, biblical interpretation, synagogue studies and the effective history of Scripture.

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The latest on the Terra Sancta Museum

THE REBOOT CONTINUES: A 2000-year-old biblical treasure. Jerusalem’s Terra Sancta Museum, which displays ancient artefacts excavated by the Franciscan order over the past 100 years, offers insight into life in the Holy Land (Sara Toth Stub, BBC).

But a multi-year restoration project has made this underground labyrinth – built and rebuilt in several layers from the time of King Herod in the 1st Century to the Mamluk sultans in the medieval period – into a museum that tells not only the history of Jerusalem, but also the story of the Franciscan Order’s archaeological discoveries made throughout Israel, the Palestinian territories, Egypt and Jordan over the last century. For more than 100 years, Franciscan friars have carried out dozens of excavations at some of the region’s most famous Christian sites, including in Nazareth, Bethlehem and here in this sprawling Monastery of the Flagellation complex, which has been a pilgrimage site since at least the 4th Century.

Past posts on the recently renovated Terra Sancta Museum are here and here. It is currently undertaking a phased reopening.

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What was the "mercy seat" on the Ark of the Covenant?

DR. RACHEL ADELMAN: Atoning for the Golden Calf with the Kapporet (TheTorah.com).

Atop the kappōret, the ark’s cover, sat the golden cherubim, which framed the empty space (tokh) where God would speak with Moses. Drawing on the connection between the word kappōret and the root כ.פ.ר (“atone”), and noting how the golden calf episode interrupts the Tabernacle account, the rabbis suggest that the ark cover served as a means of atoning for the Israelites’ collective sin.

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Melville, Jonah, and a Coptic curse

THE COPTIC MAGICAL PAPYRI BLOG: Giant Fish and Judicial Prayers: Jonah in Coptic Magic.

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Review of Goldsworthy, Hadrian's Wall

BRYN MARY CLASSICAL REVIEW: Adrian Keith Goldsworthy, Hadrian's Wall. New York: Basic Books, 2018. Pp. xx, 169. ISBN 9781541644427. $25.00. Reviewed by Michael J. Taylor, University at Albany, SUNY (mjtaylor@albany.edu).

While Goldsworthy does not make things as interesting as he might, what he does do he generally does well. He provides an overview of the Roman army of the principate, and a discussion of the complex construction and occupation history of the wall from A.D. 122 to the late fourth century. The last few chapters mostly follow the history of the Roman army in Britain, although these are sometimes more the history of emperors and pretenders than of the wall itself. The book ends with a brief guide on how to visit the wall. One disappointing aspect is the illustrations. There are plenty, to be sure, but all in black and white, and all printed directly on paper instead of plates, which inevitably reduces the sharpness and quality of the image. In many ways we get a coffee table book in terms of breezy content, but without the glossy pictures.

Under "interesting," the reviewer notes some cold-case murder scenes and other lurid finds associated with the wall.

Past posts on Hadrian's Wall (because I live in Scotland) are here and links.

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Well, Elijah, that's awkward.

DR. DAVID GLATT-GILAD: Was Elijah Permitted to Make an Offering on Mount Carmel? (TheTorah.com).

In a contest with the prophets of Baal, Elijah rebuilds an altar to YHWH that was on Mount Carmel and makes an offering. Later, he bemoans the destruction of other YHWH altars (1 Kgs 18–19). But doesn’t the Book of Kings clearly state that only the altar in Jerusalem was legitimate once Solomon built the Temple?

Sometimes a story is just too good to leave out.

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Gupta and Sanford, Intermediate Biblical Greek Reader

THE AWOL BLOG: Newly added in the Open Textbook Library. Notably, the following:

Intermediate Biblical Greek Reader: Galatians and Related Texts

Nijay Gupta, Portland Seminary
Jonah Sandford
Pub Date: 2018
ISBN 13: 9780999829233
Publisher: George Fox University Library

About the Book

After completing basic biblical Greek, students are often eager to continue to learn and strengthen their skills of translation and interpretation. This intermediate graded reader is designed to meet those needs. The reader is “intermediate” in the sense that it presumes the user will have already learned the basics of Greek grammar and syntax and has memorized Greek vocabulary words that appear frequently in the New Testament. The reader is “graded” in the sense that it moves from simpler translation work (Galatians) towards more advanced readings from the book of James, the Septuagint, and from one of the Church Fathers. In each reading lesson, the Greek text is given, followed by supplemental notes that offer help with vocabulary, challenging word forms, and syntax. Discussion questions are also included to foster group conversation and engagement. There are many good Greek readers in existence, but this reader differs from most others in a few important ways. Most readers offer text selections from different parts of the Bible, but in this reader the user works through one entire book (Galatians). All subsequent lessons, then, build off of this interaction with Galatians through short readings that are in some way related to Galatians. The Septuagint passages in the reader offer some broader context for texts that Paul quotes explicitly from the Septuagint. The Patristic reading from John Chrysystom comes from one of his homilies on Galatians. This approach to a Greek reader allows for both variety and coherence in the learning process.

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De Troyer and Schmitz (eds.), The Early Reception of the Book of Isaiah

NEW BOOK FROM DE GRUYTER:

The Early Reception of the Book of Isaiah

Ed. by De Troyer, Kristin / Schmitz, Barbara

Series: Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Studies 37

Aims and Scope
This volume brings together a lively set of papers from the first session of the Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature program unit of the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting in 2016. Together with a few later contributions, these essays explore a number of thematic and textual issues as they trace the reception history of the Book of Isaiah in Deuterocanonical and cognate literature.

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David Brown et al., The Interactions of Ancient Astral Science

NEW BOOK FROM HEMPEN VERLAG:

The Interactions of Ancient Astral Science
with contributions by : Jonathon Ben-Dov, Harry Falk, Geoffrey Lloyd, Raymond Mercier, Antonio Panaino, Joachim Quack, Alexandra von Lieven, and Michio Yano

2018. 17x24cm, 916 Seiten, Hardcover
978-3-944312-55-2 118,00 € Inkl. 7% USt., zzgl. Versandkosten


Why and when did ancient scholars make the enormous effort to understand the principles and master the mathematics of foreign astral sciences? This work provides a detailed analysis of the invention, development and transmission of astronomy, astrology, astral religion, magic and medicine, cosmology and cosmography, astral mapping, geography and calendrics and their related mathematics and instrumentation in and between Mesopotamia, Egypt, the West Semitic areas, Greece and Rome, Iran, India and China. It considers the available textual evidence from the most ancient times to the seventh century CE. The author has worked the contributions of eight internationally renowned scholars into what amounts to a new history of the oldest sciences. The result is a challenging read for the layperson and a resource for the expert and includes an extensive index to the entire volume. It provides a new typology of cultural interactions and, by describing their socio-political backdrop, offers a cultural history of the region. In particular, astral science in the Hellenistic period west of the Tigris is completely re-evaluated and a new model of the interactions of Western and Indian and Iranian astral sciences is provided.

Not surprisingly, the calendrical traditions in 1 Enoch and the Dead Sea Scrolls receive a good bit of attention. Follow the link for the TOC.

HT the NSEA Blog.

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