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Composing a text by hand demands an awareness of certain details that we can ignore when using a word processor. One of these details is if the next written word corresponds to the available space. At times, the space didn't for Hebrew scribes, and when this happened, they had several ways to navigate this situation. Let’s review some of these. ...
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Alice Mouton, Flesh and bones: the individual and his body in the ancient Mediterranean basin. Semitica et Classica: Supplementa (SUPSEC), 2. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020. Pp. 240. ISBN 9782503590387 €65,00.The volume includes essays on ancient Egyptian, Hittite, Akkadian, biblical Hebrew, and Greco-Roman literature.Review by
Julianne Burnett, Asbury University. julianne.burnett@asbury.edu
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Israel and Judah Redefined
Migration, Trauma, and Empire in the Sixth Century BCEPart of Society for Old Testament Study Monographs
AUTHOR: C. L. Crouch, Fuller Theological Seminary, California
DATE PUBLISHED: August 2021
AVAILABILITY: Available
FORMAT: Hardback
ISBN: 9781108473767£ 75.00 Hardback
Description
In Israel and Judah Redefined, C. L. Crouch uses trauma studies, postcolonial theory, and social-scientific research on migration to analyse the impact of mass displacements and imperial power on Israelite and Judahite identity in the sixth century BCE. Crouch argues that the trauma of deportation affected Israelite identity differently depending on resettlement context. Deportees resettled in rural Babylonia took an isolationist approach to Israelite identity, whereas deportees resettled in urban contexts took a more integrationist approach. Crouch also emphasises the impact of mass displacement on identity concerns in the homeland, demonstrating that displacement and the experience of Babylonian imperial rule together facilitated major developments in Judahite identity. The diverse experiences of this period produced bitter conflict between Israelites and Judahites, as well as diverse attempts to resolve this conflict. Inspired by studies of forced migration and by postcolonial analyses of imperial domination, Crouch's book highlights the crucial contribution of this era to the story of Israel and Judah.
- Introduces social scientific research on diverse migration experiences to a biblical studies audience
- IIdentifies the significance of Israel and Judah to the identity debates in the sixth century BCE
- IIntegrates postcolonial theory, trauma studies, and social scientific research on migration to interpret ancient texts
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A luxury Persian import, famous for its medicinal qualities and lovely smell, the citron became Sukkot’s פְּרִי עֵץ הָדָר “fruit of a splendid tree” in the first century C.E.PaleoJudaica posts on the etrog/citron, including ones on the Ramat Rachel garden, are collected here.
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Jews and Christians – Parting Ways in the First Two Centuries CE?
Reflections on the Gains and Losses of a ModelEdited by: Jens Schröter, Benjamin A. Edsall and Joseph Verheyden
Volume 253 in the series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110742213eBook
Published: August 23, 2021
ISBN: 9783110742213Hardcover
Published: August 23, 2021
ISBN: 9783110742138About this book
The present volume is based on a conference held in October 2019 at the Faculty of Theology of Humboldt University Berlin as part of a common project of the Australian Catholic University, the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the Humboldt University Berlin. The aim is to discuss the relationships of “Jews” and “Christians” in the first two centuries CE against the background of recent debates which have called into question the image of “parting ways” for a description of the relationships of Judaism and Christianity in antiquity. One objection raised against this metaphor is that it accentuates differences at the expense of commonalities. Another critique is that this image looks from a later perspective at historical developments which can hardly be grasped with such a metaphor. It is more likely that distinctions between Jews, Christians, Jewish Christians, Christian Jews etc. are more blurred than the image of “parting ways” allows. In light of these considerations the contributions in this volume discuss the cogency of the “parting of the ways”-model with a look at prominent early Christian writers and places and suggest more appropriate metaphors to describe the relationships of Jews and Christians in the early period.
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“What we have uncovered is a level of wealth that we could not imagine before,” Prof. Yuval Gadot, the head Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures at Tel-Aviv University - and co-director of the excavations conducted by TAU and the Israeli Antiquities Authority at the City of David - said.
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Dr Sarah Parkhouse has recently joined the Centre for Biblical Studies as a British Academy postdoctoral fellow. We sat down to discuss her work and the research project she will be undertaking.I have noted books by Dr. Parkhouse here and here.
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To read a Classical text without an apparatus has been justly compared to the experience of sitting in the back of a car while another controls the wheel. In the fullness of time, come the development of the self-driving car, this simile may eventually lose its force; but the apparatus will certainly not have lost its relevance to those who are fascinated about what ancient writers actually wrote.A lucid introduction to the science and art of textual criticism.
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Published in English.
The most important objects in the Hebrew Bible are a wooden box, styled in English »the ark« or »the ark of the covenant«, and two statues of winged creatures, »the cherubim«, that surmount it. Raanan Eichler attempts to understand these objects using the full gamut of data and tools available to the modern scholar. The study features an abundance of visual comparative material, much of it in colour, with a particularly close examination of the finds from the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. The author proposes solutions to a number of unsolved puzzles, such as the question of what cherubim looked like, and offers a new explanation of the nature of the ark and the cherubim, rejecting the prevailing scholarly view of them as having constituted an »empty throne« and footstool for the God of Israel. Rather, he argues, they constituted an empty frame, a unique cultic focus that surpassed all known systems in the ancient Near East in the extent of the efforts it represented to prevent an anthropomorphic conception of the deity in a cultic context.
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Bronson Brown-deVost. Commentary and Authority in Mesopotamia and Qumran. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019.I noted another review of the book here.
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This story has been around since 2018. I noted it here. But now the technical article is published in Nature.
A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead SeaA Tunguska-sized airburst is a significant event: "The proposed airburst was larger than the 1908 explosion over Tunguska, Russia, where a ~ 50-m-wide bolide detonated with ~ 1000× more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb."Ted E. Bunch, Malcolm A. LeCompte, A. Victor Adedeji, James H. Wittke, T. David Burleigh, Robert E. Hermes, Charles Mooney, Dale Batchelor, Wendy S. Wolbach, Joel Kathan, Gunther Kletetschka, Mark C. L. Patterson, Edward C. Swindel, Timothy Witwer, George A. Howard, Siddhartha Mitra, Christopher R. Moore, Kurt Langworthy, James P. Kennett, Allen West & Phillip J. Silvia Scientific Reports volume 11, Article number: 18632 (2021)
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HARTFORD – Dr. Amy-Jill Levine, a foremost scholar in the study of Judaism, the Tanakh (Jewish scriptures), and the New Testament has been named the Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at The Hartford Seminary. The first person to fill this post, Levine arrives from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., where she is professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies Emerita and Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies Emerita.The article includes an interview.[...]
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Background here and links.
Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
Last year's Sukkot post was here. More recent relevant posts are here and here. For the biblical background to Sukkot, see here and here.
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.
PaleoJudaica has posted on most of these stories. For the new Minor Prophets scroll fragments from the Cave of Horror, see here, here, here, here, and follow the links in-between. For the fragmentary capitals found at Armon Hanatziv, see here and here. For the new evidence for Amos' earthquake, see here. For the Iron-Age temple at Tel Moza (Tel Motza, Tel Moẓa, Tel Moẓah), see here and links. For the Jerubbaal (?) jug, see here and links. Posts on ancient Caesarea are here and here. For the early church with the Pan altar in the Banyas Springs Nature Reserve, see here. For the suspended excavations at Huqoq, see here and links.
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I discuss some of this material in an old post from 2004. And for the Talmud, see here and here.
Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.