Xeravits memorial volume (De Gruyter)

NEW BOOK FROM DE GRUYTER:

Understanding Texts in Early Judaism
Studies on Biblical, Qumranic, Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature in Memory of Géza Xeravits
Edited by: József Zsengellér
Volume 48 in the series Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Studies
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110768534

PDF & EPUB £102.00
Hardcover £102.00

eBook
Published: March 7, 2022
ISBN: 9783110768534
Hardcover
Published: March 21, 2022
ISBN: 9783110768367

About this book

This volume remembers Géza Xeravits, a well known scholar of deuterocanonical and Qumran literature. The volume is divided into four sections according to his scholarly work and interest. Contributions in the first part deal with Old Testament and related issues (Thomas Hiecke, Stefan Beyerle, and Mattew Goff). The second section is about the Dead Sea Scrolls (John J, Collins, John Kampen, Peter Porzig, Eibert Tigchelaar, Balázs Tamási and Réka Esztári). The largest part is the forth on deuterocanonica (Beate Ego, Lucas Brum Teixteira, Fancis Macatangay, Tobias Nicklas, Maria Brutti, Nuria, Chalduch-Benages, Panc Beentjes, Ben Wright, Otto Mulder, Angelo Passaro, Friedrich Reiterer, Severino Bussino, Jeremy Corley and JiSeong Kwong). The third section deals with some cognate literature (József Zsengellér and Karin Schöpflin). The last section about the Ancient Synagogue has the paper of Anders Kloostergaard Petersen.
Some hot topics are discussed, for example the Two spirits in Qumran, the cathegorization of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the authorship and antropology of Ben Sira, and the angelology of Vitae Prophetarum.

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The evil eye is not in the Bible

DR. NICOLE L. TILFORD: Does the Bible Believe in the Evil Eye? (TheTorah.com).

The belief in the power of an angry or jealous person’s eye to damage others was pervasive in the ancient Near East, in Jewish antiquity, and medieval times. But what does the Bible say?

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Evans & Wright (eds.), Gods, Spirits, and Worship in the Greco-Roman World and Early Christianity (T&T Clark)

NEW BOOK FROM BLOOMSBURY/T&T CLARK:

Gods, Spirits, and Worship in the Greco-Roman World and Early Christianity

Craig A. Evans (Anthology Editor), Adam Z. Wright (Anthology Editor)

Hardback $115.00 $103.50

Ebook (PDF) $103.50 $82.80

Ebook (Epub & Mobi) $103.50 $82.80

Product details

Published Feb 24 2022
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Extent 280
ISBN 9780567703262
Imprint T&T Clark
Illustrations 7 bw illus
Dimensions 9 x 6 inches
Series Jewish and Christian Texts
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

Description

Greco-Roman religions and superstitions, and early Christianity's engagement with them, are explored in 12 unique studies. The beliefs and fears with regard to demons (or daimons), their origins, and threatening behavior are examined, both in their pagan and Judaeo-Christian contexts. These new studies look at the Greco-Roman heroic gods, how they faced death, and how James and John, the “sons of Thunder,” may well have been viewed in some circles as the equivalent of the “sons of Zeus”, Castor and Pollux.

The contributors also explore Roman omens, especially as they relate to Rome's legendary founder Romulus and what light they shed on the omens that accompany the birth and death of Jesus of Nazareth. Particular focus is placed upon Paul, binding spells, women and hymns of exaltation, along with atheism in late antiquity, with special consideration of the charlatan Alexander. Finally, there is a re-visitation of the confusion, misinformation and legends surrounding the discovery of the Qumran caves, including fear of jinn. This book provides invaluable resources for precisely how early Christians interacted with different ideas and traditions around gods and spirits - both benevolent and malevolent - in the Greco-Roman world.

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More discoveries in Sohag

EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY: Checkpoint, remains of archaeological temple from the Ptolemaic era discovered in Sohag (Egypt Independent).

Just in case you thought Egypt had no archaeological discoveries left. The finds include the checkpoint, the temple of Isis, some Demotic and Greek documentary texts, and a lot of tombs.

For more on Sohag and its archaeology and history, some of which is of no little interest to PaleoJudaica, see here and links.

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The Mount Ebal amulet again

THE BIG CLAIMS CONTINUE: The Ebal Amulet – the oldest Israelite text ever found. It was as if I had been finding, and putting together the pieces of a large, difficult jigsaw puzzle – pieces that came from ancient history, archaeology, geography and biblical textual analysis (ZVI KOENIGSBERG, Jerusalem Post).

I note this article for completeness' sake, not because it says anything new. Indeed, it does not acknowledge the genuine concerns that specialists have raised about some of the claims repeated in it.

The amulet may be an important discovery. But until the discoverers publish it in a peer-review publication with good photographs, the scholarly conversation has not yet begun. Only then can we see what we really have and how important it is.

Background here and links.

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What happened to the rest of Paul's letters?

THE ANXIOUS BENCH: The Lost Letters of Saint Paul, and How They Were Lost (Philip Jenkins).

Why, then, were these lost letters lost?

The answer to that is quite simple. Paul probably died around 64/65AD. Very shortly afterward, during the early years of the Jewish Revolt against Rome (66-73) savage inter-communal violence broke out across the Levant, and in Egypt. ... If we look at the places described as marked by the most savage violence, where Jewish communities were extirpated, several of the worst massacres and orgies of destruction occurred in cities mentioned in Acts. Moreover, these almost certainly contained followers of Jesus, who would have retained letters by Paul. Those letters would have been lost when Jewish quarters were burned out. In contrast, no such massacres are known in Corinth, Philippi, Thessaloniki, and the other centers where letters were preserved.

Do follow the link to read the whole argument over a number of blog posts. I think it makes a lot of sense.

Cross-file under Lost Books.

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Early references to the Aleppo Codex in the Cairo Geniza

THE GENIZA FRAGMENTS BLOG: Q&A Wednesday: The Best Crown in Town? Finding the Aleppo Codex in Fustat, with Neriah Klein. An interview with Neriah Klein by Melonie Schmierer-Lee.

For many PaleoJudaica posts on the Aleppo Codex, see here and here and links.

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Cotton, Collected Papers (De Gruyter)

NEW BOOK FROM DE GRUYTER:

Roman Rule and Jewish Life
Collected Papers

Hannah M. Cotton
Edited by: Ofer Pogorelsky
Volume 89 in the series Studia Judaica
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110770438

PDF & EPUB £141.00
Hardcover £141.00

eBook
Published: March 7, 2022
ISBN: 9783110770438
Hardcover
Published: March 21, 2022
ISBN: 9783110191448

About this book

Hannah M Cotton’s collected papers focus on questions which have fascinated her for over four decades: the concrete relationships between law, language, administration and everyday life in Judaea and Nabataea in particular, and in the Roman world as a whole. Many of the papers, especially those devoted to the Judean Desert documents of the 2nd century CE have been widely cited. Others, having appeared in less accessible publications, may not have received the attention they deserve.　 On the whole, rather than addressing the grand narratives of world or national history, they look at the texture of life, seeking to provide tentative answers to historical questions and interpretations by paying fine attention to the details of literary and, especially, documentary evidence. Taken together they illuminate fundamental, often legal, questions concerning daily life and the exercise of Roman rule and administration in the early imperial period, and especially, their impact on life as it was lived in the province and the period where Roman and Jewish history fatefully intersected. The volume includes a complete bibliography of her publications./blockquote>

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VanderKam elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

CONGRATULATIONS TO JAMES VANDERKAM: Notre Dame scholar of Dead Sea Scrolls elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences. HT Joseph Lauer.

One element of Professor VanderKam's multifacted work is new to me:

His next book, R.H. Charles: A Biography, will be published soon by Oxford University Press. Charles, a 19th- and 20th-century Irish biblical scholar who worked extensively on the Book of Jubilees, is one of VanderKam’s academic heroes.

Mine too. Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Canonical Scriptures volume 1 (MOTP1) was co-dedicated to Charles, on whom more here and links and here. I am looking forward to this biography.

And again, congratulations to Jim VanderKam for this much-merited honor.

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Phoenician necropolis excavated in Spain

PHOENICIAN WATCH: Workers discover ‘unprecedented’ Phoenician necropolis in southern Spain. Preliminary surveys in Osuna have turned up eight burial vaults as well as staircases (Sam Jones, The Guardian).

Archaeologists exploring the site – which was discovered amid the Roman ruins in the town of Osuna, 55 miles (90km) east of Seville – say the Phoenician-Carthaginian cemetery dates back to the fourth or fifth century BC and is highly unusual as such sites are normally found in coastal areas rather than so far inland.

In Spain, in this period, the ruins could be either Phoenician (from Lebanese colonizers) or Punic (from Carthaginian colonizers). Accordingly, cross-file under Punic Watch.

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More on the archaeology of the Battle of Aegates

MARINE ARCHAEOLOGY: The shipwrecks rewriting ancient history (BBC News).

For centuries, historians believed that any physical evidence of the pivotal Battle of the Aegates was long gone. Then came a chance discovery – which led to dozens of shipwrecks.

For more on the underwater archaeology of the Carthaginian defeat at the Aegates islands in the First Punic War, see here and links. I commented on the account of the battle by the ancient historian Polybius in relation to the archaeological discoveries here.

For many other posts on ancient shipwrecks, see here (as above) and links, plus here and here. Cross-file under Punic Watch and Marine (Maritime, Underwater) Archaeology.

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Agastya and the Golem

GOLEM WATCH: Two Religious Views Of Power: Agastya The Hindu, And A Jewish Golem – OpEd (Rabbi Allen S. Maller, Eurasia Review).

Rabbi Allen tell us about Agastya, a character in the Mahabharata who created a perfect artificial woman to marry. Then he goes on to Rabbi Judah Loew's legendary creation of the golem, which had a more complicated outcome.

This article has a long account of the golem legend. Bonus: there are four alternative endings.

For many PaleoJudaica posts on the golem tradition, start here and follow the links.

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Berlejung et al. (eds.), Writing and Re-Writing History by Destruction (Mohr Siebeck)

NEW BOOK FROM MOHR SIEBECK: Writing and Re-Writing History by Destruction. Proceedings of the Annual Minerva Center RIAB Conference, Leipzig, 2018. Research on Israel and Aram in Biblical Times III Edited by Angelika Berlejung, Aren M. Maeir, and Takayoshi M. Oshima. 2022. VII, 342 pages. Orientalische Religionen in der Antike 45. 134,00 € including VAT. cloth ISBN 978-3-16-161248-0.

Published in English.
This volume combines the papers held at the Minerva Center's »Research on Israel and Aram in Biblical Times« conference (Leipzig 2018) on the subject of writing and re-writing history by deliberate destruction in the regions of Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia. An international group of scholars studies the subject using a multi-perspective and interdisciplinary approach. Archeological studies, ancient Near Eastern studies, and biblical studies focused on the destruction of ancient sites in Israel and Judah in the 1st millennium BC. The perspective of the defeated Israelites, Jerusalemites, and Judeans is described in detail in the Old Testament and in postbiblical literature and shows that the destructions in the past were a cultural and identity creator of the first magnitude. The longue durée of the practice of reshaping the past through the deliberate destruction of a cultural heritage in order to shape the present according to current interests becomes evident based on the Neo-Assyrian Empire's practice up to the modern era and is demonstrated by the example of the Arabian-Muslim conquest of Aram as well as current Turkish politics.

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Biblical Studies Carnival 194

BRENT NIEDERGALL: BIBLICAL STUDIES CARNIVAL 194 FOR APRIL 2022. Star Wars edition.

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A Samaritan priestly lamp at Mount Gerizim

SAMARITAN WATCH: 2,300-year-old clay candle uncovered at Samaritan high priesthood compound in Samaria (J-Wire/TPS).

Netanel Elimelech, director of the Mount Gerizim site for the Nature and Parks Authority and the Civil Administration, said that the ancient candle was found in the compound of the high priesthood and is estimated to date to a time when Mount Gerizim “had a glorious Samaritan temple city, parallel to the Jewish Temple City in Jerusalem, about 2,300 years ago.”

The "candle" in the English text is clearly a mistranslation of the Hebrew of the original article. I don't have access to the latter, but I suspect the word was נֵר, which means "candle," but also an (ancient) "lamp." The photograph shows an ancient clay lamp.

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González-Salinero, Military Service and the Integration of Jews into the Roman Empire (Brill)

NEW BOOK FROM BRILL:

Military Service and the Integration of Jews into the Roman Empire

Series: The Brill Reference Library of Judaism, Volume: 72

Author: Raúl González-Salinero

According to Raúl González Salinero, the plurality of religious expressions within Judaism prior to the predominance of the rabbinical current disproves the assumption according to which some Jewish customs and precepts (especially the Sabbath) prevented Jews from joining the Roman army without renouncing their ancestral culture. The military exemption occasionally granted to the Jews by the Roman authorities was compatible with their voluntary enlistment (as it was in the Hellenistic armies) in order to obtain Roman citizenship. As the sources attest, Judaism did not pose any insurmountable obstacle to integration of the Jews into the Roman world. They achieved a noteworthy presence in the Roman army by the fourth century CE, at which time the Church’s influence over imperial power led to their exclusion from the militia armata.

Copyright Year: 2022

Prices from (excl. VAT): €105.00 / $127.00

E-Book (PDF)
Availability: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-50725-8
Publication Date: 28 Feb 2022

Hardback
Availability: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-50675-6
Publication Date: 10 Feb 2022

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Star Trek and the Golem tradition?

GOLEM WATCH: The Golem in Star Trek. From Seven of Nine to Gray to Picard (REBECCA KAPLAN, Star Trek).

For many PaleoJudaica posts on the Golem tradition, start here (cf. here) and follow the links.

For some posts on Star Trek, see here, here, here, here, and here.

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DSS fragments at the Vatican

VARIANT READINGS: Better Images of the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Vatican (Brent Nongbri). Brent notes that he has an earlier post on the fragments here.

Back in 2005, PaleoJudaica noted claims that the Vatican owned two small Dead Sea Scrolls fragments. See here, here, and here. And note the linked-to post at the old Megillot list by Stephen Goranson. These appear to be the same fragments. Goranson has additional comments at Nongbri's 2021 post, linked to above.

I agree that the one in paleo-Hebrew script is unlikely to be from the Book of Daniel, even though it shares a word with Daniel 11:36. I would be very surprised to see a copy of Daniel in paleo-Hebrew. Also, although there is little to go on, the beginning of the next line does not look like anything in the immediate context of that verse in Daniel.

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More on the Champollion exhibition

EXHIBITION REVIEW: Celebrating Champollion. (ahramonline).

A new Paris exhibition is celebrating Jean-François Champollion, the French decipherer of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics at the beginning of the 19th century and one of the founding figures of modern Egyptology, writes David Tresilian

For more on the Bibliothèque nationale de France's exhibition celebrating Champollion and the bicentennial of his decipherment of hieroglyphic (and demotic) Egyptian, see here.

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