Richey, Visions of Gods and Monsters (PhD thesis)

THE AWOL BLOG: Visions of Gods and Monsters: Levantine and Mesopotamian Iconographies of Divine Combat and Their Textual Impressions. An open-access 2019 University of Chicago PhD Thesis by Madadh Pyrene Richey.

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What is a word and when did we decide that?

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: In the Beginning, Was There a Word? (Aaron J. Koller).

“In the beginning was the word” (John 1:1)—but what is a word?

A “word” is a thing, a concept, that seems clear from afar, but gets fuzzier the harder we look at it. Within English, is “birthday” one word or two? What about “wedding day”? If you thought it was obvious that “birthday” is one word but “wedding day” two, it is because of the way they are written.

Similarly, what gives us the idea that a written sentence is made up of individual words? ...

Surprisingly, the invention of the alphabet only made matters more confusing.

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Cross, The Poetics of Plot in the Egyptian and Judean Novella (PhD thesis)

THE AWOL BLOG: The Poetics of Plot in the Egyptian and Judean Novella. An open-access 2022 University of Chicago PhD thesis by Joseph John Cross. Downloadable for free.

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Why is Hebrew written right to left?

PHILOLOGOS: How Hebrew Came to Be Written From Right to Left. Hebrew was once written in both directions. How did it fix its direction, and what does that show about the history of writing in general? (Mosaic Magazine).

If the word "Boustrophedon" is not already in your vocabulary, this is your chance to add it.

For more on that lice comb inscribed with the earliest Canaanite sentence, see here.

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Review of a new edition of the Life of Apollonius of Tyana

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: Flavius Philostratus. Vita Apollonii Tyanei.

Gerard Boter, Flavius Philostratus. Vita Apollonii Tyanei. Bibliotheca scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana, 2043. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022. Pp. lxiii, 322. ISBN 9783110218824

Review by
Tomás Fernández, University of Buenos Aires, Conicet. Tomas.Fernandez@conicet.gov.ar

[...]

All in all, Boter’s edition has made significant advances in all major features of critical editions. His collations are more systematic, his stemma more solid, and the conjectures he includes are enough to allow the reader to picture, even in problematic cases, what the genuine reading may be.

For more on the first-century itinerant sage Apollonius of Tyana, especially in relation to Jesus, see here and links.

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On the European "Geniza"

GENIZA WATCH: The European Genizah. Thousands of Hebrew manuscript fragments were discovered in Central Europe, where they had been used by Christians to bind books (Simcha Emanuel, Tablet Magazine). Excerpts:

The European Genizah is entirely different [from the Cairo Geniza]. For the most part, its contents reflect the hundreds of manuscripts that have been preserved from that era. It therefore contains relatively few innovations. The European Genizah does, however, have a certain advantage. While the Cairo Genizah preserves the books that had reached a single city, the European Genizah contains the remnants of libraries from dozens of Jewish communities throughout Central Europe, and thus offers a comprehensive snapshot of the culture of Central European Jewry during the late medieval and early modern eras. ...

I mentioned above that most fragments discovered in the European Genizah come from works that were very prevalent in Central Europe at the end of the Middle Ages: Scripture and its commentaries, prayer books, the Talmud and its traditional commentaries, and familiar halakhic works. Most of these works were already available to us both in printed editions and in dozens of complete manuscripts. Thus, the European Genizah has not yielded much new material. Nevertheless, the Genizah makes novel contributions to a variety of disciplines.

I noted the author's book, Hidden Treasures from Europe here and a more recent book on the European Geniza here.

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Want to do archaeology this summer?

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Finding an Archaeological Dig. Answering your questions about excavating the biblical world (Nathan Steinmeyer).

It may not seem like it, but summer will be here soon. If you are thinking of volunteering at an archaeological dig in the Holy Land, now is the time to make plans. This essay is a good place to start.

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Waller, with Molin, The Bible in the Bowls (open access)

NEW BOOK FROM OPENBOOK PUBLISHERS/CUP:

The Bible in the Bowls
A Catalogue of Biblical Quotations in Published Jewish Babylonian Aramaic Magic Bowls

Daniel James Waller (author) Dorota Molin (contributions by)

Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures 16

The Bible in the Bowls represents a complete catalogue of Hebrew Bible quotations found in the published corpus of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic magic bowls. As our only direct epigraphic witnesses to the Hebrew Bible from late antique Babylonia, the bowls are uniquely placed to contribute to research on the (oral) transmission of the biblical text in late antiquity; the pre-Masoretic Babylonian vocalisation tradition; the formation of the liturgy and the early development of the Jewish prayer book; the social locations of biblical knowledge in late antique Babylonia and socio-religious typologies of the bowls; and the dynamics of scriptural citation in ancient Jewish magic. In a number of cases, the bowls also contain the earliest attestations of biblical verses not found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Pre-dating the next available evidence by four to five centuries, the bowls are a valuable resource for biblical text critics.

By making these valuable witnesses to the Hebrew Bible easily available to scholars, The Bible in the Bowls is designed to facilitate further research by linguists, liturgists, biblical text critics, and students of Jewish magic. It collates and transcribes each biblical verse as it appears in the published bowls, furnishes details of the bowls’ publication, and notes various features of interest. The catalogue is also accompanied by an accessible introduction that briefly introduces the incantation bowls, surveys their deployment of scripture in light of their magical goals, and discusses the orthography of the quotations and what this can tell us about the encounter with the biblical text in late antique Babylonia

HT the AWOL Blog.

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Profile of Michael Langlois

NORTHWEST SEMITIC EPIGRAPHY: How an Unorthodox Scholar Uses Technology to Expose Biblical Forgeries. Deciphering ancient texts with modern tools, Michael Langlois challenges what we know about the Dead Sea Scrolls (Chanan Tigay, Smithsonian Magazine).

But ancient inscriptions, whether sacred or mundane, don’t always survive unblemished. To decipher them, Langlois draws on an impressive range of academic training. He holds three master’s degrees—theology, ancient Middle Eastern languages and civilization, and archaeology and linguistics—and a doctorate in history and philology from the Sorbonne. But his facility with sophisticated technologies, some of his own design (he briefly worked constructing simulations to chart the route of a high-speed train through a mountain tunnel), has armed him with techniques that allow him to make sense of texts so badly damaged by age, climate or human folly that they are now nearly illegible. His approach, which combines the close linguistic and paleographical analysis of ancient writings with advanced scientific tools—from multispectral imaging to artificial intelligence-assisted “texture mapping”—can sometimes make long-gone inscriptions come back to life.

Or it can bury them for good—as in his most widely publicized feat of scholarly detective work, an exposé involving arguably the greatest archaeological discovery of the 20th century.

This is an excellent biographical piece on Strasbourg epigrapher, Professor Michael Langlois. PaleoJudaica has cited his work many times, notably on the Maresha archive and on debunking fake Dead Sea Scroll fragments. You can also find much valuable material on his website.

Chanan Tigay, who is the son of biblical scholar Jeffrey Tigay, is a journalist who is well known in PaleoJudaica circles for his book on the Shapira Scroll fragments. (See here, cf. here, and follow the many links.)

For more on the recent claim to have established the reading "the house of David" on the Mesha Stele, see here and here. The BAR article is behind the subscription wall. I have not seen the photographs and have no particular view on the question.

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Review of Kotzé, Images and Ideas of Debated Readings in the Book of Lamentations

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Images and Ideas of Debated Readings in the Book of Lamentations (Aron Tillema).

Gideon R. Kotzé. Images and Ideas of Debated Readings in the Book of Lamentations. Mohr Siebeck: Tübingen, 2020.

In Images and Ideas of Debated Readings in the Book of Lamentations, Gideon R. Kotzé hones in on several cases of disputed readings in the book of Lamentations where scholarship has not reached a consensus. In a number of places, the textual representatives appear strange to modern interpreters, so these “debated readings” are often emended with recourse to comparative philology, or according to the reader’s poetic sensibilities. Kotzé, however, asks readers to reconsider when and for what reason emendation is necessary. If the text comes from a cultural world far different than our own, then we ought to anchor those cases in the same world that produced them. ...

I noted the publication of the book here.

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Podcast on Babatha

JEWISH UNPACKED: Listen: Babatha: The Jewish mom of ancient times.

Yael: So, who is she? I’ve never heard of her.

Schwab: You have not heard of her. And she’s not very well-known. We’re gonna talk about Babatha and her story, but part of what’s really interesting is, she’s kind of thoroughly unremarkable in a lot of ways. In contrast to a lot of the characters we’ve talked about, Josephus, Sabbatai Zevi, Dona Gracia Nasi, Saul of Tarsus, Babatha did not have a huge impact on Jewish history. She’s not a major protagonist. She didn’t lead a movement. She didn’t have followers. And the truth is, we only talk about her and know about her because of what her documents tell us about history.

Yael: We’re actually getting a sense of what a regular person’s life was like.

I have not heard of Schwab and Yael before, but this podcast is meticulously researched and also entertaining.

Babatha left us a substantial archive of her personal papers during the Bar Kokhba revolt. For more on her and on the Cave of Letters, where her documents were found, see the links collected here

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On the cherubim

ANGELOLOGY: The Cherubim: From Guardians of Eden to Auschwitz (James A. Diamond , Marginalia).

Anxiety of Cherubim

I have been thinking for quite some time now about the significance of angels in the Jewish tradition to the extent that I devoted an entire chapter to them in a book on Jewish philosophical theology attempting to lend them some respectability. The problem that continues to vex is how to wrest meaning from creatures that are mythological figments of ancient cultures. They appear to be remnants of a pagan imagination and metaphysics, and yet they populate monotheistic Judaism’s canonical texts from the biblical, through the classical rabbinic, and the kabbalistic traditions. ...

For more on the cherubim, see here and links.

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Review of Caldwell, The Fifth Gospel

FOLLOW-UP NOVEL: Review: The Fifth Gospel ( Michael D. Langan, NBC-2).

Ian Caldwell’s second novel, “The Fifth Gospel”, a murder mystery set in the Vatican in 2004, took ten years to write. ...

“The Fifth” comes after Caldwell’s mega-hit, “The Rule of Four”, written with his boyhood friend, Dustin Thomason. Caldwell is a Princeton grad; Thomason a Harvard grad. “The Rule’s” plot concerned, among other things, senior college students at Princeton in 1999 trying to solve a mystery that appeared in a handsome book published in Venice in 1499.

Sounds like an amusing, if predictable, romp through conspiracy-theory-ville. There is an ancient Gospel hidden in the Vatican which maybe mentions the Shroud of Turin! The finder is murdered! Dark forces are at work! All the things!

The novel was published in 2015, so it isn't new. I either didn't hear about it then, or didn't get around to mentioning it. But I just ran across this reprinted review, so here it is.

I enjoyed The Rule of Four. I reviewed it briefly here. See also here.

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Review of The Language of Colour in the Bible

WILLIAM A. ROSS: THE LANGUAGE OF COLOUR IN THE BIBLE (A SHORT REVIEW).

Today I want to draw attention to a fascinating new book dealing with linguistic theory and biblical lexicography, two areas of research that are near and dear to my heart. This volume, entitled The Language of Colour in the Bible: Embodied Colour Terms Related to Green, was edited by a team of scholars that includes my friend and colleague in philology, Anna Angelini, who was kind enough to send me a copy.

[...]

I noted the publication of the book here.

For PaleoJudaica posts on language and ancient color perception, see here (cf. here) and links.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.