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Both Philo of Alexandria (c. 25 B.C.E. – 50 C.E.) and some later rabbinic interpreters insist that Moses remained celibate so that he might always be pure and ready to hear YHWH, but each arrived at this conclusion through a different approach.
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Michaël Girardin, L'offrande et le tribut: histoire politique de la fiscalité en Judée hellénistique et romaine (200 a.C.-135 p.C.). Scripta antiqua, 152. Bordeaux: Ausonius Éditions, 2022. Pp. 541. ISBN 9782356134356Cue a "What have the Romans ever done for us?" joke.Review by
Noah Kaye, Michigan State University. kayenoah@msu.edu... Should we understand from this that Roman, indeed all foreign taxes were especially hated in Judea? Was the theocracy of (ancient) Judaism, with its para-fiscal tithes and sacrifices and its elaborate system of finance for the maintenance of cult and priestly caste fundamentally anti-fiscal in its stance toward temporal power? Were Jews fiscally irreconcilable to the Roman ecumene, as in the vision of a second-century rabbi: “Everything that [the Romans] established, they established only for their purposes. They established marketplaces, to place prostitutes in them; bathhouses, to pamper themselves; and bridges, to collect taxes from all who pass over them” (b. Šabb. 33b)?
No, argues Michaël Girardin, in a daring and erudite cultural and psychological history of taxation in Judea between Cyrus and Hadrian. Judean subjects of the Hellenistic and early Roman empires, Girardin argues, only came to resist foreign taxation at moments of full-blown crisis, when charismatic leaders distorted fiscal reality in order to foment pious rebellions. ...
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Highlighting: “A Life of Psalms in Jewish Late Antiquity” by AJ Berkovitz. University of Pennsylvania Press. 2023. English. Hardcover. 274 pages. ISBN-13: 978-1512824186.Sefer Tehillim, The Book of Psalms, incorporates prayer, healing, learning, piety. It permeates our prayers, encompassing emotions of loss and grief, shouts of joy and jubilation, and words of thanksgiving and praise—but the book and its history in Judaism is misunderstood. Below are 10 little-known truths about sefer Tehillim and its origins. In my recently published book, “A Life of Psalms in Jewish Late Antiquity,” I present one through five in greater detail; Numbers six through 10 is the subject of my current book-in-progress.
[...]
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A £2.4 million-pound project dedicated to studying ancient religious manuscripts has been announced, with Glasgow University professors taking part in the research.By the way, Dr Garrick Allen has a PhD from the Divinity School of the University of St. Andrews. Garrick's work has come up many times at PaleoJudaica over the last decade.The project, titled Paratexts Seeking Understanding is combining the talents of the university’s School of Critical Studies and the School of Psychology and Neuroscience, and is funded by the Templeton Religious Trust.
[...]
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Caesarea, a coastal city in Israel, is known for its rich historical and archaeological significance. In 1950, a remarkable discovery took place in a residential area of Caesarea, revealing a stunning mosaic depicting birds and animals. This archaeological treasure, referred to as the Bird Mosaic, belonged to a magnificent Byzantine-period palace or mansion. After being carefully excavated, protected, and re-uncovered several times, it continues to captivate visitors today. Additionally, the excavation unearthed a one-of-a-kind sigma-shaped glass-gold table, shedding light on the opulent lifestyle of Byzantine Caesarea.I have posted on Caesarea's bird mosaic and the glass-gold table here and here, but the links have long since rotted. High time to mention them again.[...]
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‘MS A’ is the best-preserved early exemplar of the Mishna without Talmud or commentaries known to us.13 No less than thirty-six folios, spanning over thirty-one shelfmarks, have been discovered in the Geniza collections, today in Cambridge, Oxford, St. Petersburg, Jerusalem, New York and Toronto. These fragments stem from various tractates belonging to the orders Nashim, Neziqin, Qodashim and Toharot ...Thus there is a lot more to that MS A than the final leaf. But that leaf has been found and it does include a (damaged but reconstructable) dated colophon. You have to read to the end to learn that the colophon dates the manuscript to the mid-ninth century.
This essay discusses MS A in technical detail and in the context of the other earliest manuscripts of the Mishnah from the Cairo Geniza and elsewhere.
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The Year 2023 will mark the sixtieth anniversary of the death of Prof. Yehezkel Kaufmann. His revolutionary thinking had a strong impact on biblical studies, Jewish thought, and beyond, especially through his two influential multi-volume works, Exile and the Alien Land (1929-1930) and The History of Israelite Religion (1937-1957). Sixty years after his death, we seek to examine critically the impact of his thought and his legacy.The event takes place at Bar-Ilan University. Follow the link for information on how to propose a paper. The proposal deadline is 31 August 2023. The conference takes place on 26-27 December 2023.
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Noah Hacham, Tal Ilan, Corpus papyrorum judaicarum, volume 5: the early-Roman period (30 BCE–117 CE). Berlin; Jerusalem: De Gruyter and Magnes Press, 2022. Pp. xxvii, 217. ISBN 9783110785999I noted the publication of volume 4 here.Review by
William Horbury, University of Cambridge. wh10000@cam.ac.uk... The old and new volumes alike gather papyri, ostraca, and inscriptions associated with Jews and Judaism, giving literature, introduction, text, English translation, and commentary. The region in view continues to be Egypt; papyri found in the Judaean wilderness and nearby are not included. Volume 4 (2020), on the Ptolemaic period, and volume 5, now under review, on the early Roman period, supplement volumes 1 and 2, respectively. ...
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For more on the Mazzarón I, which is already in Cartagena and which is already (being?) restored, and the Mazzarón II, see here and here and links.
Note the variable spellings Mazarrón and Mazzarón, both sometimes without the accent.
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The burials may be connected to Qedarite traders who operated in northern Arabia and the Negev in this period or to the Minaeans, a people who hailed from an ancient kingdom in modern-day Yemen, [IAA archaeologists] Pasternak and Erickson-Gini suggest.Still, the Negev is a long way away from southern Arabia, so why were the bodies buried here? And why is it mostly (or all) women?
The location and the varied provenance of the artifacts found with the bodies suggests that the women were not from Arabia itself. But they may have been headed there, the archaeologists speculate.
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This year marks the 100th anniversary of the introduction of the worldwide Daf Yomi (“a page a day”) study of the Talmud, as well as the 500th anniversary of the first printing of the Talmud.[...]
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.
In our next bioarchaeography, we’ll be archaeology [sic] to explore the life of the Nabataean king, Aretas IV. He is only mentioned once in the Bible in connection with the apostle Paul’s escape from Damascus. He is also indirectly involved in the drama surrounding John the Baptist’s death, as the prophet had publicly criticized Herod Antipas for divorcing his first wife, the daughter of Aretas, to marry Herodias (Lk 3:19).That biblical mention is in 2 Corinthians 11:32.[...]
PaleoJudaica posts involving King Aretas IV are here and here. One involving his coins is here.
Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
Jeremiah Coogan, Eusebius the evangelist: rewriting the fourfold gospel in late antiquity. Cultures of reading in the ancient Mediterranean. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xiv, 234. ISBN 9780197580042For much more on this book, see yesterday's post here.Review by Anna Lefteratou, University of Cambridge. al2083@cam.ac.uk
... Overall, the monograph is an excellent in-depth study of the reading innovations effectuated by Eusebius’ Canons. This is a brilliant addition to the blossoming scholarship on Eusebius, the Canon Tables, and to the Reading and Writing Cultures in Antiquity that would be of interest to Classicists and early Christianity scholars alike.
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AJR is pleased to host the #SBLAAR2022 review panel of Jeremiah Coogan's Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewriting the Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2022). This book review panel took place at the annual meeting for the Society of Biblical Literature in Denver, Colorado, on November 19, 2022. ...The first essay:
Five Initial Thoughts on Eusebius the Evangelist (Paul Dilley).
My subsequent comments, organized as five initial reflections, were prompted by Coogan’s many strong insights, and in response to the ongoing holes and ambiguities in our source material.The second essay:
Echoes of Eusebius in Syriac (Marion Pragt)
Coogan presents his book as an “invitation to reexamine encounters between textual artifacts and their users” (p. 177). Inspired by Coogan’s work, I would like to explore some of the ways in which gospel authorship and the parallels and differences between individual gospels were imagined and encountered by Syriac-using Christians in late ancient and early medieval times.The third:
Eusebius, the Evangelist, and the Rabbinic Mapping of Knowledge (Monika Amsler).
While Eusebius added a cosmic dimension to the four gospels by mapping them out based on an (astronomical) table, the Talmud seems to be the cosmos created by tables that linked the content of the Babylonian rabbinic library (as the sum of all books rather than one specific collection) associatively with each other and with the Mishnah.The fourth:
Similar Things: Reflections On Eusebius The Evangelist (Jennifer Wright Knust)
Since I have no objections to Coogan’s analysis (everyone should just read this book already), I will structure my own response around two areas where I think Coogan and/or scholarship after Coogan could go next: (1) further analysis of what the “harmony of the Gospels” meant to the ancients who claimed it (or better, to follow Coogan: how a claim like “harmony of the Gospels” was used) and (2) a reconsideration of what an “evangelist” is or can be. ...Jeremiah Coogan's response:
Poetic Geography: Reading Eusebius’ Fourfold Gospel
I am grateful to each of my interlocutors in this forum for their generous engagement with Eusebius the Evangelist.[3] In what follows, I structure my response around three themes: (1) technologies and practices, (2) readers, and (3) imagination. These three themes interweave with one another as we consider how Eusebius’s reconfigured Gospel “articulat[es] a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal.”[4][...]
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By "oldest book," the article means the oldest "codex" that is, a book with pages bound inside a more durable cover (as opposed to a scroll).
For more on early history of the codex, see here and links and here.
UPDATE (28 June): More here.
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With chapters on Avestan literature and pre-Islamic official documents.
Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.