Blau Festschrift (Brill)

NEW BOOK FROM BRILL:

“An Inspired Man”

Studies in Judeo-Arabic Culture Dedicated to the Memory of Joshua Blau

Series: Études sur le judaïsme médiéval, Volume: 97

Volume Editors: Miriam Frenkel and Phillip I. Lieberman

This volume is dedicated to Professor Joshua Blau, of blessed memory. The articles included therein, written by his students and fellows, all deal with the Judeo-Arabic language and its associated culture. Among them are articles dealing with language, lexicography, cross-cultural relations, biblical translation, prayer, law, and poetics. The wide scope of material in this volume attests to the richness and breadth of Judeo-Arabic as well as to the expansive range of fields studied by Professor Blau himself.

Copyright Year: 2024

E-Book (PDF)
Availability: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-68657-1
Publication: 19 Feb 2024
EUR €149.00

The essays are in English and Hebrew. For more on the late Professor Blau, see here and here.

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Tomorrow is Assumption of Saint Methodius Day?

OLD CHURCH SLAVONIC WATCH: A Memorial to the Holy Brothers Cyril and Methodius will be a unifying international centre in the Spanish city of Malaga (Gergana Mancheva).

The first Bulgarian monument in the Kingdom of Spain will be inaugurated on 5 April, the eve of the Assumption of St Methodius for all Slavs and Bulgarians. It is dedicated to the holy brothers Cyril and Methodius and is located in a special place - in the park of the city of Málaga. It is located in a special place in Malaga.

The monument was erected in Malaga on the occasion of two anniversaries: the 1160th anniversary of the completion of the first Slavonic alphabet, the Glagolitic alphabet, and the 43rd anniversary of Pope John Paul II's declaration of Saints Cyril and Methodius as co-patrons of Europe (30 December 1980). In the words of the Pope, the two Slavic apostles are a bridge between East and West and have made an outstanding contribution to the cultural growth of the Old Continent and to the education of many generations of Europeans.

[...]

The monument is good news and I am always happy to see the two inventors of the Slavonic (Glagolitic) alphabet get some recognition. But what struck me in this article is that Saint Methodius had an assumption. Really? I didn't know that. Enoch would be proud!

The brothers Cyril and Methodius invented the Slavonic alphabet in the ninth century, thus not only converting the Slavs, but also preserving much ancient literature that otherwise would have been lost. That literature includes some intriguing Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. Not least among these is the book of 2 Enoch.

For more on the two saints and their feast days, and on Old Church Slavonic, see here and links.

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Nongbri on the Crosby-Schøyen Codex

VARIANT READINGS: The Upcoming Sale of the Crosby-Schøyen Codex (Just How Old is this Book?).

In my recent post on the upcoming sale of the Coptic Crosby-Schøyen Codex, which contains 1 Peter and Jonah, I noted that it was "dated to 300 CE ±50 years (and such dating may still be overly precise)." In this post Brent Nongbri mentions that it has also be subjected to radiocarbon dating and that some evidence points to date being at the late end of that range. So this may be an unusual case when we can narrow the range of an undated ancient manuscript to within a couple of decades.

The articles on the sale claim that this codex contains the earliest copies of the two biblical books. Maybe so for Coptic translations. But I pointed out that there are earlier fragments of the original Hebrew of Jonah among the Dead Sea Scrolls (4QXII^a, 4QXII^f, and 4QXII^g).

Add to those Murabba‛at 88, which includes fragments of the Hebrew text of Jonah, and the Nahal Hever Scroll, which contains a Greek translation of the Minor Prophets, including part of Jonah. More of the latter scroll was found a few years ago in the Cave of Horror.

Now Brent notes that P.Bodmer 8 is arguably an older copy of 1 Peter in the original Greek.

He has many other observations about the codex, as well as photos, so do have a look at his post.

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2024 LXX Summer Course at Trinity Western

WILLIAM A. ROSS: 2024 WEVERS INSTITUTE SEPTUAGINT SUMMER COURSE.

I’m very glad to post information today about the upcoming Septuagint Summer School that will be held at Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia, not too far away from Vancouver. As you can see if you scroll down to the very bottom of the Institute’s website here, it’s truly a beautiful place — and there’s good scholarship to boot!

This year, the course is from 24-28 June, just after the Montreal Septuagint Symposium, and focuses on translation and legal concepts in the Greek Pentateuch.

[...]

Follow the link for additional links and details.

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Review of Bird, Jesus among the gods

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: Jesus among the gods: early Christology in the Greco-Roman world.

Michael F. Bird, Jesus among the gods: early Christology in the Greco-Roman world. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2022. Pp. xi, 480. ISBN 9781481316750.

Review by
Riemer Roukema, Protestant Theological University. rroukema@pthu.nl

... To Bird, the similarities between portrayals of Jesus and various intermediary figures are undeniable, as well as the differences. He notes that no single figure can be regarded as a progenitor of early christology or can be considered the hermeneutic key that explains its development. He sees early christology as innovative since it puts Jesus on the level of the god of Israel. Provocatively he calls Jesus “a Jewish deity of the Greco-Roman world,” or more precisely, “an embodiment and expression of the God of Israel’s person and power.” ...

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Another attack on the (traditional) Tomb of Esther and Mordechai

VIOLENT VANDALISM: Ancient Jewish Mausoleum In Iran Attacked With Molotov Cocktails (Iran International).

A newly released video depicts Molotov cocktails being thrown on the ancient mausoleum of Esther and Mordechai in Hamadan during the early hours of Tuesday, a key archaeological site in both Jewish and Christian history.

[...]

For more on the tomb, including a previous fire attack, see the Purim-related post here.

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A mouse, a cat, and a chicken walked into a Neolithic farm ...

AVIAN (AND FAUNAL) ARCHAEOLOGY: Why Did the Chicken Cross the Silk Road? A few thousand years ago, somewhere in Southeast Asia, chickens moved in with us. And then we noticed that they were really good and so were their eggs (Ruth Schuster, Times of Israel). Good as in good to eat. And there's this:

How did we come to embrace the chicken? According to Spengler, Peters and the team, the chicken appeared in the central Thai archaeological record together with the appearance of rice and millet cultivation.

"The production and storage of these cereals may have acted as a magnet, thus initiating the chicken domestication process," they say.

What a coincidence. The house mouse also seems to have appeared in human habitats more or less simultaneously with the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, closely followed by the cat. It's become fashionable to say cats "domesticated us" though they didn't selectively breed us, as far as we know. They moved in with us because they wanted to eat the rodents congregating to share our crops and crumbs, just like the chicken would several thousand years later – apparently.

De haan, de kat en het muisje

As for ancient Judaism:

The Israeli archaeological record also features the odd eggshell, including in Jerusalem from 2,600 years ago and a whole egg from 1,000 years ago, which survived the ages intact only to be broken by accident in the lab.

For those two eggshells, see here and here. For more on the domestication of chickens in ancient Israel (Idumea?), see here.

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

Ancient Coptic biblical codex up for auction

FOR SALE: One of the oldest books in existence expected to fetch over $2.6 million at auction (Christine Kiernan, Reuters).

The Coptic Crosby-Schoyen Codex, dated to 300 CE ±50 years (and such dating may still be overly precise):

The 104 pages (52 leaves) were written by one scribe over a period of 40 years at a monastery in upper Egypt and are preserved behind plexiglass. The codex contains the first epistle of Peter and the Book of Jonah.

This may be the earliest copy of Jonah in Coptic translation, but there are substantial earlier fragments of the Hebrew original among the Dead Sea Scrolls. See the three Minor Prophets scrolls 4QXII^a, 4QXII^f, and 4QXII^g, published by Russell Fuller in Discoveries in the Judaean Desert XV.

The earliest surviving codex (book with bound-together pages) may be the El-Hiba papyrus (Graz, UBG Ms 1946), perhaps dating as early as the mid-third century BCE. See here, here, and here, but with some cautionary comments by Brent Nongbri here.

These details aside, the Crosby-Schoyen Codex is quite important. If it must be put up for sale, I very much encourage the buyer to donate it to a museum, preferably one in Egypt. For precedent, see here.

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Herodium region declared "State Land"

POLITICS AND ARCHAEOLOGY: Israel appropriates 42 acres in West Bank’s Etzion Bloc, declaring it state land. Gush Etzion mayor hails move that will allow tourism development at Herodium site; Smotrich orders demolition of three illegal Palestinian buildings over terror shooting (JEREMY SHARONand SAM SOKOL, Times of Israel).

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced Monday that the Civil Administration, an agency in the Defense Ministry, has declared 170 dunams (42 acres) of land surrounding the Herodium archaeological site in the West Bank region of the Etzion Bloc as “state land,” meaning land that is not privately owned and can be used for various purposes, including settlement development.

[...]

As you might imagine, reaction to this development is mixed.

For many PaleoJudaica posts on Herod the Great's palace-fortress, Herodium, and its excavation, start here and follow the links. For the archaeology of the Gush Etzion region more generally, see here and links, plus here and links, here, and here.

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

Cordoni, Reconfiguring the Land of Israel (Brill)

NEW BOOK FROM BRILL:

Reconfiguring the Land of Israel

A Rabbinic Project

Series:
The Brill Reference Library of Judaism, Volume: 76

Author: Constanza Cordoni

This book is about ways in which the land of Israel, the homeland of the most paradigmatic of all diasporas, was envisioned in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages in the literature of the sages. It is about the Land according to the redefined Judaism that emerged in the centuries following the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE. This Judaism replaced the temple cult with Torah study - a study that pertained in part to that very temple cult, that became a portable homeland, and that reconfigured the Land.

Copyright Year: 2024

E-Book (PDF)
Availability: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-69676-1
Publication: 01 Mar 2024

Hardback
Availability: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-69675-4
Publication: 01 Mar 2024
EUR €145.00

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Isaac Luria, businessman

GENIZA FRAGMENT OF THE MONTH (MARCH 2024): Lionising Luria: Mosseri III.232 (Ben Outhwaite).

In fact, it is only the professional, commercial activities with which Luria supported himself and his family that leave a few traces in the Genizah, wholly from the period of his life spent in Egypt. For now I’m focusing on the autograph letter by Luria preserved in the Mosseri Genizah Collection, which is the sole document written by Isaac Luria himself that we have identified among the Cambridge collections ...

For PaleoJudaica posts on the sixteenth-century mystic Isaac Luria (Ha'ARI) and on Lurianic Kabbalah, start here and follow the links.

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

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

Biblical Studies Carnival 215

ZWINGLIUS REDIVIVUS: The March Carnival Featuring The ‘Jewish Scriptures in Earliest Christianity’ Conference (Jim West).

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

Scratched Tsade for April 1st?

New Hebrew letter from Dead Sea Scrolls announced in Language Academy April Fool's joke. While assumed to be a light-hearted joke, the post provides a practical solution to a sound that the current Aleph Bet doesn't cover (Jerusalem Post).

The new letter, titled a "scratched tsade," appears as a mirror image of the Hebrew letter tsade (which makes the "ts" sound) and supposedly represents the "ch" sound, which, until now, was represented by a tsade followed by an apostrophe.

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More on that Coptic Psalter

VARIANT READINGS: The Mudil Psalter. Brent Nongbri provides some background, including why the manuscript is nicknamed the Pillow Psalter.

My first post on the psalter is here.

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Sara Japhet (1934-2024)

SAD NEWS: Passing of Prof. Sara Japhet (Shalom Berger, H-Judaic).

H-Judaic mourns the passing of Sara Japhet (1934-2024) , the Yehezkel Kaufmann Professor of Bible, emerita at the Hebrew University, an Israel Prize winner, former director of the National Library of Israel, head of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University and of the World Union of Jewish Studies -- one of Israel's leading Bible and Judaic Studies scholars, and one of the first women ever to hold many of the positions she attained.

[...]

May her memory be for a blessing.

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