Saturday, June 22, 2024

Encountering the Parables in Contexts Old and New (T&T Clark)

NEW BOOK FROM BLOOMSBURY/T&T CLARK:
Encountering the Parables in Contexts Old and New

T. E. Goud (Anthology Editor) , J.R.C. Cousland (Anthology Editor) , John P. Harrison (Anthology Editor)

Paperback
$39.95 $35.95

Hardback
$120.00 $108.00

Ebook (PDF)
$35.95 $28.76

Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
$35.95 $28.76

Product details

Published Mar 21 2024
Format Paperback
Edition 1st
Extent 296
ISBN 9780567706171
Imprint T&T Clark
Dimensions 9 x 6 inches
Series The Library of New Testament Studies
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

Description

The contributors to this book pursue three important lines of inquiry into parable study, in order to illustrate how these lessons have been received throughout the millennia. The contributors consider not only the historical and material world of the parables' composition, and focusing on the social, political, economic, and material reality of that world, but also seek to connect how the parables may have been seen and heard in ancient contexts with how they have been, and continue to be, seen and heard.
Intentionally allowing for a “bounded openness” of approach and interpretation, these essays explore numerous contexts, encounters and responses. Examining topics ranging from ancient harvest imagery and dependency relations to contemporary experience with the narratives and lessons of the parables, this volume seeks to link those very real ancient contexts with our own varied modern contexts.

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Friday, June 21, 2024

Oldest deep-sea shipwreck found off coast of Israel

MARINE ARCHAEOLOGY: Energy Company Finds Earliest Deep-sea Shipwreck in the World, and It's Canaanite. While scanning the seabed ahead of developing Israel's Orca natural gas field , Energean observed an anomaly that would change our understanding of ancient navigation skills (Ruth Schuster, Haaretz).
An energy company surveying the Mediterranean seafloor has discovered the earliest shipwreck ever found in the deep sea anywhere in the world: a Canaanite merchant vessel that sank 3,400 to 3,300 years ago, the Israel Antiquities Authority revealed on Thursday. Moreover, it designed and sent down a specially kitted robot to retrieve samples.

[...]

There's more on the Canaanite provenance, but briefly:
With the pots in hand, it turned out his identification from the initial pictures was correct. They were standard Canaanite jars common in Late Bronze Age Israel, Syria and Lebanon. That doesn't prove the crew was Canaanite, but the cargo sure was.
Question: does "Canaanite" here include Phoenician (i.e., from Lebanon), or is the material culture specific to the Land of Canaan?

The excavation involves cool use of a robot 🤖. I do like robots in the right context.

For more on ancient shipwrecks, see here and many related links. Run "shipwreck" through the search engine for specifics.

Cross-file under Maritime (Underwater) Archaeology.

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

Vermes centenary

IN MEMORY OF: Search for the Jewish Jesus. Alexander Faludy celebrates the life and legacy of Géza Vermes, born 100 years ago on Saturday (Church Times).
GÉZA VERMES (1924-2013) was born 100 years ago into a Jewish family in Makó, Hungary, but, at the age of six, was baptised — along with his parents — in the Roman Catholic Church. His eventful life would later involve ordination to the priesthood, a return to Judaism, appointment to a university chair at Oxford, and a voluminous output on the historical Jesus.

[...]

For many PaleoJudaica posts on Geza Vermes, see here and links and here and links.

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

More on Sennacherib's possible camps

HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY UPDATE: Long-lost Assyrian military camp devastated by 'the angel of the Lord' finally found, scientist claims. Has a scholar located two Assyrian military camps mentioned in the Hebrew bible? (Owen Jarus, Live Science).

This essay has a good summary of the sections of the underlying Near Eastern Archaeology article which deal with Lachish and Jerusalem. It also has some assessments of the article by other archaeologists. As usual with these things, not everyone is convinced.

Background here.

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

When was Jesus born?

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: When Was Jesus Born—B.C. or A.D.? (Megan Sauter).

This is an old one that I've linked to before, but it's good to return to the topic from time to time. There is a lot of confusion about it.

See also here, concerning a Bible and Interpretation essay by Robert Cargill. The essay link has rotted, but I have some of my own comments there.

I mostly use CE/BCE, rather than AD/BC, since the former is academically more neutral. But I don't care what other people do.

This also gives me the chance to double down about the metric system, which is made for robots 🤖 not humans.

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

Thursday, June 20, 2024

Walter (ed.), The Temporality of Festivals (De Gruyter, open access)

NEW BOOK FROM DE GRUYTER:
The Temporality of Festivals
Approaches to Festive Time in Ancient Babylon, Greece, Rome, and Medieval China

Edited by: Anke Walter

Volume 10 in the series Chronoi
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111366876

eBook
Published: April 1, 2024
ISBN: 9783111366876

Paperback
Published: April 1, 2024
ISBN: 9783111364865

About this book

Open Access

How can time become festive? How do festivals manage to make time ‘special’, to mark out a certain day or days, to distinguish them from ‘normal’, everyday time, and to fill them with meaning? And how can we reconstruct what festive time looked like in the past and what people thought about it?

While a lot of research has been done on festivals from the point of view of several scholarly disciplines, the specific temporality of festivals has not yet attracted sufficient attention. In this volume, scholars from different fields provide answers to the questions raised above, based on a fresh analysis of astronomical documents, calendars, and literary texts. Cultures as diverse as ancient Babylon, Greece and Rome, and medieval China all share a sense of calendrically recurring festive time as something special that needs to be carefully mapped out and preserved, often with great sophistication, and that gives us precious insights into the broader religious, political, and social dimensions of time within past cultures.

Regular PaleoJudaica readers are familiar with the Akitu Festival, the Babylonian New Year celebration. See here and links plus here.

Dunhuang in China might seem like a stretch, but PaleoJudaica has an interest there too. Fragments of Christian texts in Syriac and Jewish texts in Hebrew were excavated there, and even one or two medieval fragments of the Manichean version of the Book of Giants. See here and links and here and links.

Translations of the Book of Giants fragments from Dunhuang and (mostly) from nearby Turfan, as well as the fragments of the original Aramaic from Qumran, are coming out soon in More Old Testament Pseudepigrapha volume 2. The publication date is currently scheduled for April 2025.

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

Griffin, Olympiodorus: Life of Plato and On Plato First Alcibiades 1–9 (Bloomsbury, open access)

NEWLY OPEN-ACCESS BOOK FROM BLOOMSBURY:
Olympiodorus: Life of Plato and On Plato First Alcibiades 1–9

Michael Griffin (Anthology Editor)

Open Access

Paperback
$51.95 $46.75

Hardback
$175.00 $157.50

Product details

Published Jun 30 2016
Format Paperback
Edition 1st
Extent 256
ISBN 9781474295642
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Dimensions 9 x 6 inches
Series Ancient Commentators on Aristotle
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

Description

Olympiodorus (AD c. 500–570), possibly the last non-Christian teacher of philosophy in Alexandria, delivered these lectures as an introduction to Plato with a biography. For us, they can serve as an accessible introduction to late Neoplatonism. Olympiodorus locates the First Alcibiades at the start of the curriculum on Plato, because it is about self-knowledge. His pupils are beginners, able to approach the hierarchy of philosophical virtues, like the aristocratic playboy Alcibiades. Alcibiades needs to know himself, at least as an individual with particular actions, before he can reach the virtues of mere civic interaction. As Olympiodorus addresses mainly Christian students, he tells them that the different words they use are often symbols of truths shared between their faiths.

HT the AWOL Blog.

This book has been around for a while, but now it's free. It may be of interest to readers who would like to read another ancient life of Plato, albeit one centuries later and even more apocryphal than the one by Diogenes Laërtius. Alas, it doesn't give an account of the circumstances of Plato's death.

For the context regarding the newly recovered fragments from Herculaneum of what appears to be a life of Plato by Philodemus, see here and here.

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

The Golan’s Roman Road

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: The Golan’s Roman Road. A Roman road and Jewish rebellion (Nathan Steinmeyer).
This Roman highway would have been used for military transport, postal services, and to connect supply centers and economic hubs. But one thing it did not do was connect local villages to the rest of the Roman world. Instead, it appears to have passed the predominantly Jewish villages at a distance. While a possible explanation is that the road followed the most direct topographic route from the Sea of Galilee to Nawa, the presence of several watchtowers along the route could hint at a different reason.
Follow the link for a link to the recent underlying article in the journal Tel Aviv.

For PaleoJudaica posts on Roman roads in Israel, see the links collected here.

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

Wednesday, June 19, 2024

Sennacherib's camps identified?

HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY: Discovery of Neo-Assyrian Camp Allegedly Decimated by Biblical Angel (Nathan Falde, Ancient Origins).
In a new paper just published in the journal Near Eastern Archaeology, [archaeologist Stephen C.] Compton explained how he arrived at the conclusion that he had discovered a previously unrecognized Assyrian army camp looking down over the city of Jerusalem, dating to approximately the late eighth century BC. Fascinatingly, Compton’s process of discovery began with the discovery of another Assyrian archaeological site, found 42 miles (65 kilometers) south of Jerusalem at the site of the ancient city of Lachish.
This story began surfacing a few days ago. The headlines like this one made me wonder if it was credible, but it turns out to have been published in a peer review journal, which is as credible as we can manage. This Ancient Origins article gives a pretty good summary.

That article in Near Eastern Archaeology (87.2, June 2024) is behind the subscription wall, but I have it through my university access. It covers more sites than Lachish and Jerusalem and, not surprisingly, it does not mention the angel. The abstract is public:

Pp. 110-120: “The Trail of Sennacherib’s Siege Camps,” by Stephen C. Compton

Images of military conquest on Sennacherib’s palace walls often featured his siege camps. By comparing the visual and textual references to these camps with the surroundings of the cities he besieged (on site and via aerial and satellite imagery, archaeological and historical data, and early maps and surveys), likely locations are proposed for Sennacherib’s royal camps. These sites are found to have all had the same name on early maps, Mudawwara, which, in Arabic in the Middle Ages, denoted the enormous tent that housed the sultan on military expeditions. (At times, this name was prefaced with Khirbet al, indicating the ancient stone ruins thereof.) Examining all occurrences of this toponym within Judah and Philistia reveals a distribution consistent with what is known of Sennacherib’s invasion route and of the cities besieged. It also resolves some long-standing questions and contributes to identifying the locations of the cities of Libnah and Nob.

Naturally the media has been focusing on the camp at Jerusalem and the biblical claim that the angel of the Lord smote the Assyrian army there. Some of the headlines are temperate, others more exhuberant. A sampling:

New Method Helps Uncover Clues of Biblical Battle in Jerusalem (Brian Freeman, Newsmax.com)

Clues of bloody Biblical battle between angel of God and 185K invading soldiers uncovered in Jerusalem: new research (Hannah Sparks, New York Post)

Proof of Bible story about angels killing 185,000 soldiers in a night is uncovered after 2,700 years (Nikki Main, Daily Mail)

Discovery of Assyrian Military Base May Prove Biblical Battle of Angels Defending Jerusalem (Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz, Israel365News)

I struggle to imagine how an archaeological survey could "prove" that an angelic military intervention took place in antiquity, but there you have it.

We already knew about Sennacherib's campaign in this region. We have his own account as well as the biblical ones etc. But if it holds up, this new research may help us to understand it better. That is the real story.

For PaleoJudaica posts on Sennacherib's siege of Jerusalem and that story about the angel of the Lord, see here (scroll down a bit), here (cf. here), and here and links. And for still more on Sennacherib, see here and here.

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

Millard obituaries

OBITUARIES FOR PROFESSOR ALAN R. MILLARD:

Professor Alan R Millard (1937–2024) (Peter J. Williams, Tyndale House)

Obituary: Professor Alan Millard (Dr. Paul Lawrence and Dr. Bruce Routledge, University of Liverpool)

Professor Alan R. Millard (1937-2024) (Rob Bradshaw, Biblical Studies Blog)

Background here.

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

The latest on female scribes

THE ETC BLOG: On Female Scribes (Peter M. Head). Notes a new discussion in an article in a new open-access volume from De Gruyter.

For PaleoJudaica posts on female scribe from antiquity to the present, see the links collected here, plus here.

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

Tuesday, June 18, 2024

Coin hoard excavated in Lod dated to Gallus Revolt

ARCHAEOLOGY AND NUMISMATICS: Archaeologists Find Evidence of the Last Jewish Revolt Against Rome. Around 1,650 years ago, the Jews of Lod and the Galilee arose against Rome. The Gallus Revolt didn't go any better than the previous rebellions had (Ruth Schuster, Haaretz).
Thus the hoard of 94 coins from the time of the Gallus Revolt, the last Jewish rebellion against Rome, was belatedly regained, the IAA revealed on Sunday.

The stash had been placed under the floor of a 4th century building probably associated with the ancient Jewish community of Late Roman Lod on what is today Nordau Street. The coins were dated between 221 and 354 C.E.

The story is also covered by the Times of Israel:

Ancient Lod coin hoard reveals details of little-known 4th-century Jewish uprising. 94 coins found in a destroyed Jewish public building were buried during the short-lived Gallus Revolt, undertaken by the Jews during a time of Roman civil war (Gavriel Fiske)

and Live Science:

1,700-year-old 'emergency hoard' of coins dates to last revolt of Jews against Roman rule. Many of the silver and bronze coins were minted during the Gallus. Revolt during the Roman era (Jennifer Nalewicki)

For many PaleoJudaica posts on ancient Lod and its remarkable mosaics, start here and follow the links.

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

Review of Wollenberg, The Closed Book

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Written and Spoken Scripture in Wollenberg's The Closed Book (Tzvi Novick).
Wollenberg’s book compels us to keep firmly in mind what the trope of Written Torah v. Oral Torah tends to obscure, namely, that the rabbis absorbed, studied, and taught Scripture chiefly as an oral text. Surely, renewed attention to this fact will lead us to new conclusions about rabbinic scholasticism and perhaps also rabbinic theology.
For a statement by the author about her book, also at AJR, see here.

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

The Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament. What do the Dead Sea Scrolls say about Jesus? (Megan Sauter).
What do the Dead Sea Scrolls say about Jesus? Nothing.

What do they say about the world in which Jesus lived? Lots.

[...]

I tend to turn the picture around and look at the New Testament as contemporary evidence for a first-century messianic Jewish sect. But your roadmap may differ.

The 2015 underlying Bibical Archaeology Review article by James VanderKam is behind the subscription wall. But this summary essay is worth reading.

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

Monday, June 17, 2024

Review of McGrath, Christmaker: A Life of John the Baptist

READING ACTS: James F. McGrath, Christmaker: A Life of John the Baptist (Phil Long).
McGrath makes some rather bold claims in this popular-level book on John the Baptist. For example, “What became Christianity was an offshoot of the Baptist movement” (124). Jesus was a disciple or apostle of John (93), and “Jesus’s teaching was the gist of John’s message” (74). Christmaker challenges much of what most Bible readers think they know about John the Baptist.
The book was published last week.

Background here and links, plus here.

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

The Comparative Textual Criticism of Religious Scriptures (Brill)

NEW BOOK FROM BRILL:
The Comparative Textual Criticism of Religious Scriptures

Series:
Supplements to the Textual History of the Bible, Volume: 8

Volume Editors: Karin Finsterbusch, Russell Fuller, Armin Lange, and Jason Driesbach

This collection of articles uniquely brings into scholarly dialogue the textual history and criticism of authoritative literatures from diverse cultures: they study Mesopotamian literature, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Homeric epics, the Quran, and Hindu and Buddhist literatures with an interest in all matters of their textual transmission. Contributors address questions such as: What role does textual criticism play in the study of authoritative texts in these fields? How much variation exists in these textual traditions? Can you observe processes of textual standardization? What role does the oral transmission play? How are critical editions prepared? While these questions have produced a wealth of scholarly literature for each individual field, this volume is the first to study them from a comparative perspective.

Copyright Year: 2024

E-Book (PDF)
Availability: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-69362-3
Publication: 13 May 2024
EUR €129.00

Hardback
Availability: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-69175-9
Publication: 30 May 2024
EUR €129.00

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Sunday, June 16, 2024

O’Connor, The Moral Life According to Mark (T&T Clark)

NEW(ISH) BOOK FROM BLOOMSBURY/T&T CLARK:
The Moral Life According to Mark

M. John-Patrick O’Connor (Author)

Paperback
$39.95 $35.95

Hardback
$120.00 $108.00

Ebook (PDF)
$35.95 $28.76

Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
$35.95 $28.76

Product details

Published Nov 30 2023
Format Paperback
Edition 1st
Extent 216
ISBN 9780567705624
Imprint T&T Clark
Dimensions 9 x 6 inches
Series The Library of New Testament Studies
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

Description

M. John-Patrick O'Connor proposes that - in contrast to recent contemporary scholarship that rarely focuses on the ethical implications of discipleship and Christology - Mark's Gospel, as our earliest life of Jesus, presents a theological description of the moral life.

Arguing for Mark's ethical validity in comparison to Matthew and Luke, O'Connor begins with an analysis of the moral environment of ancient biographies, exploring what types of Jewish and Greco-Romanic conceptions of morality found their way into Hellenistic biographies. Turning to the Gospel's own examples of morality, O'Connor examines moral accountability according to Mark, including moral reasoning, the nature of a world in conflict, and accountability in both God's family and to God's authority. He then turns to images of the accountable self, including an analysis of virtues and virtuous practices within the Gospel. O'Connor concludes with the personification of evil, human responsibility, punitive consequences, and evil's role in Mark's moral landscape.

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