Most, Variants and Variance in Classical Textual Cultures (De Gruyter, open access)

NEW BOOK FROM DE GRUYTER:

Variants and Variance in Classical Textual Cultures
Errors, Innovations, Proliferation, Reception?

Edited by: Glenn W. Most
Funded by: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin / UB
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111054360

Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter
Copyright year: 2024
Audience: Scholars in the fields of classical studies, philology, historical linguistic and textual criticism Pages
Front matter: 18
Main content: 457
Illustrations: 35
Coloured Illustrations: 5
Keywords: Classical philology; Comparison of cultures; Edition; Historical linguistics

eBook
Published: August 19, 2024
ISBN: 9783111054360

Hardcover (£100.50)
Published: August 19, 2024
ISBN: 9783111017105

About this book

Open Access

Given the limited durability of most textual supports, texts must be reproduced if they are to survive. And given the proliferation over time of users, practices, and places which need to have access to the texts that are important for cultural institutions, this is particularly true for authoritative texts. But the reproduction of texts by traditional means – either orally or by hand – inevitably produces variations. These variations can arise because of inattention, confusion, misunderstanding, deliberate modification, physical damage, and many other factors. In general, the more a text is reproduced, the more variations are likely to occur. But although the fact of textual variation in general is doubtless an anthropological universal, the specific forms it takes and the specific attitudes to its occurrence seem to vary widely from culture to culture. How variations develop in different cultures, on the basis of which forms of scholarly practices, collaborations, and institutional frameworks; what variants say about a culture’s understandings of text, authorship, and collective authorship; what happens when variants become creative and generate their own strands of tradition; to what degree changes in transmission media and processes of distribution, translations, or the migration of texts into different cultural or institutional contexts can influence or be influenced by the development of variants – these are the questions that this book addresses in a historical and culturally comparative perspective.

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Review of Debié, Alexandre le Grand en syriaque

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: Alexandre le Grand en syriaque. Maître des lieux, des savoirs et des temps.

Muriel Debié, Alexandre le Grand en syriaque. Maître des lieux, des savoirs et des temps. Bibliothèque de l'Orient chrétien, 7. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2024. Pp. 656. ISBN 9782251454900.

Review by
Corinne Jouanno, Université de Caen-Normandie. corinne.jouanno@unicaen.fr

Dans ce gros volume de 656 pages, Muriel Debié présente un très riche dossier de témoignages sur Alexandre, comprenant à la fois des textes traduits du grec et de l’arabe et des écrits originaux en langue syriaque. L’ouvrage comporte trois parties, correspondant très exactement à ses trois sous-titres et à trois types de représentation d’Alexandre, en roi conquérant (“maître des lieu”), en souverain philosophe (“maître des savoirs”) et en figure-pivot dans la chronologie du monde (“maître des temps”).

[...]

For an English translation by Google Translate, see here.

For many posts on Alexander the Great and his connection with ancient Jewish traditions, notably in the Alexander Romance, see here and links (cf. here). For posts dealing specifically with the Alexander Romance, see here and links. For an English translation of the Syriac version, see here. For Josephus on Alexander and the Book of Daniel, see here.

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They are raising the Mazzarón II

PHOENICIAN WATCH: Murcia government excavates 7th century BC Phoenician ship in Mazarrón: “It’s a historic day” (MR. Ricky Martin, Top Buzz Times).

The headline would be more accurate to say that the Murcia goverment has started to excavate the shipwreck. The archaeologists have only brought up one piece so far, but that's a start!

The piece brought to the surface is a part of the arc of the ship belonging to the starboard side, which will give way to the process of salvaging the rest of this precious wreck and to the subsequent restoration and study works, in order to arrive in the best conditions for its future conservation and exhibition.

PaleoJudaica has been following the project to raise the Mazzarón II for some years. It will be a process up bringing it up section by section, then reassembling and restoring it. It is good to see that the extraction has finally started.

Background here and links. Note the variable spellings Mazarrón (Mazarron) and Mazzarón (Mazzaron).

Cross-file under Marine (Maritime, Underwater) Archaeology.

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JSS 69.2 (2024)

A NEW ISSUE: JOURNAL OF SEMITIC STUDIES Volume 69, Issue 2, Autumn 2024.

Includes, among other goodies, an article by Mila Neishtadt on a phrase in the Gezer Calendar and a review of The Oxford Annotated Mishnah. But everything seems to be behind the subscription wall.

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The lex talionis in the Bible and in cuneiform from Hazor

PROF. WAYNE HOROWITZ: An Eye for an Eye or for Shekels: Canaan’s Cuneiform Laws (TheTorah.com).

The cuneiform Laws of Hazor, from the first half of the 2nd millennium B.C.E., suggest that biblical laws had roots in Canaanite law. This challenges, for example, the idea that the Bible’s lex talionis was borrowed from Hammurabi’s laws. While some ancient Near Eastern laws draw distinctions between social classes, Leviticus later makes clear that all human lives are equally valuable.

I noted the discovery of the "Laws of Hazor" tablet in 2010 here and here.

For more on the efforts to find a cuneiform archive at Hazor, see here and links. Apart from a few fragments like this one, those efforts are still unsuccessfu after forty years.

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Albright Should Have Attended Penn?

THE INSTITUTE OF HISTORY, ARCHAEOLOGY AND EDUCATION BLOG: The State of Biblical Archaeology and Literature. Albright Should Have Attended Penn (Peter Feinman)

There was a lot for Albright to learn from this episode about how to present scholarship, how to present scholarship related to the Bible, and how to present scholarship related to the Bible in the American context. Now despite the comparatively large department dealing with the ancient Near East, despite the long-standing involvement in that area, and finally, despite Hilprecht’s specific involvement with the Gilgamesh epic, the subject mentioned in Albright’s letter to his father, it is easy to see why Albright in 1913 would have crossed off the University of Pennsylvania from the small list of potential graduate schools for him now that its popularizer of biblical scholarship and Gilgamesh expert was gone. Under slightly different circumstances, one can easily imagine Albright pursuing his interests in the Flood story, Genesis 14, and the Bible at the University of Pennsylvania, but in the tumultuous circumstances at the time when Albright was in college himself, this was one school to scratch off his list.

Oh well. He did okay anyway.

For those unfamiliar with William Foxwell Albright's background, he went to Johns Hopkins for his PhD and studied under Paul Haupt. Albright went on to be the twentieth century's "dean of biblical archaeologists."

That aside, this essay is a fascinating account of biblical and Assyriological scholarly politics in the early part of the twentieth century. It is the third in a series of four. I noted the first two here and here.

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Tony Burke's Regensburg Year begins

THE APOCRYPHICITY BLOG: My Regensburg Year, Part 1: August 2024.

Tony Burke is on research sabbatical for the 2024-25 academic year at the University of Regensburg in Germany. He plans to complete his Introduction to Christian Apocrypha for the Anchor Yale Bible Series. We look forward to further updates.

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That smashed jar is restored and back on display

UPDATE: 3,500-year-old jug smashed by 4-year-old is back on display — still not behind a barrier. Weeks after incident went viral, Haifa’s Hecht Museum exhibits restored artifact in its usual place, with cracks deliberately visible, using the mishap as an educational experience (Gavriel Fiske, Times of Israel).

Okay then. Background here.

Also, I hadn't noticed this:

The most well-known display [in the Hecht Museum] — before the jug incident, that is — was the “Ma’agan Michael Ship,” a sunken boat dating from 500 BCE that was discovered in 1984 in shallow waters just off the coast of Kibbutz Ma’agan Michael, south of Haifa. The boat, including the anchor, was restored and housed in a special wing of the museum.

That would be the Ma’agan Michael II. For more on it, see the links collected here.

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Review of Balberg, Fractured Tablets

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Slip Slidin' Away (Amit Gvaryahu).

Mira Balberg, Fractured Tablets: Forgetfulness and Fallibility in Late Ancient Rabbinic Culture, Oakland: University of California Press, 2023, viii+278 pages, open access

... Mira Balberg, however, points to the shifting attitudes towards forgetfulness and forgetting as a pivotal moment in the history of the rabbinic movement, and in Fractured Tablets she offers a fresh new reading of the rabbinic construction of forgetting. The rabbis shaped their subject as a fallible and often confused human being, bumbling around the world, trying to observe God’s commandments. Sadly, they are foiled by the intellectual limitations of their humanity—wich means the rabbis can offer him salvation in the image of the rabbinic movement itself. Balberg explains that at the same time that the rabbis made the cognitive demands of the Torah ever more complicated, they made confusion and forgetfulness an inseparable and totally understandable part of that same Torah itself. This is true, Balberg shows, both for observing the commandments of the complex and all-encompassing rabbinic Torah, and for retaining them in memory. ...

It would be interesting to bring the Sar Torah traditions in the Hekhalot literature into conversation with these ideas. These text give instructions for invoking the angelic "Prince of Torah" (Sar Torah) to give the practitioner supernatural knowledge and retention of Torah.

Cross-file under New Book.

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On "hated" wives

PROF. BRUCE WELLS: The Hated Wife (TheTorah.com).

Hate in ancient Near Eastern law, the Torah, and Elephantine ketubot is a legal term. If a man demotes his wife to second in rank for no fault, merely because he “hates” her, he cannot also take away her firstborn son’s right to inherit a double portion.

For more on divorce etc. among the Elephantine Judeans, see the links collected here.

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

Coptic New Year exhibition at Egyptian Coptic Museum

COPTIC WATCH: In Photos: Coptic Museum celebrates Coptic New Year with Martyr Knights exhibit. (Nevine El-Aref).

The Coptic Museum in Cairo is hosting a special 30-day archaeological exhibition, 'The Saint Knight', in celebration of the Coptic New Year (1741 AM), which corresponds to 2024-2025 AD.

This year the Coptic New Year is today. Best wishes to all those celebrating.

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

An Aramaic contract incised on a Persian-era jar?

NORTHWEST SEMITIC EPIGRAPHY: Halfat the Potter Gets a House 2,500 Years Ago. Archaeologists deduce the details of a deal featuring an unusual caveat, written in paleo-Aramaic on, of all things, a Canaanite jar somewhere in ancient Israel (Ruth Schuster, Haaretz).

We don't know where the jar was manufactured or anything of its history because it was recovered from looters, not unearthed in legal excavation. It was broken and its rim is missing, frustrating identification of its dating by style. But its reconstruction revealed an almost complete inscription all around the shoulder, below the jar neck.

The regained pot was handed over for reconstruction and analysis by the Israel Antiquities Authority's anti-theft division. The study by Esther Eshel and Boaz Zissu of Ramat Gan's Bar-Ilan University, with Haggai Misgav of the Hebrew University and Amir Ganor of the IAA, appeared in Israel Exploration Journal, Volume 74:1 based on their reconstruction of the piece, its (few) missing letters, and their reading and possible interpretation

The Haaretz article gives a good summary of the IEJ article. The full text of the latter is available on Boaz Zissu's Academia.edu site:

Eshel E., Misgav H., Ganor A., Zissu B., 2024. The Potter’s Deal: A Fourth Century BCE Aramaic Economic Inscription Incised on the Shoulder of a Jar. IEJ 74/1, pp. 64-80.

Boaz Zissu
2024, Israel Exploration Journal
72 Views 19 Pages 1 File
Aramaic, Northwest Semitic Epigraphy, Hellenistic Roman and Byzantine Archaeology in the Land of Israel, Epigraphy, Aramaic and Targum
Publication Date: 2024
Publication Name: Israel Exploration Journal

The article presents an analysis of a new, almost completely preserved Aramaic lapidary inscription incised on the shoulder of a storage jar before firing. The script utilized in this inscription displays significant similarities to known Persian-period inscriptions. Consequently, assigning this inscription to the fourth century BCE on palaeographic grounds seems plausible. This discovery is an important addition to the somewhat limited assemblage of Persian-period inscriptions documented in the southern Levant.

This is a fascinating and unusual inscription. Two comments.

First, I commend the scholars who offer their decipherment in the article for a valiant effort to understand a complicated text that comes with almost no context.

Second, I hate to be the one making issue of this again, but the object is unprovenanced. The technical article gives no information about its authentication. The opening sentence says, "An inscription on the shoulder of a large, unprovenanced storage jar acquired through the enforcement of the Israeli Antiquities Law was handed to us for further study by the Antiquities Theft Prevention Unit of the Israel Antiquities Authority." That's it. Have I missed something?

As I have said many times (notably here and here), our default assumption should be that an unprovenanced artifact is a forgery unless someone makes a credible case otherwise. Perhaps there is such a case for this object. Perhaps it's even an obvious case. But it is not made here.

We've been burned recently with another Aramaic inscription incised on clay, the fake Darius ostracon (cf. here). This situation is somewhat different, granted. But can we rule out forgery? If so, I would like to know why, how, and how confidently.

The obscure nature of the jar inscription could be an argument either against or in favor of its authenticity.

As always, I would be delighted—and grateful—if someone would show me that my skepticism is unwarranted.

Cross-file under Aramaic Watch.

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Review panel on Miroshnikov (ed.) Parabiblica Coptica - editor's response

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Editor's Response (Ivan Miroshnikov).

For the two essays being responded to, see here. A big takeaway from this exchange is the questioning by Coptic specialists of the assumption that Coptic literature was usually translated from Greek originals.

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

Ancient and Medieval Middle East seminar series 2024

UPCOMING: AMME Program announcement: Fall 2024. We are pleased to announce the exciting fall program of the Ancient and Medieval Middle East (AMME) seminars series.

The four seminars will be organized as hybrid events at the University of Helsinki and in Zoom. Please note that we have moved the in-person venue to the Main Building (details below). The second speaker of the December session will be confirmed soon.

Each themed session will consist of two talks followed by a shared discussion, and everyone are most welcome to participate!

One of the seminars involves the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Follow the link for in-person and Zoom attendance information.

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On the works of Flavius Josephus

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: The Histories of Flavius Josephus (Marek Dospěl).

A good, brief overview of the topic.

The original Aramaic edition of Josephus' Jewish War is one of those Lost Books we would love to have now - or, more optimistically, we would love to discover a surviving manuscript of.

For some recent PaleoJudaica posts on Josephus, see here and links. There are countless additional post on him in the archive.

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

Ayil, Identifying the Stones of Classical Hebrew (Brill)

NEW BOOK FROM BRILL:

Identifying the Stones of Classical Hebrew

A Modern Philological Approach

Series:
Ancient Languages and Civilizations, Volume: 7

Author: Ephraim S. Ayil

Since the translation of the Septuagint in the 3rd century BCE, scholars have attempted to identify the stones that populate the biblical text. This study rejects the long-standing reliance on ancient translations for identifying biblical stones. Despite the evident contradictions and historical inconsistencies, scholars traditionally presumed these translations to be reliable. By departing from this approach, this volume presents a novel synthesis of comparative linguistics and archeogemological data. Through rigorous analysis of valid cognates, it establishes correlations between Hebrew stone names and their counterparts in ancient languages, corresponding to known mineral species. This methodological shift enables a more accurate identification of stones mentioned in biblical texts, thus recovering their true historical context. The research not only advances our understanding of biblical mineralogy but also provides a fresh perspective on the material culture of the Ancient Levant, offering valuable insights for scholars and laymen, linguists and archaeologists alike.

Copyright Year: 2024

E-Book (PDF)
Availability: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-67800-2
Publication: 26 Aug 2024

Hardback
Availability: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-67799-9
Publication: 29 Aug 2024
EUR €75.00

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Bodner, The Psalms (OUP)

NEW BOOK FROM OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS:

The Psalms

Keith Bodner

Essentials of Biblical Studies

£16.99

Paperback
Published: 19 June 2024
200 Pages
210x140mm
ISBN: 9780190916879
Also Available As: Hardback, Ebook
9780190916879

Description

Within the library of the world's classics, the book of Psalms occupies a unique place. Few books were composed over a longer period of time and have exercised more cultural and religious influence than the Psalms, the longest and most complex collection in the Hebrew Bible. Nearly 1,000 years in the making with dozens of contributors, this ancient anthology includes 150 prayers and poems for a host of public occasions and private exigencies, ranging from the comforting passage “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” Ps 23:4 to some of the most violent imprecations, such as “Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth,” Ps 58:6).

The Psalms is an introduction to the world of the Psalms that focuses on the content and the poetic forms in the collection, guiding the reader toward an appreciation of the purposes of the Psalms and their contribution to the Scriptures of Israel. Rather than abstract theorizing, Keith Bodner offers close readings of numerous psalms, exploring the poetically-framed questions raised in the Psalms, ranging from the problem of evil and the silence of God to issues of philosophical speculation, practical atheism, and even life after death.

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