Rabbinics & Hebrew Bible jobs at the University of Postdam

H-JUDAIC has post two job advertisements at the University of Potsdam in Germany:

FEATURED JOB: Full Professorship (W 3) for Rabbinic Literature and Halacha, Universität Potsdam

The School of Jewish Theology, created in 2013 as part of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Potsdam, invites applications for the following position to be filled by October 1, 2025:

Full Professorship (W 3) for Rabbinic Literature and Halacha

The successful candidate will represent the field of Rabbinics and have specific expertise in the domain of Halacha, employing both traditional and innovative methodologies. The candidate will demonstrate ability to connect the Talmud and Rabbinics with broader Jewish intellectual history and contribute to the interdisciplinary scholarship.

[...]

Also at the School of Jewish Theology:

FEATURED JOB: Professorship (W 2) for Hebrew Bible and its Exegesis, Universität Potsdam

Professorship (W 2) for Hebrew Bible and its Exegesis

The successful candidate will represent the entire field of the Hebrew Bible and its exegesis in both teaching and research. They will place the Bible in the context of its historical, social, religious, and cultural origins, critically engaging with the text while also addressing traditional Jewish reception and interpretation

[...]

Both jobs include the following requirements:

Applicants must be members of a Jewish congregation. Non-native speakers are expected to acquire sufficient skills to function in the German academic environment over a transition period of two years.

For full particulars and application information, follow the links for both. The deadline for email submission of application materials is 9 January 2025.

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Review of Mokhtarian, Medicine in the Talmud

H-JUDAIC: Marcus on Mokhtarian, 'Medicine in the Talmud: Natural and Supernatural Therapies between Magic and Science'.

Mokhtarian, Jason Sion. Medicine in the Talmud: Natural and Supernatural Therapies between Magic and Science. Oakland: University of California Press, 2022. xix + 236 pp. $95.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780520389410.

Reviewed by Alexander Warren Marcus (Franklin and Marshall College)
Published on H-Judaic (December, 2024)
Commissioned by Jessica Carr (Lafayette College)

Excerpt:

Mokhtarian’s monograph is an important corrective to earlier apologetic scholarship by non-Talmudists, as well as to more recent studies that emphasize only the supernatural components of Talmudic remedies. He does an excellent job of synthesizing recent contextual scholarship on Babylonian rabbinic healing therapies, pointing to the importance to local contextualization and complicating simplistic distinctions between a supposedly rational West and superstitious East. In situating both “medicine” and “magic” under the umbrella of healing, he successfully recovers the understudied empirical dimensions of Babylonian rabbinic therapeutics.

I noted the publication of the book here, with more on the author's work there and here.

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Review of Davies, Representing the dynasty in Flavian Rome

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: Representing the dynasty in Flavian Rome: the case of Josephus’ Jewish War.

Jonathan Davies, Representing the dynasty in Flavian Rome: the case of Josephus' Jewish War. Oxford classical monographs. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. 256. ISBN 9780198882992.

Review by
Jan Willem van Henten, Universiteit van Amsterdam. j.w.vanhenten@uva.nl

This book offers an excellent, detailed analysis of all the references to the three Flavian emperors in Josephus’s Jewish War. Davies consistently pays attention to Roman and Jewish perspectives and reads Josephus in line with postcolonial theory as a historian who is in between two worlds. His conclusions are well-argued and careful. He rejects the binary oppositions that in his view underly previous scholarship and lead to a one-dimensional interpretation of Josephus’s role as a historian. ...

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Potsherd-core "cave pearls" in a Jerusalem tunnel

SPELUNKIC ARCHAEOLOGY: Study finds first cave pearls containing archaeological artifacts in ancient Jerusalem tunnel (Sandee Oster, Phys.org). HT Rogue Classicism.

A study conducted by Dr. Azriel Yechezkel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his colleagues from the Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University, published in the journal Archaeometry, discovered the largest known cave pearl deposit in the southern Levant. What makes these 50 cave pearls so unique is that some of them contain archaeological artifacts, making them the first in the world to contain man-made objects.

Cave pearls are a type of speleothem found in caves. They are round, pearl-like formations usually between 0.1 mm and 30cm long. They form around central nuclei, such as sand grains covered in layer upon layer of mineral deposits.

[...]

Cave pearls? Well that's something different. The pottery cores over which they accumulated seem to date mostly from the late-Persian to Hellenistic and the Byzantine eras.

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Orville S. Wintermute (1927-2024)

SAD NEWS: Official Obituary of Orval Wintermute November 20, 1927 - November 25, 2024.

Noted by the Agade List and Explorator.

Professor Wintermute is known particulary (at least by me) for his translations of the Apocalypse of Zephaniah and the Book of Jubilees in Charlesworth's two-volume collection, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha.

Requiescat in pace.

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Review of Briquel Chatonnet & Debie, The Syriac World

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Review: The Syriac World: In Search of a Forgotten Christianity.

The Syriac World: In Search of a Forgotten Christianity
By Françoise Briquel Chatonnet and Muriel Debié, trans. by Jeffrey Haines
(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2023), 304 pp., 68 b/w figs., 11 maps; $35 (hardcover and eBook)

Reviewed by Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent

... The Syriac tradition, whose literary heritage is almost exclusively Christian, has gained more attention in the Anglophone world in the past three decades due to increased scholarly focus. Despite this growing recognition of the Syriac tradition in academic circles, a comprehensive book was missing—until now.

I noted the publication of the French original here and the English translation here. Cross-file under Syriac Watch.

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The Sifting Project needs help to continue

THE TEMPLE MOUNT SIFTING BLOG: FORCED TO PAUSE: THE SIFTING SITE FACES CLOSURE AFTER HANUKKAH.

Now, more than a year since the war began, and in light of the IDF’s remarkable achievements, it seems that the existential threat to the State of Israel is behind us. In contrast, the Temple Mount Sifting Project now faces an existential threat of its own. Donations to the project have dropped by approximately 70%, and government funding processes have been frozen. These challenges, combined with a significant decline in visitors to the sifting site, force us to dramatically scale back our activities. Consequently, starting next month (after Hanukkah), we are regrettably compelled to suspend operations at the sifting site until appropriate funding is secured.

If you are feeling generous this holiday season, they could really use a contribution.

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Review of Hopkins & McGill (eds.), Forgery beyond deceit

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: Forgery beyond deceit: fabrication, value, and the desire for ancient Rome.

John North Hopkins, Scott McGill, Forgery beyond deceit: fabrication, value, and the desire for ancient Rome. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. 464. ISBN 9780192869586.

Review by
Rebecca Menmuir, Lincoln College, Oxford. rebecca.menmuir@lincoln.ox.ac.uk

Forgery Beyond Deceit is an excellent volume, immediately securing a place as required reading for anyone interested in fakes and forgeries across disciplines and chronological boundaries. At its heart is an insistence that forgeries are valuable objects which are worthy of study in and of themselves; no longer should the forgery be consigned to Philology’s growing pile of discarded works, deemed inauthentic and therefore worthless. In this way the volume represents a fundamental shift in authenticity studies of the late-twentieth and twenty-first century, and holding this belief as the book’s core allows contributors to explore avenues beyond deceit, as the title has it. ...

Follow the link for a preview and list of authors and titles.

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Apocryphal Christmas again

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Christmas Stories in Christian Apocrypha. The birth of Jesus in the apocryphal gospels (Tony Burke).

Yep, time to note this one again. For more on the Protevangelium of James, see here, here, here, and links.

And here's something new. James McGrath argues that the whole of the Protevangelium of James is a reworked John the Baptist source. (Scroll down a bit to find the discussion.)

Cross-file under 'Tis the Season.

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Langton, The Womb and the Simile of the Woman in Labor in the Hebrew Bible (Routledge)

NEW BOOK FROM ROUTLEDGE:

The Womb and the Simile of the Woman in Labor in the Hebrew Bible
Embodying Relationship with YHWH

By Karen Langton
Copyright 2025

Hardback
£101.25

eBook
£29.99

ISBN 9781032834474
178 Pages
Published October 30, 2024 by Routledge

Original Price£135.00
Sale Price GBP £101.25

Description

This book explores figurative images of the womb and the simile of a woman in labor from the Hebrew Bible, problematizing previous interpretations that present these as disparate images and showing how their interconnectivity embodies relationship with YHWH.

In the Hebrew Bible, images of the womb and the pregnant body in labor do not co-occur despite being grounded in an image of a whole pregnant female body; the pregnant body is instead fragmented into these two constituent parts, and scholars have continued to interpret these images separately with no discussion of their interconnectivity. In this book, Langton explores the relationship between these images, inviting readers into a wider conversation on how the pregnant body functions as a means to an end, a place to access and seek a relationship with YHWH. Readers are challenged and asked to rethink how these images have been interpreted within feminist scholarship, with womb imagery depicting YHWH’s care for creation or performing the acts of a midwife, and the pregnant body in labor as a depiction of crisis. Langton explores select texts depicting these images, focusing on the corporeal experience and discussing direct references and allusions to the physicality of a pregnant body within these texts. This approach uncovers ancient and current androcentric ideology which dictates that conception, gestation, and birth must be controlled not by the female body, but by YHWH.

The Womb and the Simile of the Woman in Labor in the Hebrew Bible is of interest to students and scholars working on the Hebrew Bible, gender in the Bible and the Near East more broadly, and feminist biblical criticism.

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