Burns Night, with an update

HAPPY RABBIE BURNS NIGHT, tonight, to all those celebrating!

No, this doesn't have anything to do with ancient Judaism. Except that some years ago I put up this post on Two Prophetesses for Burns Night. One was Mary the Prophetess, an ancient Jewish alchemist who reportedly invented the still.

The other was an unnamed prophetess on the Isle of Jura, Scotland. Tradition says she uttered a dire prophecy against the Campbells of Jura, which was later fulfilled. Story at the link. In her honor the Jura distillery created a brand of single malt whisky called Jura Prophecy. At the time I was planning a visit to Jura and I promised to get back to my readers if I could learn anything more about her story.

I did take that trip and an update is overdue. I couldn't find out much more. I met a local whose ancestor, if I remember correctly, reportedly witnesssed the departure of Charles. And there was an old plaque in front of the distillery which gave a few more details. Beyond that, I have not been able to verify anything about the story, so I make no historical claims. But here is the plaque. Click on the photo to expand it for easier reading.

Sadly, and unfathomably, Jura distillery stopped producing Jura Prophecy a few years ago. It was one of my favorites. It's hard now to find a bottle.

Anyway, enjoy Burns Night, if that is your thing. And always be polite to prophetesses!

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Crabbe & Lincicum, Divine and Human Love in Jewish and Christian Antiquity (Mohr Siebeck)

NEW BOOK FROM MOHR SIEBECK:

Divine and Human Love in Jewish and Christian Antiquity

Edited by Kylie Crabbe and David Lincicum

[Göttliche und menschliche Liebe in der jüdischen und christlichen Antike.]
2024. X, 359 pages.
Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament (WUNT I) 523
€149.00
including VAT

cloth
available
978-3-16-163462-8

Also Available As:
eBook PDF
€149.00

Summary

The centrality and significance of love for much of ancient Judaism and Christianity are clear. But if there is a broad, even if not universal, agreement on the importance of love, the singularity of the term »love« covers over a multitude of differences in how love is conceived and mapped onto the conceptual landscape of antiquity. In this volume, Crabbe and Lincicum assemble a set of essays that analyze the concept of love from the minor prophets to Methodius of Olympus, with a central focus on the texts that came to make up the New Testament.

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Review of Julius, Abraham: The First Jew

MOMENT MAGAZINE: Book Review | A Tale of Dueling Abrahams (ROBERT SIEGEL).

Abraham: The First Jew is [Anthony] Julius’s contribution to the Yale University Press Jewish Lives series, and it faces the challenges posed by biblical personalities that do not plague the biographer of Philip Roth or Hank Greenberg. Was there really an Abraham? If so, do the midrashim the rabbis wrote to fill the narrative gaps of Torah enjoy the same authority as the Torah narratives themselves, which are, after all, traditionally accorded divine authority?

I usually don't post on books before publication, but this detailed review is worth noting now. You can find the book here for pre-order at the Yale University Press website, with a projected 11 February publication date. Cross-file under New Book.

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How many plagues?

PROF. RABBI MARTY LOCKSHIN: Ten Plagues of Egypt? No, Eight Plagues and Four Warnings! (TheTorah.com).

The Bible never numbers the plagues of Egypt, but the number ten has been canonized in tradition, and a canonical list of the ten plagues appears in the Passover Haggadah. The 18th century enlightenment commentator Naftali Herz Wessely breaks free from the number ten, offering a more persuasive structure of twelve miracles.

The Book of Jubilees is the first source that specifies ten plagues. There is no one right answer to the question. It depends on what you want to define as a plague.

I suspect that tradition settled early-on on the number ten to go with the Ten Commandments, which are revealed next in the narrative. And in their case, the Bible does specify the number ten ("ten words" in Exodus 34:28 and Deuteronomy 4:13 and 10:4). I am far from the first to notice this connection.

That said, specifying a number doesn't remove ambiguity. There are three lists of the Decalogue, in Exodus 20, Exodus 34, and Deuteronomy 4. They are all unnumbered. The list in Exodus 34 has somewhat different laws from the other two. There has been plenty of debate about how to divide them up. And then when you start looking at manuscripts and recensions and ancient translations, it gets even more complicated.

A couple of relevant PaleoJudaica posts on the plagues are here and here.

Relevant posts on the Ten Commandments are here, here, here, here, here, and here.

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The Talmud Yerushalmi Bavot tractates project

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Rabbinic Civil Law in the Context of Ancient Legal History: A Legal Compendium to the Talmud Yerushalmi

Catherine Hezser and Constantin Willems introduce the AHRC-DFG Collaborative UK-German Research Project in the Humanities (2023-26) on Rabbinic Civil Law in the Context of Ancient Legal History.

Excerpt:

The ultimate goal of our project is to integrate the study of rabbinic law into ancient legal history, to break the traditional boundaries between academic legal studies’ predominant focus on western (Greek and Roman) legal traditions while rabbinic law is delegated to Religions departments. Everyone studying and researching ancient legal history should be invited and encouraged to take rabbinic private law (from antiquity to modernity) into account. ...

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RItual (im)purity and embodiment

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Decoding Biblical Impurity. Exploring the roots of the Bible’s emphasis on ritual cleanliness.

Taken as a whole, Feder’s presentation illuminates the ways in which notions of purity and impurity in the Bible are deeply rooted in embodied experience. In his conclusion, he observes that “this recognition allows us to appreciate that the notion of pollution is based on psychological intuitions that have facilitated human survival from prehistoric times until the present day.”

This essay summarizes a column by Yitzhaq Feder published in the current issue of BAR. The column itself is behind the subscription wall.

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Anti-scorpion amulets from Egypt

THE COPTIC MAGICAL PAPYRI BLOG: Animals in Coptic Magic II: Archangels, Mustard, and Rabbi Judah – 1500 Years of Amulets against Scorpions.

The examples we will be discussing today, though, are much later [than the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts]. From between the fifth and twelfth centuries CE survive about three dozen amulets of a distinctive type, consisting of small pieces of papyrus, parchment, or paper on which a simple image of a scorpion has been drawn, and surrounded by text which invokes superhuman powers against these creatures, or commands them to leave. We find these written in all of the major languages used in Egypt in this period – Greek, Coptic, Arabic, and Hebrew – suggesting that the use of these amulets was a practice common to Egyptians of different faiths, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and perhaps, at the earliest stage, ‘pagans’ who did not belong to any of these religions. ...

The Hebrew amulets are from the Cairo Geniza. They date to the twelfth century, but their use of Greek terms (Aphrodite and Epicurus) implies influence from much earlier Greco-Egyptian magical traditions.

The first post in this series is: Animals in Coptic Magic I: The Blood of a White Dove. It deals mostly with a late-antique Coptic Christian amulet. It also links to the (open-access) technical scholarly article by Korshi Dosoo which underlies the posts in the series.

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Guide to ethnographic passages in Tacitus

ETHNIC RELATIONS AND MIGRATION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD: Guide to Tacitus. (Philip Harland).

Includes some substantial passages on the Judeans.

For more on this blog, see here and here and links.

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Septuagint Theology and Its Reception (SBL)

NEW BOOK FROM SBL PRESS:

Septuagint Theology and Its Reception: Stellenbosch Congress on the Septuagint, 2022
Johann Cook, Wolfgang Kraus, Martin Rösel, editors

ISBN 9781628375770
Volume SCS 78
Status Available
Publication Date November 2024

Paperback $79.00
eBook $79.00
Hardback $99.00

In this follow-up to Toward a Theology of the Septuagint: Stellenbosch Congress on the Septuagint, 2018 (2020), contributors demonstrate what a theology of the Septuagint should look like. Essays address questions of methodology, and case studies from different books show the relevance and benefits of a theological approach. Examples are drawn from Exodus, Deuteronomy, Proverbs, Job, Tobit, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Hosea, Ezekiel, Daniel, and Ben Sira. Contributors include Nicholas Peter Legh Allen, Bryan Beeckman, Alma Brodersen, Johann Cook, Beate Ego, Karin Finsterbusch, Pierre Jordaan, Wolfgang Kraus, Jean Maurais , Cynthia L. Miller-Naudé, Mogens Müller, Jacobus A. Naudé, Peter Nagel Larry Perkins, Martin Rösel, Barbara Schmitz, Frank Ueberschaer, Jan Willem van Henten, and Michael van der Meer

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Shocker: Jesus wasn't called "Jesus?"

ARAMAIC WATCH!! Scientists reveal Jesus' REAL name - and say it wasn't 'Jesus' after all (Wiliam Hunter, Daily Mail).

The Mail has noticed that the name "Jesus" would have been pronounced differently in first-century Aramaic:

Jesus, as we would say it today with a hard 'J', wasn't a name that existed at the time of Jesus' life.

Instead, Jesus himself would have used a name in his native language of Aramaic.

Professor Houtman says: 'His name would probably have been in Aramaic: Yeshua.

'It is likely that this is also how he introduced himself. Another possibility is the shorter form Yeshu which is the form used in later rabbinic literature.'

Yes, all well and good. And the article includes some useful background information.

The amusing part is the way the Mail, and the media who have picked up the story, are treating this as a groundbreaking new discovery. The headlines especially, but the articles themselves leave that impression.

Experts Have Discovered Jesus’ Real Name, Which Was Not Jesus (Nathan Falde, Ancient Origins)

Jesus’ real name wasn’t Jesus, scientists claim — here’s why (Ben Cost, New York Post)

Scientists claim to have discovered the real name of Jesus Christ and it's not what we thought. The real name, according to the language Jesus spoke, could be Yezhua (AUSTIN CALDWELL, Marca)

As I said, the information is generally accurate. But the media's sensationalist framing is both funny and sad.

UPDATE: Richard Bauckham has written to point out that I could have clarified that the name Jesus/Yeshua is Hebrew, not Aramaic, and that most ancient Aramaic-speaking Jews had Hebrew names.

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Exodus and Atrahasis?

JOHANNA MARKIND: Exodus Reworks the Atrahasis Flood Epic (TheTorah.com).

The biblical authors polemicize against the Mesopotamian Atrahasis epic, not only in Noah’s flood story, but in the account of the exodus as well

Could be. The biblical authors were certainly aware of Mesopotamian Flood traditions.

I don't know of any evidence that the full story of the Atrahasis epic reached ancient Israel, but a Flood story fragment from Ugarit does name the Flood hero Atrahasis (rather than Utnapishtim, as in the Gilgamesh Epic, or Ziusudra, in the Sumerian Flood story). But the Ugarit tablet did not include the prequel material in the Atrahasis epic involving the creation of people and the plagues from the gods.

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The Lying Pen of Scribes Project

VARIANT READINGS: The Lying Pen of Scribes Project: An Appreciation (Brent Nongbri).

Over the last few years, I have had a number of occasions to mention The Lying Pen of Scribes, a project on the Dead Sea Scrolls funded by the Research Council of Norway. In fact, it may not be quite right to say “project on the Dead Sea Scrolls.” While the Scrolls have been the focus of the project, it has touched many wider issues: the trade in antiquities, fakes and forgeries, the relationship of the physical sciences to manuscript studies, and more.

[...]

I have had a number of occasions to link to the project's useful blog and otherwise to note Årstein Justnes's important work. I wish him the best for whatever comes next.

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Stoutjesdijk, A Comparative Study of the Slavery Metaphor in Early Rabbinic and Early Christian Parables (Brill)

NEW BOOK FROM BRILL:

A Comparative Study of the Slavery Metaphor in Early Rabbinic and Early Christian Parables

Series:
Jewish and Christian Perspectives Series, Volume: 41

Author: Martijn J. Stoutjesdijk

Some of the slavery parables in the New Testament have been called “texts of terror,” as the slaves who are portrayed in them are beaten or even cut in two. Despite – or because – their violence, slavery parables are often used in early Christian and early rabbinic literature to illustrate the unique relationship between God and his people. This study investigates the reasons for and meaning of using the master-slave metaphor in the parables: what does it tell us about early Christian and early rabbinic theology, including possibilities for critique and resistance vis-à-vis the divine, and what does it say about slavery in the ancient world?

Copyright Year: 2025

E-Book (PDF)
Availability: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-71310-9
Publication: 16 Dec 2024
EUR €135.00

Hardback
Availability: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-71309-3
Publication: 18 Dec 2024
EUR €135.00

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Inadvertent animal archaeologists

FAUNAL-ASSISTED ARCHAEOLOGY: 10 Animals That Made Archaeological Discoveries (Ben Gazur, Listverse). Apropos of nothing much, except that I am surprised I didn't know about any of these.

PaleoJudaica has noted such discoveries from time to time. These include two excavations by porcupines, a mole-rat archaeological survey, and an equine figurine recovery that involved heavy rain, and perhaps foxes or (again) porcupines.

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Kudos for the team that raised the Mazzarón II

PHOENICIAN WATCH: Mazarrón places itself as world leader in underwater archaeology following extraction of Phoenician shipwreck. The regional president has highlighted the historical and scientific significance of the removal of the shipwreck from the seabed (Murcia Today).

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

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Lieber, Classical Samaritan Poetry (Eisenbrauns)

NEW BOOK FROM EISENBRAUNS:

Classical Samaritan Poetry

Laura Suzanne Lieber

“Lieber’s informative and readable introductory surveys are groundbreaking.”—Christian Stadel, Bibliotheca Orientalis

$149.95 | Hardcover Edition
ISBN: 978-1-64602-182-6

$21.95 | Paperback Edition
ISBN: 978-1-64602-297-7

Available as an e-book v 250 pages
6" × 9"
2022

Description

This book introduces the evocative but largely unknown tradition of Samaritan religious poetry from late antiquity to a new audience. These verses provide a unique window into the Samaritan religious world during a formative period. Prepared by Laura Suzanne Lieber, this anthology presents annotated English translations of fifty-five Classical Samaritan poems. Lieber introduces each piece, placing it in context with Samaritan religious tradition, the geopolitical turmoil of Palestine in the fourth century CE, and the literary, liturgical, and performative conventions of the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, shared by Jews, Christians, and polytheists. These hymns, composed by three generations of poets—the priest Amram Dara; his son, Marqah; and Marqah’s son, Ninna, the last poet to write in Samaritan Aramaic in the period prior to the Muslim conquest—for recitation during the Samaritan Sabbath and festival liturgies remain a core element of Samaritan religious ritual to the present day.

Shedding important new light on the Samaritans’ history and on the complicated connections between early Judaism, Christianity, the Samaritan community, and nascent Islam, this volume makes an important contribution to the reception of the history of the Hebrew Bible. It will appeal to a wide audience of students and scholars of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, early Judaism and early Christianity, and other religions of late antiquity.

Cross-file under Samaritan Watch.

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