CRYPTIC EPIGRAPHIC ARTIFACT:
Jewish Secrets Scratched in Stone: 2,000-year-old Cryptic Text Found in Jerusalem. Excavating on Mount Zion, Shimon Gibson's team found a bewildering stone mug with a script type only seen in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Adonai is mentioned (Ruth Schuster, Haaretz).
In Gibson's mind, the inscribed mug from his Mount Zion dig speaks to the diverse complexity of ancient Judaism that was still finding its way 2,000 years ago. Was ritual prayer something only to be done at the Temple, or could it be done at home? Could chanting be used? Did it use a repetition of words, with an uplifting of the voice, and when was it to be done? The mug is a small piece of evidence pointing to an entire world hidden from view, one we can only glimpse at, like looking through a crack in a wall.
Did the Mount Zion mug have any kind of an association with the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls, whether they were Qumranite sectarians or perhaps even the Essenes themselves, based on their mutual use of cryptic writing? Maybe cryptic writing was much more common at that time than has previously been thought, and not just among sectarians but also among city dwellers as well? We don't know; the crack we have been peering through simply hasn't widened enough to show us a corpus of texts from every other part of the country; Judaism at the time had certain commonalities, but it was also very diverse, Gibson asserts.
A typically throughly-researched article by Ms. Schuster.
I noted the discovery of the cup in 2009 and followed up with quite a few posts. I talked with Stephen Pfann about it later that year and posted on the conversation here. For the other posts, start here and follow the links.
For more on 4Q186, the cryptic Qumran horoscope text, see here.
Back to the current article, regarding this:
Another expert on ancient Jewish paleography, Dr. David Hamidović of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, noted another similarity, with incantation and curse texts from a somewhat later time, which often feature seemingly meaningless words or letters known as nomina barbara. This mug seems amply blessed with nomina barbara.
As far as I am aware, nomina barbara in esoteric and ritual texts are only currently known in late-antique and later texts. If a ritual cup from the first century CE really does have them, that would be important news.
That said, given the present state of its decipherment, it's possible that the "nomina barbara" are just actual words that the decipherers have not yet figured out. It's hard to tell before a decipherment is published.
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