216 BC - A Carthaginian army lead by Hannibal defeated a numerically superior Roman army at the Battle of Cannae. It happened during the Second Punic War as Rome and Carthage battled it out for control of the mediterranean and its trade and riches.More here.
Seal of King Zedekiah's minister found in J'lem digAgain, excellent news. An Iron Age II (i.e., First Temple era) Hebrew inscription scientifically excavated and bearing a name that (given the date and location) is very likely to be of a person mentioned in the Bible. That's pretty impressive.
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS (Jerusalem Post)
A seal impression belonging to a minister of the Biblical King Zedekiah which dates back 2,600 years has been uncovered completely intact during an archeological dig in Jerusalem's ancient City of David, a prominent Israeli archeologist said on Thursday.
The seal impression, or bulla, with the name Gedalyahu ben Pashur, who served as minister to King Zedekiah (597-586 BCE) according to the Book of Jeremiah, was found just meters away from a separate seal impression of another of Zedekia's ministers, Yehukual ben Shelemyahu, which was uncovered three years ago, said Prof. Eilat Mazar who is leading the dig at the site.
The excavation at the history-rich City of David, which is located just outside the walls of the Old City near Dung Gate, has proven, in recent years, to be a treasure trove for archeologists.
"On the one hand it is so unexpected to find such a fragile bulla in such harsh conditions of excavation, while on the other hand it was logical to find precisely here the bulla of Gedalyahu ben Pashur - only meters away from the place where we found the bulla of Yehukhal ben Shelemyahu - since these two ministers are mentioned side by side in the Bible as having served together in the kingdom of King Zedekiah," Mazar said.
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Both ministers are mentioned in the Book of Jeremiah (Jeremiah 38 1-4) along with two other ministers when they came to King Zedekiah demanding the death of the prophet Jeremiah for preaching to the besieged city to surrender.
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From Foy Scalff (calffd@uchicago.edu):This is excellent news. It's exciting to have a new, substantial Northwest Semitic inscription, one that was actually excavated scientifically and whose provenance and authenticity are not in doubt.
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NEW ALPHABETIC INSCRIPTION FROM ZINCIRLI
On July 21, 2008, the Neubauer Expedition to Zincirli, directed by Prof. David Schloen of the University of Chicago and by associate director Amir Fink, found an inscribed basalt stele at the site of Zincirli (pronounced "Zin-jeer-lee") in Gaziantep province in southeastern Turkey.
The remarkably well-preserved stele, 70 centimeters wide and 95 centimeters tall, was found intact in its original location. It was set into a stone wall with its protruding tenon still inserted into the stone-paved floor. The alphabetic inscription on the stele is written in Sam'alian, the language spoken in the region of Zincirli (ancient Sam'al) during the Iron Age.
It commemorates the life of "Kattammuwa servant of Panamuwa," probably a high official of King Panamuwa, who reigned during the eighth century B.C. A bearded figure is depicted on the stele, seated in a chair in front of a table laden with food. Beside him is a thirteen-line inscription, elegantly carved in raised relief and preserved in almost pristine condition nearly three millennia after it was inscribed. It describes the establishment of the memorial stele and associated mortuary rites. This stele is unique in its combination of pictorial and textual features and thus is an important addition to our knowledge of ancient language and culture.
An analysis and translation of the inscription will be presented by Prof. Dennis Pardee of the University of Chicago at the November 2008 meeting of the Society for Biblical Literature in Boston and will be published soon thereafter.
Zincirli is the site of the ancient walled city of Sam'al, capital of an Iron Age kingdom that inherited both West Semitic and Neo-Hittite (Luwian) cultural traditions. The 40-hectare (100-acre) site was first excavated more than a hundred years ago and produced a number of royal inscriptions and other fascinating finds that are on display in various museums. Since 2006, Zincirli has been excavated annually by a team from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago—the Neubauer Expedition, a large-scale and long-term project of archaeological research at this important site.
She'an Nights, a multi-media multi-sensory night tour of the ancient city of Beit She'an-Scythopolis, has recently opened at the Beit She'an National Park, located in the Jordan Valley. Developed at a cost of $3 million in a joint initiative of the Ministry of Tourism via the Israel Government Tourist Corporation, the Israel Nature and National Parks Protection Authority and the Beit She'an Municipality, this unique project is the first of its type in the world in an archeological site and the fourth largest such project in the world.Related story here.
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She'an Nights, which is expected to attract 400,000 visitors annually, will operate nine months of the year, offering visitors the opportunity to enjoy the site in the cool night air in a region known for its sweltering summer days. After watching a 10 minute presentation that relates the history of the area (in English or Hebrew), visitors set off on a multi-sensory experience as they stroll through the streets of the excavated city of Scythopolis with its marble columns, stone streets, bathhouses, temples and mosaics, while watching audiovisual presentations projected onto dozens of giant screens on the columns, walls and even the tel behind the site.
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In the Syrian desert, the language of Jesus lives onIndeed. More power to them.
By Brooke Anderson
Catholic News Service
MAALOULA, Syria (CNS) -- Aramaic, the language of Jesus that flourished in villages thousands of years ago, is being kept alive in the Syrian desert, about an hour's drive from Damascus.
Today, Aramaic is spoken in Maaloula, an ancient mountainous town with two historic monasteries, Catholic and Orthodox, both built into the cliffs.
Georgette Halabi, a tour guide at St. Serge Melkite Catholic convent in Maaloula, grew up speaking Aramaic.
"I don't write it," she said. "But I want to learn."
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In the summer of 2007, the language went through something of a renaissance in Maaloula when the town, with the encouragement of the Syrian government, opened the Aramaic Language Institute. The program teaches written Aramaic to students of all ages, particularly children, and is affiliated with the University of Damascus.
"I've been studying since the school opened," said 11-year-old Murshed Diab, as he played with his friends on a hot summer evening after classes. "It's useful. They teach us songs in Aramaic."
His sister, Bushra Diab, 13, added: "People here don't speak Arabic. It's Aramaic. They teach us the alphabet, and I'm already starting to learn complex grammar."
The two siblings began singing an Aramaic song they learned in school, and their playmates quickly joined in.
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A group of scholars from Germany started studying Aramaic in Maaloula about 20 years ago, when the language had begun to die.
"The Germans opened our eyes and showed us we had something special," Rihan said. "A lot of Arabic had entered the language, and it (Aramaic) had almost died. It was resuscitated."
Now, Maaloula's relatively new Aramaic Committee is trying to gather information on the language from the town's elders to create a modern Aramaic dictionary. But Rihan said he hoped this was only the beginning.
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'The land, my lord, will be lost forever'This looks like a rare case of ancient inscriptions and archaeology mutually informing one another.
By Ran Shapira (Haaretz)
Tags: Canaan, Egypt, excavation
"To the king my lord and my sun: These are the words of your servant, Belit-nesheti [literally, "mistress of lions/lionesses"]. I fall at the king's feet seven times over. I must tell the king that this country is witnessing [acts of] hostility and that the land of the king, my lord, will be lost forever."
A Canaanite queen from one of the cities in Palestine's lowland sent this desperate request in the 14th century B.C.E. to Pharaoh, king of Egypt. The name of the city ruled by Belit-nesheti is not mentioned in this letter or in others that depict violent acts that aroused in her a justified feeling that she was facing a dire threat.
During that period, the city of Gezer, and the Ajalon and Sorek valleys were the scene of events that seriously challenged the rule of Belit-nesheti and other monarchs.
In another letter, she conveys the following information: "The Apiru have written to Ajalon and Zorah and the two sons of Milkilu [king of Gezer] have been almost beaten to death. I must inform the king of this act." In yet another letter, she relates that one of the cities in the area under her rule has fallen to the Apiru, and she calls to the king, "I beg the king to save his land from the hands of the Apiru, before it is too late."
The Apiru, mentioned in various documents from different parts of the ancient Near East, were a people that had been uprooted from society and which had abandoned its native land. They formed bands that engaged in robbery and in the collection of protection money, and they served as mercenaries whom the rulers of the various Canaanite cities under Egyptian rule at the time recruited as a military force when they wanted to attack their enemies. The Apiru were supported by the powerful rulers of neighboring cities who sought to seize control of her city.
Her cries for assistance from Pharaoh, who was during this period the supreme ruler of the region and of a number of Canaanite cities, elicited no response, as indicated by the findings that have recently been discovered in Tel Beit Shemesh, about a half-hour's drive from Jerusalem. Prof. Shlomo Bunimovitz and Dr. Zvi Lederman, both of Tel Aviv University's Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology, have been conducting excavations there since 1990. In their scholarly opinion, the city was devastated in a monstrous wave of violence; the remnants extant from that massive act of destruction have been uncovered in the past few weeks. In Tel Beit Shemesh, site of this ancient Canaanite city, archaeologists have discovered entire walls that collapsed in a huge fire, which apparently occurred in the mid-14th century B.C.E. Inter alia, they have found a structures containing more than 200 toppled bricks, which show the effects of exposure to the extreme heat of the massive blaze. Adjacent to the bricks, the foundations of the plastered walls from which they fell have also been uncovered.
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Belit-nesheti's letters are part of a collection of letters written in cuneiform in the Akkadian language (the lingua franca of that era) on clay tablets, that was discovered in the late 19th century in Egypt in Tel Amarna, which is located midway between Cairo and Luxor. ...
Carlson reveals in his Gospel Hoax that Smith's career, at the time he penned the fake, had come to a standstill. In 1955 he was denied tenure at the university where he had begun his career. "A successful hoax could be exactly what Smith needed," Carlson wrote, "to prove to himself that he was smarter than his peers and might even jump start his career in the process." But that motive, if that was the reason for his hoax, was overcome by events when Smith landed a position at Columbia University, wrote a successful book on ancient history, and was made a full professor in 1962. Was his intention, then, ultimately to fool and then enrage the Establishment, while the scholar in him had to make his confession by planting clues of deception in the text? Carlson thinks so. He suggests that it was a joke in order to reveal, if and when it was eventually discovered, just how clever he was!
If Morton Smith's invention of Secret Mark was, as Carlson reveals, a brilliant work of deception, it is unfortunate that he is not around to witness his exposure. Morton Smith died in 1991.
I like Hurtado's comment: "Far from being some lost version of the story of Jesus, Secret Mark is uncovered as a great practical joke -- one that keeps Morton Smith laughing from his grave".
HEAVEN ON EARTH
A Virtual Tour of Our Holy Temple
Wednesdays: July 30, August 6 and 13
7:30 - 9:00 pm (Jewishinstlouis.org)
This summer, nearly 2,000 years since the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, Chabad of Greater St. Louis will unveil Heaven on Earth, a three-week interactive course developed by the renowned Rohr Jewish Learning Institute, which recreates the ancient Jerusalem Temples from the ground up. Heaven on Earth will be offered at the Lazaroff Chabad Center, at 8124 Delmar Blvd., in University City, on three consecutive Wednesday evenings, 7:30 to 9 pm, beginning on July 30.
Through an interactive and innovative virtual tour, Heaven on Earth will enable students to conceptualize the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, allowing them to “walk through” the Temple’s ancient corridors, throng with the crowds through Jerusalem’s gates, and discover the marvels of architecture and design that were integral to this sacred site. Heaven on Earth provides students with an explanation for the central role the Holy Temple plays in the life and history of the Jewish people, and why to this day Jews of all stripes pray for the Temple’s rebuilding and converge upon the Western Wall, its surviving remnant.
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Despite such a title, and despite the absence of a love angle, the positive reception was immediate and universal. Before the end of the year, the first volume had run through four editions. By the end of the 19th century, the book had spawned multitudinous editions, including children’s picture books with little or no text. The book was translated even into languages such as Inuit, Coptic, and Maltese. ...I wonder about Aramaic.
He ventured forth to bring light to the worldAs usual with such things, its authenticity is debated. And in any case, elements of the account are arguably legendary.
The anointed one's pilgrimage to the Holy Land is a miracle in action - and a blessing to all his faithful followers
Gerard Baker (London Times)
And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness.
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Art That Does Not Hide ItselfThere are photos of both pieces in the article.
Art
By Menachem Wecker The Forward)
Thu. Jul 24, 2008
Most of the works that appear in the exhibit Idol Anxiety, at the University of Chicago’s David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, feature Christian and pagan content. But exhibit curator Aaron Tugendhaft credits the “heightened awareness” he developed from studying the Talmud as a child with helping him discover “valuable distinctions not seen by others” in the process of how objects avoid becoming idols.
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This spectrum is evident in two objects, one Jewish and one Christian, that hang side by side in the show. The Jewish image, an ink-on-parchment 19th-century Yemeni “Holy Tree” amulet, incorporates Hebrew text and diagrams of the 10 sephirot, or divine attributes in Kabbalah. The show suggests that this amulet avoids the Second Commandment’s ban on representing the divine by giving physical form to the divine attributes rather than trying to depict God directly. In modern art terms, the amulet is an abstraction rather than a naturalistic portrait.
The Christian kabbalist who created the companion piece shared no such concerns about directly representing God. The 1515 woodcut from the first printed edition of the New Testament in Syriac shows Jesus crucified, with a haloed saint looking up at him. An eagle beside the saint identifies him as John, and between him and the cross is the first verse of John’s Gospel, “In principio erat verbum” (“In the beginning was the word”). Behind Saint John are a seven-branch menorah and a football-shaped form that circumscribes the 10 sephirot. The artist joined the sephirot with the crucifixion through lines representing the stigmata that connect each sephirah with one of Jesus’ wounds. Where the “Holy Tree” carefully draws the line at representing attributes of God, the woodcut maps the divine body over the human body.
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I approach Qumran as a specialist in the texts, so when I said "Qumran provenance," that was shorthand for "coming from the Qumran library found in those caves around the site." And it is my position, and that of most specialists in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Norman Golb is an exception), that it is a sectarian library. This has been argued repeatedly and at length elsewhere and I'm not going to rehearse those arguments here. (I have addressed the issue online here, here, here, and here.) I am not an archaeologist and I hold no particular position about the use of the site and that question doesn't much matter for the point I was making. (For some discussion on this blog see here, here, here, here ,here, here, here, here, and here.) But the consensus position that the library is sectarian does raise the question of how a Samaritan biblical fragment got into it, if that's what happened. It's not impossible, but it's striking and worthy of further exploration." If it is a Samaritan fragment, this raises the question of whether the reported Qumran provenance is correct and, if it is, what the Qumran sectarians were doing with a Samaritan manuscript. Given their exclusivist sectarian worldview, it doesn't seem likely that they would have had cordial relations with the Samaritans.I, as you know, approach Qumran as an archaeologist not as a textual scholar. Even if the fragment is genuine and the provenance is correct what evidence is there to suggest that Qumran was a sectarian settlement? As an archaeologist I can not directly connect the people who inhabited the site with the scrolls beyond the fact that at least some of those inhabitants were aware of the existence of the scrolls. Even most textual scholars now accept, do they not, that some of the scrolls must have come from elsewhere? And surely the scrolls could have arrived in Qumran at different times, from different places, and for different reasons? In my DSD article (vol.14.2 - 2007) I explained why some of the accepted dating was wrong and showed that some of the identifications of areas which were supposed to 'prove' sectarianism were wrong, and, indeed, that throughout the 70 years of Hasmonean occupation the site was probably only capable of sustaining limited, seasonal industrialists. Surely the insistence that Qumran was a high-class sectarian society, despite considerable indications to the contrary, muddies the whole issue?
Again, this whole discussion depends on the fragment being genuine, which remains to be demonstrated." -
World's oldest Bible goes onlineSome people seem struck by the fact that this oldest, or at least very old, Bible includes the Apocrypha. The Cleveland Leader headlines this with "World's Oldest Bible Gets Digitized, Includes Disputed Apocrypha Books" and notes:
By Ed Payne
CNN
LONDON, England (CNN) -- The oldest known surviving copy of the New Testament gets the modern touch Thursday when parts of it go online for the first time.
The full manuscript of the Codex Sinaiticus will be online a year from now.
The full manuscript of the Codex Sinaiticus will be online a year from now.
The British Library plans to begin publishing the Codex Sinaiticus, a 4th century text handwritten in Greek, on its Web site. The Gospel of Mark and the Book of Psalms go online Thursday. The full manuscript is to be online in a year.
Translations of the Codex Sinaiticus have long been widely available, but publishing images of the manuscript online will let anyone see pages that, until now, have been viewed in detail mainly by academia.
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The Codex contains all of the New Testament, and also includes part of the Old Testament, and originally contained the entire text of the Christian Bible. It also includes Apocrypha, the 14 disputed books of the Old Testament which are typically omitted from the Protestant Bible. The Codex also contains two early Christian texts, "Epistle of Barnabas" and the "Shepherd of Hermas."And someone posting on Associated Content notes the Apocrypha connection and makes much of 2 Maccabees being in the Apocrypha, evidently being unaware that 2 Maccabees is not found in Codex Sinaiticus.
Museum Offers Gray Gaza a View of Its Dazzling Past
By ETHAN BRONNER (NYT)
Published: July 25, 2008
GAZA — It may sound like the indulgence of a well-fed man fleeing the misery around him. But when Jawdat N. Khoudary opens the first museum of archaeology in Gaza this summer it will be a form of Palestinian patriotism, showing how this increasingly poor and isolated coastal strip ruled by the Islamists of Hamas was once a thriving multicultural crossroad.
The exhibition is in a stunning hall made partly of stones from old houses, discarded wood ties of a former railroad and bronze lamps and marble columns uncovered by Gazan fishermen and construction workers.
And while the display might be pretty standard stuff most anywhere else — arrowheads, Roman anchors, Bronze Age vases and Byzantine columns — life is now so gray in Gaza that the museum, with its glimpses of a rich outward-looking history, seems somehow dazzling.
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His collection includes thousands of items, but some of the most extraordinary will not go on display now, including a statue of a full-breasted Aphrodite in a diaphanous gown, images of other ancient deities and oil lamps featuring menorahs.
Asked why, Mr. Khoudary noted Hamas’s rule and the conservative piety of the population and said simply, “I want my project to succeed.”
He did, however, bring a Hamas government minister to see the exhibition recently and pointed out two crosses on Byzantine columns to make sure he had no objections. The gap between what he calls the narrow-mindedness of today’s Gaza and the worldliness of the past is what most saddens him, he said.
A prominent construction company owner, Mr. Khoudary, who is 48 and a proponent of coexistence and global culture, has been collecting for 22 years, ever since he came across an Islamic glass coin and fell in love with its link to a bygone era. Since then, he has asked all his construction workers to save whatever they dig up so that he can search it for treasures. Local fishermen know that anything old that washes ashore will fetch a decent price from Mr. Khoudary.
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The Qumran QuandaryThe Vision of Gabriel stone gets some attention too, but the rest of the conference is not neglected.
By ZIV HELLMAN (Jerusalem Post)
Cover story in Issue 8, August 4, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here.
The Judean desert in the vicinity of the Qumran caves, on the west coast of the Dead Sea, is bleak, dusty, hot and barren. Little life stirs here. The bright blue of the vast salt lake belies its own lifelessness. It is easy to see why the original view of those who lived here 2,000 years ago and apparently wrote over 900 parchment manuscripts is that of ascetic monks who spent all their time laboriously copying sacred texts in an isolated community.
But 60 years after the discovery of the first Dead Sea scrolls by two Beduin shepherds - and seven years after the last of the scrolls to be unearthed was published and made available to scholars - that view has largely been discarded. In its place are a plethora of competing theories about who lived at Qumran, what their relationship to the scrolls was, and what legacy they left behind.
Archaeological digs at Qumran and surrounding settlements have revealed not an isolated, penurious community, but in some respects a rather flourishing one, which in the Second Temple period contained installations for blacksmithing and tanning and what seems to be an immense pottery factory. The residents there traded with other settlements, kept a stable, grew crops and raised sheep. Based on theories that the residents lived a communal lifestyle, some have termed it "the first kibbutz," complete with agriculture, light industry, a communal dining room and a common treasury - a cache of hundreds of silver coins was found on the site.
Loud rows are now erupting at academic conferences over a question that was once considered too ridiculous to ask: did the Qumran community include women and children? And the recent stunning discovery of a "Dead Sea Stone" - a first century BCE tablet found on the east coast of the lake, and possibly describing a suffering messiah who dies and is resurrected three days later - has stirred renewed interest in tracing the precursors of early Christian theology in the desert.
These were just a few of the hotly-debated topics at an early July conference in Jerusalem to mark the 60th anniversary of the discovery of the scrolls. Some 36 researchers from Israel, the United States, Canada, Austria, Germany, Britain and Belgium gathered in the Shrine of the Book - which houses the most famous scroll, that containing the complete text of the Book of Isaiah - on the grounds of the Israel Museum. The event was a testament to the persistent and even increasing interest in what are some of the world's most renowned historical documents.
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Ancient Bible with a murky past is on the path to a new era of claritySeems like a good summary of the current understanding of the rediscovery of the manuscript.
Alexi Mostrous (London Times)
The story of the Codex Sinaiticus Bible, the oldest complete copy of the New Testament in existence, reads like a script from an Indiana Jones film.
Ever since a German explorer controversially removed it from an Egyptian monastery, four countries have fought for control over the ancient manuscript.
From today, extracts from the 4th-century Greek original can be viewed online. Behind the scenes, however, “harsh and negative” discussions continue between Britain, Russia, Egypt and Germany to establish who has the right to the priceless artefact.
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Obama visits Jerusalem's Western WallUPDATE: It was Psalm 122:
Wed Jul 23, 2008 11:34pm EDT
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama made a surprise pre-dawn visit to Jerusalem's Western Wall on Thursday, at the end of a trip aimed at showing his strong support for Israel.
Obama, wearing a Jewish skullcap, placed a prayer he had written in the wall and bowed his head while a rabbi read a psalm calling for peace in the holy city.
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(IsraelNN.com) Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama wound up his two-day visit to Israel Thursday morning with a pre-dawn visit to the Western Wall (Kotel), where he and his wife quietly read Psalm 122.
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