THE SBL FORUM has published a number of new essays this month. This one in particular caught my eye:

They’ve Given You a Number and Taken Away Your Name’: Gnostic Themes in The Prisoner, Television’s Ultimate Cult Classic

Mark Holwager and Valarie Ziegler

Surprisingly, no one has discussed The Prisoner’s striking parallels to Gnostic religions. Using the Gospel of Thomas and “The Hymn of the Pearl” from the Acts of the Apostle Thomas, we will demonstrate how The Prisoner exemplifies the Gnostic myth of descent and return, depicting a hero who refuses to be fully embodied in the hateful world in which he is imprisoned, who insists (contrary to evidence) that he is from a truer world in a higher realm, and who risks everything to return to the beginning and reunite with his genuine self....

It's quite interesting. The Truman Show is another example of a retelling of the Gnostic demiurgic redemption myth in modern media. The parallels are so strong that I'm inclined to think they're deliberate. Truman is the True Man trapped in the false world of the Demiurge Christof (the off-Christ) and is inspired to escape by Sylvia (Sophia), and so on. But I'm hardly the first to point this out.

PSEUDEPIGRAPHA WATCH: Is 2 (Slavonic) Enoch being read by Dispensationalists? In the Tampa Tribune one Dale L. Gillis writes with consternation:

Recently I found that some believers in Rapture are reading The Secrets of Enoch and treating it as Scripture. While Enoch is an ancient book, it isn't in the Bible or even in the Apocrypha. Supposedly it was written before the flood and Noah carried a copy on the Ark.

Secrets of Enoch assume that God has a physical body. It tells us that both Eden and the place of torment for mortals are in the third heaven. This is apparently lower than the moon and sun, which are in the fourth heaven. The fifth heaven contains the place of torment for demons, the angels who rejected God.

Although read by Rapturists, Secrets of Enoch says nothing about God planning to Rapture believers off the earth before the end. ...

I wonder if this is an isolated incident or a trend. Could get interesting ...

ANOTHER SCALE MODEL of the Jerusalem Temple:

Farmer builds model of Biblical temple
A retired farmer has spent more than 30 years building an enormous scale model of a Biblical temple.

Last Updated: 12:44PM GMT 26 Feb 2009 (The Daily Telegraph)

Alec Garrard, 78, has dedicated a massive 33,000 hours to constructing the ancient Herod's Temple, which measures a whopping 20ft by 12ft.

The pensioner has hand-baked and painted every clay brick and tile and even sculpted 4,000 tiny human figures to populate the courtyards.

Historical experts believe the model is the best representation in the world of what the Jewish temple actually looked like and it has attracted thousands of visitors from all over the globe.

[...]

No "historical experts" are actually quoted by name, and I would take the claim with a grain of salt. The writer seems unaware of the scale model of the Temple (indeed, of the Herodian city of Jerusalem) now residing at the Israel Museum (see here and follow the links back). That one's 50:1 scale makes its Temple twice the size of this one (100:1 scale). But this is still quite an impressive hobby.

CAN'T MAKE IT UP: A Torah vending machine.

Vending Machines Dispense Torah Learning

by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu

(IsraelNN.com) Learning Torah has replaced chips, candy bars and pretzels at a vending machine on the second floor of the Jerusalem Central Bus Station. Passengers can receive a small booklet that allows them to cover a precept of Jewish Law, Mishna, Aggadah (allegories and non-legalistic text from the Talmud) and part of the weekly Torah reading.

[...]

SOME CONTROVERSIES that - directly or indirectly - involve archaeology and ancient Judaism are currently in the news:

This one just goes on and on:

Reform rabbis urge relocation of Museum of Tolerance
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS (Jerusalem Post)

The leaders of Reform Jewry in North America on Wednesday urged the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center to relocate its planned Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem to an alternative location in the city due to the location of a Muslim cemetery found on a section of the planned construction site.

[...]

Background here.

This one has been around for awhile too, but there are significant recent developments:

Palestinians ask Obama to press Israel to halt demolitions

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AFP) — The Palestinian Authority urged the US president on Monday to press Israel to scrap a plan to raze almost 90 homes in annexed Arab east Jerusalem.

"We call on President Barack Obama to intervene personally to have this project stopped," said Yasser Abed Rabbo, one of the main aides of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.

The Palestinian owners of 88 houses in the Silwan neighbourhood have received eviction notices saying that the structures will be destroyed because they were built or expanded without the necessary permits. The move would affect about 1,500 people.

[...]

Haaretz also noted the following recently:

Jerusalem offers to voluntarily relocate 1,500 Palestinian residents
By Nir Hasson

The Jerusalem municipality may offer to voluntarily relocate some 1,500 Palestinian residents of the city's Silwan neighborhood - currently living on top of an archaeological site - to alternative lots in East Jerusalem, residents say.

The option was brought up by city council and East Jerusalem portfolio holder Yakir Segev, in meetings with the residents.

[...]

(The latter via Joseph I. Lauer's list.)

Finally, an archaeological controversy involving ancient Jewish bones outside Israel:

Jewish bones in Rabat are ours'
Heritage Malta says everything must stay on site

Kurt Sansone (Times of Malta)

The Jewish catacombs in Rabat were at the centre of controversy in recent days after Heritage Malta called in police when a Jewish religious delegation allegedly entered the site without authorisation.

The Jewish community in Malta is demanding that the human bones found inside the catacombs are given a proper burial according to Jewish rites.

A Jewish delegation made up of at least 10 experts, Rabbis and archaeologists from Israel and the US was brought over to Malta by the Jewish community to carry out the burial.

[...]

YESTERDAY was the fifth anniversary of the USA release of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. The British release wasn't until 26 March and I didn't see it until late April. My review of the film is here.

Evy Nelson asks on Facebook, "Isn't it ironic that a film which generated mountains of press at the time of its release passes its 5th anniversary today unnoticed ... unmentioned?"

Sic transit gloria mundi. Now how do you say that in Aramaic?

MORE ON THE SIMULATED ARCHAEOLOGICAL DIG in Texas (see here). Trey Thames e-mails to alert me to the Tel Ya'ar website and to a local TV interview:

And he adds:

The only correction I have for the article that you referenced is the number of artifacts within the site. We have about 350 artifacts, not 50. In addition there is the remains of 4 homes and 5 skeletons. Each of the skeletons were placed in such a way, or other evidence given for cause of death or the manner in which they were killed. Trying to give our students more opportunities for deduction and analytical thinking.

I'd love to have some feedback on our program, if you have any.

Nothing except to say that it looks like a very good one.

IT'S NOT CRYSTAL, but it's a

Rare Magic Inscription on Human Skull
By Dan Levene (Biblical Archaeology Review)

Not long ago, the well-known collector Shlomo Moussaieff acquired two earthenware bowls, the open ends of which were adjoined to form a kind of case—inside the case was an ancient human skull. A magic incantation, written in Aramaic, was inscribed on the skull.

[...]

The article tells us that at least four other such skulls survive, none scientifically excavated but all discovered long enough ago that they are very unlikely to be forgeries. There's nothing about the authentication process for this one, so I can't say anything about the case for its genuineness. But here is what Levene says about it:

This skull came to Moussaieff inside two bowls that formed a case. The bowls themselves contain no writing. An examination of the bowls gave me the impression that they were an original and integral part of a single magical object of which the skull was the main part. This is, however, speculative.

The inscription on the skull contains many of the features common to magic bowl inscriptions. We know the names of at least some of the people for whom the skull incantation was made. Two of them are common Jewish names: Martha and Shilta. According to one scholar, Shilta is derived from an Aramaic word meaning “after-birth.” And the skull is probably that of a woman. Although parts of 11 lines of text have survived, it is difficult to make much sense of what remains. The text is surrounded by a squiggly line, a common element among incantation bowls.

The text, however, is only part of the mystery. Basic questions continue to baffle: Why a skull? I have no certain answer. That so few examples exist, in comparison to the large number of bowls, suggests that the use of skulls for incantation texts was rare. Judaism, of course, has many taboos regarding human remains. Even touching a corpse imparts impurity. Necromancy is forbidden5 (although it was obviously sometimes practiced). Perhaps the skull was used for this text because it was thought that the spirits of the dead, to which skulls are obviously connected, have access to the supernatural realm.

In the end, this skull and its text remain mysterious, unfortunately revealing less than they conceal.

Indeed. This is really cool and I hope it can be shown to be genuine. Related BAR articles include "Lilith: Seductress, Heroine or Murderer?" and "Word Play: The Power of the Written Word in Ancient Israel." For more on the Aramaic incantation bowls, see here and here and follow the links.

THE VALMADONNA LIBRARY, exhibited by Sotheby's, is reviewed in The New Republic:

The Valmadonna Astonishment

by Peter N. Miller
Five hundred years of sacred history in one place.
Post Date Tuesday, February 24, 2009

For medieval Christians, Jerusalem was the omphalos of the world--the navel. It was there that this world was connected to the world to come. Dante parodied this spiritualized geography in his Divine Comedy, where the descent into and beyond the bottomless pit of Inferno inverted into the mountain of purgatory whence the ascent to paradise could begin. On the Bebelplatz in Berlin, between the opera house and the old university, the Nazis celebrated their ascendency by burning the books of Jews and other degenerates in 1933. Visitors since 1995 can peer through a small glass porthole into a room carved into this ground by the Israeli artist Micha Ullman. It is a square white room filled floor to ceiling with shelves. But the shelves are empty. The books are gone, buried in the air.

If one were able to descend into that room, and if that room were as bottomless as the agonies for which it stands, and if our universe were shaped like Dante's, we would re-emerge from the Bebelplatz monument into another white square room--even bigger--also lined floor to ceiling with shelves. Only this time, in a reversal as breathtaking as it is improbable, the shelves would be filled with books. Tall and short, thick and thin, with pretty bindings and quotidian ones, a few open to spectacular illustrations, most open to ordinary pages of print. This way out of a bookless dystopia, this emergence from the collapse of civilization into a sanctuary of civilization, was available to the roughly 10,000 people who in recent weeks packed the tenth-floor galleries at Sotheby's in New York to view the 13,000 books of the Valmadonna Trust collection. They were vouchsafed a vision as hallucinatory as any in Borges.

[...]

Nice image.

See also The Valmadonna Slideshow.

TWO LECTURES by renowned specialists in early Judaism are happening in the United States on opposite sides of the country:

Schäfer to give annual Cherrick Lecture in Jewish Studies

By Neil Schoenherr

Feb. 24, 2009 -- Peter Schäfer, Ph.D., the Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies and director of the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University, will present the 2009 Adam Cherrick Lecture in Jewish Studies, "Why Did Baby Messiah Disappear? The Birth of Christianity From the Spirit of Judaism," at 7 p.m. March 19 in Wilson Hall, room 214.

The lecture is free and open to the public. A kosher reception will follow.

[...]

If you follow the link for the next one, you have to scroll down a bit:

Professor to speak about Jewish mysticism tonight

CHULA VISTA: Professor Rachel Elior, a biblical scholar from Jerusalem, will lecture on the topic of Priests & Angels: Dead Sea Scrolls and Early Jewish Mysticism, from 7:30 to 9:30 tonight at Temple Beth Sholom, 208 Madrona St., Chula Vista.

Elior, one of the foremost experts on Jewish mysticism, has written 13 books and has taught at Princeton, Yeshiva and Michigan universities.

The cost is $10 and is open to the public. Information: (619) 420-6040 or bethsholomtemple.com. –D.B.

Wish I could go to both lectures. Especially sorry about Elior's, since I'll be in San Diego in April and so am just missing it.

A LATE-ANTIQUE SYNAGOGUE in the Golan is profiled by Stephen Gabriel Rosenberg in the Jerusalem Post. Excerpt:

Today on the Golan, the greatest Jewish interest centers on the synagogues, which number as many as 25. Some have been largely renovated, like that of Katzrin, but one of the most fascinating stands in ruins at Umm el-Kanatir, and is now being carefully reconstructed stone by stone by engineer Yeshu Drei and archeologist Haim Ben-David of the Kinneret Academic College and Bar-Ilan University.

Drei has erected a giant mobile crane on the site and plans to lift all the remaining black basalt stones, which have been carefully numbered from one to more than 2,000, into position within the next two years.

The work has been going on apace for some five years and, when complete, it will be a fine monument to the skill of the original builders of the fifth and sixth centuries CE and the meticulous reconstructors of today. It already gives us today an impressive picture of what the synagogue must have been like in the past.

The ruin has some points of interest, including an engraving of a man sticking his tongue out at the viewer and, perhaps, some early evidence for a Hanukkah Menorah (cf. here).

ARCHAEOLOGIST* JOE ZIAS denounces Biblical Archaeology Review and its editor Hershel Shanks in an essay published on the Bible and Interpretation website:

H. Shanks, “The Liberator of the Scrolls,” and BAR’s Contribution to Archaeology

For years, BAR has promoted itself as having championed the interests of the Dead Sea Scrolls; in fact, Shanks continually presents himself as “liberating the scrolls from a handful of scholars and making them available to all scholars. The opposite is true.”


By Joe Zias
Science and Archaeology Group,
The Hebrew University
February 2009

It will be interesting to see how Hershel Shanks responds.

*UPDATE (28 February): Sorry, that should be "osteologist."

A DAY CONFERENCE on the Hebrew Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls is being held at KCL in May:

The Hebrew Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls
Day Conference at King's College London (Strand Campus)

Thursday 14th May 2009

PROGRAMME

10.15: Registration (Council Room, directions from Strand Campus Lobby)

10.30-12.00: Discussion of pre-circulated extracts from Michael Knibb, Professor Emeritus, King's College London, Essays on the Book of Enoch and Other Early Jewish Texts and Traditions, Brill, 2009.

12.00-12.45: Lunch

12.45-2.00: Charlotte Hempel, University of Birmingham, 'The Teaching on the Two Spirits and the Literary History of the Community Rule'.

2.00-3.15: Lutz Doering, King's College London, 'Letter, Treatise or Historicising Document? Revisiting the Genre of 4QMMT'

3.15-3.30: Tea

3.30-5.00: Short papers by Graduates and recent PhDs.*

5.00-5.30: Reception

5.30-7.00: Simon Tanner, Computing and the Humanities, King's College London, 'The Dead Sea Scrolls Digitalization project'.

*To offer a 20 minute paper (plus 10 minutes feedback and discussion) on a theme related to the Hebrew Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls, please complete and return the form at the link below by 15th March 2009 and attach a (roughly) 300 word proposal. Presenters must be registered at the conference.

To register for the conference, please complete the form at the link below, by 15th March to propose a Graduate paper and by 1st May to register, and send it, along with a cheque for £15 payable to King's College London, to:

Ariane Dreysse
Department of Theology and Religious Studies
King's College London
Strand, London WC2R 2LS

Questions? E-mail diana.lipton@kcl.ac.uk

(Via the SOTS List.)

ANCIENT HEBREW INSCRIPTIONS from Iron Age II and the Hasmonean period have been excavated at Umm Tuba in the vicinity of Jerusalem. [UPDATE: Coverage also in Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post.] (Via Joseph I. Lauer's list.)

UPDATE (24 February): Zip file of photographs here.

ARCHANGEL METATRON WATCH: The Archangel Metatron is clearly fond of jazz. Most recently we find a song in his honor by the Bad Plus. According to band pianist Ethan Iverson in an article in All About Jazz, "Metatron — in the song 'My Friend Metatron' — is an archangel with whom you'd better not mess."

Amen.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: The BBC corrects an error that was brought to their attention by CAMERA. Good for them.

The distinction between the Western or Wailing Wall (which is part of the outer wall of the Herodian Temple platform) and the Temple Mount, on which (somewhere) the Temple actually stood, is a subtle but important one. As the BBC response notes, even Israeli media sometimes get this wrong.

THE PERSEPOLIS CUNEIFORM ARCHIVE CONTROVERSY (i.e., whether the archive should be confiscated by the US Government as compensation for terrorism sponsered by the Iranian Government) is the subject of a long and thorough article in The Herald News, MA.

FOCUS: Terrorism impacting archaeology, 02-22-09
The Herald News
Posted Feb 20, 2009 @ 05:40 PM

CHICAGO — The professor opens a cardboard box and gingerly picks up a few hunks of dried clay — dust-baked relics that offer a glimpse into the long-lost world of the Persian empire that spanned a continent 2,500 years ago.

Matt Stolper has spent decades studying these palm-sized bits of ancient history. Tens of thousands of them. They’re like a jigsaw puzzle. A single piece offers a tantalizing clue. Together, the big picture is scholarly bliss: a window into Persepolis, the capital of the Persian empire looted and burned by Alexander the Great.

The collection — on loan for decades to the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute — is known as the Persepolis Fortification Archive. These are, to put it simply, bureaucratic records. But in their own way, they tell a story of rank and privilege, of deserters and generals, of life in what was once the largest empire on earth.

For Stolper — temporary caretaker of the tablets — these are priceless treasures.
For others, they may one day be payment for a terrible deed.

In an extraordinary battle unfolding slowly in federal court here, several survivors of a suicide bombing in Jerusalem in 1997 sued the government of Iran, accusing it of being complicit in the attack. They won a $412 million default judgment from a judge in Washington, D.C., and when their lawyer began looking for places to collect, he turned to the past.

[...]

This is an excellent account that gives a sympathetic and (as far as I can tell) accurate presentation of both sides of this heartrending controversy, with full attention to the evil actions of Hamas and the Iranian regime, the horrendous suffering of the terrorism victims, the immense historical importance of the archive, and the worrisome implications of using it for compensation. It's hard to excerpt, but here's the conclusion:

No one knows how much the tablets (there are 10,000 to 12,000 useful pieces) would fetch on the open market. Some academics believe it would be a mere fraction of the enormous judgments; others think no institution would even bid on them considering the legal tug-of-war.
Strachman, however, maintains he has been contacted by interested museums who want to expand their collections. He says he has no intention of trying to sell them commercially — something he says would be “absolutely inappropriate.”

He has sued the Field Museum in Chicago, too, as well as the Harvard museums and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for other Persian artifacts. In those cases, lawyers deny the items belong to the government of Iran.

Strachman also is seeking a list of all Iranian assets in the United States.

As this case works its way through the courts, Stein, head of the Oriental Institute, worries about broader implications.

“If we open up the Pandora’s box ... and sell other countries’ cultural property, how long before they do the same to us?” he asks. “It would have a deadly, chilling effect on any kinds of cultural exchanges in the future.”

Gerstenblith, the DePaul professor, agrees. The bombing survivors clearly deserve compensation, she says, adding that she wouldn’t object if land or bank assets were at stake. “Money is money,” she says. “But cultural objects are completely different.”

Seven decades after these ancient records arrived by ship, a very modern-day debate over terrorism now leaves them in a legal limbo. It may take years more before their fate — and their home — is finally determined.

“I think and have to hope that common sense is going to prevail,” Stein says. “They ultimately are the property of the people of Iran and they belong back there.”

It is a relief to hear at least that one set of plaintiffs have no intention of selling the tablets to private collectors, although if they win the case, I doubt that they would be required to stand by that, and as the article notes, museums may hold off from getting involved in the controversy. But even these plaintiffs do not promise not to break up the collection. And the article notes that the lawyer for another set of plaintiffs has made this menacing statement:

Another lawyer is trying to seize the Persepolis collection and other Iranian assets to compensate more than 150 families of 241 U.S. service members killed in a suicide bombing of a Marines barracks in Beirut in 1983.

The families hope to collect a $2.6 billion default judgment against Iran, which has been blamed for supporting the militant group, Hezbollah, believed responsible for the Beirut attack. A special measure passed in Congress last year made it easier for families to receive compensation.

“If Iran wants to protect these things ... they’re going to have to do something to pay their judgments,” says Thomas Fortune Fay, the lawyer. “Maybe they’ll all end up on coffee tables around the country.”

I think this demonstrates that the precedent of seizing antiquities as compensation would be exceedingly unfortunate and could well be exploited by people such as Mr. Fay, who have no scruples against breaking up and selling such collections to private collectors.

Read it all.

Background here.

MOTHER OF GOD: A History of the Virgin Mary, by Miri Rubin, is reviewed by Christopher Howse in the Daily Telegraph. Excerpt:

Miri Rubin, a professor of medieval history at Queen Mary, University of London, does not adopt a devotional tone in her learned book. In 500 pages she teases out strands of opinion and conviction about Mary’s place in Christianity – and beyond. In a section on Mary in Islam, she examines the teaching of the Koran, where Jesus, a prophet, is born to Mary, a virgin, whose pregnancy is announced by an angel.

[...]

Miri Rubin deals with anti-Semitic statements among early Christians too. These are less often to do with supposed deicide as with Jewish rejection of the idea that Jesus could be God. Her discussion of this thread of polemical exchange gains force from its calm objectivity.

Jews who “derided” the Christian idea of Mary did so because they knew the greatness – or enormity – of their claims: that almighty God, the transcendent creator, had been born as a little baby. Pagans, by contrast, on first hearing of Christianity might have mistaken Jesus for just another god, perhaps as godly as Dionysus in Euripides’ Bacchae. That, no doubt, is why, in her early chapters Rubin, annoyingly for some readers, consistently refers to Jesus as “a god”.

Background here.

MORE ON THE VALMADONNA LIBRARY, which is currently in exhibition by Sotheby's. The Forward tells more about how it was collected:

Collecting “Val,” as Lunzer refers to the library, has been a passion so forceful that he describes it as lunacy. “Lunacy is this,” he said, “spending $2,500 going to look at a book that costs only $300.”

[...]

The story of his collection began in 1948 after he married his late wife Ruth, who was from a Milanese-Jewish family. Her father had hidden a small trove of 16th century Hebrew books from around Italy in his basement when he and his family fled to Switzerland during the Holocaust. After the books were retrieved, her brothers asked him to take care of them.

At first, he tried to refuse, Lunzer said in an interview with the Forward at his New York hotel. But as the newlyweds traveled through Italy, visiting villages that “were magical,” he realized that many of those places had Jewish history and the books reflected that history. “I saw in the books the whole drama of Hebrew printing, with all of its implications, social and political.”

The idea entranced him, and started him on his path.

[...]

Lunzer’s greatest collecting conquest was the Bomberg Babylonian Talmud, printed in 1520 under Papal privilege. It is the first complete Talmud ever printed — becoming all the more rare because on Rosh Hashanah 1553, the Vatican ordered the burning of copies of the Talmud that had been confiscated by the Inquisition. More Church destructions of the Talmud followed.

[...]

He persuaded Westminster Abbey to part with it, which was no mean feat.

Background here.

THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS EXHIBITION from the Royal Ontario Museum goes to California in March:

EXHIBITION ANNOUNCEMENT


Cantor Arts Center, 328 Lomita Drive, Stanford
California, USA

18 March – 16 August 2009

An exhibition of unparalleled significance, Dead Sea Scrolls showcases one of the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th century.

[...]

Created by the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Royal Ontario Museum, Dead Sea Scrolls unearths the intriguing tale of their discovery, examines the environment in which they were found and explores the science and technology which helped to decipher them.

[...]

Background here.

UPDATE AND CORRECTION: The curator of the Ontario exibition, Dr. Risa Levitt Kohn, e-mails:

Hi there,
I am afraid you got this one wrong:
THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS EXHIBITION from the Royal Ontario Museum goes to California in March:
There are no plans for this show to travel and in will be in Toronto from June 27, 2009 through Jan 4, 2010.
Thanks.

Okay. It appears that the linked announcement is either erroneous or its meaning is impenetrable, at least to me. Thanks for the correction.