Shavuot 2015

THE FESTIVAL OF SHAVUOT (Weeks, Pentecost) begins today at sundown. Best wishes to all those celebrating. Some biblical background is noted here.

Review of Secunda, The Iranian Talmud

BIBLIOGRAPHIA IRANICA: Review: The Iranian Talmud. By Geoffrey Herman at AJS Review.

Background here and links.

Early Islam: The Sectarian Milieu of Late Antiquity?

ENOCH SEMINAR CONFERENCE: Early Islam: The Sectarian Milieu of Late Antiquity? / Fourth Nangeroni Meeting (2015 Milan), conference. It meets on 15-19 June, just before the regular bi-annual meeting of the Enoch Seminar at the same venue. I shall be at the latter, presenting a main paper, but I am sorry to have to miss this Nageroni meeting.

Summer School on manuscripts, philology, and technology

DEADLINE LOOMING: manuSciences '15: Franco-German Summer School : Interdisciplinary approaches to manuscript studies combining philology, materials studies, computer science and digital humanities. Via the International Organization for Qumran Studies (IOQS) mailing list. In the the message, the following from the summer school organizer, Daniel Stoekl Ben Ezra, is included:

Dear colleagues
Excuses for cross-posting. We call for applications to the manusciences '15 summer university organized by the Freie Universität Berlin and the Ecole pratique des hautes études on the beautiful island of Frauenchiemsee near Munich between September 6 and September 12, 2015. In presentations and practical exercises we will present the possibilities and limits in the application of CSI-style techniques from material sciences, imaging computational and digital humanities to manuscripts. MA students, PhD candidats, postdocs and colleagues from all countries dealing with any of the concerned disciplines or manuscript cultures may apply. We have numerous scholarships to cover the hotel and meal expenses.
Many further details can be found here: http://humanum.ephe.fr/en/manusciences-15
Deadline: May 26, 2015 (soon!).
Kind regards
Daniel

Corpus Avesticum conference

BIBLIOGRAPHIA IRANICA: Corpus Avesticum meeting: “Ḫorde Avesta.” A conference in Berlin which starts today, in which a group of specialists in a research network meet to discuss their work on producing a new, and much needed, edition of the Avesta.

Latest on Palmyra

PALMYRA WATCH: I can find no news about what has happened to the antiquities and ruins of Palmyra in the last day, since ISIS captured them. Probably no one knows. But here are a couple of relevant articles:

Ancient Palmyra Treasures at Risk From ISIS: Photos (Discovery);

After Palmyra, Islamic State said to control half of Syria (AFP/Times of Israel).

Background here and links.

More archaeological vandalism

Vandals Paint Palestinian Flags Over Israeli UNESCO World Heritage Site (David Daoud, The Algemeiner).

Inspectors from the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Israel Nature and Parks Authority filed a complaint on Wednesday with the Dimona police department over the vandalism at the ruins of the ancient city of Haluza, a UNESCO World Heritage Site located in the Negev desert.

Haluza was one of four cities in the Negev on the Nabatean Incense Route.

Review of Satlow, How the Bible Became Holy

BOOK REVIEW: The authority of the written word (Rabbi James B. Rosenberg, The Jewish Voice).

Michael L. Satlow’s “How the Bible Became Holy” (Yale University Press, 2014) is an audacious book. Satlow, professor of Religious Studies and Judaic Studies at Brown, spells out his intentions in the introductory pages: “This book proposes a very different answer to the question of when and how the Bible gained authority. I will argue here that Jews and Christians gave to the texts that constitute our Bible only very limited and specific kinds of authority well into the third-century and beyond. The “peoples of the book” did not know their book very well.”

[...]

Earlier reviews etc. are noted here and links.

Maggie Anton profiled

Talmudic temptation (Linda Mothner, Jewish Journal).

From a glass-enclosed cabinet in her Westchester home office, historical novelist Maggie Anton removed a small clay pot. Indicating the Hebrew characters inscribed on the pot in the same Aramaic text as in the Talmud, she noted the rough outline of a demonic form inside the “incantation bowl.” She explained during an interview that during the fourth to sixth centuries, the same time that the Talmud was being created, the bowls, purchased in an antiquities store in Israel, were ubiquitous in Iraq — once known as Babylonia — the setting for Anton’s latest novel, “Enchantress.”

[...]

The Talmud also claimed a major presence in Anton’s earlier trilogy, “Rashi’s Daughters.” A former clinical chemist for Kaiser Permanente, Anton said that she never could have written “Enchantress” without first telling the story of the great scholar who lived in 11th-century France. The availability of historical documentation on Rashi helped greatly. Teasing out the basic information from just the Talmud about the characters in another book, “Rav Hisda’s Daughter,” was much trickier.

[...]

I have linked to numerous articles on Maggie Anton's novels about late-antique Judaism: start here and here and follow the links. And I have collected some posts on those ancient Babylonian Aramaic incantation bowls here. This article is interesting because it tells about the unusual self-publishing route by which she started publishing her novels. If I knew that before, I had forgotten, and I'm pretty sure I've never highlighted it.

Many aspiring authors might have given up at this point. Not Anton. Hiring a literary shepherd, she and her husband, Dave Parkhurst, a patent attorney, became publishers themselves.

“I knew how to reach Jewish women, and I knew there was interest. I did a lot of cold calling of [synagogue] sisterhoods, Hadassahs and National Councils of Jewish Women chapters. Then I went all over the country and Canada and hit the Jewish talk circuit — sold books in the back of the room. They would tell their friends. There was buzz.” In 18 months, 26,000 books had sold.

Then the big publishers started a bidding war over her.

John Dee and the "Enochian" language

ENOCH WAS NOT JUST FOR THE SECOND TEMPLE ERA: Enochian: The Mysterious Lost Language of Angels (Bryan Hilliard, Ancient Origins).

In the year 1581, occultists John Dee and Edward Kelley, claimed to have received communications from angels, who provided them with the foundations of a language with which to communicate with ‘the other side’. This ‘angelic’ language contained its own alphabet, grammar and syntax, which they wrote down in journals. The new language was called "Enochian" and comes from John Dee's assertion that the Biblical Patriarch Enoch had been the last human to know the language.

[...]

The essays in Ancient Origins have been of mixed quality lately, but this one is a good summary of the story of John Dee, his "scryer" Edward Kelley, and their angelic revelations, which included the "Angelic" (later "Enochian") language; and also a good overview of the current state of the question in scholarship and among practicing magicians. Nice photos too. Dee's massive diary of his angelic séances has been useful in my own work on ancient revelatory praxis and experience (see my 2012 SBL paper here). And I have more on John Dee etc. here and links.

Palmyra falls

DISASTER: ISIS Fighters Seize Control of Syrian City of Palmyra, and Ancient Ruins (Anne Barnard and Hwaida Saad, NYT).

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Islamic State militants swept into the historic desert city of Palmyra in central Syria on Wednesday, and by evening were in control of it, residents and the Syrian state news media said, a victory that gives them another strategically important prize five days after the group seized the Iraqi city of Ramadi.

Palmyra has extra resonance as home to some of the world’s most magnificent remnants of antiquity, as well as the grimmer modern landmark of Tadmur Prison, where Syrian dissidents have languished over the decades.

But for the fighters on the ground, the city of 50,000 people is significant because it sits among gas fields and astride a network of roads across the country’s central desert.

As they have swept across Syria and Iraq, Islamic State fighters have destroyed or damaged numerous ancient sites and sculptures, condemning them as idolatry in slickly produced recruitment films, even as they pillage and sell off more portable items to finance their activities. That has raised fears both locally and internationally that Palmyra, a United Nations world heritage site, could also be irrevocably damaged.

[...]

And, lest we forget:

At the same time, he lamented that more attention had been focused on the threat to the city’s ruins than to its residents. Islamic State fighters massacred captured soldiers and civilians in outlying villages last week, according to Mr. [Khaled] Homsi [a Palmyra resident and anti-government activist] and a government soldier whose comrades were killed. And Mr. Homsi said several civilians had been killed by government shelling in Palmyra, unable to get treatment at the hospital, which was being used solely for military casualties.

The AP/AFP has reports from locals indicating that as of this morning ISIS has not damaged the site.

More:

The cradle of civilization: What is Palmyra and why is it so significant? (Darren Mara, SBS);

To surrender Palmyra is to betray civilisation itself (Boris Johnson, Daily Telegraph/Time Live).

For some historical background on Palmyra, see here and links. And another post on recent events here.

Watermelon

YONA SABAR: Hebrew word of the week: avaTiyyiaH: אבטיח.

Aqueduct discovered in Jerusalem

EXCAVATION: Section of Ancient Jerusalem’s Lower Aqueduct Discovered (Tzvi Ben-Gedalyahu, Jewish Press).

A section of Jerusalem’s Lower Aqueduct, which conveyed water to the city more than 2,000 years ago, was exposed during the construction install a modern sewer system for Arabs in the villages of Umm Tuba and Sur Bahar, near HaHoma in southern Jerusalem.

The Israel Antiquities Authority conducted an archaeological excavation there following the discovery of the aqueduct.

[...]

Dig wrap-up

INTERVIEW: Homeland creator Gideon Raff talks Dig (Michael Idato, Sydney Morning Herald).

The series was created by Heroes writer Tim Kring and Homeland writer Gideon Raff, and while both may pour a sense of cinematic adventure into the framework, there is no doubt Raff's upbringing in Israel and his personal connection to the city play a big role in setting the series tone and texture.

"I wanted to tell a story about the city, but of course I am a fan of Indiana Jones," he says. "I grew up on those movies and I love archaeology, [the idea of the] archaeological thriller, but more than anything I think I wanted it to be timely. I wanted it to be relevant like my other shows.

"It was important, Raff says, that the series strike "a core in terms of the nowadays, the threats today and in that sense, Tim and I really wanted to make a show about fanaticism and faith. Everything I researched, everything unveiled in the conspiracy in Dig is real things that are happening right now, and in that sense it's a very relevant and timely thriller."

Well, sort of.

Background here and links. [Wrong link now corrected!]

Source criticism vindicated

REMNANT OF GIANTS: Illustrating The Benefits of Pentateuchal Literary Criticism: The David and Goliath Story. This is indeed a really striking case of where source critism not only works, but it can be established by a manuscript tradition that leaves out one of the sources.

I just found out that Remnant of Giants is back and I will have to catch up on it.

Review of del Olmo Lete, Incantations and Anti-Witchcraft Texts from Ugarit

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEWS:

Gregorio del Olmo Lete, Incantations and Anti-Witchcraft Texts from Ugarit. Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Records (SANER), 4. Boston; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. Pp. vii, 254, 23 p. of plates. ISBN 9781614516279. €99.95.

Reviewed by Bronson Brown-deVost, Brandeis University (bronson@brandeis.edu)

The remains of Ugaritic literature furnish a rich source for understanding the small but influential Mediterranean village of Ugarit in the late second millennium B.C.E. While one may think immediately of the colorful mythological narratives or even the cultic texts in this regard,1 del Olmo Lete tackles here the less well understood issue of magic at Ugarit.

A comprehensive study of anti-witchcraft literature from Ugarit, both in narrative settings and in stand alone rituals, forms the primary basis for del Olmo Lete’s approach to the topic. del Olmo Lete presents transliterations, translations, and discussions of nearly all anti-witchcraft incantations uncovered at Ugarit. This includes texts in the native Ugaritic language as well as Mesopotamian texts in the Akkadian and Sumerian languages (the Mesopotamian texts were prepared by Ignacio Márquez Rowe and receive less discussion than the Ugaritic ones).

[...]

Incidentally, in answer to a question in the review, del Olmo Lete did not use the Arslan Tash amulet inscriptions because he thinks (along with many but not all Northwest Semitic epigraphers) that they are forgeries.

Everett Fox profiled

BIBLE TRANSLATOR: Tinkering With the Word of God (Avi Steinberg, The New Yorker).

[Everett] Fox has dedicated his life to giving the Anglophone ear a hint of that Hebrew drama. Many translators have tried, in one way or another, to make the Bible do in English what it does in Hebrew, but few have given top priority to the sound and feel of the original language. Fox uses every poetic means at his disposal: phrase length, line break, puns. He has paid particular attention to the word repetitions that the Biblical narrator uses to develop the story’s themes. He scrupulously preserves ancient Hebrew’s doubled verbs, which themselves sometimes double up (“you will overtake, yes, overtake, and will rescue, yes, rescue”). Orality is key to understanding the story, Fox believes, because the Bible, like many ancient texts, was designed to be sung and performed aloud. For Fox, the standard continues to be musical performance, with its openness to interpretation.

His translations of the Pentateuch and the Deuteronomistic History have been published so far.

Palmyra update

STILL IN PERIL: ISIS Attacks Druze Village, Aims for 'Victory Against the World.' Islamic State attacks Syria's Druze heartland before being forced out by pro-regime militia; clashes continue at ancient city of Palmyra. (Arutz Sheva).

Further north, fighting between IS jihadists and government forces continued outside Palmyra on Tuesday morning.

"There are clashes at the western entrance of Palmyra this morning, which lies on the road that leads to Homs city," provincial governor Talal Barazi told AFP.

On Sunday, regime forces pushed ISIS out of northern neighborhoods of Palmyra, which it had held for less than 24 hours.

Barazi said he visited Palmyra on Monday, "going through 60 percent of the city on foot," visiting the vegetable market and museum.

He said at least 40 rockets had struck Palmyra on Sunday, but that government forces maintained control over key points, including the Islamic citadel overlooking the city.

Background here and links.

Western Wall upgrade

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: Israel’s 5-Year Upgrade Plan for Western Wall. Israel's new government has approved a five-year plan to upgrade and develop the area around the Western Wall (Hana Levi Julian, Jewish Press).

Israel plans to develop the area with upgraded infrastructure, improved archaeological activity and, further development of the Western Wall site, and underground tunnels that run along the length of the Wall.

Widows in the Talmud

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: For Jewish Widows, Like Modern Drug Offenders, Just How Much Matters. Why Talmudic law is precise, and how practical matters can test the moral foundations of the system.

The amount of attention that the Talmud devotes to the rights of widows in Tractate Ketubot is a direct reflection of their vulnerability in a patriarchal society. As a daughter, a Jewish woman is under the protection of her father; as a wife, she is under the protection of her husband; but as a widow, she is suddenly left to fend for herself. Some women might have felt this as a liberation, but it was also a position of economic and social peril. How is she to make sure that her husband’s heirs—who might not be her own children, but any of his relatives—will treat her fairly? What if they throw her out of her house? What if they refuse to give her money to live on?

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.