Tamber-Rosenau on Women-Turned-Warriors and Queer Theory

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: How to Get a Head in Ancient Israel: Women-Turned-Warriors and Queer Theory (Caryn Tamber-Rosenau).

Caryn Tamber-Rosenau provides an overview of her recent publication, Women in Drag: Gender and Performance in the Hebrew Bible and Early Jewish Literature (Gorgias, 2018).

Excerpt:

I argue that the women in these tales perform femininity—seductiveness, motherliness, or a mixture of the two, depending on what the circumstances called for—as a deliberate battle strategy. Their chief weapons are not tent pegs and swords but feminine performance, and their ability to engage in this performance is intimately tied to their childlessness.

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Smash Mouth's "All Star" in Aramaic and back

ARAMAIC WATCH? Smash Mouth's 'All Star' translated to Aramaic and back becomes 'beautiful poetry' (Daniel Rutledge, Newshub).

Behold currently! You are entirely a star child! Begin your power! Go! Laugh!

The retranslated lyrics are kind of cool. For the full text of the Aramaic version, see this blog post by the translator, Isaac Mayer.

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Review of King (ed.), The Syriac World

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: Daniel King (ed.), The Syriac World. Routledge worlds. London; New York: Routledge, 2018. Pp. 842. ISBN 9781138899018. $176.00. Reviewed by Yulia Furman, Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies, National Research University Higher School of Economics (yfurman@hse.ru)

The present volume ‘The Syriac World’ has been published in the series of the Routledge publishing house ‘Routledge Worlds’, which offers comprehensive and magisterial overviews of principal historical epochs written by established experts. ‘The Syriac World’, edited by Daniel King, is dedicated to various aspects of Syriac culture, including history, literature, language and arts. It is intended primarily for scholars and students of Syriac studies and related fields. The book covers a vast variety of topics ranging from the birth of Syriac Christian culture and its pagan past to the modern descendants of the ancient Syriac churches spread all over the world. Thirty-nine contributions are divided between five major parts.

[...]

Cross-file, of course, under Syriac Watch.

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On the places that YHWH chose

ZVI KOENIGSBERG: The Place(s) that YHWH will Choose: Ebal, Shiloh, and Jerusalem (TheTorah.com).

Jews have long understood “the place that YHWH will chose” to mean Mount Zion in Jerusalem, while Samaritans have interpreted it as Mount Gerizim near Shechem. Archaeology and redaction criticism converge on a compromise solution: it refers to a series of places, one place at a time.

For more on Mt. Ebal, see here and links, and on Mt. Gerizim, see here and here and links.

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Bortolani et al. (eds), Cultural Plurality in Ancient Magical Texts and Practices

NEW BOOK FROM MOHR SIEBECK: Cultural Plurality in Ancient Magical Texts and Practices. Graeco-Egyptian Handbooks and Related Traditions. Ed. by Ljuba Merlina Bortolani, William Furley, Svenja Nagel, and Joachim Friedrich Quack. 2019. IX, 374 pages. Orientalische Religionen in der Antike 32. 129,00 € including VAT. cloth ISBN 978-3-16-156478-9.

Published in English.
A conference held in Heidelberg in 2014 resulted in this collection of essays, which explore the multifaceted aspects of magical texts and practices in antiquity, focusing especially on the Graeco-Egyptian magical papyri. The volume concentrates on questions of cultural plurality and fusion, ranging from earlier Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Greek magico-religious traditions, through the original developments of Graeco-Roman Egypt, up to and including their integration into Jewish and Byzantine magical lore. In particular, phenomena such as simple borrowing, advanced adaptation, complete assimilation or even distortion of origin and meaning stress the importance of disentangling different cultural elements and understanding their interaction. Going beyond the borders of academic fields, this book aims at giving to the transcultural perspective the importance it deserves in the study of ancient magic.

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Review of Krag, Funerary Representations of Palmyrene Women

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: Signe Krag, Funerary Representations of Palmyrene Women: From the First Century BC to the Third Century AD. Studies in classical archaeology, 3. Turnhout: Brepols, 2018. Pp. xii, 422. ISBN 9782503569659. €100,00 (pb). Reviewed by Anja Slawisch, University of Cambridge (as2653@cam.ac.uk)

In this book, Krag aims to offer new insights into a selected corpus of Palmyrene sculptures, dating from the 1st century BC to the 3rd century AD and composed mostly of female funerary representations. The book contains exhaustive and careful commentary on the pieces and categories under study, but gleaning wider insights is hampered by the verbose writing style and lack of clarity over research agenda.

[...]

Cross-file unde Palmyra Watch, Aramaic Watch, Northwest Semitic Epigraphy, and Sculpture.

Many other past posts on Palmyra, its history, the ancient Aramaic dialect spoken there (Palmyrene), and the city's tragic reversals of fortune, now trending for the better, are here and links.

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One Year of the Coptic Magical Papyri Project

COPTIC WATCH: 2019 Review: One Year of the Coptic Magical Papyri Project.

It’s hard to believe it, but a whole year has now passed since the three members of our project first sat around a table in Würzburg and began to talk about our new project on Coptic magic. In this post, we’ll discuss some of our achievements so far, and what we have coming up in the next year.

This excellent blog continues to be active. I have not kept up with it well for a while. Besides the retrospective post above, here are a couple of notable recent posts:

Anthropology of Magic IV: Lévi-Strauss on Magic. I noted the first three posts in this series here and here.

Religion in the Coptic Magical Papyri. I noted nine of the ten posts in this series here, here, and here. The tenth is Religion in the Coptic Magical Papyri X: Islam and Coptic Magic. It mentions a magical text from the Cairo Geniza which is written in part in Copto-Arabic (a term I just made up), that is, in Arabic written in Coptic script. I did not know that was a thing.

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Role-playing exorcisms?

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Performing Exercises, Performing Exorcisms (Sara Ronis).

According to the angel Raphael, the secret to exorcising the demon Asmodeus is to burn a particular fish’s heart and liver in the presence of the malevolent Asmodeus. The foul smell apparently repels this finicky demon. At least, that’s what the author of the Book of Tobit believed. Demons are weird. Demonic exorcisms are weirder still. And yet to dismiss them as simply weird is to miss out on the important social and theological work that demons do in both ancient and modern societies. Thus, I decided to devote a day to demonic possession and exorcism in a new course I was teaching on Second Temple Judaism. But how to teach this subject?

[...]

Cross-file under Pedagogy.

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Belatedly, Biblical Studies Carnival 162

THE AMATEUR EXEGETE: Biblical Studies Carnival 163 (August 2019).

Also, a related post by Phil Long, organizer of the carnival, at Reading Acts: Biblical Studies Carnival for August 2019.

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Many Recensions of the Ten Commandments?

PROF. SIDNIE WHITE CRAWFORD: The Many Recensions of the Ten Commandments (TheTorah.com).

Beyond the two version of the Decalogue in Exodus and Deuteronomy, and the usual differences between MT, SP, and LXX, in Second Temple times, liturgical texts in Qumran (4QDeutⁿ) and Egypt (Nash Papyrus), Greek references in the New Testament and Philo, and even tefillin parchments, reflect slightly different recensions of the text.

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More on Stone, Secret Groups in Ancient Judaism

IN THE MAIL FROM OUP:

Secret Groups in Ancient Judaism

Michael E. Stone

• Greatly enriches our understanding of the religious dynamic of this period
• Analyzes the Essenes and other contemporary groups as a secret society

Were there groups in Ancient Judaism that cultivated esoteric knowledge and transmitted it secretly? With the discovery and burgeoning study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and particularly of the documents legislating the social structure of the Qumran group, the foremost paradigm for analysis of the group's social structure has become the "sect." This is still dominant, having replacing the monastic paradigm used by some of the earliest scholars of the Scrolls.

But after studying what has been written on secret societies more generally, Michael Stone has concluded that many known ancient Jewish groupsthe Qumran covenanters, Josephus's and Philo's Essenes, and Philo's Therapeutaeshould be viewed as societies at the heart of whose existence were esoteric knowledge and practice. Guarding and transmitting this esoteric knowledge and practice, Stone argues, provided the dynamic that motivated the social and conceptual structure of these groups. Analyzing them as secret societies, he says, enables us to see previously latent social structural dimensions, and provides many new enriching insights into the groups, including the Dead Sea covenanters.

By examining historical and literary sources, Stone uncovers evidence for the existence of other secret groups in ancient Jewish society. This line of study leads Stone not only to consider the "classical" Jewish apocalypses as pseudo-esoteric, but also to discern in them the footsteps of hidden, truly esoteric traditions cultivated in the circles that produced the apocalypses. This discovery has significant implications, especially considering the enormous growth of study of the apocalyptic in the Judaism of the Second Temple period and in nascent Christianity over the last seventy years.

I am one of the reviewers of this book for the Mysticism, Esotericism, and Gnosticism in Antiquity Group at the upcoming annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in San Diego, California.

Past posts on the book are here and here.

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The Temple on Mount Gerizim

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: The Temple on Mount Gerizim—In the Bible and Archaeology. Worship at Ancient Temples (Megan Sauter). As usual, this is a summary on an article, this one by Anne Katrine de Hemmer in the current issue of Biblical Archaeology Review: "Reactivating Remembrance: Interactive Inscriptions from Mt. Gerizim." The full article is behind the subscription wall.

A couple of related posts are here and here.

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Review of Walsh, The Cult of Mithras in Late Antiquity

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: David Walsh, The Cult of Mithras in Late Antiquity. Development, Decline and Demise ca. A.D. 270-430. Late Antique Archaeology (Supplementary Series), volume 2. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Pp. xii, 146. ISBN 9789004380806. €121 (pb). ISBN 9789004383067. ebook. Reviewed by Matthew M. McCarty, University of British Columbia (matthew.mccarty@ubc.ca).

Ultimately, though, whether Walsh’s boldest arguments will hold true as excavations publish their data may matter less than the way that Walsh successfully re-frames the questions surrounding the end of Mithras-worship.

I noted the publication of the book here.

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Was Emmaus at Kiriath Yearim?

ARCHAEOLOGY: Israeli Archaeologists May Have Found Emmaus, Where Jesus Appeared After Crucifixion (Ariel David, Haaretz premium).

Archaeologists have uncovered the massive walls of a 2,200-year-old Hellenistic fortification that may have been built by the Seleucid general who defeated Judah the Maccabee, the famed Jewish leader at the center of the Hanukkah story. In an unexpected twist, the discovery could also help identify the location of the biblical town of Emmaus, where the Gospels say Jesus made his first appearance after being crucified and resurrected.

[...]

But just to keep things interesting, there may have been more than one ancient town named Emmaus.

For more on the excavation at Kiriath Yearim (Kiriath Jearim), see here and links. And for more on the excavation at the site of Motza (mentioned in the article as another contender for the site of Emmaus), see here and here.

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Psalmen und Chronik (ed. Hartenstein and Willi)

NEW BOOK FROM MOHR SIEBECK: Psalmen und Chronik. Hrsg. v. Friedhelm Hartenstein u. Thomas Willi. [Psalms and Chronicles.] 2019. XXII, 434 pages. Forschungen zum Alten Testament 2. Reihe 107. 99,00 € including VAT. sewn paper ISBN 978-3-16-154010-3.

Published in German.
The Books of Psalms and Chronicles open and close the ketubim in the TENAK. They share some significant mutual linguistic and thematic threads, which demonstrate their cognate character in the Second Temple literature. This becomes even more obvious if one looks at both works as a special example of the relationship of poetics and prose in ancient Jewish tradition. Finally, it is important to note how the presentation of history in Chronicles uses Psalms (from the theocratic books 4 and 5) as interpreting doxologies while conversely certain Psalms show concepts of history comparable to 1–2Chr. This volume contains the contributions of an international conference held at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich where for the first time renowned scholars discussed aspects of the relationship between Psalms and Chronicles fundamentally and in detail.

The essays are in German and English.

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Isaac Luria knew things

KABBALAH WATCH: REPORTS OF MIRACLES FROM SAFED. How the great kabbalist Isaac Luria changed the perception of the world without changing the world itself (Eli Yassif, Tablet Magazine).

To be somewhat less cautious than Leon was, I would say not that most of the original legends about Luria involve his knowledge or recognition of something but that they are all of this sort. Not a single legend told about Luria during his sojourn in Safed (or the fifty years around 1600 that this book is concentrated on; I am not speaking here about legends fashioned centuries later) recounts a miraculous deed. There are no stories of sick people lining up in front of his door so that he could cure them, or stories of threats to the Safed Jewish community that he averted or undid.

The essay also touches on ancient Jewish mysticism and magic here and there.

For past posts on Isaac Luria (Ha'ARI) and Lurianic Kabbalah, see here and links.

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Reviving ancient fragrances?

ANCIENT MATERIAL CULTURE, AROMATICS EDITION: Israeli farmer remixes ancient scents near Dead Sea (Michael Blum, AFP). It's not certain that Mr. Erlich has the right ancient plants, but an expert thinks he probably does.

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Was there a Dead Sea Scrolls conspiracy?

SPOILER: NO. Religious questions: Was there a Dead Sea Scrolls conspiracy? (Wyatt Massey, Times Free Press).

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In honor of Khaled Al-Asaad

PALMYRA WATCH: The Guardian Spirit of Palmyra, Khaled Al-As’aad (The Syria Times).

The 18th of August marks a very distressing occasion for all Syrians; yet a source of pride; in commemoration of Mr. Khaled Al-Asa’ad assassination; the Arabic Cultural Center of Abou Roumani hosted the occasion along with Mada Cultural Project, through displaying a documentary entitled “Palmyra Admirer”, directed by Ghassan Shmit, on Khaled Al-Asa’ad documenting his life and death, but most significantly his passion for his beloved Palmyra.

The Syrian archaeologist, who held the position of head of antiquities at the ancient city of Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, for over 40 years; was publicly beheaded by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) on 18 August 2015, at the age of eighty three.

For more on the murder of Dr Asaad by ISIS, see here and here.

Many other past posts on Palmyra, its history, the ancient Aramaic dialect spoken there (Palmyrene), and the city's tragic reversals of fortune, now trending for the better, are here and links.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

More on that inscribed Moabite altar

NORTHWEST SEMITIC EPIGRAPHY: Newly deciphered Moabite inscription may be first use of written word ‘Hebrews.’ Cylindrical altar from 3,000 years ago found in Jordan also offers first evidence of early Moabite script — and could repaint picture of geopolitics in the ancient Levantine world (Amanda Borschel-Dan, Times of Israel). A long and comprehensive article on the new inscriptions from Khirbat Ataruz.

Background here.

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