ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE BIBLE - Christianity Today weighs in.

What Do the Stones Cry Out?
Beware of claims that archaeology disproves�or proves�the Bible is true.
By Christian M.M. Brady | posted 09/24/2003

This is an article aimed at Evangelical Christians and proceeds from their assumptions. I'm not interested in debating these, but I do have a few points to raise about one section:

At times archeology can even substantiate claims about the text itself. The Dead Sea Scrolls offer a good example. For over a hundred years prior to their discovery, it had become commonplace for some scholars to dismiss the integrity of the biblical text. The assumption was that preserving the precise wording of such a large and diverse group of texts as the Hebrew Bible (not even considering the New Testament at the moment) could not have been transmitted from scribe to scribe over the millennia without all manner of errors creeping in. The fact that our oldest complete manuscript of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, the Masoretic Text (MT), only dated to the 10th century A.D. did not offer much assurance to those who believed that traditional scribes were as precise as they had professed to be.

Then came the famous discovery of the Bedouin in 1947. Suddenly our oldest texts of the Bible pre-dated the advent of Jesus. Scholars have now dated most of the biblical texts found at Qumran to the 2nd or 1st century B.C. (All books of the Hebrew Bible except Esther are attested, in addition to many extrabiblical texts). In this instance, a fortuitous archaeological find has demonstrated that the scribes had done a remarkable job of preserving the text. The differences between the biblical texts at Qumran and those of the Masoretic tradition are important only to linguists and textual scholars and have no serious bearing upon the meaning and context of the text. The changes are relatively slight.

This is typical of what is still found in conservative Bible handbooks, but it's an overstatement and is somewhat misleading. It is true that, say, the Isaiah manuscripts from Qumran Cave 1 show relatively trivial differences from the Masoretic Text (although these include some rather interesting readings that may be original). But the Samuel manuscripts from Cave 4 have considerably larger differences; often whole phrases were miscopied or left out of the MT. Then there are two very different editions of the book of Jeremiah known from Qumran. The longer one is the one found in our Hebrew Bible today. Another version, shorter by about 1/7 and a somewhat different order, was known from the Greek Septuagint. It used to be possible to argue that the Greek version was a mutilated perversion of the original Hebrew by an overzealous translator. But now Hebrew fragments of both editions have turned up at Qumran. Which version belongs in the Bible? I submit that this question is of interest to anyone for whom the Bible is important and that it does indeed have serious bearing on the meaning and context of the text.

I could go on at length along these lines but, to put it briefly, the Dead Sea Scrolls do indeed show that the Masoretes transmitted one biblical text-type very carefully, but this one - the MT - wasn't the only text-type that existed in antiquity and often it wasn't the best or most original.

THE SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE has revamped its website, giving it a spiffier look and adding some new content. Go and have a look at it. Note the articles on the King James Version of the Bible in the SBL Forum section on the main page, including Leonard Greenspoon's piece on "The KJV and the Jews". Also look at the Resources section, especially the Biblical Fonts, Electronic Books, and Web Resources pages.

ARE THE APOSTLE PETER'S BONES IN ROME? Tom Mueller doesn't think so. Me, I have no idea. (Via Bible and Interpretation News.)

"OLD JUDAICA EXHIBIT" (Ha'aretz):

A glass fragment from the fourth century, one of the world's oldest Judaica exhibits, will go on show starting next week at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The fragment, which contains a gold leaf on which there are sketches from the Temple, was apparently the bottom of a cup. It was found in the catacombs of Rome and was kept in the basement at the Vatican.

Click on the link to see a photograph of the object.

MY ARCHIVE IS BACK. We apologize for the inconvenience.

"MADONNA IS COMING UNDER ATTACK for preaching her new religion to children. The singer has penned a much-hyped kiddie�s book 'The English Roses,' a tale about the hazards of jealousy." (MSNBC).

Horrors, no! Teaching children religion! Next they'll be teaching them about magic and wizardry. Oh, wait . . .

By the way, Binah is the Hebrew word for "understanding," not "wisdom." (The latter is Hokhmah.) (The article above is via the Yada, Yada, Yada Blog.)


This guy, however, gets a little carried away with his claims for Kabbalah:

The Luckiest Generation on Earth (PRWeb/eMediaWire)

Excerpts:

Tel Aviv, Israel (PRWEB) September 23 2003 - For thousands of years, the secrets of the universe were passed down to a chosen few from generation to generation. Ours is the first generation on earth to have complete access to the sacred sources that explain every phenomena in the world.

[...]

According to the Israel-based Kabbalist Michael Laitman, a bio-cyberneticist by profession, Kabbalah is not about researching an ancient mystical body of knowledge, but is rather the most modern science closest to man. It is the science of the 21st century that researches the forces that we do not see, forces that govern our world and influence every moment of our lives. This is a science that will change the future of each and every individual, and all of mankind. The sources explain very clearly that once this process is underway, the entire world will gradually elevate itself to a higher state of being.

[...]

Since a Kabbalist is a person who has attained the spiritual realm, they are completely aware of the processes influencing our world. They essentially hold the key to safeguarding the future of the entire human race. Yet only people who have reached a certain stage of development will feel drawn to studying the construction of the universe, and are doing the work for the rest of humanity.

Sorry, but Kabbalah is about researching an ancient body of mystical knowledge and, as such, it's kind of cool. And, as I've said before, if people get something out of it today, good for them. But as someone who's an expert on early Jewish mysticism and who knows a good bit about Kabbalah, I can assure anyone who is in doubt that Kabbalah is not science and it doesn't explain every phenomenon in the universe. Physicists are working on that but they have a long way to go. Still, their work and its technological benefits are pretty exciting - much more exciting than bogus New Age science. If Michael Laitman really thinks Kabbalah can do everything he claims, he needs to go home and unplug his refrigerator for a reality check.

MEL GIBSON'S THE PASSION finds a distributor, at least in Australia:

While it has been confirmed that Mel Gibson's controversial film, The Passion, will be released in Australia in March through Icon Film Distribution, the Aramaic-language feature has yet to secure a distribution deal in the US. Gibson co-owns Icon with Bruce Davey.

TALMUD STUDY IS ALIVE AND WELL IN MARYLAND, although historians aren't going to buy the claim that the method is three thousand years old.

AFRICAN DIASPORA?

Tribe follows mix of customs
DNA: Genes support a tribe's belief that it migrated 2,500 years ago from the Holy Land. (Baltimore Sun)

By John Murphy
Sun Foreign Staff
Originally published September 25, 2003

TSHINO, South Africa - The Jewish community in this dusty mountain village has some unorthodox customs to mark the Jewish new year. They slaughter a cow, eat its intestines, take snuff to expel demons and then, during an all-night ceremony held inside a hut with a cow dung floor, they dance, drink and sing, summoning the spirits of their ancestors for guidance in the year ahead.

[�]

The 50,000 Lemba scattered among the foothills of the Soutpansberg Mountains in South Africa's Limpopo region have a number of traditions that have always set them apart from other African tribes.

They practice circumcision, they don't eat pork or mix milk with meat, as prescribed by Jewish dietary laws. They keep one day of the week holy, and they bury their dead with their heads facing north, toward Jerusalem.

According to Lemba oral traditions, the tribe was led from the Holy Land more than 2,500 years ago by a man named Buba, to a city in Yemen, and later crossed the Red Sea into East Africa, following a star that eventually brought it to present-day South Africa.

They say they adopted local customs during their journey, like other members of the Jewish diaspora. They intermarried with African tribes, embraced African rituals and forgot many Jewish rituals and scriptures. European colonizers later converted many of the Lemba to Christianity. The Lemba don't have rabbis, synagogues or copies of the Torah.

But their dietary laws and cultural practices, nearly identical to those in Jewish communities around the world, survived generation to generation, as did their belief that they share an ancestry with the Jewish people.

For years the outside world dismissed the Lemba's claims as sheer fantasy. That changed in 1999, when geneticists from the United States, Great Britain and Israel discovered some backing for the claims.

The researchers found that Lemba men carried a DNA signature on their Y chromosome that is believed unique to the relatively small number of Jews known as the Cohanim, who trace their ancestry to the priests of the ancient Jewish Temple and, ultimately, to Aaron, brother of Moses.

The genetic discovery might have had a greater impact on Jewish communities that had rejected the Lemba's claims than on the Lemba, who never doubted their ancestry.

[�]

"The tribe as a whole is pretty ambiguous about what it is," says Tudor Parfitt, director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. "Its identity is fractured. They don't have a language that is their own. They don't have any formal leadership. They are shaky when it comes to what they are."

[�]

Parfitt was the first historian to attempt to verify the Lemba's claims. At the urging of the Lemba's spiritual leader, Matshaya Mathiva, who died last year, Parfitt retraced their journey across Africa back to Yemen and discovered signs of the city where the Lemba claim their ancestors had lived.

Parfitt recounts his travels in his book, Journey to the Vanished City.

His research along with the DNA evidence have been key to helping the world understand the Lemba's origins. Still, he cautions, the question of whether the Lemba are Jewish has not been answered conclusively: "DNA itself doesn't make anybody Jewish. All it can do is say something about their ancestry."

[...]

ANOTHER "TOP TEN" LIST of archaeological discoveries pertaining to the New Testament, this one by Ben Witherington III in Christianity Today. It's a rather different list from the one produced by Crossan and Reed (the link is currently down while Blogspot fixes something). I imagine Witherington is going to get a lot of flack for including not only the "James Ossuary," but also the Shroud of Turin. He calls into question the C-14 dating of the latter, but there are more indications that it's a medieval forgery. (See my earlier post for a genuine first-century shroud from Jerusalem.) Witherington suggests looking for bone fragments in the ossuary and then testing their DNA against the stains on the Shroud. Well, we'd have nothing to lose by trying it, but I wouldn't bet on the exciting result he hopes for. Nor would I bet that those determined to find the Shroud genuine (and I'm not putting Ben in that category, but there are plenty of them) would be deterred by a negative result.

He also argues that the "James Ossuary," if it's genuine, proves a belief in the resurrection of Jesus. Well, maybe. The "honor and shame culture" argument seems simplistic to me. Jesus' followers could also have believed that Jesus was a martyr or that Jesus had been vindicated in heaven with much the same result.

UPDATE: Mark Goodacre comments on the article.

UPDATE: Since my archive is down, here is the link to the abstract of Shimon Gibson's paper "A First-Century Burial Shroud at Akeldama in Jerusalem, the Turin Shroud and the so-called �James� Ossuary" at July's International SBL meeting in Cambridge (scroll down to session 23-12). And here's more on the Jerusalem shroud. And here's an article on it from the Telegraph. And here's my summary of his Cambridge paper just after I heard it (rescued from Blogspot oblivion via the Google cache):

Shimon Gibson spoke on "A First-Century Burial Shroud at Akeldama in Jerusalem, the Turin Shroud, and the So-Called 'James Ossuary.'" (See abstract at SBL site - see Saturday's last post for a link.) Read the abstract, but note the following additional items. Gibson reports that he has reason to believe that the "James Ossuary" was looted from this tomb in 1998. (Incidentally, I hear from more than one source that Mr. Golan, the owner, has been arrested.) He also reports that the shroud is quite different from the Shroud of Turin, but matches the description of Jesus' shroud in one of the Gospels (John, I think).

John 20:6-7.

AN INTERIOR WALL has collapsed on the Temple Mount near the Islamic Museum. Damage was not extensive and there were no injuries. Few other details are available.

ARAMAIC STUDIES 1.2 has just come out and the table of contents and abstracts of the articles are available online. (Noted by Bas ter Haar Romeny on the Aramaic Discussion List.)

A NEW ISSUE OF BIBLICA (84.1) has just come out online and there are several articles pertaining to ancient Judaism. (Noted by Jim West on Ioudaios-L.)

THE AUTHENTICITY OF THE "JAMES OSSUARY" is defended by Ben Witherington in Christianity Today (pointed out to me by a postgraduate here at St. Mary's College):

Bones of Contention
Why I still think the James bone box is likely to be authentic.

The article concludes:

In late July the Israeli police arrested Oded Golan, the owner of the ossuary, on "suspicion" of forgery. They released him soon afterward and have yet to press formal charges. Clearly if he is a forger, they should prosecute him. But Andr� Lemaire says Golan does not have the knowledge or skill to be a forger. If the James ossuary is a forgery, then as Frank Moore Cross said in the Discovery Channel special, the forger is a genius, so skillful that he fooled the world's leading experts in various fields (paleographers, archaeologists, biblical scholars, and others). Furthermore, there is no evidence that Golan has made any money or attempted to make any money on the James ossuary or the Jehoash inscription (another artifact he brought to light, but one that is certainly not authentic). Yet making money is what forgery is all about.

This soap opera will continue to run for some time. Whatever happens with Golan, the authenticity of the James ossuary inscription does not stand or fall with him. That must be determined by the experts.

But until all the experts gain access to the IAA's data, I can affirm that Andr� Lemaire and the Toronto scholars and I have not yet found any smoking gun in the IAA's report. I am still convinced the inscription is likely to be genuine, and will be vindicated as even further study and testing is done. In the meantime, let the scholarly debate continue, and let no one think that the IAA report is anything like the definitive word on this issue. Only God has the last word.

The ossuary still cries out to us, as Jesus once said the stones of Jerusalem would do�and what it says is James, and what it says is Joseph, and best of all what it says is Jesus. The ossuary is just possibly the Word made visible.

UPDATE: Andre Lemaire also still stands by the inscription's authenticity. He is going to lecture on it in Alabama (via Bible and Interpretation News). Only he's an epigrapher, not an archaeologist. Trust me, this matters to epigraphers and archaeologists. Excerpt:

"The members of the committee, I know some of them," Lemaire said. "They are not specialized in inscriptions; when you read their report carefully, they disagree between themselves. Their conclusion is not clear; it's not justified. It could have been cleaned. They just mention that possibility, then they forget it."

BLOGSPOT IS BACK. Or, at least, whatever the problem was, it's fixed.

ANOTHER BENEFIT of a Classical education:

Settlers entrust security to geese (News.com.au)
From correspondents in Jerusalem
September 23, 2003

[...]

According to the Yediot Aharonot daily, the residents of Adei Ad in the West Bank were inspired by tale of how geese helped protect ancient Rome.

According to legend, when the Gauls invaded Rome a detachment clambered up the hill of the capitol so silently that they went unchallenged. But while striding over a rampart, they disturbed some sacred geese and awoke the garrison leading to their defeat.

Now, the residents of Adei Ad have posted their web-footed friends at the remotest areas of their settlement.

[...]

I CAN'T ACCESS PALEOJUDAICA.BLOGSPOT.COM. Our server is having problems, so it may be us, although otherwise the glitch has only been with e-mail and I seem to be able to access any other web page. So maybe it's Blogspot's server. In any case, if you're reading this the problem is presumably either local or solved. Meanwhile, I'll keep posting as the spirit moves me, on the theory that the posts are going somewhere besides the void.

SPEAKING OF BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION, there's a new essay up on the site:

Gerd Ludemann, "The Life of Jesus : A Brief Assessment"

THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS were the subject of lectures at Casper College in Wyoming by some scholars of ancient Judaism. The name Peter Flint is well know in Qumran circles and Mark Elliot and Paul Flesher run the marvelous Bible and Interpretation website.

HERE'S A GUIDE TO THE SITES OF ANCIENT ISRAEL from Archaeology Magazine. It's from 2001, but I've never mentioned it before here - and today's a very slow news day.

IRAQ'S ANCIENT CITIES are still being looted on a massive scale and nobody seems to be doing much about it. (Via Archaeologica News.)

EMIL FACKENHEIM, the controversial Holocaust theologian, has died at age 87. There are obituaries in Ha'aretz and the Jerusalem Post. Excerpt from the latter:

Fackenheim, a refugee from Nazi Germany, was most known for formulating a post-Holocaust "614th commandment" for Jewish survival that declared, "Thou shalt not award Hitler any posthumous victories." Behind that seemingly simple statement lay a lifetime of work examining how Judaism and Jewish existence could remain meaningful in the shadow of the death camps.

Whatever one makes of his work, it was always thought provoking and challenging. May his memory be for a blessing.

A 450-YEAR-OLD TORAH SCROLL that survived the Holocaust has been recovered and has made its way to Berkeley.

THEY AREN'T GOING TO FIND MOSES' GRAVE, but at least they've found love. And it does appear that they've found something that's archaeologically interesting.

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and other biblical laws in American history and law are discussed in this article:

Even before recent controversy, Ten Commandments have history with country's legal system (Kansas City Star)
By JEFFREY WEISS
The Dallas Morning News

Excerpts:

But what the Commandments actually say makes them an unlikely symbol for American jurisprudence.

Worship of idols or other deities, making false oaths in God's name, coveting your neighbor's wife or possessions -- neither Justice Moore nor his supporters would suggest those need to be punished by a trip to the hoosegow.

Even the old "blue laws' that limited Sunday shopping as a way to keep a Christian Sabbath have all but vanished.

Other parts of the Bible seem to have offered more concrete inspiration for the Founding Fathers. Deuteronomy 16, for instance, has instructions about how to appoint judges, and it tells the judges not to accept bribes.

Those Commandments that did make it into American law -- do not bear false witness, for example -- can be found in other ancient codes that don't depend on the Jewish or Christian deity.

The Code of Hammurabi, for example, was law in Babylon more than 3,800 years ago. It outlaws murder, theft, adultery and perjury -- and even suggests that honoring parents is a good thing.

[...]

Most American law is based on the English common law. Debates about the importance of religion -- and the Commandments -- in shaping that legal tradition are at least 1,000 years old, said Daniel Dreisbach, professor of justice law and society at American University.

"King Alfred said that common law started with the Ten Commandments," he said.

Many of the American colonies incorporated the Commandments directly into their early laws. The Massachusetts Bay Colony, for example, considered worship of other deities a capital offense, said Perkins of the Family Research Council.

Even the Constitution has one almost-invisible nod to the Commandment about the Sabbath: Article 1 gives the president 10 days to decide whether to sign a bill into law -- Sundays excepted.

Then there's this:

Back in 1946, E.J. Ruegemer was a juvenile court judge in Minnesota. He told the Minneapolis Star Tribune recently that he had a delinquent boy come to his bench back then who didn't know what the Ten Commandments were.

Judge Ruegemer had the idea of printing up copies for courtrooms and classrooms. His project, taken up by an organization called the Fraternal Order of Eagles, eventually got the attention of director Cecil B. DeMille, whose epic "The Ten Commandments" hit the theaters in 1956.

The two men found Catholic, Jewish and Protestant scholars willing to come up with a new version of the Commandments that incorporated all three traditions. (The DeMille list appears to have 11 commandments, unless the edicts about honoring parents and keeping the Sabbath are combined as one.) About 4,000 granite slabs were placed in towns across America.

The stars of the movie, Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner and Martha Scott, attended many of the dedications, Ruegemer recalled.

FRANK RICH has a new essay on Mel Gibson in the New York Times (via Open Book). No response on his dowdification of Mel which I pointed out last month, and about which I also e-mailed him. I'm going to have to dig up this New Yorker article; it sounds pretty interesting.

UPDATE: The New Yorker interview is excerpted and summarized here. (It seems to be the New Yorker's own summary.) If the whole article is available anywhere online, I can't find it. Interestingly, it sounds as if Gibson's much quoted wish to kill Frank Rich and his (nonexistent) dog was supposedly overheard by Gibson's marketing director. If that's true, it's not an entirely irrelevant point and none of the articles I've seen that repeated the quote put it in that context. We all say outrageous things to ourselves which we don't really mean when we think no one is listening - not least when we think someone is insulting a family member. It's a pretty horrible thing to say, but if he said it to himself and was overheard, it's not the same as saying it to an interviewer. If anyone has seen the whole article and thinks my reading is incorrect, please e-mail me and let me know.

UPDATE: On the basis of the New Yorker article, Abraham Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, says that Gibson holds anti-Semitic views.

UPDATE: Nope, I was wrong. Gibson made the comment about killing Frank Rich to the interviewer. The marketing director overheard it and tried to put a damage-control spin on it. I've tried to be sympathetic to Gibson, especially since he does seem to get a lot of hassle from the media - some of it unfair. But in this case he lost it; there's no excuse for what he said and it makes him and his whole project look bad.

A reader has alerted me to a complete copy of the New Yorker article (whose title is "The Jesus War") online at a site called FreeRepublic.com. I'm not entirely sure where this stands vis � vis copyright law: a fair use defense could be made for it, since it's followed by extensive commentary and discussion (for which, by the way, I take no responsibility). But I'm a little uncomfortable about linking to a whole long article that's been extracted from its source, so I'll leave it to you go to the site and do a search for it yourself if you want to.

A NEW ISSUE OF THE JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF JUDAISM (34.3) is available online:

THWARTED METAPHORS: COMPLICATING THE LANGUAGE OF DESIRE IN THE TARGUM OF THE SONG OF SONGS
Esther M. Menn

ON THE POLEMICAL NATURE OF 2 (SLAVONIC) ENOCH : A REPLY TO C. BOTTRICH
Andrei A. Orlov

Review of Books

Requires paid institutional or individual subscription to access.

THE PHILADELPHIA SEMINAR ON CHRISTIAN ORIGINS (PSCO) has an ambitious and exciting agenda for this academic year. I take the liberty of reproducing the whole agenda from Bob Kraft's e-mail to the PSCO list:

To PSCO email list
With apologies for not communicating earlier

The pieces are now in hand to move forward with scheduling for the 41st year of the PSCO. We have received a small grant from the UPenn Humanities Forum to enable us to bring in some outside speakers, and we have secured a room at the conference hotel in Atlanta for a session on Friday evening, before the SBL/AAR conference proper. The following paragraphs briefly describe the topic for 2003-2004, with a very tentative list of possible times and topics/speakers. Except for the UPenn people, none of the proposed speakers has yet been contacted. The schedule is thus open for further suggestions and volunteers!

For the 2003-2004 Year, the 41st of the PSCO, the topic will continue from where the past year ended, and will focus on specific "biblical" personages with whom "parabiblical" materials have been associated, following up on the sort of biographical organization used by Montague Rhodes James in his 1920 publication of "Lost Apocrypha of the Old Testament: their Titles and Fragments Collected, Translated and Discussed" (now availabe online at
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/rs/rak/courses/735/Parabiblical/jamesnew.htm )

The work by James is understandably badly in need of updating, and the internet provides an amenable format for such a task. And in addition, we propose to create an electronic "sister volume" that focuses on early Christian names and materials, along the lines explored in
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/rs/rak/courses/735/Parabiblical/NTApoc.htm .

The program for PSCO 41 will approach the subject from the perspective of selected specific names that served as magnets for associating literature and traditions -- and with a view to creating appropriately updated electronic tools for such study.

As guidelines for presenters, the following suggestions may be useful:

1. The focus is on named "persons" (or groups such as "Watchers," "the 70") who play a significant role in the attributed authorship and/or main interest of "parabiblical literature" in Judaism and/or Christianity -- thus "prosopography" or "onomastics" as a general subtitle.

2. A primary criterion for selection is the connections of the "person" to (especially "parabiblical") literature and associated traditions -- what is the subject supposed to have written or to have been the primary interest for (e.g. Noah as author or as main focus).

3. Also of interest are the stories, traditions, legends, even art, that circulated around/about the "person," especially prior to the "fixing" of written materials with the success of the printing press in or about the 16th century (i.e. in the pre-print world).

Here is a very tentative schedule and list of possibilities:

Sept/Oct (probably Thursday, 9 October at UPenn):

"Overview of the Project with selected examples (OG & Watchers, DANIEL, GOSPEL OF MARY, BARNABAS)" (see the online materials noted above)
Robert Kraft, University of Pennsylvania (PSCO coordinator)

"Armenian Developments of Biblical Traditions: Transmission and Creativity" (with focus on Adam and Eve, Ezra, and a few others)
Michael E. Stone, Hebrew University

21 November 2003, 7-8:30 pm, Atlanta Mariott Marquis Hotel, Amsterdam Room (Convention Level): Panel of experts attending the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature and American Academy of Religion in Atlanta GA, on the subject "Parabiblical Prosopography":

Focus question -- to what extent do popular narratives/reports about parabiblical identities (supposed authors and focal figures) assist us in understanding how the "parabiblical" literature was read/understood and transmitted/preserved?

some possible participants as resource people in discussion context (see, e.g., Stone & Bergren, Biblical Figures outside the Bible)--people likely to be in Atlanta but otherwise expensive as guests for Philadelphia/Princeton sessions --

NOTE: none of them have been contacted yet (although some are on the PSCO email list and will see this in planning)

John D. Turner (Univ Nebrasks at Lincoln), Seth and the Sethians
Philip Alexander (Manchester ENG), Enoch
Birger Pearson (Santa Barbara, Emeritus), Melchizedek, Norea, etc
J. Edward Wright (Univ Arizona), Baruch
James VanderKam (Notre Dame), Enoch, Noah
George Nickelsburg (Univ Iowa, Emeritus), Enoch and general
James Davila (St. Andrews SCOT), Rechabites
John Painter (Charles Sturt Univ), James the Just
Richard Bauckham (St. Andrews SCOT), James the Just
Burton Mack (Claremont), Mark
Scott Johnson (Oxford ENG), Thecla (S23-51)
Holly Hearon (Christian Theol Sem), Mary(s) (S23-125, S23-103)
Jane Schaberg (Univ Detroit), Jesus' women (S24-13)
Michael Kaler (Laval Univ), Paul (S24-15)
Christine Thomas (Santa Barbara), Peter (S24-101)
F.Stanley Jones (Cal State), Clement
Kirsti Copeland (Univ Redlands), John Baptist / Apoc. of James

January 2004:

"Parabiblical Traditions with Connections to Magic -- SOLOMON and PHILIP"
Sarah Schwarz, University of Pennsylvania
Debra Bucher, University of Pennsylvania

March 2004 (at Princeton) [some unconfirmed possibilities]

"The WATCHERS and GIANTS in Jewish, Christian and Islamic Traditions"
Annette Reed, McMaster University (Canada)
"JOSEPH AND ASENETH among the Ascetics"
Ross Kraemer, Brown University

April/May 2004: [unconfirmed suggestions -- others are most welcome as well]
"ADAM AND EVE in various Settings"
Gary Anderson, Notre Dame University
"MARY as the new Eve"
Ann Matter, University of Pennsylvania


--
Robert A. Kraft, Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania
227 Logan Hall (Philadelphia PA 19104-6304); tel. 215 898-5827
kraft@ccat.sas.upenn.edu
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/rs/rak/kraft.html

MORE ON THE DALLAS EXHIBIT "From the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Forbidden Book," with some Protestant-Catholic politics thrown in. The exhibit moves to Alabama in January.

"Bible history exhibit drawing thousands in Dallas" (Fort Worth Star Telegram)

The web page for the exhibit is at www.deadseaexhibit.com.

THE "JAMES OSSUARY," Middle Eastern politics, the minimalist-maximalist debate, "Biblical" vs. "Syro-Palestinian" Archaeology, and much more:

"Biblical Archaeology's Dusty Little Secret" (Christianity Today, via the NT Gateway Blog)

I won't even try to excerpt it. Just go and read it all.

WALTKE ON AKENSON:

Mark Goodacre links to a reply to Akenson by Professor Bruce Waltke, a member of the advisory board for the Gospel of John:

"The Gospel of John: Let he who is without sin . . ." (again, in the Globe and Mail)

I don't want to get drawn much further into this one, but I think one thing needs to be pointed out. I don't blame Professor Waltke for being annoyed with Akenson's essay, which seemed to be written with the aim of irritating people, but I do think that if he's going to reply � especially with the same tone Akenson uses - he needs to keep his facts straight. Waltke writes:

In sum, Prof. Akenson's scholarship is poor, his tone is grating and his arguments bogus. Ironically, he piously asks us to redeem the text "by informed, discriminating and gentle scholarship," when his own diatribe amounts to hate literature against Mr. Drabinsky and Christians. I say "hate literature," because among many other charges, he maligns true believers as "lunatics" for believing "that Jesus's blood be shed to complete God's plan for the[ir] salvation."

No he doesn't. This is a serious misrepresentation of what Akenson says, and it amounts to a "dowdificiation." What he actually says is:

Historically, this [John's placing "almost all the blame" for the death of Jesus on the Jews] led to the lunatic charge of deicide (god-killing) against the Jews and their descendants: lunatic because the Christian scheme of things requires that Jesus's blood be shed to complete God's plan for the salvation of true believers, and slagging a rival religious group for its implementation of God's will is simply schizophrenic discourse.

In other words, the charge of deicide against the Jews is "lunatic" (which it is, and horrific besides) because, he says, it is internally inconsistent to say the death of Jesus was central to the plan of God and then turn around and charge the people who are accused of implementing the plan with a grievous sin for doing so. Nowhere does Akenson say that the Christian doctrine of atonement by the shed blood of Jesus is lunacy.

By the way, nearly six months of blogging has taught me that whatever newspaper editors are being paid, it's too much. The Globe and Mail has published a serious error in each of these essays (Akenson's misrepresentation of the Eighteen Benedictions and Waltke's misrepresentation of what Akenson said). Didn't major newspapers used to have fact-checkers? And when they publish a rebuttal to a piece in their own paper, doesn't anyone read both pieces to make sure the rebuttal responds to what the original piece actually said? (I know that I myself didn't catch the error in the first piece but, hey, nobody is paying me to do this, and I published a correction as soon as it was pointed out to me.)

UPDATE: I note that the definition of "dowdification" I linked to above is "deliberately omitting words or phrases to change the meaning of a quote." I would not include "deliberately" in the definition, since it involves trying to read the mind and motivations of the writer. To be perfectly clear, I'm not saying that Professor Waltke deliberately distorted Dr. Akenson's meaning. I don't think that: I assume the mistake was careless, not malicious.

HERE'S A NEW SCIENTIST REVIEW OF:

Steve Fuller, Kuhn vs Popper: The struggle for the soul of science (via SciTech Daily Review)
Reviewed by Ray Percival, who runs the Karl Popper Forums.

Excerpts:

Simply put, Kuhn championed what he called "normal science", which consists of scientists busily engaged in working out the puzzles presented within a set of assumptions - the "paradigm" - which remains unquestioned. Until, that is, the puzzles become overwhelming and the notorious paradigm shift occurs.

On the other hand, Popper championed the heroic conception of science. He associated this with deliberately revolutionary thinkers such as Newton and Einstein, and admonished scientists everywhere continually to question. His famous criterion that a theory is scientific if it can be falsified implies a continuous effort to overthrow theories - including accepted ones.

[�]

For Popper, the ideal of science allowed you to say that the whole of science may be wrong; Kuhn cannot allow this, because he made no distinction between history and normative standards. Yet Kuhn is classed as a radical, and Popper as a grumpy autocrat. Fuller sets out to explain and correct these misleading images.

Sounds about right to me, and it applies (or should apply) to the humanities as well. Kuhn's sociological theory is easy to use to blugeon the consensus without doing much constructive to advance it. (The graybearded conservatives stick to their tired old "paradigm" and refuse to look at the revolutionary new theory that that will "shift" it.) Popper's epistemology provides a much more constructive system for generating new theories and testing them to see if they actually improve on the state of the question. IMHO.

I have some brief comments about Popper and the humanities in my essay "The Perils of Parallels" (criteria 7-8). This is an early draft from some time ago. I have a much longer draft that has been circulated a fair bit in Scotland, but it still needs work. Maybe I'll get around to publishing it someday.

For a good treatment of Popper (and critique of Kuhn), see David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality (Pelican, 1997). (His web page appears to be down at present.)

ANCIENT JEWISH JOKES were the subject of a lecture last night by Professor Erich Gruen (UC Berkeley) at the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. Excerpt from the Daily Pennsylvanian article:

But according to Gruen, it was not a case of simple anti-Semitism.

Rather, these jokes represent "Greco-Roman cultural snobbery" more than a widespread anti-Semitic ideology.

He explained that ancient societies simply branded all other different cultures as inferior.

Tacitus has often been called "the arch anti-Semite." But as Gruen argued, the Roman historian didn't reserve his hatred specifically for Jews --he despised Christians, Egyptians and many others as well.

In fact, explained Gruen, throughout the pagan world, many were complacently ignorant about Jewish practices and customs.

"They didn't care enough to get the facts straight," Gruen said.

He went on to note that just because ancient Greeks and Romans may not have been anti-Semites, the Jews still suffered under their rule.

SORRY, I'M OKAY NOW, apart from a case of acute Mel Gibson fatigue. (No offense, Mel.) But fortunately Mark Goodacre is all over the current stories on Jesus in the entertainment media (just keep reading and scrolling down) and I am happy to leave them to him unless something especially strikes my eye. I do have a few more thoughts on the whole Gibson thing, but I don't know when - or if - I'll get around to putting them in bloggably coherent form.

AHOY MATIES!

Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day! (Courtesy of - of course - Dave Barry.) This website has a history of the origins of the day, advice on talking like a pirate, and even an English to Pirate Translator. Out of curiosity I ran a paragraph from my "About PaleoJudaica.com page through it and got the following:

The pirate speaks,"This blog - PaleoJudaica.com - be an experiment that aimst'chronicle and comment on current developments (mainly as recorded in Internet sources) in t'academic fieldo'ancient Judaism and its historical and literary context. When I'm in town, I tryt'postt'it at least once a day, and often I do so more frequently, so please visit itt'see what it be about and then continuet'visit it often. "

What, you ask, could this possibly have to do with ancient Judaism? Well, I ran the search terms ancient jewish pirates through Google and the first result was this article on first-century "Jewish Pirates" from the Livius website.

Arr, arr. Thought you caught me out, dintcha, ye scurvy sea-dogs?

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me . . .

MORE ON JESUS MOVIES: [Please read update at bottom of post]

Donald Harman Akenson writes an interesting, frank, and provocative essay for the Globe and Mail on Mel Gibson's The Passion and Garth Drabinsky's The Gospel of John. Excerpts:

Christianity and Judaism have managed their uneasy mutual survival because the pastoral leaders of these religions have mostly been realistic. In day-to-day teaching, they have quietly rewritten each of their sets of sacred texts to highlight the generous and to downplay the more vicious aspects of their exclusivisms.

Thus, for example, Christian pastors spend a lot of time on the noble and generous Beatitudes and rarely mention that Jesus of Nazareth not only never intentionally preached to Gentiles (non-Jews), but actually compared them to dogs (see Mark 7:24-28.) And in study groups, modern rabbis spend their time on the benign teachings of Hillel and Akiba, but rarely parse the Eighteen Benedictions (the 18 curses against heretics, especially Christians) that originated in the late first century and continued to be said in some Sephardic rites well into the 20th century.

Of course, in none of these cases do the religious leaders admit what they are actually doing: gentling the sacred texts by being unfaithful to them. In seminars, sermons, homilies, they buff the hard and hateful parts off their sacred writings under the guise of reinterpreting them. We all tolerate each other a bit more as a result.

Of the Four Gospels, the Gospel of John is the closest to being hate literature. Granted, it contains some lovely writing, but its basic narrative -- and a very strong narrative it is -- shows the mainline Pharisees and "the Jews" (or, as Mr. Drabinsky often has it, the "Jewish authorities") as being responsible for the death of Jesus. The Romans get off lightly and the Jews take almost all the blame.

[...]

Why would anyone want to be faithful to such a text? It can be redeemed by informed, discriminating and gentle scholarship. But, to film a literal version of the Gospel of John is like filming a faithful version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Garth, Mel, you're missing the point. To claim faithfulness to the text of the fourth Gospel is not a defence of your films.

Ouch! The comparison is over the top, although he has a legitimate point to make about the ideology and reception history of the Gospel of John. Read it all.

Mark Goodacre comments on the essay here and makes some good points.

UPDATE: Rebecca Lesses points out to me in an e-mail that Akenson grossly misstates the nature of the Eighteen Benedictions or Amida, which are not curses but prayers to God and the heart of the Jewish prayer service. One additional one, the Birkat Haminim, does mention (and curse) the heretics and that must be what he was thinking of. Sorry, I read the essay in a rush, saw some interesting ideas in it, and slapped down a quote without parsing everything in it. It had been tugging at my mind that there was something wrong with the essay which I'd missed, but I hadn't had time to come back to it yet.

I see now (and believe it or not, I hadn't noticed this) that one of his books was reviewed by RBL a few days ago and that he said the same thing in almost the same words in a book published by the University of Chicago Press, for which the reviewer rightly takes him to task. I suppose I can take some comfort from the fact that the U of C editors also let the comment slip by, but I still shouldn't have.

Akenson has some interesting ideas and points in this article (and overall the review of his book is quite positive) but it's a pity he weakens them with this sort of error and hyperbole.

ARAMAIC-SPEAKING CHALDEAN CATHOLICS are asking for representation in the new government of Iraq.

THE JEWISH STUDIES QUARTERLY has the following article in its current issue (10.2 [2003]):

M. R. Niehoff, "Circumcision as a Marker of Identity: Philo, Origen and the Rabbis on Gen 17:1-14," pp. 89-123.

Not available online, unfortunately.

PHILOLOGOS explains the origins of the various words for "Rabbi" (the Forward). But in places he seems a bit confused on whether the words have one or two Bs. The Hebrew root is a geminate (root consonant II=III): RBB, so forms that he gives with a single B should actually have two Bs when the final root consonant(s) are followed by a vowel: "rabbi," "rabban," "rabbani." Forms like "rav"/"rab" which don't have a vowel following the final root consonant(s) just have one B/V.

Sorry you asked?

ANDRE LEMAIRE will be lecturing in New Orleans next week on Northwest Semitic inscriptions and the Bible.

RAMBI RULES! I've spent much of the last few days in the library photocopying more than forty articles that pertain mostly to the first two chapters of my book. I found almost all of these via RAMBI, the online index of articles on Jewish studies. I've mentioned RAMBI before here, but this is first time I've used it extensively for a major research project and its payoff was extraordinary. Besides the articles I found in our library, I found a few things I didn't know about in books I own, I ordered a few collections of essays via interlibrary loan, one of which just arrived, and I have a list of close to as many articles again which I can try to locate in local research libraries during our holiday in San Diego next month, with the residue hopefully to be picked up on a day trip to the Edinburgh University library and via Interlibrary loan. I also have a list a dozen or more articles that I may track down later if it looks like I need them. In the pre-Internet days it would have taken me weeks or months to find all this, and chances are that I would have missed many of the items RAMBI led me to. So be sure to include a visit to RAMBI early on in your research on ancient Judaism.

The downside, of course, is that now I have to read them all.

I CERTAINLY HOPE you are all keeping an eye on the IraqCrisis list archive and Francis Deblauwe's Iraq website. There's been a lot of good news about Iraqi antiquities in the last week or so: thousands of artifacts looted from the Baghdad Museum have been recovered, including (and this just in) the Lady of Warka sculpture. But there's still a long way to go.

"ENGAGING BIBLICAL WOMEN": a new essay by Lillian Klein in Bible and Interpretation News. It summarizes her new book, From Deborah to Esther: Sexual Politics in the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003). Excerpt:

���� As a girl, I sought to identify with the female characters of the Bible. It was difficult; they were confusing: subordinated and yet as independent as Sarah, misunderstood and mistreated as Dinah, heroic and unjustly punished as Miriam. As a woman, I became more interested in how those women were shown to cope with the constraints of their varied social situations: from ancestresses living in tents to Sheba and Esther, for instance, who dwelled in palaces; from the tensions of sibling rivalry as between Jacob�s wives to the tensions within ruling families, like those of Athaliah, mother of the king of Judah; from the many nameless women whose deeds are lost to them and to us�to those women who command our attention. As a student of literature, I have been fascinated with the allusiveness of biblical prose, always luring and never allowing the reader to reach an exclusive �truth.� Most recently, as a biblical scholar, I have sought to explore the possibilities of these various facets of interest through careful literary readings of several narratives. The result is From Deborah to Esther: Sexual Politics in the Hebrew Bible.

NEW BOOK REVIEW in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review

M. Finkelberg, G.G. Stroumsa, Homer, the Bible, and Beyond. Literary and Religious Canons in the Ancient World. Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture, 2. � Leiden: �Brill, 2003. �Pp. 284. �ISBN 90-04-12665-1. �EUR 76.00/$91.00.

Reviewed by Pieter W. van der Horst, Utrecht University.

(Hat tip, Charles Miller in Ioudaios-L.)

AN HISTORIC TOURIST ROUTE along the "Via Maris" is being planned by Israeli, Palestinian, and EU authorities, according to Ha'aretz. They met yesterday in Florence to approve plans for the project.

PALEOJUDAICA'S GOOGLE-NEWS PSEUDEPIGRAPHA AWARD (which I just made up), for mention of the Pseudepigrapha in a Google News item, goes to Professor Bert Randall and the Clarksville Leaf Chronicle, for an article that covers his lecture series on the origins and development of the Bible. Since PaleoJudaica began, I have regularly searched Google News with the term "pseudepigrapha" and, until today, the result was always null. But the article on Professor Randall includes the following crucial paragraphs (my emphasis):

The second session will look at the significance and influence on Christianity of the Tanakh, Septuagint, Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

"For example, take the Pseudepigrapha, it is a collection of around 100 scriptures written largely between the time periods of the two testaments," Randall said.

Congratulations, Professor Randall and the Leaf Chronicle, first winners of this award! Keep up the good work!

NEW BOOK REVIEWS FROM THE REVIEW OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE:

Chilton, Bruce and Jacob Neusner, eds.
The Brother of Jesus: James the Just and His Mission

Marshall, John W.
Parables of War: Reading John's Jewish Apocalypse

Akenson, Donald Harman
Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds

THE WEB PAGE FOR THE MORE OLD TESTAMENT PSEUDEPIGRAPHA PROJECT has just been updated and expanded with a number of new texts. My colleague Richard Bauckham and I are undertaking this project, in which we aim to edit a new volume of ancient Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. We are editing some of the texts ourselves and will coordinate a large group of other scholars who will prepare the other texts under our general editorship. I haven't yet mentioned the project in this blog, so now is a good a time. We shall continue to update the list as additional texts come to our attention, so if you know of something that fits our criteria and which isn't listed, please drop me a note.

Evidently this is timely, since Beliefnet says that publishing your own scriptures is "in." But ours is an academic project and does not involve founding any new religions. In fact, I would be grateful if people would refrain from using the texts to start any new religions: it could get embarrassing. Maybe we should issue a disclaimer in the volume:

These texts are supplied "as is," with no warranty of truth or accuracy and no endorsement of any claims to divine or other inspiration. The suppliers shall not be held liable for any damages, personal injury, or founding of new religions resulting from the use of these texts. We edit, you decide.

What do you think?

BEYOND BELIEF: THE SECRET GOSPEL OF THOMAS, by Elaine Pagels, has been commented on by a number of bloggers in the last few days. Andrew Sullivan read it and he liked it. New Testament Scholar and blogger A. K. M. Adam (of AKMA's Random Thoughts) has published a review in The Disseminary (noted by Mark Goodacre). And Mark, who himself is writing a book on the Gospel of Thomas, has read Beyond Belief and he didn't like it. He comments: "But what there was on Thomas -- and there's not a lot -- I was already familiar with from Pagels' academic articles. How odd that the book went through with that subtitle -- doesn't make much sense to me." I'm afraid it does to me: marketing. It's a sexy subtitle: secret Gospels sell well. But then, I'm a cynic.

UPDATE: I'm not implying that Professor Pagels is to blame for the misleading subtitle. My guess is that someone in the marketing department put it in. I haven't read the book myself, so I'm relying on Mark's impression, which I trust.

UPDATE (17 September): Mark Goodacre agrees.

THE MENORAH COIN PROJECT:

is a vast and unique project consisting of a die by die indexing, classification and representation of Biblical coins. . . . the end result is to establish the most important databank on Biblical coins, to classify these coins in the most rational way possible and to present them in the most detailed and agreeable fashion to allow everybody, from the amateur coin collector to the professional, historians, scholars, dealers, researchers or students to access it easily and freely. Of course, the MCP website can also be used for simple visual delight!

The author, a Canadian named Jean-Philippe Fontanille, is keen to have new photos of coins. You can find his e-mail on the website. There are already a great many photographs posted there. Sounds like an interesting project.

BEWARE OF ORACLES! Ancient Judaism was big on them: oracles from the Sibyl; from the Teacher of Righteousness; from biblical prophets like Abraham, Enoch, Moses, Ezra, and Baruch; from later prophets like Jesus, Jesus ben Ananiah, and Josephus. Philo found oracles everywhere. Early Christians liked them too. Lots of people like them today. Some still produce them.

Michael Dirda reviews THE ROAD TO DELPHI: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles by Michael Wood in the Washington Post (via Arts and Letters Daily). Excerpts:

The pythias, or priestess, at Delphi told Croesus that if he attacked the Persians he would destroy a great empire. Having found the oracle accurate in the past, Croesus went to war and was defeated. The great empire he would destroy was his own.

Oracles, as Michael Wood reminds us in this surprisingly wide-ranging meditation, deal in ambiguity and equivocation, the kind of double-speech technically known as amphibology. That is, oracles tell the truth, but in such a way that we don't see it. As Wood writes, "We hear what we hope for and get what we fear."

[...]

I'm particularly fond of Wood's discussion of what he calls "slither," the way that language can squirm out of its apparent meaning, i.e., "None of woman born will harm Macbeth" seems to say one thing and in fact means quite another.

"In that slither an open promise becomes a closed prophecy. I want to suggest that this is how prophecy typically works and also that this motion meets a very particular human need, what we might call a pathology of promising. Promises are kept, but promises are also often not kept, and we need to be prepared for this eventuality. The pathology arises when a promise is manifestly not kept but we can't bring ourselves to believe this. Our favorite strategy in this situation is to reinterpret the promise so that what looked like its breaking was a hasty illusion; on reinterpretation we see the promise has been kept after all, we have not been betrayed. Whose promises do we cling to in this way? Those of God or the gods, of our parents and loved ones; those of anyone whose reliability is more important to us than any truth contained in their apparent defection."

[...]

The consequences of such misunderstanding can be terribly unjust. Wood notes that oracles are repeatedly cruel, toying as gods will with people (and as wanton boys do with flies). But why is this? Do the deities wish to teach us self-reliance the hard way? In the last sentence of his book, Wood writes: "The gods appear whenever we think we know more than a human creature ordinarily could, and they disappear again when we turn to ask them what to do." Yet, as all of us know, in moments of crisis and indecision, we look desperately for signs. Christians open their Bibles at random ("Tolle, lege"), and the waffling set up conditions: "If he calls tonight, I'll leave my husband; if he doesn't, I'll stay in the marriage." But this clearly moves us away from "oracle theory," which is based on language and organized ritual, to the realm of what one might call omens. We can see omens anywhere, but they are univocal -- we only pay attention to those that give us the answers we secretly want. And not always to them.

[...]

Dirda's oracular conclusion: "What a book!"

THERE ARE STILL KARAITES IN ISRAEL - quite a few of them:

In Israel, Karaites keep their faith ---
and distance from mainstream Jews (Jewish Telegraphic Agency News)
By Ariel Finguerman and Elana Shap

ASHDOD, Israel, Sept. 14 (JTA) � They have been branded as one of the worst enemies of the Jewish people.

They have attacked the authority of the rabbis and claimed the Talmud is full of falsehoods, and were allied with some of the cruelest adversaries of the Jews, including the Russian czars and Nazi leaders.

Yet today the Karaites � members of a Jewish offshoot that denies the talmudic-rabbinic tradition � are flourishing in Israel. In fact, some members suggest that the community is experiencing a rare high point in its 1,300-year history.

Mainly concentrated in the cities of Ashdod and Ramla, Israel�s Karaite community is about 30,000 strong. There are about 5,000 Karaites elsewhere in the world, mainly in the United States.

The Karaite sect first appeared in the eighth century, breaking with mainstream Judaism by declaring that Talmudic oral law was a rabbinic invention with no legal authority. Maintaining that the Bible was the sole source of religious law, the Karaites adopted a number of practices that kept them apart from mainstream Jews.

[...]

Over the centuries, the Karaites developed a religious tradition of their own consisting of doctrines not found in the Bible.

In Israel today, they have an imposing synagogue and cultural community center in Ashdod that adheres to their particular traditions.

[...]

In Israel, the Karaite community has been able to grow thanks to the relaxation of an ancient Karaite law that prohibited �mixed� marriages with Jews, whom they call �rabbinic Jews.�

�I myself allow marriages with rabbinical Jews, but only after checking that there are no incestuous cases in their families,� says Rabbi Haim Levi, the white-bearded man at the head of the Karaite Court of Justice.

Karaites also do not don tefillin or post mezuzahs on their doorposts. They do celebrate Chanukah because, they say, the festival was established after the biblical period.

�We say that it is not possible that the Almighty gave a written law and another oral law, which partially contradicts the former one,� Levi says.

Karaite women do not immerse themselves in mikvahs, as required by Jewish law, instead using showers as a means of spiritual purification after menstruation.

The group also has a different calendar, so the Karaite Yom Kippur does not always match the fast day observed by world Jewry.

Some Karaite interpretations of the Bible are more lax than those of rabbinic Judaism, but other interpretations lead to more strict practices than in rabbinic Judaism, such as those concerning Sabbath observance.

�On the day of rest we don�t leave home, we don�t practice sexual intercourse and, on the eve of Shabbat, we disconnect the refrigerator,� Levi says.

[...]

Read it all. In July I linked to information about some Karaites outside of Israel here.

HERE'S A PAGE FROM THE BABYLONIAN TALMUD with explanations of the elements therein by Professor Eliezer Segal.

HERE'S A BELIEFNET INTERVIEW with Rabbi Harold Kushner on his new book on Psalm 23 (via Bible and Interpretation News).

HANAN ESHEL reports that he may have found a Qumran text that tells a different version of the Aqedah (Genesis 22, the binding of Isaac), one in which God did not order Isaac to be sacrificed. Jim West on Ioudaios-L points to this Star Telegram article on the Dallas "Dead Sea Scrolls to the Forbidden Book" exhibit. The relevant passage reads:

The center has designed one gallery room to look like a cave. The tiny, darkened fragments hang in frames above infrared photographs that reveal their original text. Noted archaeologist and scholar Hanan Eshel of Bar-Ilan University in Israel studied these fragments of the books of Genesis and Isaiah that are on display.

In one fragment, Eshel believes he may have discovered an ancient commentary on Chapter 22 of Genesis that contradicts the traditional interpretation of God ordering Abraham to sacrifice his son Issac. In other words, Eshel said, he now believes that God may not have asked Abraham to sacrifice his son.

"God called Isaac 'My son,' not 'your son,' " Eshel said. "This is the first time we have found this distinction."

The passage sounds interesting, but without seeing it all in context it's hard to tell how likely the proposed interpretation is. (It's interesting, isn't it, that the echo of Gen 22:2 in Mark 1:11 also has God saying "my beloved son," although in this case the change in possessive pronoun seems to come from the influence of Psalm 2:7.) The article has more information on the exhibit and several photos of ancient manuscripts.

Also, here's an article from 5 September in the North Texas Daily about another lecture by Eshel in Texas, this one about his archaeological work on the Bar Kokhba era. Excerpt:

Eshel began his work in 1986, the same time that the Israeli Cave Research Center was founded. A small comb was found in a cave north of Jericho, spurring further research into the caves. To date, Eshel's discoveries include 19 Greek and Aramaic economical documents, several coins and skeletal remains.

Eshel primarily studies areas of Israel associated with the Bar Kokhba Revolt in A.D. 135. Jewish rebels fled from Roman armies and into desert caves, only to die of starvation or at Roman hands. "Although I'm dealing with a catastrophe that happened more than 1,900 years ago, the struggles of the 20th century make me feel connected to struggles in the past," Eshel said.

Past excavations focused on religious artifacts, and Eshel said he believes what he found sheds even more light on the lives of the people that lived at that time. "We will never know exactly what happened from [A.D.] 132 to 135, but you can still learn history from economical documents," Eshel said.

The most recent excavation took place late 2002 in Ein Gedi, Israel. Eshel and his team found several coins, arrows, pots and two Greek documents.

Eshel said he has no immediate plans for another excavation, but there is still more work to be done. "There are still illegal excavations, and I'm always afraid of looters." He has a license to survey Ein Gedi and keeps a close eye on possible discoveries.

By the way, Jim West's web page, which sends me a lot of traffic, has changed its address. The new address is http://www.biblical-studies.org.

TWO NEW SCIENCE FICTION BOOKS reviewed in the Guardian have ancient classical themes. One, Roma Eterna, by Robert Silverberg, explores an alternate history in which the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt is delayed until the 28th century C.E., the Roman empire doesn't fall, and Christianity and Islam fail to become world religions. As I've mentioned before, the book I'm currently writing uses alternate history as a tool to analyze the transmission of the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, so I'm interested in keeping track of such things. I think I read the chapter on Muhammad a few years ago when it was published as a short story. Robert Silverberg . . . well . . . Robert Silverberg rules.

ANDERS BELL at Phluzein asks whether the LarkNews website, which currently has this article on the "discovery" of Proverbs chapter 32 is a (Christian) humor site and if it is credible. If he really isn't sure, the answers are yes and no, respectively. Look at the disclaimer in red caps at the bottom of the page. I've cited it before here.

THE SIEGFRIED H. HORN ARCHAEOLOGICAL MUSEUM at Andrews University in Michigan (not to be confused with the University of St. Andrews in Scotland) is moving quarters and tripling its size. Looks like they have some cool stuff.

A CATHOLIC SCHOLAR will lecture in a synagogue on Mel Gibson's The Passion. Whatever the movie's problems, it's good that it's generating this kind of dialogue.

KABBALAH FOR KIDS from the Material Girl: The English Roses. Excerpts from the NY Daily News article:

The book, inspired by the kabala, the ancient Jewish mystical system of which Madonna is a devotee, tries to communicate "the importance of sharing," she says, "and the desire to enlighten others" through the story of five little girls, a pumpernickel-fancying fairy godmother and some MTV-ish dance moves.

[...]

The five little girls' names are Charlotte, Nicole, Amy, Grace and Binah (which means "wisdom" in Hebrew).

Because the proceeds are supposed to go to charity, "I was liberated," Madonna says in her interview, "and my creativity was not motivated by ego or greed for the first time in my life."

I don't remember any dance moves in the Zohar, but I haven't read it all.

UPDATE (13 September): it occurred to me during the night that the Hekhalot Rabbati (a pre-Kabbalistic Merkavah mystical text) does have some dance moves in it. I quote my translation of �189 in Descenders to the Chariot:

Every single day, when the afternoon prayer arrives, the adorned King sits enthroned and exalts the living creatures. The word does not finish coming from His mouth before the holy living creatures go forth from under the throne of glory. From their mouths chanting is fulfilled, with their wings rejoicing is fulfilled, their hands make music, and their feet dance. They go around and surround their King; one on His right, one on His left, one before Him, and one behind Him. They embrace and kiss Him and uncover their faces. They uncover and the King of glory covers His face, and the Arabot firmament is split like a sieve before the King.

MTV-ish? Well, maybe. I'm afraid I'm even less up on MTV than I am on the Zohar.

Incidentally, the peekaboo moves are there to keep the angels from looking straight into God's uncovered face, which would be fatal even for them.

PREMIERE MAGAZINE reviews The Order and isn't much impressed. Excerpts:

Now, these aren't your average priests. Fathers Alex (Heath Ledger) and Thomas (Mark Addy) know Latin and Aramaic, but favor four-letter expletives. They subscribe to the old ways, but conceal cell phones in their cassocks. And when they're not delivering mass or praying the Rosary, they're perfectly comfortable fighting demons . . . which is convenient, since Rome seems to be full of them this time of year.

[...]

Writer-director Brian Helgeland has fashioned a dark and creepy enough supernatural yarn to entice the kind of suckers who fell for Stigmata and The Ninth Gate. But all this doomsaying is just too silly to take so seriously...

THEY'RE SERIOUS! The proposed Egyptian lawsuit against the Jews for reparations for the plunder they took during the Exodus is "under study by a group of lawyers in Egypt and Europe" according to a Reuters interview with Nabil Hilmi, dean of the law faculty at Egypt's al-Zaqaziq University. The Yahoo article quotes him as saying "This is serious, and should not be misread as being political against any race. We are just investigating if a debt is owed."

Surreal.

Luckily, Alan Dershowitz is willing to act as defense attorney for the Jews.

"THE ORDER OF NAZOREAN ESSENES, a Buddhist Branch of Original Christianity" is a modern Gnostic group with a large website. Despite the name, they seem more influenced by the Nag Hammadi Library, the Mandeans, Mani, and other things than by the Dead Sea Scrolls (although I have not gone through the site exhaustively). In any case, their approach is highly eclectic. They give summary data on their group here. This site was drawn to my attention by a neighbor who is interested in such things.

FUN FACTS about the Ten Commandments, mainly things people think they know which aren't so. This stuff probably isn't news to most PaleoJudaica readers, but I suppose it is to lots of other people. The article should have added that to "bear false witness" means to perjure yourself in court under oath, not just to lie. The Ten Commandments have no problem with lying per se.

JIM WEST replies to Bruce Chilton on the "James Ossuary" in Bible and Interpretation News.

DAVID NISHIMURA at Cronaca comments on the BBC's coverage of the new evidence for dating Hezekiah's Tunnel. The findings are being covered in lots of places now. Here's a good article in the Washington Post.

ST. ANDREWS AND ANCIENT TIBERIAS are not the only places with a problem with corpse impurity. But in Israel today, a solution is demanded, no matter how expensive:

The impure corpses cost NIS 4 million (Ha'aretz, again via Bible and Interpretation News)
By Dalia Shehori

The expansion of Kibbutz Galuyot Street, along the stretch between Schocken Street and Herzl Street in south Tel Aviv, was recently completed at a cost of NIS 12 million. A "floating bridge" - raising the surface of the road above ground - was built there for the new traffic lanes. Without this bridge, the project would have cost just NIS
8 million.

This section of the road was considered especially jammed, and widening it was necessary to allow a smooth flow of traffic; but building the bridge, so it turns out, was not a result of transportation necessities, but of religious dictates.

A Jewish cemetery dating from the period of the Second Temple and found at the site was what obliged the Netivei Ayalon company to find a creative halakhic solution - the floating bridge - to create a space between the ground and the road that would allow the impurity to escape.

[...]

The rest of the article also describes Haredi interference with the excavation of the burial site of a fifth-century nunnery (denied by the IAA) and the incorporation of a late Roman era burial cave into a new Knesset wing, facing the fitness room.

BLOGI ANTIQUITATIS:

David Meadows at Rogue Classicism has a roundup of blogs having to do with the ancient world, a number of which I mean to put in my weblogs etc. links section as soon as I get the time.

MARY MAGDALENE IN THE MEDIA:

First, a new essay (via Bible and Interpretation News), which I find irritating not so much for what it says as for its supercilious tone that implies criticism of the current state of affairs without explaining what's wrong with them or how the author would fix them.

A Quite Contrary Mary (Beliefnet)
Like Jesus, Mary Magdalene is now the subject of a cultural makeover. What agenda do feminist scholars have in mind?
By Kenneth L. Woodward

Some excerpts, with my comments interspersed:

When it comes to Biblical figures, it is not enough to say that every generation entertains notions already imagined and discarded by previous generations. In the case of Mary Magdalene, the news is not what is being said about her, but the new context in which she is being placed--and who is doing the placing and why. In other words, Mary Magdalene has become a project for a certain kind of ideologically committed feminist scholarship. That's the real news.

True enough, and an interesting sociological observation. Woodward discusses these scholars at length in paragraphs that I'm not going to excerpt, but which make a thought-provoking read.

But is not hard to guess what is going on now. For several years I have kept an anthology of selections from the various world religions that on the cover invites the reader to choose from them those that they find appealing and thereby "create your own scriptures." That anyone would package this material, I thought, was indicative of one wind blowing in the mixed weather pattern of contemporary American religion. The operative assumption is that all sacred texts are of equal value and the reader is free to make sacred those that provide personal appeal. (Karen Armstrong, who calls herself a �serial monotheist,� does much the same thing.) It is the ultimate in consumer-oriented religion, of course, and has the added advantage of bypassing the authority of any community as to which texts count as sacred and which do not.

Well yeah. This is a problem? It should be replaced with what exactly? We live in a free market of religions in which they all have to compete for adherents. People can join whatever they want or make up whatever they want. I like it that way, thanks.

And the next step? That is already upon us in the form of a new book from Harvard's Karen King, "What Is Gnosticism?" which aims at showing the great diversity among Gnostics�true and pluralizing Gnosticism --fair enough--but also at divesting Gnostics of their opposition to orthodox Christianity, thereby dissolving the very category of heresy. In short, if there is no error, then anything can be true. How very American. How inclusive and nonjudgmental. And in this age of postmodernism, so Now. In this kind of environment, even the figure of Mary Magdalene can be prostituted for polemical purposes.

Heresy only makes sense in the context of a specific faith community and the boundaries it chooses to draw around itself. And given the history of heresiology and the policing of heretics, I think the category profits from some serious watering down. I hardly think it will be "dissolved" for those to whom it matters, but I'm thankful that they don't run things anymore - at least around here. There's no danger of any inclusive, nonjudgmental, dissolving of the category of heresy in, say, Iran right now, is there?

Mr. Woodward doesn't seem to get that there is a position between anarchy, where anything and everything can be true, and dogmatic imposition of orthodoxy: letting people use their own critical faculties to decide for themselves what they think is true and what they want to treat as sacred.

I don't always agree with the feminist scholars he is talking about and he makes some legitimate criticisms of them, but I think that last sentence is a cheap and tacky shot.


Second, Karen King replies to some of Woodward's substantive criticisms in "Letting Mary Magdalene Speak" (also in Beliefnet and also via Bible and Intepretation News). Two excerpts:

Early Christians intensely debated such basic issues as the content and meaning of Jesus� teachings, the nature of salvation, the value of prophetic authority, the roles of women and slaves, and competing visions of ideal community. After all, these first Christians had no New Testament, no Nicene Creed or Apostles Creed, no commonly established church order or chain of authority, no church buildings, and indeed no single understanding of Jesus. All of the elements we might consider essential to define Christianity did not yet exist. Far from being starting points, the Nicene Creed and the New Testament were the end products of these debates and disputes. They represent the distillation of experience and experimentation�and not a small amount of strife and struggle.

One consequence of these struggles is that the winners were able to write the history of this period from their perspective. The viewpoints of the losers were largely lost since their ideas survived only in documents denouncing them. Until now. The recent discoveries provide a wealth of primary works that illustrate the plural character of early Christianity and offer alternative voices. They also help us to understand the winners better because their ideas and practices were shaped in the crucible of these early Christian debates. The Nicene Creed, for example, was never intended to be the full statement of Christian faith�after all, it does not ask Christians to affirm anything in the teachings of Jesus even though they were of fundamental importance to faith and practice. Instead every article of the Creed was formulated as a hedge against views that were considered to be wrong.

[...]

Far from suggesting that religious claims are always true and can offer no errors, this perspective insists that communities of believers need to engage critically with their tradition and be held responsible for how they appropriate it. Although nothing can guarantee that people will live wisely and morally, an account that includes all the historical resources of tradition might create a surer basis upon which theological judgments are made. An accurate historical account will not ensure that the figure of Mary Magdalene won�t continue to be prostituted for polemical purposes as she has been for centuries�but it does restore some dignity to this important woman disciple of Jesus.

Finally, on a lighter note, Monica Belluci, who plays Mary Magdalene in Mel Gibson's The Passion, has recently been quoted as saying that the movie is very . . . um . . . well . . . Oh heck, go and read it yourself. I have not been able to verify the quote in the Mail On Sunday. As if Mel didn't have enough controversy on his hands.

NEW CONFIRMATION of the dating of Hezekiah's Tunnel and the Siloam Inscription which, surprisingly, is covered by the press only (so far) in the Arab Times:

Bible's tunnel vision gets scientific backing

PARIS, (AFP) - Modern science has thrown its weight behind Biblical historians, backing their account of an Old Testament king who drove a tunnel under Jerusalem to ensure water supplies for his besieged subjects. The underwater aqueduct is known as the Siloam Tunnel or "Hezekiah's Tunnel" in honour of the embattled Hebrew king reputed to have ordered its construction in order to bring water from Gihon Spring, outside the city, to Siloam Pool in Jerusalem's ancient heart. Historians have long contended that this event is described in two Old Testament texts, 2 Kings 20:20 and 2 Chronicles 32:3,4. These recount how Hezekiah (727-698 BC) had to grapple with denying water to the besieging Assyrian king Sennacherib, yet also provide water for the besieged:

. . . "It was Hezekiah who stopped up the spring of water of Upper Gihon, leading it downward west of the City of David." The historical record, however, was only indirect, and no evidence has ever been found that directly links the tunnel to Hezekiah.

Now, however, science has provided powerful backing, thanks to forensic evidence found buried in the tunnel's walls and the latest tools in chemical analysis. Israeli scientists took samples from a layer of ancient lime plaster that the tunnellers used to line the aqueduct to prevent the precious water from draining back into the Earth. They found the plaster -- since covered with other protective smotherings over the years -- included tiny pieces of bone, rare charcoal and ash to bind it, as well as chips of wood and "extraordinarily well-preserved" plant fragments.

Radiocarbon-dating at a laboratory at Oxford University put the age of the wood sample at between 822-796 BC, and that of two plant samples at 790-760 BC and 690-540 BC respectively. That gave a ballpark date of 700 BC which also tallied with a radioisotope estimate of an ancient stalactite found in the tunnel's ceiling."Our dating agrees well... with the date commonly assigned to King Hezekiah," the authors say. "The three independent lines of evidence -- radiometric dating, palaeography and the historical record -- all converge on about 700 BC, rendering the Siloam Tunnel the best-dated Iron-Age biblical structure so far."

[�]

This is a summary of a study by Israeli and British scholars which is scheduled to appear tomorrow in the journal Nature.

�����NEW EVIDENCE FOR CALIGULA'S "GOD COMPLEX,": excavations this summer indicate he may have connected his palace to a temple of Castor and Pollux. Also discussed earlier on PaleoJudaica here.

"HEBREW AND KONKANI": a linguistic sideline to the current closer relationship between Israel and India. This article compares the history of Hebrew with the history of Konkani, a language in India which I confess I've never heard of before. The parallels aren't all that close, but it's an interesting article. (You can read more about Konkani on the culture.konkani.com website.)

KFAR KEDEM - another living history project. I've already blogged on Nazareth Village. Kfar Kedem (which means roughly, "village of long ago") is a similar project, one where tourists can get some hands-on life experience of ancient village life in the Galilee. This is no doubt fun as long as you can still get antiseptic if you cut yourself and you can take a hot shower at the end of the day and drive to a nice restaurant, then e-mail home about your experience. (Despite my love of ancient history, I wouldn't want to live there, thank you.) I'm currently writing a chapter section on to what degree we can speak of ancient Galilean culture as something distinct from Jewish culture, and I ran across this site during a Google search.

MORE LARA CROFT DISSING, this time from the Chinese Government, which has banned Tomb Raider II for being culturally insensitive. (Via Archaeology Magazine News).

I guess this just goes to show that no movie is so stupid that it won't be taken seriously by somebody.

THE QUEEN OF SHEBA may not have existed, according to archaeologist Ricardo Eichmann (son of Adolph Eichmann - and I'm not making that up). He can't find any evidence that there was such a person. No matter: ancient Judaism and early Islam produced a rich cycle of legends about the Queen. To read some of them, go to the Solomon chapter of Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews and scroll down until you get to "The Queen of Sheba."

MORE BOOK REVIEWS IN TC:

Johann Cook, ed., Bible and Computer: The Stellenbosch AIBI-6 Conference: Proceedings of the Association Internationale Bible et Informatique "From Alpha to Byte," University of Stellenbosch 17-21 July, 2000.
(Thomas Hieke, reviewer)

David J. A. Clines, The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. 5: m-n
(Johan Lust, reviewer)

David L. Washburn, A Catalog of Biblical Passages in the Dead Sea Scrolls
(Robert F. Shedinger, reviewer)

BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION NEWS has published three new essays:

"Thoughts on the James Ossuary"
By Craig Evans

"Scholars, Journalists and the Ossuary"
By Bruce Chilton

"Conservative Scholarship-Critical Scholarship"
By Niels Peter Lemche

HERE'S MORE ON THE ORDER, another movie with Aramaic in it. Follow this link for The Order's website. You can view the trailer there and, if you have Flash installed, can waste lots more time looking at photos, clips, etc. The trailer claims to show a bit of Aramaic ("the language of Christ"), but it doesn't look much like Aramaic to me, and "blood in, blood out" is not a phrase that would be easy to say in Aramaic, which doesn't allow dangling prepositions. (They would need direct objects: "blood in something, blood out of something.") Oh well.

UPDATE: Boston.com reviews The Order and trashes it.

A NEW BOOK REVIEW FROM THE REVIEW OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE:

Bellia, Giuseppe and Angelo Passaro, eds.
Il libro del Qohelet: Tradizione, Redazione, Teologia