PaleoJudaica.com

Wednesday, October 01, 2003

RADIOCARBON DATING OF ANCIENT POTTERY is now possible, thanks to scientists at the University of Bristol, who have developed a technique for dating ancient pottery using the animal fat it contains. Pottery is normally dated by placing it in a relative typological sequence, based on its shape and composition, and establishing absolute dates only when specific pottery types are found in strata that can be dated on other grounds. Cumulatively, typological dating of pottery is very accurate and useful, but this new method could be an important cross-check of the old and could also date potsherds that aren't yet established in a typological sequence. And, as you can see below, it has the potential for dating other artifacts besides pottery. This is an exciting development. Here's one of the articles on the new method (via Bible and Interpretation News):

On the antiquity of pots: New method developed for dating archaeological pottery (EurekaAlert!)

The contents of ancient pottery could help archaeologists resolve some longstanding disputes in the world of antiquities, thanks to scientists at Britain's University of Bristol. The researchers have developed the first direct method for dating pottery by examining animal fats preserved inside the ceramic walls.

[...]

The researchers analyzed 15 pieces of pottery � mostly cooking jars and bowls � ranging in age from 4,000 B.C. to the 15th Century A.D. They assigned a date using the new method and then compared their findings to the historical date verified previously by association with organic artifacts. In all cases, their results were in good agreement with the sample history.

The analysis requires partial destruction of the artifacts, but the researchers didn't run into much opposition along the way. "Museum curators require some convincing before they let you take their pottery away," Evershed says. "However, most of this pottery is not display quality material, but is stored in bags and boxes in the museum archive."

[Richard] Evershed [Ph.D., a chemist at the University of Bristol] and his colleagues also plan to use the technique to study mummies. "A lot of Egyptian mummies were exported out of Egypt by the Victorians, and they often applied modern treatments to preserve them," Evershed says. The researchers hope to distinguish between a modern treatment and the original embalming agent.

The method could eventually be used for a variety of other analyses. "Potentially, you could date any other material that has preserved organic compounds," like pitches from wood products or collagen from bones, according to Evershed. "You could even isolate individual amino acids by this preparative GC approach, but no one's tried that. That's the next step."

Tuesday, September 30, 2003

CRUCIFIXION AGAIN: Mark Goodacre points to this 1973 article by James Charlesworth, "Jesus and Jehohanan: An Archaeological Note on Crucifixion," which suggests that the hapless Jehohanan was crucified in a crouching position with the nails going through his forearms. (Incidentally, this interpretation seems to be the source of the position in which Willem DaFoe is crucified in The Last Temptation of Christ.) But this more recent article by Joe Zias (who is a specialist in ancient osteology), "Crucifixion in Antiquity: The�Archaeological�Evidence," takes the damage to the forearms to indicate that they were tied, not nailed, and also takes the victim to have been crucified in an upright position with the feet on either side of the cross. Either way, not very pleasant.

SONG OF SONGS INTERPRETATION SAMPLES, a page from the website of Alan Humm, contains excerpts of passages from Jewish and Christian authors which interpret the Song of Songs. And don't miss his link to Jay Treat's Sights and Sounds of the Song of Songs page, which includes Jay's own translation of the Aramaic Targum of the Song of Songs.

NEW BOOK REVIEWS FROM THE REVIEW OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE:

Albertz, Rainer and Bob Becking, eds.
Yahwism after the Exile: Perspectives on Israelite Religion in the Persian Era: Papers read at the First Meeting of the European Association for Biblical Studies, Utrecht, 6-9 August, 2000

Vander Kam, James C.
The Book of Jubilees

Vines, Michael E.
The Problem of Markan Genre: The Gospel of Mark and the Jewish Novel

Wire, Antoinette Clark
Holy Lives, Holy Deaths: A Close Hearing of Early Jewish Storytellers

Monday, September 29, 2003

Sunday, September 28, 2003

MEL GIBSON'S THE PASSION is the subject of a news roundup in an article in the Toledo Blade. There's now a petition website for Mel supporters. And an interesting tidbit: Gibson's hands make a cameo appearance as the ones that drive the nails into Jesus' hands. "He said it�s because of his transgressions against the Lord." Okay, but I still wish he had paid some attention to where the nails are supposed to go. (I don't doubt the sincerity of the statement he's making, but the error is distracting.) Also, based on the New Yorker interview, the article confirms that the movie will have subtitles.

Saturday, September 27, 2003

"WHY WE DIG THE HOLY LAND" - is another essay for Christianity Today's "archaeology week." This one is a reprint from 1995, which encourages Evangelical Christian institutions to put more effort and money into biblical and Middle Eastern archaeology. I'm very much in favor of this as long as the funding comes with no strings attached regarding the outcome of the research. But the tone of the article does make me worry:

We urge evangelical Christian institutions to stand in the gap, to create academic programs and cooperate in field archaeology ("digs") and to promote the importance of biblical archaeology in our churches. This is an expensive, but necessary undertaking.

It is necessary because biblical archaeology has not only enlightened our reading of Scripture (the recently discovered Tel-Dan inscription, for example, illuminates the character of David's dynasty) but has often confirmed the Bible's historicity.

It is necessary because, over the past 10 to 15 years, Middle Eastern archaeology has shifted from interpretation of the evidence in the light of the written records (including Scripture) to a bias against giving Scripture the benefit of the doubt. [Archaeologist William] Dever himself bears responsibility for much of this secularization and has alienated the constituency most likely to cheer and financially support the archaeology of the Middle East: committed Jews and Christians. Believers must once again firmly grasp the task and conduct original research in a faith-friendly manner.

[...]

Evangelicals are committed to fostering a belief in the trustworthiness of Scripture. That requires both argument and evidence. And the evidence, buried in the tells of the Middle East, requires painstaking excavation and analysis. Who will provide the funds? Who will lead the way?

Archaeology involves learning about the past through the surviving remnants of its material culture. Relating it to surviving texts passed down from antiquity is useful, if ultimately a spin-off, and harder to do than people often realize. But if conducting "original research in a faith-friendly manner" means anything besides going without preconception wherever the evidence leads the researcher, then it isn't acceptable. This has to be made crystal clear to any funders in advance. I hope this is what the writer was thinking too, but I'd be happier if he had made it explicit.

SIX HARVARD MUSEUMS are having a free-admission "Museums Community Day" tomorrow. The highlights include:

Preview tour of the upcoming exhibit "The Houses of Ancient Israel: Domestic, Royal, Divine" (opening Nov. 12) at 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. at the Semitic Museum, 6 Divinity Ave. The exhibit explores everyday life in Iron Age Israel (ca.1000-600 B.C.) and features a full-scale replica of a fully furnished, two-story village house. A tour of the "Nuzi and the Hurrians" Mesopotamian exhibit and "Ancient Cyprus" gallery is offered from 2:30 to 3:30 p.m. Founded in 1889, the Semitic Museum holds artifacts that comprise over 40,000 items, including pottery, cylinder seals, sculpture, coins, and cuneiform tablets, many from museum-sponsored excavations in Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Cyprus, and Tunisia.

Cool!

Friday, September 26, 2003

"YECHI ADONENU MORENU verabbenu melech hamoshiach leolam voed." - "May our master, teacher and rabbi, the king messiah, live forever."

Waiting for the Messiah of Eastern Parkway (New York Times)
By JONATHAN MAHLER

This long article from 21 September tells the fascinating story of the Lubavitcher community that believes that its rebbe, who died in 1994, is the Messiah and that he will come again. The parallels with Jesus and other messianic figures such as Shabbetai Zvi are obvious. I'll excerpt some interesting bits and add a few comments, but you should definitely read it all. (It was brought to my attention by a reader whose name I don't have, because the message didn't forward properly from my office. But I'll note it later when I can get at my office e-mail again. LATER: It was Steve Oren. Thanks Steve!)

It looks almost like a rain dance, only instead of precipitation, these Lubavitchers are trying to hasten the arrival of the messiah. There's just one problem. The words of the accompanying song -- ''May our master, teacher and rabbi, the king messiah, live forever'' -- refer specifically to a man who died nine years ago: Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the grand rabbi and spiritual leader of the Lubavitch movement from 1951 until 1994. The Yechi, as it is known, is sung as a demonstration of faith that their beloved rebbe will be back soon -- rising from the great beyond in a manner more befitting Jesus Christ than the savior of the Jewish people.

So if Yechi -- ''May he live'' -- is a demonstration of faith to some, it borders on a profane outburst to others. A swath of Lubavitchers are not only unwilling to utter the Yechi; they also refuse to be present in synagogues or at gatherings where it is chanted. To understand the concern of these so-called anti-messianists, consider that only a few men in Jewish history have been revered as the messiah after their deaths. One was Jesus. Another was Sabbatai Zevi, who won hundreds of thousands of followers across Palestine and Eastern Europe after publicly declaring himself the messiah in 1665. (Zevi's death was, relatively speaking, a small challenge to his adherents, who had already chosen to stick by him after his conversion to Islam.)

For the anti-messianists, their messianic brethren present a public-relations disaster of epic proportions. They worry that their Hasidic movement, which is 300 years old and has survived pogroms, Communism and the Holocaust, will become confused with a cult. What's more, they can hardly ignore the obvious Christian overtones of messianism: what kind of Jews believe in a second coming?

[�]

What started as a fissure between the community's messianists and anti-messianists has gradually opened into a canyon, with each side insisting that it is the true heir to the rebbe's vision. Over the years, the conflict between the two factions has also become one of propaganda, with rival publishing houses, magazines and bookstores. There are also endless semantic distinctions between the two factions, the most common of which is that anti-messianists write ''Of Blessed Memory'' after the rebbe's name, while messianists insist on ''Long Live King Messiah.'' There is even a Lubavitch version of the school-prayer debate, over whether the yeshivas should encourage students to sing Yechi. (Some do, some don't.)

[�]

Thirty-five years old and skinny, with long kinky black hair and a Frank Zappa goatee, Baruch Thaler left the Lubavitch movement several years ago, but his mother, stepfather and five siblings are all still very much a part of it.

[�]

A promising student in the local yeshivas, he had been on track to spread the rebbe's teachings as a Lubavitch emissary when he found himself among the throngs outside 770 on the day after the rebbe's death. Forcing his way to the front of the crowd, Thaler, who was 25 at the time, managed to grab the rebbe's coffin as it was being carried out of the building and into the car that would transport it to a graveyard in Queens. Because Jewish law requires that corpses be returned to the earth and most New York cemeteries mandate that dead bodies be fully enclosed, some Jewish coffins are made with a thin wood panel on the bottom that slides out when they are lowered into the ground. Reaching up to lift the coffin, Thaler found himself pushing directly up into that layer of plywood. As he shuffled toward the street, he could feel the shifting weight of the dead rebbe pressing into his bare hands. ''Later, people would insist that the casket was empty,'' he says. ''But this was total reality -- physical-touch confirmation.''

After the rebbe was buried, Thaler pulled away from the movement.

Empty casket - empty tomb? It looks like something along those lines is getting started here. There was an empty tomb tradition about Shabbetai Zvi as well just a few years after his death.

The biggest difficulty in trying to figure out what the rebbe really wanted is that he, too, was aware of his movement's image and thus sent different signals to those inside and outside the community. This was more than a mere P.R. gesture. The rebbe seemed to believe that bringing secular Jews back into the fold was a critical part of the process of redemption and was thus understandably wary of scaring people off with messianic zealotry.

What does seem clear is that the rebbe was, for many years, eager to quell the tide of messianism when it began to rise. But as he grew older, he became more reluctant to do so. Among the messianists' abiding articles of faith are two videotapes of the rebbe in his later years. One shows him smiling as a crowd of Lubavitchers sing Yechi around him; in the other, he is accepting a petition signed by thousands that identifies him as the messiah.

In the late 80's and early 90's, the rebbe, no doubt increasingly aware of his approaching mortality as well as of his lack of progeny, began speaking more and more frequently about the messiah -- not explicitly nominating himself but nonetheless encouraging a messianic urgency among his followers and even occasionally hinting that the messianic era had already begun.

This reminds me a little of how Jesus frequently talks in the Gospels about "the Son of Man" in an ambiguous way that could be taken to refer either to him or to someone else. (Not to downplay the horrendous complexities and problems of the whole Son of Man tradition, but the parallel is still interesting.)

In this context, it's possible to see the rebbe as a postmodern religious leader, one who intended for his followers to make their own decisions about his identity as the messiah. This would be in keeping with the tradition of Hasidism, which itself began as a populist effort to wrest Judaism from the grip of an elite group of Talmudic scholars. ''I think the rebbe wanted to dismantle his movement in a way,'' Max [Kohanzad] says. ''He realized that in order for people to be redeemed, they have to redeem themselves. The current mess is part of the rebbe's attempt to empower people.''

Or maybe there's another way of looking at it. Perhaps the rebbe was trying to walk the fine line between discouraging cultlike fanaticism among his followers and wanting to avoid shattering their hopes for imminent redemption.

I have my doubts about the rebbe-as-deconstructionist theory, but who knows?

Here's an article on Shabbetai Zvi with links to more information. Here are some notes on Shabbetai and Sabbatianism from Eliezer Segal's ever-useful website. And here, from the also very useful Livius website, is a collection of articles on the concept of messiahship and on more than thirty Jewish figures throughout history who (more or less) made messianic claims or had such claims made about them. Spot-checking some of the articles, I'd say the quality is high, although there could be more secondary literature cited.

L'SHANAH TOVAH, year 5764. Tonight at sundown Rosh haShanah, the Jewish new year, begins. This article explains some of the basics. This holiday marks the beginning of the High Holy Days or ten Days of Awe. Also, the opening of this new year coincides with the sabbath, which creates some halakhic difficulties. This article discusses how some passages in the rabbinic literature dealt with them.

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.

Thursday, September 25, 2003

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."

[...]

Wednesday, September 24, 2003

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.)

Tuesday, September 23, 2003

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.

Monday, September 22, 2003

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.)

Sunday, September 21, 2003

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.

Saturday, September 20, 2003

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.

Friday, September 19, 2003

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 . . .

Thursday, September 18, 2003

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.

Wednesday, September 17, 2003

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!

Tuesday, September 16, 2003

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.

Monday, September 15, 2003

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!"