CHRIS KNIGHTS e-mails in reply to my latest comments on the History of the Rechabites:

Thank you, Jim, for reponding so quickly to my communication. It would perhaps be helpful for readers of this Blog if I charted the substantial areas of agreement that exist between you and me:

1. We agree that The Sory of Zosimus�is the best title for rhe whole text, with The History�of the Rechabites being reserved for chapters 8-10 alone (using Charlesworth's chapter divisions)
2. We agree that HistRech is a separate�text, that has been inserted into StorZos at some stage after the creation of a form of StorZos.
3. We agree that HistRech is currently only extant within StorZos
4. �We agree that HistRech is a Greek composition
5. We agree that StorZos is - in its current and final form - a Christian work
6. We agree that the only certain date we have for HistRech is the date of the oldest ms of StorZos
7. We agree that HistRech is pseudepigraphical
8. We agree that HistRech is short and that, therefore, coming to any conclusions about it is very difficult.

In all of these, there is perhaps more�common ground between�the two of us than between either of us and Charlesworth and Martin.

Where we disgaree is over whether HistRech is a Jewish or a Christian composition, and whether we have enough evidence to tell. In considering this issue, I will freely admit that I was swayed by the views of McNeil, Martin and Charlesworth - and will observe that, when I first started researching HistRech in 1986, Charlesworth's�standing as an OT Pseudepigrapha scholar was very high indeed. Perhaps I instinctively felt that, as a mere doctoral student, there were limits to how far I could disgree with C! It's interesting that it's taken 10+ years for a better classification of what is Jewish and what is Christian in the parabiblical literature to emerge!

What we have to take into account with HistRech are:

1. Its clear use of the Septuagint, and its Greek language, and when the LXX stopped being used by Jews in antiquity
2. Its clear affinities with some rabbinic traditions about the Rechabites, and whether these affinities are coincidental or not.
3. Its lack of what�I would term 'high profile' Christian signature features, as McNeil so clearly observed
4. The extent to which the nudity command and NT quotes in it are (or are not) integral to the text - on literary-critical grounds, not theological ones. If they are integral and not inserted by a redactor then, clearly, it is most unlikely that�HistRech is Jewish.

It may be that we should see HistRech as a�Christian composition, composed by someone familiar with Jewish rabbinic traditions. I certainly have no vested interest in HistRech being Jewish, beyond having to rethink what�I said in my contribution to Roots in the Future, the Festschrift for Alec Graham, the previous Bishop of Newcastle, in 1997, where I talked about 'The Christian Use�of Jewish Writings: Ancient Example and Modern Practice'. I have also been at pains to observe in all my articles on the text that my conclusions were only preliminary, and open to development and revision. Of course, the editors of JSJ and JSP�might be concerned - although the editors of the Ante-Nicene Fathers will be rejoicing in heaven.

But I'm still not convinced that we are unwarranted in claiming that is likely to be Jewish- but your skepticism is well-taken, Jim!

Like you, I wonder if Ronit is�out there somewhere reading this ... or perhaps even Charlesworth, or Martin, or McNeil?

Best wishes,

Chris Knights

Thanks Chris. I'm busy right now, but if I can think of anything else useful to say, I'll try to post it tomorrow.

A COPTIC GOSPEL OF JUDAS is evidently circulating on the antiquities market and Stephen C. Carlson of Hypotyposeis gives some information on it. (Scroll up for another posting on it as well as an additional mention of our own Jonathan Pennington.) There's also an entry on the Gospel of Judas in Peter Kirby's Early Christian Writings website.

The concept of a Gospel in which Judas is the (or a) hero is pretty interesting and reminds me of the Judas of the Last Temptation of Christ: perhaps yet another "Gnostic" theme in it. I wonder if Nikos Kazantzakis knew about the Irenaeus passage.

THE "GENEVA ACCORDS" WERE SIGNED ON MONDAY. Of course the trouble is that actual treaties are generally signed by the governments involved. I'm not at all happy with the idea of giving the Palestinians sovereignty over the Temple Mount until their leaders repudiate their denial that the Jewish temple ever stood there.

MEL GIBSON has refused a request from the Vatican for an advance screening of his The Passion of Christ, according to Business Day. (Warning: this link has repeatedly made my Internet Explorer crash, but works fine on Netscape. Open at your own risk.) Excerpt:

VATICAN CITY - Movie director Mel Gibson has turned down a request from the Vatican to have an advance look of his movie about the last hours of Jesus of Nazareth, the film's producer said yesterday.

The Pontifical Council for Culture asked for the showing in the context of a congress here on the theme "Christ and the Cinema," which has brought together experts from Roman Catholic universities around the world.

Producer Nick Hill said the film was not ready for showing because Gibson was in the cutting room "softening" the most violent images of the crucifixion of Jesus.

Yesterday there was a report in the Daily Mirror that a special screening next week had been arranged for the Pope. It sounds as though the refused Vatican screening is something different, but I can't tell for sure from the available information.

ARTIFACTS EXCAVATED FROM BETHSAIDA will go on display at the Yellowstone Art Museum, according to the Billings Gazette. Excerpts:

Beginning Friday, 137 ancient artifacts unearthed at the Bethsaida site by [Elizabeth] McNamer [adjunct professor of philosophy and religion at Rocky Mountain College] and others will be on display at the Yellowstone Art Museum. The exhibit titled "Bethsaida: Life Revealed in the Layers" will remain in Billings through March 14.

[...]

Visitors to the exhibit will see such items as pottery, coins and fishing implements that date back to the first century A.D.

"We found a fisherman's house that was quite large," McNamer said. "Fishermen were middle-class businessmen."

Members of the archeological team found wine bottles imported from the island of Rhodes in a fisherman's house and golden jewelry, McNamer said. A gold earring will be on display at the museum.

Interestingly, continued excavation of the site unearthed a city that existed in the time of Israel's King David, McNamer said. Bethsaida most likely served as the capital of the kingdom of Geshur.

"We have unearthed the city gate that David would have walked through - it's the largest city gate ever unearthed in Israel," she said.

The exhibit will include a full-scale replica of a stele, a marker with the image of a moon god, to whom people paid homage when they entered the ancient city. According to McNamer, the city was destroyed by the Assyrians in 732 BCE (before the common era).

The city was not rebuilt until a couple of centuries before Jesus' time, McNamer said. In the year 30 A.D., Philip, the son of Herod the Great, dedicated a temple built at Bethsaida in honor of Livia Julia, Julius Caesar's wife.

An incense shovel from the temple and incense bowls were both discovered, McNamer said, and they will be part of the exhibit.

Bethsaida was destroyed in the year 70 A.D. by the Romans. Sixty years later, a great earthquake changed the topography of the land "and because of that, the city was never rebuilt," McNamer said.

THE JOURNAL TC has a new article:

Michael Graves, The Origins of Ketiv-Qere Readings

Abstract: Attempts to explain the origins of the Ketiv-Qere readings have centered around two basic models. According to one model, both the Ketiv and the Qere represent variant readings which can be traced back to an ancient collation of manuscripts. According to the other model, readers introduced the Qere into the written text (the Ketiv) with the intention of correcting what they perceived to be an error. Views that combine features of these two models also exist. The author suggests that the two traditional models have not supplied an adequate framework for evaluating the origins of the Ketiv-Qere readings and that a better approach can be established by focusing on the central questions which cut across both traditional positions.

The Hebrew in the article requires SBL fonts to be readable (for instructions, go here).

"SHOULD CHEESEBURGERS BE KOSHER?" asks Jack M. Sasson in the December issue of Bible Review. He answers no, but he still thinks that those biblical passages about seething a kid in its mother's milk may have been misunderstood. The, uh, meat of his argument is as follows:

Since bissel can mean �cook,� and hlv can refer to �fat,� and the Israelites were apparently permitted to eat fat as long as it did not come from a sacrificial offering, I propose translating our prohibition: �You may not cook a kid in its mother�s fat.� If so, we would be dealing not with an arcane or enigmatic dietary injunction, but with a wise counsel, an aphorism, instructing a farming community not to squander the bounties that God has given Israel. For, to cook an animal in its mother�s fat would require the slaughter of both the mother and the young. The imprudent killing of the producer and the produced on the same occasion would lead to a serious reduction in stock, with potentially disastrous results.

The same kind of prudent advice is found in Deuteronomy 22:6-7: �Should you chance upon a bird�s nest before you on the road, on any tree or on the ground, as hatchlings or as eggs, with the mother sitting by the hatchlings or on the eggs, do not take the mother along with the young. Shoo away the mother and take the young, so that you may prosper and live long.� As in our prohibition, banning the killing of the mother bird allows the mother to produce more eggs to chance upon later.

[...]

Within a couple of centuries after the Hellenistic period, the interdiction against cooking a kid in milk itself developed from a quaint, narrowly interpreted practice to one with a sweeping application against mixing milk and meat. In passages of the Talmud, the injunction inspired a major segment of Jewish traditional practice of kashruth, or kosher laws. In turn, as it has been persuasively argued, this attachment to a remarkable interpretation of dietary rules and regulations became a bulwark for Jewish survival. Adopting them, observant Jews found it necessary to avoid intimacy with populations that obeyed no religious rules concerning the eating of meat, preserving their distinctiveness as a community in faith and practice.

I have sought to explain the original meaning of a law that remains enigmatic to scholarship. Yet this explanation should prove irrelevant to how traditional Jews today display their attachment to their faith. Traditional Judaism owes its rules of practical life to biblical laws as interpreted by the Jewish sages. This means that lasagna and cheeseburgers must still not be served at their tables.

THE POPE HAS REQUESTED a private screening of Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ, according to the Daily Mirror.

THE CANADIAN MUSEUM OF CIVILIZATION in Ottawa is opening a new exhibit, Ancient Treasures and the Dead Sea Scrolls, on Thursday. Excerpt from the Toronto Star article:

The exhibition includes portions of three of the first Dead Sea scrolls ever found � the Isaiah B Scroll (one of the oldest biblical manuscripts known), the Community Rule and the War Scroll. The Isaiah B Scroll has never been displayed, even in Israel, before being brought to Canada.

A somewhat different version of this exhibition was on view in Montreal at the Museum of Archeology and History over the summer.

But the Ottawa museum is putting more emphasis on some of the artefacts accompanying the scrolls � seven of which were not part of the Montreal exhibit and will be making their Canadian debut in Ottawa.

One of the most startling of these artefacts: a replica of a foot bone, discovered in Jerusalem in 1968 just after the Six Day War, which provides the only known physical link to the practice of crucifixion.

"It's the cast of a heel bone," says [curator Adolfo] Roitman, an energetic 46-year-old visionary who moved to Israel from Argentina as a young anthropology scholar.

"This heel, dating back almost two thousand years, was discovered in an ossuary, which is a box for bones," he explains.

The heel bone had a nail through it, and a piece of wood was still attached to the nail. According to Roitman, the discovery of this remnant had major implications for the reconstruction of history.

"The practice of crucifixion was a reality for many years in the eastern Mediterranean," Roitman explains. "It was a widespread practice of the Romans, and thousands of victims were crucified.

"But for centuries, we had to rely on literary descriptions and images rendered by artists using their imaginations. Until this discovery, we had no physical indication of just how it was done, in the case of Jesus and

There's more on this heel bone in the article by Joe Zias cited here.

NEW BOOK REVIEWS FROM THE REVIEW OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE:

Fitzmeyer, Joseph A.
Tobit
Reviewed by Tobias Nicklas

Fountain, A. Kay
Literary and Empirical Readings of the Books of Esther
Reviewed by Slivniak Dmitri

Eve, Eric
The Jewish Context of Jesus' Miracles
Reviewed by Douglas Geyer

Malina, Bruce J., Gerd Thiessen and Wolfgang Stegemann, eds.
The Social Setting of Jesus and the Gospels
Reviewed by Robert Derrenbacker

TWO MORE NEW BOOKS ON ANCIENT JUDAISM:

Christian M.M. Brady, The Rabbinic Targum of Lamentations
Studies in the Aramaic Interpretation of Scripture, 3 Vindicating God (Brill)

M. Patrick Graham, Gary N. Knoppers, Steven L. Mackenzie, The Chronicler as Theologian (JSOT/Continuum)

IN RESPONSE TO MY SBL PAPER ON THE STORY OF ZOSIMUS, Dr. Chris Knights e-mails:

Thank you for bringing my researches on StorZos/HistRech to a wider audience at the recent SBL meeting. It's also pleasing to hear that there is someone else in the world who shares my love for what my wife has for years called 'The Ripping Yarn'... although I did suspect that you had an interest in the text, as one of your students, Alan Turnbull, did contact me a year or so back in connection with an essay he was writing. Your survey of the secondary literature suggests to me that no-one else has produced anything on the text of late. I'm not in an academic context, so keeping up with research, either my own or others', is virtually impossible. There was, I seem to remember, a research student at the Hebrew University called Ronit Nikolsky a few years back, whose own research had some overlap with mine, but where she has got to I don't know.

Thank you also for praising my work, and for agreeing with it in many respects.

Can I respond - briefly - to your main contention? I actually agree with you (and have thought for a while) that my attempt to claim a Jewish origin for AbBles rests on a very shaky foundation. Rereading that article now shows to me that it is little more than special pleading. But - as I noted at the end of 'An Initial Commentary' - my real interest is in the Rechabites, and I guess that I should have stayed with just StorZos 8-10.

Despite your observations, and noting all that you say about some early Christian texts containing little that is explicitly Christian and about early Christian writers being aware of some early Jewish traditions, I would still claim that HistRech is more likely to be Jewish rather than Christian in origin. I dispute your apparent claim that just because StorZos is a Christian monastic text, we must read all of it as such and only as such - that would be close to saying that any attempt to perceive the text's sources is unwarranted (which, clearly, you wouldn't subscribe to).

Of course, like all our theories of the tex's sources and redactions, it is all entirely subjective (in the same sense as JEPD and Q are subjective), but it seems to me that what we have in HistRech echoes too much that we find in the rabbinic references about the Rechabites (not just the late ones) - and nothing else - for it to be other than Jewish in origin. Couple this with the lack of explicit Christian motifs in the chapters and the argument is complete.

I came to the Story of Zosimus and HistRech after studying the Biblical material about the Rechabites, then the Qumran material that is not about them (pace Matthew Black - see my piece in JSP 10) and then the Rabbinic references to them - so I was reading (and still read) HistRech against a Rabbinic background.

You sugest that these similarities are coincidental, and seem to me to rather dismiss them. But who knows? Of course, you have done more work on the whole business of whether ancient texts are Jewish or Christian - and I will read your paper on that subject in due course, and look forward to reading the monograph when it appears. I've only worked on the one text, in the way that I've described, and not recently even on that one. Certainly, for me, reading HistRech against the background of all the Rabbinic references to the Rechabites makes me believe that it is Jewish in origin.

I had hoped - but never had opportunity - to look at the early Christian references to the Rechabites, as you obviously have - although I did do some work recently on how the Independent Order of Rechabites, a nineteenth century temperance organisation, used the biblical material, which appeared in The Expository Times a year or so back.

Many thanks for your reply, Chris. I corresponded with Ronit Nikolsky last spring but she was not ready at that point to share her research. At the SBL conference Tal Ilan told me that Ronit had finished her dissertation, so I'm looking forward to hearing more about it soon. Are you there Ronit?

Regarding the History of the Rechabites, I don't say that "just because StorZos is a Christian monastic text, we must read all of it as such and only as such." I say that that is the place to start and that any attempt to move backwards from there must be established on the basis of compelling positive evidence, whether external, based on the nature of the contents, or linguistic. I have discussed at length the criteria I use at earlier conference papers on "Jewish Pseudepigrapha and Christian Apocrypha: (How) Can We Tell Them Apart?" and "(How) Can We Tell if a Greek Pseudepigraphon Has Been Translated from Hebrew or Aramaic?" Both papers are very early drafts of chapters of a book I am writing this year on the Christian transmission of Jewish pseudepigrapha.

Your key arguments are (1) a number of parallels to rabbinic texts on the Rechabites and (2) the lack of explicit Christian motifs in the History of the Rechabites. As for the second, you yourself have noted that the Greek of 9.10 echoes Mark 9.5 par., so the text as we have it does have an obviously Christian feature that has to be removed to make the text Jewish. I see no good reason for doing so.

As for the first argument, I've explained at length in my paper why I don't find the parallels to the rabbinic texts compelling and I won't repeat myself here. Let me make the more general point that Aggadic parallels (i.e., parallel stories) are generally unconvincing as proof of Jewish origin because they traveled readily from Jews to Christians. Halakhic parallels (about Jewish law or ritual or purity, etc.) are much more useful because Christians were considerably less likely to borrow them, since many (but by no means all) Christians were ideologically opposed to the concept of halakhah.

It would be a fair question to ask me what would convince me that the History of the Rechabites was a Jewish work. In other words, is my position falsifiable? Is there some way I could be proved wrong that a text of this size and with this sort of origin is likely to be Jewish? I'll be frank and say that it would be difficult. One of the limitations I give in my paper on Jewish Pseudepigrapha and Christian Apocrypha is that a text needs to be of substantial length, so that we have an adequate sample of the author's viewpoint. So the nature of our evidence already makes analysis of the History of the Rechabites very difficult. Still, I would say my approach is falsifiable in that I can imagine a text of this length which had been incorporated into a monastic Christian work and transmitted in Christian manuscripts and which was still verifiably Jewish. If the History of the Rechabites contained a number of references to clearly Jewish halakhic or ritual purity issues, that would be a strong argument in favor of its Jewish origin. And if the text were written in a Greek that had a high density of the Semitisms noted by Martin as characteristic of translation Greek � or, better yet, Semitisms not explainable by LXX influence � and a couple of linguistic features or transliterated words which were clearly Hebrew rather than Aramaic, that would clinch it. I would then agree that it was very likely that it was a Jewish composition and would include in the corpus of Jewish texts.

I can even envision a situation that would convince me that the actual History of the Rechabites that we have before us was Jewish. It seems to have had an independent existence before it was incorporated into the Story of Zosimus. Suppose we found a fourth century Greek manuscript in a Syrian synagogue that had been destroyed by an earthquake and never rebuilt. And suppose that this manuscript contained a long (say, 15 chapter) and clearly Jewish account of the Rechabites � one with lots of references to halakhah, ritual purity, national/ethnic issues, etc. � which included our History of the Rechabites and gave every indication of being the original context of those three chapters. I would in that case agree that it was overwhelmingly likely that the History of the Rechabites was a Jewish composition which later had been excerpted and incorporated into the monastic Story of Zosimus.

Now you may well say that neither scenario I've given above is very likely, and you would be right. My reply is that this is not because my methodology is wrong; it's because the problem itself is nearly intractable and needs to be taken seriously as such. And I should add that although these convincing cases are extreme, the arguments that you have made in favor of the History of the Rechabites being Jewish look very weak in comparison.

Perhaps I should reinforce the additional general point that I'm not saying that we can be sure that the History of the Rechabites is not a Jewish text but that, given its transmission we cannot be even reasonably sure that it is and, unless we are, we have no business using it as such. I have a larger agenda here in that I think that the field of early Jewish studies (i.e., concerning the Judaism of the first few centuries C.E.) has been contaminated for a long time by our using a number of works to reconstruct ancient Judaism when there is excellent reason to doubt that these works are Jewish and to fear that at least some of them were composed by Christians. These include the Life of Adam and Eve, parts of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Story of Zosimus, the Testament of Abraham, 3 Baruch, the Martyrdom of Isaiah, the Testament of Job, Joseph and Aseneth, and the Lives of the Prophets. This is an incomplete list off the top of my head. Perhaps some of them are Jewish; probably at least some of them are Christian. I think it is important for the field to adopt, at this point, a minimalist position and ask which texts we can be highly confident are Jewish and use those for our reconstruction of Judaism. My book aims to tackle the problem of how to do that. It may well be that as our methods and technologies improve and we find more and earlier manuscripts etc., that we'll be able to move some of the above works into the pretty certain category. But for now they are quite uncertain and we are better off leaving them out. Another way to put this is that our picture of ancient Judaism, is by the nature of our imperfect evidence, bound to be distorted. I think we are better off distorting it by omitting some texts from consideration which potentially might be relevant than by including some texts some of which are almost certainly not relevant. I would rather work with what we are confident are Jewish texts than risk contaminating the sample with texts that may well be of Christian or other origin.

I could probably go on at length, but I have to go to a party and then to hear a lecture, so I should stop here. (Well, strictly speaking I don't have to go to them, but I intend to.) I hope some of these extemporaneous comments are helpful, or at least stimulating. I've been thinking about these matters for a long time and I would be glad to hear anything you, Chris, or anyone else has to say in reply.

VETUS TESTAMENTUM has a new issue out (53.4) with the following articles of interest:

TREADING THE BOW
J. A. Emerton

HEBRAISMS IN THE OLD LATIN VERSION OF THE BIBLE
Matthew Kraus

IN SEARCH OF TREES: ISAIAH XLIV 14 AND ITS IMPLICATIONS
Simon J. Sherwin

THE PROPHET AS INCOMPETENT DRAMATIST
John G. F. Wilks

DELIVERANCE OR DESTRUCTION? ISAIAH X 33-34 IN THE FINAL FORM OF ISAIAH X-XI
G. C. I. Wong

2 CHR. XXVI 22: ISAIAH BEN AMOZ OR ISSHIAH THE PROPHET?
John W. Olley

There are also a couple of other articles that deal with the earlier period, plus lots of book notes. Requires paid personal or institutional subscription to access.

HERE ARE SOME NEW BOOKS FROM JSOT PRESS (Continuum):

Leonard Greenspoon and Sidnie White Crawford, The Book of Esther in Modern Research

Todd Klutz, Magic in the Biblical World: From the Rod of Aaron to the Ring of Solomon

Thomas L. Thompson, Jerusalem in Ancient History and Tradition

Ian Young, Biblical Hebrew: Studies in Chronology and Typology

I have some automatic alerts that tell me about new books, but if you have a new book out in the area of ancient Judaism and you would like me to note it, please e-mail me with the information, preferably including a link to a descriptive web page.

THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT is mounting a �2 million campaign (about $3.4 million) to promote tourism in Israel according to the London Times. Excerpts:

Among the country�s selling points are the old city and Western Wall in Jerusalem, the international opera festival at Caesarea, the site of Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, and scuba diving at the Red Sea resort of Eilat.

[...]

The value of tourism to Israel has fallen from �2.3 billion in 2000, with 3 million visitors, to �1 billion last year. But the Israel Tourist Board has found that the figures are reviving this year, with large numbers of Christian groups visiting religious sites alongside Jewish travellers.

Visitor numbers began to increase after the Iraq war, with 54 per cent more people coming to the country in July than in the previous summer.

A spokesman for the Israel Tourist Board said: �Even though the media magnify the problems in Israel, the reality is Israel is a safe place to visit. Security is stringent and tourists are not targeted, while El Al is probably the safest airline flying at present.�

EVANGELIST BILLY GRAHAM has seen Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ in a private screening and he liked it.

SENIOR QUMRAN SCHOLAR GEZA VERMES WRITES ON SEX. Can't say I ever expected to pen that sentence. And yes, this Guardian article does have to do with ancient Judaism too, at least a little. Via Mark Goodacre's New Testament Gateway blog. (I can't get Mark's permalinks to work for some reason, but it's the 5:15 pm entry for 30 November.)

UPDATE: His permalinks are working again and the link is here.

TWO BRIEF BOOK REVIEWS from Jewsweek:

Wise Men and Their Tales: Portraits of Biblical, Talmudic, and Hasidic masters
by Elie Wiesel, Published by Schocken Books, 336 pages, Purchase
Summary in a sentence: The author of more than forty books, Wiesel tells the stories of men and women who have -- according to the press release -- been "sent by God to help us find the godliness of our own lives."
Opening lines: A man, a woman. Abraham and Sarah. Who has not heard of them? Everyone loves them. They radiate goodness, nobility, human warmth. Who doesn't claim kinship with them? Humankind is what it is because they shaped our destiny. He is the father of our people, she the mother. Everything leads us back to them.
The Jewsweek verdict: The book reveals little new information and, we're sorry to say, it seems Weisel just phone this one in. Although it must've been a long call.

The God of Old: Inside the lost world of the Bible
by James L. Kugel, Published by Free Press, 260 pages, Purchase
Summary in a sentence: In his new book, Harvard professor Kugel enters the spiritual world of the ancient Israelites in order to see God through their eyes, God as he was actually encountered in biblical times.
Opening lines: My field is the study of ancient texts. I have spent the better part of my life working on them, mostly texts from the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and other writings of the ancient Near East, but also Hebrew texts from the middle ages.
The Jewsweek verdict: A bit esoteric for our tastes, but the professor certainly knows his material.

There are seven more reviews in the article.

BOOKS ABOUT BOOKS. Excerpt from a set of brief reviews by Susan Larson in the Times Picayune:

For readers with a true passion for the sight and smell of leather bindings, and the rarities of the book world, the writings of Nicholas Basbanes are those of a kindred spirit. In 'The Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World' (HarperCollins, $29.95), Basbanes concludes his great trilogy of works on book culture, begun with "A Gentle Madness" in 1995 and followed by "Patience and Fortitude" in 2001. In this volume, Basbanes focuses on a number of issues related to book survival in the future. Whether it's library discards or the destruction of books in times of war, Basbanes brings a sense of urgency and intensity to every issue. Along the way we meet some heroes of book history -- Sir Henry Rawlinson (1810-1895), who suspended himself by a rope in order to make copies of Darius the Great's inscriptions at the Great Rock of Behistum outside Tehran, is particularly memorable. Basbanes also recounts the efforts leading to the recovery of the Dead Sea scrolls, the Diamond Cutter Sutra, the most recent translation of Daodejing, the traveling libraries that circulated among Jewish households during the Holocaust, the heroic record of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, created in secret by Emmanuel Ringelblum.

NEWSWEEK has three articles on women and the Bible in its current issue. "The Bible's Lost Stories" is a long piece that deals mainly with the resurgent interest in Mary Magdalene but also talks about other women in the Bible and about women biblical scholars. Excerpts (but read it all):

The year�s surprise �it� girl is the star of a mega best seller, a hot topic on campuses and rumored to be the �special friend� of a famous and powerful man. Yet she�s still very much a woman of mystery. For close to 2,000 years, Christians have known her as Mary Magdalene, but she was probably named Miriam, and came from the fishing village of Magdala. Most people today grew up believing she was a harlot saved by Jesus. But the Bible never says that. Scholars working with ancient texts now believe she was one of Christ�s most devoted followers, perhaps even his trusted confidante and financial backer.

[...]

Today, there are female Biblical scholars at dozens of institutions, and at least two universities�Harvard and the Claremont Graduate University in California�offer degree programs on women in religion. These scholars have produced a new dictionary called �Women in Scripture,� a woman�s study Bible, and feminist commentaries to various books of the New Testament and early Christian literature. �There are increasing numbers of resources concerning Biblical women that are making their way into libraries, classrooms and bookstores,� says Amy-Jill Levine, professor of New Testament studies at Vanderbilt University Divinity School. �They�re no longer just cleaned up or romanticized stories, but rigorously historical, imaginative, cross-cultural collections.� These insights are also filtering out into popular culture with a slew of literary interpretations of women�s Bible stories in the wake of Anita Diamant�s 1997 best seller, �The Red Tent,� including many about Mary Magdalene.

[...]

Perhaps the most striking protofeminist text in Scripture is the Book of Judith, wholly devoted to a heroine who saves Israel. �She�s like Wonder Woman, only Jewish,� says Vanderbilt�s Levine. Judith�s moment comes as Israel is being threatened by a neighboring power. The male Jewish leadership prepares to surrender, but Judith, a beautiful and pious widow, has another plan. Dressed in her alluring best, she enters the enemy�s camp. The general, Holofernes, becomes infatuated and plans to seduce her. But when she is alone in his chambers, Judith decapitates Holofernes and takes his head home in her food bag. The enemy flees. All of Israel, including Jerusalem and its temple, are saved, and Judith, whom scholars see as a personification of Israel, returns to her previous life.

[...]

Tamar has to deceive the most powerful man in her life in order to get what she deserves. Her Biblical sisters have had to wait thousands of years for their day in the sun, but their voices, too, are finally being heard. No one is trying to claim that the women of the Bible were anywhere near as powerful as the men in their world. But neither were they weak and passive. Perhaps they were just misunderstood. And ignored. Take the story every Sunday-school kid has heard about how Jesus fed a multitude of 5,000 with just five loaves of bread and two fish. What the Bible really says is that there were �five thousand, not counting women and children.� In other words, assuming there was a wife and at least two children for every man, Jesus actually fed 20,000 people. Why didn�t the man who recorded this tale capitalize on the opportunity to make Jesus� miracle seem even more impressive? It seems that women and children were simply too unimportant. �The amazing thing is that there are any women at all in the ancient texts,� says Deirdre Good, professor of New Testament studies at General Theological Seminary. As the scholarly debate continues, one thing worshipers might keep in mind is how often these marginalized characters prevail and are entrusted to deliver the Word of God. From Eve to Miriam to Mary, they were all players�and are , in our unfolding spiritual drama.

"God's Woman Trouble" deals with feminist biblical scholarship. Excerpt:

One important goal set by feminist scholars such as Prof. Carol Meyers of Duke University is to uncover the roles and status of women in ancient Israel. Already, some have found�surprise!�that then, as now, women exerted considerable, sometimes controlling, power within the household, despite an officially patriarchal culture. Others, however, are in quest of a grander holy grail: proof that sometime before the institution of kingship, there was an ideal era when Israelite men and women lived as public equals. But without a lot more archeological evidence, the real world behind much of the Hebrew Bible will never be recovered. �We just don�t have the information about some historical periods,� acknowledges Susannah Heschel, associate professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth, �so there is a temptation to resort to fantasy.�

That temptation especially bedevils those who employ �historical imagination� to fill the Bible�s gaps. For instance, the Book of Exodus calls Moses� sister Miriam a �prophet,� leading some feminist scholars to imagine that �the party of Moses��presumably males�suppressed stories of her prophetic acts so that none survived in the written scrolls. But the desire to plug the holes in the Bible is itself gender inclusive. In the first century B.C., male Jewish writers went farther: they created prophecies for Miriam because, like nature, they abhorred vacuums in their sacred texts. �Misrepresenting what the Bible says has a very distinguished history, going back to the third or fourth century B.C.E.,� notes Harvard professor James L. Kugel, an expert in the history of Biblical interpretation. �So perhaps we ought not to get too self-conscious about modern feminist distortions.�

Finally, there is "Decoding �The Da Vinci Code�", a brief FAQ on the nonsense in this preposterous novel.

REGARDING MY "MORE ON THE 'JAMES OSSUARY'" POST BELOW, Seth Sanders e-mails:

To uphold the tradition of philology, I will pick a nit:

Still, I would like to see the refutation published in a peer-review journal in more detail than has been presented so far.

Um, am I missing something or isn't the normal order for something to be *published* in a peer-reviewed journal before being *refuted* in a peer-reviewed journal?

Touch�. Can we have both maybe? Or else forget about the whole thing?

BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION: A Journal of Contemporary Approaches has a new, double issue out (11.3/4). Some of the many articles include:

Leviticus 16 Als Mitte Der Tora
Rolf Rendtorff

Gazing Back At the Shulammite, Yet Again
Athalya Brenner

Seeing Solomon's Palanquin (Song of Songs 3:6-11)
J. Cheryl Exum

Proving Yahweh Killed His Wife (Zechariah 5:5-11)
Diana Edelman

Ezra-nehemiah as a Narrative of (re-invented) Israelite Identity
Philip F. Esler

Israel's Holy Seed and the Foreign Women of Ezra-nehemiah: a Kristevan Reading
Harold C. Washington

'Rouzing the Faculties to Act': William Blake, Merkabah Mysticism, the Theology of Liberation and the Exegetical Importance of Experience
Christopher Rowland

With many more articles on Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and biblical historiography and theology. Requires personal or institutional paid subscription to access.

THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR JEWISH STUDIES has put its latest bulletin online. It has lots of information about jobs (in the U.K. and elsewhere), upcoming conferences worldwide, British seminar programs, recent publications of British scholars, current dissertations being supervised in Britain, and surveys of Jewish and Holocaust studies in Britain.

CYRUS THE GREAT is to be the subject of a British film that is now being planned, with Sean Connery and Angelina Jolie being sought as, respectively, the star and his empress. The goal of the movie is "to promote harmony across all the world's religions." All this according to the Daily Telegraph via N. S. Gill's Ancient/Classical History blog.

In other news of biblical gentiles in the Second Temple Period, according to Nature, Alexander the Great may have died of West Nile fever. At least part of the evidence for this seems to be a folkloristic-sounding passage in Plutarch which was written some centuries after the actual event, so I would treat the theory with due caution.

EDWARD M. COOK weighs in on the Aramaic of the "James Ossuary" in his essay "Remarks On The Aramaic Of The James Ossuary" on the Bible and Interpretation website. Excerpts:

��� Although many have wished to consign the "James Ossuary" to the dust heap of history, it continues to engender passionate comment. My own position on this artifact is still undecided. However, I do not believe that the ossuary, if authentic, tells us much that we did not already know from Galatians, one of the earliest, and most unquestionably authentic of the Pauline epistles, which refers to "James the Lord's brother" (1:19). The most the ossuary can do is confirm something that no one has seriously doubted.

��� If I do choose this moment to enter the discussion, it is because several comments have been made about the Aramaic dialect of this inscription, which are unfounded or misleading. These comments center on the second part of the inscription that reads ahuy d'Yeshua, "brother of Jesus." It has been claimed that certain elements of this phrase are uncharacteristic of first-century Aramaic.

[Detailed grammatical analysis follows.]

��� In summation, the short phrase ahuy d'Yeshua in the James Ossuary is perfectly acceptable Aramaic for the first century CE. Its morphology and its syntax are consistent with expected developments in Aramaic and are paralleled by other occurrences in other texts from the same period or earlier.

��� Is the James Ossuary authentic? Maybe, maybe not. But any final answer will have to come on non-linguistic grounds.

Philologists and epigraphers seem considerably more ambivalent about the inscription than do the archaeologists.

FEAR OF TERRORISM is having a negative impact on travel to Israel. No suprise but a great pity.

LA GEN�SE is a new African movie whose dialogue is in Bambara and which tells the story of Jacob, Hamor, and Esau. It's based on the narrative of Genesis 32-34, although it seems to take liberties with the order of events. Excerpt from the review in the Jamaica Observer:

The movie is based on the story of Jacob, Esau and caught in the middle their cousin Hamor. It begins after Jacob (Sotigui Kouyat�) learns that his son Joseph is dead, and he has his family in mourning over the loss. Only Rebecca his wife is tired of being in mourning and asks her daughter Dinah (Fatoumata Diawara) to wash the bloodied robe that Joseph's brother brought back as proof. Esau and his tribe of hunters are shadowing Jacob, waiting for the right moment to strike.

At the same time Hamor's son kidnaps Dinah and takes her virginity, and falls in love with her, so now he wants to marry her. Jacob and his 12 sons will not allow it unless the two tribes become one. To do that Hamor's tribe must circumcise all the males. When they do, Jacob's 12 sons invade the tribe and kill the entire line of Hamor. For that Dinah goes crazy and Hamor decides, too much blood has been shed, it is time for compromise.

While they converge for peace talks, Esau plans his attack. In the night we see how Jacob fights the angel of the Lord, and how Esau spares his life, and how Jacob's name is changed to Israel.

Sounds interesting.

JONATHAN PENNINGTON, one of our doctoral students at St. Mary's College, gave a paper at the SBL meetings which gets a good review from blogger Stephen C. Carlson of Hypotyposeis. Well done, Jonathan.

POPE JOHN PAUL II delivered an address yesterday which dealt thoughtfully with the meaning of Psalm 110 (Vulgate, 109) in its original context and in its subsequent interpretation by the Church.

IGNORANT STEREOTYPING ALERT (from an MSNBC News article on religion in the campaigns of the nine Democratic presidential candidates):

Former Vermont governor Howard Dean � a Congregationalist Christian who said he prays almost daily and reads the Bible but rarely attends church these days unless it is for a political event � compared some fundamentalist leaders to the Pharisees, an ancient Jewish sect that emphasized strict interpretation and observance of religious law but who have come to be associated with self-righteousness.

I can't believe that people are still repeating this stereotype of the Pharisees, but a Google search looking for this quote shows me that it is still extremely common. For the record, as current biblical encyclopedias etc. now recognize, we have very little in the way of primary sources on the Pharisees and these sources all have their own agendas which may confuse matters. The Pharisees seemed to have had their own oral traditions about scriptural issues (like everyone else, whether they admit it or not); some involvement in politics earlier on; and a good bit of interest in table fellowship (the right way to eat meals before God), Jewish festival observance, and ritual purity - issues important to many if not all Jews in the same period. The unfortunate stereotyping of some New Testament passages has passed down a very distorted picture of the Pharisees.

It is fair to say that the Pharisees wanted to keep the Torah accurately because they believed that God gave it to them, and hence their attention to detail. If the rabbinic sages are any indication - and they do seem to be the spiritual descendents of the Pharisees - this zeal for the law was combined with an extraordinary concern and sensitivity for human need.

This Wikipedia article on "Pharisee" gives a fair summary of what we know (while making more of the rabbinic evidence than I would), as does this Columbia Encyclopedia article on "Pharisees". But this Daily Study Bible article "Who Were the Pharisees?" is a pretty comprehensive collection of ignorant stereotypes.

As you probably know, I don't trust the press to represent people's views accurately and I can't find a direct quote of what Dean said, but if he did say this, then I have to say he choose his words poorly. If one wants to criticize people for being hypocritical and self-righteous, it works fine just to say that they are being hypocritical and self-righteous.

UPDATE (2 December) David Nishimura (Cronaca) doesn't think I'll have much luck changing things and he may well be right (and in retrospect perhaps my blaring headline above was a little overdone). But my point was not entirely an arcane historical one: there aren't any medievals or Byzantines around these days, whereas there are Jews and some people are still prejudging them on the basis of stereotypes of the Pharisees. I've seen it myself and it's not pretty.

A SENIOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON who specializes in classical, biblical, and ancient Near Eastern languages has been named as a Rhodes Scholar. Go Allyssa!

MORE ON THE "JAMES OSSUARY":

Scholars say Jesus box may be genuine (CNN)

Tuesday, November 25, 2003 Posted: 1526 GMT (11:26 PM HKT)

ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) -- A purported first-century inscription naming Jesus may or may not be the real thing, but Israel's labeling of the find as a fake is premature, scientists and scholars said at a panel discussion.

[...]

Panelists, speaking in Atlanta at the annual joint conference of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature on Sunday, said authorities should examine the box more closely before passing judgment.

"I don't know for sure whether this is a forged inscription, and I'm sort of cast as a defender of the inscription. I'm not," said moderator Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archeology Review, which published the initial findings. "What I do know is, Israeli authorities have badly managed the affair."

[...]

The hard, brown patina that covers the box could not be found on the inscription, where a soft, grayish chalk-and-water paste had been applied instead to imitate weathering, the [antiquities] authority said.

James Harrell, a geologist at the University of Toledo and member of the Association for the Study of Marble and Other Stones in Antiquity, said his analysis of the inscription suggests the missing patina could simply be the result of overcleaning -- not forgery.

Shanks said experts from the antiquities authority declined to speak at the forum.

[...]

This panel was "at" the AAR/SBL convention in the sense that it was held at the same hotel (and anyone is free to rent a venue there) but it was not part of the official program. It was held at the same time as the archaeology section I blogged on below, the one with McCane's paper in it. Now why is it that journalists covered this privately arranged panel while ignoring McCane's paper, which was part of the official conference program and which went through the normal peer-review process to get into it?

UPDATE: USA Today (via Archaeology Magazine News) has coverage of discussion of the ossuary in last week's (before the AAR/SBL convention) meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Excerpts:

Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologist Amir Ganor said the James ossuary investigation has expanded to encompass Bible-era archaeological artifacts collected over the past 15 years by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

[...]

In a presentation at the conference, [archaeologist Yuval] Goren described the "Jerusalem Syndrome" of forged relics, a reference to a similarly named psychological ailment afflicting tourists who visit Jerusalem and then become convinced they are characters from the Bible. Focusing on four cases of dubious artifacts, including the James ossuary, he listed common characteristics of fakes from the last decade:

� Publication or planned publication of the relic in Biblical Archaeology Review.

� Authentication of the relic's age by Geological Survey of Israel scientists and the inscription by paleographer Andr� Lemaire of Paris' Sorbonne University.

� Comments by outside experts that it's too good to be true.

"Our discipline may be contaminated to some extent by more such fakes," Goren warned. Past forgeries accepted as real suggest the science of paleography is "a fool's paradise," he said, useless for authenticating any inscriptions.

Ouch!

BY THE WAY, happy Thanksgiving to American readers, whether at home or abroad. My family, since we moved to Britain, postpone celebration to the weekend, since I'm normally very jet-lagged right after the SBL meetings; I have to teach classes on Thursday (when I'm not on leave, that is); and my son has school as usual. I'm working in my office today, but at least we've bought the turkey.

PRIZE IN JEWISH FOLKLORE AND ETHNOLOGY (from the H-Judaic list):

FYI: Raphael Patai Prize in Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

The Jewish Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society and the
Committee on the Anthropology of Jews and Judaism of the American Anthropological Association invites submissions of papers and publications from students for the Raphael Patai Prize in Jewish Folklore and Ethnology. The Prize recognizes scholarship from 2000 to 2003 from students in undergraduate and graduate programs who have done research in Jewish folklore and ethnology, including studies of expressive culture and social contexts in Jewish communities across the globe. The award includes a cash
prize and certificate. Send entries BEFORE DECEMBER 30, 2003 with a cover letter indicating program of study to:

Professor Simon J. Bronner
School of Humanities
The Pennsylvania State University
777 West Harrisburg Pike
Middletown, PA 17057-4898
sbronner@psu.edu 717-948-6724 (fax)

IOUDAIOS REVIEW has just published three new reviews and you can download them here. The main Ioudaios Review page gives subscription information. Subscriptions are free and when you have one, all reviews are e-mailed to you as they come out.

ANCIENT JEWISH VILLAGE UPDATE: I've received the following e-mail from the excavator of the site:

A colleague of mine received your list message and brought it to my attention. I am the excavator of the site in Shuafat, Jerusalem.� The article in the Jerusalem Post was quite superficial�and I wanted to pass on some more info to whom ever is interested.�
�
The settlement is a single layer site with the origins dating to the second half of the first cent. CE.� It was likely built in�relation to the Roman road which�linked�Jerusalem to Nablus. This site is situated approximately at the place of the third mile from Jerusalem.�We identified�it as a Jewish village on the basis of the extensive�assemblage of stone vessels�deriving�insitu on floors and in fills including many "Qalal"�shapes.�The�latest pottery attributed to this layer dates to the first half of the 2nd�cent. CE.� The coins include a few Hasmonean (a late Hellenistic layer was not found though Herodian pottery was found in a few loci but not a substantial amount), post-Revolt coins up to 2nd cent though lacking Bar Kochva mint.� We did not find mikveot but we only excavated a strip 4.5 m in width (the total length was around 220 m).� The remains of at least two bathhouses were seen and possible third identified by a fill of tubuli and bricks (not insitu) in a single room. We found five ceramic inkwells in one room and a horde of glass bottles in another.� That's about it right now. I would be happy to answer any questions anyone may have.
�
My email is:� debbies@israntique.org.il
�
Yours,
Debbie Sklar-Parnes
Israel Antiquities Authority

Thanks Debbie.

I'M BACK IN ST. ANDREWS, after a long trip that was improved by my being upgraded to Business Class on the transatlantic leg. I have lots of blog-intended notes from the conference, plus a backlog of other items. Let's see how far I can get this afternoon.

On Sunday morning I heard Byron McCane speak on the "Ya'acob bar Yosef ahui di Yeshua' (i.e., the text of the "James Ossuary") in the Archaeological Excavations and Discoveries: Illuminating the Biblical World Section (S23-3). One of the concepts we ancient historians take for granted, yet have immense difficulty getting across to laypeople, is that there is a large range of "theories" that we or our subspecialties agree to be quite impossible and not worth talking about (because they are obviously grossly flawed methodologically or the evidence put forth for them is obviously wrong or for various other reasons). There are lots of other theories that are somewhere between barely possible and quite likely, and it is this latter category of the possible that we spend so much time arguing about, while we tend to ignore the impossible theories except when, say, a crank manages to get them some media attention, in which case we say that they're impossible and the crank complains about ossified mainstream scholarship which can't appreciate his or her grand breakthrough.

What I'm leading up to here is that Professor McCane and every other archaeologist who opened his or her mouth in this session clearly put the genuineness of the full inscription on the "James Ossuary" in the first category: impossible, disproved, and not worth discussing. I'm not an archaeologist myself, let alone a geologist or whoever it is who decides if patinas have been cut through or not. But I'm pretty impressed with this consensus and am disinclined to take the inscription seriously after seeing their united front. Still, I would like to see the refutation published in a peer-review journal in more detail than has been presented so far.

Late in the morning, Bob Kraft presented his paper "Exploring Greek Jewish Scribal Practices: The Evidence from the Earliest LXX/OG Fragments" in the Hellenistic Judaism Section (S23-9). Follow the link to get the full text of the paper on his website.

Bob also gave a paper on "Pursuing Papyrology via the Web" in the Computer Assisted Research Section (CARG - S23-58). Some of the sites he surveyed included:

The American Society of Papyrology
APIS
ABZU
Texts, Manuscripts and Palaeography (Jay Treat)
Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (literary texts, but includes magical papyri)
John Muccigrosso's Papyrology Home Page (stops at the year 2000)
University of Michigan Papyrus Collection
Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri
Oxyrhynchus Online
Kraft's gopher papyri page
Unidentified Jewish and Christian Papyri (Kraft)
Kraft, "Textual Mechanics of Early LXX/OG papyri"

On Monday morning I gave my paper, Is the Story of Zosimus Really a Jewish Composition?" in the Pseudepigrapha Section (S24-20). One person asked if we shouldn't take the line that for Pseudepigrapha transmitted in Christian circles the burden of proof is on anyone making a claim about their origin, rather than on anyone wanting to move backwards to a Jewish text. This is true in a sense, but the point I was trying to drive home was that we actually have the physical manuscripts of a certain date and provenance. The MSS are physical facts and our starting point should be that the text made sense to someone as a Christian work at that date in those circles. The burden of proof is on anyone who wishes to move backwards from there. Sometimes it will be relatively straightforward to work backwards to a Jewish origin around the turn of the era (e.g., for 4 Ezra or the Psalms of Solomon). But in many cases, such as that of the Story of Zosimus and its sources, it is very difficult to make such a case. Another person cautioned that we have to be careful not to confuse composition with transmission, since they are not the same thing. I agree. But the starting point is the manuscripts and we need to work backwards from them as required by the evidence and only as required by the evidence.

On Monday afternoon I heard Joe Zias and Emile Puech speak on "The 'Tomb of Absalom' and the People of the Book: A Question of Literacy!" (S24-53). The point of the last clause was that for centuries in the late Middle Ages and early modern period people followed the custom of stoning the monument because they thought it was Absalom's. If any of them had been able to read the prominent inscriptions on the front of it, they would have realized that it wasn't. Zias and Puech also discussed the newly recovered Simeon inscription on the tomb, which I mentioned a few days ago.

Later on Monday afternoon I attended the session on "Massive Scholarly Data Projects: Perspectives and Experiences" (S24-120). The following projects were discussed:

Stephen Kaufman: Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon

Steve Tinney: Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary

Traianos Gagos: APIS (Advanced Papyrological Information System, on which see also above)

Gregory Crane was unfortunately not able to be present to discuss the Perseus Digital Library.

Also, Patrick Durusau spoke on "Lost in a Data Sea? Navigating with Topic Maps," and gave a number of websites on the subject. According to my notes, he said to see the technology section on the new Society of Biblical Literature website for the links. But I must have misunderstood something, because I can't find a technology section on the new Society of Biblical Literature website. I did write down one URL he mentioned: http://www.coolheads.com.

I went to other interesting papers and took notes on some of them, but it's nearly supper time here and I imagine my family would like to see a little of me, so I think this will have to suffice. Overall, a very good conference.

By the way, Mark Goodacre is also blogging the conference. I'm glad I'm not the only one who wandered around like a lost soul looking for the e-listers at the Gramcord booth in the book displays. The lower level of displays was remarkably well hidden, with no elevator access and access by only one escalator at the back of the building.

MY INTERNET TIME runs out soon and I want to get downstairs to the book display before lunch, so this will be my last Atlanta post. But I do want to mention what an energizing and reaffirming experience this conference is. I've spent most of the last few months in a room by myself slaving over a book that deals with extremely difficult historical problems - the longer I work on them the more I realize how difficult they are. Sometimes I've felt discouraged. So it's been great to be here and to have conversations on the plane, in the PSCO session, and in the hallways with people who know the subject and who see the point of what I'm doing and why I'm doing it the way I am. As I said earlier, they have alerted me to texts I didn't know about. Also, the process of talking through a project with other people who are working in related areas is in itself helpful: verbalizing and summarzing what I'm doing makes me think it through again and distil the important points for myself in ways I hadn't before. And hearing about their projects sometimes gives me new angles on mine.

That's the real point of conferences (which, of course, is not to say that drinking and gossiping are entirely irrelevant), and it's something you can't get just by posting the papers online, much as I approve of doing that too. For that reason I don't think we'll reach the point of fully virtual conferences any time soon, if ever. At least I hope not.

By the way, I haven't had the patience to correct the time given in these entries, so they still reflect the Scottish time zone. Subtract five hours from all Atlanta entries to see what time I was actually posting them.

Look for me again on Wednesday.

IN OTHER NEWS, the Guardian. reports on a BBC2 program that takes apart the Bible Code nonsense. The Yale Daily News reports that American Sign Language, Arabic, and Hebrew are the languages whose study is growing the fastest in the USA. And according to Eonline the New York Post reviewed Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ based on a pirated rough cut that fell into their hands.

Sorry, you'll have to find the URLs yourself but, armed with the information above and Google, this shouldn't be difficult.

THE PSCO SESSION last night had something over 30 attendees. Here's some of what happened, based on my hastily scrawled notes. I shall try to represent accurately what I heard (and in one or two cases I asked people after the session to make sure I had it right), but if I get something that you said wrong, drop me an e-mail and I will correct it. As always, I will refrain from quoting anyone who asked not to be quoted.

Bob Kraft opened with some observations on the Seminar and the history of the study of the "parabiblical literature." He noted in passing that Montague Rhodes James, best known in our circles for being a prolific publisher of parabiblical literature, is known in wider circles mainly for his ghost stories. A Google search of his name verifies this.

The first panelist was George Nickelsburg (University of Iowa - retired), who spoke on Enoch and Abraham. I missed the first part of his comments on Enoch in my notes, but he did say that Enoch is interesting for being in competition with the Moses tradition and even "stealing" from it (e.g., opening lines of the Book of the Watchers, where material from the Moses tradition is put in the mouth of Moses. As for Abraham, there's lots of later interest in the Aqedah (binding of Isaac): Paul and James duel over its meaning (does it show his faith or his works?) and the Testament of Abraham uses him as an example of someone who doesn't have faith. Traditions migrate among the stories of the patriarchs (e.g., Job traditions are applied to Abraham in Jubilees). Curiously, although Enoch has no real biography, he becomes typified as a model righteous person.

My comments went according to script and you can read them in Wednesday's entry below.

Brannon Wheeler (University of Washington) spoke about traditions about the prophets in the Qur'an and early Islamic exegesis. The Qur'an and early Islam grow out of late antiquity and the full range of traditions about the prophets should be looked at - they can be mutually illuminating. He had three main points, with examples. (1) Qur'anic material sometimes gives a different perspective than that of Jewish or Christian exegesis. (2) One could argue that later texts sometimes have traditions ealier than what we find in earlier texts. Pseudepigrapha and parabiblical literature in some cases are post-Qur'anic. (3) Jews and Christians also borrowed from Muslims.

Kim Haines-Eitzen (Cornell) spoke on the female figure of Thekla in early Christianity. This is not an area I know much about (I don't think i've even read the Acts of Paul and Thekla) and so my notes on her comments are not very coherent. Her (Kim's, not Thekla's) interests are in religious identity as seen through the lens of "textual communities," and in the preservation, copying, and transmission of particular texts, and in what the material form of books can tell us about their use, interpretation, and production. The earliest fragments of Thekla material are often in miniature codices, perhaps for use in pilgrimage. She also mentioned an episode in which Thekla baptized herself when she was thrown into a tank of killer seals. I think I heard that right.

My jet lag was catching up with me fast at this point and most of the discussion didn't make it into my notes. I did get a few things on the discussion of Enoch. George floated the idea that there was a developing tendency in late antiquity to focus sacred traditions on persons, unlike in the Bible. He also said that Enoch is a name looking for a tradition. He also asked why certain figures disappear from the traditions, citing as an example the the way that the Watchers story and Enoch are dropped from the fourth centuries on in Christian circles as an explanation for the origin of evil, with the Adam and Eve story replacing them for that subject. This led to a discussion of Augustine's need of an anthropological explanation as part of the reason, the question of whether there was already discomfort with Enoch in Christian circles before the fourth century (e.g., Origen), whether Enoch was entirely dropped in the Greek traditions, and what kinds of interest n Enoch there were in Egypt.

A number of people also gave me leads for additional material relating to the Rechabites, for which I am grateful.

That's about all I can squeeze from my notes. The PSCO secretary also taped the session, so maybe we can look forward to a more thorough summary in due course.

MARK GOODACRE gives us some preliminary thoughts regarding his paper on his "All-n-One Biblical Resoures Guide." To read them, go to the links section on the right, click on the "Weblogs etc." link and you will find there a link to his New Testament Gateway blog.

Mark notes the acroynym "CARG," which came about back when the Computer Assisted Research "Section" was still a "Group" (the two terms have technical meanings in SBL parlance). I've always been amused by the acronym and I was glad they kept it when the name changed. Science fiction readers will recall that in Keith Laumer's classic novel Dinosaur Beach the "Kargs" were evil Terminator-like robots from the future who came back in time to carry out dastardly deeds to change the course of history.

I'm sure the similarity in name is just a coincidence. Of course, I have presented a CARG paper myself iin recent years, so I would say that, wouldn't I?

BUWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

That's enough from me today. (Probably more than enough.) The PSCO session is this evening. Scroll down for my preliminary comments for the panel discussion. I'll aim to give you a brief report on the session tomorrow morning.

ROGER WIECK, Curator of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts for the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, will be lecturing on "The Medieval Bible" at the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Forbidden Book Exhibit on Saturday, 6 December, according to Yahoo News. Again, try using some of the key words above as search terms in Google News or in Yahoo News's seach engine to access the article.

OKAY, THE BIG NEWS is that a second inscription has been found on Absalom's Tomb in the Kidron valley. (Unfortunately, my hotel-room TV system doesn't even show you URLs, let alone let you copy them so you can link to something. Grrr. So no links in Atlanta posts: well have to try a lateral approach instead.) Regular readers will recall that Absalom's Tomb (so-called, much later than Absalom actually) has a Byzantine-era inscription referring to Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist. (Try entering the search term "Absalom" into my search engine, down and to the right, to access the relevant posts in the archive).

The new inscription refers to Simeon, who according to Luke blessed the baby Jesus in the Temple. The inscription is actually part of the text of Luke 2:25. The article appears in dozens of news sites, but the best coverage I found was on the CNN site, which includes an image of drawings of both inscriptions. Enter the article title "Biblical clue found on ancient shrine" either into Google News or the CNN website itself and this should get you the article.

Please excuse typos. I'm trying to catch them but, as I said, conditions are primitive.

I'M IN ATLANTA, blogging in my hotel room from a woefully inadequate television system. I got here yesterday evening and managed to get most of a night's sleep, although I've been up since 5:00 am. Downtown Atlanta seems to lack a single Internet cafe, which is, well, primitive. I wouldn't be blogging at all, but I promised my mother I would e-mail her and she would fret if I didn't. So I have television Internet access through tomorrow morning. Right now it's early afternoon local time and I need a nap. I"ll try to dig up some blog goodies for you later.

I LEAVE FIRST THING TOMORROW MORNING for the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in Atlanta. I am slated for two presentations there. First, on Friday evening, I'm on a panel discussion for the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins. I have some brief preliminary comments on myself and on "The Rechabites in Patristic and Parabiblical Literature," which premium subscribers to PaleoJudaica.com (meaning anyone who clicks on the link) can read now. And here's the handout that goes with the presentation.

Then on Monday morning I present a paper in the Pseudepigrapha Section on "Is the Story of Zosimus Really a Jewish Composition?" which, again, you can read here in advance along with it's handout.

There is a great deal going on at the AAR/SBL meetings, including many papers on ancient Judaism. I can't hope to attend anything like all of them (many are scheduled in conflict with one another), but I'll do the best I can and, if I can find a convenient cyber caf� and enough energy, I'll do my best to comment on a few of them here during the conference. The Cambridge SBL meeting was in a single building, but this conference is in two different hotels some distance from each other in downtown Atlanta so, assuming I do attend some papers, I may not have much time for blogging.

A while ago Mark Goodacre pointed out the SBL Program Pages site, which links to the home pages for a number of the SBL program units. Many of these already have conference papers posted. For ancient Judaism note especially the Josephus Seminar, which has links to the following papers for this year:

John M G Barclay (University of Durham) "Josephus and his Audiences: Exploring Reading Options in a Commentary" (Response: James S Mclaren [Australian Catholic University])

Jonathan J Price (Tel Aviv University), "Josephus' reading of Thucidydes: A test-case in the BJ," (Response: Honora H Chapman [California State University, Fresno])

Miriam Ben-zeev (Ben Gurion University), "Josephus' Ambiguities: His Comments on Cited Documents,"

Claude Eilers (McMaster University), "Josephus' Caesarian Acta: History of a Dossier"

Tessa Rajak (University Of Reading), "Who needs charters? Josephus in the light of Greek historiographical practice"

(Response: Erich S. Gruen [University of California Berkeley])

There's also the Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism Group (to whose main page, mysteriously, there is no link). Papers for this year include:

Jonathan Knight - The mystical understanding in the Ascension of Isaiah

Andrei Orlov - Ex 33 on God's Face:A Lesson from the Enochic Tradition

Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones - The Exegete Goes to Heaven: How Visionaries Read Visions (This is dated 2000 and the book has been published - included on the Program Pages page by mistake?)

Charles A. Gieschen - Baptismal Praxis in the Book of Revelation

These and other groups have papers from past years on their websites as well. Mark Goodacre has also been listing papers of New Testament interest this week (just keep scrolling down). If you can't get to the conference this year, there's plenty online which will give you a good virtual experience, even if it still lacks the networking in the halls between sessions and drinking at the receptions.

As I said, I'll try to do at least a little blogging while I'm there. I'm scheduled to be back in St. Andrews on Wednesday, the 26th. Have a good week.

IT'S NOT OVER YET:

Scholar says inscription about 'brother' of Jesus may be genuine (Society of Jesus USA website)


By Bronson Havard

IRVING, Texas (CNS) -- An ancient Holy Land burial box with the controversial inscription "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus" may be authentic, Jesuit Father Joseph Fitzmyer, a noted Scripture scholar, said in a lecture at the University of Dallas.

Father Fitzmyer questioned a finding by the Israel Antiquities Authority, a government agency, that the inscription was fake.

The Israeli agency known as the IAA has failed to settle the issue, he said Nov. 8 to nearly 300 people at the university located in Irving.

Father Fitzmyer sided with Andre Lemaire, a Scripture scholar at the Sorbonne University in Paris, in disputing a conclusion by the antiquities authority that the inscription on the burial box, called an ossuary, is a fake.

[...]

Read it all.

THREE NEW BOOKS ON GENESIS are reviewed by Walter Brueggemann in Christianity Today. All of this long review is interesting and it's hard to decide what to excerpt. My main interest is in the third book:

Gary Anderson offers a discussion that is limited to Genesis 1-3, a study that is remarkable in its reach�not least in its recovery of early readings of the text. In The Genesis of Perfection: Adam and Eve in Jewish and Christian Imagination, Anderson, recently gone to Notre Dame, takes up these chapters by reference to the Life of Adam and Eve, an ancient post-biblical document much used by Christians in the early centuries of the church. (Anderson offers a translation of the document in an appendix.) Anderson's concern is to study the way in which early Christian interpreters made use of the Genesis text "in conformity with an evolving interpretive tradition." That interpretive tradition was rooted in Judaism, as Anderson respectfully acknowledges; his focus, however, is upon the Christian practice of interpretation, which moves in quite distinctive and imaginative directions.

It is a primary thrust of the book to insist that the Genesis narratives are too terse and underdeveloped to be taken by themselves; they require ongoing work in an interpretive community. Given that premise, Anderson then proposes that taken canonically, the Genesis narratives must be read in terms of their ending, a culmination�in Christian practice�in Christology and with particular reference to Mary, who is the new Eve. The assumption of the book then is "canonical" in a most expansive sense, an insistence that the text must be read in a faith community and with respect for "the domain of the Creed as much as the territory of the dispassionate literary historian." The outcome is a canonical reading through the imagination of the early church, a reading that is so daring as to make even the erudite canonical approach of Brevard Childs seem timid and anemic.

Brueggemann concludes:

It strikes this reviewer as most important that these books move quickly beyond the characteristic categories of 20th century-criticism. Borgman, in his centrist approach, is less explicit about context. Kass yields a quite Jewish reading that culminates in appreciation of a community committed to holiness. Anderson's reading is powerfully Christian (Catholic!) in his comprehension of the old and deep tradition. The sum of these books invites critical reflection on the older presuppositions of scholarship, especially concerning (a) source analysis and the question of authority and (b) cultural parallels and the issue of distinctiveness, issues that became a huge battleground over the relation of faith and criticism. The new directions suggest an important unlearning in the field. Critical scholars may unlearn the deep focus on criticism for the sake of the text itself. Resisters to criticism may unlearn the vigorous energy used to defeat criticism. Both critics and resisters might rather turn to the text itself and find common ground there.

These books are especially important in Old Testament studies at a moment when the mostly British "minimalists" have exhaustingly sought to dismiss the text as "historically" unreliable. As these books make clear, such an obsession with "history" as propels the "minimalists" is hardly worth the effort. The text does not depend upon "history" nearly as much as it depends upon serious readers who both take the reading tradition of faith seriously and move on imaginatively. It is a splendid time to be a serious, imaginative reader!

It is indeed.

"ANCIENT JEWISH VILLAGE UNCOVERED IN JERUSALEM" (Jerusalem Post):

The remains of a heretofore-unknown ancient Jewish
village dating back nearly two thousand years has been uncovered on the northern rim of Jerusalem, the Antiquities Authority announced Tuesday.

The first century Jewish community was stumbled upon in late May near the entrance to the present day Shuafat refugee camp, in the wake of infrastructure work which the city was carrying out at the site for the Jerusalem's light rail-system, which is still under construction.

A three-month long archaeological excavation at the site - which archaeologists date back to the second temple period and was abandoned during the days of the Bar Kochba revolt against the Romans -- uncovered the remains of homes made of ashlar stone, courtyards and three bathhouses in the village.

Read it all.

THE LOOTED SEPHER YETZIRAH MS HAS BEEN RETURNED:

Stolen Jewish manuscript returned after 65 years (CNN)
Nazis looted 14th century document from collection in Austria

From Chris Strathmann
CNN
Tuesday, November 18, 2003 Posted: 5:56 PM EST (2256 GMT)
A rare 14th century Hebrew manuscript was returned to the Vienna Jewish community by U.S. Customs officials Tuesday.



NEW YORK (CNN) -- Nearly 65 years to the day after it was stolen by the Nazis, a rare historical Hebrew manuscript has been returned to the Austrian Jewish community.

At a ceremony in Manhattan, officials with the Department of Homeland Security's Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement presented the letter-size parchment to Erika Jakubovits, executive director of the Jewish Community Organization of Vienna.

Agents recovered the document in June 2002 after it was smuggled into the United States and slated for sale at auction.

The 14th century manuscript is one of the oldest versions of a Kabalistic text known as Sepher Yetzirah. It's one of the first texts to mention the ancient Jewish mystical movement, according to Ori Soltes of the Holocaust Art Restoration Project. The document is valued at $68,000.

[...]

Not to be snarky or anything, but I do wish reporters would learn to spell "Kabbalah" and its derivatives, especially since the subject seems to be in the news a lot these days. Two Bs, one L. Or, if you must, the older (in English, that is) spelling "Cabala," which looks to me to be Latinized, perhaps via the Christian Kabbalists. Anybody know?

Congratulations to the Vienna Jewish community on the return of the manuscript. Kudos also to the U.S. customs department for recovering it. And boo to Kestenbaum & Company for trying to go through with the sale.

A BOOK ON THE QUMRAN CALENDAR AND THE BIBLE is being self-published on the Web. Here's an excerpt from the Yahoo News press release:

'The King's Calendar: The Secret of Qumran' Sheds New Light on Questions of Old Testament Chronology
Tuesday November 18, 8:18 am ET

BRISBANE, Australia, Nov. 18 /PRNewswire/ -- After ten years of research into the chronological inconsistencies of the Bible's Old Testament - primarily the books of Kings and Chronicles - theologian R.P. BenDedek has uncovered the millennia-old mystery that, he believes, was intended to result in an inflation of the chronological history of ancient Israel. Now BenDedek has published his findings in a new book, "The King's Calendar: The Secret of Qumran," on the Web at www.kingscalendar.com.

"For over a century, the chronological history of ancient Israel has remained problematic for theologians, archaeologists and historians alike, by virtue of biblical chronology that exceeds the known parameters of ancient Near Eastern history," BenDedek explained. "But when I stumbled across a common mathematical thread running through biblical chronology, the records of Josephus, and the Damascus Document of the Dead Sea Scrolls, I knew I had found something of great significance."

That something turned out to be an artificial calendar year. When BenDedek substituted a 336-day year (twelve months of four seven-day weeks) for the Essene 364-day solar year (thirteen months of four seven-day weeks), he found that the chronological inconsistencies in I and II Kings and Chronicles disappeared.

The first third of the book is free but you have to pay for the rest, when the rest becomes available.

I am extremely skeptical of this sort of anonymously self-published attempt to solve a huge problem that has been occupying scholars for many years. In this case, I'm not at all sure that this problem has a solution, at least of the straightforward type the author envisions. If the author wants to be taken seriously, he or she should go public, present their credentials, and convince a reputable academic publisher to publish the book. This is not an area I have a lot of interest in, but a quick look-through doesn't turn up anything to allay my skepticism. For example, I can find nothing in chapter one on the numerous, extremely difficult, calendrical texts from Qumran or the burgeoning secondary literature on them. In general, knowledge of the secondary literature looks quite sketchy. If any specialists in Qumran or Israelite calendrical problems want to take the time to have a look and e-mail me their comments, I'll consider posting them here.

Meanwhile, I would advise you to save your money for something more credible.

UPDATE (19 November): "R.P. BenDedek" and I have had an e-mail exchange that is recorded in part here. This is the full text of my reply to his/her message (BenDedek's words in italics, mine in Roman font):

Hello R. P. BenDedek,

Thank you Mr. Davila for your posting. That was the aim, and I'm indebted to you.

1. Could you tell me why it is that you feel that 'purchasing' the book from an author makes it unworthy of sale, but giving your money to an academic publisher is fine? (This is rhetorical - I'm not looking for you to post this email).

Because the publisher puts the book through a peer review process that weeds out books that don't reach at least a reasonable control over the primary and secondary sources and the relevant methodologies. I am generally suspicious of self-published efforts for that reason. In the specific case of your book, it looks to me as though it would not have made it through the peer review process. Thus I don't think my readers would get their money's worth by buying it.


2. Please note that my work is anything but simple.

I never said it was simple. I said it did not control the relevant primary and secondary literature.


3. However everything that one needs to examine it, is free online, so there really is no need for 'academics' to buy it. The tools are provided free for them to 'scientifically' test the hypothesis and check the results against known history.

Fair enough.


4. Thank you for recommending it to qualified academics. That was much appreciated.

Best Wishes.


Best wishes,

Jim Davila

I wasn't precisely recommending it: I was drawing it to their attention. But if they want to take the time to look at it I'd be interested in their reactions.

WANT TO ACE THE SAT? Take Hebrew or Latin, in that order:

Students who took Latin outscored every other language-studying group on the verbal portion of the SAT except those who took Hebrew, according to the College Board's most recent profile of college-bound seniors.

A KABBALAH MS LOOTED BY THE NAZIS HAS BEEN RECOVERED.

Manuscript Looted by Nazis to Be Returned (Acron Beacon Journal)
JENNIFER FRIEDLIN
Associated Press

NEW YORK - A 14th-century Jewish manuscript seized by the Nazis from a library in Vienna 65 years ago will be returned to Austria after it turned up in a New York auction house.

The Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement division is scheduled to present the rare Kabbalistic manuscript valued at over $68,000 to Jewish Community Organization of Vienna at a news conference on Tuesday.

[...]

A description from the auction catalogue says the Hebrew manuscript is an early version of a form of the Sepher Yetzirah, or "Book of Formation," described as the "oldest and most esoteric of all Kabbalistic texts." Kabbala is an ancient Jewish mystical tradition.

[...]

The oldest certainly: specialists date the Sepher Yetzirah to anywhere from the Mishnaic period to something like the ninth or tenth century. But I wouldn't want to try to decide which Kabbalistic work is the most esoteric.

JERUSALEM THROUGH COINS is a very interesting website by amateur collector Sandy Brenner which has lots of information on coins in ancient Judaism, lavishly illustrated with photographs.

ON IOUDAIOS-L Steven Mason has posted information on a Josephus colloquium at Trinity College, Dublin and a new postgraduate program at York University in Toronto.