MORE ON THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL DEBATE ABOUT QUMRAN:

Debate flares anew over Dead Sea Scrolls
Was community inhabited by monks or mere farmers?

By Josef Federman
The Associated Press
Updated: 9:42 p.m. ET Aug. 18, 2004

QUMRAN, West Bank - Rival groups of scholars excavating this dusty plateau overlooking the Dead Sea are arguing over who lived here in biblical times � ordinary farmers or the Essenes, a monastic sect seen by some as a link between Judaism and early Christianity.

[...]

Yuval Peleg, who has been excavating at Qumran for 10 seasons with fellow archaeologist Itzhak Magen, said artifacts such as coins and pottery they had discovered indicate the community at Qumran "lacks any uniqueness."

"No one can say if they were the Essenes," he said, adding that he had not completed his analysis of the finds and therefore couldn't say more.

However, Randall Price, an adjunct professor at Trinity Southwest University in New Mexico, said his five-week dig at Qumran yielded "new evidence to support old ideas" � that a special Jewish sect lived at Qumran.

Price said he has found animal bones and a well-preserved clay pot. He said the arrangement of the bones � carefully placed together, sometimes along with pieces of pottery � "make it quite clear that this was a religious ritual."

Price said the inhabitants likely held some sort of communal meal. Price, an evangelical pastor, said the meal may have been a precursor for a ritual that later became the Christian eucharist.

He said the pot, roughly 2 feet (60 centimeters) tall and still intact, is the same type of pottery found in the nearby caves that held the original scrolls. This is further evidence of links between the Qumran inhabitants and the scrolls, he said.

[...]

TUESDAY'S LECTURE BY GABRIELE BOCCACCINI was a smashing success, with about a hundred people attending. He lectured on his theory of the Enochic origins of the Essene movement and the nature of the Qumran community as a radical splinter group of the Essenes. You can read more about this in his book Beyond the Essene Hypothesis. Many thanks to Professor Boccaccini for sharing his expertise with the people of St. Andrews. It was very much appreciated.

ISRAELITE ARTIFACTS AT UNC CHARLOTTE:

Relics of ancient faith (Charlotte Observer, requires free registration)

UNCC GETS ARTIFACTS FROM HOLY LAND TOMB
TIM FUNK
January 12, 2001


In ancient Israel, a family carves a cave-like tomb out of a rocky hillside. Inside, they lay out their dead, burn incense, share food, pour libations. The ritual pottery they use - bowls, lamps, small jugs, an incense burner - sit undisturbed for 2,800 years.


Then, almost 10 years ago, somebody finds them in the same rock-hewn tomb, south of Jerusalem, near Bethlehem.


This centuries-old story got a good, local ending Thursday when the 21 ceramic artifacts - as well-preserved as if they'd been used yesterday - were put on permanent display at UNC Charlotte.

[...]

Thomas [= benefactor Tom Phillips?] and UNCC professor James Tabor, whose focus of study is biblical archaeology, said they hope the collection from the Iron Age - the time of the prophet Isaiah - will be the beginning of what could someday grow into a biblical antiquities museum on the UNCC campus.

[...]

NADER SADAKA, Samaritan and a commander of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, has been arrested by Israeli troops near Nablus.

TWO ARTICLES ON THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS:

DNA to reveal source of Dead Sea Scrolls (Jerusalem Post)
By SARAH KATZ

Authorities are hoping that DNA testing of animal bones discovered in excavations at the Qumran plateau will reveal the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls. . . .

Prof. Oren Gutfield of Hebrew University, who participated in the excavations, is attempting to ascertain the relationship between the scrolls and their place of discovery.

"What we will do now are DNA tests to these bones in order to compare DNA results from these animals with DNA of the Dead Sea Scrolls parchment. A connection was never found between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the site itself, but if a match is found it means that the people who lived in Qumran actually prepared the scrolls from animals at the site itself," Gutfield said.

[...]

Archaeologists insist there was a community at Qumran (Ha'aretz)
By Amiram Barkat

The Qumran myth is alive and well, despite recent attempts to disprove it, according to archaeologists digging at the site.
The archaeologists, who are financed by Christian fundamentalist organizations, believe that despite recent theories to the contrary, there was a community at the place sometimes called "the oldest monastery in the Western world."

The archaeologists said at a news conference yesterday that they intend to find the proof that the residents of the site indeed wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, found in nearby caves.

[...]

THE BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION WEBSITE IS BACK. And very welcome. (Heads-up, Jim West.)

JOHN THE BAPTIST'S CAVE? Maybe. Some people in the Byzantine period seem to have thought so.

Scholar says he's found John the Baptist's cave

Monday, August 16, 2004 Posted: 2138 GMT (0538 HKT)
Members of an Israeli archeological team enter a cave they believe was used by John the Baptist.

KIBBUTZ TZUBA, Israel (AP) -- Archaeologists said Monday they have excavated a cave where John the Baptist baptized many of his followers -- basing their theory on tens of thousands of shards from small ritual jugs, a stone used for foot cleansing and wall carvings that tell the story of the contemporary of Jesus.

Only few artifacts linked to New Testament figures have ever been found in the Holy Land, and the cave is potentially a major discovery in biblical archaeology.

"John the Baptist, who was just a figure from the Gospels, now comes to life," British archaeologist Shimon Gibson said during an exclusive tour of the cave given to The Associated Press.

[...]

Gibson and his team, including volunteers from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, cleared out the layers of soil, picking up about 250,000 shards from small jugs apparently used in purification rituals.

The explorers laid bare 28 steps leading to the bottom of the cave. On the right, a niche was carved into the wall -- typical of those used in Jewish ritual baths for discarding the clothes before immersion. Near the end of the stairs, the team uncovered an oval stone with a foot-shaped indentation -- about a shoesize 45 (U.S. size 11). Just above, a soapdish-like niche was carved into the stone, apparently for ritual oil that would flow through a small channel onto the believer's right foot.

On the water-covered floor of the cave, stones and boulders had been moved aside by the worshippers and a middle path had been filled with gravel, apparently to protect those wading from stubbing their toes, said Egon Lass, an archaeological consultant at Wheaton College, near Chicago, Illinois, who also worked on the dig.

Crude images had been carved on the walls, near the ceiling, and Gibson said they tell the story of John's life.

[...]

(Via Todd's Thoughts.)

IMAGES OF THE NEW TESTAMENT MANUSCRIPTS at the Bibelmuseum Muenster are available online at the Institut f�r neutestamentliche Textforschung (INTF) website. (Heads-up Klaus Wachtel on the Textual Criticism list.)

ANCIENT GRAVES FOUND IN TIBERIAS?

Alleged burial site could delay work on new Tiberias hotel (Jerusalem Post)
By Eli Ashkenazi

Some 2,000 ultra-Orthodox demonstrators are expected to arrive in Tiberias this afternoon for a prayer assembly to protest alleged desecration of ancient graves at a hotel construction site.

Local entrepreneurs Yair Webman and Meir Shok are building a boutique hotel that incorporates a Tiberias landmark known as "the old soldiers hostel," in the northeastern part of the city. The existing structure is a large basalt house with arch-shaped windows and painted floor tiles that served until 1948 as a Muslim girls school. Construction has begun on a foundation for six additional floors for 120 rooms with a view of Lake Kinneret. In the course of digging foundations for the southern side of the hotel, ancient remains were uncovered that may be graves, and religious authorities want to halt construction there.

Webman says that the remains found "could be graves, but the Antiquities Authority found nothing here."

[...]

No word on how old the "ancient remains" are likely to be. For more on the problem of ancient burials in Tiberias, go here (and scroll down to the update).

I SHALL BE EXTREMELY BUSY for the next few weeks, maybe longer, and whatever blogging time I find will have to be snatched in odd moments. I don't know if this will result in a noticeable reduction in PaleoJudaica posts; it may well. Please bear with me. But I do intend to post two papers that I'm presenting at conferences, so count your blessings.

THE SBL FORUM had an article I've been meaning to comment on for some time:

A Royal Dignitary - Or a "Royal" Disappointment? Who's Who in Biblical Texts and Ancient Inscriptions
by Lawrence J. Mykytiuk
"To attempt to identify a biblical person in an extrabiblical inscription is to accept a number of challenges."

When you see the article or photograph, your eyes cannot leave the page for long. Your lips may slowly, silently form the word: Wow. Here is an inscription from a biblical time and place that seems to refer to someone mentioned in the Bible. You have experienced the wow factor.

Where are biblical persons named? Their names appear on ancient monuments, on their personal seals, in impressions made by their seals, and on pieces of broken pottery. Personal seals are small, rounded pieces of semiprecious stone or other hard material, with a drawing and/or the name of the seal owner carved on them, usually along with other identifying information. Impressions from personal seals appear on some jar handles and on bullae (singular, bulla). Bullae are seal-impressed lumps of dried clay affixed to official documents to seal them shut and to record the names of verifying witnesses.

We now have the names of more than 1,200 preexilic Hebrew persons from inscriptions of that era � plus many names from later eras and other biblical peoples. Yet despite this abundance of inscriptions, making a biblical identification (here abbreviated ID) in them is not easy.

[...]

He continues with a list of nine difficulties with identifying a biblical person mentioned in an inscription and concludes:

In the attempt to be objective, no one is going to completely rid Near Eastern archaeology of biblical influence anytime soon (even if that were seen as a desirable goal). Rather, when interpreting and evaluating discoveries that might tend to confirm or discount things to which biblical texts refer, one helpful method (used, e.g., by Klaas Smelik) is to interpret discoveries first in light of other discoveries, as much as possible without biblical input. Only then should they be compared with biblical texts.

I agree completely with this paragraph. He then lists six reasons why it is valuable to have such identifications and then gives as examples six or seven bullae that have been argued to mention biblical figures.

I have to say I am skeptical of all of these identifications except the first two, Gemaryahu and Shaphan, which appear in a seal impression that was discovered in a controlled excavation. Numbers 3, 4, and 5 are in the collection of bullae (clay seal impressions) published by Nahman Avigad in 1986 which were found on the antiquities market and are thus unprovenanced. I'm not familiar with numbers 6 and 7, but evidently Mykytiuk himself is not certain it is authentic (so I assume it too is unprovenanced) and the names may or may not be of biblical persons. (Stephen C. Carlson has some related thoughts on the Baruch bullae somewhere on Hypotyposeis, but I can't find the reference right now.)

For some time I have been following the question of forgeries of inscriptions supposedly from ancient Israel. It's generally agreed now that the "James Ossuary" is forged and it has been claimed that it was one of the productions of a "monster forgery machine" that may have flooded scores or hundreds of forgeries onto the antiquities market. I'm surprised that all this receives so little mention in the article (it's only touched on in difficulty #4).

It's a regrettable side effect, incidentally, that the Jewish-temple deniers are making capital of this problem.

The situation being what it is, it seems to me that, at least until we're quite sure what really happened over the last two or three decades, we should discount the evidence of unprovenanced epigraphic material that surfaced during that period. Unfortunately, that includes some of the most interesting material, such as the Ivory Pomegranate, but if that's what critical evalation of the evidence requires of us, that's what we need to do.

(See also the immediately preceding post, which has some related musings on archaeology and the "minimalist-maximalist" debate.)

UPDATE (20 August): More here

THE "MINIMALIST-MAXIMALIST" DEBATE (neither side like the name, but I don't know what else to call it) is taken on by David Hazony in the article "Memory in Ruins" in Azure. There's a shorter version in the Forward, which was where I found it). He opposes the minimalists and takes the maximalists to task for not defending their ground better, especially on the popular front. Here's an excerpt from toward the end:

What is the appropriate response to the new archaeology? The first step is to recognize just how fragile are the conclusions which Finkelstein and his school have produced. Traditional biblical archaeology, while far from perfect, has the advantage of corroborative evidence in the form of the biblical text itself. Given two plausible interpretations of an archaeological find, one that matches the biblical account and one that does not, it is reasonable to prefer the biblical reading. This is not because the biblical text is assumed to be accurate in all cases. It is because the two sources - the find and the text - lend support to each other. This way of looking at the Bible is no different from the way historians treat the testimony of any other ancient text that appears to shed light on archaeological finds.

The new archaeology, by contrast, is extremely limited in what it can tell us with confidence, a fact that stems directly from its principled refusal to credit the biblical narrative as a legitimate corroborative source. Thus a stone wall discovered in a dig may be incontrovertibly determined to be a stone wall, but nearly every meaningful conclusion about it - that it is part of a palace and not a citadel; that it was built in the ninth century B.C.E. and not in the seventh; that it was destroyed by one invading king and not another; or even that it was built by one people and not another - is a matter of interpretation. These conclusions are sometimes based on extrapolation from similar examples, or on deduction from theories concerning political or cultural conditions that are themselves highly speculative. Unlike the conclusions produced in the experimental sciences, "purely" archaeological histories are thus based on mountains of guesswork and creative gap-filling. If archaeology is ever going to produce a more reliable history, it needs the input of historical documents. And when one dismisses the most detailed document that exists concerning the biblical period, the result is to set archaeology on a path of unconstrained conjecture.

This is especially important with regard to the new theories concerning the kingdom of David and Solomon. The crucial fact is that there have been no new discoveries in the field of archaeology that cast doubt on the authenticity of the massive structures and fortifications that have until now been attributed to the united kingdom. Moreover, the finds that have turned up in recent years only lend support to the biblical story. Perhaps the most stunning archaeological discovery in the last decade was the first extra-biblical reference to David, an inscription found at Tel Dan in 1993, describing a battle fought against a king of the "house of David." Trapped by their own paradigm, the more extreme skeptics went as far as dismissing the simple reading of the text, concocting alternate readings that relieved them of having to admit that the "house of David" ever existed. But for the vast majority of scholars (including Finkelstein), this discovery was taken as conclusive evidence that, at the very least, a king named David lived and reigned, and founded a dynasty somewhere in the ancient Near East. And although Finkelstein may stand firm in his minimalist reading, maintaining that David and Solomon were nonetheless "little more than hill country chieftains," for most of his colleagues the Tel Dan inscription offered significant support for the historicity of the unified Israelite kingdom depicted in the Bible.

But the most important lesson from the Tel Dan discovery, and others like it, is that there is still a great deal of biblical history that remains buried, waiting to be found. Indeed, if the pace of biblical-era discoveries has slowed dramatically in recent years, it is not because archaeologists have come out of biblical-era excavations empty-handed, but because they essentially called off the search. In this regard, the apathy of mainstream researchers dovetails with the aims of the revisionists: The former stop looking for biblical-era remains, and the latter seize upon the lack of new discoveries to conclude that "after seventy years of digging," anything that has not yet been discovered never will be. But in reality, underneath the surface in hundreds of sites around the Near East, there remains a vast archive of Jewish history, which seven decades of biblical archaeology - regardless of the scholars' exhausted cries to the contrary - have only begun to tap.

Iron-Age archaeology is outside my expertise and I don't have any strong views on this debate. My interests were originally in the Hebrew Bible and the epigraphic texts of this period and earlier but I moved to the later period in part because it came home to me in time that the biblical material is just not suited to the sorts of historical questions that we would like to ask it. I think that Hazony is wrong in the first quoted paragraph, or at least that he oversimplifies. Scholars and archaeologists have to interpret the evidence on its own terms, and that means making sense of the archaeology as best we can on its own before turning to the biblical texts. Often when we do compare archaeology and the Bible we're comparing apples and oranges, because they give us information about very different things. Moreover, the biblical texts that claim to describe events in Iron I and earlier (i.e., from the Judges on back) give every indication of being collections of legends. There is considerably more collateral evidence, especially from cuneiform texts, for events in the Divided Monarchy, and I don't doubt that the broad outline of events in 1-2 Kings is real. My guess is that the biblical texts on the United Monarchy (David and Solomon) fall somewhere in between, in terms of what they tell us about actual history, but I really don't know (and I don't think anyone else does either).

Hazony goes on to say,

The leading biblical archaeologists, whether from Israel or abroad, should return to their calling as it was practiced by the founders of their craft. This means carrying out excavations in Israel and elsewhere, whose purpose is to elucidate the history of the biblical era - a period which is not yet well understood, but which continues to exert a profound influence on the mind and spirit of mankind.

I'm a little surprised by this. Does he mean that archaeologists are avoiding digging sites and strata from the biblical period? I doubt that this is so and I doubt that they could avoid this period in any consistent way, even if they tried. But if he means that he thinks they should be conducting their excavations to try to confirm (or disconfirm) the biblical accounts in the Iron Age, all I can say is that archaeologists need to follow the questions that their own research leads them to and we non-archaeologists are not in a good position to tell them what they should be asking. Sure, it's neat to have direct confirmation (or disconfirmation) of biblical events or stories once in awhile, but, as I said above, any intersection between text and archaeology (including inscriptions) is hard to come by and often very difficult to evaluate even when we have it.

UPDATE (16 August): Cynthia Edenberg e-mails to report "that David Hazony is active in the Shalem Center, which engages in polemic with 'new' Israeli historians."

Also, see the immediately following post for related thoughts on inscriptions.

ANCIENT POLYTHEISM is alive and well and living online, and sometimes in earthly temples too. Beliefnet has an interesting article, "Our Gods and Goddesses Are Closer to Us," which deals with "reconstructionist" Neopagans who try to recreate specific ancient polytheistic religions, although sometimes with adaptations to modern sensibilities. Excerpts:

It isn't just the Greek gods that are enjoying revived interest. There are Egyptian, Norse, Roman, Celtic and Druidic reconstructionists as well, with small groups of six to thirty people meeting in places as varied as Texas, California, Florida and Illinois.

[...]

Offline reconstructionist groups are rare, though their numbers appear to be growing. Berman's group, called Hellenion, made the leap from cyberspace to temple space in 2001 when they founded as a religious non-profit and began holding monthly worship services. By the end of that year they numbered three "demoi," or congregations, though the largest was Berman's with seven members. There are now nine Hellenion groups in places as far away from Athens, Greece as Jackson, Miss., Lancaster, Penn, northeastern Ohio and Dallas, Tex.

Like most reconstructionists, Hellenion's members want to reproduce the ancient rituals as closely as possible. But this is a problem when it comes to animal sacrifice, which the Greeks performed routinely. At the ancient Olympics, 100 bulls were sacrificed to Zeus. But at July's Bouphonia, Hellenion members decorated a hollowed-out loaf of bread with two small brown cones inserted in one end to represent horns. The crusty loaf had been hollowed out and filled with barley to represent blood.

During the ceremony, Tim Anderson, a 19-year-old college student studying for the Hellenion clergy, lifted the bread over his head and pierced it with a knife. The barley fell into a bowl that he then raised over his head and presented to the gods as an offering and left on the altar as sacred to Demeter and Persephone. He then handed the gutted bread to Kyrene Ariadne and asked if she would "scry for divinations."

"For obvious reasons, we don't want to sacrifice a bull," Berman said later. "We have lots of arguments in our community about the purity of ritual, but this is one thing that people generally agree on�that doing animal sacrifice is outdated and has lost any original meaning it once had."

Berger, the religion sociologist, says this is where the reconstructionists, so dedicated to the past, are actually doing something quite original. While most say they are dedicated to the past, they are, like most neo-pagans, innovative and creative when it comes to the actual practice.

"It is more or less like post-modern architecture," said Berger, who once attended a reconstructionist ceremony in which a pineapple was sacrificed. "They are taking bits and pieces of things from different places and making something that is really contemporary."

Peering into the gutted "bull," Berman reported to the group that she saw the Greek letter lambda, and books on the temple room's shelves revealed it meant a sinister thing or event may be a blessing in disguise. Berman sees this as a positive sign. She expects interest in Hellenic reconstructionism to rise after the Olympics, as it did after this year's television broadcast of "The Odyssey" and the release of the movie "Troy," when the number of hits to Hellenion's website spiked.

That's fine with Berman, who hopes others will find their way to the Greek gods.

"Doing group worship is so much different than doing it alone," she said. "I feel like I am in touch with something. I feel like I am not the only one."

A NEW TYNDALE TECH E-MAIL from David Instone-Brewer has been posted on his website. It is on "Book Buying, Selling, and Reviews on the Web".

DEAD SEA SCROLLS LECTURE IN ST ANDREWS:

Gabriele Boccaccini, Professor of Second Temple Judaism and Early Rabbinic Literature at the University of Michigan, will be lecturing on:

Forgotten Texts and Lost Prophets: Enoch, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Essenes

The lecture will be in Parliament Hall, South Street, St Andrews, at 7:30-8:30 pm on Tuesday, 17 August.

Professor Boccaccini is an internationally renowned expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient Judaism, and extracanonical traditions about biblical figures, especially Enoch. He is the author of Beyond the Essene Hypothesis: The Partings of the Ways between Qumran and Enochic Judaism and other scholarly monographs. He also hosted the wonderful Enoch Seminar in Venice last year.

No admission charge. All are welcome! Sponsored by the Divinity School of the University of St Andrews. If you will be in the vicinity of St Andrews on Tuesday, please do come.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: According to Cybercast News Service, Jordan has taken over control of the WAQF from the Palestinian Authority:

Jordan In Control of Temple Mount Religious Authority Instead of PA, Report Says
By Julie Stahl
CNSNews.com Jerusalem Bureau Chief
August 12, 2004

Jerusalem (CNSNews.com) - For the first time in years, Jordan is in control of the administration of the Islamic religious authority on Jerusalem's Temple Mount instead of the Palestinian Authority, signaling a weakening of the PLO and a shift in Jordan's role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a new report says.

[...]

But according to The Expulsion of the Palestinian Authority from Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, a publication of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Jordan is back in control of the Wakf, due to a persistent Israeli policy of pushing the PA out of the city.

"Israel has ended the Palestinian Authority's penetration of eastern Jerusalem and its control of the Muslim Wakf on the Temple Mount, restoring Jordanian religious administration of the Haram al-Sharif mosque compound," wrote Dan Diker in the paper, citing Israeli media as well as Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian security and diplomatic sources.

"The expulsion of the Palestinian Authority from Jerusalem and the Temple Mount is the culmination of years of activity by Israeli security forces," Diker said.

"Despite only a partial restoration of the status quo in Jerusalem, the return of Jordan's traditionally moderating influence over the Muslim Wakf administration sends an important message to those on both sides of the Jordan River," he said.

[...]

BOOK REVIEWS: Jacob Neusner briefly reviews:

Imperialism and Jewish Society 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E.
By Seth Schwartz
Princeton University Press
(new in paperback)
336pp., $19.95

The Rise of Western Christendom. Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000
By Peter Brown
Oxford
Blackwell Publishing
625pp., $29.95

in the Jerusalem Post. Excerpt:

The flaw in historical study characteristic of both works is the absence of perspective afforded through comparison. Schwartz gives attention to Judaism, but none to the other Near Eastern religions affected by the same international politics. S. K. Eddy's The King is Dead: Studies in the Near Eastern Resistance to Hellenism, 334-31 B.C. - missing from Schwartz's bibliography - is an example of the right way to do such work.

For his part, Brown avoids comparing and contrasting because he utterly ignores Judaism - a principal party to the great historical events of late antiquity - whether with regard to the advent of the Christian Empire or the rise of Islam. His history acts out standard Christian replacement theology; Judaism just doesn't register.

ARAMAIC WATCH: On the Aramaic list Sigrid Peterson reports on the NEH Aramaic Seminar at Duke this summer. Excerpts:

Some of the highlights: learning of the abrupt discontinuity between JLA (OJA) and JPA; discussing a text of immediate concern to me with my colleagues, the other participants in the reading group, and getting many perspectives; hearing Michael Sokoloff talk--about anything to do with Aramaic; learning Aramaic from excellent grammars, so new they are not even hot off the presses; extending familiarity with the manuscript bases for Aramaic texts. Doug Gropp's statement that Aramaic study should begin with either Syriac or Jewish Literary Aramaic, as those are the two early Aramaic dialects with the greatest corpus. Then, and only then, should one go on to Biblical Aramaic, with its small corpus, or the intricate problems of Qumran Aramaic, with apparent dialectical inconsistency.

[...]

Final comment: There is a need for Aramaic scholars in the U.S., and for their continued production of materials such as editions of Targumim from manuscript sources, and Syriac editions/translations. I don't see many of the Seminar particpants fulfilling that goal; only two of us had done/would be doing editions. The more modest goal of NEH, that of enhancing teaching of Aramaic, is also a bit problematic, as there are extremely few places in the US (or North America) that do anything more than have an adjunct teach Biblical Aramaic every third or fourth year. Syriac is even worse. For any of us participants to hope for a career teaching Aramaic would probably be sheer folly. Neither Paul Flesher nor Eric Meyers, the co-directors, actually specialize in teaching Aramaic/Syriac; only Lucas Van Rompay does so, as part of his position teaching Eastern Christianity at Duke.

All too true. I've only taught Biblical Aramaic once since coming to St. Andrews nine years ago, although it was also taught once by an adjunct when I wasn't able to. I hope to be able to teach Syriac some day but haven't yet.

NEW BOOK REVIEWS FROM THE REVIEW OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE:

(A little late, but I've been busy)

Calduch-Benages, Nuria, Joan Ferrer, and Jan Liesen
La sabidur�a del escriba [Wisdom of the Scribe]: Edici�n diplom�tica de la
versi�n sir�aca del libro de Ben Sira seg�n el C�dice Ambrosiano, con
traducci�n espa�ola e inglesa [Diplomat�c Edition of the Syriac Verson of
the Book of Ben Sira according to Codex Ambrosianus ...]
Reviewed by Gonzalo Aranda Perez

Cook, Stephen L.
The Apocalyptic Literature
Reviewed by Eibert Tigchelaar

Gr�neberg, Keith N.
Abraham, Blessing and the Nations: A Philological and Exegetical Study of Genesis 12:3 in its Narrative Context
Reviewed by David Mclain Carr

Provan, Iain, V. Philips Long, and Tremper Longman III
A Biblical History of Israel
Reviewed by David Firth

Provan, Iain, V. Philips Long, and Tremper Longman III
A Biblical History of Israel
Reviewed by Lester Grabbe

Walker-Jones, Arthur
Hebrew For Biblical Interpretation
Reviewed by Daryl Jefferies

Lieu, Judith M.
Neither Jew Nor Greek?: Constructing Early Christianity
Reviewed by Sabrina Inowlocki

Reeves, John C., eds.
Bible and Qur'an: Essays in Scriptural Intertextuality
Reviewed by John Kaltner

MORE ON VIRGINS: In the Forward Philologos has a column ("Questioning Virginity") on the recent debate about the Qur'anic "virgins" and connects it with the ancient Jewish/Christian debate over the meaning of the "young woman" ("virgin" in the Septuagint and the Gospel of Matthew) of Isaiah 7:14. It concludes:

And yet to think this really matters is, from a contemporary point of view, putting the cart before the horse. Not only needn't Jews be disturbed if the word almah in Isaiah can be interpreted legitimately as meaning "virgin," but they also should realize that such a meaning explains why Christianity came to believe in the virgin birth of Jesus in the first place. In other words, as is the case with many supposed details of Jesus' life and death in the New Testament, we are dealing here with a legend invented by Jesus' early disciples in order to portray him as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. It was only because they interpreted almah in Isaiah as "virgin," as did the Jewish translators of the Septuagint, that they imagined such a story about him.

In the case of both the Koran and the Bible, the attempt to determine the original meaning of this or that text can involve one in fascinating inquiries. But it is only the true believers, those who accept the Koran or Bible as God's literally given word, who will argue over the theological significance of the conclusions. Religious beliefs and behavior depend not on what a sacred text meant to say, but on what it has been thought to say over the ages by its followers. New advances in scholarship will not change their opinions, Mr. Kristof's hopes notwithstanding.

I think Philologos is wrong here. Knowledge about the actual meaning almah has done a lot to erode belief in the Virgin Birth in Christian circles over the last century or so. I suspect that we would see a similar effect in Islam if "Luxenberg"'s thesis were to convince scholars in Qur'anic studies.

UPDATE (13 August): Mark Goodacre comments. If you ask me, Philologos should be reading the Biblio-bloggers.

HUGOYE: JOURNAL OF SYRIAC STUDIES has a new issue out. Here is the table of contents:

Volume 7, Number 2 (July 2004)

Papers

Priests, Laity and the Sacrament of the Eucharist in sixth-century Syria.
Volker Menze, Princeton University

The Colloquy of Moses on Mount Sinai: Where Syriac Christianity Meets Islamic Spain and Africa between the 16th and 19th Centuries.
Karla R. Suomala, Luther College

The Pearl of Virginity: Death as the Reward of Asceticism in M��mr�� 191 of Jacob of Serug.
Robert Kitchen, Knox-Metropolitan United Church

Brief Articles

The Credentials of Mar Julius Alvares, bishop of Ceylon, Goa and India Excluding Malabar.
George A. Kiraz, Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute

Publications and Book Reviews

Wilhelm Baum and Dietmar W. Winkler, The Church of the East: A Concise History.
J.F. Coakley, Harvard University

Wilhelm Baum, Schirin: Christin-K�nigin-Liebesmythos. Eine sp�tantike Frauengestalt - historische Realit�t und literarische Wirkung. Einf�hrungen in das orientalische Christentum 3.
Cornelia Horn, Saint Louis University

Xavier Jacob et Angelo Guido Calonghi, Les Chr�tiens du Proche Orient apr�s deux mill�naires. Les vicissitudes des Communaut�s Chr�tiennes du Proche Orient des d�buts du Christianisme � la fin du IIme Mill�naire, Tirrenia Stampatori, Torino 2002.
Alessandro Mengozzi, Universit� degli Studi di Bergamo

Conference Reports

Christianity in Iraq Seminar, SOAS, April 3, 2004.
Erica C.D. Hunter, University of Cambridge

Syriac Antiochian Exegesis and Biblical Theology for the 3rd Millennium, Mount St. Mary's Seminary, Emmitsburg, June 25, 2004.
Jonathan Loopstra, The Catholic University of America

Summer Seminar�Aramaic in Post-Biblical Judaism and Early Christianity, Duke University, July 14-23, 2004.
Michael Penn, Mount Holyoke College, and Lucas Van Rompay, Duke University

Session on Syriac Lexicography, International Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, Groningen, The Netherlands, July 25-28, 2004..
Ilaria Ramelli, Catholic University of Milan

Syriac Papers at the North American Patristics Society Annual Meeting, Loyola University, Chicago, May 27-29, 2004.
Jeanne-Nicole Saint-Laurent, Brown University

Announcements

Syriac Studies Workshop, Princeton University, May 4-6, 2005.

The Bible of Edessa, Leiden, August 2, 2004.

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Beth Mardutho Amazon Associates

Journal of the Canadian Society of Syriac Studies

Gorgias Press

ATLAS Digital Journal Project

UPDATE (12 August): The following update was posted on the Hugoye list:

A delayed submission to the Hugoye 7:2 was omitted from the new issue anouncement earlier today. Please note that the Publications & Book Reviews section contains the book review below:

Sidney H. Griffith. Yahya ibn `Adi: The Reformation of Morals, A Parallel Arabic-English Text, Eastern Christian Texts, Volume 1.

John C. Lamoreaux, Southern Methodist University

Regards,
Thomas Joseph
Technical Editor, Hugoye

A NINTH-CENTURY-B.C.E. IRON WORKSHOP AT BEIT SHEMESH:

New Worlds: Site reveals the Middle East's Iron Age secrets (Jerusalem Post via Archaeology Magazine News)
By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH

The Bible relates that the Philistines zealously guarded technologies for producing superior weapons so that the Israelites couldn't get their hands on them.

But it didn't last forever. A recent dig at tel Beit Shemesh has found a iron workshop dating back to the Ninth Century BCE- the earliest known in the eastern Mediterranean.

Iron was employed for many centuries in the ancient Levant, but as an exotic metal used to make small ornaments and ceremonial artifacts, according to experts involved in the dig, which was sponsored by Tel Aviv University. Most utilitarian artifacts during the 3rd to 2nd millennium BCE were made of cheaper and more malleable copper and bronze. More recent archeological research has shown that iron replaced bronze as the leading metal only around 1,000 BCE. This is due to the fact that ancient forges weren't able to reach the high melting temperature of iron (1,537 C).

[...]

NEW INTERACTIVE ATTRACTIONS AT CAESAREA MARITIMA:

Continuum unveils Caesarea interpretation (World Leisure News, UK)

Three new attractions created by UK-based Continuum Group for the Caesarea Development Corporation have opened at the world famous archaeological site, Caesarea Maritima, on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, north of Tel Aviv in Israel.

For the past six years, Continuum�s multimedia division, Mindwave Media, has been developing the �3.75m interactive attractions to interpret the site, bringing its history to life through an AV show, a suite of talk-to interactives and a panoramic virtual interactive: from the days of King Herod through the crusades to the present day.

The AV show, Caesarea Reconstructed, is a 3D computer generated show explaining how Caesarea developed and changed over 2,000 years; covering the construction of the harbour by King Herod, church life under Byzantine rule, invasion by Arab armies in AD 648 and finally the harbour�s destruction by Sultan Baybars in 1265.

[...]

BART EHRMAN GOES COUNTERFACTUAL! In a Beliefnet interview (via Mark Goodacre) Ehrman speculates on how the world would be different if one of the heretical forms of early Christianity had become mainstream. Counterfactual history is catching on.

The Christianity Battles
What if Ebionite Christians, Marcion Christians, or Gnostic Christians had been more convincing?

Interview by Deborah Caldwell

The early Christian Church was a chaos of contending beliefs, according to Bart Ehrman, author of Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew. Ehrman says some groups of early Christians claimed there was more than one God. Some believed Jesus was human but not divine, while others said he was divine but not human. In his book, Ehrman looks at how these early forms of Christianity came to be suppressed, reformed, or forgotten. He spoke recently with Beliefnet about what Christianity might have become if a different strain had emerged victorious from first-century intellectual battles.

Your book discusses the hypothetical questions of what would have happened to Christianity, and by extension world history, if a different type of Christianity had survived. What are your best guesses about that?

It depends on which of the other sides had won. The Marcionites decided that everything Jewish had to be taken out of the New Testament and that the Jewish Bible was no longer going to considered part of the scriptures. They thought there were two different Gods--the God of the Jews and the God of Jesus. If they had won, then I guess we wouldn�t have an Old Testament anymore and there would be no connection between Judaism and Christianity. My hunch is that if that had happened, anti-Semitism wouldn�t have developed among Christians. What drove anti-Semitism was the competition between the Jewish understanding of scripture and the Christian understanding of scripture. But if there were no competition because they didn�t have the same scripture, then we may well have never had any anti-Semitism.

Do you think the Marcionite version of Christianity would have become a dominant world religion the way Christianity is now? Or do you think that Judaism would have remained equal with that version of Christianity?

It�s a good question, because Marcionite Christianity was popular for the same reasons similar beliefs are popular today. Today people will talk about how there�s a difference between the Old Testament God of wrath and the New Testament God of love. And people who make that distinction are far more drawn to the New Testament God of love. Well, that was a Marcionite distinction, because they really thought there were two different gods, and that was attractive to people. Jews throughout the ancient world, as a whole, really weren�t persecuted, but most people thought the Jews were a little bit strange as a people. And so if this religion had nothing to do with Jews and Judaism, that may have been attractive to a wider range of people.

What would Christianity have looked like if the Ebionites had won?

We would have a different New Testament to begin with. The Ebionites were opponents of the Apostle Paul. They thought he was a heretic. A lot of the New Testament had to do with the Apostle Paul and his writings. Those would have been excluded from the get-go. They would have kept what is now our Gospel of Matthew but maybe not any of the other Gospels. And it would mean that Christians would have to be Jewish, which means uncircumcised men would have to get circumcised and people would be keeping kosher food laws and would be keeping the Sabbath, worshiping on Saturday, keeping Jewish festivals. So Christianity would have been more recognizably a sect of Judaism.

What do you think would have happened if the Gnostics had been the dominant?

It�s a little hard to know with the Gnostics, because there were so many different kinds of Gnostics competing among themselves, as well as competing against the Christians who ended up winning out over the others. Gnosticism is a religion based on insider knowledge, and it�s hard to know whether that can ever become a mass religion or not, since it presupposes that you�ve got a large group of people who don�t understand, and only a few of the insiders who do understand. If Gnostics had become dominant, Christianity would have been quite different from what it is now.

Maybe more Buddhist?

That�s how a lot of people look on Gnosticism--it seems more like an Eastern religion because its practitioners are interested in acquiring insight and enlightenment rather than salvation through the death of Jesus.

[...]

UPDATE: Reader Dennis Waters e-mails:

"It�s a little hard to know with the Gnostics..."

Great line!

AN INTERNATIONAL COLLOQUIUM ON JOSEPHUS is to be held in Dublin on 5-8 September, sponsored by the Project on Ancient Cultural Achievement (PACE) at York University, which is chaired by Steve Mason. To access the information on the colloquium, click on this link or on the "Int'l Colloquium" button to the upper left on the PACE site. The site requires the current version of Flash Player. Much of the PACE site is at the "Coming Soon" stage, but it looks promising. For example, check out the image database on the Places page.

MORE ON THE GILGAMESH MOVIE at the Internet Movie Database (also via Explorator).

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: I missed this one, which is a sort of tourist's guide to the Temple Mount area in Ha'aretz, but David Meadows notes it in the latest Explorator:

The eternal rock for NIS 18
By Avner Avrahami

On the 9th of the Hebrew month of Av, in the year 70 C.E., the armies of Titus captured the Temple, burned it down and destroyed its walls. Among other things, the Romans damaged the western part of the external Temple Mount Wall and brought down its upper portions. The lower portions remained standing and the central-southern part of the wall that remained exposed has since then been known as "the Western Wall," which is "the remnant of our Temple."

The longer, northern section of that same external wall was buried during subsequent centuries beneath construction rubble, especially during the Muslim Mameluke period. During this period (from the middle of the 13th century for 250 years) the valley between the Temple Mount and the city to the west of it was filled with arches and domes upon which streets and houses were built. In this way the Muslim Quarter was built, with the arches and domes creating subterranean spaces beneath it. The Tunnel Wall is in fact a unification of spaces that was created from those arched supporting structures that were built adjacent to the Western Wall of the Temple Mount; it follows the route of the "Herodian Street" that was paved along that wall until the destruction of the Temple.

[...]

JOB OPENING AT ST. ANDREWS: Mark Goodacre is already on this but I suppose I should mention it too:

Teaching Fellow in New Testament Studies
School of Divinity
University of St Andrews

Salary - �18,893 - �20,010 pa pro rata

We have a temporary post starting on 13 September 2004 until 30 June 2005, or as soon as possible thereafter, to provide cover while a member of staff is on Research Leave. You should have expertise in keeping with the School's strong profile in New Testament. The School wishes to appoint a candidate whose work will duly contribute to its established reputation for excellence in both teaching and research. It is anticipated that the position may be particularly attractive to scholars who have recently completed their doctoral studies, though some experience of teaching New Testament in a university environment would be desirable.

You will be expected to teach a sub-honours module in New Testament Greek, honours modules on John's Gospel and the Historical Jesus.

Please quote ref: JB01/04

Closing Date: 16 August 2004

Application forms and further particulars are available from http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/hr/recruitment/vacancies or from Human Resources, University of St Andrews, College Gate, North Street, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9AJ, (tel: 01334 462571, by fax 01334 462570 or by e-mail Jobline@st-andrews.ac.uk).

SPEAKING OF JUNK HISTORY, the Palestinian Authority has broadcast an "educational" program that takes the P.A.'s Jewish-temple denial to (at least to my knowledge) new extremes:

PMW:PA Historians: Israel's Biblical history is Arab Muslim history (Independent Media Review Analysis)

Palestinian Media Watch Bulletin
August 8, 2004
PALESTINIAN MEDIA WATCH
phone: 972- 2- 625-4140 fax: 972-2- 624-2803
visit our website, click here: www.pmw.org.il
for further information, contact PMW Director, Itamar Marcus
material may be quoted, citing PMW as the source
subscribe free to PMW reports, details below
PA Historians:
Israel's Biblical history is actually Arab Muslim history
by Itamar Marcus

Introduction
On an educational program on PA TV, two senior Palestinian Authority [PA]
historians went to great lengths to deny ancient Jewish history and erase
the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel. At the same time they describe
an ancient Palestinian - Arab history, creating a historical connection to
the land that never existed.

Two central components of this Palestinian myth consist of turning Biblical
Israel into Muslim- Arabs, while teaching that the Palestinians are the
descendents of the Biblical Canaanites, who are also turned into Arabs.
With both the Canaanites and Israelites becoming Arabs and the religion of
ancient Israel becoming Islam, the PA takes authentic Jewish history,
documented by thousands of years of continuous literature, and crosses out
the word "Jewish" and replaced it with the word "Arab".

This creative historical revisionism is not new in the PA. Denying the
thousands of years of Jewish connection to the Land of Israel, coupled with
the invention of "Palestinian" history of thousands of years, have always
been of supreme importance to the Palestinian Authority. The PA is
struggling with the challenge of creating a Palestinian national identity
when no Palestinian national history exists. Even the term "Palestine"
historically had nothing to do with Arab identity, and most of the
population only migrated in the last century after the improved living
conditions and work opportunities brought about by the Zionist movement.

Thus, incessant denial of Israel's history and right to exist, and the
invention of a PA history have been backbones of PA indoctrination and
education for years.

In the broadcast last week on PA TV the following are some of the main
points of the"history".

1. The Hebrews of the Bible have no connection to the Jews today.
2. The Hebrews of the Bible were Arabs.
3. The Prophets of the Bible were Muslims.
4. Biblical King Solomon was a Muslim Prophet.
5. Solomon's Temple was not built by Israelites but by Arab Canaanites.
6. The Canaanites are the forefathers of the Palestinians
7. The Bible is legends based on what Jews imagined and not on history.
8. The Jews today are descendents of a 13 th Century Khazar tribe with
no history in the Land of Israel.
9. The location of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is a Zionist invention.
10. Zionism is Racism.

[...]

Translated excerpts from the program follow. Read it all.

The story is also covered by Arutz Sheva in " PA Television Broadcasts Revisionist History," with a link to a video excerpt from the program itself (which my system won't play).

CONSPIRACY THEORIES are the subject of an article in this weeks Sunday Times (of London). It touches on both The Da Vinci Code and The Bible Code:

Focus: The conspiracy code
A secret cabal has taken control of publishers and is making a fortune from our gullibility. Roland White delves into a plot where nothing is quite what it seems

Ever wondered why Mona Lisa has been looking so damned enigmatic for the past 500 years? Well, keep it to yourself but she�s concealing a dark and sinister secret.

This unassuming young woman is actually part of a massive conspiracy that involves a secret society, the Knights Templar, a monk assassin and serial murder, plus coded messages that cast doubt on the marital status of Christ. Seriously, this could blow the lid off the entire establishment of the Catholic church.

Don�t believe it? Well, it might be bunkum, but millions are already convinced. They have been studying details of the conspiracy in this summer�s hottest beach novel, The Da Vinci Code.

[...]

When the hardback edition first appeared, one reviewer condemned the book as �utterly ridiculous�. It�s not elegantly written and was ignored by most critics. So what accounts for its astonishing popularity? The answer is that in a largely secular age, conspiracy theories are the new religion. After all, they are the perfect replacement: they absolve the believer from blame for the ills of the world while it�s hard to prove them, one way or the other, beyond doubt.

This state of affairs was predicted about 100 years ago by the writer GK Chesterton, a devout Catholic. �When people stop believing in God they don�t believe in nothing,� he said. �They�ll believe in anything.�

[...]

It does not seem to matter that the conspiracy theorists are just as unreliable as politicians who make wayward claims about, say, weapons of mass destruction. In 1997, for example, Michael Drosnin, a Wall Street Journal reporter, published a book, The Bible Code. It claimed that the scriptures contain a hidden code predicting future events. It was an instant bestseller.

EXPERTS soon showed that the �code� was no more than the sort of patterns that could be found in any large volume of words. But that code still has its adherents and it is one of a number of phenomena to be studied in a four-part series, Conspiracies, starting next month on Sky One. It will also cast an eye over the Illuminati, a secret sect founded in the 18th century that some people claim is now running the world. That theory is clearly nonsense, of course; everybody knows that the world is run by the lizard Queen, funded by a drug-running operation controlled by MI6.

If you are looking to make your own fortune from a conspiracy theory, it�s essential to have two key ingredients: a historic event or character, plus an outlandish but faintly believable alternative to the accepted wisdom.

It also touches on conspiracy theories about Princess Diana and the "Solar Temple," September 11th, the fate of Osama Bin Laden (curiously failing to mention the - to my mind plausible - theory that he died at Tora Bora), and the sinking of the Titanic.

Requires registration, and there's a charge for it outside the U.K.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME! The weekend weather in St. Andrews has been about like in that photograph below, but, happily, a drive down the coast yesterday uncovered some sunshine. Even an hour or two of good beach weather at Elie. I did most of my celebrating yesterday, but the birthday itself was nice too - especially the nap. And being beaten at chess by my son.

There's nothing interesting in the news at the moment and, although I have one or two things I've been meaning to post, I don't feel like bothering right now. Look for me tomorrow.

THE CURRENT EXCAVATION AT MEGIDDO is the subject of a long article in the Washington Post:

Exploring Mysteries Of Ancient History
GWU Students Take Part in Dig at Megiddo, Where King Solomon Might Have Lived

By Bill Broadway
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 7, 2004; Page B07

Five local students and their archaeology professor went to Armageddon this summer, not to search for clues to a cosmic battle yet to come between Good and Evil, but to seek understanding of civilizations past.

One of the most important issues they addressed was whether a palace attributed to King Solomon in what is now northern Israel was in fact built by Solomon, the son of King David renowned for his wise leadership and for his illicit relationship with the queen of Sheba.

It's no small question, and it has great significance for Jews and Christians alike, said Eric Cline, associate professor of ancient history and anthropology at George Washington University, who co-directed a dig on a hill about 15 miles southeast of Haifa, Israel, known as Megiddo. (Armageddon is a Greek corruption of the Hebrew word har, meaning mount, and Megiddo.)

Little evidence has been uncovered to prove Solomon's ties to a particular building -- or to prove that he existed at all. Some European scholars who call themselves "biblical minimalists" maintain that Solomon is a mythological figure, a kind of Jewish King Arthur.

"These guys are nuts," Cline said in a terse assessment of their thinking.

Cline and other archaeologists believe that the so-called Solomon's Palace at Megiddo, which some consider a cornerstone in understanding Solomon's life and times, was constructed in the 9th century B.C., a century after Solomon's reign. This conclusion is based on recent excavations at the site, which is one of the world's richest archaeological fields and has yielded the layered remains of two dozen cities over a 6,000-year period.

[...]

It's an interesting article, with interviews with a number of the student volunteers. But there is this odd paragraph:

Cline said many professional and student archaeologists are drawn to Megiddo by the Armageddon connection. Many biblical scholars believe that the Jezreel Valley will be the site of the penultimate battle between the forces of God and Satan, with the final conflict and return of the Messiah taking place in Jerusalem.

My emphasis. Rather than "many biblical scholars," it would be clearer to say "Christian dispensationalists." It's not an issue that biblical scholarship (i.e., historical-critical study, archaeology, etc.) has any bearing on.

I should warn you that for some reason, I have no idea why, this article made my Netscape 7.02 browser crash three times.

UPDATE ON JEWS IN IRAQ: Or not, as the case may be. The DARPA TIDES Iraq Reconstruction Report No. 277, 5 August 2004 reports the following:

Iraqi Official Denies Granting Passports to Iraqi Jews

Qatar: Al-Jazirah Satellite Channel Television in Arabic 1513 GMT 04 Aug 04 [Announcer-read report over video]

Pascal Ishu Warda, Iraqi minister of immigration and expatriates, has denied reports that the interim Iraqi Government has granted some Iraqi Jews Iraqi passports to facilitate their return to Iraq.

[Begin Wardah recording] I have described this issue as a sensitive file because it has not been decided yet. It is a sensitive file. Therefore, I strongly and plainly deny this report, which went as far as alleging that I have given passports to Jews. If we the Iraqis inside Iraq still have no documents, so is it reasonable for us to start giving documents to people outside Iraq? [End recording]

That excuse may do for a while, but I expect to hear some progress soon. And I would feel better if this official had made it clearer that getting passports to expatriated Iraqi Jews was on his agenda and would be dealt with as soon as possible. The phrase "a sensitive file because it has not been decided yet" is not encouraging, although the full context isn't clear.

(Thanks to Chuck Jones for the heads-up.)

ARABIC, SYRIAC, VIRGINS, AND GRAPES: I've been following this story for some time but haven't yet commented on it in PaleoJudaica. The gist is that someone, allegedly a German scholar, who writes under the pseudonymn " Christoph Luxenberg" ("for security reasons") has published a book saying that the Arabic of the Qu'ran is really a sort of mixture of Syriac and Arabic and that the meanings of some passages are changed as a result. The International Herald Tribune had an article on it a couple of days ago:

Nicholas Kristof Virgins or grapes? The Koran revisited
.
'The virgins are calling you," Mohamed Atta wrote reassuringly to his fellow hijackers just before Sept. 11, 2001.
.
It has long been a staple of Islam that Muslim martyrs will go to paradise and marry 72 black-eyed virgins. But a growing body of rigorous scholarship of the Koran points to a less sensual paradise - and, more important, may offer a step away from fundamentalism and toward a reawakening of the Islamic world.

[...]

But now the same tools that historians, linguists and archaeologists have applied to the Bible for about 150 years are beginning to be applied to the Koran. The results are explosive.

The Koran is beautifully written, but often obscure. One reason is that Arabic was born as a written language with the Koran, and there's growing evidence that many of the words were Syriac or Aramaic.

For example, the Koran says martyrs going to heaven will get "hur," and the word was taken by early commentators to mean "virgins," hence those 72 consorts. But in Aramaic, hur meant "white" and was commonly used to mean "white grapes."

Some martyrs arriving in paradise may regard a bunch of grapes as a letdown. But the scholar who pioneered this pathbreaking research, using the pseudonym Christoph Luxenberg for security reasons, noted in an e-mail interview that grapes made more sense in context because the Koran compares them to crystal and pearls, and because contemporary accounts have paradise abounding with fruit, especially white grapes.

Luxenberg's analysis, which has drawn raves from many scholars, also transforms the meaning of the verse that is sometimes cited to require women to wear veils. Instead of instructing pious women "to draw their veils over their bosoms," he says, it advises them to "buckle their belts around their hips."

[...]
.
But Muslim fundamentalists regard the Koran - every word of it - as God's own language, and they have violently attacked freethinking scholars as heretics. So Muslim intellectuals have been intimidated, and Islam has often been transmitted by narrow-minded extremists.
.
Still, there are encouraging signs. Islamic feminists are arguing for religious interpretations leading to greater gender equality. An Iranian theologian has called for more study of the Koran's Syriac roots. Tunisian and German scholars are collaborating on a new edition of the Koran based on the earliest manuscripts. And just last week, Iran freed Hashem Aghajari, who had been sentenced to death for questioning harsh interpretations of Islam.

[...]

I haven't read the book myself yet and don't expect to have time to in the near future, so I can't make any very useful comments. It was reviewed very positively by Robert R. Phenix Jr. and Cornelia B. Horn in Hugoye last year, but quite negatively by Fran�ois de Blois in the Journal of Quranic Studies . If anyone who specializes in both Syriac and Arabic has read it and has a view on it, please drop me a note.

AN AUGUST MORNING IN ST. ANDREWS: At least I'm not tempted to ditch work and go to the beach.



I took the photo this morning. The gray building on the right side of the street with the red car in front of it is St. Mary's College.

UPDATE (6 August): In case the photo isn't clear (or in case you can't believe your eyes), that really is thick fog and those cars really do have their lights on. But there's much less fog today and it's considerably warmer, so maybe, just maybe, there's some hope for the weekend.

THE JOURNAL BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION has a new issue out (12.3, 2004) and it appears I missed the previous issue as well (12.2, 2004). So here are the tables of contents for both. (They require a paid personal or institutional subscription to access them.)

ISSUE 12.2, 2004:

Articles
Matters of Life and Death: The Story of Elijah and the Widow's Son in Comparative Perspective 117
Stuart Lasine

What was the Victim Wearing? Literary, Economic, and Social Contexts for the Parable of the Good Samaritan 145
Michael P. Knowles

In Memory of Jesus: Grief Work in the Gospels 175
Kari Syreeni

Book Reviews 198

List of Books Received 228

Erratum
Errata, BibInt 11, 3/4 (2003) 231

ISSUE 12.3, 2004:

Articles
Job's Fifth Friend: An Ethical Critique of the Book of Job 233
David J.A. Clines

Early Encounters with the Bible Among The Batlhaping: Historical And Hermeneutical Signs 251
Gerald O. West

Don't Touch This Book!: Revelation 22:18-19 And the Rhetoric of Reading (in) The Apocalypse of John 282
Robert M. Royalty

Book Reviews 300

List of Books Received 348

NEW BOOK REVIEWS FROM THE REVIEW OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE:

I'm behind on these, so here are the last two weeks' worth in a mass. As usual, I include those on the Hebrew Bible and Judaism, as well as such on the New Testament and early Christianity which spark my interest.


Blenkinsopp, Joseph
Isaiah 40-55: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary
Reviewed by Francis Landy

Borgman, Paul
Genesis: The Story We Haven't Heard
Reviewed by Jan Lion-Cachet

Kaltner, John
Inquiring of Joseph: Getting to Know a Biblical Character through the Qur'an
Reviewed by Rudolph De Wet Oosthuizen

Pleins, J. David
The Social Visions of the Hebrew Bible: A Theological Introduction
Reviewed by Mark Boda

Sharp, Carolyn J.
Prophecy and Ideology in Jeremiah: Struggles for Authority in the
Deutero-Jeremianic Prose
Reviewed by Kathleen Mary O'Connor

Ehrman, Bart D.
Lost Scriptures: BooksThat Did Not Make It into the New Testament
Reviewed by Michael Kaler

McLay, R. Timothy
The Use of the Septuagint in New Testament Research
Reviewed by Robert Hiebert

McLay, R. Timothy
The Use of the Septuagint in New Testament Research
Reviewed by Tobias Nicklas

Goodman, Martin, Jeremy Cohen, and David Sorkin, eds.
The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies
Reviewed by Hanna Liss

Ben Zvi, Ehud
The Signs of Jonah: Reading and Rereading in Ancient Yehud
Reviewed by Aaron Schart

Ben Zvi, Ehud
The Signs of Jonah: Reading and Rereading in Ancient Yehud
Reviewed by Kenneth Craig

Cross, Frank Moore
Leaves from an Epigrapher's Notebook: Collected Papers in Hebrew and West Semitic Palaeography and Epigraphy
Reviewed by Joseph R Cathey

Peri, Chiara
Il regno del nemico
Reviewed by Michael Duggan

Shachter, Jay F., translator
The Commentary of Abraham Ibn Ezra on the Pentateuch: Volume 5: Deuteronomy
Reviewed by Mayer Gruber

Gillman, Florence Morgan
Herodias: At Home in That Fox's Den
Reviewed by Donna Wallace

Hurtado, Larry W.
Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity
Reviewed by Moschos Goutzioudis

Hurtado, Larry W.
Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity
Reviewed by Tobias Nicklas

Lieu, Judith
Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century
Reviewed by Russell Arnold

Neusner, Jacob, ed.
Dictionary of Ancient Rabbis: Selections from The Jewish Encyclopedia
Reviewed by Joshua L. Moss

KEN RISTAU gives a candid, student's-eye-view, account of the International SBL/IOQS conference (via New Testament Gateway). Note the immediately preceding post in his Anduril blog as well.

THE SHRINE OF THE BOOK HAS REOPENED:

Shrine of the Book reopens after redesign (Jerusalem Post)
By CALEV BEN-DAVID AND MEIR RONNEN

The Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum, which holds the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest surviving biblical texts, was officially reopened to the public in a ceremony Tuesday night after undergoing three years of restoration and redesign.

[...]

Actually, I thought this happened a couple of months ago.

The Forward also has an article on the reopening:

Iconic Monument of Jerusalem Skyline Shines a Bit Brighter
By EetTa Prince-GIBSON
July 30, 2004

In 1965, the Israel Museum's Shrine of the Book, with its signature white-tiled dome, first graced Jerusalem's skyline. The center was built to hold the Dead Sea Scrolls, the world's earliest evidence of biblical texts and sectarian and apocryphal manuscripts. The scrolls were found in 11 caves along the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, only 40 kilometers due east from Jerusalem, between 1947 and 1956, and the Shrine was designed to evoke the discovery. Its dome was meant to look like the lid of the jars in which the Scrolls were first discovered; the contrast with the free-standing black basalt wall was intended to recall "The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness," a central theme in the narrative; and visitors passed through a series of openings reminiscent of the deep caves in which the Scrolls were found. Almost immediately, the complex became an iconic monument.

This summer, the shrine reopened after more than a year of extensive refurbishment and renovations. In addition to the physical restoration, which included replacement of the dome's tiles, repaving the entrance plaza and resurfacing the black granite wall, the showcases have been redesigned and rebuilt by a firm in Milan, Italy, utilizing the latest techniques in preservation and climate control.

Museum officials also decided to rotate the scrolls on display � three months on, six months off. In the main center hall, under the dome, a scroll is displayed prominently, wound around a large central column, like a Torah scroll. Visitors can encircle the column to read it. Fragments of other scrolls are displayed along the circular walls. Most of the scrolls were written on parchment, with a few rare examples of papyrus.

[...]

The Aleppo Codex (see also here) is on display there too.

"THE CLAY MAN COMETH": Philologos takes on the golem in the Forward. Excerpt (but worth reading in full):

It is only in early rabbinic times that one meaning of golem takes on a legendary cast, although this is still not the legend of the golem as we know it; rather, it occurs in a fable of Adam's first 12 hours on earth, in the second of which, so we are told by the Talmud, in tractate Sanhedrin, before God formed Adam's limbs and breathed life into him, "he was made a golem." And at the same time, golem in early rabbinic Hebrew simply can mean a thoughtless person or an idiot. Thus, we read in the Mishnaic tractate Pirkei Avot or "The Ethics of the Fathers" that "Seven traits characterize the golem and seven the wise man."

Yet the concept of a man-made humanoid, although the name golem was not given to it, can be found in the Talmud, too. Again in Sanhedrin, for example, we read about how the talmudic sage Rava created a man out of clay and sent him to his friend Rabbi Zeira, who ordered him to return to dust. Such legends grew more widespread among Jews in medieval Europe � and it was then that the word golem was first attached to them. The earliest known use of the word in this sense occurs in a commentary by the Rhineland rabbi, Eliezer of Worms (1176-1238), on the proto-kabbalistic Sefer ha-Yetsirah or "Book of Creation."

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: Well, sort of.

Famed Second Temple model moving to Israel Museum
By Amiram Barkat, Haaretz Correspondent

A famous model of Jerusalem and the Second Temple which stood at the Holyland Hotel in the capital for close to 40 years is slated to be moved to the grounds of the Israel Museum within a year.

[...]

The model, built on a scale of 50:1, shows the topography of the area as seen in that period, which was much more imposing than today. The Temple Mount was built according to exact Biblical references, and the surrounding buildings according to the understanding of its planner, archaeology professor Michael Avi-Yonah. The model was adjusted only once, following a dig in the 1970s by Prof. Binyamin Mazar which revealed that Robinson's Arch and the southern approaches to the mount looked different than the model.

SYRIAC IN TURKEY AND IRAQ figures in this Guardian article:

In the language of Jesus

Turkey's Christian revival has a message for Iraq's own communities

Martin Wainwright
Wednesday August 4, 2004
The Guardian

This week's attacks on churches in Iraq are a reminder of a small community that has lived for years with the term "beleaguered", but has the potential to re-establish a more tolerant way of life in the Middle East.

It might easily be assumed that Iraqi Christians are a colonial implant that any self-respecting nationalist would view with suspicion.

But in fact they are among the oldest religious communities in the world.

Protected for most of their long history by Islam's tradition of tolerance, they are honoured for their own great gift to mutual understanding:

Syriac, a version of Jesus's native language, Aramaic. This was the vital bridge in the transmission of Greek, Roman and Jewish thought into Arabic, from which Aristotle, Plato and company eventually returned in the Renaissance to Europe.

Its greatest stronghold is just outside Iraq, in Turkey's Tur Abdin, the "Mountains of the Servants of God", where an intriguing shift is taking place.

Pilgrims, students, and tourists of all faiths and none, are returning to nearby monasteries, which were 700 years old when the first stones were laid at Fountains or Rievaulx. Four-and-a-half centuries after the English abbeys were dissolved by Henry VIII, the cloisters still ring with Syriac chants.

Yet it is only 20 years since the pocket-sized congregations lived in terror, with bombs going off outside their walls. Almost everyone with the money to do so had fled to the west.

[...]

There's too much in it to excerpt properly and the whole thing is worth a read.

Also, British readers should note the following, which I'm going to try to listen to later this morning:

� Martin Wainwright is the Guardian's Northern editor; he presents The Tongue That Wouldn't Die, a study of Syriac, at 11am today on Radio 4

UPDATE: It was an excellent program that ranged from ancient Edessa to a modern child coining new Syriac terms for her toys and involved actual trips to modern Edessa (Sanli Urfa) and other nearby areas important for Syriac. It was the first of a three-part series, called Voices from the Dark, to be aired over three weeks. You can hear the first program by downloading this file (you have to have RealAudio installed in your system to play it).

UPDATE: Reader Harold Clumeck e-mails:

Re: your reference to Martin Wainwright's article in The Guardian. Wainwright states: "It might easily be assumed that Iraqi Christians are a colonial implant that any self-respecting nationalist might view with suspicion."

I just want to comment that this is an odd assertion indeed. Assumed by whom? Someone ignorant of the history of religion in the Middle East? Wainwright seems to presuppose here that Islam would naturally be thought of as "THE" indigenous religion, and that all others have gotten there at some later date, and by a "colonial" means. It seems a variant of the "Zionist as colonialist" prejudice. Perhaps I'm reading too much into this. But I still think it's an odd statement and consistent with Guardian bias. It reminds me of a comment made by a Western journalist about the plight of Coptic Christians in Egypt. He said something to the effect: "Why would Christians choose to live in a Muslim country?"

In addition, the reference to "self-respecting nationalist" contradicts the later reference to "traditional Islamic tolerance" mentioned in the very next paragraph

I thought the comment was strange too. Perhaps it's just a lame attempt at a "hook" to catch the reader's attention, but it doesn't make a lot of sense, and I would like to think better of those "nationalists" in Iraq, who would be well aware of the ancient history of Iraqi Christianity. But regarding the last point, I wouldn't identify Arab nationalism with Islam: there is some overlap, of course, but there need not be any connection. Baathism, for example, is an entirely secular extremist Arab nationalism. And Islam is a world religion that transcends national boundaries.

IF YOU WERE DISAPPOINTED to miss hearing about the imaginary Syriac Odes of Isaiah in my IOQS paper last week, do not despair! I have just agreed to give another paper from the same chapter of my book in the British New Testament Conference in Edinburgh at the beginning of September. I will have more time to present this one (45 minutes as opposed to 25 minutes in the IOQS meeting), so I will revert to the original planned paper and talk about the Odes of Isaiah. As usual, I intend to post the oral version of the paper here just before leaving for the conference. Meanwhile, here is the abstract:

The Odes of Isaiah: A Newly Discovered Syriac Pseudepigraphon - A Thought Experiment

Sorry, there isn't really a new pseudepigraphon called the Odes of Isaiah. Rather, this paper is a thought experiment to explore in a new way the problem of the transmission of Jewish Old Testament pseudepigrapha in Christian hands and how or to what degree we can hope to know whether such works actually originated in Jewish rather than Christian circles.

The approach is to treat demonstrably (mostly by external criteria) ancient Jewish works as if they had been transmitted as pseudepigrapha in Christian manuscripts, and to explore the implications of the "alternate histories" of these works as analogies for works whose transmission histories cannot now be reconstructed by conventional means. The method is informed by poststructuralist and reader-response concerns; the philosophy of counterfactuals and possible worlds; the exploration of counterfactual histories by science fiction writers and by historians; and some conceptual insights and categories formulated by the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum physics.

This paper postulates an "alternate history" for the Qumran Hodayot (as found in the manuscript 1QHa) in which, rather than being abandoned at Qumran, this work was transmitted outside sectarian circles, translated first into Greek and then, into Syriac, thence surviving only in a late antique or early medieval Syriac copy attributed to the prophet Isaiah. (One can point to the transmission of the Psalms of Solomon as a partial analogy.) To what degree could we show that this text was originally Jewish, and even sectarian Jewish? What literary-critical, prosodic, and linguistic criteria, if any, would be likely to be helpful in tracing its history of transmission and ultimate origin?

The abstract is slightly out of date (e.g., I'll be working with both a Greek extract and a Syriac manuscript) but it gives you the general idea.

Watch this space.

BUDGET CUTS threaten the study of ancient history in Israel:

The shaky future of higher education (Ha'aretz)
By Dvorit Peles
The threat of closure hovers over various university departments - especially the humanities.

This year the Hebrew University of Jerusalem will not be offering courses for a B.A. in Italian, Yiddish and demography. At this point it is still possible to begin a course in Ancient Near Eastern Studies - Egyptology and Assyrian Studies - but those departments are also threatened with closure, though to a slightly lesser degree than the departments of African Studies, French, German and Russian.

The threatened closure of these departments is not unique to Hebrew University, and is actually affecting all the universities in recent years, some more and some less, due to the shifting demands for courses of study, and especially because of Finance Ministry cuts in the budgets of institutions of higher education over the last four years.

[...]

The dean of the faculty of humanities at Hebrew University, Prof. Gabriel Motzkin, says that crisis periods are often actually periods of innovation, because of the need to cut back and select.

"The danger of certain areas of knowledge disappearing does exist, but sometimes instead of the disciplines that have disappeared, new disciplines emerge," he says. "It's impossible to preserve everything, even if they give me another $20 million."

Motzkin is referring to the threatened future of every discipline that has less than four positions for lecturers.

"All of the European language departments, for example, are at risk because they are small," he says. In this context, the threat to the Egyptology and Assyrian Studies departments, which each have two teaching positions and between five and 10 students each year, is the same as that facing the French department, where there are 60-80 students annually, but which also has only two teaching positions.

Another problem exists when it comes to advanced degrees. For example, in the Ancient History Department, where according to Motzkin there is an excellent teaching staff, there are no doctoral students, a fact that may place in question the continuation of the program to teach ancient Greek and Roman history.

[...]

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH:

Hanegbi: Police need money to protect Temple Mount
By JPOST.COM STAFF

Minister of Internal Security Tzahi Hanegbi said that the police force is in need of tens of millions of Shekels in order to provide optimal security on the Temple Mount, noting that - most importantly - the police are lacking in technological equipment, reported Israel Radio.

[...]

IN THE WAKE OF THE DESPICABLE ATTACKS on Christian churches in Iraq yesterday, the BBC has a survey article on "Iraqi Christians' long history." Most Iraqi Christians have Aramaic or Syriac as their liturgical language, although one of the attacks was also on an Armenian church. Terrorism against local Christians has been an increasing concern in Iraq and these latest attacks show once again the utter barbarism of the insurgents.

THE BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION WEBSITE has closed down indefinitely:

Due to funding problems, Bible and Interpretation is unable to continue publishing. We hope to return in the near future.

We hope they do too!

Thanks to Chuck Jones for alerting me to this.

ARAMAIC WATCH: FemaleFirst.co.uk has a series of articles on Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, including one on "The Passion Of The Christ - Aramaic an ancient language comes alive." Looks pretty historically accurate, although Hebrew is the basis of the Talmud, not Aramaic. It also tells the story of William Fulco's involvement in providing the ancient Aramaic for the script and it gives some interesting information on the experience the cast had with Aramaic:

Ultimately, the entire international cast of The Passion of The Christ had to learn portions of Aramaic � most doing so phonetically � becoming perhaps one of the largest groups of artists ever to take on an ancient tongue en masse.

For Gibson, the film�s �foreign language� had another benefit: learning Aramaic became a uniting factor among a cast made up of many languages, cultures and backgrounds. �To bring a cast from all over the world to one place and have them all learn this one language gave them a sense of common ground, of what they share and of connections that transcend language�, he says.

It also compelled the cast to look more deeply into their physical and emotional resources above and beyond the use of words.

�Speaking in Aramaic required something different from the actors�, observes Gibson, �because they had to compensate for the usual clarity of their own native language. It brought out a different level of performance. In a sense, it became good old-fashioned filmmaking because we were so committed to telling the story with pure imagery and expressiveness as much as anything else�.

I suspect that learning it "phonetically" means not just that they didn't learn the Aramaic alphabet, but also that they mouthed the lines without any great knowledge of the grammar or vocabulary, which is not exactly "learning" a language in my book. Still, I'm sure even that was a lot of work.

MORE ON THE COMING DEAD SEA SCROLLS EXHIBITION in Mobile Alabama:

Dead Sea Scrolls link up with NOBTS archaeological center (BPNews)
Jul 29, 2004
By Gary D. Myers

NEW ORLEANS (BP)--The Dead Sea Scrolls are coming to the Southeast.

The Gulf Coast Exploreum Science Center in Mobile, Ala., has been selected by the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA) to host the traveling Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit Jan. 20 to April 24, 2005. With assistance from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, the Exploreum will display 12 authentic Dead Sea scrolls on loan from the IAA.

[...]

The exhibit includes seven 2,000-year-old biblical scrolls with the oldest surviving text of Genesis, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Psalms, Isaiah and Jeremiah. The remaining fragments are from sectarian documents found at the Qumran site in Israel. One of 29 Deuteronomy fragments found at Qumran, the one that will be displayed in Mobile, is the only one to include all Ten Commandments.

[...]

While the exhibit made stops in Grand Rapids, Mich., in 2003 and will visit Houston in October 2004, the Mobile stop will be the largest display of biblical scrolls ever shown in the United States. The IAA only allows scrolls to be displayed for three to four months at a time. The scrolls must then return to Israel for 15 months of "rest" designed to preserve the fragile documents.

[...]

MORE LIBRARY LOOTING � IN FRANCE:

Biblioteque Hebrew archivist held for mass theft
By Haaretz Staff

The head of the French National Library's Hebrew-language archives has been arrested on suspicion of destroying or stealing irreplaceable books and documents he was responsible for, the French newspaper Liberation reported yesterday.

According to a prosecution source, "many dozens, perhaps hundreds, of documents were either mutilated or disappeared completely" from the shelves of the famous Biblioteque nationale de France.

[...]

The documents date back as far as the 14th century when king Charles V gave the order to begin collecting them. It is considered one of the richest Judaica collections and contains works from Yemen, Byzantium, North Africa, central Europe, France, Germany and England.

The works deal with all aspects of the Jewish religion, Hebrew language and literature, medicine as well as other philosophical and secular subjects; the collection also includes a Torah fragment from Constantinople written in 1505.

[...]