PaleoJudaica.com

Wednesday, August 25, 2004

Tuesday, August 24, 2004

THE BRITISH NEW TESTAMENT CONFERENCE WEBSITE now has the full schedule posted for the Edinburgh conference at the end of next week (2-4 September). This includes the main speakers, the seminar papers (with abstracts), and the short papers (also with abstracts). The full text of some papers is also (temporarily) posted. Download them now if you want them. I am nearly done with my paper and will get around to putting it online on my own web page as soon as I can, but it may be next week. I'm busy right now with my Anthropology and OT Symposium paper (the Symposium is in Glasgow on Friday) and other things, like The Book.

Monday, August 23, 2004

"IN SEARCH OF THE SACRED" Newsweek has an article on the supposed cave of John the Baptist, with some interesting digressions. Excerpts:

But the issue is more complicated for Jews. Orthodox Jews consider it a sin to disturb Jewish graves, but Dever, the American scholar, suspects the issue of Jewish graves is hiding a more serious agenda: "They don't want scientific investigation," he charges, "because they're afraid it will prove their patriarchal stories aren't historical." And, in fact, current scholarship is not especially congenial to Old Testament literalists. There is, essentially, no evidence for the existence of Abraham and the other patriarchs, and�despite more than a century of intensive study of Pharaonic Egypt�only the barest wisps of support for the Exodus, the central event in Jewish theology. There are accounts of Egyptian raids into Palestine that brought back captives, presumably as slaves, and a dispatch from a border guard in the early 12th century B.C., reporting that two people had escaped from Egypt into the Sinai. On the basis of what has been found so far, "there was no Exodus, at least not of hundreds of thousands of people making a miraculous escape across the desert," Dever says. "And there was no conquest" of the land of Canaan by Joshua. "There are several chapters in Joshua on Jericho," says Carol Meyers, a professor of Biblical studies at Duke, "but Jericho wasn't even inhabited at the time." Some things do check out: an Egyptian artifact, the Merneptah stele, refers to a victory by Pharaoh's Army over the Israelites in about 1200 B.C. That date falls in the period when the minimalists deny that Jews even lived in the Holy Land. This particular question is so politically fraught, according to Claire Pfann, a New Testament scholar in Jerusalem, that minimalists have accused their opponents of forging evidence to bolster the Zionist case.

So the territory on which Gibson has embarked is a treacherous one, both politically and geologically, but for good or ill he has jumped in with both feet. . . .

Few of his colleagues, even the few who have seen the cave, go along with him. "Maybe Gibson and the kibbutz want to attract tourists," says David Amit, a senior archeologist with the antiquities authority who describes himself as a friend of Gibson's. "It's pure fiction. It's not archeology." Even Tabor, who agrees with Gibson that the cave was undoubtedly used for ritual purposes in the first century, concedes that "you can't prove John was there." Among other objections to Gibson's theory, there is nothing in scripture to suggest that John baptized believers anywhere except in the Jordan River. And there is little more than conjecture for a scenario sketched in Gibson's book by which John "might very well have sent Jesus intentionally to visit the scene of his early baptism activities ... and our [Tzuba] was just that place."

See also the related Newsweek article "Unearthing the Bible" and Mark Goodacre's numerous postings on the John the Baptist cave story since it broke. I've linked to the first posting but there are lots more, so you might want to go to the NT Gateway main page and just keep scrolling down until you get to August 18.) Specialists are generally skeptical about the cave's connection to John. Me too. But if it can be established that it actually is a first-century installation involving ritual purification, that alone would be a tremendously important archaeological discovery.

ALSO FROM BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION NEWS:

Herod's Theater in Jerusalem - A Wooden Structure

Was Herod�s theater such a monumental structure? If it were a monumental structure in the urban center, could it disappear without trace or mention in Josephus' long and detailed description of the city
�
Joseph Patrich
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
August 2004

Sunday, August 22, 2004

ROGUE MEDIA ALERT. The Bible and Interpretation website is advertising for a field reporter:

Now Hiring: Bible and Interpretation Field Reporter

�� The Bible and Interpretation has an opening for a part-time field reporter to write stories on the latest archaeological discoveries in Israel and the Middle East, interview archaeologists and submit photos.

In order to be considered for this position, applicants must meet the following qualifications:
� Academic background in Biblical studies and archaeology
� Access to a digital camera
� Excellent writing skills
� Reside in Israel

�� This position will remain open until filled. Interested individuals should send short r�sum� and letter of interest to: melliott@bibleinterp.com

When they says "hiring," I take them to mean, you know, for money. A journalist who reports on archaeology stories and who is also trained in archaeology. Imagine that! Let's get the word out on this one. Well done!

EPHRAIM ISAAC is profiled in the Princeton Packet (via Bible and Interpretation News):

Ethopian Jew directs Institute of Semitic Studies in Princeton.

��Think of Ephraim Isaac as a bridge between geographical regions, cultures, religions and languages.
��As an Ethiopian Jew, Professor Isaac, director of the Institute of Semitic Studies in Princeton, bridges the divide between Africa and the West, Africa and the Middle East, blacks and whites and between Christians, Muslims and Jews.
�
[...]

��Professor Isaac is the son of Moses Isaac, a Jewish silversmith and Hebrew teacher from Yemen who was serving as a ritual slaughterer to a Yemeni community in Ethiopia.

[...]

��Professor Isaac was the first professor hired in Afro-American Studies at Harvard. Princeton Professor Cornel West was one of his students.
��He has taught at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Howard University Divinity School, Lehigh University and Bard College.
��His research spans biblical Hebrew, the late Second Temple Period in Israel, rabbinic literature, Ethiopian history and the origin of the African slave trade.
��Professor Isaac has been a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities and at the Institute for Advanced Study.
��There is a scholarship in his name at Harvard.
��He has translated The Book of Enoch from a 14th century Ge'ez manuscript and is currently working with faculty members at the Princeton Theological Seminary on translating Enoch from fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

[...]

TECHNOLOGY WATCH:

Arts: Digital Digging (Jerusalem Report via Archaeologica News)
Matti Friedman

A skeptical archaeologist uses state-of-the-art technology to reconstruct a long-forgotten synagogue in the Golan

[...]

You won�t find too many Israelis named Jesus -- Yeshu, in Hebrew -- but one of them is the long-haired, chain-smoking, self-educated archaeologist digging Um el-Kanatir. Yeshu Dray�s real name is Yehoshua, but he has been called Yeshu ever since (he explains rather vaguely) an incident in which his army buddies crucified him for a few hours in a Sinai wadi in the early 1970s. Dray, 51, never formally studied archaeology, but his one-man company, Restoration of Ancient Technology, has carried out some of the most important reconstructions of Israel�s ancient infrastructure. He rebuilt a section of the famous aqueduct that led from the base of the Carmel hills to the Roman city of Caesarea, for example, and part of another one that carried water from what�s today called the Etzion Bloc, south of Jerusalem, to the Temple Mount. Dray�s companion, Ilana Gonen, is also an archaeologist, and the two are working together on the Um el-Kanatir dig. The name of the site had circulated among archaeologists not only for the anticipated richness of its artifacts, but also because of the physical challenge it posed to the potential excavator. That is what drew Dray and Gonen there.

[...]

Putting a jumble of ancient rocks together this way is a tremendously difficult thing to do, and this is where the cutting-edge technology comes in. At Um el-Kanatir, Dray brought in a local company called Mabat 3-D Technology. Using laser scanners on tripods, the Mabat crew carried out scans of the ruin before the dig began, taking shots of the site from a perspective of a full 360 degrees, and then putting them together to create an overall 3-D image of the synagogue. The scan recorded the exact location and angle of each stone, each pillar and each ornament, before anything was moved. Once the location of all the artifacts had been noted digitally, diggers could begin to clear the rubble away. Knowing precisely where and at what angle the stones were found allows Dray to induce where they were before they fell. Much of this work is also done on computer, on a program that Gonen designed, which helps them to put the pieces together like a digital puzzle, seeing how they may have fit before actually moving them on the ground.

In order to keep track of the thousands of building stones on the site, Dray and Gonen implant microchips -- 3mm by 11mm -- into tiny holes drilled into them. A sensor detects the chip and gives the piece�s catalog number, which in turn tells the diggers the precise original location in the ruin provided by the laser scan. "This is the first time Israel has seen these methods," says Gideon Foerster, a veteran Hebrew University professor of archaeology who took part in the landmark digs at Masada and at Beit She�an. "They make it much easier for the archaeologist to place each of the findings. When you write numbers on the stones, which is the way it has been done until now, they get erased, and information is lost." Of Dray, Foerster says, "He�s an imaginative guy, and there is no question that he does very good work."

[...]

The synagogue was a basilica, the standard Roman-influenced design for public buildings at that time. There were balconies, supported by pillars, around three sides of the inner space, and a central nave some 40 feet high. The diggers found Byzantine coins under the floor, left there when the building was constructed, perhaps for good luck. They found household implements, agricultural tools, and a bizarre, beautiful Aladdin-style bronze lamp shaped like the head of a satyr; the flame would have flickered from the tip of his beard.

According to the Hebrew University�s Foerster, the synagogue is one of the best-preserved examples ever found in Israel. "This is undoubtedly a unique site," he says. "The number of findings, the fact that they were found in situ, and their exceptional level of preservation -- all of these things make it special."

The dig's findings sketch a portrait of a prosperous Jewish settlement, with perhaps 250 inhabitants, during the 5th and 6th centuries CE, when the Golan was in a corner of the newly Christian empire run out of Byzantium. . . .

The village was abandoned in the middle of the 8th century. Dray guesses that the end came in 749, on January 18, when a massive earthquake rocked the Jordan Rift valley, devastating Jerusalem and other urban centers. . . .

Now that the stones have been scanned, tagged and cleared, and now that the shape of the building has emerged, the next stage, say Gonen and Dray, is to raise it. "We can reconstruct the whole building -- it�s all there," Dray says with great enthusiasm, estimating that they will need about four and a half months to plan and carry out the reconstruction. The problem, predictably, is money. The dig has cost $150,000 so far, and Dray and Gonen figure they need another $250,000 to rebuild the synagogue. For now, they are continuing small-scale work on the site, hoping that the money materializes. If it does, Um el-Kanatir could become one of the Golan Height�s most popular archaeological sites.

[...]

TWO BOOK REVIEWS FROM JEWSWEEK (by Bradford R. Pilcher):

Sarah Laughed: modern lessons from the wisdom and stories of Biblical women
by Vanessa L. Ochs, Published by McGraw-Hill, 235 pages, Purchase
Summary in a sentence: University of Virginia religion professor retells the stories of Old Testament matriarchs such as Eve, Sarah, Leah and others in fresh and creative ways that help today's women rediscover their ancient wisdom and insights.
Why you should read it: Assuming you want to learn from the past, this book does a good job of humanizing heroes into terms we can understand.
Why you might be turned off: Assuming you want your Biblical literacy to be written by a rabbi and published by Feldheim, then this is not your cup of tea.

[...]

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Talmud
by Rabbi Parry Aaron, Published by Alpha Books, 345 pages, Purchase
Summary in a sentence: If you thought the Torah was heady stuff, try the Talmud that comments on it, but worry not for an idiot's guide is here.
Why you should read it: The truth is the Torah is only half the picture, and much of Jewish insight is contained in the rabbinical commentaries on our sacred scrolls. For that reason alone, you should get into Talmudic study, but it's not easy. An idiot's guide couldn't hurt.
Why you might be turned off: You might, just maybe, even if only a little bit, think of yourself as something better than an idiot. Your elitist tendencies and egotism run amok will likely prevent you from stooping to publicly peruse from the pages of an idiot's guide.

Saturday, August 21, 2004

PALEOJUDAICA NOW HAS A LINK AT BELIEFNET, one of only five listed blogs on Judaism. The editor characterizes PaleoJudaica as:

Weblog about ancient Judaism (yet updated surprisingly often)

I think this says rather more about the editor's preconceptions than about my site, but I'm glad of the link nonetheless. If you've come here via it, welcome! You can find out more about this blog at the "About PaleoJudaica" link to the right. And, as the Beliefnet blurb says, I have managed to add postings pretty much every day for a long time.

FROM THE "YOU COULDN'T MAKE THIS UP" FILE:

Madonna buys Spears Kabbalah engagement gift

World Entertainment News Network
Posted August 20 2004

Legendary singer Madonna has bought Britney Spears a "priceless" 12th century Kabbalah book to celebrate her engagement to dancer Kevin Federline.

The pop icons are devout followers of the mystical offshoot of Judaism, so the singer is thrilled with the special bound edition of Zohar - also known as Book Of Splendour - and refuses to go anywhere without it.

[...]

Between Mel Gibson and Madonna, Aramaic has a whole new lease on life.

Friday, August 20, 2004

THERE'S A DEAD SEA SCROLLS EXHIBITION IN BRAZIL reported by, and I'm not making this up, Gringoes.com. Here's their announcement with some comments from me in square brackets:

Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibition in Rio de Janeiro

Those in Rio are getting the chance to behold one of the most prized historical documents ever: the Dead Sea Scrolls. Recently open to the public at the Museu Historico Nacional in Rio, the exhibit contains three original scrolls and 7 replicas, along with 80 artifacts and translations to better understand the documents (unless you�re fluent in Aramaic and Hebrew) and for comparisons with biblical texts. A little history lesson: the manuscripts were found throughout eleven caves in the desert of Quaran [That's "Qumran."], preserved due to low humidity and high temperatures since, around, 200 to 70 BC [That's 200 B.C.E. to 70 C.E.]. Historians state its importance is that of a link between Christianity, Judaism and Islamism {I think - I hope! - they mean "Islam."], mainly since the original owners of the documents were Essenes, a Jewish Sect said to have had Jesus Christ as a member [Uh, no on that last bit about Jesus.]. The Pinacoteca of S�o Paulo will be receiving the exhibit on the 29th of October.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH:

Plan to remove Mount artifacts criticized (Jerusalem Post)
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS

A group of senior Israeli archeologists have condemned Wakf plans to remove thousands of tons of earth and rubble mixed with assorted archeologically rich artifacts uncovered during past construction work carried out by the Wakf (Muslim religious trust) on the Temple Mount, warning of repeat archeological damage at the nation's holiest site.

In a letter sent to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Sunday, the nonpartisan Committee Against the Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount deplored such action as "an irrevocable and most serious archeological, cultural, and scientific crime at the state's most important antiquities site."

[...]

The piles of earth, mixed in with heaps of garbage and construction materials, have been sitting on the eastern side of the Temple Mount for at least four years, archeologists said, and date back to the massive unilateral Wakf construction work carried out in the late 1990s at an architectural support of the mount, known as Solomon's Stables. The site was secretly turned into the biggest mosque in the country, which can accommodate 30,000 people.

Following its completion, Wakf officials dumped more than 12,000 tons of earth, with history-rich artifacts, at a garbage dump outside the Old City, an action which the Antiquities Authority called "an unprecedented archeological crime."

Concern over a similar, if smaller-scale, move now after the precedent set by the removal of antiquities by the Wakf five years ago, is heightening the archeologists' concern.

[...]

"WHAT IS COPTOLOGY?" Jill Kamil reports on the recent Paris conference in Al Ahram. (This is the same conference at which the recovery of the Coptic Gospel of Judas was announced.) Excerpts:

The only absolute certainty is that 'Coptic' has to do with Egypt," observed Professor M Tito Orlandi of Rome's University of La Sapienza in his presidential address to the eighth International Association for Coptic Studies (IACS) congress in Paris last week [Actually, it was in the beginning of July. - JRD].

The astounding fact is that, apart from linguistics (which alone can be clearly defined) there is neither an obvious character, nor can the limitations be set, on all other fields of Coptic studies, whether history, geography, literature or art. This vitally important subject concerning Orthodox Egyptian Christianity has been conscientiously considered, deliberated on and studied in depth at an international level for the last 30 years. But while there have been specialised studies by scholars around the world, seven international congresses and seminars in Egypt and abroad, its parameters are still being debated.

[...]

The presentations covered archaeology and art history, the Gnostics and Manacheism, documentary sources including the Nag Hammadi codices, papyrus collections, ostraca and specific inscriptions from various sources, discoveries of wall paintings in abandoned hermitages and in a cave church, and studies on Copts and Muslims in the Late Antique and early Islamic periods. Numerous studies have been made in recent years on textiles, monasticism, theology and magic.

Four important and useful papers were given on the progress made in the period 2000-2004: Research and Publications in Coptic Papyrology by Terry Wilfong of the University of Michigan, Research and Publication in Coptic Art by Karel Inem�e, Actualiti�s des Mus�es et Expositions by Dominique Benazeth, and Copto-Arabic Studies by Mark Swanson.

The core disciplines referred to by Orlandi in his presidential address included the study of the Coptic language in all its synchronic aspects, the study of Coptic literature written in Coptic (although from the intertextual and historical points of view it cannot be distinguished from respective contemporary Greek, Arabic, and Demotic literature); the study of the Egyptian church in all its aspects after the Council of Chalcedon in 451; the study of paleography; the study of ecclesiastical and monastic Egyptian art after Chalcedon; and the study of papyri and similar documents written in Coptic.

[...]

And so, while confusion remains over the use of the very word "Coptic", with philologists referring to the last phase of the Egyptian language, theologians to the Egyptian faith, and art historians, until recently, describing as "Coptic" anything that did not fit into other well-defined parameters, the situation looks bleak. "I could not say whether the academic teaching of Coptology has improved in the last 30 years," Orlandi admitted, "or even by how much, because there is no assessment of previous activity".

Although Professor Orlandi ended his address on an optimistic note, recalling important achievements in the last three decades with particular mention of an encyclopaedia, grammatical, historical atlas, handbook of liturgy, and a minor but total edition of the Coptic Bible, a history of Copto-Arabic literature as well as ongoing excavation of archaeological sites and diverse studies, when we observe the overall picture it would appear that the congress, for all its scope, may not have been the success it should have been. Gaps between different disciplines seem to be widening rather than diminishing, and still open to question is a definition of Coptic and the broad parameters of Coptic studies.

There's lots more. Worth a read, although I think the treatment is unduly pessimistic.

MORE ON BIBLICAL TEXTS AND ANCIENT INSCRIPTIONS: In reply to my posting on his article, Lawrence Mykytiuk e-mailed on Wednesday:

Thank you, Jim, for quoting and summarizing my July SBL Forum article, "A Royal Dignitary - Or a "Royal" Disappointment? Who's Who in Biblical Texts and Ancient Inscriptions," in PaleoJudaica.com with your comments. It's nice to know that we agree on Smelik's very practical method that aims at objectivity by comparing discoveries with other discoveries before biblical texts. I followed that method in my forthcoming book.

Regarding IDs 6 & 7 in the article, Tsidqiyahu and Hanani, I can say with certainty that the bulla is definitely unprovenanced. I apologize for not making that explicit in my article; in the interest of saving space, I chose to leave it implicit. No uncertainty on my part was involved. The references are Andre Lemaire, "Nouvelles don�es �pigraphiques sur l'�poque royale isra�lite," _Revue des etudes juives_ 156 (1997): 445-61 (these pages reference the whole article); idem, "Nouveaux sceaux et bulles pal�o-h�bra�ques," _Eretz-Israel_ 26 (Frank Moore Cross Volume, 1999): 108* and 111*, no. 10, photograph on 110*, no. 22 (the entire article is 106*-15*).

Stephen Carlson is entirely on target in questioning the second-known bulla of Berekyahu ben Neriyahu has(s)ofer in his journalistically cute question, which I enjoy, "Has anyone compared the fingerprint on this bulla to those of 20th century personages?" (Stephen C. Carlson, "An Antiquities Forgery Ring?," Hypotyposeis, posted Tuesday, February 24, 2004, accessed August 18, 2004, available http: www.mindspring.com/~scarlson/hypotyposeis/2004_02_22_arch.html ). Once the first bulla was published, a second would not have been too difficult to forge (though bullae take more steps to forge, therefore forged bullae are more easily detected than forged stone seals), so he is right to emphasize the second bulla. And certainly with the skepticism rightly aroused by recent scandalous developments, it is appropriate and almost irresistible to do so.

But the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the first-known bulla, as Avigad (1986) describes them, seem to me to support the likelihood of authenticity. I'm wondering whether you have given due weight to the details of his description in the book you refer to, _Hebrew Bullae from the Time of Jeremiah: Remnants of a Burnt Archive_ (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1986), 12-13, notably:

". . . Bullae were brought to me in small batches. There was no
reason to suspect their authenticity, and I seriously doubt whether
it would be possible to forge such burnt and damaged bullae.
Despite the delay in the appearance of subsequent batches of bullae,
there was no doubt that all of them belonged to a single assemblage;
identical impressions often occurred in different batches, and
occasionally two fragments of a single bullae [_sic_] from different
batches, could be joined. This was revealed only by means of enlarged
photographs" (p. 13).

Avigad, at that time long the dean of Hebrew epigraphers, goes on to mention "two hundred bullae" of this group in the possession of Yoav Sasson, "forty-nine further items" in the possession of Reuben Hecht, and a small number, less than a dozen, once photographed by Avigad, whose whereabouts had became unknown. So here we have what according to Avigad's photographic evidence began as a relatively gigantic hoard of some 250 to 260 bullae, burned and fragmented, then divided up for sale in small batches. I would like to inquire: what forger in 1975, when skepticism had not at all been inflamed on the scale we see today, would have found it necessary to go to all that trouble forging this huge hoard of bullae, then burning and crushing them--just to sell them to antiquities collectors? Avigad himself doubted whether it was even possible to forge bullae in such bad condition.

Since then, it has become difficult indeed to find any experienced, senior epigrapher who seriously doubts the authenticity of the first-known bulla of Berekyahu. How many can you name? What reasons do they give?

In an era in which impoverished Arab villagers go out at night in large groups to dig illegally (cf. Avigad [1986], 13), one can expect that at least some artifacts that appear on the antiquities market will be authentic but that this fact will not be directly verifiable. So it becomes necessary to rely on technical analytical methods and on the expertise of top epigraphers. Gabriel Barkay and Andy Vaughn are, in my estimation, among the latter. Barkay and Vaughn worked for hundreds of hours documenting and analyzing lmlk inscriptions, as is evident in their publications. Vaughn thought it entirely appropriate to use the hoard of bullae published in Avigad (1986) as a supplement to his provenanced, stratigraphically dated, plainly reliable inscriptions in producing his dissertation (Note: in no instance whatsoever does Vaughn's dissertation base any conclusions at all on unprovenanced material; rather, the unprovenanced bullae, whose letter shapes correspond remarkably well to those of the provenanced bullae, serve only to supplement the provenanced material, on which the paleographic conclusions are clearly based). In the bibliography that follows, the last article demonstrates his concern regarding authenticity, which produced a new, statistical method of detecting likely forgeries in groups of inscriptions.

Vaughn, Andrew G. "The Chronicler's Account of Hezekiah: The Relationship of His-
torical Data to a Theological Interpretation of 2 Chronicles 29-32." Ph.D. diss.,
Princeton Theological Seminary, 1996.
---. "Methodological Issues in the Palaeographic Dating of Hebrew Seals." Paper
presented at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research,
Philadelphia, Pa., November 19, 1995.
---. "Palaeographic Dating of Judaean Seals and Its Significance for Biblical Re-
search." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 313 (1999):
43-64.
---. Theology, History and Archaeology in the Chronicler's Account of Hezekiah.
Archaeology and Biblical Studies 4. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999.
Vaughn, Andrew G., and Carolyn Pillers Dobler. "A Provenance Study of Hebrew Seals
and Seal Impressions-A Statistical Analysis." In I Will Tell Secret Things from
Long Ago (Abiah Chidot Menei-Kedem)-Ps. 78:2b): Archaeological and Histori-
cal Studies in Honor of Amihai Mazar on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday.
Edited by Aren M. Maeir and Pierre M. de Miroschedji. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisen-
brauns, in press.

Of course, if you have indeed avoided "easy skepticism" and done the homework that can justify your views, and if you still remain skeptical of the authenticity of the first-known bulla of Berekyahu and its companion in the same group, the one and only bulla "of Yeraxme'el the king's son," you certainly have your right of independent judgment, and there is little more that I can say.

On second thought, I can offer a second shameless plug for my book that is already shamelessly plugged in the article (smile). I have been hoping that the SBL paperback would appear next month, but I do not know if it will; Brill is advertising their doubly overpriced cloth edition as available in November.

As for not paying enough attention to the matter of forgeries and fakes, the article only mentioned such issues because of space limits and the necessity to stick to the matter of IDs. In fact, the editor suggested the outline of the article for me, which made it convenient to write. The article is intended for the educated non-specialist and for the awareness of professionals in relevant fields. In the current environment, I felt it was only necessary to recognize the problem of possible forgeries and fakes. You may note that each ID or potential ID is presented with some note of whether the inscription that offers it is provenanced or not.

I replied:

Thanks very much for taking the time to reply to my PaleoJudaica post. I used to follow NWS epigraphy very closely, but I have to admit that I haven't had time to for some years. It may be that I was being too skeptical in my post. My point was that there is good reason to fear that a "monster forgery machine" has been churning out high quality fake Hebrew and Aramaic inscriptions for quite a long time. As early as the 1970s? Perhaps not. But I will feel better if the Golan trial allows us to map out whether there was a forgery ring and, if so, who was involved, when it started and how long it operated, and, ideally (and optimistically) which pieces it faked.

May I turn the question around and ask you how worried you are about the above and at what point (i.e., around what year) you think the forgery ring may have been putting professionally convincing fakes on the market? Would you agree with me in principle that unprovenanced inscriptions recovered after such and such a year (you fill in the blank) should be assumed to be fakes unless there is unusual collateral evidence of some kind to authenticate them?

He replied yesterday (and my e-mail account only let me see the message today):

Thank you for your kind reply below, Jim. I'm afraid I would have to do a considerable amount of homework in order to be much help to you regarding any forgery ring, monster or otherwise. The most recent piece I've read on the subject is Chris Rollston's strong article, "Non-Provenanced Epigraphs I: Pillaged Antiquities, Northwest Semitic Forgeries, and Protocols for Laboratory Tests," _Maarav_ 10 (2003):
135-93. Part II may appear soon.(footnote 1)

Let's say we knew for certain that a monster forgery ring operated between 1985 and 1995 (I'm picking numbers out of the air and hoping they don't happen to coincide with any real ring of forgers [nervous smile]). The proportion of forgeries on the market would probably increase, assuming no simultaneous, large increase of authentic items on the antiquities market (and if there were, how would we track that?). In any event, there would still be at least some authentic, unaltered artifacts on the market. Suspicion should of course be much greater for items that surfaced during those years, but I would be reluctant to assume that unless there is unusual collateral evidence of some kind to authenticate them, _all_ items from those years were forged or faked.

I sense a strong desire to push back against forgers; this is a good urge, but in my opinion, the way to push back should be as _refined_ as it is forceful. If you will pardon a distant analogy that may ring true psychologically, I recall a description of Marxism that you may have heard. Perhaps it came from a disenchanted Soviet citizen(?). A paraphrase goes something like this: Marxism is an attempt to heal the most delicateand intricate problems of society by the use of an axe. So, although I certainly respect differing opinions, I tend not to follow the idea of a blanket assumption of forgery during
certain years. If the Golan trial should yield specific information, then of course that would be one key to a refined response.

(footnote 1) On February 3, 2004, the Maarav Editor announced,
"Please note that MAARAV 11/1 (2004) will be appearing during mid to
late summer. MAARAV 11/2 (2004) will appear around the time of the
annual meetings of SBL and ASOR." ANE: DISCUSSION LIST FOR THE STUDY
OF THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST, accessed: August 19, 2004; available:
https://listhost.uchicago.edu/pipermail/ane/2004-February/011769.html.

Fair points all, and I withdraw my objection to the Avigad collection. And I'll go along with "suspicion should be much greater for items that surfaced during those years," as long as it is spelled out that potentially we're up against fakes circulated during those years which were produced by people who knew pretty well what they were doing and who made them with the aim of fooling contemporary professional epigraphers. As to the nature and extent of this alleged forgery ring, I shall be watching the Golan trial closely to see what emerges. Larry Mykytiuk also mentions that he's now thinking of writing an article on when to trust unprovenanced inscriptions. I hope very much that he does. I'd love to read it.

PHILOLOGOS DISCUSSES JEWISH CALENDARS THROUGH THE AGES in "A Yearly Conundrum" (The Forward). Excerpts:

Readers Ze'ev Orzech and Seth Cohen have written separately to inquire about the names of the months in the Hebrew calendar. . . .

Although both Mr. Orzech and Mr. Cohen have confused certain things, they do, between them, mention all four of the different Hebrew calendars known to us historically, i.e., 1) an ancient, lunar, prebiblical calendar, known only from a stone tablet found in an excavation near Tel Gezer halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, that indeed dates to about 1000 B.C.E.; 2) a second lunar calendar, the one used by the Bible, which generally refers to the months of the year only by number (e.g., "the first month," "the second month," etc.), but also calls four of them by name; 3) the Hebrew calendar we use today, which is also lunar and was brought back to Palestine by the Babylonian exiles returning in 538 BCE after the Babylonian empire was destroyed by the Persian King Cyrus; 4) a solar calendar used by some Palestinian Jews (including the sectarians of the Dead Sea Scrolls) who refused to recognize the Babylonian calendar in the last centuries before the Common Era.

[...]

Thursday, August 19, 2004

MY E-MAIL HAS BEEN DOWN most of the day. The University server seems to have crashed, perhaps due to the storms and flooding we've been having this week. I was expecting at least one blog-related message today, so apologies if you've e-mailed me and I haven't responded. I'll get back to you as soon as I can.

UPDATE (20 August): Still down this morning. Sorry.

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.

Wednesday, August 18, 2004

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.

[...]

Tuesday, August 17, 2004

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.)

Monday, August 16, 2004

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

Sunday, August 15, 2004

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.

Saturday, August 14, 2004

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".

Friday, August 13, 2004

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.

Thursday, August 12, 2004

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.

Wednesday, August 11, 2004

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.

Advertisements

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.

[...]

Tuesday, August 10, 2004

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.

[...]

Monday, August 09, 2004

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).