PROFESSOR MICHAEL GRANT - R.I.P.:

Professor Michael Grant (The Telegraph)
(Filed: 08/10/2004)

Professor Michael Grant, who died on Monday aged 89, was a don at Cambridge, Professor of Humanity (Latin) at Edinburgh, and vice-chancellor at the Universities of Khartoum and Queen's, Belfast, but was best known as a prolific populariser of ancient history who published nearly 50 books on the Greeks, Romans and early Christianity.

Grant was always a lucid and erudite writer, who took the view that a study of the classical world was both "infinitely worth studying in its own right, without any consideration of modern analogies" and also that "without Latin, people are handicapped because they do not understand their past, and cannot therefore effectively plan their futures".

This attitude did nothing to impede his range, nor his appeal to the ordinary reader as well as the academic professional. As well as scholarly publications on the coinage of Rome (he was a distinguished numismatist), he produced biographies of Julius Caesar, Nero, Herod, Cleopatra, Jesus, St Peter and St Paul; accounts of the literature, history, art, mythology and social life of Greece and Rome; and found time to examine the Middle Ages and ancient Israel.

[...]

But there was scarcely an aspect of ancient life which did not receive Grant's attention: The History of Rome (1978); The Jews in the Roman World (1973); Art in the Roman Empire (1995); The Classical Greeks (1989); The Hellenistic Greeks (1990) and many more were ground out by his pen.

[...]

Read it all. What a fascinating life.

On a related note, I've learned that the memorial service for Paddy Best is to be held a week from today, on 15 October.

ARCHAEOLOGIST GABRIEL BARKAY is interviewed about the Temple Mount by Pat Robertson for The 700 Club. Quite a combination.

TODAY IS SHEMINI ATZERET and tomorrow (starting at sundown tonight) will be Simhat Torah, except in Israel, where both holidays are today. (Sorry, this was mixed up in the original posting. Thanks to reader Michael Eliyahou for the correction. It's been one of those days.)

ANOTHER RITUAL FROM THIRD-TEMPLE RADICALS:

Activists reenact Temple ritual to remove Sharon (Jerusalem Post)
By YAAKOV KATZ

A group of right-wing Jewish activists reenacted a religious ritual from the First Temple period at the Shiloah Spring in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan Tuesday night, with the goal of removing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon from power and instituting a Jewish monarchy.

With shofars blasting in the background, the group � led by Prof. Hillel Weiss, a well-known Temple Mount activist and a lecturer on literature at Bar-Ilan University, and Rabbi Yosef Dayan, who recently threatened to instigate a death curse against Sharon � conducted the nisuah hamayim ritual, which they said "will begin the process of removing the secular Israeli government."

"This ceremony will lay the foundations for instituting a Jewish king, a Jewish court, and the Third Temple," Weiss told the 40 participants sitting near the Shiloah Spring. "We will draw inspiration and strength from the ceremony as the holy priests did in Temple times, and we will ensure that the Jewish people will not be removed from their land."

[...]

Well, I think the stuff about rebuilding the third temple and replacing the secular government with a religious monarchy is pretty creepy, but as long as they keep their actions to rituals and words (not involving, say, incitement to murder), they can do whatever they like as far as I'm concerned.

MORE ON THE DISCOVERIES CONCERNING EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHICS by a medieval Arab alchemist: Carla Sulzbach e-mails to point me to a message by Lennart Sundelin on the ANE list. Key paragraph:

Unfortunately it [the Kitab Shawq al-Mustaham] was not produced by someone who could actually read hieroglyphics. The Hermetic lore that this work was based on was circulating in Europe, too, long before Champollion, and it was an approach that long proved a dead-end for those trying to 'crack the code'. I think we're still stuck with Champollion and the Rosetta Stone. Alas!

You can find the 1806 English translation of the Arabic work (along with the Arabic original) here and decide for yourself. As Carla points out in her e-mail, whatever the accomplishment of Abu Bakr Ahmad Ibn Wahshiyah, it's important to keep in perspective that there was no follow-up and the hieroglyphics were not actually deciphered before Champollion.

It's an interesting episode in intellectual history, but my "extraordinary discovery" below was an overstatement. The Observer article overplays the story too. The article in the Daily Times is more measured.

I'M SKEPTICAL, but this is a very interesting story and, if the claims are borne out, it would be an extraordinary discovery:

Arab scholar 'cracked Rosetta code' 800 years before the West

Robin McKie, science editor
Sunday October 3, 2004
The Observer

It is famed as a critical moment in code-breaking history. Using a piece of basalt carved with runes and words, scholars broke the secret of hieroglyphs, the written 'language' of the ancient Egyptians.

A baffling, opaque language had been made comprehensible, and the secrets of one of the world's greatest civilisations revealed - thanks to the Rosetta Stone and the analytic prowess of 18th and 19th century European scholars.

But now the supremacy of Western thinking has been challenged by a London researcher who claims that hieroglyphs had been decoded hundreds of years earlier - by an Arabic alchemist, Abu Bakr Ahmad Ibn Wahshiyah.

'It has taken years of painstaking research to prove this,' said Dr Okasha El Daly, at UCL's Institute of Archaeology. 'I was convinced that Western scholars were not the first, and I have found evidence that shows Arabian scholars broke the code a thousand years ago.'

[...]

Via Bible and Interpretation News. Dr Okasha El Daly is listed as an honorary research assistant at the UCL Institute of Archaeology and you can find an abstract of one of his relevant papers here. More biography here and here.

Also, the Daily Times (Pakistan) has an article today ("Egyptian scholar finds Arab insights into hieroglyphs") with more details. Excerpt:

But Okasha El Daly, who lectures at University College London and holds an outreach post at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, says that a thousand years earlier, when Arab civilisation was close to its height, Muslim scholars not only took an interest in ancient Egypt but could also correctly interpret at least a few characters in the hieroglyphic script. From libraries in Paris and Istanbul, he has dug up manuscripts, which contain tables showing the phonetic value of hieroglyphs. Three Arab scholars between them correctly identified about 10 of the several dozen hieroglyphs, which they thought made up a phonetic alphabet, he told Reuters.

But more importantly, at a time when medieval Europeans thought that hieroglyphs were just magical symbols, the Arab scholars grasped two of the basic principles - that some signs represented sounds while others were determinatives, signs that conveyed the concept of the word pictorially.

That breakthrough was the work of Ahmad bin Abu Bakr ibn Wahshiyah, a ninth and 10th century polymath who lived in Iraq and wrote about everything from chemistry to the environment to agriculture and pre-Islamic cultures.

There's more and it's a very interesting read. I wonder if any of it has been published in peer-review journals. If any Egyptologists out there have comments, drop me a note.

UPDATE (6 October): See the next post for more.

TALMUD SCHOLAR YISRAEL TA-SHEMA HAS PASSED AWAY. Ha'aretz has an obituary:

Prof. Yisrael Ta-Shema, halakhic scholar, dies at 68

By Avi Katzman

Prof. Yisrael Ta-Shema passed away yesterday at the age of 68, following a long illness. Ta-Shema was a 2003 Israel Prize laureate for Talmud studies and a renowned scholar of the halakha of the Middle Ages and early modern period.

[...]

May his memory be for a blessing.

VERY STRANGE. As noted below, I had great difficulty posting today. Blogger has been doing very odd things to me lately in any case: on my office iMac it makes IE 5.2 crash every time I try to open it, yet the same browser works fine on my eMac at home. And now Netscape 7.2 at my office and 7.0 at home are having weird but somewhat different Blogger problems involving buttons that won't work. So I spent the day looking in frustration at a typo in a name which Blogger refused to repost with the correction. Grrrrr.

Is anyone else out there experiencing problems with Blogger?

I REGRET TO INFORM YOU OF THE DEATH OF PROFESSOR ERNEST ("PADDY") BEST, who taught New Testament at the University of St. Andrews (I believe in the 1960s and 70s) before moving to the University of Glasgow. He retired quite a few years ago and moved back to St. Andrews, and I saw him now and again, especially in my early years here. I have no futher details at present, but I'll let you know when I know more.

Blogger is in a bad mood this morning and is consenting to post only very sporadically. I'm doing my best to work around this.

"IN THE BEGINNING": In the current issue of the Forward, Philologos discusses Bereshit, the first word in the Hebrew Bible. (Curiously, the title of the essay is "Cracking the Whip," which appears to be an accidental repetition of the title of last week's essay.) Concluding paragraph of this week's:

Ibn Ezra was expressing himself carefully because he was taking the philosophical position in one of the great medieval debates between orthodox theology and Aristotelian philosophy � namely, that concerning the question: Was matter created by God, or is it coeternal with him? Conventionally minded Christian, Jewish and Muslim thinkers all insisted, basing themselves on Scripture, on creation ex nihilo, whereas the Aristotelians, like the great Muslim thinker Averroes, held that God fashioned the world out of matter but not matter itself. Ibn Ezra used the reading of bara as bero to come down on the side of Averroes. The next time you are tempted to slight the Hebrew vowel points, reflect that a small difference in a couple of them can change the nature of the universe.

My doctoral student, Sam Giere, is writing a dissertation on the early history of interpretation of Genesis 1:1-5, the first day of creation, so I asked him for his thoughts on the essay. He replies:

My initial reaction is this: The ambiguity of the unpointed text can lead down three paths (helpfully outlined, if I remember correctly, by Wenham in his commentary on Genesis). (1) V.1 is a title and summary for the rest of the account. (2) V.3 is the main clause with v.1 being a temporal clause and v.2 a parenthetic clause - "When God began to create the heavens and the earth, The earth being formless and void, darkness upon the face of the deep, and the breath of God hovering upon the face of the waters, God said, "Let there be light." And there was light." (my translation) One of these first two options seems most appropriate as it is anachronistic to see creatio ex nihilo in Gen 1. Which leads me to option three (3) which preserves the possibility of creatio ex nihilo.

This position understands that v.1 is a statement of the first act of creation. God created the heavens and the earth, so that from that point God has something with which to work. I happen to be looking through Jubilees at the moment for a class I'm teaching and noticed that the author of Jub states unequivocally that on the first day God created the heavens, the earth, the waters, all the spirits, the abyss, darkness, and light effectively taking out of play any difficulties in the first three verses of Genesis. On the genesis of creatio ex nihilo, there is a relatively new article by J.C. O'Neill ("How Early is the Doctrine of Creatio ex Nihilo?" JTS 53 (2002): 449-465) which readers may find interesting. O'Neill explores the question stated in the article title by looking at 2 Macc 7, Joseph and Aseneth 12, Philo's perceived interactions between Moses and Plato, Shepherd of Hermas, among others. He suggests that the Shepherd has a credal formulation of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo which is known by the mother in 2 Macc 7 and appropriated by in the New Testament. While I haven't had time to go over O'Neill's argument with a fine tooth comb, if his argument is correct the genesis of creatio ex nihilo is unlikely to date back to the Priestly writer/editor(s). Ibn Ezra aside, the question of the ambiguity of bereshit will not be solved from the perspective of creatio ex nihilo or not...

(His ellipses at the end.) For what it's worth, I lean toward his interpretation 2 as the correct understanding of the original sense of Gen 1:1. In other words, I think Genesis (P) taught the existence of primordial matter alongside of God. You can find roughly the same grammatical construction (noun in construct plus finite verbal clause construed together as a subordinate clause) in the Hebrew of Hosea 1:2.

UPDATE: Apologies for the multiple stuttering of this post, which has now been corrected. Blogger was having a bit of fun at my expense.

THERE'S A NEW TRANSLATION OF THE TORAH by biblical scholar Robert Alter:

Now a noted literary scholar has produced a fresh translation with accompanying commentary. "The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary" (Norton, 800 pages, $39.95) by Robert Alter, professor of comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley, will be released this month.

Alter has a longstanding interest in the literary character of the Bible and has written several books on the subject, including "The Art of Biblical Narrative" and "The Art of Biblical Poetry." Speaking by phone from his office recently, Alter said his new book is a continuation of a translation of Genesis that he made about 10 years ago. The project was prompted by dissatisfaction with the way the literary characteristics of Hebrew have been brought into English, including the "Tanakh," which Alter said has "a peculiar insensitivity to English style."

"I felt a lot of modern translations are almost totally obtuse about the stylistic effects of Hebrew. The King James is a great translation, but in many ways it's not too accurate, and it belongs to 17th-century understandings of Hebrew," he said. "I thought it was worth an experiment to see if I could do a version in readable modern English that did much more honor to the rhythms and syntax of Hebrew."

ASSIMILATED TO THE BLOGOSPHERE:

Peter Kirby, known already for his websites on Early Christian Writings and Early Jewish Writings and the Open Scrolls Project, has just started a new

Christian Origins Blog

He writes:

Recently I have noticed the phenomenon of blogging related to biblical and classical studies. Mark Goodacre's web site is an excellent example. Stephen Carlson has recently brought together blog and site in his Hypotyposeis and Synoptic Problem pages. Realizing that my home page for Christian Origins has been in virtual blog form anyway�brief statements with a date stamp, listed with the most recent at the top�I decided to turn this web site into a blog. Or, more accurately, a hybrid of blog and periodical, as I will continue to create blog-independent web pages for substantial papers, as these are received and reviewed.

Welcome Peter. Assimilation is painless.

A VOLUNTEER AT THE "JOHN THE BAPTIST CAVE" gives the Asheville Citizen-Times a personal account of the excavation. Excerpts:

Harry Tolley joined Dr. James Tabor at the site near the Kibbutz Tsuba in May 2001. . . .

"When I was on the dig, it had this top-secret air to it," Tolley said. "We weren't allowed to take pictures or talk to people because Shimon Gibson wanted to spring this on the archeological world. He also really wanted to have some space to work on the research for his book. I've been telling people about this for years and they never really believed me, but now I'm telling them again."

MORE ON THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS EXHIBIT AT THE HOUSTON MUSEUM OF SCIENCE (Houston Chronicle), including comments from Professor Mattias Henze of Rice University and other local scholars.

"Advance ticket sales have been phenomenal," said Lydia Baehr, public relations director of the museum. More than 13,000 tickets have been sold, the most in the museum's history, she said.

Also, The San Marcos Daily Record has an article on Randall Price and the recent Qumran excavation. As I've said before, it sounds to me as though he's overreading the evidence, but it's hard to say what it all means until a formal report comes out.

This sounds exciting:

A series of DNA tests is set to be performed on the bones found by Price and his team, because the Dead Sea Scrolls were written on the animal's skin. A test could confirm that the DNA of the skin matches that of the bones - thus showing that the same community that buried the bones also posessed the scrolls.

And so does this:

While this mode of work is significant in uncovering pieces of world history, Price would like to bring this world to his native community of San Marcos.

Price said he's considering the idea of bringing a museum to San Marcos. This museum could contain many of the discoveries found in the Middle East by Price and his colleagues - pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Egyptian artifacts were offered as possible examples.

You can find more on the debate over recent excavations at Qumran here.

ARAMAIC INCANTATION BOWL TO BE REPATRIATED:

Ancient bowl heads back to Middle East

Rosie Cowan, crime correspondent
Saturday October 2, 2004
The Guardian

A rare Middle Eastern incantation bowl - which is buried underneath houses to ward off evil spirits - has been handed in to Scotland Yard for return to the region.

A London art dealer, whom police refused to identify, brought in the item, which he had purchased in Jordan some years ago. It may have come from Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Syria or Israel, where it was common to place bowls upside down in the foundations of new homes.

[...]

Actually, as far as I can recall, all the incantation bowls that have sure provenances have come from Iraq. Does anyone know of an exception?

Kudos to the dealer for playing it straight and turning in the item.

Too bad there's no photograph with the article.

TWO NEW TRANSLATIONS OF 1 ENOCH: Gabriele Boccaccini e-mails:

Two new English translations of 1 Enoch have been published:

(A) George W.E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam
1 Enoch: A New Translation
Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004
[The volume contains the translation that the authors have done for the Hermeneia Commentary, based on the best critically reconstructed text that takes into consideration all of the textual data now available in the Ethiopic version, the Greek texts, and the Dead Sea Aramaic fragments]

(B) Daniel Olson (with Melkesedek Workeneh)
Enoch: A New Translation
North Richland Hills, TX: BIBAL, 2004
[An edition with annotations and cross-references, aimed at the general reader]

THE FROM THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS TO THE BIBLE EXHIBITION is in Michiana, Elkhart County, Indiana for the month of October. The story is noted in the South Bend Tribune and WNDU-TV. From the latter:

Co-curator Joel Lampe said, "We've had people spend three hours in front of a case we've had people come back 5-6 times because there is 5000 years of history on the exhibition floor."

The exhibit is centered on these fragments of the Old Testament dating back over 2000 years, found in the 1940's in the northwest corner of the Dead Sea. Scholars say the tiny pieces of history speak volumes about religion today. "Its a powerful exhibit it shows how God has preserved His word from the beginning of time to the present. No other faith can do what this exhibit can do for the Jewish and Christian faith," said Lampe.

The exhibit also displays important historic findings including the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence printed in 1776 from the original, some of the earliest printed Bibles and ancient Egyptian artifacts.

Does that mean the Magna Carta? The original? That's impressive.

FURTHER TO THE SBL-SEMINAR-PAPER CITATION CONTROVERSY, which I started a while ago, I've been meaning to note that Paul Nikkel of Deinde has also weighed in on the subject ("Opening access while restricting interaction with papers of a 'provisional' nature discourages dialogue at the point where it is most valuable and fruitful."). And now Mark Goodacre notes that AKMA has posted on it as well ("I�m firmly in the camp of those who regard this as a spasmodic contraction of the failing muscles of the moribund model of print publication"). Near as I can tell, the blogging contingent of the SBL membership agree that the new SBL policy on citation of Seminar Papers is ill conceived and counterproductive. I'm disappointed that the Society hasn't taken the opportunity to discuss this with us more.

THE EXPOSITORY TIMES is being relaunched in the spring of 2005. Mark Goodacre has details. The press release doesn't mention this, but Alison Jack told me at the BNTC that it would also be online. I'm not sure what the exact arrangement will be. I've promised her an article on the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha in the spring.

"MONITOR THE MOUNT": An editorial in the Jerusalem Post weighs in on the latest Temple Mount controversy. Excerpts:

Now this archaeological travesty is being compounded by a mortal and political danger of hardly less substantial proportions. Imagine if the southeast corner of the Temple Mount, containing the Marwani mosque, collapsed on thousands of worshipers praying inside. This is no idle concern, given that a large bulge has recently appeared on the southern wall of the Mount, and signs of cracking on eastern wall, both at the corner containing the mosque.

We do not know, of course, whether the danger of collapse is exaggerated. We do know that if there is a collapse, the magnitude of the human catastrophe could be enormous. We also know that, no matter how loudly our government warns of danger and complains about its self-imposed lack of access, the blame for a disaster will be laid at Israel's doorstep.

. . . The government has no choice but to insist that its own engineers, with or without an international team of colleagues to make it more palatable, are allowed to properly inspect and monitor the site, from both an archaeological and a public safety perspective.

. . . Caution and prudence are warranted, but simply hoping for the best is neither cautious nor prudent.

Any Israeli effort to increase supervision should receive backing from relevant international bodies, such as UNESCO, to counteract the baseless accusations and conspiracy theories emitted by Islamic authorities. Neither Israel nor the international community should allow extremist bullying to endanger and destroy a treasure of immense national and international significance.

MORE ON THE KETEF HINNOM AMULETS in Ha'aretz:

Bible texts on silver amulets dated to First Temple period
By Amiram Barkat

U.S. and Israeli researchers claim to have discovered proof that the Five Books of Moses were in existence during the First Temple period.

The findings are based on new laboratory techniques used to date two small silver amulets, inscribed in ancient Hebrew and discovered in a burial cave in Jerusalem in 1979. Published last week in a scientific journal in the United States, the results were reported extensively in The New York Times yesterday.

The amulets contain the text of the Priestly Benediction, which appear in Chapter 6 of Numbers, and are still recited today in synagogue prayer by descendants of the Jewish priestly clan.

[...]

This sounds like an overinterpretation of the evidence to me. My understanding is that the amulets contain the priestly benediction, also found in Numbers 6:24-26, and perhaps also material from Deuteronomy 7:9. The benediction is the sort of thing that would have been in wide circulation and proves nothing about whether the text of Numbers was assembled c. 600 B.C.E. in anything like the form we have today. The material from Deuteronomy is more interesting and, if upheld (all I've seen on it so far is a second-hand report in an e-mail message on the ANE list), indicates that D material was floating around before the exile, which I would have guessed anyway. It would have been more accurate to begin the article by saying that it is now established that some of the material found in the Five Books of Moses existed in the First Temple period.

I haven't seen the BASOR article yet; it hasn't arrived in our library. When it does, I may have more to say on the subject, but I think it's unlikely that anything I've said above will need to be changed.

SUKKOT - the seven-day Festival of Booths or Tabernacles, begins this evening at sundown.

MORE ON THE FEARED TEMPLE MOUNT COLLAPSE:

Ha'aretz has some additional information:

The warning pertains to the underground expanses known as Solomon's Stables, which have been turned into a prayer hall that can house thousands of individuals. The marble tiles that have been laid there are putting pressure on the spaces below them, as well as on the exterior wall in the southwestern corner, where the dangerous protrusions can be seen.

If in addition to this thousands more worshipers assemble in the plaza above Solomon's Stables, the ancient archways could collapse and lead to a horrific disaster.

and a recommendation:

The danger exists in only a very small section of the mosque compound. There is an ongoing dialogue among the Waqf administration, the Jordanian authorities and representatives of the Israeli government, and everyone should agree to restricting the number of worshipers in the prayer hall and on the roof of Solomon's Stables.

The mosque compound is an extensive area that can accommodate hundreds of thousands, and the restrictions in question relate to a few thousand individuals being prevented from entering one corner of the Mount.

But here's another view:

Israel seeking to control Al-Aqsa mosque compound: Jerusalem mufti (TurkishPress.com)

BEIRUT, Sept 27 (AFP) - The top Palestinian Muslim cleric accused Israel in remarks published here on Monday of seeking to seize control of the Al Aqsa mosque compound by raising safety concerns at the holy shrine in Jerusalem.

Jerusalem mufti Sheikh Ekrima Sabri said in an interview with Lebanon's An Nahar newspaper that "the foundations ... do not raise concern and the Israeli claims to that end are baseless."

These claims were only "a justification" for Israel to put its hand on the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, the third holiest site in Islam, he charged.

The mufti said a recent report by engineers from the Islamic endowments authority, experts in Islamic arts and Egyptian archaeologists confirmed that the shrine stood on solid foundations, with works needed only to cover cracks in the southern and eastern sections of the structure.

[...]

You may recall from the MEMRI Special Report on Palestinian Authority Sermons 2000-2003 (cited earlier on PaleoJudaica here) that Sheikh Ikrimeh Sabri is Arafat's hand-picked Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Palestine who has called for the destruction of the U.S.A. and Britain, said the Israelis should all go back to their own countries, and praised child suicide bombers.

I don't know what the truth is about the safety of the Solomon's Stables mosque for the Ramadan crowds, but I do know whose opinion I don't trust.

FISTICUFFS in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (and not for the first time):

Jerusalem clerics in punch-up row

Roman Catholic and Orthodox clerics have exchanged blows inside Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre, one of Christianity's holiest sites.

The punch-up began after Greek and Russian Orthodox believers took offence at a door left open by members of the Franciscan order during a service.

At least five people were injured in the fracas - including Israeli police officers called in to quell it.

The church is shared jealously by six rival Christian sects.

[...]

Kind of embarrassing.

THE KETEF HINNOM SILVER AMULETS are the subject of an article in the New York Times:

Solving a Riddle Written in Silver
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Published: September 28, 2004

he words are among the most familiar and ecumenical in the liturgies of Judaism and Christianity. At the close of a worship service, the rabbi, priest or pastor delivers, with only slight variations, the comforting and fortifying benediction:

"May the Lord bless you and keep you; may the Lord cause his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; may the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and grant you peace."

An archaeological discovery in 1979 revealed that the Priestly Benediction, as the verse from Numbers 6:24-26 is called, appeared to be the earliest biblical passage ever found in ancient artifacts. Two tiny strips of silver, each wound tightly like a miniature scroll and bearing the inscribed words, were uncovered in a tomb outside Jerusalem and initially dated from the late seventh or early sixth century B.C. - some 400 years before the famous Dead Sea Scrolls.

But doubts persisted. The silver was cracked and corroded, and many words and not a few whole lines in the faintly scratched inscriptions were unreadable. Some critics contended that the artifacts were from the third or second century B.C., and thus of less importance in establishing the antiquity of religious concepts and language that became part of the Hebrew Bible.

So researchers at the University of Southern California have now re-examined the inscriptions using new photographic and computer imaging techniques. The words still do not exactly leap off the silver. But the researchers said they could finally be "read fully and analyzed with far greater precision," and that they were indeed the earliest.

In a scholarly report published this month, the research team concluded that the improved reading of the inscriptions confirmed their greater antiquity. The script, the team wrote, is indeed from the period just before the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. by Nebuchadnezzar and the subsequent exile of Israelites in Babylonia.

The researchers further reaffirmed that the scrolls "preserve the earliest known citations of texts also found in the Hebrew Bible and that they provide us with the earliest examples of confessional statements concerning Yahweh."

Some of the previously unreadable lines seemed to remove any doubt about the purpose of the silver scrolls: they were amulets....

The New York Times article is long, informative, and looks quite accurate to me. Lots of fascinating information on the work of Barkay, McCarter, the Zuckerman brothers, etc. The scholarly article is published in the May 2004 issue of the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. (Unfortunately, they only publish their tables of contents online in PDF format.) It is extraordinary to have sixth-century B.C.E. magical amulets from ancient Israel.

MORE ON THE FEARED COLLAPSE OF PART OF THE TEMPLE MOUNT:

Wakf officials reject Israeli allegations about Mosque's imminent collapse (Palestine Information Center)
By
Sep 26, 2004, 14:46

Occupied Jerusalem - Muslim Wakf (religious endowment) officials in Jerusalem have rejected Israeli allegations that an ancient mosque at the Haram al Sharif compound is in danger of collapse.

The officials termed the allegations " baseless" and "mere pretext to take over Islamic holy places."

[...]

First, the location is ancient but the mosque itself was built in 1996. Second, my regard for the accuracty of this article didn't go up when I read the following at its end:

Israel has been carrying out excavation works beneath and in the vicinity of al Aqsa in a desperate efforts to locate the remnants of an Old Jewish Temple in the area.

However, after more than 37 years of digging, archaeologists found no evidence of any ancient Jewish structure.

Obviously, this is just more Jewish-Temple denial. Classes start today and I'm too busy to dig up much on the whole tiresome issue, but note the first-century Greek inscription excavated in Jerusalem in two copies in the nineteenth century by Claremont-Ganneau, which warns gentiles not to stray into the Temple compound beyond the Court of the Gentiles, on pain of death. Josephus mentions the inscription too.

NO FOREIGNER

IS TO GO BEYOND THE BALUSTRADE

AND THE PLAZA OF THE TEMPLE ZONE

WHOEVER IS CAUGHT DOING SO

WILL HAVE HIMSELF TO BLAME

FOR HIS DEATH

WHICH WILL FOLLOW

Sort of implies a temple, doesn't it?

On the whole issue of the possible collapse of the Solomon's Stables area, note also the comments of archaeologist Shimon Gibson:

Shimon Gibson, a British archaeologist who is an expert on the more than 45 chambers under the shrine, including Solomon's Stables, said it is unclear if there is a danger.

Describing the area under the shrine as a "Swiss cheese of underground spaces," he said there was a definite need to have a team of professionals survey the damage that may have been caused by the earthquake.

"I'm aware of some dangers that could be in existence due to the ancient age ... of 2,000 years," Gibson said. "At the same time I find that all sides tend to heat things up unnecessarily and they don't deal directly with the problem at hand."

RECENT PH.D.S IN MIDEAST STUDIES AT UCLA are listed on the UCLA International Insitutute website. The list includes the following dissertations of particular interest:

Jacob Dahl (NELC, 2003), "The Ruling Family of Ur III Umma: A Prosopographical Analysis of a Provincial Elite Family in Southern Iraq ca. 2100-2000 BC." Jacob was awarded a fellowship by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique for postgraduate research at the Mus�e du Louvre in Paris.

Lynn Swartz Dodd (NELC, 2002), "The Ancient Past in the Ancient Present: Cultural Identity in Gurgum during the Late Bronze Age-Early Iron Age Transition in North Syria." Lynn is Visiting Assistant Professor in the School of Religion and Curator of the Archaeological Research Collection at the University of Southern California.

Roger Good (NELC, 2003), �The Septuagint�s Translation of the Hebrew Verbal System in Chronicles.�

Fred Mabie (NELC, 2004), �Ancient Near Eastern Scribes and the Mark(s) They Left: A Catalog and Analysis of Scribal Auxiliary Marks in the Amarna Corpus and in the Cuneiform Alphabetic Texts of Ugarit and Ras Ibn Hani.� Fred is an Assistant Professor at Biola University in La Mirada, California.

Congratulations to all the recent Ph.D.s

MINORITY CULTURES IN NORTH AFRICA CONFERENCE:

The Berbers and Other Minorities in North Africa: A Cultural Reappraisal
Information publi�e le samedi 25 septembre 2004 par Jean-Louis Jeannelle (source : Nabil Boudraa )

Berber culture and the cultures of historically rooted North African minority groups (Jewish, Coptic, Turkish, among others) are not common foci of study in higher education. These cultures also remain shadowed in public discourse and in public policy. The same cultures have existed and thrived for a long period of time under the dominance of successive colonial powers in North Africa. Unfortunately, there is still a huge misunderstanding and a knowledge-gap regarding the diversity that constitutes the richness of a large region, situated between the East and the West and between Europe and Africa.

This conference's purpose is to promote a clearer comprehension of the complexity of these North African cultures. It will situate them in space (from Egypt to the Canary Islands) and in time (from early history to the present) within the larger dynamics of successive colonial epochs.

[...]

The conference seems to be taking place in Oregon and 1-page paper-proposals should be turned in by 1 December 2004.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH:

Authorities fear collapse of section of Temple Mount

By Haaretz Service

The defense establishment fears the Solomon's Stables area on Jerusalem's Temple Mount will collapse under the weight of the hundreds of thousands of Muslim worshippers who are expected to arrive for Ramadan observances which start in another three weeks, Israel Radio reported Sunday morning.

[...]

PONTIUS PILATE ESSAY: Warren Carter, Professor of New Testament at Saint Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, has an essay on Pilate on the Bible and Interpretation website:

Pontius Pilate: Roman Governor

Pilate�s enormous �life and death� power should shape how we read the gospel narratives of Jesus� crucifixion. Pilate is not a neutral or weak or minor character. He is not forced to crucify Jesus by the Jerusalem leaders against his will. He crucifies Jesus because it is in Rome�s interests to do so, interests he is charged with protecting and furthering.

TORREY SELAND profiles a 1987 Norweigen doctoral dissertation that argues that the De Aeternitate Mundi was not by Philo of Alexandria. The dissertation has subsequently been enlarged and translated into English, but it isn't easy to get at.

I'VE TAPED THIS BBC HORIZON PROGRAM on Solomon's Temple and the forged "Joash Inscription," but I haven't had time to watch it yet. When I've seen it, I'll comment further.

MORE CONSTRUCTION ON THE TEMPLE MOUNT?

Building Minaret on Temple Mount 'Dangerous' Move, Expert Says
By Julie Stahl
CNSNews.com Jerusalem Bureau Chief
September 23, 2004

Jerusalem (CNSNews.com) - Building a fifth minaret on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is a dangerous move because it jeopardizes the religious status quo there, an expert in Jerusalem said.

Local press reports this week indicated that Jordanian religious officials, who oversee the Islamic shrines on the Temple Mount, are planning to build a fifth minaret at the site, known to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif.

[...]

Dr. Yitzhak Reiter from the Jerusalem Institute of Israel Studies said allowing the construction of a minaret or anything on the mount is a "dangerous" and "irresponsible" move.

"The idea is a little bit dangerous because any change in the character of the site, digging, building, structural change is a violation of the status quo," Reiter said.

[...]

Archeologist Dr. Eilat Mazar is concerned about the idea of building on the Mount for other reasons.

Mazar is member of the non-political, Committee for Preventing the Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount, which sounded the alarm about what it considers the wholesale destruction of antiquities on the Temple Mount.

It is imperative that no construction be performed on the Mount without proper archeological supervision, Mazar said.

Comparing the Temple Mount's archeological significance to that of the Egyptian pyramids, she said that in the past the Wakf has used seemingly reasonable requests to engage in large building projects.

[...]

Given the WAQF's track record on this sort of thing, I'm sure not thrilled about a new construction project on the Temple Mount.

YOM KIPPUR, the Day of Atonement, begins this evening at sundown. I wish my Jewish readers an easy fast.

THE THREATENED KABBALISTIC CURSING OF ARIEL SHARON is the subject of Philologos's column this week in the Forward:

Cracking the Whip
September 24, 2004

'Who by water and who by fire," says a line in the Yom Kippur prayer U'Netaneh Tokef, which speaks of the different kinds of death in store for those not inscribed in this year's Book of Life � and if some of the extremist enemies of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his Gaza disengagement plan have their way, fire will be his fate. That is, the prime minister won't die in fire but of it, from a pulsa de-nura ("whip of fire") ceremony in which he will be cursed. "Once Again: Threats of Murder and Pulsa Denura," announced a banner headline in the Rosh Hashanah issue of the mass-circulation Israeli tabloid Yediot Aharonot.

"Once Again," for those unaware of it, is a reference to the pulsa de-nura that was performed by a small group of far right-wing Jews shortly before the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, to the efficacy of which his death was then attributed.

[...]

After describing a modern pulsa de-nura ceremony, Philologos goes on to discus the origins of the ritual:

But what does all this have to do, you may ask, with whips of fire? Not very much, it would seem. Nor will you find a single reference to a pulsa de-nura ceremony in any traditional Jewish source. All that can be found is the Aramaic term itself, which occurs in several stories in the Talmud.

The most charming and interesting of these stories � one meant to illustrate the dangers of exaggerated spiritual powers � is in the tractate of Bava Metsi'a and tells how the wonder-working Rabbi Hiyya came to synagogue on a public fast day that had been declared to pray for the end of a drought. When, the Talmud tells us, he uttered the words in the Eighteen Benedictions, "He maketh the winds blow," a strong wind sprang up at once; when he said on its heels, "And He maketh the rain fall," it began to pour cats and dogs, and as he approached the words, "And He maketh the dead rise," panic broke out in heaven lest the dead be resurrected prematurely, before the coming of the messiah. "Who has revealed such [spiritual] secrets to mankind?" God demanded to know. "[The prophet] Elijah," the angels told Him. At once, the Talmud relates, Elijah was struck by "60 whips of fire" (pulsei de-nura), which caused him to descend to earth looking "like a fiery bear" and to drive Rabbi Hiyya from the synagogue in the nick of time.

[...]

Good story. There's another, in some ways similar one in the early (pre-Kabbalistic) mystical text 3 Enoch 16:

R. Ishmael said:

Metatron, the angel prince of the Presence, the adornment of the height of all, said to me:

In the beginning I was enthroned on a great throne at the gate of the seventh (celestial) palace, and I judged all the sons of the heights, the household of the Omnipresent One, with the authority of the Holy One, blessed be He. And I apportioned greatness, kingship, greatness, power, adornment, praise, the garland, the crown, and glory to all the princes of the kingdoms, when I sait enthroned in the court on high. And the princes of the kingdoms stood in attendance on me on my right and my left, with the authority of the Holy One, blessed be He. But when the Other One (Aher, Rabbi Elisha ben Abuyah) came to observe the vision of the Chariot and he set his eyes on me, he was afraid and troubled before me and his soul was confounded to the point of leaving him, because of dread, awe, and fear of me. When he saw me, that I was enthroned like a king and the ministering angels were standing in attendance on me like servants and all the princes of the kingdoms, wearing crowns, surrounded me, in that hour he opened his mouth and said, "Surely there are two Powers in heaven!"

At once a heavenly voice (bat qol) went forth from before the Shekhinah, saying, "Return, backsliding sons, apart from the Other One." In that hour Anapiel YHWH, the glorious, adorned, lovely, wonderful, frightening prince came by the commission of the Holy One, blessed be He, and struck me with sixty lashes of light (pulsot shel 'or) and he made me stand on my feet.

(My translation.) Metatron is the deified Enoch, who in chapter 15 was turned into an enormous being of fire and given the title the Little YHWH. He was given his own (comparatively!) little throne in the seventh heaven next to God's big one and, when the notorious heretic R. Elisha ben Abuyah ascended into heaven on a mystical journey, he was confused and concluded (perhaps not entirely unreasonably) that if there were two enthroned superbeings in heaven, that must mean there were two Gods. His punishment was to be made unable to repent and Enoch/Metatron's (effectively, for inadvertently inciting to heresy) was the "sixty lashes of light" (which looks to me like an attempt at a Hebrew translation of the Aramaic pulsei de-nura) and the loss of his seat.

Such is the mythic background of the Kabbalistic ceremony. The ritual itself, as Philologos notes, is modern. And at least one of its recipients died many years later of old age. I'm pretty sure it hasn't actually been done to Sharon, since, legally, it would probably count as incitement to murder. Rebecca Lesses has more about the threat in Mystical Politics.

THE ALEPPO CODEX, a tenth-century manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, is being placed online (requires Flash). So far, material from Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, and 1 Samuel has been posted. (Via the Hirhurim blog.)

UPDATE: Jim West tells me that the complete surviving text of the Aleppo Codex is posted here, but it seems to require a font that I don't have. If there are images, as on the first site, I can't find them.

HERE'S AN ACADEMIC TRANSLATION SERVICE FOR GERMAN, geared especially toward religious studies and theology. I don't know the the translator and can't vouch for the service, so use it at your own risk. But you can read the translator's M.Th. dissertation from the Department of Theology and Religious Studies of the University of Wales here. If you do use the service, drop me a note and let me know what you think.

HERE'S ANOTHER WILLIAM MCKANE OBITUARY, this one in the Scotsman. For some reason it never registered on Google News.

THE U.A.E. GOVERNMENT IS DEFENDING THE NOW-DEFUNCT ZAYED CENTRE:

US report on Zayed centre is 'baseless'
By Muawia E. Ibrahim (Khaleej Times)

22 September 2004


ABU DHABI � The Office of Information Affairs for UAE Deputy Prime Minister has criticised a US State Department report on religious freedom, which accused former Zayed Centre for Co-ordination and Follow-up (ZCCF) of promoting anti-Semitic views, describing these charges as "baseless" and "false".

The 'International Religious Freedom Report 2004', issued by the Department on September 15, accused the centre of "providing a platform for some anti-Semitic individuals" and "publishing some books with anti-Semitic themes."

In a statement clarifying its position, which was made available to Khaleej Times yesterday, the deputy premier's information office rejected these claims and called on the US Administration to practice what it preaches i.e. to allow freedom of expression and exercise tolerance.

"We would like to state unequivocally that the Zayed Centre never hosted any speaker who promoted anti-Semitic views of any kind at the Centre, as claimed by the 2004 Report. It is unfortunate that the authors of this official US government report ignored this established fact and failed to substantiate their claims with names, dates and other evidence," said the statement.

This is a bit rich, now that the Zayed Centre website has been taken down and so someone who hasn't been following the story can't check to verify this claim. Fortunately I did extract some material on Jewish-Temple denial from the website when it was still there. Have a look and see if any of it sounds anti-Semitic to you. It certainly contains some bogus history. There was more and worse anti-Semitic material that I didn't copy, as anyone who perused the site will remember. The Khaleej Times article continues:

It accused the authors of the report of choosing to mimic questionable and politically-motivated charges made by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) claiming that the Centre hosted anti-Semitic speakers such as British historian David Irving and Jurgen Mollemann.

"These baseless charges were debunked in an earlier clarification widely circulated in the Arab and international media on September 3, 2003, stating that the Centre never hosted these speakers because it opposes all forms of hatred and racism directed at any ethnic, religious or national group, including anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism."

[...]

Follow this link for the MEMRI report in question. Here's the relevant passage (all bold-font emphasis in what follows is in the original):

Under the title "A lot of Right that was Lost because of Some Wrong," Saudi journalist Sa'd Ibn Salih Al-Sirhan wrote on the closure of the Zayed Centre: "The problem of the Zayed Centre� and its sad end reveal a chronic mismanagement of our cultural and intellectual affairs. The Centre committed professional mistakes and allowed itself to be dragged into unscholarly allegations whose only purpose was to criticize America, rightly or wrongly. It embraced a number of racist lecturers� and devoted itself to provocations: provoking the Jews generally, both Zionist and non-Zionist, and provoking America. When those in charge of the Centre would hear of a person hostile to America and its policies or hostile to Israel or to Zionism or to Jews � they would initiate an invitation to him or establish relations with him regardless of the scholarly value of his thesis or his ideological background, which could be totally racist.

"The Centre has hosted every Holocaust denier and every one who downplayed the number of the victims - a matter which is deeply rooted in Western consciousness but is of no great interest to Arabs. When a scandal burst out in the media regarding the German leader Jurgen Mollemann because of statements he made on account of which he was accused of antisemitism � those in charge of the Centre rushed to invite him. The Centre has also established contact with the British historian David Irving � a rightwing extremist - because he denied the Holocaust. This Irving figured in the scandal of the notorious 'Hitler Diaries.' The Centre also did not fail to host a certain Saudi lecturer of mediocre level, who wrote a racist article in a Saudi paper in which she propagated a racist Western rumor, namely, that the Jews make the pastries of one of their holidays with children's blood. Even though this myth refers to one holiday only, our lecturer insisted on speaking of two holidays; in one of them pastries are made with the blood of a Christian child while in the other the pastries are made with the blood of a Muslim child. For that reason the Centre hosted her.

It actually says that, according to this Saudi journalist, Mollemann was invited to the Centre, but not that he spoke there, and that the Centre "established contact" with Irving. The statement does say that "The Centre has hosted every Holocaust denier and every one who downplayed the number of the victims," but I take that to be hyperbole. The statement then gives some specifics about two such figures but does not say that either lectured there.

More details are given in this report:

IV: The Zayed Centre Praises Antisemitic German Leader for His 'Impressive Stances Regarding the Jewish Antisemitism Claims

A controversial German politician, Jurgen Molleman, [9] as a parliamentarian for the Free Democrat party, as well as the president of the Deutsch-Arabische-Gesselschaft (German-Arab Society), has on several occasions compared Israel to Nazi Germany, and has implied that he supports Palestinian terrorist attacks, saying that he would "resist violently" [10] if he was in a similar situation. Mollemann is best known for his support of German pride and nationalism and has blamed Jews and Israel for harming the German self-image by perpetuating the memory of the Holocaust.

On July 6, 2002, the Executive Director of the Zayed Centre sent a letter to Mollemann inviting him to speak at the Zayed Centre. The letter stated that the Centre "[appreciates] your impressive stances regarding the Jewish antisemitism claims� Accordingly, we have the pleasure to invite you to give a lecture at the Zayed Centre on one of the topics related to the controversy on Semitism." [11] (See Appendix A)

[...]

V: Holocaust Denier David Irving on the Zayed Center

Holocaust Denier David Irving, whose website includes many antisemitic diatribes such as a June 1, 2003 entry quoting a letter that he wrote to London's Sunday Times: "You report that President Bush visited Auschwitz and bowed his head at the Wall of Death. Lucky he did not study the World War II aerial photos of Auschwitz first�that particular wall did not exist then. But then, he must be getting quite used to this kind of fakery.� [13]

Irving also wrote about the Zayed Centre a few days later on June 5, stating: "There is an article in the Harvard Crimson of May 23 regarding the controversy surrounding a donation from Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates. By Rachel Lea Fish , the article states: 'Not only does the Zayed Centre promote intolerance and hatred towards America, Jews and Israel, but it also attempts to deny the atrocities of the Holocaust and allows individuals such as notorious Holocaust deniers David Irving and Roger Garaudy, a forum to promulgate their propaganda.'" Irving then goes on to write the following response: "As those familiar with my books know (and there were forty-seven of them in the Widener Library [at Harvard University] last time I checked) I have never written about the Holocaust (I find it boring, along millions of others); and I have never set foot or eye on the Zayed Centre forum.� [14]

However, the Zayed Centre issued a report in Arabic titled "Those Who Challenged Israel" on September 2, 2001, which stated: "This study is a historical document for all readers, in particular Arab readers. It sheds light on all the figures from around the world who have challenged Israel � Charles de Gaulle who imposed an arms ban on Israel; Kurt Waldheim who admitted the PLO to the United Nations; David Irving, the premier WWII historian, who denies the holocaust; Jorg Haider, the leader of the right-wing, Austrian Freedom Party; and finally, prominent writer and thinker, Roger Garaudy who has written well known books against Israel and global Zionism.� [15]

Again, no claim is made that these two men spoke at the Centre. Indeed, the report quotes Irving to say that he did not.

Other MEMRI reports on the Zayed Centre are here and here. These several reports document in detail the anti-Semitic activities of the Zayed Centre. If the Centre had left its website up, this could all be readily verified from its own record, but obviously the site was an embarrassment and had to go. Evidently its sponsors now think enough time has passed that they can start denying what the Centre actually did and twisting what its critics have said about it.

Guess again.

THE HOUSTON MUSEUM OF NATURAL SCIENCE has an exhibit on The Dead Sea Scrolls opening on 1 October. Cool website.

A JOINT CONFERENCE ON SYRIAC AND CHRISTIAN-ARAB STUDIES is being held in Lebanon:

Beirut (AsiaNews) - The 9th Syriac Symposium and the 7th conference on Christian Arab Studies start today in Kaslik, near Beirut. The two events are organised jointly by the Holy Spirit University (Kaslik) and the CEDRAC of Saint Joseph University (Beirut).

[...]

More than 200 papers will be presented (and discussed beginning today till Saturday). Some will deal with decoding Syriac and Arabic translations of ancient Aramaic, Coptic, Hebrew and Greek manuscripts.

[...]

THE TEMPLE MOUNT is the subject of a short article in last week's Time Magazine:

The Weight of the World:
As Israelis and Arabs bicker, the Temple Mount risks collapse

Nothing much new in it, but it does summarize the current state of play.

THE CYRUS CYLINDER, as I noted in an earlier post, is being loaned by the British Museum to the Tehran National Museum. This article in the Art Newspaper tells the remarkable story of its loan to Iran once before, during the Shah's celebration of the 2500th anniversary of the establishment of the Persian monarchy under Cyrus in 1971. Much cloaking and daggering seems to have been involved. The article concludes:

British Museum director Neil MacGregor is astonished at the revelations in the Foreign Office file and is keen to stress that relations between British and foreign museums have changed profoundly since 1971. �In the space of a generation there has been an unprecedented sharing of cultural heritage on the international exhibition circuit. The idea of objects going out and coming back is now completely normal; in those days it was more of a big deal. Today it is done on a museum-to-museum basis, not at governmental level. I have informed the Foreign Office about our plans to lend the Cyrus Cylinder and told our ambassador in Tehran, but that is all�. Looking back, Mr MacGregor is horrified at suggestions that the Cyrus Cylinder might have been given to the Shah for short-term political and military gains. The BM�s current Keeper of the Ancient Near East, John Curtis, is convinced that it is right to lend the cylinder again to Tehran. He also points out that the cylinder was inscribed by a Babylonian scribe and discovered in Babylon, now part of modern Iraq. �The Cyrus Cylinder is just as much part of the cultural heritage of Iraq as Iran. In due course, we might consider lending it to the National Museum in Baghdad�.

BOOK REVIEW in the Washington Times:

DIGGING THE DIRT: THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL IMAGINATION
By Jennifer Wallace
Duckworth Publishing, $25, 220 pages, illus.
REVIEWED BY ERIC WARGO

[...]

As Cambridge literature lecturer Jennifer Wallace suggests in her interesting new book, "Digging the Dirt: The Archaeological Imagination," archaeology is burdened by the sheer evocativeness of its subject: the ground. The business of digging things up cannot help but be an imaginative enterprise as much as a scientific one. As such, there is a need for what the author calls an "archaeological poetics" � "a sensitivity to the ground's elegiac capacity for recording and memorializing vanished histories and personal loss."

[...]

Although archaeological methods have advanced since the days of Schliemann, people are no less moved nowadays to interpret the paltriest remains in terms of their favorite stories. We seek reassuring physical evidence of their historical truthfulness, scrape for signs that they weren't (at least not completely) made up.
Archaeology in the Holy Land is a case in point. Although Ms. Wallace offhandedly suggests that all religions probably have their archaeology, faith in the historical validity of the miraculous seems intensified in Judaism and Christianity, accounting for the age-old, profound, at times naive, archaeological obsession with the landscape of Israel � a landscape one 19th-century Protestant called the "fifth gospel." The author observes that the ways Catholics and Protestants have approached that stone-strewn ground differ markedly, reflecting different feelings about history and faith.
For Jews, whose inhabitation of that landscape is ratified by the biblical narrative, the religious significance of the stones is further complicated by politics. (Israeli-Palestinian politics, Ms. Wallace observes, is the largely unacknowledged rhinoceros in the room of contemporary biblical archaeology.)

[...]

The main theme of the book seems to be archaeology and literature but it sounds quite wide ranging. It deals with the usual suspects (Troy, Pompeii, the "Ice Man," etc.) and even the exhumation of John Milton and the excavation of Ground Zero in New York.

OKAY, I'll give you one link on Madonna's trip to Israel. Unless something really interesting happens on it, that's it.

LATER: Well, that one seems only to work via Google, so if it gives you problems, try this A.P. article instead. It's not the same piece but it covers some of the same basic information.

MORE ON DARKLIGHT from Lisa Keys in the Forward:

If it sounds like the stuff of a Hollywood blockbuster, then that's exactly the director's point. "I wanted to present Lilith essentially as a Jewish superhero," Platt said in an interview with the Forward. "I wanted to take her, take this Jewish myth, and put it in the context of modern pop culture allegory. I wanted to see if there was a way to deal with a Jewish-inspired journey, a Jewish heroine, in a pop culture context."

Unfortunately, however, Platt's eagerness to universalize Lilith's appeal means that the myth is quickly stripped of its ancient mystical origins, replaced with a trajectory that's oddly similar to that of Superman. Let's see... a humanlike creature born in a now-extinct homeland, bearing extra-human powers, who is immortal, save a sole organic substance that can bring our hero to ruin? Check, check, check.

MOSES MAIMONIDES is the subject of a museum exhibit in Frankfurt, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. This year is the eight hundredth anniversary of his death.

The exhibition �Moses Maimonides: doctor, philosopher and leader of the Jews 1135-1204� at the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt is a small but impressive show that provides insight into how much two great religions and cultures, which seem to have forgotten their common roots, actually have in common. The show also offers a real sensation: two sheets with original Maimonides manuscripts, autographs from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. It also displays fine astronomical instruments from the Orient, a comprehensive overview of the scholar's life and some extraordinary volumes of Talmud commentaries and other wisdom.

BIBLICAL NAMES ARE "IN" IN AMERICA:

Biblical names hot choices for babies today (News-press.com)

My favorite howler is:

� Michael. A perpetual favorite, from the Hebrew, and means "he who is like God," "Godly" or "close to God."

Michael means "Who is like God?" - a rhetorical question whose answer is "nobody." The translation they give is impossible (and perhaps a bit blasphemous), because Mi in Hebrew is an interrogative pronoun that means "who" when asking a question. "He who" would be another word entirely.

THERE IS AN OBITUARY FOR PROFESSOR WILLIAM MCKANE by Johnstone McKay in today's Glasgow Herald.

FROM SUMERIAN TO SHOFAR: Philologos, in "Shofar Sheep" (The Forward) discusses the origins of the Hebrew word shofar, the trumpet made of a ram's horn. Excerpt:

We are told, then, that our shofar derives its name from the Sumerian word for a fallow deer. This may not seem like much of a problem to you, but having looked into it, I can assure you that it is. The fallow deer, Cervus dama, is a medium-sized ruminant, originally native to West Asia and the Mediterranean region of Europe, which stands about a meter high at the shoulder and has broad, palmate antlers. In a photograph, these look like two narrow branches that end in large, spiky leaves. You could make drummer's sticks from the branches and bone cymbals from the leaves, but I doubt whether you could make a shofar from either. How, then, did the segbar get to be the shofar's etymological ancestor?

SHANAH TOVAH! Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish new year (and biblical holy convocation of trumpets - Leviticus 23:23-25), begins today at sundown, year 5765.

THE SBL, COPYRIGHT, AND SCHOLARLY COURTESY: Further to yesterday's post, Mark Goodacre reports that Matthew Collins has e-mailed him the following. (If the message was sent to me as well, I never received it.)

my original intent in putting the rider on the papers, however, was not one of claiming copyright or any such thing (you'll notice I don't say they are copyrighted, only that one should ask permission). Rather it was to reinforce the idea of scholarly courtesy in recognizing the provisional nature (both in print and online) of the Seminar Papers as a publication. We have had this approach to the Seminar Papers since its inception. I have seen (and heard) quotations of papers printed in the Seminar Papers used to argue that scholar X holds a particular point of view - when in fact in the final version of the paper published elsewhere, scholar X either takes a very different view or doesn't address the perspective quoted. The Seminar Papers has always been a provisional publication designed to stimulate scholarly interchange at the meeting through the circulation of papers in advance of the meeting. The fact that these papers were bound in a nice volume and sold made many assume they were finished and copyrighted products. If you look at the print versions of the past, you will note the only copyright claimed is for the printed collected volume. Authors still retained all copyrights and publication rights.

A few responses, in part echoing what Mark has already said:

1. This is an unannounced and, as far as I know, undiscussed departure from the previous policy regarding SBL Seminar Papers. Some of the volumes have pointed out that the papers are preliminary work, which is fair enough, but there's never been a hint that they shouldn't be cited and, indeed, they have frequently been cited in the secondary literature. I've published two papers in the SBLSP myself, at least one of which has been cited elsewhere, indeed in the last few months. It never would have occurred to me to expect the citers to ask my permission first.

2. The new policy doesn't make any sense for the printed and bound volumes, let alone for Internet publications. It seems to be aimed at small seminars of, say, a dozen or fewer people in which they circulate the papers among themselves for discussion and feedback before revising and publishing them. In that case it's perfectly reasonable to agree that no one will quote the papers without prior permission. But in the case of the SBLSP, we're dealing with papers that have been published and are available to anyone who buys the volume or takes the trouble to look it up in a library (in the case of the printed version) or to anyone who has an Internet connection and who clicks on the link (in the case of the online version). Not at all the same thing. Scholarly courtesy is natural in the small seminar, but it becomes a more complicated issue when the paper is actually published and widely circulated.

3. I submit that my observations on copyright were relevant. The papers are copyrighted (by the author) and published, whether or not they are "finished." (And few of us ever feel our work is unalterably finished, even after publication.) Suppose I find an idea in one of the papers that is directly relevant to my current research and that moves it in a productive new direction. Then suppose that I ask the author for permission to cite it and the author says no. What do I do? Poach the idea without attibution? That could potentially count as copyright violation and in any case would be unprofessional and immoral. Drop my research and do something else? That\s unreasonable. Or, on the basis of fair use, do I cite the idea from the published work and proceed with my research?

Likewise, suppose I find a discussion in an SBLSP of something I'm working on and I disagree with the conclusions. Suppose I contact the author and ask permission to cite the discussion and the author says that he or she stands behind the view expressed but still doesn't give me permission to cite it. What do I do? If I ignore the discussion, I am not giving a full account of the state of the question (i.e., what has been published). If I include it, I am violating "scholarly courtesy" (but not copyright).

4. The point here is that the policy has not been thought through properly and it has the danger of putting other scholars in an impossible position. If people's work is at such a provisional stage that they don't want it cited, they shouldn't publish it, either in print or on the Internet. Surely the assumption for all these years of printed SBLSPs is that the work in the papers, although more preliminary than what we might find in a peer-review journal or a major monograph, is of sufficient standard to be made public and become part of the discussion.

If some SBL Seminars now don't feel that way, the easiest solution is for them to put the papers online with password protection so that only Seminar members can access them. Nothing simpler. But they shouldn't put the rest of us in the very awkward position outlined above.

5. As for people citing an author's views in a paper after the author has changed his or her mind, so what? We all change our minds all the time. Exactly the same situation can arise after a peer-reviewed journal article has been published. Granted, the peer-reviewed journal article has passed through more hurdles and more thought has been put into it, but it can still be improved upon. The whole point of publishing is to keep the state of the question advancing, and that means we all have to keep changing our minds. That is our glory, not our shame.

Matthew, I hope you will take these points under consideration and will reconsider the policy. In my view, it just doesn't work.

Also, Stephen Carlson has the following response on Hypotyposeis:

One of the nice things about the Annual Meeting is receiving feedback from our colleagues about our works-in-progress, so that we can improve them for later publication in a peer-reviewed journal or book. As such, I can understand why someone may not wish their working drafts cited or quoted in other peer-reviewed publications without someone checking with them first--their views may not be sufficiently defined for scholarly comment, or they may have been published in a more appropriate forum. Although there may be nothing legally stopping scholars or anyone else from quoting or citing papers published on-line within the ambit of fair use, it might be wise as a practical matter in more formal writings, such as in peer-reviewed articles and books, to be more restrained in citing or quoting such informal works. Providing a working draft before the Annual Meeting is a courtesy that benefits many, and it does not make much sense to discourage that behavior. We don't want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

I think I have addressed all these points above. The golden eggs kept coming through all the years of the print version and I don't see why the policy should change with Internet publication.

Perhaps an analogy might help my point. Lots of interesting stuff gets said at cocktail parties at SBL. Should they be cited too?

This is a completely false analogy. It compares chat at parties to published scholarly work. Chat at parties is not written down, is not copyrighted, and is not published. Of course one shouldn't cite it in a footnote without permission.

That being said, there are some aspects about how the courtesy policy is phrased that gives me pause. I have a duty to credit the source of the ideas I use in my work, and I can't see how someone's failure to give permission (perhaps by being unavailable or dead) should prevent that fundamental academic duty.

Agreed. This is the problem I see with the new policy.

UPDATE: Rub�n G�mez (Bible Software Review Blog) comments on my original post here.

UPDATE: Steven Carlson has more here. Just a clarification or two: I am aware of the difference between copyright and plagiarism. In the paragraph from me which Steven quotes, when I said "That could potentially count as copyright violation and in any case would be unprofessional and immoral," I meant that if, for example, in my poaching of the idea I were to copy a page or even a whole section of the paper more or less verbatim and without attribution, that would count as copyright violation. (That's right, isn''t it Steven?) If I just poached the idea but not the wording, it would be unprofessional and immoral (and plagiarism) but copyright would have no bearing. And when I said, "Or, on the basis of fair use, do I cite the idea from the published work and proceed with my research," I was assuming that I was quoting relevant material from the paper in citing it. Steven is right that if I just cited the idea, copyright and fair use would not enter into it. I should have spelled out more clearly what I was thinking.

Steven's post is very helpful for sorting out the ethical and legal issues involved in this whole SBL Seminar Paper controvery.

UPDATE (16 September): Mark Goodacre has more here

COPYRIGHT CONFUSION IN THE SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE: Mark Goodacre notes that the 2004 SBL Seminar Papers are now online at the SBL web page. He also notes the following paragraph introducing the papers:

2004 Seminar Papers
The SBL Seminar Papers are made available in advance of the Annual Meeting each year. The goal of this pre-publication is to stimulate discussion of these works in progress during the meeting itself. In keeping with this goal, papers published in the Seminar Papers will be summarized, and not read at the meeting. Because these papers represent works in progress, they should not be quoted or otherwise cited without permission from the author.

Italics in the original. I'm frequently surprised when people think they can make up their own copyright laws. I am doubly so when the Society of Biblical Literature, which should know better, tries to do it. For the record, under the rule of "fair use", anyone can quote from a copyrighted work "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research." The details are nebulous and I'm not a a lawyer, but it's safe to say that it's just not on to issue an order that your copyrighted work published on the Internet is not to "be quoted or otherwise cited" without your permission. If people want to interact with the paper, they are well within their rights to cite it or quote it in order to respond to it. They can publish the citation or quotation with the response on the Internet or elsewhere, including in a book or journal. What it comes down to is that if you don't want any public response to your paper, don't publish it, including on the Internet.

For some guidelines on fair use, see Copyright and Fair Use in the Classroom, on the Internet, and the World Wide Web, published on the web page of the Library of the University of Maryland University College. And here is a view by UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh on fisking and fair use.

Excuse me for belaboring this point, but I think it's important. If copyright really worked the way the writer of that paragraph quoted above seems to think it does, the Blogosphere couldn't enjoy the vigorous interchange of ideas which characterizes it.

LILITH ON THE SCI-FI CHANNEL:

Exclusive Look at Sci Fi's Darklight!
Source: Superhero Hype!
September 13, 2004

This Saturday marks the premiere of the new Sci Fi Channel original thriller Darklight, starring Shiri Appleby ("Rosswell"), and Superhero Hype! has an exclusive look at the film.

Shiri plays Lilith, an immortal demon based on mythology from the Kabbalah (According to legend, Lilith was the 1st wife of Adam in the Garden of Eden; she was tossed out and became a demon after she wouldn't sleep beneath Adam). In Darklight, she's the sexy, tormented anti-heroine who becomes humanity's last hope.

[...]

Darklight is an origin story, about the birth of Lilith as a super-heroine. "Lilith has amnesia, and she's living as an ordinary, 24 year-old woman (played by Shiri), trying to figure out her past. The circumstances of the movie force her to confront her true nature."

[...]

UPDATE: Seth Sanders e-mails:

Neat stuff. Those interested in the Jewish background of Lilith are encouraged to check out the earliest narrative source, the "Alphabet of Ben-Sira" (the whole text may be some kind of joke about misogyny, or a misogynist joke), conveniently translated in David Stern et al, Rabbinic Fantasies. Lilith's earlier history is strange--her character seems to begin with Lamashtu, the filthy, baby-killing Babylonian demoness who it is the job of Pazuzu (famous from the Exorcist) and the semidivine fish-men known as Apkallu to chase out. Her name, however, begins with an entirely different demon, the Sumerian LIL2 "wind." The name is re-etymologized as Lilitu from a Semitic stem *layl- or the like "night," hence the Lilith of Isaiah.

THE FOURTEENTH WORLD CONGRESS OF JEWISH STUDIES notes the availability of research scholarships for postgraduates and postdoctoral fellows at European institutions which can be used as travel funding for the Congress:

13 September 2004

Dear friends,

We are pleased to inform you of the availability of funding for European scholars who intend to participate in the fourteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies. The scholarships are titled "Small Grants for Research Purposes" and participation in the congress would mean that you would qualify for consideration if you applied for a grant. Application forms, as well as information about the eligibility criteria, can be found on the following website:

www.jewishstudiesgrants.org

We would like to emphasize a few conditions of the grant programme:

1. Scholarships are limited to PhD. students and Post Doctoral students studying at European institutions only.

2. The scholarships are granted and administrated by an independent foundation which reviews applications and selects candidates without any involvement of the World Union of Jewish Studies.

3. We advise presenting applications only after your lecture proposal has been accepted by the Congress's Executive Committee. Therefore, lecture proposals for the congress should be presented as soon as possible.

We hope these scholarships will enable some of you to attend the congress and take part in its many activities.

Sincerely,

Haim Weiss

Congress Secretary

The grants from the Academic Jewish Studies in Europe Grant Programme include many other categories as well (e.g., support for doctoral studies, post-doctoral research, library augmentation, visiting fellowships, support for translation projects, and more. If you're in Europe and work on Jewish studies, do follow the link and have a look.

REGARDING THE RUBBLE HEAP ON THE TEMPLE MOUNT, Menachem Brody e-mails:

Zachi Zweig is an archaeologist. Danny Rubinstein is a political columnist- with a political agenda.

Rubinstein states that there are no ruins of value on the Temple Mount, since the ground level before the Roman destruction was higher than the present day, and that damage was done to the underground parts as well.

1- Even if this was true [which is not clear, concerning all the areas of the mount]- large amounts of destroyed portions of buildings and their materials from the Second Temple Period are still on the mount, some in fill near the surface, and much in the underground hollows. This is exactly what the Wakf has been doing- excavating and removing these debris in order to reopen access to "Solomon's Stables" and other underground areas.

2- The information that can be gained from remains of buildings, even though they are not standing, is one of the foundations of modern archaeological investigation. This in addition to the smaller finds of coins, pottery shards, personal items, etc.

3- The question at hand is if these materials will be investigated by trained archaeologists, or clandestinely hidden at various garbage dumps, as has been done by the Wakf during the last three years.

4- The present level of the Temple Mount is built on massive subterranean arches from the time of Herod, some of which were admittedly damaged by the Romans. But most of them are still standing, built of massive hand hewn stones and capable of providing a wealth of information of the period. A casual reading of the Mishna and Talmud of Tractates Midot, Tamid, Yoma and others provides much information concerning underground gates, tunnels Mikvas and other installations.

5- Even if given that the present surface level is below that of the Second Temple- are we willing to give up on the opportunity to find remnants of the First Temple, which was built on a lower level, and whose remnants also provided fill for Herod's constructions?

6- And even given all the above, that all the remnants of the First and Second Temples miraculously evaporated from the Mount- from where is this arrogance to state that we are not interested in research to reconstruct Byzantine, Arabic and Crusader structures on the Mount? Does Danny Rubinstein suggest that since he feels that our past is not important to us- the remains of other civilizations should not be either?

THE ROMAN BONES AND THE UNDERPASS: This sort of thing seems often to be an issue for Israeli construction work:

Dispute over Roman bones halts underpass (Ha'aretz)
By David Ratner

The contractors of Yefe Nof construction company received a direct order from Transport Ministry director-general Bentzi Salman to stop building a two level underpass at the eastern entrance to Acre-Safed. The Acre Municipality says stopping the work has caused a number of problems, the greatest of which is the danger to life.
The stoppage was the result of heavy political pressure from the ultra-Orthodox community following the discovery of ancient graves. Meir Porush, MK (United Torah Judaism), led the move to stop construction of the road, which will pass beneath railroad tracks and which is essential both for safety and to ease traffic congestion at the main eastern entrance to Acre due to the passage of four trains an hour during rush hour.

Israel Antiquity Authority (IAA) archaeologists' explanations that the graves belong to Roman legionaries and not to Jews have fallen on deaf ears.

[...]

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: An article in today's Ha'aretz by Danny Rubenstein (about whom I know nothing except that he's a Ha'aretz correspondent) claims that the Temple Mount rubble heap contains no (or negligible) ancient Jewish material:

Remnants of the Temple? Not in this garbage
By Danny Rubinstein

The removal of refuse from the Temple Mount is being criticized by some experts, but does the dirt really hold any archaeological treasures?

[...]

Beneath the courts were - and to some extent still are - spaces, cisterns and arches, of which the Marwani Hall (or, as the Crusaders called it, Solomon's Stables) is the most famous and the largest. When the Temple was destroyed in 70 CE, large portions of these courts were also destroyed. The arches that supported them collapsed, many stones were removed from the mountain, and the site stood deserted for hundreds of years. The Byzantines sought to perpetuate the ruination in order to prove that Jesus was right when he predicted the destruction of the Temple. Only about 600 years after the destruction, the new Muslim rulers of Jerusalem began to restore the esplanade. They rebuilt the large retaining walls on the foundations of the Herodian walls, and recreated the underground spaces and the arches of Solomon's Stables. But the new level created by the Muslims in constructing the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque was not the same as the Herodian level - it was lower. How do we know this?

The archaeologist Meir Ben-Dov gives a few examples: The golden Dome of the Rock stands over a large piece of bedrock, which is without a doubt the highest point on the mountain. All scholars agree that the Temple was built above this level. Therefore, if we dig beneath the rock and around it, there is no chance that we will find remains from the days of the Temple. Robinson's Arch, the large stone protruding from the southern part of the Western Wall, provides additional proof. This was the spring of an arch that supported a bridge that led into the Temple Mount. If the arch is reconstructed, it comes out at a point approximately three meters higher than the present esplanade around the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

The conclusion is that there is no chance today of finding any remnant of the structures that once stood in the Temple courts. All scholars agree on this point. They also all agree that the arches of Solomon's Stables, in their present form, date from the Early Muslim period or later.

[...]

For a quite different evaluation, see the online article "What can we learn from this destructive dig?" by Zachi Zweig (whom, again, I don't know - and his web page isn't too informative) at har-habayit.org.

If any archaeologists out there have comments, please drop me a note.

HERE'S A BRIEF REPORT ON THE 2004 QUMRAN EXCAVATION, written by Randall Price. (Click on the link to download it as a pdf file.) He mentions the discovery of some storage jars of the same type in which some of the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. They also found some caches of animal bones, which he thinks represent a ritual installation. I'm skeptical until I hear more. And tying them to the celebration of the messianic banquet strikes me as rather an overinterpretation. Anyhow, read it yourself and see what you think. It also has some nice photos of the recovered artifacts. (Via Ken Penner on the g-Megillot list.)