MY PORTUGUESE IS VERY RUDIMENTARY, but I could make out that this (Google translation here) is a compliment. Thanks!

UPDATE (28 December): A better translation, plus more, here.

HELENANN HARTLEY, whom I first met a few years ago at my Dead Sea Scrolls Conference (she was Helenann Francis then), has been assimilated to the blogosphere. Her new blog, "Helenann Hartley," has to do with "general musings on daily life with a focus on all matters religious" and she promises to keep a special look out for news relating to the Apostle Paul. Welcome Helenann. (Heads-up, Mark Goodacre.)

THERE'S A BRIEF OBITUARY for Jonathan A. Goldstein by Linda Yannay in today's H-Judaic Digest.

HAPPY BLOGIVERSARY (slightly belated) to Torrey Seland's Philo of Alexandria blog!

CANA IN GALILEE, the site where Jesus is reported in John 2 to have turned water into wine, is being excavated. Maybe. There seems to be some dispute over the exact identification of the town, and two rival sites are being excavated. Stone jar fragments have been found at both (cf. John 2:6).

We're off to buy some lumber for those shelves. More later, maybe.

UPDATE: David Meadows over at Rogue Classicism notes the silliness of the A.P. article. This occurred to me too, but I didn't have time to pursue it because we were about to go out the door. The article (second link above) has this bit:

Israeli archaeologist Yardena Alexander says the Arab town was built near the ancient village.

The jar pieces date to the Roman period, when Jesus traveled in the Galilee.

"All indications from the archaeological excavations suggest that the site of the wedding was [modern-day] Cana, the site that we have been investigating," said Alexander as she cleaned the site of mud from winter rains.

American archaeologists excavating a rival site several miles to the north also have found pieces of stone jars from the time of Jesus and say they have found biblical Cana.

Another expert, archaeologist Shimon Gibson, cast doubt on the find at modern Cana, since such vessels are not rare and it would be impossible to link a particular set of vessels to the miracle.

"Just the existence of stone vessels is not enough to prove that this is a biblical site," and more excavations are needed, he said.

My bold-font emphasis. The emphasized phrase is weird. It seems to imply that someone was claiming not only that the excavation is of the right town at the right time (which is possible, if yet to be proven), but that it had found the actual room of the wedding and the actual jars that Jesus used (which is silly). I'm quite sure the archaeologists said no such thing. The only guesses I can hazard are either that the reporter misunderstood and incorrectly paraphrased whatever Gibson said or that the reporter misunderstood what the excavators said and asked Gibson if he thought that the jars were the ones from the wedding at Cana story.

TWO MORE SUGGESTIONS on what bloggers on biblical subjects should call themselves:

Scriptoblogger - Peter Kirby on the Christian Origins blog.

Biblogger (apparently pronounced "bye blogger") - Ed Cook here and here at Ralph.

Meanwhile, Rub�n G�mez at the Bible Software Review blog is sticking with biblioblogger.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: More on the planned (or is it just proposed?) rebuilding of the Mughrabim Gate walkway:

Engineer: Western Wall embankment could collapse
By Nadav Shragai (Ha'aretz)

The Jerusalem Municipality is demanding that an embankment leading from beside the Western Wall, via the Mughrabi Gate, to the Temple Mount be demolished immediately, for fear of its collapse.

[...]

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: This sounds ominous:

Target: The Temple Mount
By Nadav Shragai (Ha'aretz)

[...]

But among the extremists in the Temple Mount movements, a different wind is blowing these days. As the evacuation of the Gush Katif settlements draws near, a return to the old beliefs - the ones that Rabbi Yeshua Ben Shushan tried to put into practice 25 years ago, in the framework of the Jewish underground - has become evident. On the eve of the evacuation of the Yamit settlement in Sinai, Ben Shushan, basing himself on kabbalistic sources, concluded that "Muslim control of the Temple Mount is the root of the corruption of the Jewish nation, and this control gives Islam a spiritual wellspring from which its believers draw the strength of their presence in Israel." Ben Shushan and some of his comrades therefore reasoned that removing this "abomination" from the mount by blowing up the mosques would halt the withdrawal from Sinai.

In recent years, this simplistic outlook has penetrated the extreme margins of religious society, particularly the group known as the "Hilltop Youth" and small groups of the newly religious. The worldview of some of these groups is characterized by uncompromising messianism, alongside an anachronism that almost blatanly disconnects them from Israeli society and the state. Some of these young men "dropped out" of mainstream ultra-Orthodox or religious Zionist society because of crime or drug problems.

[...]

The writer does see some room for hope though:

The only people capable of reaching such groups - or groups that are not "kabbalistic," but view blowing up the Temple Mount as an effective means of torpedoing the evacuation of Gush Katif - in order to prevent an attack on the mount and the disaster that the Muslim world would wreak on us in retaliation, are the rabbis of the Temple Mount movements.

Most of these rabbis understand that blowing up the mosques would not only fail to hasten the redemption or prevent territorial withdrawals and settlement evacuations, but would in fact accelerate the withdrawals and evacuations. Most also understand that even though it might have been possible to act differently 37 years ago and establish a significant Jewish presence on the mount, the wall that separates the people of Israel from the mount would only be reinforced by such a mad act, while the state of Israel and its government would pay a much higher price, first and foremost on the Temple Mount, if the mosques were damaged.

HERE'S AN OBITUARY from the Times of London for the Rev Professor Carsten Thiede, who died last week. The obit mentions his work on the Dead Sea Scrolls but doesn't note his controversial attempt to support the presence of New Testament documents among them. Requiescat in pace.

HAPPY WINTER SOLSTICE (or whatever it is you're supposed to say) to any Neopagan readers.

UPDATE: Also, happy Shab-e Cheleh (Festival of Yalda) to any Iranian readers.

ANOTHER SUGGESTION: Rick Brannan on Ricoblog proposes:

It seems the common thread that holds such blogs together as a group is a primary focus on Biblical literature. Yes, it's about the Bible (hence �biblioblogger� and other suggestions �bibliablogger�, �biblicoblogger�, �biblicablogger�) but y'all reference other material as well � as evidenced by the excellent multi-blog thread on NT background literature last week. So, I thought, how about �Bib-Lit Blogger�? I'm not sure if it would be better dashed (Bib-Lit Blogger) camel-cased (BibLit Blogger or BibLitBlogger) or as a compound word (Biblitblogger or Biblit Blogger). But it has some of the same alliterative goodness that makes �biblioblogger� roll off the tongue, with just a bit more specificity than �biblioblogger� offers.

Doesn't grab me, although it's no worse that many of the other suggestions. So far none of the proposals (including mine) combine what we do in a few intuitively obvious, baggage-free, esthetically tolerable syllables. Let's keep trying.

THE JAMES OSSUARY STORY is profiled by 60 Minutes in an article called "Holy Fake?" based on a program shown last night, which I haven't seen. (I guess they have good reason nowadays to take an interest in forgery detection. Better late than never.) There's little if anything new in it as far as I can see (I'm not sure I've heard the accusations in the last paragraph before this), but it's not a bad summary of the history and state of play. It concludes:

Does he think the ossuary is real or fake? "I would say it's probably real," says [Ben] Witherington.

But the Antiquities Authority continues to insist it's a fake. And not only that. They claim Golan has been making forgeries and millions of dollars for the last 15 years. And they say the real casualty here is knowledge itself, our passion to dig down to the real foundations of our history, and our faith.

"It seems to me that there's really two possibilities when you're dealing with the James ossuary and other recent discoveries," says [Bob] Simon. "Either they're real or you've got a group of very talented forgers."

"There've been good forgers for hundreds of years," says [Neil] Silberman. "But a 16-year-old with a basic graphics program can take absolutely documented inscriptions, and rearrange the letters, and reproduce them and it makes it very much harder just to see the difference between something new and something genuine."

"So both sides are getting better. The forgers are getting better, as is science in discovering forgeries is getting better," says Simon.

"Well, that's what we call progress in archaeology, I guess," says [Neil] Silberman.

The latest twist: Oded Golan reportedly tried to sell fakes to major museums in London, Paris and New York, and he may have succeeded. The Israeli police say they plan to indict Golan on multiple charges of forgery and fraud in the next few months.

On the one hand, at least a few scholars like Witherington still seem to think that the James Ossuary inscription is probably fully genuine. On the other, the case that the IAA makes for it being partially faked seems overwhelming: (1) the fake patina and (2) the forgery lab, complete with forgeries in progress, in Golan's house. If Witherington and those like-minded want to defend the authenticity of the full inscription, those are the big charges they need to refute. I've not put the work into the inscription to form a strong opinion about it, but I am pretty skeptical. As I keep saying, I hope this comes to trial and, if so, I will be watching closely.

Two other comments. First, this passage is odd:

But 60 Minutes knows where it [the ossuary] turned up: in the Tel Aviv apartment of Oded Golan, an Israeli entrepreneur, amateur pianist and one of the world's biggest collectors of biblical antiquities.

Help me out here. Wouldn't someone who didn't know the story read this and then think that 60 Minutes was breaking the whole Golan connection right there? Golan's role as the dealer involved has been known for a long time. Maybe I'm being too picky here, but the phrasing seems kind of misleading to me. Surely the program was clearer about this?

Second, there's this passage:

The ossuary was returned to Golan. But then, just two months after it had been exhibited in Toronto, there was another extraordinary revelation.

A tablet was secretly offered to Israel's National Museum, with a reported price tag of $4 million. Why so much? It was billed as the only remnant of the Temple of King Solomon, a godsend for religious Jews, because it would strengthen their claim to the Temple Mount, which has been contested for centuries by Jews and Muslims.

First the ossuary, and then the tablet, both revealed in the space of two months? It was an amazing coincidence, but the amazing coincidences don't stop there.

Amir Ganor, head of the Antiquities Authority Detective Unit, was put on the tablet's trail and all leads pointed to the apartment of Golan. They confiscated the tablet and decided to take the ossuary as well. But when Golan led them to it, the detectives could barely believe their eyes.

The rest of the article never gets around to mentioning that this tablet, the so-called Joash Inscription, was shown to be a forgery too, by multiple converging lines of evidence, including its patina. Simon does refer to doubtful "other recent discoveries" but doesn't say the tablet is among them. I think that's rather careless. Again, I hope the program itself made all this clear.

REFLECTIONS ON THE GOOGLE LIBRARY in the NYT: The Tower of Babel, the Library of Alexandria, and the Letter of Aristeas (inter alia) are discussed. The article concludes with a fictional character's reflection:

The world encyclopedia, the universal library, already exists and is the world itself.

Yes, but it could be better indexed.

GEZA VERMES ON MATTHEW'S BIRTH NARRATIVE:

My point is that St Matthew's account of the Nativity - the basis of all Christmas celebrations - appears in a quite different light when it is considered as the product of a particular Jewish linguistic, literary and religious context, rather than the sentimental narrative we have inherited.

The doctrine of the miraculous conception and birth of a God-man was based on a remarkable mistranslation into Greek - wilful or otherwise - of Isaiah's original, quite specific Hebrew words. As for the episode of the massacre of the innocents and escape to Egypt, its similarity to the rabbinic story of the birth of Moses is so striking that it hardly can be attributed to coincidence. In both we find dreams, a murderous king advised by interpreters of sacred writings, and the frustration by divine intervention of wicked plans. Nor is it conceivable that Josephus and the rabbis, spokesmen of Jewish tradition, copied their birth legend of Moses from Matthew.

We are led inescapably to this conclusion: that the awesomely influential Nativity story in the first book of the New Testament is a speculative, rather than a historical text. Far from being a report of a literal happening, it is an amalgam of flawed Greek-Christian scriptural references, and of "birth tales" current in Judaism in the first century AD. The story with which we are all so familiar is not fact, but folklore.

But still a great story and worth appreciating as such.

UPDATE: Ed Cook comments on the article over at Ralph.

THE "HOW TO READ A SCHOLARLY PAPER" DISCUSSION has been going on among Bibl- ..., uh, bibli- ..., er, you know, those guys, for some time. Mark Goodacre has a detailed roundup with lots of good links and thoughts. I keep meaning to write up a brief guide for our postgraduates on how to read a conference paper. Maybe if I ever get around to it I'll post it online. Here are a few random thoughts, some of which may already have been said, since I haven't been keeping up with the discussion.

[Damn Blogger! I wrote out this whole post from notes I had saved previously, and when I tried to save the complete post, Blogger ate it and left me with nothing but my old notes. Grrr. This is the reconstructed version - which, to be fair, is better than the lost one. But if you ever want to save a substantial post before posting, always copy it before you hit the Save button.]

1. I nearly always read a printed paper rather than presenting it from notes or memory. But I don't just read from the article manuscript: I go over the whole thing carefully to try to make sure the thought flows well for an oral presentation, that there isn't a lot of extraneous detail (isn't it annoying when someone keeps reading out lists of primary references?), that important footnote content is moved into the presentation, and that the paper is cut to fit the time available with an eye toward including the substance and the main arguments and dropping anything that isn't central. Sometimes I throw in a joke or two as well.

I don't like to give extemporaneous presentations because it's too easy to forget an important nuance or accidentally drop something I wanted to say. It's also harder to keep track of the time. But maybe that's just how my mind works. I used to be a professional actor but, rather than making me want to do spontaneous presentations, it makes me want to (and I hope better able to) give presentations of a written text which keep the audiences' attention.

2. I almost always pass out a paper handout that has an outline of the presentation with the main structural points and the main arguments, any necessary lists of primary references, and the full text of any critically important primary-text passages.

3. I don't like Power Point for a number of reasons. First, as I like to say to my students, a paper handout doesn't crash and have to be rebooted just as you're supposed to be starting your presentation. And its fonts always work. Second, a paper handout leaves the listener with the basic arguments and primary references in a permanent format that's easy to carry home and ponder later. Third, I just don't like the way the slide format of PowerPoint herds one in the direction of sound bites and a jumpy presentation. (For more on that, see the article PowerPoint is Evil.)

Granted, the papers I present usually aren't to huge audiences and I rarely need more than 50 copies of handouts, often fewer. If I gave papers on, say, the Synoptic Gospels which required hundreds of handouts, I might feel differently.

Also, some might object that PowerPoint allows one to include neat, and sometimes very useful, graphics. Fair enough, but neat graphics can also deteriorate all too easily into cute ones, and useful graphics can usually be accommodated on a paper handout. I've even been known to throw in a Dilbert cartoon or the like on mine once in a while.

Besides the paper handout, I normally post the full text of the oral versions of my conference papers online. If you're just starting to present at conferences, you probably shouldn't do this. But if you've been publishing and presenting papers for a while, it's a bonus for your audience (and anyone else) to have access to them after the presentations.

4. Very important: If you do read a printed text, make sure to read it aloud to yourself at least once before you present it. First, this will allow you to time it and find out if it's too short or (more likely) too long, so you can adjust accordingly. Few things at conferences irritate me more than a presenter who goes on so long that there's no time for questions or, worse, who goes into someone else's time slot. Sloppy, unprofessional, and too common.

Second, the first time or two you do a dry run reading, it's a good idea to have someone else, such as a spousal unit or patient friend listen to you, just to get feedback not on content, but on presentation. There's a strong temptation to speak too fast in order to fit everything in. Don't do this. You should feel as though you're speaking slightly uncomfortably slowly. That's the best speed for your audience to take it in. Also, don't mumble. Project your voice from your diaphragm, not your upper chest. If you don't know what that means, find a friend who knows something about public speaking and ask him or her to show you.

Third, reading aloud will alert you to infelicities, typos, gaps, poor grammatical constructions, thoughts that flow poorly, and bits that don't just make sense, all of which you would otherwise miss. Quite likely after doing this you will want to go back not only to the oral version, but even to the article to make a few corrections.

These are just my own rules for giving a paper and they may or may not work for you. If not, find an approach that fits your own style. But some of the above may well be useful.

Hmmm ... maybe I'll just refer our postgraduates to this post.

Oh and, Mark, I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only one who daydreams about Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

DONE BUT NOT FINISHED: The Book has just been sent to The Publisher - all 210,000 words, plus bibliography. I learned long ago that a book is never finished until I actually hold the final product in my hands. As I've said before, I'm very grateful to the University of St. Andrews and the Arts and Humanities Research Board for their support.

I don't doubt that The Series Editor and The Reader(s) will have Suggestions For Improvement in due course (and I don't even want to think about the indexing), but for now I'm immensely relieved to set it aside and think about other things. My holiday break starts this evening, with an agenda that includes putting up shelves with my wife, playing with my son, reading fiction, and generally not working on The Book. As for the fiction, I'm rereading Stephen R. Donaldson's First and Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, since I recently bought his latest: The Runes of the Earth, the seventh book in the series, with three more projected. And Neal Stephenson's The System of the World, the final volume of his Baroque Cycle, is in the queue as well.

Oh yes, and there's blogging of course. One of my goals during the break is to update the long neglected links page, so if you've found any dead links, please drop me a note.

THE VULCAN SALUTE - a Kabbalistic ritual gesture?

QUMRAN EXCAVATION UPDATE - The Jerusalem Post has a long and detailed article ("A Crack in the Theory") on the recent excavation of Qumran by Yitzhak Magen and Yuval Peleg and the controversial theories they have formulated around it. Excerpts:

AFTER 10 years of work at Qumran, when Magen and Peleg's crew reached the bottom layer of the large pool, they were stunned to uncover a previously unseen white sediment. The powder has turned out to be the most significant clue yet to the Qumran mystery, they say.

"It was the most important thing ever found at Qumran: the bottom of the pool has some three tons of high-quality clay," Peleg told the Post. "We started to understand the site - there were no Essenes."

Qumran in the Second Temple period was not much more than a small, dusty, muddy, and smoky pottery-industry work station, devoid of spirituality, according to the clay sediment in conjunction with their other findings, he says.

The finding of "buckets and buckets" of burned dates also led the archeologists to confirm that the only other activity going on at Qumran was the production of date honey, stored in small ceramic vessels made there.

Initially, to check that the powder was indeed viable clay, the archeologists threw the fine chalk-colored residue into a vat and added water. Then they delivered the clay to a potter and asked her to fire away. The potter gave the clay a quick thumbs-up. Her first vase adorns Magen's Jerusalem office, together with dozens of handmade drawings of Qumran artifacts.



[...]

Considering that the texts are so diverse, that there are often numerous copies of the same text written in different styles, that some texts contradict each other, and taking into account the regional migration patterns during that period, Magen and Peleg say the natural conclusion is that the scrolls didn't come from one library or even from Jerusalem libraries alone, but from synagogues and libraries all over. As such, they constitute the broadest possible representation of Second Temple Jewish thought, and not just the Judaism of the Essenes, or of any one sect or geographical area.

Many scholars have long held that there were three main sects of Jews in the Second Temple period: the Sadducees, the Pharisees and the Essenes. Reconsidering that the scrolls are a broad representation of Judaism could support a theory that there were actually dozens of streams, the authors add. "The Essenes may have been one of several groups that wrote the scrolls.

I wish the sentence in bold-font (my emphasis) were right, but I just can't see it. The high density of sectarian works, the lack of other viewpoints such as pro-Hasmonean ones (e.g., no 1-2 Maccabees), and the lack of Greek texts all mark the Qumran library as a sectarian collection. I think Magen and Peleg are probably right that it's a collection of separate libraries that have been consolidated, but they were sectarian libraries to start with. I've been saying this for years.

The fact that sectarians converged on this point to deposit their religious libraries would certainly imply that the site had some sort of sectarian connection to start with, but if the archaeology indicates not, that whole aspect will need to be rethought. I look forward to reading their report when it comes out and to listening to the reactions of other archaeologists.

SIX SPECIAL LECTURES IN HONOR OF GEZA VERMES, which were presented in Oxford last June on his eightieth birthday, are now available on the Journal of Jewish Studies website. Congratulations, Geza!

ANTIQUITIES LOOTING in Israel and the West Bank. It just goes on and on:

Grave robbers ransack Holy Land history
Hundreds of archaeological sites raided every year

By Megan Goldin
Reuters
Updated: 3:38 p.m. ET Dec. 15, 2004

HEBRON, West Bank - As night falls, grave robbers fan out across the southern West Bank hills on a macabre mission.

Armed with metal detectors, shovels and pick axes, the thieves unearth graves last touched thousands of years ago and scoop up whatever loot they can find before slipping into the night, leaving broken pottery and scattered skeletons behind.

�The damage is irreparable,� said Amir Ganor, the head of the Israel Antiquities Authority robbery division. �It is not like a forest that burns down and can be replanted. If an antiquities site is robbed, then it is destroyed for good.�

[...]

DAVE KOPEL e-mails:

I noticed your question about the source of my statement regarding the Talmud reference to Syrians having droit du seigneur. It's from Rashi, and appears in a footnote of the Vilna Talmud from Mesorah Pubs. The material will appear (properly cited) in a book I'm writing on religious attitudes towards self-defense.

Thanks, Dave, for taking the time to reply.

If it's in Rashi, then the claim is much later than the Talmud. The Talmud does assert that gentile authorities inflicted this custom on Jews in b. Ketubot 3b (pointed out to me by reader Joshua Waxman). But there's no mention of the Syrian government (or the beheading woman) in that passage and the Soncino edition notes (for what their worth) apply it to the Romans. I don't know; I'm not a Talmudist. But even if the Talmud did say this about the Syrian government, it was edited many centuries after the Seleucid period. As far as I know, there is no contemporary evidence to indicate that the Seleucid government used droit du seigneur as a policy toward Jews and I think it's very unlikely. If you want to claim this (repeated here), you should back it up with primary sources from the Seleucid period. I doubt that there are any. You can make your point, that Jewish tradition has historically recognized the right - indeed the duty - of self-defense and resistance of evil, without distracting from it by including this dubious legend as a fact.

Good luck with your book.

THE REMARKABLE LIFE OF SEMITIST AND POLYMATH CYRUS H. GORDON is profiled by Professor Gary A. Rendsburg for the SBL Forum. Excerpt:

I come now to the most characteristic trait of Gordon: his broad horizons. I think it is safe to say that no scholar of the Bible, certainly no one whom I have mentioned in this paper (with the possible exception of Gaster), had such broad horizons as Gordon. The list of fields in which he worked and made important contributions is simply staggering: field archaeology, glyptic art, cuneiform law, Amarna letters, Bible, Hebrew language, Ugaritic, Aramaic magic bowls, Nuzi tablets, Minoan Linear A, Homer and Bible, and on and on. The list of subjects that he taught includes even more fields: Egyptology, Coptic, Hittite, Hurrian, Sumerian, Classical Arabic, and more. Gordon was exceptionally proud that, beyond the usual cadre of Bible and Semitics people, he produced the best of America's Hittite, Hurrian, and Sumerian scholars: Harry Hoffner in Hittite, Fred Bush in Hurrian, and David Owen in Sumerian. Another case in point: Gordon was very proud of his student Loren Fisher, who distinguished himself in Ugaritic studies especially, but whom Gordon trained in a variety of subjects, including Coptic. Gordon loved to relate how it was Fisher who taught James Robinson Coptic when both were on the faculty at Claremont, and of course Robinson went on to become one of this country's leading experts on the Nag Hammadi texts.

Many years ago, while still an undergraduate, I nearly dropped out of the field of biblical studies, but reading Gordon's book Forgotten Scripts: The Story of Their Decipherment persuaded me to stay.

MARK GOODACRE notes the good news that the Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism is publishing again and the current articles are available online.

REQUEST FOR HELP: I've mentioned that I'm doing the final proofreading for The Book, which I intend to send off to The Publisher by the end of the week. I'm stuck on a reference. The problem article is

George MacRae, "The Coptic Testament of Abraham," Studies on the Testament of Abraham (ed. George W. E. Nickelsburg; SBLSCS 6; N.p.: Scholars Press for the Society of Biblical Literature, 1976)

I have a photocopy of this but the last page is missing. The article begins on p. 327. I'm pretty sure it ends on p. 340, but not absolutely certain. If you have this book handy and would check it and drop me an e-mail with the exact pagination, I would be very grateful.

I'll even throw in a free subscription to PaleoJudaica.

UPDATE: Pp. 327-40 was correct. My thanks to Stephen Goranson, who gets the free subscription to all 2005 PaleoJudaica posts, to be accessed at paleojudaica.blogspot.com. Can you beat that?

Well, maybe.

MARK GOODACRE writes in favor of keeping "biblioblogger," and I have to say I'm sympathetic to his argument from emergent order. He also notes what seems to be first use of the term in David Meadows's Rogue Classicism.

Meanwhile, Eric Sowell has been reduced to expletive deletion when he mentions us.

REBECCA LESSES of the Mystical Politics blog has posted the abstract of her SBL paper, "'He Shall Not Look at a Woman': Gender in the Hekhalot Literature." I take a slightly different line in my book Descenders to the Chariot, pp. 279-81 (I argue that is possible that there were female Hekhalot mystics). But everyone seems to think I'm wrong.

Rebecca also has an interesting post on exorcisms and amulets in present-day Israel.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH:

Western Wall Hill - Out; Temple Period Finds - In (Arutz Sheva)
16:26 Dec 13, '04 / 1 Tevet 5765

Jerusalem city engineers will take down the hill jutting out from the Western Wall, replacing it with a bridge. Archaeologists expect to find treasures, such as a tall gate from the Second Temple.


The Jerusalem Municipality has decided to take down the hill that leads up from the Western Wall (Kotel) entrance to the Temple Mount, for fear that it might otherwise collapse. The walkway up the hill leads to the Mughrabim Gate, which is currently the only entrance for Jews to the Temple Mount. The city plans to replace the hill with a bridge that will lead into the Mughrabim Gate.

The plans are a bonanza for students of Jerusalem history, as the removal of the hill will uncover an eight-meter high gate leading into the Temple Mount. The gate, dating from the period of the Second Temple, is known as Barclay's Gate, after the 19th-century American consul who first identified it.

[...]

Articles from the Associated Press and the Jerusalem Post also cover the story, but with less about the archaeology angle.

BS BLOGGERS? Now there's a thought.

"LET THERE BE LIGHT" - A Hannukah display of ancient oil lamps in the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem. The article has some nice pictures.

JUDAS MACCABEUS ON THE WEB is a new site belonging to Tim Spadling. I've only skimmed it through quickly, but I see it has lots of good resources. I think I've already linked to his Cleopatra site. He also has websites on Hieroglyphics and on Alexander the Great on the Web. I haven't had a chance to look at the last two, but you can find links to them on his other sites.

THEY DON'T JUST DREDGE UP ANTIQUITIES from the receding waters of the Dead Sea. Recently a parchment with a modern-day political curse was found there:

The mother of all Palestinian modern-day curses (Jerusalem Post)
By Yoav Stern
During a Dead Sea-area dig in 2002, Prof. Yizhar Hirschfeld discovered two small packages wrapped in cloth. The contents of one of them, just recently made public, was a scathing curse aimed at Israeli leaders.

"Oh God almighty, I beg you God to destroy Ariel Sharon, son of Devorah, son of Eve." Thus opens a unique text, written in eloquent Arabic, on parchment found more than two years ago at the bottom of the Dead Sea.

[...]

The article isn't a satire. As it observes, the Middle Eastern cursing tradition goes back thousands of years.

BIBLIOBLOGGING (OR WHATEVER) REVISITED: Eric Sowell has a summary post on responses to my post about what we Bible bloggers should call ourselves. I agree that "Bible blogger" could have unfortunate connotations, but I don't care very much for any of the proposed alternatives. I guess I like "bibliabloggers" best among them. Let's keep thinking about it; I'm quite open to suggestions.

IT'S NOT JUST INSCRIPTIONS: According to this columnist in the West Virginia Huntington Herald Dispatch, forgeries are a problem for Jewish antiques in general, not just Jewish antiquities.

THE CODING HUMANIST (Eric Sowell) has some reader feedback regarding Jewish texts as NT background from Ken Penner and Arne Halbakken. And keep an eye on Eric's blog, since more may well be coming. (One of the disadvantages to separate-page blog entries is that you can no longer say "and just keep scrolling up." That's one of the reasons I went back to weekly page entries. The other was that single-post pages gobbled up my allotment of free search engine pages, with lots left over unindexed.)

Eric also calls for more Bible bloggers.

By the way, I'm inclined to stop using the term "biblioblogger." I don't remember where it came from, but it's confusing: it looks like it could mean "bibliography blogger" or "book blogger" or "Bible blogger" or maybe even something else. "Bible blogger" ("academic Bible blogger," if you want to be precise) is much more straightforward and I think that's what I'm going to say from now on. It doesn't cover all of what I or some others do, but it's close enough. Go thou and do likewise, if you feel so inclined. Or feel free to drop me a note to tell me why I'm wrong, if you disagree.

UPDATE (12 December): For some responses go here.

THE ABSENTEE VOTE could make a big difference for Aramaic-speaking Christians in Iraq in the upcoming elections.

MEL GIBSON'S The Passion of the Christ is one of the contenders for best foreign-language film in the Golden Globe awards. Nominees are to be announced on Monday, with a winner picked in January. The film has already been ruled ineligible for the best drama award. It's also not allowed to compete for the best foreign-language film award at the Academy Awards.

PRESIDENT BUSH ON THE MACCABEES:

PRESIDENT Bush sent a special message to Jews this week to mark Chanukkah, the festival of lights. The President drew a parallel between the Maccabees, an ancient tribe of Jewish warriors, and American troops currently fighting in the Middle East. �The bravery of the Maccabees has provided inspiration through the ages,� he said. �We must remain steadfast and courageous as we seek to spread peace and freedom throughout the world.�

ARAMAIC WATCH: The Maronite Archbishop in Jerusalem is featured in the Jerusalem Post. Excerpt:

Maronites, one of the principal religious groups in Lebanon, are members of one of the Eastern Rites of the Catholic Church. The Maronite Church is the only eastern church which never separated from Rome. While it elects its own bishops, its ultimate authority is the pope. Instead of Latin, the language of the liturgy is Syriac, an ancient dialect of Aramaic.

Paul Sayah's formal title is Archbishop of Haifa and the Holy Land, Exarch (Patriarchal Vicar) in Jerusalem, Jordan and the Palestinian Territory. While there are an estimated seven million Maronites worldwide, and some 800,000 remaining in Lebanon, Sayah's "flock" is relatively small, though geographically widespread. There are approximately 12,000 Maronite Christians throughout the entire area, of whom 9,000 are in Galilee and 1,000 in Jerusalem. There are Parish priests in each location, as well as nuns who have a key role in running the church's institutions.

A BETH SHEAN VENUS is to go on display in Israel (NYT):

A Venus Rescued From Ruins

Beth Shean has been one of Israel's richest archaeological sites since the 1920's. There, in the Jordan valley, near the river and the Sea of Galilee, archaeologists have unearthed objects spanning 4,000 years. One of the latest discoveries, a second-century Roman sculpture of Venus, goes on view March 29 at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

[...]

ACHAEMENID PERIOD SITE DISCOVERED IN IRAN. The Persian Journal reports:

"While demarking the boundaries of the Dar Castle in Naein just a few weeks ago, archeologists stumbled upon an Achaemenid settlement," said Mohsen Javery, an archeologist in Isfahan.

Covering an area of 2.5 to 3 sq hectares, the dwelling is littered with Achaemenid potteries, making experts hopeful they would discover new points about the lifestyle of people living in that era.

The Achaemenid Dynasty was a dynasty in the ancient Persian Empire, including Cyrus II the Great, Darius I and Xerxes I.

JUDITH MIDRASH SOURCES: Dan Rabinowitz e-mails:

Here are the midrash sources for the Judith story that connect it to the story of Chanukah. Yellnick, Betei Midrashim, Vienna, 1877 Heder Beit page 12; Heder Vav page 2 and Heder Aleph, p. 132. There are also a couple of books that were printed in the 16th and 17th centuries that also have the Judith story connected to Chanukah, they are, Ma'ashe Yehudit, Constantinople, 1552; Ma'aseh Yehudit, Venice, 1650 also in the Hemdat Yamim, attributed to Nathan of Gaza this story is connected to Chanukah, see Hemdat Yamim, Venice, 1757 volume 2 pp. 56a-58b. See also , Eisenstein, Otzar Midrashim, New York 1928, vol. 1 203-209 who has a couple of the narratives. All of these are fairly late.

However, there have been questions to the connection between Yehudit to Chanukah from the at least the 16th century, see Azariah de Rossi, Me'or Enayim, chapter 51 recently translated by J. Weinberg, Yale University Press, 2001 pp. 637-639.

UPDATE on my "Philo or the Pseudepigrapha?" post: Thanks to Eric Sowell (also here), Torrey Seland, Stephen Carlson, Mark Goodacre, Justin Dombrowski, and Ed Cook for their comments on (and praise of) the post. I'm glad it was useful.

I should also have thought to mention my Old Testament Pseudepigrapha website, which has material from a course I have taught a number of times at the University of St. Andrews.

As for Eric's and Ed's question, yes, the Mishnah and the other Tannaitic rabbinic texts are relevant too, but I'm not an expert on them and am hesitant to comment about how to use them for NT background. Ed has some observations. I suppose also that NT scholars could get away with judicious use of rabbinic passages that Neusner has isolated on stratigraphic grounds to be from the first century. I have a bunch of notes on how NT scholars should (and shouldn't) use Jewish sources, from a postgraduate seminar I gave a few years ago. Maybe one of these days I'll pull them together into an article.

"AUDACIOUS JUDITH": Dave Kopel, guest-blogging at GlennReynolds.com, has a Hanukkah essay on Judith. It includes related material from the rabbinic literature and links to lots of Renaissance paintings of Judith and Holofernes like this one. (I like the hat.)

I don't know the rabbinic stuff well, but two thoughts occur to me. When Kopel writes

According to ancient Jewish sources, during the period of Syrian rule, Syrian officers in Israel had the authority to rape all Jewish brides. The bride would be allowed to marry her husband only after submitting to the Syrian officer.

he should make clear that this is not historical. I certainly know of no contemporary evidence that any such policy existed. It's a typical folkloric theme designed to make baddies look badder.

And his comment

Scholars may never be able to determine with certainty if there was a Jewish woman who beheaded an enemy officer. But the persistence of the story in Judith, the Midrash, and the Talmud, suggests that the story may well be true, in some form.

even as hedged, is far fetched. The book of Judith is replete with gross historical errors and the other versions of the story are much later and, if anything, less plausible. The Judith story is just a story. Its persistence and popularity are explained by the fact that it's such a good story, not because of some elusive historical core. That said, its moral is just as Kopel indicates. He recognizes that the book of Judith isn't historical and I don't think he gains anything by trying to find historicity somewhere in the story.

Note also the link to his article "The Torah and Self-Defense" (PDF file) in the Penn State Law Review, which is full of interesting material from Jewish and early Christian exegesis of Pentateuchal passages pertaining to self-defense. One point: of the verb frequently translated ("thou shalt not") "kill" in the sixth commandment he says

The Jewish Publication Society commentary on Exodus explains that the Hebrew verb stem �applies only to illegal killing and, unlike other verbs for the taking of life, is never used in the administration of justice or for killing in war.�

Nahum Sarna, the author of the quoted commentary, is not quite correct here. The verb is used of execution by the avenger of blood, which was a valid form of the administration of justice in ancient Israel. I have discussed the whole issue here. But, even though Kopel goes on rather too much about killing lice and bacteria, his point is valid that the sixth commandment doesn't ban all killing, even of human beings.

Another interesting tidbit: he points out a saying of Jesus which advocates the death penalty.

UPDATE: Reader Dan Rabinowitz e-mails:

The article from Dave Kopel, contains many inaccuracies, perhaps the most glaring is this quote from the Talmud

"Likewise, the Talmud (a collection of the oral Jewish law, along with commentary) includes this story:

Jewish women were uniquely affected by the oppression, since the Greeks [the Syrians, who were hellenizing successors of part of Alexander the Great's empire] decreed that every virgin bride must first submit to the local Greek commander. Hence, they too were saved by the Chanukah miracle. Further, a woman actually served as an instrument of the miraculous deliverance, for Yehudis the daughter of Yochanon, the Kohen Gadol [the Jewish high priest], fed the Greek general cheese to increase his thirst, and then gave him wine to drink until he became inebriated. She then cut off his head, and this sight caused the enemy soldiers to flee.

There is no such piece in the Talmud. The Talmud does record that there was such a decree, however, this story of the abolition does not appear there. The ONLY place that it appears in later Midrashim (very late) and in some medieval commentaries. Now to be fair some of the commentaries are on the Talmud, however that does not mean that the Talmud actually says that.

Does anyone have specific references in the rabbinic literature to the story of the beheading woman?

UPDATE (10 December): More here.

UPDATE (16 December): More here. (Dave Kopel replies.)

DR. LOUIS H. FELDMAN will be giving a public lecture at Yeshiva University this morning. Menachem Butler e-mails:

The following will be taking place tomorrow afternoon [Thursday] at the Yeshiva University campus in Washington Heights, NY. For more information, please email mbutler@yu.edu.

thank you,
Menachem

_______________________________

THE TORAH U-MADDA LECTURE SERIES

ANNUAL YAHRZEIT SHIUR FOR THE GREEKS

"WHY WERE THE MACCABEES OPPOSED TO THE GREEK RELIGION AND CULTURE?"

Dr. Louis H. Feldman

(Abraham Wouk Family Professor of Classics and Literature, Yeshiva University)

This Thursday, December 9, 2004 Rubin Shul, 2:45-3:45 (club hour)

For more information, please contact: Menachem Butler - mbutler@yu.edu

THE TORAH U-MADDA LECTURE SERIES IS A PROGRAM OF THE MAX STERN DIVISION OF COMMUNAL SERVICES (MSDCS) AT YESHIVA UNIVERSITY.

UNICODE UPDATE: Danny Zacharias and Eric Sowell, bless their hearts, are promising to produce Unicode tutorials, respectively, for the Mac and PC platforms. Danny writes, "We will inform everyone when the tutorials are online and available." Watch this space.

LYCHNOLOGY IN THE NEWS: that is, the study of ancient lighting. Here's a timely article in the Lebanon Daily Star on lamps and lighting in antiquity.

Clay lamps shed new light on daily life in antiquity
Information-rich lighting devices reveal trade, religion, art and technology.

By Eric C. Lapp
Special to The Daily Star
Wednesday, December 08, 2004

[...]

Archaeologists are not able to excavate ancient light. However, they do recover the objects that housed, controlled, and sustained it. In antiquity, the chief instruments used for everyday lighting purposes were oil lamps, lanterns, torches, lamp-stands, candles, and hanging lamps. Among these devices, clay oil lamps would ultimately emerge as the most popular for satisfying the lighting needs of ancient peoples. They were comparatively easy to manufacture, inexpensive, and highly mobile.

Syria-Palestine and Arabia experienced a vibrant "lamp culture" in antiquity. This is evidenced by the significant quantities and diverse types of locally manufactured lamps found at archaeological sites throughout the region. Lamp images portrayed on mosaics and on small objects (i.e. coins, seals, lamps, and glass vessels), and literary mention of lamp use in religious texts, represent further examples of this dynamic lamp culture. Given the importance of light in the religious customs of the lands from where the three Abrahamic faiths originate, it is no wonder, then, that lamps figure prominently there in word, image, and form.

[...]

HAPPY HANUKKAH to my Jewish readers. This seven-day holiday begins this evening at sundown.

THE JOURNAL HENOCH, published by the Department of Oriental Studies at the University of Turin, now has a web page. It includes an index of all 25 volumes published so far.

Launched in 1979, Henoch contains studies on Old Testament, intertestamental literature, rabbinical and Post-biblical literature, mediaeval and modern Judaism. In addition a number of review articles are currently published, on Hebrew epigraphy, biblical archaeology, history and textual criticism of the Old Testament text, mediaeval Jewish literature. Henoch also publishes the Series Quaderni di Henoch.

HERE'S SOME COPTIC GOSPEL OF JUDAS NEWS, or at least gossip. Michael van Rijn, who has been mentioned before in this connection, has a long report on the alleged inside history of the Gospel of Judas since its discovery in the 1970s. (I can't find a permalink, but the report is labeled "Update: 3-12-2004".) It includes a photo of one leaf of the manuscript with a translation of it into English, which he says was given to him by Charles Hedrick. As before, I can't vouch for any of it: I blog, you decide. If anyone is in touch with Professor Hedrick, or if he happens to see this post, I would interested in anything he has to say about the story.

UPDATE (7 December): Sorry, the link was accidentally left out. It's there now. Also, Wieland Willker has more on the Textual Criticism list. Apparently he's been in touch with Charles Hedrick, who confirms that the photo is of the Gospel of Judas and that the translation is his.

PHILO OR THE PSEUDEPIGRAPHA? Eric Sowell, the Coding Humanist writes:

I was thinking the other day that the OT Pseudepigrapha would be more significant to study as a backdrop to the NT times. I asked Hall Harris about it and he said Philo would be. Anybody else have an opinion on this?

Like Torrey Seland (second commenter), I don't see why it has to be an either-or choice. There are good reasons to study both. (Incidentally, I am not the Jim who posted the first comment.) I have a good bit to say about this in The Book, especially with regard to the Old Testament pseudepigrapha. But while you wait for that, here are some thoughts.

First, another critically important Jewish corpus for the New Testament background is, of course, the Dead Sea Scrolls. I would say that they are more important for that purpose than either Philo or the pseudepigrapha. We have them in their original Hebrew and Aramaic in a physical context datable to the first century C.E. and located in Palestine, and they cover a huge range of Jewish themes and ideas. They are a treasure-trove of cultural, historical, and linguistic information. If you have to limit your study to one corpus (but don't!), pick them.

Second, Josephus is perhaps more important than Philo (I'm not as sure about some of the pseudepigrapha) for NT background. Again, he's a first-century, Greek-speaking Jew (but he also knew Aramaic and, presumably, Hebrew) and he comes from Palestine and knew of John the Baptist and the Jesus movement and probably Jesus himself. He gives us an enormous amount of information about the people, the place, and the period, but always from his perspective as a survivor of the Great Revolt who owed his position to the Roman conquerers of Judea and who wanted to make the Jews (and himself) look as good as possible to the Romans. See Steve Mason's Josephus web page for lots of goodies on Josephus.

Third, most (perhaps not all) of the Old Testament Apocrypha (Deuterocanonical books) are relevant as NT background material too.

As for Philo, he is useful for NT background because his works are certainly Jewish, they appear to have been transmitted with reasonable accuracy, and they are almost exactly contemporary with Jesus. Philo's disadvantages are that he is a Greek-speaking, Diaspora Jew who writes with a Hellenized philosophical agenda in Alexadria, a big city. Presumably he had relatively little in common with an Aramaic-speaking, uneducated Galilean carpenter and his followers, although perhaps more with Paul and the writer of Hebrews.

The OT pseudepigrapha are a messier problem, mainly because nearly all of them were copied and transmitted by Christians, often in a translation with the original being lost. (For the issue of translation, see here). The big questions are which texts were composed by Christians but sound Jewish because they are on Old Testament subjects, which are genuinely Jewish compositions, and of the latter, which have been transmitted without substantial Christian alteration?

The most common approach among NT scholars - I dare say even today - has been to assume that any work that doesn't have obvious Christian bits, or that doesn't have obvious Christian bits that can be argued to be secondary additions, is a Jewish composition. But this doesn't work for two reasons. First, as Robert Kraft has pointed out (see especially here and here), the most reasonable approach is not to assume that a work is Jewish until proven otherwise, but to reverse the burden of proof. We should start with the earliest manuscripts of the work and their social context and then work backwards from there as the evidence requires. Sometimes this lead us to argue for a Jewish origin, and if so, well and good, but often there isn't persuasive evidence and in those cases the default working hypothesis is that the document is a (sometimes late antique) Christian composition, since our manuscripts were produced and transmitted by Christians. The point is that we know that these documents had a Christian context and that Christians liked them and must have made some sort of sense of them. Earlier contexts are by no means excluded, they just have to be argued for with positive evidence, not assumed.

For arguments that Christians may well have written OT pseudepigrapha without any Christian references see here. For an evaluation of how some of the Dead Sea Scrolls would have been received by scholars if they had been passed down to us the same way the OT pseudepigrapha were, see here and here.

The second reason is that there is rather a wide range of possible authors of Old Testament pseudepigrapha. Many people in antiquity had the means, motive, and opportunity to compose such texts (as Ross Kraemer said to me in San Antonio). They could be Jews or Christians (of varying levels of commitment to what I call "boundary maintenance" - distingishing themselves from other groups), but there were also "God-fearers" (i.e. gentiles who had a strong interest in Judaism and some commitment to Jewish praxis, but didn't convert), "sympathizers" (gentiles who were interested in Judaism but who may not have been involved at all with a Jewish community), Jewish-Christians of various flavors, Samaritans, and quite likely other groups we know nothing about. Often it is reasonable to keep some or all of these possible authorships in mind for a text without preferring any one of them, and sometimes there are hints within a text that point to one or another of these - hints that have been ignored because scholars have been so keen to claim pseudepigrapha as first-century Jewish texts in order to use them as NT background. More on all this here.

In my own research I have concluded that the following pseudepigrapha are Jewish beyond reasonable doubt and were written either within a century of the crucifixion of Jesus or earlier and may be reasonably used for background to the New Testament writings. Texts shown to be Jewish on external grounds (mostly fragmentary preservation among the Dead Sea Scrolls): the Book of the Watchers, the Astronomical Book, the Book of Dreams, the Epistle of Enoch (all in 1 Enoch), and the book of Jubilees. Texts shown to be Jewish on internal grounds: Aristeas to Philocrates, 2 Baruch, 4 Ezra, the Assumption or Testament of Moses, Psalms of Solomon, and Pseudo-Philo's Biblical Antiquities. These are certainly very important for understanding both first-century Judaism and earliest Christianity.

Texts that are Jewish beyond resonable doubt and that were composed in the early centuries C.E., but not necessarily within a century of the crucifixion, include: the Similitudes of Enoch and 3-4 Maccabees. It is dicier to use these for New Testament background, since they may be considerably later than the New Testament writings.

Some other pseudepigrapha are likely to be Jewish but cannot be shown to be so beyond reasonable doubt, such as various bits of the Sibylline Oracles. Other texts may be Jewish but then again may not be, such as the Testament of Job and Joseph and Aseneth. Still others are often used as Jewish texts but in my opinion are probably Christian compositions; for example, the Testament of Abraham.

For all of these works, apart from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the texts are reasonably well established, but they have been passed in down long and sometimes pretty dodgy manuscript traditions, in some cases including multiple layers of translation with only the most recent translation-layer surviving. It would be prudent to concentrate on general themes and repeated ideas in them rather than on individual proof-texts.

Incidentally, the reason I'm making so much of this methodology for isolating genuine Jewish documents is that I think it serves our understanding of ancient Judaism far better if we limit our reconstruction to works that can be shown beyond reasonable doubt to be Jewish. In other words, granting that in many cased we just can't tell if a pseudepigraphon is of Jewish origin, it is better to exclude doubtful cases and base our reconstruction on what we know that we know. A false positive does more harm than a false negative: if we think we are studying ancient Judaism (or NT background) with a first-century-C.E. Jewish text and in reality it's a third-century-C.E. Christian composition, we pollute our corpus with erroneous information that distorts our understanding. Better to leave it out until such a time as we can be sure what its origin actually is, even if the price is potentially leaving out genuine Jewish works if we can't be sure beyond reasonable doubt that that's what they are.

For my detailed evaluations of each of the OT pseudepigrapha listed above - as well as of Philo, Josephus, and the Old Testament Apocrypha, you will have to wait for The Book (provisional title: Christian Transmission of Jewish Pseudepigrapha: What Can We Know and How Do We Know It?). The five papers of mine that I linked to in this post are conference papers that give summaries of early drafts of some of the chapters.

Speaking of The Book, I'd better get back to it.

UPDATE (9 December): More here.

THE SAN ANTONIO VOCAL ARTS ENSEMBLE (SAVAE), known in PaleoJudaica for its ancient Aramaic music, is playing in Eugene and Portland Oregon.

THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH is out in a new translation by Stephen Mitchell.

PROFESSOR JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN of the University of Iowa has passed away at age 75. He is well known for his publications on ancient Judaism, including his Anchor Bible commentaries on 1 and 2 Maccabees. May his memory be for a blessing.

A BIBLE TRAVELOGUE: read the children's book, see the PBS miniseries.

A JESUS COMMEMORATION COIN to celebrate the end of the first Christian millennium has been found by the Tiberias excavation, according to the Israel Ministry of Tourism:

The Ministry of Tourism in Israel also announced that a rare coin has just been discovered at the archaeological excavation of ancient Tiberias on the shores of the Sea of Galilee (the "Kinneret") in Israel. On the front of the coin, a somewhat blurred image of Jesus can be seen, while on the back, the words in Greek "Jesus the Messiah King of Kings" are engraved very clearly.

This coin is one of a series of coins that were issued in Constantinople (present day Istanbul) in celebration of the First Millennium of Jesus' birth. It is not uncommon to find this coin in one of Israel's neighboring countries, such as Turkey, but this is the first time that it has ever been discovered at an Israeli archaeological site. Prof. Yizhar Hirschfeld, Director of this excavation, explains that this coin was brought to Tiberias by Christian pilgrims. Tiberias and the other sites around Israel's Sea of Galilee were the desired destination of Christian pilgrims during the time of Muslim rule in Israel from the 7th to 11th centuries CE.

THE "DEAD SEA SCROLLS" OF CHINA:

Grinnell professor studies ancient Chinese texts

By CHUCK SCHOFFNER, Associated Press Writer

GRINNELL, ---- Working among scholars from the likes of Harvard, UCLA and Yale, Grinnell College professor Scott Cook helps to interpret the earliest known versions of some of China's most important philosophical texts.

Cook is one of only a handful of Western scholars to be given access to the fragile strips of bamboo, unearthed in 1993 from a tomb that dates back to 300 B.C.

"We've seen a number of tombs that had texts buried within them, but this is the first time we've had philosophical texts," Cook said.

The mostly Confucian texts have been compared to the Dead Sea scrolls in their historical and philosophical significance, and their discovery has brought together scholars from both mainland China and Taiwan, as well as Ivy League schools in the United States and even Grinnell, a small school of 1,500 students about 60 miles from Des Moines.

[...]

As Danny Zacharias has observed over at Deinde, the Dead Sea Scrolls have become a cultural icon. Calling other manuscript discoveries "the Dead Sea Scrolls of" is one of the more serious applications one finds in the media.

THE MACABEES AND JERUSALEM: More seasonal theories, but based on serious archaeology in this case.

How the Maccabees Reshaped Jerusalem (Jewish Journal)

by Bill Gladstone, Jewish Telegraphic Agency

[...]

�The problem is that Herod the Great built so thoroughly that many remains of the Maccabeans have almost disappeared,� said Dan Bahat, a senior lecturer at Bar-Ilan University who is spending the academic year lecturing at St. Michael�s College at the University of Toronto.

The Maccabeans, who founded the Hasmonean dynasty, likely inspired King Herod�s vision of the Temple, said Bahat, whose specialty is Jerusalem of the Second Temple period.

In recent years, the former chief archaeologist of Jerusalem has supervised the excavations of the Western Wall tunnel, the ancient subterranean passage that extends along the western perimeter of the Temple Mount.

A large water channel that was discovered in the tunnel has been accepted by many archaeologists as a Maccabean-built aqueduct and, according to Bahat, almost certainly is the most visible Maccabean relic in the Old City.

�This is the most important remain of Hasmonean Jerusalem today,� he said. �It�s an enormous ditch that was excavated from the surface in order to supply water to the fortress named Baris, which was the seat of the Maccabean family before they moved to a place in the area of today�s Jewish Quarter.�

The apocryphal Book of the Maccabees offers ample evidence that the legendary leaders of the Jewish revolt against the Greeks were great builders. As further evidence, Bahat cites the fine mosaics and frescoes excavated in various Maccabean palaces in Jericho.

[...]

MORE STAR OF BETHLEHEM THEORIES: As I said before, it's that time of year. I have no idea how valid the astronomy is and, as I said in the previous post, I'm skeptical about the history. I blog, you decide.

New Theories Suggest a Less-Than-Spectacular Star of Bethlehem

BY MARGIE WYLIE
c.2004 Newhouse News Service

[...]

While scientists disagree on the particulars, "one thing is absolutely certain," said Mark Kidger, an astronomer with the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias in Spain's Canary Islands. "Whatever the Star of Bethlehem was, it was not an extraordinarily spectacular object."

[...]

Michael R. Molnar proposes that the heavenly sign was an eclipse of the planet Jupiter that took place in the constellation Aries, among other regal portents, on April 17 of the year 6 B.C.

That morning, just before dawn, Jupiter, a planet associated with kings, emerged from behind the sun to rise in the east, appearing as a morning star. Later that day, the moon moved in front of -- or occulted -- Jupiter.

While such events can be dramatic, this one was invisible, lost in the glare of the noonday sun. Even so, the Magi would have predicted it, argues Molnar, a retired Rutgers University astronomer who lives in Warren, N.J.

[...]

Kidger, author of "The Star of Bethlehem: An Astronomer's View," disagrees.

Occultations aren't rare and so wouldn't have excited seasoned skywatchers, he said. He noted that the moon occulted various planets almost 200 times between 20 B.C. and 1 B.C.

Kidger argues that what the Magi observed was a series of astrological portents, each of which has been individually suggested as the star. Together, they led up to a not particularly brilliant, but long-lived nova -- a distant, exploding star -- recorded by the Chinese in 5 B.C.

[...]

BIBLIA HEBRAICA QUINTA: The first fascicle of the new 5th edition of Biblia Hebraica (the Megillot) can now be ordered, and a number of people have referred me to this PDF order form. It contains a sample page from Ruth and a page that describes the project (in German and English). Looks good, but it would have been helpful if the description page explained clearly how the new edition improves on BHS.

ED COOK explains the title of "Ralph the Sacred River" and comments on Dead Sea Scrolls coverage in U.S. News & World Report.

THOUGHTS ON UNICODE AND THE MACINTOSH: Over on Deinde, Danny Zacharias has some thoughts on Unicode and the Mac, precipitated by Mark Goodacre's lament that more biblical scholars are not using the Unicode fonts and my e-mail to him (update here) asking for more information on Unicode for the Mac. Like all the discussions I've seen, Danny's sends my head spinning. Examples:

First off, many computer users who know they should start using unicode fonts do not realize that it means more than just downloading a new font, it means setting up a language bar with different keyboards to use, which is part of the operating system and not the word processor. Other computer users, knowing that this type of setup needs to take place, sit content with the classical fonts and push off the unicode conversion process for later.

[...]

What I love about Mac is that no outside software is required; the language bar manages the keyboards as well as the layouts without any other software.

[...]

Okay, you need something called a "language bar" that you have to "set up," but which good-naturedly "manages" some "keyboards" and "layouts" for you, and all of this is part of your operating system. Yikes!! Darn right I'm going to stick to the SBL fonts until someone explains to me, in simple steps suitable for an idiot, where I can find the fonts (ahem, free fonts, thank you, like the SBL fonts I use now) and how I can do all this setting up and managment delegation.

Danny is thinking of producing a Unicode tutorial for the Mac. More power to him!

UPDATE: Ed Cook e-mails:

Try this. Go to Mac Help on your Help menu. Type in "changing language" in the search cartouche when the window comes up. Then click on the topic "Changing language on your computer."

Ken Penner e-mails:

Regarding your blog entries about Unicode on the Mac, apparently the level of difficulty in setting your keyboard to type Unicode Greek depends on the version of your OS (it becomes easy with 10.2).

For a free Unicode Greek keyboard (including setup instructions), see
http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~hancock/vudown.htm
Or http://alpha.furman.edu/~cblack01/greek_stuff.htmlv (bottom of page)
Or http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/Play/GkUnicode.html

Chuck Jones e-mails:

Since you like the free SBL fonts and you're interested in compliance with such standards as Unicode, you might be interested in looking at The SBL Font Foundation:
http://www.sbl-site.org/TechResearch/TechResearch_SBLFontFoundation.aspx

"The Society of Biblical Literature, with assistance from Tiro Typeworks and support from members of the SBL Font Foundation, is developing a new series of high-quality fonts to foster biblical scholarship.

Fonts in the series are attractive and legible on computer screens and in print, include characters and symbols found in critical editions, display complex scripts, and transfer between operating systems and applications that support Unicode/OpenType standards. Each character in a Unicode font is assigned a unique code, and this makes it possible for scholars and publishers to exchange texts between Unicode environments without converting texts or losing data."

Current members of the Foundation are:

American Bible Society, www.americanbible.org
American Schools of Oriental Research, www.asor.org
Baker Book House, www.bakerbooks.com
Brill Academic Publishers, www.brill.nl
German Bible Society, www.dbg.de
Logos Research Systems, www.logos.com
Westminster John Knox, www.wjkbooks.com

Many thanks, all. This goes on my agenda for the holiday break. I don't think I'll be able to get to it before then; I have to finish The Book (which is currently at the soul-destroying proofreading and double-checking-everything stage.)

PETER KIRBY is redesigning his Early Christian Writings website and he wants your feedback.

THE SCH�YEN COLLECTION has been mentioned before on this blog, with reference to its Qumran fragments and early biblical manuscripts.

Now it develops that this collection also includes many of the "Dead Sea Scrolls of Buddhism, also mentioned here not long ago. A Norwegian named Atle Omland has noted on the IraqCrisis list that he has a website on "Buddhist manuscripts from Afghanistan in The Sch�yen Collection."

I agree with him that this material should be repatriated as soon as it is practical to do so. My concerns are that we be very sure first of the security of the museum in Afghanistan, as well as of its topnotch conservation resources, and that top quality photographs should be taken of all of the fragments before they are moved again, to make sure no information is lost. (The photographs on the Sch�yen collection website are not top quality, although I imagine that the original prints are much better than the small digital files that have been posted. But probably infra-red or ultraviolet photos, or photos with various color filters would also be needed to bring out all the epigraphic information.)

More grist for the debate over how to handle antiquities on the market and in private hands.

BLOGGER NEEDS TO UPGRADE ITS SERVERS. Or something. It's getting harder and harder to get into the system to update blogs. And the publishing button is taking longer and longer to cycle through and often just leads to an error message. I'm told I'm not the only one having these problems.

TEMPORARY HEBREW BIBLE TEACHING POST AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW:

University of Glasgow

Department of Theology & Religious Studies


ONE YEAR POST-DOCTORAL POST (PART-TIME)


The Department of Theology & Religious Studies in the University of Glasgow is offering a two-fifths University Teacher post in Hebrew/Old Testament Studies/Judaism for one year, commencing February 1st 2005, pro-rata on Lecturer Scale A.

The appointed person will have a doctorate in one of the subjects indicated, with the ability to teach biblical Hebrew at levels one and two a requirement. In addition s/he will be asked to contribute to the department�s teaching in either or both of Judaism or Biblical Studies up to Level 2, together with associated administrative duties.

The Department is a flourishing centre for Theology and Religious Studies, rated 5 in the last RAE. It has a very active programme in Biblical Studies and Judaism, and lively research centres for Literature, Theology and the Arts, Islamic Studies, and Interfaith Studies. Further information about the department can be viewed on our web-site, http://www.religions.divinity.gla.ac.uk/.

Interested applicants should send their cv to the Head of Department, Dr Mona Siddiqui at

University of Glasgow
Department of Theology and Religious Studies
Glasgow
G12 8QQ

to arrive by December 30th 2004. Interviews will be held in the week beginning January 17th, 2005.

[Please address any enquiries about this position to Dr Alastair G Hunter (a.hunter@arts.gla.ac.uk)]

BLESSED ARE THE CHEESEMAKERS: The Forward has an article, "When the Hero Is Judith, and the Latkes Are Cheese," on cheese and Judaism, with special attention to Hanukkah. Excerpt:

For cheese, the hero of this particular Hanukkah story is not Judah but Judith. The Book of Judith, like The Book of the Maccabees, is to be found in the Apocrypha. According to the story recounted there, during the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar, Assyrian armies were laying siege to the small but militarily significant town of Bethulia, near Jerusalem. One of its residents, the beautiful widow Judith, was determined to save her townspeople. She managed to gain entrance to the Assyrian camp, whereupon the enemy General Holofernes espied her. Intending to seduce the beautiful widow, Holofernes invited her into his tent for a banquet. There Judith fed the general salty cheeses so that she might then ply him with goblets of wine to slake his thirst. Eventually Holofernes fell drunkenly asleep, at which point Judith seized her opportunity and lopped off his head with his own sword; the hea, she carried back to her comrades in a sack. When the Assyrian armies discovered their leader dead, his head carried aloft by Jewish fighters, they fled in panic and the town was saved.

Since that time, Judith has been a name of honor for Jewish girls � think of 20th-century Jewish artists such as Judy Holliday (n�e Judith Tuvim), Judy Chicago (n�e Cohen) and Judy Blume (n�e Sussman) � and dishes made with cheese have been a tradition at Hanukkah celebrations, to remind us of Judith's heroism.

The Judith story doesn't involve the Maccabean revolt, which is the basis for Hanukkah, but it does involve defeating an evil pagan ruler.

The article also has some recipes for cheese dishes. Enjoy.

SEMITIC PHILOLOGIST EDWARD COOK has been assimilated to the Blogosphere. His new blog is entitled "Ralph the Sacred River." I have no idea what the title means, but the blog's remit is "Observations on language (mostly ancient), religion, and culture." Check out his posting on the Copper Scroll in relation to the recent Nova program on the Cave of the Letters

UPDATE (2 December): A couple of readers have pointed out that the title is a play on a line from Coleridge's "Kubla Khan":

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

No one seems quite sure what the allusion means though. Maybe an example of slippage of meaning between oral and written versions of a text? Perhaps Ed will enlighten us in due course.

UPDATE (3 December): More on "Ralph" here.

THE NEW ASOR POLICY ON UNPROVENANCED CUNEIFORM TEXTS, which was discussed by Eric Meyers in the SBL session on "The Forgery Crisis", has now been published on the IraqCrisis list:

[Iraqcrisis] New ASOR Policy Re: Unprovenanced Cuneiform Texts in Iraq

UPDATE: Now online on the ASOR website here.

DR. MARILYN J. LUNDBERG, whom I saw last week in San Antonio, has a cool career as an Old Testament scholar. Hear all about it on a KCLA "mycoolcareer.com" webcast from August, 2003. She is associated with the West Semitic Research Project and Inscriptifact, both of which have been mentioned on PaleoJudaica. This is a very cool introduction for nonspecialists to the fields of Hebrew Bible and ancient Northwest Semitic epigraphy, one of the best I've encountered. It contains reflections on her doctoral disseration about the structure of the YHWH speeches in Job; advice to students on preparing to be a scholar; and a story about photographing pre-Mosaic inscriptions on a cliff in Egypt which involved a military convoy and a snakebite kit. Oh - and there's Indiana Jones music too.

SEASONAL SPECULATIONS ABOUT THE STAR OF BETHLEHEM are getting started:

Bethlehem Star now falls under computer's gaze (ic Wales)

Nov 29 2004

David Williamson, Western Mail


A WELSH university is carrying out research into one of the world's most enduring mysteries - the star of Bethlehem.

Martin Griffiths, from the University of Glamorgan, is fascinated by the Biblical story which led the mysterious Magi from the East to the infant Christ.

Rather than dismissing the story as pure mythology, he thinks that it is likely something extraordinary did appear in the night sky 2,000 years ago.

The bright light, he speculates, may not have been an actual star but could have been caused by a unique conjunction of the planets.

[...]

A triple conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn was seen in the constellation Pisces in 7BC. This blaze of light would have excited peoples in neighbouring cultures who looked for signs in the skies.

[...]

Anything's possible, but if I had to bet, I would bet that the star story is a legend, probably arising from messianic speculations based on Numbers 24:17 - a passage given messianic import both by ancient Jews and early Christians.

Also, for more on the Magi, see here.

THE FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES, Robert Alter's new translation of the Pentateuch, is reviewed by the Christian Science Monitor. Excerpt:

Alter's combination of a freshly minted text and splendidly concise commentaries makes the biblical words resonate. And as this example suggests, the reader of the King James Version of The Bible will not be disappointed by Alter's translation. He preserves what he calls the "direction" of that translation in its paradoxical combination of dignity and "homespun timelessness."

He chides modern translations for uniformity and blandness. Furthermore, the language of Moses is varied and discontinuous in a way not captured by traditional translations. Alter's English, especially when understood in light of his commentary, returns the variegated richness to the text.

TIMBUKTU MANUSCRIPTS: I could have sworn I had mentioned this story already, but I can't find any reference to it in my archive, so I guess not.

Lost texts find new life

By Philip Smucker International Herald Tribune

Monday, November 29, 2004
TIMBUKTU, Mali There was a time, centuries ago, when the Sahara was arguably one of the best places on earth to buy a book. From West Africa's Atlantic coast across the sandy expanses to the White Nile in the east, camels laden with chests full of books and manuscripts trekked from one oasis to the next. In caravan cities like Timbuktu, tanners, leather workers and scribes worked to replenish the rich stock of political treatises, scientific manuals, law books and sacred texts.

Many of these works were lost during the colonial era, when Africa became known as a continent with no written history. But others survived, their pages frayed but still intact, some hidden beneath mud homes, others stashed in desert caves, a trove of ancient documents dating from as long ago as 1,000 years.

Today, thanks to outside help, Timbuktu is at the edge of a cultural revival. Increasingly known as a repository of Africa's intellectual heritage, it is attracting scholars seeking to rediscover and preserve the lost texts.

[...]

Entire libraries of African texts - mostly written in Arabic, but often transcribed from local African languages - were handed down from father to son over the centuries. In those medieval times, religious and political assemblies met in the courtyards of Timbuktu's many libraries to take up legal matters and to resolve communal disputes. Elders applied ancient texts to the understanding of current affairs.

[...]

This is not directly relevant to ancient Judaism, but it occurred to me when I first read about these archives some months ago, that it was entirely likely that Jewish texts - pseudepigrapha, for example - translated into Arabic (perhaps via Syriac or Ethiopic) could be among the manuscripts. The following tidbit offers some encouragment for that hope, and even for the hope of Jewish manuscripts actually transmitted by Jews:

One of Timbuktu's largest remaining libraries, the Fondo Kati, is run by Ismael Diadie Haidara, an eclectic scholar who claims Germanic, Jewish and Black African descent.

"Timbuktu was a melting pot for centuries," said Diadie Haidara, who has written several books, including one on the Jews of Timbuktu, who flourished here centuries ago and built a synagogue that lasted through the 19th century.

I will be watching this story closely.

UPDATE: There's more on Ismael Diadie Haidara and the Jews of Timbuktu here, here, and here.

AVRAHAM NEGEV, Nabatean scholar, has died. (Ha'aretz - scroll down for the story.)

Avraham Negev, archaeologist, dies at 81

Avraham Negev, professor emeritus at the Hebrew University's Institute of Archaeology, died on Saturday in Jerusalem, following a severe illness. Negev was a leading scholar of Nabatean archaeology in Israel. Born in 1923 in Pinsk as Avraham Eisenberg, Negev immigrated to Palestine with his family as a child. In 1947, he lost his right hand as a commander in the Haganah police force. In 1953, he began to study archaeology at Hebrew University, and in 1959-1961 led archaeological excavations at the Nabatean site of Avdat. In 1972, he edited the first edition of the Archaeological Encyclopedia of the Holy Land. (Amiram Barkat)

May his memory be for a blessing.