NEW DEAD SEA SCROLLS FORUM ONLINE: Ian Hutchesson e-mails:

Dead Sea Scrolls Forum
----------------------

I'd like to announce the "opening" of a web-based forum for Dead Sea Scrolls scholars at

http://scrollsforum.com/forum

and any scholar with a solid foundation in Qumran studies is welcome to register at the site.

A web forum is functionally quite different from a mailing list. In fact members receive no mail whatsoever. A member visits the internet site using a web browser to access any messages that might be of interest. Web forums have proven to be a successful medium of communication in various technical and non-specialist fields, and I believe this format can be successful in the contacts of scholarly pursuit as well.

Forums invariably present members with an index of topics, allowing members to follow only those topics which they are interested in. The topics I have made available include:

* Texts (technical aspects)
* Biblical Scrolls
* Parabiblical Texts
* Community related texts
* Cult and Practice
* Language Matters
* Contexts
* Archaeology

If you are only interested in one of these topics you never need to look at any of the others.

As this is an internet based structure, I have had to take security into consideration. Only members can read the forum material and to do so, a member must log in. Every member will have a password to access the site.

There are two types of membership: general and scholarly. A general member will be able to read most forum topics, but won't be able to write to them. There will be specific general forums. To register as a general member all you need do is visit the site and follow the indication on the top right, which says "Register". This will give reading access to the site. To become a scholarly member, do the same, ie register as a general member, then announce yourself by sending an email to

admin@scrollsforum.com

The information you supply at registration should be sufficient to verify eligibility. It will only be a matter of a day or perhaps less before you have full access to the site.

Before registering it is strongly advised that you check the forum topic called "Start Here". You will find a message there aptly entitled "Please read before registering!"

At the beginning of proceedings I will be acting as moderator.

The aims of the Scrolls Forum are simple:

1) put scholars in contact with others about matters that concern them; and

2) analyse scrolls issues in a non-adversarial manner, fostering new, and improving on old, ideas.

If the idea appeals to you, or if you know of someone who might be interested, please spread the word around. There are a lot of scholars working in Qumran related fields around the world, mostly left to their own devices, but, given the opportunity to share their knowledge and expertise, so much can be achieved. I think that the more scholars talk to one another the better off we all will be. Please think about joining this enterprise, if the Dead Sea Scrolls and Qumran archaeology are important to your interests. Your ideas can help others, as theirs can help you.

I HAVE TO READ BLOGS to find out what's going on in my own back yard. Helenann Hartley writes:

Bible syndrome exhibition

Ekklesia reports on a new exhibition in Dundee, Scotland, about 'Jerusalem syndrome'.

For more on "Jerusalem Syndrome," go here.

A HIDDEN CAMERA visits the London Kabbalah Centre. The Telegraph has the story and it isn't pretty. Excerpt:

Having paid �860, I was next offered a trip to celebrate a Kabbalah religious festival in Israel. Rabbi Philip Berg, the leader of the Kabbalah Centre movement, would be present. I was presented with an invoice for $6,232 (�3,331); flights were to be extra.

Then I had a session with Rabbi Eliyahu Yardeni, a Kabbalah Centre teacher. He told me about the meaning of life and the secrets of the universe, and volunteered a staggering piece of information: "Just to tell you another thing about the six million Jews that were killed in the Holocaust. The question was that the Light was blocked. They didn't use Kabbalah."

It sounded as though he was blaming the Holocaust on its victims. Then he made a vitriolic attack on mainstream rabbis, labelling them the enemy of the Kabbalah Centre. I'm not Jewish, but his unprovoked rantings about Hitler's victims left me questioning his sanity.

My encounter with the Kabbalah people still makes me angry. On the one hand, I have experienced first-class surgery and care at the Royal Marsden Hospital which has, at the very least, extended my life. Yet that hospital is struggling to raise money for essential equipment that saves lives.

On the other hand, you've got the Kabbalah Centre, this wacky outfit, where, for �860, I bought a few bottles of water and some books I can't read. The Kabbalah Centre is attracting the weak and those who are most vulnerable. I know, because I've been through cancer.

And here's the Aramaic angle, which comes earlier in the article:

We talked about my cancer. [senior figure Chagai] Shouster was very careful to stress that he wasn't promising miracles, but he said there were tools that could help, including the water and the Zohar - the Kabbalah books in Aramaic and Hebrew.

[...]

"No, nothing is a gift, the water is not a gift, the Zohar is not a gift, as you know� There is the water cost. A case of 12 boxes costs �45 and the Zohar is �289. And the Shabbat meal is �26."

Shouster explained the importance of the Zohar books. No matter that they were written in Aramaic and, to me, indecipherable, I was told that I only had to run my fingers over the pages and scan the words for the "tools" to start working. Their tools, however, weren't cheap - the bill was �860, including dinner that night.

Whatever you make of the rest of the bill, the charge for the Aramaic Zohar is a rip-off, considering that you can download a good chunk of Matt's critical text for free. And you can get the whole Soncino Zohar in Aramaic and English for only $179.

THE JEWISH KINGDOM OF KHAZARIA is the subject of a "teleseminar" run by Rabbi Moshe Rudner, starting tomorrow (Wednesday).

CULTURAL ICON WATCH: Danny Zacharias has noted a, shall we say, bloated media simile involving the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Incidentally, in the new Qumranica blog (to open in early February) one of the things I want to do is to pay more attention to things like this; ways that the Dead Sea Scrolls are used as a cultural icon. Danny has come up with some good examples. I notice a lot of these things but have rarely commented on them up to now. We'll see what we come up with. Stay tuned.

REBECCA LESSES is blogging the Orion Centre's Dead Sea Scrolls symposium in Jerusalem.

"THE LORD OF THE RINGS: A Source-Critical Analysis," is a fairly weak attempt at parody by someone named Mark P. Shea (via ricoblog). Weak because it isn't source-critical at at all. It's a kind of Frazerian analysis of the LOTR using Victorian, by-the-seat-of-the-pants anthropology to find "sources" used differently in the "T" ("Tolkien") redaction and the "PJ" ("Peter Jackson") redaction. Source criticism is certainly fair game for a send-up - especially some of the sillier multisources-in-a-verse applications to the Pentateuch - but this attempt is disappointing. The concept is good and the LOTR is fertile ground, but the execution needs work.

That said, it's a shock to many doctoral students in biblical studies when they have the epiphany that basic source-critical methods actually work pretty well. (See Jeffrey Tigay's [ed.] Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism for some classic treatments of the issue.) I was one of them.

Incidentally, if you want to do source criticism of Tolkien, have a look at "Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age," published in The Silmarillion. Clearly it is by a different hand than the writer of the LOTR, since it says:

For Frodo the Halfling, it is said, at the bidding of Mithrandir took on himself the burden, and alone with his servant he passed through peril and darkness and came at last in Sauron's despite even to Mount Doom; and there into the Fire where it was wrought he cast the Great Ring of Power, and so at last it was unmade and its evil consumed.

My emphasis. This account of the destruction of the Ring leaves out a central character (Gollum) and presents Frodo's action in a rather more glorious light than the LOTR, which has the Ring destroyed essentially by a clumsy accident. I don't know whether the version quoted above is an "H" ("Hobbit") source that eliminates Gollum's part in order to make the achievement of Frodo look better, or whether the LOTR has added anti-Hobbit legendary accretions to the original story, but that they are by two different authors can scarcely be doubted.

UPDATE (11 January): That was a joke, folks! There seems to be some confusion on this point. I know that Tolkien wrote both. My serious point is that a single author can be self-contradictory, especially in a large work or corpus. Contradictions are not in themselves proof of multiple authorship. You need a consistent pattern of contradictions, different viewpoints, different styles, etc., to establish sources, and even then the results usually are fuzzy and can't be pushed very far. For example, I have a hard time denying that the Pentateuch contains sources conventionally called P and D, along with a lot of other sticky goo whose origins can't be reconstructed, at least by me.

Also, reader Jon Mackenzie points to another, more entertaining and better executed parody of source criticism and other biblical-critical methods:

New Directions in Pooh Studies:
�berlieferungs- und religionsgeschichtliche Studien zum Pu-Buch

UPDATE: Jan-Wim Wesselius e-mails:

In several recent articles I tried to explain why, as you put it in a recent post, "basic source-critical methods actually work pretty well", proposing that they give a diachronical explanation of some synchronic literary features of Genesis and the entire Primary History. Most readily available is my "Towards a New History of Israel", JHS (www.jhsonline.org) 3 (2000-2001), see for example paragraph 3.5: "We suddenly realize that what once used to be taken for proof of the Documentary Hypothesis is in reality the literary expression of two versions of the description of God himself. Both the supposed Elohist and the supposed Jahwist are literary personae in the text." The striking duplications in Genesis are, in my opinion, mainly meant to draw the readers' attention to this dual characterization. And of course, as long as one does not recognize this, ascription to different sources is a reasonable approach.

MORE DA VINCI CODE REFUTATION from New Testament Scholar Bart Ehrman and author Sharan Newman. The latter has a new book out called The Real History Behind The Da Vinci Code.

One error in Ehrman's comments, at least as presented in the article:

Brown's plot involves Jesus marrying Mary Magdalene, so the novel says it was unthinkable for a Jewish man to remain unmarried. But Ehrman says historians agree the Dead Sea Scrolls disprove Brown's claim.

Not so. The Dead Sea Scrolls never refer explicitly to celibacy. Josephus, Philo, and Pliny tell us that the Essenes, or some of them at any rate, lived lives of celibacy. A connection with the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls, however plausible, is inferential. If we had the Scrolls but not the authors who comment on the Essenes, I doubt that it would have occurred to us to think that the Qumran group was celibate.

Ehrman's point remains: there is first-century C.E. evidence for celibate Jewish men. But it doesn't come from the Dead Sea Scrolls. I've written on this in greater detail here.

UPDATE: Speaking of the Da Vinci Code, here's a Scottish angle:

Da Vinci Code crush threat to Scots chapel (The Times)
Karin Goodwin

DA VINCI CODE fever is threatening the fabric of Rosslyn Chapel, the Scottish church reputed to be the resting place of the holy grail and featured in the bestselling book.

Fears that the building and its unique stone carvings are being put at risk by an influx of visitors will lead to tourists being banned from making unsupervised visits to the medieval chapel.

Since The Da Vinci Code was published in 2003, visitor numbers at the 15th-century chapel have risen by 56%. Last year almost 70,000 visited the building in Midlothian, making it one of the country�s most popular tourist attractions.

[...]

UPDATE (11 January): Ken Penner e-mails

BTW, about your comment on the Qumran celibacy issue, "If we had the Scrolls but not the authors who comment on the Essenes, I doubt that it would have occurred to us to think that the Qumran group was celibate," there are still the cemeteries, the demographics of which are unquestionably skewed toward adult males, extremely so if one examines the standard N-S oriented graves in the cemetery east of the site. It is the absence of children that most surprises me; other cemeteries show 50% children (Tal Ilan, "'Bone of my Bones' (Genesis 2:23): Skeletal Remains, Gender and Social History" [Pages 195-214 in _Integrating Women into Second Temple History_; Peabody, Mass.: Hendricksen, 2001]). My best guess is that the women and men at Qumran abstained from procreation. Do you know of a good explanation for the cemetery demographics?

No, I don't, and you may well be right. But I am not an archaeologist and I would feel more sure about this if, first, the whole cemetery had been excavated and, second, if the archaeologists agreed on what the evidence we have from the site of Qumran means. The first won't happen any time soon: it's politically impossible now and may not come about until we can do it non-intrusively with molecular technology. And it doesn't sound to me as if the second is going to happen any time soon either.

Anyhow, in this case I was responding to Ehrman, who referred only to the Scrolls. I stand by my statement that if we only had them, it probably wouldn't occur to us to think of the group that collected them as celibate.

UPDATE (16 January): As I hinted above, perhaps not strongly enough, the error seems to have been the reporter's, not Ehrman's.

FORGERY SCANDAL WATCH:

British Museum expert called to give evidence in trial over 'ossuary of Jesus's brother fraud' (The Telegraph)
By Inigo Gilmore
(Filed: 09/01/2005)

A wealthy Israeli art collector and an Egyptologist who works for the British Museum have been named as key prosecution witnesses in the trial of five men accused of running the world's biggest ring of dealers in bogus religious artefacts.

[...]

Shlomo Moussaieff, 82, who owns Moussaieff Jewellers at the London Hilton and is considered the world's leading private collector of biblical antiquities, confirmed that he would give evidence against the five alleged forgers: Oded Golan, a major Israeli collector and dealer; Robert Deutsch; Shlomo Cohen and Rafi Brown, who are all Israelis; and Faiz al-Amaleh, a West Bank Palestinian. All deny the charges against them.

[...]

Mr Moussaieff says that he bought about �2.67 million-worth of antiquities, including bullae, or seals of ancient Jewish kings, but he rejected claims by the Israeli police that the artefacts were bogus.

"Every dealer experiences a common battle against the faker: sometimes they win, sometimes you win," he said from his home in Tel Aviv, where many works from his collection are displayed.

[...]

Dr Nigel Strudwick, an Egyptologist at the British Museum, has also been listed as an expert witness, although the museum said last week that he had not been informed.

[...]

There are some interesting new details in the article, including references to forged gold objects, one of which supposedly was actually displayed in the British Museum.

UPDATE: Ed Cook has more on one of the gold items.

SCOTTISH COMET WATCH: It was raining most of the evening. Not raining now, but still clouded over. Oh well.

"PREVIOUSLY KNOWN WRITINGS?" Someone at Deinde (permalinks malfunctioning, at least in my browser) who doesn't seem to give a name, in an aside in a post dealing with "biblioblogger" terminology, writes the following:

I think of the discussions of terminology like 'Pseudepigrapha' and 'Rewritten Bible' which are misleading and are being renamed by some scholars ('Previously Known Writings' and 'Reworked Scriptures' respectively).

I've never heard "previously known writings" applied to pseudepigrapha and I don't know what it means. The term "parabiblical literature" is sometimes used fairly similarly to "pseudepigrapha," but the match isn't exact - depending on your canon, some OT Apocrypha could be regarded as parabiblical, as could the NT Apocrypha in general. Pseudepigrapha is one of those terms that is dreadful, but so entrenched it's unlikely to be replaced.

Anyhow, please say more on this.

Incidentally, I'll take biblioblogger over any of the other options proposed in the post.

UPDATE: Should have thought to Google the phrase. Stephen Carlson has done so and explains that the suggested usage comes from a misreading of something Peter Flint wrote. Some of the nonbiblical Dead Sea Scrolls (material from 1 Enoch, the book of Jubilees, Aramaic Levi, etc.) are previously known writings whereas the others are not: we know them only from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Thanks Stephen. That was fast.

REBECCA LESSES is in Jerusalem and recently saw the Aleppo Codex.

THREE SCHOLARS (James Charlesworth, Adolfo Roitman, and Sean Freyne) will be lecturing in Montana on the historical Jesus in the 21st century.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH:

Election candidate detained at shrine
Fri Jan 7, 2005 12:42 PM GMT (Reuters)

By Ori Lewis

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli police have briefly detained Palestinian presidential candidate Mustafa Barghouthi as he tried to enter a Jerusalem shrine holy to Muslims and Jews without a permit, a police spokesman says.

[...]

"Barghouthi was detained at the Lions Gate after trying to enter the Temple Mount. He violated an express agreement with the Israeli authorities that he would not go there," Israeli police spokesman Gil Kleiman told Reuters.

"Barghouthi tried to enter Temple Mount for electioneering purposes but he was prevented from doing so for fear of causing a disturbance in a public place," said Kleiman.

[...]

SCOTTISH COMET WATCH: Sorry, it's raining.

ROCHELLE ALTMAN'S BOOK ABSENT VOICES is reviewed on the ANE list (forthcoming also in the journal Maarav) by Peter T. Daniels. He doesn't like it: "Old English paleographers and medieval musicologists deserve better. Semitists can only cringe."

I haven't yet read the book myself, so I can't comment. But I'm sure that Altman will have a response.

UPDATE (8 January): Rochelle Altman responds here. Excerpt:

In-depth studies of each component require separate large volumes --
complete with tables, a data base with a minimum of one thousand
items, and statistical analyses in accordance with the appropriate
methodology. These volumes were planned to appear, one by one,
after the overview was published. Two of these volumes are in
preparation. If, when these strictly scholarly volumes are published,
the reviewer wishes to find fault, that is an entirely different matter.

So far both Daniels and Altman have responded again once. Just keep moving forward through the archive.

UPDATE: And moving, and moving. Lots of discussion in the archive and doubtless more to come.

UPDATE (2 February): More here.

MY UNIVERSITY WEB PAGE has just been thoroughly updated. Besides being very out of date, it was looking shabby with damaged graphics and numerous dead links. In anticipation of my upcoming Dead Sea Scrolls course, which will have a web component and a new blog ("Qumranica" - watch this space), I've adopted a new web-page editing program. It should be easier now to keep all my pages current.

I DON'T THINK THIS IS A PARODY, but then I've been burned before. According to the Jerusalem Post, Davka is selling a new video game based on the story of Ehud in chapter 3 of the book of Judges.



UPDATE: It seems to be real. Arne Halbakken sends me the game's URL at the Davka site.

UPDATE: Helenann Hartley has found a Journeys of Paul� Board Game.

MORE ON THE ALABAMA DEAD SEA SCROLLS EXHIBITION:

Unscrolling the Commandments (The Birmingham News)
Thursday, January 06, 2005
GREG GARRISON
News staff writer

If Alabamians got excited about former Chief Justice Roy Moore's granite monument of the Ten Commandments, imagine how they'll react when the world's oldest known copy of the Ten Commandments arrives in Alabama for display.

The parchment from the Dead Sea Scrolls contains a complete handwritten Hebrew text of the commandments dated to within 30 years before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. It will be part of a Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit that starts Jan. 20 and ends April 24 at the Gulf Coast Exploreum in downtown Mobile. The exhibit will feature 12 scrolls from the Israel Antiquities Authority, seven of them biblical books.

[...]

The Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit opened at the Public Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich., in spring of 2003 and drew more than 237,000 visitors in a little more than three months. Mobile will be the third stop. The museums that have hosted the exhibit have been required by Israeli officials to have very strict security and environmental controls for the scrolls. The scrolls are considered so delicate that they are rotated out of public display and go back into dark storage at their home museum, the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem. "They rotate them in there as well," [Renee] Davis [Houston's director of community programs and planning] said. No fragment is displayed more than about three months a year. So the opportunity to see these particular scrolls in person is rare indeed, she said.

[...]

CHALDO-ASSYRIAN WATCH:

Christian Crisis: ChaldoAssyrians May Soon Leave Iraq En Masse (AINA)

Iraq's Christian minority is being driven out of its ancestral homeland by a wave of persecution as devastating as any tsunami. In less than four weeks, a pivotal election will take place in Iraq that represents this community's best hope for finding a secure home there, yet they find themselves marginalized and pushed aside in the electoral process -- not only by their tormentors but, perhaps inadvertently, by the U.S. government. These Christians, who are both pro-Western and pro-democracy, need our help so that they can build a future in their native land with a modicum of security and freedom. Without it, they will leave, and U.S. Iraq policy will be dealt a setback so severe it may never recover.

[...]

Should the ChaldoAssyrian community disappear from Iraq, it would mean the end of their Aramaic language (spoken by Jesus), and their customs, rites, and culture. A unique part of Christian patrimony would disappear along with this first-century church. ....

MORE TESTS NEEDED: Not all scholars are convinced that the James ossuary inscription is forged:

James Ossuary needs further investigation, professor says (Baptist Press News)
Jan 6, 2005
By Jeff Robinson

[...]

But not all experts believe the James Ossuary is fake -- renowned paleographer Andre Lemaire contends that the Aramaic inscription was penned in the first century.

Steven Ortiz, assistant professor of archaeology at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, says that fake items are common among antiques dealers but the James Ossuary needs further scientific analysis before a final verdict is pronounced.

�You have antiquities dealers who sell actual objects and forged objects,� he said. �You have two or three archaeologists who have looked at it and said it is authentic and two who have said it is not. You have [an official] from the Royal Ontario Museum [in Toronto, Canada] who says it is authentic. So what you need to do is to get scientists in a room, and, like any project, you need a scientific report.

[...]

THE VATICAN is loaning an early manuscript of Maimonides' Mishneh Torah and some other Hebrew manuscripts to Israel:

Vatican to share holy medieval texts with Israel (Sun-Sentinel.com, FL)

By Lisa J. Huriash
Staff Writer
Posted January 7 2005

The Vatican will loan the work of Moses Maimonides, one of Judaism's most celebrated rabbis and sages, to Israel this year in a gesture meant to improve relations between Catholics and Jews.

Jewish community leaders said they are ecstatic to have the opportunity to study the Maimonides document, and at least three other medieval manuscripts.

[...]

The work by Maimonides was written by a scribe in the 1400s, 200 years after his death, and is cherished as a one-of-a-kind record that covers the rules of life, such as marriage and other codes of behavior. Opponents who considered Maimonides a heretic burned many of the original works.

Two years ago, a similar delegation requested the Vatican loan out the four manuscripts, each containing hundreds of pages. Three of the books, including one written in 1435, are medieval Hebrew texts written by other authors not immediately identified.

The most excitement, however, surrounds the work of Maimonides, also known as Rambam, the 12th-century doctor and sage in Egypt whose works include the first codification of Jewish law. He is considered one of the most influential of all Jewish thinkers.

[...]

UPDATE ON RABBI JUDAH'S HOUSE (?) IN BEIT SHE'ARIM: Jim West quotes the full text of a letter of Steve Fine to Ha'aretz but does not give a permalink (and I can't find it on the site, but I didn't spend much time looking). According to Fine, who knows about such things, "There is simply no positive evidence for this identification, just as there was none at Sepphoris."

UPDATE: Fine posted the letter on the ANE list.

ODED GOLAN - A CHRIST FIGURE? And a type of James the Just to boot? Ed Cook highlights some poorly chosen metaphors.

SETH SANDERS has published his promised further comments on the forgery scandal in two installments: Biblical Archaeology from Scratch II: The Real Problem and Biblical Archaeology from Scratch III: How It Got Like This.

From installment II:

But I think the real problem might go deeper. Because there is a fundamental difficulty in the way we imagine, and thereby attempt to dig up, ancient Israel. Because of both historical facts and inherent conceptual problems, this enterprise might be doomed to fail in the terms it has set itself. As long as the burning desire to authenticate or falsify Biblical documents exists, as long as the debate is cast in these terms, problems like this will continue to come up. So another question we could ask is, why is the debate cast in these terms, of maximalism vs. minimalism, history vs. ideology, authenticity vs. forgery? Why is the question we're so fixated on--how did it get to be this way--and is this quest somehow already set up for failure?

From the third installment:

This, Hobbes would say, is the boat that Biblical studies missed: once church and state are separated, the Bible is de facto not authoritative any more, and de facto is all that matters. Once we accept the theory that all texts are the same�that communication through writing is necessary, but invisible and functionally uniform, the question of what the Bible did and does is off the table.

My initial reaction is that his analysis captures a central issue. In essence, a fair bit of the scholarly debate in biblical studies is still framed in theological terms based on assumptions that many or most of the scholars in question themselves reject. The language and agenda of the debate have not yet caught up with the metaphysics of the debaters. Verification or falsification of stories in texts is one part of the historian's problem, but that part is bloated out of proportion in biblical studies. Ultimately, in my humble opinion, the biblical texts just aren't well suited to the questions that historians have traditionally wanted to bring to them. Maybe that should tell us something. It certainly seems to me that historical verification of stories is much less of an issue for, say, Homeric studies or the study of Arthurian legends, although I can't claim to be a specialist in either. Yet the time frame between the supposed events and the written sources is not greatly different. I doubt that a forgery conspiracy on the scale of the one the Israeli authorities claim to have uncovered would be cost effective for these fields.

For that matter, how much interest has there been in establishing a historical core for the Ahiqar story, which is partly preserved in a fifth-century B.C.E. Egyptian Jewish manuscript, but which isn't part of anybody's canon? Very little.

The solution? Dare I say that specialists in the Hebrew Bible should start with the earliest surviving manuscripts and quotations (i.e., mostly the Dead Sea Scrolls and the earliest LXX fragments), understand them first in that context, and move backwards from there only as and to the degree that positive evidence requires? This point, more or less, was already made many years ago by Alan Millard in "Methods of Studying the Patriarchal Narratives as Ancient Texts," Essays on the Patriarchal Narratives (ed. Millard and D. J. Wiseman; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1980), 35-51. One could reply that I'm a boy with a hammer and everything looks like a nail to me, and that might be a fair, if ad hominem criticism. These are just my off-the-cuff, undigested thoughts. Please share your better answer with me.

UPDATE: Regarding the sentence "So another question we could ask is, why is the debate cast in these terms, of maximalism vs. minimalism, history vs. ideology, authenticity vs. forgery?" in the first quote above, Ed Cook writes:

I'm not sure why "authenticity vs. forgery" is thrown into this pot. An epigraph either is authentic or it is forged, while, say, "maximalism vs. minimalism" are two ideological grids which may admit of many degrees between ideal forms at the poles, and they may not "correspond" to any actual state of affairs. So I'm not sure how this is relevant to the forgery scandal. But read Seth, not me.

Well, Seth can speak for himself, but I took him to be saying in shorthand that the (ultimately theologically driven) need to authenticate or falsify the (events described in the) texts leads to a situation where physical verification by means of objects becomes excessively important, and thus creates, if you will, an ecological niche in which forgers can thrive. Therefore the authenticity vs. forgery of the artifacts is closely related to the (poorly formulated but widely asked) question of the authenticity or forgery of the biblical stories. Maybe I'm reading a lot into that one sentence, but I think that's the larger point. Am I close Seth?

Anyway, if that's not what he meant, I think it's still true.

Also, as an afterthought, the bipolar distinction between "authentic" and "forged" doesn't even apply unambiguously to epigraphs. If the forgery claims about the James ossuary are correct, the first part is authentic and the rest is forged.

FOLLOWING JOE ZIAS'S ADVICE, Yuval Goren has posted on the ANE list ten principles for authenticating clay bullae which, by implication, give rogues some useful advice for forging them. Dealers and collectors, you are warned!

UPDATE: Zias has yet more advice for aspiring forgers. Maybe someone should publish a handbook.

EPIPHANY COMET ON VIEW IN SCOTLAND? The weather forecast isn't promising, but I'll have a look if it's clear. Thanks for the heads-up, Helenann.

TERRORISM MEETS ARCHAEOLOGY AGAIN?

Jordan Foils Terror Plot Against U.S.

Wednesday January 5, 2005 7:46 PM

By SHAFIKA MATTAR

Associated Press Writer

AMMAN, Jordan (AP) - Prosecutors leveled charges against two suspected Jordanian terrorists after police foiled a plan to kill four American archeologists, security officials said Wednesday.

Jamil Mohammed Kutkut, 27, and Ibrahim Mohammed Zein al-Abedeen, better known by Jihad al-Qashah, 36, were charged with plotting to commit terrorist acts, illegal possession of automatic weapons and infiltrating Jordanian territories.

[...]

MORE ON ROBERT DEUTSCH: On the ANE List the Directors of the Megiddo excavation give an account of Professor Deutsch's relationship with the dig and the severance of that relationship, they say they are unaware of his being harassed by the IAA while on the site, and they express a hope that he will be able to clear his name. For the full text follow the link.

THE TENTH ANNUAL ORION SYMPOSIUM on the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls takes place in Jerusalem next week. The theme is "New Perspectives on Old Texts." Follow the link for the program and abstracts of the papers.

A MODEST PROPOSAL. Joe Zias has posted a creative solution to the forgeries problem on the ANE List: Teach first-rate forgery skills so widely that the market for unprovenanced ancient Israelite antiquities is flooded with fakes and it is no longer profitable to deal unprovenanced materials. Evidently, it's worked before.

RABBI JUDAH THE PRINCE SLEPT HERE?

Archaeology / A home fit for a prince? (Ha'aretz)
By Ran Shapira

When Alexander Zeid - who in 1909 founded Hashomer, the first armed Jewish defense force in modern times - began to build his home in the hills of Sheikh Abrik in the late 1920s, the remains of an ancient wall were unearthed. Zeid invited archaeologist Benjamin Maisler - who subsequently changed his name to Mazar - to examine the wall. Mazar determined that it dated to the Roman period, and in 1939 and 1940 he led a team that exposed a large and well-established settlement that peaked between the end of the second century and the middle of the fourth century of the Common Era.

Mazar and Nachman Avigad, the directors of the excavation, identified the site as the historic Beit She'arim, one of the largest Jewish towns in the Lower Galilee in the late Second Temple period and the era of rebellions against the Romans. ...

Yigal Tepper, a Land of Israel historian, and Yotam Tepper, an Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologist - father and son - have restudied Mazar and Avigad's findings during the last few years and have reached a surprising conclusion: The four structures are essentially different wings of the same building. And not just any building, but the home of Rabbi Judah the Prince, redactor of the Mishna - the core of the Talmud - Judaism's oral law, and leader of the Jewish community in the Land of Israel in the second century of the Common Era. The theory appears in their book, "Beit She'arim: The Village and Nearby Burial."

[...]

(Heads up, Ed Cook.)

UPDATE (6 January): More here.

THERE IS NOW A "BIBLIOBLOG BLOG." I swear I am not making this up.

This website attempts to automatically aggregate the latest blog posts about Biblical Studies.

It's run by someone named Zeth, who tells us "I am not a Biblical scholar but I do try to read their blogs." Look at the sidebar on the right for a directory of the blogs listed, plus some explanatory material. Looks quite useful.

THE PALESTINIAN ELECTION takes place on Sunday. Here's a summary the current state of play regarding East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount:

Meanwhile, although Israel claims sovereignty over all Jerusalem, it is permitting Palestinian candidates to campaign in East Jerusalem's Arab quarters.

Two of the seven candidates have already campaigned in the city, although one was briefly detained when he did so without permission.

Aides to Mr Abbas said he was expected to visit Jerusalem in the next day or two.

The status of East Jerusalem is one of the most sensitive subjects dividing Israel and the Palestinians.

Mr Abbas has made it clear that, like Arafat, his primary goal is to establish a Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem, which contains the Noble Sanctuary, the third-holiest site in Islam.

This, however, is also the holiest site of Jews, who know it as the Temple Mount.

Israel's position is that it will not relinquish sovereignty over East Jerusalem, annexed after the 1967 Six-Day War.

Nevertheless, the Israeli Government has agreed to permit the city's 200,000 Arabs to participate in the Palestinian elections.

Also, it seems that the candidates will not be allowed to visit the Temple Mount, although none of them seem to have asked to do so yet.

THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS EXHIBITION at the Exploreum in Mobile, Alamaba, opens later this month. This article from the Brewton Standard has some information on it. Nothing new, but this one paragraph confused me at first:

The Dead Sea scrolls are coming to Alabama this month, and for the first time ever, the traveling exhibit will include the scroll featuring the laws of God as revealed to Moses.

The scroll? This is a bit opaque (a Pentateuch scroll? the Temple Scroll?), but after poking around in my archive, I found an earlier article on the Mobile exhibition that says:

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

Presumably the current article is referring to this Deuteronomy scroll, but the writer doesn't realize that there are many Dead Sea Scrolls "featuring the laws of God as revealed to Moses."

USC POSTDOC:

Bruce Zuckerman e-mails:

The University of Southern California's School of Religion invites applications for a post-doctoral appointment of up to three years, to begin August, 2005.

Duties for the fellowship will include serving as a teaching assistant to one or more of the courses listed below, plus the potential of teaching one undergraduate course each year.

REL 111: The World of the Hebrew Bible
REL 121: The World of the New Testament
REL 140: Religion and Ethical Issues

One of the positions may be filled by an applicant with specialized training in post biblical Judaism and early Christianity, in particular, Dead Sea Scrolls. Further interest in archaeology and the religions and cultures of the ancient Near East (especially Mesopotamia and/or Egypt) is desirable but optional. Applicants' research interests should be especially geared to take advantage of the resources of USC's West Semitic Research (see http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/wsrp/) and InscriptiFact (see http://www.inscriptifact.com/) projects as well as the USC Archaeolgoical Research Collection (see http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/religion/arch_res.html).
The applicant's dossier file must include a letter of application, curriculum vitae, three letters of recommendation and copies of teaching evaluations (if applicable). Transcripts are also preferred. Send application materials to Dr. Donald Miller and Dr. Bruce Zuckerman, Search Committee Co-Chairs, School of Religion, University of Southern California, THH 355, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0355. Applications should be received by February 1, 2005. Compensation will be consistent with that of full-time lecturers. USC is an AA/EOE employer.

ROBERT DEUTSCH RESPONDS ON THE ANE LIST. (Via Ralph.) Deutsch says he's innocent, that the IAA has been harassing him for a long time, and that he's going to sue them. I'm confused: has he been indicted or not? Excerpt:

In a news conference the IAA has insinuated that I had "an involvement in a ring dealing with forgeries." They purposely distorted the truth by announcing my name as one of the "criminals," with the malicious intent to connect me in the mind of the public with the fake Joash inscription and the highly debated James ossuary. Even the IAA has never made such charge against me; the IAA knows perfectly well that I never saw either of these pieces before they were published, nor did I have any connection with them what-so-ever. Yet they purposely and maliciously linked my name with these objects and with the pomegranate "forgery" sold to the Israel Museum, with which I also had absolutely no involvement. The IAA never charged me with any involvement with these objects, yet included my name in their announcement of indictments against those that did, to purposely give the misimpression that I had some involvement with them. Again the purpose of the IAA is clear: to destroy my reputation and ability to continue to be a licensed antiquities dealer, and thereby harass, intimidate and destroy all of the antiquities dealers that operate in Israel in full compliance with Israeli law.

If he has been indicted with the other three, this whole thing has gone well beyond the IAA. If he hasn't, the media has royally screwed up its recent reporting. Hopefully the indictment itself will be online soon (see Ralph post linked to above).

LEIDEN UNIVERSITY is advertising a distance learning course on Textual History and Textual Criticism of the Old Testament, starting in September. (Via the Hugoye list.)

A GUARD at an archaeological park in Israel has been murdered. Terrorism is suspected.

Police suspect terror in murder of park guard (Ha'aretz)
By Yuval Azoulay

Police are investigating whether the murder of a security guard at Bet Guvrin national park, whose body was found yesterday morning at the site, was a terrorist act.

[...]

Managers of the archaeological site said yesterday that Rubin's presence had ended the spate of thefts that had plagued the park. The site was guarded all night, according to Yigal Ben Ari, central district director at the Israel Nature and National Parks Protection Authority. He said that Rubin's job was to guard the park's office area, where a lot of expensive equipment is kept.

"The need to guard the park arose following a spate of thefts and break-ins here in the past. In one case they stole a tractor, work tools and computers. In most cases the trail would lead to the village of Idna in the Hebron Hills," he said.

[...]

According to this Agence France Presse article in the Turkish Press the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades has claimed responsibility in phone calls.

"ANTIQUIBLOGGER" does have a certain ring to it. But those who have spoken seem mostly content to stick with biblioblogger. Vox bloggatorum, vox dei.

ROBERT ALTER'S TRANSLATION of the Pentateuch is reviewed in the Times. Excerpt:

If this book is to be welcomed as a vital part of literary culture rather than religious culture, that says a great deal about the current rate of secularisation. But it is not less to be celebrated. Alter has achieved the significant feat of refreshing English by taking it back to one of its sources of strength; he is not unworthy to follow in the distinguished line of Wycliffe, Tyndale and the �King James� committee as one who has made the language live again as an instrument of revelation and power.

THE TALE OF PETER RABBIT has been translated into hieroglyphic Egyptian. In what is perhaps the understatement of the year (so far), the foreword tells us that "The literary traditions and styles of England and Egypt are very different."

BULLAE UPDATE: This Hebrew article in Ha'aretz (via Ralph) gives a list of suspected forgeries and it includes the "Baruch ben Neriah" bulla in the Moussaieff collection. It says the name was added to the bulla, so apparently the object itself is agreed to be a genuine ancient artifact, like the James ossuary and the ivory pomegranate.

"UNIQUE ELITIST BIBLE INTERPRETATION." Those are the Google search terms that led a Belgian reader to PaleoJudaica about ten minutes ago. Caught, red-handed!

ROBERT DEUTSCH AND THE FORGERY SCANDAL: Chuck Jones posts the following on the ANE List:

The recent indictments for forgery make this statement on ANE on
January 21 2003 by Robert Deutsch all the more interesting:

https://listhost.uchicago.edu/pipermail/ane/2003-January/005790.html

in particular the statement on the potential political motivations for forgery.

Have there been other published statements (aside from short
quotations in the news media) from any of those indicted expressing
opinions on the artifacts in question?

(Chuck also gives a plug for my blog and those of Ed Cook and Seth Sanders. Thanks, and welcome to readers brought here by his post.)

Can anyone tell me if the bullae from the Moussaieff collection are among the suspected forgeries? The A.P's list of products of the forgery ring (which, incidentally, includes the ivory pomegranate) refers to "Numerous wax seals, said to belong to biblical figures. Some selling for $90,000." Now there aren't any wax seals from biblical period Israel, so I assume this is confused and they mean to say either stone seals or clay seal impressions; if the latter, then bullae. At least some of the ostraca in the Moussaieff collection have been argued to be forgeries, and Christopher Rollston has raised the possibility that some of the bullae are forged too. Perhaps someone who has seen the 27-page indictment can tell me whether bullae are mentioned. (Incidentally, is the indictment available anywhere online?)

If the bullae are included, it's worth mentioning that I heard Robert Deutsch speak on them at the International SBL meeting in Cambridge in July, 2003. Shortly after the conference I posted a couple of comments on his presentation. In the first I wrote:

All the papers were interesting but I'll just note Robert Deutsch's, since I have his handout in front of me. He spoke on royal bullae (clay seal impressions). I won't repeat specifics, but I'm sure he won't mind if I say that he displayed and commented on numerous bullae that included names of kings and names of royal officials of various types, and that this material gives us lots of new details about the Judean royal court in the monarchical period.

I don't think I have the handout anymore, unfortunately.

In the second I wrote:

I recall that Robert Deutsch took us in detail through his authentication procedure for the bullae he was discussing, so the people working with this material are not unaware of the problem.

All the more interesting in retrospect. What context we put this into depends, naturally, on what the trial brings out in due course.

UPDATE: Ed Cook: "They belong in a museum!" Amen.

UPDATE (2 January): More here.

JEWISH-TEMPLE DENIAL WATCH: Ed Cook points to an interpolation in an A.P. article on the forgeries, found in the Latest News column (no permalinks) of Middle East News and World Report. Actually, there are two interpolations:

It is always believed by the Palestinians that Israel's and the Jewish claim to Palestinians and Muslim sites are forged and has no merit. This indictment confirms this widely held fact.

[...]

Another Jewish forgery to be discovered and declared is the Jewish right wing extremist's claim that their Temple that was destroyed by the Romans more than four thousand years ago was located where the present Muslim Holy Site of Haram Al Shariff, Al Aqsa Mosque stands.

The writer manages to combine the usual lie about Jewish history with an egregious blunder on the date of the Romans. Again, 2005 is starting to look like 2004 pretty quickly.

STEPHEN C. CARLSON has a 2004 Retrospective for his blog Hypotyposeis.

THIS GUARDIAN ARTICLE from a couple of days ago has some details about the forgery investigation which I don't remember seeing elsewhere:

Forgers 'tried to rewrite biblical history'

Conal Urquhart in Jerusalem
Friday December 31, 2004
The Guardian

[...]

Doubts about the artefacts emerged after Israeli police began to hear rumours of an Egyptian craftsman living in Israel who would boast of his part in the forgeries while drinking in Tel Aviv. Detectives launched an investigation two years ago which rapidly became a global exercise.

The indictment lists 124 witnesses, including antiquities collectors, archaeologists, officials from Sotheby's auction house and representatives of the British Museum and the Brooklyn Museum.

[...]

The article also says that "Shuka Dorfman, head of the Israel Antiquities Authority, said the forgery ring had been operating for more than 20 years," but doesn't say how much more.

FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF MISLEADING SUMMARIES, the Faith News column in the Times devotes the following paragraph to the news of the stone jar fragments excavated in what may be ancient Cana (my emphasis):

ARCHAEOLOGISTS in Israel have found pieces of large stone jars which they say Jesus may have used to turn water into wine at the wedding in Cana. They made the discovery during a salvage dig in present-day Cana, between Nazareth and Capernaum. But New Testament scholars said that it would be difficult to authenticate the jars because experts disagreed on the location of biblical Cana.

Now I don't know if the writer, Luke Coppen, is really ignorant enough to think that the archaeologists are claiming that these are the very stone jars Jesus used in the story in John 2. I suppose it's possible that he's just perpetuating the misunderstanding of the earlier A.P. article (see second link above). Still, I'd like to think that he means to say the jars are of the same type as the ones Jesus is reported to have used and he just can't write a clear sentence. Either way, I'm not impressed with the journalism.

So 2005 is already shaping up to look much like 2004.

HAPPY NEW YEAR! The first paleojudaic item I've found this year is this A.P. review of Alan Segal's blockbuster tome on afterlife beliefs:

Jewish scholar reviews concepts of the afterlife
Book examines monotheistic faiths' views.

By Richard N. Ostling
Associated Press
January 1, 2005

Western religions that believe in a single god traditionally teach that after the present life, individuals will exist eternally in resurrected bodies. Eastern religions believe the soul is embodied in either human or animal forms in numerous past and future lives.

Now comes Alan F. Segal of Barnard College in New York with the latest review of Jewish, Christian and Muslim concepts: "Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion" (Doubleday). As one of the leading Jewish analysts of first-century Judaism and Christianity, Segal is admirably equipped to produce a 731-page blockbuster on this central, powerful theme.

He tells how Christianity borrowed and reshaped the Jewish belief in a mind-plus-body afterlife and carried it to many nations, and how Islam did the same with Christian beliefs. But before the Jews, resurrection was being taught by Zoroastrians in pre-Islamic Persia (Iran), the forebears of India's present-day Parsees.

[...]

The piece also contrasts Segal's views about resurrection in the New Testament with those of N. T. Wright.

ED COOK recounts the story of the appearance and eventual purchase of the ivory pomegranate. The question Stephen Carlson asks in the comment also occurred to me.

Here's another. In my exchange with Lawrence Mykytiuk over unprovenanced bullae (inscribed clay seals) I asked when the "monster forgery machine" started operation. At the time available information pointed to the 1980s, but if Lemaire saw the inscribed ivory pomegranate in an antiquities shop in 1979, it appears that sophisticated forgers were active as far back as the 1970s. If we follow Larry Schiffman's dictum "The most exciting things are the things most likely to be forged," what other important inscriptions need to be looked at again? Should the Avigad bullae be reauthenticated? Mykytiuk wrote to me in August:

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

None. But the same could have been said until very recently about the ivory pomegranate, and that Baruch bulla certainly counts as one of the "most exciting things." Clearly we can no longer rely upon authentications from the 1980s and 1990s. As I've said before, I don't keep up much with Northwest Semitic epigraphy any more, so I'm asking those who do. Which are the exciting inscriptions we need to look at again? How do we go about reautheticating them? What new questions need to be asked about lapidary inscriptions, bullae, papyri, etc.?

If you want realtime expert commentary on the forgery scandal as it unfolds, keep an eye on Ralph the Sacred River and Serving the Word.

SETH SANDERS comments on the forgery scandal and promises to tell us in the next installment "why this may not really be the problem at all." I'm not entirely sure what "this" is (the forgery scandal itself?), but his next post should be interesting.

"THE COMPLETE IDIOT'S GUIDE TO THE TALMUD." Really.

THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS are the subject of this popular article from Cox News Service. It summarizes some of the more outrageous episodes in them.

ALEXANDER THE GREAT KNEW HEBREW? And Babylonian? Today's New York Times has an article on Alexander ("The World of Alexander Was Rich and Beautiful Even Before the Movies") by Wendy Moonan, which is based on an interview with Professor Dimitrios Pandermalis. In it she says in passing (my emphasis),

Alexander grew up in the Macedonian court, which once welcomed Euripides the playwright and Pindar the poet. There he met visitors from all over the known world: Persia, Egypt, Crete, Sicily and the Dardanelles. Philip II hired Aristotle to tutor Alexander at age 14 in Greek, Hebrew, Babylonian and Latin, rhetoric and justice. From him Alexander probably acquired his lifelong love of learning and openness to foreign cultures.

Surely this is a misunderstanding. Aristotle was a good Greek who would have disdained the idea of learning a foreign language. Although it wouldn't surprise me if Alexander later picked up enough Aramaic to get along (it was the diplomatic language of the Persian empire), and it's conceivable that he even learned a little Babylonian (i.e., Akkadian) along the way, I don't know of any positive evidence that he knew either. And I think it's vanishingly unlikely that he knew Hebrew. Any classicists want to comment?

UPDATE: David Meadows agrees and notes that the reference to Latin is equally improbable. But I'm not sure that Professor Pandermalis should be blamed; he's not being quoted here and the problems may be due to the reporter attempting to fill in background.

I suppose it's useful to close the year with a reminder that in 2004 the mainstream media remained without a clue about ancient history.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: This Ha'aretz article ("Doomsday scenarios") gives an overview of the security nightmare that is the Temple Mount. Hard to excerpt, but here's a bit:

On the face of it, the Shin Bet and the police should now be experiencing a sense of deja vu. Once again Jewish fundamentalists are talking about an attack on the Temple Mount in messianic terms, as a means to achieve a political goal. In the 1980s, the idea was to prevent the withdrawal from Sinai; today they want to scuttle the disengagement plan. But the Jewish Division (an operational unit in the branch to foil terrorism and prevent Jewish and foreign subversion) can only envy Hazak and his colleagues, and not only because they succeeded in foiling two attempts to attack the Temple Mount (the second was almost negligible, by a group of newly religious and eccentric criminals from Jerusalem's "Lifta Gang"). Today, the Shin Bet has to cope with the zealots of the third millennium - the "hilltop youth" in the West Bank.

"There is a fundamental difference in the worldview of the hallucinatories among the hilltop youth who want to destroy the mosques, and the members of the Jewish underground back then," the senior defense official explains. "The members of the underground considered themselves part of the state and thought they would help the state with their acts. The hilltop youth are from a different world - bolder, more determined, and do not view themselves as being part of the state. On the contrary, they are divorced from Israeli society."

Read it all.

THE RIPPLES WIDEN:

Museums Advised to Check Bible-Era Relics

By KARIN LAUB
Associated Press Writer

Experts advised world museums to re-examine their Bible-era relics after Israel indicted four collectors and dealers on charges of forging items thought to be some of the most important artifacts discovered in recent decades.

[...]

Ed Cook puts it well:

The implications of these indictments, especially if followed by convictions, are enormous. It is not an overstatement to say that biblical archaeology may require a generation of disciplined, rigorous re-examination of all unprovenanced epigraphic material in order to be regarded again as a scientific discipline.

Read his whole post.

UPDATE: Here's a list of the artifacts claimed to be forgeries. So far.

MEMORABLE PALEOJUDAICA POSTS: This time of year many bloggers like to post retrospective comments on the past year. As before, I'm inclined to wait for these until PaleoJudaica's anniversary in March. But in order not to be a complete New Year's Scrooge, I've set up a new link on the links page to the right: Memorable PaleoJudaica Posts. Under it I've collected what I think are the best and most interesting posts since the blog started. It happens to have come out to seven for 2003 and seven for 2004, although I didn't plan it that way. Have a look, and if you think I've missed anything really notable, please drop me a note and remind me of it so I can consider it.

RESISTANCE IS FUTILE: Seth Sanders has been assimilated to the Blogosphere. His new blog is Serving the Word: "The Hebrew Bible and related matters ancient and modern, through the lenses of philology, anthropological linguistics and political theology." (Via Ralph.)

You will be assimilated.

LENINGRAD CODEX ONLINE: Reader Ted Blakley e-mails:

You mentioned in a recent blog that you were going to be updating your links pages. You may already be familiar with this site but I just became aware of it today through an email sent to B-Hebrew by Christopher V. Kimball. If you aren't familiar with it, it's the electronic version of the Lenigrad Codex in Unicode/XML format. It is searchable and the thing that I really liked about it was how customizable it is. You can view the text with or without vowel points, with or without accents. You can choose verse mode or chapter mode, change the size of the fonts, etc. (And if you are using Mozilla Firefox it displays the Hebrew with fewer problems than other browsers).

I'll add this to the links page along with some other things sometime in the next few days. By the way, thanks to Ed Cook's helpful suitable-for-an-idiot advice, I seem to have gotten the Unicode Hebrew and Greek fonts working on my home system.

THE ASIAN TSUNAMI DISASTER has left me without anything useful to say, apart from - for what it's worth - "I'm sorry." Ed Cook and Mark Goodacre have information on contributing to the disaster relief. As for theological reflections, I can't do better than Roger Kamenetz.

UPDATE: The above was not in response to anyone else's comments. To reiterate what I've already said in the About PaleoJudaica.com page, I blog on what I please, when I please, for my own reasons, entirely at my whim and according to my own standards. Anyone who has a problem with that is welcome to go and read another blog.

ARAMAIC WATCH: Some good news from Iraq regarding Aramaic and Hebrew studies, relayed by an Assyrian-American (Chicago Tribune via AINA):

Allow me one small example of why nearly two-thirds of Iraqis have consistently told the pollsters that they expect life will be improving in their country. When I studied at the University of Baghdad [in the early 1980s], Hussein had banned the study of the Assyrian native language, Aramaic/Syriac. This is the language that Jesus spoke. Many Americans heard it for the first time in Mel Gibson's film, "The Passion of the Christ." Assyrians around the world were thrilled to hear their language used to tell this redemptive story. And now, there is a resurrection of sorts for our language in Iraq with a new department of Syriac language at the University of Baghdad. And alongside it is a new Hebrew department, the other ancient and revered language banned by Hussein.

ODED GOLAN and three others have been indicted on forgery charges in Israel:

4 indicted on charges of antiquities fraud
12/29/2004, 10:01 a.m. CT
By GAVIN RABINOWITZ
The Associated Press

JERUSALEM (AP) � Israeli authorities indicted four antique dealers and collectors Wednesday on charges of running a sophisticated forgery ring that created a trove of fake biblical artifacts, including some hailed as among the most important archaeological objects ever uncovered in the region.

The forged treasures include an ivory pomegranate touted by scholars as the only relic from Solomon's Temple, an ossuary that reputedly held the bones of James, Jesus' brother, and a stone tablet with inscriptions on how to maintain the Jewish Temple, officials said.

"During the last 20 years, many archaeological items were sold, or an attempt was made to sell them, in Israel and in the world, that were not actually antiques," the indictment said. "These items, many of them of great scientific, religious, sentimental, political and economic value, were created specifically with intent to defraud."

The 27-page indictment charges Israeli collector Oded Golan, along with Robert Deutsch, Shlomo Cohen and Faiz al-Amaleh, on 18 counts including forgery, receiving fraudulent goods and damaging antiquities. Deutsch is an inscriptions expert who teaches at Haifa University.

[...]

Now, with any luck, we will get to the bottom of this unpleasant business.

2004 IS THE 800TH ANNIVERSARY of the death of Maimonides (as noted here and here). In commemoration, the Jewish National and University Library has published digitized copies of some Maimonides manuscripts and early editions.

Writings of Maimonides
Manuscripts and Early Printed Editions

The site requires the use of a special viewer, which must be downloaded.

(Noted by Benjamin Richler on the H-Judaic List.)

REBECCA LESSES WRITES:

My thanks to Rua da Judiaria for naming my blog on his "Magen David'Ouro Os Melhores Blogs de 2004." I appreciate the boost - now, can you tell me what this means in Portuguese?

PaleoJudaica was named in the same Rua da Judiaria post (noted here). I've linked to a Google translation, but meanwhile a few days ago Claude Detienne e-mailed the following translation:

Golden Star of David
The best 2004 blogs

I had promised to myself not to make any assessment of the year in the Judiaria, especially because here we are already in the year 5765 which began on the last 15th of September, but, after a bit of thinking... I thought it was worth to make known the blogs I consider the best of 2004, a distinction guided by the most absolute subjectivity. It is worth what it is worth: the guarantee of my continuous daily visits.

Thanks Claude. Also, regarding the Google translation, Carla Sulzbach e-mailed "It is reassuring to see that Google knows to leave Magen David in Portuguese intact." Then she points to this Google translation of a German site which transmogrifies "magen David" repeatedly into "stomach David."

MORE ON M. R. JAMES from Ed Cook over at Ralph.

ISLAM, HISTORY, AND MYTHOLOGY: Al Jazeerah recently published a long and very interesting article by Zeeshan Hasan on the history of the theology of the afterlife in the Bible and early Christianity, with special reference to its implications for the Qu'ran and Islam. I was busy when it came out and by the time I could come back to it I couldn't find it any more. But it's been reprinted by MuslimWakeUp!:

Myth Over History: Jesus and the Development of Afterlife Beliefs in the Abrahamic Traditions

The piece discusses the history of belief in the afterlife from the earliest texts in the Hebrew Bible, through the New Testament, and into the first few centuries of Christianity. The approach is historical critical and, although it sometimes oversimplifies problems (for example, by leaving the Enoch literature out of the discussion of the origins of apocalyptic thought), it's a good-faith effort to portray the situation accurately. The payoff is especially interesting. The author argues that the Qur'an made creative use of mythological themes from the earlier religions and therefore not every statement in it need be taken as literally historical:

The above discussion has important consequences for Muslim views of both culture and orthodoxy. Islam holds the Qur'an to be divine revelation; so we cannot accept the assertions of Western scholars that the Qur'anic positions on Jesus and the identity of all previous revelations are due to ignorance of history on Muhammad's part. In fact, we can find alternative explanations.

As we have seen, the Qur'anic picture of Jesus does not correspond to the historical reconstruction of Jesus as apocalyptic preacher, as the Qur'an retains traditional elements of the story such as the virgin birth and Jesus as logos/'Word' which are later Christian theological developments.

However, here we need to ask the question of why the Qur'an talks about Jesus at all. In fact, the reason the Qur'an talks about Jesus is to link Muhammad's message with the religion and culture of Christianity, which was already known and respected in Arabia. In establishing this link, the Jesus of the historians is irrelevant; what is necessary is the Jesus of Christian mythology. It is through mythology and not history that religion and culture is expressed.

It is the narrow-mindedness of our modern perspective which leads us to expect history, precisely because we have forgotten how to respect cultures and their mythologies. Fundamentalists typically deride culture for its implicit inclusion of many different traditions and consequent �impurity� in Islamic terms; but the Qur'an itself is showing its respect for earlier Christian culture and mythology by largely accepting it and rejecting only one of its many claims�the divinity of Jesus.

The historical lack of belief in afterlife on the part of previous prophets is likewise a problem of our current mindset. The unfortunate fact is that we are conditioned to think of religion in terms of orthodoxy, and thus we perceive a problem whenever we cannot find that orthodoxy. But the fact that the Qur'an asserts the identity of the messages of all prophets means that the Qur'an is not interested in asserting any kind of historical orthodoxy. Rather, the Qur'an is interested in asserting a continuity of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim traditions regardless of the lack of historical orthodoxy on afterlife. As in the case of the Qur'anic story of Jesus, the Qur'anic stories of the Jewish prophets serve to illustrate this continuity of tradition and mythology.

So the Qur'an does not share our current fascination with either orthodoxy or history, and focuses on inclusiveness and the mythological connections between cultures. This has important consequences for the open-mindedness of Muslim societies.

Recently in Bangladesh, Ahmadi Muslims have been attacked as non-believers due to their supposed belief in the prophethood of their spiritual leader, Mirza Ghulam Ahmed of Qadian. And yet, even if this charge were true, would it be nearly the deviation from orthodoxy as Abraham's apparent lack of belief in an afterlife? Likewise, in Bangladesh there are radical fundamentalist groups who are so opposed to non-Islamic manifestations of local Bengali culture that they are willing to plant bombs at traditional Bengali New Year celebrations and Sufi shrines. And yet, the intrusions of local culture that they so violently oppose are little different from the intrusion of Christian mythology (as represented by the virgin birth) which the Qur'an easily accepts.

This sort of grappling with historical issues is very important for the Islam of the twenty-first century, and I commend Zeeshan Hasan for tackling them. This is a good step forward, and I hope this piece will be widely circulated in Arabic and English in the Muslim world. More please.

HUNTING FAKES: The current issue of Archaeology Magazine looks at the problem of forgeries in museum collections:

Conversations: Hunting Fakes

A Smithsonian sleuth says counterfeits lurk in museum collections the world over.

Jane Walsh, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, is best known for her work with museum collections and for exposing several crystal skulls, once thought to be Precolumbian, as nineteenth-century German fakes. She is now working with several museums to create a database that can be used to identify bogus Precolumbian jade, crystal, and other stone artifacts. She talked to ARCHAEOLOGY about why you shouldn't always trust what you see at museums.

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The recent announcement by the Israel Museum concerning the inscribed ivory pomegranate tends to support her viewpoint.

UPDATE (30 December): Yep.

YOU PROBABLY HAVE HEARD that former Panther Reggie White has died unexpectedly. I don't follow sports news myself and only vaguely recalled his name. But here's a detail that caught my eye:

In recent years, friends say, White intensely studied ancient Hebrew to learn more about the original language that was translated into the Old Testament of the Bible. His studies connected him with the Jewish community.

THE REMAINS of a fourth-century B.C.E. village have been found near Tel Aviv:

Archeologists find ancient village near Tel-Aviv

Archeologists have discovered a village near the Mediterranean coast dating from the 4th century B.C., the Israel Antiquities Authority announced Sunday - a rare find.

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THE FACE OF JESUS as a twelve-year-old boy has been reconstructed by Italian Police, using computer-generated aging (and, evidently, de-aging) software on the Shroud of Turin image. James Charlesworth is not impressed, and not just because the Shroud's image hasn't been authenticated (probably because it isn't authentic). He has a good point, if perhaps overstated - let's leave the Nazis out of it. The limpid eyes are a Jesus stereotype and the blond highlights in the hair just don't work.

(Via Archaeologica News.)

IN CASE YOU SPENT 2004 ON ANOTHER PLANET, Bishop Tom Wright has an announcement: The Da Vinci Code is 'lousy history.'

DR. JOSEPH CATHEY, who reviews books on the Hebrew Bible etc. frequently for the Review of Biblical Literature, has been assimilated to the Blogosphere. His new blog is called Dr Cathey's Blog.

SOME ZOROASTRIANS are interviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle about Matthew's magi:

Matthew' s account of the magi does not actually say there were three wise men, nor does it describe them as kings.

They are not even mentioned in the other gospel stories.

Nevertheless, three gift-giving Zoroastrians pop up every year around this time -- even though Christmas is not one of their holidays.

And that's just fine with Silloo Tarapore, a Zoroastrian Sunday school teacher who lives in Lafayette.

"We're OK with it,'' said Tarapore, who was busy this week preparing for the upcoming 13th annual North American Zoroastrian Congress.

"Zoroastrians are so used to being a minuscule cultural minority that things like that don't bother us at all.''

An interesting popular article about the magi and about modern Zoroastrianism.

TWO NEW TRANSLATIONS OF THE GILGAMESH EPIC are reviewed in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

GEZA VERMES has an article on Jesus in yesterday's Times:

When you strip away all the pious fiction, what is left of the real Jesus?

It's a good summary of one mainstream view of the historical Jesus. I'm not sure whether we can really say that he had no political ambition. Nor am I prepared to rule out that he had some sort of messianic consciousness or even thought of himself as an angel or a god. There's some contemporary precedent for such ideas in the figure of Melchizedek in the Dead Sea Scrolls and also the figure of Enoch in the Similitudes of Enoch, and some of the material in the Gospels points in that direction. There's so much about Jesus which we just don't know. But the stratigraphic approach does lead to pretty much the picture Vermes presents.

He had e-mailed me earlier this week to alert me that the piece was coming out on Friday, but I couldn't find it yesterday. Evidently the Times isn't indexed by Google. But Helenann Hartley had the link.

MORE ON THE IVORY POMEGRANATE FORGERY: Today's A.P. article has some additional information on how the forgery was detected (my emphasis):

Snyder said the pomegranate was examined by several scholars before and after the purchase and was authenticated for the museum by Israeli archaeologist Nahman Avigad.

The director said the pomegranate was examined with the technologies available at the time. "I think care was taken," Snyder said. "If one does not take advantage of opportunities to bring into a museum setting objects that don't surface in excavations, you might miss great objects."

He said the pomegranate was re-examined with a new type of microscope that detected synthetic material in the inscription, between the ivory and the patina.

The museum said another ancient object displayed with the pomegranate, a 2,600-year-old silver amulet with a priestly blessing carved into it, was re-examined and deemed authentic.

The Ketef Hinnom silver amulets were scientifically excavated, so I don't doubt that they are authentic.

As for the pomegranate and other forgeries, I'm struck by how the forgers often seem to be some years inside the scholarly response cycle. In other words, the forgers can produce forgeries that are undetectable by the best current methods of evaluation, but the forgeries are uncovered not too many years later by new technologies unknown to the forgers or the original autheticators. I doubt the forgers care; they've already safely made their sale and crawled back into the woodwork.

I don't know if there's a solution to this problem. It may be that a century from now forgers will be producing undetectably forged first-century scrolls using nanoreplicators that deposit just the right number of C-14 atoms into the manufactured parchments to make them appear ancient, and it will only be ten or twenty years later that scholars will use the new Berry-phase data-recovery technology to detect that the quantum entanglements of the forged scrolls are all from the twenty-second century.

MERRY CHRISTMAS to all those celebrating.

Here's the earliest preserved meditation on Matthew's star of Bethlehem story, by Ignatius of Antioch in his letter to the Ephesians in the early second century:

CHAPTER 19
19:1 And hidden from the prince of this world were the virginity of Mary and her child-bearing and likewise also the death of the Lord -- three mysteries to be cried aloud -- the which were wrought in the silence of God.

19:2 How then were they made manifest to the ages? A star shone forth in the heaven above all the stars; and its light was unutterable, and its strangeness caused amazement; and all the rest of the constellations with the sun and moon formed themselves into a chorus about the star; but the star itself far outshone them all; and there was perplexity to know whence came this strange appearance which was so unlike them.

19:3 From that time forward every sorcery and every spell was dissolved, the ignorance of wickedness vanished away, the ancient kingdom was pulled down, when God appeared in the likeness of man unto newness of everlasting life; and that which had been perfected in the counsels of God began to take effect. Thence all things were perturbed, because the abolishing of death was taken in hand.

FOR YOUR CHRISTMAS PRESENT I've updated the links page for PaleoJudaica, adding perhaps a couple dozen new sites, including some blogs I've been meaning to link to. Enjoy.

THE POOL OF SILOAM STORY is being recycled for Christmas:

Archeologists uncover pool believed to be site of Biblical miracle
Dig where Jesus said to restore blind man's sight

By Ramit Plushnick-Masti, Associated Press | December 24, 2004

JERUSALEM -- Archeologists in Jerusalem have identified the remains of the Siloam Pool, where the Bible says Jesus miraculously cured a man's blindness, researchers said yesterday -- underlining a stirring link between the works of Jesus and ancient Jewish rituals.

The archeologists are slowly digging out the pool, where water still runs, tucked away in what is now the Arab neighborhood of Silwan. It was used by Jews for ritual immersions for about 120 years until 70 AD, when the Romans destroyed the Jewish Temple.

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ANOTHER OBITUARY FOR CARSTEN THIEDE, this one in the Telegraph.

THE IVORY POMEGRANATE IS A FORGERY according to the Israel Museum:

Museum: Solomon's Temple relic a forgery
12/24/2004, 12:47 a.m. CT
By KARIN LAUB
The Associated Press

JERUSALEM (AP) � The Israel Museum announced Friday that one of its most prized possessions, an ivory pomegranate touted as the only existing relic from Solomon's Temple, is a forgery.

The thumb-sized pomegranate dates to the Bronze period, meaning it is older than the first Jewish Temple, and the inscription was added recently, the museum said, releasing findings by a committee of experts.

The inscription, in ancient Hebrew lettering, reads: "Belonging to the Temple of the Lord (Yahweh), holy to the priests."

Scholars had believed that the cream-colored pomegranate, which has a hole in the bottom, was used as the top of a scepter carried by a temple priest.

The temple was built in the 6th century B.C. and expanded by Herod before being destroyed in the year 70. Today, the Dome of the Rock � a Muslim shrine that is part of the Al Aqsa complex � is located near the site of ancient temple.

Actually, it's the second temple that's dated to the six century B.C.E. Solomon's temple would have been built in the tenth century, and it was from the latter that the ivory pomegranate was thought to come.

In addition, as already noted by Mark Goodacre and others, Oded Golan is to be indicted on forgery charges next week:

Israel's Justice Ministry said Thursday it will charge the owner of the ossuary and the tablet, Israeli antiquities collector Oded Golan, with forgery next week. However, ministry spokesman Jacob Galanti would not say whether the charges referred to the ossuary and the tablet, or to others.

UPDATE: More details on the ivory pomegranate story in this Ha'aretz article.

UPDATE (25 December): More here.

MONTAGUE RHODES JAMES is well known for his ghost stories, classic dramatizations of which are currently being shown on BBC4, as pointed out by Mark Goodacre. Mark notes his Apocryphal New Testament, but James was also a major contributor to the recovery and publication of Old Testament Pseudepigrapha in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I cite his editions a number of times in The Book. Bob Kraft has some interesting information in Reviving, Refurbishing, and Repurposing the Lost Apocrypha of M.R. James page. And here's a page by Rosemary Pardoe (whom I don't know) on M.R. James and The Testament of Solomon, which includes some of James's work on the T.Sol. In June I linked to James's translation of Pseudo-Philo's Biblical Antiquities.

As for his ghost stories (some of which you can find here), I agree with Mark that they're a great read. When I read them years ago, I remember being convinced that one was set in St. Andrews (which has a perfect Lovecraftian atmosphere for such things), although I can't remember which one now. The whole collection is available in Britain in a cheap paperback, although it seems to be out of print in the USA.

UPDATE (28 December): More here.