MORE ON THE SBL RESOLUTION: Maxine Grossman has taken up my challenge and has drafted another resolution with the same aims as the first. She writes:

During the United States election of 2004, an equation was made between specific political arguments and the concept of "moral values" or "biblical values." This claim confuses politics with theology and fundamentally misunderstands both the history of the Bible and its place in contemporary faith communities.

As an organization of professional Bible scholars we share the consensus that biblical texts are diverse in their origins and their theologies, and that they are always understood through the filter of present-day concerns and interpretations.

Interpretations of the Bible can vary widely, but all such interpretations are selective. A "literal" approach, itself a thoroughly modern response to critical Bible scholarship, has no greater claim to theological legitimacy than any other approach, and it is, if anything, less reflective of the history of biblical interpretation since its origins.

A serious and sincere interpreter of the Bible can find support in its texts for almost any political view on issues including abortion, gay marriage, and stem cell research. To say otherwise, or to equate one's own political agenda with "biblical morality" to the exception of all others', is both a bad reading of the Bible and a marker of bad faith.

We call upon those who would base their political arguments on exclusive scriptural claims to recognize the hubris of such practices and the damage that they do to civil discourse on issues of concern to all of us.


Comments?

For the record, y'all, I want to say that I voted in favor of the SBL's statement, and I will do so again if that is the one they approve. I may not agree with all of its content, but I think the issues are too important to ignore. Why should other people's politics be a measure of my morality?

I like this a lot better than the first one. I may have more comments on it as they come to me. As for the last paragraph of her message, I think the last sentence cuts both ways, which is why I voted against the statement. What I really like about Max's statement is that it addresses the "biblical values" question from the viewpoint of a biblical scholar without advocating a specific political position. I consider that public service (i.e., contributing our expertise to the public debate) without it being political activism (which I use to mean advocating a particular political line). I still think the latter should be an individual matter. But thanks to Dr. Grossman for contributing to the debate and for helping me clarify my own thinking on it.

THE FROM THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS TO THE BIBLE IN AMERICA EXHIBITION is now on display in Charlotte, North Carolina.

TIMBUKTU ARCHIVES UPDATE:

Rich Trove of Islamic Tradition (Navhind Times)

An exhibition of 400-year-old Islamic manuscripts from Timbuktu that was originally mounted at the Library of Congress in 2003 will be featured in Jackson, Mississippi, in fall 2005 before circulating around the United States. ....

The manuscripts, written in Arabic, Hebrew and Greek, date from the 16th through the 18th centuries. They come from the Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library and the Library of Cheick Zayni Baye in Timbuktu, Mali. Timbuktu, a city celebrated in western verse for its exotic locale, was for centuries a significant religious, cultural and commercial outpost of Islam, and a center for Islamic book production. There, the written word, along with intricate calligraphy in bound sheaves, fostered an important industry in book selling, rivaling all other local trades.

[...]

The manuscripts presented in the exhibition are samples of scholarly treatises that explore such diverse topics as medicine, science, religion, history and commerce - topics central to the intellectual life of Islam and the era. Many of the manuscripts had remained in the hands of private collectors after being zealously guarded during the colonial period by Malian families to prevent pilfering by Europeans. ...

Hebrew and Greek, as well as Arabic. More and more interesting.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH:

Plots sold to Muslims near Temple Mt. (Jerusalem Post)
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS

The Arab chairman of a committee that serves as a go-between between police and east Jerusalem residents is selling burial plots to Muslims just outside the walls of the Temple Mount in an area classified by the state as an archeological site and national park, according to a petition filed Thursday with the High Court of Justice by a right-wing activist.

The committee chairman said he had helped police resolve disputes over a handful of graves at the site in the past but denied any involvement in the recent sales of plots there.

[...]

The claim is that a sting operation was involved. If the accusation is true, this isn't good.

THE SBL COUNCIL has posted a resolution that was circulated at the SBL meeting in San Antonio last November, although I didn't encounter it then. Members are asked to agree or disagree with it and to comment if they wish to. No explanation is given of what will happen if a majority agree or disagree. The full text is as follows:

The United States election of 2004 witnessed the emergence of "values," often referred to as "Christian values" or "biblical values," as key political issues. The "values" most commonly identified in public debates were the issues of gay marriage, abortion, and stem-cell research.

The Society of Biblical Literature, which is the largest international, professional association of teachers and scholars of the Bible, calls attention to the fact that the "values" so prominently and divisively raised in this 2004 U.S. election are not major concerns in the Bible, and in fact are not even directly addressed in the Bible. Rather, they tend to reflect the underlying problems of homophobia, misogyny, control of reproductive rights, and restraint of expression (including scientific research) in U.S. society today.

With over 7,000 members representing a broad range of political and religious leanings, the Society of Biblical Literature has fostered discussions of such fundamental problems against the background of biblical ethics and respect for all human beings. As many of our members have indicated in publications and lectures, the moral issues dominating the biblical texts focus instead on concerns such as the well-being of individuals, the integrity of community, care for the powerless and the vulnerable, economic justice, the establishment of peace, and the stewardship of the environment.

The Society of Biblical Literature urges citizens and political agencies to direct their energies toward securing these goals and values of well-being and responsibility.

I think a number of points need to be made here. First, am I the only one who finds it odd that we are given no information on who wrote this resolution? The e-mail from Matthew Collins reads:

This resolution circulated at the San Antonio Annual Meeting. It is related directly to the US context. Council determined that it would be beneficial to survey all members in this regard.

Please respond before 25 January 2005.

Here is a link to the survey:
[snip]

Thanks for your participation,

Kent Harold Richards
Executive Director
Professor of Old Testament

The text of the resolution on the web page is unsigned. Why the ambiguous "circulated" in the message? Who circulated it? To whom? Who wrote it? Frankly, it makes me uncomfortable that the Society is requesting a response of its members to an anonymous resolution whose purpose is never explained. Evidently it was not composed by the Council. May we please have the name(s) of the writer(s) and a clearer explanation of what our vote means?

Second, there is the content of the resolution. I think it grants unnecessary ground to its fundamentalist opponents by implicitly accepting that the Bible is a unit that somehow addresses "major concerns" about "values" and political matters. The anonymous writer(s) also seem to grant the Bible authority in these matters. Presumably their view of authority is different from the fundamentalist view, but this is not spelled out or explained. In any case, it develops that "the moral issues dominating the biblical texts" are actually the values of the writer(s), not those of their opponents who hold the rejected political positions. (The views of the opponents have a much more sinister origin.) In fact, it turns out that the core values of the biblical texts happen to be pretty much identical to those of American academics in the humanities in the early twenty-first century.

This claim is not easy to maintain. True, the Bible doesn't address gay marriage directly, but Leviticus does call for the execution of homosexuals (20:13), which tends to imply that the writer opposed state ratification of their unions. It's a horrible passage, but it's there. And does the Bible really focus on the "well-being of individuals" (like the women and children supposedly slaughtered at Jericho by Joshua and his army at God's behest); "the integrity of community" (like the foreign women and children driven away from their husbands and fathers by Ezra and Nehemiah); "care for the powerless and the vulnerable" (see the two previous items), and so on? Sure, many places in the Bible support most of these values (although the business about "stewardship of the environment" is a stretch), but many don't. From a historical perspective this is a remarkably selective and, frankly, myopic list. The fundamentalists have as good a claim (maybe better) on the Bible for their agenda as the trendy-but-laudable laundry list of the anonymous writer(s) of this resolution.

For what it's worth, here's my view. Why start by granting so much ground to fundamentalist assumptions? Challenge these. The Bible is a collection, a library of Biblia expressing many different viewpoints; some lofty, some barbaric, and some merely human. It does not speak with one voice. This is not controversial: it's Bible 101 for undergraduates. It is up to us as critical and responsible readers to decide what we accept in it and what we don't. Sure, let's pick and choose; that's the rational thing to do. But let's be up front about doing so and not kid ourselves that we're discovering the Bible's true message and it happens to be congenial with everything we already thought anyway. Then a real discussion can start. (It may well be that the authors of the resolution would agree with me here, but if so, they need to express themselves more clearly and with some historical sophistication.)

Third, and to my mind most important, there is the question of whether the SBL has any business promoting this sort of political statement. I submit to you that the answer is no, absolutely not. I dare say that some people will ask, Shouldn't biblical scholars get out of their academic ivory towers and show concern with important social issues? The answer, of course, is yes - on an individual basis. Not just biblical scholars; everyone should take an active role in the politics of their society. We as individuals should all be active in promoting the political issues and views that we as individuals believe in. That's part of living in a pluralistic society and a democracy. But the Society of Biblical Literature is not a political society. It is an academic organization for scholars who specialize in biblical studies and related fields - whatever their political persuasion. Let me repeat that: whatever their political persuasion. The Society is not an organization for promoting political views. Its leadership has no reason to assume that all members agree with them on their political views and they have no right, let alone obligation, to speak for the members on political matters. (The fact that I agree broadly with the anonymous writer(s) on the three specific issues they mention - and let's face it, their basic positions aren't hard to guess - is neither here nor there.) I can and do pick my own political causes and activist groups. I don't need any help from the SBL.

As the resolution notes, the Society's membership has "a broad range of political and religious leanings." Some members disagree with the anonymous author(s) of the resolution (and with me) about gay marriage, abortion rights, and stem-cell research. Fine. I recognize that there are issue to discuss regarding each, some of them difficult, and my views are nuanced and open to development. I like to discuss political issues with those who disagree with me, in the hope of persuading them to my view, but also with the desire to learn from them. But meanwhile, even if a majority of the Society chose to vote in favor of this resolution, it would not speak for all members and would not be valid as a statement of the Society. It would be a form of tyranny by majority, because the SBL is not a political society.

Your job, SBL, is "to foster biblical scholarship," as it says on the masthead of the SBL web page. That means to support me in my academic role as a biblical scholar. Just as you would never assume that I belong to a particular religion and that you can speak for me about it, so you are in no position to assume anything about my political beliefs or to speak for me on political matters.

This resolution is inappropriate for many reasons and it goes without saying that I oppose it. I hope you do too, gentle reader. The SBL is an extraordinarily useful academic organization for biblical scholars and I appreciate their support immensely. In turn, they have my unwavering support for that purpose. While I commend the Council for seeking our view on the resolution, I don't think it should have gone even that far. Such statements amount to mission creep. Let's put them aside and get back to our scholarly work (and our individual political activism).

UPDATE: I see that Ed Cook has similar thoughts about the resolution and that most of his commenters agree. Eric Sowell too (later: also here). Danny Zacharias isn't so sure.

UPDATE: Jim West points out that the URL to the resolution asks not to be copied (the e-mail said nothing about this) so I have deleted it. But why wasn't the survey password-protected (with the members' SBL membership passwords)? Seems to me this whole thing could have been better thought out. As to whether the issues should be discussed in public, I assume that the writer(s) of the resolution wishes it to become a formal public statement of the SBL in due course. I think it's entirely appropriate that the discussion about it, and about the appropriateness of the SBL making political statements at all, take place in public.

UPDATE: Maxine Grossman e-mails:

I've been thinking a lot about your post on the SBL statement, and I had to write you with a few thoughts.

First, I agree with your view that the statement is a bad one. It follows the logic of the people it is trying to oppose, by arguing that the Bible is actually about the issues that it has been interpreted to address.

I agree that a better statement would talk about the diversity of biblical texts and their origins in history. I would also want to see something about the options for interpretation open to diverse faith communities in their reading. I'm sure you're (not) surprised about that last one.

But I have to disagree with your suggestion that the proper response is an individual one. I have two reasons for this.

1. The SBL doesn't have authority to make policy or determine social practice. But it does have the authority to talk about the Bible and its interpretation. It would not be mission creep for the Society to stand up and criticize the way other people are using the Bible. Not to do so cedes the floor unnecessarily.

2. The current presidential administration is famous for being "on message." The people who are finding sources for anti-abortion legislation (etc.) in the Bible are also remarkably good at presenting a single, clear, authoritative argument. The best answer to this kind of presentation is an equally authoritative collective message. Individual statements are good, but the message of a professional organization will be taken more seriously.

Public discourse this fall made the claim that "moral values" and "religion" required acceptance of a specific political agenda. This is a spurious claim and one that the SBL is within its rights to contradict.

One last thing: whether the message is collective or individual, it needs to be clear, concise, and to the point. I'm not arguing for being simplistic or dumbing down, and I know it's hard to be nuanced and brief at the same time. But it's important to recognize the discursive assumptions of the medium. Careful caveats sound either like you don't know what you're talking about or you don't believe it.

If there is a way for the Society to make your points without advancing a specific political agenda of its own, I might be sympathetic. Diversity of biblical texts, their origins in history, and options for interpretation open to diverse faith communities all seem pretty integral to the Society's mission. A scholarly statement on how to look at the Bible from a multifaith (or lack of faith) perspective could have some potential. Presumably it would have to allow for fundamentalist positions while undercutting their claim to sole authority. I worry that people who attempted to put it together would be unbearably tempted to build their own political agenda into it, as happened with this resolution. But there's a way to prove me wrong. How about a draft proposal?

UPDATE (15 January): Tim Bulkeley weighs in: "So, I'll join the chorus of bibli*bloggers, and pray that good sense causes such a backlash of Biblical Scholars for Academic Freedom that SBL will pull back from the brink of the abyss of totalitarian 'liberalism'!" And Stephen Carlson: "I doubt John Locke would have been in favor of the proposed resolution being circulation among SBL members."

UPDATE (16 January): Maxine Grossman publishes an alternative (and much better) statement here.

UPDATE: More comments from (non-SBL members, I think) Apikorsos (thanks, Elf) and Razors Kiss. The latter will not be including me on his Evangelical apologists blogroll, for which I take no offense. Meanwhile, Steven I. Weiss, former Elder of the now-defunct Protocols blog, is, uh, not taking the survey very seriously. And illustrating my point that it should have been password protected.

UPDATE (18 January): Mark Goodacre comments at length, covering many of the same points Ed Cook and I made. He sums up, "I propose that this survey is voided as a well-meaning but ultimately not very well thought through experiment."

UPDATE (19 January): Is "fundamentalist" the right term? Maybe not.

UPDATE 19 February): More here (another security hole), here (the results and a response from Ed Cook), and here (again on the security issues - looks as though the survey was secure after all).

OXYRHYNCHUS ONLINE has a new URL: http://www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk/. Be sure and update your bookmark. (Via Wieland Willker on the Textual Criticism list.)

ANOTHER REMARKABLE SEAL?

Ancient seal corroborates Bistun Inscription text (MehrNews)
TEHRAN, Jan. 12 (MNA) -- An ancient seal has been discovered by chance which confirms the information recorded in the text of the Bistun Inscription in Kermanshah Province, an expert of the Hamedan Cultural Heritage and Tourism Department announced on Wednesday.

Fariba Sharifian explained that the Iranian police recently confiscated the seal from smugglers in the town of Asadabad in Hamedan Province, adding, �It is not clear when and where the seal was unearthed, but the information and reliefs carved on it narrate significant and interesting material.�

The seal is made of green jasper, she said.

A cuneiform inscription in ancient Persian on one side of the cylindrical seal reads �Dadar Shish, Satrap of Bactria�.

[...]

The Behistun Inscription is an account by Darius I (who also is mentioned in the Bible) of his own great deeds. It mentions two people with the name D�darshi (see here and here for details), the second of whom was Satrap of Bactria. If the seal is genuine, this is an interesting confirmation of a detail in the inscription.

If it is genuine. In its favor, it was not on the antiquities market, but was seized by the authorities from smugglers. But against its authenticity, it is unprovenance; it was seized from smugglers who presumably intended to sell it; and given the enormous interest of modern Iranians in their own history, it's the sort of exciting item that a forger would have every reason to produce in the hope of making lots of money. In light of the emerging forgery scandal in Israel, I'm skeptical.

(Via Mirabilis.)

THERE'S A CONFERENCE ON HEROD AND AUGUSTUS at University College London in June. Helenann Hartley has details.

AKMA has started a New Testament Resources Blog.

In this blog, I�ll post some links to recommended resources for the study of the New Testament. I�ll keep a bibliographic list of links to commentaries, monographs, and articles at the top of a page. That list will change over time, as I learn more or encounter problems with one or another source.

It will also include open but moderated comments.

(Via The Stuff of Earth.)

IN ANSWER TO DANNY ZACHARIAS, I have already given my opinion on the James ossuary in this post:

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.

BLOGGER FIRED FROM WATERSTONE'S BOOKSTORE: This has nothing to do with ancient Judaism, but quite a bit to do with blogging and bloggers. Also, it's a local story about a place with which I am somewhat familiar. The Guardian has the most detailed account I could find, although I heard about it first from the Biblioblog Blog and lots of newspapers and (of course) bloggers are taking an interest:

Blogger sacked for sounding off

Waterstone's says bookseller brought firm into disrepute

Patrick Barkham
Wednesday January 12, 2005
The Guardian

A bookseller has become the first blogger in Britain to be sacked from his job because he kept an online diary in which he occasionally mentioned bad days at work and satirised his "sandal-wearing" boss.

Joe Gordon, 37, worked for Waterstone's in Edinburgh for 11 years but says he was dismissed without warning for "gross misconduct" and "bringing the company into disrepute" through the comments he posted on his weblog.

Published authors and some of the 5 million self-published bloggers around the globe said it was extraordinary that a company advertising itself as a bastion of freedom of speech had acted so swiftly to sack Mr Gordon, who mentions everything from the US elections to his home city of Edinburgh in the satirical blog he writes in his spare time.

[...]

The Guardian Newsblog has more here

For those of you outside Britain, Waterstone's is a major bookseller here, something like Barnes & Noble in the USA. I buy (or at least have bought) countless books from them.

Two thoughts. If there were an award for stupidity, I would give Mr. Gordon the second prize. You won't find many people who support free speech more than I do, but even I see a difference between grumbling about your employer in the pub with your cronies after work hours and doing so in an interview with a national or international newspaper. Blogging is rather more like the latter than the former. It's a pretty-much-permanent international medium easily available to any reader who wants to consult it. It's not quite the same as a mainstream-media interview, in that such interviews are dependably widely read while a blog's readership is generally small. But if a blog story or post catches attention, its readership can swell enormously overnight. It strikes me as very imprudent to post profanely critical comments about one's boss and workplace in such a medium, while telling us the name of the company and the more-or-less specific location. It may not be illegal or actionable, but it is in very poor taste and likely to create bad feelings.

Thoughtful and constructive criticisms of the company's actions and policies may be another matter, although usually (not quite always) they are best dealt with privately within the company. But the comments at issue were clearly just venting.

First prize for stupidity, however, definitely would go to Waterstone's for the way they have handled this. The sensible thing, as Mr. Gordon observes, would have been to approach him privately, tell him the posts were offensive, and ask him to delete them and not to do it again. Problem solved. If he wanted to make a civil rights case out of it then, that would have been his decision and his problem. But I doubt he would have.

Instead, they chose the course guaranteed to draw the world's attention to Mr. Gordon, his blog, his comments, and the company who fired him. Perhaps they thought they needed to make an example of him. Guess what? Boy have they! He is now an example of a little guy oppressed by the Evil Big Corporate Goliath, and the case is generating orders of magnitude more bad publicity for Waterstone's than they would have gotten from just ignoring him. SF writer Richard Morgan (who, incidentally, is one of my favorite authors) oversimplifies a little in his letter to Waterstone's, but in this part he gets it exactly right:

Waterstones is, after all, a bookseller, whose stock in trade is the purveying of opinion, not all of it palatable to those concerned. You sell books which offer serious critique of the corporate environment and government, but do not expect to suffer punitive action from government or corporate quarters as a result. You sell books which criticise and satirise religious and political groups, but you do not expect to be firebombed by extremists as a result. Surely Joe has the right to let off steam in his free time without having to fear for his livelihood as a result. The action that has been taken so far bears more resemblance to the behaviour of an American fast food chain than a company who deal in intellectual freedoms and the concerns of a pluralist liberal society.

In a word, Waterstone's can dish it out but can't take it.

I don't know whether Waterstone's has the legal right to fire Mr. Gordon in this case (and I do respect the right to free association as well as the right to free speech). I am not a lawyer. But I do know that they have overreacted appallingly and in about the least constructive and most self-damaging way imaginable. They have presented themselves as oversensitive, heavy-handed hypocrites, fully worthy of a Dilbert cartoon. Another SF author, Charles Stross, spells out the details of their folly here and also has some constructive suggestions for a resolution.

In the past, whenever I've gone to Dundee or Edinburgh I have invariably stopped at Waterstone's to buy a book or two (or three or four, etc.), or some coffee, or often both. But as long as they continue this absurd course with Mr. Gordon, I think I can attend to my reading and caffeine needs elsewhere. I encourage my British readers, and any overseas readers who come to Britain for a conference or a holiday, to do likewise. Try Ottakar's instead for books. I hope that Science Fiction authors will also refrain from any Waterstone's book signing affairs until there is a satisfactory resolution. And if you'd like to register an opinion with Waterstone's, you can reach them at manager@edinburgh-eastend.waterstones.co.uk. Judging from the picture in the Guardian article, this seems to be the branch where Mr. Gordon worked.
But even if not, I dare say your message will be forwarded to the relevant person.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming.

UPDATE (13 January): In response to my e-mail drawing the attention of the Waterstone's management to this post, I received the following from their Customer Services:

Dear James R. Davila,

Thank you for your email.
Unfortunately we cannot comment on this matter as it is confidential between the company and the employee.
I would like to thank you for taking the time to contact me, all comments are getting forwarded to the appropriate department.

THE "MONARCHISTS" SPEAK from their new Sanhedrin:

Hear ye, hear ye: Sanhedrin seeks David's scion as king (Jerusalem Post)
By YAAKOV KATZ

Will Jews begin proclaiming "Long live the king" in the near future?

According to a group of 71 Jewish scholars who met this week in the Old City of Jerusalem in the form of a modern-day Sanhedrin � a duplicate of the religious tribunal which convened during the time of the Second Temple � a coronation day is growing closer.

[...]

The group composed largely of Kahane sympathizers that gave itself the name Sanhedrin in October, however, met Sunday to discuss the creation of a Jewish monarchy in the State of Israel.

For the past several years a group called the Monarchists has conducted extensive research into the lineage of several families in an effort to discover who has the closest bloodline to the biblical King David � a requirement for any future Jewish king.

Rabbi Yosef Dayan from Psagot, known for his recent threats to place a death curse on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, is said to be a leading candidate to become the "king of Israel."

For more on Dayan and the "death curse" story, see here and here.

[...]

The only question now is how to establish the Jewish monarchy in spite of the presiding democratic government.

"There are two possibilities," Dayan explained. "The first is that the nation or a majority from within will want the monarchy and will uproot the presiding democratic government."

The second, more realistic option, he said, is "the one cited by Maimonides � and that is that no one will know how it will be until it happens."

[...]

I think we can safely rule out the first possibility.

HEBRAIC POLITICAL STUDIES is a new journal. Jack Sasson reports on the ANE list:

Hebraic Political Studies will publish articles by scholars in the fields of political science, philosophy, history, law, and religious studies that explore the political concepts of the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature, the significance of reflections on the Hebrew Bible and Judaic sources in the history of ideas, and the role of Jewish sources in the history of the West. The journal aims to evaluate the place of the Jewish textual tradition, alongside the traditions of Greece and Rome, in political history and the history of political thought.

There is more info in the full ANE posting.

BE SURE AND READ THE UPDATES to posts from Sunday and Monday.

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.