THE LATE POPE'S RELATIONSHIP WITH JUDAISM is the subject of a thoughtful Reuters article ("John Paul forged historic reconciliation with Jews"). Excerpt:

In 1986, in Rome, he became the first Pope to enter a synagogue. In 1994, he established full diplomatic ties between the Vatican and Israel, a step widely regarded as removing any theological opposition to the existence of modern Israel.

Clarifying an ancient misunderstanding, the Pope also said God had not broken his covenant with the Jews by creating the new covenant with Christians. This repudiated an old Christian view that Jews had "missed the boat" by failing to recognise Jesus as the Messiah and so their souls would not be saved.

The forging of ties was followed by a week-long pilgrimage to Israel in 2000 that touched on issues ranging from the quest for Middle East peace to the horrors of the Holocaust and the search for religious tolerance and understanding.

"Israelis were so impressed by his amicability and felt almost as if he were a relative," Aharon Lopez, a former Israeli ambassador to the Vatican, said of the visit.

Jewish leaders elsewhere were equally impressed. "Of all the popes in history, John Paul II is the one who understood Jews the best," said Theo Klein, a former head of the French Jewish umbrella group CRIF.

Despite the distance crossed by Pope John Paul, hurdles remained in the Vatican's relationship with Israel and the Jewish people, specifically the slow pace of opening Vatican archives to Holocaust researchers and the beatification of Pius.

Lopez said much education was needed to remove the "teaching of contempt" in the Church, while adding that John Paul's papacy had brought the Jewish people's relationship with the Catholic Church to a "point of no return".

"Under the circumstances he went a very far distance, more than any other pope, perhaps because of his acquaintance with Jews and the fact that he lived through the Holocaust where he did," Lopez said.

And this article has more:

Pontiff reached out to other faiths

BY RON GROSSMAN

Chicago Tribune

(KRT) - When John Paul II stepped across the threshold of the Great Synagogue of Rome on April 13, 1986, it marked a milestone analogous to Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon. If not quite "a giant leap for mankind," it certainly was for the two faiths involved.

For almost 2,000 years, the popes and the heart of Rome's Jewish community literally had been neighbors. Only a short distance separates Vatican City and Temple Israeletico. Yet until then, no pope had ever entered the synagogue.

[...]

In 1994, he dispatched the first Vatican ambassador to Israel, four decades after other countries established diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. When his predecessor Paul VI visited the Holy Land in 1964, he studiously avoided even using the world "Israel." But when John Paul II traveled there in 2000, he repeated the message of his visit to Rome's synagogue: "You are our elder brothers."

The pope's devotion to improving Jewish-Catholic relations was not limited to grand gestures. He had an eye for the finest details. For example, he suggested the term "Hebrew Scriptures" be substituted for "Old Testament," which implied something outmoded.

[...]

And this A.P. article ("Jerusalem hails pope's interfaith outreach") has responses from Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Jerusalem. And note also this Knight Ridder piece: "John Paul II lauded for efforts to mend Jewish-Catholic relations".

This Pope had a remarkable ecumenical spirit.

POPE JOHN PAUL II HAS DIED.

Few would have predicted then that the first non-Italian Pope in 455 years would throw off the stiff trappings of the papacy, travel the globe and leave an indelible mark on history.

In over a quarter century on the world stage, he was both a champion of the downtrodden and an often contested defender of orthodoxy within his own church.

Historians say one of the Pope's most lasting legacies will be his role in the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989.

"Behold the night is over, day has dawned anew," the Pope said during a triumphant visit to Czechoslovakia in 1990.

A decade after witnessing the fall of communism, he fulfilled another of his dreams. He visited the Holy Land in March 2000, and, praying at Jerusalem's Western Wall, asked forgiveness for Catholic sins against Jews over the centuries.

Requiescat in pace.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH:

Group Protests Opponents' Plans for Rally


Friday April 1, 2005 4:01 PM

AP Photo JRL101

NUSSEIRAT, Gaza Strip (AP) - Members and supporters of the militant Islamic Hamas group demonstrated Friday against plans by Israeli opponents of the planned Gaza Strip evacuation to rally at a disputed Jerusalem holy site.

Jerusalem Police Chief Ilan Franco has said he would block the April 10 rally at the site, known to Jews as Temple Mount and to Muslims as Haram as-Sharif, because the protesters posed a security risk.

... The crowd was estimated at about 10,000 people.

[...]

If Hamas is putting its energy into protest rallies rather than suicide bombings, well, that's progress.

CHALDO-ASSYRIAN WATCH: "College to study Mich. Chaldean Americans."

They're the second-largest Middle Eastern population in Michigan.

But unlike many other ethnic groups, Chaldeans as a community have not had an in-depth analysis.

So a college is embarking on a major study and survey this year of Chaldeans -- Iraqi Christians -- in Michigan.

[...]

INDIAN ISRAELITES?

Amar: Bnei Menashe are descendants of ancient Israelites
By Yair Sheleg (Ha'aretz)

Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar decided on Wednesday to recognize the members of India's Bnei Menashe community as descendants of the ancient Israelites.

[...]

The Bnei Menashe community consists of close to 7,000 members of the Kuki-Chin-Mizo tribe, which lives in northeast India near the border of Myanmar (formally Burma). For generations they kept Jewish traditions, claiming to be descended from the tribe of Menashe, one of the ten lost Israeli tribes that were exiled by the Assyrians in the eighth century B.C.E. and have since disappeared.

[...]

I doubt very much that the group goes back to the Assyrian exile, but it's possible that they do have a Jewish origin. At any rate, their genetic profile seems to connect them to the Middle East.

HELENANN HARTLEY has a new blog address:

http://helenannhartley.blogspot.com/

Be sure and update your bookmark.

IF ONLY IT WERE SO.

MORE ON THE GNOSTIC PRADA AD: Here's a press release from Cut + Run which interviews Jordan Scott (daughter of Ridley Scott), who was the one who suggested using Thunder, Perfect Mind in the ad. Incidentally, this Coptic text from Nag Hammadi is preserved in a fourth-century manuscript, not a first-century one. There may have been speculation that a Greek original was written as early as the first century, but this is just speculation.

MORE ON THE ALLAH GRAFFITO: Arutz Sheva has some additional details.

The word �Allah� was found yesterday carved into the eastern wall of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The Arabic letters are approximately a foot tall.

It is suspected that Arab workers brought in by the Waqf Islamic authority, which controls the Temple Mount, are the culprits. Police feel they used stone cutting tools to engrave the word into the stone, which is located about thirty feet off the ground.

The stone in question is located next to scaffolding brought in by Jordanian workers to prevent the collapse of the wall.

This does not answer any of the questions bibliobloggers have been raising and it does not seem to allow for the suggestions we've advanced thus far. I e-mailed Dr. Eilat Mazar about it last night and I'll report back when I hear from her.

"THIS IS PERHAPS the most inaccurate popular article on the Dead Sea Scrolls that I have ever read, which is quite an achievement." You can read about it over at Qumranica.

DA VINCI CODE CODE: According to the Electric New Paper in Singapore, the Da Vinci Code has a quotation from the book of (1?) Enoch encoded in the introduction.

THE Doubleday hardcover edition of Dan Brown's bestselling puzzlethon contains a coded message quoted from the biblical Apocrypha's Book of Enoch.

Brown (left) has revealed that the message hints at the plot for his next book. His fans have responded with their wallets.

To see the code, open the book to the introduction on the dust jacket, and copy down every bolded letter.

Add spaces where appropriate, and you will be able to read the mysterious and slightly eerie sentence.

I'm afraid I don't own a copy of the Da Vinci Code but perhaps a reader has it handy and can tell us what the Enoch verse is?

UPDATE: Carla Sulzbach, who doesn't have the book either, e-mails this link, which says that the encoded sentence is "Is there no help for the widow's son?" But this sentence isn't in 1 Enoch or in 2 Enoch (follow the links and search them yourself) and I'm quite sure it's not in 3 Enoch either. A little Googling brings up sites that connect it with Freemansonry and Mormonism. If you want to know more about that, I'll leave you to track it down yourself. But if that's the embedded sentence, the Enoch connection isn't there. It's remarkable how the Enochic attribution is just repeated without anyone bothering to go look it up in the book of Enoch. Sigh.

HOW DO WE KNOW IT'S AN OSTRICH? Professor Gary Rendsburg takes us through an item of biblical philology from Leviticus 11:16 in the Forward.

THE BEIT SHEAN VENUS on display at the Israel Museum is getting lots of attention:

The Roman-era statue was discovered in 1993 in an ancient bathhouse at an archaeological dig in Beit Shean, a small city near the Jordan River and the Sea of Galilee. The Hebrew University archeologists who excavated the Venus sculpture uncovered several works that were also intended to decorate the lavish bathing area, including Dionysus, a goddess Athena, a headless emperor and a nymph.

Beit Shean seems to have been a very cosmopolitan place.

THE LATEST on the proposed Revava protest on the Temple Mount:

Police to bar Temple Mt. gathering
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS (Jerusalem Post)

Jerusalem police chief Ilan Franco has decided to bar a massive Jewish pilgrimage to the Temple Mount by a group of ultra-nationalists opposed to the planned withdrawal from the Gaza Strip following multiple intelligence warnings that such an event could prompt Palestinian violence at the bitterly contested holy site, police said Tuesday.

But organizers said that they were going ahead with the event, which is scheduled for April 10, setting the stage for a major show-down with police outside the Jerusalem site next month.

[...]

It's increasingly hard to imagine a way that this whole thing could turn out well.

SPEAKING OF IN POOR TASTE:

'Allah' inscribed on Temple Mount Wall
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS (Jerusalem Post)

The word "Allah" in Arabic was found hewn into the eastern wall of Jerusalem's Temple Mount, in one of the worst acts of vandalism at the history-rich site in the last several years, archaeologists and eyewitnesses said Wednesday.

[...]

I can think of more offensive graffiti than the name of God, but in the context of defacing an historic site the act is very disrespectful to both Judaism and Islam.

The letters, incidentally, are half a meter high.



UPDATE: Jim West thinks the photograph is a forgery:

Maybe i'm just skeptical of any reports of inscriptions and the like but it looks like a fake photo to me. The letters are above the surface of the stone- and yet the stone is level with the stones surrounding it. Now exactly how is that possible? If the letters had been carved in such a way that the surrounding stone were removed, then you would think that there would be a noticeable difference in the surface level of that stone and those surrounding it. Further, the lines of the "inscription" are strangely perfect. In all honesty it looks to me like a photo has been doctored to look like something has been written on it. If readers are aware of how a stone can be carved in such a way that the surface is unaffected while letters are raised in the center, I would love to hear.

It does look funny. The only way I can see to carve the inscription would be to chisel away all the surrounding material on that stone, yet as Jim says, it doesn't look deeper than the surrounding stones (although it's hard to tell for sure) and I don't see chisel marks or a surface pattern that looks different from the other stones. The stone of the inscription is the right color but it looks polished -- the surface is quite different from any other stone surface visible. But it melds into the surrounding stone and the shadows are just right if the sun is shining above and to the left, which fits all the other shadows in the picture.

I can't imagine that both the Jerusalem Post and Ha'aretz would run the story or that Eilat Mazar would comment on it without checking the stone in person. Moreover, the photographer, Ariel Jerozolimski, does lots of work for the Jerusalem Post and has more than 100 Google entries.

Could it be that material (plaster?) dyed the same color as the wall has been pressed in a mold against the stone until it bonded to it?

If any reader in Jerusalem has seen the graffito or can go look at it, I would be grateful for a report.

UPDATE: Yes, the Brian connection occurred to me too.

UPDATE (31 March): Stephen Carlson has a theory too.

KABBALISTIC CURSE WATCH:

Rabbi who cursed Rabin targets Sharon
By YAAKOV KATZ (Jerusalem Post)

Yosef Dayan, who enacted a pulsa denura � Aramaic for "lashes of fire" � death curse against Yitzhak Rabin shortly before his assassination, has received a green light from kabbalistic rabbis to place the same curse on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in the next few days.

[...]

This could lead to him being investigated by the police for incitement. In any case, it's in poor taste.

NEWS ON THE GOSPEL OF JUDAS: Middle East Online reports:

Gospel of Judas back in spotlight after 20 centuries


Swiss foundation seeks to shed light on controversial Christian text named after apostle said to have betrayed Jesus.


By Patrick Baert - GENEVA

About 2,000 years after the Gospel according to Judas sowed discord among early Christians, a Swiss foundation says it is translating for the first time the controversial text named after the apostle said to have betrayed Jesus Christ.

The 62-page papyrus manuscript of the text was uncovered in Egypt during the 1950s or 1960s, but its owners did not fully comprehend its significance until recently, according to the Maecenas Foundation in Basel.

The manuscript written in the ancient dialect of Egypt's Coptic Christian community will be translated into English, French and German in about a year, the foundation specialising in antique culture said on Tuesday.

[...]

After the manuscript is restored, the text is due to be translated and analysed by a team of specialists in Coptic history led by a former professor at the University of Geneva, Rudolf Kasser.

[...]

Of course, PaleoJudaica readers have known this since last July. It's good to see the media catching up with the Blogosphere.

The article (which has been picked up by the Agence France-Presse) does have some new information: the publication date has been moved back a bit (which is normal for this sort of thing) and there's a carbon-dating result (3rd-4th century C.E.).

UPDATE: Stephen Carlson comments on some dodgy elements in the article. Trust the media to get it wrong when they finally do get it. Sigh.

I'M BACK. The Scottish weather was typically gloomy and wet, but it was nice to get away for a bit anyhow and we did at least get to see Dunfermline Abbey. And I managed to get through Neal Stephensons' In the Beginning...Was the Command Line (which is still extremely informative despite being on computers and six years old) and to make progress on his The System of the World. I only got around to starting the latter a week or so ago. The density of infodumps on early eighteenth century culture is a little high even for Stephenson, and he can get away with a lot. But it's a page turner: it succeeds because the various protagonists are the best at what they do and don't miss much, so the conflicts are played out at a high strategic level, and because most of the players are highly sympathetic, so you find yourself rooting enthusiastically for both sides.

WE'RE OFF on a family holiday for a couple of days. I don't intend to get anywhere near a computer and if I'm confronted with one I'll probably run. I expect to be back sometime on Wednesday, so look for more blogging then.

(And thanks, by the way, to all those who blogged or e-mailed congratulations on PaleoJudaica's second anniversary.)

OIL IN THEM THERE HILLS?

Lo, there came oilmen from the West
By Ian MacKinnon (The London Times)

Biblical prophecies led an evangelical American to start drilling in northern Israel

WHEN oilmen go prospecting they usually put their faith in geologists to help their risky ventures. John Brown prefers to trust God and the Bible to make him and the State of Israel rich.

Later this week his company, Zion Oil, will begin drilling in a patch of dusty earth of northern Israel pinpointed by ancient biblical prophecies.

Unfortunately, this seems to be the biblical prophecy:

Tracts from the Old Testament books of Genesis and Deuteronomy foretold wealth in the ancient lands of the tribes of Joseph�s sons, Manasseh and Ephraim, and Jacob�s son, Asher. Moses says in Deuteronomy xxxiii, 24: �Most blessed of sons be Asher. Let him be favoured by his brothers and let him dip his foot in oil.�

The catch is that the word "oil" in this verse (Hebrew shemen) refers to fat products or organic oil, especially olive oil, but never a petroleum product. The only biblical Hebrew words I can think of for a petroleum product are h.emar and zephet, both of which mean "asphalt" or "pitch" (e.g., Genesis 14:10 for the first and Exod 2:3 for both). If the verse said Asher should dip his foot in pitch, Mr. Brown might have more of an exegetical case.

Still, I wish him luck.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH:

Ezra: �Police Won�t Let Thousands of Jews Ascend Temple Mount at One Time�
12:14 Mar 27, '05 / 16 Adar 5765 (Arutz Sheva)

(IsraelNN.com) Public Security Minister Gideon Ezra said the police will stop a large number of Jews from ascending the Temple Mount on April 10, as they requested. ...

PELIKAN'S WHOSE BIBLE IS IT? is reviewed by Harvey Cox in the Boston Globe.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: "Jordan warns against Temple Mount rally." And David Ha'ivri claims that unofficial negotiations with the police are continuing.

HAPPY EASTER to all those celebrating.

HAVEIL HAVELIM #15, THE PURIM CARNIVAL, is now available at Soccer Dad's.

HERE'S MORE ON NICOLE KIDMAN'S BIBLICAL STUDIES in the Sydney Morning Herald (requires free registration to access). She would like to do some archaeology in the Middle East:

"I love the Middle East; I love the smells and the sensations. I'd love to go on an archaeological dig. And I'd like to get my degree in philosophy. At the moment I'm doing a course in the Old Testament, but linking it to the Middle East, to Israel and Palestine. I have a tutor who teaches at UCLA and Pepperdine [University] who's wonderful; he comes to the set for two hours twice a week, and then I do a weekend class as well," she tells InStyle.

The story is picked up in various places by someone ignorant enough to think that UCLA stands for "University College Los Angeles."

MORE OVERDETERMINATION: Today is both Holy Saturday and the traditional birth date of the Persian prophet Zoroaster.

BOOK REVIEW ALERT: The following is in today's New York Times:

'Whose Bible Is It?': God Speaks; Man Translates
By JAMES KUGEL

Published: March 27, 2005

Most books about the Bible are principally concerned with how it came to be and what it meant in its historical context. But -- as readers of Jaroslav Pelikan's ''Whose Bible Is It?'' will find -- that is really only the beginning of the Bible's story. Even before the last chapters of the Hebrew Bible itself had been written, an ancient school of biblical interpreters had come upon the scene -- the earliest of them going back to the third century B.C. or so -- and they changed forever the way the Bible would be read. They (mostly anonymous) were decidedly not interested in what the stories, laws or prophecies had meant in their original context. They believed the Bible was a divinely given guidebook, eternally relevant. What interested them was what it had to teach people in their own day, and often this meant ignoring history and digging deeper, trying to find some hidden lesson in the Bible's words. Sometimes this process involved a great deal of imagination -- reinterpreting a common word or phrase to mean something quite different from its usual meaning, or even ''deducing'' the existence of conversations or whole episodes unreported in the Bible itself. They claimed it was full of teachings only hinted at in its actual words.

[...]

James Kugel, by the way, is a Harvard professor and one of my teachers. He is one of the foremost experts on ancient interpreters of the Bible and I am constantly shoving his work into the hands of my students (twice last week, for example).

THE BOOK OF GENESIS is reviewed by E. L. Doctorow in the Guardian. Really.

THE KETEF HINNOM SILVER AMULETS and the recent confirmation of their date (about 2600 years old) are the subject of a CBS News story.

PROFESSOR P. KYLE MCCARTER of Johns Hopkins University will be speaking at York College in Pennsylvania on the James Ossuary. The York Daily Record has an e-mail interview with him. He says that in his view "the jury is still out" regarding the inscription's authenticity.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH:

Far right barred from Temple Mount (Ynetnews)

Leading activists denied permission to enter holy site; meanwhile, police to investigate �Rabin is waiting for Sharon� sticker

JERUSALEM - Far right activists Baruch Marzel, Baruch Ben Yossef, and Itamar Ben Gvir have been denied permission to enter the Temple Mount by Jerusalem Police.

[...]

The article also has this to say about the proposed Revava protest:

Police say they have received no formal request for such a march, and say any such request would be debated on its own merits. They add than any approval would only be within the context of the current rules governing such visits. Current regulations provide for visits on specific days and times, and only in small groups.

This makes the police sound rather more open to the idea than previously reported (follow the link above).

PLINY GOES WIRELESS: The Independent reports that some of the original Latin of Pliny the Elder's Natural History will be broadcast in Britain on Radio 3 tomorrow night.

The programme, Between The Ears - Pliny's Naturalis Historia, was prompted by Mel Gibson's successful film, The Passion of The Christ, last year, which told the story of Jesus in Aramaic and Latin.

THE KETEF HINNOM SILVER AMULETS are on display in Holland. It sounds as though the exhibition also includes some Elephantine papyri:

Ancient Torah texts on display (Ynetnews)

Fragments from Torah texts dating back to the 7th century BCE are on display as part of an exhibition of biblical artifacts in The Netherlands

BOOK REVIEW ALERT:

The Invention Of Racism In Classical Antiquity
Posted 3/24/2005
By Ralph Amelan (the Jewish Press)

Title: The Invention Of Racism In
Classical Antiquity
Author: Benjamin Isaac
Publisher: Princeton University Press
563 pp., $45
Reviewed by Ralph Amelan

In the world of Athens and Rome, all men were brothers. The Persians? "Impetuous, truculent, devious, and insolent." The Syrians? "Drenched in perfume." The Egyptians? "Intolerable in their wantonness." The Phoenicians? "Skilled in deceiving, and ever ready to prepare stratagems in the dark." And the Jews? "Malodorous and unmanageable."

Yes, in classical times, every week was National Brotherhood Week.

[...]

And were the Jews also victims of racism, then as now? No, claims the author, surprisingly. There was certainly considerable animus against Jews, and Isaac reproduces a torrent of abuse that classical authors directed at them. But this abuse had limits. The greedy moneylender motif was unknown. The blood libel, a Christian invention, was also absent.

[...]

Looks interesting.

OVERDETERMINED: Today is Purim, Good Friday, the date that the One Ring was cast into the Crack of Doom, and my wife's and my sixteenth wedding anniversary. Carla Sulzbach points me to this article on the first two and she comments "Solar eclipses are less rare!" Now if you take only the times that Purim and Good Friday coincide on March 25th, you've got something really rare! Doubtless this confluence has vast cosmic implications, but I don't know what they are.

UPDATE: Ed Cook reflects on two of these. Reader Michael Peterson e-mails to point out that today is also the Feast of the Annunciation. The next edition of Haveil Havelim (this Sunday) will be devoted to Purim. And here are a lot of other things that happened on March 25th.

UPDATE (26 March): And here are some reflections on Purim and Good Friday by a Jewish writer. Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ makes an appearance.

THE CODEX SINATICUS DIGITIZATION PROJECT is covered in the current issue of the Economist. Looks like a good article, despite the cutsey title ("And the word was made flash"). Excerpt:

The hyperspectral imaging technique that will be used to scan the Bible was originally designed for medical purposes, by Costas Balas at the Technical University of Crete. It works by looking at each image in very narrow bands of wavelength�specific shades of red, green and so on. However, the imaging spans more than just the visible part of the spectrum of light, going from the ultra-violet (light that has shorter wavelength than violet) to the infra-red (light with wavelength longer than red). Because both the ink used to write on the vellum and the vellum itself are transparent at various wavelengths, this technique will allow scholars to see all the layers of the manuscript in at least some wavelengths, and thus perceive the various rewrites it has gone through.

Dr McKendrick says that it is one of the first projects of its kind, and one the library hopes to emulate with other manuscripts. It is only now, he says, that the technology has advanced to the point where digital copies can be as good, if not better, than the original. And the democratisation of access to the text will have a big impact on biblical scholars. Dr [Scott] McKendrick [of the British Library] points out that even the privileged few who had access to the original could spend only a short time examining it. Once the scanning is completed, the many will be able to examine it for as long as they like.

This is the most detailed account I've seen of the process of recording the information from the manuscript.

As for the rest of the article, I'm skeptical that the new information will tell us much about the process of canonization in fourth century which we don't already know. But we'll see. Certainly we'll be able to learn lots of interesting details about the making of codices, scribal conventions, the transmission of this particular manuscript, etc., and some of this may ultimately help us understand better the social context of the manuscript when it was copied.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO PALEOJUDAICA! Today is this blog's second anniversary. This was its very first post and this is my first anniversary post a year ago.

The post with the most hits in the last year was an announcement of plans for the publication of the rumor-shrouded Coptic Gospel of Judas, kindly relayed by Pierluigi Piovanelli. Thanks to a link from Instapundit a week later, the post received several thousand hits in one day.

I think my favorite post in the last year is one from December on "Philo or the Pseudepigrapha?", in which I ranked our ancient Jewish sources for their importance as NT background and summarized some of the issues treated in the book I was finishing on the methodology of studying the Old Testament pseudepigrapha. For more favorite posts of the last two years, follow the Memorable PaleoJudaica Posts link. One major innovation this year has been the opening of my temporary blog Qumranica for my course on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

I recently submitted an article to the SBL Forum for a thematic issue on biblioblogging, tentatively scheduled for publication in April. Much of the material for that article covers major PaleoJudaica posts in the last year, so I won't anticipate myself by giving the sort of detailed review I did last year. When the piece comes out, I'll put in a link in an update to this post.

It's been a good but exhausting year and blogging has helped keep it fun. And as long as the blogging stays fun, I imagine I'll keep doing it. A couple of times I have caught myself sitting down wearily to write a post out of a sense of duty rather than because I felt like it. I trashed those posts as soon as I realized what I was doing. PaleoJudaica doesn't aim to cover everything, but I do try to keep track of many of the things that look interesting to me and to comment when I have something to say and time to say it. I hope some of it has been fun and interesting for readers too.

It's worth remarking on how blogging, including biblical studies blogging (or "biblioblogging," if you must) continues to expand. This time last year there were not many blogs in this area: PaleoJudaica; Mark Goodacre's New Testament Gateway blog; AKMA's Random Thoughts; Stephen Carlson's Hypotyposeis; Torrey Seland's Philo of Alexandria blog; Ruben Gomez's Bible Software Review blog; and Tim Bulkeley SansBlogue. The Bible and Interpretation News website functioned much like a blog. David Meadows's Rogue Classicism, David Nishimura's Cronaca, Christine's Mirabilis, and Rebecca Lesses's Mystical Politics also sometimes had (and have) related material.

But in the last year quite a few other biblioblogs have started up. I can't keep track of them all, but some of the ones I try to keep an eye on include Ed Cook's Ralph the Sacred River; Jim West's Biblical Theology blog; Eric Sowell's The Coding Humanist; Seth Sanders's Serving the Word; Michael Homan's blog; Helenann Hartley's blog; Peter Kirby's Christian Origins blog; Michael Pahl's The Stuff of Earth; Joe Weak's Macintosh Biblioblog; Zeth's Biblioblog blog; Rick Brannan's ricoblog; Zhubert's blog; Dr Cathey's blog. Michael Turton's The Sword; Joel Ng's Ebla Logs; Justin Dombrowski's Midrash Le-Justin; and Daniel Driver's Figured Out. Gee, that was hard to stop once I'd started (and apologies to those I've missed). My point is made: this looks like geometric growth to me. Blogging is becoming ever more popular and people are starting blogs by the million. Many won't last but some will, and a few of those will be very good. For reasons explained in the promised SBL article, I do not think that blogging is a passing fad, and I look forward to ever more sophisticated forms of democratized media as time goes on.

According to Technorati, PaleoJudaica currently has 164 links from 126 other blogs. The counter stands at 110,852 individual hits, 68,243 of them in the last year. In the last two years, 1,074,454 words, apart from this entry, have posted on PaleoJudaica, 741,763 of them in the last year. (I hasten to add that most of them were quotations from other people!) There have been over 1700 individual hits and over 2300 page views in the last week. So in the last year links from other blogs have increased by a factor of almost 2.5 and individual hits have increased by a factor of over 1.5. Weekly individual hits are up too, although this may be partly a blip due to a link from a popular Portuguese blog about a week ago. None of these statistics are at all reliable, but they do at least indicate positive trends.

Once again, please keep visiting PaleoJudaica, keep telling your friends about it, keep sending me items, and keep letting me know when you think I've gotten something wrong. And maybe think about starting a blog yourself.

ANOTHER TYNDALE TECH E-MAIL has been published by David Instone-Brewer, this one on Theology Periodicals Online. As usual, it looks astoundingly useful.

Meanwhile, Mark Goodacre points to his own Journals page, which has additional info, and he also calls for David's assimilation to the Blogosphere. Tim Bulkeley is cautiously supportive of the idea. Now far be it from me to discourage anyone from starting a blog, but I think that the infrastructure for Tyndale Tech is pretty good as it is. I like to be able to click on one link to get a themed collection of websites and I think that a blog that just posted random websites as David found them would be less useful. Of course, maybe there's a middle way that would combine the benefits of blogging with the benefits of the current system to make something better. But David's system isn't broken, so I hope he'll be cautious about fixing it.

ISRAEL FORGERY SCANDAL WATCH: Macleans has the most comprehensive article that I've seen up to now ("Cashbox"). The author, Jonathon Gatehouse, interviewed many of the major participants in the story including Oden Golan, Shlomo Moussaieff, Joe Zias, Yuval Goren, Hershel Shanks, and the CEO of the Royal Ontario Museum, and the article has lots of interesting information I'd not heard before. Here are just a few excerpts, but read it all.

When the case goes to trial, perhaps as early as this spring, the prosecution may call as many as 124 witnesses, and enter hundreds of exhibits -- seized antiquities, tools, blueprints, documents, surveillance tapes -- that it claims will prove the existence of a concerted effort to change history. Last week, Golan was being held by police, charged with obstruction for attempting to interfere with his own case; authorities were seeking a court order to keep him jailed until the end of his trial. On the original charges, he and his co-accused have said they will plead innocent, and that they are victims of bad science and a witch hunt by overzealous bureaucrats who want to end the legal but highly controversial trade in the Holy Land's archaeological heritage. The debate that has raged in scholarly circles about the authenticity of the James ossuary will spill into the public spotlight. If Golan and the others were to be found guilty, it would expose some of the biggest names in archaeology as being naive, perhaps greedy, or possibly worse. Reputations will suffer. And the Royal Ontario Museum's looks to be at the head of the line.

[...]

Shanks hasn't been shy about firing back at the ossuary's more vocal critics. The package he sends me helpfully includes a scathing review of a book by Rochelle Altman, a specialist in writing systems who has frequently asserted that the inscription is full of errors and was written by two different hands. In the May/June 2004 edition of the Review, he launched a sharp attack on Meyers and Zias under the headline "Lying Scholars." He dismissed Zias's claim that he had seen the unaltered ossuary in a Jerusalem shop, quoting the dealer as saying he "had never heard" of the former curator. Next to the story, Shanks published an old photo of the man standing in the door of his shop chatting with an unidentified man. Unfortunately for Shanks, the other figure was Zias (whom Shanks has known for decades).

[...]

Publicly available documents of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service show that the Biblical Archaeology Society generated just under US$5 million in revenue in 2003. Shanks, whose job is described as a weekly "20-hour" position, received $162,000 in salary, while the organization paid a further $66,000 in rent to a company he owns. The charity, which lists grants to "worthwhile projects in the field of archaeology and the Bible" as one of its principal activities, handed out just $7,109 to such projects in 2003. In 2002, when Shanks made $150,000 in salary and $67,000 in rent, it gave away $8,500. One of the biggest beneficiaries was Lemaire, who received a $1,000 "travel scholarship for James ossuary work."

[...]

What he's [that is, Golan] most excited about, however, is a fax that has just arrived from a religious studies professor in France. The scholar writes that two decades ago, his brother-in-law, a former French diplomat in Israel, told him about an ossuary inscribed "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus," that was in the possession of a Tel Aviv collector. Golan's eyes are shining. He breaks away at one point to take a call from Shanks and fill him in on the latest development.

It's not until I'm well down the highway back to Jerusalem that the tumblers click into place. If Golan never recognized the significance of the inscription until just a few years ago, how would anyone else come to know that he owned such a box? And wouldn't a scholar be interested in following up such a story? Later on, I look up the professor on the Internet. He teaches at the Sorbonne, and once wrote a book with Andr� Lemaire.

(Via Joe Zias on the ANE list.)

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: The plan by the Revava group to swarm the Temple Mount on April 10th has been vetoed by the Israeli police:

Police to bar masses from Temple Mt.
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS (Jerusalem Post


Acting to defuse renewed tension at Israel's most sensitive site, Jerusalem police announced Tuesday that they would bar a massive Jewish pilgrimage to the Temple Mount by a group of ultra-nationalists opposed to the planned withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

[...]

A SABEAN MANDEAN PSYCHOPOMPIC RITUAL is described in an AFP article in the Peninsula (Qatar):

Sabean-Mandeans trying to preserve their traditions
Web posted at: 3/23/2005 3:9:4
Source ::: AFP

BAGHDAD: �I cannot speak because I am dead,� scribbles Salem Daoud on a piece of paper as he stands on the banks of the Tigris.

The 55-year-old priest looks like the biblical Moses with his thick white beard, rosy cheeks and white tunics. His headgear resembles that of a Jewish Rabbi.

He is impersonating one of 100 members of his tiny Sabean-Mandean community who died in violent incidents in Iraq over the past few months, during the US-led invasion two years ago or in the wars of ousted leader Saddam Hussein.

According to the ancient religion, which combines Babylonian, pre-Islamic, Persian and Christian beliefs, those who die of unnatural causes must have their last baptism and be honoured with a feast, otherwise their spirits would remain stuck on earth and never make it up to the �world of light.�

Tuesday is the climax of the �five white days,� one of the holiest periods in the Mandean-Sabean calendar.

[...]

Other rites are described as well.

THE MINIMALIST-MAXIMALIST DEBATE CONTINUES: Here's an encouragingly irenic essay by V. Philip Long on the Bible and Interpretation website. It is in response to an earlier essay by Niels Peter Lemche published in the same place.

Conservative Scholarship-
Critical Scholarship: Can We Talk?

At the end of the day, I believe that just as there are no "bad questions," provided that they are sincerely and respectfully posed, there are no "bogus conversations," provided they are sincerely and respectfully joined. Lemche is quite correct to decry situations in which scholars of other viewpoints are simply labeled and dismissed. This should not be done to today�s minimalist scholars, nor indeed to today�s more conservative scholars.

One small criticism: why isn't there a link to Lemche's essay in the first paragraph of this one? I wish online essayists would think like bloggers more often and link to everything in sight -- especially online pieces of immediate relevance.

YOU'VE HEARD OF THE LORD'S PRAYER IN ARAMAIC, but how about the Lord's Prayer in Elvish? Translated by Tolkien himself:

�taremme i �a han �a
na aire esselya
aranielya na tuluva
na care ind�melya
cemende tambe Erumande :
�men anta sira ilaur�a massamma
ar �men apsene �caremmar
s�v� emme apsenet tien i �carer emmen.
�lame tulya �saht�enna
mal �me etelehta ulcullo
: n�sie :

(Via Mirabilis.)

PHYSIOGNOMY -- AND HOW! It is often quite illuminating to find out what students are getting from my classes.

MEL GIBSON'S THE PASSION RECUT is a flop so far in the USA. This review suggests some reasons why. (Satire alert!)

CHRISTIAN PILGRIMS had their annual procession from the Mount of Olives into Jerusalem yesterday to celebrate Palm Sunday. This AP article has an aside I'd never heard about before:

A discovery of Jewish graves in 1954 has caused biblical scholars to reconsider the route Jesus would have followed into Jerusalem as a "ruler of peace." Jewish tradition holds that Jesus would not have brought his followers through a Jewish cemetery. However, since 330, the ritual procession has passed within 100 feet of a Jewish burial site archaeologists and scholars believe existed before the time of Jesus, said archaeologist Joe Zias.

This doesn't seem to be written very clearly and I'm not sure what's at stake. True, Jesus probably would not have gone through a Jewish cemetery, but I don't see the problem with him going past one 100 feet away. Cemeteries had to be at least 50 cubits away from inhabited areas (m. Baba Bathra 2.9), which is less than 75 feet. Can someone explain to me what the issue is here?

A CARNIVAL OF BIBLICAL STUDIES is in preparation over at the Ebla Logs blog. If you are an academic Bible blogger (biblioblogger if you insist), send Joel Ng what you regard to be your finest post ever, or the one you want most to be read. The deadline for submission is 3 April.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: Ha'aretz editorializes against the plan to bring in Diaspora Jews to help swarm the Temple Mount in protest of Sharon's disengagement plan. It also says that the event is scheduled for July, which seems to fit in with MichNews.com's comment that the April event is just a "dress rehersal. Excerpt from the Ha'aretz piece:

Moreover, as the Jews of the world object to Israeli interference in their struggles inside their states, even during outbreaks of anti-Semitic incidents, Israel will not tolerate having a foreign Jewish force flood its streets to take part in demonstrations against the disengagement plan. The displays of Jewish solidarity with Israel have so far focused on consensual situations - defense wars, economic plight, political siege. Now the extreme right wing is enlisting Jewish backup forces to help one camp, the minority, which is at odds with the majority.

Summoning Jews who are foreign citizens to Israel for a limited period of time, to participate actively in events involving the violation of state laws and confrontation with the Israeli security forces, is testimony to the distorted concept of the radical right-wing leaders. They ignore the fact that they are a minority and wish to impose their will on the majority by force - whether with the demand to count "all the generations of the Israeli nation" in the vote on the future of the territories, or by urging Diaspora Jews to come and take an active part in the resistance to the disengagement plan.

TODAY is Palm Sunday, the vernal equinox, and the Persian New Year. Best wishes to everyone celebrating any of these.

GEZA VERMES'S THE PASSION is reviewed by the London Times ("Religion: The Passion by Geza Vermes"). It concludes:

The central tension that Vermes highlights is that between history and faith. How can a historical document also be the basis of a religion? The Gospels try to square the circle by both recording events and shaping them to determine readers� response. While absolute objectivity may be impossible, this biased approach has left them increasingly scorned in our secular age. Which, Vermes states, is a loss.

To get into this beguiling book, you will need first to overlook a rather clumsy play by the publisher for the same audience who saw Mel Gibson�s The Passion of the Christ. The subtitle of the book and its glossy jacket ape the feel of �book of the film� editions. But once you are inside the pages, you realise it is the polar opposite of Gibson�s muddled literalism and gore. This is subtle, teasing and erudite stuff. It may be ultimately inconclusive, as of course it has to be, but it will give Easter a whole new dimension for all but the most closed of minds.

Vermes always has an interesting perspective, built both upon critical sifting of the material in the Gospels and on placing the sifted material in its ancient historical, philological, and geographic context.

If you're in Britain, you can get the book at a discount through the Times. See the bottom of the article.

NON SEQUITUR OF THE WEEK: Performance artist Sandra Bernhard in her current show, Everything Bad and Beautiful: "'Let me tell you,' she said, of Madonna pushing Kabbalah on Britney, 'that girl is a brilliant Aramaic scholar. When she read a portion of the "Canterbury Tales," I wept.'

THE QUMRAMICA BLOG now has last week's material fully posted. There are essay abstracts and seminar summaries for seminars on the Qumran calendrical texts and the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: The proposed mass protest of Jews on the Temple Mount on 10 April is getting rather different coverage in different places. In MichNew.com:

GOD-FEARING JEWS STAGE TEMPLE MOUNT TAKEOVER
By J. Grant Swank, Jr.
MichNews.com
Mar 18, 2005

"'We must conquer the Temple Mount to abort the withdrawal plan. If 50,000 people go to the Temple Mount, our Father in heaven will see and the (Israeli) institutions will not be able to remain indifferent,' said one of the takeover planners."

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon plans to oust Jews from their Gaza Strip homes starting July 20. Then Strip is the Palestinian Authority's. Jewish police guards will yank "fellow" Jews from their dwellings. To go where? To motels and hotels. And what about their furniture? In warehouses somewhere. Sound bizarre? Yes. And it's also illogical and unjust.

Therefore, devout Jews are rehearsing today how to take over the Temple Mount in order to draw attention to their righteous indignation against the Sharon agenda. The devout Jews' scheme of course also sets up conflict potential with Muslims throughout Israel, particularly in Jerusalem. A Jewish civil war could result. A war between Jew and Arab could erupt.

[...]

Then there are these new details:

American Jews likewise are boarding planes to join in on the mob scene in Israel. Professionals such as doctors, teachers, lawyers are planning on moving into vacated dwellings in the Strip as well as lining the avenues and beaches in order to prevent Jewish police guards from ousting Jews from their houses.

"According to the report, extremist Jews will hold a 'dress rehearsal' on the Temple Mount, or the Jerusalem mosques complex, the third holiest site for Muslims, in three weeks time.

"Dozens of police reinforcements were deployed near the compound last month, fearing possible attacks by Jewish extremists, who might try to sabotage the Prime Minister's Gaza plan."

Then in TurkishPress.com (from APF and Turkish Press) we read:

Threats against Al-Aqsa mosque are "ticking bombs": Imam
Published: 3/18/2005

JERUSALEM - The imam of Jerusalem's Al Aqsa mosque on Friday warned that threats by Jewish extremists against the sacred complex were "ticking bombs" and said the Israeli government must take responsibility for containing the threat.

[...]

On Wednesday, Israel private television screened a video showing far right-Jewish extremists, including rabbis, discussing ways of occupying the site in a bid to sabotage Israel's planned withdrawal from Gaza.

"We must conquer the Temple Mount to abort the withdrawal plan. If 50,000 people go to the Temple Mount, our Father in heaven will see and the (Israeli) institutions will not be able to remain indifferent," said one participant.

In response, Palestinian prime minister Ahmed Qorei warned of the dire consequences which would result from any such move and called on Israel to act decisively..

"We warn that the region will explode if there is any attack against Al-Aqsa," he told reporters in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

[...]

The one thing I think both sides have right is that this plan could lead to an eruption of violence. I hope we're not watching a disaster in the making. I call on everyone involved to keep this peaceful.

THE IRAQI ASSYRIANS and their political situation get favorable coverage in a Reuters article:

Iraq's Assyrians Seek Voice in New Government
Fri Mar 18, 2005 05:08 PM ET

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Supporters of Iraq's minority Assyrians urged the United Nations and the European Union on Friday to pressure Baghdad to give Assyrians more humanitarian aid and a voice in the new Iraqi government.

"Iraq was liberated to have freedom for everybody, not just the Shi'ites, Kurds and Sunnis," Andy Darmoo, who heads the "Save the Assyrians" campaign told a news conference at U.N. headquarters.

Iraq's Assyrians are Christians and speak Aramaic, the language of Christ. There are an estimated 1 million to 1.5 million Assyrians living in Iraq, most of them in the north.

They are the target of a "quiet campaign of ethnic cleansing," according to Darmoo, who left Iraq in 1965 and now lives in Kent, England.

[...]

The Washington Post also carries the article. Keep that spotlight right there!

WHY THE JEWS REJECTED JESUS: The Turning Point in Western History is the title of a new book by David Klinghoffer. It was reviewed yesterday for the A.P.:

Author looks at 'Why Jews Rejected Jesus'
FAITH

By RICHARD N. OSTLING
Associated Press Writer

During the Lenten season of 2004 there was considerable fury over Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of the Christ" and its depiction of Jewish leaders conspiring to hand Jesus over to the Romans for crucifixion.

A year later, just in time for Good Friday of 2005, a book by Jewish writer David Klinghoffer says of course that's what the Jewish authorities did: "Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History" (Doubleday).

He bases that not only on the New Testament -- whose history he distrusts to a fair extent -- but on the Talmud, Judaism's authoritative compilation of Bible commentary and rabbinic law, and later Jewish sages such as Maimonides.

[...]

Klinghoffer already published some of his ideas on Jesus in the Talmud in January and I have commented on them here. It seems he also delves a bit into counterfactual history, for which Jesus and the rise of Christianity have been popular subjects.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: Still more on the plans of the Revava group to swarm the Temple Mount on 10 April. The BBC now has a story on it and it includes a response from the Palestinian Authority:

Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei has appealed to Israel to stop any action against the compound.

"We warn that the region will explode if there is any attack against al-Aqsa," Mr Qurei told reporters.

THE PROFESSION OF "SCRIBE" is profiled in the Jerusalem Post:

Written by hand
By BEREL WEIN

One of the most honored professions in Jewish life is being a scribe or sofer.
[...]

The scribe writes the Torah, the parchments inserted into the boxes of teffilin and the parchment inserted within the mezuzot affixed to the doorposts of Jewish homes and premises. Thus, a scribe is usually called a sofer stam - the word stam being the acronym for sefer torah, teffilin and mezuzot.

Scribes are also employed to write gittin - bills of divorce, which must be written individually, by hand, for each particular case. A scribe writes with a quill made from the feather of a fowl and uses ink specially prepared for the task. His work is exacting, time-consuming and painstaking. No mistakes are allowed and in today's technologically advanced world, there are special computer driven programs that check the work of the sofer for accuracy and correctness.

[...]

Lots of interesting information here and worth reading in full.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: More on the plans of the Revava group to swarm the Temple Mount on 10 April. Ha'aretz has an article today with this news:

10,000 rightists plan to visit Temple Mt.
Right-wing extremists have announced a campaign under which they are seeking to bring some 10,000 people to the Temple Mount on the eve of the Hebrew month of Nissan. The police have no intention of allowing the plans to be put into practice.

Police usually allow Jews to visit the Temple Mount in groups of a few dozen individuals, with Jewish prayer sessions banned at the site, in keeping with a government decision from 1967. The High Court of Justice has rejected numerous petitions against this decision.

[...]

Also, the Jerusalem Post has a short article on the planned protest which refers to "tens of thousands" of people rather than 10,000. But it appears that the Arutz Sheva headline " Channel 2 Claims 100,000 Jews Plan Temple Mount Protest" is a mistake, since the article refers to only 10,000. It looks to me as though 10,000 is the number that is actually being used.

LEONARD GREENSPOON has an essay on the problem of translating the sacrificial terms in Leviticus in the Forward this week ("PORTION: Translations And Transliterations - Leviticus 1:1-5:26"). He advocates a radical solution:

In my opinion, all readers, and especially Jewish readers � for whom these chapters should retain a lively relevance as they did for talmudic rabbis (most of whom, like us, lived after the fall of the Jerusalem Temple, and the end of its sacrificial system) � are best served by transliterating these terms rather than translating them: Thus, we would have in chapter one, "olah"; in chapter two, "a minchah offering/gift", and in chapter three, "an offering of shelamim" (Fox anticipates this with his "slaughter-offering of shalom"). To my mind, this is the best way to alert readers to the fact that, at this point, they need to take some extra time to consider both the nature and purpose of these rituals.

In the best of all worlds, this approach would lead all readers to go look up these offerings and learn something about them. But in our world I fear it would just make Leviticus a more intimidating book than it already is to lay people. But it would be an interesting experiment.

THE SBL FORUM for March is devoted to forgeries. Here's a list of the articles. I don't have time to read them right now, but they look very interesting. I may comment on some of them later.

The Antiquities Market, Sensationalized Textual Data, and Modern Forgeries: Introduction to the Problem and Synopsis of the 2004 Israeli Indictment
by Christopher A. Rollston
and Andrew G. Vaughn

The Forgery Indictments and BAR: Learning From Hindsight
by Edward M. Cook

The Crisis of Modern Epigraphic Forgeries and the Antiquities Market: A Palaeographer Reflects on the Problem and Proposes Protocols for the Field [1]
by Christopher A. Rollston

The Probability of Forgeries: Reflections on a Statistical Analysis
by Andrew G. Vaughn
and Carolyn Pillers Dobler

The Jerusalem Syndrome in Biblical Archaeology [1]
by Yuval Goren

The Saga of the Yonan Codex
by Bruce M. Metzger

Epilogue: Methodological Musings From The Field
by Andrew G. Vaughn
and Christopher A. Rollston

Access to my blog accounts has been somewhere between spotty and nonexistent for some time. I hope the situation improves soon, but meanwhile I'll try to fill in the backlog as time and dodgy Blogger software allow.

SEPTUAGINT ESSAY: Jennifer Dines of Cambridge University has a short essay on the Septuagint posted at the Bible and Interpretation website:

The Septuagint: Greek Scriptures for
Greek-speaking Jews and Christians:
Some Current Research

There are fascinating implications here for how the Bible was used and interpreted in the third to first centuries BCE, but the work is difficult and delicate and scholars often come to different conclusions. This is not surprising since they have been researching these questions piecemeal for at least the last hundred years, often starting from differing premises.

The essay goes through some current issues in Septuagint research and links to the websites of a couple of relevant projects.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: WorldNetDaily has an article on the plan of the Revava group to bring thousands of Jews to the Temple Mount on 10 April.

10,000 Jews to ascend
Temple Mount
Group seeks to reclaim
Israeli control of holy site
Posted: March 16, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern

By Aaron Klein
� 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

JERUSALEM -- A grassroots Jewish organization plans to bring 10,000 Jews next month to the heavily restricted Temple Mount to spark Israeli dialogue about reclaiming the holy site from its Muslim custodians.

"The Temple Mount is the single holiest place in the world for Jews. It's about time the Israeli government restores it to the Jewish people, where it belongs," David Ha'ivri, chairman of Revava, the group orchestrating the gathering, told WND.

The visit, scheduled for April 10, would be the largest Jewish presence at the Temple Mount since the ancient Temple period, said Haivri.

[...]

This is a messy situation. I have no sympathy with the whole "third temple" agenda, for reasons I've explained before (see first link above). But again, this group has a right to assemble peaceably and they say that is their intention. It's not clear whether the event will happen at all, since the police say they have not made any decisions yet. If it does, I just hope it all stays peaceable.

THE JOURNAL OF NEAR EASTERN STUDIES has a new issue out (64.1, January 2005). It includes a couple of book reviews of interest:

Zipora Talshir, I Esdras: A Text Critical Commentary (Ralph W. Klein)
59
PDF OF BOOK REVIEW (41 kB)


Bernard A. Taylor, X Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies: Oslo, 1998 (Ralph W. Klein)
60
PDF OF BOOK REVIEW (35 kB)

Click on the links to download the PDF files. I think a paid personal or institutional subscription may be required for access, but I'm not sure.

THE PASSION BY GEZA VERMES is reviewed by Karen Armstrong in the London Times:

The Passion by Geza Vermes
reviewed by KAREN ARMSTRONG
Not the Gospel truth
THE PASSION
By Geza Vermes
Penguin, �6.99; 130pp
ISBN 0 141 02132 2
Buy the book

The patient, scholarly work of Geza Vermes has performed an invaluable service by placing the career of Jesus in its original Jewish setting. Now he has turned his attention to the Gospel accounts of Jesus�s Crucifixion. Christians believe that Jesus, God incarnate, died on the Cross to save them from the sin of Adam in an act of supreme love. Yet the story has inspired shameful atrocities, because the Gospels place the blame squarely on the Jewish people. After the reading of the Passion on Good Friday, crowds of worshippers regularly stormed into the Jewish districts, looting and killing, to take revenge.

[...]

Naturally, Mel Gibson's movie also figures in the discussion.

(Via Bible and Interpretation News.)

THE ARTICLE ON CODEX SINAITICUS from the Dallas Morning News has been reprinted by Christianity Today [correction: Christian Today - see update] with errors intact. I would have expected them to have a clue and add some corrections.

UPDATE: Oops! Peter Head e-mails:

It is "Christian Today" - a UK based Christian news agency (it is too easily confusable I think, perhaps deliberately so). Not to excuse poor journalism.

I did email the author with the following list:


Dear Eunice,

It is a pity for Christian Today to publish such an un-informed article on Codex Sinaiticus:

E.G.:
Sinaiticus was originally produced on high-grade papyrus
WRONG: parchment/vellum = animal skins

written between the 1st and 4th centuries A.D.,
WRONG: written in the fourth century

The Codex was produced as the Greek version of the principal Jewish and Christian scriptures to match Greek heritage.
UNKNOWABLE CONCLUSION


The Codex has a very special significance in Theology because the texts were written so soon after the life of Jesus, therefore it is the largest and longest-surviving Biblical manuscript in existence, including both the Old and New Testaments.
WRONG: many earlier fragments, individual books and smaller collections of Biblical books in Greek survive. Sinaiticus is 300 years after the life of Jesus. It is neither the largest Biblical manuscript in existence nor the longest-surviving (Codex Vaticanus is more complete in the OT and on most accounts older).

In addition, it contains two Christian texts written by the Shepherd of Hermas and Apostle Barnabas at around 65 A.D.
WRONG: Both Hermes and Barnabas (Not actually by the apostle) are mid-second century compositions. CHECK ANY REFERENCE BOOK!

However, since then, the texts were divided when visitors bribed and deceived monks into letting certain sections be removed for further examination in Russia, Britain and Germany, according to the Dallas Morning News.
WRONG: DMN gives only the Orthodox side of a complex issue (we might expect such from Dallas I suppose).

By comparing the texts in the world's oldest Bible with the prevalent interpreted Bible in modern language, the team of top experts and scholars involving in the project will be able to trace back and research how and more importantly, why changes were made to the original version of the Bible.
NONSENSE: this doesn't make any sense as a research method. Nor is it widely accepted that Sinaiticus is 'the world's oldest Bible'

Thanks, Peter, for the correction and my apologies to Christianity Today.

Also, on the Textual Criticism list Peter notes the following more accurate but still overstated press release from the British Library.

A NEW HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY CENTER IN ISRAEL is under discussion in the Knesset:

MKs back memorial day for `father of voluntary transfer'
By Dalia Shehori (Ha'aretz)

Under a bill endorsed by 50 MKs, the state would set up a Rehavam Ze'evi Heritage Institute to receive the same resources as those allocated to the Yitzhak Rabin Heritage Institute. The bill would also dedicate a annual day of mourning for the memory of the man who put the concept of "transfer" on the public agenda.

[...]

Former tourism minister Ze'evi, who founded the Moledet Party, was killed by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Jerusalem in 2001.

The bill was introduced by National Union MK Aryeh Eldad to perpetuate the work and heritage of Rehavam Ze'evi through the establishment "of a Rehavam Ze'evi center for the study of the history, geography and archaeology of the Land of Israel," with an emphasis on "the vision, work and heritage of Rehavam Ze'vi."

There are fractious politics behind all this, which I know little about and don't want to get mixed up in. But another Ha'aretz article today, "A requiem for Gandhi," has a detailed analysis of the political context.

The concluding paragraph of the article pulled me up short:

Yahad MK Yossi Sarid, on the other hand, said there was no reason to establish "a monument to a racist theory."

I didn't know that there was an Israeli political party called "Yahad." This word means "together" but it was also used by the Qumran sectarians in the idiosyncratic sense of "community" as a title for their own group. The Yahad party seems unaware of the earlier usage. It is a leftist social democratic party that would not exactly look on the Qumran sectarians as their ideological forebearers. Here is the Wikipedia article on "Yachad" and here is the party's own basic covenant.

A NEW TYNDALE TECH E-MAIL was distributed by David Instone-Brewer a while ago and is now up on his website. This one is on Rabbinics and Jewish Research. Many of the resources for ancient Judaism have been noted at one time or another already on PaleoJudaica and lots are in my links page, but it's useful to have them all collected on this page as well. When I get around to it, I'll add the remaining relevant links to my page.

THERE'S MORE ON HERCULANEUM and the proposed excavation to try to recover more carbonized scrolls in the Art Newspaper ("British scholars call for the excavation of the Villa of the Pa[p]yri"). In this week's Explorator (link not yet available) David Meadows points to this two-part article. One writer is Martin Bailey, otherwise unidentified, and the other is Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, who "is director of the British School at Rome and also of the Herculaneum Conservation Project." The excavation project seems more tentative here than I had thought. Bailey writes:

Outside funding for Herculaneum has already come from David Packard, whose family helped set up the Hewlett-Packard computer company. At present Mr Packard wants money to be devoted to preserving what has been found, rather than spent on new excavations. His US-based Packard Humanities Institute is backing the Herculaneum Conservation Project, which has already spent $2 million. Mr Packard says that �when the Italians decide it is time to resume excavation at the Villa of the Papyri, our foundation expects to be in a position to offer appropriate financial support��but �for the present, conservation is the responsible priority.�

Wallace-Hadrill confirms this in his contribution, taking very much the line that further excavation is desirable and should be thought about but is not in any way urgent:

It is right that it look at every aspect of the problem in a far-sighted way before leaping to conclusions. In terms of urgency, the unexcavated part of the villa stands in no danger.

Equally, in terms of urgency, the already excavated portions of the same site stand in great danger. The only responsible way forward is that embraced by the Superintendency, the Packard Humanities Institute, and the international world of archaeology: of saving and recording what we have while there is still time, and planning ahead to ensure that any future excavations will not add to an existing crisis.

The emphasis in this article is different from the London Times piece of 13 February titled "Millionaire to fund dig for lost Roman library" (noted here on PaleoJudaica). This article seemed to say that there was no conflict between excavation and conservation and that Mr. Packer was ready to fund both. As I look over it again that does seem to be the message. But the Art Newspaper has Packard and the director of Packard's conservation project putting much more emphasis on conservation and seems to indicate that there are no actual plans for excavation in the foreseeable future. I'm not sure why the tones of the articles are so different. Was the Times just being selective and overly enthusiastic in its presentation? Does anyone have more information?

THE HADRIAN MOVIE - yet another pastsploitation flick. David Meadows has some info over at Rogue Classicism. I wonder how significantly the Bar Kokhba revolt will figure in it.

THE CODEX SINAITICUS digitalization project has come to the attention of the media and, as usual, they are garbling the story. Ed Cook has details over at Ralph.

AMIR DRORI, former director of the Israel Antiquities Authority, has died.

Commander of Golani Brigade during Yom Kippur War dies
By Haaretz Service

Israel Defense Forces reserve Major General Amir Drori, who was the commander of the Golani Brigade during the 1973 Yom Kippur war, died on Saturday during a trip in the Negev Desert.

[...]

Since his release from the IDF, Drori has served as the director of the Antiquities and Archaeological Authority.

May his memory be for a blessing.

AMEN.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: More Jewish-Temple denial, this time from the Palestine Chronicle. The Temple Mount Faithful are also making things interesting.

Jewish Settlers Plan to Storm Al-Aqsa Mosque
Friday, March 11 2005 @ 08:51 AM EST

"Extremist Jewish groups, which rally for the construction of the 'Temple Mount', are expected to join the storming, according to Israeli press sources.."

By Samer Khuwayera

NABLUS, West Bank - Extremist Jewish settlers are planning to storm Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam's third holiest place, by next April, according to Al-Aqsa Institution for Reconstruction of Islamic Sanctities.

Leaders of Jewish settlers have declared some 10,000 settlers are planning to storm the holy mosque in a bid to perform Jewish �religious rituals� in the holy place, they claim to be the site of �Temple Mount�.

Leaflets are being distributed by Jewish settlers to urge Jews to join the storming of the Islamic holy site on April 10.

Extremist Jewish groups, which rally for the construction of the "Temple Mount", are expected to join the storming, according to Israeli press sources.

The campaign patron, David Hebrew from the Tfwah settlement in the West Bank city of Nablus, claimed that his campaign aimed at fostering what he termed �spiritual relations� with �Temple Mount� by performing the Jewish religious rituals within the holy mosque.

�Through this campaign, we are trying to bring some 10,000 Jews into the mosque,� he told Israel�s Channel 7.

The extremist Jewish settler pressed for opening up all entrances of Al-Aqsa Mosque before the Jewish people, claiming that Al-Aqsa belongs to Jewish people, not to Muslims.

I can't find complete verification of this story. Neither "David Hebrew" (which doesn't sound like a real name to me) nor "tfwah" (or "tfwa") show up anywhere on Google except this in this article. I can locate no mention of a David Hebrew on the Temple Mount Faithful website (see below). Can anyone in Israel confirm that there is such a settlement in Nablus or that someone named David Hebrew was interviewed on Israel's Channel 7 about these matters?

What I can verify is that the Temple Mount Faithful is planning (or at least hoping), not to "storm" the Temple Mount, but to assemble there on 10 April to perform a Passover sacrifice on an altar they say is already there.

Now let me be quite clear. I am strongly opposed to the objectives of the Temple Mount Faithful. (Links via Indy.media.ie.) I have no interest in their theological agenda but I object on archaeological and historical grounds. I don't want anybody interfering with or damaging the historical treasures that are already on the Temple Mount, including the mosques and the ancient archaeological strata of the site. Even if they decided that the site of the temple wasn't where the mosques are so that the mosques don't need to be moved, the thought of the damage that would be done to the archaeology of the site by building a third temple there makes me ill.

All that said, I do respect the right of these people to free speech and peaceable assembly, no matter how much I oppose their agenda. There is sometimes a fine line between these rights and incitement and I leave it to the Israeli government to decide where that line is. I'm glad I don't have to make that decision.

Israel claims Al-Aqsa Mosque was built on the so-called Temple Mount, an allegation refuted by scores of world historians.

This is a variation on a stock Temple-denial sentence we have seen repeatedly before. My comments previously apply as well here.

The article concludes:

Archeologists have also warned that ongoing Israeli excavations weakened the foundations of the mosque, cautioning it would not stand a powerful earthquake.

A part of the road leading to one of the mosque�s main gates collapsed in February, 2004, due to the destructive Israeli digging work.

Israeli soldiers also attempted in June, 2004, to storm the mosque�s prayer hall (Al-Musallah Al-Marwani) and ended by force restoration works that were underway there.

The first paragraph is a bit rich, given the massive destruction wreaked upon the Temple Mount by the WAQF. For a rather different take on the collapse mentioned in the second paragraph, go here. Note also that illicit digging by the WAQF is considered "restoration."

For my take on how the Temple Mount should be treated, see here.

UPDATE: "Manuscript Boy" e-mails:

I would have to check the posters all over Jerusalem to make sure, but
I think the name is David Ivri. Tafwah is surely Kfar Tapuach. And they plan to bring thousands up to the Temple Mount before Passover. It seems to be a different group from the Temple Mount Faithful.

I should have thought to Google "David Ivri." The name does exist, but the only references I can find are to a former air force commander, evidently not the man in question. In any case, the basic elements of the story look to be correct.

UPDATE: Manuscript Boy e-mailed again with the website of the group. The English version is http://www.revava.org/index.php. There's a Hebrew version as well, of course. David Ha'ivri is one of the named leaders of the group.

SEXY APOCRYPHA? Well, I'm glad someone thinks so, even though the movie Constantine doesn't seem to rise to that level. Columnist Giles Coren reviews the movie for the London Times. You may want to skip the first half, which consists of self-indulgent Coren blather. But the second half, when he actually gets to the film, is kind of funny.

So imagine my delight when I heard he [Keanu Reeves] was to take the title role in Constantine. After Colin Farrell as Alexander the Great and Brad Pitt as Achilles, what could be more natural than Keanu as the man who converted Rome? Only Keanu could give credence to the story of the Emperor who saw a vision of the Cross before the Battle at the Milvian Bridge, built a new capital on the Bosphorus and laid the foundations of Christendom. In hoc signo vinces, duuuude.

When I got to the cinema, though, the posters were not promising. It was Keanu, back in his Matrix-period black coat, toting a silver machinegun in the shape of a cross. Under him, the legend: �The wager between Heaven and Hell is on Earth.� Um, like, I totally know that, dude. Are we talking Job, here? Or the temptation of Christ, maybe? Or the sort of sexy apocrypha that Milton worked up into Paradise Lost? The Bible is full of bets. They�re always the Devil�s idea, admittedly, but God just can�t seem to say no if the odds look half tasty. He�s a regular Sky Masterson, is the Lord.

[...]

As ever in Hollywood movies, leather-bound books are used to show that it�s all very old and mysterious. Nothing freaks out the Yanks more than a book. The genre here is legal-thriller meets classy historical adventure, as succinctly indicated when, mystified by the arrival of the wrong kind of zombie (a �soldier-demon�, I believe it is) Keanu yells to Rachel Weisz, in that gurgling wheeze of his: �Check the scrolls, see if there�s any precedents!�
[...]

Be warned, however, that the end of the review seems to have a major spoiler in it.

A BYZANTINE-ERA SYNAGOGUE IN JERICHO HAS BEEN DESTROYED BY VANDALS according to Arutz Sheva:

Arabs Destroy Ancient Jericho Synagogue
17:04 Mar 10, '05 / 29 Adar 5765

(IsraelNN.com) The ancient synagogue in Jericho, known as the �Shalom Al Yisrael� (Peace on Israel) synagogue has been destroyed by Arab vandals, says the former head of the yeshiva that studied there until the start of the Oslo War.

[...]

ON THE QUMRANICA BLOG I have posted the abstract of this week's essay on 4QMMT, a summary of the seminar discussion, and some links on the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice. The latter is one of our topics next week. Do have a look.

Also: Blogger has been suffering numerous server errors recently, which has led to annoyances such as stuttered posts and posting lost during publishing. It also makes it very hard sometimes to correct typos. Apologies in advance for any problems.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH:

No relinquishing Western Wall, poll finds
By Nadav Shragai (Ha'aretz)

Ninety-one percent of the Jewish public would be unwilling to give up Israeli control of the Western Wall, 46 percent would agree to joint Israeli-Palestinian control, or sole Palestinian control, with regard to the Temple Mount, according to a poll to be aired tonight on a program on the Knesset television channel.

[...]

SOME HEBREW MATTERS:

Ed Cook relays Dave@GracePages's request for a recommendation for a grammar of biblical Hebrew. I can't be of much help, because I've never found one I really liked. I've used Lamdin and Seow long ago. Both are excellent grammars, but they overwhelm a beginner with too much information. Currently I use Martin's revision of Davidson's Introductory Hebrew Grammar. It's fine for the first semester. The level is right for first-year students, the explanations are generally good, and the exercises are helpful. The problem is that it crams all the derived stems, regular and irregular, into three chapters in the last fifth of the book, which again can overwhelm the students unless those chapters are stretched out quite a bit with supplemental material. I see that a number of people are recommending Kittel, Hoffer, and Wright. It seems to be out of print in the U.K., but maybe I should have a look at it anyhow.

Joe Cathey calls for a new chrestomathy of Hebrew and even suggests my name as a possible author. Thanks for the vote of confidence, but I have far too many other projects in progress right now. Also, I have to say I'm skeptical whether there's a market for a chrestomathy of biblical Hebrew. With BHS readily available, it's just too easy for a lecturer to assign passages straight from it, creating a personalized chrestomathy on the fly so to speak. There is also a good chapter by chapter listing of less frequently used biblical Hebrew vocabularly in Armstrong, Busby, and Carr's A Reader's Hebrew-English Lexicon of the Old Testament , so rapid reading of any part of the Bible is easy to assign too. It's true that sometimes annotations of difficult passages would be helpful, but such issues are often covered in class and I'm not sure that that annotations alone would create a sufficient market. Not that I'd be sorry to be proved wrong.

If instead you were to think of a chrestomathy involving (vocalized?) Qumran, Bar Kokba, and rabbinic Hebrew alongside biblical Hebrew, you might be able to demonstrate a greater need, but I think the market would be smaller too.