THE ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY TEACHERS (the UK's trade union for University lecturers, equivalent to the AAUP in the United States) is considering a boycott of three Israeli universities. Individual scholars from these institutions who sign an acceptable political statement would be exempted. (This is the post promised in the previous post below.)

Lecturers may boycott Israeli academics

State's policy in occupied territories fuels union debate

Polly Curtis and Will Woodward
Tuesday April 5, 2005
The Guardian

Israeli academics who refuse to condemn their government's actions in the occupied territories risk a boycott by the UK's leading lecturers' union.

The Association of University Teachers' annual council, which begins on April 20 in Eastbourne, will also debate whether to boycott three of Israel's eight universities - Haifa University, Bar Ilan University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem - over their alleged complicity with the government's policies on the Palestinian territories.

The union voted against an academic boycott policy two years ago, but campaigners believe the motions are more likely to be passed this year.

Palestinian academics have also issued a call for an international boycott of Israel.

[...]

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

The AUT website has more information on the relevant motions to the AUT council. I'll just excerpt it here, but please do read it all. First of all, let's be clear about the long-term agenda:

56 Open and Birmingham Council notes:

1. That nearly sixty of the most prominent academic, cultural and professional associations and trade unions in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza, including the Federation of Unions of Palestinian Universities' Professors and Employees and the umbrella organization of Palestinian Non Governmental Associations (NGOs) in the occupied West Bank (PNGO), and thus highly representative of the views of major sectors in Palestinian civil society, have now called for an academic and cultural boycott of Israeli institutions.
2. That AUT is affiliated to Friends of Bir Zeit University and Trade Union Friends of Palestine.
3. That the full text of the Palestinian Call can be found on the following websites: http://right2edu.birzeit.edu/news/article178 http://www.bricup.org.uk
4. That the wording of this call is as follows:
'In the spirit of international solidarity, moral consistency and resistance to injustice and oppression, we, Palestinian academics and intellectuals, call upon our colleagues in the international community to comprehensively and consistently boycott all Israeli academic and cultural institutions as a contribution to the struggle to end Israel's occupation, colonization and system of apartheid, by applying the following:
1. Refrain from participation in any form of academic and cultural cooperation, collaboration or joint projects with Israeli institutions;
2. Advocate a comprehensive boycott of Israeli institutions at the national and international levels, including suspension of all forms of funding and subsidies to these institutions;
3. Promote divestment and disinvestment from Israel by international academic institutions;
4. Exclude from the above actions against Israeli institutions any conscientious Israeli academics and intellectuals opposed to their state's colonial and racist policies;
5. Work toward the condemnation of Israeli policies by pressing for resolutions to be adopted by academic, professional and cultural associations and organizations;
6. Support Palestinian academic and cultural institutions directly without requiring them to partner with Israeli counterparts as an explicit or implicit condition for such support.'


Council resolves to circulate the full text of the Palestinian call to all LAs for information and discussion.

To be moved by Open and seconded by Birmingham
EA

To put it simply, the long-term goal here is an outright boycott of Israel it its entirety. The specific boycotts called for below are the thin end of that wedge. The Executive has agreed to circulate this call for a general boycott "for information and discussion" during the meeting. (That's what "EA" means.)

There follow three motions for the boycotts of the three specific Israeli universities. I will quote one of them below but, again, do follow the link and read the whole document.

As I said in my previous post, I am not a member of the AUT, in no small part because of their habit of championing this sort of trendy political cause. But as a British academic who specializes in Judaism, I think I need make some comments.

1. I wish that the AUT would concentrate on its real job of working to supporting British academics and improving our working conditions. There's work enough there to keep them busy.

2. I have no trouble with AUT members or anyone else criticizing the actions of the Israeli government or of particular Israeli institutions or particular Israelis. I'm not happy myself, for example, with the Israeli government's neglect of the safety of the archaeological relics on the Temple Mount, as I've said before. But the full agenda of the people who wrote this is a complete boycott of Israel, which is not reasonable. This fits in pretty well with the AUT's policy statement on Israel and Palestine, which is entirely one-sided against Israel.

3. I am not well acquainted with the particular cases above involving the three Israeli universities. At least two of them (the Hebrew U and Haifa) deny that the charges are true. Such cases get very complicated and often come down to "Did too! Did not!" and can take years to decide in court. Moreover, there are some warning signs in the AUT document that make me nervous. The first specific motion reads as follows:

57 Birmingham Council notes:

1. That on Sunday, November 21 2004 at 7:15AM, bulldozers and armed security guards hired by Hebrew University Properties, Ltd. Arrived at the home of the Al-Helou family in Jerusalem to announce that their land would be confiscated for the expansion of the university.
2. That the Al-Helou family is among seven Palestinian families whose houses are trapped among the university dormitory buildings.
3. That the families have lived in this area, called Ard Al-Samar, since 1948 when they were forced out of the Jerusalem village of Lifta with the establishment of the state of Israel.
4. That after the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem began in 1967, these families' land has been confiscated repeatedly by the university to build student dorms, so that the families are now confined in small pockets of land surrounded by the fences.


Council resolves:

1. To call on all AUT members to boycott the Hebrew University of Jerusalem until it calls a halt to all attempts to confiscate land from Palestinian families, and reaches an acceptable settlement with the families' lawyers regarding restoration or compensation in the case of land already confiscated.
2. That the boycott should take the form described in the Palestinian call for academic boycott of Israeli institutions.

ERef

The source of this report appears to be an article from the Electronic Intifada dated 22 November 2004. It reads in part:

On Sunday, November 21 at 7:15AM, bulldozers and armed security guards hired by Hebrew University Properties, Ltd. arrived at the home of Al-Helou family in Jerusalem to announce that their land will be confiscated for the expansion of the university dormitories. ... The Al-Helou family is among seven families whose houses are trapped among the university dormitory buildings. They have lived in this area, called Ard Al-Samar, since 1948 when they were forced out of the Jerusalem village of Lifta with the establishment of the Jewish state. ... After the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem began in 1967, their land has been confiscated time and again by the university to build student dorms. The dormitory buildings have been closing in on the families, who are now confined in small pockets of land surrounded by the fences.

As you can see, the information in the AUT resolution is lifted without attribution and pretty much verbatim from the Electronic Intifada piece. The Electronic Intifada is not the first place I would go to for objective news. It may well be that the story is entirely true, but I think it's a matter for serious concern that it has not been picked up by any of the major mainstream media. As far as I can tell, this is the one and only source for the story. My own rule is to be very wary of any report that comes only from a single source with a clear ideological agenda. I certainly would not make a big deal about such a story until I saw it was taken up by, Reuters, the A.P., or the like. The AUT is calling for an academic boycott of a major, world-class university on the basis of what certainly appears to be a single ideologically-oriented Internet source which they copy almost word for word without naming the source. If they have made any efforts to verify the account, they say nothing about it in the motion. That doesn't strike me as impressive research or presentation and I strongly encourage anyone who attends the meeting to point this out and call for further verification.

This post is getting too long, so I'll refrain from commenting on the other two motions. My point is made.

4. Even if all the charges are completely true, the call for a boycott is very extreme. It's one thing to criticize particular problems or abuses, it's quite another to cut off communication and any relationship entirely, and nothing here justifies it. Moreover, the call for a boycott occurs in a curious vacuum. The AUT is putting itself forward as a champion of human rights, yet a search of their site for "Saudi Arabia" and "Syria," both renowned for their gross human rights abuses, including of academics and students (notably censorship and denying the rights of women), comes up empty. (Try it!) Where is the call to boycott Saudi Arabia and Syria, whose abuses are flagrant, widespread, and systemic? Where is the condemnation of the Saudi education system or the now defunct pseudo-academic Zayed Centre for Co-ordination and Follow-up in the UAE?

And is everything really quite satisfactory with the Palestinian Authority? What about the destruction of the Temple Mount antiquities by the WAQF? Or the hate filled Palestinian Authority sermons that encourage children to become suicide "martyrs"? Or the eleventh-grade Palestinian Authority textbook that calls for the execution of anyone who abandons Islam? It's illuminating to note that the author of that textbook is offended by Christian missionaries not so much because they teach faith in Jesus, but because they promote Western culture, history, and literature; lead people to take an interest in ideas such as capitalism, atheism and communism; and promote the freedom of thought to criticize Islam and its teachings, including polygamy. Is this really the education the AUT wants Palestinian students to enter university with?

I could go on and on in this vein but, again, the point is made. Should Israel and Israeli institutions be criticized if they do something wrong? Of course. But is it right to single Israel out and boycott its institutions and even the whole country, especially in light of the ghastly human rights abuses in Israel's neighbors in the Middle East? I think not. The causes promoted by the AUT are very selective, very oddly prioritized, and advocate disproportionate and inappropriate responses.

As for me, the two conferences I organized at St. Mary's College in 1998 and 2001 included invited Israelis. I maintain close relations with Israeli colleagues and am happy to be involved with Israeli academic institutions. This is not going to change, and if the AUT has a problem with that, it's their problem.

I hope very much that these proposals are defeated by the AUT when they are voted on this Friday. It is embarrassing enough for British academics that the motions are being considered at all.

Some other recent articles on the ongoing annual AUT council in Eastbourne and the proposed Israel boycotts include these: "Academics vote on Israel boycott" (BBC); in the London Times: "Jews criticise lecturer boycott" and "Dons' boycott raises Jewish student fear"; and in the Guardian: "Why we ask for a boycott"; "To Boldly Go"; "Blunt Boycott"; "The Sins of the Few"; "Israeli debate threatens to eclipse university pay talks". And a response from Israel: "Who's turning up the heat on Palestinian academics?" (Jerusalem Post).

UPDATE (22 April): More here. For shame.

UPDATE (24 April): More here.

UPDATE (26 April): More here.

UPDATE (28 April): More here. Resistance is mounting.

UPDATE (29 April): More here.

UPDATE: (7 May): More here. A new debate has been scheduled for 26 May.

UPDATE (8 May): More here.

UPDATE (13 May): More here.

UPDATE (15 May): More here. (Response of Haifa University.)

UPDATE (18 May): More here.

UPDATE (23 May): More here.

UPDATE (24 May): More here.

UPDATE (26 May): The boycott has been repealed. This is good news, but do follow the link and read the rest of my comments.

THIS SORT OF THING is one of the main reasons I'm not a member of the Association of University Teachers (the British union for University lecturers, comparable to the AAUP in the United States). I've been working on a post on this embarrassing proposal by the AUT, but haven't had time to finish it. Rebecca Lesses lays out the basic issues.

OXYRHYNCHUS UPDATE: On the Ars Technica forum an anonymous papyrology student at the University of Chicago is expressing serious skepticism about Sunday's Independent article on the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. The writer sums up:

So as of right now, the rest of the papyrological community is waiting to hear Dirk Obbink at Oxford either back up for disavow the claims made in the article. At the very best, the Independent's reporters are covering some kind of new imaging breakthrough in an extremely hyperbolic fashion. And at the worst, they're trying to make a major story out of 20-year-old news.

My correspondence also seems to indicate that papyrologists who ought to have known already about these new texts if they were real haven't heard anything about them.

David Meadows notes some more media coverage here

Developing ...

UPDATE: Paul Nikkel e-mails:

I do believe Hannibal at Ars is Jon Stokes. Just so you can give him proper credit.

As I wrote initially at deinde when this came up, even if there was some breakthrough in the "spectral analysis" the real problem of piecing together the fragments still remains. This is the same point brought up by Meadows and Stokes. The fact that the Independent article doesn't mention anything about the fragment problem seems to indicate there's nothing substantial to report here. A statement from the Oxford team would certainly clear the issue quickly.

I certainly agree with that. Oxford papyrologists, speak!

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: For some reason this Arutz Sheva article from 14 April did not show up on Google. I only found it yesterday at the Bible and Interpretation News website.

Exclusive: Dumped Temple Mount Rubble Yields Jewish Artifacts
23:09 Apr 14, '05 / 5 Nisan 5765

A historic excavation has been taking place in an eastern Jerusalem valley for the past six months: the first-ever archaeological examination of the Temple Mount.

I note this passage in particular:

�The very act of spending time and making the effort to examine debris just because it originates from the Temple Mount transmits a very powerful message to the general public and to the world as a whole about the importance of the place,� Dr. Barkai said, likening the painstaking examination of the Temple Mount rubble to the respect given to a dead corpse by burying it.

He said the project is of particular importance due to the Islamic Waqf efforts to perpetrate something that he says is worse than Holocaust denial. "There is a phenomenon of Temple denial," Barkai said. "I just heard [Arab] MK Dahamshe this week in the Knesset denying that there were ever temples on the Temple Mount. It is a part of the cultural Intifada. I think it is just as serious as Holocaust denial. This intifada started in Joseph�s tomb and is trying to deny Jewish rights to the country."

The sifting and examinations have already yielded important artifacts from various periods, starting from the First Temple period until today. ...

I think it's an overstatement to say this is worse than or as serious as Holocaust denial, but it's still vile.

As for the artifacts discovered, the list is too long to copy here, but you should read it all. Some wonderful things have been found, which are important despite the fact that they have been torn from their precious stratigraphic context. It is very important that this salvage project get funding so that it can be completed.

MY ARTICLE, "Assimilated to the Blogosphere: Blogging Ancient Judaism," has just been published in this month's SBL Forum. However, the scores of links I put in it have been stripped!!! This will not do. I'm running to the next class right now, but I've e-mailed the editor and will tell you when I know more.

UPDATE: The article had about 63 links to my blogs, other blogs, and other websites. I assure you it makes much more sense with those links included.

UPDATE: Thanks Mark!

UPDATE (10:55 pm): For now the article has been taken down. I am in discussion with the SBL people about how to proceed in light of technical limitations of which I was only made aware today. It's late here and today has been long enough. More tomorrow.

UPDATE: (morning, 20 April): Still discussing. This may take a while. More in due course.

UPDATE: More here.

SCOTLAND IS CASHING IN on the success of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code:

Star role for Scots chapel in Da Vinci Code film

WILLIAM LYONS
ARTS CORRESPONDENT
wlyons@scotlandonsunday.com

HOLLYWOOD is coming to Midlothian. An 11th hour deal has been struck that will bring filming of the blockbuster movie based on the bestselling book The Da Vinci Code to Rosslyn Chapel.

The genteel village of Roslin is now preparing for an invasion of A-list celebrities when Tom Hanks, who plays the book�s hero Professor Robert Langdon, and Am�lie star Audrey Tautou fly in for an eight-day shoot in August.

[...]

Since The Da Vinci Code was published in 2003, visitor numbers at the 15th-century chapel have risen by 56%, but it is hoped a substantial sum can be raised from the shoot itself. Last year almost 70,000 people visited the building in Midlothian, making it one of the country�s most popular tourist attractions.

[...]

As well as the chapel, The Da Vinci Code could be worth millions for Scottish tourism. Harry Potter fans have flocked to the west Highlands to see locations, and 18% of visitors from the United States cited films as a factor in their decision to come to Scotland in a survey in 1996, the year after Braveheart was released.

[...]

Ah well, at least it's good for the Scottish economy. On the positive side, The Da Vinci Code is good for tourism and is likely to get people interested in biblical-related history and even perhaps get some bright young people interested in the field as a vocation. (Since my interest in what I do now was sparked by Erich Von Daniken's dreadful books, I shouldn't discount this factor.) But the negative side of The Da Vinci Code is, of course, that it's bogus.

MARATHON MAN II: With the extra seminar rescheduled for today, my five-hour teaching marathon begins later this morning. To start the day off right, the fire alarm went off just as I got in my office and we all spent the first 25 minutes of the morning standing out in the St. Mary's Quadrangle waiting for the fire brigade. At least there was no fire.

Blogging is likely to be light today, but I am posting some essay abstracts at Qumranica.

THE WIKIPEDIA "ARAMAIC LANGUAGE" ARTICLE is today's featured article on the Wikipedia main page. That's all to the good, but the current version of the article includes this unfortunate sentence:

Biblical Aramaic was originally written in Achaemenid Aramaic, but heavily influenced by later forms of Aramaic and Hebrew due to the work of the Masoretes in the first century CE.

The Masoretes worked in roughly the second half of the first millennium C.E. (The Aleppo Codex of the Hebrew Bible was produced by them.)

It's also a bit of a stretch to call Biblical Aramaic "Achaemenid Aramaic." Granted, Official Aramaic was settled into its mainstream form then, but the material in Daniel, while in the Official Aramaic dialect (apart from its late orthography) was written in the second century B.C.E. (granted, in some cases perhaps based on earlier stories). I think "Achaemenid Aramaic" should read "Official Aramaic" here.

UPDATE: The broken link to the article has now been fixed.

UPDATE (19 April): Ed Cook comments over at Ralph. He says the whole article needs to be rewritten, not just revised.

CHUCK JONES, the Librarian at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, has announced that he is leaving the OI to become the Head of the Blegen Library at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Chuck is well know as moderator of a number of e-mail discussion lists and as founder and maintainer of the ABZU database. I have cited the ANE list and the IraqCrisis list frequently here on PaleoJudaica. We should all say thanks to him for his hard work over many years on Internet projects from which we have all benefitted. Good luck and best wishes, Chuck!

Let's hope someone takes up his mantle at the Oriental Institute and keeps these projects going.

A GRAVE CONTROVERSY:

Highway engineer receives threat note warning road damages graves
By Roni Singer, Haaretz Correspondent

The chief engineer of the Trans-Israel Highway received a threatening letter on Sunday, apparently part of a stand-off over extending the road into an area some ultra-Orthodox Jews say contains ancient graves.

[...]

Ultra-Orthodox Jews have criticized plans to extend the partially-completed toll road, arguing that it passes over a site where Jews were buried during the Second Temple Period (536 B.C.E. to 70 C.E.). ...

And what do archaeologists say?

"PRINTING THE TALMUD: From Bomberg To Scottenstein" is a new exhibition at the Yeshiva University Museum. The Art Daily has the story:

The exhibition Printing The Talmud: From Bomberg to Schottenstein provides the visitor with a once in a lifetime opportunity to view outstanding examples of early Talmud manuscripts, such as an exceptionally rare Spanish 13th century copy of Avodah Zarah (a tractate that was frequently destroyed by Church censors), and rare examples of early printed volumes, including one of the very few extant complete sets of the famed 16th century Bomberg Talmud, the publication that established the layout of the Talmud page for future generations. Also on display is a rare copy of the Holocaust Survivors' Talmud, published in 1948 in Heidelberg Germany with the help of the U.S. Army.

Exhibited alongside these rare manuscripts is a floor mosaic from the ancient synagogue at Rehov in Israel�s Bet Shean Valley. Dating back to the 6th century this unique mosaic is the oldest preserved copy of a Rabbinic text, and the only example to survive from the time the Talmud was compiled and redacted.

UPDATE: The exhibit and some lectures associated with it are also covered by the Commentator.

TECHNOLOGY WATCH: According to the Independent, new imagining techniques are allowing the recovery of a vast amount of new information from the Oxyrhynchus papyri.

Decoded at last: the 'classical holy grail' that may rewrite the history of the world

Scientists begin to unlock the secrets of papyrus scraps bearing long-lost words by the literary giants of Greece and Rome

By David Keys and Nicholas Pyke

17 April 2005

For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.

The web page of the Oxford Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project is here (and note this page especially), but there's nothing about the breakthrough there yet.

The Independent article describes the techniques as follows:

Since it was unearthed more than a century ago, the hoard of documents known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri has fascinated classical scholars. There are 400,000 fragments, many containing text from the great writers of antiquity. But only a small proportion have been read so far. Many were illegible.

Now scientists are using multi-spectral imaging techniques developed from satellite technology to read the papyri at Oxford University's Sackler Library. The fragments, preserved between sheets of glass, respond to the infra-red spectrum - ink invisible to the naked eye can be seen and photographed.

The fragments form part of a giant "jigsaw puzzle" to be reassembled. Missing "pieces" can be supplied from quotations by later authors, and grammatical analysis.

Much like the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And this passage really caught my eye:

When it has all been read - mainly in Greek, but sometimes in Latin, Hebrew, Coptic, Syriac, Aramaic, Arabic, Nubian and early Persian - the new material will probably add up to around five million words. Texts deciphered over the past few days will be published next month by the London-based Egypt Exploration Society, which financed the discovery and owns the collection.

We are already aware that the Oxyrhynchus papyri contain some of our earliest fragments of important Old Testament pseudepigrapha (2 Baruch is an example), and it's on our agenda to go through the published material to look for hitherto unidentified pseudepigrapha fragments for the More Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Project. With luck, perhaps these new developments will add to our corpus.

UPDATE: David Meadows, over at Rogue Classicism says that most of the information in this article is a couple of years old and he speculates that this is opening hype for an as yet unannounced documentary. Maybe so, but some of the most interesting information about the new texts is presented as less than a week old. Is this poor editing of an older article or is the information actually new? Anyhow, it's new to me and has never been noted on PaleoJudaica before, so I'm glad they ran the piece.

UPDATE (18 April): Wieland Willker is skeptical.

UPDATE: More from David Meadows. BBC Radio 4 had a documentary on Oxyrhynchus.

UPDATE (20 April): More here.

UPDATE (1 May): More here, here, and here.

ANOTHER ANCIENT MOSAIC has been uncovered in Israel:

Impressive' villa mosaic unearthed near Caesarea (Ha'aretz)
By Amiram Barkat

A 500-square-meter mosaic depicting an intricate design of flamingos, peacocks, ducks and other animals that adorned the floor of a fifth-century C.E. villa, was unearthed recently on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean near Caesarea.

[...]

Cool photo.

PALEOJUDAICA is ranked #4 by Blogshares in the Ancient History Industry and its shares are currently worth $1,992.96. If only it were real money.

David Meadows's Rogue Classicism is #1, which is fair, but how authoritative can such a ranking be when it doesn't include Mark Goodacre's New Testament Gateway blog?

UPDATE: It seems Mark's blog is listed under "Bible Study," far too low in the ranking. Mark and Jim West comment further. Mark also notes that none of us make it into "Blog Heaven." Well, fie on Beliefnet. But as I've said before, if I can just make it into Limbo, I'll consider myself fortunate.

"THE PASSION OF ARAMAIC." Well, yeah. The Jerusalem Post has a long, interesting article on the Aramaic language. It opens:

Trying to unravel the mysteries of Aramaic is like embarking on an odyssey across the deserts, mountains and valleys of the Middle East and onwards to Europe and North America.

It is an intellectual adventure that leads to an array of secular scholars, devout clergy and laymen - Jewish and Christian - who are experts in the history of these Semitic languages, which in some places still survive.

They tell of Israeli rock groups that sing modern Aramaic songs, of popular radio and TV programs in Aramaic or Syriac broadcast in Canada, the US and Scandinavia and of remote villages in Syria and Iraq, where Aramaic, rather than Arabic, is the local vernacular.

Regular readers of PaleoJudaica are, of course, already well acquainted with most of this, but even they will find some new facts about Aramaic in this article. It tells of Aramaic-speaking Kurds, Christians in Nazareth who use Aramaic, Syrian villages whose traditional language is Aramaic, the origins and history of the language, Aramaic weddings by Jews in the Caucusus, how Aramaic saved a good bit of ancient Western literature for posterity, and Aramaic popular music.

Then there's this:

Outside of prestigious universities like Cambridge and Tel Aviv University, there are few, if any, schools where Aramaic or Syriac is taught as a language to read, write and speak.

All too true. I am happy to say, however, that at least biblical Aramaic is offered at the University of St. Andrews and I am scheduled to teach it here next year. I keep hoping to offer Syriac some day, but it hasn't happened yet.

On a related note, it is now possible to hear football (soccer) commentary in Aramaic. Really.

UPDATE: The following paragraph from the Jerusalem Post article is attributed to "a Christian scholar based in Jerusalem" who wished to remain anonymous:

The pervasiveness of Aramaic was such that it virtually replaced Hebrew as the preferred language of the Holy Land's Jews, a declining number of whom were familiar with the biblical tongue. This was also true of their coreligionists in Babylon and the surrounding regions of Mesopotamia - so much so, this scholar noted, that the Book of Daniel, which emerged from that milieu, "is more than 80 percent Aramaic."

This requires some correction and nuancing. First, most of chapter 2 and all of chapters 3-7 of Daniel are in Aramaic. That leaves chapters 1, a bit of 2, and 8-12 in Hebrew. I haven't done a verse count, but it's more like a 50-50 split. Second, the book of Daniel was written in the second century B.C.E. (granted, likely incorporating some older legends) and shows important Palestinian Jewish concerns (such as a preoccupation with the Maccabean revolt). In other words the indicators are that it's a Palestinian Jewish book, not a Mesopotamian one. As for the decline of Hebrew, certainly the epigraphic evidence (especially the Bar Kokhba correspondence) indicates that Hebrew was still very much in use as a living language into the second century C.E.

You would think that the Jerusalem Post could have found a biblical scholar somewhere in Jerusalem who was willing to be quoted by name with accurate information on the book of Daniel.

PROFESSOR MARVIN MEYER will be speaking next week in Billings, Montana, (which is a happening place for biblical scholarship) on the Coptic Gnostic library from Nag Hammadi.

CODEX SINAITICUS WATCH: The Art Newspaper has a long and detailed article on the current conservation and digitalization project as well as the controversy over ownership:

Sinai monks in historic agreement with British Library
Ownership dispute has been set aside for joint study and digitisation of the world�s oldest bible

One quibble:

The Codex Sinaiticus was one of the original 50 Bibles copied in Greek at the order of Emperor Constantine, or a direct copy of the period. It dates from the mid-fourth century and it is likely to have arrived at St Catherine�s in Sinai when the monastery�s church was erected in the mid-sixth century.

This is correct, strictly speaking, but could be phrased a little more clearly. It is possible that Sinaiticus is one of the Bibles commissioned by Constantine (I don't know exactly what "original" means here"), but that's only an educated guess. We don't know for sure where the manuscript came from and an Egyptian provenance has also been proposed, which apparently is what the first sentence means by "or a direct copy of the period." Again, I don't know what "direct" means here. What would an "indirect" copy be?

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: The Jerusalem Post has an article on the salvage operation, headed by archaeologist Gabriel Barkay, which is stifting the rubble from the depredations of the WAQF on the Temple Mount.

Temple Mount relics saved from garbage
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS

On the grounds of a Jerusalem national park with a view of the Temple Mount, a small group of Israeli archaeologists and volunteers sifting through piles of rubble discarded by Islamic Wakf officials from the Temple Mount into a city garbage dump have recently uncovered a series of history-rich artifacts dating back to the First and Second Temple periods.

The five-month old privately-funded project underway at the site, which is being directed by Bar Ilan University archeology professor Dr. Gabriel Barkay, is being called virtually unprecedented since archaeological excavation has never been permitted on the Temple Mount itself.

Some important finds from the second temple period and earlier are noted:

The first coin recovered from the rubble was from the period of the First Revolt against the Romans that preceded the destruction of the Second Temple, he added.

The coin bore the phrase "For the Freedom of Zion," and was particularly meaningful as the Temple Mount was one of the epicenters of the fight against the Romans.

Other finds include a spout of a Hasmonean lamp, an assortment of arrowheads, an ivory comb, a ceramic flask, various first temple figurines, and numerous pottery oil lamps.

And this is a matter for concern:

The historical project underway is now in danger of going unfinished due to a lack of financial support, with the project director saying that the project will abruptly end in one week unless organizers receive urgent financial backing needed to complete the work.

If you know any millionaires looking for a tax break, now's the time to speak up.

It is a great pity that this has to be done by volunteers with private funds. The Israeli government needs to start making serious efforts to protect the archaeology of the site and to recover what can be recovered from the rubble of what has already been bulldozed and dumped.

TORI AMOS MEETS THE GNOSTICS. And likes them.

The remarkable thing is not that Tori Amos got Gnostic on the gospels, but that it took until now. The daughter of a Methodist minister father and Eastern Cherokee bibliophile mother, with a dose of Scottish and Southern blood mixed in for good measure, Amos has just released her ninth album The Beekeeper, a cycle of songs framed by a concept constructed from suppressed Magdalene texts applied to the ancient art of shamanic beekeeping. Britney it ain't.

Nag Hammadi makes another inroad into popular culture.

THE BYZANTINE-ERA SYNAGOGUE IN JERICHO has recently been visited by Jews, according to Arutz Sheva:

Jews Return to Ancient Jericho Synagogue
22:28 Apr 13, '05 / 4 Nisan 5765

For the first time in four and a half years, a group of Jews was allowed to visit and pray in the ancient Shalom al Yisrael synagogue in Jericho Tuesday.

I JUST SENT IN my contract to write some articles for the New Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, including "Enoch, Third Book of" and "Merkavah Mysticism." The field of Hekhalot studies has come a long way since the original (1962) IDB or the (1976) supplementary volume, neither of which included either topic.

A TUG OF WAR seems to be starting over the Codex Sinaiticus.

Britain may have to give up oldest known Bible

By Dalya Alberge, Arts Correspondent (London Times)

THE British Library is facing the possible loss of one of its most important manuscripts, the world�s oldest Bible, to a Middle Eastern monastery.

The fear is raised weeks after the institution was told by a government advisory panel that a 12th-century manuscript in its collection was looted from a cathedral near Naples during the Second World War and must be returned.

The backing last month by the Spoliation Advisory Panel of a 27-year campaign by the city of Benevento to be reunited with a jewel of Italy�s heritage will have given renewed hope to St Catherine�s, a desert monastery on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, of being reunited with a manuscript that it is believed to have owned from the 6th century, if not earlier.

[...]

(Via Michael Pahl and others.)

All I can say is that I hope all parties involved have the welfare of the manuscript foremost on their agendas. It is very fragile and moving it should be done only with the utmost care and only for excellent reasons. It also needs to be kept in a place where it can be conserved properly. It would be a tragedy if political factors led to the neglect of these concerns.

UNICORNS IN THE BIBLE: Charles Hedrick has the story.

The Christians who wrote the New Testament did not use the Hebrew Old Testament, but rather its Greek translation, as sacred Scripture. In the Greek Old Testament eight passages describe an animal having only one horn (monokeros) as a translation for the Hebrew word re'em.

In the late fourth century, the Old Testament was translated into Latin (the Vulgate) using both the Greek and Hebrew. In some of the passages above the Vulgate translates the Hebrew re'em as "rhinoceros" and others as "unicorn." All Christians used the Vulgate until the 16th century, at which time Martin Luther translated the Bible into German � the first time the Bible was ever translated into a modern European language. Luther used only the Hebrew, for the Old Testament. Nevertheless, he still translated re'em as unicorn.

Hmmm ... Unicorns and Hobbits. I wonder if there are Elves too?

JACOB NEUSNER is profiled in the New York Times:

Scholar of Judaism, Professional Provocateur
By DINITIA SMITH

Published: April 13, 2005

Jacob Neusner, a mild-seeming, grandfatherly man relaxing in his easy chair, might have published more books than anyone alive. "As of this morning, 905," he said recently. It was 4 p.m. The count was still good.

Hold it! Mr. Neusner, 72, a professor of theology at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., has just called to say there are 924. This year alone there have been 22 books, most in his field, ancient Judaism. And no, he doesn't count revisions or translations.

Mr. Neusner studies rabbinical writings of the first 600 years A.D., when rabbinic Judaism evolved. He has translated both the Palestinian Talmud (35 volumes) and the Babylonian, twice (second translation, 46 volumes). In fact, he has translated most of the ancient rabbinic literature. The Chronicle of Higher Education has called him probably the most prolific scholar in the nation.

[...]

STILL THERE. According to this Jerusalem Post article, the name "Allah," which was inscribed (or something) on a stone in a wall of the Temple Mount, is still there after two weeks. None of the questions bloggers, including myself, have asked about this are answered in this article (and if Eilat Mazar replied to my e-mail, it never reached me). The piece does add one bit of new, if depressingly true to form, bit of information -- the response of the director of the WAQF to the vandalism:

After the vandalism was uncovered, Wakf director Adnan Husseini said that he saw nothing wrong with the 'Allah inscription' on the Temple Mount wall. "What's the problem with that? It's the name of God," he said.

CONGRATULATIONS to my former teacher, Professor John Huehnergard, who has been awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. I am delighted to hear that his long-awaited historical grammar of Hebrew has such support. Well done, John.

MARATHON MAN DELAYED: It developed that one of the seminars had to be canceled, so my five-hour teaching marathon is tentatively rescheduled for next Tuesday. That left the 3:00-4:00 pm hour open today, but instead of blogging (or doing some work), I retired with some of the Dead Sea Scrolls students to the pub across the street to continue the seminar. Sort of. My last lecture of the day is in World Religions in a few minutes.

JEWISH-TEMPLE DENIAL WATCH: Okay, I'm busy, but I can't resist noting this one. CAMERA has pointed out two incidents of pandering to the Jewish-temple deniers in major media outlets in recent days. In both quotes below, I have added the bold emphasis.

Reuters, 7 April, article by Jonathan Saul:

Non-Muslims Banned from Flashpoint Jerusalem Shrine

[...]

The ancient mosque compound is Islam's third holiest site. It is Judaism's most sacred site, the place where Jews say a biblical Jewish temple was razed by the Romans in 70 A.D.

[...]

The New York Times, 10 April, article by Steven Erlanger:

Israeli Troops Kill 3 Teenagers in Buffer Zone at Gaza Border

[...]

In Jerusalem, thousands of police officers fanned out in and around the Old City to prevent the threatened march on Al Aksa mosque. Jews believe that the site, also known as the Temple Mount, housed the second temple, which was destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70.

[...]

For relevant commentary, see my post some time ago regarding Time Magazine, and this post as well.

Most irritating.

MARATHON MAN: Today I have five hours of teaching: two lectures and three hours of seminars (including the rescheduled Temple Scroll seminar). I believe this is a one-day record for me, one that I hope never to exceed or even equal again. Blogging is likely to be limited. But do keep an eye on Qumranica, where I plan to be posting new material throughout the week.

JAROSLAV PELIKAN is interviewed by NPR about his new book Whose Bible Is It? You can access the audio file here.

OVERDRIVE: Due to a confluence of team-teaching commitments, combined with (welcome!) unexpectedly high enrollments in two courses, my teaching load for the next several weeks is going to be very high and I expect to be extremely busy. Blogging is refreshing for me, so I hope to be able to keep it up more or less as usual, but it will be a low priority and may slow down. Bear with me.

ASSIMILATED TO THE BLOGOSPHERE: Last week Tyler F. Williams, of Taylor University College in Edmonton, Alberta, e-mailed to alert me to his new blog, Codex. His first entry reads:

Welcome to my blogspot! I hope that my blog will be worthy of your attention. I hope to post my musings on Biblical Studies, Biblical Hebrew, Dead Sea Scrolls, Septuagint, Popular Culture, and pretty much anything else that interests me! I will also let you know about site updates and special academic events in the Edmonton area, among other things.

Welcome to the Blogosphere, Tyler!

The blog is one element of a website that contains lots of resources on biblical studies and related subjects.

UPDATE: Michael Turton notes further assimilation: a new blog called KAIMOI by University of Birmingham doctoral student Ken Olson, who is working on the Testimonium Flavianum (the mention of Jesus by Josephus). If this parody post (I hope it's a parody!) on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas is any indication, we should be seeing some good blogging from him.

ARAMAIC WATCH: Even at the Pope's funeral?

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Dean of the Sacred College of Cardinals led the funeral ceremony with great tenderness and craft. It was conducted mainly in Latin and Italian but also included several passages in languages used throughout the Catholic world such as Spanish, Swahili, Polish, Filipino, French and English. Arguably, the most spellbinding part was the prayer sung in Greek and, I think, Aramaic by members of the Eastern Churches in an emotional swirl of bejewelled robes, incense and eastern mystery.

It probably was Aramaic, most likely Syriac.

Also, David Nishimura's comments over at Cronaca on the coverage of the funeral by the New York Times are worth reading.

UPDATE: The Syriac Orthodox Church and the Assyrian Church were represented at the funeral, as was the Iraqi Syriac Catholic Church.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: The planned Revava protest seems to have fizzled:

Low Turnout at Right-Wing Jewish March
Sun Apr 10, 2005 02:16 AM ET

By Corinne Heller

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Palestinian militants threatened to abandon a de facto cease-fire with Israel if right-wing Jews went ahead with a planned march to a flashpoint holy site in Jerusalem on Sunday.

"If the Zionists defile al-Aqsa mosque, they will be planting the seeds of the third uprising," said Nizar Rayyan of the Islamic militant group Hamas.

But with Israeli police out in force at the site revered by Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary) and by Jews as the Temple Mount, only a handful of would-be marchers turned up for the 7:30 a.m. (0430 GMT) rendezvous.

Three of them were arrested, Army Radio said.

[...]

UPDATE: The BBC has posted a brief guide to Jerusalem's Holy Sites.

UPDATE: David Ha'ivri and others have been arrested. And anti-disengagement protesters disrupted a Tel Aviv freeway this morning.

UPDATE (9:40 pm GMT): Yep, it fizzled. I have to say I'm relieved.

Small Turnout for Extremist Jewish Rally at Holy Site (the Scotsman)

A rally by Gaza withdrawal opponents at a contested Jerusalem holy site today ended in a fizzle, with only a few dozen protesters showing up, but it mobilised thousands of police in full riot gear.

Police arrested 31 extremist Jews who planned to demonstrate in the Old City of Jerusalem, along with a West Bank Hamas leader who spoke at the holy site, but the mass demonstration of 10,000 pledged by organisers did not materialise.

[...]

DR. HELEN BOND has published an essay on Caiphas on the Bible and Interpretation website:

Joseph Caiaphas: In Search
of a Shadow

The Gospels, despite their differences, all suggest that Jesus had two trials, one before Caiaphas (or at least the Jewish priestly leaders) and one before Pilate. In fact, the initiative for the arrest seems to have come from Caiaphas and his chief priestly colleagues; Pilate's role appears to have been merely to ratify the sentence pronounced by the Jewish high priest. Why, then, is Caiaphas' name so little known?

By Helen Bond
Senior Lecturer in New Testament Language,
Literature and Theology
University of Edinburgh
April 2005

I'VE JUST POSTED some notes on current news stories on the Dead Sea Scrolls over at Qumranica.

RECONSTRUCTING ANCIENT TECHNOLOGY:

Research team recreates ancient underwater concrete technology (PhysOrg.com)

April 07, 2005

A University of Colorado at Boulder professor and his colleagues have taken a page from the writings of an ancient Roman architect and built an underwater concrete pier in the manner of those set in the Mediterranean Sea 2,000 years ago.

CU-Boulder history Professor Robert Hohlfelder, an internationally known underwater archaeologist, said scholars have long been in awe of the engineering feats of the early Romans. A former co-director of the international Caesarea Ancient Harbor Excavation Project, he said the research effort was spurred by the stunning hydraulic concrete efforts undertaken at Caesarea Harbor in present-day Israel and elsewhere in the Mediterranean before the time of Christ.

[...]

SALOME DANCED HERE -- MAYBE:

Tiberias dig unearths very rare marble floor
By Eli Ashkenazi (Ha'aretz)

A marble floor dating from the first century CE was unearthed during this season's excavations of ancient Tiberias.

According to archaeologist Professor Yizhar Hirschfeld, director of the three-week dig that ended yesterday, the floor is apparently a remnant of a pavement in the palace of Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great, who ruled the Galilee from 4 BCE to 38 CE.

[...]

I posted this item this morning, but as I tried to purge the multiple copies, Blogger ate the whole thing.

BLOGGER IS VERY GLITCHY TODAY. Apologies for the stuttered posts below, which I will clean up when the system allows me to. But for now I give up.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH:

Israeli police guard Temple Mount (BBC)

Thousands of Israeli police have surrounded the Temple Mount in Jerusalem amid fears that Jewish extremists plan to storm the site.

The operation follows reports that extremists hope to thwart Israel's withdrawal from Gaza by inflaming tensions with Palestinians.

Palestinian militants say they will end a truce if Jewish protesters enter the al-Aqsa mosque built on Temple Mount.

[...]

And Ha'aretz, has some sane words that I hope will be heeded:

The Palestinians should understand that the majority of the Israeli public is interested in quiet, and they should not fall victim to the anticipated provocations of the right. Even after the security forces do their utmost to prevent violence on the Temple Mount, there is still a chance that an individual terrorist could succeed in carrying out a plot. Even a "success" of this kind, heaven forbid, should not be allowed to disrupt the important plan to promote an agreement between the sides.

Keep your fingers crossed this weekend.

THE JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF THE PSEUDEPIGRAPHA has a new issue out (14.2 - January 2005) devoted to Joseph and Aseneth. Here's the table of contents:

Christoph Burchard
The Text of Joseph and Aseneth Reconsidered
Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 2005 14: 83-96.

John J. Collins
Joseph and Aseneth: Jewish or Christian?
Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 2005 14: 97-112.

Randall D. Chesnutt
Perceptions of Oil in Early Judaism and the Meal Formula in Joseph and Aseneth
Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 2005 14: 113-132.

Anathea E. Portier-Young
Sweet Mercy Metropolis: Interpreting Aseneth�s Honeycomb
Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 2005 14: 133-157.

George J. Brooke
Men and Women as Angels in Joseph and Aseneth
Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 2005 14: 159-177.

The URL for this journal has changed as well. It's now http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journal.aspx?pid=106691. The abstracts are available for free on the table of contents page. The articles themselves can be downloaded in PDF format if you have a paid personal or institutional subscription.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH:

Ezra: Mount rally is very problematic
By JPOST STAFF AND ETGAR LEFKOVITS

A scenario in which thousands of Jews plan to flood the Temple Mount is highly problematic and the police will not enable them to reach the site, Internal Security Minister Gideon Ezra said on Thursday.

Speaking with Army Radio, Ezra said that there are intelligence indications by which far right activists may carry out some sort of an attack on the mount. He did not specify whether the nature of the warnings was specific.

[...]

On Wednesday, Jerusalem police announced that the Temple Mount will be completely closed off to non-Muslim visitors on Sunday, the day of a major ultra-nationalist rally to the site.

Jerusalem police chief Ilan Franco had announced last week that he was barring 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.

[...]

In response to the increasing threats at the site, the Internal Security Ministry recently decided to set up a state of the art security system of electronic sensors on the Temple Mount a cost of about NIS 100 million (US $23 million).

The sensors are to be installed around the walls of the mount and are designed to alert security forces in the event of an attempted entry in the area.

But the newly enhanced security plan is unlikely to go in effect before the planned Gaza pullout slated for July.

[...]

That's the first I've heard of a new security system. As for the planned protest, it gives us quite enough to worry about. But then there's this:

Islamic movement to mobilize tens of thousands to counter Jewish rally
By DAVID RUDGE (Jerusalem Post)

The Islamic Movement intends to mobilize tens of thousands of Israeli Arab Muslims from throughout the country to take part in a mass pilgrimage to the Aksa mosque in Jerusalem on Sunday to counter a planned demonstration by the Temple Mount faithful and those opposed to disengagement.

[...]

This is turning into a volatile mixture, and I hope very much that cool heads prevail on the day.

Ha'aretz covers the same story here.

A GUEST LECTURE by Dr. Maxine Grossman for my Dead Sea Scrolls course has now been posted on the course web page. For more information, see my Qumranica blog.

A NEW ESSAY on the Bible and Interpretation website:

Assyriology and Biblical Studies:
Time for Reassessment?

Biblical scholars since the 1970s have often tended to be ahistorical or anti-historical in approach. This too needs to change. Comparative ancient Near Eastern methods are necessary to bring balance and perspective to biblical studies without being ideologically polemical or apologetic in nature. It is regrettable that some in the past have used comparative methods as a plank in a Christian or Jewish apologetical platform. However, the excesses or aberrations in the past are no excuse for isolation and restrictivism in the present.

Bill T. Arnold
Professor of Old Testament and Semitic Languages
Asbury Theological Seminary
April 2005

THE BIBLICAL STUDIES CARNIVAL VOL. 1 is now up over at Joel Ng's Ebla Logs. I read a lot of biblioblogs but a number of the entries, and even one of the blogs, were new to me. Go and have a look.

THE BYZANTINE-ERA SYNAGOGUE IN JERICHO is in the news:

Jericho synagogue may open for Pessah
By MARGOT DUDKEVITCH (Jerusalem Post)

Paving the way for the return of Jewish worshipers to the Shalom Al Yisrael synagogue in Jericho, the IDF and Civil Administration officials toured the site on Monday morning. Security officials warned, however, that until the PA security forces live up to their commitments and disarm terrorists and wanted fugitives in the city, worshipers will be barred from returning to the site.

[..]

The Shalom Al Yisrael synagogue was founded in the Byzantine period, and discovered in 1936 as part of excavations by D.C. Baramki of the Antiquities Authority under the British Mandate. The 10 x 13-meter mosaic floor was identified as a synagogue due to its image of the Ark of the Covenant, a menora, a shofar and lulav, and a Hebrew inscription reading "Shalom Al Yisrael" (Peace upon Israel), from which the synagogue derives its name.

It has been the subject of a lot of controversy and conflict in recent years.

ARAMAIC STUDIES has a new issue out (3.1 - January 2005). Here is the table of contents:

Alberdina Houtman
The Role of Abraham in Targum Isaiah
Aramaic Studies 2005 3: 3-14.

G. W. Lorein
{alef}{tav}{vav}{kaf}{lamed}{mem} in the Targum of the Prophets
Aramaic Studies 2005 3: 15-42.

Marco Moriggi
Two New Incantation Bowls from Rome (Italy)
Aramaic Studies 2005 3: 43-58.

Craig Morrison
The Relationship of the Peshitta Text of Second Samuel with the Peshitta Text of First Chronicles
Aramaic Studies 2005 3: 59-81.

Hezy Mutzafi
Etymological Notes on North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic
Aramaic Studies 2005 3: 83-107.

Harry F. van Rooy
The Syro-Hexaplaric Headings of the Psalms in Manuscript 12t3
Aramaic Studies 2005 3: 109-126.

The abstracts are available for free at the link above, and you can also access the articles in PDF format if you have a paid subscription or want to buy a single article. Note that the URL of this journal has changed. It's now http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journal.aspx?pid=106685.

HEBREW ON MARS! Sumerian and Mayan too. This article ("Indian mark on Mars") in the Calcutta Telegraph drew my attention to this story. It seems that the two Rovers of Nasa's current Mars Exploration Rover Mission are each equipped with a "sundial" on which the word for "Mars" is inscribed in two dozen languages. I take the full list from an old but informative Cornell News report of a press conference by PBS's "Bill Nye The Science Guy":

Appropriately for a science instrument involving Nye, the sundial design evolved through suggestions and drawings from children across the United States, solicited by Sheri Klug, director of Arizona State University's Mars Education and Outreach Program.

[...]

One idea suggested by children was that the sundial bear writing in many languages, representing the diverse cultures of Earth. The face of the sundial is engraved with the word "Mars" in Arabic, Bengali, Braille, Chinese, Danish, English, French, German, Greek, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Inuktituk, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lingala, Malay-Indonesian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Thai. Together these languages are used by more than three quarters of Earth's population. Also included are ancient Sumerian and Mayan. Mars figured prominently in both the Sumerian and Mayan cultures.

Cool, but too bad they left out Aramaic.

REBECCA LESSES comments on some textbooks for Jewish mysticism, Jewish ritual, and the Hebrew Bible over at Mystical Politics.

CHALDOASSYRIAN WATCH: Two notes in the news:

Turkey Allows a First New Year for a Tiny Minority
By KATHERINE ZOEPF (New York Times)

Published: April 4, 2005

MIDYAT, Turkey, April 1 - A windswept hilltop here in southeastern Anatolia has become the site for a reunion that once would have been unthinkable, as thousands of Assyrians from across the region have converged to openly celebrate their New Year in Turkey for the first time.

Like many other expressions of minority ethnic identity, the Assyrian New Year, or Akito, had been seen by Turkey as a threat. But this year, the government, with an eye toward helping its bid to join the European Union, has officially allowed the celebration by the Assyrians, members of a Christian ethnic group that traces its roots back to ancient Mesopotamia.

[...]

The festivities here on Friday were the culmination of a celebration that started on March 21, the first day of the Assyrian New Year. Behind Mr. Begtas, on a raised stage near the wall of the Mar Aphrem monastery, a balding baritone sang in Syriac, the Assyrians' language, a Semitic tongue similar to Aramaic.

[...]

Actually, Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic.

Ancient sect mourns Pope in Iraq
Sun Apr 3, 2005 8:35 AM BST

ANKAWA, Iraq (Reuters) - Followers of the ancient Chaldean Christian sect have gathered for mass among the mountains of northern Iraq to mourn the death of Pope John Paul, watched over by guards armed with AK-47 assault rifles.

"All Christians, even the Muslims, will hope for another pope to re-establish peace in this world," said Rabban al-Qas, a Kurd who is the Chaldean bishop of Amadiya.

[...]

Chaldeans, who use the ancient Aramaic language to conduct mass, make up the largest of Iraq's Christian sects, and say they have around 400,000 followers in Iraq. The total Christian community in Iraq is estimated at around 750,000.

[...]

GOSPEL OF JUDAS UPDATE: Stephen Carlson has collected lots of new information at Hypotyposeis.

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.