THE BRITISH OPEN started today in St. Andrews. I'm not a golfing fan, so I seized the opportunity to visit other attractions in the town while hardly anyone else was at them. I took my son and his friend to visit the ruins of the castle first. The weather was cloudy but dry and reasonably warm.


The castle has underground mines and counter-mines, left over from a sixteenth century siege, which we also explored thoroughly.

The picture above was taken from the top of St. Rule's Tower, which we climbed from within after lunch:


This is a twelfth century tower on the Cathedral grounds. St. Rule's Tower is the building in the middle. The Cathedral too is in ruins: there are spires on the left side of the Tower and one wall is on the right. The spires are also visible in the lower right part of the castle photo above.

Here's a picture of St. Andrews which I also took from atop the Tower:


The Cathedral grounds are in the foreground. The clock tower on the right-hand street is at the University Chapel on North Street. The street on the left side is South Street. St. Mary's College is a couple blocks up and on the left-hand side of South Street. The golfing is taking place in the vicinity of the West Sands, to the far right and out beyond the town.

Thanks to all of you who have sent me things today for PaleoJudaica. I'll get to them as soon as I can. As you can see, I've been having a life today.

LOOTING ARRESTS:

3 Palestinians nabbed for antiquities theft
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS (Jerusalem Post)

Three Palestinians wanted for a series of antiquities thefts over the last five years are under arrest, Israel's Antiquities Authority announced Tuesday.

The three Palestinian men, from the West Bank village of Beit Ula, were caught red-handed over the weekend plundering antiquities dating back to the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods during a night-time Antiquities Authority raid at an archaeological site in the West Bank, said Amir Ganor the head of the Authority's anti-theft division.

[...]

Any progress in the fight against antiquities looting is always welcome, but the situation is still very serious. The article concludes with the now standard Jerusalem Post paragraphs telling how looting has increased by more than 50% in the last year and "has taken on gold-rush dimensions."

(Via Bible and Interpretation News.)

UPDATE: Jim West e-mails to note the discussion of this article on the Biblical Studies list.

"WHAT IS CONSENSUS?" asks Michael Pahl. Here's my take. This is longer than I intended and I could probably keep going, but I do want to do some other things this evening. Feedback and criticisms welcome, as always. Drop me an e-mail or post on your blog in response.

First, consensus is a very slippery notion. What is consensus? I wouldn't think it's unanimity, at least not in dealing with such large and diverse groups of people. And it's certainly not simple majority. So what is it? 70%? 80%? Can 90+% safely be considered consensus?

I take consensus to mean that more people think so than not, but not everyone thinks so. Call it 51%-99%.

Second, who gets to be part of the polling sample? Only those working within a particular historical or theological perspective or methodological paradigm? All those who have published scholarly monographs on the subject? All scholars who have studied the subject in depth, whether they've published on it or not? And who determines what makes a "scholar" or appropriate authority on the subject?

I think most people measure consensus on the basis of published work in scholarly monographs and collections of essays, articles in peer-review journals, etc. I would weigh this more heavily than what a scholar thinks but hasn't published, since publication in itself requires more work and more commitment than just studying. When one refers in a publication to a consensus about something, normally a footnote follows with specific references to previous publications. Someone is a "'scholar' or appropriate authority" if he or she publishes monographs with publishers respected in the field or articles in relevant peer-review journals. Scholarly conversation has been going on for many, many years. "Scholars" and "authorities" are people who are familiar with this conversation; who have the necessary training (languages, knowledge of primary sources, methods of a field, etc.) for their opinions to be worth something; and who carry on the conversation in the venues that have developed to continue it. The process is far from perfect, but it works pretty well. And I don't know what one could replace it with which would work better.

Third, how does one actually go about doing the polling to assess consensus? One can meticulously search through all relevant literature on the subject and record opinions in a table (which is sometimes done on specific issues), but this then leads to some of the questions in the previous point, and one often quickly realizes that individual scholarly perspectives on any given issue are too complex to fit neatly into a simplistic table or scale.

So don't be simplistic. Read carefully and widely, particularly the published work of people who disagree with you, and be able to summarize the views of people you read with nuance and accuracy. It's hard work.

Finally, even if one can get past the previous questions, what does consensus prove? The consensus in 1976 on Paul's perspective on the Torah and his understanding of "justification by faith" was pretty strong, I would guess, until Ed Sanders provoked a Kuhnian paradigm shift with his Paul and Palestinian Judaism the following year. Now there is as much variegation in perspective on these issues as some of Sanders' respondents have claimed was evident in the nomism and soteriology of first century Judaism. Did the consensus prior to Sanders' book make that so-called "Lutheran" view correct? Does the lack of consensus since mean that no one has any real grasp of any of the issues?

The consensus is the thing you need to improve on if you want to advance the state of the question -- which is what scholarly research is all about. No one should pretend that a consensus is the final word. It's the starting point for your research. Apply new evidence or new methods or better reasoning to give us a better understanding of the problem. People who challenge Sanders's work don't want to go back to what was before it, they want to show that the problems are more complicated than he realized.

It's like hauling dirt up a hill so that you gradually make the hill higher so that everyone can see farther from its summit. (I like this analogy better than the one about standing on the shoulders of giants. Most people who came before us were not giants in comparison to the rest of us. But there were an awful lot of them and collectively they, each standing on the shoulders of those who came before, do constitute a kind of giant.)

Stipulated: a consensus can be an improvement on previous, wrong answers, and still turn out ultimately to be wrong itself. Newtonian physics was a vast improvement over anything that came before it and is still useful for virtually all everyday purposes today. But special and general relativity and quantum physics have shown that it is actually pretty much entirely wrong. Oh, and relativity theory and quantum physics both fit all the experimental data but are mutually incompatible, so one or both of them must be pretty much wrong too.

Stipulated: there are problems that are intractable with current evidence and on which we spin our wheels. Some of these are the questions we would most like to be able to answer. But there are plenty of problems on which we've made good progress too.

Some currently intractable problems, it seems to me, are the authorship of Joseph and Aseneth; the decipherment of Linear A; the origins of the Temple Scroll; and (to think big) the historical Jesus and the historical Josiah. Some will disagree with me about one or the other of these, but they won't be able to point to a consensus on what the answer is. Often (generally?) the problem in such cases is that we just don't have enough information to narrow down the possibilities very far.

Some random examples of problems on which we've made good, sometimes extraordinary, progress: the relative sequence and absolute dating of ancient ceramic typology in Palestine; the decipherment of ancient Egyptian, various languages in cuneiform (Akkadian, Sumerian, Hittite), Ugaritic, Phoenician, Nabatean, Palmyrene, etc.; the recovery of the previously almost entirely lost history of much of the ancient Near East from c. 2500 BCE to c. 500 BCE; and the basic decipherment of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

If there isn't a clear consensus, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find an answer that is more persuasive than the ones currently available, and that then becomes a consensus.

Until someone else improves on it.

UPDATE (14 July): Jim West replied to Michael Pahl here. (I really don't think things are as bad as all that.) Michael comments further with reference to my post here. (I don't see the difficulty with a "consensus on consensus." It's rare for people to agree unanimously on anything, but that doesn't mean we can't keep groping our way in the general direction of the truth. Let us steer between the Scylla of overconfidence in our own theories and the Charybdis of nihilism.) And Ed Cook and Mark Goodacre have thoughtful posts responding in detail to some of the issues that have been raised.

UPDATE (15 July): More here.

ON THE HISTORICITY OF THE GOSPELS: Mark Goodacre comments on Bishop Tom Wright's claim that there is a scholarly consensus that the canonical Gospels were written no later than fifty years after the time of Jesus and are dependent on earlier traditions that included substantial eyewitness testimony. Mark rightly takes issue with Wright's claim about the date and he wants to qualify the business about eyewitness testimony. But let's assume that Wright is correct on both counts. I am skeptical about how much bearing this has on the historicity of the Gospel accounts, which is the point he is getting at. Fifty years is a very long time, longer than the average life span of the period; eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable even in court cases; and the contemporary followers of charismatic intermediaries typically think those figures have miraculous powers and a direct channel to the divine (there is a substantial secondary literature on the anthropology of magico-religious practitioners). If I may take the liberty of quoting myself on this issue:

Gershom Scholem's book Sabbetai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973) provides an important cautionary tale for anyone interested in the problem of the historical Jesus. We have a great deal of information about Sabbetai -- who was born in Smyrna in 1626 and grew up to become a manic-depressive with delusions of grandeur -- and the messianic movement that emerged around him in 1665, including much eyewitness testimony and many primary documents written by the major players. When in 1666 he was given the choice of conversion to Islam or execution, he chose the former, and lived until 1676. Strangely, a good many of his followers continued to believe in him, reasoning that only the true messiah would dare to commit apostasy. The movement survived underground in various forms for generations, and for all I know may still exist today.

Scholem's analysis of this material shows that the reinventing of a messianic figure can take place not only immediately after his death but even during his lifetime. The farther removed geographically from the man himself the less interest the movement had in anything to do with the (contemporaneous) "historical" Sabbetai. Miracle stories arose within weeks of the events, sometimes sooner (pp. 480-81, 538-39, 557-64, 592-93). Indeed, before and during Sabbetai's arrest and imprisonment in Constantinople, letters and word-of-mouth gossip from that very city reported that he had raised the dead, healed lepers, passed through the locked doors of his prison, consorted with angels, and called up a pillar of fire (pp. 417-18, 535-36, 605). Within a few years after his death, a legend had arisen of his burial in a cave by the sea and the finding of the empty tomb guarded by a dragon three days later. His followers believed that he hadn't really died, but had experienced an "occultation" into the celestial realm, from which he would return gloriously in due course (pp. 919-20, 922-25).

Gross distortion of the life and message of a charismatic intermediary need not take time. It can arise full blown during the lifetime of the figure, while the true teachings and actions of the actual person are ignored. It can assimilate any and all facts to the contrary by either suppressing them or reinterpreting them. It can present us with a miraculous legendary divine being within no time to speak of after the lifetime of the figure.

From "Melchizedek, the 'Youth,' and Jesus," in The Dead Sea Scrolls as Background to Postbiblical Judaism and Early Christianity: Papers from a Conference at St. Andrews in 2001 (ed. James R. Davila; STDJ 46; Leiden: Brill, 2003), 248-74, quote from pp. 267-68, n. 32.

UPDATE: The next post is related.

UPDATE (14 July): Reader "Sarah" e-mails:

Another good example, with respect to the gospel traditions themselves, may well be Papias. What scraps remain of his voluminous work show that he entertained some rather outlandish stories about Jesus and the apostles (particularly the episodes about the death of Judas Iscariot and "remarkable" and "amazing" events involving the disciples and those raised by Christ). Interestingly, Papias wrote directly from oral tradition (such as things he learned directly from the daughters of "Philip the Apostle") about a century from the death of Jesus, and less than a
century after the age of the apostles. The loss of Papias' work is especially tragic, not in shedding light on the "historical Jesus", but in its potential in taking the obscure world of early Christian storytelling a little bit out of the shadows.

It is heartbreaking to think of how many ancient sources have been lost over the centuries.

UPDATE (24 July): Much more on lost ancient sources here.

THE RACIAL AND RELIGIOUS HATRED BILL, which makes incitement to religious hatred a crime, has passed on its third reading in the House of Commons. I have explained in detail here why it is a very bad idea. The only hope now is that the House of Lords will decline to pass it.

TAX EXEMPT? This is the first time I've heard of this place.

Holy Land exempt from property tax

The religious-themed park wins the break given churches and museums, a judge rules.

By Mark Schlueb
[Sun] Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted July 12 2005

The Holy Land Experience may seem like just another theme park, with its $30 admission charge, $5 parking fee and souvenir shops.

But, ending a four-year legal battle, a judge has ruled that the religious-themed attraction deserves the same tax-exempt status given to churches and museums. The ruling spares its owner from paying a delinquent property-tax bill that would have climbed to more than $1 million by the end of the year.

[...]

Modeled after ancient Jerusalem, Holy Land's attractions include a life-sized walled gate and re-creations of Herod's Temple and courtyard, Jesus' garden tomb, a street market with artisans' workshops, a Bedouin tent and the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. It also boasts the Scriptorium, which houses the largest private collection of biblical texts and artifacts in the country.

From the start, The Holy Land Experience was controversial. Local rabbis greeted it with trepidation, given its parent company's stated mission of converting Jews to Christianity. And the owner's decision to prohibit charismatic and Pentecostal Christians from working there prompted picketing early on.

[...]

I assume the re-creation of Herod's Temple and courtyard is not life-sized.

A DEAD SEA SCROLLS EXHIBIT is in the works for the Milwaukee Public Museum in 2007, but some funding is still needed.

CONFERENCE ON PAGAN MONOTHEISM: Peter Van Nuffelen e-mails the following call for papers:

University of Exeter
Department of Classics and Ancient History

Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire (1st-4th cent. AD)
Conference at Exeter, 17-20 July 2006

The publication of the volume Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity (eds. P. Athanassiadi – M. Frede, Oxford, 1999), in which pagan monotheism was presented as a major religious force in Late Antiquity, has led to an extensive debate on the definition and role of pagan monotheism in Late Antique society.

As part of an AHRB-funded research project concerned with the cultural and intellectual context of pagan monotheism in the Roman empire, directed by Professor Stephen Mitchell, the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter is staging a conference in July 2006. The aim is to examine pagan monotheism as a religious phenomenon and to place it in its social, political and cultural context. The focus will both be on philosophical and literary texts, and on the evidence derived from epigraphy, archaeology and material culture. The conference will also examine the various strands of monotheistic ideas and practices, and the way that these interact with other diverse religious developments in the Roman empire up to the fourth century.

The conference will address six themes:

• questions of definition and terminology
  
  
• archaeology, epigraphy, and material culture
  
  
• the intellectual basis of pagan monotheism
  
  
• monotheism, politics and social order
  
  
• monotheism and religious pluralism
  
  
• interaction among pagans, Christians and Jews

We invite papers of about 20 minutes in length, which address one of these issues. We welcome in particular contributions which offer new evidence for pagan monotheism and related phenomena, as well as detailed analyses of the contexts in which pagan monotheism must be seen. Please send proposals for papers (length 200 words) by 30 September 2005. Conference booking will begin in October 2005. It is expected that the cost of accommodation (3 nights, full-board) will be in the range £200-250.

More information can be found on the website: http://www.ex.ac.uk/classics/news/index.htm

For further information, please contact Dr Peter van Nuffelen, Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Exeter, Queen’s Building, Exeter EX4 4QH; p.e.r.van-nuffelen@ex.ac.uk

COULD HAVE BEEN SAN DIEGO:


A gorgeous, hot -- almost too hot, beach afternoon at Kingsbarns. The fog started to roll in after 4:00, but it does that on San Diego beaches too. You don't see weather like this here very often.

PRETTY QUIET IN THE NEWS, but here are couple of stories. Jim West notes an Arutz Sheva report of First and Second Temple period archaeological finds in the western Galilee, including a late Second-Temple-period village in which a ring inscribed with Hebrew names was found. Even discounting the political slant of the article, the discoveries sound very interesting and I look forward to hearing more.

Also (a bit off topic), there's been a potentially explosive find of hidden treasure in Tel Aviv.

The weather in St. Andrews has been uncharacteristically summery this July and it is beautiful and sunny yet again today. This is too good a chance to miss: forget work and forget blogging, we're going to the beach.

HEBREW TEST:

בראשית ברא אלהים את השמים ואת הארץ

UPDATE: This Hebrew has held up fine through a couple of updates. If it stays for another posting or two, I'll tell what I did this time to fix the Unicode fonts glitch.

UPDATE (10 July): This post was originally put up on the 9th, but I'm moving it to the top for a while. The Hebrew is still there after a new posting and a couple of updates, so it seems to be stable now.

If you have a problem with non-Roman language fonts, try this: go to the Blogger dashboard, click on the "Settings" menu, then click on the "Formatting" link. The "Encoding" field should be set to "Universal (Unicode UTF-8)." For some reason, mine had been set to one of the "Western" options. I don't know how it got that way, but the result seems to have been to reset everthing on the main page to a Western font every time something new was published.

The world is now safe for language fonts on PaleoJudaica.

UPDATE (12 July): Another biblioblogger conquers Unicode. Well done, Phil.

THE TALMUD AS HYPERTEXT: This idea is not new, but it comes up twice in online articles today.

First, the Global Politician has an article, "The Future of the Book," which discusses "e-books" in relation to other ancient and modern written media. The reference to the Talmud comes up here:

E-books, counter their opponents, have changed little beyond format and medium. Audio books are more revolutionary than e-books because they no longer use visual symbols. Consider the scrolling protocols - lateral and vertical. The papyrus, the broadsheet newspaper, and the computer screen are three examples of the vertical kind. The e-book, the microfilm, the vellum, and the print book are instances of the lateral scroll. Nothing new here.

E-books are a throwback to the days of the papyrus. The text is placed on one side of a series of connected "leaves". Parchment, by comparison, was multi-paged, easily browseable, and printed on both sides of the leaf. It led to a revolution in publishing and, ultimately, to the print book. All these advances are now being reversed by the e-book, bemoan the antagonists.

The truth, as always, is somewhere in mid-ground between derision and fawning.

The e-book retains one innovation of the parchment - the hypertext. Early Jewish and Christian texts as well as Roman legal scholarship were inscribed or, later, printed, with numerous inter-textual links. The Talmud, for instance, comprises a main text (the Mishna) surrounded by references to scholarly interpretations (exegesis).

Second, Michael Frawley has an essay in KPCNews (Indiana): "A ‘words and pictures man’ looks at Web design," in which the Talmud-as-hypertext meme also appears:

The print analogs continue. We talk about "pages," but the pages don't really exist, do they? Of course not. It's just content served up on a monitor, dredged up from various files. We think of hypertext linking (all of those links you click on) as being something brand new and specific to the technology of the Web -- but they're not. Hypertext is simply a way of organizing and retrieving massive amounts of information, and you don't exactly need a computer to do that. The ancient Jewish Talmud, with its maze-like layers of texts and notes, is an early example.

The Talmud: ahead of its time.

CYRUS KAR has been released from detention in Iraq:

U.S. Releases Filmmaker Detained in Iraq

By FRANK GRIFFITHS
The Associated Press
Sunday, July 10, 2005; 11:46 PM

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- An aspiring Iranian-American filmmaker who has been detained by the U.S. military for nearly two months without being charged was released Sunday, officials said.

Cyrus Kar, 44, of Los Angeles, was taken into custody May 17 near Balad when potential bomb parts were found in a taxi in which he was riding. His family had filed a lawsuit accusing the federal government of violating his civil rights and holding him after the FBI cleared him of suspicion.

[...]

With help from independent director-producer Philippe Diaz, Kar began working on a documentary about the Persian king Cyrus the Great. He shot of footage at archaeological sites in Afghanistan and Iran, according to his family and Diaz.

He was visiting Iraq to film in and around the ancient city of Babylon, one of Cyrus the Great's conquests, according to his family.

[...]

(Via the IraqCrisis list.)

CONFERENCE ON JEWISH NAMES: Joseph I. Lauer e-mails:

I was asked by Prof. Aaron Demsky to post the following announcement/program concerning The Seventh International Conference on Jewish Names at The 14th World Congress of Jewish Studies, to be held July 31-August 1, 2005, at The Hebrew University, Mount Scopus Campus, Jerusalem, Israel.

Dr. Demsky is Director, The Project for the Study of Jewish Names, Department of Jewish History, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan 52900 Israel.

He may be reached by phone at 972-2-9931-878 (home) or fax at 972-9932-208 (home).

His e-mail address is: demskya@mail.biu.ac.il

Joseph I. Lauer
Brooklyn, New York

The Seventh International Conference on Jewish Names
at The 14th World Congress of Jewish Studies

July 31-August 1, 2005
The Hebrew University Mount Scopus Campus
Jerusalem, Israel

Program

520 Antiquity
Chairperson: Yigal Levin
Sunday (31 July 2005) 11:30 - 13:30 Room: 2720
Yael Avrahami (E)
Giving Names to the Newborn in the Hebrew Bible
Siam Bhayro (E)
The Angel Name Shemihazah
Joel S. Burnett (E)
Divine Absence in Biblical Personal Names
Hananel Mack (H)
"Mehetav`el, daughter of Matred, daughter of Me- zahav" (Genesis 36: 39)

521 Toponymy
Chairperson: Yoel Elitzur
Sunday (31 July 2005) 15:00 - 17:00 Room: 2720
Yehuda Ziv (H)
The Israel Government Names Committee - Modus Operandi
Lea Mazor (H)
"Might" and "Strength" in Israeli Place Names during the First Years of
Statehood - Biblical and Ideological Aspects
Ronny Reich (H)
On the Names "Gihon" and "Shiloah"
Yossi Spanier (H)
"From the Sole of the Foot unto the Head": The Usage of the Names of Body
Parts in Geographic Description in the Bible

522 Hebrew Literature
Chairperson: Boris Kotlerman
Sunday (31 July 2005) 17:30 - 19:30 Room: 2720
Ephraim Hazan (H)
The Personal Name as a Linguistic and Stylistic Factor in Jewish Medieval
Poetry from Spain
Juliette Hassine (H)
"Sol-Hatsadique" - Onomastic Characteristics in the Creation of a Cultural
Heroine
Lea Garfinkel (H)
The Artist as a Creator: Endowing Names in Literary Works
Sara Friedman (H)
Names and Naming in Hebrew Literary Translation

523 Between East and West
Chairperson:
Monday (1 Aug 2005) 09:00 - 11:00 Room: 2720
Bracha Yaniv (H)
"Perlsticker" and "Goldsticker": Some Specialist Surnames in Tailoring
Reuven Enoch (H)
Hebrew Names in the Speech of Georgian Jews
Chana Tolmas (E)
Occupational Names of Bukharan Jews in the Modern Period
Zofia Abramowicz (E)
Jewish Names in Bialystok

524 Contemporary
Chairperson: Meir Bar-Ilan
Monday (1 Aug 2005) 11:30 - 13:30 Room: 2720
Jean-Pierre Stroweis (E)
Name Changes during the British Mandate
Michael Falk (E)
The Days of the Week as Jewish Surnames
Ofra Malka Birnboim (H)
Jewish Israeli Identity according to Proper Names of Settlers in Samaria
Aviel Kranzler (H)
Israeliness and Jewishness- Israeli Names versus Jewish Names

525 The Last Millennium
Chairperson: Refael Yankelvitch
Monday (1 Aug 2005) 15:00 - 17:00 Room: 2720
Yisrael Rozenson (H)
Geographic Names in Jewish Sources from the Period of the Crusades
Elinoar Bareket (H)
Jewish Personal Names in Fatimid Egypt during the 11th Century
Yaakov Lattes (H)
Social Stratification and Topography according the Names Contained in the
Register of Jewish Community of Rome
Yosef Rivlin (H)
Double Given Names among Ashkenazic Jewry

526 The Essence of Jewish Names:
Chairperson: Aaron Demsky
Monday (1 Aug 2005) 17:30 - 19:30 Room: Auditorium

Aharon Appelfeld (H)
My Family Names

Panel Discussion: Onomastics and Jewish Studies (E)
Discussants:
Ariel Toaff
James L. Kugel
Shalom Rozenberg

EARLY DIASPORA SYNAGOGUES are the subject of a blog post by Philip Harland.

"PAUL AND QUMRAN" -- This is a 1998 essay by N. T. Wright, published originally in Bible Review and recently posted on Wright's website. Noted by Mark Goodacre and Bible and Interpretation News.

NEPHILIM IN THE NEWS:

Is Human Cloning Really A New Biomedical Breakthrough?
Human cloning in the laboratory is inevitable and will bring with it disastrous consequences, according to Matthew Omaye Ajiake, author of Nephilim: The First Human Clones. Ajiake makes a case for the existence of human clones in Old Testament times i...

Distribution Source : PRWeb

Date : Thursday, July 07, 2005

(PRWEB) July 7, 2005 -- In 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first surviving mammal known to be conceived by laboratory cloning. Other animals since Dolly, including horses and cattle, have been created using this method. The biotechnology used to create a human clone is essentially the same as that used to clone animals.

Human cloning in the laboratory is inevitable and will bring with it disastrous consequences, according to Matthew Omaye Ajiake, author of Nephilim: The First Human Clones.

Ajiake makes a case for the existence of human clones in Old Testament times in the form of the Nephilim, descendants of Cain, one of the sons of Adam. The Nephilim were referred to as "giants" and "the fallen ones" � unnatural and grotesque creatures.

[...]

Well, I'm glad that's cleared up.

THE SBL FORUM for July has articles on "Bible museums, theme parks, etc., that you might (or might not) choose to visit." Note in particular the one by Ben Su on "The Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center" which definitely should be in the "choose to" category. The Forum also has obituaries for Nahum Sarna and Paul Ricoeur.

(Via Bible and Interpretation News.)

A THIRD-CENTURY C.E. MOSAIC IN PALMYRA (SYRIA) shows a scene from classical mythology that "experts" say may have served as inspiration for the legend of the slaying of the dragon by St. George, England's patron saint:

Mosaic inspired image of England's favourite saint
By Norman Hammond, Archaeology Correspondent (Times of London)

THE earliest known template for the image of St George slaying the dragon has been found in Syria, archaeologists believe.

A mosaic floor dating from approximately AD260 depicting the figure who became the patron saint of England has been found in the city of Palmyra in the Syrian desert. Experts say that the portrait is one of the finest classical mosaics yet uncovered and may even be the source of the St George legend.

George was reputedly a Roman soldier, martyred in Palestine some 1,700 years ago. The mosaic shows Bellerophon, a hero in Greek mythology, killing a chimera, and it was found in what appears to have been a dining room in Palmyra.

[...]

It's a bit of a stretch between Bellerophon slaying the chimera and St. George slaying the dragon, but the mosaic is still cool. Follow the link for a picture.

(Via Archaeologica News.)

TIME-TRAVEL WATCH: Physicist Amos Ori at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa has proposed a model for "A New Class of Time Machine" whose "core would consist of a toroidal vacuum embedded in sphere of normal matter." This is good news, because other time machine proposals require exotic matter and other exceedingly hard-to-come-by items. Bring it on!

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: Ed Morrisey of the Captain's Quarters has an interesting story which reports that one Michael Sanders, who has an idiosyncratic theory about the location of the First Temple (that it was south of the Temple Mount in the City of David on the Gihon Spring rather than on the Temple Mount itself), e-mailed Newsweek a "Background Only" message to the effect that prominent Israeli archaeologist David Ussishkin thinks that the Jerusalem of the Solomonic period did not extend as far north as the Temple Mount, and therefore he implicitly supports Sanders's idea. Despite the clear "Background Only" subject header, a Newsweek representative e-mailed Professor Usshiskin about it and mentioned Michael Sanders as the source.

Three comments:

1. Captain Ed has a reputation for reliability and since he says that he verified the essentials of the story with Newsweek, I take it to be accurate.

2. If so, I would be cautious about telling Newsweek anything I didn't want my name attached to in public. But read also the comments to Captain Ed's post, some of which defend Newsweek and give advice on how such things should be approached. Glenn Reynolds also has advice.

3. Regarding the theory itself, I am not an archaeologist and will defer to any professional archaeologists specializing in Israel who want to comment. Evidently the claim is that Professor Ussishkin thinks something about the bounds of tenth-century BCE Jerusalem, not anything in particular about Sanders's theory about the Temple. Regarding the latter, I have to say I have a hard time imagining that a significant piece of monumental architecture like a Solomonic temple stood on the spot indicated and no one has noticed any trace of it since. And I'm not impressed with Sander's website. He gives no indication that he has any specialist training in archaeology or the history of Israel and his theory keeps some extremely wild company on the site (speculations about the locations of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Garden of Eden, and the Ark of the Covenant -- things that are not of great concern to real archaeologists, to put it mildly). I am not impressed by his critical faculties, nor am I willing to take his word for what Professor Ussishkin thinks or the implications thereof. Too bad Captain Ed doesn't report on any reply by Ussishkin to Juliet Chung. (She is perhaps taking Sanders a little too literally about Ussishkin supporting Sanders's theory. Any support seems to be indirect at best.)

I haven't seen the Biblical Archaeology Review article Sanders alludes to in his e-mail. Can someone tell me if Ussishkin in fact say this about the boundaries of Solomonic Jerusalem and, if so, whether he discuss the implications for Solomon's Temple?

NOTE (same day): I've fiddled some with this post since it was published to make sure I'm understanding and presenting the issues correctly.

(Heads up, Michael Safrin.)

LUBAVITCHER MESSIANISM and its connections with anti-disengagement activism in Israel are explored in a long Jerusalem Post article:

The messianic temptation
By MATI WAGNER

'Long live our master, our rebbe, the king messiah forever," shouted hundreds of Chabad hassidim at the end of the evening prayer in the courtyard outside Beit Menachem, the main synagogue in Kfar Chabad, the town across the road from Ben-Gurion Airport, which serves as the Lubavitch movement's Israeli headquarters.

Inside the synagogue, a bulky TV perched on a cabinet showed old videos of the movement's revered sage, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who died in 1994.

[...]

Messianists, known as mashichistim, also believe that the dissemination of the idea that Schneerson is the messiah helps prepare the world for the messianic era.

"The rebbe said that learning and teaching about the days of redemption help bring it closer," says [Rabbi Yigal] Pizam. "Understanding the concept that the rebbe is mashiach helps prepare a Jew for the messianic era, which is coming any minute now. Knowing that he is the mashiach makes the idea of redemption that much more real and, therefore, brings it closer."

Yet in addition to the evening's decidedly messianic message, there was another theme: "We express our protest against the government's dangerous policies in the Holy Land," read the flyer advertising the rally.

[...]

Unlike mashichistim, mainstream Chabadniks acknowledge the death of the rebbe, although many do not rule out the possibility that he could still be the rebbe once he is resurrected. But more importantly, unlike the mashichistim, mainstream Chabadniks tend to avoid talking about Schneerson's role in end-of-days redemption unless asked directly.

Aggressive Greater Israel activism seems to go hand in hand with rigorous messianism: mashichistim tend to be the same men in black suits and hats blocking roads, passing out anti-disengagement flyers and attending demonstrations. The way they see it, strong messianic beliefs go together with taking the disengagement struggle to the streets.

[...]

(Via Bible and Interpretation News.)

FALSE ALARM IN EDINBURGH:

Scottish police lower alert
07/07/2005 21:25 - (News 24, South Africa)

Gleneagles - Police on Thursday lowered their alert around a shopping area of the Scottish capital of Edinburgh after determining that a suspect package was harmless, police said.

Police had evacuated an area of Princes Street, a shopping district in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle, after a suspect package was found on a bus, a spokesperson said.

She said a bomb disposal squad had carried out a controlled explosion and found no sign the package contained any explosives.

[...]

Oddly, although both the Scotsman and the BBC have the story, they have not yet posted anything about the package being harmless. In any case, the police are right to be taking no chances. With the British Open coming to St. Andrews next week, we need to be especially vigilant. And get on with the show.

APOCRYPHA NOW! No, not that Apocrypha. Film apocrypha. Here's a cinematic apocryphon that seems relevant:

Ben-Hur (1959)

The Legend: A stuntman was killed during the shooting of the famous chariot race sequence. The shot was left in the final cut over the protests of the stuntman's widow.

The Facts: No stuntmen died during the filming of the 1959 version of Ben-Hur. One stuntman was injured in a spectacular mishap during the chariot race, and that shot was left in the film, to the protestations of no one. This legend may have originated in rumors that surrounded the shooting of Fred Niblo's earlier 1926 version of Ben-Hur, during which at least one stuntman was indeed killed in an accident.

I had only heard the "legend" version of this story.

"INTEREST" OR "USURY"? How should the biblical terms be translated? Also in the Forward, Philologos has the story.

THE LOGIC OF IMPURITY: In the Forward, Professor David Kraemer has some interesting reflections on the theory behind the biblical system of ritual impurity. I'm not sure whether I buy his interpretation or not.

CYBER-ARCHAEOLOGY: I would have noticed the news much earlier today, but it chanced I took the day off and spent the morning at home helping my son and his friend dissect an old MacIntoshPlus computer excavated from our garage. They marveled at the primitive technology used by the ancients.



This is the first photo I've posted using Blogger's new image-uploading facility. I'm impressed: it's easy to use and they provide 300 megabytes of free space. Well done.

EXPLOSIONS IN LONDON: There have been seven explosions, six in the the London Underground and one on a bus. Happened about three and a half hours ago. According to the BBC (to which I'm listening at the moment) at least 95 casualties reported in the Royal Hospital, some serious and critical. Two confirmed dead. Rescue operations in progress, many more casualties likely. They're saying the attacks are not on the same scale as Bali or Madrid and were designed to shut down London transportation. I have no idea whether that evaluation will bear up. Looks like a coordinated terrorist attack timed alongside the G8 meetings. Early claims of Al Qaeda responsibility, but BBC saying we should keep an open mind for now on who did it. The Prime Minister just addressed the nation, but had little info. Ongoing updates on the TV networks and the Command Post. My heart goes out to the victims.

UPDATE: The police seem to be revising the number of explosions down to four. I'm not going to continue blogging this; you all have access to better sources for this than me. In the spirit of not permitting terrorist scum to disrupt our lives, blogging on ancient Judaism etc. will continue now as normally.

DAF YOMI BLOGGING: Over at Mystical Politics, Rebecca Lesses points to three blogs that follow and comment on the Daf Yomi cycle.

"CYRUS-THE-GREAT" FILMMAKER in detention in Iraq:

U.S. Holds Filmmaker in Iraq
* Family drafts suit to free L.A. man working on a Cyrus the Great project. Pentagon plans hearing to determine if director is a security threat.

By Henry Weinstein, [Los Angeles] Times Staff Writer

Cyrus Kar's family says he left his Los Feliz apartment for Iraq to make a documentary film about a Persian king who wrote the world's first charter of human rights. But now they fear he may never get home.

On May 17, Kar was stopped at a Baghdad checkpoint in a taxi allegedly packed with a common component for improvised explosive devices, according to a Defense Department spokesman. Since then, he has been in U.S. military detention outside Baghdad.

[...]

About three years ago, Kar became interested in the history of ancient Persia, particularly the story of King Cyrus the Great, founder of Persia. He went to Iraq, over his family's objections, to film near Baghdad. He also filmed in Iran, Tajikistan, Turkey and Afghanistan and consulted with scholars.

David Stronach, professor of Near Eastern archeology at UC Berkeley, has signed a sworn declaration to be filed with the [family's federal] lawsuit, stating that he has known Kar for more than two years and has "assisted him in making his documentary" about Cyrus the Great, whom he described as "one of history's most extraordinary figures."

Stronach said Cyrus "is mentioned many times in the Bible, not least because he liberated the captive Jewish community in Babylon � an event that allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem, rebuild the temple, and arguably, provide the conditions that permitted the birth of Christianity.

"It is impossible to tell the story of Cyrus without bringing in the subject of Babylon, his latest and greatest conquest, and one which had quite exceptional consequences. It is therefore unsurprising to me that Cyrus Kar thought it essential to go to Babylon � in present-day Iraq � to finish filming his documentary."

[...]

It's always difficult to judge such situations without access to all the information. But this one doesn't sound good.

ED COOK reports a recent telephone conversation with Hershel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archaeology Review, about the problem of unprovenanced antiquities. Me, I still can't suggest any solution better than the one Joe Zias came up with on the ANE list in January (sorry, all the ANE links seem to have gone dead): flood the market with first-rate fakes so that no dealer or collector will trust the genuineness of any unprovenanced artifact and looters will give up and turn to more profitable lines of work. If you have a better idea, speak up!

UPDATE (6 July): No one has pointed out the main objection to Joe's proposal -- that it would be illegal. Let me clarify that I mean that if there is any campaign of forgeries to undermine the antiquities market, it should be coordinated with the authorities (IAA, police, etc.). It would, after all, save them a lot of trouble in the long run.

VIGILIAE CHRISTIANAE has a recent issue (59.2, 2005) with an article of interest:

"Content Divine Infinity in Gregory of Nyssa and Philo of Alexandria"
pp. 152-177
Author: Geljon, Albert-Kees

Requires a paid personal or institutional subscription to access.

JEWISH STUDIES, AN INTERNET JOURNAL (JSIJ) has published several articles in this year's volume 4. For some reason these are listed on the page for forthcoming articles rather than the page for current articles. I haven't been keeping up as they've been posted, so here are abstracts of three that are of interest:

Judith Hauptman, "The Tosefta as a Commentary on an Early Mishnah" (English)

Recent scholarship has demonstrated that much of the Tosefta precedes the Mishnah and serves as its basis. However, this raises a fundamental question: how could the Tosefta have been a source of the Mishnah, if the Tosefta is essentially a wide-ranging commentary on and supplement to the Mishnah, as evidenced by the fact that numerous passages in the Tosefta make no sense on their own, and can only be understood when read together with the text on which they comment?

The author suggests that while the Tosefta often comments on a Mishnah, this was not *our* Mishnah, but rather some other, organized, older collection of tannaitic teachings. Numerous examples are adduced to prove this point, thereby providing evidence for the existence of a version of the Mishnah which preceded our Mishnah, which was used and modified by the redactor of our Mishnah.

Amram Tropper,"Yohanan ben Zakkai, Amicus Caesaris: A Jewish Hero in Rabbinic Eyes" (English)

In the foundation myth of Yavneh, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai flees besieged Jerusalem, surrenders to the Romans, predicts Vespasian�s promotion to emperor and is subsequently granted Yavneh as a new center for the rabbinic movement. This rabbinic story risks portraying Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai as a deserter, perhaps even as a traitor and it is puzzling that the rabbis would have depicted one of the most important sages of the formative period in rabbinic Judaism in such a potentially damaging fashion. Indeed, the nationalistic atmosphere that reigned in Judea during the late first and early second centuries would probably have discouraged contemporary rabbis from portraying a rabbinic hero in this manner, and accordingly, there is not even a hint of the escape story in tannaitic literature. I suggest, however, that later rabbis were comfortable depicting Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai in this potentially unflattering manner because of the precedent set by Jeremiah. Jeremiah�s experiences during the destruction of the First Temple, as narrated in the Bible, resemble those of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai at the end of the Second Temple period, and it seems that the rabbis typologically depicted Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai as the Jeremiah of the Second Temple.

Ronit Shoshany, "Rabbi Elazar ben Shimeon and the Thieves�A Story of Sin and Atonement" (Hebrew)

The story of R. Elazar and the thieves consists of two parts. The first part describes R. Elazar�s service under Roman rule as a thief-catcher (Bavli, Bava Metzi�a 83b). The story is interrupted by a sequence of short stories, concluding with the story of R. Yohanan and Resh Lakish (84a). This interruption is apparently an intentional editorial one, aimed at encouraging the reader to compare the stories of R. Elazar and R. Yohanan. There are several similar motifs, but there is an important difference between the two stories: R. Yohanan mourns for the dead Resh Lakish, but does not repent for having caused his death by his cruel behavior, whereas R. Elazar deeply repents of his misconduct. This repentance and self-punishment is described in the second part of the story (84b). In this article, I present a close reading of the two parts of the story of R. Elazar, and a detailed comparison between this story and that of R. Yohanan. I argue that the main theme of R. Elazar�s story is his sincere repentance and atonement, which eventually enables acknowledgment of his righteousness by readers of the story.

The full texts can be downloaded in Word or PDF format.

FONT MACBLEG: Can anyone out there explain to me -- as usual, in simple terms suitable for an idiot -- how to configure a blogspot blog to display Hebrew and Greek fonts? I can view them fine on other blogs, but haven't figured out how to embed them in blog posts myself. Perhaps the problem is that I'm using a Macintosh system (OS X 10.3.5 if it matters). I have already configured the International Input Menu to include Hebrew and Greek fonts and I can type these fonts with TextEdit. Any help would be much appreciated.

UPDATE: ?????? ??? ????? ?? ????? ??? ????

Problem solved. My thanks to Tyler F. Williams for sending me the solution. In case you're interested, this is his e-mail:

One thing I noticed about your blog is that you do not have a meta tag indicating what character set you want your page to be displayed in (so I imagine it is assuming ASCII or something like that).

Try including the following meta tag in the <*head> section of your blog template:

<*meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8">

This will set your page to be able to display Unicode fonts (that is what the utf-8 indicates)

I have added an asterisk at the beginning of both tags so they show up. I have no idea why that meta tag wasn't there. Does everybody else just know to add these things?

The Hebrew font used above is from David Instone-Brewer's Tyndale Unicode Font Kit for Macs, available from the Tyndale House Fonts for Biblical Studies page.

UPDATE (5 July): Oh oh ... publishing a new post seems to have wiped the Hebrew from this one. Does anyone have any suggestions on what to do now?

UPDATE (6 July): I may have figured out the problem. Let's see if the Hebrew stays this time.

THE CITY OF ASHDOD is profiled in the Jerusalem Post. It was rebuilt on its current site only in 1957, but it goes back to the biblical period and even was home to some of our friends the giants.

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY to American readers!

UPDATE: I finally broke down and turned on the space heater in my office. Think of me today while you're sunning on the beach, attending your picnic, and enjoying your Fourth of July barbecue.

UPDATE: Cold enough to turn on the heat in the morning, warm enough for a hay fever attack -- this is just wrong!

WATERSTONE'S UPDATE: Regular readers will recall my fulminations in January about Waterstone's bookstore's firing of Joe Gordon in Edinburgh for blog posts that criticized the company. I hadn't heard the result of his appeal until a short time ago and only yesterday did I have time to track down the details. In case you haven't heard, Joe's situation was resolved satisfactorily for all concerned. The publicity caught the attention of the Forbidden Planet book chain, they liked what they heard about Joe, and in February they hired him as a manager and the maintainer of their new blog. Meanwhile, the wheels of the appeal ground slowly until, in April, the case was resolved in Joe's favor. He was offered reinstatement, but since he now had a better and better-paying job elsewhere, "an amicable settlement was achieved in place of reinstatement" (which I take to mean that Waterstone's coughed up some monetary compensation). I haven't been in the vicinity of a Waterstone's for quite some time, but when I am again I will no longer be avoiding it (although between Amazon and the newish St. Andrews Ottakars, my book needs are pretty well served).

Lessons:

For bloggers: don't criticize your employer on your blog unless you have a durn good reason and you understand that you may have to deal with the consequences. There may be rare cases in which such criticism is justified, but a blog is not the place for grumbling about the pointy-haired boss.

For employers: if an employee says something intemperate on a blog, try to solve the problem with a private word to the blogger. Most people have sense enough to take down an unreasonable post if it's pointed out to them (Joe would have). And don't even think of firing the employee unless you can show that all reasonable steps short of that have been taken first.

Belated congratulations to both Joe Gordon and Waterstone's for coming to terms on this and getting it behind them.

BLOG WATCH: Jim West blogs on a seal inscription mentioning a Hananel whom Giovanni Garbini thinks was an Ammonite king of Jerusalem in the 7th century BCE. News to me. [LATER: More here.] Joe Cathey blogs on a new edition of Von Rad's The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays, editied by K. C. Hanson. And Phil Harland picks up on my post "Giants, Aliens, and Josephus" from last month and discusses "Aliens, Fallen Angels, and Heaven's Gate."

UPDATE: Note also Michael Homan's entries on his archaeological work this season at Zeitah in Israel. Start here and keep moving forward. Note this one in particular. (I think there may be one or two earlier relevant posts, but I can't get Michael's archive to work.) Ron Tappy and I dug at the same time at Ashkelon when we were both lowly postgraduates, and I have fond memories of the Ashkelon beach.

WHAT DOES "ISCARIOT" MEAN? More good Aramaic philology from Ed Cook and a good example of why Jastrow's Dictionary must be used with caution.

HOW DO YOU SAY "BLOG" IN LATIN? Find out here.

THE AFTERLIFE OF THE TEMPLE: Here's an interview with Simon Goldhill, author of The Temple of Jerusalem (Wonders of the World; Harvard University Press, 2005):

Construction Site

A history of the Second Temple unearths an archaeology of fantasy and longing.

INTERVIEW BY Franklin Toker

Built by Herod 20 years before the Common Era, the Second Temple�a magnificent recreation of an earlier structure built by King Solomon and destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C.E.�stood in Jerusalem for less than a century. Despite its short life, the legacy of Herod's effort has lasted millennia, bolstered by the discovery of archaeological relics and by continuing discussions of its grandeur that date back to Josephus's histories, written in the first century C.E.. In The Temple of Jerusalem, Simon Goldhill, a fellow of King's College, Cambridge University, and author of Foucault's Virginity: Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of Sexuality, examines the Temple's endurance as an object of religious and political fascination. He discusses this architectural marvel and his book, part of Harvard University Press's Wonders of the World series, with Franklin Toker.

[...]

There are also some cool pictures of artistic representations of the Temple throughout the ages.

I hope the last paragraph of the interview is wrong.

"HOW MANY CONSONANTS DID HEBREW HAVE? This is a trick question." -- Seth Sanders at Serving the Word.

HISTORY CARNIVAL XI is up at the Siris blog. Both PaleoJudaica and Ralph the Sacred River are featured.

THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE SECOND ENOCH SEMINAR have been published by Eerdmans:

Enoch and Qumran Origins: New Light on a Forgotten Connection
Gabriele Boccaccini (editor)

$40.00 Paperback

In stock (Usually ships within 3 business days)

472 pages; dimensions (in inches): 6.25 x 9.25; 2005

ISBN: 0-8028-2878-7

The rediscovery of Enochic Judaism as an ancient movement of dissent within Second Temple Judaism, a movement centered on neither temple nor torah, is a major achievement of contemporary research. After being marginalized, ancient Enoch texts have reemerged as a significant component of the Dead Sea Scrolls library unearthed at Qumran.

Enoch and Qumran Origins is the first comprehensive treatment of the complex and forgotten relations between the Qumran community and the Jewish group behind the pseudepigraphal literature of Enoch. The contributors demonstrate that the roots of the Qumran community are to be found in the tradition of the Enoch group rather than that of the Jerusalem priesthood.

Framed by Gabriele Boccaccini�s introduction and James Charlesworth�s conclusion, this book examines the hypotheses of five particularly eminent scholars, resulting in an engaging and substantive discussion among forty-seven specialists from nine countries. The exceptional array of essays from leading international scholars in Second Temple Judaism and Christian origins makes Enoch and Qumran Origins a sine qua non for serious students of this period.

Contributors:

William Adler
Matthias Albani
Jeff S. Anderson
Albert I. Baumgarten
Andreas Bedenbender
Stefan Beyerle
Gabriele Boccaccini
James H. Charlesworth
John J. Collins
Michael A. Daise
James R. Davila
Torleif Elgvin
Mark A. Elliott
Hanan Eshel
Peter W. Flint
Ida Fr�hlich
Florentino Garc�a Mart�nez
Claudio Gianotto
Lester L. Grabbe
Ithamar Gruenwald
Charlotte Hempel
Matthias Henze
Martha Himmelfarb
Michael A. Knibb
Klaus Koch
Helge S. Kvanvig
Armin Lange
Erik W. Larson
Timothy H. Lim
Corrado Martone
George W. E. Nickelsburg
Pierluigi Piovanelli
�mile Puech
Annette Yoshiko Reed
John C. Reeves
Henry W. Morisada Rietz
Paolo Sacchi
Lawrence H. Schiffman
Loren T. Stuckenbruck
David W. Suter
Shemaryahu Talmon
Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar
Patrick Tiller
Liliana Rosso Ubigli
James C. VanderKam
Jacques van Ruiten
Benjamin G. Wright III

MESSIANIC WOES FOR THE LUBAVITCHERS:

Lubavitch�s Open Wound At 770
Destroyed plaque honoring rebbe points to new round in battle over messianism and control of movement.
Debra Nussbaum Cohen - Staff Writer (Jewish World)

If ever an architectural feature of a building�s exterior stood as a symbol for the life within, then the defaced plaque honoring the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson at Lubavitch headquarters in Crown Heigh ts is it.

Like the jagged fault line that eventually brings down the mansion in the famous Edgar Allan Poe story �Fall of the House of Usher,� the cornerstone � which has been vandalized many times over the past few months and was violently ripped out this week � has come to represent a movement bitterly split by those who believe Rabbi Schneerson is the messiah and those who do not.

The plaque was put up seven years ago by the anti-messianists and bears the inscription �of blessed memory� after the rebbe�s name, referring to him in past tense.

Apparently that was too much to bear for some messianists who began defacing it as soon as it was set in place.

[...]

For more on this movement see here and here.

This passage from the article is interesting from a history of religions perspective:

�I describe the rebbe as alive,� Rabbi Sokolovsky said in an interview. �The body of moshiach does not die, even if it appears to be so. A tzaddik [righteous person] can materialize himself in the world if he needs to. �Concealment does not mean that the rebbe has an invisible body,� he said. �It has to do with people�s readiness to see it. It�s people�s perception.�

Rabbi Sokolovsky said he has met people who have seen the rebbe in person since he died.

Messianic resurrection appearances in the twenty-first century.

NEPHILIM IN THE NEWS: Here's a review of The Fallen Ones a made-for-TV movies that was shown on the Sci-Fi Channel in May. Excerpt:

The Fallen Ones

Horror films, just like any film genre, seem to go through periods of topic convergence. Recently we've seen a resurgence of the zombie film, as well as animals-eating-people movies; a couple of years ago there was a slew of demonic possession and substantiation flicks; before that there was a slasher renaissance; and right around the millennium there were a number of supernaturally-caused apocalypse movies.

Another popular subject of late has been fallen angels, either with or without an accompanying war amongst the heavenly host. Some of these have focused, wholly or in part, on nephilim, which are the offspring of angels and human women and were, according to some of the apocrypha, giants. The Fallen Ones, another from the Sci-Fi Originals stable, follows the giant theory of nephilim, and also throws in an end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it gambit for good measure.

The reviewer, Stephanie Star Smith, seems to think this one is a better-than-usual horror movie, "a notch or six above the formulaic." Plus, there are good explosions.

Given that it doesn't pretend to be real, it gets more points in my book than this.

SOME GOOD NEWS on the Israeli/Palestinian archaeology front. The US Department of State has posted the following article:

Palestinian, Israeli Scholarly Teams Preserve Shared Heritage Sites
Local communities encouraged to participate in site protection

By David C. Walsh
Washington File Special Correspondent

Washington -- Since 2001, two teams of scholars and scientists, one based in Israel, the other in the Palestinian territories, have worked on a cooperative project to preserve historical sites that are important to the Jewish, Muslim and Christian religions.

The project, called the People to People Exchange Program, was funded by a $400,000 Department of State grant as an outgrowth of the U.S.-brokered Wye River Accords, signed by Israeli and Palestinian negotiators at the Wye River Plantation in Maryland in 1998.

The Israeli team, from the Zinman Institute of Archaelogy at the University of Haifa, focuses on the historic and religious structures in Akko, northern Israel, one of the world's oldest continuously inhabited cities. The Israeli team is led by Ann E. Killebrew of Haifa University. She is assisted by Mina Evron, head of the Zinman Institute and Wye Project co-coordinator. Participants on the Israeli team include Israeli Jews, Israeli Muslims, Israeli Christians, Germans and other Europeans, and Americans.

The Palestinian Association for Cultural Exchange (PACE) team focuses on heritage initiatives in two important biblical sites in the West Bank: Beitin (old Bethel) and el Jib (old Gibeon). Team leader Adel Yahyeh, an archaeologist and PACE�s director, said, �Both were in a fragile state, threatened by roiling political currents and largely neglected.�

Rehabilitation was achieved �in close cooperation with the people of the two villages,� he said. The Palestinian cadre also was a diverse group, with Germans, Italian-Americans, and various university grad students and interns.

[...]

More please!

THE DISCOVERY OF THE CHESTER BEATTY PAPYRI: On the Textual Criticism list, Wieland Willker has posted a contemporary account of the discovery of these New Testament and Septuagint manuscripts in Egypt in the 1930s.

ELECTRONIC GREEK PHILO: Daniel Foster and Rick Brannan have e-mailed to alert me that Logos Software is offering the Greek text of Philo in a searchable electronic text. There's a special deal for pre-publication orders. Details here. The announcement begins:

Imagine being able to ask questions of a first-century Hellenistic Jewish philosopher, a contemporary of Jesus and Paul who worked to understand Mosaic thought in light of Greek ideals. What kinds of questions would you ask to better understand the theology, interpretive strategies, and historical context of the biblical writers, who often wrestled with the same task?

The writings of Philo Judaeus, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, between approximately 20 B.C. and A.D. 40, provide a fascinating glimpse into the world of Jesus and the Apostles. In fact, Philo�s works are a goldmine of information on Jewish exegetical methods, the worldview of the apostles, and theological matters of great importance for Christianity.

We are pleased to bring you the first electronic edition of the complete works of Philo in Greek, morphologically tagged. This resource is built upon the database compiled by the Norwegian "Philo Concordance Project," which published the first complete, printed concordance of Philo in 2000. The Logos Bible Software resource includes the complete works of Philo, in Greek, drawn from the same four text editions used to compile the concordance (Cohn & Wendland, Colson, Petit, and Paramelle). The lemmatization and morphology are also supplied by the Philo Concordance Project scholars.

A "BIBLICAL THEME PARK" has just opened in Eilat.

MORE ON THE RUSSIAN "INVESTIGATION" of Jewish literature as incitement to religious hatred. This week's Forward has a different version of the story:

After World Pressure, Russia Abandons Investigation Denounced as 'Blood Libel'
By E.B. solomont
July 1, 2005

Following an international outcry, state prosecutors in Moscow have abandoned an investigation into claims that a centuries-old code of Jewish law contains racist and anti-Russian material.

Prosecutors had been investigating the Congress of Jewish Religious Communities and Organizations of Russia because of its role in publishing and distributing Russian translations of the Shulchan Aruch, the 16th-century code written by Rabbi Joseph Caro. The organization's leader, Rabbi Zinovy Kogan, was questioned last week as part of an investigation reportedly launched at the behest of Russian nationalists, who said the code incited ethnic hatred and racism.

"It's not only a story about the Shulchan Aruch," Kogan told the Forward. "This conflict about the book is an attack on Judaism in Russia... an attack on the right of Jews to be Jews in Russia."

[...]

My emphasis. I think there must be a mix-up here. The earlier articles said that the text in question was the Kitzar Shulhan Arukh, which is a nineteenth-century compendium of material from the Shulhan Arukh. The point remains the same, but someone is confused about which document was being accused.

ANOTHER SARNA OBITUARY, this one by his son, Jonathan, in the Forward:

Biblical Scholar Nahum Sarna, 'Understanding Genesis' Author
By Jonathan D. Sarna
July 1, 2005

When I picture my father, my abba, renowned biblical scholar and translator Nahum Sarna, I inevitably picture him studying. His favorite room, by far, was his book-lined study: There he sat, morning, noon and long past nightfall, reading, writing and teaching.

[...]

BLOG WATCH: Ed Cook critiques one of Maurice Casey's Aramaic retroversions over at Ralph, and at Mystical Politics Rebecca Lesses alerts us to some modern-day Jewish amulets written by a soferet -- a female Jewish scribe. Cool.

PHILIP DAVIES: "DO WE NEED BIBLICAL SCHOLARS?" An interesting essay on the Bible and Intepretation website.

Personally, I think Philip is treating the problem too much as though it applies only to biblical studies. Educating university administrators and the public is something all academics have to do, and frequently this involves clearing up common misunderstandings, whatever the field. My friends who are physicists, biologists, classicists, economists, etc. have to do this too. Granted, biblical studies has its own set of problems, but so do other fields. And in general nonspecialists (usually including me!) have only the vaguest idea of what these specialists do and why it matters, and often what nonspecialists think that they (we) know about an academic field is full of misconceptions. This is the price we pay for the necessity of narrow specializations. Indeed, specialists within a field often have little understanding of what some other specialists in the same general field are doing. I think it's to the credit of the public (and university administrators) that they understand the value of supporting what we do, even if they don't understand exactly what it is. And, of course, that makes it all the more crucial that we explain the main points to them in nontechnical language that makes sense to them.

In blogs, for instance.

UPDATE: Helenann Hartley corrects a quotation in the essay.

CORRECTIONS TO NYT SARNA OBITUARY: A post on the H-JUDAIC list by Ellen Frankel, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of the Jewish Publication Society, includes the following:

On June 25, The New York Times ran an obituary for Nahum Sarna that contained several errors. Both Jonathan Sarna and I alerted the writer, Wolfgang Saxon, that Dr. Sarna served as Chair of the JPS Committee for the Translation of Kethuvim, the Writings, not the Torah; and that the JPS book, JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture, was written by Jonathan, not Nahum Sarna. The Times has promised to run a correction.

THE KITZUR SHULHAN ARUKH -- INCITEMENT TO RELIGIOUS HATRED? Here's an example of what laws against incitement to religious hatred lead to:

Russia examines Jewish religious texts

MARIA DANILOVA

Associated Press

MOSCOW - Prosecutors have launched an investigation into whether a Russian translation of an ancient Jewish religious text incites national and religious hatred, a move condemned by many Jewish organizations as anti-Semitic.

Moscow district prosecutors summoned Rabbi Zinovy Kogan for questioning last week as part of a probe into whether the Russian translation of Kitsur Shulhan Arukh, a code of ancient Jewish religious laws, provokes religious hatred, Kogan told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Monday.

The investigation was meant to review a ruling last month by Moscow prosecutors that the text did not inspire hatred and a criminal case was not warranted, said Kogan, chairman of the Congress of Jewish Religious Organizations who published the translated text.

[...]

The Kitzur Shulhan Arukh is a nineteenth-century compendium from the centrally important sixteenth-century law code the Shulhan Arukh. I've not read it, but evidently it has highly stringent tendencies and is not everyone's cup of tea. But attempting to ban it is blatant anti-Semitism. This is the sort of mess we could end up in here in Britain if the law against inciting religious hatred is passed.

UPDATE: Ha'aretz sums the story up: "A dark reminder of the Dark Ages."

UPDATE (29 June): Apparently the investigation has been dropped. This time. But the fact that there had to be an investigation at all -- the fact that a ridiculous and openly anti-Semitic charge like this was taken that seriously -- shows why this sort of law should never be on the books.

Russian prosecutors drop investigation into ancient Jewish text

By Henry Meyer
ASSOCIATED PRESS

3:38 p.m. June 28, 2005

MOSCOW � Prosecutors dropped an inquiry Tuesday into whether a Russian translation of an ancient Jewish text incites national and religious hatred � a decision that drew praise from Russia's chief rabbi and Israel's vice premier.

Rabbi Berel Lazar said he had contacted prosecutors to explain that the text was not aimed at non-Jews and to complain that officials seeking the probe had "anti-Semitic sentiments."

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"I'm happy that this case has been dropped," Lazar told The Associated Press, adding that he'd been personally informed of the decision by the Moscow prosecutor's office.

The prosecutor's office declined comment. That office was responsible for the investigation into whether the Russian translation of Kitsur Shulhan Arukh, a code of ancient Jewish religious laws, provokes religious hatred.

[...]

SBL BLOGGING: Jeffery Hodges and Tim Bulkeley are in Singapore, blogging the International Society of Biblical Literature conference. Tim has discovered my principle that "a paper handout doesn't crash and have to be rebooted just as you're supposed to be starting your presentation." Remember, PowerPoint is evil!

I hope they get to see those Dead Sea Scrolls at the Vatican exhibit (see immediately preceding post).

UPDATE (28 June): Mark Cheesman is there too and is posting on Deinde (as noted by Michael Pahl).

DEAD SEA SCROLLS IN SINGAPORE UPDATE: Reader Coleman Yee e-mails:

I just came back from the museum exhibition and am able to confirm that they do have the 2 tiny DSS fragments. The info in the g-Megillot list is more or less accurate, except that the first fragment is not actually from Daniel, but the Hebrew word found in the fragment (described in g-Megillot) can only be found in Daniel 11:36. According to the exhibition catalog, "it is possible to imagine that the fragment belongs to a non-biblical book..."

Interesting. Now the question is, how is the Vatican connected with the fragments?

ARMENIAN LANGUAGE RESOURCES: Rick Brannan has the low-down over at Ricoblog. Ancient Armenian was an important translation language not only for the New Testament, but also for Philo of Alexandria (some of whose works survive only in Armenian) and for some Old Testament pseudepigrapha.

Bet you didn't know that there was an Armeniapedia.

ON INCITING RELIGIOUS HATRED: The bill to make illegal the incitement of religious hatred in Britain passed its second reading in the House of Commons last Tuesday. It now "goes to committee" for further review and then to the House of Lords. You can read the British Government's case for it here.

This is what the bill is about, according to the Goverment website FAQ:

* The Government is extending protection to prevent hatred being stirred up against people targeted because of their religious beliefs, or lack of religious beliefs, as well as people targeted because of their race.
* This is being done through the Serious and Organised Crime and Police Bill, by expanding the existing criminal offences of incitement to racial hatred contained in the Public Order Act 1986.
* The provisions make it an offence for a person to knowingly use threatening, abusive, or insulting words or behaviour with the intention or likelihood that they will stir up hatred against a group of people based on their religious beliefs.
* It is about protecting people who might be the object of someone else�s hatred because of their religion; not about protecting religion itself.

Here are a couple of passages from this FAQ that should be underlined:

In keeping with similar legislation, the proposals do not define the meaning of religion. �Religious hatred� is defined as �hatred against a group of people defined by their religious beliefs or lack of religious belief�. Explanatory notes have been published which provide a non-exhaustive list of widely practised religions and clearly explain that the protection also covers people identified with a particular branch of a religion. They also stress that the protection of the offence covers Atheists, Humanists and Agnostics. When the circumstances are unclear, the courts will decide whether a particular group of people is protected, in the wider context of the criminal behaviour being considered. If the courts ruled that a new religious movement qualified as a religion for the purposes of the new offence, that would not prevent criticism of the practices of that movement.

And this:

The proposed and existing offences both carry a high threshold in order to protect freedom of speech. Words, behaviour or material used must be threatening, abusive or insulting and must either be intended to or likely to stir up hatred. The hatred must be aimed at people who are members of that group, not ideologies. Hatred is a strong term; which goes beyond ridicule, prejudice, dislike, contempt, anger or offence. A further safeguard in the legislation is that a person who does not intend to stir up hatred is not guilty of an offence if they did not know that their words, behaviour, written material, recording or programmes were threatening, abusive or insulting. Furthermore the offences do not apply to anything that takes place in one�s own home. All prosecutions require the consent of the Attorney General, which will prevent the offences being misused through private prosecutions. We believe the wording of the offences, the public interest test applied by the CPS, and the veto of the Attorney General are sufficient to safeguard freedom of speech.

There are some points about this proposed law which I would like to make. I'm not the first to make any of them, but they are worth belaboring.

First, there is no need for it. There are already laws that protect people from religious persecution (i.e., violence against one's person or property, or threats of or incitement of others to violence). People do not need to be protected from having someone hate their religion or express that hatred in words that fall short of threat of or incitement to violence. Sticks and stones, etc.

Second, even if this law results in only a few prosecutions (and I'll believe that when I see it), it will have a chilling effect on free speech. People will censor themselves when talking about religion, which is not good. It will push actual religious hatred underground without diminishing it, and at the same time will stifle legitimate debate about religious issues. In both cases, problems that might benefit from open discussion will fester rather than having a chance to come to any resolution.

Third, ultimately the legislation assumes, indeed requires, the goodwill of the government. The term "religion" is explicitly not defined, and probably couldn't be defined for a purpose like this. That means there's never any way to be quite sure what the law is about. The Attorney General is given tremendous latitude, and therefore tremendous power, to interpret this law, since no one actually knows what it means. It may be that this power will be used wisely and justly. But it may not be, even in the short term. Once the government has the power, it can do whatever it wants with it, whatever promises it may have made. It is not unheard-of for politicians to break their promises. And in the long run, there is serious danger that mission creep and growing distance from its original context will lead to this law being misused to criminalize legitimate free speech.

There is a larger problem here that should be mentioned: the danger of "positive rights." The point of the Bill of Rights of the American Constitution is to lay out a broad range of areas in which the government does not have the right to interfere in the life of the individual. These are "negative rights" and they are the foundation of any free society. Positive rights, that is rights to particular things which the government has to enforce, are necessary in some cases (see above for examples), but are carry serious risks of abuse and need to be strictly circumscribed. The "rights" to, say, education or "access to placement services" or -- the issue in question here -- freedom from hatred being directed toward your religion by other citizens (again, short of violence or threat of/incitement to violence) increase the power of government to interfere with individuals and the last in particular increases it in an open-ended, unpredictable and uncontrollable way. The preoccupation with positive rights is a central failing of EU legislation and is one of the problems with the (now hopefully defunct) European Constitution and one of the reasons it was the size of a telephone directory.

Obviously, this legislation against inciting religious hatred could have profound implications for academics who specialize in religion and for bloggers who write about it. If the law passes, it can scarcely be doubted that there will be people who test it by trying to bring charges against others even on specious or frivolous grounds, and it is scant comfort that the Sword of Damocles will be restrained only by the thread of the Attorney General's goodwill and good sense.

This is no way to govern. We can only hope that the mounting backlash against this bill will stop it before it is made into law.

UPDATE: Greetings Daily Dish readers. While you're here, please have a look at the "Memorable PaleoJudaica Posts" link and my recent article "Assimilated to the Blogosphere: Blogging Ancient Judaism."

UPDATE (28 June): Here's a concrete example of what such laws lead to.

UPDATE (3 July): Welcome also to readers of Britblog #20.

THE SUDOKU CRAZE leads the Jerusalem Post ("Crazy about numbers") into an excursus on numbers in Judaism, especially gematria.

The Jewish people are no newcomers to numbers, or even to doing mental gymnastics with them. We find numbers in ancient Jewish sources: Starting off in the Bible with the days of the creation, there are the dimensions of Noah's Ark, the numbers of its inhabitants, and so forth (or fifth). Indeed, a whole book of the Pentateuch is entitled "Numbers" in English, because of the census of the Jewish people in the desert. Numbers featuring in the Bible's text range from one to 100 million (Daniel 7:10).

The traditional Pessah Haggada is positively overflowing with numbers, and the climax of the Seder is the numerical riddle song, "Who Knows One?" Numbers mentioned in the Haggada text range from 1?2 to 10 9 (one billion, or one with nine zeros after it).

Numbers often feature in discussions in the Talmud, and of course there is the discipline of gematria, which uses the numerical values of the letters in the Hebrew alphabet (aleph = 1, kaf = 20, koof = 100) as a means of interpretation and commonly accords significance to concepts or phenomena which share the same numerical value. There are several weird and wonderful methods used in calculating gematrias, such as "small numbers," "filling," "great numbers" squares and factorials.

Examples follow.

The craze (Sudoku, not gematria) has hit Britain too. My wife and son are working on Sudoku puzzles here even as I write.

THOUGHTS ON ANTIQUITY is a newish blog by Chris Weimer, a student at the University of Memphis, Tennessee. The blurb for the blog is as follows:

This weblog focuses on Ancient Cultures of the world, from the Ancient Mesopotamian world to Egyptian pyramids, from Greek mysteries to Roman commissatio, from China to the Aztec, all things in antiquity.

See also his website called Neonostalgia.