THE LARGE RUIN IN JERUSALEM excavated by Eilat Mazar was in the news again last week in Ha'aretz ("A debate of biblical proportions"). There's some interesting new information, especially interviews with other archaeologists and some details about the stratigraphy which call into question a strictly 10th-century date. Excerpts (but read it all):

Nor does Professor Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University's Department of Archaeology, a leader of the band of Israeli archaeologists who doubt David's greatness, share Mazar's exuberance, which he terms a messianic outburst. "Once every few years, they find something in Jerusalem that seems to confirm the biblical description of the magnitude of the kingdom in the time of David. After a while, it turns out that there is no real substance to the findings, and the excitement subsides, until the next outburst," he says.

[...]

Professor Finkelstein has visited the City of David excavation, and says that he was impressed by two of the walls built of large stones, but that it is very difficult to date them precisely because of construction work in the area over the years. "One thing that can be said with certainty is that these walls were built before the Roman period [which begins in the late first century BCE]. Between that and the conclusion that these are the foundation walls of a palace from the period of King David is a pretty far stretch," adds Finkelstein.

Finkelstein says the latest of the many pottery shards found in the earthen fill on which the walls were built are circa the 9th century BCE or even later - and not the 12th or 11th centuries, as Mazar claims. He links the pottery to a structure that was discovered in Area G, not far from the site of Mazar's dig. This structure, which is called the Stepped Stone Structure, is a retaining wall that was built to prevent the collapse of the slope. Finkelstein says that pottery from the 9th century BCE, and maybe even from the 8th century BCE, was also found in the Stepped Stone Structure.

"Based on these findings, it may be possible to conclude that the walls in Mazar's excavation are from the 9th century or the early 8th century BCE," he says. "That is an important finding, because it describes an interim stage in the development of Jerusalem from a small and pretty meager village, as it was in the 10th century BCE, into an important, large and fortified provincial city. But it arrived at this status not in the 10th century BCE, but rather in the 8th century BCE, about 250 years after David's time."

This is obviously a debate that is going to go on for a long time, and it won't even get properly started until the site is published fully -- which undoubtedly will take some years.

(Heads-up, Mladen Popovic.)

THE JOURNAL OF SEMITIC STUDIES has a new issue (50.2, Autumn 2005) out. Some relevant articles include:

Hans-Peter Müller
Der Gottesname B'L Und Seine Phraseologien Im Hebräischen und im Phönizisch-Punischen
J Semitic Studies 2005 50: 281-296

The article deals with the semantics of Hebrew and Phoenicio-Punic b'l and with its functions in special phrases indicating attributes, appositions, localizations etc., above all in the phrase ba'al samayim and its isoglosses. Its ultimate aim is to make a proposal on the function of Ba'al religion as such in the context of the Ancient Oriental view of life.

Avi Sheveka
A Trace of the Tradition of Diplomatic Correspondence in Royal Psalms
J Semitic Studies 2005 50: 297-320

This paper suggests that the phrase וארשת שפתיו בל מנעת (Ps. 21:2) reflects an idiom from the tradition of diplomatic correspondence (documented in EA9), that expresses a proper ‘brotherhood’ relationship between equal kings. Besides explaining the use of the hapax legomenon ארשת in this specific instance, this assumption gives us a key to explaining the fact that a variant of this word — ירשת — appears in another psalm (Ps. 61:6) in a very similar context. The author suggests that the Israelite court scribes saw this word as particularly designated for requests made by a king from his counterpart, because they knew this word — which disappeared from Hebrew — only through their education in schools for scribes, where they were trained in the international diplomatic style. In both cases, then, the use of this word was a result of a conscious intention to imitate diplomatic style while referring to relations between the king and God, an intention motivated by rhetorical needs. This attempt exposes for us some of the authors' theological conceptions. While proving these conclusions the author reexamines the debated question of Psalm 61's classification, and shows that there are decisive arguments for deciding (versus the dominant opinion) that this is indeed a royal psalm.

Vincent DeCaen
On the Distribution of Major and Minor Pause in Tiberian Hebrew in the Light of the Variants of the Second Person Independent Pronouns
J Semitic Studies 2005 50: 321-327

This paper establishes for the first time the nature and distribution of Tiberian Hebrew (TH) pausal phonology. The results are consistent with the proposal by Dresher (1994) that TH pause is a direct function of intonational phrase boundaries. His prosodic analysis is extended here by establishing the half-verse as the maximal prosodic domain for TH phonology. It is on this basis that we can explain the statistical distribution of pause at syntactic and accentual phrase boundaries, extending the first approximation of the syntactic projection of TH pause delineated in Revell (1980). The results reported here define a long-term research programme in TH prosody.

E. Martín Contreras
Continuity of the Tradition: Masorah with Midrashic Explanations
J Semitic Studies 2005 50: 329-339

This article examines three masoretic lists with midrashic explanations placed in appendix IV of codex M1 from the Complutensian University Library. The study shows the original final form of these three lists and their content suggests that the traditions that present textual commentaries in the midrashim up until medieval times coexisted with the Masorah.

There are also a great many interesting book reviews.

Requires a paid personal or institutional subscription to access.

THE INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR THE STUDY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT has already posted information on its July 2007 meeting at http://www.iosot2007.si/temp/. The page also notes dates for the related meetings of the International Organization for Targumic Studies (IOTS), the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies (IOSCS), International Organization for Qumran Studies (IOQS), and the International Organization for Masoretic Studies (IOMS).

(Heads-up, Eibert Tigchelaar.)

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: The Chairman of the Palestinian Authority rejects any possibility of joint authority over the Temple Mount:

Abbas: The big jihad is construction (Ynetnews)

Palestinian leader says no compromise on Temple Mount; committed to 'two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace,' in interview with Israeli Arab newspaper
Roee Nahimas

Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas said that he was committed to seeing "two states" live side by side in peace, in an interview with an Israeli Arab paper on Friday. However, Abbas said that he "excluded" the division of authority over the Temple Mount.

“The big jihad is the jihad of construction. We want to rebuild our homeland from new, and we will fight for the arrival of peace. If there will be peace between us, there will peace in the whole area and in the world, because the whole world sees the Palestinian problem as the source of the conflict,” said Abbas.

[...]

I think what he's trying to say is that construction of Palestine as a viable society is his highest priority, but given the Waqf's destructive construction, the formulation is unfortunate in context.

PSEUDEPIGRAPHA IN THE NEWS (but spelled as "pseudoepigrapha"): Professor Avigdor Shinan reviews Howard Schwartz's Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism for Ha'aretz. Excerpt:

This legend, translated more or less literally from the Aramaic, is one of 670 stories collected by the author in a hefty volume of what he calls "Jewish mythology," i.e., an impressive anthology of oral traditions about God and the creation of the world, the evolution of heaven and hell, the holy tongue and sacred time, saints and the Holy Land, exile and redemption.

The author is a professor of English literature at the University of Missouri in St. Louis who has done extensive research in the subject of Jewish folk literature. In this book, he cites materials culled from every branch of Jewish literature, from the Bible and pseudoepigrapha,the Talmud, the Midrash and ancient mystical lore, kabbalistic writings, the literature and thought of the Middle Ages, Jewish legal texts, memoirs, Hasidic legends of the last few generations, and the ethnic folktales of different Jewish communities. In particular, he hasdrawn on the Israel Folktale Archive (IFA) at the University of Haifa, founded in honor of Prof. Dov Noy.

Translated from Hebrew, Aramaic and Yiddish (sometimes for the first time), the stories are sorted into 11 chapters, accompanied by commentary, analysis and references to previous research (mostly by scholars writing in languages other than Hebrew). The 17-page bibliography is a testimony in itself to the tremendous effort invested in the tracking down the material, not to mention organizing, translating, annotating and compiling footnotes.

I PLAN TO BE AWAY all or most of the day tomorrow and I doubt that I will have access to a computer. Blogging, if any, is likely to be late in the day.

HERE'S A NATIVE SPEAKER OF ARAMAIC at Arizona State University who has started a club ("Live Suryoyo") which "will seek to educate students about Suryoyo culture, the Aramaic language and the Syrian Orthodox religious traditions."

Someone tell the writer of the article that Hebrew and Aramaic languages come from a common ancestor, but Hebrew is not "a derivative of Aramaic."

THE CLAIMS ABOUT THE TOMB OF CYRUS and Persepolis (see previous post) are incorrect. They are not endangered by the new dam. Chuck Jones forwards the following e-mail about the matter:

Re: Sivand Dam & Pasargadae - A Letter of Clarification by
Professors Touraj Daryaee & Kamyar Abdi

Iranian Studies News Bulletin: September 4, 2005,

Professor Touraj Daryaee, the internationally renowned
premier scholar on Ancient Iranica and Professor of Ancient History at California State University, Fullerton; and the famed Dartmouth College Professor of Archaeology Kamyar Abdi have issued a Joint Letter of Clarification regarding the recent erroneous and absolutely baseless rumors about the Sivand Dam's effects on Iranica Heritage Site Pasargadae.

Here is the Text:

September 4, 2005

To Whom It May Concern:

This letter is written to clarify some of the
misunderstandings that have arisen from the building of the Sivand dam in general proximity to the archaeological site of Pasargadae. Some of our fellow Iranians are misinformed about this project there is at least one organization who is now proclaiming that the entire region will be flooded and as a result our national heritage, especially the tomb of Cyrus the Great will be destroyed. Hence, a petition campaign has began: http://www.puyeshgaraan.com/Pasargad/Pasargad_Main.htm

The Iranian Cultural Heritage website at http://www.chn.ir/ regularly informs people of matters such as these. Should anyone argue that the news on this website are false and part of a grand conspiracy by current government of Iran to destroy the Iranian national heritage, please forward them the following link to a brief paper by Dr. Remy Boucharlat, the head of the French Institute of Iranian Studies, an experienced specialist on Iranian archaeology who has been active in archaeological fieldwork in the region including the Sivand salvage work: http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=11716 (As we are both Iranians some people may prefer the word of a farangi to their fellow countryman.)

Not only the Sivand dam is posing NO threat to Pasargadae, but it has proven to be the first opportunity for Iranian and foreign archaeologists to collaborate on a salvage project since the 1979 Revolution, discovering valuable and important information relevant to Achaemenid and other periods of occupation in the region.

Unfortunately, those who do not know about these matters and only have political agendas have rallied the people to an ill-informed cause. This reminds us of the finding of the so-called MUMMIFIED PERSIAN QUEEN "Rhodogoune" which appeared to be a fake from the beginning, except to those how wanted to make it a political issue or create sensationalism. This amateurish modern fake which Carbon-14 showed to be only 3 years old and the body of a poor woman recently strangled was not an Achaemenid queen. Even the name of the lady, Rhodogoune, who was the daughter of King Xerxes, was miswritten as ru-du-gu-u-n which should be in actuality be ru-u-du-u-g-u-n-a, among other childish mistakes on the coffin's text. Of course anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of ancient Persian history would have known that Persians did not mummify the dead! So what happened to the charlatans who made a big fuss and took people's money in the name of recovering and preserving the body of an Iranian queen? Nothing! Just making a quick buck out of people's ignorance!

Please don't do this again with Pasargadae. How come no one cared about Pasargadae when it was in dire need of attention? How come now that, thanks to the efforts by Iranian and foreign archaeologists working with the Center for Archaeological Research of the Iranian Cultural Heritage and Tourism Organization, the site has been cleaned up, surveyed, and registered in the UNESCO World Heritage list, these sensationalists have raised the banner of "patriotism"?

One of us was in Shiraz two years ago when the news broke out in the local newspapers and people were in commotion. Now it has reached an international level. This is sensationalism and abusing national heritage to settle political scores! Instead of having a multitude of committees run by amateurs with little or no grasp of intricacies of Iranian history, why don't we have committees to fund legitimate archaeological and historical research to in Iran by professional archaeologists and historians in order to enhance our knowledge of our beloved country?

Touraj Daryaee
Kamyar Abdi
Professor of Ancient History
Professor of Archaeology
California State University, Fullerton
Dartmouth College
PO Box 6846
Hanover, NH 03755
Fullerton, CA 92834-6846
Kamyar.Abdi@Dartmouth.EDU
tdaryaee@fullerton.edu

THE TOMB OF CYRUS THE GREAT and the ruins of Persepolis are in danger of obliteration, according to a press release from "The International Committee to Save the Archeological," a group I've never heard of. According to them, the Iranian government is planning to open a dam that threatens to submerge the area. Does anyone know of other media treatments of this? Can any specialists in Iranian archaeology verify it or tell us more?

(Via Archaeologica News.)

ARAMAIC IS BACK ON THE BIG SCREEN, this time spoken by a demon:

Exorcism of Emily Rose more like Law and Order than highbrow horror: review

CHRISTY LEMIRE

(AP) - It may aspire to be a highbrow horror movie, but deep down, The Exorcism of Emily Rose is more like a two-hour, sweeps-period Law & Order episode, complete with special guest stars and a shocking story that's been ripped from the headlines.

Director Scott Derrickson, who co-wrote the script with Paul Harris Boardman (which was inspired by true events), is all business in telling the story of a Catholic priest on trial for negligent homicide following the death of a satanically possessed 19-year-old on whom he'd performed an exorcism.

[...]

That's not to say there aren't a few solid scares. Told in flashback, the possession and exorcism of Emily Rose (Jennifer Carpenter) can be, at times, truly startling. The college freshman experiences disturbing paranoid hallucinations, contorts her body in impossible ways and screeches and snarls in subtitled Aramaic.

[...]

Well, I guess demons must know Aramaic. Otherwise, what would be the point of all those Aramaic incantations bowls that tell them to go away?

ZOHAR -- THE MOVIE? The San Francisco Chronicle has a very interesting interview with Professor Daniel Matt, who is devoting many years of his life to translating the Aramaic Zohar into English. The third volume, up to the end of the book of Genesis, is about to be published.

FINDING MY RELIGION
Kabbalah scholar Daniel Matt takes the mysticism back to the Aramaic

Excerpt (but read it all):

How much a part of your spiritual life is the Kabbalah? It seems like it's more than just an academic interest for you.

I really try to combine an academic and a spiritual approach. I think you lose some of the richness of the Zohar if you look at it only academically -- certainly because it is a spiritual text, and it grew out of spiritual experience. The person writing it is really striving to contact the divine through Scripture, through plumbing the depths of Scripture, trying to discover the divine light hidden in the letters or hinted at by the verses of the Bible.

On the other hand, you lose something, too, I think, if you don't understand when it was written and who composed it. The person writing the Zohar is trying to present it as something ancient, but he knows what he is doing, and when he talks about hidden levels of meaning, part of the hiddenness is his own project of creating the Zohar. His own creativity is part of what's going on. It really is an experiment in fiction, a medieval experiment in fiction. And that's part of its wonder, too.

[...]

It sounds like you love what you do. So, my last question: Zohar the movie? What do you think?

I think it definitely has cinematic possibilities. The running into the donkey driver and the spectacular account of creation are pretty compelling. But I'll leave that for others.

UPDATE: I wonder if the movie would be in subtitled Aramaic. (See next post.)

HERE'S A BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW OF INTEREST:

Andrew S. Jacobs, Remains of the Jews: The Holy Land and Christian Empire in Late Antiquity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Pp. 264. ISBN 0-8047-4705-9. $55.00.

Reviewed by Matthew Kraus, University of Cincinnati

GRONINGEN UNIVERSITY in the Netherlands is offering a full Ph.D. scholarship:

FULL PHD-SCHOLARSHIP at Groningen

A full four-year PhD-scholarship in Biblical Studies is available at the University of Groningen to work with either Prof. Ed Noort (OT), Dr Jacques van Ruiten (Ancient Judaism), Dr Eibert Tigchelaar (Qumran) or Dr George van Kooten (NT). Application format available at http://www.rug.nl/theol. See English Pages: Research / Application format. Please send your initial application to Dr George van Kooten at g.h.van.kooten@rug.nl before September 15th, 2005. Please notify a student or friend.

(Via the BNTC list.)

JEWISH INCANTATION BOWLS, it seems, are alive and well and are still being produced today.

UPDATE: Evidently an Aramaic incantation bowl is on display at a museum exhibition at the University of Melbourne:

Early Writing in Egypt and Mesopotamia
Reviewer Penny Webb (The Age)
September 6, 2005

The Classics and Archaeology Collection,
Ian Potter Museum of Art,
University of Melbourne, Swanston Street, Carlton,
Until February 19

Annexed to the Ian Potter Museum of the University of Melbourne is a first-floor, light-filled room with large Gothic-arched windows visible from Swanston Street. It houses an archaeological display - pots and vases, coins, manuscripts and carvings - that's just a fraction of the 2500 or so pieces in the university's Classics and Archaeology Collection.

And, for a couple of months, it's being supplemented by 18 pieces from the Australian Institute of Archaeology, Melbourne. (The institute has been without a permanent exhibition site since 1999.)

Compiled by its director Christopher Davey, these pieces illustrate different scripts and early uses of writing (the doings of kings, records of produce, official expenditure, names of troops, a land transaction, property titles) in a variety of materials (stone and ceramic tablets, linen, vellum and papyrus fragments).

[...]

But waste no time indulging in invectives against your enemies using the sand-coloured ceramic cursing bowl inscribed on its inside surface with brush-drawn Aramaic script (from Jerusalem, second century BC).

[...]

Either the museum placard on this display contained errors, or else the reporter took careless notes, because the provenance and date are clearly wrong. All ancient Aramaic incantation bowls that have a certain provenance were discovered in Iraq. And they date from the fifth to the seventh centuries CE. But the bowl sounds cool. Too bad there's no picture.

THE BRITISH NEW TESTAMENT CONFERENCE: I'm not going to try to blog the whole conference from beginning to end. Instead, I'll just note some interesting things that I heard along the way. I'm including just a few photos here that came out tolerably well.

Liverpool Hope University promised us a new dorm to stay in, and indeed it was:


As you can see, construction on the Wesley Dormitory was not quite finished when we arrived, but the rooms were generally in good working order and the construction machinery noise started late enough and was far enough from the main events that it was not a distraction.

Dr. Darrell Hannah and I chaired the NT & Second Temple Judaism seminar. The first presenter (Friday) was Dr. Grant Macaskill, who argued that, although it is possible that 2 Enoch originated as or descends from a Jewish Urtext of the first-century CE, the case has not yet been persuasively made.

In the second session Darrell and I each gave short papers. Darrell made a case that that the Similitudes of Enoch can be dated securely in the first century BCE based on references in chapter 67.


I (above) argued that the Testament of Abraham is most naturally understood as a Christian composition from the fifth century CE or earlier and that any Jewish Urtext behind the two surviving recensions, if it ever existed at all, has been so throughly reworked that it is now irrecoverable.

In the third session (Saturday morning) Dr. Todd Klutz gave a paper on the Testament of Solomon which is difficult to summarize, but he took the position that something like an original Solomonic exorcistic handbook was updated with an account of Solomon's downfall (in the genre "rewritten scripture") which aimed to undermine the authority of the Solomonic incantations. He also tied the name of one of the demonic characters in the work (Ephippas) to ancient inscribed stone amulets pertaining to Solomon.

In the second plenary session (Friday evening) Professor Christopher Rowland gave a fascinating account of William Blake's drawings and paintings with biblical subjects. I had not known that Blake had read the book of 1 Enoch, but it seems that he had and he produced engravings based on themes in this book. You can find small images of a couple on Enochic subjects at the Biblical Art on the WWW site.

I was also at the late evening whiskey event mentioned by Sean the Baptist.

The third plenary session (Saturday morning) was also given by Darrell Hannah, who is currently on a research fellowship at Oxford, where he is preparing a critical edition of the Coptic and Ethiopic versions of the Epistula Apostolorum.


Darrell argued that this work probably knew all four canonical Gospels and it was composed by 140-150 CE. I found his presentation particularly exciting because in it he alerted me to two quotations of "the prophet" in the Epistula Apostolorum which may be of lost Old Testament pseudepigrapha.

Many thanks to Ursula Leahy and Kenneth Newport for organizing and running the conference, a much larger job than it appears. The food and drink were good, the accommodations were new (at least for those of us in Wesley), and there was an excellent program with lots of intellectual stimulation. Moreover, Ken kindly rescued my conference pack for me when I carelessly left it in the locked-up Chaplaincy (which had been converted to an impromptu donation-only bar). And on very short notice Ursula recruited her colleague David Torevell to drive Helen Bond, Louise Lawrence, and me to the rail station when our taxi failed to show (or got snapped up by someone else). Bless them all.

Michael Pahl has collected the other accounts by bloggers of this year's BNTC.

JOB AND THE QUR'AN: The Bible and Interpretation website has posted a new essay:

The Image of Ayyub (Job) in the Qur'an and Later Islam

In Mohammed’s view, Job is to be numbered among the best of human beings to receive Allah’s revelation.

By Stephen Vicchio
Professor of Philosophy
College of Notre Dame
Baltimore, Maryland
August 2005

It's interesting that Islamic tradition seems to be aware of the Testament of Job.

MICHAEL HOMAN, I am happy to note, has made his escape from New Orleans with his family and is now in Omaha.

THE ASSYRIAN DEMOCRATIC ORGANIZATION has rejected the Iraqi draft constitution:

(AINA) -- The Assyrian Democratic Organization (ADO), founded in Syria in 1957 and the largest Assyrian organization in Syria and Europe, has rejected the Iraqi draft constitution. In a strongly worded statement, the ADO objected to the language in the constitution which artificially divides the Assyrians into two groups, "Chaldeans" and "Assyrians".

The full ADO statement follows:

On August 25, Iraq's draft constitution was submitted. The draft will be voted on in a general referendum and ratified by the general assembly on October 15. The submission of the draft constitution was a great disappointment and blow to the ambitions of the Chaldean Assyrian Syriac people.

The preamble of the draft constitution intentionally ignored the historical reality of the indigenous people of Iraq (known as Assyrians or Chaldeans or Syriacs). It does not mention the Assyrians as being one of the components of the Iraqi people, alongside Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen, nor does it mention Christianity, Sabaeanism and Yezidism as religions that existed and preceded Islam in Iraq. Article 135 of the draft constitution divides the Assyrians by inserting the dividing conjunction AND between the designations "Chaldeans" AND "Assyrians", aiming at showing them as two separate independent and different ethnicities. In fact, this article comes to falsify non-negotiable historical truth and reality about the unity of the Assyrians as one nation historically, culturally and linguistically, in spite of the fact, that the three known designations Chaldean, Assyrian and Syriac have been used interchangeably during the course of Assyrian history.

[...]

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU is campaigning for leadership of the Likud party. One of his campaign promises is to make the archaeological sites at Beit She'an into a "tourist Mecca."

'Beit She’an will be tourist Mecca'
(Ynetnews)

Benjamin Netanyahu hits campaign trail in ancient town, pledges to bring millions of tourists to archeological sites in eastern Israel; mayor says town 'behind' Netanyahu, predicts former fianance minister will be next prime minister. During talk with students in local school, Netanyahu slams Sharon for acting undemocratically

[...]

THE MACCA BEE: From the Department of You Couldn't Make This Up:

(PRWEB) September 5, 2005 -- Finally a unique, fascinating Hanukah toy for Jewish children, Jewish adults and mixed Jewish marriages. A Hanukah toy for those who seek to identify with their Jewish roots during the Hanukah season. If you always wanted to learn the Hanukah prayers and songs while lighting the menorah candles, then the Macca Bee is for you. The menorah has eight candles and the Macca Bee sings the Hanukah prayers and eight songs: 2 in English; 2 in Yiddish and 6 songs in Hebrew. All the songs are orchestrated and the quality is excellent. The stuffed animal yellow-and-black-striped Macca Bee comes with a full songbook so you can sing along or accompany the music with your own instruments. A dreidle is also available for the popular game.

[...]

THE LENGTH OF THE ANCIENT CUBIT could be a factor in determining the location of the Jewish Temples on the Temple Mount, according to this AP article. Asher Selig Kaufman has een proposing relocation of the Temple for the last couple of decades. His proposal was first published in Biblical Archaeology Review in 1983 and the genesis of the current article seems to be another BAR piece. I'm not sure how seriously actual archaeologists are taking this discussion. (Kaufman was trained as a physicist originally.) Do any archaeologists want to comment?

PHILOLOGOS discusses the history of Tefillin.

I'M HOME. Got in about 8:30 pm. I see Mark Goodacre has already fulsomely blogged the entire conference. You won't get as much or as soon from me, but I do have a few photos. I'll get to it as soon as I can, but I expect to be pretty busy this weekend. Meanwhile, here's an important e-mail I've only just opened. It's a firsthand account of the situation in New Orleans as of 31 August, forwarded by reader Dr. Risa Levitt Kohn of San Diego State University. It's from a colleague of hers who was and perhaps still is stranded in New Orleans. Sorry for not getting it to you sooner.

Thanks to all of you who have sent your notes of concern and your prayers. I am writing this note on Tuesday at 2 p.m.. I wanted to update all of you as to the situation here. I don't know how much information you are getting but I am certain it is more than we are getting. Be advised that almost everything I am telling you is from direct observation or rumor from reasonable sources. They are allowing limited internet access, so I hope to send this dispatch today.

Personally, my family and I are fine. My family is safe in Jackson, Miss., and I am now a temporary resident of the Ritz Carleton Hotel in New Orleans. I figured if it was my time to go, I wanted to go in a place with a good wine list. In addition, this hotel is in a very old building on Canal Street that could and did sustain little damage. Many of the other hotels sustained significant loss of windows, and we expect that many of the guests may be evacuated here.

Things were obviously bad yesterday, but they are much worse today. Overnight the water arrived. Now Canal Street (true to its origins) is indeed a canal. The first floor of all downtown buildings is underwater. I have heard that Charity Hospital and Tulane are limited in their ability to care for patients because of water. Ochsner is the only hospital that remains fully functional. However, I spoke with them today and they too are on generator and losing food and water fast.

The city now has no clean water, no sewerage system, no electricity, and no real communications. Bodies are still being recovered floating in the floods. We are worried about a cholera epidemic. Even the police are without effective communications. We have a group of armed police here with us at the hotel that is admirably trying to exert some local law enforcement. This is tough because looting is now rampant. Most of it is not malicious looting. These are poor and desperate people with no housing and no medical care and no food or water trying to take care of themselves and their families. Unfortunately, the people are armed and dangerous. We hear gunshots frequently. Most of Canal street is occupied by armed looters who have a low threshold for discharging their weapons. We hear gunshots frequently. The looters are using makeshift boats made of pieces of styrofoam to access. We are still waiting for a significant national guard presence.

The health care situation here has dramatically worsened overnight. Many people in the hotel are elderly and small children. Many other guests have unusual diseases. ... There are (Infectious Disease) physicians in at this hotel attending an HIV confection. We have commandeered the world famous French Quarter Bar to turn into a makeshift clinic. There is a team of about seven doctors and PAs and pharmacists. We anticipate that this will be the major medical facility in the central business district and French Quarter.

Our biggest adventure today was raiding the Walgreen's on Canal under police escort. The pharmacy was dark and full of water. We basically scooped the entire drug sets into garbage bags and removed them. All under police escort. The looters had to be held back at gunpoint. After a dose of prophylactic Cipro I hope to be fine.

In all we are faring well. We have set up a hospital in the the French Quarter bar in the hotel, and will start admitting patients today. Many will be from the hotel, but many will not. We are anticipating dealing with multiple medical problems, medications and and acute injuries. Infection and perhaps even cholera are anticipated major problems. Food and water shortages are imminent.

The biggest question to all of us is where is the National Guard? We hear jet fighters and helicopters, but no real armed presence, and hence the rampant looting. There is no Red Cross and no Salvation Army.

In a sort of cliche way, this is an edifying experience. One is rapidly focused away from the transient and material to the bare necessities of life. It has been challenging to me to learn how to be a primary care physician. We are under martial law so return to our homes is impossible. I don't know how long it will be and this is my greatest fear. Despite it all, this is a soul-edifying experience. The greatest pain is to think about the loss. And how long the rebuild will take. And the horror of so many dead people .

PLEASE SEND THIS DISPATCH TO ALL YOU THING MAY BE INTERESTED IN A DISPATCH from the front. I will send more according to your interest. Hopefully their collective prayers will be answered. By the way, suture packs, sterile gloves and stethoscopes will be needed as the Ritz turns into a MASH.

UPDATE (4 September): On reading more closely, I see that this is actually from Tuesday the 29th, so it's fairly ancient history now. But it's an illuminating insider report from the immediate aftermath of Katrina.

On another note, I'm having a great deal of difficulty with Blogger. For some reason the toolbar above the "create" a new post page now takes many minutes to appear with when I use dial-up access. I'm also having other troubles getting the photograph facility to work. So I'll probably wait until tomorrow to post on the conference, so I can use my office computer.

A MASONIC ARTIFACT from the Temple Mount rubble?

(Via Joseph I. Lauer on the ANE list.)

Now, about that nap ...

I'M HERE! Liverpool, that is. The conference is about half over and we've had two seminar meetings so far, with good discussions. I feel a nap coming on, so I'm not going to do any heavy-duty conference blogging right now, but I am taking photos to share with you later. Meanwhile, have a look at the Carnival of Bad History at the Dodecahedron blog, which has PaleoJudaica in the first entry (exposing bad history, I hasten to say, not producing it). And don't miss the update to the "More Lost Books" post below, which has some additional information from Ken Penner.

I'M OFF in a few minutes to the British New Testament Conference in Liverpool, where I will be co-chairing and presenting a paper in the NT & Second Temple Judaism Seminar. Grant Macaskill, also from St. Andrews, is presenting a paper in the same seminar. Normally I post the oral text of my paper just before I leave for a conference, but this time there is an unusual situation: my paper, "Is the Testament of Abraham Really a Jewish Work?" is an extract from chapter 4 of my book, which I'm expecting to be out before long. I've already placed lots of material from the book online, so I'm not going to post this particular paper. Sorry. If you want to read it, make sure you've ordered my book for your library.

My home dial-up access has been glacial this morning, so I haven't looked at Google, and if there is anything really interesting in the news it will have to wait. As far as I know, there won't be any opportunities to blog during the conference, but if one arises, I'll try to seize it. Otherwise, I expect to be back Saturday evening, so look for me then or on Sunday. And, meanwhile, don't miss the latest History Carnival, which is to be posted later today on the ClioWeb blog.

MORE LOST BOOKS: As I promised a while ago, I am listing below some additional ancient lost Old Testament pseudepigrapha that I have run across in various places. Some are books that are completely lost apart from their title and perhaps a brief comment on their contents; others are books that are no longer extant, but fragments, quotations, or summaries of them do survive.

A number are listed in the Coptic Nag Hammadi treatise On the Origin of the World (NHC ii, 5 and XIII, 2; fourth century CE or earlier). Some small indication of contents is usually given. It is possible that these are just names made up for effect, but they may well have been real books.

• The Archangelic (Book) of the Prophet Moses (NHC II, 102.8-9)
  
• The First Book of Noraia (NHC, II 102.10, 24-25)
  
• The First Account of Oraia (NHC, II 102. 24-25 -- same book as above?)
  
• The Book of Solomon (NHC II 107.3)
  
• The Configurations of the Fate of Heaven That Is Beneath the Twelve (NHC II 107.16-17)
  
• The Seventh Universe of the Prophet Hieralias (NHC II, 112.23-24)

Hippolytus, in The Refutation of All Heresies (second-third centuries CE), mentions the following:

• The Paraphrase of Seth (5.18.1) (Contains "Sethian doctrines," but evidently is not the same work as the Nag Hammadi Paraphrase of Shem.)
  
• The Book of Baruch (5.20-22; 10.11) (Baruch is the angel of the tree of life, not Jeremiah's scribe in the Bible. This retelling of the biblical narrative by Justin the Gnostic starts with the cosmogony and moves through the Old Testament period up to Jesus. Summarized by Hippolytus.)

Others:

• Quotation of a "scripture" or "prophetic word" with OT content in 1 Clement 23:3-4 and 2 Clement 11:2-4.
  
• A very fragmentary Oxyrhynchus manuscript that seems to involve a vision of heaven and which mentions the Law and the Red Sea. Oxyrhynchus Papyri 17.6-8 (#2069).
  
• A summary of a passage supposedly from a Hebrew noncanonical book pertaining to the prophet Zechariah and King Joash. Found in the fifth-century Historia Ecclesiastica (9.17) of Salaminius Hermias Sozomenus (PG 67.1269b).
  
• "The Rich Man and the Precious Stone," a story told by Georgius Monachus Hamartolos (9th century) in Chron 4.11 (PG 121.228). The passage is supposedly quoted from a book called the Wisdom of Solomon. The quotation was made after 600, so it is perhaps too late for the MOTP Project (but not for its comprehesive list of OT pseudepigrapha).

These were located through the Accordance Software list of Greek Old Testament Pseudepigrapha.

And more:

• Cyprian (some manuscripts only) quotes an otherwise unknown passage "in Baruch" (presumably the scribe this time) in Testimonia 3.29 (third century CE).
  
• An apocalyptic fragment attributed to "the prophet" by Clement of Alexandria (late second-early third century CE) in Protrepticus (Exhoration to the Heathen) 8, end.
  
• A fragment about the Antichrist attributed to "another prophet" (besides Jeremiah) by Hippolytus in On Christ and Antichrist 15

Noted by M. R. James in The Lost Apocrypha of the Old Testament, pp. 77-78, 90, and 92, respectively.

UPDATE (2 September): Ken Penner e-mails some additional information:

You might mention in your blog entry that Denis includes several of the texts you mentioned, in his Introduction, in his Fragmenta, and in his Concordance, e.g., the fragment from 1 Clement 23:3-4 and 2 Clement 11:2-4, the Zechariah fragment, the Fable of the Precious Stone, the fragment from Clement of Alexandria, and the fragment on the Antichrist.

P. Oxy. 2069 is now known to be from 1Enoch.

The Antichrist fragment is also in de Antichristo 54.

The Clement of Alexandria reference in Protrepticus is 10, 98, 1, not 8.

Georgius Cedrenus also has the Fable of the Precious Stone (after the story of Tobit, before king Hezekiah); see I. Bekker, Georgius Cedrenus Ioannis Scylitzae (2 vols.; Corpus scriptorum historiae Byzantinae; Bonn: Weber), 1:193-194.

IRAQI JEWISH ARCHIVE UPDATE: Chuck Jones reports on the IraqCrisis list that the National Endowment for the Humanities has given $98,500 for its cataloguing and initial conservation steps.

Center for Jewish History
[Recovering Iraq’s Past (special initiative)] $98,536
Project Director: Robert Sink
Project Title: The Iraqi Jewish Archive
Description: The creation of an item-level collection assessment and inventory database of books and documents in Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, and Arabic that provide evidence of the history and culture of the Jewish community in Iraq since 762 B.C.E. A sample of the variety of paper-based materials in the archives would be conserved as a testbed for a future phase of the project.

NEW ORLEANS is a beautiful, exciting city, and the tragedy that has happened to it is almost beyond belief. I had my first teaching job there (at Tulane University) and got married there. We still have friends there. New Orleanian readers, you and your city are in my thoughts and prayers.

SAVING HOLY BOOKS: The latest Commentator (the Yeshiva University student newspaper) has a gripping account of the night in 1966 when YU students helped rescue books damaged in the Jewish Theological Seminary Library fire.

The Library Fire at JTS
By Hillel Goldberg
Published: Wednesday, August 31, 2005

In 1966, in college, it was hard to study, and I can't just blame the times. More than a civil rights revolution, a cultural revolution and the Vietnam War pulled me away from my studies. I.T., my best friend in college, and I, had our own self-created distractions.

We found charity or social work cases to take on. We worked for Soviet Jewry; we helped students struggling with gratuitous bureaucratic sufferings imposed on them by Yeshiva College. We also engaged in more than our share of philosophical discussions, engendered by what we regarded as, alternatively, brilliant or stupid remarks made by our religious studies instructors. We spent way too much time saving the world and far too little time studying.

One day, after a long stretch spending hours each day on all kinds of projects, we had a heart-to-heart. We just had to stop paying attention to the world and start paying attention to school. We reached a solemn agreement. No more cases. No more projects. No more discussions.

This was in the early afternoon. A couple of hours later, I.T. knocked on my door. He was only slightly sheepish, maybe not even that. Basically, it's as if we had never spoken that day and never reached an agreement. He says: A fire has burned down much of the library at the Jewish Theological Seminary. And what wasn't burned, is now about to be lost due to massive water damage. Books are water-logged.

What happened to our previous resolve, only a couple of hours old?

Did we even have that discussion?

We didn't even refer to it.

I.T. looked at me. I looked at him.

We had to save the water-logged, sacred tomes in the library. We had to do it.

[...]

THE PULSA DE-NURA CURSERS will not be charged with a crime:

No charges over Sharon death wish
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS (Jerusalem Post)

Attorney-General Menahem Mazuz has decided not to press charges against a group of Jewish extremists who carried out an ancient curse ceremony meant to place a death wish on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, since the appeal was to God and not to mankind, the Justice Ministry said Tuesday.

[...]

Actually, it's not an "ancient" ritual; it's only a century old.

JIM WEST is misrepresenting my published views once again, and I'm getting pretty tired of it. Having to put up this post is one of the most unpleasant experiences of my blogging career.

In Jim's post "Washed in the Blood of Peer-Review", in the context of the discussion of "open source" biblical studies, he writes:

A while back Jim Davila and I were discussing things historical concerning the so called "Solomonic Temple". I suggested that we needed hard evidence before we could speak confidently about the existence of said temple and Jim suggested that unless such a suggestion appeared in a "peer reviewed journal" he really didn't have time or interest in discussing it.

Jim's devotion to peer reviewed journals struck me as a bit narrow (for it implies, doesn't it, that unless an idea is found in a peer reviewed journal it is of no value and need not be considered).

The debate came down to whether any evidence apart from the archaeological -- narrowly construed as architectural, apparently excluding epigraphic -- could be admitted to show that there was a First Temple. I'll just refer you to what I subsequently wrote here. Jim's efforts to debunk the First Temple don't add up to much and he doesn't seem to take them very seriously himself.

But that's a side issue. More to the point, I said in the relevant post (after discussing Jim's ideas at some length):

As I said, I've not seen the position Jim is taking here in a specialist peer-reviewed publication, and I'm not inclined to put a lot of my time into debating positions that haven't passed that hurdle.

Jim posted a similarly distorted interpretation of this (followed by some sarcastic comments):

Hence, if a position isn't found in a "specialist peer reviewed publication" it has no merit and isn't worthy of the time it may involve to discuss it until it "passes that hurdle". Okie dokie, fair enough. The matter is thereby summarily concluded.

In response, I expanded on my comment in an update to the same post (emphasis now added):

This, of course, is not what I said and, given the amount of time I've spent this weekend discussing his position, is rather ungracious. Jim either thinks there was no Iron Age II Temple or else wishes to act as devil's advocate for that idea. Fine. But so far he's given me no indication that he is anything but a congregation of one. I have asked for publications on this idea and so far have received no answer. The only argument Jim has produced in favor of the idea is the lack of archaeological evidence, which I have addressed above. Somehow this is transformed into "no evidence" and "no proof." I have pointed out the matter of the Deuteronomistic History. It's certainly a mainstream position (I'm not saying a consensus) that Dtr was published either in the time of Josiah or not long afterward, and this seems to me to be the most persuasive view. Not everyone would agree, and that's fine. It's worth discussing. But Dtr is not "no evidence" and "no proof."

I'm willing to spend some time discussing speculative ideas, but there's a limit to how much, which is what I said above. I did not say that such an idea "has no merit and isn't worthy of the time it may involve to discuss it." It depends on the idea and the context of the discussion, doesn't it? Jim is putting words in my mouth that I did not say. He did this to Judith Weiss as well and it is not an appealing rhetorical tactic.

And it still isn't. Of course I discuss ideas on this blog that haven't appeared in peer-review journals. I never said I didn't. I discussed Jim's ideas about the Temple. But, as I did say, there's a limit to how much of my time I'm willing to spend on such things -- especially on a poorly thought-out position that no one has suggested in a serious publication and that no one, including Jim, seems actually to believe. Blogs can be good for discussing the merit of ideas in their early stages, and I do some of that here, but ultimately progress in the field comes from the peer-review system. It's far from perfect, but it's better than anything else anyone has come up with. To assert that "it exists simply for the preservation of power" (by "white boys," no less!) is silly.

To put it very simply: I never said that I "really didn't have time or interest in discussing" ideas not yet published in peer-review venues. I do discuss them sometimes on this blog. Nor did I say that such an idea "has no merit and isn't worthy of the time it may involve to discuss it" or that "it is of no value and need not be considered." What I said (again, after actually discussing one of these ideas) was that I am disinclined to spend a lot of time debating these positions and that how much in any given case depends on the position, how much merit I see in it, and the context of the discussion (e.g., I take time to refute Palestinian Jewish-Temple denial not because it has merit, but because the PA and others use it as a political tool).

Jim West persists in attributing views to me which I do not hold and, this time, which I have explicitly repudiated. Whatever excuse one might find for his misreading of my first, brief comment, there is no excuse for his neglecting my detailed clarification of it. He has ignored what I actually said and insists on saying in public that I hold silly, extreme views that I do not hold. In his latest post he does not even do me the courtesy of linking to my actual comments. If he had, it would have become clear to his readers that what he said was incorrect.

Jim West owes me a retraction and an apology.

I have no more time to waste on this and will not be replying to anything else he says about me. I advise my readers simply to ignore it.

UPDATE (31 August): Ed Cook comments on the issue of peer review.

ANOTHER DA VINCI CODE DEBUNKING, this one in the Scotsman by a doctoral student at the University of Glasgow.

UPDATE: Bad link fixed.

THE CHALDOASSYRIANS object to the language in the Iraqi draft-constitution:

Iraq's Draft Constitution and the ChaldoAssyrians
Posted GMT 8-29-2005 22:2:31 (AINA)

WASHINGTON -- In an unprecedented move, the U.S. administration is attempting to whitewash the division of Iraq's Christian ChaldoAssyrians along sectarian lines in the recently tabled Iraqi constitution. This effort, driven by Kurdish authorities, facilitated in part by the complacence of the Bush administration, only makes the U.S. guilty of aiding and abetting in the perpetuation of a Saddam era program of cultural genocide against this ethno-religious, indigenous group.

Saddam Hussein and previous Iraqi regimes worked to nurture artificial rifts in the indigenous ChaldoAssyrian people of Iraq in order to dilute their ability to assert their religious, political, economic and human rights in the country. The name ChaldoAssyrian is in the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) and reflects a compromise among the representative leadership of this Christian community. In the few remaining hours before the constitutional deadline, behind closed doors, Kurdish officials altered the wording in Article 122 of the constitution from ChaldoAssyrian to "Chaldean, Assyrian" as two separate peoples. This undermines the best intentions of the U.S. in Iraq vis-à-vis the most vulnerable of minorities.

U.S. officials must intercede on this matter and reverse something that will entrench one of Saddam's most heinous human rights abuses, instead of abolishing it. ChaldoAssyrians are neither Arabs nor Kurds. They speak the language of Christ and have kept that language alive despite Saddam's best efforts. They are one ethnic group who are also Christians from an array of denominations. Their values are so aligned with those of Americans and other western societies that they have little trouble assimilating when forced to flee Iraq. They are the most ardent pro-democracy community in Iraq. ChaldoAssyrians are presently slated to be governed as a religious minority in accordance with Islam's principles.

The U.S. must intercede and have the language corrected to reflect the Christians' ethnic unity if it wants to avoid laying the foundations for the exodus of these indigenous people from their homeland.

Chaldeans are simply ChaldoAssyrians who happen to be Catholic. Through its silence, the U.S. is condoning religious-based principles of constitutionalism by identifying a people for being Catholic. This flies in the face of the very core principles the U.S. itself has been ostensibly trying to promote during the deliberations. In this framework, religion does have a place in governing people constitutionally.

[...]

MINUSCULE GREEK SCRIPT: Bryan Cox has an interesting post at Biblaridion. (Via ricoblog.)

UPDATE: Actually, there are lots of good blog posts on various biblioblogs and related blogs. My blogroll is out of date, but you can find much there. If you haven't already, do set up a list of RSS feeds in your personal toolbar and keep track of what the biblioblogs are saying. I try to point out good posts now and then, but I've given up on trying to highlight all the posts I find really interesting. There are just too many of them.

But here's an interesting post on recent publications pertaining to Hebrew manuscripts over at Hagahot, a blog to which I've linked now and again, but which I haven't yet had a chance to put on my blogroll. It's another good one to keep an eye on.

Oh, and by the way, if you had any trouble accessing that radio interview, have a look at the post again. I've added a new link that seems to work better.

ARMENIAN BIBLICAL MANUSCRIPTS are on display at the Armenian Library and Museum of America in Watertown, Massachusetts:

Museum preserves history, culture of Armenia
By Mark Pratt / Associated Press
Monday, August 29, 2005

WATERTOWN -- Armenia has been conquered by the Romans, Greeks, Persians, Ottoman Turks and Russians.

Before gaining its independence in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, its people were oppressed, murdered and scattered across the globe.

"It is a rough and bloody history," said Gary Lind-Sinanian, curator of the Armenian Library and Museum of America in Watertown.

The largest Armenian museum in the U.S. preserves and promotes the distinct and vibrant culture of the Armenian people, who have survived and thrived despite their sad history.

It houses a collection of 20,000 artifacts, and continually changing displays of ornate Bibles, Gospels and prayer books; colorful rugs, clothing and iles; antique musical instruments; ancient coins from the time before Christ and dazzling jewelry.

[...]

Through Oct. 30, it features an exhibit called "Monks, Merchants and Missionaries: The Bible in the Armenian Tradition." There are ornate and colorful hand-transcribed and decorated Gospels and prayer books, including one that dates to 1207 and was in the same family for 39 generations before being donated to the museum.

"The book was said to have healing properties," Lind-Sinanian said. "People with sick relatives would travel miles to rub bread on the cover, then bring the bread back for their sick relatives to eat."

[...]

There's also a library containing more than 22,000 books. I wonder if the museum has any manuscripts of Armenian biblical apocrypha and pseudepigrapha.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: The Palestinian Authority still wants Yasser Arafat to be buried on the Temple Mount.

PA wants Arafat tomb on Temple Mount
By KHALED ABU TOAMEH

The Palestinian Authority will continue to work toward moving Yasser Arafat's tomb to the Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem, Saeb Erekat, head of the PLO Negotiations Department, announced Sunday.

Erekat, who was speaking during a meeting with PA security officers in Jericho, said the issue of transferring the late Palestinian Authority Chairman Arafat's grave from Ramallah to Jerusalem was a "trust" deposited with the PA.

"From the Israeli perspective the issue is not on the agenda and neither do I expect it to be on the agenda," said Mark Regev, Israel Foreign Ministry spokesman in response to a query by The Jerusalem Post last night.

[...]

MY RADIO INTERVIEW with Bnai Brith International on the More Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Project is now available online here. It's the segment on "The Translation of Ancient Jewish Texts." For some reason the Mac versions of the shows are are dead, so I haven't listened to it yet. But it seemed to go well in the event.

UPDATE (29 August): If you've had any trouble accessing the interview, try this page. Scroll down to the bottom of the page where it says "B'nai Brith Radio Studio J." There are two buttons at the bottom: the lefthand one is for PCs and the right one for the Mac. Both seem to work fine.

I AM SORRY TO REPORT HARTMUT STEGEMANN'S SUDDEN DEATH on 22 August. The funeral was on Friday. Eileen Schuller, who is currently in Göttingen, e-mailed me with the news today.

Professor Stegemann was a well-known Dead Sea Scrolls scholar. His work included a reconstruction of the Cave One Hymn Scroll and studies pertaining to the origins of the Qumran sectarians. He also worked on the historical Jesus.
Requiescat in pace.

THIS DOESN'T SOUND GOOD:

Filmmaker Jacobovici offers biblical archeology with a twist

By SHELDON KIRSHNER
Staff Reporter (Canadian Jewish News)

When you think of Simcha Jacobovici’s finely wrought documentaries, words like earnest and serious immediately come to mind.

Over the past 15 years, Jacobovici, one of the founders of Associated Producers, has made films running the gamut from Deadly Currents, which dealt with the Arab-Israeli conflict, to The Selling of Innocents, which revolved around child trafficking and prostitution.

But now, in a shift of gears, the award-winning Toronto filmmaker has turned his talents to biblical archeology. He has churned out a 26-part series, The Naked Archaeologist, the first episode of which will be aired on Vision TV on Sept. 5 at 9:30 p.m.

[...]

“I want to serve it up naked, stripped of the bullshit,” he said in a burst of Jacobovician rhetoric. “I bring a kind of simplicity, an outsider’s perspective, the skills of an investigative journalist, to it.”

He gravitated to the subject of archeology after making The Quest for the Lost Tribes in 1996, a film that explored an intriguing dimension of Jewish history.

But what really got him going was his perception that archeologists generally treat chunks of the Bible as fiction rather than fact.

“The received wisdom of academia on biblical archeology is that the earliest parts, from Exodus onward, are mythological stories and fairy tales.”

Archeologists who indulge in such practices are falsifying the truth, somewhat like Holocaust deniers who deny that six million Jews were murdered during World War II.

Someone should tell him that the current fad of dragging the Holocaust into every argument cheapens not only the argument, but also the Holocaust. And this particular comparison is ignorant, offensive (to both archaeologists and Holocaust victims), and just silly.

Jacobovici, who became an Orthodox Jew more than a decade ago, stands firmly in the camp of the believers.

“From a historical aspect, I take the Bible as history, unless someone demonstrates it’s not. I have no reason to believe the stories in the Bible didn’t happen.” He paused, asserting, “If you don’t think it’s true, prove it!”

Here he shows how utterly unqualified he is to be making a program on archaeology. First, you can't prove a negative. Second, archaeologists have been evaluating the biblical text for many decades in light of what they've been digging up and, in certain cases such as those of the patriarchal narratives and the Exodus, the two don't add up. There is a vast scholarly literature on these subjects, much of it readily available to nonspecialists and aimed at them. Have a look at it, Mr. Jacobovici. Then, if you have a problem with it, go learn the ancient languages and read the archaeological reports. But don't say "If you don’t think it’s true, prove it!" as though this contributes something to the discussion.

He argued that some biblical archeologists are motivated by crass politics and a dislike of Jews.

Modern archeology emerged with the rise of fascism, and some archeologists were plainly anti-Semitic, he said.

And in the case of Palestinians seeking to delegitimize Israel’s claim to the land, archeology is merely another tool in their arsenal, he added.

Fascism too? And anti-Semitism? It's all very well to impute vile motives to people with whom one disagrees, but their arguments remain to be considered after the mudslinging is over. Rather than addressing the evidence for archaeological arguments with which he disagrees, he resorts to these generalized and undemonstrated accusations.

Currently, Jacobovici is editing and polishing his next documentary, The Exodus Decoded, which will be broadcast on the Discovery Channel come November and privately screened around the same time.

There is not a single shred of archeological evidence to support the thesis that the events in Exodus occurred, he allowed.

But in his forthcoming 90-minute film, a mix of The Matrix and The Da Vinci Code, he excavates proof that Exodus is not a figment of the imagination.

This doesn't sound very promising either. Why is the Discovery Channel airing this kind of nonsense?

I see that Christopher Heard has already published similar observations over at Higgaion.

UPDATE: Tyler Williams also noted the program some time ago at Codex.

THE IRANIANS seem to be getting in on Jewish-Temple denial, although the source is Palestinian. This article ("Upon Growing Judaization of AI-Qods,
Palestine' Chief Judge Urges Islamic Nations to Defend the Holy City,) from the Iranian Quran News Agency, reports, inter alia, on a Friday sermon by Mohammed Hussein in the Al Aqsa Mosque. The relevant bit is:

As Al-Aqsa mosque is more endangered than ever before, Al-Aqsa preacher headed the attention that the Jewish extremists and settlers do not stop incitement against Al-Aqsa mosque and their overt calls to harm it and destroy it to build the alleged temple mount on its ruins.

This is pretty incoherent, but it seems to be trying to say that the Jewish extremists want to rebuild the "alleged" Temple on the Temple Mount.

More of the usual from the Palestinian Authority. I see now that Al Jazeerah and the PA's International Press Centre are carrying what must be the same press release.

MOUNTAINS GET YOU HIGH: Does anoxia explain the high-altitude revelations received by Moses, Jesus and his disciples, and Muhammad? Authors Shahar Arzy, Moshe Idel (the prominent Kabbalah scholar), and Olaf Blanke raise the possibility in an article in Ha'aretz entitled "Magical mystery tours." Excerpt:

The common elements in all three "mountain" divine revelations and the appearance of the same elements in the experiences of climbers suggest that a prolonged stay on a mountain can affect various brain functions in a manner that allows them to have such experiences. One possible explanation is that the feeling of a presence, autoscopy, hearing a presence and emotional manifestations follow deficits in body-processing. The fact that we have a body and that we sense that we are living within a body is not a trivial fact. Our brain processes multisensorial inputs that the body senses, and locates our "self" accordingly. An important role is played by a special brain region, the temporoparietal junction, which integrates the data from the various regions concerned with self-processing. This data include basic perceptions: We situate ourselves in accordance with what we see, hear and feel, but there are also more complex processes at work. We permanently mentally represent ourselves, our movements, our surroundings and what is happening there. A prolonged stay at high altitudes and the shortage of oxygen can impair multisensory integration in the temporoparietal junction.

When we externally stimulate this region of the brain with an electrode or measure a spontaneous (epileptic) activity there, similar sensations of another's presence, autoscopy, hovering and fear have been experienced. In addition, a prolonged stay at high altitudes, especially while in solitude, causes a loss of neural inhibitions: Just as this organ consists of complex systems that stimulate certain processes, it also has others of similar importance that inhibit or prevent certain processes from occurring, to help us create a good picture of the reality we are experiencing, instead of an exaggerated or "disturbed" one.

THE INK AND BLOOD EXHIBITION has done okay in Lexington, but it hasn't been a blockbuster like the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition in Mobile.

'Ink & Blood' is mild success for city

HUNDREDS VISIT DAILY, BUT MORE WERE EXPECTED

By Frank E. Lockwood

[LEXINGTON] HERALD-LEADER STAFF WRITER

A heavily advertised exhibit on the Bible hasn't drawn crowds of biblical proportions to downtown Lexington, but it's selling more tickets than local art and basketball museums.

Promoters say more than 1,000 visitors a day have been filing through the exhibit in its final week -- paying up to $16 a person to see a rare collection of sacred writings on paper, parchment and papyrus.

Organizers say they can't accurately estimate how many people have attended. But selling tickets for "Ink & Blood: Dead Sea Scrolls to the English Bible" was "a little bit more of a challenge than we originally thought," said chief operating officer Craig Salazar.

[...]

Of course, among other problems, the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Ink and Blood exhibition look like burnt cornflakes.

HERE'S ONE ASSYRIAN CHRISTIAN who is adamantly opposed to the Iraqi draft-constitution. He is especially concerned with women's rights and the rights of minorities. This WorldNetDaily piece is reprinted by AINA. Excerpt:

Iraq's forgotten minorities including the Assyrians from the ancient Assyrian Empire ("The men of Nineveh" referred to by Jesus Christ himself in the Bible and the one remaining people groups on Earth who can watch "The Passion" by Mel Gibson without subtitles since their native tongue is ancient Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke.)

Other non-Muslim and non-Arab Iraqi minorities include Mandeans and Yezidis, plus there are the often-forgotten minority Muslim groups such as the Turkoman and Shabak who are oppressed by Barzani Kurds. Although hardly mentioned in the major media, these ancient people have been fleeing Iraq in unprecedented numbers under persecution by Islamic militants and severe discrimination by the Kurdish Muslims, among whom many of these minorities live in northern Iraq.

And this New York Newsday article has more on Islamist persecution of Iraqi minorities and women, with a focus on Basra. Excerpt:

Not just the Christians, but many of the city's minorities - from obscure sects like the ancient Sabeans to the Sunni Muslims who used to run Iraq and still predominate in the rest of the Arab world - live in fear of the hard-line Shia religious parties and their militias that now rule Iraq's second-largest city.

Freedom has been curtailed for women, too. Several decades ago, almost no woman in Basra covered her head. Now, they all do, under fear of harassment or worse. Women working for foreign companies or governments, and those considered to have loose morals, have been marked for death by the militants - two Iraqi sisters who worked in the laundry at the American compound in Basra were assassinated last year.

For more on the Sabaean Mandaeans, go here.

THE LOST ARK -- Now you can buy the t-shirt.

A TRAVELOGUE ON JORDAN in the Washington Times opens with the supposed site of the baptisim of Jesus:

Jordan's biblical sites

By John McCaslin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
August 27, 2005

PETRA, Jordan -- Enthusiasm flows from Rustom Mkhjian like the stream of holy water his team of archaeologists christened John the Baptist Spring. What's enlightening about this discovery, hailed as one of the most significant archaeological and religious finds of modern time, is that I am standing in the kingdom of Jordan -- in the long-lost settlement of Bethany Beyond the Jordan where John the Baptist converted untold numbers while preparing for the coming and eventual baptism of Jesus Christ.
"Some people still think Jordan is a small town in Montana," Akel Biltaji, an adviser to King Abdullah II, tells me, "but we share with others the Holy Land."
Giving his trowel a rest, Mr. Mkhjian, a supervisor of archaeological works for the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, leads me into the shade of John's recently resurrected grotto on the banks of Jordan River.
He sifts through considerable biblical text and archaeological discourse before pointing to a specific patch of sandy ground at the base of some newly excavated steps.
"There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind, based on religious records and all the supporting evidence we've uncovered here, that this is the very spot -- right here at the bottom of the steps -- where Jesus was baptized," he says.
That would make this particular excavation -- one of more than a dozen within the grotto that reveal arches and walls, marble and mosaic floors -- the ruins of Bethabara, a church built about 500 years after Jesus' death to commemorate His exact baptismal place.

[...]

The archaeological evidence for identifying the first-century strata of the site so precisely is not discussed. I hope it amounts to more than the testimony of church-builders five hundred years later. It's not clear to me whether it is this site or yet another candidate for the place of Jesus' baptism.

Other ancient sites in Jordan are also discussed, including, of course, Petra.

THRILLERS INVOLVING ANCIENT BOOKS AND ARTIFACTS is the subject of an interesting post over at Hagahot. I've read and enjoyed Foucault's Pendulum and The Rule of Four. I also like H. P. Lovecraft and his wonderful, arcane, and usually evil ancient books such as the Necronomicon. Many years ago I got bogged down in the middle of The Name of the Rose and have never gotten around to finishing it. So far none of the other recent books in this genre (and our local Ottakars has a special shelf devoted to them) have seemed worth the time.

Attempts at this sort of thing in film are often especially dire. That said, Manuscript Boy mentions a Johnny Depp movie that I haven't seen which he seems to think was okay. And some movies in this genre are so much fun that I can't help forgiving -- or at least trying not to think about -- their pathetic attempts to deal with history. I'm thinking, for example, of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and The Mummy.

I got to thinking about the subject this morning, when I noticed a review of a new movie called The Cave, whose title reminded me of The Cave of Treasures.

"The Cave" (PG-13) A team of scientists, who look more like panelists at a underwear-model convention, explore a cave that is purported to hold ancient secrets but actually holds a hottie-eating creature. These spelunkheads stick around long enough to be picked off, one by one. It's not original, but it delivers a few jolty thrills and a couple of laughs and wraps things up before it starts to get too dumb. îî1/2

But aside from the cave with ancient secrets, the two don't seem to have much in common.

By the way, sort of on the same note, I'm continuing to compile a list of lost Old Testament pseudepigrapha and I've found a number of others since my lost books post. When I get a chance I'll post the additions to the list here.

As you may have guessed, it's a slow news day.

A NEW BOOK by Steven McKenzie is excerpted on the Bible and Interpretation website:

Jonah and Genre

Readers who have misconstrued the genre of Jonah as history have therefore approached it with an erroneous set of expectations and have often tried to force it to fit their expectations. When it is discovered that the book does not fit those expectations, the tendency is often to blame the book, declaring it "untrue" and implying that it is somehow of less significance because it does not describe historical events.

From How to Read the Bible (Oxford University Press, 2005)
Permission Granted from Oxford University Press

By Steven McKenzie,
Professor, Rhodes College
August 2005

IRAQ'S DRAFT CONSTITUTION comes in for some heavy criticism from Iraqi secularists, according to "Iraq secularists denounce "Islamist" constitution" (Reuters). Some of the criticisms, such as those regarding the centrality of Islamic law, seem to me to be well founded. But I'm less happy with this one:

The only minorities ensured specific rights are Kurds, who have a federal region in the north, and speakers of Syriac, who it says are free to educate their children in the language.

That isn't exactly what it says:

"This constitution guarantees the Islamic identity of the majority of the Iraqi people, as well as complete religious rights for all individuals to freedom of beliefs and religious practice."

"Iraq is a multi-ethnic and multi-religious country and it is part of the Islamic world, and the Arab people in it are part of the Arab nation."

"The Arabic language and Kurdish language are the two official languages of Iraq, and the right of Iraqis to educate their children in mother tongues such as Turkmen and Syriac in government teaching establishments ... or any other language in private institutions is guaranteed."

The right of religious freedom is guaranteed for all minorities. Also, there is a right to state education in "mother tongue" languages, of which Turkmen and Syriac are given as examples. It is not a comprehensive list.

As I said, this sounds pretty good on paper. But much depends on the fairness of its implementation.

JUST GOT OFF THE PHONE with Bnai Brith International in Washington D.C., with whom I did a radio interview about the More Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Project. They plan to broadcast it on Sunday. It will be available online and I'll post the URL when I get it.

THE SARDIS SYNAGOGUE is also featured in an article in the current issue of the American Journal of Archaeology:

The Date of the Sardis Synagogue in Light of the Numismatic Evidence

Jodi Magness

In the 1960s excavations at the site of Sardis in Lydia brought to light the remains of a large and richly decorated synagogue building. The synagogue was installed in a pre-existing Roman bath and gymnasium complex along one of Sardis’s main thoroughfares. Based largely on the coins discovered beneath the mosaic floors, the excavators have dated the synagogue’s construction to the mid- to late-fourth century C.E. In this paper I reexamine the numismatic evidence and conclude that the synagogue was constructed about two centuries later. Dating the synagogue to the mid-sixth century places the building and the Jewish community it served in a different historical setting.

UPDATE: Also, if you're interested in legendary temple treasures, you might want to have a look at "The Greek Temple as Museum: The Case of the Legendary Treasure of Athena from Lindos," by Josephine Shaya, also in the current issue of the American Journal of Archaeology.

THE CASUALTIES OF WAR: The Truth About the Iraq Museum," is a long article by Matthew Bogdanos which gives the definitive account of what happened to the Iraq Museum during the liberation of Baghdad in April of 2003. It's published in the current issue of the American Journal of Archaeology and can be downloaded as a PDF file. Here is the abstract:

The Casualties of War: The Truth about the Iraq Museum

Matthew Bogdanos

As Baghdad was falling to coalition forces in April 2003, the international media reported that the Iraq Museum had been ransacked and more than 170,000 of the finest antiquities from the very cradle of civilization had been stolen while U.S. forces stood idle. The list of missing objects read like a “who’s who” of Near Eastern archaeology, and the world reacted with shock and outrage. In response, the United States dispatched to the museum a highly specialized multiagency task force that had been conducting counterterrorism operations in southern Iraq at the time of the looting. Their mission was to determine what had happened at the museum and to recover whatever antiquities they could. Among several startling discoveries were that the museum compound had been turned into a military fighting position and that the initial reports that over 170,000 priceless antiquities had been stolen were wrong. Although final inventories will take years to complete, the best current estimate is that approximately 14,000–15,000 pieces were initially stolen. The investigation determined that there had been not one but three thefts at the museum by three distinct groups: professionals who stole several dozen of the most prized treasures, random looters who stole more than 3,000 excavation-site pieces, and insiders who stole almost 11,000 cylinder seals and pieces of jewelry. The investigation also determined that the international black market in Iraqi antiquities continues to flourish. Working closely with Iraqis and using a complex methodology that includes community outreach, international cooperation, raids, seizures, and amnesty, the task force and others around the world have recovered more than 5,000 of the missing antiquities. This is a comprehensive report of those thefts and recoveries, as well as an attempt to correct some of the inaccuracies and misunderstandings that have been commonly reported in the media.

THE IRAQI DRAFT CONSTITUTION is excerpted in detail by Reuters. With reference to the issue of Aramaic-speaking Christians, note the following:

"This constitution guarantees the Islamic identity of the majority of the Iraqi people, as well as complete religious rights for all individuals to freedom of beliefs and religious practice."

"Iraq is a multi-ethnic and multi-religious country and it is part of the Islamic world, and the Arab people in it are part of the Arab nation."

"The Arabic language and Kurdish language are the two official languages of Iraq, and the right of Iraqis to educate their children in mother tongues such as Turkmen and Syriac in government teaching establishments ... or any other language in private institutions is guaranteed."

My emphasis. This sounds reasonably hopeful to me. It will be interesting to hear what AINA has to say about it.

THE VOLCANO AT VESUVIUS ERUPTED nineteen hundred and twenty-six years ago today. Since the hope of recovering more of the Herculaneum library has come up now and again this year, it seems worthwhile to touch on the story.

The only firsthand account of the eruption comes from two letters from Pliny the Younger to his friend the historian Cornelius Tacitus. The letters were written in the early second century CE and were intended as source material for Tacitus' Histories. Unfortunately, the relevant section of that work is no longer extant and is one of those lost books we should very much like to see.

In the first letter (6.16) Pliny reports that as a young man he and his mother were staying at nearby Misenum with his uncle, the renowned statesman and naturalist Pliny the Elder. The mother first noticed the mushroom cloud from the eruption. The Elder Pliny was preparing his ship to go make scientific observations of the phenomenon, when a distress message arrived from a friend close to the eruption and he realized that a disaster was in the making. Shifting purpose rapidly, he mustered a convoy of naval ships and led them straight into the maelstrom on a rescue mission, dictating notes as he went. They made it as far as a friend's villa at Stabiae, four miles south of Pompeii, but the wind that had sped them in was too strong to sail against, so they were trapped. Beset by falling ash and stones and in danger of asphyxiation from the poison fumes, they waited the eruption out for two days. Pliny himself went back down to the shore to monitor sailing conditions and was killed by the suffocating gases before the evacuation could begin, perhaps caught by the attenuated edge of the pyroclastic surge that incinerated the residents of Pompeii.

In the second letter (6.20) Pliny the Younger reports that he and his mother stayed overnight at Misenum until persistent earthquakes made the buildings unsafe. They waited outside for the uncle, then reluctantly decided to join the evacuation, by this time shrouded in thick darkness even though it was daytime. Outside the town they waited, shaking off heaps of ash so as not to allow themselves to be buried. Eventually the dark clouds cleared and they were able to make their way back to Misenum to wait for news of the Elder Pliny. The letter ends at this point.

This spring when my son was having a unit on ancient Rome in his Primary Four class, we got out the Penguin translation of Pliny's letters and read these two. It wasn't exactly Star Wars III, but it is a story about real people behaving heroically in a major disaster, and he thought it was pretty cool.

The cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried by volcanic ash, a process that preserved them remarkably well. They give us much of our knowledge about daily life in the ancient Roman world. An important library was carbonized at Herculaneum, but much material from it has been recovered and there is the hope of finding more.

TECHNORATI PROBLEMS: Is it just me, or has Technorati become virtually useless in the last few weeks? I used to check it almost daily to keep track of blog links to PaleoJudaica, but it's gotten more and more unreliable and in recent days I have just been getting

Sorry, we couldn't complete your search because we're experiencing a high volume of requests right now. Please try again in a minute or add this search to your watchlist to track conversation.

every time I try to use it. Has this been happening to you too?

Perhaps it has become a victim of its own success and can no longer even begin to keep up with inquiries. A pity.

UPDATE (24 August): David Meadows e-mails to point out that word search terms still seem to work, but URLs do not. Thus if you just search for "paleojudaica" you do get all recent posts that mention this word, but not every post that has linked to the PaleoJudaica blog.

COPTIC AND ISLAMIC MANUSCRIPTS have reportedly been recovered by the Egyptian authorities before they could be taken out of the country in a British man's luggage:

Egypt detains Briton over manuscripts

8/22/2005, 4:37 p.m. CT
By SALAH NASRAWI
The Associated Press

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) — Airport authorities detained a British man for questioning Monday after they allegedly found valuable Islamic and Coptic manuscripts in his luggage, officials said.

[...]

Adil Abdel Rahman, the airport's antiquities inspector, said Ross was allegedly carrying dozens of manuscripts, including old books on religion, medicine and astrology. He allegedly also had handwritten Coptic Bibles in his luggage.

[...]