Working from the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts in the National Library in Jerusalem, we present here new and interesting findings in Hebrew Manuscripts, particularly the Cairo Genizah. This is a good place to announce preliminary findings, and get feedback from fellow scholars. We welcome posts in Hebrew or English. They will be archived in hardcopy for bibliographic reference.
Catholics Want Message of Respect for Jews to Continue
By Julie Stahl
CNSNews.com Jerusalem Bureau Chief
November 04, 2005
Jerusalem (CNSNews.com) - Catholic and Jewish scholars and theologians gathered in Jerusalem this week to mark the 40th anniversary of an important Catholic Church document acquitting the Jewish people of killing of Jesus Christ.
But scholars said they are concerned that the message of respect for the Jewish people could be forgotten by coming generations.
Blamed for the death of Jesus and considered rejected by God, the Jewish people suffered persecution, pogroms, torture and death at the hands of the Catholic Church, among others, for 1,900 years.
But a change in official Catholic doctrine came with the declaration of Nostra Aetate , a document accepted by the Second Vatican Council on October 28, 1965. It opened a door of friendship and diplomacy between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people.
[...]
Scene set for Coptic studies
The Third International Seminar on Coptic Studies will be held in Sohag early next year.
Jill Kamil looks at the preparations [Al-Ahram Weekly]
"People have come to know that the series of Coptic studies seminars that take place in monasteries are serious affairs," well-known Coptologist Gawdat Gabra says. "Already we have had a most satisfactory response to our announcement that the next seminar will take place in Sohag early next year, and it promises to be even more successful than the other two."
[...]
Egypt arrests blogger
04/11/2005 09:28 - (SA)
Cairo - Egyptian police have detained a blogger for his anti-Islamic and anti-government writings and confiscated his books and copies of his articles, his family and other bloggers said on Thursday.
Abdolkarim Nabil Seliman, a 21-year-old law student at Al-Azhar University, was arrested on October 26. His whereabouts are not known.
[...]
Another blogger, Malik Moustafa, closely followed Seliman's detention and accused followers of the fundamentalist Islamic Salafi movement in Alexandria of being behind the arrest. Moustafa said the arrest followed articles in which Seliman accused the Salafis of inciting the latest sectarian tensions in his neighbourhood of Mouharm Bay.
Blatant remarks
Seliman was detained three days after posting an article to his blog commenting on the violent riots that erupted when thousands of security forces clashed with streams of angry Muslim worshippers in front of a Coptic Christian church over a play put on by Christians deemed offensive to Islam.
[...]
In addition to his anti-Islamic writings, Seliman posted several articles blatantly attacking Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak regime and describing it as a "symbol of dictatorship".
[...]
"If you were wealthy, you could afford marble and the poor had plaster floors," [archaeologist and cultural property lawyer Lucille] Roussin said, meaning it [the synagogue floor at Hamman-Lif] was likely that this community was someplace in between. The inscriptions on the floor were written in Latin, the least common language for Jews of the period, trailing Greek and Aramaic. This suggests a high level of comfort with the prevailing culture. The designs also speak loudly. Some scholars believe that elaborate figurative images may indicate that the communities' interpretation of Jewish law was less strict — much like Reform Judaism today — than in places where only the geometric mosaics condoned by the rabbis are found. It is also possible that the Jews of Hammam-Lif simply had less knowledge of Jewish law coming together in Israel and in Babylonia.
Critical Analysis
Anti-Semitism and Arabs
By Ghali Hassan
Nov 2, 2005, 21:31
Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances — every day, in every part of the world.
- Umberto Eco, NY Review of Books, June, 1995.
To Israel’s friends and supporters of its colonial policy in Palestine, ‘anti-Semitism’ means; any criticism of Israel’s brutal policy against the Palestinians and any criticism of Zionism and its racism that continues to inflict great harm on Arabs and Muslims. The real victims of today’s Western anti-Semitism are Arabs and Muslims, not Jews.
The term ‘anti-Semitism’ has nothing to do with religion. It originated in 18th century Europe where philologists used the term ‘Semite’ to distinguish languages from each other by grouping them into ‘families’ originating from the so-called ‘mother’ tongue to which they are related. Despite the lack of a common ancestral language, Arabic, Aramaic, Amharic, Assyrian, Hebrew, etc. where [sic] grouped as ‘Semitic’ languages. For both Arabic and Hebrew, the classification was incorrect. In other words, neither Arabic nor Hebrew is Semitic.
With the rise of European racism against minorities in the 19th century, European Jews where [sic] targeted. Differences between Jews and other European citizens have to be manufactured. Since European Christians (the Protestant Reformists) adopted the Hebrew bible, religion was not an option for those differences. The Jews were identified as ‘Semites’ based on the incorrect assumption that their ancestors spoke Hebrew, which wasn’t the case. Ancient Hebrew tribes were Aramaic speakers.
While I am discussing inscriptions, it is worth noting that the epigraphic evidence makes it clear that speakers of Hebrew engaged in a monumental building project in Jerusalem around 700 (the Siloam Tunnel inscription). Other excavated Hebrew inscriptions in Jerusalem around this time include the Silwan tomb inscription, the Ophel ostracon, and an ostracon from Arad that mentions "the king of Judah." Substantial corpora of Judean Hebrew correspondence by worshipers of YHWH were found on ostraca from the end of the Iron Age (late 600s to 586/87) at Lachish and Arad. The Lachish letters mention "the king" (##3, 5), "the prophet" (#3), and possibly (the reading is damaged) "Jerusalem" (#5). The Arad ostraca also refer to "the king" (#24). These are all excavated inscriptions whose genuineness is not in doubt.
On the Internet she has challenged bloggers who dismiss her, on religious grounds and otherwise, as unqualified to take on the subject. "I tell them it's sincerely written and it's the Jesus of the Gospels," she said.
Anne Rice: 'Stations on a Journey'
The best-selling author gives up writing about vampires to write about the 'ultimate supernatural hero'--Jesus Christ.
By Marcia Z. Nelson
Anne Rice has nailed her vampire novels into a coffin.
"I will never write those kind of books again -- never," Rice said, referring to three decades of work that include bestsellers like "Interview with the Vampire" and other books in the Vampire Chronicles series.
Her books about witches and dark angels, she said, "were reflections of a world that didn't include redemption."
In the end, Rice seems to consider her new book a gift, both to Christians and to non-Christian fans of her previous work. "This is a book I offer to all Christians," she writes, "to the fundamentalists, to the Roman Catholics, to the most liberal Christians in the hope that my embrace of more conservative doctrines will have some coherence for them in the here and now of the book...
"I offer this book to those who know nothing of Jesus Christ in the hope that you will see him in these pages in some form. I offer this novel with love to my readers who've followed me through one strange turn after another in the hope that Jesus will be as real to you as any other character I've ever launched into the world we share."
Rarities Online
By Andrew Richard Albanese — November 1, 2005
With digitization, special collections are entering a golden age of usability
Columbia University librarian James G. Neal beams as he walks past item after item on display in the school’s Butler Library, treasures drawn from the massive Brander Matthews Dramatic Museum. The collection is a veritable feast for theater scholars, including everything from rare first editions, sketches, and manuscript drafts to playbills, set designs, ornate masks, and some remarkable 19th-century handcrafted marionettes.
It is in unique collections like these that Neal sees a bright future for libraries. In fact, at the April 2005 Association of College and Research Libraries annual conference in Minneapolis, Neal told an audience of librarians that in the digital age, librarians are poised to enter a new “golden age” of special collections, spurred by digitization and greater online access to primary resources.
“Research libraries traditionally have been evaluated by how many volumes they hold, but the smallest library can eventually access as many volumes as the largest,” Neal explains, alluding to the advent of digital databases for contemporary resources. “In the future, I believe great research libraries will be evaluated more and more on their special collections.”
[Alice] Schreyer [special collections librarian at the University of Chicago] points to the Goodspeed Manuscript Collection Project at the University of Chicago. With a $250,000 award from the Institute of Museum and Library Services matched by $227,762 from the university, the project has created a remarkable digital collection of 65 Greek, Syriac, Ethiopian, Armenian, Arabic, and Latin manuscripts dating from the seventh to the 19th century, complete with software to scroll over and examine every part of the manuscripts in detail. The program, Schreyer says, began with a faculty member using the collection with a class but quickly evolved. “We really felt the research potential of the collection was of global interest to scholars, and we wanted to be able to share that worldwide,” Schreyer says. “It’s a collection that has not been heavily researched because it is all in Chicago.” It is now freely accessible, and such efforts epitomize the transformation of learning.
Police arrest archaeologist suspected of ancient relic trade
By Jonathan Lis, Haaretz Correspondent
An archaeologist was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of locating and purchasing an ancient document from antiquities thieves.
Professor Hanan Eshel, of Bar-Ilan University, is suspected of purchasing pieces of a Leviticus scroll from the Bar Kokhba period (132-135 CE) from three West Bank Bedouin for $3,000. The three Bedouin allegedly showed the document first to a doctoral student of Eshel, Roi Porat. Porat, who was also questioned yesterday, allegedly called in Eshel, who subsequently made the purchase. Eshel and Porat were released with limitations after questioning.
[...]
Police probe leading archeologist
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS
In a bizarre case, the former head of the archeology department at Bar-Ilan University is under investigation for illicitly trading in antiquities valued at $1 million, police said Tuesday.
After purchasing the scroll, he [Eshel] said he had it photographed at a police lab, a claim police deny.
"I bought the scroll to give it to the State of Israel and, instead of thanking me, they are accusing me of trying to steal it, which is nonsense," he said.
Eshel maintained he reported the find to the Antiquities Authority a few months after it was shown to him, but that the authority did nothing about it.
Jerusalem police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby, however, said that Eshel hid both the discovery of the Bar Kochba-era scroll in a Judean Desert cave and his purchase of it.
The Antiquities Authority, subsequently lodged a complaint with the police, which opened an investigation, Ben-Ruby said.
During questioning, Eshel reportedly told the police he did not report the find to the Antiquities Authority because he was afraid that "they would steal the credit," Ben-Ruby said.
Prof. Aren Maeir, current head of Bar-Ilan's Land of Israel studies and archeology department, accused the Antiquities Authority and police of blowing the case "completely out of proportion."
Kabbalah leader arrested over '£30,000 charge for fraudulent cancer cure'
· Madonna's Israeli host questioned in Tel Aviv
· Woman told £4 branded water would help chances
Conal Urquhart in Tel Aviv
Tuesday November 1, 2005
The Guardian
The head of a religious centre which hosted Madonna's visit to Israel was last night under arrest on suspicion of promising to cure a woman's cancer in return for more than £30,000.
[...]
Make love, not jihad: PSYOP, OSINT efforts should tackle repression of romance
By Steve Hammons
October 31, 2005 (American Chronicle)
In the struggle against terrorism, religious extremism and in dealing with challenges in Iraq, there are many strategies and tactics available. These include so-called "hard power" options such as bullets and bombs as well as "soft power" such as persuasion, education and psychological operations (PSYOP).
Dr. Walid Phares, a professor of Middle East studies and senior fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, wrote an article titled "�Valentine's Day Enrages Jihadists." Phares noted that, "the terrorists are not intimidated by death, but they are terrorized by love."
[...]
This situation is ripe for PSYOP and open source intelligence (OSINT) endeavors to "liberate the oppressed," as the U.S. Army Special Forces motto goes.
[...]
"Love warfare has become the boldest threat that can roll back jihad. On the internet, Arab, Persian, Kurdish, Aramaic, and other love and music chat rooms attract ten times the al-Ansar-crowded rooms. There, you read and hear discussions of love; they seek, not decadence, but the early stages of a romantic revolution," according to Phares.
[...]
Police Arrest Jews Trying to Visit Synagogue in Jericho
09:48 Oct 31, '05 / 28 Tishrei 5766 (Arutz Sheva)
(IsraelNN.com) Police this morning arrested a number of Jews who were attempting by foot to visit the ancient Jewish synagogue in Jericho.
[...]
Date set for Da Vinci court case (BBC)
A date has been arranged for High Court action by two authors against the publishers of The Da Vinci Code, which they say infringes upon their ideas.
A trial will begin on 27 February to hear the claim that writer Dan Brown stole Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh's idea that Jesus had a child.
They are suing Random House, claiming the bestseller lifts from their 1982 book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.
[...]
Garamma: Stone writings of African Adam
Posted to the Web: Sunday, October 30, 2005 (Vanguard, Nigeria)
NIGERIA'S dogged cultural researcher, and erstwhile senior special assistant to the President on Arts and Culture, Catherine Acholonu-Olumba recently teamed up with India’s computer engineer and IT specialist, Ajay Prebhaka, winner of several awards as an upcoming computer "whiz kid" to undertake the most painstaking and ambitious cultural research project ever carried out on the shores of Africa.
[...]
The outcome of the journey was the discovery that Africa was home to a celestial, high technology civilization based in the present day location of the Sahara Desert - a civilization that was decimated by the deluge and by the war of the gods of antiquity, the hallmarks of which included the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid of Egypt.
Also, the stone writings of Ikom were deciphered by Acholonu, and Prabhakar and were found to contain an entire scripture in our solar system. This was the very first scripture of humanity! The researchers discovered that the writings were a combination of ancient Egyptian, Sumerian and Davidian letters. Evidence abounds in the work of the two researchers to prove that the Ikom stone writings were the original source-book of the ancient Sumerian epic of creation, Euuma Ellsh, dated 6000 B.C. (the original source of Genesis) and of The book of the Secrets of Enoch; that the delta location of the monoliths was the limed global seaport of Tilmun, from where great ships sailed the global seas of antiquity supplying gold, palm produce, spices, dates and copper; that Mount Cameroon (known as ‘The Chariots of the God" ) was the Mecca and Rome of antiquity, a veritable chariot of the gods to which the Pharaohs of Egypt betook themselves to dwell with the gods in underground dwellings connected secretly with the lands stretching through the Niger Delta and through the Niger/Benue ‘Sacred Confluence of Osiris’ to the Chad Basin (with its core in the Ejegham nation);
[...]
Ikom stone writings gave away their sacred language - The Garamma Language - the Lost Mother Tongue of mankind, the origin of the Hebrew Qabbala and the ‘Tera-gramm’ name of Yaweh. Off-shoots of the Garamma writing include Nsibidi of Ekpe cult of Southern Nigeria and the Ogham sacred writings of the Celtic dwarfs (Druids) of ancient British Isles.
[...]
These discs make it possible to examine and magnify in minute detail not just text and illustrations, but even the paper, watermarks and binding. Although for now we still see through a glass, it is no longer darkly. It is as if someone, our computer genie, were willing to take an infinite amount of time to display every detail of a treasured object, its hand-tooled leather bindings, translucent watercolors, the very texture of the paper. There is none of that greying out of the page that you find in many facsimiles. The presence of each book is almost palpable.
The Octavo Editions series covers classics in art, architecture, botany, zoology, religion, science and literature and, although the actual book is viewable in its pristine form, plenty of explanatory background material is provided as well. While the prospect of owning Gutenberg’s Bible, Redouté’s Roses or Tory’s Champ Fleury rang my bells, the following titles made this old English major positively salivate:
The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), the chef d’oeuvre of Aldus Manutius, the greatest printer of the Italian Renaissance, has fascinated poets, psychologists and iconographers for half a millennium. Anyone interested in dreams, erotica, alchemy, architecture, hieroglyphs, emblems, allegory or symbolism has probably stumbled upon this title and its hermetic illustrations and wondered about its author, its euphuistic language and its meaning.
It reads like a collaboration between Baron Corvo and Carl Jung. The real author is unknown even though the name Francesco Colonna is encrypted into the text. Joscelyn Godwin, whose 1999 translation is the only complete English version, pays lip service to Colonna in that volume, although two years earlier in Prague he told me that he was convinced by recent scholarship that Leone Battista Alberti, the humanist author and architect, wrote this strife of love in a dream. Whoever wrote it, the book is one of the most beautiful ever printed and all of that loveliness comes through in this disc.
Ancient Armenia gave faith an alphabet
By Rich Barlow | October 29, 2005 (Boston Globe)
Few birthdays are cause for a global scholars' conference at Harvard, but they're raising a metaphorical glass in Cambridge to toast the Armenian alphabet. It's not just that at 1,600 years old the alphabet makes Methuselah look like a youngster. These three dozen letters gave a written language of faith to a pivotal country in Christian history.
Years before the Roman emperor Constantine's famous conversion, Armenia was the first country to adopt Christianity as its state religion, in the year 301. At the time, Armenian was a spoken tongue only, meaning worshipers relied on translators during services to interpret a Bible that was written in other languages.
''Bare oral translations," an Armenian theologian later wrote, ''were insufficient to satisfy the aspirations of the heart."
A fifth-century priest, Mesrob Mashtotz, sated those aspirations, devising a 36-letter script (two more letters were added later) so the Old and New Testaments could be rendered in Armenian. For Armenians worldwide, including the Armenian Apostolic Church, religion and language would become intertwined as the life supports keeping the nation's culture and heritage alive outside the homeland, says James R. Russell, Mesrob Mashtotz professor of Armenian studies at Harvard.
[...]
The effects spilled over beyond Armenia's border; for example, Russell says that many works of Philo of Alexandria, the great Jewish theologian of the Greco-Roman era, have come down to us only because they survived in Armenian and subsequently were translated into Greek.
The Hebrew Teacher: Guru, Drill Instructor, or Role Model?
Last week, before he was arrested, Sheikh Ra'ad Salah, head of the Islamic Movement's Northern Branch, slammed Jerusalem Police Chief Mickey Levy for his comment that the police were considering allowing Jews to go to the site. Salah said that Levy's remarks "reveal the tragic circumstances of the existence of the Al-Aqsa Mosque under the occupying Israeli rule."
Following this week's wave of arrests of top Islamic Movement members, the organization published a declaration saying that the campaign against it was part of the "rosy, narcissistic, false dream" of the Israeli government "to build their false temple on the blessed land of Al-Aqsa."
Ra'ad's deputy, Sheikh Kamal Khatib, told Haaretz this week that the steps against his movement also serve the interests of the Palestinian Authority - and especially the new prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) - which is concerned about the control the organization is beginning to wield over the Mount.
The Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement holds an annual Al-Aqsa Festival, which it first started in the 1990s and which draws thousands and thousands of participants. The movement fundraises intensively for renovations via its Al-Aqsa Association and publishes propaganda in the form of books and articles on the "false temple" Israel plans to build once it has rid the Temple Mount of all mosques.
Brousing through the books sold at the movement's store in Kafr Qana, for example, one suddenly comes across "scientific" proof showing that the First and Second Temples never stood on the site, as the Jews believe. ...
Archbishop Al-Mu'alem stated: "I want to be clear that we are the Christians of this land and not uninvited intruders. We were Arabs before the appearance of Islam, we are still Arabs, and we will continue to be Arabs. We were the first to congratulate [the Muslims] who came in the days of the Caliph Omar. I send you back to history."
Sheik Khatib responded: "Revered Archbishop, is it a day of struggle or a day of reconciliation…? If anyone else had said those things we may have forgiven him, but coming from you - there can be no forgiveness. What do you mean when you say you were here before the appearance of Islam? It means that Islam is a foreign phenomenon here. …You should know that for us Islam is not only the religion of the Prophet Muhammad, but also the religion of Moses, Jesus, and Abraham [who according to the The Koran are considered prophets of Islam]...
Robert H. Johnston, Examiner of Dead Sea Scrolls, Dies at 77
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: October 26, 2005 (New York Times)
Robert H. Johnston, an archaeologist who helped develop a way to read ancient texts blackened or faded by time, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, died last Wednesday at his home in Brighton, N.Y. He was 77.
He spent more than a month in the hospital recently after several minor falls followed by infections and minor strokes, said his wife, Louise, but she could not point to a single cause of death.
Mr. Johnston, who for two decades was a professor and administrator at the Rochester Institute of Technology, worked in digital imaging to tease out ancient text, often minute fragments of individual characters, that had not been seen for as long as 2,000 years. This involved manipulating technology first used for medical diagnosis and enhancing pictures taken from military satellites.
Along with the Dead Sea Scrolls, texts from the time of Christ, Mr. Johnston decoded parts of a 10th-century parchment copy of a famous treatise by the Greek mathematician Archimedes that had been used as the fabric for a 13th-century prayer book, among other projects.
[...]
Israeli dig to spark Temple Mount violence?
Al Aqsa leader warns of deadly riots, busing supporters to mosque
Posted: October 24, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Aaron Klein
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com
JERUSALEM – A senior Al Aqsa leader whose group has been accused of associations with Hamas told WorldNetDaily yesterday recent Israeli digs near the Temple Mount and a plan to construct an underground visitors center near the Western Wall are really Jewish designs to destroy the mosque, potentially sparking deadly riots.
The group, which has previously been involved with Temple Mount violence, has been sending buses the past few weeks to Israeli Arab neighborhoods asking Muslims to "swarm" the Al Aqsa Mosque to protect it from "Jewish attacks," WND has learned.
[...]
Hatib told WND the recent Israeli archeological findings are "nonsense. Finding pieces of one centimeter is nothing near our historical right that counts thousands of years before Israel and before Moses. I suggest to the Israeli and Jewish fanatics and to the Christian groups in America who support them to think about how to support peace and not war."
But on December 22, AD640, a reader with a very different agenda was in control of Alexandria. Where literary works were concerned, he was strict: "Those which disagree with the Word of God are blasphemous, those which agree, superfluous." Amrou Ibn el-Ass, on orders from his caliph, decreed that the library be burned. The scrolls opened a final time, unfurled by the flames, and the complete works of Aeschylus became lost forever.
Around the world, Gaza is seen only as a deeply troubled place - a bloody arena in the Palestinians' confrontation with Israel.
But efforts are being made now to present a fuller picture.
The Palestinian Authority has approved a plan to build a national archaeological museum in Gaza.
Land has been set aside, and the United Nations is helping to develop the project.
"People around the world have looked at Gaza through the TV as a place of violence and anarchy," says the head of the United Nations Development Programme in Gaza, Khalid Abdul Shafi.
"Yes there was violence. But there is another face of Gaza - there is culture and archaeology and history."
WND: But what about the previous Jewish Temples? Do you believe they existed? Do Jews have any historic claims to the Temple Mount whatsoever?
HATIB: We the Muslims believe that Al Aqsa was built since the time of Adam – God bless him. It was built 40 years after the construction of the Al Haram Mosque in Mecca which was built thousands of years ago. Al Aqsa was built by the angels as it is mentioned in a verse of the Quran. The mosque is mentioned in the Quran, which speaks about the raising of the prophet.
We believe that the Jewish Temples existed, but we deny they were built near Al Aqsa. When the First Temple was built by Solomon – God bless him – Al Aqsa was already built. We don't believe that a prophet like Solomon would have built the Temple at a place where a mosque existed.
WND: What you are saying contradicts reality. There is no serious scholar or archeologist in the world who argues Al Aqsa was built before the Jewish Temples. And if the Temples didn't exist on the Mount, what then do you say is the Western Wall? What do you make of all the archeological findings?
HATIB: About the Kotel (the Western Wall), we deny any relation between the Temple and the Al Aqsa Mosque. We believe that the Western Wall is part of the mosque and not the Wall of Lamentation, as the Jews say. ... The Western wall is an inseparable part of the mosque.
And all the historical and archeological facts deny any relation between the Temples and the location of Al Aqsa. We must know that Jerusalem was occupied and that people left many things, coins and other things everywhere. This does not mean in any way that there is a link between the people who left these things and the place where these things were left.
HATIB: The fact that Jerusalem is mentioned in the Torah does not in any way mean that the city was populated or built by the Jews. Everyone knows that when the prophet Abraham came from Arik in 1850 before Christ he was given by the Arab King Melchizedek the land where he and his wife lived in Hebron, and it was 600 years before Moses' message, which also proves that Abraham was not a Jew.
Queen of darkness sees the light in new book on Jesus
12:00 AM CDT on Saturday, October 22, 2005
By BENEDICTA CIPOLLA Religion News Service
The queen of darkness has seen the light.
In her latest book, Christ the Lord, novelist Anne Rice turns away from the doomed souls of her best-selling tales about vampires and witches in favor of a first-person account of the 7-year-old Jesus.
Ms. Rice chooses 11 B.C. as the date of Jesus' birth. While she said she found one scholarly precedent for doing so, she uses the earlier date mainly to allow the 7-year-old Jesus to arrive from Egypt in time to witness the well-documented violence that erupted in Judea and Galilee after Herod's death in 4 B.C.
That seminal event in childhood is certain to influence Jesus in Ms. Rice's planned subsequent volumes.
[...]
The Gospels are almost silent on Jesus' childhood, giving Ms. Rice a wide berth to take certain liberties with her story. In the book, Jesus is taught in Alexandria by the Hellenistic philosopher Philo, which in turns allows for her Jesus to be fluent in Greek, something many historians doubt was the case.
Ms. Rice also borrows two incidents – the slaying of a playmate and the turning of clay sparrows into live ones – from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a second-century work that shows Jesus learning to use his divine powers for good. It was never accepted as part of the Christian Scriptures.
Dear Hugoye members
The second volume of the collection Etudes syriaques, edited by the Societe d'etudes syriaques and published by Geuthner, just came out.
Les apocryphes syriaques, ed. Muriel Debie, Christelle Jullien, Florence
Jullien, Alain Desreumaux, Etudes syriaques 2, Paris, 2005.
ISBN 2-7053-3771-7
Table of Contents
B. Outtier РPr̩face : Les apocryphes syriaques. Histoire pass̩e et future
A. Desreumaux – Des richesses peu connues : les apocryphes syriaques
D. Taylor – Quand les apocryphes syriaques relisent l’Ancien Testament
M.-J. Pierre РLes Odes de Salomon : genre litt̩raire et pseud̩pigraphie
A. Desreumaux РLes apocryphes syriaques sur J̩sus et sa famille
A. Desreumaux – Les apocryphes apostoliques
F. Jullien – Figures fondatrices dans les apocryphes syriaques
V. Calzolari РLa transmission et la r̩ception des apocryphes syriaques dans la tradition arm̩nienne
G. Troupeau РNotes sur quelques apocryphes conserv̩s dans des manuscrits arabes de Paris
M. Debie – Les apocalypses apocryphes syriaques : des pseudépigraphes de l’Ancien et du Nouveau Testament
H. Kaufhold РLa litt̩rature pseudo-canonique syriaque
J.-N. PÉrès – L’intérêt des apocryphes syriaques dans la pensée et la théologie syriaques
A. Desreumaux – Esquisse d’une liste d'Å“uvres apocryphes syriaques
This volume is sent to all members of the Societe d'etudes syriaques for 2005.
It can be bought from Librairie orientaliste Geuthner, 12 rue Vavin, 75006 Paris, France.
For North America, this volume and the first (Les inscriptions syriaques) can be bought from
Librairie GGCitée
1567, rue King Ouest
Sherbrooke (Québec) J1J2C6
Téléc. 819 566 4305
www.biblairie.qc.ca
gerald.caza@biblairie.qc.ca
See the SES web site: www.etudes-syriaques.org
Exclusive: Temple Mount tour
Ynetnews presents rare, exclusive video of holy site, currently closed to Jews, after Israeli able to sneak camcorder into Mount. Prominent archeologist who watched video says Muslim renovation did not damage shrine
Distinguished archeologist Ze’ev Herzog, who has closely dealt with the Temple Mount, watched the video and said it only served to reinforce his stance that Muslim work did not cause any significant damage to the site.
“The Waqf’s renovation activity did not cause archeological damage in my estimation,” he told Ynet. “There’s no chance there were ancient archeological remnants in the area.”
The Waqf has been removing dirt from the site, Herzog says, but notes this dirt was only brought at a later period.
“According to the video, the Waqf in fact reconstructed the site as it was during the crusader period and added a few accessories (such as fans and electricity) to make it a convenient prayer house,” he said.
Jim, Surely what Ze'ev was saying was true. The area cleared and turned into a mosque is what is often called Solomon's stables. These were utilised by the templars perhaps even as stables. Whatever they were used for the dirt moved out from them must post-date the Crusader period.
Jim, I think it is important to keep things in perspective. Yes indeed much of the deep pit to the north of Solomon's stables was probably Herodian fill. And yes it would have been better if both it and the spoil removed from the stables themselves had been treated with more archaeological respect. But truckloads of debris were removed by bulldozers from outside the city walls near the Jaffa gate by Israeli archaeologists without the debris being sifted and, moreover, I don't believe that anybody can be absolutely certain that remains from the Umayyad periods onwards were not destroyed in the process. However flimsy these structures may have been they too would have deserved more respect. Let he who is without sin.....
the whole SIS (http://www.sis.gov.eg/) site appears to have been revamped so it has probably changed address. It also appears to be having teething problems!
The six-week dig is almost over, and though some interesting finds have been uncovered, the whereabouts of the elusive Hazor archive are still unknown. With each passing day, the likelihood of finding the archives this season grows dimmer. No one says anything, but everyone knows that the next strike of the pickaxe could yield the written secrets of the site.
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Why have I have changed my mind and no longer write or subscribe? Not largely for any ethical reasons but for commercial reasons of my own. The publicity I have had for my views is a lasting benefit to me (and maybe to scholarship, but that’s not for me to say). The returns have now diminished, partly because there is little more useful publicity to be had, but mostly because the respect Shanks has among the scholarly community has diminished. His stock value has plummeted, and the benefit to scholars of being included in his pages is much less.
By Philip Davies
University Of Sheffield, England
October 2005
I would hate to see the end of BAR because I believe in popularizing scholarship. But I think it needs to have a new editor if it wants to be of any use to scholarship. Maybe there are other things Hershel can move on to: he has considerable gifts, and with the addition of a little humility, there is still much he might achieve -- elsewhere.
This Wednesday, the Oriental Institute Members' Lecture Series continues with a talk by U of C alum Cynthia L. Miller, followed by a reception in the LaSalle Bank Education Center. Join us!
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Languages Without Speakers: Reconstructing Ancient Near Eastern Languages from Epigraphic Fragments
Cynthia L. Miller, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Wednesday, October 19
8:00 PM
At the Oriental Institute, 1155 E 58th St
Free
Artifacts of language pose unique challenges for reconstruction and interpretation. Like other material artifacts, epigraphic remains are often fragmentary and enigmatic. Initially, the script must be identified and deciphered so that the text can be read, but beyond these preliminary tasks lies the real interest of Semitic philologists: What can these languages fragments tell us about the language as a whole? What can we learn about how the language functioned in an ancient society? Philologists must find ways to approach these issues without any access to living speakers of the language in question or to the ancient society within which the language was used. This illustrated lecture examines the challenges that Semitic philologists face in reconstructing the languages of the ancient Near East based on fragmentary epigraphic remains, and considers the ways in which linguistic techniques can shed light on these questions.
Speaker Cynthia Miller is Associate Professor, Department of Hebrew and Semitic Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professor Miller specializes in the syntax and pragmatics of Classical Hebrew and the related Northwest Semitic languages. She is particularly interested in moving the field of traditional Semitic philology to an understanding of, and appreciation for, contemporary linguistic approaches to the study of ancient texts. She received her Ph.D. with honors from the University of Chicago in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the Department of Linguistics (joint degree).
__________________________________________________________________
Please contact Maria Krasinski in the Membership Office with any questions:
(773) 834 9777 or oi-membership@uchicago.edu. This lecture is is free and open to the public. Members are reminded that they may dine at the University of Chicago's Quadrangle Club prior to lectures.
The Oriental Institute is located at 1155 East 58th Street, Chicago IL 60637.
Persons needing assistance should contact (773) 702 9513.
As most of you know, David Frankfurter (University of New Hampshire) will be the guest speaker Thursday night at the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins, on the theme "From Holy Man to Ritual Experts" in late antiquity. David will be arriving on campus in early afternoon (around 1:30 or so), and would be pleased to talk informally with whoever may be interested (probably in the Logan 2nd floor lounge) before the seminar attendees do dinner at Houston Hall around 6.
You can check on any details with the co-chairs of the PSCO, T. J. Wellman and Harry Tolley. Or with me.
I don't have any pre-seminar reading "assignments" to offer, although I suspect that a review of Peter Brown's "holy man" publications and their reviewers would be appropriate as well as David's recent article on "Syncretism and the Holy Man in Late Antique Egypt," Journal of Early Christian Studies (2003). When in doubt, go to google (or similarly).
Note also that at 4:30 that same afternoon, Eric Rebillard (of the Departments of Classics and History, Cornell University) will present a paper sponsored by the Ethnohistory Workshop on the status of saints' relics at the end of the fourth century entitled "Relics and the real presence of the saints: the late Roman evidence" (Room 345 of the University Museum, 4:30-6:30). It may be that David will also want to attend!
For further details on PSCO, see
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/psco/
On David Frankfurter,
http://www.unh.edu/history/fac_frankfurter.htm
RAK
--
Robert A. Kraft, Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania
227 Logan Hall (Philadelphia PA 19104-6304); tel. 215 898-5827
kraft@ccat.sas.upenn.edu
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/rs/rak/kraft.html
The T-Lounge has also always been supported of Metatron.
The nine-member hip-hop and jazz fusion band will perform with Mano Sol, Aztec Zodiac and Fall of an Empire at 8 p.m. Oct. 23.
Charlotte's Discovery Place Presents The Dead Sea Scrolls
POSTED: 3:34 pm EDT October 14, 2005 (WSOCtv.com, NC )
UPDATED: 6:57 pm EDT October 14, 2005
CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- The Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at Charlotte’s Discovery Place will feature two scrolls never seen outside of Israel.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are considered one of the greatest archeological discoveries of the 20th century. They include the earliest written texts of the Bible and are nearly 2,300 years old.
Charlotte’s exhibit will include 10 original scrolls and three replicas. It will be at Discovery Place Feb. 17-May 29, 2006.
The scrolls coming to Charlotte that have never left Israel are transcripts of Numbers and Isaiah. ...
The Mamzer Jesus and His Birth
So why did some people accuse Jesus of being born of fornication (porneia, John 8:41)? Was it for the same reason he was called “son of Mary” in his own town (Mark 6:3) rather than “son of Joseph”? What emerges from both Rabbinic literature (supplemented by Origen) and the New Testament is that Jesus’ mother was clearly known and that the identity of his father was contested.
By Bruce Chilton
Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Religion
Bard College
October 2005
Ben-Dov: "Let's say that there is a bulla and it has three letters on it. Yigal Shiloh [excavator of the City of David] had 70 intact bullas. This bulla says nothing. There is no discovery, so why blow things up like this?"
This is my first time following my article onto the blogosphere so bear with me. Your comment on my article in the Stanford Review was interesting. I believe the Nachmanides' synagogue was established by Nachmanides' pupils shortly after his death, but you described that as a "minor point." Joseph Caro did publish his work during the Ottoman period, but the example was meant to show that a productive Jewish community existed. The more major point is whether Beinin knows that a Jewish community existed continuously between 70-1516. Undoubtedly he does know. In my article I stated that Beinin's lectures IMPLIED there was no such community, meaning that his lectures were deliberately deceitful, intended to omit Jewish history, but cleverly to maintain deniability if actually called for his words. The class, as you know from the course description you downloaded, is intended for novice historians. I did download Beinin's lecture transcripts and have the videos at my house. Here is the pertinent transcript from week one:
"The total number of Jews was about 25,000, and they lived in the four Jewish holy cities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias. Some of them had lived in Palestine since the 16th Century when Ottoman authorities invited Jews who had been expelled from Spain to settle in Palestine. These were religious Jews, not Zionists. They came to the Holy Land to study Jewish religious texts and to be buried there."
The purpose of Beinin's lectures is to imply, without actually saying so, that most Jews left with Titus and came back due to Arab hospitality. If you were one of the 50 odd students who had little background, that is what you would have believed. It is brilliant, comical and evil all at the same time.
Beinin made a deliberate point of equating Jewish and Palestinian national claims. Therefore he omitted/minimized Jewish life in Palestine from 70 CE until the beginning of Zionism in the 19th century, stated that Jewish and Palestinian nationalism began "about the same time," and postulated that Palestinians might have originated from the Canaanites, and restricted Jewish archaeological finds to the "Wailing Wall." The combination of thoughts seems like a deliberate omission from an historian, who is quite eloquent and knowledgeable in many respects, and presents ideas very similar to the "history" emanating from the Palestinian National Authority, while cleverly protecting his deniability. My conclusion is that the historical talk at the very least deserves filling in. Readers can decide for themselves if they believe his omissions were dishonest.
Last March and April you reported on the condition of the Shalom al-Yisrael synagogue in Jericho (thru Arutz 7), the first a worrisome account indicating the place might have been destroyed, the second more hopeful, that a) it had not been totally destroyed and b) that Jews were allowed back for prayers.
My questions are: a) What is the current situation; b) What is the condition of the mosaic floor (is it even there?); c) Would you know of any photographs of the actual remains of the original Byzantine era building? If you do not have any of this info handy (I do realize you are very busy), would you know who best to approach with this?
History lies in the silt of Tyre
By Norman Hammond, Archaeology Correspondent (Times of London)
[...]
Tyre was an island fortress until Alexander the Great took it in 332 BC and built a causeway linking it to the mainland. The island itself is said to have been created by Hiram, King of Tyre, who sent cedars of Lebanon to King David for his palace and to Solomon for the first Temple in Jerusalem. Hiram linked the two Ambrosian Isles to create his city, with the principal harbour on the north.
The French team have sunk boreholes and extracted cores of sediment that reveal the history of Tyre. While some sediment came from the Litani river to the south, there were also cultural contributions. Mudbrick architecture yielded clay particles that sluiced down the streets, agriculture inland led to erosion and runoff, and people dumped rubbish in the harbour.
[...]
When a site is uncovered the Israelis institute a ‘salvage excavation,’ i.e. the rapid removal and recording of artefacts before the site is covered up. In most cases this results in the destruction of the site, although occasionally the site is covered up but not destroyed for future investigation, e.g. in the case of an important mosaic floor. Nevertheless the effect of these ‘salvage excavations’ is that the all-important context of the site is destroyed and the knowledge that it yields is lost forever. Such excavations fall under the authority of the archaeological staff officer, who is an officer of the Civil Administration (i.e. the Israeli military).
In addition to the loss of Palestine’s movable heritage there has also been extensive damage to, and destruction of, immovable cultural heritage. The press release of the World Archaeological Congress issued on 7 January 2004 expressed concern at the destruction of archaeological and heritage sites in the OPTs by Israeli forces, mentioning Nablus, Bethlehem and Hebron.
Ex-Employee Sues Santana
• Bruce Kuhlman, a former personal assistant to the musician, alleges wrongful termination and age, gender and religious discrimination.
By Donna Horowitz, Special to The [Los Angeles] Times
SAN RAFAEL, Calif. -- A former employee of Carlos Santana is suing the Grammy-winning musician and his wife, alleging that the couple fired him because he wasn't spiritual enough.
[...]
The Santanas have long been spiritual seekers. Carlos Santana, in a 2000 interview with The Times, credited an angel named Metatron for helping inspire his career comeback. At that year's Grammy Awards, he won eight.
[...]
Beinin teaches an online course sponsored by Stanford, Oxford and Yale entitled “Palestine, Zionism and the Arab-Israeli Conflict.” Beinin prepared a syllabus and a videotape that was mailed to students that introduced the material for each of the ten weekly classes. The rest of the class consisted of readings, a weekly online chat, and an open bulletin board, that was monitored by a young Ph. D.
The bulletin board allowed students the opportunity to correct countless mischaracterizations by the teacher. A few examples are mentioned below. In the video narrative by Beinin for the first week, Beinin stated that, following the destruction of the Jewish Second Temple by the Romans in the year 70, C.E., Jews had next come to Palestine in the sixteenth century, at the invitation of the Moslem Turks, “to study religious books and to be buried there.”
A poster noted that, in fact, the past two millennia in Palestine that Beinin had implied had little Jewish history were actually chock-full of events. These included Jewish revolts, for over five centuries; the writing and the publication of the Jerusalem Talmud and later, the Shulhan Aruch; and the establishment of a synagogue in Jerusalem by Nachmanides after 1270, a city in which Jews have lived since. Only during the First Crusades, when the Jewish community was burned alive, was there a brief period in which Jerusalem did not have a Jewish community.
Beinin lectured that the “only” remnant of the Herodian Jewish Temple was the “Wailing” Wall (an archaic term) and that the Haram, or the Moslem holy site, was located above. A post reminded the class that, actually, the whole Western and Southern Walls were remnants of the Herodian temple, and that the area above had been the Jewish Temple seven centuries before Mohammed was born. A link was presented to pictures of excavations with Hebrew inscriptions such as the Trumpeter’s stone covering an area about ten times larger than the one Beinin incorrectly described.
Book on Oriental influence on the Portuguese language to be released again
(Brazil-Arab News Agency)
The book 'Oriental Influences on the Portuguese Language', by Miguel Nimer, was reedited by his nephew, Carlos Augusto Calil, and is due to be re-launched next Tuesday, in São Paulo. The book talks about the inheritance from oriental languages like the Arabic, Aramaic, Persian and Turkish in Portuguese. Nimer, who has already passed away, was the son of Lebanese immigrants.
Hollister Author Encourages Readers to Seek Spiritual Path
Friday, October 07, 2005
Hollister resident Iran Maurice White wanted to tell a tale with a heartfelt spiritual message. His recently published novel shares his story with the world.
“The Mhystery of Everyone’s Guardian Angel” details the story of a young boy named Quaero who takes a spiritual journey to discover the truth within himself.
[...]
He grew up in San Jose and his family moved to Hollister when he was 16. He finished his last two years of high school as a Haybaler.
His first name Iran (pronounced EYE-wren) means “guardian angel” in the ancient Aramaic language, he said. This meaning has guided him in his own spiritual quest.
[...]
