TALPIOT TOMB WATCH: There's no way I can keep track of everything being written on this subject and I'm much too busy to even think of trying. But I'll try to keep pulling out something interesting from time to time. This Scientific American article qualifies:

Special Report: Has James Cameron Found Jesus's Tomb or Is It Just a Statistical Error?
Should You Accept the 600-to-One Odds That the Talpiot Tomb Belonged to Jesus?
By Christopher Mims

When Associated Producers, the production company behind the new documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus, contacted Andrey Feuerverger, he was, to put it mildly, surprised. "This is not in the usual run of things one gets to do," notes the University of Toronto statistician dryly, alluding to Associated Producers's somewhat unusual request that he calculate the odds of a tomb in Israel being the last resting place of Jesus Christ.

Despite his previous lack of interest in biblical archaeology, Feuerverger would spend two years on what turned out to be a labor of love. At the end of all of his figuring, he told the documentarians, including director James Cameron of Titanic fame and award-winning investigative journalist Simcha Jacobovici, that there was a one in 600 chance that the names—Jesus, Matthew, two versions of Mary, and Joseph—scribbled on five of the 10 ossuaries (or caskets for bones) found in the Talpiot tomb could have belonged to a different family than the one described in the New Testament.

[...]

Read it all -- it's pretty good -- but note the following.

It was only when Feuerverger assumed that some of the names were exceptional, and fit with scholars' beliefs about the historical family of Jesus, that his calculation became worthy of advertising. According to Feuerverger, the most important assumption by far was the one that dealt with the inscription that appears on the ossuary that the documentarians assert belonged to Mary Magdalene.

"The extraordinariness of the Mariemene e Mara inscription gets factored into the calculation as a very rare name," says Feuerverger. By the logic of the historians and archaeologists enlisted by the production team, this inscription is so rare that Feuerverger could safely assume that this was the only woman who possessed this name out of all of those listed in the Lexicon. This changed the odds that this tomb belonged to just any Mary Magdalene from roughly one in three to one in 80.

As Richard Bauckham has explained in his lengthy discussion of this part of the inscription, the word Mara makes much more sense as the name "Martha." (See also Ed Cook's post "Mary the Master.") This means that one of Feuerverger's basic assumptions is wrong. If we make the odds here one in three rather than one in 80, his one in 600 odds have to be reduced to one in 22.5, which sounds more reasonable.

Another point: Professor Bauckham tells me that the tomb held 35 ossuaries/bodies, most of which had already been destroyed by the time the archaeologists got to them. What are the odds that just these six ossuaries of Jesus and his immediate family randomly survived out of the 35? It's not incredibly improbable, but it is unlikely, and makes the scenario advanced in the film yet more implausible.

[CORRECTION (5 March): Richard e-mails:

Just to be accurate, I didn't mean we know there were 35 burials, just that that's the number of burials a tomb of this size could have accommodated. I think I'm right in saying it's very probable there were more than 10.]

There's also this:

U.N.C. Charlotte archeologist Tabor, a consultant on the documentary who has studied over 500 burial chambers throughout Israel, pooh-poohs the naysayers.

Professor Tabor has e-mailed me and others about this sentence:

In a Web article put up yesterday at the Scientific American site I am referred to as someone who has excavated over 500 tombs (sic!). Since I have never excavated even one tomb, and I am not even an archaeologist and have never claimed to be such, this is more than an overstatement. I am sure each of you have experienced such things in dealing with the press. Christopher Minns is a good reporter and tried to do a credible job in his story but I surely want you to know that I would never say such a stupid thing.

It looks as though the sentence has been partially corrected (from "excavated" to "studied"?), but Tabor is still erroneously described repeatedly as an archaeologist. This happens to me a lot too.

UPDATE: And here's an interesting exposition in the L.A. Times of the sensationalist agenda behind the film:

Tomb' can't keep Christianity down
'Tis the season for so-called discoveries to do away with Christianity.
By Charlotte Allen, CHARLOTTE ALLEN is an editor at Beliefnet and the author of "The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus."
March 4, 2007

EASTER IS around the corner, so it must be time for a dramatic revelation that will blow the lid off Christianity.

Remember the Gospel of Judas? Right around now last year, the "newly discovered" (actually, knocking around for 30 years until a high-price buyer could be found) Gnostic papyrus was supposed to prove that Judas Iscariot was actually a good guy. This year, the breaking news, to be uncovered tonight on the Discovery Channel in a $4-million documentary film produced by James Cameron of "Titanic," is that archaeologists have found Jesus' tomb in Jerusalem and that the ossuary containing DNA from his bones proves that he didn't rise from the dead. Talk about the Titanic — Cameron's findings aim to sink an entire religion.

[...]

ELVIS IN LATIN AND SUMERIAN! This from the East Anglian Daily Times:

Blue Suede Shoes: a big hit in Latin!
02 March 2007 | 15:01

STEVEN RUSSELL

RONALD McDonald and Mickey Mouse eat your hearts out - neither of you is the world's most recognisable icon of all time. Author Charlie Connelly knows the truth, after a global odyssey of quirkiness showed Elvis Presley being honoured and celebrated in some strange and wonderful ways.

[...]

But his favourite - the blue whale in this sea of strangeness - is Dr Jukka Ammondt. This Finnish professor of literature and linguistics - a short man with long grey hair and little round glasses - makes no attempt to impersonate Elvis. He simply happens to sing the legend's songs . . . in Latin.

“When you hear of it, you think it's going to be a one-song gag, but I've got a couple of his CDs and they're really good!” enthuses Charlie.

“He also did a three-track EP in ancient Sumerian” - spoken in Southern Mesopotamia, today's southeastern Iraq, between about 4000BC and 2000BC - “though only one was an Elvis song: Blue Suede Shoes.

“When you hear it, it takes a while to recognise it because he's been very adherent to the original Sumerian. Although no-one had ever heard Sumerian music, they studied pictures of instruments from old tablets and what have you and worked out what it would have sounded like.

“This thing grinds along and suddenly you hear Dr Ammondt booming in in this low, guttural voice. It's only when it gets to a certain chord progression that you realise it's Blue Suede Shoes. But I really like it as a piece of music and it stands on its own.

“He did tell me that, obviously, the Sumer didn't have blue suede shoes, so he had to change the lyrics a little. When he translated it into Sumerian he had to say something like 'On my sandals of sky-blue leather please don't stand.' It doesn't scan quite as well as the original . . .

“If you made it up, no-one would believe you.”

[...]

Yeah, that just about sums it up.

THE FESTIVAL OF PURIM begins tonight at sundown. Best wishes to all those celebrating.

AN ARAMAIC FRAGMENT OF TOBIT has been published in Revue de Qumran. Ed Cook has the story over at Ralph.

RICHARD BAUCKHAM has written a revised statement about the Talpiot tomb, which I am posting here in its entirety:

The alleged ‘Jesus family tomb’

As I understand it (I have not yet seen the film itself) the Discovery Channel programme “The Lost Tomb of Jesus” claims that a tomb discovered in the Talpiot area of Jerusalem in 1980, containing ten ossuaries, is the tomb of Jesus’ family and contains some of the remains of Jesus himself. If my memory serves me correctly the same claim was made in a British television programme, fronted by Joan Bakewell, just a few years ago. However the Discovery Channel programme claims to have new evidence and arguments.

The basic arguments concerning the names on the ossuaries seem to be two (1) The names, including ‘Jesus son of Joseph,’ ‘Judah son of Jesus,’ Yose, Mary and Matthew, are the names of key figures in the New Testament Gospels. Some statistical arguments are alleged to show that the odds are hugely in favour of the view that the names on the ossuaries in fact refer to the figures known from the New Testament. (2) The form of the name Mary (in Greek) is the distinctive Mariamenou. This, it is claimed, is the same form of the name as Mariamne, which is the name of the sister of the apostle Philip in the fourth-century Acts of Philip, presumed to be Mary Magdalene.

I wish to stress at the start that the issues raised by this proposal are complex and difficult. My first reactions to what I was told about it by journalists were too little considered and I had not then had time to track down all the relevant evidence and study it carefully. So I made some mistakes. (I recommend that no one pronounce on this matter without having the relevant pages of Rahmani’s catalogue of ossuaries actually in front of them. My initial lack of access to them misled me at some points, even though I was told quite carefully what they contain. They can now be seen on the Discovery Channel website.) I am fairly confident of what I’m now saying here, but ossuaries and onomastics are technical fields, and I’m open to corrections from the experts. I’ve no doubt that refinements of the argument will result from further discussion of the issues.

I shall divide my discussion into the matter of the names on these ossuaries in general, and a longer consideration of the name alleged to be Mary Magdalene, since this requires quite careful and detailed consideration. (I have refrained from using Hebrew and Greek script, and have tried to make the argument intelligible to people who know no Greek. Unfortunately at the moment I don’t have a functioning transliteration font: hence the overly simply transliteration of the names that I’ve had to use.)

The names in general

The six persons named in the ossuary inscriptions (Rahmani 701-706) are:
(1) Mariamenou-Mara ( the first name is a unique form of the name Mariam, Mary, and will be discussed separately below).
(2) Yehuda bar Yeshua ′ (Judah son of Jesus)
(3) Matia (Matthew)
(4) Yeshua ′ bar Yehosef (Jesus son of Joseph)
(5) Yose (a common abbreviated form of Yehosef)
(6) Maria (a form of Mariam, Mary)
All the inscriptions are in Aramaic except the first, which is Greek.

We should note that the surviving six names are only six of many more who were buried in this family tomb. There may have been as many as 35. The six people whose names we have could have belonged to as many as four different generations. This is a large family tomb, which would certainly have been used for quite some time by the same family. We should not imagine a small family group. Some members of the family of Jesus we know lived in Jerusalem for only three decades (from the death of Jesus to the execution of his brother James in 62). None of our other evidence would suggest that there were so many of them as to require a tomb of this size.

Only three of the six named persons correspond to the names of known members of the family of Jesus: Jesus son of Joseph, Maria (Jesus’ mother or his aunt, the wife of Clopas), Yose (Jesus’ brother was known by this abbreviated form of the name Joseph: Mark 6:3). In a family tomb only members of the family (members by birth or, mostly in the case of women, marriage) would be interred. The fact that one of Jesus’ close disciples was named Matthew has no significance at all for identifying the person in the ossuary labelled Matthew. We shall discuss Mariamenou-Mara below, but it cannot be stressed sufficiently that there is no evidence at all for the conjecture that Jesus married Mary Magdalene (and note that an extra-marital affair, which some postulate, though again without evidence, would not qualify Mary Magdalene to be in the tomb of Jesus’ family). Similarly, there is no evidence at all that Jesus had any children. (If he really had a son named Judah, would he not be mentioned somewhere in the ancient literary evidence? He would have been a useful figure for a Gnostic wishing to claim esoteric teaching of Jesus handed down from someone close to him, but he goes unmentioned in the Gnostic Gospels that do make such claims for other figures and unmentioned also in the church fathers who relay information about Gnostic claims.)

All of the names on these ossuaries were extremely common names among Jews in Palestine at this period. We have a great deal evidence about this (the data is collected in the enormously useful reference book: Tal Ilan, Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity, part 1 [Mohr-Siebeck, 2002], and also analysed in chapter 4 of my recent book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses [Eerdmans, 2006]). We have a data base of about 3000 named persons (2625 men, 328 women, excluding fictional characters). Of the 2625 men, the name Joseph (including Yose, the abbreviated form) was borne by 218 or 8.3%. (It is the second most popular Jewish male name, after Simon/Simeon.) The name Judah was borne by 164 or 6.2%. The name Jesus was borne by 99 or 3.4%. The name Matthew (in several forms) was borne by 62 or 2.4 %. Of the 328 named women (women’s names were much less often recorded than men’s), a staggering 70 or 21.4% were called Mary (Mariam, Maria, Mariame, Mariamme). (My figures differ very slightly from Ilan’s because I differ from a few of her judgments for technical reasons, but the difference is insignificant for present purposes.)

I am not a mathematician and do not know how to get from these figures to calculations of odds. I must leave the assessment of Feuerverger’s case to others. But it seems to me incredible.

The name Mariamenou-Mara

The Hebrew name Mariam was very popular among Palestinian Jews at this period, though hardly used at all in the diaspora. It was usually rendered in Greek in one of two forms: Maria and Mariamme (or Mariame). It could, of course, be simply written as Mariam in Greek characters (and this is the practice of the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, when referring to Mariam the sister of Moses, called Miriam in English Bibles). But we know only four cases in which this was done with reference to a living person of the early Jewish period. (One of these is Luke 10:39-42, referring to Mary the sister of Martha, though there is a variant reading Maria).

Much more popular were the forms Maria (the form used everywhere in the New Testament, except Luke 10:39-40, for all the various Maries it refers to) and Mariamme/Mariame (used, for example, by Josephus). Both give the name a more Greek form than the simple transliteration Mariam. Palestinian Jewish women who themselves used a Greek form of their name as well as a Semitic form (a common practice) would be likely to have used Maria or Mariamme. This accounts for the fact that the Greek form Maria is often found on ossuaries transliterated back into Hebrew characters as Mariah. (Odd as this practice might seem , there are examples for other names too.) This is what has happened in the case of the woman called Maria (in Hebrew characters) on one of the ossuaries we are studying.

It is worth noting that this Greek form of the name Miriam has nothing to do with the Latin name Maria, which also existed. The coincidence is just a coincidence. It was, however, a coincidence that Jews living in a Latin-speaking environment could have exploited, just as Jews in Palestine exploited the coincidental near-identity of the Hebrew name Simeon and the Greek name Simon. The woman called Maria in Romans 16:6, a member of the Christian community in Rome, may have been a Jew called Mariam in Hebrew (an emigrant from Palestine), or a Gentile with the Latin name Maria, or a Jew living in Rome who had the name Maria precisely because it could be understood as both Hebrew and Latin.

In the Gospels Mary Magdalene’s name is always given in the Greek form Maria, which is the New Testament’s standard practice for rendering Mariam into Greek, except for Luke 10:39-42. As we have noted it is standard Greek form of Mariam. However, from probably the mid-second century onwards we find some references to Mary Magdalene (often identified with Mary of Bethany and/or other Gospel Maries) that use the alternative standard Greek form Mariamme (or Mariame). These references are all either in Gnostic works (using ‘Gnostic’ fairly loosely) or in writers referring to Gnostic usage.

We find the form Mariamme in Celsus, the second-century pagan critic of Christianity, who lists Christian sectarian groups, including some who follow Mary (apo Mariammes). These may wll be the group who used the Gospel of Mary (late 2nd century?), a Greek fragment of which calls Mary Magdalene Mariamme. This form of her name also appears in the Coptic (a translation from Greek) of the Gnostic Work the Sophia of Jesus Christ (CG III,4). The usage may have been more widespread in Gnostic literature, but the fact that we have most Gnostic works only in Coptic makes it hard to tell.)

This tradition of using the form Mariamme for Mary Magdalene must have been an alternative tradition of rendering her name in Greek. It most likely goes back to a usage within the orbit of Jewish Palestine (since the name Mary in any form was very rare in the diaspora and Gentile Christians would not be familiar with the name Mariamme ordinarily). But so does the usage of Maria in the New Testament Gospels, at least one of which is at least a century earlier than any evidence we have for giving her the name Mariamme. It would be hazardous to suppose that Mariamme was the Greek form of her name use by Mary Magdalene herself or the earliest disciples of Jesus.

The Gnostic use of Mariamme is also reported by Hippolytus in his Refutation of All Heresies (written between 228 and 233). He says that the Naassenes claimed to have a secret teaching that James the brother of Jesus had transmitted to Mary (5.7.1; 10.9.3). What is especially significant is that the manuscript evidence is divided between two forms of the name: Mariamme and Mariamne (note the ‘n’!). It is probably impossible to tell which Hippolytus himself wrote. However, it is easy to see that, in a milieu where the name Mariamme was not otherwise known, the usage could slip from Mariamme to Mariamne.

These variant readings in Hippolytus are the first known occurrences of the form Mariamne (which the Discovery Channel programme claims is the same name as that on one of the ossuaries). Since it occurs in Hippolytus as a variant of Mariamme, and since the latter is wll attested in Jewish usage back to the first century CE, it seems clear that the form Mariamne is not really an independent version of the name Mariam (independent of Mariamme, that is). But a late deformation of the form Mariamme, a deformation made by Geek speakers not familiar with the name. This must also then explain the usage in the apocryphal Acts of Philip (late 4th or early 5th century), where Mariamne is consistently and frequently used for the sister of the apostle Philip, apparently identified with both Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany.

We can now turn to the inscription on the ossuary, which has, in Greek: MARIAMENOUMARA. The two words Mariamenou and Mara are written consecutively with no space between. This makes it rather unlikely that two women are named here. But Rahmani takes a small stroke between the last letter of Mariamenou and the first of Mara to be a Greek letter eta (long e). He takes this to be the relative pronoun he (eta with a rough breathing), reading: ‘Mariamnenou who [is also called] Mara.’ (Note that this is different, it seems, from what the Discovery Channel do when they read the eta with a smooth breathing, meaning ‘or’.) There are parallels (I gather from Rahmani) to this abbreviated way of indicating two names for the same person.

The form of the name on the ossuary in question is Mariamenou. This is a Greek genitive case, used to indicate that the ossuary belongs to Mary (it means 'Mary's' or 'belonging to Mary'). The nominative would be Mariamenon. Mariamenon is a diminutive form, used as a form of endearment. The neuter gender is normal in diminutives used for women. But the name Mariamenon is found only here in all our evidence for ancient Jewish names. It is, of course, a specifically Greek formation, not used in Hebrew or Aramaic.

This diminutive, Mariamenon, would seem to have been formed from the name Mariamene, a name which is attested twice elsewhere (in the Babatha archive and in the Jewish catacombs at Beth She’arim). Mariamene is an unusual Greek form of Mariam, presumably invented because it has a rather elegant hellenized form. When I first looked at this issue I was rather persuaded that the form Mariamne was a contracted form of Mariamene (which I think is what the Discovery Channel film claims), but I then found that the second and third century evidence (reviewed above) makes it much more plausible that the form Mariamne is a late deformation of Mariamme that occurred only in a context outside Palestine where the name was not known. So the Discovery Channel film’s claim that the name on the ossuary is the same as the name known to have been used for Mary Magdalene in the Acts of Philip is mistaken.

But we must also consider the rest of this inscription. The Discovery Channel film proposes to read Mara as the Aramaic word ‘the master’ (as in Maranatha). But, since we know that Mara was used as an abbreviated form of Martha, in this context of names on an ossuary it is much more plausible to read it as a name. This woman had two names: Mariamenon and Mara. It could be that the latter in this case was used as an abbreviation of Mariamenou, or it could be that the woman was known by Mariamenon, treated as a Greek name, and the Aramaic name Mara, conforming to the common practice of being known by two names, Greek and Semitic.

If the woman, for whatever reason, is given two different names on the ossuary, it is very unlikely that she would also have been known as Mariamene, even though this is the form of which Mariamenon is the diminutive. One other point can be made about Mariamenon. As a term of endearment it would be likely to have originated in the context of her family. But in that case, we probably need to envisage a family which used Greek as an ordinary language within the family. This does not mean it did not also use Aramaic, which would probably be the case if the names on the other ossuaries are those of family members closely related to Mariamenon. The family could have been bilingual even within its own orbit. Alternatively, the ossuaries in Aramaic could come from a branch of a big family or a generation of the family different from that of Mariamenon, such that their linguistic practice would be different. In any case, it is unlikely that the close family of Jesus would have spoken Greek within the family, and so it is unlikely that Mariamenon belonged to that close family circle.

The conclusion is that the name Mariamenon is unique, the diminutive of the very rare Mariamene. Neither is related to the form Maramne, except in the sense that all derive ultimately from the name Mariam. There is no reason at all to connect the woman in this ossuary with Mary Magdalene, and in fact the name usage is decisively against such a connexion.

UPDATE: Mark Goodacre e-mails:

Richard's memory is accurate about the earlier British documentary on this, fronted by Joan Bakewell; it was a Sunday Times piece on 31 March 1996 and a BBC1 Heart of the Matter programme on 7 April 1996 (Easter day) -- see [here.]

UPDATE (6 March): addenda and corriega to this essay can be found here.

IN THE MAIL:

Averroës, Decisive Treatise and Epistle Dedicatory (Islamic Translation Series; trans. Charles E. Butterworth; Provo: Brigham Young University, 2001)

Avicenna, The Metaphysics of The Healing (Islamic Translation Series; trans. Michael E. Marmura; Provo: Brigham Young University, 2005)

Mulla Sadra, The Elixir of the Gnostics (Islamic Translation Series; trans. William Chittick; Provo: Brigham Young University, 2003)

Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi, The Philosophy of Illumination (Islamic Translation Series; trans. John Walbridge and Hossein Ziai; Provo: Brigham Young University, 1999)

BYU has been producing these wonderful Arabic-English editions of medieval Islamic philosophers for some years. I don't know what kind of reviews they've been getting from specialists, but as an interested nonspecialist who reads Arabic, I've found them very useful and have been building up a collection of them. I got two more around this time last year, of which I've only had time to finish The Niche of Lights, alongside The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, which I'm still creeping through in my spare time. At present I'm reading Mahdi's Arabic edition of The Thousand and One Nights (along with Haddawy's translation as a crib), but I mean to get back to the Arabic philosophers in due course.

SYRIAC TEXTS ONLINE: A collection of leaves from Syriac manuscripts, complete Syriac books, and one or two complete manuscripts. Looks good, but there are some dead links and so far they've missed this.

(Via Evangelical Textual Criticism.)

SCOTT ADAMS (of Dilbert fame) is fretting about the Jesus ossuary in the Talpiot tomb and about archaeology in general.

BIBLICAL STUDIES CARNIVAL XV has been posted by Charles Halton at Awilum.com.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: UNESCO is inspecting the Mughrabi Gate excavation in Jerusalem.

EGYPTIAN BLOGGER Abdolkarim Nabil Seliman has been sentenced to four years in prison for his blogging:

The Blogger-Martyr of Egypt
Friday, Feb. 23, 2007 By AMANY RADWAN/CAIRO (Time Magazine)

A chill has just gone through the collective spine of the bloggers of the Middle East. On Thursday, Egypt sentenced Abdel Kareem Suleiman (a.k.a. "Kareem Amer" online) to four years in prison — three years for blog posts that insulted Islam and one year for similar writings that defamed President Hosni Mubarak. While bloggers have been harrassed and a couple arrested by Mideast governments in the past, this is the first time one has been sentenced to prison. Before Kareem's arrest and conviction, internet writing was considered a safe and open venue for many young men and women in the region, a vehicle to freely express their opinions, doubts and misgivings about thorny issues in their tightly controlled societies.

[...]

Barbaric.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH:

Extremist rabbis call for return of animal sacrifice
POSTED: 8:38 p.m. EST, February 28, 2007

Story Highlights
• Rabbis spark protest with calls to resume animal sacrifice at holy site
• Group plans to buy animals to find one that is ritually right for sacrifice
• Ritual animal sacrifice has been banned at Jerusalem site since A.D. 70.

JERUSALEM (AP) -- A fringe group of extremist rabbis wants to resume the biblical practice of animal sacrifice at an explosive religious site in Jerusalem, members said Wednesday.

The request defied centuries of religious bans and triggered a stiff protest from a Muslim leader.

When the Jewish Temples stood in the Old City of Jerusalem more than 2,000 year ago, animal sacrifice was a centerpiece of the religion. After the destruction of the Temples, sacrifices were banned and rabbinical teachings took their place as the focus of Judaism.

Now a group, called the "Re-established Sanhedrin" after the Temple-era religious high court, has decided to buy some sheep and try to find one that is ritually perfect for sacrifice, with an eye toward resuming the practice at the Jerusalem site, known to Jews as the Temple Mount.

[...]

JAMES TABOR has thoughts on the Talpiot tomb on his Jesus Dynasty blog. He thinks it may be the tomb of the family of Jesus.

UPDATE: Mark Goodacre is skeptical about the statistical claims. (Does Mark ever sleep?)

ARE THE BEATLES stilll bigger than Jesus? Maybe. But maybe not.

FOR THE JUNK HISTORY FILE:

'Israelites didn't build the pyramids'

Head of Egyptian antiquity council files complaint against high school: 'Ancient Egyptians built pyramids. Why do they teach otherwise?'

Smadar Perry (Ynet News)
Published: 02.27.07, 09:32 / Israel Culture

"It is well known that the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids; they regarded these structures as a national project for ancient Egypt," said Dr. Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.

Hawass filed an official complaint to the Egyptian attorney general of Egypt against a Cairo high school for teaching the students that it was the Israelites who built the pyramids.

Hawass, prominent figure in Egyptian culture and around the Arab world, criticized the school curriculum for "insisting that the Jews built the pyramids and highlighting the fact that those who refused to partake in the building were physically tortured."

The longstanding debate over who built the five pyramids of Giza, West of Cairo, was rekindled at the first official visit of an Israeli delegation to Egypt, in 1977.

"We built the pyramids," said the late Prime Minster Menahem Begin at the National Museum in Cairo. He spurred fury among Egyptian historians and archeologists. Subsequently, the Egyptian press was full of protest articles.

[...]

Let us be quite clear: there is no "debate" or "dispute" about this among the people who know anything about Eygptian history. The Israelites did not build the pyramids. If Menachem Begin thought so, he was badly misinformed. It is dismaying that misinformation like this is being taught in a school, and it's a pity that Dr. Hawass has to waste his time countering it.

UPDATE: Carla Sulzbach e-mails:

Israelites building pyramids? Blame Josephus (Ant. II.9.1 (203)!

Yep:

NOW it happened that the Egyptians grew delicate and lazy, as to pains-taking, and gave themselves up to other pleasures, and in particular to the love of gain. They also became very ill-affected towards the Hebrews, as touched with envy at their prosperity; for when they saw how the nation of the Israelites flourished, and were become eminent already in plenty of wealth, which they had acquired by their virtue and natural love of labor, they thought their increase was to their own detriment. And having, in length of time, forgotten the benefits they had received from Joseph, particularly the crown being now come into another family, they became very abusive to the Israelites, and contrived many ways of afflicting them; for they enjoined them to cut a great number of channels for the river, and to build walls for their cities and ramparts, that they might restrain the river, and hinder its waters from stagnating, upon its running over its own banks: they set them also to build pyramids, and by all this wore them out; and forced them to learn all sorts of mechanical arts, and to accustom themselves to hard labor.

My emphasis.

MORE ON THE "JESUS FAMILY TOMB" from the New York Times:

Crypt Held Bodies of Jesus and Family, Film Says

Boxes said to contain residue of the remains of Jesus and Mary Magdelene yesterday at a news conference in New York promoting a documentary.

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: February 27, 2007

A documentary by the Discovery Channel claims to provide evidence that a crypt unearthed 27 years ago in Jerusalem contained the bones of Jesus of Nazareth.

Moreover, it asserts that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, that the couple had a son, named Judah, and that all three were buried together.

The claims were met with skepticism by several archaeologists and New Testament scholars, as well as outrage by some Christian leaders. The contention that Jesus was married, had a child and left behind his bones — suggesting he was not bodily resurrected — contradicts core Christian doctrine.

Two limestone boxes said to contain residue from the remains of Jesus and Mary Magdalene were unveiled yesterday at a news conference at the New York Public Library by the documentary’s producer, James Cameron, who made “Titanic” and “The Terminator.” His collaborators onstage included a journalist, a self-taught antiquities investigator, New Testament scholars, a statistician and an archaeologist. Several of them said they were excited by the findings but uncertain.

[...]

The article has a lot of detail and fills out the highly unconvincing argument being presented in the film. It seems that there may be some DNA left in the tombs. The piece also includes an obligatory journalistic error:

One box is said to be inscribed “Yeshua bar Yosef,” in Aramaic, an ancient dialect of Hebrew that is translated as “Jesus son of Joseph.”

Aramaic and Hebrew are closely related Northwest Semitic languages, but they are languages: one is not a dialect of the other.

UPDATE: My colleague Richard Bauckham has sent me some material on these claims. He is one of the world's foremost experts on the family of Jesus. I have revised this update, deleting earlier notes he sent me and replacing them with a statement that I just received from him which covers the same ground in revised form. He adds in his e-mail, "I have been helped with this by my friend and former colleague John Kane. There are still a couple of points about the name Mariamne that I want to check."

For context, this is from the NYT piece linked to above:

Perhaps the most shaky claims revolve around the inscription on the fifth box, which the filmmakers assert is that of Mary Magdalene. It is the only inscription of the six in Greek, and says “Mariamene e Mara,” which the filmmakers say can be translated as “Mary, known as the master.”

Richard's statement is as follows:[UPDATE (2 March): this statement is now superseded by the corrected and expanded one posted here]:

As I understand it (I have not yet seen the film itself) the Discovery Channel programme “The Lost Tomb of Jesus” claims that a tomb discovered in the Talpiot area of Jerusalem in 1980, containing ten ossuaries, is the tomb of Jesus’ family and contains the remains of Jesus himself. If my memory serves me correctly the same claim was made in a British television programme, fronted by Joan Bakewell, just a few years ago. However the Discovery Channel programme claims to have new evidence and arguments.

The basic arguments concerning the names on the ossuaries seem to be two (1) The names, including ‘Jesus son of Joseph,’ ‘Judah son of Jesus,’ Mary and Matthew, are the names of key figures in the New Testament Gospels. Some statistical arguments are alleged to show that the odds are hugely in favour of the view that the names on the ossuaries in fact refer to the figures known from the New Testament. (2) The form of the name Mary (in Greek) is the distinctive Mariamenou. This, it is claimed, is the same form of the name as Mariamne, which is the name of the sister of the apostle Philip in the fourth-century Acts of Philip, presumed to be Mary Magdalene.

With regard to the first claim, all of these were extremely common names among Jews in Palestine at this period. We have much more evidence about this than was used by the programme makers. We have a data base of about 3000 named persons (2625 men, 328 women). Of the 2625 men, the name Joseph was borne by 218 or 8.3%. (It is the second most popular Jewish male name, after Simon/Simeon.) The name Judah was borne by 164 or 6.2%. The name Jesus was borne by 99 or 3.4%. The name Matthew was borne 62 or 2.4 %. Of the 328 named women (women’s names were much less often recorded than men’s), a staggering 70 or 21.4% were called Mary (Mariam, Maria, Mariame, Mariamme).

It is surely obvious that, considering the enormous popularity of all the names on these ossuaries, the probability that they refer to the same people as those so named in the New Testament, must be very low.

With regard to the second claim, the programme makers have somewhat stretched the evidence.

The most common Greek form of the Hebrew name Mariam (which would have been Mary Magdalene's Hebrew name) was Mariame or Mariamme. A less common Greek form of the name was Maria, which is the form the New Testament uses (for Mary Magdalene and all the other Maries it mentions).

The form of the name on the ossuary in question is Mariamenou. This is a Greek genitive case, used to indicate that the ossuary belongs to Mary (it means 'Mary's' or 'belonging to Mary'). The nominative would be Mariamenon. Mariamenon is a diminutive form, used as a form of endearment. The neuter gender is normal in diminutives used for women.

This diminutive, Mariamenon, would seem to have been formed from the name Mariamene, a name which is attested twice elsewhere (in the Babatha archive and in the Jewish catacombs at Beth She’arim). It is an unusual variant of Mariame. In the Babatha document it is spelt with a long e in the penultimate syllable, but in the Bet She’arim inscription the penultimate syllable has a short e. This latter form could readily be contracted to the form Mariamne, which is found, uniquely, in the Acts of Philip.

So we have, on the one hand, a woman known by the diminutive Mariamenon, in the ossuary, and, on the other hand, Mary Magdalen, who is always called in the Greek of the New Testament Maria but seems to be called in a much later source Mariamne. Going by the names alone they could be the same woman, but the argument for this is tenuous.

A final point about the Mariamenou inscription. The inscription also has a second name Mara. When Rahmani published this inscription in his catalogue of ossuaries he conjectured that the Greek particle ‘e’ (meaning ‘or’) should be supplied between the two names, making them alternative names for the same woman. The ‘e’ is not actually in the inscription, nor is there space for it between the two names. It is better to suppose that the bones of two women (or perhaps a woman and her child, the diminutive Mariamenon being used for the latter) were placed in the same ossuary (this would not be not unusual). The name Mara is known to have been used as an abbreviation of the name Martha. The programme makers take it to be the Aramaic word for ‘master,’ but this is implausible in the context. Beside the name Mariamenou on an ossuary, one would expect Mara to be a name, and since it is attested as a name this is the obviously correct reading.

SCIENCE PROVES THAT MEETINGS MAKE US DUMBER. I know this isn't about ancient Judaism, but I'm an administrator now and these things have started to matter to me.

(Via the KurzweilAI.net list.)

UNFORTUNATELY, the "Jesus Family Tomb" story is getting a lot of attention. Newsweek has a long article, plus a short video of John Dominic Crossan saying that if Jesus' body was in that tomb it wouldn't affect his faith.

LIGHT BLOGGING LATELY. Likely to continue that way for a while. Apologies.

THE MORAL IS: Don't leave your inscribed ossuaries out in the courtyard:

Mysterious bones of Jesus, Joseph and Mary

By Tim Butcher in Jerusalem (The Telegraph)
Last Updated: 1:34am GMT 24/02/2007

In a scene worthy of a Dan Brown novel, archaeologists a quarter of a century ago unearthed a burial chamber near Jerusalem.

Inside they found ossuaries, or boxes of bones, marked with the names of Jesus, Joseph and Mary.

Then one of the ossuaries went missing. The human remains inside were destroyed before any DNA testing could be carried out.

While Middle East academics doubt that the relics belong to the Holy Family, the issue is about to be exposed to a blaze of publicity with the publication next week of a book.

Entitled The Jesus Tomb and co-written by Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino, the book promises the inside story of "what may very well be the greatest archaeological find of all time".

[...]

The 10 ossuaries were taken initially to the Rockefeller Archaeological Museum outside the Old City of Jerusalem. Nine were catalogued and stored but the tenth was left outside in a courtyard.

That ossuary has subsequently gone missing.

[...]

I'm skeptical. Whatever the authors say about their statistics, this is rather like having a family burial plot with John and Mary Smith and their son John in it. Rather difficult to claim that they must be a particular Smith family. For more on the Talpiot Tomb, see here. Sorry about the bad links. The final link, which I'll fix when I get a chance, is here. For more on Simcha Jacobovici, see here. Too bad the DNA is gone.

APOCRYPHAL APOCRYPHA? How postmodern.

IN THE MAIL:

Jill Gregory and Karen Tintori, The Book of Names (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2007)

An autographed copy kindly sent by the authors.

BABBLING ON ABOUT ...

The Babble Over How to Pronounce `Babel'

By DOUGLAS J. ROWE, AP Entertainment Writer

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

(02-21) 10:54 PST New York (AP) --

An Academy Award contender that no one's sure how to pronounce? "Babel" has seven Oscar nominations, meaning the name of the film will be read at least seven times Sunday night. But its pronunciation has stumped even its biggest star.

"Thank you for honoring our film `Babble.' Or `BAY-bel' or `Bah-BELL,'" Brad Pitt said after the film received an earlier award at a film festival in Palm Springs, Calif. "We're still arguing how to pronounce it."

[...]

The article doesn't answer the question (there isn't one right answer), but it does explain the origin and etymology of the name.

TECHNOLOGY WATCH:

Responsa Project wins Israel Prize
By MATTHEW WAGNER (Jerusalem Post)

Imagine taking an obscure corpus of religious legal decisions that spans nearly two millennia, four continents and a half a million documents that is written in an ancient Semitic language, and making every single detail accessible within seconds via computer search.

And imagine doing this in the 1960s while fighting an uphill battle against an academic community that was skeptical at best, and often downright antagonistic.

That is precisely what Prof. Aviezri Fraenkel of the Weizmann Institute did. The result of his labors, the Responsa Project [Proyeht Hashut] won this year's Israel Award for the Works of Judaism category.

[...]

n 1962, MIT's Prof. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel wrote: "Any scheme of directly comparing a request formulation with a straightforward one-to-one encoding of the original document must be regarded as wholly utopian and unsubstantiated."

[...]

Today, Fraenkel's method for IR is used by Google, AltaVista, Lycos and other search engines, while the manual-index method preferred by Hebrew University is a relic of the past.

[...]

I wonder who we're laughing at right now who is working on the technological development that's going to change the face of the field in the next generation. Someone, I hope.

ASSIMILATED TO THE BLOGOSPHERE: Dr. Leen Ritmeyer has started a new blog on biblical archaeology with special reference to the Temple Mount, his area of expertise. (Via the BiblePlaces Blog.) And also, note this new blog on the Sibylline Oracles.

DON'T FORGET to keep an eye on the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Blog. Grant Macaskill and I are posting on it every weekday and the posts include online versions of our lectures for the OT Pseudepigrapha course, plus anything we notice in the news about the pseudepigrapha.

THE COPTIC WORKS OF SHENOUTE are being published with NEH funding:

The University of Hawai'i-Manoa has received a $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to translate, edit and publish the writings of an Egyptian author who chronicled the life and thought of Christians in 4th- and 5th-century Egypt.

Associate religion professor Andrew Crislip will lead a team of scholars of Coptic language and literature to create a comprehensive edition of the works of Shenoute of Atripe, who headed a federation of Christian monasteries in Egypt.

ON THE PRESEVATION OF HOLY SITES IN ISRAEL:

U.N. anti-racism panel questions Israel over non-Jewish holy sites

By Bradley S. Klapper
ASSOCIATED PRESS

11:10 a.m. February 19, 2007

GENEVA – A United Nations anti-racism panel has questioned Israel's policy on preserving holy sites, asking the country to explain whether it protects places considered sacred to religions other than Judaism.

Israel is expected to go later this week before the panel of 18 independent experts overseeing compliance with the United Nations' 38-year-old anti-racism treaty – a hearing that could fuel the debate over an Israeli construction project at Jerusalem's disputed hilltop compound known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary. The project has prompted protests among Palestinians and others in the Muslim world.

[...]

This is an important issue and I'm glad the U.N. is staying on top of it. I look forward also to hearing them report on the policies of the Saudi authorities on the preservation of holy sites in Mecca.

LOST LAST PAGE OF THE BIBLE IS FOUND!

After subjecting the document to batteries of extremely complicated scientific tests and eventually proving beyond doubt the antiquity of the find, Harvard's experts in ancient Coptic things began to slowly translate the Professor's amazing find.

As the text of the page was painstakingly translated by the ten strong team of Coptic scholars, it soon became clear that the page was indeed a missing page from the New testament and appeared to be the very last page of that most holy of tomes.

So far only the first paragraph has been translated into english and reads as follows, "All events and people depicted in this book are (missing word) and any similarity to events or people are purely (missing word). The author of this book claims that he is the sole author and reserves the right..."

I'll bet the next paragraph says "We apologize for the inconvenience."

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: A newly reported discovery at the Mughrabi Gate:

Israeli archaeologist says Muslim prayer room discovered in ramp near Jerusalem holy site

By Laurie Copans
ASSOCIATED PRESS

12:06 p.m. February 18, 2007

JERUSALEM – An Israeli archaeologist said the site of an archaeological dig outside a disputed holy compound in Jerusalem might contain a Muslim prayer room, and the work drew renewed condemnation Sunday.

Muslim leaders and critics of the dig said the announcement of the find, three years after it was discovered, confirmed their fears that Israel is intent on hiding Muslim attachment to the site. Israeli officials denied that.

[...]

The Jerusalem Post has more:

Room at Mughrabi under examination
By JPOST STAFF AND AP

The Israel Antiquities Authority on Sunday denied an earlier report that the site of the Israeli archaeological dig at the Mughrabi Gate near Jerusalem's Temple Mount contained a Muslim prayer room.

An Israel Antiquities Authority spokesman told The Jerusalem Post that "we did in fact find room three years ago but we didn't have permission to dig at the site. Now that we have permission, we are going to try and identify what this room is."

Muslim leaders and critics of the work had said the announcement of the find confirmed their fears that the authority was intent on hiding Muslim attachment to the site.

[...]

TECHNOLOGY WATCH: Is this really an improvement?

(Via Instapundit.)

LINKS BAR REPAIRED. Some readers may have noticed that the links bar to the right went dead some weeks ago. I contacted the web space provider about this and they said they were working on the problem. But nothing has happened for some time, so I have switched the files to another provider. If you have links to the page, please update them. A few of my online articles have not yet been transferred, but I'll get around to them as soon as I can. Sorry for the inconvenience.

AN APOLOGY for the Kabbalah-Big Bang memo:

Anti-Jewish memo spurs apology

Legislature: Chisum says document he passed out doesn't reflect his views

12:00 AM CST on Saturday, February 17, 2007

By ROBERT T. GARRETT / The Dallas Morning News
rtgarrett@dallasnews.com

AUSTIN – The second most powerful member of the House has apologized to the Anti-Defamation League for giving colleagues a document that contains what the league called "outrageous anti-Semitic material."

House Appropriations Committee Chairman Warren Chisum, R-Pampa, sent a letter Friday to the North Texas-Oklahoma office of the league, which works to eradicate hatred of Jews and other minorities.

"I certainly meant no harm or disrespect for the religious views held by any person or group and for having done so, I am truly sorry," Mr. Chisum wrote.

[...]

Mr. Chisum said "the document in question does not accurately reflect my views." He did not elaborate.

Nor did he mention the Atlanta-area Fair Education Foundation. Mr. Bridges' memo contained links to the foundation's Web site, which asserts that the universe revolves around the Earth. The site also depicts theories on evolution as a plot by "Jewish physicists" and Hollywood moguls to brainwash people.

The league had demanded that Mr. Chisum not only apologize but repudiate the material Mr. Bridges circulated.

[...]

Amen to that.

You can see the memo itself in links to this article.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: No news is good news.

Calm Prevails at Holy Site in Jerusalem

By ISABEL KERSHNER (NYT)
Published: February 17, 2007

JERUSALEM, Feb. 16 — Despite calls by Muslim religious figures for mass protests over Israel’s excavations near a site holy to Islam and Judaism, Jerusalem’s Old City was largely calm on Friday during and after noon prayers at Al Aksa Mosque.

The area immediately around the mosque was tense and eerily quiet. Dozens of Israeli police officers in riot gear stood on alert along a temporary wooden footbridge leading up to the mosque, which sits on the ancient man-made plateau known as the Noble Sanctuary to Muslims and the Temple Mount to Jews. After Friday Prayer last week, hundreds of police officers entered the religious compound and clashed with rioters who threw stones.

[...]

UPDATE: But the propaganda conflict continues. The ADL has a roundup of comments and cartoons from the Islamic world. The second cartoon portrays Israeli archaeologists as snakes eating at the foundations of al-Haram al-Sharif, and the third appears to portray them as a dalek.

I thought we didn't like inflammatory cartoons.

UPDATE: A few days ago the Jerusalem Post published a long Q&A session with archaeologist Eilat Mazar. It's very interesting and you should read it all.

Q&A on the Temple Mount with Dr. Eilat Mazar

Renowned archeologist Dr. Eilat Mazar of the Hebrew University and the Shalem Center answers readers' questions about the Mughrabi Gate dispute and the status of the Temple Mount in recent years. Of the hundreds of questions received, here are 20 which encompass the major issues at hand.

I'll just comment on two excerpts:

Saul Mishaan, Brooklyn, New York: I know that digging on the Temple Mount is a non-starter, but is there any research involving the use of aerial infrared photography or sonar to assist in determining the layout of the Second Temple compound?

Dr. Mazar: I know that research using these methods had been conducted from outside of the compound in order to trace hollow spaces. There were very interesting results, such as the finding that the ancient walls of the compound are very thick, and that behind them are many massive underground halls.

I didn't know this. It sounds important. I hope that as technology improves, more use of non-intrusive methods like this can fill out our knowledge of what is inside the Temple Mount.

Mary Ellen Marks Highland Lakes: Is it true that the Ark of the Covenant is buried under the mount?

Dr. Mazar: There is a very high probability that the most important ancient remains are inside the compound in the massive underground halls. This includes the Ark of the Covenant.

This is amazing, so much so that I wonder if Dr. Mazar has been misunderstood or misquoted. It is fantastically unlikely that the Ark of the Covenant is still buried under the Temple Mount. The Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar would have carted off all the major loot, and any artifacts of serious value left over would have been removed during the fifty years or so that the site lay in rubble during the exile. Anything that was missed would have been found and removed during the Herodian reconstruction of the Second Temple, which involved the rebuilding of the whole site. I'm sure there are lots of very interesting things still buried on the Temple Mount (interesting to archaeologists and historians), but the Ark of the Covenant is not one of them.

WHATEVER YOU THINK OF THE CANAANITES, there's this to be said for them:

Andresky: Muscat love: Ancient grape's ancestors can be found all over the world

(Northwest Herald)

Muscat is a grape that's hard to describe.

Almost every great wine region in the world has some of its vines. Surprisingly, it makes a wine that actually tastes like ripe grapes. Its musk-like smell is the root of part of its name, and most table raisins come from its vine. More than 250 variations of muscat exist today.

Muscat is an ancient grapevine. Many molecular archeologists consider it to be the progenitor to all domestic grapes. The bridge between wild grapes and domesticated ones can be roughly calculated to somewhere between 1000 to 800 B.C.

Back then, Phoenicians lived along the Mediterranean Sea in what is now Lebanon, Syria and Israel. As sea-farers, Phoenicians carried wine to many points past Gibraltar, such as Cornwall and the west coast of Africa. The Phoenicians and their ancestors, the Canaanites, were responsible for transmitting the alphabet, arts and a wine culture. Their wine was known as "grape of the bees." It had a peculiar musk aroma and was believed to be muscat.

[...]

ANOTHER METZGER OBITUARY: a brief one from the UPI.

UPDATE: And another, longer one from the LA Times:

Bruce Manning Metzger, 93; New Testament scholar helped edit, update Bible translations
By Mary Rourke, Times Staff Writer
February 16, 2007

Bruce Manning Metzger, a New Testament scholar and biblical translator who helped to edit several modern translations of the Bible, died Tuesday at the University Medical Center at Princeton, N.J. He was 93.

The cause was respiratory failure, his son John said Thursday.

Starting in the mid-1970s, Metzger served as chairman of a committee of about.Bible that is now used in a number of seminaries and schools of theology.

The translation, published in 1990, eliminated such archaic words as "thee" and "thou" and adjusted references to "man" where both men and women were indicated. The result was closer to current English usage than the older Revised Standard Version of the Bible, published in 1952.

[...]

Some of the adjustments aimed at preventing confusion with popular slang.

A line in Psalm 50 was changed from "I will accept no bull from your house" to "I will not accept a bull from your house."

Another line, in the second letter of Paul to the Corinthians, previously read, "Once I was stoned." Metzger's committee changed it to "Once I received a stoning."

Metzger's knowledge of ancient languages, including Ethiopic, Coptic and Aramaic as well as Greek and Hebrew, all of which are used in scripture studies, made him particularly valuable to the committee.

[...]

A TEMPLE MOUNT WEBCAM? Yep.

It's a good idea, but the setup doesn't seem to work for Apple systems. At least my iMac can't seem to access it. Typically, the A.P. article doesn't give the link, but this seems to be it.

UPDATE: The Boston Globe has an article that does include the URL correctly at the very end (plus with a botched link in the body of the article).

ARCHAEOLOGIST NELSON GLUECK died 37 years ago this week. David Hyman posts a tribute in the Jewish Standard. Excerpt:

I knew quite a lot about his archeological work and books before reading his biography, but I was astonished to learn about Glueck’s other side, the one I am afraid many Israelis are unaware of, that of leading America’s Reform movement .

Glueck was born and raised in Cincinnati. He studied and was ordained in America’s only Hebrew Union College in those days, in 1923. He then earned his doctrate in biblical theology from the University of Jena in Germany in 1927. He settled in Jerusalem immediately after his graduation. His first years in Jerusalem were enhanced by teaching at Albright’s American School of Oriental Studies. As a professor at this institute, Glueck traveled the Middle East on surveys and also participated in some major archeological excavations. After marrying Helen Iglauer in 1931 Glueck returned to Jerusalem, where he succeeded Albright as head of the American school. He dedicated the next two decades to Middle East research. This is when his world-famous achievements of excavating Tel El Chalif, exploring Transjordan, and surveying the Negev took place. His work and books granted him international fame and he established a reputation as one of the world’s leading biblical archeologists.

In 1947, Glueck was recalled to America to lead Hebrew Union College. He held this position until 1971. During these 25 years, Glueck led the college to many great achievements. He oversaw the merger with the New York-based Jewish Institute of Religion and expanded the Cincinnati-based institution to include schools in New York and Los Angeles. In Jerusalem, he founded and nurtured the School of Biblical and Archeological Studies (now known as the Jerusalem Hebrew Union College, on King David Street).

THE KABBALAH AND THE BIG BANG?

Jewish group demands apology from Georgia lawmaker

By GREG BLUESTEIN
Associated Press Writer

ATLANTA - A Jewish organization is demanding an apology from a Georgia legislator after a memo using his name claims that evolution was a myth propagated by an ancient Jewish sect.

The Anti-Defamation League sent a letter to state Rep. Ben Bridges Thursday chastising him for penning the "highly offensive" memo, which attributes the Big Bang theory to writings in the Kabbalah, a Jewish text.

Bridges has denied writing the dispatch, although one of his closest political allies, Marshall Hall, said the legislator gave him the approval to draft the memo.

[...]

I'm not sure that accusing the Kabbalah of being the source of cosmological theory is anti-Semitism: it's kind of a backhanded compliment, although that website certainly doesn't present it that way. In any case it is silly. I think it's better just to laugh at these people, not demand an apology.

"Indisputable evidence - long hidden but now available to everyone - demonstrates conclusively that so-called 'secular evolution science' is the Big Bang, 15-billion-year, alternate 'creation scenario' of the Pharisee Religion," the memo said. "This scenario is derived concept-for-concept from Rabbinic writings in the mystic 'holy book' Kabbala dating back at least two millennia."

Lots of errors here. Kabbalah is a general term for a huge corpus of mystical literature, the best know of which is the Zohar. The Pharisees were long gone by the time of the Kabbalah. Most of the Kabbalistic texts are from the twelfth-thirteen centuries C.E. or later, although Sefer Yetsirah is somewhat earlier and perhaps even from late antiquity. But the author of this quote seems to be taking the Zoharic claim of authorship in the second century CE at face value. Plus, of course, the Kabbalists, whatever their spiritual contribution, did not discover the Big Bang.

UPDATE (18 February): More here

A TARGUM SPURION is noted by Ed Cook at Ralph the Sacred River and a possible new Jesus apocryphon is noted by Tony Chartrand-Burke at Apocryphicity.

THE MANDAEAN EMERGENCY CAMPAIGN is highlighted by April DeConick on the Forbidden Gospels blog.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH:

Discovery of mosaic halts work at Jerusalem walkway
By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem (The Independent)
Published: 15 February 2007

The planned walkway at the centre of the furious dispute over Jerusalem's holiest site could be further delayed by the discovery of a Byzantine mosaic.

The geometric patterned fragment was exposed by archaeological workers yesterday at the bottom of an underground shaft where one of the walkway pillars is intended to go, as The Independent examined excavation work in the area.

"We have a real time discovery," reported Gideon Avni, director of excavations and surveys at the Israel Antiquities Authority.

Dr Avni said further excavations would now be needed to see whether the mosaic, probably from the fifth or sixth century AD, was part of a larger decorated room or house. He said it was too early to say whether the pillar would have to be moved. If the fragment turned out not to extend further, it could possibly be extracted and exhibited.

The discovery was the latest in a series of twists in the conflict over access through the Mugrabi Gate to the compound sacred to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif - noble sanctuary.

[...]

(Heads-up, David Stacey.)

BRUCE METZGER, requiescat in pace.

UPDATE: There is an obituary by Iain Torrance posted on the Hugoye list, one from the A.P (noted by Bob Kraft on the PSCO list), one in The Trentonian, and two from Christianity Today (here and, by Ben Witherington, here).

MORE ON THE BOOK OF NAMES: Karen Tintori and Jill Gregory ran across PaleoJudaica and have e-mailed the following:

We were researching current info on the Temple Mount on your site when we stumbled across the comments about THE BOOK OF NAMES. How fun!

We are the authors (and Jewish) and enjoyed reading the comments on your blog.

All of the Jewish content in the book is based on fact, and the manuscript was vetted by two rabbis to ensure accuracy. The gemstones on the High Priest's breastplate come directly from the Torah and the similarities between Kaballah [Kabbalah] and Tarot are also true.

The legend of the Lamed Vovniks indeed comes from the section of the Talmud Stephen Goranson mentions in his reply to your blog entry. Lamed Vovniks is the Yiddish term for the Tzadikim Nistarim, which is the Hebrew name for these 36 righteous souls of every generation. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamed_Vav_Tzadikim)

The Gnoseos are indeed fictional -- we created them as an offshoot of the ancient Gnostics, since Gnosticism parallels Kaballah in some ways.

We loved researching this book and spent two years writing and researching it -- and a dozen years before that trying to figure out a way to identify the Lamed Vovniks, because their identities are known only to God, not even to themselves.

We are currently researching our next thriller for St. Martin's, which involves the Temple Mount.

Watch out Dan Brown.

TODD BOLEN has various thoughts on the Jerusalem Ramp and more.

JEWISH-TEMPLE DENIAL WATCH: Someone named Linda S. Heard, who is billed as "a British specialist writer on Middle East affairs," writes the following in an article entitled "Digging up religious hatreds" in Online Journal.com:

Why all the fuss about a bridge you might wonder. In truth, there is much more at issue. At the heart of the matter is Israel's belief that Solomon's Temple, destroyed by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, once stood in the same place as the Al Haram Al Sharif, known to the Jews as "The Temple Mount." The Romans were later to destroy the second Jewish Temple, built on the same spot.

Religious Jews dream of the day the temple will be rebuilt and the Sanhedrin, an assembly of Jewish judges, reconstituted.

Messianic Evangelical Christians also want the temple to be rebuilt as they believe this is a prerequisite to the �second coming� of Jesus.

In the absence of proof in the form of artifacts, Muslims refute any assertion that the Al Haram Al Sharif was built on the place where the Jewish temples once stood. In the late '80s, Jewish claims were bolstered by a tiny ivory carved pomegranate alleged to have originated from Solomon's Temple, but the museum where it was on display eventually admitted it was a fake.

Muslim suspicions that the Israeli government is using the new walkway as a pretext to dig for artifacts to support its contention are, therefore, understandable, as are their fears that Israel�s long-term goal is to demolish Muslim holy sites to make way for a new temple.

Ms. Heard has been listening to too much Palestinian propaganda. There is artifactual evidence for the Herodian Temple (notably, the Temple Mount platform itself, along epigraphic evidence) and the Second Temple is mentioned in contemporary texts. (See here for a review of the evidence for the Second and Herodian Temples.) The case for the First Temple is inferential and it is correct that no artifacts from it survive and that the inscription on the Ivory Pomegranate is a forgery, but nonetheless the evidence for the Temple's existence is compelling. (See comments here and here.) Regular readers will doubtless be sick of hearing about this, but I think it is important to answer these baseless statements whenever they turn up. Ms. Heard's piece confirms that this false propaganda, which unfortunately is widespread in the Islamic world, is spreading to the West.

UPDATE: More of the same from the same publication. An article by Nicola Nasser (" veteran Arab journalist based in Ramallah, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied territories") has the following:

Al-buraq is the Arab-Islamic name of Al Aqsa compound's western wall, which the Jews called the "Wailing Wall" before changing it to the "Western Wall (of the Temple Mount, a widely-spread claim that has yet to be vindicated by historical fact or archeological findings) after the creation of Israel in 1948.

The same piece appears in Aljazeerah.info, although the wording of this passage is slightly different.

WELL, I GUESS SHE HAD A GREAT PERSONALITY.

(Happy Valentine's Day.)

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH -- the National Geographic Society has a roundup:

Violence Sparked by Archaeological Projects in Jerusalem
Mati Milstein in Jerusalem
for National Geographic News
February 12, 2007

Archaeological excavations have incited violence at a Jerusalem holy site sacred to Jews, Arabs, and Christians—the man-made plateau known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and to Jews and Christians as the Temple Mount.

But two other, more obscure archaeological projects have the potential to fan the flames even further.

[...]

UPDATE: Plus, an Egyptian MP carries the controversy to a new low:

Egypt MP says only n-bomb can stop Israeli digging

By Abdel-Sattar Hatita
REUTERS

11:30 a.m. February 12, 2007

CAIRO – Israeli excavations near Islam's third holiest shrine in Jerusalem sparked angry reactions on Monday from Egyptian parliament members, including one who said only a nuclear bomb would halt the Jewish state's activities.

The excavations, which Israel says aim to salvage artefacts before construction of a pedestrian bridge leading to the complex also sacred to Jews, have angered many Muslims who fear the work will harm the foundations of al-Aqsa mosque. Israel says the holy places will not be harmed.

'That cursed Israel is trying to destroy al-Aqsa mosque,' Mohamed el-Katatny of President Hosni Mubarak's National Democratic Party (NDP) told a heated parliament session held to discuss the Israeli digging.

'Nothing will work with Israel except for a nuclear bomb that wipes it out of existence,' he said.

[...]

Yep, that'll sure keep that mosque safe.

THE MANDAEANS, who have been mentioned often on PaleoJudaica (see especially here, here, here, here, and here), get some well-deserved attention from April DeConick and Stephen Carlson.

UPDATE (13 February): Bad link fixed.

IN THE MAIL:

Michael Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic of the Talmudic and Geonic Periods (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2002)

I ordered this at the SBL meetings in Washington D.C. last November at an obscene discount, and it finally arrived today by surface mail.

THE APOTHEOSIS OF THE LUBAVITCHER REBBE: For some of his followers, Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson is not just the Messiah, he's God incarnate.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe as a god
By Saul Sadka (Haaretz

"Joy to the world the Lord has come."

This misquote from Isaac Watts, along with a link to a Chabad Web site, appears on a billboard. Not a real billboard, but a Photoshopped one that appears on the Web site of a Chabad activist in the U.S.

Rabbi Ariel Sokolovsky is a Moldova-born Chabad rabbi in Portland, Oregon, and a more amiable soul would be hard to find.

Yet Sokolovsky maintains a blog he entitled "Rebbegod" and refers to Schneerson as "Rebbe-Almighty" among other adulatory sobriquets.

Drawing on rabbinical sources, he attempts to show that this is not as revolutionary as it sounds. He concedes that there are few people like him who will openly call the Rebbe God. He claims, however, that many people believe it, but do not say so openly for fear of scaring people away from Chabad altogether.

"The Rebbe and God are not the same thing exactly, but I do not object to people thinking that they are the same thing."

He recounts an incident in which he confronted his teacher - a senior Chabad rabbi from the former USSR - as to why he would not openly declare the Rebbe to be God. According to Sokolowsky, the senior rabbi jokingly warned him: "there can be many gods but only one Moshiach."

[...]

[The following are questions asked of students in Safed.]

How do they view the connection between Schneerson and God? "The Rebbe is not something different from God - the Rebbe is a part of God," says a British teenaged student.

Does this not 'idolize' Schneerson, in the literal sense? "We cannot connect to God directly - we need the Rebbe to take our prayers from here to there and to help us in this world. We are told by our rabbis that a great man is like God and the Rebbe was the greatest man ever. That is how we know he is the messiah, because how could life continue without him? No existence is possible without the Rebbe."

Would they go so far as to describe the Rebbe and God as one and the same, as some extreme Messianists have done? "No, some people have gone too far and described the Rebbe as the creator.

"They say that God was born in 1902 and is now 105 years old. You can pray to the Rebbe and he will answer, and he was around since the beginning of time. But you must be careful to pray only to the Rebbe as a spiritual entity and not the body that was born in 1902."

Does the Rebbe have a will of his own? What if the Rebbe and God disagree? "That is a ridiculous question! They are not separate in any way."

So the Rebbe is a part of God. "Yes, but it is more complex than that. There is no clear place where the Rebbe ends and God begins."

Does that mean the Rebbe is infinite omnipotent and omniscient? "Yes of course," an Argentine student says in Hebrew. "God chose to imbue this world with life through a body. So that's how we know the Rebbe can't have died, and that his actual physical body must be alive. The Rebbe is the conjunction of God and human. The Rebbe is God, but he is also physical."

[...]

For more on the movement see here and just keep following the links back.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH:

Jerusalem mayor orders new walkway plans
2/12/2007, 12:24 a.m. CT
By MATTI FRIEDMAN
The Associated Press

JERUSALEM (AP) — The Jerusalem municipality will submit new plans for a walkway leading to a disputed holy compound, a City Hall spokesman said Monday, but work was scheduled to continue at the site.

The plans for the new walkway up to the compound known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as the Temple Mount already were approved by City Hall, but Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupolianski now will demand a longer and more transparent planning process that will allow residents to see the plans and submit protests, spokesman Gidi Schmerling said.

Tensions in the city have been high since last week, when Israel began work outside the compound. The new walkway is meant to replace an ancient earthen ramp that partially collapsed in a snowstorm three years ago.

Israel says the work, about 60 yards from the compound, will not hurt Muslim holy sites but the project has drawn fierce protests from Palestinians and Arab countries.

The new City Hall decision will have no effect on the work currently under way at the site, where archaeologists are carrying out an exploratory dig to ensure that no important remains are damaged when the walkway is built.

But Schmerling said it could delay construction, which was set to begin in about six months' time. The new walkway was originally expected to be completed within a year.

[...]

On Sunday, the Cabinet voted overwhelmingly to push ahead with the work. There were no objections to the decision, the government said in a statement, though three ministers abstained.

[...]

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH:

Calm Prevails in Jerusalem on Day After Excavation Clashes

By STEVEN ERLANGER (New York Times)
Published: February 11, 2007

JERUSALEM, Feb. 10 — A few stone-throwing incidents occurred Saturday, but Jerusalem streets were largely quiet a day after the police clashed with Palestinians protesting Israeli construction work near the religious compound known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as the Temple Mount.

Some tires were burned and rocks thrown at police officers in east Jerusalem, an area largely populated by Arabs, and some rocks were thrown at a bus full of Canadian tourists near the Mount of Olives, said a Jerusalem police spokesman, Inspector Micky Rosenfeld. “No one was injured, and as far as we are concerned, things are relatively calm and quiet,” Inspector Rosenfeld said. The police presence, he said, was down from 2,000 officers on Friday.

In Bethlehem, some 30 Palestinians were arrested Saturday after brief clashes with Israeli troops near Rachel’s Tomb, the police said.

[...]

“Whoever needed to be informed was informed,” Inspector Rosenfeld said. “Both security and Muslim leaders, the Waqf and Israeli Arabs leaders knew exactly what will take place and when.”

[...]

This in contrast to the claims that the Waqf had not been informed. The construction was suspended yesterday for the Sabbath, but is scheduled to continue today.

Also, Haaretz has a good editorial ("Digs, lies and the Mugrabi bridge") by Nadav Shragai connecting the current disturbances with the larger issue of Muslim Jewish-Temple denial, which PaleoJudaica has been covering for years. Excerpts (but read it all):

Still, one good thing did happen. The Mugrabi bridge plan exposes the great Muslim denial - the denial of the Jewish bond to Jerusalem, the Temple Mount and the Temple. Dr. Yitzhak Reiter described the whole story in his study, From Jerusalem to Mecca and Back - a must for anyone wishing to understand the roots of Muslim behavior, even in the Mugrabi bridge affair - but his work remained, regrettably, an academic study, failing to prompt an appropriate public relations campaign on Israel's part. Now the public is receiving another demonstration.

Who among us knows, for example, that the al-Aqsa Mosque, which according to contemporary studies was built some 1,400 years ago, is now claimed to have been built at the time of the world's creation, during the days of Adam or Abraham? And who is aware of the fact that increasing numbers of Muslim academics and religious leaders claim it existed even before Jesus and Moses and that Islam preceded Judaism in Jerusalem?

Today, thousands of Islamic rulings, publications and sources deny the Jewish roots in Jerusalem and its holy places. They claim that the Temple didn't even exist in Jerusalem but was located in Nablus or Yemen. An Islamic legal pronouncement (fatwa) on the Jerusalem Waqf (Muslim religious trust) Web site says King Solomon and King Herod did not build the Temple at all, but merely refurbished an existing structure that had been there from the days of Adam. Today, many Muslims call the Temple "the greatest fraud crime in history" and many Muslim adjudicators attach the world "so-called" to the word "temple."

[...]

It is therefore easy to understand why the Muslims are so afraid of archaeological digs, not only on the Temple Mount itself but also around it, although these digs also shed light on Jerusalem's Muslim history. Muslims fear these excavations, not because they physically endanger al-Aqsa's foundations, but because they undermine the tissue of lies proclaiming that the Jews have no valid historical roots in the city and its holy sites.

That is a very good point that needs to be made over and over again. (For the evidence for the existence of the First and Second Judean/Jewish Temples on the Temple Mount, see here and here.)

I find that analysis more persuasive than Uri Avnery's in Media Monitor's Network ("The Method in the Madness")

The Israeli government argues that the bridge is separate from the Temple Mount. The Muslims insist that the bridge is a part of it. Behind this tussle, there is a lurking Arab suspicion that the installation of the new bridge is just a cover for something else happening below the surface.

At the 2000 Camp David conference, the Israeli side made a weird-sounding proposal: to leave the area itself to the Muslims, but with Israeli sovereignty over everything beneath the surface. That reinforced the Muslim belief that the Israelis intended to dig beneath the Mount, in order to discover traces of the Jewish Temple that was destroyed by the Romans 1936 years ago. Some believed that the real intention was to cause the Islamic shrines to collapse, so a new Temple could be built in their place.

These suspicions are nurtured by the fact that most Israeli archaeologists have always been the loyal foot-soldiers of the official propaganda. Since the emergence of modern Zionism, they have been engaged in a desperate endeavor to "find" archaeological evidence for the historical truth of the stories of the Old Testament. Until now, they have gone empty-handed: there exists no archaeological proof for the exodus from Egypt, the conquest of Canaan and the kingdoms of Saul, David and Solomon. But in their eagerness to prove the unprovable (because in the opinion of the vast majority of archaeologists and historians outside Israel - and also some in Israel - the Old Testament stories are but sacred myths), the archaeologists have destroyed many strata of other periods.

But that is not the most important side of the present affair. One can argue to the end of days about the responsibility for the Mugrabi walkway or what it might be that the archaeologists are looking for. But it is impossible to doubt that this is a provocation: it was carried out like a surprise military operation, without consultation with the other side.

The accusation that Israeli archaeologists "have destroyed many strata of other periods" is bizarre. Archaeological excavation involves the "destruction" of the excavated parts of the site, which is why it is always accompanied by careful documentation of any strata excavated. This is elementary.

Enough for now.

THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS EXHIBITION at Union Station in Kansas City opened last Thursday.

UPDATE: Also, some Dead Sea Scroll replicas are on display in Kirtland, Ohio.

MAKE FRIENDS FOR YOURSELVES OF THE MAMMON OF UNRIGHTEOUSNESS ...

Student wins iMac computer in spelling bee
By: Jacob Fullmer

USU's [Utah State University's] annual spelling bee was held Tuesday in the TSC Sunburst Lounge. The two finalists were Jordan Brimley and Tyler Pack.
USU's annual spelling bee was held Tuesday in the TSC Sunburst Lounge. The two finalists were Jordan Brimley and Tyler Pack.

You have the right to repeat the word. You have the right to hear the definition. Anything you spell can and will be used against you in this spelling bee.

Participants in this year's spelling bee were read their "spelling rights" and challenged by some of the English language's hardest tongue twisters and rule breakers.

[...]

A few students with backgrounds in ancient languages were expected to perform well. But some participants expressed frustration with the words they received. In the final round, some spellers received "mammonistic," a word with Aramaic origins, while others received "monopsony," deriving from Greek.

[...]

My emphasis

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: Here are some of the latest reports and editorials on the Mugrabi Gate-bridge excavation.

From the Chicago Tribune, widely reprinted:

Excavations incite clash between Israeli police, Palestinians

By Joel Greenberg

Chicago Tribune

(MCT)

JERUSALEM - Israeli riot police hurling stun grenades fought crowds of stone-throwing Palestinians outside Al Aqsa Mosque, Islam's third-holiest shrine, Friday in a clash triggered by Israeli excavations near the site that have drawn sharp condemnations across the Arab world.

The confrontation after Friday prayers, beamed live across the Middle East by satellite news channels, ended with no serious injuries, but it raised concerns that the protests could spread to the West Bank and Gaza Strip and inflame religious passions throughout the region.

The Israeli excavation, in preparation for construction of a new approach ramp for visitors to the hilltop compound known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as the Temple Mount, has become the latest flashpoint of the struggle for the contested area - ground zero of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

[...]

King Abdullah of Jordan and archaeologist Meir Ben Dov are protesting too:

Abdullah decries Temple Mount action
By JPOST STAFF, JOSHUA BRANNON, AND NEWS AGENCIES

Jordan's King Abdullah II on Friday condemned what he called Israel's "violations" against protestors at Jerusalem's Temple Mount compound, and warned such practices would only enhance violence and place "obstacles" in the path of peace.

"Jordan will push ahead with Arab and Islamic contacts as well as on the international level to ensure that Israel halts such deeds, which only lead to the expansion of the violence cycle and places obstacles versus efforts aimed at re-launching the peace process," Abdullah told Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas in a telephone conversation, a royal court statement said.

"The King expressed concerns over the dangerous Israeli escalation against the Islamic holy places and rejected all pretexts cited by Israel as a cover-up for its violations of al-Aksa Mosque," it added.

[...]

Meanwhile, in an interview with Israel Radio on Friday morning, archaeologist Meir Ben Dov, who headed previous excavation work at the Temple Mount site, said there was no need for the renovations to be carried out at the Mughrabi Gate and that the planned bridge was not required.

Ben Dov added that the excavations near the Temple Mount were illegal and that Israel had not received the required permits.

[...]

From U.P.I:

Analysis: Temple Mount clashes, again
By JOSHUA BRILLIANT
UPI Correspondent

JERUSALEM, Feb. 9 (UPI) -- Clashes at one of the world's holiest sites between stone-throwing Muslim demonstrators and Israeli policemen in heavy riot gear Friday ended with 30 injuries and fears it could be a harbinger of something far worse.

Most of the fighting was on a plaza the Jews call the Temple Mount, their holiest site, and the Muslims al-Aqsa, their third holiest site.

The dispute was over excavations the Israelis launched along a ramp leading to the plaza's southwestern Moors' Gate. Part of that ramp collapsed following an earthquake and snowstorms in 2004. The Israelis built a wooden bridge nearby and sought to replace it with something sturdier.

They launched "salvage excavations," an archaeological procedure designed "to prevent and minimize damage which could be caused to ancient remains as a result of the construction," the Israel Antiquities Authority said. These excavations will not extend to the Temple Mount's wall, the authority's spokeswoman Osnat Gouez said.

The Waqf that manages the al-Aqsa compound protested the excavations and Muslims repeated charges that Israel was threatening their mosques.

"No one moves a stone here without a political consideration," argued Arab Knesset Member Talab al-Sana. "The conspiracies regarding al-Aqsa have not ceased" and, "of course" Israel was digging under the mosques.

[...]

From Israel Insider:

Witness a big lie in the making!
By Moshe Kempinski February 9, 2007

If you follow the news carefully over the next couple of weeks you will be able to witness the careful and delicate work of creating a false new "reality". What began as an attempt to rebuild a damaged ramp leading to the Mughrabi gate has escalated into an international incident. The work is proceeding near a temporary walkway that replaces a centuries-old stairway which collapsed during storms in 2004. The Israeli authorities have explained that the renovations are needed to safeguard the ancient site and have told all the critics that there will be no structural damage to the ancient site or to the Temple Mount beside it.

Yet those facts will not deter the forces in the Arab world that are trying to diffuse and end the inter Palestinian warfare. ...

From Time Magazine:

Raiders of the Temple Mount
Friday, Feb. 09, 2007 By TIM MCGIRK/JERUSALEM

Amid the old city of Jerusalem and rising above it is the ancient site of Solomon's Temple and the point from which the Prophet Mohammed journeyed to Heaven. Holy to Jews and Muslims, it is as dangerous these days as a ticking atom bomb. Any readjustment of its ancient stones can detonate outrage among millions of faithful around the world. On Friday, Muslims in Jerusalem protested against Israeli excavation work next to al-Aqsa, one of Islam's holiest shrines, which sits atop the site. Around the world, Muslims declared a universal "day of anger," Israeli police stormed into the Muslim compound and fired stun grenades and rubber bullets at youths trying to hurl stones at Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall. Israeli police claim that 17 protesters and 15 police officers were injured in the clashes, but Palestinians say many more were hurt in skirmishes around the mosque grounds.

[...]

Muslims also say that the excavations will also be destroying chunks of their religious heritage, but Israeli archeologists and Palestinian workers on the site are clearing away every stone and pottery fragment with the precision of surgeons. Not that it matters. Throughout the Muslim world, the Israeli excavations adjacent to al-Aqsa are being portrayed as sacrilege, as another blow by Israel and, indirectly, by its ally America, against Islam. For the last three days, the story has topped headlines and news broadcasts throughout the Muslim world.

[...]

All this hostility could have been avoided, say Israeli experts, if the authorities had first sought clearance from the Waqf, the Islamic board which governs the al-Aqsa mosque. ...

Other articles are pouring in faster than I can keep track of them, but this should give you the general idea.

ADOLFO ROITMAN is lecturing in Florida:

Dead Sea Scrolls curator to speak of historic find

By MICHELLE JONES, [St. Petersburg] Times Staff Writer
Published February 10, 2007

TARPON SPRINGS

I* 1947 one of the most significant discoveries of the 20th century was made by three Bedouin boys playing in the caves above the Dead Sea in Israel. During their explorations they discovered a treasure, scrolls, dating from before A.D. 100.

Adolfo Roitman, curator of the Dead Sea Scrolls and director of Jerusalem's Israel Museum Shrine of the Book, will lecture locally on the religious significance of these scrolls to both Judaism and Christianity.

[...]