TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH - Forbes has more info on the damage caused by the latest Waqf excavation:

On Thursday, Israeli archaeologist Zachi Zweig said a tractor used to dig the trench damaged the foundation of a 7-yard-wide wall "that might have been a remnant of the Second Temple."

Zweig said his group, the Public Committee Against the Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount, drew that conclusion because of the location of the damaged foundation.

"We saw the damage for ourselves and documented it," he said.

The Second Temple was built by Cyrus the Great of Persia in 515 B.C. and destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D.

The tractor dug a trench that was 4 feet deep, Zweig said.

"The bedrock at this location is very shallow, so there is a high probability that ancient remnants were damaged," he added.

The top Muslim cleric in Jerusalem, Mufti Mohammed Hussein, rejected the Israeli group's charges.

"We don't harm the antiquities, we are the ones who are taking care of the antiquities, unlike others who destroy them," the mufti said.

Zweig said the Israel Antiquities Authority supervisor who was assigned to oversee the cable replacement was a novice archaeologist. "The oversight was a joke," he said.

The authority had no comment.

Earlier coverage here.

UPDATE: Additional coverage in the Jerusalem Post and Haaretz. The latter also has new info on the sifting project on the Waqf's earlier illicit excavations:

In a related development yesterday, new artifacts discovered in sifting through earth removed from the Temple Mount were presented at the eighth annual City of David archaeological conference.

The project, now in its third year, entails scrutinizing truckloads of earth removed by the Waqf in 1999.

Among the ancient finds were numerous stone tiles intended for flooring, some of which have been identified as designed for use in the Roman-era mosaic work known as opus sectile, in which colorful tiles were cut into shapes and fitted into geometric patterns.

"The discovery of stone tiles used in opus sectile flooring in [earth from] the Temple Mount is one of the most important discoveries of the dirt-sifting work," Barkai said, "and it might aid in reconstructing the appearance and character of the Temple's outer courtyard."

Also, denials from "Israeli officials" according to the APF:

Doubts over 'second temple remains' in Jerusalem

Israeli officials cast doubt Friday over claims that remains of the second Jewish temple might have been found during work to lay pipes at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem.

"If that was the case, the antiquities authority, which has an observer on site, as well as police, also monitoring the work, would have stepped in," said archaeologist Dan Bahat, a former excavations official in Jerusalem.

And the Al Aqsa Foundation (not sure what that is) responds:

A statement issued by the institution read that the Israeli parties have dubbed the maintenance works as barbarian, confirming that any construction works inside the Islamic shrine are the responsibility of the Waqf committee.

The Al-Aqsa foundation rejected the Israeli incitement against the Islamic Waqf ‘endowment’ committee, declaring willingness to defy all Israeli interventions in the mosque’s affairs.

UPDATE: Predictably, it seems that this episode is generating more Jewish-Temple denial and other way-out claims from the usual suspects:

Israel is conspiring to encroach on the Temple Mount to build a Jewish temple near the Al-Aqsa mosque, Sheikh Raed Salah, the head of the Islamic Movement northern branch, said Thursday.

Salah called on Arab and Muslim nations to "prevent the division of the Al-Aqsa by Israel."

In a letter to Arab kings and leaders of Muslim countries, Salah urged all Muslims to torpedo "Israel's plan that aims at dividing the Al-Aqsa Mosque between Muslims and Jews whereas in the Jewish part it plans to build its imaginary temple."

UPDATE (4 September): More here.

ANCIEN JUDAISM JOB AT DUKE (from the Agade list):

Via Nancy Hurtgen nhurtgen@duke.edu:
=====================================

Duke University's Department of Religion in Trinity College of Arts and Sciences invites applications and nominations for a tenure-track assistant professor position in late ancient Judaism to begin August 2008.

Candidates should have expertise in classical Jewish literature and an interest in Jewish interactions with late-ancient Christianity and/or early Islam. Additional areas of interest may include art, archaeology, gender studies or any discipline related to the cognate fields of Classical Studies, History, or Islamic Studies. The appointment includes graduate and undergraduate instruction. The appointee will participate in Duke's Graduate Program in Religion and Judaic Studies Program. They also will collaborate with faculty members in the Department of Religious Studies at the nearby University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Candidates are asked to send a letter of application, a curriculum vitae, and three letters of reference to: Chair of the Late-Ancient Judaism Search Committee, Department of Religion, Box 90964, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708-0964. Applications received by October 15, 2007 will be guaranteed full consideration but the search will continue until the position is filled. Duke University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. Women and minorities strongly are encouraged to apply.

TWO CONFERENCES AT KCL (from the Agade list):

From Diana Lipton diana.lipton@kcl.ac.uk:
================================================


TWO BIBLICAL STUDIES CONFERENCES AT KING'S COLLEGE LONDON

(1) GRADUATE STUDENT DAY CONFERENCE ON HEBREW BIBLE AND POST-BIBLICAL TEXTS

Thursday 15th May 2008, 11am-5.30pm, Council Room, Strand Campus

PhD students at any stage of their research and MA students thinking of continuing are invited to attend a one conference on the Hebrew Bible and early post and para-biblical texts (Dead Sea Scrolls, pseudepigrapha, targum, midrash) specifically for Graduate Students. This is a wonderful opportunity to meet your peers, acquire experience giving papers, get feedback on your research, and spend a day at King's College in the heart of London. We welcome proposals for papers on any aspect of your work. Papers will be 20 minutes long, followed by 10 minutes of audience questions and constructive feedback from a small panel of highly supportive professionals - Drs Lutz Doering (KCL), Charlotte Hempel (Birmingham), Diana Lipton (KCL) and Deborah Rooke (KCL), and Prof. Hugh Williamson (Oxford).

For more information, to register, and to propose a paper:

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/trs/news/

(2) A QUESTION OF SEX: EMBROIDERED GARMENTS

Monday August 4th to Wednesday August 6th 2008, Council Room, Strand Campus

Keynote Speakers: Prof. Athalya Brenner (University of Amsterdam and Tel Aviv University), Dr. Tarja Philip (Hebrew University), and Dr. Deborah Rooke (King's College London).

Proposals are warmly invited for short papers (30 minutes plus 15) and designated Graduate Student papers (20 minutes plus 10) on sex and gender in biblical and post-biblical texts (Dead Sea Scrolls, pseudepigrapha, midrash) with a priestly worldview or concerns. Among biblical texts we include Leviticus, Numbers, Ezekiel, and Ezra, along with parts of Genesis, Exodus, Joshua and Chronicles, and are open to other suggestions. Programmed events include 'Group Texts', a creative Hebrew reading session, and 'Comparing Notes: Ancient Sex and Gender in the British Museum', a tailor-made tour of the collections, followed by a guided discussion. 'Embroidered Garments' follows a successful 2006 conference on gender and difference in biblical studies, papers from which are forthcoming with Sheffield Phoenix Press.

For more information, to register, and to propose a paper:

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/trs/news/

Diana Lipton
Lecturer in Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies
King's College London
diana.lipton@kcl.ac.uk

A CONFERENCE IN HONOR OF JOHN J. COLLINS is to be held in April of 2008 at Amherst College: The Other in Second Temple Judaism: A Conference in Honor of John J. Collins. (Via the H-Judaic List.)

IT'S TRUE THAT I CAN DO 60 PUSH-UPS, but I am not this James Davila.

BLOGGERS PRESENTING at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the AAR/SBL: John F. Hobbins has compiled a list at the Ancient Hebrew Poetry blog.

UPDATE: By "bloggers" he seems to mean people who have some kind of online presence. Some of them don't actually have blogs - or at least he doesn't link to a blog for them and I don't know of one either.

CAN'T MAKE IT UP:

Jesus' conviction 'null, void'
29/08/2007 14:33 - (SA)

Nairobi - A case on behalf of Jesus Christ has come knocking on Kenya's High Court door, lodged by a fervent Christian group who wants his conviction declared "null and void" and his Crucifixion "illegal."

Though cases to right historical wrongs were far from unusual around the world, Kenya's Friends of Jesus (FOJ) had reached back two millennia in what might redefine the quest for closure.

The petition was filed on Monday with the court registrar, raising a novel set of jurisprudence quandaries - not the least of which involved the statute of limitations and whether the high court had jurisdiction over the "Son of God".

It was not certain when a ruling would be handed down.

High court spokesperson Dola Indindis said but, FOJ actually "might have a right in court because the issues raised touch on human rights and the high court has unlimited powers on that line".

[...]

Nairobi constitutional lawyer Albert Kuloba, for one, said the "FOJ should have filed it in the International Criminal Court (in The Hague) which has the mandate to hear that case."

[...]

It looks as though judicial activism might be a problem in the Kenyan court system.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH - The A.P. has a piece on the Waqf's latest excavation:

Dig at Jerusalem Site Brings Ire

Wednesday August 29, 2007 8:46 PM

By SARAH EL DEEB

Associated Press Writer

JERUSALEM (AP) - Israeli archaeologists on Wednesday criticized the extension of an underground cable at Jerusalem's holiest site for Muslims and Jews, saying that digging the trench defies professional standards for such a sensitive historic site and could damage Bible-era relics.

Islamic authorities responsible for the Al Aqsa Mosque complex, known to Jews as the Temple Mount, said the digging is necessary infrastructure work at the site to replace 40-year-old electrical cables ahead of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

The site is at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is home to Al Aqsa Mosque and the gold-capped Dome of the Rock, Islam's third-holiest shrine. It is also the holiest site in Judaism: Archaeological finds show that the remains of the temples are beneath the mosque compound, although Muslim clerics dispute that.

[...]

On the last point, see here and here.

Story background here.

UPDATE: Here's an interesting tidbit from a Reuters article carried on Ynetnews:

[Archaeologist Gabriel] Barkay said earth from the trench contained pottery shards dating to the Byzantine period. He cautioned that more relics still underground could be harmed.

This is the first claim I've seen about specific artifacts being uncovered in the excavation.

UPDATE: Reportedly, they're still at it:

Muslims Continue Temple Mount Dig without Proper Archeological Survey

By Amihai Zippor (Israel Hasbara Committee)

(IHC News, 29 August 2007) The Committee Against the Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount resumed condemnations of the State-run Israel Antiquities Authority on Tuesday, 28 August 2007, after Muslims continued digging on the Temple Mount in order to modernize infrastructure.

The Waqf, the Muslim religious caretakers of Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem, began new non-supervised digging there to prepare a section for infrastructure work on Wednesday, 11 July 2007 and used heavy equipment, destroying sensitive ground on one of the world’s most important archeological sites.

[...]

UPDATE: More photos and video here. (Via the BAS Newsletter.)

IN THE MAIL:

Risa Levitt Kohn, Dead Sea Scrolls (San Diego Natural History Museum, 2007)

The catalogue for the San Diego Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition, kindly sent to me by Professor Kohn, the curator. Lots of cool photos.

BPR3 - Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting.

Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting strives to identify serious academic blog posts about peer-reviewed research by developing an icon and an aggregation site where others can look to find the best academic blogging on the Net.

There's a contest for the icon.

(Via Chuck Jones on Facebook.)

A GUIDE TO JUDEO-ARABIC SCRIPT appears at the Omniglot site. (Via On the Main Line.)

THE SILVER COIN HOARDS FROM QUMRAN HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED, and Kenneth Lonnqvist e-mails the following information. For you, special deal.

Title: The Report of the Amman Lots of the Qumran Silver Coin Hoards. New Chronological Aspects of the Silver Coin Hoard Evidence from Khirbet Qumran at the Dead Sea. Amman 2007.

Author: Kenneth Lönnqvist

Book: A4-sized book, paperback. 72 pages with complete coin catalogue and photographs of each coin, including archaeological, historical and numismatic commentary.

ISBN: 978-952-92-2281-0

Printer: Printed by The National Press, Amman, Jordan

SPECIAL OFFER FOR A LIMITED PERIOD, UNTIL END OF SEPTEMBER 2007:
A limited number of the new numismatic publication on the Amman silver coin hoards (The Report of the Amman Lots of the Qumran Silver Coin Hoards. New Chronological Aspects of the Silver Coin Hoard Evidence from Khirbet Qumran at the Dead Sea. Amman 2007) will be distributed free of charge upon purchase of the book Archaeology of the Hidden Qumran The New Paradigm. Minna Lönnqvist and Kenneth Lönnqvist (Helsinki University Press. Helsinki 2002). 377 pages, indices, glossary, 83 photographs (including 30 colour photographs) and 62 drawings. ISBN 952-91-4958-1. Written statements of the book can be provided in PDF-form with e-mail, upon request.

Price: Bundle price or total price of the two books is 20 $ or 15 € (currency exchange rate of 24.8.2007, which may vary), excluding shipping and packing costs.

Add shipping and packing costs as follows:

1st Class (Air Mail): USA: 25 $ (dollar)
2nd Class (Economy, surface mail) USA: 12.5 $ (dollar)

1st Class (Air Mail): EU-countries: 9.5 € (euro)
2nd Class (Economy, surface mail) EU-countries: 9.5 € (euro)

Offer expires 30.9. 2007. E-mail order address: kenneth.lonnqvist@helsinki.fi
Shipping will be made when the order with address information and the payment have been received. Shipping will be processed in the order they have been received.

MOSES HAS BEEN AN AMERICAN ICON since the nineteenth century according to the New Republic:

For those of us whose vision of Moses begins and ends at the movies, or more to the point, perhaps, with Charlton Heston, it may come as a great surprise to learn that Moses was just about everywhere in mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century America. You might even say he gave Jesus a run for his money. True, Cecil B. DeMille, who hired the then young and relatively unknown Heston because of his alleged resemblance to Michelangelo's fabled sculpture, had a great deal to do with firmly affixing Moses and his Ten Commandments to the modern imagination. After all, "Mr. Movies," as he was widely known, made not just one but two wildly popular motion pictures about the Decalogue: the first, a silent film in 1923; the other, the 1956 cinematic extravaganza that we now screen every year on television come Easter and Passover. But even granting DeMille his considerable due, the historical record makes clear that the latter-day film was but the latest in a long series of encounters with the biblical figure which punctuated American history from the mid-nineteenth century on. The apotheosis of all things Mosaic, DeMille's postwar epic actually owed its success in large measure to the way it drew on the nation's longstanding preoccupation with the scriptural character, a preoccupation that was every bit as quotidian as it was holy.

These days, Moses continues to cast a long shadow over the body politic, especially when it comes to the placement of the Ten Commandments in the public square. Angry words about the appropriate role religion ought to play in twenty-first century America fill the air as proponents and opponents square off, each side laying claim to Moses' mantle. But earlier generations saw things differently, more consensually: Everyone--Jews, Protestants, and Catholics, artists and politicians - sought him out. ...

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: More on the latest Waqf excavations from the BBC.

Israeli anger over holy site work
By Martin Asser
BBC News, Jerusalem

A group of Israeli archaeologists is protesting about fresh excavations at Jerusalem's holiest religious shrine, saying it threatens priceless relics.

Muslim authorities at al-Aqsa mosque, also venerated by Jews as the Temple Mount, are digging a 150-metre trench for water pipes and electricity cables.

Israeli critics say the work is causing irreparable damage, indiscriminately piling up earth and carved stones.

Mosque officials insist it is urgent infrastructure work doing no damage.

[...]

Dr [Gabriel] Barkai identifies the area currently under excavation as the outer courts of the Second Temple, built by Herod the Great in the First Century BC.

He maintains it is where the best preservation of antiquities was anticipated, since other parts of the compound are built on exposed bedrock.

He accuses the Islamic authorities of wanting to "show who is the boss" by destroying Jewish remains in al-Aqsa mosque.

He also lambastes the Israeli Antiquities Authority, meant to supervise any work at archaeological sites, for apparently giving the work legitimacy.

Yusuf Natsheh of the Islamic Waqf dismisses such claims, saying the area has been dug many times and arguing that remains unearthed would be from the 16th or 17th century Ottoman period.

He says the work is urgently needed to maintain the al-Aqsa compound as an important religious institution.


[...]

Whatever the date of the remains, they should be excavated scientifically by specialists who know what they're doing.

Earlier coverage here, here, here, and here.

LATINO-PUNIC is the subject of recent posts on Bulbolovo (scroll down past the section on Sabean inscriptions) and Jabal Al-Lughat. Thought for the day: If ancient North African Christians were native speakers of Punic, but wrote in Latin, what if one of them wrote an Old Testament pseudepigraphon? Would the Punic influence make it look to us as though it had been translated from Hebrew and therefore must be a Jewish composition? I worry about things like this.

THE SEGEV FOREST in the Western Galilee has some interesting archaeological excavations. Haaretz reports:

"The excavations Dr. Zvi Gal carried out at the beginning of the 1990s solved a very complex puzzle about King Solomon and Hiram, king of Phoenicia," says Mordechai Aviam, director of the Galilee Archaeological Institute.

"A site of a Phoenician nature was built here, a kind of administrative and military center constructed on top of private dwellings from the 11th century. The Phoenician nature of the site bears out the story of King Solomon giving King Hiram portions of the country in exchange for the cedars of Lebanon, with which he built the Temple," Aviam says, smiling in consideration of the implications the story has for the present-day debate over dividing the land.

Not far from here, on the slope of the hill, Aviam has worked with archaeology students at a site known as the Beza Ruin. Remains were found here of an olive oil press and a private home from Second Temple times and the period of the Mishnah, the first and second centuries CE. "The place is beautifully preserved, and we know there are many archaeological finds underground," Aviam says. Gidi Aharoni, head of the Teradyon Industrial Zone (named after a martyr in the rebellion against Rome, a name to be changed to the Misgav Industrial Zone) is listening in. Aharoni is also director general of the Misgav economic corporation, and by his own admission is a lover of archaeology and the environment. For Aharoni, the two sites, beyond their historical importance, can leverage tourism in the region. ...

A WOODEN BOAT discovered in the Sea of Galilee in 1986:

The Jesus Boat
Ancient Galilee boat believed to be 2,000 years old

by Lamar Keener (Christian Examiner)

TIBERIAS, Israel — As the birthplace of civilization, archaeologists have spent years in Israel uncovering stone and earthen remnants of biblically significant treasures.

Sometimes, the finds come from the most unlikely sources.

Considered one of the most remarkable archeological finds in the world, an ancient wooden boat was discovered in 1986 that has been dated back to the first century.

During a severe drought that had lowered the Sea of Galilee to record levels, two brothers, exploring its muddy shoreline for ancient artifacts, found a piece of wood jutting out of the now-exposed seabed. The vessel had been buried in, and protected by, the seabed’s sediments.

Assisted by experts from around the world, the Israel Antiquities Authority rescued the boat during an 11-day-and-night excavation. The weak and waterlogged hull required tedious care, as it was subject to crumbling after being exposed to light and air. Although the wood looked strong, it was soft and shattered upon touch.

I don't think I've ever heard of this find before. There's a photo of the boat at the Sea of Galilee page at BiblePlaces.com.

UPDATE: Oops, that's not the boat, it's a reconstruction. My mistake. But there is a photo of the actual boat at Jeremy O'Clair's Ancient Study blog.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH - More fallout from the latest construction excavation on the Temple Mount:

Archeologists slam authorities over Muslim dig
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS (Jerusalem Post)

A group of Israeli archeologists on Monday renewed their blistering condemnation of the Antiquities Authority for authorizing Muslim officials to carry out a dig on Jerusalem's Temple Mount with tractors and other heavy equipment as part of infrastructure work to repair faulty electrical lines on the ancient compound.

The work started last month on the northern section of the Temple Mount in the area of the outer courts of the ancient Jewish Temples with the approval of the Israel Police and the state-run Antiquities Authority, Israeli and Islamic officials said. Independent Israeli archeologists said that the work left a 100-meter-long and roughly 1-1.5 meter deep trench, and has damaged the site.

[...]

A REVIEW OF GOODMAN, ROME AND JERUSALEM, in the Church Times is noted by Mark Goodacre.

DIRK JONGKIND'S BOOK, Scribal Habits of Codex Sinaiticus, has been published by Gorgias Press.

Author: Dirk Jongkind
Title: Scribal Habits of Codex Sinaiticus
Subtitle:
Series: Texts and Studies Third Series 5
Publisher: Gorgias Press LLC
Publication Date: 5/2/2007 10:18:11 AM
Availability: In Print
ISBN: 978-1-59333-422-2
Language: English
Format: Hardback 6 x 9, 1 volume(s), xvii i+ 323 pages, illustrations

Codex Sinaiticus is the oldest manuscript containing the complete text of the New Testament. Besides the New Testament, this codex from the fourth century also contains large parts of the Greek Old Testament, though quite a large part of this section did not survive. Codex Sinaiticus is much more than simply a particular instance of the Greek text of the Bible. At least three different scribes copied the text out by hand, and these scribes were faced with many decisions in the process of writing: How many letters do I put on this line? Will I contract this word as a nomen sacrum or will I spell it out in full? What do I do when I spot an error in the text I have just copied? What is the right spelling of this word? Is it time for a new paragraph? How do I fit the text I have copied to that of my colleague?

This book studies a wide variety of textual and non-textual phenomena of Codex Sinaiticus. Thus we not only learn more about this important biblical manuscript, but are also able to discern much about the individual scribes. The Codex Sinaiticus is not a homogenous book, but the product of individuals with their own habits and different qualities. This study shows that it is possible to rate the scribes of the New Testament according to their individual copying ability.

Dirk Jongkind finished his doctoral work at Cambridge University in 2005. Before taking up a research fellowship at Tyndale House, Cambridge, he was employed by the British Library in London to work on the curatorial preparation of the Codex Sinaiticus Digitisation Project. He is a fellow of St Edmund's College, Cambridge.

Tyndale House held a book launch last week. I commented on Dirk's work several years ago when he was still a doctoral student. The scribal character, layout, and physical characteristics of ancient manuscripts are important sources of historical information that have been neglected until fairly recently. This book is a welcome contribution to this area.

A NEW TESTAMENT APOCRYPHA COURSE SYLLABUS.

THE ONLINE SBL PROGRAM BOOK (3): Hellenistic Judaism.

S18-18
Hellenistic Judaism. Earlier posts here and here.
11/18/2007
9:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Room: Edward D - GH

Theme: Philosophy and Wisdom in Hellenistic Judaism

Allen Kerkeslager, Saint Joseph's University, Presiding
George H. van Kooten, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
Man as the Image of God in Hellenistic Judaism (20 min)
Matthew E. Gordley, Regent University
Didactic Hymnody and the Wisdom of Solomon (20 min)
Discussion (15 min)
Break (10 min)
Steve Young, McHenry County College
Marketing Martyrdom: De/Colonizing Philosophy as Faith in 4th Maccabees (20 min)
Erin Roberts, Brown University
Philo, Wealth, and Stoic Ethics (20 min)
Philippa Townsend, Princeton University
Being Jewish Under Rome: Philo on Greeks and Egyptians (20 min)
Discussion (25 min)

S18-66
Hellenistic Judaism
Joint Session With: Josephus, Hellenistic Judaism
11/18/2007
1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Room: Point Loma - MM

Theme: Josephus

Tessa Rajak, University of Reading, Presiding
Fabian Eugene Udoh, University of Notre Dame
Joseph as a Prototype of the Enslaved: Philo (De Iosepho) and Josephus (Antiquities of the Jews 2.39-90) (20 min)
Jason von Ehrenkrook, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
Statues, Space, and the Poetics of Idolatry in Josephus' "Jewish War" (20 min)
Discussion (20 min)
Break (10 min)
Kenneth R. Atkinson, University of Northern Iowa
Queen Salome Alexandra’s Neglected Contributions to Hellenistic Judaism (20 min)
Jan W. van Henten, University of Amsterdam
Herod as Tyrant: Assessing Josephus’ Parallel Passages (20 min)
Discussion (20 min)
Business Meeting (20 min)

Everyone is invited to the business meeting at the end of the session to discuss future directions for the Hellenistic Judaism Section.

S20-8
Hellenistic Judaism
Joint Session With: Hellenistic Judaism, Pseudepigrapha
11/20/2007
9:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Room: Edward D - GH

Theme: Exemplarity and Perfection in Hellenistic Judaism

Erich Gruen, University of California-Berkeley, Presiding
Annette Yoshiko Reed, McMaster University
The Construction and Subversion of Patriarchal Perfection (20 min)
Andrei Orlov, Marquette University
Enoch and the Anthropos: Restoration of the Glory of Adam in 2 (Slavonic) Enoch (20 min)
William Adler, North Carolina State University
Exemplary figures in the "Palaea Historica" (20 min)
Discussion (25 min)
Break (5 min)
Hindy Najman, University of Toronto
Education and Transformation in 4 Ezra (20 min)
Benjamin G. Wright III, Lehigh University
Ben Sira on the Sage as Exemplar (20 min)
Discussion (20 min)

A DEATH METAL BAND NAMED BEHEMOTH. Their frontman calls himself Nergal. You gotta love that.

MORE FROM THE ONLINE SBL PROGRAM BOOK: Sessions on the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. (An earlier post on the Program Book is here.)

First, from the Pseudepigrapha Group:

S19-30
Pseudepigrapha
11/19/2007
9:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Room: Gregory B - GH

John C. Reeves, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Presiding
Peter T. Lanfer, University of California-Los Angeles
Paradise in the Pseudepigrapha (25 min)
The Parascriptural Dimensions of Biblical Women
Vered Hillel, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Women’s Genealogies in Hellenistic Literature: The Descent of Bilhah (25 min)
Mary Bader, College of Wooster
Dinah in the Pseudepigrapha (25 min)
Rivka Nir, Open University of Israel
Aseneth as the “Prototype of the Church of the Gentiles” (25 min)
Troy A. Miller, Crichton College
Surrogate, Slave, and Deviant?: “Hagar” in Jewish Interpretive Traditions and Paul’s Use of the Figure in Galatians 4:21-31 (25 min)

S19-78
Pseudepigrapha
11/19/2007
1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Room: 30 D - CC

Theme: Addressing the Challenges of the *Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature Series* (Walter de Gruyter)

John Levison, Seattle Pacific University, Presiding
Dale Allison, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, Panelist (15 min)
David E. Aune, University of Notre Dame, Panelist (10 min)
Randall Chesnutt, Pepperdine University, Panelist (10 min)
John Endres, Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, Panelist (10 min)
Judith H. Newman, University of Toronto, Panelist (15 min)
Pieter van der Horst, University of Utrecht, Panelist
Loren T. Stuckenbruck, University of Durham, Panelist (15 min)
Break (10 min)
Panelist responses
Discussion (30 min)
Audience responses
Discussion (35 min)

And two additional highly relevant sessions:

S17-25
Rethinking the Concept and Categories of 'Bible' in Antiquity
11/17/2007
9:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Room: Salon 5 - MM

James E. Bowley, Millsaps College, Presiding
K. L. Noll, Brandon University
Rethinking Literary Function in the Emerging Hebrew Canon (25 min)
Francis Borchardt, University of Helsinki
Concepts of Scripture in 1 Maccabees (25 min)
Ian W. Scott, Tyndale Seminary
Is the Bible always Scripture?: The "Low" View of the Pentateuch in the Letter of Aristeas (25 min)
Sara Parks, McGill University and Aaron Ricker, McGill University
Harry Potter Canon Discourse and the Biblical Canons (25 min)
Robert A. Kraft, University of Pennsylvania
Finding Adequate Terminology for "Pre-canonical" Literatures (25 min)
James E. Bowley, Millsaps College
Terminating Terminology (25 min)

S19-16
Function of Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphal Writings in Early Judaism and Early Christianity (through 3rd to 4th centuries CE)
11/19/2007
9:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Room: Manchester H - GH

Theme: Theoretical Issues

Lee Martin McDonald, Acadia Divinity College, Presiding
James A. Sanders, Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center
Non-Masoretic Literature in Early Judaism and its Function in the New Testament (20 min)
Craig Evans, Acadia Divinity College, Respondent (5 min)
Discussion (5 min)
James H. Charlesworth, Princeton Theological Seminary
The Book of the People from the People of the Book (20 min)
Discussion (5 min)
Lee Martin McDonald, Acadia Divinity College
What Do We Mean by "Canon"?: A Look at Some Ancient and Modern Questions (20 min)
Loren Johns, Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Respondent (5 min)
Discussion (5 min)
Ken M. Penner, Acadia Divinity College
Citation Formulae as Indices to Canonicity in Early Jewish and Early Christian Literature (20 min)
Jonathan Soyars, Princeton Theological Seminary, Respondent (5 min)
Discussion (5 min)
Sarah L. Schwarz, Haverford College
Pseudepigrapha Among the Pagans?: Exploring the Boundaries of Audience (20 min)
Discussion (5 min)

THE 1981 MASADA MINISERIS is about to becme available on DVD:

•“Masada: The Complete Epic Miniseries” (Sept. 11). From the heyday of the network minis, this $25 million spectacular about a doomed rebellion against ancient Rome by Jewish zealots aired over four nights on ABC in 1981. It marked the American TV acting debut of Peter O’Toole as the lead Roman and miniseries megastar Peter Strauss as the lead zealot. This isn’t the edited-down version that was released on bulky videotape a few years ago but the whole eight-hour enchilada.

THE SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE PROGRAM BOOK for November's meeting in San Diego is now available online, as a number of other bloggers have already noted. I have a paper in the Qumran section:

S19-123
Qumran
11/19/2007
4:00 PM to 6:30 PM
Room: Betsy A - GH

Theme: Methods and Theories in the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Martin G. Abegg, Trinity Western University, Presiding
James R. Davila, University of St. Andrews-Scotland
Counterfactual History and Other New Methodologies (25 min)
Jonathan Klawans, Boston University
The Study of Qumran Doctrines: Methodological Reflections (25 min)
Maxine L. Grossman, University of Maryland College Park
Gendered Sectarians: Some Methodological Thoughts on Gender and the Dead Sea Scrolls (25 min)
Eyal Regev, Bar-Ilan University
Sectarianism In Qumran: A Comparative Approach (25 min)
Ross Kraemer, Brown University, Respondent (15 min)
Discussion (35 min)

There are three other Qumran sections lined up:

S18-78
Qumran
11/18/2007
1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Room: Betsy C - GH

Theme: Qumran Texts and Contexts
Lawrence H. Schiffman, New York University, Presiding
Steve Delamarter, George Fox University
Refining Sociological Models for Understanding Scribal Practices in the Biblical Dead Sea Scrolls (30 min)
Eibert Tigchelaar, Florida State University
Reading the Wiles of the Wicked Woman (4Q184 1) in Its Manuscript Context (30 min)
Alison Schofield, University of Denver
“From the Wilderness to a Door of Hope”: Thematic (Re)conceptualization of the Wilderness in Liturgical Texts (4QBarkiNapshi and 4QWords of the Luminaries) (30 min)
Steven D. Fraade, Yale University
Qumran Yahad and Rabbinc Havurah: A Comparison Reconsidered (30 min)
Vered Noam, Tel Aviv University
Ancient Halakhic Homilies in the Writings of the Qumran Sect and of the Tannaim (30 min)

S18-132
Qumran
11/18/2007
4:00 PM to 6:00 PM
Room: Salon A - MM

Theme: The Dead Sea Scrolls at Sixty: The San Diego Natural History Museum Exhibition

Esther Chazon, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Presiding (15 min)
Moshe J. Bernstein, Yeshiva University
Three Ways of Interpreting the Bible at Qumran (35 min)
James C. VanderKam, University of Notre Dame
In Those Days (35 min)
Carol Newsom, Emory University
Communion with the Angels at Qumran (35 min)

S19-32
Qumran
11/19/2007
9:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Room: Ford C - GH

Eileen Schuller, McMaster University, Presiding
Armin Lange, University of Vienna
In the Second Degree (30 min)
Bennie H. Reynolds III, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
4QApocryphon of Jeremiah C and the Problem of Genre (30 min)
Albert Hogeterp, Catholic University of Leuven
Resurrection and Biblical Tradition: The Relation between the Pseudo-Ezekiel Fragments and Ezekiel 37 Reconsidered (30 min)
Hanne von Weissenberg, University of Manchester
The Centrality of the Temple in 4QMMT (30 min)
Stephane Saulnier, University of Notre Dame
X and Duqah in Some Calendrical Scrolls: Are We any Closer to an Identification? (30 min)

Plus there's this thematic Matthew session:

S17-21
Matthew
11/17/2007
9:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Room: Emma BC - GH

Theme: Matthew and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Celebrating 60 years of Research

Lidija Novakovic, Bethel University, Presiding
James H. Charlesworth, Princeton Theological Seminary
How Important are the Dead Sea Scrolls for Understanding Matthew? (15 min)
Anthony Le Donne, Durham University
Messianic Duality in Matthew and the Dead Sea Scrolls (15 min)
George J. Brooke, University of Manchester
Matthew’s Use of Scripture in the Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls (15 min)
Craig A. Evans, Acadia Divinity College
Fulfilling the Law and Seeking Righteousness in Matthew and the Dead Sea Scrolls (15 min)
John Kampen, Methodist Theological School in Ohio
Jesus, Wisdom, and Matthew’s Place Within Judaism (15 min)
Break (5 min)
Panel Response
Discussion (70 min)

And, of course, the Dead Sea Scrolls figure in many papers in many other sessions as well.

I'll post the schedules for some other sections of interest as I find the time and the inclination.

UPDATE (26 August): More here (Pseudepigrapha-related sessions). Also, I've added the session numbers to the session listings above.

UPDATE (27 August): More here (Hellenistic Judaism).

ARAMAIC WATCH: The Village Voice astrology column delves into Kabbalah and Aramaic etymology.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): According to the Haggadah, an ancient Jewish text, the first thing God made, before anything else, was the Torah. This book was "written with black fire on white fire." The 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet became the raw materials out of which the Divine One forged heaven and earth. Now you, Cancerian, have a chance to get firsthand evidence of the power that language has to shape experience. In the coming days, I suggest that you formulate what you say with great precision. The words you use will have the power of the ancient magical incantation, abracadabra, which is derived from the Aramaic word meaning "I create as I speak."

"Haggadah (Aggada) is a genre of rabbinic texts (lore or legend rather than law), not a specific text. This material sounds as though it comes from the early Kabbalistic text Sefer Yetzirah (Sefer Yesira, "The Book of Creation"; online translation of uncertain value here; old introductory article here, authoritative 2005 edition by A. P. Hayman here), although it may be that Aggadic texts present some of the same ideas.

As for Abracadabra, the suggested Aramaic phrase is a plausible etymology, although others are possible as well. The history of the incantation and the various proposed etymologies are summed up in this article by Michael Quinion and this Wikipedia article. They, incidentally, provide additional evidence for the influence of Jewish lore on Harry Potter. On that, Quinon is a little imprecise:

Fans of the Harry Potter books will know the killing curse, Avada Kedavra, in which J K Rowling seems to have combined the supposed Aramaic source of abracadabra with the Latin cadaver, a dead body.

Wikipedia is more precise:

The "Killing Curse" in the Harry Potter stories may have been taken by J. K. Rowling from an Aramaic form "avada kedavra" or similar, which roughly means "what I speak is destroyed," influenced by the Latin word cadaver, meaning "corpse". This form differs from the "I create as I speak" form ("Avara Kedavra") by a single letter in the English transliteration; it is one of the few spells in Harry Potter not derived entirely from Latin.

THE SAN DIEGO DEAD SEA SCROLLS EXHIBITION is reviewed by the Navy Compass. They liked it.

HESCHEL CENTENARY CONFERENCE - CALL FOR PAPERS:

Celebrating Abraham Joshua Heschel at 100
Jerusalem, 25-27/12/2007

The Tenth Annual Conference of
The Institute for the Study of Rabbinic Thought
Robert M. Beren College, Beit Morasha of Jerusalem

Call for Papers:
Heavenly Torah: The Book and its Themes through the Prism of a Generation


This year we celebrate Abraham Joshua Heschel’s 100’th birthday. One of his most important works, published originally in Hebrew, with the English title “Theology of Ancient Judaism”, recently appeared in English translation as “Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations”. The tenth annual conference of the Institute for the Study of Rabbinic Thought will be dedicated to a reexamination of this work, its importance, its theological innovation, and a critique of it. Themes and issues that are seminal to the work will be discussed in their own light and in light of Heschel’s work. We herewith invite presentations, in Hebrew and in English, that address a broad range of subjects that grow out of Heschel’s work. These include:

General and specific assessment and critique of Heschel’s work in “Heavenly Torah.”

Understanding “Heavenly Torah” in the context of Heschel’s theological oeuvre.

Methodological issues in the study of rabbinic thought and Jewish theology that arise from the work; making the study of the rabbis’ thought systematic; types of theological creativity and the role of historical theology.

Retrieving the thought of individual rabbis and of constitutive “machlokot”.

Agadda and theology.

The rabbis between prophecy and apocalypse.

Specific theological issues: God, anthropomorphism, suffering, etc.

The schools of R. Akiva and R. Ishmael - halachic, hermeneutic and philosophical perspectives.

Rationalism and mysticism in rabbinic thought.

Torah from Heaven, revelation and role of human creativity in making the Torah.

Please send proposals for the conference to Alon Goshen-Gottstein, amgogo@bmj.org.il, by 20.9.07.

Sincerely

Dr. Alon Goshen-Gottstein
The Institute for the Study of Rabbinic Thought
Bet Morasha of Jerusalem

ARTICLES ON THE JUDEAN DESERT TEXTS (especially the Babatha archive) from the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik are now available online. Menachem Mendel has details.

MY RECENT BOOK, THE PROVENANCE OF THE PSEUDEPIGRAPHA (see sidebar on the right), gets a second review in the Review of Biblical Literature. (The first, by Sabrina Inowlocki, is noted here.) The new one, by Johann Cook, is here. Key conclusion:

One thing is certain: this book will force scholars to rethink their methodological positions.

If it accomplishes that, I am content.

THE SITE OF UGARIT figures in the new novel ABC by David Plante:

Gerard soon will find a concrete expression for his grief, for the letters on the scrap of paper are Sanskrit, oldest of the classical Indo-European languages to which our tongue belongs. The more Gerard studies the scrap retrieved from the ruined house, the "more its incomprehensibility took hold of him, and the more the incomprehensibility took hold of him the more he believed it must have a meaning."

Soon, he has left his wife and teaching post behind to join a similarly obsessed band of grieving parents, who are convinced that, in the mystery of the alphabet's origins -- in other words, in the very mechanism by which we set down the stories by which we live -- there is a hidden, transcendent and, perhaps, consoling meaning. Together this little band -- which includes a mother who has lost a daughter to a drug overdose, parents of a child killed by terrorists and a grief-stricken Chechen mother -- moves from Oxford to Greece, to the site of ancient Ugarit, near Latikia on the Syrian coast.

That city occupies a special place in the archaeological study of languages because it has given up not simply vast palaces and temple libraries, but also the first private manuscript collections ever found in the ancient world. Inscribed on clay tablets, the Ugarit texts comprise a polyphony of ancient Near Eastern languages -- Sumerian, Hurrian, Akkadian and Ugarit written in seven different scripts, ranging from Egyptian hieroglyphics to Cypro-Minoan to the Ugarites' own cuneiform. The latter is thought to be the most direct antecedent of our own phonetic alphabet.

Throughout this quest, the ghosts of the phonetic pilgrims' lost loved ones hover around and it is one of the strengths of Plante's beautifully controlled prose that the reality and unreality of these specters is altogether unresolved. It once was said of James Joyce that he had rejected everything about the Scholastic Catholicism in which he was raised, except its basic principles. Plante is one of those Catholic unbelievers who has abandoned everything about his faith except that sense of the sacred to be found in its mysteries and contradictions.

The arc of "ABC's" narrative evokes deeply -- though it is unspoken -- the ancient mysticism drawn from one of the most ancient of cabalistic texts, the first century "Sefer Yetzirah," which held that The Infinite ("En Sof") was accessible through contemplation of the Hebrew alphabet itself. Meditation upon the divine through the mechanism of autonomic writing and assigning of transcendent meaning to individual letters entered the mysticism of Plante's Catholic tradition through contact with the writings of the great medieval Spanish cabalist, Abraham Abulafia.

Actually the Ugaritic alphabet, based on the cuneiform (wedge) system, was a dead end and died out. It's the Phoenician alphabet that is antecedent to ours. Still, sounds like an interesting book.

UPDATE (24 August): Duane Smith comments at Abnormal Interests.

SCOTT MCKNIGHT is interviewed on Beliefnet regarding his recent book:

What Jesus Believed
New Testament scholar Scott McKnight wants Christians to say 'the Jesus Creed' and recommit to love.
Interview by Paul O'Donnell


Amid the continuing debate over who Jesus was, New Testament scholar Scott McKnight asks what Jesus did to revolutionize religious thought. Placing Jesus firmly in the Jewish tradition, McKnight identifies Jesus' key innovation as his modification of the Shema: to the ancient Jewish commandment to "you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might," Jesus appended a relatively obscure dictate from Leviticus: "Love your neighbor as yourself." In a new book, McKnight argues that Christians must reexamine their commitment to love, and offers "the Jesus Creed" as an essential guide to spiritual formation. We spoke to him recently about Jesus the Jewish prophet and revolutionary Christian.

A NEW MANDAEAN (MANDEAN) BLOG: April DeConick gives some details.

A CONFERENCE ON THE CAIRO GENIZA begins today began yesterday in Cambridge.

THE CONTROVERSY OVER TENURE for Nadia Abu El-Haj at Barnard College continues. Here are blog posts from the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Huffington Post. The latter notes a counter-petition in favor of tenure. And the Chronicle also has an article that is available only to subscribers.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: Christiane Amapour has a new CNN documentary, "God's Warriors," in which the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem reportedly indulges in more Jewish-Temple denial:

On the line with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour

By Perry Gil S. Mallari (Manila Times)

WHAT happens when manmade laws collide with God’s law? This is but one of the questions that the new CNN documentary God’s Warriors will try to answer. Hosted by CNN international chief correspondent Christiane Amanpour, the documentary is an in-depth look at the so-called God’s Warriors of Judaism, Islam and Christianity, an army of religious zealots who see contemporary society as corrupt and in need of purging.

[...]

... In contrast, another character featured in God’s Warriors, Sheikh Muhammad Hussein, the Grand Mufti (Islamic scholar) of Jerusalem pertaining to the same topic said, “The temple [the Jewish Temple] only exists in the illusion of people who speaks of it.” ...

"MIRED IN TRANSLATING APOCRYPHA":

The Gospel according to Czechs
With Bible translation, Alexandr Flek seeks to restore 'cultural literacy'

By Paul Voosen
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
August 15th, 2007

Sixteen years ago, Alexandr Flek lay upon the floor of the church where he worshipped, and he was in agony.
It had been four years since he converted to Christianity and became a preacher, and two years since the Velvet Revolution. And still, there was no project under way to translate the Bible into Czech. In the past 400 years, there had been only two Czech translations—one archaic if revered, and the other denuded of its figurative force by the taint of communism.
“On the carpet, this groaning and travailing overwhelmed me,” says Flek of that day. “I was desperate. The years were passing. There was no Bible.”
There lay Flek’s passion, harkening back to the Protestant Reformation, hundreds of years earlier: That people read the Bible firsthand, in language current and powerful.
But there was no new translation. The country’s scholars — perhaps removed from the glowing evangelism that enfolds Flek’s late arrival to religion — were mired in translating apocrypha.

[...]

I'm glad the Czechs are getting a new translation of the Bible, but I wouldn't knock translating apocrypha. I hope those scholars are still at it.

CAN'T MAKE IT UP - DEAD (SEA SCROLLS) BY CHOCOLATE:

Chuao Chocolatier Partners with the San Diego Natural History Museum's Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibition

Chuao Chocolatier has partnered with San Diego Natural History Museum to create an exclusive chocolate assortment inspired by the Museum's highly anticipated exhibition, Dead Sea Scrolls.

San Diego (PRWEB) August 20, 2007 -- Chuao Chocolatier (www.chuaochocolatier.com) has partnered with San Diego Natural History Museum to create an exclusive chocolate assortment inspired by the Museum's highly anticipated exhibition, Dead Sea Scrolls.

Chuao Chocolatier's Chef Michael Antonorsi, blended his signature Venezuelan chocolate with popular Middle Eastern spices to create bonbons that are unlike anything most chocolate lovers have ever tasted. The assortment is called "Flavors of the Region," the region being the Middle East where the scrolls were discovered.

Each box contains nine bonbons in three unique flavors.

[...]

Yum.

MESSAGES TO THE DEMIURGE can be left here. Seriously.

UPDATE (4 September): Winning entries noted here.

JUNIOR ACADEMIC POSITIONS IN RABBINICS are being advertised by the Open University and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

(Via the H-Judaic list.)

HERSHEL SHANKS is defending the authenticity of the Ivory Pomegranate. He has photographs.

(Via Jack Sasson's Agade list.)

Background here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

UPDATE (21 August): I meant to say "the Ivory Pomegranate inscription." Everyone agrees that the object itself is an ancient artifact; it's the inscription that is argued to be a forgery.

THE BBC IS HAVING MORE TROUBLE with comments on its website, according to the tabloid Daily Mail:

BBC forced to removed 'bastard' slur about Jesus from its website

By JASON LEWIS - More by this author » Last updated at 22:17pm on 18th August 2007

The BBC has been forced to remove statements from its website referring to Jesus as a 'bastard'.

It is the latest in a string of offensive comments that BBC editors have allowed members of the public to post.

The remarks have been allowed to remain for weeks, despite complaints from religious groups.

[...]

The debate had descended into an argument about the merits of Christians, Jews and Muslims when a writer, known as 'colonelartist', posted: "Are you a christian? You do know that jesus had to hide all his short life he lived in those promised land because his tribesmen used to call him fatherless, ridiculed him for being a B-A-S-T-A-R-D...'

He added: "Jesus...was also persecuted because the jews would never accept as their Messiah a person whose father was missing...'

The comments were allowed to remain for a week despite complaints. But after The Mail on Sunday contacted senior BBC officials, they were deleted.

[...]

One website user wanted to see if BBC editors were allowing these offensive remarks to remain while blocking others. He wrote: "No one can surpass the Muslims for denial of their role in Terrorism and Suicide bombing." The remarks were almost immediately deleted.

The BBC has also been criticised for allowing allegedly anti-Semitic posts from a contributor called "Iron Naz'.

In a message left on the site for more than a month, Iron Naz says: "Zionism is a racist ideology where jews are given supremacy over all other races and faiths. This is found in the Talmud...which allows jews to lie as long as its to non-jews."

The remarks brought complaints from the Board of Deputies, the organisation that represents Britain's Jews and its Community Security Trust. They say the post draws on a discredited 19th Century text, the Talmud Unmasked, which is still distributed by neo-Nazi booksellers.

However, the BBC said the remarks did not merit removal.

[...]

There's more on the latter episode here.

Stories like these reinforce my decision not to enable comments on this site.

A LILITH DEVOTEE:

For love of Lilith
Hebrew goddess helped an angry artist see the light

By DANIELLE FURFARO, Staff writer (Albany Times Union)
Click byline for more stories by writer.
First published: Sunday, August 19, 2007

COLONIE -- Richard Callner sits in a wheelchair in his sprawling, multilevel home, staring lovingly at a Gobelin-style tapestry he made in Ein Hood, Israel, more than 30 years ago. The tapestry is rich with swirling colors and figures. It features his favorite goddess: Lilith.

Even though advanced Parkinson's disease has reduced Callner's voice to a scarcely audible whisper, he happily points out the details of the piece. With the help of his daughter, Joanne, he describes how he chose the colors of the tapestry from thousands of spools of yarn the Israeli weavers offered him.

"It works because of the complexity," he breathed.

Of the three tapestries he made on that long-ago trip, two of them hang in his home. The one in the dining room shows a side silhouette of the ancient goddess, who is regarded in Hebrew folklore as the first wife of Adam. She appears to be exhaling a menagerie of birds and flowers. The one hanging in a hallway shows Lilith in a variety of poses in the garden of Eden. She is lying on her back ... flying with birds ... becoming a bird.

[...]

After returning from war, he began formally studying art. Callner's style is culled from a variety of Euopean modernists. While in Paris, he studied with Cubist painter Fernand Leger. He received his MFA from Columbia University in 1952 and began teaching.

Callner spent these years painting angry, grotesque figures in muted colors.

In 1963, while teaching at Olivet College in Michigan, he became obsessed with Lilith. His discovery of the Hebrew goddess precipitated a change, not only in his art, but also in his outlook on life. Suddenly, his work embraced elements of humor, whismy and independence. Since then, most of his paintings have been soaked in vibrant colors and wild textures and abstractions. He began to use the image of Lilith repeatedly. Sometimes she would take the form of a woman, sometimes of a bird, sometimes of color.

[...]

Sounds like she's been a good influence.

Unfortunately, there's no photo of any of these paintings.

PHOENICIAN SITE TO BE EXCAVATED:

Excavation planned for Phoenician city

SANTA GIUSTA, Italy, Aug. 18 (UPI) -- A Phoenician settlement on the Italian island of Sardinia may soon yield some of its secrets to archaeologists.

The port of Othoca is believed to lie at the bottom of a lake separated from the Mediterranean by a narrow spit of land, the Italian news agency Ansa reported. The modern town of Santa Giusta also occupies some of the ancient city.

Carlo del Vais of Cagliari University plans to dig in a small section of the lake, an area where about 100 amphorae -- or large clay jars -- appear to rest on a wooden platform. The Phoenician layers are covered by a thick layer of mud.

[...]

A BOOK ON MANDAEAN (MANDEAN) HISTORY is reviewed by April DeConick at the Forbidden Gospels blog.

Gorgias Press released in 2005 a book by Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley, The Great Stem of Souls: Reconstructing Mandaean History. For those of you interested in Mandaeism and Gnosticism, this is a must-have reference book. It is a modern reconstruction of Mandaean history.

[...]

IS THIS TRUE?

The Iberian lynx is a specialist carnivore that subsists almost exclusively on rabbits. An adult male requires one rabbit a day; a female with cubs needs three to five. Until recently this made perfect evolutionary sense on the Iberian peninsula. Rabbits were so abundant that more than 30 species preyed on them. One linguistic theory holds that the word España is derived from an ancient Phoenician name meaning Land of Rabbits.

Northwest Semitists, what do you think?

(From a Telegraph article on the lynx. My emphasis.)

THE HORRENDOUS BOMBING OF THE YAZIDIS is bad news for ethnic minorities in Iraq. April DeConick has some reflections on the Yazidis and their Gnosticism-related religion.

THE GNOSTIC IMPLICATIONS OF THE SIMULATION ARGUMENT, which I noted here in response to the recent NYT article, are not going unnoticed elsewhere. This from George Dvorsky of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies:

If we were ever to prove that we exist inside a simulation, it would be proof that the transhumanist assumption is correct—that the transition from a human to a posthuman condition is in fact possible. But that will be of little solace to us measly sims! The simulation—er, our world—could be shut down at any time. Or, the variables that make up our modal reality could be altered in undesirable ways (e.g. our world could be turned into a Hell realm).

Also, should we reside in a simulation, we have to pretty much assume that our digital benefactors are rather indifferent to our plight. Based on the amount of suffering going on around here we should probably assume a gnostic religious sensibility. These gods are not our allies; they may have created us, but they are not looking out for our best interests.

My emphasis. Also, Glenn Reynolds links to a couple of pieces that suggest how to live in a simulation. This from Robin Hanson:

In sum, if your descendants might make simulations of lives like yours, then you might be living in a simulation. And while you probably cannot learn much detail about the specific reasons for and the nature of the simulation you live in, you can draw general conclusions by making analogies to the types and reasons of simulations today. If you might be living in a simulation then all else equal it seems that you should care less about others, live more for today, make your world look likely to become eventually rich, expect to and try to participate in pivotal events, be entertaining and praiseworthy, and keep the famous people around you happy and interested in you.

That's an interesting practical theology.

And this from the BeldarBlog:

Well, duh. Act like you're not in a simulation. Otherwise you'll be inducing a software error. So, what — do you want to become the cosmic equivalent of the lines in the famously defective original Intel Pentium chip's microcode which caused that rare but catastrophic floating point division bug? Well, do you?

Well, it's true that one doesn't want to trigger a recall. But it may not be that simple. If we do live in a Gnostic simulation universe, we should think about the implications. The traditional object of the game according to Gnosticism is to obtain "Gnosis" -- salvific knowledge of the true state of affairs, and to conduct your life accordingly so as to ascend to the Pleroma, that is, to be uploaded out of the game. For further instructions, see, for example, the Apocryphon of John.

(This Gnosis is provided "AS IS" with no warranty of any kind, and use of it is at your sole risk. PaleoJudaica expressly disclaims all warranties including satisfactory quality and fitness for a specific purpose. We do not warrant that the functions residing in this Gnosis will meet your requirements or that the operation of the Gnosis will be uninterrupted or error free or that defects in the Gnosis will be corrected. Nor do we warrant the use or the results of the use of this Gnosis or any related Gnosis regarding its correctness, accuracy, reliability and the like. Should this Gnosis prove unreliable, you and not PaleoJudaica assume the entire cost of all necessary corrections, servicing, repairs or unfavorable rebirths. Under no circumstances shall PaleoJudaica be liable for any incidental, special, indirect, consequential or spiritual damages arising out of or relating to the use of this Gnosis.)

Good luck!

UPDATE: Still more arguments for the simulation scenario. They start about two-thirds of the way into the post.

UPDATE (19 August): More here.

UPDATE (20 August): The Gnostic simulation meme is spreading. (Thanks for the kind mention of this blog, but if you think PaleoJudaica is hard to spell, try Pseudepigrapha.)

TARGUM NEWS from Ed Cook over at Ralph.

MORE ON THE BARNARD TENURE CONTROVERSY: Two items deal with the petition against granting tenure to Nadia Abu El-Haj. From John Gravois at the Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog:

August 15, 2007
Alumni Group Seeks to Deny Tenure to Middle Eastern Scholar at Barnard College

Controversial research on Israel and the Palestinian territories has become the basis of yet another campaign to prevent a professor from winning tenure. A group of Barnard College alumni has drafted an online petition asking their alma mater to deny tenure to Nadia Abu El-Haj, an assistant professor of anthropology whose scholarship, they say, is flawed and skewed against Israel.

[...]

And from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency:

Petition, donor threats on prof
puts spotlight back on Columbia
Nadia Abu El-Haj, author of "Facts on the Ground," is under fire for the 2001 book's perspective.
By Ben Harris Published: 08/14/2007

NEW YORK (JTA) -- A brewing battle over tenure for a polarizing Barnard College professor is threatening to thrust Columbia University back into the center of a controversy over its academic treatment of the Middle East.

Nadia Abu El-Haj, an assistant professor of anthropology at Barnard, is the author
of "Facts on the Ground," a 2001 book that questions archaeological claims regarding the ancient Jewish presence in Israel and argues that Israeli archaeologists legitimize the Jewish state's "origin myth."

An online petition against Abu El-Haj had garnered nearly 1,000 signatures as of Tuesday, the bulk of them from students and graduates of Barnard or Columbia University, its institutional parent.

[...]

Background here.

UPDATE (21 August): More here.

THERE'S A BIBLICAL BOARD OF TRADE? According to this press release, they're giving away free tickets to the San Diego Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition.

A PHOTO ESSAY ON THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS has been published by About.com: Archaeology.

THE MINGANA COLLECTION of Syriac, Arabic, etc. manuscripts at the University of Birmingham gets a bad report over at Thoughts on Antiquity.

THE ARCHIMEDES CODEX AND A CHRISTIAN APOCRYPHA PALIMPSEST - Tony Chartrand-Burke has the story over at Apocryphicity.

THE GREEK GEEK pans the Lammas Fair in St. Andrews. Well, to appreciate it you have to have kids. I actually went on this ride, which is always just outside St. Mary's College, with my son on Monday. Never again.

But commenter Meigan is right about the doughnuts.

THE NEW TESTAMENT GATEWAY 2.0, BETA VERSION.

FOOTPRINT AS ARTIFACT:

Following the footsteps of a Roman soldier
By Ofri Ilani (Haaretz)

Archaeologists have discovered a footprint made by the sandal of a Roman soldier - one of the few such finds in the world - in a wall surrounding the Hellenistic-Roman city of Sussita, east of Lake Kinneret.

The discovery of the print made by a hobnailed sandal, the kind used by the Roman legions during the time when Rome ruled the region, led to the presumption that legionnaires or former legionnaires participated in the construction of walls such as the one in which the footprint was found.

[...]

City-destroying earthquakes are hard on the inhabitants, but they're a boon to archaeologists, because things like this get preserved in the rubble.

THE DEMIURGE is alive and well and is running our universe as a computer simulation. The link is to an article in the New York Times which summarizes the simulation argument of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom. The essential argument, as given in the NYT is:

Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.

Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.

There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.

Cambridge Astrophysicist (and recent St. Andrews Gifford Lecuturer) Martin Rees also takes the idea seriously.

Maybe the Gnostics were on to something after all.

UPDATE (17 August): More here.

BARNARD PETITION: This is the first I recall hearing about a petition about Nadia Abu El-Haj's tenure at Barnard.

Bid to deny tenure to Barnard prof

Published: 08/13/2007 (JTA Breaking News)

More than 800 people have signed a petition seeking to deny tenure to a Barnard College professor accused of shoddy scholarship and a pro-Palestinian agenda.

Professor Nadia Abu El-Haj, an assistant professor of anthropology, is under from her book "Facts on the Ground." The book attacks the field of Israeli archaeology, arguing that it has produced knowledge central to the creation of Israel's foundational myths and therefore is complicit in Israel's supposed crimes against the Palestinians.

Paula Stern, a 1982 Barnard graduate and the organizer of an online petition calling on the college to deny tenure to El-Haj, claims the professor's scholarship is shoddy and her claims unsubstantiated.

[...]

Here's a recent article by Stern on the controversy. Follow the link at the bottom of that post for earlier coverage.

UPDATE (16 August): More here.

MODERN CHRISTENDOM AS LATE-ANTIQUE BYZANTIUM?

Perspectives
The Seventh-Century Christian Obsession with the Jews:
A Historical Parallel for the Present?
Rivkah Duker Fishman



In the seventh century, the Arabs embarked on the conquest of the world in the name of Islam. The Caliphate replaced the Persian Empire and Christian Spain and conquered much of the Byzantine Empire. The latter, however, seemed to ignore the threat of the new invaders and their religion. Instead, the Byzantine political and intellectual elite focused increasingly on the Jews in tracts and legal measures. The situation has certain parallels with the present.

This seems to have been published in 2005 and I'm not sure why it suddenly appeared on Google now.

As a general principal I'm skeptical of broad-brush parallels between ancient history and the present. There are just too many differences to have any feeling of control over the variables. But I'm always relieved when at least America doesn't get cast as ancient Rome.

THE MANDAEANS are once again on April DeConick's radar. Good for her.

For more on the Mandaeans (Mandeans) see here and here. And some more posts are here, here, here, here, here, and here.

ROGUE FRAGMENTS of the Dead Sea Scrolls on display in a church in Florida?

Ancient items, modern wonder

A display includes pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

By NICK JOHNSON, [St. Petersburg] Times Staff Writer
Published August 12, 2007

The pastor of a prison outreach ministry recently visited a St. Petersburg church with what may be part of the most significant archaeological find for people of the Christian, Jewish and Islamic faiths.

The Rev. Thom Miller of Special Visit Ministry exhibited a small collection of religious antiquities, including what he said were two fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, at the Suncoast Cathedral on Wednesday for a group of church members and the media.

[...]

Miller said one of the fragments was anonymously donated to the ministry and the other was on loan from a group of physicians from New Jersey.

He plans to return to the Suncoast Cathedral in October with another Dead Sea Scrolls fragment that is held by the Ashland Theological Seminary and a more extensive exhibit of religious artifacts.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are actually a collection of more than 100,000 fragments that have been pieced together by archaeologists.

The San Diego Natural History Museum is displaying Dead Sea Scrolls on loan from the Israeli Antiquities Authority, which holds most of the scrolls.

Dr. Russell Fuller, a professor at the University of San Diego, worked as a consultant on the exhibit at the museum and edited a number of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

He said bits of the artifacts have become privately owned over the years.

"There are some small fragments in private hands in the U.S. and Europe, so it's conceivable that they could have a fragment," Fuller said. "If you have the resources and you have the contacts, it's possible that you could buy yourself a piece of Dead Sea Scroll."

[...]

There's nothing about the content of the fragments, which makes me wonder if they aren't of the "burnt cornflake" variety that don't show any actual leather letters. Can any PaleoJudaica readers in Florida report on the fragments?

HANAN ESHEL, his Leviticus scroll find, and the conflicts with the IAA are covered in Haaretz ("Questioning a scientist's true intentions"). It's a long and rambling article that describes the discovery and its implications for the study of the Bar Kokhba revolt in some detail, but here is the section on the conflict:

In September 2005, police investigators accompanied by a representative of the Antiquities Authority came to Eshel's home in Jerusalem and announced that he was suspected of trading in antiquities and in buying stolen property - the parchment fragments. The police searched his home, confiscated this and that, ordered Eshel to relinquish his passport and brought him for further questioning to the in Jerusalem police headquarters in the Russian Compound. A month later, he was summoned for more questioning and when he left, he was pounced on by reporters and photographers covering the juicy affair of the professor suspected of criminal activity.

Dozens of Eshel's colleagues, Israeli academics of repute, signed a letter published as an ad in Haaretz protesting the IAA's actions. Eshel had "rescued a scroll that could have been lost," they wrote, and "treating him like a criminal was vengeful, wrong and unfair." Never before had a member of the scientific establishment been treated in such a way, they added.

The IAA responded with an official announcement that stated it regretted that Eshel had "as a private person, broken the law, been caught and was now doing everything in his power to save his skin, including through the cynical exploitation of his colleagues."

The abusive language toward the professor reached a crescendo in a Yedioth Ahronoth headline: "The Antiquities Authority is positive: Eshel's next finding will be the defendant's docket."

Two years have passed and no charges have been filed against Eshel. The investigation seems to have stopped. The tempest in the teacup has dissipated. Some researchers believe that the IAA's battle against robbers and traders was brutally pursued at the expense of a scientist who had no ill intentions or expectation of monetary gain. Anybody who knows the antiquities market in general, and that of Jerusalem in particular, knows that it's a tricky arena. There are plenty of researchers held in the highest esteem who traded in antiquities, in peace.

The only ones to pay a price so far are the three Bedouin who found the fragments and sold them. They were arrested, tried and heavily fined.

Eshel feels bruised, but thinks that at the end of the day, it worked out. He is proud to have brought the pieces to the State.

Yet there's one person who isn't satisfiYet there's one person who isn't satisfied: Arnold Spaer, a lawyer and a member of the management boards at the Islamic Art Museum in Jerusalem and the Hecht Museum in Haifa, and a member of the Israel Museum.

Eshel told Spaer that the the IAA had cut segments from the parchment margins to verify that they were genuine. Spaer promptly complained to the police against the IAA.

Why did the authority do that? Probably, in the pursuit of another investigation into forged antiquities. A photograph of the fragments was found in the computer of Oded Golan, an antiquities trader from Tel Aviv who is accused of forging antiquities, and is in the middle of his trial. It is possible, however, that the Bedouin who found the Leviticus fragments contacted Golan before showing them to Eshel and Porat.

The latest twist in the affair is that Spaer has demanded that the Jerusalem District Prosecutor's Office address his complaint about the scroll's vandalization. The prosecution told him that it has more important things to do. To which Spaer replied, "When Dorfman and Amir Ganot" - the robbery prevention director at the Antiquities Authority - "complained at the time against Eshel, in respect to buying fragments of the scroll, the full investigative mechanism of the police and the Antiquities Authority went into action, including confiscation of documents, multiple interrogations and informing the press. Yet in this case, which is 10 times more serious, no response to the complaint is evident." Could a double standard be coming into play?, the lawyer suggested.

The IAA comments, "Following the complaint against Eshel and others on suspicion of allegedly violating the Antiquities Law, the Israel Police conducted an investigation, at the end of which the case was transferred to the Prosecutor's Office for handling." The authority added that acts to enforce the Antiquities Law against any and all offenders.

There's also a howler earlier in the article, where it says that Josephus wrote on the Bar Kokhba revolt. He wrote on the Great Revolt of 66-70, but he was long dead by the time of Bar Kokhba.

For earlier coverage of this story see here, here, here, here, here, and here.

UPDATE: Joseph I. Lauer writes the following on his e-mail list:

Many will note a confusing English translation of two sentences from the original Hebrew article. With my interpolations, the sentences should be understood to be stating: "There are any number of writings about the rebellion [that resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in 70 CE], including Josephus Flavius and other Jewish and Roman writers. But there are almost no relics of the [Bar-Kochba] rebellion."

THE RENEWAL OF THE ISRAEL MUSEUM is covered in the New York Times:

A Museum to Get Lost in, and How Israel Is Fixing It

By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: August 12, 2007

JERUSALEM
THE Israel Museum is one of the finest in the Middle East — if you can figure out how to get in and find the art.

Founded in 1965 by Teddy Kollek, the long-serving Jerusalem mayor, to ensure that Israel would have a national museum of world rank, the museum was a vital symbol of the new nation. Mr. Kollek wanted, and got, “a modernist temple to culture” surrounded by other symbols of Israel’s modern statehood, like the Knesset, the Supreme Court and the National Library, said the museum’s director, James S. Snyder.

From ancient artifacts to contemporary art, the museum seeks to anchor the archaeology, material culture and ethnography of the world’s Jews within a broader global context, both Western and non-Western. It boasts a dominant site at the entrance to Jerusalem, a widely admired sculpture garden and, of course, the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Yet its entrance is an uninspiring parking lot and ugly ticketing building, and the portal to the actual exhibits is 270 yards away, requiring a hike up a hill, often in the blistering sun. It’s also hard to find your way from one collection to the next.

Much of that is about to change as the museum embarks on an $80 million expansion and renovation that will transform the way a visitor navigates and experiences the museum.

[...]

Mr. Carpenter, who is internationally known for his work with glass, including the cable-net glass wall at the Time Warner Center in Manhattan, focused on the north-south orientation of the campus. Given the harsh light of the Middle Eastern sun from the east and the west at various times of the day, he deployed thick extruded ceramic louvers on those facades. Fixed in place, the louvers refract the light to provide a soft, interior illumination.

Yet the buildings feel largely open. Much thinner louvers on the northern and southern faces allow visitors to look in, reinforcing a sense of activity and openness, both day and night.

The architects also extended the promenade out to the street, Mr. Carpenter said, “so people would understand it as a route of invitation,” even from the parking lot. “Before, they were stuck with a closed campus and no obvious route of entry,” he said.

The new central concourse also allows museumgoers to make more logical connections, progressing historically, for example, from the ancient archaeology of the region through the Ottoman period, then to the Judaica and Ethnography collection describing Jewish life dispersed from the Holy Land.

Early regional art, beginning with biblical artifacts, will flow into the beginnings of Israeli art, which will feed into European works and then into the modern and contemporary galleries. New galleries will also allow the museum to double space for the display of 20th-century art, another strength of the collection. ...