MANDAEAN (MANDEAN) CONFERENCE CALL FOR PAPERS:

From Shafiq Abouzayd shafiq.abouzayd@orinst.ox.ac.uk
==================================================

ARAM Society for Syro-Mesopotamian Studies is organising its Twenty Sixth International Conference on the theme of The Mandaeans, to held at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, 08-10 September 2008.

The conference aims to study Mandaeism and its relationship to Near Eastern religions and gnostic movements, and it will start on Monday 08 September at 9am, finishing on Wednesday 10 September at 6pm. Each speaker's paper is limited to 30 minutes, with an additional 10 minutes for discussion.

If you wish to participate in the conference, please send your answer to the above Aram email address before March 2008. If you know of colleagues who might like to contribute to the conference, please forward this message to them or send us their names and email addresses. Yet, we would like to remind our colleagues that only academics are allowed to present a paper at an ARAM conference.

The conference will start on Monday 8 September at 9am, finishing on Wednesday 10 September at 6pm. Each speaker's paper is limited to 30 minutes, with an additional 10 minutes for discussion. All papers given at the conference will be considered for publication in a future edition of the ARAM Periodical, subject to editorial review.

If you wish to know more about our ARAM Society and its academic activities, please open our website: www.aramsociety.org

If you have any questions or comments at any time, I am always happy to receive them.


Shafiq Abouzayd (Dr.)
Aram Society for Syro-Mesopotamian Studies aram@aramsociety.org
The Oriental Institute
University of Oxford
Pusey Lane
Oxford OX1 2LE – UKý
Tel: +1865-514041ý
Fax: +1865-516824ý
shafiq.abouzayd@orinst.ox.ac.uk

(From the Agade list.)

VERY BUSY: The good news is that I have six months of research leave starting in about a week. The bad news is that I have at least two weeks of work to get done before then. But for today:

A long Jerusalem Post editorial on the recent Talpiot tomb symposium. I don't have time to read it all, but maybe you will.

A Minnesota NPR audio interview with Geraldine Brooks, author of The People of the Book. I don't have time to listen to it either, but maybe you will.

A brief review in the Jewish Journal of greater LA of James Kugel, How to Read the Bible.

ARAMAIC WATCH:

Ancient Cemetery Unearthed in Syria

10 hours ago

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — Archaeologists in northeast Syria have unearthed a 3rd century cemetery in the shape of a cross, the country's official news agency reported Wednesday.

Ten skeletons, along with pottery and coins, were found at the site in Hassaka, 441 miles northeast of the capital Damascus, SANA reported.

Some of the artifacts contained inscriptions in the ancient Aramaic language, it said.

Wednesday's find came a day after SANA reported that archaeologists had found a Roman-era cemetery in Latakia, northwest of Damascus. That cemetery was believed to date back about 1,000 years, SANA said.

[...]

I'm not sure how a Roman-era cemetery could be only 1,000 years old. There appears to be some confusion.

Neither of these cemeteries are the same as the one announced in November.

UPDATE: In response to my comment about the "Roman-era cemetery," reader Robert S. Schwartz writes, "Because what we Westerners call the Byzantine Empire, was called Roman by the Byzantines themselves?" Maybe.

GILGAMESH PUT TO MUSIC:

Shaheen builds musical bridges between cultures
By Alexander Varty (Straight.com)

Although Simon Shaheen has been a professional musician since he was in his teens, his real job is building bridges—between cultures, sonic styles, and listeners of all sorts. At the moment, for instance, he’s writing a concert for oud—the acoustic guitar of the Arab world—and orchestra, commissioned by the Detroit Symphony. And, as Shaheen explains from his Brooklyn, New York, home, there’s more to this than simply waltzing in with an armful of sheet music.

“I am scheduled to go there twice, just to work with the strings on microtonality and certain concepts of ornamentation that we use in Arabic music,” says the Palestine-born musician, a powerful performer on both the oud and the violin. “Now, this doesn’t mean that the composition will be pure Arabic music…but the context will definitely be symphonic.”

Another collaboration, with storyteller Margaret Wolfson, recasts the legend of Gilgamesh, an ancient king of the region now known as Iraq. “The big question was, ‘How does Gilgamesh relate to what’s going on today?’ ” Shaheen notes. “So we want to…connect this historic epic to contemporary Iraq, especially under the circumstances.”

[...]

Actually, I should have said Gilgamesh put to music again.

TRAGEDY IN PETRA.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH (indirectly):

Temple quarry becomes site for new elementary school
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS (Jerusalem Post)

A Jerusalem elementary school for girls is being constructed on the site of an ancient quarry that supplied enormous high quality limestones for the construction of the Temple Mount, calling into question whether part of the area will ever be converted into a major tourist site, officials said Wednesday.

The site, uncovered last year during a salvage excavation four kilometers northwest of the Old City of Jerusalem in the outlying Ramat Shlomo neighborhood, was used during the construction of the Second Temple, the Israel Antiquities Authority said.

According to an agreement worked out by the state-run archaeological body and the Jerusalem Municipality, about half of the five-dunam site, on its northeastern side, will remain an archeological site, while the other half will be used for the school, said Jerusalem regional archeologist Jon Seligman.

[...]

TU B'SHEVAT, the New Year for trees, began last night at sundown.

CORRECTION: It started on the evening of the 21st and ended on the evening of the 22nd. Sorry about that.

KENNETH ATKINSON and his work on the Septuagint are profiled in the Waterloo Cedar Falls Courier (Iowa):

UNI prof helps translate ancient scriptures
By KAREN HEINSELMAN, Courier Staff Writer
CEDAR FALLS --- Hundreds of years ago, Jewish scribes wrote out their holy scriptures by hand.

Tediously. Cautiously. Lovingly.

Today, the translation and transcription of religious texts remains a time-consuming yet fulfilling process for many modern scholars with a biblical studies bent, as Kenneth Atkinson can attest.

Atkinson, an associate professor of religion and philosophy at the University of Northern Iowa, recently assisted with a unique and awesome project. Part of an international team of some two-dozen scholars, Atkinson helped complete an English translation of the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the ancient Jewish scriptures from around 250 B.C.

[...]

Actually, the Pentateuch was translated around 250 BCE, but the rest of the books were translated over the next couple of centuries and revisions of the translations continued to be produced for some time aftet that.

Atkinson was responsible for translating one of 41 books in the Septuagint. A book of poetic writings, "Psalms of Solomon" fits between the Old and New Testament. The collection of Psalms, once used in worship, tells the story of a people awaiting a warrior Messiah.

"For Christians, this is a very important book," Atkinson said. "It helps us understand the world that Judaism, Jesus and Christendom emerged from."

So while many people of faith say they are unfamiliar with the Septuagint, actually anyone who picks up a Bible stands to encounter it, Atkinson said.

Early Christians held the Septuagint in high regard and New Testament authors referenced it, Atkinson said. Saint Augustine declared both Hebrew and Greek translations of the ancient scriptures divinely inspired, Atkinson added.

He also said that the Septuagint created a Greek theological vocabulary to convey the meaning of the Semitic languages of Hebrew and Aramaic.

The Greek Orthodox Church, actually, still uses the translation. Septuagint comes from the Greek word for 70.

[...]

The New Englisht Translation of the Septuagint is available online here.

A DEAD SEA SCROLLS CONFERENCE IN VIENNA. First I've heard of it.

The Dead Sea Scrolls in Context: Integrating the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Study of Ancient Texts, Languages, and Cultures
Vienna, 11th-14th February 2008
We are pleased to invite you to the international conference "The Dead Sea Scrolls in Context: Integrating the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Study of Ancient Texts, Languages, and Cultures," which will be held in Vienna from 11th to 14th February, 2008. The conference is organized within the framework of the cooperation between the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Vienna.

The aim of the conference is to build a bridge between the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other fields of research. Since the majority of the scrolls from the Judean Desert has been published, scholars now focus more on the interpretation of individual texts than on text editions. As all these scrolls are now easily accessible, it is time for their full integration in the various disciplines that benefit from the discovery of these very important ancient texts. The Dead Sea Scrolls enrich many areas of biblical research, as well as the study of ancient Jewish, early Christian and other ancient literatures, languages, and cultures.

For registration please contact Dara Fischer at dara.fischer@univie.ac.at.

We apologize if this invitation reached you more than once. Nevertheless, we would appreciate if you could forward this invitation to anyone who might be interested.

Best regards,
Dara Fischer

_________________________________
Institut für Judaistik der Universität Wien
www.univie.ac.at/judaistik

Spitalgasse 2/7.3
A-1090 Wien

Tel: +43/(0)1/4277-43301
Fax: +43/(0)1/4277-9433

ANCIENT MUSIC figures in this story too:

Haran offers eclectic blend of world music
By LEE CLARK ZUMPE (Tampa Bay Newspapers)
Article published on Monday, Jan. 21, 2008

TARPON SPRINGS - Haran, the latest release from Pharaoh’s Daughter, features a collection of traditional Eastern and Western songs drawn primarily from textual sources and delivered in confident, rhythmic indie world-beat compositions.

[...]

The CD opens with “By Way of Haran,” a buoyant tune underscored by psychedelic organ. Highlights include “Kah Ribon,” the Arabic song “Samai,” a dramatic retelling of the story of Joseph called “Enpesare” and “Askinu,” sung in Aramaic and based on a Kabbalistic song from the third meal of Shabbat.

Sung in several languages – Farsi, Ladino, Arabic, Aramaic, Biblical Hebrew and English – the collection is frequently spellbinding and hauntingly harmonious. In addition to vocals, Schechter plays oud and saz. Band members include Shanir Blumenkranz, bass, electric and acoustic guitar; Jason Lindner, keyboards and piano; Yuval Lyon, drums; Meg Okura, violin; Daphna Mor, ney and recorder; Mathias Kunzli, percussion; and Uri Sharlin, accordion.

[...]

ANOTHER REVIEW of People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks, this one in PopMatters. Excerpt:

Don’t get me wrong. I wanted to like this book. I finished the New Yorker article longing to read it, hoping for a melding of Mendelsohn’s The Lost, Cooley’s The Archivist, and Vreeland’s Girl in Hyacinth Blue. And Brooks is an eminently capable writer with meticulous research skills and a commendable grasp of history. If only she’d turned her talents to writing a non-fiction account of the Sarajevo Haggadah instead.

Background here.

THERE'S A MUSEM EXHIBITION ON ANE MUSIC IN JERUSALEM:

Sounds of long ago
By GAVRIEL FISKE (Jerusalem Post)

In the 21st century, music has become an ever-present commodity, providing a soundtrack for our daily lives. But before the modern age, while music was still part of daily life, it was perhaps more precious. With the proliferation of cheap MP3 players and easy access to music on the Internet, it's easy to forget that once upon a time music was something only experienced live, or not at all.

A new exhibit at the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem illustrates the role of music in the ancient Near East with an elegant display of musical instruments and iconography. Entitled "Sounds of Ancient Music," the exhibit opened on January 7 and features many noteworthy items, including some from as long ago as 12000 BCE.

As well as covering ancient Rome, Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia, the display also has a special section examining music during the Second Temple period, and features a cornerstone from the Second Temple compound believed to be from where the priests would blow trumpets to usher in Shabbat. ...

MORE ON THE TALPIOT TOMB SEMINAR: Many of the participants have signed a statement that has been posted by Mark Goodacre on the Duke University Religion Department blog. Excerpt:

The smoking gun at the conference was the surprise appearance of Ruth Gat, the widow of the archaeologist who excavated the tomb in 1980 and died soon afterwards. Mrs. Gat announced that her husband had known about the identification all along but was afraid to tell anyone because of the possibility of an anti-Semitic reaction. However, Joseph Gat lacked the expertise to read the inscriptions. His supervisor and other members of the Israel Antiquities Authority believe that Gat could not have made such a statement in his lifetime since the inscriptions seem to have been deciphered only after he had passed away. Jacobovici now claims that Mrs. Gat’s statement has vindicated his claims about the tomb.

To conclude, we wish to protest the misrepresentation of the conference proceedings in the media, and make it clear that the majority of scholars in attendance – including all of the archaeologists and epigraphers who presented papers relating to the tomb - either reject the identification of the Talpiot tomb as belonging to Jesus’ family or find this claim highly unlikely.

Read it all.

WORD IS THAT CHUCK JONES is moving to the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. Jack Sasson writes on the Agade list:

News from New York is that Chuck Jones is the new Librarian of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. He comes there immediately from the American School at Athens, where he headed the library, but had previously choreographed the collections at the Oriental Institute. He is also well know for the many notices sent out out on Agade and other services.

He begins work at NYU in March.

Congratulations Chuck!

GEZA VERMES was also at the Talpiot tomb seminar and he e-mails the following:

Like Jim Tabor, I, too, attended the Princeton symposium held in Jerusalem on "Jewish views of the afterlife and burial practices in Second Temple Judaism", subtitled, "Evaluating the Talpiot tomb in context". Many of the papers delivered on the main subject (afterlife and burials) were illuminating. In my judgement, the arguments advanced in favour of the Talpiot burial chamber being the family tomb of Jesus of Nazareth are not just unconvincing but insignificant. Discounting a handful, headed by Tabor and Simcha Jacobovici, the maker of the documentary, "The lost tomb of Jesus", most of the fifty or so participants shared this opinion. Among them figured leading archaeologists such as Amos Kloner (who published the results of the Talpiot excavations), Eric Meyer, Jodi Magness and Joe Zias. Scholars being scholars, they were bound to ask for further research. However, as things are, the matter is and, short of substantial new discoveries, must remain closed. The press's claim that the experts were deeply divided is a distortion of the truth.

He also points to more information on the Talpiot tomb controversy at Stephen Pfann's JesusTombExposed.com site.

MORE THOUGHTS FROM JAMES TABOR on the Talpiot tomb and historical method.

APRIL DECONICK was also at the Princeton seminar on the Talpiot tomb, and she has posted her observations at the Forbidden Gospels blog. She says it all depends on Mary Magdalene. And here are her conclusions:

7. The results. We didn't take a vote, or anything like that. There seemed to me to be an enormous range of opinions, many of which were connected into theology and why theologically it can't be the tomb of Jesus and his family. There were some that said "No way" for other reasons. Most people I polled during the reception said that there wasn't enough evidence to make a positive identification (for various reasons), so they said they were "very skeptical" or "skeptical." A few people, however, did find it likely if not probable. There were a number of scholars who thought that this might be an early Christian tomb or what Professor Charlesworth called a "clan" tomb, rather than a "family" tomb.

JAMES TABOR was at the Princeton symposium on the Talpiot tomb and he has a report up on his Jesus Dynasty blog here, here and here. Excerpt:

There was no official “conclusion” made by the participants, nor were any polls taken, other than the agreement at the end that there should be further examination of the tomb itself in the future. My sense is that a few would say this tomb can not be the tomb of Jesus, but that the vast majority would say that although it might be possible, there is no compelling evidence, given what we now know or possibly can know, and for some, there is evidence pointing against such an identification. Since there are no bone reports, or apparently, the possibility of full DNA testing, we seem left with what we have. A very few of those who think it might be possible would go on to say it has a probability of being the Jesus family tomb. Still, to be fair here, of those who are not convinced, I would say most find the evidence in favor to be flimsy at best. Language here can be tricky of course. For example, Shimon Gibson said at the conclusion of the conference that based on all the evidence he “does not think this is the Jesus tomb,” but that should not be taken to mean he would say it is impossible, which I have never heard him say. He simply, like most, does not find the evidence compelling enough to move to the “probably” side of things.

For my part, things that "might be possible" (of which there are all too many) are much less interesting to me than things that are supported by the balance of evidence. That said, I fully agree that further work on the tomb as well as on any nearby tombs is worth carrying out. We're bound to learn something interesting.

DAVID PLOTZ does the Shrine of the Book, Qumran, and Masada. Here's his take on the Qumran sectarians (whom he identifies with the Essenes without mentioning any of the complexities involved):

There's no getting around it. The Essenes—heroic for saving the book, stirring in how they remind us of the dawn of our civilization—were some very weird cats. The tourist terminology for them is sect, but the right word is cult. They followed a "teacher of righteousness" to this godforsaken slab of barren rock to wait for the apocalypse. They surrendered all their possessions, took vows of celibacy, and engaged in religious practices that are suspiciously reminiscent of obsessive-compulsive disorder. They took ritual baths all the time—Qumran has more bathrooms per square foot than a McMansion in Phoenix. They were freaky about urine and excrement. They did not relieve themselves on the Sabbath—at all! And they wouldn't relieve themselves inside the city walls, meaning they schlepped up the hill behind a big pile of rocks to do their business. This, Ian says, may have been a dreadful mistake. Unlike the Bedouins of the area, who leave their excrement uncovered to dry out in the desert, the Essenes buried theirs in the hill above the town. But because they buried it, the parasites in the feces lived longer. When the rains came, those parasites were washed downslope into the ritual bathtubs. According to recent research, Ian says, the Essenes had much shorter life expectancies than their neighbors, probably because their habitual washing and crazy toilet habits made them so sick. Masada and Qumran were inhospitable, miserable, sulfurous, barren, and terrifying, populated by strange people with stranger ideas, and destroyed by a Roman Empire that was by any measure more civilized. Yet at Qumran and Masada today, we can recognize the beginning of Jewish identity. In Masada, Jews mourning the destruction of their last temple made a final stand and gave modern Jews a model of Jews as warriors. In the caves of Qumran, Jews safeguarded for 2,000 years our rituals and books, the foundations of Jewish civilization. These were defeats that became victories.

For the latrine at Qumran, see here, here, and here.

ANOTHER REVIEW OF PEOPLE OF THE BOOK, in the Globe and Mail:

Saving the Sarajevo Haggadah

AMI SANDS BRODOFF

January 19, 2008

PEOPLE OF THE BOOK

By Geraldine Brooks

Viking, 372 pages, $28.50

The craze for memoirs and reality shows suggests a contemporary addiction to what really happened - the private made public before our very eyes - and, perhaps, a failure of imagination. Wrestling with truth in all of its contradictions and complexities demands active imagining, even the creation or transformation of a world: the province of the novelist. Novel, after all, means new.

In her latest work, People of the Book, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks parlays her signature gift for marrying history with invention by imagining into the global journey and survival of the Sarajevo Haggadah. This lavishly illuminated Hebrew manuscript, created in medieval Spain, contains the traditional text that accompanies the Passover Seder, the feast commemorating the Jewish exodus from Egypt, and is handwritten on bleached calfskin and embellished in copper and gold. Today, this manuscript is on display in a Sarajevo museum. People of the Book is a fictional account of the Haggadah's provenance and history, including its many close calls with destruction: the Spanish Inquisition's book burnings; fin-de-siècle anti-Semitism in Vienna; the Nazis' atrocities, and the Sarajevo siege of 1992. Of course, it is also the story of the people who created, rescued and preserved this codex.

[...]

Brooks makes her ambitious story accessible, no mean feat considering that the tale weaves back and forth in time and whirlwinds from Sarajevo to Vienna and on to Venice, Boston, Tarragona, London, Seville, Jerusalem and back to Sarajevo. Whoa. To orient readers, Brooks unabashedly tells as well as shows, explaining when necessary through the voice of her trenchant narrator. Sophisticated readers may forgive the obvious, and those jet-lagged by the narrative pace will be grateful for signposts. The result will surely be a wide and diverse readership.

However, a number of wild plot twists and Hollywood-style coincidences threaten to cheapen the novel; the story is too strong to be tricked out with these gaudy contrivances. For readers who wish to tease apart which elements of the story stem from historical reality and which from the author's imagination, Brooks provides a helpful afterword. I confess: I read this first. I'll admit that I too am a victim of the need to know what really happened.

[...]

MORE REVIEWS of The People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks.

By Ursula K. Le Guin in The Guardian. Excerpt:

Full of action but with no leavening of humour, no psychological revelations, no vivid language to focus description, the chapters grind on. Most unhappily for a historical novel, there is little sensitivity to the local colour of thought and emotion, that openness to human difference which brings the past alive.

Brooks expends a good deal of anxious effort in trying to bring a modern sense of justice and ethical judgment into places and ages where it is an anachronism. People sneeringly call such anxiety "political correctness", a term that once had meaning but now reflects only the arrogance of the person using it. Brooks's earnest goodwill deserves respect, but the fact is a novel can get away with anachronism only when it is completely invisible, and these attempts to right old wrongs are all too visible. In the same way, a kindly feminism informs Brooks's efforts to invent women who were important to the creation and existence of the precious book - a tall order, among the old rabbis - but she persists; and so we find that the artist of the lovely illuminations was a woman, and a black one at that. This is not in itself impossible; the explanations are plausible; and I'd like to believe it - but I can't. The person, the artist, the world of the artist, have not been made real enough to allow me to believe it. It's just wishful thinking. It has not taken on the fierce reality of fiction.

So in the end I wonder if this might not have been a better book if, forswearing invention, the author, an experienced journalist, had simply followed the true and amazing story of the Sarajevo Haggadah. I wish someone could make a story or a poem of Buturovic's life and death. I know I will never know the story of the Iraqi with his arms full of books and his face full of anguish.

And anothe brief one by Simmy Richman in the Irish Independent. . Excerpt:

As the action switches from Sarajevo to Vienna, Venice, Barcelona and Jerusalem, Brooks concludes that the world is made up of two types -- those who would destroy books and those who would give their lives to save them.

(Background to the book and to the Sarajevo Haggadah here.)

FREAKANOMICS AUTHORS Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt invoke the Jewish sabbatical year in their NYT column "Unintended Consequences":

How long have such do-good laws been backfiring? Consider the ancient Jewish laws concerning the sabbatical, or seventh year. As commanded in the Bible, all Jewish-owned lands in Israel were to lie fallow every seventh year, with the needy allowed to gather whatever food continued to grow. Even more significant, all loans were to be forgiven in the sabbatical. The appeal of such unilateral debt relief cannot be overestimated, since the penalties for defaulting on a loan at the time were severe: a creditor could go so far as to take a debtor or his children into bondage.

So for a poor Jewish sandal maker having trouble with his loan payments, the sabbatical law was truly a godsend. If you were a creditor, however, you saw things differently. Why should you lend the sandal maker money if he could just tear up the loan in Year Seven? Creditors duly gamed the system, making loans in the years right after a sabbatical, when they were confident they would be repaid, but then pulling tight the purse strings in Years Five and Six. The resulting credit drought was so damaging to poor people that it fell to the great sage Hillel to fix things.

His solution, known as prosbul, allowed a lender to go to court and pre-emptively declare that a specific loan would not be subject to sabbatical debt relief, transferring the debt to the court itself and thereby empowering it to collect the loan. This left the law technically intact but allowed for lenders to once again make credit available to the poor without taking on unwarranted risk for themselves.

The fallow-land portion of the sabbatical law, meanwhile, was upheld for centuries, but it, too, finally gained a loophole, called heter mechira. This allowed for a Jew to temporarily “sell” his land to a non-Jew and to continue farming it during the sabbatical year and then “buy” it back immediately afterward — a solution that helped the modern state of Israel keep its agricultural economy humming.

The trouble is that many of the most observant Israeli Jews reject this maneuver as a sleight of hand that violates the spirit of the law. Many of these traditionalists are also extremely poor. And so this year, which happens to be a sabbatical year, the poorest Jews in Israel who wish to eat only food grown on non-Jewish land are left to buy imported goods at double or triple the regular price — all in order to uphold a law meant to help feed the poorest Jews in Israel.

This is used in support of a critique of unintended consequences they say arise from the Americans With Disabilities Act and the Endangered Species Act.

VERY LITTLE TIME to blog today, but do also check out the updates to yesterday's posts.

JODI MAGNESS will also be lecturing at Columbia University/Barnard College:

Jodi Magness

Archaeologist and Distinguished Professor in Early Judaism
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Fellow, Center for Advanced Studies at Princeton University

Monday Feb. 4, 2008
6:00 pm
Held Auditorium
304 Barnard Hall

Barnard College

Open to the public

part of

The Underground Lecture Series:
What Archaeology Tells Us About Ancient Israel

sponsored by
Scholars for Peace in the Middle East
and LionPAC

ANOTHER HEBREW SEAL INSCRIPTION from Eilat Mazar's City of David excavation:

First Temple seal found in Jerusalem
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS (Jerusalem Post)

A stone seal bearing the name of one of the families who acted as servants in the First Temple and then returned to Jerusalem after being exiled to Babylonia has been uncovered in an archeological excavation in Jerusalem's City of David, a prominent Israeli archeologist said Wednesday.

The 2,500-year-old black stone seal, which has the name "Temech" engraved on it, was found earlier this week amid stratified debris in the excavation under way just outside the Old City walls near the Dung Gate, said archeologist Dr. Eilat Mazar, who is leading the dig.

According to the Book of Nehemiah, the Temech family were servants of the First Temple and were sent into exile to Babylon following its destruction by the Babylonians in 586 BCE.

The family was among those who later returned to Jerusalem, the Bible recounts.

[...]

There's a photo too. The biblical references are Ezra 2:53 and Nehemiah 7:55.

(Via Yitzhak Sapir on the Canaanite list.)

UPDATE (18 January): Again on the Canaanite list, Teodor Bors suggests that the seal reads שלמת (Shelomit, a woman's name?) rather than Temech. The "het" does look strange. What do you think?

UPDATE: Christopher Heard discusses this and other issues at length at Higgaion.

JODI MAGNESS will be lecturing at Purchase College in New Jersey on "The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls" in February.

DAVID PLOTZ does Herodion and talks about Israeli-Arab politics and questions about antiquities looting.

I certainly understand how such looting disrupts research. One Israeli archaeologist complained to me that two coins that could revolutionize understanding of his subject had appeared on the antiquities market, apparently the result of looting. Since he couldn't confirm where the coins came from, he didn't know whether they were genuine.

Even so, I appreciate the psychic longing to own a piece of the Bible, perhaps because I already do. When we got married 10 years ago, my wife's then-boss, Marty Peretz, gave us a gorgeous Book-of-Kings-era pitcher. I have no idea if it was looted—it comes from a very reputable Jerusalem store—but I find it hard to care too much. I love looking at the pitcher, wondering if any of my ancestors drank from it, and marveling that it has come all the way down through history to us. And then I rationalize it: As any archaeologist will tell you, the Israeli government and Israeli museums have warehouses stacked roof-high with ancient pottery vessels and coins, objects that no one needs to study anymore but that can't be sold, because they're national treasures. So, I confess that I sympathize a bit with the Arab looters and antiquities dealers. Everyone else in Israel is getting something out of the Bible: Why can't they?

A SEMINAR ON THE TALPIOT TOMB has been going on at Princeton:

Archaeologist hid 'Jesus tomb' for fear of anti-Semitism, widow says
By Jonathan Lis, Haaretz Correspondent
Tags: Jesus, Israel, Jerusalem

The widow of the archaeologist who discovered the tomb in Talpiot that some believe to be that of Jesus of Nazareth, explained Wednesday in Jerusalem to a gathering of senior archaeologists and other scholars why her husband kept his discovery a secret.

In an emotional voice, Ruth Gat said that Yosef Gat, a Holocaust survivor, was afraid a wave of anti-Semitism would ensue if he did so. Speaking at the three-day Third Princeton Symposium on Judaism and Christian Origins at Mishkenot She'ananim in the capital, Gat also said, "I thank God his fears did not come true in light of the discovery of the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth."

[...]

The cave was uncovered in 1980, but was not made public until the mid-1990s. Last year, the story became widely known with the release of the documentary film >"The Lost Tomb of Jesus"

The film presents a cave uncovered in 1980 during construction work on an apartment building in the southern Jerusalem neighborhood of Talpiot. The tomb contained 10 ossuaries. Hebrew letters were inscribed on some, including those Jacobovici says should be read: Yehuda bar Yehoshua, Matya, Yose, Maria, and Yeshua bar Yehosef. The bones of 35 individuals were also uncovered, interred over three to four generations.

"I fell off the chair," Jacobovici said Wednesday following Gat's presentation. "She said the leading archaeologist, who I thought had claimed it was nothing, actually thought he had discovered the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth, and as a Holocaust survivor was afraid it might lead to anti-Semitism."

Although most of those who spoke at Wednesday's seminar said it was possible the tomb was that of Jesus, Jacobovici's film was taken with a grain of salt.

"What Simcha did was good work, as long as it stays in the right perspective," said archaeologist Professor Shimon Gibson of the University of North Carolina. "We, the archaeologists and the historians, spend our lives trying to evaluate the information collected over time. The journalist, however, makes one film and moves on."

Professor Israel Knohl of Hebrew University said Wednesday that he saw no reason not to evaluate the tomb as Jesus' family tomb, although there was no unambiguous proof. He said surrounding caves should be excavated in order to obtain more proof, and explanations for various contradictions in existing evidence should be sought.

[...]

I have too many past posts on the Talpiot tomb to list them all here, but if you're interested in background, run the search term "talpiot" through the Google search facility at the top left.

For more on Simcha Jacobovici see the update to this post.

UPDATE: The Jerusalem Post has an article on the Princeton seminar too.

UPDATE (18 January): Time Magazine takes up the story. This is amusing:

Charlesworth, who is also a Methodist minister, says that the possible discovery of Christ's tomb will illicit mixed reactions among Christians.

I think the writer means "elicit."

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH:

Jerusalem approves controversial Mughrabi bridge project
By Akiva Eldar, Haaretz Correspondent
Tags: Mughrabi Bridge, Israel

Jerusalem's district planning and construction committee has approved a controversial plan to restore the Mughrabi bridge leading to one of the entrances to the Temple Mount, construction that caused an outcry among Muslims and generated protest from the Jordanian and Turkish governments in June.

The plan, approved two weeks ago, also includes expansion of the women's section of the Western Wall plaza.

[...]

It's not clear to me if this is the final go-ahead or not:

The Jordanian information minister announced progress in talks on restoring the bridge, but a Jordanian official told Haaretz Tuesday that Jordanian authorities are not aware of any change to the status quo, including expansion of the Western Wall plaza.

DAVID PLOTZ does Jerusalem:

To find the house of David, one of the Bible's most vivid heroes, a man who talked to God, killed giants, and unified Israel—that was like winning the Bible lottery.

If, of course, it's really the palace of David. Interesting overview of the current situation.

ANOTHER REVIEW OF PEOPLE OF THE BOOK:

700 Years In the Life Of a Book
Books | Review of: People of the Book

By CLARE McHUGH (New York Sun)
January 16, 2008

A cursory description of Geraldine Brooks's "People of the Book" (Viking, 384 pages, $25.95) might make the novel sound like a distaff, Jewish version of "The Da Vinci Code." That's because Ms. Brooks, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her last novel, "March" (2005), has now produced a historical mystery starring a strong-willed heroine determined to ferret out the truth about a valuable medieval Hebrew manuscript nearly lost and then found again in war-torn Bosnia.

In reality, "People of the Book" is of much more substance than Dan Brown's overwrought, silly, and ultimately distasteful thriller could ever hope to be — yet Ms. Brooks's work is just as entertaining. She has accomplished something remarkable, fashioning a story that is compelling and eminently readable, even as she maintains high intentions and an earnest purpose.

[...]

THE NABATEANS get a nice little capsule history on the website of the Jordanian Government. I don't think I've noticed it before.

JALDABAOTH wants the head of Metatron. Trust those two not to get along.

JACOB'S ICONIC FACE: Manuscript Boy has the latest at Hagahot.

THE SAN DIEGO DEAD SEA SCROLL EXHIBITION was the best ever for the Museum of Natural History:

Nearly 400,000 people view Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition

By Scott LaFee
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

January 7, 2008

BALBOA PARK – Make it the Dead Seen Scrolls.

After 192 days on display, the San Diego Natural History Museum's much-publicized exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls – the oldest known copies of the Hebrew Bible – closed yesterday.

It was the museum's most successful show ever.

About 393,000 people visited the exhibit at the Balboa Park museum during its six-month run, organizers said. While that's less than pre-show predictions of more than 450,000 visitors, the figure substantially exceeds the museum's attendance of 289,000 visitors the previous year.

[...]

THE RUMORS ABOUT THE TOMB OF CYRUS continue to propagate:

Iran Plans on Destroying Tomb of King Cyrus, Friend of the Jews

by Ezra HaLevi

(IsraelNN.com) Iran is planning on submerging the tomb of King Cyrus (Coresh), the Persian King known for authorizing the Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the Holy Temple.

According to a report by Omedia, an Iranian organization is demanding that the International Criminal Court take action against those responsible.

The Iranian ayatollahs are planning on destroying the tomb as part of a general campaign to sever the Persian people from their non-Islamic heritage; Cyrus was thought to be a Zoroastrian and was one of the first rulers to enforce a policy of religious tolerance on his huge kingdom. Journalist Ran Porat quoted a young Iranian who said that the measures being taken by the Islamic Republic’s regime include the destruction of archaeological sites significant to this heritage.

“The government is in the final stages of constructing a dam in southern Iran that will submerge the archaeological sites of Pasargad and Persopolis – the ancient capital of the Persian Empire,” the report states. “The site, which is considered exceptional in terms of its archaeological wealth and historical importance, houses the tomb of the Persian King Cyrus.”

[...]

Last year this story was circulating, but it seems to have been refuted. But claims persist that the rise in humidity could damage the tomb (see here and here).

DAVID PLOTZ on doing archaeology in Israel: "It's like opening the door on a blind date and discovering it's Kate Beckinsale."

MORE ON THE RESCUE OF THE SARAJEVO HAGGADAH: Ellen Birmbaum e-mails to note that the Wikipedia article reports:

A full history of the remarkable man, Dervis Korkut, who saved the book from the Nazi officers who sought it, is told in the December 3, 2007 edition of The New Yorker magazine. The article, entitled "The Book of Exodus" also by Geraldine Brooks, sets out the equally remarkable story of the young Jewish girl, Mira Papo, that Korkut and his wife hid from the Nazis just as they acted to save the Haggadah. In a twist of fate the story reveals how Mira Papo , then an elderly woman in Israel, brought about the safety of Korkut's daughter - from the Serbian genocide of the 1990's.

The New Yorker article is not available online, but you can read the abstract here. As Ellen notes, "it would be pretty hard to beat this story, even in a novel!"

Background here and here.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: "Fighting words," heard by a Toronto Star reporter and already familiar to PaleoJudaica readers.

For the most part, the visit proceeded calmly, but fireworks awaited when our group emerged into the sunshine.

No sooner had we replaced our footwear than we were taken in hand by the guide from the Israeli Tourism Ministry, one Gila Traybovitch.

She led her charges east of the Al-Aqsa Mosque to a gaping cavity in the plaza's surface, an area that legend says marked the location of King Solomon's stables and is now the site of extensive digging and construction work carried out by the Waqf despite widespread opposition among Israelis.

While the two Muslim guides protested, Traybovitch proceeded to denounce the Waqf project, charging it has been undertaken without expert archeological guidance and in violation of Israeli law.

"There's a whole world underneath us," she stormed. "This was done absolutely without supervision."

She said debris trucked out of the site by the Waqf and cast away as waste has yielded many precious artifacts, including official seals from the era of the First Jewish Temple.

"It really hurts to see such terrible damage done."

By this time, the Muslim guides had had enough.

"Time is over – 10:30," shouted Mohamed Abdochtish, waving at the assembled journalists to leave.

Traybovitch continued to speak out against what she regards as the intentional desecration of Judaism's holiest site, but Abdochtish begged to differ.

"This is the holy area of Islam," he told a reporter in his imperfect English, as the group hurriedly departed. "No Jewish (people) and nobody else have anything holy here. Here, Muslim and nothing else."

No blood was shed, but those sounded like fighting words.

MASADA -- THE ALAMO OF ISRAEL?

A PHOTO ARCHIVE OF EARLY QUR'AN MANUSCRIPTS survived World War II after all. This story is peripheral to the usual range of PaleoJudaica, but it's too interesting to pass up.

The Lost Archive
Missing for a half century, a cache of photos
spurs sensitive research on Islam's holy text
By ANDREW HIGGINS (Wall Street Journal)
January 12, 2008; Page A1

-- Munich, Germany

On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient manuscripts of the Quran.

The 450 rolls of film had been assembled before the war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution of the Quran, the text Muslims view as the verbatim transcript of God's word. The wartime destruction made the project "outright impossible," Mr. Spitaler wrote in the 1970s.
[Photo]

Mr. Spitaler was lying. The cache of photos survived, and he was sitting on it all along. The truth is only now dribbling out to scholars -- and a Quran research project buried for more than 60 years has risen from the grave.

"He pretended it disappeared. He wanted to be rid of it," says Angelika Neuwirth, a former pupil and protégée of the late Mr. Spitaler. Academics who worked with Mr. Spitaler, a powerful figure in postwar German scholarship who died in 2003, have been left guessing why he squirreled away the unusual trove for so long.

[...]

Quranic scholarship often focuses on arcane questions of philology and textual analysis. Experts nonetheless tend to tread warily, mindful of fury directed in recent years at people deemed to have blasphemed Islam's founding document and the Prophet Muhammad.

A scholar in northern Germany writes under the pseudonym of Christoph Luxenberg because, he says, his controversial views on the Quran risk provoking Muslims. He claims that chunks of it were written not in Arabic but in another ancient language, Syriac. The "virgins" promised by the Quran to Islamic martyrs, he asserts, are in fact only "grapes."

Ms. Neuwirth, the Berlin professor now in charge of the Munich archive, rejects the theories of her more radical colleagues, who ride roughshod, she says, over Islamic scholarship. Her aim, she says, isn't to challenge Islam but to "give the Quran the same attention as the Bible." All the same, she adds: "This is a taboo zone."

Ms. Neuwirth says it's too early to have any idea what her team's close study of the cache of early texts and other manuscripts will reveal. Their project, launched last year at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science and Humanities, has state funding for 18 years but could take much longer. The earliest manuscripts of the Quran date from around 700 and use a skeletal version of the Arabic script that is difficult to decipher and can be open to divergent readings.

[...]

For more on "Christoph Luxenberg" see here and here. But that's just an aside. The real news is that this archive should revolutionize the study of the textual criticism of the Qur'an.

UPDATE (13 January): Stephen Goranson e-mails:

In case it's of interest, a good new book surveys current approaches to the history of the text of the Qur'an: The Qur'an in its Historical Context. ed. Gabriel Said Reynolds (Routledge, 2008).

Table of Contents:
Foreword D. Madigan. Notes on Contributors. List of Images. Map: Locations Cited in the Present Volume. Abbreviations. Introduction: Qur'anic Studies and its Controversies G.S. Reynolds Part 1: Linguistic and Historical Evidence 1. The Qur'an in Recent Scholarship - Challenges and Desiderata F. Donner 2. Epigraphy and the Linguistic Background to the Qur'an R. Hoyland 3. Reconstructing the Qur'an: Emerging Insights G. Böwering 4. Reconsidering the Authorship of the Qur'an. Is the Qur'an Partly the Fruit of a Progressive and Collective Work? C. Gilliot 5. Christian Lore and the Arabic Qur'an: The "Companions of the Cave" in Surat al-Kahf and in Syriac Christian Tradition S. Griffith Part 2: The Religious Context of the Late Antique Near East 6. The Theological Christian Influence on the Qur'an: A Reflection S.K. Samir 7. Mary in the Qur'an: A Reexamination of Her Presentation S.A. Mourad 8. The Legend of Alexander the Great in the Qur'an 18:83-102 K. van Bladel 9. Beyond Single Words: ma'ida - Shaytan - jibt and taghut. Mechanisms of Translating the Bible into Ethiopic (Ga'az) Bible and of Transmission into the Qur'anic Text M. Kropp 10. Nascent Islam in the 7th Century Syriac Sources A. Saadi Part 3: Critical Study of the Qur'an and the Muslim Exegetical Tradition 11. Notes on Medieval and Modern Emendations of the Qur'an D. Stewart 12. Syriac in the Qur'an: Classical Muslim Theories A. Rippin. Bibliography. Index of Biblical Verses. Index of Qur'anic Verses. Index of People, Places and Subjects

Note also the 2006 Cambridge Companion to the Qur'an.

JOSEPH DAN is interviewed at the OUP blog about his new book, Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction.

SPEAKING OF THE BAR KOKHBA REVOLT, it is mentioned again in an Independent article on the Emperor Hadrian's sexual orientation. This in relation to an upcoming exhibition at the British Museum.

Hadrian the gay emperor
His attempt to fortify the Roman Empire is well known. But an exhibition focuses on another side of the man
By Arifa Akbar
Published: 11 January 2008

The bust is classically Roman, the face imperious. But this is no ordinary emperor. As a major new exhibition at the British Museum makes clear, Publius Aelius Traianus Hadrianus was not only a peacemaker who pulled his soldiers out of modern-day Iraq. He was also the first leader of Rome to make it clear that he was gay.

Hadrian: Empire and Conflict will see the bust make pilgrimages to both ends of Hadrian's Wall, the first time it has left the British Museum since being found in the Thames 200 years ago. But it is the singular life-story of the gay emperor that is likely to capture the interest of most visitors.

[...]

As the "people's king" – he travelled with his troops and ate the same rations – he laid the foundations of the Byzantine Empire and changed the name of Judea to create Palestine, among other legacies.

At times, however, even Hadrian's Rome played the role of violent occupier. During a suppression of a Jewish rebellion in Judea, Roman warriors were dispatched to take control ofthe region, leading to the death of 580,000 Jews. "It was probably as a punishment that he changed the name of Judea to Palestine," said Mr [Thorsten] Opper [curator of the exhibition].

The exhibition, which brings together loans from 31 countries, will display sculpture, bronzes and architectural fragments. Highlights include the Vindoanda tablets from Hadrian's Wall and a bronze head of the emperor discovered in the Thames in 1834, which will travel to both ends of Hadrian's Wall. The head comes from a statue that may have been erected in a public space in London AD122 to commemorate Hadrian's visit to Britain.

Other highlights are a bronze bust from Israel found in 1975, a papyrus fragment of Hadrian's autobiography from the Bodleian Library that has never before been on public display, fragments from Hadrian's tomb and gilded bronze peacocks measuring two metres lent by the Vatican's Museum for the first time.

UPDATE: The Guardian has an article on the exhibition too, with some additional information of interest:

The exhibition, with loans from the Louvre, the Vatican and 29 other institutions, will include beautiful sculptures only excavated in the last few years, exquisite portraits both of his wife and his male lover Antonius, one tattered piece of papyrus which is the only surviving fragment of his autobiography - and house keys found hidden in a cave in Israel, left by people fleeing the aftermath of the Jewish rebellion.

ISRAELI OPPOSITION LEADER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU has given president Bush an ancient coin:

At the beginning of the meeting, which ran 45 minutes over the time allocated to it, Netanyahu gave Bush an ancient coin discovered in Jerusalem that dates from the third year of the great Judean revolt against the Romans in the first century CE. The coin bears Hebrew writing, signaling that the Jewish people's connection to Jerusalem has lasted thousands of years.

This article says that this was from the first Jewish revolt against Rome (66-70 CE), but I know of no Jewish coins that dated themselves to this revolt. I suspect that it was a coin from the Bar Kokhba revolt in 132-135 CE.

Do any numismatists out there want to comment?

UPDATE: Reader Simon Montagu e-mails:

The report at http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART1/682/151.html (Hebrewsite) quotes the inscription on the coin: שקל ישראל שנה ג' (למרד)
ירושלים הקדושה

There are indeed such coins from the Great Revolt and I found one illustrated online at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Great_Revolt_coin.jpg

(I'm not a numismatist, but I have Ya'akov Meshorer's catalogue of
Jewish coins of the second temple period)

Thanks for the correction.

UPDATE (12 January): Carla Sulzbach e-mails with a website on coins of the Jewish War here.

A RECONSTRUCTION OF A PHOENICIAN BOAT is setting sail soon from Tyre:

Modern version of Phoenician boat to spread Lebanese spirit
By Mohammed Zaatari
Daily Star staff
Wednesday, January 09, 2008

TYRE: A Phoenician-style boat will soon set sail for Europe from the port city of Tyre in a bid to highlight the contributions of the ancient peoples of current-day Lebanon to human civilization, as well as the role that the country can continue to play in modern global society.

The ship was named Europa, after the Phoenician princess Europa, the daughter of Agenor, the Phoenician king of Tyre. According to Greek mythology, Europa was abducted and taken to Crete by Zeus, the king of the gods, who had transformed himself into a great white bull. Legend has it that the continent of Europe is named after her.

[...]

IN HONOR OF THE COLDEST WEATHER THIS WINTER, the heating system of St. Mary's College chose to die just before the end of the break, leaving the whole College without heat. Fortunately, the problem was soon located and the relevant area isolated, so the rest of the College now has heat. Unfortunately, my office is within the isolated zone and doesn't, so I have a space heater going full blast next to me in my unheated room. But, fortunately, I was about to move to Richard Bauckham's old office anyway, so the contents of my current office are being transferred as I write. I should be in a warm room soon.

CLASSICAL STUDIES is under siege at Bar Ilan University:

Will classical studies still be here in 10 years?
By Ofri Ilani (Haaretz)

Many departments in Israeli universities have shrunk in recent years, but few have sustained the kind of mortal blow taken by Bar-Ilan's Department of Classical Studies. In under five years, the number of faculty positions was cut by 40 percent.

Department head Prof. David Schaps, who specializes in Greek and Roman history, recalls another period when classical culture was neglected. "We call it the Dark Ages. It was only 1,000 years later that the value of that knowledge was recognized again, and not all of it could be reconstructed," he said. "The same thing could happen to us. There are areas that don't interest our generation, and we are allowing them to disappear. They might interest people in the future, and they won't forgive us."

Bar-Ilan, Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem all have small classics departments. Bar-Ilan's is now competing for the honor of being the university's smallest department. At the start of the decade, it had 4.5 faculty positions. Now there are 2.75 positions.

[...]

"VISION OF GABRIEL" UPDATE: The Cathedra article on the "Vision of Gabriel" ("Dead Sea Scroll in Stone") in Hebrew is available in pdf format here, with a drawing of the inscription here -- as reported in this Hebrew article.

(Heads up, Søren Holst. Background here.)

THE ZOHAR TRANSLATION currently underway by Daniel Matt is profiled by the Stanford Review:

Stanford Press revives interest in masterpiece of Kabbalah

BY CYNTHIA HAVEN

It is a teaching that is fabled to drive unprepared readers mad. It is a book of ancient Jewish wisdom. Or is it?

The Zohar—a compendium of enigmas that forms the basis of the Kabbalah—is getting a long-awaited renewal thanks to Stanford University Press's new translation, which Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel calls "masterful." The influential critic Harold Bloom calls it "a superbly fashioned translation and a commentary that opens up the Zohar to the English-speaking world." The series already has received a $10,000 Koret Jewish Book Award for "monumental contribution to the history of Jewish thought"—even though it has produced only four of a projected dozen volumes to date.

"Ultimately, it will be the biggest project Stanford University Press has ever done," press director Geoffrey Burn said. "This project will dwarf anything the press has committed to."

[...]

It's a good summary of the text and the project. I found this bit especially interesting:

Who wrote this masterpiece? Matt estimates that 75 to 80 percent comes from Moses [de León], who died in 1305. The rest may indeed be ancient texts, or perhaps the result of a collaborative effort with other contemporary kabbalists. But the question may be rather like asking whether Shakespeare or Holinshed wrote King Lear.

"You lose a lot if you only see it as an ancient composition," Matt said. Moses subtly and artfully introduces references to the effect of the Crusades on Spain, or the anguish of the Jews in an alien land. Moreover, "there's a constant interaction with earlier sources."

Scholem demonstrated that the Zohar was a medieval work and thought that Moses wrote all of it. More recent scholars have allowed for the possibility of a collaboration that drew on some older sources. I hope Matt will have more to say on this in due course.

Good article. Read it all.

PRESIDENT BUSH AS CYRUS THE GREAT?

Scroll to Mr. Bush Reminds Him of His Historic Role

by Hillel Fendel

(IsraelNN.com) A historic document is planned to be submitted to visiting US President George Bush upon his arrival this week, calling upon him to choose to be remembered like Cyrus, and not like Nebuchadnezzar.

The document, grandly transcribed on parchment and furled into a scroll, is addressed to the the "Leader of the West." It reminds President Bush to "declare to the world" that he will honor G-d's word and act "towards settling the Jewish People throughout their entire Land."

The document was signed by three figures, including the world-renowned Torah scholar, philosopher, social critic and author Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, once termed by Time magazine as a "once-in-a-millennium scholar." Rabbi Chaim Richman, representing the Temple Mount movements, and Dr. Gadi Eshel of the New Jewish Congress are also signed upon the proclamation.

The scroll is likely to be presented to Mr. Bush during his visit this week to Israel by a prominent political and social figure.

[...]

This is a new one, but we all know who was like Nebuchadnezzar.

THE SABBATEAN DÖNMEH of Thessaloniki are the subject of a piece in Balkan Travellers:

The Dönmeh: the Judeo-Islamic Mystery of Thessaloniki

Text and photographs by Albena Shkodrova

Neither Muslims nor Jews, but rather a bit of both, Thessaloniki’s Dönmeh were the most influential group in the city over a period of almost 400 years. The rumours that the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Atatürk, was one of them remain unconfirmed. But spending a few days in present-day Thessaloniki makes one wonder whether the city has really managed to rid itself of the influence of the eclectic, and often purely extravagant, tastes of the now extinct sect.

[...]

This is Yeni Jami, the ‘New Mosque’. A strange mixture of Art Nouveau and Moorish architecture from the time of the Arab Khalifate in Spain, it starts out with a stained glass window above the door and continues with rounded arches, ending with a sharp-edged, ornamental roof frieze and two wooden clock towers, decorated with multiple Stars of David.

At the entrance, the sign that says “Archaeological Museum” is both uninspiring and false. The building, however, contains the history of one of the most unusual religious communities on the Balkans – the Judeo-Muslim Dönmeh. Nominally, the building was built to serve as a mosque. Its inside is that of an Iberian synagogue. But it is neither one nor the other, and since 1962, it no longer houses an archaeological museum either, as a special building for it was constructed half a kilometre to the West.

The situation with the mosque-synagogue completely corresponds to the fate of those who built it. Their community, which arose in the city during the seventeenth century, was called by the Ottoman Empire’s authorities “turn-coats” – the literal meaning of the word dönmeh.

[...]

Zevi himself was arrested on his way to Istanbul, after asserting that he was headed to get some sense into the sultan. The Sublime Porte presented him with a choice: to be immediately beheaded and thus, to continue his saintly mission in the hereafter, or to convert to Islam. Zevi settled on the latter option without much difficulty and was released. Many of his followers went with him and this is how one of the strangest religious hybrids known in the region was created.

Historians describe this denomination as mystical Islam with elements of Judaism. Its followers pray in mosques, make pilgrimages to Mecca and abide by Ramadan’s rites. At home, however, they follow Judaic rituals. They pray to the Messiah in the name of “God, the God of Israel,” while their prayer is made up on the model of the Islamic one.

[...]

For more on Shabbetai Zvi, the mystical messiah of sin, and the Sabbatean movement, go here and keep following the links back.

ARAMAIC WATCH: Songs in Hebrew, Syriac, etc. figure in a Turkish play.

'Ashura' to be cooked and performed on stage
Monday, January 7, 2008

ISTANBUL – Turkish Daily News

Muharram, the first month of the year according to the Muslim calendar, will be greeted with the play "Ashura" during which the traditional ashura desert that is made from various kinds of fruit, beans and cereal will be prepared and shared with the audience.

[...]

Ashura depicts the story of of those people, languages and religions that have been forced to migrate for many centuries for the sake of creating a �homogeneous� society on the lands of Anatolia, and were thus left scattered all over the world. It tells us of the migration routes through songs that were sung in 12 languages.

Ashura contains 25 songs in Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Turkish, Armenian, Arabic, Kurdish, Zaza (accent of Kurdish) and Sephardic languages. The play aims to draw attention to the reality that Anatolia, with its different ethnic groups and cultures is beyond the definition of mosaic; it is more like an ashura.

[...]

I'm not sure what "Sephardic" is.

UPDATE (8 January): A couple of readers have e-mailed to suggest that Sephardic is Ladino.

PEOPLE OF THE BOOK gets yet another review, this one in the NYT by Janet Maslin. She isn't enthusiastic. Excerpt:

A Literal Page Turner of a Mystery

By JANET MASLIN
Published: January 7, 2008

“For the librarians,” says the dedication page of Geraldine Brooks’s new novel, “People of the Book.” That’s an understatement. What librarian could resist a novel that has the word book in its title, is centered on an intrepid book conservator, exults in book-preservation exotica (“I know the flesh and fabrics of pages, the bright earths and lethal toxins of ancient pigments”) and has a plot about a rare book with a long, fraught and serpentine history?

But the intense bibliographic appeal of “People of the Book” turns out to be a mixed blessing. It lands Ms. Brooks neck-deep in research. It overburdens her tale in ways that make it more admirable than gripping.

Although nobility is one of this work’s most conspicuous attributes, “People of the Book” is also schematic and histrionic, piling serial tales of suffering onto the Sarajevo Haggadah and those who determined its fate. When one character threatens to put the Haggadah in jeopardy, another character warns, “You will be sowing intercommunal dissent over the very artifact that was meant to stand for the survival of our multiethnic ideal.”

[...]

Bleah.

PEOPLE OF THE BOOK, by Geraldine Brooks, is reviewed by Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post. Excerpts:

Now, in a similar vein, we have Geraldine Brooks's People of the Book. The good news is that this new novel by the author of March, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2006, is intelligent, thoughtful, gracefully written and original. Brooks has built upon her experience as a correspondent in Bosnia for the Wall Street Journal to construct a story around a book -- small, rare and very old -- and the people into whose hands it had fallen over five centuries, people who "had known unbearable stress: pogrom, Inquisition, exile, genocide, war."

The people are inventions, but the book itself is very real: "The Sarajevo Haggadah, created in medieval Spain, was a famous rarity, a lavishly illuminated Hebrew manuscript made at a time when Jewish belief was firmly against illustrations of any kind. It was thought that the commandment in Exodus 'Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or likeness of any thing' had suppressed figurative art by medieval Jews. When the book came to light in Sarajevo in 1894, its pages of painted miniatures had turned this idea on its head and caused art history texts to be rewritten." Now it is 1996. The book has survived the wartime violence in Bosnia because the head of the library at the National Museum in Sarajevo, a Muslim, saved it from almost certain destruction by hiding it "in a safe-deposit box in the vault of the central bank." Hanna Heath, a 30-year-old Australian book conservator, has been called in by the United Nations to inspect its conditions and repair it as necessary.

[...]

As to the ending of People of the Book, well, that's for you to find out. Suffice it to say that it's a book that resides comfortably in a place we too often imagine to be a no-man's land between popular fiction and literature. Brooks tells a believable and engaging story about sympathetic but imperfect characters -- "popular" fiction demands all of that -- but she also does the business of literature, exploring serious themes and writing about them in handsome prose. She appears to be finding readers and admirers in growing numbers, and People of the Book no doubt will increase those numbers.

Earlier reviews are noted here.

MARK GOODACRE has published his Fourth Annual Ralphies.

CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT: THE BIBLE AND COMPUTERS

Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2008 09:54:45 -0500
From: Adam Mendelsohn [amend@BRANDEIS.EDU]
Subject: CFP: "The Bible and Computers: Present and Future of a Discipline"

From: "J. de Prado Plumed" [jesusdeprado.n2@gmail.com]
Subject: Bible and Computers 2008 conference, El Escorial (Madrid)
Sent: Wednesday, January 02, 2008 7:52 AM

International Conference on "The Bible and Computers: Present and Future of a Discipline"

El Escorial (Madrid), June, 16th-19th, 2008

" Following the example set by the previous seven Conferences organised by the Association Internationale "Bible et Informatique", and especially after the last AIBI-7 Conference held in Leuven (2004), the Universidad Complutense de Madrid is organising a new International Conference on the Bible and Computers, which is scheduled to take place in June 2008.

The enormous advance and technical achievements provided in the last thirty years by the application of computers technology to the edition and analysis of Biblical texts require a critical evaluation from a historical perspective. This evaluation should focus on the mentioned achievements, but also on the failed objectives, and future challenges as well. There is a need to evaluate the current tools available in the field of Bible and computers, and a necessity to consider the adequate research trend in order to satisfy the increasing demand of software related to the computer assisted programs for linguistic analysis of the Bible."

Paper proposals and abstracts of maximum 1 page should be sent to the following e-mail address: mad08bei@filol.ucm.es
Presentations will be limited to 20 minutes.

The organisation will offer financial support to 5 young scholars or doctoral students interested in attending the conference. Applicants should send CV and a cover letter including a brief statement of their current research by email (mad08bei@filol.ucm.es).

Note that call for papers closes on January 31st 2008.
http://www.ucm.es/info/mad08bei/index.htm

(Via the H-JUDAIC list.)

THE QUMRAN NON-BIBLICAL TEXTS are now available in electronic format for Mobile PDA and Cell Phones in a module with Unicode fonts produced by OliveTree Bible Software. Drayton Benner has additional information at the OliveTreeBlog.

A IS FOR THE ARK OF THE COVENANT.

ROBERT ALTER'S PSALMS TRANSLATION is reviewed by Joel M. Hoffman in the Jerusalem Post. Excerpts:

Alter, however, wants to "turn ancient Hebrew poetry into English verse that is reasonably faithful to the original and yet readable as poetry." He acknowledges the eloquence of the KJV, but faults that translation for ignoring "the rhythms of the Hebrew almost entirely"; that is, for achieving only one of his two goals.

[...]

Grammatical Hebrew syntax ought to become grammatical English syntax. (Again the issue can be tricky. "Working hard" is not "hardly working.") But Alter stumbles with some aspects of Hebrew syntax, mimicking them rather than conveying what they mean. Word order is more flexible in Hebrew than in English. So while Hebrew permits both "I was a lad" and "a lad I was," English allows only the former. Yet surprisingly, Alter's rendition of Psalm 37:25 reads, "A lad I was/and now I am old." He has taken ordinary, grammatical Hebrew and turned it into odd English. Rather than capturing the beauty of the original, he has destroyed it by mimicking it too closely. "A lad I was" is no more correct than "sing a song new."

Alter acknowledges that he grappled with this issue. In the introduction he discusses "syntactic fronting" (one technical name for the Hebrew construction "a lad I was") and specifically notes that "Biblical syntax is more flexible than English." But he justifies the "reversal of normal English word order" because, he says, it is so common in poetry, and, besides, he continues, the psalms incorporated an "archaic stratum" of Hebrew.

While some English poetry allows some words to be reversed, Alter has missed the point. English "syntactic fronting" is a jarring word order used for striking effect. By contrast, the same order in Hebrew is common and unobtrusive. He has turned the nicely poetic into the bizarrely foreign. And there is scant evidence that the language of the psalms is archaic or otherwise ungrammatical.

[...]

I haven't read Alter's translation, but I think I do have to raise two points in his defense. First, English poetry is more flexible in its word order than English prose, both for emphasis and to accommodate rhyme and meter. Also "a lad I was," at least to my ear, can be acceptable poetic language whereas "sing a song new" can't. Second, biblical Hebrew poetry does follow more archaic grammatical rules than Hebrew prose. It rarely has the definite article and almost never (I'm tempted just to say never) has the definite direct object marker (את) or the vav-consecutive verbal tense inversion. Some of the Psalms are more archaic still: Psalm 29, for example uses the very archaic "enclitic mem," but the language of Hebrew poetry in general, including the Psalms, is archaic (but not grammatical).

In spite of the errors that occasionally mar the work, The Book of Psalms is a marvelous translation, unsurpassed in its accuracy and poetry, replete with insights into the psalms' meanings, and graced with beautiful renderings of the ancient words.

Translation is always a compromise, and publishing a compromise is not easy. Readers of the Bible are indebted to Robert Alter, and fortunate that he struggled with the ancient text and coerced it into modern English form. The publication of The Book of Psalms is a watershed event, and from the seeds Alter has sown we all reap in joy - maybe even in glad song.

SOME BOOK NOTES by Susan Campbell in the South Bend Tribune are of interest:

[...]

• Geza Vermes is a respected Biblical scholar, specializing in Judaism during the time of Jesus. In his latest work, "The Nativity: History and Legend" (Doubleday, $17.95, 172 pp.), Vermes turns his trained eye to the story of the birth of Jesus, perhaps the pivotal tale of Christianity.

Stripping away the legends and add-ons of later years, Vermes casts his net far to explain (and, in some cases, debunk) what some believers hold true -- even while he maintains respect for the core story. According to Vermes, Mary, the mother of Jesus, could hardly have been a virgin her entire life, as the Bible specifically talks about her and husband Joseph enjoying marital relations after the arrival of their first-born. And though the world celebrates in December, the actual event most likely occurred in the spring, roughly four years later than we think.

[I think she means "roughly four years earlier than we think."]

[...]

• One of the best writers on religion today, Bruce Chilton, takes us into "Abraham's Curse: The Roots of Violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam" (Doubleday, $24.95, 272 pp.). He begins his inquiry with the story of Abraham and Isaac and shows how that close brush with human sacrifice sets precedent for all three religions. He makes a compelling argument that human sacrifice didn't stop with God's encouraging and then thwarting Abraham's sacrifice of his son. It continues today with militancy and fundamentalism that would ignore and even destroy those outside the boundaries of its faith.

[...]

• And, finally, it's time to reconsider Queen Jezebel. In "Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible's Harlot Queen," (Doubleday, $24.95, 272 pp.), Lesley Hazleton shows us why so much of what we know of this "harlot" -- so called because of her religion, not her sexual practices -- is wrong. Jezebel was a powerful, pragmatic ruler, deeply loyal to her husband, King Ahab, and able to survive as a leader for 30 years in a ruthless age that devoured the weak. Translating original Hebrew scriptures, Hazleton, a journalist and a former psychologist, traces the queen's life from her early years in the Phoenician city-state of Tyre, to her marriage at age 15 to the king of Israel, to her coming to grips with a culture that worshipped one god and rejected all others. And then there is her final scene, where she is thrown out a window and eaten by dogs. By the time Jezebel's life ends, Hazleton has convinced the reader that this is a truly sad loss, an end to tolerance that also spelled the end of the Israelites' freedom.

ALEPPO CODEX UPDATE: The New Jersey Jewish Standard has an article on the current efforts to recover lost pages of the Aleppo Codex. It mostly covers the same ground as previous treatments, but there's one interesting detail I don't recall seeing before. In any case, it deserves to be highlighted:

Glatzer told JTA the institute is negotiating with several former members of the Aleppo community in hopes of retrieving at least part of the remaining codex. He would not give any further details about the discussions for fear of disrupting progress.

That seems to indicate that some additional fragments do survive, which is very good news. I wish them success.

Background here.

BIBLICAL STUDIES CARNIVAL XXV has been posted by Chris Brady at Targuman.

THE EARLY MANUSCRIPTS ELECTRONIC LIBRARY, based in Los Angeles, has a website and a blog. The mission of the EMEL is:

The Early Manuscripts Electronic Library uses digital technologies to make manuscripts and other historical source materials accessible for study and appreciation by researchers and the public.

Their two big projects are:

National Center of Manuscripts, Tbilisi, Georgia

In September 2007, EMEL will travel to Tbilisi to collaborate with Georgia’s National Center of Manuscripts to digitize a selection of its most important manuscripts. The Center preserves outstanding manuscripts in a variety of languages that are the heritage of Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities. This project will feature the digitization of early Georgian manuscripts that originate from St. Catherine’s Monastery of the Sinai.

St. Catherine’s Monastery ‘Diaspora’ Manuscripts Project

EMEL seeks to digitize manuscripts that were once part of the library of St. Catherine’s Monastery of the Sinai but are now scattered in libraries around the world. In this way, scholars will be able to study the history of the world’s oldest continually operating library and reconstruct the relationships among its manuscripts. As the first installment of the project, EMEL digitized the Peckover-Foot Codex, a 12th century Greek New Testament manuscript in the Department of Special Collections, Young Research Library, UCLA.

The blog has details of the trip to Georgia. Both projects have lots of scope for interesting discoveries. Consider the following from the Tbilisi trip:

The problem that both our Georgian and Armenian colleagues face is how to read the erased layer of palimpsests. A palimpsest is a recycled manuscript. A scribe would scrape the surface of an old parchment manuscript to remove most of the original layer of ink so that the parchment could be used to make a new manuscript. The original, erased layer of ink is of great interest to scholars because it can be centuries older than the second layer.

The scraping of old manuscripts to make new ones was practiced more routinely in the Christian East than in the West, and the national libraries of Georgia and Armenia have between them some 10,000 pages of palimpsests. Some of these manuscripts are very early (5th and 6th centuries AD), and almost all of them have never been studied. It’s as if 10,000 pages of ancient Christian manuscripts were discovered in a cave--it would be big news! But these have been under our noses the whole time. We just need the right technology to make them legible again.

EMEL is cooperating with a team of U.S. scientists that has developed advanced methods of multi-spectral imaging to read the erased layer of text on palimpsests. These scientists proved their techniques with the famous Archimedes Palimpsest (www.archimedespalimpsest.org). The erased layer of the this palimpsest preserves the world’s only copies of several treatises by the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes. Using new multi-spectral imaging techniques these scientists restored these texts for the first time. The use of multi-spectral imaging on the large group of palimpsests we will encounter in Georgia and Armenia is still experimental. There are no guarantees. But it behooves us to make every effort to let these ancient texts speak again.

Bit by bit, a letter at a time, whatever it takes. Until we're done.

ANOTHER OBITUARY FOR JOHN STRUGNELL, in the Daily Telegraph.

APRIL DECONICK has a 2007 Retrospect for the Forbidden Gospels blog.

THE PRELIMINARY REPORT on the 1993-2004 Qumran excavations has now been published by the IAA online in pdf format. Todd Bolen has details at the Bible Places blog.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

RALPHIES 2007. Once again I'm taking up Ed Cook's invitation to post best-of-the-year varia. For PaleoJudaica Ralphies from 2005 and 2006, follow the links. Ed's latest Ralphies are here. All the usual disclaimers apply: the only things taken into account are those I have seen or heard (or meant to look at or deliberately avoided, etc.) and "best" is best according to my own entirely idiosyncratic tastes.

BEST FICTION BOOK: No contest here:

Stephen R. Donaldson, Fatal Revenant (The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant) (New York: Putnam, 2007)

(Past posts on the series are here, here, and here.) Donaldson just moves from strength to strength. The viewpoint character continues to be Thomas Covenant's companion, Linden Avery, and Covenant's involvement in the the story continues to be, well, complicated. Go Linden! Do something they don't expect.

Honorable mention goes to:

Charles Stross, The Atrocity Archives (New York: Ace, 2004)

Spooks meets H. P. Lovecraft meets Dilbert. Enough said.

BEST NONFICTION BOOK: I read fewer technical books this year than usual, and very few that were actually published in 2007. Of those I read that were published in the last couple of years, the best was certainly:

John M. G. Barclay, Flavius Josephus: Against Apion (Brill, 2006)

Another superb volume in the Brill commentary series on Josephus.

For honorable mention:

Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Eerdmans, 2006)

This one might have made first place but I haven't actually, er, read it yet. But I did read some of it in manuscript and our postgraduate seminar spent several weeks reviewing it just before Richard retired, so I do have a good idea what's in it. The book is clearly an important challenge to the field of New Testament form criticism and it will be very interesting to follow its long-term effect.

BEST MOVIE: I saw very few movies this year, partly because I was busy and partly because the offerings were so dire. I was happy to be among the droves that stayed away from the rash of rampantly money-losing Hollywood anti-war films. Apart from that, I took my eleven-year-old son to a number of children's movies. Of these, the best was Ratatouille, a hilarious mixture of American values and French cooking.

BEST TELEVISION: Last year I mentioned the British series Life on Mars. It concluded with a second season in 2007. This season had a warmed over feel to it and wasn't entirely satisfactory, but the last two episodes were spectacular. The best television moment of 2007 (and surely one of the creepiest) was Sam Tyler's moment of personal apocalyse in the concluding episode.

Sam's moment of satori
If you've seen it, you know what I mean. If you haven't seen the series yet, the DVD really is worth renting. I look forward to the sequel spin-off Ashes to Ashes in 2008.

The 2007 season of Doctor Who was also excellent. David Tennant gets better and better and if he pulls off another season like the last two, he could displace John Pertwee as my favorite Doctor. Also deserving of honorable mention is ITV's Primeval, a time travel show involving "anomalies" from the past and future that periodically expel entertaining monsters that have to be dealt with. It was aimed at the vicinity of my son's demographic and it cannibalized the special effects from last year's Prehistoric Park, but I quite enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to series 2 in 2008.

BEST MUSIC: Thanks to airline soundtracks, access to a car radio in the States for a while, and YouTube, I actually did listen to a little new music in 2007 (both newish and new to me). Of the newish songs I heard, the one I liked best was How to Save a Life by The Fray. Of the new-to-me variety, how could I not love The Mespotamians by They Might Be Giants? And I especially enjoyed discovering the first music video ever shown on MTV, Video Killed the Radio Star, by the Buggles. My favorite new song of 2007 is this parody of the latter, posted in October: YouTube Killed the TV Star.



Best wishes for 2008!

UPDATE (6 January 2007): Mark Goodacre has published his Fourth Annual Ralphies.

AN OBITUARY FOR EDWINA M. WRIGHT has been posted on the Union Theological Seminary website. Excerpt:

Gifted Scholar, Beloved Teacher
Professor Edwina Wright joined the Faculty of Union Seminary in 1998 as an Assistant Professor of Old Testament and later became the Director of Language Studies and Adjunct Professor of Biblical Languages. She taught introductory courses in Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Greek and an intermediate level reading course in Biblical Hebrew.

In addition to teaching, Professor Wright directed individualized courses in Biblical Aramaic and Ethiopic. She also administered the Hebrew diagnostic examination for Old Testament doctoral students and worked with the Biblical Field in providing linguistic support for students taking the Biblical exegesis practicum. She also helped plan the Summer Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Greek courses. Professor Wright worked with representatives of the Union Latino community and the Academic Office to develop Union's first course taught in Spanish, which focused on the development of conversational skills and the discussion of ministry within the Latino context.

Background here.