CHERUBIMSES – Philologos discusses, inter alia the English forms of the word Cherub:

But cherubim is a much more interesting word than kibbutzim. In medieval and Renaissance English, it was taken to be a singular form. This is why, when the Hebrew book of Genesis tells us that after Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden of Eden, God put k’ruvim at its entrance to keep humanity from returning there, the 1611 King James Version gives us, “And he [God] placed at the east of the garden of Eden cherubims.”

Ultimately, this goes back to the standard Latin Bible, which translates these words as et collocavit antes paradisum voluptatis Cherubim. Why Jerome, this Bible’s fourth-century translator, did not render the plural of the Hebrew k’ruv as cherubi or cherubes, in the Latin manner, is explained by his decision to capitalize it. He did not, that is, construe k’ruvim as a plural, but rather as the proper name of some kind of supernatural creature placed by God to guard the Gates of Eden — and as a result, cherubim or cherubin entered a large number of European languages with such a meaning.

[...]

What led Jerome, an accomplished Hebraist in his own right, to make such a mistake? He would seem to have been influenced by a vision of many cherubim in Chapter 10 of the book of Ezekiel, in which each cherub seen by the prophet is depicted as a composite creature, so that “every one had four faces: the first face was the face of a cherub, and the second face was the face of a man, and the third the face of a lion, and the fourth the face of an eagle.” Since Jerome translates the first part of this as Quattuor autem facies habebat unum: facies una, facies cherub, he apparently understood the singular Hebrew noun k’ruv to be the “cherub-face” of a four-faced creature called k’ruvim in both the singular and the plural, just as our English word “fish” can mean either one fish or many.

Sounds plausible overall. That said, I'm not a Latin paleographer, but I'm pretty sure that capitalization of names came well after the time of Jerome.

Philologos also has a theory about how cherubim came to be pictures as cute little babies. That representation is quite different from the intimidating aspect they present in the Bible and in Jewish and Christian mysticial literature. I believe C. S. Lewis once commented that "cherub" is cognate with "gryphon," and that should tell us something. I don't know whether his etymology is right, but the comparison does give a good feel for what the cherubim are like.

I'm extremely busy today, so further blogging may end up on the back burner.

IF THE UNIVERSE is a computer simulation, someone may just have found the Demiurge's "undo" command, which could be kind of useful.

(Via Instapundit.)

THE SEPTUAGINT INSTITUTE at Trinity Western University is profiled in Christianity.ca. The occasion is an upcoming conference to celebrate the completion of the NETS translation project:

Lost in Translation
International scholars will congregate at Trinity Western University to discuss the Septuagint at a September 2008 conference.
by Erin Mussolum

It is called the Septuagint and in some circles is known simply as LXX. But for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the peculiar sounding term, the Septuagint is the earliest Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.

The Septuagint Institute at Trinity Western University is dedicated to the study of this anthology of ancient texts. Created to promote research on the Septuagint, the Institute involves the largest group of specialists in this field of research at any academic institution in the country: Dr. Rob Hiebert, Dr. Larry Perkins, Dr. Dirk Büchner and Dr. Peter Flint.

From September 18-20, the Septuagint Institute will host a gathering of some of the world’s most prominent biblical scholars who will discuss the results of their research on the Septuagint. The conference marks a special occasion as well for the four Trinity Western University scholars as it will be an opportunity to celebrate, together with other experts, the recent publication by Oxford University Press of A New English Translation of the Septuagint.

[...]

VISION OF GABRIEL WATCH: Professor Israel Knohl has published a new article in Biblical Archaeology Review which defends his theory that the inscription is about the suffering Messiah ben Joseph. The full text of the article is online:

The Messiah Son of Joseph
“Gabriel’s Revelation” and the Birth of a New Messianic Model

(Background here.)

UPDATE (22 August): Note that premier paleographer Ada Yardeni agrees with Knohl's reading and translation of the key phrase "In three days, live."

Also, Douglas Mangum comments at the Biblia Hebraica blog.

MORE ON THE PHOENICIA, which was scheduled to set sail to circumnavigate Africa on the tenth of this month, although I haven't actually seen confirmation of the launch. An article in the UAE National has some additional information.

Arwad Island, the northernmost Phoenician trading post, still has a Phoenician-built wall on its sea front. When Beale was researching places to have a his vessel built, he combed the Lebanese, Turkish, Cypriot and Syrian coastlines in search of a community of traditional boatbuilders. Finally he discovered Arwad, only 35 kilometres from the Lebanese border but part of Syria, where there are still two families (one of three members, the other of 25 members) who build boats with traditional methods. A chance chat in a restaurant on the island with the 24-year-old business student Orwah Bakker, now project-manager of the expedition, led him to Khalid Hammoud, who built the ship with four others.

Hammoud’s family has been building boats for many generations. However, constructing an ancient vessel was a huge challenge, particularly as an ancient technique had to be used. It took two years of planning and design before the first plank of Aleppo pine was even laid and Bakker says that the hardest part for the team was the design stage, when every detail had to be painstakingly translated and explained.

Built of pine – whereas Phoenicians would have used the now-endangered and more expensive cedar – Phoenicia is an example of “plank-first construction”, an ancient technique that involves building the boat’s frame first and inserting the planks afterwards. The positioning of the first plank is a delicate process because it sets the shape of the whole ship. Each successive plank is then carefully joined by mortice and tenon pegs of olive wood, and each tenon fixed with two wooden dowels. The whole ship consists of 8,000 pegs, fixed with 16,000 dowels. “Usually it takes three men and two months to build any type of ship,” says Bakker. “But this time, we needed at least five or 10 builders to work on it over eight months to make it ready. It has been hard but enjoyable.”

Phoenicia’s route will take it first into the Suez Canal, and then into the Red Sea, which it has to enter before the tides change in early September. It will then pull in at Aden, Mombassa, Dar es Salaam, Maputo, Richard’s Bay, Cape Town, Accra, Gibraltar, Carthage, Alexandria, and, all being well, return to Arwad in May of next year. The stops have been chosen mainly because they make sense from a sailing point of view, but Carthage in Tunisia has particular significance because it was a Phoenician colony. Similarly, Alexandria is also where Beale suspects the Phoenician expedition to have ended, because Herodotus states that it was somewhere on Egypt’s northern coast.

Beale calls his expeditions “experimental archaeology”. Each voyage so far has been an attempt to see whether it would have been possible to sail such a vessel in certain seas at a certain time.

There are brief interviews with crew members and then this:

A week ago, the local community slaughtered a sheep to send the boat on its way. Beale adds, “We’re going to need all the luck we can get.”

Indeed.

Background here.

BUSTED!

Arab posing as J'lem tour guide nabbed for selling ancient coins to tourists
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS (Jerusalem Post)

A 43-year-old Arab resident of east Jerusalem has been arrested for allegedly posing as a city tour guide and selling tourists various rare antique coins, the Israel Antiquities Authority said Tuesday.

The suspected antiquities thief was nabbed red-handed on Sunday in the Old City of Jerusalem by the state-run archeological body's anti-theft division in the midst of making a sale to unsuspecting tourists.

The suspect was found to be carrying around 100 impressive antique coins of various shapes and sizes, including Roman coins and a motley collection of other coins dating back to the Hellenistic Period.

The coins, which were taken from various archeological sites across the country, are valued in the thousands of dollars.

[...]

That's one arrest, but it's only the tip of the tel:

About 300 archeology thefts are detected each year in Israel, with the illicit antiquities trade on the black market in the country estimated to be in the millions of dollars annually.

The phenomenon of antiquities theft has taken on gold-rush dimensions with an antiquities site now plundered nearly every day on average.

The article also has a picture of some of the recovered coins.

SCOTLAND is to blame for the notion that the Israelites built the Pyramids?

But even when human agency behind the pyramids is acknowledged, the credit for them is disputed. The most famous alternative theory is that Israelite slaves built these colossal structures. The late Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, stirred up a furore in Egypt when he claimed, prior to arriving for the first official visit by an Israeli leader to Cairo, that his ancestors built the pyramids.

Of course, no archaeologist takes this theory seriously, since the pyramids were already pretty ancient when the Israelites are presumed to have been in Egypt and it is now generally accepted that slaves did not work on the project.

There is also no biblical evidence that the Israelites worked on the pyramids. Baruch Brandel, the director of the Israel antiquities authority library, notes that: "The Torah only mentions that the Israelites built Pithom and Ramses during the new kingdom period."

So, where does this legend come from? Scotland, actually. Charles Piazzi Smyth believed that the mysterious Hyksos – who may have invaded, or simply migrated, to Egypt nearly a millennium after the pyramids were built – were the Hebrew people, and that they built the Great Pyramid.

Some Jews began to subscribe to this far-fetched theory to draw pride amid discrimination, just as the 19th century Afrocentric movement in the US extended the period of Kushite (modern-day Nubian) rule for two centuries during the third intermediate period to all of Egyptian history in order to claim that ancient Egypt was "black African".

Actually, Josephus came up with the idea long before Smyth. And unfortunately it still turns up in Egypt.

THE TOMB OF EZRA (traditional) at Al ʿUzair, Iraq, is featured in the Babylon & Beyond Blog at the LA Times. There are pictures, including of a couple of Hebrew inscriptions.

For notes on some possible Ezra traditions in Islam, see my essay on the Apocalypse of Sedrach here, points 2-3 near the end.

(Via Chuck Jones at the Iraq Crisis list.)

THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS REVISITED is a BBC series by Roger Bolton which has apparently been playing recently. I hadn't noticed it, but my doctoral student Kathleen Burt pointed it out to me. If you're in Britain you can see episode 2 on BBC iPlayer. You can also listen to the radio programs here. These might be accessible outside Britain - I'm not sure. There are interviews with George Brooke, Jodi Magness, and Daniel Schwartz.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: The article Digging out the truth? by Lela Gilbert in the Jerusalem Post looks at Jewish Temple denial in the Muslim world, the illicit and destructive digging on the Temple Mount by the Waqf, and the results of the sifting of the excavated materials by Professor Gabriel Barkay and his team. The results of the last get more and more impressive:

"At least it enables us to look at the soil, though everything comes from a very disturbed context," Barkay says. "But we know it comes from the Temple Mount. And we have tens of thousands of finds."

These finds, that cover approximately 15,000 years, have altered the historic understanding of the area's history. Sponsored by the Ir David Foundation, volunteers working with Barkay have been sifting through the debris, and have found Stone Age flint implements. They have discovered pre-Israelite material, Bronze Age pottery, two Egyptian scarabs and several seals and seal impressions.

One very significant find, confirming the recorded history of the Temple's existence, is the fragment of a bulla, a clay lump with a seal impression upon it, which is about 2,600 years old and dates from the First Temple period. Its inscription bears part of official's name, Gealyahu son of Immer. The Immer family is recorded in the Bible. "In Jeremiah 20:1," Barkay says, "probably the brother of Gealyahu is mentioned, a priestly man named Pashur son of Immer. He is introduced as the man in charge of the Temple."

Findings from the time of Solomon's Temple up to the 20th century illuminate the raging conflicts of passing civilizations. "We have enormous quantities of war artifacts: We have lead slingshots of the Seleucid armies in the battles of Judah Maccabee. We have arrowheads of the army of Nebuchadnezzar, who destroyed the First Temple. We have arrowheads of the Hellenistic period. We have one arrowhead bearing distinguishing markings of having been shot by a catapult. Those machines were only used by the armies of Titus in 70 CE in the destruction of the Second Temple. We have stone slingshots; we have spearheads; and we have medieval arrowheads from the Crusader conquest of the Temple Mount. There are even bullets from both the Turkish army and the British army in World War I."

Other findings on the Temple Mount - jewelry, coins, pottery shards and architectural fragments - provide specific details of human life spanning several millennia. "We have material dating back to the 10th century BCE, the time of David and Solomon. We have material from the time of the kings of Judah. We have material in abundance from the early Christian period. This is very significant, because it is written in most history books that the churches moved to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher after it was built (it dates back to at least the fourth century), and that thereafter the Temple Mount was neglected and was a garbage heap. But now we have to build a new history, based on archeological evidence.

"We have fragments of capitals from church buildings. We have remnants of chancel screens that separated the presbytery from the nave of the church. We have several bronze weights for weighing gold coins from the Christian era. We have to rethink the role of the Temple Mount in the time of early Christianity. Was it a garbage heap? Or is that biased history? I think that history was ideological."

Barkay says that large quantities of animal bones have been found on the Mount. "Bones are very important. We have pig bones which had to have come from pagan or Christian times. We also have bones of foxes. And that is interesting, because in the Talmud we have a story about foxes which until recently I thought was a legend."

Read it all.

Background here.

JACOB NEUSNER is interviewed by the Jerusalem Post:

'A utopian document, a utopian law'
By HAVIV RETTIG

In the world of Jewish studies, Prof. Jacob Neusner needs no introduction. The 75-year-old scholar of Talmud and rabbinic literature has written, edited or translated more than 900 books (though he doesn't want you to read them all), making him among the most active and prolific authors alive.

"But I have a limited repertoire," he says with a smile, an expertise which extends across a millennium and through dozens of difficult, tightly-written works that are the record of the rabbinic love affair with the Torah.

For Neusner, the study of rabbinic literature has been a kind of love affair in itself, and as with all true loves, he remembers clearly when it began. He sat down to study his first passage of Talmud just after Succot in October of 1954, at the age of 22. It was the eighth chapter of Baba Kama, "Hahovel," he recalls almost 54 years later.

"I was an American history major," and had always been a bit bored with the subject. "When I started studying Talmud, I finally came across something endlessly interesting. I had never met anything so challenging. It was like mathematics, only 1,000 times more complex. I was never bored again."

Now, struggling through the latest work, Sifrei Zuta Bamidbar, "a very strange text," he is a happy man. "Every line is a challenge, the challenge of reconstructing the thought processes of the rabbis."

[...]

The interview itself asks "Who were the rabbinic Sages? What can we know about their world? What can they tell us about Jewish life today?" At lot of it involves What-would-the-sages-do? sorts of questions.

BUILD YOUR OWN TABERNACLE:

Putting together prophecy
by Erin Wisdom
Saturday, August 16, 2008 (St. Joseph News-Press, MO)

The gate is four colors. Itís blue for divinity, purple for kingship, white for purity, red for blood. The gate is Jesus, 1,500 years before anyone knows him by name.

Through the gate is the outer court surrounding the tabernacle, and you must be with a priest to enter. If youíre an ancient Israelite, you bring a treasured lamb ó really more a pet than just a piece of livestock ó to sacrifice as payment for your sins.

If youíre not an ancient Israelite, you turn off your cell phone.

ìThese guys are out of 1,500 B.C.,î Everett Weed, whoís prepping you for your tour of the tabernacle, says of the priests who will take you through the experience. ìOne rang yesterday, and it scared them half to death.î

The tabernacle experience youíre about to have will take you not through the original Mosaic tabernacle but through a life-sized replica constructed by members of Green Valley Baptist Church.

[...]

ABRACADABRA!

Paul Ramírez Jonas: Abracadabra-I Create as I Speak at Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

(ArtDaily)

RIDGEFIELD.- Abracadabra translates from the ancient Aramaic language as “I Create as I Speak,” and represents artist Paul Ramírez Jonas’s desire to create work that will assert an interactive contract with the public, where one must give in order to receive.

Ramírez Jonas consistently utilizes pre-existing texts, including not only the written word, but also items as diverse as a walking trail and sheet music, in the service of creating new art. The artist considers himself a mere reader of such texts, interpreting the documents into forms such as performance, sculpture, photo, or video. Thus, a musical score may result in a sculpture, and a travelogue in a video, or the plans for a flying machine may emerge from a photo. Reading is the creative and free action that attracts Ramírez Jonas.

He says, “Being a reader, I have more in common with the public than with the author, and it is this commonality that I find so inspiring in working with pre-existing materials. My previous work also uses pre-existing texts; but my role is not as much to ‘read’ them anymore, as much as it is to present them for lecture. It is an invitation to read together, so to speak. Most pieces in this exhibition attempt, in their own way, to reassert a contract with their public. This contract stipulates that the works are here for you; but you must give a little to receive—even if it is just a penny, a wish, or a silent recitation.”

Visitors to The Aldrich’s exhibition can put that penny into a functional penny press machine entitled We Make Change. The viewer provides the muscle and the raw material; the machine re-engraves the penny so that it reads TRUST ME or WE TRUST, converting the coin, which has value in one economy, into an artwork that has value in a different economy.

[...]

A bit goofy, but at least the Aramaic etymology is plausible – as is confirmed, incidentally, by famed YouTube philologist Marina Orlova. (If bikini-clad women offend you, best not to click on that last link.)

VIRTUAL DIG SUPERVISION:

Tacoma prof supervises archaeological dig online

By JOYCE CHEN
THE NEWS TRIBUNE (Seattle Post Intelligencer)

TACOMA, Wash. -- In uncovering relics of the past, Doug Edwards is making a little history of his own.

Edwards, a religion professor at the University of Puget Sound for 21 years, has just wrapped up using video technology in Tacoma to conduct an archaeological dig in Israel - the first time anyone has led an excavation online, he says.

From July 9 through Aug. 16, Edwards supervised a team of 18 volunteers from the South Sound and across the nation, including two graduates from UPS and his 18-year-old daughter, Helen, who came home Wednesday.

"He's an amazing and far-reaching presence literally in that he was able to effectively direct an entire project from thousands of miles away," said Chris Mundigler, a colleague from Victoria, British Columbia, who's worked with Edwards since 2002 on projects around the Mediterranean.

Leading the dig from afar was born of necessity: Edwards, 58, is receiving daily treatment for bone cancer and learned in April that he couldn't accompany the team to Israel, where he's directed digs since 1992.

[...]

The team worked at Khirbet Cana, eight miles northwest of Nazareth. Cana is the site of a marriage feast where Jesus turned water to wine, according to the New Testament. The team looked for clues from shards of pottery to soil changes to see how first-century villages evolved.

Six days each week, Edwards held morning video conferences with his onsite director, along with specialists in Seattle, British Columbia and Virginia.

"The field supervisor gives me a report on what's happening, and we can share files, pictures on our computer screens," Edwards said. "For instance, if we have aerial photos and I want them to excavate a certain area, I can circle the place we want to talk about, and they can make comments on the screen."

The instant feedback - no mean feat when connecting individuals from scattered time zones - was valuable, he added.

[...]

Barry Goldstein, a UPS geology professor who's worked on digs with Edwards since 1998, described his colleague as a visionary and the "glue" of the lengthy excavation process.

Goldstein said the new technology allows interested parties to receive bits of information as onsite teams update an online database, rather than waiting five to 10 years for a comprehensive paper to be published.

[...]

This is cool. Doubly cool, with both the online supervision and the remarkable instant access to the raw data for outsiders. I with Professor Edwards a rapid and full recovery.

THE MESOPOTAMIANS by They Might Be Giants is now on YouTube.



Originally on MySpace, as noted here.

(Via Thoughts from a Young, Slightly Cantakerous, Aspiring Theologian, via the Agade list.)

VISION OF GABRIEL WATCH: Christianity Today has an article on the inscription. Excerpt:

Darrell Bock, a professor of New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary, says Knohl may be reaching too far with his translation. "The problem here is that there's not enough text to be able to be really confident about what the passage itself is reading in order to build a theory around it," he says.

Ben Witherington III, professor of New Testament interpretation at Asbury Theological Seminary, agrees that Knohl offers a lot of conjecture to fill the gaps and holes in the text. "But what if he's right?" Witherington asks. "It just means that there were more persons in early Judaism, other than Jesus and his followers, who were talking about a dying and rising messiah. That's not a problem for Christianity, as far as I can see."

Bock doesn't see much of interest for scholars. "The text deals with some type of angelic communication, but beyond that it's very hard to tell what all is going on," he says. "The connection to messiah is virtually absent."

But Witherington calls it an interesting document, beyond the rarity of an ink inscription on stone. He thinks scholars will continue to be drawn to it.

"It's some kind of prophetic, apocalyptic Jewish text," he says. "I think this stone is as significant as many of the Dead Sea Scrolls. But it doesn't seem to have any value for the discussion of Jesus except by way of general background text, like the Dead Sea Scrolls."

That sounds about right to me, and I've made similar comments here and here.

Further background here, here, here, and here.

THE ROMAN TEMPLE newly excavated in Sepphoris (Zippori) is covered by National Geographic News. Excerpt:

Temple of the Gods

The newfound temple measures about 40-by-78 feet (12-by-24 meters). It was built just south of the decumanus, a colonnaded street running east to west that served as the main thoroughfare in most Roman cities.

The temple originally had a decorated façade, but its walls were plundered in ancient times and only the foundations have survived.

No archaeological evidence was found to indicate the nature of pagan rituals carried out in the temple. The structure was not built like a Jewish synagogue, and formal Christian churches did not exist until at least the third century A.D.

Coins minted in Zippori that date to the time of Antoninus Pius, who ruled Rome from A.D. 138 to 161, depict a temple to the Roman god Jupiter and goddess Fortuna.

"Roman religion of the time was complex and variegated and involved civic religions, mystery religions, personal religions. Romans could function in different religious contexts," said Ed Wright, director of the University of Arizona's Center for Judaic Studies.

Background here.

ART AND EMPIRE: The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has an exhibition on the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Excerpt from the Art Daily article:

Art and Empire chronicles Assyria’s rise from a small landlocked kingdom in northern Mesopotamia to a magnificent empire stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea. Its territories encompassed all of present-day Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, as well as large parts of Israel, Egypt, Turkey, and Iran—the greatest dominion known until that time. The exhibition features artistry created for several great Neo-Assyrian kings, from the first, Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BC) of Nimrud, to the last, Ashurbanipal (668–631 BC), of Nineveh. Art and Empire brings the grandeur of this ancient Near Eastern realm to life through the display of 30 monumental wall reliefs, as well as numerous cuneiform clay tablets, sculpture—both in the round and in relief—and cylinder seals. Works on view range from The king on campaign (about 875–860 BC), a regal wall relief of Ashurnasirpal II going to battle in Kurdistan, to Dying Lion (around 645 BC), the moving image of a noble beast shot by an arrow, in the throes of a painful death, created during the reign of Ashurbanipal. (Among the finest wall relief carvings from this period are those of the lion hunts created for Ashurbanipal’s North Palace at Nineveh.) These are some of the many objects that shed light on the administration of the empire, culture, trade, personal beliefs, and interrelationships among religion, magic, and medicine. Military dress, equipment, and horse trappings illustrating army life, as well as decorative ivory pieces, furniture fittings, and metal vessels showcasing the luxurious cosmopolitan lifestyle enjoyed by royalty, are among the highlights of the exhibition.

[...]

Such rules and regulations, as well as public documents (tax rolls, agricultural records, and treaties), religious rituals, and literary texts were written in cuneiform script and preserved on clay tablets, many of which were discovered by Layard’s protégé, Hormuzd Rassam, from the extensive library at Ashurbanipal’s palace in Nineveh. (In the 19th and 20th century, more than 20,000 cuneiform tablets were excavated by the British Museum.) Ashurbanipal asserted that he could read the wedge-shaped cuneiform script, and his desire to preserve in one place all of the world’s important works of literature and science has been called visionary.

Some of those collected by Ashurbanipal were 1,000 years old at the time. Included in the king’s library were numerous copies of The Epic of Gilgamesh (7th century BC), considered the most important work of Mesopotamian literature. One tablet of Gilgamesh is featured in the Administration and Culture section of Art and Empire, as are intricately carved cylinder seals used by the royal household; when rolled out over clay, the impressions they made served as official seals. Often crafted from semi-precious stone, the cylinders featured scenes of kings, warriors, gods, as well as animals. Such cylinders were used to form a parure, or jewelry set, commissioned by Layard as a wedding gift for his wife, Enid. After wearing her grand necklace of Assyrian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Achaemenian seals, Lady Layard later wrote in her diary that it was “much admired” by Queen Victoria when the Layards dined with her in 1873.

[...]

THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS: THE MOVIE. A seven-minute film on the IAA website.

(Via Jim West on the g-Megillot list.)

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH:

Dome of the Rock 'erased' from Temple Mount

Religious movement’s Tisha B’Av pamphlet shows Temple Mount minus Muslim sites; group chairman says hopes al-Aqsa will be obliterated altogether, not just through Photoshop software

Kobi Nahshoni (Ynetnews)
Published: 08.15.08, 08:08 / Israel Jewish Scene

"On the eve of Tisha B'Av the serious question is raised whether we should take the opportunity and ascend to the Temple Mount as it stands empty, inviting us to build our dream house on it."

Whoever read this caption which appeared on the cover of the Maayanei Hayeshua movement’s latest pamphlet might have thought that this was a symbolic expression of the expected redemption on the eve of Tisha B’Av.

However, those with a keen eye noticed that the huge picture of the Temple Mount which was spread on the cover page was missing the Dome of the Rock, and that the pamphlet “cleaned” the mount of all Muslim signs

[...]

The chairman of the Maayanei Hayeshua movement told Ynet in response that “Jews throughout the world hope for a day in which the al-Aqsa Mosque will actually be obliterated from the Temple Mount and not just by means of Photoshop software.

“We have been waiting for this day for too long. When it happens, Jews from the entire world will come to Jerusalem in order to build the beloved Temple, and no Muslim will dare open his mouth against it. I hope that Israel is indeed ready for this day.”

This is not helpful. The political issues are obvious. I've commented on the archaeological issues here.

THE HADRIAN EXHIBITION is reviewed by Elizabeth Speller in the New Statesman. Excerpt:

Not everyone requires an official narrative, of course. Reviewers sometimes have the opportunity to see an exhibition outside opening hours, and for sensuous pleasure such intimate viewing is an unmatched experience. An exhibition, however, is primarily not a spectacle, but a conduit of information, and watching visitors respond to the displays is informative in itself. The densest bottleneck is around finds from a cave in Israel where Jewish rebels and their families attempted (unsuccessfully) to evade the Roman soldiers. The exhibits are beautifully preserved and mostly very simple: footwear, a straw basket, house keys, letters and a mirror. Almost all are objects familiar from our own lives and resonate with images we know from the aftermath of violent conflict today - and they prove that it is not just precious metal, marble and superb craftsmanship which draw the crowds or re-create the past.

Why Hadrian? He was intelligent, restless and controlling, his political skills consolidated the empire, his aesthetic agenda transformed the city of Rome, and his suppression of Judaea was to store up problems for posterity, but Hadrian was not so much an exceptional emperor as a very good exemplar, not least because such a breadth of material survives him. But ultimately, in common with the major exhibition that preceded it, "The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army", and almost certainly "Babylon", planned for November, this is an exploration of power. Specifically, of absolute power, and how it can marshal unimaginable resources to shape a world.

Background here.

DEAD BODIES are apparently less interesting than the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Well, I would hope so.

THEY AREN'T MADE OF CRYSTAL, but still ...

Three 9,000-Year-Old Skulls Found in Galilee

by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu

(IsraelNN.com) Archaeologists have discovered three 9,000-year-old skulls at the Yiftah'el dig in the Lower Galilee, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced Wednesday. Experts said the placement of the skulls confirms the worship of ancestors from during that time, practiced by displaying skulls inside houses.

[...]

"The skulls were found plastered – that is to say sculpted – which is a phenomenon that is identified with the New Stone Age," said site director Dr. Hamoudi Khalaily. "The practice included the reconstruction of all of the facial features of the deceased by means of sculpting the skull with a variety of materials such as plaster that was specifically intended for this. On the skulls that were found in the excavation the nose was entirely reconstructed."

[...]

And Arutz Sheva has this aside, which perhaps has some potential for the next Indiana Jones movie:

Some Torah authorities explain that findings which are dated before the Jewish date of creation are remnants from worlds which G-d created and destroyed before this world.

Seriously, this is a very interesting find from a period from which very little evidence survives.

ASSYRIANS Mark Genocide Awareness Day.

THE BOOK by Yona Sabar's son Ariel is reviewed by the Jewish Week. Excerpt:

The remarkable arc of Sabar’s life is at the center of his son Ariel Sabar’s outstanding book, “My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq”(Algonquin). In telling his father’s story intertwined with the family’s tales, journalist Sabar reconstructs the little-known history of the Kurdish Jews, who lived in harmony with their non-Jewish neighbors. In Zakho, Muslims would bring tea to their Jewish neighbors on Shabbat, when the Jews weren’t able to cook. Jewish men wore the same baggy trousers and embroidered shirts as Muslims, “even if a few strands of tzitzit poked out from beneath their shirts.”
“My father had staked his life on the notion that the past mattered more than anything,” the younger Sabar writes, adding, “He sublimated homesickness into a career.”
“My Father’s Paradise” is also a deeply personal story of a distant father and son who were ultimately reconciled. Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1980s, Ariel Sabar found his father embarrassing, regarding him as the uncoolest person he knew, with his unstylish clothing and beat-up car, and his passion for ancient languages rather than popular culture.
But, after moving across the country to attend college, falling in love with and marrying a non-Jewish woman and working hard in his first reporting jobs, Sabar was drawn to write about his father after the scholar was called to consult on the television series “The X-Files,” about the language Jesus might have used. For the first time, Sabar asked his father, as he might have questioned any source, about his life in Zakho. His story in the Providence Journal, “Scholar Dad Goes Showbiz: ‘I Am the Walrus’ in Aramaic” brought him a greater response than all of his previous articles combined. He then thought that he had said everything he had to say about his father.

But there was more. The truth is out there.

(Sorry, couldn't resist.)

THE FORT WALLA WALLA MUSEUM in Washington has made what sounds like a strong staff appointment:

Christina Daltoso has joined Fort Walla Walla Museum in the newly created position of executive assistant.

Daltoso is a 2004 Whitman College graduate who majored in history with a focus on the ancient world. She recently completed work at Walla Walla University, where she studied biblical/ancient languages, including classic Arabic, biblical Hebrew and Sumerian.

Having been an intern at the museum, Daltoso was involved in nearly every phase of museum work. In her new role she will assist Executive Director James Payne with the museum's capital campaign and operational issues. The job, which follows an archaeological dig in Jordan this summer for Daltoso, comes as the museum moves into "high gear" on its enhanced services, programs and related facilities project, officials say.

It's always particularly gratifying to encounter employed Sumerologists. Congratulations to Ms. Daltoso and to the Museum.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: The Al Aksa Foundation is grumbling about the Mughrabi (Mugrabi) Gate bridge construction plans:

An Islamic group on Tuesday condemned a long-time Israeli proposal to enlarge the section of the Western Wall allotted for women's prayer.

[...]

The Islamic group, which held an east Jerusalem press conference Tuesday to protest the Israeli plans, denies the existence of the Jewish temples on the Temple Mount and refers to the Western Wall as "the al-Buraq wall."

The plan for the expansion of the women's section at the Western Wall has not yet been approved by a state planning committee.

Actually, I thought that part of the plan had already been rejected. It's never very clear to me which committee (or committees), if any, is allowed to make final decisions on town planning in Jerusalem.

I'M OFF to the Edinburgh book festival. No time for blogging this morning. I'll try to fit some in this evening.

UPDATE (7:45 pm): We heard a very good lecture by Cambridge astrophysicist John D. Barrow on the history of Cosmic Imagery. But the venue was disappointing. The tent where the lecture was held was suffocatingly hot and all the doors were kept closed (to keep noise out?). I've not been to the book festival before, but I would have expected better planning. Oh, and we bought some books too.

THE ROMAN TEMPLE at Sepphoris (Zippori) gets some more coverage from the AP and the Jerusalem Post. Here' the archaeologist's take on the significance of the discovery:

The excavations, undertaken by the Noam Shudofsky Zippori Expedition led by Prof. Zeev Weiss of the university's Institute of Archaeology, shed light on the multi-cultural society of ancient Zippori. They indicate that Zippori, the Jewish capital of Galilee during Roman times, had a significant pagan population which established the temple at the heart of the city, and was later also inhabited by Christians.

"It shows that pagans who were a minority prayed in the center of the city and lived in harmony with the Jewish majority," Weiss said Monday.

Background here.

ARAMAIC WATCH: More on Maaloula (Ma'aloula, Malula) and its new Aramaic Institute:

Syrian villagers keep Jesus' language alive

Brooke Anderson, [San Francisco] Chronicle Foreign Service

(08-11) 17:06 PDT Maaloula, Syria -- Marian Shanees had never seen the letters of her native language of Aramaic. Now, a new program in Maaloula, one of the few places where Aramaic is still spoken, will change that.

"This is the first time I'm seeing my alphabet," said 7-year-old Marian, who started learning the language in early July at the Aramaic Language Institute. "I'm really happy to be studying the language of my ancestors."

Aramaic was the language spoken by Jesus and a Semitic tribe thousands of years ago. Today, it is still spoken in three Syrian villages, Jabaadeen, Serkha and Maaloula - all within an hour's bus ride of the Syrian capital of Damascus.

In the summer of 2007, the institute, in affiliation with the University of Damascus, opened its doors in Maaloula, the main town where Aramaic is spoken. Now, children and adults who grew up speaking the language can learn to read and write it.

[...]

Right now, Maaloula's relatively new Aramaic Committee is trying to gather information on the language from the town's elders to create a modern Aramaic dictionary.

Elias Tajara, 60-year-old former math teacher, is in his second summer teaching Aramaic. For Tajara, who remembers a time when the entire town spoke Aramaic fluently, teaching his native language is more important than math because "it's the language of our forefathers."

[...]

There's also a list of Aramaic words and phrases, presumably in the Maaloula dialect, at the end of the article.

Background here.

THE VIEW FROM MY OFFICE WINDOW:

Lammas Fair 2008
No, I didn't go on the Eclipse ride again (my son did), but I did have more of those doughnuts!

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

SEARCHING ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE at the Tyndale Tech blog.

A ROMAN TEMPLE has been discovered at Sepphoris:

Roman Temple Uncovered In Zippori (Sepphoris)

ScienceDaily (Aug. 11, 2008) — Ruins of a Roman temple from the second century CE have recently been unearthed in the Zippori National Park. Above the temple are foundations of a church from the Byzantine period.

The excavations, which were undertaken by the Noam Shudofsky Zippori Expedition led by of Prof. Zeev Weiss of the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, shed light on the multi-cultural society of ancient Zippori.

[...]

For a couple of recent tourist pieces on Sepphoris, see here and here.

THE PHOENICIA sets sail today to circumnavigate Africa:

Around Africa in a Phoenician boat

Lina Sinjab
BBC News, Damascus

On Arwad Island off the coast of Syria, a group of 20 sailors-to-be are preparing for a voyage their captain believes has not been undertaken for two and a half millennia.

They plan to set off on Sunday on a journey that attempts to replicate what the Greek historian Herodotus mentions as the first circumnavigation of Africa in about 600BC.

Their vessel, the small, pine-wood Phoenicia, is modelled on the type of ship the Phoenician sailors he credited with the landmark voyage would have used.

[...]

The skilful shipbuilders in Arwad are familiar with construction techniques dating back 200-300 years, but shipbuilder Orwa Bader, 28, says this is the first time they have ever tried to build in the Phoenician style.

"Usually it takes three men and two months to build any type of ship. But this time, we needed at least five to 10 builders to work on it over eight months to make it ready. It was a hard but enjoyable job."

The vessel, designed on the basis of information from wrecked ships, pottery and other archaeological artefacts from the era, is made entirely of wood, with a single sail and no engine.

The only concession to 21st Century sailing equipment is its navigational system. Its top speed will be the equivalent of 10km/h on land.

[...]

Bon voyage!

Background here.

THE NINTH OF AV (Tisha B'Av) begins this evening at sundown. An easy fast to all those observing it.

THE GAZA MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY is profiled in the Independent:

The refuge that allows Gaza to reflect on past glories

By Donald Macintyre in Sudaniya, Gaza
Saturday, 9 August 2008

It may seem an odd dilemma in a territory where more than half of families live below an internationally defined poverty line, but Jawdat Khoudary is wondering whether there should be museum charges in Gaza.

As the owner and creator of the Strip's first purpose-built archaeological museum, he has no doubt that the most prized patrons, the organised parties of schoolchildren already starting to flock to it, must come for free. And having sunk a small fortune – he won't say how much – into building this elegant and air-conditioned space overlooking the Mediterranean just north of Gaza City's Shati refugee camp, he certainly isn't trying to make money from it. But the 48-year-old owner of one of Gaza's biggest construction companies worries that if he doesn't charge a couple of shekels for individual entry, Gazans may not realise the value of their heritage as much as he does.

[...]

But even Mr Khoudary's collection is only a small fraction of the dazzling archaeological treasures of the Gaza, those already dug up and dispersed among collections round the world, those plundered and stolen, and those still waiting to be excavated.

However, this half of that fraction is rich enough to make the trip worthwhile. It ranges chronologically from sun-dried clay pots and mud-brick wall fragments from 5,500 years ago to a single – relatively – modern curiosity: a confectionery tin decorated with the portrait of Gamal Abdel Nasser.

In between are hundreds of objects that testify to Gaza's long and turbulent history from the early bronze age to the Ottoman Empire: heavy stone anchors and more recognisable Roman ones; ancient Egyptian alabaster plates; clay wine jars and Corinthian columns from the Byzantine period; oil, water and perfume pots, and a clay wheel from a [now reconstructed] child's toy cart from the Philistine period between 1600BC and 1200BC; glass bottles from the Hellenistic age and miniature sculptures in ivory. And "a very important piece", says Mr Khoudary, the clay coffin lid in the form of a man's head from the 11th century BC.

[...]

The story of Israeli archaeology in Gaza is complex, told in fascinating detail in a new book on the collection at the Israel Museum by Trude Dothan, its greatest practitioner, and the woman who between 1972 and 1982 conducted the scientific excavations at Deir el-Bala in central Gaza. These established that it had been, in the 14th and 13th centuries BC, a prosperous Egyptian or Egyptian-style settlement, including a large official palace with, in its later years, an artisans' village turning out the extraordinary, haunting, anthropoid coffins of the kind now in the Israel Museum.

[...]

Background here.

MORE ON THE DIG AT RAMAT RACHEL from the perspective of the volunteers:

Christians Excavate Holy Land Treasures for Summer Fun
Friday, August 08, 2008
By Julie Stahl

Ramat Rachel, Jerusalem (CNSNews.com) – Imagine spending your summer vacation covered with dust, swinging a pickaxe into stones that are thousands of years old.

Dozens of Christian volunteers and students from around the world are spending a month this summer doing just that -- digging for artifacts from biblical times at an archeological excavation on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

A joint project of Tel Aviv University and Heidelberg University in Germany, the excavations at Ramat Rachel are in their fourth season.

Professor Oded Lipschits from Tel Aviv University told CNSNews.com there are about 75 students – 20 from TAU, 40 from Germany and the rest from North America -- among the 100 volunteers working at the site. Some of the volunteers return year after year, he said.

[...]

Background here.

OH, AND BY THE WAY, happy birthday to me. I'm having a pizza and video evening to celebrate. Later I may go wild and pop some popcorn.

JESUS PLAYED CRICKET, MANUSCRIPT SUGGESTS:

Dr Abraham Terian, recently a visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Humanities, points to a rare manuscript as his source.

He notes that in the Armenian Gospel of the Infancy, translated into Armenian in the 6th century from a much older lost Syriac original, a passage tells of Jesus playing what may well be the precursor of cricket, with a club and ball.

Terian discovered the manuscript more than a decade ago at the Saint James Armenian Monastery in the Old City of Jerusalem.

His English translation of the book has been published by Oxford University Press.

[...]

"The most amazing part of the story of the nine-year-old Jesus playing a form of cricket with the boys at the sea shore, is that he would go on playing the game on water, over the sea waves.''

He gives the following translation: "He (Jesus) would take the boys to the seashore and, carrying the playing ball and the club, he would go over the waves of the sea as though he was playing on a frozen surface, hitting the playing ball. And watching him, the boys would scream and say: 'Watch the child Jesus, what he does over the waves of the sea!' Many would gather there and, watching him, would be amazed.''

[...]

Obviously, this is not about the historical Jesus. But it's very interesting that a Syriac apocryphal tradition that made it into Armenian has Jesus playing something like cricket. The Armenian manuscript is from the thirteenth century, but I would think that the Syriac tradition might well go back to late antiquity, as Professor Terian suggests. I hope Tony Chartrand-Burke takes this one up at Apocryphicity.

HOW WOULD ISAIAH TEXT?

A BYZANTINE-ERA OLIVE PRESS has been discovered in the Galilee:

Large Ancient Olive Press Discovered In Nth Israel
Thursday, 7 August 2008, 10:40 am
Press Release: Israel Government

Large Olive Press Discovered In Northern Israel

6 August 2008 - An ancient olive- oil production complex dating from the 6th-7th Centuries CE – one of the largest ever exposed in Israel – was discovered at Ahihud, in excavations conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority.

A unique and impressive complex for producing oil that dates to the Byzantine period, which is also one of the largest uncovered in the country so far, was discovered recently during trial excavations conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority in Moshav Ahihud, in the Western Galilee. The excavations are being carried out as part of a development plan to enlarge the village.

According to Michael Cohen, the excavation director on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, “a mighty conflagration occurred in the olive press in the seventh century CE. Remains of the blaze, which are quite evident on the walls of the building, destroyed the structure and negated the installation’s use”. This event “preserved” many of the details of the olive press.

[...]

UPDATE" Here's the press release at the IAA website. (Via the Agade list.)

THE RALEIGH DEAD SEA SCROLLS EXHIBITION is reviewed by Brian Howe in IndyWeek.com. Excerpt:

Regardless of the controversy surrounding the exhibit, which we'll address shortly, the presentation is quite impressive. Impatient museumgoers may proceed directly to the dim, climate-controlled room that houses the scroll fragments, but spending an hour or so perusing the background exhibits preceding the scrolls is advisable. A preliminary video looping in a stylized cave, shot in the gauzy style of a Discovery Channel documentary, summarizes the discovery of the scrolls and some of the still-unanswered questions about them, the most troublesome being who actually wrote them and the nature of the settlement of Qumran. This summary video is developed with texts, maps, models, artifacts and a useful audio tour throughout the presentation. You'll learn about the major players in the discovery, interpretation and circulation of the scrolls, and about what daily life was like in this region of the Middle East more than 2,000 years ago.

This being a science museum, you'll also learn how the climate of the caves helped to preserve the scrolls (which began to decompose badly once they were removed from the caves and their linen wraps), and about modern techniques of preservation and reconstruction. You'll learn about the religious and political climate in which the scrolls were written, and you'll see an amazing array of ancient artifacts recovered from Qumran: coins, ossuaries, leather sandals, linen tunics, phylacteries (or tefillin, in Hebrew), combs, pottery and oil lamps. All of this provides a remarkably thorough and immersive context in which the viewer can perceive the scroll fragments with the proper depth and gravity.

Background here, here, and here.

EMPEROR HADRIAN: YOU-TUBE HERO. Sort of. Tom Holland reviews the British Museum Hadrian exhibition for the London Times. Excerpt:

It is the supreme merit of the new exhibition Hadrian: Empire and conflict at the British Museum that it meets these issues head on, and from the start. Directly inside the vestibule, the darkness is lit by the flickering of a video screen: images of our moody, backlit hero loom, then morph back into the shadows, just as they might do on a particularly stylish YouTube promo. This is Hadrian as international man of mystery: “always in all things changeable”, as the Historia Augusta described him. Next to the screen there stands a solitary display-case, containing a couple of Marguerite Yourcenar’s notebooks, and a manuscript of Mémoires d’Hadrien.

It is possible that not a few visitors, drawn by the promise of a blockbuster show, will feel themselves to have been mildly short-changed as they stare down at an assortment of scribblings in French and Latin – but they should not abandon hope. Carry on into the Reading Room, where the main body of the exhibition is being staged, and all their expectations will be spectacularly met. For directly ahead of them, positioned at the top of a stairway, they will find three hulking pieces of marble, fragments of the kind of statue that form our own picture of Imperial Rome. A giant foot, a chunk of leg, and a colossal head: here are exhibits that have never before been displayed. Indeed, only a year ago, no one even suspected that they so much as existed: for they lay buried amid the ruins of the Pisidian city of Sagalassos, in what is now south-west Turkey. A photograph of the head at the precise moment of its discovery, still half-covered by dirt, serves to emphasize the point that is being made here. There can never be a final history of Hadrian. New finds will always be made. Memorials to the Emperor’s reign will continue to be uncovered and dusted down. Dead he may be, and the Empire he ruled as well, but the study of ancient Rome, and the ways in which we interpret it, refuse to stand still.

[...]

This is an exhibition in which context is all.

Take, for example, the section which showcases what is, to a British audience, the most familiar monument from Hadrian’s reign: his Wall. To earlier generations – and it may be to the Romans themselves – this massive undertaking served as an inspiringly visible stamp of Rome’s civilizing mission. “An encamped army encloses the fairest portion of the world in a ring like a rampart”: so gushed Aelius Aristeides, enthusing over Rome’s supposed eirenic vocation. Recent scholarship, however, has given such rhapsodies predictably short shrift. The Wall now tends to be seen in a much more sinister light, less as a bulwark of civilization than as a deliberately intimidatory tool of control and repression. Even so, it can still give a jolt to turn from inspecting artefacts as familiar as the Vindolanda tablets to the adjacent display-case, where there is another letter, very different in tone, waiting to be perused. Written on the orders of the Jewish insurrectionist Simon bar Kokhba – or perhaps even in his very hand – it was found in the so-called Cave of Letters, where desperate refugees had ended up taking refuge after the failure of the third Jewish uprising against Roman rule in barely fifty years.

The twin troves of letters, one found on the moors of northern England, and the other in a desert wadi beside the Dead Sea, have never before been brought together – and their close proximity serves to inspire a measure of sombre reflection. Britannia and Judaea, for all that they stood at the opposite ends of the Empire, suddenly do not seem so far apart. We know that the general entrusted by Hadrian with the ultimate suppression of the Jewish revolt throughout 135–6 was one Sextus Julius Severus, a former governor of Britain. The same man who was to show himself so proficient in the arts of counter-insurgency and extermination in Judaea would also have been intimately involved in the construction of the Wall. This, in Hadrian’s Empire, was what globalization could mean.

[...]

A thoughtful review, although, as usual, it tries too hard to find improving parallels to the world of 2008.

Background here.

GOG, OG, WHATEVER.

Background here.

THE CARTHAGINIANS and their ancient Mediterranean neighbors as consultants for modern global computer networking? Yep.

You might be forgiven for wondering just what the traditions, techniques and technologies of crafts-people from Ancient Greece who lived between 1500 and 200 BCE could have to do with the development of something so cutting-edge as global ubiquitous computing.

Yet a University of Leicester-led project, working with teams from the Universities of both Exeter and Glasgow in the United Kingdom, has just been awarded UKP £1.75 million from the Leverhulme Trust to investigate just that.

'Tracing Networks: Craft Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond' received the award for its theme of networking. Combining archaeology, archaeological science and computer science to investigate not only ancient cultural networks but to apply that knowledge to modern computer networking concepts.

Looking at these ancient networks across the Mediterranean region, encompassing Greek, Punic and other peoples, the research will focus on crafts-people of the period. It will ask how, and why, their traditions, techniques and technologies changed during that time and managed to cross cultural boundaries.

[...]

Gosh, £1.75 million. Wish I'd thought of that.

WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH – New decisions on the Mughrabi (Mugrabi) Gate bridge reconstruction project:

Panel nixes expansion at Western Wall
By Akiva Eldar, Haaretz Correspondent
Tags: Mugrabi Gate, Western Wall

The Interior Ministry's Jerusalem District Planning and Construction Committee approved the original plan of the reconstruction project for the Temple Mount's Mugrabi Gate on the condition that certain changes be made in it. At the end of a hearing some two weeks ago, the committee accepted the objections submitted by the Ir Amim organization to the plan for transformation of the area underneath the new bridge into a space for Jewish prayers. In so doing, it rejected an initiative of the Western Wall's rabbi, Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz, which had gained the support of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, to take advantage of the collapse of the bridge as an opportunity to expand the women's section at the site.

The bridge leading from the Western Wall plaza collapsed in 2004, and the "rescue dig" conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority ahead of construction of a new bridge sparked the anger of the Muslim Waqf, the Arab world and especially Jordan and Turkey. The significance of this latest decision is that it will now be necessary to revise the construction plans according to the committee's directives before a building permit is issued.

[...]

Background here and keep following the links back.

THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY is advertising a number of academic posts:

Hebrew University of Jerusalem - Tenure-track and tenured positions for appointments beginning in the academic year of 2009/10

The academic departments of the Faculty of Humanities invites applications from outstanding candidates (Ph.D. required, postdoctoral training highly desireable) for tenure-track and tenured positions in the following fields:

Arabic Language and Literature
Comparative Literature
Hebrew Language: Biblical Hebrew/ Modern Hebrew
Holocaust Studies
Islamic Material Culture and Archaeology
Jewish History of the Biblical period
Modern Hebrew Literature
Philosophy
Romance Studies: Spanish Language and Literature
Talmud
Theatre Studies
Yiddish Language and Literature

Responsibilities will include teaching both required and elective courses in the candidate's field(s) of specialization and related disciplines.

The language of instruction is Hebrew.

Candidates should provide 12 copies of the application no later than September 1, 2008.

For details please see our site www.hum.huji.ac.il at "faculty news".

Please note that finalists may be requested to deliver a lecture on the subject of their research. Rank will be determined according to the candidate's qualifications. Appointment will begin on October 1, 2009.

Contact Info:
Prof. Israel Bartal
Dean
Faculty of Humanities
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Mount Scopus 91905
Jerusalem
Israel
Website: http://www.hum.huji.ac.il/

From the H-Judaic list.

LARRY SCHIFFMAN will be speaking on the Dead Sea Scrolls in Raleigh, N.C.:

NC Museum To Host Dead Sea Scrolls Lecture
By The Raleigh Telegram Staff 04.AUG.08

RALEIGH The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in downtown Raleigh is hosting an eight-part lecture series about Israel at the time of the scrolls as part of its The Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition.

The museum says that New York University Professor Lawrence Schiffman will present the second lecture of the series called "Israel at the Time of the Dead Sea Scrolls," on Wednesday, August 27 at 4pm and again at 7 pm in the Museum's WRAL Digital Theater. The museum says that due to the overwhelming popularity of the first lecture, the Museum strongly recommends purchasing tickets in advance.

[...]

According to the museum, the Second Temple period (538 BC - 70 AD) was a pivotal time in ancient Israel, beginning with the conquest of Alexander the Great that expanded
the rise of Hellenism and the great Jewish religious movements.

Schiffman will survey these developments and illustrate their significance, providing background for the Dead Sea Scrolls and explaining how they have enriched the understanding of the history of this period, says the museum.

Schiffman is Edelman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and Chair of the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University. He lectures widely on the Dead Sea Scrolls; Jewish religious, political and social history in late antiquity; as well as
the history of Jewish law and Talmudic literature.

[...]

A COIN FIND at the Ramat Rachel excavation:

J'lem Dig turns up gold coins from end of Second Temple period
By Ofri Ilani (Haaretz)
Tags: archeology, second temple

In ancient times, the inhabitants of the Land of Israel and its environs would raise pigeons in underground caves. Called "columbariums," the caves had small niches, in which the birds laid their eggs. Over the years many columbariums have been unearthed at ancient sites around the country, particularly at those containing finds from the Second Temple period. A few days ago, archaeologists made a most surprising find at the bottom of such a columbarium, at a site at Kibbutz Ramat Rachel near Jerusalem - a hoard of coins from the time of the destruction of the Second Temple (70 C.E.).

Late in July, archaeologists from Tel Aviv University identified, beneath the floor of the columbarium, a ceramic cooking pot from the 1st century C.E. that held 15 large gold coins. "It's very special to find a hoard like this, and it's very exciting," related the director of the excavations at the site, Dr. Oded Lipschits, of TAU. "We discovered the hoard with a metal detector, and then we went down into the niche and found this small cooking pot inside it."

[...]

The article also mentions the find of Byzantine coins noted earlier on PaleoJudaica. Follow the link for the Ramat Rachel excavation blog.

Also, reader Brent Neely points out that the article seems to have confused the Babylonian Exile of Judah with the earlier (8th century BCE) Assyrian exile of Israel:

Lipschits believes that the palace was built during the period of the Assyrian subjugation. "This entire complex is, in my opinion, an administrative center for the occupying regime, a place where agricultural produce was collected, for delivery as a tax to the Assyrians."

During the period of the return to Zion (beginning 539 B.C.E.), the Assyrian regime was replaced by a Persian one, but the administrative center continued to operate. ...

UPDATE (6 August): Todd Bolen thinks the journalist got it right.

INFLATED HEADLINE OF THE WEEK:

Archaeologists unearth proof of plot to kill Prophet Jeremiah
By Nadav Shragai, Haaretz Correspondent
Tags: Jerusalem, Israel

Israeli archaeologists have unearthed a seal impression belonging to a minister of the biblical King Zedekiah, which dates back 2,600 years, during an archeological dig in Jerusalem's ancient City of David. The finding helps corroborate the story pertaining to the biblical minister's demand to have the prophet Jeremiah killed.

[...]

The seal impression does support the probability that the book of Jeremiah remembers some historical details from Jeremiah's time, but it's a long stretch from there to say it proves the historicity of this particular story.

Background here.

(Via Joseph I. Lauer, who comments, "I'm sure that the article's title will bring comments on many a blog." Indeed. He also notes, "Ha'aretz's Hebrew on-line article is longer and includes a reference to the Temple Mount Antiquities Salvage Operation of Dr. Gabriel Barkay and Zachi Zweig and that project's use of wet sifting of debris, a method which the article credits for the find of the Gedalyahu bulla in the City of David excavations of Dr. Eilat Mazar.")

BIBLICAL STUDIES CARNIVAL XXXII has been published by John F. Hobbins at the Ancient Hebrew Poetry blog. It is very thorough and comes in three parts: (1) Rock Hard Rockin’ Scholarship based on Primary Sources; (2) Controversies; and (3) Posts on Specific Texts.

TODAY IS A PUNIC ANNIVERSARY:

216 BC - A Carthaginian army lead by Hannibal defeated a numerically superior Roman army at the Battle of Cannae. It happened during the Second Punic War as Rome and Carthage battled it out for control of the mediterranean and its trade and riches.

More here.

UPDATE (4 August): Dorothy King has more here.

MORE EPIGRAPHIC NEWS:

Seal of King Zedekiah's minister found in J'lem dig
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS (Jerusalem Post)

A seal impression belonging to a minister of the Biblical King Zedekiah which dates back 2,600 years has been uncovered completely intact during an archeological dig in Jerusalem's ancient City of David, a prominent Israeli archeologist said on Thursday.

The seal impression, or bulla, with the name Gedalyahu ben Pashur, who served as minister to King Zedekiah (597-586 BCE) according to the Book of Jeremiah, was found just meters away from a separate seal impression of another of Zedekia's ministers, Yehukual ben Shelemyahu, which was uncovered three years ago, said Prof. Eilat Mazar who is leading the dig at the site.

The excavation at the history-rich City of David, which is located just outside the walls of the Old City near Dung Gate, has proven, in recent years, to be a treasure trove for archeologists.

"On the one hand it is so unexpected to find such a fragile bulla in such harsh conditions of excavation, while on the other hand it was logical to find precisely here the bulla of Gedalyahu ben Pashur - only meters away from the place where we found the bulla of Yehukhal ben Shelemyahu - since these two ministers are mentioned side by side in the Bible as having served together in the kingdom of King Zedekiah," Mazar said.

[...]

Both ministers are mentioned in the Book of Jeremiah (Jeremiah 38 1-4) along with two other ministers when they came to King Zedekiah demanding the death of the prophet Jeremiah for preaching to the besieged city to surrender.

[...]

Again, excellent news. An Iron Age II (i.e., First Temple era) Hebrew inscription scientifically excavated and bearing a name that (given the date and location) is very likely to be of a person mentioned in the Bible. That's pretty impressive.

For the Yehukhal (Jehucal) seal, see here, here, and here.

Incidentally, assuming Pashhur the father of Gedaliah is the same person as Pashhur the son of Malchiah (they both are mentioned in Jer 38:1), he also figures in the More Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Project. Darrell Hannnah is translating Jeremiah's Prophecy to Pashhur, a brief apocryphal text preserved in Sahidic Coptic and Ethiopic. You can read more about it here.

(Via Joseph I. Lauer's list.)

UPDATE (4 August): More here. Also, Douglas Mangum has blog roundups on the Biblia Hebraica blog here and here.

EPIGRAPHIC NEWS from Jack Sasson's Agade list:

From Foy Scalff (calffd@uchicago.edu):
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NEW ALPHABETIC INSCRIPTION FROM ZINCIRLI

On July 21, 2008, the Neubauer Expedition to Zincirli, directed by Prof. David Schloen of the University of Chicago and by associate director Amir Fink, found an inscribed basalt stele at the site of Zincirli (pronounced "Zin-jeer-lee") in Gaziantep province in southeastern Turkey.

The remarkably well-preserved stele, 70 centimeters wide and 95 centimeters tall, was found intact in its original location. It was set into a stone wall with its protruding tenon still inserted into the stone-paved floor. The alphabetic inscription on the stele is written in Sam'alian, the language spoken in the region of Zincirli (ancient Sam'al) during the Iron Age.

It commemorates the life of "Kattammuwa servant of Panamuwa," probably a high official of King Panamuwa, who reigned during the eighth century B.C. A bearded figure is depicted on the stele, seated in a chair in front of a table laden with food. Beside him is a thirteen-line inscription, elegantly carved in raised relief and preserved in almost pristine condition nearly three millennia after it was inscribed. It describes the establishment of the memorial stele and associated mortuary rites. This stele is unique in its combination of pictorial and textual features and thus is an important addition to our knowledge of ancient language and culture.

An analysis and translation of the inscription will be presented by Prof. Dennis Pardee of the University of Chicago at the November 2008 meeting of the Society for Biblical Literature in Boston and will be published soon thereafter.

Zincirli is the site of the ancient walled city of Sam'al, capital of an Iron Age kingdom that inherited both West Semitic and Neo-Hittite (Luwian) cultural traditions. The 40-hectare (100-acre) site was first excavated more than a hundred years ago and produced a number of royal inscriptions and other fascinating finds that are on display in various museums. Since 2006, Zincirli has been excavated annually by a team from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago—the Neubauer Expedition, a large-scale and long-term project of archaeological research at this important site.

This is excellent news. It's exciting to have a new, substantial Northwest Semitic inscription, one that was actually excavated scientifically and whose provenance and authenticity are not in doubt.

UPDATE (1 August): Peter Bekins comments at Balshanut and notes some bibliography on the language of Sam'al. He also points to a post by H H Hardy at Daily Hebrew. Hardy has seen the inscription, but cannot disclose its contents before Dennis Pardee presents a paper on in at the SBL meetings in November. But he promises "it is well worth the admission price for the Boston meeting, both from the point of view of philology and archeaology!" I'll be looking forward to Professor Pardee's presentation.

SHE'AN NIGHTS – more virtual history:

She'an Nights, a multi-media multi-sensory night tour of the ancient city of Beit She'an-Scythopolis, has recently opened at the Beit She'an National Park, located in the Jordan Valley. Developed at a cost of $3 million in a joint initiative of the Ministry of Tourism via the Israel Government Tourist Corporation, the Israel Nature and National Parks Protection Authority and the Beit She'an Municipality, this unique project is the first of its type in the world in an archeological site and the fourth largest such project in the world.

[...]

She'an Nights, which is expected to attract 400,000 visitors annually, will operate nine months of the year, offering visitors the opportunity to enjoy the site in the cool night air in a region known for its sweltering summer days. After watching a 10 minute presentation that relates the history of the area (in English or Hebrew), visitors set off on a multi-sensory experience as they stroll through the streets of the excavated city of Scythopolis with its marble columns, stone streets, bathhouses, temples and mosaics, while watching audiovisual presentations projected onto dozens of giant screens on the columns, walls and even the tel behind the site.

[...]

Related story here.

ARAMAIC WATCH: The Catholic News Service has a nice piece on Maaloula (Ma'aloula, Malula) with information on its new Aramaic Institute:

In the Syrian desert, the language of Jesus lives on

By Brooke Anderson
Catholic News Service

MAALOULA, Syria (CNS) -- Aramaic, the language of Jesus that flourished in villages thousands of years ago, is being kept alive in the Syrian desert, about an hour's drive from Damascus.

Today, Aramaic is spoken in Maaloula, an ancient mountainous town with two historic monasteries, Catholic and Orthodox, both built into the cliffs.

Georgette Halabi, a tour guide at St. Serge Melkite Catholic convent in Maaloula, grew up speaking Aramaic.

"I don't write it," she said. "But I want to learn."

[...]

In the summer of 2007, the language went through something of a renaissance in Maaloula when the town, with the encouragement of the Syrian government, opened the Aramaic Language Institute. The program teaches written Aramaic to students of all ages, particularly children, and is affiliated with the University of Damascus.

"I've been studying since the school opened," said 11-year-old Murshed Diab, as he played with his friends on a hot summer evening after classes. "It's useful. They teach us songs in Aramaic."

His sister, Bushra Diab, 13, added: "People here don't speak Arabic. It's Aramaic. They teach us the alphabet, and I'm already starting to learn complex grammar."

The two siblings began singing an Aramaic song they learned in school, and their playmates quickly joined in.

[...]

A group of scholars from Germany started studying Aramaic in Maaloula about 20 years ago, when the language had begun to die.

"The Germans opened our eyes and showed us we had something special," Rihan said. "A lot of Arabic had entered the language, and it (Aramaic) had almost died. It was resuscitated."

Now, Maaloula's relatively new Aramaic Committee is trying to gather information on the language from the town's elders to create a modern Aramaic dictionary. But Rihan said he hoped this was only the beginning.

[...]

Indeed. More power to them.

Background here. This article is much more upbeat than the NYT piece in April. And here's a post noting the founding of the Aramaic Institute in 2004.

TEL BEIT SHEMESH is giving up its secrets to archaeologists:

'The land, my lord, will be lost forever'
By Ran Shapira (Haaretz)
Tags: Canaan, Egypt, excavation

"To the king my lord and my sun: These are the words of your servant, Belit-nesheti [literally, "mistress of lions/lionesses"]. I fall at the king's feet seven times over. I must tell the king that this country is witnessing [acts of] hostility and that the land of the king, my lord, will be lost forever."

A Canaanite queen from one of the cities in Palestine's lowland sent this desperate request in the 14th century B.C.E. to Pharaoh, king of Egypt. The name of the city ruled by Belit-nesheti is not mentioned in this letter or in others that depict violent acts that aroused in her a justified feeling that she was facing a dire threat.

During that period, the city of Gezer, and the Ajalon and Sorek valleys were the scene of events that seriously challenged the rule of Belit-nesheti and other monarchs.

In another letter, she conveys the following information: "The Apiru have written to Ajalon and Zorah and the two sons of Milkilu [king of Gezer] have been almost beaten to death. I must inform the king of this act." In yet another letter, she relates that one of the cities in the area under her rule has fallen to the Apiru, and she calls to the king, "I beg the king to save his land from the hands of the Apiru, before it is too late."

The Apiru, mentioned in various documents from different parts of the ancient Near East, were a people that had been uprooted from society and which had abandoned its native land. They formed bands that engaged in robbery and in the collection of protection money, and they served as mercenaries whom the rulers of the various Canaanite cities under Egyptian rule at the time recruited as a military force when they wanted to attack their enemies. The Apiru were supported by the powerful rulers of neighboring cities who sought to seize control of her city.

Her cries for assistance from Pharaoh, who was during this period the supreme ruler of the region and of a number of Canaanite cities, elicited no response, as indicated by the findings that have recently been discovered in Tel Beit Shemesh, about a half-hour's drive from Jerusalem. Prof. Shlomo Bunimovitz and Dr. Zvi Lederman, both of Tel Aviv University's Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology, have been conducting excavations there since 1990. In their scholarly opinion, the city was devastated in a monstrous wave of violence; the remnants extant from that massive act of destruction have been uncovered in the past few weeks. In Tel Beit Shemesh, site of this ancient Canaanite city, archaeologists have discovered entire walls that collapsed in a huge fire, which apparently occurred in the mid-14th century B.C.E. Inter alia, they have found a structures containing more than 200 toppled bricks, which show the effects of exposure to the extreme heat of the massive blaze. Adjacent to the bricks, the foundations of the plastered walls from which they fell have also been uncovered.

[...]

Belit-nesheti's letters are part of a collection of letters written in cuneiform in the Akkadian language (the lingua franca of that era) on clay tablets, that was discovered in the late 19th century in Egypt in Tel Amarna, which is located midway between Cairo and Luxor. ...

This looks like a rare case of ancient inscriptions and archaeology mutually informing one another.

UPDATE: Dead link now fixed. Sorry.

THE RAMAT RACHEL ARCHAEOLOGICAL DIG has a blog, maintained by Keren Pedersen. Keren writes, "In case you're not familiar with the dig's particulars, it's at the Ramat Rahel kibbutz outside Jerusalem, with the earliest known settlement there a probably-Assyrian administrative center from around the time of King Hezekiah." So far they've found some la-melekh seal impressions, a Byzantine coin hoard, and a bomb.

UPDATE (31 July): Bad link fixed. Sorry, I seem to have a lot of these this week.

WANT TO SEE some fake Syriac? Go here. Story here, here, and here.

Caveat emptor! (How do you say that in Aramaic?)

THE GOSPEL HOAX by Stephen C. Carlson is reviewed by Jill Kamil in Al-Ahram. Excerpt:

Carlson reveals in his Gospel Hoax that Smith's career, at the time he penned the fake, had come to a standstill. In 1955 he was denied tenure at the university where he had begun his career. "A successful hoax could be exactly what Smith needed," Carlson wrote, "to prove to himself that he was smarter than his peers and might even jump start his career in the process." But that motive, if that was the reason for his hoax, was overcome by events when Smith landed a position at Columbia University, wrote a successful book on ancient history, and was made a full professor in 1962. Was his intention, then, ultimately to fool and then enrage the Establishment, while the scholar in him had to make his confession by planting clues of deception in the text? Carlson thinks so. He suggests that it was a joke in order to reveal, if and when it was eventually discovered, just how clever he was!

If Morton Smith's invention of Secret Mark was, as Carlson reveals, a brilliant work of deception, it is unfortunate that he is not around to witness his exposure. Morton Smith died in 1991.

I like Hurtado's comment: "Far from being some lost version of the story of Jesus, Secret Mark is uncovered as a great practical joke -- one that keeps Morton Smith laughing from his grave".

IT'S NOT MERKAVAH MYSTICISM but maybe it's the next best thing:

HEAVEN ON EARTH
A Virtual Tour of Our Holy Temple
Wednesdays: July 30, August 6 and 13
7:30 - 9:00 pm (Jewishinstlouis.org)

This summer, nearly 2,000 years since the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, Chabad of Greater St. Louis will unveil Heaven on Earth, a three-week interactive course developed by the renowned Rohr Jewish Learning Institute, which recreates the ancient Jerusalem Temples from the ground up. Heaven on Earth will be offered at the Lazaroff Chabad Center, at 8124 Delmar Blvd., in University City, on three consecutive Wednesday evenings, 7:30 to 9 pm, beginning on July 30.

Through an interactive and innovative virtual tour, Heaven on Earth will enable students to conceptualize the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, allowing them to “walk through” the Temple’s ancient corridors, throng with the crowds through Jerusalem’s gates, and discover the marvels of architecture and design that were integral to this sacred site. Heaven on Earth provides students with an explanation for the central role the Holy Temple plays in the life and history of the Jewish people, and why to this day Jews of all stripes pray for the Temple’s rebuilding and converge upon the Western Wall, its surviving remnant.

[...]

BORIS JOHNSON orates in Latin and offers current political commentary on the Emperor Hadrian.

FUN FACT: Robinson Crusoe has been translated into Coptic:

Despite such a title, and despite the absence of a love angle, the positive reception was immediate and universal. Before the end of the year, the first volume had run through four editions. By the end of the 19th century, the book had spawned multitudinous editions, including children’s picture books with little or no text. The book was translated even into languages such as Inuit, Coptic, and Maltese. ...

I wonder about Aramaic.

THE VISION OF BARACK – another newly published messianic inscription:

He ventured forth to bring light to the world
The anointed one's pilgrimage to the Holy Land is a miracle in action - and a blessing to all his faithful followers

Gerard Baker (London Times)

And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness.

[...]

As usual with such things, its authenticity is debated. And in any case, elements of the account are arguably legendary.

(Background here.)