ANOTHER 250th anniversary this month:

British museum director talking collections
An extract from Neil MacGregor's anniversary lecture where he reflects on the great works made by humans throughout history

Neil MacGregor (London Times)

It was 250 years ago this month that the British Museum first opened its doors to the public. When you visit the museum today, you visit somewhere that is like no other collection, no other building on earth. It is the only place where you can, in every sense, walk through the world, and through time, and look at the whole range of what humans have made and speculate as to what they have thought.

[...]

More on Neil MacGregor and the British Museum here.

THE TIMUBKTU ARCHIVES now have a library devoted to their conservation:

S. Africa helps Mali modernise ancient libraries
Sat Jan 24, 2009 2:44pm EST

By Rainer Schwenzfeier

TIMBUKTU, Mali, Jan 24 (Reuters) - South Africa and Mali opened a high-tech library in the Malian desert town of Timbuktu on Saturday, boosting efforts to preserve thousands of ancient manuscripts documenting Africa's academic past.

The launch is part of a South African plan to help Mali to protect up to 150,000 manuscripts, some of which date from the 13th century and document subjects ranging from science and the arts to social and business trends of the day.

South Africa has also been training Malian conservators to protect the texts, which some say will force the West to accept Africa has an intellectual history as old as its own. Others draw comparisons with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

[...]

Background here and keep following the links back. For why I think this is interesting see here and here.

I'M OFF to the St. Mary's College Burns Night Supper, this year celebrating the 250th anniversary of Robert Burns's birth. (I know we're a night early, but that's just how the scheduling worked out.)

APRIL DECONICK asks, What can I contribute to The Jesus Project? With people like April and James Crossley involved in the Jesus Project, I'm optimistic that it will produce some significant contributions.

ARAMAIC WATCH: The Mor Gabriel Syriac Orthodox Monastery in Turkey has become the center of a land controversy:

Christian monastery in Turkey fights to keep land
Wed Jan 21, 2009 8:02pm EST

21 Jan 2009

By Ibon Villelabeitia

MIDYAT, Turkey (Reuters) - In a remote village near the Turkish-Syrian border, a land dispute with neighboring villages is threatening the future of one of the world's oldest functioning Christian monasteries.

Critics say the dispute, which has become a rallying cry for Christian church groups across Europe, is a new chapter in the long history of religious persecution of the small Christian community by the Turkish state.

Tucked amid rugged hills where minarets rise in the distance, a small group of monks chants in Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ, inside the fifth-century Mor Gabriel monastery. It is a relic of an era when hundreds of thousands of Syriac Christians lived and worshipped in Turkey.

"This is our land. We have been here for more than 1,600 years," said Kuryakos Ergun, head of the Mor Gabriel Foundation, surveying the barren land and villages from the monastery's rooftop. "We have our maps and our records to prove it. This is not about land. It's about the monastery."

The dispute, on which a court is due to rule on February 11, is testing freedom of religion and human rights for non-Muslim minorities in this overwhelmingly Muslim country that aspires to join the European Union.

The row began when Turkish government land officials redrew the boundaries around Mor Gabriel and the surrounding villages in 2008 to update a national land registry.

The monks say the new boundaries turn over to the villages large plots of land the monastery has owned for centuries, and designate monastery land as public forest. Christian groups believe officials want to ultimately stamp out the Syriac Orthodox monastery.

[...]

AINA reports on a response in Europe:

"Save the monastery of Mor Gabriel, save Christendom in Turkey" -- that is the slogan of a huge demonstration planned for Sunday, Jan. 15, in Berlin. Its aim is to help safeguard the existence of Mor Gabriel -- also known as the Monastery of St. Gabriel -- which is the spiritual center of Syrian-Orthodox Christians in Turkey. Founded in 397, it is the oldest surviving Syriac Orthodox monastery in the world. It is located on the Tur Abdin plateau in Southeastern Turkey, the motherland of the Syriac people. Its main purpose is to keep Syriac Orthodox Christianity alive in the land of its birth by providing schooling and the ordination of native-born monks. Throughout its long history, it has also provided physical protection to Turkey's Christian minority. The so-called "Action Mor Gabriel" was founded by S.E. Mor Julius Dr. Hanna Aydin, the Archbishop of the Syrian-Orthodox church of Antiochia in Germany in November 2008. It unites six organizations, namely the Archdiocese of Syrian-Orthodox Churches in Germany, the umbrella organization of Tur Abdin, the European Syriac Union, the Federation of Armenians in Germany, the Federation Survoye and the Central Council of Assyrian Associations in Germany. The managing director of the "Action Mor Gabriel" is Raid Gharib, a German citizen of Turkish descent. He is a political scientist working at the university of Tübingen on a Ph.D. entitled "Nation and identity of the Syriac Christians: The quest for a feasible societal model."

A CATALOGUE of the 800 Hebrew manuscripts in the Vatican:

Vatican catalogs its Hebrew manuscripts

January 21, 2009

ROME (JTA) -- With the help of Israeli scholars, the Vatican has published a catalog of the Hebrew manuscripts kept in its library.

Publication of the work, a Vatican communique said, "represents a significant example of co-operation between the cultural institutions of the Holy See and of Israel."

[...]

(Via Joseph I. Lauer's list.)

BOOK NOTE from Wesleyan University's page on recent alumni/ae doings:

Sharp ’85 Finds Irony in Hebrew Scriptures
In her fascinating new study, Irony and Meaning in the Hebrew Bible (Indiana University Press), Carolyn J. Sharp ’85, associate professor of Hebrew Scriptures at Yale Divinity School, suggests that many stories in the Hebrew Scriptures may be ironically intended. By interweaving literary theory and exegesis, she examines the power of the unspoken in a wide variety of texts from the Pentateuch, the Prophets, and the Writings. Her book considers such themes as foreign rulers and the fear of God, the prostitute as icon of the ironic gaze, indeterminacy and dramatic irony in prophetic performance, and irony in ancient Israel’s wisdom traditions.

Sharp pays special attention to how irony can challenge the dominant ways in which the Bible is read today, especially when it touches on questions of conflict, gender, and the other.

Sharp’s research continues to explore the composition, redaction, and rhetoric of Hebrew Scripture texts. She is also the author of Prophecy and Ideology in Jeremiah: Struggles for Authority in the Deutero-Jeremianic Prose; and Old Testament Prophets for Today.

ARAMAIC WATCH: Another novel featuring a fictional Aramaic inscription:

The plot spins on a silver bracelet found in the sands of Myrtle Beach by Jesus with a metal detector. Jesus' real name is Gary, but the mysteriously inscribed bracelet briefly annoints him to followers Mark and Luke.

The bracelet passes through several hands in "Jesus Swept's" 276 pages: from Jesus to fiftysomething Liz Forsythe, the director of planned giving at Duke University, to redneck twins Hook and Sinker, the former nicknamed for the five-inch-long shark hook she ripped through her brother's bicep when he "tried his hand on her."

The inscription is translated by Liz's tiny, lesbian professor friend Gloria Grace in the Village of Weaver Woods. It turns out to be Aramaic and at least 1,000 years old. It's not giving anything away to say the inscription reads "Good works do. Kind and loving be. Joy in pleasure seek. ... These are the threads of life full filled."

How do you say that in Aramaic? In any case, I think Bill and Ted said it better with "Be excellent to each other" and "Party on, dudes!"

ANOTHER JESUS PROJECT ESSAY has been posted on the Bible and Interpretation website:

Jesus Projects and a Different Kind of Minimalism (Perhaps)

Historical Jesus scholarship still pushes the “great man” view of history with Jesus the individual massively influential. One of the ways in which the Jesus Project could provide a distinctive contribution to scholarship is to challenge and test this general scholarly assumption by analyzing broader socio-historical trends underlying the emergence of the historical Jesus and Christian origins.

By James Crossley
Senior Lecturer in New Testament Studies
Department of Biblical Studies
University of Sheffield, UK
January 2009

Crossley comes up with some ideas that might well move elements of the field of Christian Origins forward. Excerpt:

As Hoffmann pointed out, “the possibility that Christianity arose from causes that have little to do with a historical founder is one among many other questions the Project should take seriously. Inevitably, scholars and critics (if not always the same people) will ask, And just how do you go about doing that?, and neither the answer ‘Differently’ or ‘Better’ will suffice.” While my attitude towards historical Jesus studies is increasingly deconstructive, I hope I can add some constructive comments here and suggest ways in which the Project might go about “doing that,” namely ways to challenge or test the dominant assumption that Jesus was singularly so influential. There is enough work on social history and social anthropology and enough empirical data collected and analyzed to exploit these issues. Areas ripe for exploitation might include: social networks, ethnic interaction, and the origins of gentile inclusion; class-conflicts and the emergence of a new religion; universal monotheism, developments in communication, and the origins of the deification of Jesus; and so on. In each case, the influence of Jesus the individual could be tested. We might even get answers to big, big questions. Perhaps the historical Jesus was influential in changes which brought about Christian distinctiveness and identity, perhaps he was not, or perhaps his individual influence was somewhere in between. Perhaps broader socio-economic developments better explain change than the individual; in this case, we could add a further question: why was the figure of Jesus the object of affection? Perhaps Jesus’ teaching was a crucial factor in interacting with longer- and medium-term trends in historical development. Big though these questions undoubtedly are, they are not questions widely discussed in historical Jesus scholarship.

Go for 'em.

Background here.

JUDAICA AND HEBRAICA UP FOR AUCTION:

First, Antiques and the Arts Online reports on Sotheby's sales from the Delmonico Judaica Collection, including the following:

The sale's top price was achieved by an extremely rare and exquisite Fifteenth Century illuminated Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, on vellum completed by Levi ben Aaron Halfan in Florence, 1489, which sold for $362,500. A series of 40 lots from the Babylonian Talmud printed in Venice by Daniel Bomberg, 11 of which derived from the only known copy printed on blue paper, more than doubled the high estimate to achieve $2.25 million. After spirited bidding, all 11 lots of Bomberg's Talmud printed on blue paper were purchased by a private collector, and will remain assembled as a collection.

Pair of George I parcel gilt silver Torah finials, William Spackman, London 1719–20, brought $338,500.
Pair of George I parcel gilt silver Torah finials, William Spackman, London 1719–20, brought $338,500.
Chief among these was four tractates printed on blue paper, which brought $230,500 against a presale estimate of $40/60,000. Two tractates on blue paper brought $206,500, and a single tractate on blue paper soared to $194,500.

Collectors also enthusiastically competed for the largest selection of Hebrew incunabula, or early printings, to come for sale in years, yielding strong prices for the first complete edition of the entire Mishnah, with the commentary of Maimonides, completed in Naples, 1492, which achieved $254,500. Nahmanides' Perush ha-Torah (Commentary on the Pentateuch), Rome, 1469–73, which totaled $338,500; and the Teshuvot She'elot (Answers and Questions) by Solomon ben Abraham ibn Adret, Rome, 1469–73, which brought $302,500.

Second, LiveAuctioneers is advertising a 1611 Hebrew/Latin biblical fascicle:

1611, Book, "Daniel, Hezra, & Nechemiah", printed in Hebrew and Latin, Fine.
Original 1611 printing of the books of Daniel, Ezra, and Nehemiah, 7.25" x 4.5", hardcover, 134 pages. This rare, early 17th Century work was printed in Antwerp, Belgium by Officina Plantiniana Raphelengii. This volume has a Hebrew text with interlinear Latin translation, by the celebrated Dominican scholar, Santes Pagninus (i.e. Pagnini, 1470-1536). Bound in old sheep skin or leather (most of which has worn off), generally the book is clean internally. The cover is well worn, the hinges cracked, and there is an institutional stamp on the title page. The pages are numbered from 415 to 548, and the volume opens and reads in traditional Hebrew format (from right to left, and back to front). The Dominican friar's Latin version of the Hebrew Bible, the first since St. Jerome's, contributed greatly to virtually every 16th Century scriptural translator.

[...]

All I can say is that I hope that the collectors who bought or buy these items don't go dark with them. They should remain available for scholars of the Renaissance and the early modern period to study.

ARAMAIC WATCH: The manuscript digitization project in Kerala, India, gets some slightly garbled coverage in ExpressBuzz. Excerpt:

[Dr Mar] Aprem, who is the author of the book ‘Teach yourself Aramaic’, said that after the release of Mel Gibson’s film ‘The Passion of Christ’ in 2004 with most of its dialogue in Aramaic, people in different part of the world are showing interest in knowing and learning the language.

The Metropolitan said that a body called Association for the Preservation of St Thomas Christian Heritage with close association of the Oriental Institute of the University of Tobingen, Germany
, the Syriac Institute USA, Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, USA, Central European University, Hungary and the Kerala Centre for Historical Research has been constituted for the purpose.

He is the honorary president of the association.

He said that initial efforts of the association would be to preserve through digitalisation of printed books, manuscripts both in paper and palm leaves, and other locally available documents in Syrian [That should be "Syriac" - JRD].

He said that he himself has a collection of about 250 manuscripts and printed books in Syrian language.

Background here.

TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism has a new issue out (Volume 13 [2008]). Pete Williams has an article on the Syriac Peshitta of Romans and there are lots of book reviews of interest as well.

THE FIRE GOSPEL, Michel Faber's novel about newly recovered Aramaic scrolls about the life of Jesus, gets a couple more reviews. Excerpts below.

By Nancy Connors in the Plain Dealer:

In his way, Faber remains true to the Prometheus myth, but he also has a lot of fun: Theo's surname is the same as that of a German artist who painted a four-part mural of Prometheus, and his re-creation of Amazon reader comments about Theo's book is dead-on.
Yet there's a tenderness about humankind and our inarticulate, profound need to believe that shines through Faber's tale.

Or as Malchus himself writes: "The hand that holds the pen is attached to the body that aches and growls. And that is our misfortune, brothers and sisters: we speak of things that cannot be spoken. We seek to store understandings in our gross flesh that gross flesh cannot contain, like a madman who would snatch a moonbeam and put it in his purse."

By Stephen Finucan in the Toronto Star:

Faber's strength is his irreverence. No one is left unskewered, from academics and religious bumpkins to book publishers – not even the poor, soon-to-be-blown-to-smithereens curator of the Mosul museum is spared. The Fire Gospel is a very funny book.

Where it suffers is in the strictures placed upon it by the Myth series itself. Faber hasn't enough room here to flex his writerly muscles. In the end, the reader is left with is a collection of amusing set pieces more than a cohesive novel.

Background here.

SMUGGLING TORAHS FROM IRAQ?

Iraq worried that ancient Torah manuscripts were smuggled to Israel
By THE MEDIA LINE NEWS AGENCY (Jerusalem Post)

The Iraqi Interior Ministry accused security companies working with the American military forces of attempting to smuggle out unique archeological artifacts, stating its concern that Babylonian-era Torah manuscripts were smuggled to Israel, the London-based daily Al-Hayyat reported.

Iraq is searching for over 9,400 artifacts that were lost or stolen since the start of the American-led invasion in May 2003.

Among these items are Babylonian-era Torah manuscripts taken by American forces. The US promised it would return the manuscripts in two years after their renovation, but there was "information pointing to the possibility that they had been smuggled to Israel," Gen. (ret.) Widah Nas'rat of the Interior Ministry's Criminal Investigations Department told Al-Hayyat.

[...]

I don't know what "Babylonian-era" means in this context. The manuscripts are very unlikely to be older than fairly late in the Middle Ages. There were stories in 2007 and 2008 about a several-hundred-year-old Torah Scroll being removed from Iraq under questionable circumstances (see here) and perhaps this is related.

Incidentally, this week is full of exam marking, meetings, and interviews, so blogging is likely to be relegated to evenings - if my strength holds out. I will try to pace such posts as I find time to write by pre-posting some of them.

UPDATE (20 January): It occurs to me that the 400-year-old Torah Scroll mentioned above was smuggled to Baltimore, so it probably is not related.

There's also an article on the possible Torah manuscripts taken to Israel in Arutz Sheva, but it has no new information.

THE JESUS PROJECT is the subject of another essay at the Bible and Interpretation website:

Rocks, Hard Places, and Jesus Fatigue: Jesus Seminar and Jesus Project

The following comments are not a direct response to Bruce Chilton’s very helpful article on the Jesus Project but in many ways anticipate and respond to some of his observations. I offer it as further commentary on the pros and cons of undertaking yet another “quest,” at a time when New Testament scholarship, in the eyes of some, is a mission without a guiding purpose.

By R. Joseph Hoffmann
R. Joseph Hoffmann (PhD, Oxford) is Chair of CSER, the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion and co-Chair (with Robert M. Price and Gerd Luedemann) of The Jesus Project. He is Scholar in Residence (2009) at Goddard College and teaches History at Geneseo College (SUNY).
January 2009

Crouching somewhere between esthetic sound byte and historical detail is Michelangelo’s famous statement about sculpture. “The job of the sculptor,” Vasari attributes to il Divino, ”is to set free the forms that are within the stone.” It’s a lovely thought—poetic, in fact. If you accept the theory of Renaissance Platonism, as Michelangelo embodies it, you also have to believe that “Moses” and “David” were encased in stone, yearning to be released—as the soul yearns to be set free from the flesh in the theology of salvation. You will however be left wondering why such a theory required human models with strong arms and firm thighs, and why the finished product bears no more resemblance to real or imagined historical figures than a drawing that any one of us could produce. We may lack Michelangelo’s skill and his deft way with a rasp and chisel, but we can easily imagine more probable second millennia BC heroes—in form, stature, skin-tone, and body type—than the Italian beauties he released from their marble prisons. In fact, the more we know about the second millennia BC, the more likely we are to be right. And alas, Michelangelo didn’t know very much about history at all. And what’s more, it made no difference to his art, his success, or to his reputation. That is why idealism and imagination are sometimes at odds with history, or put bluntly, why history acts as a control on our ability to imagine or idealize anything, often profoundly wrong things.

If we apply the same logic to the New Testament, we stumble over what I have (once or twice) called the Platonic Fallacy in Jesus research. Like it or not, the New Testament is still the primary artifact of the literature that permits us to understand the origins of Christianity. It’s the stone, if not the only stone. If we possessed only gnostic and apocryphal sources as documentary curiosities and no movement that preserved them, we would be hard-pressed to say anything other than that at some time in the first and second century a short-lived and highly incoherent religious movement fluoresced and faded (many did) in the night sky of Hellenistic antiquity. The Jesus we would know from these sources would be an odd co-mixture of insufferable infant a la the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a hell-robber, like the liberator of the Gospel of Nicodemus, a mysterious cipher, like the unnamed hero of the Hymn of the Pearl, or an impenetrable guru, like the Jesus of the gnostic Gospel of Thomas. Despite the now-yellowed axiom we all learned as first year divinity students of a certain generation and later in graduate school (the one where we are taught that “no picture of early Christianity is complete without availing ourselves of all the sources”), I will climb out on a limb to say that these sources are not so much integral to a coherent picture of early Christianity as they are pebbles in orbit around the gravitational center we call the canon. They are interesting—fascinating even—in showing us how uniformity of opinion and belief can wriggle out of a chaos of alterative visions (maybe the closest analogues are in constitutional history), but they are not the stone that the most familiar form of Christianity was made from. That recognition is as important as it is increasingly irrelevant to modern New Testament discussion.

[...]

My initial thoughts were (1) those metaphors need to rounded up and shot to put them out of their misery and (2) why "second millennia BC?" There was only one of them. But beyond the niggling, I think the point is that what we can learn from the earliest stage of Christian origins comes from the canonical Four Gospels and I don't have too much trouble with that, but I am keeping an open mind about the Nag Hammadi Gospel of Thomas and some of the early fragments.

The conclusions and as much of a positive agenda as appears in the essay come in the last two paragraphs:

When we considered developing the Jesus Project, it was not out of any malignant attempt to “prove” that Jesus did not exist. (The press releases have done an immeasurable disservice by harping on this as the agenda). As a Christian origins scholar by training, I am not even sure how one would go about such a task, or be taken seriously if it were undertaken. Yet the possibility that Christianity arose from causes that have little to do with a historical founder is one among many other questions the Project should take seriously. Inevitably, scholars and critics (if not always the same people) will ask, And just how do you go about doing that?, and neither the answer “Differently” or “Better” will suffice. The demon crouching at the door, however, is not criticism of its intent nor skepticism about its outcome, but the sense that biblical scholarship in the twentieth century will not be greeted with the same excitement as it was in Albright’s day. Outside America, where the landscape is also changing, fewer people have any interest in the outcomes of biblical research, whether it involves Jericho or Jesus. The secularization of world culture, which will eventually reach even into the Muslim heartlands, encourages us to value what matters here and now. As one of our members, Arthur Droge (Toronto) mentioned at the recent meeting of the Project in Amherst, NY, most of us were trained in a generation ”that believed certain questions were inherently interesting.” But fewer and fewer people do. Jesus-fatigue—the sort of despair that can only be compared to a police investigation gone cold—is the result of a certain resignation to the unimportance of historical conclusions.

Reaching for the stars and reaching back into history have in common the fact that their objects are distant and sometimes unimaginably hard to see. What I personally hope the Project will achieve is to eschew breaking rocks, and instead learning to train our lens in the right direction. Part of that process is to respond to Droge’s challenge: Why is this important? And I have the sense that in trying to answer that question, we will be answering bigger questions as well.

Hmmm ... I think there is still a great deal of popular interest in historical Jesus research, as exemplified recently by the mostly misguided interest in what the new Coptic Gospel of Judas could tell about the historical Jesus. Alas, the answer is "nothing," but I think the message did eventually get across that it tells lots of interesting things about second-century Jesus movements. There may well be Historical Jesus Fatigue among New Testament scholars, although Richard Bauckham's recent book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses has certainly generated a lot of interest. But I do think there is a considerable amount of Jesus Seminar Fatigue. It would be nice if this new Jesus Project would help alleviate this by coming up with something new and interesting, but that remains to be seen. I'm skeptical, but I wish them the best.

Background here.

UPDATE: April DeConick has more on the Jesus Project here and on the Gospel of Judas here. The revised version of her book will be very welcome.

THE UNICORN LEGEND owes its existence in part to a creative translation in the Septuagint:

The Natural History of Unicorns by Chris Lavers

The Sunday Times review by Rosemary Hill

In this beguiling book, Chris Lavers pursues the unicorn across two and a half millenniums, from the bas-reliefs of ancient Persia to the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom by way of medieval tapestry. As a scientist, his main purpose is to find out what zoological truths lie behind the myth. But he is also a careful explorer of folklore, sifting fact from fiction.

The first known description of a unicorn comes in 398BC from the Greek doctor Ctesias of Cnidus, who in a book called Indica wrote about “certain wild asses which are as large as horses” and “have a horn on the forehead which is about a foot and a half in length”. This first unicorn was a colourful beast, white with a dark red head, blue eyes and a crimson, white and black horn. Lavers concedes that Ctesias was “a library type of fellow” who had never actually seen what he was describing, but that doesn't mean he was a fantasist. He was right, for example, about elephants, which must have seemed equally implausible to him, and about talking birds (which we now know as parrots).

[...]

More details were added to Ctesias's original picture over time, but for more than six centuries the legend of the beast whose single horn, if you could catch one, had curative properties remained in essence unchanged. The very different creature of later western myth - symbolic, semi-sacred - was born when the unicorn “popped up”, as Lavers puts it, most unexpectedly, in the Greek Old Testament. This beast of savage power, whose name in the Greek is translated from the curious Hebrew word “reem”, rampages through the books of Numbers, Deuteronomy, Job and several Psalms. “The unicorns shall come down with them,” Isaiah warns the enemies of God, “and their land shall be soaked with blood.”

Opinion divided sharply among early scholars as to what this Hebrew word “reem” might have meant. St Jerome in the 4th century was among those who thought it might perfectly well be a rhinoceros, and so it appeared in the Vulgate. To the more metaphysically inclined, though, something less lumbering and more spiritual seemed appropriate. Tertullian of Carthage saw the unicorn as a precursor of Christ that “pierces every race with faith”.

[...]

More on unicorns in the Bible here. And this and this are perhaps relevant as well.

MORE ON THE FACIAL RECONSTRUCTION of ancient Palestinian Jews:

Tel Aviv University researcher reconstructs ancient Israelite faces
By ISRAEL21c staff
January 18, 2009

Prof. Eugene Kobyliansky keeps two busts in his office. One represents the face of an average male Jew in ancient Israel from 332 to 37 B.C.E; the other is a composite face for Jewish women from the ancient Roman era (37 B.C.E. to 324 C.E.).

"It's like looking into a time machine, going back 2,000 years, to visit these people," says Kobyliansky.

Kobyliansky, of the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University, is the first researcher in the world to provide facial reconstructions of what Jews looked like in the land of Israel, before their exile into the Diaspora.

Using bone measurements collected from skulls at Jewish burial sites at Ein Gedi near the Dead Sea and the Jordan River, Kobyliansky created plastic molds on which to base the facial reconstructions. The technique was made possible through a unique forensics lab in Moscow, at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which uses the most up-to-date software in anthropological facial reconstruction to recreate facial features from craniums with about 70 percent accuracy.

[...]

An earlier article noted that a female skull had some African features and drew perhaps unwarrantedly broad conclusions from it. This article is more cautious and gives what may be a more plausible explanation:

... The female skull also exhibits all the Mediterranean features but, in addition, there are probably some African traits, as manifested by the shape of the nose and face.

"This woman certainly had some African intermixture," Kobyliansky explains. "We know from history and the stories of King Solomon that there were Ethiopian Jews in Israel. In this particular female, we see some African traits. But maybe she was absolutely white in color. It's impossible to say."

THE IDEOLOGY OF MASADA in Israel gets some attention from the BBC, evidently inspired by the current Gaza conflict:

Masada legend galvanises Israel

By Paul Moss
BBC News, Masada

"You cannot surrender, you cannot give up. You should fight to the last second," the young Israeli boy said after scratching his head and thinking for just a few seconds.

He was talking about what he had learned from his tour of Masada, the ancient site where a band of Jewish rebels once held out against the might of the Roman Empire.

The tour prompted a similar conclusion from one of his female classmates: "It's really important to stand up for yourself."

They want us to vanish from the world. But it will never happen. Masada will never fall again!
Teacher at Masada

"Especially now that we're at war. We need to do whatever it takes," she told me.

It is something of a rite of passage for Israeli schoolchildren - a trip to Masada - as obligatory a part of their upbringing as exams and sports days.

And Masada is a remarkable story, albeit one that is mired in legend.

[...]

I have posted on the historicity and ideology of the Masada story here and here.

UPDATE (19 January): Jodi Magness has a post on the siege of Masada at the ASOR Blog (a blog that's new to me). (Noted on Joseph I. Lauer's list.)

PROFESSOR DAN SCHOWALTER is speaking on Herodian archaeology at Arizona State:

Scholar explores fusing archeological remains, historic texts
January 29, 2009
7 p.m.

Scholar Dan Schowalter will investigative the three temples built by Herod the Great that Jewish historian Josephus writes about in his texts at a lecture at 7 p.m., Jan. 29 in Life Sciences A Building, room 1919, Arizona State University Tempe campus. Schowalter will examine the difficulty of integrating material remains at these archeological sites with textual evidence from Josephus’ texts and the New Testament.

The lecture is sponsored in partnership by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Department of Religious Studies, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, School of International Letters and Cultures, and the Central Arizona Society of the Archaeological Institute of America.

Schowalter will discuss the political significance of holy places in both the ancient and modern world. The remains of the temples at the cities of Caesarea Maritima and Samaria Sebaste in Israel have been discovered for years. But the discovery of a three-phase temple site at Omrit, in northern Israel, has created a debate about the location of the third temple.

[...]

These would be pagan temples built to please the Roman authorities etc., not to be confused with his "third" (i.e., heavily reconstructed second) Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.

THE REVIEW OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE now comes in blog format.

(Via Mark Goodacre.)

THE LAYOFFS at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology have been mentioned in various archaeology-related sources online, but I haven't yet noted them here. Jack Sasson on the Agade list has linked to a petition cum blog about them. You can read background on the controversy at that site in the right-hand sidebar. The situation sounds pretty grim and I hope a way can be found to preserve these positions.

THE EXPEDITION ARTIST of the Good Ship Phoenicia, Daniella Eubanks, is interviewed in the LA Weekly. Excerpt:

When the Phoenicia crosses the Suez Canal, Eubank and the rest of the crew will row the boat through — you can’t use a sail. Killer, but not so bad, considering that the ancient Phoenicians carried their vessels overland across the Suez, which hadn’t yet been carved through. From there, the ship will hug the east coast, round the Cape, then continue up the west coast through the Strait of Gibraltar. It will cross the Mediterranean to return home to Syria.

The crew is divided into two teams, which sleep in shifts. Pirates, being not so civilized, tend to strike at night. Eubank’s duties will include cooking and keeping watch for big tankers or strange floating objects with which the ship could collide. “We are such a tiny boat on the sea,” she says. “You know when you do something long enough that it feels like you haven’t done anything else? It was like, ‘I’m on this boat. This is my life. This is what I do.’”

Meals are her favorite times, when everybody gets together to talk and tell stories — the three guys from the tiny Mediterranean island who spoke no English, who had one TV set on the entire island. The several 20-something college students. The Swede, the Iranian photographer, the carpenter, the smattering of Brits and Aussies. What do you eat on a re-created ancient ship? On the Borobudur it was rice, fish and Navy beef, donated by the Indonesian government. Eubank made a Bolognese pasta, which the Indonesians refused to eat. “Yes, the rice did get weevils. We picked them out.” At port, they ordered pizza.

Mostly, Eubank drew and painted onboard. She painted the reflection of the purple striped sail in water, which seemed to resolve into eyes and faces and mouths agape. She painted the harbor lights glimmering on the black water at night, then the golden-yellow morning sun warming the ship’s large, arching bow, which curves up into an edged point like a scimitar. She painted the vessel’s belly. “The ship has a voluptuous curve right in the middle,” she says of the painting. “Difficult to capture.”

She also commented on the ship's anti-pirate strategy:

The pirate plan, as Danielle Eubank, expedition artist aboard the good ship Phoenicia, sees it, is to run like hell in case of attack and try to escape with her life. The pirates are real, mainly Somalian, but there are no guns aboard the Phoenicia — largely to reduce misunderstandings with potential attackers and to ensure that innocent people aren’t accidentally shot ...

Accurate as far as it goes, but I hear there's more.

BUSY TODAY. May find time to do some blogging this evening.

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. had nice things to say about biblical Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, according to an odd press release by one Don Boys. The article excoriates King, basically for not being a conservative Christian, using unpublished papers he wrote in Seminary.

He clearly asserted that the book of Jeremiah was not infallible. He also espoused the heretical view that the non-canonical books were as good as or better than the Old Testament books! “To my mind, many of the works of this period were infinitely more valuable than those that received canonicity. The materials to justify such statements are found mainly in the Apocrypha and the Pseudepigrapha. These works, although presented pseudonymously, are of lasting significance to the Biblical student.”

I don't think it's a matter of which is more valuable in principle, which would be a very subjective judgment and would depend on the criteria applied. I would say that the stories in the Hebrew Bible are generally of a higher literary quality than their retellings in later Rewritten Scripture. There are also some very good stories in the Apocrypha/Deuteroncanonica. But literary considerations aside, all of these books are of considerable historical value, although not necessarily because the stories they tell have any useful historical data about the events they narrate. Very often they don't. But the books themselves, when one reads them carefully and asks them the right questions, provide an enormous amount of historical information about the writers who produced them and, by extension, about the circumstances and social worlds of those writers.

TECHNOLOGY WATCH: DNA profiling is being applied to medieval manuscripts:

How Old Is That Book? DNA May Hold the Answer
Hide and Seek: genetic material from animal-skin pages may trace medieval manuscript origins

By Katherine Harmon (Scientific American)

Long before musty old paper volumes and Google Book Search, most tomes in medieval Europe were written on animal skins—a practice which might now hold the key to tracing their origins.

Timothy Stinson, an associate English professor at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, has started using DNA testing to track the history and age of medieval manuscripts. His goal: to create a DNA database from the books with known publication dates and places (such as calendars and histories) in an effort to use the genetic information gleaned from them as a baseline to date those manuscripts whose backgrounds are unknown.

"There are these tantalizing hints that this would work for parchment," he says of the DNA testing, "but no one was really using it." He says that in addition to tracing the roots of written documents, genetic clues may help piece together manuscripts that were separated over time.

[...]

DNA testing has previously been used to study Greek manuscripts as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Nikos Poulakakis, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Crete in Greece who conducted some of that research, says he's eagerly awaiting the results of the U.S. study. He notes that in addition to revealing important information about old manuscripts and library collections, the genetic material may also shed light on ancient trade routes and even domestic animal herds of the time.

[...]

I've posted on DNA analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. The application to medieval manuscripts is also welcome and could be useful, for example, for studying Old Testament Pseudepigrapha manuscripts, most of which are medieval.

DR. NATHAN MACDONALD, my Hebrew Bible colleague, has received some more media attention on his work on food in ancient Israel:

Biblical diet 'not very healthy'

Ancient Israel was far from "the land of milk and honey," and instead people suffered from the lack of a balanced diet, according to a theologian. (BBC)

Dr Nathan MacDonald, an Old Testament lecturer at St Andrews University, used biblical texts and archaeological evidence to study the ancient diet.

He has concluded that there were frequent famines and people's meals often lacked vitamins and minerals.

However, he believes the Bible contains important messages about sharing food.

Dr MacDonald feels his study disputes the notion held by many that the bible provides not just religious instruction and moral guidance, but the recipe for healthy living.

In North America, books based on the diet of the bible such as What Would Jesus Eat? and The Maker's Diet are bestsellers.

Dr MacDonald explained: "Though many people have thought otherwise, the evidence is that the diet in biblical times was not very healthy.

[...]

Nathan, who is a Biblical scholar, was bemused to find that he had been promoted to paleo-osteologist as well:

By examining human remains from the Israelite period, Dr MacDonald found evidence of iron-deficiency anaemia, consistent with a diet high in flat bread and low in meat and vegetables.

Otherwise the article is pretty accurate.

(Via Dorothy King on Facebook. More on Dr. MacDonald's work here and here.)

THE QUEEN OF SHEBA'S REPUTED CAPITAL is profiled in the Yemen Times:

Where a woman once ruled

Salma Ismail

German archaeologists have been conducting excavation and restoration works in Yemen for 30 years now and have helped to preserve some of Yemen’s most valuable ancient sites. YT Photo by Salma Ismail.
Once the capital of the kingdom of Queen Sheba, also known by her Arabic name Balqis, Mareb is now largely in a state of disrepair. Blocks of stone with Sabean writing bear testament to the rich history of the city. Writing in spray-paint also stands witness to the negligence of authorities to adequately protect this historical site which has been buried in the desert for over a millennium.

Officials are calling for adequate security personnel to protect the sites while no excavation is being carried out. Most security personnel are Bedouins and do not understand the importance or the historical value of the sites.

Mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur’an, but only recently excavated, new information grows daily about Sheba and this temple city of the Sabaean kingdom, home of the legendary Queen, who was very influential, wealthy and famous during her rein, some 3000 years ago. The Bar’an temple Mahram Bilqis, or Temple of the Moon God, was a sacred site for pilgrims through Arabia from 1200 BC to 550 AD.

[...]

Mareb, which was named in 1000 B.C, is located 172 km east of Sana’a, is considered to be one of Yemen’s richest archeological sites.

Landmarks of the city include the prime temple located in the southern part of the city; the temple exemplifies the Maeenian architecture, having 16 vertical and horizontal columns, formulating a grid-shape. Researchers believe that this temple was built for the worship of Athtar, the sun god. There is also another temple in the heart of the city of which four columns can still be seen.

The German Archaelogical Institute (DAI) together with the Yemeni General Organization of Antiquities and Museums (GOAM) have been conducting an excavation and restoration of the ancient Sabaean town of Sirwah in the Yemeni province of Ma’rib since 2001. In March 2008 their work led to the discovery of an ancient, well-preserved Sabaean temple dating back to 7th century BC. according to Dr. Iris Gerlach, Director of the DAI in Sana’a. The discovery was made during excavation works in the ancient Sabaean town of Sirwah, at the central province of Marib.

The large town was surrounded by a fortification wall, and included many monumental buildings, of which the most prominent is the al-Maqah Temple, a sanctuary that dates back to the 7th century BC, and is currently undergoing restoration.

During the restoration work at the al-Maqah Temple, the DAI team discovered ‘another unique and well preserved Sabaean temple as part of the ancient town.’

The sacred building has a monumental entrance decorated with pillars and different rooms inside.

[...]

There are lots of sites supposedly connected with the Queen of Sheba and I am not qualified to comment on the merits of any of them, although I have the impression that people who work in the area think Yemen is the most plausible location. For more on Mareb/Marib/Mar'ib, go here. For possible connections with Sana/Sana'a (some distance from Mareb, as noted above), go here and here. For Ethiopian legend about the Queen, go here, especially the links at the end of the post. For a supposed, and apparently highly debatable, archaeological connection with Ethiopia, go here, here, and here, (Nelson link). And here is a suggested connection with Nigeria - again, highly debatable. I have noted a Queen of Sheba museum exhibition here, here, and here. Finally, here is a note about beauty products associated with her (in legend).

THE TOP 100 THEOLOGY BLOGS according to Jessica Merritt has been posted on the Christian Colleges: Online Bible Colleges & Universities website. I'm pleased to see PaleoJudaica among the history blogs. Also, unlike her earlier Top 50 Ancient History Blogs list, this one includes Mark Goodacre's New Testament Gateway blog - among the academic blogs.

GERSHOM SCHOLEM: A Life in Letters, 1914-1982, by Anthony David Skinner, was reviewed by Anthony Grafton in The New Republic in 2003. Robert Schwartz drew my attention to the review in reponse to my recent post on another review by Grafton which involved Scholem.

The Magician
A review by Anthony Grafton

I.
When the Baal Shem Tov had to do something very hard, he went out into the woods, lit a fire, and said a prayer, and the task was done. In the next generation, when his disciple had to do a difficult thing, he also went out into the woods. He could no longer light the fire, but he said the prayer, and that was enough. The next disciple could no longer light the fire or say the prayer, but he could go into the woods, and the thing was done. But in the last generation, the rabbi sat down on his golden throne in his castle and said, "We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place; but we can tell the story of how it was done."

S.Y. Agnon told this tale of traditions, colorful and multi-layered as a Russian doll, to Gershom Scholem. The real subject of the story is the slow metamorphosis of rituals and beliefs. The Baal Shem Tov and his followers were Hasidic wonder-workers in two senses. Exemplary figures in the great East European renewal of Judaism, they were also shrewd men who earned their livings by selling amulets that protected against illness and injury. As the generations passed, the rituals that they used for protection in a world of dangers turned into something else: not weapons stored for use in an armory, but treasures displayed under glass in a museum. Words with which magi had torn Promethean fire from the skies turned over time into glowing stories that could be re-told, but not re-enacted. Yet meaning somehow still resided in the commemoration, as well as in the performance, of these rituals of power.

The tale reads like a parable of Scholem's life. ...

There follows a very useful capsule summary of Scholem's life.

On the collection of letters:

How, then, to tell Scholem's story, and tease out its meanings, for readers who do not know the worlds he inhabited — worlds almost as alien to the modern reader as the lost ones that Scholem explored? Anthony David Skinner has adopted a traditional, even old-fashioned solution to the problem of preserving a tradition. He has produced a biography in the form of an anthology of letters, with commentary. A knowledgeable and fluent writer, Skinner divides his subject's life into segments. His introductions to these segments show how well he understands Scholem's personal situations and intellectual enterprises. Skinner writes eloquently of what philology meant for Scholem. His translations are clear and generally accurate, and many of the letters that he has selected deal with matters of the highest interest.

Skinner's selections inform us about Scholem's early life in Berlin and allow us to follow his rebellion against his bourgeois family and his turn to Zionism. They also record, in detail, his encounters with two transforming powers: Walter Benjamin, with whom he carried on one of history's most complex, creative, and torturous friendships; and the Kabbalah, to which he devoted his lifetime of research. We watch Gerhard become Gershom. We marvel at Scholem's unwavering sense of vocation — the sense of mastery that enabled him to reject his parents' authority, and that of bourgeois culture and society, years before he had produced anything solid to show that he was more than an angry young man. Anyone interested in Scholem's contacts with American intellectual life, especially Jewish intellectual life, will learn a good deal here about his correspondence with writers, scholars, publishers, and rabbis.

For the work of a learned editor and a great university press, however, this volume is oddly unsatisfactory. It suffers, first of all, from a surprising number of technical flaws. Source indications are scarce. Skinner tells the reader when he has used an existing translation, but when he offers his own versions he does not tell the reader whether the Hebrew or German original can be found in Itta Shedletzky's edition of Scholem's correspondence, in the standard editions of his correspondence with other individuals, or only in the archives. He claims that he has "added brief footnotes wherever letters allude to obscure people, events, or literary texts" in order to guide readers unfamiliar with the submerged German-Jewish world that Scholem and his correspondents inhabited, but he shows no clear sense of what such readers are likely to know.

[...]

Flaws like these appear in any large-scale edition or translation. More problematic are the criteria that guided Skinner's choice of letters to translate. He draws heavily on Scholem's extraordinary correspondence with his mother. Skinner's book includes not only many of Scholem's letters home, but dozens of Betty's descriptions of the difficulties, and then the horrors, of life in Nazi Berlin. These vivid letters — and Scholem's sometimes distant-sounding replies — are gripping, full of human and historical interest. Yet they shed only a limited amount of light on Scholem himself, and virtually none on the scholarly and technical work that formed the central concern of his life.

[...]

That's just a taste. It's a very long review and well worth reading.

THE JESUS PROJECT is the subject of an article at the Bible and Interpretation website in which he also critiques the earlier Jesus Seminar. He has been involved with both seminars.

Plus ça change… “The Jesus Seminar” and “The Jesus Project”

Jesus’ cultural setting had clearly been misjudged in much of Seminar’s deliberations during the ’eighties, and today its findings are widely recognized as being idiosyncratic.

By Bruce Chilton

Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Religion
Bard College

January 2009


“The Jesus Project,” convened in 2007 by R. Joseph Hoffman for the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion, aims to pursue the task of “The Jesus Seminar,” but in a more critical vein. In a clever turn of phrase, Dr. Hoffman has written that “The Jesus of the [Jesus Seminar] is a talking doll with a questionable repertoire of thirty-one sayings. Pull a string and he blesses the poor.”

Two serious criticisms lie behind this characterization. First, Hoffman charges the Seminar with leading its presuppositions into just the anti-Fundamentalist, liberal Jesus that the majority of its members wanted to find in the first place. Second, he calls attention to the assumption of the Seminar that the sources at our disposal directly provide historical evidence concerning Jesus.

I was a Fellow of “The Jesus Seminar,” and I have been involved with “The Jesus Project” since its formal inception. By understanding where the Seminar lapsed, the Project might indeed offer the prospect of progress. So where did the Seminar fall down, and how is the Project doing in comparison?

[...]

On the Jesus Seminar:

In various presentations at meetings of the Seminar and in its journal, I called attention to signs of Aramaic antecedents in the language of the Gospels and to indications of sources behind the Gospels, both written and oral. On the whole, however, my Judaic approach did not find much resonance within the majority.

Two factors played into that response. The first has to do with the sociology of graduate education in the field of New Testament and early Christianity, which has notoriously skimped on the study of Semitic languages, although Aramaic and Syriac, as well as Hebrew, were clearly major languages of Christianity alongside Coptic, Greek, and Latin until at least the time of the rise of Islam. The second factor was more specific to the Seminar: a pronounced preference for a Greek Jesus over an Aramaic Jesus. That preference was reinforced by fashion within the Seminar and a few other circles, which has since been contradicted directly by archaeological work, to describe Galilee as an urban and Hellenistic environment, where Greek was mostly spoken.

On the Jesus Project:

The challenge for “The Jesus Project” is to learn from the mistakes of “The Jesus Seminar.” I have contributed work to the Project, but I cannot so far report any great signs of progress.

To a large extent, immediate progress should in any case not be anticipated. Critical enterprises always need time to evolve operating principles, and the Project has had to devote time and energy to issues of method in the study of the historical Jesus. Unfortunately, however, the Project has attempted to address questions of critical approach without a thorough grounding in academic study since the eighteenth century. The result is that some of the assertions made by contributors to the Project are not well informed and invoke quests for “objectivity” that seem more at home in nineteenth-century Europe than in twenty-first century America. What is more worrying, actual knowledge of primary sources (and of their languages) does not seem as great among participants in the Project as among Fellows of the Seminar. Discussion of “method” apart from specific evidence was precisely one of the failings of the Seminar and directly fed its liberal, anti-Fundamentalist agenda.

He has lots more to say about both, so read it all. For background on the Jesus Project, go here.

(Heads up, Mark Elliott of the Bible and Interpretation website, whom I originally misidentified. Sorry to both Marks.)

A SIMULATED ARCHAEOLOGICAL DIG in Texas:

Diggin’ Education: Curriculum includes search for –artifacts

The Woodlands Villager
By CHARLIE BIER
Updated: 01.10.09
Trey Thames believes students learn in places other than textbooks. Putting that belif into practice, the Biblical Studies and Latin teacher at The Woodlands Christian Academy has built a 50-foot by 50-foot simulated archaeological site on the school’s 40-acres at 5800 Academy Way.

The dig site, some 2,000 cubic yards of dirt and 15-plus tons of limestone and rock, is layered with about 50 artifacts.

As part of an elective archaeology course, TWCA students carefully unearth skeletons and bones, coins, pottery, iron tools and the foundations of four separate dwellings.

The field work helps illustrate the history and culture surrounding an Israeli city between 13th Century B.C. to 1st Century A.D.

[...]

Basically, Thames didn’t want to send students on a scattershot treasure hunt with his dig site.

“One of the things I really tried to do is make it as real as possible. There were moments in Israel when I was really excited about being there... then there were times it was like, ‘Wow, this is really hard work and I hate it,’” he said.

“Some days they were excited; some days it was a chore. It was a process, and I wanted them to get that whole experience.”

[...]

This seems to be a well thought-out and informative project. For other similated archaeology projects in recent years, see here, here, and here.

UPDATE (26 February): More here, including a dig website and a TV interview with Trey Thames.

JUDY GRUEN is frustrated because, rather than chatting with her, her teenage sons are texting friends while doing their geometry homework and discussing Talmudic Aramaic at the dinner table.

This is, admittedly, a problem more common among boys than girls, and it was no hyperbole for the Talmud to state that there were ten measures of speech given, nine of which were given to women! (If you need any proof, watch your daughter's rapid-fire talk on her cell phone.) I have had this problem also. I have watched several sons attached by the ear to an iPod, texting endless messages to friends and doing geometry homework, all at the same time. Apparently, the dictum "Say little and do much" is one they have taken to heart.

But how do we break through that classic "strong but silent" persona? How can a mom who isn't fluent in Dodger talk have a conversation with a teen that will last longer than it takes to even utter the word "con-ver-sa-tion"? One night, as I watched one son laboring over a book of Talmud, I had an idea.

Family dinner conversations were increasingly laced with halachic references and "Talmud-speak." My public high school didn't offer Aramaic as a second language, so I felt as if I almost needed subtitles in my own kitchen. I began cribbing notes when my boys tossed off various Talmudic references, and paid close attention to the disputations at hand. After about a month of furtive note-taking and my own research, I launched Operation Confabulation – one mother's attempt to wrest recalcitrant repartee from her beloved son.

Give 'em a break, Judy, and count your blessings. All parents should have your problems. But you do get points for trying to meet them on their own ground.

ANCIENT SHIPWRECKS from Israel provide new insights into the history of shipbuilding:

Shipwrecks harbor evidence of ancient sophistication
Frame-based shipbuilding emerged surprisingly early and became more advanced within a few hundred years.
By Bruce Bower (Science News)
Web edition : Saturday, January 10th, 2009

PHILADELPHIA — Surprising insights about ancient shipbuilding have floated to the surface from the submerged remnants of two major harbors, one on Israel’s coast and the other bordering Istanbul, Turkey. Researchers described their finds January 9 at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America.

Analyses of salvaged crafts indicate that shipbuilders started making sophisticated frames for their vessels by about 1,500 years ago, 500 years earlier than had been suspected, reported Yaakov Kahanov of the University of Haifa in Israel. By a few hundred years later, craft constructors had steadily improved hull designs for a diverse collection of ships, says Cemal Pulak of Texas A&M University in College Station.

Frames provided greater structural stability for ships than an earlier hull-building technique that had relied on joining planks with adhesives and fasteners to form a shell. Such vessels date to as early as approximately 2,000 years ago.

[...]

GILGAMEL the demon - one who appears as an angel of light, as some of the more dangerous ones do - had his debut tonight in the second episode of the new ITV/STV series Demons. Gilgamel clearly gets his name from the Sumerian King Gilgamesh, known mainly from the Epic of Gilgamesh, but with the ending -"-el" tacked onto the end of his truncated name. This is a time honored-method of creating angel names and sometimes demonic names as well. As for Gilgamesh, there's ancient precedent in the Book of Giants for him be recast in the role of a malevolent supernatural being. I had a couple of relevant Web lectures posted, but they seem to have accidentally been deleted in the recent upgrade of the University website. I'll try to get them restored on Monday.

Demons is silly, but it keeps its tongue sufficiently in cheek to make it kind of fun.

HEADLINE FOR THE DAY:

EVE Online Prepares to Become Apocrypha

The article isn't relevant, but the headline is cool.

THE UNBORN, the new horror movie, has been getting numerous reviews, most of which pan it thoroughly. But it appears to have a couple of themes of minor interest (dybbuk, exorcism in Hebrew), so I note the review in the Chicago Tribune:

MOVIE REVIEW 'The Unborn' ★1/2
'The Unborn' stars Odette Yustman, Gary Oldman
Rating: 11/2 stars (poor-fair)

By Michael Phillips | Tribune critic
January 10, 2009

Filmed in Chicago but universal in its lameness, writer-director David S. Goyer's horror thriller "The Unborn" is the story of a dybbuk (a spirit searching for a human host to possess) who makes trouble for the skinny North Shore college student played by Odette Yustman, who's always out jogging when she should be considering a sandwich. The movie climaxes with a Hebrew exorcism, conducted by Gary Oldman's Rabbi Sendak. If this had been a Lutheran exorcism, the victim would've been pelted with passive-aggression and a hot dish. A Unitarian exorcism? Counseling and mint tea.

[...]

Perhaps the theme most consistently mentioned in the reviews I read (I got through many, but not all of them) was how often Ms. Yustman appears in her undies or less. But the relentless use of clichés and the Holocaust-exploitation came up frequently as well.

Be that as it may, I have more on the dybbuk myth here.

PALMYRA is covered in a detailed travel piece in the Malaysia Star:

Palmyra — past & present
By LEE YU KIT

Palmyra was once ruled by Queen Zenobia, a descendant of Cleopatra. She defied Rome and her country was subjugated. All but forgotten, travellers have brought her back to life.

Excerpt:

My guide, Fayez, is a charismatic Syrian who has taught archaeology at a local university and so is an excellent source of information if prodded with the right questions. Within the tomb, the mummified remains of the dead were stored in drawers recessed into the walls and stacked vertically on top of each other. Each drawer cover bore a bust of the dead person — not as he or she was, but as he or she was thought to have become in a glorious afterlife.

In all, the tower could store over 300 remains.

Another type of burial place, as exemplified by the Tomb of the Three Brothers, is the underground chamber called a hypogeum. A flight of stairs leads to a large underground chamber which sports the same arrangement of sliding drawers stacked vertically for storing mummies. Two-thousand-year-old murals decorate the walls.

Fayez translates the script on the tomb door, in a Palmyrene dialect of Aramaic, the lingua franca of the day. It declares the tomb a commercial venture — a funeral service that accepted bodies for a fee, some two millenniums ago!

The known tombs have all long been looted and emptied, but there are some mummies at the Palmyra museum, with a detailed explanation of the mummification process — not recommended reading immediately after lunch!
An intricately carved ceiling in the Temple of Ba’al.

Palmyra is mentioned as Tadmor in ancient texts dating as far back as the second millennium BC. It is also mentioned in the Bible, and was a part of the Roman empire in the first century BC when its importance as a trading centre grew as trade flourished.

Exotic materials — fabrics, spices, ceramics, glassware and ivory — passed though Palmyra, since it was on a crossroads between the Roman empire and the great civilisations to the east.

The Roman emperor Hadrian visited Palmyra in 129 AD and was enchanted by it. The great structures that remain today were largely built during this period, the halcyon days of Palmyra.

The greatest of these is the Temple of Ba’al (sun). In the sandy wastes of toppled columns, there is little left that hints at the grandeur of the temple. It falls to my guide, who has come equipped with drawings of the temple as it once stood, to conjure up images of what must once have been a monument to the wealth and power of Palmyra.

More on recent excavations at Palmyra is here, here, here, and here. I've commented on a Greek inscription here and on an inscription in Palmyrene Aramaic located in Britain here.

MORTON SMITH and the Secret Gospel of Mark get another look in light of recently published correspondence between Smith and Gershom Scholem, the great twentieth-century scholar of Jewish mysticism. Professor Anthony Grafton has a long article in The Nation ("Gospel Secrets: The Biblical Controversies of Morton Smith"). Excerpt:

To prove that Smith invented nothing, [Guy] Stroumsa has published a fascinating collection of primary sources: Smith's correspondence with a lifelong friend, the twentieth century's greatest Jewish scholar, Gershom Scholem. Smith, an adventurer in life as well as in scholarship, went to Jerusalem in 1940 on a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship awarded him by the Harvard Divinity School. Caught in Palestine by World War II, he spent four years there. At the Hebrew University--the pre-eminent German university in the world in those days, thanks to its faculty of erudite, brilliant refugees--Smith studied classics with Moshe Schwabe and Hans Lewy and Jewish mysticism with Scholem. He helped translate Scholem's first great book on the Kabbala, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, and translated an ancient Jewish mystical text under Scholem's supervision. More remarkably, Smith wrote a doctoral dissertation, in Hebrew, on Tannaitic (early rabbinical) parallels to the Gospels and became the Hebrew University's first Christian PhD. Returning to the United States in 1945, he began a career in the Episcopalian ministry, then moved back into scholarship and became, eventually, a professor of ancient history at Columbia University, where he taught until 1990. From 1945 until Scholem's death in 1982, the two men corresponded regularly. Their letters, which Stroumsa and associates have edited, open a new window on Smith's career, the scholarly world in which Smith flourished and the Secret Mark.

For Stroumsa, the documents make one point clear beyond doubt: Smith could not have forged Clement's letter or Secret Mark. For Smith's letters show him discussing the material with Scholem, over time, in ways that clearly reflect a process of discovery and reflection. From the start, he was sure he had a new work of Clement's on his hands. In August 1959, Smith wrote to Scholem that "the material by Clement of Alexandria which I found at Mar Saba last year is turning out to be of great importance, and as soon as I get all minor nuisances off my hands I must work hard at it." Later that year he went into more detail, noting that the letter "contains some amazing information about the Carpocratians and the Gospel according to Mark." By early 1961 he was working up the materials that eventually went into his two books.

But the more radical conclusions took time to emerge. Not until October 1962 did Smith tell Scholem that "I am really beginning to think Carpocrates and the sort of things he represented (and especially the ascent through the heavens) were far closer to Jesus than has ever been supposed." If Smith really forged Clement's letter, then he also must have spent years deliberately deceiving one of the few scholars he deeply respected. Yet he showed remarkable equanimity when his efforts proved partly unsuccessful. When Smith's scholarly book on Secret Mark appeared, Scholem accepted the letter as Clementine. But though he appreciated Smith's evidence about the magical side of early Christianity as "very good and convincing as far as it pertains to the tradition of the original church," he also found himself "not sure whether the story can be truly taken as historical evidence about Jesus himself." Smith, in his reply, showed only gratitude for his friend's detailed critical response: "Your letter pleased me very much and I thank you most sincerely for writing me at such length about my book.... As to Jesus, I should perhaps have emphasized more strongly that all accounts of his teaching and practice are conjectural, and I claim to my own conjectures only that they fit the reports as well as any and better than most." This is the tone of a colleague in inquiry, not a foiled forger.

Grafton concludes:

... I believe that Smith really found his letter, and that Scholem gave him the framework into which he inserted it. But that's just what I think. Many will disagree. This time, the professor is the Cheshire cat. He smiles and is gone.

That goes against the current consensus - which doesn't, of course, make it wrong. Then again, I ask you, how much understanding of people can someone have who writes the following?

Most philologists, as is well known, have little sense of humor--something every forger needs.

UPDATE: Grafton's view (about Secret Mark, not philologists' sense of humor) may not be the consensus, but he's in good company. Note Helmut Koester's declaration at the SBL meetings in Boston last November (as reported by Mark Goodacre):

"If the Secret Gospel of Mark is a forgery, then I am the biggest fool in the SBL."

As a long-time veteran of SBL, I can assure you this is no small claim.

(Via Hypotyposeis. I will be interested to hear Stephen Carlson's thoughts on this article.)

UPDATE (13 January): More on Scholem from Grafton here.

THE TWELVE DAYS OF MEIER at Ken Schenck's Quadrilateral Thoughts blog.

PHOTOGRAPHS of the Cologne Mani Codex are available online here.

(Via April DeConick at her Forbidden Gospels blog.)

THE FIRE GOSPEL by Michel Faber, is reviewed by Janet Maslin in the NYT. Excerpt:

Mr. Faber, still best known for his long, ravishing “Crimson Petal and the White,” this time manages to be most insightful when describing fatuous superficiality. Yes, Amazon.com review parodies are cheap shots, but he makes them priceless. Theo is horrified to learn that his book is being bought by readers of “The Da Vinci Code.” He marvels at Amazon’s own flat-footed product description. (Malchus’s account is “as honest and vivid as when it was written — in the 1st century AD, at the dawn of the Western world’s greatest faith.”) He encounters spectacular displays of semiliteracy (“once he gets his ear cut off and sees the crucifixtion, thats basicly it.”)

And he is treated by pedants the way Prometheus was treated by carrion-eating birds, even when those birds themselves are a point of contention. “Carrion-eating birds (whose precise species is unclear in the Aramaic, a detail on which Grippin expends a 17-line speculative footnote!) peck out his eyes and portions of his entrails,” one particularly irreverent reader complains. “A curse on these money-grubbing exercises in imaginary scholarship, cack-handed hokum and Mickey Mouse theology!” he complains.

The footnote is a nice touch.

Background here.

MORE ON SHE'AN NIGHTS:

Reviving Ancient Scythopolis

Jan 7, 2009 4:44 PM, By Lisa Murphy (Live Design)

Reviving Ancient Scythopolis The ancient Roman-Byzantine city of Scythopolis in Israel was destroyed in 749 CE by an earthquake, but new life has been given to the area thanks to a multi-sensory multimedia project in the nearby archeological site of Beit She'an.

The $3 million project is a joint initiative of Israel’s Ministry of Tourism through the Israel Government Tourist Corporation, the Israel Nature and National Parks Protection Authority, and the Beit She'an Municipality. The attraction is expected to bring in 400,000 visitors annually and was created by C-nario and Disk-In Pro.

[...]

Following the introductory presentation, visitors walk through the streets of Scythopolis with its marble columns, stone pavements, bathhouses, and mosaics, while watching images of people and objects projected on the shops, pillars, and building remains of the city streets. The images are accompanied by voices and music, reviving the atmosphere and daily life of an old Roman-Byzantine town. In Scythopolis’ ancient theatre, visitors can watch a Roman performance of dancing and music, as well as an audience applauding the performers—all projected on the theatre seats.

[...]

Background here.

ARAMAIC WATCH: More on the manuscript digitization project in Kerala, India:

Kerala to preserve Christian heritage

(Manorama Online)

Thrissur: Kerala has launched a project to preserve and digitise manuscripts and heritage material related to 2,000 years of Christianity in the state. The project, launched in collaboration with Kerala Council for Historical Research (KCHR) and some leading European and American universities, also aims to "promote further studies on the subject in a proper perspective".

A forum called Association for the Preservation of the Saint Thomas Christian Heritage (APSTCH) has been formed to locate, gather and preserve all available documents including the manuscripts in Syrian. "The purpose of the project is to preserve and maintain the St Thomas Christian heritage, monuments, manuscripts and printed books in Syrian and Malayalam to create correct data-base for the study of Christianity in Kerala, their culture and traditions," APSTCH honorary president Mar Aprem said.

[...]

According to Mar Aprem, as many as 120 manuscripts had been digitised. They include 'The Chaldaean Kashkol' (breviary-prayer book) written in 1585 and 'Hudra' (prayer book for 365 days). According to historians, much of the original documents relating to native Christian community have been destroyed by Portuguese in the 15th and 16th century as part of their drive to "Latinise" and bring St Thomas Christians under the Papal control. Also, many other documents had perished due to humid tropical climate and the poor conditions in which they were preserved.

The KCHR is also trying to revive interest in Aramaic, an endangered Semitic dialect believed to have been spoken by Jesus Christ, among the masses, Aprem said. Aramaic, with different dialectical variations was spoken in parts of Syria, Iraq and Turkey. During Jesus's time Jews spoke Hebrew and Aramaic and its Galilean dialect was believed to have been spoken by Jesus. According to Aprem, modern Aramaic is spoken by over 4,00,000 people belonging to various emigrant communities that moved out of Middle East. For St Thomas Christians in Kerala, Syriac was the main church language till mid-20th century.

I noted what seems to be the same project last year here and I've also posted on Aramaic in Kerala here and here. And a few years ago I noted another Indian manuscript digitization project here. In that post I also discussed a Hebrew Old Testament pseudepigraphon (The Words of Gad the Seer) which was discovered in Cochin (Kochi), a city in Kerala. It would be nice if one of these projects turned up more pseudepigrapha manuscripts.

CAN'T MAKE IT UP: The Good Ship Phoenicia is protecting itself from pirates with a sonic ray gun.

(Via Dorothy King the PhDiva, who is keeping close track of current piratical conflicts. Background to the Phoenicia expedition is here.)

HERE'S "A LIST of people who belong to the online community of those who read ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and possibly other NW Semitic languages, with fire in their belly." I am pleased to be on it.

MURPHY'S LAW is celebrating (?) its 60th anniversary:

Murphy's Law rules! It’s the maxim that says if something
can go wrong, it will – and it’s now 60 years old. So just who WAS Mr Murphy?

By Marcus Dunk (Daily Mail)

Last updated at 12:35 AM on 06th January 2009

While this year marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th of the publication of his On The Origin Of Species, another major theory is celebrating an anniversary this year and - if anything - it offers an even more profound insight into the workings of the world than Darwin's theory of evolution.

It was 60 years ago that Murphy's Law was first formerly introduced to the world. Also known as Sod's Law, this is the landmark theory which, put simply, states: If anything can go wrong, it will.

[...]

For Murphy himself, the law and its variations to which he gave his name was the cause of great annoyance. While he preferred to see the law as a principle of good, defensive design - a willingness to be prepared for the worst - he regarded most versions of his Law as 'ridiculous, trivial and erroneous', and said as much before his death in 1990.

Although he may have failed to see the joke, he does have something of a point. While it is easy to label Murphy's Law as the ultimate pessimist's charter, there is an undercurrent of optimism running just beneath the surface of this Law, one that wryly acknowledges that although things will probably go wrong, recognising that fact is the first step in being prepared for when that actually happens.

Faced with a downturn that could rival the Great Depression of the Thirties, Murphy's Law is the perfect creed for our times - a rallying cry of wry pessimism and cold-eyed realism that could be just the ticket to see us through the current downturn.

Unlike the Darwin anniversaries, no formal celebrations have been planned for the 60th birthday of Murphy's Law, but no matter.

In the coming year, if your plans go awry, if disaster strikes, you lose your job, lose your home or find your slice of toast has landed butter-side down on the kitchen floor, know that in your own way you have paid tribute to Murphy and his most universal of laws.

Now you know.

(Via Dorothy King on Facebook.)

VISION OF GABRIEL WATCH: April DeConick notes an article with chemical/geological analysis by Yuval Goren in the Israel Exploration Journal.

Background here.

PHILIP JENKINS'S BOOK, The Lost History of Christianity, is reviewed by Brother Jeffrey Gros, F.S.C. in the Catholic Review Online. Excerpt:

In “The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa and Asia – and How It Died,” Philip Jenkins provides an engaging volume, whose clarity of style and accessible narrative belies the carefully researched and detailed documentation that lies behind such a readable story.

He outlines the rise, heritage and expansion of these churches in the early centuries with centers attributed to the apostles. He describes their successful missionary activity as far as China, India and Indonesia, their rich literary and theological production, and their evangelization of whole cultures. He gives an engaging and differentiated view of the coming of Islam, its complex relations with its Jewish and Christian roots, and the variety of approaches it took to its Christian neighbors and subjects. Like Christian relationships with Jews in Europe, periods of toleration alternate with periods of persecution.

A NEW BOOK on the Sibylline Oracles.

ARCHANGEL METATRON WATCH: The Mars Volta's album, The Bedlam in Goliath comes in second in Johnny Firecloud's list of The Top 40 albums of 2008 at Craveonline:

From the very first second of "Aberinkula," the album's opener, Bedlam grabs you by the throat and shoves you down the rabbit hole. Middle-eastern harmonies at the end of the track segue directly into "Metatron," where we're introduced to the true mood of the album. Cedric's frantically swaying, polysyllabic verse delivery, coupled with Pridgen's otherworldly fills and stop-starts going into the chorus are only supplemented by Juan Alderete's stunning basswork and Rodríguez-López’s wah-wah wizardry. You'd think the song is over once the dreamy mid-song breakdown ceases, giving way to silence, but you'd be wrong; without warning, the song crashes back to life with a blindingly frantic pace.

Background here.

APRIL DECONICK has a Report on "The Birth of Christianity: A Jewish Story" Exhibit: The Alexander son of Simon Ossuary. And she promises more reports on the exhibition, including on the Apocalypse/Vision of Gabriel inscription.

Background here.

UPDATE (5 January): Another review of the exhibition is here.

UPDATE: Somehow I missed April's interim report on the Apocalypse/Vision of Gabriel inscription.

THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS EXHIBITION in the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences seems to have done pretty well. It ends today.

Museum officials say they don't know how many people have attended the exhibit. A spokeswoman says at least 85 percent to 90 percent of the 2,000 slots available each day have been filled since Dec. 26.

QUR'AN CONFERENCE:

From April 19-21, 2009 the University of Notre Dame will host an international conference on the Quran entitled The Quran in Its Historical Context. Like the 2005 Notre Dame Quran conference (the papers of which are published with Routledge as The Quran in Its Historical Context), the 2009 conference is dedicated to an examination of the Qurans relationship with the historical circumstances in which it emerges and with the larger literary tradition especially Biblical in which it participates. Particular attention will be paid to the relationship of the Quran to Syriac Literature (and, among other things the theories of Christoph Luxenberg). The keynote speakers of the 2009 Notre Dame conference will be Profs. Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd and Robert Hoyland. Fr. Sidney Griffith will also present a paper. All are welcome to attend.

For more information please visit the conference website:
http://quranconference.nd.edu/

(From Gabriel Said Reynolds on the Hugoye list. Cross-file under "Aramaic Watch.")

For the conference volume of the 2005 Notre Dame conference see here. For "Christoph Luxenberg" see here and here.