THE PALESTINIAN PROTESTS over the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum continue to get coverage.

From The Forward:

Furor Over Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibition
By Michael Kaminer
Published July 15, 2009, issue of July 24, 2009.

Toronto — Crowds at the Royal Ontario Museum’s heavily hyped Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition — Dead Sea Scrolls: Words That Changed the World, which runs until January 3, 2010 — have far exceeded the museum’s own expectations. In the show’s first nine days, more than 18,000 people flocked to the museum’s spectacular new Daniel Libeskind-designed Michael Lee-Chin Crystal pavilion — about 52% above the exhibitors’ own projections.

But hosannas for the showing, featuring four scroll fragments on loan from the Israel Antiquities Authority and displayed in public for the first time, have not been universal. Last April, the Palestinian Authority appealed to Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, to cancel the show, citing international conventions that make it illegal for a government agency to take archaeological artifacts from a territory that its country occupies.

[...]

This article has some welcome detail about the specifics of the protests and the responses of the exhibition organizers.

From the Jerusalem Post:

Toronto Jews rally around museum taking flak over Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit
By LEA KAPLAN

A coalition of pro-Palestinian organizations is demanding that the Royal Ontario Museum close a Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit that opened last month, saying Israel looted the "Palestinian artifacts" during the Six Day War.

Toronto's Palestine House and the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid say the "Words that Changed the World" presentation is illegal.

When the museum refused to cancel the exhibit, which runs through January 3, the NGOs instead asked it "to release to the public and publish on its Web site the legal opinion that it obtained and on the basis of which it decided to go ahead with this exhibit," Palestine House said in a statement

The organizations are asking the museum to seek an opinion from UNESCO on the legal and ethical issues involved in the exhibit.

[...]

There was also a protest by about 30 people outside the museum.

Both articles point out that, in terms of the exhibition itself, the protests may backfire. They amount to a lot of free publicity, ticket sales have exceeded expectations, and there is a counter-movement encouraging people to buy tickets.

Background here.

PHILIP R. DAVIES is worried about biblical illiteracy and its long-term impact on biblical scholarship and on society:

... But even non-religious scholars like me were sharply conscious of the irony of our situation: without the affection and interest of religious people, we would be out of a job. More recently, Hector Avalos, the only non-religious scholar I know of that actually seems to hate the Bible, has suggested that the Bible and its academic followers should go the way of all flesh—not his phrase, nor of course mine either.

Avalos may have his way before long if the confessional/non-confessional argument persists. I think it’s time for some cooperation. As with numerous political conflicts (Northern Ireland, Palestine/Israel) the real battle is between moderate and extreme, not between those in the centre but on either side of the perceived issue. On one extreme are those who believe that the Bible is literally true, in defiance of all common sense: but scholars already spend enough of their time trying to counter this nonsense, and in any case, fundamentalists don’t care about the future of the Bible, because the future is God’s business. The real battle is with the other extreme, the biblically illiterate—whose ignorance is not even their own fault!

An interesting essay ("Whose Bible? Anyone's?") on the Bible and Interpretation website.

HUGOYE: JOURNAL OF SYRIAC STUDIES has just published Volume 12 Number 2 (Summer 2009). TOC:

Papers

The Syriac Life of John of Tella and the Frontier Politeia.
Nathanael J. Andrade, University of Michigan

Luke 17:21: "The Kingdom of God is inside you." The Ancient Syriac Versions in Support of the Correct Translation.
Ilaria Ramelli, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan

Monks, Manuscripts, and Muslims: Syriac Textual Changes in Reaction to the Rise of Islam.
Michael Philip Penn, Mount Holyoke College

Brief Article

A Bibliography of Süryânî Periodicals in Ottoman Turkish.
Benjamin Trigona-Harany

Book Review

Holger Gzella and Margaretha L. Folmer, eds., Aramaic in its Historical and Linguistic Setting.
Aaron Michael Butts, University of Chicago

Conference Reports

EACL 2009 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages. Athens, Greece. March 31st, 2009.
Wido van Peursen and Constantijn Sikkel, Peshitta Institute, Leiden

THE TALMUD BLOG is a new blog on the academic study of the Talmud. From the first post:

Welcome to a new home for scholars of rabbinic literature working in the monkish cramped carrels and offices of academe, and the magnificently isolating reading rooms of libraries around the world. The goal is to build a kind of command center that keeps up with new trends in the field, reviews recent research, covers conferences, meetings, and symposia, looks at nifty new tools, and occasionally, considers the broader implications of the scholarship. If we have learned that the internet is the collective brain of humankind, and that the Talmud is an epitome of rabbinic culture, then this site expresses but the will of the people! So comments are appreciated, and advice is golden. Take a look around. The sidebar is catered especially for your research needs - particularly students of the Bavli. But what's missing, and what's extraneous...

(Via Hagahot.)

AN OBITUARY FOR MARTIN HENGEL has been published in the Telegraph:

Professor Martin Hengel

Professor Martin Hengel, who died on July 2 aged 82, was professor of New Testament studies at the German university of Tübingen between 1972 and 1992, and one of the greatest biblical scholars of his time.


Published: 6:32PM BST 12 Jul 2009

Although Hengel enjoyed an international reputation, the early years of his academic career were seriously hampered by his father's insistence that he should be involved in the family textile business. He was obliged to manage a factory in Leicester for several years.

None the less he made a unique contribution to the understanding of the New Testament and Christian origins by combining his work in this field with no less expertise in the fields of Judaism and early church history. Thus his magnum opus Judaism and Hellenism (1969) broke new ground and changed the course of New Testament studies by demonstrating that the Judaism out of which Christianity evolved was one deeply influenced by Hellenism.

[...]

More here.

MORE ON PALESTINIAN PROTESTS over the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum:

First, Robert Fisk has an essay in the Independent ("You won't find any lessons in unity in the Dead Sea Scrolls"), chiefly mocking the efforts of the exhibit to emphasize religious "unity" and expressing disappointment that certain political issues, including the Palestinian protests, were not mentioned. Also the Armenian genocide of 1915:

So cautious are the dear old Canadians – who should by now have learned that concealing unhappy truths will only create fire and pain – that they do not even mention that "Kando", the first recipient of the scrolls, was Armenian. Of course not. Because then they would have to explain why an Armenian was in Jerusalem, not in western Turkey. Which would mean that they would have to mention the Armenian Holocaust of 1915 (one and a half million Armenian civilians murdered by Ottoman Turks).

Actually, the sources I can find which discuss Kando's background report that he was a member of the Syrian Orthodox Church (e.g., here, here, etc.). There seems also to have been an Armenian antiquities dealer involved in the early negotiations over the Cave One scrolls (see, e.g., here), so perhaps Fisk is conflating the two (and maybe he could have done his research more carefully). In any case, were Kando Armenian, I don't see why that would obligate the exhibition to bring up the Armenian genocide.

This would anger Canada's Turkish community, who are holocaust deniers. And in turn, it would anger the Israel Antiquities Authority, who do not acknowledge that the Armenian Holocaust ever happened, there being only one True Holocaust, which is that of the Jews of Europe.

It's not clear to me what this is about. Is he really saying that the IAA has denied the historical reality of the Armenian genocide of 1915? That seems, first, unlikely, and, second, rather beyond its remit. Or is the issue that the IAA has not used the specific language "holocaust" or "genocide?" Or that the Israeli Government doesn't and the IAA is guilty by association? The ADL got into some trouble over this issue a while ago and, more recently, so has President Obama. I'm not going to go into that debate except to say that the ROM Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition would have no reason either to get involved in it.

He summarizes the Palestinian case as follows:

... But up come the spoilsports, namely the Canadian "Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid", to suggest that the scrolls, originally in the hands of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities and the Ecole Biblique Française, were "confiscated and illegally removed by Israel" in 1967. The Royal Ontario Museum, the protesters say, is showing "looted" property which it has no right to exhibit. The Palestinian Authority itself has intervened, arguing that the museum is "displaying artefacts removed from the Palestinian territories". (Let us not, O Reader, mention the Elgin marbles, albeit that the Brits don't occupy Greece.)

Second, The Ottawa Citizen has an editorial about the Palestinian protests ("The old bait-and-switch"). Excerpt:

An odd assortment of groups are protesting the exhibit on the grounds that the scrolls are stolen artifacts and really belong to Arabs, not Jews. Yes, you read that correctly. Hebrew manuscripts of the Jewish Bible that were written centuries before Muhammad was born are, apparently, Muslim property.

It’s easy to see what’s going on here. Just as Holocaust denial circulates in some corners of the anti-Israel movement, there is a parallel effort to deny the Jewish people’s ancestral connection to the Holy Land. The idea is to delegitimize Israel by denying the indigenous rights of Jews. Some Israel-haters have even taken to arguing that Palestinian Arabs are the real descendants of “ancient Hebrews.”

Background here.

EXTRAORDINARY FINDS AT THE MT ZION EXCAVATION are reported by James Tabor. Lots of interesting new architecture and artifacts. This in particular caught my epigrapher's eye:

1. A stone vessel with an ancient inscription of ten lines written in an archaic Jewish script. Such stone vessels were used in connection with maintaining ritual purity related to Temple worship, and they are found in abundance in areas where the priests lived. We have found a dozen or more on our site over the past three years. However, to have ten lines of text is unprecedented. One normally might find a single name inscribed, or a line or two, but this is the first text of this length ever found on such a vessel. We have shared high-resolution photos with various epigraphic experts in Jerusalem who are working together to try and decipher this text. It is written in a very informal cursive hand and is quite difficult to read.

Note also that they are dependent on donations to continue the work. Details on contributing are at the end of the post.

NO SURPRISE:

ROM Scrolls attendance beyond expectations

James Bradshaw

Toronto — From Thursday's Globe and Mail Last updated on Friday, Jul. 10, 2009 02:47AM EDT

Attendance at the Royal Ontario Museum's Dead Sea Scrolls: Words that Changed the World exhibition has exceeded even its organizers' most hopeful projections, attracting an average of more than 2,000 people each day since it opened.

[...]

TORY LEADER DAVID CAMERON is descended from a Jewish Renaissance Hebraist according to a University of Manchester scholar:

Illustrious Jewish roots of Tory leader revealed

10 Jul 2009
David Cameron’s Jewish history goes back hundreds – if not thousands - of years, according to a University of Manchester historian.

Dr Yaakov Wise, who specialises in Jewish history, says the Tory leader is descended from a German-born Jewish scholar whose writings furthered the study of Hebrew in European Christendom at a time of widespread hostility toward its Jews.

And according to Dr Wise, who has been using archival material to examine the Cameron family tree, the Tory leader could also be a direct descendent of the greatest ever Hebrew prophet, Moses.

Cameron is a descendent of banker Emile Levita, who came to Britain as a German immigrant in the 1850s. Emile Levita was himself a descendent of Elijah Levita, who lived from 1469-1549.

During the last years of his life Elijah Levita produced, among other works, two major books: the 1541 Translator’s Book, the first dictionary of the Targums or Aramaic commentaries on the Hebrew Bible.

His lexicon of 1542 explained much of the Mishnaic Hebrew language and was a supplement to two important earlier dictionaries.

[...]

The bit about his being descended from Moses is rather more speculative. There's a Wikipedia article (take usual caveats as read) on Elia Levita here.

QUMRAN SCHOLAR LARRY SCHIFFMAN has become an officer in an organization for inter-religious relations:

New Leaders to Represent World Jewry to Other Faiths

NEW YORK, July 9 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- IJCIC, (The International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultation) the consortium charged with representing world Jewry in its relationships with other faiths, announced the election of new officers. IJCIC which is comprised of the three major religious streams and major secular organizations has existed for over 40 years. It is widely recognized as the spokesgroup and representative body for dealings with other world religious bodies.

Rabbi Richard Marker has been elected as Chair of IJCIC after serving for two years as vice chair. Professor Lawrence Schiffman who will assume the role of Vice Chair, and Betty Ehrenberg, who will serve as Treasurer, join him.

[...]

Schiffman, who serves as Edelman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic studies and chair of the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University is an internationally known scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Rabbinic Judaism. His writings have helped to redefine our understanding of the Jewish background of Christianity. In both academic and religious contexts, he has been active throughout his career in interfaith relations. He is a member of the international team that published the entire corpus of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a past president of the Association for Jewish Studies and a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research. He has served as visiting professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University and the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. He serves IJCIC as a delegate of the Orthodox Union.

[...]

RAPHAEL GOLB has pleaded not guilty to ID theft in response to charges that he assumed the identity of Dead Sea Scrolls scholar Larry Schiffman in order to defame him.

Background here.

THE LOD MOSAIC has come to the attention of the New York Times:

Polishing a Lost Gem to Dazzle Tourists

By ISABEL KERSHNER
Published: July 8, 2009

LOD, Israel — The beauty of the exquisitely preserved ancient mosaic only seemed to underline the incongruity of its surroundings.

The late-Roman-era mosaic floor, one of the largest and finest in Israel, was unveiled by the authorities last week for just the second time since it was discovered 13 years ago in the dilapidated eastern section of this poor town near the international airport, south of Tel Aviv.

Some 1,700 years old, the magnificent tiled floor spreads over almost 2,000 square feet, shaded from the harsh summer sun by a thin awning and surrounded by a canvas fence. A panoply of colorful depictions of birds, fish, exotic animals and merchant ships, the mosaic conjures up an intriguing reminder of Lod’s more glorious past.

[...]

Background here.

BOOK REVIEW in BMCR:

Gideon Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic: A History. Cambridge, UK/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. ix, 483. ISBN 9780521874571. $135.00.

Reviewed by David Frankfurter, University of New Hampshire (davidTf@unh.edu )
Word count: 2445 words

This learned and thoughtful book, building on the spate of publications of Jewish magical texts over the past thirty years (as well as the refinement of the study of magic in the ancient Mediterranean world), aims first of all to replace Ludwig Blau's 1914 Das Altjüdische Zauberwesen as the essential resource on ancient Jewish magic. But Bohak, who readers might know best for his superb on-line collection of University of Michigan magical texts is also a very engaging writer. In many ways, Ancient Jewish Magic reads more like an extended essay on the place of magic in developing Jewish religion than a systematic tour of sources. With amusing metaphors and asides about contemporary Israeli politics, and at the same time little jargon, the book deserves (and rewards) a leisurely read as much as reference consultation. (Indeed, the publishers seem to have opted against reference consultation. The Table of Contents is so woefully inadequate, lacking all Bohak's critical sub-sections, that the volume can be difficult to consult for particular topics).

The overall goal of the book is to describe the development of Jewish magical practices from the Second Temple through late rabbinic eras. This development reflected an increasingly confident sense of what is foreign to Judaism, the increasing hegemony of rabbinic sages, and an increasingly textual sense of magic itself. Magic, in Bohak's perspective, was neither peripheral nor entirely central to formative Judaism.

[...]

UPDATE: Dead link now fixed. Sorry!

TECHNOLOGY WATCH: Another manuscript imaging and digitizing project:

High-tech imaging reveals hidden past in ancient texts
July 7th, 2009

(PhysOrg.com) -- It might simply look like a smudge, but even the slightest stain on the ancient writing surface of papyrus could obscure a revelation of a past civilization. Now, with the advent of high-tech imaging, some of those secrets could reveal fascinating insights into everyday life of early Egyptian, Greek and Roman societies.

For the last four weeks, a team of national researchers and scholars examined dozens of papyri among the thousands of papyrological pieces in the University of Michigan collection. Using multi-spectral imaging, the Ancient Textual Imaging Group—led by acclaimed papyrology expert Stephen Bay of Brigham Young University—examined ancient text written on papyrus that had become illegible because they are stained, discolored and faded. Recording through a range of filters, the technology captures high-resolution color images, making clear the layers of text hidden beneath words and letters written on levels of papyrus.

The Ancient Textual Imaging Group, based at Brigham Young, is conducting a two-year venture to record illegible papyrus documents from historically significant U.S.-based collections. The project is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

[...]

For other manuscript imaging and conservation projects see here, here, and here, following the links back as indicated.

BIBLINDEX:

The ultimate goal of this site is to permit the identification of biblical quotations in all Jewish and Christian literature of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. For the time being, it already allows simple interrogation in a corpus of about 400,000 biblical references.

(Via the Agade list.)

THE COPPER SCROLL is the subject of an essay by Robert R. Cargill at the Bible and Interpretation website: "On the Insignificance and the Abuse of the Copper Scroll." Excerpt:

Scholars aren’t quite sure what to do with the Copper Scroll. Milik concluded the Copper Scroll was placed in Cave 3 around 100 CE, after the other scrolls were abandoned in the other caves. Others like Lancaster Harding and Cross believe the Copper Scroll to be the folklore of Qumran. Still others believe it describes actual treasure belonging to the residents of Qumran. I join the scholars who conclude that the Copper Scroll describes articles from the second Jerusalem Temple (most likely legendary) supposedly hidden after its destruction in 70 CE, in keeping with later date of its composition. The Copper Scroll was most likely placed in Cave 3 long after the rest of the Dead Sea Scrolls were placed in their respective caves. And while it was discovered during the excavations that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Copper Scroll should not be considered part of this collection because its author(s), script, style, language, genre, content, and medium are otherwise unattested among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Because of this irregularity, amateur treasure hunters and even some scholars regularly appeal to the Copper Scroll in a seemingly perpetual effort to promote sensational fringe theories, raise money, and bring attention to their far-fetched claims. Sensationalists prey on the ambiguous and everyone loves a treasure hunt; the Copper Scroll is both.

There follows much entertaining debunking.

I think the Copper Scroll is a genuine (i.e., not legendary) list of treasures, perhaps treasures associated with the Temple. I have more on the Copper Scroll here (follow the links back) and here.

THE LOD MOSAIC is going to New York in March to be displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art while a visitor's center is being built for it in Israel:

Ancient Mosaic to Be Displayed at Metropolitan Museum of Art
By Genevieve Long & Dalia Hartaz
Epoch Times Staff Jul 6, 2009

LOD, Israel—An archaeological treasure from Israel will make its maiden journey for display to New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in March. The Lod Mosaic, as it is dubbed, is an extraordinarily rich and detailed mosaic that was discovered 13 years ago in the city of Lod in central Israel.

It has been undergoing excavation and is now being prepared for transport to labs where it will be cleaned and restored. The work’s next stop after that will be New York City.

[...]

This was noted in earlier coverage, but this article has more details. Background here and here.

ANOTHER QUARRY:

Ancient Temple Mount quarry found in Jerusalem
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS (Jerusalem Post)

A quarry from the late Second Temple Period that produced stone to build the Temple Mount's supporting walls has been uncovered in central Jerusalem, the Antiquities Authority said Monday.

The latest discovery brought to three the number of quarries found in the city over the past two years which archeologists believe were used in the construction of the Temple walls.

The 2,030-year-old quarry, which spans more than one dunam (0.1 hectare), was discovered during a salvage excavation on the city's Rehov Shmuel Hanevi ahead of planned construction of residential buildings at the site, the Authority said.

[...]

(Thanks to readers who brought this to my attention.) For the other two quarries in the Jerusalem area, go here and follow the links. And for another quarry found recently in the Jordan Valley, see here and here.

JASTROW'S DICTIONARY of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature is under consideration for electronic publication at Logos Bible Software and I understand some initial work on the project has already been undertaken. Kent Hendricks e-mails:

Logos Bible Software recently announced a digitization project for Marcus Jastrow’s Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature. This new edition will be fully searchable, including words and phrases in any language buried deep within individual entries. It will also contain extensive linking, which readers will find especially useful when following cross-references, citations, and Hebrew Bible references. Most importantly, the electronic edition will fix some of the issues in the print versions, and use a more readable font.

The price is somewhat higher than the reprint available on Amazon, but Kent notes:

First, the recently-published print copies have been criticized for their poor quality—a difficult font for reading, blurry text, etc. Our edition will fix those issues, and add extensive linking, searching, and all of the other great features of having an electronic edition. The higher price, in our view, reflects a much higher quality book than the one currently in print.

Second, the production costs for a book of this size are very high. Other publishers have not re-typeset the original 1903 edition, which is why they can sell it for $33-$34. Since we plan on redoing the original 1903 edition from scratch (with the same content, of course), our project is significantly more expensive. Even at $49.95, we will still need a lot of orders.

So if you are interested, put in a pre-order now.

THE CODEX SINAITICUS has gone online today:

Historic Bible pages put online (BBC)

About 800 pages of the earliest surviving Christian Bible have been recovered and put on the internet.

Visitors to the website www.codexsinaiticus.org can now see images of more than half the 1,600-year-old Codex Sinaiticus manuscript.

Fragments of the 4th Century document - written in Greek on parchment leaves - have been worked on by institutions in the UK, Germany, Egypt and Russia.

Experts say it is "a window into the development of early Christianity".

[...]

The BBC piece is good but there are some more details in this Reuters article. Background here - follow the link at the bottom of the post. To celebrate the event, the British Library is holding a conference on Codex Sinaiticus today and tomorrow.

VISUALIZE THIS: Science fiction author Alastair Reynolds has a proposal for using computer technology to simulate the past:

The Tech Lab: Alastair Reynolds

(BBC)

Science fiction author Alastair Reynolds, author of Revelation Space and Century Rain, wonders if we could do a better job of looking back into history.

If there's a silver lining to the dark cloud of CGI-dominated blockbusters that seem to infest the cinema lately, it's this: the same digital technology that can make Spiderman or Hulk leap around the screen in a singularly unconvincing fashion, can also be used to create something infinitely more interesting: the past.

Imagine if you could actually walk around in a simulated version of a scene from history? Wouldn't that be worth an hour of anyone's time?

I'm not talking about the Star Trek holodeck here. I'm talking about something we could have sometime next week, if the appropriate technologies were combined.

[...]

Imagine visiting an historical site a few years down the line, something like the Roman spa in the city of Bath. Instead of being given the option to hire a handset with a pre-recorded commentary, you get given a pair of goggles, with an associated earpiece.

They're a bit scuffed from repeated use, but they've been thoroughly cleaned since the last person used them. You put them on and move into the museum proper. The goggles are preset for 45AD, but you can move the left-hand slider up and down to surf through the ages. If you wish you can even skip to post Roman times and stroll around the greening ruins.

Importantly, there's a second slider on the right side of the goggles. This one is preset to low immersion: when you first don the goggles, it displays the simulated overlay as a ghostly tracery, a bit like the vector graphics of old arcade games. You can see where walls and floors used to be, but you're still firmly anchored to the real world.

Turn the slider up a bit, though, and the overlays become progressively more solid, more photo-real.

Turn it up a bit more and the glasses begin selectively deleting what they don't want you to see - the modern walls that are in the wrong place, the modern ceiling that should show the blue sky and clouds of Roman Britain instead. What's more, the slider goes even further up the scale.

[...]

Reynolds had a brief slot on a BBC program in February discussing some of these ideas. I remember seeing it, which is odd because I didn't watch the whole program. Either I happened to switch on the television (itself unusual) at exactly the right time or, perhaps more likely, the BBC used the clip in an advert.

Alastair Reynolds is one of my favorite SF authors and I'm currently reading his The Prefect.

UPDATE: A tangetially related item here: Ancient Tourism.

PROFESSOR MARTIN HENGEL - 1926-2009. I've just learned the sad news that Martin Hengel passed away on 2 July. There's a brief Wikipedia article on him here. See also Larry Hurtado's article, "Martin Hengel's Impact on English-speaking Scholarship" in Expository Times 20.2 (2008): 70-76 (requires a paid personal or institutional subscription to download, but Michael Bird has an excerpt here). Professor Hengel's contribution to New Testament and Second Temple Judaism studies was vast. Requiescat in pace.

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY to all American readers.



(Wikimedia Commons image)

A NEW BOOK on the history of the interpretation of the Talmud and its implications:

Agreeing to disagree: KU prof’s new book on Talmud

Written by Beth Lipoff, Staff Writer [Kansas City Jewish Chronicle)
Friday, 03 July 2009 12:00

Sergey Dolgopolski has studied Talmud in his native Russia, Israel and the United States, and in his new book, he’s come to a conclusion: the disagreements in the text’s commentary are a lost art.

“What this is trying to accomplish is to show that Talmud is an intellectual discipline, like rhetoric or logic — an art of thinking,” Dolgopolski said.

In “What is Talmud? The Art of Disagreement,” Dolgopolski, an assistant professor of religious studies and Jewish studies at the University of Kansas, says that contemporary, mainstream culture encourages agreement as an ultimate goal.

However, Dolgopolski argues that the 15th century Talmud shows instances where it’s fine to disagree when someone cannot prove his point is right and another person’s is wrong.

“The book places the ways in which the Talmud has been studied into the much larger context, not only what was going on in the 15th century … but how the ways of studying the Talmud fit into the larger view of the history of western civilization and thought,” Dolgopolski said. “I’m not doing the work of a historian, but rather the work of an intellectual who looks at those methodologies from a theoretical perspective that has been developed in the 20th century.”

[...]

The Babylonian Talmud was, of course, redacted in the sixth century or perhaps a little later. I take it that by "the 15th century Talmud" the writer means the interpretation of the Talmud in the 15th century.

A RESPONSE to Palestinian objections to the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum has been published by law professor Ed Morgan in the National Post):

Ed Morgan: Dead Sea cranks
Posted: July 02, 2009, 10:45 AM by NP Editor
Full Comment, Ed Morgan

The Dead Sea Scrolls, which are being exhibited this week at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), have survived time, weather, sand--and now the political storm caused by protests at their being toured by the Israel Museum, which houses the scrolls in Jerusalem.

Opponents of the exhibit include the Palestinian Minister of Tourism and Canadian solidarity groups supporting the Palestinian cause. They accuse the Israel Museum of having taken the scrolls from the Jordanian Department of Antiquities upon Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967. Israel's actions are alleged to be contrary to international conventions protecting cultural artifacts and prohibiting their removal.

The ROM is right to stare down the protests.

[...]

Background here.

ARCHANGEL METATRON WATCH: A shakeup among the heavenly host?

Metatron Appoints New Directors and Officers

Background here.

BIBLICAL STUDIES CARNIVAL 43 has been published (with some, er ... genre adjustment) by Patrick George McCullough at kata ta biblia.

A REPORT on the Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum is in the Globe and Mail. One of many more to come, I dare say. Excerpt:

The questions of who wrote the scrolls and why are still being hotly debated, and this exhibition tends to theories rather than conclusions. The eight scrolls on show (for the first half of a six-month run) include a section of the Book of Daniel never publicly displayed before; a section of Genesis telling the story of how Joseph is wrongfully accused of rape by Potiphar's wife; and an apocalyptic text known as the Book of War, a blessing that was intended to be recited over the surviving Jews at the end of time. A second set of scrolls, including parts of Deuteronomy never displayed before, will go on show at the midpoint of the exhibition's run to minimize light exposure. Also, a fragment showing the Ten Commandments will be on display from Oct. 10 to 18.

All the fragments are displayed with full translations and ample information about their content, date and material. Beside a fragment of the Book of Psalms, hidden speakers play a contemporary recording of a female voice singing psalms in Hebrew to remind visitors these texts are sung in synagogues to this day.

Background here.

MANDEANS (MANDAEANS) in the United States face some cultural challenges. The AP has an article on them. Excerpt:

The world's roughly 60,000 Mandaeans have been coming to the United States in small numbers for several decades. Surges occurred at the outbreak of the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s, after the Gulf War in the early 1990s and after the 2006 bombing of Iraq's al-Askari Mosque, which set off sectarian violence.

Now, an estimated quarter of the population is in refugee camps in Jordan and Syria, while 10,000 remain split between Iran and Iraq. The remainder are scattered from San Antonio to Sydney. Several thousand are thought to live in the U.S., according to Mandaean-American leaders, but no formal totals are kept.

Members of Mandaean organizations from across the globe are convening in Stockholm, Sweden, on Wednesday to discuss ways to keep their religion alive in the diaspora.

One of the focuses of the conference will be language. Linguistically, the Iraqi community has all but lost its connection to the spoken Aramaic dialect of its Mandaean forefathers.

Charles Haberl, director of the Middle East Studies Center at Rutgers University, said that while Arabic and German translations of Mandaean holy scripture are available, the young Mandaean-American community is cut off from its texts because most cannot read Iraqi Arabic even though they speak it.

"When you grow up as a Christian, you know the story of (Christianity). We can't even read the Ginze," the central Mandaean religious text, said Mais Mandwee, 21, of Kalamazoo. "It's a shame."

There is a push for English translations to be produced, which would be a good thing.

PHOTOS OF THAT ANCIENT UNDERGROUND QUARRY have been published with commentary on the National Geographic Society website. Background here.

THE CURRENT WOES OF THE SAMARITANS are surveyed in the Toronto Star. I knew about the problem with finding brides, but not about the communications towers and the tahini:

Samaritans run out of brides

Israeli radio towers seen as latest threat in West Bank village
Jun 30, 2009 04:30 AM
Comments on this story (6)
Oakland Ross
MIDDLE EAST BUREAU

KIRYAT LUZA, West Bank- It is no easy matter to be a Samaritan, much less a good one, in these stressful times.

The list of their grievances is considerable: apparent health problems, an export embargo on their famous tahini, and, most worrisome, a shortage of brides.

Samaritans must endure the mysterious scourge of the seven nearby communications towers – most of them Israeli-built and controlled – whose electromagnetic radiation is deemed to be a health hazard.

"Our people suffer headaches because of this," grouses Husney Kohen, one of this venerable community's 12 hereditary priests. "Maybe this will eliminate us from existence."

Samaritans also have to contend with the rejection of their renowned tahini, made from ground sesame seeds.

"Our sauce is kosher," says Kohen, an elegant 65-year-old dressed in a grey robe. "It is the very best in the world."

For the past 18 months, Israeli customs officials have barred import of the sauce, made in a local factory that provides a livelihood for 10 Samaritan families – or did.

"The Israelis tell us it's a security issue," Kohen complains. "Why? This is another obstacle in the life of the Samaritans."

[...]

Background here.

THE APOSTLE PAUL'S DNA may be available for cloning (whether or not that is a good idea):

Basilica bones are St Paul's, Pope declares after carbon dating tests

Richard Owen in Rome (The London Times

Pope Benedict XVI said last night that bone fragments found inside the tomb of St Paul in Rome had been carbon dated for the first time, "confirming the unanimous and uncontested tradition that they are the mortal remains of the Apostle Paul".

He said that archaeologists had inserted a probe into the white marble sarcophagus under the Basilica of St Paul's Outside the Walls which has been revered for centuries as the tomb of St Paul.

The pontiff said: "Small fragments of bone were carbon dated by experts who knew nothing about their provenance and results showed they were from someone who lived between the 1st and 2nd century. This seems to confirm the unanimous and uncontested tradition that these are the mortal remains of Paul the Apostle."

[...]

The Carbon-14 result is suggestive, but it's too early to say we have proof this is Paul's body. Let's see what additional information they find if and when they open the tomb. I'm hoping for a first-century copy of Paul's genuine letters.

MORE ON THE LOD MOSAIC, which goes on display on 9 July. I noted it here a couple of weeks ago, but now the IAA website and Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs site have more photos to go with the article. There's also a video.

SCROLL DOWN or go here to read the laureation address for Bishop Tom Wright's honorary doctorate last week.

MIXED RESULTS so far in the case concerning the Mor Gabriel Monastery land dispute in Turkey:

Turkish Court Rules Against Assyrian Monastery
Posted GMT 6-24-2009 18:34:11

Midyat, Turkey (AINA) -- The Turkish court issued two decisions today in the case of the embattled Assyrian monastery St. Gabriel and postponed until September 30 another decision. The dispute is over the so-called forest, land that lies within the monastery grounds and which is comprised of half grown bush.

According to today's court decision this land is now owned by the Forestry Department (a Turkish authority). The monastery lost some 34 hectares of land (136 acres). The court decided that the Forestry Department, on behalf of the Turkish State Government, now owns the land and can do whatever it wants with it. Despite the fact that the protective wall that shields the monastery staff and its guests lies on that land. The great surprise for the most of the international representatives was that the Turkish state involved itself in such a "minor" matter that is vital for a religious community and affects a historic monument.

The case against the director of the monastery foundation, Mr Kuryakos Ergün, was held in another court room; he was charged with intentionally violating the law by building the protective wall that surrounds the grounds of the monastery. This case has been postponed to 30th September.

The Turkish State Treasury Authority lost its other case against the monastery. Twelve parcels of land both inside and outside the wall of the monastery, amounting to some 24 hectares of land (96 acres) remain in the possession of the monastery, though the board of the monastery believes this decision will be appealed.

[...]

A Monastery lawyer says that they will appeal all the way to the European Court, if necessary. There is coverage also at Hurriyet Daily News.

Background here and here.

APOCRYPHA WATCH: An Apocrypha-inspired art exhibit in Italy:

ILLEGGIO (near Udine) - Casa delle Esposizioni: Art inspired by Biblical Apocrypha including Caravaggio's Rest During the Flight into Egypt, loaned by Rome's Doria Pamphili Gallery, Guercino, Durer, Andrea Pozzo, Byzantine and Russian icons; over 80 works, until October 4.

SOTHEBY'S is auctioning an ancient Aramaic and Greek biblical manuscript owned by Westminster College in Cambridge. Steve Caruso has the story and some commentary at the Aramaic Blog. The Forbes article is here. A Wikipedia article (with all the usual caveats about such things) on Codex Climaci Rescriptus is here. The Evangelical Textual Criticism Blog was on the story (here and here) back in May. People on the Hugoye list are not happy (here and here).

As always, I hope that, if the manuscript must be sold, some philanthrophist will buy it and donate to a museum. Failing that, I hope the buyer will make sure to keep it available for scholars to study.

CONGRATULATIONS also to the Rt Revd Dr Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham, who received an honorary doctorate at the University of St Andrews last week. Meant to flag that in the Donaldson post, but was in a horrendous rush. Professor Tevor Hart gave the laureation.

UPDATE (29 June): Here is Professor Hart's laureation address:

Vice-Chancellor, it is my privilege to present for the degree of Doctor of Divinity, honoris causa, The Rt Rev Dr Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham.


Tom Wright was born on the 1st December 1948 in Morpeth, Northumberland, the second of four children, and heir to the long-established timber business run by his father. His early education was at Sedbergh school (then in the wilds of Yorkshire) where academically he excelled in classics and learned to love and to play cricket and rugby – cricket because Yorkshire were rather good at it in those days; rugby because, as he told me, one had rather little option! In between school and University came a gap year, and a chance to try his hand at the family trade – working as a lumberjack in British Columbia!

Undergraduate studies were at Oxford, first in ‘Greats’, and then in Theology as part of training for Anglican Ministry, graduating with first class Honours in both subjects. It was during this period that Tom met and married Maggie (who it is our great pleasure to welcome here today) and from then on studies were combined with the busyness of family life, with the eventual appearance of four children – Julian, Rosamund, Hattie and Oliver – and (much more recently – and the arithmetic is Tom’s, not mine!) two and a half grandchildren: Joseph, Ella, and one due in October.

A DPhil in Oxford under the supervision of George Caird led to a Fellowship and Chaplaincy at Merton, a five year spell in Canada as Assistant Professor of New Testament Language and Literature at McGill University in Montreal, and, in 1986, a Lectureship in New Testament Studies back in Oxford where Tom also held the posts of Chaplain and Fellow of Worcester College. In fulfilling these various appointments he quickly established a model of working that has been the hallmark of his career ever since; a mutually enriching counterpoint between the pastoral ‘cure of souls’ and top-flight, internationally renowned scholarship.

In the mid-1980s a prodigious publishing career began which was from the outset directed again quite self-consciously both to the academy and to the wider reading public. This has continued largely uninterrupted ever since, producing a stream of more than 60 books from popular works, through ‘mid-level’ texts for students and the theologically literate public (I confess to having several of these readily to hand on my own bookcase!), to the sort of substantial academic monograph which rather than just adding to the log-jam of scholarly works in print takes its chainsaw to the state of the discipline, reshaping it altogether. Scholars are generally deemed eminent if they manage to do this in one field of specialized concern. Tom Wright has done it both in his work on the historical Jesus, and in his contributions to Pauline studies. The core of this contribution lies in a massive six-part work Christian Origins and the Question of God of which three substantial volumes have already been published and a fourth is eagerly anticipated in the next year or so. On top of all this, Tom has published innumerable scholarly articles, and delivered prestigious named lectures in Cambridge, Duke, Harvard, London, Yale and many other universities besides. In 2007 he added St Andrews to that list, delivering one of the current series of James Gregory Lectures on Science and Religion on the theme ‘Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?’ Tom is one of the foremost living New Testament scholars, and we are not the first university to have honoured his scholarship in this way.

But Tom’s scholarship cannot properly be disentangled, let alone isolated, from the other vital side of his calling, as a pastor and (latterly) a senior churchman: First as Dean of Lichfield from 1994, then as Canon Theologian at Westminster Abbey, and since 2003 as Bishop of Durham, one of the most senior Episcopal appointments in the land. Here, both in his role as diocesan bishop and as a figure with a significant profile within the public life of the nation, he has put into practice commitments arising directly out of his theological learning. Resurrection, he urges in his writings, means that God is concerned with and for the whole of human life and not just some supposed ‘spiritual’ bit of it; from his seat in the House of Lords and in regular appearances on national TV, radio and in the press, Tom’s has been a powerful and a distinctive Christian voice on global debt, the Iraq war, constitutional reform and many other issues of the day. His particular commitment to the economic and social challenges facing the Northeast of England, and his enthusiasm for meeting the people of his diocese both in- and outside churches have made him a much-loved pastor in the region as well as a distinguished representative of an ancient tradition the riches of which, he insists, need to be recaptured and re-imagined so as to speak to our shared present and future.

Amidst all these other achievements, Tom admits to playing the piano, the guitar, the Dixieland jazz trombone and pretty much anything else musical he can get his hands on. His CV lists his ‘clubs’ as the Athenaeum and the Bishop Auckland Golf Club (of which, as Bishop of Durham, he is actually President). Golf, he says, is a great source of relaxation and solace, because it’s the one thing which, as a bishop, he can do really badly, and absolutely no one complains! So there we have it: from the chainsaw to the five-iron via the jazz trombone. A man of many and diverse hidden talents! But for all the world to see, a ground-breaking scholar, whose career-long commitment to holding the life of the academy and the Church together has had a remarkable positive impact on each.


Vice-Chancellor, in recognition of his major contribution to New Testament scholarship and to the life of the Church I invite you now to confer on Tom Wright the degree of Doctor of Divinity, honoris causa.

THE FRIEDBERG GENIZAH PROJECT has a website:

The Friedberg Genizah Project Website (FGPW)

The Friedberg Genizah Project (FGP) is an ambitious undertaking which, we hope, will greatly advance Genizah research. One of the main tasks it has set for itself is to computerize the entire corpus of Genizah manuscripts and Genizah-related materials: images, identifications, catalogs, metadata, transcriptions, translations and bibliographical references. FGPW is the Internet Website on which the project’s main results will be displayed.

If you are interested in Genizah research or in Jewish (or Islamic) Studies in general, you are cordially invited to register to the site. If you do not wish to register, you are always welcome to visit its Demo component. The site is evolving and growing constantly. Development and maintenance are carried out by Genazim (FGP Computerization Unit), headed by Prof. Yaacov Choueka.

Some background here.

(Via the Agade list.)

A DEAD SEA SCROLLS FAQ is out in the National Post. It's okay, although I think the variants in some of the biblical manuscripts are more historically and theologically significant than they do. It's amusing that there's now a Curse of the Dead Sea Scrolls, just like the Curse of the Mummy. Maybe we can get Brendan Fraser to do a movie ...

Graduation is over but I'm moving house over the next few days, so blogging may continue to be erratic.

STEPHEN R. DONALDSON, the American novelist, received an honorary doctorate yesterday at the University of St. Andrews. I have mentioned Donaldson's work here (and follow the links back) and here. I gave the laureation address in the graduation ceremony and I reproduce it below. More here (and click on image below for a larger version*).

Vice Chancellor, it is my privilege to present the American novelist Stephen R Donaldson for the Degree of Doctor of Letters honoris causa.

Stephen R Donaldson was born in 1947 in Cleveland Ohio. He lived in India as a child, where his father served as a medical missionary, returning to the United States in 1963. His father's work with "lepers," victims of the non-fatal but debilitating and disfiguring disease called Hansen's Syndrome, had an enormous influence on Stephen's later work as a writer. He earned a bachelor's degree at the College of Wooster in Ohio and an MA in English at Kent State University, then performed hospital work for two years as a conscientious objector during the Viet Nam War. Shortly afterward he became a full-time writer of fiction.

Epic fantasy is a genre that has traditionally been looked down upon in the literary and academic worlds. Strange that this should be so, given that epic is one of the most venerable genres of literature, extending back through Milton, Beowulf, Virgil, and Homer to some of the earliest preserved Sumerian literary texts about Gilgamesh the king. And epic is itself a form of fantasy literature, which Stephen Donaldson has lucidly defined as literature in which the internal conflicts of the characters are externalised in the form of monsters, magical forces, and realms not found on this earth. The importance of such literature has been finding increasing appreciation in the academic world, not least through the efforts of the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts at the University of St Andrews, which sponsors much research in this area. And the sheer literary quality of Stephen Donaldson's work has challenged the mainstream literary world to recognise the vital contribution of this genre.

Stephen Donaldson is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning writer who over more than thirty years has published nineteen novels and two collections of short stories. He is best know for his eight (of a projected ten) novels in the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, an epic fantasy series that has been compared to the work of Tolkien, but which immediately separated itself from the mass of Tolkien clones as a creative contribution to the genre that set its own agenda and attained a literary standard that equals if not surpasses Tolkien. (The Washington Post said that it was "comparable to Tolkien at his best.") The story was inspired by the work of Donaldson's father with lepers in India and it centres on a contemporary man in small-town America (Thomas Covenant) who unexpectedly contracts Hansen's Syndrome and abruptly finds himself an outcast and pariah in his own life. Covenant is mysteriously translated to another world in which he is cured of his illness and is regarded as a saviour figure with tremendous magical powers. But he cannot permit himself to believe in this reality because it defies the cardinal principle of his life as a leper: that there is no cure, that dead nerves don't regenerate, and that allowing any hope to relax his self-discipline risks injury, disfigurement and destruction. He cannot dare to believe in his own powers or use them to save this magical realm from its satanic adversary. This twist of placing a tormented twentieth-century man in an epic fantasy world where his inner conflicts have been transformed into monstrous external threats and heroic external champions has been a significant force for reclaiming fantasy as a contribution to mainstream fiction. The series explores themes of alienation, personal responsibility, power and its corruption, guilt, and hope, while telling a gripping and highly original tale. It introduces a new, beautiful, and threatened world and then explores its collective consciousness, reaching an imaginative and aesthetic level of world-creation and a depth of psychological and philosophical insight that brought a new level of credibility to the genre of fantasy.

Besides the Thomas Covenant books, Stephen Donaldson has published another two-volume fantasy series, an additional two volumes of short stories, a five-volume science fiction series known as The Gap Cycle, and the four detective novels in The Man Who ... series. Stephen Donaldson's work creatively explores important moral and theological issues such as human destiny and free will, the inherent limitations of power, the subjective and objective dimensions of evil, and the destructive power of self-hatred.

Stephen Donaldson is one of the most highly regarded living writers of fantasy and he has won numerous awards in this area. His science fiction and detective novels have also consistently challenged the boundaries of the genres and have been very well received and successful. But the success and recognition of his work extend far beyond the confines of the audience of genre literature. Eight of his books, including the most recent one, have appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List and one of them (White Gold Wielder in the Thomas Covenant series) was the eighth bestselling book of 1983 (just after Eco's The Name of the Rose). The second volume in this current series, Fatal Revenant, was published in October of 2007 and reached number twelve on the New York Times Bestseller List for hardback fiction. No other living writer of fantasy has achieved this level of acclaim in both genre and mainstream literary circles.

Stephen Donaldson currently lives in New Mexico, where he is writing the third volume of The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.

Vice Chancellor, in recognition of his exceptional contribution to literature, I invite you to confer on Stephen R Donaldson the Degree of Doctor of Letters honoris causa.

*Photograph copyright 2009, Mary Stevens. Used with gratitude by permission.

THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS EXHIBITION at the Royal Ontario Museum is about to open:

Dead sea scrolls show to open at ROM this weekend

Stuart Laidlaw
Faith and ethics reporter (Toronto Star)

In times of turmoil, it is best to reflect on what unites us, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty says, and that's what the Dead Sea Scrolls can do.

[...]

Eight copies of the scroll will be on display until October, when they will be swapped with eight different scroll fragments.

The exhibit was two years in the making, and marks the relaunch of the ROM after an extensive renovation that included the controversial addition of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal to its Bloor St. façade.

ROM chief executive William Thorsell described the scrolls yesterday as "one of the great archaeological finds of the 20th Century," and one of the most significant displays ever to come to the museum.


[...]

Background, e.g., here and here.

THE GOOD SAMARITAN MOSAIC MUSEUM has opened:

Israel opens mosaic museum in the West Bank
The $2.5m Museum of the Good Samaritan houses mosaics and antiquities at a Christian pilgrimage site

By Lauren Gelfond Feldinger | Web only
Published online 24.6.09 (Museums)

jerusalem. Hours after US president Barack Obama’s historic Cairo speech on 4 June called on Israel to stop building in the West Bank, Israel inaugurated a mosaics museum at a West Bank site.

The opening was planned without consideration for or connection to the speech, said the museum’s planner, archaeologist Dr Yitzhak Magen of Israel’s Civil Administration of Judea and Samaria (West Bank).

The $2.5m Museum of the Good Samaritan, housing nearly 50 mosaics and a collection of antiquities, was opened at the Christian pilgrimage site where the Bible’s “Parable of the Good Samaritan” is believed to be set. The site also comprises the restored Good Samaritan Inn, a reconstructed Byzantine church, and Second Temple-era dwelling caves.

The museum’s preserved and restored mosaics and other relics from the fourth to the sixth centuries originate from Christian, Jewish and Samaritan historic sites, based on themes in the parable, Dr Magen said. He also said that excavations at the site show it to be the location where King Herod’s palace once stood.

[...]

Background here.

IN THE MAIL:

John Day (ed.), Society for Old Testament Study Book List 2008 (London: Sage, 2008)

Endless goodies, as always. Our library budget is going to be taking a hit.

GRADUATION CEREMONIES and related events will fill up the next four days pretty much wall-to-wall. I will try to find a few minutes here and there to blog, but it won't be a high priority.

PROFESSOR DONALD W. PARRY has been named as one of about two dozen editors of Biblia Hebraica Quinta. He will be working on the book of Isaiah.

This article in TC gives background to Biblia Hebraica Quinta.

THIS RESTAURANT in Alva Oklahoma sounds like an interesting place to hang out:

Taking Aim

Studying the Educational Winds

06/22/09
By Judye Pistole

I was at a restaurant today having dinner with some of my dearest friends and one of them said, “Oh, that was before I ever began to study Sanskrit.” I started to laugh, saying that never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I would hear a friend of mine say, “That was before I started to study Sanskrit,” as if studying Sanskrit was something that most people would get to sooner or later.

Then I looked around the table. There were four ministers, three of us working on our doctoral degrees, each of us having studied ancient Greek and ancient Hebrew and at least one modern language. There was one student working on her master’s degree who was a teaching assistant in Hebrew and Greek and one professor who admits to having learned six languages (and by the way the professor was NOT the one who had also studied Sanskrit; neither was it someone of Indian ethnicity).

[...]

Aramaic comes up as well.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH:

Can Third Temple be built without destroying Dome of the Rock?
By MATTHEW WAGNER (Jerusalem Post)

A new Jewish interfaith initiative launched last week argues building the Third Jewish Temple in Jerusalem would not necessitate the destruction of the Dome of the Rock.

"God's Holy Mountain Vision" project hopes to defuse religious strife by showing that Jews' end-of-days vision could harmoniously accommodate Islam's present architectural hegemony on the Temple Mount.

"This vision of religious shrines in peaceful proximity can transform the Temple Mount from a place of contention to its original sacred role as a place of worship shared by Jews, Muslims and Christians," said Yoav Frankel, director of the initiative.

[...]

His main argument is that Jewish doctrine regarding the rebuilding of the Temple emphasizes the role of a prophet.

This prophet would have extraordinary authority, including the discretion to specify the Temple's precise location, regardless of any diverging Jewish traditions.

Frankel considers the scenario of a holy revelation given to an authentic prophet that the Temple be rebuilt on the current or an extended Temple Mount in peaceful proximity to the dome and other houses of prayer such as the Aksa Mosque and nearby Christian shrines.

However, both Muslims and Jews have expressed opposition to the initiative.

[...]

You don't say.

As for me, I will say what I've said before (e.g., here). Prophet or no prophet, no digging please on the Temple Mount unless it's a scientifically controlled excavation, preferably some years in the future using nonintrusive techniques.

NOT ALADDIN'S CAVE, but still not bad:

Discovery of giant underground quarry in Jordan Valley may rock archaeological thinking
By Ran Shapira (Haaretz)

A spectacular underground quarry has recently been discovered in the Jordan Valley north of Jericho, which archaeologists believe may have marked a biblical site sacred to ancient Christians.

The large cave was discovered by Prof. Adam Zertal and a team from the University of Haifa which has been conducting a survey of the region since 1978. "When we reached the entrance to the cave, two Bedouin approached us and warned us not to go in, because it was cursed and inhabited by wolves and hyenas," Zertal said yesterday from the site.

They entered anyway, discovering a ceiling supported by 22 gigantic columns on which various symbols were carved, including 31 crosses, a possible wheel of the Zodiac and a Roman legionary symbol. The columns also had niches for the placement of oil lamps and holes that apparently served as hitching posts.

Zertal says their working theory is that the site is Galgala, biblical Gilgal, mentioned on the sixth-century Madaba mosaic map. The cave, buried 10 meters underground, is about 100 meters long, 40 meters wide and 4 meters high, is the largest artificial cave so far discovered in Israel.

[...]

Pottery fragments and the incised symbols point to first usage at the beginning of the Common Era, but the cave appears to have been used for some centuries.

HAPPY SUMMER SOLSTICE to all those celebrating. It's still light out, but cloudy this time, so I had to turn on the light about ten minutes ago to read. But it's still quite light out and won't get properly dark anytime during the night for another couple of weeks. Not counting heavy rains.

GOOD TIMING: A review of Mary Beard's new book on Pompeii:

Pompeii the way it used to be: wild, chaotic and full of life

No book or website can really deliver the full picture of Pompeii

Michael Posner

Pompeii — From Saturday's Globe and Mail, Friday, Jun. 19, 2009 05:42PM EDT

Forget most of what you think you know about Pompeii. The conventional view, the starting point for dozens of books and local tour guides, is that close to 30,000 people died in the great Vesuvian eruption, engulfed by pyroclastic flows and lava surges.

But a new book breathes life into the dead stones as a chaotic living city. Those who were killed by the volcano, argues classics scholar Mary Beard, were slaves with no means of escape. Or others who, as during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, chose to defy the volcano's rumbling omens and stay put. Or perhaps looters, who snuck back in and were trapped by collapsing walls or tunnels.

Unruly, sometimes unlawful and throbbing with humanity - it's a place much like modern Naples nearby. Today, you can easily spend the better part of a day wandering the streets of this eerily well-preserved city, less than an hour south of Naples. On occasion, I wondered whether a particular building or fresco hadn't been rather too well restored and improved upon. But that's a quibble. No book or website can really deliver the full picture of Pompeii, with its cult of the phallus, its storefront eateries and its majestic forum and amphitheatre, a building that accommodated 30,000 people (but had not a single lavatory).

[...]

Herculaneum is mentioned too:

Another fascinating site, even closer to Naples, is Herculaneum. It, too, was destroyed by lava flows from Vesuvius, and lay buried under mud and ash for almost 1,600 years.

Wealthier than Pompeii, the seaside town boasted a number of impressive villas, including one owned by Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, Julius Caesar's father-in-law - the so-called Villa of the Papyri. Piso's library of Greek and Roman texts was said to be among the largest in the world at that time.

Amazingly, hundreds of scrolls, though carbonized, can still be painstakingly read using computer-enhanced multi-spectral imaging, affording the prospect that books long since thought lost to us might still be recoverable.

And here's an ancient Jewish angle:

In addition to Piso's scrolls, the National Archeological Museum (near the top of the Via Toledo, a 15-minute walk from anywhere in the city centre) includes the not-to-be-missed Secret Room, an exhibit featuring eye-popping, phallus-heavy frescoes, objets d'art and sculptures, representative of the rich and varied sex lives that Pompeiians are said to have enjoyed.

Some Jewish slaves, coerced into prostitution, may have formed their own judgments of these revels; on one wall in Hebrew are the words Sodom and Gomorrah.

More on Vesuvius here. More on the Herculaneum scrolls here and here. Relevant posts on Pompeii are here and here. According to the latter post, the Sodom and Gomorrah inscription seems to have been in Latin letters, not Hebrew. Latin seems much more likely. Last week I posted a few photos of Pompeii here. I have more pictures of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Vesuvius and will try to get around to posting some of them soon, but I'm going to be very busy until the end of the month. Bear with me.

PHOENICIAN WATCH:

Expedition ship Phoenicia sails into the pirate zone

(Sail World)

The Phoenicia Expedition, Captained by Philip Beale, an English ex-Navy sailor, is attempting to recreate the first circumnavigation of Africa, accomplished by Phoenician mariners in 600BC, in a replica Phoenician/Mediterranean vessel, called, appropriately enough, Phoenicia. They have just completed a four day sail from Hodeidah on the Red Sea coast of Yemen to Aden on the southern coast.

The passage of 270 nautical miles ended with the ship anchored securely at the inner harbour, Aden, and has has brought Phoenicia to the start point for launching Phase 2 of the expedition to circumnavigate Africa with prevailing winds and currents at the end of August 2009.

[...]

Here are some exerpts from Philip Beale's account of their journey:

[...]

Apart from the usual sailing routines of watch keeping (lookouts, pumping bilges, helming,adjusting the sails and meal preparations ) quite a bit of time has been spent on anti-piracy measures.

So we have wrapped the ship’s rails with barbed wire, razor blades, fire hoses and have molotov cocktails at the ready to throw at the pirates. Well okay, we haven’t actually done that and we have resisted offers of AK47’s (on sale foe $10 each in Hodiedah) to protect us, believing that if the pirates really want to come on board there is not much we can do to stop them- such is the low free-board of the ship and our relatively slow speed.

Our basic plan is to stay close to the Yemeni shore, darken ship at night and keep a low profile, i.e. no radar and VHF. We have a sonic device on board which may help to delay any attack while we would then alert the authorities to the situation be satellite phone.

We are in frequent contact with the local coalition forces out here as well as our security advisers at Drum Cussac, in Poole, England. We expect to pass the through Bab el Mandeb, the approach to the Gulf of Aden, tonight which is probably better from an anti-piracy point of view.

We expect it to be a bit tense as we pass through the strait as there are numerous fishing boats in the area as well as reports of vessels involved in smuggling people from Eritrea into Yemen. We are looking forward to being in Aden for the weekend-pirates permitting.

[...]

Safe travels!

More on their sonic ray-gun defense shield and additional background are here.

2 ENOCH: ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US*

The fifth Enoch Seminar** in Naples last week was a great success; not because we now understand the book of 2 Enoch -- we don't, but because we understand much better why we don't understand it and what sorts of questions we need to ask to make any progress. I have many pages of minute notes from the numerous sessions, but rather than taking days or weeks to try to digest and summarize them, I will, without further delay, boil down what seem to me to be some of the main points that have come out of this Seminar. The attributions of positions to specific people are my effort to give credit where credit is due. If I have misunderstood anything anyone has said, apologies in advance and I will be happy to make corrections.

I should begin by noting two important presentations on the first evening of the conference. Esther Eshel reported on two new Aramaic fragments of 1 Enoch. These are attributed to Qumran (i.e., are taken to be Dead Sea Scrolls), although they were recovered on the antiquities market and are thus unprovenanced. One is a papyrus fragment containing 1 Enoch 106:19-107:1 (from the story of the birth of Noah). The other is a parchment fragment containing 1 Enoch 7:1-5. Eshel thinks it is part of 4QEnoch^c ar/4Q204.

The second presentation was by Joost Hagen on the new Coptic fragments of 2 Enoch. A summary of his work on the fragments is here. I won't repeat any more of it except to say that my favorite part of the story was how he identified the work as 2 Enoch. When he deciphered the phrase "and the appearance of the angel was like snow" on one of the Coptic fragments, he entered it into Google. A translation of 2 Enoch in Google Books then told him that the phrase came from 37:1.

The study of 2 Enoch suffers severely from the problem of the lack of a complete edition of all the Slavonic evidence. Grant Macaskill set out to produce a critical edition with an eclectic reconstructed critical text, but has decided this is impossible. He is now finishing a diplomatic edition that will at least collect all the evidence of all the Slavonic manuscripts.

Even so, very few scholars know Slavonic. Of the sixty delegates of this year's Enoch Seminar, only eight were specialists in this language. It is very important that specialists in other pseudepigrapha, Second Temple Judaism, early Christianity, Byzantine studies, etc., open a dialogue with them and keep it open. One of the most important accomplishments of the Naples Enoch Seminar was to have fully opened this dialogue.

At the beginning of the final plenary session Hanan Eshel commented that 2 Enoch is like Melchizedek in the New Testament Epistle to the Hebrews. As he is without mother or father and with no genealogy, so 2 Enoch is without a date, a text, or an origin.

The problem of the short and long recensions of 2 Enoch may not be as simple as it initially looks. We must resist the temptation to place them in binary opposition as though one is "original" and the other "secondary." The truth may be far more complicated. To take just one scenario as an illustration (many more are possible) they could share a common original archetype that each has distorted in its own way. The short recension may have cut parts of the original but preserved the rest of it relatively well. The long recension may have added considerably to the archetype without any (or with much less) cutting. The result would be that the short recension is missing original material while the long recension includes both secondary and original material not in the short recension. And still more complicated scenarios are possible. (The basic point is Michael Stone's, although I have filled out the example.) We urgently need our Slavonic philologists to interrogate the text with the sorts of questions that will help us to start narrowing down the possibilities.

In addition to the problem of text and language, the content itself of 2 Enoch defies all our expectations. It is not obviously Christian: it lacks reference to Jesus and other obvious elements of early Christianity and the exalted picture of Enoch would not sit well with Christian theology. It is not obviously Jewish: it deals with biblical commandments but includes no halakhic development of them (i.e., it makes no attempt to think them through in the context of how they might actually be practiced). And it is not obviously Jewish-Christian, a widely-recognized third way that involves acceptance of Jesus as Messiah (and/or as divine0 along with acceptance of halakhic praxis. 2 Enoch is a new category that fails to fit into any of the boxes we have prepared for it and must be taken entirely on its own terms. (These points are Larry Schiffman's.)

From the various discussions during the conference, it seems to me that if there is a Second Temple-era base to 2 Enoch, the evidence is likely to come from the calendrical material in it, some of which may reflect a Jewish sectarian 364-day calendar. But at present all we can say with confidence is that there was a Greek version (behind the surviving fragments in Slavonic and Coptic) which had its origin sometime between the Second Temple period and the Byzantine period.

Andrei Orlov summed up correctly that even if we had the original manuscript of 2 Enoch in our hands, we still would not be able to understand it at present.


*A very free (perhaps excessively so) paraphrase of a comment by Enoch Seminar organizer Professor Gabriele Boccaccini in his closing address. But accurately expressing the sentiment.

**For full information on the 2009 Enoch Seminar in Naples, go to the Enoch Seminar website, click on the "Enoch Seminars" drop down menu, then click on "Naples 2009." Some of the information on the menus of the Naples 2009 page is password protected, but much is available to everyone. There's also more on Slavonic pseudepigrapha here. Many thanks to Gabriele Boccaccini and Andrei Orlov for organizing this event.

UPDATE (23 August): More here. It seems that the text of 2 Enoch is not in as much doubt as indicated above.

UPDATE (16 February 2010): More here on the priority of the short recension.

ABOUT THE PERSIAN LANGUAGE is an introductory essay by WIds at the Daily Kos. It discusses the full history of the language. It's not my area, but the part on ancient and Sassanian Persian looks accurate to me. If Iranologists have corrections, drop me a note.

I'M BACK IN ST ANDREWS. Very tired. More tomorrow.

LEAVING FOR HOME in a few minutes. Should be back late this evening.

EIGHT SPECIALISTS IN SLAVONIC PSEUDEPIGRAPHA in the same room at the Enoch Seminar in Naples:

L-R: Alexander Kulik, Andrei Orlov, Liudmila Navtanovich, Florentina Badalanova Geller, Grant Macaskill, Christfried Böttrich, Basil Lourié, Annisava Miltenova
I've been assured that this is not the first time in history that this has happened, but perhaps it's the first time in the West.

AN ANCIENT MOSAIC IN LOD is being uncovered and conserved:

One of the Most Impressive and Largest Mosaics in Israel will be Re-exposed

(Art Daily)

JERUSALEM.- Thirteen years after one of the most beautiful mosaics ever to be seen in the country was covered over, the Israel Antiquities Authority, in cooperation with the municipality of Lod and its residents, is beginning an archaeological excavation that will re-expose the mosaic, once and for all. Some 30,000 people from all over the country visited the site during one weekend when the mosaic was on display to the public.

The 1,700 year old mosaic floor, which is one of the most magnificent and largest mosaics ever revealed in Israel, was first uncovered in the city of Lod in 1996. The mosaic is a real archaeological gem and extraordinarily well-preserved. It covers an area of approximately 180 square meters and is composed of colored carpets that depict in detail mammals, birds, fish, a variety of flora and the sailing and merchant ships that were used at the time. The purpose of the building in which the mosaic floor was placed is not known.

[...]

THE VIEW FROM MY WINDOW:



Naples, with Mount Vesuvius in the background, this morning.

SLOW NEWS DAY, but here I am ditching a seminar to blog. So, thanks for checking and, for your trouble, I refer you to Manuscript Boy's post on Talmudic Archaeology over at Hagahot.

The conference is going very well and I have pages of notes, but it will be awhile before I can digest them and post some thoughts.

Our excursion to Herculaneum and Vesuvius is this afternoon. I'll post photos when I get a chance.

THE TORONTO DEAD SEA SCROLLS EXHIBITION at the ROM is, not exactly reviewed, but rather is used as the launching point for a homily by Rabbi Dow Marmur in the Toronto Star. Background here.

MORE ON THE NEW KURDISH AND SYRIAC FACULTIES being developed at Artuklu University in Turkey:

The campus will contain a mosque, a Syriac chapel and a small Yezidi temple."Historically, Mardin has been the primary university center of upper Mesopotamia, a city that was home to 13 centers of learning in the 19th century. This tradition of science will live again on our campus," Omay said, adding that the university is a 30-year-old dream come true for Mardin residents.

The rector said they have determined the vision and horizon of Artuklu University as a social-sciences university and are hoping it will grow into an international educational institution, offering courses in languages used in the Middle East. The science and literature faculty will feature Kurdish, Arabic, Persian and Syriac departments.

Omay said they will first emphasize Kurdish and Syriac, languages to which not enough attention has been paid. "Syriac is a language spoken in our region. At the forefront, work is in progress for founding the Kurdish language and literature faculty," he said. "We have completed the preliminary preparations and will apply to the Supreme Board of Education for approval."

The rector added that they will establish the faculty this year after final approval is obtained and that they plan to accept 20 students in 2010. Artuklu University has signed agreements with Dohuk and Kerkük Universities in northern Iraq for Kurdish-language education and with Damascus University in Syria for education in Arabic. In exchange, Artuklu will collaborate with those universities to establish their Turkish language and literature faculties.

Background here. More on the Yazidis here and here.

DON'T HAVE MUCH TIME, but wanted to update you briefly. Instead of reading papers, I went on a whim with some other attenders to Pompeii and spent a few hours there. The conference started in the evening. Highlights were presentations by Esti Eshel about two new Aramaic fragments of 1 Enoch (found on the antiquities market but attributed to Qumran) and by Joost Hagen on the new Coptic fragments of 2 Enoch.

Pompeii photos:

The Forum

Fresco Mosaic in the "House of the Fawn"
Mount Vesuvius as seen from Pompeii
We'll be going to Herculaneum and Vesuvius on Tuesday.

Times up for now!