TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH:

Will preservation of ancient Roman road destroy the Western Wall?
By Nir Hasson (Haaretz)
Tags: israel antiquities authority

One of the country's leading archaeologists has publicly condemned the Israel Antiquities Authority's failure to object to a plan to construct a building over a site in the Western Wall plaza where a well-preserved ancient Roman road was recently excavated.

"I would like to take advantage of this forum to raise the bothersome, and even despair-inducing, question of what will happen to these wonderful finds after the excavation is complete," Yoram Tsafrir, a former archaeology professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told his colleagues at an archaeology conference Thursday.

[...]

The [Western Wall Heritage ] [F]oundation is also planning to build a 4,800-square meter, three-story museum and educational institute that would display the Roman road on the ground floor, where visitors could see it.

But the plans to integrate the ancient road into the building do not mitigate the potential harm, Tsafrir said.

"Even the most amazing architect will not be able to avoid damaging the find," he said, adding that visitors will not be able to grasp the full extent of the road by seeing a segment in the museum.

The Antiquities Authority, which serves as an observer on the planning committees that approved the construction, said the area in question has been designated for religious purposes since Israel took control of the Western Wall in 1967.

"Yoram is my teacher, but in this case I think he's mistaken," said Uzi Dahari, the deputy director of the Antiquities Authority. "I don't see anything improper in the structure."

[...]

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS are getting more attention than they usually get these days:

Big lines as the Ten Commandments come to Toronto

Updated: Sat Oct. 17 2009 10:18:00 PM

ctvtoronto.ca

Some people who were hoping to get a close up view of the Ten Commandments at the Royal Ontario Museum were left out in the cold because of huge crowds.

The Ten Commandments were unveiled earlier this month for a two-week run as part of the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit, which opened at the museum at the end of June.

[...]

Background here and here.

A REPLICA OF THE ISAIAH SCROLL is on display in Orange County, Ca.:

Scroll replica gets home in O.C.
The copy is based on remastered photographs of Dead Sea scrolls taken in 1948.
By CLAUDIA KOERNER
The Orange County Register
Comments 0 | Recommend 0

A new Orange County museum is bringing antiquity to the modern world with a $60,000 piece of paper.

The Museum of Biblical and Sacred Writings unveiled its replica of the Great Isaiah Scroll, the longest and most complete of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Saturday night at Hangar 244 at Orange County Great Park. The museum, still working to build a permanent home for its collection and programs, will announce a temporary exhibit site for the 23-foot long scroll soon, said Ken Kremp, co-director of the museum.

The replica is based on digitally remastered photographs of the 2,000-year-old scrolls taken in 1948, only one year after their discovery in caves near the Dead Sea. A local church donated it to the museum.

"Our facsimile is actually easier and more clear than the originals," said Kremp, adding the originals now show 60 years of wear and tear not on the replica.

[...]

For last year's exhibition of the original Isaiah Scroll (IQIsa^a) see here, here, here, here, and here. And the Isaiah Scroll can be viewed in its entirety online here.

PROFESSOR GEZA VERMES received a tribute from the U.S. House of Representatives last month during his lecture tour in the States. He was also given the the keys of the cities of Monroe LA and Natchez MS and the Secretary of State of Louisiana proclaimed 29 September (the date of his lecture in Baton Rouge) "Geza Vermes Day" for the whole State.

Congratulations to Professor Vermes for these well-deserved honors, and well done to (my former home state) Louisiana, to Mississippi, and to Congress. I'm glad to see that Southern hospitality is still alive and well.

This is the text of the House tribute:

U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

E2302 CONGRESSIONAL RECORD—Extensions of Remarks September 17, 2009

A TRIBUTE IN RECOGNITION OF
PROFESSOR GEZA VERMES

HON. RODNEY ALEXANDER
OF LOUISIANA
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Mr. ALEXANDER.

Madam Speaker, I rise today in recognition of Professor Geza Vermes, an internationally renowned biblical scholar. His commitment to inspiring and educating the world has been unwavering, and he deserves our congratulations. Among his impressive list of endeavors, Vermes is perhaps best known as publisher of the first English translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls. His latest work, ‘‘The Story of the Scrolls,’’ is set to be published in February, 2010. Since 1957, Vermes has been teaching in England. Today, he is Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies and Emeritus Fellow for Wolfson College, and is a lecturer at Oxford University and throughout the world. In addition, Vermes is a Fellow of the British Academy (1985) and the European Academy of Arts, Sciences and Humanities (2001), holder of an Oxford higher doctorate and honorary doctorates from the universities of Edinburgh (1989), Durham (1990), Sheffield (1994) and the Central European University of Budapest (2008). On September 24, Vermes will be a guest lecturer at the University of Louisiana—Monroe. It is an honor to welcome such a distinguished and esteemed scholar to the 5th District.

Madam Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join me in saluting Professor Geza Vermes for his remarkable career and countless accomplishments.

LOGOS BIBLE SOFTWARE is floating the possibility of an electronic edition of Charlesworth's Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. If you're interested, visit the page and preorder it.

GOOD NEWS FROM SHEFFIELD! This just in from Louise Lawrence on the British New Testament Society list:

THANK YOU FROM SHEFFIELD

Staff and students in the Department of Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield would like to thank all of you who wrote to the Vice-Chancellor on our behalf. Hundreds of letters were sent from all over the world, and we have been truly touched by the level of support.

The Department of Biblical Studies is no longer under review and the proposal that it should be reconfigured as a Postgraduate Centre has been withdrawn. The Vice-Chancellor has asked the Faculty of Arts and Humanities to consider a short, medium and longer term plan for the Department, and a decision has now been taken that the Department will recruit undergraduates for the Biblical Studies degree in 2010. The Faculty of Arts and Humanities will work closely with colleagues to ensure that students are appropriately supported, including through the recruitment of additional staff.

We could not have achieved this without your support and the commitment and energy of our students, undergraduate and graduate. We cannot thank you enough.

I heard rumor of this last night on Facebook, but this is the first announcement I've seen. This is a good decision by the Sheffield hierarchy.

Background here.

NOTES ON THE CONSERVATION of the Dead Sea Scrolls in an article by Dylan Robertson in The Varsity (in connection with the Royal Ontario Museum exhibition):

Conservators and biblical scholars sorted and catalogued thousands of pieces of scrolls. Although some had been kept in jars and remained mostly undamaged, most were found in thumbnail-sized bits. One cave alone contained more than 10,000 fragments.

The team compared each piece by texture, colour, and handwriting, assembling the pieces like a massive jigsaw puzzle.

“You have to realize that no computers or analytical tools were used at the time,” said Rahimi.

When a match was found, the pieces would be scotch-taped together and sandwiched between two glass panels.

This process proved to be devastating to the scrolls. Although some were written on papyrus, most were parchment, an organic material highly sensitive to changes in temperature and light. The natural light from the Scrollery’s large windows, combined with the pressure of the glass plates and chemicals from the transparent tape, proved to be detrimental.

One of the most surprising things at the ROM exhibit is photographs of the scientists of the time piecing together ancient scrolls while blithely holding lit cigarettes between their fingers.

As technology improved, so began an effort to restore the scrolls.

First, the scrolls were recorded and photographed. Scientists then removed the adhesive residue from the tape using organic solvents. The pieces were cleaned of any oils and stains, and the back of the scrolls were reinforced if needed.

Conservationists then arranged the scrolls on acid-free cardboard and attached the pieces with hinges of Japanese tissue paper. These sheets were then put in protective boxes in a climate-controlled store room and checked periodically.

When being prepared for exhibition, each scroll was cross-stitched through a frame in order to hold it together.

It's easy to forget that the much-maligned original team of Scrolls scholars devoted ten years of their lives to sorting the many thousands of small fragments into their respective manuscripts - this based just on the handwriting; the content; and the color, consistency, and shape of the leather fragments.

IN THE MAIL:

Hartmut Stegemann (Editor), Eileen Schuller (Editor), Carol Newsom (Translator), Qumran Cave 1.III: 1QHodayot^a: With Incorporation of 4QHodayot^a-f and 1QHodayot^b (DJD XL; Oxford: Clarendon, 2009)

Review copy for Henoch.

ARAMAIC WATCH: The West Semitic Research project is doing important work on the Aramaic texts from the Persepolis Fortification Archive, covered in a University of Chicago press release.

Technology brings new insights to ancient language

October 14, 2009

New technologies and academic collaborations are helping scholars at the University of Chicago analyze hundreds of ancient documents in Aramaic, one of the Middle East’s oldest continuously spoken and written languages.

Members of the West Semitic Research Project at the University of Southern California are helping the University’s Oriental Institute make very high-quality electronic images of nearly 700 Aramaic administrative documents. The Aramaic texts were incised in the surfaces of clay tablets with styluses or inked on the tablets with brushes or pens. Some tablets have both incised and inked texts.

Discovered in Iran, these tablets form one of the largest groups of ancient Aramaic records ever found. They are part of the Persepolis Fortification Archive, an immense group of administrative documents written and compiled about 500 B.C. at Persepolis, one of the capitals of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Archaeologists from the Oriental Institute discovered the archive in 1933, and the Iranian government has loaned it to the Oriental Institute since 1936 for preservation, study, analysis and publication.

[...]

Scholars from the West Semitic Research Project at the University of Southern California helped the Persepolis Fortification Archive Project build and install an advanced electronic imaging laboratory at the Oriental Institute. Together, the two projects are making high-quality images of the Aramaic texts and the seal impressions associated with those texts. They are distributing the new images to the international research community through the Internet.

Inked and incised texts pose different problems that call for different imaging solutions. Making high-resolution scans under polarized and filtered light reveals the ink without interference from stains and glare, and sometimes shows faded characters that cannot be seen in ordinary daylight. Using another advanced imaging technique, called Polynomial Texture Mapping, researchers are able to see surface variations under variable lighting, revealing the marks of styluses and even the traces of pens in places where the ink itself has disappeared.

[...]

Impacts are far-reaching
The collaboration between the Oriental Institute at Chicago and the West Semitic Research Project at Southern California began with support from a substantial grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2007. To date, the teams have made high-quality images of almost all the monolingual Aramaic Fortification tablets. The next phase of the work, supported by a second Mellon grant that runs through 2010, will make images of the short Aramaic notes written on cuneiform tablets, seal impressions on uninscribed tablets and previously unrecorded Elamite cuneiform texts.

[...]

Read it all, and while you're at it have a look at the excellent photo of one of the texts.

(Via the Persepolis Fortification Archive Project blog.)

For background on the Persepolis archive and the political controversy in which it is mired, see here and here. More on the site of Persepolis here.

THIS LIST OF 100 BEST PROFESSORS WHO BLOG includes PaleoJudaica.

AN ESSAY ON THE TEXT OF THE NEW TESTAMENT, with special reference to the Westcott-Hort edition and their "Western non-interpolations," has been published by James Tabor at Bible and Interpretation:

Older is Not Always Better: Remembering Wescott and Hort

By James D. Tabor

Chair, Dept. of Religious Studies,

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

October 2009

Excerpt:

One of the more fascinating aspects of Westcott and Hort’s work was their upholding of certain readings from the so-called Western textual tradition, based on manuscripts like Codex Bezae (designated D). Generally scholars are agreed that the Western text is heavily interpolated with loose paraphrasing and lots of traditional and even apocryphal material added. However, at the end of Luke in particular, as well as a few other scattered places, the Western text is strangely shorter than the Neutral/Alexandrian text, with some surprising omissions that Wescott and Hort judged to be closer to the original.

Wescott and Hort identified nine of these passages, which they labeled by the rather cumbersome term “Western non-interpolations.” They put them as brackets as secondary additions to the original in their edition of the New Testament. I am a great fan of the original Revised Standard Version and to this day prefer it to the New Revised Standard Version (1989), which seems to be the scholarly preference today. The RSV New Testament was published in 1946–the year of my birth. It was roundly condemned as the “Devil’s Bible” and actual book burnings were reported in some circles. The passion and hatred was fueled by any number of features of this impressive new translation but I think the most widespread charge was that the scholars were trying to destroy God’s revelation by a subtle removal of key passages, including the secondary ending of Mark (16:9-20), which was printed in smaller text to mark it as an addition to the original text. In fact, the protest was so great that eventually subsequent printings of the RSV put the text size back to normal and just added a note indicating that these verses were likely secondary to the original.

I like the RSV better too.

A SURPRISE FROM THE LOD MOSAIC:

The Footprints of the Builders of the Lod Mosaic were Exposed

While removing the mosaic from the ground, Israel Antiquities Authority conservators were surprised to discover 1,700 year old foot and sandal prints beneath it

Head of the Israel Antiquities Authority Art Conservation Branch, “It’s exciting. This is the first time I have ever encountered personal evidence such as this under a mosaic”.

[...]

(Temporary IAA press release, via Joseph I. Lauer's list.)

Background on the Lod Mosaic is here.

UPDATE (29 March 2010); The permanent location of the press release is here.

THE EARLY JEWISH MONOTHEISMS PROJECT at the University of Göttingen now has a website.

The origins and development of monotheism in ancient Israel has been one of the most significant debates within the study of the Old Testament of the last thirty years. It has generated numerous books and articles and resulted in a significant shift in scholarly consensus and added considerably to our understanding of ancient Israelite religious life and thought.

Unfortunately, the discussion is frequently concluded prematurely with the exilic ‘breakthrough’ to monotheism by Deutero-Isaiah. Often scholars have worked with assumptions about the nature of monotheism which has obscured the fact that the meaning and consequences of belief in one God continue to be under negotiation into and beyond the Persian period.

The Sofja-Kovalevskaja Research Group under the leadership of Dr Nathan MacDonald seeks to examine the considerable diversity in Israelite and Jewish monotheistic thought and practice during the exilic and Persian periods, particularly through an examination of the relevant biblical texts. This website describes the academic activities of the research group and seeks to provide a number of resources for those who are interested in the subject of monotheism

And a blog.

Dr. Nathan MacDonald is a colleague at the University of St. Andrews who is currently on a five-year secondment at the University of Göttingen for this project.

MAKE YOUR OWN SHROUD OF TURIN:

Luigi Garlaschelli created a copy of the shroud by wrapping a specially woven cloth over one of his students, painting it with pigment, baking it in an oven (which he called a "shroud machine") for several hours, then washing it.

His result looks like the cloth that many Christians through the centuries have believed is the actual burial shroud of Jesus, he told CNN.

Presumably the student was removed before the baking.

Full article here.

A NEW EDITION OF A MAJOR SYRIAC LEXICON:

Michael Sokoloff, A Syriac Lexicon

Subtitle:
A Translation from the Latin, Correction, Expansion, and Update of C. Brockelmann's Lexicon Syriacum
Publisher:
Gorgias Press & Eisenbrauns
By Michael Sokoloff
ISBN:
978-1-60724-620-6
Language:
English and Syriac
Format:
Hardback, Black, 6 x 9 in
Pages:
1738

The second edition of Carl Brockelmann's Lexicon Syriacum, published in 1928, is rightly considered to be the best dictionary of Syriac ever written. However, its Latin language and the ordering of words according to triliteral Semitic roots make its use difficult for most students and scholars. Moreover, the dictionary was composed in an extremely concise manner, which meant that references were given without citing any of the text. This often makes the glosses impossible even for someone who knows Latin.

In the 81 years that have passed since the book's publication, there have been great advances in both Aramaic and Semitic studies. Moreover, Syriac studies—especially the publication of the critical texts of classical authors, such as Ephrem—have greatly enhanced our knowledge of Syriac and have made the publication of a new and up-to-date dictionary imperative. However, because a new dictionary project does not yet exist and would take decades to complete, this edition of Brockelmann's work has been undertaken to make Syriac vocabulary more accessible to scholars, students, and Syriac speakers. Following are the changes introduced into the Syriac Lexicon in this revision:

The meanings are given in English, not Latin
The vocabulary is ordered alphabetically.
All text citations have been verified by consulting the original publications, and where new critical editions have appeared (e.g., those of E. Beck for the works of Ephrem), references have been changed to point to the new editions.
Text citations with partial or complete translations have now been provided.
All of the etymologies have been thoroughly revised.
Two electronic indexes (English-Syriac and Text References) have been prepared.
This dictionary is an essential tool for anyone working in Syriac studies, Semitic linguistics, and biblical studies.

The link above is to the Gorgias Press page. You can also buy it from Eisenbrauns.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: I haven't had time to follow this story closely, but this Ynetnews.com aticle should give you some idea of what it's about.

PM to Arabs: Don't believe lies on Temple Mount dig

In attempt to defuse tension in east Jerusalem, Netanyahu calls on Arab sector not to believe extremists' claims that Israel planning to conduct excavations under Muslim holy site. 'You are a part of the State of Israel,' he says. MK Erdan: Abbas not a partner

Roni Sofer
Latest Update: 10.12.09, 10:56 / Israel News

MORE ON THE TEN COMMANDMENTS SCROLL in the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto Star):

"The response to the intellectual part of this show has been very strong," Royal Ontario Museum director William Thorsell said Friday as he opened the final instalment of the scrolls exhibit, featuring the oldest known parchment of the Ten Commandments.

[...]

As part of the second phase of the show, the Ten Commandments scroll goes on display today. But to prevent light or humidity damage, it will only be on view until Oct. 18, said Risa Levitt Kohn, curator of the exhibit, and for a total of 80 hours. The scroll, discovered in a cave at the Dead Sea in 1952 and dating from 30 to 1 BC, is remarkably well-preserved, she said. "You can still read them, depending how good your Hebrew is," says Kohn, a Toronto native and director of the Jewish Studies Program at San Diego State University.

Background here.

THE BIBLICAL STUDIES DEPARTMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD is under threat of closure, as was abruptly announced last week. This is the only department in the UK devoted solely to biblical studies and it has been well known for many years for its innovative scholarship and its out-of-the-box thinking. This seems to have taken people completely by surprise, which does not say much for a consultation process. The University of Sheffield also seems to think that it can preserve the doctoral program in biblical studies, but it is hard to imagine that this kind of vote of no confidence won't damage its reputation and recruitment. The University seems at least to be listening to the protests, although they are also reportedly discontinuing recruitment to the undergraduate program for 2010-11. They would be well advised to work closely with the department to find strategies for increasing its financial contribution to the University rather than shutting the department down in the very optimistic hope that the same benefits can still be reaped from its postgraduate program.

There is further background at the Save Biblical Studies website and this call for action at the SBL Forum. There is also a Don't shut down Biblical Studies at Sheffield Facebook page.

UPDATE (16 October): Good news here.

THE CYRUS CYLINDER is now the center of a political row:

Museum's refusal to lend Persian artefact strains UK relations with Iran

British Museum wary of lending 2,500-year-old Cyrus cylinder because of unrest since disputed election

* Matthew Weaver
* guardian.co.uk, Friday 9 October 2009 13.12 BST

The Cyrus cylinder, made around 530BC. Its lettering decrees that everyone should be free to practise their own religion. Photograph: British Museum

Britain's troubled relations with Iran have become further strained by a row about an ancient Persian artefact described as the world's first charter of human rights.

The British Museum is refusing to honour an agreement to lend the Cyrus cylinder to Iran because of the political turmoil that has gripped the country since the violently disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June.

The Iranian authorities have responded by threatening to sever links with the British Museum if it delays lending the 2,500-year-old cylinder, which was ordered by the Persian king Cyrus the Great to enshrine religious toleration.

Persian scholars claim the museum is right to be wary of lending the cylinder because of attempts by antisemitic historians in Iran to attack Cyrus's reputation as the father of the Iranian nation.

[...]

Hannah Boulton, head of press and public relations at British Museum, tried to play down the row. "When lending any material you have to check that is an appropriate moment," she said.

"We are committed to lending the Cyrus cylinder to Iran. We hope to be able to honour that commitment, we can't say when that will be. At the moment we are monitoring the situation in Iran."

[...]

The British Museum's position seems entirely reasonable to me.

Background on the Cyrus Cylinder is here, here, here, and here.

HEBREW PHILOLOGY is in the news today, which doesn't happen often enough.

God is not the Creator, claims academic
The notion of God as the Creator is wrong, claims a top academic, who believes the Bible has been wrongly translated for thousands of years.

By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent (The Telegraph)
Published: 5:45PM BST 08 Oct 2009

Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author, claims the first sentence of Genesis "in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth" is not a true translation of the Hebrew.

She claims she has carried out fresh textual analysis that suggests the writers of the great book never intended to suggest that God created the world -- and in fact the Earth was already there when he created humans and animals.

Prof Van Wolde, 54, who will present a thesis on the subject at Radboud University in The Netherlands where she studies, said she had re-analysed the original Hebrew text and placed it in the context of the Bible as a whole, and in the context of other creation stories from ancient Mesopotamia.

She said she eventually concluded the Hebrew verb "bara", which is used in the first sentence of the book of Genesis, does not mean "to create" but to "spatially separate".

The first sentence should now read "in the beginning God separated the Heaven and the Earth"

According to Judeo-Christian tradition, God created the Earth out of nothing.

[...]

Hmmm ... The idea that Genesis 1:1 does not describe creatio ex nihilo is hardly new. The interpretation of Qal/basic stem of bara' as "to separate spatially" may be, I'm not sure. Presumably it's based on the only other usage of the root: in the Piel/factitive stem it means to chop down (trees), appearing only (I believe) in Joshua 17:15, 18. It's likely enough that Genesis 1:1 is about God reworking the primordial goo rather than creating out of nothing.

MORE ON THE TEN COMMANDMENTS coming to the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition at the ROM:

Oldest copy of 10 Commandments on display in Toronto
Posted: October 08, 2009, 7:35 PM by Ron Nurwisah
Christianity, judaism, dead sea scrolls

By Charles Lewis, National Post

The 10 Commandments, the moral giant of Western civilization, usually depicted as giant slabs raised over the head of Moses descending from Mount Sinai -- or of Charlton Heston in the movie -- actually fit neatly onto a 2,000-year-old document a mere 18 inches across and seven inches high.

The fragile piece of parchment, the oldest known written version of the complete 10 Commandments, will be on display at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto starting tomorrow. Those who study ancient biblical texts say that the tiny piece of parchment is profound.

[...]

Background here.

MORE on the third-century synagogue found recently in Turkey:

ARCHAEOLOGY: ANCIENT SYNAGOGUE UNEARTHED IN TURKEY

(ANSAmed) - ANKARA - The remains of an ancient synagogue have been revealed in an archeological dig in Turkey. The ruins, estimated to be at least 1,500 years old, were unearthed by a team of archaeologists from Akdeniz University in September and new artifacts are being discovered daily. Among those discovered on the site is a marble tablet featuring a menorah (a seven-branched candelabrum which has been a symbol of Judaism for almost 3000 years and is the emblem of Israel) flanked by a shofar (a horn, traditionally that of a ram, used for Jewish religious purposes) and a bugle on one side and a palm tree and lemon tree on the other.

Background here.

EZEKIEL BREAD: Eeeugh!

SHEMINI ATZERET begins this evening at sundown. In Israel, this is also the holiday of Simchat Torah (Simhat Torah). Outside of Israel, that holiday begins tomorrow night at sundown.

Shemini Atzeret is a biblical holiday mentioned in Numbers 29:35-38. Simchat Torah is not a biblical holiday, but it marks the beginning and ending of the annual cycle of Torah readings.

COOL: The Oxyrhynchus Hymn.



(Via Mark Goodacre's NT Blog.)

For more on the Oxyrhynchus papyri, follow the links at this post.

MORE ON THE AVDAT VANDALISM:

Court extends Avdat suspects' remands
By YAAKOV LAPPIN (Jerusalem Post)

One of the two men arrested on Monday for taking part in a vandalism attack at the Negev's Avdat archeological park is the sole guard who was hired by the Nature and Parks Authority to protect the site, police announced on Tuesday.

The two men are accused by police of causing widespread damage to the site, knocking down ancient columns and splattering paint and oil on ruins, in revenge for the demolition of several illegal Beduin structures by the state on Sunday.

[...]

Aharonovich: Ovdat Culprits Will Pay for their Crime

Reported: 17:40 PM - Oct/06/09

(IsraelNN.com)

On a tour of the vandalized Ovdat archaeological site, Public Security Minister Yitzchak Aharanovich said that Israel would "deal harshly" with the vandals that caused irreparable damage to an important cultural and historical site. Two suspects from a neighboring Bedouin village are being held as suspects, one of them a security guard at the national park, which is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

[...]

MK Sanaa condemns 'witch hunt' on Arabs in Avdat vandalism case
By JPOST.COM STAFF

MK Taleb A'Sanaa (UAL-Ta'al) on Tuesday criticized what he called a "field trial and media lynch" against two Beduin arrested on suspicion of vandalizing the ancient Nabatean site of Avdat on Sunday night.

[...]

HaTikva: J'lem Riots, Ovdat Vandalism Related

Reported: 13:15 PM - Oct/06/09

(IsraelNN.com) The HaTikva Party stated Tuesday that there is a common denominator between the Arab rioting on the Temple Mount and the vandalism perpetrated against the archaeological site at Ovdat in the Negev.

[...]

Background here.

THE JESUS PROJECT seems to be stalled and perhaps dead. Co-chair R. Joseph Hoffmann has a rambling essay on it at Bible and Intepretation: Threnody: Rethinking the Thinking behind The Jesus Project.

Excerpt (on Jesus):

With due regard to the complexity of evidence surrounding Christian origins—a subject that has been complicated, in a good way, rather than solved by the discoveries of modern scholarship—I no longer believe it is possible to answer the “historicity question. “ No quantum of material discovered since the1940’s, in the absence of canonical material would support the existence of an historical founder. No material regarded as canonical and no church doctrine built upon it in the history of the church would cause us to deny it. Whether the New Testament runs from Christ to Jesus or Jesus to Christ is not a question we can answer.

Obviously I do not deny the existence of mythic materials entwined with a more or less historical memory of a real individual. But as I have written elsewhere, we cannot point to a stratum of ancient biography where such intertwining does not exist: it is a matter of degree, not genre, and a matter of guesswork, not reconstructive surgery. The fate of the Jesus Seminar and the potential fate of the Jesus Project had it continued—or rather, had it been advisable for it to continue—reveals more about the history of guesswork than about the “reality” of Jesus. The NT documents, especially the Gospels, are precisely the sort of literature we would expect to emerge from a time when the dividing line between the natural and “supernatural,” indeed, the divine and human, was not clearly drawn: the true miracle would have been for the NT to stand completely outside the limits of Hellenistic storytelling and the rudimentary historiographical interests of a religious community.

I think what he's saying is that our sources about Jesus are not such that they are useful for answering the questions we wish to ask about him as a historical person. If so, I quite agree. (The same problem, incidentally, holds true for the Hebrew Bible and the history of ancient Israel.) That makes the effort to recover a clear picture of who Jesus was and what he said and did very difficult and perhaps futile. But are there actually New Testament scholars (i.e., who publish in peer-review journals etc.) who are "mythers" who think the historical person Jesus never existed? Who are they? That seems to me to be an extreme and highly implausible position.

Excerpt (on good collaborations):

In general, collaboration is suited to constructive and technical rather than interpretative or highly theoretical work. Because of the close traditional alliance between biblical studies and theology, as well as the nature of the biblical literature itself, it is notoriously hard to keep theology at bay in the realm of interpretation. Constructive work is different. Although far from perfect on a number of levels the Hennecke-Schneemelcher Neutestamenliche Apokryphen in Deutscher Ubersetzung was a pioneer work in the non-parochial study of extracanonical literature when it was first published in German, and in English translation in 1963, making the eccentric one-man collection of ghost-story writer M. R. James virtually useless. The same can be said of James Charlesworth’s editorial management in the translation of Old Testament apocrypha in relation to the 1913 collection edited by R. H. Charles and James Robinson’s production of a serviceable English edition of the Nag Hammadi materials. We owe to that generation of scholarship a way of moving beyond the legendary slings and arrows that were characteristic of the Dead Sea Scrolls “collaboration,” tactics that spawned a whole genre of intrigue and tarnished biblical studies as being theologically interested, religiously mysterious, and academically second class.

I agree with most of this, although the last sentence baffles me a little. It was only when the editing of the Dead Sea Scrolls was broadened out into a large international collaboration involving 40+ people that publication began to make real progress. The original team was just too small, but it took time to come to terms with this and remedy it. It took the original team (yes, they did all the work) ten years just to piece together the heaps of many thousands of fragments into separate scrolls. (Incidentally, two other major comparable archives, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri and the Cairo Geniza are still very far indeed from being fully published, despite being discovered long before the Dead Sea Scrolls.) And I think that unfortunate genre of Dead Sea Scrolls studies would have spawned itself whatever the original team had done or not done.

As for M. R. James, his work on the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha is dated but still useful. But perhaps that is less true about his work on the New Testament Apocrypha. I haven't worked with it enough to know.

Excerpt (on the Jesus Project):

Do I regard the Project as worth pursuing, reviving? I think the historicity question, as I have said many times over, is an interesting one. But it is not a question that in the absence of a “real” archeological or textual discovery of indubitable quality can be answered. It cannot be answered directly and perhaps not even through the slow accumulation of new sources. The issue is not merely that such a discovery would not persuade die-hard mythers and would not support believers in the divine Christ. It is that such evidence is really not an academic possibility. Not even the unearthing of an unknown archive of the forced and sworn confession of a skilled forger and tale-teller by the name of Rufus, appearing in front of a magistrate in the year 68 CE, would suffice. We already possess material like that, it is forged.

But the chief reason that it is time to sound the knell for all such projects is that that they cannot function collaboratively, both by virtue of what they want to achieve—that is, the over-speculative nature of the task—and because they are examples of the perils of false collaboration: an incoherent anthology of opinion derived from the private prejudices and objectives of Jesus-makers.

Jesus Project, requiescat in pace?

Background to the Jesus project is here, here, here, and here.

THE LIBRARY OF THE JEWISH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY in New York is holding an open house in which a twelfth-century Talmud manuscript and fragments from the Cairo Geniza will be on display.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH:

'Hall of Ages' uncovered within Western Wall tunnels
By JPOST.COM STAFF


As police forces guarded the closed-off Temple Mount Monday, a group of visitors accompanied by a Jewish-Ukrainian philanthropist toured Jerusalem's Western Wall tunnels.
A view of the "Hall of Eras"...

The affluent Ukrainian's donation to the archaeological project made possible the rehabilitation of a Second Temple-era hall which was recently unearthed in the bowels of the Old City.

[...]

THE SAMARITANS are celebrating Sukkot too:

Ancient Samaritans celebrate different Sukkot in West Bank

by Saud Abu Ramada, Hua Chunyu, Emad Drimly

NABLUS, West Bank, Oct. 5 (Xinhua) -- As Jewish people all around Israel are celebrating their traditional feast of Sukkot (Feast of Tabernacles), in northern West Bank, Samaritans, a small religious sect who consider themselves descendants of the ancient northern Kingdom of Israel, are also celebrating Sukkot, but in a somehow different way.

In the village of Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim near the West Bank city of Nablus, the Samaritan priest and Director of Samaritan's Museum Husney W. Kohen and his family have built theirin-door Sukkah (Tabernacles) with fruits of the holy land. Kohen said the sukkah was built to recall the same Tabernacle build by ancient Israelites after they left Sinai Desert in Egypt 3,500 years ago.

Priest Kohen considers himself as one of the best among his people in building up the sukkah. According to Kohen and his family, the sukkah was made up of 300-400 kg of fruits, and it took them eight hours to put the sukkah together.

The Samaritan sect celebrate Sukkot every year, just as the world's Jews do. Although, the basic principles of the two sects are the same, however, each celebrates their own feast differently.

According to Kohen, during Sukkot, the Jews build their sukkah outside the home, while Samaritans build in-door ones.

"Both people build tents to commemorate the years ancient Israelites spent in Sinai before reaching Canaan, but according to Samaritan Torah, we have settled down in this land, so we should build sukkah inside the house, which will enable us to do everything in it," said Kohen.

[...]

ANTIQUITIES VANDALISM in the Negev:

Police arrest 2 in Avdat vandalism
By JPOST.COM STAFF

Police in Dimona on Monday evening arrested two Beduin men, a 47-year-old and a 51-year-old, on suspicion of vandalizing the Avdat National Park in the Negev on Sunday night.

The men denied involvement in the incident which left hundreds of archaeological artifacts at the UNESCO World Heritage Site severely damaged.

The suspects will be brought before the Beersheba Magistrate's Court on Tuesday for a remand extension hearing.

Police launched an investigation on Monday morning after church pillars at the ancient Nabatean City in the Negev were knocked down, stones and scripts were smashed, the altar was severely damaged and the walls of the compound were spray-painted.

[...]

This is tragic.

DID DAVID AND SOLOMON EXIST? asks Eric H. Cline in a long, good essay at Bible and Interpretation which surveys the current evidence. His take:

So, did David and Solomon exist? It is fair to say that they most likely did, at least if the Tel Dan Stele with its mention of a Davidic dynasty (Beit David) is any indication. However, the jury is still out as to how important they actually were, how large their empires were, and whether the biblical traditions and stories concerning the two men are essentially correct or were concocted later, either in the time of Josiah in the seventh century BCE or even after. Although David and Solomon have successfully overcome the sabotaging nihilism of the 1990s and the early part of the new millennium, the debates about them are still ongoing, with new discoveries impacting the debate as well as benefiting biblical archaeology as a whole.

That sounds about right to me.

THE STORY BEHIND the upcoming Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition in Minnesota:

St. Paul Science Museum Of Minnesota / Exhibit: $4 million. Bringing Dead Sea Scrolls to Minnesota? Priceless
By Devin Henry (TwinCities.com)
dhenry@pioneerpress.com
Updated: 10/04/2009 11:39:59 AM CDT

Science Museum archaeology curator, Dr. Ed Fleming, left, and Science Museum Senior Vice President, Mike Day, at the Science Museum. Day brought the Dead Sea Scroll exhibit here; Fleming helped develop the content. (Pioneer Press: Jean Pieri)

It took nearly two millennia to find the Dead Sea Scrolls hidden in a cave in eastern Israel. It took the Science Museum of Minnesota just five years to arrange to bring them to St. Paul.

When the scrolls go on display March 12, the event will cap off a multiyear, intercontinental endeavor undertaken by the Science Museum that involved trips to Israel and around the country to see how other museums had exhibited the famous sacred Jewish texts.

"It's the biggest exhibit we've ever done in terms of storyline," Science Museum Vice President Mike Day said. "In terms of artifacts, there aren't many as precious as the Dead Sea Scrolls."

Day's interest in a Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition was piqued in 2004 when he attended his first
This is a model that is currently being worked on of the dead sea scroll exhibit that will be at the Science Museum next year.
meeting as a member of the Association of Midwest Museums in Michigan: A museum there was hosting the Dead Sea Scrolls.

In 2005, the Science Museum first contacted the Israel Antiquities Authority, which catalogs and conserves the scrolls, about a possible exhibit. It would take three years of site visits and careful negotiations to get the scrolls to Minnesota.

[...]

This cloak-and-dagger tidbit is particularly interesting:

The antiquities authority continues to play a major role in the exhibit, finalizing exhibit outlines and planning another trip to Minnesota in November. To protect the scrolls, the authority is delivering each one by private courier to St. Paul, unannounced until the last minute. Once here, the scrolls will be set up in special climate controlled cases.

Even specifics about which scrolls will be coming are closely guarded. Science Museum archaeology curator Ed Fleming said the museum knows only which scrolls are "probably" coming, but he couldn't reveal them.

There's more to the exhibition's story, not quoted here, if you're interested.

The background at the end of the article is a little muddled. The Scrolls are not "older translations of books in today's Bible," they are exceptionally old manuscripts in the original Hebrew. And as for this:

For example, one common copy of the book of Jeremiah was written in Hebrew. Another version was shorter and written in Greek, another language used by the Jews of the day. The Dead Sea Scrolls feature texts of both editions in the same language, making the texts easier to compare.

It would have been clearer to note that the "same language" is Hebrew. The point is that we now know that the short edition of Jeremiah, which survives complete only in the Greek translation of the Septuagint (LXX) was translated from a Hebrew original, not abbreviated by the Greek translator. That means that, in principle, it has just as much claim to orginality as the long edition that survives in Hebrew in the Masoretic Text.

More on the exhibition here.

BOOK REVIEW (BMCR):

Gregg Gardner, Kevin L. Osterloh, Antiquity in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Pasts in the Greco-Roman World. Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentum, 123. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008. Pp. viii, 475. ISBN 9783161494116. €109.00.

Reviewed by Sabrina Inowlocki-Meister, Université de Lausanne (Sabrina.Inowlocki-Meister@unil.ch)
Word count: 4195 words

This high quality volume edited by G. Gardner and K. Osterloh is the result of a colloquium entitled "Antiquity in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Pasts in the Greco-Roman World" and organized by the editors and P. Schäfer from January 22-24, 2006 at Princeton University. The collection of articles presented here will be of interest as much to students of Greco-Roman antiquity as to those of the Near-Eastern world.

[...]

THE NEXT FEW WEEKS are looking very busy indeed and blogging may suffer for it. Just so you know.

SOME OF THE VINDOLANDA TABLETS are going home for a while:

Roman 'postcards' to go on show

(BBC)

"Postcards" written by Roman soldiers stationed in Northumberland are to be returned to the county.

The Vindolanda Tablets, named after the camp on Hadrian's Wall, are currently held in The British Museum in London.

Using a £4m Heritage Lottery Fund grant, a gallery is to be created at Vindolanda allowing some of them to be returned on temporary loan.

The tablets are among the earliest examples of the written word discovered in Britain.

They include a birthday party invitation from a commander's wife, while another reveals that soldiers wore underpants to keep warm in the northern winter.

[...]

Background to this exhibition (I think) is here. Follow the links there for more on the Vindolanda texts and their importance.

JOB: Bibliographer needed:

Gorgias Press is publishing a large bibliography on Syriac studies edited by Sebastian Brock (based on Brock’s former bibliographical works). We are looking for a researcher to validate all bibliographical data, make sure the format is standard, and proof our text against the originals. Familiarity with bibliographical information is important. This is a paid project. We are open to pay either in cash or in Gorgias books. There are 10,000 or so bibliographical entries which will be provided for proofing in chunks of 1,500 to 2,000. Deadline for the entire project is spring 2010. (Please make sure you have the time to do this before applying.) If you are interested, please send a CV and an email cover letter to gkiraz@gorgiaspress.com.

George A. Kiraz

(From the Hugoye List.)

ARAMAIC WATCH: A new book on the Aramaic texts from Elephantine:

Aramaic and Egyptian Legal Traditions at Elephantine
An Egyptological Approach
by Alejandro F. Botta

Alejandro Botta locates the Aramaic legal formulary in the context of the Egyptian legal tradition and looks at the influence of foreign legal practices on other formulae which do not have their roots in Egypt.

* Imprint: T & T Clark International
* Series: Library of Second Temple Studies, The
* Series Volume: 64
* Pub. date: 25 Aug 2009
* ISBN: 9780567045331

256 Pages, hardcover World rights $130.00

Follow the link for more details.

(Via the Agade List.)

CONGRATULATIONS TO DR. SEBASTIAN P. BROCK, who has received The Leverhulme Medal for Humanities and Social Sciences from the British Academy:

2009: Dr Sebastian Brock FBA, Emeritus Reader in Syriac Studies, University of Oxford, nd Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford

The Aramaic language is attested over a period of some three thousand years. Already in the late pre-Christian centuries it began to develop into a number of separate dialects, some used especially by Jewish writers and others, in particular Syriac, by Christians. Sebastian Brock is the world’s leading expert in this whole vast field, although his most distinctive contribution has been in the world of the Syriac-speaking communities. In detailed and wide-ranging studies alike, he has opened up whole areas of the history of Syriac liturgy, poetry, theological writing and more. In addition, he has been at the forefront in the publication and evaluation of manuscripts in the monastery collections of Egypt, Turkey and the Levant. His deep sympathy with the traditions of these threatened and increasingly dispersed communities has helped keep these ancient forms of spirituality alive both academically and culturally on a worldwide basis.

A well deserved honor indeed. Dr. Brock's web page is here.

(Via David G. K. Taylor on the Hugoye list.)

SUKKOT (the Festival of Booths or Tabernacles) begins this evening at sundown. Best wishes to all those celebrating.

SOME BACKGROUND to the acquisition of Dead Sea Scrolls fragments by Azusa Pacific University:

Yucaipan brings scrolls to Azusa Pacific
Joy Juedes, Staff Writer
Posted: 10/01/2009 11:25:42 PM PDT

By JOY JUEDES

Staff Writer [RedlandsDailyFacts]

Robert Duke's road to Israel and the Dead Sea Scrolls winds through Yucaipa.

Duke, who grew up in Yucaipa, was attending a blood drive at a Yucaipa church. He had studied in Israel and was teaching at Yucaipa Christian School.

At the blood drive, he ended up next to John Malone, a Redlands resident and member of the Yucaipa Rotary Club. The two men struck up a conversation.

"He asked if I would like to go back to school, and I said yes, and he told me about Rotary's Ambassadorial Scholarship," Duke said.

Rotary paid for Duke to study in Jerusalem for a year, where he continued to fall in love with biblical history - the Dead Sea Scrolls, in particular.
Azusa Pacific University professor Robert Duke, middle, with students at the Sea of Galilee last year. (Courtesy photo)

Now, Duke has helped bring the scrolls to Azusa Pacific University.

Duke, assistant professor in the Azusa School of Theology's Division of Religion and Philosophy, spent most of the summer confirming the authenticity of the five scroll fragments the university recently acquired.

[...]

There follows some personal background on Professor Duke. Then more on the Scrolls:

Azusa acquired four of the scroll fragments from Biondi Rare Books and Manuscripts in Venice, Calif. The fifth came from Legacy Ministries International in Phoenix.

"Ninety percent are in Israel or Jordan, and then there are these fragments that are in private collections," Duke said.

Duke said it is difficult to get ancient artifacts out of their countries of origin because of international rules and a recent antiquity fraud scandal at the Getty Museum.

Azusa Pacific is the third institution of higher education in the country, besides Princeton Theological Seminary and the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, to own original Dead Sea Scroll fragments.

"That's a great group of schools to be on the list with," Duke said.

"Bobby will play a critical role (in work with the scrolls)," said Kenneth Waters, associate dean of the School of Theology's Division of Religion and Philosophy.

"He is a young scholar but has already established himself as an authoritative source of information on the Hebrew Bible and other ancient Middle Eastern documents like the Dead Sea Scrolls," Waters said.

Duke said when he first saw digital photos of the fragments, he was struck by how genuine they looked.

"I spent a few months poring over photos, going to the seller to make sure they were authentic," he said.

"Some of it is just looking at lettering - they look like what other scrolls look like that came out of Qumran or other caves," he said.

The seller also provided carbon dating information, which helps verify age, he said.

"By looking at it and comparing with other fragments it was pretty clear we were handling the real material," he said.

Azusa's special collections staff is in charge of handling, preservation, and access to the fragments. The school also checked to make sure the fragments were not illegally owned at some point.

Staff "networked with other libraries and museums in Southern California to assure that APU is storing the fragments properly," Duke wrote in an e-mail.

"The last time I saw the fragments, they were being kept between sheets of glass with no potential for oils or residues from hands to come in contact with them," he wrote.

[...]

Background here.

ROBERT R. CARGILL wants Christians to give up the BC/AD dating terminology at Bible and Interpretation:

Why Christians Should Adopt the BCE/CE Dating System

By Robert R. Cargill
Center for the Digital Humanities,
Qumran Visualization Project

UCLA

September 2009

I have heard every argument. I have read every justification. And I have spent far too much time on Wikipedia changing BCs and ADs back to BCEs and CEs. It is a centuries-old argument that some maintain is integral to one’s identity as a Christian. Despite the rise of science, Christians have used—and many times have insisted upon—the continued use of the labels “AD” and “BC” to designate calendrical years, and thereby portray human history as directly relative to the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. But in our modern world of scientific reason and religious plurality, the battle over whether or not to use the increasingly accepted international scientific standard of BCE (“Before Common Era”) and CE (“Common Era”) has not waned, but rather has intensified. However, it is time for this battle to end; Christians should leave behind the BC/AD labels and adopt the BCE/CE dating system for all calendrical references.

[...]

I can't say I've encountered anyone lately who defends the AD/BC system anymore, but presumably I don't move in the right circles. I completely agree with Robert, although I doubt that anyone who doesn't will be persuaded by his arguments.

Some other random thoughts. First, the objection to Xmas for Christmas (which I have heard) is particularly pathetic in that the X stands for the Greek letter Chi, which is the first letter of "Christ" in Greek and is just a convenient abbreviation. Second, the argument that Jesus must have been born by 4 BCE at the latest depends, as Robert notes, on the assumption that Matthew's story that connects Herod the Great with Jesus is historical, an assumption that warrants considerable skepticism. In fact, all we know is that Jesus was an adult around 30 CE. Luke says he was about 30 when he began his ministry (3:23). But John has Jesus' opponents say to him that "you are not yet fifty years old" (8:57), which strikes me as a little odd to say to a man in his early thirties and which may imply that John thought he was older. We just don't know when Jesus was born. Third, despite EU directives and the like, I'm not particularly sympathetic to the position that the decimal Metric system should be compulsory for all uses. It's much better than the Imperial system for scientific and engineering purposes, but the duodecimal Imperial system is better for other purposes such as cooking and sewing, which require thirds and quarters and such.

The main argument for the use of BCE/CE is that it gives us all a convenient secular system to use for secular historical purposes. But even this is a Eurocentric argument, in that it is still a convention based on an event important for Christians and requires, for example, Muslims to recalculate completely the dates in their own system. But it's an improvement over BC/AD.

NEW SCROLLS FOR OLD: The Dead Sea Scrolls on exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum will be swapped on 10 October for eight other scrolls, one of which includes the Ten Commandments.

Background to the exhibition is here.

CONFERENCE:

Next year's "Use of the Old Testemant in the New" seminar will take place at St Deiniol's Library, Hawarden, N.Wales from Thurs 18 March to Sat 20th. The all inclusive cost will be around £140. Offers of papers (45 min or 30 min) to Steve Moyise (s.moyise@chi.ac.uk) by Dec 15th.

From the British New Testament Society list.

A GOLEM COIN? Actually it's a coin in honor of Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, but the Golem is on it:

Czech Coin Honors Saintly Rabbi

by Hillel Fendel

(IsraelNN.com) Yet another Czech commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the death of the prominent Jewish scholar Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague: a silver 200 Kc coin.

Known as the Maharal of Prague, Rabbi Judah died on the 18th day of the Hebrew month of Elul in 1609, corresponding to Sept. 7. The Czech government jumped the gun by issuing the commemorative coin nearly three months earlier. One face features a composition of four Stars of David of various sizes on which are written years in which pogroms occurred against the Jewish population in the Czech lands.

... The Maharal is possibly best known for the story of the Golem – a clay man that he is said to have turned into a living being.

Unique Design: Reversed Texts
The new coin, 3.1 cm in diameter, features a very unique design on its reverse side: a silhouette of the Golem, in between Hebrew passages of Talmudic texts – printed backwards, the official Czech numismatics site explains, in order to express a “look back through history generally and the history of the Jewish community in the Czech lands in particular.”

[...]

Golem background is here.

THE MILWAUKEE PUBLIC MUSEUM is hosting a Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition next year which will include the Vision of Gabriel inscription:

Dead Sea Scrolls at last coming to Milwaukee Public Museum

By Jackie Loohauis-Bennett of the Journal Sentinel

Posted: Sept. 30, 2009

After years of international negotiations, the Milwaukee Public Museum has announced that its exhibit of the legendary Dead Sea Scrolls will open on Jan. 22.

"Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible: Ancient Artifacts, Timeless Treasures" is the largest temporary exhibit ever produced by the museum, with more than 200 artifacts.

The show pulls together authentic Dead Sea Scroll fragments, illustrated manuscripts and archaeological findings from Israel, Jordan, France, England, Switzerland and the United States. The scroll segments and other texts in the Milwaukee exhibit have shed new light on the history of two religions: Judaism and Christianity.

"These are the greatest treasures of humankind," said Milwaukee Public Museum president Dan Finley. "You can't put a value on these words. These words changed the world."

The scroll fragments coming here contain parts of the earliest known texts of the Hebrew Bible - the Christian Old Testament - and some texts in the exhibit contain tantalizing references to a Messiah figure.

The exhibit also features pages from the oldest existing version of the Hebrew Masoretic text, as well as pages from hand-copied medieval Bibles and early printed Bibles, including the Gutenberg Bible.

Exhibit highlights include:

•  A fragment of the Copper Scroll, a one-of-a-kind scroll written on deteriorating metal that took scholars more than four years to cut open and translate.

•  A fragment of a version of the book of Daniel dating from between 50 B.C. and A.D. 50. This is its first display in any exhibit of Dead Sea Scrolls.

• A fragment from Ecclesiastes dating from the second century B.C.

•  The recently discovered Jeselsohn Stone with a late first century B.C. text called "Gabriel's Revelation," an apocalyptic prophecy attributed to the Angel Gabriel. The text speaks of a Messiah called Simon who will rise from the dead after three days. An exhibit label reads that this text is "interpreted by some that the story of Jesus' death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time. However, the translation 'after three days' is uncertain."

[...]

Earlier brief notes of the exhibition are here and (presumably) here. Background to the Vision of Gabriel is here and here.

NEW ARTICLES ETC. AT THE JOURNAL OF HEBREW SCRIPTURES. Ehud Ben Zvi e-mails:

Dear all,

I am glad to announce the publication of the following article in the Journal of Hebrew Scriptures (http://www.jhsonline.org)

Journal of Hebrew Scriptures - Volume 9: Article 22 (2009)

Karolien Vermeulen,To See or Not To See. The Polysemy of the Word עין in the Isaac Narratives (Gen 17-35)

Abstract

This article discusses the polysemy of the word עין in the Isaac narratives (Gen 17-35). The word’s given ambivalent nature is exploited on every level. It fits the major themes in the Isaac story as well as the small nuances in individual sentences. As such it illustrates the potential power of polysemy and its multiple, so to say polysemous, role in biblical narrative.

Those who wish to access this article directly may go to http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/JHS/Articles/article_124.pdf

Journal of Hebrew Scriptures - Volume 9: Article 21 (2009)

Aron Pinker

Intrusion of Ptolemaic Reality on Cultic Practices in Qoh 4:17

Abstract

A new interpretation is offered for Qoh 4:17 that highlights the Sitz im Leben of the Ptolemaic regime. Qoh 4:17, though couched in cultic terms and with a Temple setting, contains allusions to the Ptolemaic reality of spies and informers who helped the Ptolemaic administration exact heavy taxes. It is shown that this dual level (cultic and non-cultic) meaning persists in the unit Qoh 4:17-5:6.

Those who wish to access this article directly may go to http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/JHS/Articles/article_123.pdf

Review Article:

Journal of Hebrew Scriptures - Volume 9 (2009) - Review Article

Jeremy M Hutton, Deuteronomistic History or Histories?: New Approaches to Deuteronomy-Kings. A review article of: Markus Witte, Konrad Schmid, Doris Prechel and Jan Christian Gertz, eds., with assistance from Johannes F. Diehl. Die deuteronomistischen Geschichtswerke: Redaktions- und religionsgeschichtliche Perspektiven zur “Deuteronomismus”-Diskussion in Tora und Vorderen Propheten.

To access this review article directly please go to http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/JHS/reviews/reviews_new/review398.htm

Reviews:

Becking, Bob and Dirk Human, eds, Exile and Suffering: A Selection of Papers Read at the 50th Anniversary Meeting of the Old Testament Society of South Africa OTWSA/OTSSA, Pretoria, August 2007 (Oudtestamentische Studiën 50; Leiden: Brill, 2009). (Reviewed by Adam Oliver Stokes).

Römer Thomas (ed.), The Books of Leviticus and Numbers (BETL 215; Leuven: Peeters, 2008). (Reviewed by Viktor Golinets)

To access reviews (and review articles) please go to http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/JHS/reviews/reviews_vol.html

Note: Readers will notice the new visual version of the reviews. We think that the new version is not only "easier in the eyes" but also far more print-friendly. All the reviews in vol. 9 are now in the new visual format. Any comments you may have about this new version are welcome. Please send them to m. I wish to thank Ms. Melanie Marvin who made the shift to the new version possible and who worked tireless in this project. Thank you, Melanie.

Forthcoming:
An article, a review article and several reviews will be published soon. We anticipate that the hypertext version of the entire vol 8 (2008) be ready in about month time.
---------------

We anticipate to have an hypertext version of vol. 8 (2008) by November 2009. The printed publication of volume 8 (2008) will (hopefully) be ready by November as well. For information on the printed version published by Gorgias of vol. 7 (2007) please go to http://www.gorgiaspress.com/bookshop/p-56292-ben-zvi-ehud-perspectives-on-hebrew-scriptures-iv.aspx

At that page you will find also links to the printed versions of vols 1-6 of the Journal.

For information about the Logos version of the Journal (vols. 1-7), please go to http://www.logos.com/products/details/4336

Regards,

Ehud

Ehud Ben Zvi
History and Classics
University of Alberta
2-28 HM Tory Building
Edmonton AB Canada T6G 2H4



** This communication is intended for the use of the recipient to whom it is addressed, and may contain confidential, personal, and/or privileged information. Please contact me immediately if you are not the intended recipient of this communication, and do not copy, distribute, or take action relying on it. Any communication received in error, or subsequent reply, should be deleted or destroyed.**



_______________________________________________
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BARUCH HALPERN is interviewed about the Ark of the Covenant by PhysOrg.com:

Probing Question: Is the Ark of the Covenant real?
September 24th, 2009 By Solmaz Barazesh

When you hear the words "Ark of the Covenant" what comes to mind? For some, Steven Spielberg’s film "Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark" provides the most vivid pop-culture reference to this mysterious sacred object.

The quest to find the real Ark has inspired generations of adventurers and Hollywood directors, but the trail has always gone cold.

"Different people will give you different answers to that question," said Baruch Halpern, Penn State professor of ancient history, classics and ancient Mediterranean studies, and religious studies. "The Ark is a regular feature in the Old Testament, making several appearances in the first five books of the Bible. There are many consistent references to the Ark, and when you add it all up, it seems like the Ark was a real article."

[...]

It seems plausible enough that some such object was in the first Temple. Similar cherub throne iconography survives from Phoenician contexts (e.g., here; actual miniature cherub thrones, presumably meant to seat an image of the god, survive as well).

Halpern does a good job of gently tamping down the more wild speculations on the Ark. His conclusion is good:

In some ways, the story of the Ark is similar to other Judeo-Christian religious relics such as the Shroud of Turin and Noah’s Ark, Halpern said. "You have to remember why this scripture was written in the first place, and see the Ark’s symbolic power to people as a sacred object. If you try to over-explain it, you lose the power of the story."

For the Ark of the Covenant, see here. There's more on Professor Halpern here and here.

UPDATE (29 September): Dead link fixed. Sorry!

YOM KIPPUR (the Day of Atonement) begins this evening at sundown. A healthy fast to all observing it.

MORE DEBATE about the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum: Hebrew Bible scholar John Van Seters and Scrolls specialist Larry Schiffman are quoted in a review of the exhibition in The Record.

In April, the Palestinian Authority officials sent a letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper asking that the exhibition be cancelled.

They challenge the Israel Antiquities Authority’s right to display materials removed from Palestinian territories, alleging at least four international conventions and protocols addressing the treatment of cultural goods, agreements to which Israel and Canada are signatories, are being violated.

The controversy sparked at least two protests in front of the museum calling for a boycott of Israeli institutions in light of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

John Van Seters, a distinguished biblical scholar and professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina who is now living in Waterloo, said the protesters’ concerns must be taken seriously.

Van Seters doesn’t dispute the authenticity or importance of the scrolls. But some scholars, Van Seters included, believe such exhibitions shouldn’t be patronized.

“If they were taken, as the allegations suggest, from the . . . Palestine archeological museum in East Jerusalem, then they should be returned and they should not be sent out by Israel around the world to be put on display as being on loan from them,” he said.

“By accepting them and putting them on display, one only legitimizes and confirms the ownership of these materials that have been confiscated from their rightful owner.”

The Israel Antiquities Authority argues it is the custodian of the scrolls and has the right to display them.

And in response to the protests, the museum has posted a statement on its website indicating that the Israel Antiquities Authority has lent the scrolls to numerous libraries, galleries and museums, including the Vatican, during the past 20 years.

Lawrence Schiffman, a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar and professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, said protesters are using the scrolls to advance a political argument.

The scrolls are a cultural treasure that should be shared, he added.

In past years people were in an uproar because those who controlled them didn’t share them.

“Now it has been published. And it’s being exhibited. And the world is being allowed to benefit from this important part of our culture,” Schiffman said.

Background here and keep following the links back.

COPTIC SCROLLS is an indy film currently casting in Kansas City:

Stinson McClendon, a local filmmaker, is holding auditions this weekend for his feature-length murder mystery, “Coptic Scrolls.”

McClendon, producer and director for Baby E Films, will hold the auditions from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. today and from 1:30 to 5 p.m. Sunday at the Southeast Community Center in Swope Park, 4201 E. 63rd St.

“Coptic Scrolls” will be controversial. The film questions the ethnicity of Jesus Christ and will examine how the revelation of Jesus’ background could stir the foundation of Christianity.

McClendon said: “My intention is not to give a history lesson. I’m a filmmaker, and my main objective is to tell an exciting and moving story.”

Sounds like fun, although the part about not giving a history lesson is ominous. In any case, I hope someone has told him that this sort of thing has been done before.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR BURYING THE GENIZA from Ask the Expert at the Jewish Telegraph. Excerpt:

Answer: It sounds like you're talking about burying the contents of a genizah, Linda. Genizah means "reserved" or "hidden" in Hebrew, and is traditionally a place where Jews store sacred documents when they fall out of use.

The Talmud (Shabbat 115a) stipulates that all sacred writings (scrolls of Torah, Prophets, and Writings), should be preserved in a place where they cannot be destroyed. Though this idea originally was closely tied to a prohibition from ever erasing God's name, Maimonides ruled that holy books, such as the Talmud and midrash, should be retired to the genizah as well, even though they do not contain God's name (Mishneh Torah, Hilhot Yesodei HaTorah 6:8).

For a long time, Jewish communities set aside a room in each synagogue exclusively for this purpose and called that space the genizah. Anything from a worn-out siddur to a contract written in Hebrew would be put in the genizah when it was no longer useful, and often ritual objects such as a tallit or a lulav were added as well.

Most synagogues now have a closet or a box where they collect used papers and ritual objects that are considered sacred. The general rule is that anything dealing with sacred subjects should be placed in a genizah rather than thrown out. An Israeli newspaper, though written in Hebrew, would not need to go in a genizah, but a Megillah that had been damaged would.

Most synagogues clean out their genizot every few years by burying the contents in a Jewish cemetery as a sign of reverence and respect. Some communities even have cemetery plots that have been donated expressly for the purpose of burying the genizah. It is considered a great sign of respect to bury a Torah scroll or other sacred work near a prestigious Torah scholar. However, you are welcome to bury your household genizah in your backyard, as long as it is done respectfully.

Fortunately, the keepers of the Cairo Geniza paid no attention to any of these instructions.

THAT ANGLO-SAXON GOLD HOARD whose discovery in Staffordshire, England, was announced yesterday contains a Latin inscription that quotes from the Vulgate Old Testament:

Huge Anglo-Saxon gold hoard found

(BBC)

The UK's largest haul of Anglo-Saxon treasure has been discovered buried in a field in Staffordshire.

Experts say the collection of 1,500 gold and silver pieces, which may date to the 7th Century, is unparalleled in size and worth "a seven-figure sum".

It has been declared treasure by South Staffordshire coroner Andrew Haigh, meaning it belongs to the Crown.

Terry Herbert, who found it on farmland using a metal detector, said it "was what metal detectorists dream of".

It could take more than a year for it to be valued.

The Staffordshire hoard contains about 5kg of gold and 2.5kg of silver, making it far bigger than the Sutton Hoo discovery in 1939 when 1.5kg of Anglo-Saxon gold was found near Woodbridge in Suffolk.

Leslie Webster, former keeper at the British Museum's Department of Prehistory and Europe, said: "This is going to alter our perceptions of Anglo-Saxon England as radically, if not more so, as the Sutton Hoo discoveries.

"(It is) absolutely the equivalent of finding a new Lindisfarne Gospels or Book of Kells."

The Book of Kells and Lindisfarne Gospels are intricately illuminated manuscripts of the four New Testament Gospels dating from the 9th and 8th Centuries.

[...]

The piece with the inscription is pictured in the article with the caption:

Anglo Saxon Gold
This gold strip carries the Latin inscription: "Rise up O Lord, and may thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate thee be driven from thy face." It has two sources, the Book of Numbers or Psalm 67, taken from the Vulgate, the Bible used by the Saxons.

A somewhat related item (the Irish bog Psalter) is discussed here.

JUNK HISTORY DAY! Haaretz rounds up recent daft notions about the Ark of the Covenant:

Dreamers of the lost ark
By Uzi Dann
Tags: Israel news, Ark, Bible

About three months ago, Abune (Father) Paulos, patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, announced that the time had come for him to reveal the answer to one of the greatest mysteries in the history of civilization: the whereabouts of the biblical Ark of the Covenant, ostensibly guarded for millennia in a church in Axum, Ethiopia. Prior to his visit to Rome and his audience with Pope Benedict XVI, the patriarch decided to announce, at a press conference with the head of the Roman Catholic Church, the public unveiling of the ark.

In any other century in human history, this would have been a cosmic event. However, at that time, the world was focused on the death of pop star Michael Jackson.

The fact that Paulos changed his mind 24 hours later - even someone who was sentenced to prison and exiled under the Derg military regime cannot always withstand the Church's pressure - destroyed, at least temporarily, any chances of discovering what happened to said ark, or of crossing off another theory regarding its location.

Alas.

I first became acquainted with Ethiopian beliefs and their connection to the Ark of the Covenant during a course in the late 1980s given by Dr. Steven Kaplan, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's department of African studies (which was since closed; there's no budget for frivolities). The course fired my imagination, and I vowed to learn more about the matter. Furthermore, I was troubled by what I learned in elementary school about the gross injustice suffered by naive Uzzah, who tried to prevent the ark from touching the ground and was immediately annihilated by God.

The Ethiopian Church is convinced that Ethiopia's kings are part of the Solomonic dynasty - i.e., descendants of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The queen's visit to Solomon's bedroom resulted in Menelik, who later returned as a prince to visit his father in Jerusalem, whereupon he craftily "borrowed" the ark and its two tablets. According to Ethiopian tradition, it has been in Axum for the past 3,000 years.

For the Kebra Negast and notions about the Ark in Ethiopia, see here and keep following the links back

Steven Spielberg's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" is based on the theory that the Pharaoh Shishak, who captured Palestine in the 10th century B.C.E., took the ark back to Egypt, where it was buried with the pharaohs.

Raiders is the most tolerable of the lot, in that it doesn't pretend to be anything other than entertaining fiction. The Kebra Negast is pretty innocuous too. It's the modern ones that claim to be real which irritate me.

If we can believe the "Kebra Nagast," the chronicle of Ethiopia's kings written in 1210, or a story floated in a Hollywood movie with no historical basis - why not also give some credence to the biblical narrative?

In 2 Chronicles, we read how more than 300 years after Solomon and Shishak, King Josiah returns the ark to the Temple in Jerusalem. The Bible sadly reports that when the First Temple was destroyed, Nebuchadnezzar's soldiers demolished the ark, perhaps even melting it down and reusing its gold.

Predictably, no passage is cited. And understandably, in that there is no such passage in the Bible. (Not that I doubt that that's what happened to the Ark.) In the Bible we last hear of the Ark in an enigmatic passage in the book of Jeremiah, discussed here.

However, quasi-biblical works contain more uplifting narratives. In the Book of Maccabees, included in the Apocrypha ("external writings") for political reasons, we learn that after the Temple's destruction, God commanded Jeremiah to bury the ark in a secret cave on Mount Nebo. The exact location of this cave, the site of Moses' grave, is unknown. Undoubtedly, Mount Nebo's inclusion in the Hashemite kingdom is part of the divine plan. Had it been in Israel, the mountain would have been privatized, a franchise would have been issued for excavations and a scandalous entrance fee would be charged - probably a two-for-the-price-of-one deal.

The reference is 2 Maccabees 2:4-8.

According to another narrative, the ark was removed from Jerusalem before the city was destroyed, and ended up in the Jewish community on Elephantine Island in Aswan (some Ethiopians argue it was thereafter transported to Axum). Some people believe the Temple's priests buried the ark before Jerusalem's destruction, which would mean it's under the Dome of the Rock (as if we need more headaches!).

I've not heard of a connection with Elephantine (on which, see here, here and here) before.

Wendell Jones, who believes he was the inspiration for the character of Indiana Jones, is an American archaeologist who excavated Qumran with Israel's leading archaeologists. A few years ago, he claimed he had found the ark in that site, near the Dead Sea, and he promised to reveal it on Tisha B'Av, the Jewish fast day commemorating the destruction of both temples. Only Arutz Sheva (a radio station primarily serving West Bank settlers) took his declaration seriously. Meanwhile, there are some eccentric Europeans who believe that when the Crusaders returned from the Holy Land, they hid the ark somewhere on their grandmother's estate.

On Vendyl Jones, see here. To be fair, he didn't quite say this. I don't know anything about those Europeans.

The most captivating explanation also comes from Africa: The Lemba tribe, who believe they are descendants of Jews, tell stories of a holy box called the Ngoma Lungundu (literally, the voice of God), which came with their ancestors from Yemen to the Great Empire of Zimbabwe. Prof. Tudor Parfitt of the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies discovered that the box's size and shape match the ark's description, that it was not supposed to touch the ground, and that the Lemba tribe brought it to the battlefield, where it usually changed the course of war. A large clan within the tribe, the Buba clan, has a gene characteristic of the Kohanim (descendants of Aaron).

Lemba tradition holds that the ark self-destructed when the Great Zimbabwe kingdom collapsed, and a wooden copy of it was made. The copy was discovered in a cave in 1940 and is now in a museum in Harare.

Food for thought.

Years after my class at Hebrew University, I traveled to Axum to visit the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion, which is actually a complex of buildings, some of which are open only to men, and one of which, Chapel of the Tablet, is open only to priests. A monk guards the ark in the chapel's sanctum sanctorum - it's a lifetime job. No one but this monk can see the ark. Most people who try to sneak a glimpse are stopped at the gate by guards bearing large sticks and rocks to fend off troublesome children and curious foreigners. You can try getting past them, but then you will confront a soldier with a loaded Kalashnikov. Like the others, I could not get past him.

For Tudor Parfitt, the Lemba, and the Ark, see here and follow the background link.

For those who believe in the New Testament and the Gospel of John, God will miraculously return the ark to the Temple when Jesus' Second Coming occurs. However, under the safe assumption that this will not happen, the mystery remains intact. Meanwhile, one can make do with the twice-weekly, early-morning procession in Axum, when priests bring out a copy of the ark and thousands of believers, wearing white and bearing candles, march after it around the church's massive complex. A truly spiritual experience.

Once again no passage in the NT/Gospel of John is cited, and once again, this is because there is no such passage. It really is quite easy to find a Bible these days and check what it actually says. It's remarkable that so many journalists find this concept difficult.

UPDATE (28 September): More on the Ark here.

JUNK HISTORY DAY! The Wall Street Journal has an editorial about Palestinian denial of the Jewish Temple and the Jewish connection with Jerusalem:

Palestinian Leaders Deny Jerusalem's Past

By BARI WEISS

Jews have no history in the city of Jerusalem: They have never lived there, the Temple never existed, and Israeli archaeologists have admitted as much. Those who deny this are simply liars. Or so says Sheik Tayseer Rajab Tamimi, chief Islamic judge of the Palestinian Authority.

His claims, made last month, would be laughable if they weren't so common among Palestinians. Sheik Tamimi is only the latest to insist that, in his words, Jerusalem is solely "an Arab and Islamic city and it has always been so." His comments come on the heels of those by Shamekh Alawneh, a lecturer in modern history at Al Quds University. On an Aug. 11 PA television program, "Jerusalem—History and Culture," Mr. Alawneh argued that the Jews invented their connection to Jerusalem. "It has no historical roots," he said, adding that the Jews are engaging in "an attack on history, theft of culture, falsification of facts, erasure of the truth, and Judaization of the place."

As President Barack Obama and his foreign-policy team gear up to propose yet another plan for Israeli-Arab peace, they would do well to focus less on important but secondary issues like settlement growth, and instead notice that top Palestinian intellectual and political leaders deny basic truths about the region's most important city.

[...]

It's true: there is scant archaeological evidence of the First Temple. But not so for the Second Temple, which is accepted as historical fact by most archaeologists. From the Herodian period, aside from dozens of Jewish ritual baths surrounding the temple that have been uncovered, one retaining wall of the temple, the Western Wall, still stands.

[...]

Regarding the last paragraph, that would be "all archaeologists," not "most."

For the historical evidence for the existence of the second and first Temples on the Temple Mount, see here and here. This is of interest as well. For Shamekh Alawneh, see here. For the 1924 Waqf pamphlet, see here.