Ancient figures associated with Tyre

A ROLL CALL of ancient classical and biblical figures associated with the Phoenician city of Tyre appears in an American Spectator travel piece:

With its expensive purple dye made from a local mollusk, the murex, Tyre was the center for the Versaces and Givenchys of the ancient world. Paris took Helen of Troy here on a shopping expedition to drape in sumptuous fabric the frame and face that launched a thousand ships.

King Hiram of Tyre was an ally and trading partner of Jerusalem's King Solomon. Hiram sold Solomon the cedar timber for the great Temple.

The Jerusalem-Tyre relationship was rocky then as now. The old Hebrew prophets inveighed against the wealthy city and its neighbor, Sidon, as hotbeds of heathenism and vice. Jezebel, a Tyrian princess (and Dido's great-aunt) who married Israel's King Ahab, came to an unhappy end.

Egypt's pharaohs many times made war against Tyre. Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar battered Tyre in the 6th century B.C. Some 250 years later, Alexander the Great already had established effective mastery over the entire Levant when he demanded to offer sacrifice at Tyre to its principal god, Melqart. Alexander maintained that he himself was divine because, he said, he was a descendant of divine Herakles, of whom Melqart was only an avatar. The Tyrians didn't cotton to that.

When diplomacy failed, Alexander mounted a costly siege whose success resulted in the slaughter of thousands of Tyrians, deportation into slavery for the survivors, and ruin of the splendid city. Modern historians say there was no strategic rationale for Alexander's destruction of Tyre and its people. The impulse for the genocide was something like the rage of a deranged, spurned lover. Is "education" the answer to war and the world's other problems? Consider that the Macedonian sociopath had for his personal tutor the serene and rational Stagirite who wrote the Nicomachean Ethics.

When Jesus walked up the short road from Galilee to Tyre, preaching to the people and driving a demon out of a local woman's daughter, he saw what Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander had done to the place, fulfilling the prophecies of, inter alia, Amos, Ezekiel, Zechariah and Jeremiah. He instructed his disciples to say to Galilean towns that rejected them and their preaching: "It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the judgment, than for thee."

Tyre, its glories, and its devastations have inspired much English-language poetry, not all of it great. The shakiest entry in the Shakespeare canon is Pericles: Prince of Tyre, a weak work slapped together in a regrettable collaboration between the Bard and some London hacks from a mediaeval tear-jerker, Apollonius of Tyre. The Gnostic Necromancer Simon Magus and his paramour Helen of Tyre, who lived just after the time of Jesus, are themselves the figures of fascinating legend. Longfellow was obsessed with Tyre, but being no Dante with Paolo and Francesca, he spoiled the story of Simon and Helen in a tedium of moralistic stanzas -- "pious gurglings," as Mencken put it.

In praise of paper handouts and blog posts

PAPER HANDOUTS do not crash and need to be rebooted during a conference presentation. They also don't cost $25-$75 per presentation. This confirms my long-held view that Powerpoint is evil.

This time, however, I'm skipping the handouts and posting both my papers on this blog in advance. Read them with me on your smartphone or your iPad during the presentation. Problem solved.

Still More on Rachel's tomb

STILL MORE ON RACHEL'S TOMB: Leen Ritmeyer, at his Ritmeyer Archaeological Design blog, and Tod Bolen, at his Bible Places blog, present conflicting views on where the actual tomb of Rachel was. As Todd notes, it does not bear on the current debate about UNESCO calling it a mosque. I don't know whether there was an actual Rachel to start with, but I have no problem with the possibility that there was a different and older tradition about where the matriarch was buried.

Background on the UNESCO controversy is here and here.

Happy 7th blogiversary to Exploring Our Matrix

HAPPY SEVENTH BLOGIVERSARY to James McGrath's Exploring Our Matrix. I didn't realize it had been around that long.

More on Israeli High Court's Waqf ruling

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: Further to Sunday's post on the Israeli High Court's rejection of a lawsuit to halt the Waqf's illicit excavations on the Temple Mount, Joseph Lauer refers me to an IMRA page that post's Shurat HaDin's press release on the subject. After discussing the specifics of the case, it concludes:

This week the BAGATZ rejected our petition and gave the Islamic Waqf a freepass to continue its destruction of Israel's sacred heritage sites. The justices held that our efforts to safeguard the ancient First Temple artifacts on behalf of world Jewry could not be done by means of a private prosecution. Alternatively, it refused to order the AG to take action against the Waqf.

It is absurd that while the Israeli government is mounting an international campaign against UNESCO to protest its labeling Rachel's Tomb and the Cave of the Macpelah in Hebron as Muslim mosques and denying their Jewish origins, it obstructs Shurat HaDin from acting to safeguard the status of the Jewish people's holiest site.

I'm not a lawyer, but it's hard for me not to come away with the impression that the High Court relied on technicalities to avoid having to rule on this contentious issue. It seems unfathomable that there should be no way to pursue a legal remedy.

On Rachel's tomb etc., see here and here.

On Jeremiah and Zionism

ON JEREMIAH AND ZIONISM:

Needing Jeremiah

By Aryeh Tepper (Jewish Ideas Daily)

One of the most significant accomplishments of the Zionist project was to re-vitalize the Bible as a Jewish national document. Or, if not the Bible as a whole, at least parts of the Bible. The early Zionists were attracted in particular to those books, like Joshua and Isaiah, which appealed to the dream of return and political restoration. One biblical book that most definitely didn't fire the Zionist imagination was the book of Jeremiah.

[...]

To this day, indeed, Israeli high-school students are exposed to only a very small portion of the book of Jeremiah, while to most Israelis the story of the prophet's life remains unknown. This is a situation that Rabbi Benjamn Lau, a leading figure of the religious-Zionist camp, has set out to change in Jeremiah, a Hebrew-language book that is soon to be translated into English. In redeeming the prophet from the margins, Lau both retells the book's "plot" and enters a striking claim for Jeremiah's relevance to contemporary Israeli concerns.

[...]

Lau's Jeremiah is thus a rabbi's warning against national and/or religious self-confidence divorced from a social conscience and the commitment to moral excellence. In one sense, it may be said (though Lau doesn't say it) that his warning goes to the heart of the modern project itself, and to the war waged by hard-boiled thinkers like Machiavelli and Hobbes to emancipate politics from theology. Reversing the trajectory, Lau's Jeremiah reconnects the two by implying that their disconnection was what doomed the Jewish state in the first place. In this sense, his warning is pertinent to contemporary situations, and dilemmas, well beyond the state of Israel.

[...]

Sounds interesting.

The Nabataeans in Saudi Arabia

THE NABATAEANS (NABATEANS) IN SAUDI ARABIA are the subject of the second half of an article in the Arab News. Excerpt (there's more):

HEGRA (Madain Saleh)

Hegra, the Al-Hijr and Madain Saleh of the Holy Qur’an, is the most prominent archaeological site in Saudi Arabia, its international importance reflected by its registration as the Kingdom’s first UNESCO World Heritage site in 2008. In the Louvre exhibition, the grandeur of Hegra’s Nabatean monuments was conveyed by a series of impressive photographs that come near to conjuring the feel of Hegra for those who have not visited it.

The Nabateans were a north Arabian tribe, well established at their capital city of Petra in Jordan as early as the 4th C. BCE. Before the 1st C. BCE, the kings of Nabatea established a trading outpost at Hegra in the territory of the Lihyanite kingdom and when the Lihyanites fell, the Nabateans emerged as their successors, making Hegra their southern capital.

The wealth that the Nabateans gained from control of the international incense trade route between south Arabia and the Hellenistic and Roman world of the Mediterranean is reflected in the great carved tomb façades that the kings and high families of the Nabateans had carved from the red sandstone mountains of Hegra and Petra alike. The inspiration of their designs is a combination of the architecture of the Hellenistic world and elements deriving from Assyria, Iran and southern Arabia.

The inscriptions at Hegra are largely written in Nabatean script while some are in an early Arabic. They record precise legal dedications, showing a society ruled by law. A system of fines existed for those breaking the law. Greek and Latin sources describe the Nabatean kingdom as peaceable and well governed, and extremely prosperous and sophisticated in its tastes.

The Nabatean inscriptions on the tombs at Hegra are precisely dated and incised directly into the rock, thus ensuring their preservation. There are far fewer inscriptions that help dating at Petra and this has led to a complicated problem for archaeologists estimating the date of each Petra tomb. By contrast, the chronology of the surviving Hegra tomb façades is much clearer.

Teaching fellowship in HB at Exeter

A TEACHING FELLOWSHIP IN HEBREW BIBLE (fixed-term, part time) is being advertised by the University of Exeter.

A Greek Esther scroll

AN ESTHER SCROLL in Greek from the late first/early second century CE. I didn't know about this one.

The Dig at the Pool of Siloam--2005 until Now

BEN WITHERINGTON: The Dig at the Pool of Siloam--2005 until Now.

Sixth meeting of the Enoch Seminar, plus 4 Enoch Encyclopedia

THE ENOCH SEMINAR'S SIXTH MEETING, scheduled for June in Milan, now has a preliminary schedule published here. The topic this time is the books of 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch.

Note also the many and ever-increasing resources at the 4 Enoch Online Encyclopedia of Early Judaism

New Jesus book from Geza Vermes

GEZA VERMES has just published a new Jesus book, a collection of his essays:

Jesus in the Jewish World (SCM, 2011)

Despite the listed date, I have confirmation from the author that it has just been released and that there will be a launch at Foyles in London on 18 November at 6:30. Table of contents:

JESUS IN THE JEWISH WORLD
1. Jesus the Jew: Christian and Jewish Reactions [From Jews and Christians in a Pluralistic World, edited by Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde & Edward Shils, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1991, pp. 25-42]
2. Jesus the Jew and his Religion [unpublished]
3. Jesus of Nazareth in a Nutshell [unpublished]
4. Flavius Josephus, the Fifth Evangelist? [“Jesus in the Eyes of Josephus”, Standpoint, January-February 2010, pp. 54-57]
5. A Dream [From The Changing Faces of Jesus, Penguin, London, 2001, pp. 269-270]
6. Bible and Midrash - Early Old Testament Exegesis [From Geza Vermes, Post-Biblical Jewish Studies, Brill, Leiden, 1975, pp. 59-91]
7. Scripture and Tradition in Judaism: Written and Oral Torah [From The Written Word: Literacy in Transition (Wolfson College Lectures 1985), edited by Gerd Baumann, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1986, pp. 79-95]
8. Methodology in the Study of Jewish Literature in the Graeco-Roman Period [From Journal of Jewish Studies 36, 1985, pp. 145-158]
9. How the New Schürer came into being? [From Jüdische Geschichte in hellenistisch-römischer Zeit, edited by Aharon Oppenheimer, Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich, 1999, pp. 1-8]
10. Hanina ben Dosa: A Galilean Contemporary of Jesus [From Geza Vermes, Post-Biblical Jewish Studies, Brill, Leiden, 1975, pp. 178-214]
11. The Binding of Isaac: Genesis 22 in Rabbinic Literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament [“Isaac the First Lamb of God”, Standpoint, October 2009, pp. 62-65]
12. The Battle over the Scrolls: A Personal Account [From Geza Vermes, Providential Accidents: An Autobiography, SCM Press, London, 1998, pp. 188-207]
13. The Significance of the Scrolls for Understanding Christianity [From Journal of Religious History, 26, 2002, pp. 210-219]
14. Methodology in the Study of the Historical Jesus [To appear in a different form in the Princeton-Prague Symposium on Perspectives on the Historical Jesus]
15. The Son of Man Debate Revisited (1960-2010) [To appear in Journal of Jewish Studies 61, no. 2, 2010]

UPDATE: Professor Vermes e-mails to clarify regarding the date: The British publication date was 29 October. January 2011 is the US date given by Amazon.com.

Facsimile of the Leiden Manuscript of Talmud Yerushalmi

THE LEIDEN MS OF TALMUD YERUSHALMI is online in facsimile - all 682 folios. Links at the AWOL blog. And they aren't kidding about them taking a long time to load.

Pre-Islamic religious artifacts in Saudi Arabia

PRE-ISLAMIC ARTIFACTS seem to be causing disquiet in Saudi Arabia. In an essay in the Huffington Post (brought to my attention by Joseph Lauer), Sabria Jawhar discusses the problem. Excerpt:

But offering Madain Saleh as a tourism stop is not a problem. It was first inhabited by the people of Thamud who are mentioned prominently in the Qur'an. But what of the non-Muslim sites? Like most Saudis, I know little of pre-Islamic sites, although occasionally amateur archeologists come across such places. Frankly, it's gross negligence to destroy or hide these discoveries. The government in recent years has taken positive steps to recover and catalog artifacts, but there's a disagreement with what to do with them once they are found.

It's right that churches are not permitted in the Land of the Two Holy Mosques. But what's less certain is whether crucifixes, if found, should be destroyed or hidden. More precisely is the issue of whether Christian or Jewish artifacts can be displayed in the proper context in a Saudi museum as an acknowledgment of a people who called pre-Islamic Arabia their home.

My guess is that most Saudis will say no. Many Saudis believe there is no place in the Kingdom for such relics.

The Associated Press the other day reported that Sheikh Mohammed Al Nujaimi said non-Muslim artifacts "should be left in the ground." He said that Muslims would not tolerate the display of non-Muslim religious symbols. "How can crosses be displayed when Islam doesn't recognize that Christ was crucified?" he said. "If we display them, it's as if we recognize the crucifixion."

Most Saudis probably agree, although the argument can be made that displaying an ancient cross doesn't necessarily recognize that Christ was crucified but only acknowledges a previous non-Muslim civilization.

There is much to comment on here, but I will focus on one point. Let me get this straight: if ancient Christian or Jewish religious artifacts are excavated in Saudi Arabia, it is not certain whether they should be destroyed? The most sympathetic way that I can read this is that Ms. Jawhar is personally opposed to their destruction (she doesn't quite come out and say this), but finds it in any case to be an open question in Saudi society. The idea that religious artifacts should be destroyed because they belonged to another faith moves from the provincial into the barbaric. Indeed, Saudis even destroy their own ancient religious sites (see here and here), which is just as bad but even more unfathomable.

UPDATE (10 November): Duane Smith comments at Abnormal Interests.

Happy 10,000th birthday to Jericho

HAPPY 10,000th BIRTHDAY TO THE CITY OF JERICHO. More or less.

World's 'lowest city' Jericho celebrates 10,000 years

Nov 08, 2010 by Judith Sudilovsky (Christian Century)

Jerusalem, November 8 (ENInews)--Many people in the area believe there is little to celebrate, but Jericho, made famous in the Bible and one the earth's lowest and oldest inhabited cities, has begun a year-long celebration of its 10 000th anniversary.

So far it has been a quiet affair as the city that borders Jordan in the Palestinian-administered West Bank area is not a global tourist haven. Still a special cabinet meeting opened the festivities on 10.10.10, a day deemed good for the biblically-famed town that features in many popular Western songs.

[...]

Archaeologists have uncovered evidence of 20 consecutive settlements in Jericho, the first dating back to 9000 BC. They have also found urban fortifications dating back to 7000 BC. Archaeological remains in the area also include the winter palace of King Herod, who ruled in the area at the time of Jesus. There is the winter palace, dating from AD 743 and what Israeli archaeologists claim to be the world's oldest Jewish synagogue dating back to 50-70 BC.

Technically these Jerichos are at more than one site, but, as far as we have information, they all preserved the identity of the one city.

More on "Rachel's Tomb" as a mosque

MORE ON RACHEL'S TOMB: This Jerusalem Post article by Nadav Shragai explains how and when "Rachel's Tomb" became "the mosque of Bilal ibn Rabah":

How Rachel’s Tomb was Islamicized

Between 1993 and 1995, Palestinian groups committed terror and suicide attacks that killed 80 Israelis. In February 1996, the IDF feared that Rachel’s Tomb would furnish a convenient target for an attack of this sort, as it was situated on the main highway connecting Jerusalem and Hebron, with heavy Jewish and Arab traffic. Demonstrations of a nationalist Palestinian character erupted at Rachel’s Tomb as Muslims began to raise the argument that the site involved “Islamic soil.”

At the end of September 1996, the “Western Wall Tunnel Riots” broke out. After the attack on Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus and its fall to the Palestinians, hundreds of Arabs from Bethlehem and the Aida refugee camp attacked Rachel’s Tomb. They set on fire the scaffolding that was erected around the tomb as part of fortification work at the site and tried to break into the compound. Marching at their head was Muhammad Rashad al-Jabari, the governor of Bethlehem, an appointee of the Palestinian Authority. The IDF dispersed the demonstrators with gunfire and stun grenades. Scores were wounded, including Kifah Barakat, the commander of Force 17, the presidential guard of PA chairman Yasser Arafat.

With the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000, Palestinians again attacked Rachel’s Tomb, and for 41 days Jews were prevented from visiting the site due to shooting incidents.

The Muslims also escalated their rhetoric. They stopped calling the site “Rachel’s Dome,” as they had done for hundreds of years, and began calling it the Mosque of Bilal ibn Rabah. The Muslim religious authorities (Wakf) first began to employ this name in 1996, and it eventually took root in Palestinian national discourse.

Bilal ibn Rabah, an Ethiopian by origin, is known in Islamic history as a black slave who served the household of the prophet Muhammad as the person in charge of calling the Muslims to prayer five times a day – the first muezzin. Upon the death of Muhammad, he went to fight the wars of Islam in Syria, was killed there in 642 CE, and was buried in Damascus. The Palestinian Authority raised the argument that, according to Islamic tradition, the Islamic conquerors of the country called the mosque that was established at Rachel’s Tomb after Bilal ibn Rabah.

Yet the Palestinian argument ignores the presumptive ownership that the Jews acquired at the site for many hundreds of years and from the firmans that the Ottoman authorities issued awarding Rachel’s Tomb to the Jews at the beginning of the 19th century.

The Palestinian arguments ignore even the accepted Muslim tradition that venerates Rachel and identifies the site as her burial place. Prof. Yehoshua Porat termed the claim of a mosque at Rachel’s Tomb as mendacious. He noted that the place was known in Arabic as “Rachel’s Dome – a Jewish place of worship.”

For many years in official publications of Palestinian national bodies, there was no reference to any other name for the site, including in the Palestinian Lexicon issued by the Arab League and the PLO in 1984, or in the Al-mawsu’ah al-filastiniyah published in Italy by the Palestinian Encyclopedia organization after 1996.

The article has much more on the history of the site from the Middle Ages through the modern period.

It sounds as though UNESCO's use of the title "Bilal bin Rabah Mosque" is historically spurious.

Background here, focusing on the site in antiquity.

Gospel of Judas will not go on display in Egypt

THE GOSPEL OF JUDAS will not be displayed in Egypt according to Zahi Hawass:

“We will keep the manuscript in storage at the Coptic Museum out of respect for the feelings of Egypt's Coptic Christians,” Hawas said, noting that the alleged gospel contained material deemed disparaging to the Christan faith.

This is political correctness run amok. Meanwhile, I think Coptic Christians would rather that their government expend more effort in protecting them from being murdered. Getting this trial finished could be a step in the right direction.

UPDATE (10 November): Duane Smith comments at Abnormal Interests.

Ph.D. scholarships in Divinity at University of St. Andrews

PH.D. SCHOLARSHIPS in Divinity at the University of St. Andrews:

*PhD Scholarships in Divinity for 2011 Session*

The School of Divinity is delighted to be offering the following PhD Scholarships once again for applicants intending to commence in the 2011-12 academic session:

* The Matthew Black Scholarship: for a student working in the field
of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible;
* The Donald M. Baillie Scholarship: for a student working in the
field of Theology;
* The Richard Bauckham Scholarship: for a student working in the
field of New Testament Studies;
* The Emanuel Tov Scholarship: for a student working in the field of
Text Criticism in Old Testament/Hebrew Bible;
* The Queen Margaret of Scotland Scholarship: for a student working
in any field of Divinity;
* The Lady Kenmure Scholarship: for a student working in any field
of Divinity.

Each scholarship covers tuition fees for a UK or EU student, or a contribution of around £3500 per annum towards overseas tuition fees for a student from outside the EU.

An additional stipend of £3000 per annum (£1000 in the case of the Emanuel Tov scholarship) will be offered to each recipient for three years. The Matthew Black scholar will engage in Hebrew language teaching in years 2 and 3 of his/her residency, the Richard Bauckham scholar in equivalent teaching of Greek. The Donald M. Baillie scholar will contribute similarly to the School’s undergraduate teaching programme in Theology. The Queen Margaret and Lady Kenmure scholars will undertake equivalent teaching and/or research assistance work as invited by the Head of School. The Tov scholar will be supervised by Professor Kristin De Troyer, and will provide research assistance to her.

The successful candidates will join a rapidly expanding School of Divinity postgraduate programme. No separate application process for the scholarships is required. All applications for doctoral studies will automatically be considered, and awards will be made on merit. Further information is available from Ms Margot Clement, Postgraduate Secretary mc41@st-andrews.ac.uk.

Obituaries for Ehud Netzer

OBITUARIES FOR EHUD NETZER have been published in the New York Times, the LA Times and the Telegraph. From the Telegraph:

Ehud Netzer

Ehud Netzer, who died on October 28 aged 76, was an Israeli archaeologist who spent his career in pursuit of one of the Bible's most reviled figures; having at last discovered his quarry's tomb, however, Netzer concluded that Herod the Great was not so much a monster as a man of "outstanding talent".

Published: 5:45PM GMT 05 Nov 2010

It was a dramatic reappraisal of Herod, Rome's gore-soaked client king who ruled Judaea from about 37BC and is thought to have butchered a host of adversaries and rivals, including several members of his own family. He is infamous for the Massacre of the Innocents – the murder of newborns in Bethlehem which Matthew's Gospel records was ordered by Herod to eliminate Jesus.

The fact that Herod is thought to have died in 4BC, well before the usually claimed birth date of Christ, has not helped to clear his name or rescue his reputation. But Netzer, in excavating a series of monumental sites in the Holy Land, was central in shedding light on a less bloody aspect of Herod's rule – presenting him as a visionary "builder-king" who was able to marshal resources and men both to negotiate the political intrigues of his day and leave an architectural legacy that has endured for 2,000 years.

[...]

Background here and here.

Steinsaltz Talmud completed

THE STEINSALTZ TALMUD has been completed:

Steinsaltz completes Hebrew translation of the Talmud
The completion of this feat was marked on Sunday with the Global Day of Jewish learning.

By Haaretz Service

Forty-five years after beginning his monumental quest to translate the Babylonian Talmud into from its archaic Aramaic into contemporary Hebrew, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz has completed the task.

The completion of this feat was marked on Sunday with the Global Day of Jewish learning.
Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

The six-continent event kicked off with a life broadcast of Steinsaltz completing the final words of the translation.

[...]

Israeli High Court rejects petition re Waqf destruction on Temple Mount

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH – I don't remember hearing about this case before:

Suit Rejected; Destruction of Temple-Era Finds to Continue

by Maayana Miskin (Arutz 7)
Follow Israel news on Twitter and Facebook.

The High Court ruled against the Israel Law Center this week in a petition aimed at stopping the destruction of Jewish artifacts dating back to the Temple era. The court ruled that the destruction cannot be stopped using private prosecution. In addition to rejecting the private case against the Islamic Wakf Authority on the Temple Mount, the High Court rejected the Israel Law Center's demand that the attorney general be ordered to take action against the Temple Mount destruction.

The Israel Law Center (Shurat HaDin) had filed suit against the Wakf on behalf of 150 Israeli citizens. Charges were filed over the Wakf's use of bulldozers to carry out unauthorized construction in the area, despite archaeologists' warnings that the machinery was demolishing ancient Jewish artifacts.

[...]

There's additional background in this article:

Islamic Wakf Authority Accused of Deliberately Destroys Jewish Artifacts

Posted by Shinta Dewi on November 6th, 2010

News-worthy.info — The Israel Law Center (Shurat HaDin) filed a suit against the Islamic Wakf Authority on the Temple Mount at the Israeli High Court aimed at stopping the destruction of Jewish artifacts from the Temple era. But the Israeli High Court ruled out the petition saying that private prosecution can not be used to stop the destruction.

[...]

More on the Waqf's illicit excavations here and follow the many links.

UPDATE (11 November): More here.

Inscriptifact updates

INSCRIPTIFACT UPDATES – Bruce Zuckerman e-mails:

Thought everyone might be interested in an article I just posted and which can be downloaded at:

http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/wsrp/information/DynamicsDSS/

The reason the article needs to be downloaded is that it contains a lot of animated illustrations and is therefore too big simply to send as an attachment.

It is written in In-Design and readable through Adobe Reader 9 or higher (which, if you don't have it, is a free download, as is explained in the cover note on the site).

There are distinct limitations to what one can do in this format, but it was, to date, the best one I could find for an article of this nature.

This article (expanded from a print version in the recently published Rediscovering the Dead Sea Scrolls [Eerdmans 2010] edited by Maxine Grossman) summarizes my perspective on the methodological issues involved with the study of DSS in a digital environment using the currently available imaging tools.

Featured in the article (toward the end) are "reflectance transformation images" of the Dead Sea Scrolls we photographed in the Syrian Orthodox Church collection in Teaneck NJ. As far as I am aware, these images are the first RTI images ever done of DSS. The impact of RTI imaging—especially for the paleography of DSS—is preliminarily assessed in the article.

At the same time, InscriptiFact (8.6) has just been released and this contains a comprehensive set of ALL the images we did in NJ, including RTI images.

InscriptiFact 8.6 is a major upgrade that has been moved to a new server with new hardware. So it needs to be reinstalled by ALL users. It also contains a full set of images of the "Vision of Gabriel" inscription, more images of the Persepolis Fortification Archive and many other things as well.

For current InscriptiFact users, it will be necessary to go to

http://ruth.usc.edu:7060/index.jsp

and click on the "InscriptiFact Banner" to reinstall the database. It should take less than a minute.

Those who wish to register for InscriptiFact for the first time, should go to www.inscriptifact.com and download and send in a signed "Use Agreement" (either as a PDF attachment, a fax, or even by conventional mail) as instructed. They will be assigned a user name and password which will be sent to them by email. Use of InscriptiFact is free of charge.

Anyone who encounters difficulty downloading or using my article, should contact me at bzuckerm@usc.edu.

Should anyone run into technical glitches reinstalling InscriptiFact they should contact Li Hunt at lihunt@usc.edu.

For more on Professor Zuckerman's work, go here and here and follow the links.

A bibliography of Karaite studies

A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF KARAITE STUDIES is being published by Brill next month. (Via Abu 'l-Rayhan Al-Biruni on FB.)

Hekhalot literature conference at Princeton

A CONFERENCE ON THE HEKHALOT LITERATURE is taking place at Princeton University this month. For information, go to Andrei Orlov's blog (in Russian) and download the pdf file, which is in English. Very unfortunately, I'm not able to attend.

The people who lived at Qumran

THE PEOPLE WHO LIVED AT QUMRAN are the subject of an article in the Jerusalem Post:

Who are the people living in Qumran?

By ALEXANDER ZVIELLI
11/04/2010 11:50

The question of which Jews lived Dead Sea Qumran settlement 2,000 years ago is still the subject of controversy.

Biblical scholars have now had 60 years to research the scrolls hidden in caves close to the Dead Sea Qumran settlement. The question of which Jews lived there 2,000 years ago is still the subject of controversy.

Ever since early 1947, when three Ta’amireh Beduin discovered large clay jars containing ancient scrolls in a cave close to the ruins of an abandoned settlement at Khirbet Qumran, the 150-year-old field of scientific biblical research sought to re-examine all the accumulated knowledge in light of these new findings. In 1952, Beduin discovered another cave with a number of additional texts, and in 1956 they found cave 11.

[...]

TODAY we know that Qumran settlers were members of the Essene movement, as described by Josephus, Philo Alexandroni and Pliny the Elder and proposed independently by Prof. Eliezer Sukenik in 1948; it was worked out in detail by Andre Dupont-Sommer in 1951 and later by many other scholars. Today, however, we understand that while the Qumran group lived according to the Essene principles, administered a rigorous entrance test for admission, shared one purse and imposed communal ownership, enforced restrictions on marriage, divorce and celibacy and insisted on the rules of cleanliness, it was a separate body, established by their leader, Zadok.

[...]

That is indeed roughly the mainstream view, but this hardly represents the controversy mentioned in the first paragraph. There's no mention of Norman Golb's theory that the Dead Sea Scrolls come from literary archives in Jerusalem, now made notorious by the recent court case involving his son, Raphael, but still there to be considered on its own merits as a theory. Nor is there mention of the view of the recent excavators of Qumran that the site was a pottery workshop. The stuff about the Teacher of Righteousness is widely accepted but is still pretty much speculation.

My own position is that the Qumran sectarians probable were "Essenes," but that this idea has to be handled very carefully and is not as helpful as it might seem. To say, for example, that a church sometime in the last several hundred years was "Presbyterian" really tells us very little until we know a lot more about when and where. Presbyterianism has changed quite a lot over the centuries and Essenism may well have too.

As for the site itself, I take no position on whether the sectarians/Essenes lived there, but I do think that much of the library was brought in from outside for safekeeping during the war.

The article focuses on the work of Gabriele Boccaccini and Ben-Zion Wacholder. It's clear at least that Boccaccini was not interviewed, or the author would have worked out that he is a man.

UPDATE (7 November): It seems Professor Boccaccini got off easy. Jack Sasson on the Agade list points out that Professor Shemaryahu Talmon is mentioned in the article as "the late." Don't worry, he's fine.

UNESCO on "Rachel's Tomb" and Machpelah

UNESCO'S RULING that "Rachel's Tomb" near Bethleham and the "Tomb of the Patriarchs" (or Machpelah) are "an integral part of the occupied Palestinian Territories and that any unilateral action by the Israeli authorities is to be considered a violation of international law, the UNESCO Conventions and the United Nations and Security Council resolutions" and which refers to "Rachel's Tomb" as a "mosque" has caused predictable uproar:

Israel cuts UNESCO ties over designation of holy sites

By TOVAH LAZAROFF (Jerusalem Post)
11/04/2010 00:52

Netanyahu to ask UN chief to rebuff PA’s unilateral statehood bid on NY trip; Arab League Sec.-Gen. says he wants the UN to lead peace process.
Talkbacks (2)

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is expected to meet United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon next week in New York and is likely to urge him not to support a Palestinian bid for unilateral statehood, government officials told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday night.

The meeting comes as tension continues to mount between Israel and the UN, whose bodies often single out Israel and accuse it of breaking international law.

RELATED:
Knesset blasts UNESCO resolutions
The old/new unilateral threat

On Wednesday, the Foreign Ministry suspended cooperation with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said that relations with UNESCO would not be restored until it retracted its statement last week that two ancient biblical sites – the Cave of the Patriarchs and Rachel’s Tomb – were an integral part of the “occupied” Palestinian territories.

Ayalon said that the Palestinian Authority was behind the statement, which he added, was issued by the automatic Arab majority on the UNESCO board.

It is another attempt by the PA to delegitimize Israel, he said.

[...]

There is now a report that Israel has backed away from cutting of relations with UNESCO entirely.

World Jewish Congress Condemns UNESCO Vote on Rachel's Tomb and Cave of Patriarchs


NEW YORK, Nov. 2, 2010 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- On behalf of the World Jewish Congress, WJC President Ronald S. Lauder wrote a letter to Director General Irina Bokova of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, expressing deep dismay at the recent passage of the resolution that designated Rachel's Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs as Palestinian, with Rachel's Tomb named a mosque. In the letter, Lauder said "For UNESCO to try and remove these two ancient Jewish sites from Israel is an outrage. For thousands of years, Biblical tradition has upheld that the Tomb of Rachel was acquired and built by Jacob the Patriarch of Israel, and has been among the most sacred sites of Judaism since. The Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron has for an even longer period of time been part of the heart and soul of Israel. One has only to reference the Biblical portion read just this past week in synagogues world wide that describes the purchase by Abraham the Patriarch of the Cave of the Patriarchs and the surrounding area of Hebron...To deem these historic sites that have been an integral part of the Jewish heritage for thousands of years is a denial of factual history."

[...]

Whew! Where to start on this one?

First, the patriarchal narratives in Genesis are legends and there is no particular reason to think that Abraham, the patriarchs, or Rachel were real historical individuals rather than personified memories of tribal groups or simply fictional characters in the legends. Its always possible that they were actual individuals, but by normal historical standards that certainly isn't the way to bet.

That said, both sites have been around for a very long time in Jewish tradition. Evidence of a pre-Islamic Jewish connection to Rachel's tomb is collected by Michael Freund in the Jerusalem Post:

In the book of Genesis (35:19-20), the Bible says: “And Rachel died, and was buried on the way to Ephrata, which is Bethlehem. And Jacob set a pillar upon her grave: That is the pillar of Rachel’s grave unto this day.”

Jewish sources such as the Talmud mention Rachel’s Tomb. The midrash Bereshit Rabba (82:10), which scholars say was written in the fifth century, famously notes that Jacob buried Rachel on the road to Ephrata because he foresaw that Israel’s exiles would later pass the site, and he wanted her to pray for them.

This alone should be proof enough of the ancient Jewish connection to Rachel’s Tomb.

But it is also worth noting that centuries before Islam was founded, Jewish and Christian pilgrims visited Rachel’s burial place and made note of it in their writings.

In 333 CE, a Christian known only as the Bordeaux Pilgrim recorded having seen Rachel’s Tomb on the outskirts of Bethlehem. In his Itinerary of the Bordeaux Pilgrim, he wrote: “On the right of the road to Bethlehem is the tomb in which was laid Jacob’s wife Rachel.” Jerome, the early Church father and saint who moved to Bethlehem from Rome in 386, also mentions the tomb, as did the fourth century historian and bishop Eusebius. In his Onomasticon, an alphabetical listing of biblical place names along with their descriptions, Eusebius wrote under the entry for “Ephrata”: “On the way Rachel was buried, five miles from Jerusalem... The tomb is shown still today.

The construction around the the "Tomb of the Patriarchs" is Herodian, so apparently the Jewish connection goes back at least a couple of thousand years. For both sites we have no way of knowing how long before this the connection to the biblical characters existed.

Todd Bolen has pictures of Rachel's Tomb in a 2009 post at his Bible Places blog. In this post he expresses surprising skepticism about an ancient Jewish connection:

Looking for a bright spot in all of this? How about this: the tomb has nothing to do with Rachel anyway. According to 1 Samuel 10:2, her tomb was in the tribal territory of Benjamin, which begins five miles north along the Hinnom Valley of Jerusalem. So all this expense and rancor is over Jews who want to pray at what likely was originally the tomb of a Muslim holy man!

I don't know what he does with the pre-Islamic evidence about the site. There is further discussion in the comments and he refers to a paper he has written to which I don't have access. I don't see any way that the site itself could have been "originally" Muslim, although I don't know the history of the structures erected on the site. I agree, of course, that it is not the site of the tomb of the actual Rachel, if there was such a person. I hope that Todd will comment further on the current situation. So far his blog just has one brief notice about it.

Todd also has pictures of Machpelah at his Bible Places website.

Both sites have also traditionally been revered by Muslims for the same reasons they are revered by Jews. I hear in various places that Rachel's tomb has only been called a mosque since 1996, but I have not researched the question myself.

As for UNESCO, the ruling isn't phrased all that clearly, but it seems to be aimed at recent plans by Israel to include the two sites as part of its national heritage plan. I have been following that story for most of 2010 (see here and follow the links back). But if that's the issue, UNESCO should just come out and say it and make its political case. As it is, its recent ruling gives the impression of denying that the sites have an ancient Jewish connection, which is on the face of it ridiculous. These are two of the holiest geographical sites in Jewish tradition and by taking this tack UNESCO is only making itself look silly and making Jews very angry.

I've been pulling this post together in spare minutes over the last few days, so if it seems rambling, that's why.

UPDATE (9 November): More here, including details on how the site came to be called a mosque in 1996.

More on the Steinsaltz Talmud

MORE ON THE STEINSALTZ TALMUD, with lots of interesting background on the translation:

The Longest Translation

Forty-five years after he began his revolutionary reworking of the Talmud, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz takes time to celebrate its completion — through learning.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer (The Jewish Week)

When Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz began his monumental project of translating the Talmud into contemporary Hebrew, piercing the dense layers of wisdom and commentary contained in the ancient text, Levi Eshkol of the now-defunct Mapai party was Israel’s prime minister, the young country’s population stood at a mere 2.5 million, and when a Beatles concert there was canceled, it was assumed the country’s leaders thought the Fab Four would corrupt its youth.

It was 1965. And for the next 45 years, working at first out of a cramped office in Jerusalem, Rabbi Steinsaltz, an Israeli scholar and author, would churn out tractate after tractate, translating by his own estimate “millions” of words from Aramaic into modern Hebrew and then English.

Along the way he did nothing less than free the Talmud from the province of a small number of scholars and make it available to a new generation of learners.

[...]

This article mentions the Soncino translation in passing, but not the Neusner translation.

Background here.

Belated Halloween Golem stuff

BELATED HALLOWEEN GOLEM STUFF: 3 awesome depictions of the golem in art.

More golem posts here.

Atiqot now online

ATIQOT, the IAA archaeology journal, is now online:

Atiqot: A Journal (Archaeology) from Israel Now Available Online (Free Access)

November 2, 2010 20:35

From an Israel Antiquities Authority Announcement:

Atiqot, the leading journal of the Israel Antiquities Authority [IAA], is now available online. Articles published in 'Atiqot are the result of the numerous salvage excavations conducted each year on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, which are frequently surprising in their importance, filling in gaps that could not be understood by the localized studies of the renowned tells. The journal thus represents the most encompassing research on the region and its connections with the neighboring countries.

The online edition of 'Atiqot is published for the convenience of researchers and archaeology lovers worldwide, enabling easy access to the extensive and important data it contains. Articles are published in English or in Hebrew; those in Hebrew are followed by an abstract in English. The articles are available free of charge; registration is required.

[...]

Judean kingdom mired in bureaucracy too

THE ANCIENT KINGDOM OF JUDAH, it seems, was awash with government bureaucrats, just like us. Figures.

Attack on the Assyrian Parishoners in Baghdad

CHALDO-ASSYRIAN WATCH: The latest barbaric Islamist attack on Iraq's Aramaic-speaking Christians: Attack on the Assyrian Parishioners in Baghdad.

UPDATE (4 November): Al Qaeda ally in Iraq says all Christians 'legitimate targets'; Iraq church horror speeds Christian exodus.

Sad News: Alan D. Crown

SAD NEWS: ALAN D. CROWN – This from the Agade list:

From Shani Tzoref (s.tzoref@gmail.com) came this sad news:
=============================================

From the University of Sydney came the sad news that Prof. Alan Crown suffered a stroke two weeks ago and has now passed away.

Funeral services will be held tomorrow morning Wednesday at 10:00am, at Sydney's Chevra Kadisha

The short bio below does not convey the unflagging energy and passion that Prof. Crown brought to his many academic and community projects, or the endearing quirkiness and sense of humor with which he engaged colleagues and inspired students.

Renowned scholar of Samaritan Studies and broad areas of Jewish studies. Emeritus Professor in Semitic Studies. Chairman and Joint Master of Mandelbaum House, the Jewish College at the University of Sydney and Trustee of Mandlelbaum trust. Editor of Mandelbaum Publishing (monographs on Judaica). Chief examiner in Classical Hebrew for the State school system. Senior Associate Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Member of Advisory committee, World Union of Jewish Studies.

Professor Crown is especially known for his prolific work on the Samaritans. I can't find an online biography or bibliography, but many of his books are listed here. May his memory be for a blessing.

Neusner on The Costs of Jewish Studies Endowments

JACOB NEUSNER writes in the Huffington Post blog about The Costs of Jewish Studies Endowments. Excerpt:

When believing and practicing Jews decide who will teach what to whom, they take for granted that some things are more important than others. They affirm the cogency of the subject and know how things fit together. The Judaic system governs the things that are learned. To teachers and students, the classical texts convey truth. What follows? The Talmud is more important than a cookbook. The Jewish sponsors of Jewish learning derive the scale of values from the received canon and tradition.

Universities, by contrast, have no stake in according to Scripture or Midrash and Talmud a superior position in the curriculum. Learning in every topic and discipline defines its own priorities, and reason is not governed by revelation. So the curriculum is a mishmash of this and that -- discrete details of a main point that does not register. Anything that is Jewish is as worthy of study as anything else that is Jewish. At my own college, the history of the bagel and the status of women in Jewish law have served equally well as topics of graduation essays.

The Alexandria Letter

THE ALEXANDRIA LETTER by George R. Honig is reviewed in Blogcritics. A letter from ancient Alexandria probably would have been in Greek, not Aramaic.

Mark D. Roberts on early Christology

MARK D. ROBERTS has been putting up some thoughtful posts on early Christology at his Beliefnet blog. I list them below with some comments:

Echoes of Wisdom and the Divinity of Jesus: Part 1

Echoes of Wisdom and the Divinity of Jesus (Part 2)

Echoes of Wisdom and the Divinity of Jesus: Part 3

I was disappointed not to hear more about Philo of Alexandria's Logos theology (cf., e.g., here) or the Enochian wisdom tradition (notably in the Similitudes, 1 Enoch 42). Maybe a fourth essay is warranted.

Jesus as the Son of God

This piece takes the evidence in directions that I don't think are entirely warranted, notably here:

If Jesus had openly proclaimed himself as Son of God, his contemporaries would not have thought of this as a claim to divinity. They might have understood only that Jesus was touting his own righteousness. More likely, they would have heard a claim to be the promised Messiah, the human being who would lead Israel to throw the Romans out of God's land once and for all.

There is plenty of evidence that the phrase "son of God" could mean an angel or a divine being (cf. Job 1, Deuteronomy 32:8). And the assertion earlier in the essay that the Israelite kings were not divinized is debatable. Note that Solomon was enthroned on the throne of YHWH as king according to 1 Chronicles 29:23 and that the king is arguably addressed as God or a god in royal rites in Isaiah 9:5 (Evv 9:6) and Psalm 45:7 (evv. 45:6).

Jesus and the Perplexing Son of Man

The Son of Man in the Judaism of Jesus

The treatment of the Son of Man is good, apart from the discussion of "the one like a son of man" in Daniel 7:13:

While still dreaming, Daniel approached one of the divine attendants, asking for the interpretation of the dream. He learned that the four beasts represent four kingdoms that shall dominate the earth. But when the Ancient One finally executes judgment upon the all four beasts, the saints will be exonerated. In fact,

The kingship and dominion and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven shall be given to the people of the holy ones of the Most High; their kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey them (Dan 7:27).

Therefore, the "one like a son of man" represents the faithful people of God who endure oppression and ultimately share in God's rule over the earth.

The problem here is that the vision in chapter 7 comes in three parts: the allegorical vision of the four beasts in vv. 1-8 a second vision of the heavenly throne room consisting of God and his angels (who are evidently watching the first vision) in vv. 9-16; and the angel's interpretation of the allegorical vision in vv. 17-27. The difficulty with Dr. Roberts's interpretation is that the one like a son of man comes in the second part of the vision. He is a figure in the heavenly throne room, which is "real," that is, not part of the allegory. The kingdom of God will be given to the Jewish people ("the people of the holy ones of the Most High" in v. 27), but the one like a son of man is not an allegorical representation of them. He is a heavenly figure in his own right, perhaps the angel Michael or Gabriel (who appear elsewhere in Daniel) or - my best guess - the glorified patriarch Enoch.

Daniel 7 is arguably based on Enoch's ascent vision in the Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 14), along with Ezekiel chapter 1. In Enoch's vision he ascends on the clouds and is brought before the throne of God, and it seems likely to me that Daniel had him in mind here. Confirming this, the Similitudes of Enoch (1 Enoch 37-71) explicitly says in chapter 71 that Enoch is the Danielic Son of Man.

(I am currently teaching a course on the book of Daniel and these matters are near and dear to my heart. For more details on the reading of Daniel 7 given in the paragraph before the preceding one, see the magisterial Hermeneia commentary on Daniel by John Collins.)

With the caveats above, Dr. Roberts's summary of the state of the question regarding early Christology is good and worth a read. Incidentally, with him, I don't have any problem with the idea that Jesus spoke of the Son of Man with Daniel's exalted "one like a son of man" in mind, perhaps even referring to himself. But many historical Jesus scholars, perhaps most, think that this is a post-Jesus stratum of the tradition.

Cario Geniza book excerted on Google Books

SACRED TREASURE: The Cairo Geniza, by Rabbi Mark Glickman (noted here), is excerpted extensively on Google Books. (HT Dorothy Lobel King.)

More on the completion of the Steinsaltz Talmud

MORE ON THE COMPLETION OF THE STEINSALTZ TALMUD:

Steinsaltz completes Talmud translation, but not without controversy

By Sue Fishkoff · October 31, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO (JTA) -- On Nov. 7, noted Talmud scholar and teacher Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz will formally conclude his Hebrew translation of the Babylonian Talmud, a monumental task that has occupied him for the past 45 years.

While he marks the day in a hadran, or completion ritual, in Jerusalem, hundreds of Jewish communities around the world will celebrate a Global Day of Jewish Learning, coming together in synagogues, Jewish community centers and schools to study Jewish text and build community.

But as scholars and Jewish leaders herald his remarkable accomplishment, Steinsaltz himself has become a figure of controversy, criticized in some Orthodox circles for what many consider his unorthodox behavior.

Five years ago he found himself outside the Orthodox consensus for accepting the post of nasi, or president, of a modern-day Sanhedrin, a re-creation of the ancient Jewish legal body that set ritual observance for the Jewish people. Steinsaltz’s decision a year later to hold Rosh Hashanah services in which the shofar was sounded on Shabbat Rosh Hashanah -- a practice banned centuries ago by the Jewish sages -- caused further controversy.

For some it was his life’s work -- the translation of the Talmud -- that was problematic.

[...]

Steinsaltz’s Hebrew Talmud is not the only modern translation.

Soon after he launched his project, a team of Orthodox scholars began work on their own English translation. Published by ArtScroll, the Schottenstein Babylonian Talmud is used now by students around the world, and is available in English, Hebrew and French.

ArtScroll also published English and Hebrew versions of the Jerusalem Talmud -- a version of the Talmud written in Palestine about two centuries before the Babylonian version but not regarded by subsequent scholars as the authoritative word on Jewish law.

"There is some indication that this was done in response” to Steinsaltz, Blau said of the ArtScroll translations.

"It was done by committee, and was authorized by certain parts of the Orthodox community,” Blau said. “Some elements in the Orthodox community wanted a translation that met their requirements.”

In the late 1980s, Steinsaltz began publishing his own English editions of the Talmud, working from his Hebrew translation. He completed 22 volumes -- about half the tractates. The books are out of print, but he hopes to embark on another attempt to translate the entire Talmud into English and several other languages.

Steinsaltz’s English Talmud is not as widely praised as his Hebrew translation; the ArtScroll English version is more widely used.

[...]

Background here. More on the Artscroll Talmud here and here.

UPDATE (3 November): Jacob Neusner e-mails:

The JTA story that you printed on the Steinsaltz Talmud says there are two English language translations of the BAVLI, Steinsaltz and Artscroll. There are four, Soncino and mine,

In mine I translated 32 tractates and the other five were done by others (fully credited to them ad loc). Soncino was done in the 1930s and finished in 1948, I think. All she had to do was check out the LC catalogue.

The reference for the Neusner translation is: The Talmud of Babylonia. An American Translation. Chico, then Atlanta: 1984-1995: Scholars Press for Brown Judaic Studies.

I think the author of the article was focusing on very recent Talmud translations just now being finished, but she indeed should have mentioned the earlier, already completed English translations.

Iraqi Jewish archive update

IRAQI JEWISH ARCHIVE UPDATE:

Iraqi Jewish documents remain in limbo

Damaged during the U.S. invasion and shipped from Baghdad to Washington for preservation, a collection of antique Torahs and other material faces an uncertain future. Back to Iraq? Or to Israel?

By Alice Fordham, Los Angeles Times

October 31, 2010

[...]

Saad Eskander, the director of Iraq's National Library and Archive, says the collection belongs in Iraq. He said he was negotiating with the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, but if those talks failed, he would probably work with international organizations to take the case to U.S. courts.

"Jews are Iraq's oldest community. They are a significant part of the history of establishing Iraq," said Eskander, who helped rebuild the National Library after it was reduced to rubble by fighting and looting.

Jewish groups in America and Israel, however, have raised concerns about the safety of the collection if it were returned to Iraq.

"We fear the documents might be lost forever to Iraqi Jews," said Eric Fusfield of the B'nai B'rith international Jewish organization, which wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton this year calling for an immediate bar on the return of the documents.

"The Iraqi government should be commended for trying to preserve the Jewish legacy … but these are Jewish communal properties first and foremost."

State Department officials in Baghdad declined to comment beyond saying that negotiations were ongoing and that they hoped for resolution soon.

[...]

Shmuel Moreh, a professor of Arabic literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, left Iraq in 1951, along with hundreds of thousands of Jews who were victimized in the wake of the creation of Israel. He believes that all Jewish documents from Iraq are vital, and would like to see them in Israel.

"We need the documents to learn about history," he said. "We couldn't take any documents from Iraq when we left."

Although he felt that the Iraqi government had every right to claim the documents as their own and said he would be happy to work with good copies of the documents, he expressed doubt that Iraq had the skills to read the rare Judeo-Arabic scripts or the facilities to conserve the archive.

The collection, now kept in cold storage, would be subject to Iraq's flickering electricity supplies and to the still-considerable risk of bombs, thieves and institutional disarray.

A trip to the Babylonian section of a museum in Berlin, filled with archaeological treasures taken in the 19th century from what is now Iraq, had made Moreh believe the documents would be safer elsewhere.

He was accompanied by a group of Iraqi academics who admired the magnificent winged bull sculptures of the early Assyrian civilization displayed in the museum. Had they remained in Iraq, they would probably have been pocked with bullets or stolen, he said.

Moreh said: "Even these educated people said, 'What luck that the Germans took all this and kept it in such a way. They saved my civilization.'"

As always, I think the decision should be made on the basis of what is best for the ancient artifacts, not on any nationalist considerations.

Background here, where I make the same point at greater length, and here.

Phoenicia completes her journey

THE GOOD SHIP PHOENICIA completed her journey almost a week ago:

Phoenicia Ship Arrives in Arwad Island Port
(DP-News-Sana)

Tartous, Coastal Region- After a 26-month journey, Phoenicia Ship on Saturday arrived in the Port of Arwad Island, finishing its 17,000- mile trip around Africa.

The ship sailed through the Red Sea, the Cape of Good Hope and Gibraltar Strait in an attempt to revive the Phoenician heritage dating back to2600 years ago, carrying the message of peace and cultural communication that Syria has always been keen to spread throughout time.

The ship's captain, Philip Bill talked about the two-year voyage and the difficulties it went through such as the storms and high waves in South Africa, noting that the ship was once chased by a small boat in Somalia until a bigger ship helped them reach a safer place.

[...]

Congratulations to the crew and all involved!

Background here.

A popular book on the Cairo Geniza

A POPULAR BOOK ON THE CAIRO GENIZA:

Rabbi tells story of Hebrew texts found in Cairo

Kathleen Lavey • klavey@lsj.com • October 29, 2010 (LSJ)

Rabbi Mark Glickman first heard about the Cairo Genizah in 1985, while he was in rabbinical school.

The story of a trove of ancient documents found in a 1,000-year-old Egyptian synagogue doesn't get the same amount of ink as tales of the gold and jewels from the nearby tombs of Egyptian rulers.

But Glickman thinks maybe the crumbling documents should, because of the details they offer about life in the Middle East in the Middle Ages, when Arabic-speaking Jews were part of the fabric of the Islam-dominated society around them.

"The picture is of a Jewish culture that lives in peace and harmony and happiness, for the most part," Glickman said. "It not only paints a beautiful picture of the past, it paints a very hopeful picture of the future."

Glickman, who leads two small congregations near Seattle, is visiting Michigan and will discuss his new book, "Sacred Treasure: The Cairo Genizah" in two appearances: 7 p.m. Sunday at Congregation Kehillat Israel in Lansing, and at 7 p.m. Monday at Michigan State University.

[...]

To research the book - a snappy, fast-moving history written for the non-academic crowd - Glickman and his teenage son, Jacob, traveled to Cairo, where they got a glimpse inside the now-empty genizah, and Cambridge, where they looked over many documents.

A non-specialist treatment sounds like a good idea to me.

UPDATE (1 November): More here.

More coverage of Ehud Netzer's death

THE DEATH OF PROFESSOR EHUD NETZER in a tragic accident has been covered in many media articles in the last day including in the Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, Arutz Sheva, and the AFP. I understand that the initial announcements yesterday were premature: he was on life support at the time, but with no hope of recovery. The life support was discontinued late yesterday.

Zenobia on Zenobia

ZENOBIA ON ZENOBIA.

Eyewitness account of the Christmas story?

EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT OF THE CHRISTMAS STORY?

'Revelation of the Magi' an Ancient Manuscript Lost for Centuries in the Vatican Library Reveals Eyewitness Account of the Christmas Story

Theologian Brent Landau presents the ancient account of Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar, the three “wise men” who journeyed to Bethlehem to greet the birth of Jesus. The Revelation of the Magi offers the first-ever English translation of an ancient Syriac manuscript written in the second to third century after the birth of Christ and safeguarded for generations in the Vatican Library.

This book sounds like an important scholarly contribution, but if I were the author I would be kind of irritated with the headline of this press release (which I'm sure was composed without his knowledge or approval). The document claims to be an eyewitness account, like many apocryphal gospels, but of course it actually is a legend written centuries after the time of Jesus' birth, as the opening paragraph does make clear. As such, it is very good now to have an English translation of it.

UPDATE: Brent Landau e-mails:

The book is very attractively packaged with lots of pretty pictures, but scholars will also want to consult my dissertation, available here.

Zuckerman photographs SBTS's DSS fragments

THOSE DEAD SEA SCROLL FRAGMENTS acquired recently by Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary have been photographed by epigraphic photographer Bruce Zuckerman. Good.

Seminary's Dead Sea fragments go hi-tech

Posted on Oct 27, 2010 | by Benjamin Hawkins (Baptist Press)

FORT WORTH, Texas (BP)--In a convergence of ancient Scripture with the latest in photographic technology, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary worked with the West Semitic Research Project this fall to prepare for the study and publication of its Dead Sea Scrolls collection and other artifacts.

A workshop hosted by the seminary's Tandy Institute for Archaeology featured a team from the West Semitic Research Project at the University of Southern California that specializes in producing high-definition images of ancient texts and artifacts. The scholars made images of Southwestern's collection of Dead Sea Scrolls fragments as well as some artifacts from the seminary's Carlson Cuneiform Collection.

"The West Semitic Research Project is one of the best for the digital imaging of ancient manuscripts, particularly Dead Sea Scrolls fragments," said Steven Ortiz, associate professor of archaeology and biblical backgrounds at Southwestern and director of the Charles D. Tandy Archaeology Museum.

[...]

Background here and follow the links.

Is "pizzazz" Aramaic?

IS "PIZZAZZ" ARAMAIC? Anatoly Liberman at the OUP blog is very skeptical:

Pizzazz “flair, pep, etc.” I’ll first quote part of the letter: “According to my Chambers Dictionary, Diana Vreeland made piz[z]azz popular in the thirties, but there is a similar word with a similar meaning in the Talmud. It’s entirely possible that the word traveled to America via Yiddish. [… ] I fear the NED’s long-established tendency to be Hebrew-blind might spill over into Aramaic.” NED (New English Dictionary) is the same as OED. Not being a specialist in either Hebrew or Yiddish, I can offer only very vague and inconclusive advice. Our correspondent may have found the Hebrew etymology of pizzazz in Isaac Mozeson’s dictionary The Word. If this is so, he has enough reason to distrust it, because this dictionary is a collection of moderately amusing, but mainly irritating fantasies (the author who has no knowledge of historical linguistics traces a sizable section of the vocabulary of English to Hebrew). Second, whatever the practice of OED (I am not sure it pays no heed to Hebrew or Aramaic), in English etymology it is sometimes better to be Hebrew-blind than Hebrew/Yiddish-wide-eyed. Dozens of English words, especially those related to swindling and crime and those sounding funny, have been declared Hebrew or Yiddish, with no research supporting such statements. To show that pizzazz has come to English from Hebrew via Yiddish, proof us needed that this word was sufficiently common among the New York Jews and popularized by them in slang. I am not aware of such evidence. Those lexicographers who dared offer conjectures about pizzazz suggested an unlikely blend, an imitation of a roar, and so forth. Finally, pizzazz, with its multiple z’s, has such a strong sound symbolic shape that it could easily be coined in different places at different times and refer to exuberance and zest (incidentally, zest, of French descent, also has a z and is also of unknown origin; it first designated part of a walnut and was put into drinks for flavor; similar use has been recorded in connection with pizzazz). I once dealt with the obscure etymology of razzmatazz (evidently, razz-ma-tazz), swizzle, and tizzy “nervous excitement.” They taught me great caution in dealing with z-words.

As I noted a couple of years ago, Philologos agrees.

Dead Sea Scrolls drew 262,171 to Science Museum

STATISTICS: Dead Sea Scrolls drew 262,171 to Science Museum.

Background to the Minnesota exhibition here.

Ehud Netzer has died

EHUD NETZER has died from a tragic accident at the Herodium excavation. The Jerusalem Post reports the accident here. Overnight the news has reached me from multiple sources that he died from his injuries yesterday. This was forwarded by Mladen Popovic:

Van: Roger Wilson
Datum: 28 oktober 2010 7:09:48 GMT+02:00
Aan: CLASSICISTS@liverpool.ac.uk
Onderwerp: Professor Ehud Netzer
Antwoord aan: Roger Wilson

Colleagues will be saddened to learn that Professor Ehud Netzer, the distinguished Israeli archaeologist, has died at the age of 76 after a tragic accident. On October 25th he fell 15 metres while excavating the ancient theatre on the hillside at Herodion, injuring his head and neck, and died two days later in hospital in Jerusalem. His discovery at Herodion of the Tomb of Herod in 2007 made headlines around the world, but he will be remembered for many superlative excavations at sites associated with Herod, culminating in his magisterial The Architecture of Herod, the Great Builder (2006), as well as for the excavations at Sepphoris, which he directed from 1985 to 1993. A modest and unassuming man, who wore his learning lightly, he will be greatly missed by his family and friends and by colleagues around the world. Anyone who wishes to express their sympathy should write to Kathryn Gleeson (kathryngleason@hotmail.com), who will pass on your words to Ehud’s family and his colleagues at the Hebrew University.

Professor R J A Wilson, MA, DPhil, FSA
Professor of the Archaeology of the Roman Empire
Director, Centre for the Study of Ancient Sicily
Head, Department of Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies
University of British Columbia
1866 Main Mall
Vancouver V6T 1Z1
Canada

I noted his announcement in 2007 of the discovery of Herod's tomb here. His most recent appearance at PaleoJudaica was in the middle of last month, here.

May his memory be for a blessing.

More fragments of the Gospel of Judas

MORE FRAGMENTS OF THE GOSPEL OF JUDAS. April DeConick reports.

New book: Elior, A Garden Eastward in Eden

NEW BOOK:

גן בעדן מקדם: מסורות גן עדן בישראל ובעמים
Gan Beden Mikedem, Masorot Gan Eden beIsrael uBeamim
A Garden Eastward in Eden: Traditions of Paradise: Changing Jewish Perspectives and Comparative Dimensions of Culture, edited by Rachel Elior,
Scholion-Interdisciplinary Research Center in Jewish Studies, The Hebrew University, Magnes Press: Jerusalem 2010
ISBN 978-965-493-461-9
ebook ISBN 978-965-493-462-6

Review: Herrero de Jáuregui, Orphism and Christianity in Late Antiquity

BMCR REVIEW:

Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui, Orphism and Christianity in Late Antiquity. Sozomena. Studies in the Recovery of Ancient Texts 7. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2010. Pp. xiii, 442. ISBN 9783110206333. $136.00.

Reviewed by Benjamin Garstad, MacEwan University (garstadb@macewan.ca)

Preview

Readers seeking a speculative and sensational exposé of intimate and hitherto secret links between phantasmal circles of Orphic adepts and the first Christians will not find one in this book. Instead Herrero de Jáuregui has offered the scholarly world a sober and substantial contribution which is sure to stand the test of time in the form of a philological examination of the testimonies of Orphic texts and practice found in early Christian apologetic literature. This material (the most important examples of which are offered in translation as appendices to the volume) is not only among our best evidence for the phenomenon of Orphism in antiquity, it also represents a telling case-study of the early Christian engagement with the religious and philosophical discourse of the Greek culture which surrounded it, as the early Christians might have said, of which it was a part as contemporary scholars, like Herrero de Jáuregui might say. All those interested in the religious life, both pagan and Christian, of the Imperial centuries should be grateful that this translation has made Herrero de Jáuregui’s 2007 book Tradición órfica y cristianismo antiguo accessible to a wider audience.

[...]

Michael Coogan on Bible"family values"

MICHAEL COOGAN: Bible has some shocking 'family values'.

Reminiscing about the Harvard Old Church Slavonic course

JOHN FREEDMAN REMINISCES in the Moscow Times about the Harvard Old Church Slavonic course:

Lunt did not brook lazy thought, to say nothing of lazy actions. He would not abide it in his students or in his scholarly opponents. The professor’s often cranky, cantankerous articles, reviews and letters to editors were legendary. And this is important — in fact, it is the whole point: The legend grew not because of Lunt’s acerbic pen, but because of the unparalleled clarity and superiority of his arguments.

Lunt may have shot down more puffed-up academic careers than any other scholar of his time. And it was all because he believed in the truth and in doing things thoroughly and right. People established reputations by concocting elaborate theories for aberrations in syntax or word formation in old texts, or at least until Lunt realized that their whole argument was based on that simplest and most malicious bane of human existence — the error. The scribal error.

The wrong letter in the wrong place; a strange shift in the narrative flow of a sentence. What some interpreted as Old Church Slavonic morphing into Old Russian or showing the influence of some other linguistic construction was nothing more than the result of a scribal error.

I love conjuring Lunt in my mind as he describes the situation to us.

“The candle was burning low. The poor monk had been without sleep for 24 hours. It was cold outside. No. It was freezing. The cell in which the monk worked was like a block of ice. A wolf howled outside his door. He took his mind off what he was doing for just one second, but when he turned his bleary eyes back to the page he had lost his connection to what he was doing. He wrote down the wrong letter. Scribal error. This is not an example of linguistic development.”

Sure enough, Lunt showed us similar situations in the same text, recorded by the same scribe, and all were correct. Only this one was wrong. Scribal error. Bleary eyes.

Horace Lunt and I were never close. I wasn’t of much interest to him, for my field of study was literature, not linguistics. He knew perfectly well that those of us studying literature just needed to get some requirements out of the way in order to go about doing what we were in graduate school to do. I don’t think he begrudged us that. It was merely another of those things about which nothing could be done — like scribal errors. If the latter could not be suffered, the former could.

I’ll go further in the interest of full disclosure and honesty. I did not much like Old Church Slavonic, which we all called OCS. Oh, there were things that fascinated me and stuck with me, like the fact that the name of Old King Wenceslaus from the Christmas carol can be demonstrated to be the same name as the Slavic Vyacheslav. But that’s the pop version of OCS. It’s pretty much all I retained in the way of the discipline’s science.

Which brings me to the point of this freeform remembrance: Horace Lunt had more influence on me than any other scholar I studied with. His rigor came through loud and clear during that first class I had with him in September 1983. I can still hear it in my head to this day.

Every time I fail to catch a typo, every time I fail to properly check a fact, every time I say “good enough,” only to learn later that I was less than exact, I remember Horace Lunt. Scribal error. For all that I never learned or retained from his truly extraordinary course in Old Church Slavonic, I was profoundly affected by his attitude, his approach, his honesty before himself, his colleagues and his work.

Professor Lunt reminds me of Professor William Moran, from whom I took introductory Akkadian at the same place at exactly the same time. Moran's dictum You have to make the grammar work is branded into my synapses.

More on Old Church Slavonic here and here.

Review of Collins, Beyond the Qumran Community

BOOK REVIEW from the H-JUDAIC list:

John Joseph Collins. Beyond the Qumran Community: The Sectarian
Movement of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Grand Rapids William B. Eerdmans
Pub. Co., 2010. xii + 266 pp. Illustrations. $25.00 (paper), ISBN
978-0-8028-2887-3.

Reviewed by Alex Jassen (University of Minnesota)
Published on H-Judaic (October, 2010)
Commissioned by Jason Kalman

Revisiting the Origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls

[...]

Into this fray enters John J. Collins's new book _Beyond the Qumran Community: The Sectarian Movement of the Dead Sea Scrolls_. The bulk of its pages carefully assess the merits and drawbacks of many of the prevailing theories on the Dead Sea Scrolls and Qumran. At the same time as Collins deftly critiques sixty years of scholarship, he offers his own vision for the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls and their relationship to the site of Qumran. Collins is well positioned to undertake both tasks, having long been active in the study of the scrolls. His sobering approach to the material allows the evidence to speak for itself--rather than the phenomenon Collins observes far too often, of scholars speaking for the text (and, of course, saying far too much). In this sense, a good deal of this volume consists of a careful deconstruction of other approaches, many of which are rendered speculative at best by the textual or archaeological evidence. His analysis of the textual evidence is restrained, perhaps too restrained for many. But, in the end, this judicious approach often leaves the reader in agreement with Collins versus the alternatives.

[...]

A soferet writes a Torah scroll

A SOFERET is writing a Torah scroll:

Local Woman Bucks Jewish Law, Handwrites Religious Text

by Bay City News

October 25, 2010 11:53 AM

In a dimly lit alcove on the second floor of San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum, a young woman has spent the last year performing a task for which the process has barely changed since about 500 A.D.

Five and a half centuries after the printing press was invented and decades after word processors came to dominate offices, 35-year-old Julie Seltzer is nearing completion of one of the few handwritten ritual Torah scrolls ever to be commissioned from a woman.

Seltzer's work is the centerpiece of "As It is Written," a museum exhibit that gives patrons an intimate experience with the 62 sheets, 248 columns, 10,416 lines, and 304,805 letters of the ritual, or Sifrei, Torah.

The museum estimates that more than 86,000 visitors have watched Seltzer deliberately form the letters of the Sifrei Torah with hand-made turkey quills and kosher ink. She writes on parchment made of cow hide and sharpens the quills every five lines or so.

Jews call themselves the People of the Book, and that book is the Torah. It's comprised of the five the books of Moses, which are also the first five books of the Old Testament in the Bible.

Printed copies of the Torah are used for study, but only a Torah scroll written by a trained scribe, or sofer, is permitted for holidays and other ritual use.

Seltzer is a female scribe, or soferet, and while Jewish law traditionally permits women to write wedding contracts and do decorative work on scriptures, the Talmud, an important 6th Century Jewish text, specifically says Torahs written by women are not kosher.

Museum Director Connie Wolf decided she wanted to hire a woman anyway.

[...]

Does the Talmud actually say that? Does someone have the reference?

For more on female scribes, including Jen Taylor Friedman, who trained Ms. Seltzer (and who also created Tefillin Barbie), go here and follow the links.

Director of El Shaddai on the Book of Enoch

TAKEYASU SAWAKI, the Director of El Shaddai: The Ascension of the Metatron, has more to say about his use of 1 Enoch:

"As a Japanese creator, I want to make something that only Japanese people can make. I don't want to follow the European people's way," he told Gamasutra in a new feature interview. While his studio is based in Japan, parent Ignition Entertainment is headquartered in the UK.

The game is based books from the Christian Apocrypha, books considered by Protestant Christians to not be part of the Biblical canon. El Shaddai is essentially a Japanese imagining of parts of the Western religion. The main character in the game is Enoch, a very pure former human that is now working for God.

"I read, of course, the Book of Enoch, and I also read a lot of other people's books dealing with those two characters. I think all of those books were boring," said Sawaki, who also worked at Capcom on Devil May Cry and Okami. "I think my image of Enoch is closer to the original Enoch. Because I read a lot of information, and based on that, I drew this Enoch."

1 Enoch is part of the Old Testament pseudepigrapha, although, given its transmission and use in Christian circles, it could be regarded as a Christian apocryphon as well. It is canonical only to the Ethiopic Church, so it outside the biblical canon not only for Protestants, but also Jews, Catholics and the (Christian) Orthodox.

Background here.

A visit to the Madaba Map

THE MADABA MAP was visited by Kalpala Sunder, who writes about it in The Hindu:

Time machine

KALPANA SUNDER

Bucolic scenes where herds of goats have the unofficial right of way, Bedouins swathed in flowing robes… Jordan echoes with stories from the Bible and reminders of the hoary past. This country is mentioned in both the Old and the New Testament as the tribal kingdoms of Edom, Moab and Ammon.

From Amman, we drive down the 5,000-year-old King's highway (one of the oldest roads in the world), which rambles through stunning landscapes. Our first stop is at Madaba the Mosaic Town. Hundreds of mosaic maps are scattered throughout this town where Christians and Muslims live in harmony. Madaba is an archaeologist's delight. The St. George's Greek Orthodox Church is a 19th Century construction, which has on its floors, a fragment of a wonderfully vivid mosaic map dating back to the 6th Century. This is the first cartographic representation of the Holy Land. This map, unearthed in 1896, was once a clear map of all the major Biblical sites from Palestine to Egypt, with over 150 captions in Greek. This map was probably intended to help pilgrims to the Holy Land. Today, this map has helped archaeologists and historians assign modern-day sites to places mentioned in the Bible.

Attention to detail

What makes the map come alive are the details — the fish that swim in the Jordan River turn back when they get to the Dead Sea; the lion that hunts a gazelle in the desert; the palm trees at Jericho...

[...]

More on the Madaba Map here.

Charlesworth interviewed about Google DSS project

JAMES CHARLESWORTH is interviewed by the BBC about the new Google Dead Sea Scrolls archiving project.

Background here.

Samaritans mark holiday of Tabernacles

SAMARITANS mark holiday of Tabernacles - a photo gallery.

HT Carla Sulzbach again.

New World Hebrew Forgeries and Arutz Sheva

THOSE NEW WORLD HEBREW FORGERIES have taken in Arutz Sheva, which embarrasses itself thoroughly with Audio: Did King Solomon Discover America Way Before Columbus? and King Solomon vs. Christopher Columbus. They fall for the Los Lunas inscription, the Bat Creek stone, and more. Why doesn't it occur to journalists to talk to some actual experts before publishing this tripe?

HT Carla Sulzbach.

Background here.

Completion of the Steinsaltz Talmud translation

THE STEINSALTZ TALMUD TRANSLATION into Modern Hebrew is about to be completed:

Steinsaltz’s Talmud translation to be centerpiece of Global Day of Jewish Learning
North Jerseyans to take part in Global Day of Learning

Abigail Klein Leichman • Local (New Jersey Jewish Standard)
Published: 22 October 2010


Four North Jersey venues will join Jewish communities around the world in offering free programming on Nov. 7, the Global Day of Jewish Learning. This first-ever worldwide, trans/non-denominational program is planned to coincide with the culmination of Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz’s 45-year project to translate the voluminous Talmud from ancient Aramaic folios into modern punctuated Hebrew. The event also falls on the UJA Federation of Northern New Jersey’s annual Mitzvah Day.

At about 2 p.m., Steinsaltz is scheduled to pen the final words of his monumental work in a live telecast from Jerusalem. A champion for open access to Jewish learning, he is widely credited with making talmudic study available to the masses, as his translation is being prepared for publication in French, Russian, English, and Spanish.

[...]

This is a celebration of the completion of the Hebrew translation, but a fair number of tractates have also been translated into English.

SBTS acquires more DSS fragments

THREE MORE Dead Sea Scroll fragments have been acquired by Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary:

Fort Worth seminary obtains more pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Posted Friday, Oct. 22, 2010 (Star-Telegram)

FORT WORTH -- Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary has acquired three more fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the seminary announced this week.

The fragments were obtained from a private collector in Europe through a gift from a friend of the seminary, according to a news release. Early analysis shows that the new fragments include two portions of Deuteronomy and one of the Psalms.

[...]

SBTS obtained three additional fragments early this year.