What Just Happened

WHAT JUST HAPPENED – Here's the full text of my second SBL paper, which is being presented orally (and thus without all the links) on Monday afternoon.

WHAT JUST HAPPENED
The rise of "biblioblogging" in the first decade
of the twenty-first century
© James R. Davila, University of St. Andrews
2010 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in Atlanta
S22-209 SBL Blogger and Online Publication Section
In the tradition of my two papers on biblioblogging published in 2005, I have poached the title of this paper from elsewhere, this time from a 2002 book by James Gleick subtitled "A Chronicle from the Information Frontier." Gleick's book chronicled the rise of e-mail and the Internet in everyday life over the previous decade and it remains an entertaining and informative period piece. The aim of this paper is somewhat similar, if more constrained: it concerns the rise and development of "biblioblogging" or blogging devoted to the area of academic biblical studies. Many aspects of this topic were treated in my two earlier papers and I have made some effort here to avoid overlapping with them. (I should note in passing that the written version of this paper is posted on my blog with numerous links, so I encourage listeners at the SBL session to check there as well to get the full effect.) I will begin with some brief background notes on the rise of computer and Internet applications to biblical studies, then say a few words about the rise of biblioblogging, and then draw on the predictions I made in 2005 as a launching point for discussing further developments over the last five years. I do not hope to be as entertaining or as informative as Gleick, but I offer the following as someone who has been involved in developments since the early 1990s and who has been part of the biblioblogging revolution more or less from its inception. Let me proceed then, at the risk of trying my audience, with a riff on yet another book title, this one by Neal Stephenson:

In the beginning ... was Bob Kraft. The likelihood is that this audience has heard of Professor Kraft, seen his University of Pennsylvania website, and is aware that he has been a major influence driving the adoption of computer technology in academic biblical studies for some decades. With Emanuel Tov, Bob conceived of the Computer Assisted Tools for Septuagint Studies Project in the late 1970s, a project that received NEH funding and which is still ongoing today, having produced numerous important computerized textual resources that have generated many publications. As early as 1982 Bob was one of the teachers of a course at Penn on "Computers and Textual Research" and he began editing a bulletin called "OFFLINE: Computer Assisted Research for Religious Studies" in April of 1984, publishing it in various print venues and in early electronic discussion groups.

Bob was also instrumental in moving the field into the next stage of computer literacy, as the founder of a small e-mail group (spun off from the Humanist listserve list), which group focused its discussion on ancient Judea. Inspired by the success of this group, Steve Mason founded the listserve discussion list Ioudaios in April of 1990 at York University. (It later moved to Lehigh University as Ioudaios-l.) The great canon debate took place on Ioudaios in the early months of its existence. The ANE list followed in 1993, founded by Chuck Jones and John Sanders at the University of Chicago. Notable also is the Orion list on the Dead Sea Scrolls, published by the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which ran from 1995 to 2001. For a time such lists proliferated; I ran three myself from 1997 to 2002. Ioudaios-l and the ANE list are still operating today. The 1990s were a heady era in which we learned to take for granted that we could trade notes to colleagues around the world anywhere, anytime, at the speed of light. And so the stage was set for the blog.

I first heard about "weblogs" or "blogs" from an essay by Andrew Sullivan in the London Times in about mid-2002. I began reading his blog, then some other political blogs. At some point it dawned on me that a blog could be a useful tool for calling the media to account on the seemingly endless errors they spew out when covering the academic field of biblical studies and related matters. So, as the saying goes, I stopped shouting at my television (and newspaper) and started the PaleoJudaica blog in March of 2003.

The blog is one of those ideas whose utility seems obvious – once someone else has thought of it. Granting the existence of the World-Wide Web and hyperlinks, it makes perfect sense to set up a web page that:

• can be easily updated while saving the old versions as separate "posts," as though they were diary entries;
  
• focuses on the thoughts of a single person (or a small number of people) rather than acting as a bulletin board for a large group;
  
• does not need to be subscribed to and can be checked on by readers or not, as they please;
  
• potentially gives more control over content than an e-mail list. Originally blogs did not come with a comments feature and it still remains optional, although most blogs now use it. (Mine does not.) The comments can be moderated or not, like posts on an e-mail list, but unlike a list, blog comments are always at least nominally posted in response to a specific post by the owner, and those who post too many off-topic comments tend to acquire "troll" status and be banished.
  
• Blogs are also by their nature already on the Web and are therefore search-engine indexed without the need of expensive listserve software.

The advent of the "biblioblog," a blog with a substantial amount of content on academic biblical studies, came either with PaleoJudaica or with New Testament scholar AKMA Adam's more diary-style blog, AKMA's Random Thoughts, in January of 2002. In the year following the founding of PaleoJudaica, I am aware of the creation of seven more such blogs: Mark Goodacre's NT Gateway blog (building on his much older New Testament Gateway website), Stephen Carlson's Hypotyposeis, Torrey Seland's Philo of Alexandria blog, Rubén Gómez's Bible Software Review, Tim Bulkeley's SansBlogue, Jim West's Biblical Studies blog (whose archive has been deleted), and James McGrath's Exploring Our Matrix (which I only recently learned was that old). It's interesting to note that all of these original bloggers continue to blog today, although some of them have rebooted their blog with a new name, sometimes rather more than once.

By March of 2005, two years after the founding of PaleoJudaica, I was aware of sixteen more biblioblogs, which I noted at the time amounted to geometric growth. By this time blogging about the academic study of the Bible had acquired enough self-consciousness to generate the great naming debate of late 2004 and early 2005, with the result that "biblioblogging" became the generally accepted term for what we do, despite the fact that librarians had decided to use the same term. And around the same time as PaleoJudaica's second anniversary the first Biblical Studies Carnival (for biblioblogs) was published by Joel Ng at his no-longer-archived Ebla Logs.

Also in 2005 I published two papers on the phenomenon of biblioblogging, the first in April at the SBL Forum and the second as a paper for an SBL session on biblioblogging in November. In them, and in a related blog post from the same time I made a number of predictions about what to expect from biblioblogging in the coming years. It seems a useful exercise to revisit these now, both to see how I did and as a roundabout way of reviewing aspects of the last five years. (As an aside, let me mention that shortly after my two essays were published, Blogger re-jigged the URLs to all previous blog posts, so many of my internal links in the essays no longer work. Apologies for Blogger's unhelpfulness.)

One prediction was (in late November of 2005) that over the next couple of years the geometric increase in the number of biblioblogs would continue. At the time I was aware of thirty more biblioblogs, making the total close to fifty. Geometric growth would then produce about 100 at the beginning of 2007 and 200 at the beginning of 2008. Statistics have been hard to come by, but I have located one supposedly comprehensive list of biblioblogs in September of 2009 which named 362 blogs "which deal primarily with matters concerning scholarly or academic biblical studies" and another 262 "which have a different primary focus (e.g. theology, ancient Near Eastern archaeology, devotional and homiletic approaches to the Bible) or are commercial rather than personal blogs – yet which contain some biblical studies material." PaleoJudaica is listed in the first category, although I don't really think of it as dealing primarily with the Bible. This gives us a total of 585 blogs that have at least some academic Bible-related content. If we take a reasonably big-tent approach to the subject, it looks as though geometric growth did continue through at least into 2008 and perhaps even into 2009. It may well be that growth has leveled off. There are, after all, only so many biblical scholars to go around! Or the actual number may now be beyond normal human ability (or even nerd ability) to keep track of and we may not know it until our search spiders become more intelligent. In any case, my fairly cautious prediction of two more years of geometric growth seems to have been correct.

Second, I predicted "that blogging and other forms of online publishing will grow more and more user friendly and more and more people will develop a personal media voice," and, more specifically, that "blogging is in fact an early and primitive manifestation of what will become the ubiquitous media presence of the individual ... everyone who wants to will have a media soapbox as easy to access as CNN and the BBC are in our time."

What can I say? We are there. At the time, Facebook was a small cloud on the horizon, used mostly by university students. I signed up on it in the spring of 2005 to keep track of pictures being posted of me by my students, but its mass adoption (more than 500 million users at present) is a more recent phenomenon. LiveJournal has been around since 1999, but remains much less popular, with only 31 million subscribers. Twitter appeared in 2006 and currently has more than 100 million users. Flickr was launched in early 2004 and at present hosts more than 5 billion images. YouTube opened in early 2005 and currently two billion videos a day are being viewed on it and twenty-four thirty-five hours of content are being posted every minute. And smartphones are making the uploading of all kinds of content ever easier.

If I may hazard more predictions, I expect that these somewhat fragmented and still relatively primitive private media productions will become increasingly powerful, increasingly user-friendly, and increasingly integrated into a personal media expression that is as seamless as the user wishes it to be and that puts into the hands of a private individual the media resources that in the 1980s would have been available only to a major production studio. There is no time here for a proper discussion of the implications this will have for society and individual liberty, but I think they will be largely positive. In a word, the increasingly Orwellian surveillance powers of the State will be to a significant degree neutralized by the ability of billions of individuals to turn those powers back on the State and to shine the glaring light of universal publicity on an ever-increasing portion of its actions. This is already happening.

I predict also that, despite all the new media resources, blogging has found its own niche in the new media – it provides focused discussion that is readable at leisure and ring-fenced for particular purposes – and it will be here to stay at least for quite some time to come.

Lastly, in 2005 I predicted that, "any professional news story will be subject to immediate criticism by experts and eyewitnesses; these worthwhile responses will be indexed next to the story itself by intelligent software; and everyone will know to check for them. The emergent order we can see developing around us even now will let the cream rise to the top and hold the media (and bloggers!) accountable for their every word as soon as it is uttered. ... I think we can look forward to a leaner, sharper, more cautious, and better informed press corps as time passes."

Well, we've made a little progress; less, I confess, than I had hoped. The New York Times does index possibly relevant (though often not) blog posts next to their articles, and Google indexes blog commentary on media publications, but not always sensibly and helpfully. But my experience remains that the legacy media by and large is determined to ignore the implications of the new mass individual media and the increased scrutiny and accountability it generates. Journalists who are not experts in anything continue to pontificate and editorialize with a sanctimony that is increasingly intolerable to their audience, with the result that that audience is steadily shrinking. I stand by my 2005 prediction, but I will update it to say that I expect to see a radical shakeup of the mainstream media in not too many years. Empires will topple and major organizations will go under or undergo a massive restructuring. When the dust settles, the professional mass media will be a smaller, leaner, more focused enterprise that is integrated with and sensitive to the private mass media that will hold it to account. Whatever form the new professional media takes will have to compete directly with coverage by private individuals and amateur groups which meets the current highest professional production standards. Or so I hope.

Let me next say a little about what biblioblogging has done and continues to do for the field. First, it has made possible the rapid dissemination of information on new discoveries and other matters of interest – as well as dissemination of accessible specialist commentary on such matters – to a vastly enlarged audience. I have given examples in the past, but some interesting recent ones include the discovery in 2008 of an Iron Age II seal in Hebrew in Jerusalem which was initially read with the name "Temech." But within a fortnight criticisms of the reading in the biblioblogosphere led the excavator to revise it to "Shelomit." In 2009, the discovery of Coptic fragments of 2 Enoch (formerly knowing only in Old Church Slavonic) was rapidly disseminated by biblioblogs. And in 2010 when a dubious decipherment of an important Hebrew inscription was published by the media, it quickly became apparent that a quite different and more cautious decipherment had been published months before by John Hobbins at his Biblical Hebrew Poetry blog.

Second, blogging helps to put a personal face on biblical scholarship by allowing scholars to speak with an informal public voice different from the voice of academic publication. Even the most academic of academic blogs is a much more personal expression of the author's thoughts than any academic peer-review publication. And, for better or for worse, the blog will probably be read by more people than those scholarly publications. Not infrequently, we also get a welcome glimpse of the lives of prominent biblical scholars through blogs. I note, for example, my own blog posts on the ninetieth birthday party of New Testament and Gnosticism specialist Robert McLachlan Wilson and on the retirement party of New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham, and, less rather festively, April DeConick's account of her and her family's encounter with Hurricane Ike.

Third, blogging encourages biblical scholars to interact publicly with popular culture. Sometimes this borders on farce, if not tragedy, as in the recent widely-publicized court case in which the son of a prominent Dead Sea Scrolls scholar was convicted of attempting to discredit a scholar who opposed his father's theories by impersonating him online and having him confess to false misdeeds. The son's associated massive campaign of sock-puppeted online comments was exposed by a blogger and the case was widely watched and commented on in the blogosphere.

On a more constructive note, we can mention James McGrath's frequent posts on science fiction and its relation to theology and biblical studies on his blog Exploring Our Matrix or Robert Cargill's recent blog reflections of the National Geographic TV documentary that he hosted. Happily, in this case we had a reputable documentary hosted by an actual biblical scholar, but in many cases we are not so fortunate and specialist critiques by bibliobloggers becomes all the more important. As for James's science fiction commentaries, I myself am carefully avoiding all his posts on Lost, because I'm not yet finished watching the series. But the titles look fascinating.

Fourth, blogging has also generated some interesting discussions and controversies within the field and its professional organizations. An amusing example with a serious point behind it is the recent attempt of leaders in the Society of Biblical Literature hierarchy to censor the title of a paper being presented by a member at this year's conference. The paper writer posted the correspondence on his blog, which led to some pointed commentary within the biblioblogosphere, followed by the decision of the Society to withdraw the request to alter the paper's title. And April DeConick's post from last year on the deleterious effects of the proliferation of SBL sessions will, I suspect, remain all too relevant this year.

Fifth, a new development, and a sign of the times, is that blogging has helped scholars to mobilize in support of their colleagues in an era of job cuts and financially threatened departments. A recent story on this theme, one with a happy ending, involved the attempt to shut down the Biblical Studies Program at the University of Sheffield. (And, worth noting as an aside, this and related events inspired Helen Ingram to post an eloquent and much commented-on defense of the academic study of theology on her blog The Geek Muse.)

Sixth and finally, I think it is fair to say that biblioblogging has contributed at least a little to the accelerating erosion of the authority of the mainstream media. My earlier two papers collected many examples and you can find many more in posts on many biblioblogs since 2005.

To conclude, blogging has found a solid niche in academic biblical studies in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It has enriched the field in numerous ways and its expansion over the decade has been geometric, at least until recently. Moreover, the contributions of blogging have been amplified rather than diluted by the advent in recent years of additional new media such as Facebook, Twitter, and podcasts. All three are routinely used in synergy with blogs and I believe, although I cannot prove statistically, that dissemination of blog posts through these other media routinely increases blog traffic rather than reducing it. We are nowhere near a zero-sum game within the new media. And all indicators are that biblioblogging will be with biblical studies for a long time to come.

UPDATE (25 November): I have revised the language of the paper slightly in a few places to clarify a mathematical point raised in the session discussion.

Off to SBL in Atlanta, plus review of Schäfer, Origins

I'M OFF TO ATLANTA for the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, which runs from Saturday to Tuesday. I'm presenting two papers there. The first is on Saturday morning:

Review of Peter Schäfer, The Origins of Jewish Mysticism
(Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2009)

SBL S20-114 Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism Section

Click on the link to download the paper as a pdf file.

The book under review is partially available at Google Books (here). Ordering information can be found there as well. It's expensive for individuals, but if your local research library doesn't have it yet, make them buy it.

You can find an early summary of what eventually became my book Descenders to the Chariot (mentioned in the review) here:

The Hekhalot Literature and Shamanism

Early drafts of two of my articles mentioned in the review can be found by following the links:

Ritual in the Jewish Pseudepigrapha

The Hekhalot Literature and the Ancient Jewish Apocalypses (pdf file)

In the review I also refer to the work of Professor Maxine Grossman. The text of an online lecture she gave to my Dead Sea Scrolls class is available here and it treats some of the relevant issues. Do read her book, though.

I have received the sad news that, due to unavoidable circumstances, Professor Schäfer will be unable to attend the session.

I'm giving the second paper, "What Just Happened: The rise of 'biblioblogging' in the first decade of the twenty-first century," on Monday. The next post, which I have preposted for publication in 15 minutes, will have the full text of that paper, with links.

Have a good week. I shall be very busy, but I hope to be able to continue some blogging during the conference.

Raphael Golb to be sentenced today

RAPHAEL GOLB is to be sentenced today in the Dead Sea Scrolls identity-theft case in which he was convicted on thirty of thirty-one counts last month. He says he's going to appeal.

Robert Cargill has commentary in a UCLA News Week interview.

UPDATE: Mr. Golb has been sentenced to six months in prison and five years probation.

More protesting over Jaffa graves

MORE PROTESTING over the excavation of Jaffa graves for a hotel:

Jewish group threatens to picket Core Club, Gramercy Park Hotel over hotel construction in Israel

Gatecrasher (NY Daily News)

Wednesday, November 17th 2010, 4:00 AM

A group called Save the Graves wants to bury real estate developer Aby Rosen in protests.

After staging demonstrations outside the Lever House headquarters of Rosen's RFR Holding and, last week, outside his upper East Side home, the Central Rabbinical Congress of the USA and Canada has announced it will turn up the heat on the Quaker-maned magnate by picketing two of his investments: VIP hangouts the Core Club and the Gramercy Park Hotel.

As we reported this summer, the CRC's beef with Rosen and RFR involves the company's project to build an ultraluxe $600 million hotel in Jaffa, Israel. Construction crews there have unearthed an ancient grave site, and the protesters allege RFR has ignored their pleas to deal with the remains in a proper manner.

[...]

A spokeswoman for Rosen responded with a cryptic release that does not name Save the Graves or the CRC, but rather states, "Israel's High Court of Justice has rejected the claims of "an anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist religious extremist group to obtain a temporary injunction" against RFR.

The release also contends the remains were "definitively determined" to be of "pagan origin" and concludes: "The project continues to move forward without delay."

Background here.

New technology gives on-site assessments in archaeology

TECHNOLOGY WATCH:

New technology gives on-site assessments in archaeology

DURHAM, N.C. – The ability to tell the difference between crystals that formed naturally and those formed by human activity can be important to archaeologists in the field. This can be a crucial bit of information in determining the ancient activities that took place at a site, yet archaeologists often wait for months for the results of laboratory tests.

Now, however, an international team of physicists, archaeologists and materials scientists has developed a process that can tell in a matter of minutes the origin of samples thousands of years old. The new device is easily portable and works by "lifting off" the spectral fingerprint of a material with infrared light.

The first material tested was the mineral calcite, commonly found in rocks such as limestone, which forms over millions years in sediments. These rocks can also contain the mineralized shells of sea creatures. Archaeological sites may also feature calcite that was a part of ash, plaster, or other building materials.

In the latest issue of the journal Advanced Materials, on-line today, Stefano Curtarolo, associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials sciences and physics at Duke University, and Kristin Poduska, associate professor of physics at Memorial University in Newfoundland, and their colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, describe the new approach, which has already been successfully tested in archeological sites in Israel.

[...]

Last summer, a team of archaeologists and scientists from the Weizmann Institute successfully tested the new approach at an ancient site in central Israel at Tel Safit, close to where David is thought to have slain Goliath.

"Whenever they found something white, they would call us over to do tests," Poduska said. "We were able to confirm whether the sample was rock or plaster, which helps us decide how to proceed at the excavation site."

[...]

Egyptian blogger Karim Amer released from prison

EGYPTIAN BLOGGER Abdolkarim Nabil Seliman (Karim Amer) has been released from prison after serving a four-year sentence:

Dissident Egyptian blogger freed after 4 years

The blogger, known as Kareem Amer, had been jailed on charges of insulting Islam and defaming President Hosni Mubarak. He had written harshly about religious fanaticism and Egypt's authoritarian government.

By Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times

November 18, 2010

Reporting from Cairo —

An Egyptian blogger whose case epitomized the struggle for freedom of expression in cyberspace has been freed after serving four years in prison on charges of insulting Islam and defaming President Hosni Mubarak.

Human rights organizations announced Wednesday that Abdel Kareem Nabil Suleiman, the blogger known as Kareem Amer, had been released from prison. His ordeal highlighted the Egyptian government's concern over dissident voices arising on websites and online social networks that are trickier to control than traditional opposition media outlets.
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"We are deeply relieved and happy to know that Kareem's nightmare is over and he is free at last," the international advocacy group Reporters Without Borders said in a statement. "Nothing will be able to erase his four years of suffering as a result of a totally unjustified conviction, but at least he will no longer be the scapegoat of Egyptian government anger at criticism expressed by bloggers.

[...]

Background to this barbaric story is here.

Sefer ha-Razim, translation and commentary

IN THE MAIL:

Bill Rebiger and Peter Schäfer, Sefer ha-Razim I und II - Das Buch der Geheimnisse I und II: Band 2: Einleitung, Übersetzung und Kommentar (TSAJ 132; Tübinger: Mohr Siebeck, 2009)

I have noted volume one, the edition of the manuscripts, here and here.

Advice on giving conference papers

THE ANNUAL MEETING OF THE SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE starts this weekend in Atlanta. Convenienty, Inside Higher Ed has a piece on The Art of the Conference Paper (noted by James McGrath on FB). Looks useful, especially for those presenting a paper for the first time or (for conferences further in the future) hoping to get a first conference paper accepted. That also gives me an excuse to dust off my 2004 post on How to Read a Scholarly Paper, which some may find useful. It also links to a post by Mark Goodacre on the same subject, which links to lots of other related posts. Plus, my post includes a picture of Buffy.

National Geographic: David and Solomon

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC:

David and Solomon
Kings of Controversy

Was the Kingdom of David and Solomon a glorious empire—or just a little cow town? It depends on which archaeologist you ask.

Indeed. This is not my speciality, but it looks like a good, informative article.

Boo to Blogger's rubbish search function!

BOO to Blogger's rubbish search function! I'm glad someone else has noticed this. If you want to search the PaleoJudaica archives, my comment to Mark's post has instructions.

Christian Apocrypha galore from Tony Burke

CHRISTIAN APOCRYPHA GALORE from Tony Burke at Apocryphicity:

Update on More Christian Apocrypha Page

Updated: Christian Apocrypha at the 2010 SBL

A new Greek NT from SBL and Logos

A NEW GREEK NEW TESTAMENT from the Society of Biblical Literature and Logos Bible Software.

As will be clear from the nature and scope of the apparatus, this text may be considered a “reading edition,” with the apparatus serving to alert the reader to the more important places where there are differences between editions of the Greek NT and to indicate how other editions have handled matters.

More here.

How Similar is a Visionary Shaman to an Apocalyptic Prophet?

LOREN ROSSON: How Similar is a Visionary Shaman to an Apocalyptic Prophet?

I've treated some similar themes here.

UPDATE (17 November): More directly relevant is my 2006 SBL paper "The Hekhalot Literature and the Ancient Jewish Apocalypses," which you can download here.

Ray-gun tech used on the DSS

X-RAY TECHNOLOGY is being used on the Dead Sea Scrolls:

This week, Berlin scientists are to brief scholars on 21st century methods of sorting the fragments, which contain Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic writing and are kept at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

The new methods, which include shining X-rays through the parchment and papyrus, are guaranteed not to damage them.

Re-analysis would not only help to resolve some fierce academic and religious disputes that have been based on differing readings of the texts, but also help reconstruct several more documents which had seemed lost for ever in the muddle of fragments.

The new methods were evolved by BAM, Germany's material-science laboratory in Berlin.

'We'll be able to say if any two fragments have identical material properties,' explained BAM spokeswoman Ulrike Rockland. 'If they do, they come from the same piece. No one could say that with certainty before.'

[...]

Rockland said the Berlin laboratory worked on a variety of the goatskin fragments to develop procedures to catalogue them.

These include examination with light, electron and environmental scanning electron microscopes and advanced technologies known as X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy.

The experts devised standard ways to trace how each piece of parchment was made and how it aged.

'Goatskin is an organic material. If two fragments have the same X-ray, Raman and infrared signature, they must belong together,' said Rockland.

The procedures can also identify different batches of handmade ink. The scientists manufactured their own iron-gall ink using ancient recipes to test what happens as it dries and eats its way into the parchment.

The sole disadvantage of the new tests is the high cost.

The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin paid for the initial, joint German-Israeli research project.

The results will be presented at a 'workshop' in Berlin Monday where scientists and humanities scholars will mingle to learn how they can help one another to take the research forward. Authors: Jean-Baptiste Piggin, Ulrike von Leszczynski

From Monsters and Critics. For some perhaps related ray-gun technology see here. (Sorry, I can't remember what the first, dead, link was about.) Also, this post on photographic techniques and manuscript digitization is probably related as well.

More on Crossan's The Greatest Prayer

MORE ON JOHN DOMINIC CROSSAN'S The Greatest Prayer, this time in the LA Times. Excerpt:

Crossan has written several books about the historical Jesus. In a sense, he said in an interview, each one has helped lead to his latest book, "The Greatest Prayer: Rediscovering the Revolutionary Message of the Lord's Prayer" (HarperOne 2010).

[...]

Crossan calls the Lord's Prayer "a prayer from the heart of Judaism on the lips of Christianity for the conscience of the world."

To understand it, he said, it is necessary to comprehend the culture in which it was written, that of 1st century Judaism. The prayer appears in the New Testament twice, in slightly different forms: In Matthew 6:9-13, and in Luke, 11:2-4. In both cases, it is delivered by Jesus, which helps explain the revered status it holds.

When Jesus' disciples heard the prayer, Crossan said, they would have responded differently than a modern churchgoer. To begin with, he said, the term "Father" — "Abba" in the original Greek or Aramaic — connoted a "householder," one who oversaw the affairs of a family. A householder, he added, would have been judged by how well he provided for everyone.

When the prayer continues with "hallowed be thy name," he said, what it means by "hallowed" is "a fair distribution for all, the justice of an equitable household."

In other words, Crossan said, the prayer is about "distributive justice," about making sure that all are cared for.

"It is revolutionary," he writes, "because it presumes and proclaims the radical vision of justice that is the core of Israel's biblical tradition.… It dreams of an Earth where the Holy One of justice and righteousness actually gets to establish — as we might say — the annual budget for the global economy."

But not everyone is convinced.

Background here.

Talmon, Text and Canon of the Hebrew Bible

NEW BOOK:

Text and Canon of the Hebrew Bible
Collected Studies

by Shemaryahu Talmon
EIS - Eisenbrauns

Eisenbrauns, 2010

Via lots of people.

Mandaic Unicode

MANDAIC UNICODE. Excellent!

More on the Mandaeans (Mandeans) and Mandaic here (immediately preceding post).

Iraqi Mandaeans hard to resettle in 1 place

MORE TRIBULATIONS for the Mandaeans: UN: Iraqi Mandaeans hard to resettle in 1 place (AP).

More on the Mandaeans (Mandeans) here and here and follow the many links.

Related: Fear of jihad driving Christians from Iraq (USA Today) (cf. here).

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.