Completion of the Steinsaltz Talmud

THE COMPLETION OF THE STEINSALTZ TALMUD is covered with detailed background in The Forward: Man of the People of the Book: After 45 Years, Adin Steinsaltz Has Completed His Talmud Translation.

Excerpt:

Reflecting on the past five decades, he said that one of the biggest challenges has been responding to the changing needs of those who study Talmud and coming up with a translation and commentary that satisfy the modern, curious mind. “The Talmud mentions a name or an object — what is it? This question possibly for my great-grandfather wasn’t a problem — It was a vessel or it was a tree or it was an animal, and that was enough. In our times, you won’t be pleased if you are only told it’s an animal.” Providing this kind of information took him to some pretty unlikely places for a Talmudist, including a long conversation he recalled with a top Israeli expert on fowl.

His second challenge, in the course of opening up the Talmud to the uninitiated, was to explain the various expressions that form the basis of Talmudic logic. In the past, commentators assumed that people had learned at heder the hermeneutical rules around which the text is structured. Today, one cannot assume, for example, that kal v’chomer, a rabbinic rule for drawing an inference from one case to another, is a meaningful concept to a Jewish reader of the Talmud.

A third challenge for Steinsaltz was to confront some of the ethical questions regarding the Talmud and its style that are specific to modern readers. One arises from the fact that the Talmud constantly tries to harmonize apparently divergent scholarly opinions. “Is this harmonization fair? That you push two people together when they are really not in agreement? It would be much easier to say, ‘Okay, they have two different opinions and let them go as they are.’ All the Talmud is a big attempt at harmonizing. So this is a question that possibly my great-grandfather didn’t ever think about.”

Background here.

A tribute to Anson Rainey by Bill Schniedewind

A TRIBUTE TO ANSON RAINEY by Bill Schniedewind has been published an the SBL site: A Personal Reflection on the Life and Work of Anson F. Rainey (January 11, 1930–February 19, 2011). Bill reports that he is completing Professor Rainey's new edition of the Amarna letters, which is exciting news.

Via Bob Cargill at XKV8R.

More tributes to Anson Rainey here.

Historical marvels at Tel Dan

HISTORICAL MARVELS AT TEL DAN are noted briefly by Wayne Stiles in the Jerusalem Post. The ninth-century Aramaic Tell Dan inscription, which mentions "the house of David," gets star billing.

Aramaic or Assyrian Ikea instructions?

ARAMAIC OR ASSYRIAN IKEA INSTRUCTIONS? The final paragraph of this Guardian article:

British Museum buys Assyrian treasures cleaned by Agatha Christie

The crime writer used face cream to restore the ivories discovered in the city of Nimrud by her archaeologist husband

says the following:

Scholars are itching to get their hands on the ivories after the exhibition. Some of the pieces have notes on the back in ancient Aramaic, which appear to be the Ikea flatpack instructions of almost 3,000 years ago on how to assemble the furniture.

Why ancient Aramaic? That doesn't make any sense to me; Assyrians in Nimrud in the seventh century would be writing in Assyrian (Akkadian), not Aramaic. Can anyone confirm what language these assembly notes are in?

UPDATE: Dorothy King e-mails to solve the mystery, which only arose from my careless reading of the article. An earlier paragraph in the article says:

The collection comprises almost 1,000 numbered items, as well 5,000 fragments or unnumbered pieces. These carved ivories, dating from the 9th-7th centuries BC, were mostly made in Syrian and Phoenician cities near the Mediterranean coast and were brought to Assyria as loot.

These ivories must have been from Syria, where the assembly instructions would have indeed been in Aramaic.

Mughrabi Gate ramp renovations

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: Israel plans work at contested Jerusalem holy site. The site is the Mughrabi (Mugrabi) Gate ramp. Background here.

Did 'mummy's curse' kill Egyptian looters?

WORKS FOR ME: Did 'mummy's curse' kill Egyptian looters?

I'd like more verification before I actually believe this story, but it was too good not to note.

Al Ahram: Egypt's antiquities moved for fear of looting

AL AHRAM: Egypt's antiquities moved for fear of looting.

When Buffy met biblical studies

TWO OF MY FAVORITE THINGS: When 'Buffy' Met Biblical Studies. The connections with biblical studies are pretty tenuous, but the author, Ronald Helfrich, seems to be advocating a more traditional text-based approach to academic Buffy studies. That sounds all right to me.

Lawrence Schiffman at YU

LAWRENCE SCHIFFMAN is now at Yeshiva University: New Vice Provost Schiffman Advances Undergraduate Synergy, Ideology.

(HT, Joseph Lauer.)

Background here.

Review of Rose Williams, A Beginning Latin Christian Reader

BMCR REVIEW:

Rose Williams, A Beginning Latin Christian Reader: de bonis cogitationibus. Mundelein, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, Inc., 2010. Pp. iv, 79. ISBN 9780865167506. $15.00 (pb).

Reviewed by Michael Klaassen, St. Timothy’s Classical Academy (michael.klaassen@st-timothys.ca)

Preview

Rose William’s “A Beginning Latin Reader, De Bonis Cogitationibus” is a much-needed book and a welcome addition to the field of elementary Latin readers, where good, simplified versions of biblical texts are in short supply. This book will serve a niche market, of course – Christian and “classical” schools, as well as the home-school crowd, who want biblical and ethical readings to back up their elementary study of Latin. Williams has explicitly designed the book as a companion to Waldo Sweet’s Artes Latinae, and as such its approach is not one that will appeal to all teachers of the language, particularly those who use the grammar-translation method.

[...]

Ed Cook on stative and progressive

ED COOK gives us one of his interesting (but alas infrequent) philological posts over at Ralph the Sacred River: "Loving This Book": Stative and Progressive.

Francesca Stavrakopoulou on Asherah etc.

FRANCESCA STAVRAKOPOULOU educates the Daily Mail about Asherah and the (now lost!) Kuntillet Ajrud inscription: Why the BBC's new face of religion believes God had a WIFE.

Nice pictures—both of Francesca and the drawings on the potsherd. For some reason, though, most of the inscription (upper left, where her thumb is) is missing. Steve Wiggins posts a drawing that includes it here.

UPDATE (14 March): Not "lost" after all? More here.

New JSIJ article on midrashic reconstructions

JSIJ - JEWISH STUDIES: AN INTERNET JOURNAL has published a new article: Arnon Atzmon, Reconstructing the Original Midrash Based on Rabbinic Parallels: A New Paradigm for an Old Problem (in Hebrew). Click on the link to download as a pdf file.

Abstract

Modern scholarly reconstructions of rabbinic texts have tended to avoid the use of higher critical methods, because they are based on the indirect evidence provided by parallels in rabbinical literature. Indeed, they seldom use these methods in combination with the lower critical method, which is based on the study of direct textual witnesses. Rather, scholars engaged in textual reconstruction have adopted the lower critical method almost exclusively as their primary tool, arguing that reference to parallels in rabbinic literature is a speculative and problematic methodology. In this paper, I support the use of higher criticism for reconstruction of the original versions of rabbinic texts by demonstrating its usefulness in this framework. I propose distinguishing between two paradigms of textual reconstruction based on higher critical methods by presenting the results of midrashic reconstructions.

Reimagining the Talmud in poetry

REIMAGINING THE TALMUD in poetry.

On Sidon's archaeological heritage

PHOENICIAN WATCH:

Sidon's rich archeological heritage has yet to be fully uncovered

By Mohammed Zaatari
Daily Star staff
Friday, March 04, 2011

SIDON: The southern coastal city of Sidon has many archeological sites that still await discovery, according to report prepared by a Lebanese archeological association.

The report, prepared by Dr. Sami Farhat, a member of the Lebanese Association for Heritage and Archeological Studies, revealed that besides the famous Phoenician Eshmoun temple which lies at the northern entrance of Sidon, a temple to the goddess Astarte is located in the southern part of the city.

[...]

Ancient Kabbalistic metal books? I doubt it.

COUNT ME SKEPTICAL:

Heavy metal secrets from a Mid-East cave
Israel’s archaeological establishment believes they are a fake. But could a collection of metal books be an early example of Kabbalah?

By Simon Rocker, March 3, 2011 (The Jewish Chronicle)

Robert Feather is out to prove the sceptics wrong. A metallurgist with a passion for archaeology, he has been asked to help authenticate what he believes could be one of the most exciting religious discoveries since the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The West London Synagogue member has previously published a book on the Copper Scroll, the Dead Sea Scroll thought to hold clues about the location of buried Temple treasure.Now he is trying to establish the origins of a mysterious cache of metal books which could be linked to the Kabbalah.

The objects belong to Hassan Saeda, a Bedouin farmer in Galilee who says they have been in his family's possession since his great-grandfather found them in a cave in Jordan, a century ago.

His collection consists of more than 20 codices (early books), cast mostly in lead and containing cryptic messages in Hebrew and Greek along with symbols such as the menorah. In various places, the Hebrew letters appear to stand for Bar Kochba, leader of the second-century Judean revolt against the Romans; and the talmudic mystic Shimon bar Yochai, who hid from the Romans in a cave for 13 years.

[...]

The IAA and epigrapher Andre Lemaire regard them to be forgeries, and apparently crude ones at that. But sure, go ahead and do more tests on them. It can't hurt. And post good photos of them online so epigraphers and textual specialists can evaluate them freely. I would be happy to be wrong, but the case so far does not sound promising.

As for this:

Institutions involved with antiquities tended to be "ultra-cautious", Mr Feather said, "because they have burned their fingers on previous occasions. A classic example is that of the Shapira strips."

Moses Shapira was a 19th-century antique dealer in Jerusalem who acquired some leather strips which he thought were early biblical writings. "Initially they were hailed as one of the greatest historical finds of all time," he said. "Subsequently the British Museum dismissed them as forgeries, largely because the text differed from the biblical version of the time. Shapira was so distraught that he blew his brains out in a hotel in Amsterdam," he said.

"When the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls was discovered in 1947, similarities to the Shapira texts made scholars reassess their conclusions. It is now generally accepted that the Shapira strips were probably the oldest known version of Deuteronomy."

I know of no specialist who regards the Shapira texts as anything but forgeries. See the 2009 comments by blogger-epigrapher Christopher Rollston here and this refutation of Allegro's attempt to reopen the question in the 1960s (requires JSTOR access).

UPDATE (22 March): More here and here.

Article on Secret Mark in BAR

NEW ARTICLE ON SECRET MARK by Allan Pantuck, also in BAR.

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri in BAR

THE OXYRHYNCHUS PAPYRY: The remarkable discovery you’ve probably never heard of — new article by Stephen J. Patterson in BAR. Excellent introductory treatment of the subject.

Zahi Hawass has resigned.

ZAHI HAWASS has resigned.

(HT Judith Weingarten on Facebook.)

UPDATE: More here, also via Judith.

New collection of inscriptions from Jerusalem

A NEW COLLECTION of inscriptions from Jerusalem:

Major Research Project Documents for First Time all Ancient Inscriptions from Jerusalem and Surrounding Area

(ArtDaily)

JERUSALEM.- The first installment of a major international research project gathering all the inscriptions ever found in Israel and the Palestinian Authority from the period of Alexander the Great (4th century C.E) until Mohammed (beginning of the 7th century A.D.) has recently appeared. The Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palestine (CIIP), as the collection is called, will eventually encompass nine volumes, and promises to become one of the most important tools of research into this period. The first volume of the collection includes more than 700 inscriptions from Jerusalem and surrounding areas up until the destruction of the Second Temple.

[...]

Pope: Jewish people must never again be blamed for crucifixion

POPE: Jewish people must never again be blamed for crucifixion (Catholic Herald).

The Pope takes a significant step forward in furthering the cause of inter-religious dialogue by explicitly exonerating the Jewish people from all blame for the Crucifixion and death of Jesus.

In his forthcoming book on Jesus, the Pope dedicates three pages to the famous passage in St Matthew’s Gospel in which “the Jews” demand the execution of Christ and shout to Pontius Pilate: “Let his blood be on us and on our children.”

He uses both scholarship and faith to explain that the mob does not represent the Jewish people, but sinful humanity in general.

Furthermore, he offers theological insights to say that the blood of Jesus is not used in the purposes of vengeance but is poured out to reconcile mankind to God.

This ground was covered already by Vatican II in the 1960s, but apparently this is the first time a Pope has explicitly stated this position.

Septuagint Summer School in Göttingen

SEPTUAGINT SUMMER SCHOOL is being offered this year in Göttingen by my St. Andrews colleague Professor Kristin De Troyer.

Biblioblogging regular features for February

THE BIBLICAL STUDIES CARNIVAL, the Biblioblog top 50, and the Biblioblog top 10 by vote have all been published for February. February, not March. Excuse my confusion.

NYU conference: Ancient Jewish Science and the History of Knowledge

NYU CONFERENCE: Ancient Jewish Science and the History of Knowledge.

Review of Boccaccini and Ibba, Enoch and the Mosaic Torah

BOOK REVIEW:

Gabriele Boccaccini, Giovanni Ibba, eds. Enoch and the Mosaic Torah: The Evidence of Jubilees. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2009. xxi + 474 pp. $55.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8028-6409-3.

Reviewed by Carla Sulzbach (McGill University)
Published on H-Judaic (February, 2011)
Commissioned by Jason Kalman

Connections between Jubilees, 1 Enoch, and Qumran

The present volume contains the main papers of the Fourth Enoch Seminar, held in Camaldoli (Italy) in July 2007. Since its inception in 2001, every seminar has covered a specific aspect of or contact point with what has been coined “Enochic” Judaism. Although that notion is not without its critics, it is a useful term as a starting point for study and discussion, if only because the Enochic corpus is so large and interacts on so many levels with other Second Temple Jewish texts.

[...]

Tekhelet recovered?

TEKHELET RECOVERED?

Rediscovered, Ancient Color Is Reclaiming Israeli Interest

By DINA KRAFT (NYT)
Published: February 27, 2011

RAMAT GAN, Israel — One of the mysteries that scholars have puzzled over for centuries is the exact shade of blue represented by “tekhelet,” which the Bible mentions as the color of ceremonial robes donned by high priests and ritual prayer tassels worn by the common Israelite.

Though scientists and scholars are still debating the exact shade of the ritual blue, the dye used is modeled after a 2,000-year-old textile, above, and is produced from sea snails found in Israeli waters.

What was known about tekhelet (pronounced t-CHELL-et) was that the Talmud said it was produced from the secretion of the sea snail, which is still found on Israeli beaches.

Traditional interpretations have characterized tekhelet as a pure blue, symbolic of the heavens so that Jews would remember God. Not so, according to an Israeli scholar who has a new analysis: tekhelet appears to have been closer to a bluish purple.

The scholar, Zvi C. Koren, a professor specializing in the analytical chemistry of ancient colorants, says he has identified the first known physical sample of tekhelet in a tiny, 2,000-year-old patch of dyed fabric recovered from Masada, King Herod’s Judean Desert fortress, later the site of a mass suicide by Jewish zealots after a long standoff against the Romans.

[...]

An earlier effort to recover tekhelet dye is also mentioned in the article and was noted here at PaleoJudaica in 2003.

UPDATE (2 February): A recent article in The Forward on the latter: Dyeing To Be Holy: Snails Make Tzitzit Blue Again. (HT Joseph Lauer and Gerald Rosenberg.)

Philo in postcolonial perspectives?

TORREY SELAND: Philo in postcolonial perspectives?

AWOL goodies

THE ANCIENT WORLD ONLINE (AWOL) BLOG currently has lots of goodies posted:


LSJ at TLG: The Liddell-Scott Jones Lexicon
I have an old edition of the LSJ as an app for my iPod Touch and I use it a lot (along with a similarly old edition of the Lewis and Short Latin lexicon). But this is the current, up-to-date edition and it's very useful to have it online.

Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG®) Updates: Added to the TLG since early February 2010.

What's new in the E-CORPUS digital library
Arabic, Syriac, Georgian, and Hebrew manuscripts.

Mandaic Online: Mandaic.org: Mandaic and Neo-Mandaic Texts and Resource

SBL and AAR back together

THE SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE and the American Academy of Religion have made up and are back together. April DeConick is happy. So am I.

Some background to the split is here.

James McGrath reviews Forged by Bart Ehrman

JAMES MCGRATH reviews Forged, by Bart Ehrman, over at Exploring Our Matrix.

Learn About the 3 Punic Wars

PUNIC WATCH: N. S. Gill: Learn About the 3 Punic Wars.

Review of Dura Europos exhibit at McMullen Museum

THE DURA EUROPOS EXHIBITION at the McMullen Museum is reviewed in Wicked Local Dover:

Dura-Europos: A buried city unearthed

By Chris Bergeron
wickedlocal.com
Posted Feb 25, 2011 @ 10:01 AM

Around 165 A.D., Christians, Jews and pagans lived and worshiped side by side in a cosmopolitan city called Dura-Europos by the Euphrates River on the frontier of the Roman Empire.
Located in modern-day Syria, it housed a Roman military garrison of more than 10,000 soldiers and civilians whose lives reflected the hopes and dangers of those uncertain times.
A couple exchanged an engagement ring engraved with the word “Omonoia,” or “concord.” Soldiers dallied in a brothel adorned with a statue of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. A man named Tiro sold a 28-year-old female slave Math-Sin for 700 denari, worth about two years of unskilled labor.
Then sacked by invading Sasanians and abandoned in 256, the city lay covered by earth and lost for 16 centuries.
Through serendipity and determined archaeology, the city has come alive again through a remarkable exhibition at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College.

[...]

I have already noted the exhibition here. Lots more links on Dura Europos are given here.

Review of new translation of hymns of Zoroaster

BOOK REVIEW by Marion James in Today's Zaman:

‘The Hymns of Zoroaster’

[...]

The general assessment of Zoroaster in Western general knowledge often depicts him as an ancient oriental guru -- the pre-history forerunner of modern Indian holy men. In his new translation of the sacred texts of Zoroastrianism, Oxford Professor M.L. West challenges this thinking by stating that Zoroaster was “a revolutionary religious thinker and leader who appeared from nowhere in a remote region of Central Asia at the very dawn of Iranian history.”

[...]

What remains today of the teachings of Zoroaster? The hymns (Gathas) and a liturgy in seven chapters (Yasna Haptanhaiti) were mainly composed before the third century B.C. Of the 21 volumes, only 14 remain and some of those are fragments. These poems are composed in a very archaic language -- the obscure Older Avesta. The existing available translations differ widely from one another: West maintains that this is because many have been done by pure linguists who have paid little attention to the religious aspects of the pronouncements and ignored the beliefs and interpretations of modern-day Zoroastrians.

So, in a groundbreaking new work, he presents us with a new translation that is eminently readable. “Translation is challenging,” he says, as there are very few examples of Older Avestan available to us today. Moreover, “understanding the meaning is challenging.”

[...]

“The Hymns of Zoroaster: A New Translation of the Most Ancient Sacred Texts of Iran,” by M.L. West, published by IB Tauris (2010), 15 pounds in paperback ISBN: 978-184885505-2

Review of new translation of Arrian's Alexander

BOOK REVIEW in Hellenic News of America:

The Campaigns of Alexander: Anabasis Alexandrou

Paths of Glory
By STEVE COATES

THE LANDMARK ARRIAN

The Campaigns of Alexander: Anabasis Alexandrou

Translated by Pamela Mensch

Edited by James Romm

Illustrated. 503 pp. Pantheon Books. $40.

[...]

Arrian's great work on Alexander's electrifying campaigns of Asian conquest is now the subject of “The Landmark Arrian,” the most recent volume in the much-praised Landmark series of annotated editions of Greek historians, this one skillfully edited by James Romm, a professor of classics at Bard College, and supplemented with a panoply of maps, illustrations and background essays by leading Alexander scholars. The addition of Arrian to the Landmark list represents a departure of sorts. The previously featured historians — Thucydides, Herodotus and Xenophon — lived in the great era of Greek city-states in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.; by and large, they did their work by recording their own experiences or information related to them by others.

By contrast, Arrian lived in a radically different world, as an ethnic Greek and a Roman citizen, a military commander and high public official under the emperors Trajan and Hadrian, as well as a philosopher and leading literary light of his day; as a historian, Arrian sets out to describe events that took place 400 years before his own lifetime, based on a wide variety of earlier historical accounts, all now lost, written with widely differing aims, from the fabulous to the propagandistic. In this sense, Arrian is closer to modern historians than to his more famous precursors, “a noble predecessor and even, perhaps, a little bit of a model,” as it's put in “The Landmark Arrian.”

[...]

No wonder “attempting to reconstruct the historical Alexander is almost as problematic as trying to reconstruct the historical Jesus,” as Paul Cartledge writes in this volume's introduction. ...

DSS lecture by Alex Jassen at Gustavus Adolphus

A DEAD SEA SCROLLS LECTURE is being given by Alex Jassen at Gustavus Adolphus College on 10 March.

New book on ancient (pagan) angels

NEW BOOK: Rangar Cline, Ancient Angels: Conceptualizing Angeloi in the Roman Empire (Brill, March 2011).

Although angels are typically associated with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Ancient Angels demonstrates that angels (angeloi) were also a prominent feature of non-Abrahamic religions in the Roman era. Following an interdisciplinary approach, the study uses literary, inscriptional, and archaeological evidence to examine Roman conceptions of angels, how residents of the empire venerated angels, and how Christian authorities responded to this potentially heterodox aspect of Roman religion. The book brings together the evidence for popular beliefs about angels in Roman religion, demonstrating the widespread nature of speculation about, and veneration of, angels in the Roman Empire

Sheffield Conference: Religion in the Persian Period

A CONFERENCE ON RELIGION IN THE PERSIAN PERIOD is being held at the University of Sheffield in July.

It is thought that early forms of Judaism began to emerge in the Persian period amongst population groups with ancestral connections to the territories of Samaria and Yehud. The possible influence of Zoroastrianism on emerging Judaism has been explored periodically, but the issue of whether the Achaemenids continued to practice old Persian religion or emerging Zoroastrianism remains a point of debate. Persian policy with regard to religious tolerance or intolerance throughout the empire also could be profitably explored, as well as developments in religion amongst other subject groups under Persian hegemony.

Tzvee Zahavy: Alan F. Segal: An Appreciation

TZVEE ZAHAVY: Alan F. Segal: An Appreciation.

When my dear friend Alan F. Segal died at age 65 on Sunday, February 13, this earthly world lost a diligent, productive scholar of religions and a sparkling lecturer and teacher. And more than that, a great force of positive energy departed from our midst.

[...]

Hebrew Bible/Rabbinics and philosophy e-mail list

AN E-MAIL LIST on the Hebrew Bible, Rabbinic literature, and philosophy is now running. From Jack Sasson's Agade list:

From Yoram Hazony (yhazony@shalem.org.il):
=====================================

Sign Up for “Bible-Philos” Listserv

I wanted to inform you that the Shalem Center’s Department of Philosophy, Political Theory and Religion has organized a new listserv to provide information for scholars interested in being informed of developments in the philosophical investigation of the Hebrew Scriptures, Talmud and Midrash.

The “Bible-Philos” list will provide you with announcements relating to conferences, publications, and fellowships in the following subject areas:

1. The philosophical study of the metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political thought of the Hebrew Bible, Talmud and Midrash.

2. The historical reception of the metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political thought of Hebrew Bible, Talmud and Midrash in the West and beyond.

List subscribers will be encouraged to submit announcements and brief reviews of new publications appearing in these areas, which will then be distributed to list members.

To sign up for the “Bible-Philos” list, please click here.

An overview of the Jewish Philosophical Theology project at the Shalem Center is available here.

For additional information please feel free to write to me at (yhazony@shalem.org.il).

The website for the list, with the subscription link, is here.

Arutz Sheva Radio tributes to Anson Rainey

TRIBUTES TO ANSON RAINEY have been published by Arutz Sheva on a radio show. Joseph I. Lauer sends information on accessing the audio files:

The following Arutz Sheva article leads to an audio of the LandMinds program.
At the archive site http://www.foundationstone.org/LandMinds10/downloads/ the following portions of the broadcast can be heard:
270. Anson Rainey Memorial (Part I) (February 23, 2011)
271. Anson Rainey Memorial (Part II) Interview with Dr. Paul Wright (February 23, 2011)
272. Anson Rainey Memorial (Part III) Interview with Dr. Yigal Levin (February 23, 2011)
273. Anson Rainey Memorial (Part IV) Interview with Prof. Aharon Demsky (February 23, 2011)

Background here.

UPDATE: Bad link now fixed. Sorry about that.

New BBC series on Jewish history

A BBC SERIES ON JEWISH HISTORY is coming in 2012:

Schama to front BBC Jewish history series

Thursday, February 24 2011, 11:37am EST
By Andrew Laughlin, Technology Reporter [Digital Spy]

Academic and TV presenter Simon Schama is to front a new series on BBC Two documenting the incredible history of the Jews.

In the five-part series, titled The History Of The Jews, Schama will explore the 4,000 years of Jewish history from the Ancient Israelites to the impact of the Jewish people on the modern world.

Discussing the series, Schama said that any historian would want to tell the "epic story" of the Jewish people on Earth.

[...]

Excavations of important Syriac-related sites in Turkey

ARAMAIC (SYRIAC) WATCH:

Syriac monastery to be included in Faith Park

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

VERCİHAN ZİFLİOĞLU
ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

The thousands-of-years-old Syriac Mor Yakup Monastery complex in Mardin’s Nusaybin district is being restored. The historic monastery and a nearby tomb of a 13th-generation grandchild of the Prophet Mohammed will be united and opened to tourism as a Culture and Faith Park Complex. Mardin Gov. Hasan Duruer says the project will emphasize the beauty of living together

The restoration of churches and monasteries in Anatolia has not lost speed over the last few years, and the next relic slated to undergo reconstruction work is the Mor Yakup Monastery complex in the southeastern province of Mardin.

[...]

Common excavation with Syria

The restorations and excavations for the Faith Park project started in 2000. Duruer said during the restoration, 15 statues on calcareous ground, a mosaic panel, chamber ruins and 225 graves were found in the northern limestone grounds of the church as well as the ruins of a school that belongs to the monastery complex.

He said right after the opening of the park, archaeological excavations will begin to unearth the ancient city of Nisibis. “A part of the ancient city is within the borders of Syria and so we intend to pursue the work together with Syria,” he said.

[...]

The church father Ephrem the Syrian, famous especially for his corpus of beautiful Syriac hymns, lived in Nisibis in the fourth century. An excavation of this site would be very important. I hope it happens.

Nag Hammadi murder acquittals

NAG HAMMADI MURDER TRIAL UPDATE: This story should not be lost within the larger picture of recent events in Egypt.

Egyptian Christians Enraged Over Court Acquittal in Christmas Eve Massacre

Posted GMT 2-21-2011 0:45:47

(AINA) -- The Egyptian Emergency State Security Court in Qena acquitted today two of the three suspects in the Christmas Eve Massacre in Nag Hammadi in January, 2010, where six Coptics, between the ages of 16 to 23, were shot and killed by Muslims in a drive-by shooting. The Copts were killed as they filed out of Church after celebrating the Coptic Christmas Eve midnight mass in Nag Hammadi, 600km south of Cairo A Muslim bystander was also killed and nine Copts were seriously injured (AINA 1-7-2010).

The three Muslims accused of the shootings were Mohamed Ahmed Hussein, more commonly known as Hamam el-Kamouny, Qurshi Abul Haggag and Hendawi Sayyed. Mohamed Ahmed Hussein, 39, was sentenced to death by the court on January 16 and the other two were acquitted today. The defendants were charged with using force to disrupt public order and intimidate citizens, with the premeditated murder of seven people, illegal possession of fire arms, the attempted murder of nine others, and voluntarily damaging fixed and liquid assets.

Bishop Cyril, the Coptic Orthodox bishop of Nag Hammadi, said "The court imposed one death sentence because one Muslim was killed, and the Egyptian judiciary wasted the blood of the six murdered Copts, who are of no value to the society. This verdict saddened all Christians worldwide because it means that the State is applying Islamic Sharia on all Christians in Egypt." He explained that according to Sharia the blood of one Muslim, victim Ayman Hisham, is paid for by the blood of one Muslim, Al-Kamouny; since one Muslim died, one Muslim got the death penalty.

Bishop Cyril said that according to the law an accomplice to a crime is on equal standing to the person who committed the crime. "So where is this law and why has it been by-passed in this case and why have the two accomplices been an acquitted?" He said that this verdict brought back sadness and pain to the families of the victims who expected the second suspect to have been sentenced to life imprisonment -- if not the death penalty -- and the third at least fifteen-year imprisonment, but not an acquittal. "This is why we know that in Egypt the blood of a Christian is worth nothing."

[...]

Background here and follow the links.

Watson meets St. Jerome, sort of

WATSON MEETS ST. JEROME, at least in the imagination of Mike Hinkle (Edmond Sun):

When I read the story, I couldn’t help but think about a grumpy old fifth century church father. Let me explain.

A couple years ago, I took a room in an Arab hotel in East Jerusalem, rented a car and spent some time driving around Israel. My rental agreement wouldn’t allow me to take the car into the West Bank, so I hired a Palestinian taxi driver to take me through the Israeli checkpoint to Bethlehem. While there, I was shown to the damp tiny chamber where St. Jerome did much of his history-making work.

You may already know about St. Jerome, but just in case you don’t, here’s a snapshot. He was a crusty old ascetic that spent a good deal of his life writing Christian commentaries and translating the Bible from its original languages into Latin. He spent the last 30 years of his life writing and studying in a small poorly lit monastic cell in Bethlehem. St. Jerome had a towering intellect and made notable contributions to Christian theology and scholarship. But he really didn’t think much of his fellow man — being the sinful creature he is. And Jerome had little use for physical comforts. His only extravagance had to do with the acquisition of scholarly works and writing materials.

When I visited St. Jerome’s tiny cell in Bethlehem, I tried to get my mind around the discipline, commitment and self-denial that would lead someone to spend more than 30 years in these cramped, uncomfortable surroundings. It would be interesting to know if, at the end of his journey, St. Jerome felt like the results justified the sacrifice.

But now we have the mighty Watson. One can imagine an army of uninspired scholars feeding Aramaic and Hebrew characters into a database and standing by as Watson spews forth a superior translation in 10 minutes or less. It might be possible to download a comprehensive collection of dictionaries along with the original writing and allow Watson to produce biblical commentaries far superior to St. Jerome’s.

St. Jerome was prepared to endure cold and hunger in order to commit his meager resources to the purchase of his reading and writing materials. Today, I am able to transport a library of 1,700 books and receive daily newspapers from all across the world to be read on a device not much bigger than a slice of bread.

It would be interesting to know in terms of readability and quality, how the translations and commentaries of Watson would compare with those of St. Jerome. No matter what you may say in the abstract, there are those who will argue that, given sufficient commitment of resources, Watson’s work will prove superior.

Computers are not yet up to producing the Latin Vulgate (no, not even after this) or writing biblical commentaries with original content. But Watson brings the possibilities unsettlingly closer.

Another popular book on the Cairo Geniza

ANOTHER POPULAR BOOK ON THE CAIRO GENIZA is excerpted by The Jewish Week:

The Living Sea Scrolls

Inside a ‘battlefield of books,’
a rich mosaic of Egyptian Jewish life.

Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole
Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 22, 2011

This April, the Schocken / Nextbook Jewish Encounters series will publish “Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza” by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, which tells in dynamic fashion the story of the retrieval of what has often been called the greatest discovery of Jewish manuscripts ever made. “No longer can we speak of the seven wonders of the world —” Cynthia Ozick has written of the Geniza and of “Sacred Trash.” “In this astounding and acutely relevant tale, Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole have uncovered a remarkable eighth; and in its connection to our own humanity, it surpasses all the rest.” What follows is a small piece of that wondrous story.

[...]

The excerpted passage is a nice brief account of the history and importance of the Cairo Geniza.

As indicated above, another popular book on the Geniza has been recently published, with a rather similar title: Sacred Treasure: The Cairo Geniza, by Mark Glickman. I have noted it here (and follow the links).

La biblioteca di Alessandria. Storia di un paradiso perduto

BMCR REVIEW of a book on the ancient Library of Alexandria:

Monica Berti, Virgilio Costa, La Biblioteca di Alessandria: storia di un paradiso perduto. Ricerche di filologia, letteratura e storia 10. Roma: Edizioni Tored, 2010. Pp. xvi, 279. ISBN 9788888617343. €30.00 (pb).

Reviewed by Alexandra Trachsel, University of Hamburg (alexandra.trachsel@uni-hamburg.de)

Preview

The study on the Library of Alexandria presented in this book is based on the results of the current research projects of the two co-authors. Both scholars are working on fragmentary texts from the Hellenistic period and have edited collections of fragments from ancient authors where the question of the selection and transmission of texts is crucial.1 In addressing this question, the authors have been brought to focus also on the function and the impact of the Library of Alexandria in processes of selection and transmission. Furthermore, both authors are developing their own projects in the field of digital humanities2 and this is an additional reason, as they admit themselves, for their scholarly focus on the Library of Alexandria. The link between these two topics is clearly stated in the first lines of the book and gets fully developed in the last chapter, entitled "Ritorno ad Alessandria." In between, the study offers a very wide panorama, based on an up-to-date bibliography, including both the process which led to the creation of the Library of Alexandria and the activity carried out within this institution. Another distinctive feature of this study, which differentiates it from other works on the Library of Alexandria, is the fact that it is framed by two chapters of a more deliberative nature. The first is a summary of the controversial evidence from Antiquity about the location of the library , while the last one, as just mentioned, draws parallels between the modern projects of "universal libraries" in digital form, such as Europeana and Google Books, and their Alexandrian model from Antiquity.

[...]

Chris McKinny on Anson Rainey

CHRIS MCKINNY has a tribute to Anson Rainey at the BiblePlaces blog. My favorite part is the quote from Emanuel Hausman:

You may have heard this from Anson before but he often joked that the first thing on facing GOD was to ask Him how he pronounced YHWH -.- May he rest in peace.

Update on Jewish Catacombs under Mussolini's villa

THE JEWISH CATACOMBS under Mussolini's villa are being restored in association with the Holocaust museum being built there:

Italy’s first Holocaust museum to be built in Rome

By LISA PALMIERI-BILLIG JERUSALEM POST CORRESPONDE
02/22/2011 01:56

Country was partner, not victim, of Nazis, but hasn’t done soul-searching like Germany, says director.

ROME – Mayor Gianni Alemanno and the municipal authorities of Rome will be announcing on Tuesday the construction of a Holocaust museum as a focal point in the city’s 10-year “Stati Generali” plan for major projects in the city.

The Italian government and RAI-TV are currently sponsoring a television spot, which will be shown repeatedly until June, calling for Italians to submit any relevant wartime family records or material for exhibition.

Italy’s first Holocaust museum, based on preliminary plans drawn by architects Luca Zevi and Giorgio Maria Tamburini under the sponsorship of Rome’s previous mayor, Walter Veltroni, will be built in the central area of Villa Torlonia. The 2,500- square-meter building – estimated at a cost of 19 million euros, to be covered by the city – will be part of a designated 4,000-sq.m. area adjacent to both former dictator Benito Mussolini’s villa and the two millennium-old Jewish catacombs, that will be restored and opened for visits.

Other Stati Generali projects include modernizing Fiumicino Airport, improving the street network and restoring ancient cultural sites.

The museum’s director, Marcello Pezzetti, has a vast plan in mind, specifically aimed at increasing Italians’ awareness of their own role in the Holocaust.

[...]

This museum has been in the planning stages for a long time; I've been following the story since 2004 (background here and follow the links back). Still no word on when the building will commence.

Update on the Mor Gabriel Monastery case

UPDATE ON THE MOR GABRIEL MONASTERY CASE from Zenit:

The monastery is at the center of a harsh battle initiated in 2008 by the leaders of three Kurdish villages dominated by a tribe supported in Parliament by one of their leaders, Suleyman Celebi, who is a Parliamentarian with the pro-Islamic ruling party of Erdogan (the AKP or Party of Justice and Development).

Several accusations have been leveled against the monastic community, including proselytism, which is based on the fact that young men study Eastern or Syrian Aramaic at the monastery. There are also claims that the monastery was built on a place where a mosque once stood -- an unfounded and even absurd accusation, given that Mor Gabriel well precedes the birth of Islam. The accusation that sticks -- at least in the eyes of Turkish officials -- is the one upheld by the Treasury Ministry: undue appropriation of land. Even this accusation is not very comprehensible, given that the community of Mor Gabriel regularly pays the taxes on the land in question.

The affair has recently met with, perhaps, its definitive conclusion. With a decision made public on Jan. 27 (but that actually dates to Dec. 7), the "Yargitay" or Ankara Court of Appeals -- Turkey's highest appeals court -- overturned a verdict issued on June 24, 2009, by the court of Midyat. According to the Yargitay decision reported by Forum 18 News Agency, 12 plots of monastery land with a total area of 99 hectares (244 acres) are to be considered "forests" and hence belong "ipso facto" to the Turkish state.

A farce

For Mor Gabriel, the decision is a hard blow. To lose the lands means to lose the means of sustenance necessary for survival. While sources close to the Forum 18 agency described the decision as "highly political and ideological," the whole affair was described from the beginning as "a spectacle trial" or "farce."

"The purpose of the threats and the lawsuit seems to be to repress this minority and expel it from Turkey, as if it were a foreign object," the head of the Aramaic Federation, David Gelen, told AsiaNews back in 2009. "Turkey must decide whether it wants to preserve a 1,600-year-old culture, or annihilate the last remains of a non-Muslim tradition. What is at stake is the multiculturalism that has always characterized this nation, since the time of the Ottoman Empire."

The decision caused little upheaval in European environments, with the exception of Germany, where several parties, including the Social Democratic fraction in the Bundestag (Lower Chamber) and even Die Linke (the Left), denounced it.

I followed the case for some time in 2009 (background here and follow the links), but it has been quiet for the last year and a half. Next stop, the European Court of Human Rights.

Christopher Rollston on Anson Rainey

CHRISTOPHER ROLLSTON has posted a tribute to Anson Rainey at the Rollston Epigraphy blog:

Among the Last of the Titans: Aspects of Professor Anson Rainey’s Life and Legacy (1930-2011)

20 February 2011

The contours of the life of Professor Anson Rainey are significant, well known, and well documented. He was a force of nature, and he was beloved, respected, revered, and (on occasion) feared. Within the field, he was a polymath. He was among the most capable and authoritative scholars of the Northwest Semitic languages. Indeed, he was as comfortable in Ugaritic, Phoenician, and Aramaic as he was in Old Hebrew. Moabite and Ammonite were subjects of great interest for him and he knew the preserved texts in these languages so very well. In addition, he was also a most capable scholar of Egyptian and Coptic. Moreover, he was also a formidable scholar in various fields and subfields of Assyriology, and his contributions to the Amarna Letters are substantive, diverse, and legion; arguably these are some of his most enduring contributions. Of course, among his greatest passions was historical geography, and it is my opinion that he had no peers in this field. Furthermore, he had also spent many seasons excavating, and he knew the archaeology of much of the ancient Near East so very well. Of course, in addition to his fluency in several European languages, he was also fluent in both modern Hebrew and also modern Arabic. I know of no one who was so capable in so many things. With his death, we are witnessing the loss of one of the last of the polymath “titans” of the field.

[...]

Read it all.

Background here.

Talmud conference at YU

A TALMUD CONFERENCE at Yeshiva University: Talmuda de-Eretz Yisrael: Archaeology and the Rabbis in Lat Antiquity. The dates are Sunday-Monday, March 27-28, 2011. Registration is now open.

Via Joseph I. Lauer's list.

Kerala Syriac manuscripts project

ARAMAIC WATCH:

Project to trace and preserve Syrian X''ian texts in progress

Thrissur, Feb 20 (PTI) A project to trace, catalogue and digitise lost documents relating to religious practices, culture and heritage of Syrian Christians of Kerala has been launched by the Church in collaboration with some European universities and local historical research bodies.
"The main objective of the project is to unearth valuable 16th and 17th century documents in Syriac, which had either been vandalised or stashed away by Portuguese Missionaries in their quest for bringing the ancient Christian community of India under Papal dominance," Metropolitan Mar Aprem, Metropolitan of the Church of the East, told PTI.
As the initial result of the programme, a facsimile edition of a manuscript has been brought here after its original text was lost seven centuries ago.
According to local church historians and secular scholars, a large volume of literature concerning the Syrian Christian culture and heritage were destroyed by Portuguese Missionaries by burning after the historic Synod of Diamper, held at Udayamperoor near Kochi in 1599, which offered a last chance to non-Catholic denominations to fall in line.
The text, known as Nomocannon of Abdisho of Nisibis (Canon Law), was compiled by the Metropolitan of Nisbis and Armenia in 1291 AD. The prelate died in 1318 AD, he said.
The revived text was edited by Istva Prczel of the Central European University, Budapest, formerly researcher at the Oriental Institute, Tubingen University, Germany.

[...]

I've noted the same project here, with a background link leading to a number of earlier posts.

The King James Bible reconsidered

KJB@400 WATCH:

The King James Bible reconsidered

We are steeped in the idioms and phrases of the King James Version. On its 400th anniversary, David Edgar questions how revolutionary it really was [in the Guardian]

Excerpt:

Celebrants of this year's anniversary have enjoyed pointing out the ironies of the translation: that it was commissioned to mollify the losing faction at a religious conference; that far from "inventing the language", it was written in archaic prose; and – most surprising of all – that it was made not by an individual genius but by six largely anonymous committees. But its authorship is much broader than the 53 clerics and one lay scholar who were selected to do James I's bidding in 1604. Most of the memorable Biblical phrases listed above were coined not in the hallowed cloisters of Oxford colleges or in the sepulchral calm of the Jerusalem Chamber but on the run. Five of the seven major English Bibles of the 16th century were produced in exile; two of their makers died at the stake. Each new Bible was the manifesto of a faction in the religious wars that revolutionised Tudor England, each subsequent Bible a revision and many a riposte. The full, 80-year-plus history of the English Bible is the story of the English reformation; it is spattered with blood and scorched with fire.

Lots of interesting background information on the earlier translations by Tyndale and others, used heavily by the King James version.

Sad News: Anson Rainey

SAD NEWS: ANSON RAINEY. News of Anson Rainey's death today has come in from numerous sources. Here is Jack Sasson's notice from the Agade list:

The saddest news from many sources in Israel is that Anson Rainey, a warrior for West Semitic scholarship, died this Shabbat in the early afternoon, after a blessedly brief battle with pancreatic cancer.

He will be buried tomorrow (Sunday, February 20), at 12pm, at the cemetery in Barkan (by Ariel). Shiva'ah will be observed at his home, [snip].

The notice below is taken from the website of the Department of
Archaeology at Tel Aviv University at:
http://www.tau.ac.il/humanities/archaeology/directory/dir_anson_rainey.html.

Go there for a list of publications.

May his memory be for a blessing.

What’s Going On With Egyptian Synagogues?

CARLY SILVER: What’s Going On With Egyptian Synagogues?

As far as I know, no news outlet has reported extensively on the fates of individual synagogues. I have found only scattered reports about various sites. Apparently, some synagogues are being guarded and others are shuttered, but not much info is available. The Ben Ezra synagogue, original home of a cache of documents about life in the Middle Ages, provided scholars with a priceless fount of information about Jewish commerce in that time period. What is known about its fate during the chaotic Egyptian uprising? I don’t know.

As of late January, the synagogue of Eliyahu Hanavi reported that its employees were safe, but shops in the surrounding area have been looted. Another synagogue that was reported on was in the Egyptian town of Ghabes. There, a few weeks ago, a synagogue was set aflame and Torah scrolls were burned.

Why have we not been informed about what is happening to the Jewish cultural patrimony in Egypt? Are they so destroyed that news outlets just won’t tell us what happened? Can they not get close enough to figure it out? According to some, little synagogue damage has occurred in Alexandria or Cairo because “there remain only a handful of elderly Jews in Egypt’s second-largest city and virtually none in the capital.” Therefore, there doesn’t need to be coverage if nothing has happened, some might say. But I believe that the international Jewish community would like to know what has happened to these sites.

Aside from Zahi Hawass's assurance (quoted in this blog post) that synagogues in Egypt are safe, I don't recall seeing any specifics. I have not been following the news about Egyptian antiquities closely lately, but Google brings up nothing on the synagogues from the last few days. Does anyone have more detailed current information?

Video on Hirbet Madras excavation

THE EXCAVATION AT HIRBET MADRAS (KHIRBET MIDRAS) is covered in a video by the Jerusalem Post. It makes more of a possible connection between the church and a tomb of a prophet Zechariah than I think is warranted (more on that here) but is interesting and worth viewing nevertheless.

More background here.

Review of Halperin, Journal of a UFO Investigator

DAVID HALPERIN'S JOURNAL OF A UFO INVESTIGATOR is reviewed by Stuart Schoffman in The Forward. Excerpt:

Whatever on earth (or in heaven) it is meant to mean, “Journal of a UFO Investigator” is a captivating, wildly idiosyncratic book, a rare mashup of genre fiction and high-flying myth that lingers in the mind and invites rereading. Here, too, Halperin plants a helpful seed for his critics, in an early scene in the Rare Book Room of the Philadelphia library, implausibly manned by a 15-year-old Jewish kid named Julian. “That’s the remarkable thing about rare books, isn’t it?” Julian says to Danny. “You fall under their spell, you just can’t stay away.”

By the way, Potiphar's wife does not succeed in seducing Joseph, either in Genesis or the Qur'an. That's a rather important point.

Other reviews etc. here.

Obituary for Alan Segal

AN OBITUARY FOR ALAN SEGAL in the Columbia Spectator:

Prof. Segal remembered for devoted friendships, defense of Judaism

Segal, who taught for 30 years of teaching in Barnard’s religion department, died on Sunday.

By Sammy Roth

Published February 18, 2011

Former Barnard professor Alan Segal, who retired in December after 30 years of teaching in Barnard’s religion department, died of complications from leukemia on Sunday. He was 65.

Segal was primarily a Jewish studies professor and scholar, teaching courses at Barnard such as Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Judaism in the Time of Jesus. He was also known for his work on different views of the afterlife and the relationship between Judaism and early Christianity.

[...]

And note this:

[JTS Prof. Tzvee] Zahavy said that even though Segal had been ill for a while, “it really did not slow him down,” adding that he had just completed a book which will probably be published soon, possibly by Columbia University Press.

Background here.

Festschrift for John J. Collins

CONGRATULATIONS TO JOHN J. COLLINS, for whom a Festschrift has just been published:

The "Other" in Second Temple Judaism: Essays in Honor of John J. Collins (Calvin Institute of Christian Worship Liturgical Studies) [Hardcover] Daniel C. Harlow (Editor), Matthew Goff (Editor), Karina Martin Hogan (Editor), Joel S. Kaminsky (Editor) (Eerdmans, 2011)

Shai Secunda has more details at the Talmud Blog.

Ryan S. Olson, Tragedy, Authority, and Trickery: The Poetics of Embedded Letters in Josephus.

BMCR REVIEW:

Ryan S. Olson, Tragedy, Authority, and Trickery: The Poetics of Embedded Letters in Josephus. Hellenic Studies 42. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, Trustees for Harvard University, 2010. Pp. xiv, 254. ISBN 9780674053373. $24.95 (pb).

Reviewed by Linda Zollschan (zollschan@yahoo.com)

This volume developed from Olson's DPhil dissertation from Oxford supervised by Martin Goodman, Chris Pelling and Steve Mason. Olson's central thesis is that the practice of quoting letters by Josephus was in imitation of long-standing Greek literary tradition that began with Homer. Olson proposes that Josephus made conscious allusions in his historical works to Greek literature which formed part of the influences that were part of Josephus' thought world. The author is completely up-to-date with the latest trends in scholarship regarding Josephus as a stylist of Greek literature, particularly the tragedians Sophocles and Euripides. Olson provides a stipulation that he is not concerned to distinguish between those Greek authors who were 'close' to Josephus' thought world from those that were distant.(4) Olson maintains that Josephus' audience was familiar with the literary models that Josephus incorporated into his work and that this audience was comprised of elite Romans in the city of Rome itself. (37-44)

[...]

Another DSS anniversary

ANNIVERSARY:

This week in Haaretz 1955 / PM announces all seven Dead Sea Scrolls are now in Israel's hands

The press conference held by Prime Minister Moshe Sharett in his office on February 13, 1955, was more like an state party than a mere media event. Sharett, flanked by Hebrew University president Benjamin Mazar and archaeologist Nahman Orgad, had important news to convey: Four Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1947 in a cave in the Judean Desert were now in Israel's hands.

The announcement meant Israel was now in possession of all seven scrolls. "Three other scrolls were already held by the university, and so now all seven are ours," Haaretz quoted the prime minister as saying.

[...]

Obituary for Alan Segal

OBITUARY FOR ALAN SEGAL:

Alan F. Segal, leading religious scholar, dies at 65

* By Jay Levin The Record (Hackensack N.J.)
* First Posted: February 16, 2011 - 7:47 pm
Last Updated: February 16, 2011 - 7:47 pm

HACKENSACK, N.J. — Alan F. Segal of Ho-Ho-Kus, N.J., a leading religious scholar whose views on the origins of Judaism and Christianity and on the afterlife were much sought after, died Sunday. He was 65.

[...]

Background here.

More on Alan Segal

A TRIBUTE TO ALAN SEGAL in Time Magazine by former student Joe Klein: The Rivers of Babylon. Excerpt:

... Alan Segal died a few days ago, after a long illness. He was not much of a believer, he once confessed to me. But I disagree. He belonged to the cathedral of learning, a blessed place where penitents transcend and lose themselves in a larger, deeper, boundless world. Scholarship was his Jerusalem. He inspired me and I'd like to see him off now, and thank him, with a portion of the psalm he used to welcome his students into his classroom:

How can we sing the songs of the LORD

while in a foreign land?

5If I forget you, O Jerusalem,

may my right hand forget [its skill].

6May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth

if I do not remember you,

if I do not consider Jerusalem

my highest joy.

On a related note, Diana Muir Appelbaum has written to me to say that Alan showed her a late draft of a complete book manuscript last summer, which he intended to publish. Does anyone know the status of this manuscript, which would be his final book?

UPDATE: Tzvee Zahavy e-mails:

Alan's book is complete and at the publisher in the final phases prior to publication.

His expansive thoughtful review of my son's book appeared on the Brill site yesterday, I saw it there after returning from Alan's funeral.

A REVIEW OF YITZHAK ZAHAVY, ARCHAEOLOGY, STAMPS, AND COINS OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL

The Review of Rabbinic Judaism
ISSN: 1568-4857, Online ISSN: 1570-0704
DOI: 10.1163/157007010X536339
Volume 13, Issue 2, pages 262-274
http://brill.publisher.ingentaconnect.com/content/brill/rrj/2010/00000013/00000002/art00008

UPDATE: Another tribute from Jeffrey Garcia at his Helek Tov blog. (HT Joseph Lauer.)

Anniversary of beginning of Qumran excavations

ANNIVERSARY:

On this day: The Dead Sea Scrolls

February 15 1949: Excavations begin at Qumran

By Jennifer Lipman, February 15, 2011 (The Jewish Chronicle)

[...]

In 1949 the site was identified by European and US archeologists, and on February 15 1949 a team lead by Roland de Vaux and Gerald Lankester Harding began excavating the area. The excavations continued until 1956.

Deborah Green, The Aroma of Righteousness

BOOK NOTED by Josh Lambert in Tablet Magazine:

How did the rabbis of the Talmud smell? No, this isn’t the set-up for a terrible joke (the punchline of which would inevitably, lamentably, have to be, “With their noses”). Posed sincerely, this question drives Deborah Green’s The Aroma of Righteousness: Scent and Seduction in Rabbinic Life and Literature (PSU, March). Tracking references to perfume and incense in the Torah, Talmud, and midrash, Green recovers what she can of the olfactory culture of late antiquity to place the rabbis’ senses of smell into their historical context—and to understand how their embodied, sensual lives influenced their theological understandings.

The Lod Mosaic in the NY Review of Books

THE LOD MOSAIC EXHIBITION, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is reviewed in the New York Review of Books:

The Lod Mosaic

G.W. Bowersock

It’s not easy to make sense of the remarkable Lod Mosaic, a large, ancient floor newly discovered in Israel and now on display in the United States for the first time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But the very difficulty of interpretation, together with the excellent state of preservation, is what makes it so fascinating. We simply don’t know whether it was part of a residence or an official building, and we can’t even say whether the owner or owners were Jewish, Christian, or pagan. The date is not secure either, although the excavator proposes about AD 300 because late third-and-fourth-century coins and ceramic scraps were found immediately above it. Miraculously, what is on display at the Met survived intact apart from one large gash near the bottom that the excavator considers ancient damage, although not everyone agrees.

[...]

There are lots of photos, and detailed discussions of the images on the mosaic.

Background here.

Happy Mandaic Valentine's in First Place Day!

JAMES MCGRATH: Happy Mandaic Valentine's in First Place Day!

Sad News: Alan F. Segal

SAD NEWS: ALAN F. SEGAL: I received a note this morning from Gabriele Boccaccini reporting that Alan Segal passed away peacefully yesterday afternoon. I can only add my agreement to Gabriele's comments:

Alan's premature death is very sad news for all of us who had the privilege of knowing him and being his close friends, and is a great loss for the entire community of specialists in Second Temple Judaism and Christian Origins. May his memory be a blessing.

Our thoughts are with his family.

I met Alan in 1991 at a Divine Mediator Figures Group session at the Society of Biblical Literature conference. At that time his best-known work was Two Powers in Heaven. He also presented a major paper at my 1998 St. Andrews conference on the origins of the worship of Jesus. He has since made many other important contributions to the study of ancient Judaism and early Christianity, has been a co-member of the steering committee for the SBL Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism Group, and was one of the major voices in the field. There is a short Wikipedia entry about him here.

May his memory be for a blessing.

UPDATE: James McGrath has links to Google preview pages of Professor Segal's books.

UPDATE: April DeConick has a long post in honor of Professor Segal.

UPDATE: Here is his Barnard College faculty profile page (via the Agade list). Note also his article in the recently noted Festschrift for Rachel Elior, With Letters of Light (final entry, which must be one of his last publications).

UPDATE (15 February): Larry Hurtado has a tribute.

UPDATE: Jared Calaway has a tribute as well. Jared was Alan's last doctoral student. Also, Mark Goodacre links to other brief notices.

UPDATE (16 February): More here.

A Feminist Talmud Commentary: Tractate Sukkah

H-JUDAIC REVIEW:

Shulamit Ṿaller. Massekhet Sukkah: Text, Translation and Commentary. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009. x + 224 pp. $157.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-16-150121-0.

Reviewed by Harry Fox (University of Toronto)
Published on H-Judaic (February, 2011)
Commissioned by Jason Kalman

A Feminist Talmud Commentary: Tractate Sukkah
Shulamit Valler's book is part of a mega-project under the editorship of Tal Ilan to produce the first feminist commentary to the Babylonian Talmud. In conformity with the series as a whole (and as outlined in Ilan's Massekhet Ta'anit[1]), Valler opens her study with a general introduction to her particular tractate, followed with selected Mishnaic texts related to gender issues, followed by the bulk of the work--selected Babylonian Talmudic texts of the same sort but independent of the Mishnah. The Babylonian Talmud serves as the cornerstone of rabbinic Judaism, the Judaism that informed the Jewish people until emancipation and beyond; hence it is a timely and worthy project. It follows on the heels of similar projects examining the biblical canonical literature for Jews and Christians under the critical lens of feminism. Perhaps the project will push Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and others in Eastern religions towards a similar critical examination of their own canonical collections. To wit, this social revolution is now possible after a generation of effort produced a critical mass of feminist scholars capable of putting the traditional text under such intense scrutiny.

[...]

Bauckham lectures online

BAUCKHAM LECTURES ONLINE: Ed Gallagher e-mails:

On Friday 11 Feb. 2011, Dr. Richard Bauckham delivered the Charles Coil Lectures at Heritage Christian University. The audio and handouts for these lectures are now available here.

Lecture 1: The "Individualism" of the Gospel of John: Audio, Handout

Lecture 2: Divine and Human community in the Gospel of John: Audio, Handout

Background here.

Conservanda est Carthago

PUNIC WATCH: Conservanda est Carthago.

Ben Ali's pillaging of Carthage must become a thing of the past

With the removal of Ben Ali from power, archaeologists have hopes of restoring the ancient site to the people of Tunisia

o Richard Miles
o guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 9 February 2011 12.49 GMT
o Article history

One of the most interesting consequences of the recent political upheavals in Tunisia has been that Tunisian archaeologists have at last been able to speak out against the damage inflicted on the ancient site of Carthage by the regime of the former president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. It is a truly depressing tale of how greed and philistinism have come close to destroying large parts of one of the world's most important archaeological sites.

The site of the ancient city of Carthage has been fought over many times in its long and turbulent history – most famously in 146BC, when a Roman army captured the city and obliterated it in a shocking episode of brutal annihilation. Roman intent that their great enemy should never rise again was reinforced by the curse that the victorious Roman general Scipio placed on anyone who dared to rebuild the city. Yet Carthage did rise again. The city, with its excellent harbour, occupied far too important a strategic position to be left deserted for long. The new city went on to have a distinguished history as the capital of the new Roman province of Africa, and later as one of the great centres of ancient Christianity. In short, Carthage is an archaeological site of world historical significance. Yet once again, its very existence is under serious threat – this time not from the weapons of an invading army but the bulldozers of unscrupulous property developers.

[...]

With the removal of Ben Ali and his crooked regime from power, Ennabli and a number of like-minded professionals have once more stepped forward to lead a new campaign to safeguard Carthage. Their demands are straightforward. First, the new Tunisian government needs to urgently approve the protection and development plan for Carthage that the previous regime had been stalling on (for the nefarious reasons set out above) since its drafting in 2000. Second, all illegal building projects on the site of Carthage and its environs must be halted immediately. Lastly, it must as quickly and transparently as possible restore to the people of Tunisia the national heritage that was stolen from them. These measures are essential if the new government is to prove to a sceptical public that it really can provide a much-needed fresh start for Tunisia. If it delays for too long, the danger is that people will start taking justice into their own hands, and the consequences of that could be absolutely catastrophic.

• There is a petition to sign in support of the new campaign to save the site of Carthage here

I have tried twice to sign the petition, but both times the page just hung up until I had to close it. Perhaps you will have better luck.

Metatron, Wikipedia, and guys arguing in a pub

ARCHANGEL METATRON WATCH—with reference to Wikipedia and guys arguing in a pub:

What Wikipedia really is is an unholy admixture of the two founding principles of Guinness World Records (“the best-selling copyrighted book series of all time” – Wikipedia), started by the McWhirter brothers as a means of settling arguments in pubs. Men would be on the point of fisticuffs over where the world’s largest pipe organ was, or what the biggest snake was, and so (the idea went) another man – perhaps the landlord – would produce the Guinness Book of Records (as it was originally called) and read out the answer. Hands would be shaken, conciliatory pints pulled, and peace reign again.

Wikipedia combined the argument with the resolution into one, live, universal-access pub brawl. It’s as if there’s a second room, beyond the public bar: a room behind a green baize door marked “[Edit]”. The door is soundproofed. All the drinkers can hear is their own conversation, until voices in the corner by the dartboard are heard raised in increasing anger. The public bar falls slowly silent as it dawns on the clientele that two men are having a terrible row about the angel Metatron. Lapels are gripped. The men’s faces are no more than two centimetres apart, and red. They are shouting “Yeah?” at each other. “Yeah?” “Yeah!” “Oh yeah?” Then the landlord steps out from behind the bar. He opens the green baize door. Briefly, a scene of terrible struggle is revealed: men in Pendleton shirts, men in spectacles, men with beards and tablet computers, men with notebooks and photographs and lists; men struggling and shouting and trading blows; men rolling about on the floor shouting; here and there, the odd woman, trying to make herself heard.

Then the noise abruptly stops. The men stand up, brush themselves down, assume the lineaments of civility. The last man to speak steps forward. “Metatron?” he murmurs politely; “Primarily a medieval Judaic mystical concept, though there are occasional references in the Talmud?”

Peace settles. The green baize door is closed but as the latch clicks shut, a momentary surge of resuming battle is heard?

Khirbet Midras church to be covered over

KHIRBET MIDRAS (Hirbet Madras), the excavation of the ancient church where it is speculated the tomb of a prophet Zechariah may be, is being covered over again due to lack of funding. Jerusalem Post:

Unfortunately, no inscriptions were recovered, and so the cultural and religious context of the church is not completely clear. Behind the apse, an empty crypt was discovered, which may have been used for burial or related to the veneration of relics.

Some scholars suggested the church was related to the memorial of Zacharia, but with the lack of an inscription, this possibility remains as an educated guess.

An agonizing issue, says [archaeologist] Danny [Herman], is that with the lack of budget to prepare the site for visits and tourism, next week the Israel Antiquities Authority plans to cover the whole building, in order to protect its remains.

Therefore, this weekend is probably the last chance to see the church, including its extraordinary mosaic floors, before they are concealed.

Background here.

Colloquium: The Dead Sea Scrolls and Pauline Literature

QUMRAN COLLOQUIUM: Les manuscrits de la mer Morte et la littérature paulinienne – The Dead Sea Scrolls and Pauline Literature, to be held in Metz, France, on 14-16 June 2011.

National Geographic: Egypt Antiquities Restoration Under Way

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC: Egypt Antiquities Restoration Under Way.

With Letters of Light

NEW BOOK:

With Letters of Light: Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Early Jewish Apocalypticism, Magic, and Mysticism in Honor of Rachel Elior (Edited by Daphna Arbel and Andrei Orlov; Ekstasis: Religious Experience from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, 2; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011; ISBN 978-3-11-022201-2; US$ 182.00).

This collection of essays is a tribute to Rachel Elior’s decades of teaching, scholarship and mentoring. If a Festschrift reflects the individuality of the honoree, then this volume offers insights into the scope of Rachel Elior’s interests and scholarly achievements in the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jewish apocalypticism, magic, and mysticism from the Second Temple period to the later rabbinic and Hekhalot developments. The majority of articles included in the volume deal with Jewish and Christian apocalyptic and mystical texts constituting the core of experiential dimension of these religious traditions.

Contents of the volume:

Daphna Arbel and Andrei Orlov
Rachel Elior – An Appreciation from her Colleagues and
Students - 1-5

Frances Flannery
The Consideration of Religious Experience in the Work of
Rachel Elior - 6-10

I. Exegesis

Kelley Coblentz Bautch
Peter and the Patriarch: A Confluence of Traditions? - 13-27

Silviu N. Bunta
In Heaven or on Earth: A Misplaced Temple Question about
Ezekiel’s Visions - 28-44

James R. Davila
Scriptural Exegesis in the Treatise of the Vessels, a Legendary
Account of the Hiding of the Temple Treasures - 45-61

Dan Merkur
Cultivating Visions through Exegetical Meditations - 62-91

Sergey Minov
“Serpentine” Eve in Syriac Christian Literature of Late
Antiquity - 92-114

Annette Yoshiko Reed
From “Pre-Emptive Exegesis” to “Pre-Emptive Speculation”?
Ma‘aseh Bereshit in Genesis Rabbah and Pirqei deRabbi Eliezer - 115-132

Mark Verman
Earthly and Heavenly Jerusalem in Philo and Paul:
A Tale of Two Cities - 133-156

II. Ritual

Crispin Fletcher-Louis
The Book of Watchers and the Cycle of New Year Festivals - 159-168

Yuval Harari
A Different Spirituality or ‘Other’ Agents?: On the Study of
Magic in Rabbinic Literature - 169-195

Rebecca Lesses
“They Revealed Secrets to Their Wives”: The Transmission of
Magical Knowledge in 1 Enoch - 196-222

Jodi Magness
The Impurity of Oil and Spit among the Qumran Sectarians 223-231

Andrei Orlov
“The Likeness of Heaven”: The Kavod of Azazel in the
Apocalypse of Abraham - 232-253

Pieter W. van der Horst
Mystical Motifs in a Greek Synagogal Prayer? - 254-264

III. Transformation

Daphna Arbel
“A Chariot of Light Borne by Four Bright Eagles”:
Eve’s Vision of the Chariot in the Greek Life of Adam and Eve - 267-284

Joseph Dan
“Messianic Movements in the Period of the Crusades” - 285-298

April D. DeConick
Jesus Revealed: The Dynamics of Early Christian Mysticism - 299-324

Celia Deutsch
Aseneth: Ascetical Practice, Vision, and Transformation - 325-348

Naomi Janowitz
“You Are Gods”: Multiple Divine Beings in Late Antique
Jewish Theology - 349-364

Alan F. Segal
Transcribing Experience - 365-382

UPDATE: April De Conick has more on the book at her Forbidden Gospels blog.

Richard Bauckham on lecture tour in USA

RICHARD BAUCKHAM is on a lecture tour in the United States through early March. Mark Goodacre notes his upcoming lectures at Duke here. Also, Ed Gallagher, who pointed out the lecture website to me, asks that I mention the two lectures at Heritage Christian University, in Florence, Alabama, on "Identity and Community in the Gospel of John" on Friday, 11 Feb. (9:30am and 1:00pm).

Eerdmans now has a blog

EERDMANS PUBLISHING COMPANY now has a blog: EerdWord.

Colloquium on Secret Mark at York University

A COLLOQUIUM ON THE SECRET GOSPEL OF MARK is being held at York University in April. Phil Harland e-mails:

Tony Burke and I (Phil Harland) have been busy arranging a special colloquium on the Secret Gospel of Mark at York University (to be held Friday, April 29, 2011). We would like to invite scholars and students who are interested to attend. The public is also invited to the evening session.

For information and registration, go to:
http://www.tonyburke.ca/yorkchristianpocrypha/

Here is the information for the conference:

“Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? The Secret Gospel of Mark in Debate”

April 29, 2011, York University (Vanier College)
Scholarly Discussion (9 am-5 pm) and Public Debate (7-9 pm)

Featuring: Scott Brown, University of Toronto; Tony Burke, York University; Bruce Chilton, Bard College; Craig Evans, Acadia Divinity College; Phil Harland, York University; Charles Hedrick, Missouri State U.; Peter Jeffery, U. of Notre Dame; Marvin Meyer, Chapman University; Allan Pantuck, U. of California; Pierluigi Piovanelli, U. of Ottawa; Hershel Shanks, Editor ofBiblical Archaeology Review

From the website:

Scope and Objectives

In 1958, American Biblical scholar Morton Smith made an astounding discovery in the Mar Saba monastery in Jerusalem. Copied into the back of a 17th century book was a lost letter by Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150-215 CE) containing excerpts from a longer version of the Gospel of Mark. This Secret Gospel of Mark, as it became known, is now one of the most debated texts of the Christian Apocrypha. More than fifty years after its discovery, there is still no consensus on the issues of its authenticity. Was the letter truly written by Clement of Alexandria? Or by a medieval or even modern forger? Was the forger Morton Smith himself? The debate has heated up in recent years with the publication of Stephen Carlson’s The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s Invention of Secret Mark (Waco, TX: Baylor, 2005) and several criticisms of Carlson’s work by other scholars. Unfortunately, there has been no effective venue for these scholars to share their views on the text and arrive closer to a resolution of the issue of its authenticity. It is hoped that some progress can be made by bringing these scholars together to present their latest work on the gospel to each other, to an audience of interested scholars, to a curious public, and ultimately to an even wider audience with the publication of the papers and summaries of the discussion that arises from their gathering.

Review of Halperin, Journal of a UFO Investigator

DAVID HALPERIN'S JOURNAL OF A UFO INVESTIGATOR is reviewed by Adam Sobsey in indyweek.com. Excerpt:

Those with knowledge of Jewish mysticism will probably find more resonances than the lay reader, for whom the book is less an allegory than a frantic phantasmagoria, scary and bewildering, full of unwanted transformations and disappearances and suffering, without a light at the end of what Danny calls a “tunnel that leads from death into life”—that is, adulthood, where the terrain is “jagged rocks.” Danny doesn’t want to stay trapped in the tunnel, of course, but nor does he want to emerge, plunge and be dashed on the rocks below. Welcome to adolescence.

Background here.

James Kugel on cancer and religious belief

BIBLICAL SCHOLAR JAMES KUGEL has written a book on his experience with cancer and what he learned about human beliefs:

After cancer, biblical scholar James Kugel considers religious belief

By Sue Fishkoff · February 7, 2011

PASADENA, Calif. (JTA) -- When Jewish biblical scholar James Kugel was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of cancer in 2000, he didn’t find religion.

The world-renowned academic and author of numerous books, including the acclaimed “How to Read the Bible,” already was a practicing Orthodox Jew.

Instead, Kugel used his own very sudden confrontation with mortality to explore the roots of religious belief in general.

The result, “In the Valley of the Shadow,” published this month by Free Press, is an examination of what happened to Kugel after his diagnosis and how it helped him understand why people believe what they do.

Now cancer-free, Kugel retired in 2003 after 20 years as the Harry M. Starr Professor of Classical and Modern Hebrew Literature at Harvard University. He lives with his wife in Jerusalem, and he serves as chair of the Institute for the History of the Jewish Bible at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan.

In his book, Kugel explains his theory of the “small self” versus the “big self.” The small self, a concept that has existed throughout most of human history, posits the individual as a finite piece of the network of the universe. By contrast, the big self, a concept common among Western people today, refers to those who view the world through the prism of their own all-encompassing presence.

[...]

The article includes an interview with him about the book. I studied with Professor Kugel at Harvard University in the 1980s.

The church in Laodicea?

THE CHURCH IN LAODICEA?

Ancient church discovered in western Turkey

Monday, January 31, 2011
ISTANBUL - [Hürriyet] Daily News with wires

An ancient church mentioned in the Bible has been discovered in western Turkey, according to the head of the excavation.

Culture and Tourism Minister Ertuğrul Günay visited the ancient city of Laodicea on Sunday in Denizli province and was briefed by Professor Celal Şimşek, head of the excavation team. The professor said they have discovered the Laodicea Church, one of the seven mentioned in the Bible. Şimşek said the church from the fourth century A.D. was found by underground radar search, a system they have tried this year for the first time. “The major part of the church, which is built on an area of 2,000 square meters, has kept its original [status].”

[...]

The biblical references to a church in Laodicea are Colossians 4:15-16 and Revelation 3:14-22 (note: not "Revelations"). Also, the second-century heretical Christian leader Marcion evidently knew a manuscript tradition that made the NT letter of Paul(?) to the Ephesians a letter "to the saints who are in Laodicea." (The letter may have been a circular sent to multiple churches.)

Two problems here. First, the excavated church is from the fourth century but these New Testament books were written in the first century. Is there any reason to think this building goes back that far? Second, the references in Colossians and Revelation are to a "church" (ekklesia) in the sense of a community of believers in Laodicea, not a building. We are actully told in Colossians 4:15 that this church met in the house of someone named Nympha.

It is, of course, of great archaeological and historical interest that a fourth-century church building has been found in the ruins of ancient Laodicea, but so far nothing about it seems significant for first-century Christianity or the New Testament.

Larry Hurtado: Happy (400th) Birthday KJV!

LARRY HURTADO: Happy (400th) Birthday KJV!

Happy International Septuagint Day!

HAPPY INTERNATIONAL SEPTUAGINT DAY!

Arutz Sheva: More Waqf digging on the Temple Mount

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: More Waqf digging on the Temple Mount, according to Arutz Sheva. They have photos.

Digging on Temple Mount 'to Erase Traces of Jewish Altar'

by Gil Ronen

Muslim religious authorities are concluding a clandestine eight-month dig on the Temple Mount that is intended to erase traces of the Jewish Temple's Altar, Temple activists charge.

The digs have been taking place under the Dome of the Chain, believed to have been built over 1300 years ago. For eight months, the dome - which has a diameter of 14 meters - has been surrounded by a metal fence and black cloth, which hide whatever activity has been going on there from outside inspection. The Muslim Waqf religious authority has claimed the activity is simply a refurbishing of the structure, but refuses adamantly to let Jews or tourists near.

[...]

UPDATE (8 February): Todd Bolen is not buying the headline.

First day of classes

FIRST DAY OF CLASSES. May find time to do some blogging this evening.

Review of Halperin, Journal of a UFO Investigator

DAVID HALPERIN'S JOURNAL OF A UFO INVESTIGATOR receives a fairly negative review by Adam Mansbach in the Boston Globe. It also includes some important spoilers, so read at your own risk.

More on the book here.

Update from Zahi Hawass

ZAHI HAWASS has another update on Egyptian antiquities: The Sphinx is Sad. He says that the two mummies reportedly damaged in the Egyptian Museum were actually unidentified skulls that were stolen and then recovered without further damage. He also reports that the antiquities at Memphis and Saqqara, as well as various other sites are unharmed. His report on Saqqara is confirmed by a National Geographic article here, mostly based on the reporter's eyewitness testimony.

(HT Dorothy Lobel King on Facebook.)

UPDATE: Lee Rosenbaum has an anonymous report from a French Egyptologist which claims that Saqqara did suffer damage. (Via the Egyptology Blog, entry from 17:36 on Saturday.)