Belated recognition for Maaloula

IN DAMASCUS: Photo exhibition showcasing town of Maaloula and Aramaic music concert at Opera House (Syria TV).

Culture Minister Dr. Lubana Mashouh, who attended the exhibition, told SANA that this exhibition’s importance lies in the fact that it showcases a part of Syria’s cultural and Christian heritage, as the town of Maaloula is a symbol of coexistence of Syria.

She said that this exhibition also underlines Syria’s values of love and fraternity, representing a response to those who hate life and adopt the language of murder and animosity.

For his part, photographer Shammas said that this exhibition represents Syria’s suffering, particularly Maaloula, due to terrorism, and that he worked for two years to document the town with his photographs which depict various locations such as St. Serkis Convent and St. Thecla Convent as well as the people of Maaloula and their traditions.

Better late than never, I suppose. But it would have been nice if Maaloula had received this kind of attention before militant Islamists had devastated the town and desecrated the grave of St. Thecla in the civil war. Better still, if it had received some protection from the Syrian Government before that happened. Or at least the Government could have refrained from closing Maaloula's Aramaic Institute because idiots had noticed that the Aramaic script looks like Hebrew.

Cross file under "Aramaic Watch" and "Ma'aloula, Malula." Follow the links in my comments above for much background on Maaloula.

The Deir al-Surian Library in the news

THE MONASTERY AT DEIR AL-SURIAN is profiled in an article by Teresa Levonian Cole in Spear's Magazine, reprinted by AINA: Egypt's Mysterious Monastery Hides Ancient Secrets. I don't see anything in it that hasn't been covered in previous posts, but it's a nice overview of the Monastery, the recent renovation of its library, and the precious Coptic, Arabic, Ethiopic, and Syriac manuscripts that have been preserved in it for many centuries. Excerpt (but worth reading in full):

The sprawling suburbs of Cairo have encroached upon much of the surrounding wilderness. But follow the Desert Highway for a 90-minute drive north-west from the capital and you will reach a timeless oasis that lies behind Deir al-Surian's 40-foot blush-coloured walls.

Above these 10th-century defences peep the domes of churches, whose treasures -- including magnificent frescoes dating from the 7th century -- most visitors have come to see. Also visible are palm fronds, spires and, in the north-west corner, a squat tower complete with drawbridge, which is where this story begins.

The tower, built around AD 850, contained the monastery's original library. It might have remained a library like any other, had it not been for a decision by the new vizier to tax the monasteries in Egypt. To plead exemption for Deir al-Surian, Abbot Mushe of Nisibis made his way to the Abbasid capital of Baghdad in 927, and, while awaiting the Caliph's decision (it was favourable), embarked on a five-year spree that would yield a cache of 250 manuscripts from Syria and Mesopotamia.

This would form the core of his monastery's collection which, over the years, increased to number Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic and Christian-Arab texts, dating from the 5th to the 18th centuries. They would include biblical, Patristic and liturgical writings, as well as early translations of philosophy, medicine and science, many of whose original Greek texts have been lost.

Of these treasures, the most ancient are the writings in Syriac (a dialect of Aramaic, the language of Christ), which include the earliest dated Old and New Testament manuscripts ever found in any language: part of the Book of Isaiah, dated AD 459/60, and a Gospel of AD 510.

Lord Curzon visited the library in the early nineteenth century and came away with some manuscripts. The British Museum purchased many of the rest, but quite a few are still there. I hope they stay safe.

Past posts on the Monastery of Deir al-Surian and its library are here, here, here, here, and here. And two posts deal with that single page recently recovered from a Syriac manuscript dated to 411 C.E. (here and here).

UPDATE (20 February): Tony Burke comments.

DSS purchase in 1955

ANNIVERSARY: On This Day: Israel reveals it has all the Dead Sea Scrolls after secretly buying them from Arabs (Julian Gavaghan, Yahoo News). Cool contemporary newsreel.

The article is a little confused toward the end: the Dead Sea Scrolls are the (roughly) 972 scrolls found in the eleven caves near Qumran and are widely believed to be a library left by a single sectarian Jewish group that was probably related in some way to the Essenes. The "letters hidden by those fleeing Roman forces" are from the period of the Bar Kokhba revolt, a couple of generations later, found in other caves in the area.

Reconstructing a Phoenician

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: WHAT DID ANCIENT PHOENICIANS LOOK LIKE? (Culturekiosque).

The American Univerisity of Beirut Archaeological Museum opened a special exhibition recently, showcasing a reconstruction of a Phoenician man, whose 2500-year-old skeleton was discovered in Tunis, in 1994.

So actually he was a Carthaginian. But close enough.

Albeck, Introduction to Jewish Law in Talmudic Times, on sale now

FOR YOU, SPECIAL DEAL: Introduction to Jewish Law in Talmudic Times, by Shalom Albeck (Bar-Ilan University Press) is available at 30% off until 20 February.

The 10 coolest dead languages?

BUZZFEED: The 10 Coolest Dead Languages. Via Christopher Rollston on Facebook.

Now Jessica Misener has produced a nice list and there is nothing wrong with the dead languages in it. I myself read (or at least have at one time been able to read) six of the ten. But as commenters on Chris's post point out, many worthy ancient languages are omitted. What about Ugaritic, Phoenician, and Sumerian, not to speak of Syriac, Hittite, Linear B, and Avestan? And those are just well deciphered ones. Etruscan, Proto-Elamite, Linear A, and Olmec are cool too, even if we don't really know what they say. There is much coolness here, and I would be hard pressed to pick a top ten myself. But points to Ms. Misener for trying.

Harkins et al. (eds.), The Watchers in Jewish and Christian Traditions

NEW BOOK: Angela Kim Harkins, Kelley Coblentz Bautch, John C. Endres (eds.), The Watchers in Jewish and Christian Traditions (Fortress, 2014).

At the origin of the Watchers tradition is the single enigmatic reference in Genesis 6 to the "sons of God" who had intercourse with human women, producing a race of giants upon the earth. That verse sparked a wealth of cosmological and theological speculation in early Judaism. Here leading scholars explore the contours of the Watchers traditions through history, tracing their development through the Enoch literature, Jubilees, and other early Jewish and Christian writings. This volume provides a lucid survey of current knowledge and interpretation of one of the most intriguing theological motifs of the Second Temple period.

As noted on Friday, Dr. Harkins is coming soon to the University of Birmingham for a two-year fellowship on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Aramaic Lord's Prayer bracelet

ARAMAIC WATCH: Independent entrepreneurial Aramaist Steve Caruso has a Kickstarter project: The Galilean Aramaic Lord's Prayer Bracelet Project.

Unprovenanced in Gaza

TODD BOLEN: Apollo Statue Discovered in Gaza. With what some think is a fishy story about its discovery.

The label "magic" in antiquity

SARAH VEALE: On the Arbitrary Appellation of Magic in Antiquity – "what is labelled magic is a moving target" (Invocatio).

New Jewish Babylonian Aramaic grammar

NEW BOOK: Elitzur A. Bar-Asher Siegal, Introduction to the Grammar of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic (Lehrbücher orientalischer Sprachen - LOS III / 3, 2013).

The dialect spoken and written by the Jews of Babylonia from the third century CE onwards is known as "Jewish Babylonian Aramaic". This is the first comprehensive description of this dialect since Levias' "Grammar of Babylonian Aramaic" of 1930. The current book offers a thorough reexamination of the grammar on the basis of a large corpus in its manuscript witnesses. It not only synthesizes the results of recent scholarship but introduces original insights on many important questions. The book is designed to appeal to readers of all backgrounds, including those with no prior background in Babylonian Aramaic or the Babylonian Talmud. The discussion frequently makes reference to parallels in other Semitic languages and in other Aramaic dialects, as well as to a variety of topics in linguistics . The book is structured as a textbook: it introduces topics in an order determined by pedagogical considerations, and offers vocabulary notes and translation exercises at the end. At the same time, the book can be used as a reference grammar.

(Via the Talmud Blog on Facebook. Cross-file under "Aramaic Watch.")

Harkins coming to Birmingham

CHARLOTTE HEMPEL posts the following on the SOTS Facebook page:

NEW DEAD SEA SCROLLS APPOINTMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM

Dr. Angela Kim Harkins, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Fairfield University, Fairfield, CT, USA, has been awarded a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship (IIF) from the 7th Framework Programme for Research funded by the European Commission for 24 months of continuous research at the total sum of 309,000 Euros. Dr. Harkins will conduct research at the University of Birmingham in collaboration with Dr. Charlotte Hempel on a project entitled, “The Teacher of Righteousness and Religious Experience in the Dead Sea Scrolls.” The proposed project is an interdisciplinary and comprehensive assessment of the evidence for the figure known as the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ in the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered at Khirbet Qumran. Dr. Harkins will use integrative approaches to understanding the body and its experiences, with special attention to how the instrumentalization of emotions can shed light on the experience of religion during this time. While emotion’s role in the construction and reconstruction of memory has long been acknowledged, this study examines how the strategic arousal of affect generated by texts that mention the Teacher of Righteousness serves to reinvigorate and intensify his memory among his followers.

Marie Curie Incoming International Fellowships (IIF) are individual fellowships that aim to attract top-class researchers from outside Europe to undertake innovative research in Europe from 1 to 2 years (incoming phase), with a view to developing mutually-beneficial research co-operation. Proposals from all areas of scientific and technological research of interest to the European Community are accepted and there are no pre-defined priority areas.

This is excellent news. Congratulations to Dr. Harkins, to the University of Birmingham, and to Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship on this side of the pond.

Iraqi Jewish Archive - some progress?

UNANIMOUS SENATE RESOLUTION: Senate bids to save ancient Iraqi Jewish archive. Time is running out for State Dept. to renegotiate the status of the massive collection before it’s returned to Iraq in June (Rebecca Shimoni Stoil, Times of Israel).

The resolution “strongly urges the Department of State to renegotiate with the Government of Iraq the provisions of the original agreement that was signed between the National Archives and Records Administration and the Coalition Provisional Authority in order to ensure that the Iraqi Jewish Archive be kept in a place where its long-term preservation and care can be guaranteed.”

It also implies that the archives, now in the US, should not be returned to Iraq, stipulating that “the Iraqi Jewish Archive should be housed in a location that is accessible to scholars and to Iraqi Jews and their descendants who have a personal interest in it.” Only a handful of Jews remain in Iraq, and their descendants are scattered across the world, with large numbers living in Israel and the United States.

Renegotiation sounds good to me. I could get behind that. But the question is whether the State Department and Iraq can. Stay tuned ...

Background here and links.

Happy Valentine's Day!

PALEOJUDAIC EROTICA: Ancient Jewish Aphrodisiacs Can Spice Up Valentine’s Day—or Any Shabbat Dinner. Whatever holiday you’re celebrating, put romance on the menu by taking some advice from everyone from Maimonides to Dr. Ruth (Merissa Nathan Gerson in Tablet).

Should unprovenanced cuneiform tablets be published?

ASOR BLOG: Cuneiform Exceptionalism: An Argument for Studying and Publishing Unprovenanced Tablets (Jerrold S. Cooper).

I don't have a great deal at stake in this particular debate, but I find Professor Cooper's arguments pretty persuasive. I have taken a similar position about certain types of antiquities here (see my point (3) in my comments under the quote of Larry Stager) and my arguments would apply likewise to cuneiform texts. A follow-up post to that one is here. Additional relevant comments are here and links. In the case of Northwest Semitic inscriptions, unprovenanced texts should be regarded as fake until shown convincingly to be otherwise.

The Lexam English Septuagint

BRIAN W. DAVIDSON: Interview with Two Editors of the Lexham English Septuagint

Rick Brannan and Ken Penner were kind enough to sit down and talk with me about a recently published English translation of the LXX, the Lexham English Septuagint (LES). I shared an early draft of these questions with a few friends who are involved in Septuagint studies, and couple of them had questions of their own. I have included these below.

The machines still need us. For now.

A little-known Syriac fragment of 4 Ezra

LIV INGEBORG LIED: Recycling 4 Ezra: 4 Ezra 8:33-41a and 41c-48 in the covers of an Arabic codex. The codex is written in Arabic, but the papyrus fragment of 4 Ezra was incorporated as part of the codex cover and is in Syriac.

UPDATE: I have collected a lot of background information on 4 Ezra and related texts here, and note also here.

Coming back to Talmud

ONE MAN'S ODYSSEY: Reading David Foster Wallace Led Me Back to Studying the Talmud. The late author’s work was Talmudic in nature. That’s why his books made me miss the Jewish texts I’d left behind (Joseph Winkler in Tablet).

After a torrid and heady five-year relationship with Talmud, first in yeshiva in Israel then at Yeshiva University, I had given up the Talmud and left Orthodoxy about three years before the event. But speaking about Wallace, I suddenly realized that I couldn’t really ever leave the rigors, pains, and joys of a Talmudic mindset. It marked me for life.

(HT reader Yehoshua Rabinowitz.)

When is a sukkah not a sukkah?

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: How Large Must a Sukkah Be To Be Called a Sukkah—And Yet Still Be Far From Heaven? In dissenting opinions, Talmudic rabbis propose and debate every detail of Sukkot’s booth and, in so doing, measure God

Unusually, a Talmudic sage appeals to the praxis of a woman to decide the halakhah. Plus, why Elijah didn't really ascend to heaven.

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

News on the Gospel of Jesus' Wife

LARRY HURTADO: “Jesus’ Wife” Fragment: Latest Developments.

Maybe we're finally getting somewhere with the GJW.

Background here and links.

UPDATE (12 February): Rumors are flying that the ink has tested as ancient. If so, that will be interesting, although the various literary problems with the text need to be addressed as well. But in any case it will very encouraging to have one of these controversial texts being published properly in a peer-review journal.

JSIJ: Brody, "Petoterot and Benot Shuah"

JEWISH STUDIES, AN INTERNET JOURNAL has published a new article: Robert Brody, "Petoterot and Benot Shuah." Click on the latter link to download the article as a pdf file. Abstract:

This article discusses Mishnah Avodah Zarah 1:5, which lists items which Jews are forbidden to sell to pagans, apparently because they were likely to be used in idolatrous worship. These include pine cones "and/with their petoterot" and benot shuah; "and" is the reading of the so-called Babylonian manuscripts of the Mishnah while "with" is the reading of the so-called Palestinian manuscripts. The author argues that "and" is the more original reading and that the traditional understanding of petoterot as stalks is correct. He further contends that Lieberman's identification of benot shuah needs to be corrected slightly: this term should be understood as referring specifically to the fruit of a certain variety of pine tree and not to the tree itself, which was called simply shuah.

The Digital Loeb Classical Library®

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS: Forthcoming in Fall 2014: The Digital Loeb Classical Library®.

The Loeb Classical Library®, founded by James Loeb in 1911, has from the very beginning fostered its stated mission to make classical Greek and Latin literature accessible to the broadest range of readers. The digital Loeb Classical library extends this mission for readers of the twenty-first century. Harvard University Press is honored to renew James Loeb’s vision of accessibility and with the introduction of the digital Loeb Classical Library presents an interconnected, fully searchable, perpetually growing, virtual library of all that is important in Greek and Latin literature. Epic and lyric poetry; tragedy and comedy; history, philosophy, and oratory; the great medical writers and mathematicians; those Church fathers who made particular use of the Classics—in short, our entire Greek and Latin Classical heritage is represented here with up-to-date texts and accurate and literate English translations. 523 volumes of fully searchable Latin, Greek, and English texts are available in a modern and elegant interface, allowing readers to browse, search, bookmark, annotate, and share content with ease.

Follow the link for a video and more information.

This might not be the most tactful time to bring this up, but many of the Loeb volumes are out of copyright and are available for free as digital scans. But this new version is much spiffier and has better features.

Other past posts on the LCL are here and here.

An Iraqi Jew on the Iraqi Jewish Archive

THE FORWARD: Send Iraqi Jewish Archive Back Where It Belongs. Priceless Trove Will Serve Vital Educational Role in Baghdad. Sigal Samuel's core arguments are here:

The three main arguments for keeping the trove here go something like this. First, Iraq stole these artifacts from the Jews; that makes these Jews (or their descendants) their rightful owners. Second, Iraq persecuted its Jews to the point of extinction; why should they get to keep our things? Third, nowadays only about five Jews remain in Iraq, a country that most of world Jewry cannot easily visit; shouldn’t the artifacts be kept someplace accessible?

My response? No, no and no.

However much we as Iraqi Jews may resent having had this property stolen from us (and believe me, I’m not pleased about it), the only reason we’re seeing it now is because the State Department got it out of Iraq by promising, ultimately, to send it back there. There’s a word for people who take stuff, promise to return it, and then don’t. It’s called stealing.

It’s also called cultural imperialism. Hauling these precious artifacts out of Iraq and into an American gallery brings to mind the Egyptian artifacts that were taken out of their native country to fill the display halls of the British Museum. After all that the U.S. forces did in Iraq — including creating the unstable conditions that led to the plundering of that country’s National Museum in 2003 — we should blush at the thought of expropriating this archive for our own museums.

This is a difficult one. In practical terms, the most important consideration is what the State Department decides to do with the archive. It has the power to do pretty much what it wants. A closely related issue is, of course, international law, on which I am not qualified to comment.

In moral terms, the following considerations seem to me to be the most important (your mileage may vary).

1. Personal effects, such as report cards, should be returned to living owners or the immediate families of dead ones, if they want them.

2. Centuries-old Torah and Talmud manuscripts and the like should be kept wherever they are safest and they should be available for scholars to study. I am not sure Iraq is the best place for either desideratum. They are the heritage of humanity, not just of Iraq and not just of Jews, although if specific owners can be established, I suppose they would have a claim on them too, as per point 1 above.

3. The claim of Iraq to the archive is tenuous at best. If the manuscripts had been looted from a museum, there would be a much stronger case for their return to that museum. (Parallel case here.) They were not. They were recovered from the offices of the Iraqi secret police, who looted them from Jews who were expelled from Iraq. The analogy of returning art stolen by Nazis to Germany has some force to it. And this is not the best time to bring up Egyptian artifacts.

4. It's generally a good idea for the State Department to keep its promises or, if not, to have a compelling reason for breaking them.

Whether all that adds up to a solution, I leave up to you. I blog, you decide.

Follow the link to this most recent post on the Iraqi Jewish archive, which has links leading back to 2003.

Schachter on Talmudic layout

THE TALMUD BLOG: The Flow of Things: Ruminations on Talmudic Layout (Ben Schachter).

In celebration of The Talmud Blog’s redesign, I have been invited to offer some observations on the layout of the Talmud inspired by my background as a practitioner and scholar of the visual arts. This is a double honor for me as this is also my inaugural post. Thank you for the invitation.

Seland, Why Read Philo?

FORTHCOMING BOOK: Why Read Philo? And How! Handbook to Philo of Alexandria, Torrey Seland (Eerdmans).

Guidebook par excellence to a significant ancient Jewish scholar

A contemporary of both Jesus and the apostle Paul, Philo was a prolific Jewish theologian, philosopher, and politician — a fascinating, somewhat enigmatic figure — who lived his entire life in Alexandria, Egypt. His many books are important sources for our understanding of ancient Judaism, early Christianity, and the philosophical currents of that time.

Why Read Philo? And How! is an excellent introductory guide to Philo's work and significance. The contributors — all well-known experts on Philo of Alexandria — discuss Philo in context, offer methodological considerations (how best to study Philo), and explore Philo's ongoing relevance and value (why reading him is important). This practical volume will be an indispensable resource for anyone delving into Philo and his world.

Due out in the Autumn. Cross-file under "Asking the Important Questions."

Daniel J. Harrington, S. J., 1940-2014

SAD NEWS, POSTED BY GABRIELE BOCCACCINI ON THE ENOCH SEMINAR FACEBOOK PAGE:

The rector of Faber Jesuit Community at Boston College announced this evening [Friday] that Dan Harrington, S.J., passed away at 6:30 pm Friday evening.

The wake will be at 5:00 pm on Wednesday, February 12, at St. Ignatius Church, 28 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467. The funeral will follow the wake at 7:00 pm.

Daniel Harrington (1940-2014) was one of the most distinguished specialist in Second Temple Judaism, author of numerous books and articles.

May his memory be for a blessing / Requiescat in pace.

Indeed.

Jack Sasson also links to Fr. Harrington's Wikipedia page here and his Boston College page here. Not mentioned in any of the above is his extensive, important work on Pseudo-Philo's Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum (Biblical Antiquities), for example, here, here, and here.

2014 Gorgias book grant

GORGIAS PRESS:

Welcome to the Gorgias Book Grant Program

As part of our efforts to provide resources to graduate students in the humanities, Gorgias Press is announcing its annual book grant. Every year, Gorgias chooses two graduate students for its Gorgias Book Grant, an award of $500 worth of Gorgias titles (each) to outstanding students in their fields.

2014-2015 Grant Field: Any field within the scope of Gorgias Publications
Application Deadline March 1, 2014
Grant Date March 31, 2014

Follow the link for application details

Septuagint poetry

TIMOTHY MICHAEL LAW: A haiku for the LXX.

Appropriate for today.

Time to party

TODAY IS INTERNATIONAL SEPTUAGINT DAY!

Go read some Greek. Just go wild.

New edition of Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars

4TH EDITION: Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature by L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson (OUP). Forthcoming at the end of February.

One of the remarkable facts about the history of Western culture is that we are still in a position to read large amounts of the literature produced in classical Greece and Rome despite the fact that for at least a millennium and a half all copies had to be produced by hand and were subject to the hazards of fire, flood, and war. This book explains how the texts survived and gives an account of the reasons why it was thought worthwhile to spend the necessary effort to preserve them for future generations.

In the second edition a section of notes was included, and a new chapter was added to deal with some aspects of scholarship since the Renaissance. In the third edition (1991), the authors responded to the urgent need to take account of the very large number of discoveries in this rapidly advancing field of knowledge by substantially revising or enlarging certain sections. The last two decades have seen further advances, and this revised edition is designed to take account of them.

Talmudic moral conundra and medicine

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: In the Talmud, One Sin Is Beyond Repentance: Giving God and Jews a Bad Name. A holy desecration is unethical in part because of the social pressure to reflect well on the tribe.

Plus the "trolly problem" and some dubious cures for rabies.

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

Raphael Patai Prize winner

THE WINNER OF LAST YEAR'S RAPHAEL PATAI PRIZE: 2013 Patai Prize in Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Awarded to Kate Reyes.

The winner of the Prize is Kate A. Reyes for her essay, "Demonology and Magic Ritual Texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” completed at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. Committee members praised its erudition and the sophistication with which she analyzed historical texts. The paper was part of her Honours dissertation under the supervision of Professor James R. Davila. Ms. Reyes graduated with an MA in Biblical Studies and Hebrew. In her undergraduate studies, she was awarded the Robert T. Jones Fellowship to undertake a Master of Theological Studies at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University.

I have known about this for some time, but have only just found the online announcement. I have already congratulated her in private, but now I am very happy to do so in public. Well done, Katie!

The Raphael Patai prize normally runs every year and usually is announced at the end of January. Last year's announcement was noted here. I haven't been able to find an announcement yet for 2014, but I will keep you posted.

Sappho and Jesus' Wife

DAVID MEADOWS has an interesting discussion of some indirect implications of the announcement of the recent discovery of two new poems of the Greek poet Sappho for the Gospel of Jesus' Wife. If you haven't heard the latter story yet, see David's Rogue Classicism post A New Sapphic Poem ~ Wading into the Morass for initial background. Briefly, an anonymous private collector has made available to Cambridge paleographer Dirk Obbink an unpublished papyrus containing a couple of hitherto unknown poems attributed to Sappho. The papyrus is unprovenanced, but is perhaps from Oxyrhynchus. Based on its physical characteristics and the content of the poems, it is the judgment of Obbink (and dude knows his stuff) that it is genuine and the poems are by Sappho.

Okay, cool, but what has this to do with Jesus' wife? According to Obbink the owner "submitted the papyrus to autopsy and multi-spectral photography, as well as Carbon 14 testing of an uninscribed portion of the papyrus sheet itself by an American laboratory, that returned a date of around 201 AD, with a plus-minus range of a hundred years." As David asks, "So it appears that it really isn’t that difficult to arrange for this sort of testing. The obvious question: what’s taking so long to get it done with the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife?" To be fair, the TLS article does not say exactly when the owner commissioned the tests, but the implication seems to be that this was done after the papyrus was made available to scholars for evaluation. But it would be helpful to have clarification on exactly when the tests were done.

Cross-file under "Asking The Important Questions." Background on the Gospel of Jesus' Wife is here with many links.

The Dead Sea Scrolls Reloaded

UPGRADE: The Dead Sea Scrolls – Version 2.0. The Israel Antiquities Authority is launching today an upgraded version of its Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library. It includes 10,000 new photographs of unprecedented quality (HeritageDaily).

More on the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library (with Google, the IAA, and the Israel Museum) here and links.

St Andrews Symposium deadline extended

THE ST ANDREWS SYMPOSIUM FOR BIBLICAL AND EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES: Early-Bird Registration Extended Until 15 February. For you, special deal!

Background here and links.

Book of Books exhibition

AT THE BIBLE LANDS MUSEUM IN JERUSALEM: ‘Book of Books’ exhibits 2,000 years of Bible texts. Items include fragments from Dead Sea Scrolls, Septuagint, early New Testament Scriptures, Cairo genizah, illuminated biblical manuscripts and Gutenberg Bible.

“The Book of Books” exhibition includes original fragments from the Septuagint, the Vulgate, the Gutenberg Bible and the Cairo genizah, along with medieval illuminated manuscripts, Torah scrolls and other biblical relics. At the end is a working replica of the 15th century Gutenberg printing press that revolutionized the availability of the Scriptures.

“The exhibition is about the Bible as a book, not about theology,” says curator Dr. Filip Vukosavović as he takes ISRAEL21c through the show. “We cover over 2,000 years of the existence of the Bible as a physical item, and how it developed chronologically, geographically and linguistically throughout the world from Israel, where both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament originated.”

Since opening in October, the show has drawn so many visitors that its six-month run was extended.

Apparently the exhibition consists of material from the Green Collection (on which more here and here and links). Past posts on the Bible Land Museum and its exhibitions are here, here, here, here, here, here (and links), here, here, here, and here (and links).

UPDATE: Dead link now fixed. Sorry about that!

Hurtado on ancient Jewish monotheism

LARRY HURTADO: Forthcoming Article: “Ancient Jewish Monotheism.”

Leona Glidden Running, R.I.P.

PIONEERING FEMALE SCHOLAR:

Biblical Languages Expert Leaves Legacy of Student Mentorship

By Patricia Spangler
http://news.adventist.org
Posted 2014-01-31 21:21 GMT

Leona Running, who was the first female professor at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary, where she served for nearly six decades, and was an expert in biblical languages, died on January 22. She was 97.

[...]

Outside Adventist circles she was best known for her biography of William Foxwell Albright, whom she knew from her doctoral work at Johns Hopkins University in the early 1960s.

Conference on ancient evil

CONFERENCE: Evil in Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity.

Conference: Evil in Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity
23rd - 24th May 2014

As part of the ongoing research program of the Centre for the Social-Scientific Study of the Bible, an international group of biblical scholars will gather at St Mary’s University [Twickenham, London] in order to present research on the conception and significance of “evil” in Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity.

The keynote speaker will be Professor Loren Stuckenbruck of LMU-München, and will be joined by other invited speakers who will approach the topic from cultural, theological, historical, and textual perspectives. There is also some room for proposals for short papers*.

The event will be held in the beautiful Waldegrave Drawing Room on the St Mary's campus, and members of the public who are interested in this exciting topic are welcome to attend.

*Please send an abstract to chris.keith@smuc.ac.uk. The deadline for submission of abstracts is Tuesday 1st April.

Evil in this area is a popular topic these days. Sounds like an interesting conference.

Ben-Dov and Sanders (eds.), Ancient Jewish Sciences

ONLINE PREVIEW: Ancient Jewish Sciences and the History of Knowledge in Second Temple Literature. Editors: Jonathan Ben-Dov and Seth L. Sanders. TOC:

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction
Jonathan Ben-Dov and Seth L. Sanders

2. Enoch and the Beginnings of Jewish Interest in Natural Science
Philip Alexander

3. Enoch’s Science
James VanderKam

4. “I Was Shown Another Calculation” (חשבון אחרן אחזית): The Language of Knowledge in Aramaic Enoch and Priestly Hebrew
Seth L. Sanders

5. Philological and Epistemological Remarks on Enoch’s Science: Response to Papers by Seth L. Sanders and James VanderKam
Loren Stuckenbruck

6. Ideals of Science: The Infrastructure of Scientific Activity in Apocalyptic Literature and in the Yahad
Jonathan Ben-Dov

7. Networks of Scholars: The Transmission of Astronomical and Astrological Learning between Babylonians, Greeks and Jews
Mladen Popović

8. “Ancient Jewish Sciences” and the Historiography of Judaism
Annette Yoshiko Reed

A Bibliography for Ancient Jewish Sciences

Looks excellent.

Le Donne on the Noah Movie

ANTHONY LE DONNE: Noah... like a Dumpster Fire waiting to Happen. There is plenty of scope for a disastrously bad movie here, but we'll see ...

Earlier posts on Darren Aronofsky's upcoming Noah movie are here and here.

Oxford Postdoc in Cult of Saints: Syriac

SYRIAC HAGIOGRAPHY IS SO 2014: Research Associate, Cult of Saints project: Syriac

Salary: £29,837 - £31,664 p.a.
Fixed-term for four and a half years
Oxford vacancy reference: 111754

We are seeking to appoint a postdoctoral researcher from 1 April 2014 or as soon as possible thereafter to work on the project ‘The Cult of Saints: a christendom-wide study of its origins, spread and development’, directed by Dr Bryan Ward-Perkins and funded by a €2.3 million ERC Advanced Grant (2014-18). The project will investigate the origins and development of the cult of Christian saints, gathering all the evidence that is available on the cult, from its origins until around AD 700, across all the languages of early Christianity that have left evidence from this period (Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Greek and Latin). The project will employ six postdoctoral researchers in producing a series of monographs and a freely-available searchable database of the evidence for the cult of saints, with English translations of texts and full reference to relevant scholarly work. During the project, two workshops will be held with expert scholars from across Europe, in particular to test the effectiveness of the nascent database, and a major international conference will take place.

The appointee will have responsibility for collecting and researching all the material in Syriac, and will also produce a sole-authored monograph on some major aspect of the cult of the saints among the Syriac-using churches. S/he will liaise closely with Dr David Taylor of the Oriental Studies Faculty, Oxford. The appointee will be required to represent the project and deliver papers at team workshops, external workshops, conferences, public events, and other meetings. The successful candidate will hold a doctorate in a relevant field, have excellent knowledge of Syriac and the historical context of late-antique Christianity, and an effective working knowledge of the necessary modern scholarly languages. Knowledge of relevant ancient languages beyond Syriac, experience of working with hagiographical material and experience of working with databases would be desirable.

Only applications received before mid-day UK time on Monday 3 March 2014 can be considered. Interviews are expected to be held during early March. You will be required to upload a CV and supporting statement as part of your application.

Follow the link and scroll down for the listing and a link to further information. The same project also has a Greek-language postdoc.

Was the early Hebrew alphabet a syllabary?

ASOR BLOG: The Lost Link: The Alphabet in the Hands of the Early Israelites (Brian E. Colless).

A technical but, for epigraphers, very interesting argument that the shapes and stances of the letters in the earliest "Hebrew"/"Israelian" inscriptions indicated the vowels that went with them. I think the theory needs to be published in a peer-review journal before we get too excited about it, but it's good to have a preliminary presentation in this blog post.

Latin resources

SOME LATIN TEXTS AND RESOURCES OF INTEREST:

Vetus Latina (Torrey Seland)

The Latin Josephus Project (via James Darlack on Facebook)

Congratulations to Christopher Rollston

ERIC CLINE ON FACEBOOK:

I am delighted to announce that Christopher Rollston will be joining us in a permanent full-time position as Associate Professor of Northwest Semitic Languages and Literatures in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations here at the George Washington University. His position will begin on 1 August, in time for the Fall semester.

The George Washington University has just made an excellent appointment.

Well done, Chris. What a long, strange trip it's been.

Hollander, Josephus, the Emperors, and the City of Rome

NEW BOOK FROM BRILL:

Josephus, the Emperors, and the City of Rome
From Hostage to Historian

William den Hollander, Canadian Reformed Theological Seminary

In Josephus, the Emperors, and the City of Rome William den Hollander places under the microscope the Judaean historian's own account of the latter part of his life, following his first encounters with the Romans. Episodes of Josephus' life, such as his embassy to Rome prior to the outbreak of the 1st Judaean Revolt, his prophetic pronouncement of Vespasian's imminent rise to the imperial throne, and his time in the Roman prisoner-of-war camp, are subjected to rigorous analysis and evaluated against the broader ancient evidence by the application of a vivid historical imagination. Den Hollander also explores at great length the relationships formed by Josephus with the Flavian emperors and other individuals of note within the Roman army camp and, later, in the city of Rome. He builds solidly on recent trends in Josephan research that emphasize Josephus' distance from the corridors of power.

Robert Curzon, manuscript collector

LIV INGEBORG LIED: On manuscripts, preserves and cold feet: Robert Curzon's Visits to Monasteries in the Levant.

Lord Curzon (a.k.a. Lord Zouche) has been mentioned in previous PaleoJudaica posts here and here. And his 1873 obituary in The Times is online here.

Professor Lied gives Amazon links to purchase Curzon's volume. But if you don't want a hard copy (and you already have enough jar lids) you can read it here or download it as a pdf file or an electronic book here, both for free. For you, special deal!

Not dead yet?

IT'S FEELING BETTER: The Death of the Documentary Hypothesis (David Bokovoy).

MOTP1 reviews online

OLD TESTAMENT PSEUDEPIGRAPHA: MORE NONCANONICAL SCRIPTURES, Volume 1, is getting some attention in various online media.

First, Rick Brannan has finished his Twitter summary of the volume. Links to the tweets are collected on his blog here (noted previously here) and here.

Second, as Rick notes, Jim West has published a review on his blog here.

Third, Daniel Gurtner has published a review at Academia.edu here. (You have to log in as a member to download the whole thing.)

So add the above to the recent popular-media excitement over The Treatise of the Vessels.

Nice to see that the volume is already getting some attention. Here at St. Andrews, we are also going through it in our postgraduate Hebrew Bible/Old Testament seminar this semester.

If you haven't ordered your copy yet, you can buy it from Amazon here.

Review of Seow, Job 1-21

MARGINALIA: The Book of Job’s Past, Present, and Future Consequences – By Davis Hankins. Davis Hankins on C.L. Seow’s Job 1-21: Interpretation and Commentary. Excerpt:

Beyond Joban studies, Seow’s work unsettles the traditional commentary genre and opens vast interpretive possibilities for rereading our great books in light of the caches of evidence that interpreters have long treated according to what could be characterized as a usefulness paradigm. That is, the present text and interpreter make use of the past only to the extent that the past is useful to present concerns. What is not useful is suitable only for the archive. The uniqueness of Seow’s approach might be described in terms of its emergentist paradigm: the present is nothing more than an emergence out of the possibilities past consequences have opened.

More than simply a breath of fresh air for our shared humanistic inquiry, such work is also potentially quite urgent at this moment when the humanities are threatened on many different fronts, including by the ubiquitous demand for demonstrable usefulness. Where is the demonstrable usefulness of the humanities more clearly evident than in the history of consequences? This history reveals not only the usefulness of the humanities, but also how the humanities have shaped what counts as useful, an impact often overlooked in such discussions. While this history largely remains to be written, Seow’s significant contribution will hopefully and surely compel us to continue writing it.

I take the point and am largely sympathetic to it, although I think a good bit of the current trendy call for the humanities to be "useful" is corrosive and needs to be resisted. (Related thoughts here, here, and here.) But that is not to detract from the value of what sounds like a marvelous book.

Is Abracadabra Aramaic?

STEVE CARUSO: Abracadabra is NOT Aramaic.

Technically he is correct, but I think it's a little more complicated. Steve acknowledges that the first part of the phrase, "Abra," could come from the Aramaic word "to create," although it is badly pronounced (but ancient Greek-speaking magicians were less than rigorous about such things) and that the middle part, "ca" could be a preposition meaning "as" or "like." The problem is the last part, "dabra" which looks like an Aramaic form (with the emphatic ending "-a") of the Hebrew (not Aramaic) word davar (דבר), "word" (not "I speak"). As far as I can tell, this Hebraism is not attested in Aramaic, but we should be cautious about this, since the Hebrew root was borrowed into Aramaic, as we see in the word dibbura (דיבורא), "speech, "utterance," etc., in Rabbinic Aramaic (Jastrow, 295; Sokoloff, Palestinian, 144; Sokoloff, Babylonian, 326). If we allow for the possible similar (and otherwise unattested) borrowing of davar, Abracadabra could be a badly pronounced rendition of "I create according to the word" or the like. It seems entirely plausible to me that an ancient Jewish or Greco-Egyptian magician could have come up with this sort of cool-sounding incantation.

More on Abracadabra here and here and links.

Cross-file under "Aramaic Watch."

4 Maccabees in Sahidic Coptic

ALIN SUCIU: Ivan Miroshnikov’s Article on the Sahidic Version of 4 Maccabees. This Vetus Testamentum article is downloadable at Alin's blog post for free. For you, special deal!

Cross-file under "Old Testament pseudepigrapha."

The Mercava platform

AMBITIOUS NAME:

Mercava platform claims it’s the future of Jewish education
Daf Yomi program providing free Talmud access is being piloted in 100 schools; is it revolutionary, or over-hyped?

By Julie Wiener January 25, 2014, 10:13 pm (Times of Israel)

NEW YORK (JTA) — An Israel-based nonprofit boasts staff and board members from brand-name companies like Facebook and Disney. Its splashy fundraising video promises a customizable online platform for Jewish learning with a comprehensive digital library of Judaic texts featuring translations, links to related sources, maps and videos.

But is Mercava the future of Jewish education or mere vaporware, the tech term for overly hyped software that never fully materializes?

[...]

The promotional video is cool, but I thought it could have more specifics. But maybe I don't think like a startup investor. In any case the agenda of the project is, as this article notes, also nothing if not ambitious:

Mercava is hardly the first piece of Jewish educational technology, but it may be the most ambitious. A start-up called Sefaria has begun enlisting volunteers to help put the entire Jewish canon online. The publisher Behrman House makes its textbooks available in digital form. And Israel’s Center for Education Technology has helped develop interactive textbooks for use in Jewish day schools.

But none matches Mercava in the sheer breadth of features, services, texts and other media it plans to make available in one central hub. The scale of the site’s ambitions is evident in its marketing rhetoric, which touts the project as “the biggest thing to happen to Talmud since Talmud.”

[CEO and co-founder Yehuda] Moshe said Mercava has been in development for nearly five years and that most of the “underlying work” is done. A basic version of its Daf Yomi program providing free access to the Talmud already is available and has been piloted in almost 100 schools, mostly in Australia and England, he says.

Additional products will begin rolling out in July with the release of 1,000 interactive books in Hebrew and English. A lesson builder tool for teachers will be released soon after.

It is not clear whether Mercava will be open source, but Moshe emphasized that most of its contents will be offered for free.

[...]

Incidentally, this isn't the first time the Hebrew word "Merkavah" has been used as a product title. That one was pretty ambitious too. It will be interesting to follow what happens with the Mercava platform.

Some exegetical creativity in the Talmud

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: Too Much, Too Little: Talmudic Rabbis’ Creativity Shines When Interpreting Prohibitions. Manna, and fasting, are not just miracles of sustenance and faith, but also elements of jurisprudence. Excerpt:

Something similar happens in Yoma 76a, where Rabbi Elazar HaModai deduces that “the manna that fell for the Jewish people was 60 cubits high”—about 90 feet. At first, Rabbi Tarfon is skeptical, saying, “Modai, how long will you collect words?”—that is, speak meaninglessly. But Elazar HaModai has the figures to support his assertion. When the flood came in Noah’s time, he points out, the waters rose 15 cubits above the earth. Now, the flood happened because “the windows of heaven were opened.” But in the case of the manna, the book of Psalms says that God “opened the doors of Heaven.” And a door, Elazar calculates, is four times the size of a window. Thus the manna should be four times as high as the waters—that is, 60 cubits.

As Mr. Kirsch observes, this instance of Talmudic creativity is not without its problems. But it does illustrate how carefully the rabbis attended to intertextual connections within scripture. Read the whole column for examples of how jurisprudence fits in.

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

Welcome to Madhavi Nevader

OT/HB THREE-YEAR LECTURESHIP UPDATE: I am delighted to report that the temporary lectureship in Old Testament/Hebrew Bible here at St. Andrews has been filled with the hiring of Dr. Madhavi Nevader. She is just finishing up a Mellon Fellowship at Oxford and will be joining us here in the next couple of weeks.

Of course, everyone on Facebook already knows about this, but still a PaleoJudaica announcement is in order. Welcome Madhavi!

Review of Waddell, The Messiah

DIGLOTTING: Book Review: The Messiah – A Comparative Study of the Enochic Son of Man and the Pauline Kyrios.

Title: The Messiah: A Comparative Study of the Enochic Son of Man and the Pauline Kyrios

Author: James Waddell

Bibliographic info: XVI + 209 + 30 (of indices and bibliography)

Publisher: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013.

Somehow I missed this book when it came out.

Chancellor's Fellowship at Edinburgh

LARRY HURTADO: NT Position Advertised: Edinburgh. The closing date for applications is 7 February 2014.

Postdoc on Syriac hagiography

SYRIAC WATCH: Job vacancies: two fully-funded ERC Postdoctoral Re
search Fellowships (4 years each) at Ghent University (Belgium).

The Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University (Belgium) is seeking well-qualified applicants for two fully-funded Postdoctoral Research Fellowships attached to the European Research Council project Novel Saints. Ancient novelistic heroism in the hagiography of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages (http://erc.europa.eu/cordis_search/project_details/109905). The Principal Investigator of this project is Prof Dr ! Koen De Temmerman, who, as a classicist, specializes in ancient fiction and its persistence in later periods.

There is one position available in the field of Syriac hagiography and another in that of Persian medieval narrative literature.

The two successful applicants will start employment on 1 June 2014 or as soon as possible thereafter.

Deadline: applications should arrive no later than 21 March 2014.

The description of the position in Syriac hagiography is as follows:

The successful candidate will have an excellent knowledge of Syriac and a very good working knowledge of both Latin and Greek. (S)he will preferably have specialized in Syriac, late antique narrative literature and will have as central corpora within the project the so-called Acts of Persian martyrs, collections of Lives and hagiographical romances. Each of these three corpora invites dialogue with those examined by other team members. (S)he will be capable of producing (a) a text edition (with English translation) of a carefully-selected set of late Sasanian Acts and (b) detailed literary studies that cover the narrative qualities of the texts and analyze concepts of heroism and fictionalization.

HT Andrea Schmidt (via Peter Van Nuffelen) on the Hugoye list.

Research grant on Christian-Jewish enmity

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: How did it happen that the Jews became identified as enemies of Christians? Let me add my congratulations, along with Chris Keith, to McMaster Associate Professor Anders Runesson and his Swedish colleagues who have just received a major grant from the Swedish Research Council to study this problem.

Satlow, How the Bible Became Holy

NEW BOOK FROM YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS:

How the Bible Became Holy

Michael L. Satlow

In this sweeping narrative, Michael Satlow tells the fascinating story of how an ancient collection of obscure Israelite writings became the founding texts of both Judaism and Christianity, considered holy by followers of each faith. Drawing on cutting-edge historical and archeological research, he traces the story of how, when, and why Jews and Christians gradually granted authority to texts that had long lay dormant in a dusty temple archive. The Bible, Satlow maintains, was not the consecrated book it is now until quite late in its history.

He describes how elite scribes in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.E. began the process that led to the creation of several of our biblical texts. It was not until these were translated into Greek in Egypt in the second century B.C.E., however, that some Jews began to see them as culturally authoritative, comparable to Homer’s works in contemporary Greek society. Then, in the first century B.C.E. in Israel, political machinations resulted in the Sadducees assigning legal power to the writings. We see how the world Jesus was born into was largely biblically illiterate and how he knew very little about the texts upon which his apostles would base his spiritual leadership.

Synthesizing an enormous body of scholarly work, Satlow’s groundbreaking study offers provocative new assertions about commonly accepted interpretations of biblical history as well as a unique window into how two of the world’s great faiths came into being.

Michael L. Satlow is Professor of Religious Studies and Judaic Studies at Brown University. He has been awarded fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. He lives in Providence, RI.

Some of this sound controversial. Should generate an interesting discussion.

HT T Michael Law on Facebook.

Bindings of Syriac manuscripts

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: The Syriac manuscripts in the British Library: what happened to the bindings? (Liv Ingeborg Lied). More reason to think that we should save every scrap of every artifact from antiquity, even if it doesn't seem interesting to us now.

More On Shamma Friedman

MORE DETAILS FROM THE TALMUD BLOG: Shamma Friedman, Israel Prize Recipient.

Background here.

Mnemonic guide to the Gospel of Thomas

NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Gospel of Thomas: a quick guide (Peter M. Head at ETC).

Review of Ben-Eliyahu, Between Borders

THE TALMUD BLOG: A Review of Eyal Ben-Eliyahu’s “Between Borders”- Guest Post by Hanan Mazeh.

Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, Between Borders: The Boundaries of Eretz-Israel in the Consciousness of the Jewish People in the time of the Second Temple and in the Mishnah and Talmud Period, Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press, 2012, 348 pp. $27.

Eyal Ben-Eliyahu‘s Between Borders is the kind of book which deals with such fundamental questions that it makes you wonder how it is that they had not been seriously addressed before. ...

Workshop on modern Jewish reception of Josephus

H-JUDAIC: CFP: Workshop "The Jewish Reception of Josephus in the 20th and 21st Centuries. To be held on 16-17 June 2014 at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in Yarnton Manor. Follow the link for paper-proposal information.

An earlier workshop in the same series is noted here. And an interview with Tessa Rajak about the project is noted here.

Carthaginian child sacrifice

PUNIC WATCH: Carthaginians sacrificed own children, archaeologists say.
Graves holding tiny cremated bones confirm accounts dismissed as Greek or Roman black propaganda, study shows (Maev Kennedy, The Guardian). Oxonian lecturer in ancient history, Josephine Quinn:

The inscriptions are unequivocal: time and again we find the explanation that the gods 'heard my voice and blessed me'. It cannot be that so many children conveniently happened to die at just the right time to become an offering – and in any case a poorly or dead child would make a pretty feeble offering if you're already worried about the gods rejecting it."

"Then there is the fact that the animals from the sites, which were beyond question sacrificial offerings, are buried in exactly the same way, sometimes in the same urns with the bones of the children."

Although hundreds of remains were found, there were far too few to represent all the stillbirth and infant deaths of Carthage. According to Quinn, there were perhaps 25 such burials a year, for a city of perhaps 500,000 people.

[...]

Past coverage of this debate is here, here, and here. As for this:

Quinn said many of her academic colleagues were appalled by her conclusions.

"The feeling that some ultimate taboo is being broken is very strong. It was striking how often colleagues, when they asked what I was working on, reacted in horror and said, 'Oh no, that's simply not possible, you must have got it wrong.'"

"We like to think that we're quite close to the ancient world, that they were really just like us – the truth is, I'm afraid, that they really weren't."

I think anyone familiar with the carnage that is the history of the last century will agree with me that, yes, they were.

HT Francesca Stavrakopoulou on Facebook.

More mosaics excavated in Israel

LIVESCIENCE:

Ancient Church Mosaic With Symbol of Jesus Uncovered in Israel

By Megan Gannon, News Editor | January 22, 2014 10:09am ET

Update: The article was updated on Jan. 23 at 9:55 a.m. ET to include comments from an archaeologist at the site.

Archaeologists in Israel have uncovered intricate mosaics on the floor of a 1,500-year-old Byzantine church, including one that bears a Christogram surrounded by birds.

The ruins were discovered during a salvage excavation ahead of a construction project in Aluma, a village about 30 miles (50 kilometers) south of Tel Aviv, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced Wednesday (Jan. 22). ...

For many other mosaics discovered in Israel, see here and links.

News on that other Ark

IRVING FINKEL'S NEW BOOK, THE ARK BEFORE NOAH, gets extensive coverage in two articles in The Telegraph.

Irving Finkel: reader of the lost Ark
Tom Chivers meets the man who deciphered a 4,000-year-old blueprint – for the original Noah’s Ark

By Tom Chivers

7:00AM GMT 19 Jan 2014

Four thousand years ago, a millennium and a half before the first Jewish scholars put pen to parchment on the Book of Genesis, a scribe in what is now Iraq carved the story of a great flood on to a clay tablet, in the strange and beautiful script known as cuneiform. The story told of how a god came and warned a great man to build a boat, and to take his family on that boat, and two animals of every kind, because the world was to be cleansed with a flood.

About 30 years ago, one Douglas Simmonds wandered in to the British Museum, and handed the tablet to a man called Irving Finkel, who immediately recognised it as one of the most important archaeological finds of recent years. Dr Finkel, an Assyriologist or student of the civilisations of ancient Mesopotamia, begged Simmonds to leave it with him, but he would do no such thing. It took him until 2009 to convince Simmonds to let him have it; when he did, what he discovered was a piece of the flood story – the Assyrian story of the Ark, centuries before Noah.

[....]

Dr. Finkel himself also has written an article that tells the story of acquiring the tablet and deciphering it, as well as what it says and why it is important: Noah's Ark: the facts behind the Flood. A recently discovered Babylonian tablet is a blueprint for a round-shaped ark that animals could board two by two . The headline sums up the unique information in the tablet: it gives detailed instructions for building a gigantic round boat, or coracle, and it has the animals enter the boat "two by two," the latter point paralleling the biblical account. The parallel is interesting, because it has not shown up in a cuneiform text until now, although, really, how else were they supposed to go in?

George Smith, the original discoverer of the cuneiform Flood story, is mentioned in both articles. More on his sad story here. This new tablet also appeared briefly in the news several years ago.

Irving Finkel is looking as iconically scholarly as ever. More on Dr. Finkel here, here, here, here, and here.

Hugoye previews 17.1

HUGOYE: JOURNAL OF SYRIAC STUDIES: "The preview drafts for Hugoye 17.1 are now published online. These papers come from the 2013 Hugoye Symposium ("Garshunography in the Syriac Tradition")." You can read them at Hugoye Preview Drafts. Current TOC:

Neo-Aramaic Garshuni: Observations Based on Manuscripts
Emanuela Braida, University of Toronto

Greek and Latin in Syriac Script
Sebastian P. Brock, University of Oxford

A Kurdish Garshuni Poem by David of Barazne (19th Century)
Mustafa Dehqan, Independent Scholar, Iran
Alessandro Mengozzi, University of Turin, Italy

Armenian Garshuni: An Overview of the Known Material
Hidemi Takahashi, University of Tokyo

Jobar Synagogue update

THE ANCIENT JOBAR SYNAGOGUE in Damascus is back in the news. Regular readers will recall that it was reported destroyed in the civil war back at the end of March, but a day or two later the reports were corrected to say that it had been damaged but not destroyed. Now Adam Blitz has a detailed status update in the Times of Israel: The case for Jobar: Syria, synagogues and subterfuge. As a matter of urgency regard must be made to Jobar synagogue’s many artefacts should they soon find their way into the antiquities market….

Jobar synagogue, two kilometres North East of Damascus’ Old City, has not been far from the News. Headlines fell during Passover of this past year and culminated in a dramatic story of a synagogue “burned to the ground” (“Historic Damascus Synagogue looted and burned” JTA Jewish Telegraph Agency 31 March 2013). Immediately before Christmas the converse was stressed with a different story of a cryptic message from the Free Syrian Army rebels (F.S.A) to a certain individual named “Moti” (“Syria’s ‘Destroyed’ Ancient Synagogue is Still Intact” The Times of Israel, 22 December 2013). This coverage, together with Sotheby’s recent sale (17th December 2013) of an item purported to be a “rare surviving artifact of the Jewish community at Jobar [which] may be all that remains of this ancient and venerable community” [1], guaranteed Jobar’s place in the annals of 2013.

[...]

More updates are to follow.

“Matters that Satan challenges”

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: Some Jewish Acts Seem Meaningless. The Talmud Says You Should Do Them Anyway. Illogical Jewish laws are ‘matters that Satan challenges’: raising doubts for enemies of Judaism and skeptical Jews
.

To counter this skepticism, the rabbis drew what would become a tremendously important distinction in Jewish thought, between the rationally justifiable commandments and the mysterious, seemingly inexplicable ones. In Leviticus 18:4, God commands the Israelites to follow both his “ordinances” [mishpatim] and his “statutes” [huqqim], and in Yoma 67b the rabbis turn these into two different categories of mitzvot. Ordinances include “matters that had they not been written it would have been logical that they be written,” such as the prohibitions on “idol worship, prohibited sexual relations, bloodshed, theft.” These are what might be called natural laws, which any human community might institute without divine guidance.

Statutes, on the other hand, are “matters that Satan challenges”—that is, the laws that enemies of Judaism, and perhaps skeptical Jews themselves, raise doubts about, since they seem to have no logical basis. This category includes the ban on pork and on wearing mixed garments, and also the ritual of the scapegoat. It’s easy to be skeptical about these commandments, but the rabbis insist that they, too, are absolutely essential to Judaism. “Lest you say these are meaningless acts, the verse states: ‘I am the Lord,’ to indicate, I am the Lord, I decreed these statutes, and you have no right to doubt them.” Perhaps the statutes are even more crucial than the ordinances, since they are a pure test of Jewish faith: There is no reason to perform them other than submission to God’s will.

Plus sealing up the inclination to commit idolatry and gouging out the eyes of sexual desire.

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

Doudna on Qumran

THE ASOR BLOG: Qumran Revisited: a Reassessment of the Archaeology of the Site and its Texts (Gregory L. Doudna).

More on Greg Doudna's theories about Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls here, here, here, here, here, and here. More on David Stacey's views about the site of Qumran here, here, here (this link also has more links on the archaeology of Qumran in general), and here, and here. And still more on the archaeology of Qumran here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Two NT jobs

LARRY HURTADO: Two Jobs in NT (with impending closing dates). I was going to post on these, but I see Larry has already done so. One is at Groningen and the other at Durham. The latter includes expertise in Second Temple Judaism as a desideratum.

Jihadis desecrated St. Thecla's grave in Maaloula?

MODE OF LIFE: Pillager of Monasteries in Maaloula Found Dead.

With news of [Abu Jafar's] death, other news has come to light. The Lebanese Calam reported on January 13 that “jihadists plundered the grave of Saint Thekla”. According to Father Makarios Gulwma, secretary of the Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East for the Catholic Melkites told RIA Novosti: “The fighters of Al-Nusra and Free Sham removed the bells of the churches of historic Maaloula, torched the iconostasis of the Orthodox Monastery of St Thekla as well as the Melklite Catholic Monastery of Saint Sergius, and they plundered the grave of St. Thekla after digging it up. They burned all the crosses and destroyed them.” The same witness complained that they stole the bronze statue of the enthroned Jesus adorning the Monastery erected by the Orthodox Foundation of Saint Paul of Syria.

HT Akma Adam on Facebook. Much more on Maaloula (Ma'loula, Malula) here and here and many links. Until its recent plundering by Jihadis in the Syrian civil war, it was known as one of the last places where Aramaic was still a spoken language.

Thecla is best known through the stories in the Apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla. More on her and the Acts here.

Cross file under "Aramaic Watch."

Review of Schniedewind, A Social History of Hebrew

FRED REISS: Book Review: ‘A Social History of Hebrew’ (San Diego Jewish World).

A Social History of Hebrew: Its Origins Through the Rabbinic Period by William M. Schniedewind; Yale University Press, New HavenISBN 978-0-300-167668-1 ©2013, $45.00, p. 261, including notes, bibliography, and index

WINCHESTER, California–William Schniedewind, UCLA professor of Mediterranean studies, Near Eastern languages, and the Bible, and author of A Social History of Hebrew explains that his motivation for writing this book is based on a statement he heard at a lecture many years ago: “I am only interested in the languages, not the people who spoke them.” For Schniedewind the purpose of studying languages is “to understand people, their societies, and their culture.”

[...]

Lod Mosaic heading to Russia

THE JERUSALEM POST: Unique 1,700-year old Lod mosaic from Israel to visit Russia. A tractor building a road serendipitously uncovered a tiger's tail, leading to a stone menagerie. (Ariel David).

Not only rock stars go on global tours. Great works of art do so too, and after being buried for 1,700 years, the Lod mosaic is taking the world by storm.

The ancient masterpiece, one of the largest and best-preserved Roman mosaics ever found, will be exhibited at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, starting December.

It is the first joint archeological exhibition of Israel and the Hermitage, renowned for its vast collections of antiquities and paintings, say the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Hermitage.

[...]

Much background on the Lod Mosaic and its recent international tour of museums is here and links. The post also contains links to coverage of many other ancient mosaics.

Talmud scholar wins Israel Prize

CONGRATULATIONS TO SHAMMA FRIEDMAN: How Shamma Friedman, Winner of This Year’s Israel Prize, Revolutionized Talmud Study: Meet the American-born JTS professor who modernized an ancient pursuit (Shai Secunda, Tablet).

A few earlier PaleoJudaica posts involving Professor Friedman are here, here, and here.

New book on text of NT Apocrypha

TONY BURKE: Book Note: Thomas Wayment, The Text of the New Testament Apocrypha.

Palindromes!

PHDIVA: Sarah Bond: Power of the Palindrome. I like the skull.

Via Invocatio.

A Hodayot hymn translated

JOEL M. HOFFMAN: Translating an Ancient Hebrew Prayer of Thanks from the Dead Sea Scrolls. The hymn is from 1QH^a Column 10.

HT James McGrath on Facebook.

The Indy Exhibition

FORT WORTH MUSEUM: Indiana Jones™ and the Adventure of Archaeology: The Exhibition.

Indiana Jones and the Adventure of Archaeology, opening March 8, 2014, uses the Indiana Jones™ film series as both a starting point and a backdrop for an exciting and entertaining introduction to the real science of field archaeology. Showcasing items from four different collections, Indiana Jones and the Adventure of Archaeology is far more than a static display of movie props. Museum-goers learn how archaeology has changed from the mid-20th century, when Indy’s adventures took place, until the present day.

Well, okay. I guess if there's a scholarly conference on The Life of Brian, there can be a museum exhibition on Indiana Jones and archaeology.

Masada at 50

FROM DAVID STACEY:

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Masada excavations Guy Stiebel of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and currently the archaeologist in charge of Masada, will give a lecture Past, Present and Future - The Excavations at Masada, between 4-6 p.m. on Wednesday 12th February in the Jewish Museum, 129-131 Albert Street, London NW1. The lecture will take into account excavations undertaken at Masada during the past 25 years and is being partially sponsored by the British Friends of Hebrew University.

Also marking 'Masada at 50' - The Observer will be holding a Masada Exhibit which will run from Tuesday 21 January to Friday 21 February in the foyer of its HQ at Kings Place, 90 York Way, London, N1 9GU. The exhibition concentrates on the Observer's role in championing the excavations and includes testimonies and memorabilia from some of the volunteers. Access is free, 10am to 6pm each day, 7 days a week.

"Biblical Studies Online"

NEW WEBSITE: Biblical Studies Online. Created by Sheffield blogger James Crossley and Antipodean giant-hunter Deane Galbraith. HT Mark Goodacre. Looks like a great site, but the lack of a "Pseudepigrapha" listing in the sidebar needs to be remedied.

UPDATE (22 January). Two things. First, the dead link has been fixed. Sorry about that. Second, Deane Galbraith e-mails:

I have just added an online pseudepigrapha site to Biblical Studies Online. The sidebar won't list a separate pseudepigrapha category, because we're avoiding (as far as one can) the canonical/non-canonical distinction. Instead, ancient Jewish and Christian literature (itself a problematic distinction, as you well know) is listed under each genre - whether canonical or non-canonical.

Article on the Geniza Aquila manuscripts

ETC: The religious provenance of the Aquila manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah. An article by Edmon L. Gallagher in JJS asks whether the manuscripts are really of Jewish provenance.

New Philology and grimy manuscripts

LIV INGEBORG LIED: Dirt, fingerprints and wax stains (or: meet some "real readers" of 2 Baruch). Spit too. Grody.

A new Aramaic fragment of 1 Enoch!

MICHAEL LANGLOIS: An Unpublished Aramaic Manuscript of the Book of Enoch. This is apparently a Qumran manuscript and it comes from the Schøyen Collection. Like most Qumran "manuscripts," not much of it survives; only 1 Enoch 7:1-5. But the Aramaic text has some features of interest in relation to the Greek and the Ethiopic texts. Prof. Langlois has published the fragment in the current issue of Semitica and he has also posted the French article as a PDF file: Un manuscrit araméen inédit du livred’Hénoch et les versions anciennes de 1 Hénoch 7,4.

Bit by bit, a letter at a time, whatever it takes. Until we're done.

More on the Schøyen Collection here, here, and links.

"Rust" in Hebrew

HAARETZ WORD OF THE DAY: Khaluda: The word for rust that suddenly appeared in the Mishna. It has the same root as 'dig' and 'naked molerat' but derives from a different Aramaic source. Which maybe comes from Greek. It's good to know these things.

AncientThought.com

A NEW WEB VENTURE CALLED ANCIENTTHOUGHT.COM has issued a call for contributors for articles pertaining to early Christian history. Many of the topics involve Second Temple Judaism.

More on that column capital and tunnel near Jerusalem

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Proto-Aeolic Capital Associated with Judah’s Longest Spring Tunnel. Partly in proactive response to the reported announcement tomorrow about "King David’s Castle."

Background here and links.

Fixed-term post in Rabbinic/Medieval Jewish Studies

REPOSTED (original post here) with updates and more details, kindly supplied by Vadim Putzu:

Rabbinic/Medieval Judaic Studies: The Judaic Studies Program at Franklin & Marshall College invites applications for a Visiting Assistant Professor, beginning Fall 2014. The position is in pre-modern Judaism with possible subfields in rabbinics, medieval philosophy, or Kabbalah. The appointment is renewable for a second year on evidence of good teaching and administrative approval. Appointment will be at the Visiting Instructor or Visiting Assistant professor level depending on qualifications; teaching experience highly desirable. The successful candidate will teach introductory courses in Hebrew Bible and Classical Jewish Texts as well as upper-level courses in his/her specialty; the teaching load is 3/2 and includes teaching at least one course each year in the College’s general education Connections program.

Candidates should submit the following materials as PDF files (searchable preferred) to:

Tami.Lantz@fandm.edu: letter of application, curriculum vitae, graduate transcript, three letters of recommendation, teaching statement, and teaching evaluations. Hard copies are also acceptable, and may be sent to Professor Maria Mitchell Chair, Judaic Studies Program, Franklin & Marshall College, Box 3003, Lancaster PA 17604-3003. The deadline for receipt is February 14, 2014. Franklin and Marshall College is a highly selective liberal arts college committed to having an inclusive campus community where all members are treated with dignity and respect. As an Equal Opportunity Employer, the College does not discriminate in its hiring or employment practices on the basis of gender, race or ethnicity, color, national origin, religion, age, disability, family or marital status, or sexual orientation.


https://netforum.avectra.com/eWeb/DynamicPage.aspx?Site=AJS&WebCode=positions#fm

http://www.aarsbl.org/listing/rabbinicmedieval-judaism-visiting

Graffiti epigraphy

BROOKLYN COLLEGE: History Professor Studies Ancient Graffiti in Late Antiquity Burials.

For Karen B. Stern, making her way through the ancient tunnels and caves of ancient mortuary complexes in Israel is all in an ordinary day's research. Her goal is to find and study carvings—pictures and texts—inscribed at the burial sites, carvings that the history professor calls graffiti, because unlike epitaphs, the inscriptions were made after the tombs or monuments were finished. Some of these carvings date back more than 2,000 years. Many are crudely executed. Still, they are no less important to the field of archeology.

Considered, until recently, a form of defacement or desecration, the graffiti in mortuary complexes were part of a more acceptable and widespread cultural practice than archaeologists originally suspected, contends Stern, who obtained her Ph.D. in religious studies from Brown University in 2008.

"Had they been considered a defacement by the people of that era they could've been easily removed." Instead they went untouched, leaving to posterity dedications that memorialize the dead, curses inscribed as warning to people who wanted to pillage or desecrate tombs, and even the names of rabbis mentioned in both Jewish and early Christian writings.

While her interest was originally sparked by graffiti found at the synagogue discovered at the Roman outpost of Dura-Europos in today's Syria, Stern, who has received a 2014 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities—has done much of her research at Beth She'arim, a vast necropolis carved in the hills near Haifa, in northwest Israel. Its subterranean chambers, once accessed by steps and pathways, contain hundreds of burials from Roman Palestine and its surroundings.

[...]

For an article by Prof. Stern on her work at Dura Europos, see here. And for an interview with her and more on her work at Beit She'arim, see here.