Philologos on Genesis and the Enuma Elish

PHILOLOGOS: Legends of the Fall. Did Genesis Originate in Babylon? Genesis is such a complicated compedium of traditions that it is difficult to talk about it "originating" in any particular place. As Philologos concludes, any connection between the "abyss" (tehom) of Genesis 1 and Tiamat in the Babylonian creation story (the Enuma Elish) is pretty thin, but not entirely to be dismissed. Much more interesting is this parallel:

Consider, for example, the verse in Chapter 74 of Psalms in which the Psalmist says to God, “Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength, thou didst break the heads of the sea monsters [taninim] in the waters.” Although nowhere in the Bible is there any actual recounting of such an episode, it is clear that a tradition about God having subdued the forces of the depths at the time of Creation existed in Hebrew circles, too.

Hints of this story also appear in places like Exodus 15, Psalm 89:5-11, and Isaiah 51:9-11 and a full-length version is found in the Ugaritic Baal Cycle (where Yamm, "Sea," plays the role of Tiamat).

This is an old Philologos column, but I haven't noted it before and it gives a nice summary of the Enuma Elish.

Smith on Biblical and ANE studies in America

NORTHWEST SEMITIC EPIGRAPHY DAY: The State of Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies in America (Mark S. Smith, ASOR Blog). Excerpt:

This change corresponds to a further shift in our programs, universities, and society. Within our programs, questions have been raised about how to pursue the learning needed for research. Why study a fairly obscure language such as Ugaritic when you can study wonderful areas such as anthropology or literary criticism? The underlying question is not the value of all these areas; we should all be interested in as vast a series of fields as possible. The issue becomes why one at the expense of the other and how they are valuable for what sorts of questions or problems.

In the university, the field of Bible and ANE is of little interest to other fields. Unlike many others, little in ours has attracted the interest of other academics. For various historical reasons, we generate little by way of theory for other fields, although I think that we conduct various sorts of inquiry valuable to others (for example, the analysis of textual processes for literary criticism). Bible and ANE studies have also tended to its own tasks, with little concern for relating our value to other fields. We need to do better.

Okay, the topic is broader than NWS epigraphy, but Professor Smith himself is a NWS epigrapher and, as he notes, the field is central to the topic of this important essay. The picture is not dissimilar in the U.K. There is not the same exploitative use of adjunct labor (although there are a lot of temporary full-time teaching fellows). But we have to deal with the corrosive effects of the government-implemented periodic research evaluations (currently the "Research Excellence Framework" or REF), which both drive and constrain University research in increasingly unhelpful ways.

Related posts here and here.

Golan gets Joash inscription back

NORTHWEST SEMITIC EPIGRAPHY DAY: Jehoash Tablet Returned to Oded Golan (Todd Bolen, Bible Places Blog). More fallout from the Israel forgery trial, on which background here and oh so many links. Some background on the Jehoash (Joash) inscription, which I and many (most?) others do not regard as genuine, is here and links.

Tyson on the Ammonites

NORTHWEST SEMITIC EPIGRAPHY DAY:

After Sodom: The Sons of Ammon in the Iron Age
(Bible and Interpretation website)

The biblical texts that mention the Ammonites were compiled or written in the seventh century or later, during periods of intense challenges to Judean sociopolitical and religious identity from imperial power. It is not surprising that the texts highlight similarities and differences between Judah and the people of the Transjordan. The similarities and differences helped to define Judean identity.

See Also: The Ammonites (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014).


By Craig W. Tyson
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies
D’Youville College, Buffalo, NY
May 2014

Millard on the Jerusalem inscription

NORTHWEST SEMITIC EPIGRAPHY DAY: Precursor to Paleo-Hebrew Script Discovered in Jerusalem. Alan Millard examines the Proto-Canaanite script of the earliest alphabetic text ever found in Jerusalem (Robin Ngo, Bible History Daily). Excerpt:

Alan Millard believes that we will likely never know with certainty what the earliest alphabetic text from Jerusalem says. What we can conclude is that the storage jar was inscribed in a place where ordinary workmen made pots, not in the lofty study of a royal scribe. Along with other early inscriptions, including the Gezer Calendar and the Qeiyafa Ostracon, Millard contends that this inscription from Jerusalem may signal widespread—if elementary—literacy during the time of David and Solomon.

Background on that 10th century BCE Hebrew(ish) Jerusalem inscription is here and links.

Postdoc on ancient Greco-Roman translation

AT THE UNIVERSITY OF OSLO: Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship - Translating in Antiquity, Translating Antiquity.

Petra and archaeoastronomy

NABATAEAN NEWS: Petra, built for the sun gods? (Daisy Carrington, CNN). Excerpt:

"I don't think we really understand what significance some of these structures truly had," says Megan Perry, an associate professor at East Carolina University's department of anthropology.

Recently, a team of archaeoastronomers sought to gain some insight into the function of these ancient structures by measuring their celestial alignments. Their findings, which were published in the Nexus Network Journal, suggests that the Nabateans purposefully built Petra's most sacred structures to align or light-up during celestial phenomena, including the summer and winter solstices and the equinoxes.

[...]

Perry has spent a lot of time studying the layout of monuments in Petra for clues as to whether the city was laid out organically, or -- as Belmonte suggest -- if it was planned.

"The tombs seem to be based on natural topography. Nothing in terms of their layout suggests a tie to any kind of solar orientation. If there was one, they'd all be facing the same way, but they surround the city and face in an infinite number of directions," she notes.

[...]

It does make sense that all the effort of carving those buildings out of stone might have had a larger purpose behind it, but one can't be dogmatic when the specialists disagree. In any case, it's good to see Petra covered in something other than a travel piece.

I see I have already noted this story here, but the CNN article has some additional information. See the latter link also for past posts on Petra.

Deductive exegesis in the Talmud — plus four New Year's days

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: On the Impossibility of Over-Interpreting the Bible. Why Talmud study is not reading, in the usual sense of the word, but rather deciphering the true meaning of the text. Excerpt:

This is not reading in the usual sense of the word. Rather, it is using the Bible text almost as a kind of mnemonic, assigning a different category of promise to each phrase in the verse. One of the things I often wonder in reading the Talmud is exactly what the rabbis meant when they said that theirs is the true meaning of the text. Did they think that the references to burnt-offerings and Temple donations and charity could actually be deduced from the apparently unrelated words of the Bible? Or did they believe that God had dictated the text in such a way as to make room for all the necessary legal interpretations? Either way, it’s clear that the rabbis read the Bible not simply as a sacred history, but as a comprehensive guide to law and life. Since every word was divine, and God does nothing without a reason, it was impossible to over-interpret the Bible; everything that one found there had to have been put there.

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

Samoa Synagogue defaced

ARUTZ SHEVA: Swastikas, PLO Flag at Ancient Synagogue. Samoa synagogue, near Hevron, defaced by Jew-haters. Local leader expects authorities to act severely (Iddo Ben Porat).

About 200 people who visited the ancient Judean synagogue at Samoa, near Hevron, on Sunday, found spray-painted swastikas on the walls of the structure and PLO flags flying above them.

[...]

The late antique Samoa (Eshtemoa) Synagogue has also been mentioned in this post.

Lost book found: R. Elazar of Worms on Proverbs

ARUTZ SHEVA: NY Rabbi Unearths Lost Commentary of Ancient Scholar. Rabbi Allen Schwartz deciphers lost text of Rabbi Elazar of Worms' handwritten insights on Book of Proverbs from Crusader times. (Ari Yashar). R. Elazar (Eleazar/Eliezer) of Worms (c. 1176 – 1238) was a prolific writer who compiled and developed many Jewish mystical and magical traditions in his works.

The NT and Romania

JAMES MCGRATH: What Living In Romania Taught Me About The New Testament. The honor-shame value system in action. This is a revived old post on Exploring Our Matrix, but I haven't seen it before and I imagine many of my readers haven't either.

Crossley on Casey

JAMES CROSSLEY: Maurice Casey (Part 1 of 2): An Academic Life and Maurice Casey (Part 2 of 2): Influence. The most thorough and comprehensive blog obituary published thus far and will clearly hold its own or better when the official obituaries start coming out.

Background here and here.

Herodian Masada frescoes restored

HAARETZ: Frescoes from Herod’s time at Masada restored and returned to national park. Italian conservators return the artworks that were sitting in a warehouse for 20 years (Shirly Seidler).

For 20 years, the frescoes that decorated the “Commandant’s Residence” (Beit Hamefaked) on top of Masada were stored away in a warehouse at the national park. This week, after a month’s work, a team headed by Italian expert renovator Prof. Maurizio Tagliapietra of the University of Verona and including employees of the Israel Parks and Nature Authority completed the restoration of another room on the top of the historic mountain.

[...]

“The frescoes are from the period of Herod,” said Tagliapietra. They are of geometric figures, with no human beings, and show no perspective, he said. The frescoes prove the room was the living quarters of commanders who were close to Herod and responsible for his personal security, as indicated by their proximity to the Northern Palace.

[...]

Archaeology of Aelia Capitolina

HAARETZ: The construction work that triggered the Bar Kokhba Revolt.
What can coins minted by the rebels and Jerusalem’s Roman rulers tell us about the chain of events that eventually led to today’s Lag Ba’omer bonfires? (Nir Hasson). Excerpt:

During the revolt the Roman government was involved in a huge construction project in Palestine – the rebuilding of Jerusalem as a Roman city, Aelia Capitolina.

There are two basic historiographic approaches to the link between the founding of Aelia Capitolina on the ruins of Jerusalem and the Bar Kokhba revolt.

According to the second-century Roman historian Lucius Cassius Dio, the construction of the city, with a temple to the god Jupiter in the center, was itself the spark that ignited the rebellion: The Jewish extremists could not tolerate the fact that a pagan Roman city was being built on the ruins of Jerusalem.

But the fourth-century historian Eusebius, who served as the bishop of Caesarea before turning his hand to writing history, argued that Aelia Capitolina was a result of the revolt — part of the Roman Empire’s punishment for its outbreak — not the cause.

“There was a chicken-and-egg debate here,” says Israeli archaeologist Shlomit Wexler-Bedolah, “What came first and what led to what – the revolt to the construction of the city, or the construction of the city to the revolt.”

Since the days of Cassius Dio and Eusebius, rivers of ink have been spilled on the debate. In recent years Wexler-Bedolah and the late. Alexander Onn conducted several excavations in the area of the Western Wall. The excavations, done on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority and financed by the Western Wall Heritage Foundation, helped to provide a precise date for the construction of Aelia Capitolina.

Wexler-Bedolah’s conclusion is that the construction work on the new city began at least several years before the outbreak of the revolt. In other words, it is quite possible that the excuse for the rebellion was the sight of the laborers rebuilding Jerusalem as a pagan city.

Also, the building of the temple to Jupiter on the Temple Mount likely contributed to the ill feelings, and it is not clear whether the new name for the city was decided on before or after the revolt.

Deadline for return of Iraqi Jewish Archive extended

PROGRESS: Schumer Announces Iraqi Jewish Archive Permitted to Stay in the US Until Permanent Location in America is Determined

Washington, DC - May 15, 2015 [Sic] - U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer today announced that the State Department, along with the Ambassador of the Republic of Iraq to the U.S., will extend the period in which the Iraqi Jewish Archives may remain in the United States. The United States had initially agreed to return the items in 2014.

[...]

“I applaud the decision to permit the Iraqi Jewish Archive to remain in the U.S. until a permanent location is found. However, we will not rest until the collection is made accessible to the Iraqi Jewish community indefinitely,” said Schumer. “These sacred and treasured artifacts were taken from the Iraqi Jewish community during a time of state-condoned discrimination, and this community should have access to the precious possessions they were forced to leave behind.”

"I must convey the heartfelt sentiment of WOJI - to the US and Iraqi governments for reaching an agreement under which the Iraqi Jewish Archive will remain in the United States for the foreseeable future. It is WOJI's fervent conviction that we, the Iraqi Jewish community, are the rightful heirs of the Iraqi Jewish Archive, our precious patrimony,” said Maurice Shohet, Chairman of the World Organization of Jews from Iraq (WOJI).

[...]

In December, the Iraqi delegation, in cooperation with the Iraqi Jewish community, buried 49 Torah scroll fragments, which were part of the collection. The burial under Jewish ritual custom took place at New Montefiore Cemetery.

Schumer has been advocating on behalf of the Iraqi Jewish community and has urged the State Department not to return the collection to Iraq. In February, the Senate unanimously passed a resolution, which Schumer co-sponsored, that urges the State Department to renegotiate the return of the archive.

Schumer today announced that the State Department, the Ambassador of the Republic of Iraq to the United States and the National Archives and Record Administration will extend the period in which the collection may remain in the United States.

The rest of the press release deals with background that will be familiar to regular PaleoJudaica readers. The story is also covered by The Algemeiner: Iraqi Jewish Archive’s U.S. Exhibition Extended. It appears that the extension of the deadline is indefinite; or at least neither article mentions a new deadline.

Background here and links going all the way back to the discovery of the archive in 2003.

Almond, The Devil

GIVING THE DEVIL HIS DUE:

The Devil: A New Biography
Philip C. Almond (author)

I. B. Taurus Hardback | In Stock | £20.00

It is often said that the devil has all the best tunes. He also has as many names as he has guises. Lucifer, Mephistopheles, Beelzebub (in Christian thought), Ha-Satan or the Adversary (in Jewish scripture) and Iblis or Shaitan (in Islamic tradition) has throughout the ages and across civilizations been a compelling and charismatic presence. For two thousand years the supposed reign of God has been challenged by the fiery malice of his opponent, as contending forces of good and evil have between them weighed human souls in the balance. In this rich and multi-textured biography, Philip C Almond explores the figure of the devil from the first centuries of the Christian era through the rise of classical demonology and witchcraft persecutions to the modern post-Enlightenment 'decline' of Hell. The author shows that the Prince of Darkness, in all his incarnations, remains an irresistible subject in history, religion, art, literature and culture.

Zohar Dictionary

DANIEL C. MATT: Zohar Dictionary.

Daniel Matt : This is a partial Zohar dictionary, composed over the past 17 years while working on The Zohar: Pritzker Edition. It takes a little getting used to, since it follows the order of the English alphabet, although the entries represent the transliteration of Aramaic (and Hebrew) words and roots. It will be useful for those working (and playing) with the original Aramaic text. It appears in three parts (A-N, O-S, T-Z). My reconstructed Aramaic text of the Zohar (based on numerous Zohar manuscripts) is available on the website of Stanford University Press

http://www.sup.org/zohar/?d=&f=Aramaic_Texts.htm

HT Judy Barrett. Background on Daniel Matt's groundbreaking edition and translation of the Zohar is here, with links going back a decade.

Hmmm ... perhaps I should publish my private Hebrew glossary of the Hekhalot literature someday in a similar format.

Lag B'Omer belatedly

LAG B'OMER — The Counting of the Omer — took place over the weekend (sunset to sunset, 17th-18th). Best wishes to all who observed it.

I was down with the flu for the past several days, hence the blogging silence. I'm very behind on everything, especially exam marking, but I will deal with the blogging backlog as time permits.

Research Associate in Biblical Hebrew Philology

JOB AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE: Research Associate in Biblical Hebrew Philology.

Golb and the freedom to annoy

THE NEW YORK TIMES ON THE RAPHAEL GOLB CASE: Top Court Champions Freedom to Annoy (John Leland). Excerpt:

The decision on Tuesday was mixed for Mr. Golb, a real estate lawyer who has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard. The seven judges threw out 10 charges, leaving Mr. Golb with misdemeanor convictions on nine counts of criminal impersonation and 10 of identity theft. The case now goes back to State Supreme Court in Manhattan for resentencing. Without the felony conviction, Mr. Golb can now reapply for his law license.

In striking down the statute on aggravated harassment dealing with speech that was merely annoying or alarming, the judges unanimously ruled that the law was unconstitutionally vague and overbroad. They cited another court’s ruling that “any proscription of pure speech must be sharply limited to words which, by their utterance alone, inflict injury or tend naturally to evoke immediate violence.” Mere annoying speech, the lingua franca of many New Yorkers, was not enough.

This seems to address the concerns raised by UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh. Background on the case is at that post, here, and links.

"The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition" Project

THE TIMES OF ISRAEL: Controversy lurks as scholars suss out original Biblical text. International team tries to reverse engineer changes made to holy text over thousands of years, but may invite new problems (Anthony Weiss). Excerpt:

For the past 14 years, the team behind “The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition” has been laboring on a project to sift through the text and reverse the accumulated imperfections and changes, returning the books of the Hebrew Bible to something like their original versions. The first volume is due out later this year.

“It is a little chutzpadik,” acknowledged Ronald Hendel, HBCE’s general editor and a professor of Hebrew Bible at the University of California, Berkeley.

It’s also a messy, painstaking and controversial endeavor that has been criticized by some of the world’s leading biblical scholars. The critics argue that what Hendel and his team are attempting to do is misleading, counterproductive or flat-out impossible.

“I think it will actually end up causing more problems,” said Michael Segal, a senior lecturer in Bible at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The difficulties in the project stem from the Bible’s long history of transmission from scribe to scribe through the centuries. HBCE is trying to reverse engineer that process, to sift through the various extant texts of the Bible and — by analyzing grammatical glitches, stylistic hitches and contradictions of the texts — establish a reading closer to if not the original, then at least the archetype on which the subsequent copies were based.

A good, thoughtful article that clearly and concisely lays out the complexities involved in the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible.

UPDATE: Bob Buller sends the link to an earlier, longer version of the article that gives more context and detail: Scholars seek Hebrew Bible’s original text — but was there one? (JTA).

Magdala in the news

THE SITE OF MAGDALA, redicovered a decade ago, is profiled by the NYT: A Resort in Galilee Rises Where Jesus May Have Taught (Isabel Kershner). Excerpts:

Soon it was clear that the site was not just near Magdala; this was Magdala. The dig went on to uncover an ancient marketplace and a separate area of rooms with adjacent water pools, presumably used for producing the salty cured fish that Magdala was famous for; a large villa or public building with mosaics, frescoes and three ritual baths; a fishermen’s neighborhood, scattered with ancient hooks and other equipment; and a section of a first-century harbor. The ancient synagogue was discovered at the precise spot where the architects had planned to erect an ecumenical chapel, to the right of the hotel entrance.

The discovery of the ruins meant that the building plans had to be changed to accommodate them, and the restaurant and hotel are still under construction. But the new spirituality center is completed, with a boat-shaped altar that blends with a view of the harbor and the Sea of Galilee. “Jesus used to preach to the crowds from Peter’s boat, so we tried to reproduce that idea here,” said Father Solana, who belongs to the Legionaries of Christ, an order founded in Mexico. “Our plans, with a higher providence, merged very, very strongly.”

The pope is not scheduled to visit Magdala during his three-day trip to the region, which will include stops in Jerusalem, Jordan and Bethlehem. Instead, the tabernacle from the boat altar will be taken to the Notre Dame Center in Jerusalem to receive his blessing. Afterward, on May 28, the site will be officially inaugurated as the Magdala archaeological park, and the adjacent spirituality center will be dedicated in the presence of Israeli government representatives and the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Fouad Twal.

[...]

The ancient synagogue had some unusual features, including an ornately engraved stone block that archaeologists say was probably used as a table for reading the Torah. It is carved with columns and arches, a seven-branched menorah with vessels for wine and oil to each side, a 12-leaf rosette and chariots of fire. The stone appears to be a miniature of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, which was destroyed in the year 70, adorned with symbols also meant to commemorate the First Temple.

Lots more on Magadala, its menorah engraving, and its mosaics is here and links.

Schrodinger's Cat and corpse impurity

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: Which Is More Sacred: a Festival or Shabbat? A Mitzvah or Money?With great metaphysical creativity, Talmudic rabbis probe the exact limits of comparison and analogy. Excerpt:

To illustrate the concept, the Gemara turns to another, related area of law: the ritual impurity of corpses. “If there is a corpse in a house that has many entrances,” the law holds, “all the entrances are ritually impure.” This is because the corpse might pass through any of the entrances on its way out of the house, and so they are all considered potentially tamei. Once the corpse is actually taken out, however, the tumah only affects the actual entrance used, and the others go back to being ritually pure. Indeed, it’s enough simply to mentally designate one of the entrances as the one that will be used to transport the corpse, in order to remove impurity from all the others. (I’m reminded, as I have been before in the Talmud, of Schrodinger’s Cat: As in quantum mechanics, potentialities don’t turn into actualities until they are observed.)

I noted that column here and another column that takes up the same theme here. The analogy with quantum indeterminacy is very imperfect, but is entertaining. There's lots more going on in this week's column, so read it all.

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

Catalogues of Syriac and Coptic manuscripts

TWO NEW CATALOGUES OF MANUSCRIPTS have just been published. The first, from Peeters:

Catalogue of the Syriac Manuscripts and Fragments in the Library of Deir al-Surian, Wadi al-Natrun (Egypt)

Series:
Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, 227

Authors: Brock S., Van Rompay L.

Year: 2014
ISBN: 978-90-429-2962-3
Pages: XXII-834 p.
Price: 105 EURO

Summary: Deir al-Surian, the famous Monastery of the Syrians in Egypt, has long been known for its unique collection of Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, and Ethiopic manuscripts. This catalogue provides detailed descriptions of 48 Syriac manuscripts (many of them composite) and the more than 180 fragments that are preserved in the Monastery today. Ranging in date from the 5th to the 18th century and with a majority of them being earlier than the 10th century, the manuscripts present us with major authors and works of the Syriac literary tradition. They include biblical texts (among them the earliest dated Gospel manuscript in any language), original Syriac compositions, and translations from Greek and (occasionally) Coptic. Several works were previously unattested. Connections with manuscripts from Deir al-Surian that are preserved in European collections (primarily the British Library) are indicated wherever relevant. Colophons and various kinds of notes by scribes, readers, owners, and occasional visitors also receive attention, thus allowing interesting glimpses into the history not only of individual manuscripts, but also of the Monastery and its library. Accompanying the catalogue is an album containing more than 300 pages of images.

Follow the link for TOC and ordering information. Past posts on the Monastery of Deir al-Surian and its library are here and links. And Liv Ingeborg Lied has recently located Syriac quotations of 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra through this catalogue.

The second, from Franz Steiner:

Alessandro Bausi (Hrsg.), Paola Buzi (Bearb.)

Coptic Manuscripts

Part 7: The Manuscripts of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin Preussischer Kulturbesitz. Part 4: Homilectic and Liturgical Manuscripts from the White Monastery. With two documents from Thebes and two Old-Nubian manuscripts

Band 21.7
Verzeichnis der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland (VOHD)

2014.
274 p.
7 Tafeln, cloth bound
ISBN 978-3-515-10711-2

Again, for more information, follow the link. Past posts pertaining to the White Monastery are here, here, and here. And Alin Suciu comments on the catalogue in this post: Catalogue of the Coptic Manuscripts in the Collection of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.

UPDATE: This discussion on the Hugoye list notes the recent book by Saadi Al-Malih, Books and Documents of Iraqi Minorities (Un ponte per, 2013), which may turn out to be of related interest regarding Syriac manuscripts.

Majority of Golb convictions upheld

ROBERT CARGILL: NY Court of Appeals Upholds 19 Convictions Against Raphael Golb in Dead Sea Scrolls Case.

The NY Court of Appeals has upheld 9 convictions of criminal impersonation and all 10 forgery convictions in the case of the People of NY v. Raphael Golb. The court vacated the top charge of identity theft (felony), 5 criminal impersonation convictions, all aggravated harassment convictions, as well as the conviction on the count of an unauthorized use of computer.

[...]

Background here, with many, many links.

Goodacre (et al.) on Casey

MARK GOODACRE: Maurice Casey (1942-2014). His own comments and reminiscences, with links to blog posts by others.

Background here.

Schäfer awarded Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize

CONGRATULATIONS TO PETER SCHÄFER: Der Judaist Peter Schäfer erhält den Dr. Leopold Lucas-Preis 2014. This year Professor Schäfer is the recipient of the well-deserved Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize, given annually by the Evangelical Theological Faculty of the University of Tübingen, with an award of 50,000 Euros. You can read the somewhat glitchy Google translation of the German press release here.

The publication of the Festschrift for Professor Schäfer in 2013 was also noted here.

Azazel

HAARETZ: Word of the Day / Azazel: What the hell does it mean? Israelis use this word all the time but have no idea that it’s a name of an ancient desert goat-demon worshiped by their ancestors (Elon Gilad).

Israelis use the word a-za-ZEL all the time, but they don’t know what it really means.

It appears in phrases like “le'azazel eem zeh” which translates to “the hell with it” and “lekh le'azazel” which translates as to “go to hell” - but azazel doesn’t actually mean hell. There's also “sa'ir le'azazel,” which means scapegoat, but azazel doesn’t mean scape either. It is a very mysterious word indeed.

[...]

There is, of course, the goat offered to Azazel on the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16, but there is much more. Just one comment:

We learn more about Azazel from the Book of Jubilees and the Book of Enoch, where it says :“And Azazel taught men to make swords and knives and shields and breastplates; and made known to them the metals [of the earth] and the art of working them; and bracelets and ornaments; and the use of antimony and the beautifying of the eyelids; and all kinds of costly stones and all colouring tinctures. And there arose much godlessness, and they committed fornication, and they were led astray and became corrupt in all their ways.” (8:1-3)

Maybe. The Ethiopic text reads Azazel, but the Aramaic fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls and the ancient Greek translation (both of the Book of the Watchers, the first section of 1 Enoch in chapters 1-36) read Asael (עשאל), which is a different name that means "God has done." The latter is a perfectly good name for an angel. It looks as though the demonic name Azazel has been substituted in the Ethiopic for the angelic name Asael. That said, an Aramaic fragment of the Book of the Giants (4Q203 frag. 6, again, from the Dead Sea Scrolls) does refer to Azazel, apparently as one of the Watchers, so the name confusion seems to pre-date the Ethiopic translation. The second section of 1 Enoch, the Similitudes or Parables, has Azazel throughout, but we have nothing but the Ethiopic for this section and it is entirely possible that here too the original was Asael.

The bat qol

PHILOLOGOS ON THE BAT QOL (HEAVENLY VOICE): Is There an Echo in Here? And Other Questions About a Bat-Kol.

Can this [Greco-Roman] myth [of Echo and Narcissus] be the source of the rabbinic bat-kol? It certainly is possible; other Greek myths show up in rabbinic literature in concealed form, too. And because an echo has no clear source and seems to come now from nowhere in particular, bat-kol took on its second meaning of “a voice from the blue” — that is, a heavenly pronouncement. A bat-kol, for the early rabbis, was not the same as the voice of God that was heard by the biblical Prophets and did not have the weight of prophetic authority. Its status, indeed, was ambiguous, since the hearer of it could never be sure just where it emanated from or whose will it reflected. Heaven, in rabbinic thought, was also populated by angels sometimes acting on their own, and a bat-kol could come from them, too.

This reminds me a bit of the old joke about the man who fell off the side of a high cliff but managed to grab a bush a partway down. He called out, "Is anyone up there?" Then a voice from heaven thundered, "I am here. Let go of the bush and I will catch you." The man looked up at heaven, looked down at the ground far below, and then looked up again and called out, "Is anyone else up there?"

The bat qol (bat kol) figures in earlier PaleoJudaica posts here and here.

Review of van der Vliet and Hagen (ed.), Qasr Ibrim

BMCR REVIEW:

J. van der Vliet, J. L. Hagen (eds.), Qasr Ibrim, Between Egypt and Africa: Studies in Cultural Exchange. (NINO symposium, Leiden, 11-12 December 2009). Egyptologische uitgaven, 26. Leiden; Leuven: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten; Peeters, 2013. Pp. vi, 191. ISBN 9789062582266. €42.40 (pb).

Reviewed by Stanley M. Burstein, California State University, Los Angeles (sburste@calstatela.edu)

[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]

Well-preserved settlement sites are often called another “Pompeii.” Though most don’t live up to the billing, Qasr Ibrim is one of the exceptions. Located roughly half way between the first and second cataracts of the Nile in the frontier zone between Egypt and Nubia, Qasr Ibrim was, during its long history from the early first millennium BCE to the nineteenth century CE, one of the principal urban and military centers of Lower Nubia. Moreover, not only did it survive the flooding of Lower Nubia by the Aswan High Dam, but the anaerobic conditions created by the hot and dry climate of the region have resulted in the exceptional preservation of organic materials of all kinds, from garbage to luxury textiles, leather goods, and papyrus and parchment documents. With publication of the extraordinarily rich finds from the Egyptian Exploration Society excavations at Qasr Ibrim still far from complete, books dealing with the site are of necessity essentially progress reports. That is certainly true of this excellent volume, which contains thirteen papers delivered at a conference held at Leiden in December, 2009 on the theme of cultural interaction between Egypt and the Mediterranean basin and the interior of Africa.

[...]

More on Qasr Ibrim, which is the site where Coptic fragments of 2 (Slavonic) Enoch were recovered, is here and here. And editor Joost Hagen has been mentioned recently here.

UPDATE: Stephen Goranson sends reference to an article that challenges the identification of the Qasr Ibrim Coptic fragments with 2 Enoch: "The Angel of Tartarus and the Supposed Coptic Fragments of 2 Enoch," Böttrich, Christfried, Early Christianity, Volume 4, Number 4, December 2013, pp. 509-521(13).

Sartre-Fautriat and Sartre, Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie

NEW BOOK:

Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie: Le plateau du Trachôn et ses bordures

Annie Sartre-Fautriat et Maurice Sartre

Bibliothèque archéologique et historique, BAH 204

Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie, tome XV, fasc. 1 et 2

Beyrouth, Presses de l’Ifpo, 2014

ISBN 978-2-35159-395-0

28 x 22 cm, 730 p., 2 volumes (358 + 392 p.)

80 €

This new volume of IGLS contains all the greek and latin inscriptions of the Leja, the large basaltic triangular plateau situated south of Damascus and which was called Trachôn, the « Rough », by ancient sources. This name gives a perfect image of this wilderness and desolated country. The inscriptions illustrate the life during the ancient greek and roman periods in the villages built around or on the plateau, specially in the south part, more cultivated. These texts are essentially religious consecrations, dedications for emperors or governors, commemorations of private or public buildings, epitaphs, milestones of the roman road crossing the plateau from north to south. Most of them have been published by travellers and scholars since the beginning of the XIXth century, but a big lot of them have been found by the authors of this book during their explorations of the country.

Maurice Casey - 1942-2014

SAD NEWS: Word today from Paul Middleton on Facebook via James Crossley that Professor Maurice Casey, Emeritus Professor of New Testament at Nottingham University, has passed away. Professor Casey was best known for his work on early Christology, the Son of Man, and the Aramaic background of the Gospels. His Wikipedia page (with his death not yet noted) is here.

He was an invited seminar presenter at my 1998 international conference on the origins of the worship of Jesus. A few Paleojudaica posts interacting with his work are here, here, and here. I have disagreed with him on many things, but he never held back from tackling the difficult and important questions and I always found his ideas stimulating to engage with. Requiescat in pace.

Latest Reviews of the Enoch Seminar

RECENT REVIEWS AT REVIEWS OF THE ENOCH SEMINAR:

1. Elisa Uusimäki reviews David Andrew Teeter and Bernd U. Schipper,
eds., Wisdom and Torah.

2. Christfried Böttrich reviews Joshua G. Mathews, Melchizedek's
Alternative Priestly Order.

3. Michael T. Miller reviews Peter Schäfer, The Origins of Jewish Mysticism.

4. Isaac W. Oliver reviews Carlos A. Segovia, Por una interpretación no cristiana de Pablo de Tarso: El redescubrimiento contemporáneo de un judío mesiánico.

The Talmud as the basis of Israeli law?

THE TIMES OF ISRAEL: Netanyahu reported to say legal system based on Talmud. Ultra-Orthodox member of the Likud party also says PM told him Israel would officially adopt Hebrew calendar (Marissa Newman). That should stir things up.

Klaus Beyer - 1929-2014

SAD NEWS BELATEDLY: It just came to my attention a few days ago, via Jack Sasson, that renowned Aramaist Klaus Beyer of Heidelberg University passed away on 12 April. There is a German obituary by Holger Gzella (Leiden) posted here (pdf file). Requiescat in pace.

The GJW as a case study

PETER M. HEAD: Pseudo-Gospel of Jesus Wife as Case Study. Has some useful observations.

Background on the Gospel of Jesus' Wife is here with many links.

Interview with Shamma Friedman

THE TALMUD BLOG: An Interview with Shamma Friedman (Yitz Landes)

Today, May 6th 2014, Prof. Shamma Friedman of the Jewish Theological Seminary and Bar-Ilan University will be awarded the Israel Prize in Talmud, the most prestigious prize that the field has to offer. Over the course of my undergraduate studies at Hebrew University, I had the great fortune to work for Prof. Friedman as a research assistant. Earlier this week I visited him at his office at Machon Schechter to conduct this interview, and to continue work on his new website.

Background here and links

Suing the Third Temple into existence?

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: Lawsuit Demands Bank Loans for 'Building the Third Temple.' Ethiopian immigrant sues Israel's major banks – for denying him loans that he is seeking to build the Third Holy Temple in Jerusalem (Moshe Cohen, Arutz Sheva).

Cross-file under "Can't make it up."

Hurtado on GJW latest

LARRY HURTADO: The “Jesus’ Wife” Controversy: Scholarship, Publicity, and The Issues. Some good commentary on the current state of the question.

Background on the Gospel of Jesus' Wife is here and here and oh so many links.

Making women mind (or not) in the Talmud

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: Talmudic Rabbis, All Men, Admit They Cannot Bring Women Under Their Power. In debating the principles of intentional sin, sages find that pleading ignorance is no defense, even if not all laws can be followed.

It is here that the Gemara explains the principle, “Better that they be unwitting sinners and not be intentional sinners.” It is fascinating that this admission of the limits of rabbinic power takes place in such a gender-specific context: The rabbis, all men, acknowledge that they cannot bring women completely under their power. Women’s own practices and customs have an integrity that the law must respect.

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

The ultimate Noah review

JACK COLLINS: Noah: Hollywood Midrash. This is the best review I have seen of the Noah movie and very likely the best one that has been published. I learned a lot from it.

Background on Noah is here and links. My own review of Noah is here.

LMU Research Fellowships

POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP: Ludwig-Maxilimians-Universität München: 10 Research Fellowships.

More 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra in Syriac

LIV INGEBORG LIED: 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra: Another Syriac lectionary manuscript.  This is more of interest for specialists in the Syriac liturgy than for the text of 2 Baruch or 4 Ezra, but nevertheless it involves a couple of quotations of the Syriac text of both, which one does not find very often at all.

Related post here.

Conference on Rabbis and Other Jews

AT YALE UNIVERSITY: RABBIS AND OTHER JEWS: Rabbinic Literature and Late Antique Judaism (May 11, 2014).

This conference brings together colleagues and former students of Professor Steven Fraade, the Mark Taper Professor of the History of Judaism at Yale University, to workshop papers in anticipation of a festschrift in his honor. In keeping with Professor Fraade's research interests, the papers will focus mainly on the relationship between tannaitic literature and the rabbis' contemporaries and Second Temple predecessors.

More from Brice C. Jones on the Green Collection

TWO DISTURBING BLOG POSTS from Brice Jones:

More on the Private Collecting of the "Indiana Jones" of Biblical Archaeology

The 'First Century' Gospel of Mark, Josh McDowell, and Mummy Masks: What They All Have in Common

Background here and links.

Papyrus forgeries?

FURTHER TO ROGER BAGNALL'S STATEMENT, "I don’t know of a single verifiable case of somebody producing a papyrus text that purports to be an ancient text that isn’t. There’s always the first," quoted yesterday, two people have e-mailed with examples of forged papyri.

Joseph D. Reed at Brown University:

Though not a Coptic specialist or religious historian, I've been following the news about the Jesus' Wife fragment, including the notices on your blog. I'm reminded of an evident forgery of a papyrus fragment of Bion of Smyrna that I came across while researching Bion years ago. I'm attaching the ZPE article in which C. Gallazzi analyzes it as modern (though written on ancient papyrus); there's a photo of the papyrus at the bottom of the last page. Some of Gallazzi's arguments are similar to the ones raised against the two Coptic fragments, especially those concerning the John fragment by Hagen et al. I was reminded of it by Bagnall's statement that he knew of not a "single verifiable case of somebody producing a papyrus text that purports to be an ancient text that isn’t"; the Bion case is at least in some ways parallel.

The article is Claudio Gallazzi, "Un papiro falso con un frammento di Bione, cm.6.4 ×4.3," Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 34 (1979): 55-58.

Pierluigi Piovanelli at the University of Ottawa:

[With regard to Bagnall's statement] here is an excerpt from footnote 106 (devoted to illustrious forgeries) of my article in Burke's volume Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery?, p. 183.

(... on) the Artemidorus Papyrus (attributed to the Greek forger Constantine Simonides [1820-1867?]) (... see) Luciano Canfora, The True History of the So-called Artemidorus Papyrus (Bari: Edizioni di Pagina, 2007); idem, Il viaggio di Artemidoro. Vita e avventure di un grande esploratore dell’antichità (Milan: Rizzoli, 2010); idem, La meravigliosa storia del falso Artemidoro, La memoria 855 (Palermo: Sellerio, 2011); Kai Brodersen and Jaś Elsner, eds., Images and Texts on the “Artemidorus Papyrus”: Working Papers on P.Artemid. (St. John’s College Oxford, 2008), Historia, Einzelschriften 214 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2009); Federico Condello, “ ‘Artemidoro’ 2006-2011: l’ultima vita, in breve,” Quaderni di storia 74 (2011) 161-248 (kindly brought to my attention by Claudio Zamagni) (...).

Larry Hurtado has recently blogged on the notorious hoaxer and forger Constantine Simonides. It seems Simonides was responsible for a number of forged papyri.

So if the Gospel of Jesus' Wife and the Harvard John fragment are papyrus forgeries, they are not unprecedented. There is even precedent for the use of ancient papyrus to make a forgery.

Background here and links.

UPDATE: Joseph Reed e-mails a follow-up:

Thanks for calling attention to the Bion forgery on your blog. That papyrus has some general similarities to the new Coptic ones—size, shape, appearance of the writing (though the letter forms are different)—common signs of a cautious counterfeiter? I believe the jury is still out on the fascinating Artemidorus papyrus that P. Piovanelli brought to your attention; despite the vigorous warnings of Canfora and Janko most researchers, it seems, incline toward authenticity—but its alleged fabricator, Constantine Simonides, did apparently forge texts on authentically old papyri.

GJW: Another Goodacre roundup

MARK GOODACRE: Jesus' Wife Fragment Round-up. The latest news is that the Smithsonian documentary on the Gospel of Jesus' Wife is running later today, plus the Daily Mail has taken up the recent developments on the story.

Background here and links.

UPDATE: The New York Times has just published an article on the recent developments: Fresh Doubts Raised About Papyrus Scrap Known as ‘Gospel of Jesus’ Wife’ (Laurie Goodstein). There is new information in it, including further responses from Malcolm Choat, Roger Bagnall, and Karen King.

“This is substantive, it’s worth taking seriously, and it may point in the direction of forgery,” Karen L. King, the historian at Harvard Divinity School, said in a telephone interview, her first since the recent developments. “This is one option that should receive serious consideration, but I don’t think it’s a done deal.”

[...]

Malcolm Choat, a Coptic expert at Macquarie University in Australia who cautiously contradicted the doubters in his paper last month for the Harvard journal, said in an interview that the new evidence was “persuasive,” but “we’re not completely there yet” — until the John and Jesus wife papyruses can be studied in person or using high-resolution images to understand their relationship. Roger Bagnall, a renowned papyrologist who directs the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, and who early on deemed the Jesus’ Wife papyrus likely to be genuine, said in an interview about the skeptics, “Most of the people taking this view wanted it to be a fake, and they haven’t asked critical questions about their own hypothesis.”

Perhaps the copying of these two John texts was done in ancient times, not the modern era. Perhaps the John and Jesus’ Wife fragments were not written by the same hand: Indeed, the testing found that the ink is similar but not the same.

The critics have asserted it would not be hard for a forger to mix a batch of carbon-based ink that could fool scientists.

But Dr. Bagnall said, “I don’t know of a single verifiable case of somebody producing a papyrus text that purports to be an ancient text that isn’t. There’s always the first.”

The spotlight now turns to the provenance and the owner of the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife. Dr. King promised him she would not identify him publicly, but said she knows she is now under pressure to do so.

I don't think the people arguing it's a fake "wanted it to be a fake." I was originally suspicious because it sounded too good to be true, and subsequent evidence has continued to point considerably more in the direction of a forgery than not. In any case, ad hominem criticisms can go in both directions and are ultimately unhelpful. The evidence remains to be evaluated on its own terms after all the accusations are done. The Lycopolitan John manuscript (the Qau Codex) was buried in a tomb, so it's hard to see how the Harvard John fragment could have been copied from it. I suppose it's possible that the Lycopolitan John manuscript had been copied (exactly according to its lineation) and the Harvard John fragment was copied centuries later (uniquely for a manuscript in the Lycopolitan dialect and, again, exactly following the lineation, this time of alternate lines) from this lost intermediate manuscript. Neither this nor any other scenario I can think of sounds likely to me.

I don't know of any verified modern forgeries using papyrus, but there has been at least one modern (1960s) forgery using parchment: the notorious Hebron "Philistine" scrolls. It was a bad forgery, but it managed to fool a number of scholars. Producing a papyrus forgery is not greatly different in principle, although this one, if that is what it is, is more sophisticated in that it uses ancient materials. But we would expect the arms race between scholars and forgers to result in more sophisticated forgeries.

The most substantive point in Prof. Bagnall's reply is that the two documents may not be in the same scribal hand. That would weaken the connection between them. Some experts in Coptic paleography need to have a look at this question and give us evaluations of whether the two hands are the same.

UPDATE (6 May): For examples of papyrus forgeries, see here.

A crucified Hasmonean king?

HAARETZ: Cold case: Did archaeologists find the last Maccabean king, after all? Crucified remains and a broken jaw have confused scientists for decades. But it could well be that the last Hasmonean king has been found under a private house in Jerusalem (Ariel David).

In 1970, a rock-cut tomb was discovered by workers building a private house in Jerusalem's Givat Hamivtar neighborhood. Inside the two-chambered burial, dating back to the first century BCE, archeologists found a decorated ossuary – a limestone box containing the bones of the deceased – and an enigmatic Aramaic inscription affixed to the wall.

"I am Abba, son of Eleazar the priest," proclaimed the 2,000-year-old text. "I am Abba, the oppressed, the persecuted, born in Jerusalem and exiled to Babylon, who brought back Mattathiah son of Judah and buried him in the cave that I purchased."

Who was Abba, this unfortunate priest from Jerusalem? And who was the Mattathiah whose remains were apparently buried in the cave?

These questions have been fiercely debated by scholars for the past 40 years. Now. new research indicates that the initial interpretation of the find, that has long been dismissed, may have been right all along. This view identifies the Abba cave as the final resting place of a key figure in Jewish history: Mattathiah Antigonus II, the last king of the Hasmonean dynasty, whose reign was followed by Roman conquest, the destruction of the Second Temple and two millennia of exile.

[...]

Horrific death

The theory that Abba may have retrieved the Hasmonean king's body from Antioch, today in southern Turkey, and secretly buried it in his family tomb received a boost in 1974, when Nicu Haas, Israel's top physical anthropologist at the time, discussed his analysis of the bones found inside the ossuary on Israeli television.

Interviewed for a program titled "The Last of the Maccabees," Haas said he had identified the bones of at least two individuals, one older and one a young adult, around the age of 25, who had suffered a horrific death. Three nails where found in the ossuary with pieces of hand bones attached to two of them, suggesting the victim had been crucified.

Haas also identified clean cuts on the man's second vertebra and lower jaw, indicating he had been decapitated with a sword or other sharp object. These findings were consistent with Mattathiah's age and with the account of his execution given by ancient historians Josephus Flavius and Dio Cassius who recount that Marc Antony had the king crucified, scourged and beheaded.

With Haas' analysis, all the pieces of the puzzle seemed to fall into place. But then, there was an accident. A month after the TV program aired, Haas slipped on an icy Jerusalem street and hit his head. He spent the last 13 years of his life in a coma and never published his findings on the cave.

The bones were passed on for analysis to Patricia Smith, an anthropologist from the Hebrew University. While agreeing that the remains included the skull fragments of a young man, she concluded that the cut jaw belonged to the elderly person - and that this individual was a woman. In her report, published in 1977 in the Israel Exploration Journal, she also dismissed the idea that crucifixion had occurred because the nails had not passed through the bones.

[...]

In a paper published last year in the IEJ, Yoel Elitzur, a Hebrew University historian, sheds some light on the enigmatic priest Abba and links him to the Hasmonean dynasty.

As a scholar of Semitic languages and of the names of places in ancient Israel, Elitzur notes that in Jewish texts and manuscripts the name Abba and Baba were often used interchangeably. He identifies Abba as the head of a family mentioned by Josephus as the "the sons of Baba" and described as being supporters of the Hasmoneans long after Herod had taken power.

[...]

Some key remains, including the nails and the cut jaw and vertebra, were sent for safekeeping to Tel Aviv University anthropologist Israel Hershkovitz and remained untouched in his lab for years.

After reading Elitzur's paper, Hershkovitz re-examined the remains. He analyzed the nails using an electron microscope, determining that they did break the bones of the hand, as would occur in crucifixion. This itself is a blow to skeptics, since Romans rarely crucified women, Hershkovitz said.

He also doubts Smith's finding that the time-worn jaw belonged to a woman.

[...]

Read it all. Whoever the victim was, if Hershkovitz's conclusions are correct, this would the the second crucified body recovered from antiquity. The other is noted here, where the question of crucifixion of women is also discussed. See also here and links.

Has a stone left over from construction of the Second Temple been found?

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: A heart of stone (Nadav Shragai, Israel Hayom).

The Antiquities Authority has uncovered some 60 meters of Western Wall foundations, leading to an exciting discovery: One unique smooth stone, unlike any other in the wall • The stone may be left over from the construction of the Second Temple.

[...]

Now begins the fourth chapter, a new era. Very quietly, archaeologists have been expanding their excavations to expose the Western Wall's foundations. At first, the excavations involved only a few meters. Now, Israel Hayom reports for the first time that roughly 60 meters of the Western Wall's foundations at the southern end, beneath the Jerusalem Archaeological Park (near the Davidson Center), have been exposed.

[...]

The most important finding that has been revealed so far has to do with the revised dating of the Western Wall's construction. Shukron and his colleague, Professor Ronny Reich (his partner in the City of David excavations), went against prevailing opinion when they determined that the Western Wall had not been built by Herod, but rather by Agrippa I and Agrippa II, Herod's grandson and great-grandson. What led them to this conclusion, which goes against all convention, was the discovery of 17 ancient coins that were minted during the time of Valerius Gratus, who served as procurator of Judea during the years 17 and 18 C.E.

The coins were discovered in soil that the Western Wall's builders had used to fill in a mikveh, cisterns and cellars over which the Western Wall was built. When this soil was sifted, the coins from Valerius Gratus' time were discovered -- which meant that the mikveh had been demolished and the first layer of the stones of the Western Wall built on top of it in the year 17 at the earliest, and perhaps even later.

Since Herod had begun building the Temple in 22 B.C.E. and died in 4 B.C.E., his heirs, not he, were the ones who began constructing the lower foundations of the Western Wall about 20 years after his death. They, or their descendants, built the upper foundations, including the stairs at Robinson's Arch that led to the Temple Mount from the west, later still.

[...]

The coins that led the archaeologists to their revolutionary conclusion were found roughly two and a half years ago. Since then, one surprise has followed another and finding has followed finding. The recent discovery is fascinating at the very least: a single stone that is different in appearance from the others and raises quite a few questions. It is completely smooth, lacking the cut margins at the edges that we know well from the other stones of the Western Wall.

[...]

Eli Shukron explains it with an interesting theory. "This stone came from the Temple Mount, from the surplus stones that were used in the construction of the Temple itself. Those stones were high-quality, chiseled and smooth, like this unusual one, which was discovered among the Western Wall's foundations. This stone was intended for the Second Temple, and stones like it were used to build the Temple -- but it was left unused. The builders of the Western Wall brought it down here because it was no longer needed up above -- and this is how the other stones of the Temple looked," he says, adding, "Anyone who passes a hand gently over this stone feels a slightly wavy texture, just like the Talmud describes."

[...]

More on the question of the dating of the Temple Mount wall is here (which I had forgotten about) and more on that and that recently discovered chisel (mentioned later in the article) is here.

Taking action on the Iraqi Jewish archive?

ARUTZ SHEVA: US Lawyer Urges Court Injunction to Save Iraqi Jewish Archive. American attorney says Jewish community does not need to wait until ancient archive is returned to Iraq to take action.

Speaking at a 31 March New York conference on the legal issues posed by the question of the Iraq-Jewish archive, American attorney Nat Lewin said that the community should not wait until the archive was returned to Iraq before taking action, insisting that the community would receive a sympathetic hearing in the US.

[...]

There is a precedent for cultural property to be returned to its owners: the Russian government was forced to return the fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe's library to the international Hassidic organisation Chabad in New York. It had been seized by the Bolsheviks in 1917.

Nat Lewin, who has taken on numerous Jewish cases pro bono, represented Chabad in that instance. The Iraqi-Jewish archive was less straightforward, however, since there are multiple owners. Like the Chabad library, the archive was not valuable but represented the biography of the Iraqi-Jewish community.

[...]

It's complicated. Read on. Background here and links. Background on the Schneerson Library is here and links. It appears that there have been some developments in the latter story since my last post on it.

Ariel & Fontanille, The Coins of Herod

NEW BOOK FROM BRILL:

The Coins of Herod
A Modern Analysis and Die Classification

Donald T. Ariel & Jean-Philippe Fontanille

Herod, ruler of Judea at a pivotal time (40–4 BCE) in the region’s history, was Rome’s most famous client king. In this volume, Herod’s coinage benefits from a comprehensive reappraisal. The coins and dies have been thoroughly examined, resulting in innovative iconographic and technological interpretations. Study of the coins’ presence in hoards, their archaeological contexts and geographical distribution, together with other typological, epigraphic and numismatic observations, have aided in establishing that all of the types were minted in Jerusalem. A new relative chronology of Herod’s dated and undated coins is the most important by-product of this study. Finally, an attempt is made to peg this seriation to known events within the king’s reign.

GJW: more media attention

LIVESCIENCE: 'Gospel of Jesus's Wife' Looks More and More Like a Fake (Owen Jarus). The recent developments concerning the Gospel of Jesus' Wife continue to propagate in the mainstream media. This article quotes (and in one case uses a graphic) from a number of blogs, including PaleoJudaica. There are also a couple of pieces of new information. First, two Coptologist papyrologists who have been involved in the analysis of the GJW are at least declining to disagree yet with Christian Askeland's arguments for its inauthenticity:

Live Science contacted two Egyptologists who have examined the Gospel of Jesus's Wife firsthand to get their opinions. Malcolm Choat, of Macquarie University, who published an analysis of the writing of the Gospel of Jesus's Wife recently in Harvard Theological Review, says that he needs time to investigate Askeland's findings before he can comment. Similarly, Roger Bagnall, the director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University (the Gospel of Jesus's Wife was examined there at one point) said that he needs time to analyze Askeland's findings and those of other scholars before he can comment.

Second, Professor King and Harvard are not commenting so far:

King has remained silent on the new evidence. Calls made by Live Science to Harvard Divinity School's media relations office were not returned. Calls made directly to King's phone were also not returned. The reasons for the silence are unclear; there are unconfirmed reports that divisions have emerged within the Harvard Divinity faculty over the authenticity of the papyrus.

Background here and links.

Moriggi, A Corpus of Syriac Incantation Bowls

NEW BOOK FROM BRILL:

A Corpus of Syriac Incantation Bowls
Syriac Magical Texts from Late-Antique Mesopotamia

Marco Moriggi, Università di Catania

The Aramaic incantation bowls from Sasanian Mesopotamia are the most important source we have for studying the everyday beliefs of the Jewish, Christian, Mandaean, Manichaean, Zoroastrian and Pagan communities on the eve of the Islamic conquests. In A Corpus of Syriac Incantation Bowls, Marco Moriggi presents new editions of forty-nine Syriac incantation bowls that were originally published between 1853 and 2012, with accompanying introductions, translations, philological notes, photographs and glossaries. Furthermore, there is a detailed analysis of the Estrangela and Manichaean scripts as used on the bowls, together with newly drawn script charts. In gathering, organising and updating most of the published Syriac bowls, this book provides a valuable resource for further research into both their language and content.

The GJW in the WSJ

JERRY PATTENGALE: How the 'Jesus' Wife' Hoax Fell Apart. The media loved the 2012 tale from Harvard Divinity School. (Wall Street Journal).

In September 2012, Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King announced the discovery of a Coptic (ancient Egyptian) gospel text on a papyrus fragment that contained the phrase "Jesus said to them, 'My wife . . .' " The world took notice. The possibility that Jesus was married would prompt a radical reconsideration of the New Testament and biblical scholarship.

Yet now it appears almost certain that the Jesus-was-married story line was divorced from reality. On April 24, Christian Askeland—a Coptic specialist at Indiana Wesleyan University and my colleague at the Green Scholars Initiative—revealed that the "Gospel of Jesus' Wife," as the fragment is known, was a match for a papyrus fragment that is clearly a forgery.

[...]

It's a good sign that word of the latest developments regarding the Gospel of Jesus' Wife are being picked up by the mainstream media, even if in this case the article doubles as an advertisement for the Green Collection.

Background on the GJW and the Harvard John fragment is here and links. Related post here.

Rollston on forgery in 2005

A PRESCIENT ARTICLE BY CHRISTOPHER ROLLSTON from the SBL Forum in 2005 has just been flagged again on Facebook by Seth Larkin Sanders: The Crisis of Modern Epigraphic Forgeries and the Antiquities Market: A Palaeographer Reflects on the Problem and Proposes Protocols for the Field. Excerpt:

Using such sources, a deft modern forger has the essentials regarding script, orthography, vocabulary, syntax, language, and culture to produce a fine Old Hebrew forgery. All of these sources are widely considered standard in the field and are readily available; therefore, knowledge of, and access to, the proper resources is not an issue (and such sources are available for all the Northwest Semitic languages, not just Hebrew). Forgers also now have available software programs (e.g., Adobe Photoshop) that can be used to facilitate accurate "script production."

Some of the remaining requirements would be adequate time; some knowledge of, or expertise in, chemistry or ancient metallurgy (or an associate with such expertise); access to various materials such as potsherds, ancient metals, stone of Levantine quarry, small pieces of ancient papyrus or vellum, some carbonized remains (for the production of "ancient" ink), and sufficient finances. None of these necessities is problematic.

Because non-provenanced epigraphs often sell for thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, funding is not a major issue; that is, the sale of one forgery could fund the production of several additional forgeries. Moreover, ancient materials of various sorts are readily available to those participating in, or associated with, excavations or those dealing with the market. In addition, the chemical composition of ancient patinas can be replicated.

I noted the article here back when it came out. Some of the many, many related PaleoJudaica posts are here, here, here, here, and here and links.

Rollston's 2005 article demonstrates that long before the fake metal codices or the Gospel of Jesus' Wife emerged, specialists were well aware of the danger of forgers using ancient materials such as lead or papyrus to create fake artifacts with an appearance of antiquity. Good call, Chris.

The Talmud on Jewish chosenness

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: Why Did God Choose the Jewish People To Receive the Torah? Talmudic rabbis debate the paradoxical belief in Jewish chosenness despite the evidence of Jewish powerlessness.

One famous midrash tried to come to grips with the problem by imagining that before choosing Israel God actually offered his Torah to all the nations of the Earth. But one by one they rejected it, finding its laws and prohibitions too burdensome; only the Israelites agreed to take it on themselves. This midrash, however, casts the law itself in a rather ambiguous light. It strongly suggests that the Torah is not exactly a boon—that it’s something an ordinary person would flee if possible. This doesn’t really suit the rabbis’ deep love and reverence for the Torah, which they see more as an inexhaustible gift. At the same time, the story puts the Jews themselves in a very flattering light: Only this people was pious and disciplined enough to accept the hard job of living by God’s law.

In this week’s Daf Yomi reading, however, we saw the rabbis offer a very different rationale for why the Jews received the Torah. ...

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

Hagen on the Harvard Gospel of John fragment

ALIN SUCIU: Guest Post: Joost L. Hagen – Possible further proof of forgery: A reading of the text of the Lycopolitan fragment of the Gospel of John, with remarks about suspicious phenomena in the areas of the lacunae and a note about the supposed Gospel of Jesus’ Wife. He provides more evidence that the Gospel of John fragment is a fake.

Dr. Hagen will be familiar to regular readers from this, this, this, and this.

Background on the GJW and the John fragment is here and links.

NT Teaching Fellowship at St. Andrews

JOB: Teaching Fellow in New Testament, University of St Andrews -School of Divinity. A one-year post commencing 1 September 2014. Application deadline is 30 May. Follow the link for details.

The Vatican Library catalogues and Syriac

UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME: Professor critiques Vatican Library texts (Emily McConville, The Observer). The headline isn't very accurate, since it is the catalogues he is "critiquing" (i.e., correcting), not the texts:

The Vatican library provides invaluable resources for Department of Classics professor Joseph Amar, but in the course of his study, he has worked to correct discrepancies in one of the library’s manuscript catalogs, he said.

Using manuscripts from the first centuries of Christianity, Amar said he studies the writings of early Christian thinkers. Many of the manuscripts he studies reside in the Vatican Library, collected over many centuries and cataloged in the Bibliotheca Orientalis Clementino-Vaticana, an 18th-century tome that lists the authors of documents, their publication dates and descriptions of their contents, Amar said.

He also studies the Aramaic language and its dialects, which linked Christianity and Judaism and, at times, made them almost indistinguishable.

“In general, it’s about documenting Christianity at a crucial stage in its history, where it’s still very Jewish-looking but hasn’t become entirely the kind of Christianity we recognize today,” Amar said. “It sort of still has one foot in Judaism and one foot in Christianity. This is preserved in these ancient manuscripts because Jews and Christians were using the same language.”

[...]

Tucked away near the end of the article is a tidbit that could be quite important:

Amar said the process often leads to new discoveries. For example, scholars believed for centuries that Jacob of Edessa, an influential Biblical scholar, had written a commentary on the Book of Genesis ⎯ but no one could find it. Meanwhile, a catalog contained a misidentified Genesis commentary, Amar said. By comparing that manuscript’s writing and handwriting style with Jacob’s known works, Amar said he was able to correctly attribute the commentary to him.

Finding a lost Syriac commentary on Genesis by Jacob of Edessa sounds like a big deal to me. The only other information given is the photo of Professor Amar, with what looks like a photocopy of the manuscript, with the caption "Classics professor Joseph Amar examines a copy of the commentary of the Book of Genesis by Jacob of Edessa. Amar said he believes this manuscript was published in the third century." Something is garbled there, because Jacob of Edessa was born c. 640. Perhaps he said that the Aramaic dialect Syriac spread from Edessa in the third century?

The text in the photo appears to be written in Syriac script, but I can't make out anything else. Out of curiosity I flagged the article on the Hugoye list and Alison Salvesen and Bas ter Har Romeny commented here. Cross-file under "Syriac watch," "Lost book found?" and "Watch this space."

GJW latest, plus the Green collection

MARK GOODACRE gathers up all the latest on the Gospel of Jesus' Wife: Jesus' Wife Fragment Round-up. It is a good sign that CNN is taking note of the latest developments.

Background here and links.

On a tangentially related note, Brice C. Jones has an interesting and slightly disquieting post about the Green Collection of ancient manuscripts: On the Green Collection and Private Collectors of Biblical Artifacts.

Background on the Green Collection is here and here and links

Second-Temple-era bones?

DISCOVERY: Hikers Find Human Skull and Bones in Gush Etzion Cave (Tazpit News Agency).

A surprised group of hikers in Gush Etzion stumbled across human bones in a cave near Ein Tzurim, according to police.

The hikers immediately called 100 (Israel’s 911), and the police came to investigate.

The police, once on the scene realized that this wasn’t a murder scene and called the Israel Antiquities Authority. A preliminary examination by their experts indicate that the bones are apparently those of Jews from the Second Temple period.

[...]

The article doesn't give any reason for this identification of the bones and expresses proper caution about the conclusion. Watch this space ...

Jewish epigraphy workshop

WITH MARGARET WILLIAMS: Jewish Epigraphy: A Workshop, at New College, University of Edinburgh, on 11-12 June. Tempting ...

GJW: the latest

THE GOSPEL OF JESUS' WIFE is still generating blog posts and media attention:

April DeConick: What are the facts about the Gospel of Jesus' Wife?

April is asking some important questions, one or two of which I have also touched on here. There is a lot of interesting discussion happening on Facebook, especially from Mark Goodacre and Bob Kraft on the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins page (which is a closed group). I hope some of it ends up in some public forum in due course.

Mark Goodacre: Laboratory tests can’t always catch modern forgeries - as Harvard Theological Review has (inadvertently) proved (guest post by Andrew Bernhard)

Mark Goodacre: Tentative chronology on Coptic "Jesus Wife" fragment (guest post by Stephen Goranson)

Charlotte Allen: The Deepening Mystery Of the 'Jesus' Wife' Papyrus (Weekly Standard)

Background here and links.

Assyrian seal: time travel not required

HAARETZ: Archaeologists baffled by 8th century BCE seal found in Galilee How the seal from Assyrian King Sargon II’s rule came to be found where it is remains unclear; ancient ring made of carnelian also found (Eli Ashkenazi).

Two archaeological finds at the Omrit site in the northern Galilee have baffled Israeli archaeologists. The first is a seal dating back to the eighth century B.C.E., which was found in the "wrong" place. The second is an orange carnelian ring of uncertain origin, that apparently dates from the Middle Ages.

[...]

The site includes the ruins of three concentric temples:

The innermost part contains the most ancient temple, dated to the year 40 BCE. In the middle is a shrine dated to the time of Herod, around 20 BCE. Some believe that it is one of three temples Herod built in honor of Emperor Augustus, along with two others in Caesarea and Tiberias.

The third, later, temple dates back to the first century CE.

The seal, the older of the two artifacts, was found behind the wall of the earliest shrine, within a layer of filler between an internal and external wall.

Archaeologists don't understand how the seal ended up there, as the temple was built roughly 700 years before the seal was created. The layer of filler also contained small glass tools and other objects which were apparently taken out of the temple during construction.

[...]

The last paragraph baffled me for a while, since it's a bit difficult to explain an artifact excavated in the fill of a wall that was built seven hundred years before the artifact was made. A careless time traveler, perhaps? But as Joseph Lauer already independently worked out, this is just a typo. Read "after" rather than "before." It is unusual to find a prime artifact in a wall that is seven centuries younger, but time travel is not required.

Moles?

A MOLE BY ANY OTHER NAME ... Word of the Day / Khafarperet: The word that means mole but shouldn't, The sages didn't realize Israel has no moles. Hint as to what khafarperet might mean: It probably isn't fruit-digger (Elon Gilad, Haaretz).

Rather more recently, a text of Isaiah [2:20] was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, which in fact had the word khafarperet as a single word. But this doesn’t free us from the problem of what a khafarperet was, since as we already said - the Holy Land has no moles.

[...]

There may not be moles but there are spalax, which are blind rodents that live in holes, also known as mole-rats. The zoologically challenged might be pardoned for thinking the delightful rodents are moles, since they look like moles, dig like moles et cetera.

In modern parlance, when an Israeli sees a spalax (or more likely, a mound created by one), he'll probably tell you it's a khafarferet, not realizing that he's dead wrong and the species is actually a mole-rat, known locally as kholed. But that's okay, since that is probably what khafarperet originally meant anyway.

It's always good when an even number of mistakes makes you right.

Yad Vashem

FOR YOM HASHOAH*: Word of the Day / Yad Vashem Any bewilderment over the Holocaust memorial museum's name can be cleared up by the knowledge that 'yad' doesn't always mean hand (Shoshana Kordova, Haaretz).

This use of yad, which means “power” and “strength” as well as “monument,” can be seen in the biblical description of a memorial to Avshalom, King David’s rebellious son: “Now Absalom in his lifetime had taken and reared up for himself the pillar, which is in the king’s dale; for he said: ‘I have no son to keep my name in remembrance’; and he called the pillar after his own name; and it is called Absalom’s monument [yad Avshalom] unto this day” (2 Samuel 18:18).

There is indeed a stone tomb called Yad Avshalom (known in English as the Tomb of Absalom or Absalom’s Pillar) in Jerusalem’s Kidron Valley, though Israeli archaeologist Gabriel Barkay recently announced that it’s more likely to be the final resting place of Herodian monarch Agrippa I.

“Thus saith the Lord: Keep ye justice, and do righteousness; for my salvation is near to come, and my favor to be revealed,” reads Isaiah 56:1. In verse 5, we are told: “Even unto them will I give in my house and within my walls a monument and a memorial [yad vashem] better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting memorial, that shall not be cut off.”

Indeed, Yad Vashem, which was established in 1953, describes itself as “the Jewish people’s living memorial to the Holocaust.”

*Israeli Holocaust Memorial Day, which was yesterday.

GJW: recent related blog posts on Coptic, papyri, and legal issues

THE GOSPEL OF JESUS' WIFE remains a live subject for now.

First, Coptologists continue to comment on it and the reasons for concluding it is a forgery.

Alin Suciu: The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife Papyrus. Final Considerations

Christian Askeland: The forgery of the Lycopolitan Gospel of John

Incidentally, if you would like to know more about the Lycopolitan dialect of Coptic, Peter Nagel has an informative online article at the Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia: Lycopolitan (or Lyco-Diospolitan or Subakhmimic).

Second, David Meadows is starting a new Papyrus Series over at Rogue Classicism. It will be on recent papyri discoveries and it sounds as though the GJW and the the new Sappho papyrus will receive attention in due course. The series begins with The Papyrus Series I: Egyptian Soldier Letter Home.

Third, I've been meaning for a while to note a blog post at Faces and Voices by Roberta Mazza on the legal issues of dealing with unprovenanced fragments like the GJW and the Sappho papyrus: Papyri, private collectors and academics: why the wife of Jesus and Sappho matter.

Background on the GJW is here and links.

www.floodofnoah.com

DR. INGRID LILY has set up an interesting website on the Noah movie called Noah's Flood. It collects essays and media by scholars and writers. I don't think I've mentioned it before, so have a look.

Background on Noah is here and links.

Schiffman on exile and return in the DSS

ANOTHER BLOG SERIES BY LAWRENCE H. SCHIFFMAN: Exile and Return in the Dead Sea Scrolls (2 posts).