Yadin-Israel, Scripture and Tradition

NEW BOOK FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS:

Scripture and Tradition
Rabbi Akiva and the Triumph of Midrash
Azzan Yadin-Israel

336 pages | 6 x 9
Cloth Dec 2014 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4643-8 | $75.00s | £49.00 |
Ebook Dec 2014 | ISBN 978-0-8122-9043-1 | $75.00s | £49.00 |
A volume in the Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion series

"Conceptually sophisticated and wonderfully erudite, Scripture and Tradition touches on the most fundamental questions of the Midrashic project."—Moshe Halbertal, New York University

The earliest rabbinic commentary to the Book of Leviticus, the Sifra, is generally considered an exemplum of Rabbi Akiva's intensely scriptural school of interpretation. But, Azzan Yadin-Israel contends, the Sifra commentary exhibits two distinct layers of interpretation that bring dramatically different assumptions to bear on the biblical text: earlier interpretations accord with the hermeneutic principles associated with Rabbi Ishmael, the other major school of early rabbinic midrash, while later additions subtly alter hermeneutic terminology and formulas, resulting in an engagement with Scripture that is not interpretive at all. Rather, the midrashic terminology in the Sifra's anonymous passages is part of what Yadin-Israel calls "a hermeneutic of camouflage," aimed at presenting oral traditions as though they were Scripture-based injunctions.

Scripture and Tradition offers a radical rereading of the Sifra and its authorship, with far-reaching ramifications for our understanding of rabbinic literature as a whole. Using this new understanding of the Sifra as his starting point, Yadin-Israel demonstrates a two fold break in the portrayal of Rabbi Akiva: hermeneutically, the sober midrashist who appeared in earlier rabbinic sources is transformed into an inspired, oracular interpreter of Scripture in the Babylonian Talmud; while the biographically unremarkable sage is recast as a youthful ignoramus who came to Torah study late in life. The dual transformations of Rabbi Akiva—like the Sifra's hermeneutic of camouflage—are motivated by an ideological shift toward a greater emphasis on scriptural authority and away from received traditions, an insight that sheds new light on the vexing question of midrash and oral tradition in rabbinic sources. Through this close examination of a notoriously difficult text, Scripture and Tradition recovers a vital piece of the history of Jewish thought.

Suciu's Coptic Resources

ALIN SUCIU: Coptic Resources. (Via AWOL). A useful-looking page, which is different from his Coptic Bible Resources, already noted here.

Herman on Hanukkah and Zoroastrianism

ARASH ZEINI: Religious transformation between East and West. An article by Geoffrey Herman which proposes to connect the development of Hanukkah with Zoroastrian ritual in Babylonia.

New books from Magnes Press

DANIEL IN NEO-ARAMAIC:

Language and Tradition XXXIII
THE BOOK OF DANIEL IN A NEO-ARAMAIC TRANSLATION
By Yona Sabar
Edited by: Aharon Maman
Magnes Press

In Hebrew. Except for the Aramaic part.

And this book, also from Magnes, looks interesting, although the page is not forthcoming with many details

Korot Volume 22 - The Israel journal of the history of medicine and science
THE SERPENT IN MEDICINE, MEDICAL CULTURE AND THE JEWISH TRADITION
Edited by: Samuel S. Kottek

The articles are in Hebrew and English.

Korpel and de Moor, Adam, Eve, and the Devil

BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION: Adam, Eve, and the Devil!

See Also: Adam, Eve, and the Devil: A New Beginning (Sheffield Phoenix Press Ltd, 2014).

By Marjo C.A. Korpel
Protestant Theological University,
Amsterdam / Groningen

Johannes C. de Moor
Protestant Theological University,
Amsterdam / Groningen
December 2014.

ConclusionCanaanite mythological traditions, especially those from the city of Ugarit, throw new light on passages about Adam and Eve in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and parabiblical literature. Several elements that cannot be traced back to the canonical Hebrew Bible appear to be present in Canaanite texts that are at least twelve hundred years older. This allows for the hypothesis that there has existed an unbroken chain of popular religious tradition that was deliberately repressed in rabbinic Judaism, but occasionaly cropped up in extra-canonical works. Further exploration of these hitherto elusive links might be rewarding.

Past posts on the Devil/Satan (etc.) are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Moss on the Via Dolorosa

CANDIDA MOSS: Oops! Jesus’ Last Steps Are in the Wrong Place. The discovery of the site where he was sentenced to die confirms that pilgrims are off course in Jerusalem (The Daily Beast).

The unveiling of this site marks a fine confluence of archeology and biblical text; it is a wonderful opportunity for people to visit an important Christian site. The only problem is that for hundreds of years tourists have already been visiting the site of the trial of Jesus, in a completely different part of Jerusalem. The Via Dolorosa or “Way of Sorrows,” the road that Jesus is believed to have travelled as he carried his cross from his trial to his crucifixion, is currently at the top of must-see lists of religious attractions for visitors to the city. Each year more than a million Christian pilgrims visit Jerusalem hoping to retrace the steps of the Savior.

Bibliobloggers are cited. Background here.

Margaret Barker and the Latter Day Saints

JOHN TURNER AT THE ANXIOUS BENCH: Why Mormons Love Margaret Barker. Interesting analysis.

Martin Guerre and the Talmud

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: The Return of Martin Guerre: Abandoned, Adulterous, Raped, and Widowed Wives. Talmudic sages say that sinful acts—especially those committed by women—are not the rabbis’ fault.

The main subjects of Tractate Yevamot are marriage and death. Initially, the rabbis were concerned with a man’s responsibilities toward his dead brother’s widow, who is his sister-in-law or yevama. Much of the tractate so far has dealt with whether and how such a man should marry his yevama, or else release her from her obligation by performing the ceremony of chalitza. This week, however, as Daf Yomi readers began chapter 10 of Yevamot, the subjects of death and marriage were brought together in a different way. Now the rabbis shift their attention from the brother-in-law to the widow herself. What happens, they ask, if a widow remarries, only to discover later that her first husband is in fact still alive?

[...]

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

Judaism's Holiest Site

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: National Geographic Runs Correction on Judaism's Holiest Site (CAMERA). Guess what the correct answer is.

De Gruyter Prize

SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE: De Gruyter Prize for Biblical Studies and Reception History. I'm not sure how I missed noting this one earlier, but it is an important prize for recent PhDs. Follow the link for details. The actual submission is not due until 1 March, but note that to be eligible you must send an indication of intention to submit by 10 January.

"Greek" amulet bleg

MYSTERY: Ancient Amulet Discovered with Curious Palindrome Inscription (Owen Jarus, LiveScience).

An ancient, two-sided amulet uncovered in Cyprus contains a 59-letter inscription that reads the same backward as it does forward.

Archaeologists discovered the amulet, which is roughly 1,500 years old, at the ancient city of Nea Paphos in southwest Cyprus.

One side of the amulet has several images ...

On the other side of the amulet is an inscription, written in Greek, that reads the same backward as it does forward, making it a palindrome. ...

Ancients amulets are not uncommon and the reported content of the inscription, including it being a palindrome, is the sort of thing you find in the Greek Magical Papyri. The mystery, which the media seems to have missed entirely, is that the inscription is not in the Greek language. Rather, it is in some other language but written in Greek letters. Such things are known. For example, this post discusses an ancient amulet written in the Hebrew language, but in Greek letters. But this one isn't written in Hebrew or any other language I recognize. Can someone out there tell us what it is? Here is the Greek text:

ΙΑΕW

ΒΑΦΡΕΝΕΜ

ΟΥΝΟΘΙΛΑΡΙ

ΚΝΙΦΙΑΕΥΕ

ΑΙΦΙΝΚΙΡΑΛ

ΙΘΟΝΥΟΜΕ

ΝΕΡΦΑΒW

ΕΑΙ

The article says:

This translates to "Iahweh(a god)is the bearer of the secret name, the lion of Re secure in his shrine."

UPDATE: Thanks to Stephen Goranson, who has e-mailed to draw my attention to the following article:

MAGICAL AMULET FROM PAPHOS WITH THE ιαεω- PALINDROME.
By: Śliwa, Joachim. Studies in Ancient Art & Civilization , 2013, Vol. 17, p293-301, 9p; DOI: 10.12797/SAAC.17.2013.17.24

The author indicates that the palindrome is in Egyptian and is also found elsewhere. Because of the content, I suspected an Egyptian connection, but I couldn't get it to work as Coptic. But it seems it is some form of Egyptian.

Orthodox Christmas

HAPPY ORTHODOX CHRISTMAS to all those celebrating! It is being observed today in Coptic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Church Slavonic, etc., liturgies.

Pearce and Wunsch (eds.), Documents of Judean Exiles and West Semites in Babylonia in the Collection of David Sofer

CORNELL CHRONICLE: New archive from Jewish Babylonian exile released.

In a major contribution to Biblical and Mesopotamian studies, the first extra-biblical archive from the exiled Judean community in Babylonia in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. has been published as part of a series edited by Cornell professor David I. Owen.

“Documents of Judean Exiles and West Semites in Babylonia in the Collection of David Sofer” (CDL Press, 2014) by Laurie E. Pearce of the University of California, Berkeley, and Cornelia Wunsch of the University of London provides complete editions, translations, copies and photographs of 103 cuneiform texts from the David Sofer Collection and an extensive commentary on hundreds of new Judean personal names with Yahwistic elements.

“These names add substantially to our understanding of Judean religious beliefs during this formative period in the development of exilic Judaism,” says David I. Owen, editor-in-chief of the series “Cornell University Studies in Assyriology and Sumerology.” Owen is director of the Jonathan and Jeannette Rosen Ancient Near Eastern Studies Seminar and the Bernard and Jane Schapiro Professor of Ancient Near Eastern and Judaic Studies Emeritus in Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences.

[...]

This is an exciting development. It is very unusual to have substantial new literary sources for Babylonian (or any other kind of) Judaism of the Second Temple period.

UPDATE: Originally the title of this post gave the series editor as the volume editor. This has now been corrected. Apologies for the error.

Transgendered halakhic challenge

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: Transgender woman denied entry to Western Wall. After being denied entry to the women's section of the Western Wall, Kay Long approached the men's section only to be yelled at and told to enter the section that had already rejected her (Dr. Ruchama Weiss, YNetNews.com). Life in the twenty-first century is complicated. I wonder what the Talmudic sages would have made of this story.

Interview with Peter Schäfer

PETER SCHÄFER is interviewed by Moshe Gilad in Haaretz: Berlin Jewish Museum's new director: Only education can stop new phenomena of anti-Semitism. The new director of the Jewish Museum Berlin, Peter Schäfer, gets a chance to shake up what's already a major tourist attraction.

His appointment two months ago garnered lots of interest, both due to the institution’s status as a leading site in the German capital, and because of Schäfer’s presence itself. Throughout its 18-year history, the museum was run by its founder, Michael Blumenthal, a German-American economics professor and a U.S. secretary of the Treasury in the Carter administration.

Schäfer, who isn’t Jewish and was born in 1943 in the Ruhr region, is an outstanding choice for many reasons. After completing a degree in religious studies at the University of Bonn, he spent three years studying Judaism and Semitic languages in Jerusalem. Later he earned a doctorate in philosophy and Judaism at Freiburg and Frankfurt.

Until 1998 he worked as a Jewish-studies professor in Germany before taking a prestigious job at Princeton and living in the United States for 15 years. His English-language work “Judeophobia,” which has been published in Hebrew, addresses the way Jews and Judaism were seen by the Greeks and Romans. It identifies the sources of anti-Semitism in the ancient world.

Later in his academic career, Schäfer became the only scholar to win both Germany’s prestigious Leibniz Prize and the Mellon Award, considered the highest honor in the United States for humanities scholars.

The article includes lots of personal background on Schäfer and lots on his plans for the museum. Not mentioned among his accomplishments is his foundational and groundbreaking work on early Jewish mysticism (Hekhalot literature), magic, and other Jewish literature. His appointment to the Berlin Museum was noted here. Some other past posts on his work are noted there and are also here, here, here, here, here, and here. Read the whole article quickly, before it goes behind the subscription wall.

Shipwreck from 400 BCE to be rebuilt

REPLICA: Post Holy Land: The Ma‘agan Michael ship will sail again. The wreck of the Ma‘agan Michael ship was discovered in 1985, and excavated over three seasons in 1988 and 1989 by the Leon Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies of the University of Haifa. (Dr. Deborah Cvikel, Jerusalem Post)

The wreck of the Ma‘agan Michael ship was discovered in 1985, and excavated over three seasons in 1988 and 1989 by the Leon Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies of the University of Haifa. A large part of the wooden hull of the ship, 11.15 m long, 3.11 m wide and 1.5 m deep, survived. Because of the significance of the archaeological find, the remains were completely excavated, retrieved from the seabed, conserved, and are now on display in the Hecht Museum at the University of Haifa. The timbers of the ship and the other finds have been studied in detail, contributing significantly to our knowledge of how ancient ships were built, and life on board. The ship was 14.4 m long and had a single square sail. She was loaded with a cargo of building stones, and some of the crew's possessions and the carpenter's tools were found in the wreck. She was probably on her maiden voyage.

The late Dr. Elisha Linder, the founder of the Ma‘agan Michael ship project, had a burning desire to build a sailing replica of the ancient ship. His dream is now becoming a reality thanks to generous donations by supporters headed by Sara and Avi Arenson. The keel-laying ceremony took place in July 2014, and launching is planned for 2016.

I'm surprised that I haven't heard about this shipwreck before this, but I can find nothing in the archives. For another project that built and sailed an ancient ship replica, see my many past posts on the Good Ship Phoenicia here and links.

McGrath on Jesus as hero

BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION:

Rankled by Wrangling over Rank-Raglan Rankings: Jesus and the Mythic Hero Archetype

The scale was not designed to determine historicity. Its folklorist users show little or no interest in the attempt to do what historians do, namely peeling back layers of myth in search of underlying history, if there is any. The Rank-Raglan scale does not seem, contrary to Carrier’s claim, to consistently fit figures who were definitely not historical better than ones who certainly were. And so Carrier’s attempt to use the scale to slant his calculations of probability in the direction of the non-historicity of Jesus are at best unpersuasive, and at worst deliberately misleading.

By James F. McGrath
Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature
Butler University
December 2014

A very sensible discussion about the use and abuse of the Rank-Raglan scale as applied to Jesus. Many years ago when I used to teach Ancient Mythology, I used this scale on heroes from Gilgamesh to Jason the Argonaut and found it to be a useful heuristic device for comparison and as a discussion starter. But James is quite right that historical figures can sometimes be cast (by themselves or their later followers) in the role of the hero and doing well on the scale has no bearing on an ancient figure's historicity.

I'm not sure what James means by "earliest" vs. "subsequent" sources, but for what it's worth, I would give the Jesus of the four Gospels quite a high score on the scale: full points for 4, 5, 6, 7, 10 (Egypt-Nazareth to Jerusalem), 11 (over Satan in temptation narrative), 15, 16, 18 (mysterious: darkness over land, torn Temple curtain, resurrected saints, etc.), 19, 20, 21, 22; a half point each for 1 (mother virgin of royal line, but not royal herself), 2 (likewise Joseph from royal line but not a king), 8 (reared in Egypt, then Galilee, but by his mother and arguably his "foster" father), 9 (very little about his childhood), 14 (uneventful interlude, but not "reign"), and 17 (driven from Jerusalem, but not throne). That comes out to about 16/22. The elements that do not apply at all are 3 (Joseph is not a near relative of Mary) and 12-13 (Jesus doesn't get married or become king). But I can see how some of these could be up for debate.

UPDATE: Professor McGrath comments here.

Klawans on ancient Jewish theology and law

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Ancient Jewish Theology and Law. Jonathan Klawans on the divergence of the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes (Robin Ngo).

According to scholar Jonathan Klawans, ancient Jews—including the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes—cared as much about matters of Jewish theology as about laws and practices.

This column summarizes an article in BAR whose full text is behind the subscription wall.

Syriac church to be built in Turkey

SYRIAC WATCH: Syriac Christians to build Turkey’s first new church (Daily Sabah).

The government will permit one of Turkey's Christian communities to build a church, the first such house of worship to be built completely from scratch in the Republican Era. According to Vatan newspaper's Emre Eser, the church will be built in the Yeşilköy district of Istanbul with funds provided by the Mardin Syriac community.

[...]

One of the oldest Christian denominations, Syriac Christians use a language related to the ancient Aramaic of Jesus Christ in their liturgy.

[...]

The Syriac community in Turkey seems to be making some progress. Background here and here and many links.

The site of Jesus' baptism? Maybe.

FOR EPIPHANY: Jordan welcomes throngs of tourists at site where believers say Jesus was baptized (Dale Hanson Bourke, Religion News Service).

AMMAN, Jordan — For most Americans, Epiphany (Jan. 6) passes with little celebration.

Traditionally, the 12th day of Christmas is marked by Eastern Orthodox, Catholics and some mainline Protestants as the day the three kings visited the baby Jesus. For Eastern Rite Christians, Epiphany (also called Theophany) emphasizes the revelation of Jesus as the son of God through his baptism and the beginning of his public ministry. Thousands of believers make pilgrimage on that day to the Jordan River where John baptized Jesus.

And that’s where the controversy begins.

While Israel has long claimed that Jesus was baptized on the Israeli side of the river, increasingly scholars are lining up to support archaeological research showing the baptism site is actually in Jordan. When Pope Francis visited the Holy Land last spring, he made a point of holding Mass at the Jordanian baptism site, lending additional credibility to the claim.

[...]

Earlier posts on the possible sites for Jesus' baptism are here, here, here, here, and here.

Supreme Court decision on Battir (Betar)

THE MEDIA LINE: Israeli Supreme Court Freezes Barrier Through Battir (Linda Gradstein).

Palestinians and environmentalists claim victory

Israel’s Supreme Court has frozen plans to build the separation barrier that Israel has been building in and around the West Bank, through the village of Battir, a 4000-year Palestinian village next to Jerusalem.

The residents of Battir, along with several Israeli environmental NGO’s, appealed to the court three years ago not to allow the barrier to go through Battir, a Palestinian village of 6500 next to Jerusalem that has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, because of its agricultural terraces that have been used for thousands of years. The petitioners argued that building the barrier in Battir would destroy the terraces, which continue to be used today.

[...]

The court did not close off the future possibility that the Israeli government will ask to build the barrier through Battir. However, the ruling said that if that happens, the state would have to put in a new request, and the environmental groups would then be able to issue new objections, meaning that any new attempt to route the barrier through Battir could drag on for several years.

[...]

Betar was also the site of Bar Kokhba's last stand in 135 CE. Background to this case is here and links.

Maleness and its disqualification in the Talmud

LAST WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: Does a Penis Make the Man? Hermaphrodites, Eunuchs, and Jews With Genital Deformities. Jewish law loves to separate people into airtight categories. Real-life sex and gender are more complicated. What then?

And in this week’s reading, the Talmud turned to gender boundaries, asking what exactly makes a man a man. Today, we might answer this question in a variety of ways, from the genetic—a male is someone who possesses a Y chromosome—to the cultural and social—a man is someone who is educated to perform that role. For the rabbis, the answer is more straightforward: A man is someone who possesses a penis. But this is not as clear a matter as one might assume. What if you are born with a penis, but it gets cut off or punctured? What if your sexual organs are invisible and indeterminate, as in the case of what the Talmud calls a tumtum? Or what about those rare individuals who are hermaphrodites, having both a penis and a vagina? These rare cases are of interest to the rabbis not because they would have come up regularly, but because they complicate the tendency of Jewish law to separate people and things into airtight categories.

Some readers may find that this Talmudic discussion moves into the realm of Too Much Information.

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

From Ottoman prison to the trial of Jesus? Well maybe.

EXCAVATION: Archaeologists find possible site of Jesus’s trial in Jerusalem (Ruth Eglash, Washington Post).

JERUSALEM — It started 15 years ago with plans to expand the Tower of David Museum. But the story took a strange turn when archaeologists started peeling away layers under the floor in an old abandoned building adjacent to the museum in Jerusalem’s Old City.

They knew it had been used as a prison when the Ottoman Turks and then the British ruled these parts. But, as they carefully dug down, they eventually uncovered something extraordinary: the suspected remains of the palace where one of the more famous scenes of the New Testament may have taken place — the trial of Jesus.

Now, after years of excavation and a further delay caused by wars and a lack of funds, the archaeologists’ precious find is being shown to the public through tours organized by the museum.

[...]

The real story seems to be that archaeologists have found the remains of a big building (or maybe just the remains of its sewage system?) which arguably was a palace in the Herodian period. It requires additional inferences to get anywhere near the trial of Jesus, but naturally that is the narrative seized on by the media.

As usual, the actual story is important and interesting, both archaeologically and historically, but some hype needs to be peeled back to get to it. But at least they didn't save this one for Easter.

Anxious Sethians

PHILIP JENKINS has a two-part review at The Anxious Bench of a recent book by Dylan Burns:

Seth and the Alien God

The origins of Gnosticism are normally discussed in terms of debates within Christianity. However, one richly informative conflict occurred beyond the familiar realm of church history.

One of the great minds of Late Antiquity was the Egyptian-born philosopher Plotinus, the leading figure of Neoplatonism, and a younger contemporary of Origen. Around the year 263, in Rome, Plotinus engaged in a furious debate with some Gnostic thinkers. Although the two sides shared many assumptions and terminology, Plotinus condemned his enemies for what he saw as their gross misunderstanding of Platonic philosophy. Among other complaints, he warned that their radical elitism would lead them into misconduct and immorality. Effectively, he expelled these Gnostics from the mainstream philosophical world of the time, after a long period in which Platonists and Gnostics had coexisted and debated together.

That story is quite well known, but recent work has shed major light on just who these Gnostics were. I am referring to Dylan M. Burns’s excellent recent book Apocalypse of the Alien God: Platonism and the Exile of Sethian Gnosticism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). This ambitious and wide-ranging work identifies Plotinus’s Gnostic foes as Sethians.

[...]

I have more on Plotinus and those apocalypses here.

Sons of Light and Sons of Seth

I discussed Dylan M. Burns’s book Apocalypse of the Alien God, an account of the influential early Gnostic sect called Sethians. Burns’s arguments resonated because of work I have been doing recently on the origins of Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism, and the influence of the sectarian Judaism we know from Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

[...]

Gibson on the Western Wall's fallen stones

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: Archaeologist: Western Wall stones result of earthquake, not Roman demolition. Prof. Shimon Gibson says the huge stones near the Western Wall may have been caused by major earthquake in 363 B.E. (Nir Hasson, Haaretz).

The Old City in Jerusalem is full of archaeological attractions from all periods of its life. But one of its most emotional – certainly for Jewish visitors – is the pile of huge stones lying next to the southern section of the Western Wall, in the Jerusalem Archaeological Garden and Davidson Center, next to the Western Wall plaza.

Information signs, tour guides, books and archaeologists explain that these stones fell to the street during the destruction of the Holy Temple, with the end of the Great Revolt in 70 C.E., and that they are the most palpable testimony to the destruction.

However, professor of archaeology Shimon Gibson suggests these walls stayed in place nearly 300 years after the destruction, and fell not by the hands of man but in a major earthquake that wracked Jerusalem in 363 C.E. He presented this thesis for the first time at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, last week, and the theory has aroused disputes among senior archaeologists.

[...]

Syrian antiquities sites in 2014

SCIENCE CODEX summarizes and links to a report by the American Association for the Advancement of Science: Widespread looting and damage to historical sites in Syria.

Four of six major archaeological sites in Syria have been heavily looted and damaged, according to an analysis of high-resolution satellite images that documents the extent of the destruction.

The report analyzes six of the 12 sites that Syria has nominated as World Heritage Sites: Dura Europos, Ebla, Hama's Waterwheels, Mari, Raqqa, and Ugarit.

Images from 2014 show numerous pits throughout three sites where ancient cities once stood. The pits generally do not appear in similar images from 2011, when the conflict in Syria began.

[...]

Background here and here and links.

Steinberg, Shimon

NEW NOVEL: Op-Ed: Book Review: "Shimon", the Story of a Talmudic Giant. A book about a gladiator turned Talmudic Sage, which inadvertently shows the greatness of the Torah's attitude to human failings (Rochel Sylvetsky, Arutz Sheva).

"Shimon" is the story of the life of third century Talmudic scholar Resh Lakish, whose real name was Shimon ben Lakish, gleaned from the few fascinating episodes about him as related in the Talmud.

John Steinberg has used the few available personal glimpses of Resh Lakish's biography to create an historic novel that brings to life the period of cruel Roman rule over Jews struggling to preserve their society intact, skillfully employing much literary license to fill in the story of an unusual man who set his stamp on the Talmud.

[...]

BAS top 10 for 2014

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Top 10 Biblical Archaeology Discoveries in 2014 (Robin Ngo).

The Tenth of Tevet and the LXX in the Talmud

THE LEGEND OF THE SEPTUAGINT reportedly receives mixed reviews in Talmudic tradition: The Tenth of Tevet. A day commemorating a variety of Jewish tragedies. (Rabbi Berel Wein, The Jewish Press)

The Tenth of Tevet marks the onset of the siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Babylonia, and the beginning of the battle that ultimately destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple of Solomon, and sent the Jews into the 70-year Babylonian Exile. ...

However, there are other commemorative days that fall immediately before the Tenth of Tevet and their memory has been silently incorporated in the fast day of the Tenth of Tevet as well. On the eighth of Tevet, King Ptolemy of Egypt forced 70 Jewish scholars to gather and translate the Hebrew Bible into Greek. Even though the Talmud relates to us that this project was blessed with a miracle — the 70 scholars were all placed in separate cubicles and yet they all came up with the same translation — the general view of the rabbis of the time towards this project was decidedly negative. The Talmud records that when this translation became public “darkness descended on the world.”

This translation — the Septuagint — eventually became the basis for the Old Testament section of the Christian bible a few centuries later. The Greek translation of the Bible also further aided the advance of the agenda of the Hellenist Jews to bring Greek culture into Jewish life, and to attempt to reform Judaism in the image of Greek values and lifestyle. The “koshering” of the Greek language by its use in translating the Hebrew Bible had wide ramifications in Jewish society and undermined some of the efforts of the rabbis in combating the allure of Greece in Israel of then.

Unfortunately, the article gives no specific Talmudic references. The Tenth of Tevet was on New Year's Day 2015.

800 coins

ANOTHER LOOTING ARREST: Antiquities thief busted with over 800 ancient coins. Beit Shemesh man caught while prowling archaeological site with metal detector; found to have immense trove of currency, necklaces, seals, arrowheads and more at his home (Ilan Ben Zion, Times of Israel).

Hundreds of ancient coins and ancient artifacts were found at the home of a suspected antiquities thief in Beit Shemesh last week after the man was caught in the act at a nearby archaeological site, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced Wednesday.

[...]

There has been a number of looting arrests in Israel recently.

2015

HAPPY NEW YEAR to all those celebrating! Probably everybody.

Many of you have already seen this, but here's something just for fun.



Very clever, even though most biblical philologists have no problem with "liberals" or Finkelstein.

This one reminds me of this old song, The Scientific Man, which I learned as a nursery rhyme:

htt

The words of the chorus as I learned them were:

Oh he knew all about etymology,
Hebrew, Shebrew, Jubjubology;
Syntax, tintacks, hobnails, bootjacks.
He was full as a Pickford's Van.
Those who cracked and backed up Edison,
Swore his jaw was more than medicine,
Simply because, people said he was
A well-learned scientific man.

Best wishes for 2015 and, as always, keep reading PaleoJudaica.

Meerson and Schäfer et al., Toledot Yeshu

NEW BOOK FROM MOHR-SIEBECK:

Toledot Yeshu: The Life Story of Jesus
Two Volumes and Database. Vol. I: Introduction and Translation. Vol. II: Critical Edition
Ed. and Transl. by Michael Meerson and Peter Schäfer with the collaboration of Yaacov Deutsch, David Grossberg, Avigail Manekin, and Adina Yoffie

The Book of the Life of Jesus (in Hebrew Sefer Toledot Yeshu ) presents a "biography" of Jesus from an anti-Christian perspective. It ascribes to Jesus an illegitimate birth, a theft of the Ineffable Name, heretical activities, and finally a disgraceful death. Perhaps for centuries, Toledot Yeshu circulated orally until it coalesced into various literary forms. Although the dates of these written compositions remain obscure, some early hints of a Jewish counter-history of Jesus can be found in the works of Christian authors of Late Antiquity, such as Justin, Celsus, and Tertullian. Around 600 CE, some fragments of Jesus' "biography" made their way into the Babylonian Talmud; and in 827, archbishop Agobard of Lyon attests to a sacrilegious book about Jesus that circulated among Jews. In the Middle Ages, the book became the object and tool of an acrimonious controversy. Jews, Christians, and theists, such as Ibn Shaprut, Luther, and Voltaire, quoted and commented on Toledot Yeshu , trying to disprove the beliefs of their opponents and revealing their own prejudices. The narrative was translated into Latin and many vernacular languages and soon branched into numerous versions with only a few basic facts in common. The present publication provides researchers with reliable conclusions regarding the narrative's origin and evolution. In addition, the purchase of the volume offers full online access to a comprehensive database of Toledot Yeshu manuscripts, designed to encourage and facilitate further research about this important book in the history of Jewish-Christian polemics. All Hebrew and Aramaic manuscripts are edited in the present book and database: an unusual combination of a traditional critical edition with an electronic research tool. The database features a full-text search of all manuscripts as well as printing and downloading capabilities. The price includes access to the database (for one simultaneous user). Access for institutions is provided through the IP address, for private individuals through username and password. An activation code is enclosed in the book. Access to a free seven day trial period can be obtained here: toledot [AT] mohr.de .

Also, related, at the Jesus Blog: Mika Ahuvia on Toledot Yeshu.

Pollack et al. (eds.), World Philology

NEW BOOK FROM HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS:

World Philology
Edited by Sheldon Pollock
Benjamin A. Elman
Ku-ming Kevin Chang

BOOK DETAILS
HARDCOVER
$45.00 • £33.95 • €40.50
ISBN 9780674052864
Publication: January 2015
464 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
4 tables

Philology—the discipline of making sense of texts—is enjoying a renaissance within academia after decades of neglect. World Philology charts the evolution of philology across the many cultures and historical time periods in which it has been practiced, and demonstrates how this branch of knowledge, like philosophy and mathematics, is an essential component of human understanding.

Every civilization has developed ways of interpreting the texts that it produces, and differences of philological practice are as instructive as the similarities. We owe our idea of a textual edition for example, to the third-century BCE scholars of the Alexandrian Library. Rabbinical philology created an innovation in hermeneutics by shifting focus from how the Bible commands to what it commands. Philologists in Song China and Tokugawa Japan produced startling insights into the nature of linguistic signs. In the early modern period, new kinds of philology arose in Europe but also among Indian, Chinese, and Japanese commentators, Persian editors, and Ottoman educationalists who began to interpret texts in ways that had little historical precedent. They made judgments about the integrity and consistency of texts, decided how to create critical editions, and determined what it actually means to read.

Covering a wide range of cultures—Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, Indo-Persian, Japanese, Ottoman, and modern European—World Philology lays the groundwork for a new scholarly discipline.

BMW Hannibal Tour

PUNIC WATCH: BMW i3, i8 take on 2014 Hannibal Tour (Wheels24).

FOLLOWING HANNIBAL'S TRAIL: Three winners of a contest in Europe, organised by Bridgestone and German car magazine AutoBild, were invited to take part in a journey from Munich to Rome following Hannibal's journey with elephants over the Alps in 218BC, driving the new electric BMW i3hatchback and hybrid BMW i8 sports car. ....

Of course they were.

The papyrus market in the news

THE TELEGRAPH: The online battle for papyrus texts. Papyrus scrolls are also now increasingly desirable items in the distinctly 21st Century world of the online auction trade, writes Philip Sherwell.

They are tattered yellowing fragments of bygone civilisations, ancient manuscripts that open a remarkable window on previous millennia, including the earliest days of Christianity.

But papyrus scrolls are also now increasingly hot items in the distinctly 21st Century world of the online auction trade.

[...]

When a fragmentary parchment sheet from the 3rd century AD featuring portions of Paul’s epistle to the Romans was bought at Sotheby’s for £301,000 auctioneers and antiquity experts alike were stunned.

But although there is no suggestion of any impropriety in these particular sales, scholars are alarmed by the burgeoning online trade as some unscrupulous sellers also cash in.

They portray a free-ranging trade, particularly on the online auction giant eBay, where precious documents are carved up for sale, potentially stolen goods are trafficked and forgers can flourish.

Brice Jones, a papyrologist and lecturer in New Testament and Early Christianity at Concordia University in Montreal, has become an online scrolls sleuth, scouring auction websites for manuscripts that are often incorrectly labeled or their provenance unclear.

[...]

I have linked to Brice C. Jones with reference to such matters here, here, here, and here. For a somewhat different view on the Green Collection, see the comments of Roger Pearse noted here. The article also mentions the sad (in different ways) stories of The Gospel of Jesus's Wife and The Gospel of Judas.

Hurtado Festschrift

CONGRATULATIONS TO LARRY HURTADO: Mark, Manuscripts, and Monotheism (Festschrift for Larry Hurtado) (Tommy Wasserman, ETC).

Coptic postdocs

ALIN SUCIU: Two Positions Available in the Project “Digital Edition and Translation of the Coptic-Sahidic Old Testament” (Göttingen Academy of Sciences). Closing date: January 20, 2015. More on the project here.

DSS coming to L.A.

PRESS RELEASE: SDSU Jewish Studies program tells 2015 plans.

• Dead Sea Scrolls: The Exhibition, curated by SDSU’s Jewish Studies Program Director, Dr. Risa Levitt Kohn, opening March 10, 2015 at The California Science Center in Los Angeles. This traveling exhibition, different in content and design than the San Diego show of 2007, opened in New York City in 2011 and has been on display in Philadelphia, Boston, Cincinnati and Salt Lake City. The exhibition features over 600 objects, including ten Dead Sea Scrolls and is the largest collection of Israeli archaeological artifacts ever exhibited outside of Israel.

I have been following the peregrinations of this exhibition for years. Background here and many links. I reviewed the 2007 exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls in San Diego here.

The "Dead Sea Scrolls" of China on display in Taiwan

CULTURAL ICON WATCH: NMH exhibit to feature Taoist artifacts (Taiwan Today).

A total of 183 artifacts depicting the history of Taoism are to be displayed in a special exhibition at the National Museum of History Dec. 20 to March 29, 2015, in Taipei City.

[...]

Among these items:

Another highlight is a collection of the oldest extant bamboo slips quoting Lao Tzu, which date to the Warring States Period (476-221 B.C.). The equivalent for Taoism of the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Hebrew Bible, the slips have never before left mainland China.

“The unearthing of these bamboo slips proves the existence of Lao Tzu the person and his thought,” Wang [Jichao, head of the exhibition department of the Hubei Provincial Museum,] said, explaining the significance of the texts.

Sort of. In fact the name Lao Tzu means "Old Man," which may in this context just mean "Wise Philosopher" rather than a proper name, so the work may be anonymous. It would be clearer to say that these manuscripts show that the literary work called "Lao Tzu" (better known as the Tao Te Ching) does indeed go back to the Warring States Period.

Now this has nothing to do with ancient Judaism, except as an interesting parallel discovery in China. I note it mainly because of the comparison with the Dead Sea Scrolls, which, at least in the West, serve as the template for a momentous discovery of ancient manuscripts.

A decade ago I noted and discussed a similar manuscript discovery in China as an example of the Dead Sea Scrolls as cultural icon.

BAS on 2015 excavation opportunities

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Digs 2015: Blast from the Past. Read the full article from the January/February 2015 issue of BAR (Megan Sauter).

BAR’s January/February issue—known as the “Dig” issue—has been highlighting excavation opportunities for the past 40 years. This year, in addition to sharing reports and images from the 2014 excavation season, we checked in with individuals featured on the cover of past “Dig” issues, along with some BAS scholarship recipients, to see what they’re doing now. Read their updates, enjoy essays from this year’s BAS scholarship winners and explore excavation opportunities in 2015 with our annual dig guide.

Review of Hasan-Rokem and Gruenwald (eds.) Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews

BOOK REVIEW IN THE FORWARD: Reconsidering Louis Ginzberg's Legendary 'Legends of the Jews' Enduring Lovability of 6-Volume Paean to Heroes (Benjamin Iwry).

Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews: Ancient Jewish Folk Literature Reconsidered
edited by Galit Hasan-Rokem and Ithamar Gruenwald
Wayne State University Press, 224 pages, $44.99

The legacy of the Talmudist Louis Ginzberg exemplifies the benefits of lovability in Jewish studies. Those familiar with the life of Henrietta Szold (1860-1945), founder of Hadassah and Ihud, the political party in Mandate Palestine, are aware of Szold’s unrequited passion for Ginzberg, which ended sadly for her when he married another woman. Szold cotranslated part of Ginzberg’s “Legends of the Jews,” (1909-1938; in six volumes plus an index by Boaz Cohen). The work was eventually published over three decades and widely reprinted in different editions. If any work of stunning erudition can be called loveable, then surely Legends retains this allure.

[...]

So although some contemporary critics, notably Bernhard Heller in “The Jewish Quarterly Review” (July 1933) offered detailed amplifications or suggestions about the “Legends,” the work and its author have attracted ecstatic praise. Which makes “Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews: Ancient Jewish Folk Literature Reconsidered” unusual for offering conceptual criticism of Ginzberg’s methodology. Coedited by Galit Hasan-Rokem, professor of folklore emerita at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Ithamar Gruenwald, professor emeritus of Jewish philosophy at Tel Aviv University, this new book derives in part from a colloquium at the fifteenth Congress of the World Association of Jewish Studies in August 2009.

[...]

I have cited Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews occasionally in PaleoJudaica posts (here, here, here, here, and here) and even once or twice in my published work. It is old and out of date now, but it is an unparalleled retelling of Jewish traditions about the Bible for nonspecialists and the notes on primary sources remain useful even for specialists. As noted in the past posts, it is available online.

On the authorship of the Gospels

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Are the Gospels Anonymous? (James McGrath). Yes, but ...

Iranica

ARASH ZEINI has some recent posts of interest:

Avestan research 1991–2014. Links to a helpful article (part 1) by Almut Hintze which surveys the field. Much of it is technical, but the first part is quite accessible to nonspecialists (like me!).

Scribal practices in the Turfan Christian community. Recent article by Mark Dickens. Much more on Turfan and its direct and indirect importance for ancient Judaism (notably, the Book of Giants) here and links.

Mani at the court of the Persian kings. New book from Brill by Iain Gardner, Jason BeDuhn and Paul Dilley.

Did Jesus exist?

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Did Jesus Exist? Searching for Evidence Beyond the Bible. Lawrence Mykytiuk’s feature article from the January/February 2015 issue of BAR with voluminous endnotes. The answer to the question, of course, is yes, he did. Not that we necessarily know much about him beyond that. This article is a useful discussion, aimed at nonspecialists, of the earliest extra-biblical references to Jesus.

I was a little surprised not to see any reference to the published work of Ken Olson, who argues that Eusebius wrote the longer Testimonium Flavianum (a variant of Mykytiuk’s Alternative 2, which Mykytiuk rejects). More on that here.

Some past PaleoJudaica posts on the did-Jesus-exist question are, here, here, here, here, and here. I have touched on the question of the Historical Jesus occasionally. Some posts are collected in the last post linked-to in the preceding sentence, and see also here and (on the languages Jesus spoke) here and here.

More on Professor Mykytiuk's work is here and links.

Tenth-century BCE bullae found

ARTIFACTS: New Finds Suggest Biblical Kings David and Solomon Actually Existed. Six clay seals found at the archaeological site of Khirbet Summeily in Israel offer evidence that supports the existence of Biblical Kings David and Solomon, says a team of archaeologists led by Dr Jeff Blakely of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (SciNews.com).

I don't usually note stories about Iron Age finds unless there are inscriptions involved, but this one merits some comment. The title is a bit exuberant, raising hopes that these clay seals mention something that we can connect to a Davidic or Solomonic royal government. Alas, no. Some have seal markings impressed, but none bear any writing. Nevertheless, they are of considerable interest. The second paragraph of the article sums up their importance:

The official clay seals, or bullae, unearthed by Dr Blakely’s team at Khirbet Summeily – a small Biblical period village (10th-8th century BC) located in the northern part of Israel’s picturesque Negev desert – provide evidence that some type of government activity was conducted there in that period.

The business about David and Solomon comes from the inference that evidence for this level of literacy and social organization in this comparatively remote location implies a stronger central government than archaeologists often allow for in this period. And if a stronger central government, why not one headed by David or Solomon, just as the Bible says? Maybe so, but I'm not getting too excited until someone finds a tenth-century inscription that mentions one of them.

All that said, these are the first bullae from as early as the tenth century BCE and we are very lucky to have them. Let's hope the archaeological luck holds and they find some more, this time with some writing on them. And I wouldn't say no to one that refers to David or Solomon. That would be especially lucky, but it's hardly unthinkable. As I noted just a couple of days ago, there is a ninth-century inscription that mentions "the House of David."

Gold in them there caves?

MORE LOOTERS: Four arrested for attempting to loot ‘hidden treasure’ from ancient West Bank cave. Two Palestinians and 2 Israelis charged with colluding to dig up buried gold from Roman-Byzantine period (Daniel K. Eisenbud, Jerusalem Post).

Two Palestinians and two Israelis were arrested earlier in the week for allegedly colluding to attempt to loot buried gold from a protected ancient cave near the West Bank, the Antiquities Authority announced Wednesday.

According to an Antiquities Authority official, the two Arab suspects, from Tulkarm, were caught “red handed” by inspectors from the organization’s robbery- prevention unit digging a 4.5-meter hole at the 1,800-year-old site, which dates to the Roman-Byzantine period.

The suspects were found with excavation equipment, including a generator, electric drill, lighting, shovels and numerous buckets, the official said in a statement.

[...]

Who thinks up these things? If the reports are accurate, it sounds as though some people put a lot of effort and money into a high-risk project with extremely speculative returns. They'd have been better off buying lottery tickets.

Similar recent story here.

Harvard Semitic Museum refurbished

THE HARVARD GAZETTE: The old, made new. Refurbished Semitic Museum celebrates the past while reorienting for the future (Corydon Ireland). This article describes the new renovated Semitic Museum, but also gives a capsule history from its opening in 1903. As I've mentioned before, I got my PhD back in the 1980s from the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations ("NELC") program at Harvard. Most of my courses were taught in the Semitic Museum, back when most of the artifacts were locked up in the basement and unavailable. Professor Lawrence Stager was hired during the time I was a student there and he was the one who set about changing all that. I'm surprised he isn't mentioned in the article. Nevertheless, it is a highly informative piece that is hard to excerpt. But here's just one taste:

Central to understanding the museum’s past is its first director, David Gordon Lyon (1852-1935). Born in Alabama, educated in Germany, and the first university chair of Assyriology in the United States, Lyon was an energetic scholar of Semitic languages, whose passion was establishing a museum.

“The beginning of this wonderful story goes back to this gentleman,” said Manuelian, who is Phillip J. King Professor of Egyptology. “He was quite a dynamic lecturer and speaker,” and brought with him from Germany the idea of “the seminar principle,” that a good collection accelerates understanding and scholarship.

The joint lecture discussed the persistent and peripatetic Lyon, the shifting fates of the museum building, and the Harvard collection of more than 40,000 Near Eastern artifacts.

A devout Baptist with an appetite for exactitude but with discipline leavened by Southern charm, Lyon taught Hebrew, Assyrian, Syriac, Aramaic, Akkadian, and other languages first set down in cuneiform. For 40 years he collected artifacts, and recorded trips to the Holy Land with deadpan ethnographic photos of ordinary life. “Lyon was a pioneer,” said Greene, a documentarian of what turned out to be the last two decades of the 500-year-old Ottoman Empire, then in decline.

He also wrote obsessively in diaries. There are 38 volumes — one a year — culled from small notebooks that Lyon would transcribe at night. Today, they provide a rare window into the Harvard of a century and more ago.

Christmas 2014

MERRY CHRISTMAS to all those celebrating!

Posts of Christmas past are collected here and links. And more recent Christmas-related posts are here and here.

Hanukkah menorah bracelet excavated

COSMIC SYNCHRONICITY WATCH: Archaeologists uncover 1,600-year-old menorah bracelet on Hanukkah. Last day of Mount Carmel excavation turns up rare turquoise glass shard (Lazar Berman , Times of Israel).

Archaeologist Limor Talmi was minutes away from wrapping up her excavation of an ancient garbage pit last Thursday,when a piece of 1,600-year-old glass was brought to her, bearing imprints of menorahs.

The timing was fortuitous, not only because she was readying to close up shop but because it was also the second day of Hanukkah, the Jewish holiday most closely associated with the seven-branched candelabra.

“Like in a good story, on the last day, when we needed to finish the dig, in the last box, in the last half hour, when we said, ‘That’s it, yalla, we need to close up and go,’ the head of the glass department brought this item to show me,” Talmi told the Haaretz daily.

The shard, found in the Mount Carmel national park near Elyakim during an Israel Antiquities Authority dig of refuse pits, features two menorahs. One of the menorahs is shown with its candles lit.

[...]

Cool. And for a change the timing of the announcement was determined only by fate. Perhaps that and it being the last day of the excavation, which in itself seems to be a magnet for important discoveries.

Follow the link for a photo. More on ancient depictions of menorahs is here, here (end of post), here (Magdala again!), and here, and links.

The Tel Dan Stele and "the House of David"

THE TEL DAN BEYT DAVID INSCRIPTION is another old discovery that has received some new attention recently. The attention is not because of Christmas this time; rather, it is because the stele is currently on display at a major museum exhibition in New York:

Ancient rock adds evidence of King David’s existence
Stone slab with earliest reference to House of David, on display at Met, said to be ‘one of the most important Biblical artifacts ever found’

By Menachem Wecker December 16, 2014, 2:52 am 54

NEW YORK (JTA) — Dimly lit, the stone slab, or stele, doesn’t look particularly noteworthy, especially when compared to the more lavish sphinxes, jewelry and cauldrons one encounters en route to the room where it is installed.

Indeed, in a Twitter post this fall, art journalist Lee Rosenbaum described the nearly 13-by-16 inch c. 830 BCE rock, as “homely.”

What’s significant about this stone — on view at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of its “Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age” exhibit running through January 4 — is its inscription: the earliest extra-biblical reference to the House of David.

“There is no doubt that the inscription is one of the most important artifacts ever found in relation to the Bible,” Eran Arie, curator of Israelite and Persian periods at the Israel Museum, wrote in the exhibit catalog.

[...]

Some background to the whole question of the historicity of David and Solomon is here and links.

Did Jesus preach at Magdala?

THE DAILY MAIL: Did Jesus preach at this synagogue? Archaeologists excavate 2,000-year-old ruins in ancient town of Magdala where Christ is thought to have taught disciples

• Synagogue is thought to have been focal point when Jesus visited Magdala
  
• Ruins discovered during preparation to build a hotel beside Sea of Galilee
  
• Ancient town of Magdala lies under what is now Migdal in northern Israel
  
• Jewish artefacts date back to the time of Jesus and the rise of Christianity
  
• Discovery has led to thousands of Christian pilgrims visiting the site
  
• Site now owned by Catholic organisation Legion of Christ who claim Jesus preached at the synagogue during his time in what is now northern Israel
(Richard Grey).

This story is not new, but is being widely disseminated in the media for Christmas. Its real interest is the discovery of a first-century synagogue at this site, whatever the site may have been called in the first century. Did Jesus preach there? Maybe, but the identification of the site with a supposed Magdala ("The Tower") from which Mary came is based on a chain of inferences that is not entirely secure. It's not even clear that Mary's nickname referred to her home town. Maybe she was just tall. Joan Taylor (who seems to be coming up a lot here lately) gave her professorial inaugural lecture at KCL on this question and I heard it when she presented it at a plenary session of the 2014 British New Testament Conference.

Much background on the excavation of Magdala is here and links.

UPDATE (27 December): The Mail article seems to have vanished, at least for now, but here is an earlier one from the Mail that covers some of the same ground with a heavy emphasis on Mary Magdalene: The clues found near Mary Magdalene's home that suggest Jews and early Christians once worshipped together (Victoria Woollaston). And here's a more recent one from Israel Today: Synagogue Where Jesus Preached Uncovered (David Lazarus).

The history of the Hasmoneans

HAARETZ: Meet the Hasmoneans: A brief history of a violent epoch. Judas Maccabeus' death would mark the end of the Maccabean revolt against the Greeks – and the start of the extremely unstable Hasmonean dynasty.. Elon Gilad provides a pocket history of the Hasmoneans from the death of Judah to the time of Herod the Great.

Taylor responds to review and discusses priestly garments

MARGINALIA: The Essenes and the Qumran Settlement – By Jodi Magness. Jodi Magness on Joan E. Taylor’s The Essenes, the Scrolls, and the Dead Sea.

Taylor provides a valuable analysis of ancient authors on the Essenes, but her interpretation of the settlement at Qumran is idiosyncratic and unfounded.

I already noted this review here, but now Taylor has a response: MRBlog: Joan Taylor responds to Jodi Magness.

For many past posts on the archaeology of Qumran, see here, here, and links

Bonus: What did Jewish Priests Wear? (Joan E. Taylor, the ASOR Blog). Excerpt:

The trouble is that in general Jews (Judaeans) just looked like everyone else. As Shaye Cohen has noted, there is not a single comment in the whole of Graeco-Roman literature that describes any specifics of Jewish appearance (apart from male circumcision, which could not, as a rule, be seen). Jews were not even identifiable in terms of male beardedness.Cohen points to certain rulers who wanted Jews to wear distinctive clothing to mark them out as different when they were otherwise indistinguishable. Textiles found in Masada and the Judaean desert caves indeed indicate that Jews wore exactly the same garments as elsewhere in the Mediterranean world. And there is not a single example of Parthian-like pants.

In my view,the coin image defines the kneeling figure by the one distinctive type of dress Judaeans had: their ‘Parthian-like’ priestly dress. ...

Free registration is required to read the full text of the latter essay.

Divorce, infertility, and green goo in the Talmud

LAST WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: Only the Wife Knows If the Husband’s ‘Semen Shoots Like an Arrow’ And other problems of divorce, infertility, and urination, in this week’s Talmud study.

Last week, we read that it is a mitzvah to produce children, in accordance with God’s instruction to Adam and Eve, “be fruitful and multiply.” The rabbis debated how many children a Jew had to produce to fulfill the commandment, with some saying a boy and a girl was enough, while others said two boys were needed. (Notably, no one was content with two girls, presumably because a daughter did not continue a family’s line and property.) But is it only men who .are commanded to have children, or are women equally obligated? This was a subject of disagreement in this week’s Daf Yomi reading. In Yevamot 65b, the mishna reads: “A man is commanded with regard to the mitzvah to be fruitful and multiply, but not a woman. Rabbi Yochanan ben Beroka says that a woman is also commanded.”

[...]

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

Blogging update

SORRY FOR THE DEARTH OF BLOGGING. I've been down with a cold and such energy as I have has gone to holiday matters. I hope to be back soon.

Urgent: Middle Eastern languages at Manchester

THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR JEWISH STUDIES has set up a petition to protest the planned elimination of degree-level study of the Persian, Turkish, and Modern Hebrew languages from its curriculum. The text of the petition is as follows:

Protect Modern Hebrew and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Manchester

British Association for Jewish Studies

It is with dismay that we the undersigned have learned that the University of Manchester, which boasts a proud tradition of social responsibility and engagement with global challenges, has taken a decision to withdraw its provision of degree-level modern Hebrew language teaching, along with Persian and Turkish. We fully recognise the financial difficulties facing many UK universities and the low number of students who elect to take such degrees, but we expect a world class university like Manchester to take a stand to protect vulnerable subject areas of such vital concern in the world today. We call upon the University of Manchester to reconsider this decision which will seriously impoverish the UK provision of education in Middle Eastern languages and which will have a detrimental effect on the University's international standing in Jewish Studies, in particular.

LETTER TO
University of Manchester

The British Association for Jewish Studies is aware of the decision taken by the University of Manchester to discontinue the provision of Modern Hebrew, Persian and Turkish, and to withdraw ten Middle Eastern Studies degree programmes. We write now to urge you in the strongest possible terms to reconsider this decision and reinstate this important provision of Jewish Studies and related subjects.

Academic colleagues across the UK are well aware of the financial constraints faced by universities in light of student numbers. However, the University of Manchester is currently internationally renowned for its provision in Jewish Studies, something to be proud of at a national level. We would appeal to you to reconsider the importance of preserving and protecting this small yet distinguished subject area, and retaining the associated staff.

The British Association for Jewish Studies is firmly of the opinion that universities have a responsibility to protect so-called ‘minority’ subjects and ensure their continued intellectual vitality, especially as they remain central to the wider advancement of knowledge and understanding of global challenges. We need only look at current world affairs to see the importance of academic study on the Middle East. If key language provision of education in such areas is lost, we risk reducing expertise in and engagement with the Middle East. There is a moral imperative for universities such as Manchester to continue to provide education and language training for the next generation of scholars and policy makers in such a crucial sphere of world affairs.

As a national association, we conduct an annual survey of Jewish Studies related teaching in the UK, and we are therefore well placed to advise you that your decision will have serious implications for the future development of the academic field of Jewish Studies. The fact that student numbers are small – and they are small everywhere in the UK – only makes it more likely that the closure of modern Hebrew and related degrees at one of the key providers of Jewish Studies in the UK will inevitably result in fewer experts in the field, and, as such, there will be a long term impact on the number of research-active staff in Jewish Studies at Manchester and in the UK more generally.

In addition, the closures could have a serious impact on the research activity of the Centre for Jewish Studies at Manchester, a world-leading institution. A reduced presence in teaching may be understood as a reduction of activity in Jewish Studies and related subjects, thus making it harder to attract the best scholars and funding success. At the very least, the closures would be interpreted as a reduced commitment to Jewish Studies and related subjects at Manchester, and would not reflect well on the UK’s position in Jewish Studies.

Jewish Studies at Manchester has always been highly respected both nationally and as a world-leader in the field, and is one of the principal providers of Jewish Studies in Higher Education in the UK. As you are no doubt aware, our annual conference will take place at the University of Manchester this year. We are extremely concerned about the high profile impact of your decision on Jewish Studies at a national level, and also on the reputation of the University of Manchester and the UK as world-leading providers of such subjects.

We implore you to reconsider this decision.

I have signed the petition with the following comment.

Although the subjects are specialized and no doubt attract a small number of students, their importance, both social and historical, far outweighs the limited size of the programs. It is hard to think of a worse moment in history for a major university to decide that it should be investing *less* effort in understanding the Middle East. Moreover, the University of Manchester has an excellent and well-earned reputation in Jewish Studies and it should be building on this rather than diluting it.

Please follow the link above and sign the petition too.

Charlesworth on The Lost Gospel

JAMES H. CHARLESWORTH has posted a review of Wilson's and Jacobovici's The Lost Gospel on Academia.edu. You will recall that the book argues that the Syriac version of the Old Testament pseudepigraphon Joseph and Aseneth is a first-century document that gives a veiled account of the marriage and family life, etc., of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Charlesworth does not accept this: Has Lost Gospel Been Found Proving Jesus Married Mary of Migdal?

Professor Charlesworth is perhaps best know for his editing of the of massive and magisterial two-volume Old Testament Pseudepigrapha in the 1980s.

HT Joel L. Watts, who comments further here.

Also, Mark Goodacre has now posted Richard Bauckham's seven-part review of the book as a single PDF file here.

Background here and here.

Metatron and Mrs. Coulter

ARCHANGEL METATRON WATCH: Baddies in books: Mrs Coulter, the mother of all evil. On the surface she’s all glamour and respectability - but the villain from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is malice in a furlined hood (Imogen Russell Williams, The Guardian). Just a reminder that Metatron was an important character in that very successful trilogy.

When it comes to the mother of all evil, Mrs Coulter, chief antagonist of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, is a serious contender for the title. A charismatic fusion of archetypes - stepmother, fairy godmother, wicked witch - she distils pure terror into the shape of “a beautiful young lady whose dark hair falls shining delicately under the shadow of her furlined hood”. On the outside, she’s just the sort of groomed, sophisticated parent a motherless pre-teen might wish for, but Metatron, the Regent of Heaven, has her measure in The Amber Spyglass ...

Hanukkah 2014

HAPPY HANUKKAH (CHANUKKAH) to all those celebrating! The festival begins this evening at sundown.

Past Hanukkah-related posts are collected here and links and there are more recent ones here and here.

Also, Haaretz has a recent piece by Rabbi Yehoshua Looks about one of the major characters in the story: On the eve of Hanukkah, a story of a fallen high priest. The tension in defining boundaries between religious and secular life and practice remains with us millennia after Jason the high priest built a contentious gymnasium in Jerusalem. Excerpts:

From the charcoal drawings of two warships and the inscriptions inside the tomb, one speculation is that Jason was a naval commander who sailed the coast of Egypt. But in her book "Doubt: A History," Jennifer Michael Hecht tells another story from that era, of a Jewish high priest named Jason who had lost his standing as he pandered to the pull of assimilation.

[...]

According to Hecht, Antiochus retired the pro-Ptolemaic Jewish high priest, a son of High Priest Simon, replacing him with Simon's more progressive younger son Jason, who secured his selection with a bribe. Jason, who was born Joshua but, tellingly, chose to go by the Greek version of his name, already had a strong following of Jews who opposed the strict application of Jewish law. Jason, Hecht writes, quickly took steps to make the finer things of Greek culture available to Jews, and his first order of business was building a gymnasium in Jerusalem, at the foot of the Temple Mount.

The attitude to these events, as recorded in the Book of Maccabees, is clear.

[...]

Ironically, today’s Maccabiah Games, also known as the Jewish Olympics, in its naming reflects a case of modern amnesia. What the games celebrate, the Greek ideals of physical skill and prowess, are in part, what the Maccabeans were fighting against. Metaphorically, Jason the high priest, buried in the tomb in the heart of modern day Jerusalem or wherever, is probably smiling.

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Litigation over the Crowns of Damascus

MANUSCRIPTS OF THE HEBREW BIBLE: Open book: Syrian Jewish bibles might spark ownership dispute (Daniel Estrin, AP).

More on the Crowns of Damascus and related matters here and links.

Marriage, sex, virginity, and even celibacy, in the Talmud

LAST WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: Virgins, ‘Partial Virgins,’ Sodomy, Bestiality, Prostitutes, Marriage, and Forbidden Sex. In the patriarchal society of the Talmud, a woman’s body is always under the supervision and scrutiny of men.

In last week’s column, I wrote about the surprising frankness with which the rabbis of the Talmud address sexual matters. In America, we are used to regarding religion and sexuality as opposites or enemies, constantly coming into conflict over issues like abortion and homosexuality. This must be, in part, a legacy of America’s Christian heritage, for since Paul, Christianity has placed a high value on chastity and asceticism. Still, while we may regard the Talmud as comparatively sex-positive, the rabbis were not advocating free love. As we saw in this week’s reading from Tractate Yevamot, they drew a tight connection between sex, love, marriage, and procreation. According to Rav Huna, in Yevamot 61b, “Any intercourse that does not increase [i.e., result in children] is nothing other than licentious sexual intercourse.”

[...]

Incidentally, Ben Azzai, one of the four rabbis who entered Paradise (the one who died there), gets a mention in this week's column. It seems he never got married.

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

Apocryphal Christmas

'TIS THE SEASON: Christmas Stories in Christian Apocrypha. The birth of Jesus in the apocryphal gospels (Tony Burke, Bible History Daily).

Ancient Jewish epitaph in Greek

INSCRIPTION: Ancient Jewish tombstone found repurposed in 19th century Muslim mausoleum. Samuel and his family rediscovered 1,800 years later in the cemetery of the former Jewish capital in Galilee (Ran Shapira, Haaretz).

A roughly 1,800-year old stone inscription from a Jewish tomb has been found in the wall of a 19th-century Muslim mausoleum in the Upper Galilee, where it was repurposed from being part of a door lintel to part of a wall.

The partially broken stone is written in Greek, not Hebrew or Aramaic, which is the usual language on ancient Jewish tombs. But it lists the members of a clearly Jewish family that lived in Zippori, then called Sepphoris, between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE.

According to the inscription, "Samuel son of… and his wife… and his entire family" were buried at the site.

[...]

Past posts on Zippori/Tzippori/Sepphoris are here and here and links.

Mladen Popović awarded €1.5 millon ERC grant

CONGRATULATIONS TO MLADEN POPOVIĆ: Prestigious ERC Starting Grant for Mladen Popović. Innovative research on authors of Dead Sea Scrolls wins European grant of €1.5 million

Last Monday, the European Research Council (ERC) awarded a grant of €1.5 million to Prof. Mladen Popović of the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies for his project The Hands that Wrote the Bible. Digital Paleography and Scribal Culture of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Popović can use the funding to continue developing his pioneering research on the Dead Sea Scrolls. He now intends to discover who wrote these ancient documents.

Follow the link for additional details on his project. I first heard the good news last week at the Bible as Notepad Conference, where we were exploring many related issues. HT to the OT/ NT Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha page on Facebook for the link.

Bible as Notepad Conference concluded

I'M BACK FROM OSLO, where I attended the Bible as Notepad Conference. Besides the many interesting papers, highlights included a visit to Martin Schøyen's house to view some of his vast collection of manuscripts, and having the chance to hear Malachi Beit-Arie tell stories about Israeli academic life fifty years ago and about his doctoral supervisor Gershom Scholem.

Thanks to Liv Ingeborg Lied and her associates and assistants for a very stimulating conference.


(Photo courtesy of Liv Ingeborg Lied. Click on the image to enlarge it.)

UPDATE: Professor Lied has posted her introductory presentation for the conference. Go here and follow the link. And she has a related post here.

Feldman and Goldman, Scripture and Interpretation

NEW BOOK FROM DEGRUYTER:

Feldman, Ariel / Goldman, Liora
Scripture and Interpretation
Qumran Texts that Rework the Bible

Ed. by Dimant, Devorah

Series: Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 449

Aims and Scope

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls more than sixty years ago has revealed a wealth of literary compositions which rework the Hebrew Bible in various ways. This genre seems to have been a popular literary form in ancient Judaism literature. However, the Qumran texts of this type are particularly interesting for they offer for the first time a large sample of such compositions in their original languages, Hebrew and Aramaic. Since the rewritten Bible texts do not use the particular style and nomenclature specific to the literature produced by the Qumran community. Many of these texts are unknown from any other sources, and have been published only during the last two decades. They therefore became the object of intense scholarly study. However, most the attention has been directed to the longer specimens, such as the Hebrew Book of Jubilees and the Aramaic Genesis Apocryphon. The present volume addresses the less known and poorly studied pieces, a group of eleven small Hebrew texts that rework the Hebrew Bible. It provides fresh editions, translations and detailed commentaries for each one. The volume thus places these texts within the larger context of the Qumran library, aiming at completing the data about the rewritten Bible.

Safrai (ed), The Literature of the Sages

REISSUED BY BRILL:

The Literature of the Jewish People in the Period of the Second Temple and the Talmud, Volume 3 The Literature of the Sages
First Part: Oral Tora, Halakha, Mishna, Tosefta, Talmud, External Tractates.

Edited by Shmuel Safrai

The literary creation of the ancient Jewish teachers or Sages ‒ also called rabbinic literature ‒ consists of the teachings of thousands of Sages, many of them anonymous. For a long period, their teachings existed orally, which implied a great deal of flexibility in arrangement and form. Only gradually, as parts of the amorphous oral tradition became fixed, was the literature written down, a process that began in the third century CE and continued into the Middle Ages. Thus the documents of the rabbinic literature are the result of a remarkably long and complex process of creation and editing.
The volume here re-issued was a classic when published in 1987. It made lasting contributions through its careful and succinct analysis of specific natures of various documents, and their textual and literary forms. In its time it incorporated ground-breaking developments and it remains required reading for those who missed it the first time.
In the future CRINT plans to publish a revised and updated companion volume that is to reflect recent debate and a greater range of scholarly views, reference to developments in scholarship regarding Second Temple, Qumran and New Testament as well as to ancient Mesopotamian and Persian sources and archaeology. New methodologies from the Humanities and reference to digitation of source material will also be incorporated.

Dick on Gnosticism

GNOSTICISM WATCH: The 10 best adventure novels from 1965. Joshua Glenn shows why 1965 was a very good year for science fiction, comic books, and spy novels (BoingBoing).

Philip K. Dick’s science fiction adventure The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Via an odyssey of nested hallucinations, Dick burns the Gnostic idea that the world is the creation not of God, but of an evil, lesser deity, forever into the reader’s mind. The title character is a demiurge who brings to mankind a “negative trinity” of “alienation, blurred reality, and despair.” Probably my favorite PKD novel, after A Scanner Darkly.

More on Philip K. Dick here. And lots more on modern reflections of Gnosticism here and here and links.

Gauthier, Psalms 38 and 145 of the Old Greek Version

NEW BOOK FROM BRILL:

Psalms 38 and 145 of the Old Greek Version

Randall X. Gauthier

One of the critical, ongoing discussions in Septuagint Studies today concerns the issue of how texts were understood by their translators, and how those translations are able to provide the modern reader with clues to that original interpretation. In Psalms 38 and 145 of the Old Greek Version, Randall X. Gauthier provides a word by word, sentence by sentence, commentary on Psalms 38 and 145 in the Septuagint (LXX) version, or more accurately, the Old Greek (OG) version. Specifically, this study attempts to understand the semantic meaning of these psalms at the point of their inception, or composition, i.e. as translated literary units derivative of a presumed Semitic Vorlage.

Early Christian literature in Ethiopic

ALIN SUCIU: Panel on Early Christian Literature Preserved in Classical Ethiopic (Ge’ez) (from Timothy B. Sailors). The Panel meets in Warsaw at the 19th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies in August of 2015.

One of the more important sources for the study of early Christian literature are the versions of these writings preserved in Classical Ethiopic (Ge’ez). This panel will provide the opportunity to focus upon the all too often under-appreciated Ge’ez versions of these works of literature originally composed in the first several Christian centuries. These include books that would come to be part of the Christian Bible, writings categorized among the so-called ‘Apostolic Fathers’ or ‘Apologists’ or ‘Church Fathers’ and so-called early Christian ‘Apocrypha’, consisting, for example, of apocalypses, acts of apostles and testaments. Moreover, many of the ancient church orders from this era are importantly preserved in Ge’ez versions, as are other writings of a monastic, didactic or legendary nature.

As is well known, some important Jewish literature from the Second Temple period — 1 Enoch and Jubilees – is also preserved complete only in Ethiopic.