Ethio-Hebrew

ADAM MCCOLLUM: Ethio-Hebrew Psalms (BL Add. 19342). Because it turns out that Ethio-Hebrew is a thing. I didn't know that.

Cargill on Golb

ROBERT CARGILL: Appeal Denied: Dr. Golb to Serve 2-month Prison Sentence.

Background on the Raphael Golb Dead-Sea-Scrolls internet-impersonation case is here with many links.

Review of Pearce and Wunsch, Documents of Judean Exiles

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Pearce and Wunsch, Documents of Judean Exiles and West Semites in Babylonia (by Simcha Gross in Book Notes). Excerpt:

Of course, this volume is dedicated primarily to producing editions of texts, with helpful brief introduction, discussion, and useful appendices, all meant to aid the study of the tablets. It is the great achievement of this volume that it enables other scholars to integrate this new and exciting evidence into fuller accounts of the early Second Temple period.

I noted the book a couple of months ago here. And I have more posts on the Babylonian-Judean cuneiform tablets here and links.

Smithsonian: Siege of Masada

DOCUMENTARY: Smithsonian Tells Real Story Inspiring CBS' The Dovekeepers in SIEGE OF MASADA, 3/27 (broadwayworld.com). More on The Dovekeepers is here and links. And some past posts on the historicity of Josephus' Masada narrative are collected here.

Der Golem centenary

GOLEM WATCH: How the Golem Got His Groove Back. Gustav Meyrink Made Jewish Frankenstein a Household Name (Benjamin Ivry, The Forward).

This year marks the centenary of the book publication of Gustav Meyrink’s serialized novel “Der Golem.” Until a 2006 episode of TV’s “The Simpsons,” where Bart Simpson stole a golem from Krusty the Clown, Meyrink’s was probably the most famous adaptation of the ancient Jewish legend in which a man of clay is brought to life by magic as a “sort of friendly Jewish Frankenstein,” as Germanist Cathy Gelbin stated in “The Golem Returns.” ...

Gershom Scholem weighed in on the book too:

And Gershom Scholem, then a brilliant young student of Jewish mysticism, complains in “On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism”: “By taking up a figure of Kabbalistic legend and transforming it in a very peculiar way, Meyrink tried to draw a kind of symbolic picture of the way to redemption. Such literary adaptations and transformations of the golem legend have been frequent… Meyrink’s work, however, far outdoes the rest. In it everything is fantastic to the point of grotesque… Behind the facade of an exotic and futuristic Prague ghetto, Indian rather than Jewish ideas of redemption are expounded. The alleged Kabbalah that pervades the book suffers from an overdose of Madame Blavatsky’s turbid theosophy.” ... Scholem concluded: “I visited Meyrink on one or two other occasions, and he never failed to astonish me.”

The Golem is a very popular figure in modern popular culture and you can find many PaleoJudaica posts on him here and links.

Authorship of Esther

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS (BELATED PURIM EDITION): Who wrote the Book of Esther? Tradition says Mordechai wrote the Book of Esther, but surely he wouldn't have gotten the timing of his own expulsion a century wrong? (Elon Gilad, Haaretz). Excerpt:

There is a problem with the timing, too, which could also be an artifact of the book having been redacted long years after the event.

The Book of Esther says Mordechai was exiled from Judah with King Jeconiah: "Now in Shushan the palace there was a certain Jew, whose name was Mordechai… Who had been carried away from Jerusalem with the captivity which had been carried away with Jeconiah king of Judah, whom Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon had carried away" (Esther 2:5-6).

But King Jeconiah was expelled from Judah by Nebuchadnezzar 130 years before Xerxes ascended the throne. Surely a contemporary writer like Mordechai would have known that.

And then there’s the language of the book. On the one hand, the fact that no Greek influence made it into Esther is strong evidence that the book was written before the Achaemenid Dynasty was destroyed by Alexander the Great in 330 B.C.E., marking the start of the Hellenistic period.

On the other hand, the form of the Hebrew of the book, and, even more so, the form of the many Persian loanwords embedded in it, both indicate that the book was likely written toward the end of the Achaemenid Dynasty.

Taken together, the evidence of the vagueness about the king and the timeline problems, and the language, indicate that the redaction was by a Jewish scribe writing in Shushan in the middle of the 4th century B.C.E., about events that apparently happened more than a century before.

That about sums up the historical and philological issues. The only thing I would add is that the lack of Greek language or other Greek influence in the book may be more a cultural than a chronological feature. Most of the Hebrew sectarian texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls are similarly devoid of Greek influence even though they were written well into the Hellenistic period. They just didn't like Greek culture. Esther too may have been written in the Hellenistic period by a writer with a similar aversion.

The rest of the article summarizes various interesting scholarly speculations about the book and is worth a read.

Golb gets jail time

RAPHAEL GOLB: Panel Affirms Sentence in Dead Sea Scrolls Case
(Joel Stashenko, New York Law Journal).

An appeals court has affirmed a two-month jail sentence for a blogger whose case prompted the state Court of Appeals to rule that the state's second-degree aggravated harassment statute was unconstitutional.

A unanimous panel of the Appellate Division, First Department, upheld Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Laura Ward's sentence, which included three years of probation, for Raphael Golb in People v. Golb, 13595.

[...]

HT Stephen Goranson.

If I understand the situation correctly, Mr. Golb is now out of appeals and must serve his sentence. Reuters also has an article that notes the following:

Golb, who has remained free during the appeals process, is scheduled to begin his sentence on July 22, the district attorney's office said.

Background on the Golb Dead-Sea-Scrolls internet-impersonation case is here and follow the many links.

The Textual History of the Ethiopic Old Testament Project

"THE TEXTUAL HISTORY OF THE ETHIOPIC OLD TESTAMENT PROJECT (THEOT) is an international effort to identify and to trace textual trajectories found in Ethiopian manuscripts that contain books included in the canon of the Hebrew Bible." It does not seem to have its own dedicated website, but this post on the Juxta website (the source of the quotation) gives some information on it, as do the 2011 and 2014 calls for papers of the SBL Ethiopic Bible and Literature Consultation. And this Marylhurst University press release (from which I found out about the project) briefly discusses the work of Dr. Garry Jost on the Ethiopic text of Obadiah.

Isbel on From Yahwism to Judahism

BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION:

From Yahwism to Judahism

Some scholars have argued that there were multiple factors involved in the reasons why the exiled Judahites did not abandon Yahweh for Marduk, but the scaffolding for the multiplicity as it is normally defined is of such a patchwork character as to be unwieldy.

By Charles David Isbell
Director of Jewish Studies
Louisiana State University
December 2008

Review of Drake, Slandering the Jew

H-JUDAIC:

Susanna Drake. Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. 184 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8122-4520-2.

Reviewed by Gail Labovitz (American Jewish University 15)
Published on H-Judaic (February, 2015)
Commissioned by Matthew A. Kraus

According to the Flesh: Sexual Slander as a Tool of Early Christian Anti-Jewish Rhetoric

Two decades ago, Daniel Boyarin took the title of his book Carnal Israel from Augustine’s Tractate Against the Jews, where in the course of interpreting 1 Corinthians 10:18 (“Behold Israel according to the flesh”), Augustine describes the Jewish people as “indisputably carnal.” Stating at the outset that “Augustine knew what he was talking about,” Boyarin therefore announced his intent to “assert the essential descriptive accuracy of the recurring Patristic notion that what divides Christians from rabbinic Jews is the discourse of the body, and especially sexuality.”[1] In this new book, however, Susanna Drake returns to the rhetoric itself. Although she cites Augustine, and Boyarin’s interpretation of his words, as “the initial provocation for the present study” (p. 112, n. 8), her concerns are not the accuracy, but the intent and implications of such accusations made by Christian writers against Jews in late antiquity: what did it mean not only for Augustine, but for a number of early Christian writers--and those for whom they wrote--to accuse Jews of carnality? Her questions are: How did the figure of the “carnal Jew” come to function as a topos of early Christian literature? When did this topos first appear, and what purposes did it serve? How did the stereotype of the carnal Jew serve Christian leaders as they forged the boundaries between orthodoxy and heresy, Christianity and Judaism? And what can the development of this topos tell us about ancient understandings of gender and sexuality (p. 2)? To this end, she examines “the sexualized representations of Jews in writings by Greek church fathers from the first through fifth centuries CE” (p. 2); the authors she focuses on are the unknown author of the Epistle of Barnabas, Justin Martyr, Origen, Hippolytus, and John Chrysostom.

[...]

Review of Tabory and Atzmon, Midrash Esther Rabbah

THE TALMUD BLOG: Review of Tabory and Atzmon, ‘Midrash Esther Rabbah’ (Shai Secunda).

Overall, this new edition is a great pleasure to work with – and to learn from, beginning to end. No doubt it will be the fountainhead from where all future research on the literary history of Esther midrashim begin. When read on its own, this midrash will ever-beguile you with its playful hermeneutics (another valuable introductory chapter outlines Esther Rabbah’s many different interpretive strategies) and surprising traditions.

Purim 2015

HAPPY PURIM to all those celebrating! The festival begins tonight at sundown.

Some past Purim posts are collected here.

The Talmud on Sefaria

THE TALMUD BLOG: The ‘Status of The Talmud’ on Sefaria (Yitz Landes). The Sefaria website is here.

AJR on Josephus

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW has recently published two pieces on Josephus:

The Jewishness of Josephus: an Interview with Sören Swoboda

This is an interview with Sören Swoboda, author of Tod und Sterben im Krieg bei Josephus: Die Intentionen von Bellum und Antiquitates im Kontext griechisch-römischer Historiographie (“Death and Dying in War in the Works of Josephus: The Intentions of Bellum and Antiquitates in the Context of Greco-Roman Historiography”). The book was published in 2014 by Mohr Siebeck. Dr. Swoboda is currently a member of the Theological Faculty at the University of Jena, in Germany. The interview was conducted at the SBL meeting in November 2014.

The Understudied and Marginal Josephus: Bringing Him into the Conversation (Jacob Feeley)

Indeed, outside his usual haunts, Josephus appears rather like a strange guest at a dinner party, politely acknowledged with smiles or nods, but rarely approached. This is in part understandable. That Josephus wrote in Greek, an extremely difficult language which takes years if not decades to master, may deter students of Jewish Studies in particular. Josephus, moreover, does not speak as readily to the immediate concerns of contemporary Jewry. For Classicists, with their prejudice for literary style (a stylist, Josephus was not), their unfamiliarity with the Jewish tradition, and the general decline in knowledge of the Bible, Josephus can appear arcane or unappealing. Even those who refer to his works tend to use them as repositories of useful data rather than interpreting them on their own terms.

The Talmud on gentile governments, rape, and testimony

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: Belief, Truth, and Lies in Divorce, Marriage, Rape, and Female Chastity. Rightly or wrongly, Talmudic thinkers presumed that gentiles would persecute the Jews in their midst.

Can Jews rely on gentile courts to dispense justice? The question arose in this week’s Daf Yomi reading, in the course of an extended discussion of the major subject of Tractate Ketubot so far: female chastity. And the rabbis’ answer speaks volumes about their experience with the Roman and Persian governments they lived under. Many moments in the Talmud make clear that Jews in Talmudic times—as in much, perhaps most, of Jewish history—saw non-Jews as potential persecutors. (In Tractate Eruvin, for instance, we learned that a Jew should never live alone among gentiles, for fear that they will murder him.) And the Talmud periodically refers to times when the laws cannot be enforced due to government persecution—as happened after the Bar Kochba revolt in the 2nd century C.E., not long before the Mishna was written down.

[...]

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

Review of Taylor, Antiochus the Great

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW:

Michael J. Taylor, Antiochus the Great. Barnsley: Pen & Sword Military, 2013. Pp. xviii, 190. ISBN 9781848844636. $39.95.

Reviewed by Filippo Canali De Rossi, Liceo Classico Dante Alighieri (canali.filippo@libero.it)

Preview

Il libro è una biografia di Antioco III inserita nella storia della dinastia dei Seleucidi, a partire dal fondatore Seleuco I Nicatore fino agli ultimi epigoni. È la storia di un grande impero sovranazionale e delle strategie messe in atto per la sua creazione e successiva espansione, conservazione e difesa della sua esistenza.

[...]

Could the ancients see blue?

Could our ancestors see blue? Ancient people didn't perceive the colour because they didn't have a word for it, say scientists

• Studies say language shapes what we see by making us focus on objects
  
• Blue doesn't appear at all in Greek stories and other ancient written texts
  
• As a result, scientists believe ancient civilisations didn't notice the colour
  
• Egyptians - who were the only culture that could produce blue dyes - were the first civilisation to have a word for the colour blue in 2500 BC
  
• The Himba people in Namibia do not have a word for blue and tests have shown they have difficulty distinguishing between green and blue (Ellie Zolfagharifard, The Daily Mail)

The blue and black (or gold and white) dress that sweeped the internet last week revealed just how differently two people can see the world.

But it's not just about lighting conditions or optical illusions - evidence is mounting that until we have a way to describe something, we may not see its there.

Ancient languages, for instance, didn't have a word for blue and scientists believe as a result our ancestors didn't notice the colour even existed.

[...]

It wasn't just the Greeks. Blue also doesn't appear in the Koran, ancient Chinese stories, and an ancient Hebrew version of the Bible, according to a German philologist named Lazarus Geiger.

[...]

This story, which I have noted before, is making the rounds and the Mail's coverage is as good a place to find it as any. For the blue-black/white-gold dress, see here. (I see white-gold.)

In principle it makes sense that people might not be able to distinguish a color if their language didn't have a word for it. That said, I am not persuaded that ancient Hebrew did not have a word for blue. Ancient garments dyed with the tekhelet dye look to me to be in shades of blue, although I'm only looking at photos and the tones may be more bluish-purple. But there also is the Hebrew word sappir, which is a kind of gem, either sapphire or lapis lazuli, both of which we would call blue. This seems to me to be good evidence that the ancient Israelites could see something like our color blue.

Bronze statue in new Israel Museum collection

THE BELFER COLLECTION: Bronze nude stands out in new acquisition by Israel Museum. Rare statue and ‘absolutely pristine’ ancient glass among artwork to go on display in honor of institution’s jubilee (Ilan Ben Zion, Times of Israel).

His unblinking black eyes are what first draw you in. Beneath curled brazen locks, his piercing gaze is arresting — in part because he’s an unblemished four-foot statue older than Jesus. Visitors to the Israel Museum will soon lock gazes with this rare Roman bronze — one of just a handful remaining intact from the ancient world — when it goes on public display for the first time in June.

The 1st century BCE nude, with its original colored-glass eyes, was among several hundred ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman artifacts recently donated to the Israel Museum by New York art collectors Robert and Renee Belfer in honor of the institution’s 50th anniversary. The museum hailed the addition as a “transformative gift” that helps flesh out its already impressive collections.

[...]

The adolescent figure’s identity is uncertain, as the object it once held in its right hand is missing. “If divine, the possibilities include Hercules, who might have held his club, or Bacchus, who would have held his kantharos,” or two-handled drinking bowl, the catalog description of the statue reads. “If an athlete, he could have held a palm branch or a wreath.”

His provenance is likewise obscure. What’s known is that he was obtained by late TV mogul John W. Kluge after passing through the hands of at least two other antiquities retailers. The Belfers bought the boy at a Christie’s auction in New York for a cool $1,351,500 in 2004.

[...]

It's a nice statue all right. But given that it's unprovenanced and bought on the antiquities market, I just hope it's genuine.

Background on the collection is here.

Jesus' house in Nazareth?

ACTUALLY, PROBABLY NOT: Jesus' House? 1st-Century Structure May Be Where He Grew Up (Owen Jarus, LiveScience).

Archaeologists working in Nazareth — Jesus' hometown — in modern-day Israel have identified a house dating to the first century that was regarded as the place where Jesus was brought up by Mary and Joseph.

The house is partly made of mortar-and-stone walls, and was cut into a rocky hillside. It was first uncovered in the 1880s, by nuns at the Sisters of Nazareth convent, but it wasn't until 2006 that archaeologists led by Ken Dark, a professor at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, dated the house to the first century, and identified it as the place where people, who lived centuries after Jesus' time, believed Jesus was brought up.

[...]

As usual with these things, the real story is that we now have detailed records of the excavation of a first-century Jewish house in Nazareth, which is archaeologically quite important. That there is a Byzantine and Crusader-era tradition that it was the house of Jesus hardly amounts to significant evidence that it was.

Leonard Nimoy z'l'

PEACE BE UPON LEONARD NIMOY, who, by his own account, adapted his Vulcan hand salute from a Jewish ritual he saw (well, peeked at, actually) in Synagogue as a boy. The sign represents the letter Shin (שׁ). Back in 2004 I noted the story of the salute here.

He lived long and prospered. May his memory be for a blessing.

Ahituv awarded 2015 Israel Prize

CONGRATULATIONS: Prof. Shmuel Ahituv to be 2015 Israel Prize laureate in Biblical Research Ahituv is a past head of the bible, archeology and ancient near eastern studies department and was the founder of the BGU Press (Lidar Gravé-Lazi, Jerusalem Post).

Prof. Shmuel Ahituv, of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, will be awarded the Israel Prize in Biblical Research, the Education Ministry announced on Thursday.

[...]

Ben Sira, gender, and canon

BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION:

Why Is There a Bible and What Do Women Have To Do With It?
Gender, Ben Sira, and the Canon

What makes Ben Sira stand out within this larger cultural gender ideology is that the women he fears most are not the women on the street, or even the singing girls he expects to encounter at banquets (Sir. 9:1-9). Rather, in a far more acute manifestation of gender anxiety, the woman he fears most is his own wife.

The following essay is adapted from Ben Sira and the Men Who Handle Books: Gender and the Rise of Canon-Consciousness (Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2013).

By Claudia V. Camp
John F. Weatherly Professor of Religion
General editor, Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies
Texas Christian University
January 2015

Conference on Jewish Attitudes Toward Wealth and Poverty

MICHAEL SATLOW: Conference Announcement: Jewish Attitudes Toward Wealth and Poverty. At Brown University in November.

Anxious Gnosticism

PHILIP JENKINS has been putting up a series of informative posts on Gnosticism over at The Anxious Bench. They are still in progress, but this seems like a good time to note what he has published to date and to make some comments of my own.

Those Who Know

Ever since my undergraduate years, I have been interested in early Christian history and Gnosticism. In the next few posts, I will talk about some of the things I have learned about Gnosticism, why it is so important, and some of the areas I am still trying to explore in my present book project. Here, I will just define my terms, and identify my main questions.

More on Kabbalah and Gnosticism here.

The Beginning of Wisdom

I am assembling that package of ideas out of pure imagination, and I can point to no group of texts that prove its existence. What I am suggesting is that a large part of Gnosticism could, hypothetically, have been constructed without wandering too far outside Judaism as it existed, in its very diverse and sectarian forms, during the first century AD.

True, but I still want some texts.

Athens, Jerusalem and Nag Hammadi

Gnosticism thus emerges from a world in which Platonism more generally defined had become a common currency of philosophical language and thought. Of the vast number of ideas and theories that Plato and his successors generated, some are particularly relevant to our subject here, in providing the intellectual vocabulary of Gnosticism.

Gnostics and Platonists

Although the origins of Gnostic thought are controversial, many of the core themes and terms undoubtedly stemmed from Greek philosophical thought, especially Platonism. That did not necessarily mean that early Gnostics were taking these ideas directly from Greek thinkers or schools, rather that they came from a Jewish (and emerging Christian) world that had long sought to integrate Platonic concepts. Any attempt to separate Greek and Jewish elements in this synthesis is doomed to failure.

Asking the Wrong Question

I have been puzzling over the origins of Gnosticism, and we can certainly find some plausible answers to that issue. Jewish, Greek and Christian, (and possibly Persian), the building blocks were all clearly there. Perhaps, though, I have been asking the wrong question all along. Instead of asking why some people came up with that particular set of answers, we should rather inquire why others didn’t.

Philo’s Answer

Greek philosophy made it all but impossible to reconcile the transcendence of God with a deity who created and ruled the world, with a deity like that portrayed in the Hebrew Bible. During the Second Temple era, that clash of visions was deeply troubling for Jews who wished to integrate into the Greek-dominated international culture.

Of the thinkers who tried to reconcile the systems, the best-known was Philo of Alexandria (25 BC – 50 AD), whose life overlapped with figures like Jesus and Paul. ...

Dating the Gnostics

Obviously, arguing from silence is risky. The account I have given here is drawn from Irenaeus, who was widely traveled and well-connected, but who did not necessarily know everything that was in progress in every corner of the Christian world. He knew Asia Minor, Rome and Gaul at first hand, but might not have had such good connections elsewhere. As I have remarked, such early accounts of Gnosticism are curious in their geographical emphasis. They focus on Alexandria and Antioch, with much commuting to and from Rome. Few pay much attention to the quite intense activity that seems to have been in progress in Mesopotamia, where Jewish Christian, baptismal and Gnostic sects were highly active no later than the early second century. Perhaps Irenaeus was simply missing some key events and activists.

Alternatively, perhaps Irenaeus really was depicting historical reality, in which Gnosticism really was an innovation of the late first century, at least a generation or two after Jesus’s time. And at least in its early days, it was strictly confined to Syria, even to Antioch itself.

The question then arises: why then, and why there?

I'm sure Professor Jenkins's answers will continue to be interesting and I look forward to hearing more. Background to the series is here.

For my part, I have not found any arguments for a pre- (or non-) Christian Jewish Gnosticism in antiquity persuasive. The development of Gnosticism seems much easier to me once you add Pauline theology (notably its demotion of Jewish law) into the mix of Judaism and Platonism. And, tellingly, none of the surviving Gnostic texts deal with the halakhic and national/ethnic issues that the demiurgic myth would inevitably have raised. I have discussed the issues in greater detail here and here.

Idumeans in the Court of Judea

BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION:

Full House: Idumaean Preeminence in the Court of Judaea

The power struggles among these Idumaean nobles, which probably originated long before the Hasmonean annexation, were no longer simply local fights between petty elites. Instead, they were transported from a local Idumaean context to the national stage of the Judaean royal court and the Roman Near East.

See Also: The Many Faces of Herod the Great (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2015)


By Adam Kolman Marshak
Gann Academy
Waltham, MA
February 2015

Review of Morlet et al. (eds.), Les dialogues Adversus Iudaeos

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW:

Sébastien Morlet, Olivier Munnich, Bernard Pouderon (ed.), Les dialogues Adversus Iudaeos: Permanences et mutations d'une tradition polémique. Actes du colloque international organisé les 7 et 8 décembre 2011 à l'Université de Paris-Sorbonne. Collection des Études Augustiniennes. Série Antiquité, 196. Paris: Institut d'Études Augustiniennes, 2013. Pp. 428. ISBN 9782851212634. €46.00 (pb).

Reviewed by Barbara Crostini, Stockholm University (barbara.crostini@su.se)

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

This is an extremely wide-ranging, informative, and balanced collection of essays on a body of literature that is as important as it is sensitive in the current scholarly investigations of intercultural and interfaith relationships across the centuries. The individual contributions are of the highest level, displaying remarkable scholarship but also subtlety in reviewing the materials. While the weight of the evidence lies in the late antique period, which receives the greatest number of contributions in the volume (pp. 49–268), the perusal of this genre into the medieval period (pp. 269–384) and beyond (pp. 385–402) affords a better perspective by which to evaluate the earlier dialogues, whose context is necessarily constrained by our limited knowledge about the period.

[...]

Looting of archaeological sites in Israel

TREASURE HUNTERS: Israel struggles to stop archaeological site raids (Yuval Avivi, Al Monitor).

The staff of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) gets very nervous whenever news breaks that a large archaeological treasure has been found. That is what happened Feb. 17, when amateur divers discovered a treasure trove of rare, ancient coins near the ancient port town of Caesarea. “We know that the discovery of a treasure of this size, and the publicity that such a find receives in the media causes people to think that they can find treasures just about anywhere,” Eitan Klein, deputy director of the Unit to Prevent Antiquities Theft at the IAA, told Al-Monitor.

Klein said, “People take the law into their own hands and set out to find antiquities themselves, even though this means breaking the law and causing destruction to important archaeological sites. For the most part, they don’t even find anything. What was discovered last week is the kind of thing that happens just once every 50 years.”

[...]

I have not commented on the discovery of this trove of Fatimid-era gold coins near Caesarea, because it falls outside the chronological horizon of PaleoJudaica, but the story has been all over the news and you can read more about it, for example, here. Otherwise, background here and links and, more generally, here and links.

The CSM on the Assyrian Christians

THE CHRISTIAN SCIENTIST MONITOR: Who are the Assyrian Christians under attack from Islamic State? (+video). With roots in ancient Mesopotamia and a tenuous footing within modern Middle East nation-states, Assyrians have been displaced by conflicts in Iraq and Syria, and exile communities have grown up in Turkey, Iran, and Europe. (Michael Holtz). Excerpt:

So who are the Assyrians? Alternatively known as Syriac, Nestorian, or Chaldean Christians, they trace their roots back more than 6,500 years to ancient Mesopotamia, predating the Abrahamic religions. For 1,800 years the Assyrian empire dominated the region, establishing one of most advanced civilizations in the ancient world. (An example of this is the city of Arbel, one of the earliest permanent agricultural settlements.)

The Assyrian empire collapsed in 612 B.C. during the rise of the Persians. Then, 600 years later, they became among the earliest converts to Christianity. They still speak an endangered form of Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ, and consider themselves the last indigenous people of Syria and Iraq.

Following the birth of Christianity, Assyrian missionaries spread across Asia, from the Mediterranean to the Pacific, and built a new empire that lasted until Arab Muslims swept through the Middle East in 630.

Cross file under Syriac Watch and Modern Aramaic Watch.

Also in the Monitor, Husna Haq reports on a recent ISIS depredation: ISIS burns Mosul library: Why terrorists target books. UNESCO has called the destruction of libraries and books in Mosul 'one of the most devastating acts of destruction of library collections in human history.' The older (apparently Arabic and Syriac) manuscripts from the Dominican friary in Mosul were spirited out before ISIS fully took over the city.

More on the recent horrors visited on Mosul and elsewhere in the Middle East is here and links.

UPDATE: ISIS continues to destroy antiquities in Mosul: ISIS thugs take a hammer to civilisation: Priceless 3,000-year-old artworks smashed to pieces in minutes as militants destroy Mosul museum (Julian Robinson, The Daily Mail). And, as Joseph Lauer reminds on his e-mail list, they also continue relentlessly to kill people.

Latest on circumcision controversy in NYC

THE CONTROVERSY over metzizah b’peh is back in the news, with New York City recently lifting the requirement for the signing of parental consent forms before the procedure, which is mentioned in the Mishnah and Talmud, can be undertaken. The practice is rare today and is controversial because it can transmit disease, notably herpes.The Forward reprints an Haaretz article by Elon Gilad which summarizes the history of the practice and the current situation: How Ancient Circumcision Rite Sparked Modern Schism. Excerpt:

We first encounter the practice in the Mishnah, the first compendium of laws of rabbinic Judaism (c. 200 CE): “We perform all the requirements of circumcision on the Sabbath: We circumcise, uncover, suck, and place a compress with cumin on it” (Sabbath 19b).

The critical word here is the Hebrew word for suck: metzitzah.

In the Talmudic commentary on this passage in the Mishnah (Shabbat 133b), the 4th century rabbi Papa of Babylon writes that failure to perform this suction is dangerous for the baby, and any mohel who neglects to perform the ritual should be fired.

In other words, the rabbis viewed metzitzah as a health measure. Their thesis of medicine and disease was informed by the prevailing theory of the time - Hippocrates’ theory of the four humors, authoritatively expanded upon by the prominent Greek physician Galen in the 2nd century.

Background here and links.

AAR 2015: Traditions of Eastern Late Antiquity sessions

JAMES MCGRATH: Traditions of Eastern Late Antiquity AAR Call for Papers 2015.

Review of Regev, The Hasmoneans

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW:

Eyal Regev, The Hasmoneans: Ideology, Archaeology, Identity. Journal of Ancient Judaism. Supplements, 10. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013. Pp. 340. ISBN 9783525550434. €99.99.

Reviewed by Friedrich T. Schipper, University of Vienna (Friedrich.Schipper@univie.ac.at)

Preview

Although the Second Temple period is an intensively researched period of Jewish history and although the Hasmonean rulers were key players for one and a half centuries within this period, only a few comprehensive portraits of the Hasmoneans and their time have been published in the past 10 years. Eyal Regev, professor of archaeology at Bar Ilan University, provides a very solid overview of various aspects of the Hasmonean rule and legacy, concentrating on ideology and identity and thereby filling a thematic gap in research on the Hasmoneans. Regev strives for a twofold interdisciplinary approach – historical and archaeological as well as text-oriented historical-critical and comparative socio-anthropological – “in order to see more clearly WHO the Hasmoneans actually were” and “HOW they ruled the Jewish people”.

[...]

Oxford Commentary on the DSS

ANNOUNCEMENT: Oxford Commentary on the Dead Sea Scrolls. The General Editor is Timothy H. Lim (University of Edinburgh).

The series is intended for a broad readership of scholars and students who work in the fields of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament Studies, or in other areas of Early Judaism. Published by Oxford University Press, each volume will expound on the religious ideas and themes of the scrolls.

This is a very welcome development. Follow the link for a list of volumes in progress.

Gzella on the cultural history of Aramaic

ARAMAIC WATCH (BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION):

Aramaic, the English of the Levant in Antiquity

A holistic approach to Aramaic can uncover a shared backdrop of distinct cultural and religious traditions, help to trace their origins in the absence of other historical or archeological information, and enable one to appreciate the rich texture of certain words and expressions in the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament.

See Also: A Cultural History of Aramaic (Brill, 2015).

By Holger Gzella
Professor of Hebrew and Aramaic
Leiden University
January 2015

Conclusion:

Even a bird’s-eye (or rather a satellite’s-eye) view of the history of Aramaic like this one shows that each attempt at renewing and enriching Aramaic philology feeds into many academic debates, such as theology, history, sociolinguistics, language contact and change, or multiculturalism. It is firmly connected to the patrimony of the entire Near East and thus has a potentially high profile at an interdepartmental level. This is the principal justification for maintaining in-depth expertise in one or two of the major periods of Aramaic in present-day Faculties of Humanities. But whoever views complexity as such as meaningful and valuable, may well study Aramaic as an end in itself, independent of its possible applications – and will be amply rewarded.

Indeed.

BAR on archaeological looting

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Archaeological Looting and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage. Can we prevent archaeological looting? Robin Ngo summarized a BAR editorial by Hershel Shanks. The editorial itself is behind the subscription wall.

On a related note, the ASOR Blog has posted A Statement on Mesopotamian Antiquities Issues by Benjamin R. Foster, Curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection. A free registration is required to read the whole (brief) statement.

Some potentially relevant recent PaleoJudaica posts are here and here.

Review of Yadin-Israel, Scripture and Tradition

THE TALMUD BLOG: A. Gvaryahu on A. Yadin-Israel ‘Scripture and Tradition: Rabbi Akiva and the Triumph of Midrash.’

The Shekel

ON THE TEMPLE TAX: For the Month of Adar: What Was the Shekel? Posted a bit after Parashat Shekalim reading, but in time to remember that Adar was when those shekels were brought to the Temple and to recall the custom of giving the equivalent of half a shekel to charity on Purim. (Shuli Mishkin, Arutz Sheva). In 2008 I noted the discovery of a half-shekel coin by the Temple Mount Sifting Project. And more on the peruta is here.

Complimenting the bride in the Talmud

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: Can a Blind Bride Be Attractive? If Not, How Do You Pay Her a Compliment? The sages debate the demerits of little white lies, and consider the subtleties of legal claims made by spouses and other property owners

Every bride is beautiful on her wedding day, the saying goes. But is she really? As it turns out, this was a matter of dispute between the two factions we often hear about in the Talmud, the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai. ...

Besides wedding etiquette, this week's section deals with legal claims and witnessing a contract.

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

An Ethiopic manuscript of Jannes and Jambres

TED ERHO, who is pursing a PhD under the supervision of Professor Loren Stuckenbruck at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, has informed me that he has discovered a new manuscript of the Old Testament Pseudepigraphon Jannes and Jambres in an Ethiopic translation in a collection in Ethiopia. Hitherto the text was known only from a couple of very fragmentary manuscripts in the (presumably original) Greek and an excerpt in a Latin translation. In volume 2 of the Charlesworth Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, pp. 427-442, there is an English translation of this material by A. Pietersma and R. T. Lutz.

Jannes and Jambres are legendary Egyptian magicians who opposed Moses during the ten plagues against Egypt. They are mentioned in the New Testament in 1 Timothy 3:8, in the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Damascus Document (CD V.17-19), and in various other places. This new manuscript preserves quite a lot of missing text from the book and it is a very exciting discovery. Ted told me about it last December at the Bible as Notepad Conference, but he asked me to keep it confidential until he could return to Ethiopia and study the manuscript more closely. I am now delighted to have his permission to announce the discovery. He e-mails the following information on the manuscript.

The fragment consists of a bifolium of non-consecutive leaves datable on palaeographic grounds to the beginning of the 14th century, or perhaps slightly earlier. Although in relatively good condition and generally legible, the top inside corner is damaged, resulting in the loss of a few letters from the first two lines of each affected column; mold or some sort of related bacterial contamination on the recto of the initial leaf have additionally caused several characters and one full word to become completely obscured.

Approximately 80% of the text of Jannes & Jambres preserved in this Ethiopic witness is previously unattested. In two places, however, parallels exist with the Greek evidence. The first of these occurs at the very beginning of the fragment and overlaps with both Vienna Frag A and P. Chester Beatty XVI Frame 4↓, while the second, which commences about two-fifths of the way through f. 1v and continues almost until the end of the leaf, aligns with Vienna Frag B and P. Chester Beatty XVI Frame 3→. No precise textual correspondences with the extant Greek material exist for any portion of the second Ethiopic leaf. Its content, however, consists primarily of laments for various elites who have died (probably the nobles of Egypt), which each section introduced by the question "Where is (name)?", traces of which may be attested in the very fragmentary later leaves of P. Chester Beatty XVI. In any case, the substantial quantity of unique material in the Ethiopic fragment suggests that the Greek evidence probably represents a smaller portion of the full text of the apocryphon than has been supposed to date.

Back in 2009 I mentioned the book of Jannes and Jambres as an Old Testament pseudepigraphon that is not entirely lost. Now it is less lost than before.

Let's all say it together: Bit by bit, a letter at a time, whatever it takes. Until we're done.

UPDATE (24 February): Peter M. Head comments.

Wilkinson, Tetragrammaton: Western Christians and the Hebrew Name of God

NEW BOOK FROM BRILL:

Tetragrammaton: Western Christians and the Hebrew Name of God
From the Beginnings to the Seventeenth Century

Robert J. Wilkinson

The Christian Reception of the Hebrew name of God has not previously been described in such detail and over such an extended period. This work places that varied reception within the context of early Jewish and Christian texts; Patristic Studies; Jewish-Christian relationships; Mediaeval thought; the Renaissance and Reformation; the History of Printing; and the development of Christian Hebraism.
The contribution of notions of the Tetragrammaton to orthodox doctrines and debates is exposed, as is the contribution its study made to non-orthodox imaginative constructs and theologies. Gnostic, Kabbalistic, Hermetic and magical texts are given equally detailed consideration.
There emerge from this sustained and detailed examination several recurring themes concerning the difficulty of naming God, his being and his providence.

Death Metal, Greek Philosophy, and Gnosticism

GNOSTICISM SHOWS UP IN THE MOST UNLIKELY PLACES: Pneuma Hagion's R. Discusses Death Metal, Greek Philosophy, and Gnosticism (Kim Kelly, Noisey (Vice)). Excerpt:

Tell me about the idea of Pneuma Hagion. As Lovecraftian as the project's title sounds, I read that it's actually Greek for "holy spirit." Clearly there's a perversion going on here. Your lyrics aren't posted, so could you give me some insight into what message and ideas you're trying to convey?
The perversion idea is pretty spot on: this is a Gnostic band, and one of the most well-known strategies of Gnostic exegesis is the inversion of canonical scripture. Specifically, Pneuma Hagion represents several things to me, but I use it primarily as a symbol of the "divine spark" celebrated in Gnostic mysticism. I tend to subscribe to the pseudo-dualism of flesh versus spirit which is so common to biblical demiurgical traditions (pseudo-dualist because this dualism is actually played out against a monistic backdrop).

The Greek connection deepens with a song like "Caverns"— I immediately thought of Plato's Allegory of the Cave.
And here is where you truly are spot on; this observation is incredibly accurate. "Caverns" absolutely draws on the Allegory of the Cave, and I definitely see Pneuma Hagion as a vehicle of Light and Wisdom. To expand (briefly) on the general themes at work in Pneuma Hagion, I can summarize it this way: the true Self of any person is their divine Spirit, which is at once of the same substance as, yet separated from, God. I speak here of something similar to Tillich's "God Above God"; this is NOT the god of scripture or of any mainstream religion, past or present: this is a God removed from, yet intimately connected with, our sensible world. So in effect, the idea is to remember our origins, to see the truth, and to escape this cave. I take a very, very negative view of this universe and of life in general, which is typically Gnostic, but this is attenuated somewhat by my belief in many Neoplatonic ideas.

More on modern reflections of Gnosticism here and links.

Antiquities collection donated to Israel Museum

ON ITS 50TH ANNIVERSARY: NY antiquities collection donated to Israel Museum. Gift from Robert and Renee Belfer, which includes more than 300 ancient Greco-Roman and Near-Eastern glass vessels, comes as institution celebrates its 50th anniversary this year (AP).

More on the 50th anniversary of the Israel Museum here. And for another impressive collection of ancient glass, now on display at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, see here.

Helsinki workshop on text, ritual, and magic

ANNOUNCEMENT: Workshop on Text, Ritual and Magic (Helsinki, April 14-15). Follow the link for a schedule of papers. This is another one I wish I could make it to.

Levin, The Death of Carthage

PUNIC WATCH: THE DEATH OF CARTHAGE is Released.

Author Robin E. Levin takes inspiration from Titus Livius' account of the Second Punic War to pen her new historical fiction novel, "The Death of Carthage: Second Edition" (published by Trafford Publishing).

Set during the third and second centuries B.C., "The Death of Carthage" follows the events of the Second Punic War from three perspectives, with the novel itself organized into three books - one for each voice.

[...]

Interview with Moulie Vidas

THE BOOK OF DOCTRINE AND OPINIONS BLOG (ALAN BRILL): Interview with Prof Moulie Vidas. In addition to the interview, there is lots of good background on Professor Vidas and his work, notably his recent book, Tradition and the Formation of the Talmud. Previous PaleoJudaica posts on Moulie Vidas and his work are here, here, here, and here.

More on virginity in the Talmud

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: Virginity Is a Commodity (and Can Be Divined by Sitting a Bride on a Wine Barrel). Talmudic rabbis are less interested in mystical speculation than in concrete questions, like the state of women’s hymens.

How many times did God create human beings? As with many seemingly simple matters, the Torah turns out to be maddeningly ambiguous on this question. In Genesis 5:1-2, we read, “In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God he made him; male and female he created them, and blessed them, and called their name Adam.” This description echoes the earlier phrase from Genesis 1:27, which says, “And God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” But does this describe one act of creation or two? “In his own image” seems to imply one creation, since God surely can’t have two images; but “male and female he created them” suggests that he created each gender separately. And this is not to mention the story of Adam and Eve, which has God creating the first woman from the rib of the first man.

[...]

Wisely, Mr. Kirsch (and evidently the sages in this passage) do not get sidetracked by the question of Lilith.

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

The DSS and the NT

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament. Megan Sauter summarizes a March/April 2015 Biblical Archaeology Review article by James VanderKam. The article itself is behind the subscription wall.

Tomb of Ezra now a mosque?

Iraq: Video Shows Tomb of Ezra The Scribe Turned into a Mosque. Squeezed by ISIS and Iranian-backed Shia militias, Iraq's ancient Jewish heritage is slowly being destroyed and Islamized. (Lyn Julius, Arutz Sheva).

A recent Facebook video from the shrine of Ezra the Scribe, some 400 kilometres south of Baghdad, has confirmed what many have suspected for some years: this tomb, that Jews have revered since Biblical times, has now been transformed into a mosque.

[...]

But the video does show that Hebrew inscriptions still survive, namely psalms inscribed on marble or wooden plaques. These are typical of Jewish holy places in Iraq. They are shaped like lamps - the menorot of the Temple - and bear the ineffable four-letter name of God.

Peer through a window into the sarcophagus and you will see an inscription in Hebrew identifying it as the final resting place of Ezra the Scribe.

[...]

As the article notes, this seems to contradict some earlier reports that raised concern that the site had been damaged or destroyed. I haven't seen the video in question and would not have the specific knowledge necessary to evaluate its veracity. And there seems to be some confusion between this site and a synagogue in Basra.

Background here. Background on the (traditional) Tomb of Ezekiel (mentioned in the article) is here with many links.

On to Tractate Ketubot

LAST WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: Virgin Brides, Premarital Sex, and Jewish Patriarchal Ownership of Female Bodies. The ‘Daf Yomi’ cycle heads into thorny gender issues around marriage, gynecology, and Sabbath sex.

In most Jewish weddings today, the ketubah or wedding contract is treated as a piece of artwork to display rather than a legal document to live by. In fact, I’d guess that most Jewish couples who sign a ketubah under their rabbi’s supervision don’t have any idea what the Hebrew text actually says—it’s simply part of the tradition. But under Talmudic law, the ketubah is not just a flourish; it is just what its name implies, a “written” contract that lays out the precise monetary and practical obligations that the bride and groom incur by getting married. Those obligations are the subject matter of Tractate Ketubot, which Daf Yomi readers began this week.

[...]

An earlier PaleoJudaica post on Jewish marriage contracts from antiquity to modern times is here.

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

"Gaza wine" seeds excavated

DISCOVERY: Byzantine-era seeds of ‘Gaza wine’ found in Negev. Handful of 1,500-year-old charred grape seeds could help scientists unlock secret of one of the finest ancient wines (Times of Israel).

A handful of 1,500-year-old charred grape seeds that were once used to make one of the world’s finest ancient wines was discovered in southern Israel recently, the Israel Antiquities Authority said this week.

They were found in the Negev city of Halutza, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, during joint excavations by the University of Haifa and the IAA. The dig was conducted at an ancient garbage dump in the city, some 20 kilometers southwest of Beersheba.

[...]

There is hope that DNA analysis can resurrect this variety of grape vine and perhaps lead to the wine being recreated. For some parallel efforts to recreate ancient wines and beers, see here and links.

Stolen Talmud tractate recovered

NO LONGER MISSING: Stolen 19th Century Talmud Found. The book was stolen from the National Library years ago. Judaica auction house owner arrested (Orly Harari, Gil Ronen, Arutz Sheva). As this post's header indicates, the stolen item was a tractate of the Talmud, not the whole thing. The latter would have been an awfully large item to sneak off with. In any case, I'm glad it has been recovered.

Codex Vaticanus online

TIME TO PARTY! Codex Vaticanus Is Now On-Line (Michael Bird). More on the Oxford/Vatican manuscript digitization project is here and links.

Artscroll Talmud/Mishnah sale

FOR YOU, SPECIAL DEAL: Save Big with Artscroll’s Talmud and Mishnah Sale (Yeshiva World). Big as in 30% off. More on the ArtScroll/Schottenstein Talmud here and links.

More on the DSS coming to L.A.

JEWISH BUSINESS NEWS: Dead Sea Scrolls: The Exhibition to Hit Los Angeles in March. Excerpt:

Opening March 10, 2015 at the California Science Center, the exhibition explores the science and significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls, manuscripts composed, copied and hidden in caves 2000 years ago. Over half of the scrolls on display have never before been seen in the US, and some have never been exhibited since their discovery. The Los Angeles presentation is made possible with generous support from presenting sponsors The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation, Jewish Life Television and the Consulate General of Israel in Los Angeles.

Of special interest will be sections from ten of the Dead Sea Scrolls, including parts of the oldest discovered copies of the Hebrew Bible, also known as the Old Testament. The fragmentary scrolls in the exhibition contain passages from Genesis, Isaiah, Psalms, and even, an ancient marriage contract dated to the 1st century CE. Visitors will experience the Dead Sea Scrolls within the rich historical and cultural context of ancient Israel. Through multimedia exhibits, guests will explore the science and technology used to date, assemble and preserve these ancient manuscripts for future generations.

And a perspective from my home town San Diego: SDSU-Curated Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibit Coming to L.A. (Debbie L. Skylar, Times of San Diego).

Background here with many links. The exhibition has traveled through many cities already.

Banned Aramaic

ARAMAIC WATCH: Lecturer bans use of Jewish phrase. Exam proctors instructed not to write ‘Besiyata Dishmaya’ on board, igniting anger among students (Times of Israel).

A lecturer at Israel’s largest public college stirred controversy Wednesday after instructing proctors not to write a common religious phrase on a class board during an exam.

The instructions were made public after a student photographed and uploaded to the Internet an envelope apparently containing exams for a politics course at Sapir College near Sderot, on which “Please do not write BS”D on the board” was handwritten.

BS”D, an acronym for the Aramaic phrase meaning “with the help of heaven,” is traditionally written by practicing Jews at the top of every written document.

According to students present in the class, though, it appears the orders were not followed.

[...]

DSS anniversary

SIXTY YEARS AGO: This Day in Jewish History / Four Dead Sea Scrolls come home to Israel. PM Sharett announces that an Apocalyptic Noah text and the oldest version of Isaiah among the Dead Sea scrolls bought from Syrian Church (David B. Green, Haaretz).

On February 13, 1955, Israel’s prime minister, Moshe Sharett, held a press conference to announce that the country had acquired four more of the fabled Dead Sea Scrolls, an acquisition of sterling importance to scholars of ancient Judaism and early Christianity and a real coup for the fledgling state’s national pride.

[...]

The four scrolls were the the Great Isaiah Scroll, the Community Rule, the Pesher to Habakkuk, and the Genesis Apocryphon.

UPDATE: I have corrected the opening of this post. My how time flies.

Tomb of Ezra being destroyed?

BAD NEWS: Iraqi Terrorists Destroy Synagogue, Take Over Ezra's Tomb. Systemic destruction of Jewish holy sites in Iraq continues; embargo imposed on local media. (Tova Dvorin, Arutz Sheva). The report comes from media in Arabic. More links are found in this Israel Today article.

There is speculation that ISIS is involved, based on their past actions, but this is not confirmed.

As with the various other tombs of prophets in Iraq, the Tomb of Ezra is the traditional tomb of the biblical figure (who is a scribe in Ezra-Nehemiah, but becomes a prophet in works like 4 Ezra); the actual location of Ezra's burial site is unknown. Nevertheless, any harm done to it is tragic damage to a Jewish cultural icon in Iraq. More on the traditional Tomb of Ezra is here.

Hugoye 18.1

HUGOYE: JOURNAL OF SYRIAC STUDIES has published a new issue: Volume 18.1 (Winter 2015). Follow the link for the TOC and for links to the articles, etc., all online for free. This issue is in memoriam Luise Abramowski.

Gabbay and Secunda (eds.), Encounters by the Rivers of Babylon

NEW BOOK FROM MOHR SIEBECK:

Encounters by the Rivers of Babylon
Scholarly Conversations Between Jews, Iranians and Babylonians in Antiquity
Ed. by Uri Gabbay and Shai Secunda

This volume presents a group of articles that deal with connections between ancient Babylonian, Iranian and Jewish communities in Mesopotamia under Neo-Babylonian, Achaemenid, and Sasanian rule. The studies, written by leading scholars in the fields of Assyriology, Iranian studies and Jewish studies, examine various modes of cultural connections between these societies, such as historical, social, legal, and exegetical intersections. The various Mesopotamian connections, often neglected in the study of ancient Judaism, are the focus of this truly interdisciplinary collection.

The conference was noted here back in 2011.

The Babylonian-Judean cuneiform tablets and looting

A COMPLICATION? Ancient Tablets Displayed in Jerusalem Fuel Looting Debate (AP). The article says that suspicion has been raised that the tablets may have been looted in the 1990s, but the owner says that they were originally acquired legally in the 1970s. Whatever the merits of this particular case (and I do not have sufficient information to form an opinion), the whole issue of what to do about looted antiquities is fraught and difficult.

Background on the Babylonian-Judean cuneiform tablets is here and links. Some old posts dealing with the question of scholars using unprovenanced antiquities are here and here. See also these two essays in Bible and Interpretation:

New Policy on Cuneiform Texts from Iraq (ASOR, November 2004)
Should Scholars Authenticate and Publish Unprovenanced Finds? (Eric M. Meyers, February 2005)

UPDATE: The author attribution for the 2004 Bible and Interpretation essay was originally incorrect. I have corrected it above. Apologies for the error.

"Leviathan" excavated

"LEVIATHAN THAT CROOKED SERPENT": Ancient Leviathan Fossils Found in Arava Valley. Archaeologists and scientists have found remains of what may have been an ancient Leviathan in the Arava Valley, not far from the Dead Sea (Hana Levi Julian, The Jewish Press). Actually its a plesiosaur (kind of an aquatic dinosaur) called Elasmosaurus, not Leviathan. Leviathan is a mythological sea dragon mentioned in the Bible (e.g., Isaiah 27:1, whence the quotation), the Ugaritic texts, etc. Any connection between the two is extremely hypothetical. For example it is possible that ancient peoples occasionally dug up plesiosaur bones and that was the origin of the worldwide dragon myths. But there is no proof of this and I am skeptical.

There's lots more on ancient dragon traditions here, here, and links.

The Babylonian-Judean cuneiform tablets exhibition

BY THE RIVERS OF BABYLON: Remembering Babylon: New Exhibit Explores Roots of Jewish Life in Iraq (The Jewish Press: Anav Silverman, Tazpit News Agency).

The only museum in the world, dedicated to the history of the Ancient Near East from a biblical perspective, has a new exhibition examining the Babylonian exile of the Jewish people as never seen before. The Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem has amassed a collection of over 100 cuneiform tablets, original documents from the Judean community, which are now on display to the public for the first time.

[...]

The latest announcements include some new information about the contents of the tablets:

By the Rivers of Babylon, which also features innovative multi-media, original animations and local archeology from the First Temple, traces the family tree of fourth-generation Judean exile, Hagai Ben Ahiqam, all the way back to his great-grandfather, Samak Yama, who was born in Judah. One tablet describes the division of inheritance among Haggai and his brothers in Bablyon – the kind of information that Dr. Vukosavović says that one could find in a lawyer’s file cabinet today.

Hagai’s family lived in the Babylonian city known as Al-Yahudu, an important city, among many cities, which were settled by Judean exiles over 2,500 years ago, following Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of Jerusalem and the First Temple in 586 BCE.

Background here and links.

BAR's 40th

CONGRATULATIONS TO BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY REVIEW: Storied and Controversial Biblical Archaeology Magazine Turns 40. They do manage to keep things interesting.

The Israel Museum's 50th

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE ISRAEL MUSEUM: Israel Museum kicks off 50th anniversary celebrations. Exhibits include contemporary Israeli artists, the country as it was in 1965, exhibit on the Shrine of the Book, and the history of humankind (Judy Maltz, Haaretz).

The Israel Museum will kick off its 50th anniversary celebrations this week, with exhibits including contemporary artists and the country as it was in 1965.

Over the years, the country’s leading cultural institution has collected more than 500,000 objects and now serves nearly one million visitors a year.

It houses huge holdings of biblical and Holy Land archaeology, among them the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest biblical manuscripts ever found.

[...]

More on the renewal of the Israel Museum here and links. And a post on the Museum's 40th anniversary is here.

More on Flesher's award

PAUL FLESHER e-mails the following:

Several people have expressed interest in knowing more about the research project I will be conducting in my term as the Gitin Professor at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research. It has mistakenly been reported that my project encompasses the Huqoq mosaics. I wish to clarify that my research concerns not the Huqoq synagogue but the mosaics of other synagogues. To date there has been significant scholarly attention given to the zodiac cycles decorating the floors of ancient Galilean synagogues, but less attention to the other images. I intend to bring a ritual studies analysis to the floors of the synagogues at Sepphoris and Beth Alpha, looking especially at the images of the Temple/Torah Shrine, the lions, and sacrificial acts and implements. By combining information from the mosaics with interpretations found in the Palestinian Targums and the Palestinian rabbinic literature, where my expertise lies, I hope to reconstruct the sabbath liturgy and the meaning it was given in these sites.

Background here. I did not quote the full press release, relying on interested readers to follow the link. Apologies if this caused any confusion.

Hurtado on new Coptic text

LARRY HURTADO: Newly-Identified Coptic Text. The text is The Gospel of the Lots of Mary, which I have also discussed here.

By the way, this week looks increasingly busy and I may get little, if any, chance to blog during it.

On Kulp and Rogoff, Reconstructing the Talmud

EVENT IN MODIIN THIS SATURDAY: Reconstructing the Talmud: A Talmud Blog Event. In honor of the new book by Joshua Kulp and Jason Rogoff, Reconstructing the Talmud: An Introduction to the Academic Study of Rabbinic Literature (Mechon Hadar, 2014). An uploaded recording is promised for those who cannot attend.

HUCA 82-83

H-JUDAIC: TOC: Hebrew Union College Annual.

Volumes 82-83 of the Hebrew Union College Annual are now available in print and electronically.

Just to be clear, although the date of the volume is 2011-12, it just came out. Follow the link for the TOC, which includes a number of articles on ancient Judaism.

Lied on manuscript digitization

LIV INGEBORG LIED: Digitization and manuscripts as visual objects: effects of a media change.

So, how will the transformation of manuscripts into visual objects online change scholarship on texts and manuscripts? As has also been pointed out in the above mentioned research on media shifts, there is no one-to-one relationship between technological change on the one hand and change in social practices (what people do with media [Kratz 1959]) on the other. Until someone decides to answer the question based on actual empirical research we don’t yet know how this shift influences scholarly practices. For now, all answers will necessarily be hypothetical and suggestive, and I’ll phrase them in the form of follow-up questions.

PaleoJudaica has been following many different manuscript digitization projects over the years. Start here and follow the links.

Abraham and Nimrod

ARASH ZEINI: Abraham and Nimrod. Zarathustra too!

More on the new Ben-Hur movie

NOW FILMING: Morgan Freeman to star in Kazakh director's Ben-Hur (Dinara Urazova , Tengrinews).

Kazakh director Timur Bekmambetov has begun to film an epic historical drama Ben-Hur, produced by Paramount Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Tengrinews reports citing the press release posted on the official website of Bekmambetov’s film company Bazelevs.

The role of Judah Ben-Hur in the new movie will be played by Jack Huston. Morgan Freeman will perform the role of Ilderim, while Rodrigo Santoro will take the role of Jesus Christ.

The plot of the new film is based on a classic of American literature - the novel by Lew Wallace "Ben-Hur: A Tale Of The Christ," first published in 1880. The novel takes place in Palestine under Roman rule at the time of Jesus Christ. In the story, the young and wealthy Jew Judah Ben-Hur looses everything as he is betrayed by his best friend, ending up in slavery. On his journey Ben-Hur meets Jesus, an event which helps him find his path in life.

[...]

Background here. Past posts on the 2009 live O2 production (in Aramaic and Latin) of Ben-Hur are here and here and links, and past posts on the classic 1959 movie are here and here.

The Gospel of the Lots of Mary

NEW COPTIC TEXT: Newfound 'Gospel of the Lots of Mary' Discovered in Ancient Text (Owen Jarus, Live Science).

A 1,500-year-old book that contains a previously unknown gospel has been deciphered. The ancient manuscript may have been used to provide guidance or encouragement to people seeking help for their problems, according to a researcher who has studied the text.

Written in Coptic, an Egyptian language, the opening reads (in translation):

"The Gospel of the lots of Mary, the mother of the Lord Jesus Christ, she to whom Gabriel the Archangel brought the good news. He who will go forward with his whole heart will obtain what he seeks. Only do not be of two minds."

[...]

This looks like a good popular treatment of what looks like a very interesting new text that was published by AnneMarie Luijendijk last year. The text classes itself as a "gospel" in its own title, but by our genre classifications it is not one. Rather it sounds like an example of "Sortilege," a text that uses biblical verses and phrases to give its readers divinatory guidance — sort of a Bible-inspired I Ching. Jeff Childers gave a very interesting paper on some of these texts at the Bible as Notepad Conference last December. In the little I have seen there is not much information on the biblical passages used in this text, but the blurb for the monograph confirms that it is "replete with biblical phrases."

So no, this is not a new apocryphal gospel. But it is a new late antique Coptic text of considerable interest for ancient divinatory practices, and it is always good to have new texts.

Tu B'shevat 2015

TU B'SHEVAT, the New Year for Trees, began last night at sundown.

This year Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz has an article on The Evolution Of Tu b’Shvat for The Jewish Week.

Also inspired indirectly by today's holiday, Elon Gilad asks Did ancient Jews worship trees? in Haaretz, with the sub-heading "The Hebrew words for 'oak' and 'terebinth' seem to derive from the ancient word for 'god - el."

Regarding the latter, I would not make too much of an apparent similarity between these tree names and the word for "god" in Canaanite; this could just be a coincidence. But it would not surprise me if ancient Israelites practiced divination by dendrology. Various forms of divination have existed in Israelite and Jewish circles from antiquity to the present and the practitioners did not and do not think of this as worship of anyone other than God.

But one ancient Israelite custom which was pretty close to tree worship and is only hinted at in this article, is the worship of the Canaanite goddess Asherah (see here and here) as consort to the God of Israel. The Deuteronomistic Historian complained about this (e.g., 1 Kings 16:33; 2 Kings 21:7, 23:14-15) and there is epigraphic evidence for it as well. It appears to have been a fairly widespread practice in some circles, and her symbol seems to have been a sacred pole or tree used in her cult. But this would not have been tree worship; rather the tree or pole would have been considered a receptacle for the essence of the goddess and it would have been she who was being worshipped.

But none of this has anything directly to do with Tu B'Shevat; it only arises because trees are also involved.

Jenkins on a Zoroastrian inscription

ALEITIA: The Forgotten First Eastern Christians. History has neglected these early Christians outside Europe and the Mediterranean. Philip Jenkins turns to a third-century Zoroastrian inscription for a snapshot of early Eastern Christianity. Excerpt:

The leading figure in Persia’s Zoroastrian priesthood was one Kartir (or Kerdir), a revolutionary figure who departed from the standard imperial model of wide-ranging cultural tolerance. In the 270s, at Naqsh-e Rajab near Persepolis, Kartir commissioned some immodest inscriptions that vaunted his services to this faith and his empire. Among these very informative words, we find a boast of his intolerant and persecuting activities, and how he had “smitten” various minority religions:

“The heresy of Ahriman [the Devil] and the demons departed and was routed from the empire. And Jews and Buddhists and Hindus and Nazarenes and Christians and Baptists and Manicheans were smitten in the empire, and idols were destroyed, and the abodes of the demons disrupted and made into thrones and seats of the gods.”

Interesting commentary follows. Professor Jenkins has been discussing early Eastern (mostly Syriac) Christianity and related matters quite a bit over at The Anxious Bench.

Flesher receives Gitin Award

CONGRATULATIONS TO PAUL FLESHER: UW’s Flesher Receives Distinguished Professorship Honor.

February 2, 2015 — Professor Paul Flesher of the University of Wyoming’s Department of Religious Studies has received a prestigious award that includes funding for a four-and-a-half month residency in Jerusalem in spring 2016.

The Seymour Gitin Distinguished Professorship award is given by the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research (AIAR) in Jerusalem.

[...]

Flesher is internationally known for his research on the Jewish Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible, known as the Targums, as well as his work on early synagogues, from their origins into the Rabbinic period. Since 2011, he has been part of an archaeological team that is unearthing a late Roman (fifth century) synagogue at Huqoq in Israel’s lower Galilee which has a floor covered in mosaics. The site has already become famous for its depictions of the Samson story (Judges 13).

[...]

Professor Flesher has been quoted often on PaleoJudaica, mostly, but not exclusively, regarding the James Ossuary (most recently here). More on the Huqoq mosaics here with many links.

UPDATE (12 February): More here. Note that the full press release makes clear that his research project involves mosaics other than the ones at Huqoq. Also, I have fixed a dead link above.

Power, Authority and Canon

DAY CONFERENCE:

Power, Authority and Canon
6 May 2015
New College, University of Edinburgh
The theme of the conference revolves around the issues of historical and theological ramifications of canonization. Why were some texts and not others elevated to the status of “holy scriptures”? What are the effects in conferring authority on these texts? Website: http://conferences.hss.ed.ac.uk/power-authority-canon/

0900-0915 Welcome

0915-1000 John Collins (Yale University), “Uses of Torah in the Second Temple Period”

1000-1045 Michael Satlow (Brown University), “Bad Prophecies”

1045-1100 Coffee

1100-1145 Manfred Oeming (Universität Heidelberg), “The Way of God: Ethicsand Ritual as Birthplaces of Canonicity”

1145-1230 Timothy Lim (University of Edinburgh), “The Insufficiency of Divine Inspiration”

1230-1330 Lunch

1400-1445 John Barton (University of Oxford), “How far does the content of canonical texts matter?

1445-1530 Walter Moberly (University of Durham), “Canonicity and Religious Truth: What Role, if any, Should Traditional Canon Play Today?”

1530-1615 Craig Evans (Acadia Divinity School), “Jesus and the Beginnings of the Christian Canon of Scripture”

1615-1700 Tea

1700-1745 Shaye Cohen (Harvard University), “Some Reflections on the Canon”

1745-1800 Closing Remarks

A Special Event:
On 5 May, Professor Shaye Cohen will give a Gunning lecture on “The Bible and the Mishnah”, Martin Hall, New College, 5pm

Registration at www.bit.ly/GunningConf

Day fee: £30 (concession £15) includes conference attendance, refreshments and lunch. Contact: Jean Reynolds, School of Divinity, New College, Mound Place, Edinburgh EH1 2LX, Tel: 44-(0)131 650 8948. Email: J.Reynolds@ed.ac.uk

E-mailed by Timothy Lim. Looks very interesting.

Still more on the Babylonian-Judean cuneiform tablets

PHILOLOGY! ‘By the rivers of Babylon’ exhibit breathes life into Judean exile.
Never-before-showcased clay tablets documenting the first diaspora go on display at Jerusalem’s Bible Lands Museum (Ilan Ben Zion, Times of Israel). Another article that gives still more details about this important discovery. Read it all, but I will just comment on two passages.

“It puts a face on the real people who went through these fateful events,” Dr. Filip Vukosavović, curator of the exhibit, told The Times of Israel. The tablets preserve a wealth of Judean names — including the familiar Natanyahu — of the exilic community, and even include a handful of Aramaic inscriptions.

This is easy to miss, but, if accurate, it's very important. We have almost no Babylonian Aramaic from this period. We know plenty of Aramaic was written in Babylonia in the Second Temple Period; there is even a special Akkadian word for an Aramaic scribe (sepīru), distinguished from a scribe who copied cuneiform tablets (tupsharru). But Aramaic was normally written on perishable materials and almost none of it survived the humid Babylonian climate. To have even a little Babylonian Aramaic from the period of the Exile is in itself a major discovery. (Cross-file under "Aramaic Watch.")

Each document catalogs when and where it was written and by whom, providing scholars with an unprecedented view into the day-to-day life of Judean exiles in Babylonia, as well as a geography of where the refugees were resettled. The earliest in the collection, from 572 BCE, mentions the town of Al-Yahudu — “Jerusalem” — a village of transplants from Judea.

This is a bit garbled. The phrase Al-Yahadu is Akkadian for "town of Judea," which makes sense as a name for a village of exiled Judeans. It doesn't have anything directly to do with Jerusalem. This article from the 2011 Story of Iran and the Jews Exhibition (noted here) discusses the correct meaning of the phrase.

Background here and links.

Ashkelon looting arrests

AND AGAIN: Tomb raiders arrested in Ashkelon National Park for looting, damaging ancient site. Three suspects found with metal detector and digging equipment claim they were looking for "worms to go fishing" (, Jerusalem Post).

Three Beduin men were arrested Friday night for breaking into and attempting to loot an ancient burial site in Ashkelon National Park, the Israel Antiquities Authority Robbery Prevention Unit announced on Sunday.

According to an IAA spokesman, the suspects, all in their 30s, drove an SUV from their village outside Beersheba to the Byzantine-era tomb equipped with a sophisticated metal detector and digging equipment.

“They broke into the ancient tombs and during their digging caused irreparable damage to gravestones, ancient pottery, and coffins,” said IAA robbery unit inspector and archeologist Guy Fitoussi.

[...]

Other recent looting arrests in Israel are noted here and links.

Happy bicentennial to the CMS College, Kottayam, Kerala

SYRIAC WATCH: Kerala college oldest in India, set to turn 200 in February (Vinod Nedumudy, Deccan Chronicle).

Kochi: One of the most prestigious colleges in Kerala, the CMS College, Kottayam, is set to turn 200 next month, becoming the oldest Indian college.

Associate professor of Malayalam, Dr Babu Cheriyan, who has chronicled the history of the college Towards Modernity: The story of the first college in India, found references from various historians that suggest that the college was started in 1815, March with 25 students, mainly belonging to Syriac studies, and not in 1817 as widely believed.

[...]

There's lots more on the study of Syriac in Kerala here (cf. here) and links.

Punic moat in Spain

PUNIC WATCH: 2,200-Year-Old Moat Discovered in Spain (Archaeology Magazine). Better yet, the moat had Carthaginian artifacts in it.

More details here: Found in Spain: traces of Hannibal's troops. Spanish archaeology students have discovered a 2,200-year-old moat in what is now the Catalan town of Valls, filled with objects providing evidence of the presence of troops of the Carthaginian general Hannibal in the area (Jessica Jones, The Local).

Coptic summer school

ALIN SUCIU: International Summer School “The Coptic Bible and Coptic Literature in the Digital Age” (Göttingen/Hamburg, July 20 – August 1, 2015).

The Institute for Egyptology and Coptic Studies at the University of Göttingen and the Corpus of Coptic Literary Manuscripts (CMCL) at the Hiob-Ludolf-Institute for Ethiopian Studies, University of Hamburg, will be offering a two-week summer school “The Coptic Bible and Coptic Literature in the Digital Age”. The summer school will focus on cataloguing and editing Coptic manuscripts – Biblical and literary – using both traditional scholarly techniques and new methods in the Digital Humanities (DH).

The Summer School is associated with two major projects, the ”Digital Edition of the Coptic Old Testament“ in Göttingen and the “Corpus of Coptic Literary Manuscripts (CMCL)” in Hamburg, and will profit from the expertise of the staff members as well as that of international experts.