Mason moves to Groningen

CONGRATULATIONS TO STEVE MASON:

University of Groningen appoints Steve Mason to new Chair in Ancient Mediterranean Religions and Cultures

Professor Steve Mason will be appointed Distinguished Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Religions and Cultures at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies of the University of Groningen from August 1, 2015. Mason is a leading scholar in the history and literature of the eastern Mediterranean under Roman rule, especially Roman Judaea, the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, and Christian-Jewish-Roman relations.

Initiators of the Chair are the Dean of the Faculty, Prof. Kocku von Stuckrad, and Prof. Mladen Popović, Chair of the Department of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Origins and Director of the Qumran Institute, which Mason will join. The new Chair will undertake and facilitate education and research in currents of ancient Mediterranean religion and culture that remain important for modern European and Middle Eastern identities. The establishment of the Chair supports the university’s strategic investment in the humanities, given their importance alongside science for modern life. It reflects the view of both the RUG and Mason that a critical understanding of our shared past, recent and ancient, throws light on our modern identities, including the sources and potential resolution of conflict.

Steve Mason studied Judaism and Early Christianity at McMaster University (Hamilton, Canada). After his Ph.D. (University of St. Michael's College, 1986, by way of the universities of Jerusalem and Tübingen) he worked at The Pennsylvania State University, as Head of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, and at Toronto’s York University, most recently as Canada Research Chair in Greco-Roman Cultural Interaction. Since 2011 he has held the Kirby Laing Chair in New Testament at the University of Aberdeen. Mason was the first Dirk Smilde Fellow at the Qumran Institute in Groningen, from January through May 2014. His career has been one of building bridges around the ancient Mediterranean: between disciplines and between ancient and modern times.

Plans are taking shape for an international Master’s programme for an international Master’s programme that Steve Mason will develop together with Mladen Popović. Mason will also continue editing the series Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary (Brill), the first detailed commentary to all the works of Josephus. His history of the Jewish-Roman War (66–74 CE) will appear with Cambridge University Press in the coming months.

For more information, see http://www.rug.nl/ggw/news/archive/2015/university-of-groningen-appoints-steve-mason-to-new-chair-in-ancient-mediterranean-religions-and-cultures.

Sent in by Mladen Popovic. I am delighted for Steve and for Groningen, although he will be missed in Scotland.

Video on the Cairo Geniza

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: JTS Cairo Genizah Manuscripts.

Background on the Cairo Geniza is here and here and oh so many links. The latter link is specifically about the collection at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

UPDATE: Bad link now fixed. Sorry about that.

April 7th in PaleoJudaic history

CLEVELAND JEWISH NEWS: This Day, April 7, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin. Includes a couple of items of interest to PaleoJudaica. First:

451: Attila the Hun sacked Metz in what is now Germany as he pillaged his across Europe. Based on the Thirteenth Tribe, there are those who contend that a large proportion of Europe’s Jews were descended from the Khazars a warrior people connected to Attila.

For more on the claim that European Jews are descended from the Khazars, as well as some objections, see here and links.

Second, an unfortunate legal development:

529: The Roman Emperor Justinian issued the first draft of the Corpus Juris Civilis. Justinian codified the ant-Jewish imperial view of the world that began under Constantine. The code made “anyone who was not connected to the Christian church a non-citizen.” More specifically, the principle of "Servitude of the Jews" (Servitus Judaeorum) was established by the new laws, and determined the status of Jews throughout the Empire for hundreds of years. The Jews were disadvantaged in a number of ways. Jews could not testify against Christians and were disqualified from holding a public office. Jewish civil and religious rights were restricted: ‘they shall enjoy no honors’. The use of the Hebrew language in worship was forbidden. Shema Yisrael sometimes considered the most important prayer in Judaism ("Hear, O Israel, YHWH our God, YHWH is one") was banned, as a denial of the Trinity. A Jew who converted to Christianity was entitled to inherit his or her father's estate, to the exclusion of the still-Jewish brothers and sisters. The Emperor became an arbiter in internal Jewish affairs. Similar laws applied to the Samaritans.”

Drones vs. looters again

TECHNOLOGY WATCH: Tomb raiders tracked by DRONES: Jordan site uses quadcopters to work out when looters steal priceless antiquities

• Drones are used to take arial photographs of Jorden [sic] site
  
• Analysis can reveal areas where looters have dug into tombs
  
• Looters often discard human remains and sell antiquities

(Sam Mcneil, AP, at the Daily Mail). The story is about Jordan, but the technology could be used anywhere where looting is a problem. More on drone techology being used against looters is here.

Humour in the Rabbinic Literature

GALUS AUSTRALIS: Counting Teeth: Humour in the Rabbinic Literature (Simon Holloway).

Part One: Is it Okay to Laugh?

Q: Why did Queen Esther merit to rule over one hundred and twenty-seven provinces of the Persian empire?

A: Because she was descended from Sarah, who lived to the age of 127!

Okay, so it’s not a particularly funny joke, I’ll grant you. It appears in the midrash to Esther (Ester Rabbah 1:8), and is said by Rabbi Akiva to a room full of sleeping students in an effort to get their attention. According to Rabbi Chanokh Zundel, in his 19th century commentary on Midrash Rabbah (Etz Yosef, ibid), it was Rabbi Akiva’s way to speak “words of jest” (מילי דבדיחותא) in order to keep his classroom focused.

The tradition of telling jokes in order to better deliver one’s message is not only of great antiquity but possesses a fine rabbinic pedigree as well. The Talmud is replete with instances of lexical levity, and most of them are funnier than Rabbi Akiva’s Esther joke. I would like to provide something of a catalogue (though it is far from exhaustive) of jokes within the Talmud, and to cap it off I would like to share with you a few of my favourite examples from the world of mediaeval rabbinic humour.

[...]

The catalogue of jokes is coming in the next installment. Lol.

Destruction wreaked on Hatra

ISIS CONTINUES ITS ASSAULT ON THE PAST: Islamic State destroys Iraq's ancient city of Hatra. A video released overnight shows IS militants smashing sledgehammers into its walls and shooting at priceless statues at the UNESCO World Heritage site (AP).

In late antiquity the Aramaic-speaking city of Hartra was one of the last bastions of indigenous Mesopotamian religion and culture.

Background here and links.

Syriac manuscripts saved in Iraq

A SMALL VICTORY: In Iraq, a historic Christian library saved from militants (AP). The manuscripts of the Mar Matti Monastery, at least one of which is as much as 1100 years old, have been saved from ISIS. Cross-file under Syriac Watch.

Anxious messiahs

PHILIP JENKINS AT THE ANXIOUS BENCH: Messiahs by the Sackful.

Some timely thoughts for Holy Week!

In Jesus Christ Superstar, a mocking Pilate complains that “You Jews produce messiahs by the sackful!” Most popular histories take it for granted that Jewish thought was dominated by the eager expectation of a messiah, who would be an individual man, and the main debate concerned the nature of that role. Would he be a mighty conqueror, a new David? In his weakness and apparent worldly failure, Jesus, we are told, represented a truly odd candidate for messiahship.

In fact, the story is much more complex than this account would suggest. Yes, candidates for messiahship were much in evidence during and after Jesus’s time, culminating in the nationalist leader Simon Bar-Kokhba in the 130s AD. But we should stress how new this focus was historically. As in so much else, the two or three centuries before Jesus’s time witnessed rapid and radical development in the concept of the messiah, an idea far more nuanced than our modern stereotype would suggest.

[...]

And also: Making the Messiah.

The figure of the Messiah has been critical to both Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism. Christians, by definition, are followers of the Messiah. In tracing the origin of this idea, though, we must draw a distinction between eschatological hopes of a glorious coming age, and the individual figure of the messiah, the Davidic king. In the familiar form of a specific human who would usher in the Last Times, the concept is only really defined during the second century BC. In the decades before Jesus’s birth, the idea was still a work in progress.

[...]

Easter 2015

Happy Easter to all those celebrating!

Biblical and related passages concerning Easter are collected here.

Update on the Babylonian Talmud forum etc.

THE TALMUD BLOG has posted a number of updates to its Babylonian Talmud Forum (noted here):

What is Bavli: Approaching the Bavli’s Contexts (Pt. 2/3)

What is Bavli: A Response (Pt. 3/3)

And also at the Talmud Blog: E. Bar-Asher Siegal – A Response to M. Morgenstern, with reference to Morgenstern's review of Siegal's Introduction to the Grammar of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, which was noted here. (Also see related post here).

Ogren, Time and Eternity in Jewish Mysticism

NEW BOOK FROM BRILL:

Time and Eternity in Jewish Mysticism
That Which is Before and That Which is After

Edited by Brian Ogren, Rice University.

Time and eternity are concepts that have occupied an important place within Jewish mystical thought. This present volume gives pride of place to these concepts, and is one of the first works to bring together diverse voices on the subject. It offers a multivalent picture of the topic of time and eternity, not only by including contributions from an array of academics who are leaders in their fields, but by proposing six diverse approaches to time and eternity in Jewish mysticism: the theoretical approach to temporality, philosophical definitions, the idea of time and pre-existence, the idea of historical time, the idea of experiential time, and finally, the idea of eternity beyond time. This multivocal treatment of Jewish mysticism and time as based on variant academic approaches is novel, and it should lay the groundwork for further discussion and exploration.

Follow the link for TOC etc.

Passover 2015 and the blood moon tetrad

HAPPY PASSOVER TO ALL THOSE CELEBRATING. The festival begins tonight at sundown. See last year's Passover post for the relevant biblical texts.

This is the third of four "blood moons" coinciding with a major Jewish holiday in the space of two years: one tomorrow (Saturday), and one last year on Passover and then one on the immediately following Sukkot, as well as one coming on this year's Sukkot. For reasons explained in the last post, this doesn't really add up to a much of a cosmic synchronicity.

Also, a small coincidence, but again not adding up to a cosmic synchronicity (because this happens pretty often) today is Good Friday. Best wishes to all those observing it. You can read the Gospel accounts of the Passion of Jesus in Matthew 26-27; Mark 14-15; Luke 22-23; and John 18-19. Note also Paul's account of the Last Supper in 1 Corinthians 11:23-26.

Dig week 5

KIMBERLY WINSTON: ‘Dig’ turns up a possible messiah complex (RNS).

(RNS) This week’s episode of “Dig,” the USA Network’s action-thriller fueled by biblical conspiracy and ancient archaeology, dives into Jewish law and prophesy in a way that clearly signals where the rest of the story is going.

In line with previous episodes, “Dig” continues to spin out its convoluted tale against a background of religious items and imagery — the current episode features a mikvah, a shofar, a priestly breastplate and more. Major spoiler alert here — read on only if you are up-to-date with the series.

[...]

No obvious allusions to Old Testament Pseudepigrapha this week, but I have had it confirmed by someone close to the show that the writers were familiar with Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures (on which see last week's post, link below).

Background here and links.

The archaeology of Herod the Great

DAVID LASKIN EXPLORES Herod the Great’s Israel (NYT).

Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem may be more transcendent and his mesa-top retreat at Masada more spectacular, but Herodium (about 10 miles south of Jerusalem on the occupied West Bank) was where I channeled the spirit of the man. I was also channeling the spirit of a monster. From 37 to 4 B.C., Herod the Great (not to be confused with a slew of lesser heirs and successors who shared his name) ruled Judea with a bloody, iron fist. Though the account by the Gospel writer Matthew of an “exceeding wroth” Herod slaughtering the innocents of Bethlehem is probably apocryphal, the king did murder a wife, mother-in-law and three sons, along with untold numbers of enemies and rivals.

Yet he was one of the world’s great builders — an instinctive architectural genius who planned, sited, sourced and landscaped magnificent structures of classical antiquity. Epic was his preferred scale. No project was too ambitious or daring, whether it was throwing up a city from scratch or replacing Judaism’s holiest site from the ground up. Judea rejoiced when Herod died, but I found myself breathless with admiration after a week spent tracking his footsteps.

A long travelogue that covers the major sites associated with Herod.

UPDATE: Related: Jesus, Herod and the Irgun — All in One Jerusalem Room. 2,700 Years of History Unearthed in Old City Prison (Ben Sales, The Forward).

(JTA) — When Amit Re’em embarked on a 1999 excavation of an abandoned Ottoman prison in the Old City of Jerusalem, he didn’t expect anything revolutionary.

The dig was primarily aimed at inspecting the site before it was transformed into an event space for the nearby Tower of David Museum, and Re’em, then just 28, hoped at most to uncover some remains of a Herodian palace, or maybe part of a wall from the second century.

He did find those things — along with much more.

In one 160-by-30-foot space, Re’em unearthed an archaeological timeline of Jerusalem dating back 2,700 years. Layers from nearly every era of the city’s history lay on top of each other, from the time of the First Temple through the Roman, Crusader and Ottoman periods, and up to Israel’s independence in 1948.

[...]

Background on that story is here. Also, background on Herodium and Herod's possible tomb there, as well as on the recent Herod exhibtion in the Israel Museum, is here and here with many links. And some past posts on Herod the Great himself are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Philology challenge for April

ADAM MCCOLLUM: Reading challenge, April 2015

Here, then, is the challenge for the month: not a contest, but an individual exhortation to purposefully spend a given amount of time and effort moving — or more picturesquely, plowing, sailing, crunching, &c. — through a text or texts, with understanding. You pick the language, the genre, the text(s), the length. The unique thing is to read carefully more than you might normally do for this month. It might be an opportunity to work especially hard on a language you’re now closely involved with, or it might be an opportunity to return to a language you’ve not read in a while. Simply to be not too vague, here are some language suggestions in no particular order (I assume that if you know the language well enough to do this, you know some texts to read, but in any case, the Bible is usually a good place to start due to the accessibility of texts and the ease of comparison with other versions) ...

As it happens I have already been doing this with Qur'anic Arabic this semester (as preparation for a couple of projects involving later forms of Arabic), so I am giving myself credit for the challenge.

Biblical studies and memory

BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION:

Memory and the Knowledge of Things Past

By Daniel Pioske
Georgia Southern University
March 2015

Excerpt:

Not surprisingly, I find the concept of memory to be of historical value. In terms of the history of ancient Israel and Judah this significance can be located, at least to a certain degree, in the interpretive possibilities memory permits when assessing the past(s) represented in the Hebrew Bible. For in contrast to the now stale debates of the 1990s and early 2000s between those who held to the historical or fictitious character of biblical storytelling, a connection between the past portrayed in the Hebrew Bible with a form of memory (whether cultural, collective, or social) allows the historian to move beyond these rather rigid distinctions. This is possible because studies of memory have illustrated how a remembered past is always constructed through the prism of present concerns, but in way that does not necessarily sever such memories from a time previous to their recollection.

More on The Dovekeepers

A FEW RECENT ARTICLES ON THE DOVEKEEPERS and related matters:

VIDEO: Cote de Pablo & Diego Boneta Chat Upcoming CBS Mini-Series THE DOVEKEEPERS (The Broadway World). The video doesn't play in my region, but you may have better luck.

Roma Downey and Rachel Brosnahan on "The Dovekeepers" (CBS News). Brief sound-bite interviews.

Downey and Burnett present epic tv stories for Passover,Easter season, and more (The Examiner). Besides The Dovekeepers, they have a number of Bible-related projects going which I have not been following.

The Seventh Sentinel and the pseudepigrapha

OLD TESTAMENT PSEUDEPIGRAPHA WATCH:

Fantasy Novel "The Seventh Sentinel" Wins New Apple Book Award for Excellence in Independent Publishing

Dayton, OH, April 01, 2015 --(PR.com)-- "The Seventh Sentinel" by Yolanda Ramos receives Medalist Honors in the Fantasy category of the 2014 New Apple Book Awards for Excellence in Independent Publishing.

Book Synopsis
Moments before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., the seven Archangels remove powerful, ancient artifacts from the Jewish temple. These are given into the safekeeping of seven men. Throughout the ages, these men and their descendants become known as the Seven Sentinels. In medieval times, the Seven Sentinels formed various military Orders as a cover for their activities. Today, of the Seven Sentinels, two are dead and two have turned rogue, which means only three remain to carry out their roles. A war rages between Heaven and Earth. It is up to the newly empowered Seventh Sentinel to stop the rogues and Fallen Ones, from using these artifacts to gain control of the souls of mankind. Can the Seventh Sentinel endure?

[...]

The story of angels removing artifacts from the Temple before its destruction is very ancient, appearing first (as far as I can tell) in the Old Testament pseudepigraphon 2 Baruch (c. 100 CE). Chapter 6 (Charles translation):

6 1 And it came to pass on the morrow that, lo! the army of the Chaldees surrounded the city, and at the time of the evening, I, Baruch, left the people, and I went forth and stood by the oak. 2 And I was grieving over Zion, and lamenting over the captivity which had come upon the people. 3 And lo! suddenly a strong spirit raised me, and bore me aloft over the wall of Jerusalem. 4 And I beheld, and lo! four angels standing at the four corners of the city, each of them holding a torch of fire in his hands. 5 And another angel began to descend from heaven. and said unto them: 'Hold your lamps, and do not light them till I tell you. 6 For I am first sent to speak a word to the earth, and to place in it what the Lord the Most High has commanded me.' 7 And I saw him descend into the Holy of Holies, and take from there the veil, and holy ark, and the mercy-seat, and the two tables, and the holy raiment of the priests, and the altar of incense, and the forty-eight precious stones, wherewith the priest was adorned and all the holy vessels of the tabernacle. 8 And he spoke to the earth with a loud voice:
'Earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the mighty God,
And receive what I commit to you,
And guard them until the last times,
So that, when you are ordered, you may restore them,
So that strangers may not get possession of them.
9 For the time comes when Jerusalem also will be delivered for a time,
Until it is said, that it is again restored for ever.'
10 And the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them up.

In this novel the angels hand the artifacts over to human guardians, which is more reminiscent of the story in The Treatise of the Vessels. (The latter, however, does not have angels involved in the hiding of the treasures.) I suspect the author of The Seventh Sentinel was at least familiar with the story as found in 2 Baruch.

If you keep an eye out for it, you find the influence of the Old Testament pseudepigrapha all over the place.

Passover etymologies

MOSTLY SPECULATIVE: The enigmatic origins of the words of the Passover seder. The origin of the words we use during the Seder can teach a lot about the origin of the holiday. But some, including the word for 'matza', remain oddly obscure. (Elon Gilad, Haaretz. But the possibilities discussed are interesting. For example:

Let’s move on to to some of the dishes served in the Passover seder. Khazeret or hazeret is a bitter herb that Seder celebrants put on the Passover plate to represent the bitterness of the slavery in Egypt.

The word appears in the Mishnah (Pesachim 10), but is rather enigmatic. It seems to have come from the Hebrew root kh-z-r, but this root usually denotes “returning,” yet in the Mishnah, it is clearly a word related to a foodstuff.

Some other words that share the root have no obvious connection to "return" either, such as the Hebrew word for pig – khazir.

So we don’t know why khazeret is got its name, but what is it? The Talmud states that it is lettuce, and that is how it was understood by later generations too.

But Jews living in Eastern Europe had difficulty getting lettuce to eat, at Passover or any other time, and used horseradish instead. The horseradish tradition spread from Eastern Europe to other Jewish communities around the world, even those that can obtain lettuce. In fact, the practice became so commonplace that the modern Hebrew word for horseradish is khazeret.

Rehearsal sacrifice of the paschal lamb

(PROSPECTIVE) TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: Temple Mount activists slaughter lamb in public 'rehearsal' of Passover sacrifice. Hundreds attend ceremony held by group advocating for the re-building of Jewish temple in the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, in show of strength marking rising influence of their cause. (Nir Hasson, Haaretz)

Several hundred people on Monday attended a “rehearsal” for the Passover sacrifice, held in a schoolyard in the Kiryat Moshe neighborhood of Jerusalem. The lamb was slaughtered by kohanim (members of the priestly class) who performed the various stages of the sacrifice through the roasting of the lamb and eating it.

It was a show of strength by Temple Mount activists – and this year they had additional reasons to celebrate, including the recovery of senior activist Yehuda Glick from an assassination attempt and the possibility that the next cabinet will include three ministers (Habayit Hayehudi’s Uri Ariel, and Likud’s Miri Regev and Tzipi Hotoveli) who enthusiastically support changing the Temple Mount’s status quo to allow Jewish prayer.

[...]

The organizers stressed that this was not the sacrifice of the paschal lamb, but a rehearsal for the real thing. “So that we’ll know what to do, so that we can feel this ancient experience,” said Arnon Segal, a Temple Mount activists and the event’s emcee. The real Passover sacrifice must be on Passover eve, toward evening, on the Temple Mount.

[...]

Arutz Sheva has video of the event here.

I don't have any interest in getting involved in this political discussion, apart from reiterating that there should be no building or excavation on the Temple Mount before its archaeological record has been fully documented using non-invasive scanning technologies and/or minimally invasive and nondestructive technologies such as nanotechnology. But what these people want is to undertake the sacrifice on the Temple Mount, but not necessarily in the (rebuilt) Temple.

Support of children etc. in the Talmud

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: Would a Jackal Take Better Care of Its Young? For most Jews in Talmudic times, marriage was the biggest financial transaction of their lives.

Is a Jewish father legally obligated to provide food and shelter for his children? This question might seem like a no-brainer: Nothing is more natural or expected than for a parent to care for his or her child. But is this social and ethical obligation also a legal obligation? The answer, which Daf Yomi readers learned this week in Ketubot 49a, is more complicated than you might expect. ...

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

More anxious Gnosticism

PHILIP JENKINS has concluded his series of blog posts on ancient Gnosticism over at The Anxious Bench:

Gnostics and Other Christians

We should rather say that Gnosticism emerges from these Jewish-Christian borderlands. It did not exist as a free-standing pre-Christian movement rooted in pagan or Hellenistic ideas.

The Gnostics and the Interwar Crisis

That 70-130 period, then, marks not only a crisis within Judaism itself, but among movements that had grown up within the Jewish framework. We might usefully describe this era, in fact, as an interwar period, one that lived with the after-effects of one disaster while grimly awaiting the near-inevitable second phase. Anti-Judaism became more common, as did critical attitudes towards Jewish claims to exclusivism. Thinkers were struggling to build a Jewish-derived world-view without the necessity to accept the exclusive God of the Hebrew Bible, with his burdensome Law. Gnosticism is much more than anti-Judaism, but without that element, it is impossible to sustain.

From Qumran to the Gnostics

I have been describing the emergence of some key ideas of sectarian Judaism that continue into Christianity, and to some extent in Rabbinic Judaism. My argument is that the era in which those ideas appear, roughly the last two centuries BC, is one of the most creative and influential in Western religious thought.

Many of these continuities are obvious from Gnosticism. When we read the account of early Gnostic thinkers, as reported in the Christian writer Irenaeus c. 175 AD, we see so many themes that would have been instantly familiar to sectarian Jewish predecessors.

I am nervous about raising some of these arguments, as they have such a long and disreputable history in scholarship, with excessive claims about Jesus and John the Baptist being Essenes, and over-reaching Essene-Gnostic linkages. ...

Earlier posts in the series are noted here, along with some of my own commentary.

Pseudepigrapha in the news

OLD TESTAMENT PSEUDEPIGRAPHA WATCH: Ancient writings shed light on Aseneth, Moses (Dawn Baumgartner Vaughan, The Herald Sun).

The Jewish Federation of Durham-Chapel Hill gathers interfaith clergy for an annual conference with a speaker bringing a new perspective of religious knowledge. Ancient texts shared by a University of Minnesota professor were new stories to learn for some longtime clergy at the event held recently at Beth El Synagogue.

Patricia Ahearne-Kroll was the guest speaker and shared excerpts from Jewish writings recorded by Christian scribes in Egypt during the period of the Second Temple, between the fourth century B.C. and first century. The writings include figures already known to Jews and Christians, including Joseph of the “coat of many colors” story and Moses. Ahearne-Kroll is an assistant professor in the department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota. She received her doctorate in Biblical studies from the University of Chicago Divinity School.

[...]

The ancient texts that Professor Ahearne-Kroll discussed were Joseph and Aseneth and the fragmentary work of Artapanus.

William W. Hallo, 1928-2015

SAD NEWS: In Memoriam: William W. Hallo, expert on ancient Near East (YaleNews).

William W. Hallo, the William M. Laffan Professor Emeritus of Assyriology and Babylonian Literature, died on March 27 at the age of 87.

Hallo spent his career studying, teaching, and writing about Assyriology, archaeology, biblical studies, Semitic studies, and Babylonian literature. During his 40 years at Yale, he also served as curator of Babylonian Collection at the Yale Library and as master of Morse College 1982–1987.

[...]

Professor Hallo's work made many contributions to Assyriology, Sumerology, and the study of ancient Judaism. May his memory be for a blessing.

Reviews of The Dovekeepers

THE DOVEKEEPERS MINISERIES is now playing. Early reviews seem less than wildly enthusiastic. Here are a couple:

Neil Genzlinger, NYT: Review: ‘The Dovekeepers,’ a CBS Mini-Series Starring Cote de Pablo.

The whole enterprise is bathed in a gloss that doesn’t fit the story. The landscape is hot and dusty, but the actors rarely are — even the slaves and soldiers seem immune to sweat and grime, and the women always look as if they just came out of a desert spa. “The Dovekeepers” is aimed at people who might want to see history from something other than a male, generals-and-kings viewpoint but at the same time don’t want it too messy or too real.

(The Bend Bulletin republishes this one with the title A bodice-ripping look at ancient history, which seems to sum the matter up pretty well.)

Brian Lowry, Variety Magazine: TV Review: ‘The Dovekeepers’.

The broadcast networks should be applauded (and even encouraged) for bringing the miniseries back from the brink of extinction and again embracing epic storytelling. But watching “The Dovekeepers” fail to take off merely underscores the difference between anteing up for togas and to lens in Malta and actually producing something with genuine heft.

Background here and links.

Jesus' cross

EASTER STORIES HAVE STARTED AND THE MEDIA ARE ASKING: Was the cross of Jesus made of olive wood or pine?

One of the perplexing realities for archaeologists is a lack of residual wood from the massive record of Roman crucifixion. Despite the fact the Romans killed tens of thousands of people through crucifixion — and as many as 500 a day during the siege of Jerusalem from 66-70 CE — the only piece of evidence connected to this terrible punishment was discovered in 1968, when archaeologists found the heel bone of a crucified man with the nail still intact.

In the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Israel Hershkovitz, who teaches anatomy and archaeology at Tel Aviv University, said that the heel bone of the crucified man was found in a Jewish burial tomb in a northern suburb of Jerusalem, near Golgotha — the hill where the Romans crucified people.

The man, whose ossuary, or burial box, identified him as Yehohanan, was in his mid 20s when he died on the cross. His good teeth and lack of heavy musculature meant that he most likely came from a wealthy family, for most crucifixion victims were far too humble to wind up in tombs –save for Jesus, who was put in one by the wealthy Joseph of Arimathea. Others buried in the same tomb as Yehohanan had connections to the Temple, so it’s possible that he was killed by the Romans for some political transgression.

Yehohanan was cut down from the cross with a 4.5-inch nail still in his right heel bone, and with part of a board still attached to the head of the nail. Hershkovitz believes that the relative shortness of the length of the nail reveals much about Roman crucifixion methods. “The nail was too short (to go through) two heel bones, so sure enough each foot was hammered separately to the cross.”

Hershkovitz is convinced that crosses were not made from olive trees because the people depended on the olive tree for food and wouldn’t be slashing them down to make crosses.

More importantly, for the purpose at hand, they wouldn’t be suitable because of the structure of the tree itself.

From the CNN wire (via Fox News) article "What’s ‘true’ about Jesus’ cross? Duke professor weighs in." The Duke professor is Mark Goodacre, who makes a brief appearance at the end with commentary on the "True Cross" phenomenon.

Regarding the quoted passage, it seems the ancient remains of two crucified men have been found in Jerusalem, not just one. See here and links for posts on both, as well as related matters regarding ancient crucifixion.

Masada date palm update

METHUSELAH: Extinct Tree Resurrected from Ancient Seeds is now a Dad (April Holloway, Ancient Origins). Excerpt:

The first leaves were plagued with white spots, which the researchers put down to insufficient nutrients and it was thought that the plant would never survive. But as time progressed, the leaves began to look healthier. In 2011, the plant produced its first flowers and now he has become a father.

“He is over three meters [ten feet] tall, he’s got a few offshoots, he has flowers, and his pollen is good,” [botanical researcher Elaine ] Solowey told National Geographic. “We pollinated a female with his pollen, a wild [modern] female, and yeah, he can make dates.”

Solowey now hopes she will be able to plant an ancient date grove. To do that, she would need to grow a female plant from an ancient seed as a mate for Methuselah, and it’s looking promising – Solowey has managed to sprout a small handful of other date palms from ancient seeds recovered at archaeological sites around the Dead Sea, and at least two of them are female.

Solowey hopes to one day have a whole grove of Judean date palms like this grove of date palms of another species pictured in Spain

“We would know what kind of dates they ate in those days and what they were like,” Solowey said. “That would be very exciting.”

Background here and links.

Hashkes, Rabbinic Discourse as a System of Knowledge

NEW BOOK FROM BRILL:

Rabbinic Discourse as a System of Knowledge
"The Study of Torah is Equal to them All"

By Hannah E. Hashkes

In Rabbinic Discourse as a System of Knowledge Hannah Hashkes employs contemporary philosophy in describing rabbinic reasoning as a rational response to experience. Hashkes combines insights from the philosophy of Quine and Davidson with the semiotics of Peirce to construe knowledge as systematic reasoning occurring within a community of inquiry. Her reading of the works of Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion allows her to create a philosophical bridge between a discourse of God and a discourse of reason. This synthesis of pragmatism, hermeneutics and theology provides Hashkes with a sophisticated tool to understand Rabbinic Judaism. It also makes this study both unique and pathbreaking in contemporary Jewish philosophy and Rabbinic thought.

Elior's Hekhalot Zutarti now an eBook

MAGNES PRESS has just announced that some of its older publications are now being re-released as eBooks. Prominent among them is:

HEKHALOT ZUTARTI
Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought supplement A (1982)

By Rachel Elior

Purchase options: Price Site price
Online book & PDF download $ 10.50
Online book for libraries
Total $ 10.50

Publisher: The Hebrew University Magnes Press
Series:
Jerusalem Studies In Jewish Thought
Categories:
Jewish Mysticism
Publish date: January 1982
Language: Hebrew

Danacode: 45-141002
ISSN: 0333-7081
Pages: 98

Hekhalot Zutarti or 'Lesser Hekhalot' is one of the fragmentary mystical documents of the various texts comprising the Hekhalot literature and indeed has long been considered one of the earlier examples. The first reference to this text which until now has never been completely published, is found in the tenth century 'Responsum' of Rav Hai Gaon, the head of a Babylonian academy, citing the well known Talmudic fragment of the Treatise Hagigah relating to the dangers of mystical practice . Hai Gaon has written:
"There are two myshnayot that the Tanaim are teaching in that matter and they are called Hekhalot Rabbati and Hekhalot Zutarti and that is well known. About these contemplations said the Tana, "four entered the orchard" it is also explained in that Baraita, Rabbi Akiva spoke to them "When you come to the place of the pure marble plates then do not say: Water, Water'. In Hekhalot Zutarti it is said: the entrance of the sixth palace looks like thousands and ten thousands of waves of water but there is not one drop of water only an air of splendor from the pure marble paving stones with an appearance like unto water".

Except for this quote relating to the gate of the sixth palace which gives us our only textual touchpoint as to the indentity of the text, we possess no further positive evidence as to its contents, its beginning or its end, its character or its form.

In the principal manuscripts of the Hekhalot Literature we do not find a text entitled Hekhalot Zutarti. The true identity of the text should be questioned since its existance is based on such slender evidence.
A. Jellinek was the first to suggest that certain fragments of Oxford manuscript 1531 is Hekhalot Zutarti. This identification together with its parallels in other manuscripts, has been accepted in a l l subsequent research. The survey of the manuscripts containing the Hekhalot tracts does not verify this arbitrary assumption since the passages containing Hekhalot Zutarti, according to Jellinekfs suggestion , do not present a continuous composition or a textual unit but rather a conglomeration of somewhat related bits and pieces .
In the Hekhalot Zutarti as identified by Jellinek there are several different strata of Merkaba tradition unrelated as to author, chronological date of writting , and of form. We find about ten non successive passages a l l beginning with the words ״Rabbi Akiva spoke:" There is no continuous plot to bind these fragments as a whole and further in the Hekhalot literature we find many other and similar paragraphs which are also attributed to Rabbi Akiva.

There are other portions of Hekhaloth Zutarti which can be found in some texts comprising the Hekhalot literature such as: "Shiur Quoma", Sar Torah", "Metatron", "Ezekiel's Chariot" and the long lists of secret names of the Deity and his wardens. The editorial considerations, therefore , for including each particular passage in Hekhalot Zutarti are not readily appearent and the compilation of these fragments in to a structural whole must seriously be questioned.

This author sees them as most probably representing various mystical traditions from different circles of Yordi Merkava, copied in a haphazard manner with no attempt to attain textual unity .
Hekhalot Zutarti should not be considered as an unfolding narrative or book but rather different forms of literature which grew from a nucleus of idea , situation , or perhaps a true mystical experience and to which has been grafted, with the passing o f time, other similiar traditions and new material.

If these passages must be seen- as a unit, then their nucleus must be the well known archtypical mystical experience of Rabbi Akiva - the four who entered the orchard - since their uniqueness is obviously founded on the visionary experience.

However, it is doubtful that at any time these parts were truly compiled together in a more coherent manner than we now possess.

It has been accepted in previous research that Hekhalot Zutarti is the oldest text of this literature , however, no philological analysis has ever been attempted to prove this the thesis.Taking into consideration the nonhomogeneous character o f the text as described above, no generalization as to the antiquity of the text as a whole should be made.

Several negative generalizations can be infered , to wit: Hekhalot Zutarti does not reflect a specific time or historical occurance; it is lacking any eschatological orientation or apocalyptical characterizations as found in other texts of Hekhalot literature; and, it is lacking any literary framework binding its various parts. Perhaps the only true connecting link , excepting the central position of Rabbi Akiva, is the importance stressed on the mystical meaning inherent in the secret and sacred names of the Deity.

This critical edition of Hekhalot Zutarti is based on the Jewish Theological Seminary manuscript 8128 and the different variations as found in the other major manuscripts, it also contains the abridged contents and detailed notes, and includes an introduction dealing with the various aspects and problems as outlined in this summary.

Elior's critical edition of the Hekhalot Zutarti was published before Schäfer's Synopse zur Hekhalot-Literatur and it remains an important resource, albeit one that had become hard to find. It is good news that Magnes Press is making it available again, and at a very reasonable price.

Other newly re-released Hebrew Magnes eBooks include:

Shulamit Elizur, Rabbi Eleazar be-rabbi Qilar Liturgical Poems

Ephraim E. Urbach From the World of the Sages

Israel Knohl, THE SANCTUARY OF SILENCE. A study of the priestly strata in the Pentateuch

Has Dig been reading The Treatise of the Vessels?

TELEVISION: TV’s ‘Dig’ unrolls a Dead Sea Scroll to unravel a conspiracy (Kimberly Winston, Religion News Service).

Key to the advancing of the already complicated “Dig” plot is something referred to as the “war tablet.” Supposedly written by the Essenes, the tablet is supposed to be stored at Jerusalem’s Israeli Museum and is said to contain a code that will reveal the hiding places of 12 precious stones.

That's "Israel Museum," as given correctly later in the article. And as Ms. Winston also says, the account of the Essene "war tablet" looks, at least initially, like a combination of the Qumran War Scroll and the Qumran Copper Scroll. But I think something more is going on. In 2013 I published a translation of a Hebrew text of uncertain date called The Treatise of the Vessels in Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, volume 1, pp. 393-409. This text is a collection of entertaining legends about how and where the treasures of the First Temple were hidden by "Shimmur the Levite and his companions" before the Babylonians destroyed the Temple in 586/87 BCE. The Treatise says that the list of treasures was written down on a "tablet" (not a scroll), and one version adds "of bronze" (II 11). The Qumran Copper Scroll does not mention any specific collection of twelve precious stones, but The Treatise of the Vessels does:

(XII) And in addition twelve fine stones were transmitted by the hand of Heleq son of Shimmur the Levite, by his hand to preserve them and to return them to the tribes, those on which the names of the tribes were engraved, which used to shine over the heads of the tribes, increasingly outstanding and precious in their value, vying with one another. And no king or prophet or man knew in which place these were hidden, except Heleq son of Shimmur the Levite.

It looks to me as though the writers of Dig have read this and have incorporated it into their storyline. This should be fun to follow.

More on Dig is here and link. More on the Copper Scroll is here and links. My translation of The Treatise of the Vessels received some media attention early in 2014 when someone noticed that it claimed to tell the hiding place of the Ark of the Covenant. You can read about that and lots of additional background on the text here and links.

Another looting arrest in Israel

CAVE RAIDER: Man arrested for attempting to loot antiquities from northern underground cave. Extensive, irreversible damage caused to site carrying remains from Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman eras (Daniel K. Eisenbud Jerusalem Post).

According to spokeswoman Yoli Schwartz, the incident took place near Afula, in the Jezreel Valley, on Tuesday night when the suspect, in his 50s and from a nearby Arab village, was found by Border Police and IAA officers with digging tools at the ancient ruins site.

“The suspect dug deep underground from 2,000-year-old holes in an attempt to get to an area below the hole that probably served as a storage unit in ancient times to find remnants that could be sold on the black market,” Schwartz said on Thursday.

R.I.P. His Holiness Khanania Dinkha IV, 1935-2015

SAD NEWS: Assyrian Patriarch Passes Away (AINA).

Chicago (AINA) -- The Patriarch of the Holy Apostolic Catholic Assyrian Church of the East, His Holiness Khanania Dinkha IV, died Thursday at 10:04 AM at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. The cause of death was a virus infection and pneumonia. The Bishop of India, Mar Aprim Mooken, will serve as acting patriarch until a new patriarch is elected.

[...]

Requiescat in pace.

Cross-file under Syriac Watch.

What was the afikoman originally?

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS (PASSOVER EDITION): Where does the afikoman come from? Surprisingly to modern Jews who assume it's a half-piece of matza, we do not know what the original intention was: interpretations range from roast pigeon to afterparties (Elon Gilad, Haaretz).

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the afikoman, a half-piece of matza that gets "stolen" and hidden during the Seder ceremony and then is found and ritually eaten for dessert, is that its origin is a dictate in the Mishnah, which explicitly states: "One should not have any afikoman after the Passover sacrifice" (Pesahim 10:8). So how did one rabbi's "don't" become everyone's "do"?

But actually there is no consensus on what was the afikoman actually was. Some think the original reference was to a dessert after the Passover meal, while others believe it refers to Grecian post-feast debauchery.

It seems that even the students of Rabbi Judah the Prince, who compiled the Mishnah in approximately 200 CE, didn’t know what he meant either, as the Talmud (500 CE) preserves the answers of three of his students to the question “What is an afikoman?

[...]

The Babylonian Talmud was redacted somewhat later than that, and there is no guarantee that its traditions about R. Judah's disciples, who lived centuries earlier, are accurate. But by the time of the Talmud's traditions it seems that that there was no longer a clear memory of the meaning of the word in the context of Passover. Read the whole article for the history of the development of the modern custom.

Reminder: with free registration you can read the full text of a limited number of Haaretz articles each month.

Tunisian museum reopens

NOT LETTING THE TERRORISTS WIN: Why Terrorists Attacked Tunisia’s Museum Extremists are afraid of the country’s democracy (Yassine Brahim, Wall Street Journal).

When violent minorities seek to undermine peaceful majorities, the best response is to not change course. That’s why in Paris, the Charlie Hebdo magazine defiantly published another edition soon after the attack on their offices, and thousands marched in solidarity with them. In Ottawa, after a soldier was killed at Canada’s national war memorial, other soldiers swiftly took his place on ceremonial duty. And in Boston, the first marathon after the bombing was one of the biggest ever.

In the same spirit, the Bardo museum that was attacked has re-opened its doors. This museum reflects the melting pot of civilizations that have influenced our nation, including the Greek, Punic, Roman and Islamic. One of the most popular exhibits is an ancient mosaic depicting Virgil with the muses History and Tragedy standing to either side of him. It is a fitting symbol. We can continue to make history, or succumb to tragedy. I know what choice Tunisians will make, but we will need continued support at this challenging time.

Background to the Tunisian attack and the other recent militiant-Islamist assaults on the past is here and links.

Agade List archive

AWOL: Agade List Archive at the SBL. The posts in Jack Sasson's prolific Agade e-mail list are being collected and archived by the Society of Biblical Literature from now on. The archive will eventually include all postings back to 2010. Chuck Jones also notes that Agade posts going back to 2011 are available on Twitter.

More on the Temple Institute's altar

BREAKING ISRAEL NEWS: New Details Emerge on Rebuilt Altar of Jewish Holy Temple [PHOTOS] (Ahuva Balofsky). Some additions and corrections to the earlier announcement that the Temple Institute has built an altar it says is suitable for use in an actual Temple. Background, commmentary, and additional links here.

The Index of Bibliographic References to Talmudic Literature

H-JUDAIC: Internet Resource: Index of Bibliographic References to Talmudic Literature.

The Index is a comprehensive online research tool directing the user to discussions and interpretations of Talmudic passages found in both modern academic research and medieval Talmudic scholarship (Geonim and Rishonim). By clicking any Talmudic passage, the user will receive a list of specific books and page numbers within them discussing the selected passage.

Gnostic Countercultures

EXPLORING OUR MATRIX: Redeeming Gnosticism. James McGrath notes the "Gnostic Countercultures: Intrigue and Terror" conference at Rice University, which begins today. He also has links to various Gnosticism posts, including one from yours truly.

Patriarchal injustice in the Talmud

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: When Jews Were Like ISIS. We, too, stoned our women for infidelity. Patriarchal injustice persists in Orthodoxy. What’s a modern Talmud reader to do? Excerpt:

The idea that Jewish law can be unjust, that we have evolved a moral sense more complex and advanced than biblical codes can contain, is not at all a modern invention. Two thousand years ago, Philo of Alexandria was already reading the Exodus story as a philosophical allegory of individual spiritual liberation. Eight hundred years ago, Maimonides theorized that many Jewish laws were instituted solely to distinguish Judaism from paganism, not because they were inherently moral. Yet Philo and Maimonides were equally quick to insist that their revisionist explanations of Jewish law did not compromise the authority of that law: Whatever the reasons for the law, it had to be obeyed to the letter. What is modern is the idea that we have the right to legislate for ourselves. Secure in that freedom, I think it is possible to read the Talmud with the necessary combination of respect and distance.

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

Congratulations to AJR

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: AJR receives American Academy for Jewish Research Grant.

Porcupine archaeology

EXCAVATION: Porcupine unearths 1,400 year old oil lamp at archaeological site in Emek Hefer (Jerusalem Post).

Archaeologists with the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) have uncovered a 1,400 year-old ceramic oil lamp with the help of an unlikely aide – a porcupine.

Last week, during a routine patrol at the Horbat Siv ancient ruins – a Roman-Byzantine site near Emek Hefer in central Israel, anti-antiquities theft inspectors found the oil lamp on top of a pile of dirt that a porcupine had unearthed while digging a burrow.

[...]

The BBC, Jubilees, and Noah's wife

OLD TESTAMENT PSEUDEPIGRAPHA WATCH: David Threlfall's Noah Begs Modern Questions (Jonathan Romain, Huffington Post). It seems the BBC has a documentary about Noah airing on 30 March and those responsible have been reading their pseudepigrapha.

The first [novelty about the documentary] is that it answers one of the great mysteries about the Noah story. We know who was in the ark; Noah and his wife, along with his three sons, Shem, Ham and Japhet and their wives...so, the names of all the men, but what was Noah's wife called? If Mrs Noah was one of the few people righteous enough to be saved in an otherwise wicked world, then surely she is important enough to have a name?

The BBC have come up with an answer, based on the Book of Jubilees (4.33) in the Apocrypha - a collection of books from the biblical period that were not included in the Bible itself, and so are regarded as interesting but not sacred. Apparently, her name was Emzara, which - in husband and wife shorthand - becomes 'Emmy' and so along with other famous biblical couples such as Adam and Eve, Samson and Delilah, we can now add Noah and Emmy.

Emmy.

Twelfth anniversary

HAPPY TWELFTH ANNIVERSARY TO PALEOJUDAICA! Below is a list of my favorite PaleoJudaica posts from the last twelve months. Some are just notices of important stories, but most involve more of my own commentary than usual. And when there are links, be sure to follow them for more information. Past anniversary posts are here and links.

Is Noah Gnostic?
Random thoughts on the Noah movie
Blood moon tetrad, the Talmud, Passover, and Thallus
GJW: conclusively a forgery? (Yep, pretty much.)
About PaleoJudaica
Middle East: Aramaic speakers and Yazidis
Beelzeboul
The Shapira scrolls again (updated 9/17/14)
Esoteric and mystical traditions in b. Hagigah
New Jesus document? Sadly, no.
Was Isaac sacrificed?
A new Syriac Gospel in which Jesus married Mary Magdalene? I don't think so.
McGrath on Jesus as hero
"Greek" amulet bleg
Posts on the Babylonian-Judean cuneiform tablets: start here and follow the links.
An Ethiopic manuscript of Jannes and Jambres
SBL paper 2015
Posts on ISIS's desecration of Jewish, Christian, and Pagan historical heritage in the Middle East: start here and follow the links.
Could the ancients see blue?

As always, thanks for reading PaleoJudaica! Please keep coming back and keep bringing your friends.

Pardes

YONA SABAR: Hebrew word of the week: Pardes (Jewish Journal).

The Hebrew word pardes has come up in PaleoJudaica off and on with reference to the Story of the Four Who Entered Paradise (see here and here and links) and also with reference to the concept of "Paradise" in general. Note also the synchronicity of the book My Father's Paradise by Ariel Sabar, Yona's son (see here and links).

Kolbet and Daley (eds.), The Harp of Prophecy

NEW BOOK:

The Harp of Prophecy: Early Christian Interpretation of the Psalms

Edited by Paul R. Kolbet, lecturer in Early Christianity, and Brian E. Daley, S.J., the Catherine F. Huisking Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame

(University of Notre Dame Press)

Follow the link for a description. Posted by Yale News.

Workshop on Studying Ancient Magic

IN OSLO IN JUNE: STUDYING ANCIENT MAGIC: Categorisation – Comparison - Materiality. Follow the link for a call for papers.

Reviewlet of Würthwein, The Text of the Old Testament (3rd ed.)

EUANGELION: Book Notice: The Text of the OT.

Ernst Würthwein
The Text of the Old Testament: An Introduction to the Biblia Hebraica. 3rd Edition.
Revised and expanded by Alexander Achilles Fischer. Translated by Erroll F. Rhodes.
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014. 363 pages.
Available at Amazon.com.

By Jill Firth

Jealous girlfriend erases Metatron

ARCHANGEL METATRON WATCH: Jealous girlfriend erases game from boyfriend’s phone, destroys relationship in process (Evie Lund, RocketNews24).

Today we’d like to bring you the comic tragedy of a ridiculous couple in Japan whose relationship ended up in the toilet, all over something as simple as a mobile game…

It all started with the mobile game Puzzle & Dragons, aka Pazudora. Apparently, the jealous girlfriend of this story just couldn’t handle her boyfriend paying so much attention to something other than her when in her company, so while he was in the bathroom, she DELETED the app from his phone. But let’s not judge her before we’ve heard her account of the story, okay?

[...]

The chief point of dissension seems to have been the character Metatron in the game. To be fair to the girlfriend, the Metatron in question is very female and very pneumatic.

I've relayed many strange Metatron stories over the years, but this one is certainly a contender for the strangest.

Hatra Image Gallery

ASOR BLOG: Hatra Image Gallery.

Please take a look at the bellow photo gallery of Hatra circa 2009 and 2010. Brought to you by The Ancient Near East Today. With a special thank you to the photographers, Suzanne Bott and Col. Mary Prophit, US Army.

Background here and links.

On ancient Palmyra

ARASH ZEINI: Palmyra: Trade families, city and territory. An article by Leonardo Gregoratti.

More on Palmyra here and links.

More from Doudna on Qumran

BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION:

A Narrative Argument that the Teacher of Righteousness was Hyrcanus II

In what may come to be regarded as one of the more unusual, indeed astonishing, oversights in the history of Qumran scholarship, so far as is known it seems no previous scholar has proposed that Antigonus Mattathias, the last Hasmonean king of Israel, executed by the Romans in 37 BCE, might be the figure underlying the Wicked Priest of Pesher Habakkuk or the doomed ruler of Pesher Nahum.

(Excerpted from pp. 95-107 of Gregory Doudna, “The Sect of the Qumran Texts and its Leading Role in the Temple in Jerusalem During Much of the First Century BCE: Toward a New Framework for Understanding” in D. Stacey and G. Doudna, with a contribution from G. Avni, Qumran Revisited: A Reassessment of the Archaeology of the Site and its Texts [Oxford: Archaeopress, 2013].)

See Also: Article Archives - Dead Sea Scrolls.

By Greg Doudna
March 2015

More on Doudna's theories, which so far have not found much acceptance among Qumranologists, is here and links.

The Jordan metal codices as modern amulets?

FAKE METAL CODICES WATCH: Dr. Samuel Zinner, an independent scholar who specializes in indigenous and comparative religious studies with a special interest in Judaism, has posted a paper at Academia.edu on the Jordan metal codices: The Jordan Lead “Codices”: Ancient Amulets, Modern Forgeries, or Something Else? The Jordan Lead Tablets as Early Modern Zionist Lag BaOmer Amulets. (HT Daniel McClellan.) Excerpt (from pp. 4-5):

Personally I think it unfortunate that the Jordan tablets were so soon overly associated with Christian origins and claims to antiquity, because together these seem, at least in large part, to have fated the objects to scorn and perhaps eventual oblivion, certainly to enduring controversy. The claim that the tablets might be Jesus’ diaries, for instance, means that the artefacts would be of virtually no value if not truly ancient. By contrast, if the artefacts had been presented as what they appear at face value to be (in my opinion at least), namely, basically modern vintage Jewish amuletic art inspired by traditional Jewish coinage, synagogue art, mysticism, and religious identity in early modern Zionist modes, then the objects could have been more calmly assessed as works of Jewish art and possible ritual (“possible” because we may here be dealing with an idealized depiction of kabbalah of past ages), whose intrinsic value (or lack thereof) would not in the least have hinged upon the question of ancient origins.

The parallel that springs to mind in this context, and which surprisingly was never referenced after the Jordan “codices” story emerged, is the early twentieth-century Zionist Bezalel school of art, whose metal products (Hanukkah menorahs, Passover plates, etc.) and arts and crafts in other media regularly incorporated motifs from ancient Jewish coinage, especially that of the Jewish War and the Bar Kokhba Revolt, which is incidentally also often the case with the Jordan lead tablets’ images. ...

Dr. Zinner criticizes me at the beginning of the paper for assuming that the only two possibilities were that the objects were either ancient artifacts or modern objects and therefore necessarily forgeries. That is a fair point. In my defense, in the blog post Dr Zinner cites (here) I agreed with Philip Davies that the codices were in principle worthy of further study, so it is not quite true that I found them "unworthy of any serious attention at all":

I agree that it is worthwhile for someone to try to track down how, where, and when the codices were made. If Philip wants to spend his time doing this, more power to him. But I doubt very much that this will lead to significant evidence that they are ancient productions.

Dr Zinner and I agree on the last point: the codices are modern artifacts, not ancient ones. But in any case, he has taken the discussion in a very interesting direction, exploring the possibility that the codices are modern productions that were only later misunderstood to be ancient, and later still further misunderstood to have some early Christian connection. I have read his paper (quickly) and his theory involves many matters about modern Jewish art history that are outside my own expertise. I should add that he reports that Mr. Elkington has cooperated fully with his research, making photographs of all the objects available for it, which is to Elkington's credit.

A few preliminary observations. Ironically the report that at least one of the codices (or amulets or whatever) is made from ancient lead is a significant problem for this theory. If these are modern artifacts that are merely evoking ancient iconography and themes without intention to deceive, why did the artisan go to the trouble of manufacturing them from ancient material? Also, Dr. Zinner offers some intriguing decipherments of the letters on the objects, which, however depend frequently on letters being transposed, written backwards, and omitted. That doesn't make him wrong: as he observes, such things did happen. But every time one has to invoke such irregularities, the proposed decipherment becomes more speculative and less persuasive. And I can't say that I find the proposed parallel with the angel name in the ancient magical treatise Sepher HaRazim persuasive either. Nevertheless, I encourage Dr. Zinner to submit his research for peer-review publication so that it can be properly evaluated by the relevant experts. I am skeptical, but I will watch with interest for any further developments.

Background here with many, many links going back to March of 2011.

Numerology in Dig?

TELEVISION: ‘Dig’ TV series starts adding up: Watch the numbers (Kimberly Winston, Religion News Service). Interesting observations. It does sound as though something is going on with the number 19, although not, strictly speaking, involving gematria. The latter involves adding up the numerical value of the letters in a word and then connecting it with other words whose letters add up to the same value.

Background here.

Mar Behnam Catholic monastery in Iraq destroyed?

REPORT: ISIS CONTINUES ITS ATTACK ON THE PAST: Isis 'blows up famed 4th-century Mar Behnam Catholic monastery' in Iraq (Gianluca Mezzofiore, International Business Times).

Islamic State (Isis) militants have allegedly blown up parts of the ancient monastery of Mar Behnam near the predominantly Christian town of Qaraqosh, south-east of Mosul, according to pictures from IS media shared on twitter and a Kurdish media report.

The photos, released by IS members, show the 4th-century monastery's tomb complex of Mar (Saint) Behnam and Mart (Saint) Sarah reduced to rubble.

Dr Nicholas al-Jeloo, an expert on Assyrian monasteries in Iraq from the University of Melbourne, visited the monastery, previously run by the Syriac Catholic Church, in January 2010 and confirmed the authenticity of the pictures to IBTimes UK.

[...]

The monastery is known for its carvings and features, including "very intricate inscriptions in Syriac, in Armenian and in Uygur, a Turkic language from Western China" said Al-Jeloo.

"The place is a major site of pilgrimage, at the very origins of Christianity in the region, and it links us to our ancient Assyrian heritage - being only a stone's throw from the ruins of Nimrud, also destroyed by Isis. The only way I could describe it is as a work of art. It was one of the most richly carved monastery complexes in northern Mesopotamia up until today," he said.

[...]

The monastery also had a huge collection of manuscripts dating back centuries. "Luckily, all of them have been digitised," he said.

[...]

Does that mean that the manuscripts themselves are now lost? I hope not. The expulsion of the monks from this monastery was noted here and here last July.

Cross-file under "Syriac Watch." More on recent militant Islamist attacks on the past here and links.

A Centre for the Study of the Jordanian Lead Books

FAKE METAL CODICES WATCH: The still-anonymous Erasmus blog at The Economist notes (A chink of light) a very interesting development regarding the Jordan metal codices:

Yesterday an initiative was launched in London which should improve the chances of the codices being seriously investigated: something that everybody, including the most hardened sceptics, must presumably want. Under the benign gaze of Richard Chartres, who as bishop of London is the third-ranking hierarch in the Church of England, it was announced that a Centre for the Study of the Jordanian Lead Books has been established (as a not-for-profit limited company) with some distinguished figures lending their weight to the project. The centre's board includes two veteran British politicians, Sir Tony Baldry and Tom Spencer; an "evaluation panel" will be headed by Professor Robert Hayward of Durham University; and a Jordanian professor, Fayez Khasawneh of Yarmouk University, has agreed to chair an "advisory council".

Perhaps the most urgent need now is for some independent, peer-reviewed metallurgical analysis. One test found that the lead could indeed be ancient, but a sceptic would immediately retort that ancient lead can be re-fashioned by modern forgers. On the other hand, the objects show an extraordinary variety of forms of corrosion; a forger would have needed to be extraordinarily diligent and energetic to tailor-make all these effects. It's also worth stressing that even if some of the objects in this collection are proved to be forgeries, that doesn't mean they all are. Another possibility is that they will prove to be relatively old copies of a prototype that is much older still; that would still be of great interest.

A brief article on the announcement of the founding of the Centre is here.

The really good news is that Professor Robert Hayward is heading the "evaluation panel." He is an expert in Second Temple and Late Antique Judaism and an eminently appropriate person for the job.

My most recent substantive post on the fake metal codices (and, yes, I still think they are fakes) is here from two years ago, in reply to "B.C." of the Erasmus blog. A couple of other relevant posts since then are here and here.

Regarding B.C.'s comments quoted above, I note first that he or she says "even if some of the objects in this collection are proved to be forgeries, that doesn't mean they all are." That is a bit disingenous, given the undisputed fact that the copper codex featured in the original announcement was shown almost immediately to be a crude fake that used (incompetently) a Greek inscription published in the 1950s and that everyone acknowledges that many of the codices currently circulating are fakes. (To be fair, the latter are supposed to be forged copies of the original lot of codices.) It would have been considerably clearer, especially to readers new to the story, to say "even though some of [or even "one of ... has"] the objects in this collection have been proved to be forgeries ..."

I don't know what the last sentence quoted means, so I will refrain from commenting.

Later in the article, B.C. says, "Perhaps the newly-established Centre should take heart from the fact that it took quite a few years for the importance of Dead Sea Scrolls to be widely realised." Well, it took some years for them to be widely known at all, but when Israeli biblical scholar Eliezer Sukenik saw one of them, shortly after its discovery, he immediately realized it was genuine. And years later when some of the scrolls were, as B.C. observes, put up for sale in America in the Wall Street Journal, Sukenik's son, Yigael Yadin (himself a biblical scholar), quickly made arrangements to buy them on behalf of the State of Israel. It may be that buyers were wary because of the high price and the not-entirely-clear ownership status of the scrolls rather than doubts about their genuineness. (You can read most of this in the link that B.C. provides, with some more at the one I've given.)

That doesn't sound very much like the story of the Jordan codices to me.

I have been saying for years (e.g., here) that the current evidence is very strong that the whole lot of metal codices are modern fakes (with at least one apparently made from ancient lead), but if someone wants to make a real case that some of them are genuine, they need actually to argue it. If I may quote myself:

Bottom line: such evidence as we now have, which is not inconsiderable, indicates that the Jordan metal codices are fakes. I am prepared to consider any new, reputable (especially peer-reviewed) evidence to the contrary, but failing that, I see no reason for scholars to be concerned about them.

We now have the good news that a panel of specialists is going to examine the codices. Very early on I offered a list of conditions that needed to be fulfilled to demonstrate that some of them are genuine. And I underline that any such case needs at least to make the cut of being published in peer-review journal articles or monographs. I look forward to hearing more about the membership of the evaluation panel and to seeing what they produce in due course.

Review of Nickelsburg and VanderKam, 1 Enoch 2

MARGINALIA REVIEW OF BOOKS:

Questioning Categories and Shifting Paradigms in the Study of Second Temple Judaism and Christian Origins – By Simon J. Joseph
March 17, 2015
Simon J. Joseph on George W. E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam’s 1 Enoch 2

The review, which is also a wide-ranging discussion of the case for the existence of an ancient "Enochic" Judaism, concludes:

The task of the historian is to avoid (re)inscribing orthodoxies where they are historically anachronistic and to recognize the diversity, fluidity, and interactivity of ancient Judaism and Christianity. Fortunately, our knowledge of the ancient past — in particular, the Enochic literature, the Qumran manuscripts, and the earliest Christian writings, authors, and communities — is currently expanding into a far more complex pattern of interrelationships within Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity than previous generations recognized. The publication of 1 Enoch 2 by Nickelsburg and VanderKam represents a significant milestone in this rediscovery of Early Christianity-within-Early Judaism.

And now Tunisia

MORE SLAUGHTER AND ANOTHER ATTACK ON THE PAST: Gunmen storm Tunisian museum, kill two Tunisians, 17 foreign tourists (Tarek Amara, Reuters/Jewish Journal).

Gunmen in military uniforms stormed Tunisia's national museum, killing 17 foreign tourists and two Tunisians on Wednesday in one of the worst militant attacks in a country that has largely escaped the region's "Arab Spring" turmoil.

Visitors from Italy, Germany, Poland and Spain were among the dead in the noon assault on the Bardo museum near parliament in central Tunis, Prime Minister Habib Essid said.

Security forces stormed the former palace around two hours later, killed two militants and freed other tourists held hostage inside, a government spokesman said. One policeman was killed in the police operation.

European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said Islamic State militants, who have become particularly active in neighboring Libya, were behind the attack. "The EU is determined to mobilize all the tools it has to fully support Tunisiain the fight against terrorism," she added.

[...]

The museum is known for its collection of ancient Tunisian artifacts and mosaics and other treasures from classical Rome and Greece. There were no immediate reports the attackers had copied Islamic State militants in Iraq by targeting exhibits seen by hardliners as idolatrous.

[...]

Background here and links.

AJS call for papers on ancient Jewish medical knowledge

H-JUDAIC: CFP: AJS, Boston 2015 - Jewish medical knowledge and rabbinic discourse(s) in Late Antiquity. Follow the link for details. The deadline for submission of paper proposals is 7 April 2015.

The Copper Scroll

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Column: Scroll: Treasure map or ancient hoax? (Don Knebel, Current in Westfield)

A pretty good, brief, popular account of the Copper Scroll. Excerpt:

Scholars are divided about who made the Copper Scroll and what, if any, treasures it describes. Some believe the scroll identifies items from the Second Temple in Jerusalem, hidden before the Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. Others argue the items were accumulated by first century Essenes living in Qumran, near where the scroll was found. Still others claim the treasures came from the First Temple, destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C. Finally, some scholars believe the Copper Scroll repeated an ancient fable. Fable or not, explorers from around the world have sought fame and fortune using the ambiguous descriptions in the Copper Scroll, so far digging up only dirt.

As far as I know, no scholars think that the Copper Scroll describes treasures from the First Temple, although a legendary list of such treasures and their hiding places does survive in The Treatise of the Vessels. There is no confirmed case of any of the Copper Scroll treasures actually being found, although one site at Nahal Hever, excavated by archaeologists, does have at least a superficial similarity to one of the treasures described in the document. In any case, few, if any, specialists now think that the treasures listed in the Copper Scroll are just legendary.

Lots more on the Copper Scroll etc. is here and links.

DSS Ponzi scheme?

THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS IN A MANUSCRIPT SCANDAL: French police widen net in manuscripts investigation. In case against dealer charged with fraud, authorities are now looking at suppliers and other booksellers (Vincent Noce, The Art Newspaper).

The scandal in France involving manuscripts’ dealer Gérard Lhéritier and his company Aristophil is growing daily. Earlier this month, he was charged with fraud, money laundering, creating false accounts and embezzlement. Bail was set at €2m. His accountant and his daughter were also indicted, as well as his main supplier, one of the most important Parisian booksellers, Jean-Claude Vrain. A prominent Sorbonne law teacher, Jean-Jacques Daigre, who was Aristophil’s legal council, was held by police but released without being charged.

[...]

Hundreds of investors bought shares in each of Aristophil’s historic manuscripts (see below for details on the collection). They say they were led to believe their investment would bring a profit of 40% or more over five years. According to state prosecutors, there was no way they could recoup their money. Investors were thus persuaded to sign a new contract with a new fund, or paid with fresh money brought in by newcomers, in what authorities describe as a Ponzi scheme. Lhéritier categorically denies this, saying he was following normal business practices, on the rise of an underestimated market.

[...]

And the details on the collection?

Lhéritier has amassed one of the world’s most important private manuscripts collections, containing documents, books, photographs, drawings and watercolours. It includes such treasures as fragments from the Dead Sea scrolls, Medieval illuminated manuscripts, the Marquis de Sade’s infamous The 120 days of Sodom written while he was a prisoner in the Bastille, Louis XVI’s address to the French public before his execution, Romain Gary’s novels and the two Surrealist manifestos written by André Breton, as well as thousands of documents signed by Balzac (including his journal, nicknamed le garde-manger), Baudelaire, Vigny, Flaubert, Apollinaire, Verlaine, Cocteau and the like.

Hmm ... I suppose the moral is that you shouldn't try to get rich off of the Dead Sea Scrolls. You are warned.

Tekhelet in the news

RESURRECTED? Feeling Blue, in The Biblical Sense: Return of Tekhelet Dye Revives Lost Mitzvah (Deborah Fineblum Schabb, The Jewish Voice).

The Talmud defines the tekhelet dye as derived from the “blood” of a rare amphibious snail known as the chilazon. The mitzvah to wear a thread of that dye on one’s tallit is mentioned multiple times in the Torah. But the tekhelet supply ground to a complete halt following the Muslim conquest of the land of Israel in 638 CE, when Jews were cut off from their local source of the chilazon. Though many theories surfaced over the years, even the most educated Jews had no concrete proof of which modern-day creature the Talmud’s chilazon actually was. Due to that mystery, the mitzvah of tekhelet was largely lost, becoming a source of puzzlement for centuries.

Now, thanks in large part to a few enterprising individuals and some enthusiastic rabbis, what appears to be original chilazon has been found—and tekhelet strings are being dyed in a fashion much like the process performed by our ancestors.

Interesting. So someone has figured out how to make bluish-purple dye from powdered snails that could be the ones used in antiquity to make the tekhelet dye. That is encouraging, but not in itself convincing. It seems that some material actually dyed with tekhelet survives from antiquity (see here). What would be convincing if a chemical analysis of that dye showed that the modern reconstructed dye has the same composition. I don't know how close we are to being able to make such comparisons, which ideally would involve non- – or at least minimally – destructive chemical analysis, but this sounds like a desideratum for the future.

Additional background in the last link above, as well as here and here and links.