The anomalous and paradoxical nature of the twelfth curse (Deuteronomy 27:26).Rabbinic exegetes found the curse difficult, but the Apostle Paul put it to use for his own purposes.
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Hanan Eshel, Exploring the Dead Sea Scrolls: Archaeology and Literature of the Qumran Caves, edited by Barnea Selavan and Shani Tzoref. Journal of Ancient Judaism. Supplements, 18. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015.The long, informative review concludes:
The volume itself is a testament to the legacy of Hanan Eshel in the field of Qumran studies and the history of the Qumran caves. Additionally, this volume serves as a gift from his closest friends and partners in scholarship to the world as a lens through which to view the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
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Tour guides leading thousands of visitors to Masada each year follow a similar routine: Where Roman troops breached the walls, they retell Josephus Flavius’s account of how a group of obsessive, fanatical Jewish rebels refused to concede to servitude or slaughter, and committed suicide instead.It sounds plausible that a range of refugees could have ended up seeking safety at Masada during and after the Great Revolt. The new and interesting thing about the current excavation is the use of sophisticated technology to squeeze vastly more information out of the material remains than was posssible in Yadin's day.
For decades, archaeology at the site has been calling the story of the suicide, so central to Israel’s national myth, into question. Now new discoveries may force a revision of the notion that the group atop the fort was much more diverse than the heroic band of brigands celebrated by the cherished story.
“We’re actually excavating a refugee camp,” said Guy Stiebel, the archaeologist leading excavations carried out earlier this year by Tel Aviv University. Masada’s inhabitants during the seven years of the revolt were “a sort of microcosm of Judaea back then,” comprised of refugees from Jerusalem and across Judaea, including priests, members of the enigmatic monastic group from Qumran that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, and at least one Samaritan.
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Cutting edge archaeological techniques helped glean a more detailed picture of the past that would have been impossible during Yadin’s time. The picture emerging from these new data about Masada’s inhabitants is far more complex than previously assumed.
“It’s not one monolithic group,” Stiebel explained, describing the people living at Masada before its fall “very vibrant community of 50 shades of grey” of Judea.
“We have the opportunity to truly see the people, and this is very rare for an archaeologist,” he said. Among them are women and children, who are too often underrepresented in the archaeological record. Through archaeology, the study of the material culture found on Masada, architecture and a restudying of Josephus, he and his team can even pick out where different groups originated from before coming to Masada.
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The 13 essays in this volume aim to provide “a broad introductory exploration of the applicability of the perspective of New Philology to late-antique Christian and Jewish texts in their manuscript contexts” (vii). In the introductory chapter the editors clarify the idea of ‘New Philology’ by arguing that when scholars of early Christian and Jewish literature acknowledge the fact that our surviving textual witnesses constitute in fact only snapshots of a movie about a developing textual tradition and that such snapshots are not necessarily representative of the entire movie, “it is pertinent to approach the interpretation of these texts from a perspective inspired by New Philology, taking textual fluidity and manuscript culture fully into consideration” (1). This is meant as a corrective to the traditional approach in which manuscripts are used only, or mainly, in the service of the reconstruction of an Urtext and in which variant readings are regarded as ‘deviations’ from it. Manuscripts are rather testimonies to the ‘life’ of a text, and in most modern critical editions of ancient literature the text presented is usually “foreign to the pool of existing manuscripts and the texts presented there” (3). The ‘unruliness’ displayed by actual manuscripts is thus made invisible, much to the detriment of scholarship. Fluidity of the texts should not be regarded as textual ‘corruption’ because ‘living’ texts were altered in the course of transmission to suit new times and needs. By hiding variants in a critical apparatus one also hides the fact that in a manuscript culture texts are constantly in a process of change. “As an alternative way of dealing with medieval manuscript variance New Philology pinpoints the fact that a literary work does not exist independently of its material embodiment, and that this physical form is part of the meaning of the text” (6). A ‘finished’ text is an illusion, for the changes introduced to the text during its transmission are not corruptions but should be studied as important aspects of the life of the text.I was pleased to see that the reviewer liked my essay on the Hekhalot literature, the last one in the volume.
[...]
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The Arch of Titus has undergone many physical changes over the course of its long history. Featured in the exhibition is a life-size carved replica of the existing Spoils of Jerusalem relief panel from the interior passageway of the Arch, based on three-dimensional and polychrome scanning conducted under the direction of Yeshiva University’s Arch of Titus Project in 2012. (The replica and projected reconstruction have been developed and produced by VIZIN: The Institute for the Visualization of History together with Neathawk Designs, of Williamstown, MA.)HT the Bible Places Blog. For more on the research behind this exhibition, see here and links.
Stretching from the Roman era to the present, The Arch of Titus – from Jerusalem to Rome, and Back explores the image and symbolism of the Arch from various vantage points – from emperors and popes to Jews and Christians, who re-interpreted the meaning of the Arch in modern times. Rare artifacts from collections in Italy, Israel and the United States illuminate the monument’s vibrant history, as the Arch itself went from monumentalizing victory to falling into ruination and, eventually, to being restored in the modern era.
An international conference presented in partnership with the Yeshiva University Center for Israel Studies will take place on October 29, 2017.
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Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
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2017 marks the 70th anniversary of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Long story short, in late 1947 a young Bedouin boy tossed a stone into a cave, heard the clink of breaking pottery, and would later scramble in to find the tattered remains of ancient scrolls from the centuries leading up to and after the Common Era. By 1955, 11 caves off the northwest shores of the Dead Sea offered up fragments of nearly a thousand scrolls inscribed with content of ancient Jewish texts and copies of nearly every book of the Old Testament. Seventy years on, we’ve learned a lot about these accidental yet incredible finds. However, in many ways we’re just starting to understand their original contexts and contemporary impact.
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The editors recall in their introduction the state of the field in biblical criticism prior to the publication of the studies of Thompson and van Seters, tracing some of the key publications from the pre-1970s landscape of biblical archaeology and concluding that these past studies had essentially accepted the historical construct of the biblical narrative in their reconstruction of ancient Israelite “history.” Into this landscape, scholars such as Thompson and van Seters radically reframed the way in which the Bible could be used in confrontation with the archaeological and extra-biblical data. Writing in 1974, Thompson broke with theory that linked the patriarchal narratives to the lived experience of the Bronze Age. Confirming Thompson’s conclusions, in the following year van Seters extended this critique, arguing that these narratives actually reflect a context in the Iron Age, and not the Bronze. Thereafter scholars felt increasingly able to disconnect their historical reconstructions of ancient Israel and Judah’s past from a biblically oriented narrative, turning instead to evidence gleaned from archaeological findings, as well as ancient Near Eastern texts, and the “Copenhagen School” was born. In this volume, a number of scholars map some consequences of this development as well as possible avenues of future research. Some of the highlights of these contributions are detailed below.
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Deuteronomy directs male landowners to bring the first fruits and recite a declaration. The Rabbis distinguish between the two parts of this commandment, including everyone in the bringing of the produce and excluding Levites, converts, and women only from the declarations. Eventually, even this exclusion largely falls by the wayside.
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Now Professor Steven Fine of Yeshiva University and his team have "colorized" the Arch of Titus in Rome, based on the discovery that the menorah depicted on the panel showing Roman soldiers parading with treasures looted from the Second Temple in Jerusalem had been painted yellow.For past posts on the Arch of Titus, including the discovery of yellow pigment on it in 2012 and the follow-up leading to this reconstruction of the Arch, see here and here and follow the links.
It is absurd to think that the triumphant Romans colored only the menorah, especially as we are realizing they painted everything. The whole Arch was probably a blaze of color that would have complied with the aesthetics of the time, but would make westerners today shudder.
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Their reconstruction is theoretical, but is based on common sense and standard Roman iconography, and also the belief that the Romans had a very limited palette. For instance blue was a tough color to synthesize until the 19th century: "They had to use costly lapis lazuli, which decomposes quickly."
Initially they imagined the Roman soldiers shouldering the Temple spoils walking on green grass, but experts on Roman statuary counseled them to use basalt gray. They could surmise that the trumpets had been colored silver (the historian Josephus says as much) and that the background sky was blue, that leaves were green, and so on. "Our colors are really bright because it's the day they were painted. We took the tone from the yellow and did it across the board," Fine says.
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The bones of Jews who perished in the Great Revolt by Jews against the Roman Empire, and which were discovered at an archaeological site near the community of Givat Assaf in the Binyamin region, were recently brought to burial secretly in Ofra.The bones were discovered in a cave, so this seems to be the first time these people were buried.
The remains were discovered in 2013 at the archaeological site, which is a Jewish village from the time of the Second Temple. Mikvahs, coins from the time of the Great Revolt and vessels made out of stone were discovered at the site.
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But when they took into account how skin scrolls were made, the discovery made sense, Migliore said. The first step after removing the hide from an animal was to bathe the skin in a sea-salt bath to help preserve it, she said. This bath would have killed off most microbes that eat away at flesh — but it also introduced salt-loving and salt-tolerant marine bacteria. These little microbes huddled in the middle layers of the parchment, where the salinity was just right. When the scroll was read and stored at various monasteries throughout its lifetime, changes in temperature and humidity would have allowed the salt-loving bacteria to grow and thrive. Many of these species produce purple pigments, Migliore noted.
Eventually, though, those salt eaters would have seen their supply run out and died off. Their corpses, Migliore said, provided a whole new source of food for the next phase of bacterial colonization. The Gammaproteobacteria moved in and ate not only the dead halophilic bacteria but also the fine collagen matrix of the goatskin parchment. This caused parts of the parchment to flake off, lost forever.
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The starting-point, widely recognized, is that there were Western Asiatic people in Egypt. Call them: Asiatics, Semites, Canaanites, Levantine peoples. These aliens were there, for centuries, and they were coming and going all along, just not in millions at a time.Background here.
The second step was to identify a group among these as the Levites. They are the ones in Israel with Egyptian names, the ones who foster circumcision, a known practice in Egypt, the ones with connections to Egyptian material culture: a Tabernacle that has parallels with the battle tent of Rameses II, an ark that has parallels with Egyptian barks.
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Why can’t a man remarry his wife once she has been married to someone else?A survey of the history of interpretation, with a new explanation. It sounds possible to me.
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This semester, the head of one of the most highly regarded honors programs in the country joined the UK family as the inaugural dean of the UK Lewis Honors College. Christian Brady for 10 years — from 2006 to 2016 — served as dean of the Schreyer Honors College at Penn State University. Previously, he directed the honors program at Tulane University.
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What is your academic background? I am particularly interested in how people read and interpret the Bible throughout all ages and in all cultures. My primary area of research is in biblical interpretation, specifically rabbinic interpretation of the Bible within Targumic literature. A “Targum” refers to the Jewish Aramaic rendering of the Hebrew Bible; it is a unique sort of translation. A Targum renders into Aramaic every word of the biblical text in its proper order, but often will add additional material, woven seamlessly into the newly formed text. My particular area of interest is how this additional material transforms the meaning of the biblical text in question.
[...]
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Italian scientists are a few thousand euros and a test tube away from conclusively identifying the body of Pliny the Elder, the Roman polymath, writer and military leader who launched a naval rescue operation to save the people of Pompeii from the deadly eruption of Mt. Vesuvius 2,000 years ago.This sounds crazy, but it could just work. The body was found at the right place and the man died during the eruption of Vesuvius. The gold jewelry he was wearing is consistent with Pliny's status. And the new technology could identify down where he grew up.
If successful, the effort would mark the first positive identification of the remains of a high-ranking figure from ancient Rome, highlighting the work of a man who lost his life while leading history's first large-scale rescue operation, and who also wrote one of the world's earliest encyclopedias.
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When daylight came again 2 days after he died, his body was found untouched, unharmed, in the clothing that he had had on. He looked more asleep than dead.Pliny's body was not buried in ash. It was found untouched. But it sounds as though the mystery body was buried in ash:
In the first years of the 20th century, amid a flurry of digs to uncover Pompeii and other sites preserved by the layers of volcanic ash that covered them, an engineer called Gennaro Matrone uncovered some 70 skeletons near the coast at Stabiae. One of the bodies carried a golden triple necklace chain, golden bracelets and a short sword decorated with ivory and seashells.I would like to know more about the recovery of these skeletons. Presumably Pliny's body was buried after it was found. Possibly this would have been in a mass grave. There were many dead and they would have to have been interred rapidly to prevent the spread of disease. But I would think that the people who knew him would have kept his jewelry and sword to give back to his family.
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The Exodus: History RecapturedProfessor Friedman appears to be swimming against the tide on this one. But tides do turn ...
I believe we can get at what probably took place in Egypt over three millennia ago. That would be a lot. But we have much more. We have evidence that without the historical anchor of the exodus, we would not have had the rise of the idea of monotheism. And without the experience of that returning group from Egypt, we might not have had the ethic of caring for the stranger. Monotheism and loving others as ourselves—two radical developments, major developments, in human consciousness became embodied in the heart of Western religion.
Chapter from: The Exodus (HarperOne, 2017).
By Richard Elliott Friedman
Ann & Jay Davis Professor of Jewish Studies
University of Georgia
September 2017
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Millennia ago, Jerusalem may have opened its doors to thousands of refugees from the north of the country. A new cache of First Temple bullae (sealings) discovered in an excavation at Jerusalem’s City of David shows a mixture of names from the Kingdom of Israel and Judah used on official bureaucratic correspondence dating from after the fall of Israel at the hands of the Assyrians in 720 BCE.The reasoning here more or less accurately reflects the IAA press release, which you can read here. But I do not find it compelling. They found several names that are found in the Bible only as names of northerners. But I don't think we know enough about the Israelite and Judean onomasticon (range of names) to rule out that southerners also bore them.
The dozens of clay imprints were used on letters and documents which were bound by string and sealed by wet clay pressed with the sender’s mark or name. The impressive trove was discovered at recent digs uncovering three Late Iron Age buildings frozen in time by the destruction caused by the 586 BCE Babylonian siege. The discovery was made by a team of Israel Antiquity Authority archaeologists led by co-directors Dr. Joe Uziel and Ortal Chalaf.
Among the dozens of bullae is a rare find of an intact sealing, bearing the name “Ahiav ben (son of) Menahem,” referring to two kings of Israel but found in the capital of the Kingdom of Judah, Jerusalem.
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In looking beyond the Hebrew scriptures to the epigraphic corpus of the ancient Near East, we multiply the data from which to adduce theories of textual development. When biblicists hypothesize theories of textual development, they do so situated in a distinctly modern textual culture and are prone to project anachronistic attitudes and practices upon cultures at a great distance in time and place. Empirical models offer us methodological control as we observe how ancient scribes more closely contemporaneous with the scribes of Israel edited and expanded cherished texts across the centuries.The new book sounds interesting, as do the ideas summarized in the essay. But the use of "empirical models" to study biblical source criticism isn't all that new. The phrase comes from the book Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism, edited by Jeffrey Tigay in 1985. (A reprint by Wipf and Stock is available here). And that book was influenced by Tigay's 1982 monograph, The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic. The 1985 collection really belongs in the bibliography of this essay.
See Also: Inconsistency in the Torah: Ancient Literary Convention and the Limits of Source Criticism (Oxford University Press, 2017)
Ebook: https://www.amazon.com/Inconsistency-Torah-Literary-Convention-Criticism-ebook/dp/B071G8HM2W/ref=mt_kindle?_encoding=UTF8&me=
By Joshua Berman
Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible
Bar-Ilan University
August 2017
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Holtz has written what he calls an “imagined biography” about the much-admired rabbinic figure born around 50 CE. “Rabbi Akiva: Sage of the Talmud” is a compelling new volume in Yale University Press’ “Jewish Lives” series. While Akiva’s name is mentioned 1,341 times in the Babylonian Talmud, he is a “man without a past.” What exists are stories — literary anecdotes about his life, parallel retellings that are not identical, lessons inferred from his actions, drawn from the Mishnah, Tosefta, the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds and midrashim — all “internal” sources of Judaism. Understanding that these stories can’t be read as factual accounts, Holtz parses them, often in various versions, to tease out the culture, values and religious teachings embedded within. Amidst the challenges, he manages to capture Akiva’s distinctive voice.For past PaleoJudaica posts on the book, see here and links.
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“Let there be no kadesh among the sons of Israel. You shall not bring the fee of a harlot or the pay of a kelev (dog?) into the house of YHWH” (Deut 23:18-19).It is not certain that this passage refers to homosexual prostitution. But if it does, Dr. Saassoon draws out some significant implications.
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Parashat Ki Tetze (Deuteronomy 21:10-25:19) contains more commandments than any other parashah. According to one mitzvah tabulator,[1] the count is 27 positive mitzvot (“thou shalts”) and 47 prohibitions (“thou shalt nots”). The commandments are simply listed, one after another, with little or no thematic or verbal connection between them.[2] Without contextual clues how to interpret the law, we are left with just the plain text whose meaning is often elusive.
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The Department of History (http://history.ucsd.edu) at UC San Diego is pleased to announce a search for the Endowed Chair in Studies in Ancient Jewish Civilizations and concurrent tenured appointment at the full or associate professor level in the Department of History. Scholars whose research focuses on the Second Temple period, the Rabbinic period, and Jewish interactions with the Hellenic world are particularly encouraged to apply. Income derived from the Chair’s endowment will be available for the support of research and related scholarly and teaching activities. The successful candidate will join UC San Diego’s cohort of Endowed Chairs specializing in Greek History and Jewish Studies and will help enhance the department’s gathering strength in the History of the Ancient Mediterranean. The successful candidate for this tenured position must have a Ph.D. in History or a related field at the time of appointment on July 1, 2018.Follow the link for further particulars. The deadline for first consideration of applications is 1 November 2017.
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Published in English.
In this work, Andrei A. Orlov examines the apocalyptic profile of the angel Yahoel as the mediator of the divine Name, demonstrating its formative influence not only on rabbinic and Hekhalot beliefs concerning the supreme angel Metatron, but also on the unique aural ideology of early Jewish mystical accounts.
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The Old Greek (OG) translators are often times (mis)understood to be mechanical in their approach to translating the Hebrew Text (HT), often pictured as giving a plain, or even rigid, word for word rendering of their Hebrew source. Of course this description is closer to the mark when describing Song of Songs or Ecclesiastes or even Numbers etc. But not all translators went about their task in this way. Some of them wove deliberate interpretation or exegesis into their translations (of course all translations are interpretations to a degree so that we should think about translations on a continuum from less to more interpretation). The Isaiah (image: Codex Marchalianus) translator is an example of a more interpretive translator, and I was struck by what appears to be a beautiful example of his technique in 9:9.
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Contrary to the generally held view, the Second Temple Era was not a time of prophetic dormancy, but of genuine activity, though of a different character than that of the pre-exilic age. The conference on The Prophetic Voice at Qumran, held 11–12 April 2014 at the Leonardo Museum in Salt Lake City, provided a venue for lively discussions of many of the issues connected with the question of prophecy and prophetic writings in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Second Temple texts. Three of the scholars—Emanuel Tov, Eugene Ulrich, and James C. VanderKam—were featured as keynote speakers, and an even dozen scholars made presentations at the conference, of which nine are published in the present volume.
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Published in English.An earlier volume of Professor Dimant's collected studies was noted here a few years ago. And a recent essay by her on Tobit was noted here.
The studies by Devorah Dimant collected in this volume survey and analyze Jewish works composed in Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek during the Second Temple period, and discuss their contents, ideas and connections to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Together they offer a broad and fresh perspective of the Jewish literary scene at this period, developed in the land of Israel in the last centuries BCE and the first century CE.
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Daily Discoveries of a Bible Scholar and Manuscript HunterHT Facebook and Amy Anderson at the ETC Blog.
By: Alessandro Falcetta
Published: 08-03-2018
Format: Hardback
Edition: 1st
Extent: 624
ISBN: 9780567674180
Imprint: Bloomsbury T&T Clark
Dimensions: 234 x 156 mm
RRP: £130.00
Online price: £117.00
Save £13.00 (10%)
About Daily Discoveries of a Bible Scholar and Manuscript Hunter
This is the first full biography of James Rendel Harris (1852-1941), Bible and patristic scholar, manuscript collector, Quaker theologian, devotional writer, traveler, folklorist, and relief worker. Drawing on published and unpublished sources gathered in the States, Europe, and the Middle East, many of which were previously unknown, Alessandro Falcetta tells the story of Harris's life and works set against the background of the cultural and political life of contemporary Britain. Falcetta traces the development of Harris's career from Cambridge to Birmingham, the story of his seven journeys to the Middle East, and of his many campaigns, from religious freedom to conscientious objection.
The book focuses upon Harris's innovative contributions in the field of textual and literary criticism, on the acquisitions of hundreds of manuscripts from the Middle East, on his discoveries of early Christian works, in particular the Odes of Solomon, on his Quakers beliefs and on his studies in the cult of twins. His enormous output and extensive correspondence reveal an indefatigable genius in close contact with the most famous scholars of his time, from Hort to Harnack, Nestle, the 'Sisters of Sinai', and Frazer.
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But for serious exegesis, you need also to take account of how a word is used in the larger Greco-Roman environment of the NT. This is especially so for infrequently used words in the NT. And for this now, I judge this Brill lexicon to be the superior choice. I’ve used it now a number of times over the past several months in specific searches, and have been pleased with the results. ..Past posts on The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek are here and here.
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The relationship between (Late Antique) Platonism and (more or less) “subphilosophical phenomena”1 like ancient Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and the Chaldean Oracles has been increasingly explored in the last decades.2 The volume under review is a welcome addition to this research trend, as it aims to examine how discussions among advocates of Platonism and of religiously influenced cultural phenomena contributed to shape their respective cultural/philosophical identities. 3Some past posts on Neoplatonism and why it is interesting to PaleoJudaica are here, here, here, here, and links
It is impossible to assess critically every contribution within the limits of a review; hence, after a very brief overview of the book’s structure, I will focus on those papers which I consider most stimulating.
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Deuteronomy envisions a king constantly reading torah and limiting his wealth and resources. Is this how kings are described in the rest of the Bible?Spoiler: the answer is no.
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Thus begins the biography of Zenobia, queen of Palmyra, in the Historia Augusta (History of the Emperors), written near the end of the fourth century A.D. And what we read there is almost all we know about the queen.Judith wrote this post for the Getty Research Institute’s blog, The Iris, in connection with their Palmyra exhibition (on which more here and here). She has republished it on her own blog, Zenobia: Empress of the East. Past PaleoJudaica post on the Empress Zenobia are here and links. Alas, my hope that ISIS would spare Palmyra was unfounded.
Sometimes, I think if it were not for her coins Queen Zenobia would be taken as a legendary figure. There could be a kernel of truth in the story, but it is a tale so fantastical, so gendered, with sources so unreliable, that it simply could not have historical value. Yet Zenobia did exist, and she did go to war against the Romans. And, as Empress of the East, she came within a hair’s breadth of victory.
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NEW YORK (Reuters) - A disbarred U.S. lawyer convicted of impersonating Dead Sea Scrolls scholars in emails on Thursday lost his bid to escape his two-month prison sentence.This case, which involved the Dead Sea Scrolls in a sad kind of way, has been going on quite a while. If you are unfamiliar with it or have forgotten the details, the article gives a summary toward the end. Also see here and here for summaries. For the other past PaleoJudaica posts on the subject, start here and follow the many links.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York left in place Raphael Golb’s convictions in New York state court on 10 criminal counts, but rejected another seven. Golb’s lawyer, Ronald Kuby, said that he and his client had not yet decided on their next action.
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The root for “coin” in Hebrew, tevah, is the same as that of the “nature” of a human being. Just as God stamped an individuality on a person, so an ancient moneyer hammered a die on to a circle of silver.That sounds speculative to me. The negative title "Bar Koziba" only appears much later in the Talmud. And we don't know how much influence the rabbis had in the time of Bar Kokhba.
Coinage was also a form of propaganda for those in authority and conveyed often subtle messages to the population. Bar Kochba’s coins during his rebellion against the Romans contain the inscription, “Shimon, prince of Israel” — but only during the first year of his rebellion, 132-133 CE.
During the following year, it is mysteriously shortened to simply “Shimon”. Was this a result of rabbinical protests against Bar Kochba’s pretensions to being the messiah? After all, some rabbis referred to him as Bar Koziba (“the liar”) rather than Bar Kochba (“the star”).
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Collected Ghost StoriesM. R. James was a scholar who flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. PaleoJudaica has mentioned him from time to time with reference to his still-valuable work on the New Testament Apocrypha and Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. See here and quite a few links.
(OWC Hardback)
M. R. James
Edited by Darryl Jones
Oxford World's Classics Hardback Collection
- The only one-volume edition to include all the published stories included in M. R. James's 1931 Collected Ghost Stories, plus three uncollected tales.
- Includes a lively introduction that explores James's conservative, donnish background and the character traits that contributed to the extraordinary power of his closely focused tales, whose terrifying narratives are discussed.
- The most accurate and comprehensive annotations to James's stories elucidate his antiquarian, classical, and literary references as well as providing interesting publishing history details.
- An Appendix reprints the prefaces and introductions to James's individual story collections together with three short articles by James about the ghost story, which present the fullest first-hand account of his approach to the genre.
- Up-to-date bibliography and chronology.
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Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
Some of the post-2002 DSS-like fragments have polluted the DSS and Qumran modules (that are based on prof. Martin Abegg’s data) in Accordance, BibleWorks, and Logos both on a corpus and manuscript level. This also has statistical implications. See the following list (where I refer to the modules as they are presented in Accordance) ...The Post-2002 Dead Sea Scrolls Fragments: A Tentative Timeline of Acquisitions (Årstein Justnes & Ludvik A. Kjeldsberg).
We have constructed a tentative timeline of acquisitions using Knightlab Timeline JS. Comments and corrections are appreciated.The Post-2002 DSS-like Fragments: A Price List (Årstein Justnes).
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One of the most important archaeological projects in Israel today, the Temple Mount Sifting Project, has run out of money and been temporarily shut down. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government should move quickly to fund the project until completion.Somebody needs to fund it. The Israeli Government would find the money well spent. But I wouldn't say no to funding from a wealthy philanthropist either.
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The reality is that everything seems allowed because too many collectors/dealers, as the two who purchased the papyri at the centre of this post, do not respect the laws and ethics underpinning such exchanges (before you even start with a pointless counter-argument, I am afraid to say that no, darling, eventual ignorance of the laws does not excuse them). Moreover, eBay policies enforcement seems inefficient at best, and police active control is also low, even more so in the UK where the Art and Antiques Unit seems to be under threat of closure. Despite all the rhetoric on heritage preservation, and the amount of public money put in various programs, the truth is that this kind of everyday unregulated and unethical (when not illegal) market is slowly killing our cultural heritage in the open and apparently with the consent of everyone implied in the transactions.
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Meanwhile, however, Netanyahu had joined the trend, uploading a photo of the item on his Facebook page and writing how the coin, ostensibly a half-shekel dating to the era of the Second Temple, had been found in the province of Benjamin, in the West Bank. The moving discovery, the premier wrote in his post, further attests to the deep ties between the people of Israel and their land – including ties to Jerusalem, the Temple and Judea and Samaria.I don't blame the Prime Minister for being fooled by the story. I and a lot of other people were too. But there is perhaps a lesson here. It is best not to try to score political points off of new discoveries before they have been fully authenticated.
Netanyahu’s Facebook editor, Yonatan Orich, says the post has been removed until the issue can be clarified.
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We seem to be trapped, indeed, in a form of circular reasoning. On the one hand, a number of biblical words are said to have originated in India because Solomon’s sailors reached it or the route to it. On the other hand, Solomon’s sailors are said to have reached India or the route to it because a number of Indian words occur in the Bible!Some entertaining but speculative ideas here.
Is there a way out of this loop? If there is, it is connected to the “once in three years” (aḥat l’shalosh shanim) of 1Kings 10:22. Although nothing I’ve read on the subject treats of this phrase (it’s quite possible that I’m ignorant of scholarship that does), it seems reasonable to assume that it refers to a period of time in which Solomon’s ships regularly departed from Etsyon-Gever and returned to it. Where could they have been in this period?
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Jörg Rüpke. Religious Deviance in the Roman World: Superstition or Individuality? (Translated by David M.B. Richardson). Cambridge University Press, 2016.Excerpt:
Scholars of ancient religion and legal traditions will find Rüpke’s volume resourceful for the development of religious norms throughout Roman history, from the early Republic to Late Antiquity. Though expansion and clarification is needed in various sections, especially regarding what constitutes religion, the usefulness of Rüpke’s volume truly is found in the presence of primary sources as well as the contextualization of those sources in the Roman world.I'm surprised not to see any mention of magic, which was often regarded as borderline religious deviance in antiquity and sometimes over the line.
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For more than 20 years, children visiting the Israel Museum in Jerusalem during the winter festival of Hanukkah have had the opportunity to go home with an “ancient” coin. Struck by the kids on a small mint in the museum’s Youth Wing, the souvenir is an exact, albeit one-faced, replica of an ancient coin.Maybe so.
Perhaps too exact, it turns out.
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The last time the Ark of the Covenant was supposedly seen was in Jerusalem, some 2,600 years ago.Seriously, there is some very interesting work going on at Kiriath Jearim. But any connection between it and the real Ark of the Covenant (assuming there was such a thing) relies on a great deal of inference and imagination. Still, inference and imagination are most of what we have for the Ark, so we may as well put then to good use.
Now archaeologists are exploring the ancient town of Kiriath Jearim, where the Bible says the ark was kept for 20 years before being taken to Jerusalem. Even if the excavators don’t expect to find the ark itself, and they don't, they have made discoveries that shed new light on the history of the ancient Israelites and the birth of Judaism itself. Their finds also support theories that King David may not have been the one who moved the ark to Jerusalem.
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AbstractI noted another article about the gem here. In that post I raised some queries about its provenance and authentication. Dr. Kotansky addresses these questions, citing my blog post. See especially p. 632 and n. 4 of his article.
The obverse, showing the earliest extant image of the Crucifixion, has an inscription suggesting a non-canonical source, while the reverse inscription reveals later reuse of the gem by a non-Christian.
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Cline writes with a passion to communicate his love of archaeology to future generations (“a new introductory volume, meant for people of all ages”, p. xvii). His title is taken from the discernment of archaeological features (p. 217); he continues, “Six stones is a palace built by aliens”. His closing paragraph reflects on how he would rather be digging and demonstrates Cline’s commitment to the careful scientific study of the past. At times this (British) reviewer found the book idiosyncratic (as Cline accepts, p. xix, and suggests critics write their own version), the style relaxed, and the choice of locations were sometimes unexpected. For all that, I am glad to have read it, and to have absorbed a little bit of Cline’s enthusiasm for our shared discipline: and I look forward to Cline’s students, who have shared this journey, becoming the next generation of archaeologists.I didn't know about the Disney Chair of Archaeology at the University of Chicago.
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Deuteronomy introduces the possibility of future Moses-like prophets who will continue to instruct the Israelites how to follow YHWH’s commandments. At the same time, it makes the existence of such a prophet virtually impossible.
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Professor Brent Seales will describe his ground-breaking research that is allowing modern scholars to access carbonized ancient texts that have been unreadable up to now. Professor Seales earned his PhD in computer science at the University of Wisconsin and is currently chair of the computer science department at the University of Kentucky.The lecture takes place at the University of Wisconsin on 20 October 2017. Follow the link for more details.
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Matt has made the Zohar into a readable work—for the first time in any language. Israeli scholars, writing in Hebrew, are consulting his notes. Students in college or seminary courses, lacking the linguistic tools to delve into the original, will now be able to prepare assignments on this previously closed text. Matt, along with a distinguished coterie of scholars associated with this project, is making the bet that the true radiance of the work will be enhanced rather than diminished by this translation.For much more on the Zohar and on Daniel Matt's translation of it, start here and follow the many links.
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Jewish and Christian tradition ascribes authorship of the Pentateuch to Moses in the 13th century B.C.E. Is this what the Pentateuch itself implies about who wrote it and when?I have posted some thoughts on the current state of Pentateuchal source criticism here and here. And I have said more about lost books quoted in the Hebrew Bible here and links.
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A little over five years ago I posted an idea about creating a social network analysis of the rabbis found in classical rabbinic literature. In the interim I have thought a lot about this project but have done very little on it. I still believe it is worth doing, though, and I have finally taken a concrete step forward.The list of names is now in a spreadsheet. The outside-the-box approach of this project could produce some illuminating results about the ancient rabbinic social world.
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Archaeologists should be led by the evidence, and not force the evidence into their theories.Dr. Arav thinks that the site of e-Tell was Bethsaida, not, as argued in recent media reports (see here and links), El-Araj. Past posts on the e-Tell excavation and the possible identification of the site with Bethsaida are here, here, and here.
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“The Library of Early Christology” is a new series of reprinted works focused on the origins of beliefs in and devotion to Jesus as sharing in divine honor in early Christianity, the series published by Baylor University Press.This new series reprints some excellent, classic works of scholarship. They are generally also important for understanding ancient Jewish messianism and divine mediation.
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