Ancient interpreters debated the identify of Moses’ Kushite wife and the nature of Miriam and Aaron’s complaint. Philo allegorizes her as an eye’s perfect focus, reflecting Moses’ direct perception of God. Reading this together with Philo’s allegorical understanding of Zipporah as a “bird” with direct access to heaven highlights the greatness of Moses’ wife as the fourth matriarch of Israel.
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Despite what the Bible says in 2 Kings 23, cultic changes during Hezekiah’s reign were absolute and left nothing to be centralized by King Josiah at the end of the seventh century. Indeed, only one phase of Judahite religious reform is visible in archaeological record, and that one is Hezekiah’s.
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So, now a question for the people associated with the Green Collection and the Museum of the Bible: Do we have any provenance information on these pieces? They have a similar character to the Oxyrhynchus Mark fragment, and they seem to have become a part of the Green Collection at about the same time as the Oxyrhynchus Mark fragment was alleged to have been for sale. It would be most illuminating if the Green Collection or the Museum of the Bible would provide detailed acquisition information about these pieces.Background on the Mark fragment is here and links. A post on the announcement about the Romans fragment is here. And a related post on supposedly early New Testament fragments is here.
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Thousands of people have come from far and wide — sometimes two by two — to visit the red-brick, ark-shaped building in Southwest.I will flag a couple of new details. First, an upcoming exhibition:
The Museum of the Bible, on the 400 block of 4th Street SW, has received nearly 603,000 visitors (about 100,000 a month) since its 2-ton, 40-foot-tall bronze doors opened in November.
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Next month, the museum will open new exhibits, including one focuses on women’s roles in artifact collecting.Second, survey results:
Women comprise the majority of the museum’s visitors, and the “Noblewomen and the Bible” exhibit will tell the story of women from Germany’s House of Stolberg who amassed a collection of manuscripts and books, many of which were stolen by the Soviets during World War II. Some stolen artifacts have since been recovered.
According to post-visit surveys, more than 90 percent of the Museum of the Bible’s visitors have rated their experience as excellent or good, and most would recommend the experience to a friend or family member.They seem to be pleasing their target audience.
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As stated in the introduction by Chrubasik and King, the book focusses on the ways in which the relationship between local communities and Greek culture was negotiated in key areas of the Hellenistic world: Asia Minor, the Levant, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. The center stage is held by the non-Greek communities of those areas who refashioned and reshaped what they deemed to be Greek cultural forms to suit their own needs and interests. By studying different regions with different local interpretations of Greek culture, the volume aims to sketch a more nuanced cultural history of the Eastern Mediterranean. According to the editors, this focus on local interpretations of Greek cultural forms should also raise the question whether the historiographical terms Hellenism and Hellenization to describe these processes are still useful labels for the cultural processes at play in this time period—similar to questions raised about the usefulness of the term ‘Romanization’.5 The volume not only has a broad geographical scope but also a wide chronological one. The editors do not adhere to the traditional chronological boundaries of the Hellenistic period, 323—31 BCE, as they consider the interaction between Greek and non-Greek cultures not restricted to this period. The overview starts in 400 BCE, the beginning of a period of intensification of non-Greek engagement with Greek cultural forms especially in Asia Minor, as demonstrated by several contributions. Similarly, the editors rightly argue that engagement with Greek culture did not cease with the battle of Actium. Yet, why 250 CE was chosen as the end date is not clarified. Surely, Greek cultural influence did not come to an end in the middle of the 3rd century CE.Ancient Judaism receives plenty of attention in the book. There is also coverage of Palmyra, Dura-Europos, Babylon, Egypt, and Asia Minor.
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Known as the Cairo Geniza, the 350,000 fragments of paper and parchment can be anything from the most holy religious manuscripts to the most mundane legal forms, holding endless opportunities to learn about medieval life in the Middle East.Progress so far:
Penn Libraries, which holds about 650 of the fragments, is coordinating with universities and other institutions in the public crowdsourced project, Scribes of the Cairo Geniza.
The first phase, launched on August 8, 2017, was designed to sort a first batch of digitized fragments as either Hebrew or Arabic, or in some cases both, as well as to determine whether the scripts were written in an informal or formal style. It included more than 30,000 fragments from the Jewish Theological Seminary through the Princeton Geniza Project and the 650-plus from the Penn Libraries collection.For past PaleoJudaica posts on the Scribes of the Cairo Geniza Project, see here and links. This is the most detailed report I have seen on it. The combination of crowdsourcing and digitization looks to be very powerful.
That first phase ended May 19, and the more than 30,000 fragments that were successfully sorted are now the foundation for the second phase.
The second phase, which begins later this month, invites the public to participate in deciphering and transcribing the sorted fragments.
“Luckily for us the research community in first classification were incredible,” Blickhan says. “The results of the first phase are impressive.”
While there is some skepticism in the academic community about the public contributing to such a scholarly pursuit, Allen and Eckstein say that the work by the public so far has exceeded their expectations. The public has consistently agreed whether texts were Arabic or Hebrew, formal or informal.
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Like so many volumes these days, this book is one of the outputs of a large collaborative project, this time on pagan-Jewish-Christian polemics and homiletics in the Latin fourth to sixth centuries.1 The topic is timely in the context of the renewed interest in Late Antiquity in general and in pagan-Christian polemics in particular.For some past PaleoJudaica post on Porphyry, see here and links.
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The Forschungsstelle für Aramäische Studien at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main and its director, Prof. Dr Dorothea Weltecke, are glad to announce the upcoming seminar “Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing of Syriac Sources: Ongoing Projects, Current Issues and Methods in Practice”, an international workshop on ecdotical methods and approaches in textual criticism of Syriac and Garshuni texts organized by Dr Simone Isacco Maria Pratelli and funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.The workshop takes place on 8-9 July 2018. Follow the link for further particulars.
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Friday, November 2, 2018 to Sunday, November 4, 2018For some reason this only just came up in my search regime. The call for papers came to an end on 31 May, but it should still be possible to attend without a presentation. Follow the links for details.
Location:
Germany
Website:
https://www.micah.hebraistik.uni-mainz.de/micah2018/
"The 13th Mainz International Colloquium on Ancient Hebrew (MICAH) 2018 will meet November 2–4. (Friday-Sunday) at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany.
As always, topics of the MICAH meeting cover grammar and linguistics of Ancient and Classical Hebrew (Epigraphic and Biblical Hebrew, Qumran and related Hebrew, and Ben Sira) as well as studies of older or contemporary adjacent Semitic languages and epigraphy, as for instance Ugaritic, Phoenician-Punic, Old and Imperial Aramaic and Early Syriac, or Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite and the like in phonetics, lexic, morphology and syntax. Topics on non-Semitic but contact languages (e.g. Philistine, Luwian) and general linguistics in connection with these languages will also considered welcome.
[...]
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More information will have to await proper excavation, which has not begun yet, Alexandre stresses. But meanwhile it can be said that the archaeologists also found the names of the dead, carved onto the ossuaries in Greek.Third is this anomaly:
The multicultural Jews of Tiberias
Jewish names in Greek on graves in the Holy Land? Absolutely. It was very much the practice. Half the graves in ancient Jerusalem from the same era are also inscribed in Greek, Aviam says. Other inscriptions found in Tiberias itself, linked to Jews from the 3rd century, were in Greek too.
“It just means that the people buried in the cave had been people who knew Greek. It doesn’t speak to their Judaism but to their internationality, their multiculturalism,” Aviam explains. “They would have had cultural ties with Greek-speaking people. Jews could keep their mitzvot and write on their graves in Greek.”
But if the Jewish burial cave in Tiberias dates to the 1st or even the early 2nd century, there’s a snag. At least according to the Jewish-Roman historian Josephus, Tiberias wasn’t supposed to have Jews yet.See the article for discussion.
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So it is strange to reflect that, by the time the Mishna was compiled around the year 200 C.E., no living person had witnessed a Temple sacrifice. Yehuda HaNasi was roughly as distant from the destruction of the Temple as we are from the American Civil War; and the amoraim, the rabbis of the Gemara, lived hundreds of years later. They were all trying to mentally reconstruct a series of long-vanished rituals that they knew about only from the Torah and from some scraps of oral tradition. Crucially, they had no diagrams, which would have helped enormously in figuring out the exact dimensions and placement of the altar, the courtyard, and the other parts of the Temple complex.Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.
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Tzippori was home to a flourishing mixed pagan, Christian and Jewish community during the 4th-7th centuries CE. In the third century CE, it was the seat of Rabbi Yehuda Hanasi, aka Judah the Prince, where he began compiling the Mishnah. There is no iconography on the wine presses and, according to National Parks Authority archaeologist Dr. Zvika Tzuk, in such a heterogeneous society, it would be impossible to know who made the wine at these two presses.On his e-mail list, Joseph Lauer has asked for more information about this "obscure Jewish law." I don't know the answer, but if you can help, please drop me a note.
However, he told The Times of Israel, based on an obscure Jewish law practiced during the Shmita year (every seventh year in the agricultural calendar when the fields are meant to “rest”), the size of the smaller wine press could be an indication that it was used by Jews of the era.
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The rock-hewn cave comprised an entrance hall decorated with colored plaster, a central room with several burial niches, decorated ceramic and stone ossuaries (burial chambers), and a small inner chamber. Carved stone doors stood at the entrances into the rooms. In one of the chambers, Greek inscriptions were engraved with the names of the interred. These inscriptions will be studied by specialists.There are some good photos at the link.
The cave was probably robbed in antiquity.
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Beginning Sunday, June 10, the Armstrong International Cultural Foundation (the humanitarian arm of the organization that publishes the Trumpet magazine) will host a three-month archaeological exhibit in the lobby of Armstrong Auditorium. We have titled the exhibit “Seals of Isaiah and King Hezekiah Discovered,” after the stars of the show: two clay seal impressions (bullae) of King Hezekiah and Isaiah.The Isaiah of the seal may or may not be the biblical prophet. The exhibition has an openly-expressed agenda, which you can take or leave as you please. Armstrong College has a close relationship with Israeli archaeologist Eilat Mazar and her Ophel excavation in Jerusalem. The exhibition includes many interesting artifacts and sounds worth seeing.
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While the stars of the show are the seals of King Hezekiah and Isaiah, the supporting cast is also exciting. Among the artifacts on loan from the Israel Antiquity Authority are iron arrowheads used in the Assyrian siege of Lachish, silver bullion, and royal Judean clay vessels. Featured Assyrian history will include replicas of the wall reliefs of Lachish, the Azekah inscription, and the famous Annals of Sennacherib Prism (aka Taylor Prism).
[...]
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M. Sanhedrin 10:1 is considered to be the most important statement of rabbinic heresiology in tannaitic literature. However, a close examination of this text’s development suggests that it is not a straightforward expression of c. 200 C.E. rabbinic doctrine at all, but a reworked tradition from an earlier sectarian milieu.Last year I noted Dr. Grossberg's new book, Heresy and the Formation of the Rabbinic Community (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017) here.
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So there's no denying that Jews have been in Italy for a very, very long time. It's the most ancient community of Jews in the Western world, one that has withstood centuries of sorrow and tsoris while producing some of the nation's most important thinkers and writers.I noted the opening of MEIS last December here. This article provides a lot more information about it.
And it's a topic that's the center of attention at the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah. (In Italian, that's Museo Nazionale dell'Ebraismo Italiano e della Shoah, or MEIS for short.)
To explain the mission of MEIS, director Simonetta Della Seta poses a question: How is this museum different from all other Jewish museums?
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Given the long stretch of time during which the sculpture could have been created and the fact that control of Abel Beth Maacah changed throughout this period, the sculpture could depict numerous kings, [Professor Robert] Mullins [of Azuza Pacific University] said. Three possibilities are King Ahab of Israel, King Hazael of Aram-Damascus and King Ethbaal of Tyre, but there are many other candidates, he said.The fragment is currently on display in the Israel Museum.
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Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
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Hebron plays a central role in many biblical stories. It was the prominent city in the Judean highlands, with large fortifications in the Early Bronze, Middle Bronze, and Iron Ages. During the Second Temple period, Hebron was occupied by the Idumeans. Recent archaeological excavations have uncovered large mikvaot (ritual baths), indicating that the inhabitants embraced Judaism.
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Scripps National Spelling Bee pronouncer Jacques Bailly surprised 11-year-old Abhijay Kodali with his example sentence for the word pseudepigrapha by launching into Taylor Swift's 'Shake It Off."Abhijay Kodali spelled the word correctly. But another contestant won the competition with the correct spelling of ... wait for it ... "koinonia."
"Pseudepigrapha is a plural noun. It means spurious words purporting to originate from biblical characters, as in 'Jasmine realized the speaker was spouting pseudepigrapha as soon as he quoted Moses saying 'Haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate, baby. I'm just gonna shake shake shake shake shake. Shake it off.'"
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If the paper’s findings are borne out, the historical timeline of the Holy Land would need to be rewritten.The first author of the paper, Professor Sturt Manning, explains:
Through a faulty calibration scale, the study argues, organic carbon-14 evidence linking archaeological sites to the Israelite period may have been given false early dates. This new proposed calculations would cause their “biblical” ties to be much less certain.
To be precise, the study’s findings indicate a discrepancy of only a few decades — but that is just dramatic enough to dispel much C-14-based “evidence” of a potential Davidic United Monarchy.
“If you only have radiocarbon but have a good set of data and a known archaeological sequence (e.g. stratified layers at an archaeological site) then you can hope to get within a few decades or so – so high-precision dating,” he writes.Do read the whole article. It's early days yet and the results of the study - which are based on analysis of early-modern materials - need to be replicated and extended to earlier periods. But the results may be significant for the chronology of first-Temple Israel and the question of the historicity of the United Monarchy.
And here is the big catch: “If you have nothing but a few radiocarbon dates, then you are more looking at ca. 50-100 years or so precision,” he writes.
During the particularly sensitive early Iron Age in Israel, such a broad 50- to 100-year time frame can mean the difference between one archaeological or biblical era and another.
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Due to their historical and cultural density, the 27 years between 69 C.E. and Domitian’s assassination (96 C.E.) have claimed increasing scholarly attention in recent decades. However, precisely because the dynasty founded by Vespasian only ruled for a relatively short period, the very concept of a clearly defined (and clearly definable) “Flavian age” can be legitimately questioned. The volume edited by Zissos successfully demonstrates not only that the idea of a “Flavian age” is historically and culturally viable, but also that this age represents a crucial phase in the longer continuum of the early imperial history of Rome. Moreover, while it is true that our knowledge of Flavian Rome mainly derives from contemporary literary sources, this companion has the merit of moving beyond the focus on Flavian literature to “examine the Flavian age in a broader and more inclusive sense” (p. 2). Overall, the volume provides us with the economic, political, religious and cultural coordinates of a complex multicultural world, where the negotiation of racial identities plays an important role and where a new balance in the relationship between center and periphery begins to emerge.There is a chapter on Flavian Judea. And Josephus comes up as well.
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Ancient interpreters contemplated the substance of manna, a food that traverses the chasm between divine and mundane realms, falling from heaven to be consumed on earth. In kabbalistic thought, the Zohar presents manna as granting the desert generation an embodied experience of knowledge of God; such an opportunity is available to mystics in everyday eating and through birkat ha-mazon (Grace after Meals).For some Talmudic exegesis on manna, see here.
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JNS.org – Students from schools in the Lev Hasharon Regional Council helping on an archaeological dig on the Sharon plain have unearthed an ancient coin dating back to the year 300 C.E., among other finds.I can find no other information about the coin. From the photo its surface looks almost completely abraded to me. I'm impressed that specialists could identify it.
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Ilana Kurshan has won the 2018 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for her book “If All the Seas Were Ink: A Memoir.”Ms. Kurshan won first prize. For more on her book, see here and links. Chanan Tigay was one of three third-place finalists and he won $5,000.
Tigay, whose book “The Lost Book of Moses: The Hunt For The World’s Oldest Bible” is about the mystery surrounding a Dead Sea Scroll, is a former reporter for JTA.The book is about the Shapira scroll, which is not exactly a Dead Sea Scroll. For more on his book, see here and links.
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By Thomas L. ThompsonA personal memoir. The Bible and Interpretation website currently also has a list of the essays they published by Professor Davies. Scroll down to "Remembering Philip Davies 1945-2018."
Professor Emeritus
University of Copenhagen
May 2018
The death of my most dear friend Philip Davies on Friday, May 31, by cancer is a great loss to our entire field. He was not only a scholar of great talent and integrity, who interested himself in all that touched biblical studies. He was also ever a scholar of astonishing originality and discipline, whose impact on the field was immeasurable, not least because of the clarity of his arguments and his ability to focus on the rhetorical center of an issue. Who would have dreamt that such a simple distinction as that between the “biblical Israel”, the “ancient Israel” constructed by historians and the “Israel of the past”, which no longer exists, could have provoked a decade-long debate among biblical scholars, archaeologists, historians and theologians as Philip did in his 1992 essay, In Search of Ancient Israel?
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DENVER (CBS4) – The Denver Museum of Nature and Science is in the middle of replacing 10 Dead Sea Scrolls currently on display with 10 new ones.With video. Background on the Denver exhibition is here and links. That link also gives more on Pnina Shor, who is overseeing the rotation.
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You could call them the ultimate excavators: Bulldozing dirt that’s 10 times their body weight, they can survive underground in thin oxygen, they work for literally peanuts, and, being remarkably resistant to cancer, they don’t even take sick days.This article is a follow-up to an earlier one on the archaeological use of mole-rat mounds at Tel ‘Eton. For more on faunal-assisted archaeology, see the links there.The proposal is to formalize the use of rodent mounds as part of archaeological surveys.
A team of Israeli archaeologists proposes that Middle East blind mole-rats, with their massive numbers and burrowing skills, be systematically harnessed for cheap labor. And in fact, analysis of their molehills just may constitute a revolution in archaeological best practices.
Instead of taking hours — or even days and weeks — to complete complicated and time-consuming surveys in search of hidden ancient sites, the Bar-Ilan University researchers propose systematically studying dirt from molehills, or other rodent dirt piles, to more efficiently and cheaply ascertain loci of human activity from the past.
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In this week’s Daf Yomi reading, in Zevachim 48a, the Gemara introduced a concept that helps to illuminate the worldview of the rabbis. A certain teaching, we read, “is dear to the tanna”: he has a special attachment to a particular point of law. And the reason is that this point is “derived through interpretation”: that is, it is not stated explicitly in the Torah, but has to be worked out by the rabbis themselves. Evidently, the rabbis had a particular fondness for laws that they had to figure out on their own, and liked to teach such laws first, because they were “dear.” I found this a moving idea, since it shows how the rabbis invested their feelings (and their egos) in what might seem like an abstract or technical process of legal reasoning. A tanna who solved a problem must have felt a certain pride of ownership in it, the way a mathematician might feel about an especially difficult proof.Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.
[...]
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Archaeologist Sturt Manning and colleagues have revealed variations in the radiocarbon cycle at certain periods of time, affecting frequently cited standards used in archaeological and historical research relevant to the southern Levant region (Israel, southern Jordan and Egypt). These variations, or offsets, of up to 20 years in the calibration of precise radiocarbon dating could be related to climatic conditions.For ancient Israel and Second Temple Judaism, twenty years one way or another usually won't make a significant difference for historical purposes. But sometimes it might. And for ancient Egypt, whose chronology is known more precisely, it could make a difference more often.
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As part of its year-long series, “Celebrating Israel at 70; A cultural perspective” Temple Beth Shalom in Santa Fe is offering a presentation titled, “Survival Against All Odds; The Conservation of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other Artifacts.” It takes place at eight-pm. The presenter is Michael Maggen, who is the head of the Paper and Parchment Conservation Laboratory at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.If you missed the lecture, do listen to the audio interview. Maggen discussed the Dead Sea Scrolls and he gave a preview of the lecture, which involved the Genesis Apocryphon and the Aleppo Codex.
KSFR’s Tom Trowbridge spoke recently with Maggen.
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What turns heads is the rest of the mosaic. In the center panel sits a magnificent zodiac wheel, featuring, among other pagan images, depictions of naked humans—including a conspicuously uncircumcised Libra. The wheel encircles a haloed Helios, the Greek sun god, mounted atop his chariot. Women representing each of the four seasons sit to the corners of the zodiac, with the accompanying Hebrew inscription of the names of the seasons.A nice photo essay.
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Meshel, Ze'ev, Kuntillet Ajrud (Horvat Teman): An Iron Age II Religious Site on the Judah-Sinai Border, ed. Liora Freud (Jerusalem, Israel Exploration Society, 2012).Past PaleoJudaica posts on Kuntillet ‘Ajrud (Kuntillet Ajrud) and its finds are collected here.
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The New Testament Apocrypha—or better: non-canonical early Christian literature—has had a great impact on western culture despite attempts by mainstream Christianity to suppress it. Stories and ideas from these texts appear in literature, art, church doctrine, and even modern fiction such as Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code. This course is designed to introduce students to a wide range of non-canonical Christian texts—from gospels, to acts of individual apostles, letters, and apocalypses. The goals will be to understand each text’s place in the development of Christian thought and to observe their use in modern scholarship. Particular emphasis will be placed on the work of the so-called “new school” in New Testament Studies that claims some of these texts may predate, and therefore may have influenced, the canonical gospels.Good stuff.
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Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
Professor Pat Smith is correct, along with others, that there is no evidence for crucifixion in the Abba tomb, moreover we asked experts totally unaware of the controversy as to the sex of the skeleton with signs of trauma, all concurred that we are talking about an elderly female.This in reference to my recent post on the new (apparently) crucified skeleton from Rome. I mentioned the Abba tomb skeleton as another one, possibly of Mattathiah son of Judah, which had been argued to have been crucified. I discussed that in more detail here. But from what Dr. Zias says above, the expert consensus is otherwise.
Following Dr. Haas tragic accident, the material in question was transferred to my lab in the Israel Antiquities Authority and I can state with a high level of confidence that no evidence whatsoever for crucifixion was present.
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Unwitting conservators of the past used standard sticky tape to try and hold together famous but fragile treasures, such as the Dead Sea scrolls and drawings by filmmaker Federico Fellini. The trouble is that, in addition to ruining the aesthetic integrity of a piece of art, the adhesive on tape can cause discoloration over time. Certain types of tape can even bleed past where they were placed and alter the visual appearance of the work.Good. In past posts I have flagged the longstanding problem of the use of scotch tape in the early, primitive efforts to conserve the Dead Sea Scrolls. See here, here, and here. I hope this new technology helps to solve the problem.
Modern art restorers have traditionally used solvents and intense humidity to loosen tape, methods that can damage the piece or present a toxic hazard for restorers. Now, a team of chemists from the University of Florence has developed a new treatment for the sticky affliction that's safe for humans and doesn't damage the art.
The method starts with hydrogel, a type of gel with high water content used in a variety of common objects, from plastics to pills. The hydrogel used by the Italian researchers was between 95 and 98 percent water. The other five to two percent is made of intersperced nano-sized droplets of organic solvents.
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These are not the only fragments of Judeo-Arabic versions of Mishnaic tractates, but they all come from a single manuscript and for that reason may have much more to tell us than we might learn from isolated fragments of other manuscripts. On the basis of the pages we have, we can do much to re-construct the shape and appearance of the original manuscript. We can also compute that the entire Mishnah, with its translation, in this single manuscript must have filled nearly 6,000 pages, making for an enormous and, in view of the thickness of the paper, unwieldy, multi-volume copy of the text.Past PaleoJudaica posts on Judeo-Arabic are here and links. Past posts noting Cairo Geniza Fragments of the Month in the Cambridge University Library's Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit are there and here links.
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Eden, the Tree of Life and the Wisdom of the SerpentWell, maybe. As I read this essay I was thinking about the author's comment early on:
The essential plot can be understood, not as a struggle between God and the Devil, but as a conflict involving the dynamic, royal, masculine God of the heavens and the primordial Mother Goddess who for millennia had been worshipped as the Mistress of the earth. To be sure, the story is told from the point of view of the former. The serpent is reduced to being the subtlest of the creatures that the Lord God had made. The Goddess is not even mentioned by name, though she is there, as the tree of life, for that is how she was so often depicted among the ancient Canaanites. Indeed, because she was represented in tree form, it is not surprising that Yahweh declared that the tree and its fruit were taboo.
By Jay Williams
Professor Emeritus
Hamilton College
May 2018
The problem, however, is that the story has too many loose ends, too many confusing subtleties to be so easily unraveled and explained. If it is to be understood as an account of why humans are all sinful, why does the word “sin” never appear in the story?I think the same objection applies to the author's thesis. If the Goddess is so important in this story, why is she never mentioned directly?
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A lesion on the foot of a 2,000-year-old skeleton discovered in a Roman burial site in northern Italy appears to constitute rare tangible evidence of execution by crucifixion, according to an interdisciplinary team of Italian researchers.The skeleton shows signs of violence that are consistent with crucifixion, but the evidence is apparently not conclusive. The other, certain, crucified skeleton mentioned in the headline above, is that of one Yehohanan ben Hagkol, on which more here and links.
Although broadly attested to in historical writings — including the New Testament — it is only the second known archaeological proof of the particularly cruel form of capital punishment practiced by the Romans against criminals, as well as revolutionaries such as Jesus.
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Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
Only every once in a while (and not that often in one scholarly generation) a book comes along that not only changes fundamentally the perspective on its chosen topic, but, through its novel methodology, will have major repercussions for other fields of scholarship as well. Maren Niehoff’s intellectual biography of Philo of Alexandria is such a work.
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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.
At the beginning of this week’s Torah reading of B’ha’alotkha (Numbers 8-12), the Bible gives instructions for the daily kindling of the menorah.For many past PaleoJudaica posts on ancient menorahs and representations of menorahs, see here and links and here.
The menorah has long occupied a prominent place in the Jewish imagination. From the time of its placement in the inner courtyard of the Tabernacle in the desert and later of the Temple in Jerusalem, to its rekindling after the Maccabees’ defeat of the Seleucids, to its central position on the Arch of Titus in Rome, to its modern repurposing as the emblem of Jewish revival by the state of Israel, few Jewish symbols have been as familiar or as evocative.
And yet the Bible leaves unstated the significance of the menorah and its seven branches, its importance to the Temple, or its meaning and purpose with respect to the relationship between God and His chosen nation and perhaps beyond. On these matters, an examination of five key scriptural passages can shed light.
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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.
The ancient city of Dan is located in a beautiful and lush valley in Israel's northern Galilee region. Visiting the area today especially in early spring, is to stop to gaze in wonder at nature's paintbrush splashing light and color with gorgeous abandon.If only. Maybe someday.
Dr. Richard D. Small has brought that once vibrant city and its still verdant environs to life, writing a compelling book published by Touchpoint Press and available at Google Books, that juxtaposes life in Israel during the first century B.C.E. with the Israel of today. He does it by means of a fast moving plot in which a young Arab, Musa, digging at the archaeological excavations of ancient Dan discovers an urn containing the diary of Elisheva, who lived in Dan during the Second Temple period reign of Hasmonean Queen Shlomzion.
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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.
The main purpose of the Melammu Project is to investigate the continuity, transformation, and diffusion of Mesopotamian and Ancient Near Eastern culture from the third millennium BCE through the ancient world until Islamic times and after."The work of the project is often of direct or indirect relevance to ancient Judaism. Its newsletter has recently gone online. The main link given in the AWOL post is dead at the moment. But this one works.
Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
It was the color of the sea, the sky, the divine sapphire-hewn Throne of Glory, according to the Tannaite sage Rabbi Meir. It was a color used in the Jewish temples, the hue of its high priests’ robes, and the shade of the blue tassel that the Bible commands be affixed to one’s garments.Past posts on the tekhelet dye, its ancient uses, and modern efforts to recreate it, are here and follow the links.
But starting in the seventh century CE, the source of the natural dye to produce the biblical tekhelet [blue] — as well as its royal purple counterpart, argaman — faded from history for hundreds of years.
Long sought by Jews to revive the ancient practice of wearing a fringe of techelet, the revered colors were also the subject of other Ancient Near East cultures’ fascination and ritual worship and the source of a hugely prosperous ancient dyeing industry, according to a new exhibit at Jerusalem’s Bible Lands Museum, “Out of the Blue,” which is set to open on June 1.
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The Roman destruction of Jerusalem’s Second Temple in 70 CE scattered the Jewish people out into the empire, from the Greek islands to as far as modern-day Spain and Portugal. Following this cataclysmic event, Jerusalem’s great assembly of the Sanhedrin, a sort of Supreme Court of the Jewish nation, migrated north to the Galilean city of Bet She’arim.A nice photo essay, as we have come to expect from Atlas Obscura.
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During a joint patrol with the Civil Administration of Judea and Samaria’s archeology unit, authorities stopped the criminals at an archaeological site south of the Peduel settlement in the West Bank. The criminals were found on site with digging equipment and taken in for questioning by security authorities. Previous excavations at the site uncovered a large monastery and a church with ornate mosaics, among other finds, the unit said.Sadly, many such stories continue to come up. See here and links, as well as here, here, here, and here.
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Monday, June 4, 7:00 pmThe speaker:
BMH-BJ Congregation, Fisher Hall
560 S Monaco Pkwy, Denver, CO
Free Admission
Since its inception in 2010, Pnina Shor has been the head of the Dead Sea Scrolls unit of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). In this role, she oversees the curatorship, conservation and preservation, exhibition and digitization of the IAA’s more than 20,000 scrolls. ...Background on the Denver Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition is here and follow the links.
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Fast forward 72 years. Twenty of these scrolls, and more than 600 artifacts have traveled almost 7,000 miles to Denver, Colorado for a special six-month long exhibition at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.The headline alone makes this article worth a link. But it's also a nice and detailed review of the whole exhibition, which includes more than just Dead Sea Scrolls.
The exhibition, which holds the largest collection of artifacts from the Holy Land to arrive in the United States, aims to tell the story of the ancient Israelites who wrote the scrolls, as well as the larger story of the development of the Middle East, and of the religious traditions that shaped western civilization.
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Spreading title deeds on a coffee table, leaders of the Syriac Christian community in southeastern Turkey enthusiastically spoke about how they settled a controversial issue regarding the return of their properties. In 2014, ownership of churches, monasteries and cemeteries belonging to the ancient community were transferred to the state after Mardin, the southeastern city where they are located, was designated as the "greater city municipality." The community fought for their return but faced bureaucratic red-tape and a lengthy legal process. Finally, they were formally handed title deeds yesterday, crediting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for helping them to settle the issue.I have been following the fortunes of the ancient and historic Mor Gabriel Monastery for some time, with emphasis in the last several years on disputed land seizures by the Turkish Government. I am not sure whether all the problems are resolved yet, but this latest report seems to count as good news.
Properties were returned to the Foundation of Mor Gabriel Monastery that represents the small community concentrated mainly in Mardin. ....
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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.
But, to bring it back to my original point: If there are such unpublished pieces, the majority of which probably have certain Oxyrhynchite provenance, why are editors choosing to publish pieces of dubious provenance in The Oxyrhynchus Papyri series? I’m genuinely curious.It's a good question. The questions about the no-longer-first-century Mark fragment just published in the series are helping to draw attention to it.
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Yesterday, the Egyptian Exploration Society, the nonprofit organization that acts as curators of the Oxford-based Oxyrhynchus Society, announced a new discovery: a late second- or early third-century CE fragment of the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark, just published in The Oxyrhynchus Papryi Volume 83 (2018), edited by distinguished Oxford academics Daniela Colomo and Dirk Obbink. In what must be the archetypical example of the expression “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” this pile of ancient refuse has produced one of the oldest fragments of the oldest Gospel story (Mark is believed by scholars to be the earliest Gospel.) This makes it a substantial and significant discovery for those interested in the history of Christianity, the evidence of the dating of the books of the Bible, and the history of book-making. But it also comes with a substantial mystery surrounding its origins, its dating, and its potential connection to the ubiquitous Green family, the owners of Hobby Lobby and the founders of the Museum of the Bible.This story is labyrinthine but worth trying to follow. As usual, Professors Moss and Baden lay out the evidence as clearly as possible.
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Josephus in his Antiquities of the Jews, tells the story of Queen Helena of Adiabene and her sons Kings Izates II and Monobazus II, and how they converted to Judaism in the mid-first century C.E. Rabbinic literature preserves several anecdotes about this family. However, the rabbis knew little about them, and grappled with their insider/outsider status.Regular PaleoJudaica readers are well acquainted with the intriguing figure of Queen Helena of Adiabene. This essay collects and evaluates the accounts and legends about her.
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.