Vintage Phoenicians

PHOENICIAN WATCH: 2,600-year-old wine ‘factory’ unearthed in Lebanon. The oldest press found in the country was used by ancient Phoenicians to manufacture vintages once adored around the Mediterranean (TOM METCALFE, National Geographic). The link to the underlying article in the journal Antiquity is bad. But this seems to be the article:

Phoenician lime for Phoenician wine: Iron Age plaster from a wine press at Tell el-Burak, Lebanon

Adriano Orsingher (a1), Silvia Amicone (a2), Jens Kamlah (a1), Hélène Sader (a3) ...
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2020.4Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2020

It looks as though you can access the article from Cambridge Core for free.

Lots of ancient wine presses have been found in Israel. I have linked to stories about many of them. Run "wine press" through the search engine to access them.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

SBL/AAR 2020 is going full virtual

IN CASE YOU HAVEN'T HEARD: THE SBL & AAR MEETINGS ARE GOING ONLINE IN 2020 (NSEA Blog).

I am participating in a MEGA session interacting with Radcliffe G. Edmonds III, Drawing down the moon: magic in the ancient Greco-Roman world. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. I will be comparing his work on the Greco-Roman magic with the Jewish magical traditions in the late-antique Hebrew magical handbook Sefer HaRazim, The Book of the Mysteries.

My abstract:

Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman and Ancient Jewish Worlds

This paper will review Drawing Down the Moon: Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World, by Radcliffe G. Edmonds. I will read the book alongside the evidence for ancient Jewish magic, with a focus on the Talmudic-era Hebrew tractate Sefer HaRazim, the Book of the Mysteries. Like Greco-Roman magic, ancient Jewish magic made use of cursing and binding spells, erotic spells, healing and protective spells, divination, and astrology. But Jewish magic developed these practices under the creative influence of biblical tradition. Both Greco-Roman and Jewish magic present us with a complicated relationship between prayer and magic. The relationship of Jewish magic to alchemy and theurgy is more complicated still and requires discussion.

I don't know the new date and time of our session, but I'll let you know when I find out.

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More from Sabar on Veritas

ANOTHER INTERVIEW: How a mysterious man fooled a Harvard scholar into believing the 'Gospel of Jesus' Wife' was real (Daniel Burke, CNN). An interview with Ariel Sabar about his new book, Veritas. It includes responses by Walter Fritz, the owner of the Gospel of Jesus' Wife fragment and a response from Harvard University. CNN reports that they contacted Professor King for comment but did not receive a reply.

I find preposterous the suggestion that Professor King may have know from the start that the fragment was fake. No specialist would risk their reputation knowingly backing a forgery that was likely to be unmasked sooner or later.

Background here and links.

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OT/HB job at Berkeley

DEPARTMENT OF NEAR EASTERN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY: Assistant Professor - Hebrew Bible - Department of Near Eastern Studies. A tenure-track position! The recruitment period closes on 31 October 2020.

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Oxford Archaeology Image Database

THE AWOL BLOG: Oxford Archaeology Image Database. Wow, what a site!

This website has images from many archaeological sites in Iraq and images of artifacts in some major museums. It looks extraordinarily useful.

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Tuplin Festschrift on Xenophon's Cyropaedia

NEW BOOK FROM HARRASSOWITZ:

Ancient Information on Persia Re-assessed: Xenophon’s Cyropaedia
Proceedings of a Conference Held at Marburg in Honour of Christopher J. Tuplin, December 1–2, 2017

editor(s): Jacobs, Bruno
series:
Classica et Orientalia
volume: 22
pages/dimensions: XXXII, 408 pages
language: English
binding: Book (Hardback)
dimensions: 17.00 × 24.00 cm
weight: 972g
publishing date: 05.08.2020
prices: 98,00 Eur[D] / 100,80 Eur[A]
ISBN: 978-3-447-11283-3

In the past Xenophon’s Cyropaedia has attracted the attention of scholars primarily for literary-historical reasons. It is one of the main tasks of the present publication to free discussion of the work from this relatively narrow disciplinary constraint.
As questions of genre cannot be ignored anyway, the volume opens with contributions that consider where Cyropaedia stands in relation to historiography, the novel and Socratic literature. The next group of studies deals with how Xenophon drew on material from other authors and from his own experience to develop a picture of the emergence of the Persian Empire and of the way in which power was exercised there. Investigations of this sort presuppose questions about the historië that underpins Cyropaedia, and that topic is the focus of two further contributions that deal specifically with the types of information that were available to Xenophon. A final group of contributions looks at the impact of the work in canonical and deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament, in the writings of the Alexander historians and in modern literature up to the 18th century.

The Cyropaedia is also a source for what I like to call Greek Fantasy Babylon.

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Colburn, Archaeology of empire in Achaemenid Egypt

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: Archaeology of empire in Achaemenid Egypt.

Henry P. Colburn, Archaeology of empire in Achaemenid Egypt. Edinburgh studies in ancient Persia. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. xix, 318 p.. ISBN9781474452366 £85.00.

Review by
Jan P. Stronk. jpstronk@planet.nl

[The Table of Contents is listed below.]

This is said to be the first study of the material culture of Egypt during the period of Achaemenid Persian rule, and its goal is to challenge the common idea that Achaemenid rule of Egypt was either ephemeral and weak or oppressive and harsh. To achieve his goal, Colburn focuses on three main tasks, (1) to describe the intellectual foundations of our knowledge of the archaeology of the 27th dynasty; (2) to assemble a corpus of visual and material records from Egypt that can be dated with confidence to the 27th dynasty; (3) to use this corpus to characterize Achaemenid rule in Egypt.

[...]

Not mentioned in the review, but the Judean community on Elephantine Island flourished during the 27th dynasty. They left us an important corpus of Aramaic papyri.

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The Sifting Project is a Trip Advisor top 10%

THE TEMPLE MOUNT SIFTING PROJECT: WE’RE IN THE TOP 10% OF ATTRACTIONS WORLDWIDE! The lack of international vistors in August seems to have been more than made up by Israeli visitors. That's good new, since things were looking grim at the end of July. It's also good to see the Sifting Project receiving this recognition.

Background on the Temple Mount Sifting Project is here (cf. here) and follow the many, many links.

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The Sibylline Books and the Saecular Games

NUMISMATICS: Coins of the Ludi Saeculares and Rome’s Millennial Games (Steve Benner, CoinWeek).

Even though the origins may go back as far as the fifth century BCE, the first celebration of the Saeculares games was in 249 BCE during the First Punic War. Due to a series of portents, the Sibylline books (a collection of oracular prophecies) were consulted, and it was decided by a group of priests called the quindecemviri that they should sacrifice to the underworld deities for three consecutive nights and hold games including chariot races. The Romans also had to swear to hold the Games every 100 years. As promised, the games were held again in 149 BCE during the Third Punic War. It was really at this time that the celebration became a regular centennial event.

The Roman Ludi Saeculares (the decemcentennial celebrations of the anniversary of Rome's founding) were inspired by interpretation of the Sibylline Oracles during the Punic Wars. And some cool coins were minted to go with the celebrations.

To be clear, these Sibylline Oracles are the original Roman ones, which are almost entirely lost today. But they inspired derivative Sibylline Oracles composed by Christians and Jews. The latter have come up now and then at PaleoJudaica.

For past posts and background on the Sibylline Oracles, see here, here, here, and links. Cross-file under Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Watch and Punic Watch.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Sasanika

THE AWOL BLOG: Sasanika: Late Antique Near East Project.

The Sasanian (Sassanian) era is of considerable interest for the study of late-antique Judaism. This site looks like a useful resource. You can find many PaleoJudaica posts on the period in the archives. Some in the last few years are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Steiner Festschrift - Biblical, Semitic and Jewish Studies

NEW BOOK FROM THE BIALIK INSTITUTE:

Semitic, Biblical and Jewish Studies
In Honor of Richard C. Steiner
Aron J. Koller, Mordechai Z. Cohen, Adina Moshavi (editors)

Publisher: Bialik Institute
Catalog number : 1111930
ISBN: 978-965-536-277-0
In collaboration with Michael Scharf Yeshiva University Press
Year Published: 2020
Pages: 434 English, 267 Hebrew
Cover: Hard
Language: English & Hebrew

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Gray on rabbinic charity

THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST TODAY: Charity (Tzedaqah) as a Late Antique Rabbinic Religious Idea (Alyssa M. Gray).

I noted the publication of Professor Gray's book, Charity in Rabbinic Judaism, here. And I have noted recent books on related topics here and here and links and here.

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Magic Jesus?

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Jesus Holding a Magic Wand? Supernatural Depictions of Jesus in Early Christian Art (Marek Dospěl). This essay is a summary of an article by Lee M. Jefferson in the current issue of BAR. The article is behind the subscription wall, but the essay is worth a read on its own.

There is more magic Jesus in the apocryphal traditions. For flying Jesus, see here and for shape-shifting Jesus, see here.

Cross-file under Iconography.

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Connecting Deuteronomy's deletion dots

PROFESSOR ALBERT L. BAUMGARTEN: Dots on Deuteronomy 29:28: A Polemical Response to Qumran’s Secret Laws (TheTorah.com).

“The secret things belong unto YHWH our God; but the things that are revealed belong unto us and to our children forever”—the verse has eleven dotted letters indicating erasure marks, but why? The answer lies in a controversial interpretation found in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

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Cuneiform tablet scans

THE AWOL BLOG: Cuneiform Tablet Collection at the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East (HMANE). (Formerly the Harvard Semitic Museum.)

These 3-D scans take some time to load, but they look very useful for puzzling out the 3-D cuneiform signs.

It looks like there is a lot of work to be done with this Harvard collection. One fun feature of it, is the Graeco-Babylonaica tablets: bilingual tablets containing lists of Akkadian or Sumerian words with Greek transliterations next to them. I couldn't find any of these in the scanned tablets, but I didn't look at anything like all of them.

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Handwriting at Arad revisited

FORENSIC EPIGRAPHY: TAU: Tel Arad texts show literacy in Kingdom of Judah was widespread. Researchers used state-of-the-art image processing and machine-learning technologies to analyze the texts, along with police forensic methods (HANNAH BROWN, Jerusalem Post).

In 2016, they decided that there were at least four different authors, possibly six, according to algorithms, statistical probability and textual evidence. Findings were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

But they kept thinking of other ways to explore these questions, and the TAU researchers decided to compare the algorithmic methods, which have since been refined, to the forensic approach and invited [forensic handwriting specialist Yana] Gerber to join the team.

Using her forensic methods, Gerber found that the 18 texts were written by at least 12 distinct writers with varying degrees of certainty.

The 2016 study received a lot of attention. I blogged on it with my own comments here, here, and here, and I noted comments by George Athos here. More recently, the Arad ostraca have been in the news with the discovery of additional writing on the back of ostracon 16.

You can read the technical PLOS ONE article that is the basis for the current story here.

I don't feel qualified to evaluate the technical elements of the study. I note that it made an effort to falsify the results:

The second dataset, used to validate the two algorithms, contained handwriting samples collected from 18 present-day writers of modern Hebrew. This dataset allowed us to estimate the False Positive and False Negative rates for the algorithmic methods that we employed; it can be downloaded at [42]. It will be stressed that the modern Hebrew dataset was not used to train or calibrate the algorithm for its activation on the first, ancient Hebrew dataset (or vice versa). The purposes of the modern Hebrew dataset were algorithm verification and sanity check.

The results of the "sanity check" were as follows:

Modern Hebrew script experiment

The Modern Hebrew experiment yielded 4.76% False Positive and 2.66% False Negative error rates. These results demonstrate the soundness of our algorithmic sequence. In fact, taking into account the 0.1 threshold, the empirical error rates may indicate “conservativeness”of our p-values estimation.

A 95%+ success rate looks good. However, this cross-check seems only to have been applied to the algorithms. What about the human forensic analysis? It was the latter that found the larger number of writers for the Arad ostraca. Were her results cross-checked in a similar way? I could not find an answer to that question in the article, although I may have missed it.

As for the broader claims, as I said in 2016, we already have good indication that literacy was widespread in the kingdom of Judah c. 600 BCE. This study gives us no reason to think otherwise. The sample is still small, but it seems to offer some confirmation of that conclusion.

Stay tuned. Our tools for asking such questions continue to improve. Cross-file under Technology Watch.

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Online memorial for Rabbi Steinsaltz

THE STEINSALTZ LEGACY: Prime Minister Netanyahu, actress Mayim Bialik speak at Rabbi Steinsaltz tribute. Event pays tribute to renowned Torah scholar Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz a month after his passing (Arutz Sheva).

Background here and links.

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Marguerite Harl, 1919-2020

WILLIAM A. ROSS: REMEMBERING THE WORK OF MARGUERITE HARL († 30 AUGUST 2020).

It is with sadness and gratitude that the Septuagint scholarly community is commemorating the life and work of Professor Marguerite Harl, who passed away just over a week ago at the remarkable age of 101 in her hometown of Paris, France.

[...]

Requiescat in pace.

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Brown et al. (ed.), Reading Other Peoples’ Texts

NEW BOOK FROM BLOOMSBURY/T&T CLARK:

Reading Other Peoples’ Texts
Social Identity and the Reception of Authoritative Traditions

Editor(s): Ken S. Brown, Alison L. Joseph, Brennan Breed

Published: 05-14-2020
Format: Hardback
Edition: 1st
Extent: 304
ISBN: 9780567687333
Imprint: T&T Clark
Series: Scriptural Traces, The Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies
Dimensions: 6 1/8" x 9 1/4"
List price: $115.00
Online price: $103.50
Save $11.50 (10%)

About Reading Other Peoples’ Texts

This volume draws together eleven essays by scholars of the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, Greco-Roman religion and early Judaism, to address the ways that conceptions of identity and otherness shape the interpretation of biblical and other religiously authoritative texts.

The contributions explore how interpreters of scriptural texts regularly assume or assert an identification between their own communities and those described in the text, while ignoring the cultural, social, and religious differences between themselves and the text's earliest audiences. Comparing a range of examples, these essays address varying ways in which social identity has shaped the historical contexts, implied audiences, rhetorical shaping, redactional development, literary appropriation, and reception history of particular texts over time. Together, they open up new avenues for studying the relations between social identity, scriptural interpretation, and religious authority.

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More on those Phoenician figurines

PHOENICIAN WATCH: Long-lost Phoenician figurines could reveal secrets to ancient cult. “They were wrapped in newspapers from the 70s and covered in these brittle plastic bags that crumbled as soon as you touched them” (Hannah Brown, Jerusalem Post).

This article gives some new information, especially about the history of the assemblage after its discovery.

Joseph Lauer has also provided a reference for the technical article behind this story: Shipwreck or Sunken Votives? The Shavei Zion Assemblage Revisited (Meir Edrey Adi Erlich Assaf Yasur‐Landau, International Journal of Nautical Archaeology).

It is behind a subscription wall, but I have been able to read it. It answers my question about whether the finds are of Phoenician origin (i.e, from the Levantine coast) or Punic origin (from Carthage and its satellites). The origins of the clay and the pottery forms show clearly that they are of Phoenician origin. That's interesting in that it provides new evidence for the worship of the goddess Tanit in Phoenicia. My understanding (but this is not my expertise) is that there was previously little evidence for that.

Background here. Cross-file under Marine (Maritime, Underwater) Archaeology and Not a Shipwreck.

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Archaeology and the "Deal of the Century"

ARCHAEOLOGICAL POLITICS: The historic battle for Israel’s heritage. Hundreds of heritage and archaeology sites in Judea and Samaria are reportedly slated to be removed from Israeli control and transferred to the jurisdiction of the proposed Palestinian state (NAOMI LINDER KAHN, Jerusalem Post, Jerusalem Report).

Background here and links.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

On ancient synagogues

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Ancient Synagogues in Israel and the Diaspora. What is the meaning of “synagogue” in the Bible? (Megan Sauter). This BHD essay was first published in 2015, but I seem to have missed it then. It introduces a BAR article on the subject by Professor Rachel Hachlili, which is behind the subscription wall.

For some PaleoJudaica posts on ancient synagogues, see here and here and links.

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Hugoye 23.1

A NEW ISSUE: Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 23.1 (2020). This is a high-quality, peer-review, open-access journal. Issue 22.1 (2019) was noted here (updated link here). And for more, follow the links from either of those links. Cross-file under Syriac Watch.

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2020 Aramaic Enoch Conference

ONLINE CONFERENCE: 2020 Aramaic Enoch Conference.

From the Books of Enoch to Genesis Apocryphon:
Aramaic Manuscripts of 1 Enoch and Related Aramaic Traditions from Qumran
October 20-22, 2020

International Conference on the Aramaic Manuscripts of 1 Enoch
organized by the Institute of Biblical Studies (KUL, Lublin, Poland)
in collaboration with the Enoch Seminar

• Chairs: Henryk Drawnel and Gabriele Boccaccini
  
• Secretary: Joshua Scott

Attendance is free, but registration (at the link) is required. Registration is now open.

The tentative schedule is there as well. Looks like an excellent lineup.

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Unsung Qumran excavators

VARIANT READINGS: Two Unheralded Excavators of Cave 1 at Qumran: Ibrahim Asuli and Mohamed Mustafa. Brent Nongbri has been doing more photographic detective work.

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Review of Garroway, Growing Up in Ancient Israel

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Book Note I Growing Up in Ancient Israel: Children in Material Culture and Biblical Texts (Caralie Focht).

Kristine Henriksen Garroway, Growing Up in Ancient Israel: Children in Material Culture and Biblical Texts. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2018.

For more on Professor Garroway's work on children in ancient Israel and the ancient Near East, see here and links. She has co-edited another book in the area in 2020, noted here.

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More on those Jerusalem architectual fragments

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Architectural Artifacts from First Temple Period Found. Rare architectural details of Proto-Aeolic style discovered on the Armon Hanatziv Promenade (Jonathan Laden). A good overview of the new discoveries, without a sensationalistic headline.

Background here.

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Another Temple Mount lockdown?

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: Officials mull Temple Mount closure as Old City declared a COVID-19 ‘red zone.’ After virus czar high infection rates, National Security Council meets to consider imposing restrictions at sensitive holy sites; closure would likely be opposed by Palestinians (Times of Israel).

The previous Temple Mount lockdown ended at the end of May.

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Not the Holy Grail, but ...

ARTIFACT: Unique Christian chalice uncovered at Vindolanda (ITV News).

Buried amongst a rubble filled building, now known to be the remains of a 6th century Christian church, were 14 fragmentary remains of an incredibly rare lead Christian cup or chalice.

Although in very poor condition due to its proximity to the surface of the ground, each fragment of the vessel was found to be covered by lightly etched symbols, each representing different forms of Christian iconography from the time.

This is a little outside PaleoJudaica's usual range of interest, but I do like to keep an eye on what is turning up at Vindolanda.

Regular readers will recall that Vindolanda is the site of an ancient Roman fort in Northumberland. It is best known as the source of the "Dead Sea Scrolls of Britain" — many hundreds of wooden writing tablets inscribed in Latin, mostly with documentary texts. They date to the late first and early second centuries CE. I have visited Vindolanda twice and blogged about both visits. See here, here and here. Follow the links from there for more posts. And I have a more recent post on Vindolanda under coronavirus lockdown here.

Over at the Anxious Bench Blog, Professor Philip Jenkins has an instructive post about the historical context of the chalice and the ruined church in which it was found: Wall, Church, and Chalice. Even though this wasn't the Grail, the area does have at least a nebulous connection with the Arthurian tradition.

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The Newark holy stones in the news

NEW WORLD HEBREW FORGERY (OR SOMETHING) WATCH: Lepper: The Newark Earthworks and The Holy Stones (Brian Lepper MSN News).

The curious Newark holy stones are Hebrew inscribed objects found in association with ancient Native American earthworks in the vicinity of Newark, New Jersey, in 1860. For some years Dr. Lepper, curator of archaeology for the Ohio History Connection, and his colleague Jeff Gill been promoting the theory that the stones were forged as emancipationist propaganda to try to prevent a civil war. Obviously, the plan did not succeed.

I have discussed the Newark Stones in more detail here. You can follow the links from there for more posts on them. It looks like all the previous article I had linked to have rotted, so this is a recent article in Dr. Lepper's own words. As far as I know, his theory, which in itself sounds plausible, has not been published in a peer-review journal.

No specialist thinks today that the Newark holy stones are ancient artifacts. But Rochelle Altman once argued that they are stolen medieval Jewish relics. (The link is gone.) Again, I am not aware of any formal publications of this idea.

Whatever kind of thing they are, they look pretty cool. Someone did put a lot of work into them. The current article has some photos. Lepper and Gill have a more detailed popular article posted on Dr. Lepper's Academia.edu page. It has some close-up photos as well.

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Resurrecting "the dates that Jesus ate"

CULTIVATING ARCHAEOLOGY: Aided by Modern Ingenuity, a Taste of Ancient Judean Dates. The harvest of the much-extolled, but long-lost Judean dates was something of a scientific miracle. The fruit sprouted from seeds 2,000 years old (Isabel Kershner, New York Times).

Yummy:

“They are beautiful!” exclaimed Dr. Sarah Sallon with the elation of a new mother, as each date, its skin slightly wrinkled, was plucked gently off its stem at a sunbaked kibbutz in southern Israel.

They were tasty, too, with a fresh flavor that gave no hint of their two-millenium incubation period. The honey-blonde, semi-dry flesh had a fibrous, chewy texture and a subtle sweetness.

And here's an entrepreneurial idea:

Aside from Dr. Sallon’s interest in their medicinal properties, there was some banter among the institute staff about mass producing the old-new fruit, with an eye to marketing the fruit as “the dates that Jesus ate,” and using the funds for research.

Background on the resurrection of these ancient date plants is here and links.

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Times still hard at end of 2020 dig season

ARCHAEOLOGY CANCELED: US archeologists barred from digging in Israel due to coronavirus. Putting an archaeological excavation on hold does not come without costs, as, according to Manor, "there is an increased risk of site deterioration, both from the elements and plundering" (Daniel Nisinman, Jerusalem Post).

Past posts on the suspension of archaeological digs in Israel due to the coronavirus are here and here.

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Gilgals galore!

ZVI KOENIGBERG: Gilgal: YHWH’s Footprints in the Land of Israel (TheTorah.com).

This is the place of My throne and the place for the soles of My feet... Ezekiel 43:7

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Fonrobert et al. (eds.), Talmudic Transgressions. Engaging the Work of Daniel Boyarin

NEW BOOK FROM BRILL:

Talmudic Transgressions

Engaging the Work of Daniel Boyarin

Series:
Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism, Volume: 181

Editors: Charlotte Fonrobert, Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Aharon Shemesh, and Moulie Vidas

Talmudic Transgressions is a collection of essays on rabbinic literature and related fields in response to the boundary-pushing scholarship of Daniel Boyarin. This work is an attempt to transgress boundaries in various ways, since boundaries differentiate social identities, literary genres, legal practices, or diasporas and homelands. These essays locate the transgressive not outside the classical traditions but in these traditions themselves, having learned from Boyarin that it is often within the tradition and in its terms that we can find challenges to accepted notions of knowledge, text, and ethnic or gender identity. The sections of this volume attempt to mirror this diverse set of topics.

Contributors include Julia Watts Belser, Jonathan Boyarin, Shamma Boyarin, Virginia Burrus, Sergey Dolgopolski, Charlotte E. Fonrobert, Simon Goldhill, Erich S. Gruen, Galit Hasan-Rokem, Christine Hayes, Adi Ophir, James Redfield, Elchanan Reiner, Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Lena Salaymeh, Zvi Septimus, Aharon Shemesh, Dina Stein, Eliyahu Stern, Moulie Vidas, Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, Elliot R. Wolfson, Azzan Yadin-Israel, Israel Yuval, and Froma Zeitlin.

Prices from (excl. VAT): €180.00 / $207.00

E-Book (PDF)
Availability: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-34533-1
Publication Date: 15 May 2017
Hardback
Availability: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-34532-4
Publication Date: 19 Jun 2017

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The Archaeology of Mithraism (ed. McCarty & Egri)

BIBLIOGRAPHIA IRANICA: The Archaeology of Mithraism. Notice of a new book: McCarty, Matthew & Mariana Egri (eds.). 2020. The Archaeology of Mithraism: New Finds and Approaches to Mithras-Worship (Babesch Supplements 39). Leuven: Peeters.

For PaleoJudaica posts on the Mithras cult (Mithraism), see here, here, here, here, here, and links.

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Kemp, Ezekiel, Law, and Judahite Identity

NEW BOOK FROM MOHR SIEBECK: Joel B. Kemp. Ezekiel, Law, and Judahite Identity. A Case for Identity in Ezekiel 1–33. 2020. XI, 195 pages. Forschungen zum Alten Testament 2. Reihe 123. 59,00 € including VAT. sewn paper ISBN 978-3-16-156579-3.

Published in English.
The consistent presence of juridical diction, legal metaphors, and courtroom imagery reveals that Ezekiel 1–33 is set within a precise juridical framework. In this study, Joel B. Kemp argues that focusing upon these legal elements has two primary benefits for our understanding of the book. First, the juridical framework provides greater clarity and coherence to some passages within Ezekiel 1–33. Second, the book (especially Ezekiel 16) uses its legal elements to articulate a version of Judahite identity under Neo-Babylonian hegemony. To connect these legal elements to identity development, the author uses some insights from the works of Erik Erikson and Urie Bronfenbrenner. According to his analysis, Ezekiel 16 equates the legal status of the city with Judahite identity to prove that the experiences of Neo-Babylonian domination did not nullify or rescind the legal agreement ( ברית) between the deity and Judahites. Rather, the punishment this chapter describes demonstrates the continuing validity of the contract and the version of Judahite identity rooted in it. Consequently, the Judahites' acceptance of the legal appropriateness of Neo-Babylonian domination is the sine qua non for remaining in the legal relationship that defines Judahite identity.

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Frankenstein's Golem?

GOLEM WATCH: The Mighty Golem and Mary Shelley (Peter R. Fernandez, Times of Israel Blogs). With speculation about Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's awareness of the Golem legend, plus a survey of Golem traditions over the centuries.

For many PaleoJudaica posts on the Golem tradition, start here and follow the links.

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Coptic Scriptorium News

COPTIC WATCH: Coptic Scriptorium News Summer 2020 Corpora Release 4.0.0 (Chuck Jones, The AWOL Blog). With lots of new goodies for Coptologists.

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The Usha excavation

ARCHAEOLOGY: The rich history of Usha – an ancient city now in ruins - Anat Harrel (ILTV).


The city of Usha in the Galilee was a critical center of the rabbinic movement in the late second century CE, a generation or two before the consolidation of the Mishnah.

This video explores the excavation's olive press and wine press from this period, each of which was associated with its own ritual bathing pool (mikveh).

Last year I noted a discovery from the Usha excavation.

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Magnificent First-Temple-era palace inferred near Jerusalem

ARCHITECTURAL FRAGMENTS: At popular Jerusalem promenade, archaeologists find a First Temple-era palace. Rare column heads located at Armon Hanatziv walkway, indicating residents of ancient city found their fortunes outside the walls after easing of Assyrian siege 2,700 years ago (Times of Israel).

It's entertaining to compare the headlines for this story to the articles. The Times of Israel, above, is fairly restrained. Others are less so:

Rare ancient royal mansion unearthed in Jerusalem. Magnificent, rare remains of residential structure from the time of the Kings of Judah discovered in excavation by Israel Antiquities Authority (Abigail Klein Leichman, Israel21c)

Mystery of 'magnificent palace' found in Jerusalem (BBC/MSN)

It took me a while to work out that there is no magnificent, mysterious, lavish First-Temple-era palace. That is, there is no surviving ground architecture with foundation and walls and such.

The actual news is that archaeologists found some quite important stone fragments, including three capitals of Proto-Aeolian columns. From the stone fragments they infer, I'm sure correctly, that there was once a magnificent palace in the area.

Alas, it is long gone, destroyed, apparently, by the Babylonians in 586/87 BCE. But the capitals are very impressive. Todd Bolen has a post on their importance at the Bible Places Blog.

Some headlines do reflect the situation more clearly. For example: Limestone artifacts from ancient royal mansion unearthed in Jerusalem (Brooks Hays, UPI). Good for them.

Never assume that a headline tells you the story accurately.

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Butts & Gross (eds.), Jews and Syriac Christians

NEW BOOK FROM MOHR SIEBECK: Jews and Syriac Christians. Intersections across the First Millennium. Edited by Aaron Michael Butts and Simcha Gross. 2020. XII, 350 pages. Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 180. 149,00 € including VAT. cloth ISBN 978-3-16-159134-1.

Published in English.
Scholarly interest in intersections between Jews and Syriac Christians has experienced a boom in recent years. This is the result of a series of converging trends in the study of both groups and their cultural productions. The present volume contributes to this developing conversation by collecting sixteen studies that investigate a wide range of topics, from questions of origins to the development of communal boundaries, from social interactions to shared historical conditions, involving Jews and Syriac Christians over the first millennium CE. These studies not only reflect the current state of the question, but they also signal new ways forward for future work that crosses disciplinary boundaries between the fields of Jewish Studies and Syriac Studies, in some cases even dismantling those boundaries altogether.

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Deuteronomy's rules for marrying a captive woman

PROF. RABBI SHAYE J. D. COHEN, DR.RABBI ZEV FARBER: Marrying a Beautiful Captive Woman (TheTorah.com).

If an Israelite wishes to marry a woman taken captive in war, she becomes part of the Israelite polity and is protected from future re-enslavement. Uncomfortable with the Torah’s permitting this marriage, the rabbis declare it to be a compromise to man’s “evil impulse,” an idea reminiscent of Jesus’ claim that the Torah allows divorce as a compromise to humanity’s “hard heart.”

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The Sifting Project on the Temple Mount mystery hole

THE TEMPLE MOUNT SIFTING PROJECT BLOG: OUR COMMENTS ON THE UNKNOWN UNDERGROUND CISTERN THAT WAS DISCOVERED ON THE TEMPLE MOUNT. Who better to comment on this story?

The hole probably opened into a late Second Temple-era drainage channel or passageway. Blocking it without letting archaeologists examine it is a lost opportunity. The Waqf deserves all the bad publicity it gets for this.

Background here and here.

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Ultra-Orthodox protests over grave excavations

ARCHAEOLOGY AND THEOLOGICAL POLITICS: Ancient Graves Discovered Outside Jerusalem Spark Battle Over Roadworks. Ultra-Orthodox activists protest removal of skeletons, dismantling of 1,900-year-old graves – despite the fact they're probably not Jewish (Nir Hasson, Haaretz premium).

The discovery of ancient graves outside Jerusalem has led to a fight that threatens the construction of the new main road entrance to Jerusalem.

Archaeologists discovered the graves during an excavation ahead of the paving of a new route from Motza, a suburb north-west of Jerusalem, to the center of the city. They believe they were part of a Roman colonial settlement dating back 1,900 years. This would mean the graves did not belong to Jews, who did not live in this area after the destruction of the Second Temple.

[...]

A large Canaanite-era temple has also been excavated at Tel Motza (Tel Moza, Tel Moẓa, Tel Moẓah). For more Iron-Age discoveries there, see here and links. Motza may also be the site of New Testament-era Emmaus.

The article also reports that there has been recent protesting in Tel Aviv over ancient graves found during digging associated with the light rail.

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Rosen-Zvi, Between Mishna and Midrash

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Mishnah, Midrash, and How to Read Tannaitic Literature (Ishay Rosen-Zvi). Notice of a New Book:

Between Midrash and Mishna*: Reading Tannaitic Literature (the Open University, 2019) [Hebrew]

[*The title should read Mishna and Midrash. - JRD]

Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Tel-Aviv University

Excerpt:

Between Mishna and Midrash is a new introduction to these two compositions. It is based on two courses (Intro to Mishnah and Tosefta and Intro to Tannaitic midrash) I have been teaching at Tel-Aviv University since 2006. I had many years of tweaking and revising the material, and so could try out several organizing principles. Ultimately, I decided that the most useful (and, as student feedback affirmed - stimulating) manner of organizing these two introductions is to tackle the puzzles that lie at the core of each of the compositions – that of the Mishna as a new Torah and that of the uniquely innovative hermeneutics of the Midrash. And there is of course a third puzzle – that of the relationship between the two works ...

This sounds like a really useful book. I hope the author and the publisher will consider an English translation.

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Greenspoon, Jewish Bible Translations

THE BIBLE AND INTEPRETATION:

Jewish Bible Translations and Translators

By the last decades of the nineteenth century, American Jews became more centrally organized and more numerous. Among the institutions founded beyond any single denomination was the Jewish Publication Society (JPS), headquartered in Philadelphia. At a time when Jewish biblical scholarship and interpretation were not highly regarded in academic circles, avenues for publishing Jewish works were similarly constrained. To fill this gap, the JPS was organized. Its first major project was an English-language version of the Bible. As mentioned earlier, it was essentially a Judaized version of KJV, which retained as much of the classic’s style and cadence as possible. It was also formatted and printed to look very much like editions of KJV in appearance. It brought together the rabbinic and lay leadership of most American Jewry, including its editor-in-chief Max L. Margolis, and was very well received. It has functioned with this status for over fifty years.

See Also: Jewish Bible Translations: Personalities, Passions, Politics,
Progress (Jewish Publication Society, 2020).

By Leonard J. Greenspoon
Creighton University
September 2020

Cross-file under New Book. The scope of the book is wider than the summary implies. It starts with the Greek Septuagint in antiquity and moves chapter-by-chapter to the modern era.

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The mystery hole is memory-holed

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: Waqf fills hole on Temple Mount, possibly hiding archaeological treasures. “The finds on the mountain reflect 3,000 years of Jewish activity at the site, and every pit dug in the site could shed light on thousands of years of Jewish history” (Tzvi Joffre, Jerusalem Post).

I am of two minds about this. On the one hand, I don't want to make a mountain out of a mole-hole. The hole was only three cubic feet in size. It probably didn't hide any significant archaeological treasures. The Waqf says it was probably a hole in a water conduit. Could be. And it is entirely possible that the best way to maintain the area's structural integrity was to fill it in with concrete.

On the other hand, we don't know what was in the hole. There may have been something interesting. Artifacts do show up in such places. And we don't get a chance to see inside the Temple Mount platform very often.

It would have been little trouble to bring in archaeologists to have a look. Now we will never know.

At minimum, the story has bad optics. The Waqf gave itself some easily avoided bad publicity.

Background here.

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Grunge Enoch

OLD TESTAMENT PSEUDEPIGRAPHA WATCH: MESSED UP STORIES FROM THE BOOK OF ENOCH [link corrected) (Benito Cereno, Grunge).

I didn't have high expectations when I started reading this piece. But once I started, I couldn't stop. It is actually quite a good summary of the books of 1-2-3 Enoch by someone who has read them carefully.

The essay does concentrate on the weird and lurid aspects of the books. But that adds up to summarizing their main points. Worth a read.

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A response to Garfinkel about his God figurines

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Facing the Facts about the “Face of God.” A Critical Response to Yosef Garfinkel (Shua Kisilevitz, Ido Koch, Oded Lipschits, and David S. Vanderhooft). Quite a long critical response.

Background here. Cross-file under Iconography.

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Biblical Studies Carnival 174

READING ACTS: Biblical Studies Carnival 174 for August 2020 (Phil Long).

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Some assembly required

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Make Your Own Magical Papyrus (Geoffrey Smith).

Cross-file under News You Can Use (?) and Pedagogy.

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Clint Burnett on the NT and inscriptions

INTERVIEW: How do inscriptions help us read the New Testament? (Ian Paul, Psephizo).

Dr Clint Burnett is Lecturer of New Testament at Johnson University in Knoxville, Tennessee USA, and has just published Studying the NT Through Inscriptions: An Introduction (Hendrickson, 2020), and I had previously heard him present some of his research at the annual Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) conference. I asked him about his research, and why inscriptions provide important practical information in reading the New Testament.

I have corrected the dead link to the book title. Cross-file under New Book.

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Schiffman on 2020 discoveries

PROFESSOR LAWRENCE H. SCHIFFMAN: 2020 DISCOVERIES. While the world was in lockdown, excavators and archaeologists were still busy discovering new worlds beneath the surface. A new article by Professor Schiffman in Ami Magazine.

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An undersea Tanit sanctuary?

MARINE ARCHAEOLOGY: From the Seabed, Figures of an Ancient Cult. A trove of Phoenician artifacts was long ascribed to a single shipwreck. More likely they were tossed overboard, and over centuries, a new study suggests (Joshua Rapp Learn, NYT).

The site is "Shavei Zion, off the coast of western Galilee."

I am confused about whether this sanctuary was for Phoenician traders (i.e., from roughly the coast of Lebanon) or Punic traders (from Carthage and its satellites in North Africa) or both.

The site is near the Phoenician coast, but as far as I know, Tanit was a Punic goddess. There is very little evidence that she was worshipped on the mainland.

Cross-file under Phoenician Watch and Punic Watch and Not a Shipwreck. Past PaleoJudaica posts on marine (maritime, underwater) archaeology are here and links.

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Temple Mount mystery pit

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: Mystery: New Pit Opens in Temple Mount Floor (David Israel, JewishPress.com). Developing ...

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Painful for all involved

DR. HILARY LIPKA: A Woman Who Seizes a Man’s Testicles During a Fight, Her Hand Is Cut Off (TheTorah.com).

A wife who intervenes in a fight to save her husband by grabbing his opponent’s testicles is punished by having her hand cut off (Deut 25:11–12). What is the nature of her offense? Why isn’t her intent to save her husband a mitigating factor? What is the relationship between the punishment and the crime?

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Burke reviews Sabar, Veritas

THE APOCRYPHYCITY BLOG: Some Reflections on Ariel Sabar’s Veritas.Tony Burke gives us a thorough review of Ariel Sabar's new book about the Gospel of Jesus' Wife affair.

All of that said, I’m a scholar—in particular, one who works with literary criticism and textual criticism—so I am compelled to pore over Sabar’s book and find problems, inconsistencies, and errors of fact. Maybe this is just my defensive reaction to his attack on “elite” scholarship, or more specifically, his unfavorable depiction of one of our own (Karen King, well-regarded for her work on the Gospel of Mary and her book What is Gnosticism?); maybe I just need a break from trying to figure out how to teach my courses over Zoom. Regardless, for anyone interested, here are some of my thoughts on Veritas.

Background here and links.

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The many-crowned rider

READING ACTS: The Rider on the White Horse – Revelation 19:11-16. Phil Long is back after hiatus in August. I hope he was off having a nice break.

He continues his blog series on the Book of Revelation, now on the final seven visions. We have jumped from the second vision in chapter 18 to the fourth vision, the second one in chapter 19.

For notice of previous posts in Phil's series on Revelation, see here and links.

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Sensenig, Jehoiachin and his Oracle

NEW BOOK FROM GORGIAS PRESS:

Melvin Sensenig
Jehoiachin and his Oracle
A Jeremianic Scribal Framework for the End of the Deuteronomistic History

Series: Perspectives on Hebrew Scriptures and its Contexts, 31

Gorgias Press | 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.31826/9781463240448

£89.00 PDF
FORMATS
PDF
ISBN: 978-1-4632-4044-8
Published: 15 Jan 2020

OVERVIEW
King Jehoiachin, the last Judahite king exiled to Babylon, became the focus of conflicting hopes and fears about a revived Davidic kingship after the exile. As Sensenig demonstrates, this conflict stemmed from a drastic oracle from Jeremiah that seemed to categorically reject Jehoiachin, while the canon records that he not only survived but thrived in exile.

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Contextualizing coins

NUMISMATICS: CONTEXTUALIZING COINS: AN INTERVIEW WITH DR. NATHAN T. ELKINS (AUSTIN ANDREWS, Pocket Change Blog).

NE: You are absolutely right. Coins are magnificent objects. They often bear the portrait of a certain ruler and we can frequently associate them with specific events and vibrant periods of history. When holding an ancient coin, you think not only about the imagery on it and what it meant in the social and political contexts at the time it was struck, but you also think about the lives of those who handled them thousands of years ago, who they were, and what they thought about those images on the coins that are so intriguing—but foreign—to us today. I understand the allure.

The answer to those questions we like to speculate about when holding a coin can only be answered by attention to context. ...

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Past pandemics

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Pandemics in Perspective (Sarah Yeomans).

Humanity has confronted pandemic events many times before. An examination of our current state through a historical lens can perhaps offer us another adjective: hopeful.

There are various stories of plagues in the Bible, but this article does not cover them. It limits itself to plagues in antiquity for which we have eyewitness accounts. The essay doesn't have a direct connection to ancient Judaism. But I note it for its relevance to current events.

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Who cited whom in the Talmud?

MICHAEL SATLOW: The Rabbinic Citation Network. Professor Satlow and his collaborator Mike Sperling have produced a visual representation of the rabbinic citation network in the Babylonian Talmud. Follow the link for a link to the site.

Cross-file under Talmud Watch.

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Bons (ed.), Historical and Theological Lexicon of the Septuagint, vol. 1

NEW BOOK FROM MOHR SIEBECK: Historical and Theological Lexicon of the Septuagint.Volume I: Alpha – Gamma. Edited by Eberhard Bons. 2020. CLXIII, 990 pages. 289,00 € including VAT. cloth - unit price. ISBN 978-3-16-150747-2.

Published in English.
The Hebrew Bible has played an important part in the development of Western culture. However, its central ideas – such as monotheism, the demythologization of nature or the linearity of time – had to be taken out of the national and linguistic milieu in which they had developed if they were to to become fertile on a wider scale. They also needed to be rendered palatable to a mentality that had experienced the scientific, rationalist revolution prepared by the Greeks. The Septuagint – the oldest Greek translation of the Jewish Bible, produced over the third and second centuries BC – is the first important step in this process of acculturation.
Over the last twenty years the Septuagint has come out of the shadow of its Hebrew source. Historians of Judaism, linguists, and biblical scholars have come to view the Septuagint as a significant document in its own right. As the discoveries in Qumran have shown, the Hebrew source text of the Septuagint was not identical to the traditional text received by the synagogue (the Masoretic Text). Also, the translators appear to have taken a degree of liberty in interpreting the text. Dominique Barthélemy used the term 'aggiornamento': the Septuagint is a kind of update of the Jewish scriptures.
This large-scale collective and interdisciplinary project aims to produce a new research tool: a multi-volume dictionary providing a comprehensive article (around 500 articles in all) for each important word or word group of the Septuagint. Filling an important gap in the fields of ancient philology and religious studies, the dictionary is based on original research of the highest scientific level.
The dictionary will be published in English. The first volume contains over 160 articles on words with the letters Alpha to Gamma.

William A. Ross also celebrates the volume's publication here. Some years ago I noted a prequel volume here.

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Another Steinsaltz memorial

OBITUARY: Adin Steinsaltz: Rabbi who brought the Talmud within reach of millions (Emily Langer, The Independent/MSN News).

“The Talmud is the central pillar of Jewish knowledge, important for the overall understanding of what is Jewish,” Rabbi Steinsaltz once told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But it is a book that Jews cannot understand. This is a dangerous situation, like a collective amnesia. I tried to make pathways through which people will be able to enter the Talmud without encountering impassable barriers. It’s something that will always be a challenge, but I tried to make it at least possible.”

Background here and here.

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More art in a Beit Guvrin-Maresha cave

EXHIBITION: Beit Guvrin cave transforms into first-of-its-kind art installation. Italian contemporary artist Ivo Bisignano is showing his first solo exhibition, “Human Forms,” in the Southern Cave, one of the many caves located in the Beit Guvrin National Park (SHARON FEIEREISEN, Jerusalem Post).

This story is about a modern art installation. Normally I would not cite it. But it ties in nicely with yesterday's post on the mysterious amatory inscription in the well-decorated Sidonian Cave, also in the Beit Guvrin-Maresha National Park. Follow that link for other caves in the area which found uses in antiquity.

Whatever attraction those caves had then seems to hold today.

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Flee to Pella!

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Pella: A Window on Survival (Mark Wilson).

Before writing my doctoral thesis two decades ago, the only Pella that I knew about was a small town in south central Iowa famous for its windows and doors. But in the course of my research, I discovered fascinating data about another Pella located in the Perean foothills of the Jordan River. In March I finally had the opportunity to visit the Pella located in northwestern Jordan.

[...]

I lived for several years in that Pella in Iowa. It's a nice town. I haven't visited the ancient Pella, but you can learn more about it at the link.

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Tomb tryst in the Sidonian Cave?

MYSTERIOUS EPIGRAPHY: The Strange Afterlife of a Mysterious Tomb Inscription. “I lay with another but I love you, the one most dear to me” (Gitit Ginat, Atlas Obscura).

Not everyone is convinced. Some believe that it is indeed a message between two lovers, others that is more like a playful love poem. Others claim that the writer was a sex worker, sarcastically warning a client to come back and pay her.

Inscriptions involving people's private affairs are typically very hard to understand. Inevitably, much background is unstated. That is one reason why ancient letters (epistles) are difficult to decipher.

This Greek inscription is fascinatingly ambivalent but seems to involve some communication between erotic partners. But the nature of the relationship, the point of the message, and even if both were still alive, remain unclear.

The highly decorated and inscribed tomb complex in the "Sidonian Cave" is remarkable in itself.

For more on Beit Guvrin-Maresha National Park, which became an UNESCO Heritage Site in 2014, see here. Another cave in the area produced a large archive of Aramaic and Greek inscribed bullae. See here, here, and here, and follow the links for more on the region.

CORRECTION: Apart from a few Greek letters and numbers, those bullae were uninscribed. But another excavation at Maresha did produce a lot of Aramaic ostraca.

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Pandemic pedagogy: parchment-packages

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: ‘Parchment-Packages’ in The Jewish Jesus Class Pedagogical Practices in the Digital Age (Deborah Forger).

A creative exercise in making virtual instruction tangible.

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Davila's "AI Jesus?"

TECHNOLOGY WATCH? Engineer creates 'AI Jesus' by feeding a natural language processing system the King James Bible that produces interesting and terrifying scripture (Stacy Liberatore, Daily Mail).

• Engineered programmed AI by feeding it the entire King James Bible
  
• The system, dubbed 'AI Jesus,' has produced 30,000 words as of yet
  
• The AI wrote about three topics: 'the plague,' Caesar' and 'the end of days'
  
• Although much of the text resembles that of the bible there are many glitches

Some of the oracles sound bizarre, but not too bad. Others are just bizarre. On "the end of days":

And the AI gave its own take on the topic.

‘And he that was dead, the servant of the LORD came unto me, saying, Son of man, speak unto you all that dwell in the wilderness and they shall be saved by the border of the LORD and his priests and his sons, and on the seven lambs, and of the seven places of the beast, and the other on the sabbath days.

But again, throughout the text a number of glitches appear such as:‘And when he was come into the house of God, which said unto the chief captain, and the gates of the brook, and the priests, and the fat that was made priest, and there was given him a wife, and his work was cast into the sea.’

Why, you ask, is PaleoJudaica devoting a post to this nonsense? Because the name of the engineer caught my attention. The article names him as "George Durendal."

Alert readers will notice that the surname is the name of Count Roland's sword in the Crusader-era chansons de geste. It may be a surname too. I don't know.

But at the bottom of the article the link gives the name "George Davila." That is the name used on the project's GitHub website. His profile link gives all three names. Perhaps Durendal is a pen name. I don't know.

As far as I know, the author is no relation. But I couldn't resist reading about his computer-generated revelations. Now you can too.

Mr. Davila Durendal's project is entertaining. And some of the other apocryphal scriptures, and even some biblical passages, are nearly as incoherent. But I think the Bible is safe from competition from AI scriptures for now.

Cross-file under Just For Fun.

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Equal time for et-Tell as Bethsaida

ARCHAEOLOGICAL ASSERTION: Biblical village of Bethsaida where Jesus fed the 5,000, walked on water and helped a blind man to see is finally identified by archaeologists after 32 years of excavations (Michael Havis, Daily Mail).

This article presents a robustly confident case for the identification of et-Tell as the ancient city of Bethsaida. Only near the end does it mention the contending side, el-Araj.

This might seem a bit imbalanced, but the article seems to be in response to another Mail piece from early June. It reported on the flooding of El-Araj, which it presented with comparable robust confidence as the site of Bethsaida.

I didn't link to that Mail article, but I did publish a couple of posts on the flooding of el-Araj here and here in May. Follow the links from there for lots of posts on both sites and the debate.

The two Mail articles give a good account of both perspectives. Both cases sound entirely convincing to me. I take no position on the question. I blog, you decide.

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Eye in the sky spies Palmyra

PALMYRA WATCH: Israel releases pictures of Palmyra from new spy satellite (Judah Ari Gross, Times of Israel Live Update). The name of the satellite is Ofek 16.

For many posts on Palmyra, its history, the ancient Aramaic dialect spoken there (Palmyrene), and the city's tragic reversals of fortune, which more recently seem to have been trending for the better, start here and follow the links.

Cross-file under Technology Watch.

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Vesuvius Day, belatedly

COMMEMORATION: Vesuvius Day 2020: History and Significance of the day (Rob Harris, Time Bulletin).


(My photo of Vesuvius from a conference in Naples in 2009)

The volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius took place on 24 August in 79 CE. A first-person account of it was published some decades later by Pliny the Younger in two letters to the Roman historian Tacitus. His uncle, Pliny the Elder, led a daring naval rescue mission into the eruption zone. Pliny's intervention may have saved something like 2000 people, the equivalent of about half the total death toll at Pompeii. The Elder Pliny died while doing scientific observations of the eruption.

Some think that a body recovered in a mass grave on the shores of the town of Stabiae is that of Pliny the Elder. I am skeptical, but who knows? That post sums up key developments around the eruption of Vesuvius so far in 2020 and gives links to many earlier posts. A couple of subsequent posts are here and here.

"Fortune favors the bold."

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Elymais coin recovered in Iran

NUMISMATIC APPREHENSION: Elymais coin found in southwestern Iran (Tehran Times).

The coin is unremarkable. I mention it because it has a nice connection with a story in the Old Testament Apocrypha.

Elymais was a region in the Parthian empire. It is mentioned in 1 Maccabees 6:1. The passage says that Antiochus IV Epiphanes noticed a wealthy city in Elymais whose riches seemed worth plundering. This did not go well for him.

Note that, contra the English translation linked to above, the better Greek reading in the verse says that the city was in Elymais, not that the city was Elymais. Elymais was a region not a city.

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The hanging and the cursing

PROF. RABBI MARTY LOCKSHIN: A Corpse Left Hanging Overnight Is a “Cursing of God” (TheTorah.com).

The body of an executed criminal is hanged but must be buried on the same day, כִּי קִלְלַת אֱלֹהִים תָּלוּי, “because a hanged body is a cursing of God” (Deut 21:23). What does this phrase mean?

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Incantation bowls in the classroom

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Incantation Bowls and Embodied Knowledge (Krista Dalton).

But rather than focus solely on cognition, I wanted to emphasize the embodied role of the ritual expert. This inspired me to bring incantation bowls into the classroom.

For many PaleoJudaica posts on Babylonian Aramaic incantation bowls, see here and links, here, and here. For another make-your-own project involving such bowls, see here

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What is a prophet like Moses?

PROF. KENNETH SEESKIN: Prophecy and Legislation After Moses (TheTorah.com).

Deuteronomy promises the Israelites that God will continue sending prophets “like Moses.” But if the Torah’s legislation cannot be adjusted, what is the role of later prophets? And how can all the changes to Torah law made by the rabbis be justified?

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Pajunen & Tervanotko (eds.) Crossing imaginary boundaries (on the DSS)

THE AWOL BLOG: Crossing imaginary boundaries: the Dead Sea Scrolls in the context of Second Temple Judaism. An open-access book edited by Mika S. Pajunen & Hanna Tervanotko and published by the Finnish Exegetical Society.

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C-14 calibration changes Coptic curve

VARIANT READINGS: A New Radiocarbon Calibration Curve and Early Christian Manuscripts (Brent Nongbri). The new INTCAL20 C-14 calibration shifts the probable date range of some Coptic (and presumably other) manuscripts to some decades later than previously thought.

For past posts on Carbon-14 dating, see here and links. Cross-file under Technology Watch and Coptic Watch.

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Lewis on writing a history of ancient Israelite religion

THE BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION:

The Fascination, Challenges, and Joys of Being a Historian of Ancient Israelite Religion

What is entailed in writing a history of ancient Israelite religion? How might the concept of divinity be used as an organizing principle to explore the wide variety of religious experiences? What skill-set is needed for such an undertaking, and what is the nature of our dataset? What can we conclude with any confidence when we acknowledge that we stand at such a vast distance?

See Also: The Origin and Character of God: Ancient Israelite Religion through the Lens of Divinity (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Theodore J. Lewis
Blum-Iwry Professor of Near Eastern Studies
Johns Hopkins University
August 2020

Cross-file under New Book.

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Burke on the not-so-lost gospels

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Christian Apocrypha: The “Lost Gospels”? Apocryphal texts and early Christianity. This BHD essay by Ellen White summarizes an article in the current issue of Biblical Archaeology Review by Tony Burke. As usual, the article itself is behind the subscription wall.

For more on More New Testament Apocrypha volume 2, edited by Professor Burke, see here, here, and here.

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Academic post in Syriac Christianity at Notre Dame

SYRIAC WATCH: Professor of Syriac Christianity, University of Notre Dame. Advert courtesy of NAPS. The job is full-time and tenure-track, at the assistant or associate professor level. The application deadline is 15 October 2020.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Høgenhaven, The Cave 3 Copper Scroll: A Symbolic Journey

NEW BOOK FROM BRILL:

The Cave 3 Copper Scroll: A Symbolic Journey

Series:
Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah, Volume: 132

Author: Jesper Høgenhaven

In The Cave 3 Copper Scroll: A Symbolic Journey, Jesper Høgenhavn presents a reading of the Copper Scroll as a literary text. For more than 60 years, scholars have debated whether or not the treasures recorded here reflect historical realities. This study argues that the dichotomy between “facts” and “fiction” is inadequate for a proper understanding of the Copper Scroll. The document was designed to convey specific images to its readers, thus staying true to the format of an instruction for retrieving hidden treasures. Yet, the evoked landscape is dense with symbolical associations, and the journey through it reflects deliberate narrative patterns. The scroll was written against the background of the social and political turmoil of Jewish Palestine in the 1st century CE, and reflects contemporary concerns and interests.

Prices from (excl. VAT): €116.00 / $140.00

E-Book (PDF)
Availability: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-42958-1
Publication Date: 13 Jul 2020
Hardback
Availability: Not Yet Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-42855-3
Publication Date: 19 Aug 2020

For many, many PaleoJudaica posts on the mysterious Copper Scroll, start here and just follow those links.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Testing the Canon of Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology (ed. Gansell & Shafer)

BIBLIOGRAPHIA IRANICA: Testing the Canon of Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology. Notice of a new book: Gansell, Amy & Ann Shafer (eds.). 2020. Testing the canon of ancient near eastern art and archaeology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The articles on the Cyrus Cylinder (cf. here) and on Hazor-Masada look particularly interesting.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

When God sends lying prophets

PROF. JAMES A. DIAMOND: Discerning False Prophecy: The Story of Ahab and the Lying Spirit (TheTorah.com).

Ahab’s 400 court prophets all assure him that he will defeat Aram, but the prophet Micaiah tells him that these prophets are being enticed by a lying spirit, sent by YHWH himself, for the purpose of destroying Ahab. If Ahab had been willing to face his own position vis-a-vis God honestly, he would have known who was telling the truth.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Authoritative Writings in Early Judaism and Early Christianity (ed. Nicklas & Schröter)

NEW BOOK FROM MOHR SIEBECK: Authoritative Writings in Early Judaism and Early Christianity: Their Origin, Collection, and Meaning. Ed. by Tobias Nicklas and Jens Schröter. 2020. VI, 356 pages. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 441.139,00 € including VAT. cloth ISBN 978-3-16-156094-1.

Published in English.
Recent scholarship on the history of the biblical canons has increasingly recognised that the Jewish and Christian Bibles were not formed independently of each other but amid controversial debate and competition. But what does it mean that the formation of the Christian Bible cannot be separated from the developments that led to the Jewish Bible? The articles in this collection start with the assumption that the authorization of writings had already begun in Israel and Judaism before the emergence of Christianity and was continued in the first centuries CE by Judaism and Christianity in their respective ways. They deal with a broad range of sources, such as writings which came to be part of the Hebrew Bible, literature from Qumran, the Septuagint, or early Jewish apocalypses. At the same time they deal, for example, with structures of authorization related to New Testament writings, examine the role of authoritative texts in so-called Gnostic schools, and discuss the authority of late antique apocryphal literature.

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Consolino & Herrin, The Early Middle Ages (Bible and Women series)

NEW BOOK FROM SBL PRESS:

The Early Middle Ages
Franca Ela Consolino (Editor), Judith Herrin (Editor)

ISBN 9781589835757
Status Available
Price: $59.00
Binding Paperback
Publication Date July 2020
Pages 420

Examine the creative, profound dialogue between medieval women and biblical traditions

The latest volume in the Bible and Women series examines the relationship between women and the Bible’s reception during the early Middle Ages (500–1100 CE) in both the Greek East and the Latin West. Essays focus on interactions between women and the Bible through biblical precepts on women and for women, biblical women as the subjects of action or objects of discussion, and writings by women that refer to the Bible as a moral authority. The women discussed in the volume range from the well-known—including the nuns Kassia in Byzantium and Hrosvita in the West; the aristocrat Dhuoda, author of a moral guide for her son; Gisela, the sister of Charlemagne and abbess of Chelles; and her niece Rotrude—to those who remain anonymous. Contributions also explore how the Old and New Testaments exercised influence on emerging Islam.

Features:

• Analysis of images of the Virgin Mary as a means of tracing the spread of her cult and feast days from East to West
  
• Exploration of the significance of classical culture for medieval women who composed poems for a Christian audience
  
• Evaluation of art as a means of establishing devotional relationships not necessarily mediated by the voices of preachers or the reading of texts

The volume focuses on Christian women and Christian reception, but it includes an article by Martha Himmelfarb on "The Virgin Mary and Ancient Jewish Literature."

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.