THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM is the subject of a new book by Rabbi Harold Kushner, profiled and excerpted by MSNBC. Excerpt from chapter one:

I would guess that there is one, and only one, chapter of the Bible that most people in the English-speaking world know by heart. We may remember a lot of stories about Adam and Eve, Noah, Joseph, and Moses. We may be able to recite the Ten Commandments, parts of the Sermon on the Mount, and other passages that have entered into our literature. But when it comes to an entire chapter, I suspect that the only one we remember completely is chapter twenty-three of the Book of Psalms, the Twenty-third Psalm, �The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. . . .�

Even if you cannot recite the entire psalm perfectly, you know it well enough to say it along with a congregation, the way many of us sing along with �The Star-Spangled Banner� at a baseball game. We are so familiar with the Twenty-third Psalm that when a new translation of the Bible comes along, using archaeological and linguistic evidence to help us understand more accurately what the original Hebrew and Greek meant to say, we are uncomfortable with the �improvements.� We welcome the rewording of the stories, stripped of the Elizabethan vocabulary of the four-hundred-year-old King James translation (done in the time of Shakespeare). We don�t miss the use of �begat� and �wouldst� and �thee� and �thou.� But when it comes to our favorite psalm, we crave familiarity more than accuracy.

Why do we love this psalm so much, more than any of the other 149 psalms in the Bible? Why do we reach for it at moments of personal distress, cherishing its recitation at funerals and memorial services? It is a beautiful literary creation, but the anthologies are full of beautiful writings, and they don�t capture our hearts as the Twenty-third Psalm does. In just a few lines, it conveys the distilled wisdom of generations, offering us a way of seeing the world that renders it less frightening, teaching us to deal with the loss of people we love and with conflict with people who don�t like us or who treat us badly. It shows us how to recognize the presence of God at times and in places where we might think God was absent or when we might be so distracted by our own concerns that we would overlook God�s presence. It has the power to teach us to think differently and, as a result, to act differently.

ASSIMILATED TO THE BLOGOSPHERE:

Dr. Mark Goodacre has just started the NT Gateway Weblog as a supplement to his superb New Testament Gateway website. Bookmark it now!

MORE ON THE MANDEANS IN IRAQ:

Dwindling sect attempts to rebuild in Iraq

By Pamela Hess
UPI Pentagon Correspondent
Published 9/2/2003 7:43 AM

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 2 (UPI) -- The end of the short war brought long-awaited news for the Mandeans, an obscure religious sect that follows the teachings of John the Baptist and takes a somewhat dim view of Christ and Mohammed though it respects all religions.

Documents recovered from the vaults of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein provided answers for what happened to 69 of the sect's members who disappeared. They were executed. A mass funeral laid their souls to rest Aug. 8.

The Mandeans, or Sabeans as they are known in Iraq, are still awaiting news of 73 others, all of who disappeared during the 40 years Saddam's Baath Party was in power. It's a paltry number compared to what other groups have lost to political violence in Iraq, but when you are among 20,000 like-minded believers, each one counts, says Alaa Dhlh Kamar, the spokesman for the church in Baghdad.

The U.S. led war exacted its own toll -- 31 Mandeans died in the bombing of Baghdad, 13 of them in a single house, Kamar said.

Despite the losses, which are felt grievously, it is a great relief for the Mandeans to be free of Saddam. The regime made a big show of allowing the Mandeans to practice their religion unfettered, as they were considered "people of the book" -- actually mentioned in the Koran -- but Kamar says it was just that: show.

"We practices freely in the public media only," he said.

The Mandeans were a periodic stop for the international media as it trouped through pre-war Baghdad. Their unusual baptismal ritual -- often once weekly, with the adherents in glowing white robes -- and multiple simultaneous weddings made for good television and good public relations for the regime, which systematically slaughtered Kurds, Shiites and political opponents.

[...]

The Mandeans were not allowed to have schools for their children to teach them the ancient Aramaic in which their sacred texts are written. Al-Ginza Raba, which means "the greatest treasury," their holy book was translated into Arabic by a famous Iraqi poet two years ago after more than 2,000 years in the lost language. The religion will have a hard time recovering from 40 years of oppression.

[...]

The article has lots more interesting details, so read it all.

PROFESSOR GARY LEUPP has published a piece on Mel Gibson's The Passion in Counterpunch. He is a specialist in Japanese history, but his essay, entitled "Gibson's Christ on Trial: Dispassionate Notes on the 'Passion' Controversy," is overall well informed and informative and you should take the time to read it in full. He has his own agenda, which is fair enough, but he does make a real effort to treat the matter dispassionately and the piece is a contribution to the debate. That said, I also think he gets it seriously wrong just in terms of fairness in one place, and in at least two others he gets some facts wrong. There are other places where I think the emphasis goes too far in a particular direction or where I want to quibble about details or where my opinions differ, but let those go.

The section I have serious problems with is the following:

8. Mel Gibson is a devout, if dissident, Catholic. Anti-abortion, pro-death penalty, and accused of hostility to feminists and gays, Gibson is no model of tolerance.

Actually, I thought that "tolerance" meant tolerating the views of people who disagree with you. Unfortunately, the politically correct meaning of tolerance is adhering to a particular political agenda and a particular set of political views and no others. It sounds suspiciously as though that is the operating definition here. Professor Leupp evidently is pro-choice and anti-death penalty. Fine. But are people who disagree with him by definition intolerant? Let's make it personal with a single example. I disagree with him on capital punishment. Am I intolerant as a result? I respect his view. Does he respect mine? I recognize that the issue is heavily debated and problematical and I regard my view as coming to terms with necessary evils. I have had many discussions with people who disagree with me and almost always I find them to have thoughtful and respectable reasons for their view. That sort of mutual respect and agreement to disagree is what I think of as tolerance. If Professor Leupp is labeling people who disagree with him on the issue of capital punishment as "no models of tolerance," well, he has the right to say and think whatever he likes, and I don't care if he approves of me or not, but I think that is an Orwellian and provincial opinion. If that's not what he was saying, I think he needs to speak more clearly. And if Gibson has said something outrageous about these subjects, let's hear it. Let's have links to the quotations in full context so we can judge it for ourselves.

But that is a minor point. It's the rest of the sentence that really crosses the line: "and accused of hostility to feminists and gays, Gibson is no model of tolerance." Being accused of something makes someone "no model of tolerance"? Since when? I challenge Professor Leupp either to show (again, links to quotes in full context, please) that Mel Gibson has actually said or done something disrespectful to feminists or gays or else to retract this statement. As it stands now, this just won't do.

The other two points are the following.

11. Objective historians consider the "real" history underlying the Passion storyline unclear. Most concede (although some scholars contest this) that there was a Jewish man living in the Roman province of Judea in the early first century CE who, killed ca. 30, became an object of worship of the Christian faith.

I know of no living, serious scholar in historical Jesus studies (and by "serious" I mean people who publish in the major peer-review journals and present papers at the major conferences) who holds the view that Jesus never existed. I'm not a historical Jesus specialist myself, but I do publish on Jesus sometimes, and I can tell you that the scholarly debate is on how much we can tell about the historical Jesus from our problematical sources, not whether he existed at all. If Professor Leupp has specific people in mind, I'd be interested in hearing names and references.

32. This concept of a god undergoing a horrible death, descending to the netherworld, the rising from the dead, offering salvation to humankind (or to select believers), is not unique to Christianity but occurs in other religions once popular in the Middle East. The Babylonian god Tammuz (earlier, the Sumerian god Dimmuzi) rises from the dead, due to the actions of the goddess Ishtar, on the third day.

It's been awhile since I've tried to keep up with Sumerology (although, again, I have published in the area in the past). But it's common knowledge that the idea that Dumuzi (not Dimmizi) was a dying and rising god has been refuted by better Sumerian sources. Samuel Noah Kramer talked about this long ago in The Sumerians, 153-60, and Thorkild Jacobsen reinforced it in The Treasures of Darkness, chapter 2. More recently, Jacobsen has an article on "Dumuzi" in the Encyclopedia of Religion. The whole category of "Dying and Rising Gods" is dubious. See the article with that title in the Encyclopedia of Religion by Jonathan Z. Smith. This point bears on #49 as well.

I hope at this point I don't really need to repeat that I am not defending The Passion; that I haven't seen it yet and won't have an opinion until I do; that the trailer gives me causes for concern; that I just think that the debate should proceed as accurately and fairly as possible; that my criticisms of what others say about it are intended to be constructive to those ends; and blah, blah, blah. I don't need to repeat all that, do I?

ROGUE CLASSICISM has its official launch today, with a very ambitious agenda. Later today we are promised an introduction to blogging and the nonsordid story of how David's blog came to be. This is one to bookmark. (Either that or click on the convenient PaleoJudaica link to the right, under weblogs, since you'll be visiting here already. Right?)

THE MINIMALIST-MAXIMALIST DEBATE is summarized for a popular audience in the article "The Old Testament wars: Is the Bible history or fiction?" in the Baltimore Sun, with mention of a number of recent books that bear in one way or another on the Bible's historical accuracy. Excerpt:

The extreme revisionist position, as summarized by William G. Dever in the March/April issue of Biblical Archaeology, is that the Hebrew Bible is the product of the religious and cultural identity crisis of Judaism in the Hellenistic era, dating from the fourth to the first centuries B.C.

This was a period in which Judaism came into full contact with Greek culture, and needed desperately to form a clear sense of its own identity in order to survive. According to the revisionists, the Torah is essentially literature, and is a "social construct" reflecting the religious interests and propaganda of a late, elitist theocratic party within Judaism.

According to these critics, there was not an "early Israel" as a distinct ethnic entity from the 13th to the 11th centuries B.C., as described by the Torah, no Judahite state before the late eighth century, and no significant political capital in Jerusalem before the second century B.C.

Even Dever himself, once thought of as a traditionalist, does not believe in the full accuracy of Hebrew text. In his Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 280 pages, $25), Dever says that while the Exodus stories "may rest on some historical foundations, however minimal," the Israelites did not spring primarily from the people who fled Egypt, as the Bible maintains.

THE TEN SEPHIROT are a theological construct integral to the Kabbalah. Eliezer Segal explains them at this link.

����������HE'S BACK! Indiana Jones will be limping through a fourth adventure. No word on what archaeological treasure he'll be raiding this time. Via Archaeology Magazine News, although I also saw it somewhere else earlier but I forget where.

UPDATE: It was in Phluzein.

MY SABBATICAL BEGINS TODAY. I have the whole academic year off to finish the book I'm writing on Christian transmission of Jewish Pseudepigrapha. Regular readers will be familiar with some of the work I have done in this area from draft papers here, here, and here. I intend to post more draft material from the book as the year progresses, so stay tuned.

All this means that the summer is over and I shall be very, very busy from now on. I still intend to post something here most every day, except when I'm out of town or have a cold or other major distraction, but I'm not going to allow myself to waste much time on the blog during the day. Longer, more analytic posts will have to wait for evenings and weekends � and then only as time and family permit, so commentary on really interesting articles and such may come with a certain time lag.

Still, as I said, I mean to provide you with something new here daily under normal circumstances. So do keep coming.

THE JERUSALEM POST has an editorial on Mel Gibson's The Passion:

Editorial: This battle is Christian, not Jewish (via Bible and Interpretation News)

It concludes:

Uncouth threats notwithstanding, stifling this film strikes one as wrongheaded and counterproductive. The best way to combat potential anti-Semitism here is to turn to our Christian friends.

It is they who should be trying to influence Gibson into removing from the movie elements which perpetuate the canard of deicide and eternal collective Jewish guilt. Failing that, they should be teaching the faithful that a true Christian rejects doctrinal anti-Semitism and all that comes with it. It is Christianity that must come to terms with its own theology and history, and decide whether it wants to allow Mel Gibson to steer it back to another era.

Leading Christian Zionist Rev. Elwood McQuaid strikes just the right note: For Christians, the Crucifixion "was a crime of humanity. Scapegoating Jewry is only a cop-out for the rest of us."

MAYBE NOT. According to this New York Times article, 20th Century Fox has declined to distribute Mel Gibson's The Passion. " Many executives in Hollywood say that Mr. Gibson's movie, which chronicles in bloody detail the last hours of Jesus' life, is potentially inflammatory and not commercial enough for a high-profile mainstream studio like Fox."

HERE'S WHAT'S BEEN HAPPENING lately on the Temple Mount.

THE LINKS COLUMN on the right has just been thoroughly updated. I have made small changes and corrections to the "About PaleoJudaica.com" page and (the space provider did this, not I) it also now has a slightly different address (http://www.flyservers.com/members4/paleojudaica.com/About%20PaleoJudaica.com.html - the "%20" can also be written as a single blank space). In the unlikely event that you have a link to it, you will need to update the link to get the latest version. In addition, in the links to other sites I have corrected a dead link and added about thirty new links, mostly to things I mentioned in the blog over the last few months, bringing the grand total to around 150. If you encounter any dead or incorrect links among them, please let me know.

I've already found several other pages I meant to add and I have a number of things in the queue to be profiled on the blog. I will add them as time permits. Meanwhile, there's a lot of new content in the links section. Enjoy.

GEORGE NICKELSBURG has a new book out:

Ancient Judaism and Christian Origins: Diversity, Continuity, and Transformation

Synopsis:

In the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, Christian scholars portrayed Judaism as the dark religious backdrop to the liberating events of Jesus� life and the rise of the early church. Since the 1950s, however, a dramatic shift has occurred in the study of Judaism, driven by new manuscript and archaeological discoveries and new methods and tools for analyzing sources. George Nickelsburg here provides a broad and synthesizing picture of the results of the past fifty years of scholarship on early Judaism and Christianity. He organizes his discussion around a number of traditional topics: scripture and tradition, Torah and the righteous life, God�s activity on humanity�s behalf, agents of God�s activity, eschatology, historical circumstances, and social settings. Each of the chapters discusses the findings of contemporary research on early Judaism, and then sketches the implications of this research for a possible reinterpretation of Christianity. Still, in the author�s view, there remains a major Jewish�Christian agenda yet to be developed and implemented.

THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST got it right too. Last week I watched the video: there are two crucifixion close-ups and both clearly show the nails going through the wrists, not the palms. I won't carp about the movie's historical inaccuracies and weirdnesses, since both the book and the movie make clear that the story is just the fantasy of Nikos Kazantzakis. But it's worth noting that, nevertheless, Martin Scorsese did bother to get that crucifixion detail right. I have some other comments that include spoilers, so if you haven't seen the movie and intend to, don't read the next paragraph.

I'm struck by the "Gnostic" themes taken up in the story, things found particularly in the Nag Hammadi library. The docetic myth, which inverts the traditional meaning of the crucifixion story, is itself inverted to a procosmic stance. And then there's laughing savior on the cross. For both, read The Apocalypse of Peter. Some of the Nag Hammadi texts also make Mary Magdalene a close confidante of Jesus, although not, um, that close (e.g., the Dialogue of the Savior and � the non-Nag Hammadi text in the Berlin Museum � the Gospel of Mary). The theme of the "holy whore" also appears: see for example The Thunder: Perfect Mind. I don't think Kazantzakis could have read all these in 1955 when the book was published, but perhaps he picked up on descriptions of similar heretical ideas criticized at length in the Church Fathers. Or maybe he just had Gnostic revelatory fantasies. If you're interested in this stuff, you should invest in James Robinson's (ed.) The Nag Hammadi Library, which translates the texts, and John Dart's The Jesus of Heresy and History (earlier title, The Laughing Savior) which gives a basic, nontechnical and user-friendly introduction to them and their context and implications. Unfortunately the latter is out of print, but you can pick up a used copy from Amazon at the link above. You can read selections from the Nag Hammadi texts, along with lots of other interesting information, at the Gnostic Society Library website.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS disses the Ten Commandments. A bit shrill, especially toward the end, but he makes some good points. Strangely, he seems to think it's debatable whether Moses was "pre-Christian."

MORE ARAMAIC ON THE BIG SCREEN:

SEPT. 5

The Order: Directed by Brian Helgeland. Starring Heath Ledger, Shannyn Sossamon, Mark Addy.

Ledger plays a New York priest investigating the death of the head of his order, whose body was covered in religious symbols and Aramaic writing. He heads off to Rome and discovers the murder may have been committed by a sect known as the Sin Eaters. Sossamon plays an artist whom he once helped by performing an exorcism on her, and Addy plays another priest who helps him out. Helgeland, who wrote the screenplay for L.A. Confidential, also directed A Knight's Tale.

I thought the Sin Eaters were British (scroll down for entry). What's with the Aramaic? Weird.

UPDATE: Anders at Phluzein comments.

A NEW REVIEW ARTICLE IN TC:

James A. Sanders, "Avenues of Access to Scripture in Early Jewish Literature," a review of David L. Washburn, A Catalog of Biblical Passages in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Abstract: David Washburn's A Catalog of Biblical Passages in the Dead Sea Scrolls is the latest example of an index or catalog of biblical passages found in early Jewish literature. It is compared with the earlier efforts by Scanlin, VanderKam/Flint, Abegg, and others. Despite its shortcomings, Washburn provides a useful tool for scholars, but future publications of a similar nature could be improved by considering the publications mentioned in the present article and by being more comprehensive in scope.

OUR SCHOOL LIBRARIAN just casually mentioned to me that for space reasons they have to get rid of Lane's multi-volume Arabic-English Lexicon and would I like it. Hyperventilating around the fangs I'd just grown, I told him yes please. Plus they're giving me the Lewis and Short Dictionary of Latin.

The Zayed Centre has officially been shut down for "engaging in a discourse that starkly contradicted the principles of interfaith tolerance."