MORE ON THE PROPOSED SILWAN HOUSE-DEMOLITIONS: This UPI article has lots of details from both sides of the controversy and is worth a read.

Palestinian neighborhood fears demolitions

[...]

The two-story house is one of 88 that Jerusalem's municipality says have been built illegally and should be removed to restore an open public area in the valley that it wants to make a national park. The archaeological and ancient remains in that area "have an international and national value and they give the city its status as one of the most valuable cities in the world," Jerusalem City Engineer Uri Shetrit said.

It is the most important archaeological site in the country, said Amihai Mazarm a professor at the Institute of Archaeology. Large areas have been excavated, King David's palace was probably there, but dense Arab and Jewish construction in recent years prevents archaeological digs, he told United Press International.

"The issue is who lives in the village (now), not where David walked 3,000 years ago. ... This cannot be a reason to take (down) houses of people who have lived here all their lives," said peace activist Meir Margalit of the Israel Committee Against House Demolitions.

Palestinians and peace activists suspect the municipality's moves in Silwan are part of Israel's efforts to surround Jerusalem's Arab neighborhoods with a string of Jewish homes. That would cut East Jerusalem from its West Bank hinterland and then East Jerusalem could hardly be the Palestinian state's future capital.

[...]

SPECIAL TREASURES of the Jewish Theological Seminary Library are now available for viewing online. Among these are Cairo Geniza fragments of Talmudic and other texts and of texts by Maimonides, including one containing his signature.

(Via Hagahot.)

MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN: Philologos has a good column on this mysterious phrase.

RIOTING OVER SUPPOSED GRAVES AT HIGHWAY 6:

Haredim riot in renewed grave protest
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS (Jerusalem Post)

Several dozen haredim pelted motorists, buses and police with stones Wednesday night at a central Jerusalem thoroughfare in renewed protest over what they believe is the desecration of ancient graves during construction of the trans-Israel highway, police said.

[...]

Once again, archaeologists say there are no ancient graves there.

ESCHATOLOGY IN THE NEWS: Arutz Sheva has a piece by one Moshe Lerman entitled In the Footsteps of the Moshiach," which gives a very (very) detailed exegesis of Daniel's seventy weeks (Daniel9:24-27) , combined with Lurianic Kabbalah, with the agenda of proving that Meir Kahane was the Messiah ben Joseph (the suffering messiah in rabbinic tradition who dies in battle -- I can't find a good link) and that the new Sanhedrin is predicted in scripture. If I am reading Lerman correctly, he reckons that Daniel's final seven weeks of years began around 1970 (20 years before Kahane's assassination). This is a wonderful modern-day example of actualization of scripture for current events in the exegete's time (one of my research interests for the second temple period). Which is by no means, of course, to endorse the writer's political views, exegesis, or forecasts.

BLOGGING -- how ... Ciceronian.

FIRE IN EIN GEDI:

Fire Destroys Part of Dead Sea Reserve


Tuesday May 31, 2005 9:31 PM

JERUSALEM (AP) - Two-thirds of Israel's Ein Gedi nature reserve was destroyed by fire Tuesday, causing considerable damage to animal and plant life in the lush oasis sandwiched between the harsh Judean Desert and the Dead Sea.

[...]

Also at risk are archaeological sites, including ruins from the Chalcolithic period about 4,000 B.C., when inhabitants first began to use copper. During the Byzantine period, the Jewish residents of the area built a synagogue there. Ein Gedi also is mentioned in the Bible.

The cause of the fire isn't known yet. It seems no one was injured, but there's nothing about whether any of the archaeological sites were damaged.

UPDATE: My doctoral student, Ian Werrett, e-mails to point to this Jerusalem Post article, which suggests that the fire was started by a cigarette. He adds:

As you know, I was on the archaeological team working at the Byzantine site in Ein Gedi in 1996/97 and, based on the description of the fire in the Jerusalem Post, I doubt that it came anywhere near the Byzantine site or the ancient tell of Ein Gedi. It sounds to me that the fire happened in Nahal David, which is half a mile or so to the west of these two sites. Having said that, the Chalcolithic site is on the cliffs above Nahal David and could have been damaged but, if memory serves, there is little to no vegetation around the Chalcolithic ruins.

GRAVE CONTROVERSY CONTINUES: The construction of Highway 6 near Kibbutz Regavim is proceeding again, despite Hareidi Orthodox protests, but the Israeli Transportation Minister has promised to stop it if any ancient graves are actually found.

THE PLAN TO DEMOLISH PALESTINIAN HOMES IN SILWAN is receiving vigorous press coverage. There are articles in the Jerusalem Post, Ha'aretz, Al Jazeera, and the Scotsman. Reuters considers whether the demolition of a mosque is involved and Scoop reports that there will be a protest rally in Silwan this afternoon.

OXYRHYNCHUS PAPYRI WATCH: The New York Times has an article ("Historical Discovery? Well, Yes and No") which explicitly corrects some of the excesses of the Independent article that started the whole media discussion. Excerpt:

As is so often the case with British newspapers, the Independent article turned out to be both true and not true. It was right to say that new technology was indeed making it easier, in some cases, to read the Oxyrhynchus material, and that new discoveries were being made. But it was not right to say that the technology had just been discovered, or that it was functioning as a sort of Rosetta stone, or that so many new revelations were emerging as to herald "a second Renaissance."

"This stuff has been coming out for years now, and some of the things mentioned in the Independent story are months or years old," said Dr. James Romm, an associate professor of classics at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., and the director of its classical studies program. He called the article "very much overhyped" in a field where any public attention at all is rare.

"I'd love to know who first talked to whom in order to generate such good P.R," Dr. Romm said in an interview. "There is material coming out from those authors, but it's coming out in dribs and drabs."

(Via Rogue Classicism.)

UPDATE: Just occurred to me to ask, why the qualification "British newspapers" in the first quoted sentence? Sounds pretty typical of the press to me. The New York Times is not exempt. (See also here and here.)

ILLEGAL PALESTINIAN HOUSING in the vicinity of early Jerusalem is slated to be demolished:

Jerusalem to raze Silwan homes
By Meron Rapoport (Ha'aretz)

The Jerusalem Municipality has begun proceedings to raze 88 buildings housing some 1,000 residents in the Silwan neighborhood, to "restore the area to its landscape of yore," according to the city engineer, Uri Shetrit. The demolition, if it goes ahead, will be among the largest to take place in East Jerusalem since 1967.

The Silwan houses are within a neighborhood the Palestinians call "al-Bustan" and the municipality calls "King's Valley." It's located inside the wadi sloping down from the City of David, below the Old City, adjacent to the compound settled by Jews from the non-profit organization Elad. Wadia al-Fahari, who is coordinating residents' action, says that the neighborhood's earliest houses date from the 1940s and `50s, and most houses were built in the late 1980s and early `90s on private land belonging to Silwan villagers.

Shetrit issued a letter in November 2004 "ordering the removal of illegal construction in King's Valley." Shetrit's letter explained that the area is "the beginnings of Jerusalem" from 5,000 years ago, and that "King's Valley, along with the tel of David's City, constitutes an entire archaeological entity in which all of the sites are interconnected."

[...]

If the demolition proceeds, I imagine it will be controversial.

A DEAD SEA SCROLLS MUSEUM IN TENNESSEE? Maybe. The curator (owner?) of the Ink and Blood exhibition seems to be setting out to found one.

Biblical museum possible for 'Boro

By ERIN EDGEMON (Daily News Journal)
edgemon@dnj.com

The curator of a traveling exhibit of authentic Dead Sea Scroll fragments and rare Bibles said Murfreesboro would be his first choice for a permanent museum to display the massive collection of artifacts and manuscripts.

A 10-15 acre site near state Route 840 and Interstate 24 in Rutherford County would be the perfect location, said William Noah, a local physician and exhibit curator.

[...]

Artifacts now on exhibit range from fragments of Dead Sea Scroll fragments, the very earliest biblical fragments in existence; ancient inkwells that date from 2000 B.C. to the time of Christ; Proto Cuneiform clay tablets, pictographic writings dating from 3100 B.C.; and Roman artifacts such as coins, medical instruments and Byzantine jewelry.

A nonprofit entity � the National Museum of Biblical History � was formed this year as a fund-raising vehicle for the permanent museum of the same name. A portion of the proceeds of the Ink & Blood Dead Sea Scrolls to the English Bible Museum beginning with the Lexington, Ky. exhibit, which opens in Lexington Center June 24, will go toward funding the museum.

John Kea, chairman of the nonprofit board, said he expects it to be a number of years before the museum will become a reality.

[...]

OXYRHYNCHUS PAPYRI (ETC.) WATCH: The Washington Post has an article ("Imaging Technology Makes Ancient Text Readable") on the use of multispectral imaging on the Oxyrhynchus papyri and the Herculaneum scrolls, with special attention to work at BYU. On a quick read-through I didn't see any notable inaccuracies. A couple of excerpts:

Obbink, who holds appointments at both Oxford and the University of Michigan, is a leading authority on ancient classics and conservation. He won a 2001 MacArthur Fellowship for his work at both Oxyrhynchus and Herculaneum. In 1996, he reconstructed Philodemus's "On Piety," a treatise on the gods and religion, from seemingly disparate pieces of the Herculaneum scrolls.

At Oxyrhynchus, Obbink is trying to repeat this achievement by recovering Hesiod's "Catalogue of Women," a genealogy describing the love affairs of gods with mortals and the offspring they produced. "We have so many pieces now that the text can be said to exist," Obbink said. "There are a lot of gaps, but you can read it."

That being the case, the following is especially interesting to someone who works on the Old Testament pseudepigrapha, which often were written in or now survive translated into most of these same languages:

Obbink and his colleagues have found a variety of languages and scripts in the fragments. Besides Greek and Latin, they include Hieratic (cursive hieroglyphs), Demotic (hieroglyphic shorthand), Coptic (Egyptian with the Greek alphabet), Aramaic, Hebrew, Persian, Old Nubian, Syriac and, in the later deposits, Arabic.

Obbink is going through 725 boxes of material to pick out the promising fragments, which are assigned to students "who translate them and try to figure them out," he said. "It's part of learning Greek and Latin, and it sharpens your editing skills."

TODAY the annual Scottish Universities postgraduate day-conference is taking place here in St. Andrews, with St. Mary's College (and, more specifically, yours truly) as host. We have 20 student papers and a keynote address by Professor Philip Elser. It will be a very full day and I have commitments in the evening as well. I will try to do some blogging if I get a few minutes free here or there, but no promises.

UPDATE: The conference went very well, with 55-60 attending from St. Andrews, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Glasgow, and Stirling. Many thanks to all who participated, attended, and helped out.

CHILD SACRIFICE IN CARTHAGE UPDATE: Philip Harland agrees with me and N. S. Gill provides some background links.

THE TALMUD ON WHEN LIFE BEGINS? The Washington Post has an article today on the theological debate over the use of stem cells, a subject that has been touched on before in PaleoJudaica. I'm not interested in getting into the debate, but this paragraph caught my eye (my emphasis):

DeLay and others who oppose stem cell research on theological grounds might be surprised to learn that it is not Abraham but Adam whose life and circumstances are interpreted by Jewish and Muslim thinkers when they assess the morality of this science. In Genesis, God breathes into a lump of clay to form the first man, Adam. Thus, life is seen as beginning when organs, particularly the lungs, develop, since it is then that the vital spirit arrives. The Talmud states that before 40 days, what is in the uterus is akin to water, not a human being. DeLay would do well to return to the Bible, because rabbis and imams who read it as their source of inspiration would not concur that Abraham's life and Muhammad's life were defined some seven to eight days after their conception, the time when researchers take stem cells from the blastocyst.

Is it true that the Talmud says this? If so, can anyone give me the reference?

UPDATE: Nachum J. Stone refers me to Bekhorot 21b and Carla Sulzbach to Yebamoth 69b.

UPDATE (1 June): For somewhat related matters, see my earlier post "Abortion and the Torah."

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: It appears that a terrorist attack has been narrowly averted.

2 armed Palestinians arrested at J'lem checkpoint
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS (Jerusalem Post)

Two Palestinians were arrested Friday at a checkpoint outside of Jerusalem after three firebombs were found in their possession, police said.

The two 20-year-old suspects told police interrogators they had heard on the news that a group of Jewish extremists were preparing to ascend the Temple Mount, and that they were planning to use explosives against them, Jerusalem Police spokesperson Shmuel Ben-Ruby said.

Well spotted.

LAWRENCE MYKYTIUK, who has appeared before in PaleoJudaica (here, here, and here), has now published his book on Israelite epigraphy. Purdue University has a press release about it.

Researcher develops methods to test artifacts' links to the Bible

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. � A Purdue University professor has invented a system to judge whether ancient inscriptions refer to people in the Bible.

Lawrence Mykytiuk (MICK-ee-took) uses the system to test whether archaeological inscriptions refer to ancient Hebrew kings such as David, Omri, Jeroboam II, Uzziah and other Old Testament personages such as Mesha and the high priest Hilkiah. The system and results are detailed in his new book, "Identifying Biblical Persons in Northwest Semitic Inscriptions of 1200-539 B.C.E." (Society of Biblical Literature, $42.95).

[...]

I look forward to reading it.

SPEAKING OF HISTORICAL REVISIONISM, David Bernstein over at the Volokh Conspiracy draws attention to the Egyptian State Information Service's web page on "Jerusalem in history", which has many wild, tendentious, historical errors. I doubt that I've caught all of them, but here are some.

Historical facts prove that Jerusalem has witnessed Arab urban and human stability since the year 3000 BC. In 2500 BC, Arab Jebusites, descendants of the Jebusite Ben Canaan, made the City their capital and called it Orsalem, from which the Europeans derived Jerusalem, which means the City of Light.

The "Jebusites" are mentioned in the Hebrew Bible as one of the pre-Israelite peoples in the land. The word may be an Amorite name. The Amorites, for whatever it's worth, spoke Northwest Semitic dialects related to Hebrew, not Southern Semitic Arabic. The Bible associates the Jebusites with Jerusalem and give pre-Israelite names of kings of Jerusalem as Melchizedek (Genesis 14:18) and Adoni-zedek (Joshua 10:1-4), again, West Semitic names, not Arabic ones. In any case, we are deep in the realm of legend here and we cannot say with any confidence what the ethnic background of the Jebusites was. There is no positive evidence of their being Arabs and such evidence as we have indicates that they were not.

The etymology of the name "Jerusalem" is not very clear, but it doesn't mean "City of Light." It looks like a West Semitic name (again, related to Hebrew but not Arabic), perhaps meaning "foundation of (the god) Shalim" or some such.

The Chaldean King Nebuchadnezzar expelled the Jews from the two kingdoms. In 580 BC, he destroyed the City, burned the Temple and expatriated the Jews to Babylon in Iraq.

Since then, namely 600 years BC, the political history of the Jews had ended in Palestine.

Actually Nebuchadnezzar's destruction of Jerusalem was in 586/87 BCE, but let's not quibble. The last sentence is misleading. It is true that from this point on Judea was almost always under foreign rule, but there remained a large Jewish population in Palestine with a considerable political presence. Note that this section entirely ignores the second temple, which stood in Jerusalem between about 520 BCE and 70 CE.

In 232 BC., Alexander the Great invaded Palestine and annexed it to the Greek Empire. Afterwards, Mark Antonio reinvaded it in 189 BC. Then came the Nabataean Arabs to invade it in 90 BC as was annexed to their capital till the Roman invasion in the 1st. Century AD.

Alexander the Great's dates are 356-323 BCE. Mark Antony's are c. 83-30 BCE. The Nabatean King Obodas I defeated Alexander Jannaeus in 90 BCE and took territory from him (Moab and Gilead) but he did not annex Palestine.

Under the Roman reign, the Jews informed the Roman ruler about Jesus Christ in 27 AD and accused him of atheism. Consequently, the Roman ruler crushed them all and destroyed the City and established a new one where the Jews were inhibited to enter.

The causes of the Jewish revolt against Rome in 66-70 CE are complex, but the issues did not have to do with Jesus.

1- Excavations under the western wall (the base of the so-called Wailing Wall) proved nothing related to the Israelis. All What they found were only two sentences on some rocks about Isaiah engraved in type of writing that makes attributing them to Kings David or Solomon impossible.

This is so garbled that I'm not at all sure what it is supposed to mean. I am not aware of any inscriptions found under the Western Wall or which mention Isaiah. A Hebrew inscription from Silwan village from roughly the time of Isaiah comes from a tomb that may be mentioned in Isaiah 22:15-16. That and the Siloam tunnel inscription (cf. here) do demonstrate that the people living in Jerusalem and its vicinity c. 700 BCE spoke Hebrew and engaged in substantial public works in the city.

2- Excavations proved that the Jewish temple had been totally ruined thousands of years ago. This was clearly cited in the relevant Jewish references. Dr. Cathleen Cabinpus, Director of Excavations in the Jerusalem-based School for Monuments, affirmed that there was no trace of the Temple of Solomon.

Yes, the Jewish (second) temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, pretty close to 2000 years ago. I am not sure what that is supposed to prove. It was there for centuries. And yes, no archaeological remains of the first temple have been found, but given Herod's extensive rebuilding and expansion of the Temple Platform, the remains of the first temple may have been virtually entirely removed in his time. In any case, given the lack of access to the site by archaeologists and the deliberate destruction wreaked upon it by the Palestinian Authority, there hasn't been much opportunity to check. The recent salvage operation (follow the last link) has found material culture (including Hebrew inscriptions) from both the first and second temple periods.

4- There is no historical evidence that Al Bouraq Wall, the so-called Wailing Wall, was part of the Temple of Solomon. Besides, the real name of this wall is Al Bouraq Wall as mentioned by Prophet Mohammed, PBUH in his Hadith (speech) about his journey from Mecca to Jerusalem and his Ascension to seventh heavens.

Whatever one calls it, the "Wailing Wall" is part of the Temple Platform built by Herod the Great, not Solomon (no one claims it is Solomonic), and clearly dates to the Herodian period (around the turn of the era -- 2000 years ago). Herod's work, particularly on the temple, is mentioned frequently in contemporary literature. There was no such massive construction project on the Temple Mount in the Islamic period.

Now let us be clear: this is a website published by the Egyptian Government. It is riddled with both tendentious and simply careless errors about the history of Jerusalem. If this is what they come up with on matters about which I know something, I'm not inclined to assume that anything else they say is reliable.

UPDATE (28 May): Reader Gary Greenberg e-mails:

In your comment on the Egyptian Government's lies about Jerusalem, you might have noted in response that the Maccabees ruled an independent Jewish empire about as large as David's for about a century prior to the Roman conquest.

Yes, that's another one. You can read more about the Hasmonean dynasty (142-63 BCE) here and here. Also, an independent Jewish goverment was declared during the Bar Kokhba revolt (132-135 CE), but although the revolutionaries controlled much of the countryside, they appear not to have gained control of Jerusalem, and the Romans put the revolt down after a few years.

UPDATE (2 June): An article in the Forward gives some Egyptian political context for this sort of thing: "Report Slams Egypt Over Antisemitism."

UPDATE (1 July): Greetings, History Carnival XI readers. You may also be interested in reading my recent article, "Assimilated to the Blogosphere: Blogging Ancient Judaism."

DELENDA EST CARTHAGO -- NOT? Tunisians are now claiming that the ancient Carthaginians did not engage in child sacrifice.

Carthage tries to live down image as site of infanticide

Thursday, May 26, 2005
By Andrew Higgins, The Wall Street Journal [reprinted in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette)

CARTHAGE, Tunisia -- Mhamed Hassine Fantar has a bone to pick with the Roman Empire, French writer Gustave Flaubert and a group of Americans who specialize in digging up old graves.

An expert on ancient Carthage -- a city obliterated by the Romans more than 2,000 years ago -- Mr. Fantar is campaigning to clear his forefathers of a nasty stigma: a reputation for infanticide.

"We didn't do it," says the 69-year-old archaeologist, rejecting accusations that the ancient citizens of this North African land sacrificed babies to appease their gods.

At a time of roiling debate across the Arab world about the future, rewriting the distant past can also be an urgent matter. Modern Carthage, dotted with ancient ruins and the luxury villas of the nation's current elite, looms large in Tunisia today. The country's president, an admirer of Mr. Fantar's work, lives here in a waterfront palace. Tunisia's national identity, forged by a secular regime fearful of political Islam, rests on the celebration of Carthage's pre-Islamic glories.

[...]

A major excavator of Carthage disagrees:

Lawrence Stager, a Harvard University archaeology professor and expert on the subject, calls the revisionism a whitewash. He's now editing a book that will include the results of long forensic analysis of charred bones he helped dig up in Carthage in the 1970s. This, says Mr. Stager, will prove beyond reasonable doubt that Mr. Fantar and his followers are wrong. Still, he isn't expecting to win them over. "No one really relishes having ancestors who committed such heinous acts," he says.

Human sacrifice was common in many ancient cultures. But Carthage was particularly notorious, branded as a serial killer of children for at least 600 years in a site now known as the Tophet, a Hebrew word meaning "roaster" or "place of burning." Most Western scholars believe the practice was organized around the worship of two deities. Mr. Stager says it may also have been a primitive mechanism of population control. Others suggest a more sporadic activity connected to spring fertility rights.

I'm pretty suspicious of this sort of revisionism that comes an obvious political agenda. But it's not my area of expertise. For the debate between Professor Stager and Mr. Fantar see here. (Full disclosure: Larry Stager is one of my teachers.)

UPDATE (29 May): More here.