BREVARD CHILDS is dead at the age of 83. The Yale Divinity School has an obituary:

Brevard S. Childs, an iconic figure in biblical scholarship, dies at 83

Brevard S. Childs, one of the most influential Old Testament scholars of the 20 th century, died Saturday afternoon in New Haven at the age of 83 from complications from injuries sustained in a fall in his home.

[...]

As noted in the obituary, St. Andrews Divinity postgraduate Daniel Driver has a Brevard S. Childs website with lots of additional information. Daniel also has a blog, Occasional Publications, whose most recent post is a tribute to Childs.

Requiescat in pace.

JEWISH MAGIC makes an appearance in a conference on health in the Middle Ages at the University of Nottingham:

Demonic Possession And Miraculous Healing

Science Daily — Latest research into health in medieval Europe — taking in everything from demonic possession to miracles of healing — is to be revealed at The University of Nottingham.

Experts from all over the world are gathering at the University to exchange their latest findings on concepts of 'Health and the Healthy Body' in early medieval times, 400-1200AD.

[...]

The lecture in question is:

'”This should not be shown to a gentile”: Medico-magical entries in medieval Franco-German Hebrew manuscripts and their social significance', Ephraim Shoham-Steiner, Ben-Gurion University, Israel. Includes a discussion of texts detailing short potions, charms and medical remedies in the pages of Hebrew manuscripts.

SOME FAMOUS SKELETONS FROM MASADA are being given a new interpretation:

Researchers claim to have solved mystery of Masada remains (The Scotsman)
MATTI FRIEDMAN IN MASADA

AN ISRAELI anthropologist is using modern forensic techniques and an obscure biblical passage to challenge the accepted wisdom about human remains found at Masada, the desert fortress famous as the scene of a mass suicide nearly 2,000 years ago.

A new research paper re-examines the remains of three people found in a bathhouse at the site - two male skeletons and a woman's full head of hair, including two braids.
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They were long thought to have belonged to a family of Zealots - the fanatic Jewish rebels said to have killed themselves rather than fall into Roman slavery in the spring of 73AD, a story that became part of Israel's national mythology.

The bodies found at Masada were recognised as Jewish heroes by Israel in 1969 and given a state burial.

But now it seems Israel might have mistakenly bestowed the honour on three Romans, according to the paper, published yesterday in the journal Near Eastern Archaeology by anthropologist Dr Joe Zias and forensics expert Azriel Gorski.

[...]

Actually the occupiers of Masada were Sicarii, not Zealots.

The core argument is given as follows:

The new paper focuses on the hair, noting the absence of a skeleton to go with it. Forensic analysis showed the hair had been cut off the woman's head with a sharp instrument while she was still alive.

Dr Zias' attempt to explain the discrepancy led him to the Old Testament's Book of Deuteronomy, where a passage says that foreign women captured in battle by Jews must cut off all their hair, apparently in an attempt to make them less attractive to their captors.

He thus concluded that the hair belonged not to a Jewish woman but to a captured foreign woman.

In his scenario, the woman was attached to the Roman garrison stationed at Masada at the time the Zealots took over the fortress and killed the Roman soldiers. Jewish fighters threw two Roman bodies into the bathhouse, and then treated the woman captive according to Jewish law, cutting off her hair, which they threw in along with the bodies.

Typically, the article does not give the biblical reference. The passage in question seems to be Deuterononmy 21:10-14:

10: "When you go forth to war against your enemies, and the LORD your God gives them into your hands, and you take them captive,
11: and see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you have desire for her and would take her for yourself as wife,
12: then you shall bring her home to your house, and she shall shave her head and pare her nails.
13: And she shall put off her captive's garb, and shall remain in your house and bewail her father and her mother a full month; after that you may go in to her, and be her husband, and she shall be your wife.
14: Then, if you have no delight in her, you shall let her go where she will; but you shall not sell her for money, you shall not treat her as a slave, since you have humiliated her.

If this passage applies to the Masada scenario, it would imply that one of the Sicarii occupiers had taken the captured gentile woman as a wife. It doesn't seem likely to me that an eligible woman would have been found in a remote Roman garrison, but I suppose it isn't entirely impossible. One question is whether she had to be an unmarried virgin. The passage seems to imply this, since she only bewails her mother and father, not her (dead?) husband or her children. Still, the earlier passage in Deuteronomy 20:10-15 which deals with holy war commands the preservation of all women as "booty," which may imply that any captured woman could be taken as a wife or concubine:

10: "When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it.
11: And if its answer to you is peace and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you.
12: But if it makes no peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it;
13: and when the LORD your God gives it into your hand you shall put all its males to the sword,
14: but the women and the little ones, the cattle, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as booty for yourselves; and you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the LORD your God has given you.
15: Thus you shall do to all the cities which are very far from you, which are not cities of the nations here.

I would not have expected that whole families would be living in the garrison at Masada with women potentially eligible if captured, but I don't know much about the social organization of Roman garrisons in the provinces.

Incidentally, I read the hair and nail cutting in Deuteronomy 21 to be a rite of passage to mark the woman's changed status, not any effort to make her less attractive.

Anyhow, an interesting theory to go with an odd piece of evidence from Masada. I'll try to get a chance to look up the article, which doubtless presents the arguments much more clearly and in greater detail.

UPDATE: It's actually an AP article and the Washington Post has a more complete version. Note in particular the following:

Ehud Netzer, a veteran Hebrew University archaeologist who participated in the 1960s dig and later oversaw restoration work there, questioned the new findings.

Zias is "building a story on assumptions built on assumptions," he said.

"I think that with the existing information, you can't make such theories, and I think that those people should be allowed to rest in peace," Netzer said.

UPDATE (26 June): Joe Zias kindly sent me a copy of the article and it does clarify one of my questions above, about women at provincial Roman garrisons in this period:

As to the inevitable question of a woman garrisoned atop Masada prior to its capture by the Zealots, a cache of documents found preserved in a Roman period fort in northern Britain reveal that higher-level Roman officers and soldiers often brought women with them during military campaigns (Bowman 1994: 51–65). Therefore the shorn woman may have been married or at least related to one of the two males killed and thrown into the Northern Palace bathhouse. Her braided hair however suggests that she was married, since a woman in the Greco-Roman world changed her hairstyle after marriage to symbolize her unavailability to any man but her husband (Cosgrove 2005).

Bowman 1994 is the following:

Bowman, A. K.
1994 Life and Letters on the Roman Frontier: Vindolanda and It’s
People. London: British Museum Press.

The slightly later garrison at Vindolanda did, of course, include whole families.

UPDATE (27 June): Josh Waxman comments at Parshablog.

THE HOLY GRAIL is in the news. Science Daily has the following:

Archeologist says Holy Grail is in Rome

ROME, June 21 (UPI) -- An Italian archeologist says the Holy Grail -- a cup used by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper -- is buried beneath a church in Rome.

Alfredo Barbagallo said ancient records show the cup is buried in a chamber beneath the Basilica of San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura, one of the seven churches Christian pilgrims used to visit when they came to Rome, The (London) Telegraph said Thursday.

[...]

I'm in a hurry and and can't locate the Telegraph article right now. As for the Grail, I'll believe it when I see it.

For earlier PaleoJudaica coverage of Holy Grail news, see here and here.

THE JERUSALEM FORGERY CONFERENCE, convened by the Biblical Archaeology Society in January of this year, is the subject of a special report on the BAS website. There's also an audio file of the paper by Gabriel Barkay.

(Via Joseph I. Lauer's list.)

HAPPY SUMMER SOLSTICE to all those celebrating.

AN EGYPTIAN JEWISH MUSEUM? An outfit I don't know called "AME Info" has the following interesting brief item:

Egypt resisting Jewish museum

Talks between Egypt and Israel to open a Jewish museum in Cairo are making minimal progress, according to eTN. The Jewish Community Council in Cairo believes there are enough Jewish monuments and artifacts in Egypt to build a museum. But many Egyptian archaeologists dispute the country's Jewish history, and claim that only indigenous Egyptian artifacts have been found in areas that Jewish scholars claim have Hebrew history.

It's heartening that the idea of a Jewish museum seems at least to be under discussion. Certainly there would be ample material. There is the Ben Ezra Synagogue and attached Cairo Geniza; the excavated ruins at Elephantine and the Jewish Aramaic papyri discovered there (some of which are currently in the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities); many Jewish and biblical texts among the Oxyrhynchus papyri; legends about the translation of the Septuagint in association with the Library of Alexandria; lots of Jewish traditions associated with Alexandria, notably the works of the philosopher Philo. And so on and so on. (See also the material collected in this TourEgypt! article by one Jimmy Dunn [not the Durham NT scholar of the same name!].)

I hope this concept of an Egyptian Jewish Museum gains some traction, although I don't doubt it will be resisted.

On a related note, in the last few days I've been meaning to point out that Egypt Today had an article celbrating Egypt's rich religious heritage, but unfortunately the article would lead us to believe that these consist only of Islamic and Christian sites. The closest we come to Jewish sites is this, listed under Christian sites:

If hiking’s your cup of tea, head to the Sinai and trek up Mount Sinai to watch the sunrise from the spot where it is believed the prophet Moses received the Ten Commandments from God. St. Catherine’s Monastery below shelters the Burning Bush of Old Testament fame, and an impressive collection of icons and jeweled crosses.

It's also odd that the TourEgypt! website entry for Elephantine Island makes no mention of the Jewish garrison and Jewish papyri excavated there, although the other TourEgypt! piece cited above does mention them.

THIS WEEK I have to attend seven graduation ceremonies (plus a rehearsal), four lunches, and two dinners as Principal of St. Mary's College and Dean of the School of Divinity. Blogging, if any, is likely to be light!

THE MODERN HISTORY OF THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS, with special reference to the controvery about access to them up to 1991, is surveyed in an article in the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. Surprisingly, it says nothing about the role of the Huntington Library in the controversy when it released its Scrolls microfilms in 1991.

I think the piece is a little hard on the original Christian team, who did put a lot of effort into placing the Scrolls into their Jewish context, although they also were understandably quite interested in their Christian background and they did neglect (through lack of specialist knowledge) connections with Rabbinic literature. And I don't think that any of the team members argued that the "sectarians were proto-Christians," in the sense of their having some clear genetic connection with Christianity. That the form of Judaism represented by the Scrolls had some interesting overlaps with Christianity is hardly under debate.

The article could also have mentioned that the original team spent ten years piecing together the bits of manuscripts that came from Cave Four. The Scrolls did not land in our hands in anything like complete manuscripts. I like to say that their reconstruction was like taking a thousand jigsaw puzzles, mixing them all together, throwing away most of the boxes, discarding 80-90% of the mixed pieces, then trying to reconstruct the puzzles. However much you want to criticize the original team for their policies on access, the collating of the scattered fragments into what was left of the individual manuscripts was a heroic piece of work that took up a large chunk of their careers and for which they rarely receive explicit credit. This article is a case in point.

(Full disclosure: I was one of the postgraduates in the 1980s who received Scrolls from team members to publish in our doctoral dissertations. For the record, I did not turn down any requests from scholars to see the material I was working on, and as far as I know, none of those other postgrads did either.)

A DEAD SEA SCROLL and some other ancient manuscripts are on display next week at ACTS Bible College in Minnesota:

A manuscript fragment in Hebrew on brown leather, the beginning of a scroll with characters in a Herodian Hebrew book script, dating from the late first century A.D.

There's a photo of the scroll as well (click on it to enlarge).

SOME OF NEWTON'S THEOLOGICAL AND APOCALYPTIC WRITINGS are on display at the Hebrew University's National Library:

Father of modern science calculated: World to end in 2060
By Ofri Ilani (Haaretz)

At the top of the ancient, densely written English manuscript a verse in Hebrew stands out: "Blessed is the name of His glorious kingdom for ever." Other pages contain sketches of the Temple and calculations of the end of the world, based on verses from the Book of Daniel. The author of these mysterious ruminations was not a sorcerer nor a religious fanatic but none other than Isaac Newton, the 17th-century mathematician and physicist considered the most influential scientist of all time.

Newton's original theological and mystical writings will be on display in a special exhibition entitled "Newton's Secrets," opening today at the National Library at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This is the first time the manuscripts, in Israel since 1969, have been presented to the public. A digital version of some of the letters can be seen on the National Library's site: at www.tinyurl.com/28ervr.

One of the most intersting manuscripts is a letter from 1704, in which Newton calculates that the world will end in 2060, based on a phrase from Daniel 12:7 "for a time, times, and a half." Newton interpreted this phrase as meaning 1,260 years would pass from the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire by Charlemagne in 800, until the End of Days.

[...]

THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON meets the Mafia.

HEROD THE GREAT'S ACCOMPLISHMENTS are reflected on in Forbes:

Herod's Lost City
Todd Pitock 06.18.07

From the shoreline of Caesarea on Israel's north coast, it's just a few fin kicks and a short descent below the sun-glazed surface of the Mediterranean until you reach the sunken ruins of the harbor that made this one of the great cities of antiquity.

My dive-buddy, Avi Baz, is a buoyant 56-year-old spirit who can go to depths on either of two of his favorite subjects: diving and Caesarea. Like most Israelis, he is fluent in Hebrew, English and politics. We float on our backs a couple of hundred yards toward a buoy that marks one point of entry into Caesarea's newly opened Underwater Archeology Park, a roped trail where recreational divers can view artifacts and excavated ruins along the contours of the sunken marina.

"The visibility will be excellent," Avi says. "I tell you, there is nothing like this in the world. Do you realize," he adds, "that after the fall of the Roman Empire, the technological know-how [that built this port] disappeared for more than 14 centuries?"

[...]

QUMRAN ENTERS VIRTUAL REALITY:

Armchair archeologists can explore Qumran virtually
By Tom Tugend, Contributing Writer (Jewish Journal)

After glancing at the nearby caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were stored, I walked through the entrance to the main building at Qumran, checked out the scriptorium with its ink wells and oil lamps and the pottery-making workshop, and then up to the four-story tower for spotting approaching Roman legions.

Although it was a hot day, I was perfectly comfortable because my virtual walking tour of the desert settlement was conducted at a sophisticated UCLA computer site, courtesy of the Qumran Visualization Project.

"What we've built here is a fully reconstructed, three-dimensional, real-time, interactive model of Khirbet Qumran," explained Robert C. Cargill, a graduate student in the UCLA Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures.

Joining Cargill was his department chairman, professor William Schniedewind, who initiated the project to graphically enliven his class on ancient Israel and to probe current scholarly disputes on the genesis of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

[...]

Cargill and Schniedewind, who developed the computer model over a 15-month period, plan to eventually replace the panoramic photography with satellite imagery, which will allow them to simulate the surrounding topography and terrain. They also hope to create virtual models of the caves where the scrolls were found.

[...]

Joseph I. Lauer notes that the UCLA virtual Qumran site can be found here.

AN ANCIENT JEWISH SETTLEMENT has been found in Israel in a salvage excavation:

Second Temple Jewish settlement found between Jerusalem and TA
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS (Jerusalem Post)

A Second Temple Jewish settlement has been uncovered between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, including structures that may have been used as hiding places during the Bar Kochba Revolt, Israel's Antiquities Authority announced Monday.

[...]

I've been meaning to note this one, but things have been busy around here.

THE ANCIENT BIBLICAL MANUSCRIPTS CENTER at the Claremont School of Theology has a semi-annual newsletter called The Folio, which I have been receiving for many years. I notice that the ABMC website now has an archive of The Folio starting with its inception in 1981 and complete up to 2005. (These are photographic reproductions in PDF format and some of the files are very large.) The archive preserves a lot of the history of the ABMC and each Folio issue usually has an interesting article on some research subject. For example, the current one (24.1, not yet online) has a piece by Marvin A. Sweeny on "Targum Jonathan on Zechariah 3: An Early Vision of Heaven."

A PAGE FROM A TALMUD MANUSCRIPT in the British Library is available online. Manuscript Boy has the details over at Hagahot.

THE CRADLE OF CHRISTIANITY EXHIBITION is in Atlanta on its final stop. It contains, among other things, a fragment of the Temple Scroll.

FRAGMENT OF THE MONTH: The Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge University has a new feature on its website:

A fragment that has provoked interest in the Unit in the last month will be displayed together with a brief explanation as to why it deserves attention.

Day in, day out, Unit researchers are working on cataloguing and describing the Taylor-Schechter Collection; hundreds and thousands of manuscripts are examined each month. Just occasionally work stops and colleagues call each other over to take a look at an unusual, unexpected or particularly interesting fragment. In itself the small piece of paper or vellum may not be that significant — when viewed in the wider context of the tens of thousands of pieces in the Collection — and it may ultimately get no more than a brief mention in one of the Genizah Series catalogues, but it has provoked our interest for a moment and so earned a place here.

So far, three fragments have been posted:

April 2007, two new responsa of Moses Maimonides

May 2007, St Augustine in the Genizah

June 2007, Redating a leaf from a medieval Hebrew Book of Tobit (T-S A45.25)

(Via Jack Sasson's Agade list.)

UNESCO'S MEMORY OF THE WORLD PROGRAM is doing great work in manuscript preservation, through both conservation and digitization. The UNESCO website has a page on the project (link above). There's an introductory interview with Abdelaziz Abid, "a programme specialist in the Memory of the World programme." Excerpt:

That means that digital documents are even more fragile than those on traditional materials?

Of course. A piece of parchment can survive for several centuries. Newsprint lasts several decades. It isn’t that the CD-ROM or the USB key can’t last for decades too, but the way in which the information is coded soon becomes obsolete. The problem isn’t the lifespan of the physical materials, but the progress in formats.

In Yemen, manuscripts were discovered in the main Sana’a mosque by chance that had remained walled up for 13 centuries! If you forget a digital document somewhere, at the end of ten years there’s nothing left of it.

If we don’t pay attention to preserving digital documents, we will leave a black hole for future generations. They’ll find Sumerian clay tablets, Chinese, Arabic and European manuscripts and paper…and getting to the 20th and 21st centuries, nothing! We must preserve traces of what we have created.

As regular readers know, I keep a special eye out for manuscript collections and hoards that may preserve early Jewish texts and somewhat later Jewish and Christian biblical apocrypha and pseudepigrapha. A couple of the projects seem relevant.

Timbuktu manuscripts: Africa’s written history unveiled

Excerpt:

Long forsaken treasures

But do the indigenous populations of Mali know that they possess, under their feet or in their attics, hundreds of thousands of vital manuscripts dating from the 13th to the 19th century? Nothing is less certain. Because of a sanctified notion of African oral tradition, an absence of translation due to lack of funds (barely 1% of texts are translated into classical Arabic, French or English) and a certain reserve about rummaging through the memory of Africa, however honorable, government authorities are hesitant to exhume what resembles a political golden age.

Let us judge for ourselves: treatises on good governance, texts on the harmful effects of tobacco, pharmacopeial synopses…works on law (particularly on divorce and the status of divorced women), theology, grammar and mathematics sit in dusty heaps in private libraries or at the Ahmed Baba Documentation and Research Centre in Timbuktu. Written commentaries by the sages of Cordoba, Baghdad or Djenne can still be seen there. On screen-fronted shelves, legal acts regulating the lives of Jews and apostate Christians testify to the intense commercial activity of the era. Parchments concerning selling and freeing slaves, the market prices of salt, spices, gold and feathers are propped against correspondence between sovereigns from both sides of the Sahara, illustrated with illuminations in gold.

All this is frightening. It is intimidating, to the point that even scientists are troubled by so much available knowledge. George Bohas, professor of Arabic at the Ecole normale supérieure in Lyon and an initiator of the Vecmas program (evaluation and critical editing of sub-Saharan Arabic manuscripts) notes, “We estimate the body of existing manuscripts at 180,000, of which 25% have been inventoried, less than 10% catalogued, and 40% are still in wooden or iron containers!” Not counting all the manuscripts stashed in the homes of families, who don’t want to give them up, either out of ignorance or for sordid profiteering reasons.

PaleoJudaica has been following the story of Timbuktu's manuscripts for some time. See here and follow the many links back.

The second project is:

The Matenadaran, from copyist monks to the digital age

In the heart of Erevan, capital of Armenia, the Matenadaran houses seventeen thousand manuscripts and 30,000 documents, some dating back to antiquity. Texts on very varied subjects, written in Arabic, Persian, Syriac, Greek, Latin, Amharic, Japanese and certain Indian languages, are stored together in this museum-library, created at the same time as the Armenian alphabet in 405. Today the Matenadaran is entering the digital age thanks to UNESCO.

Good stuff. Who knows what they're going to find in these collections?

UPDATE: The dratted transition to New Bloggger seems to have screwed up a lot of my internal links in past posts, which is most irritating. Earlier references to the Timbuktu archives can be found here, here, here, and here.