A LILITH DEVOTEE:

For love of Lilith
Hebrew goddess helped an angry artist see the light

By DANIELLE FURFARO, Staff writer (Albany Times Union)
Click byline for more stories by writer.
First published: Sunday, August 19, 2007

COLONIE -- Richard Callner sits in a wheelchair in his sprawling, multilevel home, staring lovingly at a Gobelin-style tapestry he made in Ein Hood, Israel, more than 30 years ago. The tapestry is rich with swirling colors and figures. It features his favorite goddess: Lilith.

Even though advanced Parkinson's disease has reduced Callner's voice to a scarcely audible whisper, he happily points out the details of the piece. With the help of his daughter, Joanne, he describes how he chose the colors of the tapestry from thousands of spools of yarn the Israeli weavers offered him.

"It works because of the complexity," he breathed.

Of the three tapestries he made on that long-ago trip, two of them hang in his home. The one in the dining room shows a side silhouette of the ancient goddess, who is regarded in Hebrew folklore as the first wife of Adam. She appears to be exhaling a menagerie of birds and flowers. The one hanging in a hallway shows Lilith in a variety of poses in the garden of Eden. She is lying on her back ... flying with birds ... becoming a bird.

[...]

After returning from war, he began formally studying art. Callner's style is culled from a variety of Euopean modernists. While in Paris, he studied with Cubist painter Fernand Leger. He received his MFA from Columbia University in 1952 and began teaching.

Callner spent these years painting angry, grotesque figures in muted colors.

In 1963, while teaching at Olivet College in Michigan, he became obsessed with Lilith. His discovery of the Hebrew goddess precipitated a change, not only in his art, but also in his outlook on life. Suddenly, his work embraced elements of humor, whismy and independence. Since then, most of his paintings have been soaked in vibrant colors and wild textures and abstractions. He began to use the image of Lilith repeatedly. Sometimes she would take the form of a woman, sometimes of a bird, sometimes of color.

[...]

Sounds like she's been a good influence.

Unfortunately, there's no photo of any of these paintings.

PHOENICIAN SITE TO BE EXCAVATED:

Excavation planned for Phoenician city

SANTA GIUSTA, Italy, Aug. 18 (UPI) -- A Phoenician settlement on the Italian island of Sardinia may soon yield some of its secrets to archaeologists.

The port of Othoca is believed to lie at the bottom of a lake separated from the Mediterranean by a narrow spit of land, the Italian news agency Ansa reported. The modern town of Santa Giusta also occupies some of the ancient city.

Carlo del Vais of Cagliari University plans to dig in a small section of the lake, an area where about 100 amphorae -- or large clay jars -- appear to rest on a wooden platform. The Phoenician layers are covered by a thick layer of mud.

[...]

A BOOK ON MANDAEAN (MANDEAN) HISTORY is reviewed by April DeConick at the Forbidden Gospels blog.

Gorgias Press released in 2005 a book by Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley, The Great Stem of Souls: Reconstructing Mandaean History. For those of you interested in Mandaeism and Gnosticism, this is a must-have reference book. It is a modern reconstruction of Mandaean history.

[...]

IS THIS TRUE?

The Iberian lynx is a specialist carnivore that subsists almost exclusively on rabbits. An adult male requires one rabbit a day; a female with cubs needs three to five. Until recently this made perfect evolutionary sense on the Iberian peninsula. Rabbits were so abundant that more than 30 species preyed on them. One linguistic theory holds that the word España is derived from an ancient Phoenician name meaning Land of Rabbits.

Northwest Semitists, what do you think?

(From a Telegraph article on the lynx. My emphasis.)

THE HORRENDOUS BOMBING OF THE YAZIDIS is bad news for ethnic minorities in Iraq. April DeConick has some reflections on the Yazidis and their Gnosticism-related religion.

THE GNOSTIC IMPLICATIONS OF THE SIMULATION ARGUMENT, which I noted here in response to the recent NYT article, are not going unnoticed elsewhere. This from George Dvorsky of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies:

If we were ever to prove that we exist inside a simulation, it would be proof that the transhumanist assumption is correct—that the transition from a human to a posthuman condition is in fact possible. But that will be of little solace to us measly sims! The simulation—er, our world—could be shut down at any time. Or, the variables that make up our modal reality could be altered in undesirable ways (e.g. our world could be turned into a Hell realm).

Also, should we reside in a simulation, we have to pretty much assume that our digital benefactors are rather indifferent to our plight. Based on the amount of suffering going on around here we should probably assume a gnostic religious sensibility. These gods are not our allies; they may have created us, but they are not looking out for our best interests.

My emphasis. Also, Glenn Reynolds links to a couple of pieces that suggest how to live in a simulation. This from Robin Hanson:

In sum, if your descendants might make simulations of lives like yours, then you might be living in a simulation. And while you probably cannot learn much detail about the specific reasons for and the nature of the simulation you live in, you can draw general conclusions by making analogies to the types and reasons of simulations today. If you might be living in a simulation then all else equal it seems that you should care less about others, live more for today, make your world look likely to become eventually rich, expect to and try to participate in pivotal events, be entertaining and praiseworthy, and keep the famous people around you happy and interested in you.

That's an interesting practical theology.

And this from the BeldarBlog:

Well, duh. Act like you're not in a simulation. Otherwise you'll be inducing a software error. So, what — do you want to become the cosmic equivalent of the lines in the famously defective original Intel Pentium chip's microcode which caused that rare but catastrophic floating point division bug? Well, do you?

Well, it's true that one doesn't want to trigger a recall. But it may not be that simple. If we do live in a Gnostic simulation universe, we should think about the implications. The traditional object of the game according to Gnosticism is to obtain "Gnosis" -- salvific knowledge of the true state of affairs, and to conduct your life accordingly so as to ascend to the Pleroma, that is, to be uploaded out of the game. For further instructions, see, for example, the Apocryphon of John.

(This Gnosis is provided "AS IS" with no warranty of any kind, and use of it is at your sole risk. PaleoJudaica expressly disclaims all warranties including satisfactory quality and fitness for a specific purpose. We do not warrant that the functions residing in this Gnosis will meet your requirements or that the operation of the Gnosis will be uninterrupted or error free or that defects in the Gnosis will be corrected. Nor do we warrant the use or the results of the use of this Gnosis or any related Gnosis regarding its correctness, accuracy, reliability and the like. Should this Gnosis prove unreliable, you and not PaleoJudaica assume the entire cost of all necessary corrections, servicing, repairs or unfavorable rebirths. Under no circumstances shall PaleoJudaica be liable for any incidental, special, indirect, consequential or spiritual damages arising out of or relating to the use of this Gnosis.)

Good luck!

UPDATE: Still more arguments for the simulation scenario. They start about two-thirds of the way into the post.

UPDATE (19 August): More here.

UPDATE (20 August): The Gnostic simulation meme is spreading. (Thanks for the kind mention of this blog, but if you think PaleoJudaica is hard to spell, try Pseudepigrapha.)

TARGUM NEWS from Ed Cook over at Ralph.

MORE ON THE BARNARD TENURE CONTROVERSY: Two items deal with the petition against granting tenure to Nadia Abu El-Haj. From John Gravois at the Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog:

August 15, 2007
Alumni Group Seeks to Deny Tenure to Middle Eastern Scholar at Barnard College

Controversial research on Israel and the Palestinian territories has become the basis of yet another campaign to prevent a professor from winning tenure. A group of Barnard College alumni has drafted an online petition asking their alma mater to deny tenure to Nadia Abu El-Haj, an assistant professor of anthropology whose scholarship, they say, is flawed and skewed against Israel.

[...]

And from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency:

Petition, donor threats on prof
puts spotlight back on Columbia
Nadia Abu El-Haj, author of "Facts on the Ground," is under fire for the 2001 book's perspective.
By Ben Harris Published: 08/14/2007

NEW YORK (JTA) -- A brewing battle over tenure for a polarizing Barnard College professor is threatening to thrust Columbia University back into the center of a controversy over its academic treatment of the Middle East.

Nadia Abu El-Haj, an assistant professor of anthropology at Barnard, is the author
of "Facts on the Ground," a 2001 book that questions archaeological claims regarding the ancient Jewish presence in Israel and argues that Israeli archaeologists legitimize the Jewish state's "origin myth."

An online petition against Abu El-Haj had garnered nearly 1,000 signatures as of Tuesday, the bulk of them from students and graduates of Barnard or Columbia University, its institutional parent.

[...]

Background here.

UPDATE (21 August): More here.

THERE'S A BIBLICAL BOARD OF TRADE? According to this press release, they're giving away free tickets to the San Diego Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition.

A PHOTO ESSAY ON THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS has been published by About.com: Archaeology.

THE MINGANA COLLECTION of Syriac, Arabic, etc. manuscripts at the University of Birmingham gets a bad report over at Thoughts on Antiquity.

THE ARCHIMEDES CODEX AND A CHRISTIAN APOCRYPHA PALIMPSEST - Tony Chartrand-Burke has the story over at Apocryphicity.

THE GREEK GEEK pans the Lammas Fair in St. Andrews. Well, to appreciate it you have to have kids. I actually went on this ride, which is always just outside St. Mary's College, with my son on Monday. Never again.

But commenter Meigan is right about the doughnuts.

THE NEW TESTAMENT GATEWAY 2.0, BETA VERSION.

FOOTPRINT AS ARTIFACT:

Following the footsteps of a Roman soldier
By Ofri Ilani (Haaretz)

Archaeologists have discovered a footprint made by the sandal of a Roman soldier - one of the few such finds in the world - in a wall surrounding the Hellenistic-Roman city of Sussita, east of Lake Kinneret.

The discovery of the print made by a hobnailed sandal, the kind used by the Roman legions during the time when Rome ruled the region, led to the presumption that legionnaires or former legionnaires participated in the construction of walls such as the one in which the footprint was found.

[...]

City-destroying earthquakes are hard on the inhabitants, but they're a boon to archaeologists, because things like this get preserved in the rubble.

THE DEMIURGE is alive and well and is running our universe as a computer simulation. The link is to an article in the New York Times which summarizes the simulation argument of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom. The essential argument, as given in the NYT is:

Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.

Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.

There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.

Cambridge Astrophysicist (and recent St. Andrews Gifford Lecuturer) Martin Rees also takes the idea seriously.

Maybe the Gnostics were on to something after all.

UPDATE (17 August): More here.

BARNARD PETITION: This is the first I recall hearing about a petition about Nadia Abu El-Haj's tenure at Barnard.

Bid to deny tenure to Barnard prof

Published: 08/13/2007 (JTA Breaking News)

More than 800 people have signed a petition seeking to deny tenure to a Barnard College professor accused of shoddy scholarship and a pro-Palestinian agenda.

Professor Nadia Abu El-Haj, an assistant professor of anthropology, is under from her book "Facts on the Ground." The book attacks the field of Israeli archaeology, arguing that it has produced knowledge central to the creation of Israel's foundational myths and therefore is complicit in Israel's supposed crimes against the Palestinians.

Paula Stern, a 1982 Barnard graduate and the organizer of an online petition calling on the college to deny tenure to El-Haj, claims the professor's scholarship is shoddy and her claims unsubstantiated.

[...]

Here's a recent article by Stern on the controversy. Follow the link at the bottom of that post for earlier coverage.

UPDATE (16 August): More here.

MODERN CHRISTENDOM AS LATE-ANTIQUE BYZANTIUM?

Perspectives
The Seventh-Century Christian Obsession with the Jews:
A Historical Parallel for the Present?
Rivkah Duker Fishman



In the seventh century, the Arabs embarked on the conquest of the world in the name of Islam. The Caliphate replaced the Persian Empire and Christian Spain and conquered much of the Byzantine Empire. The latter, however, seemed to ignore the threat of the new invaders and their religion. Instead, the Byzantine political and intellectual elite focused increasingly on the Jews in tracts and legal measures. The situation has certain parallels with the present.

This seems to have been published in 2005 and I'm not sure why it suddenly appeared on Google now.

As a general principal I'm skeptical of broad-brush parallels between ancient history and the present. There are just too many differences to have any feeling of control over the variables. But I'm always relieved when at least America doesn't get cast as ancient Rome.

THE MANDAEANS are once again on April DeConick's radar. Good for her.

For more on the Mandaeans (Mandeans) see here and here. And some more posts are here, here, here, here, here, and here.

ROGUE FRAGMENTS of the Dead Sea Scrolls on display in a church in Florida?

Ancient items, modern wonder

A display includes pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

By NICK JOHNSON, [St. Petersburg] Times Staff Writer
Published August 12, 2007

The pastor of a prison outreach ministry recently visited a St. Petersburg church with what may be part of the most significant archaeological find for people of the Christian, Jewish and Islamic faiths.

The Rev. Thom Miller of Special Visit Ministry exhibited a small collection of religious antiquities, including what he said were two fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, at the Suncoast Cathedral on Wednesday for a group of church members and the media.

[...]

Miller said one of the fragments was anonymously donated to the ministry and the other was on loan from a group of physicians from New Jersey.

He plans to return to the Suncoast Cathedral in October with another Dead Sea Scrolls fragment that is held by the Ashland Theological Seminary and a more extensive exhibit of religious artifacts.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are actually a collection of more than 100,000 fragments that have been pieced together by archaeologists.

The San Diego Natural History Museum is displaying Dead Sea Scrolls on loan from the Israeli Antiquities Authority, which holds most of the scrolls.

Dr. Russell Fuller, a professor at the University of San Diego, worked as a consultant on the exhibit at the museum and edited a number of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

He said bits of the artifacts have become privately owned over the years.

"There are some small fragments in private hands in the U.S. and Europe, so it's conceivable that they could have a fragment," Fuller said. "If you have the resources and you have the contacts, it's possible that you could buy yourself a piece of Dead Sea Scroll."

[...]

There's nothing about the content of the fragments, which makes me wonder if they aren't of the "burnt cornflake" variety that don't show any actual leather letters. Can any PaleoJudaica readers in Florida report on the fragments?