TEL BEIT SHEMESH is giving up its secrets to archaeologists:

'The land, my lord, will be lost forever'
By Ran Shapira (Haaretz)
Tags: Canaan, Egypt, excavation

"To the king my lord and my sun: These are the words of your servant, Belit-nesheti [literally, "mistress of lions/lionesses"]. I fall at the king's feet seven times over. I must tell the king that this country is witnessing [acts of] hostility and that the land of the king, my lord, will be lost forever."

A Canaanite queen from one of the cities in Palestine's lowland sent this desperate request in the 14th century B.C.E. to Pharaoh, king of Egypt. The name of the city ruled by Belit-nesheti is not mentioned in this letter or in others that depict violent acts that aroused in her a justified feeling that she was facing a dire threat.

During that period, the city of Gezer, and the Ajalon and Sorek valleys were the scene of events that seriously challenged the rule of Belit-nesheti and other monarchs.

In another letter, she conveys the following information: "The Apiru have written to Ajalon and Zorah and the two sons of Milkilu [king of Gezer] have been almost beaten to death. I must inform the king of this act." In yet another letter, she relates that one of the cities in the area under her rule has fallen to the Apiru, and she calls to the king, "I beg the king to save his land from the hands of the Apiru, before it is too late."

The Apiru, mentioned in various documents from different parts of the ancient Near East, were a people that had been uprooted from society and which had abandoned its native land. They formed bands that engaged in robbery and in the collection of protection money, and they served as mercenaries whom the rulers of the various Canaanite cities under Egyptian rule at the time recruited as a military force when they wanted to attack their enemies. The Apiru were supported by the powerful rulers of neighboring cities who sought to seize control of her city.

Her cries for assistance from Pharaoh, who was during this period the supreme ruler of the region and of a number of Canaanite cities, elicited no response, as indicated by the findings that have recently been discovered in Tel Beit Shemesh, about a half-hour's drive from Jerusalem. Prof. Shlomo Bunimovitz and Dr. Zvi Lederman, both of Tel Aviv University's Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology, have been conducting excavations there since 1990. In their scholarly opinion, the city was devastated in a monstrous wave of violence; the remnants extant from that massive act of destruction have been uncovered in the past few weeks. In Tel Beit Shemesh, site of this ancient Canaanite city, archaeologists have discovered entire walls that collapsed in a huge fire, which apparently occurred in the mid-14th century B.C.E. Inter alia, they have found a structures containing more than 200 toppled bricks, which show the effects of exposure to the extreme heat of the massive blaze. Adjacent to the bricks, the foundations of the plastered walls from which they fell have also been uncovered.

[...]

Belit-nesheti's letters are part of a collection of letters written in cuneiform in the Akkadian language (the lingua franca of that era) on clay tablets, that was discovered in the late 19th century in Egypt in Tel Amarna, which is located midway between Cairo and Luxor. ...

This looks like a rare case of ancient inscriptions and archaeology mutually informing one another.

UPDATE: Dead link now fixed. Sorry.

THE RAMAT RACHEL ARCHAEOLOGICAL DIG has a blog, maintained by Keren Pedersen. Keren writes, "In case you're not familiar with the dig's particulars, it's at the Ramat Rahel kibbutz outside Jerusalem, with the earliest known settlement there a probably-Assyrian administrative center from around the time of King Hezekiah." So far they've found some la-melekh seal impressions, a Byzantine coin hoard, and a bomb.

UPDATE (31 July): Bad link fixed. Sorry, I seem to have a lot of these this week.

WANT TO SEE some fake Syriac? Go here. Story here, here, and here.

Caveat emptor! (How do you say that in Aramaic?)

THE GOSPEL HOAX by Stephen C. Carlson is reviewed by Jill Kamil in Al-Ahram. Excerpt:

Carlson reveals in his Gospel Hoax that Smith's career, at the time he penned the fake, had come to a standstill. In 1955 he was denied tenure at the university where he had begun his career. "A successful hoax could be exactly what Smith needed," Carlson wrote, "to prove to himself that he was smarter than his peers and might even jump start his career in the process." But that motive, if that was the reason for his hoax, was overcome by events when Smith landed a position at Columbia University, wrote a successful book on ancient history, and was made a full professor in 1962. Was his intention, then, ultimately to fool and then enrage the Establishment, while the scholar in him had to make his confession by planting clues of deception in the text? Carlson thinks so. He suggests that it was a joke in order to reveal, if and when it was eventually discovered, just how clever he was!

If Morton Smith's invention of Secret Mark was, as Carlson reveals, a brilliant work of deception, it is unfortunate that he is not around to witness his exposure. Morton Smith died in 1991.

I like Hurtado's comment: "Far from being some lost version of the story of Jesus, Secret Mark is uncovered as a great practical joke -- one that keeps Morton Smith laughing from his grave".

IT'S NOT MERKAVAH MYSTICISM but maybe it's the next best thing:

HEAVEN ON EARTH
A Virtual Tour of Our Holy Temple
Wednesdays: July 30, August 6 and 13
7:30 - 9:00 pm (Jewishinstlouis.org)

This summer, nearly 2,000 years since the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, Chabad of Greater St. Louis will unveil Heaven on Earth, a three-week interactive course developed by the renowned Rohr Jewish Learning Institute, which recreates the ancient Jerusalem Temples from the ground up. Heaven on Earth will be offered at the Lazaroff Chabad Center, at 8124 Delmar Blvd., in University City, on three consecutive Wednesday evenings, 7:30 to 9 pm, beginning on July 30.

Through an interactive and innovative virtual tour, Heaven on Earth will enable students to conceptualize the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, allowing them to “walk through” the Temple’s ancient corridors, throng with the crowds through Jerusalem’s gates, and discover the marvels of architecture and design that were integral to this sacred site. Heaven on Earth provides students with an explanation for the central role the Holy Temple plays in the life and history of the Jewish people, and why to this day Jews of all stripes pray for the Temple’s rebuilding and converge upon the Western Wall, its surviving remnant.

[...]

BORIS JOHNSON orates in Latin and offers current political commentary on the Emperor Hadrian.

FUN FACT: Robinson Crusoe has been translated into Coptic:

Despite such a title, and despite the absence of a love angle, the positive reception was immediate and universal. Before the end of the year, the first volume had run through four editions. By the end of the 19th century, the book had spawned multitudinous editions, including children’s picture books with little or no text. The book was translated even into languages such as Inuit, Coptic, and Maltese. ...

I wonder about Aramaic.

THE VISION OF BARACK – another newly published messianic inscription:

He ventured forth to bring light to the world
The anointed one's pilgrimage to the Holy Land is a miracle in action - and a blessing to all his faithful followers

Gerard Baker (London Times)

And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness.

[...]

As usual with such things, its authenticity is debated. And in any case, elements of the account are arguably legendary.

(Background here.)

IDOL ANXIETY:

Art That Does Not Hide Itself
Art
By Menachem Wecker The Forward)
Thu. Jul 24, 2008

Most of the works that appear in the exhibit Idol Anxiety, at the University of Chicago’s David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, feature Christian and pagan content. But exhibit curator Aaron Tugendhaft credits the “heightened awareness” he developed from studying the Talmud as a child with helping him discover “valuable distinctions not seen by others” in the process of how objects avoid becoming idols.

[...]

This spectrum is evident in two objects, one Jewish and one Christian, that hang side by side in the show. The Jewish image, an ink-on-parchment 19th-century Yemeni “Holy Tree” amulet, incorporates Hebrew text and diagrams of the 10 sephirot, or divine attributes in Kabbalah. The show suggests that this amulet avoids the Second Commandment’s ban on representing the divine by giving physical form to the divine attributes rather than trying to depict God directly. In modern art terms, the amulet is an abstraction rather than a naturalistic portrait.

The Christian kabbalist who created the companion piece shared no such concerns about directly representing God. The 1515 woodcut from the first printed edition of the New Testament in Syriac shows Jesus crucified, with a haloed saint looking up at him. An eagle beside the saint identifies him as John, and between him and the cross is the first verse of John’s Gospel, “In principio erat verbum” (“In the beginning was the word”). Behind Saint John are a seven-branch menorah and a football-shaped form that circumscribes the 10 sephirot. The artist joined the sephirot with the crucifixion through lines representing the stigmata that connect each sephirah with one of Jesus’ wounds. Where the “Holy Tree” carefully draws the line at representing attributes of God, the woodcut maps the divine body over the human body.

[...]

There are photos of both pieces in the article.

STILL MORE THOUGHTS on the new Deuteronomy (?) fragment that contains a Samaritan reading (background here and here). Mladen Popovic has e-mailed to note Shemaryahu Talmon's article "A Masada Fragment of Samaritan Origin," Israel Exploration Journal 47 (1997): 220-32, which argues that a hymnic fragment from Masada which mentions Mount Gerizi[m], writing the name as one word, and which is written in the paleo-Hebrew script, is of Samaritan origin. (This seems plausible enough and it would not be too surprising if both Samaritan and Jewish refugees ended up on Masada late in the Great Revolt.) Talmon mentions one additional piece of evidence which seems relevant: Josephus uses the Greek form of the name and it comes down to us in the manuscripts written continuously (Jewish War 1 §63), which comfirms that Jews sometimes, not always, wrote it that way.

Also, David Stacey e-mails:

" If it is a Samaritan fragment, this raises the question of whether the reported Qumran provenance is correct and, if it is, what the Qumran sectarians were doing with a Samaritan manuscript. Given their exclusivist sectarian worldview, it doesn't seem likely that they would have had cordial relations with the Samaritans.

Again, this whole discussion depends on the fragment being genuine, which remains to be demonstrated." -

I, as you know, approach Qumran as an archaeologist not as a textual scholar. Even if the fragment is genuine and the provenance is correct what evidence is there to suggest that Qumran was a sectarian settlement? As an archaeologist I can not directly connect the people who inhabited the site with the scrolls beyond the fact that at least some of those inhabitants were aware of the existence of the scrolls. Even most textual scholars now accept, do they not, that some of the scrolls must have come from elsewhere? And surely the scrolls could have arrived in Qumran at different times, from different places, and for different reasons? In my DSD article (vol.14.2 - 2007) I explained why some of the accepted dating was wrong and showed that some of the identifications of areas which were supposed to 'prove' sectarianism were wrong, and, indeed, that throughout the 70 years of Hasmonean occupation the site was probably only capable of sustaining limited, seasonal industrialists. Surely the insistence that Qumran was a high-class sectarian society, despite considerable indications to the contrary, muddies the whole issue?

I approach Qumran as a specialist in the texts, so when I said "Qumran provenance," that was shorthand for "coming from the Qumran library found in those caves around the site." And it is my position, and that of most specialists in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Norman Golb is an exception), that it is a sectarian library. This has been argued repeatedly and at length elsewhere and I'm not going to rehearse those arguments here. (I have addressed the issue online here, here, here, and here.) I am not an archaeologist and I hold no particular position about the use of the site and that question doesn't much matter for the point I was making. (For some discussion on this blog see here, here, here, here ,here, here, here, here, and here.) But the consensus position that the library is sectarian does raise the question of how a Samaritan biblical fragment got into it, if that's what happened. It's not impossible, but it's striking and worthy of further exploration.

THE CODEX SINAITICUS PROJECT is still getting lots of attention in the press. Here's a piece from CNN:

World's oldest Bible goes online
By Ed Payne
CNN

LONDON, England (CNN) -- The oldest known surviving copy of the New Testament gets the modern touch Thursday when parts of it go online for the first time.
The full manuscript of the Codex Sinaiticus will be online a year from now.

The full manuscript of the Codex Sinaiticus will be online a year from now.

The British Library plans to begin publishing the Codex Sinaiticus, a 4th century text handwritten in Greek, on its Web site. The Gospel of Mark and the Book of Psalms go online Thursday. The full manuscript is to be online in a year.

Translations of the Codex Sinaiticus have long been widely available, but publishing images of the manuscript online will let anyone see pages that, until now, have been viewed in detail mainly by academia.

[...]

Some people seem struck by the fact that this oldest, or at least very old, Bible includes the Apocrypha. The Cleveland Leader headlines this with "World's Oldest Bible Gets Digitized, Includes Disputed Apocrypha Books" and notes:

The Codex contains all of the New Testament, and also includes part of the Old Testament, and originally contained the entire text of the Christian Bible. It also includes Apocrypha, the 14 disputed books of the Old Testament which are typically omitted from the Protestant Bible. The Codex also contains two early Christian texts, "Epistle of Barnabas" and the "Shepherd of Hermas."

And someone posting on Associated Content notes the Apocrypha connection and makes much of 2 Maccabees being in the Apocrypha, evidently being unaware that 2 Maccabees is not found in Codex Sinaiticus.

Background here.

UPDATE (31 July): Bad link fixed. The paragraph on 2 Maccabees has been deleted at Associated Content.

AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL MUSEUM in Gaza:

Museum Offers Gray Gaza a View of Its Dazzling Past

By ETHAN BRONNER (NYT)
Published: July 25, 2008

GAZA — It may sound like the indulgence of a well-fed man fleeing the misery around him. But when Jawdat N. Khoudary opens the first museum of archaeology in Gaza this summer it will be a form of Palestinian patriotism, showing how this increasingly poor and isolated coastal strip ruled by the Islamists of Hamas was once a thriving multicultural crossroad.

The exhibition is in a stunning hall made partly of stones from old houses, discarded wood ties of a former railroad and bronze lamps and marble columns uncovered by Gazan fishermen and construction workers.

And while the display might be pretty standard stuff most anywhere else — arrowheads, Roman anchors, Bronze Age vases and Byzantine columns — life is now so gray in Gaza that the museum, with its glimpses of a rich outward-looking history, seems somehow dazzling.

[...]

His collection includes thousands of items, but some of the most extraordinary will not go on display now, including a statue of a full-breasted Aphrodite in a diaphanous gown, images of other ancient deities and oil lamps featuring menorahs.

Asked why, Mr. Khoudary noted Hamas’s rule and the conservative piety of the population and said simply, “I want my project to succeed.”

He did, however, bring a Hamas government minister to see the exhibition recently and pointed out two crosses on Byzantine columns to make sure he had no objections. The gap between what he calls the narrow-mindedness of today’s Gaza and the worldliness of the past is what most saddens him, he said.

A prominent construction company owner, Mr. Khoudary, who is 48 and a proponent of coexistence and global culture, has been collecting for 22 years, ever since he came across an Islamic glass coin and fell in love with its link to a bygone era. Since then, he has asked all his construction workers to save whatever they dig up so that he can search it for treasures. Local fishermen know that anything old that washes ashore will fetch a decent price from Mr. Khoudary.

[...]

AT LAST! A detailed report on the recent Dead Sea Scrolls conference in Jerusalem:

The Qumran Quandary
By ZIV HELLMAN (Jerusalem Post)

Cover story in Issue 8, August 4, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here.

The Judean desert in the vicinity of the Qumran caves, on the west coast of the Dead Sea, is bleak, dusty, hot and barren. Little life stirs here. The bright blue of the vast salt lake belies its own lifelessness. It is easy to see why the original view of those who lived here 2,000 years ago and apparently wrote over 900 parchment manuscripts is that of ascetic monks who spent all their time laboriously copying sacred texts in an isolated community.
But 60 years after the discovery of the first Dead Sea scrolls by two Beduin shepherds - and seven years after the last of the scrolls to be unearthed was published and made available to scholars - that view has largely been discarded. In its place are a plethora of competing theories about who lived at Qumran, what their relationship to the scrolls was, and what legacy they left behind.
Archaeological digs at Qumran and surrounding settlements have revealed not an isolated, penurious community, but in some respects a rather flourishing one, which in the Second Temple period contained installations for blacksmithing and tanning and what seems to be an immense pottery factory. The residents there traded with other settlements, kept a stable, grew crops and raised sheep. Based on theories that the residents lived a communal lifestyle, some have termed it "the first kibbutz," complete with agriculture, light industry, a communal dining room and a common treasury - a cache of hundreds of silver coins was found on the site.
Loud rows are now erupting at academic conferences over a question that was once considered too ridiculous to ask: did the Qumran community include women and children? And the recent stunning discovery of a "Dead Sea Stone" - a first century BCE tablet found on the east coast of the lake, and possibly describing a suffering messiah who dies and is resurrected three days later - has stirred renewed interest in tracing the precursors of early Christian theology in the desert.
These were just a few of the hotly-debated topics at an early July conference in Jerusalem to mark the 60th anniversary of the discovery of the scrolls. Some 36 researchers from Israel, the United States, Canada, Austria, Germany, Britain and Belgium gathered in the Shrine of the Book - which houses the most famous scroll, that containing the complete text of the Book of Isaiah - on the grounds of the Israel Museum. The event was a testament to the persistent and even increasing interest in what are some of the world's most renowned historical documents.

[...]

The Vision of Gabriel stone gets some attention too, but the rest of the conference is not neglected.

(Heads up, reader Yoel Heltai.)

MORE ON THE CODEX SINAITICUS:

Ancient Bible with a murky past is on the path to a new era of clarity

Alexi Mostrous (London Times)

The story of the Codex Sinaiticus Bible, the oldest complete copy of the New Testament in existence, reads like a script from an Indiana Jones film.

Ever since a German explorer controversially removed it from an Egyptian monastery, four countries have fought for control over the ancient manuscript.

From today, extracts from the 4th-century Greek original can be viewed online. Behind the scenes, however, “harsh and negative” discussions continue between Britain, Russia, Egypt and Germany to establish who has the right to the priceless artefact.

[...]

Seems like a good summary of the current understanding of the rediscovery of the manuscript.

The Codex Sinaiticus Project website goes live today with Mark and the Psalms. I'll link to it when they've been posted.

Background here.

UPDATE (1:45 pm BST): The site (http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/) is now live, but the photo page is oversubscribed ("Too many concurrent connections (> 100.000). The manuscript page is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.").

SENATOR OBAMA has visited the Western Wall:

Obama visits Jerusalem's Western Wall
Wed Jul 23, 2008 11:34pm EDT

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama made a surprise pre-dawn visit to Jerusalem's Western Wall on Thursday, at the end of a trip aimed at showing his strong support for Israel.

Obama, wearing a Jewish skullcap, placed a prayer he had written in the wall and bowed his head while a rabbi read a psalm calling for peace in the holy city.

[...]

UPDATE: It was Psalm 122:

(IsraelNN.com) Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama wound up his two-day visit to Israel Thursday morning with a pre-dawn visit to the Western Wall (Kotel), where he and his wife quietly read Psalm 122.

[...]

FURTHER THOUGHTS on the new Deuteronomy (?) fragment with a Samaritan reading in it. A couple of readers have pointed out that the orthography of the phrase "Mount Gerizim," is written as one word (בהרגרזים - HarGerizim), and Menachem Brody notes that this is typically Samaritan and offers further support for a Samaritan provenance for the fragment. This is correct, although we don't know the origin of the spelling and it might well be an old Jewish spelling. Some Septuagint manuscripts have Greek spellings of "Mount -" names transliterated with the "Mount" part (Αρ) attached directly to the name, and the Old Latin has the unseparated spelling Argarzim in 2 Maccabees 5:23 and 6:2 for Mount Gerizim. Note also the unseparated spelling Armagedon (Αρμαγεδων) for "Mount Megiddo" (הר מגידו) in Revelation 16:16. Some LXX papyrus fragments also use the unseparated Greek spelling of Mount Gerizim (αργαριζιμ), although it has been argued that these are also of Samaritan provenance.

For a discussion of this issue which collects the relevant evidence, see R. Pummer, "ΑΡΓΑΡΙΖΙΝ: A Criterion for Samaritan Provenance?" Journal for the Study of Judaism 18 (1987): 18-25. The article should be online here (a paid subscription site), but there's a glitch at present and the page displays articles from the wrong journal. I've e-mailed Ingenta to inform them of the problem.

The fact that this new fragment has both the reading "Mount Gerizim" in this passage and the unseparated spelling of the name does present a pretty good case for a Samaritan provenance, although it's not quite conclusive. The reading could still be an early variant later seized on by the Samaritans to support their own temple on the site, and we don't know for sure how widespread this spelling of the name was in this early period.

If it is a Samaritan fragment, this raises the question of whether the reported Qumran provenance is correct and, if it is, what the Qumran sectarians were doing with a Samaritan manuscript. Given their exclusivist sectarian worldview, it doesn't seem likely that they would have had cordial relations with the Samaritans.

Again, this whole discussion depends on the fragment being genuine, which remains to be demonstrated.

LANGUAGES IN DANGER is a new book by Andrew Dalby which "considers the consequences of the current language crisis, in which a language is dying every two weeks." He's produced a list of ten for the Guardian, although it's not entirely clear what the criteria are for inclusion. Coptic is certainly threatened, but Greek is a stretch, and French more so. The Indus Valley language isn't threatened, it's long gone and remains undeciphered. And I am very skeptical about anyone being able to reconstruct the language of "Eve." Anyhow, there you have it.

MORE ON THE HADRIAN EXHIBITION:

From the Guardian:

So many exhibitions talk big then give you a few casts and copies and wall texts. This show delivers: it is an archaeological treasury whose beauty is the result of exceptional loans of some of the supreme works of Roman art from the Capitoline and Vatican museums in Rome, the Louvre in Paris, and new archaeological finds such as a colossus of Hadrian, excavated recently in Turkey. There are handwritten letters from the Jewish rebel leader Simon Bar Kokhba, and a papyrus fragment on which is written the Alexandrian poet Pankrates's celebration of a lion hunt where Hadrian deliberately missed his own shot, in order "to test to the full the sureness of aim/ Of his beauteous Antinous".

The Romans lived as if history were a book that concerned them - they displayed their flaws and crimes as proof that they belonged on its pages. The darkest stories and judgments on them are to be found in their own histories: see this, then read the Annals of Tacitus. This exhibition has the realism and the grandeur you find in Tacitus. Under the blue dome of the Victorian Reading Room inspired by Hadrian's architectural masterpiece, the Pantheon, Roman art at long last gets its triumph.

From Reuters:

Hadrian has echoes today
Wed Jul 23, 2008 8:47am BST

By Jeremy Lovell

LONDON, July 22 (Reuters Life!) - He had his fingers burned in ancient Iraq, fought insurrections on several fronts and built a huge wall to protect a fractious frontier, but still had time to boost the economy and leave major artistic legacies.

Many of the trials and tribulations that faced Rome's emperor Hadrian nearly 2,000 years ago still resonate today.

"The conflict zones in Hadrian's day are the conflict zones of today," said Thorsten Opper, curator of a new exhibition, "Hadrian - Empire and conflict" at London's British Museum.

[...]

Background here and just keep following the links back.

MORE ON THE CODEX SINAITICUS PROJECT: That AP article I alluded to yesterday is out.

Scholars plan to reunite ancient Bible _ online

By RAPHAEL G. SATTER – 8 hours ago

LONDON (AP) — The oldest surviving copy of the New Testament, a 4th century version that had its Gospels and epistles spread across the world, is being made whole again — online.

The British Library says the full text of the Codex Sinaiticus will be available to Web users by next July, digitally reconnecting parts that are held in Britain, Russia, Germany and a monastery in Egypt's Sinai Desert.

A preview of the Codex, which also has some parts of the Old Testament, will hit the Web on Thursday — the Book of Psalms and the Gospel of Mark.

[...]

I am also quoted later in the piece, accurately, if telegraphically.

James Davila, a professor of early Jewish studies at St. Andrews University in Scotland, said the Codex also includes religious works foreign to the Roman Catholic and Protestant canons — such as the "Epistle of Barnabas" and the "Shepherd of Hermas," a book packed with visions and parables.

Davila stressed that did not mean the works were necessarily considered Scripture by early Christians: They could have been bound with the Bible to save money.

The point I was making was that, given the expense of producing a large codex like this, it would be understandable if the compilers of a Bible included some books that were considered valuable for reading in church, even if they didn't consider them scripture. That may explain the inclusion of the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas, although The Shepherd actually was considered scripture by some early Christians. But the fact that these two books come after the New Testament, at or near the end of the manuscript, supports the possibility that they were included as a non-scriptural appendix.

It's a good article. I look forward to seeing the preliminary site when it opens.

MARY MAGDALENE'S FEAST DAY is today.