BOOK REVIEW at BMCR:

Maria-Zoe Petropolou, Animal Sacrifice in Ancient Greek Religion, Judaism, and Christianity, 100 BC to AD 200. Oxford Classical Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xii, 336. ISBN 978-0-19-921854-7. $120.00.

Reviewed by Paul Dilley, Kansas State University (pdilley@ksu.edu)
Word count: 1337 words

This important book is a survey and analysis of animal sacrifice in Greek polytheism, Judaism, and Christianity, from 100 BC to AD 200, in the eastern Mediterranean. It is part of a recent resurgence of studies on sacrifice in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and its relationship to Judaism and Christianity.1 The author is motivated by "the fact that Christianity is known as a religion with no altars for slaughter, in combination with the historical fact that early Christians came from religious environments where animal sacrifice was practiced" (p. v). Despite this ultimate goal of understanding Christian sacrifice, the work is most useful as a series of individual studies. Petropoulou bases her research almost entirely upon textual sources, both literary and epigraphic; given the geographical area of study, most of these are in Greek, although she also considers the Mishnah in English translation. Rather than assuming a decline in Greek animal sacrifice in the Roman period, a frequent assertion made popular especially by the influential scholar M.P. Nilsson, Petropolou demonstrates its continued significance during the first two centuries of the development of Christianity. In this context, she then explores Hellenistic Jewish, early Rabbinic, and early Christian attitudes to animal sacrifice.

[...]

HANNIBAL as a role model for business investors:

Leaders & Success
Hannibal Overcame Mountains To Reach Victory

By SEAN HIGGINS, INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 05/27/2009 05:19 PM ET

The name of the game was strategy, and Hannibal played it well.

"Of all that befell both the Romans and the Carthaginians, the cause was one man and one mind: Hannibal's," wrote the ancient Roman historian Polybius in his account of the Second Punic War.

Hannibal (247-183 B.C.) was the greatest military genius of antiquity, a master of battlefield tactics and long-term strategy. For 16 years he fought the mighty Roman legions, chalking up victory after victory. Only the failures of other Carthaginian leaders let Rome survive at all.

[...]

LARRY SCHIFFMAN lectured recently in Manchester on the Dead Sea Scrolls:

English Community Prepares for Holiday With Dead Sea Scrolls Lecture

By Chana Kroll (Chabad.org)
May 27, 2009 3:30 PM

Few if any archaeological finds in the past century have elicited the interest or controversy that has surrounded the Dead Sea Scrolls. With that in mind, Jewish residents of Manchester, England, sat down to learn more about the scrolls, and what they can and cannot tell researchers, from one of the world’s leading scholars on the topic, New York University professor Lawrence H. Schiffman.

Schiffman, who serves as chair of NYU’s Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and is a member of the university’s Centers for Ancient and Near Eastern Studies, began his pre-Shavuot address at the Beis Menachem Community Centre – a Chabad-Lubavitch educational institution in Manchester – by referring to what he called the “mystique” of the scrolls.

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ALL THINGS ARE BETTER IN KOINE:



I love it.

(Via Helen Ingram on Facebook.)

GEZA VERMES gave a lecture recently on Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls which is summarized in the Bournemouth Daily Echo:

Professor’s quest for the ‘real’ Jesus

7:00pm Wednesday 27th May 2009

By Fiona Pendlebury »

JESUS was a charismatic Jewish teacher rather than the divine figure of Christianity.

That is one of the claims of Professor Geza Vermes, an expert on the historical Jesus, and one of the first people to examine the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Prof Vermes, who is Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies at Oxford University, gave a talk to a packed audience at the Orthodox Synagogue in Bournemouth on the historical Jesus. He has penned several books on the subject.

[...]

KILROY HIC ERAT. Ben Witherington discusses ancient graffiti for Biblical Archaeology Review in "Biblical Views: The Writing on the Wall."

HAPPY SHAVUOT (Festival of Weeks) to all those celebrating. It begins this evening at sundown. More here.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: Haaretz reports on some recent developments. Yesterday:

PA minister: Hand Temple Mount over to global Islamic group
By Avi Issacharoff, Aluf Benn, Barak Ravid and Jack Khoury, Haaretz Correspondents
Tags: peace process

The newly appointed minister for Jerusalem affairs in the Palestinian Authority cabinet, Hatem Abdel Khader, has released a statement Monday noting that he favors transferring control of the Temple Mount to the 57-member Islamic Conference Organization in the framework of an Israel-PA peace agreement.

Haaretz reported last week on the P.A.'s willingness to transfer control of the Temple Mount to the organization. "The most important thing is to end the Israeli occupation," Abdel Khader also said.

PA president Mahmoud Abbas is to meet Thursday in Washington with President Barack Obama, in their first meeting since Obama took office.

[...]

Today:

Mounting opposition
By Zvi Bar'el
Tags: East Jerusalem, Palestinians

The announcement by Nabil Abu Rudeina, spokesman of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), to the effect that the PA is willing to transfer the holy places in Jerusalem to Islamic sovereignty in exchange for genuine Israeli compromises, was ostensibly supposed to constitute a breakthrough.

But that same Islamic sovereignty does not particularly thrill the foreign ministers of the 57 countries that met at the end of the week in Damascus for the Islamic Conference Organization. The proposal did not even come up for discussion. Instead, the participants mainly discussed the wording of the decisions condemning the construction and excavation activities being conducted by Israel in the Temple Mount area, whose purpose is the "Judaization of Jerusalem."

Not only can the proposal to transfer the Temple Mount to Islamic sovereignty not be defined legally - since what legal significance is there to the term "religious sovereignty" - it also angers some Fatah members, who say that "if the proposal really is valid, it overturns the vision of Yasser Arafat, who always adhered to the viewpoint that a Palestinian state without Jerusalem as its capital and the Palestinian flag on Haram al Sharif [the Temple Mount], is not a state."

Although Arafat had a relatively flexible viewpoint when it came to the religious status of Jerusalem, and always made a point of mentioning that it is holy to Christians and Muslims, in order to check any attempt to internationalize the city, when it came to control and sovereignty he was sharp as a razor.

[...]

And then it starts to get complicated ...

EPHRAIM ISAAC has become an editorial adviser for a new online encylopedia about Ethiopia, called Ethiopedia.com.

More on Professor Isaac here and here. And he has a Facebook page here.

THE BOOK OF ESTHER'S ORIGIN is explained by Oxford Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley in a new book reviewed in BMCR:

Stephanie Dalley, Esther's Revenge at Susa. From Sennacherib to Ahasuerus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xvi, 262; maps 4, figs. 53. ISBN 978-0-19-921663-5. $99.00.

Reviewed by Gary Beckman, University of Michigan (sidd@umich.edu)
Word count: 936 words

The Book of Esther is perhaps the oddest work included within the canon of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The story is set in Iranian Susa--far away from ancient Israel and Judah, and the biblical God is not mentioned even once in the text. Rather, we encounter a folkloristic narrative in which a murderous plot against the Jews of the Persian Empire is thwarted and turned back upon its originator without the aid of divine intervention, solely through the efforts of a virtuous, beautiful, and courageous woman. While there is still much debate among practitioners of biblical studies as to the historical veracity of many of the tales contained in the Books of the Pentateuch, Samuel, and Kings, few outside of fundamentalist circles seriously maintain that the widespread massacre of anti-Semites described at the conclusion of the Book of Esther--and mentioned in no independent ancient source--actually took place. And it was already recognized more than a century ago that the names of the protagonists of the work, Esther and her uncle Mordecai, are not ordinary Hebrew personal designations, but rather mutations of the names of the Mesopotamian divinities Ishtar (goddess of love and war) and Marduk (patron deity of the city of Babylon).

In this ambitious book, Stephanie Dalley, a cuneiform scholar from Oxford, sets herself the task of explaining just how this work came into being and why it entered the sacred literature of the Jews. She is well prepared to tackle this problem, having over the past decade devoted particular attention in her research to the precipitation of Assyrian and Babylonian traditions in both Classical Greek and biblical sources, discussing, for example, the "Hanging Gardens of Babylon," Semiramis, and the wives of Sargon II of Assyria (see bibliography, pp. 230-31).

[...]

The theory in brief:

... In a nutshell, she speculates that in Assyrian religion, significant historical incidents could be translated to the divine plane, incorporated into mythology, and reenacted in turn by humans in ritual, as documented in the obscure Akkadian-language liturgical scripts known to scholars as "Cultic Commentaries" (113-20). In particular, Dalley further postulates that the wars of Assurbanipal against the Elamites, whose capital was at Susa, were reflected in a festival of Ishtar of Nineveh (156). Consequently, the cultic calendar pertaining to this avatar of the goddess and various elements of her worship were passed on in oral and written tradition after the fall of Assyria, to reappear in altered form in the story of Esther. The resultant narrative entered the lore of the Jews as an aetiology for the festival of purim "lots," the etymology of whose designation unquestionably points to an Assyrian origin (167).

It will be interesting to see how convincing other Assyriologists find the reconstruction of this cultic calendar. The reviewer registers a very Scottish verdict of "not proven."

TECHNOLOGY WATCH: A new effort to unroll those carbonized scrolls from Herculaneum.

Computer scientist to 'unroll' papyrus scrolls buried by Vesuvius [BC-SCI-VESUVIUS-SCROLLS:LX]

(Lexington Herald-Leader (KY) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) LEXINGTON, Ky. _ On Aug. 24, 79 A.D., Italy's Mount Vesuvius exploded, burying the Roman towns of Herculaneum and Pompeii under tons of super-heated ash, rock and debris in one of the most famous volcanic eruptions in history.

Thousands died. But somehow, hundreds of papyrus scrolls survived _ sort of _ in a villa at Herculaneum thought to have been owned at one time by Julius Caesar's father-in-law.

The scrolls contained ancient philosophical and learned writings. But they were so badly damaged _ literally turned to carbon by the volcanic heat _ that they crumbled when scholars first tried to open them centuries later.

The remaining scrolls, stored away in Italy and France, haven't been read _ or even unrolled _ since 79 AD.

Now, a computer scientist from the University of Kentucky hopes that modern digital technology will allow him to peer inside two of the fragile scrolls _ without physically opening them _ and unlock secrets they have held for almost 2,000 years.

Brent Seales, the Gill professor of engineering in UK's computer science department, will use an X-Ray CT scanning system to collect interior images of the scrolls' rolled-up pages. Then, he and his colleagues hope to digitally "unroll" the scrolls on a computer screen so scholars can read them.

"It will be a challenge because today these things look more like charcoal briquets than scrolls," Seales said. "But we're using a non-invasive scanning system, based on medical technology, that lets you slice through an object and develop a three-dimensional data set without having to open it, just as you would do a CT scan on a human body." The two scrolls that Seales and his team will work on are stored at the French National Academy in Paris. The UK group will spend July working there.

[...]

Seales sees other potential applications for the system, including deciphering otherwise unreadable written materials for homeland security purposes. But, he also admits that there are other ancient tests he'd like to examine.

"There are pieces of the Dead Sea scrolls that still haven't been opened yet," he said. "I've talked with some members of teams that work with those materials, and I'd love to see what more we could wring out of them.

"I guess I just like solving mysteries."

Indeed. Non-invasive scanning techniques are the way of the future. For a similar project in the United Kingdom, see here. For more on technological efforts to recover the text of ancient manuscripts, see here. (The University of Kentucky project is also mentioned briefly.)

A NEW COMMENTARY ON 2 MACCABEES is reviewed in BMCR:

Daniel R. Schwartz, 2 Maccabees. Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008. Pp. x, 617. ISBN 9783110191189. $158.00.

Reviewed by Frank Shaw, Cincinnati, Ohio (feshaw72@email.com)
Word count: 3053 words

The publication of a full-length commentary in English on 2 Maccabees is a rare occurrence (the only other one was a quarter century ago), so the appearance of Schwartz's tome is both needed and welcome. His mentor Menahem Stern had just begun work on a 2 Macc. commentary when he was murdered during the first intifada in 1989, and the task of continuing the project fell to Schwartz. Originally published in Hebrew in 2004, the book has undergone significant changes in the English version. General comments between his translation and the verse-by-verse commentary have been added; the bibliography has been improved and updated; statements only related to modern Hebrew have been dropped; various revisions and corrections have been made, some stemming from reviewers of the Hebrew edition. Important too is Schwartz's claim of an "English translation [that] is not only new but also qualitatively different from the Hebrew one." Here he means it is "freer and, consequently, more idiomatically English" (vii). Naturally the English version will be far more widely read than the Hebrew one.

[...]

Via the Agade list.

THE SYRIAC MOR GABRIEL MONASTERY in Turkey has won the first of four land dispute cases currently under litigation:

Christian monastery in Turkey wins back land
Fri May 22, 2009 11:28pm IST

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - One of the world's oldest functioning Christian monasteries has won a legal battle to have land it had owned for centuries restored to it, after a Turkish court ruled on Friday it could not be claimed by the state.

The dispute over the boundaries of Mor Gabriel, a fifth-century Syriac Orthodox monastery in eastern Turkey, had raised concerns over freedom of religion and human rights for non-Muslim minorities in Turkey, a predominantly Muslim country and European Union aspirant.

In a statement, the Syriac Universal Alliance (SUA), a leading Syriac group based in Sweden, said a Turkish court in Midyat had reversed an initial decision by the land registry court to grant villages some 110 hectares (272 acres) of monastery land.

[...]

ARAMAIC WATCH: Turnabout is fair play?

Arameans call for reversal of place names

(Today's Zaman)

The Syriac Universal Alliance (SUA), an umbrella organization for Aramean federations, appealed to Minister of Interior Beşir Atalay on Monday for the “reversal of the Turkification of ancient Aramaic place names” and for Arameans to be given the right to replace their Turkish surnames with their original Aramaic family names.

[...]

IMPRESSIVE:

College degree awarded to high school student

By Judy Harrison
BDN Staff

HAMPDEN, Maine — Amaris Temoso Buchanan was awarded a college degree before earning her high school diploma.

The 17-year-old senior at Bangor Christian Schools on Sunday received an Associate of Arts degree in biblical languages from Grace Evangelical College and Seminary in Bangor. She won’t be handed her high school diploma until June 5.

“Learning languages always intimidated me,” she said at Grace’s intimate graduation ceremony at Community Church of the Open Door on Main Road North, “but once I began studying, I just fell in love with it.”

The languages the Southwest Harbor student learned have not been spoken regularly for centuries. She studied ancient Greek, Hebrew and Syriac — the languages in which the books of the Torah and the Bible were written.

[...]

The reporter is a little confused: Syriac is the post-biblical Aramaic dialect of Edessa, but parts of the Bible are written in Aramaic. In any case, very well done, Amaris!

THE USE OF UNPROVENANCED ARTIFACTS is defended by Dorothy D. Resig in Biblical Archaeology Review:

The Valuable Contributions of “Worthless” Artifacts

by Dorothy D. Resig

A trend has developed recently in the archaeological establishment: Ignore all unprovenanced artifacts. This approach is especially popular among field archaeologists, who believe that objects without a stratified context are worthless. The Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) and the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) have even banned the publication of articles and the presentation of papers about unprovenanced objects from their journals and conferences.

Other scholars reject this view, however. As Swiss Biblical scholar and religious historian Othmar Keel said in an interview with BAR, “I don’t think we can write a history of the ancient Near East without relying on unprovenanced material.”* That prompted us to take a look at several unprovenanced artifacts—all published in BAR—that have contributed significantly to our understanding of the Biblical world.

[...]

Some thoughts.

1. There are two problems with unprovenanced artifacts. First, their authenticity is not obvious, as in the case of an excavated artifact, and so they must be authenticated by other means and this may not always be possible. Second, important information has been lost when the archaeological context of the artifact is severed from it and discarded. The first is a reason not to use unprovenanced artifacts, or at least to use them with considerable caution. The second is regrettable, but is not a reason not to use them.

2. I don't think the Amarna tablets or the Dead Sea Scrolls are good examples to use here, because subsequent excavations at the relevant sites demonstrated their provenance and confirmed their authenticity. Thus the second problem above still applies, but much less the first.

3. The bullae and, to a lesser degree the incantation bowls, are quite problematical because they are comparatively easy to forge (unlike, say, the Moabite Stone).

4. We've been warned that a Monster Forgery Machine has been polluting Hebrew and Aramaic epigraphy for decades, making the market in unprovenanced inscriptions highly unreliable, although so far the Israel forgery trial has not produced compelling evidence that this is so. Still, starting just from first principles, there is reason to worry about this possibility. But meanwhile, as a rule of thumb, I suggest that the cooler and more exciting the unprovenanced artifact, especially if it relates closely to already known and treasured texts such as the Bible, the more we should suspect it is a forgery and demand convincing authentication.

TWO NEW INSCRIPTIONS from the pre-Exilic period have been found in Jerusalem. This Arutz Sheva article summarizes and has photos:

Ancient First Temple Artifacts Uncovered in Jerusalem

by Hana Levi Julian

(IsraelNN.com) Archaeologists from Israel’s Antiquities Authority (IAA) have revealed two important artifacts recently discovered in Jerusalem, both dating from the First Temple Period (8-7 BCE).

The first, a bone seal engraved with the name “Shaul” was found in an excavation being conducted under the auspices of the IAA, in cooperation with the Nature and Parks Authority in the Walls Around Jerusalem National Park, located in the City of David.

The dig, which is underwritten by the “Ir David Foundation” (City of David) is being carried out under the direction of Professor Ronny Reich of the University of Haifa and Eli Shukron of the IAA.

[...]

The second artifact, an ancient jar handle bearing the Hebrew name “Menachem” was uncovered in the neighborhood of Ras el ‘Amud during an excavation prior to construction of a girls’ school by the Jerusalem municipality.

[...]

There's a more detailed treatment of the Shaul seal on the IAA website (temporary URL), with a downloadable photo here. (Via Lauer and Sasson.)

I'm doing better, but am going back to my nap now.

SORRY - Have a cold and am too muzzy to blog today.

PROFESSOR MOSHE WEINFELD passed away recently, and there is now an obituary by Nili Wazana posted at the SBL site. It opens:

Moshe Weinfeld, 1925–2009

But Where Can Wisdom Be Found?
Prof. Moshe Weinfeld passed away on April 29, 2009, on Israel’s 61st Independence Day. Weinfeld’s wisdom was biblical in its breadth and depth, both “a plastered cistern, which loseth not a drop,” and a “welling spring.” Like the biblical hakham, his knowledge was all-encompassing, encyclopedic, “from the cedar in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall.” True to his name, “Moshe was a very humble man,” and his modesty accompanied his approach to every person, both in his personal and in his academic dealings. In his scholarship, he “sought to discover useful … truthful sayings,” yet he did not present them as the only, final, and definitive word, always leaving room for further discussion. ...

May his memory be for a blessing.

(Via the Agade list.)

JACOB NEUSNER AND THE POPE DEBATE JESUS:

CAN THE TORAH BE AMENDED?
Pope & Rabbi Square Off Over the Teachings of Jesus

May 2009By Hurd Baruch (New Oxford Review)

Hurd Baruch, a retired attorney living in Tucson, Arizona, is the author of Light on Light: Illuminations of the Gospel of Jesus Christ from the Mystical Visions of the Venerable Anne Catherine Emmerich (MaxKol Communications, 2004).

Lives there a man who actually deplores Jesus' Sermon on the Mount? Yes, there does. His name is Jacob Neusner, and he is a highly esteemed and scholarly orthodox rabbi and professor, with more than 900 books to his credit, including several that take Jesus to task for His teachings. Rabbi Neusner views the teachings of Jesus as contrary to the Torah, which he regards as the ultimate and final expression of God's will and commandments. (The Torah is God's revelation to Moses at Mt. Sinai as set forth in the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch.) Neusner considers that measuring stick fair and appropriate, given Jesus' statement that He came not to abolish the law and the prophets, but to fulfill them (Mt. 5:17-20).

The culmination of Neusner's negative analyses, A Rabbi Talks With Jesus, drew the comment from Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger that it was "by far the most important book for the Jewish-Christian dialogue to have been published in the last decade." That was in 1993 -- so why bring it up now? Because Cardinal Ratzinger is now our Holy Father, and he has written his own book, Jesus of Nazareth, in which he frames his sixty-page analysis of the Sermon on the Mount ("the new Torah brought by Jesus") partially as a rebuttal to the imagined dialogues Neusner would like to have had with Jesus and His disciples, had he been alive in their time. Referring to Neusner's dialogues from A Rabbi Talks With Jesus, Pope Benedict writes, "More than other interpretations known to me, this respectful and frank dispute between a believing Jew and Jesus, the son of Abraham, has opened my eyes to the greatness of Jesus' words and to the choice that the Gospel places before us."

[...]

UPDATE (18 May): One correction to the above: Rabbi Professor Neusner was ordained a rabbi by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, the seminary of Conservative Judaism, in 1960 and therefore is not an Orthodox rabbi. Also, there's another review of the two books here. (Heads up, Joseph I. Lauer.)