Main road of Byzantine-era Jerusalem being excavated

THE MAIN ROAD of Byzantine-Era Jerusalem is being uncovered due to necessary road works:

Main road of Jerusalem from the Byzantine era exposed
10 Feb 2010

Archaeological excavation in the heart of the Old City confirms the description on the Madaba Map and reveals Jerusalem's main road from the Byzantine period for the first time.

(Communicated by the IAA Spokesperson)

The Madaba Map – an ancient mosaic map in a church in Jordan from the sixth-seventh century CE, which depicted the Land of Israel in the Byzantine period, explicitly showed: the entrance to Jerusalem from the west was via a very large gate that led to a single, central thoroughfare on that side of the city.

Various evidence of the important buildings in Jerusalem that appear on the map has been uncovered over the years or has survived to this day – for example the Church of the Holy Sepulcher – but the large bustling street from the period when Jerusalem became a Christian city has not been discovered until now. The reason for this is that no archaeological excavations took place in the region due to the inconvenience it would cause in stopping traffic in such a busy central location.

Now, because of the need for a thorough treatment of the infrastructure in the region, the Jerusalem Development Authority has initiated rehabilitation work and is renewing the infrastructure in this area in general, and next to the entrance to David Street (known to tourists as the stepped-street with the shops) in particular. Thus it is possible for both archaeologists and the public to catch a rare glimpse of what is going on beneath the flagstone pavement that is so familiar to us all.

[...]

(Brought to my attention by reader Carla Sulzbach.)

A NEW LIST: TOP 50 BIBLICAL HISTORY BLOGS. The list is organized by category rather than ranking. PaleoJudaica is one of them.

Paleography chair being axed at KCL

THE LAST PALAEOGRAPHY (PALEOGRAPHY) CHAIR IN THE UK is being eliminated by Kings College London, and all hell is starting to break loose. As it should.

Writing off the UK's last palaeographer

o John Crace
o The Guardian, Tuesday 9 February 2010

The decision by a London university to axe the UK's only chair in palaeography has been met by outrage from the world's most eminent classicists. John Crace on why the study of ancient writings matters – and why history will be lost without it

Dry, dusty and shortly to be dead. Palaeographers are used to making sense of fragments of ancient manuscripts, but King's College London couldn't have been plainer when it announced recently that it was to close the UK's only chair of palaeography. From ­September, the current holder of the chair, Professor David Ganz, will be out of a job, and the subject will no longer exist as a separate academic discipline in British universities. Its survival will now depend entirely on the whim of classicists and medievalists studying in other fields.

The decision took everyone by ­surprise. "It was only recently that Rick Trainor [the principal of King's] was calling the humanities department [to which palaeography is attached] the jewel in the university's crown," says Dr Mary Beard, professor of ­classics at Cambridge University. "There had been a complete overhaul of ­minority disciplines in the mid-1990s, so there was consensus that everything had been pared down to the bare minimum."

How things change. With Lord Mandelson – in his incarnation as secretary of state for business, industry and skills – now imposing a minimum 10% cut in spending throughout higher education, universities are looking to slash and burn departments. And esoteric subjects such as palaeography are easy targets; they attract comparatively few students and, most importantly, comparatively little in the way of research grants – the only way the past few governments have measured a subject's worth.

But if Trainor was hoping palaeography would do the decent thing, he badly misjudged the situation. Professor Ganz – the fourth person to have held the chair since it was endowed in 1949 – didn't roll over and die quietly. "On the assumption that this means the end of the chair of palaeography, I am having to fight for my subject," he says, "and I have been deeply moved by the level of support from friends, many of whom I have never met."

That's pretty much all Ganz is saying for now – but, having initially raised a very restrained, academic form of hell, others are now doing the talking for him. A Facebook page to save the chair has more than 4,000 members, and many of the world's most distinguished classicists have petitioned King's to ­reconsider its position. Even his ­students are stepping in to defend him. "Without a palaeography professor such as David Ganz, not only will King's be sorely deprived of a basis on which to teach almost every other university discipline," says Alexandra Maccarini, "but the study of humanities everywhere will suffer from the absence of a devoted specialist in the subject."

[...]

If you are on Facebook, please go and join the Facebook page, which is here. I have. And whether you are on Facebook or not, you can sign the petition (currently has almost 5500 signatures, including mine) here.

The article is quite sympathetic and offers a robust defense of palaeography. A couple of excerpts:

Either way, the point is much the same. It's not just that we wouldn't have a clue what the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Cyrus Cylinder (over which the British Museum and the Iranian government are currently locking horns) actually mean without palaeography; we wouldn't know how to evaluate their historical importance. Multiply this by every fragment and every hand-written folio, and the history of the world begins to be up for grabs.
[...]

Giving up on palaeography is like giving up on art, history and culture. It's like deciding we know all we want to know about the past, so we're not going to bother to find out any more: "It's not as if we can come back to it in 15 years' time if we then decide there's enough money," says Beard. "Palaeography can't be taught in an online tutorial; it's a skill handed down from one academic to another. If King's does go through with its decision, it's the end of the subject in this country."

One criticism of the piece though; it shouldn't assume that subjects like paleography can't bring in research grant money. The research councils and other funding sources recognize the value of such things and are quite willing to fund projects on them if they are well thought out. My own (comparably arcane) research on the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha depends heavily on palaeographic work (my own and that of many others) and I have raised more than £100,000 in research grants for it in the last five years.

I hope the Principal of KCL reconsiders this action and does the right thing.

Ph.D. scholarship on Second Temple Judaism at Groningen

NOTE THE PH.D. SCHOLARSHIP on Second Temple Judaism at the University of Groningen, on which I posted this weekend.

Row over Cyrus Cylinder takes a new twist

THE ROW OVER THE CYRUS CYLINDER has taken a new twist:

Iran cuts cultural links with British Museum over Cyrus Cylinder

Lucy Bannerman (London Times)

Iran has severed all cultural ties with the British Museum over the institution’s failure to hand over an ancient Persian treasure.

At the centre of the diplomatic row is a 2,500-year-old cuneiform tablet, known as the Cyrus Cylinder, which most historians regard as the world’s first declaration of human rights.

Curators had been due to lend the artefact to Tehran last month, but announced that the handover would be delayed after the discovery of new tablets that they believe could help its research. The delay has provoked the anger of Iranian officials, who announced an end to dialogue yesterday in protest at a decision that they believe is politically motivated.

[...]

Given the shaky prospects of the current Iranian regime, it may be just as well if the artifacts don't go there anytime soon. Background and related thoughts are here.

50th anniversary

50TH ANNIVERSARY:

February 8, 1960: Tel Aviv, Israel — Archaeologists hoped today they may have uncovered another cache of 'Dead Sea Scrolls' in an obscure cave once used as a hideout by rebels against the Romans. They reported finding fragments of parchment scrolls, believed to have been written about the same time as the Dead Sea scrolls. The new scrolls are the first found on the Israel side of the Dead Sea.

This must be referring to Yigael Yadin's excavations of the Bar Kokhba caves, which did produce some impressive epigraphic discoveries in 1960, including battle communiques dictated by Bar Kokhba himself.

Temple Mount Watch: Mughrabi Gate bridge

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: Jordan is still resisting renovations to the Mughrabi (Mugrabi) Gate bridge:

BJordanian Pressure Preventing Western Wall Walkway Construction

by Gil Ronen

(IsraelNN.com) Jordanian pressure is preventing the completion of a walkway to the Temple Mount next to the Western Wall (Kotel), according to Nadav Shragai, senior researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

[...]

The plan for renovating the walkway to the Rambam Gate has been approved, Shragai said, but the government is delaying its implementation. “At first they wanted the bridge to be suspended from support columns,” the veteran former journalist explained, “but environmental groups objected. In the end it was decided that the bridge would be placed on what remains of the [dirt] ramp, in order to avoid damage to houses in the Mughrabim neighborhood. This plan currently has the necessary approvals and all that is needed is a construction permit from the Kotel Heritage Fund which answers to the Prime Minister's Office. For some reason, because of pressure from the Jordanian government, the government is not granting this permit.”

[...]

Background here.

James Tabor lecture: What kind of Jew was Jesus?

JAMES TABOR is lecturing on "What Kind of Jew was Jesus?"

How would Jesus worship? Scholar to address Jewishness of Jesus at UNCA

By Arnold Wengrow • February 7, 2010 (Citizen-Times)

ASHEVILLE — Should Jews who are committed to their faith be interested in Jesus? Would Christians who believe in the divinity of Christ want to know about Jesus the Jew?

James Tabor, a scholar of early Christianity, says he will pose these “deliberately provocative” questions in his talk “What Kind of Jew Was Jesus?” at 7 p.m. Thursday at UNC Asheville's Reuter Center.

“Next to Moses, Jesus was the most famous Jew on the planet,” Tabor said in a telephone interview from his office at UNC Charlotte, where he chairs the religious studies department. “If he was a faithful Jew in his own world,” he said, “there's a sense, as (Jewish philosopher) Martin Buber said, that Jews can reclaim him. Not as what the church made him, but as he was.”

Christians should be interested in the Jewishness of Jesus, Tabor said, because “whatever their theology might be, history must be brought in. Even the Catholic Church is interested.”

Tabor, the author of “The Jesus Dynasty,” a book about the historical Jesus and his family, noted that the current pope, Benedict XVI, is writing a two-volume book that discusses both the history and the theology of Jesus' life.

[...]

For the "Jesus Family Tomb" or Talpiot Tomb, see here and follow the links.

Essay on names in Genesis 1-11

AN ESSAY ON NAMES IN GENESIS 1-11 has been published at Bible and Interpretation:

Names in Genesis 1-11

The names are often overlooked by modern readers, but not by the ancient Israelites, who understood Hebrew.

See Richard S. Hess, Studies in the Personal Names of Genesis 1-11 (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2009)

By Richard S. Hess
Earl S. Kalland Professor of Old Testament and Semitic Languages
Denver Seminary
February 2010

One of his conclusions is that some of these names are very old indeed.

By the way, the name Japheth is surely related to the name of the Greek Titan Iapetus.

Essay on the Archangel Gabriel

THE ARCHANGEL GABRIEL is the subject of an essay at Bible and Interpretation:

Gabriel Blow Your Horn! - A Short History of Gabriel within Jewish Literature

From the ancient to the modern world, angels have been the subject of fascination and wonder. Perhaps only second to Michael in fame, the angel Gabriel has enjoyed a long and celebrated history among Jews and Christians alike.

By David L. Everson
Classics Department
Xavier University (Cincinnati, OH)
December 2009

An interesting discussion of early references to Gabriel. I'm not clear why the book of Daniel is segregated from "Second Temple Literature," especially inasmuch as most scholars think the Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 1-36) is earlier than Daniel. Gabriel is also mentioned in the Qumran War Scroll and also, of course, in the recently published Vision of Gabriel inscription (see here and here and follow the links). The latter really ought to have been noted.

Book Review (BMCR): Bagnall, Early Christian Books in Egypt

BOOK REVIEW (BMCR):

Roger S. Bagnall, Early Christian Books in Egypt. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009. Pp. xv, 100. ISBN 9780691140261. $29.95.

Reviewed by Benjamin Garstad, Grant MacEwan University (garstadb@macewan.ca)

Roger Bagnall is one of the foremost authorities on the written remains of Roman Egypt and the evidence they offer us for a lost world, but in this slender volume he wears his formidable learning lightly. The four essays that make up the book are adapted from lectures he gave at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris in 2006. They offer engaging and approachable insights into a field of research in which even professional classicists are compelled to defer to the training and experience of experts, but which remains of interest to many. With a sweeping breadth that sacrifices remarkably little in the way of convincing depth, Bagnall makes an up-to-date survey of the topic of early Christian books in Egypt, indicates where (and why) research may have gone astray in the past, and points the way forward for future work.

[...]

This part in particular is of interest:

Bagnall follows his argument for the paucity of Christian literary remains we should expect before the turn of the second century with a pair of case studies. The first concerns Carsten Peter Thiede's attempt to date the Magdalen papyrus fragment of the Gospel of Matthew to the first century and support his overall contention that the Gospel was composed before the fall of Jerusalem in 71. I can only imagine that it was the notoriety of this case which suggested it as an example of a private or partisan agenda skewing the scholarship of early Christian papyri toward an early date. It certainly required no subtlety for Bagnall to demolish Thiede's claims for the benefit of the reader. Indeed, it might be considered a mean-spirited exaggeration to describe an affair which might have been dismissed with a shrug as "gruesome" and "horrifying" and to characterize Thiede's ZPE article as a parody of academic form with none of its substance, particularly in light of his recent death. De mortuis nihil nisi bonum, after all. Without lash in hand Bagnall seems, by contrast, inconclusive in his treatment of Antonio Carlini's suggestion that a fragment of the Shepherd of Hermas might belong to the first half of the second century. Carlini himself concedes that the palaeographic evidence is at odds with the testimony of the Muratorian Canon (dated to near the end of the second century) that the Shepherd was written during the episcopate of Pius in Rome (142-55). Bagnall offers a generous hearing to Carlini's resolution of the problem with reference to the composite nature of the Shepherd and the possibility that we might find remains of its independently circulating parts. The Hermas fragments highlight the complications of serious and disinterested scholarship. The contrasting examples of early dating might have played well to the audience of a lecture, but are perhaps not so instructive in the less ephemeral format of a written essay.

The late Prof. Thiede's attempts to find fragments of the Greek New Testament among the Dead Sea Scrolls have also not been found persuasive. Also, the Muratorian Canon has been redated to the fourth century by some scholars.

An early codex of the book of Isaiah also figures in the book.

St. Anthony's monastery restored

ST. ANTHONY'S MONASTERY in Egypt has undergone restoration:

World's oldest monastery restored

(BBC)

Egypt has completed the restoration of reputedly the world's oldest Christian monastery, called Saint Anthony's.

The monastery is believed to be 1,600 years old. The government-sponsored restoration project cost over $14m (£8.9m) and took more than eight years.

The monastery is a popular site for Coptic Christian pilgrims.

The restoration comes soon after Egypt's worst incident of sectarian violence in a decade, when six Copts were shot dead on Christmas Eve.

[...]

Of tangential interest to PaleoJudaica, but noted because of the connection the Egyptian authorities (including Zahi Hawass) have been making with the Nag Hammadi murders, already covered here. And the restoration is a good demonstration that the Egyptian Government is taking care of non-Muslim antiquities. This should go without saying, of course, but under current circumstances I can see why they would want to emphasize it.

Second Temple Judaism Ph.D. position at Groningen

A PH.D. POSITION dealing with Second Temple Judaism is being advertised at the University of Groningen. Mladen Popovic e-mails:

PhD position The Jewish Revolt against Rome (0,9 fte) (210026) at the Qumran Institute of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands

The Graduate School of Theology and Religious Studies of the University of Groningen is looking for a PhD candidate (0,9 fte) for the project 'The Jewish Revolt against Rome: Religious Groups and the Shaping of Identities in First-Century Judaea'.

This PhD position is financed by a grant of the SNS/Reaal Fund. It will run parallel to the interdisciplinary NWO VENI project The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Jewish War against Rome (66-70), which investigates the impact of Rome on the self-understanding of a Jewish group at Qumran prior to the revolt. PhD candidates are expected to carry out research within the historical and a f first-century Judaea in relation to the impact of the Roman Empire on the region and the conflict of 66-70/73. Projects may investigate e.g. Flavius Josephus' position, specific Jewish groups, Roman reactions, specific sites, regions or interregional connections from different perspectives and on the basis of different sources (literary, archaeological and/or numismatic). The final form of the PhD project will be determined in consultation with the PhD candidate.

We are looking for enthusiastic candidates with a Master's degree or equivalent, in a (sub)discipline in which the doctoral study will take place. Candidates with a degree in Hebrew Bible, J! ewish Stu assics, or Archaeology are especially encouraged to apply.

The degree must have been obtained within a reasonable period of time and with results that justify the expectation that the student will be able to successfully complete the programme in four years.

This PhD position is available as of September 1st, 2010.

Signed applications should be received by the Graduate School Office by March 1.

For additional information see:

http://www.rug.nl/ggw/vacatures/10PhDJRR

BBC: Archaeology and the struggle for Jerusalem

THE POLITICS OF JERUSALEM ARCHAEOLOGY is addressed by the BBC in Archaeology and the struggle for Jerusalem. Like the essay I commented on a couple of days ago, this article raises a number of valid concerns, but it too ignores entirely the part played by Islamist denial of basic historical facts such as the existence of Jewish Temples on the Temple Mount in antiquity. It's curious that this myopia is so common among Westerners who comment on the situation.

The Samaritan High Priest has passed away

THE SAMARITAN HIGH PRIEST has passed away.

Samaritans mourn their high priest
BY BEN HARTMAN
05/02/2010 05:00 (Jerusalem Post)

Elazar ben Tsedaka, 83, ‘wise’ and ‘selfless,’ traced his office back to Aaron.

Snow flurries drifted to the ground on Mount Gerizim overlooking Nablus on Thursday, as mourners gathered to bury the spiritual leader of the Samaritans, who passed away the previous day.

High Priest Elazar ben Tsedaka ben Yitzhaq was born during a snowstorm 83 years ago, one mourner said. On Thursday, as he was being laid to rest at the holiest site in the Samaritan religion, the snow began to fall again.

According to Samaritan tradition he was the 131st holder of the post since Aaron. This is not be accepted by all historians, but the office may well go back to the Hellenistic period, which would still make it the oldest office in the world. One account in Josephus suggest that it is an offshoot of the Zadokite high priests in Jerusalem from around the time of Alexander the Great.

Mourners took shelter from the storm inside the community center in the hilltop neighborhood of Kiryat Luza, where much of the ethnoreligious group of 730 lives. Nearly all the rest live in Holon’s Neveh Pinchas neighborhood.

Inside, well over 100 men gathered in a somber, eerily quiet ceremony around the casket holding Elazar, who will be replaced as head priest by his cousin Aharon Ben-Av Hisda Cohen.

[...]

Photos of the funeral are here. I don't know what Samaritans say for this, but I hope that may his memory be for a blessing will serve.

(Heads up, Carla Sulzbach.)

Rashi's Daughters trilogy completed

THE RASHI'S DAUGHTERS TRILOGY by Maggie Anton is now complete.

Background here.

On the congeniality of an apocalyptic Jesus

HELEN BOND finds an apocalyptic Jesus all too congenial to today's world and therefore no safeguard against distortion when we try to reconstruct the historical Jesus (Bible and Interpretation again). In the 1980s the Jesus Seminar found a Jesus that always looked to me suspiciously like a contemporary American humanities professor, so the problem is not new. The best rule of thumb is to try to follow the evidence on a detailed level where it leads, without assuming that any reconstruction is likely to be more objective in principle than any other. And it's also important to face the fact that our historical evidence for Jesus was not written with our interests in mind and may well not suffice for the type of historical reconstruction of his ministry and his teaching which we want.

Biblical Scholarship and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

JULIA M. O'BRIEN has recently visited Israel and the West Bank and has reflections on Biblical Scholarship and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict at Bible and Interpretation. She is quite right that solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian issues must be political ones and that uncritical use of the Bible and ideological use of the archaeology of the area are entirely unhelpful. That said, I was disappointed that she completely ignored the Islamist ideologies that are very much in play and which try to deny any historical connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel/Palestine, often resorting to Orwellian dismissal of the historical evidence (as with the persistent denial that there was a Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount). Scholars need to combat both trends so that the politicians can proceed without distraction by historically worthless ideologies. PaleoJudaica spends a good deal of time on this problem.

UPDATE (5 February): Related thoughts here.

The Holiness Code cramps today's Jerusalem lifestyle

ABIGAIL PICKUS is finding that those laws in the Holiness Code of Leviticus are cramping her social life in Jerusalem. Note especially Leviticus 20:13 and 21:14.

Biblical Studies Carnival 50 (?)

BIBLICAL STUDIES CARNIVAL 50 (or something) has been posted by Duane Smith at Abnormal Interests.