Dirk Smilde Fellowship at Groningen University

CONGRATULATIONS: Prof. Steve Mason receives first Dirk Smilde Fellowship.

Prof. Dr. Mladen Popović, director of the Qumran Institute of the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen, will award Prof. Dr. Steve Mason the inaugural Dirk Smilde Fellowship on 20 September 2013. The ceremony will take place in the Drents Museum in Assen, location of the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition.

Prof. Steve Mason (University of Aberdeen)is the first Dirk Smilde Fellow to start in the academic year 2013-2014. He shall stay at the Qumran Institute from January through May 2014. Prof. Mason is a leading specialist on the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, the Jewish religion of the early Roman period, and Jewish cultural interactions with Greek and Roman culture. He is editor-in-chief of the first commentary series on Josephus (published by Brill, Leiden). His research focuses on the wider cultural and historical context of the world Josephus was living in. Prof. Mason’s research is a perfect match with the research of the Qumran Institute and the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies.

More on Professor Mason here and links.

DSS lecture at Kent State

ADOLFO ROITMAN, TONIGHT: Dead Sea Scrolls curator to speak at Kent State.

"we learned in the Mishnah that a bride turns her face"

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: When the Rabbis Do Things by the Book, They Give the Talmud Its ‘Talmudic’ Qualities. In this week’s Daf Yomi, deference, privilege, and the appearance of impropriety from the rabbis of ancient Jewish society.

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

Sukkot

THE FESTIVAL OF SUKKOT (BOOTHS, TABERNACLES) begins this evening at sundown. Best wishes to all those observing it.

And here's something from Philologos for the season: Why Sukkot Is a Harvest Holiday, Even Though There's Little To Harvest. Holiday Is Not the Best Time to Reap Grain.

News on the title of the Gospel of Matthew

BRICE C. JONES: Simon Gathercole on the Earliest Title of Matthew's Gospel on a Papyrus "Flyleaf." Cool.

Old Church Slavonic and modern politics

SLAVONIC WATCH: A tug-of-war over the origins of the Slavonic alphabet: Press 24: Cyril and Methodius are Bulgarians; Slavonic alphabet is Bulgarian – latest anti-Macedonian scandal in Brussels.

Background here and here and links.

PhD fellowship

AT THE UNIVERSITY OF OSLO: PhD Research Fellowship in Early Christian Studies.

A full-time PhD research fellowship position in Early Christian Studies is available at The Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo. The position is attached to the ERC-project NEWCONT. Tentative starting date is 1st January 2014.

Job description

NEWCONT is an ERC-funded research project that focuses on the Coptic Nag Hammadi Codices in the context of Christianity and monasticism in the fourth and fifth centuries. It is a project that seeks to increase our knowledge of early Christianity and monasticism and the historical reception of the Bible. For further information on the NEWCONT-project, see the project's webpages.

The proposed PhD-project should be relevant to the NEWCONT-project, with which the successful applicant will be in close collaboration. Proposals focusing on the history and theology of Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries are especially welcome. The working language is English, and the PhD-dissertation should be written in English.

The appointment is for a period of 4 years. 75 percent of the position is allocated to the Candidate's research training, while 25 percent is allocated to required duties. The required duties comprise teaching, research assistance, etc.

The purpose of the PhD Research Fellowship is research training leading to the successful completion of a doctoral dissertation (monograph) to be defended at a public defense for the doctoral degree. The successful candidate will be automatically accepted to the research-training program (PhD-program) at the Faculty of Theology.

Follow the link for further particulars.

HT Liv Ingeborg Lied on Facebook.

Assistant Professor of Christian Near East

JOB AT THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA: Assistant Professor of Christian Near East.

The Department of Semitic and Egyptian Languages and Literatures in the School of Arts & Sciences at the Catholic University of America invites applications for a tenure track position, to begin in August 2014, at the rank of Assistant or Associate Professor, in early Christian Near Eastern languages, literature, and history. The successful candidate will have a thorough knowledge of Syriac grammar and literature. Knowledge of Classical Arabic and other Semitic languages, as well as other Christian Near Eastern languages, such as Coptic and Armenian, is a plus.

The successful candidate will have an earned doctorate, with an excellent record of teaching, publishing, research, and service, or the promise of these, commensurate with experience. Responsibilities will include: teaching graduate courses and seminars in Syriac language and literature, the history of the Christian Near East, and other languages within the candidates competence; advising students in the Department; participation in activities within the Department and allied programs and units within the University (including the possibility of undergraduate teaching on occasion); conducting and directing research in the languages and literatures of the Christian Near East.

The application deadline is 1 November 2013. Follow the link for further particulars.

HT James McGrath on Facebook. Cross-file under "Syriac Watch."

Iraqi Jewish archive again

SHORT ANSWER: NO. Does Iraq deserve the return of its Jewish archive? But even more to the point, it is far from clear to me that the archive will be safer or better cared for there than where it is now.

More thoughts on these issues here (especially the last paragraph and links). Additional background here with links going back a decade.

Middle East latest

MORE REPORTS OF MURDER AND DESTRUCTION IN THE MIDDLE EAST:

There are reports of the murders of at least three Christians by Islamist rebels in the Aramaic-speaking Syrian town of Maaloula (Ma'loula, Malula), although there is limited verification. What is clear, though, is that the town is caught between the Syrian Government and the rebels and things are going badly there.

Eyewitness Account of Three Syrian Christians Killed by Extremists (Joan Frawley, National Catholic Register)

Syrian Jihadist Slits Throat of Christian Man Refusing to Deny Christ, Then Taunts Fiancée, 'Jesus Didn't Come to Save Him' (Leonardo Blair, The Christian Post).

Christians fighting for survival against jihadist rebels in ancient Maaloula (Catholic Online).

Maaloula's cathedral and churches empty of Christians as Syria's latest front-line fight takes its toll. Its churches are empty, its monasteries deserted, many pitted and holed by the battles raging around them. (Bill Neely, ITV News, The Telegraph).

Syrian Militants Battle For Christian Village (Deborah Amos, NPR).

Background on Maaloula is here with many, many links.

Meanwhile in Egypt: Coptic archaeological site wrecked (Daily News Egypt).

The latest attack targeted Ansana, a historical Egyptian site believed to have been used as a Coptic monastery. Yet, information about it is scarce. “[The site] was never properly studied and published,” said archaeologist Monica Hanna. The site was bombed with dynamite. ... The whole area is full of Coptic, Syriac and Greek inscriptions that have not been completely studied and documented.

I cannot hope to keep track of all the relevant (to PaleoJudaica) atrocities happening right now in the Middle East, but these are some of them.

Review of Ehrman, Forgery and Counterforgery

BOOK REVIEW IN MARGINALIA: David Lincicum on Forgery and Counterforgery, by Bart Ehrman: Lies, Damned Lies, and Patristics. Excerpt:

Learned humanists exposed many more of these ancient frauds during the Renaissance, but the authenticity of the documents that compose the New Testament was not seriously questioned until the late eighteenth century. Since that time, there has been protracted debate about not only the presence of pseudepigrapha in the New Testament but also the possible motivations a pseudepigrapher might have had. Most critical scholars now acknowledge at least some pseudonymous texts in the New Testament, but the question of motive still rattles. Some contend that pseudonymity was practiced as an open secret, a transparent fiction, and that the audience was in on the ruse. Others claim that the students or co-workers of departed apostles wrote the letters, perhaps even with their blessing, the same way a philosopher’s student might write in their name.

There’s just one problem: this pretty much never happened in antiquity. Following a growing chorus of voices in recent years — though German Neutestamentler have been saying this a lot longer and with more consistency, significant voices have arisen in the Anglophone world as well — Ehrman rightly notes that whenever a forgery is uncovered in antiquity, it is condemned as deceptive. For too long, scholars have hidden behind the hazy notion that the idea of “intellectual property” didn’t exist in the ancient world — as though authors lived in a golden utopia of verbal communism, untroubled by the very possibility of plagiarism per definitionem, until all this came to a screeching halt in 1710 with the first copyright statute. The intention of pseudepigraphers, as Ehrman and others have demonstrated in convincing detail, is to deceive. You don’t begin a letter, “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the saints … ,” unless you want the audience to think you’re Paul.

Alexander, Gender and Timebound Commandments in Judaism

THE TALMUD BLOG: Review of Elizabeth Shanks Alexander, ‘Gender and Timebound Commandments in Judaism’- Guest Post by Raphael Magarik.

Yet, while Alexander conceived the idea for the book, as she explains in the introduction, “in the shadow of a contemporary cultural debate,” she writes as a Talmudist. Thus, she restricts herself historically to pre-Medieval sources and methodologically to descriptive history. Further, within those frameworks, Alexander does not so much answer as destroy the original question.

Rollston on David and Northwest Semitic epigraphy

CHRISTOPHER ROLLSTON IN BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION: By God I am King: David’s Rise to the Throne in Broader Context.

The epigraphic texts from the ancient Near East, therefore, paint for us a broader picture, they reveal more of the depth of the tapestry that is the world of the ancient Near East. And the epigraphic texts remind us that ancient Israel was part of the ancient Near Eastern world.

This essay will be useful when I lecture on the United Monarchy in my first-year Intro to Hebrew Bible this semester.

Yom Kippur

YOM KIPPUR, the Day of Atonement, begins this evening at sundown. An easy fast to all those observing it.

Biblical background noted here.

The Talmud and intellectual questions

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: When Talmud Is the Focus of Jewish Observance, Theology Comes to Life. Instead of asking us to passively agree with the rabbis, oral law engages the intellect in concrete problems of logic and interpretation.

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

DeConick et al., Practicing Gnosis

IN THE MAIL:

Practicing Gnosis
Ritual, Magic, Theurgy and Liturgy in Nag Hammadi, Manichaean and Other Ancient Literature. Essays in Honor of Birger A. Pearson

Edited by April D. DeConick, Gregory Shaw, and John D. Turner

Ritual, magic, liturgy, and theurgy were central features of Gnosticism, and yet Gnostic practices remain understudied. This anthology is meant to fill in this gap and address more fully what the ancient Gnostics were doing. While previously we have studied the Gnostics as intellectuals in pursuit of metaphysical knowledge, the essays in this book attempt to understand the Gnostics as ecstatics striving after religious experience, as prophets seeking revelation, as mystics questing after the ultimate God, as healers attempting to care for the sick and diseased. These essays demonstrate that the Gnostics were not necessarily trendy intellectuals seeking epistomological certainities. They were after religious experiences that relied on practices. The book is organized comparatively in a history-of-religions approach with sections devoted to Initiatory, Recurrent, Therapeutic, Ecstatic, and Philosophic Practices. This book celebrates the brilliant career of Birger A. Pearson.

My article, "Ritual in the Hekhalot Literature," is included in the volume.

Middle East varia, none good

I'VE BEEN COLLECTING bad-news articles and blog posts on the Middle East for the last couple of weeks. Sadly, they all remain relevant.

War Threatens Palmyra, UNESCO Pleads for Syrian Heritage Protection (Magda Abu-Fadil, Huffington Post). Background on Palmyra and its inscriptions is here and links. More on Palmyra in this war is here and here.

Syria's Rich Archaeological Treasures Imperiled by Civil War (Tia Ghose, Live Science).

Arms for Antiquities: Syrian Artifact Smuggling Bleeds Sites Dry - including Dura Europos (Joanne Bajjaly, Al-Akhbar). Background here and links.

Ma'loula Under Attack (Steve Caruso, The Aramaic Blog). Background on Ma'loula (Maaloula, Malula) is here with many links.

Pictures: Looters Shatter Museum of Ancient Egyptian Treasures (National Geographic).

Egypt demands return of stolen artifacts from Europe and U.S. (Afrik News). For some reason someone decided that this was a good time to re-release this 2009 article.

UPDATE: Accidentally left this one out: Mount Sinai monastery latest victim of Egypt's upheavals. Closure of St Catherine's monastery due to security concerns has devastated tourist trade of nearby town named after it (Patrick Kingsley and Marwa Awad, The Guardian). St. Catherine's Monastery and its manuscripts have been mentioned often at PaleoJudaica, for example, here, here, here, here, and here.

Goodacre on Schama on Paul

DOCUMENTARY FAIL: Simon Schama's misreading of Paul (NT Blog).

To reiterate, I think this is a superb documentary and I am a big fan of Schama. But I think this section falls below his usual standards. One of the reasons that this is important is that getting the history right plays a key role in Jewish-Christian relations. Given the appalling history of Christian attitudes to Jews and Judaism documented by Schama, it is worth paying careful attention to what Jews like Paul, right at the beginning of the Jesus movement, actually said.

Background on the documentary The Story of the Jews is here and links.

Cyrus Cylinder mystery

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Who broke the Cyrus Cylinder? (A. J. Cave, Payvand News of Iran). Key excerpt:

On 28 August, 2013, Dr. Jon Taylor, Assistant Keeper of Cuneiform Collections at the British Museum gave a talk: “Hormuzd Rassam and the Discovery of the Cyrus Cylinder” to a packed audience at Cal (UC Berkeley). The talk was presented by the Assyrian Heritage Fund and co-sponsored by the Center for the Middle Eastern Studies and the Townsend Center for Humanities. Among the attendees was the elderly great, great, great grandson of one of the brothers of Rassam who had traveled just for the occasion.

To prepare for the talk, Dr. Taylor had resorted to archival research in the vast acquisition registers of the British Museum. Thumbing through old records at the museum, he found out (rather unexpectedly) that the cylinder (identified later as the “Cyrus Cylinder” by the Assyriologists the British Museum) was listed as “unbroken” in boring bureaucratic documents, leading him to speculate that the cylinder was most likely broken (perhaps intentionally) before it was shipped to London.

Why?

Intense western interest in eastern biblical lands and peoples in the 19th century did not just lead to spectacular discoveries of ancient civilizations, it sparked a lively global trade in ancient artifacts procured in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” manner. Since 1850s illicit diggings for antiquities that institutions and individuals are willing to pay good money for have progressed in the Middle East without any sign of decline. Local laborers usually got paid literally pennies for each inscribed tablet they dug up, so it was not unusual for them or actually anyone in the antiquities supply-chain to break clay tablets they found into pieces to increase their meager pay and sell the “surplus” to Baghdad dealers.

Dr. Taylor prepared a list of the usual suspects who had access and motive to break the unbroken cylinder, and like a clever crime novel detective eliminated all but two, one of them Daud (Fat) Toma, one of overseers Rassam had hired—not deemed trustworthy even by Rassam himself.

We would never know without a shadow of a doubt, but we can safely say that the real culprit was the insatiable black market for antiquities.

For much more on the Cyrus Cylinder, see here and links.

Them Bones

LIVESCIENCE: Animal sacrifice at temple powered ancient Jerusalem's economy: Animal bones found in a dump dating to the end of the second Temple period suggest that animal sacrifice powered Jerusalem's economy.

Pilgrims came from hundreds of miles away to sacrifice animals at an ancient temple in Jerusalem, new research suggests.

An analysis of bones found in an ancient dump in the city dating back 2,000 years revealed that animals sacrificed at the temple came from far and wide.

"The study shows that there is a major interprovincial market that enables the transfer of vast numbers of animals that are used for sacrifice and feasting in Jerusalem during that time period," said study co-author Gideon Hartman, a researcher at the University of Connecticut.

The finding, published in the September issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, confirms visions of the temple depicted in historical Jewish texts and suggests the economic heart of the city was its slaughtering operation.

[...]

You can find the original journal article here (#22) (noted by Joseph Lauer).

On the Temple as a "massive slaughterhouse," see also here.