Anothe cache of ancient coins found in Israel

Hikers Find Cache of Rare Coins from 2,300 Years Ago. Three Israeli Caving Club hikers found the cache in a stalactite cave in northern Israel. (The Jewish Press).

Three hikers have discovered a cache of rare coins and silver and bronze objects 2,300 years old in a cave in one of the important discoveries in northern Israel in recent years, according to Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA).

[...]

The youngest member of the group, Hen, 21, says he forced his way into one of the narrow niches when he suddenly caught sight of a shining object. He discovered two ancient silver coins, which it later turned out had been minted during the reign of Alexander the Great who conquered the Land of Israel at the beginning of the Hellenistic period (late fourth century BCE).

Several pieces of silver jewelry were found alongside the coins, among them rings, bracelets and earrings, which were apparently concealed in the cave, together inside a cloth pouch some 2,300 years ago.

“The valuables might have been hidden in the cave by local residents who fled there during the period of governmental unrest stemming from the death of Alexander, a time when the Wars of the Diadochi broke out in Israel between Alexander’s heirs following his death,” IAA archaeologists said.

[...]

This would be not long after, and perhaps even in the same general region as when the Samaria Papyri were left in a large cave — but in that case because their owners were also in the cave and were suffocated when Alexander's army lit a fire in front of the cave mouth.

UPDATE (10 March): You can read the IAA press release here (HT Joseph Lauer).

ISIS continues its desecration of the past

THE ANTIQUITIES DEPREDATIONS OF ISIS IN IRAQ are coming so fast now that they are hard to keep up with. Here are some recent articles.

ISIS' destruction of biblical Iraq: A bitter irony of history. Nineveh has come full circle: After 2,700 years, the gleeful destroyer was itself destroyed. And now Hatra and Nimrud are gone too (Julia Fridman, Haaretz).

Within days, militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria destroyed three extraordinary cultural heritage sites in Iraq going back thousands of years: Nineveh, Hatra and Nimrud. For the ancient Assyrian capitals, their wanton destruction was a tragically ironic turn of events, given that their rulers, some 2,700 years ago, had been among the most brutal and destructive the region had known.

The destruction of cultural heritage by an occupier is nothing new. There is even a term for it: Urbicide, the destruction of an urban center in order to erase its memory for future generations.

The rulers of Nineveh, which fell first, then Nimrud and now, Hatra had done their share of destruction – records of which they proudly left behind, including in the form of wall art.

Though while ISIS seems to be following the Assyrians' rule book, whether in ignorance, irony or specifically to mimic long-gone great rulers, they do not cavil at selling antiquities they loot. In fact this is apparently a major source of funding for the group.

[...]

UNESCO: ISIS Antiquities Destruction in Iraq a 'War Crime.' UNESCO calls on ICC, UN Security Council to prosecute ISIS over destruction of antiquities in Nimrud, Iraq as 'war crime' (Arutz Sheva).

The head of UNESCO condemned on Friday the destruction of the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud in Iraq by the Islamic State group, saying it amounted to a "war crime."

"I condemn with the strongest force the destruction of the site at Nimrud," Irina Bokova said in a statement.

[...]

Islamic State militants bulldoze ancient Nimrud ruins as idolatrous (Reuters).

Islamic State fighters have looted and bulldozed the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud, the Iraqi government said, in their latest assault on some of the world’s greatest archaeological and cultural treasures.

A tribal source from the nearby city of Mosul told Reuters the ultra-radical Sunni Islamists, who dismiss Iraq’s pre-Islamic heritage as idolatrous, had pillaged the 3,000-year-old site on the banks of the Tigris river, once capital of the world’s most powerful empire.

[...]

Hatra, city featured in The Exorcist, destroyed by ISIS (Leslie Eastman, Legal Insurrection Blog). I didn't know about the connection with The Exorcist, but I have noted Hatra's importance in late-antique Aramaic-speaking Silk Road culture here and here.

And finally, what might come next:

Libyan Antiquities Feared as Next ISIS Target (Susan Raab,Nonprofit Quarterly). Excerpt:

Stating that “ISIS holds an intolerance towards items that are deemed jahili (pre-Islamic) and antiquities that depict humans,” Dr. Hafed Walda, the pending deputy ambassador to the permanent Libyan delegation at UNESCO, has said “Their eyes are on big museums which have fine collections of Greek and Roman sculptures…. This, coupled with the fact that ISIS’s power has grown substantially in Libya, particularly along the Mediterranean coastline, has brought the group closer to sites of historical significance.”

Among the sites cultural and government leaders believe are most vulnerable in Libya are the ancient Roman theatre, Leptis Magna, just outside of Tripoli; the coastal town of Sabratha, a former Phoenician trading post with the remains of an amphitheater, temples and a basilica; and the archaeological site of Cyrene, considered one of the most impressive Greco-Roman sites in the world. ISIS militants have also proclaimed the city of Misrata, which houses a museum, a Roman forum, and a great basilica, as one of their primary targets.

Background here and here and links.

UPDATE: Judith Weingarten has more on Hatra: ELEGY FOR HATRA: The City of the Sun God.

More on the Sixth Legion excavation

POPULAR ARCHAEOLOGY: Archaeologists Return to Unearth Base of the Roman Sixth Legion. Remains of walls, barracks and artifacts testify to a major 2nd-3rd century CE Roman military presence near ancient Megiddo, Israel. Excerpt:

But real validation didn’t come until 2010, when Tepper began focused archaeological investigations at el-Manach using a variety of remote sensing techniques. This, along with data acquired through preliminary archaeological and historical work, led to the first full-scale excavation at el-Manach in 2013, employing a team of archaeologists, American and European students, and participants from local youth and community groups under co-directors Tepper and Matthew J. Adams of the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research and Jonathan David of Gettysburg College.

What they found at the site, now referred to as Legio after an associated ancient place name, was nothing short of reaffirming.

“The data gathered so far in survey, research, and excavations shows a complex and unexpected settlement scenario at Legio,” wrote Tepper, et al. in a project summary soon to be published in Popular Archaeology Magazine. “At its heart is a large legionary base of the Sixth Legion, perhaps accommodating the full legion of nearly 5,000 soldiers from all over the empire. Nearby would have been a vicus, an ad hoc civilian settlement providing entertainment, commercial support, and other services for the men of the legion. At Kefar ‘Othnay, just south of the base, was a Jewish-Samaritan village in which there is evidence for an early Christina gathering place, dedicated in part by a Roman centurion.”

Background here.

Ethio-Hebrew

ADAM MCCOLLUM: Ethio-Hebrew Psalms (BL Add. 19342). Because it turns out that Ethio-Hebrew is a thing. I didn't know that.

Cargill on Golb

ROBERT CARGILL: Appeal Denied: Dr. Golb to Serve 2-month Prison Sentence.

Background on the Raphael Golb Dead-Sea-Scrolls internet-impersonation case is here with many links.

Review of Pearce and Wunsch, Documents of Judean Exiles

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Pearce and Wunsch, Documents of Judean Exiles and West Semites in Babylonia (by Simcha Gross in Book Notes). Excerpt:

Of course, this volume is dedicated primarily to producing editions of texts, with helpful brief introduction, discussion, and useful appendices, all meant to aid the study of the tablets. It is the great achievement of this volume that it enables other scholars to integrate this new and exciting evidence into fuller accounts of the early Second Temple period.

I noted the book a couple of months ago here. And I have more posts on the Babylonian-Judean cuneiform tablets here and links.

Smithsonian: Siege of Masada

DOCUMENTARY: Smithsonian Tells Real Story Inspiring CBS' The Dovekeepers in SIEGE OF MASADA, 3/27 (broadwayworld.com). More on The Dovekeepers is here and links. And some past posts on the historicity of Josephus' Masada narrative are collected here.

Der Golem centenary

GOLEM WATCH: How the Golem Got His Groove Back. Gustav Meyrink Made Jewish Frankenstein a Household Name (Benjamin Ivry, The Forward).

This year marks the centenary of the book publication of Gustav Meyrink’s serialized novel “Der Golem.” Until a 2006 episode of TV’s “The Simpsons,” where Bart Simpson stole a golem from Krusty the Clown, Meyrink’s was probably the most famous adaptation of the ancient Jewish legend in which a man of clay is brought to life by magic as a “sort of friendly Jewish Frankenstein,” as Germanist Cathy Gelbin stated in “The Golem Returns.” ...

Gershom Scholem weighed in on the book too:

And Gershom Scholem, then a brilliant young student of Jewish mysticism, complains in “On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism”: “By taking up a figure of Kabbalistic legend and transforming it in a very peculiar way, Meyrink tried to draw a kind of symbolic picture of the way to redemption. Such literary adaptations and transformations of the golem legend have been frequent… Meyrink’s work, however, far outdoes the rest. In it everything is fantastic to the point of grotesque… Behind the facade of an exotic and futuristic Prague ghetto, Indian rather than Jewish ideas of redemption are expounded. The alleged Kabbalah that pervades the book suffers from an overdose of Madame Blavatsky’s turbid theosophy.” ... Scholem concluded: “I visited Meyrink on one or two other occasions, and he never failed to astonish me.”

The Golem is a very popular figure in modern popular culture and you can find many PaleoJudaica posts on him here and links.

Authorship of Esther

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS (BELATED PURIM EDITION): Who wrote the Book of Esther? Tradition says Mordechai wrote the Book of Esther, but surely he wouldn't have gotten the timing of his own expulsion a century wrong? (Elon Gilad, Haaretz). Excerpt:

There is a problem with the timing, too, which could also be an artifact of the book having been redacted long years after the event.

The Book of Esther says Mordechai was exiled from Judah with King Jeconiah: "Now in Shushan the palace there was a certain Jew, whose name was Mordechai… Who had been carried away from Jerusalem with the captivity which had been carried away with Jeconiah king of Judah, whom Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon had carried away" (Esther 2:5-6).

But King Jeconiah was expelled from Judah by Nebuchadnezzar 130 years before Xerxes ascended the throne. Surely a contemporary writer like Mordechai would have known that.

And then there’s the language of the book. On the one hand, the fact that no Greek influence made it into Esther is strong evidence that the book was written before the Achaemenid Dynasty was destroyed by Alexander the Great in 330 B.C.E., marking the start of the Hellenistic period.

On the other hand, the form of the Hebrew of the book, and, even more so, the form of the many Persian loanwords embedded in it, both indicate that the book was likely written toward the end of the Achaemenid Dynasty.

Taken together, the evidence of the vagueness about the king and the timeline problems, and the language, indicate that the redaction was by a Jewish scribe writing in Shushan in the middle of the 4th century B.C.E., about events that apparently happened more than a century before.

That about sums up the historical and philological issues. The only thing I would add is that the lack of Greek language or other Greek influence in the book may be more a cultural than a chronological feature. Most of the Hebrew sectarian texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls are similarly devoid of Greek influence even though they were written well into the Hellenistic period. They just didn't like Greek culture. Esther too may have been written in the Hellenistic period by a writer with a similar aversion.

The rest of the article summarizes various interesting scholarly speculations about the book and is worth a read.

Golb gets jail time

RAPHAEL GOLB: Panel Affirms Sentence in Dead Sea Scrolls Case
(Joel Stashenko, New York Law Journal).

An appeals court has affirmed a two-month jail sentence for a blogger whose case prompted the state Court of Appeals to rule that the state's second-degree aggravated harassment statute was unconstitutional.

A unanimous panel of the Appellate Division, First Department, upheld Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Laura Ward's sentence, which included three years of probation, for Raphael Golb in People v. Golb, 13595.

[...]

HT Stephen Goranson.

If I understand the situation correctly, Mr. Golb is now out of appeals and must serve his sentence. Reuters also has an article that notes the following:

Golb, who has remained free during the appeals process, is scheduled to begin his sentence on July 22, the district attorney's office said.

Background on the Golb Dead-Sea-Scrolls internet-impersonation case is here and follow the many links.

The Textual History of the Ethiopic Old Testament Project

"THE TEXTUAL HISTORY OF THE ETHIOPIC OLD TESTAMENT PROJECT (THEOT) is an international effort to identify and to trace textual trajectories found in Ethiopian manuscripts that contain books included in the canon of the Hebrew Bible." It does not seem to have its own dedicated website, but this post on the Juxta website (the source of the quotation) gives some information on it, as do the 2011 and 2014 calls for papers of the SBL Ethiopic Bible and Literature Consultation. And this Marylhurst University press release (from which I found out about the project) briefly discusses the work of Dr. Garry Jost on the Ethiopic text of Obadiah.

Isbel on From Yahwism to Judahism

BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION:

From Yahwism to Judahism

Some scholars have argued that there were multiple factors involved in the reasons why the exiled Judahites did not abandon Yahweh for Marduk, but the scaffolding for the multiplicity as it is normally defined is of such a patchwork character as to be unwieldy.

By Charles David Isbell
Director of Jewish Studies
Louisiana State University
December 2008

Review of Drake, Slandering the Jew

H-JUDAIC:

Susanna Drake. Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. 184 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8122-4520-2.

Reviewed by Gail Labovitz (American Jewish University 15)
Published on H-Judaic (February, 2015)
Commissioned by Matthew A. Kraus

According to the Flesh: Sexual Slander as a Tool of Early Christian Anti-Jewish Rhetoric

Two decades ago, Daniel Boyarin took the title of his book Carnal Israel from Augustine’s Tractate Against the Jews, where in the course of interpreting 1 Corinthians 10:18 (“Behold Israel according to the flesh”), Augustine describes the Jewish people as “indisputably carnal.” Stating at the outset that “Augustine knew what he was talking about,” Boyarin therefore announced his intent to “assert the essential descriptive accuracy of the recurring Patristic notion that what divides Christians from rabbinic Jews is the discourse of the body, and especially sexuality.”[1] In this new book, however, Susanna Drake returns to the rhetoric itself. Although she cites Augustine, and Boyarin’s interpretation of his words, as “the initial provocation for the present study” (p. 112, n. 8), her concerns are not the accuracy, but the intent and implications of such accusations made by Christian writers against Jews in late antiquity: what did it mean not only for Augustine, but for a number of early Christian writers--and those for whom they wrote--to accuse Jews of carnality? Her questions are: How did the figure of the “carnal Jew” come to function as a topos of early Christian literature? When did this topos first appear, and what purposes did it serve? How did the stereotype of the carnal Jew serve Christian leaders as they forged the boundaries between orthodoxy and heresy, Christianity and Judaism? And what can the development of this topos tell us about ancient understandings of gender and sexuality (p. 2)? To this end, she examines “the sexualized representations of Jews in writings by Greek church fathers from the first through fifth centuries CE” (p. 2); the authors she focuses on are the unknown author of the Epistle of Barnabas, Justin Martyr, Origen, Hippolytus, and John Chrysostom.

[...]

Review of Tabory and Atzmon, Midrash Esther Rabbah

THE TALMUD BLOG: Review of Tabory and Atzmon, ‘Midrash Esther Rabbah’ (Shai Secunda).

Overall, this new edition is a great pleasure to work with – and to learn from, beginning to end. No doubt it will be the fountainhead from where all future research on the literary history of Esther midrashim begin. When read on its own, this midrash will ever-beguile you with its playful hermeneutics (another valuable introductory chapter outlines Esther Rabbah’s many different interpretive strategies) and surprising traditions.

Purim 2015

HAPPY PURIM to all those celebrating! The festival begins tonight at sundown.

Some past Purim posts are collected here.

The Talmud on Sefaria

THE TALMUD BLOG: The ‘Status of The Talmud’ on Sefaria (Yitz Landes). The Sefaria website is here.

AJR on Josephus

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW has recently published two pieces on Josephus:

The Jewishness of Josephus: an Interview with Sören Swoboda

This is an interview with Sören Swoboda, author of Tod und Sterben im Krieg bei Josephus: Die Intentionen von Bellum und Antiquitates im Kontext griechisch-römischer Historiographie (“Death and Dying in War in the Works of Josephus: The Intentions of Bellum and Antiquitates in the Context of Greco-Roman Historiography”). The book was published in 2014 by Mohr Siebeck. Dr. Swoboda is currently a member of the Theological Faculty at the University of Jena, in Germany. The interview was conducted at the SBL meeting in November 2014.

The Understudied and Marginal Josephus: Bringing Him into the Conversation (Jacob Feeley)

Indeed, outside his usual haunts, Josephus appears rather like a strange guest at a dinner party, politely acknowledged with smiles or nods, but rarely approached. This is in part understandable. That Josephus wrote in Greek, an extremely difficult language which takes years if not decades to master, may deter students of Jewish Studies in particular. Josephus, moreover, does not speak as readily to the immediate concerns of contemporary Jewry. For Classicists, with their prejudice for literary style (a stylist, Josephus was not), their unfamiliarity with the Jewish tradition, and the general decline in knowledge of the Bible, Josephus can appear arcane or unappealing. Even those who refer to his works tend to use them as repositories of useful data rather than interpreting them on their own terms.

The Talmud on gentile governments, rape, and testimony

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: Belief, Truth, and Lies in Divorce, Marriage, Rape, and Female Chastity. Rightly or wrongly, Talmudic thinkers presumed that gentiles would persecute the Jews in their midst.

Can Jews rely on gentile courts to dispense justice? The question arose in this week’s Daf Yomi reading, in the course of an extended discussion of the major subject of Tractate Ketubot so far: female chastity. And the rabbis’ answer speaks volumes about their experience with the Roman and Persian governments they lived under. Many moments in the Talmud make clear that Jews in Talmudic times—as in much, perhaps most, of Jewish history—saw non-Jews as potential persecutors. (In Tractate Eruvin, for instance, we learned that a Jew should never live alone among gentiles, for fear that they will murder him.) And the Talmud periodically refers to times when the laws cannot be enforced due to government persecution—as happened after the Bar Kochba revolt in the 2nd century C.E., not long before the Mishna was written down.

[...]

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

Review of Taylor, Antiochus the Great

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW:

Michael J. Taylor, Antiochus the Great. Barnsley: Pen & Sword Military, 2013. Pp. xviii, 190. ISBN 9781848844636. $39.95.

Reviewed by Filippo Canali De Rossi, Liceo Classico Dante Alighieri (canali.filippo@libero.it)

Preview

Il libro è una biografia di Antioco III inserita nella storia della dinastia dei Seleucidi, a partire dal fondatore Seleuco I Nicatore fino agli ultimi epigoni. È la storia di un grande impero sovranazionale e delle strategie messe in atto per la sua creazione e successiva espansione, conservazione e difesa della sua esistenza.

[...]

Could the ancients see blue?

Could our ancestors see blue? Ancient people didn't perceive the colour because they didn't have a word for it, say scientists

• Studies say language shapes what we see by making us focus on objects
  
• Blue doesn't appear at all in Greek stories and other ancient written texts
  
• As a result, scientists believe ancient civilisations didn't notice the colour
  
• Egyptians - who were the only culture that could produce blue dyes - were the first civilisation to have a word for the colour blue in 2500 BC
  
• The Himba people in Namibia do not have a word for blue and tests have shown they have difficulty distinguishing between green and blue (Ellie Zolfagharifard, The Daily Mail)

The blue and black (or gold and white) dress that sweeped the internet last week revealed just how differently two people can see the world.

But it's not just about lighting conditions or optical illusions - evidence is mounting that until we have a way to describe something, we may not see its there.

Ancient languages, for instance, didn't have a word for blue and scientists believe as a result our ancestors didn't notice the colour even existed.

[...]

It wasn't just the Greeks. Blue also doesn't appear in the Koran, ancient Chinese stories, and an ancient Hebrew version of the Bible, according to a German philologist named Lazarus Geiger.

[...]

This story, which I have noted before, is making the rounds and the Mail's coverage is as good a place to find it as any. For the blue-black/white-gold dress, see here. (I see white-gold.)

In principle it makes sense that people might not be able to distinguish a color if their language didn't have a word for it. That said, I am not persuaded that ancient Hebrew did not have a word for blue. Ancient garments dyed with the tekhelet dye look to me to be in shades of blue, although I'm only looking at photos and the tones may be more bluish-purple. But there also is the Hebrew word sappir, which is a kind of gem, either sapphire or lapis lazuli, both of which we would call blue. This seems to me to be good evidence that the ancient Israelites could see something like our color blue.