Samaritan Passover 2015

Members of the Samaritan sect in Israel skewer sheep for the traditional Passover ceremony in West Bank city of Nablus (Khaleda Rahman, The Daily Mail)

• Passover is a commemoration of when the children of Israel were freed from slavery and led out of Egypt by Moses
  
• Some Jews practiced animal sacrifice for Passover in ancient times, but today it is only done by the Samaritans
  
• They were descended from the ancient Israelite tribes, but broke away from mainstream Judaism 2,800 years ago
  
• Because of a less than strict adherence to Judaism and part-pagan ancestry, they were despised by ordinary Jews

With lots of photos. On the last bullet point, it depends on what you mean by a "less than strict adherence to Judaism." I think the Samaritans would say that that they held a strict adherance to Samaritanism. But yes, until recently, there was considerable hostility between Samaritans and Jews. Past posts on the Samaritan Passover, which comes a little after the Jewish Passover, are here and here and links.

Epigraphy cycling

Cycling, history and Independence. A guided family bike tour on Israel's Independence Day. (Joanna Shebson, Jerusalem Post). The epigraphic part comes at the end of the article:

At the end of our tour [apparently in the vicinity of the the ruins of Etri], my 11-year-old son picked up an old piece of pottery and screamed with excitement. This might sound like it’s right out of a movie, but it’s true! He recognized ancient Hebrew writing on the back, and our guide pulled out an iPhone to Google the ancient Hebrew alphabet.

With bated breath, we waited to see if the message was legible. Sure enough, it spelled “Michael Ben- Baruch.”

The guide explained to us that the artifact we had found might not be authentic, but the “thrill of the find” kept my boys smiling for the rest of the day.

We carefully wrapped the piece and left a message for the Israel Antiquities Authority to set up a time to come and see it. They will be able to tell us if it’s authentic or if it was placed on the scene recently.

Here is the inscribed ostracon:



Alas, it appears to be a fake. The lettering looks freshly inscribed and the plene spellings of "Michael" (with a yod) and "Baruch" (with a vav) are anachronistic for the paleo-Hebrew script.

Orlov, Divine Scapegoats

NEW BOOK FROM SUNY PRESS:

Divine Scapegoats
Demonic Mimesis in Early Jewish Mysticism



Andrei A. Orlov - Author
Price: $95.00
Hardcover - 352 pages
Release Date: May 2015
ISBN10: N/A
ISBN13: 978-1-4384-5583-9

Summary

Explores the paradoxical symmetry between the divine and demonic in early Jewish mystical texts.

Divine Scapegoats is a wide-ranging exploration of the parallels between the heavenly and the demonic in early Jewish apocalyptical accounts. In these materials, antagonists often mirror features of angelic figures, and even those of the Deity himself, an inverse correspondence that implies a belief that the demonic realm is maintained by imitating divine reality. Andrei A. Orlov examines the sacerdotal, messianic, and creational aspects of this mimetic imagery, focusing primarily on two texts from the Slavonic pseudepigrapha: 2 Enoch and the Apocalypse of Abraham. These two works are part of a very special cluster of Jewish apocalyptic texts that exhibit features not only of the apocalyptic worldview but also of the symbolic universe of early Jewish mysticism. The Yom Kippur ritual in the Apocalypse of Abraham, the divine light and darkness of 2 Enoch, and the similarity of mimetic motifs to later developments in the Zohar are of particular importance in Orlov’s consideration.

Semitics post at Yale

FULL-TIME JOB: Yale University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences (Humanities), Religious Studies: Lector or Senior Lector in Semitic Languages.

Location: New Haven, CT

Closes: Nov 1, 2015 at midnight Eastern Time (GMT-4 hours)

YALE UNIVERSITY, the Department of Religious Studies, is seeking to make a full-time appointment of a Lector or Senior Lector whose teaching responsibilities may include Aramaic, Advanced Syriac, Ugaritic, and additional Semitic languages, such as Ethiopic, beginning July 1, 2016. Ph.D. preferred but not required. Interest in the use of technology in teaching desirable. Rank dependent on qualifications and experience. Initial appointment will be up to three years, with possible renewal. Yale University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer. Yale values diversity among its students, staff, and faculty and strongly welcomes applications from women, protected veterans, persons with disabilities, and underrepresented minorities. Please submit a detailed letter of application, curriculum vitae, evidence of effective teaching, a sample of scholarly or pedagogical writing, and three letters of reference. Review of applications will begin November 1, 2015.

Epiphanies of the Divine in the Septuagint and the NT

CONFERENCE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM: Epiphanies of the Divine in the Septuagint and the New Testament: Mutual Perspectives. NCTL Learning and Conference Centre, Nottingham 14-16 May 2015.

The Department of Theology and Religious Studies in collaboration with the Centre for Bible, Ethics and Theology (CBET) will host the V. International Symposium of the Corpus Judaeo-Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti.

The Corpus aims to improve the understanding of individual New Testament writings as an integral part of the culture of Hellenistic Judaism. Drawing on a rich history of scholarship, the project seeks to provide an innovative tool that gives a single overview of the Jewish-Hellenistic parallels that have been put forward for the understanding of a given text in the New Testament.

Via the BNTC list.

Biblical texts on wood and bark

ETC: Texts on wood and bark (Peter M. Head). Peter mentions the documents recovered at Novgorod and the possibility of Christian texts being among them. The Ostromir Gospels, although not excavated, come from there. But more directly relevant, among the excavated items is the Novgorod Psalm Book (same link, plus here), also written in wax on a wooden tablet.

Also, there's lots more on Vindolanda and its texts here and links.

Cross-file under Church Slavonic Watch.

Another review of Houston, Inside Roman Libraries

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW:

George W. Houston, Inside Roman Libraries: Book Collections and Their Management in Antiquity. Studies in the history of Greece and Rome. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Pp. xvi, 327. ISBN 9781469617800. $59.95.

Reviewed by Scott G. Bruce, University of Colorado at Boulder (bruces@colorado.edu)

Preview

George Houston’s primer to the contents and organization of Roman libraries from the late Republic to the time of Constantine is a valuable work of scholarly outreach intended for students and scholars new to the study of ancient book culture. More expository than argumentative, it discusses in clear and accessible prose “everything that one might find in a Roman library” (p. 1) from the book rolls themselves to the furniture, storage containers, buildings, and personnel that facilitated their use by Roman readers. The introduction to the book lays out basic information on the physical characteristics of papyrus scrolls in antiquity and provides the reader with a vocabulary of technical terms used throughout the study, including opisthograph (a scroll with writing on both sides), sillybon (a tag denoting the author and title of a work, usually attached to the end of a scroll), and stichometric counts (evidence for the enumeration of lines copied by professional scribes, perhaps to calculate their rate of pay). There follow six chapters on the assembly of Roman book collections, the papyrological evidence for ancient book lists, two case studies of the physical remains of book collections from Herculaneum and Oxyrhynchus, the storage facilities that housed ancient libraries, and the personnel who worked in them.

[..]

An earlier review with commentary on the book's relevance for ancient Judaism is noted here.

The youngest Aramaist

MODERN ARAMAIC WATCH: Hamilton’s Assyrians have youngest church reader in world (Carmela Fragomeni, Hamilton Spectator).

At Hamilton's St. Mari Assyrian Church, parishioners endearingly call George Hashimoto, 13, their "small deacon."

"We're proud of him," says Evette Haddad. "He's unique, so we gave him that little title."

George is the church's "Old Testament Reader." It's a distinguished position requiring investiture by the Assyrian bishop in Toronto — an honour bestowed when George was only seven.

St. Mari's priest, Father Younan Marwan, says George is very smart and was "the youngest in our church in the world, I'm sure, when he started reading."

George, whose mother is Assyrian from Iraq and father is Japanese, has spoken and read Assyrian fluently since an early age.

[...]

He was seven when he started. Maybe there is hope for Aramaic as a living language.

von Soden's Akkadian dictionary

AWOL: Wolfram von Soden: Akkadisches Handwörterbuch. Now badly out of date, especially after the completion of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, but still a useful resource for Assyriologists.

More looting arrests in Israel

Police arrest alleged antiquities thieves for stealing 2,000-year-old coins. The arrests were part of a joint effort staged by the Border Police and the Israel Antiquities Authority. (Jerusalem Post).

Authorities said that the men had stolen ancient coins from the Roman and Byzantine periods that are believed to be over 2,000 years old.

The police said that the suspects were caught in the act of digging for more artifacts in the Tel Ma’aravim site.

There have been an awful lot of these arrests lately. I hope it is doing some good.

Day on the Serpent in Eden

BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION:

The Serpent in the Garden of Eden and its Background

The serpent in the Garden of Eden is popularly equated with the Devil. However, modern scholars agree that this was a later identification and not the original meaning, but there is no consensus as to what the original background of the serpent was. This brief article critiques a number of the proposals that have been made and suggests a possible background for the serpent. More generally it also discusses other questions of interpretation that have arisen in connection with the serpent in Genesis 3, in particular the suggestion that the serpent should be viewed more positively than has been customary and questions associated with the so-called Protoevangelium in Genesis 3:15.

Adapted and expanded from: John Day, From Creation to Babel: Studies in Genesis 1-11 (LHBOTS 592; London/New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013), 35-37.


By John Day
Emeritus Professor of Old Testament Studies
Lady Margaret Hall
Oxford University
April 2015

Judeo-Persian manuscripts

ADAM MCCOLLUM: Some Judeo-Persian manuscripts at the BnF.

The Judeo-Persian (etc.) manuscripts found in a cave in Afghanistan were a big story some years ago.

A letter by Schechter on the Cairo Geniza

GENIZA FRAGMENT OF THE MONTH (OCTOBER 2014): Add.6463(e)3416: Breathing the 'dust of centuries' (Melonie Schmierer-Lee).

This letter was written three weeks after Solomon Schechter arrived in Egypt. He writes to Francis Jenkinson, the University Librarian, describing his work in the Genizah chamber and his dealings with the local men who were assisting him. His main purpose, however, is to notify Jenkinson that he plans to send the first batch of manuscripts on ahead, and, as he intends to offer the manuscripts to the Library, would the Library look after them until Schechter’s return. The letter was preserved among Jenkinson’s papers, and eventually deposited in the University Library itself.

N=1 classes at Harvard

SYRIAC WATCH: Center of Attention. Students pursue one-person classes (Lara C. Tang, Harvard Crimson).

Peaking out between the enormous enrollments of the CS50s and Ec10s of the Q guide sits NEC91r, a supervised research tutorial in the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department. Its sole student in the fall of 2013, Christian G. Sidak ’17 was the only undergraduate to study Syriac-Aramaic at the time.

Sidak decided to attend Harvard with every intention of pursuing Aramaic. However, upon his arrival in Cambridge, he learned that the professor who taught Aramaic A, the beginner Aramaic course, was absent on sabbatical.

Unfazed, Sidak approached the director of undergraduate studies for NELC and petitioned for a class in Syriac-Armaic. According to Sidak, the petition process presented no challenges, as the department easily found a professor who was willing to teach a one-person seminar in the ancient language.

[...]

In my time at UCLA I was the only undergraduate taking the Biblical Studies degree and I took a number of courses on my own with Stanislav Segert, including Biblical Aramaic. If memory serves, he told me to go and read Rosenthal's grammar and all the Aramaic texts in the Bible and then come tell him when I was done so he could give me a final exam.

Likewise, when I was a doctoral student at Harvard in the 1980s, I was the only registered student in a Sumerian reading class with Piotr Steinkeller, although there were also auditors in that case. Ec10, by the way, is an introductory Economics class at Harvard that is famous for its gigantic enrollments. For a while I dated one of the several secretaries who worked full time just for that one class.

A couple of times over the years I have taught a Hebrew seminar here with just one student, but my Aramaic class has, for some reason, always been well attended. And our Hebrew enrollments are considerably stronger now than back then.

DSS party

ON ISRAEL INDEPENDENCE DAY: Moving and Shaking: Dead Sea Scrolls, Yom HaAtzmaut and The Women’s Guild (Ryan Torok/Tess Cutler, Jewish Journal).

Blue tablecloths decorated tables, Israeli music played, and Hebrew-speaking security personnel were on guard as the local Israeli consulate held an upbeat Yom HaAtzmaut celebration at the California Science Center on April 23.

The crowd of 500 mixed and mingled, enjoying food and cocktails, while dignitaries posed for photos and many people ventured upstairs to the museum’s second floor to tour the museum’s current Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition.

The event drew a slew of influential and diverse personalities, including politicians, astronauts and clergy. They included Consul General of Israel in Los Angeles David Siegel and Israeli-American Council (IAC) Board Chairman Shawn Evenhaim.

[...]

Background on the California Science Center's exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Los Angeles is here and links.

Dig Episode 9

KIMBERLY WINSTON: TV’s ‘Dig’ goes to the gates of hell — and hopefully, back. We'll see. For more on the the tradition of the 36 righteous or "lamed vovniks," see here and links.

More on Emek Shaveh vs. Elad

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: Archeological activists: Elad must cede control of Temple Mount tunnel. Excavation of the tunnel, which extends from the Silwan parking lot opposite the Dung Gate to the Western Wall, commenced in 2009 by the IAA. (Jerusalem Post).

During a Thursday morning press tour of a contested tunnel being excavated under the Temple Mount, Yonathan Mizrachi stopped to explain why his archeological NGO submitted a petition to the High Court requesting that a right-wing NGO cease managerial oversight of the project.

“We don’t think any private organization should operate an archeological site, but especially one with a political agenda in a place that is important to everybody who cherishes the history of Jerusalem – including Jews, Muslims, Christians, and non-religious people,” said Mizrachi, executive director of Emek Shaveh, a left-wing, European- funded consortium of archeologists.

[...]

Asked to respond to Emek Shaveh’s petition, Ze’ev Orenstein, the organization’s director of international affairs, issued a strongly worded statement defending Elad’s current role and its right to manage the tunnel.

“Both Israel’s government and Supreme Court confirmed the Elad Foundation’s operation of the City of David National Park,” the statement said. “Furthermore, no other national park has grown as rapidly as the City of David – growing from having only a few thousand annual visitors a decade ago to over half a million visitors each year today – and benefiting people of all faiths and backgrounds.”

[...]

Background here and links. Cross-file under Politics.

New Hebrew biography of Scholem

MASTER OF MYSTICISM: Finally, this author puts the great Gershom Scholem in context. A new Hebrew biography of is the first to place the philosopher-historian’s remarkable breadth in a historical light, while offering a coherent understanding of his professional and political development. (Nitzan Lebovic, Haaretz). “From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back: Gershom Scholem Between Israel and Germany,” by Noam Zadoff (in Hebrew), Carmel Books, 119 shekels.

Excerpt:

The biography focuses less on Scholem’s personal life – it ignores, for example, the story of his wife’s affair – but develops a coherent understanding of his professional and political development. For Zadoff, Scholem’s story leads “From Berlin to Jerusalem,” as Scholem titled his own autobiographical account of his life and of his friendship with Walter Benjamin, but also along a path that led back to Berlin (hence the title of the book). His story leads from his political commitment, during the 1920s, to Brit Shalom – the first peace organization in the Middle East, which called for a binational state in Palestine – to his commitment to the search for lost Jewish libraries after the Holocaust. The biography also explores his friendships and rivalries with well-known intellectuals, and devotes much attention to Scholem’s involvement with the Eranos Circle in Switzerland, which brought him together with a small group of thinkers who were interested in similar topics. They included C.G. Jung, Karl Kerényi, Mircea Eliade, as well as Scholem’s colleague Martin Buber, and his protégé Yosef Weiss (Zadoff edited the correspondence between Scholem and Weiss, in Hebrew).

The narrative, even beyond the biographical details, is shaped by the history and rhetoric of spiritual Zionism and the hope for the revival of an ancient and secret language; Scholem extended his understanding of kabbala to Hebrew as a whole.

Zadoff follows Scholem through his endeavors to institutionalize his philosophy of language and history of kabbala. Scholem did both as a leading scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where his influence and reputation grew exponentially following his appointment, but nevertheless failed to cross the intellectual-political Rubicon and win adherents among the political elite. Being unable to cross that threshold, and watching helplessly the rise of messianic forms of Zionist nationalism, convinced Scholem that his intellectual path should turn back to Europe.

And this conclusion is intriguing:

Undoubtedly, Scholem’s powerful impact and intellectual contributions will continue to occupy us, even haunt us. This exceptionally tall man with protruding ears called himself “a metaphysical clown,” and prepared his own legacy by planting hints and secrets in his own texts, thereby promising a wealthy suggestive world to his followers “[or at least ] those of them who have a sixth bibliographical sense which is a must for the keepers of secrets.” After all, he admitted to Weiss (in a letter written March 31, 1960), [“I have] planted signs like one of the figures hiding in the well-known paintings.”

What is that about?

Ramelli and Perkins (eds.), Early Christian and Jewish Narrative

NEW BOOK FROM MOHR SIEBECK:

Early Christian and Jewish Narrative
The Role of Religion in Shaping Narrative Forms
Ed. by Ilaria Ramelli and Judith Perkins

The authors of this volume elucidate the remarkable role played by religion in the shaping and reshaping of narrative forms in antiquity and late antiquity in a variety of ways. This is particularly evident in ancient Jewish and Christian narrative, which is in the focus of most of the contributions, but also in some "pagan" novels such as that of Heliodorus, which is dealt with as well in the third part of the volume, both in an illuminating comparison with Christian novels and in an inspiring rethinking of Heliodorus's relation to Neoplatonism. All of these essays, from different perspectives, illuminate the interplay between narrative and religion, and show how religious concerns and agendas shaped narrative forms in Judaism and early Christianity. A series of compelling and innovative articles, all based on fresh and often groundbreaking research by eminent specialists, is divided into three large sections: part one deals with ancient Jewish narrative, and part two with ancient Christian narrative, in particular gospels, acts, biographies, and martyrdoms, while part three offers a comparison with "pagan" narrative, and especially the religious novel of Heliodorus, both in terms of social perspectives and in terms of philosophical and religious agendas. Like the essays collected by Marília Futre Pinheiro, Judith Perkins, and Richard Pervo in 2013, which investigate the core role played by narratives in Christian and Jewish self-fashioning in the Roman Empire, the present volume fruitfully bridges the disciplinary gap between classical studies and ancient Jewish and Christian studies, offers new insights, and hopefully opens up new paths of inquiry.

Incantation Bowls and Jewish practice

ARAMAIC WATCH: Relics, writings show non-Jewish influences on Jewish practices. Rabbi Josef Davidson launches a homily with the ancient Babylonian Aramaic incantation bowls. Really.