"This is how I lost my faith"

SHULEM DEEN: This is how I lost my faith: Science helped, yes — but finally I accepted the holy texts were written by man. I thought religion and sacred texts held absolute truth handed down from God. I was so powerfully wrong (Salon).

Among people who lose faith, I would later learn, many point to scientific knowledge as the catalyst for their changed worldviews. I, too, found much of what I learned troubling. Wherever I turned, I discovered that ideas I had once taken for granted, trusting in rabbis and sacred texts to convey absolute truths, were dubious at best. The universe was not six thousand years old but closer to 14 billion. Humans shared a common ancestor with apes—and all living things, for that matter— and were not the exalted species created by God’s hand out of clay of the earth on the sixth day of Creation. The sages of the Talmud, by our traditions infallible, were demonstrably wrong in their understanding of the natural world.

Two great balls of fire descended from heaven, and their names were Abaya and Rava, said the old rebbe of ruzhin. The two great masters of the Talmud, their names occurring at least once every three pages, were not humans but chunks of divinity. Balls of fire. Reading the Talmud anew, however, I discovered that the sages were as flawed as could be expected of any ancient people. They were mired in superstition and misogyny and xenophobia, which did not necessarily mark them as villains but offered troubling indications of ordinary humanness.

Nothing, however, had a more shattering impact on my faith than the realization that, stripped of religious exegesis, our primary religious text, the Hebrew Bible, had the markings of human rather than divine authorship; it was beautiful, intricate, layered in poetry and metaphor and heart-stopping drama, but human nonetheless.

[...]

Just because I go after and condemn Talmud libel, it doesn't mean I don't sympathize with people who struggle with the implications of historical criticism for what they have been taught about the scriptures in their faith tradition. It is one thing to read scriptures sympathetically and to find historical and moral problems in them from our intellectual and moral perspective in the twenty-first century. It is quite another to twist them out of context and disseminate outright lies about them to promote anti-semitism. This essay is an honest and heartfelt account of the author's encounter with historical criticism and how it affected his faith.

Maaloula rediviva

MODERN ARAMAIC WATCH: Virgin Mary Statue Rebuilt in Ancient Syrian Christian Town. Maalula, one of oldest Christian towns in world where Aramaic still spoken, celebrates as statue of Mary destroyed in fighting rebuilt (Arutz Sheva).

The historic Christian Syrian town of Maalula celebrated Saturday as a new statue of Mary, worshiped in Christianity as the mother of Jesus, was erected in its center, replacing the figure destroyed in rebel attacks in 2013.

Dozens of families gathered alongside government officials and religious dignitaries in the main square, which was adorned with government flags and a giant portrait of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Located north of Damascus, Maalula is one of the world's oldest Christian settlements, and its inhabitants still speak Aramaic, a language spoken by Jews in Israel at the time Jesus was said to have lived.

[...]

Background on Maaloula (Ma'aloula, Malula) is here and here and links.

More on the new Khirbet Qeiyafah inscription

EPIGRAPHY: Inscription bearing name from Davidic era found at ancient site. Ishba’al son of Beda, found on 10th century BCE jar, likely not the same as a rival to King David with the same name, but discovery confirms popularity of moniker 3,000 years ago (Ilan Ben Zion, Times of Israel).

A new ancient Canaanite inscription including the same name as a character mentioned in the Bible as a rival to King David was found by archaeologists on a pot unearthed at a site in the Elah Valley, west of Jerusalem, researchers said Tuesday.

The inscription on a large clay storage jar found at Khirbet Qeiyafa dates to the Iron Age, from around 1020–980 BCE, and bears the name of Ishba’al son of Beda, researchers said in an article published in May’s edition of the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research.

[...]

As usual, PaleoJudaica readers were already well aware of this story. Background here.

Ancient menorah graffito

Gladiator Fights Revealed in Ancient Graffiti (Owen Jarus, Live Science).

Hundreds of graffiti messages engraved into stone in the ancient city of Aphrodisias, in modern-day Turkey, have been discovered and deciphered, revealing what life was like there over 1,500 years ago, researchers say.

The graffiti touches on many aspects of the city's life, including gladiator combat, chariot racing, religious fighting and sex. The markings date to a time when the Roman and Byzantine empires ruled over the city.

[...]

Aphrodisias also boasted a sizable Jewish population. Many Jewish traders set up shop in an abandoned temple complex known as the Sebasteion.

Among the graffiti found there is a depiction of a Hanukkah menorah, a nine-candle lamp that would be lit during the Jewish festival. "This may be one of the earliest representations of a Hanukkah menorah that we know from ancient times," said Chaniotis.

[...]

Jarus's parallel article, In Photos: Ancient Graffiti Discovered in Aphrodisias, has a photo of the graffito (fourth photo down).

More on ancient depictions of menorahs is here and here and links.

There are still people who want to burn the Talmud

BOOK BURNERS: Extremists plan to destroy Israeli flags and burn Talmud at Golders Green rally (Marcus Dysch, The Jewish Chronicle).

Neo-Nazis plan to destroy Israeli flags during a protest at the heart of the Jewish community next month.

Organisers of the July 4 demonstration in Golders Green, north-west London, have also urged supporters to attend a secret burning of the Talmud ahead of the event.

Joshua Bonehill-Paine, a white supremacist activist, wrote on his website on Monday that a “private ceremony” would be held to burn the religious texts “in recognition of its racist anti-white teachings”.

[...]

Book burning. Where have we seen that before?

I don't know what, if any, specific claims Mr Bonehill-Paine is making about the Talmud, and I have no inclination to go and look at his website. But I do know that false claims about the Talmud have been circulating in recent years and that they have done a good bit of harm. See here and links.

UPDATE (6 July): More here.

British Library Conference on Rare Book Trafficking

ON 26 JUNE: British Library Conference on Rare Book Trafficking (REBECCA REGO BARRY, Fine Books Magazine).

On June 26, the British Library will host “The Written Heritage of Mankind in Peril: Theft, Retrieval, Sale and Restitution of rare books, maps and manuscripts,” a conference focused on the illegal trading of priceless cultural materials. The full-day seminar, open to dealers, librarians, collectors, auction house staff, security experts, and interested others, may be a response in part to the Girolamini Library thefts that rocked the rare book world in 2014 and more recent suggestions that Middle Eastern regimes are profiting from plundered books and antiquities. (A report last week claims that ISIS is selling ancient Hebrew and Aramaic manuscripts online.)

[...]

For the claims about ISIS selling Hebrew and Aramaic manuscripts see the link in the article and also here.

The Talmud doesn't approve much of vows

LAST WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: Why Taking Vows Is a Wicked Act. In this week’s ‘Daf Yomi,’ the Talmud explores why oaths are not for the virtuous, except in the rarest of cases.

What kind of Jew makes vows to God? You might think that it would be an especially devout and God-fearing person; vows, after all, are promises to go above and beyond the already demanding laws of Judaism, to make a personal sacrifice in the name of God. For instance, one might vow to God not to eat certain food, or drink wine, or do business with a certain person. But the treatment of vows in Tractate Nedarim, the section of the Talmud devoted to the subject, leaves no doubt that the rabbis did not think vowing made you a better Jew. On the contrary. In Nedarim 9b, Rabbi Meir quotes a line from Ecclesiastes, “Better that you should not vow, than that you should vow and not pay,” and takes it a step further: “Better than both this and that is one who does not take a vow at all.”

[...]

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

The twelve stones and lots of gold

Temple Mount Activists Find Billions of Dollars in Gold on Mount Eilat [VIDEO].

A treasure-trove of raw gold worth billions of dollars is believed to be sitting under Mount Eilat in southern Israel, Breaking Israel News has learned.

In an exclusive interview, Rabbi Yehuda Glick, the Executive Director of The Temple Mount Heritage Foundation in Jerusalem, revealed the news, which had been kept under wraps for the last several years.


[...]

Actually, in the video Rabbi Glick says "more than a billion," not "billions." But anyway, that would still be a lot of gold. But even if there is that much gold there, one still has to weigh the cost of getting it out, and he says it's a hundred meters down, which sounds pretty expensive. The point is raised, but not really addressed in the article:

Explaining the discovery, Glick said that everything began with Friedman, a researcher for The Temple Institute, who had been studying each of the 12 unique stones set on the breastplate of the High Priest as described in the Bible. Each stone represents one of the 12 tribes of Israel.

During his studies, Friedman realized that without a geology background he could not properly appreciate the depths and meanings behind each of these stones. This led to his discovery that in 2007 gold had been found in the mountains of Eilat by an Australian research team, who later abandoned the dig because the value of gold at the time was not worth their efforts.

The real value of the gold is based on how much it is worth intrinsically, minus the cost of excavating it.

Be that as it may, what really caught my eye was the business of the twelve stones of the high priest's breastplate being associated with a vast treasure of gold. Where have we heard that before? Oh yes, The Treatise of the Vessels:

(XI) And the treasuries of gold and silver from the days of David and until Zedekiah and until when Israel were exiled to Babylon: a myriad myriads of shields of gold and of silver beyond measure and at Tel Baruq underneath the great willow that is in Babylon on whose (branches) they used to hang their lyres (cf. Ps 137:2); and from the House of the Forest of Lebanon they took gold to the measure of 1,009 thousand kors. And all the prophets and the sages and the scribes could not calculate the wealth and the glory that used to be in Jerusalem.

(XII) And in addition twelve fine stones were transmitted by the hand of Heleq son of Shimmur the Levite, by his hand to preserve them and to return them to the tribes, those on which the names of the tribes were engraved, which used to shine over the heads of the tribes, increasingly outstanding and precious in their value, vying with one another. And no king or prophet or man knew in which place these were hidden, except Heleq son of Shimmur the Levite.

In this case the gold is from the Jerusalem Temple and is hidden in Babylon, but the juxtaposition with the twelve stones is still noteworthy and it makes me wonder if Rabbi Glick is acquainted with other similar legends about ancient treasures connected to the temple artifacts.

One more comment: both the article and Rabbi Glick in the video quote Genesis 2:12 in support of their project: “The gold of that land is good; the bdellium and the onyx stone are there.” But the quotation refers to "the land of Havila" around which the river Pishon flows. It's not very clear where this is, if it is a place and not another legendary El Dorado. South Arabia has been suggested, but the southern Negev does not seem to be a promising candidate.

As for the gold, we'll see. Watch this space.

The Treatise of the Vessels also came up recently with reference to the televisions series Dig: see here and here. And also cf. here.

Palmyra in 1926

PALMYRA WATCH: From the archive, 12 June 1926: A trip to Palmyra in Syria. An archaeological congress in Syria takes our correspondent to Palmyra, ‘the skeleton of an ancient magnificence’ (The Guardian).

The first tombstones of Palmyra began some twenty miles farther on; and soon we entered, by a starlit but moonless night, a dead valley overshadowed by ghostly hills, in the middle of which lay the entrance to a white and sleeping city. Or so it seemed; but as we approached we saw the scattered and gleaming bones of this skeleton of an ancient magnificence.

Background here and links.

Cultural contributions of the ancient Assyrians

ARAMAIC WATCH: Op-Ed: The Assyrians and ISIS: Part I. A most timely account of the ancient Assyrians, on the surface similar to ISIS, but distinguished by their achievements in addition to war and carnage. Their savagery is all that ISIS mimics. (Joe David, Arutz Sheva). An interesting mixture of correct history and dubious assertions. A few comments:

Much of what they [the Assyrians of the ancient Assyrian empire] accomplished proved to be of value and survived the test of time. Refined by future civilizations, these achievements included a postal system, libraries, magnifying glasses, paved roads, locks and keys, a method for telling time, plumbing with flushing toilets, Hammurabi’s Law (which is generally known for its “eye-for-an-eye” punishment), a system for managing vast land holdings (by using governors to oversee territories), and a useful knowledge of astronomy (acquired, not just for scientific purposes, but to assist superstitious rulers make decisions).

For the purpose of this article, one of their most important contributions was their devotion to one god, not the Jewish Patriarch Abraham's monotheism, but related. Although the Ancient Assyrians had many gods, representing different aspects of nature, those other gods were all an extension of their primary God, Ashur. He was their king of all gods, their omnipresent, omnipotent, and universal Creator. By spreading this idea of one God, rather than a multitude of gods, common among some primitive societies, they were able to lay the foundation for what would follow: the birth of one-god religions like Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.

The first paragraph is correct, but I am very skeptical of the second. Yes, Ashur was the chief god of the Assyrians. Many ancient peoples had a chief god who was highest among the gods, but at least by the time of Second Isaiah, Israelite monotheism took an additional step and regarded their god YHWH as qualitatively uniquely divine and not just quantitatively the most powerful of many gods. The Assyrians did not take that additional step to what we would today regard as real monotheism and I can see nothing about ancient Assyrian religion that influenced that step for ancient Israel.

It took about 600 hundred years for the Assyrians to rise from their ashes. In 33 AD they built another empire. This time it was a Christian empire, the very first Christian empire in the world, based on the teachings of Jesus.

Their transition to Christianity didn’t occur immediately. Their loyalty to Ashur continued until about 256 AD. But in 33 AD Ashurism began to fade in importance, when the Assyrians converted to Christianity through the teachings of three apostles – Saints Thomas, Bartholomew, and Thaddeus. These three apostles, after founding the Holy Apostolic Catholic Assyrian Church of the East in Edessa, Turkey (in the upper Mesopotamia area), were responsible for providing the direction for what would follow thereafter, the spread of Christianity across Asia.

Well, sort of. The Eastern church included Aramaic-speaking descendants of the Assyrians who eventually converted to Christianity. But Assyrians did not found a "Christian empire" in 33 AD. The originally Jewish Jesus movement spread all over the known world in the first century, including the East, but the Greek-speaking (and eventually Latin-speaking) Gentile church had a couple of pretty good Christian empires going as well in due course.

The city of Edessa (in Anatolia - modern-day Turkey) was indeed a key center of early Eastern Christianity and the Aramaic dialect spoken in that city in the second century was the basis for Syriac, the language of the ancient Eastern church.

Unfortunately, the Assyrian Christians are rarely given much attention in history books. When most people think of the Assyrians, they often think of the Ancient Assyrians, not the Assyrian Christians, despite their significant intellectual and spiritual contributions to civilization. As a result, many of their achievements have been carelessly attributed to other groups. Here are a few of their many accomplishments:

Between the fourth and sixth centuries, they revived the knowledge accumulated by the Greeks and translated it into Syriac and later from Syriac to Arabic. This included many religious works as well as the works of important thinkers like Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates.

This is pretty much right, although this translation process continued for centuries up to Abbasid Baghdad. The rest of the essay moves beyond my areas of expertise, but I don't see anything obviously incorrect in it.

Daf

YONA SABAR: Hebrew word of the week: Daf. Most people probably don't know that the word Daf in Daf Yomi comes from ancient Sumerian.

The History of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, vol. 4

NEW BOOK FROM MAGNES PRESS: THE HISTORY OF THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM. Who’s Who Prior to Statehood: Founders, Designers, Pioneers. By Assaf Selzer, translated by Jenni Tsafrir. This is the fourth and final volume of the history.

Avestan

BILIOGRAPHIA IRANICA: The problems of the transmission of the Avesta and the Tools for Avestan Text Criticism (TATEC). An article by Alberto Cantera.

Review of Bar-Asher Siegal, Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud

MARGINALIA REVIEW OF BOOKS: The Talmud and the Desert Fathers – By Daniel Boyarin. Daniel Boyarin on Michal Bar-Asher Siegal’s Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud. The review concludes:

What is clear and further clarified from Bar-Asher Siegal’s groundbreaking work is that the Talmud is no longer a hermit, cut off from family ties with other so-called non-rabbinic Jews, nor Zoroastrians, nor Greek philosophy, nor Syriac monastic literature as shown so compellingly by Bar-Asher Siegal. It is not that this context rather than that context is more illuminating; rabbinic Mesopotamia was a meeting point of empires, languages, and cultures, a crossing-point between East and West, and the Talmud was part and parcel of that complex cultural world. Bar-Asher Siegal’s book opens another door into that world and the ways and means that its presence there sheds light on the Babylonian Talmud.

I noted the book upon its publication in 2013.

Egypt exhibition in Wales

COPTIC (ETC.) WATCH: Wrexham Museum reveals the mysteries of ancient Egypt. Famous British Museum collection set to kick off tour in North Wales's largest town (STEVE BAGNALL, Daily Post).

Ilona Regulski, the British Museum’s curator of Egyptian Written Culture, said: “Ancient Egypt has produced an astonishing variety of written material representing indigenous as well as foreign languages.

“No other culture has yielded such a rich variety of inscribed objects and nowhere else have they been so well preserved.”

Ms Regulski said the exhibition WRITING FOR ETERNITY: Decoding Ancient Egypt illustrates 4,000 years of writing in Egypt presenting ancient hieroglyphs next to Coptic, Greek, Arabic and Nubian documents.

She added: “Familiar objects, such as papyrus and stone, alternate with surprising artefacts such as the scribe’s pen and pieces of jewellery.”

Tov, Text-Critical Use of the Septuagint, 3rd ed.

TOMMY WASSERMAN: Tov, Text-Critical Use of the Septuagint in Biblical Research (ETC). The fully revised and expanded third edition of this important book. Plus, special deal!

UPDATE (15 June): Dead link now fixed!

On ISIS selling "ancient" artifacts

PLUNDER: ISIS sells priceless ancient artifacts on FACEBOOK: Gold statues, scrolls written in Aramaic and coins up to 10,000 years old being peddled online by terror group

• Facebook has removed pages that were flagged for reportedly selling artifacts stolen by ISIS
  
• Among the goods being offered were golden statues, scrolls written in both Hebrew and Aramaic, clay tablets, and ancient coins
  
• The terrorist organization is believed to be using middlemen to sell the artifacts they plunder, and have made up to $100million

(CHRIS SPARGO, Daily Mail)

On the one hand, this is bad. On the other, there is a certain amount of garbling here: coins were only invented around twenty-five hundred years ago, so ten-thousand-year-old coins would be pretty scarce. All of the artifacts pictured in the article look modern to me (i.e., produced within the last few hundred years and maybe quite recently), although I am not a numismatist or an expert on gold statues.

There are two Hebrew scrolls. The script looks modern in both cases and it may be relevant that a Syriac manuscript in gold lettering has come up in the news in recent years and seems to be early modern to modern. That said, here is a report of a ninth-century Latin manuscript also written in gold lettering, so this is an old custom. But that said, Steve Caruso keeps better track of these things than I do, and he has seen a number of what he regards to be modern forgeries of Hebrew and Syriac manuscripts in gold lettering in recent years.

I do not think these Hebrew manuscripts are very old.

It looks like ISIS is looting modern artifacts too and selling them, and that some of these are being taken to be ancient. Some may even be forgeries. All in all it's a bad business.

Related post here.

Rediscovered papyri at Basel University

I BET THERE ARE MORE DRAWERS LIKE THIS IN EUROPEAN LIBRARIES: Ancient papyrus texts found in Basel uni library. A valuable collection of ancient Egyptian papyrus manuscripts has been discovered in the University of Basel’s library after being forgotten for more than a century (The Local Ch).

The 2,000-year-old texts, written in Greek, Latin, Coptic Egyptian and hieratic, were acquired by the university 115 years ago but were subsequently overlooked.

Sabine Huebner, professor of ancient history, recently found them in two drawers in the library’s manuscripts section, the university said on its website.

She began searching for them after responding to a request from a papyrologist (a scholar studying ancient papyrus manuscripts) who wanted to know if the Basel university had a papyrus collection.

The 65 manuscripts are “mostly everyday documents”, such as contracts, letters receipts and petitions, Huebner said in an interview published by the university.

But one of the most interesting ones is a private letter written by a Christian that dates from the first half of the third century, she said.

[...]

So far there is no mention of anything directly relevant to ancient Judaism in the papyri, but there were Jewish communities in Egypt at the indicated time, and something may surface in due course. Watch this space.

The article concludes with this reminder:

Huebner added that only five percent of known papyrus manuscripts in the world have been edited and published while most are sitting in boxes waiting to be analyzed, offering plenty of potential for new research.

And that's just the known ones, not the ones still sitting forgotten in some drawer. I commented on the implications for Old Testament pseudepigrapha research back in 2007 (with reference to a BNTC lecture by Larry Hurtado).

I guess the Devil needs a Bible too

THE LARGEST MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPT: The mystery of the 'Devil's Bible': Sinister drawing inside 'cursed' medieval manuscript that legend says was drawn by Lucifer himself.

• The mysterious Codex Gigas has a full-page colour image of the Devil
  
• Legend has it that a monk made a deal with the devil to create the text
  
• Handwriting analysis has revealed that the text was written by one scribe

(Ellie Zolfagharifard, Daily Mail)

Legend has it that a monk from the Middle Ages was sentenced to being walled up alive for breaking his monastic vows.

To avoid punishment, the monk promised to write, in a single night, a book containing all human knowledge. As midnight approached, the monk became desperate and turned to Lucifer for help, offering to make a pact to finish the book in exchange for his soul.

Lucifer agreed and signed the work by adding a self-portrait of himself. In the colourful image, he is placed against an empty landscape framed by two large towers.

So what did all human knowledge consist of back then? Let's see:

The Codex Gigas contains five long texts along with the complete Bible.

The book begins with the Old Testament, and it is followed by two works by Flavius Josephus who lived in the first century AD.

It ends with the New Testament and the last of the long works is a Chronicle of Bohemia by Cosmas from Prague.

Josephus would probably be pleased that his works were considered essential human knowledge, but I don't think he would have approved of the context.

A more detailed description of the contents, as well as other information about date etc., is found on the Codex Gigas Wikipedia page.

About half of the codex consists of the entire Latin Bible in the Vulgate version, except for the books of Acts and Revelation, which are from a pre-Vulgate version. They are in the order: Genesis–Ruth; Isaiah–Daniel; Hosea–Malachi; Job; Samuel and Kings; Psalms–Song of Solomon; Wisdom of Solomon; Wisdom of Jesus; Esdras; Tobit; Judith; Esther; and Maccabees. Between the Testaments are Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews and De bello iudaico, as well as Isidore of Seville's encyclopedia Etymologiae and medical works of Hippocrates, Theophilus, Philaretus, and Constantinus. Following a blank page, the New Testament commences with Matthew-Acts, James-Revelation, and Romans-Hebrews. Following the picture of the devil, Cosmas of Prague's Chronicle of Bohemia, a list of brothers in the Podlažice monastery, and a calendar with necrologium, magic formulae and other local records round out the codex. The entire document is written in Latin; in addition, it contains Hebrew, Greek, and Slavic alphabets (Cyrillic and Glagolitic).

Mrs. Judas Iscariot

NEW TESTAMENT APOCRYPHA WATCH: Artist finally puts a face to the name of Mrs Judas Iscariot (Nick Clark, The Independent).

She goes unmentioned in the Bible, but Mrs Judas Iscariot is finally getting recognition thanks to her first-ever portrait, which is the star attraction at a new exhibition of paintings set to tour cathedrals.

The show, inspired by ancient stories that fleshed out Biblical characters centuries afterwards and even added new ones, seeks to give a voice to unnamed and forgotten women in the scriptures.

Artist Chris Gollon has painted 17 new works for Incarnation, Mary & Women from the Bible, which opens at Chichester Cathedral next week and will subsequently travel to the cathedrals of Durham and Hereford.

One of the most striking new works is the portrait of Judas’s wife, a figure who does not feature in the Bible but begins to be referenced in story fragments from as early as the fifth century.

[...]

And this is intriguing:

One papyrus fragment with Coptic text dates to the fifth century, telling the story of Judas’s wife convincing him to betray Jesus and then refusing to feel remorse after he does.

Typically, the article does not tell us which text this is. But perhaps Tony Burke will enlighten us.