New Reviews of the Enoch Seminar

RECENT REVIEWS AT REVIEWS OF THE ENOCH SEMINAR:

Eliza Rosenberg reviews Susan Marks, First Came Marriage

Kenneth Bergland reviews Kenneth A. Kitchen and Paul J. N. Lawrence, Treaty, Law and Covenant in the Ancient Near East

Isaac W. Oliver reviews George W.E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam, 1 Enoch 1 & 2 (Hermeneia Series)

Dereck Daschke reviews Hindy Najman, Losing the Temple and Recovering the Future: An Analysis of 4 Ezra

Morna D. Hooker reviews Eve-Marie Becker, Troels Engberg-Pedersen, and Mogens Muller (eds.), Mark and Paul: Comparative Essays Part II for and against Pauline Influence on Mark

Nathalie LaCoste reviews Sarah J. K. Pearce, The Words of Moses Studies in the Reception of Deuteronomy in the Second Temple Period

Augusto Cosentino reviews Gary N. Knoppers, Jews and Samaritans: The Origins and History of Their Early Relations

Patrick Pouchelle reviews David Hamidović (ed.), Aux origines des messianismes Juifs: Actes du colloque international tenu en Sorbonne, à Paris, les 8 et 9 juin 2010

Review of Honigman, Tales of High Priests and Taxes

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW:

Sylvie Honigman, Tales of High Priests and Taxes: The Books of the Maccabees and the Judean Rebellion against Antiochos IV. S. Mark Taper Foundation imprint in Jewish studies. Oakland: University of California Press, 2014. Pp. ix, 554. ISBN 9780520275584. $95.00.

Reviewed by Linda Zollschan (zollschan@yahoo.com)

Preview

Honigman presents a radical historical reconstruction of the causes of the Maccabaean revolt and a new reading of the First and Second Books of Maccabees. The book begins with a general introduction that provides an overview of the subject matter, the purpose of the authors of the First and Second Books of Maccabees and the problems with older research on the Maccabaean revolt, namely that of Bickerman and Tcherikover.1 She criticises their positivist reading of the sources, the framing of the relationship between the Jews in Judaea and the Seleucid empire in terms of a legalistic conception of institutions, and their views regarding the Hellenization of Jerusalem. She then outlines how she intends to proceed.

[...]

Some topically related posts are collected here and links.

Review of Portier-Young, Apocalypse against Empire

THE TWO CITIES: Review of Apocalypse against Empire by Anathea E. Portier-Young (Max Botner).

Bottom Line: This book represents an important contribution to our understanding of (1) Judean history during the Seleucid and Hasmonean period, (2) the functions of apocalyptic literature within that period, and (3) the ways in which scripture can provide counter-liturgies to the claims of empires. I would highly recommend this book to all who are interested in this area—seasoned scholars and neophytes alike.

I noted the book when it came out here. Earlier reviews are noted here and here.

Elul

YONA SABAR: Hebrew word of the week: Elul.

The Hebrew exiles in Babylonia remained loyal to Judaism but were also influenced by the Babylonian culture, including borrowing the names of the months from the Babylonians.* Indeed, the names don’t have any Hebrew etymology. ...

Old Sumerian in New Zealand

IN A MUSEUM, THAT IS: Inscription one of five known (John Gibb, Otago Daily Times).

Otago Museum staff long suspected that an ancient cuneiform inscription in a polished brick-like rock in their collection was something special.

But it was only after assyriologist Prof Wayne Horowitz, of Jerusalem, visited the museum in 2013 and made a careful study, that the truth about this 3500-year-old inscription has become known.

And the museum now realises that it is home to one of only five known cuneiform inscriptions linked to Hasmar-Galsu, a ruler in the ancient Sumerian civilisation, in the ancient equivalent of southern Iraq.

[...]

No, this doesn't have anything to do with ancient Judaism. It just goes with a recent theme of ancient inscriptions showing up in unexpected places.

Ethiopic manuscripts at Princeton

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Ethiopic Manuscripts in the Princeton University Library (Don Skemer).

The Princeton University Library is fortunate to have one of the largest collections of Ethiopic manuscripts outside Ethiopia, including nearly 180 codices and more than 500 magic scrolls, as they are called.

One of them is a manuscript of 1 Enoch used by R. H. Charles in his 1893 edition.

HT Ancient Jew Review. For more on the ancient Ethiopian city of Axum (Aksum) see here and links. Cross-file under Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Watch.

Eshel on the Decalogue

ESTHER ESHEL: The Oldest Known Copy of the Decalogue? A careful examination of the three oldest copies of the Decalogue—4QDeutⁿ, 4QPaleoExodus^m, and the Nash Papyrus—surprisingly shows that none of them reflects the Masoretic Text (TheTorah.com)

HT Ancient Jew Review.

St Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai

NEW (?) BOOK:

St Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai: Its Manuscripts and their Conservation PAPERS GIVEN IN MEMORY OF PROFESSOR IHOR ŠEVČENKO

Available from the Saint Catherine's Foundation website but not, apparently, from Amazon. While you're at the link, look to the right to see the Featured Manuscript of the Month link. So far two very interesting Syriac manuscripts from the Monastery are featured: Sinai Syriac 16 and Sinai Syriac 30.

HT Alin Suciu on Facebook. More on St. Catherine's Monastery and its precious repository of manuscripts is here and links.

Passages

EXHIBITION: Passages is a traveling museum exhibition featuring "biblical artifacts depicting the history of the Bible." It is associated with the Green Collection's Bible Museum, which is currently under construction in Washington D.C. The exhibition is currently running in Santa Clarita, California. The Los Angeles Daily News reports that some Dead Sea Scroll fragments are included, but I cannot find any further specifics.

Past posts relating to the Green Collection are here and links.

Review of Alter, Strong As Death is Love

A NEW VOLUME OF ALTER'S TRANSLATION: Found in translation: giving voice to those who wrote ‘Hebrew Bible.’ In his work on many books, Robert Alter aims to translate not just the poem but the poet (Eavan Boland, The Irish Times).

For almost two decades Alter has pushed ahead, bringing out volumes of this translation with dizzying speed. In 1999 it was The David Story, a translation of the first books of Samuel, offering the powerful narrative of a Biblical anti-hero. In 2004 it was The Five Books of Moses; in 2007 The Book of Psalms; in 2009 The Book of Genesis. With hardly time to draw breath in 2010 he added The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes. And now comes this new title. Strong As Death is Love covering the books of Ruth, Esther, The Song of Songs, Jonah and Daniel. All the volumes carry as their sub-title A Translation with Commentary.

And the role of the translator? In an interview Alter said, “I want to try to
convey in English what I think were the actual values and mind-sets of the ancient Hebrew writers, which is also, in the poetry, inseparable from the concreteness of their language and the compactness and rhythmic force of the poetry they wrote.”

Background on Professor Alter and his translation of the Hebrew Bible is here with many links.

Schwartz on ancient Jewish History, part three

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW VIDEO: Seth Schwartz | Part Three: Criticism. Part one is noted here and part two here.

Dead Sea Scrolls in a cellar in Massachusetts

The Dead Sea Scrolls: Worcester West Side Secret (Joshua Lyford, Worcester Magazine). A detailed account of a little-known episode in the early history of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Worth a read.

There are many footnotes to a fascinating story like that of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the journey they embarked on is interesting from start to finish, but a particularly thoughtful note should be made of the years before the scrolls became so renowned. While their owner tried to drum up interest to sell them, four of the most crucial Dead Sea Scrolls spent five years locked in a safe, housed in the cellar of a quaint, tidy home on Worcester’s west side. From this home, in the shadow of Bancroft Tower, those four scrolls would prove to be just as ancient and intriguing as Samuel believed, and eventually captured world’s imagination.

More on Mar Samuel is here and more on Kando is here and links.

A Northwest-Semitic seal excavated in ... Russia?

THE DAILY MAIL (WILL STEWART): Treasure trove of warrior jewellery unearthed in Russia: Ancient grave belongs to woman who worshipped fire 2,000 years ago

• The woman was a Sarmatian from the first century AD in southern Russia
  
• More than 100 arrowheads and a horse harness confirm she was a warrior
  
• A gem with an ancient inscription in Aramaic was found buried with her
  
• A hiding place in the grave contained a collection of knives and a sword

A stunning trove of ancient jewellery has been found in the grave of a noble warrior woman dating back to the first century AD.

The female fighter was a Sarmatian - a group of people who worshipped fire and whose prominent role in warfare was seen as an inspiration for the Amazons of Greek mythology.

And the discovery of the intact burial mound in Russia has been described as 'priceless' by archaeologists.

The Sarmatians were nomadic people who migrating from central Asia to the Ural mountains between the 6th and 4th century BC.

[...]

Next to her skull, gold earrings with pendant chains were found, while a bronze mirror was close to her shoulder.

'The collar of her dress was decorated with stamped buckles of gold leaf in the form of a stylised ram's head,' he said.

'Her sleeves were embroidered with colourful beads combined with gold triangular and hemispherical plaques.

'On each hand - a gold bracelet. On her breasts were various beads, among which was a gem with a single-line Phoenician or early Aramaic inscription. At her pelvis lay a gold vial.'

[...]

Below is the photo of the seal. The caption reads "The female fighter was a Sarmatian, a people who worshipped fire and whose prominent role in warfare was seen as an inspiration for the Amazons of Greek mythology. A gem with a single-line Phoenician or early Aramaic inscription was found buried with her (pictured), placed on her chest."

This is a stone seal written in the Paleo-Hebrew script. As far as I know, this type of seal was only made between the eighth and fifth centuries BCE. (But my knowledge of the subject is not particularly up to date.) It is in one of the Northwest Semitic languages, but I don't know enough about the paleography of this period to identify whether it is Hebrew, Phoenician, Aramaic, Ammonite, Edomite, or Moabite. Someone who knows the scripts better than I do could probably discern the national origin of this one and its date to within a century or so.

The letters are inscribed backwards on the seal so that the mirror-image imprint it leaves will read in the right direction. This is normal for such objects. The first letter of the inscription was inscribed last and it looks squashed, probably because the stonemason miscalculated and didn't leave enough room for it. The seal reads לאלישב (l’lyšb), "belonging to Elyashiv." Elyashiv (Eliashib) is attested as a man's name in the Hebrew Bible in Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther, and on at least a couple of 7th-century BCE Hebrew seals. I can't find it in any of the other languages, but I haven't looked comprehensively and some of them may well have used it too.

The big question is, what was this turn-of-the-era Sarmatian woman in Russia doing with a Northwest Semitic seal from four to eight centuries before her time? The report is that it was scientifically excavated, so forgery or salting seem exceedingly unlikely. I guess it could have been a family heirloom. It certainly raises other questions about trade between Eastern Europe and the Middle East from the late Iron Age to the Hellenistic period. Assuming this report is accurate in its particulars, this is an extraordinary discovery and I think we shall be hearing more about it.

UPDATE (19 August): More here.

UPDATE (22 August): Still more here and here.

Google Alphabet

PHOENICIAN WATCH: ‘Alphabet,’ From Ancient Greece to Google. By betting on ‘Alphabet’ as the name for its new parent company, Google is relying on a word that has only existed in English for about five centuries (BEN ZIMMER, WSJ).

By betting on “Alphabet,” Google is relying on a word that we all learn as children but has only existed in English for about five centuries. In Old English, if you wanted to refer to the alphabet, you would use a word formed from the first four letters: “a-be-ce-de.” In Middle English this was shortened to “a-be-ce,” or as we would now spell it, “ABC.”

Around 1500, when classical scholarship was all the rage, English borrowed the Latin “alphabetum,” which in turn came from the Greek “alphabetos,” derived from the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, “alpha” and “beta.”

Those names can trace their lineage back to the ancient Phoenician writing system. The “alpha” equivalent was shaped like a cow’s head, named after the Phoenician word for “ox.” Similarly, “beta” meant “house” and was shaped like one. In the alphabetic system, those characters came to stand for the initial sounds of the pictured words.

I think the name "Google" is more clever, but we'll see.

The Jews of Kaifeng

TRAVEL: Tracing ancient Jewish influences in China (Eileen Wingard, San Diego Jewish World).

SAN DIEGO — A highlight of my recent trip to China was in Xian, once the largest city in the ancient world and capital of China throughout 11 dynasties. After arriving by bullet train from Beijing, we had dinner at a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant and spent the evening listening to three speakers whose subject was the Chinese Jews of Kaifeng, a city on our original itinerary, but cancelled due to security reasons.

Professor Xu Xin , China’s leading scholar on the Jews of China, as well as the founder and director of the Diane and Guilford Glazer Institute for Jewish and Israel Studies at Nanjing University, gave us an overview of the history of the Jewish community of Kaifeng. Although historians may differ on the exact beginning of Jewish immigration to China, some dating the first arrival of Jews as far back as 220 BCE, what is definitely known is that during the Tang Dynasty, 618-906 CE, a poem and other records confirm the presence of Jews. Also, it is known that the Jews came on the Silk Road as traders.

In fact, a document, written on paper in a Judeo-Persian language, using Hebrew characters, was found on the Chinese-Tibet border. At that time, paper was only produced in China, so the Jewish trader had obviously been to China. These were Mizrahi Jews from Persia and Babylon. Some may also have come from India. Keifeng was then the major metropolis at the beginning of the Silk Road.

[...]

I would take that 220 BCE arrival date with a grain of salt, but the Jewish community in Kaifeng does seem to have been there by around 900 CE and it still exists today. Ms. Wingard heard a lecture by one of its leaders when she was in Xian. Past posts on the Jews of Kaifeng are here, here, and here. And there's more on that Chinese Judeo-Persian text here.

More on the floorboard mikveh

SOME BACKGROUND: Ein Karem: One village, three religions (Mordechai Goldman, Al-Monitor).

In early July, an ancient mikveh, a ritual bath in which observant Jews dip to purify themselves, was discovered in the pastoral Jerusalem neighborhood of Ein Karem. The 2,000-year-old mikveh, which would have been filled with rainwater, was found during renovation work on a home in the neighborhood. It was well preserved, down to some stone and clay tools on the pool floor, and probably served its owners at the time of the Second Temple. The unearthing of the mikveh strengthens the evidence of a Jewish link to ancient Ein Karem, the Arab-Palestinian and Christian links having already been established.

[...]

Archaeological evidence of the Jewish connection to Ein Karem has only been found in recent years, beginning with the 2004 discovery of a mikveh in the village. Amirav had found a cistern in the John the Baptist Church that turned out to be a purification bath. That discovery drew international attention and was the first evidence of a Jewish link to ancient Ein Karem, a connection that until then had only been cited in texts.

Now a second mikveh, large and impressive, has been found. “We were very excited by this discovery,” said Uriyah, a poet who lives with her partner, Tal, and their six children in the house where the mikveh was found. Requesting that her full name not be divulged to avoid droves of curious tourists, she told Al-Monitor, “This connected me very much to our Jewish heritage. For us, every descent into the space of the mikveh is a kind of descent through the tunnel of time.”

Tal, on the other hand, is unmoved by the Jewish aspect of the finding. “Religion doesn’t mean anything to me,” he said. “There’s an archeological find here, and that’s what’s important.”

[...]

I noted the discovery here back in early July. This article doesn't add a great deal, apart from the mention of the 2004 discovery and the brief interview with the owners of the house. But it did not register with me at the time that the find was in the neighborhood of Ein Karem (Ein Kerem). Back in 2011 this area was in the news concerning a controvery over the handling of Second Temple-era architecture at a building site. And some shadowy rumors involving treasure from the Copper Scroll were also involved. See here and here for the story.

I seemed to have missed the reports of the discovery of a mikveh in Ein Kerem in 2004.

Schwartz on ancient Jewish History, part two

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW VIDEO: Seth Schwartz | Part Two: 70 C.E. For part one, etc., see here.

New AWOL index

AWOL: New Index of Online Publications: The AWOL Index. Looks very useful.

Nearly $33K for sacred cow

RED HEIFER PROJECT UPDATE: Jewish Temple group raising $125K online to breed sacred cow (Brian Schaefer, JTA).

It’s been nearly two millennia since the Second Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, bringing to an end the priestly period of Jewish history and commencing the Diaspora.

A third Temple has been prophesied, and in preparation for the messiah, nonprofit Jewish group The Temple Institute wants to build it.

Last month, the institute launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo with the goal of raising $125,000 to breed a red heifer, a requirement for Temple purification rituals. It has already raised nearly $33,000 from some 500 donors.

[...]

That's close to $20,000 raised in the last four weeks. Additional background on the project can be found here and links.

Obituary for Patricia Crone

THE TIMES HIGHER: Patricia Crone, 1945-2015. A scholar who transformed our understanding of early Islam has died (MATTHEW REISZ).

In her first book, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (with Michael Cook, 1977), Professor Crone drew on archaeological discoveries and contemporary Aramaic, Armenian, Greek and Syriac sources to cast a critical light on traditional Muslim accounts of the origins of the religion. This led to a view of early Islam as a form of tribal rebellion, deeply linked to Judaism, against the surrounding Byzantine and Persian empires – a controversial interpretation which has been debated and developed ever since.

Background here. And some other recent indications that our understanding of the earliest history of Islam may be due for revision are noted here and links.