Hanukkah 2015

HAPPY HANUKKAH (CHANUKKAH, CHANUKAH) to all those celebrating! The eight-day festival begins tonight at sundown.

A couple of recent posts on Hanukkah are here and here. Past Hanukkha posts with additional historical background are here and links.

A divinized first-century healer

SARAH VEALE: ANCIENT MIRACLE WORKERS: THE EMPEROR VESPASIAN. Jesus wasn't the only one in the first century with a miraculous-healing gig.

The day the moon stood still?

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Mark W. Chavalas: Were sun and moon stopped in their tracks? (LaCrosseTribune.com).

The sun and moon have been in the news lately. The Rev. John Hagee has claimed that recent blood moons (a popular phrase for a total lunar eclipse) have biblical significance of cataclysmic proportions concerning modern-day Israel. Notwithstanding Hagee’s so-called expertise in astronomy (and Bible, for that matter), a discussion of what the Bible actually says of the movement of heavenly bodies is in order.

According to Joshua 10, the Israelite leader, Joshua, made a “mad dash” to get to Gibeon to protect that town against a coalition of Amorite kings. Like any good military leader in antiquity, Joshua inquired of God about his chances in battle; God guaranteed victory, which was all Joshua needed know.

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Dr. Chavales then summarizes the case that the passage refers not to the sun and moon miraculously standing still in the sky, but to a propitious arrangement of the sun and moon in the sky which gave an omen that the Israelites would win the battle. I haven't seen his source by one John Walton, but a similar case was also made by John S. Holladay, Jr., in his 1968 article "The Day(s) the Moon Stood Still" in the Journal of Biblical Literature 87, pp. 166-78, which underlines the point that the place of the moon is also important in the story, so it can't just be about the sun standing still. Holladay argues that Mesopotamian omen literature explains what the poem was originally about, and that the writer of the book of Joshua was quoting an already ancient poem (from the Book of Jashar) which he misunderstood in his prose account of the battle. I too find this argument basically persuasive.

For my part, I have no problem with the idea that ancient Israelites would seek an omen for such matters (cf., e.g., 1 Samuel 10:17-24). Be that as it may, one problem with the theory is that the rubric assigning the poetic quotation to the Book of Jashar is probably secondary. It is missing in the Septuagint. So the quotation was probably originally unattributed and a later scribe either knew or was misinformed or inferred that it came from the Book of Jashar, which is quoted elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. Still, the poetic passage does seem to be a quotation of an earlier work which was the only source the prose author had and which he understood imperfectly.

I have written about the Book of Jashar (which perhaps was originally called "The Book of the Song") in my article "Quotations from Lost Books in the Hebrew Bible" in Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, volume 1 (ed. Bauckham, Davila, and Panayotov; Eerdmans, 2013), pp. 673-98, which you should definitely buy. A summary handout is here. Other past posts relevant to the latter article are collected here.

Past posts on the recent Blood Moon Tetrad, and some of the nonsense written about it, are here and links.

Cross-file under "Lost Books."

JAOS 135(3) (2015)

BIBLIOGRAPHIA IRANICA: Journal of the American Oriental Society. This posts flags reviews of interest for ancient Zoroastrianism in the current issue of JAOS. These are, more or less, also of potential interest for ancient Judaism. But click through to the TOC for more material of interest for the latter.

Interview with Christine Shepardson

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Christine Shepardson.

AJR interviews Dr. Christine Shepardson about her book Controlling Contested Places: Late Antique Antioch and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy.

Late-antique Judaism gets a brief mention in connection with John Chrysostom.

More on the Hezekiah seal impression

ROBERT CARGILL HAS some questions about the recent news of the discovery of a seal bearing the name of King Hezekiah in Jerusalem. This one strikes me as particularly interesting:

And if that’s what this is about (the new reading of the inscription), then what do other epigraphers say about this reading? No “ben” in between Hezekiah and Ahaz? And does it really say Ahaz? Does it fit within the border of the seal?

There have been many media stories about the announcement in the last day or so. Here are a couple:

Impression of biblical king's seal found in Jerusalem (BBC). A brief report that seems to capture the main points.

King Hezekiah in the Bible: Royal Seal of Hezekiah Comes to Light (Robin Ngo, Bible History Daily). Includes some useful historical background to the find.

The discovery of the bulla was noted here on Thursday.

Lod Mosaic in Venice

THIS MOSAIC GETS AROUND: Roman mosaic floor from Lod on view in Venice. An ancient Roman mosaic floor from Lod in Israel is currently exhibited in Venice by Fondazione Giorgio Cini in collaboration with the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Shelby White and Leon Levy Lod Mosaic Center (M.Apelblat, The Brussells Times).

The Lod Mosaic will be on view until 10 January 2016 at the exhibition centre on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore.

This is the last European stop in an international tour which included United Kingdom, France, Germany and Russia. On its return to Israel it will be exhibited in a visitor centre to be built in Lod.

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Background here with many links. Another ancient mosaic has recently been discovered at Lod as well.

On transliterating biblical names

FROM HEBREW TO GREEK: The Lost Meanings of Biblical Names. The festival of Hanukkah, which starts this weekend, should remind us that translation can sap the ancient power of religious names (AVIYA KUSHNER, WSJ).

For centuries, the Septuagint was the dominant translation in Western culture, ultimately influencing even the King James Bible. But many Jews weren’t keen on translating their holy book: One ancient source calls for a fast on the anniversary of the Septuagint’s publication, saying that when it appeared, “darkness descended on the world for three days.”

They had ample justification for worrying over distortions and omissions. Hebrew names, one of the richest parts of the Bible, were often transliterated instead of being translated into Greek. Meaning-laden names thus lost their meaning.

Well, yes, but that's why you have commentary. I do not regard this as a tragedy. Any reading of a text places the text in a new context and to some degree alters its meaning. I grant that the ancient Greek translations of the books of the Hebrew Bible have cases (e.g., the Book of Isaiah) which carry this tendency pretty far.

Barbara Thiering 1930-2015

SAD NEWS: Academic and iconoclast Barbara Thiering exemplified tumultuous 1960's ethos (Sydney Morning Herald).

BARBARA THIERING 1930–2015
Historian, feminist and iconoclast Barbara Thiering once observed that, for a woman of her temperament, she had been born at a fortunate time in Australia. She was too young for World War II, was a young adult in the prosperous 1950s, an intellectual during the 1960s and 1970s, when the world was ripe for such things, and a successful writer and academic in her later years.

She participated in a time of great growth and change when opportunities were opening up for women, which she applauded and encouraged. The combination of her high intelligence, strong will and independent free-thought created a path for her life, reflecting the changing position of women and the political and religious turbulence of the later 20th century.

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Her Wikipedia profile, which as of this writing has not yet been updated to note her death, is here. Inevitably she will be remembered for her controversial work on Jesus, which no one follows. But it is also worth mentioning her work on the prosody of Qumran poetry, which remains useful today.

Barbara Thiering, "The Poetic Forms of the Hodayot," Journal of Semitic Studies 8 (1963): 189-209.

Requiescat in pace.

More on the background of Hanukkah

HISTORY: What We Know About the Truth Behind the Hanukkah Story (Ashley Ross, Time Magazine).

In 175 BCE, the land of Israel was part of the Syrian-Greek Empire led by a King named Antiochus IV, also called “Epiphanes,” meaning “the gods’ beloved.” The most commonly cited source for the history of that time is the book First Maccabees, which was written in about 100 BCE, not too long after the events it describes. But [JTS Professor David] Kraemer cautions that, like all books, ancient and modern, it’s got a perspective. According to First Maccabees, religious persecution by Antiochus Epiphanes led the rebels known as Maccabees to take back their temple from the Syrian-Greek Empire. Meanwhile, another book called Second Maccabees has a very different story. According to that version, a group of Jews had been attracted by Hellenistic ways, and it was against that Hellenized leadership that the Maccabees revolted, taking back their temple. And that’s not all.

“We seem to also have eyewitness accounts of the events,” Kraemer says. “It’s a hidden account, the final prophecy of the prophet Daniel, which was written at the time of the Maccabean revolt, so you’ve got some evidence about it but it’s not a direct testimony. It’s very difficult to interpret.”

Some comments. (1) "Epiphanes" means "(a god) manifest," i.e., look at me, I'm a god! The ancients thought this was as crazy as we do. (2) An account of events sixty-plus years after they happened has ample scope for distortion of historical memory. (3) In addition to the Book of Daniel, the Animal Apocalypse (1 Enoch 83-90) was written during the Maccabean revolt. It is equally difficult to interpret. (4) I'm surprised that the article does not make clear that the story about the oil lamp that miraculously burned for eight days, which it mentions, comes in the rabbinic literature, long after the sources discussed here.

Mani was an artist

BIBLIOGRAPHIA IRANICA: Mani’s pictures. New book: Gulácsi, Zsuzsanna. 2015. Mani’s pictures: The didactic images of the Manichaeans from Sasanian Mesopotamia to Uygur Central Asia and Tang-Ming China (Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 90). Brill.

Mani left paintings? Who knew?

Cross-file under Manichaean (Manichean) Watch.

Greek in Hellenistic Palestine

LARRY HURTADO: Language Usage in Jewish Palestine: Epigraphic Evidence.

Walter Ameling draws upon epigraphical evidence to consider languages usage in Jewish Palestine in the Hellenistic and Roman periods in a data-rich recent essay: “Epigraphy and the Greek Language in Hellenistic Palestine,” Scripta Classica Israelica 34 (2015): 1-18. The thrust of his study is that from the Seleucid period onward Greek was widely used. As this publication won’t be readily available to some, I’ll give a few representative extracts.

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Past posts on the related topic of the languages Jesus spoke are here, here, here, here, here, and links

Ancient sources for Hanukkah

A GOOD, BRIEF OVERVIEW: Chanukah: A Survey of the Ancient Sources (Mitchell First, Jewish Link).

Lim on canon

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Understanding the Emergence of the Jewish Canon (Timothy Lim). The first instalment of the AJR Forum on the biblical Canon.

Doak on the giants

THE BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION:

The Embarrassing and Alluring Biblical Giant

Whatever interpretive paths we choose, the giant remains alluring, even if a bit embarrassing. After the Hebrew Bible had (mostly) been completed, giants lived on, prolifically, in the traditions of third–first century BCE Judaism, most notably in 1 Enoch and the Qumran Book of Giants. These early Jewish traditions cannot simply be attributed to an arcane exegetical fascination with the weirdness or ambiguity of the giant; rather, early interpreters saw in these figures deeply meaningful opportunities to speak of the persistence of evil and the meaning of empire.

See also: The Last of the Rephaim: Conquest and Cataclysm in the Heroic Ages of Ancient Israel (Ilex Series 7; Ilex Foundation and the Center for Hellenic Studies; via Harvard University Press, 2012); Consider Leviathan: Narratives of Nature and the Self in Job (Fortress Press, 2014)

By Brian R. Doak
Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies
Faculty Fellow, William Penn Honors Program
George Fox University
December 2015

There are far too many PaleoJudaica posts on giants to give as background links. I wouldn't know where to start. But if you are curious, run "book of giants" and "og the giant" through the search engine and that will bring up lots of them. Posts, not giants.

An inscribed bulla of King Hezekiah

THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM: Impression of King Hezekiah’s Royal Seal Discovered in Ophel Excavations South of Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

First seal impression of an Israelite or Judean king ever exposed in situ in a scientific archaeological excavation

Discovery brings to life the Biblical narratives about King Hezekiah and the activity conducted during his lifetime in Jerusalem's 1st Temple Period Royal Quarter

This is an exciting discovery, chiefly because, as it says above, this is the first seal impression mentioning Hezekiah which has been uncovered in a scientific excavation. Other Hezekiah bullae (clay seal impressions) have surfaced on the antiquities market since the 1990s, but one could always doubt their authenticity. There is no doubt that this one is authentic. It is very sad that the papyrus document it once sealed has long ago disintegrated into dust.

For more on the earlier Hezekiah bullae, including a damaged one published by Nahman Avigad in the 1980s without his recognizing the name on it, see this 2002 Biblical Archaeology Review article by Robert Deutsch: Lasting Impressions: New bullae reveal Egyptian-style emblems on Judah’s royal seals. (The latter was brought to my attention by Antonio Lombatti.)

UPDATE: It sounds as though the question of the bulla being "exposed in situ in a scientific archaeological excavation" may require some qualification. Candida Moss notes the following in her Daily Beast essay Archaeologist Says the Bible’s King Hezekiah Is Real:

But Robert Cargill, an archeologist at the University of Iowa, told me that the claims about biblical proof are overstated. “If this is a legitimate object, then it simply confirms the existence of a king named Hezekiah in Jerusalem.” That, Cargill added, is something scholars already knew from other archeological discoveries.

The story has made headlines in the British tabloids, but archeologists like Cargill are more skeptical both about the evidence itself and the potential agenda of the find. The significance of the discovery hinges on the claim that it was uncovered in its original archeological context, but the area in which it was unearthed is politically contested and archeologically compromised. The material is being sifted from piles of dirt removed as part of Palestinian construction in the area. As such, Cargill said, “there’s no reason to believe that it is a forged object. The problem lies in the compromised archeological stratigraphy at the point of discovery.”

If this is accurate, the bulla comes from the salvage archaeology of a construction site and the dirt was removed as part of the construction, rather than, apparently, by the archaeologists. As Professor Cargill says, there's no reason to think the object is forged, but this is not quite the same as it being scientifically excavated in a stratigraphically rigorous archaeological excavation.

UPDATE: Professor Cargill points me to this, which indicates that the Temple Mount Sifting Project actually found the object in 2010. It remains unclear from the current reports whether the dirt came from construction excavation or scientific, stratigraphic, archaeological excavation.

UPDATE: From the Hebrew University press release:

This bulla came to light, together with many pottery sherds and other finds such as figurines and seals, in Area A of the excavations (2009 season), supervised by Hagai Cohen-Klonymus.

But apparently the dirt was not sifted until 2010.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Yes, it was a garbage pit. What does that mean? Was it garbage from a specific period in a clear stratigraphic context? Sounds like it, in which case I would count that as excavated in a stratigraphically rigorous archaeological excavation. But I am not an archaeologist and am not going to try to comment on the fine points of stratigraphy. I assume the details will be made clear in the publications. Meanwhile, it's an interesting object whose genuineness is beyond reasonable doubt. It confirms what we already knew from the Sennacherib Prism etc., that there was a king named Hezekiah around 700 BCE. It also identifies Ahaz as his father, who is also mentioned as such in the previously published bullae. Any doubts (but I don't know of any) of the genuineness of the latter bullae seem now assuaged. Ahaz is also known in his proper time from an Assyrian inscription.

Review of Rudich, Religious Dissent in the Roman Empire

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW:

Vasily Rudich, Religious Dissent in the Roman Empire: Violence in Judaea at the Time of Nero. Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies. London; New York: Routledge, 2015. Pp. xxiv, 350. ISBN 9780415161060. $160.00.

Reviewed by William den Hollander, Canadian Reformed Theological Seminary (wdenhollander@crts.ca)

Preview

The monograph under review is in more than one way a bold one. While his expertise as a Roman historian certainly provided Rudich with a valuable foundation for the present study, and his earlier examinations of dissident psychology led naturally to this analysis of violent religious dissent,1 his focus on Roman Judea necessitated a brave plunge into unfamiliar territory, a virtual quagmire of scholarly literature that he admits to having underestimated initially (xi-xii). The high degree to which he immersed himself in the ancient texts and modern scholarship is, however, a credit to his industry and a direct benefit to the depth of his contributions—although it should be noted that he closed his ‘dossier’ by the end of 2011, so that the book does not necessarily reflect the latest trends in scholarship.

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Western Wall museum approved

Controversial Plan for Museum at Western Wall Gets Final Zoning Approval. Planning board rejects most objections to Western Wall Heritage Foundation building, but limits its area; opponents considering petitioning High Court (Nir Hasson, Haaretz).

An appeals subcommittee of the Jerusalem District Planning and Building Committee has given its final approval for a plan to construct a center called “Beit Ha-Liba” (House of Core Values) in the Western Wall Plaza in the Old City of Jerusalem. The center was conceived of and promoted by the Western Wall Heritage Foundation and the Western Wall’s rabbi, and will include offices, a museum and an educational center.

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Background here, from back in 2010. This story has been quiet for a while.

UPDATE (4 December): Dead link now fixed!

Byzantine-era olive press in Shiloh

EXCAVATION: 1,300-year-old olive press uncovered at Ancient Shiloh (Efrat Forsher, Israel HaYom).

The large size of the press and its proximity to a similar one found in 2011 provide proof that aside from being the capital of Israel for 369 years and housing the Ark of the Covenant, Shiloh was also the region's main manufacturer of olive oil.

I don't seem to have noted the discovery of that other olive press in 2011. Reports of the excavation of some other ancient olive presses in recent years are here, here, and here.

Iraqi Jewish archive exhibition in Florida

IRAQI JEWISH ARCHIVE WATCH: Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU presents Discovery and Recovery: Preserving Iraqi Jewish Heritage.

Just in time for Art Basel Miami Beach, the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU (JMOF-FIU) unveils the Discovery and Recovery: Preserving Iraqi Jewish Heritage exhibit on December 3, 2015. The exhibition, which runs through February 14, 2016, details the dramatic recovery of historic materials relating to the Jewish community in Iraq from a flooded basement in Saddam Hussein’s intelligence headquarters, and the National Archives’ ongoing work in support of U.S. Government efforts to preserve these materials.

In both English and Arabic, the 2,000 square foot exhibition features 23 recovered items and a “behind the scenes” video of the fascinating yet painstaking preservation process. The entire collection includes more than 2,700 Jewish books and tens of thousands of documents in Hebrew, Arabic, Judeo-Arabic and English, dating from 1524 to the 1970s. A special website makes these historic materials freely available to all online: www.ija.archives.gov. This work was made possible through generous support from the U.S. Department of State.

The National Endowment for the Humanities in partnership with the Center for Jewish History were very helpful in providing key start-up support for the project.

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With a video on the conservation efforts for the exhibition. Background on the Iraqi Jewish archive is here, with links going all the way back to the first report of the archive's discovery in 2003.