A targum (an Aramaic translation of Scripture) is a translation that does not come alone: hardly ever is it left unattended by its parent text, the Hebrew Bible. While it may play, it is always supervised, its game subject to specific rules. A targum is not supposed to ever leave home and strike out on its own. The reasons for this peculiar and probably unique conception of translation as one part of a bilingual text are to be sought in contemporary rabbinic views on how to read and translate the Hebrew Bible.
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Wednesday, December 16, 2015
Smelik on the Targum
AJS PERSPECTIVES: The Translation as a Bilingual Text: The Curious Case of the Targum (Willem F. Smelik).
Kister et al. (eds.), Tradition, Transmission, and Transformation
NEW BOOK FROM BRILL:
Tradition, Transmission, and Transformation from Second Temple Literature through Judaism and Christianity in Late Antiquity
Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Symposium of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature, Jointly Sponsored by the Hebrew University Center for the Study of Christianity, 22–24 February, 2011
Edited by Menahem Kister, Hillel I. Newman, Michael Segal, and Ruth A. Clements
Many types of tradition and interpretation found in later Jewish and Christian writings trace their origins to the Second Temple period, but their transmission and transformation followed different paths within the two religious communities. For example, while Christians often translated and transmitted discrete Second Temple texts, rabbinic Judaism generally preserved earlier traditions integrated into new literary frameworks. In both cases, ancient traditions were often transformed to serve new purposes but continued to bear witness to their ancient roots. Later compositions may even provide the key to clarifying obscurities in earlier texts. The contributions in this volume explore the dynamics by which earlier texts and traditions were transmitted and transformed in these later bodies of literature and their attendant cultural contexts.
Unearthing the World of Jesus
SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE: Unearthing the World of Jesus. Surprising archaeological finds are breaking new ground in our understanding of Jesus’s time—and the revolution he launched 2,000 years ago (Ariel Sabar). This article focuses on the Galilee in the first-century. Magdala gets a lot of space, but other sites such as Bethsaida receive some attention too. Excerpt:
What archaeologists have begun to recover is Jesus’s world—the beat of everyday life in the fishing villages where he is said to have planted the seeds of a movement. The deepest insights have come from millions of “small finds” gathered over decades of painstaking excavation: pottery shards, coins, glassware, animal bones, fishing hooks, cobbled streets, courtyard houses and other simple structures.
Before such discoveries, a long line of (mostly Christian) theologians had sought to reinterpret the New Testament in a way that stripped Jesus of his Judaism. Depending on the writer, Jesus was either a man who, though nominally Jewish, wandered freely among pagans; or he was a secular gadfly inspired less by the Hebrews than by the Greek Cynics, shaggy-haired loners who roamed the countryside irritating the powers that be with biting one-liners.
Archaeology showed once and for all that the people and places closest to Jesus were deeply Jewish. To judge by the bone finds, Galileans didn’t eat pig. To judge by the limestone jugs, they stored liquids in vessels that complied with the strictest Jewish purity laws. Their coins lacked likenesses of humans or animals, in keeping with the Second Commandment against graven images.
Hanukkah at the Arch of Titus
YU NEWS: Hanukkah at the Arch of Titus. Professor Steven Fine Reflects on Jewish View of Menorah Depicted on the Arch of Titus Through the Ages.
Where the miracle and hope of Hanukkah celebrates the ascending lights of the menorah, a new lamp set ablaze each night (a process that is paralleled in the heavens as the days begin to lengthen with the winter solstice, roughly during Hanukkah), the Arch of Titus menorah is dark, carried by reveling heathen soldiers in a triumphal parade and into a triumphal museum built by Titus’ father, the emperor Vespasian. In truly Orwellian language, this museum was called the “Temple of Peace.”Lots more on the Arch of Titus here and just keep following those links.
Yet looking up at the menorah of the Arch of Titus, our ancestors have often conjured a far more positive image, one that bears a positive lesson for us today.
García Martínez, Revelación, Autoridad y Canon en Qumrán
NEW ARTICLE: García Martínez, Florentino, "Revelación, Autoridad y Canon en Qumrân." Published in Revelación, Escritura, Interpretación. Estudios en honor del Prof. D. Gonzalo Aranda Pérez pages:87-108. Via Masora digital.
Tuesday, December 15, 2015
The decline of piety according to the Talmud
THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: Your Bubbe Was Not More Jewish Than You Are. The Talmud debunks the myth of declining Jewish piety.
Reading Daf Yomi, one of the things that has most interested me is the Talmud’s picture of the Jewish society of its day. It’s easy to assume that, because the rabbis who assembled the Mishna and the Gemara were exceptionally learned and pious, the Jewish world they lived in was itself extremely devout. Surely the Jews of Palestine and Babylonia in the 1st centuries C.E. would put American Jews to shame with their Jewish knowledge and practice! Yet that is certainly not the way the rabbis of the Talmud understood their world. On the contrary, the impression they give is of a Jewish community divided between a very pious elite—the people the Talmud calls chaverim, “friends,” who took care to scrupulously follow the law—and an ignorant, unreliable mass of ordinary Jews, the am ha’aretz. What’s more, as we saw in this week’s Daf Yomi reading, the rabbis were convinced that they stood at the end of a long, irreversible decline in Jewish piety. If we think that Jews who lived centuries ago were better Jews than we are today, the Jews of centuries ago thought exactly the same thing.Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.
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Review of Jenkins, The Many Faces of Christ
NEW TESTAMENT APOCRYPHA WATCH: Book review: 'Many Faces of Christ' discusses evolution of church (Michael L. Ramsey, The Roanoke Times).
We know Christ from the paintings and writings of Europeans. We also know him from the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the Pauline letters and other books in the New Testament. After the Church allied itself with the Roman Empire in A.D. 336, many other gospels were removed from the canon of Christianity and were lost — or were they?More on the book is here and links
Philip Jenkins, distinguished professor of history at Baylor University, presents in his new work “The Many Faces of Christ” stories of how the lost gospels were not lost at all. The subtitle, “The Thousand Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels,” answers the question of whether theses writings were lost or just excluded from readings approved by councils of the established church.
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I. Howard Marshall, 1934-2015
SAD NEWS: This weekend brought the sad news of the death of Emeritus Professor I. Howard Marshall, retired from Aberdeen University. I quote the notice by Paul Middleton to the British New Testament Society List:
UPDATE: A notice by Mark Goodacre is here, and he links to others.
Colleagues will be saddened to learn of the death of Prof. Ian Howard Marshall at the weekend, aged 81.Howard was a prolific and massively influential scholar and a very nice guy. I know I have seen him in recent years at the annual British New Testament Conference in September, although I cannot remember if he was there this year in Edinburgh. Other notices of his death: by James McGrath here and by Michael Bird here. Requiescat in pace.
Prof. Marshall was Emeritus Professor of New Testament Exegesis at the University of Aberdeen. He took his MA, BD, and PhD from Aberdeen and began teaching there in 1964, becoming Professor in 1979.
He was the author of dozens of volumes, including commentaries on Luke (NIGTC, 1978), the Epistles of John (NICNT, 1978), Acts (TNTC, 1980), 1 and 2 Thessalonians (NCB, 1983), 1 Peter (IVP, 1991), Philippians (Epworth, 1992), and the Pastoral Epistles (ICC, 1999). He also published many significant books on New Testament Theology and Interpretation, including New Testament Theology: Many Witnesses, One Gospel (IVP, 2004).
Prof. Marshall was a former President of the British New Testament Society, and will be sadly missed.
Dr Paul Middleton
Secretary, The British New Testament Society
UPDATE: A notice by Mark Goodacre is here, and he links to others.
Does the Magdala Stone explain Jesus' execution?
CANDIDA MOSS: Is This Stone the Clue to Why Jesus Was Killed? A stone found in Israel with carvings of a chariot may be the key to understanding the charge of blasphemy leveled at Jesus Christ (The Daily Beast).
The stone is the Magdala Stone, on which more here. I have posted a photo of it here.
Even if we grant that the Magdala Stone showed a chariot in the holy of holies in the Jerusalem Temple, any connection with the execution of Jesus seems to me far-fetched. First, the idea that the heavenly Temple had chariots within it is very ancient, going back at least to the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice in the Dead Sea Scrolls. And the Chronicler explicitly states (more or less - the text is difficult) that King David put a "golden chariot (of) the cherubim" in the holy of holies of the earthly Temple and that their wings were spread over the ark of the covenant (1 Chronicles 28:18). So the idea is hardly new.
Second, I see no reference to the divine chariot in Mark 14:62. Jesus is quoted as alluding to the enthronement of the Davidic King alongside God in Psalm 110:1 and the coming of the son of man on the clouds of heaven in Daniel 7:13. I grant that claiming to be the heavenly Davidic King and the Danielic one like a son of man is not blasphemous by first-century Jewish standards, although it would have been considered megalomaniacal and quite possibly (especially by the Romans) seditious. But it is not at all easy to read the divine chariot into what Jesus is presented as saying, so I don't see that the Magdala Stone, interesting though it is, is very helpful for that issue. But, as always, such matter should be argued in the peer-review literature.
The stone is the Magdala Stone, on which more here. I have posted a photo of it here.
Even if we grant that the Magdala Stone showed a chariot in the holy of holies in the Jerusalem Temple, any connection with the execution of Jesus seems to me far-fetched. First, the idea that the heavenly Temple had chariots within it is very ancient, going back at least to the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice in the Dead Sea Scrolls. And the Chronicler explicitly states (more or less - the text is difficult) that King David put a "golden chariot (of) the cherubim" in the holy of holies of the earthly Temple and that their wings were spread over the ark of the covenant (1 Chronicles 28:18). So the idea is hardly new.
Second, I see no reference to the divine chariot in Mark 14:62. Jesus is quoted as alluding to the enthronement of the Davidic King alongside God in Psalm 110:1 and the coming of the son of man on the clouds of heaven in Daniel 7:13. I grant that claiming to be the heavenly Davidic King and the Danielic one like a son of man is not blasphemous by first-century Jewish standards, although it would have been considered megalomaniacal and quite possibly (especially by the Romans) seditious. But it is not at all easy to read the divine chariot into what Jesus is presented as saying, so I don't see that the Magdala Stone, interesting though it is, is very helpful for that issue. But, as always, such matter should be argued in the peer-review literature.
Monday, December 14, 2015
Was Isaiah's Rabshakeh an exiled Israelite?
THE BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION:
How Did Rabshakeh Know the Language of Judah?Interesting and not-implausible proposal.
Article from Marbeh Ḥokmah: Studies in the Bible and the Ancient Near East in Loving Memory of Victor Avigdor Hurowitz (Winona Lake, Indiana : Eisenbrauns, 2015).
By Yigal Levin
Bar-Ilan University
December 2015
That Coptic magical handbook
COPTIC WATCH: Thousand-year-old ‘Egyptian Handbook of Ritual Power’ deciphered (Nina Awad, StepFeed).
Researchers at the Macquarie universities in New South Wales, Australia, gave deciphered a 1,300-year-old Egyptian manuscript believed to be a manual on how to use and create magical spells.The publication of the manuscript was noted here in November, but this article has additional information.
The manuscript, which has been dubbed the “Egyptian Handbook of Ritual Power” by scientific researchers and scholars, was first found by a merchant in the late ’70s and though numerous attempts were made to decode the contexts of the ancient document, all attempts seemed fruitless.
With 20 pages deciphered, researchers believe that due to the way it was written, the handbook most likely came from some place in Upper Egypt and was probably created by a member of the Sethians, a minority group that worshiped Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve.
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Sanders on early Jewish myths
PHIADELPHIA SEMINAR ON CHRISTIAN ORIGINS: PSCO Presentation: 3 December 2015:) "Where Did Early Judaism Get Its Myths? Enoch and the Making of a Modern Academic Tradition" Seth Sanders (UC Davis) (Audio file.)
Metatron Gets Pumped, Crashes Horribly
ARCHANGEL METATRON WATCH: Metatron Inc (OTCMKTS:MRNJ) Gets Pumped, Crashes Horribly (Georgi Kamburov, Hot Stocked).
Not the first time this has happened to an archangel.
Not the first time this has happened to an archangel.
Bibliographia Iranica
AWOL: Bibliographia Iranica. Regular readers of PaleoJudaica are well familiar with this site, but it's good to see it getting more publicity.
Sunday, December 13, 2015
The Roman Calendar in Rabbinic Sources
LECTURE: ‘A Matter of Time: The Roman Calendar in Rabbinic Sources’ at YINR (ELLIN HEILMAN, The Jewish Link).
Sarit Kattan Gribetz, assistant professor of historical theology at Fordham University, will be speaking on “A Matter of Time: The Roman Calendar in Rabbinic Sources.” This lecture, part of the continuing series presented by WIJS (Women’s Initiative for Jewish Studies) will be presented on Tuesday evening, January 12, 7:45 p.m. at the Young Israel of New Rochelle (1149 North Avenue, New Rochelle, N.Y.).
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Review of Quack and Luft (eds.), Erscheinungsformen und Handhabungen Heiliger Schriften
BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW:
Peter Head has noted the review over at ETC: The physical appearance and handling of sacred texts in terms of material text culture.
Joachim Friedrich Quack, Daniela Luft (ed.), Erscheinungsformen und Handhabungen Heiliger Schriften. Materiale Textkulturen, Bd 5. Berlin; München; Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. Pp. vii, 349. ISBN 9783110371246. €89.95.Jewish and Christian texts receive attention as well.
Reviewed by Geert Lernout, University of Antwerp (geert.lernout@uantwerpen.be)
Preview
This collection of studies is the fifth volume in De Gruyter’s series on “material text cultures” and is based on papers given at a conference in Heidelberg in 2011. Most of the material texts dealt with in the volume are “sacred texts”; an introductory chapter by the second editor attempts to define this term, which is not easy given the wide diversity of cultures involved—from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia to China and contemporary Bali.
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Peter Head has noted the review over at ETC: The physical appearance and handling of sacred texts in terms of material text culture.
Resources on the Cultural Crisis in the Near East
ASOR BLOG: Resources on the Cultural Crisis in the Near East.
Related PaleoJudaica posts are here and here and many links.
The scale of the human crisis in Syria has expanded and now involves Europe. Damage to archaeological and heritage sites also continues at an alarming rate. We present here a series of new and important links discussing the ongoing cultural disaster.Grim but important reading.
Related PaleoJudaica posts are here and here and many links.
Nordic excursion to Ethiopia
LIV INGEBORG LIED: NNJCI excursion/seminar to Ethiopia.
The Nordic Network for the Study of Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the First Millennium (NNJCI) is proud to present its new seminar on Ethiopian Christianity and its contacts with Jewish and Islamic traditions. This is a unique opportunity to visit Ethiopia, its several awe-inspiring places (such as the stone hewn churches in Lalibela, the ancient Aksum and several monasteries) in the guidance of both local and Nordic experts.Follow the link for further particulars.
The duration of the seminar is two weeks (October 23 to November 6, 2016). It will include preparatory readings and short presentations of each participants which equals 5 ECTS. The seminar is primarily intended for PhD-students, but it will also be open for advanced master’s students and postdoctoral researchers.
Coptic database
AWOL: Banque de données des textes coptes documentaires - Brussels Coptic Database.
Welcome to the site of the database of the Coptic documentary texts of the "Centre de Papyrologie et d'Épigraphie Grecque" of the Université Libre de Bruxelles.Another Coptic database is always a good thing.
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