CUA receives Ethiopic manuscript collection

ETHIOPIC WATCH: Catholic University Receives Donation of Ethiopian Manuscripts Valued at More Than $1 Million.

The Catholic University of America is now home to one of North America's most important collections of Ethiopian religious manuscripts, thanks to a generous donation from Chicago collectors Gerald and Barbara Weiner. The handmade manuscripts, which originate from Ethiopia and which date back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, include more than 125 Christian manuscripts, 215 Islamic manuscripts, and 350 "magic" scrolls.

With this donation, which is valued at over $1 million, Catholic University is now the holder of the fifth largest collection of Ethiopian Christian manuscripts in the United States and the largest collection of Ethiopian Islamic manuscripts outside of Ethiopia.

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Good!

Elliott, "Beyond the Bible"

CHRISTIAN APOCRYPHA WATCH: NASSCAL Member Publication: J. K. Elliott Goes “Beyond the Bible” in TLS.

Review of Feeney, Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW:

Denis Feeney, Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2016. Pp. xii, 377. ISBN 9780674055230. $35.00.

Reviewed by Jackie Elliott, University of Colorado Boulder (Jackie.Elliott@colorado.edu)

Preview

This characteristically elegant and learned book essentially takes what we know about the origins of Roman literature and re-frames it in a larger, comparative context. That larger context illuminates not only how peculiar it is for a literature to have developed at all in the ancient world (either in Greece or at Rome) but especially how peculiar it is that Roman literature, from its origins and successively, presents itself as a continuation and development of Greek literature. (Ovid, Am. 15 and Accius’ Didascalica are Feeney’s opening examples of that representation.) Feeney’s object is “to de-familiarize the terms of comparison and of reference we use in describing the Roman experiment so as to bring the strange developments of the period into perspective” (p. 8). His engaging comparative data and the work he does to breathe life into facts and ideas we have long lived with (e.g. the First Punic War becomes the “Great War” on analogy with the war of 1914-18, explained in n. 2 on pp. 279-80) readily assist him in that aim.

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The subject is not of direct interest to PaleoJudaica, but the book does touch on some matters of interest, such as Manetho, Berossus, Carthage, "the Hebrew texts," and Ancient Near Eastern literature. There appears not to be much, if anything, on translations of the Bible into Latin.

SBL 2016 video: Williams on the so-called "Septuagint"

WILLIAM ROSS: PETER WILLIAMS ON THE SO-CALLED “SEPTUAGINT.”

Related post here.

Reconstructing a Cairo Geniza manuscript

GENIZA FRAGMENT OF THE MONTH (DECEMBER 2016): The Long Art: T-S AS 144.331 (Katelyn Mesler).

“Life is short, the art is long.” So begins one of the foundational texts of Greek medicine, the Aphorisms of Hippocrates. The ‘art’ of which Hippocrates wrote was the knowledge and skill to be acquired by physicians, but the sentiment has been expressed in other contexts, not least of which is R. Tarfon’s saying, “The day is short, the work is great” (mAvot 2:15). Faced with hundreds of thousands of textual fragments, far too many still unidentified, researchers of the Cairo Genizah might sometimes feel the same. But the increasing number of catalogs, digitization of fragments, and other electronic sources are helping make the research more productive than ever, even for a newcomer to the field such as myself. And so, I’d like to share with you a story about T-S AS 144.331.

The shelfmark in question is actually a collection of 82 small fragments from numerous different sources, some in Hebrew, some in Arabic, and some with little or no legible text.

[...]

This commentary by Maimonides on a Hebrew translation of Hippocrates is not of direct interest to PaleoJudaica (although I do touch on Maimonides from time to time). But the process of the reconstruction of the manuscript from tiny fragments using new technologies is of much wider potential application and interest. It may, for example, prove useful for the Dead Sea Scrolls, of which many thousands of tiny fragments still remain unidentified. Cross-file under Technology Watch.

Past posts noting Cairo Geniza Fragments of the Month in the Cambridge University Library's Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit are here and links.

Biggest 2016 archaeological discoveries

PHOTO ESSAY: The 9 Biggest Archaeology Findings of 2016 (Owen Jarus, Live Science).

PaleoJudaica has noted some of these stories as well. For the Noah's Ark mosaic at the Huqoq Synagogue excavation, see here. For the charred Ein Gedi Leviticus scroll, see here and links. For the excavation of the tomb (of Jesus?) in the Holy Sepulcher (Holy Sepulchre), see here and here and links. For the recently published Dead Sea Scrolls (some of which seem likely to be forgeries), see here (cf. here) and links. For the Jerusalem papyrus (whose genuineness is also in debate), see here and here and links. And note also the very recently announced discovery of inscribed, but as yet unreadable, scroll fragments from the Cave of the Skulls.

Jewish Studies postdoc at Washington University

H-JUDAIC: JOB: Washington University in St. Louis, Jewish, Islamic, and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures: Friedman Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Jewish Studies. Open to any field within Jewish Studies. "Applications will be reviewed beginning February 8, 2017."

deSilva, From Herod to Hadrian

VIDEO: FROM HEROD TO HADRIAN, PARTS 1 AND 2 (David deSilva).


"History of Herod the Great and his kingdom, to 4 BC."


From the division of Herod's kingdom to the Second Jewish Revolt.

HT James McGrath.

Wisdom and Jesus at Christmas

OLD TESTAMENT APOCRYPHA WATCH: Christmas lightning (Brad Roth, The Doxology Project Blog).

The Wisdom of Solomon, an ancient scripture now found in the Protestant Apocrypha, is sometimes read on Christmas Eve. It goes like this:

For while gentle silence enveloped all things, and night in its swift course was now half gone, your all-powerful word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne, into the midst of the land that was doomed, a stern warrior (Wisdom 18:14)

The passage was originally intended as a poetic description of the coming of the angel of death to take the Egyptian firstborn, but it gets retrofitted in Christian tradition to describe the coming of Christ on Christmas. Talk about reinterpretation. I love the action and intensity of the text. The night’s “swift course was now half gone.” The word “leaped from heaven.” The word landed in a doomed land as “a stern warrior.” It gives Christmas Eve a bit of an edge.

I didn't know that, although now that I look at the passage I suppose that it hardly could have been otherwise. By the way, the full references is Wisdom 18:14-15.

Reviving frankincense and myrrh

"A GRASS-ROOTS PROJECT": Revival of Biblical plants. Israeli farmer growing ancient flora like myrrh (RUTH EGLASH). This article was originally published in the Washington Post, but I seem to have missed it. This is a reprint in the Journal Gazette.

KIBBUTZ ALMOG, West Bank – Guy Erlich is a pioneering Israeli farmer, but not in the way you might imagine.

Instead of developing new crops or innovative biotechnology, Erlich is engaged in a grass-roots project: Reviving ancient plants mentioned in the Bible.

Think frankincense and myrrh, plus a few others.

At his farm on Kibbutz Almog, a West Bank settlement a stone’s throw from the Palestinian city of Jericho and a few miles from the Dead Sea, Erlich is growing ancient plants once used to make holy balms, perfumes and natural medicines.

Frankincense and myrrh, along with gold, are forever intertwined with the Christmas story as the gifts the wise men took to the baby Jesus in the city of Bethlehem, just 20 miles from here.

[...]

I noted another project to revive frankincense and myrrh here several years ago.

Languages and scripts of the DSS

THE LEON LEVY DEAD SEA SCROLLS DIGITAL LIBRARY: Languages and Scripts.

While the majority of Dead Sea Scrolls were written in Hebrew, the collection also includes many Aramaic and Greek texts, as well as some Arabic texts and a small number of Latin fragments.

[...]

A good brief overview. A lot of people don't realize how many Latin and Arabic manuscripts have been discovered in the Judean Desert.

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Kaiser, Studien zu Philo von Alexandrien

NEW BOOK FROM DE GRUYTER:

Kaiser, Otto

Studien zu Philo von Alexandrien
[Studies on Philo of Alexandria]

Ed. by Witte, Markus
In coop. with Hofmann, Sina
Series: Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 501

99,95 € / $140.00 / £74.99*
eBook (PDF)Publication Date: November 2016ISBN 978-3-11-049265-1

Aims and Scope
The volume presents studies by the Marburg Old Testament scholar Otto Kaiser on the works of the Jewish religious philosopher Philo of Alexandria in the context of intellectual and cultural history. They examine issues of Jewish Biblical exegesis along with Philo’s anthropology and cosmology, his understanding of ritual and prayer, and his ideas about living a virtuous life and overcoming death.

HT Torrey Seland.

Stone, Armenian Apocrypha Relating to Angels and Biblical Heroes

NEW BOOK FROM SBL PRESS:

Armenian Apocrypha Relating to Angels and Biblical Heroes
Michael E. Stone

ISBN 9781628371543
Status Available
Price: $55.95
Binding Paperback
Publication Date October 2016
Pages 322

Explore how the vivid and creative Armenian spiritual tradition shaped biblical stories to serve new needs

Michael E. Stone’s latest book includes texts from Armenian manuscripts that are relevant to the development and growth of biblical themes and subjects. Most of these texts have not been published previously. Stone has collected a fascinating corpus of texts about biblical heroes, such as Joseph and Jonah, Nathan the Prophet, and Asaph the Psalmist. In addition, he has included documents illustrating particular points of the biblical story. This work reflects not just on how the Bible was interpreted in medieval times, but also how its stories and details were shaped by and served the needs of the vivid and creative Armenian spiritual tradition.

Features:

• Expanded stories from Exodus
• Introductions,translations, and notes
• Insights into the Armenian "Embroidered Bible," through which many biblical incidents were known to Armenian literature, art, and thought

Follow the link for ordering information, etc.

Otero and Morales, The Text of the Hebrew Bible and Its Editions

NEW BOOK FROM BRILL:

The Text of the Hebrew Bible and Its Editions
Studies in Celebration of the Fifth Centennial of the Complutensian Polyglot

Andrés Piquer Otero and Pablo Torijano Morales, Universidad Complutense de Madrid

In The Text of the Hebrew Bible and its Editions some of the top world scholars and editors of the Hebrew Bible and its versions present essays on the aims, method, and problems of editing the biblical text(s), taking as a reference the Complutensian Polyglot, first modern edition of the Hebrew text and its versions and whose Fifth Centennial was celebrated in 2014. The main parts of the volume discuss models of editions from the Renaissance and its forerunners to the Digital Age, the challenges offered by the different textual traditions, particular editorial problems of the individual books of the Bible, and the role played by quotations. It thus sets a landmark in the future of biblical editions.

The Coptic Acts of Pilate

ALIN SUCIU: Guest Post: Anthony Alcock – The Sahidic Version of the Acts of Pilate.

Anthony Alcock has prepared an English translation of the Sahidic version of the Acts of Pilate. This text constitutes the source of many apocryphal Passion narratives composed in Coptic. ...

Follow the link for a link to a pdf file of the translation. Cross-file under Coptic Watch and New Testament Apocrypha Watch.

Schiffman on Jerusalem after the Maccabean Revolt

PROFESSOR LAWRENCE H. SCHIFFMAN: JERUSALEM AFTER THE MACCABEAN REVOLT. Professor Schiffman has posted another recent article in Ami Magazine.

Why are Hanukkah and Christmas out of sync?

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Hanukkah overlaps with Christmas this year. But why all the moving around? (Josh Hafner , USA TODAY).

Christmas (as celebrated in the Western Church) is timed according to the Gregorian calendar, which is a solar calendar. But Hanukkah is timed according to the Jewish religious calendar, which is technically a luni-solar calendar (not a lunar calendar, as the article says - although it does describe the details correctly). This Jewish calendar is based on the lunar cycle, but is periodically corrected with a leap month so that it stays in reasonably close alignment with the solar year. So the two holiday can be quite out of sync in their timing, but they do line up sometimes.

The reason many Orthodox Christian traditions celebrate Christmas on 7 January is that they are still marking it according to the old Julian calendar.

In antiquity the Enochic and Qumran Jews used a purely solar calendar that was rounded off to a 364 day year, which conveniently meant that each religious festival was on the same day of the week each year. But it also meant that their calendar moved out of alignment with the actual solar year by a day and a half each year. Whether and how this was corrected is not perfectly clear.

Past posts on Jewish calendars are here and here and links. Cross-file under 'Tis the Season and ditto (Hanukkah Edition).

Davies on DSS and ancient Judaism

BIBLE ODYSSEY: Dead Sea Scrolls and Early Judaism (Philip R. Davies).

Transcript
The significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls is to… early Judaism is huge. It’s on two levels. ...

HT AJR.

Joseph Fitzmyer, S.J., 1920-2016

SAD NEWS: Remembering Joseph Fitzmyer, S.J. (America Magazine).

Father Joseph Fitzmyer, S.J., died peacefully this morning at Manresa Hall, Merion Station, Pa. He was 96. Father Fitzmyer was a leading Catholic biblical scholar, and we asked several scholars influenced by his life and work to offer their remembrances.

[...]

Father Fitzmyer's biblical scholarship was wide-ranging. I am most familiar with his foundational work on the languages of ancient Palestine and the Semitic background of the New Testament. At the Agade list, Jack Sasson also points to his Wikipedia entry, which gives some details on his career and his publications.

Requiescat in Pace.

Christmas 2016

MERRY CHRISTMAS to all those celebrating!

Posts of Christmas past are collected in my 2015 Christmas post and links. Posts relating (sometimes loosely) to Christmas in the last year are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.