On the transmission of Jewish magic books

MAGIC AND MYSTICISM: ‘TOO HOLY TO PRINT’: THE FORBIDDEN BOOKS OF JEWISH MAGIC. Books fraught with danger—curses, secrets, marvelous cures, diviners, demons—caused political intrigue and censorship (J.H. Chajes, Tablet Magazine). This is a really interesting article on the transmission of Jewish magical works and practical Kabbalah from the Middle Ages to the present. It also touches on the hekhalot literate and the pulsa de-nura cursing rite. Although the material covered is medieval and later, some of it has older roots. For example a good part of the medieval magical work Sefer Raziel is based on the Talmudic-era magical tractate Sefer HaRazim. Regular readers will recall that I am currently finishing up a new English translation of the latter work.

The dateline of this article is February 2014. Apparently I didn't see it then. I did note a lecture series by the author a couple of years ago.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

The Talmud on inferential exegesis

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: Myth and Meaning. In this week’s ‘Daf Yomi’ Talmud study, the ancient rabbis take personal ownership of their Torah interpretations, as they map the spaces that separate the holy from the mundane.

In this week’s Daf Yomi reading, in Zevachim 48a, the Gemara introduced a concept that helps to illuminate the worldview of the rabbis. A certain teaching, we read, “is dear to the tanna”: he has a special attachment to a particular point of law. And the reason is that this point is “derived through interpretation”: that is, it is not stated explicitly in the Torah, but has to be worked out by the rabbis themselves. Evidently, the rabbis had a particular fondness for laws that they had to figure out on their own, and liked to teach such laws first, because they were “dear.” I found this a moving idea, since it shows how the rabbis invested their feelings (and their egos) in what might seem like an abstract or technical process of legal reasoning. A tanna who solved a problem must have felt a certain pride of ownership in it, the way a mathematician might feel about an especially difficult proof.

[...]

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Is C-14 dating miscalibrated for the southern Levant?

TECHNOLOGY WATCH: New radiocarbon cycle research may alter history (Daniel Aloi, Cornell Chronicle).

Archaeologist Sturt Manning and colleagues have revealed variations in the radiocarbon cycle at certain periods of time, affecting frequently cited standards used in archaeological and historical research relevant to the southern Levant region (Israel, southern Jordan and Egypt). These variations, or offsets, of up to 20 years in the calibration of precise radiocarbon dating could be related to climatic conditions.

For ancient Israel and Second Temple Judaism, twenty years one way or another usually won't make a significant difference for historical purposes. But sometimes it might. And for ancient Egypt, whose chronology is known more precisely, it could make a difference more often.

Another recent story dealing with a different effort to recalibrate radiocarbon dating was noted here. [UPDATE: bad link now corrected. Sorry about that!]

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Maggen on the conservation of the DSS etc.

LECTURE: Dead Sea Scrolls’ Conservation To Be Discussed in Santa Fe (Tom Trowbridge, KSFR FM).

As part of its year-long series, “Celebrating Israel at 70; A cultural perspective” Temple Beth Shalom in Santa Fe is offering a presentation titled, “Survival Against All Odds; The Conservation of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other Artifacts.” It takes place at eight-pm. The presenter is Michael Maggen, who is the head of the Paper and Parchment Conservation Laboratory at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

KSFR’s Tom Trowbridge spoke recently with Maggen.

If you missed the lecture, do listen to the audio interview. Maggen discussed the Dead Sea Scrolls and he gave a preview of the lecture, which involved the Genesis Apocryphon and the Aleppo Codex.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

The Baram Synagogue

ANCIENT ARCHITECTURE: Israeli attractions: Baram Synagogue. Close to the Lebanese border in the upper Galilee lies Baram National Park, home to the Baram synagogue, evidence of the continuous Jewish presence in Israel from ancient times to the present day (Ron Traub, Jewish News Syndicate). Nicely diagrammed.

Past PaleoJudaica posts on the Baram Synagogue are here and here.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

More on 3 Maccabees

PHIL LONG'S OLD TESTAMENT PSEUDEPIGRAPHA SERIES continues apace at his Reading Acts Blog. There are three new posts on 3 Maccabees. I believe these are all reposts from from 2017. Other posts in his current summer OTP series have been noted here and links.

Third Maccabees 2 – Have Mercy on the Downcast

Third Maccabees 3-6 – The Incident with the Elephants

Apostasy in Third Maccabees

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Biblical Studies Carnival 147

5 MINUTE BIBLE: May 2018: Biblical Studies Carnival 147 (Tim Bulkeley). With special attention this month to videos and podcasts.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

The pagan-themed synagogue mosaic at Hammat Tiberias

ATLAS OBSCURA: Zodiac Mosaic of Hammat Tiberias. The mosaic floor of a 4th-century synagogue features a pagan zodiac wheel alongside traditional images of a Torah ark and menorahs (Joel Cusumano).

What turns heads is the rest of the mosaic. In the center panel sits a magnificent zodiac wheel, featuring, among other pagan images, depictions of naked humans—including a conspicuously uncircumcised Libra. The wheel encircles a haloed Helios, the Greek sun god, mounted atop his chariot. Women representing each of the four seasons sit to the corners of the zodiac, with the accompanying Hebrew inscription of the names of the seasons.

A nice photo essay.

I have discussed the cultural background of this synagogue mosaic (and other similar ones) here. More recently, another zodiac mosaic featuring Helios in his chariot was found in the Huqoq Synagogue.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Paleo-Hebrew DSS

THE AWOL BLOG: Paleo-Hebrew Dead Sea Scrolls. This website looks like a really useful resource for the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls written in the Paleo-Hebrew script.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

On Kuntillet ‘Ajrud and YHWH's Asherah

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Puzzling Finds from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud. A drawing of God labeled “Yahweh and his Asherah” or the Egyptian god Bes? Regular readers will be well familiar with the remarkable finds from this site, but this brief essay gives a convenient summary and it has links to other essays that fill that out.

The final report mentioned in the essay was published in 2012:

Meshel, Ze'ev, Kuntillet Ajrud (Horvat Teman): An Iron Age II Religious Site on the Judah-Sinai Border, ed. Liora Freud (Jerusalem, Israel Exploration Society, 2012).

Past PaleoJudaica posts on Kuntillet ‘Ajrud (Kuntillet Ajrud) and its finds are collected here.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

York NT Apocrypha course

NEW TESTAMENT APOCRYPHA WATCH: Over at his Apocryphicity Blog, Dr. Tony Burke has been posting updates on his 2018 course on the New Testament Apocrypha at York University. The ten weeks of the course are now completed. Due to circumstances he explains there, much of it was taught by video. You can watch the videos if you want to. You can also read the summary posts on each week's lecture. This is the course description from the syllabus:

The New Testament Apocrypha—or better: non-canonical early Christian literature—has had a great impact on western culture despite attempts by mainstream Christianity to suppress it. Stories and ideas from these texts appear in literature, art, church doctrine, and even modern fiction such as Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code. This course is designed to introduce students to a wide range of non-canonical Christian texts—from gospels, to acts of individual apostles, letters, and apocalypses. The goals will be to understand each text’s place in the development of Christian thought and to observe their use in modern scholarship. Particular emphasis will be placed on the work of the so-called “new school” in New Testament Studies that claims some of these texts may predate, and therefore may have influenced, the canonical gospels.

Good stuff.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Philip R. Davies 1945-2018

SAD NEWS: I have received a number of reports that Professor Emeritus Philip R. Davies passed away last Thursday 31 May. He was Professor of Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield until his retirement some years ago. He kept active in the field after retirement and kept up an internet presence too. His Wikipedia page is here. His Sheffield University page is here. And his Academia.edu page is here.

Philip was well known for his out-of-the-box thinking and I learned a lot from him, especially on how to think about the Dead Sea Scrolls. His doctoral dissertation on the War Scroll influenced how I looked at that work, and you can see some of how I used it in my teaching in this online lecture on the War Scroll for my Dead Sea Scrolls class. I also drew on his ideas about the Pesharim and on utopianism and Qumran sectarianism.

I knew Philip for many years and we kept in touch off and on. Our last e-mail exchange was last summer, when we talked about the lead codices and the merits of Islay whiskies. He also appeared from time to time in PaleoJudaica posts. I see that a few years ago I commented, "Davies is usually controversial and always interesting." I think that is a fitting epitaph.

Requiescat in pace.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

More on the Abba tomb skeleton (crucifixion)

OSTEOLOGIST JOE ZIAS e-mails the following:

Professor Pat Smith is correct, along with others, that there is no evidence for crucifixion in the Abba tomb, moreover we asked experts totally unaware of the controversy as to the sex of the skeleton with signs of trauma, all concurred that we are talking about an elderly female.

Following Dr. Haas tragic accident, the material in question was transferred to my lab in the Israel Antiquities Authority and I can state with a high level of confidence that no evidence whatsoever for crucifixion was present.

This in reference to my recent post on the new (apparently) crucified skeleton from Rome. I mentioned the Abba tomb skeleton as another one, possibly of Mattathiah son of Judah, which had been argued to have been crucified. I discussed that in more detail here. But from what Dr. Zias says above, the expert consensus is otherwise.

That leaves us with Yohanan's certainly crucified skeleton and the new one from Rome, which may also have been crucified.

I am grateful to Joe Lauer for putting out a call for clarification and to Joe Zias for contacting us with the updated information.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

On the Mishnah

MY JEWISH LEARNING: Why The Mishnah Is the Best Jewish Book You’ve Never Read. This almost 2,000-year-old text flies under the radar -- but it's immensely important to Jewish life (LEX ROFES AND MJL ADMIN). This is a good introduction to the Mishnah, aimed at the complete novice. It also has some links at the end for further study.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Hydrogel

TECHNOLOGY WATCH: Tape Is Ruining Priceless Art. This New Gel Can Fix It. The common trick to fix a tear has plagued art conservators, but chemists are developing newer and safer methods to restore old art (Sarah Gibbens, National Geographic).

Unwitting conservators of the past used standard sticky tape to try and hold together famous but fragile treasures, such as the Dead Sea scrolls and drawings by filmmaker Federico Fellini. The trouble is that, in addition to ruining the aesthetic integrity of a piece of art, the adhesive on tape can cause discoloration over time. Certain types of tape can even bleed past where they were placed and alter the visual appearance of the work.

Modern art restorers have traditionally used solvents and intense humidity to loosen tape, methods that can damage the piece or present a toxic hazard for restorers. Now, a team of chemists from the University of Florence has developed a new treatment for the sticky affliction that's safe for humans and doesn't damage the art.

The method starts with hydrogel, a type of gel with high water content used in a variety of common objects, from plastics to pills. The hydrogel used by the Italian researchers was between 95 and 98 percent water. The other five to two percent is made of intersperced nano-sized droplets of organic solvents.

Good. In past posts I have flagged the longstanding problem of the use of scotch tape in the early, primitive efforts to conserve the Dead Sea Scrolls. See here, here, and here. I hope this new technology helps to solve the problem.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Machiela on charity in the Aramaic DSS

VIDEO LECTURE: Charity as a Theme in the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls, Dr. Daniel Machiela. I don't have time to watch this through right now, but the author and title are very promising, and AJR says it's "terrific." Enjoy!

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

A Judeo-Arabic translation of the Mishnah

GENIZA FRAGMENT OF THE MONTH (MAY 2018): Mishnah with Judeo-Arabic Translation: T-S E1.124 (David J. Wasserstein).

These are not the only fragments of Judeo-Arabic versions of Mishnaic tractates, but they all come from a single manuscript and for that reason may have much more to tell us than we might learn from isolated fragments of other manuscripts. On the basis of the pages we have, we can do much to re-construct the shape and appearance of the original manuscript. We can also compute that the entire Mishnah, with its translation, in this single manuscript must have filled nearly 6,000 pages, making for an enormous and, in view of the thickness of the paper, unwieldy, multi-volume copy of the text.

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

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

The serpent and the Goddess?

THE BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION:

Eden, the Tree of Life and the Wisdom of the Serpent

The essential plot can be understood, not as a struggle between God and the Devil, but as a conflict involving the dynamic, royal, masculine God of the heavens and the primordial Mother Goddess who for millennia had been worshipped as the Mistress of the earth. To be sure, the story is told from the point of view of the former. The serpent is reduced to being the subtlest of the creatures that the Lord God had made. The Goddess is not even mentioned by name, though she is there, as the tree of life, for that is how she was so often depicted among the ancient Canaanites. Indeed, because she was represented in tree form, it is not surprising that Yahweh declared that the tree and its fruit were taboo.

By Jay Williams
Professor Emeritus
Hamilton College
May 2018

Well, maybe. As I read this essay I was thinking about the author's comment early on:

The problem, however, is that the story has too many loose ends, too many confusing subtleties to be so easily unraveled and explained. If it is to be understood as an account of why humans are all sinful, why does the word “sin” never appear in the story?

I think the same objection applies to the author's thesis. If the Goddess is so important in this story, why is she never mentioned directly?

Be that as it may, it's an interesting reading. Toward the end, the essay seems to turn into a manifesto for the revival of Goddess worship. Perhaps that could work for some circles in the twenty-first century.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

On Petra and the Nabataeans

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Solving the Enigma of Petra and the Nabataeans. Who were the Nabataeans? (Glenn J. Corbett). This essay is a very good, brief but detailed, introduction to the subject. As usual, it includes links to relevant Biblical Archaeology Review articles that are behind the subscription wall.

Cross file under Nabatean Watch (Nabataean Watch).

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Another crucified skeleton?

OSTEOLOGY: How Jesus died: Extremely rare evidence of Roman crucifixion uncovered in Italy. Although attested to in scores of historical writings, this skeleton is only the second example providing tangible archaeological proof of the cruel method of capital punishment (Amanda Borschel-Dan, Times of Israel).

A lesion on the foot of a 2,000-year-old skeleton discovered in a Roman burial site in northern Italy appears to constitute rare tangible evidence of execution by crucifixion, according to an interdisciplinary team of Italian researchers.

Although broadly attested to in historical writings — including the New Testament — it is only the second known archaeological proof of the particularly cruel form of capital punishment practiced by the Romans against criminals, as well as revolutionaries such as Jesus.

[...]

The skeleton shows signs of violence that are consistent with crucifixion, but the evidence is apparently not conclusive. The other, certain, crucified skeleton mentioned in the headline above, is that of one Yehohanan ben Hagkol, on which more here and links.

Also, not mentioned in the article, it has been argued that another skeleton, apparently of one Mattathiah son of Judah, was also crucified. I noted that story several years ago here. I have heard nothing more about it since.

Other past posts on this horrific ancient method of execution are here and links and here.

Also worth mentioning is the recent discussion of the crucifixion gem, which gives one of the earliest artistic depictions of the crucifixion of Jesus.

UPDATE (2 June): It seems that third skeleton mentioned above was not crucified and is not of a man. Details here.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.