Ada Yardeni - 1937-2018

SAD NEWS: The news has come in from the Agade List and Facebook sources that Dr. Ada Yardeni has passed away. She was one of the premier Hebrew paleographers in the world. Her website is here.

May her memory be for a blessing.

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Gemeinhardt and Tanaseanu-Döbler (eds.), Das Paradies ist ein Hörsaal für die Seelen

NEW BOOK FROM MOHR SIEBECK: »Das Paradies ist ein Hörsaal für die Seelen«.
Institutionen religiöser Bildung in historischer Perspektive. Hrsg. v. Peter Gemeinhardt u. Ilinca Tanaseanu-Döbler. [»Paradise is a Lecture Room for the Souls«. Institutions of Religious Education in Historical Perspective.] 2018. XIII, 332 pages. Studies in Education and Religion in Ancient and Pre-Modern History in the Mediterranean and Its Environs 1. 49,00 € hardcover ISBN 978-3-16-155856-6..

Published in German.
Religious cultures were involved in education in highly different ways in classical antiquity. What were the aims and processes of transmitting education for religious purposes, which parts and methods were considered desirable (or dangerous), and who were the agents in this field? These and related questions are tackled in this interdisciplinary volume focusing on the institutionalization of education and featuring case studies on constellations of education and religion in ancient Greece, late antique Judaism, Christianity, the Latin Middle Ages and classical Islam.

The topics of the essays range widely, but include the Dead Sea Scrolls, early rabbinic Judaism, and late-antique Judaism.

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Finkel, Smith, and the Babylonian Ark Tablet

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: The Animals Went in Two by Two, According to Babylonian Ark Tablet. Old Babylonian flood tablet describes how to build a circular ark (Noah Wiener). I covered some of the same ground, based on the same 2014 Telegraph article on the work of Irving Finkel, here. But I missed this BHD piece when it came out around the same time. It's just been reprinted, so here it is.

It also has a section on George Adam Smith, the discoverer of the Babylonian Flood story in the nineteenth century. You can read more about him in the link in my post above and also here.

Also, I have a more recent post on the work of Dr. Finkel here.

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YHWH inscription from Gerezim

THE HOLY LAND PHOTOS' BLOG: The Divine Name — YHWH — at Mt. Gerizim (Carl Rasmussen). Plus links to other photos of the site.

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The Biblioblog Top 50

IT'S BACK: The Biblioblog Top 50.

The Biblioblog Top 50 is the official ranking of biblical studies blogging. Although posting somewhat less regularly in recent years, the Biblioblog Top 50 is pleased to celebrate its tenth anniversary this year. Yet those whom we really want to celebrate are the many bibliobloggers who continue to inform and entertain us – with their views and opinions at the cutting edge of biblical studies.

PaleoJudaica is #6 this month.

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The Mesha Stele and Numbers 21

EPIGRAPHY, THE BIBLE, AND HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY: North Israelite Memories of the Transjordan and the Mesha Inscription (Prof. Israel Finkelstein and Prof. Thomas Römer, TheTorah.com).

The Mesha Inscription describes Omri’s conquest of the mishor in the Transjordan, and Moab’s subsequent (re)taking of it, in the 9th century B.C.E. Reading Numbers 21 in conversation with archaeological findings confirms much of this and offers us a glimpse at the history of this region before the Omride conquest.

Past PaleoJudaica posts on the Mesha Inscription (Mesha Stele, Moabite Stone) are here and links. For more on the lost books quoted in Numbers 21, see here.

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The Prayer of Joseph

READING ACTS: The Prayer of Joseph. Another installment in Phil Long's current summer series on the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. Past posts in the series have been noted here and links.

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Larry Hurtado

LARRY HURTADO: Going Offline . . . for a While. Professor Hurtado reports that he is unwell and is receiving treatment. I am very sorry to hear of his illness.

All best wishes to Larry from me and on behalf of PaleoJudaica's readers.

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Stellenbosch Septuagint Symposisum

WILLIAM ROSS: STELLENBOSCH SYMPOSIUM ON THE THEOLOGY OF THE SEPTUAGINT. The Symposium takes place on 17-19 August 2018. Follow the link for details. They are no longer accepting paper proposals, but it's not too late to register.

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Jupiter's hand - and Rome in Scotland and in Judea

ARCHAEOLOGY: Ancient Roman ‘hand of god’ discovered near Hadrian’s Wall sheds light on biggest combat operation ever in UK. Exclusive: Made of 2.3 kilos of solid bronze, sculpture going on permanent display at Vindolanda Museum (David Keys, The Independent).

Archaeologists have discovered an ancient Roman “hand of god” – but the story it tells is tragically anything but heavenly.

The hand – unearthed near Hadrian’s Wall and made of 2.3 kilos of solid bronze – was almost certainly a gift to a military deity for giving the Romans victory in the largest military combat operation ever carried out in Britain, before or since.

The operation – a relatively little-known Roman invasion of Scotland in 209-210 AD – was also probably one of the bloodiest events in British history.

[...]

It is quite a remarkable artifact in itself, but it also has resonances for PaleoJudaica. I have posted before on the second-century C.E. epigraphic discoveries at Vindolanda. As I mentioned at the link, I'm going back there next month. More on that later.

Most readers are probably also aware that I live in Scotland. And the ancient Roman campaigns in Scotland also have a connection with the Bar Kokhba Revolt. The earlier Roman invasion around 140 was headed by Quintus Lollius Urbicus, the commander who also led the defeat of the the Bar Kokhba rebels in 135. More on that Scottish campaign is here and here.

I'm looking forward to seeing the bronze "hand of Jupiter" in Vindolanda soon.

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Graduation 2018

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE CLASS OF 2018!

It is Graduation Week at the University of St. Andrews. Many students in the School of Divinity, from undergraduates to Doctors of Philosophy, are graduating. Well done, all!

This is a photo taken at the Divinity Garden Party earlier this week.



On my right is Bouddicca, who studied Hebrew, Old Testament, and Ancient Jewish Literature with me. On my left is Abigail, who took Hebrew and Old Testament with me. Congratulations to both, and to all this year's graduates.

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Free online books from Orbis

THE AWOL BLOG: Newly added to Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis Online, June 5/6, 2018. That's nearly 250 volumes available online for free. For you, special deal!

UPDATE: I just noticed this, which brings the total over 250.

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The Prayer of Manasseh

READING ACTS: The Prayer of Manasseh. Another installment in Phil Long's current summer series on the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. Past posts in the series have been noted here and links.

Two comments about the Prayer of Manasseh. First, a Hebrew version of it does survive. It was recovered from the Cairo Geniza. But it is clearly a translation into Hebrew from the (original?) Greek version (and perhaps the Syriac), so Phil's point remains sound.

Second, I have argued the possibility that the Prayer of Manasseh is a Christian rather than Jewish composition. I mentioned that article here.

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A breakthrough on the Herculaneum scrolls?

TECHNOLOGY WATCH: Buried by the Ash of Vesuvius, These Scrolls Are Being Read for the First Time in Millennia. A revolutionary American scientist is using subatomic physics to decipher 2,000-year-old texts from the early days of Western civilization (Jo Marchant, The Smithsonian).

The scrolls represent the only intact library known from the classical world, an unprecedented cache of ancient knowledge. Most classical texts we know today were copied, and were therefore filtered and distorted, by scribes over centuries, but these works came straight from the hands of the Greek and Roman scholars themselves. Yet the tremendous volcanic heat and gases spewed by Vesuvius carbonized the scrolls, turning them black and hard like lumps of coal. Over the years, various attempts to open some of them created a mess of fragile flakes that yielded only brief snippets of text. Hundreds of the papyri were therefore left unopened, with no realistic prospect that their contents would ever be revealed. And it probably would have remained that way except for an American computer scientist named Brent Seales, director of the Center for Visualization & Virtual Environments at the University of Kentucky.

PaleoJudaica has been following the work of Dr. Seales on the Herculaneum papyri and other ancient manuscripts for years. For past posts, start here and just follow those links.

This article is the most comprehensive one I can remember on the topic. And ... there's progress.

He’d brought a speck of charred papyrus from one of the Herculaneum scrolls he studied a decade earlier. The ink on it, he had found, contained a trace of lead. In Grenoble, direct X-ray imaging of the scrolls had not been enough to detect the ink. But when you fire hugely powerful X-rays through lead, the metal emits electromagnetic radiation, or “fluoresces,” at a characteristic frequency. Seales hoped to pick up that signal with a detector placed beside the fragment, which was specially calibrated to capture photons at lead’s characteristic frequency.

It was a long shot. The minuscule fluorescence of the letter would be swamped by radiation from the protective lead lining the room—like looking for a flickering candle from miles away on a rainy night, Seales said, as we stood in the crowded hutch. But after several days of intense work—optimizing the angle of the detector, shielding the main X-ray beam with tungsten “flight tubes”—the team finally got what it was looking for: a grainy, but clearly recognizable, “c.”

“We’ve proven it,” Seales said in triumph as he displayed the legible image to the Oxford audience in March. It is, Seales hopes, the last piece of the puzzle he needs to read the ink inside a Herculaneum scroll.

The results have scholars excitedly re-evaluating what they might now be able to achieve. “I think it’s actually very close to being cracked,” says [Dirk] Obbink, the Oxford papyrologist. He estimates that at least 500 Herculaneum scrolls haven’t been opened. Moreover, excavations at Herculaneum in the 1990s revealed two unexplored layers of the villa, which some scholars believe may contain hundreds or even thousands more scrolls.

Many scholars are convinced that Piso’s great library must have contained a range of literature far wider than what has been documented so far. Obbink says he wouldn’t be surprised to find more Latin literature, or a once-unimaginable treasure of lost poems by Sappho, the revered seventh-century B.C. poet known today only through the briefest of fragments.

The recovery of that one letter has the prospect of opening the floodgates for the decipherment of the Herculaneum scrolls, and of any number of other ancient manuscripts.

That's enough excerpting. The article is long. You should read it all.

Bit by bit, a letter at a time, whatever it takes. Until we're done.

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Lawrence of Arabia - archaeologist

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Lawrence of Arabia as Archaeologist. Read Stephen E. Tabachnick's full article on the archaeological life of T.E. Lawrence as it was published in Biblical Archaeology Review.

Much of Lawrence’s story is fairly well known, thanks not only to the Lean film but to the publicity work of the American journalist Lowell Thomas, who as early as 1919 began telling Lawrence’s story—albeit not always accurately—in slide shows that he presented to millions of people in New York and London. Since Lowell Thomas’s biography, With Lawrence in Arabia (1924), approximately 50 biographers have kept the story current.

But despite all this publicity, it is sometimes forgotten that Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888–1935) was a very competent Middle Eastern archaeologist before the war and that his archaeological activities and Biblical interests helped shape him for the military and political role he later played. Although his pre-war work focused on the Crusaders and on the Hittites, he contributed to the resolution of at least one important issue in Biblical archaeology and touched on several others.

He also did archaeological work on the Nabateans (Nabataeans).

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Still more Psalms of David

READING ACTS: More Psalms of David. Another installment in Phil Long's current summer series on the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. This post focuses on Psalms 151-155 in the Charlesworth collection. Past posts in the series have been noted here and links.

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An interfaith DSS event in Colorado

TO GO WITH THE DENVER EXHIBITION: Scholars discuss significance of Dead Sea Scrolls at Boulder interfaith gathering (Carina Julig, Daily Camera).

Religious groups from around Boulder gathered Sunday night at the Islamic Center of Boulder to learn about the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the shared significance to their faiths.

"The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Ancient Community Who Used Them," an interfaith event organized by the Boulder Stake of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and hosted by the Islamic Center of Boulder, was designed to complement the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit on view at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. It featured three scholars who discussed the religious and historical significance of the scrolls from their respective academic backgrounds.

Every seat in the Islamic Center's main room was taken, with over 350 people in the audience from a number of religious organizations across Boulder. Atonment Lutheran Church hosted an interfaith dinner before the talk, which a number of Boulder County Christian, Muslim and Jewish religious leaders attended.

[...]

Background on the Denver Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition is here and links.

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The Talmud on bird sacrifices

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: Bird Sacrifice. In this week’s ‘Daf Yomi,’ Talmudic rabbis try to establish the rules governing ritual slaughter of feathered offerings.

The sacrifices discussed in the first chapters of Tractate Zevachim involved the slaughter of large animals such as bulls and sheep. With Chapter Seven, the focus moves to bird offerings—the doves and pigeons that are prescribed for sacrifice in the Torah. Bird offerings, too, come in two varieties: sin offerings, whose meat is set aside for consumption by the priests, and burnt offerings, which are burned whole on the altar. Much of the Talmudic discussion revolves around problems that arise when one type of sacrifice is accidentally performed as the other type: Are the offerings still valid, and can they be eaten without communicating impurity?

[...]

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

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Davies on "A New ‘Biblical Archaeology’"

THE BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION:

A New ‘Biblical Archaeology’

If the biblical texts are not purely literary artefacts but also historical ones, they are in principle, or in theory, capable of being integrated with material artefacts. Given the dangers of biblical fundamentalism and its corresponding archaeological activities and the emerging danger of archaeological fundamentalism that believes only archaeology delivers history and only archaeologists can write a competent history, it is important to focus on the means by which textual and material data should be analysed in such a way that a history can be written that makes sense equally of both.

Chapter from: Biblical Interpretation Beyond Historicity: Changing Perspectives 7 (Routledge, 2016).

By Philip R Davies (1945-2018)
Palestine Exploration Fund
Emeritus, University of Sheffield
June 2018

More on the late Philip R. Davies here and links.

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More Songs of David

READING ACTS: More Noncanonical Songs of David. For the first time, Phil Long takes up a text from MOTP1 in his series of posts on the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. Past posts in the series have been noted here and links.

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