Pinchas is portrayed as a hero in the Torah and Second Temple sources for killing Zimri and his Midianite lover, Cozbi. Rabbinic sources struggle with the absence of any juridical process or deliberative body, which contravenes their own judicial norms, and therefore recast or minimize his act in subtle ways.And there's a similarly awkward story about Moses too.
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A portion of this collection consists of an 11thcentury private archive belonging to a Jewish family from the town of Bamiyan. These manuscripts, 29 of which were purchased by the National Library in 2013, and 250 more in 2016, were reported at the time as resembling the finds of the Cairo Genizah, and the light they shed on Jewish life during the first half of the 11thcentury in this once diverse and thriving region, and now we are beginning to know why.It's been close to a couple of years since we've had any news on these important manuscripts. They were found in a cave in Afghanistan. They first surfaced in the news at the end of 2011. This article gives a convenient summary of the latest work on them, notably the ambitious master's thesis of Ofir Haim at the Hebrew University.
The documents are written in six languages, Early Judaeo-Persian, Early New Persian, Judaeo-Arabic, Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic, and range in genre from Islamic legal instruments to personal correspondence, civil contracts to biblical commentary, debt lists to poetry. The most celebrated manuscript so far is a page of 10thcentury exegete Saadia Gaon’s commentary on Isaiah 34, otherwise absent from the rebbe’s corpus, and yet this is hardly the most revelatory document to emerge from the cave in Afghanistan.
Although it will take years, perhaps decades, before all the text is analyzed, important progress has already been made. ...
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Published in German.I missed the 2014 publication of this book, but here's the student-edition reprint.
This collection of Reinhard Feldmeier's essays is linked by a common theme: the question about God, posed repeatedly by Jews, Christians and Gentiles. The author shows how the biblical belief in God is discussed again and again in the context of ancient religiosity and philosophy in a perpetual process of assimilation and delimitation, rejection and appropriation, surpassing and transformation and in this way how the examination of the history of religion helps raise our awareness of the biblical discourse on God. In the first part, Feldmeier deals with the history of ancient religion in the Roman Empire and in the second part he traces how in this context Jews and Christians reflected on their belief in the God of Israel and the father of Jesus Christ and created a new awareness of this. In the third part he focuses on the connection between the belief in God and Christology.
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It is a single-quire papyrus codex containing the book of Proverbs in the Akhmimic dialect of Coptic. It’s generally assigned to the fourth century, although earlier and later dates have been proposed. It was purchased in Cairo by Bernhard Moritz with the help of the Coptologist Carl Schmidt in 1905, and it was in a remarkable state of preservation at that time.This story illustrates the importance of preserving — and keeping track of! – every scrap of evidence from antiquity.
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Excavation is telling us new stories about an old civilization. In today's Academic Minute, part of University of Missouri week, Benton Kidd explores the colorful lives of the Phoenicians. Kidd is a researcher and associate curator of ancient art at Missouri.Dr. Kidd is excavating a Phoenician site at Tel Anafa in northern Israel.
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The earlier Sephorim post, on a recent ruling on artichokes by the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, is here: The Humble Artichoke.The Not-So-Humble Artichoke in Ancient Jewish Sources Susan Weingarten is an archaeologist and food historian living in Jerusalem. This is an adapted extract from her paper 'The Rabbi and the Emperors: Artichokes and Cucumbers as Symbols of Status in Talmudic Literature,' in When West met East: the Encounter of Greece and Rome with the Jews, Egyptians and Others: Studies presented to Ranon Katzoff on his 75th Birthday. Edited by D. Schaps, U. Yiftach and D. Dueck. (Trieste, 2016).
Susan Weingarten
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It is hard to overestimate the influence that Larry had on the field of Biblical archaeology; he revolutionized the field. To get a sense of his contribution, it is worth reviewing the scholarly landscape of the 1970s. After the death of William F. Albright, unexpectedly followed by the death of G. Ernest Wright, Biblical archaeology as a discipline was no longer fashionable. Archaeology in the United States was in the midst of a revolution, throwing off past ways in favor of new “scientific” methods. In such a context, admitting to being a “Biblical archaeologist” was a bit like walking into a chemistry lab and admitting to practicing alchemy. This same American revolution in archaeology also looked askance at archaeologists around the world (including those in Israel) who were not up-to-date on the latest archaeological theory or jargon.Past PaleoJudaica posts on Professor Stager are here and here and links. I was a doctoral student at Harvard when Larry arrived. I was not an archaeologist, but I sat in on some of his classes and worked at the Ashkelon excavation for a couple of seasons. Reminiscences are at the links.
From the beginning, Larry stood above these trends. He was secure enough in himself that he did not feel the need to limit what he could study or from whom he could learn. ...
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Thus, while Samaritans and Jews share the concept of one holy center, the respective cultural semantics connected to that concept are completely different. This rupture is intensified by one element inherent to the concept itself: Since the latter requires that there is only one holy center, there cannot be two, and no way for mediation or compromise exists: The shared concept, together with two mutually exclusive cultural semantics, creates a sharp line of distinction between the two communities. And while not only the general concept is shared, as well as many motifs related to it, the latter inevitably acquire a completely different meaning once they travel across this border. Thus, while from the Jewish perspective the Jerusalem Temple is situated on Mount Moriya (see 2 Chronicles 3:1), the latter is a site on Mount Garizim, according to the Samaritans. Similarly, Jewish eschatology is closely tied to Jerusalem, and not to Mount Garizim.HT AJR.
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Another irāda of Abdul Hamid II gave permission for the collection to be sent to Berlin on loan. Before the fragments were dispatched, however, the whole batch was inventoried and photographed by the Ottoman authorities. The number of fragments at this time was given as 1558. The collection arrived in Berlin on June 17, 1902, and was deposited at the Royal Museums; in 1904, it was moved to the State Library. It consisted mainly of Jewish, Christian, and Samaritan texts, in a variety of scripts and languages: Greek, Hebrew, Samaritan, Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Christian Palestinian Aramaic, and even Armenian. Among the fragments, many were palimpsests or had been re-used as the bindings of books. Unexpectedly after six years, in December 1908, the Ottomans demanded the return of the fragments. A prioritized list of 54 fragments, prepared by von Soden, and an almost complete Syriac codex was all that could be photographed before the collection was sent back in its entirety.[2] The Ottomans confirmed that the collection reached Istanbul; however, its current whereabouts remain a matter of conjecture since then.Also an Aramaic magical handbook.
Violet’s collection consists of a small though significant fraction of the Damascus Genizah. The larger part, which amounted to perhaps 99.5% of the Qubba’s contents, was transferred to Istanbul. The majority of the fragments were housed eventually at the Türk ve İslam Eserleri Müzesi, the Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum, where the collection was called şâm evrakları “Damascus papers”. An inventory made in 1955 numbers 13,882 items, with a total of 211,603 pieces.
The surviving photographs contain Jewish fragments. Among these are a ketubba, a Judaeo-Arabic glossary of the Mishna and a commentary on Leviticus. A number of folios contain the Hebrew Bible, Job 31, with full Tiberian vocalization and accents, overwritten with an unidentified Syriac text.
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“Drop by Drop: A Story of Rabbi Akiva,” by Jacqueline Jules. 2017. Kar-Ben Publishing. Paperback, 32 pages. Age Range: 3-6 years. ISBN-13: 978-1512420913.I noted a recently-published, imaginative biography of Rabbi Akiva (for adults) here and links. And for past posts on his wife, Rachel, see here and links.
Akiva is just a poor shepherd living an ordinary life, until he falls in love with Rachel. Rachel thinks her husband could become a great man of learning but Akiva can’t even read! Is he too old to be a scholar or can he follow the example of the water in the nearby brook? Water is soft, yet drop by drop, it can soften the hardest stone.
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Yardeni was “definitely one of the three best paleographers of the Dead Sea Scrolls and maybe one of the best Hebrew paleographers for all [historical] periods,” said [Prof. Emanuel] Tov this week.There's more on Ada Yardeni here and links.
Tov told The Times of Israel that Yardeni’s background in graphic arts gave her a decided advantage in reading ancient scripts.
“She was the only one who combined the practical knowledge of a calligraphist with the scholarly insights of the knowledge of the development of the writing in all the various Hebrew scripts,” he said. “She was the only one who really knew exactly how the movement and the strokes of the scripts went, which was a tremendous benefit in analyzing the scripts and helping others in analyzing their scrolls.”
Personal friend Cotton-Paltiel told The Times of Israel that unlike many of today’s scholars, Yardeni worked directly from primary sources.
Most scholars, she said, develop theories based on documents in which texts are deciphered by others. “Ada mainly worked on the primary documents herself and gave us the material to work on.”
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Jeremiah 39 describes Nebuchadnezzar’s siege of Jerusalem, and even names some of the officials who were with him and their titles (v.3). Babylonian administrative records uncovered by archaeology revises our understanding of who they were.Prof. Holtz's conclusions seem to agree with those of Dr. Lawrence Mykytiuk. Regular readers will remember Dr. Mykytiuk's list of 50 biblical persons mentioned in inscriptions, later updated to 53 persons. The updated list includes the second Nergal-sharezer who is noted here by Prof. Holtz.
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Despite the Biblical description and archaeological parallels, there are still some mysteries about Solomon’s Temple. For example, 1 Kings 6:31 describes the doors between the outer sanctum and the inner shrine of Solomon’s Temple as having five mezuzot (the plural form of mezuzah). What is a mezuzah? In the Bible, mezuzah is normally translated as “doorpost.” However, in the context of Solomon’s Temple, doors with five doorposts do not make sense.This essay summarizes a BAR article from 2015. The article itself is behind the subscription wall, but the essay gives you the gist of it.
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Between 1997 and 2011, the Oriental Institute maintained a list, by year, of its publications. This offered a useful chronological overview of the publication activity. I have now compiled lists for 2012-2017 (so far) and include links to the 1997-2011 lists below.These monographs cover the full range of Ancient Near Eastern Studies. Some of them are of interest for Semitics, ancient Hebrew, and ancient and medieval Judaism — for example, the Golb and Huehnergard Festschriften. You can download a copy of any of them for free. For you, special deal!
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