Biblical Studies Carnival December 2019

BELATEDLY NOTED: Biblical Studies Carnival #167: December 2019, by Alex Finkelson at the Scribes of the Kingdom Blog.

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The Talmud on detecting puberty

THE MOST RECENT DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: GIRL, YOU’LL BE A WOMAN SOON. As the seven-and-a-half-year cycle of page-a-day ‘Daf Yomi’ Talmud study comes to a close, the ancient rabbis discuss when adolescence ends and compare female sexual maturity to ripening figs.

Each volume of the Koren Talmud Bavli comes in a dust jacket that bears an image related to its contents. Avoda Zara, about idol worship, features a marble bust of a Greek god; Menachot, about meal offerings, has an illustration of a sacred vessel full of flour. So I was curious, as Tractate Nidda approached, how the publishers would choose to illustrate a volume whose main subject is menstrual blood. Their clever solution was to use an image of figs, for reasons that Daf Yomi readers discovered in last week’s reading.

[...]

And then there's this:

It feels strange to say this, but after seven and a half years, this is the next to last column in my series about Daf Yomi. The cycle concludes on Jan. 4 with the last page in Tractate Nidda, before starting all over again the next day with the first page of Berachot. Next month, in my final column, I will reflect on my long talmudic journey and on the Siyum HaShas, which will bring together 90,000 Jews to celebrate the Daf Yomi experience on New Year’s Day.

The new Daf Yomi began yesterday on Sunday, 5 January. I will have a few more comments to go with Adam Kirsch's final Daf Yomi column in the coming week.

But meanwhile, you can hear an inverview with Adam about his seven-and-a-half-year Daf Yomi experience on Tablet's Best Food Forward podcast, Ep. 210. The interview begins around 16:20 and lasts 22 minutes.

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

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Review of Coşkun and Engels (eds.), Rome and the Seleukid East

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: Altay Coşkun, David Engels (ed.), Rome and the Seleukid East: Selected Papers from Seleukid Study Day V, Brussels, 21-23 August 2015. Collection Latomus, volume 360. Leuven: Peeters, 2019. Pp. 512. ISBN 9789042939271. €84,00 (pb). Reviewed by Michael J. Taylor, University at Albany, SUNY (mjtaylor@albany.edu).

The past decade has proven a heady time for Seleucid studies, which has metamorphosed from a marginalized sub-field marooned in the void between Ancient History and Near Eastern Studies to a vibrant locus of interdisciplinary study, a topic that unites specialists in the Hellenistic World, Republican Rome and Judaic Studies, where sources range from Classical and Biblical literature to Greek epigraphy to cuneiform tablets. Such interdisciplinary vitality is on full display throughout this excellent volume.

This volume includes essays involving Antiochus III, Antiochus IV (see last link), and Judaism of the Hasmonean period, all of interest to PaleoJudaica.

For more on the Seleucid dynasty and its importance for biblical studies, see here and links

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Professor Larry Hurtado PhD Scholarship Fund

LARRY HURTADO'S BLOG has an In memorandum posted by one of his children. It notes the founding of a scholarship fund in Larry's name.

Background here and links.

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Review of Piotrkowski, Priests in Exile

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Book Note | Priests in Exile: The History of the Temple of Onias and Its Community in the Hellenistic Period (Miguel Vargas).

Meron M. Piotrkowski. Priests in Exile: The History of the Temple of Onias and Its Community in the Hellenistic Period. Walter de Gruyter, 2019.

From the conclusion:

In sum, one truly gets the sense that Piotrkowski addresses every issue related to Onias' Temple. Because of its breadth, Priests in Exile is bound to become essential reading, not only for those interested in Oniad history, but also for anyone interested in Egyptian Judaism or Hellenistic-Jewish literature. As commented above, it is true that the evidence leaves open the possibility of competing interpretations. This is especially the case for the literary material. Nevertheless, scholars should seriously consider Piotrkowski's individual claims. ...

Earlier PaleoJudaica posts on the Jewish Temple at Leontopolis, Egypt, are here, here, here, here, and here.

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The Sibyl's Pompeii prophecy

OLD TESTAMENT PSEUDEPIGRAPHA WATCH: Could a Jewish author have been first to record destruction of ancient Pompeii? The Sibylline Oracles, likely written by a Jew post-Vesuvius eruption, ostensibly prophecy the city’s devastation as divine retribution for sacking of Second Temple 9 years prior (Julie Masis, Times of Israel).

If the fourth Sibylline Oracle was really written no later than 81 CE, it might predate by several decades the letters of Pliny the Younger, who survived the eruption when he was a teenager and wrote a lengthy account of the experience later on. Pliny published his letters between the years 100 and 109.

Still, the Sibylline Oracle cannot begin to compare with the details included in Pliny’s letters, which provide a first-person account of the disaster.

For more on Pliny's letter about the eruption of Pompeii, see here and here. And for still more posts on Vesuvius and Pompeii, follow the links in the latter post, plus see here. For a post on an apocryphal quote from the Sibylline Oracles on Pompeii, see here.

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

LXX reading plans for 2020

NOW'S THE TIME TO START: READING THE SEPTUAGINT IN 2020 (William Ross, Septuagint &c.)

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2020!

HAPPY NEW YEAR! Have a great 2020. I hope it will include frequent visits to PaleoJudaica.

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

Top-10s for 2019

RETROSPECTIVE: So far I have found two top-10 lists for 2019 of interest to PaleoJudaica.

From Jesus' Time: The 10 Most Interesting Biblical Discoveries of 2019 (Stephanie Pappas, Live Science).

Biblical Archaeology’s Top 10 Discoveries of 2019 (Gordon Govier, Christianity Today).

There is some overlap in the two lists.

If I get time (I didn't in 2019), I will post a list of top PaleoJudaica posts for the year (or two years) on the blog's anniversary in March.

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

Levine on The Jewish Origins of the Christmas Story

BELATEDLY FOR CHRISTMAS: The Jewish Origins of the Christmas Story (Amy-Jill Levine, TheTorah.com).

The narratives of Jesus’ conception and birth as presented in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke echo Jewish history and cite Jewish prophecy. In that sense, the Christmas story can be said to have Jewish origins.

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Hanukkah and Saturnalia?

BELATEDLY FOR HANUKKAH: Did Ancient Jews Change Hanukkah to One-Up the Competition? New research into the origins of Hanukkah shows that this joyful holiday developed and evolved alongside other gentile light-based festivals like Saturnalia (Candida Moss, The Daily Beast).

At the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature conference held in San Diego last month, Dr. Catherine Bonesho, an assistant professor in Early Judaism at UCLA, presented a paper on religious competition in the ancient world. In her research, Bonesho examined ancient traditions about Hanukkah preserved in the writings of rabbinic authors in order to see what ancient Jews thought the holiday was about. Bonesho told The Daily Beast that our traditions about Hanukkah started much later than most people know. After Josephus, “the ritual of lighting lamps does not appear in textual form until the Mishnah (200 CE), nor does the tradition of the miracle of oil appear until the Babylonian Talmud (edited between 5th-7th centuries CE),” Bonesho said.

For more Hanukkah-related legends, see the immediately preceding post here.

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Hasmonean essays from TheTorah.com

BELATEDLY FOR HANUKKAH: Channah, Daughter of Mattathias: Instigator of the Maccabean Rebellion (Prof.Rachel Adelman, TheTorah.com).

1 Maccabees recounts how Mattathias instigated a rebellion against the Greeks out of zealotry against Jewish idolatry. Later midrashim tell how Mattathias’ daughter Channah goaded her father and brothers into fighting the Greeks to protect her from being raped by the local governor.

Mariamme, the Last Hasmonean Princess (Dr.Malka Zeiger Simkovich, TheTorah.com).

The Hasmonean princess Mariamme is best known today for her tempestuous and doomed marriage to Herod the Great. During her lifetime, however, Mariamme was a Jewish celebrity in her own right. As a descendant of the Hasmonean family on both her maternal and paternal sides, Mariamme was the closest thing that Jews had to royalty.

For more on that disturbing legend involving Herod, his Hasmonean wife, and honey, see here, here, and here. And a couple of other posts involving the historical Mariamme (Mariamne, Marianne) are here and here.

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Vision, Narrative, and Wisdom in the Aramaic Texts from Qumran (Bundvad and Siegismund eds.)

NEW BOOK FROM BRILL:

Vision, Narrative, and Wisdom in the Aramaic Texts from Qumran

Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium, 14-15 August, 2017

Series:
Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah, Volume: 131
Editors: Mette Bundvad and Kasper Siegismund

The Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran have attracted increasing interest in recent years. These texts predate the “sectarian” Dead Sea scrolls, and they are contemporary with the youngest parts of the Hebrew Bible. They offer a unique glimpse into the situation before the biblical canons were closed. Their highly creative Jewish authors reshaped and rewrote biblical traditions to cope with the concerns of their own time. The essays in this volume examine this fascinating ancient literature from a variety of different perspectives. The book grew out of an international symposium held at the University of Copenhagen in August 2017.

Hardback: €99.00/$119.00
E-Book: Open Access

E-Book
Status: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-41373-3
Publication Date: 24 Sep 2019

Hardback
Status: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-41370-2
Publication Date: 26 Nov 2019

I noted the CFP for the Copenhagen Symposium here. Cross-file under Aramaic Watch.

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Geniza Fragments 78

GENIZA FRAGMENTS, the Newsletter of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, Cambridge University Library has published its October 2019 Issue. Topics include "The Genizah as an untapped source of Geonic responsa" and "The Sisters of Sinai in Jerusalem." For past posts on Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, the "Sisters of Sinai," start with "The Incredible Lady Bible Hunters" of St Andrews! and follow the links.

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Children in the ANE

ANCIENT FAMILY: Children in the ancient Middle East were valued and vulnerable — not unlike children today (Shawn Flynn and Kristine Garroway, The Conversation). But for children today (thank goodness!), the child mortality rate is no longer 50%.

An informative, wide-ranging, popular article. I have noted Professor Garroway's work, including her book, Growing Up in Ancient Israel (SBL Press, 2018), here, here, here, here, and here.

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Christmas 2019

MERRY CHRISTMAS to all those celebrating!

This is a good opportunity to mention two New Books of seasonal interest, both from Wiqf and Stock (Cascade Imprint):

The Protevangelium of James
BY Lily C. Vuong

About

The Protevangelium of James tells stories about the life of the Virgin Mary that are absent from the New Testament Gospels: her miraculous birth to Anna and Joachim, her upbringing in the temple, and her marriage at the age of twelve to the aged widower Joseph. The text also adds significant details to the well-known stories of Jesus’ conception, birth, and escape from the slaughter of innocents perpetrated by Herod the Great. Despite its noncanonical status, the Protevangelium of James was extremely influential in churches of the East, and since its publication in the West in the sixteenth-century has captured the imagination of readers all over the world. This study edition presents a fresh, new translation of the text with cross-references, notes, and commentary. The extensive introduction makes accessible the most recent scholarship in studies on Mary in Christian apocrypha, offers new insights into the text’s provenance and relationship to Judaism, and discusses the text’s contributions to art and literature.


The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and the Nativity of Mary
BY Brandon W. Hawk

About

The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew is one of the most important witnesses in Western Europe to apocryphal stories about the lives of Mary, Joseph, Jesus, and Mary’s parents, Anna and Joachim. This apocryphon was also used as the basis for another, the Nativity of Mary, which gained equal popularity. As bestsellers of medieval Christianity, these Latin apocrypha are major witnesses to the explosion of extra-biblical literature in the Western Middle Ages. Despite their apocryphal status, the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and the Nativity of Mary proved influential throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, as their popularity and influences may be traced in Christian literature, visual arts, liturgy, and theological perspectives still revered by Roman Catholic theologians. These apocrypha also remain significant works for considering the history of monasticism and the cult of the Virgin Mary. This book draws upon a range of manuscript sources to present comprehensive English translations of the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and the Nativity of Mary with full introductions and commentaries, as well as translations of related works with accompanying commentaries.

Cross-file under New Testament Apocrypha Watch.

For posts of Christmas past, see my 2018 Christmas post and links. A Christmas-related post from the last year is here.

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Review of Ameling et al., Corpus inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae. Volume IV

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: Walter Ameling, Hannah M. Cotton, Werner Eck, Avner Ecker, Benjamin Isaac, Alla Kushnir-Stein, Haggai Misgav, Jonathan Price, Peter Weiß and Ada Yardeni (ed.), Corpus inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae. Volume IV: Iudaea/Idumaea Part 1, 2649-3978. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2018. Pp. xxvi, 1580 (2 vols.). ISBN 9783110543643/4. $345.98. Reviewed by Benedikt Eckhardt, University of Edinburgh (b.eckhardt@ed.ac.uk).

It will not be necessary to once again sing the praise of the CIIP project as a whole; suffice it to point to the reviews of Volume I, II and III on this platform.1 However, Volume IV, covering Judea proper and Idumea, is exceptional even by CIIP standards: its 1580 pages require two separate books, and add more than 1300 items from 172 locations to the Corpus.

[...]

For more on the Corpus inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae (CIIP), including reviews of earlier volumes, see here and follow the links

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Biale, Gershom Scholem (in Hebrew)

NEW BOOK FROM MAGNES PRESS:

Gershom Scholem
Master of the Kabbalah

By: David Biale
Translation: Amotz Giladi

Synopsis
David Biale’s Gershom Scholem traces Scholem’s tumultumous life, tying together his scholarly studies with his political activism and cultural criticism. By mining a rich trove of diaries, letters and other writings, Biale shows how Scholem’s inner life must be understood as the necessary background to understanding his most important writings. Far from a dry, ivory-tower scholar, Scholem emerges as a passionately engaged man of his times, whose life encompassed the most significant events of the Jewish twentieth-century: World War I, the rise of Nazism, World War II and the Holocaust, and the creation of the state of Israel.

More details
Publisher: Magnes Press
Year: 2019
Catalog number: 45-531013
ISBN: 978-965-7008-31-7
Pages: 214
Language: Hebrew
Weight: 400 gr.
Cover: Paperback
Series: Bridges

For other recent books and posts on Scholem, the renowned twentieth-century scholar of Kabbalah, see here (cf. here) and links.

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Hanukkah 2019

HAPPY HANUKKAH (CHANUKKAH, CHANUKAH) to all those celebrating! The eight-day festival begins tonight at sundown.

Last year's Hanukkah post is here. It links to past Hanukkah posts with additional historical background. For PaleoJudaica posts in the last year that relate to Hanukkah, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here (but I'm not sure why).

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

Another review of Moss, Divine Bodies

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: Candida R. Moss, Divine Bodies: Resurrecting Perfection in the New Testament and Early Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. 208. ISBN 9780300179767. $45.00. Reviewed by Harry O. Maier, Vancouver School of Theology (hmaier@vst.edu).

... Paul speaks of a glorified resurrected body, she succinctly summarizes, not a glorious one. Following Troels Engberg-Pedersen’s analysis of Stoic influences on Paul’s ideas, Moss agrees that Paul is talking of the (transformed) stuff of what resurrected bodies are made, not their qualities (p. 13). The script risks taking leave of the teachings of the apostle upon which it purports to rest: “Onto Paul’s assertion that the resurrected body will be heavenly, two thousand years of interpreters have mapped their own culturally informed values about bodily perfection” (p. 14). They have largely ignored what the New Testament sometimes does say about Jesus’ resurrected body as touchable, scarred, and perhaps hungry and thirsty. Moss seeks a complicated and non-systematic early Christian view of the resurrected body that attends to the hypothetical nature of early Christian speculation on the topic and its debt to larger currents of its cultural world.

I noted another review of the book here.

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