Another Millard obituary

IN MEMORIAM: The archaeologist and the teacher: life and ministry of Alan Millard. One emphasis Millard made in his talks is that archaeology provides valuable information that can be used to deepen our knowledge of the Bible (Arturo Terrazas, Evangelical Focus).

Background here and links.

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Review of Crellin, The semantics of word division in northwest Semitic writing systems

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: The semantics of word division in northwest Semitic writing systems: Ugaritic, Phoenician, Hebrew, Moabite and Greek.

Robert S.D. Crellin, The semantics of word division in northwest Semitic writing systems: Ugaritic, Phoenician, Hebrew, Moabite and Greek. Contexts of and relations between early writing systems (CREWS) . Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2022. Pp. 256. ISBN 9781789256772.

Review by
Joseph Lam, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. jclam@email.unc.edu

In this highly technical monograph, Robert Crellin surveys the phenomenon of so-called “word dividers” in Northwest Semitic epigraphic texts in an effort to discern what principles, if any, might guide their distribution. ...

The history of word divisions in writing sometimes makes me wonder when people first noticed that their language had words and wasn't just the flow of their thoughts. Perhaps this came later than we might think.

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Interview with Jody Magness on the DSS

PODCAST: The Dead Sea Scrolls (National Review).

John J. Miller is joined by Jodi Magness of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to discuss the Dead Sea Scrolls.

I don't have time to listen to this right now. But if you do, Jody Magness is always good.

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ToI on the new Infancy Gospel of Thomas fragment

NEW TESTAMENT APOCRYPHA WATCH: 1,600-year-old papyrus fragment contains earliest account of Jesus’ childhood. Scrap from extra-biblical Infancy Gospel of Thomas discovered in German archive contains story of young Jesus bringing clay birds to life on the Sabbath (Gavriel Fiske, Times of Israel).

A small, 1,600-year-old papyrus fragment discovered in a German archive has been revealed to contain the earliest known copy of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, an early Christian text describing the childhood of Jesus that once enjoyed enormous popularity but was not canonized into the New Testament.

[...]

A good article that covers the issues. It interviews Dr. Lajos Berkes, one of the publishers of the fragment, and also Prof. Tony Burke, who has published recent editions of the Greek and Syriac versions of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.

Background here.

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AI translates Aramaic. Sort of.

RELIGION PROF: ChatGPT Writes Sermons, Translates Aramaic.

James McGrath set ChatGPT to translating some Syriac. As is usual with AI, the results can be useful, as long as you have a human check it to filter out gibberish.

I will leave the part about sermons for others to comment on.

Cross-file under Algorith Watch and Syriac Watch.

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Review of Friesen, Acting gods, playing heroes ...

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: Acting gods, playing heroes, and the interaction between Judaism, Christianity, and Greek drama in the early common era.

Courtney J. P. Friesen, Acting gods, playing heroes, and the interaction between Judaism, Christianity, and Greek drama in the early common era. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2023. Pp. 180. ISBN 9781032491028.

Review by
Edward Creedy, King's College London. edward.creedy@kcl.ac.uk

In Acting Gods, Playing Heroes Courtney Friesen argues that the development of Jewish and Christian thought and practice in the early Common Era was heavily influenced by the diversity of dramatic performance and literary reproductions popular across the ancient world. ...

I noted the publication of the book here.

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... Documentary Papyri and the New Testament (Brill)

NEW BOOK FROM BRILL:

Everyday Life in Graeco-Roman Times

Documentary Papyri and the New Testament

Series:
Studies in Cultural Contexts of the Bible, Volume: 16

Editors: Christina M. Kreinecker, John S. Kloppenborg, and James R. Harrison

Everyday life in Graeco-Roman times has fascinated generations of scholars, students, and people interested in the New Testament alike. One of the most unique sources to access ancient everyday affairs are documentary papyri because they provide access to the ancient world both before and while it was shaped into one in which Christianity began to predominate. These textual sources allow the modern reader to meet everyday people from the past through their own writings and in texts about their daily affairs, joys, and sorrows. Documentary papyri provide an abundance of information to contextualize the New Testament and its authors, and to better understand its stories and messages. This volume aims at highlighting some of these contexts and to shed new papyrological light on the New Testament. The essays in this volume have been written in honour of Peter Arzt-Grabner, who has illuminated the New Testament through documentary papyri for more than three decades.

Copyright Year: 2024

E-Book (PDF)
Availability: Not Yet Published
ISBN: 978-3-657-79463-8
Publication: 11 Mar 2024
EUR €120.56

Hardback
Availability: Published
ISBN: 978-3-506-79463-5
Publication: 08 Mar 2024
EUR €120.56

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Tri-partite temples at Tell Tayinat in Turkey

HOLY LAND PHOTOS' BLOG: Tell Tayinat and the Judean Temple — Design and Placing the Treaty/Covenant Document in the Holy of Holies (Carl Rasmussen).

I wanted to visit Tell Tayinat because it was an important center during the Early Bronze Age and during the Iron II Period. It is especially interesting because of two tripartite temples that seem to have affinities with the Tabernacle and Solomonic Temple as described in the Bible. In addition, a bit-hilani palace was discovered here—similar in design to Solomon’s Palace in Jerusalem and a palace found at Megiddo (in Israel). In addition, numerous reliefs, statues, cuneiform tablets, etc. have come to light during the excavations! Tell Tayinat may have been Kunula, the capital of the Neo-Hittite Kingdom of Patina (ca. 950–725 B.C.).

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The Nuzi archive

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: The Nuzi Tablets. Bronze Age records from the time of the Patriarchs (Philippe Bohström).

An informative, balanced account of the discovery of the Nuzi tablets, their importance for ancient Near Eastern (Hurrian) history, and their possible (but highly debated) relevance for biblical studies.

A few PaleoJudaica posts involving the Nuzi tablets are here, here, and here.

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Brazil, Jesus and YHWH-Texts in the Synoptic Gospels (T&T Clark)

NEW BOOK FROM BLOOMSBURY/T&T CLARK:

Jesus and YHWH-Texts in the Synoptic Gospels

Scott Brazil (Author)

Hardback
$115.00 $103.50

Ebook (PDF)
$103.50 $82.80

Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
$103.50 $82.80

Product details

Published Mar 21 2024
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Extent 248
ISBN 9780567713957
Imprint T&T Clark
Dimensions 9 x 6 inches
Series The Library of New Testament Studies
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

Description

Scott Brazil examines the frequent practice of applying Old Testament YHWH-texts to Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. He argues that this YHWH-text phenomenon evidences a high Christology in the primitive church that traces back to Jesus himself. He thus finds in this Synoptic practice a stinging contradiction against the modern critical theory that a high Christology took many decades to develop in the early church and exists only in John among the canonical Gospels.
Brazil surveys the Synoptic Gospels in canonical order, exegeting dozens of passages in which OT texts originally referring to YHWH are either clearly or most probably applied to Jesus. He observes the frequency, diversity, and ubiquity of the practice, as well as its wide range of OT source material and its parallel to the NT practice of applying OT messianic texts to Jesus. And from the data he offers several ramifications, including the early deliberate employment of YHWH-texts to Jesus, the likelihood that Jesus is the source of the practice, the high Christology of the Synoptics, and the redemptive-historical metanarrative that Jesus is the divine interpreter and central figure of the Jewish Scriptures.
Ultimately, Brazil argues that understanding the prolific application of OT YHWH-texts to Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels cannot be neglected without truncating genuine NT Christology.

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Social Memory Theory and Conceptions of Afterlife in Jewish and Christian Antiquity (Brill)

RECENT BOOK FROM BRILL:

Social Memory Theory and Conceptions of Afterlife in Jewish and Christian Antiquity

Series:
Studies in Cultural Contexts of the Bible, Volume: 8

Editors: Thomas R. Hatina and Jiří Lukeš
Contributors: Thomas R. Hatina, Jiří Lukeš, Christian Handschuh, Frederick S. Tappenden, Jiri Janak, David Cielontko, Michael Sommer, Zeba Crook, Tobias Nicklas, Anthony Le Donne, Brad Anderson, Stu Talane, Sandra Huebenthal, Kyle Parsons, and Craig C. Broyles

Why are conceptions of afterlife so diverse in both Jewish and Christian antiquity? This collection of essays offers explanations for this diversity through the lens of social memory theory. The contributors attempt to understand how and why received traditions about the afterlife needed to be altered, invented and even forgotten if they were to have relevance in the present. Select ancient texts conveying the hopes and fears of the afterlife are viewed as products of transmission processes that appropriated the past in conformity with identity constructs of each community. The range of literature in this collection spans from the earliest receptions of Israelite traditions within early Judaism to the Patristic/Rabbinic period.

Copyright Year: 2023

E-Book (PDF)
Availability: Published
ISBN: 978-3-657-79621-2
Publication: 07 Nov 2022
EUR €101.87

Hardback
Availability: Published
ISBN: 978-3-506-79621-9
Publication: 02 Dec 2022
EUR €101.87

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Encountering the Parables in Contexts Old and New (T&T Clark)

NEW BOOK FROM BLOOMSBURY/T&T CLARK:

Encountering the Parables in Contexts Old and New

T. E. Goud (Anthology Editor) , J.R.C. Cousland (Anthology Editor) , John P. Harrison (Anthology Editor)

Paperback
$39.95 $35.95

Hardback
$120.00 $108.00

Ebook (PDF)
$35.95 $28.76

Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
$35.95 $28.76

Product details

Published Mar 21 2024
Format Paperback
Edition 1st
Extent 296
ISBN 9780567706171
Imprint T&T Clark
Dimensions 9 x 6 inches
Series The Library of New Testament Studies
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

Description

The contributors to this book pursue three important lines of inquiry into parable study, in order to illustrate how these lessons have been received throughout the millennia. The contributors consider not only the historical and material world of the parables' composition, and focusing on the social, political, economic, and material reality of that world, but also seek to connect how the parables may have been seen and heard in ancient contexts with how they have been, and continue to be, seen and heard.
Intentionally allowing for a “bounded openness” of approach and interpretation, these essays explore numerous contexts, encounters and responses. Examining topics ranging from ancient harvest imagery and dependency relations to contemporary experience with the narratives and lessons of the parables, this volume seeks to link those very real ancient contexts with our own varied modern contexts.

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Oldest deep-sea shipwreck found off coast of Israel

MARINE ARCHAEOLOGY: Energy Company Finds Earliest Deep-sea Shipwreck in the World, and It's Canaanite. While scanning the seabed ahead of developing Israel's Orca natural gas field , Energean observed an anomaly that would change our understanding of ancient navigation skills (Ruth Schuster, Haaretz).

An energy company surveying the Mediterranean seafloor has discovered the earliest shipwreck ever found in the deep sea anywhere in the world: a Canaanite merchant vessel that sank 3,400 to 3,300 years ago, the Israel Antiquities Authority revealed on Thursday. Moreover, it designed and sent down a specially kitted robot to retrieve samples.

[...]

There's more on the Canaanite provenance, but briefly:

With the pots in hand, it turned out his identification from the initial pictures was correct. They were standard Canaanite jars common in Late Bronze Age Israel, Syria and Lebanon. That doesn't prove the crew was Canaanite, but the cargo sure was.

Question: does "Canaanite" here include Phoenician (i.e., from Lebanon), or is the material culture specific to the Land of Canaan?

The excavation involves cool use of a robot 🤖. I do like robots in the right context.

For more on ancient shipwrecks, see here and many related links. Run "shipwreck" through the search engine for specifics.

Cross-file under Maritime (Underwater) Archaeology.

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Vermes centenary

IN MEMORY OF: Search for the Jewish Jesus. Alexander Faludy celebrates the life and legacy of Géza Vermes, born 100 years ago on Saturday (Church Times).

GÉZA VERMES (1924-2013) was born 100 years ago into a Jewish family in Makó, Hungary, but, at the age of six, was baptised — along with his parents — in the Roman Catholic Church. His eventful life would later involve ordination to the priesthood, a return to Judaism, appointment to a university chair at Oxford, and a voluminous output on the historical Jesus.

[...]

For many PaleoJudaica posts on Geza Vermes, see here and links and here and links.

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

More on Sennacherib's possible camps

HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY UPDATE: Long-lost Assyrian military camp devastated by 'the angel of the Lord' finally found, scientist claims. Has a scholar located two Assyrian military camps mentioned in the Hebrew bible? (Owen Jarus, Live Science).

This essay has a good summary of the sections of the underlying Near Eastern Archaeology article which deal with Lachish and Jerusalem. It also has some assessments of the article by other archaeologists. As usual with these things, not everyone is convinced.

Background here.

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

When was Jesus born?

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: When Was Jesus Born—B.C. or A.D.? (Megan Sauter).

This is an old one that I've linked to before, but it's good to return to the topic from time to time. There is a lot of confusion about it.

See also here, concerning a Bible and Interpretation essay by Robert Cargill. The essay link has rotted, but I have some of my own comments there.

I mostly use CE/BCE, rather than AD/BC, since the former is academically more neutral. But I don't care what other people do.

This also gives me the chance to double down about the metric system, which is made for robots 🤖 not humans.

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Walter (ed.), The Temporality of Festivals (De Gruyter, open access)

NEW BOOK FROM DE GRUYTER:

The Temporality of Festivals
Approaches to Festive Time in Ancient Babylon, Greece, Rome, and Medieval China

Edited by: Anke Walter

Volume 10 in the series Chronoi
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111366876

eBook
Published: April 1, 2024
ISBN: 9783111366876

Paperback
Published: April 1, 2024
ISBN: 9783111364865

About this book

Open Access

How can time become festive? How do festivals manage to make time ‘special’, to mark out a certain day or days, to distinguish them from ‘normal’, everyday time, and to fill them with meaning? And how can we reconstruct what festive time looked like in the past and what people thought about it?

While a lot of research has been done on festivals from the point of view of several scholarly disciplines, the specific temporality of festivals has not yet attracted sufficient attention. In this volume, scholars from different fields provide answers to the questions raised above, based on a fresh analysis of astronomical documents, calendars, and literary texts. Cultures as diverse as ancient Babylon, Greece and Rome, and medieval China all share a sense of calendrically recurring festive time as something special that needs to be carefully mapped out and preserved, often with great sophistication, and that gives us precious insights into the broader religious, political, and social dimensions of time within past cultures.

Regular PaleoJudaica readers are familiar with the Akitu Festival, the Babylonian New Year celebration. See here and links plus here.

Dunhuang in China might seem like a stretch, but PaleoJudaica has an interest there too. Fragments of Christian texts in Syriac and Jewish texts in Hebrew were excavated there, and even one or two medieval fragments of the Manichean version of the Book of Giants. See here and links and here and links.

Translations of the Book of Giants fragments from Dunhuang and (mostly) from nearby Turfan, as well as the fragments of the original Aramaic from Qumran, are coming out soon in More Old Testament Pseudepigrapha volume 2. The publication date is currently scheduled for April 2025.

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

Griffin, Olympiodorus: Life of Plato and On Plato First Alcibiades 1–9 (Bloomsbury, open access)

NEWLY OPEN-ACCESS BOOK FROM BLOOMSBURY:

Olympiodorus: Life of Plato and On Plato First Alcibiades 1–9

Michael Griffin (Anthology Editor)

Open Access

Paperback
$51.95 $46.75

Hardback
$175.00 $157.50

Product details

Published Jun 30 2016
Format Paperback
Edition 1st
Extent 256
ISBN 9781474295642
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Dimensions 9 x 6 inches
Series Ancient Commentators on Aristotle
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

Description

Olympiodorus (AD c. 500–570), possibly the last non-Christian teacher of philosophy in Alexandria, delivered these lectures as an introduction to Plato with a biography. For us, they can serve as an accessible introduction to late Neoplatonism. Olympiodorus locates the First Alcibiades at the start of the curriculum on Plato, because it is about self-knowledge. His pupils are beginners, able to approach the hierarchy of philosophical virtues, like the aristocratic playboy Alcibiades. Alcibiades needs to know himself, at least as an individual with particular actions, before he can reach the virtues of mere civic interaction. As Olympiodorus addresses mainly Christian students, he tells them that the different words they use are often symbols of truths shared between their faiths.

HT the AWOL Blog.

This book has been around for a while, but now it's free. It may be of interest to readers who would like to read another ancient life of Plato, albeit one centuries later and even more apocryphal than the one by Diogenes Laërtius. Alas, it doesn't give an account of the circumstances of Plato's death.

For the context regarding the newly recovered fragments from Herculaneum of what appears to be a life of Plato by Philodemus, see here and here.

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The Golan’s Roman Road

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: The Golan’s Roman Road. A Roman road and Jewish rebellion (Nathan Steinmeyer).

This Roman highway would have been used for military transport, postal services, and to connect supply centers and economic hubs. But one thing it did not do was connect local villages to the rest of the Roman world. Instead, it appears to have passed the predominantly Jewish villages at a distance. While a possible explanation is that the road followed the most direct topographic route from the Sea of Galilee to Nawa, the presence of several watchtowers along the route could hint at a different reason.

Follow the link for a link to the recent underlying article in the journal Tel Aviv.

For PaleoJudaica posts on Roman roads in Israel, see the links collected here.

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

Sennacherib's camps identified?

HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY: Discovery of Neo-Assyrian Camp Allegedly Decimated by Biblical Angel (Nathan Falde, Ancient Origins).

In a new paper just published in the journal Near Eastern Archaeology, [archaeologist Stephen C.] Compton explained how he arrived at the conclusion that he had discovered a previously unrecognized Assyrian army camp looking down over the city of Jerusalem, dating to approximately the late eighth century BC. Fascinatingly, Compton’s process of discovery began with the discovery of another Assyrian archaeological site, found 42 miles (65 kilometers) south of Jerusalem at the site of the ancient city of Lachish.

This story began surfacing a few days ago. The headlines like this one made me wonder if it was credible, but it turns out to have been published in a peer review journal, which is as credible as we can manage. This Ancient Origins article gives a pretty good summary.

That article in Near Eastern Archaeology (87.2, June 2024) is behind the subscription wall, but I have it through my university access. It covers more sites than Lachish and Jerusalem and, not surprisingly, it does not mention the angel. The abstract is public:

Pp. 110-120: “The Trail of Sennacherib’s Siege Camps,” by Stephen C. Compton

Images of military conquest on Sennacherib’s palace walls often featured his siege camps. By comparing the visual and textual references to these camps with the surroundings of the cities he besieged (on site and via aerial and satellite imagery, archaeological and historical data, and early maps and surveys), likely locations are proposed for Sennacherib’s royal camps. These sites are found to have all had the same name on early maps, Mudawwara, which, in Arabic in the Middle Ages, denoted the enormous tent that housed the sultan on military expeditions. (At times, this name was prefaced with Khirbet al, indicating the ancient stone ruins thereof.) Examining all occurrences of this toponym within Judah and Philistia reveals a distribution consistent with what is known of Sennacherib’s invasion route and of the cities besieged. It also resolves some long-standing questions and contributes to identifying the locations of the cities of Libnah and Nob.

Naturally the media has been focusing on the camp at Jerusalem and the biblical claim that the angel of the Lord smote the Assyrian army there. Some of the headlines are temperate, others more exhuberant. A sampling:

New Method Helps Uncover Clues of Biblical Battle in Jerusalem (Brian Freeman, Newsmax.com)

Clues of bloody Biblical battle between angel of God and 185K invading soldiers uncovered in Jerusalem: new research (Hannah Sparks, New York Post)

Proof of Bible story about angels killing 185,000 soldiers in a night is uncovered after 2,700 years (Nikki Main, Daily Mail)

Discovery of Assyrian Military Base May Prove Biblical Battle of Angels Defending Jerusalem (Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz, Israel365News)

I struggle to imagine how an archaeological survey could "prove" that an angelic military intervention took place in antiquity, but there you have it.

We already knew about Sennacherib's campaign in this region. We have his own account as well as the biblical ones etc. But if it holds up, this new research may help us to understand it better. That is the real story.

For PaleoJudaica posts on Sennacherib's siege of Jerusalem and that story about the angel of the Lord, see here (scroll down a bit), here (cf. here), and here and links. And for still more on Sennacherib, see here and here.

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