THERE'S A TEMPLE MOUNT ROUND-UP in the Boston Globe. It starts with the recent earthquake damage to the Dome of the Rock and mentions the Palestinian Authority's Jewish-temple denial. Excerpts:

So far, the Palestinian newspaper Al Quds has published a front-page report that the stunning gold Dome of the Rock -- an internationally known symbol of the city -- was damaged by the quake, and the Jerusalem municipal government has requested a police permit for its inspectors to enter the highly-charged, Muslim-controlled area to check for structural damage.

A reporter who visited the mosque Wednesday saw no damage to the dome, but observed a horizontal row of fresh cracks in a westerly wall of the mosque. The cracks were nearly half an inch wide and 8 inches to 16 inches long. Worshipers and Israeli security sources said the earthquake also opened new cracks in the Marwani Mosque, which is better known to Jews and Christians as the Solomon's Stables area of the compound.

[...]

"It is a very good trigger" for rallying the Muslim masses, said a senior Israeli police official, who spoke on condition that his name not be published. "No leader of Arabs could say `I'm not involved' when Al Aqsa is invoked."

Muslims are fearful that if Jews become involved in the affairs of the site -- which was the scene of the great Jewish temple built by King Solomon at the dawn of verifiable human history, and of the Second Temple, built by King Herod, from which Jesus chased the moneylenders -- they will attempt eventually to reestablish a Jewish temple there.

Israelis worry that the "waqf," the Palestinian-dominated Muslim religious trust that has day-to-day sovereignty, is both incompetent to maintain the archeologically complex site and liable not to preserve non-Muslim antiquities found there.

The Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa have been in place since the seventh and eighth centuries, respectively, and Palestinian leaders including Yasser Arafat and the current mufti of Jerusalem, Ikrima Sabri, assert that there is no evidence the Jewish temples ever existed.

The deep distrust sometimes produces paralysis, sources on both sides acknowledge, and that could pose grave danger to the physical stability of the ancient site.

Earthquake damage is just one in a series of recent signs of physical deterioration.

MORE ON THE MANDAEANS:

Gnostic Sect in Iraq Lobbies to Protect Its Way of Life (Los Angeles Times)
* The Mandaean Sabians are emerging from their closed society to press for recognition and rights in a lawless and largely Muslim land.

By Megan K. Stack, Times Staff Writer

[...]

During Saddam Hussein's regime, years the Mandaean Sabians spent hunkered in their cloistered communities while their country dried up, water came to represent the many things Iraq was losing.

The regime drained the marshes and dammed the rivers. Mandaean temples were seized by Hussein, and the sect was banned from erecting new houses of worship. Some members were killed.

But now the marshes are wet again, and the rivers full. This has been Iraq's rainiest winter in nearly a decade � and the Mandaean Sabians are hoping for a renaissance.

"The dictator did not allow us to express our religion freely," said Toma Zeki Zehrun, the Mandaean secretary of affairs in Baghdad. "Now it is time." A quiet people who preach peace and traditionally shy from authority, the Mandaean Sabians are pushing cannily into politics. They have opened a rudimentary lobbying campaign to protect their rights during Iraq's political formation and have enlisted spokesmen to meet with political and religious figures.

All the while, they are reminding anybody who will listen that they are a test for Iraq's nascent government. The quality of Iraq's democracy will show itself in the protection of its minorities, they argue.

The Mandaean Sabians want permission, never granted under Hussein, to build schools to educate their children in their language. The sect also expects representation in the Iraqi Governing Council and is pushing for a mention in the Iraqi constitution.

"We would like to fix our religion as a religion of Iraq," Zeki Zehrun said. "We demand strongly to prove our existence, and to participate in the political process." But with opportunity comes danger. Mandaean Sabians are vulnerable and isolated in a newly lawless Iraq. Moreover, some Islamists are taking advantage of the demise of the secular regime by leading a sort of vigilante push to impose Islamic code on Iraqi society. Christians and other minorities, including the Mandaean Sabians, have suffered most, especially in the south.

Here in the southern city of Nasiriya, a predominantly Shiite Muslim region, Mandaean Sabians are particularly worried about protecting their weekly baptism rituals. Muslims regard the rites either as charming curiosities or infidel shows of paganism. The sect has been accused of worshipping images, and threats to the Baghdad temple have driven its rituals indoors, away from the river and into the white pools built within the temple walls.

[...]

It has been 50 years since Lady E.S. Drower, a lifelong observer of the Mandaean Sabians, was disturbed by the increasing secularism and dwindling priesthood of the sect. "The writing is on the wall: In 50 years' time this ancient religion will languish into its death," she wrote. But the sect is still here.

Good luck to them!

MORE ON ARAMAIC and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ:

In 'Passion,' ancient Aramaic again finds its voice (Newark Star-Ledger)
Sunday, February 29, 2004

BY MARY JO PATTERSON
Star-Ledger Staff

At the searing blockbuster "The Passion of The Christ" last week, a retelling of the last hours of Jesus' life, George Kiraz sat rapt as moviegoers around him wept.

All around him people succumbed to their emotions, but Kiraz quietly exercised his brain and ears. He was focusing on the dialogue, spoken in the ancient tongue of Aramaic.

"We felt a bit guilty. People were sobbing all around us," said the Piscataway resident, who went with his wife Christine. "We were really concentrating on the language. It was so exciting to hear it."

[...]

Most Americans have probably never heard of Aramaic, although it figured in one episode of the TV show "Law and Order" and was actually spoken in a 1998 Denzel Washington movie, "Fallen." Most of the Talmud, the sourcebook of Jewish religious law, is in Aramaic. So are portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Most of the Talmuds (there are two of them) are in Hebrew, but there's some Aramaic. Aramaic has also figured in the movies Stigmata and The Order.

"I would like my children, when they go to church and hear liturgical Syriac, to understand it," said Kiraz, who worships at Saint Mark's Syrian Orthodox Church in Teaneck and at a new Syrian Orthodox parish he helped found in Cranbury.

Kiraz also has published teaching aids for Tabetha, including a coloring book, so that she is learning her ABCs in Aramaic as well as English -- plus Turkish. Mom Christine Kiraz, a chemist for Colgate-Palmolive, was born in Istanbul and speaks Turkish to her daughter. That makes Tabetha, who learns English at the baby sitter's next door and from TV, trilingual.

At the opening-day showing of "The Passion," Kiraz found he only understood about 60 percent of the dialogue. His wife, who studied Aramaic as an adult, understood a bit less.

No matter. They were thrilled to hear the sounds of a 2,000-year-old language come off the big screen.

"Thanks to this movie, there is a realization that there are communities that speak Aramaic," said Kiraz, director of the Syriac Institute in Piscataway, an organization that promotes the study of Aramaic. He earns his living as a consultant in the field of computational linguistics, which combines computer science with the study of language.

[...]

"It's kind of a dream for us," George Kiraz said, one day after viewing the movie. Little Tabetha played nearby, thumbing through her Aramaic dictionary and coloring in the letters.

"We hope that this interest in Aramaic will not peak and then disappear," he said. "We hope it will continue."

Me too.

Also, here's an interview with renowned Aramaic scholar Joseph Fitzmyer which I seem to have missed.

SO THAT EXPLAINS Microsoft Word X for the Macintosh. Now it all makes sense.

For the pedants who are wondering what this has to do with ancient Judaism, I'm trying to write a book on the subject using this dreadful word-processing software. Version 5.1 was vastly better but now I'm committed to version X, at least for this project. I'm a tolerably geeky sort but I find this software to be incredibly cumbersome and badly designed.

Maybe I should switch to AppleWorks after this book is done. Heck, maybe I should even transfer the whole project over now. Anyone out there have any recommendations?

(Thanks to Instapundit for noting the above link to the Volokh Conspiracy.)

ARCHAEOLOGIST GABRIEL BARKAY has lectured in New Orleans on the Ketef Hinnom silver amulets:

'Silver scrolls' are oldest O.T. scripture, archaeologist says (Baptist Press News
Feb 27, 2004
By Gary D. Myers

NEW ORLEANS (BP)--While excavating a burial tomb near Jerusalem in 1979, Gabriel Barkay uncovered the oldest known copy of Old Testament scripture. The priestly blessing, recorded in Numbers 6:24-26, was discovered on two small silver scrolls dated to the 7th century B.C.

�This was a discovery of utmost importance,� said Barkay, professor of archaeology at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv. �These verses pre-date the famous Dead Sea Scrolls by approximately four centuries. They are the only biblical verses we have from the time of the First Temple [period].�

[...]

The two silver scrolls were discovered by Barkay�s team in a rock-hewn burial cave southwest of the ancient city of Jerusalem. The structure of the tomb was of interest to Barkay because it dated to the First Temple period, but it appeared that over centuries looters had taken all the artifacts. The tomb had last been used for storing Turkish army rifles during the Ottoman period.

However, Barkay and his team discovered that some artifacts had been preserved in a bone repository in the tomb. When a family member died, he or she was placed on a burial bench in the tomb along with personal items such as vases and jewelry, Barkay explained. After the dead body decayed, the bones were collected and placed in a bone repository located in a separate area of the tomb. The practice is referred to in the Old Testament as being �gathered unto his fathers.�

[...]

The larger of the two scrolls was only about three inches long when it was unrolled. The smaller one was just over two inches long. Barkay said the thin fragile silver of each scroll was etched with 19 lines of tiny, Hebrew script. It was years before researchers realized that the inscription was an almost exact representation of the priestly blessing found in Numbers. Careful study revealed that the Hebrew characters used were distinctive of the 7th century B.C.

In English the verses read: �The LORD bless you and keep you; The LORD make His face shine upon you, And be gracious to you; The LORD lift up His countenance upon you, And give you peace.�

[...]

Barkay published a book about the find in 1986, but recent advances in computer technology have helped researchers discover additional verses on the silver scrolls. The new research technique revealed that the scroll contains other verses from the Pentateuch. Barkay has written a manuscript about these other finds and plans to publish it in the near future.

[...]

You can see a photograph of the unrolled larger amulet here.

MOSES' HORNS AGAIN. Edward Cook e-mails:

I hate to beat to death the topic of Moses' horns, but I couldn't resist sending you this quote from James Kugel's "The Bible As it Was":

[Jerome's] translation was apparently based on the apparent connection of the word "beam" with "horn" in Hebrew: not only did this make good philological sense, but horns elsewhere were sometimes an ornament in headgear and a sign of distinction. The implications of Jerome's translation were not witnessed at once, but starting in the late Middle Ages, Western sculptors and painters frequently represented Moses as having horns. (Kugel, p. 437)

My apologies if Kugel has already been cited in the discussion. He didn't seem to find anything objectionable in Moses' "horniness".

Kugel hasn't been cited. Larry Swain and David Nishimura (see the link above) have made it pretty clear that Christian anti-Semitism was not directed at Moses and the OT worthies in general, so I'm now convinced that Michelangelo was trying to reflect what he thought the Bible said about Moses and was not demonizing him, nor did he expect his patrons to take the horns as demonic.

TEMPLE MOUNT UPDATE:

Here are some photographs of the collapsed embankment. And heres an article in the Jerusalem Post on the efforts to repair the bulge on the south wall of the Temple Mount. The work was reported to be finished last month, but evidently it isn't. Excerpt:

Following a one hour police-escorted tour of the ancient compound Tuesday, [Minister-without-Portfolio Natan] Sharansky, responsible for Jerusalem and Diaspora affairs, said that slabs of new stone and two tractors filmed last month at the site were being used by Jordanian workers to complete repairs on a bulge on the southern wall.

Earlier this month, the head of the Jordanian team, Dr. Raief Najim, had said that the year-long repair work on the bulge on the southern wall had been completed, but that additional restoration work was needed in other areas of the 2,000-year old wall.

But officials say that, despite the Jordanian announcement and a recent Technion report on the state of repair work at the bulge, the work at the site is far from over. Sharansky said that it appeared to him that the repair work on the bulge was less than 50% complete.

Both links are via Bible and Interpretation News.

MYSTERY WITNESS UNVEILED: Stephen Carlson reports that, as promised, Hershel Shanks has revealed the identity of the archaeologist who reportedly saw the "James Ossuary" in an antiquities dealer's shop in the mid-1990s, but with it lacking the phrase "brother of Jesus." It was Joe Zias. I haven't seen the article myself and there's nothing on the Biblical Archaeology Review web page yet, but you can read about it in Carlson's post linked-to above. He also summarizes David Noel Freedman's promised article on the "Jehoash Inscription."

EARTHQUAKES IN ISRAEL: The Jerusalem Post has a historical review:

When the earth trembles
By BEREL WEIN

The tremors felt throughout Israel earlier this month had been predicted for some time by seismologists.

There is a fault (no pun intended) that runs through our country, and every so often the seismic plates shift and rub against each other, causing the earth to tremble.

Our country has a long history of earthquakes. In the Book of Isaiah and the Book of Kings, we are told of the great earthquake that occurred during the reign of King Uzziah in First Temple times. That earthquake made such a great impression upon the populace that later events were dated from the time of the quake.

Not entirely correct. There is no mention of this earthquake in Isaiah or Kings but the prophet Amos dates his visions by it in Amos 1:1 and it is mentioned in passing in an anonymous oracle in Zechariah 14:5

According to the Talmud, the earthquake coincied with King Uzziah's contraction of leprosy; subsequent references to the physical earthquake connoted the "spiritual earthquake" that befell the king.

This earthquake also foretold the decline of the Kingdom of Judah, even though that would not occur for a number of centuries. Because of this, the earthquake during the time of King Uzziah became a watershed in Jewish history.

[...]

The prevalence of earthquakes in Israel during Second Temple times is indicated in the prayer of the High Priest on Yom Kippur. He included a special wish that the people who lived in the Sharon should be spared the fate of "having their houses become their graves." Apparently, there were frequent and damaging earthquakes in that area. The messianic era is also to be marked by earthquakes in Israel. The mountains of Jerusalem are predicted to split, though it will occasion more joy than sorrow.

Elijah's vision of God was accompanied by an earthquake in 1 Kings 19:11-12 and Jesus' death and resurrection likewise according to Matthew 27:52-54 and 28:1 (but not according to the other Gospels). Paul and Silas were delivered from prison in an earthquake according to Acts 16:26. Earthquakes are also mentioned as an element of the eschatological crisis in Isaiah 29:6, Ezekiel 38:19, and Mark 13:8 (//Matthew 24:7, Luke 22:11) and various places in the Book of Revelation. Whether or not all of these happened (or will happen), this shows that people in biblical times were used to frequent earthquakes.

READER EVY NELSON (a.k.a. Yvonne Gomez Nelson) points me to a piece on Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ which she has recently published in Christianity Today:

The Latest Temptation of Christians

TWO BOOK REVIEWS of interest in the current issue (72.1; March, 2004) of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion:

Lamontte M.Luker : Passion, Vitality, and Foment: The Dynamics of Second Temple Judaism
Reviewed by Carl D.Evans
pp. 267-269

James Arthur Diamond : Maimonides and the Hermeneutics of Concealment: Deciphering Scripture and Midrash in "The Guide of the Perplexed."
Reviewed by Aaron Hughes
pp. 249-252

Note also this article:

Authority, Tradition, and the Creation of Meaning in Medieval Kabbalah: Isaac of Acre's Illumination of the Eyes
Eitan P.Fishbane
pp. 59-95
Abstract Full-Text PDF�(380�KB)

JUDITH WEISS of Kesher Talk has a roundup of media coverage of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Just click on the link and start scrolling down.

"IN THE MOVIE BUT NOT THE BIBLE": Beliefnet has the details. Emmerich appears to be a significant source of inspiration.

By the way, someone tell the Beliefnet people that the ad singing "Celebrate" is obnoxious.

THE SYRIAN VILLAGE OF MAALOULA is featured in another article:

Syrian Villagers Determined to Keep Ancient Language Alive (VOANews.com)
Laurie Kassman
Maaloula, Syria
25 Feb 2004, 17:22 UTC

Arabic is the official language of Syria, but in the mountain village of Maaloula residents still converse in Aramaic, a language that can be traced back 3,000 years.

The village of Maaloula is nestled in the snowy mountains, 50 kilometers north of Damascus. In the ancient language of Aramaic, the name means, opening to a high place.

Its relative isolation has allowed spoken Aramaic to survive for several thousand years - from the days when the Assyrian Empire spread across Syria and southern Turkey, and traders carried its words to Afghanistan and beyond.

I think they mean a few thousand years. We first start getting Aramaic inscriptions in the early first millennium B.C.E. And the following is a bit odd too:

Later, it is said that Jesus Christ spread the language, as he traveled through the region to preach a new religion.

"When he addressed the people, Hebrew was the language of the prayer, of scriptures, but Aramaic was the vernacular," he [retired school teacher Georges Rezkallah] said. "It was simple script." Use of Aramaic began to die as the Greek conqueror Alexander the Great spread his empire and his language across the region. Later, the spread of Islam gave Arabic a more prominent role.

I think someone has misunderstood what Rezkallah was saying. Jesus' listeners already spoke Aramaic in the areas where he traveled (which did not include Syria). There was no need for him to spread the language.

This sounds encouraging:

Georges Rezkallah, his mustache and sideburns flecked with gray, says he is about the only one left in the village who can read, write, and speak Aramaic fluently.

Mr. Rezkallah has devoted his life to preserving the language of his ancestors. Now, the mayor of the village wants him to share his knowledge.

"Now, we are trying to build a center," he said. "This is what the mayor has told me - to build a new center. He asked us to come and train a number of teachers, 25 or more."

ARAMAIC SPEAKERS go to see The Passion of the Christ:

Assyrians hear native tongue in 'Passion' (AP in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

[...]

Aramaic is spoken by a handful of small Christian groups from Iraq and other parts of the Middle East, including Chaldeans, who are Catholic, and Assyrians, who have their own church.

There are an estimated 250,000 Chaldeans and Assyrians in the United States - mostly in Michigan, California and Chicago - said Martin Manna, executive director of the Chaldean Chamber of Commerce, based in Farmington Hills.

In metropolitan Detroit, where Manna says the Chaldean community numbers about 120,000, Chaldean Catholic congregations have organized special outings to see the movie.

[...]

For Ismat Karmo, 48, hearing Aramaic in the movie caused mixed emotions.

"It makes me feel proud and sad at the same time. Proud that we always carry this language that at one time was the dominating language in the region and a language that was spoken by Jesus, and sad that today there is not enough support for it to preserve it," said Karmo, a businessman who came to the United States from Iraq when he was 21.

Did anybody ask him how well he could understand the Aramaic in the movie?

Also, note this:

But Joseph Amar, a classics professor specializing in Christian Aramaic at the University of Notre Dame, strongly criticized the endeavor, saying there is no way to know how similar the Aramaic spoken in Jesus' time is to the forms preserved today.

"It has no intellectual integrity. The very enterprise is bogus," he said.

I wouldn't go that far, but it certainly is very speculative.

UPDATE: There's more in this Detroit Free Press article. Martin Manna, mentioned in the article above, evaluates the Aramaic:

Manna, who is president of the Chaldean American Chamber of Commerce in Farmington Hills, saw a matinee Wednesday and left the theater moved by the story but slightly confused by the language.

"These people were obviously amateurs when it came to the language," Manna said of the actors. "We did catch about 30 to 40 percent of it."

And another scholar gives his view:

Since then, Aramaic has evolved and splintered into dozens of dialects. Jews once spoke a western dialect, while Chaldeans and Assyrians used an eastern dialect. Chaldeans today speak a modern form they call Chaldean, though scholars and linguists call it Syriac.

"There are many, many forms; some of them I really can't even read," said Charles Krahmalkov, a recently retired professor of ancient and biblical languagesat the University of Michigan. "Dictionaries are coming out now all the time on the various Jewish dialects and Christian dialects."

Krahmalkov said he was astonished when he learned Gibson was filming in Aramaic and Latin.

"I don't think it was the first time it was done, but it is usually done in English and spiced with foreign languages," he said. Gibson "had a conception and an idea, and it was a fascinating one."

UPDATE: According to this BBC article, Syriac speaker George Kiraz had more success than Manna:

Some believe audiences may be put off by having to read so many subtitles, but for George Kiraz the language was the highlight.

For Dr Kiraz, who lives in New Jersey, this was the first time he could hear his own language in a Hollywood blockbuster.

"From a language point of view, they did a good job," the Aramaic-speaker told BBC News Online after being one of the first to see the film when it opened on Wednesday.

"I understood 60% or more of the Aramaic - not bad considering I wasn't used to the particular dialect they used."

Dr Kiraz is founder and president of the Beth Mardutho Syriac Institute in Piscataway, New Jersey. The organisation promotes the study of Syriac, an Aramaic dialect.

Other articles on Aramaic are here and here.

UPDATE: Pontius Pilate speaks Aramaic in the movie? So Monsignor William Carr in a round table discussion in Wichita:

"I even found it amusing that the Latin of course was with the ecclesiastical pronunciations, which came centuries later, but it was done with an Italian accent. I was able to get some of the Aramaic from the Hebrew... but little details you get hung up on. The inscription on the cross was supposed to be Hebrew, but was Greek and Latin. As I mentioned beforehand, the (language) of that time was not Latin but Greek. If anybody spoke another language, they spoke Greek. They didn't speak Latin.

"And Pontius Pilate communicating in Aramaic is just unbelievable. Totally unbelievable. So those things, I would get a little disturbed by. But that's me. The whole thing I think is to try to capture the message....

"Just unbelievable" is right. One of the strongest arguments for Jesus knowing some Greek is that it is almost impossible to imagine Pilate bothering to learn the Judean vernacular. Ancient Roman governors were not modern diplomats (who frequently don't learn the language of their assigned country anyhow). Presumably he spoke to Jesus and the crowd (assuming the story of the crowd is historical) in Greek. I suppose Gibson, rightly enough, did not want to have Jesus speaking Latin. But this brings us back to the fact that the characters should, at least for the most part, be speaking Greek rather than Latin anyhow.

UPDATE (27 February): Ruth Gledhill has more on the movie's Aramaic in her review in the London Times:

Does it matter that the film is in Latin and Aramaic?

There is not a lot of dialogue, so you hardly notice the language after a while. But it is important.

Gibson left out the deicidal line from Matthew 25:27.

She means Matthew 27:25. And he didn't: he just didn't give it a subtitle in English.

But there are two scenes where Jesus's persecutors demand his crucifixion, crying to Pilate: "Yitstalev! Yitstalev! Yitstalev!" This is Aramaic but it happens also to mean "crucify him" in modern Hebrew. How anyone in a post-Holocaust era, and aware of the sensitivities swirling around modern Israel, could have done such a thing as this almost beggars belief.

"PURE PORNOGRAPHY." Andrew Sullivan reviews Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Excerpt:

I wouldn't say that this movie is motivated by anti-Semitism. It's motivated by psychotic sadism. But Gibson does nothing to mitigate the dangerous anti-Semitic elements of the story and goes some way toward exaggerating and highlighting them.

REVIEWS of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ are pouring in already and it's only being released today. Mark Goodacre, bless his heart, is keeping track of them, starting with this post (then just keep scrolling up).

As Mark mentions, the movie won't be released in Britain until 26 March. I'm not privy to any advance screenings, so you'll have to wait for my opinion until then. I hope everyone will be thoroughly bored with the subject by then anyway. According to custom established with the last two Lord of the Rings movies, I'll be organizing a group of people from St. Mary's College to attend the British premier.

In the meantime, I hope we can talk of other things.

STILL MORE ON MOSES' HORNS. Larry Swain e-mails:

Thank you very much for posting my points on Moses' horns the other day. I would like to respond, perhaps a final time, to Gerald Honigman's points and suggest some bibliography for those interested in pursuing the matter further.

Gerald writes: "While scholars, artists and others may interpret this sculpture as they will and assume Michelangelo's understanding of the fine details of the differing translations and attempts to portray a variety of ideas via his Moses, my main point stays the same"

Here I will raise a number of points:
a. merely restating the position does not make it any more true
b. Gerald has passed by the import of my comments. The point I sought to make was that Michaelangelo was certainly NOT weighing in his mind the various semantic options. There really was one option available to him: the Latin Vulgate. Remember that Michey worked on this sculpture 1513-1515: this is before any of the great vernacular
translations, before Erasmus' Greek NT, before the Reformation. Michaelangelo knew the Vulgate, the Vulgate has "cornutam faciem". There are few options for Michaelangelo here. So no fine details of translations are needed, only a basic knowledge of the story of the ten commandments in Latin, which he would have known as an educated man in the Renaissance.
c. And as if this were not enough, let me mention once again that not only does the Vulgate invite such a depiction of Moses, and had done so as the principle Scriptural source for over 1100 years before Michaelangelo, but we have a long, ubiquitous, and very common understanding of Moses with portruding horns on his head--commentaries, sermons in Latin and the vernacular languages, sculpture, stained glass, manuscript art, church art and sculpture....a horned Moses, sometimes with two "horned" groups of rays, sometimes with horns of light (which in sculpture is difficult to depict), but by the time of Michaelangelo again we have some 1100 years of such depictions of Moses, and very little else. This is difficult to set aside.

Gerald continues with a lengthy discussion again on the unfortunate anti-Semitic depictions of Jews. I don't deny any of this demonization of Jews. Its a matter of historical record. What I do deny is the connection made by Gerald that this is the necessary background for Michey's Moses. As I pointed out last time, figures from the Christian Old Testament are NOT lumped in with the Jews of Jesus' and subsequent eras. The heroes of the Bible are commemorated in church calendars and have "saints" days, they are studied and provide exempla for Christian belief and practice, they enjoy special priveledge in the liturgy where the works of the Old Testament are read and preached on and commented on. The figures of the Old Testament are types of Christ and so not only prophesy about him, but the events of their lives become prophesies too, and so Moses' shining face with horns is read as a prophecy of Jesus'transfiguration. In fact, in the famous, and so very influential, story of the Harrowing of Hell, it is these Old Testament figures, MOSES included, that Christ comes down and delivers from Hell!

Now what Gerald's position would have to lead us to is that Michaelangelo and company rejected that understanding and use of the Old Testament and that suddenly Moses, rather than as a type of Christ, is without preamble or comment understood as standing in for Jewry. I don't find such a change in perspective in the literature, not even in the Reformation.

This brings me to Gerald's most interesting point, that the masses would have seen horns on Moses' head as "devil's horns" and thus that all Jews, including Moses, are some devil spawn. But would the masses have seen horns on Moses in this fashion? Frankly, no. I've already given the reasons: 1) Old Testament figures were pre-Christian Christian heroes and were not lumped together with the villified Jews. 2) there was a long, common, all but omnipresent tradition of describing and depicting Moses with horns.

Let me take a couple of off the top of my head examples. There's a Botticelli painting that depicts the rebellion and punishment of Korath and company. In this painting Moses is depicted as having two horns of light rays emanating from his forehead. All the other people in the painting are Jews. NONE of them has horns. Not one.

Let me skip backwards to a 12th century Cistercian mss that has an illumination of Moses teaching the 10 Commandments to the children of Israel. Once again we have a crowd of "Jews" gathered around Moses but the only figure with horns is Moses, horns colored white presumably to signify light.

There are myriads more, but the point is simply that the average person in the street going into church, passing statuary on the street, looking at stained glass, hearing sermons on Moses and the ten commandments and the giving of the law etc would have been quite accustomed to seeing and hearing about Moses with horns, and knowing that it was Moses with horns of light, not a devil spawned Jew.

On the issue of Michey's not including horns on other Jewish figures, we need to remember that we are not just talking about David here--there are sculptures of Jeremiah and other Old Testament prophets as there are also on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. And in not one of these cases are there horns. Only on Moses, which I suggest is best explained by not only the choice of words in the Vulgate, but by a hoary tradition of depicting and describing Moses in such a fashion.

Finally, I'll make an additional point that I did not make before. That point is that we need to look at the context. Michey was commissioned by the pope to sculpt an appropriate tomb for him, a very large and expensive tomb was planned with the sculpture of Moses as its centerpiece. Before M completed it, the pope died, and his family approached M about a smaller, less expensive ediface to the pope. This is what we now have located in the church "St Peter in Chains" which is were the Horned Moses is. To sustain Gerald's position we must ourselves why Michaelangelo would risk offending his patron's family and lose a very good commission by making an insulting sculpture the centerpiece of a "tomb" commemorating a pope? While Michey often had no use for the church and disagreed with the church, and even ran into some difficulties on certain paintings in the Chapel, nonetheless, I don't think that he would go so far as to put a demonized Moses/Jew as the centerpiece of that large memorial to the Pope just to tweak a nose or two It just doesn't fit the context of his creation or even of his personality.

I in no way wish to minimize the horror of anti-semitism in Christian society, nor its theological justifications in those circles. However, I will say that this is not a case of anti-semitism, but simply a piece of fabulous art depicting an important and lauded figure commemorating appropriately another kind of law-giver, in a typical and well-wrought fashion.

To end at last, I will point to Ruth Mellinkoff _The Horned Moses in Medieval Art and Thought_ to start, and of course opening any Medieval or Renaissance art book will show a number of such depictions of Moses with his horns.

UPDATE: David Nishimura of Cronaca holds the same view.

MEL GIBSON AND THE HOLOCAUST: This is one I missed. On 30 January the New York Post reported the following exchange between interviewer Peggy Noonan and Mel Gibson. It appears that the whole interview hasn't been published in full. At least I couldn't find it online.

January 30, 2004 -- 'YOU'RE GOING to have to go on record. The Holocaust happened, right?" Peggy Noonan asks of Mel Gibson in the Reader's Digest for March.

Gibson: "I have friends and parents of friends who have numbers on their arms. The guy who taught me Spanish was a Holocaust survivor. He worked in a concentration camp in France. Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine, several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century, 20 million people died in the Soviet Union."

Blogger David Bernstein of the Volokh Conspiracy is disquieted by the quotation, which never quite comes out and says that, yes, millions of Jews were murdered in an attempt at genocide. Bernstein thinks this sounds suspiciously like the carefully phrased waffling of the Holocaust deniers. See his post, "Mel Gibson: Holocaust Denier?"

UPDATE: Reader Paul Connors e-mails:

Re: MEL GIBSON AND THE HOLOCAUST

In the article you refer to in your recent blog, David Bernstein said last
month of Mel Gibson: "if someone would ask him directly, 'do you believe
that the Germans murdered approximately six million Jews during World War
II' and he said 'yes' I would leave it at that."

In the more recent and well-known interview with Diane Sawyer (transcript
here:

http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/sixtyminutes/stories/2004_02_22/story_1034.asp
Mel Gibson clearly agrees that six million "defenceless and innocent Jews"
had died in concentration camps in "an atrocity of monumental proportion".

So he does. I'm afraid I haven't been keeping up with Gibson interviews. The full quote in context is:

DIANE SAWYER: Gibson's father, Hutton Gibson, age 85, who has written books and a newsletter with some decidedly provocative terms of phrase. He has called the Pope "Garrulous Karolus, the Koran kisser". And in that New York Times magazine interview, he seemed to be questioning the scope of the holocaust, sceptical that six million Jews had died. What does Gibson think?

MEL GIBSON: Do I believe that there were concentration camps where defenceless and innocent Jews died cruelly under the Nazi regime? Of course I do, absolutely. It was an atrocity of monumental proportion.

DIANE SAWYER: And you believe there were millions, six million, millions?

MEL GIBSON: Sure.

DIANE SAWYER: I think people wondered if your father's views were your views on this.

MEL GIBSON: Their whole agenda here, my detractors, is to drive a wedge between me and my father and it's not going to happen. I love him. He's my father.

DIANE SAWYER: And you will not speak publicly about him beyond that.

MEL GIBSON: I am tight with him. He's my father. Got to leave it alone, Diane. Got to leave it alone.

I'm relieved to see the clarification. One of David Bernstein's readers suggested that Gibson's careful phrasing in the first quote was to try to avoid personal conflict with his father. Perhaps that's right.

"A MONSTER 'FORGERY MACHINE.'" Rochelle Altman reviews "Oded Golan: Another Type of Trustworthy" (na'aman ocher) (Ouvda) for Bible and Interpretation News:

The History Merchants

Excerpts:

�� The forged products are not unique in type; they are unique in extent. While this is a money machine on a magnitude that Wilhelm Shapira could never imagine in his wildest dreams, this is also a forgery machine geared to rewrite the history books on an equally vast scale. It is the enormous scale of the operation that is unique.

��� When kings and emperors and governments rewrote their histories (as the winners always do), their primary purpose was to whitewash themselves. This is not the case here. Helena started the relics-machine rolling back in the fourth century, but she did not think in terms of money. Shapira, the best known of the 19th-century forgers, thought in terms of money. This time money, yes, but with an agenda aimed at the "creation" of biblical history; a fake history that lets the forgers turn legitimate scientists and scholars into whispering voices trying to be heard above the roar stimulated by the sensational finds and the agenda behind the "finds." And what an ugly agenda it is!

[...]

� The target is the religious market. This is a market that Dr. Yuval Goren refers to as "The Jerusalem Syndrome" in his paper presented at the SBL in Atlanta in November of 2003; that paper is available for all to read right here on bibleinterp.com. And there are also most specific markets, one of which Ian Ransom exposed in his book Mary and the Ossuary: Beneath the "Brother of Jesus" Forgery. This market is the key to the entire series of sensational "finds."

Another take-no-prisoners Altman essay.