A NEW INTRODUCTION TO THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS is coming out, authored by a Comparative Lit professor at Arizona Western College (Pam Kuhlken) and by senior biblical and Scrolls scholar David Noel Freedman.

THE CAIRO GENIZA gets a nice little profile in the Canadian Jewish News. Excerpt:

As with other major discoveries discussed in this column, it was locals who first brought the material to the attention of the outside world. At first, Europeans noticed something new in the Cairo antiquities market. It was thanks primarily to the efforts of two sisters, Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson, residents of Cambridge, that the renowned university there obtained the bulk of the collection.

This was indeed quite fortuitous, since they brought the material to the attention of the man who would be forever associated with the Genizah documents, the redoubtable and legendary Rabbi Solomon Schecter, who at that time was the reader in talmudic and rabbinic literature and keeper of the collection of Hebrew manuscripts at Cambridge.

Fortunately, Rabbi Schecter was probably the one man in the world who would be able to fully appreciate and analyze the material. One of the first documents he came across was the Wisdom of Ben Sira, popularly known as Ecclesiasticus, which he published. His study of the material is still a landmark of scholarship.

But Rabbi Schecter realized that he would have to go to the source, to the genizah of the Ben Ezra synagogue itself. What he found there astounded both him and the world. It contained more than 100,000 documents, which have since given us a unique and unparalleled look into a prominent Jewish community of 1,000 years ago.

The article also discusses recent Canadian contributions to Geniza research, including the refurbishment of the Ben Ezra synagogue, a ditigization project on the texts, and a possible upcoming conference.

MEETINGS AND EXAM MARKING all day today. I'll try to post something tomorrow.

MANUSCRIPT COLLATING FOR DUMMIES. Really.

A 7TH-CENTURY CE SCROLL FRAGMENT OF EXODUS, apparently from the Cairo Geniza, is on display at the Israel Museum:

Rare scroll fragment to be unveiled
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS

A rare Torah scroll fragment from the Book of Exodus dating back to the 7th century that includes the famous Song of the Sea will be unveiled Tuesday at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the museum announced Monday.

The manuscript, which is a fragment of a Torah scroll from the Book of Exodus (13:19-16:1), comes from the six-hundred year period from the 3rd through 8th centuries known as the "silent era," from which almost no Hebrew manuscripts have survived.
[...]

The Song of the Sea manuscript is one of a kind in terms of its historical and literary significance," said Israel Museum Director James S. Snyder. "It bridges the gap in the period of history between the Dead Sea Scrolls [1st-2nd century CE] and the Aleppo Codex [10th century], both of which are permanently housed in the Shrine of the Book."

[...]

HAPPY SHAVUOT (FESTIVAL OF WEEKS, PENTECOST) to all those celebrating. It begins this evening at sundown.

THERE'S AN OBITUARY OF DAME MARY DOUGLAS in The Times:

Professor Dame Mary Douglas
Challenging and wide-ranging social anthropologist whose ideas and influence reverberated far beyond her discipline

Dame Mary Douglas was one of the outstanding British social anthropologists of the latter half of the 20th century. Her books, Purity and Danger (1966) and Natural Symbols (1970), were seminal for anthropologists and were widely appreciated in other disciplines.

A Sunday Times survey of “Makers of the 20th Century” in 1991 listed Purity and Danger among the 100 most influential nonfiction works since 1945; only four women and four anthropologists made the list.

Starting as an Africanist, she branched out to cover contemporary Western society, addressing such topics as risk analysis and environmentalism, and food and consumption. Old Testament religion was another interest, first in her famous discussion of the “abominations of Leviticus”, in Purity and Danger, and latterly in studies of Numbers and Leviticus.

[...]

The obit is quite interesting and informative.

(Via the Agade list.)

HANNIBAL'S ROUTE through the Alps is under investigation by a Classics Lecturer at Stanford:

"Few historical problems have produced more unprofitable discussion than that of Hannibal's pass over the Alps," said the mid-20th-century historian F. W. Walbank, whom Patrick Hunt, a lecturer in the Classics Department, quotes in acknowledging the difficulty and exhilaration of researching the subject. Hunt, director of the Stanford Alpine Archaeology Project, estimates that 20 major studies and articles have focused on it in the past century alone.

He has been investigating the question for the past decade. Now, he hopes he may have found the answer.

"It may be hubristic and definitely ambitious of me to think I might be able to prove that route," he conceded. His most notable predecessor was Napoleon Bonaparte, who reputedly carved his name under Hannibal's on rocks he found in the Alps.

But Hunt has new scientific tools to assist his investigation, and with them have come a profusion of evidence. As the first geoarchaeologist to tackle the question, Hunt has employed methods as diverse as analyzing rock weathering rates, scrutinizing lichen growth, studying pollen records and modeling historical glaciation on computers to help him envision how the land today might be different from that described in ancient texts. Ultimately, the tools will help him comprehend how feasible it was that certain paths were taken by Hannibal and his army traversing the mighty Alps.

[...]

The next leg of his investigation is to look for hard evidence in the form of artifacts. "You have to assume that an army of 25,000 people plus elephants is going to leave a record of its passage," Hunt said. "But to date, not one Carthaginian coin has been found in the Alps proper."

And so he proposes new methods. "I think the topography has sufficiently changed over several millennia so that if the evidence is there, it's not going to be on the surface. I would look not on the direct route, but down the precipices," he said. Also, he said, efforts should be focused where the geology is stable, where rapid erosion would not have buried remains deeply.

Hunt and his team have identified 19 sites to excavate and are awaiting from the European governments the permits that are required before any evidence can be removed from the land. Hoping to be at the cusp of a breakthrough, Hunt and his research have attracted attention and funding from Helen and Peter Bing and the National Geographic Society.

[...]

I hope they get funding and find something.

THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS go on display in San Diego next month.

TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH:

Jerusalem's Temple Mount: Historic Preservation with 3D Laser Scanning
Thursday, 01 March 2007

A 1.851Mb PDF of this article, complete with images, is available by clicking HERE

The Temple Mount is a 35-acre historic site in the Old City of Jerusalem which is of central importance to Judaism, Islam and Christianity. It was the site of the first and second Jewish Temples in Jerusalem and is currently the site of two major Muslim shrines, the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque. The mount is hemmed in by an enclosure wall that was erected to create a level platform on which Herod the Great could rebuild the Jewish Temple in the first century B.C. In February 2004 an earthquake displaced a portion of the mount's eastern wall ( cover photo and Figure 1). To analyze the deformation and determine whether remediation was needed, the Israel Antiquities Authority engaged Mabat 3D Technologies, Ltd., of Tirat-Carmel, Israel to document and measure the displacement using 3D laser scanning.

[...]

The bulge in the southern wall was also scanned.

(Cross file under Technology Watch.)

THE POPE'S NEW BOOK ON JESUS is reviewed by Geza Vermes in The Times:

Jesus of Nazareth
The scholar Ratzinger bravely declares that he and not the Pope is the author of the book and that everyone is free to contradict him
By Pope Benedict XVI, reviewed by Geza Vermes

I LEARNT ABOUT the imminent appearance of Pope Benedict XVI’s book on Jesus at the University of Princeton about four weeks ago. I attended there an international conference on methodology in the quest of the historical Jesus where I was to give the opening address. The title, Jesus of Nazareth, not “Jesus, the Son of God” or something similar, seemed to imply that the Pope was one of us, a seeker after historical truth. Indeed, his preface explicitly states that his study incorporates modern historical criticism, and is intended to portray Jesus as an “historical” figure “in the strict sense of the word”. I must confess, however, that my initial reaction was overoptimistic.

[...]

There follows a summary of historical-Jesus scholarship from the nineteenth century to the present. Then there is a discussion of the book. Here's an excerpt:

Yet I must protest against the reiterated papal claim that the divine Christ of faith – the product of his musings – and the historical Jesus – the Galilean itinerant healer, exorcist and preacher – are one and the same. In the absence of a stringent linguistic, literary and historical analysis of the Gospels, especially of their many contradictory statements, the identification is without foundation. One must declare groundless Benedict’s appeal to “canonical exegesis”, an exercise in biblical theology whereby any text from the Old or the New Testament can serve to explain any other biblical text. Such an approach to biblical studies would force back Catholic Bible experts, already the objects of frequent papal disapproval in Jesus of Nazareth, to a preCopernican stage of history.

As a final comment, may I, after a lifetime of study of Judaism and early Christianity and in the light of hundreds of letters inspired by my books, voice the conviction that the powerful, inspirational and, above all, real figure of the historical Jesus is able to exercise a profound influence on our age, especially on people who are no longer impressed by traditional Christianity. While scholarly exegesis removes some of the mystery enveloping the church’s Christ, it does not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Contrary to Pope Benedict’s forebodings, the world would welcome this authentic Jesus.

Read it all.

THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS EXHIBIT IN KANSAS CITY was a great success. Can't say I'm surprised.

Union Station hits jackpot with Dead Sea Scrolls
The display of the artifacts netted nearly $3 million and far exceeded expectations.
By MATT CAMPBELL
The Kansas City Star

The lines were long on Feb. 8, the opening day of the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at Union Station, and the interest never waned for the duration of the event, which ended Sunday. A total of 177,782 people saw the scrolls, an average of 1,975 a day.

The Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit was the most successful ever at Union Station, selling so many tickets that the station could edge into the black for the first time.

The show closed Sunday after averaging nearly 2,000 visitors a day and netting nearly $3 million, according to preliminary figures released Thursday. The 90-day exhibit far exceeded projections.

[...]

DAME MARY DOUGLAS, I am sorry to report, has died earlier this week. Jack Sasson relays the sad news on the Agade list in an e-mail forwarded from Mark Geller, which I take the liberty of copying here:

Dame Mary Douglas (1921-2007) passed away yesterday evening (16 May), after receiving her knighthood at Buckingham Palace last week. Her contributions to anthropology and biblical studies will be of lasting importance. On the day she passed away, she received proofs of her introduction to a new volume, Imagining Creation, which will appear within the next few months.

Jack also points to this notice about Professor Douglas regarding an honorary degree she received in 2000 at the University of Pennsylvania.

Requiescat in pace.

ALEXANDER THE GREAT AND THE SIEGE OF TYRE: There's new geological information on Alexander's siege of Tyre, which siege is alluded to cryptically in the Bible in Ezekiel 26. If you're not familiar with the details of the event, the Livius article "Alexander takes Tyre" is informative. Here's the news from the National Geographic Society:

Alexander the Great Conquered City via Sunken Sandbar
Kate Ravilious
for National Geographic News
May 15, 2007

Changing sea levels and shifting sands helped Alexander the Great conquer the ancient island city of Tyre in one of his most famous military victories, new research shows.

In 332 B.C. the Greek military commander invaded the island just off the coast of modern-day Lebanon, then part of ancient Phoenicia.

New geological findings and computer models show that the growth of agriculture on the island caused sediment runoff, which spurred the formation of a long, thin submerged sandbar between Tyre and the mainland.

Alexander and his men cunningly exploited this sandbar, the findings suggest, to build a 0.6-mile (1-kilometer) raised path, or causeway, out of wood and stone.

[...]

MORE BIG-SCREEN ARAMAIC: Babylonian and Sanskrit too.

Alexandra Maria Lara has 'Youth'
Attracting the eye of Francis Ford Coppola
By KATJA EICHINGER (Variety)

Given her lineage, Alexandra Maria Lara just might have the acting gene stamped in her DNA. Her father, Romanian actor Valentin Platareanu, had been running Bucharest National Theater before emigrating to Berlin, where he founded the Charlottenburg Acting Academy. Lara soon followed in her father's footsteps, attending classes there and eventually landing a part in a German TV series at the age of 16. She has never looked back.

"My first part came along by accident and then everything happened really fast," recalls Lara, now 28. "I've never tried to force anything. So far I've been very fortunate to get some great parts, but maybe it's exactly because I never pushed too hard."

While she's played significant roles in such miniseries as "Napoleon," "Der Wunschbaum" and "Doctor Zhivago," it wasn't until she held her own as the personal secretary Traudl Junge to Bruno Ganz's Hitler in "Downfall" that her career experienced a dramatic upswing and attracted the attention of Francis Ford Coppola.

For the filmmaker's much-anticipated "Youth Without Youth," Coppola's first directing effort in 10 years and based on a WWII-era novella by Romanian writer Mircea Eliade, she had to master speaking ancient tongues such as Aramaic, Sanskrit and Babylonian.

[...]

My emphasis. By "master speaking" I assume they mean "learn to pronounce words in." I doubt very much that she really learned any of these languages. Nevertheless, a movie adaptation of a novel by Eliade with ancient languages sounds pretty interesting.

GOAT DNA AND THE SCROLLS:

How goat skin DNA solved Dead Sea scrolls mystery
By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH (Jerusalem Post)

Scientists at the Hebrew University's Koret School for Veterinary Science near Rishon Lezion are helping to piece together some of the 10,000 fragments of Dead Sea Scrolls found decades ago in Qumran by examining the DNA profiles of the goats whose skin was used to make the parchment and reducing the number of possible matches.

Dr. Galia Kahila Bar-Gal said during a journalists' tour at the nearby Hebrew University Veterinary Teaching Hospital, where students learn and treat animals, that she and colleagues were looking at genetic forms from each fragment to know which came from specific animals. Once they know that two pieces came from the skin of the same animal, it is easier to piece them together, she said.

[...]

A NEW TESTAMENT JOB AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS:

School of Divinity

Lectureship/Senior Lectureship/Readership in New Testament

Salary - £33,101 - £47,194 per annum
We are seeking applicants committed to excellence in teaching and research in New Testament. You will contribute to the School's existing strengths in exegetical, literary and historical scholarship. Specialism within the canon of New Testament is open, though a research interest in the interface between biblical studies and Christian theology and/or the history of interpretation is highly desirable. You will teach both NT content and Greek to students from undergraduate to doctoral level. You are a team player who will be fully involved in the School's research, supervisory and administrative roles.

While applications to the Lectureship are welcome from junior scholars, you will be expected to hold a PhD when you take up the position, you will need to demonstrate a capacity and commitment to research and publication as well as teaching, and you should have at least one to four major publications in print. If appointed at the level of Senior Lecturer or Reader, you would be expected to come with a strong international research profile.

This appointment is similar to an assistant or associate professorship in North America. The position will begin on 1 September 2007 or as soon as possible thereafter. Appointment at Grade 7 or Grade 8 may be considered depending on the level of appointment made.

Informal enquiries to Dr Jim Davila (Tel. +44-1334-462834; email: divhos@st-andrews.ac.uk). Further information about the School of Divinity can be found at: http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/divinity.


Please quote ref: PS225/07
Closing date: 1 June 2007
Application forms and further particulars are available from Human Resources, University of St Andrews, College Gate, North Street, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9AJ, (tel: 01334 462571, by fax 01334 462570 or by e-mail Jobline@st-andrews.ac.uk. The advertisement and further particulars and a downloadable application form can be found at http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/hr/recruitment/vacancies.

The University is committed to equality of opportunity.

Please note the early closing date (1 June). If you applied to the earlier NT post and wish to apply now for this one, please send a new application aimed at this job description. The further particulars web page is malfunctioning at present, but you can have the application form and further particulars sent to you by contacting the Joblines e-mail address above.

UPDATE (16 May): Typo corrected (paragraph above should have read "earlier NT post"). Also, the malfunctioning website is now functional again.

AN OLD TESTAMENT/HEBREW BIBLE JOB AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS:

School of Divinity

Lectureship/Senior Lectureship/Readership in Old Testament/Hebrew Bible

Salary - £33,101 - £47,194 per annum/
We are seeking applicants committed to excellence in teaching and research in Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. You will contribute to the School's existing strengths in philological and historical scholarship. Specialism within the canon of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible is open, though a research interest in the interface between biblical studies and Christian theology and/or the history of interpretation is highly desirable. You will teach both Old Testament/Hebrew Bible content and Hebrew language to students from undergraduate to doctoral level. You are a team player who will be fully involved in the School's research, supervisory and administrative roles.

While applications to the Lectureship are welcome from junior scholars, you will be expected to hold a PhD when you take up the position, you will need to demonstrate a capacity and commitment to research and publication as well as teaching, and you should have at least one to four major publications in print. If appointed at the level of Senior Lecturer or Reader, you would be expected to come with a strong international research profile.

This appointment is similar to an assistant or associate professorship in North America. The position will begin on 1 September 2007 or as soon as possible thereafter. Appointment at Grade 7 or Grade 8 may be considered depending on the level of appointment made.

Informal enquiries to Dr Jim Davila (Tel. +44-1334-462834; email: divhos@st-andrews.ac.uk). Further information about the School of Divinity can be found at: http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/divinity.

Please quote ref: PS226/07
Closing date: 1 June 2007
Application forms and further particulars are available from Human Resources, University of St Andrews, College Gate, North Street, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9AJ, (tel: 01334 462571, by fax 01334 462570 or by e-mail Jobline@st-andrews.ac.uk. The advertisement and further particulars and a downloadable application form can be found at http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/hr/recruitment/vacancies.

The University is committed to equality of opportunity.

Please note the early closing date (1 June). If you applied to the earlier OT/HB post and wish to apply now for this one, please send a new application aimed at this job description. The further particulars web page is malfunctioning at present, but you can have the application form and further particulars sent to you by contacting the Joblines e-mail address above.

UPDATE (16 May): The malfunctioning website is now functional again.

THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR.

THE IDENTIFICATION OF HEROD'S TOMB is not going unchallenged. Newsweek has an article (BeliefWatch: Entombed) which notes the following from James Charlesworth:

As with all such discoveries, however, there's almost no proof, and already some of Netzer's colleagues are raising questions. Herod, says James H. Charlesworth, of Princeton Theological Seminary, was a ruthless leader—so paranoid that he had his own sons and his wife killed for allegedly betraying him. Why would a king who knew he was hated, a leader fully aware of the perils of grave-robbing and desecration, not hide his tomb away? "He certainly wouldn't put his tomb on the hillside where everybody would see it," says Charlesworth. "I would think he would put the tomb in the base. There are massive tunnels down there."