TWICE USED SONGS by Terry Giles and William J. Doan is profiled by Dana Massing GoErie.com:

Authors explore use of songs in Hebrew Bible

BY DANA MASSING
dana.massing@timesnews.com [more details]

Published: November 29. 2008 12:01AM

Why do we sing the national anthem before a baseball game?

For the same reason writers worked songs into the prose of the Hebrew Bible, says one of the authors of a new book.

"To create community solidarity," Terry Giles said.

Giles, a Gannon University professor, and William J. Doan, a former Gannon professor now at Pennsylvania State University, have written "Twice Used Songs: Performance Criticism of the Songs of Ancient Israel."

In it, the authors use performance criticism to understand why biblical writers put songs in their stories.

The songs that Doan and Giles write about are considered "twice-used" because their first appearance wasn't in the Scriptures known to Christians as the Old Testament.

[...]

AN EXHIBITION in Texas on ancient Judaism:

Dec. 12, ‘The Birth of Christianity: A Jewish Story’ to open at HMNS

(Jewish Herald-Voice)

Through the display of ancient scrolls, objects and artifacts, the story of two of the world’s most influential religions unfolds in “The Birth of Christianity: A Jewish Story,” a new special exhibition opening Dec. 12 at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. The exhibition will continue through April 12, 2009.

“In 2005, The Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition evoked a remarkable response from tens of thousands of museum visitors,” said Joel A. Bartsch, president of the HMNS. “ ‘The Birth of Christianity: A Jewish Story’ continues the journey begun in The Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition and broadens the dialogue – beyond the fascinating Qumran community that created the Scroll – and into the dawn of the Christian era,” said Bartsch. “One particularly moving part of the exhibition includes the oldest known copy of the messianic prophecies from the Book of Isaiah – one of the original Dead Sea Scrolls discovered at Qumran – displayed alongside the oldest known copy of the New Testament Book of Luke, including the earliest known version of the story of Christ’s nativity.”

[...]

There's also a video interview with Prof. Matthias Henze of Rice University.

DEAD SEA SCROLLS are coming to Rome:

Dead Sea Scrolls to be displayed in Rome
11/27/2008 | 10:34 PM (GMANews.TV)

JERUSALEM – Italian president Giorgio Napolitano says he will open an exhibition of the famed Dead Sea Scrolls in Rome next year.

Israel's Antiquities Authority announced Thursday that parts of the scrolls will be shown in Rome early next year. Segments of the scrolls are lent out regularly to museums around the world but haven't been shown in Italy yet.

[...]

THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS EXHIBITION at the New York Jewish Museum is reviewed by Jerome A. Chanes in The Forward. Excerpt:

The Jewish Museum’s exhibition is different from other displays of the scrolls; it does not plant the flag in the soil of any one theory of the scrolls’ provenance, but concentrates on their messages. In this tiny and exquisitely curated exhibition, fragments of but six scrolls — out of the 900 found, and tens of thousands of other fragments — were chosen, each one very different from another. There is a fragment from the book of Jeremiah, one of the earliest copies of the Hebrew Bible in existence; there is an early example of Hebrew prayer, from Words of the Luminaries; there is a fragment from the Apocryphal Book of Tobit, a text not included in Hebrew Scripture but accepted into some versions of the Christian Bible; there is a text from the Aramaic Apocryphon of Daniel, and there are fragments from two books of regulations: the Community Rule, on the ordering of the affairs of the community, and the War Rule, on how a great war at the end of days should be conducted.

[...]

And this is the ultimate goal — and the nuanced message — of The Dead Sea Scrolls: Mysteries of an Ancient World. In curating the exhibition to focus on the texture of the scrolls’ language rather than on the controversies surrounding the scrolls themselves, The Jewish Museum is not just avoiding conflict. It is showing that it has a keen understanding of the difference between taste and politics when it comes to the fields of archeology, art and literature. In freeing the art from the politics, this exhibition sensitively bridges the gaps between art and politics, between questions of artistic taste and those of religious sensitivities. In the dim light of the scrolls gallery, the viewer is able, after two millennia, to converse with Jeremiah, Tobit and Daniel.

And Huliq News has a review as well. Excerpt:

The Dead Sea Scrolls: Mysteries of the Ancient World is on view at The Jewish Museum through January 4, 2009. This new exhibition features fragments of six scrolls, which have never been seen in New York City before. Three of the scrolls are being exhibited for the first time anywhere. Revered and revelatory, the Dead Sea Scrolls on display, together with over 30 artifacts discovered near the caves where the documents were found, provide new insights into the varied beliefs of ancient peoples and religious diversity today. A seven-minute film further enriches the visitor experience.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING to my American readers!

Busy day today and I'm pre-posting this. It will probably be late in the day, if at all, before I get to blogging.

I'M HOME. Got in a few hours ago and have been occupied with family things. No blogging right now. Time to try to sleep off some of this cold.

PARDEE'S PRESENTATION on the new Zincirli inscription (now the Kuttamuwa Stele) is summarized by Douglas Mangum at the Biblia Hebraica blog. And follow the link there for a rendering of Pardee's transcription by Jim Getz.

Via Yitzhaq Sapir at the Aramaic list.

Background here and here.

GOOD CONFERENCE. Hightlights included both of the Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism Group meetings, the memorial session for John Strugnell, and the Pseudepigrapha Group session on Problematizing "Pseudepigrapha." I've made some notes on the last, which amount almost to a paper proposal for next year. I may get around to posting some thoughts, but not right now.

UPDATE (1:14 pm and bits thereafter): No, not yet. I've got a cold starting up and am not feeling too energetic.

My paper presentation went well. People seemed to find it informative, they laughed in (mostly) the right places, and I even managed to slip in a Terminator joke. (It's not in the written version, but if you know the mythos you can probably guess where.)

My flight leaves this evening and I'm in the hotel lobby at the moment. I may or may not be able to blog (or feel like blogging) later at the airport. If not, look for me (briefly) Wednesday evening in St. Andrews. On Thanksgiving I will be involved in our fall graduation ceremonies, receptions, etc. from the morning until late in the evening, so you may not hear much from me.

Safe trip home to all SBL travelers.

SHARE A TAXI? If anyone at the SBL conference would like to share a taxi with me to Logan Airport around 12:00 noon today, please e-mail me asap.

UPDATE: Got someone now. Thanks!

THE MUSEUM OF TOLERANCE in Jerusalem is defended by Rabbi Marvin Hier at the Simon Wiesenthal Center website:

Letter to the Editor / Museum of Tolerance is a beacon of light, not a wall

Regarding Bradley Burston's article "Dividing Jerusalem, one wall at a time"

Bradley Burston criticizes the Museum of Tolerance project in Jerusalem claiming it would be "dividing Jerusalem one wall at a time" because it is being built atop an ancient Muslim cemetery.

What he deliberately hides from his readers is that the land was given to the Simon Wiesenthal Center by the government of Israel and the City of Jerusalem, who presented petitions to the Supreme Court in support of the Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem.

He also obscures the fact that the Simon Wiesenthal Center is not building on the nearby Mamilla cemetery, but on the adjacent site which, for nearly a half-century, served as Jerusalem's municipal car park where every day hundreds of Jews, Christians and Muslims parked their cars. Electric cable and sewer lines were laid below the ground.

During all this time, not a single Muslim group or individual, including today's most vociferous critics said a word in protest although as they argued before the Court they knew all along it was a cemetery, yet kept silent for a half-century.

[...]

It is important to note that the Sheikh initiated the proceedings before the High Court because he saw this as a land grab in the center of Jerusalem. The Court immediately ordered mediation between the parties to be conducted by former court president Meir Shamgar. Our Center was very sensitive to the issue and offered numerous compromises, but they were all rejected out-of-hand by Sheikh Salah, who refused to even meet to discuss them. He insisted that the Court rule on the matter.

Now, after over two years in the Courts, the Supreme Court has handed down a 119-page unanimous verdict in favor of the Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem. Sheikh Salah and his defenders, who eagerly sought the Court's relief, are now agitating against its decision because they lost.

It is not those who lie beneath the ground who threaten the stability of the Middle East. It is the intolerance of extremists above the ground and those with an agenda who impede any prospects for civility and respect.

[...]

Via Brad A. Greenberg at the Jewish Journal's God Blog.

Background here.

THE VIEW FROM MY WINDOW:



That's the Hilton on the left and the domed building is the Christian Science Center.

THE LEUVEN DATABASE OF ANCIENT BOOKS came up today in the discussion after Craig Evans's paper "A Preliminary Survey of Christian Literature Found in Oxyrhynchus." Here the About entry for the site:

The present database attempts to collect the basic information on all ancient literary texts, as opposed to documents. At present, it includes 12669 items, dating from the fourth century B.C. to A.D. 800 and incorporating authors from Homer (8th cent. B.C.) to Romanus Melodus and Gregorius the Great (6th cent. A.D.), including 3671 texts of which the author can no longer be identified (to find an empty field, type "=" (without the quotes) in the field authorname).

Text editions by classical philologists and patristic scholars are usually based upon medieval manuscripts, dating many centuries after the work in question was first written down and transmitted by copies from copies from copies. Here the user will find the oldest preserved copies of each text. At the same time he will get a view of the reception of ancient literature throughout the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine period: which author was read when, where and by whom throughout Antiquity.

The term "books" is used in the same wide sense as in the catalogues of Mertens-Pack and Van Haelst, for "texts that were intended to reach the eyes of a reading public or at least possessed a more than ephemeral interest or usefulness". Therefore we have excluded documents quoting some line of Homer (e.g. Pack2 399, 471, Van Haelst 1191), but also oracle questions (e.g. Pack2 2492-2493, Van Haelst 954, 958) and horoscopes, which we consider documentary texts. As we are interested in books, we do not include references to inscriptions (e.g. Pack 2960, 2490; Van Haelst 53, 111, 792-818). Magical texts on gold, lead, bronze etc. (e.g. Van Haelst 184-191) are not incorporated, because their aim is purely practical. But magical texts based on handbooks will be found, even though the dividing line is often subjective.

Our interest being in books, not in the study of literature, we have grouped multiple texts on a single roll if they were intended as parts of one book . This is especially the case for anthologies, which are split up in Pack among the different authors (e.g. Pack2 0031 + 0401 + 1319 + 1320 are grouped as LDAB 1048). We keep two entries, however, when a literary papyrus is reused for another literary text, and also in the case of composite codices, when the different works were originally written on individual quires (LDAB 107760, 17904, 107905).

Looks very useful.

THE BABYLON EXHIBITION at the British Museum is reviewed by Boyd Tonkin in the Independent. Excerpt:

Thanks to a soundtrack, sometimes the tablets speak to us of kings, dreams and battles. This mid-sized exhibition never claims blockbuster status. So the great intellectual adventures that led to our detailed knowledge of life in Babylon – the excavations by Robert Koldewey in the 1900s, or the decipherment of cuneiform by Henry Rawlinson – get slightly short shrift in these displays. Frustrated visitors might want to invest in the superb book, edited by Irving Finkel and Michael Seymour. It fills in the gaps.

Sin and doom hogs the limelight. Whether this works depends on the standard of "legacy" material. We get drippy Victorian paintings of the Jewish exile, while Rembrandt's Belshazzar's Feast has not made it up the road from the National Gallery. A collection of music inspired by Babylon, from Verdi's Nabucco through the inevitable Bob Marley and down to Boney M, looks like the fruit of a Google trawl. Modern art prompted by images of the Tower of Babel – especially by Pieter Bruegel's crumbling helter-skelter – shines brighter, in the eerie digital city of Julee Holcombe's Babel Revisited or MC Escher's never-to-be-finished skyscraper.

Again, I wanted a show that invites analogies between ancient and modern to go the whole Babylonian hog. Burning and collapsing towers, a panic-stricken city, rumours of a vile oriental despot: this show's processional way leads the mind inexorably back to Saddam and Bush.

Background here.

RESURRECTING HEBREW (Nextbook. 219 pp. $21) by Ilan Stavans is reviewed in the Washington Post by Yehudah Mirsky. The review opens with a nice example:

In the Bible, the Book of Ezekiel begins with the heavens opening to reveal a stunning vision of God. Above the angels, astride a throne, like a fire encased in a frame, the prophet sees a kind of "hashmal."

This word is unique to Ezekiel's vision; in the entire Hebrew scriptures, it appears only there. Its exact meaning is uncertain, but the Talmud -- the vast compilation of Jewish law, lore and interpretation from the first centuries of the Common Era -- offers a powerful etymology: It comes from the phrase "Creatures of fire . . . keep their silence [Hebrew: HASHot] and murmur [u-meMALelot]." Thus, tradition holds that the mysterious hashmal is the aura surrounding the heavenly throne, woven from the breaths of angels, so sacred as scarcely to be audible, even to God.
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Yet on the streets of Israel today, hashmal is everywhere. As any child can tell you, it means "electricity."

More on the Hashmal here.

THE FIRE GOSPEL by Michel Faber is reviewed by Ed Lake in the Independent. Excerpt:

You'll have guessed by now that this is satire of the broadest sort. Faber's signature preoccupation with extreme grottiness, established in The Crimson Petal and the White (think Jane Eyre rewritten by William Vollmann) remains intact: The Fire Gospel's brief duration is fit to burst with seedy dwellings, open wounds and post-coital slumps. But alas, The Crimson Petal's imaginative suppleness and care haven't fared nearly so well.

Indeed, the present novel feels like hack work, dashed off. Its title notwithstanding, a parade of religious weirdos and some rote digs at the publishing industry do not an inspired text make. Nothing – except perhaps the Amazon pastiche, cheap shot though it is – feels closely observed or passionately invested. And, as it happens, the piece was commissioned as part of Canongate's otherwise surprisingly decent Myths series, so perhaps Faber didn't feel he had quite the free hand he would have liked.

Background here.

FROM THE BOOK DISPLAY:

Albert Pietersma and Benjamin G. Wright, A New English Translation of the Septuagint (OUP, 2008)

I picked up a copy of this yesterday. This new publication makes the Septuagint available in an accurate, readable translation to a wide audience. Those who have no Greek can now find out what it says, and even those who know Greek well will find it helpful to be able to read long stretches of the text in English to get a ready feel for a book or an extended passage. Thanks to this translation it's now much easier to treat the Septuagint not just as a translation of the Hebrew Bible, but also as a collection of literary works from Second Temple times. Well done!

Background here.

THE NEW ZINCIRLI INSCRIPTION is covered by Archaeology Magazine, with nice photos and lots of new background on the excavation and the discovery:

Insight into the Soul

November 19, 2008
by Eti Bonn-Muller

An inscribed stele from Zincirli, Turkey, illuminates Iron Age beliefs about the afterlife

An eighth-century B.C. funerary stele unearthed this summer at the site of Zincirli in southeastern Turkey, known in ancient times as Sam'al, is providing rare insight into Iron Age concepts of the soul. Archaeologists from the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute recently announced a translation of the monument's 13-line inscription, which is emblazoned beside a depiction of the deceased, a high official named Kuttamuwa.

[...]

When graduate students from the University of Chicago, led by Virginia Rimmer, the excavation area supervisor, first uncovered the monument's rounded top, they noticed vertical lines incised across it. "They wondered if that was writing so they started looking at these scratches, trying to figure them out," Schloen says. The lines, it turns out, were from modern plows. The stele lay fewer than eight inches below the surface of a wheat field that had been farmed for generations.

A workman carefully exposed the object further and next saw its rounded back, which the archaeologists thought might be a grindstone. But when the workman saw the top line of clear writing, he called Rimmer over right away. Working in the area were two graduate students specializing in Northwest Semitic philology, Samuel Boyd and Benjamin Thomas, who had just taken a course in exactly the kind of inscription and dialect on the stele. "None of the rest of us were experts on this particular script," says Schloen. "They translated it on the spot!"

[...]

Those were some lucky graduate students!

By the way, kudos to the excavator and epigrapher for making the stele, including good photographs, available so quickly and in advance of the official publication.

(Heads up, reader Chip Hardy.)

MORE ON KHIRBET QEIFAYA and its proposed identification with the biblical Sha'arayim:

Biblical City Where David Battled Goliath Found?
Mati Milstein in Tel Aviv
for National Geographic News
November 21, 2008

The remains of an ancient gate has pinpointed the location of the biblical city Sha'arayim, say archaeologists working in Israel.

In the Bible, young King David is described as battling Goliath in the city, before eventually killing him in the Elah Valley.

The fortified gate at the Elah Fortress—the second to be found at the site—proves the existence of Sha'arayim, which means "two gates" in Hebrew, said Hebrew University archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel.

"All the sites from this period uncovered so far had only one gate. We have two gates and this is very unusual," Garfinkel said.

The gate, constructed of stones weighing up to ten tons, is located on the site's eastern side, facing Jerusalem.

[...]

Evidence of King David

The discovery is the second recent find to be made at the Elah Fortress—known as Khirbet Qeiyafa in Arabic—which is located near the present-day Israeli city of Bet Shemesh.

In October, Garfinkel revealed a 3,000-year-old pottery shard with text believed to be Hebrew—then hailed as the most important archaeological discovery in Israel since the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Initial carbon-14 dating of olive pits found at the site, as well as analysis of pottery remains, placed the text to between 1000 and 975 B.C.—the time King David would have lived.

[...]

The article concludes:

Garfinkel said he will continue to explore the Elah site in search of further evidence.

"Maybe we'll find an inscription on the gate indicating who built the city: 'I David, son of Yishai, built this city,'" he said with a laugh.

Or something. Wouldn't that just be nice?

Background here.

ARAMAIC WATCH: It doesn't give the last words of Joseph of Arimathea, but there's a British ancient Aramaic inscription from Hadrian's Wall. Robin Yassin-Kassab has the story in "On the Empire's Edge" at the UAE National:

Walking out along the wall stirred the imagination: I was walking in the steps of ancient Syrians. A tombstone found at Housesteads depicts an archer armed with an oriental-style recurved bow. Texts found elsewhere show that a cohort of 500 bowmen from the Syrian city of Hama served in Britain, and spent some of their time on the wall, perhaps shooting game for the garrison to eat.

To me, this was of more than academic interest. We moved only recently to this area from Oman, and we still lack a sense of belonging. Castle Douglas, our damp little town, seems very monocultural, and my family, being multicultural – my wife is Syrian, from Damascus and perhaps originally Palmyra, and I am an Anglo-Syrian mix – seem correspondingly out of place. Yet all those centuries ago there had been Syrians here, and north Africans, and Europeans of all descriptions. I wanted to learn more, so after crisps and coffee at the cafe we drove on to visit the Roman ruins at Corbridge, where Barathes died.

Before my grandfather died he told me that a Syrian soldier was buried on the wall. Clutching at straws in my Scottish isolation, I trawled the internet for information on this lost countryman. I didn’t find a soldier but Barathes, an itinerant Syrian merchant, entombed just south of the wall in Corbridge. My wife was particularly pleased with my discovery, for Barathes was, like her, originally from Palmyra. The presence of a Palmyran at this northern fort means the Syrian archers were not alone; there were Syrian businessmen and even Syrian religious officials in Roman Britain. An altar dedicated to Syrian goddesses has been excavated at Catterick in Yorkshire, bearing the inscription: “For the Goddesses of the city of Hama, Sabinus has made this.” And in some strange way in cold Castle Douglas, Barathes’s proximity made us feel that we too were not alone.

It took half an hour to get from Housesteads to Corbridge. The old Stanegate road used to end here, at the fort built in AD79 when Emperor Agricola was campaigning into Scotland. But Corbridge was more town than fort; there were temples, markets and an aqueduct as well as a barracks.

And Barathes the Palmyran would have been here for trade, even if his white hair (he was 68 when he died – a venerable age in Roman times) qualified him for a restful retirement. He was a trader of ensigns, a flag salesman, and apparently a wealthy man. A fragment of his gravestone, enough to tell his name, age, origin and occupation, was found recycled as building material in the wall of a nearby house. Today it’s on show in Corbridge’s museum.

I pitied this lonely Arab who had so narrowly escaped historical oblivion. What must it have been like for Levantine men to work at what was then the remotest edge of the earth? Although Phoenicians from Carthage (in modern Tunisia) had come to buy British tin in the fourth century BC, until the Roman invasion many in the ancient world refused to believe that the misty isles of the far north-west even existed. I remembered standing on the wall beyond Housesteads, looking into the raw, dark moorscape of crag and rock and black water, and feeling to my bones how the British frontier was a bad luck posting. The kind of fabled land a Syrian would have used to scare his children into obedience. Finish your soup or we’ll send you to northern Britain!

After exploring the ruins we sat in a cafe in modern Corbridge and looked through the window onto the elegant village houses, wondering how many chunks of Roman masonry had gone into their construction. As I drank my soup (tomato, and tasty) I read the Corbridge guidebook, and learnt there had been more to Barathes’s old age than icy winds. He had commissioned the tombstone of a British woman called Regina, who was buried at Arbeia, the easternmost fort on the wall. This was too good to be true: I had to visit Arbeia.

[...]

And here, overlooking the mouth of the Tyne, stood Arbeia. The low, bare ruins of the fort are bordered by redbrick terraced houses and a school. There is an impressively reconstructed Roman gateway, and down the road a little is a view of the sea. The name Arbeia means ‘place of the Arabs’. In the site museum I was surprised to discover that these Arabs weren’t Syrian but Iraqi – “boatmen of the Tigris” to be precise. In a strange historical reversal, Iraqis serving a global empire once helped to police North Sea shipping, as the British Navy patrols the Shatt al-Arab today. The Iraqis were in charge of sea supplies for the garrisons stationed on Hadrian’s Wall. The Semitic goddess Astarte (or Ishtar) was worshipped here, beside the gods of Spanish soldiers. There was even a maghrebi presence: the museum contains the tomb of 20-year-old Victor, a freed slave “of the Moorish nation.”

But it was Regina’s story that crowned the visit. At a very young age Regina became a slave, and at some point she was purchased by Barathes. Later he declared her a freedwoman, and then married her. Regina died at the age of 30, and her grieving Palmyran husband spared no expense on her tombstone. She is sculpted holding her spinning and a jewellery box, and wearing a Romano-British dress. As well as the Latin, there is an inscription in Aramaic, the language of Barathes which is still spoken in a few Syrian villages today. It reads, simply and poignantly: “Regina, the freedwoman of Barathes, alas.” The tombstone is in fine condition except for Regina’s head, which has fallen away; she has a name and a sketchy biography, but no face.

[...]

My emphasis. I knew of Barathes and Regina from the Minimus books, but I didn't know about the Aramaic inscription. Cool.

The Arbeia website is here. It reports that the Aramaic (Palmyrene) inscription reads RGYN BT HRY T HBL.

More on Hadrian's Wall here.

GOOD ADVICE from Mark Goodacre on Enjoying SBL, even though I shall doubtless once again ignore the part about burning the candle at both ends. But maybe I'll redeem myself with an afternoon nap from time to time.

Perhaps this is also a good time to mention my advice on How to Read a Scholarly Paper from several years ago.

I've been awake since 3:00 am, but had a good night's sleep after a couple of very long days. I'm planning to spend today shopping and sightseeing and to attend the PSCO session tonight.

Meanwhile, the gym opens at 6:00.