The Princeton University Library is fortunate to have one of the largest collections of Ethiopic manuscripts outside Ethiopia, including nearly 180 codices and more than 500 magic scrolls, as they are called.One of them is a manuscript of 1 Enoch used by R. H. Charles in his 1893 edition.
St Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai: Its Manuscripts and their Conservation PAPERS GIVEN IN MEMORY OF PROFESSOR IHOR ŠEVČENKOAvailable from the Saint Catherine's Foundation website but not, apparently, from Amazon. While you're at the link, look to the right to see the Featured Manuscript of the Month link. So far two very interesting Syriac manuscripts from the Monastery are featured: Sinai Syriac 16 and Sinai Syriac 30.
For almost two decades Alter has pushed ahead, bringing out volumes of this translation with dizzying speed. In 1999 it was The David Story, a translation of the first books of Samuel, offering the powerful narrative of a Biblical anti-hero. In 2004 it was The Five Books of Moses; in 2007 The Book of Psalms; in 2009 The Book of Genesis. With hardly time to draw breath in 2010 he added The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes. And now comes this new title. Strong As Death is Love covering the books of Ruth, Esther, The Song of Songs, Jonah and Daniel. All the volumes carry as their sub-title A Translation with Commentary.Background on Professor Alter and his translation of the Hebrew Bible is here with many links.
And the role of the translator? In an interview Alter said, “I want to try to
convey in English what I think were the actual values and mind-sets of the ancient Hebrew writers, which is also, in the poetry, inseparable from the concreteness of their language and the compactness and rhythmic force of the poetry they wrote.”
There are many footnotes to a fascinating story like that of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the journey they embarked on is interesting from start to finish, but a particularly thoughtful note should be made of the years before the scrolls became so renowned. While their owner tried to drum up interest to sell them, four of the most crucial Dead Sea Scrolls spent five years locked in a safe, housed in the cellar of a quaint, tidy home on Worcester’s west side. From this home, in the shadow of Bancroft Tower, those four scrolls would prove to be just as ancient and intriguing as Samuel believed, and eventually captured world’s imagination.More on Mar Samuel is here and more on Kando is here and links.
A stunning trove of ancient jewellery has been found in the grave of a noble warrior woman dating back to the first century AD.Below is the photo of the seal. The caption reads "The female fighter was a Sarmatian, a people who worshipped fire and whose prominent role in warfare was seen as an inspiration for the Amazons of Greek mythology. A gem with a single-line Phoenician or early Aramaic inscription was found buried with her (pictured), placed on her chest."The female fighter was a Sarmatian - a group of people who worshipped fire and whose prominent role in warfare was seen as an inspiration for the Amazons of Greek mythology.
And the discovery of the intact burial mound in Russia has been described as 'priceless' by archaeologists.
The Sarmatians were nomadic people who migrating from central Asia to the Ural mountains between the 6th and 4th century BC.
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Next to her skull, gold earrings with pendant chains were found, while a bronze mirror was close to her shoulder.
'The collar of her dress was decorated with stamped buckles of gold leaf in the form of a stylised ram's head,' he said.
'Her sleeves were embroidered with colourful beads combined with gold triangular and hemispherical plaques.
'On each hand - a gold bracelet. On her breasts were various beads, among which was a gem with a single-line Phoenician or early Aramaic inscription. At her pelvis lay a gold vial.'
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This is a stone seal written in the Paleo-Hebrew script. As far as I know, this type of seal was only made between the eighth and fifth centuries BCE. (But my knowledge of the subject is not particularly up to date.) It is in one of the Northwest Semitic languages, but I don't know enough about the paleography of this period to identify whether it is Hebrew, Phoenician, Aramaic, Ammonite, Edomite, or Moabite. Someone who knows the scripts better than I do could probably discern the national origin of this one and its date to within a century or so.
The letters are inscribed backwards on the seal so that the mirror-image imprint it leaves will read in the right direction. This is normal for such objects. The first letter of the inscription was inscribed last and it looks squashed, probably because the stonemason miscalculated and didn't leave enough room for it. The seal reads לאלישב (l’lyšb), "belonging to Elyashiv." Elyashiv (Eliashib) is attested as a man's name in the Hebrew Bible in Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther, and on at least a couple of 7th-century BCE Hebrew seals. I can't find it in any of the other languages, but I haven't looked comprehensively and some of them may well have used it too.
The big question is, what was this turn-of-the-era Sarmatian woman in Russia doing with a Northwest Semitic seal from four to eight centuries before her time? The report is that it was scientifically excavated, so forgery or salting seem exceedingly unlikely. I guess it could have been a family heirloom. It certainly raises other questions about trade between Eastern Europe and the Middle East from the late Iron Age to the Hellenistic period. Assuming this report is accurate in its particulars, this is an extraordinary discovery and I think we shall be hearing more about it.
UPDATE (19 August): More here.
By betting on “Alphabet,” Google is relying on a word that we all learn as children but has only existed in English for about five centuries. In Old English, if you wanted to refer to the alphabet, you would use a word formed from the first four letters: “a-be-ce-de.” In Middle English this was shortened to “a-be-ce,” or as we would now spell it, “ABC.”I think the name "Google" is more clever, but we'll see.
Around 1500, when classical scholarship was all the rage, English borrowed the Latin “alphabetum,” which in turn came from the Greek “alphabetos,” derived from the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, “alpha” and “beta.”
Those names can trace their lineage back to the ancient Phoenician writing system. The “alpha” equivalent was shaped like a cow’s head, named after the Phoenician word for “ox.” Similarly, “beta” meant “house” and was shaped like one. In the alphabetic system, those characters came to stand for the initial sounds of the pictured words.
SAN DIEGO — A highlight of my recent trip to China was in Xian, once the largest city in the ancient world and capital of China throughout 11 dynasties. After arriving by bullet train from Beijing, we had dinner at a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant and spent the evening listening to three speakers whose subject was the Chinese Jews of Kaifeng, a city on our original itinerary, but cancelled due to security reasons.I would take that 220 BCE arrival date with a grain of salt, but the Jewish community in Kaifeng does seem to have been there by around 900 CE and it still exists today. Ms. Wingard heard a lecture by one of its leaders when she was in Xian. Past posts on the Jews of Kaifeng are here, here, and here. And there's more on that Chinese Judeo-Persian text here.
Professor Xu Xin , China’s leading scholar on the Jews of China, as well as the founder and director of the Diane and Guilford Glazer Institute for Jewish and Israel Studies at Nanjing University, gave us an overview of the history of the Jewish community of Kaifeng. Although historians may differ on the exact beginning of Jewish immigration to China, some dating the first arrival of Jews as far back as 220 BCE, what is definitely known is that during the Tang Dynasty, 618-906 CE, a poem and other records confirm the presence of Jews. Also, it is known that the Jews came on the Silk Road as traders.
In fact, a document, written on paper in a Judeo-Persian language, using Hebrew characters, was found on the Chinese-Tibet border. At that time, paper was only produced in China, so the Jewish trader had obviously been to China. These were Mizrahi Jews from Persia and Babylon. Some may also have come from India. Keifeng was then the major metropolis at the beginning of the Silk Road.
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In early July, an ancient mikveh, a ritual bath in which observant Jews dip to purify themselves, was discovered in the pastoral Jerusalem neighborhood of Ein Karem. The 2,000-year-old mikveh, which would have been filled with rainwater, was found during renovation work on a home in the neighborhood. It was well preserved, down to some stone and clay tools on the pool floor, and probably served its owners at the time of the Second Temple. The unearthing of the mikveh strengthens the evidence of a Jewish link to ancient Ein Karem, the Arab-Palestinian and Christian links having already been established.I noted the discovery here back in early July. This article doesn't add a great deal, apart from the mention of the 2004 discovery and the brief interview with the owners of the house. But it did not register with me at the time that the find was in the neighborhood of Ein Karem (Ein Kerem). Back in 2011 this area was in the news concerning a controvery over the handling of Second Temple-era architecture at a building site. And some shadowy rumors involving treasure from the Copper Scroll were also involved. See here and here for the story.
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Archaeological evidence of the Jewish connection to Ein Karem has only been found in recent years, beginning with the 2004 discovery of a mikveh in the village. Amirav had found a cistern in the John the Baptist Church that turned out to be a purification bath. That discovery drew international attention and was the first evidence of a Jewish link to ancient Ein Karem, a connection that until then had only been cited in texts.
Now a second mikveh, large and impressive, has been found. “We were very excited by this discovery,” said Uriyah, a poet who lives with her partner, Tal, and their six children in the house where the mikveh was found. Requesting that her full name not be divulged to avoid droves of curious tourists, she told Al-Monitor, “This connected me very much to our Jewish heritage. For us, every descent into the space of the mikveh is a kind of descent through the tunnel of time.”
Tal, on the other hand, is unmoved by the Jewish aspect of the finding. “Religion doesn’t mean anything to me,” he said. “There’s an archeological find here, and that’s what’s important.”
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It’s been nearly two millennia since the Second Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, bringing to an end the priestly period of Jewish history and commencing the Diaspora.That's close to $20,000 raised in the last four weeks. Additional background on the project can be found here and links.
A third Temple has been prophesied, and in preparation for the messiah, nonprofit Jewish group The Temple Institute wants to build it.
Last month, the institute launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo with the goal of raising $125,000 to breed a red heifer, a requirement for Temple purification rituals. It has already raised nearly $33,000 from some 500 donors.
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In her first book, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (with Michael Cook, 1977), Professor Crone drew on archaeological discoveries and contemporary Aramaic, Armenian, Greek and Syriac sources to cast a critical light on traditional Muslim accounts of the origins of the religion. This led to a view of early Islam as a form of tribal rebellion, deeply linked to Judaism, against the surrounding Byzantine and Persian empires – a controversial interpretation which has been debated and developed ever since.Background here. And some other recent indications that our understanding of the earliest history of Islam may be due for revision are noted here and links.
A 2,000 year-old mikveh, discovered recently during construction work done on a new children's playground in Jerusalem, gave us a rare peek into the Second Temple era (1st century AD). But the many archeological sites scattered around Israel aren't just the purview of historians and archeologists – they hide within them a chance for the public at large to explore the past and get a glimpse of what life was like in the land of Israel hundreds, and even thousands, of years ago.This is a more creative list and most people will not be familiar with many of the sites, but they all sound interesting.
The guides at Keshet Yonatan, a center dedicated to educating the public about historical travel in Israel, in cooperation with the Eshkolot forum, have gathered a list of archeological sites open to the public. Family, groups, and individuals can all take trips to these sites.
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In the Jewish religious imagination, blame for what is actually the primordial “curse” is often placed squarely on Eve. Eve is seen as responsible for all of the unpleasantness of the reproductive process: menstruation and childbirth included.Is this really true? Eve is not mentioned outside of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. Christianity certainly makes much of this curse and Eve's part in it in Christian interpretation of the "Fall" of humanity (see already 1 Timothy 2:11-15), but I am not familiar with ancient Jewish texts that explicitly blame Eve for the unpleasantness of things like menstruation and childbirth. There is, of course Life of Adam and Eve 33-35 and Apocalypse of Moses 25, but I do not accept these Adam and Eve pseudepigrapha to be Jewish works and in this I am in good company. I am not saying that Professor Moss is wrong, but I know of no such ancient and persuasively Jewish texts and I would like to see specifics. Anyhow, to continue:
In the ritual regulations that make up the book of Leviticus, menstrual blood turns out to be something of a problem. According to the book’s priestly author, menstruation is a cause of ritual impurity. Not only is a menstruating woman impure for seven days, but anyone who touches her is unclean “until the evening” (Lev. 15:19). Sex is squarely out of the question (unless you want to bring seven days of impurity on yourself) and, in the meantime, everything she sits or lies on also becomes unclean. The impurity associated with menstruation—much like the impurity associated with skin diseases or emissions of semen—was communicable through touch.
The prohibition on contact with menstruating women is not found only in Judaism. The Koran prohibits intercourse during menses (2:222) and the Hindu Laws of Manu indicate that a woman becomes purified from menstruation when she bathes at the conclusion of her period (6:66). Bathing post-period appears to have been the cross-cultural cure-all, but until menses were over women were contagious. Until 2005, Hindu women in Nepal were forced to live in cow-sheds during their period. To this day some traditional members of Orthodox Christianity abstain from receiving Holy Communion during menstruation.
But this is about more than either cleanliness or ritual purity. The idea that menstrual blood poses a health risk is evident in a variety of cultures. The ancient Jewish collection of rabbinic opinions known as the Talmud reads, “If a menstruant woman passes between two [men], if it is at the beginning of her menses, she will slay one of them, and if it is at the end of her menses, she will cause strife between them” (b. Pesaḥ. 111a). Watch out, Chris Wallace and Brett Baier.
Pilgrims heading to Philadelphia for the World Meeting of Families and papal visit will have a chance to see fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls and other rare biblical artifacts dating back hundreds of years at an exhibit at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.The following are among the items to be displayed:
The display, Verbum Domini II: God's Word Goes Out to the Nations, will be free to the public and available at the Convention Center from Sept. 21 through Sept. 26, which is the day Pope Francis is set to arrive in Philadelphia.
The exhibit showcases more than 80 items from one of the world's largest private collections of rare biblical texts and artifacts, which are a part of the Museum of the Bible's Green Collection and were originally shown at the Vatican, according to World Meeting of Families organizers.
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More on the Bodmer Psalms Codex is here. More on the Codex Climaci Rescriptus is here and links. And follow the links in those posts for more on the Green Collection. Another museum exhibition of Bible-related artifacts opening in Philadephia, also in honor of the Pope's visit, is noted here.
- Fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls
- Five pages from the Bodmer Psalms Codex, a near-complete copy of the book of Psalms in Greek on papyrus from the third to fourth century CE
- Pages from the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, which contains Christian texts from the sixth to eighth century