ANCIENT ORIGINS: The Terrifying Doomsday Prophecy of the Tiburtine Sibyl (NATALIA KLIMCZAK). A pretty good essay on the ancient sibylline traditions, but it could be a little more lucid in places. As it says, the Sibyl was a legendary pagan Greek prophetess (or prophetesses). She was co-opted and multiplied by the Romans, still pagan, then adopted as a prophetess in Jewish tradition, then in turn by Christians. There are many ancient books of Sibylline Oracles, but these are all written by Jews or Christians. Nothing remains of the original Roman Sibylline Oracles except the odd quotation.
One important omission in this essay is information on where to read the various books of Sibylline Oracles in English translation. The bulk of them was translated with introduction by John Collins in volume one of Charlesworth's Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (Doubleday, 1983). (I don't have the page numbers handy.) The Tiburtine Sibyl has been translated into English with introduction recently by Rieuwerd Buitenwerf in volume one of Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures (ed. Bauckham, Davila, and Panayotov; Eerdmans, 2013), pp. 176-88. And another translation of the same work, this one by Stephen Shoemaker, is coming out in August of 2016 in volume one of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures (ed. Tony Burke and Brent Landau). Enjoy.
Saturday, January 02, 2016
The Cotton Genesis on display at the BM
HIGHLIGHT FROM EGYPT: FAITH AFTER THE PHARAOHS: Abraham and the Angels: The Cotton Genesis at the British Museum (British Library Medieval manuscripts blog).
The miniature of Abraham and the angels from the Cotton Genesis is one of the first items on display in the exhibition Egypt: faith after the pharaohs currently taking place at the British Museum. The Cotton Genesis is a landmark in the history of biblical illustration. Produced probably in Egypt during the 5th or 6th century, it contains a copy of the Book of Genesis written in Greek. This extensively illuminated codex once contained a sequence of over 300 illustrations, but tragically it was severely damaged in the fire of 1731 at Ashburnham House, where it was stored together with the rest of the library of Sir Robert Cotton. In the fierce heat of the fire, the parchment leaves shrank and were partly burned or charred. Despite its poor state of preservation, the Cotton Genesis remains an exceptional witness of early biblical illustration and of the highly accomplished technique of late antique book painting.Background on the exhibition is here and links.
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Journal of Late Antiquity 8.2 (2015)
THE JOURNAL OF LATE ANTIQUITY has a new issue out (8.2, 2015) devoted to Religion, Medicine, Disability, and Health in Late Antiquity. A couple of the articles deal with rabbinic Judaism.
The circumcision of Jesus
ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: On the Eighth Day of Christmas… (Andrew Jacobs).
And the eight days were fulfilled for circumcising him, and he was called by the name Jesus, which he was called by the angel before he was conceived in the womb. - Luke 2:21Somewhat related posts are here and here.
Since antiquity Christians have imagined Jesus as an infant, circumcised according to Jewish Law on the eighth day of his life: the paradigmatic mark of the Jewish covenant on the Christian savior's body. While modern Christians may derive an irenic interfaith message from this image, this sign had quite a different significance in the first Christian centuries.
[...]
Mor, Judean Hebrew
NEW BOOK FROM THE ACADEMY OF THE HEBREW LANGUAGE: Judean Hebrew: The Language of the Hebrew Documents from Judea Between the First and the Second Revolts, Uri Mor (in Hebrew).
HT the IOQS Facebook page.
HT the IOQS Facebook page.
Friday, January 01, 2016
Hillel and Shammai have their own streets
THE STREETS OF JERUSALEM: On Hillel Street (ELAINE ROSE GLICKMAN).
Some past posts on Hillel the Elder are here, here, here, and here.
Hillel Street veers off from King George Street, running near Mamilla Cemetery, Independence Park, and the pedestrian mall known as Ben Yehuda. But my favorite thing about Hillel Street is the fact that it runs parallel to – wait for it – Shammai.And so she does. As usual with these things, the rabbinic stories she re-tells about Hillel the Elder may often tell us more about the late antique rabbis and what they believed than correct details about the historical Hillel.
If this fact does not fill you with as much delight as it does me, that’s either because I need to get out more – or, to give myself the benefit of the doubt, perhaps because you have not been acquainted with the great stories of this sage. And just in case it’s the latter, please let me fill you in!
[...]
Some past posts on Hillel the Elder are here, here, here, and here.
Arava aqueduct
ARCHAEOLOGY: Roman Aqueduct Excavated in Arava Region. The discovery of an ancient aqueduct reinforces the theory that agriculture in the Arava dates back thousands of years. (JNi.Media).
An aqueduct which transported water into agricultural land was excavated at the “Biblical Tamar” site near Ein Hatzeva, a cooperative village in the central Arava valley. According to legend Tamar, which is mentioned as part of the southern border of the Promised Land, was built by King Solomon.
The ancient aqueduct is more than 1,000 years old, and it is possible that it was built as far back as the Roman period (63 BCE to 324 CE). It was discovered during archaeological excavations conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority at the Biblical Tamar site in the Arava in recent weeks. The aqueduct was initially uncovered during works by the Arava Drainage Authority to regulate the flow of the Hatzeva spring.
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Glimpses of Jesus Through the Johannine Lens
THE BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION:
“Glimpses of Jesus Through the Johannine Lens—An Introduction and Overview of John, Jesus, and History, Volume 3”
This essay is a slightly expanded version of Paul Anderson, Felix Just, and Tom Thatcher. eds. John, Jesus, and History, Vol. 3: Glimpses of Jesus Through the Johannine Lens, scheduled for publication early in 2016 by SBL Press.
See Also: The John, Jesus, and History Project-New Glimpses of Jesus and a Bi-Optic Hypothesis.
By Paul N. Anderson
George Fox University
https://georgefox.academia.edu/PaulAnderson
By Jaime Clark-Soles
Associate Professor of New Testament
Southern Methodist University
December 2015
Sanders, Paul: The Apostle’s Life, Letters, and Thought
JESUS CREED BLOG: The New Perspective is Now Complete (Scot McKnight).
What we needed from Sanders was something more than the last sections of P&PJ and more than we got in his little book on Paul in the Past Masters series. I’m happy to announce we have that book now. To use the words of my father in law, it’s a “ming” (his term for something big and heavy). It’s got to be connected to the Ming dynasty but I don’t find this meaning in urban dictionaries. Anyway, E.P. Sanders now has a book called Paul: The Apostle’s Life, Letters, and Thought (Fortress, 2015). The book was pressed between our two front doors on Christmas Eve Day so it is my Christmas present.
It’s 862 pages, but the font is unusually large (nice for this reader’s eyes) and there’s plenty of white space and, even more, Sanders has great prose — he is crystal clear. He doesn’t care about the old perspective, new perspective and apocalyptic Paul debate. He simply lays out what he thinks Paul means in all his (authentic) letters, paragraph by paragraph. Which is, as the title of his post suggests, the completion of the new perspective on Judaism by forging an interpretation of Paul.
Thursday, December 31, 2015
New Year's Eve
AS 2015 COMES TO AN END, PaleoJudaica has tallied up 1534 posts for the year, considerably more than any previous year since it began back in 2003. It has received something on the order of half a million page views in 2015. As usual, I will save my list of top posts of the year for the blogiversary notice in March.
I have been putting more effort into the blog and I hope you've been enjoying it. Thanks for visiting. I will do my best to keep up the pace and quality in the coming year.
I have been putting more effort into the blog and I hope you've been enjoying it. Thanks for visiting. I will do my best to keep up the pace and quality in the coming year.
A New Year's message from ...
ARCHANGEL METATRON WATCH: Getting Ready for the New Year: A message from Archangel Metatron.
Another 2015 Biblical Archaeology top ten
CHRISTIANITY TODAY: Biblical Archaeology’s Top Ten Discoveries of 2015. A glimpse at the important work that took place at excavations this year (Gordon Govier). This list overlaps considerably with the list published in Haaretz earlier this week, but is not quite the same and is more oriented to epigraphic discoveries. For the Haaretz list and background to the stories, see here. As for this one, background on the Horvat Kur mosaic is here and links; on the Davidic-era seal is here; on the Eshba'al (Ishba'al) seal from Khirbet Qeiyafa is here and links; on the new Lachish ostracon is here; and on the carbonized Leviticus scroll is here and links. I did not post on the Beit Shemesh idol head or the Iron Age gate at Gath.
Interview with Louis Feldman
THE JEWISH PRESS: On The Bookshelf (Elliot Resnick).
Professor Louis Feldman received his PhD from Harvard University in 1951 and recently retired after teaching Latin and Greek at Yeshiva University for close to 60 years. A proud Orthodox Jew, Feldman is considered the world’s expert on Josephus and is the author of such works as “Jew & Gentile in the Ancient World” and “Josephus’s Interpretation of the Bible.”The interview follows.
Tzoref, Selavan (eds.), Eshel, Exploring the Dead Sea Scrolls
NEW BOOK FROM VANDENHOECK AND RUPRECHT:
Shani Tzoref, Barnea Levi Selavan (Hg.), Hanan Eshel
Exploring the Dead Sea Scrolls
Archaeology and Literature of the Qumran Caves
1. Auflage 2015
314 Seiten with 9 fig. gebunden
ISBN 978-3-525-55096-0
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
Journal of Ancient Judaism. Supplements - Band 018
120,00 €
Bei Abnahme der Reihe: 110,00 €
Among the most prominent hallmarks of the late Prof. Hanan Eshel (1958–2010) were his generosity, passion, and integrative approach. The eighteen essays in this volume were selected by Prof. Eshel shortly before his untimely death, to be printed as a collection aimed at contextualizing the textual finds of the Dead Sea Scrolls within their archaeological settings and within the contours of contemporary scholarship.
The Qumran texts that stand at the center of these articles are correlated with archaeological and geographic information and with a variety of textual sources including epigraphic evidence and, especially, the Hebrew Bible, Josephus, and rabbinic texts. The essays are organized according to the provenance of the discovered material, with sections devoted to the Damascus Document and the scrolls from Caves 1, 3, 4, and 11, as well as a final more general chapter.
Half of the essays have been previously published in English, while the other half have been translated from Hebrew here for the first time. The book includes essays that have been co-authored with Esther Eshel, Shlomit Kendi-Harel, Zeev Safrai, and John Strugnell.
Wednesday, December 30, 2015
Was Eve made from Adam's penis-bone?
BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: The Adam and Eve Story: Eve Came From Where? Somehow I missed this one when it came out last September. It seems that Professor Ziony Zevit published an article then in Biblical Archaeology Review asking “Was Eve Made from Adam’s Rib—or His Baculum?” (i.e., his penis-bone - which human males do not have). At the moment I don't have access to the BAR article, which is behind a subscription wall, but the BHD article summarizes it. The case also seems to have been argued in his 2013 book, What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden? (Yale University Press). For some reason the BAR article and the theory seem suddenly to be getting a lot of attention in the media. The Daily Mail reports in detail and notes the predictable outrage the notion is receiving from some BAR readers. And in Haaretz, Elon Gilad expresses considerable skepticism. (As noted here, he has already done some research on the general subject.)
I haven't seen the full argument, so I won't offer a view. I will say, first, that it seems to depend on the assumption that a removal of Adam's rib would have been taken as a etiological change such that all men subsequently would have been missing a rib. That's a reasonable reading, but it is open to debate. The story could have assumed that a rib was removed from Adam without it having any effect on his descendants, in which case his odd number of ribs would not have been an exegetical problem. Second, as Gilad observes at the end of his article, it is not clear how closely ancient Israelites attended to details of skeletal anatomy. Details of human anatomy only began to be studied systematically by the Alexandrian anatomists. But I concede that counting up how many ribs people have seems like an obvious thing to do.
I haven't seen the full argument, so I won't offer a view. I will say, first, that it seems to depend on the assumption that a removal of Adam's rib would have been taken as a etiological change such that all men subsequently would have been missing a rib. That's a reasonable reading, but it is open to debate. The story could have assumed that a rib was removed from Adam without it having any effect on his descendants, in which case his odd number of ribs would not have been an exegetical problem. Second, as Gilad observes at the end of his article, it is not clear how closely ancient Israelites attended to details of skeletal anatomy. Details of human anatomy only began to be studied systematically by the Alexandrian anatomists. But I concede that counting up how many ribs people have seems like an obvious thing to do.
Divine Sonship Symposium
CONFERENCE REMINDER: Son of God: Divine Sonship in Jewish and Christian Antiquity - The St Andrews Symposium for Biblical and Early Christian Studies. Noted earlier here. The symposium takes place on 6-8 June 2016 St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews. Garrick Allen has posted a flier here at Academia.edu. The call for papers is open until 15 February and the Early Bird registration fee is available until 29 February. Follow the links for further particulars
Exhibition on John Dee's library
REMINDER: Scholar, courtier, magician: the lost library of John Dee. Coming soon: An exhibition exploring one of Tudor England's most extraordinary and enigmatic figures. 18 January - 29 July 2016. More information on this exhibition at the Royal College of Physicians, Regent's Park, London, is here. You will also find links there to other posts about John Dee and about my own research on his angelic séances in relation to ancient Jewish visionary traditions. Related post here.
Interview with James K. Aitken
WILLIAM ROSS: LXX SCHOLAR INTERVIEW: DR. JAMES K. AITKEN
Today I have the pleasure of posting an interview with my doctoral supervisor, James K. Aitken, as a part of my ongoing series of LXX Scholar Interviews. Jim is lecturer in Hebrew, Old Testament, and Second Temple Studies at the University of Cambridge (and currently taking doctoral students). We have been working together since October 2014 and I have benefited immensely from his supervision, despite the various logistical problems we’ve had in the meantime!The interview follows.
As you will read about below, Jim is also quite active in the Septuagint guild and has contributed several key publications in the last few years. He brings a unique set of interests and expertise to the field and is in the midst of producing work that will certainly generate significant discussion within both Septuagint and Second Temple scholarly circles.
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