Where are those Temple treasures?

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Where are the Temple treasures? (Is It the End of the World Blog: Jim Fletcher, Beliefnet). The short answer is that the Copper Scroll may have involved the treasures of Herod's Temple, but otherwise all we have are legends of dubious value about the subject. My publication of the first English translation of one of these, The Treatise of the Vessels (see that last link), seems to have made me something of a surprise authority on the matter. Or at least I still get letters and phone calls from people who are convinced that they know the answer to the question.

As far as I know, the most recent serious attempt to find that answer is Sean Kingsley's 2006 book God's Gold, on which more, here and links. I doubt that the Vatican has any of them. And the speculation that Alaric's tomb in Cosenza, Italy, holds a vast treasure that includes the Temple menorah remains speculation unless and until the tomb is actually found and excavated and it turns out to have a treasure and that treasure turns out to include the menorah. We'll see.

Postdoc on DSS scribes

UNIVERSITY OF GRONINGEN: ERC StG Postdoc Digital Palaeography and Scribal Culture of the Dead Sea Scrolls (216007).

Job description
This Postdoc subproject is embedded within a larger research programme titled The Hands that Wrote the Bible: Digital Palaeography and Scribal Culture of the Dead Sea Scrolls, funded by the European Research Council. The main objective of this interdisciplinary project is to shed new light on ancient Jewish scribal culture and the making of the Bible by investigating two aspects of the scrolls’ palaeography: the typological development of writing styles and writer identification. The combination of new C14 samples and the use of computational intelligence as quantitative methods in order to assess the development of handwriting styles and to identify individual scribes will be used to cluster manuscripts as products of scribal activity in order to profile scribal production and to determine a more precise location in time for their activity, focusing, from literary and cultural-historical perspectives, on the content and genres of the texts that scribes wrote and copied and on the scripts and languages that they used.

The goal of the Postdoc subproject is to describe the processes of and developments in three to four centuries of copying the biblical manuscripts found in the Judaean Desert in relation to palaeographic dating and writer identification. The major research question is how variant forms and editions of biblical manuscripts can be correlated to palaeographic dates, to identification of writers, as well as other variables such as scribal practices and different find-sites. Previous scholarship has explained textual variety in terms of chronological developments or sociological differences, or both, based on traditional palaeographical dates, or on models of a Qumran scribal practice, and generally on a smaller sample of manuscripts. On the basis of a database of all substantial biblical manuscripts from the Judaean Desert, the Postdoc researcher will select one more confined group of manuscripts (most probably either Deuteronomy or the Psalms), and qualitatively analyse the differences between the manuscripts as well as in relation to the authoritative text forms of the later traditions, in order to plot such variants against the developing time and the different find places and correlating these not only to traditional text-typologies of text, but also to occurrences of rewriting and so-called Fortschreibung, and to the various scribal practices.

The postdoc will work together with a PhD at the Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Engineering Institute (ALICE), headed by Prof Lambert Schomaker, with experts from the Center for Isotope Research at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, headed by Prof Hans van der Plicht, and with a PhD and student assistants at the Qumran Institute of the faculty.

Follow the link for further particulars. This post is advertised alongside this.

UPDATE (21 March): Somehow the first link above got mixed up and led to the PhD position for this project, not the postdoc. I have corrected the link. Sorry for the mixup.

Kolton-Fromm seminar, Investing (in) Jerusalem

AUDIO FILE:

PSCO Presentation: 21 January, 2016: Investing (in) Jerusalem
Naomi Koltun-Fromm (Haverford).

Seminar
Prof. Naomi Koltun-Fromm is Professor of Religion at Haverford College. She specializes in Late Ancient Jewish history, Jewish and Christian relations, religious polemics, comparative biblical exegesis, rabbinic culture and the Syriac speaking churches. She recently published a book, Hermeneutics of Holiness: Ancient Jewish and Christian Notions of Sexuality and Religious Community, which traces the nexus of sexuality and holiness from the biblical texts into the fourth-century rabbinic and patristic writings. Her present research focuses on the representation of Jerusalem in early Jewish, Christian and Muslim writings.

Wikipedia: ISAW

THE WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE ON The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World has been revised and updated.

Social memory and giant Jesus in the Gospel of Peter

REMNANT OF GIANTS: Pure Forms, the Giant Jesus, and Chris Keith on Social Memory. Evidently to be continued.

EABS Early Judaism CFP 2016

EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION OF BIBLICAL STUDIES: Early Judaism and Rabbinics Programme: Call for Papers – Lueven [Leuven] 2016 Content, Composition and Biblical Interpretation in Late Homiletic Midrash. Follow the link for details and contact information. And general information about the 2016 meeting of the EABS is here.

BNTC 2018

PLANNING WELL AHEAD: British New Testament Conference at St Mary’s in 2018 (Steve Walton). That is St Mary’s University, Twickenham. We at St Mary's College at the University of St Andrews did our bit back in 2013. The 2016 meeting will take place at the University of Chester.

I probably once knew where the 2017 BNTC is meeting, but I've forgotten and I can't find it online. If the organizers would like to drop me a note, I will update this post with the information.

I'm looking forward to the coming meetings. I never miss if I can help it.

Carobs, chocolate, and the Talmud

CONTINUING ON THIS WEEK'S THEME OF TREES: Carob or Chocolate: Tu B’shvat’s Trees? (Rabbi Debbie Prinz,Jewish Journal). Alas, chocolate is not found in the Talmud and cocoa trees did not and do not grow in ancient or modern Israel. But carobs are another matter:

The Talmud notes that carob pods alone nourished the poor Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa from Shabbat to Shabbat. (Ta’anit, 24b) The famous Honi Hamaagal story about planting for future generations centers on a carob plant. (Ta’anit, 23a). Carob’s appearance in other Middle Eastern based religions extends to Islam. During Ramadan carob juices are drunk. In addition, in Christian sources, the Book of Matthew (3:4) claims that John the Baptist ate carob in the desert, thus explaining its English denotation as St. John’s Bread. Perhaps this association puts carob on Easter and Lent menus.

As for Matthew 3:4, my understanding is that when it says John ate locusts, it means locusts. For my part I would be happier if it meant carobs. More on that here and here.

More on the holiday of Tu B'Shevat (coming this weekened) here.

The destruction of St. Elijah's Monastery and thoughts on ISIS

BUT ISIS DOESN'T CARE: World blasts ISIS for destroying oldest Christian monastery in Iraq (AP/Israel HaYom). And ISIS isn't going to care as long as "blast" continues to be used metaphorically.

This is a good time to remember that larger atrocities, such as ISIS's now codified practice of making captive Yazidi women into sex slaves, heavily outweigh the issue of antiquities. I focus on antiquities because that is what this blog is about.

This blog is not (generally) about advocating particular political or military solutions in world affairs, and I am not calling for more direct military intervention in the Middle East, although that is an option that those who make such decisions will need to consider. I don't envy them their job.

Meanwhile, I will continue to bear witness to and condemn what is happening in the Middle East.

Background here and links.

Research post with Lexicon of Greek Personal Names

FIXED-TERM JOB AT OXFORD:

Researcher (Lexicon of Greek Personal Names)

Faculty of Classics, Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St Giles’, Oxford

Grade 7: £30,738 - £37,768 p.a.

The Faculty of Classics is seeking to appoint a full-time researcher for the AHRC funded Lexicon of Greek Personal Names project, directed by Professor Robert Parker. The appointment will be for a fixed period of 3 years. The appointee will be a member of a research group which will prepare volume VI of the Lexicon, that covering names from the Roman provinces of Syria, Palaestina, Arabia, and areas further East. The special responsibility of the appointee will be for names attested in non-Greek sources; s/he will have excellent knowledge of at least one relevant ancient Semitic language and willingness to acquire competence in others, and a good knowledge of Ancient Greek and Latin and relevant modern languages. S/he will have, or be near completion of, a relevant PhD.

The deadline for applications is 18 February 2016. Follow the link for further particulars.

HT Briquel Chatonnet at the Hugoye list.

Tweeting Enochians

THE ENOCH SEMINAR IS NOW ON TWITTER.

Paul's polite bribe?

THE BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION:

The Collection for the Saints as a Polite Bribe: An Effort to Humanize Paul

Scholars have puzzled a great deal over this collection. One group understands it in analogy to the temple tax, which every Jew had to pay annually, while another group points out that with it the promise of the pilgrimage of the nations is fulfilled. Finally in 2002, inspired my pal Tom Hall, I have coined the phrase that the collection was “a polite bribe” on Paul’s part.

By Gerd Lüdemann
Emeritus Professor of the History and Literature of Early Christianity
Georg-August-University of Göttingen
Visiting Scholar at Vanderbilt University
Homepage: gerdluedemann.de
January 2016

Some palimpsests

GENIZA FRAGMENTS 70: The October 2015 issue of the Newsletter of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, Cambridge University Library has a number of interesting articles, notably "Palimpsests? There’s more than meets the eye..." by Melonie Schmierer-Lee. A palimpsest is a manuscript whose original writing has been erased and over-written with a new text. Careful scrutiny, these days often with the help of technology, can allow scholars to recover the erased text.

On a related note, AWOL pointed to the following earlier this month: Galen Syriac Palimpsest Digital Release at OPENN. More on that manuscript is here.

Some other posts on various palimpsests are here, here, here, here, and here. And this post discusses a forged palimpsest manuscript from the nineteenth century.

Word clouds in religion courses

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Using Word Clouds as Informal Assessment in Religion Courses (Shayna Sheinfeld). She gives examples from the Judaism and Christianity units in her Western Religious Traditions course.

Tu B'Shevat: the date palm in Israel, plus the seven fruits

IN HONOR OF TU B'SHEVAT, COMING THIS WEEKEND: The Disappearance and Return of the Date Palm (Jo Ann Gardner, The Forward). An interesting historical review. But it is short of specific literary references. Naturally, Methuselah receives a mention.

And there's also this, from the same author in The Forward: Why We Eat the 7 Fruits on Tu B’Shvat. The short answer is Deuteronomy 8:7-8.

UPDATE: Missing title now included. Sorry about that!

Satlow course on rabbinics

MICHAEL SATLOW, THIS SEMESTER: And the Other…. Syllabus for course on the Mishnah and Tosefta.

Schneerson Library update

PROGRESS? Putin believes situation around Schneerson Library improved considerably (Interfax Religion).

Moscow, January 20, Interfax - Russian President Vladimir Putin voiced hope that the Schneerson Library problem has ceased to be acute now.

Putin said at a meeting with representatives of the European Jewish Congress that the Schneerson Library, which is currently exhibited at the Tolerance Center in Moscow, has been an apple of discord with representatives of the U.S. community for some time.

"I hope that now when these books will become a heritage of all those who want to familiarize themselves with them, work in the scientific field, I believe that there already should not be such acuteness. To my mind, the situation has cardinally changed," Putin said.

[...]

Background here and here and links. I have following this story since early 2010. In 2013 the Russian President proposed the solution of moving the library to the European Tolerance Center in Moscow. It isn't yet clear, at least to me, how this is now going to play out.

ISIS destroys another ancient monastery

ISIS AND ANTIQUITIES WATCH: Satellite proves ISIS destroyed 1,500-year-old monastery. AP confirms with satellite imagery that St. Elijah's Monastery, built 590 CE, was 'pulverized' by jihadists in Mosul (Arutz Sheva)

Satellite photos on Wednesday confirmed the reports of activists from last August, revealing that Islamic State (ISIS) jihadists have demolished the nearly 1,500-year-old St. Elijah's Monastery near Mosul to rubble.

Associated Press asked satellite imagery firm DigitalGlobe this month to photograph St. Elijah's, the oldest Christian monastery in Iraq, and then compare the images with previous pictures from the same site.

The results, published by AP on Wednesday, reveal the monastery has indeed suffered the same fate as hundreds of ancient sites in Iraq and Syria, having been destroyed by ISIS jihadists.

[...]

Background on the assault of ISIS on the past and its caretakers is here with many links.

Inspired by Lilith

POETRY: Lilith Remains A Powerful Inspiration For Jewish Feminists (Julie R. Enszer, The Forward).

So I listened and listened. Lilith and the one hundred demons she births every night filled my mind and my notebook one summer with poems. I wrote the poems in the haze of early morning insomnia then revised them and shaped the book in conversation with other Jewish poets and scholars thinking about Lilith. Plaskow’s work was crucial in my thinking and reading. So was the work of Marge Piercy and her poetic midrash. The collection, “Which Lilith?: Feminist Writers Re-Create the World’s First Woman,” edited by Enid Dame, Lilly Rivlin, and Henny Wenkart, was an invaluable compendium for me of thinking about Lilith.

For the many past PaleoJudaica posts on Lilith, see here and links.

Talmudic dissertations and theses

THE TALMUD BLOG: DISSERTATIONS AND THESES, 2015.