Visotzky, "How the Rabbis Adapted Roman Culture to Create Judaism as We Know It"

THE BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION:

How the Rabbis Adapted Roman Culture to Create Judaism as We Know It

In antiquity, as today, synagogue architecture followed local custom. This was true for the adoption of the Greco-Roman public building, the basilica, as the standard form for ancient synagogues. Roman buildings, churches, and synagogues might be indistinguishable from one another but for the dedicatory inscriptions and art that archeologists find within them. One may safely assume that the same architects, artisans, and contractors built all of these buildings with but minor modifications depending upon which community was paying their bills.

See Also: Aphrodite and the Rabbis: How the Jews Adapted Roman Culture to Create Judaism as We Know It (St. Martin’s Press, 2016).

By Burton L. Visotzky
Appleman Professor of Midrash and Interreligious Studies
Jewish Theological Seminary
www.burtonvisotzky.com
January, 2017

There's more on Professor Visotzky's new book here.

More destruction at Palmyra

PALMYRA WATCH: IS carrying out new demolitions at Palmyra — antiquities chie. Maamoun Abdulkarim says jihadist group damaged amphitheater, destroyed 16-columned structure in ancient city (AFP). Here we go again.

Background on Palmyra, its history, the ancient Aramaic dialect spoken there (Palmyrene), and the city's tragic recent fate, now a second time, in the hands of ISIS is here with many, many links.

Inaugural Apocrypha

OLD TESTAMENT APOCRYPHA WATCH: Trump Inauguration’s Bible Reading Is Not in Your Bible. Why it's good for Protestants to hear from the Apocrypha (David deSilva, Christianity Today).

When Cardinal Timothy Dolan moved to the podium to pray at President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration, his prayer may have struck you as oddly familiar.

The passage he prayed from is very similar to Solomon’s prayer for wisdom in 1 Kings 3. But, it’s not the version Protestant Christians know, because it’s not in the Bible that we read.

It comes, instead, from the Wisdom of Solomon, a book included in the Catholic and Orthodox churches’ Old Testament, but not included in Protestant churches’ Old Testament.

[...]

No reading from 1 Enoch this time. Maybe someday.

The Old Testament Apocrypha are (at least almost entirely) ancient Jewish texts, but they are not part of the Jewish biblical canon (or the Protestant one), although they are included in the Catholic and Orthodox canons. Professor deSilva focuses in this article on why they are important for Christians, which is appropriate for Christianity Today's audience. But the OT Apocrypha are also important for the history of Judaism. In fact, it happens that just yesterday I wrote up a lecture for my new course on Ancient Jewish Literature (DI4731) on what the Old Testament Apocrypha contribute to our knowledge of Second Temple Judaism. It's actually quite a bit.

Petra meets Google Cardboard?

AWOL: A virtual trek through Petra with Google Cardboard. I didn't know there was a thing called Google Cardboard. The twenty-first century is not proving easy to keep up with.

The Google Streetview tour of Petra was noted here in 2015. Cross-file under Nabatean (Nabataean) Watch. Some past PaleoJudaica posts on on the Nabateans and the ancient city of Petra are collected here and follow the many links.

Coptic epitaphs excavated in the Sudan

COPTIC WATCH: Massive Burial Ground Unearthed at Medieval Monastery in Sudan (Owen Jarus, Live Science).

Four cemeteries, from which at least 123 individuals have been excavated so far, have been unearthed near the remains of a medieval Christian monastery in Sudan. A few of the burials contained individuals buried in unusual ways.

The cemeteries and remains, which have been excavated over the past two years, are located at a monastery called al-Ghazali near the Nile River. The people who were buried there lived about 1,000 years ago, during a time when a series of Christian kingdoms flourished in the area, according to Robert Stark, a doctoral student at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who presented the findings this month in Toronto at the joint annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America and the Society for Classical Studies.

The discoveries include well-preserved burial shrouds that in a few instances still cover the skulls of the deceased, Stark said. The archaeologists also found tombstones with engravings of prayers that were written in Greek or Coptic (an Egyptian language that uses the Greek alphabet). In one cemetery, some people were buried in mysterious ways: For example, two individuals were found with post-mortem cut marks incised in their bones.

[...]

There are more photos at Live Science: In Photos: 1,000-Year-Old Cemeteries Unearthed in Sudan. Unfortunately, neither article has a photo of any of the inscriptions, but the first one does have some more information on the tombstones and their epitaphs.

Siloam Inscription to stay in Istanbul

EPIGRAPHY AND POLITICS: Despite detente, ancient Hebrew text ‘proving’ Jewish ties to Jerusalem set to stay in Istanbul. Netanyahu has hailed Siloam Inscription as evidence ‘etched in stone’ of Jews’ historic connection to holy city, but Israeli officials are not seeking its return (Ilan Ben Zion, Times of Israel).

Despite Netanyahu’s argument asserting the unparalleled significance of the inscription, Israel has made no overtures to secure its return or that of the other two ancient inscriptions held at the Istanbul museum.

Israeli diplomats in Turkey and Jerusalem said there were no communications with the Turkish government on that point, and a Netanyahu spokesman said there were no current efforts to pursue the repatriation of the inscriptions.

A Foreign Ministry spokesperson said that while Israel has repeatedly expressed interest in the repatriation of the Siloam inscription, the issue is not currently on the agenda.

Well, despite the messy political situation in Turkey, they're probably safe for now where they are. PaleoJudaica followed the unsuccessful effort to have the Siloam Inscription returned to Israel on loan in 2007 in posts here, here, here, here, and here. The other two inscriptions from Israel now in the Istanbul Museum are the Gezer Calendar (on which more here, here, and here) and the Temple Warning Inscription (on which more here - and here for a fragmentary copy in Israel).

Looting arrests at Horbat Mishkena

BUSTED: Caught red-handed: 11 grave robbers arrested at northern ruins. Authorities arrest 11 grave robbers in the process of robbing ruins of ancient Jewish town mentioned in the Talmud (Arutz Sheva).

A team of antiquities raiders was apprehended at Horbat Mishkena, an archaeological site of a Roman-era Jewish town near the Golani Junction in the Lower Galilee.

The team of thieves, which was comprised of eleven Arabs, was apprehended by a squad from the of Robbery Prevention Unit of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), acting in conjunction with the police and border guard volunteers.

The suspects were caught while digging illegally in the ancient shelter system and causing a great deal of damage to the site.

[...]

With video of the arrest. There were looting arrests near the same site just a little over a month ago.

De Gruyter open-access books 2016

AWOL: Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies - De Gruyter Open - Published in 2016. Some of them are of at least background interest for the study of ancient Judaism.

Lim on the Dead Sea Scrolls At Seventy

ANNIVERSARY: The Dead Sea Scrolls At Seventy (Professor Timothy Lim, Centre for the Study of Christian Origins Blog). An excellent brief summary of the scholarly state of the question on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the site of Khirbet Qumran in 2017.

Latest on the Aramean nation in Israel

MODERN ARAMAIC WATCH: Resurrecting a languishing language and culture (Brooke Conrad, The Hillsdale Collegian).

On Wednesday, the Israeli Knesset passed a bill allowing Aramaic Christians to register for free as their own ethnicity in Israel.

Previously, Aramaic Christians had to pay a cumbersome $400 to register in the Israeli state. But now, according to Shadi Khalloul, the founder of the Israeli Christian Aramaic Association, this bill not only makes it much easier for Aramaic Christians to register, but also will help the state of Israel to recognize the Aramaic Christian community as separate from their Arabic Muslim neighbors.

Khalloul belongs to a group of about 10,000 Maronite Christians who live in Israel. The Maronite Church dates back to A.D. 350 and was set apart largely because its members continued to speak Aramaic, which many believe to be the language of Jesus.

[...]

The official recognition of an Aramean nation by Israel in 2014 was noted here and here. Follow the links in the second post for more details about the constituent groups of this Aramean nation. For more on the Maronites specifically, see here and links.

Valmadonna Library acquired by Israel National Library

VALMADONNA LIBRARY UPDATE: National Library makes ‘historic’ acquisition of rare Hebrew texts. Valmadonna Trust Library’s manuscripts span the globe and a millenium, including a 1491 Bible; will be on display at institution’s new Jerusalem home (Ilan Ben Zion, Times of Israel).

Israel’s National Library on Wednesday announced the acquisition of thousands of Hebrew manuscripts and books from one of the most significant collections in the world.

The 8,000 or so texts from the Valmadonna Trust Library collection were purchased in collaboration with collectors David and Jemima Jeselsohn in a private sale through Sotheby’s for an undisclosed sum.

The Valmadonna’s 13,000-book assemblage of Hebrew texts from Amsterdam to Shanghai and a host of historic Jewish communities in between, spanning a millennium, was assembled by the late Jack V. Lunzer, a Jewish British industrialist. Lunzer died in December, at the age of 92.

[...]

This is good news. The acquisition will keep the library from being broken up any further to be sold piecemeal. Well done to the INL and to the Jeselsohns.

Background on the story is here and here and links. Past posts involving the Valmadonna Targum of Ruth are here and here, with more on the manuscript here. The Jeselsohns are also the owners of the Gabriel Revelation inscription (Vision of Gabriel).

The Journal for Late Antique Religion and Culture (update)

AWOL: Open Access Journal: The Journal for Late Antique Religion and Culture . There's not much directly about ancient Judaism in this journal, but there are articles on matters of background interest in late antique religion such as the Greek Magical Papyri, Syriac studies, Gnosticism, and Neoplatonism. Noted here in 2015, but there have been several new issues out since then.

Forness on Syriac homilies

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Dissertation Spotlight | Philip Michael Forness.

Philip Michael Forness, “Preaching and Religious Debate: Jacob of Serugh and the Promotion of His Christology in the Roman Near East,” Ph.D. diss., Princeton Theological Seminary, 2016.

Excerpt:

My dissertation, “Preaching and Religious Debate,” investigates homilies as a source for understanding social history. The sermons of John Chrysostom and Augustine of Hippo contain a wealth of information about the places and contexts in which they preached. But this sets them apart from most extant homilies. Indeed, the homilies falsely attributed to Chrysostom and Augustine far outnumber their authentic works. These works were often written in non-classical languages and feature in the literature of a wide variety of eastern Christian communities. Scholars have little hope of finding the context of any one of these pseudonymous homilies.

I seek to answer questions about the homiletical literature in general by focusing on these texts within Syriac literature. Syriac homilies from late antiquity provoke an exploration of the possibility of using sermons without a defined context as historical texts. Around seven hundred homilies authored in Syriac survive from the fourth through sixth centuries. Yet most have resisted efforts to identify their dates, locations, and liturgical settings. By attending to these texts, we are forced to confront the difficulty of interpreting the seemingly de-contextualized remains of most sermons from late antiquity.

Cross-file under Syriac Watch

Jesus exhibition at the Israel Museum

CONTEMPORARY ART: A Second Coming for Jesus — at the Israel Museum (Aviya Kushner, The Forward).

‘It turns out that all Israeli art is about Jesus,” an American tourist said to me as he moved away from a painting in The Israel Museum’s paradigm-shifting new exhibit titled “Behold the Man: Jesus in Israeli Art.” In Hebrew, the title is a bit different: Zeh Ha’Ish, or “This Is the Man.” Throughout the exhibit, language makes a difference; the wall text often diverges in subtle but important ways in Hebrew and English.

The world’s museums are full of portrayals of Jesus, but scenes of the Madonna and child, the crucifixion and the Last Supper are generally not thought of as Jewish subjects, or as the stuff of Jewish art. The Jesus narrative was used to invoke hatred of Jews for centuries; some Jews interpret the Hebrew name for Jesus, yeshu, as an acronym for y’mach sh’mo u’zichro, or let his name and memory be obliterated.

But in this groundbreaking and utterly fascinating exhibit, Jesus is certainly not obliterated; instead, Jesus is used to symbolize the suffering and powerlessness of Jews in the Holocaust; Palestinians in both intifadas; Mizrachi Jewish refugees housed in ma’abarot, or temporary camps, in 1950s Israel, after being expelled from Arab countries; the disabled in Israeli society; Israeli soldiers sent to die in war; and in one of the most haunting pieces, the personal suffering of a major Israeli artist who lost his wife in childbirth, and their daughter three years later, and who painted himself as Jesus and then locked the painting in a cabinet. The painting was found a year after the artist’s death.

[...]

AtHala

YONA SABAR: Hebrew Word of the Week: atHalah "inception, initiation; restart (computer)."

Solomon's mines at Timna

ARCHAEOLOGY: Preserved fortification, donkey stables dating to King Solomon discovered at TAU's Timna Valley excavations (Tel Aviv University/PhysOrg).

Some believe that the fabled mines of King Solomon were located among copper smelting camps in Israel's Timna Valley. The arid conditions at Timna have seen the astonishing preservation of 3,000-year-old organic materials, which have provided Tel Aviv University archaeologists with a unique window into the culture and practices of a sophisticated ancient society.

An advanced military fortification—a well-defined gatehouse complex—unearthed recently at Timna, including donkey stables, points to the community's highly-organized defense system and significant dependence on long-distance trade. The research was recently published in The Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

The fortification dates to the reigns of Kings David and Solomon in the 10th century BCE.

[...]

In the remarkably intact two-room fortification, located in one of the largest smelting camps in the Timna Valley, the researchers also found evidence of a complex long-distance trade system that probably included the northern Edomite plateau, the Mediterranean coastal plain and Judea. The complex featured pens for draught animals and other livestock. According to precise pollen, seed, and fauna analyses, they were fed with hay and grape pomace—high-quality sustenance that must have been delivered from the Mediterranean region hundreds of miles away.

"The gatehouse fortification was apparently a prominent landmark," says Dr. Ben-Yosef. "It had a cultic or symbolic function in addition to its defensive and administrative roles. The gatehouse was built of sturdy stone to defend against invasion. We found animal bones and dung piles so intact, we could analyze the food the animals were fed with precision. The food suggests special treatment and care, in accordance with the key role of the donkeys in the copper production and in trade in a logistically challenging region."

[...]

I'm keeping a special eye on the Timna excavation, because of the abundant organic remains that have been found there. The arid climate seems ideal for their preservation and the discoveries have included textiles from the 10th century BCE. If there is any place where Solomonic-era scrolls or papyri might have survived, it is Timna. Let's hope that we get lucky and some turn up.

Warlord and Scribe

ASSIMILATED TO THE BLOGOSPHERE: Warlord and Scribe: Northwest Semitics in Context. A new blog by Nathaniel E. Greene, who is a Ph.D. candidate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The opening post is Sinai 115 and Historical Canaanite Phonology.

Welcome, dear reader, to the first entry of Warlord and Scribe: Northwest Semitics in Context. I’ll have a post up soon about the name of the blog and, for those of you who stick around for that, I hope you enjoy it. Keep an eye out, too, for my forthcoming article on the Qubur al-Walaydah bowl in BASOR 377.

[...]

The Sinai 115 inscription has been in the news lately regarding a theory being promoted by Douglas Petrovich. See here and links. Mr. Greene agrees with the skepticism already expressed by other philologists about Prof. Petrovich's theory, and he adds additional arguments against it.

Cross-file under Philology.

Yom Tov

YONA SABAR: Hebrew Word of the Week: Yom Tov “(Jewish) Holiday (on which work is forbidden).” This column is from back in September of 2016, but I missed it then, so here it is. It looks as though I have missed a few (perhaps I need to refine my Google searches), so I will catch up in the coming days.

Bockmuehl, Ancient Apocryphal Gospels

READING ACTS: In Today’s Mail: Markus Bockmuehl, Ancient Apocryphal Gospels.

Thanks to WJKP for sending along a review copy of this new textbook by Markus Bockmuehl. This is the latest in the Resources for the Use of Scripture in the Church series, which is itself a subset of the Interpretation commentary series.

[...]

I look forward to Phil Long's review in due course. Meanwhile, the publisher's blurb reads as follows:

In this reader-friendly guide, Markus Bockmuehl offers a sympathetic account of the ancient apocryphal Gospel writings, showing their place within the reception history and formation of what was to become the canonical fourfold Gospel. Bockmuehl begins by helping readers understand the early history behind these noncanonical Gospels before going on to examine dozens of specific apocryphal texts. He explores the complex oral and intertextual relationships between the noncanonical and canonical Gospels, maintaining that it is legitimate and instructive to read the apocryphal writings as an engagement with the person of Jesus that both presupposes and supplements the canonical narrative outline. Appropriate for pastors and nonspecialists, this work offers a fuller understanding of these writings and their significance for biblical interpretation in the church.

Cross-file under New Book and New Testament Apocrypha.

Strategic move for Metatron

ARCHANGEL METATRON WATCH: Metatron, Inc. Announces Strategic Move into the Areas of Mobile Encryption, and Virtual Reality for its Mobile Development Business.

The Company will embark on re-branding Metatron mobile development business in the specific areas of mobile encryption and security, and applications for the growing market in virtual reality. Under this new goal, the Company will keep its focus on a couple of dynamic concepts within the mobile market, and will look to reduce or shelve other projects to the back burner so as to keep our core focus on these market segments to better execute our projects to market.

[...]

The archangelic company Metatron.inc has been busy since its founding in 2009. It has slain a giant, engaged in due diligence, gotten pumped and crashed horribly, and still managed to recover and make a foray into the cannabis sector.