The correct reading of a single letter – even a blank space – in an ancient manuscript can sometimes make a big difference. For more examples, see here and here.
Bit by bit, a letter at a time, whatever it takes. Until we're done.
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For the Freedom of Zion
The Great Revolt of Jews against Romans, 66–74 CEGuy MacLean Rogers
Format: Hardcover
Price: $37.50A definitive account of the great revolt of Jews against Rome and the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple
“A lucid yet terrifying account of the 'Jewish War'—the uprising of the Jews in 66 CE, and the Roman empire’s savage response, in a story that stretches from Rome to Jerusalem.”—John Ma, Columbia University
This deeply researched and insightful book examines the causes, course, and historical significance of the Jews’ failed revolt against Rome from 66 to 74 CE, including the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. Based on a comprehensive study of all the evidence and new statistical data, Guy Rogers argues that the Jewish rebels fought for their religious and political freedom and lost due to military mistakes.
Rogers contends that while the Romans won the war, they lost the peace. When the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem Temple, they thought that they had defeated the God of Israel and eliminated Jews as a strategic threat to their rule. Instead, they ensured the Jews’ ultimate victory. After their defeat Jews turned to the written words of their God, and following those words led the Jews to recover their freedom in the promised land. The war's tragic outcome still shapes the worldview of billions of people today.
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The Pharisees: a SBL 2021 Review Forum (Kelley Coblentz Bautch and Joshua Scott)
The Pharisees (Eerdmans, 2021), edited by Joseph Sievers and Amy-Jill Levine, is an important recent publication for readers of AJR and indeed all readers interested in Jewish history and Jewish/Christian relations.[1] This volume, with contributions from twenty-seven scholars of an international scope, is significant for numerous reasons, as the reviews in this AJR Forum make clear. ...I noted the 2019 conference here from which the essays in the book come. I knew the book was coming out, but its publication appears to have slipped by me in December.
Pharisees Part One: Historical Reconstruction (Kathy Ehrensperger)
By way of some concluding remarks, in terms of the historicity of the Pharisees, as we have seen especially in the first portion of the volume (chapters 1-5), it is difficult to find more than a few details, like relation and knowledge of the Law, political presence, some popularity. This should already lead us to caution.Who Needs the Pharisees? New Testament and Beyond (Anders Runesson)
Summing up – and answering our initial question, “Who needs the Pharisees?” – it seems that, on the whole, we today, both Jews and Christians, need them more than anyone has ever done before, but for very different reasons. And we need them in academic historical, non-polemical form.
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JERUSALEM (VINnews) — A new genizah (archive) with rare ancient Jewish documents was discovered in the Cairo Jewish cemetery last month, but a report by Israeli Arab affairs correspondent Roi Kais reveals that employees from the Egyptian Antiquities Authority arrived at the cemetery this week and began emptying the genizah, despite the vehement opposition of the local Jewish community.I can't find any reference to this discovery elsewhere, although I feel like I vaguely remember seeing one. No word here on the contents of the geniza or the dates of the manuscripts.[...]
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I am suprised that Xinhua seems to be the only media outlet covering this story.
For many PaleoJudaic posts on the ancient site of Hippos-Sussita, start here (cf. here) and follow the links. Some years ago, archaeologist also discovered footprints of Roman soliders embedded in mortar at Hippos-Sussista.
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New Technology in an Ancient World: Using Artificial Intelligence to Study Ancient Hebrew TextsCross-file under Algorithm Watch.The overall aim of the project is to develop a method to integrate these fields, using cutting edge machine learning techniques, with the goal of getting a much more complete picture of the development of the text and language of the Hebrew Bible than is currently possible.
By Martijn Naaijer
Faculty of Theology
University of CopenhagenBy Anders Søgaard
Department of Computer Science
University of CopenhagenBy Martin Ehrensvärd
Faculty of Theology
University of Copenhagen
March 2022
It's good to hear from The Bible and Interpretation again.
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For more on his work on the Babylonian Talmud, see here and here and links.
Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
In the last decade, [Sarah] Sallon and Elaine Solowey of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies at Kibbutz Ketura germinated date seeds that were radiocarbon-dated to between 1,800 and 2,400 years old. The seeds had been discovered by archaeologists at sites in the Judean Desert, including Masada. Seven trees grew.For PaleoJudaica posts on the work of this team on resurrecting the ancient Judean date palm, start here and follow the links. Related post here.The seven trees were named, from the oldest seed to the youngest: Methuselah, Hannah, Adam, Judith, Boaz, Jonah and Uriel. And lo, genetic analyses Sallon and international teams published in Science Advances in 2020, and in a 2021 paper in the journal PNAS by Muriel Gros-Balthazard and colleagues, show that these seven trees aren’t all the same type.
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“This initiative is an opportunity on the largest possible stage for us all—Jews, Christians, Muslims and Samaritans—to reflect about otherness and complexity, about core issues of who each of us is, and about what we hope to be,” said Professor Steven Fine.For some background on the exhibition, and on the Samaritans, see: Encountering Samaritans. YU project explores our distant, oft-estranged cousins (LARRY YUDELSON, The Jewish Standard).
For the documentary film associated with the exhibition, see the H-Judaic notice: EVENT: The YU Israelite Samaritans Project: First Public Viewing of "The Samaritans: A Biblical People," NYC (March 27),
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Published in English.
The Persian period has long been considered a »dark era« in Israel's history. For this reason, research has mainly focused on how it is depicted in the Hebrew Bible. A spectacular discovery of archaeological relics and epigraphic sources was hence hardly noticed: the military colony located on the island of Elephantine in the Nile, on the border between Egypt and present-day Sudan. The basic approach of this volume, which documents a three-year Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft project, is to break with a research tradition focusing on the Judeans (Jews) mentioned in the Aramaic papyri from Elephantine and instead investigate the military colony in a broader historical context also documented by Demotic and Egyptian-hieratic evidence found at Elephantine. The studies presented focus on three main subject areas: society and administration, religion, and literature. They show that historically the island of Elephantine hosted a multicultural society with several interactions between the Egyptians and the other inhabitants, and that it was also an important administrative centre for the Persian authorities.
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Message and Composition of the Book of IsaiahAn Interpretation in the Light of Jewish Reception History
Antti Laato
Volume 46 in the series Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Studies
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110761818eBook
Published: January 19, 2022
ISBN: 9783110761818Hardcover
Published: January 31, 2022
ISBN: 9783110761634About this book
The study deals with the theological message and composition of the Book of Isaiah and promotes a thesis that an early Jewish reception history helps us to find perspectives to understand them. This study treats the following themes among others:
1 Hezekiah as Immanuel was an important theme in the reception as can be seen in Chronicles and Ben Sira as well as in rabbinical writings. The central event which makes Hezekiah such an important figure, was the annihilation of the Assyrian army as recounted in Isaiah 36-37.
2 The Book of Isaiah was interpreted in apocalyptic milieu as the Animal Apocalypse and Daniel show. Even though the Qumran writings do not provide any coherent way to interpret Isaianic passages its textual evidence shows how the community has found from the Book of Isaiah different concepts to characterize the division of the Jewish community to the righteous and sinful ones (cf. Isa 65-66).
3 Ezra and Nehemiah received inspiration from the theological themes of Isaianic texts of Levitical singers which were later edited in the Book of Isaiah by scribes. The formation of the Book of Isaiah then went in its own way and its theology became different from that in the Book of Ezra–Nehemiah.
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(Artscroll) The Mesorah Heritage Foundation is celebrating the completion of the Schottenstein Edition of the Talmud Yerushalmi in English, a truly historic accomplishment in the Jewish world.The Talmud Yerushalmi (Palestinian Talmud) was comparatively neglected until well into the twentieth century. Jacob Neusner produced a multivolume English translation of it in 1982-1994. Now two new English translations of it have just been completed, the Schottenstein edition above and the Sefaria translation.[...]
For more posts on the Talmud Yerushalmi, start at the link just above and keep going from there.
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Luca Arcari, Vedere Dio: le apocalissi giudaiche e protocristiane (IV sec. a.C.-II sec. d.C.). Frecce, 291. Roma: Carocci Editore, 2020. Pp. 442. ISBN 9788843098507 €39,00.Review by
Luigi Walt, Universität Regensburg. luigi.walt@ur.de... In other words, what Arcari wants to underline is the cognitive, emotional, and social value of these ancient visionary accounts, namely the fact that such texts could function as formidable tools for organizing the world as well as instruments for propaganda, aimed at constructing religious identities which were in competition but also in dialogue with each other.
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Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew BiblePossession and Other Spirit Phenomena
Reed Carlson
Volume 9 in the series Ekstasis: Religious Experience from Antiquity to the Middle Ages
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110670035eBook
Published: January 19, 2022
ISBN: 9783110670035Hardcover
Published: January 31, 2022
ISBN: 9783110669343 v PDF & EPUB £73.50
Hardcover £73.50About this book
Lautenschlaeger Award 2021
Spirit possession is more commonly associated with late Second Temple Jewish literature and the New Testament than it is with the Hebrew Bible. In Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible, however, Reed Carlson argues that possession is also depicted in this earlier literature, though rarely according to the typical western paradigm. This new approach utilizes theoretical models developed by cultural anthropologists and ethnographers of contemporary possession-practicing communities in the global south and its diasporas. Carlson demonstrates how possession in the Bible is a corporate and cultivated practice that can function as social commentary and as a means to model the moral self.
The author treats a variety of spirit phenomena in the Hebrew Bible, including spirit language in the Psalms and Job, spirit empowerment in Judges and Samuel, and communal possession in the prophets. Carlson also surveys apotropaic texts and spirit myths in early Jewish literature—including the Dead Sea Scrolls. In this volume, two recent scholarly trends in biblical studies converge: investigations into notions of evil and of the self. The result is a synthesizing project, useful to biblical scholars and those of early Judaism and Christianity alike.
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Martin McNamara, Caoimnín Breatnach, John Carey, Joseph Flahive, Charles D. Wright, Apocrypha Hiberniae II, Apocalyptica 2. Corpus Christianorum. Series Apocryphorum, 21. Turnhout: Brepols, 2019. Pp. xxiv, 589. ISBN 9782503585352 €355,00.Conclusion:Review by
Thomas Kraus, University of Zürich. t.j.kraus@web.de
This volume is a masterpiece of editorial technique and methodology; and it is an invaluable foundation of further studies of Irish apocrypha. At the same time it provides essential insights into the ongoing processing of biblical or non-biblical material, its transmission and reception, and its regional adaptation. It comprises the most distinguished scholars working in the field, who must be thanked for their meticulous and scrupulous work.Some PaleoJudaica posts involving Irish apocrypha (linking to essays by Philip Jenkins) are here, here, and here. See also Grant Macaskill's essay on The Pseudepigrapha in the Irish Church for a class we co-taught on the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha.
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Notions of Time in Deuterocanonical and Cognate LiteratureEdited by: Stefan Beyerle and Matthew Goff
Volume 2020/2021 in the series Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Yearbook
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110705454eBook
Published: December 20, 2021
ISBN: 9783110705454Hardcover
Published: December 31, 2021
ISBN: 9783110702194About this book
A comprehensive investigation of notions of "time" in deuterocanonical and cognate literature, from the ancient Jewish up to the early Christian eras, requires further scholarship. The aim of this collection of articles is to contribute to a better understanding of "time" in deuterocanonical literature and pseudepigrapha, especially in Second Temple Judaism, and to provide criteria for concepts of time in wisdom literature, apocalypticism, Jewish and early Christian historiography and in Rabbinic religiosity.
Essays in this volume, representing the proceedings of a conference of the "International Society for the Study of Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature" in July 2019 at Greifswald, discuss concepts and terminologies of "time", stemming from novellas like the book of Tobit, from exhortations for the wise like Ben Sira, from an apocalyptic time table in 4 Ezra, the book of Giants or Daniel, and early Christian and Rabbinic compositions. The volume consists of four chapters that represent different approaches or hermeneutics of "time:" I. Axial Ages: The Construction of Time as "History", II. The Construction of Time: Particular Reifications, III. Terms of Time and Space, IV. The Construction of Apocalyptic Time. Scholars and students of ancient Jewish and Christian religious history will find in this volume orientation with regard to an important but multifaceted and sometimes disparate topic.
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Celebrating the Remedy of Neglect: a review of Liv Ingeborg Lied, Invisible Manuscripts: Textual Scholarship and the Survival of 2 Baruch (Jeff Childers).
With 2 Baruch, we have so little to hand, we are quick to welcome the expansion of sources that Lied’s approach affords us. But if we were to amend our ways and quit neglecting the artifacts and their readers generally, how might that transform our approach to works for which the embodiments are exponentially more numerous than for 2 Baruch? ...
Response to the Respondents (Liv Ingeborg Lied).
For previous essays in the AJR forum (SBL 2021 panel) on Professor Lied's book, see here and links.
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Finally, what is the best way to describe the date of the codex in light of all the data (palaeographic and radiocarbon)? We can now say with a high degree of confidence: “fourth century to mid-sixth century.”That's good, and that's what we expected. But the intrusive conservation process does still leave some doubt about the C-14 result.
For more on the Cologne Mani Codex, including online photos and background information, see here and links.
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Ahead of the Purim holiday, Israel's National Library has revealed the exchange of historical letters proving Iranian Jews purchased the Tomb of Esther and Mordechai in the Iranian city of Hamadan. The purchase of the land in 1971 marked 2,500 years to Persian King Cyrus the Great's edict allowing Babylonians to worship the god of their choice.I noted this story a couple of years ago, so it is not exactly a revelation. But this year's story includes scans of a couple of the letters, which I have not seen before.[...]
Again, this is the traditional tomb of Esther and Mordechai. They are characters in the Book of Esther, an ancient novel. But apparently there is some reason to believe that the tomb goes back to late antiquity and has a Jewish connection.
For that and for more on this tomb, which was in the news a good bit in 2020, start here and follow the links.
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