Muraoka, Appendices to the Septuagint Book of Daniel (Peeters)

NEW BOOK FROM PEETERS PRESS:

Appendices to the Septuagint Book of Daniel

AUTHOR:
Muraoka T.

PRICE: 25 euro
YEAR: 2025
ISBN: 9789042953789
PAGES: XIV-91 p.

SUMMARY:

The three short pieces presented in this volume fit into the traditional text of the book of Daniel and can be read and studied very profitably. They richly supplement the stories and history narrated in the canonical book of Daniel. Most likely they were written in Greek and not translated from Aramaic. The Greek text is presented here with an accompanying English translation and philological comments.

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Gold jewelry excavated at Hippos-Sussita

ANCIENT BLING: Roman-era gold jewelry found at Hippos testifies to wealth of city likely visited by Jesus. Although found out of context, unearthed ring and earrings shed light on ancient Galilean affluence in the first centuries of the Common Era (Rossella Tercatin, Times of Israel).

An exquisite golden ring and a pair of earrings dating to the Roman period (1st-3rd centuries CE) have recently been unearthed during archaeological excavations at the Sussita (Hippos) National Park, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority announced Thursday.

The artifacts help shed light on the affluence that once defined this ancient city overlooking the Sea of Galilee – one of the 10 cities of the Decapolis alliance where, according to the Gospels, Jesus preached, Dr. Michael Eisenberg told The Times of Israel in a phone interview.

“The ring was found a few days ago, while the earrings were uncovered a few months ago,” said Eisenberg, co-director of the Hippos (Sussita) Excavations Project with Dr. Arleta Kowalewska, both from the University of Haifa.

[...]

For many PaleoJudaica posts on artifacts and architecture recovered in and around the site of Hippos-Sussita, start here and follow the links. Another less-impressive ring was found in Sussita National Park a couple of years ago.

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Review of Pagels, Miracles and Wonder

ON THE HISTORICAL JESUS: Book Review | ‘Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus’ by Elaine Pagels. An Exploration of the Mystery of How a Poor Young Man Inspired a Religion That Reshaped the World (David Starkey).

The book’s seven chapters each try to answer a separate question: What happened before, during and after the virgin birth? Who is Jesus? What is the Good News? And so on. Pagels is especially keen to examine how two elements of Jesus’s story that might have been Christianity’s most glaring weaknesses were transformed by his earliest biographers into two of its greatest strengths.

Cross-file under New Book.

For some of my own thoughts on the question of the historical Jesus, see especially here and here, plus there are links.

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Moabite sex workers at Baal Peor?

DR. ATAR LIVNEH: Moabite Women Seduce Israel into Worshiping Baal Peor (TheTorah.com).

Balaam induced Moabite women to ensnare Israelite men into apostasy at Baal Peor. Philo, 1st century C.E., portrays these women as calculating prostitutes. Later, the Sifrei, ca. 3rd century, recasts the episode as a bawdy Roman farce—complete with marketplace, wine, and brothel-like seductions—portraying the Israelites less as tragic sinners and more as fools blinded by lust.

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An AI system for reconstructing ancient (Latin) inscriptions

ALGORITHM WATCH:

Article Open access Published: 23 July 2025

Contextualizing ancient texts with generative neural networks

Yannis Assael, Thea Sommerschield, Alison Cooley, Brendan Shillingford, John Pavlopoulos, Priyanka Suresh, Bailey Herms, Justin Grayston, Benjamin Maynard, Nicholas Dietrich, Robbe Wulgaert, Jonathan Prag, Alex Mullen & Shakir Mohamed

Nature (2025)

Abstract

Human history is born in writing. Inscriptions are among the earliest written forms, and offer direct insights into the thought, language and history of ancient civilizations. Historians capture these insights by identifying parallels—inscriptions with shared phrasing, function or cultural setting—to enable the contextualization of texts within broader historical frameworks, and perform key tasks such as restoration and geographical or chronological attribution1. However, current digital methods are restricted to literal matches and narrow historical scopes. Here we introduce Aeneas, a generative neural network for contextualizing ancient texts. Aeneas retrieves textual and contextual parallels, leverages visual inputs, handles arbitrary-length text restoration, and advances the state of the art in key tasks. To evaluate its impact, we conduct a large study with historians using outputs from Aeneas as research starting points. The historians find the parallels retrieved by Aeneas to be useful research starting points in 90% of cases, improving their confidence in key tasks by 44%. Restoration and geographical attribution tasks yielded superior results when historians were paired with Aeneas, outperforming both humans and artificial intelligence alone. For dating, Aeneas achieved a 13-year distance from ground-truth ranges. We demonstrate Aeneas’ contribution to historical workflows through analysis of key traits in the renowned Roman inscription Res Gestae Divi Augusti, showing how integrating science and humanities can create transformative tools to assist historians and advance our understanding of the past.

A well-constructed study of a new AI system that may be quite useful as an aid to human reconstruction and decipherment of ancient inscriptions. It would work best with formulaic inscriptions from a period and language with many surviving examples of similar inscriptions.

For discussion of reconstruction of damaged ancient Hebrew and Aramaic (etc.) texts, with and without AI help, see here and here. Again, this would work best for highly formulaic texts, of which few, but not none, survive in ancient Hebrew or Aramaic. Frank Moore Cross's reconstruction of the Aramaic legal texts (slave conveyances) from the Samaria Papyri come to mind.

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Metaphor etc. in the Bible

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: “Hey, Turtledove!” How metaphors, similes, and nicknames make the Bible sparkle (Robin Gallaher Branch).

As a biblical scholar dealing daily with the Bible’s terseness, I sometimes wryly wonder if the writers kept one eye on the price of papyrus and parchment! Yet the more I study, the more I applaud the authors for the creative, succinct ways they hook our hearts and engage our imaginations.

In particular, as I discuss here, they deftly use a variety of literary tools—including similes (introduced by “as” and “like”), metaphors, and the pronoun “who”—to add color, character, and meaning to the biblical story. Here are some examples:

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Danzig obituary

IN MEMORIAM: Rabbi Neil Danzig, scholar who unlocked mysteries of the Talmud, dies at 74. Longtime professor of rabbinics at Jewish Theological Seminary explored writings of the Geonim, the Jewish leaders and scholars during the late sixth to mid-11th centuries (Andrew Silow-Carroll, JTA via Times of Israel).

JTA — Rabbi Neil Danzig, a longtime professor of rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and an authority on the post-Talmudic Babylonian scholars known as the Geonim, died July 4. He was 74.

A longtime resident of Teaneck, New Jersey, he was buried in Israel.

As a scholar of medieval rabbinic literature, Danzig explored the halachic, or Jewish legal, writings of the Geonim, the Jewish leaders and scholars during the late sixth to mid-11th centuries in what is now Iraq. The Geonim secured the Babylonian Talmud as the central canonical work of rabbinic literature.

[...]

Background here.

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A purple dye factory or fish-salting facility at Tel Dor?

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Eating Salted Fish in Roman Judea. Reinterpreting Tel Dor’s purple dye factory (Nathan Steinmeyer).

This essay summarizes an open-access article published in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology:

A Roman Fish-Processing Facility at Tel Dor, Israel: Reinterpreting the Roman ‘Purple Dye Factory’

Jackson T. Reecea The Department of Anthropology, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA, Thomas Levy, Anthony Tamberino, Alexandra Ratzlaff, Marko Runjajić & Assaf Yasur-LandauO
Published online: 14 Jul 2025
Cite this article https://doi.org/10.1080/10572414.2025.2518959

ABSTRACT

In this article we suggest that the Roman industrial complex on the coast of Tel Dor in Israel, previously interpreted as a purple dye factory, should be reinterpreted as a cetaria of similar scale to those in the western Mediterranean. We use analogous evidence from cetariae in Spain and Morocco to support this new interpretation. The identification of the Tel Dor fish-processing facility sheds new light on the participation of Dor in the globalisation of the Roman Mediterranean economy.

Cross-file under Culinary Archaeology.

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Mendels, A Hellenistic Ethical Lexicon (T&T Clark)

NEW BOOK FROM BLOOMSBURY/T&T CLARK:

A Hellenistic Ethical Lexicon

Three Hundred and Seven Rules of Conduct of Expanding Empires

Doron Mendels (Author)

Hardback
$120.00 $108.00

Ebook (PDF)
$108.00 $86.40

Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
$108.00 $86.40

In stock

Product details

Published Jul 10 2025
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Extent 160
ISBN 9780567718273
Imprint T&T Clark
Dimensions 9 x 6 inches
Series Jewish and Christian Texts
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

Description

Building on his previous work on Hellenistic Interstate Political Ethics (T&T Clark, 2022) leading historian Doron Mendels presents three hundred interstate ethical rules of conduct which he has discovered within three reconstructed Hellenistic codes. These codes appear in the work of three major Hellenistic historical writers, with Mendels also adding remarks that appear in The Letter of Aristeas.

Mendels has formulated these – probably originally oral – rules embedded within the historical narratives using a mixture of statements by rulers and other actors concerning interstate relationships, historical events which point to ethical behaviour of states and/or their breach, as well as related thoughts of the historians themselves regarding interstate encounters. The result is a comprehensive catalogue of ethical rules referring to behaviour on the international scene, which include not only rules but also a lexicon of moral terms borrowed from the individual ethical scenarios. The volume constitutes a significant addition to knowledge of the Hellenistic era in the 3rd-1st centuries BC, the universe against which Judaism and early Christianity operated.

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A fifth-century West Bank church was not burned down.

INCENDIARY? Israel Police finds no damage to Christian church after false claims of arson by Jewish settlers draw broad condemnation. US Amb Huckabee & Sen. Graham had condemned incident in Samaria (All Israel News Staff).

The Israel Police announced Monday that, contrary to previous reports, the Church of Saint George in the Christian village of Tabyeh was not damaged by a nearby fire.

"Contrary to misleading reports, no damage was caused to the Church of Saint George in Taybeh. The fire was limited to an adjacent open area, not the holy site. Emergency services received reports from local residents, including both Israelis and one Palestinian caller," the police stated.

Noting that they have started a "thorough investigation", the Police statement added, "If arson is confirmed, justice will be pursued regardless of race or background. Due process is based on facts, not headlines."

[...]

I have been following this story for a while, trying to piece together what actually happened from conflicting reports.

Briefly, on 7 and or 8 July, there was a fire in a field adjacent to the stone ruins of the fifth-century Church of Saint George in Taybeh, on the West Bank. Apparently there was another fire in the same vicinity on the 11th. Contrary to some reports, the church was not damaged. Jewish settlers were accused of starting the fires, but so far I have not seen any evidence advanced for who, if anyone, set them. The fires are under investigation. If they were arson, the perpetrators need to be brought to justice.

I am pretty sure that these specifics are correct. I am not certain of exactly how many fires were involved. The above article has the most detailed account I could find of the current state of the story. It includes photographic and video evidence and more details. But the story remains in some flux.

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Biblical archaeology, interrupted

ONCE AGAIN: War Interrupts Biblical Archaeology. Israel-Iran conflict stalled excavation efforts, forcing international teams to flee (GORDON GOVIER, Christianity Today).

Conflict in the Middle East has once again had the unintended effect of stalling efforts to excavate biblical history. Across Israel, digs were canceled when war broke out in mid-June. Though the war between Israel and Iran lasted only 12 days, it came in the middle of the dig season, when weather conditions and schedules align for archaeological work.

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Crossan Festschrift (Cascade)

NEW BOOK FROM WIPF AND STOCK (CASCADE):

Adventures of an Itinerant Imagination
Essays Celebrating John Dominic Crossan on His Ninetieth Birthday

by Bernard Brandon Scott
Series: Westar Studies

Imprint: Cascade Books
340 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 x 0.68 in

Paperback
9798385249503
Published: June 2025
$41.00 / £30.00 / AU$63.00

eBook
9798385249527
Published: June 2025
$41.00 / £34.99 / AU$59.99

DESCRIPTION

John Dominic Crossan is the most important scholar on the historical Jesus since David Fredrick Strauss in the nineteenth century. Both his scholarly The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (1991) and the more popular Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (1994) made the bestsellers list. But the scope of his work goes well beyond the historical Jesus to studies on the death of Jesus and anti-Semitism, Christianity and empire, archaeology, the apostle Paul the Pharisee, and recently apocalyptic and the environment. He addresses both scholarly and popular audiences, ancient sources and contemporary concerns. The essays in this volume explore and access the range of his work for his various audiences. Some of the essays are scholarly in tone, while others are quite personal. A feature of this book is Crossan's complete curriculum vitae.

Congratulations to Professor Crossan, who is now in his tenth decade (b. 1934).

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New photos of P52

VARIANT READINGS: New Images of P52 (Brent Nongbri).

For P52, a very early papyrus fragment of the Gospel of John held by the Rylands Library in Manchester, and the debate over its exact date, see here and links.

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Redfield, Adventures of Rabbah and Friends (SBL)

NEW BOOK FROM SBL PRESS:

Adventures of Rabbah and Friends: The Talmud's Strange Tales and Their Readers
James Adam Redfield

ISBN 9781967013036
Volume BJS 374
Status Available
Publication Date June 2025

Paperback $50.00
eBook $50.00
Hardback $82.00

Adventures of Rabbah & Friends offers a new reader-centered approach to some of the Talmud’s most challenging stories. James Adam Redfield illustrates how these tales have interacted with diverse interpretive frameworks from ancient myth to modern mysticism. By reevaluating conventional assumptions about coherence, authority, and tradition, the book redefines how stories can function in the Talmud, reorients the study of rabbinic literature around practices of reading and reception, and opens pathways for connecting the Talmud with broader conversations in the study of literature. Redfield’s analysis of the vibrant dialogue between many voices in this literary tradition—storytellers, editors, performers, transmitters, commentators, anthologizers, and more—reveals their diverse and original contributions to the art of interpretation in Jewish culture. Rich appendixes revealing the stories’ reception in late ancient exegesis, medieval responsa, and early modern ethical and mystical commentaries make this volume a valuable specialist resource, while its lively prose is accessible for a wider audience of students and humanities scholars.

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Baden, The Literary History of the Pentateuch (Mohr Siebeck)

NEW BOOK FROM MOHR SIEBECK:

Joel S. Baden

The Literary History of the Pentateuch

Collected Essays

[Die Literaturgeschichte des Pentateuch. Gesammelte Aufsätze.]
2025. XII, 298 pages.
Forschungen zum Alten Testament (FAT) 187

€139.00
including VAT cloth
available
978-3-16-163468-0

Also Available As:
eBook PDF €139.00

Summary

In these collected essays, Joel Baden explores the history of the Pentateuch's literary composition. Including detailed analyses of specific passages as well as broad theoretical and methodological reflections, these essays offer a glimpse of both the mechanisms by which the Pentateuch came into being and the scholarly frameworks through which the Pentateuch is viewed. Spanning the first fifteen years of his career, this volume also represents a record of the recent trends in pentateuchal scholarship, especially the growth of the neo-documentary hypothesis.

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Simulations of late-antique viticulture in the Negev

ALGORITHMIC ARCHAEOBOTANY: New study finds secrets behind Byzantine wine economy in Israeli desert. Farmers in the Byzantine-period Negev developed a flourishing wine industry using advanced rainwater harvesting techniques, with new study showing high vulnerability to droughts (Ynet News).

Farmers in the Negev Desert during the Byzantine period, from the 4th to 7th centuries, developed a flourishing wine industry despite the region’s arid conditions, relying heavily on sophisticated rainwater collection systems — according to a new study from the University of Haifa.

The new study published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE, reveals how these farmers achieved remarkable success and why their industry eventually collapsed. Using an innovative computational model, researchers reconstructed the scale of wine production, the conditions behind its prosperity and the vulnerabilities that led to its decline.

[...]

Unhelpfully, the article does not link to that underlying open-access PLOS ONE article. Here it is:

Wine economy in Byzantine Shivta (Negev, Israel): Exploring the role of runoff agriculture and droughts through Agent-Based Modeling

Barak Garty , Gil Gambash, Sharona T. Levy, Guy Bar-Oz
Published: July 10, 2025 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0325204

Abstract

Viticulture was a vital agricultural and economic activity during the Byzantine period, also in marginal regions like the Negev Desert. Innovative dryland farming techniques, such as runoff harvesting systems, terraces, and pigeon towers, enabled intensive grape cultivation and a thriving wine export economy. This study focuses on the resilience and adaptability of viticulture in the hinterland of Shivta, analyzing how climatic challenges like aridification and drought tested Byzantine water management strategies. The AGENTS model, developed in NetLogo, integrates various components to simulate viticulture dynamics in the Zetan watershed, calculating water availability, crop yields, and labor costs. The results show that higher runoff ratios improve yield efficiency, while excessive runoff ratios diminish productivity. Prolonged droughts significantly decrease wine production and extend recovery times beyond a decade. Wetter climatic scenarios slightly enhance yield efficiency but do not overcome structural limitations, highlighting the fragile nature of viticulture in the Negev desert. Overall, this study highlights the importance of effective water management in sustaining agriculture and the constraints that limited resilience in Shivta’s agricultural system. The modeling approach offers insights applicable to other regions and historical contexts facing environmental challenges.

For lots more on the archaeology of Shivta, including its viticulture, see here and links.

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Longacre on Hornkohl on linguistic dating of biblical Hebrew

THE OTTC BLOG: Diachronic Diversity in Classical Biblical Hebrew.

I just saw that Aaron Hornkohl has published an open-access book on Diachronic Diversity in Classical Biblical Hebrew, where he argues that we can see diachronic indications even within the corpus of Classical Biblical Hebrew. He suggests that, on balance, the Pentateuch reflects an earlier stage of Hebrew than the early prophets et al.

[...]

Drew Longacre offers some text-critical thoughts about this recent book.

Background here.

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Reordering an Aramaic ostracon that may mention Passover?

ARAMAIC EPIGRAPHY: Reading Berlin P. 10679 Inside Out

Gad Barnea

Tel Aviv
Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University

Pages 85-106 | Published online: 12 Jul 2025 https://doi.org/10.1080/03344355.2025.2479279

Abstract

Ostracon Berlin P. 10679 (TADAE D7.24) was first published in 1908 and has since attracted attention mostly due to its use of the term (b)psḥʾ—cognate with the Hebrew psḥ known from the Hebrew Bible in relation to the Passover. The text itself has generally been considered opaque and unclear. However, as shown in this article, the ostracon has thus far been read in the wrong order. It should be read convex-to-concave (cv > cc) rather than concave-to-convex (cc > cv)—a conclusion based upon philological and epigraphic analyses. The new interpretation provides a much improved reading, adding greater clarity and consistency to the text. The article cautions against presupposing a cc > cv flow of writing on ostraca and suggests that other confusing cases could benefit from a reevaluation. Unfortunately, the term (b)psḥʾ remains as obscure in the newly assembled context as it has always been.

Not to be confused with the Elephantine "Passover Papyrus,"—which does not actually have the word "Passover" in the surviving text.

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On linguistic dating of biblical Hebrew

THE BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION:

Isn’t It Time to Break Up with Linguistic Dating? Rethinking Hornkohl’s Method—and What Comes Next

In the end, Hornkohl’s work represents a well-argued example of an older paradigm trying to survive in a new era. His case studies are meticulously done and worthy of attention. But until we reckon fully with the compositional and textual realities of the Hebrew Bible, linguistic dating will remain, at best, a hopeful guess—and at worst, a circular exercise in self-confirmation.

By Robert Rezetko
Independent Researcher
Research Affiliate of the Universities of Arizona, Copenhagen, and Sydney

By Ian Young
Professor of Biblical Studies and Ancient Languages
Faculty of Theology and Philosophy
Australian Catholic University

By Martin Ehrensvärd
Associate Professor of Biblical Exegesis
Faculty of Theologyv University of Copenhagen

By Martijn Naaijer
Postdoctoral Researcher
Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies
University of Zurich
July 2025

A critique of an open-access New Book published by OpenBook Publishers which I have not yet mentioned:

Diachronic Diversity in Classical Biblical Hebrew

Aaron D. Hornkohl (author)

According to the standard periodisation of ancient Hebrew, the division of Biblical Hebrew as reflected in the Masoretic tradition is basically dichotomous: pre-exilic Classical Biblical Hebrew (CBH) versus post-Restoration Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH). Within this paradigm, the chronolectal unity of CBH is rarely questioned—this despite the reasonable expectation that the language of a corpus encompassing traditions of various ages and comprising works composed, edited, and transmitted over the course of centuries would show signs of diachronic development. From the perspective of historical evolution, CBH is remarkably homogenous. Within this apparent uniformity, however, there are indeed signs of historical development, sets of alternant features whose respective concentrations seem to divide CBH into two sub-chronolects. The most conspicuous typological division that emerges is between the CBH of the Pentateuch and that of the relevant Prophets and Writings. The present volume investigates a series of features that distinguish the two ostensible CBH sub-chronolects, weighs alternative explanations for distribution patterns that appear to have chronological significance, and considers broader implications for Hebrew diachrony and periodisation and for the composition of the Torah.

For earlier installments of this debate, see here and links.

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Archaeological dating methods

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Dating Game: How Archaeologists Date the Biblical Past (Yoav Vaknin, Biblical Archaeology Review, Summer 2025 issue).

Here, I briefly review the uses (and limitations) of several dating methods, including my own specialty, archaeomagnetism, which I believe can significantly improve our understanding of Iron Age chronology.

Unusually, but welcome, the full text of this BAR article is available for free.

HT Bible History Daily, which summarizes.

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