News on the Beth Shemesh alphabetic cuneiform tablet

NORTHWEST SEMITIC EPIGRAPHY: Enigmatic Canaanite Tablet Turns Out to Be School Exercise, Israeli Researchers Say. Inscription found nearly a century ago in Beth Shemesh was a sequence of letters copied by a budding scribe, and reveals existence of a school there nearly 3,500 years ago (Ariel David, Haaretz).

This research has extracted some important new data from the enigmatic Beth Shemesh (Beit Shemesh) alphabetic cuneiform text, including (not mentioned in the headline above) information on the order of the alphabet in late second millennium Canaanite. Such inscriptions are very rare outside the site of Ugarit.

For more on the Halaḥam ordering of the alphabet, see here.

The underlying article in Tel Aviv: Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University 51, (2024): 3-17 is available for free online:

Archaeo-Material Study of the Cuneiform Tablet from Tel Beth-Shemesh
Cécile Fossé, Jonathan Yogev, José Mirão, Nicola Schiavon & Yuval Goren

Abstract

The Fifth Haverford excavation season at Tel Beth-Shemesh (Ain Shams) in 1933 revealed a fractured tablet bearing a cuneiform inscription dating to the Late Bronze Age. Considered to be the earliest alphabetic cuneiform text uncovered in the Canaanite arena outside of Ugarit, this tablet quickly became the focus of many studies. Later readings suggested that this was the earliest example of a South Semitic Alphabetical sequence. Through petrographic material analysis, the present study examines the possible location of production of the tablet and discusses the implications with regard to the object’s function and cultural context.

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Review of Vörös, Mount Machaerus

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Review: Mount Machaerus (Konstantinos Politis).

Mount Machaerus
An Introduction to the Historical, Archaeological, and Pilgrim Site Overlooking the Dead Sea in the Kingdom of Jordan
By Győző Vörös
(Amman: The American Center of Research, 2024), hard cover, 171 pp., 96 figures; free download available from the ACOR website.

Reviewed by Konstantinos Politis

With Mount Machaerus, Győző Vörös has authored an invaluable summary of his superb four-part publication series about the spectacular Herodian citadel that dramatically overlooks the eastern shore of the Dead Sea in Jordan.[i] It is written in an easily accessible style for students and visitors to appreciate the ancient site without compromising academic content. The colorful illustrations and architectural reconstructions are particularly useful in bringing to life a hitherto unknown but important palace of the early Roman period.

[...]

Follow the link for the free-download link. Cross-file under New Book.

For past PaleoJudaica posts on Győző Vörös's excavation of Machaerus (the reputed site of the execution of John the Baptist), see here and links.

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Satlow on astrology

MICHAEL L. SATLOW: The Business of Astrology.

The practice of astrology is, of course, ancient. So too is criticism of it. Like today, most politicians and intellectuals throughout antiquity thought astrology to be, at best, a dubious activity. At worst, it was a way to manipulate the masses to oppose the State. At the same time, these same intellectuals largely subscribed its basic tenets.

My new translation of Sefer HaRazim is forthcoming in MOTP 2. It should be out early in 2025.

It is also worth noting that there is a roughly Geonic tractate on astrology written in Hebrew: Baraita di-Mazzalot, "The External Tractate of the Constellations."

For more on astrology in ancient Judaism, see here and links (cf. here).

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More on new and old Plato traditions

ASSESSMENT: Ancient scroll reveals new story of Plato's death—here's why you should be suspicious of it (Bert van den Berg, The Conversation).

So how likely is Philodemus's particular story, for which we know of no other sources, to be true?

There are reasons to be suspicious. The death of ancient philosophers was meant to reflect their lives and teachings. If not, posterity was quite happy to invent an appropriate deathbed scene.

This article has good observations, some of which overlap with the ones I made here. I agree that the account of Plato's last night is likely apocryphal.

While we're on the subject of Plato, Roger Pearse has an excellent recent post on How did the works of Plato reach us? – The textual tradition of the dialogues.

Plato’s works have reached us in medieval handwritten copies, the earliest written around 900 AD. The dialogues are arranged into nine groups of four dialogues, or “tetralogies.”[1] These give us the works in complete form, from direct copying down the centuries. But there are also surviving fragments of ancient copies on papyrus, found in rubbish dumps in Egypt where the climate is dry, which sometimes give a better reading in this passage or that, where the text has become corrupt in the centuries. Plato also is quoted at great length by other ancient authors, and sometimes these also have readings to contribute. Finally there are ancient translations of Plato into other languages.

[...]

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Conference on Jewish and Christian Perspectives on the Encounter with God

AT ST VLADIMIR'S ORTHODOX THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY: Third Annual Academic Symposium. “I Saw the Lord” (Isa 6.1): Entangled Jewish and Christian Perspectives on the Encounter with God.

Saint Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary (SVOTS) will hold its Third Annual Academic Symposium on November 13-15, 2024.

This year’s symposium, titled “I Saw the Lord (Isa 6.1): Entangled Jewish and Christian Perspectives on the Encounter with God,” gathers leading Orthodox Christian and Jewish scholars from around the world, who will reflect on the manner in which theophanic texts—biblical accounts of Divine Revelation to the patriarchs and prophets—have always been and remain foundational to their respective doctrinal and spiritual traditions. For more details, see the Vision Statement below.

[...]

The two keynote addresses will be available online.

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Elephantine exhibition

STAATLICHE MUSEEN ZU BERLIN: Elephantine: Island of the Millennia.

26.04.2024 to 27.10.2024
James-Simon-Galerie

The Nile Island Elephantine can be experienced through the special exhibition on the Museumsinsel, presented in the James-Simon-Galerie and in the Neues Museum. In this comprehensive, world-first exhibition, outstanding objects from Berlin’s collections will be shown alongside highlights from around the world. The diverse content of the texts will be contextualised with reference to archaeological finds and interpreted from a contemporary perspective, giving audiences a unique, first-hand experience of the island of Elephantine on the Museumsinsel Berlin.

[...]

There is also a documentary on the Elephantine Project:

HT Todd Bolen at the Bible Places Blog.

For many, many PaleoJudaica posts on the Elephantine Papyri and the site of Elephantine, see here and links, plus here.

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On divorce documents

GENIZA FRAGMENT OF THE MONTH (APRIL 2024): Geṭ groundwork from the Cairo Genizah: practising writing a Jewish divorce document (T-S 10J2.34) (Marc Michaels).

This Geniza text is dated to 1492, but the essay covers geṭ conventions ranging from the Bar Kokhba Revolt era to the present.

For PaleoJudaica posts on marriage and divorce law in the Talmud (noting Daf Yomi essays by Adam Kirsch), follow the links from here. For divorce among the Elephantine Judeans, see the links collected here.

For PaleoJudaica posts noting Cairo Geniza Fragments of the Month in the Cambridge University Library's Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, see the many links collected here.

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On Coptic

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: What Is Coptic? The language of Christian Egypt (Marek Dospěl).

Another in the useful BHD introductory series on biblical and related languages. Earlier essays are collected here (biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, and biblical Greek) and here (Akkadian).

For more on the Coptic Dialects, see here. For more on the Mudil Coptic Psalter ("Pillow Psalter"), see here and link. For more on Shenoute and the White Monastery, see here and links. For many posts on the Coptic Gnostic Library from Nag Hammadi, see here and links. And for a great many additional posts on the Coptic language and Coptic literature, run "Coptic Watch" through the search engine.

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Lester, Deuteronomy and the Material Transmission of Tradition (Brill)

NEW BOOK FROM BRILL:

Deuteronomy and the Material Transmission of Tradition

Series:
Vetus Testamentum, Supplements, Volume: 198

Author: Mark Lester

Deuteronomy and the inscribed texts depicted within it are often called “books.” Moreover, its treatment of writing has earned it a prominent place in historical accounts of the religion of ancient Israel and Judah. Neither Deuteronomy nor its text-artifacts, however, are books in any conventional sense of the term. This interdisciplinary study reorients the analysis of Deuteronomic textuality around the materiality, visuality, and rhetoric of ancient rather than modern media. It argues that the Deuteronomic composition adapts the media aesthetics of ancient treaty tablets and monumental inscriptions to a story that is itself transformed into an artifact of the past.

Copyright Year: 2024

E-Book (PDF)
Availability: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-69185-8
Publication: 04 Mar 2024
EUR €116.00

Hardback
Availability: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-69180-3
Publication: 28 Feb 2024
EUR €116.00

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Litwa, Simon of Samaria and the Simonians (T&T Clark)

NEW BOOK FROM BLOOMSBURY/T&T CLARK:

Simon of Samaria and the Simonians

Contours of an Early Christian Movement

M. David Litwa (Author)

Hardback
$115.00 $103.50

Ebook (PDF)
$103.50 $82.80

Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
$103.50 $82.80

Product details

Published Apr 04 2024
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Extent 224
ISBN 9780567712950
Imprint T&T Clark
Dimensions 9 x 6 inches
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

Description

Who were the Simonians? Beginning in the mid-second century CE, heresiologists depicted them as licentious followers of the first “gnostic,” a supposedly Samarian self-deifier called Simon, who was thought to practice “magic” and became known as the father of all heresies.

Litwa examines the Simonians in their own literature and in the literature used to refute and describe them. He begins with Simonian primary sources, namely The Declaration of Great Power (embedded in the anonymous Refutation of All Heresies) and The Concept of Our Great Power (Nag Hammadi codex VI,4). Litwa argues that both are early second-century products of Simonian authors writing in Alexandria or Egypt. Litwa then moves on to examine the heresiological sources related to the Simonians (Justin, the book of Acts, Irenaeus, the author of the Refutation of All Heresies, Pseudo-Tertullian, Epiphanius, and Filaster). He shows how closely connected Justin's report is to the portrait of Simon in Acts, and offers an extensive exegesis and analysis of Simonian theology and practice based on the reports of Irenaeus and the Refutator. Finally, Litwa examines Simonianism in novelistic sources, namely the Acts of Peter and the Pseudo-Clementines. By the time these sources were written, Simon had become the father of all heresies. Accordingly, virtually any heresy could be attributed to Simon. As a result-despite their alluring portraits of Simon-these sources are mostly unusable for the historical study of the Simonian Christian movement. Litwa concludes with a historical profile of the Simonian movement in the second and third centuries.

The book features appendices which contain Litwa's own translations of primary Simonian texts.

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The Exagoge of Ezekiel is playing in New York

THEATRE: Exagoge Review. The oldest Jewish play, PLUS (Jonathan Mandell, New York Theater).

“Exagoge,” inspired by the oldest known Jewish play, is a wildly ambitious, complicated but largely accessible new work of immersive theater: a play, opera, and Passover seder all in one – and all in just 100 minutes, which (if you know seders) is itself an achievement. There is much else besides its comparative brevity to recommend this latest work by the reliably erudite Edward Einhorn and his Untitled Theater Company No. 61., which began at La MaMa in the middle of Passover and is running through May 12 (two weeks past the holiday.) The play, which is thought-provoking in itself, provides a modern frame both for the opera, which has moments of exquisite singing and vivid stagecraft, and for the seder, which is more or less for real, and fun, if unorthodox (thus, for some, possibly problematic.)

A Jewish dramatist named Ezekiel the Tragedian wrote the original “Exagoge” some 2,200 years ago in Alexandria, Egypt. Although only a fragment of Ezekial’s play remains (269 lines), that’s plenty enough for scholars to know it was a drama written in Greek about the exodus of the Jews from Egyptian bondage, influenced by the tragedies written several centuries earlier by Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles. It retells the story from the Exodus book of the Bible, but incorporates non-Biblical elements, such as a phoenix that rises up at the end – which some (such as Einhorn) speculate was Ezekiel’s effort (as Einhorn puts it in a note) “to reach out to the pagan community. We know that, historically, the Jews of Alexandria were surprisingly integrated into Alexandrian society” (which at the time was what we would now call multicultural.)

[...]

Another adaptation of Ezekiel's Exagoge was performed in 2016. I noted it here and links. The outside links have rotted or were glitched, but you can now read the missing review of it by Rabbi John Rosove here.

A new Oxyrhynchus fragment of the Exagoge was also discovered in 2016, noted here and here. Presumably that was too late to be taken into account by the 2016 production. I don't know about the current one.

For more posts on the Exagoge, follow the links in the ones above. Cross-file under Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Watch.

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Gross, Babylonian Jews and Sasanian Imperialism in Late Antiquity (CUP)

NEW BOOK FROM CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS:

Babylonian Jews and Sasanian Imperialism in Late Antiquity

AUTHOR: Simcha Gross, University of Pennsylvania
DATE PUBLISHED: April 2024
AVAILABILITY: Available
FORMAT: HardbackISBN: 9781009280525

£ 100.00
Hardback

Description

From the image offered by the Babylonian Talmud, Jewish elites were deeply embedded within the Sasanian Empire (224-651 CE). The Talmud is replete with stories and discussions that feature Sasanian kings, Zoroastrian magi, fire temples, imperial administrators, Sasanian laws, Persian customs, and more quotidian details of Jewish life. Yet, in the scholarly literature on the Babylonian Talmud and the Jews of Babylonia , the Sasanian Empire has served as a backdrop to a decidedly parochial Jewish story, having little if any direct impact on Babylonian Jewish life and especially the rabbis. Babylonian Jews and Sasanian Imperialism in Late Antiquity advances a radically different understanding of Babylonian Jewish history and Sasanian rule. Building upon recent scholarship, Simcha Gross portrays a more immanent model of Sasanian rule, within and against which Jews invariably positioned and defined themselves. Babylonian Jews realized their traditions, teachings, and social position within the political, social, religious, and cultural conditions generated by Sasanian rule.

• Challenges a pervasive historical paradigm in the study of ancient Jews that treats them as siloed and isolated from their surroundings
• Models how to make an often opaque and rhetorically narrow religious text – the Talmud – speak to its own larger historical context
• Explores different ways to study Jews alongside Christians and other religious communities outside the binary of contact or conflict

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