Scroll Matters

Last week I was contacted via e-mail by Dutch journalist Henk Schutten, who sought my opinion on four Dead Sea Scrolls fragments that had shown up on the antiquities market in Holland, and who wondered if I knew of other scrolls recently being offered for sale. I told him that I was aware of no recent sales or discoveries other than the Leviticus fragments recently purchased in Israel by Hanan Eshel.

I was also able to tell him that the four fragments he mentioned (and pictured in photographs that he sent me) were included in a recent presentation by Hanan and Esther Eshel at the SBL meeting in November of 2004 and published in the journal Dead Sea Discoveries in 2005. (The four fragments were two pieces of Isaiah, which belong to IQIsa-b, and two fragments of an apocryphon, evidently 4Q226.) These fragments, according to public statements made by the Eshels, were sold by the Kando family to American collectors Bruce Ferrini and Lee Biondi, and examined by Eshel in the US in 2004.

In his recent article in Het Parool, Mr. Schutten has evidently misunderstood my information on the 4 fragments as applying to the Leviticus fragment as well.

His first quote mentioning my name is as follows:

[Edward] Cook has nothing but harsh words for the dealers and collectors, and the additional fragments now on offer.

"Apart from anything else, it is illegal". He does not even discount the possibility that some of the larger scrolls have been cut into small fragments both to increase their profitability and to conceal their origins.

My one use of the word "illegal" in our correspondence was in reference to the possible looting of the archeological sites of Khirbet Qumran and Khirbet Mird, in response to Schutten's inquiry about the supposed offer for sale of amulets discovered there. (See Letter 3 in the Appendix below.) As far as I know, the possession (or sale) of antiquities in Israel acquired before 1978 is not illegal, although it may be unethical and is certainly deplorable.

The second quote mentioning me goes like this:

[Cook] states that the involvement of the Kando family is a virtual certainty in the new finds. He adds, "More than likely that the Kando family have had the scrolls or fragments for a long time". "It is known that in the 50s many Bedouins first offered their finds to Kando. There is no guarantee whatsoever that Kando did not keep part of the material for himself. Everything indicates that the family are trying to market the fragments".

For the record, I did not say, nor do I believe, that the Leviticus fragments allegedly found in the Nahal Arugot actually come from manuscripts in the possession of the Kando family. And I can't imagine why anyone would believe, or publish, a scenario in which a manuscript is taken from a legally held collection in order to pass it off as the product of an illegal looting! What I did say to Schutten is contained in Letter 2 below. Letters 1-3 below comprise all the significant statements made by me to Schutten; Letter 4 is from Schutten and speaks for itself.

With reference to the Nahal Arugot find, I continue to believe that Hanan Eshel was guilty of nothing more (or less) than poor judgment by entering into negotiations with someone who had illegally looted an archeological site and neglecting to notify the Israel Antiquities Authority until the sale had been made. I also have read no convincing evidence that the cave Eshel was told was the find-spot was in fact the cave where the fragments were discovered. Apparently no other fragments were discovered there in situ, which would be the necessary proof. These Leviticus fragments must still, in my opinion, be considered unprovenanced.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: The fragments that initially aroused Mr. Schutten's curiosity have been published: Esther Eshel and Hanan Eshel, "New Fragments from Qumran: 4QGenf, 4QIsab, 4Q226, 8QGen, and XQpapEnoch," Dead Sea Discoveries 12/2 (2005) 134-157.


Appendix: Correspondence with Henk Schutten

1. (My first reply):

Thank you for your letter and kind words about "Ralph."

I am not aware of any specific incidents of DSS fragments suddenly appearing on the market, aside from the recent acquisition in Israel of 4 small fragments of the Book of Leviticus. The scholar who bought them did so because he was afraid the fragments would be smuggled out of Israel. Possibly the fragments that you mention are part of the same cache of manuscripts.

I would be very interested in hearing more details and receiving pictures of the fragments. I also recommend that you get in touch with two Dead Sea Scrolls experts at the University of Groningen, E. J. C. Tigchelaar and Florentino Garcia-Martinez, who may be better informed about the possible sale of recent manuscripts than I am.

2. (My second letter, after I ascertained that the scrolls pictured in Schutten's photographs were those made public by the Eshels in the SBL in November):

Many thanks for the pictures, which I hope to examine more closely later on.

Last year in the USA, a fragmentary papyrus of the Book of Enoch was presented at a meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature and was described as belonging to the Kando family. The scholars making the presentation (Hanan and Esther Eshel) also mentioned 12 other fragmentary manuscripts in the possession of the Kando family. It seems likely that the manuscripts you mention are the same ones described by the Eshels and [another scholar].

Judging by all these lines of evidence, I think it is very likely that the Kando family has had scrolls or scroll fragments in their possession for many years. It is known that in the 1950's, many Bedouin brought their discoveries to Kando before they were shown to the authorities, and there is certainly no guarantee that Kando did not keep a lot of material. It seems now that he did, and his family is now trying to sell these fragments via the antiquities trade.

There are persistent rumors of a large scroll of Enoch in private hands. I don't know whether there is any substance to these rumors at all. My concern as a scholar is that the Kando family or private collectors are possibly destroying large scrolls in order to sell smaller pieces one at a time. This would be a tremendous loss.

3. (In answer to an inquiry about copper amulets allegedly offered by the Kando estate for sale):

Jewish Amulets on metal (silver, copper, lead, bronze, gold) from the early centuries A.D. are known, but they are rare; I only know of about 20 in existence. Another one in copper would be a very interesting find. The name of the angel seems to be Uriel. If the amulet was in fact found in or near Khirbet Qumran, that would be very significant.

The second one mentioned seems to be of the same general type, but apparently written in a dialect of Aramaic called Christian Palestinian Aramaic, or sometimes Palestinian Syriac. The site known as Khirbet Mird in Israel contains the ruins of a Melkite Christian monastery from the first millennium A.D. and a number of papryi and other texts written in Christian Palestinian Aramaic were found there. Possibly this second amulet was found in or near Khirbet Mird.

It is a great pity that these interesting pieces are being advertised to collectors instead of being made available to scholars and museums. It's also illegal, of course.

4. (from Schutten, in response to my Letter 2):

That's a coincidence, Hanan Eshel presenting DSS-fragments from the Kando family. It makes his recent discovery of the new Leviticus-fragments a bit suspicious, don't you think? Can you tell me where I can find more information about this presentation last year for the Society of Biblical Literature? (I tried Google but that didn't work out)

Tagged Pseudepigrapha

I see that Logos is planning a Greek pseudepigrapha module that is fully tagged. That's great! However, I would like to point out that Accordance Bible Software has a fully tagged Greek Pseudepigrapha module available right now. I'm looking at it as I write. But it's nice that Logos is trying to catch up. :)

Latin for the Judgin': A critical edition

According to this tidbit from Rogue Classicism, John Roberts "has the Latin for the judgin'." As many people know, the judgin' exams are rigorous, and you need to have the Latin to pass.

Don't know what I'm talking about? I am channeling a comedy bit from the British review "Beyond the Fringe," from the 'sixties I believe, that Peter Cook (no relation) used to do. His character, a working-class man, says:

Yes, I could have been a judge but I never had the Latin, never had the Latin for the judgin', I never had it, so I'd had it, as far as bein' a judge was concerned. I just never had sufficient of it to get through the rigourous judging exams. They're noted for their rigour. People come out staggering and saying "My God, what a rigourous exam!" - and so I became a miner instead. A coal miner. I managed to get through the mining exams--they're not rigourous, they only ask one question, they say, "Who are you", and I got 75 per cent on that. I'd rather have been a judge than a miner. Being a miner, as soon as you are too old and tired and sick and stupid to do the job properly, you have to go. Well, the very opposite applies with judges.

Believe me, it's a lot funnier when Peter Cook delivers it. (Is the record still in print, or available on CD?)

However, I should point out that the excerpt I have given above was put together by me and does not occur, as far as I can tell, on the web. In short, it is a harmonizing text. Below I give a critical diplomatic text, with apparatus, based on the following five witnesses: A, B, C, D, and E. For my base text, I use B, which is closely allied to C, but C was copied by a rather careless scribe. Both A and D are defective, in that their text is incomplete. E has some affinities with A, but both represent a different tradition than BC.

B: "Yes, I could have been a judge, but I never had the Latin, never had the Latin for the judging, I just never had sufficient of it to get through the rigorous judging exams. They’re noted for their rigour. People come out staggering and saying ‘My God what a rigorous exam' – and so I became a miner instead. I’d rather have been a judge than a miner. Being a miner, as soon as you are too old and tired and sick and stupid to do the job properly, well you have to go. Well the opposite applies with judges."

Yes] ABCE; D om. || never had the Latin, never had the Latin] ABCE; D never had the Latin [one occurrence] || for the judging] ABCE; D adds. I never had it, so I'd had it, as far as being a judge was concerned || just never had sufficient of it] BCE; A didn't have sufficient || out staggering and saying] BC; E out saying || I became a miner instead] BCE; A I managed to become a miner || instead] AE add a coal miner. I managed to get through the mining exams--they're not (A adds: very) rigourous, they only ask (A adds: you) one question, they say, "Who are you", and I got 75 per cent on that || I'd rather ... with judges] BC; AE om. || well you have] B; C om. well || opposite] B; C very opposite

From the apparatus it emerges that AE and BC are mainly differentiated textually by the fact that AE has a joke about miners where BC has a joke about judges; D is quite short and has neither, but has a third joke that only amounts to a pun. An Old Testament scholar would talk about doublets, perhaps hypothesizing an Anti-Judge source (J) and an Anti-Miner source (M) and perhaps a Pun source (P), which built on a now-lost piece of folklore about failing a Latin test. (And a minimalist would deny that Peter Cook ever existed.) New Testament scholars would postulate some complicated redaction-critical business, and divide on whether the anti-judge or the anti-miner version was the most authentic, depending on which group the historical Peter Cook was believed to be in conflict with. The "Peter Cook Seminar" would assert that the "anti-judge" version was authentic, on the grounds that Peter Cook would have been in opposition to the establishment and in favor of the working man. (And a radical NT scholar would deny that Peter Cook ever existed.)

One thing no one would do is what I did at the beginning and produce a harmonized text. This is considered to be anti-historical and disrespectful of the sources, which must each be allowed to speak for themselves. However, I can assure you, based on oral memory (I listened to the record about 500 times when I was in seminary), that the pun, the anti-judge joke, and the anti-miner joke all occurred in Cook's original comedy routine. I can even tell you that none of the versions I have read have quite captured the dialect. The character tended to drop his aitches, yielding I never 'ad it, so I'd 'ad it as far as judgin' was concerned. And judging was always judgin', to form an assonance with Latin.

Therefore, after all the critical sifting work has been done, I still think that in some cases one should be allowed to hypothesize an original text or tradition that is a harmony or combination of all the witnesses, since in some cases (as illustrated here) all our witnesses are incomplete versions of a larger original.

Senioritis

I'm not that old (53). My wife tells me "50 is the new 40" — whatever that means. And I don't feel old (when there are no mirrors around). I can still dunk shoot a basketball, I still watch VH1, read Uncut, keep up with the latest pop culture crapola. I still have my hair (that's not a receding hairline, I just have a big forehead, OK?).

But there are things going on. Shaving seems increasingly complicated for some reason. I'm sore after a long walk. An afternoon nap gets me through the day. I see strangers my age at the grocery store and I feel like hailing them as long-lost friends, as if we are both members of a minority group. And the kid bagging the groceries looks right through me like I'm not there. It all adds up to one thing: winter is coming; it ain't here yet, but it will be before you know it.

So naturally I want to know how the musical artists who have gotten me through my life so far are doing with the same experience. Poor Pete Townshend. I bet he can't go to the pub or the corner store without someone asking, "Hey Pete! I thought you said you hoped you'd die before you got old! Well, now you're old! Huh? Huh?" But I don't know, because I haven't listened to his stuff for years. Is he even writing new stuff?

There's Paul Simon, who wrote a song not too long ago called "Old":

Down the decades every year
Summer leaves and my birthday’s here
And all my friends stand up and cheer
And say man you’re old
Getting old

Now there's a guy who's always got aging on his mind. About 40 years ago he said in a song, "I was 21 years when I wrote this song / I'm 22 now but I won't be for long." And in "Old Friends" he said, "How terribly strange to be 70." Well, Paul, pretty soon you'll be 70 and you can tell us if it's strange or not. My guess is it will seem pretty normal.

What about Dylan? It struck me last year when I saw him in Columbus, in fact, while he was in the middle of singing it, that "Mr. Tambourine Man" is an old man's song:

My weariness amazes me, I'm branded on my feet,
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty street's too dead for dreaming.

My senses have been stripped, my hands can't feel to grip,
My toes too numb to step ...
I'm ready to go anywhere, I'm ready for to fade
Into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way,
I promise to go under it.

But he didn't sing it like he was still connected to it. There was a lot more fire in his more recent material, like "Floater":

The old men 'round here, sometimes they get
On bad terms with the younger men
But old, young, age don't carry weight
It doesn't matter in the end

Then there's Neil Young. I love the Neilster, but I haven't gotten his last few albums, so I don't know how he's doing with the aging thing. Could he still sing "Old Man"?

Old man take a look at my life
I'm a lot like you
I need someone to love me
the whole day through

There's the wonderful and underrated Jonathan Richman, who's just about exactly my age. Is he still singing "Dignified and Old"?

Someday we'll be dignified (Hey kids, Hey kids)
Someday we will be dignified and old

Actually, I don't think pop artists, when they get old, write songs about it. It's the young men who do that. The old guys just don't feel like they are old. (Exhibit 1: The Rolling Stones.) It reminds me of a discussion I had years ago at Hebrew Union College with a really old professor (now deceased). I mentioned to him the hoary idea the Solomon had written the Song of Solomon when he was young and Koheleth when he was old. He said, "It's exactly the opposite. He wrote Koheleth when he was young, because it's typical of the young to put on an image of self-conscious world-weary disillusionment. And he wrote the Song when he was old and could think of nothing but sex."

Maybe that is the way of the world. The young write songs about being old, because they fear it. The old don't write about it, because they don't feel like they are old. It seems to be true of my generation anyway. In a few years, you can walk down the hallway of a nursing home — past the bedpans, the walkers, and the wheelchairs — and hear the stereos playing "Blitzkrieg Bop" or "Hit Me with Your Best Shot" or "Walk on the Wild Side," and there will be black light posters hanging on the walls, and peace signs next to the trays of pills.

Getting old? Not for a while yet. Now if you'll excuse me, it's time for my nap.

UPDATE (7/28): Follow-up posts from Tim Bulkeley and Gordon Govier. BTW, Gordon is the host of the excellent radio program The Book & The Spade.

Penguins

If you're tired of summer blockbusters (super heroes, car chases, explosions, Sith Lords), or even if you're just tired of the heat, or the headlines, I recommend going to see March of the Penguins. It's not a run-of-the-mill National Geographic-type documentary; no talking heads, no scientific interviews. Just hordes of beautiful penguins as far as the eye can see.

At first I thought the penguins were cute, in a waddling, anthropomorphic way; but during the movie they assume an animalic dignity that I didn't expect. When we left the theater, it was the human beings around us who looked strange.

It was a refreshing experience for the soul. And for a week now, Amy and I have occasionally been imitating the penguin waddle around the house, just to see if we could do it (we can't). That really puts the quizzical look on the dogs' faces: What are they up to now? Are we still getting dinner?

Take the kiddies, although I should warn you that there is some (tasteful) penguin sex. (Google that, you perverts!)

A Rocky Bolt from the Heavenly Blue

When I was in seminary, I remember hearing George Ladd refer to Matt. 11:27 par. Luke 10:22 as "a solid block of Johannine rock," because, although the saying is Synoptic, it reminds one of the style of the discourses of Christ in the Gospel of John.

Since then, I've also heard it referred to as "a bolt from the Johannine blue." Interestingly, there are all kinds of variations. Here are a few, courtesy of Google and Google Print:

a thunderbolt from the Johannine heaven
a meteorite from the Johannine heaven
an aerolite from the Johannine heaven
an aerolite from the Johannean heaven
a boulder from the Johannine moraine
the bolt from the Johannine blue
an erratic block of Johannine rock
a solid block of Johannine rock
a bolt from the Johannine heaven
a bolt from the Johannine sky
the synoptic thunderbolt from the Johannine sky
a meteor from the Johannine sky
the Johannine aerolite

The phrase is most often attributed to Karl von Hase, a 19th century German historian of Christianity in the form "an aerolite from the Johannine heaven." But I don't know what the original German was. I imagine the "bolt ... blue" variant is an accommodation to English idiom; but I don't know where the "block ... rock" variant comes from. Does anybody else?

UPDATE (7/24): Reader Kevin Snapp emailed me the original quotation from von Hase:

Die einzige synoptische Stelle, darnach `Niemand den Sohn erkennt ausser der Vater, und Niemand den Vater erkennt ausser der Sohn und wem irgend der Sohn es offenbaren wolle,' macht den Eindruck wie ein Aerolith aus dem johanneischen [sic] Himmel gefallen, allenfalls auch aus dem Gesichtskreise des Paulus.

The reference is Karl von Hase, Geschichte Jesu, nach akademischen Vorlesungen (2te Aufl. Leipzig 1891), 527. Many thanks, Kevin; also thanks to Pilgrim in the comments for attempting a back-translation.

It's interesting that some of the versions of the phrase preserve the rare word aerolith or aerolite, although the more recent versions abandon it for words more readily understandable (like meteor) or idiomatic (bolt), even if the image is slightly changed. And some scholars have obviously recast the image in terms they like better or that are more euphonious ("rock ... block"). There's a lesson here for biblical criticism, not least in the fact that the underlying meaning remains unchanged throughout all the permutations.

An Aramaism in Matt. 11:26 par. Lk. 10:21

Although I've spent some time lately debunking various attempts to find Aramaic wordplay in the gospels, I do think that Aramaisms are to be found in them, and that New Testament scholars need to be aware of them.

A simple and very clear example is the idiom in Matt. 11:26 par. Luke 10:21, where Jesus in his prayer says to God, that He had revealed hidden things to babes, because "thus it was well-pleasing in thy sight" (Gk. houtos eudokia egeneto emprosthen sou), literally, "such was will/pleasure before you."

This particular idiom does not appear in the Septuagint, in the Greek Pseudepigrapha, or in any other place in the New Testament (except one, Mt. 18:14, see below). The best parallels elsewhere are in Aramaic, especially the targums.

In these examples, a translation of the Hebrew is given first, then a translation of the Targum:

Deut 10:10: "the Lord did not want to destroy you" = Targ. Neof. "there was no pleasure before the Lord to destroy you"

Judg. 13:23 "if the Lord wanted (to kill us)" = Targ. Jon. "if there was will/pleasure before the Lord (that we should die)"

I Sam. 12:22 "the Lord wanted to make you a people for himself" = Targ. Jon. "there was pleasure before the Lord to make you a people before him"

I Sam. 16:8 "the Lord has not chosen this one" = Targ. Jon. "there is no pleasure before the Lord in this one"

Isa. 1:11 "what is the multitude of your sacrifices to me?" = Targ. Jon. "there is no pleasure before me in the multitude of your holy sacrifices"

Jer. 44:22 "the Lord cannot bear any more" = Targ. Jon. "there was no longer pleasure before the Lord to forgive"

Jonah 1:4 "you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you" = "you, O Lord, have done as there was pleasure before you"

There are quite a few other examples.

The word translated "will, pleasure" is רעוא ra'awa, which corresponds very closely to Greek. eudokia. The Aramaic of the Gospel phrase would be something like ken hewat ra'awa qodamak, "such was will/pleasure before you" = "that is what you wanted to do."

A similar instance in the Gospels is Matt. 18:14: "it is not the will of your Father who is in heaven" (Gk. ouk estin thelema emprosthen tou patros humon tou en ouraniois), which in Aramaic would be la ra'awa qodam abukon di bi-shmayya. Here thelema is used instead of eudokia, but the underlying idiom is clearly the same.

Is this definitely Aramaic and not Hebrew? There are examples of the equivalent Hebrew phrase, the oldest of which is in Pirke Avoth 5:20: "May there be pleasure before you, O Lord our God (that the Temple be built)" = yehi ratzon millephaneykha YY eloheinu. Therefore it is possible that the Aramaism in Mat. 11:26 par., 18:14 is actually a Hebraism. However, the use of "before" (Aram. qodam, Gk. emprosthen) as a mark of respect, in this idiom and others, seems to have its origin in Aramaic, not Hebrew, usage. Therefore I opt for Aramaic.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: These are long-known examples of Semitic influence; of many references, the best discussion is probably in Gustav Dalman, Die Wörte Jesu.

The New Scroll

The new scroll fragments of Leviticus from the Wilderness of Judea provide a good opportunity for comments on the antiquities scene in Israel. Here's a quote from the AP story:

[Hanan] Eshel said he was first shown the fragments last year during a meeting in an abandoned police station near the Dead Sea.

A Bedouin said he had been offered $20,000 for the fragments on the black market and wanted an evaluation.

The encounter that both excited and dismayed the archaeologist who has worked in the Judean Desert since 1986.

"I was jealous he had found it, not me. I was also very excited. I didn't believe I would see them again," said Eshel, who took photographs of the pieces he feared would soon be smuggled out of the country.

But in March 2005, he discovered the Bedouin still had the scroll fragments. Eshel bought them with $3,000 provided by Bar Ilan University and handed them over to the Antiquities Authority, he said.

"Scholars do not buy antiquities. I did it because I could not see it fall apart," Eshel said.

Scattered thoughts: It's too bad the IAA or the Hebrew University or somebody doesn't offer a reward saying: "$1 MILLION TO THE FIRST PERSON TO DISCOVER A CAVE CONTAINING UNDISTURBED SCROLLS." A new bibliophorous (scroll bearing) cave would be worth more than any number of scraps.

It's too bad that the discoverer wanted the scholar's opinion only for authentication to make an illegal sale.

This scroll is not very sexy (c'mon — Leviticus?), and therefore it is probably authentic. A fake scroll would have mentioned Jesus or Paul and been offered for sale to the Israel Museum for $5 million, after a breathless article touting its importance had been published in BAR. But I'm glad they're doing tests on this one.

Where — and I mean exactly what cave? — was this discovered in? Why didn't Eshel just say, "Nice scroll. I'll give you your asking price if you can show me exactly where you discovered it. If not, hey, enjoy your Leviticus!"

How many other scrolls are being sold to collectors all the time by the Bedouin without publicity? Rumors abound.

UPDATE (7/17): Jim Davila asserts that Leviticus is indeed sexy, as anything biblical is sexy. Fair enough, and of course in the present state of biblical archaeology any unprovenanced article must be ipso facto under suspicion. I am wondering, though, if ancient animal skin suitable for forgery can be easily found. Other forgeries on stone, ceramic, or papyrus are less easily detectable since uninscribed ancient pieces of these materials are common. But truly ancient animal skin suitable for forgery must be rare (but I speak under correction). I agree that we should be cautious.

Speaking of unauthenticated scrolls, whatever happened to the so-called "Angel Scroll"?

Consensuses

An interesting discussion among Jim West, Jim Davila, and Michael Pahl on the meaning of "consensus," summarized here by Michael.

I would only add that there seem to be at least two kinds of consensus. One we might call a hard consensus, wherein the facts of the matter are so well-known to specialists or professionals that there is no serious doubt among them.

Another kind is the "soft" consensus, which is the result of a kind of scholarly flocking behavior. One view becomes fashionable, or famous, or is espoused by a particularly influential scholar, or just gets repeated a lot and everyone starts jumping on the bandwagon. Although a vote would reveal a "consensus," there is in fact a lot of room for opposition and contradiction, and little hard core of indisputable fact.

This presents a problem for outsiders: How can you tell if a particular consensus of specialists is hard or soft? I think the debate about global warming is an example of this kind of problem. As an outsider, I've become convinced that there is a hard consensus among scientists about global warming, although many politicians still want to portray it as soft, with room for reasonable doubt.

I take it that the question of the dating of the gospels, about which the question of consensus originally arose, is inevitably a matter of "soft" consensus. Of course, all of us want to treat our own ideas as a matter of "hard" consensus, "accepted scholarly opinion." I think that in our field there are relatively few matters of hard consensus. But soft consensuses (?) usually erode over time, or diminish when we scholarly sheep follow a new bellwether.

More on the Marzeah Papyrus

Stephen Goranson forwards this link to a site claiming that Raffi Brown (one of the indicted co-conspirators in the forgery scandal) was the forger of the Marzeah Papyrus and the Ivory Pomegranate. I have no idea whether the information on the site is good or bad — the wild writing style does not inspire confidence — but since the Marzeah Papyrus has been previously discussed here, I pass the link along for readers to sift through on their own. (I also feel that there are other incautious statements on that site that may be libelous. Caveat emptor.)

If any readers have independent knowledge of these claims, I'd be interested in hearing from you.

UPDATE: Joe Cathey summarizes a recent report in the Israel Exploration Journal on the Ivory Pomegranate.

Blogging and Academic Job Hunting

This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education may provide a good reality check for bloggers, both in Biblioblogdom and elsewhere. Read the whole thing. Here's an excerpt:

Job seekers who are also bloggers may have a tough road ahead, if our committee's experience is any indication.

You may think your blog is a harmless outlet. You may use the faulty logic of the blogger, "Oh, no one will see it anyway." Don't count on it. Even if you take your blog offline while job applications are active, Google and other search engines store cached data of their prior contents. So that cranky rant might still turn up.

The content of the blog may be less worrisome than the fact of the blog itself. Several committee members expressed concern that a blogger who joined our staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see. Past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum.

Personally, I try not to rant, bitch, moan, talk trash, or get personal on "Ralph." And I try to stay pretty much within the broad topics I've established herein, while still maintaining enough variety to keep myself, my family, and my friends, both lay and professional, interested.

But I must admit that I didn't think about blogging being a barrier to future employment. I think it's a pity that the committee described in the article was suspicious of blogging as such. However, all of us should probably remind ourselves that the dashed-off tripe we ladle into the bitstream is going to be cached and available for reading for a long time. "Every idle word ..." (There's a spiritual lesson here, too.)

Maybe this issue can be taken up at the Biblioblogging session in November at Philadelphia. I'd be interested in hearing what others think in the meantime, especially those with faculty positions. If you were on a search committee, would you check a candidate's blog? If you did, what would you look for?

UPDATE (7/10): Thanks for all your comments, although nobody answered my question.

AKMA responds to the same article here, and Ann Althouse here, and she links to this Metafilter discussion. She also says, "But, for me, blogging is so phenomenally satisfying that I would find the possible career advancement sacrifices worth it." Wow. Spoken like a woman with tenure and an endowed chair.

I suppose the moral of the story is this: If you want to know if a critique of blogging is valid or not, don't ask bloggers.

Spielberg's War

"War of the Worlds" was better than I expected, which was something on the pedestrian level of "Batman Begins." It transcended its own blockbuster hype and really made me belatedly begin to think of Steven Spielberg as a real auteur.

Of course, Spielberg is not really interested in aliens or spaceships or any other sci-fi stuff. In this respect he could not differ more from George Lucas, who really thinks aliens and spaceships are cool and interesting and worth forging a story around.

What Spielberg really likes more than anything else is showing people under pressure; what do people act like in dire straits? The crisis is different — sharks, combat, the Holocaust, dinosaurs, aliens — but the focus is always on characters in crisis, not on what is causing the crisis. (Raiders of the Lost Ark is an exception, but doesn't really count, since the whole conception was Lucas's, not Spielberg's.) This really comes out clearly in "War of the Worlds" when Ray's car is attacked by other refugees: this is the scariest scene in the movie, and it could take place in a war movie or a dinosaur movie or a movie about a big storm a-comin'. The people are just as scary as the aliens, if not more so. Spielberg excels at this kind of film.

(Compare the superficially similar Twister; there is a plot about men, women, relationships and competition, etc., but it's just machinery to keep people encountering those awesome tornadoes. If Spielberg had made it, the tornadoes would just be machinery to put these people in extreme situations and see what happens to them.)

There were what seemed to me some references to other Spielberg movies. The burgeoning cloud with lightning flashing within, which conceals aliens, reminded me of Close Encounters, as does a later scene when characters are transfixed in an alien spotlight; the basement scene was a lot like the one in Jurassic Park when the raptors attack in the hotel kitchen; the combat scenes are inevitably like those in Saving Private Ryan; an alien who is first noticed as a grasping hand is reminiscent of certain parts of E.T. I don't know if Spielberg is repeating himself or not, but maybe the references to his other movies with aliens are intentional and ironic. The aliens are E.T.'s evil twins.

Visual references to 9/11 are sprinkled throughout, yet another sign that Spielberg is not really thinking about extra-terrestrials. His message for us in this movie is not unlike the messages in his other movies: "Don't give up, you can get through this." It's not deep, but it's timely.

The previews were also interesting. Every movie looks good in trailers, but I was pleased at the overall look of the Narnia movie, and even "King Kong" looks like it might be worthwhile.

Learning in War-Time

Our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims of the London bombings and their families.

At times like these, I am often tempted to think, Why work? Why should I write, study, blog, catalog, parse verbs, or do research, when there is so much suffering in the world, so much of "real" importance to be done, besides which my activities pale into insignificance?

I find C. S. Lewis's sermon "Learning in War-Time," delivered in Oxford as the Second World War broke out, a bracing tonic for these feelings. Read it all, if you can find it. A few quotes:

Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes. . . . [Men] propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the last new poem while advancing on the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature.
...
If we had foolish un-Christian hopes about human culture, they are now shattered. If we thought we were building up a heaven on earth, if we looked for something that would turn the present world from a place of pilgrimage into a permanent city satisfying the soul of man, we are disillusioned, and not a moment too soon. But if we thought that for some souls, and at some times, the life of learning, humbly offered to God, was, in its own small way, one of the appointed approaches to the Divine reality and the Divine beauty which we hope to enjoy hereafter, we can think so still.

So ... back to work.

My Chat with Hershel

A few weeks ago, Hershel Shanks called me up. Our discussion was both cordial and frank, as one might say of a summit between Bush and Chirac. I didn't take notes, but some of the highlights, as I remember them:

His call, as it turns out, was prompted by the post "The Latest News from Hershel Shanks." He began the conversation saying that he had read the post on my blog criticizing him. ME: A post criticizing you? Which one? HS: You mean there's more than one? ME: Actually, there are quite a few.

He asked why I didn't just send a letter to the editor at BAR. I told him that these days I would rather blog than write a letter to the editor.

If you've been reading "Ralph," then you know my differences with Hershel. I would like to see certain changes in Biblical Archaeology Review, and I would like to see — at least — unprovenanced artifacts treated with suspicion instead of good will, not just in BAR, but throughout the guild. Hershel told me I didn't live in the real world, that these items would continue to be discussed, and the field could only benefit by full discussion and complete openness of debate.

I responded that unprovenanced artifacts would always have a cloud over them, and that this cloud would prevent the unfettered use of epigraphic material we all find interesting. I want to see Biblical archaeology placed on a sound footing, not undermined by the antiquities market and by forgers.

Hershel said that people have a right to know, and that interesting discoveries can't be kept a secret. The story of the Dead Sea Scrolls is a case in point. I said that scholars should not be in the business of providing authentication of artifacts for the benefit of collectors; epigraphs appearing on the antiquities market should not be for sale, and unprovenanced epigraphs, after having been handed over to the authorities, should be examined by experts before being published. Hershel says that such rules will just drive the market underground.

Hershel accused me of thinking that he was "immoral ... a bad guy." I said I preferred to use the words "unwise" or "incautious" or "overeager." (And I don't think I've ever said on "Ralph" or elsewhere that Hershel is personally a bad guy, which he certainly is not.)

More was said, which I can't now recall with exactness; if memory serves, among other things, Hershel said or implied that the looting of antiquities would not stop until the Israeli-Palestinian problem was solved; that the banned antiquities trade in Egypt continued to flourish underground; and that Kyle McCarter thinks the Ivory Pomegranate is authentic. I declined to discuss the Pomegranate further until a full report comes out; I'm a philologist, not a paleographic expert.

We ended by agreeing that such discussions as we had on the phone were good, and wishing that others could have overheard. He encouraged me to blog on our conversation, which I am now doing. I didn't change his mind, he didn't change mine.

Violent Americans Bomb Innocent Comet

This is cool. Happy Fourth!

Does "Iscariot" Mean "the Liar"?

The etymology of Judas's surname Iscariot has been much discussed. I am surprised to see a theory gaining ground that, in my opinion, has little to recommend it. I refer to the proposal that the Aramaic word sheqar, "lie," is the basis of the name. M. Limbeck writes in the Exegetical Dictionary of the NT:

Starting from Aram. sheqar and shiqray/sheqarya, "liar," which with the ending -a and with aleph prostheticum becomes ishqarya, Iscariot can be taken as "the liar, the false one" ...

I have a number of problems with this proposal. First of all, there is not, as far as I can tell, any Aramaic word shiqray, sheqarya that means "liar." The idea that there is apparently comes from an error in Jastrow's Dictionary (p. 1626, s.v. שׁקרא), where he misinterprets a verbal form in b.Yev. 55b שׁקרי , "I lied" — as an adjective. That is the only "attested" use of this otherwise non-existent word. The normal Aramaic word for "liar" would be shaqqar, which cannot be made to yield "Iscariot."

Secondly, you can't just tack on a prosthetic aleph any place you want to; it occurs primarily on words that begin with consonant clusters (which shiqray does not). As far as I can determine, prosthetic aleph is not attested with this root at all in Aramaic. So what we have here is an arbitrary syllable added to a word that does not exist; and this is proposed in a widely used lexical tool as the most probable etymology! (I. Howard Marshall, in his commentary on Luke, also refers to this as the "most plausible" etymology.)

The old idea that Iscariot means "man of (the town) Kerioth" (Hebrew ish qeriyot) is still the best. Limbeck objects that a Hebrew surname would not be used, but I think this is not true; tombstones and ossuaries from the first century CE bear names in both Hebrew and Aramaic. Plus, names with ish + city name are quite common in the Mishnah. Here's a few:

Natai Ish Tekoa (Hal. 4:10)
Yosi ben Yoezer Ish Zereda
Yosi ben Yohanan Ish Yerushalaim (Sota 9:9)
Yakim Ish Hadar (Eduy. 7:5)
Antigonus Ish Sokho (Avot. 1:3)
Halaphta Ish Kefar-hanania (Avot 3:6)
Levitas Ish Yabneh (Avot 4:4)
Eliezer Ben Yehudah Ish Bartota (Tev. Y. 3:4)

Judas's full designation in Hebrew would likely have been Yehudah ben Shimon Ish Qeriyot (cp. John 6:71, "Judas son of Simon Iscariot," which also has the variant reading "from Kariot" for "Iscariot").


BIBLIOGRAPHY: M. Limbeck, "Iscariotes," Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament, edited by Horst Balz, Gerhard Schneider, p. 201.

Aramaic Wordplay in Luke 14:5?

I'm still plugging along in Casey's Aramaic Sources of Mark's Gospel. I observe that he approves (p. 30) of Matthew Black's hypothesis of Aramaic wordplay at the origin of Luke 14:5. Here's the text of the NIV with the proposed Aramaic originals in parentheses: “If one of you has a son (bar) or an ox (be'ir) that falls into a well (ber) on the Sabbath day, will you not immediately pull him out?”

Casey calls this "perfectly plausible." There are at least two problems with this theory. One is that be'ir (בעיר) is not the Aramaic word for "ox," which is tor (תור). Be'ir just means "livestock, large domestic animal," and could include other animals as well as oxen. One of Casey's methodological principles is that one should not just translate backwards to get at the original Aramaic, but also ask how a suggested Aramaic original would have likely been translated. In this case, I think that be'ir would surely have been rendered as ktenos, not as bous, which is what the Lukan text has. Bous most reasonably points back to tor, and that dissolves the wordplay.

That's one problem. Another one is the textual problem in this verse. For "son" (huios) in the Nestle-Aland critical text, the Textus Receptus has "ass" (onos), which is supported by Sinaiticus, among others. "Son" looks to be better attested; on the other hand, "son" spoils the a fortiori argument apparently used by Christ in this verse (compare the similar story in Matt. 12:9-13): If animal, why not human? On the other hand, perhaps the argument is not a fortiori, but a maiori ad minus; since the custom allows the greater breach of Sabbath law, it should allow the lesser: If lifting, why not healing? It's a toss-up, and the textual decision is interwoven with the exegetical choice.

A remote possibility is that the original Aramaic (if there was such a thing) read bar torin, calf, literally, "son of oxen," and that this somehow made it into the Gospel as "son or ox" (bar o tor). I doubt that's what happened, but I mention it for the sake of completeness.

Welcome to Readers of Expecting Rain

To Dylan fans directed to this blog by Expecting Rain, here's a few more posts from this blog you might like:

Dylan and the Bleeding Tree
Bob Dylan and Esau's Kiss
Dylan's Mustache

Enjoy!

Weekend Reading

Jim Davila discusses the "Ink and Blood" exhibit, which has been mentioned on "Ralph" previously ... An interesting discussion on the meaning of "War of the Worlds" at Siris ... Robin at Beth Turnip talks about the commercialization of the church ... Byzantium Shores says something many of us we can agree with: "I think the real media bias is not to the liberal or to the conservative, but to the stupid." No argument here.

Congrats to the San Antonio Spurs for winning the NBA championship. But the real MVP was 'Nu, not Timid Tim. (Does this mean that basketball is yielding to foreign players? I don't know. Did jazz become French because of Django Reinhardt? As long as basketball thrives, who cares?)

Rasheed Wallace and the Synoptic Problem

The always stimulating Language Log provides more grist at this post. Mark Liberman is interested there in possible collocations in English, but his post interested me as an example of the problem of written transmission of oral sources. The quotes in the following are taken from that post, but are put to a different use.

Rasheed Wallace, the great forward for the Detroit Pistons, arguably let his team down in Game 5 of the NBA Finals when he left his counterpart on the Spurs, Robert Horry, unguarded to make the winning 3-pointer. After Game 6, which Rasheed helped his team win, he was asked in the pool press conference what made the difference between his Game 5 and Game 6 performances. These are the reported replies:

New York Times: "I just made a bonehead play the other night," said Wallace, who finished with 16 points. "I had to put it behind me, it was over with and I had to come to play tonight."

Philadelphia Inquirer: "Even though I did a bonehead play the other night, I just had to put it behind me," Wallace said.

Houston Chronicle: "I did a bonehead play the other night," he said. "I had to put it behind me. It was over with. It was no pressure. I don't feel pressure. I had to do the things I needed to do."

Toronto Sun: "I did a bonehead play the other night (leaving the Spurs' Robert Horry open for the winning shot in Game 5), but I had to put it behind me," Wallace said.

Obviously the same utterance is being reported, but the words are slightly different. Everyone has the phrase "bonehead play," but only the Times says he "made" it, not "did" it. The Times also says he "just" made the play, while the Inquirer says he "just" put it behind him. The Chronicle and the Sun don't have "just" at all. The Inquirer puts the bonehead play in a subordinate clause ("even though..."), while the others don't. The Chronicle has a sequence the others don't, about "pressure." The papers also differ on what Rasheed felt he "had to" do. The Times has two things he had to do: put it behind him, and come to play. The Inquirer and the Sun just have the first one, while the Chronicle agrees he had to do two things, but they are put it behind him, and "do the things I needed to do."

Now all these guys were listening to the same press conference and, I assume, were taking notes by hand. If they recorded the utterance, they still had to write/type it out by hand. Even so, they were unable to agree on the ipsissima verba Rasheedi, although, arguably, one can hear in their stories the ipsissima vox Rasheedi.

As it happens, there is a transcript of the press conference, and we have the verbatim utterance of Rasheed:

Just went at it as another good game. Even though I did a bonehead play the other night, had to put it behind me. It was over with, just came out and had to play tonight.

Now compare the "real" thing with the reports. The Times and Inquirer writers did hear "just" (twice), but inserted it at the wrong places. The Inquirer was right about the subordinate clause. The Times and the Chronicle were right about the two "had to"'s, but were wrong about the second one: he "had to play," not "had to come to play" (Times) or "do the things I needed to do" (Chronicle — what was this guy smoking?). None of them reproduce the introductory remark about "another good game." The Sun and the Inquirer abridge the whole utterance. And he "did" the play, not "made" it.

All of these differences — revision, reordering, abridgement, etc. — are paralleled in the Synoptic Gospels. What interests me is that the results from this little real-life sample are not unlike the results gained elsewhere from studies of oral transmission and written transmission, especially the very interesting article by Robert McIver and Marie Carroll in JBL 121 (see below). They performed experiments to test the reliability of oral transmission and written transmission, but they didn't test the reliability of written notes on an oral utterance. I've always thought it was highly possible that the first auditors of Jesus (or of the apostles, if that makes you more comfortable) took notes, a perfectly normal thing to do in antiquity. But — if the "Rasheed test" is typical — even that does not guarantee any kind of verbatim record. As for me, I'm satisfied with the ipsissima vox. (Note to self: also relevant for comparison of Targumim.)

In conclusion, I'll give another example from the same Language Log post. In this case, we don't have a transcript, so you'll have to use your critical faculties to decide which is closest to the "living voice." The speaker is A. J. Feeley, backup quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles. A. J., are you going to reward your offensive line by taking them out to dinner? The Synoptic response:

"On my salary, I'll take them out to Wendy's for a cheeseburger," Feeley said. "Make it a limit of one." (Philadelphia Inquirer)

"With my salary, I'll take 'em out to Wendy's for a cheeseburger," Feeley said, flashing his perfect smile for the cameras. "And they get limited to one...the Happy Meal." (New York Daily News)

"With my salary," he said, "I can take them all out to Wendy's for dinner. Limit them each to one cheeseburger." (New York Times)

My guess is that the "Markan" redaction is found in the Daily News. It's all there, the vernacular language ("take 'em"), the personal detail (the smile), and the vivid lifestyle reference (the Happy Meal). The "Matthean" redaction is the Inquirer, which abridges the statement, omits the smile and the Happy Meal, and cleans up the language. The New York Times is the "Lukan" representative, who also leaves out the smile and the Happy Meal, eliminates all traces of colloquialism ("I can take them all out" for "I'll take 'em out"), and introduces a reference to "dinner," moving "cheeseburger" to the end of the pericope.

Who says sports and scholarship don't mix?

BIBLIOGRAPHY: R. McIver and M. Carroll, "Experiments to Develop Criteria for Determining the Existence of Written Sources, and Their Potential Implications for the Synoptic Problem," Journal of Biblical Literature 121 (2002): 667-687.

UPDATE (6/24): Mark Liberman responds and includes a more exact transcript of the Rasheed pericope.

CBS and the Junkumentary

Last night, whenever there was a timeout during the Pistons-Spurs game, I switched over to the "100 Greatest Movie Quotes" show on CBS. It was clear from this limited exposure that the networks have no idea of how to make junkumentaries (my word, as far as I know). VH1 churns these things out by the truckload, and they're fun (100 Greatest Metal Moments, etc.) as long as the brain is disengaged. But VH1 knows what to do with talking heads; have them on for five seconds, then go back to the clips. CBS thinks it has to move up really close to them, vary the angle and lighting, and in general treat the heads like the Delphic oracle. I think they were trying to fool us into thinking this was a real, critical look at film instead of the quickie junk it actually was. ("We're CBS! We're not cable!")

As for the quotes? The usual suspects, as far as I could tell. My own quotes would have been dramatically different. Here's a selection off the top of my head:

"I caught you a delicious bass." (Napoleon Dynamite)

"Do the chickens have large talons?" (Napoleon Dynamite)

"Back off man, I'm a scientist." (Ghostbusters)

"Whassup?" (A Night at the Roxbury)

"Max, are we going through plutonium?" (Annie Hall)

Rebels are we,
Born to be free,
Just like the fish in the sea.
(Bananas and Sleeper)

SONIA: Boris, let me show you how absurd your position is. All right, let's say that there is no God and each man is free to do exactly as he chooses. Well, what prevents you from murdering somebody?
BORIS: Well, murder is immoral.
SONIA: Immorality is subjective.
BORIS: But subjectivity is objective.
SONIA: Not in any rational scheme of perception.
BORIS: Perception is irrational. It implies immanence.
SONIA: The judgment of any system or a priori relation of phenomena exists in any rational or metaphysical or at least epistemological contradiction to an abstract and empirical concept such as being, or to be, or to occur, in the thing itself or of the thing itself.
BORIS: Yeah, I've said that many times.
(Love and Death)

Some Movies

I saw some movies this past weekend. Everyone seems to be blogging about "Batman Begins," and I saw it, so I'll join in. It was OK. It was good, in a summer-blockbuster-y kind of way: lots of explosions, gadgets, iron-jawed heroes, slimy villains, last second escapes. The usual stuff. Was it great? No. Actually pretty formulaic. The script didn't make a whole lot of sense. (Why didn't Bats bring the antidote with him in one of his gazillion pockets instead of having to schlepp whats-her-name back to the Batcave to save her sanity? Just so they could have a Race Against Time?)

I might have liked it better if, the day before, I hadn't seen "Howl's Moving Castle." Truly amazing. I have no idea why, in Cincinnati, this movie is tucked away in the local art-house cinematheque instead of being out there at the Jumboplex where America's kiddoes can see it in droves. It had all the excitement of "Batman" — no, make that twice the excitement — and a ton of imagination, of which "Batman" had zero. Some of the visuals had the quality of dreams, and the characters all had character. Three cheers for Miyazaki.

The Date of C.S. Lewis's Conversion(s)

When I was growing up as a Southern Baptist, I was told many times that if you can't name the very year, month, and day — nay, even the hour — that you became a Christian, your claim to be saved was in serious doubt. I've come to doubt this punctiliar understanding of conversion; I've encountered too many godly people who have "always been Christians" or whose conversion occurred (or is occurring) in increments or installments. This is not to say that the dramatic crisis-conversion is not valid either, but it's not the only way to go.

A case in point is perhaps the most famous conversion in 20th century English-speaking Christianity, that of C. S. Lewis. Not only is there some doubt among his biographers as to the exact date of the conversion, there seems to be some vagueness in Lewis's own writings on the subject.

Readers of Lewis will recall that his conversion took place in two stages. The first was his conversion from a pantheistic Absolute Idealism to Theism. This process is described in some detail in his memoir Surprised by Joy (1955), but the date is not given, beyond "the Trinity Term of 1929." The Trinity Term lasts, I gather, from about mid-April to about mid-June. It is therefore only a slight inaccuracy when Humphrey Carpenter in his book The Inklings refers to CSL's conversion in "the summer of 1929."

Unfortunately, there is no reference in any of Lewis's letters of 1929 to this event. The editor of the Collected Letters, Walter Hooper, guesses that the night when Lewis knelt down in his rooms at Magdalen and admitted "that God was God" was sometime in May 1929. But CSL does not refer to any spiritual change in himself until Jan. 1930 in a letter to Arthur Greeves, in which he refers to his renewed efforts to live a moral life and his afternoon "meditations" — but his language still implies a pantheistic, not a theistic, understanding of God.

And, in a letter that is assigned by the editor to Feb. 1930, Lewis writes to Owen Barfield that "the Spirit ... is showing an alarming tendency to become much more personal and is taking the offensive and behaving just like God." Hooper rightly notes that this experience is also described in Surprised by Joy ch. 14: "Idealism ... cannot be lived. It became patently absurd to go on thinking of 'Spirit' as either ignorant of, or passive to, my approaches." But this realization, as Lewis describes it in the memoir, came before the Trinity Term of 1929. This is impossible. The 1929 date must be incorrect.

Lewis also tells us in SBJ that "as soon as I became a Theist I started attending my parish church on Sundays and my college chapel on weekdays." It is not until Oct. 1930 that Lewis writes to Greeves that "I have started going to morning Chapel at 8." Although one cannot be sure when this habit began, it's unlikely that a man who had been going to chapel for over a year would write in this way.

I've therefore become convinced that Lewis misremembered the date of his conversion to Theism, and that it was very likely the Trinity Term (or even later) of 1930, not 1929, that saw the crucial change from Pantheism to Theism.

But is it conceivable that Lewis himself could have gotten this date wrong? He was notoriously vague about dates. We find him writing in July 1939 to a correspondent that "though I'm 40 years old as a man I'm only about 12 as a Christian." "About 12" would place his conversion to Christianity (which came in 1931) around 1927, which is too early on any reckoning. In Feb. 1946 he tells another correspondent that "my beliefs continued to be agnostic, with fluctuation towards pantheism ... till I was about 29." "About 29" would be in the year 1927 or 1928 (Lewis was born Nov. 29, 1898); again too early, on the evidence of the letters. Lewis's own recollection was too vague to be relied upon.

Oddly enough, we are in better shape concerning the second stage of his conversion, when he accepted Christianity. I say "oddly" because Lewis admits in SBJ that he himself remembered little about it. His letters from the time, however, fill in the blanks of the memoir. On Sept. 19, 1931, Lewis had a long discussion with J. R. R. Tolkien and H. V. Dyson in which his last objections to Christianity were overcome; the details are given in several letters to Greeves.

On Oct. 1, 1931, Lewis tells Greeves "I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ — in Christianity.... My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it." The conversation is not described in SBJ, and he does not mention in this letter the trip to the zoo he describes in SBJ:

I know very well when ... the final step was taken. I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.

There seems to be no documentation of exactly what day this was. Hooper states that it was Sept. 28, 1931, while George Sayer in his biography of Lewis says that it was Sept. 22. All we know for certain is that it had to take place between Sept. 19 (the date of the Tolkien-Dyson conversation) and Oct. 1 (the date of the letter to Greeves).

Well, what is the upshot of all this? Simply that Lewis's (and our) uncertainty surrounding the exact dates of his conversion(s) are not, in the final analysis, all that important. As he himself said: "As for what we commonly call Will, and what we commonly call Emotion, I fancy these usually talk too loud, protest too much, to be quite believed, and we have a secret suspicion that the great passion or the iron resolution is partly a put-up job." It is not Lewis's (or our) remembered decisions or emotions that finally tell the story of conversion; the true story, the important details, of all our biographies, can only be told from the perspective of Heaven. We are all unreliable narrators; but — "there is One Who is reliable."

Dylan and the Bleeding Tree

In Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" (1963), the narrator speaks of a series of frightening and ominous things that he encountered on his journey, all of them heavily loaded with symbolism. One of them is this:

I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin'

I've always been intrigued by the possibility that Dylan was influenced by a scene in Dante's Inferno when writing this line. In the seventh circle (Canto 13), Virgil leads Dante through the Wood of Suicides, where Dante breaks off a twig from one of the trees:

Then I stretched my hand a little forward and plucked a branchlet from a great thorn-bush, and its trunk cried out, "Why dost thou rend me?" When it had become dark with blood it began again to cry, "Why dost thou tear me? hast thou not any spirit of pity? Men we were, and now we are become stocks; truly thy hand ought to be more pitiful had we been the souls of serpents." (tr. Charles Eliot Norton)

As all the commentators note, Dante in turn is influenced by a scene in Virgil's Aeneid (Book 3):

There, while I went to crop the sylvan scenes,
And shade our altar with their leafy greens,
I pull'd a plant- with horror I relate
A prodigy so strange and full of fate.
The rooted fibers rose, and from the wound
Black bloody drops distill'd upon the ground.
(John Dryden translation)

In the 16th century, Spenser used the same image in The Faerie Queene:

And thinking of those braunches greene to frame
A girlond for her dainty forehead fit,
He pluckt a bough; out of whose rift there came
Small drops of gory bloud, that trickled downe the same.

In all these cases the tree is in fact a human being; but only in Dante's case is the arborification of the human a punishment for a specific sin, namely suicide. (The human trees in Virgil and Spenser just happened to fall afoul of the wrong god or witch.) This fits well in the context of Dylan's song, where the images in the catalog all have some kind of moral resonance.

And we now know that Dylan in the early '60's was reading The Inferno. He mentions it in his memoir Chronicles Volume One.

Still, even after all this source hunting, I remain uncertain. It recently struck me that an equally good source (if we must have a source) is the anti-lynching protest song "Strange Fruit" made famous by Billie Holliday:

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

"Strange Fruit" was written by a Jewish songwriter (Abel Meeropol) under a different name (Lewis Allan). Meeropol was also known for having adopted the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg after their execution. It seems likely to me that Dylan, who was active in New York leftist circles in the early '60's, might have been attracted to this song for many reasons. ("Strange Fruit" is also mentioned in Chronicles.)

WAC and the Sicarii

Danny Zacharias at deinde.org has been reading Wise-Abegg-Cook:

My sense is that it was probably Michael Wise who wrote the essay proposing that the Qumran sect was Sicarii in orientation. It was an interesting read, and I am curious to hear what others think of it. Ultimately I was unconvinced, but his noting of texts also found at Masada, as well as his explanation for the existence of 4Q448 (In Praise of King Jonathan) at Qumran was interesting. I am wondering what other readers or bloggers think about it. Perhaps Ed Cook would have time to blog about, since his name is technically attached to the proposal.

In fact, the introduction to Wise-Abegg-Cook (up to page 35) was drafted by me and then revised by both Marty and Mike. Therefore my name is more than "technically attached" to it.

Danny, if you will re-read the introduction with more care, you will see that there is no proposal that "the Qumran sect was Sicarii in orientation." The key sentence is found at the top of page 33, "After the Romans came to power, the situation changed." Our model sees the proper background for the Qumran scrolls in the internecine strife in the Hasmonean state of the first half of the first century BCE. The sect, broadly speaking, chose the anti-Pharisaic side in this dispute; the Sicarii did not yet exist. There are no specifically sectarian texts that seemed to have been composed after the Romans came to power; but, in the first century CE, sectarian compositions (War Scroll, 1QS, etc.) seem to have influenced and been adopted by other, "carrier" groups that may, or may not, have descended directly from the first century BCE group that composed the sectarian texts. One of these groups may have been the Essenes as Josephus describes them; there is strong evidence that another such group was the Sicarii. Therefore it would have been more accurate to say that "the Sicarii were 'Qumranian' in orientation" than the other way around.

I have previously blogged about the dating of the Scrolls here and here.

The revision has been completed for the second edition of Wise-Abegg-Cook; hopefully it will be in print by November and available at SBL.

A picture of the three of us at our last editorial meeting can be seen here; I'm on the left.

The Flaming Fire Illustrated Bible

This is an interesting venture in multimedia Bible. (HT: Ann Althouse.) Caution: Not all of the illustrations are unto edification.

Ancient Stench and Corpse Removal

My "research" into the stench of ancient cities has thrown some light on a couple of passages in Jewish literature that always puzzled me. The ancients seemed to take a remarkably laid-back attitude to corpse removal, as this quote from Suetonius shows:

During Vespasian's aedileship, the Emperor Caligula, furious because Vespasian had not kept the streets clean, as was his duty, ordered some soldiers to load him with mud; they obeyed by stuffing into the fold of his senatorial gown as much as it could hold ... Then a stray dog picked up a human hand at the crossroads, which it brought into the room where Vespasian was breakfasting and dropped it under the table. (HT: David Noy).

My guess is that the corpses that tended to accumulate in the open were those of foreign travelers, slaves, criminals, or other pariah groups. This explains, I think, why Tobit was able to keep pretty busy at his avocation of burying fellow Jews:

If I saw the dead body of any of my people thrown out behind the wall of Nineveh, I would bury it. (Tobit 1:17) [Tobias said]: “Look, father, one of our own people has been murdered and thrown into the market place, and now he lies there strangled.” (2:3)

And lastly, the Mishnah quotes a saying of Hillel (Pirke Aboth 2:7):

One time he saw a skull (or: head) floating on the waters, he said to it: Because you drowned others, they drowned you; in the end, those who drowned you will drown.

I always thought the occasion for this saying was strange; how likely was it that someone would see a human skull in the water? But now I can see that it would not have been that unusual.

Aramaic Wordplay in Matt. 3:9 par.?

I've been reading Maurice Casey's Aramaic Sources of Mark's Gospel, and so far (I haven't read much) it's good, especially on the methodological side.

I have some quibbles with the Aramaic, though. For instance: Casey discusses A. Meyer's idea that there is an underlying Aramaic wordplay at Matt. 3:9 || Luke 3:8: "God is able of these stones (Gk. lithon = Aram. abnayya ) to raise up children (Gk. tekna = Aram. benayya) unto Abraham." This suggestion has made its way into many a commentary.

But Casey says:

That is not unreasonable, but it does involve the selection of benayya, which might well have been translated huious, rather than ynqyn, which was bound to be rendered tekna. (p. 13)

Casey's point, and it is well taken, is that you can't just translate the Greek backwards into Aramaic to find wordplays and such; you have to imagine how a translator would most likely have rendered any putative Aramaic original. He thinks that benayya would most likely have been rendered "sons," not "children"; yanqin is the Aramaic word most likely to have been rendered "children."

However, this clashes with another one of Casey's methodological points, and that is that the words of a putative Aramaic original have to be attested from the Aramaic of the right period. And the word yaneq, plural yanqin, is not attested in Qumran Aramaic or other Palestinian sources of this period. Not only that but semantically yaneq (etymologically "suckling") focuses on the youth of the person designated, not on their biological descent. Therefore in different dialects, yaneq can mean "boy" (Targum Onkelos), "infant" (Targum Neofiti) or just "young one" (Elephantine papyri). The best Greek equivalent for yaneq in the New Testament period would have been paidarion or nepios, not teknon.

Plus, teknon is well-established in the LXX as a translation of Hebrew ben, "son, child" (e.g. Gen. 22:7). Therefore, I conclude that Casey's critique falls to the ground.

That does not mean that there really was a wordplay in Matt. 3:9||Luke 3:8, though. For the wordplay to work, both "stones" and "children" have to be in the emphatic state, equivalent to the Greek article. But in the Greek, "these stones" has the article, but "children" does not. Therefore, if there is an Aramaic original underlying this saying, "these stones" would have been abnayya illen, and "children" would have been just benin, not benayya as Meyer thought. Not much of a pun. Therefore, IMHO, there was no Aramaic wordplay present in Matt. 3:9||Luke 3:8.

UPDATE (6/7): Ken Penner rightly asks in a comment below whether the wordplay might be better in Hebrew, rather than in Aramaic. Yes, it might. Delitzsch, for instance, in his Hebrew New Testament, translates min ha-abanim ha-elleh yakhol ha-elohim le-haqim banim le-abraham. It is also undoubtedly true that in some instances Hebrew is just as good a candidate for the substratum of the Gospels as Aramaic, since we now know that Hebrew was by no means a dead language in the first century CE.

Nevertheless, this has to be weighed against the preponderance of evidence showing that Jesus taught in Aramaic and that the early church was Aramaic-speaking. Not only that, but the Hebrew back-translation is more vulnerable to Casey's critique than the Aramaic one, because, while tekna might be a perfectly good translation of Hebrew banim, it also might render Hebrew yeled, pl. yeladim, which, like teknon, is related to a root meaning "to beget." (See Gen 33:6 LXX.) (Now that I think of it, the Aramaic cognate yelad, yaldin would also fit.) Therefore, I think strong evidence is lacking for Hebrew or Aramaic wordplay in this pericope (which does not mean I think there is no evidence for a Semitic substratum in the Gospels).

UPDATE (6/10): Mark Goodacre comments here. Jim Davila comments as follows:

I think Casey's methodology is weak. His discussions of translation theory and bilingualism don't feed directly into the rest of the book in any way that is clear to me. And he neglects or ignores a considerable secondary literature on problems with retroversion of Hebrew and Aramaic from Greek (Beyer, Maloney, Martin, Fitzmyer, Barr, Tov, Wright, etc.).

I don't necessarily disagree with Jim, as I haven't read more than about 20 pages of Casey at this point, and haven't gotten past Casey's review of past literature. If what Jim says is true, then what is (in my opinion) the book's good beginning methodologically goes downhill. I'll let you know what I think.

I will say this: Based on some casual glances at Casey's retroversions later in the book, I would say that his grasp of Aramaic is weak and is not up to the task of retroversion (whether that task is worthwhile or not). That sounds terrible, I know, and I hope to back up that opinion later on with some examples. (In the meantime, see Randy Buth's comment below.) But it is a fatal weakness for such a book on such a topic.

Ararat, Urartu, Lubar, Kardu

Apparently they are still looking for Noah's ark on "Mount Ararat," also known as Agri Dagi.

I suppose it is worth repeating that the biblical text does not mention a particular peak where Noah landed, but refers to the "mountainS of Ararat." Ararat was not a mountain, but a kingdom — the ancient name is Urartu — in the vicinity of Lake Van in modern-day Turkey. I don't know whether its borders extended as far north as the location of Agri Dagi, in the northeast of Turkey next to Armenia.

The Book of Jubilees (2nd century BCE?) named the mountain as "Mount Lubar." The Targum and Peshitta designated the area as "Kardu" or Cordyene, now known as Kurdistan. Jerome translated the key phrase as super montes Armeniae. Apparently the idea that Agri Dagi was the site of the ark's landing dates only from the 11th-12th centuries CE.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lloyd Bailey, "Ararat," Anchor Bible Dictionary I:351-353.

Sith Happens: Thoughts on Episode III

(Caution: spoilers ahead.)

This past weekend I finally saw Revenge of the Sith. I thoroughly enjoyed it, as I have all of the "Star Wars" movies (even the hapless Episode I — Jar Jar reminds me of a dog I used to have). Amy didn't; she had problems with the script. The Lad went with us; it was his third viewing, although the first one experienced with full sentience, since his first two were late-night outings.

I said just now that I enjoyed it, and I'll stand by that. It was a visual feast, with the full complement of space battles (with physically impossible sounds in the vacuum of space), gloriously impractical machines (tanks with legs?), and the spectacularly creepy General Grievous — a character that ignites all our subconscious fears of spiders, skeletons, sharp objects, and physical deformity in one wonderful design.

(Speaking of design, the Jedi archives look exactly like the Long Room in Trinity College, Dublin, as this site shows. Apparently Lucasfilm has denied any borrowing.)

Not only that, there were some scenes of great mythical power, especially when the Emperor descends to the banks of the lava rivers of Hell (also known as Mustafar) and retrieves the battered husk that is Anakin, to restore him to a tortured existence as Darth Vader. It is a hideous parody of the Resurrection, with a little Frankenstein thrown in.

However, the mythic power is often undermined by intrusions into the script from the Zeitgeist. At some point, Obi-Wan says, "Only the Sith deal in absolutes." Huh? So that would make the Jedi ... relativists? Post-modernists? Obviously the whole story falls to the ground unless the Emperor and the Dark Side are evil and the Jedi good, and those, folks, are absolutes. Seems to me like the line should have been, "Only the Sith believe in situation ethics"; or, "Only the Sith try to make evil seem like good." Especially given this exchange:

OBI-WAN: Anakin, Chancellor Palpatine is evil.

ANAKIN: From the Jedi point of view! From my point of view, the Jedi are evil.

But in the 21st-century USA, believing in absolutes is Bad, and suddenly we are not in a galaxy far, far away anymore. Boo, George Lucas!

There is also a scene of toe-curling badness, where Yoda is counseling Anakin; it needs only Anakin on a couch and Yoda with a notepad to make it a complete parallel to psychotherapy. Anakin is afraid Padme will die in childbirth:

YODA: Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force. Mourn them, do not. Miss them, do not. Attachment leads to jealousy. The shadow of greed, that is.

ANAKIN: What must I do, Master Yoda?

YODA: Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.

Eww. No, Master Yoda, that won't work, especially when it is Anakin's re-awakened love for his son (in "Return of the Jedi") that leads to his redemption.

So: Revenge of the Sith is not a deep movie, although it tries to be; the best things in it, as in its five predecessors, are the scenes that use, and revitalize, the most basic components of a half-century of pulp sci-fi and fantasy: spaceships, robots, desert planets, weird creatures, good guys and bad, true love triumphant, swords, sorcery, princesses, emperors, magic, treachery, loss, recovery, hidden saviors, secret identities, and ray-guns. When Lucas sticks close to these things, he can't be beat. His fanboy subconscious is mightier than his all-too-modern conscious. Use the Force, George! Thankfully, he did. Most of the time.

The Stench of Ancient Cities

A few weeks ago, I was reading a portion of Genesis Rabba (Parasha 34) with some HUC grad students, and we came across a story that begins: "Two women were coming out of Tiberias, and one said to the other: Blessed is He who brought us out of this bad air!"

The story is told to demonstrate how parochial the two women are, for Tiberias was a noted resort and famous city. But it seems likely that, for someone who lived in the country, ancient cities had a definite bad odor. In one of his letters, Seneca writes:

I expect you're keen to hear what effect it had on my health, this decision of mine to leave (Rome). No sooner had I left behind the oppressive atmosphere of the city and that reek of smoking cookers which pour out, along with a cloud of ashes, all the poisonous fumes they've accumulated in their interiors whenever they're started up, than I noticed the change in my condition at once....

Of course, the ancients had very different ideas about sanitation, cleanliness, and modesty. Readers of Josephus will remember the amount of time he devotes to the "strange" Essene toilet habits:

War 2:148-9: "Nay, on the other days they dig a small pit, a foot deep, with a paddle (which kind of hatchet is given them when they are first admitted among them); and covering themselves round with their garment, that they may not affront the divine rays of light, they ease themselves into that pit, after which they put the earth that was dug out again into the pit; and even this they do only in the more lonely places, which they choose out for this purpose; and although this easement of the body be natural, yet it is a rule with them to wash themselves after it, as if it were a defilement to them."

Josephus obviously thought it excessively modest to defecate in private (uncovered public latrines were common in his day), and excessively fastidious to wash afterwards — which sheds a certain light on the stench of ancient cities.

Interesting observations (including the quote from Seneca) and bibliography can be found here.

Quran or Koran?

OK, which is it — Koran or Quran? The New York Times vacillates, depending on which wire service they're picking up. If it's Reuters, the headline is "Guantanamo Probe Finds 5 Koran Mishandling Cases." If it's AP, the headline is "Inquiry Finds Some Quran 'Mishandling.' "

I'm not going to discuss the substance of these stories; I hope that all my readers will agree that the "mishandling" is deplorable, as well as counter-productive. But the question of popular transliteration interests me.

There seems to be an overall tendency these days to go with a stricter, more Arabically "correct" transliteration in the media. I notice muslim more often than moslem, Muhammad more often than Mohammed. The preference for quran or even qur'an over "Koran" is in line with this tendency.

Strictly speaking, a transliteration "Quran" seems at first glance linguistically correct. The root of the word is cognate to Hebrew קרא, and both roots refer to (among other things) reading or audible recitation. The qur'aan is the "reading," that which is read or recited (compare Hebrew מקרא, miqra, "that which is read," the Bible).

Nevertheless, the Arabic sound conventionally transliterated as "Q" indicates a phonemic contrast (to Arabic "K") that does not exist in English. In fact, in English, the grapheme QU always indicates the phonetic sequence /kw/, and English speakers are going to want to import that /kw/ pronunciation into the spelling "Quran," leading to the monstrosity /kwuran/ or the like.

Therefore, to better approximate the actual pronunciation of the word, I wish they would settle on the older standard spelling "Koran." In English, the Arabic /q/ and /k/ are both adequately signaled by English K. And after all, English is what we're speaking here, right? We don't refer to certain foreign capitals as Moskva, Yerushalayim, Bruxelles, or Roma. Nor should we adopt the spelling Quran for the Islamic scripture.

By the way, as far as I can tell, in German the spelling is still "Koran," and in French they prefer "Coran." In archaic English the preferred term was apparently "Alcoran," based on Arabic al-qur'aan "the Koran," occasionally leading to the solecism "the Alcoran."

Goodacre Becomes Blue Devil; BBC Mourns

Mark Goodacre is crossing the Big Pond to Duke University. Congratulations!

Just one crucial word of advice, Mark: Krzyewski is pronounced "Shashefsky." Practice it at home till you get it right.

Happy Birthday, Bob

Today is Bob Dylan's birthday.

Now that it's dust and ashes
now that it's human skin
Here's to you Bob Dylan
a poem for the laurels you win

Sincerest form of flattery
is imitation they say
I've broke my long line down
to write a song your way

Those "chains of flashing images"
that came to you at night
were highest farm boy's day dreams
that glimpse the Angels light.

And tho the dross of wisdom's come
and left you lone on earth
remember when the Angels call
your soul for a new birth

It wasn't dope that gave you truth
nor money that you stole
— was God himself that entered in
shining your heavenly soul.

— Allen Ginsberg, "On Reading Dylan's Writings," 1973

The Latest "News" From Hershel Shanks

Hershel Shanks is still apparently unwilling to engage in any serious self-criticism or even enter into any serious dialogue on the subject of the recent forgery scandals. In the most recent issue of Biblical Archaeology Review (May/June 2005) he mugs, rants, denounces, criticizes, and mocks — but he does not seriously discuss any of the issues that have been recently raised about the scandal and the role of his magazine.

On p. 46 appears a misleading article entitled "Israeli Prosecutor Repudiates IAA Report on Forgery." This is based on what Shanks sees as a discrepancy between the IAA report on the ossuary and the wording of the forgery indictment — not, as the headline would imply, a new statement by the prosecutor rejecting the work of the IAA. Shanks notes that the forgery indictment claims that only the words "brother of Jesus" on the ossuary were forged, while, he believes, the IAA report claims that the entire inscription was forged. Shanks trumpets this as an "irreconcilable conflict."

There is not a word in the voluminous IAA report even remotely suggesting that the first part of the inscription is authentic, as the indictment now admits.

So, Hershel, have you actually read the IAA report? Then you might remember these words by Esther Eshel:

B.... The inscription itself exhibits variations in handwriting, thickness and depth of the incised letters when comparing the words “James son of Joseph” to the words “brother of Jesus”. ...
C. There is a significant difference between handwritings in the first and second parts of the inscription. The first part is written in the formal style of a scribe and the second part is cursive. The letters bet and kuf in the first part are characteristic writing of a scribe, and the second, cursive part has a characteristic alef.
...
In summary, the different handwritings of the two parts indicate that the inscription is not authentic, although the original ossuary may possibly have contained the first part of the inscription, the second part was added later.

In short, Shanks's article is advocacy journalism gone bad: misleading, sloppy, and inaccurate.

Also in the recent BAR is a wholly unwarranted piece (p. 49) ponderously mocking the recent contribution of Andy Vaughn and Carolyn Dobler in the March SBL Forum. For one thing, Shanks does not give a complete URL for the article, so that readers of BAR will not be able to read it for themselves. (It is here.) For another thing, Shanks does not deal in any way with the gravamen of the Vaughn-Dobler piece, which is the statistical analysis of the seals and the implication that the antiquities market has provided many forged items. In this article, as in all of his recent writings on the scandal, Shanks is not dealing seriously with any of the issues; he is just playing to the gallery and hoping no one will call him to account.

I might blog about a few of Shanks's other remarks in future posts. In closing, though, let me just note that in the SBL Forum in which Vaughn and Dobler's essay appeared, there was another essay dealing solely with Shanks's own contribution to the problem (written, as it happens, by me). Although he must have read it, he does not mention the article at all in BAR. Is he afraid his readers will find it? Would he rather attack others than defend himself? Stay tuned.

Maarav 11/1 Is Out

The new issue of Maarav: A Journal for the Study of the Northwest Semitic Languages and Literatures (11.1, 2004) has arrived in my mailbox. The table of contents is as follows:

Shmuel Ahituv and Ada Yardeni
"Seventeen Aramaic Texts on Ostraca from Idumea: The Late Persian to the Early Hellenistic Periods"

Seth L. Sanders
"What Was the Alphabet For? The Rise of Written Vernaculars and the Making of Israelite National Literature"

Christopher A. Rollston
"Non-Provenanced Epigraphs II: The Status of Non-Provenanced Epigraphs within the Broader Corpus of Northwest Semitic"

Marilyn J. Lundberg
"Editor's Notes: The Ahiram Inscription"

Edward M. Cook
Review of A Dictionary of Judean Aramaic by Michael Sokoloff

Peter T. Daniels
Review of Absent Voices: The Story of Writing Systems in the West by Rochelle Altman

Lots of interesting stuff here for (and by) bibliobloggers. Go here to find out how to get a subscription for yourself or your institution.

Biblioblogoholics

Mark Goodacre describes the upcoming CARG session on biblioblogging, in which I have the honor of participating. Judging by some of the comments out there (collected by Stephen Carlson here), we will all need a professional 12-step program by November.

I guess we're all supposed to confess whether we're addicted or not. Well, I don't know about you, but I am not addicted. No sir! I can quit anytime. I mean it! No problem. Got that? Not a problem!

My Link to Elvis

I grew up in an atmosphere of warm personal interest in Elvis Presley. My grandparents were acquainted with his grandparents and lived in the same small town. When I was 4 or 5 years old, I was taken to see him perform at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair & Dairy Show (back in the days when he was still good).

Now, this past weekend, I discovered that Dr. William Hunt, the doctor who delivered Elvis, was married to my great-aunt Lula.

No, don't write to me asking for memorabilia, I don't have any. But law! ain't it a small world! (Sorry, after being in Mississippi, my Southern accent has reasserted itself.)

Thankyouverymuch.

"Sexual Cleansing" and Levirate Marriage

Last week, the New York Times featured an article about the practice of "sexual cleansing" in Africa:

Here and in a number of nearby nations including Zambia and Kenya, a husband's funeral has long concluded with a final ritual: sex between the widow and one of her husband's relatives, to break the bond with his spirit and, it is said, save her and the rest of the village from insanity or disease. Widows have long tolerated it, and traditional leaders have endorsed it, as an unchallenged tradition of rural African life.

Now AIDS is changing that. Political and tribal leaders are starting to speak out publicly against so-called sexual cleansing, condemning it as one reason H.I.V. has spread to 25 million sub-Saharan Africans, killing 2.3 million last year alone. They are being prodded by leaders of the region's fledging women's rights movement, who contend that lack of control over their sex lives is a major reason 6 in 10 of those infected in sub-Saharan Africa are women.

It sounds like a real problem; but I'm probably not the only Biblical scholar who was reminded of the practice of levirate marriage. A woman widowed without children was, in ancient Israel, married to her husband's brother in order, by means of a legal fiction, to bear children to her late husband (Deut. 25:5-10). From the Anchor Bible Dictionary:

This type of marriage is known as levirate marriage, from the Latin levir, “brother-in-law.” Its continuation into the NT era is demonstrated by the Sadducees’ question to Jesus about the childless woman who was married in sequence to six of her late husband’s brothers (Matt 22:23–33 = Mark 12:18–27 = Luke 20:27–40). We have seen that levirate marriage existed in Ugarit, in the Middle Assyrian (no. 33) and Hittite law codes (no. 193), and possibly in the Nuzi texts. In these texts the primary concern is with producing a (male) child to carry on the name of the deceased husband.

Here's my question: Is there any historical connection between the levirate law and the practice of "sexual cleansing"? Is the latter a debased and superstitious form of the former; or is the levirate law a later development of a primitive ritual that originally had nothing to do with "preserving the husband's name"? It seems to me that both alternatives are equally likely. It is also possible, of course, that there is no historical relationship at all. Maybe a historical anthropologist (if there is such a thing) can answer this.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Richard Kalmin, "Levirate Law," Anchor Bible Dictionary

UPDATE: The article referred to by Andrew in the comment below is excellent. It doesn't address the historical question I raised, but many cross-cultural comparisons suggest themselves.

Goin' South

"Ralph" will be on a short hiatus the next few days as we visit kinfolk in Mississippi.

In the meantime, you can enjoy this article by a BBC reporter (HT: Bible & Interpretation), who reports on Mississippi with the air of Livingstone returning from the jungle. He discovers that there are — gasp! — Christians in the Deep South.

Google's Peep Show

I've been playing around with Google Print, and enjoying it — up to a point. It promises to be a valuable tool — one of these days. Their mission statement is as follows:

Google's mission is to organize the world's information, but much of that information isn't yet online. Google Print aims to get it there by putting book content where you can find it most easily – right in your Google search results.

Good enough. The problem is, I haven't yet come across a book whose entire content is online. The maximum amount I have been able to access for any one book is about 15 pages.

So what's the point? Is this in fact only an elaborate way of getting users to buy the book, as the numerous "buy this book from" links would suggest? There is in fact supposed to be a "find it in a library" link, but it doesn't appear on any pages that I have seen.

At this point, Google Print (and I know it's in the beta stage) is the print equivalent of a peep show: "Try these free samples! Get hooked and buy the rest!" They're going to have to lift some limitations on presenting full content, or else the tool will be more frustrating than helpful.

Coleridge's Pants

It is interesting to reflect that John Betjeman was one of C. S. Lewis's first students. They didn't get along.

Even humour separated the two men, and Betjeman complained peevishly that his tutor had forever ruined Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' by wondering whether the 'pants' in the line, 'As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,' were made of wool or fur.

Betjeman would really have hated this blog.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Oxford in English Literature: The Making, and Undoing, of 'The English Athens', by John Dougill. (Univ. Michigan Press, 1998.)

George Psalmanazar

Mark Goodacre calls our attention to Alice Liddell, of Alice in Wonderland fame, as one of the DNB "Lives of the Week." Another featured life is that of George Psalmanazar (1679-1763), a fascinating character, a mad linguistic genius. A few excerpts:

... Psalmanazar decided to make his identity more exotic, and posed as a Japanese convert to Christianity. To facilitate the project, he revised the certificate that he had had drawn up to prove that he was Irish, and devised an alphabet and many words of a language that he thought might be taken for Japanese. Aware that Hebrew was written from right to left, he imagined that other ‘oriental’ languages would follow that pattern. He invented twenty letters with shapes, names, and pronunciations that resemble some Greek and Hebrew letters. By his own account, he also added ‘many other particulars equally difficult, such as a considerable piece of a new language and grammar, a new division of the year into twenty months, a new religion, &c. and all out of my own head’ (Memoirs, 137).

... this time [he] used the name of Salmanazar (ibid., 169), which he took from the name of a biblical king of Assyria and captor of the Israelites, Shalmaneser (2 Kings 17). Later he began spelling the name with an initial P to make it more exotic.

... [H]is fanciful account of Formosa, which occupies little more than half of the book's 327 pages ... raised doubts about his veracity in several quarters at the same time as it excited many readers. Among his entertaining but suspicious claims were that Formosa was Japanese rather than Chinese; that the state religion, founded by an avatar named Psalmanaazaar, required the annual sacrifice of 18,000 boys under the age of nine; and that the production of children was facilitated by the encouragement of polygamy, although adultery was absolutely forbidden.

... [Regarding other cases of false identity and forgery in the 18th century]: In these and many other cases of forgery and assumed identity in the period, the impostor imagined he had access to hidden information and that he himself was in touch with a deeper or older, often more ‘natural’, tradition of knowledge than that accepted by the current establishment. The flourishing of such forgers at this time may have been a response to the increased professionalization of knowledge during the period. Psalmanazar's quarrel with the Royal Society, his defence of revelation in religion, and his immersion in ancient Hebrew may be all regarded as a rebellion against modern forms of knowledge.

OK, so a "defence of revelation in religion, and an immersion in ancient Hebrew" are rebellions against modernity, are they? Well, count me in. Vive la revolution!

Happily, Psalmanazar eventually recanted his lies, became a believing Christian and a friend of the young Samuel Johnson. He died shortly before Johnson first encountered James Boswell in a London bookshop.

Onkelos in Les Miserables

I'm always interested when the targums wind up in unexpected places. I ran into a mention of Onkelos in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, ch. 5:

[The monsignor] was a man of letters and rather learned. He left behind him five or six very curious manuscripts; among others, a dissertation on this verse in Genesis, In the beginning, the spirit of God floated upon the waters. With this verse he compares three texts: the Arabic verse which says, The winds of God blew; Flavius Josephus who says, A wind from above was precipitated upon the earth; and finally, the Chaldaic paraphrase of Onkelos, which renders it, A wind coming from God blew upon the face of the waters.

The good bishop was apparently interested in renderings of Genesis 1:2 that translated ruach as "wind." No more is said in the novel of this interesting dissertation.

Many modern translations translate "wind," including the JPS and NRSV.

"The Curse of Akkad" and Global Warming

For the first time since cities were built and founded,
The great agricultural tracts produced no grain,
The inundated tracts produced no fish,
The irrigated orchards produced neither syrup nor wine,
The gathered clouds did not rain, the masgurum did not grow.
At that time, one shekel’s worth of oil was only one-half quart,
One shekel’s worth of grain was only one-half quart. . . .
These sold at such prices in the markets of all the cities!
He who slept on the roof, died on the roof,
He who slept in the house, had no burial,
People were flailing at themselves from hunger.

That's from the "Curse of Akkad," a lament over the fall of the empire of Sargon the Great. It appears in Part II of a remarkable series of articles on global warming by Elizabeth Kolbert appearing now in the New Yorker. Kolbert has convinced me that global warming is real, caused by human factors, and of grave consequence.

I don't share the academy's visceral loathing of George Bush, but his administration has, in my opinion, fumbled badly on environmental policy. Here's hoping someone does something about it before 2100. Kolbert quotes one scientist:

“We may say that we’re more technologically able than earlier societies. But one thing about climate change is it’s potentially geopolitically destabilizing. And we’re not only more technologically able; we’re more technologically able destructively as well. I think it’s impossible to predict what will happen. I guess—though I won’t be around to see it—I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that by 2100 most things were destroyed.” He paused. “That’s sort of an extreme view.”

By the way, she quotes "The Curse of Akkad" because archaeologists working at Tell Leilan in Syria have theorized that climate change — a drought, to be specific — brought Sargon's 2nd millennium empire to an end.