Now We Are Six

On November 30, 2004, the first post of this blog appeared. The first year or so was quite active, and coincided approximately with the birth of biblioblogging, of which this blog was one of the first. But "Ralph" has never sought, or received, any factitious badge of approval or value-ranking from the world of biblioblogging (now firmly part of the Establishment) and I now question whether my blog is a part of that increasingly self-conscious and contentious world.

The last few years have been less active, as other activities have crowded out daily, or even weekly, blogging. Most particularly, I consciously decided a while back to devote most of the time I had for writing to preparing scholarly books and articles; and, this, I think, was a wise choice.

Still, writing for "Ralph" is always one of my greatest pleasures. Looking back, I see plenty of ephemeral matter, but nothing that embarrasses me. Several of the posts have in the past developed into lectures, presentations, or articles, and some may still do so. And, as far as I know, "Ralph" is still the only blog ever to be cited in a scholarly footnote in Revue de Qumran.

This year especially has been quiet for "Ralph," although the most famous post in Ralph's history was cited in two books about Bob Dylan. One of them is Sean Wilentz's Bob Dylan in America (Doubleday, 2010), pp. 303ff. Wilentz, professor of American Studies at Princeton, cites "Ralph," without giving the URL (how rude!) or the author (how clueless!). Indeed, he appears to believe that the name "Ralph" is my pseudonym, apparently without noticing that my name and email appear (and have always appeared) right there on the blog.

The other citation is in Alessandro Carrera, "Oh, the Streets of Rome: Dylan in Italy," which appeared in Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan's Road from Minnesota to the World (ed. C. J. Sheehy & T. Swiss; Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2009), where the author refers to me as "very puzzled." Sure, if by puzzled you mean outraged. I also was interviewed by phone by yet another author who is writing a book about Dylan. Not bad for a philologist whose expertise is in a wholly different area.

"Ralph" will continue, probably at the same slow pace. And yes, the Ralphies for 2010 will shortly appear. Watch this space.

Scenes and Observations from SBL Atlanta 2010

In no particular order ...


Two huge ballrooms were assigned to a session attended by about 15 people.

My room, thankfully, was in a tower (Hyatt) where I didn't have to go up in one of those glass elevators.

Best meal: Atlanta Grill, with Marty Abegg and James Bowley. We planned the next volume of the Dead Sea Scrolls Concordance.

I bought two books: The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism by Adele Berlin and the Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis.

The good people at Accordance updated me and fixed me up with a ton of awesome software.

The most crowded session I attended was the one on Biblioblogging. I listened to Jim Davila's and Chris Brady's excellent papers on the state of the art, then had to go to another session. Chris suggested (as you can read here) that there be an SBL committee to provide peer-review insight on the tenure-relevant research found in online sources. I agree if the sources are research resources, but not if they are blogs. Blogs should resist "sivilizin'".

Jim Davila is still watching Lost.

Against all probability, the guy I sat next to at the Bloggers lunch lives only a few blocks away from me.

John Hobbins is really tall.

The HUC grad school survives.

I enjoyed discussing syntax with fellow UCLA alums Kirk Lowery and Randy Buth.

There will never be a time when most people know how to deliver a paper at SBL.

I met a man who had taken Hebrew from me over 20 years ago.

I enjoyed talking about Amazon's Kindle with Dean Forbes.

The number of religious books being published every year is inversely proportional to the number of actual Christians.

I worked on my paper the night before I gave it. At least I didn't write my paper the night before I gave it.

Air Tran advertises free Wi-Fi in their terminal. It's only free if you want to check your flight information. For anything else, you have to pay.

I enjoyed seeing some of my students at their first SBL.

The memorial service for Hanan Eshel was moving, with most major Qumran scholars in attendance.

MARTA is better than Metro. Cheaper, too.

The Brill reception was awesome, and the view from the 49th floor of the Peachtree Tower was spectacular.

The Fuller breakfast was great, but it's a little sobering to realize that I am now among the oldest attendees.

I'll add more as I recall more....

Old Dog, New Trees

Summers, for academics, are empty vessels waiting to be filled; not like the academic year, whose content is largely determined by others. During summer, to a certain extent, free will returns; and therefore each summer takes on a character of its own.

This summer for me was the summer of trees, in two senses. The first is the literal sense of our vegetable friends and neighbors. It was inevitable that trees should attract my attention, since the DC area has one of the largest tree canopies in the nation. Sooner or later I had to take some account of them. Probably it was on walks with the dachshund, whose interest in trees is of long standing, that I first said to myself "What about these trees?" I don't remember the moment, but there must have been one in which trees presented themselves to me as objects of worthy curiosity, and I found myself getting some books about trees, and how to identify them, and what was the nature of their leaves, bark, flowers, overall shape, and usefulness. I started taking note, and the diversity amazed me. In our neighborhood are many lindens (or basswoods) planted for shade, as well as many varieties of that handsome genus Acer, the maple. Silver, red, striped, goosefoot, the delicate little Japanese maple. Very common is the Eastern white pine, and kinds of spruce and fir that I have not yet gotten to. The great elms. The mighty oak — best of all. Near us the common type is the pin oak, but near the Capitol you can find the awesomely large Northern Red Oak. The cherry trees — of course! Lots of those. Two dogwoods in our back yard. The gorgeous and immense yellow poplar, with its tulip-shaped leaves. From the Metro you can see the catalpa, or indian bean, with huge leaves and long seed pods. On the CUA campus are many other varieties, including a cedar of Lebanon. Sycamores, ash, willow — where have you been all my life?

I don't have any desire to be an arborologist and my interest in the industrial use of trees is nil. I am only a watcher of trees, and this summer I have learned to take in my surroundings with more discernment. That's one feature of the summer of 2010.

The other kind of trees is the figurative, linguistic type. Originally I planned to do a not very intensive review of Greek, and duly began working through some grammars. It was not long, though, before I began to be distracted by the unsatisfactory way in which the grammars (which shall remain nameless) approached syntax — even in some cases, using the old grammar-school sentence diagrams. I gradually found myself searching for a better approach and abandoned Greek for technical linguistics, in fact, the severe formalities of the Chomskyan generative school. I devoured a good many textbooks of this approach, even reading Chomsky himself, and had the sensation of a keen intellectual pleasure as I delved into the system, which is powerful and elegant (although not perfect, which is the topic for another post). I filled many sheets of paper with trees, i.e., tree diagrams — and not your dull flat structures either, but the beautiful binary structures of the X-bar theory and its various epicycles. If I can, I will keep up this exploration into the fall, as time permits. But even with just a few short weeks of study, I feel braced by the austere rigor of the system. That's the second benefit of Summer 2010.

On Monday classes begin, and free will has to be put on a leash again. I don't really mind. The trees, all of them, will continue to be there, summer's gift, as duty returns.

Bob Dylan, Carl Sandburg, and the "Borrowing" Problem

One of the oddest things (among many odd things) in Bob Dylan's memoir Chronicles is his narration of a conversation with poet and playwright Archibald MacLeish, who had commissioned him to write some music for a play. According to Dylan, MacLeish said that he, MacLeish, had been a classmate of Douglas Macarthur at West Point (Chronicles, p. 112). In fact, MacLeish, although he served in the Army, never went to West Point. So how did this misinformation get into Dylan's book?

It has already been established that Dylan incorporated expressions, phrases and entire sentences from other authors in the book. A little research reveals that the same practice underlies parts of the MacLeish conversation and is responsible for the misattribution of certain statements to MacLeish. In this case, the source is the preliminary material to the Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, (2002). This book has an introduction by Archibald MacLeish, and a preface (called "Notes for a Preface") by Sandburg himself. The remark about West Point comes in the Sandburg preface, not the MacLeish introduction:

Sandburg, p. xxx:
"At twenty-one I [Sandburg] went to West Point, being a classmate of Douglas MacArthur and Ulysses S. Grant III ..."

Chronicles, p. 112:
"MacLeish had been a classmate of Douglas MacArthur at West Point ..."

Confirmation of Dylan's borrowing comes from elsewhere in Sandburg's preface, such as this remark:

Sandburg, p. xxx:
"A few masterpieces last across the years. ... Perhaps no wrong is done and no temple of human justice violated in pointing out that each authentic poet makes a style of his own. ... I have forgotten the meaning of twenty or thirty of my poems written thirty or forty years ago."

Chronicles, p. 113:
"He said that he'd forgotten the meaning of a lot of his earlier poems and that an authentic poet makes a style of his own, a few masterpieces last across the years."

Sandburg (Preface, p. xxviii) also alludes to "Michelangelo saying in 1509, 'I have no friends of any kind and I do not want any,' and forty years later writing, 'I am always alone and I speak to no one.' " This too is picked up in Chronicles: "He also talked about Michelangelo, said that Michelangelo had no friends of any kind and didn't want any, spoke to no one" (p. 112).

Another possible allusion lies on p. xxvii of Sandburg's preface, where he says (italics added): "A well done world history of poetry would tell us of the beginnings and the continuing tradition of blank verse, rhymed verse, ballads, ballades, sonnets, triolets, rondeaus, villanelles, the sestina, the pantoum, the hokku; also odes, elegiacs, idylls, lyrics, hymns, quatrains, couplets, ditties, limericks, and all the other forms," and Dylan quotes MacLeish to the same effect: "Archie spoke about blank verse, rhyme verse, elegiacs, ballads, limericks and sonnets" (Chronicles, p. 112).

One final parallel: Sandburg writes of Stephen VIncent Benet (p. xxvi): "He knew the distinction between pure art and propaganda in the written or spoken word." Dylan says of MacLeish: "He also told me that there's a difference between art and propaganda and he told me the difference between the effects" (p. 112).

However, Dylan also attributes to MacLeish some expressions found in MacLeish's introduction to Sandburg, such as on p. xx, where the poet alludes to "... the comparative dimensions of ... Sappho and Sophocles, of Dante and Donne," which Dylan turns into this: "He asked me if I had read Sappho or Socrates. I said, nope, that I hadn't, and then he asked me the same about Dante and Donne." (Note the miscopying of "Socrates" for "Sophocles.") (I owe this observation to Scott Warmuth.)

It is now apparent what happened. Dylan, in the course of concocting (or reconstructing) a conversation with MacLeish, pulled from his shelves a copy of Sandburg's Complete Poems, Introduction by Archibald MacLeish, to get some ideas. However, he confused MacLeish's short introduction with Sandburg's long preface, and as a result wound up making MacLeish say a number of things that actually were said by Sandburg.

No doubt many Dylan-worshippers will now argue that this confusion is a sign of Dylan's genius. I think Bob just got his sources mixed up. It happens, especially when you're "borrowing" a lot from other writers.

Shoddy-Wall-Builders

When translating the Damascus Document for the Dead Sea Scrolls book I co-authored with MIke Wise and Martin Abegg, I took some pains not simply to translate mechanically the Hebrew words of the text, but to make explicit the nuances of certain enigmatic expressions that were important for a better understanding. One of these expressions is "Shoddy-Wall-Builders," which occurs four times in the Damascus Document (4:19; 8:12, 18; 19:31), and which is a rendition of Hebrew בוני החיץ.

Peter Flint and James VanderKam make generous use of our translation in their popular textbook The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls (2002). Nevertheless, in their discussion of Qumran history, they refer to this translation of mine as "curious," and they prefer to translate the phrase as "Builders of the Wall." I now want to make explicit the reasoning behind the choice of words I used, and suggest that it is not curious at all, but demanded by the context.

The persons designated as "builders of the wall" in the Document are portrayed as followers of a false teacher and a false law, and as such have earned the displeasure of God. But why are they called "builders of the wall"? It is agreed by all that the phrase is taken from Ezekiel 13:10: "Because, yes, because they have misled my people, saying, Peace, when there is no peace; and because, when one builds a wall (בנה חיץ), they smear whitewash on it." In the original context, the prophet is denouncing false prophets who give as a divine message something out of their own imaginations. Their message is false and unreliable.

The metaphor the prophet uses is of someone who builds a wall, which is then covered with white paint to hide its imperfections. For the metaphor to function properly, in fact, it is necessary that the wall be understood as one that is not solid or well-built. Otherwise, what would be wrong with whitewashing a wall? Note that the JPS translates this part of the verse as "daubing with plaster the flimsy wall which the people were building."

The word used for "wall" reinforces this interpretation. The word חיץ is not the ordinary Hebrew word for a city wall (חומה) or a building wall (קיר) or a fence (גדר). It only appears here in the Hebrew Bible, and in post-Biblical Hebrew, it seems to refer to a light temporary partition. Jastrow defines it as "a pile of loose and uneven material, a rough extemporised embankment, opp[osed] to earth-covered and finished." To build such a wall and then to paint it as if it were a dependable finished structure would be highly irresponsible.

The authors of the Damascus Document knew perfectly well the implications of the phrase. Their opponents were in every way comparable to the false prophets of Ezekiel's time; like them they built up an unreliable body of teaching – a "shoddy wall" – and like them they hid its imperfections (in 8:12 the same group is called "Whitewashers"). They were not "builders of the wall" – an expression that conveys little – but they were "Shoddy-Wall Builders."

BIBLIOGRAPHY: VanderKam, James C., and Peter W. Flint. The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Significance for Understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus, and Christianity. San Francisco, Calif: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002.

Wise, Michael Owen, Martin G. Abegg, and Edward M. Cook. The Dead Sea scrolls: a new translation. San Francisco: Harper, 1996, rev. ed. 2005.

Olive Pits and Alef-Bets: Notes on the Qeiyafa Ostracon

There seems to be a general feeling that there is something about the Qeiyafa Ostracon that counts against a strong minimalist understanding of the history of the Israelite monarchy. I personally think that a strong minimalist position is highly unlikely even without the evidence of the ostracon, so evidence of this kind would not surprise me. Nevertheless it might be interesting, now that the ostracon has been officially published, to give it a brief assessment of its nature and significance.

One of the key tenets of a minimalist stance is that there is little evidence of a strong state in Israel from the 10th century BCE, the period when the United Monarchy is usually placed. Since Khirbet Qeiyafa is dated to the early 10th century BCE (based on the evidence of pottery and carbon-14 dating of olive pits at the site), this causes any finds from the site to have some bearing on the question of the situation in Judah at the time. Even without the ostracon, the fact that there was a strongly fortified town within the borders of ancient Judah at the time evinces some degree of organized building activity, suggestive of political unity. This is a point that the excavators themselves make.

Another trait of state centralization often said to be lacking during the crucial 10th century is literacy, or at least the evidence of a writing tradition in epigraphic artifacts. Here is where the ostracon comes in. The more the ostracon can be taken as evidence of literacy at some level, or as the product of a scribal culture, the more the idea of a centralized state and its educational system becomes probable. Can it be taken in this way?

The ostracon itself is hard to read because of the faded letters, and even the letters that are clear do not yield a connected text or even hint at a possible genre, at least in the readings contained in the official publication. (The interpretation of Gershon Galil, so far available only in a press release, seems to depend on restoring crucial letters or filling in key lacunae in a way that does not carry conviction.) Although the reading of Misgav and his associates agrees in several points with the alternate reading provided by Ada Yardeni, the two readings also diverge from each other in important ways, and neither reading is conducive to meaningful consecutive translation.

So what do we have?

(1) A text written from left-to-right. Although some may choose to withhold judgment at this point, the fact that the second line swerves upward at the right side of the ostracon confirms the general impression of left-to-right direction: a writer swerves upward when he runs out of room at the end of a line.

(2) A text written in the Old Canaanite form of the alphabet, the form that the letters took before (but more about this later) the evolution of national scripts. The closest analogue among previous discoveries is the Izbet Sartah Ostracon, also written left-to-right. But several of the Qeiyafa letters are still unidentified, and for others there are different opinions about their values. Even for those where there is agreement, there are some violent changes of letter stance within the text, which is more typical of earlier forms of this script but not of later (e.g. Izbet Sartah does not have the same variations in stance). My impression is that this would count against rather than for the idea that there was a widespread scribal culture: surely a guild of national scribes would regularize the letter shapes and stances?

(3) A text whose language, although North-West Semitic, is still undetermined. The key sequence of letters is the first five letters: אלתעש. This has plausibly been interpreted as Hebrew אל תעש, "do not do!" Among the NW Semitic languages, the verbal root עשה 'to do' is diagnostic of Hebrew (and its congeners, such as Moabite). Although HALOT gives a few other languages where the root may appear, in this location at this date, only Hebrew is a viable candidate, if the interpretation is correct.

However, the sequence may be interpreted otherwise, and I will come back to it. Other sequences that have been plausibly read are שפט, line 2, עבד, line 1, בעל, line 3, נקם, line 4, מלך, line 4, and possibly חרם, line 5. The roots give us no help for language identification, since all of them are attested throughout North-West Semitic (although נקם and שפט are less common in Aramaic). The lack of a clear text is a handicap, needless to say.

One key sequence is found at the end of line 4. Misgav et al. read the last few letters as יסד מלך גת, "YSD king of Gath," although the last letter is restored. Yardeni, however, reads it differently. Leaving the yod aside, the last five letters she reads as בדמלך. The letter she reads as bet Misgav et al. take as either samekh or ḥet. But the letter in question, although it does not look like the other bets of the text, does look like the bets of some other Old Canaanite texts. If Yardeni is correct, then this sequence is crucial, because בדמלך is a Phoenician name, Bōd-Milk, and the name element "Bod-" ("in the hand of") is not found in Hebrew.

If this is a Phoenician name, then we might explore, heuristically, whether the other readable sequences also suggest names. In line 1, we can take עבדא as Abda, a name attested in several Phoenician inscriptions (Benz 148), as is Bodmilk (Benz 75). The first three letters of line 2 are שפט and this can be taken as Shaphat, an extremely common Phoenician name (Benz 182-184). In Yardeni's reading, the sequence beginning line 3 is גרבעל which could be "Gerbaal," an attested Phoenician name (Benz 103). The letters נקמי in line 4, while not attested, could be a hypocoristic (shortened) form of a name with the verbal form naqam, "to avenge."

Finally, we may reconsider the form אלתעש in this light. The verbal root עוש has been identified in a number of Semitic names (including Biblical Yeush, Gen 36:5 and elsewhere). If the root does occur in the present sequence of letters, then we might take the letters אלת as the goddess Ilat; the name would mean "Ilat helps" or "Ilat, help!" Ilat is a component of some Phoenician names.

If the names are Phoenician, this might mean that the text is Phoenician, but it doesn't prove it. Phoenician names could be mentioned in a text of another language. But the text as a whole would have to be understood in a convincing way before this could be argued. Unfortunately, we are still far from understanding what kind of text the ostracon is overall.

(4) The most significant fact about the ostracon, in my view, is the date. If the dating of the level it was found in is correct – late 11th/early 10th century BCE – then the use of this Old Canaanite script is surprising. Within a century or less of the ostracon's writing, another inscription would be made in ancient Israel of a very different sort. I refer to the Tell Zayit abecedary, which dates at the latest to the late 10th century BCE. But unlike the Qeiyafa ostracon, the Tell Zayit text is written from right-to-left and already has many of the distinctive letter shapes that would characterize Hebrew inscriptions after that time. It is on the way to becoming the Hebrew national script. If any text by itself indicates the presence of a literate culture or scribal guild, it is not Qeiyafa, but Tell Zayit. The chronological gap between the two epigraphs is not very large, but the contrast is dramatic, and may indicate a correspondingly rapid dramatic change in the cultural situation in 10th century Judah. Was this change caused by the monarchy? That's too big a conclusion from this limited data, but the possibility is tantalizing.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Misgav, H., Garfinkel, Y. and Ganor, S., "The Ostracon." In Garfinkel, Y. and Ganor, S., Khirbet Qeiyafa Vol. 1. Excavation Report 2007-2008 (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2009), pp. 243-257; Yardeni, A. 2009. "Further Observations on the Ostracon." In Garfinkel, Y. and Ganor, S. Khirbet Qeiyafa Vol. 1. Excavation Report 2007-2008, pp. 259-260; Franz Benz, Personal Names in the Phoenician and Punic Inscriptions (Rome, 1972).

Is Sin in Aramaic a Commercial Term?

I have not yet read Gary Anderson's Sin: A History, but Bruce Marshall, in discussing the book, attributes the following view to Anderson:

Before the Babylonian exile ... sin was sometimes described as a defiling stain but mainly as a burden to be borne. . . . Part of the reason all this changed after the Babylonian exile was linguistic. Aramaic became the primary tongue of the Persian Empire in which the Jewish people lived during the Second Temple period, and in Aramaic the language for religious transgression comes directly from the world of commerce. The word for a debt owed to a lender is the same as the word for a sin.

The Aramaic word that Anderson (or Marshall) refers to is ḥōb, which can indeed mean in many Aramaic dialects either a debt owed to a lender or a sin. However, this does not mean that Israel's view of sin changed because the nation adopted the Aramaic language.

1. The earliest occurrences of ḥōb in Aramaic sources – in this case, the Elephantine papyri – refer exclusively to commercial debt. The verbal/nominal root for "religious transgression" in the earliest sources is ḥṭʾ, as in Hebrew.

2. The single occurrence of ḥōb in the Hebrew Bible, in Ezek 18:7, also refers to commercial debt (apparently; the text is in some disorder). The post-exilic texts that Anderson (or Marshall) cite (Second Isaiah, Daniel) don't use the term (except Dan 1, which uses the verbal root metaphorically for "making something forfeit"). Therefore the Exile is not the key phase linguistically.

3. The use of the verbal root at Qumran does refer to religious transgression, but is not used very often either in Hebrew (CD 3:10, 4Q266, 4Q276 [?]) or in Aramaic (4Q534, 4Q537, 4Q550, 11QtgJob [2 or 3x]). (Note also the related word ḥōbā in 4Q162 [Hebrew] and 4Q534/4Q536, 4Q542 [Aramaic], which means guilt or obligation). The primary word in both languages is still ḥṭʾ (Hebrew and Aramaic), ʿwn (Hebrew), or pšʿ (Hebrew).

4. The great increase in the attested uses of ḥōb for "religious transgression" happens after the Second Temple period in both Hebrew (see the Mishnah) and in Aramaic (see Targum Onkelos). It is also used in these sources to refer to non-religious obligations or duties.

I infer from these facts that the Babylonian exiles did not encounter a form of Aramaic that used a commercial term for religious transgression, leading to a change in the concept of sin. Instead, the change in the concept of sin occurred first and then the commercial term was gradually adopted to express it. This may have happened to some degree in Second Temple Judaism, but the sources don't suggest a big terminological change at this time.

In fact, the idea of debt and sin are necessarily related, whether terms from commerce are used or not. Sin is necessarily understood as something prohibited; and, if it occurs, there is an obligation to seek a remedy (forgiveness or expiation) if one is available or undergo punishment if not. In any case, something is owed. The semantics of religious obligation are thus very close to the semantics of commercial debt; in both cases, a duty exists to make up for a lack that one is responsible for. It is not surprising or wrong that eventually the language of financial debt should eventually be adopted to express religious or moral obligation. But the idea that Aramaic facilitated this process is incorrect.

I'm not sure that the other conclusions Anderson (via Marshall) draws from this are warranted, but my concern in this post is to establish the philological facts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bruce D. Marshall, "Treasures in Heaven," First Things (January 2010, no. 199), pp. 23-26.

Sixth Annual Ralphies

The Ralphies. "Are they still around?" Yes, they are, VIrginia. And you get to read them.

Most of the year my mind was on my work, for a change, and therefore I kind of lost touch with the outside world – which, as far as I can tell, is not a bad thing. But still, no one can totally cut themselves off. So, without more ado, here are the awards for ...

Best TV Show: It's Lost, OK? Lost, Lost, Lost, Lost, Lost! Only one more year to go, and I expect it to be good. I also very much like Fringe, and Walter Bishop is my new role model.

Best Movie: Ummmmmm, didn't see many movies this year. I saw a couple of blockbusters – Harry Potter and (on DVD) Star Trek. Not bad, I guess, but not great. Am I getting too old for this fanboy stuff? Gee, I hope not. But the movie I liked best (although I think it dates to 2008) was Gran Torino.

Best Record: Oh gee, here's another category I've lost touch with. Most of what I hear is unsystematically gleaned from the radio, not from buying records or downloading tracks. Via the radio I have to admit I always tapped my toe, or some other appendage, whenever Katy Perry's "Hot n Cold" came on. Another guilty pleasure was John Mayer, whose "Gravity" I first heard on an episode of House, loved it, and then was red-faced when I found out it was the work of that poseur. But the Ralphie goes to the recordings of a Washington state bluegrass group, Molly & Tenbrooks. Highly recommended.

Best Non-FIction Book: I read a ton of stuff for work, but I don't know what to pick out of that stack for higher praise than anything else. So this will have to lie fallow this year.

Best Fiction Book: Not a lot of new stuff came through; this year, the pleasure reading mostly was confined to old favorites. In London I bought a paperback copy of Stephen King's Under the Dome, which reinforced my impression that, although King knows how to start a story, he doesn't know how to end one. No, the best fiction book I read, though it was not new, was The Annotated Innocence of Father Brown, by G. K. Chesterton, with notes by Martin Gardner. Although Gardner is not completely in sympathy with Chesterton's worldview, he does provide a lot of interesting information in his annotations.

Best Blog: I just wanted to tip my hat to a blog that everyone who is interested in Hebrew studies should read regularly, John Hobbins's Ancient Hebrew Poetry. I bet this guy preaches some interesting sermons.

OK, boys and girls! That's it for this year! Be very, very good and there will be more Ralphies in the years to come!

Poetic Tenses (cont.): Hidden Preterites and False Preterites

1. As I noted previously, the SC2 can appear in poetry without the waw which usually accompanies it in prose. The same is true (and this is more widely accepted) of the PC2, which can appear in poetry as the type wayyiqtol, as in prose, or simply as yiqtol. Examples are ready to hand, such as Ps. 24:2, כי הוא על ימים יסדה || ועל נהרות יכוננה , "for he founded it (the earth) on the seas, and made it firm on the rivers." The past orientation is clear from the context, which deals with the creation of the earth. Other examples are Deut 32:10-13, Ps. 18: 4-19; etc. (There is an excellent post here on this very verse, with stimulating discussion in the comments.)

Another example, precisely of the same sort, is found in Ps. 78:58: ‏‏ויכעיסוהו בבמותם ובפסילים יקניאוהו. "They angered him with their high places, and with their images made him jealous." Only the most captious or over-subtle interpreter could find a difference in the time reference of the two verbs here.

2. More controversial are examples of the opposite kind, in which verbs vocalized as preterites (PC2) must be understood as PC1 (imperfect) or jussive (PC3). This entails a rejection of the Masoretic vocalization, but the overall implicature of the poem, along with lexical and syntactical cues – in short, the context – make such a move necessary in many cases. An example is Ps. 94:23: ‏‏וישב עליהם את אונם וברעתם יצמיתם. "May he turn against them their sin, and destroy them for their evil."

In this case, the first verb wayyashev must be understood as PC3, not PC2. The LXX translates both verbs in the future tense (see the BHS apparatus). Another example is Ps. 29:9, where ‏וַיֶּחֱשֹׂף must be understood as PC1, in accordance with the sense and form of the verb ‏יְחוֹלֵל in the previous line. Here also the LXX translates the first verb as present participle, the second as future; note also that the targum translates both by participles.

To sum up: in Biblical Hebrew poetry, the form known as wayyiqtol (preterite) in prose can be simply yiqtol in poetry, but still a preterite. On the other hand, forms that the Masoretic text presents as wayyiqtol preterites must sometimes be understood from the context to be imperfect or jussive with conjunctive waw (and therefore the MT must be vocalized differently).

I think these principles are fairly uncontroversial. I'll try to get to more debatable ones (e.g., the prophetic perfect) sometime in the near future. In the meantime, comments are welcome.

Toward a Theory of Hebrew Poetic Tenses

A simplistic take of the Hebrew verbal system is that there are two conjugations, the prefix-conjugation (or imperfect), or PC, and the suffix-conjugation (or perfect), or SC. Formally, this is not far from the truth, but it is generally recognized now that there are actually three different PCs: the imperfect (PC1), the preterite (PC2) and the jussive-cohortative (PC3). All of these have diverse historical origins. Although formally they often fall together in Biblical Hebrew, occasional differences in morphological form are discernible between these three.

There are also two kinds of SC: the perfect (SC1) and a second form (SC2) sometimes called the "converted perfect," or just we-qatal (because in prose the SC2 is usually preceded by the conjunction ו). My impression is that the SC2 is currently the most discussed of these forms. Although SC1 and SC2 may have the same historical origin, they function synchronically in different ways, and should always be distinguished.

The workings of these five conjugations is pretty well understood now in prose texts: PC1 for future, general present, modal, or past habitual; PC2 for narrative past; PC3 for volitional mood. SC1 is also used for past tense when narrative sequence is not in view, while SC2 is used in the same way as PC1 with the added feature of sequentiality. There are various fine-tunings of all these functions, but the broad outlines are agreed upon.

As I said, this picture is valid for prose only. When it comes to Hebrew poetry, the outline is not so clear. Various conjugations appear in neighboring poetic lines without clear difference in function. PC1 appears to sometime be used for the past, SC1 for the future. Plus "odd" uses of SC1, such as the precative perfect or the prophetic perfect, are claimed to appear in poetry.

Without going into the whole history of discussion, I propose that Hebrew poetry is more like prose than usually thought, but with the difference that word order is variable and the usual conjunctive particles that in prose differentiate the conjugations are either absent or replaced with different particles. More particularly, I think that the "odd" uses of the SC1 are often actually "normal" uses of SC2. The reason this has been hard to notice is because usually SC2 in prose occurs with the conjunction ו, but in poetry the ו is optional. In other words, in poetry you can have the וקטל without the ו. This accounts for some anomalies in Hebrew poetry.

For instance, in Ps. 23, all the finite verbs are PC1 except for v. 5, ‏dishanta. (The questionable form veshavti in v. 6 I leave out). Although dishanta is SC, it is almost always translated in accordance with the presumed general present tense of the other verbs: "thou anointest (my head with oil)." Here it makes most sense to take this SC as SC2, continuing the tense of the PC1. In prose, the line would read as follows: תערך שלחן -- ודשנת בשמן וגו , "you prepare a table ... and anoint with oil," etc.

Another example is from Ps. 11:2: הרשעים ידרכון קשת כוננו חצם , "the wicked string the bow, they set their arrow (on the string)."** Most English translations again use the general present for both verbs, although the first is PC1 and the second is SC. In prose, the second verb would be וכוננו , "and then they set," etc. It is SC2, not SC1.

The picture is complicated, of course, by the fact that SC1 is also used in poetry, both in a past sense and, depending on the Aktionsart of the verb, as a present. Plus it should be asked whether there was some kind of suprasegmental differentiation (such as stress accent) between SC1 and SC2 in poetry. In a future post, time permitting, I might go into these issues and also the question of the prophetic perfect and the precative perfect as poetic usages of SC2, but this necessarily brief survey gives the general idea. Comments and reactions are welcome.

**Many translations obscure the fact that the idiom דרך קשת means "to string the bow" (by stepping on one end and bending the other end down to attach the string), not "to bend the bow (for shooting)." Hence stringing has to precede setting the arrow, and the second verb cannot be taken as past or as conceptually prior to bending.

A Note on the Translation of Gen 3:15

A Roman Catholic deacon, in a talk I heard yesterday, asserted that the usual English translations of Gen 3:15b, "He/it shall bruise your head," are mistaken. The proper translation, he said, was "she shall bruise your head," and refers allegorically to the Virgin Mary.

I checked this when I got home and the Hebrew clearly says הוא ישופך ראש, "he/it will bruise your head." Whence the good deacon's assertion? The Septuagint also clearly uses the masculine form. But the Vulgate says ipsa conteret, "she will bruise." A little research turned up a boatload of comment on this reading (a controversy of which I had been until yesterday completely unaware). The RC Douay Rheims translation follows this reading. However, the Nova Vulgata, the revised Latin version authorized by the Vatican now reads ipsum conteret, "it will bruise." This is no doubt correct in terms of the original text; nor can I believe that St. Jerome's original translation of the Hebraica veritas was anything but ipsum.

What amazed me in the literature was the fierceness of the opposing sides. Apparently in a previous age, up to the 19th century, the question of Gen 3:15 seemed to both RC and Protestant to involve crucial questions, and that to retreat amounted to surrendering a key point. But there could only be one outcome to the debate, and the RC church has accepted it, recognizing, I think, that its claims about Mary are not really at risk in the question of the translation of this verse. Nevertheless, I can tell you that at some levels, among the laity, the old debate is still very much alive.

UPDATE: Translation of ipsum corrected to neuter, with thanks to Scott Johnson.

Apposition in Biblical Hebrew

I've been going through Waltke and O'Connor's Intro to Biblical Hebrew Syntax with some students, giving it a detailed read and appraisal. It's been tremendously influential and is without question a magisterial work. However, I must admit I'm not wholly sold on everything in it.

An example is the treatment of apposition (Chapter 12). Apposition is described as a "sequence of nouns ... with the same syntactic function and agreement and with comparable reference" (p. 226). This is not very clear, as W&OC seem to recognize. I want to discuss a different set of criteria, without discussing all the details of the chapter.

The appositive phrase is basically of the structure N1 N2. This is similar to the structure of the construct phrase, but in the construct phrase the N2 cannot be omitted without disturbing the phrase structure. In apposition N2 can be dropped and the phrase structure is left intact. For instance in the construct phrase nehar Perat, "the river Euphrates", while notionally appositional, is syntactically a construct phrase and Perat cannot be omitted leaving only nehar. But in the phrase ha-melek Dawid, "king David," Dawid could be omitted leaving ha-melek to function as a one member noun phrase. So the first test is omission of N2.

The omission test doesn't work against adjectival phrases however. In the phrase N-Adj, Adj could be dropped, just like N2 in the appositional phrase, e.g., ish tov, "a good man" could be pared to just ish. We could say that tov has a "distinct sort of reference" (W&OC 12.1c) as an adjective, but not every word used attributively in Biblical Hebrew is morphologically an adjective, e.g., ish yoshev ba-bayit, "a man dwelling in the house," where Adj = participle + prepositional phrase.

In fact, it is not easy to find further tests to differentiate appositional phrases from adjectival, but I propose two possibilities. One is the reversibility test. One could conceivably reverse the order of N1 and N2 in apposition, e.g., ha-melek Dawid = Dawid ha-melek. One could not similarly reverse ish tov into *tov ish. Thus the adjectival phrase shares with the construct phrase the trait of irreversibility.

However, I am not sure this works all the time. My intuition (as well as W&OC) tells me that ishah almanah "woman, widow" in Hebrew is apposition, but it is not reversible. One could not say, I don't think, *almanah ishah just as well as ishah almanah. Perhaps this means we should actually understand this phrase and others like it as adjectival modification, and not apposition.

Another possible test is the repetition of the preposition test (or: "rep of prep"). In apposition, a governing preposition may be repeated before N1 and N2, e.g., livni le-Yitzxaq, "to my son, to Isaac" (Gen 24:4). The same could not happen in the adjectival phrase, e.g., ha-ish ha-tov "the good man" cannot become *la-ish la-tov "to the good man." But as W&OC point out (12.3f), the preposition or other particle is not repeated in apposition if N1 is a proper name. It is not clear why this is.

In any case, I think it is clear that some of the further cases mentioned by W&OC, e.g., shloshah banim, "3 sons," cannot possibly be apposition. The relation between numeral (or other quantifier) and the quantified noun does not meet any set of criteria for apposition, including W&OC's. Further discussion of quantifiers will have to wait, however. For now, I'd be interested in hearing comments about apposition.

Teaching Aramaic: Diachronic or Synchronic?

This note is more jottings for my own benefit --a form of thinking out loud -- than a fully considered proposal. Comments from scholars are welcome.

In teaching introductory Aramaic, the decision has to be made whether a synchronic or diachronic approach is to be used. The textbook I currently use (an unpublished text by another scholar) uses the synchronic approach, with the Aramaic of Targum Onkelos as the beginning dialect.

For a certain class of nouns, the synchronic approach leads to certain problems. Consider the two words gabra "man" and nahra "river." Although they are alike on the surface, a diachronic approach would discern historical etymons of a different shape, namely [gabr] and [nahar]. Because of differing processes of historical change, these forms have a similar outcome. Because of changes affecting monosyllablic nouns ending in a consonant cluster, [gabr] becames at a certain point [gabar] (with anaptyxis), and then [gbar] (with pretonic short vowel reduction in open syllables), although the base form for suffixes remains [gabr]. On the other hand, [nahar] was bisyllabic from the beginning, and only underwent the vowel reduction yielding [nhar] for the absolute, while the base form for suffixes also underwent vowel reduction, yielding [nahr-] out of [nahar].

But in the synchronic approach, is there any reason to posit different historical base forms? Can one come up with a set of rules that generates all the relevant forms, both absolute and determined, without appeal to historical forms?

Let's propose for both forms the underlying base forms [gabr, nahr]. The next rule would be:
A. CVCC bases must be changed to CVCVC in free-standing forms. This gives us [gabar, nahar]

Next rule:
B. Short vowels in open unstressed syllables reduce to shewa or zero. This gives us [gbar, nhar].

One could even reduce it to one rule, as follows:
A'. CVCC bases must be changed to CCVC in free-standing forms.

Does this work? Let's try it on two more nouns: sipra "book" and zimna "time."
A'. The rule rewrites [sipr, zimn] as [spar, zman]. These are the correct absolute forms.

But the rule should probably specify that the vowel in the rewritten form has to be /a/.
A''. CVCC bases must be changed to CCaC in free-standing forms.

Does this work? Let's try two more, malka "king" and laxma "bread." Application of A'' should yield [mlak, lxam]. However, these forms are not correct. The absolute forms are [málak, lxem]. Now what?

For malka, there has to be another rule modification, namely
A'''. CVCC bases must be changed to CCaC in free-standing forms, or else to CáCaC.

For laxma, the rule needs a further modification, namely
A'''''. CVCC bases must be changed to CCaC or CCeC or CáCaC in free-standing forms.

This rule might cover most forms. However, the rule has to be understood as predicting the parameters of possible lexical surface forms, and not as generating forms on its own.

I'm starting to think that the diachronic approach might just as well be introduced at this point. For instance, the diachronic approach will predict correctly that historical CVCC bases can become CáCaC or CCaC or CCeC, while historical CVCVC bases will become only CCaC or CCeC. This seems like a useful distinction to make.

Of course, this doesn't even start to deal with the question of spirantization. Maybe I'll deal with that in the next post.

More Dylan Thefts, II: Rollins, Pynchon, Hemingway, etc.

A while back I reported on some passages of other authors that Bob Dylan had re-used in Chronicles. I've continued to find more, as have others, especially the indefatigable Scott Warmuth.

Some of the more interesting borrowings I've found are the following:

The Portable Henry Rollins (1998), p. 131:
"Roads full of debris and sadness, old music shifting on the radio. The smell of gasoline on my hands."

Chronicles, p. 74:
"Radio sounds came shifting out of cafes. Snowy streets full of debris, sadness, the smell of gasoline."

Hemingway, "The Battler," The Nick Adams Stories:
"Nick saw that his face was misshapen. His nose was sunken, his eyes were slits, he had queer-shaped lips. Nick did not perceive this all at once; he only saw the man's face was queerly formed and mutilated. It was like putty in color."

Chronicles p. 75:
"His face was misshapen, looked queer formed, almost mutilated -- like putty in color."

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, p. 529
"...cast-iron flowers on spiral vine all painted white..."

Chronicles, p. 58:
"There were some iron flowers on a spiral vine painted white leaning in the corner"


Jack London, "The White Silence":
"All movement ceases, the sky clears, the heavens are as brass; the slightest whisper seems sacrilege ...."

Chronicles, p. 96:
"When I hear Hank sing, all movement ceases. The slightest whisper seems sacrilege."

"The Yellow Claw", Sax Rohmer:
"Through the leaded panes of the window above the writing-table, swept a silver beam of moonlight."

Chronicles, p. 166:
"From the far end of the kitchen a silver beam of moonlight pierced through the leaded panes of the window illuminating the table."

Scott has also uncovered a lot of other interesting material, which I'll leave to him to write about.

There are two ways to take all this. One is to say that Dylan is alluding, not copying; paying tribute, not ripping off; and conceivably playing a game with his readers, daring them to find (as he knows they will) the various authors whose words he has creatively re-used. This is part of his genius. This is a perfectly respectable point of view. The second perspective, however, is the one that I favor, which is to be disappointed that Dylan's descriptions, narrations, and word choices are, much of the time, not his. It seems like lack of imagination, and maybe a little distrust of his own abilities, to say nothing of the questionable ethics.

But whatever you think, isn't it better to know what his method is? Chronicles, it's now becoming clear, is comprised of some authentic reminiscence and some fiction (I take it that the characters Ray, Chloe, and Sun Pie, to name a few, are fictional). Within this mixture, typically when he is reaching for an eloquent description of the physical setting, or of his own tangled thoughts, he uses the words of others, sometimes heavily rewritten, sometimes only lightly retouched. Plagiarism or collage? It's your choice.

This is to be distinguished from the use of sources for the purpose of information. Scott has demonstrated that Dylan used an issue of Time magazine for his portrait of the early '60's. It can also be demonstrated, for instance, that Dylan's information about Balzac (Chronicles, pp. 45-46) is derived from Graham Robb's Balzac: A Biography (1995). (What, you thought Bob knew Balzac personally?) Nothing problematic about any of that. I would have cited these sources, but I'm an egghead, and Bob is not.

More of this stuff will come out. Eventually the palimpsest that is Chronicles will be as full of marginal glosses as the Talmud. Like his method or not, it is interesting to see what the dude has been reading. And if we didn't like Bob, it wouldn't matter, right?

Little Walter, Bob Dylan, and the Two Sonny Boys

Bob Dylan, in his autobiographical Chronicles, tells this story of Sonny Boy Williamson:

The only comment that I ever got [on my harmonica playing] was a few years later in John Lee Hooker's hotel room in Lower Broadway in New York City. Sonny Boy Williamson was there and he heard me playing, said, "Boy, you play too fast." [p. 257]

An interesting parallel is found in Blues with a Feeling: the Little Walter Story, by Tony Glover, Scott Dirks and Ward Gaines:

[Billy Boy Arnold] asked [Little Walter] if he knew Sonny Boy. Walter replied, "Yeah, I knew him. He was really good man, he was the best. He used to tell me 'you play too fast, you play too fast.' " [p. 89]

There are several possibilities here. One is that "Sonny Boy Williamson" really said that Little Walter and Bob Dylan played too fast and told them so. It is certainly true that the early Dylan occasionally played harmonica at a frantic, helter-skelter tempo.

On the other hand, since it is now clear that Chronicles contains generous helpings of fiction as well as fact, maybe Dylan appropriated this story to himself. It is a telling fact that the section in which Dylan's story occurs deals partly with Minnesota harpist Tony Glover, who is co-author of Blues with a Feeling. Also pointing to the fictional character of the story is the fact that the Little Walter anecdote refers to the first Sonny Boy Williamson, who died in 1948. Dylan's anecdote has to refer to Sonny Boy Williamson II, who died in 1965.

Therefore if both stories are true, then Sonny Boy I told Little Walter that he played too fast, and Sonny Boy II told Dylan that he played too fast. This is certainly possible. But I have to favor the idea that, given other evidence of Dylan's borrowing of sources, he also borrowed this one, without noticing that he assigned the saying to the wrong Sonny Boy.

Williamson on the Oxford Hebrew Bible Project

I've been sort of planning to write a critique of the plans for the Oxford Hebrew Bible, and why I think the whole plan is misconceived; but H. G. M. Williamson beat me to it. Good, it saves me some time.

Saludos Lakers, Campeones Mundiales

This is a rare post about sports. Those who know me know I'm a Lakers fan. I come by it honestly, living for 13 years in LA during the height of the Magic-Kareem era. Despite my travels since then, I've retained an allegiance to the purple & gold.

So I'm jazzed the Lakers won the NBA championship this year. I have to say, though, that any feelings for or against Kobe, so prominent in media coverage, had little to do with it. I love what Kobe does for the Lakers, I admire his abilities, and I root for him. But I don't find Kobe all that appealing as a person, and the style of his game doesn't galvanize me. When I was a kid we called players like Kobe "hot dogs," and it was not a compliment. Nowadays every above-average player is a hot dog, and the league is the worse for it.

So these days I'm actually more interested in two other kinds of players. One is the non-hot-dog, the guy who plays (seemingly) without arrogance but with excellence. My two favorite non-hot-dogs -- let's call them hamburgers -- my two favorite hamburgers are Lamar Odom and Pau Gasol. It's always good to see hamburgers get rings.

The second kind I like is the big man. My heart has always been with the big men of the Association. The first team I ever loved and rooted for in the NBA was the Philadelphia 76ers of 1967, with Billy Cunningham, Hal Greer, Matt Guokas, coach Alex Hannum, etc. -- but mainly, if you were a kid like me, you noticed Wilt Chamberlain, freakishly large, a man among boys. Kids like the big men for the same reason they like dinosaurs, and if you need any further explanation, then you don't get it. I've never grown out of this, and my favorite players have been the giants, like Wilt, Kareem, Shaq, Yao, even Rik Smits, Ralph Sampson, Manute Bol, Shawn Bradley. I want to see them succeed and amaze me while they're doing it. (No, Dwight Howard isn't in this category. He's just not tall enough. Good player, though.)

On the Lakers, there's only one big who fits in this superhuman category, and that's Andrew Bynum. He's shown flashes of greatness, but he's been hampered by injuries. But he's the guy that really interests me. I hope that the Lakers make it back to the Finals next year, with Bynum performing superhuman feats of dunking and blocking, helped by a couple of hamburgers and, OK, maybe the one hot dog.

Bob Dylan, Young Thief

Looks like Bob Dylan got an early start "borrowing" lyrics, according to this. His career winds down as it began, passing off the words of others as his own.

"Lost": The Godgame Returns

A while back, I wrote about "Lost as Godgame." After watching last night's season finale, I think I was right, although possibly there are two godgames going on.

We met Jacob last night, the white figure (and therefore good guy), and his nemesis, dressed in black. Let us call him Esau, although Seth (nemesis of Osiris) would be quite as suitable. I think everything that has happened thus far is due to the manipulations of one of these two figures.

Some significant reveals of the finale:

Dead means dead. No one returns from the dead on the island. Therefore "Neo-Locke," as we discover, is a tool or meat puppet of Esau. When Neo-Locke told Richard Alpert to tell the real Locke that he had to die, this was a con of some kind. Esau needed Locke's corpse in order to con Ben and the Others.

This presumably means also that "Christian Shephard" is also a meat puppet or manifestation of Esau. (Note that Neo-Christian and Neo-Locke never appear on screen together.) Therefore everything "Christian" has said to anyone is a con of some kind. He doesn't speak for Jacob. Locke was not supposed to move the island or die. Jack wasn't supposed to come back.

If so, then Esau at the moment can only work through one kind of being: dead people: Christian Shephard, John Locke, Yemi, Alex Rousseau.

Since the Smoke Monster (through Alex) told Ben that he had to obey Neo-Locke, we have to assume that Smokey is also a manifestation (or perhaps is) Esau. Ben Linus's "judgment" was also a con. (Is there more than one Smokey? Is there a white Smokey, too?)

We saw Greek and Egyptian last night, and we heard some Latin. Would it have killed them to put some Aramaic in the show?

New Ancient Document

This (HT: Paleojudaica) looks like it might be interesting. Kudos to the IAA for providing a hi-res photograph link.

The cursive script is hard to read. The beginning of the text, at least, is in Aramaic: בתרין עשר (on the 12th day) and then dated to לחרבן בית ישראל -- an unusual dating formula, to be sure ("after the destruction of the house of Israel"). However, I am told that the rest of the text is in Hebrew, and that it will be published in due course by Esti Eshel and Ada Yardeni.

IT'S "FREE REIN"

Once again, I encountered the spelling "free reign" in a magazine. This is starting to happen a lot. NO. This is not correct. The correct spelling is free rein. Get it right or pay the price.

Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers
each soft Spring recurrent;
It was not as his Spirit, in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of His eleven Apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that-pierced-died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendance;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time which will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
-JOHN UPDIKE

Dylan Quellenforschung

In advance of the new album, a track has been released from Bob Dylan's new album, "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'." It's a blues number that won't blow anyone's mind.

All the Dylanologists are saying, though, that it "sounds like 'Black Magic Woman'." That song, it will be remembered, was originally recorded by Fleetwood Mac, although the one everyone knows is the cover version by Santana.

However, in my opinion, the real template for the Dylan song is Otis Rush's "All Your Love," right down to the recurrent words "pretty baby." As with "Black Magic Woman," the more famous version is someone else's, in this case John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, with some absolutely scorching guitar licks from Eric Clapton. Give all of these a listen, and let me know what you think.

The Wheel in the Wind

In Ps. 83:14, God is enjoined to make the wicked ‏kglgl, which the KJV translates as "like a wheel" (similarly LXX and Vulgate). Although the word glgl does mean "wheel," it makes little sense in context, and exegetes have generally seen in the Hebrew a reference to some other round thing that the wicked could intelligibly be compared to. Since in this verse glgl is compared to qash, straw, driven before the wind, and in Isa. 17:13 to motz , chaff, whipped up by the storm, many take glgl in these two verses to be a reference to a plant, Gundelia tournefortii, which, when dry, forms a kind of tumbleweed. (It is also an extraordinarily ugly plant.)

Although HALOT, in giving this information, refers us in the first instance to Gustav Dalman's Arbeit und Sitte in Palästina (1928-42), Dalman got his information from Immanuel Löw's Die Flora der Juden (1924; still a great reference tool). And where did Löw get it from? From the great 12th century commentator Rashi, who made the identification more than 900 years ago.

Most modern translations reflect this insight, such as NIV "make them like tumbleweed" and JPS "make them like thistledown." But it is surprising how many translate as "like the whirling dust" (ASV, NAS, NRSV), which is less apt. Possibly these translators were under the influence of the older lexicon BDB, which interprets this glgl as "whirl (of dust or chaff), sim. of foes put to flight by God."

I first noticed all this while reading through the 16th century Aramaic lexicon, Meturgeman, by Elias Levita. Levita, as expected, understands the word as does Rashi, glossing it as ‏פרח עשב שהוא מתגלגל, a plant growth that rolls. The citation he gives from the Psalms Targum is ‏היך גלגלא דמתגלגל ואזיל ניח במודרון, understood as "like a glgl, that keeps on rolling, coming to rest on a slope."

However, Levita's text differs from other Targum texts, which read ‏ולא ניח במודרון, "... and does not come to rest on a hillside." The second reading fits the context better, but the image as a whole is obscure to me. Does it mean the wind blows the weed without stopping, so that even when it comes to an obstacle it keeps on rolling? Or is it possible that the reference really is in this case to a wheel, so that we must understand it as "like a wheel that keeps on rolling and does not stop, down a slope"? The last translation is the one I gave in my Psalms Targum text; but now I am not sure. Anybody out there have any thoughts on the Aramaic?

New Dylan Album

Bob Dylan has a new record coming out. Sounds like it could be interesting; supposedly a rock record, but with lots of accordion on it. Is it zydeco? I doubt it. The name of it is Together Through Life.

As for the previous record, Modern Times, the always alert Scott Warmuth has some Chaucerian observations.

Speaking

I'll be speaking Monday at 5:15 pm at Catholic University on the topic "Recent Epigraphic Discoveries and their Bearing on the Origin of Christianity." The lecture is part of the Early Christian Seminar sponsored by the Center for the Study of Early Christianity and is open to the CUA community and invited guests. If any readers of "Ralph" are in the neighborhood and would like to come, let me know and I'll send you more info.

Song of the Week

Come on
Step up
Jump around
Step in
Get up
Stay up
Get down
Come on
Jump in
Move around
Come on
Step up
Get up
Way up
Get down
All right

Raphael Golb Arrest

Wow, this is a blockbuster that will have the community of Qumran scholars buzzing for months, if not longer. A vast quantity of relevant material has been collected by Bob Cargill here.

The sad thing about this scandal is not only the paranoia and vitriol on display in what was originally a scholarly dispute, but the tawdry and shoddy means used to propagate them. Incredible. The scholars who were the victims (particularly Cargill and Larry Schiffman) are to be congratulated for taking steps to bring this activity to an end, but it's a shame that their time had to be spent doing that instead of scholarship.

I'm just watching it all with disbelief from the sidelines. If I learn anything not available from other sources, I'll report it.

Linguistics Terms that Illustrate What They Mean

I see that I haven't blogged the ENTIRE month of February, which is a new record of some kind of futility (or possibly: commitment to work outside of cyberspace. Take your pick.).

To get the ball rolling again, I shall submit a list of terms from linguistics that illustrate what they mean. The late Herb Paper and I cooked these up years ago over lunch (although "haplogy" already existed as a joke among linguists).

HAPLOGY < haplology

DITTOTOGRAPHY < dittography

SYNCPE < syncope

APOCOP < apocope

'PHAERESIS < aphaeresis

NANSALIZANTION < nasalization

ANAPATYXIS < anaptyxis

Book Fans Bid Updike Adieu

Now John Updike is gone. Time was when I thought he was the greatest American writer of them all. I moved away from that, but I never read an Updike book that didn't have me shaking my head in wonder at his mastery of the language. Some of his phrases have stuck in my mind ever since I first encountered them: the hand in Couples that "showed cornute against the cruciform mullions." The Russian accent of a man trying to speak French who "sloshed in the galoshes of Russian zhushes" (from The Coup). In Roger's Version, the aftermath of intimacy when a man sees his ejaculate "glistening on her belly like an iota of lunar spit." He was a wordsmith without parallel.

He was also the last Barthian in an age when Protestantism either became evangelical or went liberal. My hat's off to him for that, even though I think it left him without sufficient resources to fight off secularism. But I loved it when he told an interviewer that, although he had doubts, he refused to make the "leap of unfaith." Hopefully, he now has his reward.

(BTW: I always thought that Updike wrote this sentence: "His breath smelled of (though no banquet would serve, because of the known redolence of onions, onions) onions." But on looking it up, I find that it was penned by Anthony Burgess. Live and learn.)

Richard John Neuhaus

Richard John Neuhaus has died. He was one of the great Christian voices in the US, from the 'sixties until now. His book The Naked Public Square (1984) played a big role in the formation of my thinking (such as it is) about Christian faith and public policy.

The obituaries will probably focus on his Catholic years, and probably rightly. But I don't want to forget a few things he did in his Lutheran days, either. One of them was to help convene the group that later issued the "Hartford Declaration: A Theological Affirmation." Its concerns are still valid today. Among the signatories, besides Neuhaus, were Peter Berger, Richard Mouw, Avery Dulles, Ralph McInerny, Lew Smedes, Robert Wilken, William Sloane Coffin, Stanley Hauerwas, and others — a veritable Who's Who of orthodox Christian theology in America.

Another was his book Time Toward Home (1975, now out of print), which rehabilitated the idea of American history and religion as a possible avenue of God's grace.

It was not long after TIme Toward Home came out that Neuhaus gave the Payton Lectures at Fuller Seminary while I was a student, and I met him briefly. I asked him some kind of convoluted question about resurrection and Pannenberg's theology, which he turned into some kind of sense and gave a thoughtful answer to. But in general he did not suffer fools gladly. He was an important advocate for the church, and we'll not see his like again. Recquiescat in pace.

Fifth Annual Ralphies

Oh yeah, the Ralphies. Even more than last year, I have been out of touch with popular culture. In fact, since around August, when we moved to the DC area, I've been busy in the academic life and haven't bought a CD, gone to a movie, or read a ... no, actually, I've read plenty of books, so never mind that. I've also watched some TV. But generally I feel like I've been away.

And I haven't been blogging that much, either, and I've paid the price for that, in that very few people stop by here anymore. Such is life. But despite it all, I shall award Ralphies, as I do every year, for my own sake, if not for yours.

BEST MOVIE: As I say, I haven't seen a movie since the summer. I never got to see The Dark Knight (unlike every other living human) or Journey to the Center of the Earth 3-D, which I really wanted to see. In fact, all I remember going to see was WALL*E and Hellboy II, both of them excellent. Since WALL*E is the politically correct choice in this politically correct year, I shall award the Ralphie to ... Hellboy II.

BEST RECORD: Uhhh .... I really haven't been listening to much music lately. Did I even buy a CD this year? If I did, I can't remember what it was. But I hereby choose to define "record" quite loosely, so I award the Ralphie to a melancholy song I downloaded that went to the top of my iTunes playlist: Pull of the Pint, by Bill Coleman.

BEST BOOK (FICTION): I had a couple of good reads this year. During the whole move (which was not a moving experience, if you get me), I beguiled the time by reading Stephen King's Dark Tower sequence, which I would recommend only if you are a big King fan already. Otherwise, skip it. I also enjoyed The Tin Roof Blowdown, by James Lee Burke. But I give the Ralphie to a book that I actually read last December too late for the 4th Ralphies: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. Highly recommended.

BEST BOOK (NONFICTION): I've read a ton of non-fiction lately, but mainly in connection with my work, and none of those books are of recent vintage. I will award the Ralphie to a non-academic work, though, that gave me much to think about: James Martin's My Life with the Saints.

BEST TV SHOW: Lost is, and will continue to be, the TV show for me, and the 4th season was as great as ever. But it was cut short by the writers' strike and somehow it feels like the Ralphie should go to something that is around more. The Office is just not worth watching anymore, and The Simpsons is far gone from its glory days. I award the Ralphie this year to House, which is compulsively watchable, fun, thought-provoking, and on practically 5 nights a week in syndication. Can't beat that.

That's all, folks! Have a fantabulous Christmas and an ecstatic New Year! See you next year!

Post SBL 2008

I haven't had time till just now to comment on the SBL 2008 in Boston; nor have I much to say this time around. I greatly enjoyed the various meals and meetings I had with friends and students, both planned and unplanned (especially the McGreevy's pub hilarity), but overall I'd have to say this meeting lacked some luster. Maybe it was the absence of the AAR, which made everything seem smaller, especially the book exhibits; maybe it was the unseasonably cold weather; maybe it was the chastened mood of an academy feeling the economic pinch; maybe it was just me. But Boston 2008 didn't knock my socks off.

I greatly enjoyed several papers, especially those of David Everson, Edward Goldman, Joe Zias, and my colleague Andrew Gross. My own paper, after being finished months ago, felt stale and unpolished to me, and I'm sorry I didn't do a better job of composition and execution. Hopefully it came off better to others than it seemed to me.

The nicest moment for me came when Sam Greengus told me at the Hebrew Union College luncheon, "We will always consider you a ben bayit." Thank you, and a blessing on HUC and its outstanding graduate studies program.

As for the new Zinjirli inscription, I may add a few updates to the post dealing with it; but in general I thought Prof. Pardee did an excellent job and he is to be thanked for putting this interesting inscription in front of the scholarly world so rapidly. The full philological treatment of the inscription will be published in BASOR within a year's time.

The New Zinjirli Inscription

The new Zinjirli inscription is featured in a New York Times article, along with a good (but not quite clear enough) picture. I can make out a few phrases, but the resolution is not great enough for my eyes to transliterate the whole thing.

The picture features a man, probably Kittamuwa, the sponsor of the stele, sitting with a TV remote in one hand and a turkey drumstick in the other. Just kidding! I surmise that he is actually holding a pomegranate and some other foodstuff.

A partial translation from Dennis Pardee, with whatever bits of Samalian I can glean:

I Kuttamuwa, servant of [the king] Panamuwa (אנכ כתמו עבד פנמו), am the one who oversaw the production of this stele for myself while still living. I placed it (ושמת ותה) in an eternal chamber [?] and established a feast (חגג) at this chamber (יד זנ): a bull for [the god] Hadad (שור להדד), a ram for [the god] Shamash (יבל לשמש) and a ram for my soul that is in this stele (ויבל לנבשי זי
בנצב זנ).

Interesting to note is another occurrence of the definite object marker wt. The inscription may also throw light on the occurrence of ybl in the notoriously obscure line 21 in the Panamuwa inscription, which now seems to require interpretation as referring to sacrifice.

A few other phrases are readable; but why not wait for Pardee's definite treatment this weekend? I'm looking forward to it.

UPDATE (11/30/08): Pardee's presentation in Boston was a thorough and competent survey of the inscription. The word for "chamber" is syr or syd, not yd. I will deal with other aspects of the inscription at another time. I will further note that the text will no doubt inaugurate a discussion concerning aspects of the West Semitic cult of the dead due to the expression "my soul that is in this stele." As one scholar noted in Boston, this has to be connected to the use of the term nephesh for tombs at a much later time. It is also possible that the Kuttamuwa stele may have some relation to the so-called baityloi, also known from a later period, which were considered to house spirits or other numina; Philo of Byblos called them lithoi empsychoi, "stones with souls." Let the games begin.

A Note on Sirach 42:18b

(Tristan, this post is for you.)

The Hebrew text of Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus ) 42:18b, from the Masada manuscript, says of God ‏יׄביט אתיות עולם, "he sees from of old the things that are to come" (NRSV). The word אתיות is everywhere taken to be the feminine plural participle of the verb ‏אתי, "to come." This is a reasonable supposition since that form does occur in the Hebrew Bible, in Is 41:23; 44:7; 45:11. On the other hand, in the next verse a different word, ‏נהיות, is used for future events.

Nevertheless it occurred to me while reading the text with a seminar class today that an alternative understanding of the word might be "letters," understood as "elements." In post-Biblical Hebrew the word ‏אות "sign, letter" has two plural forms: ‏אותות when the meaning is "signs, miracles" and אתיות when the meaning is "letters."

If God is said to "see the letters of the world," what could that possibly mean? It might mean the same as the expression τὰ στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου, "the elements of the world" used in Paul's letters; στοιχεῖα means not only "elements," but also "letters." It is possible that Hebrew "letters" could also mean "elements," and that Ben Sira's expression refers to the four elements, the building blocks of creation.

But also possible — if this reading is accepted — is the idea that the 'otiyyot `olam are the "eternal letters," the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet through which, according to later tradition, the world was created. This idea plays a role in the later Sepher Yezirah and in the thought of Kabbalah. I doubt that Ben Sira had a fully developed Kabbalistic concept in mind, but the intersection in meaning of Greek stoicheion and Hebrew 'ot may have worked on his strongly Torah-centric theology to influence his expression in this one verse, which in turn influenced or foreshadowed later developments.

Orthography of the High Priest Sarcophagus

Jim Davila has directed us to the discovery of an inscription on a sarcophagus dating from the Second Temple period, which reads ‏בן הכהן הגדול, "son of the High Priest."

I will leave the historical analysis to others who are better qualified. What interests me are the orthographical minutiae. The main two words, kohen and gadol, both give the opportunity for the use of matres lectionis (consonants used as vowel letters). However, only one word has a mater, ‏גדול. This is consistent with the vast majority of its occurrences in the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible.

The spelling of the other word, ‏כהן, without a mater, is also consistent with its spelling in the Masoretic Text, where it never appears with a mater. Not very interesting, I know. However, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the largest collection of Second Temple Hebrew texts that we have, the word appears with a mater in the majority of cases (‏כוהן), as does ‏גדול. This is true for both words even of the biblical texts.

The Mishnah has the same orthography as the Masoretic text, but for the expression "High Priest," it uses the phrase without the definite article: ‏כהן גדול. The same is true of the Hasmonean coins, but this may be for reasons of space.

So of the three ancient forms of this title (Masoretic tradition, Qumran, Mishnaic/numismatic), the sarcophagus is aligned with the Masoretic tradition. As far as I know, this has no historical implications. I just think it's interesting.

The Jesus Bowl: Another Crock

Well, this is all over the place. Once again, it does not seem to be as big a deal as everyone is saying.

(1) The bowl pretty clearly reads δια χρηστοu, "through Chrestos," not "Christ." Chrestos is a personal name, as well as an adjective meaning "decent" or "useful."

(2) If the bowl is dated from the 2nd century BCE to the early 1st century CE, it cannot in any case refer to Jesus Christ. The epithet Christ was not added to the name of Jesus of Nazareth until after the crucifixion, in the 30's of the first century. And Jesus of Nazareth did not exist in the 2nd or 1st century BCE (unless he was an infant in the closing years of the 1st century BCE, as seems probable).

Not visible in the photo are the words supposed to be "the magician": O GOISTAIS. I don't recognize this form; I know the word γοητής or γόης which can mean magician. I have no idea what GOISTAIS is supposed to be.

In short, this big story is something of a muddle. Perhaps some experts on Greek paleography and lexicography could weigh in. In the meantime, don't get too excited.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World, by Matthew Dickie (Routledge, 2003).

Jailer, Gaoler ... Goaler?

I was playing a little hooky yesterday from class preparation and reading a bit of Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers. I came across the phrase "king, judge, or goaler." ("The temporal king, judge, or goaler, can work but on the body.") My first thought was that "goaler" was a typo for "gaoler," the British equivalent of "jailer," and I so emended the text in my mind.

My second thought was that maybe the reference was to some other function, and that perhaps I had been too hasty. So I looked in the online OED. Lo and behold, the spelling "goaler" was listed as one of the spelling variants of JAILOR, JAILER, GAOLER. A little more research via Google Print turned up a great many occurrences of the spelling GOALER with the meaning, and presumably the pronunciation of, "jailer." It goes back at least as far as variant readings in Shakespeare's Folios and seems to expire sometime in the late 19th century; Trollope was using a spelling that was on the way out.

Granted then the venerable pedigree of the spelling "goaler," does that make it any less of an error? Judging from the etymology of the word, the combination OA cannot be anything but a confused orthography for the more correct AO — and yet it was surprisingly popular and widespread.

From this I draw this lesson for textual studies, that it is necessary to distinguish between the proper ("correct") reading and the "correct" etymology. GOALER is the correct reading in Trollope, although the orthography is a poor representation (therefore "incorrect") of the pronunciation and the etymology of the word in general (which is why, no doubt, such a spelling gradually vanished in the presence of competing spellings).

Qal or Niph'al?

In response to a student's question, I was led to look up the parsing of the form ‏יֵחַת in HALOT — the Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, now the standard lexicon for Biblical Hebrew (a revision of the older Koehler-Baumgartner lexicon). I was surprised to see that all of the forms of that type (the imperfect of the root ‏חתת) were taken to be from the Niph'al stem.

If you look at the same forms in BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), they are parsed, correctly in my opinion, as from the Qal stem. Now purely from the standpoint of morphology, either parsing is possible. Due to the accidents of accidence (so to speak) the same vocalization would be used in either case.

Nevertheless, if HALOT is correct, we would have the strange arrangement whereby the perfects of the root are in the Qal and the imperfects are in Niph'al (there are a few in Piel and Hiphil but they don't concern us). It is more sensible (and more economical) to assume that both perfect and imperfect forms are parsed as the Qal.

This assumption is strengthened when one notes that חתת is a stative verb, not an active verb (look at Jer. 50:2, for example), and the underlying Qal vocalization *yiqtal is standard for stative verbs. With geminate verbs, the vocalization יֵחַת is exactly what would be predicted. I have no idea why HALOT opted for the Niph'al in this case.

I don't suppose that anyone really thinks that HALOT is infallible, do they? If you do, then stop.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Among many grammatical treatments, see Waltke & O'Connor, An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax, §22.3j (p. 369).

RIP DFW

Writer David Foster Wallace is dead. I will miss him.

All the newspapers are calling him "postmodern," which is true in kind of a chronological way, but he really didn't fit that whole ironic life-is-just-a-game-without-rules mold of the postmodern. More than any other modern writer (not that I know that much about modern writing), he tried to meld a contemporary sensibility with a commitment to values, or at least value-seeking, that is universal.

This old interview at Salon, after Infinite Jest came out, has a lot of insights. Some excerpts:

There's something particularly sad about [living in America today], something that doesn't have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It's more like a stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness. Whether it's unique to our generation I really don't know.

... I get the feeling that a lot of us, privileged Americans, as we enter our early 30s, have to find a way to put away childish things and confront stuff about spirituality and values. Probably the AA model isn't the only way to do it, but it seems to me to be one of the more vigorous.

... The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting [as not lying] -- which for me meant you pass over it for the interesting, complex stuff -- can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can't, that seems to me to be important. That seems to me like something our generation needs to feel.

There are certain contemporary writers or artists that one feels like are companions for the journey, and this is different than liking the old writers who are great and nourishing but dead long ago. They (the companions) make one feel not alone. And now DFW has gone, and we're a bit more alone than we were.

One last thing: his essays in books like Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, are just incredibly funny. His description of the McCain 2000 campaign in Lobster (as well as his evisceration of John Updike in the same) just have to be read. Honor a great writer and go read 'em.

The Noise of Solemn Assemblies

Today the inaugural Mass marking the beginning of the academic year at Catholic U. took place, the first event in which I marched in procession as a faculty member. I very much enjoy the pageantry of this sort of thing, to say nothing of the doxological aspect. I have a liking for the heraldry of the event, with all the faculty in doctoral robes from a hundred different universities, the procession of a hundred concelebrating priests, the monks and nuns, austere but distinctive in the habits of their several orders. It's like a meeting of the Justice League of America, combined with the Avengers, but holier.

Unfortunately my own finery was completely borrowed, since I do not own the UCLA regalia. The Office of the Provost made some spare robes available, and mine was a plain black thing, although with the requisite three stripes and front panels of the Philosophiae Doctor. However, I regret to say that my borrowed hood proclaimed me only a Master. I am determined by the next convocation to acquire (somehow) the attractive plumage of the over-educated Bruin. But dang: it's expensive.

Tell me, readers who are faculty — do you have your own regalia? How in the world did you afford it? And what is your favorite academic costume? Or: Who has the worst?

Catching Up

Sorry I've been gone so long (sounds like a Dylan song). I've been moving across 3 states and doing all the things that that entails, as well as organizing some classes for the fall. I hope to check in a little bit more often into the blogosphere.

There have been a lot of interesting things going on out there. Some of the most interesting are these:

A new Zincirli inscription. Of all the recent discoveries, this one looks like the most interesting. I look forward to Pardee's presentation in Boston. Save me a seat.

A new seal.

More discussion on the Vision of Gabriel — more than I have time to summarize. However, I gather that the crux of Israel Knohl's philological argument is reading a certain word in line 80 as ‏חאיה, and understanding it as the Qal imperative of the root ‏חיי, translated "live!" But we would not normally expect aleph to serve as a mater lectionis for a reduced or zero vowel, which is what we would expect in the first syllable. It seems pretty far-fetched to me. You have one scholar arguing on the basis of a disputed reading for a philologically unlikely verb found in an inscription of questionable provenance. I think Christianity is safe.

On the non-philological front, Adam Gopnik has written a very good article on G. K. Chesterton in The New Yorker. Unfortunately only the abstract is available on-line. There are any number of things I might take issue with Gopnik here, but in one case I think he is (regrettably) dead right, and that is the issue of Chesterton's anti-Semitism. I don't think any objective reader, even one who loves GKC (as I do), could deny that he was anti-Semitic. This doesn't mar every one of his books (here I disagree with Gopnik), and the great ones, like Orthodoxy, are free of it. But no one can read, say, The New Jerusalem, without being saddened by the vile things he occasionally uttered. For this reason, a defense such as this one at Ignatius Press Insight, is misconceived.

The Vision of Gabriel

The so-called "Vision of Gabriel" (background from Paleojudaica here) has begun to attract the attention of the mainstream press. Instead of repeating the usual complaints about how the mainstream press doesn't do their homework and tends to exaggerate or misconstrue the true significance of an ancient text, let us take them as read and move on.

The excitement of the press apparently has to do with the supposed relevance of the text as background to early Christian doctrine about the death of Christ and his resurrection on the third day. This is from the wire service story:

Israel Knohl, Professor of Biblical Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, says one line of the text tells the 'prince of princes' slain by the evil government, 'in three days you shall live'.

He suggests the story refers to the death of a Jewish prince called Simon who led a revolt against King Herod.

Daniel Boyarin, of the University of California at Berkeley, said that there was growing evidence suggesting that Jesus could be best understood through a close reading of the Jewish history of his day.

'Some Christians will find it shocking - a challenge to the uniqueness of their theology, while others will be comforted by the idea of it being a traditional part of Judaism,' he said.

Now I haven't read anything scholars have written about this text other than the article in Cathedra by Yardeni & Elitzur, which also contains a photo and a transcription. However, just based on reading the transcription of the text itself, I confess I can't see much of anything that might give rise to the remarks quoted in the press.

The text is very lacunose and very obscure, and there are only a few groups of lines together that allow a connected translation. Although the phrase "after three days" occurs more than once, only one of them occurs in a chunk of connected text (lines 15-26; the x's represent illegible text):

... one, two, three, forty prophets and sages and pious men. My servant David sought from Ephraim [xx] The sign I am seeking from you. For YHWH Sabaoth, God of Israel [xxx xxx] holiness for Israel. After three days you shall know that YHWH God Sabaoth, God of Israel has said it. Evil is broken from before righteousness. Ask me and I will tell you what this evil(?) Branch [unclear] you are standing. The angel is as your support for Torah. Blessed be the glory of YHWH God from his dwelling place. It is yet only a very little while and I shall shake the heavens and the earth. Behold, the glory of YHWH God Sabaoth, God of Israel — these are the seven chariots by the gate of Jerusalem and the gates of Judah ...

(The expression "three days" also occurs in line 54 and line 80 in fragmentary contexts.) Clearly the text will require a good bit more of collaborative analysis before its purpose and nature are clarified. But in this chunk at least, nothing is stated about resurrection or the Messiah. The mention of "the Branch" (tzemach, lines 21-22) could easily have a messianic connotation, but the fact that it is evil (if the reading is correct) argues that "this evil plant" is a more apt translation.

The lines that Israel Knohl refers to are apparently lines 80-81, which I would translate as follows:

... within three days [...] I am Gabriel [...] prince of princes [...] windows(?) of enemies [...]

The "prince of princes," if not Gabriel himself, may be a reference to the archangel Michael or to God, as in Dan 8:25. Obviously Knohl's reading or restoration of the text is extremely hypothetical.

There are throughout the text some clear references to post-exilic prophetic literature, such as the allusion to Haggai 2:6 in the paragraph quoted above. In line 75, there is a mention of "three shepherds [who] went forth for Israel," probably an allusion to Zechariah 11:8. My guess is that the text has something to do with an interpretation or re-contextualization of these prophetic scriptures. I certainly do not see anything directly relevant to early Christian beliefs about the death and resurrection of Jesus.