Toward a Definition of Maximalism

In the study of the Hebrew Bible today, the terms "maximalism" and "minimalism" are thrown around with great abandon. I personally believe the term "minimalism" has a meaning, but "maximalism" does not. Take this test and tell me what you think.

It's easy to find out if you are a minimalist. Just answer "no" to the following question:

Did King David exist?

But trying to find out if you are a maximalist is harder. Let us suppose you have answered "yes" to the above question, but "no" to these two questions:

Did Moses exist?
Did Abraham exist?

Are you still a maximalist? What if you answered "yes" to Moses and "no" to Abraham? Are you still a maximalist?

Let's stipulate that if you said "yes" to all three, maybe you really are a maximalist. But let's add a couple more names to the mix:

Did Noah exist?
Did Adam exist?

Now, if you answered "no" to those two, but "yes" to all the rest, are you still a maximalist? Do you have to answer "yes" to all to be a maximalist, or does that make you a "fundamentalist" (a word I hate, and almost never deployed without a subtext of polemic)?

The question about "Adam" is particularly thorny. Unless you believe the human race has always existed, then you must believe there was at some time a first human. But you might want to object that we are not in a position, historically speaking, to know the name of the gentleman (or lady).

In fact, I submit that it is impossible to define "maximalism." Even if one answered "yes" to David, Moses, and Abraham, as I do, one might still want to add "--but I don't necessarily believe every story told about him." What does that make you?

UPDATE: Thanks for your comments (me too, Dr. Cathey). Responses, appreciative and thoughtful, have also been posted by Jim West and Tim Bulkeley.

Scholar Confesses: Jerry Springer Was My Mayor

Apparently there is an opera about Jerry Springer (!) that is causing a furore in Great Britain. I find the idea of an opera about Jerry Springer a hard thing to imagine, but I am perfectly willing for the Brits to indulge in Jerry Springer. Just keep him far away from me.

Jerry Springer used to be mayor of Cincinnati, the town I live in. His most famous act of the time was to be arrested after paying a Kentucky prostitute with a personal check -- a breathtakingly stupid act. Later he became a noted and respected pundit on local TV, always taking the liberal-leftist point of view, quite unusual in conservative Cincinnati.

Finally (finally!) he left for Chicago, forsaking his pious liberal platitudes in order to trowel out a truly mind-boggling amount of sludge onto the nation's airwaves via his own show. He contemplated running for the Senate from Ohio in 2000, but decided not to.

I can't think of anyone more suited to be the symbol of all that is junky on TV, which now apparently includes the BBC. After all, he was born in London. Y'all can keep him.

Forgery Roundup: Moussaieff to Testify Against Golan, Deutsch

The UK Telegraph reports that Shlomo Moussaieff will testify against Oded Golan, Robert Deutsch, Rafi Brown and the others indicted in the forgery scandal:

Shlomo Moussaieff, 82, who owns Moussaieff Jewellers at the London Hilton and is considered the world's leading private collector of biblical antiquities, confirmed that he would give evidence against the five alleged forgers: Oded Golan, a major Israeli collector and dealer; Robert Deutsch; Shlomo Cohen and Rafi Brown, who are all Israelis; and Faiz al-Amaleh, a West Bank Palestinian. All deny the charges against them.

The article continues:

Mr Moussaieff says that he bought about £2.67 million-worth of antiquities, including bullae, or seals of ancient Jewish kings, but he rejected claims by the Israeli police that the artefacts were bogus.

"Every dealer experiences a common battle against the faker: sometimes they win, sometimes you win," he said from his home in Tel Aviv, where many works from his collection are displayed.

"Listen, I'm a big boy. In my business, if I bought a fake, I can only blame myself. If I fail, I fail. I do not think that these are fakes. Since the age of 40, I think I've had enough knowledge to avoid buying fakes."

Even though Mr Moussaieff believes that he has not been duped, the indictment alleges that during one transaction he grew suspicious of the authenticity of a gold bulla and, after checks showed it to be a fake, refused to pay the $1 million (£535,000) asking price.

Prosecutors said that this raised doubts about the authenticity of other items he bought from the alleged conmen. Major Jonathan Pagis, who is leading the Israeli police investigation, said: "People want very much to believe that what they bought is genuine. The buyers' faith is unshakable, as they want to believe that they have a genuine piece of history."

The article is confused; bullae are seal impressions, not seals. It is unlikely that there exists a "gold bulla"; but one could easily imagine an actual seal with a gold setting. Another witness is also named:

Dr Nigel Strudwick, an Egyptologist at the British Museum, has also been listed as an expert witness, although the museum said last week that he had not been informed.

Amir Ganor, the head of Israel's Antiquities Authority detective unit, who launched the investigation, claims that one forged item, a "gold object which had connections to Egypt" was bought and displayed by the British Museum.

He would not give more details, saying that the matter was still under investigation, but he added that he would be seeking help from Scotland Yard in the run-up to the trial later this year.

The article concludes:

[Amir] Ganor said that the trial would be the biggest ever seen in connection with forged artefacts. "It is important because it is connected to the sinister exploitation of religion, of the Jewish and Christian beliefs," he said.

"We hope it will also have an impact on academic studies by experts around the world, so that in future they base their research on real items, not forged items."

Read the whole thing.

I don't understand exactly what Moussaieff will say against Golan et al., if he still believes, for instance, that eponymous Moussaieff Ostraca and other artifacts are genuine. Does he feel that he has been cheated, or not? Watch this space.

UPDATE: The gold item (not "gold bulla," as the article states) that Moussaieff initially considered to be a forgery was described in Biblical Archaeology Review:

Another item casting suspicion on Golan is a seal inscribed “Belonging to Manasseh son of Hezekiah king of Judah.” If genuine, the Menashe (the monarch’s Hebrew name) seal would be an extraordinary object, the rarest of the rare. Hezekiah was an important eighth-century B.C.E. king of Judah, and his son Manasseh ruled from 697–642 B.C.E. The seal is especially treasured because it purports to be in its original gold setting. According to Golan, a Palestinian brought it to him on behalf of an unknown owner. Unable to handle a purchase of that magnitude (the original asking price was $2 million), Golan took it to Moussaieff, who, after much deliberation and consultation, decided that it was likely to be a forgery and declined to buy it. The formation of the letters on the seal was not elegant enough for a king, Moussaieff felt (a judgment shared by others). Besides, the first letter of the monarch’s name looked too much like a Moabite mem rather than a Hebrew mem. But, still, this was not enough to definitely declare it a fake.

Moussaieff later changed his mind about buying the seal and asked Golan to bring it back. When Golan contacted his connection, however, he was told that the seal was no longer available. Apparently, someone else had purchased it and perhaps smuggled it out of the country. No one, including Golan, knows where it is today.

From H. Shanks, "Is Oded Golan a forger?" BAR 29.5 (Sept./Oct.) 2003.

Thoughts on BCE/CE, BC/AD

Mark Goodacre mentions in this post (last paragraph) the non-use of the terms "BCE" and "CE" in the church and academy. This is an issue I have thought about quite a bit, since I have done a fair amount of public speaking to Christian, Jewish, and interfaith audiences of laypeople.

My general rule is that for Jewish audiences (of course) I use BCE/CE, for interfaith groups I use BCE/CE with a brief explanation, and for Christian audiences I use BC and AD. You might ask why I don't use BCE and CE with the Christians as well, after explaining what they are. I have to confess that in oral presentation I really prefer BC and AD because of their contrastive value -- audiences find it easy to mishear and confuse BCE and CE, and sometimes the speaker (me) also mixes them up. This problem is reduced with BC and AD, which sound sufficiently different not to be confused.

Nevertheless, I agree it would do no harm for Christian audiences to hear BCE and CE a bit more and get used to them. Sometimes in "interfaith" groups (which often turn out to be largely Christian) I've heard people scoff at the use of "BCE/CE" as an example of political correctness; and my response is usually, "No, it's just good manners. The majority group in a culture should not get to decide what terms minorities are allowed to find offensive or discomfiting." And then people are fine with it, as long as their speaker does not mix the terms up.

By the way, it is really amazing how many people don't know what "AD" means. Most know that "BC" means "before Christ" but fewer know that "AD" stands for anno Domini (in the year of the Lord). In fact, a lot of people I've talked to think it means "After Death," that is, the death of Christ!

On the other side of the coin, I once made the mistake of saying to a Jewish audience that "CE" stood for "Christian Era." You can imagine the fervor of the objections to that. They carefully explained that it meant "Common Era," and clearly didn't believe me when I protested that I had merely misspoken. And yet in Modern Hebrew, the equivalent of "CE" is li-s'firat ha-notzrim, "by the reckoning of the Christians" -- in other words, "Christian Era." But that's Hebrew, in a culture where Jews are the majority and can afford less semantic vigilance. In the USA and other English-speaking countries, it is, and will remain, "Common Era."

Finally, I have to share the worst explanation I've ever read for the use of "CE." According to PBS, it's used "because of new knowledge regarding the date of the Christ's birth"! Huh?

UPDATE: Michael Pahl and Helenann Hartley follow with apt comments. I should add that my post refers only to my practice with lay audiences; within the academy, I always use BCE/CE.

Potpourri: Aramaic, Snowclones, Album Covers

I wrote this piece last spring for lay audiences; now you can enjoy it. I'll add a link on the right later on.

For those of you who love The Simpsons (as I do), this post on Language Log provides some interesting information on the use of Homer's "mmmm.... [NOUN]." It also mentions a useful new word: "snowclones." Follow the links.

The 10 Worst Album Covers of All Time: This made me weep with laughter, but then I'm a sentimental guy.

Mmmmmm.... Aramaic....

Dating the Dead Sea Scrolls, Again

I have continued to ponder the question of dating the Dead Sea Scrolls, especially in view of some criticisms from Stephen Goranson, and other considerations that have occurred independently to me. Part of my perplexity lies in what to do with the Carbon-14 dating, concerning which Goranson and Greg Doudna are now having an acrid debate on the ANE list.

I remain pretty sure that the upper date, the terminus a quo, for the formation of the Scroll sect cannot be much earlier, if at all, than 100 BCE. I think the archaeological evidence and the internal evidence of the scrolls all point this way. Since no one is giving me any grief about that date, I'll say no more about it.

The lower date, the terminus ad quem, is more difficult. In my earlier post, I opted for 5 BCE, relying mainly on Doudna's analysis of the C-14 dating. Now the fact is, I don't really know a damn thing about the science or the math of C-14 dating; I pretty much have to rely on what I can pick up from the journal articles. Since Doudna's conclusions generally supported what I already believed on other grounds, I was happy, in time-honored scholarly fashion, to use them to bolster my own argument.

Nevertheless, even aside from Doudna's C-14 argument, I started to have a bad conscience about the terminus ad quem. For one thing, I really didn't need a terminus ad quem at the end of the first century; for the purposes of my historical reconstruction, it was sufficient to rule out the 2nd century BCE. No reliable scholar would wish to put the origin of the sect in the 1st century CE.

Not only that, although one could argue (and I did) that no sectarian texts from Qumran date from the 1st century CE, it is unquestionably true that some sectarian texts were copied in the 1st century CE: the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice from Masada. It is also true that other sectarian texts continued to be copied long after the 1st century CE: the Damascus Document, discovered in two medieval copies from the Cairo Geniza. So my terminus ad quem, if not my historical reconstruction, is shaky even without the C-14 evidence.

Into this perplexity now comes the just published article "Redating the Radiocarbon Dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls," by Joseph Atwill and Steve Braunheim with Robert Eisenman. The article attacks in no uncertain terms Doudna's C-14 interpretation. Their conclusion:

...when taken as a whole the C14 date showed that neither paleography nor C14 dating is a sufficiently precise tool to contribute conclusively to the debate over the accurate dating of the Scrolls. (p. 157)

As I stated, I just don't have the science to assess many of the claims in this article. It looks to me like its real agenda is to clear the way for Eisenman's claims that the scrolls are connected to early Christianity, and I regard that theory as far-fetched. But it did convince me that I can't just continue to blithely use C-14 arguments without understanding them.

I will say that when the article speaks about matters in which I am a specialist, it is disingenuous and self-serving. An example is when the authors refer to "dated evidence of a contract [evidently 4Q348] carrying the name of a High Priest and date of approximately 46-47 CE; thus giving vivid internal evidence that negates any idea that the documents were deposited in this cave prior to this time" (p. 150). I can't believe that the authors don't know that all the Qumran texts numbered 4Q342-8, 4Q351-60 are unprovenanced and thought to come in fact from the Wadi Seiyal! They also apparently don't know that the Kefar Bebayou papyrus is now known as the Kefar Berayu papyrus (p. 156).

So this article is slanted and sloppy; but I can't just dismiss it. What I can do is henceforth relegate the various C-14 datings to the footnotes. If that leaves me with a more open terminus ad quem than I at first wanted -- so be it!

BIBLIOGRAPHY: "Redating the Radiocarbon Dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls," by Joseph Atwill and Steve Braunheim with Robert Eisenman, Dead Sea Discoveries 11.2 (2004), pp. 143-57. Greg Doudna's most recent discussion of the date of the scrolls can be found here.

Forgery Roundup: Oded, Man of Sorrows

Since the indictments, I've been going back and reviewing some of the literature previously published on Oded Golan, and I was struck by some things he said in (where else?) Biblical Archaeology Review:

[When I agreed to allow the James ossuary inscription to be published in BAR] I had no idea that I would have to undergo my own Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem.

And at the end of the article:

I cannot say for certain whether the ossuary once bore the bones of James... who received a death sentence by the Sanhedrin and was later stoned... But I do know with certainty that the present government authorities in Jerusalem have proven, through their conduct, or should I say misconduct, that they are truly successors of that government of 2,000 years ago.

Let's see now. If I follow the metaphors here, Golan is casting himself first as the suffering Jesus and then as the martyred James the Just, and the Israeli government as the Sanhedrin. I can't be the only person who finds this not only grotesque, but offensive.

Incidentally, Golan also has the chutzpah to say: "I live modestly." Huh? That doesn't square with glimpses of his apartment seen in Sixty Minutes a few weeks ago, or in the views of it seen in an Israeli documentary, as described by Rochelle Altman:

Mr. Oded Golan enters, seated at his blonde grand piano set in the middle of a spacious room and surrounded with tiers of glass shelves, packed with artifacts, set against the distant walls. Golan's apartment, with its rooms running back the length of the building and spanning roughly 25 meters across the frontage, is an apartment with a price tag of at least $800,000 in US currency. Wait! What happened to Golan's "tiny" apartment in Tel-Aviv where he was visited by the reporters from Time magazine?

That article bears re-reading, especially in view of the indictments.

Elsewhere in the blogosphere: Jim West gives the text of a letter to the ANE list from Israel Finkelstein, the excavator of Megiddo, and why Deutsch was discharged from the Megiddo excavation. By the way, it is easy to infer from Deutsch's website that he is still involved in the Megiddo project!

Mark Goodacre raises a pregnant question. He wonders what the reaction to the indictments is of Ben Witherington, who has always believed in the authenticity of the James ossuary. This raises an interesting issue for me on the attitude to be taken by and towards scholars who write about texts that later turn out to be forged. I hope to blog about this soon.

Seth Sanders has an erudite discussion about biblical archaeology on his blog; read all his posts on this topic. He does say one thing that puzzles me, though:

So another question we could ask is, why is the debate cast in these terms, of maximalism vs. minimalism, history vs. ideology, authenticity vs. forgery?

I'm not sure why "authenticity vs. forgery" is thrown into this pot. An epigraph either is authentic or it is forged, while, say, "maximalism vs. minimalism" are two ideological grids which may admit of many degrees between ideal forms at the poles, and they may not "correspond" to any actual state of affairs. So I'm not sure how this is relevant to the forgery scandal. But read Seth, not me.

UPDATE: Jim Davila gives a convincing construal of Seth's words here. As to the relevance of the James Ossuary, part of which is forged, according to reports: I should have said above "the words of an epigraph are authentic or forged," since, as Jim points out, forged words can be added to authentic ones. My point, in any case, was that the terms "authentic" and "forged" do not admit degrees.

Goodbye, Will

Today was New Comics Day, but a sad one, due to the death of Will Eisner, a giant in the field, the very first comics auteur. The New York Times wrote:

Will Eisner, an innovative comic-book artist who created the Spirit, a hero without superpowers, and the first modern graphic novel, "A Contract With God," died on Monday in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where he lived. He was 87.
...
His seriousness helped bring mainstream attention to works like Art Spiegelman's "Maus" and Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis." As Mr. Couch put it: "He drew on everything from Theodore Dreiser to the Talmud. He brought American literary naturalism to the comics. And he kept publishing these books until everybody woke up and said, 'Wow, these are books! This is an art form! We should take this seriously!' "

Every artistic field has its "best-of" award: the Oscars, the Emmies, the Grammies. The annual awards for best comics are the Eisner Awards.

The Problem of Planted Epigraphs

Jim West has an interesting post this morning with a quote from archaeologist Joe Zias:

As one who has seen the profession, somewhat as an outsider (anthropologist) I can guarantee you that things get planted in sites, both here in Jerusalem and several sites along the Dead Sea.

That reminded me of something I just read in Avigad & Sass's Corpus of West Semitic Stamp Seals, regarding Seal no. 1206, which they take to be a forgery. Here is part of the catalogue entry:

Tel Qasile, chance find made in 1946 by a certain Dr. Hoff, who was one of a party led by archaeologist J. Kaplan... Reused limestone mosaic tessera of the Byzantine period [with an ancient Hebrew inscription] ...

It can only be guessed who made the seal and put it in the party's path, and why. In this light one of the two famous Hebrew inscriptions from Tel Qasile, or both, likewise chance finds made [on the surface] before the excavation, may have to be reexamined. (pp. 457-458)

The two famous Hebrew inscriptions are two ostraca first published in 1951. One of them is pictured here. The second one provides the only extra-Biblical mention of "gold of Ophir." (See the article here.)

I don't know whether these two ostraca are authentic or not, but they raise a question that only just occurred to me. For an artifact to have a provenance, must it be discovered in the ground? If surface finds are suspicious, then that will cast a shadow over a lot more material. I'd be happy to hear from archaeologists about this issue.

If, by the way, the "gold of Ophir" ostracon falls under suspicion, then that would disqualify all the Hebrew epigraphical references that I can think of with the form METAL + LOCATION. The expression "silver of Tarshish" (כסף תרשׁשׁ) occurs in one of the Moussaieff Ostraca, and the phrase "copper of Edom" (נחשׁת אדם) occurs in the Jehoash tablet.

The Tel Qasile ostracon, of course, is not part of the "Golan team" suspected forgeries.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Maisler, B. 1951. "Two Hebrew Ostraca from Tell Qasile." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 10: 265–67.

Stamp Seals and Provenance

I've been looking at the Corpus of West Semitic Stamp Seals, by Nahman Avigad and Benjamin Sass (1997). I don't think I realized before how thoroughly the study of ancient West Semitic seals has been compromised by the number of unprovenanced items. Of the 1189 items in the Corpus, only 180 -- 15% -- have an archaeological provenance. If the jar-handle impressions are removed from the calculation (they are considered uncharacteristic of the seals as a whole) the number becomes 134 out of 1139, or 11.8%.

Depressing. Especially when one considers that seals without provenance could possibly be forged, as Sass notes, in the last sentence of the book:

The possibility that our mostly unprovenanced material contains forgeries should always be borne in mind, for the impact of such items on works like the present one is inestimable. (p. 552)

In fact the question of authenticity haunts this entire volume. Not only at the end of the work, but at the beginning Sass says "We are dealing mostly with material of unknown origin, and the possible presence of forgeries ... should constantly be borne in mind" (p. 15). In introducing the section on "Names," Sass says "That the body of the material is largely unprovenanced is a considerable disadvantage" (p. 465). In seal after seal, the notation "Authentic?" recurs.

It is interesting that the "Baruch" bulla (no. 417 in the corpus), named in the indictment of Golan et al. as a forgery, is not questioned. There is, however, a notice that the script of the Baruch bulla is the same as that of two other bullae (no. 413, with the name "Gaalyahu," and 535, with the name "Yeshayahu son of Hamul"). These bullae may also fall under suspicion.

I don't know the solution to the problem of unprovenanced or forged material. But as a philologist I know that I would use the names and words contained in the unprovenanced seals either sparingly or not at all; and if I did use them, I would treat them like Barry Bonds' hitting records: to be clearly marked with a big asterisk.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Corpus of West Semitic Stamp Seals, by Nahman Avigad, revised and completed by Benjamin Sass, Jerusalem 1997. (UPDATE: See also Hershel Shanks, "Fingerprint of Jeremiah's Scribe," Biblical Archaeology Review 22.2 [March-April 1996], for Bulla B referenced below.)

UPDATE: As the comment below points out, the actual indictment apparently considers the fingerprint-bearing Baruch bulla to be a forgery, not necessarily the one on display in the Israel Museum. But surely if one is a forgery, the other is one as well? They were clearly imprinted with the same seal. I can't imagine that Bulla B, the fingerprint bulla, is a fake and not Bulla A. Or do some imagine that Bulla B was faked as an imitation of Bulla A, with the fingerprint added as a special feature? I would think that using a real bulla as the template for a fake bulla would be extraordinarily risky, since the seal impression would have to be, not just similar, but an exact match.

Here's another question: Bulla B famously has the "scribe's fingerprint" impressed into the clay. If it is a forgery, whose fingerprint is it? Could they use this fingerprint to identify the forger?

Here is Avigad's original drawing of Bulla A:



UPDATE II: The fingerprint question had already been raised by Stephen Carlson@Hypotyposeis here.

Urban Vocab

My son used this term the other day. Said I was "harshing his mellow." What do I do now? Other than point out that it is an example of this, I mean.

Words Gone Wild

If you're here for Forgery News, you have to realize: "Ralph" is about more than forging antiquities (although, these days, not much more). I promise there will be more about the forging scandal as it develops. Meanwhile...

I enjoy reading Uncut, the British music magazine. I get all a lot of information about new music from them, because for some reason the Brits have way better taste than we do in music. Plus, it comes with a CD glued to the cover that always contains some usually at least decent and occasionally mind-boggling music.

Nevertheless, their recent issue with the listing of 2004's top 60 albums contained some prose that I could only describe as, uh, overripe. Check out some of these phrases and tell me what you think.

HARD TO IMAGINE: "bleakly corrosive yet strangely uplifting" (#6, Mark Lanegan Band)

??? AWARD (winner): "sad but livid perfection" (#9, American Music Club)

ADJECTIVE OVERLOAD: "sharp-dressed quartet's precise guitars and jagged rhythmic angles, flushed with arthouse swagger" (#10, Franz Ferdinand)

OVERDOING IT: "songs possessed of a terrible, haunted beauty that made him sound like a prophet whose long unheeded warnings of doom had now come all too horribly true" (#11, Tom Waits)

OVER MY HEAD: "UK 2-step, glitch-house and the hypersyncopation of Nu R&B" (#15, Junior Boys)

HARD TO IMAGINE II: "woozy netherworld" (#16, REM)

ADJECTIVE OVERLOAD: "goosebump-inducing quasi-religious fire of strings, choir, and hillbilly banjo" (#24, Sufjan Stevens)

??? AWARD (honorable mention): "arresting style of mutant grime-pop" (#25, Dizzee Rascal)

HARD TO IMAGINE III: "mystical trip into an eerie neverland of joyful bohemian blues" (#26, Devendra Banhart)

PSEUDO-CRITICAL JARGON ALERT: "his vocals are clearly indebted to early Bolan" (#26, Devendra Banhart)

ADJECTIVE OVERLOAD: "defiant agit-rock blitz of angry, clattering riffs" (#29, Steve Earle)

BEST LINE: "Bono doesn't do intimate, so even a song about his dying father sounds like it's being broadcast through a megaphone" (#35, U2)

HARD TO IMAGINE IV: "sumptuous soundtrack to self-loathing" (#38, The Czars)

??? AWARD (runner up): "thrillingly morbid" (#40, Interpol)

NOT MANY OF THOSE (winner): "pop's most famous Icelander" (#41, Bjork)

ADJECTIVE OVERLOAD: "stirring set of scuffed Latino rhythms, high-noon hymns and creepy piano interludes" (#42, Giant Sand)

??? AWARD (honorable mention): "a thrilling, compulsive niche" (#46, Secret Machines)

ADJECTIVE OVERLOAD: "ragged-but-jangling guitars and scuffed-up vocals of this delightfully scruffy, home-made, semi-acoustic affair" (#53, Paul Westerberg)

NOT MANY OF THOSE (runner-up): "the finest young British female singer-songwriter to emerge over the last 12 months" (#60 Polly Paulusma)

In case you were wondering, their Album of the Year was Brian Wilson, "Smile." My son agrees. I don't.

The Moussaieff Ostraca, Bibliographic Notes

I wish to correct an error that I made in an earlier post, when I said that Robert Deutsch was the first to publish the Moussaieff Ostraca. That is not correct. Deutsch was apparently involved in the sale of the ostraca to Shlomo Moussaieff, but was not involved in their publication.

Having gotten that confession off my chest, I will give here a short chronological bibliography of such items as I have been able to gather about the two ostraca in question.

The first publication was by P. Bordreuil, F. Israel, D. Pardee, "Deux ostraca paléo-hébreux de la collection Sh. Moussaieff," Semitica 46, 1996, pp. 49-76.

Shanks, H. "Three Shekels for the Lord, ancient inscription records gift to Solomon's Temple." Biblical Archaeology Review Nov./Dec. 1997, pp. 28-32.

P. Bordreuil, F. Israel, D. Pardee, "King's Command and Widow's Plea: Two New Hebrew Ostraca of the Biblical Period," Near Eastern Archaeology 61, 1998, pp. 2-13.

The authenticity of the ostraca is questioned and a debate begins:

Israel Eph‘al and Joseph Naveh, “Remarks on the Recently Published Moussaieff Ostraca,” Israel Exploration Journal 48 (1998).

Angelika Berlejung and Andreas Schüle, “Erwägungen zu den neuen Ostraka aus der Sammlung Moussaieff,” Zeitschrift für Althebräistik 11 (1998), pp. 68–73.

Elisha Qimron, “New Hebrew Inscriptions: Their Linguistic Origin,” Leshonenu 61 (1998).

Shanks, H. "The Three Shekels and Widow's Plea ostraca: real or fake?" Biblical Archaeology Review May/June 2003, pp. 40-45.

Christopher Rollston, "Non-Provenanced Epigraphs I: Pillaged Antiquities, Northwest Semitic Forgeries, and Protocols for Laboratory Tests," Maarav 10 (2003), discusses the Moussaieff Ostraca on pp. 145-146, 158-173, and concludes, "I am confident beyond a reasonable doubt that both of the Moussaieff Ostraca were indeed written by the same person, and that both are modern forgeries."

A jumbo-size drawing by Rollston of the "3-shekel" ostracon can be found here.

UPDATE (1/3, 6:45 pm): Jim West links to this report in which the fifth suspect in the forgery scandal has been named: Rafael Braun. This is undoubtedly the "Raffi Brown" mentioned in an earlier post, who was involved with the acquisition of the ivory pomegranate. With respect to the Moussaieff Ostraca, the following paragraph is interesting:

The indictment accused Braun and antiquities collector Shlomo Cohen of attempting to forge an inscription on an ostracon - a fragment of limestone pottery - from the period of the kingdoms of Judea, which lasted from the 10th to sixth century B.C.

"During or close to 1995 the two accused men formed a conspiracy to forge an ostracon with the purpose that it would constitute an ostracon with an inscription from the period of the Judean kingdoms," the indictment said. "The accused did this for financial benefit."

In view of Braun's indictment, this quotation from BAR becomes all the more significant:

The former head of the Israel Museum’s laboratories, Rafi Braun, is now a leading Jerusalem antiquities dealer. Braun claims that it is impossible to stop illegal digging. According to him, the better antiquities dealers in Israel perform a service by advising the government of unusual pieces that come on the market and by directing these pieces to museums.

The article quoted is Hershel Shanks, "The Verdict on Advertisements for Near Eastern Antiquities—Dubitante," BAR 10.6 (Nov./Dec.) 1984.

Forgery Roundup: Deutsch to Sue IAA?

The ANE (Ancient Near East) mailing list has been having some interesting conversations about the forgeries:

Robert Deutsch responds to the indictment here.

The public announcements and press conference by the IAA during this last week, in which they purposely linked my name to a host of allegedly illegal activities with which the IAA knows that I have absolutely no connection, leaves me no alternative but to immediately file suit against the IAA and its agents personally, for irreversibly damaging my name and reputation and for the serious financial consequences of their malicious and criminal acts.

Yuval Goren explains how thermoluminescence is not an infallible guide to the age of a bulla here.

I am trying to obtain from Israel a copy of the indictment. If I'm successful, I'll try to post it on Ralph or provide a link to it.

UPDATE: I am informed by Uzi Dahari of the IAA that the Hebrew text of the indictments will be posted soon on the Hebrew site of the IAA.

The Abdi Seal: Another Forgery?

In view of the fact that the indictment of the suspected forgers lists officials at Sotheby's, the London auction house, as witnesses, it is natural to ask whether an unprovenanced seal sold by Sotheby's is suspected of being a forgery.

It was first published by Andre Lemaire (there's a caveat right there) in Biblical Archaeology Review (another caveat). But let Lemaire tell the story:

The name of the northern kingdom of Israel’s last king has turned up on a beautiful seal from the eighth century B.C.E.! Although the seal did not belong to the king himself, it was the property of one of his high-ranking ministers....

The seal surfaced at a Sotheby’s auction in New York City at the end of 1993. Neither Sotheby’s nor the owner of the seal apparently knew what they had. The title of the catalogue—“Antiquities and Islamic Works of Art”—gave no hint that one of the items was a rare Hebrew seal. Although the catalogue correctly dated the seal to the ninth-seventh centuries B.C.E., it misidentified the seal as Phoenician and estimated its value at between $1,200 and $1,800. An excellent picture of the seal was enough, however, to alert one member of the small community who follow these things; when the hammer fell on December 14, 1993, the seal fetched $80,000. Even at this price, most experts agree, the purchase was a steal. The winning bidder—and now owner of the seal—was Shlomo Moussaieff, an Israeli collector living in London, who has made it available to me for study and publication.

The inscription on the seal reads לעבדי עבד הושׁע, "(Belonging) to Abdi servant of Hoshea." Lemaire took the "Hoshea" of the seal as the name of the last king of Israel (the Northern Kingdom), as, perhaps, he was intended to. This seal has entered the lore of apologetics as one more proof of biblical accuracy, as in this site (which has an illustration) and a dozen others. And in fact, for all I know, this seal might indeed be authentic, though unprovenanced. But the circumstances of its becoming known are similar to the cases of the suspected forgeries.

It would be good to have a list of exactly what antiquities are under suspicion. But even when such a list is made public, I hope scholars never again treat unprovenanced material, even in the absence of indications of forgery, as evidence on a par with artifacts discovered in situ.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lemaire, "Royal Signature: Name of Israel's Last King Surfaces in a Private Collection," BAR 21:6 (Nov./Dec.), 1995.

Top Ten Reasons to Suspect Your Priceless Collection of Antiquities is Forged

With apologies to David Letterman...

10. Dealer always greets you with "Shalom, sucker!"
9. Text of temple plaque proves to be headlines from last week's Haaretz.
8. Sticker on bottom of ossuary: HOW'S MY FORGING? CALL 1-888-IFORGE.
7. Ancient Hebrew bulla came with ancient Hebrew decoder ring.
6. Text of Aramaic ostracon, when translated, reads: PLEASE RECYCLE.
5. Lab analysis of patina reveals trace amounts of bubble gum.
4. On bottom of decanter: "Made in China."
3. Text of ancient Egyptian scarab: "I (heart) Pharaoh."
2. Dan Rather vouches for their authenticity.
1. They were purchased from Oded Golan.

A List of Suspected Forgeries

At the risk of turning this blog into a Forgery Watch, I will mention this item before taking a breather, I hope, from forgery news. Joseph Lauer (via an email from Jim West) mentions a list of some of the forged objects in the Hebrew edition of Haaretz. The list is as follows:

1. The James Ossuary
2. The Mattanyahu Decanter (see below)
3. The Ivory Pomegranate
4. Stone Menorah
5. Seal of the King Manasseh
6. Baruch son of Neriah bulla
7. The Yehoash Tablet
8. The Widow's Plea Ostracon
9. The 3 Shekel Ostracon [the latter two also known as the Moussaieff Ostraca]

I'll try to blog about some of these items in the days to come. The decanter, which is featured in some of the press conference pictures, is described in an article by Hershel Shanks, "Is Oded Golan a Forger?" from the Sept./Oct. 2003 issue of BAR (also found here, scroll down).

On paleographic grounds, the inscription is dated to sometime before 600 B.C.E. The decanter, about 7.5 inches tall, is very well preserved and its inscription is easily read. The only decoration is three concentric circles around the neck of the vessel. The decanter apparently holds a quarter of a certain measure; just which measure, scholars do not know. Mattanyahu, a common name meaning “gift of Yahweh,” may have been a Temple priest.

Apparently, the IAA thinks the decanter, too, may be a modern forgery. It was reportedly sold to Moussaieff by Golan. It was published in Forty New Ancient West Semitic Inscriptions, by Robert Deutsch, an antiquities dealer who has been closely involved with Golan and Moussaieff (he is editing a festschrift for Moussaieff) and by Deutsch’s Ph.D. adviser, Professor Michael Heltzer of Haifa University.

Here is a picture of the decanter:

Surfing the Antiquities Trade

The websites of several antiquities dealers are pretty interesting. Robert Deutsch, one of those indicted in the forger ring, runs a shop called The Archaeological Center. It is by far the richest of the sites I have seen in epigraphic material. Among the items offered for sale is this Aramaic ostracon:

He also offers for sale this ossuary, apparently uninscribed:

The whole site repays close attention. Apparently, as this site shows, Deutsch also has some LMLK jar-handles for sale.

I wouldn't venture to guess about the authenticity of these objects. If the ostracon is one of those Idumean ostraca recently published, it is probably for real.

The Barakat Gallery in Los Angeles also has some interesting items. This collection of letters, for instance, baffles me. I've never seen anything like it. This Aramaic incantation bowl is interesting, but unprovenanced, like all these items. Adding to the value of this Phoenician scarab is the scholarly article by Pierre Bordreuil authenticating it at the bottom of the page. And lastly, the Mandaic Incantation Amulet was found in Jerusalem, which is most unexpected. Check out the prices for these and other items. It's a lucrative business, indeed.

Again, I don't know if any of these items are forgeries or whether they were obtained through illegal means. They may all be authentic and obtained legally, for all I know. But I can't help saying, along with Indiana Jones, "They belong in a museum!"

UPDATE (1/1, 7:48 pm): Jim West has several follow-up posts here, here, and here. Jim Davila adds some apt comments. The storm seems to be centering for the moment on Robert Deutsch; see the posts of the past few days.

Forgery Roundup

The AP story on the indictment was interpolated in this way by at least one Arab site:

Another Jewish forgery to be discovered and declared is the Jewish right wing extremist's claim that their Temple that was destroyed by the Romans more than four thousand years ago was located where the present Muslim Holy Site of Haram Al Shariff, Al Aqsa Mosque stands.

It can't be repeated too often, I suppose: that the First and Second Temples existed and that they were located on the Temple Mount is a historical fact, not anybody's "claim."

This excerpt from another story tells us where the next forgery might be located:

The indictment lists 124 witnesses, including antiquities collectors, archaeologists, officials from Sotheby's auction house and representatives of the British Museum and the Brooklyn Museum.

Hey, kids! Want to make your own ancient patina at home? Here's how!

The Christian Science Monitor, in an interesting background piece, indicates that the illegal antiquities trade is also being driven, in part, by the depressed economic status of Palestinians.

As sites in the West Bank are being emptied, it appears more Palestinians are taking the risk of crossing the politically sensitive "Green Line" that separates Israel from the West Bank, in search of more promising places to dig. A rise in poverty is a likely motive. Last year, the IAA's anti-theft unit reported that it caught a Palestinian Authority policeman digging within Israel to supplement his meager wages.

Read the whole thing.

On New Year's Eve

This morning when I went out to get the paper, I thought at first it was raining, for I heard water pouring out of downspouts and the patter of drops everywhere. But it wasn't raining. Four days and nights in a row of forty-plus temperatures had finally brought about a rapid meltdown of all the ice and snow from last week's mammoth snowstorm. Sodden lawns are now visible and everyone's cars are filthy from salt and mud. But it's good to start the New Year off with ice-free streets.

... The last time I was in a bar, a few years ago, I noticed a sign that said DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE. I said to myself, "How do they think we got here?" Nevertheless I hope everyone follows this sound advice tonight. Me, I'm turning in early in hopes of staving off a cold that has been stalking me all day. If I blog only a little in the next day or so, you'll know I was unsuccessful.

... Best wishes to all for a safe and happy 2005.