We wanted to let you know of the existence of a Facebook Group for the Baptist History and Heritage Society. If you’re a Baptist and have interest in history, we’d love to have you join in. And don’t worry, you don’t have to be a member of the Society- but that would be great too!
Airton Jose da Silva has an interesting post, following up an earlier on the same topic, concerning the apparent hegemony of English language biblioblogs. It is true that a lot of North American and British biblioblogs are limited to English only citations and links- but that isn’t the case here or over on biblioblogs.com. Indeed, my own rolling blogroll always includes (as it does at present) several non English links and those we know of and have merit for biblical studies are permanently indicated on Biblioblogs.com.
This is no minor issue so far as I’m concerned. The main benefit of the internet is the internationalization and immediacy of conversation that it makes possible. Argentinians and Brazilians and Spaniards and Brits and Germans and Italians and Americans and Danes and loads of others can converse and share ideas as never before. The benefits of these exchanges are immense, allowing all those who participate to break free from the shackles of their self imposed parochialism. I attempted to make the same point in the inaugural ‘Blogger’ session of the SBL in Philadelphia a few years back and still believe it today.
The more involvement by biblical scholars in the public arena we call the internet, the more ignorance and stupidity can be debunked in the same forum. I hope now, as I did back in Philly, that more and more non-American and non-Canadian and non-British scholars become involved in blogging the Bible. If you know of such a soul not on the biblioblogs roll- do tell. I for one am all for enlarging the family to include people who don’t write in, or even speak, English.
Both James and Drew have taken me to task for uttering the secret words… evolution is a doctrine. Apparently you’re not supposed to say that out loud. I won’t repeat my earlier post on the subject since that’s not necessary. I will simply ask one final question and then I’ll leave this dead horse to its happy decomposition. If the theory of evolution isn’t a doctrine, why do its defenders expend such religious zeal to defend it? Frankly I couldn’t care less if its true or false. I am just amazed at the almost fundamentalistic zeal expressed by its caretakers. It’s a religion. And hence, it’s a doctrine.
[n.b.- I like both James and Drew- and don't want to annoy them- but the question posed in the post title is a legitimate one].
What, say ye? Oh doubter! There’s proof of it here in an L.A. Times piece. There’s even a picture of the receipt! And behold,
DHL in Israel handles more than 100,000 deliveries every month and say they’ve seen it all. Except for a package sent by ‘Yahweh’ to ‘Moses’ (OK, so the mail’s slow). The information on the shipping bill had an Arizona address for Yahweh and Moses at Mt. Sinai — but in Jerusalem. One would think He would know where Mt. Sinai was, and that Moses didn’t make it into the promised land.
Via Antonio.
The New York Times reports today that the Israel Antiquities Authority plans to make the text of the Dead Sea Scrolls available online.
In a crowded laboratory painted in gray and cooled like a cave, half a dozen specialists embarked this week on an historic undertaking: digitally photographing every one of the thousands of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls with the aim of making the entire file — among the most sought-after and examined documents on earth — available to all on the Internet. … The process will probably take one to two years — more before it is available online — and is being led by Greg Bearman, who retired from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Data collection is headed by Simon Tanner of Kings College London. Mr. Bearman is also using a specially made, $75,000 spectral camera that can produce a photographic image of previously illegible sections. … Once this project is completed, he said with wonder, “every undergraduate will be able to have a detailed look at them from numerous angles.”
Grand news and with fingers crossed it will come to fruition in good time.
Antonio has put together a website collecting all those ‘Jesus and the Virgin Mary’ sightings. Fantastic! It’s one stop shopping for everything you’ll ever want to view about the apparitions of the holy family. Enjoy! And, as PT Barnum rightly noted, there really is a sucker born every minute.
[Originally posted July 31, 2008]
UPDATE: Larry writes today, August 26, 2008- in clarification of his position regarding this artifact:
A COUNTER-CORRECTION: Over the weekend of August 23-24, a very close examination of the scanned, online photograph of the bulla of Gedalyahu son of Pashhur, particularly a comparison of the daleth, yodh, and he’ in the name Gedalyahu has convinced me that the tapered mark on the right side of the vertical stroke of the he’ is not an accidental pock-mark left by a piece of grit that came out of the clay. Rather, it is the extension of the uppermost horizontal stroke of the he’ on the right side of the vertical stroke. The fact that this uppermost horizontal stroke in that he’ does in fact cross the vertical stroke, combined with fact that the horizontal strokes converge, makes this a diagnostic letter which indicates that narrower date of late seventh to early sixth century is correct (see Andrew G. Vaughn, “Palaeographic Dating of Judaean Seals and Its Significance for Biblical Research,” _Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research) 313 (1999): 47, 52–3). I have written the case for this perception of the he in Gedalyahu which supports the narrower range of dates, and I hope to publish it in a scholarly journal in the near future.
Previous post was as follows:
Larry commented on the previous post as follows (and I’ve exalted his comments to a post of its own):
Okay, via a photo, a scan, and the Internet, now we can read the letters on the bulla for ourselves. Conveniently, there is no iconography to be endlessly debated. An evaluation of this potential ID can be based on three questions.
Question 1, authenticity: Since this bulla has been excavated under controlled conditions, I accept it as authentic, not least because Prof. Eilat Mazar is a scholar and archaeologist of the highest integrity. This acceptance is also butressed, as far as I can tell, by the absence of aberrant paleographic details and the absence of any other discernible, serious anomalies in the available data.
Question 2: setting, i.e., time and place, which amount to the question of a date of the inscriptional person (the seal owner) within about 50 years of the biblical person and the question of a match between the socio-political entity to which the inscriptional person belonged and that of the biblical person)
2a. Date: as far as I can tell, the paleography fits the late seventh to early sixth centuries. That would match the lifetime of the biblical Gedalyahu ben Pashhur, minister of Zedikiah, king of Judah (Jer 38:1). In this question of paleographic dating, I definitely defer to the expert opinions of Northwest Semitic paleographers of the caliber of Dr. Christopher Rollston, Dr. Andrew Vaughn, and their peers.
2b. Socio-political entity: From the provenance in the City of David, the -yhw ending on the name of the seal owner (indicating the southern kingdom of Judah rather than the northern kingdom of Israel), and the clearly Hebrew paleography, the bulla belonged to a Judahite.
Question 3: Are there sufficient marks of an individual to avoid confusing two different persons? The name fo the seal owner matches the consonants of Jer 38:1. If the letter after nun in ben is really a pe’, then the patronym would also match the consonants in Jer 38:1 (I am using “Biblia Hebraica Leningradensia” [ed. Aron Dotan; Hendrickson, 2001], the nearest Tanakh I could grab off the shelf). I need to explore whether the letter after the nun in ben might be a letter of similar shape, such as kaph, mem, or nun. Note: might this letter provide a possibility for reading another name? It’s time to look up possible alternative names and verbal roots, but k$xwr and n$xwr are not Hebrew words—I wish I had “DNWSI” available, but it’s at home. As for a possible m$xwr, which I would vocalize as mashxor, meaning “darkness,” is it in the classical Hebrew onomasticon? No, I do not find it as a Hebrew name. I do find this word in “The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew”, vol. 5, ed. D. J. A. Clines (Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 519a, but not as a personal name (”I am dark but comely” in the Song of Songs notwithstanding).
It seems, then, that we have a name and patronym that match the biblical name and patronym, i.e., two identifying marks of an individual. There is no title, second patronym, or other mark of an individual in the bulla. Unless additional data from the site becomes available (maybe conclusive proof that it was a palace or royal administrative building? Compare my “Identifying Biblical Persons” (SBL, 2004), 145-147, for similarities to and differences from the case of the bulla of Gemaryahu ben Shaphan) or increased understanding of existing data becomes available, we must work with our current understanding of the data now available from the bulla itself. According to reference sources, the patronym could only be Pashhur. If the patronym turns out to be verifiable as Pashhur in the bulla itself, then this ID is grade 2, reasonable but not certain. But it cannot be more than a grade 2 ID, because there could have been more than one father-and-son pair having a son named Gedalyahu and a father named Pashhur. In that case, this ID has enough in its favor to be a reasonable hypothesis, but not an ID to be relied on.
Or, for we Americans, the parking garage. In Jerusalem. Yitzhak Sapir does us the kindness of pointing this report from the IAA out on the Biblical Studies List concerning the excavation at Giv’ati (in the City of David).
The excavation area is located on the northwestern side of the City of David spur, along the eastern fringes of the main valley that delimits the spur on the west (Fig. 1). The excavations are part of a multi annual project whereby the entire area of the car park (c. 5 dunams) should be excavated. It was decided to excavate this season approximately one quarter of the area (Area M1) down to bedrock and establish the stratigraphic and chronological sequence and the different periods (Fig. 2).
Most interesting are the notes concerning the Iron Age, Second Temple, and Hellenistic strata (scroll down). Of the Iron Age the essay notes
The remains of the period, exposed in five strata that represented most of the Iron Age, were founded directly on bedrock, marking the earliest settlement in this part of the City of David. This period was mainly characterized in this area by relatively densely built houses of careless and poor construction. The houses, built of one-stone-wide walls, contained a variety of domestic installations. These indicate a residential quarter that existed in the area during this period.
The early phase of the Iron Age was noted for the use of bedrock the builders had employed for setting the buildings’ walls and incorporating it within their built complex of structures. Thus, ‘habitation pockets’, confined between the buildings’ walls and bedrock outcrops, were discovered. This phase was dated earlier than the eighth century BCE, based on the abundance of ceramic finds. The later phase of this period dated to the seventh–sixth centuries BCE. No building remains from Iron I were discovered.
The absence of architectural and ceramic remains from the Bronze Age period is especially conspicuous. With the exception of a small number of potsherds from the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, these periods were not present in the excavation area.
The report also includes some excellent photos.
John Hobbins has bits and snippets from Collins’ forthcoming Yale Magazine essay on the ‘Messiah Stone / Gabriel’s Vision’ thing. For instance
The controversy surrounding [the Vision of Gabriel stone] was stimulated by an article by an Israeli scholar, Israel Knohl, in the Journal of Religion, early in 2008 [go here]. He argues that the text describes a messianic figure before Jesus, who was expected to die and be raised from the dead after three days. Later Jewish tradition knows of a dying messiah (the messiah of Ephraim, son of Joseph), but these traditions are usually dated at least a century after the time of Jesus. … This is not the first time that Knohl has tried to find a “messiah before Jesus” in a Jewish text. Seven years before the Gabriel text came to light, he published a book with that title, claiming that a fragmentary text in the Dead Sea Scrolls referred to a suffering messiah, who would rise and be taken up to heaven. That book was not well received by scholars. Knohl now claims to be vindicated by the new evidence. But his reading of the Vision of Gabriel is highly conjectural and goes far beyond the evidence. … The text simply does not say what Knohl claims it says. It is too fragmentary. It is not clear that the Ephraim mentioned in the text is a messiah. Even if Knohl is correct in reading the word after “three days” as “live,” it does not follow that it means “rise from the dead.” A reference to a chariot does not necessarily mean that someone is taken up to heaven. This is not to say that Knohl’s interpretation is impossible. But there is not much reason to think that it is right.
So- there you have it. If you’re keeping score it’s Knohl and Yardeni against, well, everyone else. To be sure, truth isn’t determined by majority vote. But arguments that persuade more folk familiar with the issues to one side or the other usually have truth on their side. To continue the wrestling metaphor hinted at in the post title- it looks like Knohl is out by a 3rd round pile driver delivered by Collins himself.
Namely, the signers of the so called ‘Amethyst Initiative’- because only a fool believes that lowering the drinking age will make college students safer. It adopts the same moronic mentality that would suggest that drunk driving is a problem, so let’s make sure drunks drive home from the bar by providing them a car. Tony Cartledge is right on the mark when he writes
Somehow, these highly educated administrators have convinced themselves that making alcohol more available to students will lead to less inebriation, reduced rowdy behavior, and fewer students dying of alcohol intoxication. The group’s primary argument seems to be that the irresistible appeal of drinking oneself into oblivion lies in the added rush of doing so illegally. Bull hockey.
Bull indeed. It’s counterintuitive stupidity.
Why do these ‘College Presidents’ want to lower the drinking age (for people whose brains aren’t even developed fully anyway?) …
The real motive for the initiative, as Linda Chavez notes in an excellent editorial for the Boston Globe, could be that college leaders don’t want to be responsible for enforcing the law on their campuses.
That’s it. Evasion of responsibility for policing their own liquor soaked campuses. Or, to put it plainly so that even those presidents can comprehend it- they’re lazy.
