May 16, 2012
Tablets From The House Of Urtenu
Pierre Bordreuil and Dennis Pardee along with Robert Hawley have just formally published 87 alphabetic tablets from the house of Urtenu in Ugarit. Several of these tablets have been previewed here and there over the last couple of years. Not surprisingly over half of the tablets are administrative texts of various kinds but there are some judicial texts and private and royal letters too. The collection also includes three “exercises.” Being abnormal, I am anxious to have a good look at the exercises. A couple of my back burner projects draw on the specific nature (content, structure, etc.) and distribution of student exercises. Truly abnormal readers may remember that I recently quoted a text that mentioned an Urtenu. I think it most likely this Urtenu.
You can find the full tablet of contents of the new publication at the Maison de l'Orient et de la Méditerranée website.
And below is all you need to find this volume at your nearest library or bookseller. Well, maybe not you’re nearest library or book seller but at some library or bookseller.
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Posted by Duane on Wednesday, May 16, 2012 at 2:25 PM (UTC-08:00)
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May 15, 2012
Slow Blogging For Now
I have a head cold and I can’t think and blog at the same time. Some readers may not be surprised at the second half of the conjunction. Abnormal blogging will resume when my head clears.
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Posted by Duane on Tuesday, May 15, 2012 at 12:52 PM (UTC-08:00)
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May 13, 2012
“Not Of A Chemical Nature”
Ha'aritz has a disturbing and abnormally interesting story about a threat against Israeli historian Shlomo Sand. The disturbing part is that Prof Sand’s life was threatened. The threat came in a letter with an envelope also containing some kind of white power that came flying out when Sand open it. It is not completely clear why Sand was threatened but in all likelihood it is in reaction to his recent book, The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland.
The abnormally interesting part of the story concerns the nature of the white power. “Throughout the day, the police examined the substance and discovered it was not of a chemical nature [emphasis added].” I suppose readers should infer from this that the white power was not a dangerous chemical. At least that is almost certainly the implicature of the statement - I hope. But that sure isn’t what it says and if the stuff is not of a chemical nature, exactly what is its nature? But I worry that there is also something else working in this implicature. Those things that are not harmful are not chemical. No one thinks this on reflection but I worry that such formulations reinforce a set of pernicious concepts about the world.
Via Zwinglius Redivivus.
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Posted by Duane on Sunday, May 13, 2012 at 2:55 PM (UTC-08:00)
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May 10, 2012
The Proper Order Of Things – Snakes Then Scorpions
Our Text for the day is Deuteronomy 8:15:
. . . who led you through that great and terrible wilderness, where were venomous snakes, and scorpions, and drought, where there was no water; who brought you water out of the flint rock.
Compare this with the Ugaritic incantation text KTU 1.178 (RS 92.2014). Out of laziness, I follow Pardee’s translation but insert a bnṯ and a cqrb here and there for reference.
I, for my part, will call you. I will shake bits of sacred wood, So that the serpent (bnṯ) not come up against you, So that the scorpion (cqrb) not stand up under you. The serpent (bnṯ) will indeed not come up against you, The scorpion (cqrb) will indeed not stand up under you! In like manner, may the tormentors, the sorcerers not give ear to the word of the evil man, To the word of any man: When it sounds forth in their mouth, on their lips, May the sorcerers, the tormentors, then pour it to the earth. For Urtenu, for his body, for his members.
There are quite a few things that can be said about the passage from Deuteronomy and the incantation from Ugarit but, as usual, I want to focus on the abnormal. Notice that in both texts, snakes (serpents) are mentioned before scorpions. This is no mere coincidence.
From Esarhaddon 2 iii: 13b-14 we have,
MUŠ u GÍR.TAB šá ki-ma kul-ba-bi ma-lu-u ú-ga-ru
ṣēru u zuqaqīpu kīma kulbābī malû ugāru
. . . the plain teems with snakes and scorpions as if with ants.
And this is just one of several examples from Akkadian tablets and inscriptions. As it was the subject of a past post, the topic of snakes teeming may be the subject of a future post. Think Herodotus, The Histories, I:78. But that’s not what I’m worrying over today.
We see the same snake scorpion order in series Šumma Ālu where tablets with snake omens come before tablets with scorpion omens in numbered sequence. We see the order in vocabulary texts like the Practical Vocabulary Assur where MUŠ = ṣe-ru (snake) is in line 396 and a list of variously colored gír.tab (scorpions) begins in line 397. (Note to self: checkout Hh XIV. From what I can see in CAD, the snake-scorpion order may repeat itself for some reason.)
So how did the set order become snakes before scorpions? I have no idea. One thing I can say with reasonable certainty is that this order was embedded in Akkadian scribal culture which was also the scribal tradition at Ugarit. Whether or not it was embedded in ancient Hebrew scribal cultural and, if so, how that came to be so embedded are different questions. But given the right odds, I’d bet on it being part of Hebrew scribal culture also. Does this also reflect a small element of the larger culture? Who knows? With very few exceptions, all the written material we have comes from and/or was propagated by scribes.
Are there other such embedded micro-cultural elements? Yeah, lots of them. This and the other examples that might be pulled together are each small things. Not one of them means much on its own. But together they provided us with insights into how the ancients saw and organized their world.
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Posted by Duane on Thursday, May 10, 2012 at 3:01 PM (UTC-08:00)
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May 9, 2012
Khirbet Qeiyafa - Getting It Right
So far there have been quite a number of abnormally interesting blog posts on the recently and loudly announced cultic finds from Khirbet Qeiyafa. John Hobbins provides a clear statement as to the significance of these finds,
My take: the finds from KQ Yossi Garfinkel and his team continue to present to the public with great fanfare are boring. They are compatible with biblical traditions about the time period in question. They also fail to confirm those traditions in the sense of proving that, for example, someone named Saul based in the northern highlands contested the Philistines, only to be succeeded by someone named David based for a time in Hebron and then in Jerusalem, to be succeeded by someone named Solomon who developed organic ties with the Phoenicians of Tyre and endowed Jerusalem with a state-sponsored temple.
That seems about right. Read his whole post.
Even more concise is the quotation with which Seth Sander begins his report of a conversation between himself, Matthew Suriano and Jacqueline Vayntrub,
"The difference between the new model shrines and others is that these come with a press kit."
I’m not sure which of the three of them made this statement but it is dead on.
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Posted by Duane on Wednesday, May 9, 2012 at 9:32 AM (UTC-08:00)
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May 8, 2012
Cult Objects From Khirbet Qeiyafa
This from the first two paragraphs of the English news release,
Prof. Yosef Garfinkel, the Yigal Yadin Professor of Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, announced today the discovery of objects that for the first time shed light on how a cult was organized in Judah at the time of King David. During recent archaeological excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa, a fortified city in Judah adjacent to the Valley of Elah, Garfinkel and colleagues uncovered rich assemblages of pottery, stone and metal tools, and many art and cult objects. These include three large rooms that served as cultic shrines, which in their architecture and finds correspond to the biblical description of a cult at the time of King David.This discovery is extraordinary as it is the first time that shrines from the time of early biblical kings were uncovered. Because these shrines pre-date the construction of Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem by 30 to 40 years, they provide the first physical evidence of a cult in the time of King David, with significant implications for the fields of archaeology, history, biblical and religion studies.
I'm not sure why I got this news release but I did.
And here’s a picture of Professor Garfinkel with one of the box thingys.
Now I’m perhaps more open than some to there having been a King David. But the first two paragraphs of this news release says “King David” three too many times for my taste. And it doesn't get any better as one reads on. If one feels a need to speculate it should be done after the objects and their archaeological context are described or, at a minimum, one should use the word "speculation" as often as one speculates. Then, news releases tend to go for the sensational and depend on Mark Twain’s theorem for further amplification.
But language is a treacherous thing, a most unsure vehicle, and it can seldom arrange descriptive words in such a way that they will not inflate the facts--by help of the reader's imagination, which is always ready to take a hand and work for nothing, and do the bulk of it at that. [Following the Equator].
This doesn’t mean that I think the finds aren’t abnormally interesting nor does it mean that I think they don’t have anything to do with early Israelite religious practices. It means that I think a sensationalized presentation of potentially important evidence for anything is inappropriate prior to scholarly publication in a peer review environment. It tends to poison the well of honest inquiry.
A lot more will be said about these finds and about Finkelstein and Fantalkin’s recent article on Khirbet Qeiyafa in Tel Aviv. I may even have more to say. But not today. This is a rather full day for me and I haven’t read Finkelstein and Fantalkin’s article. Even as I write the blogosphere is filling with responses. More to come.
Reference:
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Posted by Duane on Tuesday, May 8, 2012 at 7:41 AM (UTC-08:00)
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May 7, 2012
Early Spring
Or should it be "Earlier Spring"?
A couple of years ago I wrote about Amy Seidl's Early Spring: An Ecologist and Her Children Wake to a Warming World. At that time I said,
There is some risk in Seidl's approach. This is particularly true should a reader separate the many stories from the science. In the hands of some, her approach might reinforce the common tendency to discuss global warming in terms of anecdotal evidence: a hot day in winter "supports" the idea of global warming; a cold day in summer shows that global warming is "bunk." But I think the risk is worth it in this case. If we are to adapt to our changing world and mitigate all but certain further deterioration, those of us who are not scientists need to develop informed intuitions to guide our everyday activity, to reinforce our individual efforts, large or small, and to inform our political decisions. It is exactly a book like Seidl's that provides the non-specialist with a basis for those intuitions.
Recently, E. M. Wolkovich of the Division of Biological Sciences, University of California San Diego, and a host of others published a paper, “Warming experiments underpredict plant phenological responses to climate change,” that informs many of the issues Seidl was getting at.
Here’s how Leslie McCarthy of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies described the study.
The study of phenology, the timing of annual plant events such as the first flowering and leafing out of spring, provides one of the most consistent and visible responses to climate change. Long-term historical records, some stretching back decades and even centuries, show many species are now flowering and leafing out earlier, in step with rising temperatures. Because these records aren't available everywhere and predicted future warming is often outside the range of historical records, ecologists often use controlled experiments that create warmer conditions in small plots to estimate how different species will respond to expected temperature increases.
While the paper is behind a Nature paywall the supplemental material, charts, graphs, and supporting data, aren’t.
If you have an interest in this and don’t want to pay for the paper, take a look at McCarthy’s summary and the supplemental material. If you don’t have an interest in this, It’s high time you developed one.
Via Climate Progress
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Posted by Duane on Monday, May 7, 2012 at 10:05 AM (UTC-08:00)
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May 5, 2012
Yes, I Do Have A Few Bibles
Over at BLT, gaudetetheology tells us of his favorite Bibles. He means by Bible those collected works normally included in a Christian Bible in the Roman Catholic tradition. While there is considerable overlap, this does not equal the collected authoritative works of other Christian traditions which, like all things theological, differ among themselves. gaudetetheology does have a Jewish (JPS) and a Protestant (CEB) translation and he is very aware of differences in canon.
gaudetetheology challenged us fess up to how many Bibles we have and which are our favorites. Well, I'm not exactly sure how many we, Shirley and I, have. On the left is my old Kittel. It’s seen better days. Now I use Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia for study of the Hebrew Bible. But I also consult the various Bibles on this shelf – some more of them more often than others.
As you can see from the section of our bookshelf where old Bibles go to die (below), we have quite a few translations. Actually we have several other translations, not all English translations, in other places.
But my favorite translation of the Hebrew Bible is JPS. gaudetetheology likes this one too. My favorite translation of the Christian New Testament is . . . Well, I don’t really have a favorite. I do keep an RSV handy just in case.
Below is a picture of the remains of the Oxford Annotated Bible I used in Gerald Larue’s introduction to the Old Testament class back in 1964. No, that isn’t blood on it. It’s Mercurochrome. How Mercurochrome got on the Bible does have to do with blood but I’ll save that story for another day.
This Bible is Shirley’s Pletcher family Bible. Pletcher was her maiden name. We have another one that is my great grandmother’s family Bible. I also have an old Novum Testamentum with Lexicon. This very small, almost unreadable, Greek New Testament was a gift from a dear friend. It does not have a publication date but I believe it to be from the early 19th century. When I need to look at a Greek version of the Christian New Testament, I look at something a little more recent – Nestle-Aland, 1985. Yes, I know there is are more recent editions of Novum Testamentum Graece but I don’t have one.
Not too bad a Bible collection for a secular humanist. But then I was once a faithist and I've been working on it for more than a half century.
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Posted by Duane on Saturday, May 5, 2012 at 6:32 PM (UTC-08:00)
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May 4, 2012
Apropos To My Thoughts On The Snake In Genesis 3
Marvin Sweeney writes,
Freed from the presuppositions of historical analysis that the trickster or deceptive nature of G-d’s character in Genesis is simply the product of a primitive and theologically unsophisticated stage in Israelite religious development, scholars are now coming to recognize that divine duplicity and deception cannot be dismissed as the product of primitive culture, but must be taken into account in biblical interpretation (Reading the Hebrew Bible after the Shoah: Engaging Holocaust Theology [Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2008], 25).
While Sweeney has his take on “divine duplicity,” I think that, at least when it comes to Genesis 3, the issue involves tension between the mind of the god and the will of the god. What a god may “know” and what a god may will are not necessarily the same thing.
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Posted by Duane on Friday, May 4, 2012 at 8:44 PM (UTC-08:00)
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May 3, 2012
How Long Did It Take And How Much Did It Cost?
On AEGEANET and ANE-2, Judith Weingarten directs us to ORBIS.
ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World reconstructs the time cost and financial expense associated with a wide range of different types of travel in antiquity. The model is based on a simplified version of the giant network of cities, roads, rivers and sea lanes that framed movement across the Roman Empire. It broadly reflects conditions around 200 CE but also covers a few sites and roads created in late antiquity.The model consists of 751 sites, most of them urban settlements but also including important promontories and mountain passes, and covers close to 10 million square kilometers (~4 million square miles) of terrestrial and maritime space. 268 sites serve as sea ports. The road network encompasses 84,631 kilometers (52,587 miles) of road or desert tracks, complemented by 28,272 kilometers (17,567 miles) of navigable rivers and canals.
While the site focuses on the Roman world, Judith is correct that it has much to offer those of us who have abnormal interests in the Bronze Age and the Ancient Near East in general. Take some time to check it out. Even with a bug or two, ORBIS will reward your efforts.
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Posted by Duane on Thursday, May 3, 2012 at 2:59 PM (UTC-08:00)
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