Saturday, December 29, 2012

Simcha Jacobovici Pulls Another Fast One

If you read Simcha Jacobovici's blog regarding the Amos Kloner lecture (and here) last Thursday at the Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies Annual Conference "New Studies on Jerusalem", No. 18, there are two surprises waiting for you.

The first is that the main knockdown of Simcha's theory ('Divine Jehovah, raise up, raise up') by Kloner, the "fish", which was that the illustration is actually an amphora ("he says that he believes that the fish image is really an “amphora”), which Simcha - in the Haaretz story and in the Daily Mail - presented as if it was horizontal:



 when it was actually vertical on the ossuary



is not mentioned.  


Simcha simply writes:

He started the presentation in front of a packed audience of some 300 people by reviewing a front page article in the Israeli daily “Ha’aretz” which featured our finding of the “Sign of Jonah” on an ossuary in the Patio tomb. Thereafter, his entire talk was aimed at stating that only Prof. Tabor and I think that the fish is a fish and that the inscription is noteworthy.

As Simcha was there, as he claims, why does he leave his readers in the dark about the wrong direction in which the image was presented to the world?  Why doesn't he refute that he purposely mislead or that the newspapers erred or something to cover up what would seem to be a glaring example of misrepresentation?

Here is Kloner's original drawing impression from 1981:



Can Simcha blame the camera angle?

The second surprise is that no comments are permitted.

So how can one argue and discuss the matter with Simcha?

For example, on the meaning of the inscription 


that Kloner favors Rollston's interpretation (see D.) and here which has no connection with raising up.

Odd those surprises.

______

P.S.

Tabor.

From Times of Israel.
 

  ^

2 comments:

James D. Tabor said...

Yisrael, I just wanted to point out that the image in question is positioned vertically in our book and was so represented at both press conferences, one in NY, the other in Jerusalem, as you can clearly see from the replica ossuaries and a large reproduction behind our heads, oriented properly. Part of my published report on the excavation discusses in detail the orientation. There has never been any attempt to represent it otherwise or "pull a fast one." I think some of the newspapers who reproduced the image did turn it horizontally, probably because of column inch factors and space I would guess, but we have never deliberately tried to misrepresent the orientation. Rather than an "up side down" fish we have an image where Jonah is being vomit out onto the shore. If the image were turned up or sideways the fish would be spouting Jonah into the sea, as in later Christian art. I cover this in detail on my blog, one of several posts if you are interested.

YMedad said...

thanks for that important clarification. otherwise, we might have thought that Simcha's charge versus Kloner, that he was hiding material, was empty because that's what he had done by allowing those papers to get away with fooling the public. you did ask them to clarify the misrepresentation, yes?