From the Series: Extra-Biblical Testimonies to Biblical Events

Many doubt the Bible is a genuine reliable record of history.

For example, do we have testimony to an exile of Jews from Judea as a result of an Assyrian conquest in 585 BCE?

Well ---

There are the Āl-Yāhūdu tablets. "Āl-Yāhūdu" is Akkadian and means "Town of Judah" or "Village of the Judeans."  There was a settlement in Babylonia where deported Judeans and their descendants lived after the exile that followed the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE.

The tablets found numer about 200 cuneiform, including fragments. They were written in Akkadian on clay tablets. Most date from approximately 572–477 BCE, spanning the late Neo-Babylonian and early Persian periods. They were salvaged from the antiquities market and were later studied by scholars.

These are ordinary administrative and legal documents, including land leases, tax records, loans, labor obligations, property transactions and court-related documents.

They show that the Judeans, aka Jews, retained their identity, bore clearly Yahwistic names, such as Ahikam, Gedaliah, Shelemiah, Yashuv-Tzadok and...Netaniah. They contain references to the God of Israel (Yahu/Yah) and prove the exiles did not just disappear into Babylonian society but retained their national ethnic identity.

As Ariel Kopilovitz has observed:

“It will be a long time” (Jer 29:28). These words, allegedly sent to the Judean exiles in Babylonia, were meant to suppress expectations that existed among them, and possibly also among some of those remaining in Judah, that the exile would end soon (Jer 28:1–4). Jeremiah declares that the opposite is true: the exiles must prepare for a long stay in Babylonia and therefore should build houses, plant gardens and do as much as they could to improve their living conditions until their long-awaited restoration.

As Lauire Pearce has written:

The term ‘Judean’ refers to people with origins in the southern kingdom of Judah, which, along with the northern Israelite kingdom, occupied a strategic position between the imperial powers of Mesopotamia (Assyria, and later, Babylonia) and Egypt. Assyrian king Sennacherib (704-681 BCE) vanquished the northern kingdom, and deported the vast majority of Israel’s population throughout locales in Mesopotamia and North Syria. Although he also deported a significant portion of the Judean population, as illustrated in wall reliefs depicting the siege of Lachish and recorded in 2 Kgs 18:14-16, Sennacherib maintained Judah as a political identity, albeit as a vastly reduced vassal state. The scattered redistribution of deportee populations across the landscape complicates the identification and study of Israelites and Judeans in Assyrian sources, as the few distinctively Israelite or Judean names stand in geographic and social isolation from others of the same background; it is thus difficult to trace their history and/or social and economic location. The documentary situation is different with the population of Judah, deported to Babylonia in several waves: in 597 BCE, following Nebuchadnezzar’s capture of Jerusalem, which resulted in the deportation of the 18-year-old king Jehoiachin and his family (2Kgs 24:12-16); in 587 BCE, after destruction of the Jerusalem Temple; and in 582 BCE. Unlike their Assyrian predecessors, Babylonian kings (primarily Nebuchadnezzar) resettled their deportees as largely intact groups and resettled them in single locales, in many cases, in new settlements named for their places of origin. Some deported Judeans were settled in a town called Yahudu (“Judah”). 

The tablets cover more than a century, showing families across multiple generations. This helps explain why many Jews remained in Babylonia even after Cyrus the Great allowed exiles to return to Judah in 538 BCE.

The Āl-Yāhūdu documents provide direct contemporary evidence of the lives of ordinary Judeans in exile.

The tablets 

help confirm that large numbers of Judeans were indeed deported to Babylonia, that they formed recognizable communities and maintained distinct identities while adapting to Babylonian rule.

The Babylonian exile was not simply a literary or theological concept but a documented historical reality reflected in everyday records.

The standard scholarly publication is the book Documents of Judean Exiles and West Semites in Babylonia in the Collection of David Sofer by Laurie E. Pearce and Cornelia Wunsch, which first brought many of these texts to broader academic attention. Documents of Judean Exiles and West Semites in Babylonia in the Collection of David Sofer.

One scholar wrote:

"The documents published in the present volume are of immense importance for the study of Judeans in Babylonia... The new evidence from Āl-Yāhūdu and its surroundings corroborate...that exile did not equal enslavement, but Judeans had rights, responsibilities, and even opportunities to prosper. From now on, the study of Judean communities in Babylonia is to be primarily based on cuneiform sources, not only on the sporadic pieces of information found in the Hebrew Bible."

And most importantly, from this community that retained and preserved and cherished its identity, Jews returned to the Land of Israel.

^

Did Israel 'Emerge' in 'Ancient Palestine'?

In a review of Emanuel Pfoh's "The Emergence of Israel in Ancient Palestine: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives" by Jeremy Hutton you can find this theory gaining a grip on the academic discourse - and soon to be mass discourse:

...an increasingly vocal contingent has challenged the critical theory (/theories) of historiography employed by traditional historical-critical approaches to the biblical text...Emanuel Pfoh steps into the gap and offers his own terms for peace with this book...itself is a methodologically and theoretically grounded study of how one might begin to write about “the emergence of Israel in ancient Palestine.”

...The author marshals critical historiographic theory, state formation theory, and other anthropological models in an attempt to deal “specifically with Israel’s origins and the question of statehood in Palestine”.  Throughout this introduction Pfoh positions himself as a proponent of “alternative historical explanations of what happened in Iron Age I Palestine in regard to ‘Israel’ ” (emphasis added). This effort comes as nothing surprising in the field of “biblical historiography” (construed loosely as the total combined subsets of biblical scholars, historians, archaeologists, Egyptologists, and Assyriologists who concern themselves with the reconstruction of the history of an ethnic group in the Southern Levant known as “Israel”)...he seeks “to assess the changing historical nature of the entity called ‘Israel’ as a product of contemporary history-writing” through both a review of the various proposals for understanding Israel’s emergence in Palestine (conquest, pastoral infiltration, etc.) and a sharpening of the “minimalist” critique of traditional biblical historiography....of Israel, Pfoh attempts to justify the critical historians’ foundational premise that “we cannot speak of Israel in history without firm evidence, and we cannot base our image of historical Israel on the biblical Israel that dwells in the Old Testament”...

...we have little or no access into the Bible’s meaningfulness within the original social context of its production. Because the historical narratives’ “intention is not historical,” “one cannot deem [them] historiographic” either...

...Pfoh attempts to deconstruct the putative relationship between the various “Israels” known from the ancient epigraphic texts. Pfoh dismisses as skewed any archaeological interpretations of the data that may be linked to the biblical text (e.g., A. Faust’s connection—hardly new with Faust—between
“the absence of pig bones in the Iron I highlands” and Israelite identity; 165; cf. 166–67).  Instead, Pfoh argues that the name “Israel”—if that is in fact what the Mernepta Stela says—“had survived afterwards in the territory and was adopted—from the ninth century on—by people living in the highlands” (172). Moreover, because “[e]thnic consciousness is… "retrospective” and “historiography … defines and creates ethnicity,” we have no access to the identity of early Judaism’s namesake Israel. There follows an outline of what we can know (from epigraphic remnants) or reconstruct (on the basis of archaeology and social-scientific theory) about the genesis and organization of the earliest known polity in the Iron Age II southern Levant: the Bīt-Humriya. This history, however, is not accessible through the biblical text, since “it is during the later periods of however, is not accessible through the biblical text, since “it is during the later periods of ancient Palestine’s history, the Persian and the Graeco-Roman, that we find the proper context in which biblical Israel was created”.

In his “Concluding Reflections” (188–94), Pfoh wraps up a number of independent lines of argumentation that have been touched upon through the course of the study. In a few pages, Pfoh defends himself (and implicitly his congeners) from charges of anti-Semitism and nihilism. But the more salient threads of this short summary are tied together around the theme of epistemology: comparison of the historical reconstruction and the biblical text proceed “only at the final stage of research, but such an endeavour must never aim to achieve a harmonization or an historical corroboration of ancient mythic images,” since doing so “simply misses the point of the original intention [of the biblical text] because of the mixing of logical categories”. “Mythic traditions are rationally unfalsifiable, they just cannot be tested, not because they may not be confirmed by historical or archaeological data—which they are sometimes!—but because they are
created by a different mentality, by another episteme, which never should be confused or blended with our own”...

Sex and The Bible - Book Review Extract

From a review of David Leeming's "Sex in the World of Myth" by Krešimir Vuković

The chapter on Israel and Canaan presents the multifaceted ancient history of the area in a very interesting way stressing that sexuality plays a great role in many stories which found their way into the canon of the Bible. But again several myths are treated superficially. The author writes that “Satan, in the garden of Eden” tempted Adam and Eve (p. 50). This is now widely accepted in Christian retellings but is in fact a later interpretation (in the New Testament) that finds no basis in the original Hebrew. Satan rarely makes a direct appearance in the Old Testament books (the Book of Job is an exception), and the first potential hint of his involvement in Eden is in the Book of Wisdom 2.24 (composed in Hellenistic Alexandria, probably as late as the 1st century BC). Originally, the snake is only a snake (which could be interpreted in a number of different ways) in the same way that the fruit of the tree that Eve picked was not an apple until the similarity between mălum (evil) with mālum (apple) in the Latin version gave rise to this idea.

The infamous story of angels visiting Lot just before the demise of Sodom and Gomorrah gave rise to the old term ‘sodomy’. The author erroneously supports it on p. 59, giving the impression that the story is actually about sex between men. The Hebrew tradition and commentaries make it clear that the theme of the story is in fact hospitality, and the sin of Sodom is one of arrogance and pride. A gang of Sodomites ask to have their way with Lot’s two heavenly guests (referred to as ‘men’), but Lot refuses and offers his daughters instead. The angels then intervene and blind all the attackers. 

The point of the story is not that Lot is concerned about maintaining heteronormativity but that guests are considered sacred. The fact that homosexual relations were banned in ancient Israel (famously in Leviticus) is true but irrelevant in this context. Lot would rather give up his own daughters than break the sacred law of hospitality, which the Sodomites do not respect. Their threat of gang rape indicates an act of aggression and arrogance that is irrespective of the angels’ gender. The Jewish tradition discussed hospitality as the main issue of the story for centuries. The first negative reference to same-sex attraction in the story of Sodom appears in Philo of Alexandria (1st century AD), and it will take another several centuries for this interpretation to become the prevailing one with the Christian authors of late antiquity.

^

Does Arami Mean "Syrian"?

T'ruah held a demonstration outside of Trump Tower in New York this past Sunday to protest the US administration's immigrant policies.

Here are two photographs of the signs and I've circled one word:

That word, in the Hebrew, is Arami.  You may be familiar with it as it appears in the Haggada, quoted from Genesis 26:5.  It is also found in Deuteronomy 26:5.  It relates to Laban.

It is also translated as Aramean.  As to the exact meaning of the verse, see here.

But where was Aram?

Wikipedia informs:

Aram stretched from the Lebanon mountains eastward across the Euphrates, including parts of the Khabur River valley in northwestern Mesopotamia on the border of Assyria...Several of the Aramaean territories located within Aram are also referenced in the Hebrew Bible. These include Aram-Naharaim, Paddan-Aram, Aram-Damascus, Aram-Rehob, and Aram-Zobah.

So, Syria is connected geographically. Or not.

Genesis 28:10 says that Jacob fled to Haran, where he went to his mother's kindred, thus making Aram Naharaim a region beyond the Euphrates.  And 

the most important part of Aram, so far as the Hebrews were concerned, was Damascus. Amos (i. 5) and Isaiah (vii. 8) indicate this; the one by equating Aram with Damascus, the other by declaring that Damascus is the head of Aram...

In Rabbinical Literature:

"Aramean" was from the earliest times the equivalent of "heathen" in the Jewish vernacular, because the heathen neighbors of the Jews used the Aramean tongue. An old Targum, mentioned by the Mishnah (Meg. iv. 9), employs the word "Aramiyu-uta" in the sense of heathendom; as does also R. Ishmael in the first half of the second century (Yer. Meg. iv. 75c). In Palestine the word "Aramean" was so tabooed that the Jews preferred to use the Greek word "Syriac" to designate their mother-tongue, rather than call it "Aramean.

Did Syria as Syria exist at this time?  No. There is no Syria in the Bible. Some evangelicals, though, identify the current struggle in modern-day Syria as being the same as mentioned in Isaiah as regards Aram.

So these quite liberal Rabbis are basing their link between a Biblical verse relating to Jewish forefathers and the revolt in Syria just like evangelical Christians do.

Odd.

But was an "Aramean father" a Jew?

This source indicates no:

In the Old Testament the Aramaeans are represented as being closely akin to the Hebrews and living in northern Syria around Harran from about the 16th century bc. The Aramaeans are also mentioned often in Assyrian records as freebooters.

An Aramean is a person who lived in that location and yet the Bible has Laban, son of Betuel, as identified as an Aramean. Genesis 10:22 has Aram as the son of Shem and Genesis 22:21 lists Aram as a son of Kemuel, son of Nahor, Abraham's grandnephew. 

But the verse in Deuteronomy reads

And thou shalt speak and say before the LORD thy God: 'A wandering Aramean was my father, and he went down into Egypt, and sojourned there, few in number; and he became there a nation, great, mighty, and populous.

Going back to the meaning of the verse, included in the Seder night ritual recitation, as based on Pesachim 10:4, it actually reads "My father was a wanderer", not, I would maintain, a refugee.  Was that father wandering due to strife or by his own decision?  Well,

According to Ibn Ezra, the verse refers to Jacob, who, when he was in Aram, was lost. Rashbam...argues that the verse more appropriately applies to Abraham, who can correctly be identified as an Aramean.

Abraham followed God's command to leave his home in contemporary Iraq and travel westward.  

In other words, the implicated message in the sign is not a true reading of the verse.

Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, modern Orthodox rabbi and leader of the Jewish community of Efrat in his The Passover Haggadah (KTAV, 1983) notes:

The Haggadah teaches us through Laban’s example that Jews ought to fear the enemy within as much or even more than the enemy without. While non-Jewish persecutors, such as Pharaoh, have taken their toll of Jewish lives throughout history, even more Jews have been lost through the blandishments of the Labans of the world. Those presumably close to us–our "family"–have caused more danger to the Jewish community through the scourge of assimilation. Their kiss has been the kiss of death.

What a blast of an interpretation that is.

That would seem to fit these T'ruah Rabbis.

^

A Call From Shiloh To Rabbis, Leaders and Educators

I address these thoughts to Rabbis, educators and leaders of Jewish organizations who have been caught up with a renewed wave of critical attacks on Israel from within the Jewish community.

You are familiar with them if only because on these times of social media platforms but also because of the aggressive invasive nature of these attacks and the wide support certain Jewish media and members of the Rabbinate and academia lend to them.

We have completed the Ten Days of Penitence between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.

Most of you, at one time or another in the past few years, probably had occasion to comment on the Haftarah of the first day of Rosh Hashana.  The story of Hannah awakens thoughts of mercy, of pain, of being socially outcast, of feminism, of misogyny and other issues to which American Jewry especially is attuned.

The childless Hannah accompanies her husband with his second wife to the Tabernacle and in an act of courage, she prays at the Tabernacle for a son:

Hannah rose up...and she was in bitterness of soul--and prayed unto the LORD, and wept sore...remember me, and not forget Thy handmaid...Now Hannah, she spoke in her heart; only her lips moved, but her voice could not be heard; therefore, Eli thought she had been drunken. And Eli said unto her: 'How long wilt thou be drunken? put away thy wine from thee.' And Hannah answered and said: 'No, my lord, I am a woman of a sorrowful spirit; I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but I poured out my soul before the LORD. Count not thy handmaid for a wicked woman: for out of the abundance of my complaint and my vexation have I spoken hitherto.' Then Eli answered and said: 'Go in peace, and the God of Israel grant thy petition that thou hast asked of Him.' And she said: 'Let thy servant find favor in thy sight.' So the woman went her way, and did eat, and her countenance was no more sad.

The Talmud states that "on Rosh HaShana Sarah, Rachel, and Hannah were remembered by God and conceived sons" and in a braita explanation, Rabbi Elazar said:

"This is derived by means of a verbal analogy...it is written about Hannah: 'And the Lord remembered her' (I Samuel 1:19). And...the term remembering is derived from another instance of the term remembering, with regard to Rosh HaShana, as it is written: 'A solemn rest, memorial proclaimed with the blast of a shofar' (Leviticus 23:24). From here it is derived that Rachel and Hannah were remembered by God on Rosh HaShana."

Furthermore, "the meaning of one instance of the term revisiting is derived from another instance of the term revisiting. It is written about Hannah: 'And the Lord revisited Hannah' (I Samuel 2:21), and it is written about Sarah: 'And the Lord revisited Sarah” (Genesis 21:1). From here it is derived that just as Hannah was revisited on Rosh HaShana, so too, Sarah was revisited on Rosh HaShana.

You may wondering where I am going with this.  

My intention is simple: do you know about Shiloh?

The Tabernacle to where Elkanah, Penina and Hannah walked was located at Shiloh.

The Tabernacle was erected there by Joshua:

And the whole congregation of the children of Israel assembled themselves together at Shiloh, and set up the tent of meeting there

The tribal portions were divided amongst the tribes:

And Joshua cast lots for them in Shiloh before the LORD; and there Joshua divided the land unto the children of Israel according to their divisions.

Shiloh was where the tribe of Benjamin was permitted to unite with the rest of the tribes at the:

feast of the LORD from year to year in Shiloh...And they commanded the children of Benjamin, saying: 'Go and lie in wait in the vineyards; and see, and, behold, if the daughters of Shiloh come out to dance in the dances, then come ye out of the vineyards, and catch you every man his wife of the daughters of Shiloh, and go to the land of Benjamin...And the children of Benjamin did so, and took them wives

Shiloh was where the Prophet Achiah berated a King of Israel when he was visited by Jeroboan's wife:

when Ahijah heard the sound of her feet, as she came in at the door, that he said: 'Come in, thou wife of Jeroboam; why feignest thou thyself to be another? for I am sent to thee with heavy tidings. Go, tell Jeroboam: Thus saith the LORD, the God of Israel: Forasmuch as...thou hast not been as My servant David, who kept My commandments, and who followed Me with all his heart, to do that only which was right in Mine eyes; but hast done evil above all that were before thee, and hast gone and made thee other gods, and molten images, to provoke Me, and hast cast Me behind thy back; therefore, behold, I will bring evil upon the house of Jeroboam,

And it where the children of Israel were told that

the land was subdued before them. 

and from where three men appointed from the tribes were told that they would be sent, to

arise, and walk through the land, and describe it according to their inheritance

We've recited these past two weeks the "Mi Sh'Anan, Hu Yaneinu" prayer numerous times, and among the geographic places mentioned in the 20 verses are Mount Moriah in Jerusalem (or perhaps East Jerusalem as some of your call it), Bet El, Mitzpah, Gilgal and Jericho, all located in what several Jewish leaders call the "West Bank".

What all this indicates, in all simplicity, is that a Jew cannot ignore that Judaism's religious, moral, ethical and philosophical values cannot be separated from our people's geographic history.  Not only time but place are essential to the reality of Jewishness.

As you are in the positions you are in, you should point out to the students, the youth and others who have been caught up with recycled non-to-anti-Zionist positions as if predicated on something called "occupation".

The land "occupied" is part of the historic Jewish homeland, first and foremost.  Not some far-flung colonial enterprise.  Indeed, it was the area intended to enjoy the right of "close settlement on the land as per the decision of the League of Nations and continuously confirmed.

Those who employ a veneer of "Judaism" in order to negate that reality, historical and contemporary, should and need be corrected.  Do not allow them to proclaim falsehood.

And that is your job.

____________

P.S.

"There is no Jewish existence without the Bible; it doesn't exist," the prime minister said. "In my opinion, there is also no Jewish future without the Bible."

And without the Bible and subsequent Jewish continuum of residency in the Land of Israel, the Jewish People loses its ability to grasp its geo-political Jewish identity.

^

Can We Tolerate a Tollerton?

In something called The Conversation*, Dr. David Tollerton writes against Eli Weisel.

Tollerton lectures in "Jewish Studies and Contemporary Biblical Cultures and his two main research interests are (i) religious responses to the Holocaust and (ii) uses of the Bible in relation to modern identities, conflicts and concepts of blasphemy".

Here is his lead in to his article:

From debates concerning the Temple Mount in Jerusalem to the 1967 Six Day War’s titular reference to the days of creation, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has often been made to resonate with biblical images and language.

"Titular reference"?

The war lasted ... six days, no?  Is that a joke on his part?  Should they have called it the "War of the Three Week Waiting Period"?  

As for "debates concerning the Temple Mount", actually the role of Mount Moriah and Jewish national renaissance can be traced back, in the modern period, to Rabbis Kalischer, Akiba Eiger, the Chatam Sofer in the early 19th century in connection with the revival of sacrificial service and then in the 1920s involving Rabbis Kook and Hirschhorn concerning permitting entrance into the Temple Mount.  Tollerton is not exactly scholarly in this instance.

But to his central point:

to frame the debate in terms of biblical descriptions of child sacrifice is unhelpful. In one passage, Wiesel creates a three-way comparison between Hamas, the child-sacrificing Moloch-worshippers of the Hebrew Bible, and the mass-murder of Jewish children during the Holocaust.

Tollerton does not mention the 160 children sacrificed in tunneling the "smuggling tunnels" and I do not have up-to-date figures on the "terror tunnels" but they should be in the dozens (and we won't mention the Gazan Arabs killed by Hamas rockets falling short or exploding on launch as, perhaps, Tollerton would refer to them as "sacrifices").  In writing so, he misrepresents Weisel's advert.  Without this relevant framework, Tollerton is quite unfair to argue with Weisel, especially in an organ whose readers, I am presuming, are primed to be anti-Israel and this only adds fuel.

Tollerton is buzzed by the Bible.  It's his right.  He can deconstruct as much as he wants and others can deconstruct his destruction (no misspelling).  But not to misuse the good book and its imagery as well as its basic moral message for mankind, including Muslims.

Tollerton, in the past, has written about blasphemy using the

interesting interface between [the Monty Python film] Life of Brian and historical scholarship on the period, consideration of such debates in late Second Temple Judaism also highlights in more general terms how unstable concepts of blasphemy can be during times of social upheaval. 

This present script of his does injustice to his academic thesis as well as to the reality of Hamas. Or, perhaps, his academic thesis, as applied to current political events is colored by his ... political outlook?

Even if he dismisses the applicability of a Biblical paraphrasing to describe what is happening in Gaza, Hamas surely is engaged in child sacrifice, the ritual sacrifice of Jewish children.  And I think the Nazis acted similarly.

And for this, shame on Tollerton and, how a university tolerates Tollerton is beyond me.

_____________

*

The Conversation is "an independent source of news and views, sourced from the academic and research community and delivered direct to the public.  Our team of professional editors work with university, CSIRO and research institute experts to unlock their knowledge for use by the wider public...Our aim is to allow for better understanding of current affairs and complex issues...We only allow authors to write on a subject on which they have proven expertise...Since our launch in March 2011, we’ve grown to become one of Australia’s largest independent news and commentary sites. Around 35% of our readers are from outside Australia."

P.S.

I received this comment which I decide belongs inside the post:

His central premise in any case goes unargued.  He presents it here:

“Rather than seeing Hamas fighters as human beings driven by varying mixtures of rage, desperation and extremist ideology, they become players in an ongoing battle between good and evil that is epic in scope and primordial in origin.” 
And that’s bad why?  Tollerton doesn’t say.  He merely avers that Wiesel’s approach for drawing analogies and framing moral lessons “provides little insight into messy realities.”  A complete dodge.
How about this: Hamas fighters, as morally responsible human beings, should give up rage, desperation, and extremism and get a job.  Argue against that, Tollerton.

_____________

UPDATE

Not children but it is sacrificial in a sense.  In other socieites, they could have been called "activists promoting peace and coexistence through anti-terror activity".

^

A Bible Story and the New York Times

In "Gaza Conflict Is Just the Latest Round in a Long War", the NYTimes' Steven Eelanger suggests that

Israel’s real problem is the instability from the failure to negotiate a sovereign Palestinian state and finally fix its borders.

To be fair, he indicates that one of the main problems that exist is that

Unlike Fatah, Hamas claims the whole of the British mandate of Palestine as land granted by Allah, which cannot be ceded. In other words, Israel is illegitimate and its occupants should “go home.” The most any senior Hamas official ever offered was a “hudna,” a cease-fire, which the Prophet Muhammad offered enemies to restore his strength.

That's a really big problem. Problem?  That discounts not only peace but that even if there is a peace, there'll be no security:

Fatah controls the West Bank in coordination with Israel, which keeps Hamas suppressed. With no Israeli forces in the West Bank, Hamas might dominate there, too.

But he reserves his punchline for the Jews:

...the power of religiously motivated self-sacrifice...After all, it was in Gaza that Samson, calling on God, pulled down a temple on his Philistine enemies, making him an early kind of suicide bomber.

Well, if we are gong to use the Bible for reference and resource, let's do it properly.

Samson, like a modern-day liberal, believes in coexistence.  We read in Judges Chapter 14 that:

1 And Samson went down to Timnah, and saw a woman in Timnah of the daughters of the Philistines. 2 And he came up, and told his father and his mother, and said: 'I have seen a woman in Timnah of the daughters of the Philistines; now therefore get her for me to wife.' 

But she betrays him in the matter of the riddle.  And then in the next chapter we read:

1 But it came to pass after a while, in the time of wheat harvest, that Samson visited his wife with a kid; and he said: 'I will go in to my wife into the chamber.' But her father would not suffer him to go in. 2 And her father said: 'I verily thought that thou hadst utterly hated her; therefore I gave her to thy companion; is not her younger sister fairer than she? take her, I pray thee, instead of her.' 3 And Samson said unto them: 'This time shall I be quits with the Philistines, when I do them a mischief.'...6 Then the Philistines said: 'Who hath done this?' And they said: 'Samson, the son-in-law of the Timnite, because he hath taken his wife, and given her to his companion.' And the Philistines came up, and burnt her [Samson's wife] and her father with fire. 7 And Samson said unto them: 'If ye do after this manner, surely I will be avenged of you, and after that I will cease.' 

Samson confronts a perverted system of social justice. A father hands off his daughter in a form of prostitution.  The community practices violence in all its intra-communal relations.  There is also disproportionality: 3,000 men of Judah bind Samson and hand him over to the Philistines.  And then Samson kills 1000 Philistines and not one Israelite is killed!

One harlot and the two posts of the gates of Gaza later, he takes up with Delilah who also betrays him.  One haircut later and the Philistines capture him and they

put out his eyes; and they brought him down to Gaza, and bound him with fetters of brass; and he did grind in the prison-house. 22 Howbeit the hair of his head began to grow again after he was shaven. 

Constant betrayal, unwillingness to maintain the peace or fulfill obligations, taunting torture, violent behavior and more is what Samson confronts, not to mention the original subjugation of his people.

If there is a message in there, Erlanger could do much better than he did.

^ 

The Second Shiloh Conference on the Bible & Archaeology

The Second Shiloh Conference on the Bible and Archaeology was conducted today at Shiloh.

It was fascinating, instructive and well-attended.

Rav Yoel Bin-Nun addressed the issue of a second, smaller and portable Ark of the Covenant which carried the necessities for the Urim and Tumim.  Prof. Finkelstein provided a background and indicated that Carbon14 confirms the fiery destruction of Shiloh around 1050 BCE.  Dvir Raviv described the Bar-Kochba period, late Roman, around Shiloh which includes 22 burial caves with identifiable remains of the period and 8 other sites including Turmos Aya and others.  Dr, Meitiling suggested that Shiloh provides the key to understanding that the beginning of the Israelite settlement in the hill-country as 14th century BCE.

Pictures:

Minister of Construction Uri Ariel greets and said:
"שילה זה מקום של חיים, של תפילה ושל התחברות...בנינו כבר הרבה 'בתי מקדש מעט' 
אבל אנחנו צריכים שייבנה גם בית המקדש האמיתי בהר הבית". 
(Translation: Shiloh is a place of life, of prayer and of 
joining together...we have built many synagogues 
(minor temples) but we also require that the 
real Temple be built on the Temple Mount").*

Professor Israel Finkelstein

Dr. Reut Ben-Aryeh

The crowd

The area of the northern plateau

P.S.  INN story.

___________________

UPDATE


This:

A government minister from a nationalist religious party called Thursday for the Jewish Temple to be rebuilt on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.  The statement...breaks a long-standing taboo on high-ranking government officials speaking about changing the fragile status quo on the holy and contested esplanade, and will likely draw ire from official Israeli circles and anger the Arab and Muslim world...

What "taboo"?

_________________________

And there was this announcement:

This Sunday, July 7th, Ariel University will commence its first season of excavations at Tel Shiloh. Excavations will be conducted on the eastern side of the site, adjacent to Area G of the Bar-Ilan University excavations directed by Prof. Israel Finkelstein in the early 1980s. Binyamin Har-Even, Head of Excavations and Surveys Branch of the Staff Officer of Archaeology Unit, will be joining me in directing the dig.  This year we will be conducting a short season, running until Thursday, July 18th. You are cordially invited to visit us during the course our work at the site. Please contact me to let me know if and when you’d like to stop by.

^

Hamas Revives Biblical Narrative

Remember that encounter of Samson with the lady of Soreq, Delilah:

6 And Delilah said to Samson: 'Tell me, I pray thee, wherein thy great strength lieth, and wherewith thou mightest be bound to afflict thee.' 7 And Samson said unto her: 'If they bind me with seven fresh bowstrings that were never dried, then shall I become weak, and be as any other man.' 8 Then the lords of the Philistines brought up to her seven fresh bowstrings which had not been dried, and she bound him with them. 9 Now she had liers-in-wait abiding in the inner chamber. And she said unto him: 'The Philistines are upon thee, Samson.' And he broke the bowstrings as a string of tow is broken when it toucheth the fire. So his strength was not known....15 And she said unto him: 'How canst thou say: I love thee, when thy heart is not with me? thou hast mocked me these three times, and hast not told me wherein thy great strength lieth.' 16 And it came to pass, when she pressed him daily with her words, and urged him, that his soul was vexed unto death. 17 And he told her all his heart, and said unto her: 'There hath not come a razor upon my head; for I have been a Nazirite unto God from my mother's womb; if I be shaven, then my strength will go from me, and I shall become weak, and be like any other man.' 18 And when Delilah saw that he had told her all his heart, she sent and called for the lords of the Philistines, saying: 'Come up this once, for he hath told me all his heart.' Then the lords of the Philistines came up unto her, and brought the money in their hand. 19 And she made him sleep upon her knees; and she called for a man, and had the seven locks of his head shaven off; and she began to afflict him, and his strength went from him. 20 And she said: 'The Philistines are upon thee, Samson.' And he awoke out of his sleep, and said: 'I will go out as at other times, and shake myself.' But he knew not that the LORD was departed from him...

It has come to Gaza, in a way.  Here:

Police in Hamas-ruled Gaza have started grabbing young men with long or gel-styled spiky hair off the streets, bundling them into jeeps, mocking them and shaving their heads, two of those targeted and a rights group said Sunday.  It is the latest sign that the Islamic militants are imposing their strict practices on the population.

Hamas has been slowly forcing its fundamentalist interpretation of the religion on already conservative Gaza since it overran the territory in 2007, but the new crackdown on long hair and tight or low-waist pants — in several cases accompanied by beatings — appears to be one of the most aggressive phases of the campaign so far.

The crackdown began last week, and two of those targeted told The Associated Press said they were rounded up in separate sweeps in Gaza City that included more than two dozen young men.

House painter Ayman al-Sayed, 19, had shoulder-length hair before police grabbed him and shaved his head Thursday.

"The only thing I want to do is leave this country," said al-Sayed, who despite his ordeal defiantly wore stylish but outlawed narrow-leg tan khakis Sunday. "I am scared. They just take you from the street without reason. I don't know what they are going to do next." 

Hamas officials played down the campaign — a stance adopted in the past that allows the group to distance itself from a controversial crackdown while at the same time instilling fear in those it targeted.  Ziad al-Zaza, the deputy prime minister of Gaza, said the head-shaving "was a very limited, isolated behavior of the police and is not going to continue."

Which reminds me of the verses at the beginning of that chapter in Judges:

3 And Samson lay till midnight, and arose at midnight, and laid hold of the doors of the gate of the city, and the two posts, and plucked them up, bar and all, and put them upon his shoulders, and carried them up to the top of the mountain that is before Hebron.

^

Another Hollywood Talmudic Plot

A new movie is in the works.

A Biblically-themed film.

With Russel Crowe

playing...Noah.

An item:

"Noah" won't be your average Biblical epic though. Aronofsky plans to feature wingless angel demons and giants--based on his tweets, a creature named Og. According to Indie Wire, Og was the King of Bahan, a race of giants, and part of the Rephaim in the Bible.
"According to Jewish folklore, Noah built a special compartment in the Ark for him and/or he rode out the flood by sitting on the top. Either way, we'll see how Og will make an appearance, but it's another interesting note to a movie that is playing as much with myth and legend as it is with the elements of the standard story we know," writes Kevin Jagernauth.

That, of course, is not Hollywood but Midrash:

The Midrash (Pirkei D'Rebbe Eliezer 23) relates* that Og sat on one of the rungs of the ark's ladders and swore to Noach and his sons that he would be their slave forever. Noach then punched a hole in the ark to which he would feed Og through every day. This pledge, however, wasn't enough for Og to survive the flood. The Gemara (Zevachim, 113b) relates that the waters in the flood of Noach were boiling hot but Hashem cooled all the water around the ark so Og would be able to survive and the ark could travel. So we see that Og was a pretty great man as well, for he merited a miraculous miracle.

*

And all living things which were upon the face of the 
earth decayed,^ as it is said, " And every living thing was 
destroyed which was upon the face of the ground " {ibid. 
23), except Noah and those who were with him in the ark, 
as it is said, " And Noah only was left, and they that 
were with him in the ark " {ibid.), except Og,^ king of 
Bashan, who sat down on a piece of wood under the gutter ^ 
of the ark. He swore to Noah and to his sons that he 
would be their servant for ever.'' What did Noah do ? 
He bored an aperture in the ark, and he put (through it) his 
food daily for him, and he also was left, as it is said, " For 
only Og, king of Bashan, remained of the remnant of the 
giants " (Deut. iii. 11). 

And there's this in Talmud Nidah 61b:

...He thought: Peradventure the merit of our father Abraham will stand him by, for it is said, And there came one that had escaped, and told Abram the Hebrew, in connection with which R. Johanan explained: This refers to Og who escaped the fate of the generation of the flood.

An interesting take.

^

Biblical Violence

Here are some lectures from the program of the Norwegian Summer Academy for Biblical Studies (NSABS) International Meeting Schedule (provisional)

Monday, August 7
09.00-09.20: Kristin Moen Saxegaard: Theological Reflections Encountering Violence  10.00-10.30: Karl William Weyde Holy War or YHWH’ War? On a Central Issue in OT Research
11.00-11.30: Markus Zehnder: The Annihilation of the Canaanites - A Reading of Deuteronomy 7:1-5 and Similar Passages in Context
11.30-12.00: Robert L. Hubbard: Rest for the Wary - Cities of Refuge and Cycles of Violence
14.00-14.30: Årstein Justnes: A Violent Hope - ‘Scriptural’ Eschatology in the Dead Sea Scrolls
15.30-16.00: Terence Fretheim: God and Violence in the Old Testament
16.00-16.30: Joshua Berman: The Biblical Ideal of the Warrior Citizen
Tuesday August 8
08.45-09.15: Hallvard Hagelia: Violence and Ethics in Amos
09.30-10.00: Karin Finsterbusch: Violence against Judah and Jerusalem: Images of Destruction in Jer 4-6
10.00-10.30: Gordon McConville: Does Violence ‘Come with the Territory’? An Exploration of Peace and Violence in the OT
13.30-14.00: Georg Fischer: Who is Violent, and Why? Pharaoh and God in Exodus 1-15 as a Model Case for Violence in the Bible
14.00-14.30: Lennart Boström: Uzzah’s Fate (2 Samuel 6) and Similar OT Stories – A Theological Problem for the Modern Reader
15.00-15.30: Lars Olov Eriksson: The Enemies in Psalm 119 in Relationship to Its Genre
15.30-16.00: Knut Heim: Poetic Justice: Violence, Justice and Ethical Ideals in Biblical Poetry Short Break

^

The Highs and the Low in Archaeology in Israel

In addition to the ideologically-driven pro-Pal. archeologists who seek to actively undermine Jewish connection to Jerusalem and the Land of israel, Jewish or other, people like Taha Hamdan of whom it is said:

“When people talk about doing something in Palestine and they learn that it will have to go through Taha, the advice is basically to forget it” because, he says, Taha is “very political” and takes control of projects to consolidate his power.

who is supported by Gerrit van der Kooij, of the Leiden University in the Netherlands archaeologist, there is a professional and academic dispute going on whether the Bible is confirmed by today's science and whether the Bible can be thought of as a credible source and is its chronology reliable (a related previous post).

More information and understanding can be gleaned from a profile on Dr. Eilat Mazar, "Archaeology's Rebel":-

..."I'm suggesting that what we've revealed can be related quite safely to King Solomon." Such a bold biblical connection from a modern Israeli archaeologist is rare. It provokes other archaeologists (except for evangelical ones), but it also exposes how the discipline has changed over the past several decades...

...In 1998, the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR), the main professional organization for archaeologists working in the Middle East, changed the name of its magazine from Biblical Archaeologist to Near Eastern Archaeology in order to separate itself from that modus operandi...

...also noted [are] objections from Israel Finkelstein, a professor at the Tel Aviv University Institute of Archaeology...Finkelstein is the chief proponent of the Low Chronology, which re-dates archaeological findings from the 10th century B.C. This method of dating minimizes the significance of David and Solomon, suggesting that they were minor chieftains rather than major rulers. The Low Chronology is based in part on the paucity of archaeological evidence for David and Solomon's rule in Jerusalem itself.

Mazar's team discovered a 3/4-by-1-inch fragment of a clay tablet inscribed in Akkadian cuneiform script. The tablet was dated to the 14th century B.C.—the oldest writing ever found in Jerusalem.  "It's very small, but it does tell much because it was written by a very highly skilled scribe," Mazar said. The dating puts it in the period of the Amarna Letters, a cache of correspondence sent from vassal Canaanite kings to the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten. Six of the letters were from Abdi-Heba, the ruler of Jerusalem.

...Mazar doesn't shy away from being called a biblical archaeologist, as some of her colleagues might. She likes the terminology..."it's not like I'm here because it's some anonymous place. This is Jerusalem, which we know best from the Bible...I don't believe these [modern] archaeologists who ignore the Bible," she said. "To ignore the written sources, especially the Bible—I don't believe any serious scholar anywhere would do this. It doesn't make any sense."

...archaeologists working at sites such as Khirbet Qeiyafa and Khirbet en-Nahas have found new evidence for a centralized Judean monarchy during the time of David and Solomon. The pendulum is swinging away from the biblical minimalists.

Mazar calls the Bible a historical document. But she also says that it needs to be tested and examined. While evangelicals can appreciate her vigorous defense of the Bible as an independent narrative in the field of biblical archaeology, she does not view it as holy writ.  "I'm not religious," she said. "The only interest we share is interest in historical sources, either the Old Testament or the New Testament. Everything [in the Bible] is important to me in order to be examined or studied.

...Mazar secured financing and began to dig in 2005 [in the northern section of the City of David]. Soon the diggers uncovered the remains of what she called the Large-Stone Structure. The impressive size of the remains made it clear this was no ordinary building. Diagnostic pottery tests allowed for a 10th century B.C. date. Mazar announced that the most logical conclusion was that she had found the remains of King David's palace...[and] One of her supervisors working inside the Large-Stone Structure spotted raised letters on a flattened ball of clay about the size of a fingernail. Called a bulla, it was the seal impression from an important document. It read, "Belonging to Jehucal, son of Shelemiah, son of Shovi."... Mazar wrote, "I felt as though I had just resurrected someone straight out of the Bible."...[another] bulla was unearthed with the name of one of Jehucal's colleagues: Gedaliah, the son of Pashhur, also mentioned in Jeremiah 38:1. "That is why archaeology is so fascinating," said Mazar. "It's written in the Bible, and then we find these seal impressions. It demonstrates that this biblical story is so accurate."...

Academic and scientific debates are fine. Minimalism or whatever.

Identity theft is another matter. And denying Shiloh as Jewish is not only personally downright insulting but rather highlights to ludicrous of the effort on the one hand, and the simplistic incredulousness displayed by those at the UN, the EU and foreign ministries of countries that delight in pumping the Pals. with money to undermine Jewish nationalism and what Zionism has achieved.


UPDATE

Anyone attemnding this lecture:

'Dangerous Archaeology: The Ethics of Fashioning the Past in Jerusalem'

A public lecture by Professor Raphael Greenberg (UCL and Tel Aviv University), With response by Dr Beverley Butler (who was co-author of Keys to the Past, Keys to the Future: Developing a National Policy for Museums in Palestine. Consultancy paper commissioned by Palestinian Authorities/ UNESCO. She argues for a "need to problematise the ‘over-determined’ assertions (or appropriations) of ‘heritage as cure’ and ‘heritage as healing’ and the accompanying overdetermination at play"). Sponsored by the UCL Centre for Museums, Heritage, and Material Culture Studies, Thursday, November 17th, 6pm, Room 612, Institute of Archaeology, UCL, All welcome.

Abstract

Archaeologist are both producers and interpreters of the
archaeological record. Where ideological pressures are powerful,
archaeologists, their discoveries and their interpretations are often moulded to conform with them. The dangers of a conformist archaeology will be discussed, as will its ethical alternatives, with particular reference to Israel/Palestine and ancient Jerusalem.

In other words, no real debate, no real confrontation of theses.

Rafi is one of the 'antis':

...the ostensibly dovish Ha'aretz reporter Danny Rubinstein saw no shame in closing an op-ed piece critical of Elad's settlement plans by asking rhetorically, "But who can remain unmoved by the important addition to the study of Jerusalem's past that is now being revealed by the City of David digs?"

Tel Aviv University professor of archaeology Rafi Greenberg, for one, can. As he leads the alternative archaeological tours that he and a small group of like-minded Israeli colleagues have begun to conduct around Silwan and the City of David site--in a modest but concerted effort to counter the grossly skewed version put forth by Elad and the archaeologists on its payroll...he is deeply troubled by what is happening--to Silwan, to Israel, to his profession...

He's been a bother for the past few years, aiding the new paradigm of "politicisation of urban heritage" theme or what Noam Chomsky terms (p. 54) ‘the counterrevolutionary
subordination of scholarship’, or, in short:

“The Bible should not be the guiding principle or the yardstick of an archaeological site,” Greenberg says. “Archaeology should tell an independent story

and see here.

Butler, mentioned above, presented a paper in December 2010 which drew, in its first part, on the work of Derrida, Said and others

"who have identified the marginalising capacity of dominant Euro-North American archival and cultural-museological institutions. The second half of my text grounds the above conceptual-ethical issues in the context of Palestinian cultural politics and memory-work, in particular with reference to the imagining of Jerusalem, both as a place of exile and return but also as something to capture, aspire and build. I use this critical framework to draw out the silences in archives and cultural institutions and the epistemological and 'real' violences at play in what Derrida characterises as 'archive trauma' and to respond to Said's call to 're-read' the colonial
archive 'contrapuntally' in order to create an 'othering' of dominant archival discourse. My paper will that what is needed to provoke such an 'othering' is a commitment to rethink the archive in terms of alternative understandings of 'hospitality', 'memory-work' and in terms of what Derrida has referred to as 'heritage dignity'...

Greenberg, along with Butler, Chomsky, Said and Hamdan, is not independent but quite mobilised.


^