Biblia Hebraica continues to gather more reactions to the Khirbet Qeiyafa inscription. See here for his latest summary. He also links to this post by Christopher A. Rollston. Rollston categorically states that “[the] script of this ostracon is definitively NOT Old Hebrew” and offers the following sober reaction, emphasis added.
Because of its [...]
As a follow-up to this post on a recently discovered Hebrew epigraphical text and the problems of its interpretation, one of the more famous examples of interpreting epigraphical texts through potentially Biblically-biased eyes comes to mind. For some years people felt that an Ugaritic text describing the cooking of a kid in its mother’s [...]
(photo courtesy of the University of Haifa)
Never a dull moment for the history of the Hebrew language.
A breakthrough in the research of the Hebrew scriptures has shed new light on the period in which the Bible was written. Prof. Gershon Galil of the Department of Biblical Studies at the University of Haifa has deciphered an [...]
One place that I don’t miss visiting is Megiddo Prison. I had a number of stints of miluim (reserve duty) there and it was far from a pleasant place. Jeffrey Goldberg got a book from his prison guard stint and all I got was…the oldest Christian house of worship ever discovered! To be [...]
INN is reporting that archaeologists have discovered a synagogue dating from the late second temple period in Migdal/Magdala, north of Tiberias. See this press release and these posts. Below are some pictures from the Antiquities Authority.
The article quotes Dina Avshalom-Gorni saying that this is the first time that a menorah decoration has been found [...]
It seems that another burial cave of a rabbi was discovered in Tzippori. (hat tip) See here for a previous post on epigraphical rabbis. Apparently this inscription is in Aramaic and says “This is the burial[place-MM] of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi ha-Kappar.” That he inscription says “Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi ha-Kappar” leads some to [...]
In 1981 Shaye J.D. Cohen wrote a very influential article “Epigraphical Rabbis” [The Jewish Quarterly Review, New Ser., Vol. 72, No. 1. (Jul., 1981), pp. 1-17]. In this article Cohen examines the names of rabbis for whom we have epigraphical evidence of their existence, comparing the “epigraphical” to the “literary” rabbis. His conclusions [...]
What a few weeks it has been for the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Scholarship suggesting the existence of the Essenes, a religious Jewish group that lived in the Judea before the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, is wrong, according to Prof. Rachel Elior, whose study on the subject will be released [...]
As Purim is almost over, a quick post on an interesting facet of Megillat Esther. Among all of the scrolls and fragments that make up the Dead Sea Scrolls there is at least a fragment of every single biblical book except for Esther and possibly Nehemiah. See here, here, and this article which [...]
The dating and ubiquitousness of ancient synagogues is the subject of some controversy, e.g. see here. Donald D. Binder has a nice web site surveying Second Temple Synagogues where you can find much information about numerous synagogues and inscriptions. One of the most interesting finds is the Theodotus inscription.
Theodotus, (son) of Vettenus, priest [...]
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