BARlines

018

Joy Ungerleider-Mayerson (1920–1994)

Joy Ungerleider-Mayerson, an acknowledged leader in archaeological philanthropy and a scholar in her own right, died of pancreatic cancer on September 7, 1994, at age 74.

In good health until only a few months before her death, she was felled by this particularly ravaging form of the disease. Her spirit remained unquelled to the very end, however. Hundreds of people from all walks of life gathered for her funeral in New York—a rabbi from Israel, a Catholic priest from Boston and archaeologists and scholars from all over. She was more than their benefactor. She was their colleague and friend.

Memorial services were later held at New York’s Jewish Museum, where she served as a particularly creative director for eight years, and at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where she was an active member of the board of trustees.

Joy’s philanthropy was coupled with an intense personal involvement and interest. She was not simply dispensing good. She was determined to make a difference. And she did.

For many difficult years, she provided crucial support for the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) and served on its board of trustees. At her death, she was chairman of the board of directors of the W. F. Albright School of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem. She also provided support for numerous archaeological excavations in Israel.

Joy definitely had a mind of her own, as everyone knew. Despite her immense devotion to Israel, she was critical of Israel’s early resistance to releasing the Dead Sea Scrolls and made her position clear to the director of the Antiquities Authority. She also supported the scholars who were reconstructing the unpublished scrolls with the aid of a computer. Subsequently she underwrote part of the cost of the Biblical Archaeology Society’s publication of these reconstructions.

Her philanthropic interests extended far beyond archaeology, however. She supported an enormous number of educational and other institutions in Israel, always attempting to bridge the gap between tradition and modernism, drawing on the strengths of both. She took very seriously the Jewish concept of tikkun olam—to heal or repair the world. She was intimately involved in the peace process between Israel and her neighbors, supporting, among other things, the Institute for Social and Economic Policy in the Middle East at Harvard University. She met with PLO chairman Yasser Arafat before the famous handshake on the White House lawn, which she witnessed as an invited guest, beaming as the President nudged Yitzhak Rabin and Arafat to shake hands.

Joy’s interests were nurtured early by her parents. Her father, David S. Gottesman, provided the funds for Israel’s purchase of the four intact Dead Sea Scrolls brought to the United States in the 1950s by the Assyrian cleric, the Metropolitan Samuel, who had acquired them from the Bedouin. The Gottesman family then provided some of the support to build the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem to house these and the other three original scrolls Israel had acquired from Cave 1.

After her father’s death, Joy continued his work through the Dorot Foundation—Dorot means generations in Hebrew.

Joy was the author of two books—Jewish Folk Art (Summit, 1986) and (with Nitza Rosovsky) Museums of Israel (Abrams, 1989). These, like her philanthropy, have had considerable influence. Many of Israel’s smaller museums have been put “on the map” through Joy’s (and Nitza’s) book.

Joy was also blessed with a large and loving family. In 1972 her husband of 27 years, Samuel Ungerleider, died. She endowed a major facility at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem in his memory—Beth Shmuel (House of Samuel), a youth hostel and student center.

In 1977 she married Professor Philip Mayerson, a specialist in the history, linguistics and archaeology of the Levant in the Byzantine period. They complemented each other beautifully. Their lovely home in Jerusalem was the center of the most exciting intellectual and political talk in the Holy City.

In addition to her husband Philip, Joy is survived by two sisters, six children and seven grandchildren. May her memory be a blessing. We will all miss her. She is irreplaceable.

020

Caiaphas Identification Questioned

The discovery of the ossuary of the high priest Caiaphas who, according to the Gospels, presided at the trial of Jesus, made headlines around the world, as well as in BAR.^a Now an English scholar and a French scholar in separate publications have questioned this identification.

The identification is based on three inscriptions on two ossuaries excavated recently in Jerusalem containing what appeared to be the name Caiaphas. The name is spelled two different ways, however. Twice it is spelled QF’ and once QYF’.

According to William Horbury of the Cambridge University Divinity School in England, writing in the Palestine Exploration Quarterly,¹ the Aramaic form of the name as preserved in Greek in the New Testament would most likely be Qayyapha. The three-letter form of the name as preserved on the ossuaries would most likely be pronounced Qopha or Qupha, depending on whether the second letter of the longer, four-letter spelling was Y (yod) or W (waw). The difference between yod and waw is only in the length of the simple vertical line that determines whether it is one or the other. If the four-letter spelling had been found alone, it would, says Horbury, be closer to Caiaphas, but the two shorter spellings suggest that the second letter in the longer spelling is a vowel rather than a consonantal Y. Thus the name is likely to be two syllables rather than three. In Horbury’s words, “A development from [QF’] to Aramaic Qayyapha and Greek Caiaphas seems less straightforward, despite shared consonants.” According to Horbury, the name may be that of another high priest referred to as ha-goph in some (minority) manuscripts of the earliest rabbinic text, the Mishnah. Despite this conclusion, “It is likely that the names Qopha and Qayyapha were somehow related, but special argument would be needed to establish that they were interchangeable … On the evidence now available [the] momentous identification [of the name on the ossuaries with the high priest Caiaphas of the New Testament] cannot be classed as probable.”

According to Emile Puech of the École Biblique in Jerusalem, the letters in the longer spelling cannot be identified with certainty and the shorter spelling could be read Qefa, Qoppa or Qufa, but certainly not Qayyapha.² Puech does not even think the tomb is that of a priest. The tomb is small when compared to some other priestly tombs, and it is not very near the presumed site of the tomb of the high priest Annas. Moreover, the Caiaphas family was Sadducean and we do not know the Sadducees used ossuaries since none has yet been so identified with certainty. In addition, a coin in one of the ossuaries suggests that these people believed in an afterlife, the coin presumably payment to the god Charon to ferry the deceased safely across the River Styx. The Sadducees, however, are not thought to have believed in an afterlife. If this ossuary proves to be Sadducean, we would need to revise our views regarding Sadducean burial customs and their beliefs about the afterlife, writes Puech.

021

“Oldest Highway” Discovered in Egypt—Did Joseph Use It?

A team of American geologists has discovered what it believes is the world’s oldest paved road. Uncovered in Egypt, the 4,600-year-old highway is about eight miles long and six feet wide, and links a basalt quarry in the barren desert to ancient waterways. Constructed with flagstones, slabs of stone laid on sand with no surface preparation, this cobbled road represents a remarkable engineering achievement for the Early Bronze Age. The team of researchers was led by Thomas Bown, of the U.S. Geological Survey, and James Harrell, of the University of Toledo in Ohio.

Today the road appears to go nowhere, ending in the middle of the parched desert. Thousands of years ago, however, it ended on the shore of Lake Moeris, then about 66 feet above sea level. Lake Moeris received its water from the annual floods of the Nile River. During floods, the Nile and lake converged through a gap in the hills near the modern villages of el-Lahun and Hawara.

Why was the road built from the quarry to the lake shore? Researchers conclude that basalt blocks from the quarry were first transported along the highway to the lake and then loaded onto barges. When floods came, the barges floated over to the Nile to be sent to the monument sites at Giza and Saqqara.^b

Archaeologist James K. Hoffmeier of Wheaton College in Illinois has extensively studied the uses of basalt in Egyptian Old Kingdom monuments. Hoffmeier confirms that the pure basalt floor of Pharaoh Khufu’s temple at Giza originated from this very quarry, where heavy black basalt was laid down by volcanic eruptions about 30 084million years ago.

Basalt, a dense, igneous rock, is among the hardest of building materials. Various tools for splitting, hammering and cracking rocks have been discovered from the Chalcolithic period. Incisions on the basalt blocks at Khufu’s temple, however, indicate that the Egyptians used saws to cut the stone.

In a letter to the New York Times, Zecharia Sitchen, author of When Time Began, claimed that the Biblical Joseph used this highway and that it “served to transport food, rather than stones.” Sitchen maintains that the Lake Moeris region was a breadbasket for Egypt and that the small remaining lake is today called Bahr Yusof, the Waterway of Joseph. He believes the labyrinthine rooms adjoining the pyramid of Amenemhat III at nearby Hawara were “chambers that stored grain.”

Not likely, replies James Hoffmeier. Nearly a millennium separates Joseph from the building of the recently discovered highway. The road originates in the basalt quarry, which makes its use rather obvious—to transport basalt blocks to Giza and Saqqara. And, unfortunately for Sitchen’s argument, the labyrinth at Hawara has been understood since 1885 (when Flinders Petrie published The Pyramids and Temples of Giza) to be part of the funerary temple of Amenemhat III. That it might have served as a national grain storage facility, said Hoffmeier, is an odd assumption. It is also unlikely that carts were used for transporting grain. No texts or reliefs from ancient Egypt show grain being loaded into carts; instead, grain was typically loaded in sacks and carried by donkeys. Now try to imagine ancient Egyptians building a highway for donkeys.

Canceled Dead Sea Scroll Conference Has Scholars Boiling

Rightly or wrongly, the BBC’s honor (or is it honour?) has been badly stained by first inviting a bevy of the world’s leading Dead Sea Scroll scholars to a conference at the University of Manchester and then, at the last minute, calling it all off.

The whole affair has been a painful embarrassment to the prominent British scroll scholars—Professors Geza Vermes and Philip Alexander of Oxford University and Professor George Brooke of the University of Manchester—whom the BBC enlisted to lend their names to conceptualize the program, to suggest scholars who should be invited to speak on particular topics, and to participate themselves as lecturers.

The conference was scheduled for August 28–August 31, 1994. Programs were printed and mailed out all over the world. People from as far away as Australia planned to come.

Lectures and discussions were scheduled on such topics as: “The Scrolls, Judaism and Christianity”; “The Archaeology of Qumran”; “Who were the People of Qumran?”; “The Bible: Its Text and Status at Qumran”; “The End of Days and the Messiahs”; and “Was Jesus Unique?”

These enticing topics were to be discussed by the most prominent and distinguished of lecturers: In addition to the British participants, the list included Emanuel Tov of Hebrew University, the chief scroll editor; Magen Broshi, curator of the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem; James VanderKam of Notre Dame and Lawrence Schiffman of New York University (both editors of a new journal devoted to the Dead Sea Scrolls); John Collins of the University of Chicago; Eugene Ulrich, chief editor of the Bible manuscripts from Qumran—the list went on and on.

Then in early July—less than two months before the conference was to begin and after non-refundable plane tickets had been purchased and schedules finalized—the BBC’s production company sent notices advising that the entire conference was being cancelled, “due to lack of financial support.”

The BBC blames the debacle on its production company, Roger Bolton Productions. “The BBC was not involved in organizing this conference and … it would be inappropriate for the BBC to make any comment about the cancellation,” the British Broadcasting Corporation wrote BAR. “I suggest you contact Roger Bolton at Roger Bolton Productions.”

The invitations were issued by the BBC in association with Roger Bolton Productions.

Roger Bolton did not return telephone calls. A spokesman for Roger Bolton explained, however, that the BBC made only a paltry contribution to the conference and that the production company was unable to raise the balance elsewhere (he declined to give the figures). Although the conference had been planned more than a year in advance, Bolton’s fundraising effort did not begin until the spring of this year.

Bolton blames its own inexperience in organizing conferences for the late fundraising effort. But there are other factors in the background. Bolton has produced a Dead Sea Scroll video for the BBC, entitled “The Secrets of the Sea,” which was to be aired in Britain on the opening night of the conference. But then the Commonwealth Games were scheduled for that night, and the BBC scrubbed the Dead Sea Scroll program for the athletic games. Worse yet, the BBC had been unable to market its TV production in the United States or to sell programs of the conference discussions. They saw their profits flying out the window.

In the end, Bolton and the BBC decided to cut their losses and let the scholars and registrants for the conference swing in the breeze.