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Roitman Appointed Curator at Shrine of the Book

On November 1, 1994, Adolfo Roitman, a lecturer at Hebrew University, became the new curator of Jerusalem’s Shrine of the Book, the museum built in 1965 to house the Dead Sea Scrolls initially acquired by Israel. The 37-year-old Roitman replaced Magen Broshi, recently retired, who had served in that post since the museum’s opening.

The new curator shares the view of many that in recent years the essentially unchanging exhibit at the museum simply failed to tell the story of the scrolls.^a Roitman told BAR, “Although many people visit the Shrine, they often don’t understand the real meaning of what they’re looking at. They know the scrolls are important, but they don’t know why.”

The main problem, Roitman said, lay in the conception of the museum in years past as a shrine—a holy place where visitors were expected to worship, to maintain a respectful silence and an attitude of awed reverence. Roitman envisions a “living museum” where children are as welcome as scholars, and where visitors can talk informally and exchange information without feeling that they are violating the decorum of a temple. The paramount obligation of the Shrine of the Book, he believes, is to educate the public about the rich and varied history of Second Temple Judaism.

By “public,” Roitman makes clear, he means foremost the people of Israel: The institution’s primary mission is to teach Israelis about their own history, especially the development of Judaism.

“Much has been written about the value of the scrolls for our understanding of early Christianity,” Roitman said. “But the first step is to understand them in the light of Second Temple Judaism. The second step is to grasp their implications, as they touch on other movements, such as Christianity and Hellenism.”

Roitman expects to use every available means to educate visitors: multi-media programs, films, videos, lectures and the like—though he cautions that some changes, such as possible expansion of the museum’s space, will depend on funding.

Along with Roitman’s appointment, a decision was made to include the Shrine of the Book in the archaeological administration of the Israel Museum. Roitman now reports to Ya’akov Meshorer, the museum’s chief curator for archaeology. Although the Shrine of the Book has always technically been a branch of the Museum, it was previously run as an autonomous unit. According to Roitman, the Shrine of the Book’s separateness from the museum was a symptom of the notion that it was a sacred place, to be distinguished from the more “profane” museum.

Now that the Shrine of the Book is tangibly tied to the Israel Museum’s archaeology department, Roitman and his staff will be able to draw on the resources of the museum, facilitating the flow of information and ideas.

Roitman, originally from Argentina, moved to Israel in 1980 after taking a degree in anthropology in Buenos Aires. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. at Hebrew University, writing his dissertation on the Book of Judith. His The Structure and Meaning of the Book of Judith is forthcoming from the Judaica Series of Brown University.

Prior to his appointment as curator, Roitman taught in the departments of Jewish Thought and Comparative Religion at Hebrew University, and lectured on Jewish thought at the Seminary of Jewish Studies, which is affiliated with the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City.

He plans to continue teaching and writing during his tenure at the Shrine of the Book. An expert in the pseudepigrapha and apocrypha (Bible-like writings not incorporated into the canon), Roitman says he became interested in the Qumran scrolls for the same reasons he took up the study of apocryphal writings, such as Judith:

“In the apocrypha I found another kind of Judaism. It’s not that the apocrypha differ from ‘orthodox’ Judaism—there was no single orthodoxy in the Second Temple period—but that they present a Judaism different from what I had known. The apocrypha are one expression of the spirit of Judaism, and the Rabbinic tradition is another 022expression. Although the Qumran people thought they were revealing the real spirit of Judaism, we know that they, too, offered just one expression—one option. The real spirit of Judaism is pluralistic. Christianity, at one time, was also one expression of the Jewish spirit, one option for Jews and others. But now it is a fully developed religion.”

With the appointment of this thoughtful scholar, we look forward to an exciting chapter in the history of this important institution.

Ice Core Samples Date the Fiery End of an Island and a Theory

Ash from the massive volcanic eruption on the Greek island of Thera—known today as Santorini—that sunk most of that island and helped bury the Mycenaean culture on Crete has been discovered deep in ice from central Greenland.

Last year, as part of a study called the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2, the ice cores’ ash layers were examined by a team headed by Gregory A. Zielinski of the University of New Hampshire. The ice researchers analyzed the samples and compared their sulfur content with those of ash fragments in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea known to come from the eruption at Thera. The relative depth of the Thera ash in the 9,000-foot Greenland ice cores dates the eruption to 1623 B.C., Zielinski reported in the journal Science on May 13, 1994. Other evidence—oak trees preserved in Irish peat bogs with narrow tree rings believed to have been caused by the ash cloud from the Thera eruption—had previously put the eruption at roughly the same time.

The 1623 B.C. date is untimely news for Hans Goedicke, an Egyptologist at Johns Hopkins University. Goedicke has suggested that the Thera eruption occurred a century and a half later—in about 1477 B.C.—with the providential effect of creating a tidal-like wave that parted the Red Sea for the Israelites fleeing captivity in Egypt and that swept away Pharaoh’s army.^b Goedicke based his theory in part on an Egyptian inscription that he believes obliquely refers to the Exodus of the Israelites. Few, if any, scholars share his reading of the inscription. In any case, the new evidence from Greenland gives added weight to the 1623 B.C. date of the eruption and would seem to put Goedicke’s theory permanently on ice.

Wandering Relics—History Bought and Sold

The sale last July of a stone relief from the palace of the Assyrian king Assurnasirpal II (883–859 B.C.) raises thorny questions about the ownership of ancient artifacts. The carving, bought for $11.86 million reportedly by a Japanese museum, was removed from the palace in the mid-19th century by Sir Austen Henry Layard, who presented it to an English estate. The estate later became a school, where the slab remained until the auction earlier this summer.

But who owns it? Not the Japanese, or England or the school, says Iraq: Because the palace sat in present-day Iraqi Kurdistan, the relief belongs to the government of Iraq. Before the sale Iraqi representatives asked Christie’s auction house to withdraw the piece. But Christie’s refused, noting that because Layard’s excavations were undertaken with the permission of the Ottoman Empire, the relief was legally his.

In an earlier issue of BAR (“Please Return the Siloam Inscription to Jerusalem,” BAR 17:03), we made the case, based on patrimony, for Israel’s right to the Siloam Inscription (eighth century B.C.). The most important surviving ancient Hebrew monumental inscription, the Siloam inscription describes how workmen tunneled toward each other to build a channel that carried water from the Gihon Spring to within the walls of Jerusalem. By providing the city with safe access to water, Hezekiah sought to withstand a siege by the Assyrian king Sennacherib in 701 B.C.^c In 1880, vandals chipped the inscription from the wall of Hezekiah’s Tunnel; the pieces ended up in the possession of an antiquities dealer, from whom the Ottoman authorities confiscated them and took them to Istanbul. Today the inscription sits in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. The Turkish authorities have now been asked to return the inscription to Jerusalem.

Museum Guide

Early Cultures of the Levant: Chalcolithic Art on Loan from The Israel Antiquities Authority

Long-term loan

Ivory and stone figurines from the Beersheba and Gilat regions, house-shaped ossuaries from Azor and remarkable copper and ivory finds from the Cave of the Treasure, from Nahal Mishmar in the Judean Desert by the Dead Sea, are among the 15 objects on display in the museum’s Ancient Near Eastern Galleries. The first long-term loan the Israel Antiquities Authority has made to any museum, these artifacts date to the Chalcolithic period (4500–3300 B.C.) and illustrate aspects of Levantine culture.

The figurines, rendered in both naturalistic and abstract styles, may have played a role in fertility cults. The architectural details of the ossuaries—including gabled and rounded roofs, detachable doors, windows and painted decorations incorporating stylized human and animal features—possibly indicate that they were considered final dwelling places for the dead. The finds from the Cave of the Treasure come from a hoard of over 400 objects, including copper standards and perforated, sickle-shaped segments of hippopotamus ivory that may have been used as ceremonial standards. The artifacts in the exhibit attest to a degree of artistry and metallurgical skill unparalleled at this time in the ancient Near East.

Ancient Mariners of the Adriatic

Opens January 28, 1995

Finds from the Royal Ontario Museum excavations and objects on loan from the Archaeological Museum of Split, in Croatia, document the fertile history of the otherwise desolate island of Palagruza, in the heart of the Adriatic Sea. The island served as a stopping place for sailors in the sixth millennium B.C., the earliest ventures into the mid-Adriatic yet discovered; as a flint quarry in the Early Bronze Age (3300–2200 B.C.); and as a cult center for the Greek god of sailors, Diomedes, from the sixth to the fourth centuries B.C. By 2000 B.C., Palagruza was the center of a previously unknown trade network operating at the dawn of classical Mediterranean civilizations. The items on view include stone tools and blades, an archer’s wristguard, pottery and a selection of Greek and Roman objects.

Roitman Appointed Curator at Shrine of the Book