First Glance

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Q: What has four horns, stands about 18 inches tall and has been spotted at nine sites in Israel?

A: An incense altar!

At least that’s what most scholars would tell you, basing their response on the similarities between the small horned stands discovered on archaeological digs and the biblical description of the incense altar that stood before the desert Tabernacle (Exodus 30:1–6). But the excavated altars show almost no signs of incense-burning, and some were discovered outdoors, where people would have been unlikely to waste precious incense, argues Menahem Haran. In “Altar-ed States: Incense Theory Goes Up in Smoke,” Haran proposes that the altars were used for a more mundane type of offering. Based on the biblical text, Haran concludes that incense in ancient Israelite religious usage was largely confined to the Jerusalem Temple. (Seymour Gitin, co-director of excavations at Tel Miqne [biblical Ekron], where almost half of the small horned altars from Israel have been discovered, vehemently disagrees with Haran’s conclusions, as he told us when he released a picture of Ekron altars. We have invited him to respond in a future issue of BR and promised Haran a reply in the same issue.)

Haran holds the Yehezkel Kaufmann Chair of Bible Studies at Hebrew University, in Jerusalem, and is the author of Temples and Temple Service in Ancient Israel (Eisenbrauns, 1985) and Ages and Institutions in the Bible (Am Oved, 1973). See “Explaining the Identical Lines at the End of Chronicles and the Beginning of Ezra” BR 02:03.

The story of Jonah is surely one of the best-known tales in the Bible: Told by God to denounce the evils of Nineveh, Jonah attempts to flee God’s order by heading in the opposite direction from the wicked Assyrian city. After Jonah catches a ship to Tarshish, God sends a storm, the crewmen throw Jonah overboard, and Jonah ends up in the belly of a big fish—where he repents and is spit up on shore. In “Staging Jonah,” Lance Wilcox recounts his experiences in adapting the Book of Jonah for the stage and interprets the story as a moral satire that pokes fun at human folly.

An assistant professor of English at Elmhurst College, in Illinois, Wilcox has published articles on British literature and co-authored two textbooks. For the past 15 years he has been involved in the theater as an actor and playwright.

Like east and west, Judaism and Christianity have long been thought of as distinct and unchanging entities, twains that never meet. In a somewhat different view, the two great faiths are seen as parent and child (with Christianity often assumed to have surpassed its progenitor). Both viewpoints have in the past poisoned relations between the two faiths and have also colored scholarship. Today, a more nuanced understanding of the two religions is fast gaining ground: that modern Judaism and Christianity are parallel heritors of a many-faceted ancient Judaism. Gabriele Boccaccini describes these “Multiple Judaisms.”

A native of Florence, Italy, Boccaccini received his Ph.D. from the University of Turin and currently teaches in the near eastern studies department at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Middle Judaism: Jewish Thought, 300 BCE to 200 CE (Fortress, 1991) and serves on the International Council of Christians and Jews.

For years scholars thought the text of the Hebrew Bible reached its current form in the wake of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. That theory is now yielding to new evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls and from Masada. The formation of the Jewish Scriptures began much earlier than previously thought, explains Adam S. van der Woude in “Tracing the Evolution of the Hebrew Bible.”

Formerly a professor of Old Testament and early Judaism at Groningen University, the Netherlands, van der Woude is a fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has written widely on the Dead Sea Scrolls and is the author of numerous commentaries on the prophets.

A Note on Style

B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era), used by some of our authors and often used in scholarly literature, are the alternative designations corresponding to B.C. and A.D.

Q: What has four horns, stands about 18 inches tall and has been spotted at nine sites in Israel?
A: An incense altar!