First Glance

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Depicting Moses with horns on his head may strike some as a school-boy’s prank, or an act of whimsy. It is in fact a popular artistic tradition more than 900 years old. Viewers startled by the sinister quality that such horns incongruously impart to Moses’ image may well wonder why this tradition arose. As William H. Propp shows in “Did Moses Have Horns?” the artists were merely being faithful to a disputed translation of single Hebrew word from Exodus. Propp examines the controversy surrounding this word and offers an interpretation that may help to resolve the issue.

Propp is an assistant professor in Hebrew language and Bible studies at the University of California at San Diego. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. His dissertation will be published in Harvard Semitic Monographs later this year under the title Water in Wilderness: A Biblical Motif and its Mythological Background.

In “Afterlife—Ancient Israel’s Changing Vision of the World Beyond,” Bernhard Lang charts the prehistory of heaven. The ancient Hebrews’ first concept of a world after death—a subterranean kingdom called Sheol—endured for centuries. As the Bible shows, Samuel, King Saul, Isaiah, and even the philosophical Job were all familiar with the ghostly rituals of Sheol. Lang sees a turning point in the seventh century B.C., when King Josiah’s religious reforms established a stricter monotheism strongly focused on this world. Then, with a generous helping of Persian and Greek imported ideas, the Jews began to mold the now-familiar notion of heaven as the resting place of the souls of the righteous.

“Afterlife” provides a glimpse of Lang’s recently completed book, Paradise Found. Written with Colleen McDannell, and to be published this year by Yale University Press, the book presents a “comprehensive social and cultural history of heaven,” according to the authors. Professor of Religion at the University of Paderborn, West Germany, Lang is the editor of the International Review of Biblical Studies and the author of several books in German, including an introduction to biblical study.

Reducing the Bible to bytes may seem sacrilegious, but the computer is proving to be a valuable tool for the scholarly study of the Bible’s linguistic aspects. In “Computers and the Bible,” Emanuel Tov explains how the Bible has been encoded for computer study and discusses some of the ways in which computer-aided analysis will enhance our understanding of the Bible.

A Bible scholar whose professional activities span three continents, Tov teaches in the Bible Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is Greenfield Lecturer on the Septuagint at Oxford University in England, and helps direct the Philadelphia-based Computer Assisted Tools for Septuagint Studies (CATSS) project. He is most at home with his wife and three children in Jerusalem, Israel. Tov’s previous BR article, “The Saga of David and Goliath,” appeared in our Winter 1986 issue.

In a world without humidity and insects, Hartmut Stegemann’s “How to Connect Dead Sea Scroll Fragments,” would not have been written. But in the real world, where humidity and insects have turned many of the Dead Sea Scrolls into incomplete and baffling collections of fragments, Stegemann’s innovative methods for reconstructing fragmentary scrolls are vitally important. His article shows how scholars play detective as they use a variety of physical clues to help them assemble the decayed pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Stegemann’s pair of doctorates in Semitic studies and the Old Testament make him especially qualified to head the 30-year-old Qumran Research Center at Göttingen, West Germany. There he is engaged in preparing a dictionary of the non-biblical texts found at Qumran. A frequently published authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Stegemann has been professor of New Testament science Göttingen University since 1980.

Depicting Moses with horns on his head may strike some as a school-boy’s prank, or an act of whimsy. It is in fact a popular artistic tradition more than 900 years old. Viewers startled by the sinister quality that such horns incongruously impart to Moses’ image may well wonder why this tradition arose. As William H. Propp shows in “Did Moses Have Horns?” the artists were merely being faithful to a disputed translation of single Hebrew word from Exodus. Propp examines the controversy surrounding this word and offers an interpretation that may help to resolve the issue. Propp is […]