Queries & Comments

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BAS’s Bias

I was dismayed to see the discriminatory terms for the Biblical Archaeology Society’s scholarships to the Annual Meeting (Strata, BAR 23:03). These scholarships are available only to “Israeli Ph.D. candidates, Israeli women who have completed a Ph.D. within the past ten years and Arab archaeologists.” The announcement goes on to state, “Applicants must demonstrate that they could not otherwise afford to attend the meetings.”

Explain to me why any Israeli men who have completed a Ph.D., or indeed any Israeli scholars, should not qualify if they meet the means test? Explain to me why Arab archaeologists should receive preferential treatment compared to Israeli men or women?

Isn’t there enough discrimination in the Middle East, and enough politics being mixed in with archaeology, without your tossing in your own mix of it?

Digging Their Own Graves

Some time ago you highlighted the difficulty faced by universities in finding funding for Biblical archaeologists (William G. Dever, “The Death of a Discipline,” BAR 21:05). From my perspective as an Evangelical with an interest in history, I am not surprised. What else do you expect when liberal theology and liberal archaeology have treated the Bible as a very suspect source of historical fact? Why would anyone want to fund a chair to study myths and legends? It is the so-called Biblical archaeologists who have dug this grave for themselves.

An Anachronistic Clock

The advertisement of Tutankhamun with a 20th-century clock impaled in his chest (May/June 1997, p. 1) reminded me of actor John Barrymore’s description of an anachronism in an old movie: “Like a brassiere on the Venus de Milo.”

Essene Quarter

Were Essenes and Christians Related?

Bargil Pixner’s “Church of the Apostles Found on Mt. Zion,” BAR 16:03, and “Jerusalem’s Essene Gateway—Where the Community Lived in Jesus’ Time,” BAR 23:03, are important articles. With the centers of the Jewish Christians and of the Essenes in such proximity on Mt. Zion, what is his view of a possible relationship?

The writer is the author of The Archaeology of the New Testament (Princeton, 1969). See response after the next letter.—Ed.

Two Dates for Passover

Thank you for the article on the Gate of the Essenes. I was interested to learn that the traditional site of the “Last Supper” was in the area of the Essene Quarter of Jerusalem. This suggests another possible link between Essenes and Christians.

In the account of the preparation for the Last Supper, or Passover meal, in Mark’s Gospel, we read that Jesus sent two of his disciples into the city, telling them that they would meet a man carrying a jar of water. He told them to ask the man, “Where is my guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?” (Mark 14:13–14). Jesus then told the disciples that the man would show them to a large upper room where they should prepare for the Passover (Mark 14:15).

A man carrying water? This wouldn’t be as culturally unusual as it seems if the 010area were an Essene community. Given the premium on space for Passover celebrations, deduced from the numbers of pilgrims and permanent residents of Jerusalem, finding a place for a large party would not have been simple.

Two thoughts occur. Annie Jaubert, in her book The Date of the Last Supper (Staten Island, NY: Alba House, 1965), suggests that Galilean Jews observed a solar calendar, the Jubilees calendar. Passover for them always occurred on a Wednesday, just as Pixner reports for the Essenes. My take on this is that the Temple authorities would have welcomed a partial solution to their logistical problem of slaughter for all those lambs on the lunar Passover (Friday) by accommodating the solar calendar folks, even if they disapproved technically.

Whether or not Jesus approved of the Essenes’ interpretation of the purity laws, he may have had connections in the Essene community. So the “Upper Room” may well have been right where tradition places it, in what Pixner has excellently demonstrated to be the Essene Quarter.

Could the route into the city taken by those disciples in Mark 14:13 have been through the Gate of the Essenes?

Bargil Pixner responds:

There was not a continuity between the Essenes and the early Christians in the sense that one grew out of the other. Rather, there was a parallel development with both communities living next to each other on the same hill and exerting influence on one another.

I should like to stress that Jesus was not an Essene, nor were his apostles, although his family from Nazareth might have had Essene leanings. In my opinion, Jesus followed the way of John the Baptist. The Baptist may have grown up in an Essene community (Qumran? Kosiba?). Luke 1:80 suggests this: “And the child grew and became strong in spirit, and he was in the desert till the day when he appeared publicly to Israel.”^a When he felt his mission to preach to all Israel in preparation for the kingdom to come, he had to leave the Essenes, who were only interested in their own select group, the “Sons of Light”; the “Sons of Darkness” were beyond their field of interest. Jesus left Nazareth and started his own group in Capernaum, where he explained the Torah based on the sages of Israel, such as Rabbi Hillel, and his own interpretation. He lived like a normal Jew, visited the Temple of Jerusalem, celebrated the feasts according to the calendar used in the Temple, with the exception of the last Passover, which he celebrated according to the Essene (solar) calendar in an Essene guesthouse on Mt. Zion—because he foresaw that on the Temple Passover he would be dead. Those interested might like to read my book With Jesus in Jerusalem to get a better idea of my interpretation.

I would also like to mention two peculiarities of the primitive Jewish Christian community on Mt. Zion. First, Acts 6:7 tells us that “a large group of priests (kohanim) became obedient to the faith.” Where else would they have come from, if not from the Essenes (certainly not from the Sadducees, the sworn enemies of the first Christians)?

Second, the social life of the Essenes was based on communal property. Of the Hebrew-speaking first Christians it is said, “No one claimed that any possession was his own, but they had everything in common” (Acts 4:32). This commonality of goods was practiced only in the Jerusalem community. A minor difference between the two groups’ practice of communal property is that for Essenes it was obligatory, for Christians it was voluntary.

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There’s No Silver Dome

Thanks for Bargil Pixner’s excellent article on Mt. Zion. The writer of the caption on page 24 has done a disservice to the reading/touring public, however. People looking for a silver dome on the Temple Mount are going to have a problem. It’s not there, and hasn’t been there for 12 years.

The dome of Al-Aqsa hasn’t been silver since the summer of 1985. In that year the old lead that had been on the Dome of the Rock—before it was replaced with anodized aluminum by King Hussein of Jordan in 1962—was used to re-cover the dome of Al-Aqsa. It has been black ever since.

Imageless Deities

Substitute Masseboth?

There is a Jewish custom of leaving a small stone or a pebble on a grave when visiting a cemetery. I wonder if it is a substitute massebah like the ones shown in Victor Hurowitz’s “Picturing Imageless Deities,” BAR 23:03.

Victor Hurowitz responds:

Leaving a small stone at the grave when visiting a cemetery is considered a sign of respect for the dead, indicating to later visitors that the grave has been visited. I guess it may be compared with signing a guest book.

I once heard of a custom connected with 1 Samuel 25:29, where Abigail says to David: “May your soul be bound up in the bond of life before the Lord your God, but may He cast away the souls of your enemies like stones from a sling.” The words “may his/her soul be bound up in the bond of life” are the traditional wish for the dead and are often engraved on Jewish tombstones. In the Biblical context this verse may refer to a practice in which shepherds check the number of sheep or goats in their flocks by putting a stone for each animal in a pouch. When an animal dies or is sold, a stone is removed from the pouch. Accordingly, we may explain the stone left at the grave as symbolic of the soul, which is to be retained in God’s pouch. I do not remember where I heard this explanation. In any case, it is hard to call this stone a “substitute massebah.”

Siloam Inscription

Paleographers’ Mutability

In “Defusing Pseudo-Scholarship: The Siloam Inscription Ain’t Hasmonean,” BAR 23:02, a bevy of scholars attacks John Rogerson’s and my article in Biblical Archaeologist, suggesting a possible “late” date for the Siloam Inscription. These scholars base their critiques largely on paleography. I’d like to quote two eminent scholars on this subject.

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First, the words of Frank Moore Cross, in his seminal essay, “The Development of the Jewish Scripts” (in G.E. Wright, ed., The Bible and the Ancient Near East [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961], pp. 133–202): “The Palaeo-Hebrew script of Qumran is properly described as an archaistic revival from the book hand of Israelite times. It shows little development in the interval between the epigraphs of the seventh-fifth centuries B.C. and manuscripts of Maccabean or Hasmonean date. Evidently the script was taken up anew in the era of nationalistic revival of the second century B.C., to judge from its use as a monumental script by the Hasmoneans on their coinage, as well as its resurgence as a Biblical hand… More-over, in the second century B.C., Palaeo-Hebrew forms, dormant for several centuries, begin afresh to evolve at a fairly steady pace…On the other hand, the earliest examplars of the Palaeo-Hebrew hand at Qumran exhibit a remarkable fidelity of form and stance, when compared with archaic scripts, and were penned with fluid grace and speed…When the first of the Palaeo-Hebrew fragments were found in Cave I, an alternate explanation was proposed, that the fragments were in fact archaic, from the fourth or fifth century B.C. But later finds, including manuscripts in which there is an extensive mixture of Palaeo-Hebrew and Jewish scripts (and in one instance a mixture of Palaeo-Hebrew, Jewish and Greek scripts), have rendered this proposal inadmissible.”

Second, the following opinion on the script of Hasmonean coins was offered by Ya’akov Meshorer in his Jewish Coins of the Second Temple Period ([Tel Aviv; Am Hassefer/Massada, 1967], pp. 48–49): “For various reasons, perhaps also due to national prestige or the desire to create a link between the earlier kingdoms of Judah and Israel and that of the Hasmonean dynasty, ancient Hebrew letters were used on coins, and on coins only. These were however not living letters to which the principles of development and evolution could apply, as some scholars have tried to show, but something far simpler. The artists who engraved the dies of the coins copied the letters from ancient manuscripts which were no doubt kept in the library of the Temple at Jerusalem. Thus the style of a letter on a particular coin would resemble that in a certain ancient scroll but not on another contemporary coin copied from a different scroll in the same library. The multiplicity of styles in the lettering on the coins of the Hasmoneans has its origins, therefore, in the different sources from which the letters of the inscriptions on the coins were copied.”

I do not quote these merely to show that what you call our “off the wall” opinion concerning the Siloam script is in fact in line with “expert” opinion, nor even to show how Cross changes his mind as easily as his mentor William F. Albright used to, but rather to suggest that if you want to create your own list of “pseudo-scholars,” you can make some quite impressive additions, and there is no reason not to include Harvard, which has, as we all know, such a huge investment of pride in the practice of paleography.

Shapira’s Strips

Did Anyone Notice Before?

It is hard for me to understand how serious scholars fell for the obvious forgery of Shapira’s Strips (Fred Reiner, “Tracking the Shapira Case,” BAR 23:03). Simply on structural grounds, without even considering the content or the age of the writing, Shapira’s strips are clearly fake. In any normal scroll, the text would start somewhere on a vertical leather strip and continue down to the bottom and then jump to the top of the next—until the text was complete. On the Shapira scroll, however, the text jumps from the bottom of a vertical strip to the bottom of the next vertical strip, and so on, because the forger only had the bottoms of leather strips available—an impossible way for any scribe to write who has the entire vertical leather strip free to write on.

Am I correct? Did anybody notice this before, and if they did, wasn’t this adequate basis to dismiss the strips as forgeries?

Mansoor Remains Unconvinced

I will in no way feel unhappy if the fragments offered by Moses Shapira to the British Museum in 1883 are declared forgeries. But I remain unconvinced by the arguments presented by André Lemaire in “Paleography’s Verdict: They’re Fakes!” BAR 23:03.

Indeed, if the criteria used to evaluate the Shapira strips were applied to the Dead Sea Scrolls, these texts too would be invalidated. Claude Conder, one of the British Museum experts, condemned the Shapira fragments as a forgery because no leather manuscript could be preserved for more than 2,000 years “in the damp atmosphere of a country which has a rainfall of twenty inches.” We now know that the Dead Sea Scrolls were preserved for over 2,000 years.

Lemaire repeats several objections made first by Shapira’s contemporaries, Charles Clermont-Ganneau and Christian David Ginsburg. I refuted many of these arguments when, in 1958, I first called for a reexamination of the Shapira fragments.¹

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Let me briefly address these points:

1. Lemaire states that the text of the Shapira strips contains variants from the standard Hebrew text (known as the Masoretic text) that are easily explained as having been made under the influence of the Mesha Stela.

But such variants are not so unusual, and they appear in texts that clearly have not been copied from the Mesha Stela. The Masoretic text and the Dead Sea Scrolls often substitute words that were more common at the time of the transmission of the text. In Deuteronomy 1:36, the Shapira strips use ytlb (blty, meaning “except”); the Masoretic text has ytlwz (zwlty, “except”). Blty is a more common term in the Masoretic text, occurring more than 80 times, while zwlty occurs 16 times. In Isaiah 13:10, the Masoretic text has wlhy (yhlw, “to give light”); the Dead Sea Scrolls have wryay (y’yrw, “to give light”). This root, rwa (‘wr), appears more than 160 times in the Masoretic text, while yhlw appears only four times.

2. Some spelling variants in the Shapira strips reflect a confusion between j (h|) and k (k), as well as between f (t|) and t (t). Such confusion, Lemaire claims, is not attested in ancient times but is typical of Hebrew spoken by European Jews.

However, these variants do occur in the Hebrew Bible and in the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as among users of modern Hebrew. Such scribal errors are committed because of the similarity in the phonetic values of certain letters. Here are some examples: Benjamin Kennicott refers to variant readings in the Pentateuch, which he identifies as Variant K. For Genesis 4:7, the Masoretic text has htpl (lfth, “at the gate of”), while Variant K has hfpl (lft|h). For Genesis 33:14, the Masoretic text has ( “slowly”), while Variant K has ytal (l’ty). For Jeremiah 52:15 and the parallel passage in 2 Kings 25:11, the Masoretic text uses ÷wmah (h’mwn, “the multitudes”) and ÷wmhh (hhmwn). For 1 Chronicles 13:12 and 2 Samuel 6:9, the Masoretic text has ûyh(hyk, “how”) and ûya (‘yk).² The Jewish Masoretes who transmitted these variants were clearly not European Jews.

I would also like to take issue with Kyle McCarter’s arguments in the same issue of BAR (“Why All the Fuss?” BAR 23:03). McCarter attributes the excitement caused by the Shapira fragments to Wellhausen’s documentary hypothesis, which was published in the same year as the Shapira strips. I disagree. The main reason—as contemporaneous articles and newspapers clearly indicate—was general interest in the Bible and religion. The reports emphasized that the strips provided examples of Biblical Hebrew dating 1,400 to 1,500 years earlier than any 018then extant Hebrew Bible. This century’s discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls generated the same sort of excitement in the scholarly world and among the general public.

I have high respect for McCarter’s scholarship. His doctoral thesis on the Greek alphabet is truly a masterpiece. I was looking forward to his views on the Shapira fragments. Unfortunately, his article sheds little light on our discussion. McCarter, like his mentor, the eminent Frank Moore Cross, is one of the leading paleographers today. It is disappointing that he makes no mention of paleography.

William F. Albright (Cross’s mentor) observed that “paleographic criteria are insufficient to establish the dating beyond doubt.”³ Authorities like David Noel Freedman and his colleagues point out that even though the Qumran Leviticus Scroll was penned by a single scribe, there are “inconsistencies of the script.”⁴

Last, McCarter refers to the consistent use of Elohim in Shapira fragments, “even in passages where Yahweh appears in the Hebrew Bible.” He again bases his argument on Wellhausen. But this disparity can be explained. In my opinion, during the Second Temple period there developed a belief in God’s transcendence and therefore the use of “Yahweh” was restricted. In that period—not only in rabbinic writings but also in the New Testament—attributes of the Lord are used as replacements for the name “Yahweh” and even for the term “the Lord.” Instead, Yahweh is called “Our Father in Heaven,” “The Merciful,” “The Compassionate,” “The Holy One May He Be Blessed,” “The Name,” “The Place” and more. It is also of incidental interest to observe that Ginsburg initially stated that the combination ûyhla µyhla (elhym elhyk) did not appear in the Hebrew Bible; Ginsburg therefore concluded that the fragments were forged. But in fact, identical combinations appear in Psalms 45:7, 48:14, 50:7 and 67:6.

André Lemaire responds:

Professor Mansoor’s reaction to my comments on the Shapira strips is surprising. He discusses only two of my internal criteria (involving the paleography and language of the text). He does not take into account my five external criteria (involving the physical condition of the scrolls), or my paleographical analysis of the Shapira text in relation to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and these provide the main body of evidence allowing an epigrapher to decide whether Shapira’s scroll was a ninth- to sixth-century B.C.E. manuscript or a modern copy.

However, even Professor Mansoor’s “refutation” of the two internal criteria is not justified: 1. I did not write that there are no variants in manuscripts of the Masoretic tradition. Their existence is very well known to Biblical scholars. My point was that some (not all!) of the variants in the Shapira scroll are easily explained as having been made under the influence of the Mesha Stela. To illustrate this point I gave an example that Professor Mansoor does not discuss; instead, he discusses other examples—taken from his 1959 paper—that I did not mention in my article.

2. As for the confusion ofj and k, f and t Professor Mansoor writes that “these variants do occur in the Hebrew Bible and in the Dead Sea Scrolls.” But he only points to examples listed by the 18th-century scholar Benjamin Kennicott, who looked for as many variants as he could find. The only Hebrew 019manuscripts available to Kennicott were from after 1100 C.E., and many of the variants he found are clearly mistakes (scribal errors, say) that appear only in these late European manuscripts. For instance, I do not think that any Biblical scholar would claim that the K (for Kennicott) variants in Genesis 4:7 (jfpl) and Genesis 33:14 (ytal) were original. In fact, the confusion between these letters does not appear either in early Masoretic tradition—for instance, in the Aleppo Codex (tenth century C.E.) or the Leningrad Codex (early eleventh century)—or in Qumran manuscripts. Nor is it attested in old Hebrew inscriptions from the ninth to sixth centuries B.C.E., the supposed date of the Shapira scroll.

So Professor Mansoor’s alleged refutation of two of my nine arguments does not hold true. I have no hesitation to say again, in accord with all the 19th-century scholars who actually saw the Shapira manuscript, that it was indeed a forgery.

P. Kyle McCarter responds:

I think Professor Mansoor has missed my point. I agree that the reason the Shapira strips created such a sensation was “general interest in Bible and religion” and excitement about the apparently great age of the leather manuscripts. But the reason interest in Bible and religion was so high at that time in Europe was the recent and widely publicized appearance of Wellhausen’s book, which seemed to cast doubt on the high antiquity of parts of the Bible.

The documentary hypothesis as articulated by Wellhausen assigned relatively late dates to the Mosaic law codes and, more generally, to those parts of the Bible that referred to God as ’elohim. The Shapira Deuteronomy fragments seemed to belong to a very early manuscript that contained portions of the law of Moses and consistently called God ’elohim. So if the Shapira strips were authentic, they would provide an immediate empirical refutation of Wellhausen’s ideas, which were perceived by some as an attack on the integrity of the Bible itself. It’s no wonder they created such a sensation.

Corrections

We regret the omission of a photograph credit for the picture of Mt. Ararat on page 22 of the July/August 1997 issue (see Strata, BAR 23:04). The photo was taken by Ahmet Arslan.

Also, in our Strata item on a Byzantine cross discovered near Jerusalem’s Jaffa Gate (“A True Crux,” Strata, BAR 23:03), we incorrectly identified one of the co-excavators of the dig. The cross was found by Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron.

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A Note on Style

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

BAS’s Bias