Queries & Comments
008
BAR Too Self Referential
I have been pleased to subscribe to BAR for many years, and often tell friends about it. In four years of graduate school, however, I learned to pay close attention to asterisks and footnotes, and I have finally grown sufficiently disgusted to write you. Rarely does an asterisk in your magazine lead to anything that helps me understand the sentence I have just read. Instead you tell me to see previous articles in your magazine, but I don’t keep a file. Please stop disturbing my reading by bragging on yourself.
Rev. Dr. Charles O. Erickson
Kalamazoo, Michigan
Back issues (except those that are out of print) can be ordered by calling 1–800-221–4644 or through our Web site (www.biblicalarchaeology.org). We are developing a research area on our Web site that will allow users to search all back issues, even those out of print. Watch for details in the coming months.—Ed.
Passed-On Copies
I have been looking for your magazine since last year after I bought a copy from a school book sale. It took awhile, but I finally found it. I will now pass my copy on to other interested friends and wait for the next issue.
Danny Wiggins
Cartersville, Georgia
When you pass it on, please tell your friends to subscribe.—Ed.
Pronunciation Guide Needed
BAR is one of my favorite magazines, always intellectually and visually stimulating. However, I do have one suggestion that would help me and, I think, many other readers.
I find myself stumbling over the Hebrew, Egyptian and other ancient names. Could you include a pronunciation guide in the articles? Either a small box or references within the text would be a great help.
Jack Zavada
Galesburg, Illinois
Good suggestion.—Ed.
Herod’s Horrid Death
It Was Rectal Cancer
I have just read your interesting and informative article, “Herod’s Horrid Death,” BAR 28:02. As fascinating as the historical review was, I was a little disappointed with the theories as to the cause of death. The medical consultant, Dr. Walter Y. Loebl, for instance, did not explain the “strong pains in the colon from ulceration of the entrails,” the “malignancy in the abdominal area” or the “inability to take food due to overpowering pains,” described by the first-century historian Josephus.
As a pathologist with an excellent track record of predicting autopsy findings by a careful review of the pre-mortem record, I would like to take a crack at the mystery of Herod’s underlying disease. While I would agree that there is strong evidence for heart and kidney failure (as initially proposed by Edward Merrins and subsequently by Dr. Loebl), I think these are end-stage 010results of another underlying process, namely rectal cancer. Rectal cancer would have initially led to blood in the stool (the only way the ancients could conclude “ulceration of the entrails”) and eventually to total intestinal obstruction, leading to abdominal swelling and pain (“malignancy in the abdominal area” and “strong pains in the colon”). Liver metastases could have also contributed to the abdominal signs of a rectal cancer. Herod’s “inability to take food due to overpowering pains” was almost surely a reference to intestinal obstruction, which Dr. Loebl doesn’t explain. Intestinal obstruction also leads to “disagreeable breath” (typically a fecal smell). By the way, for those hoping that Herod’s demise was unpleasant, dying from rectal cancer with intestinal obstruction is a particularly miserable and lingering way to go, as any doctor will tell you.
Kidney failure (uremia) is not uncommon in end-stage cancer cases and may result from blockage of the urinary tract, hypovolemia (internal bleeding, poor water intake with dehydration, etc.) or shock. I agree that uremia is a likely explanation for the intense itching. I would have expected a description of jaundice if the itching had been from toxins of liver outflow (bile duct) obstruction and agree that pancreatic cancer is unlikely. Kidney failure in Herod’s case could well have been from blockage of the urinary tract (bladder outlet obstruction) by locally spreading rectal cancer. I believe this is the most likely scenario, since Herod appeared to be fluid-overloaded (orthopnea, edema around the feet and ankles) rather than hypovolemic. It is also why I place the cancer in the rectum rather than elsewhere in the colon. So while Herod’s kidneys and heart were most likely failing, I think the scenario of end-stage rectal cancer makes the most sense. A combination of severe pain, kidney failure and poor circulation to the brain could well explain the signs of emotional instability, fainting when warmed in oil, mental confusion and seizures (“spasms in all limbs of unendurable force”).
I agree that “putrefaction of the private member, creating worms” was almost surely myiasis, if we can take the worm description literally. However, a putrefying penile cancer might be a consideration, if the “worms” reference can be interpreted as a form of literary license to describe putrefaction (“worm-eaten”). Incidentally, penile cancer is now almost uniformly recognized as having a venereal transmission—and Herod was a promiscuous guy. Penile cancer can lead to kidney failure from blockage of the urinary tract. Tumors in the abdomen from penile cancer could also lead to an intestinal obstruction scenario as described above and would have been a particularly fitting way for Herod to go.
E. Terry Tatum, M.D.
Chief of Pathology
The Medical Center at Bowling Green
Bowling Green, Kentucky
Nikos Kokkinos responds:
In my article I discussed only the four symptoms that Dr. Loebl found most diagnostic, leaving the rest to be included in his own paper in the forthcoming volume of the British Museum conference (N. Kokkinos, ed., The World of the Herods [Portsmouth, Rhode Island: Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series]). In the case of the “strong pains in the colon from ulceration of the entrails” (which, incidentally, I originally translated as “rectum” but changed to “colon” in order to follow literally the word kolon of Josephus’s War 1.656 and Antiquities 17.169), Dr. Loebl comments, “Such ulceration requires instrumental inspection, or post-mortem. If bleeding is implied, then cancer of the rectum is possible—but there is no mention of bleeding or obstruction with complete constipation.” As for the “malignancy in the abdominal area,” Dr. Loebl says that pancreatic cancer “can cause diabetes and obstruct the bile flow from the liver to the intestine” but agrees with Dr. Tatum that pancreatic cancer is unlikely. However, he says there are problems with a diagnosis of rectal cancer as well.
As an ancient historian and archaeologist, I am not qualified to address this question medically (see Dr. Loebl’s comments below), but I can help in the area of ancient Greek by pointing out that the word “malignancy” (in the abdominal area) is given as kakôsis only in Antiquities; the word used in War is instead phlegmonê, which is translated as “inflammation” but which can also be taken as “swelling” and thus close to Dr. Tatum’s understanding. Moreover, the word “ulceration” (of the entrails) is given as helkôsis in Antiquities but is missing from the concise account of the War. It is interesting that the only other place in his entire corpus that Josephus used this word is in connection with the cause of death of Apion, a Hellenized grammarian in Alexandria. Apion was an older contemporary of Josephus who had strongly criticized the Jews, and against whom Josephus wrote two books. Josephus found his death appropriate and well-deserved: “For he was circumcised out of necessity, because an ulcer was created on his private member, and since the operation brought no relief, putrefaction set in, and he died in terrible 011tortures” (Against Apion 2.143). In reference to Apion, Josephus used the word helkôsis to describe what could, though not necessarily, be taken as cancer. Dr. Loebl considers cancer of the penis to be less likely as a cause of urinary obstruction in a man of Herod’s age than enlargement of the prostate. With cancer of the pancreas and cancer of the private member excluded, is rectal cancer the only other explanation for Herod’s kidney and heart failure? Here I defer to Dr. Loebl.
Walter Loebl, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, London, responds:
Rectal cancer is quite common, and must have been about as common 2,000 years ago. So rectal cancer is certainly one possibility to explain the abdominal symptoms that Josephus describes—assuming that when Josephus says “ulceration” he means an observation of rectal bleeding. However, Josephus does not mention bleeding nor constipation. And Dr. Tatum must surely realize that the very same clinical abdominal picture, including rectal bleeding, can result from mesenteric artery (or vein) thrombosis—a clot in the major vessel supplying blood to the intestines—which would leave us with the simpler explanation of age-related arteriosclerosis, without the need for an additional process such as cancer. And if one wishes to complicate the explanation with an additional disease, then volvulus—twisting of the bowel—or intussusception (telescoping) of the gut are also possible.
It Was Diabetes
I am a diabetes nurse educator and I would like to point out something regarding your very interesting article on “Herod’s Horrid Death,” BAR 28:02. The symptoms of diabetes given by Dr. Loebl—“an increased thirst, the production of much more urine and weight loss—progressing to confusion and coma”—match those of Type 1 diabetes mellitus, or childhood diabetes. It is obvious that Herod did not have this problem because he did not have those symptoms as a child. But I believe Herod might have had Type 2 diabetes, which, when uncontrolled, leads to every one of the symptoms he exhibited.
Diabetes simply means that there is too much glucose (a type of sugar) in the bloodstream. There can be different reasons for this. In Type 1 the cause is the reason given by Dr. Loebl—the pancreas no longer produces insulin. Insulin is the key that unlocks the body’s cells to let glucose enter (to be used for fuel for the cells to do their work). If that key is missing, the glucose from the 012last meal continues to circulate in the blood instead of feeding the cells, forcing the cells to break down proteins and fats rather than glucose in order to create energy for work; ultimately the cells will consume themselves.
The cause of Type 2 diabetes is a gradual buildup of resistance to insulin by the body’s cells. A person can have normal secretion of insulin for many years, but the cells begin to be less and less sensitive and refuse to open up readily when the insulin comes around to them. During those first years, the pancreas usually produces extra insulin that can “strong-arm” the cells open so the sugar can finally get in. In most cases the person with this condition may have no symptoms whatever; but during this long time period, the extra sugar circulating in the blood stream is doing damage to the inside of the blood vessels.
After many years of Type 2 diabetes, the organs begin to show damage from the lack of proper blood flow or from the blockages that can develop. Then you see heart and/or kidney failure, strokes (with dementia, perhaps) and other kinds of deterioration. Herod’s symptoms sound very much like those of many patients I have cared for on a cardiac/renal hospital unit. Heart failure and renal (kidney) failure both result in serious generalized edema and impaired oxygenation (which also affects the person’s thought processes). Renal failure also causes anemia, skin fragility and many other afflictions; there are often blood clots to the lower extremities, resulting in death to the tissues below the clot—the toes, foot, leg or other areas. These patients have only very recently been treatable, so people with these conditions in antiquity would have suffered even more—for instance, from the rotting of dead tissues, places to which maggots would happily be attracted.
Type 2 diabetes is a hereditary problem waiting to happen. Factors that contribute to bringing it on include being overweight (high fat, high sugar diet), not getting enough exercise, age, certain medications, injury, illness or stress. If Herod did have Type 2 diabetes and its complications, I suspect that any or all of these factors could have had a part in bringing the ailments upon him.
Barbara Hallblade, RN, BSN
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Nikos Kokkinos responds:
It was not possible in my article to give a full description of diabetes, so well detailed by Barbara Hallblade. She is quite right: Herod could not have had Type 1 diabetes. And while Type 2 diabetes may not be excluded, Dr. Loebl informs me that “if it was severe enough to damage the blood vessels, then it would also have caused excess thirst, excess urine and weight loss.” Josephus does not mention any of these symptoms, either in Herod or in his relatives—some of whom would perhaps also have been affected by this familial condition. Dr. Loebl concludes that “the explanation of his symptoms and signs does not require the diagnosis of diabetes, although it could have been present—as a few doctors have previously claimed.”
Stands by His Diagnosis
Dr. Jan Hirschmann has recently postulated that Herod died from Fournier’s gangrene, as you reported in “What Killed Herod?” Strata, BAR 28:02. Fournier’s gangrene is a rapidly fatal bacterial decay of the skin of the scrotum and/or the penis. But significantly, Josephus does not use the Greek terms gaggraina and sphakelos, which would have described the tissue death seen in Fournier’s gangrene; nor does he use the Greek term erysipelas, which would have described the frequently present gas gangrene under the genital skin.
Nikos Kokkinos has pointed out that Josephus calls the process sêpsis (in Antiquities) and sêpedôn (in War). Both words have the same root and are understood almost identically as “putrefaction,” “decay,” “rot” or “the formation of pus.” So Dr. Hirschmann’s proposed diagnosis is based on the mistaken English translation of “gangrene” for the Greek sêpsis. Furthermore, Fournier’s gangrene is very rare and occurs mainly in younger men. Based upon its pre-antibiotic incidence, the statistical probability that the 69-year-old Herod had Fournier’s seems to be very low indeed.
Herod had a superficial purulent infection of the swollen skin of his penis only (aidoion, singular). In the warm climate of Jericho, this genital sêpsis attracted flies, whose eggs developed into maggots (“worms”). But I do not think that this contributed significantly to the real cause of Herod’s death, namely cardio-renal failure.
Dr. Walter Loebl
Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, London
Woodford Green, United Kingdom
A Virus Right Between the Eyes
Dr. Philip Mackowiak is described as inviting physicians to tackle a number of mysterious deaths—Edgar Allen Poe, Pericles, General Custer, Alexander the Great and so on (“What Killed Herod?” Strata, BAR 28:02). Is that the General Custer who got killed by ancient Indian viruses at the Big Horn?
Boris Feinman
Boynton Beach, Florida
Funny you should ask. The annual Historical Clinicopathological Conference at the University of Maryland Medical School usually focuses on the physical causes of death of a historical figure. However, according to the conference organizer, Dr. Mackowiak, the 2000 conference was exceptional in that it focused on the subject’s mental health, not what physically killed him. General Custer, the subject of that year’s event, rashly led his 265 men (including two brothers and other close family members) into battle against a 4,000-man-strong Native American force at Little Big Horn, Montana, on June 25, 1876. Custer and every last man in his charge was slain. The general’s fatal psychiatric flaw (according to Dr. David B. Mallott, the psychiatrist discussing the case)? Histrionic personality disorder.—Ed.
Pig Sounds Like Son—In Greek
The quote attributed to Augustine, “Better to be Herod’s pig than his son,” loses much when translating from the original Greek into Latin (“Herod’s Horrid Death,” BAR 28:02). There is word-play in the Greek for pig (huos) and son (huios) that is lacking in the Latin and is the whole point of the saying.
Jerrold A. Powers
Capitola, California
Dancing in Denver
Morality Tied to Historicity
In “Dancing in Denver: From One Scholarly Meeting to Another,” BAR 28:02, Hershel Shanks reports on a challenge issued by Hugh Williamson to William Dever asking how the moral 062lessons of the Bible could stand if the history recounted in the Pentateuch did not—not the patriarchal narratives, not the Exodus, not the giving of the law. It appears evident to me that history writing gains in credibility when it is near to the events it describes or has accurate contemporaneous sources, and is diminished in reliability the further removed it is from those events. But the question of moral import is not tied to the historicity of the reportage. What matters is that the tales of the Pentateuch represent the past that the historical Israelites believed was theirs. This “Biblical worldview,” to use Dever’s term, is true and desirable, philosophically, if we find it so, independent of the historicity of the events it recounts.
Avram Israel Reisner
Baltimore, Maryland
Who’s a Minimalist Now?
I just finished reading your article on the Denver meetings. I could hardly believe what I read!
I just want to say “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” for having the courage to stand up and say that William Dever is just as much a minimalist as the ones he accuses. If the Bible is not reliable historically, how can anyone take it seriously as a resource for ethics or morals?
It is the moral standard the Bible presents, and its view of my own human condition, which I am honest enough to admit hits the mark unerringly, that convinces me of its reliability at other points. That man, in his limited view of things, just might not find convincing evidence in archaeology for the historicity of the Bible is not surprising in light of the view of man himself and his limitations presented in the Bible.
Joe Brenneman
Pastor, Faith Assembly
Warsaw, Indiana
Correction
In “Herod’s Horrid Death,” BAR 28:02, the date for the end of Herod’s reign should be 4 B.C.; Herod’s son, who minted the coin shown in “Herod’s Roman Temple,” BAR 28:02, was Philip Tetrarch, not Philip II, and the temple shown in the coin is in the Ionic order, not Corinthian; also, the cutaway diagram of the Temple Mount in “Herod’s Roman Temple,” BAR 28:02, should have shown domed vestibules over the “Double” and “Triple” Gates.
004
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.
In “Biblical Detective Work Identifies the Eunuch,” BAR 28:02, P. Kyle McCarter, Jr. suggests that the “Nathan-melech, servant of the king” on the bulla owned by Shlomo Moussaieff is the same person as the “Nathan who is over the house” whose seal was studied by Nahman Avigad, who is the same person as the Nathan-melech who was an officer in Josiah’s court (2 Kings 23:11). This is all very interesting and possible. McCarter also analyzes the name and suggests that it means “(the named deity) gave” or “has given.” Furthermore, he writes that we know names with the verbal phrase “natan” and with the theophoric ending –el, –yah or –yahu, and that the name natan-melek should be translated as “the King has given” referring to the heavenly King, Yahweh.
I suggest another interpretation for the name ntnmlk. Since Hebrew is written with consonants only and words can be vocalized and read in more than one way, I think that the original name of this individual was Nathan-molek, which means “Molek (a local deity) has given.” Possibly as a result of Josiah’s reforms, this man was encouraged to change his name to Nathan-melek. It is also possible that the individual did not change his name but had his name changed by the Biblical redactors.
I am aware of the controversy regarding whether “molek” was a deity or a type of sacrifice, but the possibility of it being a name of a deity should have been raised.
Oded Borowski
Director, Program in Mediterranean Archaeology
Emory University
Atlanta, Georgia
013
How to Read History in the Bible
In your report on the 2001 American Schools of Oriental Research panel on “Can a History of Israel Be Written?” BAR editor Hershel Shanks presses scholars for an “up or down” vote on which features of the Biblical text can be regarded as part of a secure “historical core” (“Dancing in Denver: From One Scholarly Meeting to Another,” BAR 28:02). I regret that I was not able to participate in the panel in person because of family illness, but in our planning of the session we had a rather different focus in mind. Since the three panelists agreed that histories of Israel can and are being written, what are the concepts of history and methods of research that lead us historians to “represent” the past in one way or another? We agreed to each offer a sample of how we work as historians.
I have not seen the texts of the presentations by William Dever and Kyle McCarter. Presumably, however, from the three sentences devoted to Dever’s historical practice, he did illustrate his approach as applied to events in the eighth century B.C.E., and from the one sentence devoted to McCarter’s historical practice, he illustrated his approach with David and the United Monarchy. BAR describes the content of my paper, read in my absence by the panel convener, as “mainly focused on methodological issues,” perhaps implying that such issues are more technical than substantive. Unfortunately the BAR report chose to give major attention to Dever’s lashing of other scholarly views and to chiding the panelists and other attending scholars for not finding a “historical core” in the Patriarchal and Mosaic traditions. In the interest of furthering the discussion that Shanks calls for at the end of his report, I am offering the gist of my panel presentation.
I raised three methodological issues and illustrated how they bear on history writing. Further clarification of these issues will be found in my recently published book, The Politics of Ancient Israel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001).
1. Periodization of Israelite History. I pointed out some of the consequences of dividing the history of Israel into certain, more or less fixed eras, such as premonarchic, monarchic, Exilic, and post-Exilic (the traditional division), or First Temple and Second Temple eras (frequent among those working on post-Exilic topics), or tribal, monarchic and colonial periods (the division I customarily use). The danger of any division is that it may prejudge historical issues or miss the ways in which aspects or influences of earlier periods continue in later periods. Carving up Israel’s history into sequential chronological phases can easily obscure the complexity of most Biblical literature that we depend on for historical reconstruction.
The Biblical sources are characteristically cumulative; they preserve traditions and ideologies of successive phases of Israelite experience. This phenomenon is not always an inadvertent result of compilation and redaction. Often it appears that monarchic traditionalists (such as the Deuteronomistic historian) consciously picture the Israel they know in tribal terms, and colonial traditionists (such as the Chronicler) purposely represent restored Judah in tribal and/or monarchic terms. Needless to say, this “archaizing” habit of Biblical traditionists constitutes a challenge to the historian to assess which reports of the past are inventions of a later writer and which preserve more or less authentic details or traces of the ethos of previous eras.
2. Interactive Power Networks in Israelite History. I stressed the necessity of attending not only to religious and political developments in Israel, but also to economic, military, social and cultural networks with which religious and political power networks necessarily interacted. The way these power networks collaborated or conflicted, and the balance of power among them, seems to have varied considerably from tribal through monarchic to colonial times. A sufficiently full and nuanced history of Israel will not only attend to prominent religious and political leaders but will focus on society-wide developments that help us understand the facilitating and limiting factors that prompted and conditioned their work.
Oftentimes these diverse power networks are not clearly delineated in the Biblical texts. The resources of comparative social sciences are extremely helpful in showing how societies comparable to Israel in one respect or another coped with similar fundamental issues of corporate life. In my judgment as a Biblical historian, the experiences of pre-state peoples in Iceland and among the Iroquois and Sioux Indians of North America are highly instructive for an understanding of tribal Israel. As for the institutions and practices of monarchic Israel, there is a wealth of information about ancient Near Eastern states within which we can situate the kingdoms of Israel and Judah as typical instances of small-to-medium-sized states under growing pressure from the great empires of Assyria, Neo-Babylonia and Persia.
3. Reading Israelite History “Teleologically.” Finally I raised the issue of reading Israel’s history “teleologically” (from the Greek term telos, meaning “end” or “goal.”) I suggest that at each stage of the gathering of Israelite traditions, the writers of the moment were operating with a sense of how those traditions affected “the end point” at which they stood, whether in the United Monarchy, divided monarchy or colonial period. Each traditionist put a special “twist” on the traditions of the past that they selected and organized. We contemporary historians also shape our visions of Israelite history according to the various “end points” at which we stand in the long, ongoing history of Biblical interpretation.
Thus, we can expect to find teleologies (or ideologies) at work in the various sources we draw on to formulate a larger historical scenario. In assessing these teleologies in the text, we can expect that our own teleologies will be at work in shaping the integrated historical accounts we propose. It is dangerous to ignore or suppress the teleologies in the text and in the historian. When we do so, history-writing becomes solely a matter of “getting the facts straight” with insufficient attention to the way “factual data” are “packaged” in our sources. Moreover, without self-awareness, we may be inclined to confuse our own teleologies with the textual teleologies, a process that undermines our task as historians. It seems to me that the primary level of dispute between the “minimalists” and “maximalists” is actually over textual and personal teleologies and not over “the historical facts.” Each party attributes teleology/ideology to the other, in the process often getting their opponents’ position wrong, while showing little evidence of critical clarification of their own teleology/ideology.
Some BAR articles do pay attention to the issues I have raised. BAR should more often include such issues as a matter of course rather than focus relentlessly on historical facts without sufficient discussion of how historians assess, contextualize and integrate claims to factuality.
Norman K. Gottwald
Professor Emeritus, New York Theological Seminary
Berkeley, California
BAR Too Self Referential
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