Queries & Comments

010

Never Again, Unless You Resign

My husband and I set out a few days ago to find your magazine and perhaps begin a subscription. As a graduate of Moody Bible Institute and a seminary student, he hoped that the magazine would offer something new to his studies and his own Bible study time. We found a copy of the July/August 2003 issue at a local bookstore and took it home. It is the last copy we will purchase.

The first item I read was the editor’s column, First Person. I was surprised to hear you insulting and questioning a group of your peers for not sufficiently covering archaeology related to Israel and the Bible. However, I read on, assuming that although you may be over-reacting, you knew more about the situation than I did.

Next I read Queries & Comments. There, I read that the former president of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) and a former member of your editorial advisory board (Joe Seger) accused you of writing an article even more insulting and argumentative than the one I had just read! That was followed by a letter of resignation from a current member of your editorial advisory board (Lawrence Geraty)!

I read on, hoping to find some true archaeology, but you did it again. I began reading of a man who had funded archaeology (“Leon Levy, Supporter of Archaeology, Dies at 77, ” Strata BAR 29:04). I thought that it was kind of you to recognize his passing, until I found that you were using this as another chance to insult ASOR and also the Archaeological Institute of America.

Then another insulting and far more personal attack came in “Israel Antiquities Authority Declines Dirty Money.” This time you spent over two pages attacking an individual who had offended you, while trying to disguise it all as archaeology. Whatever your disagreements with IAA director Shuka Dorfman, it seems extremely unprofessional and immature to use your magazine as a means of attack.

You have a great opportunity to make people aware of the ties between Scripture and archaeology. Instead you are wasting paper and ink on your personal vendettas and aggrandizement. I will never again read a copy of your magazine unless I am told that it contains your letter of resignation.

Unusual Editor

It’s very unusual for a magazine editor to print letters that berate said editor! Some people may love Hershel Shanks and some may hate him, but all will have to admit he has guts!

Hurrah for Shanks

I am writing to wholeheartedly disagree with the recent criticism of Hershel Shanks in BAR for allegedly over-injecting himself and his interests into his publications. As a long-time subscriber, I particularly look forward to and enjoy the opinions and positions he takes. It is important that we remember that archaeology, as with all human endeavors, is influenced by politics, egos, error, ideology and personalities. Mr. Shanks does us all a service by pointing out instances of these and challenging them.

Keep up the good fight, sir.

011

Foul Baal

Please kindly withdraw my subscription. You had a picture of Baal in the July/August 2003 issue (“The Shechem Temple,” BAR 29:04) that is evil and offensive to the Lord.

Shechem Temple

American Scholarly Isolationism

Lawrence E. Stager is to be congratulated for his contribution on the migdal temple of Shechem: It seems that indeed the Bronze Age temple of El(-berith), no doubt one of the most famous and impressive buildings in Canaan, survived into the Iron Age (“The Shechem Temple,” BAR 29:04). And yet: We knew already, or at least we could have known. The merit of Stager’s convincing case is in itself not diminished by the fact that the same scenario was suggested 25 years ago. Dr. Helga Weippert (University of Heidelberg) first raised the same point in 1978 (Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina Vereins [ZDPV], vol. 94, 1978, pp. 167–176). The ZDPV is an internationally renowned scholarly journal. Weippert is also the author of Palästina in vorhellenistischer Zeit (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1988) which may well be the most thorough, scholarly handbook on the archaeology of Israel/Palestine to date. There the same point is presented again (p. 277).

A similar oversight occurs in Stager’s endnote 24, where his contributions on “Jerusalem and the Garden of Eden” are quoted. His published works are enlightening and delightful, but they make no mention of the research by Manfred Görg (University of Munich) who has long since argued for associating Eden with an idealizing geography of Jerusalem (M. Görg, “Wo lag das Paradies?” Biblische Notizen 2, 1977, pp. 23–32).

It is natural that the American public and lay people interested in archaeology are not familiar with publications in languages other than English. For the scholarly community the case is different. Standard reference works and journals are to be judged by their quality, not their language. There sometimes seem to be indications, well reflected in BAR, for an alarmingly growing tendency by American scholars to cut themselves off from the research that is going on in the “rest” of the world. When science is no longer international, it is no longer science. American isolationism should have no place in archaeology (or anywhere else).

Lawrence E. Stager responds:

I am grateful to Dr. Wimmer for drawing my attention to Dr. Helga Weippert’s book review in ZDPV. I regularly read this fine journal, but this review slipped by me.

Endnote 24 was not meant to be exhaustive in its citations. I am quite familiar with Manfred Görg’s article dealing with the relationship of Eden and Jerusalem. Others besides myself have made this association, but were not mentioned in this footnote. They include Jon D. Levenson, who published his views on the matter a year before Görg (see Levenson’s Theology of the Program of Restoration of Ezekiel 40–48 [Harvard Semitic Monographs 10, 1976] and his great book, Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1985); Elizabeth Block-Smith, chapter 2 in Michael D. Coogan et al., eds., Scripture and Other Artifacts (Philip J. King festschrift, Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994); and Margaret Barker, The Gate of Heaven: The History and Symbolism of the Temple in Jerusalem (London: SPCK, 1991).

Before reaching his overwrought and preachy generalizations about me and other American scholars, Dr. Wimmer should have been wise enough to digest my writings over the past 30 years and those of my American colleagues in Biblical archaeology and history. Had he done so, he would have found substantial non-English fare on which to dine. Wimmer’s misgivings about “American isolationism” would seem better directed to the White House than to the academy.

When Did Writing Develop in Canaan?

In the article on the Shechem temple, Lawrence Stager says that a large pillar found in the entryway was once plastered and then painted over with an elaborate inscription. He documents this inscription from the time of the Judges by references in Deuteronomy and by an eighth-century B.C. inscription from Jordan. It was my understanding that Canaanite writing (including Hebrew)—one of the major contributions to the world—did not develop until the tenth century, and even then simply as a memory device. There are no monumental inscriptions to be found in the tenth century, much less during the period of the Judges (1200–1000 B.C.).

Admittedly, there are several Scriptural references to writing before this time. The poignant letter from David to Joab regarding Uriah (2 Samuel 11:14) is one of them. All these, of course, are mentioned by authors from a later period who were familiar with writing and assumed that writing existed during earlier times.

Hieroglyphic and cuneiform inscriptions, of course, abound during this time period, but they would seem irrelevant to 11th-century B.C. Canaan. Please explain.

Lawrence E. Stager responds:

Dozens of Old Canaanite alphabetic inscriptions have been found dating between 1800 and 1000 B.C.E. A convenient survey of early writing in Canaan and Israel can be found in Life in Biblical Israel, which I co-wrote with Philip J. King (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), pp. 300–317 [voted the best scholarly book on archaeology by the Biblical Archaeology Society’s panel of judges, see “Biblical Archaeology Society Publication Awards”—Ed.]. For a more detailed and technical analysis of these inscriptions and the dozen or so from the tenth century B.C.E. see the book just off the press by the renowned epigrapher and Biblical scholar Frank Moore Cross, Leaves from an Epigrapher’s Notebook: Collected Papers in Hebrew and West Semitic Palaeography and Epigraphy (Harvard Semitic Studies 51; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003).

There can be little doubt (naysayers to the contrary) that the elite of Jerusalem were literate during the time of David and Solomon, since “documents from the kingdoms of both Israel and Judah, but not the neighboring kingdoms, of the eighth and seventh centuries contain Egyptian hieratic signs (cursive hieroglyphic) and numerals that had ceased to be used in Egypt after the tenth century” (Life in Biblical Israel, p. 313). This observation by Egyptologist Orly Goldwasser led her to the conclusion that the “fact that the hieratic numerals appear in both Israel and Judah points to an earlier date of adoption, probably the age of David and Solomon” (“An Egyptian Scribe from Lachish and the Hieratic Tradition of the Hebrew Kingdoms,” Tel Aviv 18 [1991], p. 251). Near Eastern historian Nadav 012Na’aman has used this and other data to conclude that there is clear evidence of writing in the court of Jerusalem, the seat of the Davidic dynasty, in the tenth century B.C.E. (“The Contribution of the Amarna Letters to the Debate on Jerusalem’s Political Position in the Tenth Century B.C.E.,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 304 [1996], p. 22).

Whatchamacallit

Three Easy Lessons

I enjoyed William Dever’s article on finding a name for the field (“Whatchamacallit,” BAR 29:04). However, as an outsider but a long-time reader of BAR, I think the solution seems simple. Judging by what we read, archaeology clearly has three divisions:

1. Digger Archaeologists. These are the people with picks and shovels who move the earth and make the discoveries—any era, any location, any country.

2. Reporter Archaeologists. These are the people who write the reports—often telling what the digger did long after he or she has gone to an eternal reward.

3. Rhetorical Archaeologists. These are the ones who argue that the other two groups made horrible errors in digging, interpreting, analyzing, reporting, failing to give proper credit, accepting funds from tainted sources, using impolite language or generally doing or saying something the rhetoricians don’t like.

There now, isn’t that simple?

Simon Ossuary

Give Us Evidence, Not Assertions

Congratulations to Tom Powers on his sleuthing into a 40-year-old journal to unearth for a second time what might be Simon of Cyrene’s son’s ossuary. The article does a great job in presenting general background and several points in favor of that identification. However, a key premise is asserted with no evidence: that Sara and Jacob, names found on other ossuaries in the same family cave, “were names used chiefly in the Diaspora.” I find that hard to believe. Also, no evidence is presented that the eight Greek-style names found on the other ossuaries in the cave were common in Cyrenaica. As these premises are the basis for the key assertion that the tomb was that of a family from Cyrenaica and thereby of the New Testament personality, they should be more explicitly supported.

Tom Powers responds:

Mr. Bergen is quite right that the Simon family’s claimed connection to Cyrenaica hinges largely on the names found on the ossuaries in the cave-tomb and on the geographical distribution that can be demonstrated for these names. While a detailed treatment of the names was beyond the scope of my article, the assertions that did appear, in summary form, are those of the late professor Nahman Avigad. This was perhaps not made clear in the article, for which I apologize. The source is Avigad’s 1962 publication of the tomb in the Israel Exploration Journal (vol. 12, pp. 1–12), where he discusses the significance of each name and gives the scholarly citations.

Apart from the names themselves, Avigad draws two other important pieces of evidence from the inscriptions. One is a geographical reference and the other a stylistic feature (the latter not mentioned in my article), both of which, he says, point to Cyrenaica. Perhaps it will help fill in some of the gaps to quote directly from Avigad’s summary conclusions:

“Most of the Greek names [Arristobola, Philiskos, Damon, Thaliarchos, Dositheus, Mnaso, Horea and Alexander] have never been found before in Greco-Jewish inscriptions in Palestine. Some are especially common in Cyrenaica. Three out of four Jewish names (Sara, Sabatis and Jacob) are new in the onomasticon of ossuaries. In the Hellenistic period these names are chiefly in use among the Jews of the Diaspora. One member of the family is known to have come from Ptolemais [one of the three cities 013named Ptolemais was in Cyrenaica]. The use of the sign |__ [a special L-shaped symbol] to indicate the age of the deceased, found on one of the ossuaries, is a practice common on Jewish tomb-stones in Egypt and Cyrenaica. All these data combined suggest that the family must have come from one of the large Jewish communities of the Diaspora—Egypt or Cyrenaica. For reasons stated above, Cyrenaica is more likely to have been the country of origin of this family.”

That was Avigad, writing in 1962. Forty years down the road, we must admit that his work is a bit dated, not to mention the scholarly sources he drew on. I asked Dr. Tal Ilan, of Hebrew University, for an up-to-date assessment of the names. Her scholarly work on Jewish names was cited in my article. Here are Dr. Ilan’s comments about the geographical distribution of the names in question:

“[T]he name Sarah is almost non-existent in Jewish material from Palestine at the time of the ossuaries (see in my recent book, A Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity, Part I: Palestine 330 B.C.E.-200 C.E.) and was very popular in Cyrene, so much so that I doubt very much whether the Jewish Sarah is intended; I believe it is more likely a local name, abbreviated from the theophoric pagan Sarapion. I also believe the name Thaliarchus is much attested in Cyrene (also not specifically, but occasionally, for Jews). As for the other names, there is nothing specifically Cyrenian about them. The name Jacob is indeed much more often attested in the Diaspora than in Palestine.”

Incidentally, my article, as edited, left out a quote from Dr. Ilan: In her opinion it is “very likely” that the ’Alexander (son) of Simon’ ossuary does in fact refer to the individuals mentioned in the New Testament.

Not Totally Obscure

In view of the remark that the inscription(s) in the Simon family tomb garnered “little notice for the past four decades,” I wish to draw your attention to pp. 140–141 of my book Ancient Jewish Epitaphs. An Introductory Survey of a Millennium of Jewish Funerary Epigraphy (300 B.C.E.-700 C.E.) (Kampen, The Netherlands: Kok Pharos, 1991), where I discuss this material in its relevance to New Testament studies, as I did also in the same year in my inaugural address as professor of New Testament and Ancient Judaism at Utrecht Universities in The Netherlands (later published in German in Biblische Zeitschrift 36 [1992], pp. 161–178). So the situation is not as black as you picture it.

Literacy in Jesus’ Time

Only a Fraction Was Literate

I must take issue with Alan Millard’s use of evidence in “Literacy in the Time of Jesus” (BAR 29:04). He would do well to read W.V. Harris’s Ancient Literacy for a more careful analysis. As Harris proves with copious evidence, it is unlikely that more than 10 percent of the population was functionally literate.

Millard’s evidence does not support his conclusion that literacy was common. First, most of his evidence relates to the upper classes, who were a very small minority and able to afford things like stone ossuaries or a written marriage contract. Second, scribes made a living reading and writing for a fee, so anyone could have documents drawn up without being literate. Consider Masada: 10 percent of 900 people equals 90 literates, more than enough to account for all the evidence there. Even a mere dozen would do. Thus, the evidence must be interpreted with far more caution than Millard employs.

Of course, Millard’s thesis that someone could have written down Christ’s words does not depend on widespread literacy. Even if only 10 percent of the population was sufficiently literate, that’s one in ten of those in company with Jesus (think of the tax collectors). And as Millard himself points out, the Gospels depict Jesus as literate, so he would hardly need notetakers, anyway. He could record his own teachings. But idle speculation is pointless. If Luke had firsthand written notes of any kind, and not just hearsay supposedly originating with eyewitnesses, he would have, like most historians of his day, named his sources. He didn’t. Thus the “could have” argument Millard advances is useless.

See Alan Millard’s response at the end of this section

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What Did Jesus Speak?

Alan Millard claims that “we may assume that he [Luke] could read notes made by eyewitnesses to Jesus’ ministry.” But Joachim Jeremias claimed that “Luke knows no Hebrew” (New Testament Theology: The Proclamation of Jesus [New York: Macmillan, 1971, p. 294]). Shouldn’t Millard address the question of what language Jesus spoke, in what language the hypothetical notes could have been written and what language(s) Luke could read?

See Alan Millard’s response at the end of this section.

Notes from the Scene

Alan Millard’s article ties in very much with a pet theory of mine—that much of what Jesus is quoted as saying in the Gospels could be direct quotes, having been taken down by a shorthand reporter at the scene. This would be particularly true of the long discourses that we see in the Gospel of John.

The art of shorthand was well-known in classical times. For instance, Cicero’s Greek slave Tiro was so gifted as a shorthand transcriber that Cicero gave him his freedom. After Cicero’s murder, Tiro lived to nearly 100 years of age and is thought by some to be largely responsible for the preservation of Cicero’s writings.

If Latin speech could be taken down in shorthand, then why not Greek or Aramaic? Such work could have been done or financed by Jesus’ wealthy admirers or, on the other hand, by the security agencies of the Romans or of Herod, either of which might have had an interest in taking down what this prophet was saying.

Only Brief Notes May Be Accurate

Alan Millard makes a convincing argument but chooses to address only highly selected examples—brief quotes. He writes, “It is not hard to imagine someone in first-century Israel coming home one day and writing out the memorable words he had just heard: ’Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted’ (Matthew 5:4) or ’I and the Father are one’ (John 10:30).”

I agree. But what about something like “The Sermon on the Mount?” It can’t be a word-for-word transcription of a long 014speech. Can you, for example, give anything but a very general account of the President’s last State of the Union address?

See Alan Millard’s response at the end of this section.

A Boost for Millard

Some facts may be adduced to further bolster Alan Millard’s contention that some sayings of Christ may well have been written down while Christ was alive. The Talmud holds that many batei sefer (schools), which taught reading and writing, existed before the destruction of the Second Temple—that is, in Christ’s time. Reflecting the commonness of writing is the fact that at least five of Christ’s original 12 disciples could apparently write (Matthew, John, Peter, James, and Jude).

The casual letters often found among the 50,000 manuscripts of the Oxyrhynchus papyri show that writing was by no means restricted to official matters and was often engaged in by non-official persons who wrote of banal phenomena. The existence of such letters greatly increases the probability that Christ’s deeds were referred to in one or more similar letters of a non-official nature.

Given the aforementioned five literate apostles, and given Christ’s three-year ministry, we have 15 man-years during which letters may have been written while Christ was alive. If letters were written once every five years, on average, some three letters may have been written by Christ’s disciples while He was alive. But since Christ had at least 70 other disciples (Luke 10:1), it appears overwhelmingly probable that some disciples would have written about Christ during His lifetime.

The only questions that remain concern the extent to which such letters would be valued and retained, and whether edited translations could have formed the basis for the Gospels themselves.

Alan Millard responds:

I am grateful for the interest my short essay has aroused. It was stimulated by the assumption widely held by New Testament scholars that little or nothing of Jesus’ words was written prior to the fall of Jerusalem, which seemed to me to be contradicted by archaeological and textual evidence. Richard Carrier draws attention to W.V. Harris’s 016major study, and I can assure him that I have read it and the subsequent studies that responded to his work, notably, Literacy in the Ancient World (1991) edited by J.H. Humphrey. Certainly the legal deeds belonged to well-to-do people, but the variety of witnesses’ signatures suggests a wider circle of writers at various levels of ability. Harris’s estimate of 10 percent of the population being functionally literate applies to the Roman world, but in Jewish society there was an expectation that men should be able to read the Scriptures and that may have produced a higher proportion of literates. Gordon Kirchhevel sees a problem with Luke using notes made by eyewitnesses to Jesus’ ministry if he, Luke, knew no Hebrew (Aramaic was the common language). It is as possible that some notes may have been made in Greek as well as in Aramaic. More reasonably, one might envisage Aramaic notes being translated for Luke. My article was deliberately restricted to the matter of reading and writing. The occasional citations of Jesus’ words in Aramaic by the Gospel-writers is sufficient to show that Jesus spoke that language. It is likely that he also spoke some Greek because routes passed through Galilee to and from Greek-speaking regions. In Judea, Jerusalem, as a major pilgrimage center, would have had many inhabitants who knew enough Greek to sell their wares to visitors and some who interpreted for them. The Greek-speaking cities of the Decapolis and the coast were not isolated from their neighbors in the hill-country. Luke’s report of Jesus reading from Isaiah in the synagogue at Nazareth indicates that he could read Hebrew, as well. I have discussed this question in chapter 5, “A Polyglot Society” of my book Reading and Writing in the Time of Jesus (New York: New York Univ. Press, 2000). [See also Joseph Fitzmyer, “Did Jesus Speak Greek?” BAR 18:05—Ed.] The use of shorthand writers in first-century Palestine, proposed by Andrew Engebretson, is uncertain. In the first century B.C. Cicero’s secretary Tiro reputedly invented the system which became the standard form throughout the Roman empire, but examples of true shorthand for Greek have not been found earlier than the second century A.D., although various types of abbreviated or speedy writing existed long before. The question of reporting lengthy speeches, raised by Allen Whipps, is apposite. Again, we can only speculate, but we may surely suppose that Jesus made many of his major statements more than once, affording more opportunities for any who wished to record them, as we may suppose did Socrates and other Greek teachers whose lengthy discourses were circulated in writing by their disciples. Moreover, different members of Jesus’ audience may have told what they recalled to someone who wanted to write it down. I am grateful for Jordan Moar’s point about the possible number of readers and writers in first century Palestine on the basis of Talmudic references to schools and the Oxyrhynchus papyrus letters. While Talmudic texts relating to the time before A.D. 70 have to be treated with some caution as they were not put into writing until some centuries later, other sources, such as Josephus, indicate that in Talmudic schools boys were instructed early in the Torah. The letters on papyrus are certainly part of the body of material that points to a wider use of writing than commonly assumed in New Testament studies.

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.

Never Again, Unless You Resign