Queries & Comments

008

First Person

Tablets of the Law Discovered in Sinai?

I could hardly believe what I was reading in First Person (“Should Israel Return the Tablets of the Law to Egypt?” BAR 38:05). Have the original Tablets of the Law been found and kept secret, forgotten in a university vault? That seems hardly credible! Why hasn’t it hit the headlines?

How Did It Manage to Be Kept Secret?

Is the report on finding the Ten Commandments for real? Why are the archaeologists who made the discovery not named? What university were they from? How was such a potentially important find kept secret this long, and how did the Egyptians find out about it?

We received a bundle of letters like these. I’m sorry to have misled so many people. But I did explain in the piece that this was only a hypothetical case, not an actual case, posed in order to test the soundness of the rule that antiquities always belong to the state in which they were found, regardless of the culture reflected in the find. Three times I referred to the excavation of this discovery as a “hypothetical.” Immediately after describing the episode, I stated, “In law school this is called a hypothetical; that is, a hypothetical case that tests the application of a legal rule. In this instance: Would Israel be obligated to turn over to Egypt the original Tablets of the Law if they had been discovered in Sinai?” Two paragraphs later I referred to “this hypothetical case.” Four paragraphs after this, I again referred to “our hypothetical.”—H.S.

Should Israel Give the “House of David” Stela to Syria?

Your First Person would have been more balanced if you showed that other people in the Middle East might have claims on material held by Israel, similar to Israel’s claims on others.

The Aramaic stela from Tel Dan is Biblical, and no one doubts that it was likely set up by a king of Damascus, probably Hazael. To my mind the State of Israel’s asking for the Gezer Calendar or Siloam Tunnel Inscription back from Turkey, and the Syrian government asking for the Tel Dan stela back, would be similar situations.

When you only present one side of this issue, those, like me, who know the broader picture, can be put off and are less likely to be supportive of your argument. Also, the Tel Dan scenario isn’t really hypothetical. If you did raise this issue in BAR, I wager it would get around to someone in Syria with some power at some point. Then for political purposes the Syrians would stake a public claim to the stela. Maybe you just don’t want the Syrians to think about this?

You’ve raised this issue before, but have kept it narrowly focused on what Israel wants; it would be nice to see something new.

Modern Egyptians Are Imbued with Ancient Egyptian Culture

I read with interest your piece on whether Israel should return the Tablets of the Law to Egypt.

As an archaeologist, archaeological conservator and lawyer, I worked very closely for years with the Egyptian antiquities organization, the Supreme Council of Antiquities, handling and coordinating repatriation efforts regarding Egyptian pieces illegally excavated, exported or stolen from Egypt, as well as items reaching back to the period of time when Egypt was occupied by colonial powers, i.e., Britain and France. I therefore have a deep background in this arena.

The general rule to which you refer, that archaeological objects, especially those recently excavated, belong to the nation with sovereignty over the place where the object was found, is reflected in the law of almost every country that has any cultural patrimony to speak of, including both Israel and Egypt. The laws of both countries essentially state that any archaeological objects found, excavated or discovered within the sovereign limits of their territory belong to the state.

You state in your article that, “While the nation where the object was found certainly has some claim to the object, so does the culture that produced it.” You then advance the argument that while modern Egypt occupies the same space occupied by ancient Egypt, “It has no cultural relationship to ancient Egypt. Egyptians don’t speak the same language (ancient Egyptians spoke Egyptian; most modern 009 010 Egyptians speak Arabic), they don’t use the same writing system (hieroglyphic vs. the Arabic alphabet), don’t worship the same gods, don’t revere the same texts and there is no resonance of ancient Egyptian culture in modern Egyptian Culture. The opposite, of course, is true of Israel.”

I am compelled to say that these arguments are not well taken. The ancient Egyptian language survives. It is Coptic, which is spoken by virtually every Christian Egyptian, numbering in the millions, and is used today in the liturgy and language of the Coptic Church. It enables us to reconstruct how the ancient language was spoken and sounded.

It is true that modern Egyptians do not use the same writing system. Hieroglyphic and its offshoots of hieratic and demotic were abandoned in part because they were cumbersome and complicated. But proto-Hebrew, the oldest form of Hebrew, is today virtually unrecognizable and unused by the modern speaker and writer of Hebrew. In fact, only the most erudite and devoted of scholars are able to decipher it and even then with difficulty. It seems that modern speakers of Hebrew are as guilty as their modern Egyptian counterparts in abandoning what was cumbersome and difficult.

I will concede that modern Egyptians don’t worship the same gods as their ancestors, as well as the fact that they do not revere the same texts, at least not in the sense of their being valid religious documents today. But if you ask an Egyptian about the Book of the Dead, he or she will tell you what it is and note with pride the artistic achievements contained therein. He or she can tell you about the ancient Egyptian wisdom texts, such as the Maxims of Ptahhotep, which, if you are at all familiar with them could be taken as the antecedent to Proverbs as found in the Jewish and Christian Bibles of today. Just because the form of faith has changed doesn’t mean that modern people do not have an appreciation of the value of what their ancestors accomplished and used, or that they should be deprived of it.

Let me remind you that many ancient Egyptian objects have been found at sites in Israel. Under the arguments you advance, the Egyptians could claim them.

How the Mother God Got Spayed

The Female in God’s Maleness

I enjoyed reading April DeConick’s column (Biblical Views: “How the Mother God Got Spayed,” BAR 38:05) but have my own opinion on God’s maleness.

People tend to attribute gender to many things. An unborn child was traditionally referred to as “he,” until the actual gender became known. Cars are often referred to as “she” by their owners. God has been traditionally been called “Father.” One of His names, “El-Shaddai” is often translated “God Almighty.” “El” 011 points to the power of God Himself. Shaddai seems to be derived from another word meaning breasts, according to William F. Albright (see also Harriet Lutzky, “Shadday as a Goddess Epithet,” Vetus Testamentum 48 [1998], pp. 15–16). This implies that Shaddai signifies one who nourishes, clearly a female characteristic.

Borderline Blasphemy

I read with dismay and revulsion April DeConick’s “How the Mother God Got Spayed.” The title itself is vulgar and offensive. The hostility toward the word of God is especially disturbing; it seems to be borderline blasphemous.

From the very beginning, the Bible gives equal status to the woman with man. The woman was made in God’s image, the same as the man. The word helpmeet (ezer) means ally.

A Bizarre Take on an Old Idea

I found April DeConick’s “How the Mother God Got Spayed” to be a somewhat bizarre take on a tired old meme, the alleged male chauvinism of the Bible. Genesis 1:27, however, is clear: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (emphasis mine).

Why Catholic Ordination Is Restricted to Men

April DeConick misunderstands and so misrepresents the Roman Catholic tradition of ordaining only males to the priesthood. She correctly points out that patriarchal and male dominated societies of the past have failed to recognize the significant importance of women in society in general and religion in particular. She then incorrectly assigns this bias as the reason for Catholicism’s refusal to ordain women to Holy Orders. This view may well have influenced early Church practices in this regard, but it is not the fundamental reason for traditional practices in ordinations.

The actual reason for restricting ordination to men is rooted in the relationship of God to his people in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Frequently in Hebrew scriptural texts God is represented as the national husband of his bride, the chosen people of Israel. These texts, as in the prophet Hosea, saw a spiritual marital covenant between God and his people. Jesus, a Jewish rabbi, continued this perception.

St. Paul, another Jewish rabbi, brings this view into Christian life in Ephesians 5. Here St. Paul presents Jesus as the groom of his bride, the Christian church. The priest at Eucharist, the Mass, represents Jesus precisely as this groom. Grooms, like Jesus, are male and so the 068 male-only priesthood. This practice is theological and spiritual, not misogynic.

Pronouncing YHWH?

We’ve often heard that “Jehovah” is an amalgamation of the unpronounced Tetragrammaton (YHWH) and, when spoken, is pronounced “Lord” (Adonai). Did this start as a rabbinic practice? Would Jews of the first century, including Jesus and his followers, have avoided saying YHWH out loud? Can you explain this?

Jeffrey H. Tigay, Emeritus Ellis Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literatures, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania responds:

“Jehovah” is indeed a hybrid word, combining the Hebrew consonants of God’s name, yod-heh-vav-heh (YHWH, written JHVH in the Latin alphabet), and the vowels of His title Adonai, meaning “(my) Lord.”

Out of reverence for God’s name, Jews in the late Second Temple period, prior to the time of the rabbis, increasingly avoided pronouncing it; they used various substitute words instead. When they read Scripture aloud, wherever the name YHWH appeared, they said “Adonai” (somewhat like the way we say “pound” when we see the abbreviation “lb.,” from Latin libra). This is why most Bible translations render the Tetragrammaton as “(the) Lord”—they are really translating the substitute name.

The Biblical text was originally written only with consonants. In the Middle Ages, when diacritical marks were added to indicate vowels, the vowels of Adonai were added to the consonants YHWH as a reminder to say the substitute word. Some Christian students of Hebrew in Europe, unaware that the vowels represented a different word, took them to be the vowels of YHWH (JHVH in their alphabet) and therefore pronounced the latter as Jehovah (the use of “e” rather than “a” as the first vowel is for grammatical reasons). This became the common representation of the Tetragrammaton in English literature.

We can’t pinpoint exactly when Adonai came to be the preferred substitute, but it is likely that Jews of the first century, including Jesus and his followers, did use this or another substitute.

Correction

In “A Jewel from the Crown” (Exhibit Watch, BAR 38:05), the featured fragment of the Aleppo Codex contains text from Exodus 8 (not Deuteronomy as stated in the column). We thank Adolfo Roitman, director of the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, who brought this error to our attention.

First Person