Using Inscriptions from the Antiquities Market: Polarized Positions and Pragmatic Proposals

Dr Christopher Rollston writes:

Archaeological sites in the Middle East have been ransacked, pillaged, and plundered for many decades. The motivations of the actual pillaging are normally economic: the pursuit of marketable artifacts. That is, the pillagers wish to find objects that can be sold to collectors. Of course, the motivations of the collectors who purchase these pillaged antiquities range from the desire to possess a piece of ancient history to having putative proof for a cherished belief. Among the artifacts most prized by collectors are ancient inscriptions.

Think briefly about scientific archaeological excavations. Complete pots and potsherds are carefully collected, catalogued, documented, and analyzed, while broken pots are often restored. Organic materials are meticulously bagged and tagged and sent to be carbon dated. Animal bones and seeds are studied to learn about animal husbandry, agriculture, and ancient diets. Grinding stones, needles, and pins are photographed and studied carefully to shed light on aspects of daily life. Metal objects are sent to laboratories for scientific analyses. Stone tools such as arrowheads are sent to specialists for analysis. And inscriptions are sent to epigraphers to be read and analyzed. The result is that knowledge is gained about ancient languages and dialects, and about ancient social structures, and religious practices and ideas. The final result is that scientific excavations yield an enormous amount of information about the ebb and flow of ancient lives.

In contrast, those pillaging sites for marketable objects do not have the resources, time, desire, or the training to do any of these things. This is despite the fact many looters have experience working on excavations, sometimes as skilled laborers. Rather, looters rifle through sites and collect nothing except the most marketable of objects. The rest are disturbed, broken, and ignored. After all, the primary goal of the pillager is finding something that will sell, something that will satisfy the appetite of the black market in pillaged antiquities. What then about inscriptions found by looters?

Read on at the ASOR Blog.

 

Christopher Rollston – Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel

Christopher Rollston

From here:

One of the world’s leading experts on ancient writing in the Middle East, Christopher Rollston joins us to talk about his new book, Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel, and what it has to say about the Bible and the biblical world.

Give it a listen or download in mp3 here.

 

Belief in the Resurrection in Ancient Context

Dr Christopher Rollston:

BELIEF IN THE RESURRECTION IN ANCIENT CONTEXT: LATE SECOND TEMPLE JUDAISM, EARLY POST-BIBLICAL JUDAISM, AND EARLY CHRISTIANITY

There is often a great deal of misunderstanding about this subject generally.  That is, people who do not work in ancient history or ancient religion often assume that a belief in a resurrection was some sort of distinctively Christian belief.  That, however, is a serious misconception.  The fact of the matter is that within various segments of Late Second Temple Judaism, as well as within Early Post-Biblical Judaism, the notion of a resurrection was warmly embraced by many.  The locus classicus in the Hebrew Bible is arguably the following text from the mid-2nd century BCE: “Many of those sleeping in the dust of the earth shall awaken, some to everlasting life and some to everlasting peril” (Dan 12:2; notice here that the correlative of “damnation” or “hell” is also present in some fashion, of course).  Within the Old Testament Apocrypha, the notion of a resurrection is embraced at times as well, with the narrative about the martyrdom of “the mother and her seven sons” being a fine exemplar of this.  Thus, according to the narrative, one of the sons said during the torture that preceded his death: “the King of the universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life, because we have died for his laws” (2 Macc 7:9).  Similarly, the mother herself says within the narrative, as an exhortation to her martyred sons: “the Creator of the world…will in his mercy give life and breath back to you again” (2 Macc 7:23).  2 Maccabees arguably hails from the first half of the 1st century BCE.   Regarding the dead, the Wisdom of Solomon also affirms that the dead “seemed to have died,” but “they are at peace,” and “their hope is full of immortality,” and they will ultimately “shine forth” and “will govern nations and ruler over peoples” (Wisdom 3:2-8 passim, with the Greek future tense being used here).  The Wisdom of Solomon arguably hails from the second half of the 1st century BCE.  Significantly, all of these texts antedate the rise of Christianity and they all affirm a belief in a resurrection.  In short, many Jewish people believed in a resurrection long before Christianity came along.  To be sure, a belief in a resurrection was not universally accepted by all Jewish people in the Second Temple period.  Some Jewish people did not believe in a resurrection.  For example, the traditionalist Ben Sira rejected the notion of eternal bliss for the righteous and eternal punishment for the wicked.  Thus, he wrote: “Who in the netherworld can glorify the Most High, in place of the living who offer their praise?  No more can the dead give praise than those who have never lived; they glorify the Lord who are alive and well” (Sir 17:27-28).  In sum, although not all Jewish people of the Late Second Temple period accepted the notion of a resurrection, there are texts from this period that demonstrate that a fair number did…

Furthermore, the Jewish historian Josephus (lived ca. 37-100 CE) also discusses the subject of the perishability and imperishability of the soul, with regard to some of the major strands of Judaism during the first century of the Common Era…

Read on here.

And from the conclusion:

Thus, in the final analysis, the cumulative evidence is decisive: There is nothing distinctively “Christian” about a belief in a resurrection.  Rather, some segments of Late Second Temple and Early Post-Biblical Judaism believed in a resurrection and some segments did not.  Christianity, as an heir to apocalyptic branches of Judaism, was quite consistent in always affirming a belief in a resurrection, but the fact remains that belief in a resurrection is well attested prior to the rise of Christianity, and this belief also persists in certain segments of Judaism after the rise of Christianity.

Christopher Rollston

 

The Extra Letter on the Tel Dan Inscription

Writes George Athas:

I recently returned home from the annual Society of Biblical Literature conference in San Francisco. While there I heard a very interesting paper by Andrew Knapp (Johns Hopkins University), in which he gave a new take on part of the text of the Tel Dan Inscription. This Old Aramaic inscription is perhaps best known for containing the phrase House of David (or something close to this). Knapp’s paper focused not on this phrase, but on another section of the inscription. He argued that the word קדם in line 4 of the inscription, which scholars usually translate by the adverb formerly, is actually a toponym, Qedem. He pointed to other sources in which there appears to be a place called Qedem in the northern Transjordan in the general vicinity of Damascus…

… This extra letter stands in addition to the other major flaws of the general consensus view of the inscription, such as the claim that Fragments B1 and B2 belong to the immediate left of Fragment A. This claim and the text reconstructed on the basis of this configuration is virtually physically impossible. Furthermore, the authorship  and dating of the inscription were pegged to Hazael in c.840 BC, but this was concluded before the find site at Tel Dan was fully excavated. Subsequent seasons of excavation at Tel Dan show that this is slightly too early for the relevant strata. In addition to this, it seems that the consensus view largely sidesteps the fact that Hazael was a known usurper of the Damascene throne. That is, his father was not the previous king of Damascus. In fact, the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III refers to Hazael as ‘the son of a nobody’, implying that he was not part of the previous ruling dynasty. This fact is further reflected by the biblical tradition that Hazael murdered his predecessor to take the throne (2 Kings 8.15). And yet the Tel Dan Inscription (at other points) refers to the author’s father as though they were the reigning monarch. The general consensus view of the inscription simply does not make sense. The much more likely candidate for authorship is Hazael’s son, Bar Hadad.

There are many other flaws in the general consensus view of the Tel Dan Inscription, which I won’t enumerate here…

Read the whole post here.

HT:  Dr Jim West