Todd Bolen, Author at BiblePlaces.com

Weekend Roundup

Did the synagogue save Judaism? Paul V. M. Flesher answers the question in a new essay at the Bible and Interpretation, observing that “Judaism is the only Mediterranean religion that was practiced in 50 BC that still flourished in 500 AD.” He also addresses the “two-hundred-year gap” when there were allegedly no synagogues in the Holy Land.

NUMIDAT is a new one-of-a-kind online database of ancient coins, containing nearly 90,000 records.

Wayne Stiles hears echoes of Rosh Hashana in the ruins of the Temple Mount. Yoni Cohen recommends a six-hour hike in the Negev.

Now that 1,200 mines have been cleared, excavations have begun at ancient Carchemish. The team is comprised of 25 Italian and Turkish archaeologists who hope to transform the site into an archaeology park. One official eager for tourists said, “I hope [the excavation] does not take very long.” (Background and photos here and here.)

Leen Ritmeyer notes upcoming lectures at the Palestine Exploration Fund in London.

The Preserving Bible Times Collection (5 vols) for Logos Bible Software quickly received the minimum number of orders and is now under development. The discount is valid until the collection ships.

The Israel Museum is selling some of its artwork.

If you are looking for results for an excavation in Israel, particularly of a smaller site, the search page for Hadashot Arkheologiyot is the place to start. The content is all free.

ASOR has a roundup of stories in the broader world of archaeology.

I thought that the photo below was hilarious. If you’ve always wondered what that combustible city of Nablus looks like, you can find the answer in William A. Simmons, Peoples of the New Testament World (Hendrickson, 2008). (To see what they cropped out of the photo, compare it with this one.)

HT: Benj Foreman

“The city of Nablus”

Tagged Jerusalem, Lectures, Resources, Turkey, Weekend Roundup

How To Discover Boundary Inscriptions

The discovery of a Sabbath boundary marker in the Galilee several months ago makes one wonder just how many more have been preserved. Surely this was not the only one, either for this village or for other villages. Inscriptions in the rock like the Sabbath one were made at least twelve times around the city of Gezer.

BibleWalks made the initial discovery and now they are encouraging others to join in the hunt. To assist in this endeavor, they have created several maps that show the Sabbath marker in relation to two ancient sites. Roads are then drawn out in each direction and the intrepid adventurer can explore these routes to discover the next inscription. As BibleWalks notes, when hiking the hills of Galilee, the joy is not only in reaching the destination but in the journey itself. You can get all of the details here.

Tagged Challenge, Galilee, Opportunities

Free: Ashkelon Excavation Reports

Volumes 1 and 2 of the Ashkelon Reports are now available for free download. From Dig Ashkelon:

As we continue our new discoveries, we are excited to be able to bring you a summary of our results from 1985-2004 in the form of two final report volumes: Ashkelon 1 and Ashkelon 2. These two volumes provide over 900 pages of information on the ancient city of Ashkelon and can be downloaded free of charge due to the generous sponsorship of the Leon Levy Foundation. For those scholars who need the printed volumes, please note that they are still for sale at Eisenbrauns. These volumes – both in their publication, and now in their free distribution – reaffirm our commitment to making the result of our excavation available to the widest possible audience, so that all can appreciate appreciate and learn from the wonders of the history of Ashkelon.

Elsewhere it is written:

Eventually, each volume in the series will be available for download making the excavation of Ashkelon one of the most accessible in the world.

I don’t have enough positive things to say. Ashkelon 1: Introduction and Overview (1985-2006) fills 700 pages and sells for $135. Ashkelon 2: Imported Pottery of the Roman and Late Roman Periods has 233 pages and sells for $45.

Ashkelon 3: The Seventh Century B.C. has 28 chapters, 800 full-color pages, and sells for $93. The third volume was published this year and is not currently available for download.

Under this model, libraries and institutions will purchase the book and help to cover publication costs. After several years the Leon Levy Foundation will provide the funding so that the digital file (pdf) is made available to researchers and students who otherwise might not be able to afford the purchase. There is much merit in this model and I would love to see other expeditions follow suit.

Ashkelon from northwest

Tagged Philistines, Resources

Five Dead Sea Scrolls Online in High Resolution

Google and the Israel Museum are beginning to fulfill their promise to make the Dead Sea Scrolls available online. The first installment includes five scrolls:

Great Isaiah Scroll
Community Rule Scroll
Commentary on Habakkuk Scroll
Temple Scroll
War Scroll

The Jerusalem Post explains that readers can search the Isaiah Scroll in English:

The Isaiah Scroll was also translated line by line, allowing viewers to search in regular search engines in English for specific phrases or verses in the scrolls. A verse-by-verse Chinese translation will be finished shortly, as Bible scholarship is extremely popular in China, said Israel museum officials.

The article also describes the digitization process:

Ardon Bar Hama, a freelance photographer and one of the world’s premier experts in photographing ancient texts for online viewing, used a $50,000 camera that exposed the scrolls to the light for 1/4,000th of a second. Ben Hama’s camera shoots at a resolution of 1,200 megapixels, in comparison, a good personal camera shoots at about 12 megapixels.
Google utilizes cloud computing to store to the giant images, allowing people to browse the scrolls from their cell phones. Users will also be able to highlight their favorite verses and post them to their Twitter or Facebook pages, or to comment on verses through the site in an international dialogue.

The full article is here or you may go directly to the scrolls at the Israel Museum website. Prepare to be impressed.

Tagged Dead Sea, Technology

Israel Returns 620 Artifacts to Jordan

From the AFP:

Jordan said on Monday Israel has returned 620 Early Bronze Age pottery items that were taken in the 1960s by a US archaeologist for research at a Jerusalem-based institute.
“Israel returned the items, including pots, plates and jars, in April. American archaeologist Paul W. Lapp borrowed them in the 1960s for study and research,” Fares Hmud, acting director of Jordan’s antiquities department, told the state-run Petra news agency.
“They were taken to the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, and because of the (1967 Six-Day War), Jordan could not take the items back at that time.”
Hmud said the antiquities will be displayed at a museum in the Jordan Valley.
Jordan has said it was still trying to restore from Israel books and manuscripts dating from the first century AD after being smuggled to Israel several years ago.
It is also demanding the return of the Dead Sea Scrolls, also known as the Qumran Manuscripts, which contain some of the earliest biblical texts. The oldest documents date back to the third century BC while the latest was written in 70 AD.

Another article adds that the artifacts were discovered at Bab al-Thira’a. Though the articles do not say, it seems likely that the failure to return the objects was related to the archaeologist’s death in 1970. Paul Lapp died in a drowning accident at the age of 39, leaving behind a wife and five kids (BA 33: 60-62, via jstor).

HT: Daniel Wright

Tagged Jordan

Weekend Roundup

Corrections and Updates to “Identifying Biblical Persons in Northwest Semitic Inscriptions of 1200-539 B.C.E.”

This article updates the cutoff point for the inscriptions treated in the book mentioned in the title, which was mid-2002, to July 31, 2008. It evaluates 32 proposed identifications (IDs) of biblical persons in ancient Near Eastern inscriptions of 1200-539 B.C.E. All 32 IDs or non-IDs are listed and indexed at the end.

Shmuel Browns explains the significance of Khirbet Qeiyafa and concludes with a report of Israel Finkelstein’s paper on the Large Stone Structure and the Stepped Stone Structure in the City of David. He dates the SSS to both the Iron Age and the Hellenistic period.

An ancient shipyard near Rome is being excavated.

Dan Brown and the Grail That Never Was. Paleobabble posts a link to a scholarly article that is “a succinct, readable dismantling of Brown’s bogus history.”

Antioch on the Orontes was a significant city in the early church. Today known as Hatay, the city’s museum boasts some impressive mosaics and other finds. But most is in storage until a new museum is built.

The new museum is to have the capacity to host 800 people at a time and 10,700 square meters of exhibition space.
Visitors who come to the Hatay museum can see around 906 square meters of mosaics at this point, though around 300 square meters are still in the museum’s warehouse due to space shortages. In fact, the museum’s total holdings include 35,433 pieces, but only 1,425 of these are on display due to serious space problems.
With pieces from the Hittite, Hellenic, Byzantine and Roman eras on display, the Hatay Archeologicy Museum was always known as the second most significant mosaic museum in the world, following Tunisia’s Bardo Museum. That is, until last week, when the Gaziantep Zeugma Mosaic Museum opened, and the Hatay Archeologicy Museum dropped to third place for mosaics.

I’m surprised the Medeba Museum in Jordan is not ranked in the top three.

HT: Jack Sasson

Nude fishermen mosaic in Antioch (Hatay) Archaeological Museum

Tagged Italy, Jerusalem, Museums, Shephelah, Turkey