Yosef Garfinkel’s team excavated a large shard with writing on it dated to ca. 1000 BCE. The ostracon reportedly contains the words “judge,” “slave,” and “king.” This is important for not only understanding the evolution of alphabetic writing, but also should shed light on the history of early Israel. This was a time that society transfered from a tribal period of judges to a monarchy, the time of state formation under kings such as David.
Hello darlings. There has been quite a bit of chatter recently about Sarah Palin in Southern Baptist circles. Many have argued that the United States cannot have a woman leader, citing verses such as 1 Timothy 2:12 “I permit no woman to teach or have authority over a man,” or Ephesians 5:22 “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.” Recently the Southern Baptist Convention ruled that while a woman can’t lead a house or a church, she can in fact lead a nation.
Ernie Chambers,a state Senator from my home state of Nebraska, has been trying for the past year to sue God for “death, destruction, and terrorization.” He is trying to make the point that anyone can sue anyone. A US judge just threw out the case, ruling that because God has no address, legal papers can’t be served. Chambers unsuccessfully argued that God is omniscient and would therefore know about the papers being served.
King Tut returns to his tomb and is pretty upset that all of his stuff, including his favorite pendant with a monkey and a beetle on it, is all missing. Check this out in the Onion.
Well, remember way back when in ancient Thebes, when Oedipus solved the riddle of the Sphinx and then did it with his mom and then poked his eyes out? It turns out recently that the Sphinx has gotten its eyes pecked out by some rogue pigeons. No word on the mama.
The Vatican recently ruled that the name Yahweh can’t be “used or pronounced” in Catholic Masses. The Vatican’s document explains that the name Yahweh was “held to be unpronounceable and hence was replaced during the reading of sacred Scripture by means of the use of an alternate name: ‘Adonai,’ which means ‘Lord.’” The letter also states: “Avoiding pronouncing the Tetragrammaton of the name of God on the part of the church has therefore its own grounds. Apart from a motive of a purely philological order, there is also that of remaining faithful to the church’s tradition, from the beginning, that the sacred Tetragrammaton was never pronounced in the Christian context nor translated into any of the languages into which the Bible was translated.”
But the dudes at the Vatican must realize that Moses and all the Iron Age Israelites said “Yahweh” all the time. They even named their kids after Yahweh.
A bulla, or seal impression, bearing the name of Gedalyahu ben Pashur was just found in Jerusalem. Gadalyahu was a minister of King Zedekiah, and is mentioned in Jeremiah 38:1-4.
There’s a new Dead Sea Scroll making the rounds in the news, but surprisingly darlings, it isn’t a scroll at all. Rather, it’s a stone. It’s a large tablet with two columns containing 87 lines of inked Hebrew, most likely from the Qumran vicinity, though we can’t be sure. Sadly, the find is out of context. It was “found” about 10 years ago and then an Israeli-Swiss collector bought it from a Jordanian antiquities dealer and kept it in his home in Zurich. What is remarkable for Bible scholars is that the text sheds light on the historical context of the New Testaments’ claims that Jesus died for three days and then was resurrected. The text, now known as “Gabriel’s Revelation,” is reported to be an apocalyptic message from the angel Gabriel. He announces to the “prince of princes” that he’ll die for three days and then live. The text was originally published about a year ago by Ada Yardeni and Binyamin Elitzur in a Hebrew Journal known as Cathedra. Another article by Israel Knohl is what appears to have attracted the press back to the text. Knohl published“‘By Three Days, Live’: Messiahs, Resurrection, and Ascent to Heaven in Hazon Gabriel” in the latest issue of The Journal of Religion. Knohl argues that this “Messiah” who dies and is resurrected might be Simon, a martyr mentioned in Josephus. We should keep in mind, darlings, that the 3 days of death motif also draws from Jonah spending 3 days in a big fish, as referenced Matthew 12:40.
