National Geographic has posted its list of the Top Ten Archaeology Finds of 2009. None of them are directly related to the Bible, but readers with a wider interest will enjoy the summary. If time permits next week, I’ll try to come up with a list of top finds related to the biblical world from 2009. If you see a similar list elsewhere, note it in the comments here or send me an email.
Joe Lauer has sent along notice of this conference which will be held in Tel Aviv on December 24, with lectures in Hebrew.
The Ingeborg Rennert Center The Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology The Faculty of Jewish Studies Bar-Ilan University
Invite you to
The 15th Annual Conference of
The Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies
“NEW STUDIES ON JERUSALEM”
8:20 gathering
8:45 opening remarks:
Prof. Joshua Schwartz, Director of the Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies
Prof. Avraham Faust & Dr. Eyal Baruch, conference organizers
Session 1 – 9:00-10:55
Chair: Eyal Baruch
09:00 Ronny Reich & Eli Shukron- Channel II in the City of David, Jerusalem: Technical Details, Date and Function
09:20 Avraham Faust- King David’s Palace, a Hellenistic Structure or a Jebusite Fort: A Reexamination of the Large Stone Structure Unearthed by Eilat Mazar in the City of David
09:40 Moshe Garsiel- The Book of Samuel: Compilation Stages and Historical Value for Describing David’s Kingdom and His Capital in Jerusalem
10:05 Ehud Netzer- An opus reticulatum Structure, West of the Old City, Jerusalem
10:25 Ram Bouchnick, Omri Larnow, Guy Bar-Oz & Ronny Reich- Jerusalem Fish Menu from
the Late Second Temple Period
10:45 Discussion
10:55 Break
Session 2 – 11:20-13:10
Chair: Joshua Schwartz
11:20 Michael Ben-Ari- Simchat Beit Sho’eva – The Origins of the Custom.
11:40 Varda Sussman- Shaving/paring of Herodian Oil Lamps
12:00 Ze’ev H. Erlich (Jabo) – What is the ‘Kotel ha-Katan?’
12:20 Amos Kloner- The Damascus Gate
12:40 Yoav Farhi & Oded Lifshitz– A Unique Bulla from the Ramat Rahel Excavations Bearing the Name of Hadrian
13:00 Discussion
13:10 Lunch Break
Session 3 – 14:20-16:30
Chair: Josef Drory
14:20 Yehoshua Peleg- Were the Temple Mount Gates Reconstructed in the Second Century CE?
14:40 Gabriel Barkay and Zachi Zweig- A Roman Period Centaur Relief from the Temple Mount
15:00 Perez Reuven- A Decorated Beam from the Roman Period in the Temple Mount
15:20 Bat-Sheva Garsiel- The Status of Jerusalem in Early Islamic Theological Writings
15:40 Michael Ehrlich- The Southern Quarters of Jerusalem during the Medieval Period: A Multi-
Periodical Overview
16:00 Oded Shay- The Contribution Made by the Jerusalem-based Monk Father Antonin, to Jewish
Studies and to the Research of the Material Culture of Palestine in the Final Years of the Ottoman
period
16:20 Discussion
16:30 Break
Session 4 – 17:00-18:30
Chair: Boaz Zissu
17:00 Amos Frumkin & Boaz Lengford- The Research of a Karstic Cave Used for Refuge in the
Jerusalem Hills
17:20 Boaz Zissu & Roi Porat- A Hoard of Coins and Other Finds from the Bar-Kokhba Period,
Recently Discovered in a Refuge Cave in the Jerusalem Hills
17:40 Guy Stiebel– “On the Edge” – Military Equipment from a Refuge Cave in the Jerusalem Hills
18:00 Hanan Eshel- New Discoveries from a Refuge Cave in the Jerusalem Hills, and their
Contribution to the Study of the Bar-Kokhba War
18:20 Discussion
The conference proceedings (app. 300 pp. including 17 articles in Hebrew, with English abstracts)
will be on sale during the conference
For additional information, please contact the Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies (see
email address at bottom of this page) or Avi Faust (email address here).
Previous conference proceedings are available for purchase here.
The headlines on the web this morning are a little more sensational:
- Burial cloth found in Jerusalem cave casts doubt on authenticity of Turin Shroud (Daily Mail)
- Jerusalem tomb discovery casts further doubt on Turin Shroud (Telegraph)
- Jesus-era leper sheds light on Turin shroud mystery (Haaretz)
- Remains in tomb near Old City show first known case of leprosy (JPost)
- ‘Jesus-era’ burial shroud found (BBC)
The tomb was found nearly a decade ago, and all of the sensational results have been known for years. Two of the excavators, Gibson and Tabor, have both written extensively on this discovery in books they have published.
What is new is the publication of an article in the US Public Library of Science Journal, with the finding that this was evidence of the first human known to have leprosy. That’s good, but it’s not news. Maybe the news is buried in the details, and the publication of this article provides an opportunity to review an important discovery. That’s fine, but it should be noted that news outlets lead you to believe that there are more discoveries than they actually are because they report the same items time after time, particularly during the Christmas and Easter seasons.
If you read only one article, I’d suggest the one in the Jerusalem Post. But the best photos are in the Daily Mail. Here are the important facts:
- A man was buried in this tomb between AD 1 and 50.
- The rock-hewn tomb was located on the south side of the Hinnom Valley, in a cemetery used by the wealthy.
- The man was wrapped in a burial shroud with a different weave from that of the Shroud of Turin.
- The deceased suffered from tuberculosis and leprosy. (Apparently even the rich got sick.)
- A significant portion of the dead man’s hair was recovered and analyzed (it was clean, short, and lice-free).
- The man did not receive a secondary burial in an ossuary, as was typical at the time.
Here’s an important statement in the JPost article:
Based on the assumption that this is representative of a typical burial shroud widely used at the time of Jesus, the researchers conclude that the Turin Shroud did not originate from Jesus-era Jerusalem.
That gives you the basis for the researchers’ conclusion that the Turin Shroud is fake. As long as there was only one shroud maker in town in the first century, we can be absolutely sure that the Turin Shroud is from the medieval period. (I have no interest in or knowledge about the Shroud, but I do care about assumptions necessary for conclusions. The conclusions are in the headlines; the assumptions are always buried if not omitted.)
You can read the rest in the articles linked to above. The books that I alluded to by the archaeologists are these:
- Shimon Gibson, The Final Days of Jesus: The Archaeological Evidence
- James Tabor, The Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity
UPDATE (12/17): James Davila at Paleojudaica responds to the Jerusalem Post statement quoted above:
That’s not quite what it says in the Daily Mail article quoted in my post yesterday. The claim there is that “[i]t was made with a simple two-way weave – not the twill weave used on the Turin Shroud, which textile experts say was introduced more than 1,000 years after Christ lived.” That is a more general claim that ought to be verifiable or falsifiable based on the reasonably ample surviving textile evidence from antiquity. If it is true that this type of weave is only attested much later, that would severely weaken any case for the genuineness of the Shroud of Turin. Are there specialists in first-century textiles out there who would like to speak up?
With last week’s release of the delightful volume Traditional Life and Customs, I am planning to feature a number of photographs from that collection here in the coming weeks. With yesterday’s post on Jaffa Gate, I thought I’d follow it up with a photo taken here from the early 1900s. This was during a time when traffic flowed freely in both directions.
The tins were used for petrol, and obviously, they are empty here. If you’re going through a tough patch at work today, you might think of this guy and be thankful that you don’t have his job.
The photo is taken from the Traditional Life and Customs volume of The American Colony and Eric Matson Collection (Library of Congress, LC-matpc-05929).
- Tagged American Colony Photos
The Jaffa Gate area is set to be the focus of extensive renovations over the next year and a half. This may be of particular interest to those who are planning to visit Jerusalem in 2010 or 2011. According to a flyer distributed by the municipality, the project includes:
- Restoring infrastructure
- Improving pedestrian access
- Installing “street furniture”
- Restoring facades of buildings in the square inside Jaffa Gate
They predict that visitors will be inconvenienced for 18 months, with work proceeding “24 hours a day.” In particular, the following changes will be made:
- Vehicular traffic will be one-way from Jaffa Gate to Zion Gate
- Loading and unloading access will be restricted
- Pedestrian traffic and “access to shops will not be impeded in any way”
Work has already begun and Jerusalem resident Craig Dunning has visited the area and sends some photographs with permission to post them here. He notes that until today work has primarily consisted of the removal of paving stones, and traffic continues to move in both directions.
Work begins in front of Tourist Information Office
Enclosed area next to covered suq
Removal of paving stones next to taxi stand; photo taken this afternoon
Hanukkah begins today. You can read all about it in this month’s issue of Jewish Magazine.
JTA has an article on how the Maccabees would be viewed in today’s world. “My guess is that most liberal Jews today wouldn’t necessarily get along with the Maccabees if they showed up again,” says Rabbi Jill Jacob.
Hanukkah is also the occasion for the Jerusalem Post to discuss in two articles the Heliodorus Stele and three additional fragments discovered earlier this year (previously mentioned here).
Israeli archaeologists have also found evidence recently that the Hasmoneans controlled territory south of the biblical Negev (near modern Sede Boqer). The IAA has a few high-resolution images here. Apparently Josephus was right, after all.
Aren Maeir has posted a stratigraphic chart from Gath in PowerPoint format.
This article brought tears to my eyes, especially when I read about the pottery that has been found from the “Persians, Umayyad, Crusaders, Mukluks and Ottomans.” The Mukluks—oh, I love that! I just wish I had a lecture to give now on the Mukluks. (The rest of the co-authored article is likewise
unreliable.)
HT: Joe Lauer
- Tagged Discoveries, Negev, Shephelah, Weekend Roundup