Encaustic wall painting from Sòlunto, Sicily | Currently held in the Museo archaeologico regionale di Palermo (Italy) | Image Source
On AJR
Book Note: Katharina E. Keim, Pirqei deRabbi Eliezer: Structure, Coherence, Intertextuality (Leiden: Brill, 2017)
Nadiv: “Pirqei deRabbi Eliezer (PRE) is a “thematic discourse” that is organized as a shadow to the Bible (from creation to Sinai) and is made up of an anthology of literary forms pieced together in a “lego-like” (p. 75) structure. These are the major conclusions of Katharina Keim’s study, a 204 page work, with excellent appendices, based on her Manchester dissertation of 2014. This is a project of literary classification, a study of PRE’s structure, themes, genre, sources, and relation to other texts (“intertextuality”), with the goal of defining the type of composition that PRE is in order to know how to best understand the work.”
Pedagogy with Jill Hicks-Keeton: “We solved racism!” and other miscalculations in the biblical studies classroom
Hicks-Keeton: “In order to think well about our world, to engage in meaningful intellectual exchange, and, well, to achieve basic biblical literacy, we all need conceptual space for the possibility of polyvalence. Making sameness out of difference is not a solution to racism, and making one’s own Bible (whatever Bible that may be) into ‘everyone’s Bible’—the Bible—is as serious a miscalculation as Greendale’s ‘human being.’”
Articles and News
Sarah Rose Sharp reviews the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology’s new exhibition of pigment and the ancient Mediterranean.
Online exhibition, organized by the Freer/Sackler galleries, provides superb resources and visuals for the Sogdians.
New Testament Review podcast tangles with the question of the persecution of early Christians.
Detailed outline of the nineteenth-century history of language of “western civ.”
Targum Neofiti now available as a resource at AlHaTorah.
Elisabeth Hollender at the Katz Center blog dives into the community history visible in the material manuscript of a medieval German Mahzor.
Special issue of the Journal of Ancient Judaism published: reorienting ancient Judaism beyond the Greco-Roman world [paywall].
At least one hundred Egyptian inscriptions, plus some stele and ostraca, found at ancient amethyst mining sites at Wadi El-Hudi.
If you are finishing a PhD in the areas of New Testament, Early/Late Antique/Early Byzantine Christianity, or Classics, please consider writing a Dissertation Spotlight for @ancientjew - OR if you would like to contribute as a book note author - be in touch! Feel free to DM me!
— Erin Galgay Walsh (@ErinCGW) 30 March 2019
You've heard of Garšūnī: Arabic written in Syriac script. But there are also manuscripts in which Syriac script is used to write Persian, Georgian or Armenian. On the latter, see Hidemi Takahashi (@UTokyo_News), 'Armenian Garshuni', Hugoye 17 (2014) @bethmardutho & @gorgiaspress pic.twitter.com/FbYwGkb9ZC
— Timothy B. Sailors (@tbsailors) 30 March 2019
Hot off the presses: our special issue of Journal of Ancient Judaism on "Reorienting Ancient Judaism: Syrian, Mesopotamian, and Persian Perspectives"! https://t.co/XPN03V5dDc @jae_heehan @Simcha_Gross pic.twitter.com/EgPdsZh09k
— Dr. Annette Yoshiko Reed (@AnnetteYReed) 31 March 2019