The Rabbinic Network, in italiano
My recent piece in Tablet on my work with Michael Sperling on the rabbinic network was just picked up by an Italian website. It also contains a short interview with me about the project.
The Rabbinic Citation Network
Some months ago I wrote about my work with Michael Sperling analyzing and graphing the rabbinic citation network in the Babylonian Talmud (see here). Our full academic paper on this remains forthcoming (although all of our data and code is now public – for more information see here), but in the interim I wrote a more accessible essay that discusses our work for Tablet Magazine. That piece can be found here.
Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine: Presentation
It’s been quite a year and for many completely prosaic reasons I have not kept up this blog as I should have. This is not to say that I have not been busy (even if, at time, languishing under the conditions of the year), although not in the kinds of scholarly activities that I had an easy time sharing. I will try to be better, especially in the approaching academic year, although I doubt anyone seriously missed my posting.
This year I’ve done very few public-facing activities (I am not a fan of Zoom). But one thing I did do was to make a presentation on my Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine project. It’s a kind of “state of the project” presentation. We are in the midst of designing a major overhaul of our interface in particular, so stay tuned! The entire SunoikisisDC series looks great, so I encourage you to investigate it for more good stuff.
Ben Sira and Wine
I recently published a commentary on the book of Ben Sira in the Jewish Annotated Apocrypha. As a result of that, I was invited by Rabbi Drew Kaplan to appear on his podcast series, “Jewish Drinking.” Before this appearance, I had never much thought about how Ben Sira’s approach to wine fit into a wider conversation about how different Jewish texts portray drinking. I thank Rabbi Kaplan for the opportunity to explore this topic with him.
Josephus’s Knowledge of Scripture
In my book, How the Bible Became Holy, I suggested that both Josephus and Paul should be seen in a similar light: Jews from Jerusalem who, like many in their class, were brought up with little knowledge of Hebrew or Scripture, and whose first real exposure to written Scripture was in Greek translation in the Diaspora. I have published a few preliminary studies on this, and not that long ago published the scholarly version for the argument about Paul. Now the scholarly article on Josephus, “Josephus’s Knowledge of Scripture,” has just appeared in the Journal of Ancient Judaism. The article can be accessed here, but requires either a fee or institutional access to Brill. Here, though, is the Abstract:
Scholars have long debated whether Josephus learned Scripture while he was in Jerusalem or only once he got to Rome. The question intersects with, and is hard to answer without, a more general assessment of language use and the education of the (priestly) elite in Jerusalem at that time. This paper argues that Josephus knew little Hebrew and never learned to read Scripture in the original; he was, in this respect, typical of the Jewish elite. His introduction to written Scripture was in its Greek translation, in Rome.