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I am delighted to announce the publication of my new edited volume, The Gift in Antiquity, published by Wiley-Blackwell.  The official description:

“You shall not bring the fee of a whore or the pay of a dog into the house of the Lord your God in fulfillment of an vow, for both are abhorrent to the Lord your God,” the Bible declares (Deuteronomy 23:19; translation NJPS).   This cryptic verse, like many such other biblical commands, raises a large number of exegetical problems.  How does one define a “whore” and, more problematically, “the pay of a dog”?  What is the situation that the verse envisions?  What precisely is abhorrent to the Lord, and why?

Leaving aside here the clause “the pay of a dog,” one traditional way to understand this is to envision a situation in which a prostitute vows to give something to God.  Perhaps she does this because she feels that God has shown favor to her (e.g., healed her or her children from an illness; helped her business flourish); perhaps just because she wants to give.  God, though, will not accept such a gift because it the means by which it was acquired were “abhorrent.”

This interpretation is certainly not impossible, but it is also not without its difficulties.  There are many ways to acquire money that one would think that God would find “abhorrent.”  Why is this particular act singled out?

An alternative scenario, though, is suggested by a passage in Herodotus.  In it, Herodotus discusses the gift of a prostitute, Rhodopis, to a temple:

For Rhodopis desired to leave a memorial of herself in Greece, making an offering such as nobody else had thought of and placed in a temple…. With a tenth of her money she had made many iron roasting-spits, as many as the tithe would provide, and sent them to Delphi; and they are still here now, piled up behind the altar that the Chians dedicated.  (2.135)

The problem suggested in this passage is not the way that the prostitute acquired her money, but the way that she used her money to “clean” her reputation by giving a gift (usually made as a fulfillment of a vow) to the temple.  This, then, is what may also be behind Deuteronomy 23:19: what is abhorrent is not the money itself but the use of the money to create a permanent  “memorial” to a prostitute within the Jerusalem temple.

In antiquity, as today, money could buy respectability.

Yesterday and today Israeli news has been abuzz with a story that dare not speak its name.  In 2010 a mysterious prisoner committed suicide in an Israeli prison.  The Australian press is reporting that this prisoner was actually an Australian citizen who moved to Israel and was involved in ways unspecified with the Mossad before being detained and “disappeared.”  The circumstances of his detention and death remain murky, as does the reasoning behind the Israeli government’s insistence that Israeli news outlets do not actually report on this affair, although it is now all over the world press.

Quite incidentally, I stumbled this morning on a much older spy case.  In 1963, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that an Egyptian spy named Kabarik Jacobian had been arrested in Israel.  JTA reported only the bare outline of the story, in which Jacobian was given a cover identity as a Jew and then joined the Israeli army, in which he served briefly.  It is unclear if he actually harmed Israeli security.

Whatever happened to Jacobian?  Here, the internet trail runs dry – I have not looked particularly hard, but I have been unable to find any mention of him apart from this brief report.  If anybody has any ideas how I might learn more about Jacobian, please let me know!

P.S.  After posting this I received this link from a friend, for those who read Hebrew.  It would still be interesting to know what happened to him after he returned to Egypt.

The Bible is an incoherent document.

This is not news.  It was noticed long ago and has spawned some two centuries of biblical criticism that has focused on answering the very simple question of how the biblical texts came to be incoherent – that is, if we reject the religious assumption that the biblical text is in fact perfect and that all seeming problems can be solved with creative interpretation, how do we account for the many contradictions, tensions, and repetitions in even short narrative passages?

Biblical scholars have proposed several different models for explaining how the biblical texts reached their present, sometimes peculiar, form, but I think that four explanations are particularly popular:

1. Interpolation.  A scribe in antiquity, reading a scroll with the text, makes a marginal note on the side.  The note might reflect his knowledge of a similar story but with some different details or might be his own suggestion.  The next scribe, though, when copying the text over, simply incorporated these marginal notes into the new copy.
2. Rewriting.  Some sections of the Bible clearly rewrite other sections.  The author (or authors) of 1 and 2 Chronicles, for example, simply rewrote earlier historical books in order to emphasize what he/they found important.
3. Additions.  Scribes would add blocks of material – sometimes just words, verses, or whole sections – because something about the original text bothered the scribe.  Sometimes these additions clarified the text, at other times they dramatically changed its message.
4. The Documentary Hypothesis.  This is what most well-known fruit of biblical criticism.  According to this model, scribes had different sources that they wove together into a single semi-coherent narrative.

Rationally, I understand how scholars have arrived at each of these explanations.  They often offer a nice and elegant solution to problems in specific passages. But when I stand back to consider the assumptions behind these explanations, I am left somewhat puzzled.

If we take the perspective of the scribe, I understand (1) and (2).  We have many documented cases through the Middle Ages of (1) occurring in texts, and there is little reason to think that in the biblical period something similar didn’t happen on occasion with these texts.  (2) makes the most sense: if I am confronted with a semi-coherent text, it would be easier to simply rewrite it than to edit it heavily.

But what about (3) and (4)?  The assumption that seems to be behind them both is that the scribe thinks that the base text in front of him is considered so holy or sacred that he can’t actually change it or delete anything from it.  He can only add to it.  Now think about this for a second – how would this work?  Would the same people whom I, as a scribe, are afraid of annoying by deleting or changing pieces of their text not also be annoyed if I inserted passages that might change the basic meaning of the text?  Do I think that nobody is going to catch the problems that I just created?

I don’t have an answer to this.  Explanations (1) and (2) might account for some of the problems in the biblical text, but not all.  (3) and (4) don’t fully work for me, but I don’t have any better explanation to offer.  If you do, please let me know.

As is well-known, the Jews of Palestine largely refrained from using figural art from around the 2nd century BCE (or a bit earlier) to the third or fourth century CE, including the creation of statues.  There were, of course, exceptions to this general phenomenon – some figures show up in grave graffiti and on some municipal coins from cities like Sepphoris, that had a strong Jewish population – but when seen against the archaeological record of the Greek and Roman worlds the absence is striking.  Equally striking is the virtual explosion of such art beginning in the third and fourth centuries CE.  While we still lack identifiably “Jewish” statues, representations of figures begin appearing routinely on synagogue floors, among other places.  What happened?

The predominant scholarly explanation for the absence of such art in the earlier period is that Jews interpreted “the second commandment” strictly.  This, more or less, follows the explanation of the ancient Jewish historian Josephus.  Yet in a recent essay, Jason Ehrenkrook suggested that Josephus may have had ulterior motives for offering this explanation: it makes it easier to convince his Roman patrons that the Jews refused to erect statues of the Roman emperors due to religious rather than political scruples.

At the other end, scholars have suggested that the explosion of such art in the third century is due to a combination of (1) influence from non-Jewish art and (2) a deliberate reinterpretation of the second commandment or reinterpretation of the art so that it is not covered by this commandment.  There are unquestionable parallels between Jewish and Christian (and Roman) art at this time, but that does not really explain why it began when it did.  There is also some rabbinic evidence for (2), but it is rather thin and in any case probably was not of much concern to the actual patrons of this artwork.

The question of why Jews avoided figural art for centuries and then took it up with a passion has, undoubtedly, a complex answer. What I would like simply to suggest here, though, is an angle that I am not sure has been sufficiently appreciated.

In an earlier post, I suggested that Jewish knowledge of the Bible through the first century CE may have been far less comprehensive than we sometimes think.  It expands, certainly in the Galilee, beginning in the second century CE.  This might, I think, help us to understand the changing art.

In antiquity, almost all art was based on myths.  If the art – whether from the ancient Near East or the Greek or Roman worlds – did not actually representat such myths, it modeled contemporary scenes on them (e.g., an athlete or monarch portrayed as a mythic hero).

The Jews, though, had no divine or semi-divine figures to represent and, just as importantly, most did not really have easy access to or know the myths that could be represented.  Later, as knowledge of the Bible spread, so did the art, which was almost entirely modeled on biblical stories such as the sacrifice of Isaac and the Exodus from Egypt.  The increased knowledge of the Bible not only increased access to these myths, but also helped to authorize them for use.  It was less the second commandment per se that stopped Jews from figural representation before then than an inability to frame a Jewish myth that would be appropriate for artistic representation.  The same, incidentally, applies to Christian art, which also begins to develop around the third century as their sacred texts begin to circulate more widely.

Just an idea.