As reported in Science Daily, the University of Toronto led excavation of Tayinat in Turkey has uncovered a 10th/9th century BCE temple. It evidences cultural and political continuity going from the Late Bronze age to the Iron age, which undercuts the otherwise concensus view that this period was one of cultural collapse and chaos in the eastern Mediterranean region.
Excavation of the Tayinat temple
Marvin H. Pope, my Yale dissertation director and advisor, of blessed memory, is famous for his professional interest in Love and Death. Among other writings, it came to expression in his monumental commentary on the Song of Songs. In class he would often wax eloquent on the parallels between the Hindu goddess Kali, the one he called the black goddess, and the Ugaritic goddess Anat. Both disturbingly violent.
So I was delighted to find Pope surfacing in the very entertaining and erudite mystery by Laurie R. King, entitled Night Work: A Kate Martinelli Novel (Bantam, 2000). Kate is a detective with the San Francisco police. Both Kali and “the Pope” come up in the course of her investigation of a series of homicides of misogynists and wife abusers. It turns out they were perpetrated by devotees linked to a Kali cult. (more…)
An eighth century BCE stele from Zincirli in southeastern Turkey contains an inscription. It contains the line “and a ram for my soul that is in this stele.” The inscription was written in Phoenician, a West Semitic language akin to Hebrew and Aramaic.
Other coverage:
cnn.com has a news item about their top ten heroes of 2008. We have described the judges of the biblical book of Judges as tribal and community heroes. Have a look at this article and compare these modern heroes with the heroes of the biblical age. Are these the types of people you would identify as heroes? If not, who woiuld you choose?
I learned a new word today while cruising Wikipedia on Armageddon — the word “mondegreen“. It refers to a misheard and then often repeated word or phrase from a poem or song. The Wikipedia entry gives some examples, to which I would add “round John virgin, mother and child” from the Silent Night (we all know the associated joke) and “low in the gravy lay” from the Easter hymn. Check out more misheard lyrics here.
The Christian Science Monitor has a review of a couple books on plants in the Bible. The site also has some interesting discussion regarding whether Adam and Eve actually ate an apple….
ANSA reports that an obelisk, looted by Italian troops during World War II, was returned to Aksum amid great celebration. Aksum is the reputed home of the Queen of Sheba, cited in the Hebrew Bible as traveling to Jerusalem to honor the wisdom of Solomon.
Archaeologists have excavated a portion of the wall around Jerusalem at the time of the Second Temple. Check out the pictures of this dig and artifacts associated with it.
A Chicago Tribune article Sermons to tackle labor issues: Activist says Moses was original worker advocate describes a movement in churches, temples, and mosques to connect the Hebrew Bible to the labor movement and workers’ rights.
A group called Make Textbooks Affordable asserts that textbooks should be offered inexpensively online and should meet the criteria affordable, inexpensive, and easy to print. These are all very worthy goals and publishers are going to have to explore how to make it happen.