Yaakov ben Aharon, Samaritan High Priest (1896-1916), with a Samaritan Pentateuch | Part of a stereograph series from Views of Palestine (1905) | Image source
On AJR
Dissertation Spotlight: Mari Jørstad, The Life of the World: The Vitality and Personhood of Non-Animal Nature in the Hebrew Bible (Duke, 2016)
Jørstad: “I argue that the biblical writers lived in a world populated with a wide variety of “persons,” only some of whom are human. These include cloud persons, river persons, mountain persons, and soil persons; attention to such non-human persons profoundly influenced how biblical writers imagined and narrated human interactions with the world. History here is not a human enterprise, but a cooperative venture between humans, their landscapes, and God.”
PSCO report: Cam Grey on movement, meshworks, and the sacred landscapes of Germanus
Chalmers: “In hagiographical literature, the sensing bodies of holy people link intangible divine realities with the visible world. For this reason, the veneration of saints and their bodies has been one of the focal points of scholarly interest in late antiquity. But, as Cam Grey argued, when we conceive of ancient people moving through landscapes as felt, experienced, and active, we can approach understanding how late antique authors wrote saints’ bodies from a road less travelled.”
Articles and News
The New Books network publishes their fantastic interview with Mira Wasserman about animality, new materialism, and Talmud.
On Samaritans, theft, stolen manuscripts, and the hunt for Pentateuchs.
Eve Feinstein compares sexual prohibitions in the Bible and its Ancient Near Eastern contexts.
Terrific blog piece on the University of Wisconsin-Madison project to collate and digitize Palmyrene Aramaic inscriptions.
Stunning photographs of the monumental arch at Palmyra.
Penn Museum opens its brand new Middle East galleries.
Continued Museum of the Bible controversy, and the return of smuggled artifacts to Iraq.
Eidolon launches the first in a new set of projects, a curated list of articles about Virgil.
A guide to Carolingian genealogies by Sarah Greer.
The time between Passover & Shavuot is called the Counting of the Omer. Pictured is a calendar used for measuring this time, tallying the days between the Exodus from Egypt & the giving of the Torah; it is housed in the @magnes. #LagBOmer #TBT
— Katz Center (@katzcenterupenn) 3 May 2018
(https://t.co/ccM069R9lc) pic.twitter.com/fklp5TF50i
Behold the Velociraptor of St John #medievaltwitter #manuscripts
— Mateusz Fafinski (@Calthalas) 2 May 2018
HB VII 4, f131r pic.twitter.com/XIV9kyBCLT
Multispectral imaging of tiny, previously ignored Dead Sea Scroll fragments reveals new words, and in one case may point to a previously unknown manuscript.https://t.co/bBX95q3KD5
— Michael Press (@MichaelDPress) 2 May 2018