Giotto, Adoration of the Magi, c. 1306.

Both Luke and Matthew mention Jesus’ birth as occurring during Herod’s reign (Luke 1:5; Matthew 2:1). Josephus relates Herod’s death to a lunar eclipse. This is generally regarded as a reference to a lunar eclipse in 4 B.C. Therefore it is often said that Jesus was born in 4 B.C.

But physics professor John A. Cramer, in a letter to BAR, has pointed out that there was another lunar eclipse visible in Judea—in fact, two—in 1 B.C., which would place Herod’s death—and Jesus’ birth—at the turn of the era. Below, read letters published in the Q&C section of BAR debating the dates of Herod’s death, Jesus’ birth and to which lunar eclipse Josephus was referring.

When Was Jesus Born?

Q&C, BAR, July/August 2013

Let me add a footnote to Suzanne Singer’s report on the final journey of Herod the Great (Strata, BAR, March/April 2013): She gives the standard date of his death as 4 B.C. [Jesus’ birth is often dated to 4 B.C. based on the fact that both Luke and Matthew associate Jesus’ birth with Herod’s reign—Ed.] Readers may be interested to learn there is reason to reconsider the date of Herod’s death.

This date is based on Josephus’s remark in Antiquities 17.6.4 that there was a lunar eclipse shortly before Herod died. This is traditionally ascribed to the eclipse of March 13, 4 B.C.

Unfortunately, this eclipse was visible only very late that night in Judea and was additionally a minor and only partial eclipse.

There were no lunar eclipses visible in Judea thereafter until two occurred in the year 1 B.C. Of these two, the one on December 29, just two days before the change of eras, gets my vote since it was the one most likely to be seen and remembered. That then dates the death of Herod the Great into the first year of the current era, four years after the usual date.

Perhaps the much-maligned monk who calculated the change of era was not quite so far off as has been supposed.

John A. Cramer
Professor of Physics
Oglethorpe University
Atlanta, Georgia

FREE ebook: The First Christmas: The Story of Jesus’ Birth in History and Tradition. Download now.

Email(Required)

REQUEST FREE BOOK

When Was Jesus Born? When Did Herod Die?

Q&C, BAR, January/February 2014

Professor John A. Cramer argues that Herod the Great most likely died shortly after the lunar eclipse of December 29, 1 B.C., rather than that of March 13, 4 B.C., which, as Cramer points out, is the eclipse traditionally associated with Josephus’s description in Jewish Antiquities 17.6.4 (Queries & Comments, “When Was Jesus Born?” BAR, July/August 2013) and which is used as a basis to reckon Jesus’ birth shortly before 4 B.C. Professor Cramer’s argument was made in the 19th century by scholars such as Édouard Caspari and Florian Riess.

There are three principal reasons why the 4 B.C. date has prevailed over 1 B.C. These reasons were articulated by Emil Schürer in A History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ, also published in the 19th century. First, Josephus informs us that Herod died shortly before a Passover (Antiquities 17.9.3, The Jewish War 2.1.3), making a lunar eclipse in March (the time of the 4 B.C. eclipse) much more likely than one in December.

Second, Josephus writes that Herod reigned for 37 years from the time of his appointment in 40 B.C. and 34 years from his conquest of Jerusalem in 37 B.C. (Antiquities 17.8.1, War 1.33.8). Using so-called inclusive counting, this, too, places Herod’s death in 4 B.C.

Become a BAS All-Access Member Now!

Read Biblical Archaeology Review online, explore 50 years of BAR, watch videos, attend talks, and more

Third, we know that the reign over Samaria and Judea of Herod’s son and successor Archelaus began in 4 B.C., based on the fact that he was deposed by Caesar in A.U.C. (Anno Urbis Conditae [in the year the city was founded]) 759, or A.D. 6, in the tenth year of his reign (Dio Cassius, Roman History 55.27.6; Josephus, Antiquities 17.13.2). Counting backward his reign began in 4 B.C. In addition, from Herod the Great’s son and successor Herod Antipas, who ruled over Galilee until 39 B.C., who ordered the execution of John the Baptist (Mark 6:14–29) and who had a supporting role in Jesus’ trial (Luke 23:7–12), we have coins that make reference to the 43rd year of his rule, placing its beginning in 4 B.C. at the latest (see Morten Hørning Jensen, “Antipas—The Herod Jesus Knew,” BAR, September/October 2012).

Thus, Schürer concluded that “Herod died at Jericho in B.C. 4, unwept by those of his own house, and hated by all the people.”

Jeroen H.C. Tempelman
New York, New York

John A. Cramer responds:

Trying to date the death of Herod the Great is attended by considerable uncertainty, and I do not mean to claim I know the right answer. Mr. Tempelman does a good job of pointing out arguments in favor of a 4 B.C. date following the arguments advanced long ago by Emil Schürer. The difficulty is that we have a fair amount of information, but it is equivocal.

The key information comes, of course, from Josephus who brackets the death by “a fast” and the Passover. He says that on the night of the fast there was a lunar eclipse—the only eclipse mentioned in the entire corpus of his work. Correlation of Josephus with the Talmud and Mishnah indicate the fast was probably Yom Kippur. Yom Kippur occurs on the tenth day of the seventh month (mid-September to mid-October) and Passover on the 15th day of the first month (March or April) of the religious calendar. Josephus does not indicate when within that time interval the death occurred.

Only four lunar eclipses occurred in the likely time frame: September 15, 5 B.C., March 12–13, 4 B.C., January 10, 1 B.C. and December 29, 1 B.C. The first eclipse fits Yom Kippur, almost too early, but possible. It was a total eclipse that became noticeable several hours after sundown, but it is widely regarded as too early to fit other information on the date. The favorite 4 B.C. eclipse seems too far from Yom Kippur and much too close to Passover. This was a partial eclipse that commenced after midnight. It hardly seems a candidate for being remembered and noted by Josephus. The 1 B.C. dates require either that the fast was not Yom Kippur or that the calendar was rejiggered for some reason. The January 10 eclipse was total but commenced shortly before midnight on a winter night. Lastly, in the December 29 eclipse the moon rose at 53 percent eclipse and its most visible aspect was over by 6 p.m. It is the most likely of the four to have been noted and commented on.

None of the four candidates fits perfectly to all the requirements. I like the earliest and the latest of them as the most likely. The most often preferred candidate, the 4 B.C. eclipse, is, in my view, far and away the least likely one.

If Jesus was born in Bethlehem, why is he called a Nazorean and a Galilean throughout the New Testament? Learn more >>

A Different Fast

Q&C, BAR, May/June 2014

John Cramer responds to Mr. Tempelman’s letter to the editor (“Queries and Comments,” BAR, January/February 2014) that Herod’s death occurred between a “fast” and Passover. Mr. Cramer acknowledges that the fast of Yom Kippur fits the eclipse but doesn’t fit the time frame of occurring near Passover. There is, however, another fast that occurs exactly one month before Passover: the Fast of Esther! The day before Purim is a fast day commemorating Queen Esther’s command for all Jews to fast before she approached the king. Purim fell on March 12–13, 4 B.C. So there was an eclipse and a fast on March 12–13, 4 B.C., one month before Passover, which would fit Josephus’s statement bracketing Herod’s death by a fast and Passover.

Suzanne Nadaf
Brooklyn, New York

This suggestion seems plausible and, if I recall correctly, someone has already raised it. The consensus, if such exists, seems, however, to be that the fast really should be the fast of Yom Kippur, but resolving that issue requires expertise to which I make no claim. Too many possibilities and too little hard information probably leave the precise date forever open.

Become a BAS All-Access Member Now!

Read Biblical Archaeology Review online, explore 50 years of BAR, watch videos, attend talks, and more

When Did Herod Die? And When Was Jesus Born?

Q&C, BAR, September/October 2014

Regarding the date of the death of Herod the Great, the question of which lunar eclipse and which Jewish fast the historian Josephus was referring to must be considered in light of other data that Josephus reported. Professor John Cramer’s suggestion that an eclipse in 1 B.C.E. would place Herod’s death in that year, rather than the generally accepted 4 B.C.E., cannot be reconciled with other historical facts recorded by Josephus.

As is well known, Herod’s son Archelaus succeeded him as the ruler of Judea, as reported by Josephus (Antiquities 8:459). Josephus also recorded that Archelaus reigned over Judea and Samaria for ten years, and that in his tenth year, due to complaints against him from both Jews and Samaritans, he was deposed by Caesar Augustus and banished to Vienna (Antiquities 8:531). Quirinius, the legate or governor of Syria, was assigned by the emperor to travel to Jerusalem and liquidate the estate of Archelaus, as well as to conduct a registration of persons and property in Archelaus’s former realm. This occurred immediately after Archelaus was deposed and was specifically dated by Josephus to the 37th year after Caesar’s victory over Mark Anthony at Actium (Antiquities 9:23). The Battle of Actium is a well-known event in Roman history that took place in the Ionian Sea off the shore of Greece on September 2 of the year 31 B.C.E. Counting 37 years forward from 31 B.C.E. yields a date of 6 C.E. for the tenth year of Archelaus, at which time he was deposed and Quirinus came to Judea. And counting back ten years from that event yields a date of 4 B.C.E. for the year in which Herod died. (The beginning and ending years are both included in this count, since regnal years for both Augustus and the Herodians were so figured.)

These reports, and the chronology derived from them, provide compelling evidence for the generally accepted date of Herod’s death in the spring of 4 B.C.E., shortly after the lunar eclipse of March 13, regardless of the fact that eclipses also occurred in other years.

Jeffrey R. Chadwick
Jerusalem Center Professor of Archaeology and Near Eastern Studies
Brigham Young University
Provo, Utah

Read Lawrence Mykytiuk’s BAR article “Did Jesus Exist? Searching for Evidence Beyond the Bible” >>

There’s More Evidence from Josephus
Q&C, BAR, January/February 2015

In the letter to the editor in BAR, September/October 2014, Jeffrey Chadwick gives the argument for the death of Herod in 4 B.C. [used for determining the date of Jesus’ birth]. For over a century, this has been part of the standard reasoning for the 4 B.C. of Jesus’ birth. However, it does not come to grips with all of the data from Josephus. Elsewhere I have written about this. [An excerpt by Professor Steinmann can be read below.—Ed.]

One cannot simply and positively assert that a few short statements by Josephus about the lengths of reigns of his sons can be used to prove that Herod died in 4 B.C. Instead, one needs critically to sift through all of the evidence embedded in Josephus’s discussion as well as evidence external to Josephus to make a case for the year of Herod’s death.

Andrew Steinmann
Distinguished Professor of Theology and Hebrew
University Marshal
Concordia University Chicago
Chicago, Illinois

Originally Herod had named his son Antipater to be his heir and had groomed Antipater to take over upon his death. However, a little over two years before Herod’s death Antipater had his uncle, Herod’s younger brother Pheroras murdered. Pheroras had been tetrarch of Galilee under Herod. Antipater’s plot was discovered, and Archelaus was named Herod’s successor in place of Antipater. Seven months passed before Antipater, who was in Rome, was informed that he had been charged with murder. Late in the next year he would be placed on trial before Varus, governor of Syria. Eventually Herod received permission from Rome to execute Antipater. During his last year Herod wrote a will disinheriting Archelaus and granting the kingdom to Antipas. In a later will, however, he once again left the kingdom to Archelaus. Following his death his kingdom would eventually be split into three parts among Archelaus, Antipas, and Philip.

Josephus is careful to note that during his last year Herod was forbidden by Augustus from naming his sons as his successors. However, in several passages Josephus also notes that Herod bestowed royalty and its honors on his sons. At Antipater’s trial Josephus quotes Herod as testifying that he had yielded up royal authority to Antipater. He also quotes Antipater claiming that he was already a king because Herod had made him a king.

When Archelaus replaced Antipater as Herod’s heir apparent some two years before Herod’s death, Antipater may have been given the same prerogatives as Archelaus had previously enjoyed. After Herod’s death Archelaus went to Rome to have his authority confirmed by Augustus. His enemies charged him with seemingly contradictory indictments: that Archelaus had already exercised royal authority for some time and that Herod did not appoint Archelaus as his heir until he was demented and dying. These are not as contradictory as they seem, however. Herod initially named Archelaus his heir, and at this point Archelaus may have assumed royal authority under his father. Then Herod revoked his will, naming Antipas his heir. Ultimately, when he was ill and dying, Herod once again named Archelaus his heir. Thus, Archelaus may not have legally been king until after Herod’s death in early 1 B.C., but may have chosen to reckon his reign from a little over two years earlier in late 4 B.C. when he first replaced Antipater as Herod’s heir.

Since Antipas would eventually rule Galilee, it is entirely possible that under Herod he already had been given jurisdiction over Galilee in the wake of Pheroras’ death. This may explain why Herod briefly named Antipas as his heir in the year before his death. Since Antipas may have assumed the jurisdiction over Galilee upon Pheroras’ death sometime in 4 B.C., like Archelaus, he also may have reckoned his reign from that time, even though he was not officially named tetrarch of Galilee by the Romans until after Herod’s death.

Philip also appears to have exercised a measure of royal authority before Herod’s death in 1 B.C. Philip refounded the cities of Julias and Caesarea Philippi (Paneas). Julias was apparently named after Augustus’ daughter, who was arrested for adultery and treason in 2 B.C. Apparently Julias was refounded before that date. As for Caesarea Philippi, the date of its refounding was used to date an era, and the first year of the era was 3 B.C. Apparently Philip chose to antedate his reign to 4 B.C., which apparently was the time when Herod first entrusted him with supervision of Gaulanitis.

Additional support for Philip having been officially appointed tetrarch after the death of his father in 1 B.C. may be found in numismatics. A number of coins issued by Philip during his reign are known. The earliest bear the date “year 5,” which would correspond to A.D. 1. This fits well with Philip serving as administrator under his father from 4–1 B.C. He counted those as the first four years of his reign, but since he was not officially recognized by Rome as an independent client ruler, he had no authority to issue coins during those years. However, he was in position to issue coinage soon after being named tetrarch sometime in 1 B.C., and the first coins appear the next year, A.D. 1, antedating his reign to 4 B.C. While the numismatic evidence is not conclusive proof of Herod’s death in 1 B.C., it is highly suggestive.

Given the explicit statements of Josephus about the authority and honor Herod had granted his sons during the last years of his life, we can understand why all three of his successors decided to antedate their reigns to the time when they were granted a measure of royal authority while their father was still alive. Although they were not officially recognized by Rome as ethnarch or tetrarchs until after Herod’s death, they nevertheless appear to have reckoned their reigns from about 4 B.C.

FREE ebook: The First Christmas: The Story of Jesus’ Birth in History and Tradition. Download now.

Email(Required)

REQUEST FREE BOOK

Related reading in Bible History Daily:

Christmas Stories in Christian Apocrypha

Who Was Jesus’ Biological Father?

Why Did the Magi Bring Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh?

Herod Antipas in the Bible and Beyond

August 2017: An Eclipse of Biblical Proportions

Classical Corner: A Comet Gives Birth to an Empire

How Old Is That? Dating in the Ancient World

All-Access members, read more in the BAS Library

Herod the Great—The King’s Final Journey

Antipas—The Herod Jesus Knew

Herod’s Horrid Death

How Early Christians Viewed the Birth of Jesus

How December 25 Became Christmas

The Magi and the Star

“Herod’s Death, Jesus’ Birth and a Lunar Eclipse” was originally published on January 7, 2015.

The post Herod’s Death, Jesus’ Birth and a Lunar Eclipse appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

The Claremont Colleges Digital Library

The Nag Hammadi Codices are a group of papyrus manuscripts discovered near the city of Nag Hammadi in southern Egypt, about 70 miles north of Luxor. The codices (i.e., bound volumes) contain writings that shed light on the diverse religious and philosophical currents of the early Christian period.

Reportedly, the discovery was made in 1945 by Egyptian farmers digging for fertile soil at the base of the Jabal al-Tarif cliff on the east bank of the Nile River across from Nag Hammadi. The codices were allegedly found buried in a ceramic storage jar. Both the precise location and circumstances in this chance discovery story are questionable, with some scholars suspecting that the manuscripts come from an illicitly excavated grave (or graves). They are now in the Coptic Museum in Cairo.

Become a BAS All-Access Member Now!

Read Biblical Archaeology Review online, explore 50 years of BAR, watch videos, attend talks, and more

The collection consists of 12 papyrus volumes and fragments of another one. They contain a total of 52 separate texts, which make up 48 individual titles, as some works appear twice, in different codices. These texts are all written in Coptic Egyptian, though it is generally assumed that they were originally composed in Greek. Although the versions preserved in the Nag Hammadi codices were collected and written down sometime in the mid-fourth century, the original works must have been conceived during the first three centuries of the Christian era.

The writings include noncanonical gospels, acts, letters, apocalypses, revelatory dialogs, and philosophical tractates. Although these illuminate ancient Judaism and early Christianity, they most importantly aid our understanding of Gnosticism, of which there were several schools. Generally, ancient Gnostics shared contempt for this physical world, which they accepted was created by the biblical God, but who they believed was a lower, jealous deity that resulted from a singular, higher, ultimate, transcendent deity. Understanding this—through a higher insight (gnosis, in Greek)—allowed one to liberate the transcendent divine spark trapped within the material world and imprisoned within the physical, human bodies of Gnostics, and let her return to the divine realm (i.e., achieve salvation). Modern interpretations of Gnosticism range from viewing it as a Christian sect to a religion in its own right to a movement transcending any single religion.

The most consequential text for New Testament studies is the Gospel of Thomas (see photo, top)—a collection of Jesus’s sayings that appropriately assumes its place alongside the hypothesized synoptic sayings source Q. Some other works reflect traditions of Jewish thought or are Christianized versions of Gnostic tractates.

Some scholars link the codices with early Egyptian monasticism, specifically the nearby Pachomian monastery at Faw Qibli—due to monastic documents used as stuffing inside the covers of two of the codices and ascetic overtones in several treatises. It would make sense for the codices to have been removed from a monastic library and hidden away in the time of accelerated evolution of the Christian orthodoxy and promulgation of the official canon of Christian Bible in the mid-fourth century that brought banning of apocryphal and heretic books. It has yet to be proven, however, that Pachomians either produced or read the codices. Imprecisely, the manuscripts are often referred to as a “Gnostic library,” but it is not obvious that they constituted a personal or institutional library, and the works they contain are not all Gnostic. For instance, a copy of Plato’s The Republic, edited to include some contemporary Gnostic concepts, was included among the writings.

Two collaborative projects have produced critical editions of the original texts: an English completed one appeared in the series Nag Hammadi Studies (reproduced in a five-volume set The Coptic Gnostic Library, 2000), and the French ongoing one in the series Bibliothèque Copte de Nag Hammadi. Translations exist in many languages, including English.1 Fourteen volumes of The Facsimile Edition of the Nag Hammadi Codices (1972–1984) offer reproductions of the original manuscripts.

A version of this post first appeared in Bible History Daily in October, 2020

Read more in the Bas Library

Not a BAS Library or All-Access Member yet? Join today.

Nag Hammadi Codices Shed New Light on Early Christian History by James Brashler. Books written by good scholars seldom achieve bestseller status. When the book is about a little-known collection of manuscripts associated with heretical religious sects and written in a dead language that few people have even heard of, best-seller status is even more remarkable. It is a tribute to the skill and ingenuity of Professor Elaine Pagels (with a “g” as in gelatin), formerly of Barnard College and now on the faculty of Princeton University, that her book The Gnostic Gospels has been so well received by the publishing establishment and the reading public. Summarized in a series of articles in The New York Review of Books, offered as a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection, and translated into several other languages, her book is a lucidly written account of the significance of the Coptic Gnostica documents found in 1945 near Nag Hammadi, Egypt.

Q by Stephen J. Patterson. The Lost Gospel. The very concept provokes a flood of questions. If it is lost, how do we know it ever existed? How do we know what was in it? Who lost it? And how was it lost? Perhaps most intriguing of all: Will it ever be found?

The Gospel of Thomas: Does it contain authentic sayings of Jesus? by Helmut Koester and Stephen J. Patterson. Scholars have long theorized that collections of Jesus’ sayings circulated in the decades following his death and that therefore they would be among the earliest witnesses to his message. Modern critical scholars have even been able to reconstruct one of these collections of sayings —we’ll tell you how later. In the scholarly jargon, this collection of sayings is called simply “Q,” from the German word quelle, meaning “source.” But a copy of Q has never been found.

The post Nag Hammadi Codices appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

ABRAHAM’S ANGELS. The Promise of the Three Angels to Abraham by Lodovico Buti.

It is no secret to students of the Bible that the ancient Hebrews loved plays on words. And nowhere in the Hebrew Bible are there more plays on words in relation to names than in the Book of Genesis.

Let’s start with the name Abraham. Abraham starts life as Abram, a name with parallels in ancient sources. Abram’s name means “high father” or more probably “exalted Ab,” where Ab (meaning “father”) is a deity’s name or an epithet of a deity such as El, the Canaanite father of the gods.

Yet there is no name like Abraham. Why precisely did God change Abram’s name to Abraham, a name that has no discernible meaning in Hebrew? Abraham means father (ab) of r-h-m, but there is no word with the root r-h-m attested anywhere in the Bible or in the known Ugaritic or Phoenician language texts. Hebrew (and other Semitic languages) consists of mostly three-letter roots, such as z-k-r, which means “to remember.” As a noun, the word zeker means “memory.”

However, the root r-h-m does exist in Classical Arabic, a dialect of Arabic attested about a thousand years later than Hebrew. In Arabic, r-h-m usually pertains to a particular kind of rain. ‘Arhamu, one form of this root, means “more (and most) fruitful or plentiful, or abundant in herbage or in the goods or comforts of life.¹ It is tempting to conclude that there is an otherwise unattested Arabic root r-h-m meaning “to be plentiful,” but this is admittedly speculative. Because we can’t be sure that such a root existed in Arabic, it is even a bigger leap to understand the r-h-m of Abraham’s name as meaning “to be plentiful” in Hebrew, even though it would fit well with a presumed meaning, “father of a multitude (of nations).”

And yet, the Hebrew text in Genesis 17:4-5 seems to suggest a wordplay on the theme of a multitude. In the text, God says, “I hereby [make] a covenant with you, and you shall be father to a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you father to a multitude of peoples” (author’s translation).

On one level the pun seems to be simple; in expanding Abram to Abraham, God is punning on the first syllable, “ab,” and the final syllable, “ham,” which is the root of a Hebrew phrase for “father of a multitude” (ab hamōn), rendering Abraham the “father of a multitude.” Yet the brilliance of the wordplay goes beyond this, for the name Abraham sounds very much like the Hebrew phrase “ab rab ‘am.” Because ‘am is the Hebrew word for “people,” and rab is another Hebrew word for “multitude,” the name Abraham could also be another way of saying, “father of a multitude of peoples.” This double play on words explains why the Bible chose the phrase, “Father of a multitude of peoples,” in relation to Abraham’s name change.

Let’s now consider the names Adam and Eve. In the case of Adam, there is an obvious pun between Adam and the Hebrew word ’adamah, meaning “earth.” Adam as the name of the first man is fitting, too, because in Hebrew ’adam means “man.” Thus, we have in the chapter that introduces the first man such verses as, “There was no man [’adam] to work the earth [’adamah]” (Genesis 2:5). Here the pun is implied for Adam proper. It culminates in Genesis 3:19, in which God says to Adam, “By the sweat of your brow, you shall eat your bread, until you return to the earth [’adamah], from which you were taken.”

The name Eve is actually pronounced ḥawwa in Hebrew. Genesis 3:20 puns that the name means “mother of all the living,” although the direct derivation of this definition from the Hebrew is difficult to find. However, Eve’s name may have a possible ancient Sumerian antecedent. The name of the Sumerian goddess of healing, Ninti, can mean “lady of life” or “lady of the rib” because the Sumerian word ti means both “life” and “rib.” In one Sumerian myth, it was Ninti’s role to heal the accursed deity Enki’s rib, which returned him to life.

It is possible that this Sumerian myth inspired a bilingual play on words in Genesis 3:20. Eve, which the Hebrew text calls life-giving “mother of all the living,” was formed from Adam’s rib (Genesis 2:21), and not from some other, perhaps seemingly more appropriate, body part.^a So while the Hebrew does not convey the pun, the Hebrew scribes, who were very learned and likely knew the Sumerian myth, understood the pun and may have retained a modified version of it, although it is doubtful if the average Israelite would have gotten the pun.

Another name in the Book of Genesis given special treatment is Noah. A parallel for the figure of Noah is Utnapishtim in the Gilgamesh Epic from Mesopotamia. Like Noah, Utnapishtim builds an elaborate ark, which saves life. Unlike Noah, Utnapishtim is rewarded with eternal life, and his name means, “soul of Utu [the sun god],” possibly an allusion to Utnapishtim’s immortality.

We will return to the meaning of Noah’s name after we explain the quadruple play on Noah’s name in Genesis 5:29 and Genesis 6:6-8, saving the first for last. Genesis 6:6 says, “YHWH felt remorse that he had made human beings on the earth and was saddened in his heart.” The words “felt remorse” translate the Hebrew verb n-ḥ-m, which contains the consonants of Noah’s name n-ḥ. This is an anticipation of Noah and a wordplay on Noah’s name as it appears a couple of verses later, just as the puns on “man” and “earth” anticipated the introduction of Adam.

One might not be sure that this is a purposeful wordplay, except for the fact that the same root n-ḥ-m reappears immediately in the following verse of Genesis 6:7, “And YHWH remarked, “I shall wipe out the human race that I created from the face of the earth, from humans to beasts to creeping things, to the birds of the sky, for I greatly regret [Hebrew root n-ḥ-m] that I have made them.” The last clause is a repetition of verse 6, except that it uses a different conjugation of the root n-ḥ-m. The wordplay sets the stage for the next verse, “And Noah found favor in the eyes of YHWH.”

The words “Noah” and “favor” are an anagram: In consonants, Noah is written n-ḥ, while the word “favor” is written ḥ-n.² That this is purposeful wordplay cannot be doubted. Yet the wordplay does not end here, since the word “greatly regret” (root n-ḥ-m) also contains the letters of Noah’s name (n-ḥ) in another wordplay. The author seems to have added the clause, “for I greatly regret that I made them”—something that is already clear from the fact that he is wiping out all living things—simply to play on the name Noah.

As a kind of rule of biblical wordplay, at least two out of the three root letters must be the same.

What then does Noah’s name mean? Again, the biblical writer provides an explanation. In Genesis 5:29, the text clearly puns on the verb n-ḥ-m, setting the stage for the plays on words I have already pointed out. Here, Lamech, Noah’s father, names him Noah, saying, “He [literally, “this one”] will provide relief [root n-ḥ-m] from our work and from our hardships on the soil that YHWH has cursed.”

Incidentally, Noah’s father, Lamech, is singled out as the only person in the Bible graced to live 777 years. Seven is a special or holy number in the Bible: On the seventh day of Creation, God rested (using the root for the Sabbath and, thereby, punning on the noun “Sabbath”) and sanctified the work he had done (Genesis 2:1-3). The 777 years comes to show that he was a good seed and worthy to father Noah, who was righteous and blameless in his time. Like his great-grandfather Enoch, who walked with God after the birth of his son Methusaleh, Noah walked with God (Genesis 5:22, Genesis 5:24; Genesis 6:9).

It has been suggested that Noah’s name is related to the Hebrew word nuaḥ (n-w-ḥ), meaning “to rest,” but I want to posit another meaning for the root n-w-ḥ—one based on comparative Semitics, specifically drawing on Akkadian, the ancient language of Assyria and Babylonia. Because of the large overlap between Hebrew and Akkadian vocabulary and grammar, I believe the root of the Akkadian cognate nâḫu meaning (among other things) “to relent, to be pacified, to abate (of storms, waves, fire, fighting)” provides a better understanding of Noah’s name.³

If this is the case, then the question becomes exactly who is doing the relenting and the abating? It is possible that the name Noah (n-w-ḥ) does not simply apply to the character of the ark builder, but is also a pun on the action of God himself, who ultimately relents from destroying the human race in the flood story of Genesis and, just as apropos, allows the flood waters to abate. Given the plays I’ve already shown above, these two meanings of Noah, “relent” and “abate,” appear to be in line with the wordplay theme pervasive throughout the flood story!

It is important to see that the Hebrews adopted the ancient flood story that originated in Mesopotamia. It is a story far more ancient than the Hebrew Bible and perhaps even older than the people Israel, who would retell it over time and put their own stamp on it, starting with Noah being righteous and blameless in his time. Like Enoch, Noah walked with God, and unlike the corrupt and sinful people of his time, Noah found favor in God’s sight. Therefore, God relented by letting the flood waters abate.

Either way, we see that the name Noah had relevance to the flood story—it was chosen for a reason! In the Mesopotamian Atrahasis Epic, which recounts another flood story, people were simply too numerous and noisy for the gods to tolerate. The unethical behavior of the people of Noah’s time is different—and is the unique “spin” of the Hebrew Bible.

I would like to conclude with an example of another type of wordplay altogether: alliteration. Alliteration is the use of the same letters or sounds in adjacent or closely connected words that make them stand out in the ears of the hearer when read aloud. However, more than biblical wordplay, this is a device in the composition of the Bible that completely escapes the attention of those who read the Bible in translation.

For our final example, we return to Abraham. Genesis 21:4, Genesis 21:7-8 details the circumcision of Isaac:

[Abraham] circumcised his son Isaac at the age of eight days as God had commanded him … And [Sarah] said, “Who would recount to Abraham that Sarah would nurse sons, that I gave birth to a son in his time of old age?” Then the boy-child grew and was weaned, and Abraham made a big feast on the occasion of Isaac’s weaning.

My English translation shows no sign of alliteration, yet it appears in the Hebrew original. The Hebrew verb I translate as “recount” is a rare word that one would not expect Sarah to use, but it was likely chosen for purposes of alliteration centered on the “m” and “l” sounds.⁴As the passage stands, the Hebrew reads mi millel l’ (“who would recount to”), which is alliterative in itself. When you add wayyamol (“he circumcised”) from verse 4, plus wayiggamal (“and he was weaned”) and higgamel (“weaning”) from verse 8, all with the “m-l” combination found in mi millel l’, you get an excellent example of the Hebrew writer shaping his text for purposes of alliteration.

These examples show that the biblical writers engaged in wordplay at every opportunity in shaping the biblical narrative. I believe that in Genesis (among other places in the Hebrew Bible, such as the literary prophets) plays on words are a way of showing the divine at work in the world, involving what they believed to be the very words of God.

Endnotes:

[1] Edward William Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon, (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1995–1956).

[a] Ziony Zevit translates tsela‘ as “baculum” in his article “Was Eve Made from Adam’s Rib—or His Baculum?” BAR, September/October 2015.

[2] Nahum Sarna, Genesis: The Traditional Hebrew Text with the new JPS Translation, JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), p. 47.

[3] The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, vol. 11.1 (1980).

[4] Gary A. Rendsburg, “Alliteration in the Book of Genesis,” in Elizabeth R. Hayes Karolien Vermeulen, eds., Doubling and Duplicating in the Book of Genesis: Literary and Stylistic Approaches to the Text (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2016), p. 85.

This post originally appeared in Bible History Daily in July, 2020

Read more in the BAS Library

Not a BAS Library or All-Access Member yet? Join today.

As Simple as ABC: What acrostics in the Bible can demonstrate
Acrostics are alphabetical texts.
Bible scholars disagree on their purpose.
Consequently, translations differ.
Despite differences in emphasis,
Every translator acknowledges that
Form and meaning are connected.
Given the strictures of acrostics, however,
Holding on to both is impossible….

Sacred Sex, Sacrifice and Death: Understanding a prophetic poem Sacred sex, child sacrifice, the cult of the dead—these are the subjects of a powerful, 11-verse poem in Isaiah 57:3–13. Our task will be to understand how the poet makes his points, why he juxtaposes these three seemingly different subjects and what they tell us about the times in which the poet wrote.

Getting Personal: What names in the Bible teach us In the Bible’s beginning, in the story of creation, names provide literary analogies or connections. For example, “Adam” in Hebrew means both “person” (Genesis 1:26–28) and “man” (Genesis 2:5–4:1). As the name of the first man, it suggests a generic person, or everyman. It’s not until Genesis 4:25 that Adam is used as the name of a particular human being.

The post Wordplay in Genesis appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

ASHKAR-GILSON 2 is a Torah scroll sheet possibly dated before 800 C.E. Unlike the new Library of
Congress manuscript, this fragment is not fully legible without the help of modern technologies.
Credit: Courtesy of David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University

A scroll is comprised of a long series of individual sheets of papyrus or parchment glued together. Even after the ancient practice of writing on scrolls gave way to the invention of the codex—the predecessor of the modern book—the Jews retained the older technology of the scroll for liturgical purposes. To this day, the Torah scroll remains the central object in synagogue worship; it is housed in the Ark and brought forth for the public reading of the Bible.

Nevertheless, the oldest complete Torah manuscripts are in the codex form; the most authoritative being the famous Aleppo Codex, dating to about 920 C.E., and the St. Petersburg Codex (formerly, Leningrad Codex), which dates to 1009 C.E.

The few surviving Torah scrolls that are this old are all very fragmentary and almost illegible. It is thus exciting to find a very old, well-preserved Torah scroll, even if it’s only a fragment, a single sheet. One such treasure has recently augmented the collection of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. As Gary Rendsburg, Chair of Jewish History at Rutgers University, explains in the November/December 2019 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, this Torah manuscript is the oldest complete Torah scroll sheet fully legible to the naked eye.

Once part of a Torah scroll from circa 1000 C.E., this single sheet of parchment contains part of the Book of Exodus beginning with the Ten Plagues and ending with the first feeding of the Israelites with the “bread from heaven” in the wilderness (Exodus 10:10–16:15). “To our good fortune, and most unusually,” adds Rendsburg, “on the back of the sheet there is a bilingual inscription in Hebrew and Russian.”  The inscription tells the fate of the manuscript during the 19^thcentury, when it evidently was brought from the Middle East to Crimea. Eventually, it was presented to a brother of Russian Czar Alexander II.

Penned around 1000 C.E., this precious Torah scroll sheet has recently been purchased by the Library of Congress. It contains the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15:1–18), usually arranged in a unique, “half-brick over brick, brick over half-brick” layout, recognizable here in the left column.
Credit: Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Hebraic Section

To uncover the mystery-shrouded history of this Torah scroll sheet, read the article “A Rare Torah in the Library of Congress” by Gary A. Rendsburg in the November/December 2019 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

More on Codices in the BAS Library:

“The Leningrad Codex”, Bible Review, August 1997

“The Aleppo Codex”, in Bible Review, August 1991

“Who Owns the Codex Sinaiticus?”, in Biblical Archaeology Review, November/December 2007

Not a BAS Library member yet? Join the BAS Library today.

The post New Old Torah Scroll appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

In the November/December 2010 issue of BAR, we published “Bells, Pendants, Snakes and Stones” by archaeologist Yitzhak Magen about the decades-long excavations on Mt. Gerizim in Samaria. Magen revealed evidence of a Samaritan temple that he said dated to the time of Nehemiah, the fifth century B.C.E. In response to that article, reader John Merrill wrote in looking for clarification about the date, which conflicts with Josephus’s account of events surrounding the Samaritan temple’s construction. See below Yitzhak Magen’s detailed explanation of the temple dating and timeline of related events.

• John Merrill’s letter

• Yitzhak Magen’s response

This Bible History Daily feature originally appeared in March, 2011

The post Dating of the Samaritan Temple on Mt. Gerizim appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

Photo: Jim Haberman.

Read about the Huqoq mosaics in the BAS Library:

Jodi Magness, Shua Kisilevitz, Matthew Grey, Dennis Mizzi, Karen Britt, and Ra‘anan Boustan, “Inside the Huqoq Synagogue,” BAR, May/June 2019.

Karen Britt and Ra‘anan Boustan, “Artistic Influences in Synagogue Mosaics: Putting the Huqoq Synagogue in Context,” BAR, May/June 2019.

Jodi Magness, “Archaeological Views: A Lucky Discovery Complicates Life,” BAR, March/April 2015.

Jodi Magness, “Samson in the Synagogue,” BAR, January/February 2013.

Not a BAS Library or All-Access Member yet? Join today.

More on the Huqoq mosaics in Bible History Daily:

A Samson Mosaic from Huqoq

Huqoq 2014: Update from the Field

Jodi Magness Reflects on a Lucky Discovery in Huqoq, Israel

Huqoq 2015: New Mosaics Unearthed at Huqoq Synagogue

New Huqoq Mosaics: Noah’s Ark and Exodus Scenes

Huqoq 2017: Mosaics of Jonah and the Whale, the Tower of Babel and More

Huqoq Mosaic Depicts Israelite Spies from Numbers 13

Huqoq 2019: Newly Discovered 1,600-Year-Old Mosaic of the Exodus

Analyze the ancient inscription at Huqoq:

Photo: Jim Haberman.

Read David Amit’s “Mosaic Inscription from a Synagogue at Horvat Huqoq.”

Read Karen Britt’s “The Huqoq Synagogue Mosaics.”

The post Explore the Huqoq Mosaics appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

What would happen if the Pope’s library were accidentally burnt? How can we reconstruct and visualize ancient and medieval pilgrimage routes? Technology is changing the way we study and preserve texts and artifacts. In a series of web-exclusive articles written by scholars engaged in the Digital Humanities, learn how this growing field of study is helping to analyze textual and archaeological data—and how you can help.

Digital Humanities: An Introduction

What if the Dead Sea Scrolls were damaged? What if the Pope’s library burned down? In “Digital Humanities: How Everyone Can Get a Library Card to the World’s Most Exclusive Collections Online,” George Washington University associate professor of history Diane H. Cline explores the research opportunities and potential impact of Digital Humanities projects. This new field not only preserves publications, it extends access to the humanities to anyone with Internet access.

Read “Digital Humanities: How Everyone Can Get a Library Card to the World’s Most Exclusive Collections Online” by Diane H. Cline >>

Mapping Technologies

Want to follow a fourth-century pilgrim itinerary from Bordeaux via Constantinople to the Holy Land? Experiment with ancient travel times and their costs over land, sea and sand in the Roman Empire? University of Iowa assistant professor of classics Sarah E. Bond explains in “Map Quests: Geography, Digital Humanities and the Ancient World” how the Digital Humanities offer opportunities to explore, interact with and contribute to maps of the ancient world.

Read “Map Quests: Geography, Digital Humanities and the Ancient World” by Sarah E. Bond >>

Open Access to Digital Data

Interested in exploring the results of archaeology projects directly from the researchers? Cutting-edge technology is helping archaeologists generate a tremendous amount of digital data each year. At the same time, the scientific community increasingly expects direct access to the data. In “Open Context: Making the Most of Archaeological Data,” Alexandria Archive Institute cofounders Sarah Whitcher Kansa and Eric Kansa describe Open Context, an open access, peer-reviewed data publishing service that has published over one million digital resources, from archaeological survey data to excavation documentation and artifact analyses.

Read “Open Context: Making the Most of Archaeological Data” by Sarah Whitcher Kansa and Eric Kansa >>

Making University Collections Accessible to All

Many university departments across the world have shelves and storerooms full of books, artifacts and research collected over several decades. What do you do when the “skeletons in your closet” are a box of 2,000-year-old artifacts? That was the question facing the University of British Columbia’s Department of Classical, Near Eastern, and Religious Studies. In “From Stone to Screen: Bringing 21st-Century Access to Ancient Artifacts,” members of the From Stone to Screen graduate student project at UBC discuss their ongoing efforts to create digital archives of their department’s artifact collection—making these fascinating objects accessible to a global audience online.

Read “From Stone to Screen: Bringing 21st-Century Access to Ancient Artifacts” >>

The post Digital Humanities and the Ancient World appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

Explore below coverage of the Raphael Golb trial.

In 2010, a New York jury returned a verdict of guilty on 30 of 31 counts against 50-year-old Raphael Golb, son of University of Chicago Dead Sea Scroll scholar Norman Golb. Thus ended Raphael Golb’s three week trial in which he admitted to originating hundreds of emails and blogs, in some of which he used fake accounts to impersonate prominent scroll scholar Lawrence Schiffman of New York University.
Some weeks later, Golb was sentenced to six months of prison time.

Signing his name as Schiffman, Raphael Golb made it appear that Schiffman was confessing to having plagiarized from Raphael Golb’s father, Norman, whose offbeat views on the scrolls differ markedly from Schiffman’s. The prosecution charged the younger Golb with identity theft, forgery and harassment. Four additional scholars were also victims of Golb’s impersonation.

The targeted scholars disagree with Golb’s father about the origin of the scrolls. Norman Golb contends that Qumran, near the caves where the scrolls were found, was a military fortress, not the communal home of a group of Essenes, as most scholars believe, and that the scrolls originated not with the Essenes but from several libraries in Jerusalem.

• Golb’s Sentencing (Oct 1, 2010)

• Golb’s Conviction (Nov 18, 2010)

• Dead Sea Scrolls Scholar’s Son Off to Jail (Jan 30, 2013)

• Raphael Golb’s Dead Sea Scroll Conviction Affirmed By New York’s Highest Court (May 16, 2014)

• SCOTUS Declines Dead Sea Scroll Case (Feb 26, 2018)
 

 
Interested in the history and meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls? In the free eBook Dead Sea Scrolls, learn what the Dead Sea Scrolls are and why are they important. Find out what they tell us about the Bible, Christianity and Judaism.
 

The post Raphael Golb Guilty of Impersonating Dead Sea Scrolls Scholar appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

Yitzhak Meitlis, Excavating the Bible: New Archaeological Evidence for the Historical Reliability of Scripture (Savage, MD: Eshel Books, 2012).

The book Excavating the Bible is based on four premises:

I must note that a review of the history of ancient Israel shows that the existence of two entities or two ethnic elements—one on the plains and one in the mountains—is known from different periods. For example, in the second part of Iron Age I there were essential differences between the Israelite inhabitants of the mountains and the Philistines on the coastal plain, and to a great extent the situation is the same today.
 

 
As the point where three of the world’s major religions converge, Israel’s history is one of the richest and most complex in the world. Sift through the archaeology and history of this ancient land in the free eBook Israel: An Archaeological Journey, and get a view of these significant Biblical sites through an archaeologist’s lens.
 

 
These are the main principles upon which the book is founded. On the basis of them, I produced a correlation between archaeological data and the Biblical narratives; I do think that archaeology and the Bible reside well with one another and the integration between them enables the enrichment of insights into the Biblical period. I wish to stress that even a scholar who does not accept my interpretation of the archaeological findings should deal with the data and analysis of archaeological findings that I present and analyze with traditional archaeological instruments. Such confrontation is lacking in the reviewer’s statements.

Now I turn to a number of details mentioned in the review:

The upshot is that it seems that the reviewer did not give my book an in-depth reading, and this can be understood by his review. The book presents new insights based on the accepted archaeological rules, and it is only fitting that the reader treat the concept presented in it objectively and openly.
 

 
Yitzhak Meitlis is professor of Biblical archaeology at Herzog College. He received his Ph.D. in archaeology from Tel Aviv University and also holds degrees from the Hebrew University and Bar Ilan University. In 2005 he was honored with the Minister of Education Prize for innovation in Jewish Studies.
 

The post Excavating the Bible—A Response appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

In the May/June 2012 BAR, epigrapher Christopher A. Rollston’s “What’s the Oldest Hebrew Inscription?” considered four contenders as candidates for the oldest Hebrew inscription: the Qeiyafa Ostracon, the Gezer Calendar, the Tel Zayit Abecedary and the Izbet Sartah Abecedary. Rollston asks: Is the script really Hebrew? Is the language Hebrew? Should the inscription be read right-to-left like modern Hebrew or left-to-right? How old is it? Where did it come from? Rollston concludes by stating that the earliest Old Hebrew inscriptions come from periods that postdate the inscriptions from Qeiyafa, Gezer, Tel Zayit and Izbet Sartah.

Rollston’s thoughtful discussion was met by dissenting responses from distinguished archaeological and Biblical scholars, including Yosef Garfinkel, the director of excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa and Lachish, and Aaron Demsky, a professor of Biblical history and the founder of the Project for the Study of Jewish Names at Bar-Ilan University.

Read Christopher Rollston’s “What’s the Oldest Hebrew Inscription?” as it appeared in the May/June 2012 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, or read a summary of the article in Bible History Daily.

Interested in ancient inscriptions? Read Alan Millard’s assessment of the oldest alphabetic inscription ever found in Jerusalem in “Precursor to Paleo-Hebrew Script Discovered in Jerusalem.”

Yosef Garfinkel’s “Christopher Rollston’s Methodology of Caution,” which appears in the September/October 2012 BAR, critiques Rollston’s approach for rejecting associations with the Hebrew language without proposing viable alternatives. He discusses the importance of the Qeiyafa Ostracon and other inscriptions for their understanding of the language used by local populations, arguing that archaeological evidence forms the basis of cultural associations, instead of pure textual analysis. His discussion serves as an indictment against both academic speculation and over-cautious reasoning, promoting the idea that the language in all four inscriptions can serve as a useful tool in understanding the early phase of Hebrew language in the Iron Age.

Read Yosef Garfinkel’s “Christopher Rollston’s Methodology of Caution.”

Read Demsky’s “What’s the Oldest Hebrew Inscription?–A Reply to Christopher Rollston.”

At Khirbet Qeiyafa, the Biblical name Eshbaal has been found for the first time in an ancient inscription. Read more >>

Originally published in 2012, updated in 2014.

The post Three Takes on the Oldest Hebrew Inscription appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.