Caves cut into the rock | The site of Qumran, Israel | Image source
On AJR
The AJR Animal Forum continues! Beth Berkowitz, “The Uppity Donkey and the Distraught Rabbi: Critical Animal Studies and the Talmud”
Berkowitz: “Colleen Glenney Boggs writes that “animals are animals in American literature and … we have not adequately accounted for them as such … accounting for them as such will change how we read that literature.” So too will accounting for animals change how we read Talmud and, beyond that, the literatures of late antiquity. For Boggs, accounting for animals means deconstructing the biopolitics of modernity. Ancient texts like the Talmud allow us to take biopolitics back to their formative years, to reveal how animals came to occupy the margins of personhood and how their only partially suppressed subjectivities formed the backdrop for the emergence of the human self as we know it.”
Book Note: John Penniman, Raised on Christian Milk: Food and the Formation of the Soul in Early Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017)
Robinson: “What does it mean to “eat well”? The phrase evokes authenticity, social belonging, and moral superiority as much as physical nourishment. In Raised on Christian Milk, John Penniman poses this question to ancient Greco-Roman, Jewish, and Christian thinkers and finds an answer located in mother’s milk. Two intellectual gastronomies are at work: the Greco-Roman discourse of milk as a union of nature and nurture, and the Pauline trope of milk and solid food as a model of Christian formation. Central to both is the ability of milk to convey essence, identity, legitimacy, and wisdom to soul and body alike.”
Articles and News
Terrific Daniel Machiela video lecture on charity in the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls.
The Passion of the Apostles Peter and Paul added to the e-Clavis database.
All seven volumes of the Bomberg Talmud online at the British Library site.
Stellar photo essay by Agnes Crawford on the House of Augustus on the Palatine.
Yousuf Chughtai writes at Eidolon on the contemporary possibilities of attention to the Hellenistic period.
SBL program book online for the annual meeting in November 2018.
Terrific popular piece on pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions.
Reminder of the Cult of the Saints project database, which contains every reference to early Christian saints through to 700CE.
Best wishes to our contributors and readers presenting at the annual NAPS meeting in Chicago! Say hello to @ErinCGW and @Matt_J_Chalmers and find out about opportunities to submit to AJR! #NAPS2018 #LateAntiquity
— Ancient Jew Review (@ancientjew) 23 May 2018
Writing on the use of the color red today, and so thinking about a favorite funerary urn I saw last summer @mbamtl. It is a Hellenistic era Sicilian funerary vessel with a deceased woman on the lid and one heck of a Dionysiac scene painted on it. Likely done with cinnabar. pic.twitter.com/8jeffx1Vuk
— Sarah Bond (@SarahEBond) 21 May 2018
Spot the dog! Only just noticed this little puppy in The Brother Haggadah (Or 1404), one of the many benefits of being able to zoom into the images online! What other details can you find? #HebrewProject https://t.co/Lt3CuHjjbw pic.twitter.com/CBYCLfpkRv
— BL Hebrew Project (@BL_HebrewMSS) 24 May 2018
"Please call some of us in and listen to what we wish to tell you: There are lots of mistakes here as no one in charge knows about farming." #EmployeeExperience from 2300 years ago preserved in @BLMedieval's Papyrus 2090 #ThursdayThoughts from 257BC Egypt. pic.twitter.com/mkDgIQFtJh
— peter toth (@petetoth) 24 May 2018