Recently in Semitics Category

From Christopher Rollstone comes more information about the Jerusalem 1 fragment (previously referenced).  I recommend the entire article though I've excerpted a few salient points:

• The clay from which the tablet was made matches the soil of Jerusalem, so the tablet was probably made locally
• The signs use partially match several tablets from the Amarna corpus that come from King Abdi-Heba of Jerusalem, but there are a number of differences

Even more interesting is a brief note from John Huehnergard, probably one of the most well known current Akkadian scholars:

An additional factor is that the reading of line 2 as tab-ša 'you are' is problematic. The traces of the signs as copied don't conform well to the reading. If the tablet was written in Amarna Canaano-Akkadian (which is not certain given the fragmentary state of the text), the reading is also unlikely grammatically: all examples of the verb bašû listed in the Knudtzon glossary are based on the durative ibašši, none on the preterite ibši; further, 1st- and 2nd-person forms of bašû in such Amarna texts are what are called mixed forms: the base is the durative ibašši but the person is marked by suffixes, as in i-ba-ša-ta 'you are' in EA 73:40. So I doubt that line two has a form meaning 'you are'; and that leaves us even less on which to judge what type of text it is.

So basically we are sure it's a tablet, pretty sure it is from the late bronze-age and from Jerusalem, and not sure of much else...

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In the current excavations of the old city of Jerusalem a small, but interesting fragment has been found, dubbed Jerusalem 1.  In the midst of Iron Age fill was a small fragment of a 14th C Akkadian tablet, making it roughly contemporary with the Amarna tablets.  Hebrew University, which sponsers the work has released a nice high-res photo:


(source)
The tablet is only about 2x2.8cm, and, according to the report in the Jerusalem Post:

the symbols appear to be insignificant, containing simply the words "you," "you were," "them," "to do," and "later," the high quality of the writing indicates that it was written by a highly skilled scribe.

That not withstanding, I'm sure we'll hear all sorts of crazy speculation (tablet sent from the Amarna court, early copy of Hebrew scripture, fragment of the tablets of the covenant), since ANYTHING leads to that sort of madness

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• I believe I've mentioned one or two of these before, but Charles Halton has put together a full M.A. in Biblical Studies' worth of free online classes
• Alan Lenzi has discontinued Feeling Finite, just as I was starting to understand prayers to Sin
• There has been a large amount of noise in the not"quite":http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2949640/Noahs-Ark-found-in-Turkey.html-reputable-press about the supposed discovery of Noah's Ark. Dr Randall Price, one of the archaeologists involved, and a firm believer (he runs World of the Bible ) has released this statement admitting that it is a hoax.

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Wright, J. Edward. The Early History of Heaven. New York: Oxford University Press. 2000

   This book presents itself as a history of the Judeo-Christian view of Heaven, that is the space above the sky, whether inhabited by the souls of all the saved or just a mechanism of spheres, supporting the planets.    It presents itself as spanning two worlds, "valuable for both the general audience and the specialist" (p. x), with the text aimed to be accessible to all, and the endnotes for a more scholarly sort. 
  The organization is chronological, beginning with Sumerian and Akkadian conceptions of a tripartite universe and the Egyptian view of the heavens.  These provide a basis for the early Israelite universe, which is explained in detail.  At this point one of the weaknesses of the book becomes evident, the illustrations.  The bulk of the illustrations are drawings from other sources, frequently with partial captions (p. 93 for eg.).  There is no unifying style and some of them, though topically accurate, are quite difficult to parse (p. 103).
   Following Egypt and Mesopotamia, we enter early Israelite tradition, which is explained quite well.  The reconstruction of early Israelite semi-monotheism provides a good introduction to what can be a difficult topic and the structure of the universe, and heaven in particular as a mirror of the earthly Temple is covered. 
  What follows is a short chapter on Greek, Roman, Persian and Ptolemaic Egyptian traditions, which are covered only in basics.  There is an explanation of the various models of the universe, those of Pythagoras, Eudoxus and others, but not explanation of the bizarre elements many of these models possess: Pythagoras' "Counter-earth" or the numerous intervening spheres of later models. 
  Finally the author's focus is reached, later Jewish and early Christian views of Heaven.  He provides some excellent examples from some of the more complex Apocryphal works beginning with those which stuck with a "single heaven" cosmology, and then those later works which adopted the Greco-Roman multiple-Heaven view.  The texts are complex, but the explanations are quite well constructed, and make the concepts as clear as possible, given the oddities of some of the texts.  It is in these texts that the concepts of human "souls" ascending into heaven post-mortem gains popularity, as well as the entrance requirements for those souls: good works, charity, and the most popular, orthodoxy beliefs that agree with the author.

In conclusion, I'd recommend the book.   There are some weaknesses in the "general audience" accessability, including some passages in ancient Greek and some common scholarly techniques for transliteration, which the non-scholarly audience might not follow.  That and the, previously mentioned, uneven quality of the illustrations would be the only major problems.

(I learned about the book from Alan Lenzi)
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The same monastery that sponsored the greatest work of illumination of at least the last two centuries, the St. John's Bible, has put a large selection of their manuscript collection online.  In many cases the images are not as high-quality as I'd like and the search engine is a bit odd, but the breadth of the collection more than makes up for it. It includes:

• St. John's Abby Collection - artifacts and documents gathered by the monks of St. John's in the last 150 years 
• Ethiopian Manuscript Project - 400 years of Ethiopian manuscripts
  
• Hill Manuscript Museum and Library - a long-standing project to preserve and make accessible manuscripts, originally on microfilm

I was first attracted to the site because the Hill Museum has the ability to search for illustrated capitol letters by letter, and I was hoping to build a new banner:
(letters from a 13th C Homillary A and M)

Eisenbrauns runs an annual Valentine's Day contest, write a love poem in any ancient middle-eastern language (Greek too!).  This year the third-place winner was remarkably amusing:

The Song of the Four Locusts
  She loves you
  Let us sing it twice,
  Even three times,
  She loves you.

And so on....

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From The Onion:

Representatives from the sports drink manufacturer Powerade announced Wednesday that Nisroch, the ancient Assyrian god of agriculture, has been resurrected from the depths of Assyro-Babylonian mythology to serve as the key marketing figure for their newest product, Nisroch: Eagle Heart X-TREME WHIRLWIND!.....

more

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It's been a while since I worked on my Prolog-based parser for Akkadian verbs, but I noticed a bug and realized I wanted to get back to it.  As part of that, I've added a change log, to track bugs and improvements

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From the boston.com 2009 Year in Photos series comes this shot:

A Palestinian demonstrator uses a tennis racket to return an empty tear gas canister at Israeli soldiers during a protest against the controversial Israeli barrier in the West Bank village of Bilin near Ramallah October 23, 2009. (REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis)

"Members of the earth's earliest known civilization, the Sumerians, looked on in shock and confusion some 6,000 years ago as God, the Lord Almighty, created Heaven and Earth."
.....
Clearly there's more

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