—On the name “Israel”—

In the Hebrew Bible, “Israel” is the name given to Jacob at Jabbok.

Jews today trace their ancestry to Jacob, and thus count themselves among the “Children of Israel”.
But from when did Jews/Judeans actually begin to regard themselves as “Israel”?

🧵1/17 “Jews” is the English for descendants of people who lived in “Yehudah” (Judea), and who therefore identified as “Yehudim” (Judeans).
Following the Biblical account, one would assume that ancient Judeans also identified as members of a larger national unit called “Israel”.
2/17

Just finished this latest book by Prof. Reinhard Kratz, which dovetails extraordinarily well with my own work (as he kindly notes).

He makes the argument that the Maccabean revolt was not the result of any putative decrees by Antiochus IV against Torah observance.

🧵1/4 Before the revolt, the Torah was not well-known or widely practiced.

It was not the "πάτριοι νόμοι", the “ancestral laws” of the Jews at this early date.
2/4

—Conversion to Judaism—

Unlike conversion to Christianity, conversion to Judaism is not primarily about adopting any specific beliefs.
It is about adopting a new “citizenship” among the Jewish people.

(Photo: Tomb of “Jacob the proselyte”; Beth She‘arim, 3rd–5th c. CE)

🧵1/10 In the West, our notions of religious conversion tend to be heavily influenced by Christianity, where adopting the belief in Jesus as one’s Lord and Saviour is absolutely central to the conversion process.
It is all about changing one’s belief structure.
2/10

Was “race” ever a concept within rabbinic halakhah?

A very short🧵
1/7 Rabbinic halakhah famously tends to pay careful attention to details such as color, size, weight, volume, length of time, etc.
Such details often have legal or ritual ramifications with regard to a broad spectrum of topics.
2/7

——The Maccabean Watershed ——
Part 4
Jerusalem and the Temple
Following the Maccabean revolt, Jerusalem underwent a seismic shift.
From a small town, with a few hundred residents, it became THE metropolis of the Jewish people in their homeland and throughout their diaspora.
🧵1/11

https://twitter.com/AdlerYonatan/status/1863678486428176476

Precious few archaeological remains dating to the Persian or Early Hellenistic period have been uncovered in Jerusalem.
The southwestern hill (today’s Mt. Zion, Armenian Quarter and Jewish Quarter) were completely uninhabited.
2/11

——The Maccabean Watershed ——
Part 3
Until now, we saw how Judea went from a backwater province to a sovereign state, acting as a player on the region’s geopolitical stage.
Here we examine a pivotal consequence of this new status: adoption of TORAH as the law of the land.
🧵1/14

https://twitter.com/AdlerYonatan/status/1863678486428176476

Throughout the Persian and Early Hellenistic periods (late 6th to early 2nd century BCE), there is little reason to think that the Torah was widely known and regarded as authoritative.
Not only is there no positive evidence for widespread Torah observance…
2/14

As someone who fancies himself as having a career entirely invested in rigorous, uncompromising work on the first three boxes here… in what follows I will seek to defend the fourth box:
“Midrash” or “Exegesis”.
🧵1/8 ● “There is no cat here!”
○ True. But I just 𝗱𝗿𝗲𝘄 one out of the dots.

● “But you could have drawn a dog! Or a dragon! Or a rock!”
○ True. But I 𝗰𝗵𝗼𝘀𝗲 to draw a cat.
2/8

——The Maccabean Watershed ——
Part 2
In my previous post, I began to lay out my argument for why I think the Maccabean revolt marks a watershed in history.
I began there with administration.
We continue here with Judeans’ adoption of Greek cultural elements.
Hold on tight!
🧵1/15

https://twitter.com/AdlerYonatan/status/1863678486428176476

As long as Judea remained a backwater province, Judeans had little need learn Greek, adopt Greek names, or absorb Greek material culture.

From the Persian period, through the Early Hellenistic period, all surviving inscriptions in Judea are in Aramaic (or rarely Hebrew).
2/15

——The Maccabean Watershed ——
Part 1
The Maccabean revolt marks a watershed in world history.
It was the catalyst for the emergence of Judaism, and consequently for the birth of Christianity and Islam.
In the advent to Hannukah and Christmas, I will post a series on this.
🧵1/10 The opening shot of the battles of Lexington and Concord has been called the “shot heard round the world”.
It marked the start of a new global age of democracies.
To my mind, the Maccabean revolt was even more consequential.
2/10

This stele is the earliest evidence for a Jewish presence in Europe.

It probably predates the beginning of Judaism (i.e., widespread observance of Torah), which likely emerged only a century later—back in the ancestral homeland of Judea .

A 🧵1/7 The stele was unearthed in a temple for the hero-god Amphiaraus at Oropos, on mainland Greece.
Its inscription is dated paleographically to the first half of the 3rd century BCE.

It is a manumission stele declaring the freedom of a Jewish slave named Moschus.

2/7

Seems this post began to go viral.
Most of the comments can be summed up as:
“You should read the Old Testament—it’s all about that!”
Note the dates here:
257 BCE is quite a bit later than what most folks think of when they think of the Hebrew Bible.
My (veiled) critique...
🧵1/4

https://twitter.com/AdlerYonatan/status/1859308536632836245

…in the original post was not against Judaism or the Hebrew Bible.
It was against the unjustified (to my mind) scholarly consensus which views the “post-Exilic” period as one in which "monotheism" came to reign supreme among ancient Judeans.
2/3

—Kol Nidrei—

It is perhaps the most iconic parts of the Yom Kippur service, often moving congregants to tears.
The words themselves, however—in stilted Aramaic and which most people don’t understand—are quite banal.

So what is its secret?

🧵1/8 Kol Nidrei is a technical declaration annulling vows which a person might make over the coming year.

Halakhah takes vows very seriously, and urges people not to make vows in the first place.

It is legal-technical statement—it holds no deeper meaning.
2/8

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗝𝗲𝘄𝗶𝘀𝗵 𝗣𝘂𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗟𝗮𝘄𝘀 𝗧𝗼𝗱𝗮𝘆
—Part II—

In my previous post, I explained how the Jewish purity laws are, for all intents and purposes, no longer kept today.
Why did Jews cease to observe an entire section of Torah law?

A new 🧵
1/14

https://twitter.com/AdlerYonatan/status/1826292836519882826

As I wrote in my previous post, two primary archaeological phenomena are associated with purity observance beginning in the late 2nd century BCE:
(1) ritual immersion pools;
(2) tableware and storage vessels made from chalk (regarded as impervious to impurity).
2/14

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗝𝗲𝘄𝗶𝘀𝗵 𝗣𝘂𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗟𝗮𝘄𝘀 𝗧𝗼𝗱𝗮𝘆

There seems to be a lot of confusion out there about how the Jewish purity laws are observed today.

So I thought I'd post a short 🧵 on the topic.

Here goes...

1/15 The Pentateuch includes a large amount of laws relating to the laws of purity.
Most of these are concentrated in Lev 11–15 and Num 19, but there are laws scattered elsewhere.

These include a long list of things which cause impurity, along with…

2/15

Were the Biblical Authors “Elites”?

Were Biblical writers influential, elite members of the societies within which they lived and wrote? Did ordinary people living in their day know who these authors were, and would they have paid attention to what they had to say?
🧵1/6 In speaking of an author as a member of an “elite”, one would seem to imply that the writer wields a certain degree of influence upon the general society within which he or she lives and works.
Would ordinary Judeans or Israelites have known who the Biblical writers were…
2/6

על המונחים "קלף" "דוכסוסטוס" ו"גויל" בספרות התנאית לאור אנליזות מיקרוסקופיות וספקטרוסקופיות של תפילין, מזוזות ומגילות עתיקות ממדבר יהודה.

פורסם היום במחקרי יו"ש.

🧵1/5

academia.edu/121763123/On_t…
מאמר זה מציע פירושים חדשים לשלושה מונחים המופיעים בספרות התנאית בהקשר לסוגי העורות שעליהם כותבים תפילין, מזוזות וספרי תורה: "קלף", "דוכסוסטוס" ו"גויל".

בימי הביניים נפלה מחלוקת בקרב חכמי הראשונים בהבנת המונחים האלה, וגם בתקופה המודרנית נדרשו מלומדים לסוגיה זו...
2/5

Ever since I began translating Tractate Miqva’ot for the new Oxford Annotated Mishnah, I stopped using the term “miqveh”/”miqva’ot” when writing and speaking about the ancient stepped pools we unearth through archaeology.
I now think that this term is inaccurate.

A short🧵
1/8 In translating a text, one has to pay very, very careful attention to words.
And in translating the Mishnah’s “miqveh”, I came to appreciate that the word means “pooled water”.
That is, it always and everywhere is speaking about the water itself…
2/8

A Bar Kokhba era (132–135 CE) hiding complex has been found at Huqoq in Galilee.

The find adds to a growing body of evidence from northern sites relating to the Second Revolt which suggests that the rebellion extended beyond Judea, deep into Galilee.

1/10jpost.com/archaeology/ar… Unlike the First Revolt (66–73/74 CE), for which we have the writings of Flavius Josephus, the textual evidence for the Second Revolt is extraordinarily limited.
2/10

It's been a year since 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘖𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘑𝘶𝘥𝘢𝘪𝘴𝘮 was published.

Post Oct. 7, I’d like to discuss a topical matter that I left out of the book: how the hypothesis of a Persian-era emergence of Judaism is deeply indebted to various strains of antisemitism.
A🧵
1/16 The book’s subtitle is: “An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal”.
What’s “reappraised” is the long-standing scholarly hypothesis which locates the origins of Judaism in the postexilic Persian era. The idea dates to the 19th century and has since become virtually axiomatic.
2/16

THE IMPERIAL CULT MEETS JUDAISM

What are Jewish ritual immersion pools doing adjacent to the Augusteum (temple dedicated to the cult of #Augustus) at Samaria-Sebaste?

The 18-month embargo on this article is over today, so I’ve posted it here:
academia.edu/62122869/The_I…
A 🧵 1/10 Excavations conducted in the first half of the 20th century at Samaria-Sebaste uncovered an Augusteum, surrounded by additional Roman-era structures. In 1992, Dan Barag published a compelling hypothesis that these buildings were a royal compound belonging to Herod himself.
2/10

Can a deeply religious Christian or Jewish scholar engage in sound archaeological/historical research which relates in one way or another to the Bible?
My answer is a resolute “YES!”
So long as there is no conflict between the scholar’s beliefs and the subject of the study.
🧵1/9 Religious beliefs which relate to the nature of God, to hierarchies of values, or to how a person should act in the world need not pose any conflict of interest with archaeological and historical questions surrounding times, places and events that relate to Biblical texts.
2/9