Tag: Franciscans

Report from Jerusalem #51, 18th June 2013

UNESCO Delegation to Jerusalem Old City

At the end of May a delegation of UNESCO professionals arrived in Jerusalem to inspect new works and renovations in the Old City, which became a World Heritage site in 1981, but was also on the list of endangered sites. It was last inspected in 2004 and the current mission was to check the general state of preservation of the interior and particularly the walls, which had recently been renovated under the direction of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). The UNESCO report was to be presented and then discussed in June in Paris, when Israel wanted to negotiate the replacement of the Mugrabi Gate access, where a bridge is planned, but that had been strongly opposed by the Arab administration, the Waqf. Unfortunately Israel called off the tour of inspection at the last minute because the Palestinians had, they said, “politicised” the inspection, when the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah claimed in public that “the visit of the UNESCO Mission is a preface for the victory of Palestinian and Arab diplomacy”. The Israeli side saw this as an attempt to politicise the inspection that was planned to be purely professional. It is hoped that the cancellation is only temporary and that the inspection, which was to cover six mosques, six churches and six synagogues, will be rescheduled to a later date.

Oldest Known Torah Scroll Found at Bologna, Italy

It was recently announced that Prof. Mauro Perani had discovered that a Torah scroll held in the library of the University of Bologna had been wrongly ascribed to the seventeenth century. It was really to be dated to between 1155 and 1225 said Perani, basing himself on the features of the script and format, and supported by two C14 tests. If all this is correct, the scroll would be the earliest complete Torah scroll (Sefer Torah) known to date. According to a photograph, the writing on the scroll is very clear and the parchment colour has only slightly darkened. The University reported that the scroll was probably acquired in the nineteenth century after Napoleon’s suppression of the local monasteries.

Mameluke Hostelry in Cana of Galilee

Work has recently been carried out on an extensive salvage dig at Kfar Kanna in the Lower Galilee near Nazareth. The plot, with an area of about four dunams (nearly two acres), belongs to the Custodia Terrae Sanctae (Franciscan Order) and is located near to the Wedding Churches that commemorate Jesus’s first miracle of the water turned to wine at the Jewish wedding in Cana (Kfar Kanna). The excavation conducted by the IAA, under the direction of Yardenna Alexandre, uncovered a complex of five rooms built of stone walls on two sides of an extensive open courtyard. The rooms were roofed with short local timbers supported on stone arches, which were found in a collapsed state on the floors. The site is on a gentle rock slope to the west and rainwater was drained into a reservoir or cistern that served the residents. The abundant pottery remains and a few coins date the building to the Mameluke period, and the large quantities of animal bones on the site, together with a mass of culinary and dining vessels, suggest that the major activity was the preparation and consumption of meat meals.

The presence of imported vessels hints at foreign connections and this combination of the finds points to the possible identity of Christian pilgrims coming to the site of the miracle in the Mameluke and early Ottoman periods (15th to 16th centuries). Digging below the surface exposed limited earlier remains of the Roman and possibly Byzantine periods. After recording, the owners plan to construct a school and community centre on the site.

Computer Advance in Geniza Research

A team of computer scientists from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, led by Prof. Ya’akov Choueka of the Friedberg Genizah project, is piecing together all the disparate fragments of the Cairo Genizah. Their work is enabling variously-held fragments to be pieced together in a matter of weeks, rather than the years needed for more traditional methods, which required scholars to travel to the different locations. Choueka claims that his team are reconstructing “the original Genizah” and the information is being posted on-line here. for viewing by the public as well as scholars. The results of the project will be presented to the 16th World Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem from July 28th to August 1st this year.

Stephen Gabriel Rosenberg

W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research, Jerusalem

Report from Jerusalem, #7, November 2008

Immediately after sending off Report no.6, a number of important finds were announced, particularly at the Seminar on 28th October at the Hebrew University, so here goes.

Eilat Mazar continues to make new discoveries at the City of David site. The latest is an underground water tunnel (partly plastered) that ran under the building, which she calls The Large Stone Structure, which appears to have fed a nearby pool. It debouched onto the hillside and was deliberately blocked (and still is) at a later date. From pottery and two broken lamps, Mazar dates it to the Early Iron Age, and speculated that it may have served to help Joab, David’s general, to penetrate into and conquer Jebus, pre-Israelite Jerusalem, by way of the ‘tzinnor’ (2 Sam.5:8), but that is not yet by any means established. At a later date the tunnel may have served as an escape route for those fleeing from the Babylonian destruction of 586 BCE.

The find of a shard from Khirbet Qeiyafa (perhaps ‘Ruin Beautiful’) in the Elah Valley, southwest of Jerusalem, has raised enormous interest. It is inscribed with five lines of an early Canaanite script, a precursor of Palaeo-Hebrew. The excavator, Yossi Garfinkel of the Hebrew University, claims this to be the earliest Hebrew inscription yet found as he thinks that the first line contains at least two Hebrew words, ‘Al Ta’aseh (do not make…)’, but no full reading has yet been made of the shard. The find was made in the cooking area of a house alongside the six-chambered gate of this 23-dunam (6-acre) town, on a hilltop site overlooking the Elah Valley, where conflicts were fought between the Philistines and the kingdoms of Saul and David, according to the biblical record. It was built in the Early Iron Age but occupation ceased shortly afterwards, judging by the pottery. After a long interval it was re-occupied in the early Hellenistic period, during the Ptolemaic occupation of Palestine, then called Coele-Syria. The evidence for the latter comes from coins found on site. The find of the shard was made in the second season of the dig. It is planned to continue for several more years to uncover the central area of this walled hilltop town.

NEWS FLASH
Further news on Khirbet Qeiyafa: Yossi Garfinkel has just announced that there was a second gate to the city, which was not obvious as it had been built over in Hellenistic times. For an Iron-Age town to have had two gates was most unusual; it was a unique feature. He points out that the site lies between the better-known towns of Azekah and Socoh. In Joshua 15:36 there is a town called Sha’arayim (which means ‘two gates’), mentioned together with the two sites of Azekah and Socoh. It is referred to again in the account of the battle with the Philistines. After David’s combat with Goliath in the Valley of Elah, the Philistines flee, ‘and the wounded of the Philistines fell down by the Way to Sha’arayim….'(1 Sam. 17:52).

The third dramatic find was that of an oval black seal in the dig opposite the Western Wall of the old City, conducted by Shlomit Wexler-Bedollah for the IAA. It shows a typical Assyrian archer, as on the Lachish reliefs in the British Museum, alongside a three-letter Hebrew name, X-G-V (the first letter is a Heth), and can be dated by the script to the 8th or 7th century BCE. The seal is so curious, combining a Hebrew name with an Assyrian motif, that it has already been pronounced a fake (a fashionable point of view) by one expert. but this is unlikely, as it was found in a controlled scientific excavation and is so unusual that a forger would neither know nor be tempted to make the connection. One possibility is that it belonged to an Israelite mercenary working for the Assyrian army that besieged Jerusalem in the time of Sennacherib and Hezekiah, but nothing is definite so far.

On the subject of fakes, the trial in Jerusalem District Court of Oded Golan and three accomplices, accused of faking the Yehoash Tablet and the Inscription on the James, brother of Jesus, Ossuary, has been halted for several months until January 2009. The trial has been going on for nearly three years, the court only meets once a week, and the judge has advised the police and the IAA to reconsider their case as they have so far been unable to pin down the charges on Golan and his co-defendants, in spite of the fact that most experts consider the two artifacts to have been faked, something which the defendants continue to deny. The judge’s opinion is a setback for the IAA but it is thought that they will continue to prosecute though they may consider new tactics when the case resumes next year. Watch this space.

Another dramatic find, reported from Southern Jordan by Thomas Levy of the University of California, was of a large copper-smelting plant in the area of the kingdom of Edom, dated by radio-carbon analysis to the 10th century BCE. The plant is a 10-hectare site called Khirbet en-Naxas (‘Ruins of Copper’) about 30 miles north of Petra, and contains over a hundred buildings and a fortress, and is littered with large black slag heaps, and the remains of burnt charcoal that have enabled radio-carbon dating to be made. Although people are quick to associate copper mines of this period with Solomon (1 Kings 7:47) it is more likely that it was the Egyptians, as at Timna, that worked the mines, as an Egyptian amulet of the goddess Mut and a scarab from Tanis in Egypt were found in situ.

Sad news of the death of the Franciscan priest Michele Piccirillo on 26 October at the age of 63. Piccirillo was Professor of Biblical History and Geography at the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum in Jerusalem and an expert on the wonderful Byzantine mosaics of Jordan, on which he published at least four major volumes.

Stephen Rosenberg,
Albright Institute, Jerusalem