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Ancient Tablet Ignites Debate on Messiah and Resurrection
#1
<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.nytimes">http://www.nytimes</a><!-- m -->. com/2008/ 07/06/world/ middleeast/ 06stone.html?
_r=1&ref=middleeast &oref=slogin

July 6, 2008

Ancient Tablet Ignites Debate on Messiah and Resurrection
By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM ??? A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that
scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus
is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles,
especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the
dead after three days.

If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to
a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of
Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection
was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time.

The tablet, probably found near the Dead Sea in Jordan according to
some scholars who have studied it, is a rare example of a stone with
ink writings from that era ??? in essence, a Dead Sea Scroll on stone.

It is written, not engraved, across two neat columns, similar to
columns in a Torah. But the stone is broken, and some of the text is
faded, meaning that much of what it says is open to debate.

Still, its authenticity has so far faced no challenge, so its role in
helping to understand the roots of Christianity in the devastating
political crisis faced by the Jews of the time seems likely to
increase.

Daniel Boyarin, a professor of Talmudic culture at the University of
California at Berkeley, said that the stone was part of a growing body
of evidence suggesting that Jesus could be best understood through a
close reading of the Jewish history of his day.

???Some Christians will find it shocking ??? a challenge to the uniqueness
of their theology ??? while others will be comforted by the idea of it
being a traditional part of Judaism,??? Mr. Boyarin said.

Given the highly charged atmosphere surrounding all Jesus-era artifacts
and writings, both in the general public and in the fractured and
fiercely competitive scholarly community, as well as the concern over
forgery and charlatanism, it will probably be some time before the
tablet???s contribution is fully assessed. It has been around 60 years
since the Dead Sea Scrolls were uncovered, and they continue to
generate enormous controversy regarding their authors and meaning.

The scrolls, documents found in the Qumran caves of the West Bank,
contain some of the only known surviving copies of biblical writings
from before the first century A.D. In addition to quoting from key
books of the Bible, the scrolls describe a variety of practices and
beliefs of a Jewish sect at the time of Jesus.

How representative the descriptions are and what they tell us about
the era are still strongly debated. For example, a question that arises
is whether the authors of the scrolls were members of a monastic sect
or in fact mainstream. A conference marking 60 years since the
discovery of the scrolls will begin on Sunday at the Israel Museum in
Jerusalem, where the stone, and the debate over whether it speaks of a
resurrected messiah, as one iconoclastic scholar believes, also will be
discussed.

Oddly, the stone is not really a new discovery. It was found about a
decade ago and bought from a Jordanian antiquities dealer by an
Israeli-Swiss collector who kept it in his Zurich home. When an Israeli
scholar examined it closely a few years ago and wrote a paper on it
last year, interest began to rise. There is now a spate of scholarly
articles on the stone, with several due to be published in the coming
months.

???I couldn???t make much out of it when I got it,??? said David Jeselsohn,
the owner, who is himself an expert in antiquities. ???I didn???t realize
how significant it was until I showed it to Ada Yardeni, who
specializes in Hebrew writing, a few years ago. She was overwhelmed.
???You have got a Dead Sea Scroll on stone,??? she told me.???

Much of the text, a vision of the apocalypse transmitted by the angel
Gabriel, draws on the Old Testament, especially the prophets Daniel,
Zechariah and Haggai.

Ms. Yardeni, who analyzed the stone along with Binyamin Elitzur, is an
expert on Hebrew script, especially of the era of King Herod, who died
in 4 B.C. The two of them published a long analysis of the stone more
than a year ago in Cathedra, a Hebrew-language quarterly devoted to the
history and archaeology of Israel, and said that, based on the shape of
the script and the language, the text dated from the late first century
B.C.

A chemical examination by Yuval Goren, a professor of archaeology at
Tel Aviv University who specializes in the verification of ancient
artifacts, has been submitted to a peer-review journal. He declined to
give details of his analysis until publication, but he said that he
knew of no reason to doubt the stone???s authenticity.

It was in Cathedra that Israel Knohl, an iconoclastic professor of
Bible studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, first heard of the
stone, which Ms. Yardeni and Mr. Elitzur dubbed ???Gabriel???s Revelation,???
also the title of their article. Mr. Knohl posited in a book published
in 2000 the idea of a suffering messiah before Jesus, using a variety
of rabbinic and early apocalyptic literature as well as the Dead Sea
Scrolls. But his theory did not shake the world of Christology as he
had hoped, partly because he had no textual evidence from before Jesus.

When he read ???Gabriel???s Revelation,??? he said, he believed he saw what
he needed to solidify his thesis, and he has published his argument in
the latest issue of The Journal of Religion.

Mr. Knohl is part of a larger scholarly movement that focuses on the
political atmosphere in Jesus??? day as an important explanation of that
era???s messianic spirit. As he notes, after the death of Herod, Jewish
rebels sought to throw off the yoke of the Rome-supported monarchy, so
the rise of a major Jewish independence fighter could take on messianic
overtones.

In Mr. Knohl???s interpretation, the specific messianic figure embodied
on the stone could be a man named Simon who was slain by a commander in
the Herodian army, according to the first-century historian Josephus.
The writers of the stone???s passages were probably Simon???s followers,
Mr. Knohl contends.

The slaying of Simon, or any case of the suffering messiah, is seen as
a necessary step toward national salvation, he says, pointing to lines
19 through 21 of the tablet ??? ???In three days you will know that evil
will be defeated by justice??? ??? and other lines that speak of blood and
slaughter as pathways to justice.

To make his case about the importance of the stone, Mr. Knohl focuses
especially on line 80, which begins clearly with the words ???L???shloshet
yamin,??? meaning ???in three days.??? The next word of the line was deemed
partially illegible by Ms. Yardeni and Mr. Elitzur, but Mr. Knohl, who
is an expert on the language of the Bible and Talmud, says the word is
???hayeh,??? or ???live??? in the imperative. It has an unusual spelling, but
it is one in keeping with the era.

Two more hard-to-read words come later, and Mr. Knohl said he believed
that he had deciphered them as well, so that the line reads, ???In three
days you shall live, I, Gabriel, command you.???

To whom is the archangel speaking? The next line says ???Sar hasarin,??? or
prince of princes. Since the Book of Daniel, one of the primary sources
for the Gabriel text, speaks of Gabriel and of ???a prince of princes,???
Mr. Knohl contends that the stone???s writings are about the death of a
leader of the Jews who will be resurrected in three days.

He says further that such a suffering messiah is very different from
the traditional Jewish image of the messiah as a triumphal, powerful
descendant of King David.

???This should shake our basic view of Christianity,??? he said as he sat
in his office of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem where he is
a senior fellow in addition to being the Yehezkel Kaufman Professor of
Biblical Studies at Hebrew University. ???Resurrection after three days
becomes a motif developed before Jesus, which runs contrary to nearly
all scholarship. What happens in the New Testament was adopted by Jesus
and his followers based on an earlier messiah story.???

Ms. Yardeni said she was impressed with the reading and considered it
indeed likely that the key illegible word was ???hayeh,??? or ???live.???
Whether that means Simon is the messiah under discussion, she is less
sure.

Moshe Bar-Asher, president of the Israeli Academy of Hebrew Language
and emeritus professor of Hebrew and Aramaic at the Hebrew University,
said he spent a long time studying the text and considered it
authentic, dating from no later than the first century B.C. His 25-page
paper on the stone will be published in the coming months.

Regarding Mr. Knohl???s thesis, Mr. Bar-Asher is also respectful but
cautious. ???There is one problem,??? he said. ???In crucial places of the
text there is lack of text. I understand Knohl???s tendency to find there
keys to the pre-Christian period, but in two to three crucial lines of
text there are a lot of missing words.???

Moshe Idel, a professor of Jewish thought at Hebrew University, said
that given the way every tiny fragment from that era yielded scores of
articles and books, ???Gabriel???s Revelation??? and Mr. Knohl???s analysis
deserved serious attention. ???Here we have a real stone with a real
text,??? he said. ???This is truly significant.???

Mr. Knohl said that it was less important whether Simon was the messiah
of the stone than the fact that it strongly suggested that a savior who
died and rose after three days was an established concept at the time
of Jesus. He notes that in the Gospels, Jesus makes numerous
predictions of his suffering and New Testament scholars say such
predictions must have been written in by later followers because there
was no such idea present in his day.

But there was, he said, and ???Gabriel???s Revelation??? shows it.

???His mission is that he has to be put to death by the Romans to suffer
so his blood will be the sign for redemption to come,??? Mr. Knohl said.
???This is the sign of the son of Joseph. This is the conscious view of
Jesus himself. This gives the Last Supper an absolutely different
meaning. To shed blood is not for the sins of people but to bring
redemption to Israel.???
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#2
I saw this the other day, too. It's really interesting. What I want to find is the original article that Yardeni wrote on it. I've not been able to find it yet, though. The news articles are interesting, but it would be really cool to get more details from a scholarly article. It is definitely a most exciting find.
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#3
Here is one scholarly article on this text: <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/850657.html">http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/850657.html</a><!-- m -->
However, the views expressed here are very controversial.
The most comprehensive place that I've found on the web talking about this amazing new text is here: paleojudaica.blogspot.com/2007_12_16_archive.html
This latter one is also very fair and unbiased. They offer a good analysis. I really want to get my hands on Cathedra vol. 123 now, though. If anyone knows where you can find it or buy it, please let me know.
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#4
Rafa Wrote:You know what I find interesting about this tablet? Not that it talks about a "Suffering Servant" Messiah, the notion that this is not an ancient teaching is something of a modern rabbinical invention. What I find interesting about this is that it reconciles the two different messianic depictions of the Tanakh into a single figure. In traditional rabbinic literature these two depictions have always been problematic since they appear so contradictory. So you have for example the legend that Messiah be Joseph would be slain by the spear of Gog (the Antichrist) and that Gog would in turn be killed by Messiah ben David.This tablet reunites the two figures in a single person- which is the account of the New Testament. You have the Suffering Servant and then the "national salvation" Messiah at the very end of times. Therefore our exegesis of scripture can be fully attested by ancient sources.
I agree that this is the new, unique, and most important thing about this find. Even the DSS didn't do this for us. They clearly divide the two Messiahs into two figures.
However, the attestation to three days is a close second most important point in this discovery, if, that is, Knohl is correct.
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#5
Shlama guys,

Quote:I saw this the other day, too. It's really interesting. What I want to find is the original article that Yardeni wrote on it. I've not been able to find it yet, though. The news articles are interesting, but it would be really cool to get more details from a scholarly article. It is definitely a most exciting find.

Sorry, I'm kinda late in posting this. Hope it's still relevant and helpful (I also forgot that I viewed the tablet's insciption months ago - I get B.A.R.):




Quote:The text first came to wide attention when our print publication, Biblical Archaeology Review published Yardeni???s ???A New Dead Sea Scroll in Stone???? in its January/February 2008 issue (Yardeni pointed out that had the text been written on leather, she would have thought of it as another Dead Sea Scroll fragment).

Quote:You can read Yardeni???s BAR article by clicking .....

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://bib-arch.org/archive.asp?PubID=BSBA&Volume=34&Issue=1&ArticleID=16&extraID=14">http://bib-arch.org/archive.asp?PubID=B ... extraID=14</a><!-- m -->

Quote:..... and you can also see her transcription of the Hebrew text .....

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://bib-arch.org/images/DSS-stone-hebrew.jpg">http://bib-arch.org/images/DSS-stone-hebrew.jpg</a><!-- m -->

Quote:..... and her English translation.

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://bib-arch.org/news/dssinstone_english.pdf">http://bib-arch.org/news/dssinstone_english.pdf</a><!-- m -->




Blessings guys,

Ryan
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#6
Oh ..... and I almost forgot .....




Quote:Watch for Knohl???s full article, ???The Messiah Son of Joseph: ???Gabriel???s Revelation and the Birth of a New Messianic Model,??? in the September/October 2008 BAR, out in mid-August. It will include the full text of the stone Dead Sea Scroll, plus Professor Knohl???s reconstructions.




Shlama <!-- sConfusedatisfied: --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/satisfied.gif" alt="Confusedatisfied:" title="Satisfied" /><!-- sConfusedatisfied: -->
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#7
Wow. Every time I think I could not possibly hear a more insane conspiracy theory I come back to this website. I'm proven wrong every time. The tablet does not exist? Please, Ben, do us all a favor and prepare an article on this tablet being a hoax and then send it in to any major scholarly journal or publication. Tell us about your success.
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#8
<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.answering-islam.org/Gilchrist/jonah.html">http://www.answering-islam.org/Gilchrist/jonah.html</a><!-- m -->

Ben Masada, this is for you, a comprehensive refutation of your persistent diatribe concerning three days and three nights.
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#9
<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.neverthirsty.org/dload/feature-articles/gabriels_revelation.pdf">http://www.neverthirsty.org/dload/featu ... lation.pdf</a><!-- m -->

The verdict has not yet come in after all this time. The thing I find fascinating is that some Jew wrote it before Yeshua was born. Did he really get a message from Gabriel?
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