Liz is Aramaic Designs’ newest team member, and has already begun to craft things of beauty by drawing inspiration from the language. If you would like to commission her for a tattoo design or art piece, please email in to us here for a quote.
Her artists page at Aramaic Designs can be found here and the following t-shirt designs are now available immediately:
Pretty soon, these will also be available as tattoo stencils with both flash art and color-reference.
Peace,
-Steve
By ETHAN BRONNER
Published: July 6, 2008
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.
[…]
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.
[…]
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.
[…]
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.
[…]
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.”
Read more here:
I’d love to see how things unfold around this artifact, especially if or when they publish high quality photographs or a transcription. Keep your eyes peeled. 🙂
If anyone finds the transcription, I’d also appreciate it if they were to post a link in response to this thread so we can get some discussion going.
Peace,
-Steve
Since I’ve been doing some more work on the True Children of Abraham Debate in the Gospel of John, I was looking through a rather old book on the subject of Aramaic Primacy (the late C. F. Burney’s “The Aramaic Origin of the Fourth Gospel”) and came across something that I had long since forgotten about the phrase טליא דאלהא (talyâ d’alâhâ) or “The Lamb of God.”
In Galilean Aramaic, not only does talyâ mean “lamb,” but also “child” and “servant.” Burney’s argument was that this choice of words in John was a deliberate pun, which I’m finding more convincing as I research it. I have his full argument (since it’s now in the Public Domain) posted here:
There was a request for a picture of the actual ossuary inscription, and I realize that the last picture I posted was really rough and difficult to see. This image is from the Israeli Antiquities Authority (which is by far the clearest image I’ve been able to see and the one that I based most of my reconstruction on) and I have fiddled with the brightness/contrast as well as applied an unsharp mask to bring the inscription out.
I found posted over on the NT Gateway Weblog a wonderful illustration of how the inscription was broken down by Frank Moore Cross which pretty much agrees, letter for letter, with how I was able to pull “Yeshua” out of the tangle:
Frank Moore Cross’ interpretation
(click to enlarge)
My interpretation
(click to enlarge)
The broken down illustration has been cleaned up to a very large extent and is much easier to read. However, there is one thing that I find myself disagreeing on, and that is the interpretation of bar (“son of”). I’ve noticed three things:
First, you’ll notice that the cleaned up image has a very small swash added to the top of the supposed bet where none of the other line drawings or photographs of the ossuary do. Again, this may be due to the poor quality of images that are out there, and could be easily cleared up with a small series so little as 3 megapixel images with varying light angles.
Second, what is identified as a resh has been smoothed out in the illustration. In the images of the ossuary and line art drawings there is a part where the stem of the glyph curves inwards. This immediately struck me as a bet. To my knowledge, as informal Herodian script eventually progressed, that particular featured ended up as a characteristic quirk of Rashi script many many years later (much like how the Rashi shin bears similarity to that form of Herodian), to which there is a comparison below:
Certainly not conclusive, but an alternate hypothesis at the very least.
Finally, the downwards stroke seems to be completely ignored, which could also be possibly read as a final nun (a hypothesis that some scholars agree with); however, I must admit that this then raises questions about how to interpret the first character in this grouping.
With these in mind, there is a possibility that this reads ben rather than bar, but I still believe that either interpretation is inconclusive.
