LAWRENCE: It's my pleasure to welcome you all back
and to see that we continue to have
wonderful participation in the conference,
which we thank all the participants.
Now, we are going to hear our first paper
from Professor James VanderKam of the University of Notre Dame.
And without any further ado, I will turn it over to him.
Jim.
OK. Good.
JAMES: Alright.
Thank you Larry.
Good to see you again.
Thanks to the sponsoring organizations
and to organizers like yourself.
And I want to say a special thanks to Kirsten Howe
who has certainly answered all of my questions very well.
Today, I want to talk about two texts that interest me quite a bit
and I believe are very good illustrations of what might be done
with Biblical events, texts, characters
as these are passed along in the tradition.
And in some ways, this will illustrate what (INAUDIBLE)
were talking about a little earlier,
the different kinds of ways in which very intelligent people
read older texts like Genesis and Exodus,
what messages they found in them
and perhaps what messages they wanted to add to them.
So there are two texts that we'll consider.
The Book of Jubilees and the Visions of Amram,
which is a text found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
First, a few basics about both of these texts.
The Book of Jubilees is
an example of what we usually call rewritten scripture.
It has an introductory chapter which tells us
that the book contains the revelations given by an angel of the presence
to Moses while Moses is on Mount Sinai.
And the angel of the presence is reading from heavenly tablets.
So this book claims it is revelation from heaven
given to Moses at Mount Sinai.
The following chapters tell the stories of Genesis,
all the way to the end of the book, and then on into the Book of Exodus
until the Israelites are at Mount Sinai
and the covenant is made there.
So,
it is an example of rewriting the older stories
in the book of Genesis and the book of Exodus.
The book was written in Hebrew and a number of the fragments
of the fragmentary copies of the book of Jubilees
have been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
A total of 14 copies in all,
which is a an unusually high number of copies.
The other texts called the Vision or Visions of Amram
is a text found at Qumran, a text that we didn't know about
before the discovery of the fourth cave
and the publication of those texts.
There are seven copies of this work, it appears.
They're numbered by the numbers given to the texts from cave four
as 543 to 549.
And using the different copies of this text,
we can put together a pretty good sequence in it
and get a pretty good idea of what the writer is saying.
Now, the Visions of Amram was written in the Aramaic language
and it contains a statement from this man Amram.
He may not be the most familiar person to
people in our audience but his name is mentioned in the Bible
and his claim to fame for us
is that he was the father of Moses and Aaron and Miriam.
His name is listed in genealogies in the Bible.
But when we read the stories about Moses' birth,
his father is just called his father,
he's not given the name, Amram, there.
In this text, Amram, Moses' father,
is calling his children together
as he's about to die to die at the age of 136.
and in the text, he gives wise words to his children.
So Jubilees and the Visions of Amram are rather different kinds of texts
but in one small respect, they overlap with each other
and give us illustrations of how people,
very early writers like this, were dealing with some issues
in the last chapter or so of Genesis
and the first chapter of the book of Exodus.
Now, about the Visions of Amram,
and in fact, that's what the text calls itself.
So it's one of those scrolls that gives itself a name.
We can tell from several of the copies, how the text began,
and putting these fragmentary copies together,
the beginning of the text reads like this.
I haven't prepared a slide of this, so I'll just read it to you.
It begins "A copy of the book.
The words of the visions of Amram, son of Kohath, son of Levi.
It contains everything that he told his sons
and everything that he commanded them
on the day that he died
in the 136th year,
that is the year of his death,
in the 152nd year of Israel's sojourn in Egypt".
And at that point, the text tells us
"he gave his 30 year old daughter Miriam
to his younger brother Uzziel".
Another name that's mentioned in the Bible,
who is a son of Kohath just as Amram is.
So he gives his daughter Miriam
in marriage to his brother Uzziel.
A niece marriage in this case.
Amram hosted a seven day banquet, after which he summoned his son Aaron
who was supposed to be about 20 years of age at the time.
And Aaron is to call the other children
for the testamentary address
that Amram is going to give them.
So those are some basic things about these two works.
Now, even though they are so different,
they overlap in one section that I would like to turn to now.
If we look at these texts in their entirety,
we might be surprised that they overlap in anything
but in... as a matter of fact they do.
The one section where they give a similar material,
or related material, is the story about
the effort to bury the bones of Joseph's brother in Canaan
and some obstacles that impeded the effort.
These two texts - Jubilees and the Visions of Amram -
provide the earliest literary records
of a story or perhaps stories
about warfare between the king of Canaan and the king of Egypt
and how that conflict impacted travel between the two countries
and thus, affected the project
to bury the bones of Joseph's 11 brothers.
So let's turn to the account in Jubilees first,
and if we could have that slide
so we can have the translation in front of us,
that would be good at this time.
There we have the account in the book of Jubilees.
You can see it's from chapter 46
and the beginning of chapter 47.
Now remember, an angel of the presence
is dictating all of this stuff to Moses.
It's an unusual section because at this point,
the angel of the presence gets up to Moses' life.
So he starts talking...
telling Moses what happened in his - Moses' - own life.
Now this is from my translation of the Book of Jubilees.
So before Joseph died, he ordered the Israelites
to take his bones along
at the time when they would leave the land of Egypt.
He made them swear about his bones because he knew
the Egyptians would surely not allow him to be brought out
and be buried in the land of Canaan on the day of his death
since Makamaron, the king of Canaan,
while he was living in the land of Assur,
fought in the valley with the king of Egypt
and killed him there.
He pursued the Egyptians as far as the borders of Egypt.
He was unable to enter because another new king ruled Egypt.
He was stronger than he, so he returned to the land of Canaan
Kanan and the gates of Egypt were closed
with no one leaving or entering Egypt.
Joseph died in the 46th Jubilee in the sixth week
during its second year.
In brackets there, you see what the year of the world is
that Jubilees expresses in that unusual way.
He was buried in the land of Egypt and all his brothers died after him.
Then the king of Egypt went out to fight with the king of Canaan
in the 47th Jubilee in the second week
during its second year. The Israelites brought out
all the bones of Jacob's sons except Joseph's bones.
They buried them in the field of the double cave,
that is Machpelah in the mountain.
Many returned to Egypt but a few of them remained on the mountain.
Few of them remained on the mountain of Hebron
and Moses father, Amram, remained with them.
Then the king of Canaan conquered the king of Egypt,
closed the gates of Egypt,
conceived an evil plan against the Israelites,
and then we read about the oppression,
including the words about expressing the king's concern
that the many many Israelites might fight against the Egyptians.
And then we get to the birth of Moses
after his father returns from Canaan to Egypt.
Moses' birth in the year 2330 of the world.
Now, a few comments on that version.
It relates fairly closely to the end of the Book of Genesis.
And if you're familiar with that part of the Book of Genesis,
you start reading and you think
'Oh yes, I know this story at the end of Genesis'
but all of a sudden, it takes a turn
and you get some unfamiliar material.
You meet a king, Makamaron, the king of Canaan
who conquered the king of Egypt and so on.
Now at the beginning of the story, of course,
Joseph is the key actor in the drama
and the writer refers to Joseph's instructions to...
First, he gives them to his brothers, and then the text says,
he gives them to the Israelites
to bring up his bones when the Israelites leave Egypt,
they'll leave when the Lord visits them.
Whatever that might have been.
But he speaks very emphatically about this.
And later on in the book of Exodus,
there's reference to Moses taking the bones of Joseph
when they left Egypt and the burial is talked about in Joshua 24.
Now, these statements of Joseph's
making his brothers or the Israelites
swear that they'll bring his bones out of Egypt
suggests that there was something unusual about his case.
He does not mention the bones of his brothers
or any need to bring their bones up
at the time of the divine visitation.
So the reader senses that Joseph's remains
will be treated differently, as indeed they were,
but does not know why,
and Jubilees explains why that was,
it was because of this war with the king of Canaan
that meant that the borders between the two areas were closed
so one couldn't go out from Egypt to bury Joseph
as they had buried his father Jacob.
Now, we also read, both in the Bible and Jubilees,
about Joseph's burial in the land of Egypt
before his brothers die.
Well, the victory of the king of Canaan over Egypt
and the closing of Egypt's borders
explains why Joseph couldn't be buried in Canaan
right away on the day of his death.
He already knew this beforehand apparently,
almost in a prophetic way,
so he gave instructions about handling his bones.
Now, the brothers deaths after Joseph,
this is suggested by a couple of verses in the Bible
that they died after Joseph.
Their bones were handled when the king of Egypt,
the new king of Egypt,
made a counteroffensive against the king of Canaan
that opened the borders of Egypt.
So they took advantage of this time,
went up and buried the 11 brothers but not Joseph,
who was already buried in Egypt.
So they went to the family burial ground, the cave on Machpelah.
Well, when the king of Canaan reconquered Egypt
and, again, forced closure of the borders,
the oppression began in Egypt.
And of course, there was the fear
that the Israelites would fight against the enemies of Egypt,
which seemed to be Canaan at this time,
and so the Egyptians oppressed them.
Eventually, Amran returns to Egypt after a 40 year absence
and Moses is born.
Now, could we see the other slide
which has the translation of the Visions of Amram?
This is a translation of Ed Cook Dead Sea Scrolls reader
that I've modified slightly.
And this is a composite text
based on several of the manuscripts of the Visions of Amram.
It's a typical Qumran text in that you have a lot of gaps
that we don't know what was present there.
But there is reference, and remember, Amram is talking,
he's In the land of Canaan, he went to bury our fathers.
These appear to be the 11 brothers of Joseph.
And he mentions that his father, Kohath or Kohath,
was also along there.
And they talk about building the tombs of the fathers,
so it doesn't seem as if it's just a burial in a cave,
they're actually building tombs.
While others of the relatives are there.
A large body of people are burying the 11 brothers of Joseph.
But then they hear about a war, it says,
a frightening rumor of war.
And our group, he says, returned to the land of Egypt.
And then Amram says that...
I don't know if he went back to Egypt and then back to Canaan again
or just stayed in Canaan, but at any rate,
he remained in Canaan to bury the bones of Joseph's brothers.
And war broke out.
He mentions that he has both (INAUDIBLE) and Canaan
fighting against Egypt, and they close the borders again.
This... the text mentions apparently,
although it's quite broken here,
that Amram was separated from his wife, Jochebed, for 41 years,
and only after that, was he able to return.
And then the text continues with a vision that Amram talks about.
So both of these texts - Jubilees and the Visions of Amram -
talk about a war between Canaan and Egypt,
how the border gets closed, how this affects the burial process
of burying the 11 brothers.
We don't know the immediate preceding context for the Visions of Amram
because of damage to the texts
but we can tell that it's not as closely tied
to the text of Genesis and Exodus as Jubilees is,
and it, of course, focuses on Amram.
After all, this texts is named after him.
And it's the account of his report to his children on his deathbed.
This is one of several texts we have from the Dead Sea Scrolls,
Aramaic texts about these early priests,
Levi, his son Kohath and his son Amram.
We have texts about all of them in Aramaic
expanding what little is said about them in the Bible.
Perhaps the reason being that it was felt
these characters really should have more of a resume
to justify their occupying such an important position
in the genealogy of priests.
Very briefly, you can see that the burial of Joseph's brothers
is a major element in the plot.
Much more time is spent in this text with that
than in Jubilees, which mentions it just in one line.
It's quite a project because the tombs have to be built.
Another element that's important in the Amram text
is that Amram is separated from his wife.
It may be that the text says
he did not take another wife during these 41 years,
although apparently others were available,
and he's eager to get back home to see his wife.
But the two of them are separated for many many years.
Now, what I want to consider very briefly
is the relation between these two accounts.
Did one...
Did, say, Jubilees borrow it from the testament
or the Visions of Amram
or was that the other way around
or did both of them borrow it from some other source?
Jubilee is... I think everybody agrees,
was written in the 2nd century BCE,
exactly when during the century, people debate.
I think maybe toward the middle of the century.
It may be that the Visions of Amram is an older text.
The editor of the text, Emile Puech, certainly thought it was older
and that perhaps Jubilees used the Visions of Amram.
I think though that that's very unlikely,
the texts are similar in some ways.
They both refer to a war between Canaan and Egypt
and both present the war
as the context for burying the bones of Joseph's brothers.
And both mention Amram's return to Egypt
after apparently about the same amount of time, 40 or 41 years
that he was separated from his wife in Canaan
before he could go back to the land of Egypt.
So the emphases are certainly different
and it seems as though the Visions of Amram
pick up only a part of the war account
whereas Jubilees has a more expanded form of the war account,
having three phases in it,
and Jubilees includes the Joseph story,
the last days of Joseph in its account.
Now, we could...
I think it's likely that both of them do this story
from some other source or sources
and we could just briefly ask what that source might have been.
I think that one could put together
from some hints in the books of Genesis and Exodus
that there was a war or a threat of war
at the time around Moses' birth
and the time of the oppression in Egypt.
Perhaps already at the end of Genesis,
there was hostility between Egypt and Canaan.
And there are many hints to this effect in the text,
and I've already mentioned the fact that the new king of Egypt
was concerned about the Israelites becoming so numerous and mighty
that they were mightier than the Egyptians in case of war.
They might join their enemies, the Canaanites apparently
and fight against Egypt and leave the land.
The Israelites are put to work on (UNKNOWN)
it says in Exodus.
One of the understandings of this term (UNKNOWN)
was that these were fortified cities.
We find this understanding of the term
in the Septuagint and a couple of the Targums.
It's certainly what we have in the book of Jubilees.
I suspect then that the two do it from a common source.
I think maybe someone do to gather the clues
that we have in Genesis and Exodus
about possible conflict at the end of Joseph's life
and the burial of the brothers and so on.
Conflict between Egypt and Canaan.
I wonder if a story like this was perhaps in something
like the texts that we call either reworked Pentateuch or Pentateuch,
whatever they were. These somewhat expanded stories
or accounts of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus,
Numbers and Deuteronomy.
Maybe something like this entered into such a text
and this is the way in which our two authors ran into it
and both developed it for their own purposes.
OK, I'll stop there. Thank you.
LAWRENCE: OK. Thank you very much for this wonderful presentation.
And we go to our wonderful question moderator, Pat.
PATRICK: Thank you, Professor VanderKamp.
So, can we have a couple of questions lined up so far.
First being from Dr Elizabeth (UNKNOWN) who asks,
if you have any thoughts on the language difference
between the Visions of Amram being in Aramaic
and Jubilees being in Hebrew.
JAMES: I don't have many thoughts about it.
I know it's sometimes argued in our field that
the Aramaic texts at Qumran are generally earlier
than the Hebrew ones,
whether that's the case all the time,
I really don't know because I haven't investigated it.
It is interesting that Jubilee is it sticks much more closely
to the texts of Genesis and Exodus
and explains certain problems that arise in the text
or fills in certain gaps in the text.
Whereas the Aramaic text is of more of a free composition,
a free creation, I think.
Perhaps writing in Aramaic allowed that
or facilitated that more so than writing in Hebrew,
but we, of course, have some Hebrew texts
that are also
more freely with material and scriptural books.
PATRICK: Great. Thank you.
So another question lined up here asks
if you have any thoughts on whether the Visions of Amram
should be considered as a sectarian document,
closely associated, for example, with (UNKNOWN)
or just how any sort of sectarian interpretation
might be involved in any of these expansions
or reworkings of the biblical text.
JAMES: I don't...
I'm not aware of any very strongly sectarian aspects
of the Visions of Amram.
It is a text that partakes of a concern we find
in other texts from Qumran also
that I think are not obviously sectarian
like the Aramaic Levi document
and the testament of Kohath.
These are texts that, as I said earlier,
give a better resume to these ancient priests than we...
otherwise have only names for them given in the Bible.
But I don't see these as sectarian texts.
I don't...
It's not obvious to me at least that they are,
let's say, texts attacking the current priesthood,
the priesthood in Jerusalem in a sectarian fashion
like we find some other attacks in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
I presume these texts were written before this particular
group of (INAUDIBLE) was formed,
and therefore, we wouldn't expect to find sectarian features
in them anyway.
PATRICK: Great. Thank you.
Let's see.
Yeah. I mean a follow-up question to that, I guess,
is one posed here about just how widely then
might these texts be representative of,
kind of, currents and thoughts, traditions
in the second temple period.
JAMES: I think that both of them show,
in addition to
the desire to expand on
what the end of Genesis and the beginning of Exodus offer us.
I think both of them show some evidence
of concern with chronological problems
that arise in the scriptural text.
One of the chief problems in chronology
that we find treated in several sources,
both in the scrolls and outside,
is the time after the descent into Egypt,
after Joseph's or Jacob's descent into Egypt.
He lives another 17 years there
and we read about the end of Joseph's life.
And we also have a genealogy in Exodus 6
of the early priests,
the descendants of Levi for several generations
where we run into Kohath and Amram and Aaron.
And that particular genealogy
does not give us the kind of chronological information
that we would get, say, in Genesis 5 or 11
where we find out how old the father was
when his first son was born.
But all of this fed into the larger problem
of when did the Israelites leave from Egypt.
How do you explain the number in Exodus 12:40,
about the 430 years,
or the one in Genesis 15 about 400 years.
So they play into a larger chronological issue
and offer their own solutions to it.
PATRICK: Do we have time for one more?
LAWRENCE: I think we can take one more question
because this is the last session of the day,
if we end up ending five minutes late, not gonna hurt anyone, I think.
PATRICK: Sure. So we have a question from Jonatan Miller.
So I'll just...
It's a little...
It sets up well, so I'll just read the whole thing.
Could these texts be trying to make sense of I Chronicles 7,
especially verse 24, which insinuates
that the sons of Ephraim never left the land of Canaan.
Perhaps they were stuck on account of the border closure.
JAMES: I don't see any obvious connection to that particular issue.
We find a focus here on
at least in the Amram text, on the part that
Amram and his family, his father and so on,
played in this burial process.
And I really don't see any
explicit indication that the Ephraim issue was involved.
LAWRENCE: OK. Thank you very much Jim for this wonderful presentation.
And I think the audience (INAUDIBLE)
figure out that most of the people speaking are all friends,
and we all hope to be seeing each other soon in person
and arguing out some of these issues.
So our next speaker, Ariel Feldman,
from Brite Divinity School will be speaking on
'Deciphering fragments, tefillin -
which are phylacteries - or an amulet'. OK?
Professor Feldman.
ARIEL: Well, let me begin with a word of thanks
to Professor Schiffman for this generous invitation
to be a part of this wonderful conference.
I am also very grateful to Professor Justin
and all others at NYU and beyond who made this event possible.
My presentation today is a result of
a sort of a scholarly side job, if you like.
Some time ago, I was asked to write an essay
on the fifth book of the Hebrew Bible
- the Book of Deuteronomy in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
This proves to be a really challenging task
because Deuteronomy appears to be everywhere in Dead Sea Scrolls
including the tiny tefillin or phylacteries.
Many of you are familiar with this quite well known Jewish custom
of wearing phylacteries or tefillin.
Fill in small boxes with leather straps.
During morning prayer on weekdays,
one of the two boxes is attached to one's forehead
while the other one goes on the left arm.
And inside these two little boxes are four biblical passages.
The next slide shows a scribe hard at work
to prepare this tefillin slips which contain,
as you may know, pieces from Exodus chapter 13,
verses one through ten and also 11 through 16,
Deuteronomy six, verses four through nine,
and Deuteronomy 11, verses 13 through 21.
One of these passages is particularly well known,
Deuteronomy six, verses four through nine,
which contains the famous (UNKNOWN) Israel,
'the Lord is our God, the Lord alone'.
Well, when you look at the sentence marked in red,
'bind them as a sign on your hand
and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead',
this is a sentence that is commonly cited as the scriptural basis
for the custom of making and wearing tefillin.
However, a reader might wonder
whether this requirement was intended to be understood literally
or rather as a figure of speech.
When this command was first understood literally is unknown.
What we do know, however, is that this custom or custom associated
with such a literal interpretation of Deuteronomy six,
was in place already in 2nd century BCE.
How do we know that?
Well first, there might be a hint to an existence of such a custom.
in the Letter of Aristeas,
a Jewish work written sometime in 2nd century BCE in Greek.
Secondly and far more importantly,
we have in our possession multiple tefillin from the Judean desert.
Predominantly from the caves of Qumran.
And the oldest ones of them are dated on palaeographic grounds
to the 2nd century BCE.
So let me explain a little bit more
what exactly was found among the Qumran scrolls
as far as tefillin are concerned.
We have several complete phylacteries
with slips inside the cases.
In fact, recently, Dr Yonatan Adler
was able to locate, in the depths of a storage,
a box with nine tefillin cases which seemed to have text inside,
and they are still yet to be opened.
In addition to few complete tefillin,
the Judean desert also include multiple tefillin cases which are empty,
some 25 of them,
as well as many tefillin slips out of the boxes,
some 40 of them.
Most of them come from the Qumran caves,
and a few from sites associated
with the Second Jewish revolt against Rome under Bar Kokhba.
Well, this ancient tefillin are remarkable objects.
First, there is a craftsmanship.
The cases are tiny.
For instance, this tefillin published by (INAUDIBLE)
which has four compartments
to house for slips of text,
is only 13mm by 20mm.
Namely, less than an inch.
The texts themselves are also exceedingly small.
Again, taking the (INAUDIBLE) tefillin as an example,
one of the slips measures some 27 by 44mm.
An inch by two inches.
As you can see, they were carefully folded
Into tiny packages and then fastened to prevent unfolding
apparently with the hair of a clean kosher animal such as a goat.
Finally, there is the script.
Many tefillin from the Judean desert feature a tiny script
with letters often ranging between 0.5 and 1mm.
This sort of miniature writing must have required
a remarkable skill and concentration.
In some cases, the script is quite difficult to decipher.
The challenge is not only the small size of the letters
but also the tendency found here and there
to reduce the familiar shapes of the Hebrew letters
to simpler forms.
Apparently, in order to make the process of writing easier and faster.
I would like to offer one example of such a reduction
or simplification, if you like, of the letters
coming to you from a slip of (UNKNOWN)
from the eighth cave of Qumran.
And this image represents two words from Deuteronomy 10, 22.
If you're able to follow Hebrew, you can follow the text
in the red in the square script below the image.
The two words in question are (UNKNOWN) and (UNKNOWN)
rendered into English as 'so many persons went down'.
Please know that there is no space or interval
between the two words at all.
More importantly, I think,
you can see how similar the letters are in the second word.
Without knowing the Biblical passage, would you ever be able to tell
that this four vertical lines are actually four different letters.
(UNKNOWN)
The Qumran tefillin are remarkable
not only because of their physical features
but also because of their contents.
As you may know, Rabbinic law, 'Halakha'
requires a precise and uniform execution
of the slips inserted into the tefillin.
No slightest deviation from the received text of Exodus and Deuteronomy
is allowed.
One of the biggest surprises of the Qumran tefillin, in this regard,
was that multiple tefillin include more biblical text
than traditional or Rabbinic tefillin do.
Thus in Exodus for instance, several verses from the preceding chapter,
Chapter Twelve, verses 43 through 51 are included.
In the case of Deuteronomy,
preceding sections from chapters five, six and ten
are copied.
The inclusion of Deuteronomy five is particularly important
because it contains the famous Ten Commandments.
Besides the tefillin slips
that include large chunks of Exodus and Deuteronomy,
there is also one tefillin slip which is unusual.
It contains a few verses from Shirat Haazinu,
or Moses' song from Deuteronomy 32.
I should make sure now that along with this expansive tefillin,
there are also several phylacteries at Qumran
that have exactly the same biblical passages
as traditional tefillin do.
Most of this tefillin slips from Qumran
were deciphered and published relatively early
by a gifted polygrapher, JÃ³zef Milik.
His work on reading and reconstructing these tiny scrolls
is astonishing.
And this brings me back to my little side joke story, if you will.
As I studied the tefillin slips
containing passages from the Book of Deuteronomy,
I came across one slip that Milik left unread.
No that he completely ignored it. No.
He actually masterfully unrolled it
and then reassembled it from several small scraps.
However, he considered it to be
practically indecipherable, to quote his own language.
This tefillin slip is known as 4Q Phylactery T.
Let's take a closer look at it.
What you see on the next slide appears to be the
earliest available photograph of this 4Q Phylactery T.
Taken during the process of initial sifting
and arranging of the fragments,
sometime in 1958.
On this image, it appears still as a folded text.
And many of the fragments surrounding it
belong to other tefillin that Milik read and published.
Clearly, very little can be said about this tiny text
from this particular image at this particular stage.
The next image takes us...
A few years ago taken picture from 2014
and it presents a partially unfolded text.
I'm saying partially unfolded text of fragment one
because the long rectangular piece
in the right bottom corner of the fragment
is actually a sort of multi-layered wad.
A sandwich, if you like, with several layers of text inside.
If unfolded, it would reveal the entire missing part
of the text on the right-hand of the text.
I very much hope that it will be soon opened
by our high skilled curators.
As with other tefillin slips,
this fragment is very small - about 30mm wide and 15mm high.
The letters are tiny too, no more than 1mm high
just like in many other tefillin from Qumran.
And as in several other phylacteries, the height of the letters
Is not only the challenge that I'm dealing with
but also the challenge that
the main letters appear to be very similar in their shape.
Please take a look at this image.
Lots of similarly looking vertical strokes.
In addition, the ink also has spread out some,
blurring the precise contours of the letters.
Well, when I first saw it,
I felt, to quote the well-known musical, excited and scared.
I was excited because I thought,
"How often does one find a text that no one really worked on?"
It seemed to be an incredible opportunity to be a part of,
so to speak, original Dead Sea Scrolls experience deciphering of fragment.
However, I also felt apprehensive because it was very clear to me
that this is a difficult one.
If Milik gave up on it, it has...
must have been very difficult to read.
At the same time, as you know, these days,
these days, we have so many new tools at our disposal
when we work on this text.
First, thanks to IAA, I had an access
to the new high resolution images of this text,
for which I'm very grateful to the Scrolls team at IAA.
Second, I had the software to manipulate these images,
enlarging and changing their features as needed.
Milik, as you will recall, worked with a magnifying glass only.
Finally, I had another great advantage.
My wife is interested in Dead Sea Scrolls
and she happens to be a software engineer,
so she and I decided to join forces.
We spend long hours inspecting the old and new images
trying to match them with the text of Exodus and Deuteronomy
that we expected to find that this fragment.
However, the more we tried, the less likely it seemed to be.
The text simply refused to match those biblical verses.
So what do you do when you have a string of tiny letters,
many of which look alike,
with almost no intervals between the words,
and unlike tefillin slips, you don't know the text.
All of a sudden, it was no more a task
of deciphering an unread tefillin slip
but an apparently unknown document.
So here's what we try to do.
First, we try to identify the letters that were more or less distinct.
And using various charts prepared by other scholars,
figure out what could they be.
We pay particular attention to what appeared to be
the final letters making the ends of the words.
Second, my wife designed a software
that allowed us to search for strings of letters
we thought we were able to recognize
within biblical texts.
We, of course, had no idea
whether there is any biblical passage in this fragment,
but we got lucky.
We were able to identify several words.
In fact, two full lines of text that had a match in the Hebrew Bible.
It wasn't Exodus or Deuteronomy
but rather the book of Psalms.
Psalm 36, verses eight through 11.
As you can see on the slide,
this is not a precise quotation
but some sort of paraphrase of this ritual passage.
The passage itself reads
'All people may take refuge in the shadow of your wings.
They feast on the abundance of your house.
And you give them drink from the river of your delights.
O continue your steadfast love to those who know you
and your salvation to the upright of heart'.
So the words in red have a parallel in the fragment.
They will drink their fill from the shadow of your wings.
They will take refuge with the sadness of your house.
And then we have a missing part.
He will place you on the river of delights.
And the upright of heart will rest.
Well, once we had this match,
we could proceed with more certainty.
For now, we knew a bit more
about the way the scribe executed his letters.
This is not to say we were able to offer a definitive reading
of the entire fragment, this is still a work in progress,
still the preliminary additions that we were able to publish
suggested an addition to this quotation from Psalms 36.
This fragment also contains non-biblical text,
not a passage from the Bible at all,
that deals with such topics as healing, strength and blessing.
Yet there were more surprises in store.
There is another fragment in this tiny scroll.
It is much smaller but it is somewhat easier to read.
As you can see from these two images on this slide,
it is also still partially folded
and needs the loving hand of a curator to unfold and straighten it.
Meanwhile we are able to digitally unfold it using Photoshop.
And you can see the result on the next slide.
As with the previous fragment,
we soon realized that this is not a text of Exodus or Deuteronomy.
(INAUDIBLE) was fragment one.
Some of the wording here is not easy to decipher.
Still in line four, we think one can clearly read the name of Raphael.
As you may know, Raphael is the name of an angel.
In such early texts as first book of Enoch,
he's one of the top angels, one of the archangels.
His name comes from the Hebrew root meaning 'to heal'.
And another early Jewish text, the book of Tobit,
he helps to heal the main protagonist, Tobit,
and restrains a demon named Asmodeus.
In fact, later Jewish magical texts and amulets
frequently invoke the name of Raphael.
But all we know from this text
Is that Rafael will frighten them.
But 'frighten' does not explain
who are implied by the plural feminine 'them'.
However, the Hebrew noun 'ruach', 'spirit'
or (UNKNOWN) in plural, comes to mind.
Interestingly, a similar language of frightening evil spirits
is found in another Dead Sea Scroll.
This text is known as the Song of the Sage.
It appears to contain hymns
that were recited by the Dead Sea Scrolls community
for protection from evil spirits.
So, the text describes the role of the person
entrusted with this task as follows,
'And I, the instructor, proclaim his glorious splendor
so as to frighten
and to terrify all the spirits of the destroying angels'.
Well, having done all this work,
we are now facing the big question.
What is this tiny text that resembles tefillin,
as far as physical features are concerned, and yet contains a text
that does not match other ancient tefillin at all?
Is this another tefillin text?
After all, one of tefillin from Qumran contains Deuteronomy 32,
which is never to be found in other tefillin.
Another option to consider is that this text is an amulet.
The problem with this proposal is that
we have no other contemporary Jewish texts to compare it with.
The earliest Jewish, or should I say Judean text
which is an amulet we possess
is the famous Silver Scrolls
from the burial cave in Ketef Hinnom in Jerusalem.
These tiny silver scrolls are dated to 7th or 6th century BCE.
Then we have reference to written amulets and rabbinic texts,
which are much later.
We also have actual Hebrew and Aramaic amulets
from 4th and 5th century CE onwards.
That's if you like the gap between the Ketef Hinnom amulets
and those from the late antiquity is rather impressive,
it's about 1000 years.
An absence of written Jewish amulets from this entire period of time
has been suggested to be an indication that Jews just abstained
from written amulets in this period of time at all.
Still I think we can compare our little text
with at least the later Jewish amulets.
There are several similarities.
Rabbinic texts, for instance, tell us that
amulets and tefillin often looked alike.
One actually could mistake an amulet for tefillin.
It seems to fit our text rather well.
Rabbis also reported amulets contain biblical texts,
which our text also does, Psalm 36.
The actual later amulets we possess often mention angelic names.
Well, as we could see, our text does too.
But there are also important differences
which are not to be overlooked.
Ancient Jewish amulets, or amulets in general, are often personalized.
They evoke the name of a person
for whom this particular amulet is written.
Also, later Jewish amulets are often very specific.
They aim at particular disease, particular danger or particular desire.
Finally, there's almost invariably
a text or a phrase of adulation,
which is a formula making the demons obey the amulet.
All these features are clearly absent from our text.
Yet I think this does not necessarily rule out
the possibility that our tiny scroll is an amulet,
for these very features are also missing
from the Ketef Hinnom amulets, the early ones.
In fact, in comparison to later Jewish amulets,
Ketef Hinnom amulets seem to be
more of a prophylactic type, if you like.
They're not treating a particular disease or menace
but rather secure protection from evil in general
and a divine blessing.
Perhaps this could be true of our object.
It served a sort of protection
prophylactic purpose, if you like.
So what is it then?
A tefillin, a phylactery or an amulet?
Well, you're, of course, free to make your own judgement
but please allow me to complicate things a little bit further.
Does it really have to be this or that?
Several scholars have argued that tefillin
were apotropaic objects or amulets themselves.
The most detailed argument in support of this thesis
has been recently put forward by (UNKNOWN)
In his important monograph, he argues
that tefillin originated as amulets.
A kind of, if you like, Jewish response
to the prevalence use of amulets in the Greco-Roman world.
The biblical passages utilized in them
intended to secure a long life in the land for their owners.
Well, if this logic is followed one step further,
then what we have at Qumran, maybe,
is a variety of
apotropaic text. A variety of miniature text
serving apotropaic purposes.
The majority of them uses the familiar passages
from Exodus and Deuteronomy.
Some prefer longer stretches of text while others, shorter.
There is also one instance of an amulet using Deuteronomy 32.
And now, there is also a text - our text -
which is a very different animal.
It is citing biblical verses but otherwise, is a non-biblical document.
Well, if you were to agree,
if all this is correct
and all these tiny text we're discussing are amulets in a way,
then we would have still a very interesting question to answer.
Why do most of them
contain Exodus and Deuteronomy
and only one seems to contain a non-biblical text?
All I can suggest at this point is that this may say something
about the community or communities that own this object.
A community or communities that prioritize scripture
over other texts that could secure divine benevolence.
Well, what began as a side job for me became a long-term project.
I've been working on Qumran tefillin ever since.
I think there might be one or two more tiny scrolls
that appear to be tefillin but contain texts that do not really match,
again, Exodus and Deuteronomy.
Yeah. This is a topic for a different presentation.
Thank you.
LAWRENCE: Thank you very much Ariel for this wonderful presentation.
And I think you may have used an amulet to show your success.
And of course, we wish you continued success
in research on tefillin.
And turn over to Pat for our questions.
PATRICK: Great, Thank you very much.
I think we're...
I'm sharing the screen so we can see you.
Professor Feldman, thank you very much.
So we have a few questions lined up already.
But right off the bat,
a couple of questions are asking about just the...
the kind of material context of these tefillin man...
or this tefillin manuscript at least, right?
So what was it? Where were they discovered?
What was their context?
And can we tell whether or not they were written at Qumran
or brought there, like some theories, I suppose,
about the scrolls not all being from Qumran...
being written by sectarians at the site, etc. etc.
So...
ARIEL: Thanks very much. Although those are really big questions.
(INAUDIBLE) the final answer on all of them.
Well, as far as the places where they've been found,
most of them, the majority have been found at Qumran
from what we have from the Judean desert, of course,
and there are several that have been found
in the caves that are related to
those Judeans who were seeking shelter from the Romans apparently
during the Second Revolt against Rome,
but possibly, also in the times of the First Revolt.
So the majority comes from the Dead Sea area, from the caves of Qumran.
Some of them have features
that according to at least to one school of thought,
may suggest that they have been written at Qumran itself
because of particularities of morphology and orthography.
However, it's not entirely clear whether those indications are enough
to secure that sort of very clear location for this text.
There is one or two that are so remarkably resembling
the traditional Jewish tefillin - the rabbinic tefillin -
that an article has been published that suggests
that maybe in those two,
we have an example of a tefillin that was actually pharisaic
and brought by a member perhaps,
adjoining member to Qumran, and, therefore, we have it there.
But so far, these are predominantly theories.
We cannot say anything for sure about the location of those texts.
What is also very interesting
that many of them have been found out of their cases,
out of their little housings,
and this is raising a question why,
what's the reason to have those texts out of those housings
and housings apart.
I think maybe it's a bit premature
to give any final answers to all this.
First because not much work has been done on tefillin.
And secondly, we still have this ninth specimen
waiting to be opened at some point
and many more secrets, I think, will become more apparent
as they go completely out and published.
PATRICK: Yeah. Kind of following up on this.
Is there any connection to burial practices
or being buried in burial areas?
ARIEL: Well, for the Ketef Hinnom amulets, as you will recall,
those two silver scrolls were found, indeed,
in a burial cave in Jerusalem.
And one of the suggestions that scholars have made
is that those two amulets were actually
made or prepared to accompany a person on his journey
or her journey to the other world.
This is not entirely clear too.
These amulets might have been used in one's life as well
and then to continue with that person Into the burial cave.
There is no reasons whatsoever
to assume that tefillin were used in a similar fashion.
PATRICK: Great.
Thank you. So we have a question here about
since some material that you discovered here
related to works of Psalms,
so how do you see these tefillin,
or at least this one, impacting
your view of the use of Psalms,
the textual tradition of Psalms etc.?
ARIEL: Well, this is a wonderful question.
As our listeners may know,
Psalms is a very important book in Jewish tradition
for so many reasons, but also
in the use in amulets.
In fact, it has been suggested that Psalm 91,
the first verses of that Psalm,
are the most widely-used piece of scripture
In Judea or Judeo-Christian amulets ever.
So for us, maybe it's an instance of this
importance of Psalms
also for that sort of personal piety, if you would like,
for that personal touch of divine,
the use of the text as an object of one's body
to protect or safeguard,
to seek divine benevolence.
PATRICK: Great. And on this same topic,
Professor (UNKNOWN) asks if Psalm 90 is quoted in any tefillin.
ARIEL: Is quoted where?
PATRICK: In any tefillin.
ARIEL: No. No, no.
Unfortunately not. And I think I probably misspoke,
it's that Psalm that I was referring to as the most widely-used.
And unfortunately, we have...
I mean this is not the probably proper language,
fortunately, unfortunately.
We don't have it in those tefillin.
We don't have it in those little texts.
I wish we would.
That would make a very interesting connection
between the later tradition of including that Psalms in amulets
and also to such scroll as 11Q11
which includes that Psalm along with incantations.
Some of the early examples of incantations we had in our hands.
PATRICK: Yeah. I mean you put this in the context
of some of these other Dead Sea Scrolls,
11Q11, the Songs of the Sage,
I'm also thinking of - was it? - 4Q444,
4Q Incantation.
And those texts are clearly written in larger script,
they're written to be read and to be used.
So what might be a way that we can,
if we start to see connections between these
and break down the barriers between
strictly tefillin, strictly amulet etc.
we start to kind of break down those barriers,
what sort of generic distinctions can we draw then
between a text it's clearly been written for reading
and use in that way
and one that's been kind of tied up
and is not being read in the way the tefillin (INAUDIBLE)
ARIEL: Well, that's precisely the sort of question
that I'm pondering on quite a bit.
What amazes me, what excites me,
is the tiny script which is not really legible, to be honest,
it was not intended to be read at all.
The text becomes much less of a text
but more of an object if you would like,
a sacred object, an apotropaic object.
And that, in itself, is a very interesting trajectory
in which text ceases to be a significant, important,
because if it's containing something particular,
because if it's (INAUDIBLE) and it becomes
an object that can bring some goodies to the person.
Well, how to explain all this and place it in a neat logical way?
I don't think we know enough yet.
I would really postpone this question
until we have all those additional tefillin
that Dr Adler was able to find
Maybe those little boxes have also scriptural text inside of them
and that will completely change our perspective
on the frequency or on the percentage of presence
of scriptural, non-scriptural
and how all those texts in their miniature form might have been used.
So, a great question.
It's really worth a book.
LAWRENCE: I think we have to move on to the next paper.
Thank you for this wonderful presentation.
So we will now be hearing from Daniel Machiela of McMaster University
on 'Reimagining Israel, the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls
and Judaism in the Hellenistic Period'.
DANIEL: Well, I wanna start by thanking Larry for the introduction
and also Larry and all of the organizers
for both putting together a stellar conference here.
This is fantastic. And also for the invitation
to take part in it and to present.
So, the title of my talk is
'Reimagining Israel, the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls
and Judaism in the Hellenistic Period',
which is a little overly ambitious, I realize, in hindsight.
I'm going to have a little bit more of a focused paper.
But hopefully, we'll also be able to talk a little bit
about how these texts do, in many ways, reimagine Israel.
I want to start just by saying a few words
about how I got to the study of these texts.
So, I've been studying the Aramaic scrolls now for a number of years,
over a decade at least.
I started during my dissertation where I worked on
the Genesis Apocryphon primarily.
This is the picture that you see on the slide in front of you here.
And when I finished that first phase
of my research on the Genesis Apocryphon, I thought,
'Well, that was so fun and so fascinating and so interesting'
that I wonder what the rest of those Aramaic Scrolls
might have going on.
And so, I decided to go through and read the entire Aramaic Corpus
in the original language.
And that was fostered by a couple of things.
The first was, and this was the most important,
that, at that point, Emile Puech had just published DJD37
which was the second major volume of Aramaic texts from Qumran.
And so this, for the first time, made available
all of the Aramaic texts,
virtually all of the Aramaic texts from Qumran.
Along with that,
well, I had been very interested in the scrolls for quite a while,
I noticed that most of the attention in studying the scrolls,
certainly at a popular level, went to
the biblical texts on the one hand,
topics like we were hearing about
from Gene and Molly and Arman yesterday.
Cannon, how the Biblical text was formed in antiquity,
and then on the other hand, the sectarian scrolls.
A lot of attention about this Jewish group
associated with the site of Qumran and elsewhere.
But not a lot of attention had been given
to Aramaic texts relatively speaking,
so I thought it would be interesting to go and have a look.
And I came to this corpus of texts with several questions.
I'll list Just a few of the questions that I had
when I started out on this mission.
for you on the slide here.
First of all, I really did know at the beginning,
what kind of texts do we find written in Aramaic at Qumran.
To what extent and what ways are these Aramaic texts a corpus?
What do we mean by calling them a corpus of Aramaic texts
if we use that language?
Does that just mean they're all written in Aramaic
or are the things that go beyond simply the Aramaic language
which tie these texts in some way together?
And then finally, why Aramaic?
This question already came up with Jim's talk earlier.
Why would the Visions of Amram there
be written in Aramaic and not in Hebrew
and another text in Hebrew?
So I didn't really have questions,
I've been slowly formulating my own answers to many of these questions.
And in what follows, I'm going to deal mostly
with the first two questions, not so much the why Aramaic
but if we wanna talk about that during the question session
and we have time, we certainly can.
OK. So what am I going to do for the rest of this presentation?
The first thing I want to do is give a very brief overview
of the corpus of Aramaic texts because I realize
there are a lot of people watching and many may not be familiar
with just what's there in the Aramaic Corpus,
so I'm going to give a very quick overview.
And then secondly, this gets to
the 'reimagining Israel' part a little bit.
I'm going to focus on one theme
that I see as being shared between two texts.
These texts are the Genesis Apocryphon and the Aramaic Levi document.
And so, we'll take a look at those texts after the corpus is introduced
and a few passages from them.
But first, let's just look at the Aramaic scrolls. What do we have?
First of all, we have around 130 Aramaic manuscripts
discovered in the caves of Qumran.
Now of course, you can count differently
and any different scholar you might ask would give you a different count
but this is going to be in the range, in the ballpark let's say,
of the number of manuscripts that we would find.
Again, depending on how you count all of the manuscripts from Qumran,
you come up with around 15 percent of the overall Qumran corpus.
All calculations are somewhere in the mid teens.
People differ by a percentage or two here or there.
And it really depends.
I use DJD39 and Emanuel Tov's count
of just over 900 manuscripts to get this number of 15 percent.
So it's not a negligible percentage, that is to say,
it's not like the Greek texts
where it's only a few percent of the overall corpus.
This is fairly significant. It's a considerable percentage.
And then, how many literary works,
how many compositions do we find here?
Well we've got, again, around 30. And I say 'around'
because scholars will differ on where to draw boundaries between texts.
Part of the problem here, of course, is that they're so fragmentary.
Many of these texts, it's very difficult to tell
whether they might have belonged to the same text or not.
You know? Speaking...
Professor VanderKamp was speaking earlier of the Visions of Amram.
And for example, there you have 4Q549
which is included as one of the manuscripts of the Visions of Amram
by some scholars and not included by others.
And 548 is also discussed a little bit.
So you've got around 30, give or take a few works,
depending on how we divide those.
Or what about the caves? How widely distributed are they?
Well, we find Aramaic manuscripts in seven out of the 11 caves.
So, most of the caves had Aramaic writings in them.
Given the fact that cave seven has Greek texts only
and some of the other texts have very few literary remains,
we could say that most of the caves with texts in them
had Aramaic texts as well as Hebrew texts.
And then, at least six of the compositions
were found in more than one cave.
That is where we have one composition spread out among multiple caves.
The text across the widest number of caves
is a text called 'the New Jerusalem'.
I'll talk about it in just a moment.
That was found in five different caves.
Most of the others of these six were in two or three caves.
OK. So, so much for the stats and the numbers.
Now, I wanna talk a little bit about how we classify these texts.
Different scholars have taken...
have attempts to classify these texts.
I think especially of (UNKNOWN) classification which is widely used
and is very helpful.
She tends to classify the texts based on the topics that they deal with,
somewhat the literary genre.
I take a little bit more of a literary genre approach
in the way that I divide the texts.
And I have three groupings, which I'm going to run through quickly.
The first, and by far the largest,
is what I've called narrative literature composed in Aramaic.
The important part is composed first in Aramaic,
related to earlier Biblical traditions.
And I'll just refer you back to the papers of yesterday afternoon
as to why I put biblical there
and also what (UNKNOWN) was saying earlier today.
We should be very careful how we use that word
in relation to the Second Temple period if we use it at all.
But they were clearly related to earlier traditions.
Other scholars such as (UNKNOWN)
Yonatan (UNKNOWN) have noticed
that these narrative texts tend to fall into two different clumps.
We can put them in two different buckets, I suppose, we could say.
And they're associated with historical periods in Israel's past.
The first period that seems to be of interest
is what's sometimes called the patriarchal and matriarchal period.
I here call it the period from Enoch
to the generation of Aaron, Moses and Miriam.
And then on the other hand, we have a group of texts
that seem to be focused on the exile - the period of the exile.
So just to list a few of these texts for you.
We have a number of writings that are focused on the person of Enoch.
Enoch was a very popular character in a number these texts.
And I just list them here for you.
We have the Genesis Apocryphon, which I'll talk about
a little later on further.
We have the New Jerusalem text, which I just mentioned earlier.
This, it's a little bit difficult to know where to put it.
(UNKNOWN) has suggested that
the text is told from the perspective of Jacob,
and I think he's probably right
based on some information in Jubilees and elsewhere.
It's a first person vision of the city of Jerusalem,
and very interesting, the way Jerusalem is portrayed in this text.
And then we have a number of texts which are focused on,
the way I've said it is the priestly line of Levi,
and this includes the Visions of Amram, which we've already heard about.
And I'll talk about the Aramaic Levi document in a little while.
In terms of the exile,
we have these two texts.
Tobit takes place during the Assyrian exile.
'Jews in the Persian Court' is a so-called court tale,
which is placed in the Persian court.
And so both of these take place in the exilic period
and deal specifically with that time frame.
And then we have a whole bunch of texts really
which I've gathered here under the term 'Danielic'
or the heading 'Danielic'.
This includes the Aramaic portions of the book of Daniel,
and we might want to include the Hebrew chapter one along with it
depending on what we think of that chapter
and whether it's been translated.
And then a number of other texts which either
are associated with the figure of Daniel
or seem, in some way, related to the Aramaic tales of Daniel
in other ways like the Prayer of Nabonidus
or the Four Kingdoms text.
And unfortunately I don't have time to get into all of these
but ask questions later if you have them.
Now one last thing before I move on is
there a number of literary features which, I think,
tie this group of texts together in various assemblages in various ways.
One is the literary style or the literary format.
A really large number of these texts are told in first person narration
or what we might call pseudepigraphy,
from the perspective of a character from Israel's past.
And I think this is very connected
to what Hindy Najman was talking about earlier today,
the mimesis which is happening.
We also have a number of shared subgenres which take place.
I mentioned court tales already.
We have a lot of dream visions in these texts.
We have a lot of discourses, ethical discourses, about wisdom and such
given from fathers to their children.
These recur throughout a number of the texts.
Then we have specific themes such as proper marriage, for instance.
I think (UNKNOWN) is going to talk about that
later on in the conference in the Genesis Apocryphon.
And then we have specific idioms,
which are used in several different places across the corpus.
And I won't really have a chance to get into that.
But my main thesis here is that among these narrative texts,
we do have a lot of interconnections.
Very quickly, I'm not going to deal with the other two categories
in the remainder of my talk but I just wanted to list them.
The second category that I would put out there
are translations of earlier Hebrew texts.
We have two manuscripts which are translations,
sometimes they're called 'Targums', of the book of Job,
11Q10 and 4Q157.
A fair bit of research has been done on these. They're very interesting.
We also have a text which is sometimes called
the Targum of Leviticus.
It's hard to know exactly what it is. What we can say is that
it's an Aramaic translation of some parts of Leviticus 16
which is the Day of Atonement ceremony.
And what exactly this text is is little unclear.
There is some interesting material characteristics
about that particular manuscript as well.
Then as a third group, we have the inevitable 'other'
or miscellaneous category,
which catches everything that you didn't see before.
And in this category, there actually aren't very many texts
If we look at the Aramaic group as a whole.
I've listed, I think, most of them here.
There may be a couple of others that we could include
but there is a list of false prophets.
There's a physiognomic text which talks about
the physical features of a person from head going downward.
There's a brontological text, which is an omen text,
which seems to have a lot of parallels
with other Mesopotamian omen texts.
And then there is, getting to Ariel Feldman's paper again,
there's an apotropaic incantation text
which talks about fevers and chills and things entering one's body
and seems to be warding off evil against that.
Like I say, I'm gonna focus now on that first group of scrolls
and look at just one very narrow small example as an indication of
some of these interconnections that I've mentioned already.
And it's a shared theme.
The shared theme that I wanna talk about
is the idea of Israel's wisdom as a gift to the nations.
And this is connected with how Israelites in these texts
are interacting with foreigners especially.
I'm gonna begin by looking at the Genesis Apocryphon.
And the Genesis Apocryphon rewrites, retells, recasts
the narrative of Genesis.
It's fragmentary,
we don't possess the beginning and the end of the scroll,
but what we have preserves around Genesis five to Genesis 15.
And at many points, the Genesis Apocryphon greatly expands
on the Genesis account,
seeking to solve (UNKNOWN) conundra and do all sorts of other things.
But we can definitely pick up on some themes,
the interests of whoever wrote this scroll.
And I wanna talk about one of those themes for just a few minutes here.
And that is related to the story of Abram and Sarai in Egypt.
We hear this story in Genesis 12, it's quite short in Genesis 12
but it's greatly expanded in the Genesis Apocryphon,
and I think the way that it's expanded is quite interesting
and so I wanna take a look at that.
By the way, in the book of Jubilees,
which is often compared with the Genesis Apocryphon,
this story is passed over in almost the quickest way possible.
So here's one place as many connections as these two texts seem to have
where we see quite a big difference
in the way that this story is handled in Jubilees
versus the way it is in the Genesis Apocryphon.
Like I said, the text is a little fragmentary.
So where there are brackets, that means we don't have the text.
We can reconstruct fairly well, I think,
the passages that I'm giving you here.
I'm not going to read this entire passage.
But it's the first one that I wanna look at together.
So, Abram and Sarai, at this point, have entered into Egypt.
And in Genesis 12, we learn that
Pharaoh was told about Sarai from his officials,
from some of his wise men, and takes her to be his wife.
What we aren't told in Genesis 12 is how that happened.
How did Pharaoh, or Pharaoh's officials,
first learn about Sarai and Sarai's beauty?
Rabbinic literature has stories about how this happened
but we get quite a different story here in the Genesis Apocryphon
and the Apocrypha dwells on this at some length.
We find out we're missing the beginning of the text.
Where you see the ellipsis at the beginning,
we're missing some parts. But it has to be
that the pharaoh heard about Abram's wisdom.
And this was the premise on which he eventually learns about Sarai.
So, Abram's wisdom must have preceded him.
And Abram is now speaking in the first person
and he's telling us that the pharaoh sent
three of his highest officials to come
because of my words and because of my wisdom.
So, this is the reason that we have the officials coming.
And when they get there, they ask for three things.
They ask scribal knowledge, wisdom and truth.
And very interestingly, the response of Abram
is that he obliges first of all their request. He says, "Alright."
And he reads the book of Enoch to them.
This is the way that he fills them in
on the things that they're seeking to know.
So what we have here is
Egyptian knowledge basically being attributed to Abram
but also Abram being willing to share the knowledge that he has,
which is his ancestral wisdom, with the Egyptians.
We lose the text after this for a little while
but it's clear that there was quite a nice situation
in which they had a talk about these teachings
and they had a meal together.
And this must be the context in which
they saw, they caught a glimpse of Sarai
and went back and reported to the pharaoh.
So, I wanna quickly put up here just the three Aramaic terms
used for the three attributes that I mentioned earlier.
(UNKNOWN)
These are the three things that Abram relates to the Egyptians.
Moving along,
the pharaoh takes Sarai. She moves in to be with him.
This is, again, greatly expanded.
I just wanna dwell on one more detail,
and that is that we're told that Abram heals the pharaoh
from the affliction that we're told he has in Genesis 12.
Now this, in part, is brought over
as Moshe Bernstein and others have shown, Daniel Falk as well,
from Genesis 20 and they're very closely related
a story of Abimelech and Abram and Sarai.
But there are a few details that even that doesn't account for.
And one of those is basically the fact that
Abram performs an exorcism on the pharaoh
by casting out an evil spirit from him,
by praying over him and laying his hand on him.
The main point I wanna make with this story is that
we have a very positive portrayal of the interactions
between the Egyptians and Abram here,
and the fact that Abraham teaches the Egyptians something.
He makes a contribution to their knowledge.
Now, I wanna move along very quickly
to another text, the Aramaic Levi document.
This is a text told mostly from the first person perspective, again,
of the figure of Levi.
And towards the end of the work, as far as we can tell,
there is what's often called a wisdom poem.
And a central part of the wisdom poem,
which is spoken by Levi to his children,
it's really an ethical exhortation of sorts, focused on wisdom.
As an example of this wisdom, he holds forth Joseph
as the central example, his brother, Joseph.
And he says that Joseph taught scribal knowledge
and insight and wisdom
to kings.
The text is a little convoluted here
and I don't have time to get into the textual difficulties,
but what we clearly have is another triplet
very like the three terms that we found in the Genesis Apocryphon.
Here are the terms in Aramaic
that we find in the Aramaic Levi documents.
(UNKNOWN)
And then just here for comparison, again,
are the three terms that Abram relates in the Genesis Apocryphon,
again, to the Egyptians.
So I think this is one connection. And both cases,
we have Joseph and Abram teaching the Egyptians
a very similar set of things
with two of the terms that they're teaching overlapping one another.
If we keep going further down into the poem,
we'll see a description that I think could perfectly describe
Abram's interactions with the Egyptians in the Genesis Apocryphon.
To every land and place, country to which he will go,
he has a brother and a friend therein. He's not a foreigner.
And also they wish to learn from his wisdom.
His friends are many, his well-wishers are numerous
and they will seat him on a seat of honor
in order to hear his wise words.
Now, what I want to notice is just one detail here at the end,
and that is that we have these foreigners wanting to learn
from someone like Joseph because of the wisdom
and because of the words of a figure like Joseph.
Now, I will just recall here
the words from the Genesis Apocryphon.
The officials of the Egyptians came to see Abram
because of my words and because of my wisdom.
So again, we have a very similar situation.
Again, a very positive portrayal
of how Joseph is interacting with the Egyptians
and the idea that there is a real contribution here, that the knowledge,
the revealed knowledge that people like Joseph and Abram have
can make a contribution to foreigners like the Egyptians.
OK. So very quickly, just to sum up and to conclude,
I would suggest that here we have Israel's role reimagined
through figures like Abram and Levi or Joseph
in the Aramaic Levi document.
And I would suggest that here we have a couple of Aramaic texts
with some clear similarities.
These include but aren't limited to the fact
that they're both in first person narration,
what we might call pseudepigraphic.
They're focused on figures from Israel's past.
They share this theme of teaching wisdom to foreigners
and they also use similar idioms like these trios of terms
that we find in the Aramaic Levi document and Genesis Apocryphon.
Thinking just very quickly about
the broader historical context for a moment.
I would make just a couple of points.
There are many others that could be made.
But the first is that this theme fits, I think, quite well
within the Hellenistic compositional setting
within which most scholars would place these texts.
Certainly, the Aramaic Levi document has often been proposed
to be a product of the Hellenistic period.
And I think we have, in these texts, really
a reimagining of the roles of figures from Israel's past
showing that there was something
which Israel had to offer the foreign nations,
and we see that in various ways and I think we see it
in the couple of texts that we just looked that here.
The other observation is that these texts,
texts like the ones that we've been looking at so far...
Excuse me. I'm gonna go back here.
Move the window so that I can read this.
They're providing readers and listeners with paradigms really
for thinking about Israel's inherited wisdom.
This is something which, of course,
should be cherished, it should be guarded.
For people who have looked at the testament of Kohath,
you'll certainly see this there. It's called Israel's inheritance.
But it's also something that can be shared with foreigners
to their benefit, both the benefit I think of the foreigners
and as we see especially in the Aramaic Levi document,
also to the benefit of Israelites.
I would just note very briefly that this is quite a different approach
than the one we see adopted in the later sectarian texts.
So, sometimes people ask questions
about how the Aramaic texts might be related to the sectarian texts.
I think that's an interesting question to ask,
but this is one point where we certainly see a great difference
where the sectarian texts often have antagonism towards outsiders,
even others of the people of Israel, the Jews at the time.
So, I think I'm gonna stop there and see if anybody has some questions.
And I thank you for your attention.
LAWRENCE: OK. Thank you very much for this reopening of the question
of trying to generalize on the Aramaic text.
And we turn over to Patrick for questions.
PATRICK: Great. Yeah. Thank you Professor Machiela.
So we have a few questions lined up
but I wanna just start off by asking a question of my own
about the relationship of the kind of reimagining Israel's role,
especially in terms of knowledge and wisdom,
in relationship to the same sort of impulse that we see
in some Hellenistic Greek Jewish literature.
So I'm thinking of like (UNKNOWN)
who use this... who kind of give this role to Moses, for example.
I wonder if you could speak to that (INAUDIBLE).
DANIEL: Yeah. I can, I think
that the impulse is essentially the same.
You know? I think we have it showing up
in different ways in different places during the Hellenistic period
and I would say that this particular literature is trying,
in a broad and general way, to do something similar,
that is to bridge the gap between these ancestral traditions,
the wisdom that's been received,
the Hebrew ancestral writings on the one hand
and the way of life that comes along with that
and this cultural situation in which
Israel, at this point, doesn't have political hegemony.
They're having to live in these foreign cultures.
And the question is, how one navigates that. And I think that
like some of the texts that you mentioned
where that's being done through the figure of Moses.
Interestingly, Moses really isn't a focus in these texts
but we have a number of other historical characters where
I think they're kind of vehicles through which
some of these issues can be worked through.
So these stories are reworked and retold in ways
that will speak to this Hellenistic setting in new ways.
And so, I guess, that's where my word 'reimagining' comes in
because these figures are being reimagined to speak to a new situation.
PATRICK: Agree. Thank you.
So, we have a question here from Professor Katherine (UNKNOWN)
Sorry if I'm...
She asks, 'Given the language ideologies
of some groups in the Second Temple period,
can you say something about the relative status of Aramaic
among the Dead Sea Scrolls compared to Hebrew'.
DANIEL: Yeah. Well, thank you. That's a great question.
And there are a couple of ways you could go with this.
I think in terms of going back to the question of 'why Aramaic?',
one part of the answer, I think,
is that Aramaic was a prestige language at this time for sure.
During the Hellenistic period, we start to see some Greek being used
but Aramaic, as we see at places like (UNKNOWN)
is still very much active and there,
it's the language of the empire.
And so, I think there was...
the choice for Aramaic was partly ideological
in the sense that this was the language of world literature.
We see things like the (UNKNOWN) inscription and (UNKNOWN)
other texts being written in Aramaic.
In terms of the context of Qumran, why Aramaic,
I think I would go first for a historical explanation there.
I think that these texts, as VanderKamp mentioned earlier,
typically are taken to be earlier than the sectarian Hebrew texts.
And I think the reason why they're in Aramaic
is mostly because that's the language in which they were composed
and they were just passed along in that language.
At some point, there obviously was a desire
to move back to Hebrew, I think.
Many have proposed that this happened with the Hasmoneans,
during the Hasmonean period. I think that's probably right
to a large extent.
And the interesting thing is we do find one case - 4Q200.
There is one Hebrew manuscript of The Book of Tobit.
There are five, four or five of Aramaic
and one Hebrew.
So that to me indicates that someone wanted,
at some point, to turn that into a Hebrew book rather than,
or at least translated into Hebrew rather than have it in Aramaic.
So, that's at least start of an answer.
LAWRENCE: I think we have to call it quits
on the discussion of this interesting paper.
Go on to our last speaker.
I think we should estimate that we will be ending
something like ten after three instead of the scheduled time.
I hope that's OK with everybody
because we wanna make sure to give every one full time.
And so, now we will be hearing from Bronson Brown-deVost
from Georg-August-UniversitÃ¤t GÃ¶ttingen
on digital exploration of the Dead Sea Scrolls
with Scripta Qumranica Electronica. OK.
BRONSON: So, I would like to thank the conference organizers
for inviting me to speak about
the Scripta Qumranica Electronica project this afternoon.
It's actually night for me.
It's a project that I've had the pleasure to work on
for the last four years.
Scripta Qumranica Electronica is a German-Israeli cooperative project
under the (UNKNOWN)
And our principal investigators are Reinhard Kratz here in GÃ¶ttingen,
Jonathan Ben-Dov in Haifa, now Tel Aviv,
and Nachum Dershowitz at Tel Aviv.
We work closely with our project partner, Pnina Shor,
former director of the Dead Sea Scrolls Unit
at the Israel Antiquity Authority,
and her successor, Joe Uziel.
Ingo Kottsieper been in charge of technical development
here in GÃ¶ttingen. Noam Mizrahi is working on
the analysis of parallel texts. And Daniel StÃ¶kl Ben Ezra
has been working on digital analysis of the scrolls.
You may have already had the chance
to hear Pnina and Joe speak yesterday. I hope you did.
Jonathan will be speaking in the coming days
as well as some of our other colleagues
from the Israel Antiquities Authority (INAUDIBLE)
I hope you get a chance to hear them speak.
So much for the people working on the project.
What are we trying to accomplish here in Scripta Qumranica Electronica?
So I'll just show quickly this slide
with our principal investigators and project partners. Lots of names.
And this slide with, again, a lot of names.
But it's really important for us to show the people who are working
and have been working on the project. There's been a lot of man hours
and woman hours and sleepless nights going into this project,
so everyone's been working very hard and contributing a lot.
So, so much for that.
What are we trying to accomplish in Scripta Qumranica Electronica?
We're creating two main resources,
a website that provides digital editions of the Dead Sea Scrolls
and a web-based research environment
that enables scholars to create and share
their own digital critical editions of individual manuscripts.
The website for viewing the SQE digital editions
will include several exemplary critical editions
created by members of the project, myself included,
as well as non-critical editions
created via automated computer analysis. I really hope.
The SQE platform has been made possible
by leveraging the output of two major projects.
One is the imaging of the scrolls
carried out by the Israel Antiquities Authority
under the direction of Pnina Schor for the Leon Levy digital library.
I'm sure you've already seen many many images from that project.
And the second source is the transcription and analysis of the scrolls
under the direction of Reinhard Kratz, Ingo Kottsieper
and Annette Steudel
here in GÃ¶ttingen for the Qumran WÃ¶rterbuch Projekt
at the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu GÃ¶ttingen.
Lots of German words. I promise that's the end of the German.
So, one of the main questions we came to this project with
is what exactly defines a digital edition.
Well, we're still trying to explore that question
and we will continue to do so
long after this project reaches its conclusion.
We do, however, have some main concepts in mind
which are perhaps easiest to highlight
in comparison to traditional print editions,
with which you might be familiar.
I'll present them here in relation to the project,
process of an editor creating an edition.
Firstly, an editor usually begins
by organizing the materials necessary for creating the edition.
This may include
materials previously organized by other colleagues.
In a final print edition, this information
will not be easily accessible to a reader, if at all.
One goal of our digital edition is to make it simple
for a reader to dig down and access
the same datasets that the editor used
to create the digital edition.
This is done by means of links
to data stored internally in our database
as well as links to external resources.
Secondly, an editor will evaluate this body of evidence
and decide how to construct the edition
and what accompanying notes and commentary should be included in it.
Due to the limitations of print,
the editor must usually place boundaries
on how much ancillary information is included in the volume
and is also usually limited by the print medium itself,
for instance, life-size mock-ups of a scroll
are usually difficult to share in many print volumes
as are large numbers of high resolution images.
Such restrictions do not typically apply to digital editions
and it is possible to convey much more
of the critical editorial process.
The reader can then test the editorial decisions
by directly interacting with the primary data
in the same way that the editor did,
thus, providing greater opportunities for independent verification.
Finally, the editor of a print volume
is confined to the physical spatial limits of a paper book,
with limits such as size, colour and formatting
often playing a large role in the presentation of the final product.
The print edition being a physical object
can only exist in one place at one point in time.
It must be transported and is only copied with difficulty.
A digital edition can transcend many of these bounds
though it does not always do so.
It can be copied at virtually no cost
and transferred at incredible speeds
It often affords both the editor and the reader
a greater degree of freedom in the way it is presented.
And at the end of the day,
it can also be serialized into a physical form
such as a book or off prints if somebody wishes to do so.
The digital edition adds also a further benefit
to the traditional print edition.
It can be made malleable such that
the editor can easily and quickly update it
should he or she desire to,
and a user can interact with it dynamically to create derivative works,
all the while, maintaining clear attribution of origin.
This is much more difficult to effectively achieve in the print world.
So, what does our digital edition look like?
A small group in our project has put together
some mock-ups with functionality
that they would like to see in the end product.
In this window, we see a column from the scroll of 4Q instructions
or (INAUDIBLE) One of the texts that Daniel must be working on.
It's a very important wisdom composition at Qumran
that was unknown to us before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Already we see access to lots of information such as Hebrew text,
including reconstructions, an English translation,
links to the new high resolution images
used in the reconstructed column in the middle
and links to images of these fragments from around 70 years ago.
Some display options and links to additional data.
I'll get into this a little more closely in the coming slides.
It's a lot to take in
even though it's just a little bit on your computer screen.
So, the image to the left contains images of fragmentary remains
overlaid with some reconstructed Hebrew text
in a font face based upon the letters as found
in the existing portions of the scroll.
The English text on the right is a translation of the Hebrew.
The system allows the English translation
to be linked to the Hebrew text on the image.
Thus lay people who know even a little Hebrew
can easily find the original text for themselves,
and that's an important thing for our project,
to get more and more people involved
in looking at and reading these scrolls.
Then this pane from the far right provides quick links
to the images used in the reconstructed column
along with links to older images that you see
with the PAM numbers, PAM43.487 and so forth.
It also has a quick link to the parallel text found in 4Q416.
So you could click on that and go directly to that text.
And then it has some additional data
which would certainly include editor commentary
and other types of information related to what you see on the screen.
So, this is just a short glimpse of some of the features
that will be available when exploring the Dead Sea Scrolls
in a digital addition on the SQE platform.
But I would like to turn now from website mock-ups
to the current virtual research environment
which we're using to prepare our digital editions.
And these are not mock-ups.
So, the virtual research environment
is currently under heavy development
and is usable already for several tasks.
This environment is similar to the online edition
but adds the opportunity to create and change information.
It will be published online alongside the digital edition's web site,
but unlike that website, you can register to use this,
which is very helpful when you want to save any changes you make.
Registration will be free and open to all.
When you first log-on to the virtual research environment,
you will see a list of additions,
the ones you have created or work on jointly
and a list of those provided by the base data stored in our system.
So you see, for instance up here, personal editions,
and here, publicly available editions.
Within any editions that is yours personally or is shared with you,
you have the option to add further editors.
The edition can be shared with several levels of permission
such as read only, write or admin,
and these are more or less self-explanatory.
What you don't see going on under the hood, so to speak,
is a complete editor tracking system.
This keeps a full record of
who is responsible for each change in the edition.
Such a minute accounting of each editor's contribution
would be impossible in a print edition
and incredibly distracting if ever attempted.
The digital platform, however,
makes such best practices effortless and easily accessible.
What is more, our system accomplishes all of it edits in real time,
thus, saving the editor from many confusing circumstances
created by near contemporaneous edits.
For instance,
here we see one editor, the one on top,
cleaning up the mask for a fragment.
In this case, the automated masking algorithms
selected a little too much area and included
some of the backing material along with the fragment itself.
The current editor wants to clean it up a bit
and make the mask conform a bit more closely to the parchment remains.
At the same time, another editor,
the one in the bottom pane, is looking at some transcribed text
next to a cut-out image of the same fragment.
Now, I want you to watch. Once this editor finishes drawing,
the editor will save the changes, and if you look at the image here,
you will see as these changes are saved,
those changes immediately apply down,
though I have this on loop, so you're seeing it again.
So the video I showed here was filmed in real time on my computer.
So you can see, the time that it takes to save an edit to our database
and then to broadcast it to all other colleagues
working on the same manuscript is nearly instantaneous.
This is really helpful because if a mistake was made,
the editors could communicate it immediately
via email, phone or discord or whatever
while the problem is still fresh in both people's minds.
I want to slow down for just a bit and highlight the editorial work
that was going on in the previous slide.
Each image of a Dead Sea Scrolls fragment
contains rulers and color calibration meters
along with a label and a lot of other black background.
If we want to reconstruct a nice column of text
like shown in the earlier slides or even an entire scroll,
we need to extract each fragment from that image.
This is a process that you saw being carried out in the last slide.
In essence, we mark one or more regions on an image
and give them an identification.
As you see here, we have four regions
marking the four separate fragments on this one image.
Maybe there are even five.
They each have a label in the top left panel.
9A, 9B, 9C, 9D and 10B.
Now that the fragments are marked and identified,
they can be extracted and moved independently of each other,
which we will see in a moment.
But first, you may remember that I mentioned
we often have several images of the same fragment.
A new one like this,
and, in fact, we have corresponding images in infrared
and also with raking bytes from the right and left-hand side.
We also have older images called the pam series
which are infrared and grayscale scale images.
The current system we use will allow us
to map regions in the new images
to regions in the pams.
This mapping will allow to quickly access those older images.
And you see here, on the bottom,
a black and white looking image, that is one of the older pams,
and then one of the newer images
with the color bars and rulers attached to it.
The Tel Aviv computer science team has been hard at work
developing algorithms to automatically find
any given fragment in the pams.
We also are working on how to be able to implement a morphing feature
so that when parchment has shrunk over time,
we could stretch it back to the form it had in the old pams.
or also do the reverse.
Searching the pam images themselves is very important in our field.
You may have the pleasure to hear (UNKNOWN) speak
about some of the new fragment identifications he has made.
There are also exist fragments in the pam images.
And that have become forgotten over time.
And by mapping all of the pam images with the new ones,
we hope to identify those fragments
that have fallen through the cracks.
The second tool that you saw in the real time demonstration
was the text ink mapping tool.
This tool lets you select a letter from the transcription
and define ink remains that it corresponds to.
Here we see a nice (UNKNOWN)
highlighted in red in the transcription
together with its corresponding ink remains,
highlighted in yellow,
on the fragment.
We are mapping every bit of ink here for several reasons.
Firstly, it clarifies to every reader
exactly what you, as an editor, see.
This corresponds to the repeatability of editorial analysis,
I mentioned above.
This can be especially helpful when looking at particularly small
or damaged fragments where it is not always so clear
how an editor is interpreting the ink
even how he or she is placing the fragment.
In addition to that, it enables many other computational possibilities.
For instance, we can automatically create a custom font
based on the handwriting in a single manuscript,
which could be helpful for training purposes.
We can evaluate the likelihood
of reconstructed text in a fragmentary manuscript
by comparing the specific dimensions it would likely require
based on the dimensions we know of the handwriting so far.
We can also use this empirical data to evaluate damaged letters.
We can compare the letters of one scroll with those on others
or we can compare all the letters within a manuscript
to look for similarities and differences.
These are all possibilities once we have mapped the ink remains.
But this is quite tedious to do manually.
So, our computer science team has been working
to automate this to some extent.
Right now, the results are incomplete but look very promising.
The results above were produced
in cooperation with the Escripta project,
which intends to do this sort of thing
for manuscripts in all languages and periods.
Here, we see the identification of regions on an image.
That is the green, red, green, red boxes.
With the identification of Hebrew letters contained within them,
which I'm sure is quite difficult to see on your screens, I apologize.
But the results here are astonishingly good.
We hope that this technology in conjunction with some other processes
will enable us to create serviceable editions for the entire corpus.
Granted, they won't be as curated
as well as the exemplary editions that we are preparing
but they will be a very good base to build upon.
So how does this all come together?
We have cut out fragment images
that can be moved independently of each other,
we have mappings of ink to transcription,
and we also have the ability to situate the fragments
on the virtual canvas, so to speak.
All of this comes together to facilitate what we see here.
Three pieces that make a direct join with each other
and fit so closely that we can find complete letters
which were only fragmentary on the individual pieces themselves.
All the data used to create this is stored in a database
with proper attribution and the process is completely repeatable
by anyone else who cares to download the editorial information
and apply it to the images.
We do not actually create new images.
They are cropped dynamically in the browser.
So we have no need to create all sorts of new custom images
every time somebody makes a small change.
This has the added benefit that you can always quickly get back
to the raw untouched data.
An editor can attach comments
to virtually any part of the process described above
in order to describe, in order to explain the decisions that were made
or to provide ancillary information.
Now, perhaps time will allow me for a few closing remarks
about how we designed our system
and the principles upon which we operate.
Though I fear that many... it may only succeed
in putting the vast majority of our audience to sleep at this point,
and it's - I know - just late afternoon for you
so you probably don't wanna go to bed just yet,
but maybe you can watch this again later.
As you've already seen, we have a website, two websites in fact,
that gather information from our data servers
and display it on the screen.
This is probably rather apparent to everyone.
What you don't see behind the scenes are two components.
An API server and a database.
Most of you probably have some idea what a database is.
For us, it is a, so called, single source of truth.
If data is in there, it will be accessible for the long term.
If it is not in there, then it will disappear from your screen
the next time you reload the website.
What is perhaps not so clear is the SQE API server or, better, servers.
This is the gatekeeper to the database.
When a website tries to get information from the database,
it asks the SQE API to go fetch it.
The API decides whether the user
really is allowed to get that information.
It also packages the information
in a way that is easy for the user to read and understand.
The same thing happens when a user tries to edit or create data.
The API checks whether the user
is allowed to create or edit such information.
You may remember the permissions that I mentioned earlier.
And then, it writes the data to the database.
And finally, it notifies all other relevant parties
that a change has been made.
I will end with an example of why we make our API publicly accessible
and how it fits with our hopes for the future.
Here is the output of a simple Python program I wrote last week.
It requests data about the letter forms directly from the SQE API.
Then it analyzes the information
and finds the prototypical or most common form of a letter.
Here we see that it sifts through many damaged forms
of the letter 'aleph' and forms in several orientations,
and in the end, it comes up with a pretty good looking aleph.
Perhaps a tool like this
will become an official part of the SQE websites
but perhaps it won't.
The importance of making the API accessible
is that anyone who wants to move
beyond the common tools we create on the websites
is allowed to do so and enabled to do it.
In closing, SQE is committed to open access and open source licensing.
All of our tools, from the website to the API
to the database, are available with MIT licences on github.
All our data is licensed with Creative Commons licensing.
What is more, when the websites go live,
our APIs will be directly accessible
for people to create new and different tools, should they wish to.
Even as we push forward rapidly to complete our present goals,
we also keep an eye to the future.
We have high hopes for what SQE will soon become.
And we can only imagine what will happen after that.
Thank you very much for your time.
LAWRENCE: OK. And thank you for this fascinating presentation.
Now, we turn it over to Patrick for questions.
PATRICK: Thank you very much.
So you might have answered this at the outset,
but there's a couple of questions just about
the general timeline for SQE and its availability for use
by scholars, the public etc.
BRONSON: Yeah. So kind of the harsh thing is
I stop getting paid in June of next year, I believe.
And so, it should be done before that.
PATRICK: Alright.
BRONSON: I wish I had more time but these are the limits.
PATRICK: Terrific. Thank you.
So let's see. Here, we have
a couple of other questions.
One about the use of semantic technology
and how language is handled,
and if you could just speak to that a little bit.
BRONSON: Sure. Do you know...
Are they talking about semantic web type stuff
or about the terms that we use?
PATRICK: (INAUDIBLE) databases.
BRONSON: OK. Great.
So yeah. This is kind of a cool thing.
So technically, in the back end of our project,
we use an SQL database.
So it's a really old timey traditional thing.
But in fact, a lot of the data structures we use,
for instance, the way we string words together, is a graph.
It's a directed acyclic graph.
And so, while we're not using something like Neo4j or Ontotext,
we are using graph type data structures.
And then as far as the semantic...
the whole semantic question goes,
this is something that's kind of close to my heart.
You can throw a bunch of data out there
but if you don't describe really carefully
what it is and what you meant for it to be,
it becomes kind of junk that people have to sift through.
And so, while we are not yet exactly hooked up
with using semantic ontologies, like an owl description,
we are moving in that direction to be able to support that as well.
And one of the ways that we would like
to interface with the wider community
is by outputting our text also as TEI.
So then, it would have a bit of a semantic element to it,
although TEI is not easy from a semantic...
It's not a semantic definition.
I hope that helps.
PATRICK: Yeah. Thank you.
So maybe this is building off of the same kind of issue
in terms of the technology here.
But we also have a question about the use of machine learning
to train neural networks to read through the scrolls
or bring fragments together or how that might
kind of contribute to this process.
BRONSON: Yeah. So our Tel Aviv team,
the head of that is Nachum Dershowitz,
who is an ex world expert in machine learning,
as well as Lior Wolf,
who is an advisor for the project.
And so, there's a lot of different places
where we use neural networks.
And we are using that, for instance, in the removal of background.
That uses some components of a AI.
What I just showed with the brief attempt to use machine learning
to isolate the letters on the fragment,
that's using neural networks in several different layers,
LSTMs and things like this. A lot of jargon to throw at you.
But the long and short of it is
what we see happening in this project which is really exciting
is this interface between what machines can do and what humans can do,
and trying to take tasks that humans do really well
and feed that data to machines
to let the machines do what they do really well.
And so, I see it as a real balancing act, a real give and take.
And so, there's a lot of that going on in this project,
and I expect it to continue long after I'm finished with it
and the project is up and running.
PATRICK: Great. Thank you. Yeah.
So another kind of question here that sort of relates
to the features on SQE
regards potentially using GIS analysis,
constructing maps with locations mentioned in the scrolls
or where the scrolls were found, on either end,
if that's incorporated at all.
BRONSON: So we don't have that incorporated very much.
I've seen some very cool stuff like this in some cuneiform,
some projects, digital humanities projects using cuneiform,
where they have tablets and you can find
which caches come from which, sort of, part of Iraq and so forth,
and Anatolia.
For right now, we don't,
except that the images, the IAA does have information
- metadata with their images -
that suggests which cave it comes from
or which find spot it comes from.
So that information is available.
And you should be able, if you wanted to,
to sort by the collection by cave,
get all the cave one things and all the cave seven things
or the cave of horrors, (INAUDIBLE)
Documents from my favorite cave, the cave of horrors.
Just 'cause of the name.
LAWRENCE: One last question?
PATRICK: Sure. Yeah. So, final question then.
Regards the English translation that accompanies the fragments
as presented here on SQE.
Are these taken from older editions?
Are they generated anew?
Or how is the English... ?
BRONSON: So right now, they're going to be done independently
by each scholar who's working on the edition.
So we have the exemplary edition. So myself and my colleagues
will translate the English afresh for that.
We don't have a source right now
for the English translations for every scroll.
This is something that we may find a way to take from somewhere else.
That's a possibility.
Also if the Qumran WÃ¶rterbuch gets an extension,
then English translations is the next thing that they want to work on.
And so, via the Qumran WÃ¶rterbuch database, it would come in to SQE.
So there's a couple possibilities right now
but we don't have anything lined up
for English translations for the entire corpus
as it stands right now.
Thank you.
LAWRENCE: Interesting presentation.
And we wanna thank everyone of our speakers
and our audience who joined with us today,
our staff members and everyone.
Hope you will be back. More of the type of thing that we were hearing.
We'll be having a session tomorrow starting at 9:00
on science, technology and the scrolls.
And of course, we hope you'll stay with us
throughout the rest of the conference.
Thank you very much. And have a good rest of today
and evening. Thank you. Bye.