The world’s most famous (and powerful) oracle resided at Delphi, high up the slopes of Mount Parnassus in the Temple of Apollo. In ancient times, supplicants would wind up the mountainside, patiently hoping for words of wisdom from the priestess (called the Pythia) in the temple’s adyton (inner chamber). Corbis

Archaeologists are good at recovering things left behind by the past, such as buildings, incense altars, tools and relief carvings. What they are not so good at recovering are the ideas, feelings and emotions—the innerness—of sentient ancient beings. It’s one thing to examine a temple’s holy of holies; it’s another thing to understand what went on there and what people experienced. Sometimes, however, there’s an exception to the rule.

Numerous classical authors report that natural phenomena played an essential part in one of their most sacred religious rituals: the oracle at Delphi. According to the geographer Strabo (c. 64 B.C.–25 A.D.), for example, “the seat of the oracle is a cavern hollowed down in the depths … from which arises pneuma [breath, vapor, gas] that inspires a divine state of possession” (Geography 9.3.5). Over the past five years, a team of researchers—a geologist, an archaeologist, a chemist and a toxicologist—has put that claim to the test, making it much more likely that we will actually understand what happened at Delphi.

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When ancient Greeks and Romans had to make decisions, they consulted the gods—by drawing lots, casting dice, interpreting dreams and analyzing such signs as sneezes, thunderbolts and flying birds. But for matters of the utmost importance, they sought to hear the words of the gods in the mouths of oracles.^a

Pythias were virgins who dedicated their lives to prophesying on behalf of the god Apollo. The first Pythia is said to have been the goddess Themis, who is depicted on a fifth-century B.C. cup (shown here) sitting on a tripod and holding a bowl and a sprig of laurel (Apollo’s sacred tree). According to Strabo (c. 64 B.C.–25 A.D.) and other sources, the Pythia was inspired by mysterious vapors, though these accounts have been largely ignored by modern researchers. Now, however, a team of archaeologists and geologists have proved that the Temple of Apollo sat directly above fault lines that likely released intoxicating carbon-based gases into the adyton. Was this the oracle’s secret?

Paradoxically, in male-dominated classical Greece the most influential voice, the Delphic oracle, belonged to a woman. The oracular temple was perched on the south slope of Mount Parnassus, surrounded by high cliffs, about 75 miles west of Athens. Getting to Delphi required either a long trek across the mountains or a sea voyage to the north shore of the Gulf of Corinth. However difficult the journey, thousands of visitors sought guidance from the holy woman, called the Pythia,^b who spoke on behalf of the gods.

The Pythia dealt less in visions of the future than in right choices: where to locate a new colony, when to attack an enemy, how to lift a curse, whom to choose as leader, what offering to make to which god. No kingdom, city or private person could afford to make critical decisions without consulting the Pythia. Thanks to her prestige, Delphi became the richest and most famous Hellenic sanctuary. The Greeks called it the omphalos, or “navel of the world.”

How could a mere mortal command such respect? The answer lies in the belief that Apollo—the god of revelation and inspiration—used the Pythia as his mouthpiece, taking possession of her during oracular sessions. The Pythia would fall into a trance, and the words she spoke were supposedly those of Apollo, delivered in a voice very unlike her normal tones.

Most scholars believe the Delphic oracle was established around the eighth century B.C., when founders of new colonies would consult the Pythia before setting out for the western Mediterranean, North Africa, Asia Minor or the Black Sea. The origins of the oracle are recounted in a story about a goatherd named Koretas, who pastured his flock on the slope of Mount Parnassus. Koretas noticed that when the goats grazed near a certain fissure in the mountainside, they began to bleat strangely. Approaching the fissure, he was filled with a prophetic spirit. Eventually, a woman—the first Pythia—was appointed to sit on a tripod over the cleft and give prophecies. Before she could mount the tripod, however, a goat had to be sacrificed to ensure that the day was propitious.

Image: Frank Ippolito.

During the classical period, supplicants would line up at dawn to walk along the Sacred Way, a steep path snaking up through the sanctuary toward the Temple of Apollo. The priests and temple attendants determined the order of the queue, giving priority to state embassies and then working their way down through military commanders, athletes, poets and, last of all, mere heads of families concerned about a child or an investment. The supplicants filed past bronze statues, war monuments and treasure houses dedicated in the past by grateful visitors. It would have been late in the day by the time the ordinary men at the rear reached the terrace of the temple and viewed the famous inscriptions, “Know Thyself” and “Nothing in Excess.”

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From here the way led up a ramp to a great colonnade of Doric columns, and then through a double door into the temple itself. Inside burned a constant pinewood fire tended by women of Delphi. The final approach to the oracle led downward into a sunken space below the level of the temple floor, where the visitor would be confronted by a gold statue of Apollo and the omphalos stone that marked the sacred spot. The Pythia sat in a recessed inner sanctum called the adyton, a Greek word meaning “not to be entered.” Standing outside the adyton, visitors would ask their questions and await the response.

Unlike itinerant prophets and omen-interpreters, the Pythia derived her power from the place—she could only prophesy while seated in the adyton within the Temple of Apollo. According to Strabo, the pneuma arose from a small opening (chasma ges) in the adyton: “Over the mouth [of the opening] a high tripod is set. Mounting this, the Pythia inhales the pneuma and then speaks prophecies in verse or in prose. The latter are versified by poets on duty in the temple” (Geography 9.3.5.).

Strabo was not the only ancient source to describe the adyton and the intoxicating gas. The second-century A.D. traveler Pausanias told of a spring in the temple’s adyton that made the Pythia prophetic. Also, in On the Obsolescence of the Oracles, the biographer Plutarch (c. 46–120 A.D.), who served as a priest of Apollo at Delphi, described an exhalation of vapor in the adyton that sent the Pythia into a trance.
Despite these testimonies, no serious scholar over the last 50 years has accepted the idea that the Pythia’s trance was caused by a gaseous emission.

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Modern investigations began in the 1890s, when French archaeologists began to excavate the sanctuary at Delphi. They first moved the modern village of Kastri, household by household, from above the ancient sanctuary to the town of Delphi, west of the sanctuary. The French archaeologists uncovered the boundary wall of the ancient sanctuary, an entry gate, and the lower stretches of the Sacred Way. By 1893 they had reached the terrace of the Temple of Apollo—where they found that scarcely a stone remained in place above the floor. The columns had toppled, and the statuary had been carried off or destroyed. In the lower chamber, where the oracle once spoke, no trace of the ancient structure remained. Even the archaeologists’ attempts to reach bedrock were frustrated as water filled the excavated areas.

While the French team was excavating the temple, a young English scholar named A.P. Oppé published a report based on his visit to the site. Oppé proposed that the ancient sources had confused the fissure with a nearby gorge, and that the vapor was simply a fiction that had been passed down from source to source.¹

In 1927, after a hiatus precipitated by World War I, a scholar named M.F. Courby published the French team’s final report of the temple excavations. He described the bedrock under the center of the temple as “fissured by the action of the waters”—suggesting that the ancient traditions of an opening in the rock may have been correct.² By then, however, Oppé’s theory that the ancients simply misconstrued the facts had taken too strong a hold among scholars for the issue to be reconsidered. The final blow came in 1950: Pierre Amandry of the École Française d’Athènes stated definitively—or so it was widely believed—that exhalations of intoxicating gas could never have existed at Delphi. Only volcanic activity could produce such gas, Amandry (incorrectly) noted, and Delphi does not lie in a volcanic area.³ For almost half a century, debates about the geological origins of the oracle virtually ceased.^c

The first step toward a modern reassessment of the evidence was made in the 1980s by geologist (and co-author) Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, the senior member of our project in Delphi. De Boer was conducting surveys, under the auspices of the United Nations and the Greek government, to identify active fault lines. One area he studied was the south slope of Mount Parnassus, where he noted an exposed fault both east and west of the sanctuary of Apollo—though it could not be seen at the site of the temple, where it was covered by ancient construction and debris from rock slides. De Boer suspected that the fault did indeed run under the temple, but he gave the matter no more thought.

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It was not until the summer of 1995 that Zeilinga de Boer encountered an archaeologist, co-author John Hale of the University of Louisville, who assured him, first, that he could not possibly have seen any such feature at Delphi and, second (after Zeilinga de Boer described the fault in detail), that this might be a discovery of major importance. We decided to continue investigations at Delphi, eventually adding a chemist (Jeff Chanton of Florida State University and the U.S. Geological Survey Magnetic Laboratory) and a toxicologist (Henry Spiller of the Kentucky Poison Center) to the team.

In 1996, with the support of Rozina Kolonia, the director of the Delphi Museum, we conducted a survey of the site and found that the sections of exposed fault on either side of the sanctuary were indeed part of the same fault—an active fault extending about 13 miles east-west along the southern flank of Mount Parnassus. We named this fault the Delphi Fault.

This egg-shaped stone—the very stone described by the Greek writer Pausanias, who visited Delphi in the second century A.D.—represents the omphalos, or “navel of the world.” According to Greek legend, Delphi was fixed as the center of the world when Zeus released two eagles, one from the west and the other from the east, which met in the sky above Delphi. The original omphalos stone, now lost, was probably an archaic cult object that supplicants draped with wreaths, resembling the wreaths carved in relief on this stone. Erich Lessing

In subsequent seasons we identified a second fault, extending approximately southeast-northwest. This fault could be traced along a line of springs running through the center of the sanctuary. The highest spring, above the temple, is called the Kerna Spring; its water is currently channeled westward to modern Delphi. Further down the slope, though still above the temple, a mass of travertine (a kind of limestone) deposited by calcite-rich waters indicates another spring. There is also an elaborate channel for a spring built into the southern foundation wall of the temple itself. Although this spring is dry today, the early 20th-century French archaeologists found it difficult to reach bedrock within the sanctuary because their holes kept filling up with water. Down the slope below the temple, yet another spring emerges from a cleft in the bedrock near the Treasury of the Athenians.
We have named this southeast-northwest fault the Kerna Fault, after its highest spring. In de Boer’s opinion, the Kerna Fault intersects the Delphi Fault at or near the site of the temple.

What the ancient authors described as a fissure (chasma ges) in the rock over which the Pythia sat was probably a small fracture extending up from the intersection of these two faults. Very likely, this is also what M.F. Courby, in his 1927 publication of the French team’s excavations, was describing when he wrote that the bedrock was “fissured by the action of the waters.”

Greek geologists had already identified the limestone under the temple as bituminous (oil-bearing), with a petrochemical content as high as 20 percent. These petrochemicals appeared to be a possible source of gases. But how exactly could they be released from the rock into the atmosphere?

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The Delphi Fault is linked to one of Greece’s most geologically active features: the great rift, or graben, that today is filled by the waters of the Gulf of Corinth. This is a recent feature, geologically speaking, having formed roughly two million years ago. The rift continues to widen; as it does, motion occurs along faults and earthquakes are triggered. In 373 B.C., for example, earthquakes almost completely destroyed the Delphic temple on the north side of the gulf, as well as coastal towns on the south side.

As slippage occurs along the fault lines, adjacent rock masses are heated, vaporizing the lighter petrochemicals in the limestone and expelling gases upward along the face of the faults. Once faulting has opened such a pathway, gases continue to rise, although the volume would slowly decrease over time. We believe that this is exactly what happened at Delphi: The rock masses deep in the earth were heated, and they intermittently produced gases that rose up along the intersection of the two fault lines, eventually entering the adyton of the temple through one or more fissures over which the Pythia sat.

Read about the discovery in ancient Hierapolis of Pluto’s Gate, a site shrouded in misty poisonous vapors and considered sacred to the underworld deity Pluto.

Exhalations of gases from bituminous limestone have been observed by geologists studying underwater faults in the Gulf of Mexico. There light hydrocarbon gases—methane, ethane and ethylene, all of them intoxicants—have been found bubbling up from the rock below. Closer to Delphi, similar exhalations were detected near the Isthmus of Corinth, as well as on the island of Zakynthos.

We decided to test the spring water at Delphi, along with samples of the travertine rock that the ancient springs had deposited on the retaining walls and slopes around the temple. If significant quantities of gases had been emitted with the spring water, traces of these gases might be found in the travertine deposits. The very presence of travertine rock, formed from dissolved calcites in warm spring water, is evidence that the springs along the Kerna Fault had their origin at deep levels.

The water and travertine from the sanctuary of Apollo, which were analyzed by Jeff Chanton, revealed traces of the light hydrocarbon gases found in the Isthmus of Corinth and on Zakynthos. Could this explain the Pythia’s state of intoxication in ancient times?

Apollo sits on a carved ompholos stone—perhaps even a representation of the stone shown in the previous photo—on a coin (shown here) minted in Antioch in 225–223 B.C. Clearly, the Delphic oracle and its association with Apollo were well known throughout the ancient world in Hellenistic times. By the first century A.D., however, the Pythia’s powers were failing, perhaps because the volume of gases flowing into the adyton had decreased—and by the fourth century, the demise of the oracle was complete. Photo: American Numismatic Society.

The ancient sources describe two distinct types of prophetic trance experienced by the Pythia. First, and more normally, she would lapse into benign semi-consciousness, during which she remained seated on the tripod, responding to questions—though in a strangely altered voice. According to Plutarch, once the Pythia recovered from this trance, she was in a composed and relaxed state, like a runner after a race. A second kind of trance involved a frenzied delirium characterized by wild movements of the limbs, harsh groaning and inarticulate cries. When the Pythia experienced this delirium, Plutarch reports, she died after only a few days—and a new Pythia took her place.

According to toxicologist Henry Spiller, both of these symptoms are associated with the inhalation of hydrocarbon gases. Spiller studies the effects of such inhalants on young people, known as “huffers,” who breathe in fumes from gas, glue, paint thinner and other substances because of their intoxicating properties. Perhaps the Pythia too was high on one of these hydrocarbon gases.

It may even be possible to identify the kind of gas. Plutarch—who, we recall, was a priest of Apollo at the Delphic sanctuary—noted that the intoxicating pneuma had a sweet smell, like expensive perfume. Of the hydrocarbon gases, only ethylene has a sweet smell—so ethylene was probably a component in the gaseous emission inhaled by the Pythia.

Now, there is a good deal of evidence concerning ethylene intoxication, particularly from the early 20th century. In laboratory tests involving human subjects, the pioneering anesthesiologist Isabella Herb and other scientists studied the effects of light doses of ethylene. Ethylene worked twice as fast as nitrous oxide (laughing gas) and achieved similar effects with only half the quantity. In high concentrations, ethylene produced complete unconsciousness; in low concentrations, it induced a trance state. Ultimately, ethylene’s use as a medical anesthetic was discontinued because of its combustibility: A spark from electrical equipment in the operating room could ignite the ethylene canister, causing it to explode.⁴

From the evidence of “huffers” and the experiments with ethylene, we know that subjects normally react to inhaling small quantities of these gases by entering a benign “out-of-body” trance. They can remain seated and answer questions, but their tone of voice and typical speech patterns are altered. Recovery takes place as soon as the subject is removed from exposure to the gas, and complete amnesia about the trance follows. In a minority of cases (about one in six) in the ethylene experiments, subjects experienced delirium, or a “bad trip.” Experimenters had to use restraints to hold down those undergoing this delirium, which was accompanied by groaning, shrieking and a thrashing of the arms and legs.

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Unfortunately, no detailed accounts of the Pythia’s behavior survive from the golden age (seventh to fifth century B.C.) of the Delphic oracle. By the time Plutarch took office as priest of Apollo at Delphi, the oracle’s powers had significantly diminished. According to Plutarch, emissions of pneuma in the adyton were slight and unpredictable, leading to the decline of the oracle itself. He suggested that whatever produced the pneuma in the rock below the temple had become exhausted, or that the fissures in the rock had been blocked up in the 373 B.C. earthquake. The Delphic oracle never recovered its former prestige after this earthquake, even though the temple was rebuilt.

The diminished flow of gas may not have been the only reason for the decline of the institution. Plutarch opined that the pneuma was merely a trigger for the prophetic trance, and that the Pythia’s lifelong training and psychological preparation played the most important role in her spiritual possession. In a memorable simile, Plutarch compared Apollo to a musician, the Pythia to a lyre, and the pneuma to the musician’s uncanny ability to produce music by touching the instrument. Perhaps there were socio-cultural reasons for the decline of the institution, or perhaps, as the gaseous emissions became less powerful, devoting one’s life to the oracle became less attractive.

Whatever the reasons for the oracle’s demise, we can no longer dismiss ancient traditions concerning its origins and power. Strabo, Plutarch and the others have been rescued by science from a century of calumny.

Read the Bible History Daily feature Medicine in the Ancient World.

The House of Apollo: A History

The Delphic oracle appears often in Greek myth, even in the account of the repopulating of the earth after a great flood. The high god Zeus, distressed over mankind’s wickedness, sends a flood to cover the earth, but two pious human beings, Deucalion (Prometheus’s son) and Pyrrha (Prometheus’s niece), survive by climbing Mount Parnassus. With the ebbing of the flood, the two descend the mountain and come upon the Delphic temple site, where they hear a voice: “Veil your heads and cast behind you the bones of your mother!” Like many of the Delphic oracles, this one is initially enigmatic, but Deucalion and Pyrrha soon realize that the earth is their mother; so they throw rocks over their shoulders, and the rocks are transformed into men and women, saving humanity from perdition.

Photo: Erich Lessing.

Another famous, or infamous, visit to the oracle was made by the young Oedipus—who, having been adopted as a baby, wanted to know the identity of his parents. (The third-century A.D. marble relief above shows Oedipus [center] sacrificing to the Delphic oracle in front of a statue of Apollo [left].) However, the Delphic oracle informed the young man that he would murder his father and commit incest with his mother. To foil the prophecy, Oedipus left Corinth, which he (erroneously) believed to be his native land. On his journey he killed another chariot-driver in a fit of ancient road rage—but unknown to him, the other driver was his father Laius, King of Thebes.

The oracle at Delphi was also consulted by non-mythical figures. In the sixth century B.C., King Croesus of Lydia, in western Anatolia, inquired whether he should attack King Cyrus of Persia. “If you attack,” replied the Pythia, “you will destroy a great kingdom.” Croesus attacked the Persians, suffered total defeat, and saw his kingdom absorbed into the Persian Empire. Croesus had destroyed a great kingdom—his own.

Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

More than a century later, the philosopher Socrates—shown above in a Hellenistic bust—reminded the Athenians at his trial in 399 B.C. that the oracle had declared him the wisest of men, a fact that did not save him from execution.

Photo: David Harris/Collection Israel Museum

After Greece was conquered by Rome, a number of Roman emperors posed questions to the oracle. Nero (54–68 A.D.) was warned to beware the 73rd year, and he was later assassinated by troops who made the 73-year-old Galba emperor in his place. Hadrian (117–138 A.D.), shown in the bronze statue above, ever the intellectual, wanted to know the birthplace of the poet Homer. (The Pythia’s answer: Homer was the grandson of Odysseus and born at Ithaca.) The oracle advised Diocletian (284–305 A.D.) to persecute Christians—which Christians avenged by destroying a number of oracle sites in the fourth century A.D. Finally, the envoys of the pagan Roman emperor Julian the Apostate (361–363 A.D.) received word of the oracle’s demise from the Pythia: “Tell the king the fair-built hall has fallen; Apollo now has no house or oracular laurel or prophetic spring; the water is silent.”

Notes

a. The oracle at Delphi was not the only ancient oracle, though it was the most powerful. Other Greek oracles were located at Epidaurus and in Asia Minor at Colophon and Didyma. Italy’s most famous oracle was at Cumae (near Naples), where a sibyl, or priestess, prophesied in a cavern; originally, the sibyl’s utterances were inscribed on palm leaves.

b. “Pythia” derives from the original name of the site, Pytho. Homer, for instance, refers to Apollo’s “shrine in Pytho” (Odyssey 8.94). The name “Delphi” came later.

c. However, this was not so among such Greek scholars as Spyridon Marinatos (1901–1974), the excavator of ancient Thera (modern Santorini), which was buried in a volcanic eruption around 1638 B.C. Marinatos argued that Delphi’s active geological history made it difficult to know what changes might have occurred over the past two millennia. He also made a report on an anemotrypa (wind hole) in the modern town of Delphi—a small cleft in the rock that emitted gas with a sulfurous smell. Scholars outside Greece ignored these ideas.

1. A.P. Oppé, “The Chasm at Delphi,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 24 (1904), pp. 214–240.

2. M.F. Courby, Topographie et architecture: la terasse du Temple: Fouilles de Delphes (1927), vol. 11, pp. 65–66.

3. Pierre Amandry, La mantique apollinienne a Delphes: Boccard (Paris, 1950), pp. 215–230.

4. See Isabella Herb, “Ethylene: Notes Taken from the Clinical Records,” in Anesthesia and Analgesia (December, 1923), pp. 210, 231–232; Herb, “Further Clinical Experiments with Ethylene-Oxygen Anesthesia,” Anesthesia and Analgesia (December, 1927), pp. 258–262; A.B. Luckhardt and J.B. Carter, “Physiologic Effects of Ethylene: A New Gas Anesthetic,” Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 80 (January–June 1923), pp. 765–770.

“Was She Really Stoned?” by Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and John R. Hale appeared in the November/December 2002 issue of Archaeology Odyssey. The article was first republished in Bible History Daily in May 2013.

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Related reading in Bible History Daily

Lay That Ghost: Necromancy in Ancient Greece and Rome

Solomon, Socrates and Aristotle

Who Were the Minoans?

Stoa Poikile Excavations in the Athenian Agora

The Gospel of the Lots of Mary

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The post The Oracle of Delphi—Was She Really Stoned? appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

“It’s About Time—Easter Time”

by Ben Witherington III

One of the problems in reading ancient texts like the Bible in the 21st century is the danger of anachronism—by which I mean bringing unhelpful modern ideas and expectations to our readings. This problem becomes all the more acute when dealing with ancient texts on which much historical import hinges.

On what day did Jesus rise? On Easter morning, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome came to Jesus’ tomb to anoint his body (Mark 16:1–2), as depicted here in Henry Osawa Tanner’s “The Three Marys” (1910). Photo: Fisk University Galleries, Nashville, Tennessee.

For example, we are a people obsessed with time—and with exactness when it comes to time—down to the nanosecond. In this regard, we are very different from the ancients, who did not go around wearing little sundials on their wrists and did not talk about seconds and minutes. They did not obsess about precision when it comes to time.

Take a few examples from the Gospels that may help us read the stories about Jesus’ last week of life with more insight.

Some texts tell us that Jesus predicted he would rise “after three days.” Others say he would rise “on the third day.” In Matthew 12:40 Jesus mentions, “three days and three nights,” but this is just part of a general analogy with the story of what happened with Jonah and the whale, and as such the time reference shouldn’t be pressed. Jesus is just saying, “It will be like the experience of Jonah.”

On the other hand, in Mark 8:31 Jesus says, “The Son of Man will rise again after three days.” He mentions the same event in John 2:19 as “in three days,” and on various occasions the Gospel writers tell us Jesus used the phrase “on the third day” (see, e.g., Matthew 16:21; 17:23; 20:19; Luke 24:46). On the face of it, this might seem to involve a flat contradiction. While both predictions could be wrong, is it really possible both could be right?

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The problem with this sort of modern reasoning is that it assumes the Gospel writers intended always to write with precision on this matter. In fact the phrase “after three days” in the New Testament can simply mean “after a while” or “after a few days” without any clear specificity beyond suggesting several days, in this case parts of three days, would be involved.

In fact, the Hebrew Bible provides us with some clues about these sorts of differences. Second Chronicles 10:5, 12 clearly says, “Come to me again after three days … So … all the people came to Rehoboam on the third day because the king had said ‘Come to me again the third day.’” Apparently “after three days” means the very same thing as “on the third day” in this text.

Is this just carelessness, or is it in fact an example of typical imprecision when it comes to speaking about time? I would suggest that the phrase “after three days” is a more general or imprecise way of speaking, whereas “on the third day” is somewhat more specific (though it still doesn’t tell us when on the third day). These texts were not written to meet our modern exacting standards when it comes to time.

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One of the keys to interpreting the time references in the New Testament is being aware that most of the time, the time references are not precise, and we must allow the ancient author to be general when he wants to be general and more specific when he wants to be more specific. Especially when you have both sorts of references to the time span between Jesus’ death and resurrection in one book by one author, and indeed sometimes even within close proximity to each other, one should take the hint that these texts were not written according to our modern exacting expectations when it comes to time references.

Isn’t it about time we let these authors use language, including time language, in the way that was customary in their own era? I would suggest it’s high time we showed these ancient authors the respect they deserve and read them with an awareness of the conventions they followed when writing ancient history or ancient biography and not impose our later genre conventions on them.¹

“Biblical Views: It’s About Time—Easter Time” by Ben Witherington III originally appeared in Biblical Archaeology Review, May/June 2016. The article was first republished in Bible History Daily on April 18, 2016.

Ben Witherington III is the Amos Professor of New Testament for Doctoral Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky and on the doctoral faculty at St. Andrews University, Scotland.

Notes:

1. For help with understanding how to read the Bible in light of its original contexts, see Ben Witherington III, Reading and Understanding the Bible (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2014).

Related reading in Bible History Daily:

When Was the First Communion?

Jesus’ Last Supper Still Wasn’t a Passover Seder Meal

Tour Showcases Remains of Herod’s Jerusalem Palace—Possible Site of the Trial of Jesus

The “Strange” Ending of the Gospel of Mark and Why It Makes All the Difference

How Was Jesus’ Tomb Sealed?

All-Access members, read more in the BAS Library:

Biblical Views: It’s About Time—Easter Time

From Death to Resurrection: The Early Evidence

Resurrecting Easter: Hunting for the Original Resurrection Image

The Rose of Jericho—Symbol of the Resurrection

The post On What Day Did Jesus Rise? appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

Lighten up! Laughter is an important, and often overlooked, literary element in the Bible. Perhaps Vincent Van Gogh’s Still Life with Bible could have used more pigments from his floral paintings? Photo: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam/Vincent van Gogh Foundation.

“The heart knows its own bitterness, and no stranger shares its joy.”
—Proverbs 14:10

“A cheerful heart is a good medicine.”
—Proverbs 17:22

I remember one day resolving to do arduous work in 2 Chronicles. Studiously plowing through the reigns of Solomon through Jehoshaphat, I came to 2 Chronicles 21:20 and laughed outright. The text reads, “Jehoram was thirty-two years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem eight years. He passed away, to no one’s regret, and was buried in the City of David, but not in the tombs of the kings” (italics added). Being a wordsmith myself, I smiled at this bygone scribe relieved at this monarch’s death. Evidently Jehoram was not well liked. The editorial statement provides a light touch—comic relief, if you will—to the Chronicler’s usually routine kingship formula.

As I study and teach, I find I read the Bible ever more slowly, and as I do, I smile more and more frequently. I listen for its humor. My emotions span sorrow, understanding or joy as I empathize with the characters who cross its pages. I chuckle at many passages, even while acknowledging the sadness they may contain. Consequently, I believe it’s possible to read many verses, stories and even books through the lens of humor, indeed to see portions of the Bible as intended to be very funny. An appropriate response is laughter. I’ve come to this conclusion: Humor is a fundamental sub-theme in both testaments.

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Laughter in the Hebrew Bible

Let’s start with an umbrella verse, Ecclesiastes 3:4: “A time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance.” The Biblical text, always practical, acknowledges human emotions and makes boundaries for their proper use.

God’s Laughter in the Hebrew Bible

Let’s look at God’s laughter. After all, he’s the creator.

Consider Psalm 37:12-13: “The wicked plot against the righteous, and gnash their teeth at them; but the Lord laughs at the wicked, for he sees that their day is coming.” Laughter here shows the impotence of the wicked and the futility of their plots and gnashings against the righteous. Why? Because, as the psalm answers, those who hope in the Lord will inherit the land and the Lord knows the wicked face a reckoning.

God directs the same kind of laughter toward earthly hotshots who think their power exceeds his. Psalm 2:2, 4 declares that when “the kings of the earth take their stand,” marshalling themselves “against the Lord … and against his Anointed One,” then “the One enthroned in heaven laughs.”

But Zephaniah 3:17 illustrates joy, a different aspect of God’s laughter and character, one more consistently expressed throughout the Biblical text: “He will take great delight in you … he will rejoice over you with singing.” My students often are amazed that the idea of rejoicing carries with it the idea of physical activity. The verse presents this possibility: God’s delight can entail joyful songs and public dancing.

Who Is Responsible?

One story that makes me laugh is the conversation taking place somewhere on Mt. Sinai between God and Moses. The recently-released Hebrew slaves are sinning by worshipping a calf made of gold and declaring that it, not the Lord, led them out of Egypt (Exodus 32:4-6). Neither God nor Moses wants these rowdies at this moment. Like a hot potato, responsibility for the former slaves passes back and forth between them.

Robin Gallaher Branch has written several Bible History Daily-exclusive character studies. Read her commentary on Judith, Barnabas, Anna and Tabitha.

The Lord swaps first, telling Moses the reveling Israelites are “your people” (v. 7) (italics added). But Moses quickly catches on. He declines association with them. As far as Moses is concerned, these people are not his! Morphing into intercession mode and speaking in what no doubt is a respectful tone, Moses rejoins, “O, Lord, why should your anger burn against your people, whom you brought out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand?” (v. 11) (italics added). He reminds the Lord of his promise to his servants Abraham, Isaac, and Israel to make their descendants “as numerous as the stars in the sky” (v. 13). This scene’s humor softens the chapter, which ends sorrowfully. The Israelites’ sin leads quickly to the deaths of many by plague, and thus the chapter ends (Exodus 32:35). The chapter’s structure incorporates dialogue, rebellion, crisis, and punishment.

Biblical Humor Through Innuendo

Consider Genesis 18:10-15, wherein God informs Abraham and Sarah they will have a son by “this time next year” (v. 10). Sarah openly laughs, thinking she is worn out and now will have sexual pleasure again (v. 11). After all, she is about 89! We learn later that Abraham, probably about 99, also thought along sexual lines. He believed God could give him and Sarah descendants and make them parents even though he—as a man—was “as good as dead” (Hebrews 11:11-12). The idea of fathering a child at his age struck him as funny.

Humorous Books in the Hebrew Bible

Whole books in the Hebrew Bible have strong elements of humor. An ongoing humorous element in the Book of Esther is the number of banquets it mentions. They number at least 10, thereby forming the book’s structure and carrying much of its action. One wonders: Do these rulers do anything except dine and wine and plot and whine?

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We are meant to laugh and learn throughout the Book of Jonah. Yes, we can laugh at Jonah’s open disobedience of going west to Tarshish when God commands him to go northeast to Nineveh (Jonah 1:1-3); at Jonah’s “time out” to think about things in the belly of the great fish (1:17a); at his pouting, obstinate silence for three days while being digested (1:17b); at his being vomited by the great fish on dry land—somewhere probably in the Mediterranean world (2:10); at his terse, seven-word sermon to Nineveh (3:4); at his anger over the success of this sermon, the repentance of the entire city (4:1). But the laughter is sometimes tinged with sadness, for Jonah’s anger prevails and he never understands God’s compassion for those who do not know him and for their cattle (4:11). Indeed everything in the Book of Jonah—the sailors, sea, big fish, gourd vine, hot wind and the Ninevites—obeys God. Everything and everybody except one: Jonah. God shows his colors of compassion and mercy—and Jonah disdains them.

Humor in the New Testament

The New Testament, similarly, abounds with laughter. Jesus must have been a compelling personality to keep the attention of crowds for days and the steadfast loyalty of at least twelve disciples for three years. In addition to being a riveting teacher whose words brought life, he was likely the kind of personality that was just fun to be around.

For example, a crowd numbering about 5,000 men followed him to a solitary place (Mark 6:30-44). Jesus’ teaching evidently made people forget to eat, bring food or worry about work.

In his classic work The Humor of Christ, Elton Trueblood lists thirty humorous passages in the Synopic Gospels. In one way or another, they’re all one liners, parables or stories Jesus told. Trueblood thinks Jesus’ audience would have laughed at the image of those who loudly proclaim their righteous actions to others (Matt. 6:2) because it was all too prevalent. An audience would have found the idea of rulers calling themselves benefactors ludicrous (Luke 22:25)—because the working folks knew all too well it wasn’t so. No doubt the audience chuckled when Jesus commended the vociferous, obstreperous widow for her persistent pestering of the unjust judge and cited her as a successful model of prayer (Luke 18:1-8).

Paul employs humor in his letter to the new church in Corinth (1 Corinthians 12:12-27). He addresses several problems reported to him. The problems—pride, exclusivity and attitudes of “I don’t need or want you”—could destroy the new church, for they counter the love Jesus taught. Instead of singling out by name troublemakers in Corinth, he allegorizes the situation in a humorous, non-threatening, open way: “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’ And the head cannot say to the feet, I don’t need you’” (v. 12:21). Paul affirms the need of all parts, and their need to function in unity, in the Body of Christ.

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In the home of Jairus, a synagogue ruler, Jesus uses practical knowledge to break a tense situation. Jairus’ twelve-year-old daughter just died. Jesus, three of his disciples and the child’s parents fill the room (Mark 5:40). Jesus goes to the body, picks up the girl’s hand, says to her, “Talitha koum!” which means, “Little girl, I say to you, get up!” (v. 41). The girl immediately gets up and walks around the room (v. 42a). Mark records the reaction of those in the room as “completely astonished” (v. 42b); in other words, they’re probably stunned and silent. Jesus responds with something practical: He tells them to give her something to eat (v. 43). A natural human reaction—when grief is turned to unexpected joy as when a dead girl is brought back to life—is something loud like laughter or shouting. Here, Jesus cracks a joke by reminding everybody that a girl who has been sick, experienced death, and is now alive is hungry! Of course she needs to eat! All twelve year-olds have ravenous appetites! This practical, timely and kind statement from Jesus breaks all the tension, pent-up grief and amazement present in the room among the girl’s parents and Jesus’ three disciples. I read this scene as Jesus’ cracking a joke. And the proper appreciation of a joke is laughter.

This Bible History Daily feature was originally published on August 21, 2013.

Robin Gallaher Branch received her Ph.D. in Hebrew Studies from the University of Texas in Austin in 2000. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship for the 2002–2003 academic year to the Faculty of Theology at North-West University. Her most recent book is Jereboam’s Wife: The Enduring Contributions of the Old Testament’s Least-Known Women (Hendrickson, 2009).

More from Robin Gallaher Branch in Bible History Daily

What’s Funny About the Gospel of Mark?

Deborah in the Bible

Judith: A Remarkable Heroine

Barnabas: An Encouraging Early Church Leader

Part II—Barnabas: An Encouraging Early Church Leader

The post Laughter in the Bible? Absolutely! appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

A lost Syriac manuscript, the Revelation of the Magi, translated into English by Bible scholar Brent Landau, may help answer that key question from the Christmas story: “Who were the magi?” Photo: Ms Vaticanus Syriacus 163, © 2011 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

Who were the magi, those gift-bearing wise men from the east who are so central to the traditional telling of the Christmas story? Bible scholar Brent Landau believes he has found at least one answer to this age-old question.

The Bible tells us very little about the magi. Their story appears but once, in the Gospel of Matthew (2:1–12), where they are described as mysterious visitors “from the east” who come to Jerusalem looking for the child whose star they observed “at its rising.” After meeting with King Herod, who feigns an intention to worship the child but actually plans to destroy him, the magi follow the same star to Bethlehem. There, upon seeing the baby Jesus and his mother Mary, the magi kneel down and worship him, presenting him with their three famous gifts—gold, frankincense and myrrh. Then, without reporting to Herod, they depart for their homeland, never to be heard from again.

For early Christians, the seemingly pivotal yet unexplained background of the mysterious magi provided abundant room to shape new narratives around the question “Who were the magi?” One of the most compelling, recently translated into English by Bible scholar Brent Landau, is the so-called Revelation of the Magi, an apocryphal account of the traditional Christmas story that purports to have been written by the magi themselves.

The account is preserved in an eighth-century C.E. Syriac manuscript held in the Vatican Library, although Brent Landau believes the earliest versions of the text may have been written as early as the mid-second century, less than a hundred years after Matthew’s gospel was composed. Written in the first person, the Revelation of the Magi narrates the mystical origins of the magi, their miraculous encounter with the luminous star and their equally miraculous journey to Bethlehem to worship the child. The magi then return home and preach the Christian faith to their brethren, ultimately being baptized by the apostle Thomas.

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The earliest known depiction of the magi is this mid-third-century C.E. fresco decorating the Catacomb of Priscilla, one of Rome’s oldest Christian cemeteries. Photo: Scala/Art Resource.

According to Brent Landau, this dramatic account not only answers the question “Who were the magi?” but also provides details about how many they were, where they came from and their mysterious encounter with the star that led them to Bethlehem. In the Revelation of the Magi, there are not just three magi, as often depicted in early Christian art (actually, Matthew does not tell us how many there were), nor are they Babylonian astrologers or Persian Zoroastrians, as other early traditions held. Rather from Brent Landau’s translation it is clear the magi (defined in this text as those who “pray in silence”) are a group—numbering as few as 12 and as many as several score—of monk-like mystics from a far-off, mythical land called Shir, possibly China. They are descendants of Seth, the righteous third son of Adam, and the guardians of an age-old prophecy that a star of indescribable brightness would someday appear “heralding the birth of God in human form.”

When the long-prophesied star finally appears, the star is not simply sighted at its rising, as described in Matthew, but rather descends to earth, ultimately transforming into a luminous “star-child” that instructs the magi to travel to Bethlehem to witness its birth in human form. The star then guides the magi along their journey, miraculously clearing their path of all obstacles and providing them with unlimited stamina and provisions. Finally, inside a cave on the outskirts of Bethlehem, the star reappears to the magi as a luminous human child—the Christ child—and commissions them to become witnesses to Christ in the lands of the east.

It’s a fascinating story, but does it actually bring us any closer to understanding who the actual magi of the Christmas story might have been? Unfortunately, the answer is no, says Landau, although it may provide insight into the beliefs of an otherwise unknown Christian sect of the second century that identified with the mysterious magi.

“Sadly, I don’t think this is actually written by the historical wise men,” said Landau in an interview with National Public Radio’s Diane Rehm. “In terms of who wrote it, we have no idea. [But] the description of the magi and [their religious practices] is so remarkably detailed and I’ve often wondered whether it’s reflecting some actual community out there that practiced and kind of envisioned themselves in the role of the magi.”

Based on Strata, “Lost Syriac Text Gives Magi’s View of the Christmas Story,” Biblical Archaeology Review, November/December 2011.

This Bible History Daily feature was originally published on November 29, 2011.

Related reading in Bible History Daily:

Why Did the Magi Bring Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh?

Witnessing the Divine

Christmas Stories in Christian Apocrypha

Frankincense and Other Resins Were Used in Roman Burials Across Britain

Magi Reunited

All-Access members, read more in the BAS Library

The Magi and the Star

Lost Syriac Text Gives Magi’s View of the Christmas Story

Witnessing the Divine

What Was the Star that Guided the Magi?

Ancient Aromas

The Magi’s Gifts—Tribute or Treatment?

The post Bible Scholar Brent Landau Asks “Who Were the Magi?” appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

Was Jesus a Jew? This late-15th-century painting by the Spanish artist known as the Master of Perea depicts a Last Supper of lamb, unleavened bread and wine—all elements of the Seder feast celebrated on the first night of the Jewish Passover festival. Whether the Last Supper was a Passover Seder is one issue scholars have raised as they have been discovering the Jewish Jesus. Photo: Christie’s Images/Superstock.

Jesus himself didn’t write the Gospels. They are late-first-century accounts that we are continually interpreting. In seeking to emphasize the uniqueness of Jesus, traditions have distanced Jesus from the cultural setting of his day, whether that be his Jewish roots or the larger Greco-Roman world.

In the 19th century, German theologians emphasized this distance as Saldarini explains below. Was Jesus a Jew? Was Christianity a Jewish sect? The conflicts in the early church between Peter, claiming his Jewishness, and Paul, the missionary to Gentiles, were more complex than some 19th-century theologians have allowed.

Albrecht Ritschl saw a Jesus who attacked Scribes and Pharisees and, he claimed, Judaism itself. Jesus taught something so new that it overthrew and superseded his Jewishness. Christianity itself was to be purified of its Jewish elements. Ritschl turned this theology to attacks on Jews, giving ammunition to the 20th-century Holocaust.

Ritschl’s Jesus focused on his personal relationship with God—a relationship that transcended historical contexts. But Jesus was born in a Jewish home and lived in the Jewish culture and in the land of Israel. Was Jesus a Jew? Yes, Theological study is further discovering the Jewish Jesus and what his Jewishness means to Christian theology and Jewish-Christian relations.

For Christians, Jesus’ Jewishness is critically connected to his familiar role as Christ—more than an ethereal spiritual role but a role rooted in the history of the people of Israel. Disassociating Jesus from his ethnic roots can lead to violence toward Jesus’ own people. As Anthony J. Saldarini elaborates below in “What Price the Uniqueness of Jesus?” discovering the Jewish Jesus is a task that can give Christians a better understanding of Jesus.

What Price the Uniqueness of Jesus?

To wrench Jesus out of his Jewish world destroys Jesus and destroys Christianity

Bible Review, June 1999

by Anthony J. Saldarini

When I was growing up in St. Kevin’s Parish in the Dorchester section of Boston in the 1940s and ’50s, Jesus was unquestionably a Christian. Even more strangely, in Germany during the Nazi era Jesus was an Aryan Christian. How did a first-century Galilean Jew become a Christian and, for some, an Aryan Christian at that?

Before we laugh at this foolishness, we should remember that we have not one word written by Jesus and not one contemporary account of his activities. Instead, we have four late-first-century interpretations of Jesus: the Gospels. Each demands and has received constant reinterpretation. Though the risk of misinterpreting Jesus is great, every generation has no choice but to try to make sense of the Gospels.

We necessarily interpret as we read, but not all interpretations are created equal, despite the claims of some postmodern thinkers. A Christian Jesus is a parochial, self-serving myth and an Aryan Jesus a perverse one. But why then have Christians so persistently thought of Jesus as a Christian and resisted admitting the obvious, that Jesus was a Jew? Answer: the pervasive problem of uniqueness.

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All religious traditions seek to present themselves as somehow special, better or primary, as irreplaceable or unique. For Christians this means that either Jesus as a person or his teachings and actions must stand out from his historical setting. For centuries the theological claim that Jesus is divine sufficed. In our empirical world of science and history, many Christian scholars take another tack; they seek to make Jesus dissimilar from the Judaism of his day and from the Greco-Roman world in which it was set.

As is often the case, contemporary historical and theological conflicts have their roots in the fertile scholarship of 19th-century Germany. The names Ferdinand Baur (1792–1860) and Albrecht Ritschl (1822–1889) may not immediately leap to mind, but a brief sketch of their activities will help illuminate Christian biases then and today.

Baur argued successfully that early Christianity had originated historically within Judaism and, less convincingly, that all of early Christian history reflected a struggle between a Jewish wing (led by Peter) and a gentile wing (led by Paul) until a synthesis was achieved. Subsequent scholarship has established that Paul was much more Jewish, and the conflicts among the early followers of Jesus much more complex, than Baur thought. But his fundamental point, the Jewish matrix of Christianity, endures.

In “Uncovering the Jewish Context of the New Testament,” Amy-Jill Levine reveals what Jews (and Christians) should know about Christian scripture and Jesus the Jew.

A Jesus who taught like a Jew and an early Christian community that looked like a Jewish sect troubled many 19th-century German Lutheran scholars, who preferred to envision a Jesus who taught a new and unique doctrine that overthrew the established tradition. In reaction to Baur, Albrecht Ritschl “solved” the problem by attacking the Jews. For him, Jesus did not reform or transform Judaism, he condemned it. Jesus the Jew, in Ritschl’s view, transcended Judaism by purifying Christianity of its Jewish elements. From the middle of the 19th century until World War II, numerous German scholars, including Adolf Harnack and Rudolf Bultmann, followed Ritschl’s lead in one way or another. None were Nazis, but reading them after the Holocaust leaves us with an eerie sensation.

Ritschl protected the uniqueness of Jesus and extricated him from his Jewish setting by replacing the Jewish Jesus with a Romantic Jesus who had a supernatural, ineffable relationship with God, a relationship that superseded all historical influences. Deep personal relationships are the stuff of modern theology and spirituality, but separated from the weave and grit of historical reality, the personal Jesus quickly devolves into a personal projection disconnected from community and culture.

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So we must face the crucial question: Does Jesus the Jew—as a Jew—have any impact on Christian theology and on Jewish-Christian relations? Or is Jesus’ life as a Jew just accidental? After all, he had to be born something: Incan or Ethiopian, Mongolian or whatever. Is Jesus’ Jewishness superseded by his role as Christ, the Messiah (the “Anointed One”), sent by God to save all nations?

To wrench Jesus out of his Jewish world destroys Jesus and destroys Christianity, the religion that grew out of his teachings. Even Jesus’ most familiar role as Christ is a Jewish role. If Christians leave the concrete realities of Jesus’ life and of the history of Israel in favor of a mythic, universal, spiritual Jesus and an otherworldly kingdom of God, they deny their origins in Israel, their history, and the God who has loved and protected Israel and the church. They cease to interpret the actual Jesus sent by God and remake him in their own image and likeness. The dangers are obvious. If Christians violently wrench Jesus out of his natural, ethnic and historical place within the people of Israel, they open the way to doing equal violence to Israel, the place and people of Jesus. This is a lesson of history that haunts us all at the end of the 20th century.

“What Price the Uniqueness of Jesus?” by Anthony J. Saldarini originally appeared in Bible Review, June 1999. The article was first republished in Bible History Daily in September 2011.

Related reading in Bible History Daily:

Did Jesus Exist? Searching for Evidence Beyond the Bible

Uncovering the Jewish Context of the New Testament

Was Jesus’ Last Supper a Seder?

The Origin of Christianity

When Did Christianity Begin to Spread?

The post Was Jesus a Jew? appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

Temple Staircase. This massive staircase led to the Mount Gerizim temple.
Photo: Bukvoed/CC by 3.0.

Although it is not possible to identify every ritual activity that took place at ancient temples, Anne Katrine de Hemmer Gudme of the University of Copenhagen has reconstructed some that may have occurred at the temple on Mount Gerizim. In her article “Reactivating Remembrance: Interactive Inscriptions from Mt. Gerizim” published in the July/August/September/October 2019 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, she investigates the inscriptions found at the Mount Gerizim temple. These featured in people’s worship at the temple.

Although the Mount Gerizim temple isn’t mentioned in the Bible, worship on Mount Gerizim is referenced in John 4:19–24, where Jesus speaks to the Samaritan woman. During their conversation, she asks whether people should worship at Gerizim or Jerusalem: “The woman said to him, ‘Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem’” (John 4:19–20, NRSV). From this passage in the Bible and other historical texts, we see that the Samaritans viewed Mount Gerizim as their primary place of worship.

Mount Gerizim Temple. These ruins once belonged to the temple on Mount Gerizim.
Photo: Amos Meron/CC by-SA 3.0.

Archaeological evidence shows that a temple was built on Mount Gerizim around 450 B.C.E. during the Persian period. The temple complex was expanded during the Hellenistic period around 200 B.C.E., and it functioned until the Maccabees destroyed it in 110 B.C.E. Therefore, the omission of the Mount Gerizim temple in the New Testament isn’t surprising since the temple was destroyed long before the New Testament was written. Since the first temple on Mount Gerizim dates to the Persian period, we might expect a reference to it in the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible), such as the Book of Nehemiah.¹ However, the text is silent about its existence.

The temple on Mount Gerizim once contained numerous inscriptions, many of which commemorate offerings. They name a gift that is offered to the deity, the giver, and his or her dependents. Of these dedicatory inscriptions, Gudme has identified about 50 that request a counter-gift of “good remembrance” from the deity. She explains that the dedicatory inscriptions would have been placed within the Mount Gerizim temple to remind the deity of the offering and the giver:

There appears to be a common notion … that to be remembered positively by a deity is desirable—probably conceptually similar to the notion of being blessed—and that it can be obtained by placing a physical object in close proximity to where the deity is perceived to be present, so that this object—the inscription—may continuously remind the deity of the worshiper who donated the inscription.

Although we do not know the original location of the inscriptions within the sanctuary, they would have been placed where visitors could see them. Gudme describes how later worshipers—both literate and illiterate—might have interacted with these inscriptions:

We simply cannot assume that all visitors to these sanctuaries were literate, so an actual recitation of the text of the inscription seems unlikely. However, it is possible that some literate visitors could have read aloud to others. It may even be possible that literate temple personnel could have assisted visitors in reading inscriptions. Even if visitors were unable to read and had no opportunity to have the inscriptions read for them, these inscriptions may have been culturally recognizable as objects that required an interactive response. If that is the case, then the inscriptions may have triggered visitors to the sanctuary to touch one or several of the inscriptions that they passed on their way and to mumble, “Remembered be,” as they did so.

If this reconstruction is correct, it gives us a window into what a ritual practice at the Mount Gerizim temple may have entailed: Worshipers read and/or echoed the inscriptions, repeatedly reminding the deity of the giver and his or her offering. Thus, the inscriptions featured in the worship of the giver and of later visitors.

Temple Inscription. This dedicatory inscription comes from the temple on Mount Gerizim and reads, “[That which] Yosef [son of …] offered [for] his [wi]fe and for his sons [before the Lo]rd in the temple.” It mentions a gift offered to the Lord (Yahweh) at the Mount Gerizim temple. The inscription is currently housed in the Good Samaritan Museum.
Photo: Bukvoed/CC by 4.0.

[T]he Gerizim inscriptions resemble a large number of Aramaic dedicatory inscriptions and graffiti in the Eastern Mediterranean area where the  phrase “for good remembrance” and the more common “may he/she be remembered for good” is widespread. These other inscriptions are dated roughly from the second century B.C.E. to the second century C.E., and come from sanctuaries in places such as Hatra and Assur (in modern Iraq) and Palmyra (in modern Syria).

Such dedicatory inscriptions appear to have been common during the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Learn more about the temple on Mount Gerizim and its interactive inscriptions in Anne Katrine de Hemmer Gudme’s article “Reactivating Remembrance: Interactive Inscriptions from Mt. Gerizim” published in the July/August/September/October 2019 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

Subscribers: Read the full article “Reactivating Remembrance: Interactive Inscriptions from Mt. Gerizim” by Anne Katrine de Hemmer Gudme in the July/August/September/October 2019 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

Notes

1-“Dating of the Samaritan Temple on Mt. Gerizim,” Bible History Daily (blog), published on March 6, 2011.

Related reading in Bible History Daily

Dating of the Samaritan Temple on Mt. Gerizim

The Samaritans: A Profile

Understanding the Good Samaritan Parable

The Samaritan Schism

All-Access members, read more in the BAS Library

The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land: Mount Gerizim

Samaritan Synagogue Faces Mt. Gerizim

Reactivating Remembrance: Interactive Inscriptions from Mt. Gerizim

This story first appeared in Bible History Daily in August, 2019

The post The Temple on Mount Gerizim—In the Bible and Archaeology appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

St. Anna the Prophetess by Rembrandt Van Rijn. Luke’s depiction of Anna in the Bible paints her as a pious prophetess whose advanced age and honorable behavior usher in the new covenant.

Anna is one of the Bible’s most unusual women. Introduced at the end of the Birth Narrative (Luke 1:1-2:40), Anna concludes the sextet of named, pious Israelites surrounding the miraculous births of John and Jesus. The others are Zechariah, Elizabeth, Mary, Joseph and Simeon. Anna arrives at the purification of Mary, Joseph and Jesus in the Temple, 40 days after Jesus’ birth (Luke 2:22-38). It is a scene repeated over and over in Israelite culture, for the law required a sacrifice of a lamb or two pigeons or two doves after a son’s birth (Leviticus 12:2-8).

However, this purification is unlike any other, for Simeon and Anna arrive at the ritual independently, though both seem led by divine direction (Luke 2:22-38).

Luke’s pairing of Simeon and Anna provides an interesting comparison. Simeon arrives first, and Luke records more of his encounter. Simeon is an old man. He exclaims, “Now, Sovereign Lord, you can let your servant depart in peace” (v. 29). He prophesies that the child in his arms is God’s salvation, “prepared in the sight of all people, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel” (Luke 2:28, 30b-32). Notice Luke’s deft writing: Simeon praises the Lord while Anna offers thanks; he prophesies, but she is called a prophetess (Luke 2:29-32, 34-36).

Regarding Anna, Luke provides three terse verses that manage to vividly depict her as a woman deserving the honor bestowed on the elderly in the ancient Mediterranean world (v. 36-38). The appositive prophetess heads her description (Luke 2:36). In this she outranks Simeon, a man praised as righteous and devout (Luke 2:25) who may be a priest because he holds the baby Jesus. Anna is the New Testament’s only named female prophetess. Luke gives her father’s name, Phanuel, but not her husband’s. He mentions her tribe, Asher. As such, she numbers among the few New Testament characters with tribal listings. Others include Jesus, of the house and lineage of David and the tribe of Judah (Luke 2:4; Matthew 1:1-16), Saul of Benjamin (Philippians 3:5) and Barnabas, a Levite (Acts 4:36).

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Luke summarizes Anna’s encounter with the little family. Unlike Simeon, her direct speech is narrated—yet it is powerful. While Simeon speaks of the larger and later context of the child to the Gentiles and Israel (vv. 30-32), Anna evangelizes immediately and selectively—to those “looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem” (v. 38). She and Simeon join others in Luke’s gospel in recognizing this child’s great significance and wide import: the angel Gabriel (1:31-33), Elizabeth and John (in uterus) (1:42-45), Zechariah (1:76-79) and the Bethlehem shepherds who also evangelize (2:11-12, 20).

As a prophetess, Anna receives insight into things that normally remain hidden to ordinary people; she recognizes who this child is and tells of his significance to selected people in Jerusalem. Her actions affirm Amos 3:7: “Surely the Sovereign Lord does nothing without revealing his plans to his servants the prophets.”

Luke dwells on Anna’s advanced age with ambiguity. Let’s simply agree with the text: she is ancient! Luke tells us she was married for seven years, then widowed. Her widowhood has either lasted 84 years or she is 84 years old when she crosses the Biblical stage (vv. 36-37). If the former, she could well be 105 years old, the same age as the apocryphal figure Judith when she died (Judith 16:28). Some scholars figure it this way: Anna married at age 14, evidently a common age, was widowed at age 21, and then meets the young family 84 years later at age 105.

I tend to see her as 105 because it is in line with the numerous miracles and unusual occurrences already surrounding the Birth Narrative, including the advanced age of Zechariah and Elizabeth when John was conceived (Luke 1:7, 13, 18, 57), and the Holy Spirit’s action of overshadowing Mary, who was able to conceive without intercourse (Luke 1:31-35). My point is this: age 105 is not out of line with Luke’s narrative replete so far with angelic visitations and miracles—especially when Luke fills in with more details about Anna. In Deuteronomy, Moses prophesies that for the tribe of Asher, Anna’s tribe, “your strength will equal your days” (Deuteronomy 33:25). Surely Anna’s life shows evidence of that.

Luke’s description of her lifestyle may be seen as eccentric today, and quite likely was considered so at the time. She never leaves the Temple (v. 37). She worships night and day, fasting and praying. She is a workaholic, available 24/7. Yet her lifestyle evidently invigorates her, for she is mobile, articulate, alert, spiritually savvy and unselfish.

Who was the first person to truly recognize Jesus as the Messiah and understand the implications? In the article “Mary, Simeon or Anna: Who First Recognized Jesus as Messiah?” Ben Witherington III takes a close look at the account given in Luke, and sheds some light on what the Biblical narrative has to say about who was the first to recognize Jesus as the Messiah.

Luke indicates that her habits of worship, prayer and fasting represent a routine, probably one of decades. Evidently she resides within the Temple or on its premises. A precedent in earlier centuries could have been the presence of Levite musicians and heads of families “who stayed in the rooms of the temple and were exempt from other duties because they were responsible for the work day and night” (1 Chronicles 9:33). So perhaps this behavior was not so unusual during the first century because of the full time work of worship the Levites undertook.

Anna, this worship workaholic, sets her own hours, schedule, route and routine. Arguably she listens to God and prays as directed. Others recognize her as a prophetess. The work of prayer indeed characterizes a prophet, for God told Abimelech that Abraham was “a prophet and he will pray for you” (Gen. 20:7). Anna knows fasting brings results. Biblical precedents include Esther’s three-day fast before courageously approaching Xerxes (Est. 4:15-16), and the abstinence of Daniel and his three friends regarding the delicacies of King Nebuchadnezzar’s table (Dan. 1:12).

Let’s consider Luke’s textual silences. Luke omits mention of her family; perhaps she had outlived her children. But if she has living family members, what do they think of her lifestyle? Do they share her devotion to constant worship? What about her finances? Is she independently wealthy, or do others provide her food? What did she look like? These questions remain unanswered, for they do not contribute toward Luke’s themes.

The Biblical text, however, contains clues regarding her appearance and character. Her lifestyle of fasting may indicate thinness; her ability to walk around the Temple indicates her fitness and that her eyesight and hearing are intact; her designation as a prophetess indicates her spiritual acuity; her talk of the child to those interested in the redemption of Jerusalem indicates her deep connection with a likeminded community.

With this in mind, Anna shows one model of aging in the Biblical text. Luke presents her positively, as a woman without the bitterness that may come with age and as one full of hope. As she moves throughout the Temple, no doubt she seeks to do good to those whom she encounters. Luke’s description shows her as well adjusted, engaged in Israel’s life and useful to the Lord. She may well have become the model for the righteous church widows Paul describes in 1 Timothy 5:5. Arguably the best representatives of the Old Covenant—Zechariah, Elizabeth, Simeon, and worship workaholic Anna—although all elderly, all ably serve as transitions to the New Covenant.

Robin Gallaher Branch is Extraordinary Associate Professor in the Faculty of Theology at North-West University in Potchefstroom, South Africa. She received her Ph.D. in Hebrew Studies from the University of Texas in Austin in 2000. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship for the 2002–2003 academic year to the Faculty of Theology at North-West University. Her most recent book is Jereboam’s Wife: The Enduring Contributions of the Old Testament’s Least-Known Women (Hendrickson, 2009).

Bible History Daily articles by Robin Gallaher Branch:

The Bible and Sexuality in South Africa

Barnabas: An Encouraging Early Church Leader

Part II—Barnabas: An Encouraging Early Church Leader

Judith: A Remarkable Heroine

Judith: A Remarkable Heroine, Part 2

Bibliography:

Arias, Mortimer. 1984. “Simeon and Anna Sodalities: A Challenge to Churches in Transition.” Missiology: An International Review 12(1):97-101.

Barclay, William. 1956. Luke. Philadelphia: Westminster Press.

Branch, Robin Gallaher. 2004. “Genesis 20: A Template for Prophecy.” In die Skriflig 2004 38 (2):1-18.

Campbell, Joan Cecelia. 2009. Phoebe: Patron and Emissary. Collegeville: Liturgical Press.

Fee, Gordon D., & Douglas Stuart. 2003. How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth. Grand Rapids: Zondervan.

Geldenhuys, Norval. 1979. Commentary on The Gospel of Luke: The English Text with Introduction, Exposition, and Notes. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

Hastings, James, ed. 1926. The Speaker’s Bible: St. Luke, Volume 1. Aberdeen: The Speaker’s Bible Offices.

Hendrickson, William. 2002. New Testament Commentary: Exposition of the Gospel According to Luke. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House.

Marshall, I. Howard 1978. The Gospel of Luke: A Commentary on the Greek Text. Exeter: The Paternoster Press.

Marshall, I. Howard. 2004. New Testament Theology: Many Witnesses, One Gospel. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press.

Wright, Tom. 2004. Luke for Everyone. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.

This Bible History Daily feature was originally published on April 19, 2013.

The post Anna in the Bible appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

This vellum copy of the Gutenberg Bible is owned by the Library of Congress. The Gutenberg Bible, the Vulgate (Latin) translation, is the first book printed using moveable type. Printed in the 1450s in Mainz Germany, this is one of only 48 copies that still survive (11 in the United States), and is considered to be one of the most valuable books in existence. Photo: Raul654’s image is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

For as long as there have been Biblical texts, there have been Biblical hermeneutics, or Biblical interpretations. One definition of hermeneutics (given by Bernhard W. Anderson in a piece he wrote for Bible Review) is that Biblical hermeneutics are “modes of [Bible] interpretation[s].” In another Bible Review article, James A. Sanders offered a Biblical hermeneutics definition as “interpretive lens[es]” through which one reads the Bible. Going a step further, the Merriam-Webster dictionary extends its hermeneutics definition to include not only the methods or principles of the interpretations but also the study of those very Biblical interpretations. In short, the hermeneutics of the Bible are the many ways people read the Bible.

Biblical hermeneutics even take place within the Biblical text itself. In the Hebrew Bible, the authors of the Psalms and the prophets often referred back to the Torah and incorporated their own interpretations and understanding of the text from their social locations

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In the years leading up to the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E., several different Jewish groups had risen to prominence, including the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes. Although they were all Jewish, each group had very different Biblical hermeneutics. Definition of what happened to the soul after death, proper temple sacrifice and the importance of studying the law differed among these groups because of their varying approaches. Christianity also began as a Jewish sect, but as Jesus’ followers developed their own hermeneutics in relation to the law and the role of the messiah, it became a distinct religion.

Today there are many hermeneutics applied to the Bible. These methodologies range from historical-critical, to post-colonial, to rhetorical, to cultural-critical, to ecological to canonical-critical. These are all types of Biblical hermeneutics. Part of the reason that so many hermeneutics exist is that interpreters have different goals. For example, if you want to understand how Moses’s life in the wilderness differed from daily life in the ancient Levant, you would use an archaeological/anthropological hermeneutic. However, if you want to understand the gender politics between Miriam and Moses in the wilderness, you would use a feminist or womanist approach to the text. Different hermeneutics lead to different types of interpretations. Cheryl Exum famously wrote two articles on Exodus 1-2:10 focusing on the women in the narrative. Her conclusions in these articles appear contradictory, but that is because she used two different hermeneutics (rhetorical and feminist) and each method focused on different elements of the text, which led to different interpretations of the text.

Learn about the Hebrew Bible in a free course of 25 video lectures by Harvard professor Shaye Cohen. Take the course >>

Even archaeology, which is the focus of BAR, is a Biblical hermeneutic. By studying the remains of ancient people and how they lived, and comparing their finds to the texts, archaeologists are able to offer exciting new interpretations. For example, the sacrifice of Isaac is one of the most interpreted stories throughout history. The disturbing narrative about a God who orders his follower to sacrifice his son, but ultimately withdraws this command at the final moment, has caused great discomfort in readers for several reasons. Many of these reasons revolve around the modern revulsion regarding child sacrifice. The world of archaeology provides insight into the practice (or non-practice) of sacrifice in the ancient world, as well as the hilltop altars, which appear in the story. For more on this topic see “Infants Sacrificed? The Tale Teeth Tell” by Patricia Smith in the July/August 2014 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

There are many ways in which you can approach the text, and your method will determine your interpretation. It is important then to be transparent about what is essential to you as a reader and recognize how that impacts the interpretations that you develop. Your interpretive goal will ultimately determine your Biblical hermeneutic.

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Ellen White, Ph.D. (Hebrew Bible, University of St. Michael’s College), was the senior editor at the Biblical Archaeology Society. She has taught at five universities across the U.S. and Canada and spent research leaves in Germany and Romania. She has also been actively involved in digs at various sites in Israel.

Read how noted scholars arrive at a definition of Biblical hermeneutics:

Bernhard W. Anderson, “The Bible: Word of God in Human Words,” Bible Review, June 1997.

James A. Sanders, “’Spinning’ the Bible,” Bible Review, June 1998.

This Bible History Daily article was originally published in July 2011. It was updated and expanded by Dr. Ellen White on October 13, 2014.

The post Defining Biblical Hermeneutics appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

The Justinian Plague decimated the Byzantine population during the reign of the Christian emperor Justinian I. Portrait in the Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna.

Justinian himself was a victim of the plague. While he was able to recover, much of the Byzantine population did not, and the spread of the plague shaped world history for centuries to come. When Justinian’s troops had conquered nearly all of Italy and the Mediterranean coast, they were struck by plague and could not continue the conquest through Europe, ultimately losing much of the conquered territory after Justinian’s death. The Justinian Plague halved the European population and weakened the Byzantine Empire, making it vulnerable to the Arab conquests of the seventh century.

Recent bacterial research has linked the Justinian Plague to the world’s most infamous affliction, the Black Death, which claimed the lives of up to 200 million people in the 14th century, as well as the third pandemic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Scientists investigating DNA from the teeth of nineteen skeletons from the sixth-century German cemetery Aschheim confirmed the presence of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria associated with the bubonic and other plagues.

While Procopius, the court historian of the Roman emperor Justinian, reported that the plague (which he said claimed the lives of 10,000 people in Constantinople every day; see full account below) originated on Egyptian grain ships, the recent scientific study suggests that the yersinia pestis originated in Asia, like the more recent instances of plague.

Read the full study “Yersinia pestis DNA from Skeletal Remains from the 6th Century AD Reveals Insights into Justinianic Plague” as it appears in the open access, peer-reviewed journal PLOS Pathogens.

The free eBook Life in the Ancient World guides you through craft centers in ancient Jerusalem, family structure across Israel and ancient practices—from dining to makeup—throughout the Mediterranean world.

Procopius on the Justinian Plague

** This text by the sixth-century historian Procopius is republished from Fordham University’s Internet Medieval Sourcebook. In “History of the Wars, II.xxii–xxxiii,” Procopius describes the events of 542 C.E. This translation is from Procopius, History of the Wars, 7 Vols., trans. H. B. Dewing, Loeb Library of the Greek and Roman Classics, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1914), Vol. I, pp. 451–473, available online here. **

DURING these times there was a pestilence, by which the whole human race came near to being annihilated. Now in the case of all other scourges sent from heaven some explanation of a cause might be given by daring men, such as the many theories propounded by those who are clever in these matters; for they love to conjure up causes which are absolutely incomprehensible to man, and to fabricate outlandish theories of natural philosophy knowing well that they are saying nothing sound but considering it sufficient for them, if they completely deceive by their argument some of those whom they meet and persuade them to their view. But for this calamity it is quite impossible either to express in words or to conceive in thought any explanation, except indeed to refer it to God. For it did not come in a part of the world nor upon certain men, nor did it confine itself to any season of the year, so that from such circumstances it might be possible to find subtle explanations of a cause, but it embraced the entire world, and blighted the lives of all men, though differing from one another in the most marked degree, respecting neither sex nor age.

For much as men differ with regard to places in which they live, or in the law of their daily life, or in natural bent, or in active pursuits, or in whatever else man differs from man, in the case of this disease alone the difference availed naught. And it attacked some in the summer season, others in the winter, and still others at the other times of the year. Now let each one express his own judgment concerning the matter, both sophist and astrologer, but as for me, I shall proceed to tell where this disease originated and the manner in which it destroyed men.

It started from the Egyptians who dwell in Pelusium. Then it divided and moved in one direction towards Alexandria and the rest of Egypt, and in the other direction it came to Palestine on the borders of Egypt; and from there it spread over the whole world, always moving forward and travelling at times favorable to it. For it seemed to move by fixed arrangement, and to tarry for a specified time in each country, casting its blight slightingly upon none, but spreading in either direction right out to the ends of the world, as if fearing lest some corner of the earth might escape it. For it left neither island nor cave nor mountain ridge which had human inhabitants; and if it had passed by any land, either not affecting the men there or touching them in indifferent fashion, still at a later time it came back; then those who dwelt round about this land, whom formerly it had afflicted most sorely, it did not touch at all, but it did not remove from the place in question until it had given up its just and proper tale of dead, so as to correspond exactly to the number destroyed at the earlier time among those who dwelt round about. And this disease always took its start from the coast, and from there went up to the interior.

Click here to read the Bible History Daily feature “Medicine in the Ancient World.”

And in the second year it reached Byzantium in the middle of spring, where it happened that I was staying at that time. And it came as follows. Apparitions of supernatural beings in human guise of every description were seen by many persons, and those who encountered them thought that they were struck by the man they had met in this or that part of the body, as it havened, and immediately upon seeing this apparition they were seized also by the disease.

Now at first those who met these creatures tried to turn them aside by uttering the holiest of names and exorcising them in other ways as well as each one could, but they accomplished absolutely nothing, for even in the sanctuaries where the most of them fled for refuge they were dying constantly. But later on they were unwilling even to give heed to their friends when they called to them,and they shut themselves up in their rooms and pretended that they did not hear, although their doors were being beaten down, fearing, obviously, that he who was calling was one of those demons. But in the case of some the pestilence did not come on in this way, but they saw a vision in a dream and seemed to suffer the very same thing at the hands of the creature who stood over them, or else to hear a voice foretelling to them that they were written down in the number of those who were to die. But with the majority it came about that they were seized by the disease without becoming aware of what was coming either through a waking vision or a dream. And they were taken in the following manner. They had a sudden fever, some when just roused from sleep, others while walking about, and others while otherwise engaged, without any regard to what they were doing. And the body showed no change from its previous color, nor was it hot as might be expected when attacked by a fever, nor indeed did any inflammation set in, but the fever was of such a languid sort from its commencement and up till evening that neither to the sick themselves nor to a physician who touched them would it afford any suspicion of danger. It was natural, therefore, that not one of those who had contracted the disease expected to die from it. But on the same day in some cases, in others on the following day, and in the rest not many days later, a bubonic swelling developed; and this took place not only in the particular part of the body which is called boubon, that is, “below the abdomen,” but also inside the armpit, and in some cases also beside the ears, and at different points on the thighs.

Up to this point, then, everything went in about the same way with all who had taken the disease. But from then on very marked differences developed; and I am unable to say whether the cause of this diversity of symptoms was to be found in the difference in bodies, or in the fact that it followed the wish of Him who brought the disease into the world. For there ensued with some a deep coma, with others a violent delirium, and in either case they suffered the characteristic symptoms of the disease. For those who were under the spell of the coma forgot all those who were familiar to them and seemed to lie sleeping constantly. And if anyone cared for them, they would eat without waking, but some also were neglected, and these would die directly through lack of sustenance. But those who were seized with delirium suffered from insomnia and were victims of a distorted imagination; for they suspected that men were coming upon them to destroy them, and they would become excited and rush off in flight, crying out at the top of their voices. And those who were attending them were in a state of constant exhaustion and had a most difficult time of it throughout. For this reason everybody pitied them no less than the sufferers, not because they were threatened by the pestilence in going near it (for neither physicians nor other persons were found to contract this malady through contact with the sick or with the dead, for many who were constantly engaged either in burying or in attending those in no way connected with them held out in the performance of this service beyond all expectation, while with many others the disease came on without warning and they died straightway); but they pitied them because of the great hardships which they were undergoing. For when the patients fell from their beds and lay rolling upon the floor, they kept putting them back in place, and when they were struggling to rush headlong out of their houses, they would force them back by shoving and pulling against them. And when water chanced to be near, they wished to fall into it, not so much because of a desire for drink (for the most of them rushed into the sea), but the cause was to be found chiefly in the diseased state of their minds. They had also great difficulty in the matter of eating, for they could not easily take food. And many perished through lack of any man to care for them, for they were either overcome by hunger, or threw themselves down from a height. And in those cases where neither coma nor delirium came on, the bubonic swelling became mortified and the sufferer, no longer able to endure the pain, died. And one would suppose that in all cases the same thing would have been true, but since they were not at all in their senses, some were quite unable to feel the pain; for owing to the troubled condition of their minds they lost all sense of feeling.

Now some of the physicians who were at a loss because the symptoms were not understood, supposing that the disease centred in the bubonic swellings, decided to investigate the bodies of the dead. And upon opening some of the swellings, they found a strange sort of carbuncle that had grown inside them. Death came in some cases immediately, in others after many days; and with some the body broke out with black pustules about as large as a lentil and these did not survive even one day, but all succumbed immediately. With many also a vomiting of blood ensued without visible cause and straightway brought death. Moreover I am able to declare this, that the most illustrious physicians predicted that many would die, who unexpectedly escaped entirely from suffering shortly afterwards, and that they declared that many would be saved, who were destined to be carried off almost immediately. So it was that in this disease there was no cause which came within the province of human reasoning; for in all cases the issue tended to be something unaccountable. For example, while some were helped by batlling, others were harmed in no less degree. And of those who received no care many died, but others, contrary to reason, were saved. And again, methods of treatment showed different results with different patients. Indeed the whole matter may be stated thus, that no device was discovered by man to save himself, so that either by taking precautions he should not suffer, or that when the malady had assailed him he should get the better of it; but suffering came without warning and recovery was due to no external cause. And in the case of women who were pregnant death could be certainly foreseen if they were taken with the disease. For some died through miscarriage, but others perished immediately at the time of birth with the infants they bore. However, they say that three women in confinement survived though their children perished, and that one woman died at the very time of childbirth but that the child was born and survived.

Now in those cases where the swelling rose to an unusual size and a discharge of pus had set in, it came about that they escaped from the disease and survived, for clearly the acute condition of the carbuncle had found relief in this direction, and this proved to be in general an indication of returning health; but in cases where the swelling preserved its former appearance there ensued those troubles which I have just mentioned. And with some of them it came about that the thigh was withered, in which case, though the swelling was there, it did not develop the least suppuration. With others who survived the tongue did not remain unaffected, and they lived on either lisping or speaking incoherently and with difficulty.

Read about the discovery of evidence of the Cyprian Plague, an “apocalyptic” pandemic, in ancient Thebes >>

Now the disease in Byzantium ran a course of four months, and its greatest virulence lasted about three. And at first the deaths were a little more than the normal, then the mortality rose still higher, and afterwards the tale of dead reached five thousand each day, and again it even came to ten thousand and still more than that. Now in the beginning each man attended to the burial of the dead of his own house, and these they threw even into the tombs of others, either escaping detection or using violence; but afterwards confusion and disorder everywhere became complete. For slaves remained destitute of masters, and men who in former times were very prosperous were deprived of the service of their domestics who were either sick or dead, and many houses became completely destitute of human inhabitants. For this reason it came about that some of the notable men of the city because of the universal destitution remained unburied for many days.

And it fell to the lot of the emperor, as was natural, to make provision for the trouble. He therefore detailed soldiers from the palace and distributed money, commanding Theodorus to take charge of this work; this man held the position of announcer of imperial messages, always announcing to the emperor the petitions of his clients, and declaring to them in turn whatever his wish was. In the Latin tongue the Romans designate this office by the term Referendarius. So those who had not as yet fallen into complete destitution in their domestic affairs attended individually to the burial of those connected with them. But Theodorus, by giving out the emperor=s money and by making further expenditures from his own purse, kept burying the bodies which were not cared for. And when it came about that all the tombs which had existed previously were filled with the dead, then they dug up all the places about the city one after the other, laid the dead there, each one as he could, and departed; but later on those who were making these trenches, no longer able to keep up with the number of the dying, mounted the towers of the fortifications in Sycae [Galata], and tearing off the roofs threw the bodies there in complete disorder; and they piled them up just as each one happened to fall, and filled practically all the towers with corpses, and then covered them again with their roofs. As a result of this an evil stench pervaded the city and distressed the inhabitants still more, and especially whenever the wind blew fresh from that quarter.

At that time all the customary rites of burial were overlooked. For the dead were not carried out escorted by a procession in the customary manner, nor were the usual chants sung overthem, but it was sufficient if one carried on his shoulders the body of one of the dead to the parts of the city which bordered on the sea and flung him down; and there the corpses would be thrown upon skiffs in a heap, to be conveyed wherever it might chance. At that time, too, those of the population who had formerly been members of the factions laid aside their mutual enmity and in common they attended to the burial rites of the dead, and they carried with their own hands the bodies of those who were no connections of theirs and buried them. Nay, more, those who in times past used to take delight in devoting themselves to pursuits both shameful and base, shook off the unrighteousness of their daily lives and practiced the duties of religion with diligence, not so much because they had learned wisdom at last nor because they had become all of a sudden lovers of virtue, as it were—for when qualities have become fixed in men by nature or by the training of a long period of time, it is impossible for them to lay them aside thus lightly, except, indeed, some divine influence for good has breathed upon them—but then all, so to speak, being thoroughly terrified by the things which were happening, and supposing that they would die immediately, did, as was natural, learn respectability for a season by sheer necessity.

Therefore as soon as they were rid of the disease and were saved, and already supposed that they were in security, since the curse had moved on to other peoples, then they turned sharply about and reverted once more to their baseness of hearts and now, more than before, they make a display of the inconsistency of their conduct, altogether surpassing themselves in villainy and in lawlessness of every sort. For one could insist emphatically without falsehood that this disease, whether by chance or by some providence, chose out with exactitude the worst men and let them go free. But these things were displayed to the world in later times.

Learn about the medical treatment of cupping in Bible History Daily >>

During that time it seemed no easy thing to see any man in the streets of Byzantium, but all who had the good fortune to he in health were sitting in their houses, either attending the sick or mourning the dead. And if one did succeed in meeting a man going out, he was carrying one of the dead. And work of every description ceased, and all the trades were abandoned by the artisans, and all other work as well, such as each had in hand. Indeed in a city which was simply abounding in all good things starvation almost absolute was running riot. Certainly it seemed a difficult and very notable thing to have a sufficiency of bread or of anything else; so that with some of the sick it appeared that the end of life came about sooner than it should have come by reason of the lack of the necessities of life.

And, to put all in a word, it was not possible to see a single man in Byzantium clad in the chlamys, and especially when the emperor became ill (for he too had a swelling of the groin), but in a city which held dominion over the whole Roman empire every man was wearing clothes befitting private station and remaining quietly at home. Such was the course of the pestilence in the Roman empire at large as well as in Byzantium. And it fell also upon the land of the Persians and visited all the other barbarians besides.

This Bible History Daily article was originally published in May 2013.

The post Justinian Plague Linked to the Black Death appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

Pluto’s Gate in ancient Hierapolis was considered a gateway to hell and sacred to the underworld deity Pluto. Photo: Francesco D’Andria, Discovery.

Shrouded in misty poisonous vapors, Pluto’s Gate, or the Plutonium, was a cave entrance sacred to Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld. According to the first-century geographer Strabo, the site was home to rituals in which any animals entering the enclosure “meet with sudden death.”

Hierapolis archaeologist Francesco D’Andria reconstructed the route of the area’s thermal spring to discover Pluto’s Gate, which was destroyed by Christians in the sixth century. The Plutonium’s infamous mystique is not just the stuff of legend; during the excavation, several birds were killed by carbon dioxide emissions as they approached the Plutonium cave’s entrance.

During the excavation, poisonous fumes from Pluto’s Gate killed several birds, echoing the seemingly mythological tales recorded by Strabo. Photo: Francesco D’Andria, Discovery.

This is not the first astounding discovery at D’Andria’s excavation at Hierapolis, located next to the often-visited hot springs and travertines at the World Heritage Site of Pamukkale. According to the apocryphal Acts of Philip, the apostle Philip preached and converted many Hierapolis residents, yet he was martyred there nonetheless. An octagonal church was built in Hierapolis to memorialize the saint, and a sixth-century bread stamp depicts Philip standing at the very site. The publication of D’Andria’s article “Conversion, Crucifixion and Celebration” in the July/August 2011 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review was followed by the discovery of a small church that D’Andria believes to be the tomb of St. Philip.

Our free eBook Ten Top Biblical Archaeology Discoveries brings together the exciting worlds of archaeology and the Bible! Learn the fascinating insights gained from artifacts and ruins, like the Pool of Siloam in Jerusalem, where the Gospel of John says Jesus miraculously restored the sight of the blind man, and the Tel Dan inscription—the first historical evidence of King David outside the Bible.

“CASTLE OF COTTON.” The translation of Pamukkale, the modern Turkish name for the area near Hierapolis, aptly describes the breathtaking natural travertine formations at the site. Hierapolis sits on an active seismic fault line that has created earthquakes and hot springs over the millennia, the latter an early attraction of the site. The precipitation of minerals from the geothermal hot springs harden into the sedimentary rock travertine and form the so-called “cotton flowers” that continue to attract visitors. Photo: Archive of the Italian Archaeological Mission to Hierapolis.

Hierapolis’s gateway to hell was an important sacred space in the city. The first-century traveler Strabo described its deadly properties:

The Plutonium, below a small brow of the mountainous country that lies above it, is an opening of only moderate size, large enough to admit a man, but it reaches a considerable depth, and it is enclosed by a quadrilateral handrail, about half a plethrum in circumference, and this space is full of a vapour so misty and dense that one can scarcely see the ground. Now to those who approach the handrail anywhere round the enclosure the air is harmless, since the outside is free from that vapor in calm weather, for the vapor then stays inside the enclosure, but any animal that passes inside meets instant death. At any rate, bulls that are led into it fall and are dragged out dead; and I threw in sparrows and they immediately breathed their last and fell. But the Galli, who are eunuchs, pass inside with such impunity that they even approach the opening, bend over it, and descend into it to a certain depth, though they hold their breath as much as they can (for I could see in their countenances an indication of a kind of suffocating attack, as it were)—whether this immunity belongs to all who are maimed in this way or only to those round the temple, or whether it is because of divine providence, as would be likely in the case of divine obsessions, or whether it is, the result of certain physical powers that are antidotes against the vapor (Strabo, Geography 13.4.14, trans. by Horace Leonard Jones).

 

Read more about Pluto’s Gate at Hierapolis.

Related reading in Bible History Daily:

King Midas and His Golden Touch at the Penn Museum

The Oracle of Delphi—Was She Really Stoned?

Tomb of Apostle Philip Found

Where Is Biblical Colossae?

The Church of Laodicea in the Bible and Archaeology

This Bible History Daily feature was originally published on April 1, 2013.

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