Spirit of Scholarship Abstracts
Anton Deimel (1865–1954), Jesuit and Assyriologist
Mark Avila, O.M.V., Pontifical Biblical Institute
Born in 1865 in Olpe, under an hour's drive east of Cologne in West Germany, Anton Deimel completed Gymnasium in Paderborn and eventually made his way to Holland where, in 1887, he entered the Society of Jesus, at the time banned in Germany as a consequence of the Kulturkampf. He was ordained a priest in 1900 and continued research under the Jesuit Assyriologist Johann N. Straßmaier. In 1909 he was called to the newly founded Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome where he was named professor of the languages and cultures of the Ancient Near East. There he gained an international reputation for his pioneering work in Assyriology. Among his groundbreaking publications were Pantheon Babylonicum (1914), Die Inschriften von Fara (Šuruppag) in three volumes (1922–1924), and his magnum opus, the multivolume Šumerisches Lexikon (1925–1950).
Archaeology and Bible: A New Equilibrium?
Josef Mario Briffa, S.J., Pontifical Biblical Institute
“Biblical archaeology” has received plenty of bad press over the decades, and the idea of digging with the Bible in one hand and trowel in the other, so common in the early and mid-twentieth century, is undoubtedly flawed. This paper will argue that in the last twenty years the field of archaeology relating to both the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and the New Testament has reached a certain mature equilibrium, despite the sensationalist title and claims that often resonate in the media.
French Ecclesiastics and Assyriology (1879–1908)
Dominique Charpin, Collège de France
The study of the beginnings of Assyriological education in Paris reveals an astonishing phenomenon: a good portion of the students were ecclesiastics. Some names have remained famous, starting with Father Scheil. Others are famous for reasons outside of Assyriology, such as Alfred Loisy. Other names are less well known, like that of Father Lucien Méchineau. But most of them are completely forgotten, like those of Abbés Aurèle Quentin or Jules Sauveplane: who still knows that the latter wrote the first French translation of the Epic of Gilgameš in 1892? It is to this phenomenon that my contribution will be devoted. It began in 1878, a date which marks the official beginning of the teaching of Assyriology at the EPHE. It ends in 1908, the year that saw both the excommunication of Abbé Loisy on the one hand, and the entrance of Father Scheil to the Academy on the other.
The End of the Late Bronze: Evidence from the House of Urtenu Archive at Ugarit
Yoram Cohen, Tel Aviv University
A general agreement among scholars regarding the end of the Late Bronze Age in Syria has been questioned in recent years. Notably, revisionist scholarship has tried to play down the role of the Sea Peoples in the destruction of the coastal cities, while conclusive proof regarding the hunger which was said to have caused the end of the Late Bronze Age was missing. The letters from the House of Urtenu (published in 2016) allow us to remove all doubts and substantially fill in the gaps in the historical reconstruction of Hittite rule in Syria and the end of Ugarit.
Cuneiform Astral Tablets: An Overview with a Look at Prayer Times
Wayne Horowitz, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
An estimated 10,000+ cuneiform tablets related to what we today call Astronomy and Astrology have been identified in collections around the world. These include a wide range of genres from Sumerian and Akkadian literary works dating to the third and second millennium BCE to highly precise mathematical-astronomical works from the Hellenistic Period. This presentation will provide a very quick basic overview to this material, highlighting some of the most famous and important works, and will conclude with a specific question regarding prayer times in Ancient Mesopotamia in light of Jewish tradition and Canonical Hours in Catholic liturgy.
“Totoque in orbe Hammurabi, legeris, probaris!” The Contributions of Jean-Vincent Scheil to Ancient Near Eastern Studies as Reflected in His Latin Poems
Enrique Jiménez, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität
Jean-Vincent Scheil, O.P., was a prominent Assyriologist who lived between 1858–1940. Among his most remarkable, least well-known compositions are his Latin poems, written in classical meters and emulating classical models, in particular Martial and Horace. Assyriological and other contemporary events frequently seep into Scheil’s Latin poetry, a fact that makes them relevant for the study of his life and academic career, his inner thoughts and concerns, and the Assyriology of his time. In his Latin poetry Scheil frequently commemorates some of his publications in the field of ancient Near Eastern studies, and in particular the tablets he edited for the first time. The present contribution will present some of these poems, with special attention to the poem in Alcaic stanzas that celebrates the publication of Hammurapi’s Law Code, entitled Ex Susiano pulvere proditas.
Jesuit Scholarship and the Rediscovery of Babylonian Mathematical Astronomy
Teije de Jong, University of Amsterdam
After the discovery of the remains of the ancient city of Nineveh in mound Kuyunjik near Mosul in Iraq in the middle of the 19th century, numerous clay tablets with cuneiform texts were found among the ruins of Nineveh, Babylon, Uruk, and other cities in ancient Mesopotamia. In addition to administrative, literary, and religious texts, some of these tablets contained large numerical tables while others contained text interspersed with numbers. Thanks to their curiosity, the motivation, and the pioneering research of three Jesuit priests—Johann Nepomuk Strassmaier, Joseph Epping, and Franz Xaver Kugler— we now know that these texts contain astronomical observations and computations of the positions of the sun, moon, and planets. In addition to sketching the historiography of the rediscovery process, I will try in this paper to come up with answers to the following question: how did Jesuit priests become involved in this endeavor? What made them so well prepared and motivated to play such a crucial role? Why did the German Jesuit Province allow, or possibly even stimulate, them to carry out their pioneering studies over five decades, from about 1880 to 1930? Answers to these questions must remain rather speculative at present because the Jesuit archives, as far as they are available, have not been searched systematically to provide the relevant documents.
The Philology of David Heinrich Müller, an Outsider Turned Insider in Fin-de-siècle Vienna
Michael Jursa, Institut für Orientalistik der Universität Wien
This paper addresses the life and work of David Heinrich Müller, professor of Semitic Philology at the University of Vienna from 1881-1912. Among his Assyriological contributions, the paper will focus in particular on Müller's take on the laws of Hammurapi, which arguably reflects aspects of Müller's lived experience in the intellectual climate of Vienna around the turn of the century.
Premises and Possibilities in the Study of Ancient Near Eastern Treaties: Reflecting on the State of the (Sub)Field
Jacob Lauinger, Johns Hopkins University
The first decades of the 21st century have seen important developments in the study of those ancient Near Eastern cuneiform texts that are commonly described as “treaties”: The discovery and publication of new texts, the re-editing of old texts, new reference tools and resources, and a critical reflection on old methodologies combined with the adoption of new approaches. In this talk, I survey some of the most important developments in the subfield of cuneiform treaties, step back to consider how we got to where we are, and end by asking where we might go next.
Archeology and Ancient Oriental Studies as a Tool against 'Higher Criticism'
Hanna Liss, Hochschule für Jüdische Studien, Heidelberg
Sigmund Jampel (1874-1934) was born in Tucholka, Galicia in 1874. The son of an Orthodox family, he completed a traditional course of Talmud study in Pressburg before going on to university at Heidelberg and Gießen, where he studied Semitic languages. After he completed his dissertation, on the Book of Esther, in 1905, he served as a rabbi for the German town of Schwedt an der Oder while also working as an instructor for the Jewish Community of Berlin. Although Jampel maintained a lifelong commitment to traditional Judaism and was known to inveigh against “liberal” as well as “conservative” tendencies among his contemporaries, he was noted for his efforts to draw upon new archaeological and Assyriological discoveries to illuminate the history of Israel. Jampel was one of a group of Jewish scholars—like David Heinrich Müller (1846-1912), who translated the Code of Hammurabi into Hebrew—who made a serious effort to understand the relationship between primary sources of evidence for ancient Judaism (i.e. archaeological and epigraphic material) and secondary sources (the literary testimonials of the Bible). His goal in so doing was to prove the historicity of those Biblical accounts that predate the Prophets, as well as to refute the “frivolous theories” of the Protestant Bible scholar Julius Wellhausen.
His work on certain papyri (“The Papyrus Find of Aswan,” 1907; “The Most Recent Papyrus Finds From Elephantine,” 1911), which includes transcriptions, translations, and commentary, makes clear just how much was lost by the German universities of that time, which closed their doors to what had already become a highly sophisticated discipline of “Jewish Studies.” The weight of this decision fell on Jewish scholars and students, but also (and perhaps especially) on their Christian peers, who were denied the opportunity to learn from outstanding teachers as well as participate in exciting academic debates which, because they took place exclusively in Jewish journals, were typically unavailable to those at university unless they happened across them by chance as part of their reading.
The journals in which these debates were published were a diverse lot, including newspapers targeted at a broader audience, whether Orthodox or liberal, like the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums (first published in 1837) or Jeschurun (1854), as well as specialized academic publications like the Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums (1822/23) or the well-known Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums (1851–1939). But because of the marginalization of Jewish Studies by the Christian intellectual establishment, the arguments they advanced were all too rarely acknowledged. The aim of this paper is to rehabilitate the work of a practically forgotten Jewish scholar of the Near East.
From de Vaux’s Generation to Today: Some Trajectories in Study of the Literature Associated with Qumran
Daniel Machiela, University of Notre Dame
Study of the manuscripts found in eleven caves from the vicinity of Qumran—part of what are popularly called the Dead Sea Scrolls—has come a long way since the pioneering contributions of Fr. Roland de Vaux and the scholars of his generation. In this paper, I will trace how questions and issues raised by de Vaux regarding the nature of the Qumran sect and its library have developed over the seventy-five years since their discovery. De Vaux’s published Schweich Lectures, delivered to the British Academy in 1959, will serve as the point of departure for this survey.
Roland de Vaux in the Context of His Time
Jodi Magness, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Roland de Vaux is best-known for his excavations at Qumran and his leadership of the team that published the Dead Sea Scrolls. Although this recognition is well-deserved, de Vaux had a distinguished career as an archaeologist and biblical scholar that extended well beyond Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls. In this paper, I review de Vaux’s life in the context of his time and consider his legacy in terms of his accomplishments as well as what he failed to achieve.
Treaty and Covenant: The Contributions of William Moran and Denis McCarthy
Dominik Markl, S.J., Pontifical Biblical Institute
Following up on an observation by Elias Bickerman, George Mendenhall offered the first systematic comparison between the Hittite treaty form and the Sinai Covenant in 1954, which had a profound impact on the subsequent history of research on the concept of the covenant in the Hebrew Bible. Important studies followed by scholars such as Klaus Baltzer and Moshe Weinfeld. This paper will focus on the contributions to this field of research by William J. Moran (1921–2000) and Denis J. McCarthy (1924–1983). Both had been raised in Chicago and both taught, as Jesuits, at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. Moran had obtained his doctorate as a student of William Foxwell Albright in 1950; at the Pontifical Biblical Institute, he directed several doctoral dissertations, including Norbert Lohfink’s work on Deuteronomy 5–11. After his departure from Rome in 1966, Moran taught at Harvard until 1990. His work on the love of God in biblical covenant texts and the ‘love’ owed to the suzerain in ancient Near Eastern treaty texts was highly original (Catholic Biblical Quarterly 25 [1963] 77–87). In the same year, McCarthy published his doctoral dissertation Treaty and Covenant (Analecta Biblica 21), written under the direction of Henri Cazelles at the Institut Catholique in Paris. McCarthy succeeded Norbert Lohfink at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in 1969 and continued to contribute to this comparative research in several publications.
Roland de Vaux: A Major Contribution to the Dialogue between Scripture and Archaeology
Jean Jacques Pérennès, O.P., École biblique et archéologique française
Fr. Roland de Vaux (1903–1971), a French Dominican, was a pioneering Catholic figure in Ancient Near Eastern studies. Having arrived in Jerusalem in 1933, he quickly played a major role in the Ecole founded by Fr. Marie-Joseph Lagrange. Director of the Revue biblique from 1938, he was the head of the Ecole from 1945 to 1965. As an archeologist and specialist of the history of ancient Israel, he was involved in major excavations projects such as Tell el-Far’ah (between 1946 and 1960) and Qumrân (1947-1958). He also played an important role in the publication of the Bible de Jerusalem. Several of his publications (Institutions de l’Ancien Testament, Histoire Ancienne d’Israël, Les sacrifices de l’Ancien Testament) are still considered major contributions. He was internationally recognized during his lifetime—a visiting professor in Harvard in 1965–66, for instance—and his work continues to shape scholarship until today. He is clearly one of the most important members of the Dominican school of Jerusalem after its founder, Father Lagrange.
A Hundred and Twenty Years Since The Laws of Ḫammurabi: the Legacy of J.-V. Scheil in Old Babylonian Studies
Hervé Reculeau, The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago
“Never since the era of [archaeological] excavations opened—neither in Egypt, nor in Assyria, nor in Babylonia, to name just the few major areas of investigation—did a document come up that is more significant, by its high moral reach and its broad content, than the Laws of Ḫammurabi.” (Scheil, 1902)
A hundred and twenty years ago, Jean-Vincent Scheil—then a member of the French Délégation Archéologique en Perse working at Susa under the direction of Jacques de Morgan—was the first Assyriologist to ever lay his eyes on the world-famous stele now in the Louvre. Less than one year later, his original edition of the Laws made their provisions available to scholars and enthusiasts alike, and made King Hammurabi of Babylon (1792–1750 BCE) a household name on par with the Assyrian and Babylonian kings of the first millennium BCE mentioned in the Bible. For the first time, the everyday life of ancient Mesopotamians transpired from the cuneiform record, and a comparative approach to the social and legal history of the Ancient Near East could be envisioned.
Scheil's own work extended way beyond the time of Ḫammurabi—the so-called Old Babylonian Period (20th-17th c. BCE)—, which is today one of the best documented periods in the entire history of Mesopotamia, through a rare variety of cuneiform materials: a handful of law codes, dozens of literary compositions, hundreds of royal inscriptions, thousands of scholarly texts, close to 35,000 published archival documents of various nature (administrative accounts, legal documents, letters)—and many more still awaiting publication. Tracing some of Scheil's early contributions to their present-day descendants, this presentation explores the continuities and mutations in Assyriological practice in the context of the massification of evidence, the advent of Digital Humanities and Big Data, and more generally our better understanding of the period, its history, and the life of its actors.
Édouard (Paul) Dhorme and Ugaritic Studies
Mark S. Smith, Princeton Theological Seminary (Princeton)
Édouard Dhorme, along with Hans Bauer, are justly famous for their leading roles in deciphering the Ugaritic alphabet. Dhorme also enjoyed other significant achievements in Ugaritic studies. He further represents an important figure in Catholic Biblical scholarship. This presentation will highlight Dhorme's achievements and situate this figure and his work in the larger context of his critical relationship to Marie-Joseph Lagrange, famous as the founder of the École Biblique.
Neo-Babylonian Constellations
Laurie E. Pearce, University of California, Berkeley
As “The Spirit of Scholarship” explores the contribution of Catholic scholarship to the fields of biblical and cuneiform students, it is fitting to consider the nexus of scholars whose work focused on texts dating to late first millennium Babylonia. Review of the work and collaborations of Strassmaier, Kugler, and Epping makes clear their impacts on the fields of Babylonian mathematics and astronomy, as well as Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid archival studies, and lays out their legacies in the growth of the field, and their place in the comparative study of the biblical world and the ancient Near East.
The “Sumerian Temple State” from Current Perspective – Reevaluation of a Long-lived Concept
Ingo Schrakamp, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität and Freie Universität
In the early 20th century, Anna Schneider, Anton Deimel, and Adam Falkenstein developed the model of the Sumerian Temple State. Based on Presargonic administrative texts from Lagash and the so-called Reforms of Urukagina, this concept regarded the temples as the sole owners of all arable land and the center of the economic and political power of the state. Though repeatedly questioned, it was likewise accepted for the preceding and succeeding periods of the 3rd millennium and remained highly influential until recent times. A recent critical reevaluation suggested that mid-3rd millennium Sumerian temples managed a subsistence economy based on agriculture and husbandry and provided for the population, while the palace controlled strategic resources, long-distance trade, diplomacy, and military, and could dispose of the production of the temples. Based on this background, this talk summarizes the history of research of the concept, critically evaluates its textual basis, including Urukagina’s so-called Reforms, and finally interprets their evidence from a longue durée perspective on the political-ideological and socio-economical development during the 3rd millennium.
On the Catholic Background to Ancient Near Eastern Studies (ca. 1875-1950), by way of an Analogy
Abraham Winitzer, University of Notre Dame
This paper will introduce this meeting’s topic and its historical setting and then call attention to a set of questions that appear basic to our common historiographic project. To wit, are the remarkable pathbreakers to be discussed influenced by their spiritual, personal, or historical backgrounds and, if so, how and to what extent? And in what ways is their scholarship shaped by such “external,” subjective factors? Answers to these questions naturally await the meeting’s specific contributions and their subsequent discussions, though this paper will strive to stress the significance of the place of the historian in the telling of history by way of a roughly contemporary analogy.
Sumerology Today: Milestones Achieved, Further Needs
Annette Zgoll, Georg-August-Universität
This paper concerns the state of Sumerology today: where the discipline stands currently and what visions we have for the future. The timing is ideal. Milestones in scholarship have been reached in recent decades. Groundbreaking lexical and grammatical research has paved the way for our understanding of the texts. Digitisation has also provided new access to Sumerian texts for scholars and the general public. Even so, much remains open to discussion. This is due to the special nature of the Sumerian language, which is extremely ambiguous. To meet this challenge, we need—in addition to grammatical and lexical studies—to expand the field of semantic studies on texts. We also need semantic approaches to be able to grasp the content of texts. These must be in constant exchange with broader historical approaches. These approaches aim to reconstruct the world of the Sumerians as accurately as possible from their own perspective in order to understand what the texts meant to those for whom they were composed, and vice versa: to reconstruct on the basis of the texts more precisely the Sumerians’ own perspectives and worldview.