Vol III of Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palestinae

[ficino]

Review of Volume III of Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae.

http://www.bmcreview.org/2014/11/20141118.html

These are from the southern coast: Yappa, Yavneh, etc. Many of the inscriptions in this volume are funerary and in Greek, from 3rd to 6th centuries, but there are many other kinds as well. For example, inscriptions on weights, or inscriptions in mosaics from synagogues, churches, and monasteries, and two pagan ones. I could not tell from the review the age of the earliest inscription that the editors judge Christian.

[Kunigunde Kreuzerin]

Larry Hurtado

Language Usage in Jewish Palestine: Epigraphic Evidence

Walter Ameling draws upon epigraphical evidence to consider languages usage in Jewish Palestine in the Hellenistic and Roman periods in a data-rich recent essay: “Epigraphy and the Greek Language in Hellenistic Palestine,” Scripta Classica Israelica 34 (2015): 1-18. The thrust of his study is that from the Seleucid period onward Greek was widely used. As this publication won’t be readily available to some, I’ll give a few representative extracts.
...

[Secret Alias]

Well of course it was but why is this any more surprising than if you looked at Syria in the period after WWII and found that French was widely used?

[Kunigunde Kreuzerin]

Well of course it was but why is this any more surprising than if you looked at Syria in the period after WWII and found that French was widely used?

Correctly. I thought it was worth mentioning because this is probably not the major opinion.

[semiopen]

The_Passion_of_the_Christ has the Romans speaking Latin in Judea, which is probably not correct.

Gibson chose to use Latin instead of Greek, which was the lingua franca of that particular part of the Roman Empire at the time, since there is no source for the Koine Greek spoken in that region.

Seems like a lot of work to have them speak basically the wrong language, but I guess once you go down that road shit happens.

I found something that SecretAlias might be interested in -

http://www.unrv.com/forum/topic/486-lat ... -ca-30-ad/

The Cavalry cohort was Ala I Sebastenorum that consisted of Samaritans and probably spoke a local dialect and perhaps Greek. We also know of the existence of a Cohors I Sebastenorum, which was also a Samaritan unit with similar language possibilities.

I also found this; would not recommend downloading it -

Josephus, Suetonius and Tacitus on the Military Service of Roman Jews - http://www.academia.edu/4732342/Josephu ... Roman_Jews

[DCHindley]

I also found this; would not recommend downloading it -

Josephus, Suetonius and Tacitus on the Military Service of Roman Jews - http://www.academia.edu/4732342/Josephu ... Roman_Jews

Why do you not recommend it for download? I have run across it before, but wasn't particularly impressed by it. It seemed disjointed and I was unable to grasp the point he was making. You?

DCH

[semiopen]

The full text was available online but there was a button that said connect to download which makes me suspicious.

The text dealt with things I'm not very familiar wish; the Jewish expulsion from Rome, the 4000 Roman Jewish soldiers sent to Sardinia, etc. It also had obscure anecdotes that were new to me, such as the Aramaic/Hebrew inscription that Jewish soldiers put on the tomb of Gordian_III in the mid third century CE.

There was also a discussion of the Jewish refusal to fight on Shabbat. Someone here, brought up that Josephus had mentioned this and I thought it must be a joke but then the article mentioned Tacitus also recorded this. If they didn't actually fight on Shabbat, it seems Judaism was in a much more dire state of decay than I had thought.

I thought the article was quite interesting, but that's coming from a layman.

[DCHindley]

I did download the article this time.

Academia.edu is OK. They just allow members to download PDF copies of the articles or books you can preview online. Sometimes the authors will allow you to read a sample and then optionally purchase an e-copy. Many seem to use the site to upload pre-publication versions of articles published elsewhere. They might be a little different in wording, or even be complete re-writes. However, they do not allow pirated copies to be posted, as you might see at other sites like Scribd. No dreaded "EXE" file downloads or anything like that, which should never be downloaded (generally assume an EXE file where you expect a PDF to be a Trojan/malware/virus). I think they use FTP type downloads.

DCH

[semiopen]

Thanks very much for the advice, DC.

I'm not planning my usual Hanukkah bashing thread this year, but hope everyone has happy holidays just the same.