A new mobile app developed by Architip allows users to view 3D reconstructions of ancient Biblical cities right on their smartphones. The technology has been piloted at the site of Tel Lachish (pictured) and will eventually be available for many other sites throughout Israel. Image courtesy Architip.

Using augmented reality software and 3D modeling, Israeli startup Architip is developing a smartphone app that will enhance the visitor experience at historical and archaeological sites. The technology has been piloted at the site of Tel Lachish (pictured), where the Architip team mapped and “virtualized” the city famously besieged by the Assyrians during the reign of King Hezekiah of Judah. In the future, visitors to major archaeological sites will be able to use the Architip app to visualize the grandeur of many other ancient Biblical cities.

Read more about the new smartphone app.

BAS Library Members: Read more about the site of Lachish in “Why Lachish Matters” by Philip J. King as it appeared in the July/August 2005 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

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This artist’s drawing of Caesarea Maritima shows the glory and power of the Roman capital of Judea. The manmade harbor (the largest in the ancient world) was largely constructed with Roman Hydraulic concrete. Robert Teringo/National Geographic Society

Standing the tests of time, Roman concrete is very resilient. One only has to look at structures like the Pantheon in Rome or the harbor at Caesarea Maritima in Israel to see that this is true, but is it as durable as modern concrete? According to findings by Paulo Monteiro and his team at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, it is. As well as being just as durable, Roman concrete was also more eco-friendly than our modern recipe, which consists of lime and clay. This mixture requires that it be heated at high temperatures and results in significant carbon dioxide emissions. Roman hydraulic concrete, on the other hand, was made from pumice, mortar, lime and volcanic ash from Italy—pozzolana—and fired at much lower temperatures, thereby creating the more eco-friendly Roman concrete. While it takes longer for the Roman concrete to set, it is just as durable as modern concrete. A full report of Monteiro’s findings was posted online in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society on May 28.

Read more in the UC Berkeley News Center.

BAS Library Members: Read more about Herod the Great’s use of hydraulic concrete at Caesarea Maritima in Kenneth G. Holum, “Building Power: The Politics of Architecture.” BAR September/October 2004.

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Louis Hersent. Daphnis and Chloe. Erich Lessing/Art Resource NY.

In “Daphnis and Chloe in the Garden of Eden” in the July/August 2013 issue of BAR, Theodore Feder explores how a second-century pagan love story alludes to the Biblical tale of Adam and Eve. Delve deeper into the story with passages from Longus’s romance, their Biblical counterparts and a slideshow of additional artistic representations of the lovers and their idyllic garden.

Written around 200 A.D. by the Greco-Roman author Longus, Daphnis and Chloe is a pagan pastoral romance that echoes the Biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Daphnis and Chloe are simple country-dwelling teenagers in love. They are the adopted children of pastoralists indentured to a far off Master. In a meadow where the couple often meet, there is an apple tree, completely bare except for one large and sweet apple hanging from the topmost twig. Daphnis climbs the tree and picks it for Chloe, to her dismay. Daphnis justifies himself, saying that if he did not pluck it, the apple would fall to the earth and be trampled by a beast or poisoned by a snake.

In spite of some variations, all the principal elements of the Genesis story of Adam and Eve are included in Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe. There are male and female counterparts, the tree and the fruit in the Edenic setting and even an ominous mention of a snake. It is likely that Longus knew some version of the Genesis story, whether by first or second hand. As Theodore Feder writes, Daphnis and Chloe is an example of how “stories of the Jews and early Christians were becoming part of the general cultural inventory of the time.”

Read passages from Longus’s text below (translated by Ronald McCail) alongside their Biblical counterparts to see how Daphnis and Chloe draws from the Genesis story of Adam and Eve. Scroll through our collection of artistic depictions of Daphnis and Chloe in their idyllic world. We include pieces by Marc Chagall, Francois Boucher, Louis Hersent and Francois Gerard.

BAS Library Members: Read “Daphnis and Chloe in the Garden of Eden” by Theodore Feder as it appears in the July/August 2013 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

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Excerpts from Daphnis and Chloe and Genesis

All text from Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe are from the excellent translation by Ronald McCail. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

Daphnis and Chloe, Book 3.33-34 (pp. 63-64)

There stood an apple-tree, all picked, with neither fruit nor leaf remaining; bare were all its boughs; yet one apple still hung ripening atop the very topmost twig, an apple large and lovely, which by itself surpassed the sweet scent of its whole clan. He feared to go up there, the harvester, nor had he taken heed to reach it down—perhaps some power was guarding it, that apple fair, for a love-struck shepherd.

When Daphnis saw the apple, he made to go up and pluck it, and took no notice of Chloe when she tried to hold him back. Whereupon she, ignored, went angrily away to the sheep and goats; but Daphnis quickly clambered up the tree and succeeded in plucking the apple and bringing it down as a gift for Chloe, and made this speech to the wrathful girl:

‘O maiden,
this apple
the lovely Seasons of the Year brought forth
and a fair tree fed
beneath the mellowing Sun
and Chance preserved;
and, while I have eyes, I am not the one to leave it there
that it may fall to earth
for browsing beast to trample
or gliding snake to poison
or Time to ruin when it lies forlorn—
the cynosure,
the nonpareil.
This did Aphrodite win as a prize for beauty,
this do I give you as a prize of victory.
Like witnesses have you both:
Paris was a shepherd,
a goatherd am I.’

With these words he placed the apple in her bosom, and when he came close she kissed him, so that Daphnis was not sorry that he had risked climbing to such a height. For the kiss that he got was better than even a golden apple.

Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7

The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.’

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God say, “You shall not eat from any tree in the garden”?’ The woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.”’ But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

Daphnis and Chloe, Book 4.8 (p. 68)

True, they were weeping for fear of their master; but even a complete stranger would have wept, had he chanced on such a sight.

Genesis 3:8

They heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.

The Lebanese newspaper The Daily Star shared this artist's rendering of the upcoming Sidon archaeology museum.

The museum will be built at the Frère site, where British Museum-run excavations have exposed several millennia of history over the past fourteen field seasons. The exhibit will feature artifacts from Sidon reaching back as far as the fourth millennium B.C.E., and museum developers hope the new construction will help shape the city’s narrative by tying together a diverse range of local cultures and Mediterranean influences.

Read more in The Daily Star

Read more about the excavation at ancient Saida in the Bible History Daily feature British Museum Excavations at Sidon Expose Millennia of History

Take a look at a unique artifact from ancient Saida in Worldwide: Saida, Lebanon.

An image from The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library homepage. See the scrolls yourself at http://www.deadseascrolls.org.il/

The harshness of the curse of Ham, his son Canaan and their descendants has been a source of scholarly debate for millennia. A new reading of the Dead Sea Scroll 4Q180-4Q181* provides a fresh perspective on Canaan’s transgression.
 

Read more in Haaretz.

View the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library.

Notes
* Biblical scholar Jim Davila confirmed that the text came from scroll 4Q180-181 on his PaleoJudaica blog. Read more here.

** BAS Library Members: Read James C. VanderKam’s “Jubilees” as it appeared in Bible Review, Dec 1992.

Following the recent conference “Out of Egypt: Israel’s Exodus Between Text and Memory, History and Imagination,” UC San Diego is hosting the exhibit “EX3: Exodus, Cyber-Archaeology and the Future” through Sunday, June 9, 2013. Organized by UCSD’s Norma Kershaw Chair in the Archaeology of Ancient Israel and Neighboring Lands and BAR author Thomas E. Levy, the exhibit will “showcase alternative interpretations of the Exodus, using high-tech display tools in a museum-of-the-future setting.”

From the Out of Egypt program:

The Exodus in the Hebrew Bible, Egyptology and 21st century archaeology provided the theme and scholarly content. A team of archaeologists, Egyptologists, geoscientists, computer scientists, engineers, and digital media technologists worked together using scientific visualization and media tools to show how computerempowered scientists grapple with one of ancient history’s great mysteries – the Israelite Exodus from Egypt known from the Hebrew Bible. The exhibition took place in the Qualcomm Institute Theater, a reconfigurable performance space that was transformed into a museum space highlighting the use of new visual and audio technologies. A large format 8′x32′ 64 million pixel screen and several other tiled display systems were used for the computer visualizations, and a new 50-megapixel 3D large scale immersive display system called the WAVE, had its premier. New audio systems and content were developed by the Sonic Arts researchers to project archaeological and geological audio data. The entire transdisciplinary team, in addition, focused their collective skills on presenting results of research in Iron Age (ca. 1200 – 500 BCE) cyberarchaeology in Jordan and its relation to a larger ancient Near Eastern historical problem, and achieved the goal of presenting original research for both scholarly and public dissemination in the format of the “museum of the future.”

Click here for more information.
 

Ancient Israel in Egypt and the Exodus

Cyber-Archaeology in the Holy Land — The Future of the Past, written by pioneering members of UCSD’s Cyber Archaeology research community—Thomas E. Levy, Neil G. Smith, Mohammad Najjar, Thomas A. DeFanti, Albert Yu-Min Lin and Falko Kuester.

Also, be sure to check out our new Archaeology Technology page.

Samaria was the capital of the northern Kingdom of Israel, and remains of Roman-era Sebaste adorn the site's acropolis. However, thirteen years of neglect threaten the site's cultural heritage. Photo: Duby Tal/Albatross

Despite the site’s impressive remains and sacred value to Jewish, Muslim and Christian visitors, the Associated Press recently reported that the Biblical capital is “marred with weeds, graffiti and garbage.” In the 1990s, the West Bank site was managed by Israel’s National Parks Authority, but after the second intifada began in 2000, the site has been closed and has not received proper maintenance or protection. The neglected archaeological site is reported to be covered in litter, and antiquities have been smashed or sprayed with graffiti.
 

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Read more.
 

Related Content in Bible History Daily

Did the Northern Kingdom of Israel Practice Customary Ancient Israelite Religion?

Biblical City of Shekem Set to Open in the West Bank

A CT scan of an iron bead from the Gerzeh cemetery reveals oxide and metal components. Image: Meteoritics & Planetary Science.

A research team led by Open University meteorite scientist Diane Johnson examined the nickel content and crystalline structure of one of the beads to confirm that the iron came from a meteorite. The team was able to reconstruct the way the ancient Egyptians worked the material: “Successive virtual CT slices revealed bending points and a joining edge, suggesting production by beating flat a fragment of iron, followed by bending to produce the tube.”

While there is no confirmed evidence of iron smelting in the region before Greco-Roman times, the presence of iron objects in royal tombs reveals that they were a symbol of status in earlier periods of Egyptian history. The Egyptians themselves appear to have been aware of the otherworldly source of their iron. The authors of the study write that “from the late 18th Dynasty, approximately 1300 BCE, the term biA-n-pt starts to be used, which literally reads iron from the sky and from this point onwards … the term becoming synonymous with metallic iron in general.”

Read the study “Analysis of a prehistoric Egyptian iron bead with implications for the use and perception of meteorite iron in ancient Egypt” by Diane Johnson, Joyce Tyldesley, Tristan Lowe, Philip J. Withers and Monica M. Grady as it appears in Meteoritics & Planetary Science.

Interested in ancient metallurgy? BAS Library Members: Read Thomas E. Levy and Mohammad Najjar, “Condemned to the Mines” as it appeared in Biblical Archaeology Review, Nov/Dec 2011.

Not a BAS Library member yet? Join the BAS Library today.

There are only three mentions of left-handed people in the Bible—and all of them refer to members of the tribe of Benjamin, including their deadly accurate slingers (see drawing above). Were these people from the tribe of Benjamin left-handed by nature or nurture? Modern studies in the genetics of left-handedness may be able to shed light on this curious case. (Drawing by Josh Seevers, courtesy of Boyd Seevers)

The Hebrew Bible mentions left-handed people on three occasions: the story of Ehud’s assassination of the Moabite king (Judges 3:12–30), the 700 Benjamites who could use the sling with deadly accuracy (Judges 20:16) and the two-dozen ambidextrous warriors who came to support David in Hebron (1 Chronicles 12:2). All of these stories of left-handed people in the Bible appear in military contexts, and, curiously, all involve members of the tribe of Benjamin.

In a Biblical Views column in the May/June 2013 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, professors Boyd Seevers and Joanna Klein ask the question, “Were these warriors from the tribe of Benjamin left-handed by nature or nurture?” Citing studies in the genetics of left-handedness and Biblical texts, Seevers and Klein show that it may have been a bit of both.

Benjamites may have been genetically disposed to left-handedness at birth, but the trait may also have been encouraged in soldiers to give them a strategic advantage in combat—somewhat like left-handed baseball pitchers today—against right-handed opponents who were unaccustomed to fighting “lefties.” Warriors from the tribe of Benjamin might have been trained to be equally or more effective with their left hands.

Then again, perhaps the Biblical writers simply enjoyed a bit of word play. The name Benjamin means “son of (my) right hand.” Perhaps the irony of left-handed “sons of right-handers” caused the Biblical authors to take note in these cases.

For more about the tribe of Benjamin, left-handedness in the Bible, and the genetics of left-handedness, see Boyd Seevers and Joanna Klein, Biblical Views: “Left-Handed Sons of Right-Handers” in the May/June 2013 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

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Italian scholar Mauro Perani dated this Sefer Torah scroll from the University of Bologna Library to the 12–13th centuries C.E., making the manuscript the world’s oldest extant Sefer Torah. Photo: Alma Mater Studiorum Universita' di Bologna/AP

The Sefer Torah is the oldest known complete Torah scroll; however, it is not the oldest extant Torah. The Aleppo and Leningrad Codices, each of which contained the complete text of the Hebrew Bible, were written up to two centuries before the University of Bologna Torah scroll. The tenth-century Aleppo Codex, a 760-page parchment manuscript, was the oldest complete Biblical text containing the version that was ultimately selected and accepted as the most authoritative text in Judaism. The text was complete with vowel signs, punctuation, notations for liturgical chanting and textual notes. However, it was damaged and pages were lost during riots in Aleppo in 1947.* The Leningrad Codex, written around 1010 C.E., is now the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible. Both the Aleppo and Leningrad volumes are codices (books with pages or leaves), which are different from scrolls. In a BAR article discussing the Leningrad Codex,** scholars James A. Sanders and Astrid Beck write:

As early as the first century C.E., Christian scholars began transmitting their holy works in codices rather than scrolls, and by the third century the codex was standard. In the Jewish world, however, the codex was not adopted until about the seventh century. The traditional scroll, or roll book (Latin uolumen, from which our word “volume” comes), continues to be used today for reading the sacred text in synagogues. These scrolls for reading the sacred text, however, contain only the five books of Moses. No scroll is big enough to contain the entire Hebrew Bible.

This discovery seems to confirm the bond that binds to double-strand Bologna and the Torah: it was in the city of Bo-lan-yah, the dialect pronunciation which in Hebrew means: “In it houses the Lord”, where in 1482, the first edition of the Hebrew Pentateuch got printed, and today, it is Bologna to claim the oldest Torah-scroll to be hosted and preserved in its BUB-library. In 1546, art. 50 of the Statutes of a Jewish charity confraternity, constituted in that year, paraphrased the verse of Isaiah 2,3: “For out of Zion shall go forth the Torah” saying: “For out of Bologna shall go forth the Torah”, referring to the editio princeps of the most sacred text that Judaism possesses, printed 62 years earlier in their town.

Click here to read the press release as it was posted by Mauro Perani.
 

Notes

* Yosef Ofer, “The Shattered Crown: The Aleppo Codex, 60 Years After the Riots,” BAR, September/October 2008.

** Astrid Beck and James A Sanders, “The Leningrad Codex,” Bible Review, Aug 1997.
 

Related Content in the BAS Library

Ofer, Yosef. The Shattered Crown: The Aleppo Codex, 60 Years After the Riots,” Biblical Archaeology Review, Sep/Oct 2008, 38-49.

Minkoff, Harvey. “The Aleppo Codex.” Bible Review, Aug 1991, 22-27, 38-40.

Beck, Astrid, Sanders, James A. “The Leningrad Codex.” Bible Review, Aug 1997, 32-41, 46.

Crown, Alan D. “The Abisha Scroll—3,000 Years Old?.” Bible Review, Oct 1991, 12-21, 39.

Shanks, Hershel. “Scrolls, Scripts and Stelae.” Biblical Archaeology Review, Sep/Oct 2002, 24-27, 29-30, 32-34, 68.

Not a BAS Library member yet? Join the BAS Library today.
 

Related Content in Bible History Daily

For dozens of articles on the world’s most famous scroll collection, visit our Dead Sea Scrolls page.

For more on early Torah manuscripts, read:

Comparing Ancient Biblical Manuscripts

Travelogue of the Aleppo Codex