Queries & Comments

More Queries and Comments Fall 2024

Mysterious Jerusalem Channels

I WOULD LIKE to make a small addition to the news piece about the channels recently excavated south of the Temple Mount. The channels in the northern installation (in the article’s photo), of course, do not show signs of channeling water, as you rightly reported, but they do show signs of counterclockwise circulation. It is visible in the photo and is confirmed by the rare Jerusalem rains. This, too, told archaeologist Yiftah Shalev to reporters. Unfortunately, the installation is now cut by a modern concrete wall, and nothing can be done about it. By the way, that’s me in the photo, along with a long-time volunteer from Madrid!

Igor Tsaritsyn
Tour guide and City of David Excavations worker
Herzliya, Israel

Mt. Sinai Fantasies

Convent of St. Catherine with Mt. Horeb, by David Roberts. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

THAT IS A LOVELY painting towards the back of your current BAR issue (“A Thousand Words,” p. 68) allegedly depicting Mt. Sinai and St. Catherine’s Monastery. But much of it is the painter’s own fantasy. Having visited the place myself, I know that those imposing towering mountains in the background of the painting simply do not exist, except in the painter’s imagination. In fact, the top of Mt. Sinai is not that far above the ground on which the monastery has been built.
Anne W. Tennant
Denver, Colorado

Warrior Women Mosaics

I FOUND THE ARTICLE on Warrior Women mosaics extremely interesting (Karen Britt and Ra’anan Boustan, “Warrior Women: Deborah and Yael Found at Huqoq,” Winter 2023). The one major omission, in my opinion, is the relation to synagogue art in general. The extensive discussion by the authors failed to explain how the Jewish tradition generally forbid the display of illustrations of any human beings inside of a synagogue. However, in the specific area within the lower Galilee, there are number of synagogues, including Huqoq, that have mosaics, which prove to be exceptions to this practice. The explanation has been put forward that this location fell under extensive Greek influence. It has been suggested that mosaics telling stories were a large part of Greek tradition, and that this relationship influenced the Jewish synagogues built in the area.
Frank Simon
Greenacres, Florida

KAREN BRITT AND RA’ANAN BOUSTAN RESPOND: The Huqoq synagogue mosaics, in fact, participate in a long tradition of decorating ancient synagogues with imagery that included human figures. From the third-century synagogue at Dura Europos in Syria with its well- preserved program of wall paintings that present stories from the Bible to the sixth-century synagogue at Gaza with its floor mosaic depicting King David playing the lyre, the archaeological evidence demonstrates that synagogues were richly decorated environments that contained imagery populated with human figures and, as you suggest, reflect an interest in storytelling. For a discussion of the Huqoq mosaics within the broader context of synagogue art, refer to our article “Artistic Influences in Synagogue Mosaics” in the May/June 2019 issue of BAR where we discuss the ways in which craftspeople put longstanding artistic traditions of the ancient Mediterranean world to new purposes.

Offensive Style

THROUGHOUT THE SPRING ISSUE, your articles vocalized the Hebrew divine name YHWH as YaH’WeH. It seems BAR requires its writers to use this term, which is highly offensive to most Jews. Please ask a scholar, who feels strongly about this vowellization, to present their case, given the absolute lack of any authoritative pronunciation of the divine name as YaH’WeH.

There were no vowels in ancient texts upon which to rely to assert that this was ever the pronunciation of the name of Israel’s God. The best we have are the divine prefixes and suffixes -y’ho and -yahu, as well as the etiological story in Exodus 3:14 of ehyeh asher ehyeh. That phrase uses the verbs for “to be” to associate “being itself” as a legitimate explanation of the consonants YHWH. However, none of these is enough to firmly base a definitive usage of YaH’WeH, which is solely a scholarly conceit.

YaH’WeH is just as unsupported a vowellization as the word “Jehovah,” based as it is on the vowels for ‘adonay (“my Lord”) having been inserted between the consonants of YHWH. This then forms, in Latin characters, the name J’howah, to remind Jews not to try to pronounce the name.

However, in the end of that verse, God tells Moses to say, “Ehyeh sent me.” So the only divine name with any authority and history based on those four consonants is Ehyeh, not YaH’WeH. But the drawback of this pronunciation is that it does not use all the letters of YHWH. So perhaps Yahuh (YaHuWH), which uses all four consonants and is based on highly pronounceable and inoffensive version of that common theophoric suffix -yahu, might be more logical and academically acceptable.

If there were some reason that folks wished not to use God names in liturgy, they could, on the basis of this verse, use Ehyeh.

I am not aware of any religious people who use this presumed name in any way, with the very few exceptions of some Christian sectarians. And YaHWeH is just as wrong as Jehovah, because they are based on the vowels for ‘adonay.

If someone wishes to write God, or the Lord, or whatever name is meaningful to them and respectful in general, that should be up to them, and not a magazine’s uniform standard.

Rabbi Ari Mark Catrun
Palo Alto, California

We certainly appreciate the religious sensitivities regarding the use of the divine name. BAR, however, is a secular, non-denominational magazine focused on presenting the latest scholarship on the Bible and archaeology to a popular audience. As such, our style reflects standard usage among many archaeologists and biblical scholars. On p. 60 of this year’s Fall issue, long-time contributor and BAR Editorial Advisory Board member Ronald Hendel, who is a professor of Jewish studies at the University of California, Berkeley, discusses the evidence for how the divine name was pronounced and why that spelling is preferred among scholars.—ED.