Queries & Comments

Queries and Comments Summer 2025

Slumbering Dreams

THANK YOU for the illuminating Winter issue. On this occasion, however, you appear to have chosen the cover with greater care than the contents, as it is not clear to me why you bothered to publish Zuzana Chovanec’s article “Slumbering Dreams: Testing for Ancient Opium.” As far as I can tell, it has no relevance to the biblical narrative and only a tenuous connection with the Holy Land.

It is not that there may not have been some reference to opium in the New Testament, which I have addressed in my article “High and Lows in the Holy Land: Opium in Biblical Times,” published in Eretz-Israel: Archaeological, Historical, and Geographical Studies 20 (1989), pp. 148–154, which Chovanec evidently has not read. Instead, she has chosen to devote most of her article to the scientific techniques used to identify the substances once held by Late Bronze Age Cypriot Base Ring juglets.

Important as these processes are, their elaboration seems out of place in a magazine concerned with the role of material and literary evidence in elucidating the Bible. It is difficult to avoid the impression that Chovanec’s main purpose is to carry forward her campaign to dispute the thesis that these Cypriote juglets, of which the three illustrated examples from Tel Beth-Shemesh have not yet been properly published, once held an opium solution.

Robert Stuart Merrillees
Mailly le Château, France

Remembering Alan Millard

IT IS A PITY that K. Lawson Younger’s obituary of Alan Millard (“Milestones,” Winter 2024) is a shortened version of the full version posted on your website. Although the printed version justly recognizes Alan’s academic achievements, it leaves out the gracious tribute to him as a person. Alan was a true gentleman, a scholar of unassailable faith and impeccable scholarship. His approach to the subject of his scientific inquiry was exemplary. He never allowed his acceptance of the spiritual truth to get in the way of his search for the historical truth, and he remained unswayed by academic fashion or political correctness. He was painstaking and precise in his research and saw it as his duty to make the results intelligible and accessible to the public as well as his academic peers. Hershel Shanks rightly saw in him the combination of intellectual talents that made him an ideal contributor to BAR.

Robert Stuart Merrillees
Mailly le Château, France

The Ten Lost Tribes

I MUCH ENJOYED and appreciated the historical lesson in William Dever’s “How the Ten Tribes of Israel Were Lost,” published in the Winter issue. However, it reignited a bit of uncertainty in me, because since my retirement, in 1997, I have had the leisure time to read and study more than I could as a busy clergyman, and I’ve convinced myself that there were only nine northern tribes (thus only nine lost tribes). The readership of BAR has enough scholars to correct me if I’m wrong, but every time I count the northern tribes on a good Bible map, I always come up with nine. On the other hand, counting Benjamin as part of the Southern Kingdom, along with Judah and Simeon, which had no defined borders but was quite definitely within the bounds of Judah, I get three.

Richard Gist
Princeton, Minnesota

Our readers can look forward to the upcoming Fall 2025 issue of BAR, where this confusing math is summarized in the “How Many” quiz. —Ed.

Navigating the High Seas in Antiquity

IN THE WINTER news piece “Navigating the High Seas in Antiquity,” Jacob Sharvit of the Israel Antiquities Authority is quoted: “The discovery of this boat now changes our entire understanding of ancient mariner abilities.” I just don’t see how this jump of a conclusion can come from such scant evidence of the mere location of the wreckage. Couldn’t this vessel have been hugging the coast as usual and been blown off course by a strong storm? What evidence could there possibly be that this was a planned course? The fact that it sunk with cargo on board might more strongly suggest an off-route storm course as opposed to the assumption of superior mariner abilities.

Sylvia Bauer
Kelso, Washington

Cuneiform Tablet

THE “TEST KITCHEN” involving a cuneiform tablet from Mari, in the Winter issue, was fascinating. Is there a translation we could consult?

George Edward Sanborn
Richmond, Virginia

The partially restored text of this particular tablet, which is written in Old Babylonian and is currently in the Louvre Museum (AO 20161), reads as follows: “Zi[mri-Lim] son of Iahd[un-Lim], king of Mari, [Tuttul], and the land [of Hana], builder of an i[ce]-house, (something) which formerly n[o] k[ing had built] on the bank of the [Euphrates], had ice of … brought over and [had] an ic[e]-house [built] on the bank of the Euphrat[es], in Terq[a, the city] beloved of the god [Dagan].” —Ed.

Slaying the Serpent

I WAS DELIGHTED to read your news piece reporting on the Hazor seal engraved with the image of a hero dispatching the seven-headed serpent (“Slaying the Serpent,” Winter 2024). I have known of the much older Sumerian depiction of a hero slaying the seven-headed serpent-snake for a couple decades. I’ve known of the biblical Revelation’s seven-headed serpent and beast for very many decades. Thank you for informing us that there are other ancient depictions extant within this same conceptual genre.

Steven R. Corey
Montrose, Colorado

YHWH

A NUMBER OF BIBLE translators use the name Jehovah when the Tetragrammaton appears in Hebrew. Some also use the name Jehovah in the New Testament where there is evidence in the context that the earliest manuscripts would have included the Tetragrammaton rather than the Greek word kyrios (“Lord”). What is your view?

Laurence Wilson
King’s Lynn, United Kingdom

To our knowledge, there are no known New Testament manuscripts that would contain the word “Jehovah.” Modern translations that use the word—most notably the Jehovah’s Witnesses—do so solely on the unverifiable assumption that original manuscripts would have used the Tetragrammaton instead of the Greek kyrios when referring to God or Jesus. —Ed.

Mary and Martha

ELIZABETH SCHRADER POLCZER’s case for Martha (“The Mystery of Mary and Martha,” Winter 2024) being erroneously added to John 11 is built almost entirely on scribal variants in the first five verses of the chapter. Even a cursory reading of 11:19–39, however, establishes that (unless there are more scribal “corrections” that call these verses into question), Mary and Martha were two persons. Yes, it’s the obvious question: Why the scribal corrections? But should problematic variants in five verses call into question the clear presentation of two sisters in the following 20 verses?

Two sisters in Luke 10 are often confused with the sisters in John 11; so Schrader argues that “if Martha were not in John’s Gospel,” there would be no reason to connect the sisters in the two stories. But the fact that the two stories are mistakenly conflated is not evidence that Martha is not there in John; a mistake is being built upon the faulty foundation of another mistake. (By the way, the apostle John was there for the events of Luke 10—he wouldn’t have been confused.)

Six times in her conclusion, Schrader says “if,” “perhaps,” and “might,” while supposing that “possibly” John was corrupted to avoid elevating Mary to rival Peter. With all due respect, unfounded speculations built on uncertainties only serve to undermine the plausibility of her theory.

Is it not possible that copies of the Gospel—even Papyrus 66, which was a copy—mistakenly left Martha out of the story, and were being corrected by later scribes, who put Martha back in where she belonged?

Les Paulsen
Corbyville, Ontario, Canada

Elizabeth Schrader Polczer responds:

Thanks so much for this thoughtful question. To answer the first point, the case for Martha’s later addition is actually not built on scribal variants in only the first five verses of John 11. There are instabilities around Martha’s presence throughout the entire manuscript transmission, in any verse where she might appear. As the BAR article mentioned, some gospel manuscripts state that Mary (not Martha) served the supper in John 12:2. Many other early manuscripts display similar discrepancies: Some gospel manuscripts unexpectedly name Mary as the sister who went out to meet Jesus as he was coming to see them following Lazarus’s death (John 11:20, 30), and some patristic authors oddly name Mary when referencing Jesus’s interactions with the family of Lazarus in John 11:27, 11:34, or 11:39. Readers can find a fuller picture of the evidence in my 2017 Harvard Theological Review article titled “Was Martha of Bethany Added to the Fourth Gospel in the Second Century?”

As a responsible scholar of antiquity, I always qualify my statements with “if,” “perhaps,” and “might.” This is because I haven’t “proven” that Martha was added to John. Similar to the “Q” hypothesis, my thesis is simply one plausible explanation of the evidence at hand.

Regarding the last point, I am arguing that some ancient copies of John 11–12 circulated with Lazarus and Mary only, and some copies included Martha as well. The scribe of Papyrus 66 likely had access to both text forms, and after briefly attempting to adjudicate between the two, finally decided to copy from the version that included Martha.