Joe Scales

I have just accepted a position as a postdoctoral fellow in Ancient Studies (with the Ancient World research group) at @unibergen.bsky.social. I'm hugely excited and looking forward to moving up there and getting started in the new year. More details on the project to follow next year

I have just accepted a position as a postdoctoral fellow in Ancient Studies (with the Ancient World research group) at @unibergen.bsky.social. I'm hugely excited and looking forward to moving up there and getting started in the new year. More details on the project to follow next year

Aren’t these takes just the ideology of the texts which narrate the events? Samuel is not keen on kings (if I recall correctly) so no kings look good. Josephus is clear that the temple was fit for destruction by the Romans, but we don’t have to buy that it was a corrupt state from his evidence alone

I’ll be running an online introduction to Josephus in November. Sign up if you have interest or pass on to students if you think they might

I’m curious to see how they manage such a thing, but this may well be the way going forwards.

Thank you, depending on what your interest is in, then this article might be more useful for your purposes: works.hcommons.org/records/y0tz...

For some (glorious) reason this is now open access. Please enjoy the content as well as the title

I found the OP: bsky.app/profile/drew... credit to Andrew Jacobs for the suggestion

I believe I saw someone suggest this yesterday but have forgotten who. I want to keep my account as it’s a good way to access publications without institutional affiliation, but this may change down the line if they persist in this kind of behaviour.

A temporary solution to try and limit academia[dot]edu taking my work for AI development and other commercial uses. I think I saw someone suggest this yesterday but have forgotten who.

Queen Alexandra was not the widow of Judah Aristobulus I This article assesses the state of the question on the identity of Alexandra, Queen of Judea, in the period before her regency. Currently, outside of a few select publications, the field identifies Al...

I’ve opted to replace all the files (other than some tables of contents and promo) with a file explaining why the paper is not there and how those interested can get hold of the research.

Example:
www.academia.edu/126297442/Qu...

Good to know

A lot of the terms also specify use of materials for AI generation. I think I’ll remove what’s on there this week although perhaps the data has already been plundered

Anyone have any suggestions for scholarship on Philo’s discussion of slavery in Every Good Person Is Free?

Thanks, I had a similar discussion as I had with AJR. It’s not quite the right volume for review with JSJ.

I have a now venue-less book review for one of the recent Josephus commentary volumes. Does anyone know of a good place for this or should I just self publish it on Knowledge Commons and/or zenodo?

Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve been in contact and it doesn’t quite fit with the usual reviews, so we have decided that it’s not the right venue for one commentary entry in a long running (and at present incomplete) series.

I have a now venue-less book review for one of the recent Josephus commentary volumes. Does anyone know of a good place for this or should I just self publish it on Knowledge Commons and/or zenodo?

A house being dark and spooky doesn’t make it haunted

As part of my Dead Sea Scrolls class at the seminary, they asked my to try to connect my class to the topic of (modern) social justice. I never really thought about this: does anyone know any good resources?

And here it is, my greatest article title to date: “The Booty Call: Plundering as (Dis)assemblage in the Book of Judith.”

Here Katia and I get into a range of meanings that plunder and artefact manipulation for Judith’s capture and dedication of Holofernes’ items

brill.com/view/journal...

Thanks to the reviewers, editor and other staff over at Vetus Testamentum for their work. Always a pleasure to publish with VT.

And here it is, my greatest article title to date: “The Booty Call: Plundering as (Dis)assemblage in the Book of Judith.”

Here Katia and I get into a range of meanings that plunder and artefact manipulation for Judith’s capture and dedication of Holofernes’ items

brill.com/view/journal...

These look amazing, very cool project idea even if unfinished

I believe we get into it briefly in this section but we mostly treat textual material for the bulk of the chapter. I can perhaps dig out an off print if it’s of interest when I get back from travelling next week.

Possibly, I’ve seen some argue that stone vessels are possibly correlated with ossuary development but I don’t think there’s necessarily much to this

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion, Gender, and Sexuality in the Ancient Near East Cutting across disciplinary boundaries and challenging traditional understandings of historical cultures, this handbook examines the ways in which gender, sexua…

For those interested you can see the full table of contents here: www.bloomsbury.com/uk/bloomsbur...

44. Hasmonean coins enjoyed a long life. They only ever seem to have minted relatively small bronzes but these seemed to remain in circulation for centuries, being found deliberately buried under late Antique synagogues. My friend @tinerassalle.bsky.social wrote an interesting diss on such deposits

Ossuraries come a bit later if I recall correctly, perhaps around a century or more after, but perhaps there’s some better data on this. The miqva’ot never quite left though, they just seem to have been less popular in periods.

43. Around the mid to late second century BCE, immersion pools probably for the purposes of ritual washing, start to appear all over Judea. We have some theories about why then, and a pretty good idea of why they were used, but there are no textual attestations to one for the next several centuries.