Quaestiones Quodlibetales

QUAESTIONES QUODLIBETALES
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In this section, I offer you some food for thought. If you’d like to share your opinions or join the discussion, I invite you to follow me on my social media channels, where we can explore these and many other topics together.

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The story of the Star of Bethlehem is told by Matthew in the second chapter of his Gospel (2:2–12). In fact, Matthew refers to a star seen “at its rising” (ton astera en tè anatolè, τὸν ἀστέρα ἐν τῇ ἀνατολῇ). The tradition of the star as a comet comes from Giotto, who, having been impressed by the sight of Halley’s Comet, depicted it in the frescoes of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua in the early 1300s. From then on, the star became associated with a comet.
The great astronomer Kepler, on the other hand, hypothesized that it was a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn aligned with the Sun, which he had personally observed. He calculated that a similar phenomenon occurred around 6–7 BCE, since this triple conjunction happens roughly every 794 years. The Jupiter-Saturn conjunction was already known in antiquity, especially in Babylon—the land of astronomers and astrologers—where the Magi likely originated.
In any case, whether it was a fixed star or a comet, it is extremely unlikely that it played any real role in the birth of Jesus. Bethlehem is only 7–8 km (about 4–5 miles) from Jerusalem—a distance far too small to be pinpointed by a celestial event. Halley’s Comet, for example, passes at a distance of about 63 million kilometers from Earth; Jupiter (which is closer to Earth than Saturn) is between 588 and 968 million kilometers away. A supernova (an exploding star—Newton himself witnessed one, SN 1054) would be at a distance of at least hundreds or thousands of light-years from Earth (not counting the Sun itself, which in 5–6 billion years will become a planetary nebula and then a white dwarf).

The three Synoptic Evangelists report that at the death of Jesus, the sun was darkened: “At the sixth hour darkness came over the whole land,” writes Mark (15:33). Matthew and Luke record this phrase with only minor variations (Mt. 27:45; Lk. 23:44). Luke adds an absolute genitive (tou hēliou eklipontos, τοῦ ἡλίου ἐκλιπόντος) that is understood as a reference to an eclipse: the verb ekleipō means “to fail, to cease,” but when used with the sun (as here), it means “to be eclipsed,” hence “as the sun was eclipsed.”
As universally acknowledged, it is impossible for a solar eclipse to have occurred on the day of Jesus’ death. The Jews used a lunar calendar in which the month began with the new moon. The Jewish Passover always fell on the 14th of Nisan (the spring month corresponding to March–April), during the full moon, when a lunar eclipse is possible—but not a solar eclipse, since the moon is in opposition to the sun at that time.
It is no coincidence that the account is found in Mark, who was almost certainly writing in Rome and was not very familiar with Jewish customs. It is unsurprising that Matthew confirms and adds other supernatural elements of his own—such as the earthquake and the saints rising from the dead. It is, however, somewhat surprising that Luke—a cultured man who had conducted research—did not recognize the impossibility of a solar eclipse occurring under those circumstances.

According to Matthew, Jesus says: “When the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne, at the renewal of all things, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” (Mt. 19:28) This verse is quite perplexing. At that moment in the narrative, Jesus and the twelve apostles are traveling from Galilee to Judea; they have crossed the Jordan but have not yet reached Jerusalem. Therefore, among these Twelve is Judas, who according to this verse would also have his own throne from which to judge the twelve tribes of Israel. If we remain within the Gospel account—according to which Judas carried out his betrayal and then hanged himself in remorse (Mt. 27:3–5), with the narrator fully aware of how the story ends—it is hard to see how Judas could possibly have an eternal throne assigned to him. This seems impossible. This brief passage also astonishes for a second reason: only the Lord (YHWH) sits on the throne of glory. Glory (kavod) is the Divine Being revealed; his throne symbolizes justice, as is clear in the Old Testament: – Isaiah 66:1: “Thus says the Lord: Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool.” – 1 Kings 22:19: “Micaiah said, ‘Therefore hear the word of the Lord: I saw the Lord sitting on his throne, with all the host of heaven standing beside him on his right and on his left.’” Moreover, “the sons of man” were given the earth, but not the heavens: “The heavens are the Lord’s heavens, but the earth he has given to the children of man.” (Psalm 115:16)
The Eucharistic rite closely reflects two well-known Old Testament passages: the episode of Melchizedek—who offers bread and wine and then blesses Abraham as he returns from the victorious military campaign to rescue his nephew Lot during the war of the four kings against the five—and a saying from Proverbs 9:4–5: “To those who lack sense she says: ‘Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed!’” A similar rite existed even in the Qumran community (perhaps the Essenes), as recorded in the Community Rule, dating to the 2nd century BCE (VI, 4–6). Jesus’ invitation to eat his body and drink his blood is problematic in light of the well-known Old Testament prohibition: blood—whether human or animal—rendered a person impure when lost for any reason. Thus, women after childbirth and during menstruation were considered impure for a certain number of days; slaughtered animals had to be completely drained of blood, etc. Blood could not be consumed, since it represented life itself. Jewish life was deeply marked by the horror of idolatry, blood, and pork. It seems unlikely that Jesus actually said what the Gospels attribute to him; it is more probable that the Hellenistic authors of the Gospels interpreted the memories and oral tradition of the Last Supper in light of scriptural precedents—and perhaps the Qumran ritual.

Jesus spoke Aramaic, a language of the ancient Near East. More specifically, he spoke the Palestinian Aramaic dialect of Galilee, which differed from the Palestinian Aramaic of Jerusalem mainly in certain pronunciation features. This is also reflected in the Gospels, where Peter is recognized because of his accent. It is possible that Jesus also knew Greek (which would explain how he could converse with the Syro-Phoenician woman in the episode recounted by Mark and Matthew), and he almost certainly knew Biblical Hebrew (as Luke depicts him reading a passage from the prophet Isaiah in a synagogue on the Sabbath and then commenting on it).

In the Gospel of Mark, sixteen words or short phrases of Jesus are reported in Aramaic, though not all are rendered accurately.

Aramaic is a Semitic language, like Hebrew, Arabic, Ethiopic, as well as Assyrian and Babylonian—and before them, Akkadian. These are consonantal, paratactic languages written from right to left using alphabetic scripts. Aramaic developed in the late second millennium BCE among nomadic tribes roaming Syria.

It became the lingua franca of the East when it was imposed on subjugated peoples by the Assyrian Empire, and later by the Babylonian and Persian empires. Aramaic thus evolved into a family of languages and was spoken by many peoples across many lands for a long time.

Abraham is the father of many nations. His name is composed of ab/av (“father”) and rum (“to exalt”). He had eight sons by three women: Ishmael by Hagar, Isaac by his half-sister Sarah, and six others by Keturah.

His firstborn, Ishmael (Ishmael, “the Lord hears”), is considered the ancestor of the nomadic Arab peoples. The name of his mother, Hagar, is Egyptian and may be connected to the Hagrites, a local ethnic group. Hagar was cast out by Sarah because, having become pregnant by Abraham, she looked down on her. But the angel of the Lord appeared to Hagar at the spring of Shur in the desert and persuaded her to return to Sarah in submission, promising her a great lineage. Ultimately, however, Sarah had Hagar and Ishmael permanently expelled from Abraham’s household.

His second son, Isaac (Yitschaq, “he laughs”), born to Abraham’s beloved and very beautiful wife Sarah, is famous for the well-known episode of the near-sacrifice, in which he plays only a secondary role. He was given as a wife his relative Rebekah, to whom he was an uncle. Sarah (“princess”) is one of Israel’s “matriarchs” for several important reasons: by divine intervention, she became the mother of Isaac, from whom Jacob and the twelve tribes of Israel would descend. She is also the central figure in the story of the sister-wife: she is offered by Abraham as a bride first to Pharaoh and later as a promised wife to Abimelech. Sarah was, in fact, Abraham’s half-sister.

These episodes, which are rather puzzling in themselves, reveal the different periods in which the various sagas of Abraham’s story were composed: there is an “archaic” Abraham, who still follows the strategy of endogamous marriage for himself and his son Isaac; and a “modern” Abraham who, when Pharaoh shows an interest in Sarah, tells him: “No, she’s not my wife, she’s my sister!”

As for his third wife, Keturah (“Keturah”), Genesis mentions only the names of their six sons. The name Keturahcomes from a root meaning dense smoke or vapor.

P.S. Etymologies taken from the Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon.

Talking about the language of Abraham first requires establishing the historical period in which he lived. The Bible tells us that Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldeans, but this is an anachronism, since the Chaldeans arrived in Mesopotamia around the 11th century BCE—well after the Exodus. Moreover, the word “Chaldeans” (Kasdim in Hebrew) is thought to derive from Chesed, one of Abraham’s own nephews, the son of his brother Nahor. So it makes sense to set aside the Chaldeans in this context. Let’s look at the biblical chronology: in Genesis (15:13), it is written that the Hebrews would spend 400 years in Egypt; in Exodus (12:40), it says they remained there 430 years. Then, in 1 Kings (6:1), it is stated that Solomon’s Temple was built 480 years after the Exodus, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign (around 968 BCE). Adding the 40 years of wandering in the desert, we have 400 + 40 + 480 = 920 years, which we add to 968, giving 1888 BCE. This is the date of Abraham’s departure from Ur according to the biblical narrative. In the early second millennium BCE, in southern Mesopotamia, the language spoken was Old Babylonian—that is, the southern variety of Akkadian, the earliest Semitic language from which written records have survived, dating about a millennium before Abraham. Additionally, Sumerian was still in use as a sacred and ceremonial language. The northern variety of Akkadian was Old Assyrian.

The Assyrian King List is a list of Assyrian kings compiled by the Assyrians themselves over the course of their millennia-long history. It has come down to us in three copies and two fragments, all fairly similar to one another.

The earliest kings, described as “those who lived in tents,” date back to the late third millennium BCE. The last king recorded in the lists, Sin-shar-ishkun, died in 612 BCE, the year Nineveh—the Assyrian capital—was captured by the Medes (ancestors of today’s Kurds) and the Neo-Babylonians (i.e., the Chaldeans), following a rebellion war that lasted four to five years. The date of Nineveh’s fall marks the beginning of the Kurdish calendar.

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Ebla was a city in northwestern Syria, located between present-day Aleppo and Hama, about 140 km from the Mediterranean Sea. It flourished between 2400 and 1600 BCE. Ebla was a Semitic city that began its history almost simultaneously with the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, which, in fact, destroyed it around 2300 BCE. Ebla rose again and was destroyed twice more, the last time around 1600 BCE. The language spoken there was Eblaite, an East Semitic language. About 17,000 artifacts from Ebla’s royal archive have been discovered, including clay tablets and their fragments, written in Paleo-Akkadian and Eblaite using cuneiform script. According to the official website of the Ebla excavations—carried out by Italian archaeologists since the 1970s (http://www.ebla.it/index.html)—the archive dates from approximately 2350 to 2300 BCE.
Mari was the second major center of ancient Syria, chronologically speaking, and is an invaluable source of historical information. Its immense archive—about 20,000 clay tablets, mostly written in Akkadian using cuneiform script—dates to Mari’s second period of prosperity, at the turn of the third to the second millennium BCE. The Mari archive documents administrative and political events of the Amorite Lim dynasty. The Amorites were nomadic Semitic tribes divided into two groups: the Banu-Simaal, the “sons of the left hand,” to which the Lim belonged, and the Banu-Yamina, the “sons of the right hand.” When one faces the rising sun—that is, when one “orients” oneself—the left hand points north and the right hand south. Even today, Yemen means “the south” (and indeed the modern state of Yemen is located in the south). Therefore, the Banu-Yamina were the Benjaminites, “sons of the south,” who existed as early as 2200 BCE—long before Jacob’s son Benjamin and the biblical tribe of Benjamin appeared on the historical stage. The city of Mari was a major commercial hub in Upper Mesopotamia. Its history spanned roughly 2,500 years, starting around 2900 BCE. It is believed to have been founded as a new settlement during the “Sumerian” era, when Sumerian city-states in southern Mesopotamia were thriving—and warring. Control of water was vital, which led to the founding of a northern city like Mari (located about 1 km from the Euphrates River, near the modern border of Syria and Iraq). Mari also became an important commercial crossroads due to its strategic location. It engaged in shifting conflicts with Ebla, the Assyrians, Babylon, and other smaller kingdoms. In the 17th century BCE, the kingdom of Mari—and its great king, Zimri-Lim—was conquered by Hammurabi, king of Babylon. Hammurabi took the archive related to his own city but left the rest intact.

Ugarit was an important commercial center starting around 1900 BCE and remained active until its destruction around 1200 BCE, probably at the hands of the so-called Sea Peoples. It was located on the northwestern coast of Syria and served as a major Mediterranean port; archaeological evidence shows it was inhabited as far back as the Neolithic period. Like all settlements in Palestine and Canaan—which lay along the route between Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia—it was constantly influenced by the dominant empires of the time, especially the Egyptians and the Hittites.

The language spoken in Ugarit was Ugaritic, a Northwest Semitic language that was completely unknown until the discovery of the archive.

The archive, unearthed in 1928, dates to around 1300 BCE. It consists of tablets written in eight languages and four scripts. Of particular note is an alphabetic script using cuneiform signs to represent the 30 sounds of the Ugaritic alphabet. Other artifacts were written in Egyptian hieroglyphs and so-called Hittite hieroglyphs—used respectively for Egyptian and Luwian (an Anatolian Indo-European language)—as well as in cuneiform script for Akkadian and Sumerian (both Semitic languages), and for Hittite and Hurrian, which are Indo-European languages.

This remarkable linguistic diversity reflects the cosmopolitan character of Ugarit, due both to its geographical position and the commercial nature of its economy.

The Amarna Letters are what remains of the archive documenting the foreign relations of the Egyptian Pharaoh Amenhotep IV of the 18th Dynasty, who lived around 1375–1333 BCE. He introduced a radical monotheistic religious reform into Egyptian life, setting aside the traditional gods and their cults in favor of the sole deity Aten, represented by the solar disk—putting him in sharp conflict with the established priesthood centered in Thebes. The 300 letters (out of a probable original total of around 3,000) were discovered in 1887, as so often happens, by chance—when a peasant woman was rummaging through ancient ruins on an unremarkable mound. This mound (called tell in Arabic and tel in Hebrew) turned out to be modern-day al-Amarna, the site of ancient Akhetaten (“Horizon of Aten”), the brand-new royal capital founded by the Pharaoh. Amenhotep IV’s “heresy” did not survive him; his successors—Nefertiti (if she indeed ruled) and Tutankhamun—returned to Thebes, restored the traditional religion and cults, abandoned the city, and erased Amenhotep’s name from records. The letters are written in Babylonian (except for two in Hittite and one in Hurrian), which at the time served as the international diplomatic language, and they are inscribed in cuneiform script. They represent the correspondence between the Pharaoh and the kings of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine; many of the kings of Palestine and southern Syria were his vassals. The literary and grammatical quality of the letters varies depending on the sender: only those from Babylon are, unsurprisingly, written in correct form, while the others clearly show interference from the sender’s native language. This is of great significance to linguists, who can catalog these foreign glosses and compare them with contemporary texts.
Around the middle of the fourth millennium BCE, two writing systems developed almost simultaneously in Egypt and in southern Mesopotamia: Egyptian hieroglyphs and cuneiform script. Before the invention of writing, seals (from the Latin sigillum, meaning “small sign”) were certainly already in use: these were personal marks impressed on soft materials to attest to the identity of the signee. Even earlier still, small clay tokens representing units of account—dating back to the invention of agriculture and animal domestication around the ninth millennium BCE—were used to count quantities of grain, livestock, and more. The term hieroglyph comes from the Italian transliteration of the Greek adjective ἱερογλυϕικός (hieroglyphikos), meaning “sacred carving,” referring to the characters engraved on temples and statues of gods and rulers. When written on papyri, hieroglyphs took the form of a simplified script called hieratic, used since ancient times, and an even more streamlined, almost shorthand-like script called demotic (a term coined by Herodotus), which developed around the mid-seventh century BCE. Hieroglyphic writing simultaneously had phonetic, ideographic, and determinative values (i.e., certain signs specified a category: for example, there was a specific sign indicating that a given people were nomadic rather than settled). There was also a so-called “Hittite hieroglyphic” script, though it was used to write Luwian, an Indo-European language of Anatolia; this script does not appear to have derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs. Cuneiform writing, as the name itself suggests, involved pressing wedge-shaped marks with a stylus—usually a sharpened reed—onto soft clay tablets, which were then baked. Alternatively, it could be carved into stone, stelae, or statues. Finally, from a diachronic perspective, we arrive at alphabetic writing, which was much easier to learn and write, since each sign represented a single sound. The introduction of the alphabet is conventionally dated to the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, around 1200 BCE, although the process of its development was undoubtedly much longer: Proto-Canaanite and Proto-Sinaitic scripts are earlier examples of alphabetic writing systems.

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