Antiquitopia

Here's an announcement for a public presentation I will be giving next week at Illinois Wesleyan University. If there is anyone within driving distance who can make it, we'll have a good time! Monday, Jan. 31, 4 p.m., CLA 205 -- Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion Jared Calaway will present the Religion Department Colloquium, "Moses on the Mount: Visions of the 'Pattern' of the Tabernacle in Jewish and Christian Literature."

Scholars of the ancient Israelite sanctuaries often discussion the construction, plan, and symbolism of those spaces, yet one of the more interesting recent readings of a sanctuary is Mark K. George’s Israel’s Tabernacle as Social Space , in which he develops a “spatial poetics” to discuss the social dynamics of the tabernacle in terms of “spatial practice,” “conceptual space,” and “symbolic space.” He models his categories off of the French Marxist spatial theorist, Henri Lefebvre’s La production de l’espace [ The Production of Space ], who spoke of spatial practice, representations of space, and spaces of representation with the heaviest emphasis on the last category, which Lefebvre saw as having the greatest revolutionary potential against capitalism. Spatial practice refers most directly to the physicality and materiality of space—how humans shape spaces (such as buildings, parks, and roadway systems) and how those buildings in turn shape human behavior, or, for our purposes, th...

A new book on the tabernacle is coming out and looks interesting: Israel's Tabernacle as Social Space by Mark George. I am interested, at least, because I have a lot of work on the Tabernacle in Exodus 25-31, 35-40 and its later understandings in later texts in my dissertation. I am also interested in constructions/conceptions of space (and time) vis-a-vis the sanctuary, so this looks very relevant for me. Here's the blurb: The narratives about Israel’s tabernacle are neither a building blueprint nor simply a Priestly conceit securing priestly prominence in Israel. Using a spatial poetics to reexamine these narratives, George argues that the Priestly writers encode a particular understanding of Israel’s identity and self-understanding in tabernacle space. His examination of Israel’s tabernacle narratives makes space itself the focus of analysis and in so doing reveals the social values, concerns, and ideas that inform these narratives. Through a process of negotiation and e...

I have been rereading Jubilees today, mostly because I am finding it increasingly relevant to my chapter on the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice , and I found the passage on the expulsion of Adam and Eve particularly interesting (and a bit funny): And he made for them garments of skin and he dressed them and sent them from the garden of Eden. And on that day when Adam went out from the garden of Eden, he offered a sweet-smelling sacrifice--frankincense, galbanum, stacte, and spices--in the morning with the rising of the sun from the day he covered his shame. On that day the mouth of all the beasts and cattle and birds and whatever walked or moved was stopped from speaking because all of them used to speak with one another with one speech and one language. And he sent from the garden of Eden all of the flesh which was in the garden of Eden and all of the flesh was scattered, each according to its kind and each one according to its family, into the place which was created for them. But...

Today I was trying to double check a reference regarding the פרוכת or "veil" that separates the holy place from the most holy place (Exodus 26:31; 36:35; 2 Chronicles 3:14) in b.Yoma 72a, regarding the distinction between embroidered and woven work in the Tabernacle. And I found a lot of good resources for studying the Talmud. For example, you can find the entire Soncino translation at halakhah.com , where you can download it in .pdf format. Perhaps more impressively for scholarship, you can view digital photographs of different MSS themselves at Online Treasury of Talmudic Manuscripts . The navigational tools are all in Hebrew. You indicate what order, tractate, page (daf), side (amud), and then which manuscript. Seeing the page is important, since the arrangement is very important for Rabbinic documents. Unfortunately, however, it only includes the Bavli and the Mishna. There are numerous other sites, many including streaming audio, so you can hear the text, but these ...