Author Archives: Tyler F. Williams

Yehukal Seal Tracing Update

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I had some very helpful comments by Robert Deutsch on the tracing of the letters on my Yehukal Seal blog entry. I have updated the image to reflect most of the recommendations, though I have to admit that I cannot make out some of the suggestions on the picture of the seal I am working with — even after magnifying the image and making changes to the contrast and colour balance, etc., with Photoshop. For instance, I just don’t see the upper half of the first lamed, but I think I do see part of the middle bar on the yod (the second letter). At any rate, I did make some of the suggested modifications. (A higher resolution picture would perhaps make it easier to trace).

As I noted in the comments thread to the original post, the (only) purpose of the tracing was to bring the letters — as best as I could discern them from a lo-resolution photograph — into sharper relief so that people who haven’t ever looked at a seal or other inscriptions can use the chart to read the seal. Thus, my purpose was pedagogical, not paleographical.

Robert Deutsch remains convinced that the bulla is from the late 8th or the first half of the 7th century BCE, while Peter van der Veen defends Mazar’s date of late 7th early 6th century BCE. Perhaps we’ll need to get them to debate their evidence to see if some consensus can be reached on the date.

Going Potty in Ancient Times (GPAT 1)

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A question on the biblical studies email list about the use of the circumlocution “cover your feet” in 1 Samuel 24:3 for defecating has me thinking about the potty. Not that it is very difficult to get me thinking about toilets! I am the son of a plumber and a third-year apprentice plumber (never did finish much to the chagrin of dear old Dad… got religious instead and now I’m a professor who gets paid less than plumbers!).

So here is my brief and very selective survey of going to the potty in ancient times.

Going Potty in the Hebrew Bible

Well, I thought I would begin where the email discussion did: the use of the expression “cover feet” (סכך + רגל) in 1 Samuel 24:3 to describe Saul going into a cave relieve himself. This more than likely indicates the posture taken when defecating. Thus it’s a circumlocution for the act of squatting with robes covering/cloaking the action (For the posture of squatting see Deuteronomy 23:13 where יש×?ב “sit” is used to refer to going the bathroom). This passage doesn’t say anything about permanent potties, however. This expression is also found in Judges 3:24, where perhaps we get a bit of insight into more permanent facilities. The Judges passage narrates Ehud’s somewhat colourful killing of Eglon king of Moab (this passage is chok full of potty humour!). Most translations represent Eglon getting killed by Ehud in the throne room. Recently, however, Tom Jull has made a persuasive case for the room being the other throne room, the potty (JSOT 81 (1998) 63-75). Thus the image we are left with is an enclosed chamber ensuite off the throne room in which Ehud killed Eglon as he was getting up off the potty. Bummer… no pun intended!

Potty-Time at Qumran

A toilet was discovered at Qumran in locus 51. Here are some pictures from Humbert and Chambon, Fouilles de Khirbet Qumran (1994).

The toilet at Qumran was private. It consisted of a pit dug into the floor of an enclosed, roofed chamber. One toilet for the whole Qumran community clearly suggests this wasn’t the toilet used by everyone (talk about a line-up!). Perhaps it was reserved for full-fledged members of the community (kind of like getting keys to the executive washroom at work!). It appears that Israelites/Judahites liked their privacy when in the loo (Enclosed chambers were also found in the Iron Age II level in the city of David).

Public Potties in Ephesus

While people in ancient Israel were bashful about going potty, that wasn’t the case for ancient Greeks and Romans. My first experience of an ancient toilet was in Ephesus some 16 years ago. Here’s picture of my dear wife sitting on the potty in the Scholastika Baths in Ephesus… and look, she’s even reading!

I always thought that the watercourse in front of the seat was for cleaning the dust off your feet while you do your business. While that may be the case, I’ve also heard that instead of toilet paper or leaves, people would clean themselves with a sponge fixed onto a short wooden stick and that the water channel was used to “dip the stick” to clean it. Some people even think that this is where the expression “wrong end of the stick” comes from.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this brief toilet tour… now I really have to go…

Graphical Searches: Logos and Accordance Compared

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Rick Brennan — of Ricoblog fame — has posted an excellent tutorial on using the Graphical Query Editor in Logos Bible Software (“Nouns and Adjectives and Graphical Queries, Oh My!” 4 August 2005) on the brand new Logos Bible Software Blog.

Since I hadn’t used this feature of Logos much, I decided to work through it myself. As I was working through the tutorial I was thinking, “how does this compare with Graphical Searches in Accordance Bible Software?” So I decided to offer this comparison of the two products.

[Technical Note: I am running Logos Bible Software 2.1c on a Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop powered by a 2.00 GHz Mobile Intel Pentium 4-M CPU with 512 MB RAM; Accordance Bible Software 6.7 is running on my PowerMac G4 powered by dual 500 MHz G4 processors with 512 MB RAM.]

The Question

From his study of “good servant” (καλὸς… διάκονος) in 1 Timothy 4:6, Rick was wondering “what other things are called ‘good’ in the Pastoral Epistles.” This led to his investigation of the adjective καλος “good” using the Graphical Query Editor in Logos.

The Steps

  1. Select Resource to Build your Search Upon. The first step is to open your tagged Greek New Testament Text that you will build your search upon. This is comparable in both programs. In Logos you would open “NA27” from your Library listing, while in Accordance you need to select “GNT” in the search text pop-up window (In both programs you can define a “workspace” for NT study that would have this text as well as others already set up).
  2. Open Graphical Query Document/Greek Construct Window. This step begins the same in both programs. In Logos you just need to select “Graphical Query” in the “new document” icon in the toolbar, in Accordance you select “Greek” from “New Construct” under the “File” menu (In Accordance you could also just use the keyboard shortcut).
  3. Specify First Search Term.The search term that needs to be specified is the word καλος “good.” In Logos you have to drag the “TERM” box and drop it onto the canvas. This will open a dialog box where you specify information about the term. Since you are searching for a Greek term, you have to manually change the language to Greek (once you do this there is a slight pause as Logos builds a Greek word list), change your keyboard to Greek, and then type in “καλο.” At this point a list of words will be generated in which you select καλος (which is found twice with different inflections) and click OK. In Accordance this step is less complex. You first drag “LEX” (short for lexeme) from the construct palette to the first element column. At this point a dialog box automatically appears (with no pause) in which you can begin typing “καλο” (as you are using the Greek Construct Window, there is no need to specify language or change your keyboard). Like Logos, a list of words will be generated in which you can select καλος and click OK. (A nice feature of Logos is that once you select the word from the list, you get an extended dictionary entry on the word; Accordance only provides an English gloss).The next part of this step is to specify that the word you are searching for (καλος) is an adjective. In Logos you need to drag the “REF” (short for reference) box onto the canvas , at which point a reference properties dialog box opens. In it you have to specify the data type (Greek Morphology (GRAMCORD)), click the Adjective checkbox, and click OK. Then, in order to specify that these two things refer to the same term, you have to drag an arrow between the items and double-click it, and then specify that the items are the “same.” Once again, Accordance is a bit easier because it already provides the tagging items on the construct palette. All you have to do is drag the “Adj.” (short for adjective) box into the same column below where you specified καλος and a dialog box opens after which you only need to click OK. (When you drag the “Adj.” box into the same column, Accordance ascribes the characteristic to everything in the same column). More significantly, you do not even need to do this step in Accordance! The program will automatically recognize you are searching for the adjective καλος as soon as you specify its agreement with a noun (see below).
  4. Specify the Second Search Term. Now its time to specify the noun object you want to search for in connection with καλος. In Logos this step is similar to the previous; you drag “REF” to the canvas, specify noun as the part of speech, and click OK. In Accordance all you have to do is drag the “Noun” box to the column adjacent to your other search items, and click OK on the dialog box that automatically opens.
  5. Specify Agreement between Search Terms. In Logos, drag the “AGREE” object to the canvas and connect it to the two search terms by dragging arrows between the objects. Then double-click on the agreement object and a dialog box will appear in which you can select “case” and “number” as the characteristics you want the terms to agree in, and click OK. In Accordance you need to drag the “Agree” object from the construct palette over the two columns; at this point it will automatically connect the two columns with an arc (no need to manually link them) and bring up a dialog box in which you can select “case” and “number,” and then click OK.
  6. Specify the Proximity between Search Terms. In Logos, you draw another arrow between the adjective and noun objects and in the dialog box specify “3” in the “intervening” box; you should also make sure to check “Ignore order of terms” (more on this later). Click OK. In Accordance drag “WITHIN” over top of the two columns and again a dialog box appears in which you can specify the number of words separating the two objects. Enter 3 and click OK.
  7. Perform the Search. Now its time to perform the search. In Logos, once you click “Search” an “Advanced Search” dialog box opens in which you have to specify the resource you want to search (select NA27 or click “open resources” if you only have NA27 already opened), the unit you want to search (select “sentence” after selecting “special”), and the range which you want searched (click on “Bible Text” and type “1Ti-Titus”). Then you click “search.” In Accordance things are once again a bit easier. Once you click OK, then it automatically performs the search on the search text you already specified in Step 1. The only thing that you may need to specify further is the search field (select “sentence” from the drop down menu) and range (select “Pastoral Epistles” from the range drop down menu; you may have to define the range if you haven’t done so before). Then click OK once again.
The Graphical Query Editory in Logos (click for a larger image)
Accordance’s Greek Construct Window (click for a larger image)
  1. Analyze the Results. In Logos, the search results are displayed in a dialog box that lists the verse references; the results were 47 occurrences in 19 articles (articles = sentences). To see the actual results in context you can either click on them individually and that will find the verse in NA27 with the search words highlighted. Alternatively you can export the results to a verse list, though the search terms would not be highlighted and — more problematic — it doesn’t display all of the hits (for example, it doesn’t display 1Tim 6:19 since it appears to only represent the verse containing the first hit in the sentence).In Accordance, the results are displayed with the complete verse and reference, as well as with the hits highlighted. Significantly, the results with Accordance are different: 16 hits in 29 verses. This highlights a significant difference between the two programs: in Logos you can tell the program to ignore the order of terms being searched, while in Accordance the order of the elements in the Construct Window is taken into consideration when searching (there is no option to ignore the order of the terms in Accordance). Thus, the Accordance search only found the occurrences where καλος was followed by a noun, not vice versa. This limitation is not insurmountable; all you have to do is duplicate the Construct Window (File:Duplicate) and switch the order of the elements by dragging them to the other side, and link the two Construct windows within the search entry box (Search:Enter Command:Link) and perform your search.
The Search Results Window in Logos (click for a larger image)
The Search Results Displayed in Accordance (click for a larger image)

Conclusions

While both programs ended up with the same results (they should since they are searching the same tagged text!), it took significantly less steps in Accordance to do the same search — even with the limitation Accordance has in regard to the order of the search elements. While the ability to ignore the order of the constituents is a very nice feature of Logos, it doesn’t make up for the unnecessary complexity of its searches compared to Accordance. Small things like having the program spell out “Noun” or “Adjective,” rather than the obtuse “J????” for an adjective with no other tagging or “N???” for a noun (and this only gets worse when you start searching with more complex tags). Or not having to select a Greek keyboard after you have already specified you are performing a Greek search (there are many more examples of unnecessary repetition in Logos). I also find that working with search results is more straightforward in Accordance; there is no need to export the results to a verse list. Finally, while this will vary depending on your computer, I found Logos to be a bit slower.

Since most serious Bible software packages have similar search capabilities and available tagged texts, what separates them is their ease of use and intuitive design. In this regard, it is hard not to recognize the superiority of Accordance. The fact that Accordance only runs native on a Macintosh certainly limits its desirability for Windows users. However, knowing that it does run on a Windows machine at a half decent speed with emulation software should give one pause when deciding what to purchase. While Logos leads the pack in the sheer number of resources and electronic texts it has available, I hope they focus some of their resources on developing a more intuitive and snappy interface — especially for their Macintosh version due out later this year.

For more information on the different biblical software packages available, please see my Software for Biblical Studies pages.

NOTE: After completing my comparison I was informed that one of the software developers at Accordance posted a similar — albeit less detailed — comparison on the Accordance Bible Software Forum.

UPDATE: Rubén Gómez has also posted a comparative review at Bible Software Review Weblog (Gee, Great minds think alike!). His review is worth a look because it also includes the Advanced Search Engine in BibleWorks in the comparison.

Yehukal Seal Picture and Discussion (Updated)

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Here is a pretty clear picture of the Yehukal bulla that was discovered by Eilat Mazar in her Jerusalem dig:

(Thanks to Joseph I. Lauer for the link; the picture was published in the Taipei Times)

Here is a tracing of the bulla I made to show the letters in greater relief; note that the first nun begins on the second line and is incomplete and the heh-vav at the end of the second line were difficult to make out in their entirety (Thanks to Ed Cook for the identification of the partial nun).

While it is not the easiest to decipher, it appears to read: ליהוכל בנ שלמיהו בנ שבי, which could be translated variously as “Belonging to Yehukal son of Shelemyahu son of Shobi” or “Yehukal son of Shelemyahu son of Shobai.” I translated the name שלמיהו with a shin primarily because that is a known name (Jer 36:14, 26; 38:1; Ezra 10:41; 1Chron 26:14), while Selemyahu is not. The same argument can be made for Shobi (2Sam 17:27) and Shobai (Ezra 2:42; Neh 7:45). Moreover, since most (if not all) Hebrew names are related to verbal roots with specific meanings and include theophoric elements which interplay with the meaning of the root, both Shelemyahu and Shobi make sense, while the alternatives readings with the letter sin do not.

This may very well be the same person mentioned in Jeremiah 37:3 יהוכל בן שלמיה “Jehucal son of Shelemiah” (NRSV) and 38:1 יוכל בן שלמיהו “Jucal son of Shelemiah” (NRSV). Robert Deutsch, however, dates the bulla on paleographical grounds to the late 8th, or the first half of the 7th century BC, precluding the identification with the Yehukal mentioned by Jeremiah. In respone to this dating, Peter van der Veen has defended Mazar’s date well within the range of Jeremiah’s career. He notes: “the unequal stance of the horizontal lines as well as the long top horizontal bisecting the vertical shaft are strong indications of a late 7th-6th cent. BC date (as we know from all the provenanced material!!). The lack of field dividers (though more common around 700 BC) is not an argument against a late Iron Age IIC date. Similar bullae were found at Lachish Str. II and hence are well attested ca. 600 BC” (From Jim West on Biblical Theology).

For those who may know Hebrew, but are unfamiliar with the archaic Hebrew alphabet, here is part of a handout I give to intermediate Hebrew students:

There are a number of good discussions of the seal on the web: Ed Cook perhaps has the best at Ralph the Sacred River. Jim West also has a number of posts on the subject at Biblical Theology blog: here and here. Duane Smith at Abnormal Interests has also posted a good discussion of the seal.

King David’s Palace Discovered – Minimalists Convert!

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The International Herald Tribune has posted a story on the recent excavations and discoveries in Jerusalem: “King David’s fabled palace: Is this it?” (Also available at the New York Times). The find purportedly includes “the partial foundations of a sizable public building, constructed in the Phoenician style, dating from the 10th to 9th centuries B.C., the time of the united kingdom of David and Solomon.” (Picture of Mazur by Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times). Here is an excerpt:

Even Israeli archaeologists are not so sure that MS. Mazar has found the palace – the house that Hiram, king of Tyre, built for the victorious king, at least as Samuel 2:5 describes it. It may also be the Fortress of Zion that David conquered from the Jebusites, who ruled Jerusalem before him, or some other structure about which the Bible is silent.

Either way, they are impressed by its likely importance. “This is a very significant discovery, given that Jerusalem as the capital of the united kingdom is very much unknown,” said Gabriel Barkay, an archaeologist from Bar-Ilan University. “This is one of the first greetings we have from the Jerusalem of David and Solomon, a period which has played a kind of hide-and-seek with archaeologists for the last century.”

Based on the Bible and a century of archaeology in this spot, MS. Mazar, 48, speculated that a famous stepped-stone structure excavated previously was part of the fortress David conquered, and that his palace would have been built just outside the original walls of the cramped city, on the way to what his son, Solomon, built as the Temple Mount.

“When the Philistines came to fight, the Bible said that David went down from his house to the fortress,” she said, her eyes bright. “I wondered, down from where? Presumably from where he lived, his palace.”

“So I said, maybe there’s something here,” she added, referring to East Jerusalem.

While it is obviously too soon to know the significance of the find, it will be fun to see the “minimalists” do everything they can to deny a connection with David and the “maximalists” muster the evidence to “prove” that David existed just as the Bible says! (Gee, do I seem a bit skeptical of the nature and tone of the minimalist/maximalist debate?)

UPDATE: Jim West over at Biblical Theology blog has posted on this story as well. The battle for Middle Earth Jerusalem is about to begin…