Johanan Rakkav's Blog

Now that my Yahoo 360 Blog has been transferred over to my Yahoo Profile (with apparent success), it's time to try out my first entry in the new format...

Who knew that the famous Beatles song (and then the famous Elton John cover) "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" was only coincidentally associated with LSD, despite its origins in the psychedelic era? The real inspiration is described in this article and many others -- and also the tragedy in the life of the original "Lucy", who is now gravely ill with lupus.

שלום בישוע המשיח
יוחנן רכב

Wow. I haven't been here since April of this year (in a post which I decided to remove tonight), although so much has happened since that it seems much, much longer. I've been waiting for Yahoo to update its Profile system, and this has finally happened, but I see that my blog interlinks still have some formidible bugs. However, if one plays with the various links one may gain access to at least most of my entries regarding my trip to Jerusalem -- which is a good thing. Piece by piece, I may transfer that information elsewhere (as if I don't have enough to do).

If you want to follow what's going on in my life these days, then you should look on my (rarely used) Blogger blog, or else on my (very commonly used) WordPress blog. Just to start things off, here's a little rant on my WordPress blog.

ברבות בישוע המשיח - יוחנן רכב

Friday, January 18, 2008 - Thursday, January 24, 2008 -

[I am going to cut this blog very short, not because the amount of material in my journal is so overwhelming for these days - even though it is abundant - but because of lack of time and because I would have to edit out so much proprietary material (and so much peripheral material as well) that creating the entries would take more time than they would be worth.

Suffice it to say that:

1) On Friday morning, I finally got to go up into the bell tower of the YMCA in the company of a couple from Berlin (the husband from Germany, the wife from Ireland). The photo above illustrates part of the interesting architecture of the place, as do photos like this one. And for some reason, I totally forgot to write about the adventure in my journal!

2) On Sunday, John Hulley & I were able (with some difficulty) to find where Mira Zakai lives. She is a very interesting and intelligent woman, and it's too bad that we didn't have more time to talk. The then-infamous teacher's strike had just ended, and she had to go back to teaching classes again. Afterwards, I stayed with John until it was time to go to Ben Gurion Airport.

3) The trip back to Houston - over several days, beginning with a late-Sunday departure from Ben Gurion - bounced me all over, with a day's stopover in New York City in below-freezing weather, a two-day stop in Charlotte, NC. (where I was happily "debriefed" several times by my friends in the senior ministry of the Living Church of God), and finally home. (This traveling doesn't count the airport layovers, one of which was at Washington-Dulles. Somebody goofed at the Society of Biblical Literature a meeting or two ago, when they recommended the other airport in the area; it's much farther away from the center of town!)

And with that, I will cease...]

ברכות בישוע המשיח - יוחנן רכב

Thursday, January 17, 2008 -

My hand is cramping & I must rest [interestingly, it did so when I wrote the foregoing by hand, and it's doing so now as I type].

Again...This was the day reserved for the Israel Museum (the Second Temple Jerusalem Model and the Shrine of the Book) and the BLMJ's ancient music [exhibition] & permanent exhibitions. The STJ Model gave excellent "photo ops", as did the outside of the Shrine. [The photo above shows the white roof of the Shrine of the Book and the black wall nearby; part of the symbolism therein is the War of the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness described in the Dead Sea Scrolls.] Inside the Shrine, no photos were allowed, but it was fascinating & gently moving to see the exhibits of the DSS [Dead Sea Scrolls] (esp. the Isaiah Scroll) & above all the Aleppo Codex (easily the high point for me).

I'd learned enough from my [self-guided] tour to help a young woman & her lady friend understand the significance of the DSS. A bit later, I joined a tour by a volunteer museum guide, & actually managed to add some information (esp. on the Masoretic tradition). A highlight for her was to meet some young Jewish-Americans who could chant from the Codex [according to their own tradition, probably Ashkenazic]. I tried the same with SHV's method, but the unfamiliar words (from 2 Samuel 19:30ff) defeated me. But I got to sing part of Ex. 15 later for the guide.

I've seen parts of the DSS before, & facsimiles of both the DSS & the Codex, but never did I think I'd see the actual Codex. It's not a small book! I was not overwhelmed emotionally - it was more of a gentle, reverent delight.

[Part of that relative reserve on my part may have been because the Letteris Edition is better even than the Aleppo Codex in its accentuation, and I'd give a great deal to find out how and why this happened. The Keter Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Crown) - based on the Codex and allied manuscripts - is featured in the same display area; I happen to own this edition. It is beautifully wrought, but in Psalms especially it doesn't compare in completeness to Letteris with regard to accentuation.]

Looking over the BLMJ's music exhibit again, and then over the general exhibits, reassured me about the basic connection of the Bible & man's reconstruction of history. The chief problem is the dating of the earliest human cultures. The sequence is right.

Oddly enough, Anne Kilmer - whom I'd thought had left several days earlier - was visiting the curator (Joan) while I was there. Through Joan, I passed on my greetings.

ברכות בישוע המשיח - יוחנן רכב

Wednesday, January 16, 2008 -

Finally I got to go to the Talpiot Tomb Conference. [The village itself is transliterated into English as "Talpiyot" on Israeli road signs.] This was the third & last day. Without papers [to cite in my hand], my notes here must be summary indeed. I did take good photos though, but not enough. [One I made sure I got was a summary of some of the assumptions behind the statistical calculations made for a documentary mentioned below.]

[I should say here that Dr. James H. Charlesworth of the Princeton Theological Seminary had organized the symposium on the Tomb and its context . Some mentioned below and others have proposed that this tomb is the "family tomb" of Jesus and some other New Testament figures, including even Mary Magdalene. Dr. Charlesworth and others find that identification unconvincing, and for good reasons (which were brought out well even in the one day I was there at the symposium). One task I have now is to write an article on the subject that could be used in one of the Living Church of God's publications.]

Dr. Tabor was there [James Tabor, author of The Jesus Dynasty and someone I had encountered through my own activities some years before], & greeted me warmly & with surprise. [He actually wondered if I'd moved to Jerusalem. I rather wished I had by that time, despite the troubles in the land.] He was one of the panelists & presenters that day. Dr. Charlesworth was the first I met, however, & he graciously waived the fees for me (thanks, Everett [a mutual friend]). Dr. C.'s opening remarks were largely a rebuke of the lack of civility expressed the day before regarding filmmaker [Simcha Jacobovici], thanks to his documentary on the Tomb (...). [Apparently someone in the audience openly had called SJ a "liar" - who that was, or one of them, probably is a matter of public record by now; and SJ may not have been the only one so abused. From all accounts and my own observations, Dr. Tabor was not in good graces with a number of people there either, although that didn't seem to dampen his enthusiasm any by the third day.]

Since the papers [presented] will be published by Wm. B. Eerdmans & since all is on video also (and since news articles have come out), in sum: the scholars predictably ended up split on the significance of the Tomb. Quotations in the press notwithstanding, Dr. C.'s objections were to me by far the most strenuous, followed by Dr. McDonald's. But [SJ felt] "vindicated" that some [said the tomb "could be" that of Jesus].

Let me say that in the Q&A of the first session, I got up and said basically this - in the two conferences I'd attended, I'd observed two kinds of scholars: empiricists who let the data inform their metaphysics, and metaphysicians who manipulate the data. You can tell the latter by their overemphasizing part of the data and underemphasizing or suppressing the rest. This is a tendency of human nature that we all must watch for. It is the former that make the sounder cases. (These are not my exact words, but they carry the gist of the message.)

The high part of the lunch, coffee breaks & recenption afterward was the incredible orange juice. I have never had anything like it in my life.

One amusing event: a presenter from Greece [said during the reception] that I was more famous than he. His presentation got no questions, yet no less than three times he'd heard my name brought up in conversation. Maybe Dr. Tabor was responsible. I'd met a man named John Hulley earlier. Dr. Tabor came up and gave me very high praise - John was a friend of Dr. T.'s, a [longtime] resident in Jerusalem, & had some association or partial knowledge of the [original] Worldwide Church of God.

I am not putting down all that happened at the seminar, or anything like it. Dr. Charlesworth's closing comments - in which he expressed "a LOT" of problems with the identification of the Talpiot Tomb - probably will be overshadowed by the comments of the widow of Mr. Gath, the excavator of the Tomb. [For clarification of the events of the excavation, the abovementioned Wikipedia article is a decent place to start.] She claimed her husband believed the Tomb was that of Jesus Christ, but as a Holocaust survivor feared saying so publicly. As [SJ] predicted, this remark was a bombshell to the media. But two scholars I spoke with [was one of them the redoubtable Dr. Eric Meyers, whom I'd met shortly prior?] could not believe Mr. Gath had really thought that. One [the young Oriental scholar] thought the widow simply misunderstood what she'd heard. Another, from Hebrew U., told Dr. Tabor in my presence that he was the only one who ever raised that possibility with Mr. Gath. If the heated argument he had in Hebrew before the press [the Associated Press, if no one else] was any indication, he [probably] defended the implications of that [statement].

John Hulley was he who told me of the rabbi searching for the lost music of Israel. I urged John to tell him about SHV's work & to get a hold of me. [Given the rabbi's reported association with the Temple Institute, he may know of SHV's work already.]

ברכות בישוע המשיח - יוחנן רכב