Person: Russell, James
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Russell, James
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Publication From Mashtots' to Nga'ara(2012) Russell, JamesPublication Biblical Revolutions: Some ObservationsRussell, JamesPublication Deuteronomy and the MedesRussell, JamesThe Jerusalem priesthood produced the Book of Deuteronomy in the late seventh century BCE. It restates concisely and eloquently the teachings of the rest of the Torah in a single volume that is tightly structured around the powerful personality of Moses. It also calls upon the Children of Israel to make a decisive, free choice between good and evil, life and death. This kind of statement is very unusual in the Hebrew Bible (and the medieval commentators realize this), but it corresponds closely to the most accessible of the Hymns of Zarathustra; and at the time Deuteronomy appeared the Medes, whose priesthood were most likely Zoroastrian, were approaching the zenith of their power. The question of influence is inescapable. The article considers also the paleo-Hebrew fragments of Deuteronomy offered for sale in the 19th century as perhaps early Qumranic discoveries; and considers how a scholar of faith might approach the historical Bible. An appendix considers other lost or hidden books.Publication A Note on Balaam’s Chimaera(Brill Academic Publishers, 2017) Russell, JamesThe Biblical tale of Balaam and his taking donkey was elaborated in the Babylonian Talmud: Balaam commits bestiality with the animal and this is accounted one of his failings as a pagan prophet, which accumulate as he tries and fails to curse the Children of Israel. This aspect of testing, probably transmitted by Jews of Iran and Sasanian Mesopotamia, probably becomes the source of an Iranian folk myth about a demonic ass called "mantrier". The myth enters Armenia from there and becomes a legend about the trial that a Christian holy man successfully overcomes.Publication The Bible and Revolution: Some Observations on Exodus, Psalm 37, Esther, and Philo(2017) Russell, JamesPublication Publication The Lyre of King David and the Greeks(2018-06-21) Russell, JamesPublication Odysseus and a Phoenician tale(Saint Petersburg State University, 2018) Russell, JamesThe question of the authorship of the two Homeric epics— whether there was one Homer, or two— has vexed scholars since the inception of critical literary study. The more bellicose, less inner and mysterious Iliad was by far the more popular poem in antiquity. And although the later Aeneid of Virgil tendentiously fuses together war and nostos (homecoming), it is of arms and a man, not a man of many ways and wiles, that the Roman poet sings. Odysseus is likened, invidiously, to a Canaanite (Phoenician) traveling merchant in his flexibility and adaptability— he, the "rootless cosmopolitan" of his remote age, resonates with the predicament of alienation of modern man and with the psychological depth of the modern literary sensibility, then bellicose, candid, limited Achilles and Aeneas. It is proposed in the article that the Odyssey employs the topos of a man traveling in search of lost members of his family, with a happy resolution, that seems indeed to have been peculiarly popular over many centuries with Phoenicians and Carthaginians. The author suggests indeed that Menaechmus, the name of a character in a play based on this topos with a Punic setting that might even have been performed, in a Northwest Semitic translation in Qart Ḥadašt (Newtown, i.e., Carthage) itself, is merely the very common Hebrew name Menachem. And it is noted that the topos recurs, employed in aid of religious propaganda of the Jewish Christians, in the setting of the PseudoClementine Recognitions.Publication On the Image of Zoroaster(2013-11-19) Russell, JamesPublication A Note on Armenian hrmštk-el(Brill, 2014-05-13) Russell, JamesThe hapax *framaštaq in the Babylonian Talmud is a loan from a Middle Iranian slang word for the penis; from its base comes the common Armenian verb hrmštkel, "to shove in", which is not attested in Classical texts and might have had an obscene connotation in ancient times that it no longer possesses.