Menorah Review (No. 39, Winter, 1997)

An Interpretive Methodology With Supersessionist Forebodings -- Through a Glass Brightly: Seeing the Unseeable -- The 12th Annual Selma and Jacob Brown Lecture -- Controversy and the Dead Sea Scrolls -- Book Listing -- Jewish Civics -- Leah -- Book Briefing

Syzygies of Abelian and Bielliptic Surfaces in P^4

So far only six families of smooth irregular surfaces are known to exist in P^4 (up to pullbacks by suitable finite covers of P^4). These are the elliptic quintic scrolls, the minimal abelian and bielliptic surfaces (of degree 10), two different families of non-minimal abelian surfaces of degree 15, and one family of non-minimal bielliptic surfaces of degree 15. The main purpose of the paper is to describe the structure of the Hartshorne-Rao modules and the syzygies for each of these smooth irregular surfaces in P^4, providing at the same time a unified construction method (via syzygies) for these families of surfaces.Comment: 64 pages, author-supplied DVI file available at http://oscar.math.brandeis.edu/~popescu/dvi/bielliptics2.dvi AmS-TeX v. 2.

‘Engage the World’: examining conflicts of engagement in public museums

Public engagement has become a central theme in the mission statements of many cultural institutions, and in scholarly research into museums and heritage. Engagement has emerged as the go-to-it-word for generating, improving or repairing relations between museums and society at large. But engagement is frequently an unexamined term that might embed assumptions and ignore power relationships. This article describes and examines the implications of conflicting and misleading uses of ‘engagement’ in relation to institutional dealings with contested questions about culture and heritage. It considers the development of an exhibition on the Dead Sea Scrolls by the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto in 2009 within the new institutional goal to ‘Engage the World’. The chapter analyses the motivations, processes and decisions deployed by management and staff to ‘Engage the World’, and the degree to which the museum was able to re-think its strategies of public engagement, especially in relation to subjects,issues and publics that were more controversial in nature

Explicit Solution By Radicals, Gonal Maps and Plane Models of Algebraic Curves of Genus 5 or 6

We give explicit computational algorithms to construct minimal degree (always $\le 4$) ramified covers of \Prj^1 for algebraic curves of genus 5 and 6. This completes the work of Schicho and Sevilla (who dealt with the $g \le 4$ case) on constructing radical parametrisations of arbitrary genus $g$ curves. Zariski showed that this is impossible for the general curve of genus $\ge 7$. We also construct minimal degree birational plane models and show how the existence of degree 6 plane models for genus 6 curves is related to the gonality and geometric type of a certain auxiliary surface.Comment: v3: full version of the pape

The Heir of Righteousness and the King of Righteousness: The Priestly Noachic Polemics in 2 Enoch and the Epistle to the Hebrews

It has previously been noted that 2 (Slavonic) Enoch, a Jewish pseudepigraphon written in the first century CE, contains traces of polemics against the priestly Noachic tradition. In the course of the polemics the role of Noah as the pioneer of animal sacrificial practice to whom God reveals the commandments about the blood becomes transferred to other characters of the story, including the miraculously born priest Melchizedek. In light of the polemics detected in 2 Enoch, it is possible that another work written at the same period of time, namely, the Epistle to the Hebrews—a text which like 2 Enoch deals with the issues of blood, animal sacrificial practice, and the figure of Melchizedek—might also contain implicit polemics against Noah and his role as the originator of such practice. It has been noted before that the author of Hebrews appears to be openly engaged in polemics with the cultic prescriptions (δικαιώματα λατρείας) found in the law of Moses and perpetuated by the descendants of Levi. Yet the origin of animal sacrificial practice and the expiatory understanding of blood can be traced to the figure of Noah, who first performed animal sacrifices on the altar after his disembarkation and who received from God the commandment about the blood. By renouncing the practice of animal sacrifices and invalidating the expiatory significance of the animal blood through the sacrifice of Jesus, who in the Epistle to the Hebrews is associated with the figure of Melchizedek, the authors of the Epistle to the Hebrews appear to be standing in opposition not only to Moses and Levi, but also to Noah. Here again, as in 2 Enoch, the image of Melchizedek serves as a polemical counterpart to Noah and the priestly Noachic tradition, which the hero of the Flood faithfully represented

CD Manuscript B and the Community Rule – Reflections on a Literary Relationship

This article begins by noting the proliferation of textual overlap between the Damascus Document and the Rule of the Community. Some examples of such overlap, such as the penal code, have received a large amount of scholarly attention in the wake of the publication of all the Cave 4 manuscripts. This study returns to a passage from CD manuscript B (CD 20:1b-8a) that has long been recognized as closely related to 1QS 8-9 and offers a reconsideration of the relationship between both texts in the light of the full publication of all the S manuscripts. The analysis offered here uncovers a complex inter-relationship between both texts as well as some intriguing pointers towards a complex literary history within the S tradition