NEW CHRONOLOGICAL INFORMATION FROM RADIOCARBON DATING OF HUMAN REMAINS AT JACOB’S WELL, NABLUS, PALESTINE

ABSTRACT Jacob’s Well, located in modern city of Nablus and ancient Shechem (Tall Balata) in the northern West Bank of Palestine, attracts modern day tourists and pilgrims. It is found in the eastern suburbs of the city. Since 333 AD, pilgrims have been writing accounts of the well, and it has been venerated by both Christian and Jewish communities throughout its history. It is believed to be the well referred to in the New Testament, where Jesus conversed with a Samaritan woman, the orthodox saint, Photini. It now forms the central feature in the crypt of the St Photini Greek Orthodox church in the walled grounds of a monastery. In order to gain more information on the chronology of the site, we analyzed human skeletal remains found at the site in 1997. These consist of three skulls and a femur. One of the skulls was found in a sarcophagus alongside the church and the two other skulls and a femur were found in a burial ground alongside the monastery, north of the church, over which a room has now been built. Radiocarbon analysis reveals that the remains date to four historical periods or events: the early Christian period, before structural additions to the well by Constantine the Great in the fourth century; the Samaritan Revolts (AD 529 and 556), the Sassanid Invasion (AD 614–628), and Abbasid rule (AD 750–1258). Dating of one skull suggests it may have been that of Germanus, a fourth century bishop of Nablus, and that there may have been a very early structure, shrine, or burial chamber at the site before the fourth century. We provide contextual information based on historical and contemporary literature.

The Use of the Septuagint in the Liturgy and Lectionary of the Greek Orthodox Church

The Septuagint has made a major contribution to the Greek Orthodox Christian liturgy, but this is an aspect of its reception history that has hitherto received little scholarly attention. In this chapter, aspects of the contribution are examined under five headings, ‘The Psalms’, ‘The Odes’, ‘Old Testament Readings’, ‘Quotations and Allusions’, and ‘Vocabulary’. The question of how the Septuagint came to play this role in Christian worship, and especially whether it reflects prior Jewish use of Greek Scripture in the liturgy of the synagogue, is considered in a final section, ‘Origins’, surveying the information available and current opinions and debates in this difficult field.

Familia Șorban/Șerban, în secolele XIV–XVII. Schiță genealogică

"Șorban/Șerban Family in the 14th-17th centuries. Genealogical sketch This article aims to reconstruct the historical route of a lower nobility family, from the first appearance in history to the beginning of the modern era. It is the Sorban/Serban family, with two branches, in the north-western part of Transylvania (in the broader sense), respectively in the south-west part of it, having a common root, in the world of the Maramures knezes, continued by a common strain, among the petty nobility of Chioar. The objective is to contribute to a better knowledge of the lower nobility in the western provinces of present-day Romania, on the background that the nobility of these parts is not yet sufficiently represented in the Romanian historiography. The oldest members of the family can be identified in the first half of the 14th century, as knezes Stan Albu and Locovoy of Cosău. At the beginning of the next century, the knezial family individualized in several branches, including the Sorba of Călineşti. In the 16th century, a member of this family crossed into Chioar District, and his three sons received a diploma of ennoblement in 1609, for services to Prince Gabriel Báthory. During the 17th century, the Sorba(n) family appears in several conscriptions of the Chioar, divided into two branches. At the beginning of the 18th century, a Şorban emigrated to the Mureş Plain, near Arad. There will emerge a strong branch of the family, which changes its name to Şerban and sticks to the Greek Orthodox Church, while the other one keeps its name, but shifts to the Greek Catholic Church. Both branches contribute in the 19th and 20th centuries to the intellectual and political elite of Romanians. Descendants of both branches are now well-known people in the cultural field. Keywords: Romanian-nobility, genealogy, Șorban, Șerban, Locovoy "

DaT18 Database: A Prosopographical Approach to the Study of the Social Structures of Religious Dissent in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Transylvania

"Drawing on the many records created by the Habsburg state during the confessional troubles in Transylvania from the 1740s to the 1760s, the DaT18 project merges digital instruments and prosopography to arrive at sketching the social pattern of the Orthodox leadership. This article briefly discusses the technical choices involved in building the relational database that my approach centres on, before talking in more detail about the challenges faced when transposing the information in the primary sources into digital format. First, the question of making use of structured vs. unstructured data, as most of the documents I work with already present some form of tabular layout, while the more narrative ones require different strategies to mitigate losses when converting them. Secondly, the difficult process of record linkage, with many of the persons only mentioned by their first name and no surname to help label each individual entered in more than one source. Lastly, the daunting task of estimating economic resources, since there was no reliable standard in an age that saw four different fiscal systems in use and many regional flavours within the same scheme. Keywords: prosopography, relational database, clerical careers, data structuring, Greek Orthodox Church."