I was saddened to hear today of the passing of Bezalel (Buzzy) Porten.
I first encountered Porten's work in a very early article that he wrote using Aramaic documents from Elephantine to sketch out the layout of a neighborhood in Elephantine. It was a brilliant piece of work, one that later enabled the archaeologists to identify some of the very structures that he had mapped out.
Later, when finishing my dissertation at Yale, Porten came to be a visiting scholar teaching the Elephantine texts and let me sit in on his class. When I had finished work on my dissertation and was waiting for its approval, Porten invited me to co-author an article on Aramaic funerary texts from Egypt because he wanted an Egyptologist to help. Porten was a meticulous and exacting co-author who was very particular about what he wanted. I learned much about Aramaic speakers in Egypt and how Egyptian religious formulas were translated into Aramaic. For me, however, our most exciting discovery was that the author of the Aramaic dedication on an altar from the Serapeum at Memphis was not a native Aramaic speaker, though his father, to whom he dedicated the inscription, was. We know this because some of the letters were backwards (typical of those who are new to and unfamiliar with an alphabet) and because he used the wrong tense in Aramaic to translate an Egyptian religious expression. We never would have noticed those details had Buzzy not insisted that we look at the original (or at least a hand copy) and had been a stickler for Aramaic grammar.
I had many other encounters with Buzzy over the years. Once about a proposed joint project on Idumean ostraca that never materialized but which Buzzy brought to fruition by himself (with his longtime collaborator, Ada Yardeni). Most of the time, we met at the national meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature. Buzzy was always excited to see me. He was also willing to discuss problems in the field with me, such as what the Idumean ostraca were and what social situation produced him. When I did not see him last year in San Diego, I missed him.
Though Buzzy moved easily in the scholarly world, he was a religious man. He had memorized the Tanakh and would quote it from memory and comment on it when necessary. He also used to belong to a group that read the Targums together. I remember that he assumed that all Jews were good Jews, even anciently. If someone with an Aramaic name, gave their child a name with a pagan deity as part of the name, they must not have been Jewish. Only when the evidence was incontrovertible would he consider the other alternative, which, to his credit, he did.
When Buzzy reached the other side, there were probably a crowd of people, whose story he brought to light, there to welcome him. Buzzy, if he cares about that any more, can now find out from the scribes of the Idumean ostraca, what exactly they were doing.
Rest in peace, my friend. May his memory be a blessing.
