HEROD’S EAGLE Albert I. Baumgarten Hanan Eshel’s contributions are located at the intersection between object and text. Sometimes the object itself contains the text; at other times, he analyzes archeological inds in the light of textual evidence. his study of Herod’s eagle is about an object that no longer exists, but is described in a text, and interprets Josephus’ report about the fate of the eagle in the Temple during the waning days of Herod’s reign and thereater. It brings together text and object, perhaps not in the way Hanan Eshel has usually done himself, but derives its inspiration from his work, nonetheless. I In his ield work in Malaysia, the American anthropologist James C. Scott (1936–) of Yale University, discovered a pattern that com- plicated his research: his local respondents were regularly lying. Not only did they feel no obligation to tell him the truth, but lying was an important form of passive resistance to his eforts. When Scott put this phenomenon into a wider context, he realized that this behav- ior was part of what he called the “weapons of the weak.” 1 Expand- ing the horizons even further, Scott wrote about Domination and the Arts of Resistance, stressing the importance of “hidden transcripts,” the things one dared not say out loud for fear of the regime, as a key aspect of the ways the weak resisted dominant repressive regimes across a wide range of examples. he practical expression of these “hidden transcripts” in everyday life included lying, robbery, sabotage, and slowdowns, all ways of indicating opposition to the oicial public transcript that was supported and enforced by the authority, power, and violence of those in charge. For safety’s sake, these expressions 1 James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).