3 Things I (Re)learned from SBL Baltimore

I just returned from the combined annual meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) and the American Academy of Religion. Here are the three most important things I (re)learned.

1. Bring comfortable shoes.

Last year, I made a wise decision in my choice of footwear and had no discomfort despite the massive amount of walking that was required due to the sheer size of the convention center in Chicago. This year, even though everything was relatively nearby, I had to buy a different pair of shoes after day 1 because I made a bad choice of footwear this year.

2. Lose the laptop.

If you're not giving a paper or having to write or revise your paper at the last minute, do not bring your ancient, massive, heavy laptop. You will not use it at all and you will not want to carry it around everywhere. Your smartphone is now more than adequate for 99% of what you used to bring your laptop for. If you have a light, small, awesome newer laptop, this may not be a problem for you.

3. Bring a coat to the East Coast. 

Even if the 10 day weather forecast for an East Coast city says the weather should be cool but not wintry during SBL, bring a hat, coat, and gloves anyway, not just a blazer and a scarf. Weather forecasters can't always see the Arctic cold snap coming that far in advance. Remember this when SBL is in Boston again in a few years.

Bonus Tip: Practice people skills.

Social interaction among academic types can be awkward at times. Navigating new relationships and just-made acquaintances can be complicated for those of us who tend more on the introverted side of things. Before next year, I plan to prep a little better and practice interpersonal communication skills, building rapport, and reading between the lines.

See You in Baltimore, Greenhorns?

A week from tomorrow you will be able to find me in the exhibitor's hall at the SBL/AAR annual meeting in Baltimore, Maryland. According to Le Donne's taxonomy of participants, I am primarily an "Observer." (I've also moved from regular participant to occasional observer in the biblioblogosphere, too, but you already knew that.)

I especially enjoy observing "Greenhorns" (like Joel and Jeremy, but especially Cliff) in all their wide-eyed idealism, basking in their fledgling exposure to academia, dreaming that one day they, too, will be respected scholars and tenured professors. I imagine they are the ones keeping the booksellers in business, too.

Perhaps I should have a booth in the exhibit hall where I could dispense free career advice to the master's students daydreaming over their future careers where "work" involves reading by the fireplace in an overstuffed leather chair. Ah, greenhorns, publishers need your purchases and schools need your enrollment and tuition, but they've run out of places for you to teach and make a living once you finish.

Most of my advice would be variations on what they can read for themselves at the following links:

• Ph.D. Attrition
• The Ten Commandments of Graduate School
• The Long Odds of the Tenure-Track Job Search (subscribers-only)
• Need Advice on a Non-Academic Career? Don't Ask Me.

If they think things might be different in Bible or Theology, I would point them to these 2012 posts from Peter Enns' blog:

• Some Unasked for Advice on Whether an Evangelical Should Get a PhD in Biblical Studies
• Documented Evidence from SBL: The Job Market for Professors is, How We Say in Academia, Majorly Horribly Bad
• God and Your PhD (More Unasked for Advice about Your Future Plans)

If they insist on going forward with their plans (and the ones I talk to are unswayed by my cynicism), I'll recommend they head over to Wipf & Stock and buy Nijay's book: Prepare, Succeed, Advance: A Guidebook for Getting a PhD in Biblical Studies and Beyond.

Q&A with Seth Sanders, Part 2

As I sit here in WI reading the many blog, Facebook, and Twitter updates from the 2010 Great Bible Scholar Gathering in Atlanta (also known as the SBL Annual Meeting), I keenly feel my absence with the WI temp around 30 degrees on a bright sunny day and the high in Atlanta predicted around 70. As promised, here is the second part of my interview with Seth Sanders, author of The Invention of Hebrew (part 1 here).

4. How does your work compare to other recent work on writing and scribal practice in the ancient world? 

There's been a series of great books asking what larger-scale scribal institutions in Israel and Judah would have looked like: An important one people may not have heard of is Nadav Na'aman's Hebrew book The Past that Creates the Present, the most in-depth look at how history-writing began in Hebrew. Bill Schniedewind's How the Bible Became a Book, crucially, looks at history-writing from the point of view of material culture, avoiding the circularity of taking scribes' own accounts as the truth. Van der Toorn's Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible and David Carr's Writing on the Tablet of the Heart use our richest sources of data: Mesopotamia and Egypt, where they could afford to pay thousands of people to spend their lives copying texts. 

I part ways with them in not trying to reconstruct a big scribal culture. Because when you base your reconstruction on the existing late Iron Age evidence you get a different picture than when you go from either Mesopotamia or the Bible. There may have been really different approaches to writing in the alphabet and the Levant. One clue: at Ugarit, where we have tons of texts, we don't have a single verbatim duplicate text. Now, what does that have to do with the fact that in biblical narrative, nobody ever quotes anyone verbatim? 

BTW I'm glad you didn't use the word “literacy” in that question. [For why, see more from Seth here.] 

5. How have recent discoveries in Iron Age archaeology and epigraphy such as the Qeiyafa ostracon affected your view of the development of Hebrew? 

Surprisingly, they seem to be confirming it. Those hundreds of new excavated uninscribed seals and bullae from the 10th and 9th centuries suggest ever more strongly that nobody was using Hebrew seals as logos or legal devices til the Iron Iib. Qeiyafa is also a wonderful example of what I was imagining because it shows such a crisp break between the Iron Iib and what came before: the script is left to right or top-down and resembles 12th or even 13th century forms. So paleographically it has no direct connection with Iron Age Hebrew. The content is even more ambiguous, since good scholars read it as either a letter or a name list. And the dating is the most remarkable thing: if it's late, as the excavators argue based on limited radiocarbon data, then you've got a big fortress in the 10th century with a writing tradition pretty far from Hebrew as we know it. Which would suggest a big change during the 9th century, maybe an invention? But Lily Singer-Avitz's interpretation of the pottery conforms with the paleography and suggests it's earlier, more what we'd expect from the Iron I. I wasn't expecting evidence like that to pop up right when I finished the book!

If you're in Atlanta, don't forget to catch the book review panel tomorrow morning at 9:00 am!!

Q&A with Seth Sanders on The Invention of Hebrew, Part 1

I've spent quite a bit of time over the past year with Seth Sander's insightful book, The Invention of Hebrew. (See earlier post here). A few days from now, there will be an SBL panel discussion devoted to the book.

S21-121

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Hebrew Bible, History, and Archaeology
11/21/2010
9:00 to 11:30 
Room: Piedmont - Hyatt RegencyTheme: Book Review: Seth L. Sanders, The Invention of Hebrew (University of Illinois Press, 2009)
Matthew Suriano, University of California-Los Angeles, Welcome (5 min)
John Hobbins, United Methodist Church, Presiding (10 min)
Avraham Faust, Bar Ilan University, Panelist (20 min)
Bruce Zuckerman, University of Southern California, Panelist (20 min)
Simeon Chavel, University of Chicago, Panelist (20 min)
Steven Grosby, Clemson University, Panelist (20 min)
Seth Sanders, Trinity College - Hartford, Respondent (30 min)
Discussion (25 min)

I wish I could make it to the book review panel, but unfortunately, I won't be at SBL this year. The issues raised by Seth's book are supremely important for the future of biblical studies (IMO) and deserve a broader audience, so I spent some time interviewing Seth about the book over email. The first part is below and the rest will be posted in the next day or so second part has been posted here.

1. The central question of your book – why did the Israelites start writing in Hebrew at all – seems so fundamental to the study of biblical literature, yet studies on the origin and composition of biblical texts rarely consider it. Why?

They don't realize it's a question you can even ask. I didn't realize it was a question I could ask. But once you realize that for 2,000 years most Semitic speakers just wrote Babylonian and never showed any interest in writing their own language it starts to look like there's something weird about Hebrew and Ugaritic. Why did these people start to produce literature in a Semitic language? And why did Hebrew survive?

It started to feel like there was a huge elephant in the room nobody was talking about. But I didn't realize there was an elephant until I ran across an article by Sheldon Pollock, “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History.” Pollock makes a very basic point: in most times and places people didn't read or write the language they spoke. The norm is for there to be a universal, supposedly timeless, written language, what he calls a cosmopolitan language, one implicitly intended for everyone no matter who or where they were. Latin is an example.

So why does Israel's language and literature outlast its polity? What Pollock points out is that local literatures are actually invented, usually in reaction to these cosmopolitan literatures. A light bulb goes on and people say, “Hey, why don't we write about our place, our culture?” And what's so remarkable is it seems to have happened in Western Europe around the 10^th century CE when people moved from Latin and invented written German, French, and Spanish and in South Asia, when people moved from Sanskrit to Tamil and Javanese. I realized that maybe Hebrew was part of a similar movement but almost 2,000 years earlier. It means that the Bible may have a different historical significance than we've assumed.

2. What ramifications could your conclusions have for the ongoing debate over the origin of biblical literature?

It gives us a secure place on which to stand; it certainly doesn't conclude the debate about when and why the Bible was written, but it may provide the most solid jumping-off point for discussing it. Whatever else you may want to believe, we know that people in Israel and Judah are writing substantial prose texts between the 8th and 6th centuries B.C.E. We can't be sure before that, but there's no reasonable way to dispute that by 800 people are writing in a skillful, standardized form of Hebrew: they're writing prayers and letters and putting their names on seals. But just as importantly, it is not the case that “'twas ever thus;” earlier, it wasn't. We know that something changed for this to happen: they were not putting their names on seals in the 9th or 10th centuries, and the two texts we have from 10th-century Israel are really very different in their level of standardization from the texts from Kuntillet Ajrud. The alphabetical order of the Tel Zayit stone is closer to that of the earlier Izbet Sartah ostracon than it is to the Kuntillet Ajrud abecedaries. Maybe they're doing sporadic or experimental writing in Hebrew in the 9th century, but it hasn't become a standard—you don't need it on a seal to identify yourself or make a document legal. 

What bothers people about the debate on the origins of biblical literature is how extreme the positions can get without any external anchor. One person may say biblical literature started in Solomon's court because it's plausible that you have a serious kingdom with serious intellectual activity in the 10th century. Another person may say biblical literature really started in the Persian period because they see a post-exilic perspective in parts of Deuteronomy. But those two positions are based mainly on exegetical choices--how you choose to read the Bible. Without clear external evidence, both positions run the risk of being just things you choose because they make you feel better about yourself. Unless we can share a common starting point in evidence it's not much more than a shouting match.

 3. Scholarship is a collaborative ongoing effort. Can you name several scholars or schools of thought that were most influential as you developed your thoughts for the book?

The Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock really gave me the idea because he asked such a simple, powerful question, “What makes a literature even possible?” I never saw anyone else dare to ask that. He has a massive, rich book on these issues now, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture and Power in Premodern India. The Classicist Gregory Nagy, who along with Frank Moore Cross was the reader of my undergrad thesis, was the first person I saw who let social theory really play together with ancient texts: he didn't impose theory on Homer to show he was more sophisticated than Homer, but to bring out dimensions of Homer's distinctiveness and, if I can say this, blood—the disturbing, rooted vitality of an ancient document that our careful, pristine treatment can bleed dry. 

The first person to show me how to read language as culture was a linguistic anthropologist named Robin Shoaps. She guided me to a few of the best articles and scholars, where I got ideas for how to rigorously pursue this stuff: the idea that how you speak is as important as what you say, not just a bunch of grammar to decipher in order to get to the “real meaning.” She just did an amazing piece on a very obscene, but theoretically significant, Pseudepigraphon in modern-day Guatemala called “The Testament of Judas.” 

And I would never have been able to even approach any of these texts without my academic grandfather and father, Frank Cross and Kyle McCarter. Both of them have an unusual combination of technical rigor, sensitivity to the material's subtle nuances, and openness to ideas. That Hopkins training gave me some amazing colleagues in my generation like Christopher Rollston, who continued Cross and McCarter's tradition of epigraphic work, but took a huge step forward by using it to make systematic arguments about how scribes were trained in IAIIb Israel and Judah, and Ryan Byrne, who did what I think was the most incisive article on the social life of Levantine writing between the LBA and IA. Even beyond the academic training Cross and McCarter gave, they made it feel like true discovery was always possible, just around the corner, if you kept your eyes open and kept at it.

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Seth L. Sanders is Assistant Professor of Religion at Trinity College, Hartford, CT.

Hendel: Farewell to SBL

Anyone interested in the ongoing tension between faith and reason in what passes for biblical studies today will want to read Ron Hendel’s piece in BAR titled “Farewell to SBL.”

I fully agree with Hendel that SBL should be focused on critical investigation of the Bible, free of overt religious proselytizing and theologically-motivated biblical interpretation.

Here is Hendel remarking on Waltke’s recent review of Fox’s Proverbs commentary.

Instead of reason, “faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”—as interpreted by evangelical scholars—should be the rule in Biblical scholarship. Waltke dismisses critical inquiry as an annoying nuisance, like the scratchy sound of an old LP. This is in the midst of a review of a brilliant scholarly commentary on the Book of Proverbs, written by a Jewish scholar, in the Anchor Yale Bible series.

On the one hand, I give Waltke the respect he has earned as a scholar, and I am happy to listen to his views. But when he says such rationally absurd things as “the factual data validates Solomon’s authorship of Prov[erbs] 1:1–24:33” (which belongs to a post-Solomonic stratum of Hebrew, as Waltke ought to know), and when he asserts that Moses wrote the laws of Deuteronomy (which are written in post-Mosaic Hebrew), we are clearly not in the world of critical Biblical scholarship at all. This is religious dogma, plain and simple.

I was equally incredulous reading Waltke’s assertion that Solomonic authorship of Proverbs was “factual.” (See the discussion here on that review and Waltke’s position.) Hendel continues, pointing out why this growing trend for the SBL to accept non-critical Bible scholarship is leading closer to full validation of their non-critical and dogmatic views.

Why is this a problem? Certainly Waltke is entitled to his views. The problem is that the SBL has loosened its own definition of Biblical scholarship, such that partisan attacks of this type are now entirely valid. When I learned of the new move to include fundamentalist groups within the SBL, I wrote to the director and cited the mission statement in the SBL’s official history: “The object of the Society is to stimulate the critical investigation of the classical biblical literatures.”³ The director informed me that in 2004 the SBL revised its mission statement and removed the phrase “critical investigation” from its official standards. Now the mission statement is simply to “foster biblical scholarship.” So critical inquiry—that is to say, reason—has been deliberately deleted as a criterion for the SBL. The views of creationists, snake-handlers and faith-healers now count among the kinds of Biblical scholarship that the society seeks to foster.

This trend in the SBL likely explains the odd reviews that Alan Lenzi pointed out on his now-gone blog this past spring – confessional, dogmatic, non-critical reviews published by RBL (like Waltke’s, for example).

For my part, I had found secular biblical studies and the forum provided by SBL to be an intellectually stimulating middle ground where those of us of all faiths (including no faith) could discuss the Bible from a critical, academic point of view, free from dogma and religious divisions. I was surprised, then, to find scholars blurring the line between confessional faith and factual argument even last year at the annual meeting.
What’s to be done? We can’t all just let our memberships lapse and leave the society, can we?

Does Psa 33 Allude to Gen 1?

Last weekend at the Upper Midwest Regional SBL meeting I heard a Hebrew Bible paper on Wisdom Theology in the Creation Psalms. At several points, the presenter indicated that he felt the psalmist had been aware of the creation accounts of both P and J. It was clear that he was still developing an understanding of how one would demonstrate such a textual connection that was more than a “feeling.” During the Q&A, I asked for specific examples he’d found supporting his assertion, but he answered mostly about thematic connections and the idea of creation by speech. I hate to be the one to burst his bubble, but after examining the shared locutions between Psa 33 and Gen 1, I have to conclude that it is very unlikely that the psalmist knew of or used the Priestly Creation Account in Gen 1-2:4a. The idea of creating by speech is known from ANE mythology (e.g., the deity Ptah creates by naming things in one Egyptian account). Beyond that, the only thematic connection is that both are creation texts.

So, I started thinking about what would constitute a clear allusion to Genesis 1. The shared locution should be distinct and recognizable in order to function as an allusion. I found 10 lexical items in Psa 33 that are also found in Gen 1: ארץ, שמים, רוח, עשה, צבא, מים, ים, תהום, היה, אדם.

With the exception of תהום , all occur over 350 times in the Hebrew Bible. So, do common words like “earth” (2498x), “to make” (2573x), and “to do” (3514x), constitute an allusion?

I think not.

Are there any terms that are sufficiently concentrated in Gen 1 and fairly rare overall in the Hebrew Bible to possibly support an argument for allusion? The words above come from very common vocabulary used in Gen 1.

Here are a few terms from Gen 1 that are sufficiently uncommon to serve as markers of allusion: תהו, בהו, רקיע, בדל, רמש, שרץ, מין, צלם, תנין. Most of these terms occur 20x or less in the Hebrew Bible. The verb בדל “to divide” (42x) and the noun מין “type, kind” (31x) are the only exceptions, but בדל occurs 5x just in Gen 1, raising its profile for allusion.

Unfortunately, none of those terms occur in Psa 33. I have yet to search whether they occur in any other creation texts in the Hebrew Bible, but that is another question that I’m interested in: Does any of the Hebrew Bible allude to Genesis 1 at all?

What else in Gen 1 is sufficiently distinct to be considered a clear allusion to that creation account in a psalm or other Hebrew text?

NAPH 2010: Diachrony & Biblical Hebrew

I had the privilege to sit in on some of the papers at the 2009 NAPH sessions on Diachrony & Biblical Hebrew. It's a fascinating topic, but it's even more fascinating as an opportunity to observe human behavior in the scholarly back-and-forth on a controversial topic where neither side has a chance at convincing the other because neither has any willingness to compromise their own positions based on any available evidence. Ahh . . . minimalists and maximalists. Scholarly apologetics. (Is that an oxymoron?) Of course, being in the middle - I would get shot at from both sides.

To a point, the historical change in Biblical Hebrew CAN be demonstrated from evidence. Dean Forbes showed that pretty convincingly in New Orleans. But, the underlying uniformity of Biblical Hebrew suggests that actually dating the texts based on the fact that historical change happened is difficult-some would say impossible. I think Ian Young, et. al., have argued a good case at least in the sense that they've drawn awareness to the problems inherent in attempting to date texts based on linguistic variation. (Ironically, my move to the center on this question was influenced by what we learned in a seminar on Linguistics & Biblical Hebrew with Dr. Miller combined with a linguistics class at UW on socio- and historical linguistics.) Below is the official call for papers issued by NAPH for their 2010 sessions.

Subject: NAPH 2010 Session at SBL Meeting: Diachrony and Biblical Hebrew

The NAPH session on Diachrony and Biblical Hebrew organized by Ziony Zevit and Cynthia Miller in 2009 will conclude with three additional sessions at NAPH 2010.  While some of the presenters will be invited, we welcome paper proposals for the 2010 sessions to be held in conjunction with the SBL meeting November 20-23, 2010 in Atlanta.

The proposal should include a description of the aspect of diachrony (or language variation or stylistics) to be examined, the methodology employed, and the language data analyzed.  Please send the proposals to clmiller2@wisc.edu and to ZZevit@ajula.edu no later than February 15, 2010.

We are in conversation with several interested publishers concerning the publication of a volume on Diachrony in Biblical Hebrew with the papers from the 2009 and 2010 sessions, along with some invited papers from leading scholars of historical linguistics and language variation.

Cynthia L. Miller, Professor and Chair, Department of Hebrew and Semitic Studies, 1220 Linden Drive, 1344 Van Hise Hall, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, (O): 608-262-9785, (F): 608-262-9417,clmiller2@wisc.edu

Ziony Zevit, American Jewish University, 15600 Mulholland Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90077-1519, (O) 310-440-1266, zzevit@ajula.edu

Go Where the Evidence Leads

Thanks to James McGrath, I became aware of this recent post by Dan Wallace and the ensuing discussion (363 comments and rising). I found myself agreeing with most of what was frustrating Wallace except for the odd statement up front that "most biblical scholars are not Christians." I (and I imagine many others) are wondering how he's defining "Christian." The thrust of the post seemed to lean toward "Christian=conservative evangelical" in which case a better statement would have been - "most biblical scholars are not evangelicals." The definition of "Christian" was clarified by Wallace in comment #32:

Again, I would say that a Christian is, by definition, conservative. And that means that he or she believes in the atoning work of Christ, the God-man, and in his bodily resurrection. Jan thought that I was defining things awfully narrowly, but this is the historic position of all three branches of Christendom. In light of that definition, I would say that SBL is overall not conservative, not Christian.

I'm still not sure that his definition moves much past the equation of Christian with "conservative evangelical." Despite that minor problem with semantics, I think the issue Wallace raises is important. I have to admit that even coming from a conservative evangelical Christian background, I have had the impulse to brush off or ignore students or scholars who I perceived to be from more conservative institutions. I've hesitated to discuss issues with them, fearing that it might devolve too quickly into an apologetics debate focused on defending the nearest untenable doctrine that critical scholarship has questioned. Unfortunately, Dallas Seminary seems to have become the poster child for uncritical conservative Christian institutions, possibly undeservedly so. Of course, there are more fundamentalist institutions out there, but they tend to not even make a blip on the academic radar. Dallas does.

For some reason, fostering true intellectual debate and encouraging critical thinking is threatening to the status quo on both sides of the conservative/liberal divide. (Liberal and conservative are slippery terms, I know, but it's what Wallace was using. Both are a matter of perspective. I'm too liberal for some and too conservative for others.)

Apparently, consensus (no matter how wrong it might be) feels safer than allowing students or scholars to "go where the evidence leads" (Wallace's mantra as he says toward the end of the post).

A genuine liberal used to be someone who was open to all the evidence and examined all the plausible viewpoints. Now, “liberal” has become a hollow term, invested only with the relic of yesteryear’s justifiably proud designation. Today, all too often, “liberal” means no more than left-wing fundamentalist, for the prejudices that guide a liberal’s viewpoints are not to be tampered with, not to be challenged.
...
If we’re to judge liberal vs. conservative by one’s method, then the new liberal is the evangelical and neo-evangelical who is willing to engage the evidence, examine all sides, and wrestle with the primary data through the various prisms of secondary literature. He’s open. I tell my students every year, “I will respect you far more if you pursue truth and change your views than if you protect your presuppositions and don’t.” And they know my mantra, “Go where the evidence leads.”

It's unclear to me, however, how "going where the evidence leads" would work at a conservative evangelical college or seminary. The evidence often leads to a discussion no one wants to have because it challenges the consensus - theological or otherwise. Also, most Christian institutions have some kind of doctrinal statement. What if the evidence leads away from some of the positions on the school's statement of faith? That doesn't go over well. In college, a friend over-dramatically nailed his "theses" arguing why many of our lifestyle rules were unbiblical to the chapel door. Unfortunately, his 50-page well-documented piece was quickly dismissed as "specious" by the administration. The doctrinal statement often takes a very narrow position on non-essentials (like eschatology). What if the evidence led me away from pre-tribulational premillenialism? Well, I'd just have to keep quiet about that or risk rocking the boat.

So, I agree with Wallace that evangelical scholars are capable of quality scholarship, and I share his desire that all of us in academia should feel free to "go where the evidence leads." Those of us who try, too often find ourselves in the middle - getting shot at from both sides.

Highlights from SBL

This was a great weekend. I tested some of my own SBL advice and got to witness how uncannily accurate my "hierarchy" could be.

I focused on meeting people, not listening to papers, but I still attended my fair share of sessions.

On Saturday, I heard Yosef Garfinkel describe their work excavating Khirbet Qeiyafa. It was a fascinating talk because their results demonstrate that this was a fortified city on the border between Philistia and Judah from the mid-11th century to the mid-10th century BCE. While I don't recall it being pointed out explicitly, this conclusion creates serious problems for Israel Finkelstein's assertions that there were no fortified cities in Judah before the 9th century BCE. They found evidence at Kh. Qeiyafa of urban planning of a particularly Judean-style found also at 4 other sites in Judah including Beersheba, Tell en Nasbeh, and Tell Beit Mirsim. He also spoke briefly about the inscription they'd discovered last year and the identification of the site as biblical Sha'arayim.

I think I only sat through one session in it's entirety. I appear to share Mark Goodacre's propensity for nodding off during the sessions. I'm good for one paper, sometimes two in a row. I usually ducked out after the 2nd or 3rd paper or slipped into a session only for the one paper that I really wanted to hear. In fact, I spent most of my time on Sunday slipping in and out of sessions on text criticism, children in the biblical world, diachrony in Biblical Hebrew, and metaphor and metonymy in biblical poetry.

The best part, though, was the people. I had the privilege of having dinner with Chris Brady and his friend Rick Wright on Saturday. On Sunday, I managed to hear Caryn Reeder's paper and browse the book tables with her for a bit (I like to look at books with non-Hebrew Bible people. They draw my attention to things I wouldn't pick up on my own). I had lunch with Alan Lenzi - which was a great time, albeit brief as we were both heading to sessions in a mere half hour's time. I bumped into Chris Heard once or twice as well over the weekend. The list goes on and on. I saw several former professors and many bible bloggers (such as Jim West, Mark Goodacre, Chris Tilling, Bob Cargill, Ken Brown, Michael Halcomb, Karyn Traphagen and John Anderson), especially since I was at blogger-organized dinners on Sunday and Monday nights. I had the pleasure of chatting with George Athas at the Sunday dinner (no, he doesn't blog - we're not an exclusive group). The highlight of the conference, socially, however was the Monday dinner organized by John Hobbins. The food was excellent, the company was fantastic, and the praise for my professor's book (Michael V. Fox, Proverbs 10-31) was just short of gushing. I also had the chance to meet Tzemah Yoreh, get better acquainted with Seth Sanders, meet Seth's wonderful girlfriend Eudora Struble (an archaeologist with the U of Chicago Zincirli project), and chat with Bernard Levinson. I also met Simon Holloway, Tyler Williams, and spent more time with Chris Brady.

I also made it to my fair share of receptions and met many many more old acquaintances who introduced me to new acquaintances. An exhaustive list would be too tedious to read, so don't feel slighted if I didn't "name drop" that I bumped into you at SBL.

Back to my "hierarchy," most people are very polite and gracious when you meet them. Some, however, are too keenly aware of the fact that their place on the pecking order is just a bit higher than yours. Those people don't have time for you if there is no direct benefit to their attempts at moving higher up the food chain. Sadly, even some senior scholars can exhibit this lack of courtesy sometimes. My tongue-in-cheek ranking is a serious caste system to some.

Finally, the one session that I sat through in its entirely without nodding off at all was the Monday afternoon review session of Bernard Levinson's book, Legal Revision and Religious Renewal in Ancient Israel. But to that session, I intend to devote an entire post . . . later.

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year!

No, not the "Holidays" . . . it's SBL time!

I finally arrived at 12:45 am. The plus side of being delayed in Dallas for an hour was that I got to meet Caryn Reeder and Adam Winn, both do NT related stuff, so that's exciting since I'm not really familiar with critical issues relevant to NT biblical studies.

Caryn's presentation is on Sunday (9-11:30am MR Studio 9) on Suffer the Children: Children and War in Deuteronomy, Lamentations, and Josephus's Jewish War. Sounds interesting to me anyway.

Adam is the first presenter at the Mark Group on Sunday (4-6:30pm SH - Oak Alley). His presentation is called Power or Suffering? Reconsidering Mark's Christological Presentation.

I spent the morning roaming the exhibit hall and meeting people - new acquaintances, old acquaintances, people who've forgot they met me last year, etc. Good times. Chris Brady walked by without saying hello, though. I'll find him later. (To be fair, I was a bit out of his line of sight.) I got to shake Jim West's hand though, so that was a treat. Wow . . . the number one biblioblogger for months and months and months and months . . . I'm never washing this hand . . . oh wait, too late.

Grad Student Guide to Having Fun at SBL

Offering advice and survival tips about SBL has been a popular topic lately, so I thought I’d add my 2 cents worth. As a grad student who’s been attending for several years now, I think I have a good perspective on why going to SBL is important and how you can make the most of your trip. So here’s my advice. Some are serious, some are in jest. It’s up to the reader to discern how best to apply them.

1. Wear comfortable shoes. You’ll be walking around most of the day for 3-4 days straight. It’s important.

2. Try to meet as many people as possible. This is very very easy to do. Either find an experienced guide to show you around and introduce you to all their friends, or strike up conversations with anyone whose name you recognize.

3. Strike up conversations with senior scholars. Act like you know them. See if they play along. So many fawning grad students introduce themselves every year that for all they know, they have met you before.

4. Dress professionally. As a grad student, attending SBL is a multi-year networking effort. Crafting an image is important. The last thing you want an interviewer to randomly remember about you is how poorly dressed you were at SBL several years earlier.

5. Schedule your time, but remember your priorities. People before papers. Use sessions chiefly as a means for meeting people. The important papers will get published later.

6. Remember your place. There is a hierarchy of importance among all the people mingling at SBL. Remember your place on the totem pole or on the food chain or whatever metaphor strikes you.

Sample hierarchy (least to greatest): Security guard at exhibit hall > first year seminary student > support staff at publishers’ booths > seminary students > 1st year university grad students > MA students > PhD students > ABDs > newly minted PhDs w/o tenure track employment > editorial staff at publishers’ booths > junior professors on tenure track > full professors > senior scholars > academic celebrities. (List was revised to separate ABDs from newly minted PhDs. In the interest of full disclosure, I exist in the blank white space in between "PhD student" and "ABD.")

7. Be nice to the staff at the book tables. This is a variation of the “be polite to the receptionist when going to a job interview” rule. You don’t want to have word of your bad behavior spread. Remember, you’re wearing a nametag.

8. Depending where you are in the food chain, the book exhibit staff may not treat you with the same deference you show them. If they won’t sell you the “last” copy (as happened to Pat), feign surprise and exclaim, “Oh no! My advisor sent me in here to buy it for him. You may have heard of him/her - (insert name of senior scholar / academic celebrity here). You’re sure there’s nothing you can do?”

9. Name drop all the time. They don’t know you from Adam, but they will recognize the names of important people that you may or may not have actually met. Your status will increase by association.

10. Pretend that you understand the papers and surrounding discussions on arcane topics. Smile and nod. Remain silent but appear thoughtful. If you must speak, repeat what you’ve heard them saying but do it subtly and in your own words.

11. Interject in every discussion that turns philosophical, theological, or methodological with “yeah, but how will that help me in my ministry?” Repeat in variant forms ad infinitum.

12. Invite yourself to any and all receptions. It helps to know the name of at least one major scholar at each school. At cash bars, ask them to put your selection on the tab of (name senior scholar from institution).

13. Buy books in small quantities over the course of the whole conference. What fun is it in buying everything the first day? Plus it’s a lot easier to carry one or two extra books at a time. Have the publisher’s ship them whenever possible. Are you really going to read 12 books on the plane ride home?

So, there it is. The grad student’s guide to having fun at SBL. I hope you enjoyed it. Remember that some of these suggestions are tongue-in-cheek. Use at your own risk. If you can’t tell which are serious and which are not, don’t risk it. Ignore the whole thing.

P.S. Don’t be afraid to say hi if you see me wandering the halls at the conference. After all, meeting people is what I’m all about at SBL.

Biblia Hebraica - SBL Affiliated

After some further consideration and a helpful comment from Mark Goodacre on my previous post, I've decided to embrace affiliation and proudly display the logo on my sidebar. Here's Mark's comment:

I doubt that the affiliation will be a negative one, Doug. The SBL has lots of affiliations and relationships with different groups and these relationships are regularly to the good. Much of the time it is simply a question of providing a forum for the discussion of important and / or interesting questions. The fact that the SBL has a session on the status of women in the profession is not giving women in the profession some kind of official recognition that they would not otherwise have. Rather, it is a useful forum for women to come together and discuss key issues and take action on women in the profession. Individual scholars will choose to attend those sessions, and take action, or not, as they choose. And no woman scholar is given a hard time for not attending. Or think of something like the Computer Assisted Research Group, or the sections on Pedagogy. These are venues where like minded people can "opt in" and participate should they choose to do so. No one is forcing them to be involved; no one is given a hard time for not being involved. This is the way I see blogging and the SBL -- it could be a really useful venue for coming together and discussing some issues of interest and relevance.

Dissent is Small-Minded Childish Whining and Sniveling

At least that seems to be where Jim West is taking the discussion of the SBL affiliation with bibliobloggers.

Doug and the rest of you lot who can’t seem to get a grip on reality (and he mentions them), take part in the SBL Blogging Program Unit, or don’t.  It really is just that simple.  If you choose to take part, great.  If not, nothing is accomplished by your childish and small minded ongoing campaign of whining and sniveling.

Grow up, in other words.  Or better yet, join Joel.

I much preferred the polite and potentially productive, dialogue-seeking tone of Mark Goodacre and Chris Brady. I am actually open-minded about the possibilities of the official affiliation due to their involvement.

Jim has also suggested in a comment to my previous post that perhaps I would not care to attend the bibliobloggers dinner in New Orleans (though I've made no such indication that I thought that was a joke-why the hate?). I still plan to attend if I'm allowed to, Jim. Otherwise, if dissenters are excluded, then I guess I'll be having dinner with Chris Heard instead.

SBL and Biblioblogging

Apparently, there's now some sort of "official" affiliation between "bibliobloggers" and the Society of Biblical Literature. I have to admit that when I first saw this on Jim West's blog that I thought it was a joke, following up as it did so closely on the latest flare-up of the perennial "where are all the female bibliobloggers?" question. [On which question, I heartily agree simultaneously with all of you. Yes, more women should blog. Yes, the atmosphere might be hostile at times. Yes, no one is "in charge" of blogging. Yes, the group of so-called bibliobloggers is self-selecting, so no one is forced to not participate.]

At any rate, I thought it was a joke because "affiliation" implies there was an organized entity (i.e., bibliobloggers) to be affiliated with. Maybe we need an official society now with membership dues, member rolls, officers, and all the like.

So, I would like to be open-minded about the possibilities like Mark Goodacre and Chris Brady, but for now, I am more skeptical like John Hobbins, Chris Heard, and Alan Lenzi. In fact, Chris laid out the best analysis so far that I've seen explaining why, at the very least, this is a bizarre turn of events. Alan's right, too, saying that "there are some of you out there taking this blog thing WAY too seriously." Do you all realize what a tiny minority bibliobloggers themselves make up in the wider field of Bible and religious studies? Using my program as a microcosm, there are 19 grad students and 4 faculty members. I'm the only "biblioblogger." That's 4%. There are 4 female grad students and 1 female faculty member. So women make up 22% of my program, over 1 in 5. What would the odds need to be for that 1 in 20 who is a biblioblogger to also intersect with the 1 in 5 (or 4 in 20) who happen to be female?

Anyway, Alan's right. Chris Heard is right. Check out his post. Of course, I'm still a little open-minded to the possibilities so check out Chris Brady's and Mark Goodacre's posts, too.

Wellhausen wasn't that bad of a guy

James McGrath has reported on his exciting weekend at the Midwest SBL Meeting in Illinois. I would've liked to catch the session on teaching the Bible. He writes:

A nice moment was when one member shared the experience of reading Julius Wellhausen's Prolegomena to the History of Israel, and how clear it was when reading that book that Wellhausen's source critical approach was an attempt to make sense of the text, not impose a pre-defined framework upon it. Critical reading of the Bible is nothing other than an attempt to take the Bible seriously, all of it in all its details and with all its difficulties. Pretending that the Bible doesn't have these features is, by way of contrast, an act of infidelity to Scripture.

Wellhausen often gets a bad rap, usually from people who haven't read him or at least haven't read him charitably. One reason ad hominem is so effective is that we tend to see things as worse than they are when we already "know" that someone else was wrong and have a bad impression of that person.

Presenting on Creation in Second Isaiah

I learned this afternoon that my paper on "Creation Traditions in Isaiah 40-66" was accepted for presentation at the Upper Midwest SBL regional meeting in March in St. Paul. It will be my first time presenting a paper since I've been in grad school. I'm looking forward to it.

Now if I could only come up with a dissertation topic . . .

Blogging will probably be light in the coming months as I'll be consumed with working, teaching, preparing for preliminary exams, and writing a dissertation proposal . . . among other things.

Update (1/22/09): Thanks, James, for pointing out that I meant the Upper Midwest region, not the Midwest region. Jordan and James, I'm not sure how but your comments ended up in moderation limbo without an email coming to me to come approve them. That's why they've sat unpublished for a week. Sorry about that.

SBL: Rainey's "Levantine Literary Reservoir"

Back at SBL on 11/22, I was sitting in the Ugaritic Studies & Northwest Semitic Epigraphy Section from 9:00-11:30 am. The third presenter was Anson Rainey, and his presentation seemed to be a continuation or elaboration of his recent BAR article on Israelite origins. (To keep my Guild membership intact, I must confess that I only read BAR to find things to debunk and argue with.) I covered that article back in October and raised several issues that Rainey addressed in the SBL talk such as the Canaanite shift and the relationship among the NW Semitic dialects in the area.

In his SBL presentation, Rainey immediately reiterated his position that Hebrew was not a Canaanite dialect. It is most closely related to Moabite and Aramaic. Only Phoenician is Canaanite. This seems to be just playing with terminology and forcing a split among what were otherwise closely related people groups in terms of language and material culture. Remember that Rainey himself had brought up in BAR the evidence for continuity of pottery styles from the Canaanite coast to the central hill country to the Transjordan. In this presentation, he appealed to work by D.N. Freedman who had concluded that Israelite Hebrew was a Canaanite dialect, but Judean Hebrew was not. Rainey claimed that the isoglosses connecting Israelite Hebrew and Phoenician were also found in Moabite and Old Aramaic.

He was trying to strengthen his case for the origin of Hebrew in Transjordan. In my response to his BAR article, I pointed out that the affinities between Hebrew and Moabite are likely the result of Hebrew influence on Moabite, not evidence of common origin in Transjordan. Rainey, however, used this occasion to assert that the Israelites came from pastoralists migrating westward, not disgruntled Canaanites moving eastward from the coast. My main concern with his theory is the fact that it was constructed precisely to provide this sort of counterpoint to the indigenous Canaanite "peasant revolt" version of Israel's origins.

The purpose of the SBL talk was to develop an explanation for how the Hebrew Bible came to have such strong links with Canaanite literature if in fact, they were not Canaanites.

He began by distinguishing Ugaritic from Canaanite. Ugaritic is not Canaanite, but they share a parallel culture. There is no chance that later writers had Ugaritic tablets in front of them, so there must be another explanation for the parallels between Ugaritic texts and Hebrew poetry, especially Isaiah and Psalms. Rainey's answer is that these traditions were inherited from the "Levantine literary repetoire." (He used repetoire and reservoir interchangeably in this phrase.) This body of literature must have existed by 14th century BCE in Canaan.

So, the story goes - the pastoralists migrated in the 12th century BCE into the hill country of central Canaan. There are parallels of pottery and culture between Transjordan and the rest of Canaan and Phoenicia during the Iron Age. (At this point, I was wondering what specific evidence we have, material or linguistic, for making fine distinctions between people groups and language groups during the Iron Age.) Then, they adopted the Phoenician alphabet and started writing.

At this point in the discussion, Rainey addresses the problem of the Canaanite shift. He discusses examples from 15th century BCE Amarna letters and the 13th century Papyrus Anastasi to move the date of the Canaanite shift much later. The only positive evidence he offers comes from the 10th and the 7th centuries. One problem with his attempt to re-date the Canaanite shift is that most of his evidence comes from transcriptions of West Semitic names into Akkadian or Egyptian. How reliable are place names for dating sound change? Proper names tend to be insulated from sound change and preserve an older pronunciation longer. I believe Rainey's Canaanite shift theory was related in some way to the accented syllable, but he kind of lost me there as I was contemplating whether or not names were good evidence.

He appeals to the story of Elijah at Carmel from 1 Kings 18 to show that Elijah could be alluding to things that were generally known about Baal (known because of the common literary heritage of the area). The story is used to show the approximate timing when the Levantine literary corpus could have influenced Israelite literature. Rainey believes the 8th century texts of the Hebrew Bible have the closest parallels with Ugaritic literature. Therefore, this is likely the most fruitful period of Phoenician literary influence. His examples included Isa 22:15, Isa 27:1, Psa 74, and Isa 51. There are parallels even though they didn't know about Ugarit because of the shared literary tradition in the Levant. Hebrew writers are borrowing from the Cisjordanian literary reservoir at a time when diplomatic cooperation with the coastal Canaanites is high and one could only expect the stories to be shared among people working closely together. In this way, Rainey has explained the parallels between the Hebrew Bible and Canaanite literature without requiring the Israelites to have originally been Canaanites. The borrowing was based on areal influence, not genetic relationship.

I actually have no problem with the theory that there was a body of shared literary tradition known among the literati of Syria-Palestine. I'm not sure how it bolsters the case of Transjordanian Israelite origins, but during the questions following the presentation, it became clear that what Rainey really would like to prove is that the ultimate origins of Israel are with some proto-Aramean group in the Middle Euphrates region of Mesopotamia, not Transjordan at all.

I do have a problem with Rainey's subtle attempts to re-draw the map of the dialect geography of Syria-Palestine and to re-date the Canaanite shift. I'm pretty sure there's evidence of the Canaanite shift before the 10th century that he must have forgotten to mention.

Kuttamuwa Stele Translation

I intend to work through the Kuttamuwa inscription eventually, but in the meantime, John Hobbins at Ancient Hebrew Poetry has beat me to it. Here's his translation and analysis in two parts: Part 1 and Part 2. 

I was also asked if I have Pardee's translation, and I do not. I was focused on copying down other details during the presentation. However, I agree with John and Jim Getz who have it but don't intend to publish it without permission.

Commensality as Idolatry in Tannaitic Literature

In honor of Thanksgiving Day, I thought it appropriate to share some thoughts from an SBL session last week on the theme of commensality.

On Friday Nov 21 immediately after I arrived for SBL, I hurried over to the Sheraton (after some confusion over which hotel the Fairfax room was actually in) and enjoyed the meeting of the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins where my friend Jordan Rosenblum was a presenter. While all the presentations were interesting and the discussion following was lively, Rosenblum's talk was, naturally, the best (mainly because it was the most relevant to my interests). His topic was "Commensality as Idolatry in Tannaitic Literature."

He began with a passage from Tosefta Avodah Zarah 4:6 (ed. Zuckermandel 466):

Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar says: "Jews [literally: Israelites] outside of the Land [of Israel] are idolaters." How so? A non-Jew makes a [wedding] banquet for his son and goes and invites all of the Jews who live in his town. Even if they eat and drink [only] their own [food and wine] and their own servant stands and serves them, they are idolaters, as it is said: "And he will invite you and you will eat from his sacrifice" [Exodus 34:15].

Rosenblum has a penchant for pushing his point with a cleverly constructed phrase. The problem in this passage is "commensal, not culinary." That is, it's not about what you eat but who you eat with. In contrast to the laws of kashrut, the rabbis here are "problematizing the diner, not just the dinner." Note the passage says that even if they eat their own food and wine and are served by their own servant, they are still idolaters. Why is that?

The answer seems to be that eating together = idolatry. But why? Where does the connection to idolatry come from? Apparently, it's guilt by association. The rabbinic logic is seen in Rosenblum's second example from Mekhilta d'Rabbi Shimon b. Yohai on Exodus 34:17 (ed. Epstein and Melamed 222).

Thus, if one eats of their sacrifices, he will marry from amongst their daughters, and they will lead him astray and he will worship idols.

Clearly, "sharing bread" will soon lead to "sharing a bed", so commensal relationships are governed by the proscription against intermarriage found in the Torah in Exodus 34:15-17 (NJPS):

15 You must not make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, for they will lust after their gods and sacrifice to their gods and invite you, and you will eat of their sacrifices. 16 And when you take wives from among their daughters for your sons, their daughters will lust after their gods and will cause your sons to lust after their gods. 17 You shall not make molten gods for yourselves.

Their "separation at table" indicated a broader "separation of social identity." Sharing a table was the first step toward sharing a bed - the beginning of the slippery slope to idolatry. Rosenblum emphasized that commensality with non-Jews was "problematized but not prohibited." The rabbis use persuasive rhetoric to build up "fences around the table" to convince their audience that sharing a meal with a non-Jew was a social situation best avoided.

Rosenblum strengthened his case with additional examples from Sifre Numbers 131 and Mishnah Avot 3:3, but I think it's convincing that while the rabbis didn't explicitly prohibit sharing meals with non-Jews, they used Scripture concerned with intermarriage and idolatry to persuade their Jewish community to keep separate at meals.

Rosenblum's presentation reminded me of a New Testament parallel. This tendency toward separation at meals appears to be a very early tradition, even preserved in this passage from Galatians about a dispute between Paul and Peter (Cephas) over the proper etiquette of sharing meals between Jews and Gentiles.

Galatians 2:11-14 (ESV)

11 But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. 12 For before certain men came from James, he was eating with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party. 13 And the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. 14 But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, "If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?"

Since this was a presentation at a seminar on Christian Origins, it is interesting that early Christianity took specific steps to move away from this separation at table as a marker of separate social identity. I wonder how long it took before Roman writers started noticing a distinction.

SBL: P, H, and Ezekiel Paper

Jim Getz has summarized Kevin Wilson's paper from this morning at SBL:

In the Pentateuch section, Kevin A. Wilson
(Wartburg College) presented on “The Demotion of the Levites in P and H
.” Wilson had previously given a paper posing the correct order of the
priestly material as Priestly Tradition, Ezekiel and the Holiness
School corpora. He uses it here, but his main methodology is uses more
standard source-critical tools. PT strata of the rebellion of Korah in
Num 16-18 do not portray him as a Levite. Ezekiel 44 makes use of this
PT material when he rails against Levite and sets about their demotion
and expulsion from the cult. The HS then writes this Ezekiel material
into Num 16-18, but turns the demotion of the Levites into a promotion
– they serve as a buffer between the people and the sanctuary. Makes
sense, but questions of whether Ezekiel 44 is authored by the prophet
haunt me. Perhaps I need to reread Kevin’s earlier arguments based on
linguistic evidence to see if this answers my concerns.

I wonder what Michael Lyons thinks of this since his dissertation was based on the argument that Ezekiel was reading and interpreting H.