Inaugurating Mobile Blogging

Having discovered Blogger now has an iOS app, I may find time to post more regularly. My steep decline in posting roughly correlates with my switch to iPhone (which also roughly correlates to the death of my laptop). Apart from work, my online presence has been primarily mobile for over a year.

This short post is my initial test of the app. The only down side I can see so far is not being able to add links.

Regular blogging may commence soon.

The Latest from Khirbet Qeiyafa

Something really really big that has finally and totally proven the historical reliability of the Bible has once more been found. But first, some perspective:

The idea that a single, spectacular finding can reverse the course of modern research and save the literal reading of the biblical text regarding the history of ancient Israel from critical scholarship is an old one. Khirbet Qeiyafa is the latest case in this genre of craving a cataclysmic defeat of critical modern scholarship by a miraculous archaeological discovery.[1]

Khirbet Qeiyafa has proven to be a very newsworthy archaeological dig. First, there was the pretty cool ostracon announced in 2008. Then there was the sensational, unofficial, buzz-generating interpretation of that ostracon announced by Prof Gershon Galil. Professional epigraphers and archaeologists are still debating the reading and significance of the inscription (see the May/Jun 2012 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review). 

I admit that I haven't really been following the excavation since early 2010 (background from early 2010 here), but this morning Yosef Garfinkel, the lead archaeologist from Hebrew University excavating at Khirbet Qeiyafa, has announced the discovery of artifacts interpreted as proof of King David's ancient Israelite kingdom in the 10th century BCE. The announcement was highly anticipated but the news conference (as with many such announcements) has the ring of an attempt to head off the battle over interpretation of the finds before it's even begun. Once again, I find myself stuck between wanting to cheer on the maximalist interpretation and recognizing the valid questions raised by those of a more minimalist leaning.  

Image: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

In short, clay and stone boxes were discovered in connection with three large rooms interpreted as having cultic (religious) significance. The site is interpreted as Israelite based on the absence of pig bones and the absence of graven images. The boxes and related artifacts are being interpreted as scale model versions of the "Ark of God." 

However the artifacts are interpreted, it is a significant find which highlights the continuing importance of this site for reconstructing the history of the region in the 10th century BCE. In addition to reading the major press release version of the story, I recommend balancing your understanding with George Athas' observations on the discovery. I imagine the rest of the biblioblogosphere is exploding with the story even as we speak...let's take a look...here's a post on the subject by Todd Bolen; Jim Davila; Brian LePort; Jim West; Duane Smith. Of course, I'm really waiting for a response from biblioblogger archaeologist-in-chief, Bob Cargill.

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[1] Israel Finkelstein and Alexander Fantalkin, “Khirbet Qeiyafa: An Unsensational Archaeological and Historical Interpretation” Tel Aviv 39.1 (2012), 58. From G.M. Grena’s quote in a comment onAren Maier’s blog. 

Biblia Hebraica Moves to Washington

Or "why I only posted 20 times in 2011."

2011 was a year of transitions for me and my family. First, I switched PhD programs at the beginning of the year. My thesis proposal was submitted to the University of the Free State, South Africa last March. After struggling to decide on a topic at UW-Madison, I jumped at the opportunity to combine research on ancient Bible versions with Translation Studies methodology with Jacobus Naudé and Cynthia Miller-Naudé. I hope to make significant progress on that research this year, since other transitions consumed the rest of 2011.

In June, I began working for Logos Bible Software as a contributing editor for Bible reference in their publications department. I began telecommuting from Wisconsin and started planning our cross-country move. We intended to move mid-summer, but the reality of packing up after 6.5 years in one place with a growing family slowly corrected that plan to a late summer move. We finally arrived in Bellingham, Washington in late September.

I spent six months this year writing over 200,000 words. That kept me a little too busy for recreational writing like blogging and even research writing like my thesis work. In the meantime, we were all adjusting to a new timezone, new climate, new city, new church, new friends, and the new slightly strange Pacific Northwest culture.

My goal for 2012 is to find balance. Keep up with family, friends, research, and hobbies like blogging. I even plan to add exercise to the mix (the quintessential cliche New Year's resolution).

 

 

A World Without God

The latest issue of Bible Study Magazine has my Hebrew word study dealing with the word pair tohu and bohu (as in "formless and void" from Gen 1:2). An edited version of the article is available on the LogosTalk blog, too.

What does it mean that the earth was formless and void? Did it already exist and God just shaped it? And did God create the matter and then shape it for a purpose?

Check out the blog post to find the answer or pick up a copy of the Nov/Dec issue of BSM to get the full discussion.

The Historical Jeremiah

Many readers of the Bible come to the text with the unexamined (and usually unqualified) assumption that the literature is unequivocally historical. In other words, the people existed and the events happened more or less as described by the text. But was the version of the character presented in the text an accurate portrayal of the real, historical figure? We can't know. I've realized that history-writing is much more about creating a plausible narrative about the past than about precisely recording the details. So, the historical person and the biblical/literary character are not one and the same. In the case of Jeremiah, no scholar highlighted the difficulty of reconstructing historical and biographical information from the biblical account as thoroughly as the late Robert P. Carroll. Despite his reputation as the quintessential skeptic and practitioner of a hermeneutic of suspicion in biblical exegesis, I found his honesty about the limits of our knowledge refreshing and his conclusions quite in line with what I've proposed before.

The ‘I’ and ‘me’ of various prose pieces are assumed by most exegetes to represent Jeremiah as speaker, and the editorial framework frequently attributes prose actions and statements to him. Reading the book at face value and following the dictates of traditional and conventional readings of the text, the bulk of modem scholars have understood Jeremiah to be the book of the life and times of Jeremiah the prophet, with direct access to his words, deeds, innermost thoughts and reflections. Such an approach presupposes so much historical information to which nobody has access and a one-to-one correspondence between text and social reality that it is an extremely problematical reading of the book. The precise relation between the character constructed by the writers of the tradition and a hypothesized ‘historical’ Jeremiah behind the book is a very difficult question to answer, though not acknowledging its existence in the first place does not make it any the less real a problem for interpreting the book. For the purpose of this chapter the character of Jeremiah presented in the book will be treated as the creative fiction of the editors and writers who produced it and the relation between the ‘historical’ Jeremiah and the ‘fictional’ Jeremiah will be left to the speculative sophistications of the reader....

Although the majority of scholars continue to read Jeremiah as a biographical or autobiographical set of documents, and this ‘compact majority’ must be recognized for whatever value may be attached to such statistical reports, we cannot prejudge the issue as if there were no alternative or more feasible accounts of how the book was put together. Such accounts undergird the logic of the claim that perhaps the figure of Jeremiah is more the creation of the tradition than the creator of it.**

The bottom line is that reading any biblical book as if it provides direct historical/biographical information is problematic, especially in light of the clear theological program that motivated the anonymous writers behind the bulk of the historical narrative (the so-called Deuteronomists and the Deuteronomic school). What was their theological program and how did it affect the "spin" they put on the biblical history? Tune in next week...
**Quoted from R.P. Carroll, Jeremiah (London; New York: T&T Clark, 2004), 75, 77.