Perhaps not, but the least one might do is frame the issues in the study of the Pentateuch in such a way that attention to the Pentateuch becomes a matter of burning interest to anyone who occupies herself with (1) the foundations of national and international law, (2) the Scripture-based ethical stances that inform the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and the cultures indebted to them, (3) the proper stance a state and those who maneuver the levers of power should have over against a state constitution, not to mention (4) the historically unique mode of political address which dominates the Pentateuch; said mode of address in which a single principle of justice and truth addresses a polity and (re-)creates said polity in the process, continues to be productive at the junctures which inform political debate in the 21st century. 

A conference in May on the Pentateuch at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is promising in this regard. Here's hoping that the May conference will awake many from their dogmatic slumbers, as Hume once succeeded in doing to Kant's benefit. 

For more information, go here: http://ias.huji.ac.il/convergence. I tip my hat in gratitude to Bernard Levinson and the other organizers of this splendid conference. 

The artist: Dr. He Qi, a professor at the Nanjing Union Theological Seminary and a tutor for master candidate students in the Philosophy Department of Nanjing University. He is also a member of the China Art Association and a council member of the Asian Christian Art Association. The image is copied from the database of Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN.

While we live in a time of darkness and confusion, the promised coming of the root and offspring of David, the bright and morning star, reminds us that darkness doesn’t have the last word. Light prevails over darkness.  We can live as children of the light, affirming hope - even in the midst of the most gloomy of circumstances. 

Anna, now in 4^th grade, is living the life of an only child after living surrounded by the love of her two siblings for her whole life. She cannot hide the fact that she truly enjoys the extra attention she did not have before. But when she skypes with Betta or talks on the phone with Giovanni her eyes light up and a big smile creases her face. She misses them terribly! School is more challenging this year and it has been positive for Anna to step up to the plate.  Anna is a passionate church mouse. With growing self-confidence, she participates fully in worship on Thursday evenings at the Gathering Place (campus ministry), Saturday afternoons at the Family Church (Paola’s congregation), and on Sunday mornings at First Church (where John is pastor). Anna continues to love reading and to enjoy dance and piano.

Betta is having the time of her life in Peru as a Rotary exchange student.  She has been blessed to have an excellent host family in Lima and has made new friends from around the world. Her Spanish is now excellent even if her Italian has been paying the price. A bright spot has been her participation in the life of the Hogar San Francisco de Asis, a medical mission for destitute and sick children. Follow her at bettainperu.tumblr.com. Betta looks forward to joining the Family Church on a mission trip to Naples Italy this summer. She will go on to be a freshman at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Giovanni is months away from graduating with honors from Emory University in Atlanta with a degree in philosophy and minor in comparative literature. The web design start-up company he and friends have continues to advance (write-up here in the NYT). The courses Giovanni is taking at Emory - comparative literature, philosophy, history, the classics - will ensure that he goes through life with strong points of intellectual reference. He enjoys playing soccer and plays for an amateur team in downtown Atlanta.

Even if Paola is proud of her older children’s accomplishments and independence she misses them greatly and tries her best to continue to smother them using all the technology and communications tools available to her.  Her ministry at the Family Church is thriving. She is also the circuit leader of the Appleton churches. With services on both Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings, she is busier than ever. She is leading a mission trip to Naples Italy this summer. What an experience that should be for all concerned. She often cooks up a storm for guests. One might very well say that food is a sacrament in the Benecchi-Hobbins household. Taste and see that the Lord is good.

John’s ministry at First Church – Oshkosh is in its third year. Perhaps most valued for the way he celebrates the life of a loved one at a funeral, he himself enjoys mentoring young people in elementary school, middle school, high school, and college most of all. John serves on the boards of Oshkosh non-profits such as Habitat for Humanity, Bella Medical Clinic, and Southwest Rotary. He is on the editorial board of the Journal for the Evangelical Study of the Old Testament and publishes in biblical studies. A short commentary on Habakkuk is available online. He is delighted that First Church will add two new part-time staff in 2013 and that he will have the opportunity of serving, not only as the lead pastor of First Church, but part-time as the second pastor of a sister church in Oshkosh, Calvary Lutheran (ELCA).

In January we are looking forward to having a 17 year-old Rotary exchange student from Argentina in our home. Her name is Ailén. She is fluent in English and German besides Spanish, and we are confident that she will quickly become a part of the family and adapt to life on the frozen tundra.

John Wesley famously said, “The world is my parish.” How true that has become for our family with the passing of time.  Merry Christmas and a happy New Year!! 

John            Paola        Giovanni          Elisabetta            Anna

My advice to Republicans: stop believing your own sad rhetoric about the 47%. Misanthropes deserve to lose elections.

My advice to Republican friends who consider the Bible to be the quintessential rule of faith and practice: take Psalm 72 to heart, and start making a case for smart government, not: the less government, the better. 

Blogger and Online Publication
11/18/2012 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM
Room: N129 - McCormick Place
Theme: Blogging and Professional Scholarship

Robert Cargill, University of Iowa, Presiding

The Advantages of Reviewing Books Online and the Need for an Industry Standard
John Hobbins, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh

The experience of biblical bloggers and the example of the online Review of Biblical Literature points to the advantages of reviewing books online if one’s target audience is the ever-growing number of people who research a topic via an electronic search engine without wanting to be limited by the confines of ATLA or JSTOR. Online book reviews by bloggers and electronically available book reviews in peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Hebrew Scriptures, precisely because they are at everyone’s fingertips with no money down and no logins required, are among the most-read and frequently accessed secondary literature in the field of biblical studies. Moreover, thanks to the fast-and-furious nature of blogging, a number of threads document responses to a book as presented in a book review with unparalleled immediacy. Finally, the elastic nature of the electronic medium has meant that very long book reviews face, technically speaking, no obstacles; at the same time, tweet-length book reviews have become commonplace. Where do we go from here? In the paper, in addition to recounting amazing episodes from the annals of the biblical blogosphere, I argue in favor of an industry standard for electronic book reviews and present a proof of concept in that sense. A proposed standard is important not because it should or will become the norm, but because the existence of a proposed standard will raise the bar on several fronts and encourage the more intrepid to put it in practice and help the field of academic biblical studies realize the full potential of electronic media for research and teaching.

Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
11/19/2012 9:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Room: S103a - McCormick Place

John Cook, Asbury Theological Seminary, Presiding

The use of kî at the boundary between quotative frame and quotation in ancient Hebrew
John Hobbins, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh 

The purpose of this paper is to examine all instances of kî at the boundary between frame and quotation in Biblical Hebrew and identify those examples in which kî is best understood to be a complementizer relative to a head clause recoverable from context. The standard grammars and lexica interpret examples of kî at the boundary between quotative frame and quotation as if it were equivalent to dî recitativum in Aramaic or hoti recitativum in Greek whenever that possibility is not precluded by the semantics of the passage in question. But it makes more sense, in line with Cynthia L. Miller, The Representation of Speech in Biblical Hebrew Narrative: A Linguistic Analysis (HSM 55; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996) 103-116, to replace that default interpretation with another, namely, that kî is a clause-initial conjunction which subordinates the clause it heads to a matrix clause in all cases in which a semantically appropriate matrix clause, expressed or unexpressed, is recoverable from the context. For example, the matrix clause to which the kî-introduced clause in Exod 3:12 relates is gapped from the preceding context (3:11): “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and that I should lead the Israelites out of Egypt?” He said, “[You should go to Pharaoh and you should lead the Israelites out of Egypt] because I am with you.” This is an example of a specialized use of a kî-introduced clause in an adjacency pair; that is, a unit of conversation that contains an exchange of one turn each by two speakers (though an adjacency pair may be rounded off by a third element in conversations of unequal power distribution; more than one example of rounding off is attested in Exod 3). In an adjacency pair, the first turn elicits a response of a certain kind in the second turn; both turns have identifiable linguistic profiles. The examples to be discussed include, but are not limited to, Exod 3:11-12; Num 22:28-30; Judg 6:15-16; and Ruth 1:8-10.

    Prayer is one of the most universal human gestures. You can even be a deist like Albert Einstein, who believed in God but not in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (a God who joins himself to a particular people), and still imagine that there is a dimension of the mind, a noosphere, which connects us all immaterially and in which change for the good or the bad is possible.

    Even if Einstein did not so imagine, but believed more modestly that sympathy is the first and most important foundation of ethical behavior, he might well have understood that prayer is an expression of sympathy, to be greatly prized even by those who cannot bring themselves to pray.

    The question worth pondering: is Spinoza's God in whom Einstein so ardently believed like a brain as Einstein was wont to think of a brain, a muscle with no personality, or is Spinoza’s God a brain as we now know it to be, a place in which beliefs, data, and emotions are processed and combined?

    Since intelligence is a place like the latter, and interactive by nature, the conclusion is inescapable: prayer is a supremely logical gesture.

Background reading from Scripture: Jonah 1 (God answers the prayers of "pagans"); Matthew 7:7-10 (the sympathy of a fatherly God). Background reading in Einstein:

I believe in Spinoza’s God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world. [Einstein, Albert; Calaprice, Alice. The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (p. 325). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.]

To [the sphere of religion] belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. [Einstein, Albert; Calaprice, Alice. The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (p. 334). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.]

A religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt about the significance of those super-personal objects and goals that neither require nor are capable of rational foundation. [Einstein, Albert; Calaprice, Alice. The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (pp. 334-335). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.] Einstein, it is fair to say, was frum in the sense he defines.

A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectively on sympathy, education, and social relationships. [Einstein, Albert; Calaprice, Alice. The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (p. 328). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.]

We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. [Einstein as quoted in Jerry Mayer's Bite-Size Einstein (p. 25). The quote is unsourced. It is consistent with other things Einstein said, but that does not mean the quote is his. I cite it with reservations. Regardless, we now know that the brain is far more than an elaborate computer. Belief and emotion, not to mention the powers of which Paul speaks – faith, hope, and love – are the fuel on which the brain runs.]

    To be sure, beyond blocking the comments of proven delinquents, the most one can do is encourage commenters to put themselves in that vulnerable location in which respectful dialogue can take place and learning occur. This is what scholars ask of fellow scholars. It is what teachers ask of students. It is what students have a right to expect from teachers.  

    Finally, it is a reasonable expectation that one’s life and one’s thought cohere at some level. Contradictions between life and thought are a legitimate topic of discussion. The discussion of real and apparent contradictions at the intersection of the personal and the ideological are a staple of honest conversation. But if perceived contradictions in someone else’s thought and life are fair game for you, then you must be ready to respond to discussion of perceived contradictions in your point of view at the intersection of life and thought.

    This blog has had over 1 million six hundred thousand page views and 15,000 comments in five or six years of activity. I have never been able to keep up with the number of requests for help, the number of friendships, and the number of discussions my blogging has fomented to date. This is the most serious challenge a blogger who blogs with fervor is likely to face. That said, I am happy to belong to a community of bloggers and commenters who share a commitment to groundrules of the kind Hurtado outlines. 

Q #1: If I boarded the elevator in the lobby of the Empire State Building, and rode to the 80th floor with a fellow Hebrew scholar who asked me to state the rules of usage that apply to the use of grammatical gender in ancient Hebrew, I would say the following in the 45 seconds at my disposal. (1) If the subject or subjects of a verb are exclusively masculine, the gender of the verb must also be masculine. (2) If the subject or subjects are feminine, the gender of the verb must also be feminine. (3) If the subject or subjects of a verb comprise masculine and feminine of a given species, the gender of the verb will be masculine, unless the verb has an explicit compound subject in which one of these subjects is to be spotlighted, in which case the gender and number of the verb will agree with the subject to be spotlighted, not the gender and number of the compound subject. (4) If the grammatical gender of a noun is feminine, but the social gender of the referent subject is masculine, the gender of the verb will be masculine. (5) I can't think of any examples offhand of the opposite, in which the gender of the noun is masculine, but the social gender of the referent subject is feminine. 

You will notice that I haven't used up my entire 45 seconds. What would you add to the above? Where do the above statements stand in need of correction? 

    Here are David’s first seven responses to this question (more to follow):

1.  At this point in my research, I avoid elevators whenever possible and take the stairs instead! I am so aware of complexity that I nearly despair of being able to succinctly articulate what I observe. But I’ll try. . . .

2.  Let’s explicitly limit ourselves to speaking only about references to persons. (References to animals and to inanimate objects do not necessarily follow the same rules. They are not burdened by our interest in the referent’s social gender.)

3.  Your starting point appears to be the extralinguistic reality that the text designates by its wording. You are asking how the speaker or writer of biblical Hebrew would make reference to a given person with a known social gender. What I try to do instead is formulate the rules from the audience’s perspective -- to start with the text (linguistic expression) as the given, and then ask what it is (and is not) saying about the referent’s social gender. That’s what I mean by the term “referential gender”: what the expression is saying about the referent’s social gender.

4.  Because the terms “feminine/masculine” are so ambiguous, lately I prefer using the terms “marked/zero-marked” to describe syntactic gender, versus “womanly/manly” to describe referential gender (as distinct from grammatical gender).

5.  The key factor in referential gender is often overlooked: the reference’s specificity. We must distinguish between two basic kinds of reference: categorizing versus identifying. With any linguistic reference, the audience must disambiguate whether it is referring to a category of persons (“anyone who fits the description” -- what I call a categorizing reference) or to a particular person (what I call an identifying reference). Some expressions can be employed to make either type of reference; it depends on the situation and shared knowledge.

6.  So here is the crucial addition that I would make to your elevator rules: If the reference’s wording (e.g, the verb) is syntactically zero-marked (masculine) and the reference is categorizing, then the referent’s social gender is not specified. The reference per se is gender-neutral or gender-inclusive.  

7.  For that reason, the mental leap from linguistic realm to extralinguistic (personal characteristics) needs to be explicit. Yet in some of your assertions, it’s not clear. For example, "If the subject is exclusively masculine...” Better: “If the social gender of the syntactic subject’s referent is exclusively manly.” Your way of stating it is simpler, but unfortunately such imprecision can easily lead us astray.  

    Since it’s “Summertime, and the livin' is easy, fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high” (Gershwin), it may not be easy to distract fellow Hebraists into joining a conversation on this topic at this time. On my part, I would respond to David’s points along the following lines.

    First of all, I would say that gender representation in language, like gender construction in culture, is both extremely routinized and nonetheless subject to subversion and inversion in specific cases. I remain interested in stating rules that apply to gender representation, not only in reference to the social gender of persons, but to that of animals and abstract concepts such as wisdom and foolishness. It is a linguistic universal that so-called inanimate objects are endowed with social gender by those who speak of them. As much as we might want to draw a sharp distinction between grammatical gender and social gender – and we need to as linguists - the tendency of language speakers, individually and collectively, is to conflate the two for a variety of ends. Even in a language like English, which is impoverished from the point of view of marking gender, overt marking of gender, albeit “unnecessary” for the “normal” needs of communication, is still common. That is why in English a car becomes a she in a variety of contexts or genres. In ancient Hebrew, attention to the metaphoricity of grammatical gender pays dividends, both from the point of view of a performer of ancient Hebrew, and a spectator. 

    It is true that I stipulate rules from the point of view of a performer of ancient Hebrew, not a spectator, and that I have social gender in mind, in reference to persons and to members of a species, in my rules (1)-(3), and social gender-by-convention in mind in reference to “inanimate” objects. In my view, it is of great heuristic value to do so. I realize that it is contrived to do this, but no more and no less contrived than to stipulate rules from the point of view of a spectator of ancient Hebrew. I see David’s point about distinguishing between social and grammatical gender. What is of interest is the interplay of social and grammatical gender, not only at the level of syntax, but at the level of realities and categories as varied as ant, god, and wisdom.        

    Finally, I wonder about David’s “crucial addition” to my elevator rules. My problem is that I am not sure it is practically true that speakers or listeners think in terms of the binary David proposes, categorizing versus identifying. I imagine that speakers and listeners think more or less exclusively in terms of identifying references. Still, I agree with David that the social gender of a referent cannot be read off from grammatical gender, because of what I refer to as the “coed” goes to “masculine” rule. One might pose the question in this way: If I am speaking about a category of individuals that are all male or who will be assumed to be all male under normal circumstances, do I use “masculine” verbs in concord with that fact or do I use “zero-marked” verb forms for lack of an alternative? Put another way, is the “zero-marked/marked” binary an etic distinction, or an emic distinction?

    For David Stein's narrated slide show, based on his NAPH presentation, entitled “Meaningful Manipulations of Grammatical Gender: Explaining a Set of Exceptions to So-Called Masculine Precedence in Biblical Hebrew,” go here.

    Based on the information that has so far come to light, it comes down to two things. (1) Because the person he loves in this world more than anyone else is himself. (2) Because he wanted others to experience the devastation he experienced when his dreams of a great life were smashed. 

    Like the Joker of Batman fame he announced himself to be, James Holmes saw himself as a victim. Victimhood is the perennial backstory of countless acts of violence. It is the backstory to this one as well. Holmes knew that it was not his fault that the life he dreamed for himself was taken away from him. He wanted to take away from other people the same thing that was taken away from him: a future he could believe in.     

    James Holmes wanted to have a happy life. When he became unhappy to the point of not seeing how he might become happy again, he was overcome by a desire to make others share his experience of devastation and defeat. He continues to be possessed by that desire. That is the only explanation for his lack of remorse for what he did. 

    Like Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian who killed 77 people not long ago, James Holmes cannot be described as out of his mind. On the contrary, like Breivik, the Unabomber, and many other mass murderers, he lived inside his mind. He was a hyper-intellectual. 

    James Holmes is like us in a thousand ways. The only way we can protect ourselves from the demon of loving oneself more than anyone else is to recognize sin for what it is. In the words of Martin Luther, sin is the fact of being incurvatus in se, curved in on oneself. 

    The best way to avoid sin is by not playing the blame game to account for our shattered dreams and our bottomless misfortune. The best way to avoid sin is by living by the questions God, who is the sum of all that is true, good, and beautiful, has posed to humanity from time immemorial. 

    Here is a short list of places where such questions are found: Genesis 3:9 [“Where are you?”]; Genesis 4:9 [“Where is your brother?”]; Jonah 4:4 ["Are you right to be angry?"]; Job 40:8 [ “Do you condemn me that you may be in the right?”];  Luke 6:46 [“Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I say?”]; Mark 8:29 [“Who do you say that I am?”].

    I concur with the following comment by Rich in the thread pursuant to his post:

I just want to get to the point of being able to talk about how to make Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, and the writer of Hebrews sound as different in English as they do in Greek. And step one is to talk about subtle differences in usage. In this case, what linguists call markedness.

    Fine. Here is a feature of usage in the gospel of Matthew. The author likes to conform to Biblish diction and cite in Biblish for the sake of his LXX literate readership. He also likes to calque non-Biblish phraseology, like "the kingdom of heaven" and “our Father who is in heaven,” phraseology Jesus shared with the Pharisees. Hence the occurrence in Matthew of a relatively large number of Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic > Jewish Hellenistic Greek turns-of-phrase.

    In Matt 15:9, that's why we find the wording we do, per LXX Isa 29:13. For example: ἐντάλματα ἀνθρώπων “commandments of men” (not an exact calque of the Hebrew מִצְוַת אֲנָשִׁי; the collective singular "command" is pluralized).

    It is true of course that “men” in this phrase, in Hebrew and Greek, is not gender-specific. Neither is “men” gender-specific in comparable English phraseology of a literary register, for example: “The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men/ gang aft agley,/ an' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain.” (a reading of the whole wonderful poem).

    I would argue that “a commandment of men” in Isa 29:13 is a fine literary translation of a component of a literary text. Isa 29:9-14 (with the exception perhaps of 29:11b-12) is a tautly composed diatribe blistering with a high density of patterned poetic language.

    To be sure, “a commandment of men” might not qualify as a politically correct translation. That, of course, might be considered a feature, not a bug. It *is* the translation of the Jewish Publication Society (NJPSV).  

    The salient contrast in Isa 29:13 depends on a “before God/before men” binary: heartfelt worship in response to God’s invitation versus lip service in response to a commandment of men drilled into a faux believer. A similar binary underlies Jer 31:34. Isa 29:13:

יַעַן כִּי נִגַּשׁ הָעָם הַזֶּה בְּפִיו

וּבִשְׂפָתָיו כִּבְּדוּנִי

וְלִבּוֹ רִחַק מִמֶּנִּי

וַתְּהִי יִרְאָתָם אֹתִי

מִצְוַת אֲנָשִׁים מְלֻמָּדָה

Because this people drew near with their mouth
and honored Me with their lips
while their heart was far from Me,
their worship of Me became
a commandment of men learned by rote.
[NJPSV somewhat modified]

    It makes sense to incorporate a parallel set of translation choices into a rendering of Matt 15:19 even if the latter’s distinctive features must also be respected:

Ὁ λαὸς οὗτος τοῖς χείλεσίν με τιμᾷ,
ἡ δὲ καρδία αὐτῶν πόρρω ἀπέχει ἀπʼ ἐμοῦ·
μάτην δὲ σέβονταί με,
διδάσκοντες διδασκαλίας ἐντάλματα ἀνθρώπων.

This people honors me with their lips
while their heart is far from me;
in vain do they worship Me,
teaching as doctrine the commandments of men.
[RSV=ESV slightly modified].

    I'm not sure there is a better way to capture the Biblishness and Rabbinicness of the style of Matthew than to preserve agreement in matters of detail across registers Matthew wished to conjoin: biblical Greek understood from within, and acting as an indictment of, Greek literate Pharisaic Judaism. I note in passing that the love-hate relationship with the Pharisees the gospel of Matthew reflects is unlikely to be an innovation of Matthew. It is best attributed to Jesus himself.

   One rephrases  "commandment(s) of men" at considerable peril - though Mark does, after the original is reproduced, in a similar context: “commandment of God” versus "the tradition of men" (Mark 7:8).

    NT authors demonstrate a strong commitment to the Biblish of their day. If you naturalize the NT’s Biblish too much – Biblish as in Hebrew Bible > Septuagint Biblish - you remove a component of its markedness.

    To calque or not to calque: that is the question. An exact calque is not necessary. An approximate calque seems preferable - across both passages. Viewed from this standpoint, RSV=ESV, as often, has a great deal in its favor.

    The chief error of RSV=ESV is not getting the grammar of Isa 29:13 right: the narrative past tense of the Hebrew – “[their worship of me] became” - conveys an essential semantic feature: the apodosis of a condition.

    HCSB cannot be recommended across the passages, with its Matthew still speaking in Biblish even though its Isaiah speaks in more natural English.

Because these people approach Me with their mouths
to honor Me with lip-service—
yet their hearts are far from Me,
and their worship consists of man-made rules
learned by rote—

These people honor Me with their lips,
but their heart is far from Me.
They worship Me in vain,
teaching as doctrines the commands of men.

NIV 1984 is superior to NIV 2011 at Matt 15:9. NIV 2011 truncates the text; "the teachings they teach" would have been appropriate.

They worship me in vain;
   their teachings are but rules taught by men.

They worship me in vain;
   their teachings are merely human rules.

    If there is an alternative method of retaining the stylistic choices of Matt 15:9 to the one suggested here, a method which retains agreement across text and subtext, with Matthew quoting the KJV of his day with little modification - I would love to hear it. In the meantime, give me that old time religion.

    The question, then, is how biblical literature makes assertions about the way things are. Let me count the ways: through myth, legend, and chronicle; through the description of the bios of a people and individuals thereof; through the critique of prescription (torah) and prediction (prophecy); through satire, parody, and parable (e.g., Jonah, Esther, and the parables of Jotham and Nathan); through prayer, by definition the most fundamental indictment of the way things are; through praise, the affirmation of particular features of the way things are; through empirical observation and speculative inquiry within the bounds of philosophical religion (Proverbs; Job; Qohelet).

    The discussion of a particular example may help clarify. Exodus – Numbers reflects on the election and identity of the people of Israel through the genre of theological ethnography. The narrative expatiates on the saving gifts of God: the gift of leaders, however flawed; the gift of deliverance, even if it leads straight into a wilderness; the gift of Torah that, if heeded, will preserve a people in a land of their own, and if ignored, will serve as a witness against it; the gifts of a singular locus of God’s presence and a caste of individuals able to distinguish between what is holy and what is common, even if that caste, beginning with Aaron himself, proves unable to live up to its commission. At every step the narrative exposes the contradictions that endanger the election and identity God bequeaths on a particular people. Historical contingencies, paradigmatically, are constantly in view.  

    The narrative intends to describe the way things are. It does so by collapsing into a pivot of the formative past (1) an interpretation of conflicts and (2) conflicts of interpretation that have characterized the history of Israel over the long duration. In what sense does the narrative do so in ways that analogous ideological narratives which reflect on the election and identity of a people do not? In what sense is the narrative true whereas other narratives are false?

    The New York Review of Books blog has published a stunning collection of interviews of Chinese dissidents by Ian Johnson. If you have not read the series, you would do well to drop everything and spend a few hours savoring the tempered wisdom of people like Bao Tong  and Ran Yunfei. At stake in the interviews is the identity and self-understanding of the Chinese people. Identity and self-understanding are likewise at stake in Exodus – Numbers. The analogy is stringent. Here is Ran Yunfei:

    Everything they teach you to admire is jiade (fake). Right now they’re pushing Lei Feng (the Communist hero who was a model of selflessness) again. But everyone knows that Lei Feng is made up. All of their model heroes are false: Wang Jie, Liu Wenxue, Lai Ning: fake fake fake. So when they teach morality their teaching tools are fake. Completely fake. After a while the students learn that Lei Feng is a fake. He existed but all the stories are made up. It’s destructive—it destroys everything you’ve been taught. You feel that nothing is real. How can they teach virtues? It’s impossible. The problem is they don’t have a bottom line. There is no bottom line in society. You find out that the things you’re supposed to admire the most are untrue. So it seems nothing is real. So the only way the party can succeed is by cheating you. That becomes their biggest success.

    Exodus-Numbers and the hagiographical literature of the Chinese Communist Party instantiate with equal vigor the genre of ethnocentric ideological narrative. But there is a difference. The exempla of the latter are fake, fake, fake. The exempla of the former ring true, to this day. They are an unvarnished, accurate reflection of the struggles of a chosen people over the long duration.

    The biblical exempla form the basis of elucidatory discourse to this day in synagogues and churches around the globe. The exempla challenge and shape the identity of millions of people. They have done so for a hundred generations and they will do so long as heaven and earth endure. They create true rather than false conscience in those that take the exempla’s message to heart.  

    Not only does the Bible embody a set of assertions about the ways things are. It embodies a set of assertions about the way things are supposed to be. In a recent review, Walter Brueggemann says, “all we have is image and metaphor.” I beg to differ - or perhaps I misunderstand. What we have in the Bible is text which addresses and constitutes a readership by way of truth claims about the ways things are and the way things are supposed to be. 

Related posts

The Search for the Historical Moses
The Historicity of Moses

    I hope the vote is not close. I don’t think it will be. The vote is likely to represent an inflection point in national politics. It may also portend changes that will change the name of the game on the international stage. The writing will be on the wall. I am not convinced that either the Republicans or the Democrats will interpret the results with a clear eye.

    Since I am a member of the editorial board and have a review essay published in the first issue, I answer the question from an insider’s point of view.

    JESOT is a forum for scholars, evangelical and non-evangelical, who wish to make a positive contribution to the evangelical study of the Old Testament. It is not dissimilar in its proof of concept from well-established and highly respected periodicals such as the Jewish Quarterly Review and the Catholic Biblical Quarterly as well as lesser known journals such as Feminist Studies in Religion,  Jahrbuch für evangelikale Theologie, and Protestantesimo. That is, JESOT is a scholarly venue designed for and by scholars with a recognizable set of cultural loyalties.

    For that very reason JESOT runs the risk of seeming to be a tea party to which birds of a different feather are not invited. The opposite is the case. JESOT is open to contributions from scholars whose commitment to an honest quest for truth is on a par with that of scholars of like mind who belong to the global community of hundreds of millions of people commonly characterized by the adjective “evangelical.” Furthermore, as the first issue proves, JESOT is hardly a tea party populated by gentle spirits in their golden years. It is more like a bar scene from the first installment of the Star Wars series. Don’t believe me? Take a look at Douglas Stuart’s feisty review of Victor Hamilton’s Exodus commentary.

    JESOT, with an editorial staff and board populated by numerous bloggers - William R. Osborne (College of the Ozarks); Matthieu Richelle (Faculté Libre de Théologie Évangélique, France); John Hobbins (University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh); Cristian Rata (Torch Trinity Graduate University, South Korea); George Athas (Moore Theological College, Australia); and Charles Halton (Houston Baptist University) - is a quintessential example of open access scholarship. It is available online free of charge. It will also appear in print thanks to the good offices of Wipf & Stock. As it comes out of the gate, the closest competitors to JESOT are the Jahrbuch für evangelikale Theologie (but most of the articles and reviews are in German, and only the TOCS are available online) and Hiphil (available online, but it has stopped publishing). Here’s hoping that JESOT will take things to the next level, and become a journal that reflects the depth and breadth of evangelical scholarship on the Old Testament, the diversity and unity of that scholarship, on all six continents.

    Evangelicals have an almost insatiable appetite for scholarship which contributes to a better understanding of the literature which serves them as an intellectual and spiritual resource of the first order. Evangelical or not, if you hope to be widely read and see your books purchased, it makes sense to publish in what promises to be a widely read, first rate evangelical journal in biblical studies.

    Not long ago, Ronald Hendel let his membership to the Society of Biblical Literature lapse (the BAR editorial in which Hendel announced the move is behind a subscriber firewall at BAR’s site, but is also available on Hendel’s website here and also here; discussion and links here and here). The decision was based on a perception that SBL had lost its commitment to critical inquiry and succumbed to a takeover by “cultural despisers of reason” by which he meant not only “some postmodernists, feminists, and eco-theologians,” but, first and foremost, some evangelicals.

    "The SBL has a commitment to the standards and practices of academic inquiry. The best of the evangelical scholars understand this," Hendel later told Christianity Today. That is true. In particular, it is true of the burgeoning number of evangelicals who are members of SBL. It is also true of the members of the editorial board of JESOT. We get the need for standards and practices of academic inquiry shared by scholars of diverse cultural loyalties.

    Note how Hendel, despite himself, ends up speaking to CT as if he were a spokesman for SBL, an SBL he claimed no longer existed not many months before. Welcome back to the fold, Ron! (He has in fact renewed his SBL membership.) It’s a big tent. There is room for just about everyone.

    JESOT peer reviews submissions in double blind fashion. Should you wish to submit to JESOT, your submission will be evaluated on its merits: (1) the quality of its engagement with a topic of interest to academic biblical scholars; (2) the quality of its interaction with previous work by biblical scholars on the same topic; and (3) the contribution it makes to ongoing debates which invest the world of evangelical biblical scholarship. Not on whether you have a Ph.D. or teach at this or that institution.

    A few comments on the first issue. The articles are diverse in terms of the methodologies they deploy. A strength of two articles, Does Divine Plurality in the Hebrew Bible Demonstrate an Evolution From Polytheism to Monotheism in Israelite Religion? by Michael S. Heiser and Deuteronomy and de Wette: A Fresh Look at a Fallacious Premise by Eugene H. Merrill, is a willingness to take on entrenched viewpoints in the guild. To do so is always a worthy venture.

    On the other hand, I was struck by a lack of engagement in Heiser’s article with a number of relevant contributions. In particular, I was left wondering whether Michael found himself in agreement with the central theses of Jan Assmann’s seminal studies, and what he thought about the engagement of Michael V. Fox and Benjamin D. Sommer with Assmann’s contributions. Assmann, Fox, and Sommer, after all, see monotheism as a revolution rather than as an evolution from polytheism.¹

    I was similarly struck by the lack of engagement in Merrill’s article with the field of comparative law, as if a date for Deuteronomy could be offered without attempting a historical explanation for the differences between comparable laws in the Covenant Code, the Holiness Code, and the Deuteronomic legislation. It makes sense to start with de Wette, and to see him quoted in Latin as Merrill does is a singular satisfaction to this linguist, but it would have been rewarding to go on from there and engage more recent scholars who subscribe, as Merrill would have it, to a fallacious premise. A short list: on the other side of the Atlantic: Georg Braulik; Norbert Lohfink; Lothar Perlitt; Eckart Otto; and Alexander Rofé; on this side of the Atlantic: Bernard Levinson; Jeffrey Tigay; and Moshe Weinfeld.²

    As for the book reviews, they are, with one or two exceptions, incisive and to the point. Puff reviews are a snore. It’s great to see them outnumbered in JESOT by cranky reviews. It is heartwarming to read reviews of a great variety of contributions to academic biblical studies. The reviewed works reflect a wide range of points of view, more often non-evangelical than evangelical in approach.

    JESOT is not a ghetto journal. Nor is the journal about tiptoeing through the tulips. I try to smash a few pieces of furniture myself in the review essay I offer.

Notes 

¹ A Sommer quote from a review of one of Assmann’s books: “Assmann distinguishes between ‘inclusive monotheism,’ which evolves from polytheism as polytheists recognize all the gods to be manifestations of the one God, and ‘exclusive monotheism,’ which rejects the plurality of gods as false and seeks truth in the one God. The former is an evolutionary development within polytheism, while the latter is a revolutionary rejection of polytheism. Assmann asserts that both are evident in Egyptian religion, the former in New Kingdom texts focusing on Amun-Re, the latter in the religion of Akhenaten. Assmann assumes, with considerable justification, that the religion of the Hebrew Bible and classical Judaism displays the exclusivist/revolutionary sort of monotheism. He does not explore the extent to which the inclusivist model is also present in Hebrew scripture and later Judaism (for example, in Jewish mysticism, and in some pre-priestly and pre-Deuteronomic streams of biblical thought).” Fox’s discussion of Assmann is full of insights, but is virtually unknown. Here is a link.

² It is also striking that Merrill fails to at least mention the best recent attempts to situate the origin of Pentateuchal content in the late Bronze Age. No mention, for example, of the studies of Joshua Berman. 

[T]his year I’m going to spend some time with the book that laid the groundwork for my Jewish life— my faded, tattered copy of Egermeier’s Bible Story Book. Although the publishers likely never intended it, the book has become my own profoundly Jewish text, perfect for Shavuot study and reflection. When I read it, I will relive my first experience of Jewish study. I will picture my small blonde head bent over the text, absorbing a lifetime’s worth of lessons from the stories of my people.

    One more cite. It helps explain why the Old Testament speaks to people, and always will, in ways that others may never understand:

[T]hen there was David, my girlhood crush: David the shepherd boy, David the strong and savvy warrior, David the builder, David the flawed but righteous king. No teeny-bopper idol in Tiger Beat magazine could compete. Most of all, I loved David the poet. A weakness of Egermeier’s was that it did not contain my very favorite part of the Bible: the Psalms. So, I kept my RSV Bible at hand to consult after reading about David and gazing at the illustrations of him in Egermeier’s.

    Read the whole thing. There are Jews who feel threatened by the fact that some Jews are becoming messianic (Christian) Jews (and have the gall to continue to keep a kosher table, or keep one for the first time). There are Christians who feel threatened by the fact that some Christians are becoming Jews. Caution is in order, and if we are friends with the people in question, and we ourselves have strong religious convictions, we might pass on very strong words of warning.

    On the other hand, given the fact that people prefer the devil they don't know to the one they already know (I'm trying to be even-handed here, and bracket out the question of God's leading), conversions in all directions are to be expected.

    My household is bilingual. We go back and forth between languages. The girls had been at it for some time. Betta and Paola are fussing over a seated Anna, busy with her hair. The room is sweet with the smell of bath oils and estrogen. I say to Paola, “Che fai?” She answers in English, laughing, “Embrace yourself!”

    We all laugh. We knew she meant “Brace yourself!” [this is going to take the entire day]. “Brace yourself!” translates naturally and simultaneously into “Preparati!”, which back-translates to “Prepare yourself!”

    There would be a problem if “Prepare yourself!” were thought to be a faithful translation of “Brace yourself!” It is a natural translation, but it is not a faithful translation. By “faithful” I mean faithful to the stylistic choices of the original.

    Literary translation, the translation method usually employed for classics, is a style of translation that pays attention to diction. “Prepare yourself!” eliminates the metaphorical freight of “Brace yourself!” From the point of view of diction, “Prepare yourself!” is not an adequate translation of “Brace yourself!” In the kinetic context I reported, full of long arms and dresses and fingers through hair, “Brace yourself!”, with its undertone of “Back off: you have entered the harem,” “Prepare yourself!” is lame compared to “Brace yourself!”

    Both word-for-word and thought-for-thought translations have a way of mangling metaphors. A biblical example is הֶבֶל, meaning “air, breath, vapor” in Hebrew, as used in Qohelet. To translate Qoh 1:2 הבל הבלים word-for-word, “merest breath” (Robert Alter), is inadequate, since the metaphorical freight of “breath” in English is far from identical to that of הבל in Hebrew. It is not better to translate הבל, Q’s master-metaphor, with a non-metaphor, such as “absurd” (Michael Fox). Abstractions are pitiful substitutes for metaphors.

    In each example below, a word-for-word translation is offered first (Alter); a thought-for-thought translation second (NLT 1996); a metaphor-for-metaphor translation third (my translation).

    In Qohelet, הֶבֶל “air” is a master metaphor that stands for things that are devoid of sense. “Crock” is a comparable metaphor in English. In Qoh 11:8, it is not ephemerality (“mere breath”), meaninglessness, or absurdity that is coming. What is coming is crock; specifically, decrepitude, days of darkness, touched on again in 12:4. Life is a crock according to Q, and he speaks from the point of view of a crock, a man who has seen better days.

    It is not a question non-believers necessarily pose, unless they want to aggravate believers. Ayn Rand atheists in particular are convinced that God does not care, and neither should they. Live and let die.

  An ethically responsible way of approaching the question of God’s justice is to turn the question against ourselves. For example, why don’t we do something about human trafficking, since we can?

    Some argue for a ban on the things that feed the appetite for human trafficking: (1) the sale of sex and (2) the sale of illegal drugs. The facts are clear. Pimps prefer workers they can threaten and treat as slaves. Drug dealers prefer sellers they can throw away if caught: illegal aliens, minors bereft of guardians, and hopeless addicts. Some countries, such as Sweden, ban prostitution. Virtually all countries ban the sale of a cornucopia of drugs sought after by pleasure seekers and addicts. The extent to which said bans are effective is limited.

    Others argue that prostitution should be legal like other for-profit enterprises, and taxed based on the sheep-shearing principle (the principle attributed to the Social Democrat Olof Palme, who famously said that the goal of responsible government is not to kill capitalism, but to shear it as one shears sheep). Supposedly that would make life better for prostitutes and their clients, and less profitable for pimps.

    But Janice Reymond points out that “legalization has failed to protect the women in prostitution … [or] decrease … trafficking from other countries.”

    Tolerance and taxation of prostitution have a long history.¹ The taxation of prostitution in Rome was a significant source of revenue for the See of Peter when occupied by Pope Leo X. For many pilgrims, the theory apparently was: what happens in Rome stays in Rome. The theory, of course, rests on the most wishful of foundations. What about the women and men who serviced the pilgrims? What about the diseases they transmitted to third parties?²

    There is no doubt that Jews and Christians in general, past and present, have considered prostitution to be a necessary evil at best, with emphasis on the evil. In a separate post, I plan to discuss the views of Augustine and Aquinas on the subject, since they are often misrepresented.

    My concern in this post is not prostitution per se, but human trafficking. Human trafficking is a pervasive practice in the modern world. It takes many forms, one of which involves the enslavement of women in order to put them to work in the sex-for-money industry. It will continue regardless of how and whether states clamp down on it.  Here and now, what can we do about human trafficking?  

    The answer is obvious. We can redeem the captives, one person at a time.

    Maimonides is our teacher here. If you are a Christian and think Rambam should not be your teacher, you aren't familiar with the words of your teacher par excellence: "The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat. Therefore whatever they tell you to observe, that observe and do" (Matt 23:2). Rambam rules that he who ignores ransoming a captive is guilty of violating mitzvot such as "you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand to your needy kinsman" (Deut 15:7); "you shall not stand by idly while the blood of your fellow man is shed" (Lev 19:16); and "you shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Lev 19:18). He writes that redeeming a captive takes precedence over feeding the poor or clothing them (Hilchot Matanot Aniyim 8:10):

    Not just Rambam, but the Sages in general built Torah on the crowns of the tips of the letters of the cited verses. They developed a policy of redeeming Jews from oppressors with an outlay of significant resources. The outcome is an inveramento, an authentic radicalization, of Torah given through Moses from Mt. Sinai.

    The practical good that authentic radicalization has accomplished is difficult to overestimate. Few will question that good unless they are ignorant of, in recent times, the Soviet Jewry program or the example of Judy Feld Carr.

    There is much to be said for Rambam’s hierarchy of ethical responsibilities. Maimonides himself wrote letters, discovered among the manuscripts in the Cairo Genizah, exhorting his fellow Jews to ransom captives. He collected money to that end. As David Golinkin notes in his animated defense of the redemption of Jewish captives for more than they are worth, Jews did precisely that in ancient times.

    Apart from a celebrated case or two, why then do Jews and Christians invest so little in securing the release of captives? It is as if they too subscribe to a “live and let die” philosophy.

    I have friends who have dedicated their lives to freeing captives of the prostitution industry, one person at a time. Their names: Jason and Lorraine. They have been at it less than a year in Austria, a hub of international prostitution. They have already helped a trafficked woman out of coerced prostitution. She is from Nigeria, is now 20 years old, and had been forced to work as a prostitute for two years. After various setbacks, at a fork in the road, as Jason recounts it, she makes a statement of faith:

She says she wants to get out of prostitution and she tells us she’s ready to testify against her trafficker. She’s scared, very scared. The police tell her she’s lying. The process is long and complicated and messy, fraught with danger and uncertainty, but she goes through with it and names the trafficker. She’s finally FREE! Now [she] is living in Vienna waiting for asylum. She needs food, a job, housing, emotional healing and everything else you can imagine a victim of trafficking would need at this point. She’s starting her life over though, and this is exciting.

For background on the challenging work of creating an anti-trafficking network (ATN), the articles in this issue of “Go East” are helpful. If anyone would like to contribute to the work of Jason and Lorraine and the ATN to which they are connected, do not hesitate to email me.

Notes 

¹ The amount of slipshod research in the field is, truth to be told, enormous. Do not trust what you read unless you have verified it after spending time with the primary sources. A grasp of a diverse set of interpretive approaches to the sources is also essential if missteps are to be avoided. The detailed and source-conscious research of Michelle Laughran is exemplary. A remarkable but widely neglected essay by Henry Ansgar Kelly, “Bishop, Prioress, and Bawd in the Stews of Southwark,” Speculum 75 (2000) 342-388, debunks one half-baked theory after another (pdf available on request).

² The taxation of prostitution in pre-counter Reformation papal Rome is reminiscent of the same in Imperial Rome; for the latter, see Thomas A. J. McGinn, Prostitution, Sexuality, and the Law in Ancient Rome (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

    The premier example of the Moshe Held principle involves the interpretation of the grammar of Gen 1:1-3: following the discovery of Enuma Elish (“When on high …”) and the Atrahasis Epic (“When the gods were like men …”), the interpretation of Gen 1:1-2 (“When God began to create”) as stage-setting for the first mainline event of Gen 1, “God said, ‘Let there be light’” (Gen 1:3), a view already advanced by Rashi, became more plausible.

    A host of modern interpreters, with or without knowledge or dependence on the discoveries, and with or without knowledge of Rashi’s interpretation, construe likewise: among others, Heinrich Ewald, Max Geiger, Karl Budde, William Foxwell Albright, Otto Eissfeldt, Siegfried Herrmann, Harry M. Orlinsky, Ephraim A. Speiser, and Francis I. Andersen. I describe the “new-old” understanding of Gen 1:1-3, with which I concur, in a “Technical Note” here. Robert Holmstedt offers an analysis in terms of a type of relative clause: go here and here for online discussion.

    For a discussion of rabbinic interpretations of the passage in question, see Peter Schäfer, “Berēšit bārā ‘Elōhīm. Zur Interpretation von Gen 1:1 in der rabbinischen Literatur,” JSJ 2 (1971) 161–66. On this view, Gen 1:1-3 finds its closest analogues in Gen 2:4b-7 and Hos 1:4. For variations on this understanding which however miss the fact that the wayyiqtol marks the matrix clause or mainline event, see Ibn Ezra and, among moderns, Paul Humbert, "Trois Notes sur Genèse I," Interpretationes ad Vetus Testamentum Pertinentes Sigmundo Mowinckel Septuagenario Missae ( = NTT 56 [1955]; Nils A. Dahl and Arvid S. Kapelrud, eds.; Olso: Forlaget Land og Kirche, 1955) 85-96 (ET here), repr. in idem, Opuscules d'un hébraïsant (Mémoires de l'université de Neuchâtel 26; Neuchâtel: Secrétariat de l'université; 1958) 193-203; idem, “Encore le premier mot de la Bible: à propos d'un article de M Walther Eichrodt,” ZAW 76 (1964) 121–31; and Walter Gross, “Syntaktische Erscheinungen am Anfang althebräischer Erzählungen: Hintergrund und Vordergrund,“ in Congress Volume: Vienna (John A. Emerton, ed.; VTSup 32; Leiden: Brill, 1981) 131-145. For the alternative view that Gen 1:1 represents an independent clause, see John H. Walton, Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2011) 123-127, and bibliography cited. I thank James Spinti for sending me a PDF of Walton’s important volume. If blog readers show interest in a review of Walton’s volume, I may very well oblige.

¹ Daniel Bodi, The Demise of the Warlord: A New Look at the David Story (Hebrew Bible Monographs 26; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2010) 4, cited by Jeremy Hutton in a review.  

    The press release is riddled with statements and conjectures that are unlikely to stand the test of time. Todd Bolen takes issue with this press release statement:

The biblical tradition presents the people of Israel as conducting a cult different from all other nations of the ancient Near East by being monotheistic and an-iconic (banning human or animal figures). However, it is not clear when these practices were formulated, if indeed during the time of the monarchy (10-6th centuries BC), or only later, in the Persian or Hellenistic eras.

Bolen pushes back:

In other words, the presence of cultic material outside of Jerusalem challenges the biblical claim that Israelites worshipped only one God in one place. But there is no such biblical claim. Scripture is very clear that though the Lord commanded the Israelites to worship only at the central altar (Deut 12), the Israelites perennially failed to keep this command. … What discoveries like these from Qeiyafa show is not that monotheism evolved only late in Israel’s history but that God’s covenant people failed to worship in the prescribed way, just as the Bible records.

    The trouble with Bolen’s pushback is that the prescriptions of Deut 12 as usually interpreted (it’s about time that Adam Welch’s work is dusted off and read again; go here) and the cult centralization program initiated under King Josiah stand in contradiction to prescriptions found in Exod 20:21-22 (“in every place”). It is not a question of prescription in contradiction with description. It is a question of prescription in contradiction with prescription. Given Exod 20:21, it comes as no surprise that an 8th cent. BCE prophet like Amos demonstrates no awareness of a “one place of worship” rule. His critique of goings-on at Bethel, Gilgal, Dan, and Beersheba has nothing to do with a “one place of worship” rule.

     George Athas on his part takes issue with the ark of God nonsense. Then he turns around and offers speculation that is no better grounded:

The most likely explanations for this state of affairs [the fact of the single stratum at KQ datable with some plausibility to ca. 1000 BCE] are that either there was a localised authority in the Shephelah region (cf. David Ussishkin’s perspective), or someone up in the highlands of Judah had a hand in this. Are the spotlights converging on us finding the kingdom of David in archaeology? Well, if there was a House of David (which I argue is another name for Jerusalem) that could be a player on the international stage in c.800 BC as per the Tel Dan Inscription, and there is an organising authority in the Valley of Elah in c.1000 BC, it’s not inconceivable that the two entities could end up aligning, such that we eventually have some strong evidence for a Kingdom of Judah in the time of David and Solomon.

What? Now we have two entities? The House of David is another name for Jerusalem? Hurowitz (fifth comment on the thread) calls him on it: “I think both you and Yossi have gone overboard.”

    What should we conclude in the wake of the finds of Khirbet Qeiyafa? The best anyone can do is offer controlled speculation of the kind that clearly distinguishes premises and conclusions. I herewith offer my own controlled speculation in interaction with that of Sanders, Suriano, and Vayntrub, whose post is the most substantial to appear so far.

    SSV note first of all that the press release’s claims about the new discoveries might easily be characterized as “exaggerated, self-contradictory,” “fundamentalist,” and “hasty.” As if the claims were designed to launch sales of a new book about KQ, Footprints of King David.  It is hard to argue with SSV on this score.

    SSV go on to note:

if the new object is a temple model from around 1000 BCE, and Judahite, it suggests people here were already aware of, and perhaps worshipped in, temples before the Jerusalem one. This is the world that was drawn on, and rearranged, to produce Samuel and Kings' memories of an earlier Jerusalem

    But it would be more accurate to say that (premise 1) if the 1000 BCE date for the Iron Age I terminal/Iron Age IIA initial stratum of KQ with which the inscription, the gates, the clay shrines, and the other blockbuster finds are associated is correct, and (premise 2) if KQ is a Judahite site, both reasonable but not indisputable premises, the world said stratum at KQ presents to us was, to conclude, that “drawn on, and rearranged, to produce Samuel and Kings' memories of” realities in ancient Israel before Solomon built a temple in Jerusalem.

    SSV go on to note:

if the excavators are right in dating it [the said stratum and associated finds; in particular, the inscription] so late -- against the paleography and probably the pottery -- it shows that the writer of Qeiyafa was nearly contemporary with, but separate from the standar[d]ized scribal culture that spread from the Phoenician coast to Israel and Judah.

    However, one might just as well note that (premise 1) if the stratum and associated finds, including the inscription, reflect the culture of a perimeter site of a polity which ran from Beersheba in the south to Beth-Shemesh to the north, the center of which and eastern limits of which cannot be pinned down on the basis of archaeological finds alone, a polity that (premise 2) contended with another, that of the Philistines, another polity for which we would not have a name if we did not credit biblical literature with at least some degree of accuracy in terms of its passed-down cultural memories relative to a time frame with a conceivable lower limit of 970 BCE, both reasonable but not indisputable premises, said finds, including the inscription, are compatible with the notion that, to conclude, a standardized scribal culture did not spread from the Phoenician coast to the aforementioned non-Philistine and non-Canaanite polity before the reign of King Solomon (or someone with a different name who did things similar to those attributed to him in the Bible).

    Why will some scholars balk at the formulations just offered? Some scholars, Israel Finkelstein in primis, are heavily invested in a theoretical framework in which the biblical sequence Saul-David-Solomon is deliberately called into question. Fine. Bring it on. But many others, with greater justification in my judgment, will counter that the Saul-David-Solomon sequence and the specific cultural transitions the sequence implies is one of the things biblical tradition is unlikely to have gotten completely wrong.

    My take: the finds from KQ Yossi Garfinkel and his team continue to present to the public with great fanfare are boring. They are compatible with biblical traditions about the time period in question. They also fail to confirm those traditions in the sense of proving that, for example, someone named Saul based in the northern highlands contested the Philistines, only to be succeeded by someone named David based for a time in Hebron and then in Jerusalem, to be succeeded by someone named Solomon who developed organic ties with the Phoenicians of Tyre and endowed Jerusalem with a state-sponsored temple.

    NOTE: A number of statements I make in this post will be hard to follow by anyone who has not read the relevant bibliography by Kang and Garfinkel, and the relevant articles by Singer-Avitz and Finkelstein in recent issues of Tel Aviv. Those who want pdfs of said articles are free to email me and ask for them. Further background reading, with bibliography, is available at Avi Faust's place. Note especially his article entitied "The Archaeology of the Israelite Cult." For Nadav Naaman's (far from convincing, but interesting) take on the recent finds, go here. For comment by qualified archaeologists, check out Aren Maeir here, and Owen Chesnut here.

    Jonathan Paradise has been kind enough to allow me to include here a pdf of the text of a lovely poem by Amichai, with commentary by him. The poem is the latest example of a weekly poetry column Paradise has put together for some time. If you would like to receive a Hebrew “Poem of the Week” with commentary from Paradise, email him at the address provided on his University of Minnesota faculty page, where he teaches in the Classics and Near Eastern Studies department.

    Cristian Rata (evedyahu) remarks that in many cases “dismissed professors knew that they were stepping outside the confessional statements they signed (or assented to) when they got hired.” When this happens, it is the duty of the institution’s administrators to protect the institution’s commitment to a particular confession and affiliated religious polities. Hurtado replies to Scot McKnight’s defense of the idea of a Christian college/university by agreeing that “Christian institutions have the right to maintain their religious integrity, including core faith-and-ethical commitments. But there are cases I know where issues not a part of the terms of employment, not clearly a feature of any faith-statement, have led to the summary dismissal of academic staff.” That is a key distinction. John Stackhouse notes that faculty at a state university do not always appreciate the contribution of avowedly evangelical or Christian faculty to public and academic debate. Stackhouse himself came close to being drummed out of the corps for the crime of being an evangelical Christian.

    Deane (Galbraith, whom many know from his blogging as NT Wrong, at Equinox, and at the Dunedin School) suggests that “True intellectual debate can never have limitations agreed in advance, whether the ‘secular’ or ‘Christian’ limitations you [Hurtado] mention. Conversely, to the extent that there are any such limitations, these institutions fail to be academic, and indeed compromise the entire endeavour. Some institutions fail in this regard to a greater extent than others, of course – such as those institutions which require faculty members to limit themselves to intellectual positions which are rightly considered absurd (e.g. esp. the profession of biblical inerrancy).”

    I profess to what Galbraith considers absurd, and am proud of it. Still, I agree with him that true intellectual debate requires a forum in which a wide spectrum of views is accorded a hearing. But the fact of the matter is that at most universities a wide spectrum of views on given topics does not find expression. Some views are heavily promoted, others squelched or caricatured. With exceptions, state and private universities alike tend to be good at protecting the freedom of expression of some faculty but not others, and to look kindly on some points of view, academic, political, religious, gender theory wise, and not others.

    The litmus test in my view is not whether a given institution contains within itself the widest possible spectrum of viewpoints on any given topic (though some universities model this ideal, to at least some extent). The litmus test revolves around the capacity of an academic interlocutor (individual or collective) to interact with positions she or he rejects with fairness and perspicacity.

    I have no reason to doubt that Hurtado is reacting to actual examples of academic injustice and shameful cowardice, even if he does not offer actual examples. But it would be more useful to discuss examples on the public record, both at state and private universities. 

“I have a lot more faith in the American criminal justice system than I do in Saudi Arabia’s ‘art therapy’ program.” - Charles Johnson.

I would add, sadly, “not by terribly much.”