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SBL Mid-Atlantic Region Call for Papers

Posted on by Brooke

It’s a call for papers!

The Mid-Atlantic Region of the Society of Biblical Literature will have their annual meeting March 11-12, 2010, in New Brunswick NJ.

Any member of SBL may propose a paper, regardless of their region.

That’s not even all the good news: the annual meeting will include a plenary address by Benjamin Sommer, professor in Bible and Ancient Semitic Languages at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Dr. Kenton Sparks (Biblical Studies, Eastern University) will give the presidential address.

Beginning Blogging in Biblical Studies: Suggestions

Posted on by Brooke

Among the collaborative projects I’m assigning my introductory students this fall is blogging. (They’ll also participate in a course wiki, and do in-class collaborative work). Blogging will be mandatory, and graded. Besides a rubric for the assignment, I also wish to give them suggestions about academic blogging: what makes blogging appropriate for biblical studies and for an introductory course in Hebrew Bible?

This is my first draft. What suggestions can you offer for improvement?

Suggestions for Beginning Blogging in Biblical Studies. There is overlap between these suggestions, and the divisions are somewhat artificial. But, for the student who is still trying to learn to keep her writing within the bounds of “biblical studies,” they offer some guidelines to help stay on track.


  • Summary: Summarize some resource: a chapter from the textbook; a lecture or part of a lecture; a hypothesis concerning some topic. A summary should have balance: its proportions should reflect those of its source. A summary should have a neutral point of view: it is not a review or a critique. Reading your summary, the author of the source would agree that you depict her work accurately and in terms she recognizes as her own.

  • Integration: Try to integrate some new piece of knowledge with concepts you already feel you control. For example, maybe you’ve just learned about the literary genre “saga,” and you want to integrate it into what you already know about form criticism. Often, you will modify what you already think you know in order to integrate new data.

  • Synthesis: There are two or more things that you’ve learned separately, and you are trying to bring them into a single coherent picture. What does X have to do with Y? Or X and Y with Z? What does the Judean “royal theology” have to do with post-exilic messianic expectations, and what (if anything) do the two have to do with apocalyptic? What do the “complaint psalms” have to do with the “dissenting wisdom” of Ecclesiastes, and what (if anything) do the two have to do with hypothetical Israelite scribal schools? This sort of work might be tentative, provisional, even speculative, but it should be clear about its line of reasoning and where its warrants are grounded in concrete evidence.

  • Assessment: Here, you assess a piece of work in light of our own norms and methods of critical inquiry as they take shape in our course over the term. Suppose you’ve read an outsider’s blog entry or seen a YouTube video, and that work makes claims about the Bible or about the Bible’s historical context. Would that work pass muster in our class? Why or why not? Could its conclusions be sustained with moderate revisions to its arguments, or is it hopelessly wrong in its factual accuracy or lines of reasoning? (Your assessment should include an element of summary, according to our canons for summary described above.)

  • Reflection: Here, you bring some aspect of your recent learning into conversation with your own habitual worldview or ways of talking about things. Treat it very much like “integration” above. Keep a profession tone. Avoid stream of consciousness, spiritual autobiography, and inappropriate self-disclosure. This mode should not dominate your blogging, but in proportion it can resolve tensions, enhance collaboration, and spark fresh ideas for you and others.


O readers: What sorts of additions might you make to these suggestions? What revisions, whether for clarity or otherwise? What sorts of blogging would you like your introductory students to be able to do?

Barack Hussein Obama Anti-Christ Video Debunked. Sigh.

Posted on by Brooke

Debunking dishonest Bible-woo is tiresome (but not hard: this post took me less than 75 minutes from conception to Publish), but has to be done. Let's be clear: the maker of this video starts with the conclusion he wishes to reach (that the President is the “antichrist” [whatever that is, which is a topic for another day]). He then commits whatever sleight-of-hand and misdirection is necessary to work backward from that conclusion to an impressive-sounding biblical basis. We'll link the video, then take it step by step.

[Update, 2011/01/18: the original poster has removed the video. You can still find a version of it here, with some attempts at bolstering the video’s claims.]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXMAnlMmEPw]

“I will report the facts.” Nearly of these “facts” are false:

“Jesus spoke these words originally in Aramaic…” This is not known. It may be that Jesus preached both in Aramaic and in the Greek of the New Testament. If he did preach in Aramaic, there is no reason to be optimistic about our ability to retrovert the Greek of the gospels into that alleged Aramaic original. Imagine giving an English translation of Don Qixote to twelve English-speaking scholars who had never heard Spanish spoken by a native, and having them all retrovert the English translation to the original Spanish. Know how many completely different “originals” you’d get? That’s right: twelve.

“…which is the oldest form of Hebrew.” No, it isn’t. Aramaic doesn’t precede Hebrew. They are sibling languages, with significant differences in vocabulary, morphology, and grammar. So, speaking in Hebrew is not “much the same way” as the way Jesus would have spoken Aramaic.

“…from the heights, or from the heavens.” Nice try: the speaker has substituted “heights” (in order to get to bamah, the word he wants to use) for “heavens” (shamayim, a word he wants to get away from because shamayim sounds nothing like “Barack Obama”). The argument from this point is not based on Jesus’ words (in any language), but on a paraphrase that the speaker finds convenient.

(We could stop here: Now that we see that the groundwork comprises crippling falsehoods, it is clear that anything built on it is pointless. We’ll continue anyway, just for the exercise.)

“…from Strong’s Hebrew Dictionary.” As Bryan mentioned on Facebook, When someone grounds their argument in the use of Strong’s concordance/dictionary, they are saying, “I do not know any Hebrew. Do not trust anything I say on the topic.” Strong’s is a tool designed for people who do not know Hebrew.

Baraq is the Hebrew word for lightning: this is a fact. It has nothing to do with the name of our President, but baraq does mean “lightning.” Barack, our President’s name, is Swahili, and related to Hebrew Berekh, “to bless.” (Think of the better known form, Barukh, “blessed.”) In other words, why would a speaker of Hebrew (or Aramaic, or Greek) would use the word “lightning” to evoke the Swahili (or Arabic) name, Barak = “blessed/blessing”?

Isaiah 14: No mention of Satan here: Isaiah is plainly talking about the king of Babylon, whom he compares to the mythic “Daystar, son of Dawn.” He says so [ref. added: Isa 14:4]. But, the Jesus of the gospel Luke may be evoking Isaiah when he says that he “saw Satan falling as lightning from the heavens,” so I’ll give this a pass.

Isa 14:14: “I will ascend above the heights of the clouds.” That’s right: the word “heights” (which, you’ll recall, Jesus does not use anyway) is not associated with the falling of the Daystar, but with his (planned but not certainly achieved) ascent. Also, the “heights” are plural: the phrase is bamotê-ʿab, “the heights of the cloud.” Hear it? Not bamah, but bamotê.

“Some scholars use the O [to transliterate the conjunction waw].” No, they don’t, because it is never, never pronounced “O.” The prefixed conjunction we- or wa- becomes u- in biblical Hebrew when it precedes a bilabial consonant (b, m, p) or any consonant followed by the shewa, or half vowel (Cĕ-; think of the first vowel in a casual pronunciation of “America” or “aloof”). It is never o-. Sorry, but never.

“…or, ‘lightning from the heights.’” Okay, in the second place, the conjunction never means “from.” Hebrew (or Aramaic) has a preposition for that. The phrase baraq u-bamah (not o-bamah) will mean, “lightning and a height” (whatever the heck that is; also remember that baraq has nothing to do with “Barack”). The phrase will never, never mean “lightning from the heights.” Sorry, but never. (And in the first place, remember, Jesus never even said, “lightning from the heights.” He said, “lightning from the heavens,” which is why all this stuff about “heights” is pointless.)

Conclusion: if a Jewish rabbi today, influenced by Isaiah, were to say the words of Jesus in Luke 10:18 (seriously: why would our rabbi do this?), he would not say, “Barakh Obama.” He would not even say, baraq u-bama. Or baraq u-bamoth (lightning and heights). If he means to use Jesus’ words, he would not even say, baraq min-habbamoth (lightning from the heights). I suppose he might (might) say, baraq min-hashamayim (lightning from the heavens). So now you know why our secret Muslim president’s Arabic Kenyan birth certificate remains hidden in a clandestine madrassah in the Lincoln Bedroom: because on it, you will indeed find the true name of the antichrist…

(oh, wait, neither Isaiah, Luke, or even Revelation [or Daniel, if you care] use the word “antichrist”: it is used in the letters of John as a generic term for “unbelievers”)

…Baraq Min-Hashamayim.

If you want to see some other debunking, go see Mark Chu-Carroll at Good Math Bad Math, Michael Heiser at PaleoBabble, Bryan at Hevel, and James McGrath at Exploring Our Matrix. Each of them adds some additional arguments that I don't make here.

Promises to Keep

Posted on by Brooke

(Btw, you will have heard it elsewhere already, but Biblical Studies Carnival 44 has erected its tents and opened for admission over at Jim West’s place.)

Every now and then, in order to keep a post under a thousand words or so, I’ve thrown out a promise to flesh some idea out more fully in the future. Here, I’m going back to try to list some of those outstanding promises.


  • “Being a Student” series: I offered suggestions for students planning to ask for letters of reference, and said I would occasionally offer similar posts on “being a student.” I’ve done a bit, and may step up that series as we get into the academic year.

  • I have…several…times…used…the…term “woo,” a term used by science bloggers and atheist bloggers to describe instances of pseudoscientific claims and arguments. At least once, I have promised to devote a post to justifying the term “Bible woo.” I keep deferring the post, because it calls for some fairly serious platform-building, including 1) distinguishing evidentiary “biblical studies” from devotional “Bible study”; 2) establishing how historical studies and literary criticism sit among the sciences; 3) figuring out how not to have to bring in an explanation of modernism and post-modernism if it can be avoided by any means; 4) distinguishing unsuccessful but methodologically sound “biblical studies” from fraudulently-conceived, pseudoscientific “Bible woo.”

  • In a related vein, I once suggested that the dichotomy “science v. religion” might profitably be swapped out for the distinction between “literal speech and figurative speech.” That is, if religious speech would try to be more clear about whether it means to be literal (and therefore falsifiable) or figurative (and therefore subject to the different critical canons of literary art), then much of the “science v. religion” conflict is sidestepped. My one post on the topic addressed a particular news item (Obama’s nomination of Francis Collins as Director of National Institutes of Health). I would like to write a follow-up post that fills in the argument that I started there.

  • These two are promises I’ve made to myself in the form of drafts or outlines: I would like to write a post about how we users decide what new technologies or platforms are for (“What is Twitter For?”); and I would like to further promote awareness of iTunes U and YouTube/Edu by featuring particular items from time to time.

  • As SBL gets closer and my fall teaching progresses, I will be testing out ideas about my paper topic: How strategies in distance learning contribute to the brick-and-mortar classroom.


By writing this post, I don’t mean that I’m going to drop everything until every item is neatly scratched off with a fine point pen. In fact, August (with class preparation amping up into high gear) might not even be the most fruitful time for the careful thinking that these plans ask for. But, it puts my loose ends of yarn into one basket here at my elbow.

What of these plans, if anything, would you like to see taking shape first? What other kinds of posts would you like to see more of?

Bloggers at SBL, and Tweetup Tweeting

Posted on by Brooke

Daniel and Tonya had the terrific idea of compiling a list of bloggers presenting at the annual meeting of the SBL (Society of Biblical Literature). The meeting is always the weekend before Thanksgiving (U.S.), and takes place this year in New Orleans. Thanks for this resource!

Speaking of SBL, there have been occasional rumblings of an SBL Tweet-up for Tweeple who, well, go to SBL. To my knowledge, it is still at the “let’s keep in touch on this” stage. I recently revived the hashtag #SBLTweetup, so keep an eye on that tag and we’ll see what develops. Me, I think the most logical venue is Jim West’s hotel room. :^) (Jim, I’m probably with you on Twitter in the pews, if only because thumb-typing while crossing yourself sounds ludicrous and even dangerous.)

[Later: I should add that, confusingly, the initialism “SBL” is already used on Twitter for “Spam Block List” and some other things that I don’t know what they are.]

It’s never too soon to get amped about a long weekend of…well, why reveal our society’s hidden mysteries? Come to New Orleans and see what there is to get amped about.

Seven Biblioblogs I Make Sure to Read

Posted on by Brooke

You can get the history on this meme from Chris Heard. John Anderson asks which seven biblioblogs we actually read most often (so, not necessarily favorites). I point out that the question is complicated by the fact that not everybody posts at the same rate. It is also complicated by the fact that I follow a lot of darned blogs. So, these are the seven that, if I’ve got 185 unread posts in my NetVibes feed and not enough time to really catch up, I make sure to read these.


  • Akma’s Random Thoughts. Besides being a friend and example, Akma has always been, and will continue to be, my liaison to even other smart people with good ideas: Michael Wesch and David Weinberger alone have changed many of the ways I think about my vocation, and I first gave them a hearing simply because Akma seemed to think it a good idea.

  • Higgaion. Chris Heard’s was one of the first Bible-related blogs that I discovered. My current rubrics for research papers are in direct descent from his grading flow chart, and who can thank him enough for his series on The Exodus Decoded? As one of the centurions was heard to exclaim,


Others Chris saved (from having to produce a point-by-point refutation to Jacobovici’s migraine-inducing woo-fest); himself he could not save!


  • Abnormal Interests. Duane, I don’t want to encourage you in your unseemly hero-worship, but here’s an anecdote you might like. I found Mark Twain’s short story “About Barbers,” and liked it so much I read it aloud to my wife Michelle. After I read it, I asked her if she could guess the author from the prose style. Without hesitating she ventured, “Akma?”
    Shoppers who like Abnormal Interests may also enjoy Karyn Traphagan’s Boulders 2 Bits, Charles Halton’s Awilum and C. Jay Crisostomo’s mu-pàd-da.

  • Hevel. Bryan is a friend, classmate, and fellow backpacker. Like Akma and Chris, Bryan does the work, so I don’t have to: if Bryan wants to figure out open-access education and Macintosh productivity software in his limited spare time, I should reinvent those wheels? Also, he’s a genuinely good person, so when social convention insists I pass as one I sometimes can just try to do like Bryan (but with a Chicago accent) and hope for the best.

  • Exploring Our Matrix. I wasn’t raised in a conservative biblical tradition, but I teach many students who are. So, I have to seek out conversations that are critical aware and which engage thoughtfully the concerns of biblical maximalist readers. James McGrath is critical, generous, and his comment threads draw controversy like a post-diluvian sacrifice draws gods.
    Shoppers who like Exploring Our Matrix may also like Doug Mangum’s Biblia Hebraica and Art Boulet’s finitum non capax infiniti.

  • Ancient Hebrew Poetry. Always keep up on John Hobbins, except when I find a certain critical mass of Italian, whereupon I simply stare for a few seconds and nod sagely in case anyone is watching. I wish more translators would “work out loud” like John does.
    Shoppers who like Ancient Hebrew Poetry may also enjoy Philip Sumpter’s Narrative and Ontology.

  • בלשנות Balshanut. It’s not easy being a lazy semiticist: so much to read, so little time budgeted for keeping informed. Pete Bekins makes the impossible possible by reporting on his reading with detail and clarity. Like Chris Heard above, Pete does the work, so I don’t have to.
    Shoppers impressed that Pete Bekins, Art Boulet, Charles Halton, Karyn Traphagan, Philip Sumpter, and C. Jay Crisostomo accomplish so much blogging as students will also enjoy these other students with high-quality blogs: Adam Couturier at משלי אדם mišlê-ʾadam, John Anderson at Hesed we-ʾemet, Brandon Wason’s Sitz im Leben, and probably other student biblioblogs as well (thanks to Daniel and Tonya).


What seven biblioblogs do you make time for when time is short? (And what student biblioblogs are you reading?) If you take up John’s meme, trackback, ping, or link to this post so I can be sure to see it!

Discourse Approach to BH Verbs (Balshanut)

Posted on by Brooke

Pete Bekins (בלשנות Balshanut) has provisionally completed—in only about one month’s time—an eight-part teaching and learning series on “A Discourse Approach to the BH Verbal System.”

The series does not have its own unique tag, though a Wordpress search for Pete’s tag “Semitic Verbal System” gets you the series and lots of other Balshanut posts in that larger vein. So, I link here each of the posts, for anybody who missed some or who would like to start from the beginning.


Take your time and have fun. I’ll be making sure that my intermediate Hebrew students are aware of the series.

Five Primary Sources

Posted on by Brooke

Looks like Kevin is the one who got the ball rolling on this meme. DanielandTonya, while kindly stopping by to see my “Five Books or Scholars” post, invited my response to this one. [Whups: also tagged by Adam.] I like the idea, I just wish it were easier to narrow things down. As before, Duane’s Caveat applies: this is the list you get today. Ask me tomorrow, you’ll likely get a whole different list (like one with Sinuhe in it!).

Ugaritic Baʿlu cycle (with Bryan): the characterization and activity of Baʿl and ʾEl just wonderfully illuminate many (most?) of the ways that the God of Israel is represented throughout the Hebrew Bible in his several hats (warrior, fertility god, judge, lawgiver, king, god of the father). What is more, the several conflicts of the monarchic period—temple or tent; dynastic succession or prophetic legitimation; centralized authority or local control—all are better understood in the light of this material.

Zakkur and Mesha inscriptions: yeah, I’m cheating by lumping some favorites into pairs. I put these together because they both show in Israel’s neighbors the belief that the king or people has a special relationship with the god, and that the god intervenes decisively in history on behalf of the king or people. The devotee of Baalshamayn and Chemosh, as much as that of YHWH, experiences the protective love of the god for the god’s own people.

Hammurapi: both for the prologue and the laws. I love how the prologue illuminates elements of the royal theology: that the god takes the king by the hand, and the human king imitates the divine king by protecting the weak from the strong, the poor from the rich. (You also get this about Marduk in Enuma Elish, right?) And of course the laws continue to raise excellent questions about the genre of the biblical law codes, particularly about their setting and function.

Jubilees, 1 Enoch 1–36: overlap with Jim here. Who can help but love these early co-readers of the Bible? Like us, they read with care the details of the biblical text at hand (like Gen 5:24; or Gen 6:1-4; or Gen 22), and like us, they found themselves saying, “Now, what the…?”

Kuntillet Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom: again I’m with Bryan here. Whether Asherah is imagined as a consort of YHWH or no, the symbol is associated with eighth-century goddess worship that likely descends contiguously from that known from earlier iconography.

Have you not yet been tagged on this meme? You have now.

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Nominate Posts for June Biblical Studies Carnival

Posted on by Brooke

Remember to nominate posts for the next Biblical Studies Carnival.

Have you saved any bookmarks this month at Delicious or Diigo, in your browser Bookmarks, or in a clippings folder? Been moved to comment somewhere? If a June post anywhere has gotten you thinking, then nominate it for the carnival so others can get down on it as well.

Instructions for submitting posts are at Tyler’s site. Here is the most recent carnival so you can see what one looks like.

Follow-up: Milestone Women in Biblical Studies

Posted on by Brooke

A short while back, I asked who you would include in a list of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament scholars who are women. In most cases, readers’ comments concerned the scholar’s landmark contributions to the field. In some cases, a choice was rooted more in the personal experience that a reader has had of a colleague, mentor, or teacher.

I began to annotate the list, but that not only got out of hand (=showed my ignorance), it also became all too controlling and editorial. So instead, I offer one link per figure: a faculty page or Wikipedia where possible, an Amazon or similar page where necessary: whatever is ready to hand that offers some starting information.

(Why do schools’ web sites hide their faculty pages so cleverly? Why do so many faculty lack a web page altogether, being relegated instead to cluttered, pointless, hyperlink-less lists? Why do so many academic sites bubble with enthusiasm for events that are “coming up” in 2006?)

Anyway: If you are aware of a better link for any of these folks, speak up in a comment and I’ll make additions.


Thank you all for your input. Don’t be shy about adding others in the comments, and let me know if I can improve the list with better links.

Dealing with DeWette: Evaluating Bias and Evidence in Biblical Studies

Posted on by Brooke

You know what my favorite thing is about blogs? Comments. By which I mean, “commenters.” A comment thread is sometimes no more than a string of unconnected exclamations or diatribes, but at best, the comments to a blog post take a genuinely interactive course and add some serious value to even the best of posts. When authors devote the same kind of care to their comments as they would to their own blog posts, sure, they add value to their own name, or “brand,” since they often (but not always) are linked to their own blogs or profiles. But more, they add value to the posts to which they comment, unpaid and (outside of the small circles who do this “web” “log” thing), unacknowledged.

I woke up this morning to belatedly discover a short exchange on DeWette, a biblical source critic who preceded the better-known Julius Wellhausen. Kevin Edgecomb finds himself rightly appalled at the anti-Judaic biases that have animated Protestant biblical scholarship, especially early source criticism. Briefly, his commenters judge that, while Kevin is correct in discerning bias, he has not made his case that a) DeWette’s source-critical conclusions lack evidentiary support, and that b) later biblical scholars have uncritically preserved DeWette’s (or Wellhausen’s) conclusions and ignored the anti-Judaic biases with which those scholars approached the biblical evidence. Doug Mangum has posted a response and a follow-up.

On the one hand, Kevin is doing exactly what he should be doing: reading the early source critics with a hermeneutic of suspicion (self-link). How do their arguments and conclusions reflect their anti-Judaic (and for that matter, anti-Roman Catholic, anti-ritual) biases? How does the rhetoric of their arguments and conclusions seek to reproduce those biases in the reader? Terribly important questions, these.

On the other hand, I’d argue that Kevin’s initial post dismisses DeWette’s conclusions without addressing his use of evidence and line of reasoning. Doug brought up the “intentional fallacy,” and I would further specify the fallacy of “poisoning the well”: the fallacious idea is that, once DeWette has been brought into (deserved or undeserved) ill repute, we can just assume that his arguments are inconsequential. Finally, Kevin makes the rather sweeping claim that later biblical source criticism has willfully ignored the plain biases in the work of its predecessors. In other words, he argues that while he reads DeWette with a hermeneutic of suspicion, biblical scholars on the whole (who agree with DeWette on dating the core of Deuteronomy to the 7th century) have not done so.

I call attention to the comments to these three posts, because they represent the kind of conversation typical of strong scholars concerning this procedural issue. How do we acknowledge the biases of our forebears (once recognized as such) while still engaging in our continuing work their use of evidence and their lines of reasoning?

It is essential that we model “best practices” in this regard, because our own students and their students will learn from our example and read us accordingly when our own biases, invisible to us, come to be recognized. On the matter of bias and evidence, as on any matter, as we comment, in such a mode can we look forward to being commented on.

A Little Help: Milestone Women in Biblical Studies

Posted on by Brooke

What women would you include in a list of major figures in the study of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament? In particular, who are among the movers and shakers: critical scholars whose work must be taken into consideration by anyone approaching their subject matter?

I invite you to be as subjective and idiosyncratic as you like in your proposals. Nobody has to defend their choices, though by all means describe your reasons as you like.

I ask because I am drafting up some reading lists to use as a resource for designing some courses and for revising courses I already teach. I don’t want to limit myself to the women scholars toward whom I already habitually gravitate.

For obvious cultural reasons, we tend to tick off the major turning points in biblical studies according to men's names: Wellhausen, Gunkel, Noth, von Rad, Muilenburg. From that point, it has been easier (relatively speaking!) for women’s work to be published and to receive regard. As much as possible, I would like to get names from a broad range of periods and approaches.

Taking the study of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament as a whole—old names and new, from every aspect of critical biblical study—what women would you include in a list provisionally titled, “Women biblical scholars with whose work you really must be in conversation, if I am to take seriously your treatment of texts”?

Carnivalia: Coming Up, and Around the Bend

Posted on by Brooke

Time is almost up to suggest entries for the May 2009 Biblical Studies Carnival, to be hosted at Ketuvim. See the carnival’s home page to learn how to submit an entry; additional options for submissions by the host himself.

The most recent Teaching Carnival, at Bethany Nowviskie, is already eleven days old. The roughly semiweekly Teaching Carnival involves blogs about higher education (there are other carnivals for K–6 or K–12). I have read the Teaching Carnivals for a couple of years now, and continue to learn (and laugh) at a rate of about a ton per carnival.

Accentual Rhythm in a Modern Hebrew Poem

Posted on by Brooke

John Hobbins wrote up a translation and some commentary on a Hebrew poem by Shimshon Meltzer. When I tried to comment, TypePad declined to accept my data. Presumably, I had too darned many tags in my comment, what with my endless italicizing of stressed syllables. So, I am posting my comment here and linking to it over at John’s.

John, thanks for including the notes on rhythm. The default 4-3 line is like half of a ballad stanza (“There are strange things done in the midnight sun / by the men who moil for gold”). Those first four lines use it consistently to “get things rolling.” The occasional 3-4 lines first create a sense of suspense by failing to deliver the fourth beat in a half-line (your translation preserves this well: “Adam and his wife, sinners—”) then compensate and close with the four-beat finale (“Nahash the deceiver, piercing curse”).

Wonderful that the poet first makes that rhythmic break at the narrative point where the young students (just freshened in their naivete by the exercise: line three) first read for themselves of Adam and Eve’s sin.

It would be fun to experiment in English accentual poetry using this scheme.

Silicon-Chip Tanak Goes to Pope

Posted on by Brooke

The world’s smallest Hebrew Bible will be given to Pope Benedict XVI by Israeli President Shimon Perez.

I had reported earlier on the Hebrew Bible, which is etched onto the gold face of a silicon chip that is one half of a millimeter square.

The news came as a surprise to elementary Hebrew students worldwide, who had assumed that their 5.5"×7.5" BHS already used the most miniscule type modern science could produce.

Reminder: Get Carn(iv)al

Posted on by Brooke

Biblical Studies Carnival 41 will be hosted by James McGrath at Exploring Our Matrix. James offers instructions for nominating posts to be included in the carnival. Tyler Williams had also posted instructions.

It’s a piece of cake, so if you feel the urge, take a look at posts from April in biblical studies that you have bookmarked, or Delicious’d, or Diigo’d, or Digg’d, and get them some exposure in the Carnival so the rest of us can sink our teeth into them, too.

See the homepage of the Biblical Studies Carnival for more information and links to the meaty current carnival and also to previous carnivals.

Hearing Out the Text: A Hermeneutic of Suspicion and Openness to the Voice of the Other

Posted on by Brooke

Bryan Bibb posted recently on Ben Witherington’s review article of Bart Ehrman’s latest book, Jesus, Interrupted. I have not closely followed Ehrman or conversations about his work, but Witherington’s review gripped my imagination, because he brought the “Ehrman conversation” into the context of some of the essential critical questions that animate biblical studies. I am interested in his words on the “hermeneutic of suspicion,” a mode of reading in which the reader remains warily alert to the text’s worldview with its peculiar heirarchies and how the text at hand will 1) reflect and reinforce that worldview, silencing and marginalizing other voices with their concerns, and also 2) seek through its rhetorical devices to reproduce in the reader that worldview and its heirarchies. (The phrase “hermeneutic of suspicion” is Ricoeur’s but the definition mine, expressed in terms of ideological criticism). Witherington writes in part:

to actually understand an ancient author you must start by giving them the benefit of the doubt and hear them out, doing one’s best to enter creatively into their own world and thought processes before understanding can come to pass. To approach the text with a hermeneutic of suspicion is to poison the well of inquiry before one even samples the water in the old well.

Reading this, I remember once hearing a biblical scholar argue that we should read without a hermeneutic of suspicion, equating a hermeneutic of suspicion with being “suspicious of God.” In that instance, my sense was that the lecturer was calling for us to move beyond a hermeneutic of suspicion, to stop reading in that vein. I do not know Witherington’s work as well as I would like, but I do not want to read him here as calling for an end to a hermeneutic of suspicion. Rather, I want to read him more literally: that a hermeneutic of suspicion is not a productive starting place in the reading process, that its right time is simply later in the game than one’s “approach to the text.”

I see a parallel claim in an essay by Norman R. Petersen, “Literary Criticism in Biblical Studies,” 25–50 in Orientation by Disorientation (ed. Richard A. Spencer; Pittsburgh: Pickwick Press, 1980). His question is how the critic can most productively use both historical-critical and literary-critical methods when reading biblical texts. He concludes that questions intrinsic to the text (“what is its form,” “what devices does it deploy,” “how is it structured”) allow us to keep reading to the end, to “let the narrator have his say,” whereas questions extrinsic to the text (“who wrote it,” “where/when/why,” “to whom did he write”) force our attention away from the details of the text at hand. Therefore, he proposed that after having established one’s text textual-critically, one should first approach the text with literary questions, and then only after completing uninterrupted readings of the whole approach it again with historical critical questions.

It is in the same spirit that I would agree with Witherington’s admonishment that we not “approach the text” with a hermeneutic of suspicion. Taking Hosea 2 as an example: if a hermeneutic of suspicion is my initial mode of reading, I may jump straight into a moral critique of the metaphor and reject precipitously the text’s ability to speak an appropriate word to modern listeners. I would then have failed to “giv[e the text] the benefit of the doubt and hear [it] out, doing one’s best to enter creatively into [its] own world and thought processes,” as Witherington puts it. By postponing (not indefinitely) a hermeneutic of suspicion, then I have the opportunity to let the metaphor work on me to convince me of its underlying claims about God’s ways with the people Israel and with creation, before I go on to consider rejection of the metaphoric vehicle Hosea has chosen.

I do not mean to say that such an exercise of mental division can really be accomplished in strict terms; Petersen, too, certainly acknowledges that we’re talking more about mutually-infectious cycles of reading than a linear “step program.” Also, I have reservations about seeking even to postpone a hermeneutic of suspicion: once you let your guard down to a text’s attempts to persuade you of its worldview, well, there’s little point in trying to bar the door when the intruder is already in the house.

What are your thoughts on a hermeneutic of suspicion? Is it more pressing than ever, given that the marginalized are with us always, or are there reasons to think that we are “beyond” it? If we hold to a hermeneutic of suspicion, how do you describe its right relation to a vulnerable openness to be changed by the “other” whom we meet in a text?