Sansblogue

In a comment to my previous post Jim West asked:

Congratulations to my colleague Jonathan Robinson whose fine blog Xenos has just shot into the BiblioBlog Rankings making his first appearance an instant 33rd whiuch does not sound like much, till you realise that he narrowly follows Robert CargillOfficial Blog
and is actually ahead of Mark Goodacre’s classic and thoughtful NT Blog!

Incidentally my headline reflects the fact that as I write Xenos’ latest post is entitled: badgers, mushroom, and links which suggests the breadth of coverage of this blog :) and since “badger” is my default false answer for multichoice questions  he caught my attention ;)

I have abstracts on my mind, we are collecting the hoard submitted for the Spiritual | Complaint colloquium, and arranging them into possible sections for the book, while hoping for more for the Isaiah and Empire colloquium which otherwise looks like requiring each participant to write two chapters ;)

In the meanwhile I was writing to a nervous postgraduate researcher who has to produce an abstract for a presentation to our research seminar. I had commented that the function of an abstract was to “sell” your paper as interesting and something the reader might want to hear. She suggested mentioning chocolate, so I replied:

“I think outright bribery is frowned upon, but massaging the abstract, or filling it with wishful thinking is normal.

“This paper will explore...” means “I really hope that this line of approach, that I have not tried yet, sounds really interesting to me, and I hope that maybe it will allow me to have something worthwhile to say by the time the event comes round.”
“Previous research has shown...” either means “I think I read somewhere, but can’t for the life of me be sure, that…” or possibly “This current paper is a rehash of work I did last year which I am tarting up in the hopes of another publication, because I am too busy to think of new ideas.”

Do you have suggested “translations” for similar stock phrases from abstracts? (Not phrases you have used, of course, but ones that others might use that have a similar split between surface and deep meanings ;)

I won’t link to their site, but if you are interested you know the URL. Love it or hate it BAR is a significant commercial enterprise interested in the archaeology of the Ancient Near East, and in the days before Flickr I benefited from their photo sets for teaching. But when someone identified as:

Author : Sara Murphy (IP: 216.156.120.90 , 216.156.120.90.ptr.us.xo.net)
E-mail : smurphy@bib-arch.org

posts a lengthy advertising piece with two links to their site on my “About” page (Do I even have an about page? Let alone one that mentions “Biblical” archaeology?) I see red! This is spam, and I’ve labeled it as such. If you use WordPress and they spam you please mark it as Spam, that way the innocent may be protected by Akismet from giving nearly free advertising to BAR.

PS: I have also written to Ms Murphy suggesting that her employer may not appreciate being labeled as a spammer. I will post any reply here.

Colloquium and Book

Call for papers:

This colloquium (sponsored by Laidlaw-Carey Graduate School in Auckland, New Zealand) will explore cultural and theological implications of aspects of the book of Isaiah in the context of empire. Potential papers might include, but are by no means limited to:

• readings of particular texts in the light of ancient imperial contexts
• studies of the redaction history of Isaiah
• Isaiah (or a particular text) in contemporary “imperial” or post-colonial contexts
• theological reflections
• cross cultural perspectives on Isaiah in imperial contexts
• contemporary political reflections

The colloquium will take place in Auckland, NZ, on 14th-15th February 2011 (this is summertime in NZ but after schools have begun for the year). Since we intend to publish a book with the same title in 2011, draft papers will be circulated among participants in 2010 and final form submitted by April 15th 2011.

Please send enquiries and abstracts before 30th September 2010 to:

Dr Tim Bulkeley tim@carey.ac.nz or
Dr Tim Meadowcroft TMeadowcroft@laidlaw.ac.nz

For some reason SBL do not seem to have added this colloquium to their online listing, despite emailing them, though SOTS and some other professional societies have circulated the Call for Papers. In order to make it better known please either repost this, or email the link to any scholar you know with an interest in Isaiah.

Over the years, and I began being Internet active with the Amos commentary material in 1995 (so it is 15 years), I have had several contacts by email in which I have “pastored” for a while people I have never met or seen. They are only words on a screen.  Yet I call these fragile and somewhat tenuous relationships pastoring. Why?

Usually these correspondences start with an email that asks a question. Often the question may seem factual, but usually suggests some possibility that it is “really” about something deeper. Then gradually, or sometimes swiftly, the person I am “talking” with comes to trust me, and the talk goes deeper. Obviously the anonymity of the medium, the fact that we do not meet face to face, share friends, and live in different countries is part of what enables these conversations to take place.

Perhaps therefore, it is because of the severe limitations of the medium that these conversations can take place at all. Maybe email pastoring reaches places physical pastors cannot reach…

I wonder though how many such relationships I have refused, without knowing it, by a swift hard response to a “trivial” question from a unknown reader of my websites and blogs…

It’s all Steve’s fault, though all he seems to have intended (by his post at Sects and Violence in the Ancient World) was to start a fine old argument about ancient space aliens and pyramids ;) But then Duane took it up and threw an interesting (Naturally and abnormally interesting one ;) )) spanner, into the works, asking how Christian talk of Jesus as divine impacts our reading of talk of divine kingship in the ANE.

But it is Jim Getz’ Musings on Divine Kingship that really got me thinking.¹ After an all-too brief tour of the ANE, and some highly pertinent remarks on the small and insignificant nature of whatever “Israel” actually was at the time, he wrote:

There are hints of divine kingship in the Bible. Psalm 2 is the premiere example, but others could be cited as well. However, these data are always somewhat cryptic. Surely the Deuteronomists saw the king’s role in the cult highly conscribed. Both P and H pass over the king in silence. The writer of Ezekiel 40-48 envisions an extremely limited role for rulers in his eschatological temple. Does this indicate a reevaluation of the king’s divine status in light of the realities of foreign hegemony, or does it hearken back to ideas found in Ugaritic texts?

I wonder, is this all? There are admittedly few ascriptions of divinity, or even permanent sacral status, to kings in the Hebrew Scriptures (though Psalm 110, especially in the light of its use in Hebrews, is an interesting addition to his list), but there are more passages that directly or indirectly protest against or undermine such claims. Ezek 28 is the most obvious example, though of course one might claim that the wrongness of the prince of Tyre’s aretalogy² consists (in part) in the fact that he had no “real” claim to be an emperor. And yet, since I am teaching Gen 2-3 currently, I have to admit that I wonder how far the burlesque elements of that narrative are crafted to subvert such claims. And if it was then surely the claims being subverted must have been nearer to the writer than the prince of Tyre?

“The lady [or at least Scripture] doth protest too much, methinks.”

1. As opposed to merely listening with interest. [↩]
2. First person text, usually a poem, in which a deity lists their attributes and titles, the Isis aretalogies have been compared to the self-presentations of Lady Wisdom in the Hebrew Scriptures. [↩]

Isn’t it exciting that at last there might be movement in the direction of a really simple and significant piece of what AKMA neatly neologises as “neopublishing“! By now you know that it all started with a twit that was published on Brooke’s Facebook page (see his blog Anumma for the belated expression of this in public “Open Access Intro to OT“) that happily was seen by AKMA. And that Mark offered (in The Future for Textbooks Online) his own slant on AKMA’s take on Brooke’s ideas. Doesn’t this sound like the resume of an episode of one of those teenage soaps one’s daughters watch?

In the latest round of posts, AKMA (Funding Neopublishing) highlights some really interesting ideas for funding such a project, and since this is a high demand, low(ish) cost project the idea of (almost) crowdsourcing the funding ought to be possible :) While Mark, always the gentleman and peacemaker, seeks to convince (himself and?) us that AKMA’s multiauthor multiple possibility neotextbook is really much the same sort of teaching tool as his own proposal for a gateway site focused on the needs of beginning students and intro classes. They aren’t, but both would serve really useful purposes. FOSOTT as a textbook would allow consistency of design, format and presentation making the assimilation of the basics of the discipline easier for beginners. An Intro Gateway as a collection of links to quality (somewhat?) assured resources selected for usefulness to beginners would be great for the further reading that we hope all students will do, and that the smart ones actually do do.

Incidentally, to display my own peacemaker tendencies, I think both Mark and Bob (in his comments to Mark’s most recent post) have it right: Mark point that there are now (on at least most topics) far more quality resources and enough to make a workable “further reading” list for an intro class is correct. Bob is also right though that Google works better as a search engine, and so can offer more complete coverage than even the NT Gateway or iTanakh can manage (just note the cost though for an intro class, teachers must spend more time educating students to be critical).¹

1. Yes, we say that this is what we do, but really we sometimes resent the time spent explaining how they should have known that the latest Indiana Jones stunt is not worth the price of the salesman/archaeologist?’s hat, since that time would have been much better spent downloading more of our precious learning into their poor feeble brains. [↩]

In this post I am NOT thinking of the clear or muffled ar-tic-u-lation that my speech teacher prized, but the other sort. And, teaching “Understanding and Interpreting the Bible” this week the topic of textual articulation came to the fore. First in trying to explain the nature and function of a “conjunction”  to students who have no understanding of grammar (not even those who attended secondary schools with “Grammar” proudly flaunted in their historic names).

Conjunctions, I said are the (often little) words that join and articulate text. They tell us how the parts work together. As such they are very important clues to what a text is doing.

They are. And all¹ languages have them. But² not all languages have them, or use them, equally. And³ they certainly do not use them in the same places. Different languages and different speakers articulate their texts differently.

For this week on spotting the workings of text at a local level, we studied 1 Tim 6:17-19. Most of our students do not learn Greek or Hebrew :(⁴ so we were working on an English text and with English grammar. 1 Timothy 6:19 provides a nice example:

thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.
ἀποθησαυρίζοντας ἑαυτοῖς θεμέλιον καλὸν εἰς τὸ μέλλον, ἵνα ἐπιλάβωνται τῆς ὄντως ζωῆς.

Actually the NIV makes the point more dramatically opening the verse “In this way” where the Greek just has a participle. Hebrew texts offer even more of these challenges, since the paratactic constructions favoured by the language use fewer written markers of syntax.

At which point I’ll call back my speech teacher, a grandiloquent old act-tor, for it is only by articulating a written text clearly that we can begin to understand it. For where written grammatical markers of syntax are lacking only clear articulation can “make sense” of the text.

1. Or at least, all that I have studied so far. [↩]
2. Yes, I know this is the second time I have started a sentence with a conjunction :) I do hope all prescriptive grammarians are spinning like tops in their graves, or soon will be, since prescriptive grammar is unnecessary and unwanted. Well actually it is not, I need to know that starting sentences with conjunctions is “wrong” for my use of this construction to be chosen for effect, and not mere carelessness. So prescripts you may cease your rotations forthwith :) [↩]
3. Yes, a third! When you are on a roll it is hard to stop ;) [↩]
4. No, I don’t know how someone can be a serious Bible student without the languages, either. Though I note that only Greek was compulsory at Oxford, and that I failed to take Hebrew, to my shame. To Oxford’s shame I believe that even Greek is now not required for the Honours School of Theology :( [↩]

Brooke has now posted his own take on the project Open Access Intro to OT so perhaps I’ll have to start using OAIOT ;)