OT scholars are way cooler than NT scholars. Maybe funnier, too.
(David Ker in a comment on my podcast Humour in the Bible: 21B: Ecclesiastes (again))

Photo by Otto Phokus

All I should say is: you might possibly think that, I couldn’t possibly comment!

But I will offer a challenge to those Old Testament scholars (and would-be scholars) applying for my job to see if they can help instantiate his claim. And to those New Testament people applying for George’s job, you have a hard act to follow!

Incidentally I think we OT people have a head start, after all the NT was written in Greek, and it is a well-known fact that the Greek language causes people to claim to think logically and rationally, whereas Hebrew is the language of relationship, and relationships are always funny.¹

PS: I also challenge all you NT scholars out there to start producing podcasts or blog posts that show examples of humour from every book of the NT to match my series covering humour in the Hebrew Bible :)

1. PPS yesterday was our 36th wedding anniversary, and we still make each other smile, so it must be so ;)

I do not like boundaries. (Well except the ones I erect to keep the animals in ;) It is fun to cross borders, things are different on the other side. Travel broadens the mind.

So, for my latest Librivox reading I’ve tried two of La Lontaine’s Fables both from book 9. Both were fun, and both, for an anglophone, mind-twisting. I read:

05 – L’Écolier, le Pédant, et le Maître d’un jardin – 00:02:48
[mp3@64kbps - 1.3MB]

and:

08 – Le Fou qui vend la Sagesse – 00:02:23
[mp3@64kbps - 1.1MB]

But what a shame that so few people try to experience the “otherness” of Scripture by learning to read in Hebrew or Greek (or Aramaic, but all that effort for just a few chapters may be more understandable laziness).

PS for my English readings of other really good literature (one example which involves transgressing borders is Kipling’s American Notes) here’s the list so far.

Colloquium and Book

Call for papers:

Aoraki Mt Cook across Lake Pukaki, NZ

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.

Articulated trucks are easier to turn ;) photo by crabchick)

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.

Eduard von Grützner's Falstaff from Wikipedia

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 :(

There is a good clearly annotated list of resources for Hebrew learners at the Biblical Hebrew NZ site. It also lists courses and other opportunities in New Zealand, and if you are in reach of South Auckland a chance to get together with others for mutual encouragement. There is an email list too.

The latest Tyndale Tech email just arrived. I do not usually repeat them here, I reckon if you are interested you subscribe! But this one has a much wider than usual potential readership. In it David Instone-Brewer of Tyndale House, Cambridge presents a pretty full list of the remarkable range of online or freely downloadable Bible study tools, and also highlights briefly the main ones to buy as well.

If you study the Bible, at any level at all from beginner to PhD there is likely to be something here for you that you did not know about! The range of superb online tools has grown so fast over the last few years, that it is now amazing what is available.

The concluding chapter is short, and to the point. It’s a rattling good read, not only nicely summing up the more exciting ideas that have been presented and argued in the preceding chapters, but also pulling them together into a more coherent whole.

Like most good conclusions there is a tendency to over-simplify, so probably the history of history is more complex than the presentation of Foucault’s Jerusalem/Rome typology suggests, but isn’t it a stimulating way of approaching the issues!

There is also much to think about, and develop in so many ways in the presentations of the history of Hebrew literature from Iron Age epigraphy to Hebrew Scripture. Not least here the place given to prophets like Moses ;) Through it all, and not only in the material summarised in the final section, the interest in the political face of texts is deftly woven.

My conclusions (having read the “Conclusion”)

This is a book I will recommend, time and again, and probably refer to again and again. It could easily also be a book that launches a thousand (or at least quite a lot of) articles, there are so many thought provoking ideas and superb one-liners.

Chapter 4 discusses matters of most direct concern to biblical scholars (as such). It contains a wealth of material to bring non-specialists (like me) more up to date on Hebrew and other North West Semitic epigraphy from the Iron age.

The Mesad Hashavyahu ostracon presents a field worker's complaint in writing about the confiscation of his cloak. Tracing image from Wikimedia.

There are continually intriguing glimpses of this ancient world and its adopting, and adapting, of a different communications technology. One of the both at the same time most, and also least, surprising details are the parallels between ancient Greek adoption of the alphabet, where early literacy concerned exclusively drinking, dance and sex, and the early adoption of the Internet ;) Noticing this has a serious outcome, to demonstrate that alphabetic literacy did not need scribal schools to flourish. Likewise digital literacy in our day owes little if anything to the formal education system (beyond the basic “learning to read”). This suggests that the lack of evidence of Iron Age scribal schools in Palestine is not sufficient evidence for lack of literacy. Indeed texts like Lashish 3, in which a military commander resents his superior’s asssumption that he may not be able to read and write himself, and the Mesad Hashavyahu ostracon which, although we assume it was not written by the field worker, demonstrates his access to and use of the medium.

This chapter contains fascinating information, and also intriguing claims these are often closely argued. For example the important section which seeks to show deliberate standardisation of Hebrew script in the eighth to sixth centuries, and that this standardised system both crossed the boundaries of the (expected on the basis of biblical accounts) northern and southern kingdoms but also stopped at their boundaries. There are however somtimes annoying jumps in the argument, so although Sanders aims to base his discussion on the epigraphic evidence rather than on the accounts in the biblical texts (where our earliest copies come from a long time after the period being discussed, so offering questionable evidence) he seems to assume two Hebrew kingdoms, rather than discover them. Likewise on p.124:

If written Aramaic and Moabite were created in competition with an emerging standard form of Hebrew, then they re indirect evidence for the invention of written Hebrew in the late ninth century.

I think the argument is circular, since I do not remember evidence being presented to suggest that these other script/languages were indeed created “in competition” with Hebrew.  So, for example the Mesha inscription predates the examples of “Standardized Hebrew”.

For me one of the most interesting aspects of this chapter was the focus on prophetic texts, and on the light epigraphic evidence throws on the possible processes of composition and transmission of such texts. Here both the Deir’ Alla inscription, Hebrew ostraca and the Bronze Age materials from Mari are all woven into a coherent account of how such written prophecy worked among West Semitic peoples, and how this written prophecy changed over time. This is really exciting!

When talking about biblical prophecy (in particular Isaiah 10:5-15) he takes Machinist’s interpretation of the passage as a neat reversal of Assyrian royal propaganda, and includes the evocative phrase: “a new double speaker: the prophet and the god he ventriloquizes” which both expresses the idea and provokes further thought about what is being said. This is typical of flashes if insight communicated in vivid language that are found everywhere and enliven what risks becoming a sometimes technical discussion.

He argues that texts like this, from Isaiah, depend upon the langauage and genres of Neo-Assyrian royal propaganda, and that such propaganda was lost with the rise of Babylon replacing Nineveh as the imperial centre (a claim I would have liked to see backed by evidence). If that is so then these biblical texts must originate from an Assyrian dominated historical context, and not a later one.

One of the key points of this chapter, could have done with being brought more sharply into focus, and discussed at greater length. For the claim that invention of Hebrew was intimately bound up with the invention (or recognition) of a responsive (and in some ways authoritative?) audience, a “you” addressed by the texts, is highly significant for understanding the texts handed to us as Bible. This is also important because this claim is central to demonstrating the thesis of the chapter. From signs like this I get the impression that a bigger, less easy to read, monograph stands somewhere behind the book I am reading. Perhaps rather these more detailed arguments are made in Sanders work published in more specialised places.

Previous posts in this review:
• The Invention of Hebrew: First impressions
• The Invention of Hebrew: first and last paragraphs
• The Invention of Hebrew: Chapter One
• The Invention of Hebrew: Chapter 2: What was the alphabet for?

Letter from Abdi-Hepa (ruler of Jesusalem) to Amenophis III in syllabic cuneiform Canaano-Akkadian

My reading of this chapter was rather interrupted. It has taken me weeks, which is a shame as this is the material which most interests me :( The off/on schedule was partly caused by “life”, but partly I think because I could have done with revising a noddy guide to writing in the late Bronze to early Iron Ages before reading it. (This is not Seth’s fault, he provides a clear and full but also brief summary as he goes along, the fault was mine reading in installments with enough gap to forget between – I’ll have to reread the chapter in one sitting some day :)

Basically the argument is that in this period the different formas of writing were used in different ways by different people. The empires and their local agents using cuneiform syllabic writing, (at least some/one) local power(s) using alphabetic cuneiform and the marginalised using a linear alphabetic script (pretty much what we think of when we say alphabet signs scratched or drawn rather than impressed like cuneiform). The linear script was almost only used to label things or places, there are no letters or literary texts from this period, and the training “texts” are simply practice alphabets. By contrast there is evidence of training of scribes in cuneiform.

Wadi el-Hol alphabetic writing from Bruce Zuckermann in collaboration with Lynn Swartz Dodd "Pots and Alphabets: Refractions of Reflections on Typological Method" (MAARAV, A Journal for the Study of the Northwest Semitic Languages and Literatures, Vol. 10, p. 89)

He also argues that neither writing system represented a “language”. Canaano-akkadian was a system allowing the transmission of messages between specialists who probably translated in turning the message from writing to speech, it was not anyone’s spoken language.  At the other end the alphabet was used to name things, so in a different way does not really represent a language. Ugarit was the main exception known to us, there cuneiform was used to communicate a local language in alphabetic form, this was a conscious mimicing and alternative to the langauge forms of empire. It flourished at a time when both Mesopotamian and Egyptian powers were weak.

This is fascinating stuff, especially when (as he promises to do in the next chapter) you put it together with his thesis about the different political cultures related to these linguistic and technological expressions.

I do hope I haven’t mangled this chapter’s argument too badly. I half wonder if I should read it properly before posting this, but (a) I MUST finish the Amos article and (b) I want to read the next chapter (this is a page-turner) and (c) I am trying to podcast reflections on the E100 at a rate of 2 per day, so that when my sabbatical ends I’ll have a stockpile to see me through the lean weeks while I am teaching ;)

So… if you have read ch.3, and think I’ve got it wrong, please comment so I can correct this post and not mislead people!

It is a long time since I have mentioned TanakhML, but it is one of the few online resources I use almost daily for reading the (Hebrew) Bible. The Interface is neat and attractive, it is fairly easy to browse the text, you can turn various elements like vowels and accents on or off, but best of all you can click the little button that says “accents” at the top right of the browse window and get a view of the verse you are at that shows instantly how the Masoretes read it, purase by phrase. For someone like me who has never really tried to master the accent system this is brilliant!