Sansblogue

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. [↩]

James has added a strong plea (to the mix of posts on the idea of a Free Open Source Old Testament Textbook) that any project not be limited to mere textyness. While, naturally, I agree (after all the Amos: Hypertext Bible Commentary was at least in part a partial intro textbook in (early) hypertext form, I would also like to see a core to the project that can produce a texty text book, for such a limited text is convenient for both teachers and students in a class setting.

So I’d see James’ plea as adding weight, and perhaps the possibility of dedicated new material, to Marks addendum to the Textbook idea.¹Mark explains this well with an example in another fine post The “Textyness” of the Textbook in a Digital Age:

Let’s say you are talking about the topic of form-criticism and introducing Richard Bauckham’s recent contributions about the involvement of alleged eye-witnesses.  You could record your own audio or video about this, in which you attempt to summarize his position, or you could watch and listen to the man himself doing it for you.  Examples of this kind could be multiplied.  My point is not that we should stop producing new resources — of course not.  But rather that we should start thinking seriously about the integration of good existing resources into our new model.

On the other hand, Mark’s latest post The Shortcomings of Traditional Textbooks in the Digital Age, and Our Invitation gives a clear vision of how such an Open Textbook with its associated richer collection might be significantly different from and better then merely another (but free) textbook:

The traditional textbook’s difficulty is that however strong its author, it is still that author’s views that are presented, in all their particularity.  What the textbook of the digital age can produce is something that is genuinely multi-authored as well as multi-media, a resource that encourages the university student to think critically from the earliest point by listening to different voices speaking on the same subjects.

1. See Neopublishing, FOSOTT and gateway sites formy take on why these are different but hopefully related projects. [↩]

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 ;)

From AKMA and Mark I learned that Brooke Lester had asked his Facebook friends, “I know the answer before I ask, but: Do we have no good, critical, open-access Intro to Old Testament textbooks?”

I have no idea what Brooke said, because this conversation is not on Anuma, and I’m not in the favoured few friended on Facebook. But both Mark and AKMA’s replies are brilliant, and brilliantly different. I read AKMA’s first, and he outlines exactly how such a project, that he calls FOSOTT Free Open Source Old Testament Textbook project would work. Basically with different people contributing chapters, and eventually a collection of variant chapters offering different perspectives and approaches to choose from and build your own textbook. As AKMA points out most of the infrastructure is ready and print on demand would make paper copies easily obtainable. I also love AKMA’s suggestion of podcast editions, short video intros and other optional extras. I’d add three details that I did not notice in AKMA’s presentation (which you must read!) some form of peer review or selection of authors¹ so that the quality is not compromised and an archive of earlier editions so that versions are stable and therefore citable² Thirdly I’d like to see strong guidelines for authors so that there is a measure of consistency in the topics treated and headings used, because such a straitjacket though a crimp on authors’ creativity would make life easier for poor beginning students ;)

Mark’s suggestion is a beefed up and focused version of his NT Gateway (or perhaps more precisely of Chris Heard’s iTanakh) such a site, collaboratively curated, that pointed students to suitable selected material already available on the web would also be brilliant.It has the advantage of avoiding the need for yet more spiffy wheel designs, but the disadvantages of lack of consistency and difficult printability.

I can envisage using both in different ways. FOSOTT as a textbook, that students are required to read selected chapters from week by week, they can choose whether to read online or buy a print copy, and the beginner focused Gateway site as a suggested further reading resource.

I therefore volunteer to write a chapter for FOSOTT, I can start writing at the end of next year (2011) when my current writing projects end, and if FOSOTT gets underway would prioritise it over another “volume” of HBC or other projects.

1. Notice that here I strongly disagree with a commenter who suggested starting the textbook as a Wiki – not because I don’t like Wikipedia, I love it, but because there is so much crud “biblical” material around and I want a resource I can use to help my students see what “good” looks like! [↩]
2. As a teacher I need this so that I can check students bizarre quotations in their essays. [↩]

Until today, when responding to a challenge on my Facebook status (concerning my labours to convert my article into the required format for submission to a European journal) I had never realised the logic behind the European system of Bible referencing.

I was once, while teaching Old Testament in Congo (then Zaïre) quite comfortable with the European system of citing Bible references, after all as a student I’d used the manuscript superscript verse numbers ;) But now after nearly two more decades of mainly Anglophone referencing I was confused. To illustrate here’s an example table:

Anglophone manuscript:	Anglophone computer:	French & German:
Am 71	Am 7:1	Am 7,1
Am 71-3	Am 7:1-3	Am 7,1-3
Am 71-3,4-5	Am 7:1-3, 4-5	Am 7,1-3.4-5

To brains habituated to Anglophony the last column is counter-intuitive, but just think of how the different cultures write numbers:

Anglophone numbers:	Francophone numbers:	Words:
100	100	One hundred
1,000	1.000	One thousand
1.1	1,1	One decimal one/one and one tenth

PS, before the pedant police tells me I have used the wrong typographic symbol for the Anglophone decimal sign, and believe me some people can get really excited about such things ;) I should point out that I have done it the way 99·9999% of the population does to make my point more pointed, OK?

Jim has published a piece of rhetorical bombast, of the sort that only one who so fiercely and often delights in castigating the depraved could manage, taking issue with claims by Hector (and others) that biblical studies as a discipline allied to ecclesial interests has a place in the academy (as a “study”).  It’s shortcomings of logic and charity have been ably pointed out (e.g. by Duane, of the self-avowedly abnormal interests). Beyond that it has stirred up an intense flurry of discussion on the Biblical Studies e-mail list, one which has skirted and (I think) in dozens of contributions made incursions across, if not set up camp on the other side of, the rules of engagement of that list.

For all its failings, and despite all its strengths, this opinion piece raises sharply the significant issues around the place of biblical studies in the academy, and the nature of biblical studies as a discipliine. I’d like here to offer my $0.02 worth:

1. There are two sorts of study of “The Bible” currently pursued. They have different goals and methods.
   • One is the study of Scripture (The Bible, which name, since it comes from Greek meaning “The Books”, implies a committed stance towards the text[s] as those belonging to and constituitive of particular communities, this we might therefore properly call “biblical studies”.
   • The other is the study of ancient texts that have been significant for the development of Western culture. While it focuses on these texts because they are/have been perceived as Scripture such study does not consider them as such. We might call this “the study of ancient Christian (or Jewish) texts”.
2. Up till now the same people have, by and large, performed both tasks. However, while either discipline might enrich the other they are different. Because they have different goals, methods and stance towards their object of study.
   • It has also caused students much grief, signing up for a course that they expected to be in biblical studies (as understood above) to in fact receive something more attuned to the interests and approach of the study of ancient Christian texts.
   • It has also caused some confusion and perhaps grief to teachers who have either had to act as if schizophrenically composed of two different personalities or to remain “in the closet” about significant parts of their being. (Both those doing SoACT while practicising Christians and those pretending to do BS while having no regard for the object of their study as Scripture.)

It is high time this motley confusion ended. Ban the names Bible, biblical and Scripture from all course titles etc. except where the text is in fact treated as the Scripture of a particular community. And by contrast ban the claim to “objective” (and so, I suppose, inherently modern) discipline.

There may still be many of us who elect to take part in both disciplines, but we could do so understanding that in their different contexts we are expected to play by different rules. Each discipline could enrich the other, not least by providing sparring partners ;) But what each is claiming to achieve might be clearer. The poor Society for Biblical Literature would either have to decide to change its name, take that name seriously, or perhaps divide into two sections ;)

Incidentally this divorce will cause little stir beyond the Western world, because there except when Western missionaries have carried their own training with them there has been little of the purely “Scientific” study of ancient Christian texts on offer ;)

The best loved Psalm is also one which comes alive the most when a little contextual light is shone upon it.

<A Psalm of David.>

Yhwh is my shepherd, I shall not be needy.

Shepherds did not drive their flocks, or leave them out on the hills to fend for themselves. Because of the protection and care flocks needed “shepherd” was a common metaphor for leadership, especially kingship. In the Bible and the ANE more generally.

He causes me to lie down in green pastures;
he leads me beside still waters;
he restores my life.

He leads me in right paths
for his name’s sake.

“Green” is a relative term! Except after rains, pasture land in the Judean Desert or the northern Negev is seldom lush. Cf. “I shall not be needy” (v.1). Shepherding country in Palestine is in drier areas (east of the hills or in the south) where surface water is found at the bottom of “Wadis”, steep gorges cut by torrential flooding as water runs quickly off the hills in the rainy season. Such water was life-giving, but potentially dangerous, if run-off from a storm far away in the hills was approaching as a flash flood.

Even though I walk through the darkest valley,
I fear no evil;
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff– they comfort me.

Rods are often thought of a sticks for beating people, but here the thought is of a shepherds crook, used to guide, protect and sometimes rescue…

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.

Anointing could be a reference to the consecration of kings and priests, but it could simply be continuing the theme of a host and guests, in Egypt for example perfumed wax cones were given to guests to place on their heads, so that as they melted the perfume was released.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
and I shall live in the Yhwh’s house my whole life long.

Yhwh’s house here is not the temple, the psalmist is not envisaging a life in temple service, but rather Yhwh’s household, as a member of the “family of God”.

NB: This post is a companion to my E100 podcast at 5 Minute Bible.

I’ve been too busy today trying to incorporate dead and still living German scholars into my reading of Amos that I have not read my RSS feeds, but I took a few minutes out to Facebook, and saw Bill’s post “Y Jnny Cnt Rd d Bbl“. He mentioned my how not to read books (Thanks :) and also a Christianity Today article and Johnny Can’t Read the Bible. He discusses the interesting thought that clerical attempts to assist ploughboys [to borrow an idea apparently shared by Wycliffe, Tyndale and Luther among others] to become more biblically literate, may be by their nature self-defeating.

This caused me to reflect on how well my not reading advice works with the Bible (it is after all intended for not-reading modern academic and scholastic writing) sadly, or perhaps happily, it does not really work with the Bible. Or only to a limited extent… Clearly the start of the whole thing in Gen 1-3 is a big help, perhaps the end in Rev 21 also assists us… but looking the start and end of most books do not really help, and there is no table of contents provided, nor pictures or diagrammes :(

NZ is currently enjoying such an attempt, Bible Society New Zealand, Scripture Union and Wycliffe Bible Translators New Zealand are encouraging people to read 100 “essential” Bible passages. To which I (as the very model of a modern cleric) am offering 5 minute audio reflections.

In preparing these I have been reminded how interesting it is to compare the way the four Gospels each begin and end. The podcast of that 5 minute bible study will not appear for another month, so here’s a link to a special preview edition of the file ;)