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Dr Tim Bulkeley

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For posts from Jan 2004 - Nov 2009 see here.

Divine kings in “Israel”?

August 9, 2010 No comments

Shapur II investiture at Taq-e Bustan: the "God Mithra emerges from a Lotus flower, crowned by a lightning sun, holding the Barsum (wood bundle symbol of divine power). At the right side, god Ahuramazda wearing his classical crenellated crown gives the king the Farshiang ( ribboned ring symbol of royal power). ... their heads are on the same level suggesting the king is equal to gods.


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. [↩]
archaeology, Ezekiel, Genesis, Teaching Bible , , , ,

WordPress to codex :)

August 8, 2010 1 comment

TaDa a codex! (Photo by Friar's Balsam)

The Center for History and New Media, George Mason University the people who brought us Zotero, the neat simple free “just does what it should” bibliography manager have held a One Week | One Tool project funded by the (US) National Endowment for the Humanities. The tool they produced (only 0.3 alpha as yet to be fair) they call Anthologize.

Anthologize is a free, open-source, plugin that transforms WordPress 3.0 into a platform for publishing electronic texts. Grab posts from your WordPress blog, import feeds from external sites, or create new content directly within Anthologize. Then outline, order, and edit your work, crafting it into a single volume for export in several formats, including—in this release—PDF, ePUB, TEI.

I wonder if we could use it with some other WordPress plugins to make making FOSOTT easier? And what about collaborating on and publishing the output of a colloquium? Like the Isaiah and Empire one?

The only trouble is, to get full brownie points in the academic system we may need to use a conventional respected print publisher, and I doubt any of them will be happy with opting into such a system :( How come systems (like the NZ “Performance Based Research Funding” exercise or US tenure committees) end up stifling innovative ways of undertaking basic scholarly tasks like publishing the results of research? Still FOSOTT wouldn’t count for such purposes anyway – it is merely teaching!

HT: Digital Campus

Blog, Open Source, Publishing, Utilities, Writing

Plagiarism as toilet training

August 4, 2010 2 comments

By didbygraham

Plagiarism has been a hot topic in staff rooms over recent years, and there has been a flurry of interest in the social media over the last day or two. Charles Halton has a nicely provocative piece Authors or Criminals? as well as attempting to set felines among columbida:

What’s all the fuss about?

We live in a very odd culture that extends ownership rights to non-tangible things like ideas and words.  However, these are relatively modern inventions.  Within the ancient world there was no such thing as “intellectual property” or even “authorship” as we understand it.  Literature was composed not by individuals but by communities–whether these communities were sitting around campfires recounting stories real or fiction or in between or whether the communities were scholars writing for other scholars.  Within the ancient world literature developed over time and subsequent generations of composers used previous work in order to fashion their own accounts.  Hardly any scholar put their name on their work (there are a couple exceptions of acrostic poems which spell out a scribe’s name).

All this fuss about plagiarism has me thinking–are students merely reverting to an ancient view of authorship?

This post has generated a fascinating discussion of “ancient” authorship and its conventions, the comment thread is well worth a look! But I want to address that final question: “All this fuss about plagiarism has me thinking–are students merely reverting to an ancient view of authorship?”

Firstly: I am thinking of students operating in a Western academic context, I am aware that different considerations apply to students of other cultures operating within those cultural settings. “You cannot step into the same river twice.”1 Culture has moved on and so has technology, in a world of Zotero the habits of Baruch are no longer applicable.

Secondly: Plagiarism is a matter of respect. If I present another’s words or ideas as if they were mine I fail to respect them treating their work as of no value to me. I also fail to respect myself, for by failing to distinguish my own contribution to the conversation, or indeed situate it within a conversation, I suggest it is of no value.

Thirdly: Plagiarism is a matter of socialisation. There ain’t no such animal as a “digital native” we all, including your twelve-year-old, learned to speak video and audio we have been socialised into these modes of discourse just as we were once toilet trained. We can all no matter how young or old (within limits, but these are limits to all aspects of academic life) be socialised into citing our sources, just as we can all (again with only fairly extreme limits) be socialised into not depositing our excreta here and there as the urge takes us!

There are no digital natives. Indeed on the issues of plagiarism and citation, our classes commonly have students between late teens and seventies, with the majority between twenties and fifties, I have most problems with those in the middle of this range. The young are eager and willing to learn, the old also (or at that stage of life they would not have undertaken a course of formal education). It’s some of the the middle aged, fat and forty, fat in mind not necessarily body, who won’t learn! But, if you won’t learn, then you fail. End of story :(

  1. Heraclitus of Ephesus, Fragment 41; Quoted by Plato in Cratylus [↩]
Education, Study skills , , ,

Hypertext and FOSOTT

July 31, 2010 No comments

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. [↩]
Open Source, Publishing, Teaching Bible none

Neopublishing, FOSOTT and gateway sites

July 30, 2010 No comments

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. [↩]
Bible: OT, Open Source, Publishing, Teaching Bible , , ,

Articulated texts

July 30, 2010 5 comments

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 :( [↩]
languages, Teaching Bible, Translation , , , ,

FOSOT addendum

July 26, 2010 No comments

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

Biblical, Open Source, Publishing, Teaching Bible none

Free Open Source Old Testament Textbook project

July 24, 2010 No comments

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. [↩]
Audio, Bible: OT, Biblical, Education, Open Source, Publishing, Teaching Bible

Children or sons: a question of translation (and therefore culture)

July 24, 2010 No comments

In one of my classes I was asked about translation, so I was delighted to see Susanne’s post Adoption of children: the NRSV and the ESV it deals carefully and clearly with a translation issue whose cultural implications are thorny and it involves both originator and receptor cultures. Do look at it :)

Biblical, Gender, Translation none

Soul Bar and Bistro: Cuisine – Villa Maria Restaurant of the Year

July 17, 2010 No comments

Soul is on the waterfront overlooking the boats

Soul Bar & Bistro
Viaduct Harbour,
ph: 09-356 7249,
soulbar.co.nz
Lunch & dinner 7 days  (5-31 July) $70

Entrée Smoked salmon with salsa verde & toasted sourdough

Main Jerusalem artichoke  risotto with truffle, parmesan  & a poached egg
OR roasted Harmony pork chop, Puy lentils, silverbeet & apple purée

Dessert Tamarillo brulée
OR Kaimai Creamy Blue – Waharoa NZ & Soul’s oatmeal biscuits

Choice of two wines:
Villa Maria Single Vineyard Ihumatao Verdelho 2008
Reserve Marlborough Chardonnay 2007
Reserve Noble Riesling 2009

The starter again quaintly designated “Entrée” was simple and nicely balanced, understated elegance, with a tasty pesto and a strong olive oil drizzle that set off the salmon beautifully.

The pork chop was huge, but pronounced really good. The artichoke risotto continued the understated balance, with nice touches like the little crispy bits (I do not know the technical term, and the waiter understood what I meant) made from  very thinly sliced bread rolled thinner and deep fried. I would never have thought of using Jerusalem Artichokes in a risotto (starch on starch) but it went so well.

The Tamarillo brulée was a nice finish to a really good meal.

The wines were delicious, the Verdelho went really well with the risotto, but I was less convinced by some of the other matches, and also wonder if 2 from 3 is a cop out. It would have been a fairer comparison, and more fun for us to list the wines against the courses and then say 2 from  3 – after all food and matching is part of what it is about!

Again though a lovely meal, very good service and superb value :)

BTW in case you are wondering at two expensive meals in two days, the previous week Barbara was on holiday, and we were both sick and so hardly stepped outside the door, some holiday! This is part of the make up :)

Restaurant of the year ,
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