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2015 Annual Meeting
Meeting Begins: 11/21/2015
Meeting Ends: 11/24/2015
Call for Papers Opens: 12/17/2014
Call for Papers Closes: 3/4/2015
Requirements for Participation
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Meeting Abstracts
Arabic Versions of the Bible: A Status Quaestionis
Program Unit: Biblia Arabica: The Bible in Arabic among Jews, Christians, and Muslims
Ronny Vollandt, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
The historiography of biblical translation into Arabic, unlike the translation movement in ?Abbasid Baghdad, is in its infancy. Medieval scholarship about Arabic translations of the Scriptures—Jewish, Christian, and Muslim—continued in the Early Modern era in the printed editions and was eventually absorbed by biblical textual criticism, as part of the larger field of the history of biblical versions. Modern scholarship, as has been shown, doubted that the study of Arabic translations could provide insights into the Bible itself. After the early and influential attempts by Ignazio Guidi and Georg Graf to reconstitute the genre, scholarship stagnated in the twentieth century, and only recent years have seen something of a revival. In my contribution, I intend to survey the recent trends in the study of the Arabic Bible and will give an outlook on what still has to be done.
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Reciting the Revolution: Dr Ali Shariati’s Liberationist Approach to the Qur’an
Program Unit: Qur’anic Studies: Methodology and Hermeneutics (IQSA)
Alexander Abbasi, University of Johannesburg
In the context of the build up towards the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Ali Shariati's critique against both outsider imperialist colonizers and insider authoritarian leaders, in addition to his strong gnostic tendencies, helped him to revitalize and awaken Muslim consciousness towards viewing the Qur’an as a revelation of revolution.
The purpose of this paper is to analyse and discuss Shariati’s approach to the Qur’an, which I argue was both political and liberationist in nature. I focus on his liberationist perspective, particularly in terms of the following topics: 1) the way in which Shariati’s usage of Islamic figures relates to the Qur’an 2) the way he transforms qur’anic words and language 3) Shariati’s view of the Qur’an as a revolutionary platform 4) and the Qur’an as a gnostic platform.
Overall, Shariati’s approach towards and engagement with the Qur’an can be inferred by the ways in which he reinterpreted the place of Islamic figures. He argued that the Shi'i clergy wasted their time by blindly promoting such taqlid (tradition) as “the love of Ali” and “shedding tears for Hossein,” and spending most of their time writing on “trivial rituals” or “compiling reports on the imams.” For Shariati, there was much value to the lives of Muhammad, Abraham, Ali, and other Qur’anic and Islamic figures, especially in fighting for justice. Shariati lamented the depolitization of both well and lesser-known figures as he felt “personalities like Abu Dharr, Salman, Ammar and Hujr were the true followers of Mohammad’s struggle against idolatory, the nobility, despotism, ignorance, and capitalism” (Rahnema 1998: 200).
For Ali Shariati the Qur’an unites all Muslims and is the model to build on for resistance. Shariati lambasts the hegemony within the Shi'i clerical class for only teaching the general population to recite the Holy Book and to be attracted to the beauty of its cover, but not to let it live through interpretation. Shariati focuses on reintroducing the Qur’an into Muslim society, and mentions the need for such initiatives as establishing general public Qur’anic studies centers, in addition to centers for studying the Hadith of the Prophet (Shariati 1986: 73). For Shariati the Qur’an is a revolutionary platform and basis for his progressive Islamic ideology.
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What Do We Need to Be Saved From?
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Milton Acosta, Seminario Bíblico de Colombia
What do we need to be saved from?
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The Term 'Liska' and Its Material Meaning: Reflections of Persian Time Meals and Offerings in 1 Samuel, Ezekiel, Nehemiah, and Ezra
Program Unit: Meals in the HB/OT and Its World
Klaus-Peter Adam, Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago
This paper investigates whether and how one can determine a Western influence of meal traditions in selected texts of the Hebrew Bible from the Persian period. It presents two lines of argument. First, it considers the evidence for one selected borrowed word in Hebrew, liska, ‘temple chamber’. Of Greek origin, liska is used in 1 Sam, Jer, Ezek, Neh, and Ezra. The paper seeks to illuminate its meaning in temple architecture as a designation for a chamber adjacent to the temple. Some traditions presuppose that in these cultic rooms wine was drunk, Jer 35:4-5, and meals were hold, 1 Sam 9:22; cf. 1 Sam 1:3-5; other passages suggest the chamber functioned as storage place for cultic vessels Ezra 8:29; 10:38; 10:40. The paper evaluates the relevance of the fact that a borrowed term designates a temple chamber that was used for communal drinking and eating. It considers whether culturally specific food practices were associated with this term. The second line of argument considers meal and offering scenes in selected narratives in 1 Sam 1-2; 9*; 16:1-13; 28:21-25. It asks whether one can ascertain Western influence in these descriptions of meal practices and on which methodological grounds this might be possible.
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The Terminology for Enemies in the Psalms: A Lexicographic Conundrum Revisited
Program Unit: Book of Psalms
Klaus-Peter Adam, Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago
The complex lexicography of the enemies of the individual in the Psalms has been presented in a variety of ways. Scholars arranged the rubrics for enemies along three dominant fields of metaphors which, naturally, partly overlap: Images from the area of war, images of hunting and chase, as well as various animal metaphors. Another possibility to portray the various facets of enemy terminology is to distinguish the various lexicographic fields of designations. For instance, terms used in combination with the generic ‘opponent’, Hebrew ’oyeb, on the one hand, can be distinguished from terms that are predominantly combined with the Hebrew term ‘rš’, traditionally rendered ‘the wicked’. Otherwise, one could list the nomenclature of the almost one hundred terms for enemies in alphabetic order or portray the terminology for enemies through the lense of conflict settlement procedure. This paper explores this last possibility and considers the roles of opponents. It takes its starting point with a description of the basics of conflict settlement between individuals and presents a phenomenology of patterns of inimical behavior in the Psalms. It starts out with the names of participants, the procedures of conflict settlements between individuals as its organizing principle. It then presents terms for the specifics of conflict settlement in the Psalms: The intrinsically collective nature of enemies; the terms for social defamation of an enemy; the typical oscillation between the rhetorical and physical character of assaults; the terms for ambushes, ruses and for persecution. This paper makes the point that the complex lexicography of the enemies of the individual in the Psalms may be best grasped when reading the texts in the framework of conflict settlement between individuals. As a consequence, I seek to present major aspects of enmity in the Psalms On the backdrop of a theory of private conflict settlement, that is, ultimately in relation to principles extent in parts of biblical law. For reasons of practicability, I will focus on the first and second David Psalter.
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The African Joseph: His Contribution to Ancient Israel and Africa (Gen 41:41–45)
Program Unit: Genesis
David Tuesday Adamo, Kogi State University
Genesis 41:41-45 indicated that Pharaoh gave his ring, his garment of fine linen, a new name, (Zaphenath-parreah), a wife, and a royal authority. He made him ride on a chariot. He also made his people to shout and pay obeisance for him. What could be the reason for this action? What appears to be the main reason is to reward Joseph with African royal citizenship because of what he has done for the land. It is also probably to make Joseph’s authority more acceptable by Africans/ Egyptians. The purpose of this paper is to examine Genesis 41 critically and especially, each of Pharaoh’s actions in the light of African/Egyptian and biblical culture. Egypt as an African country not only geographically but also ethnically will be examined. The implication to ancient Israel and Africa will also be examined.
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Where Is Ezra? Ben Sira’s Surprising Omission and the Selective Presentation in the Praise of the Ancestors
Program Unit: Wisdom in Israelite and Cognate Traditions
Samuel L. Adams, Union Presbyterian Seminary
Commentators have long puzzled over the fact that Ben Sira extols Nehemiah in the Praise of the Ancestors (Sir 49:13) but does not mention Ezra. The assessment of Ezra as a “scribe skilled in the law of Moses” (Ezra 7:16) would seem to make this earlier figure highly appealing, especially since Ben Sira accentuates the prestige of the scribal vocation (Sir 38:34b-39:11). Moreover, the elevation of Ezra in later apocalyptic texts indicates his abiding importance as a hero of acclaim. This paper will review questionable theories for the omission, including the possible lack of availability of the book of Ezra, the more tolerant understanding of marriage in Sirach, and Ben Sira’s opposition to the prominent role of Levites in Ezra. More plausible theories about priestly factions will receive attention, including the question of Ben Sira’s bias towards Aaronids, and whether the author focuses specifically on “builders” in the latter part of chapter 49. Such inquiries will allow for a broader consideration of Ben Sira’s selective recitation in the Praise of the Ancestors and the intentionality of the larger presentation. Most commentators overstate the significance of the omission, since the litany of figures in this section is eclectic and reflective of popular legends. Our exploration will allow for broader conclusions regarding the goals of Sirach 44-50 and the merit of longstanding theories concerning this section.
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Christology and Cognitive Science
Program Unit: Mysticism, Esotericism, and Gnosticism in Antiquity
Grant Adamson, Rice University
Much of early Christian belief about Jesus in the second century and thereafter was the product of harmonization. Using historical-critical methods, we can train ourselves to see where the Pauline Jesus was harmonized with the Jesus of Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, etc. But as useful as those methods are, they do not provide sufficient theoretical framework for analyzing the harmonization process in detail and going beyond the inputs (Paul, Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, etc.) to the new structure and meaning that emerge when two or more inputs are combined. Blending theory, from the field of cognitive science and the subfield of cognitive linguistics, does. It allows us to recognize the creativity of early Christian thought such as in the harmonization process and the development of christology. I apply blending theory as a supplement to historical-critical methods and demonstrate its utility for christological studies in my analysis of a passage from the Letter of the Apostles dealing with the incarnation. There the Johannine prologue is combined with the Lukan infancy narrative so that the two heavenly descents of the divine Logos (input: John) and the angel Gabriel (input: Luke) occur as a single descent, and so that the virgin Mary conceives aurally while she listens to the word/Word of God that is simultaneously both spoken to her and speaking to her at the annunciation. Though this may be an elaborate instance of novelty, blending theory is no less useful for studying the general development of early Christian belief in the incarnation of a pre-existent Jesus through virgin birth, which is creatively Christian even without angelic transformation of Jesus into Gabriel or aural conception by the virgin Mary.
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Jeremiah Dispels Diaspora Demons? Concerning the Possibility That Jer 10:11 Was Interpreted by 4Q71 and LXX as an Aramaic Magical Incantion against Evil Spirits
Program Unit: Qumran
James S. Adcock, University of St. Andrews
Jeremiah’s enigmatic Aramaic verse in 10:11 has continued to perplex generations of critical scholarship. 4Q71 and LXX Jeremiah suggest that 10:11’s original hymnic function has been replaced with a magical or apotropaic focus against demons, as suggested by Bernard Duhm originally. This is confirmed by Qumran demonology manifest in magical incantation texts such as 4Q286-87, 4Q560, 8Q5, 11Q11; apotropaic prayer material like 4Q510-11; 4Q444; 6Q18; and also pseudepigraphic material (1 Enoch, Jubilees). Correspondingly, a proper understanding of 10:11’s original Hymnic function allows one to suggest that the Masoretic poetic structure of the hymn has greater antiquity than that of 4Q71 or LXX 10’s Vorlage. Later Diaspora demonology could account for the changes from MT 10 to LXX 10 and 4Q71. Moreover, 2nd Temple period literature (Apocryphon of Jeremiah C; 1 Baruch; Epistle of Jeremiah) also provide a conducive environment for LXX 10:1-18’s alterations. Thus, early interpretations of Jeremiah demonstrate the logical mechanism of how LXX Jeremiah formed 10:1-16, which gave emphasis to verse 11 in its structural placement of verse 9 within 5, along with the incumbent minuses of 10:6-8 and 10 (4Q71). Jewish reception took essentially the same interpretation of 10:11, as confirmed in the epistolary genre described in Targum Jonathan, Midrash, and Rabbinic commentary. LXX 10:1-18 and 4Q71 both reflect the Epistle of Jeremiah’s explanation for the Aramaic language switch in 10:11 as an epistle addressed to the Jewish Diaspora. Likewise, LXX 10 and 4Q71 reflect a text form that corresponds to a popular emphasis of 10:11 as Jeremiah’s epistolary stricture against idolatry in the exile. Thus, Duhm’s proposal of a magical incantation as well as the context of the Epistle of Jeremiah give viable explanation for the abbreviated or rewritten form of LXX 10 and 4Q71 received by its exilic audience.
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The Words of Jeremiah or the Words of God? Attempting to Make Sense of the Divine Name Variation in the Septuagint and Masoretic Texts of Jeremiah
Program Unit: International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies
James S. Adcock, University of St. Andrews
LXX and MT Jeremiah 1:1 famously differ in their introduction to the book. LXX 1:1’s plus of “the speech of God upon Jeremiah” presents the Vorlage’s special claim to a divine oracle in contrast to MT’s simple phrase of “the words of Jeremiah.” Our analysis of the divine name variation in MT and LXX gives confirmation of P.M. Bogaert’s theory of LXX representing an edition which emphasizes scribal transmission of God’s words rather than necessarily Jeremiah’s words. When Jeremiah’s divine name references are compared in LXX and MT, both texts demonstrate similar variation with the result that it is often difficult to distinguish whether the translator or the LXX Vorlage was responsible for the name differences. Pietersma has described LXX Jeremiah’s translation technique as the most complex in the LXX corpus. Our study of the divine names profoundly demonstrate Pietersma’s claims. It is very likely that some abbreviation of divine titles has taken place at the hand of the translator, since even MT’s longest divine title survives in LXX (e.g. LXX 51:7). But, where one finds the rare LXX plus material of divine titles, such names probably represent the LXX Vorlage’s edition’s special emphasis or theology. We find little Qumran confirmation for divine names in LXX, save only in 4Q70’s Proto-MT text’s confirmation of one LXX title (12:4). Thus, one must rely upon translation technique analysis with lack of much external controls, unless one assumes an unlikely hypothesis of a damaged Vorlage manuscript for moments of free renditions (e.g. LXX 39:8, 19). No Qumran documents support LXX’s shorter divine titles, so that it is difficult to dismiss translation abbreviation as a frequent phenomenon. Thus, LXX Jeremiah’s translation technique proves to be more complicated than simply a strictly literal one, since the lengthy book has sections of different trends.
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Growth to a Hymn or Editing to a Sermon against Idols? What Can LXX Jer 10:11 Tell Us about the Two Editions of Jeremiah?
Program Unit: Transmission of Traditions in the Second Temple Period
James S. Adcock, University of St. Andrews
Does Jeremiah 10’s textual variation represent evidence of MT expansive development from an ancestor common to the LXX edition? The answer is far from settled in our mind! MT 10:1-16’s antithetical hymnic structure gives a more sophisticated organization which proves to be a more original genre text form. LXX 10:1-16’s text, however, displays a coherence focused on a later interpretive understanding of verse 11, which indicates that the Proto-MT structure gave birth to the LXX perspective. The epistolary genre of later 2nd Temple Period texts related to Jeremiah like the Epistle of Jeremiah, 1 Baruch, and the Apocryphon of Jeremiah C demonstrate a cultural milieu which produced LXX 10’s text. 4Q71 and LXX 10 both betray later exilic concerns which narrow their focus on 10:11’s Aramaic verse, in contrast to the antithetically parallel hymn found in 4Q70 and MT. LXX has actually reversed the original intent of 10:11 as a war taunt against Judah’s idolatry to one against paganism. The abbreviation of LXX (4Q71) and its transposition of 10:9 within 10:5 reflect a textual improvement for the sake of a more compressed logical flow of thought towards 10:11’s aniconic emphasis. MT 10:1-16’s hymnic organization proves to be a more original text form in contrast to LXX’s flattened logical structure which restricts its message against idolatry’s gods in verses 5, 9, and 11. LXX 10:1-16 thereby produces a more conducive setting for LXX 10:11’s Diaspora letter, so as to allow 10:11’s aniconic sermon to be received as an exilic message. Moreover, later reception seems to have taken a similar interpretation, as confirmed in Targum Jonathan, Midrash, and Rabbinic commentary. Since Jeremiah becomes a very important Diaspora persona, it is not surprising that Jeremiah’s scriptural material (MT 10:1-16) was rewritten like Mosaic scriptures in the 2nd Temple Period.
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“The Distaff of Silence”: A Gender Reading of the Esther and Joseph Narratives in the Hebrew Bible
Program Unit: Women in the Biblical World
Rachel Adelman, Hebrew College
This paper engages in a close textual analysis of the dynamic analogies between the Joseph and Esther narratives, drawing on the methods of feminist hermeneutics and rabbinic midrash. While many scholars (Adele Berlin, Sandra Berg, and Michael Fox to name a few) have noted the parallels between these stories of the Hebrew/Jew who rises to prominence in a foreign court – I focus on the gendered aspect of their character development. As beautiful orphans, who “find favor in the eyes” of those who see them, both Esther and Joseph are feminine figures, tailored for their diplomatic roles precisely because they master the art of discretion. Though seemingly passive victims of their placement within the palace precincts, they rise to prominence through the combination of wile and concealed identity.
The conventional reading suggests that Esther was planted within the Imperial court as a kind of mole, only later to reveal herself as a Jewess to undermine Haman’s decree of genocide against her people. Yet why does the Queen delay the revelation of her identity until the second feast? Joseph, too, conceals his identity from his brothers, behind the mask of ‘Egyptian’ viceroy within Pharaoh’s court. After a twenty-two-year absence, why does he further delay the reconciliation with his brothers and reunion with his aged father? The unmasking only occurs after the brothers’ second descent down to Egypt. The rabbinic tradition suggests that both Joseph and Esther inherit the trait of discretion, dubbed the “distaff of silence,” from Rachel, the matriarch (Gen. Rab. 71:5). What is the nature of this distinctly feminine metaphor? How does it play itself out in the narratives of deceit or discretion? And why is it linked back, in a kind of genetic essentialism, to the matriarch? Drawing on psychoanalytic/literary approach of Avivah Zornberg and Julia Kristeva, I explore the legacy that the matriarch as a marginalized figure bequeaths her children. Buried on the border, she calls to her children “who are not” to return from exile (cf. Jer 31:14). Over the arc of their stories, both Esther and Joseph are transformed from “object”, seen and acted upon by others, to “subject,” agents of their own narrative, through a stage of being “abject”, one “who is not,” outside of the purview of the eye of the beholder. They rise to prominence, endure and die in exile, and become emblematic of the power of discretion for the Jew in the Diaspora. I argue that the nexus between Hebrew/Jew and masculine/feminine are inversely related in the two narratives. And in the final revelation, for both Esther and Joseph, there is a complete break-down of essentialist gender categories. Esther writes. Joseph weeps. This paper represents a condensed version of the final chapter in my forthcoming book: The Female Ruse: Women’s Deception and the Divine Sanction in the Hebrew Bible (Sheffield Phoenix Press).
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Reflexive Self-Awareness in Religious Belief? American Muslim Responses to Cognitive Dissonance
Program Unit: Religious Experience in Antiquity
Zaid Adhami, Duke University
In this paper, I examine the relation between “cognitive conservatism” and reflexive self-awareness in American Muslim religious belief. I ask: When people are reflexively aware of their doubts and cognitive dissonance regarding their religious beliefs, how are they able to sustain their convictions? In addressing such questions, I draw on insights from cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy, which I put in conversation with my own ethnographic reflections, drawing on extended interactions and conversations with a handful of ethnographic interlocutors. These young American Muslims discuss the ways in which they separate out an “analytical” perspective from a “faith” perspective. The latter is nurtured by and nurtures ritual practice and ethical disciplines. Thus their reflexive acknowledgement of the ambiguity of things they believe and the possibility of error is relegated to the peripheries of their consciousness, due to their “absorption” in ritualized practices and behaviors that become central to their religious lives.
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The Qur'an in Light of Prosopography
Program Unit: The Qur’an: Manuscripts and Textual Criticism (IQSA)
Ghali Adi, University of Edinburgh
Epigraphic data from the formative period of Islam has been increasing exponentially over the last two decades thanks to the efforts of scholars like Frederic Imbert, Solange Ory, Robert Hoyland and Saudi archaeologists like al-Ghaban, Kilabi and al-Rašhid. It is thanks to these endeavours that a number of significant studies have examined the literary content and context of the Quran in this material genre, yet, as Robert Hoyland adumbrated in 1997:
"... There are almost no studies… which consider...who wrote them and why…." (Hoyland 1997)
Contrary to the idea that inscriptions contain “only proper names…of obscure persons who have left no trace of their existence…”(van Berchem 1915) this type of data could potentially provide a rich source of prosopographic information that could be of significant value to even the most sceptical of early Islamic historians. As part of my ongoing research into this dimension, I will aim to combine both approaches (literary and prosopographical) to see how such identified individuals, at least in a Hijazi setting, fit into a Quranic literary context. In addition to dating of the Quranic inscriptions, knowing the social and historical backgrounds of such individuals provides valuable information about how the Quran was viewed, how the Quran was cited and how this process evolved during the first two centuries of Islam.
The data presented will include a number of edited and highlighted inscriptions that have been previously published and several unpublished inscriptions from sites such as Gabal al-Safinah. Examples provided may include figures of high standing, early narrators of hadiths and even the occasional not so famous son or grandson of a prominent scholar or companion.
Analysis of this pool of data will hopefully highlight the rich potential of this undeveloped avenue and may provide insights into the geographical context in which the Quran was formed.
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Kaige Readings in a Non-Kaige Section in 1 Samuel
Program Unit: Textual Criticism of the Historical Books
Anneli Aejmelaeus, University of Helsinki
Ever since the publication of Dominique Barthélemy’s Devanciers d’Aquila (1963), the so-called Kaige revision has had a permanent place in the text-historical discussion of Samuel – Kings. Certain sections of the Greek text of these books (2 Samuel 10 – 1 Kings 2 and 1 Kings 22 – end of 1 Kings), according to an earlier theory of Henry St.J. Thackeray attributed to a different translator, were described by Barthélemy as the produce of an early Jewish revision which corrected the Greek text to correspond more closely to the current Hebrew text, practically the proto-Masoretic text. The same phenomenon was found in the Nahal Hever Minor Prophets scroll and the B-text of Judges, and its characteristic features have been further defined in more recent literature. Within Samuel – Kings this discussion has so far mainly concerned the above-mentioned sections. Nevertheless, textual study of 1 Samuel has revealed that similar readings can sporadically be found also in a non-Kaige section, and in particular, in the B-text (Vaticanus and its satellites), which is the main representative of the phenomenon in the Kaige sections as well as in Judges.
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Colonized Apostles: Paul of Tarsus and Pedro Albizu Campos
Program Unit: Postcolonial Studies and Biblical Studies
Efrain Agosto, New York Theological Seminary
Recent "empire studies" of the the Apostle Paul reflect on him "as apostle to the nations," confronting or conforming to the Roman imperial order, depending on who one reads. Centuries later in another hemisphere, in a territory of the United States "empire," the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico sought to resist encroaching U.S. colonization in the first half of the 20th century under the vigorous leadership of its "apostle of independence," Pedro Albizu Campos. This paper explores these two "colonized apostles" as they confront their Empires both as impassioned missionaries for their communities and as martyred political prisoners.
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The Other Rituals at the Epidauran Asklepieion
Program Unit: Greco-Roman Religions
Stephen P. Ahearne-Kroll, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
Seeking healing at an Asklepieon famously involved incubation and some encounter with the god in a dream, resulting in healing or some instruction for a remedy for whatever ailed the incubant. However, the process of receiving healing from Asklepios involved much more than incubation. The process also involved extensive ritual offerings to other gods, the identities of which vary by location, although there is some overlap. At the height of popularity of the Epidauran Asklepieion in the 4th century BCE, a suppliant would expect to participate and perform a varied set of rituals as part of the incubation process. There was a period of decline in the Epidauran sanctuary between the middle of the 2nd century BCE and the renovation of the sanctuary by Hadrian and then Antoninus in the 2nd century CE. The negative political relationship between Epidauros and Rome could account for much of the decline, but the experiences of healing in the early decades of the sanctuary seem to have ceased in this period, given the lack of dedicatory evidence for healing. The decline of the sanctuary may have been perceived by ancients as Asklepios ceasing to heal at this particular sanctuary. In their desire to restore the Epidauran Asklepieion to prominence, neither Hadrian nor Antoninus focused on exclusive worship of Asklepios. They saw the complex ritual life of the sanctuary as integral to its rejuvenation—Hadrian by modeling it after the Pergamon sanctuary’s inclusion of various gods not seen at Epidauros before, and Antoninus by a restoration of the traditional cultic activity found at the sanctuary in the 4th c. BCE. This paper will flesh out this ritual activity at Epidauros and offer some initial thoughts about how these rituals may have worked together to effect healing for the suppliant. I will argue that this complex web of rituals—termed prothumata (ancillary or preliminary sacrifices)—created distinct and proper relations between the human individual and a defined community of divine figures, including Asklepios. Although incubation received all the headlines, the prothumata, as Hadrian and Antoninus saw, provided the ritual matrix within which the incubatory encounter with Asklepios fit best.
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The Relationship between Historical Development of Qur'an and Historical Development of Its Exegesis
Program Unit: Linguistic, Literary, and Thematic Perspectives on the Qur’anic Corpus (IQSA)
Mohammad Hasan Ahmadi, University of Tehran
The historical philology and hermeneutical interpretation of the Qur'an, should be based on a triangular field: (1) view of the Qur’an’s emergence in Late Antiquity (as an interpreted Bible), (2) the historical development of the Qur'an (the Qur'an emergence from a real historical event); and (3) the historical development of the Quran Exegesis. The third one -which the paper will discuss- is often ignored by scholars in the Qur'anic scholarship today. What I mean by that is: the scholarship preconceptions of the Qur'an in its continuous developing process. Rather than imagine the emergence of the Qur'an isolated from historical development of Exegesis, we have to imagine a sort of twin birth of scripture and its exegesis. The Quran - Unlike other divine books – has emerged as an interpreted text by the prophet (16:44). This track was followed by The Muslim exegetes later on and gradually developed during past centuries. Thus scholars have to deal not only with the text of Qur'an but with its developing exegesis as its late subtexts. Both the rethinking of the Muslim exegetes -as it mirrors the contextual meaning of the text- like investigation into the Text's traditional understanding can complete -together- the philological meaning. If the text itself can disclose the logic behind the historical progression then the exegetical texts can disclose the philological meaning of the Qur'anic text. If there is a close relationship between the Qur'anic text and the community, then there is such a close relationship between text and exegesis from the very beginning centuries. Then the resulting separation of the Qur'an from its historical development of Exegesis is no academic trifle from a philological perspective. More ever one might claim that the modern discipline of philology has developed by classical Muslim exegetes of the Qur'an too.
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A Luhmannian Perspective: Communicating Damascus
Program Unit: Social Sciences and the Interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures
John Ahn, Howard University
Niklas Luhmann’s social theory is ambitious, complex, layered, grand, paradoxical, scientific and radically different. His theory is prolific and widespread in German speaking circles. On the same stage with Habermas (his most fierce critic), Bourdieu, Giddens, and Foucault, his 1,200 page work Die Gesellschaft der Gesellchaft (The Society of Society) parses and surpasses Talcott Parsons, George Spencer-Brown, Thomas Luckmann, Emile Durkheim , Edmund Husserl among others, evolutionarily evolving with “autopoiesis” (Humberto Maturana and Francesco Varela), “meaning,” and “sub-systems.” Risking oversimplification, his approach is a systems theory or a societal system (Gesellschaftsystem) with sub-systems that are independent of each other– educational system, cybernetics system, economic system, legal, political, social, organizational, and religion. In a Systems Theory of Religion, he radically replaces religion’s concern and center on humanity and anthropology with “society” and “communication” (utterance, information, and understanding). Yet, he is interested in the form of religion and argues for “the code” that unlocks the paradoxes. He rejects the social theory that individuals comprise society and order. He rejects the notion that sociologists can truly comprehend the actions, including communicative action, of others. Rather, “Society exists only when individuals communicate.” And only those that are part of that society or group can understand that society/group. “Social systems cannot observe themselves from the outside.”
This paper has three parts. (1) First, after introducing Luhmann’s general theory: communication, evolution, and differentiation in three separate dimensions: Sozial (social), Zeit (temporal), and Sachdimensionen (functional), (2) I move to the “speeches” (Laut [sound] and Sinn [meaning]) against Damascus (in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah, etc.[OAN]) as communication media and (3) conclude with the form of the society communicated (mass media) in the Damascus Document, endeavoring to provide some insight into how a systems theory approach offers a truly fresh social reading, namely, as Luhmann argues, a modern society is not structurally superior to earlier types.
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Why Be an Angel When You Can Be a Goddess? Jewess Magic in Antiquity
Program Unit: Gender, Sexuality, and the Bible
Mika Ahuvia, University of Washington
Scholars tend to assume that late antique ritual practitioners could only have been male. The assumption has been that only men were literate and that therefore, scribal magic could only have been a man’s line of work. This is treated as self-evident despite the fact that there are known and published examples of ancient Jewish Aramaic incantations written in the first person feminine.
In this paper, I argue that there is good reason to take the feminine authorship of these incantation texts seriously. Furthermore, I explain how recognizing the feminine perspective of these texts can help us understand the logic and religious vocabulary of the incantations.
In this presentation, I will focus on one fascinating Jewish incantation from Babylonia and place it into its ancient Jewish Babylonian context. Previous scholars have focused on its philological background and have provided the foundation for contextualizing this incantation further.
This incantation is one of the few incantations written in Talmudic Aramaic and is also written in the first person singular feminine. Although this practitioner appeals to Babylonian goddesses alongside the Jewish God, I argue that it must be understand in the context of the limitations and possibility afforded Jewish women in the late antique religious imagination. When one considers the general patterns of adaptation of ritual techniques in late antiquity, I will argue that the choices made by this female Jewish practitioner come into view.
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Two New Handbooks of the Septuagint: Purposes and Future Prospects
Program Unit: International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies
James Aitken, University of Cambridge
A discussion of two new LXX handbooks.
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Symbolic Conversations and Characterizations: A Comparison and Contrast of the Samaritan Woman in John 4:1–42 with the Syrophoenician Woman in Mark 5:25–30
Program Unit: Johannine Literature
Adesola Akala, University of Durham
A close examination of the narrative portrayals of the Samaritan woman in John 4:1-42 and the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 5:25-30 reveal symmetric and diametric characterizations that advance the narrative and theological strategies of the gospel writers. The aim of this presentation is to show how the gospels of John and Mark accomplish a similar narrative strategy by using the conversations these two women have with Jesus. Using principles of symbol theory, this paper explores the significance of the symbolic characterizations of the two similar yet dissimilar women. The Samaritan woman, intentionally sought out by Jesus, is initially reserved but eventually engages in a theological conversation laden with symbolism that leads to Christological self-revelation, thus opening the door for the inclusion of the Samaritans in the Messianic mission. On the other hand, the Syrophonecian woman intentionally seeks Jesus out but is initially rejected; she argues with him and overturns his symbolic terminology to receive her request, thus opening the door for Gentile inclusion in the Jewish Messianic blessings. Both women are symbolically positioned in their geographical locations and engage in symbolic conversations that contain similar themes such as water/bread/food, personal rejection/reception, family/relational crisis, and ethnic exclusivity/inclusivity. Although the two narratives vary in length, plot, socio-historical context, and setting, a close reading of both texts reveals a common underlying purpose. As sociocultural outcasts on many levels, the vivid characterizations of these two women create suspense and defy hearer-reader expectations. As symbols of individual and communal inclusion the Samaritan woman and the Syrophonecian woman respectively enhance the narrative plots and theological agendas of the gospels of John and Mark.
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The Biblical Concept of Marriage as Practiced in an African, Socio-cultural Context: The Ewe of Southeastern Ghana a Case in Point
Program Unit: African Biblical Hermeneutics
Dorothy BEA Akoto, Interdenominational Theological Center
This paper considers the Biblical concept of marriage and its practice in various socio-cultural contexts as very challenging. In light of this the paper proposes that marriage can be divided into three distinct components of 1. Pre-Marriage, 2. Marriage Proper and 3. Post-Marriage. Each of these stages makes unique contributions to the marriage. The paper employs passage from various parts of the Bible to substantiate its argument and concludes that this paper makes a valuable contribution to Academia by proposing a new understanding to the concept as not limited to Stage 2 but as beginning with stage 1 and ending with stage 3. As a beginning proposal, it acts as an introduction to the topic and invites further contributions from scholarship.
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Enslavement and Eunuchs: Matthew 19:12b in Narrative and Historical Context
Program Unit: Slavery, Resistance, and Freedom
Jennifer S. Alexander, Vanderbilt University
As Glancy argues, New Testament scholars have downplayed the issue of slavery in the Roman Empire (2010). They have also been slow to address enslavement in Jesus’ parables (2000). Her insights may be extended to slavery in other New Testament contexts, and in particular Matthew 19, a chapter embedded in Matthew’s larger narrative context of households and discipleship. While Glancy helpfully directs attention to the problematic issue of slavery in the first gospel, and though she does address eunuchs in other contexts (2006), she neglects Matthew’s man-made eunuchs of 19:12b.
Glancy is not alone in this regard. Even those scholars who have devoted studies to Matthew’s distinctive verse about eunuchs or have treated Mt 19:12 in commentaries, have done little more than offer a one- or two-line declaration to the effect that “eunuchs who were eunuchized by people” were typically slaves (cf. Kartzow and Moxnes). Some commentaries fail to do even this much (e.g., Talbert, Evans, Senior). The focus of inquiry remains squarely on Matthew’s third group of eunuchs: “those who eunuchized themselves for the sake of the kingdom of the heavens” (19:12c).
To date and to the best of my knowledge, no scholar has devoted a study exclusively either to Matthew’s first group of eunuchs (“those who were engendered thus in mother’s womb”) or to the second. For the Slavery, Resistance, and Freedom Section, I propose to focus exclusively on the latter by situating these eunuchs in broader narrative and historical context. A careful comparison of this second group, including conceptions of their status, gender, and kinship connections, will be made with their counterparts in the LXX and other Greco-Roman texts.
I focus especially on eunuchs who worked in high-level positions for powerful kings and elite landowners/householders like those Matthew presents. In such positions, eunuchs enhanced the social standing of sovereigns. They often exhibited a high degree of autonomy as they served and protected the interests and bodies of their slavemasters and, in some cases, gained an intimate knowledge—whether they desired it or not—from mundane personal activities (e.g., sleeping, eating, bathing), to desired lovers and marriage partners, to military and political activities.
This also sheds light on Matthew's placement of 19:12 in its immediate narrative context which, I will argue, is not coincidental. The Matthean Jesus speaks about eunuchs immediately before he instructs his disciples about children and just after he challenges Pharisees about God’s will concerning marriage, divorce, and remarriage. Here I explore Matthew's connection between non- procreative children and enslaved eunuchs, both of which groups the evangelist associated with the kingdom of the heavens.
This paper will demonstrate that Matthew’s eunuchs of 19:12b advance the evangelist’s larger program of disrupting earthly households and a traditional cycle of human reproduction to prioritize and glorify God’s household and God's masculine status as the ultimate pater familias.
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Babies and Building Blocks: A Re-constructive Reading of God’s Household in 1 Peter
Program Unit: Children in the Biblical World
Amy Lindeman Allen, Vanderbilt University
This paper re-reads 1 Peter’s haustafel from a childist perspective concerned with children both absent and present. It re-imagines 1 Peter’s haustafel as a model for the Christian family based on growth and interdependence, rather than power and submission. In this model, God is pater familias, mimicking patriarchy in order to bring about a reversal in which elders imitate infants. This is argued in three parts: (1) attending to children and the ideologies that govern their relationships; (2) uniting the metaphors of infants and building blocks; and (3) re-imagining an alternate model of household relationships.
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Textual History and/as Reception History: Textual Variation in the Greek Manuscript Tradition of Revelation 4–5
Program Unit: Novum Testamentum Graecum: Editio Critica Maior
Garrick Allen, University of St. Andrews
It has long been observed that the textual history of the book of Revelation is anomalous in comparison to other NT works in numerous ways. Instead of a condition to be lamented, this situation offers a unique opportunity to explore the early reception of this work within its own manuscript tradition, a tradition that is particularly amenable to reflection on the relationship between textual history and reception history. This study investigates Revelation’s early reception by examining the ways in which textual variation and paratextual features in its manuscript tradition constitute acts of reception. This discussion requires three steps. First, I outline trends in the studies of the textual culture of the late Second Temple period, a period in which scribal intervention is manifest, and argue that a similar, yet muted phenomenon remained an undercurrent in the development of the Greek tradition of Revelation. Second, I examine this theory using concrete examples of textual variation in Rev 4-5 preserved in witnesses dating before the 7th century CE. These test cases highlight the various factors that motivated and regulated textual change and suggest that many of these changes reflect interpretive or explicative intent, a desire to preserve Revelation’s relevance and increase its clarity. Finally, the study concludes with some reflection on what this data means for the on-going production of the Editio Critica Maior of Revelation.
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The Cretan Quote of Titus 1:12: Why Paul Appears to Be Such a Bigot
Program Unit: Disputed Paulines
Isaiah Luke Allen, Asbury Theological Seminary
Conventional readings of Titus 1:12-13 present real grammatical and contextual problems. Taken at face value, the apostle Paul addresses Titus and quotes Epimenides, a (5th-6th Century BCE) Cretan poet, in a descriptive and highly disfavorable moral assessment of the Cretans that Paul himself shares. This paper exposes some of the literary-contextual, grammatical, and semantic problems with this reading and suggests an interpretation that coheres with the NT portrayal of the canonical Paul and Titus, the grammar of the passage, and the context of the argument in the letter to Titus. Rather than being a bigot, Paul is exposing and attacking bigotry in the church.
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Logos and LEGOs: Everything's Not Awesome—The Brick Bible Controversy
Program Unit: Bible and Popular Culture
Spencer L. Allen, University of Pennsylvania
In 2001, Brendan Powell Smith posted his retelling of six stories from Genesis using only LEGO bricks on his website (thebricktestament.com) and biblical texts. By 2015, his website included more than 400 biblical stories and over 4500 photographs, boasting that this project is “the world’s largest, most comprehensive illustrated Bible.” Smith has also published several critically-acclaimed picture books, including 2011’s A New Spin on the Old Testament, 2012’s A New Spin on the Story of Jesus, and five short children’s books. Smith’s success stems from a mix of the visual playfulness that permeates his work and the revival of the LEGO brand, which now includes clothing, several amusement parks, video games, animated series, and 2014’s wildly popular The LEGO Movie.
Despite Smith’ successes, his Brick Bible project has not been without controversy. In many ways, this controversy resembles some of the criticism that surrounded R. Crumb’s 2009’s The Book of Genesis Illustrated: All 50 Chapters. Specifically, too many people expect a Bible picture book to be a children’s book; they do not imagine it as a graphic novel intended for adult audiences. Whereas Crumb’s cover cautions its audience with visual and verbal cues, Smith’s New Spin volumes offer no such warning, and its cover art is as inviting to children as an official LEGO box. Although thebricktestament.com notifies its readers that it is a “sprawling website best suited for those with the maturity to read the entire Bible,” and identifies stories containing (plastic toy) nudity, sexual content, and violence, Smith’s New Spin volumes lack the sexually explicit poses found on the website.
However, his self-editing for publication did not prevent his detractors from complaining that his books are too sexually graphic, and Sam’s Club refused to carry the Old Testament volume in 2011 for precisely this reason after receiving complaints from the public. Another reason that Smith’s work has been condemned by various faith communities is his avowed atheism. Because of his nonbelief, Smith has been labeled as an outsider. One Catholic writer argued that his “skewed perspective on matters of faith...makes a pretty good case against faith,” and several evangelicals have written similar responses. Others complain that Smith’s interpretation of scriptural chronology or theology differs from their own, or as one blogger noted, “most stories are (literally) accurate, but missing the heart of Jesus.” In response, Smith dismisses these critics, claiming that he only desires to increase people’s knowledge of the Bible and not to change anyone’s beliefs.
This paper examines Smith’s Brick Bible as graphic novels geared for educating adults and evaluates his claim that he has let “the Bible speak for itself.” It also considers the criticisms leveled against his work by evangelical writers, who also argue that their readings or interpretations let “the Bible speak for itself,” and by Catholic writers, who come from a tradition wary of (over) literal interpretation. The paper concludes with a brief overview of Smith’s children’s books and how they stack up against his detractors’ concerns.
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Ishtar-of-Arbela’s Mythological, Mystical, and Prophetic Independence from Ishtar-of-Nineveh
Program Unit: Bible, Myth, and Myth Theory
Spencer L. Allen, University of Pennsylvania
In her 2004 study of Assurbanipal’s Hymns to the Ishtars of Nineveh and Arbela, Barbara Porter argues that the seventh-century (B.C.E.) Assyrian king revered two distinct and independent goddesses. Specifically, Assurbanipal identifies them as Lady-of-Nineveh and Lady-of-Arbela, although they are usually called Ishtar-of-Nineveh and Ishtar-of-Arbela in Neo-Assyrian documents. In addition to using feminine-plural verbs, adjectives and possessive pronouns, Assurbanipal identifies the Ninevite goddess as “the mother who bore him” (SAA 3 3 r. 14), whereas the Arbelite goddess is “my creator” (r. 16) to distinguish them. Despites the king’s claims and Porter’s analysis, students of Assyrian theology often regard these two ladies as mere localized manifestations of one singular Ishtar entity rather than independent divine entities. However, as demonstrated in Allen’s 2015 monograph The Splintered Divine, Assurbanipal was not the only Neo-Assyrian who recognized that the Ninevite goddess was separate and distinct from her Arbelite counterpart. An abundance of Sargonid period royal inscriptions, international treaties, administrative documents, personal correspondences, and ritual texts reflect a theology similar to the king’s, indicating that a significant portion (if not a majority) of the population recognized or revered multiple independent Ishtar goddesses.
Just as international and succession treaties distinguish these two goddesses, so do mystical and mythological texts that were never intended for distribution or a popular audience. For example, the so-called Mystical Miscellanea (SAA 3 39), an esoteric text that only initiated readers were permitted to read (r. 26), identifies the Arbelite goddess as Marduk’s mother (l. 22) and the Ninevite goddess as his wet nurse (l. 19), a notable reversal of the roles played in the kings’ lives. Not only are they differentiated here, but the mythology underlying Mystical Miscellanea’s explicit syncretisms and Enuma elish’s implicit syncretisms in ll. 19-23 necessitate these goddesses’ differentiation for polemical reasons: Nineveh and Assyria must be superior to Babylon and Babylonia. Other esoteric texts, with mythological overtones building upon Enuma elish while simultaneously distinguishing the Ninevite and Arbelite goddesses, are the Assyrian and Ninevite versions of the Marduk Ordeal (SAA 3 34 and 35, respectively). Indeed, these two inscriptions also differentiate other localized Ishtar goddesses, including the goddess known as Lady-of-Babylon and yet another separate Ishtar goddess who lacks a localized epithet. Finally, a series of prophetic texts demonstrate that Assurbanipal was not the first to imagine Lady-of-Nineveh as the royal matron and Lady-of-Arbela as the royal wet nurse (e.g., SAA 9 1.6); prophets had already made this distinction during his father Esarhaddon’s reign.
Because these esoteric compositions treated Ishtar-of-Arbela as a distinct and separate goddess from Ishtar-of-Nineveh (and from other Ishtar goddesses), we can conclude that the authors of such creative and speculative texts shared the same theology and mythology as the king, his courtiers, and the lay Neo-Assyrian population. Moreover, this is a theology and mythology that students of Assyriology tend to downplay or deny.
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“Thus I Purified Them from Everything Foreign”: Purity Traditions and Postcolonial Perspectives in Ezra-Nehemiah
Program Unit: Postcolonial Studies and Biblical Studies
Andrea E. Allgood, Brown University
The treatment of persons classed as foreign and the issue of intermarriage in Ezra-Nehemiah has received much attention recently, especially because these themes are seen to be integral to how the authors of these texts navigated the construction of a postexilic Israelite community. This paper builds on the work of scholars such as Saul Olyan by focusing on the types of purity ideologies utilized in Ezra-Nehemiah, especially those relating to intermarriage and alien persons. The paper argues that the ways in which purity rhetoric is applied in these texts can be better understood if one takes into account the postcolonial perspective of the authors of these texts. After briefly exploring the difficulties involved in a postcolonial examination of the purity discourse in Ezra-Nehemiah, this study suggests that the ways in which the authors of these texts utilized purity traditions allowed them to couch the issue of “Self” and “Other” in specifically Israelite terms, even though the situation is negotiated in a colonized environment, possibly even through the lens of imperial authorization. In this way, Ezra-Nehemiah’s strategic implementation of purity traditions reflects the situation of colonialism, which, as David Chidester summarized, “represents a complex intercultural encounter between alien intruders and indigenous people.” Because the protagonists of Ezra-Nehemiah are the quintessential arbiters of what is “insider” while they themselves arrive from a foreign land, authorized to do the work of “indigenous” social formation as the agents of the colonizer’s imperial apparatus, the nature of how insider/outsider and native/foreign play out in these books is unusual and complex. This speaks to the kind of negotiated power dynamics and cultural give-and-take observed by Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak to erode the dichotomies of Self/Other and imperialism/resistance in order to form a third space where “culture” actually happens. The purity ideologies employed in Ezra-Nehemiah speak to a larger intra-Israelite discourse on the ramifications of a colonial existence, articulated in this case through a specifically Israelite lens (priestly purity traditions), and negotiated with an awareness that “Us” and “Them” were fluid categories in a postcolonial situation.
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The Kingdom of Heaven in the Gospel of Matthew and Tannaitic Tradition
Program Unit: Synoptic Gospels
Tobias Ålöw, Göteborgs Universitet
At the center of the Gospel of Matthew one finds “the Kingdom of Heaven”. This expression is unique to Matthew, not only relation to the rest of the New Testament, but also to all preceding literature. It is not found in the Hebrew Bible, not in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and not in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. Neither is it found in the later texts by Josephus and Philo; and it appears only occasionally in early Christian literature. However, it occurs on numerous occasions in the rabbinic literature, but this material has only been dealt with – primarily by Dalman, Billerbeck, Moore and Kuhn - in a partial and methodologically insufficient manner. Though there is a chronological problem attached to the use of rabbinic literature in relation to the New Testament, the rabbinic sources provide, for all intents and purposes, our only comparative material to Jesus’ talk about the Kingdom, and some evidence – especially when it comes from the general cultural continuum of Mediterranean antiquity – is better than no evidence at all. Accordingly, this paper explores the uses of the corresponding Hebrew expression "malchut shamayim" in Tannaitic tradition, and their relevance for the interpretation of the Matthean phrase "he basileia twm ouranwn".
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Hagar and Ishmael: The Importance and the Meaning of Their Stories
Program Unit: Pentateuch
Yairah Amit, Tel Aviv University
More than on source criticism, this paper will focus on the important place that the stories about Hagar and Ishmael – coming after the Covenant between the Parts and before the Binding of Isaac – have in the final editing of the book of Genesis. Moreover, there are aspects of quantity and quality. The quantitative aspect shows that two whole stories are dedicated to Hagar and Ishmael, who are not mentioned in grammatical singular anywhere in the Bible, differently for example from figures like Ammon or Moab. The qualitative aspect shows that the Hagar and Ishmael stories are a continued effort to present them positively. Therefore this paper will trace the varied poetic means used to shape these characters in a positive way. Finally, the most interesting question is why or what was the author-editor's purpose, and this paper will try to suggest the answer.
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Multiple Narratives of God, King, and People in 2 Samuel 7: On More and Less "Deuteronomistic" Versions of the History of Israel
Program Unit: Deuteronomistic History
Sonja Ammann, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Humboldt University of Berlin
2 Sam 7 contains terminology and ideas generally considered "Deuteronomistic", that is to say, 2 Sam 7 shares this terminology and ideas with texts within Deut-Kgs which are part of a larger historiographic project or redaction. At the same time, 2 Sam 7 contains elements which are otherwise unattested within Deut-Kgs and show closer ties to the Latter Prophets, priestly and sapiential traditions. Some of these elements—such as the priestly material—clearly post-date the emergence of a historiographical project shaped by "Deuteronomistic" ideas. Therefore, 2 Sam 7 provides a good example to investigate later developments evolving from a "Deuteronomistic" narrative of Israel's history. Various conceptions of history are expressed in this text, each with its particular scope and structure, and its particular configuration of the roles of God, the rulers and the people. In this paper, I examine how the historical schemes within 2 Sam 7 relate to their immediate literary context on the one hand, and to the larger framework of biblical narratives of the history of Israel on the other hand. This investigation sheds light on the literary history of 2 Sam 7 and contributes to the exploration of "Deuteronomism" as an evolving historiographical discourse.
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"Let Us Celebrate the Festival": Paul’s Placement of Jewish Ritual Language in 1 Corinthians 5:1–8
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Chang Seon An, Boston University
'Let Us Celebrate the Festival’: Paul’s Placement of Jewish Ritual Language in 1 Corinthians 5:1-8
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Jericho on the Road to Regime Change in Jesus’ Encounter with Bartimaeus
Program Unit: Markan Literary Sources
Craig E. Anderson, Azusa Pacific University
Commentators have noticed the remarkable nature of Jesus’ abrupt entry and immediate departure from Jericho in Mark 10:46. Its significance rests both in its function as a structural pivot within the book and within its ostensibly arbitrary nature in the narrative – i.e. Jesus seems to enter Jericho simply for the sake of entering Jericho.
Understandably, interpreters responding to this notice typically read this pivotal verse as a reference to the Israelite conquest of Jericho featured in Joshua 6. Although, it is admittedly reasonable to acknowledge that Mark 10:46 makes an intertextual reference to Joshua 6, the Elijah-Elisha narrative in the Book of Kings offers a better reference point for Mark 10:46 than the Book of Joshua does.
There are numerous points by which Mark 10:46-52 shows dependency upon 2 Kings 2-10. First, as we have already seen, the reference to Jericho in Mark 10:46 accords with 2 Kgs 2:4-18. Second, although blindness has no role in Joshua, the curing of blind Bartimaeus in Mark 10:46-52 corresponds with Elisha blinding and opening the eyes of the Arameans in 2 Kgs 6. Third, the double reference to “son of David” reflects the Book of Kings, not Joshua – although Joshua pre-figures Josiah, he does not bear direct connections to David himself; however, through the presentations of the kingships of Solomon, Hezekiah, and Josiah, the Book of Kings focuses upon “sons of David” as the nation’s saviors. Fourth, Bartimaeus’ response of throwing off his cloak in Mark 10:50 anticipates other people spreading their cloaks before Jesus in Mark 11:8 within Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. This has no parallel in the Book of Joshua; rather it serves as a notable allusion to the people spreading their cloaks before Jehu’s triumphal entry in 2 Kings 9:13.
As such, these data indicate that, although Mark’s allusions may be peripherally tied to the Book of Joshua, they bear much more substantive links to the Book of Kings. This is hermeneutically relevant as these allusions emphasize the fact that the Markan narrative focuses not so much on territorial conquest, but rather on regime change.
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Are Idols Real? Demons, Christians, and Rabbis
Program Unit: Pauline Epistles
Sonja Anderson, Yale University
In 1 Corinthians, Paul deploys the kind of biblical rhetoric that simultaneously affirms and denies the reality of “idols”: they are both nothing in the world (8:4) and yet are conduits to demons (10:20). When we look slightly later, however, the apparent “metaphysical contradiction,” recently analyzed by Emma Wasserman, seems to disappear. Virtually all ancient Christian apologists claim that demons dwell in or around pagan statuary, and that demons are the reason Christians should shun such imagery. By contrast, rabbinic literature, most notably tractate Avodah Zarah, lacks any association of idols with demons. This is striking given the otherwise conventional demonology of rabbinic texts: demons look frightening, they make people sick, and the world is filled with them. It is also striking given the association of idolatry with demons in Jewish apocalyptic literature such as Jubilees. How should the difference between rabbinic and Christian (and other Jewish) texts on this issue be understood? My paper will suggest that demons filled an apologetic need felt by gentile Christian communities and that the rabbinic silence on demons and idolatry was a component of the so-called parting of the ways.
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Apocalyptic Jesus = a Violent Messiah? Revisiting Q’s Apocalyptic Idiom
Program Unit: Historical Jesus
Olegs Andrejevs, Carthage College
Owing to its pre-gospel roots, the synoptic sayings gospel Q is understandably viewed as one of the likeliest sources for the words of the historical Jesus. In the decades following the publication of John S. Kloppenborg’s influential “Formation of Q” it became possible to employ Q’s evidence to construe the historical Jesus as a sage. This construct is based on the allegedly sapiential orientation of the document’s earliest layer (Q1). Unfortunately, the scholarship that has focused on the pursuit of the “sapiential Jesus” has frequently approached its quest as a zero sum situation where any hint of the apocalyptic was viewed as an interference with that goal. No doubt, this overly categorical approach has had much to do with the desire to see the historical Jesus as exclusively a peaceful teacher of wisdom.
One of the practical consequences of this was that Q’s apocalyptic sayings became unnecessarily viewed as a blemish on Jesus’ otherwise stellar resume of a nonviolent messiah. Those sayings were then suppressed accordingly, either by being isolated to the document’s redactional layer (Q2) where they were read as a Church construct or through creative interpretation that labeled apocalyptic material sapiential. The few objections that have been raised against this practice in recent decades, including notably the observations made by Dale C. Allison, Jr., have been largely ignored or brushed off. Q1 became the New Quest’s black box and the retrieved image of a sapiential messiah had to be defended at all cost.
But does Q’s apocalyptic idiom, such as it is, equal violence? Aside from the issue of accuracy in the quest for the historical Jesus, this is obviously a pressing question in today’s world when apocalyptic idiom is in fact frequently understood by various religious groups to constitute a call to violence. In this paper I attempt to reinforce the view of the early Judeo-Christian apocalyptic discourse as (a) eminently non-violent politically and (b) oriented toward eschatological justice rather than divine violence. Among other factors, I show that the resemblance of Q’s apocalyptic thought to that of the Enochic book of Parables is not complete and that Q’s Son of Man is not a carbon copy of the Enochic one. Here, I engage the figure of Q’s John the Baptist for a number of tradition-historical considerations. Finally, several important adjustments are made to Kloppenborg’s Q1 compositional layer. Based on those adjustments, I list form- and literary-critical arguments suggesting that in Q’s earliest layer the document’s author(s) presented Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet whose message was devoid of the incendiary element frequently associated with that genre.
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How to Survive an Execution: The Trauma of Crucifixion, Incarceration, and Contemporary State-Sanctioned Killing
Program Unit: Biblical Literature and the Hermeneutics of Trauma
William A. Andrews Jr., Chicago Theological Seminary
Reading the Bible through the lens of trauma studies highlights the presence of both victims and perpetrators in biblical texts. This awareness is heightened when one reads the texts with a group of which many members are at once traumatized and traumatizers. One such gathering is the religious studies class I teach inside a maximum-security prison. The trauma of the crucifixion and its ongoing effects on the earliest Christians resemble the circumstances endured by the incarcerated and the condemned inside US prisons, as well as the loved ones they leave behind. This paper applies trauma theory to a comparative reading of the Gospel accounts of the trial, torture, execution, and death of Jesus with particular attention to ways these texts are appropriated by contemporary prisoners living through similar experiences. This approach provides insight into the horror of crucifixion and the US justice system while also suggesting indications of Post-Traumatic Growth in the early Christian communities behind the texts and in contemporary communities affected by incarceration.
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Probing the Jewish Setting of Matt 11:25–30
Program Unit: Qumran
Joseph Angel, Yeshiva University
While some scholars view Matthew 11:25-30 as espousing a “Wisdom Christology,” others note that the description of Jesus as “gentle and humble in heart” is more evocative of the image of Isaiah’s servant (e.g., Graham Stanton). In this case, however, one need not choose one option over the other. Rather, the passage exhibits a convergence of wisdom and servant traditions, similar to that associated with the Son of Man in the Parables of Enoch.
This paper argues that the convergence of eschatological revelation of divine wisdom with the image of the servant in Matthew is illuminated by Qumran traditions associating the apocalyptic revelation of divine wisdom specifically with an eschatological priestly figure who encounters hostility from rival teachers, rejection by the people, and is cast in the image of Isaiah’s servant (4Q541 9; 1QH 12; Self-Glorification Hymn). This is especially apparent in the light of comparison with 1QH 12, which is characterized not only by the Hodayot form and the application of the servant imagery, but also the motifs of thanksgiving for the gift of revelation, mediation of revelation to an elect remnant over against the majority of faithless Israel, contrast of the harmful nature of Pharisaic teaching over against the salvific nature of the Teacher’s divine instruction, hostility and rejection from the people at large, and announcement of destruction for non-believers. While direct literary dependence cannot be demonstrated, the constellation of similar form and motifs suggests that traditions about an eschatological priestly teacher of the kind expressed in the Qumran texts indeed lie beneath the portrait of Jesus in Matthew. It is argued that Matthew’s utilization of this tradition probably does not stem from an intention to portray Jesus as a priest, but rather to enhance the portrait of the ideal Messiah and Son of God.
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Ruins, Zion, and the Animal Imagery in the Septuagint of Isaiah 34
Program Unit: International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies
Anna Angelini, Lausanne University
For a long time, the “free” character of the translation of the Septuagint of Isaiah has been considered to represent a reinterpretation, in the sense of an actualization of older prophecies as historically fulfilled in the time of the translator. Since Seeligman’s work (1948), scholars have underlined the fact that a “contemporizing” interpretation of oracles offers an explanation for the divergences between the Greek and the Hebrew, as well as a better understanding of the Greek itself (Hanhart 1983; Koenig 1982; Van der Kooij 1998). Troxel (2008) has recently criticized this “contemporizing” (Erfüllungsinterpretation) theory. He explains divergences between the translation and the source-text by linguistic and contextual reasons, and claims that they are motivated by the translator’s interest in offering an understanding of Isaiah’s text to his Greek readers. In my paper, I will explore the Septuagint version of Isaiah 34 as a test case, through a systematic comparison between the Greek and the Hebrew text. This chapter deals with Edom’s destruction and the description of a landscape of ruins, peopled by strange animals with demonic features, among whom the mention of Lilith constitutes the strongest mark. Important changes occur in the translation from Hebrew to Greek, increasing in the second part of the oracle (vv. 11-17): they considerably transform the animal scenario, the nature and the function of the described landscape. I will explore these differences in the broader context of the chapter. Against this background, I will argue that some of the divergences between LXX and MT can be explained by the fact that in the LXX, unlike in the MT, part of the oracle of Isaiah 34 is addressed against Zion, and not against Edom (v. 8). Such a modification implies a shift in the final meaning of the text, making it an unique case among other oracles about ruins in the Hebrew Bible (cf. especially Isaiah 13), and creating a link to the beginning of chapter 35, which is focused on Zion’s restoration (see Van der Kooij 2011). I will conclude by evaluating to what extent and in which measure we are dealing here with an exegesis that can be defined as “actualizing”, or if the divergences are due to the “alexandrian” features and method of the translator, as highlighted by Troxel.
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Augments in Biblical Hebrew: A Neglected Area of Study
Program Unit: Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
Matthew Anstey, Charles Sturt University
This paper provides a morphophonological study of augments(that is, the material between noun/verb and pronominal suffix)in Biblical Hebrew, according to the Tiberian tradition, from a synchronic perspective. The study of augments has been largely neglected, resulting in shortcomings in the description and analysis of their phenomena in introductory and advanced grammars. The predominant presentation of augments as belonging to the pronominal suffix will be shown to be erroneous; rather, it will be argued that they belong to the lexical base. The implications of the research for both the study of Biblical Hebrew morphology and the teaching of Biblical Hebrew will be explored.
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"Write Them on the Tablet": Using Pen Tablets for Online Hebrew Teaching
Program Unit: Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies
Matthew Anstey, Charles Sturt University
This presentation will demonstrate the use of a digital pen and tablet to write Hebrew script for online learning. Three uses will be demonstrated: (1) permanent online lectures recorded with Adobe Captivate; (2) live online lectures with online students connecting with Adobe Connect; and (3) personalised video responses to specific student questions. Guidelines will be provided to show how this technology can be best utilised, and made compatible for both desktop and mobile access. This technology revolutionizes online learning as it allows the presenter to "write" Hebrew for students as if using a whiteboard.
An example of (3) can be seen at https://vimeo.com/120536790
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Integration Strategies of Pentecostal Churches in the African Diaspora
Program Unit: African Association for the Study of Religions
Bernard Appiah, University of Birmingham
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And on the Seventh Day, He Sat Down: The Qur'an, the Sabbath, and the Throne of God
Program Unit: The Qur’an and the Biblical Tradition (IQSA)
George Archer, Georgetown University
In many passages, the Qur?an tells us that after making the cosmos in six days, God took to His throne. This act of divine sitting is a powerful reformulation of the well-known narrative of Genesis 2:2-3: “On the seventh day He rested from all His work […] and made it holy.” While the Qur?an often cites the creation in six days, it never includes the biblical lore’s account of the seventh. This paper will argue that the Qur?anic rejection of the day of rest is a consequence of the Qur?anic affirmation of soul-sleep. Like many Syriac Christian sources, the Qur?an posits the dead in a sleep-state as they await the final Resurrection. However, unlike those sources, the Qur?an uses soul-sleep as a way of rejecting the cults of the dead: saints and the divine Christ most especially. If the dead are sleeping, they cannot hear prayers or intercede with the living — they are out cold. The opposite trend to this claim about the dead is that God never sleeps or dies. God is always active, alive, aware, and powerful. However, how can this be reconciled with that claim that God’s work as the Creator required a day of rest (yawm al-sabt)? Simply put, the Qur?an fixes the tension by putting God into the most powerful kind of rest possible: sitting in state on a throne. God’s rest in the Qur?an inverts the connotations of the biblical lore, while keeping the traditional cosmogony in place. Unlike the Jewish sabbath which suggests that God grows tired, or the Christian sabbath that suggests that God passes into the sleep of death, the rest of God in the Qur?an proves that He never grows weary, and unlike false objects of worship, He never succumbs to death.
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Reexamining the ‘Fathers’ in Deuteronomy’s Framework
Program Unit: Book of Deuteronomy
Bill T. Arnold, Asbury Theological Seminary
Deuteronomy’s framework contains seven occurrences of the patriarchal name-formula (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), five of which are used appositionally to modify “fathers.” The influential theory of John Van Seters and Thomas Römer takes these as late insertions in the text made necessary during the post-exilic period when the ancestral traditions of Genesis were first bound to the Moses-exodus narrative. Israel’s “fathers” in Deuteronomy, therefore, did not originally denote the patriarchs of Genesis but the exodus generation. Recent critiques of the theory have been narrowly oriented diachronically (Biberger) or synchronically (Hwang). This reexamination of the name-formula identifies Deut 1:8 as a crux interpretum for the insertion theory, as others have suggested, and explores further its role in Deuteronomy 1-3. The paper reviews the issues, reconsiders the pertinent data, and proposes a specific hypothesis that eschews a “redaction-versus-rhetoric” dichotomy. The result is a new perspective on the use of the patriarchal name-formula in Deuteronomy.
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Initiation, Vision, and Spiritual Power: The Hellenistic Dimensions of the Problem at Colossae
Program Unit: Polis and Ekklesia: Investigations of Urban Christianity
Clinton E. Arnold, Talbot School of Theology (Biola University)
For most of the history of interpretation of the Colossian “philosophy,” scholars have suggested that the author of the NT letter to the Colossians was polemicizing against some form of syncretistic teaching. This was often thought to be Gnosticism or a proto-Gnostic teaching with substantially Hellenistic contours. In the past forty years, however, the pendulum swung in the direction of Judaism as the source of the rival teaching. The change was stimulated by the 1973 work of Fred Francis who argued that “worship of angels” (Col 2:18) did not mean that angels were objects of worship, but that the leaders of the factional teaching at Colossae were advocating a Jewish-oriented visionary experience of worshipping with the angels around the heavenly throne. He, and many who were to follow him, began arguing that the other aspects of the teaching that were once thought to reflect Hellenistic (or local) religious features could be explained purely on the basis of Jewish texts. This trend in the interpretation of the problem at Colossae has been particularly popular in American and British scholarship.
In this paper, I will argue that there is one aspect of the rival teaching that remains an insurmountable obstacle for the view that the Colossian “philosophy” is an entirely Jewish issue. That is the presence of the rare term embateuo in Col 2:18 where it occurs in a context expressive of visionary experience. The direct relevance of the repeated appearance of this term in a handful of inscriptions at an Apollo sanctuary cannot be easily dismissed. The term is used there in a technical sense for the higher stage of mystery initiation ritual (for “entering” the oracle grotto) for people who came to consult the oracle. The fact that there is also inscription evidence of delegations from the Lycus Valley coming to consult this famous oracle further underlines the relevance of the embateuo inscriptions.
This crux text along with other aspects of the rival teaching are best seen as reflecting Hellenistic religious influence. Nevertheless, one cannot dismiss some of the Jewish aspects of the problem at Colossae. It is my contention that these variegated elements represent a syncretism that best coheres around an interest in spiritual power of a shamanistic kind.
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Humanity's Native Son: A Postcolonial Reading of Luke 8:26–39
Program Unit: Jesus Traditions, Gospels, and Negotiating the Roman Imperial World
Elizabeth Arnold, Emory University
In looking at biblical literature through a post-colonial lens, Leo Perdue explains in his book Reconstructing Old Testament Theology, colonial oppression of an indigenous population by a colonizing external power is identified by military and/or economic control. The single greatest tool of colonization is language, both impeding the people’s voice and native tongue and imposing the imperial language on the people. Finally, evidence of a people being colonized is a dehumanization of the native people. The presence of all three—military/economic control, silencing of the mother language, and dehumanizing conditions—composes the image of a native culture that has been hijacked in order to serve the colonial masters. A post-colonial reading therefore investigates how each of these is exposed with an effort made to retell or reclaim the story of the people, their language, and their human dignity.
In my paper, I argue that Luke’s portrayal of Jesus’ Temptation by Satan (Luke 4:5-7) presents Satan as the figurehead for imperial oppression on the culture of all humanity, not merely the Jewish culture that was dominated by the Greco-Roman forces. I will then exegete the story of the Gerasenes’ Demoniac in Luke 8: 26-39 as the model of the post-colonial story. First, I connect the man’s poverty and possession by demons named after an army battalion to Perdue’s definition of colonial occupation. Second, I link the man’s inability to speak for himself and the demonic ventriloquism to the imperialistic repression of language. Third, I will discuss the inhumane living conditions of the man as the proof of dehumanization. Each one of these situations is reversed by Jesus in this pericope with ample textual and linguistic evidence. In addition, the people who witness this miraculous transformation and fearfully oust Jesus can be described as “native collaborators” with the colonial masters (demons).
In short, this particular narrative provides the prime demonstration of Edward Said’s description of the effects of colonization: “The object of this consolidated vision is always either a victim or highly constrained character, permanently threatened with severe punishment, and…excluded ontologically.”
Finally, just as Jesus’ ministry begins with Satan’s imperialistic statement of ownership, it ends with a connection to the intended human culture: Eden. On the cross, Jesus states that he will be in pa?ade?s? (Luke 23:43). This same word pa??de?s?? is used in the Septuagint’s account describing the Garden of Eden (Gen 2:8). Luke 4:5-7 and 23:43 provide the contextual bookends for the story of the demoniac’s exorcism. Jesus begins with an understanding of the colonial occupation and moves toward a renaissance of the native culture.
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Everyday Life in a Roman Town like Colossae: The Papyrological Evidence
Program Unit: Polis and Ekklesia: Investigations of Urban Christianity
Peter Arzt-Grabner, Universität Salzburg
Although the great majority of papyri and ostraca have been excavated in Egypt, finds from Palestine, Libya, Jordan, Syria, Bactria, Crete, Italy, Dacia, Britannia and even Switzerland show that the material from Egypt allows for reconstructing the general private, business and administrational life throughout the Roman Empire, left aside that local and regional differences can be found everywhere. Thus, what we, generally, find about marriage and family, slavery, taxes, business relationships etc. in papyri and ostraca from Egypt, can be transferred to the average city life in Asia Minor. This paper aims at drawing a picture about what everyday life might have looked like in the Lycus Valley, namely in Colossae, and at taking the household and house church of Philemon, as described by Paul in his letter, as the entity that is to be compared with, no matter if this household has to be located in Colossae or elsewhere.
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Is Ghulat Religion Islamic Gnosticism? (1) The Shi'ite “Extremists” of Early Islamic Iraq
Program Unit: The Qur’an and Late Antiquity (IQSA)
Mushegh Asatryan, University of Calgary
The contribution is the first part of a collective project, which studies whether (or to what degree) the religion of an 8th-9th century Islamic group called “extremist Shi'ites” (“Ghulat” in Arabic) were influenced by (or borrowed from) the Syro-Mesopotamian Gnostic traditions. Throughout the 20th-21st century, scholars of early Islam have routinely referred to the religion of this group as “Gnostic,” implying a direct connection between their doctrines and those of the Syro-Mesopotamian Gnostic traditions. This approach has suffered from two shortcomings. First, the teachings of the Ghulat were poorly known due to the scant information about them: they have chiefly reached us from heresiographic accounts — necessarily biased and skewed —, and from just two known original writings by the “extremist” Shi'is. Second, the sources on the Ghulat were in works on Islamic history not sufficiently examined. Our contribution thus aims at rectifying both shortcomings. Due to a recent publication of a large number of original Ghulat writings and the discovery of two manuscripts, we now have forty one titles of Ghulat treatises, surviving in their entirety or in partial quotations of later authors. I will begin my paper by arguing for the existence of a unified “Ghulat Corpus” by showing that the presently known Ghulat writings were produced, circulated, and read in the same religious and social milieu, and contained a limited, continuously recycled, inventory of cosmological themes. I will then delineate the major theological and cosmological teachings of the Ghulat Corpus, including, among others, the notion of the “great chain of being” leading the virtuous upwards to the divine realm and the sinners downwards into the world of metamorphosis; the notion of God’s incarnation in human flesh; and the teaching about “shadows and phantoms,” luminous spiritual beings created before the universe. By presenting the main contours of the Ghulat religion, this paper serve as a foundation for the second paper of the project, where Dylan Burns studies whether and to what degree early Shi'i “extremists” were in fact Gnostic.
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Drama in the Classroom
Program Unit: Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion
Rose Aslan, California Lutheran University
This method can be used to encourage students to practice close reading and to understand text by acting it out. I have used it in my Islam courses, but it can be used for any course accompanied by a text that tells the story of a specific event. The professor assigns five short chapters/episodes that each narrate a short part of a longer historical narrative. This activity allows students to engage more deeply with and develop empathy for historical figures from their readings. Students get to know one another better through improvised drama, gain a better understanding of the reading, and connect with a topic which would normally be alien and strange for them. Students use their creativity and imagination to teach their classmates about the contents of the narrative.
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Where Has All the Romance Gone? Blending Theory and the Divine Conjugal Metaphor
Program Unit: Metaphor in the Bible and Cognate Literature
Gillian Asquith, Melbourne School of Theology
A certain genre of popular Christian literature presents salvation history as a divine romance and exhorts the individual believer to pursue an intimate relationship with God in marital terms, appealing to the divine conjugal metaphor of God as husband for its biblical warrant. This perspective is bolstered by the suggestions of some scholars that the divine conjugal metaphor demonstrates an essential marital nature to the relationship between God and Israel. This paper will apply Blending Theory of Metaphor to the prophets’ use of conjugal imagery and show that both of these views are based on an inadequate understanding of metaphor. The mapping of implicit elements from the central input spaces of the metaphor into the blend results in an emergent structure that provides the conceptual framework for understanding conjugal imagery. In this case, the socio-theological significance of marriage and the prohibition of Deut 24:1-4 combine to render the conjugal metaphor a powerful expression not only of Israel’s apostasy but of God’s unprecedented forgiveness. Exegetical comments on Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel will show that language describing God as husband always appears in the context of God as cuckold; imagery of Israel and God enjoying a current, functional, marital relationship is absent. The metaphor does not develop the marital characteristics of God’s relationship with Israel, but rather uses the covenantal basis of marriage to focus on Israel’s idolatry and God’s response to it.
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Jonah's Prayer (2:3–10): An Integral Part of the Book of Jonah
Program Unit: Biblical Hebrew Poetry
Elie Assis, Bar-Ilan University
Most scholars of the Book of Jonah believe that the poem in 2:3-10 is a late interpolation to the book and is not an integral part of it. This opinion is based on various points, the main and strongest being that the poem is a prayer of thanksgiving and not a lament. A prayer of lament is what is expected when Jonah is trapped in the belly of the large fish. Even scholars who interpret the book synchronically often agree that the psalm is a latter addition. Yet, according to this consensus, it is unclear why the editor did not select a poem better suited to the context of the narrative. The question of the origins of the poem will be investigated in the context of the book as a whole. An analysis of the aim of the Book will shed new light on the form of the poem and its place in the composition as a whole. In this paper, I will claim that poem is an integral part the Jonah story, and that there is no reason to attribute it to a separate author, and that only such an approach adequately explains the unique features of the poem. An analysis of the rhetoric of the poem will reinforce this conclusion.
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A Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri
Program Unit: Papyrology and Early Christian Backgrounds
Rodney Ast, University of Heidelberg
This presentation introduces the Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri, a new initiative funded by a DFG-NEH Bilateral Digital Humanities Program grant that aims to create the infrastructure for an online corpus of literary and subliterary papyri on the model of the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri (www.papyri.info).
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Biblical “Land” Texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls: The Wilderness Experience as Lived at Qumran
Program Unit: Scripture in Early Judaism and Christianity
Kenneth Atkinson, University of Northern Iowa
The Dead Sea Scrolls contain many interpretations of biblical “Land” texts that use Moses’ wilderness experience and the promise of land to emphasize strict separation from the temple priests. Moses is invoked as an authority in these documents to urge Jews to remain faithful to God’s commandments (CD 5:21-6:1; 1QS 1:3). They particularly highlight Moses’ denunciations of transgressions committed by the priests and the people (i.e., 4Q390 2 I, 2-3; 2Q21 I, 1-2; 4Q504 1-2 II, 7-11a). What is unique is that the Dead Sea Scrolls use these biblical texts from the Exodus sojourn to portray their current situation as a modern-day wilderness experience to urge pious Jews to move to the desert. Like Moses and the Israelites of the Exodus period, the Qumran community too lived in camps (1QM 3:13-4:17) where they sought to fulfill the Torah (4QMMT C 6-32). But what is unique for the Qumran community is that their literal interpretation of the biblical land texts required them not only to isolate themselves from the temple priests to maintain ritual purity, but to construct an actual altar at Qumran to fulfill Moses’ commands regarding the proper treatment of the land.
The first portion will explore the biblical “Land” texts from Qumran to highlight how they emphasize the wilderness tradition. It will show how the Qumran community envisioned themselves living in the wilderness on the verge of entering the Promised Land. As such, they were not obligated to observe those laws that were to be implemented upon entering the Promised Land, especially those connected with the temple sacrifices. Part two briefly highlights the archaeological evidence put forth by Jean-Baptiste Humbert and Jodi Magness that the enclosure to the north in the Qumran settlement (loci 130-135), which contained numerous animal bone deposits and ash, was a sacrificial courtyard in the late first century B.C.E. However, this section will propose that the interpretation of the biblical land texts reflected in the Dead Sea Scrolls suggest that the Qumran sectarians did not use this altar for sacrificial offerings since they believed that the Israelites had made none when they lived the wilderness (Jer 7:22; Amos 5:25). Rather, the Qumran sectarians revived the biblical laws pertaining to “desired meat,” whose blood must be returned to the land (=ground). This theory perhaps best explains the archaeological evidence, as well as the content of such texts as the Temple Scroll (LIII 1-6) that describe laws pertaining to the eating of “desired meat” in the wilderness.
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Bonhoeffer, Qoheleth, and the “Natural Joy of Bodily Life”
Program Unit: Theological Interpretation of Scripture
Tyler Atkinson, Bethany College (KS)
This paper will argue that Bonhoeffer’s treatment of Qoheleth’s carpe diem chorus in “Natural Life” both enhances the theological reading of Ecclesiastes on eschatological grounds and challenges contemporary ethicists to sing the refrain in protest against the degradation of marginalized bodies. After situating Bonhoeffer’s use of Ecclesiastes within the broader argument of “Natural Life,” the paper will look at the reception history of Qoheleth’s chorus, drawing attention to Luther’s radical interpretive turn as the basis for Bonhoeffer’s own reading in the context of the church struggle in Nazi Germany. It will show that Luther’s interpretation is paradigmatic for Bonhoeffer’s in both its ethical orientation and its eschatological emphasis. Finally, it will propose that this ethical-eschatological reading of Qoheleth’s chorus both enhances and challenges the theological interpretation of Ecclesiastes as it compels readers to protest attacks on rights (in the Bonhoefferian sense) to bodily life.
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Seeing the Invisible, Knowing the Unknowable: Philo's Assent to God
Program Unit: Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism
Harold Attridge, Yale University
Much of Philo's philosophical exegesis of Jewish scripture revolves around the issue of how mortal man can encounter God. He argues that the sacred text both describes and enables the quest for that One Who Is. His treatment of the theme involves classical images of the movement of the soul to God as well as references to his own personal experience. Evocative imagery and erudite argument combine to foster an philosophical "mysticsm" in the receptive reader.
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The Fourth Gospel: Genre Matters?
Program Unit: Johannine Literature
Harold Attridge, Yale University
This paper will explore the significance of the generic affiliations of the fourth gospel in the light of the ways in which ancient Greek and Roman authors played with the conventions of genre in defining the place of their own work in the literary landscape of the time. Like his classical contemporaries, the author of the Fourth Gospel positions his work within an array of literary types, while distinguishing his approach as a dramatic narrative from that of other gospel writers inclined to pursue a more "historicist" approach to the story of Jesus.
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Methods of Translating Plant Metaphors in LXX Isaiah
Program Unit: Metaphor in the Bible and Cognate Literature
Benjamin Austin, Providence Christian College
Gideon Toury points out that metaphors cannot always be translated literally due to difficulties both in the source text and the target language, and describes six methods that could be used to translate metaphors. (Toury, Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond, 82-83.) This paper will discuss examples of these six methods (and some more subcategories) as found in LXX-Isaiah’s translation of plant metaphors. It will also attempt to explain why each method is adopted.
The first method examined is translating metaphors with the same metaphor. The expectation for the LXX, generally, is to render literally, but this category is rarely used in LXX-Isa. Where it is used, sometimes a metaphor is rendered literally but the context is changed. In some places the metaphor is preserved in translation but is adjusted to help with its interpretation.
When LXX-Isa translates a metaphor with a different metaphor, it is sometimes due to lexical or textual reasons. Other times the metaphor is changed by a metonymic shift. Sometimes a unique metaphor is changed into a more conventional metaphor that occurs more often in the OT. Some metaphors are exchanged for more vivid metaphors. Sometimes the translator change the tenor but the vehicle is maintained.
The LXX-Isa translator will sometimes translate metaphors with non-metaphors. Some Hebrew idioms, dead metaphors, and metonymies are rendered non-metaphorically. Some puns or homonyms are rendered also in ways that remove a possible metaphor. The most drastic way of rendering a metaphor with a non-metaphor is to interpret the meaning of the metaphor and so to translate what the metaphor is thought to express.
In a few places a non-metaphor is translated as a metaphor, usually by way of substituting one word or because of the perceived meaning of an individual word.
In a few places multiple metaphors are merged, to better suit Greek rhetorical sensibilities. Similarly, some metaphors are omitted completely, to cut down the amount of imagery in a passage.
Sometimes metaphors are translated with similes. This is often done when a simile is implied in the Hebrew, or where there is some Hebrew particle which may have been confused for a comparative marker. In a few places it seems to be done due to specific exegetical considerations related to the passage in which they occur.
Cataloging metaphor translation methods helps demonstrate the versatility of a translator, but can by no means give us a full picture by itself. It is important to attempt to understand the issues related to each individual metaphor in the passage in which it occurs, since sometimes the same problem is dealt with differently and since the context may have produced translation issues more important than issues related to the metaphor. It is noteworthy that dead and conventional metaphors, which should be the hardest to translate, are often rendered literally. Original metaphors, on the other hand, should have been easiest to translate literally, but are often rendered in unexpected ways by LXX-Isa.
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On The Bad Jesus (Sheffield Phoenix, 2015)
Program Unit: Metacriticism of Biblical Scholarship
Hector Avalos, Iowa State University
Did Jesus ever do anything wrong? Judging by the vast majority of books on New Testament ethics, the answer is a resounding No. Writers on New Testament ethics generally view Jesus as the paradigm of human standards and behavior. But since the historical Jesus was a human being, must he not have had flaws, like everyone else?
The notion of a flawless human Jesus is a paradoxical oddity in New Testament ethics. The promotion of a flawless Jesus shows that New Testament ethics is still primarily an apologetic enterprise despite its claim to rest on critical and historical scholarship.
The Bad Jesus : The Ethics of New Testament Ethics (Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2015) presents detailed case studies of fundamental ethical principles enunciated or practiced by Jesus but antithetical to what would be widely deemed ‘acceptable’ or ‘good’ today. Such topics include Jesus’ supposedly innovative teachings on love, along with his views on hate, violence, imperialism, animal rights, environmental ethics, Judaism, women, disabled persons and biblical hermeneutics.
After closely examining arguments offered by those unwilling to find any fault with the Jesus depicted in the Gospels, The Bad Jesus concludes that current treatments of New Testament ethics are permeated by a religiocentric, ethnocentric and imperialistic orientation. But if it is to be a credible historical and critical discipline in modern academia, New Testament ethics needs to discover both a Good and a Bad Jesus.
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Humans Left Alone: The Book of Esther and the Vicious Cycle of Scapegoating
Program Unit: Social Sciences and the Interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures
Vanessa Avery, Sacred Heart University
The biblical Book of Esther presents a tale driven by conflict, secrecy, rivalry, and violence, and God is nowhere to be found. Despite the sense of joy, charity and security in exile the Book of Esther has often brought to Jews, this book has also been a springboard for animosity and hatred. Indeed, God is not present in the book; the violence is abominable; and the characters are unsavory. Jews and Christians alike have questioned its inclusion in their religious life.
The theory of Rene Girard provides a different way of understanding this scripture and why it might have been included in the canon. This paper shows that the book of Esther reveals Girard’s “scapegoating mechanism,” which unfolds through the basic structure of the “persecution text” in three stages: 1) the onset of crisis; 2) aggressive rivalry and lynching; and 3) an interdiction or ritual to memorialize the violence. This paper details how the Book of Esther plays out this pattern in cycles, gradually “revealing” the pattern by moving from silent to redeemed victim. In this way, the Book of Esther brings the reader from what Girard would call “the pagan to the biblical.”
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Song of Songs and the Garden of Eden
Program Unit: Megilloth
Orit Avnery, Shalem College and Shalom Hartman Institute
Much has been said about the themes linking the Song of Songs with the Garden of Eden, including among others the temptation, the trees, sexuality, and desire.
I intend to deepen the comparison of the two texts by exploring the theme of sleep. In the Garden of Eden, God brings sleep upon Adam, and while Adam sleeps God takes “one of his sides” and creates the woman.
The text in Song of Songs is often vague regarding whether the protagonists are awake or asleep, and whether events take place in reality or in a dream. Who is asleep in the Song of Songs? What happens during sleep? What is the relationship between sleep and wakefulness? An examination of these questions will help us reach thought-provoking insights regarding the relationship between the gardens featured in the Song of Songs, and the primordial Garden of Eden.
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The Rhetorics of Smell in the Words of Isaiah and Its Socio-moral Background
Program Unit: Rhetoric of Religious Antiquity
Yael Avrahami, Oranim Academic College
TBD
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'Loud Snap . . . Blackness Dumped on Thetan’: Scientology and the Western Esoteric Tradition as a Comparative Model for Enochic Literature
Program Unit: Mysticism, Esotericism, and Gnosticism in Antiquity
William Babcock, Duke University
Even a superficial perusal of New Age literature at the local Barnes & Noble will reveal not only a number of thematic parallels between this popular genre and many pseudepigraphical ascension texts, but also possibly discover direct references to such material. The enduring popularity of the Enochic tradition within Western esotericism suggests a number of points of contact which might prompt new understandings of these texts’ shared rhetorical strategies, as well as the pre-modern communities responsible for their production, circulation, and interpretation.
The Enochic corpus has often been assumed by scholars like Paul Hanson to derive from economically marginal sectarian communities. However, following April DeConick’s provocative re-imagining of early Christian Gnostic writings as a kind of 'ancient New Age', I want to question models like Hanson’s as an adequate explanation for the development and popular distribution of the Enochic writings.
Olav Hammer’s Claiming Knowledge offers a sophisticated schema of esoteric traditions which can provide a starting point for (re-)assessing the Enochic literature, including the following,
Emphasis upon personal, emotional experience as the primary means to knowing, versus either mainstream humanistic scholarship, or empirical evidence gleaned from experimental lab science.
The establishment of a ‘cultic milieu’, an esoteric discourse in which there are ‘movement texts’, authoritative interpreters, and a distinctive ‘U-shaped’ view of history.
The use of the religious traditions of other cultures, in addition to mainstream scientific discourse, as significant Others in the construction of a sectarian worldview.
Drawing upon Hammer’s typology, I will offer a case study for how this schema can be used to connect ancient and modern esoteric literatures, like the Church of Scientology, in a fruitful comparative dialogue. Incident II is a space opera cosmogony revealed to upper-level initiates. In addition to representing a key step in the Scientology technology of spiritual self-actualization, this narrative also critically reshapes auditors’ preceding experiences of space opera past lives into a coercive charismatic discourse.
2 Enoch likewise contains all the significant elements of Hammer’s typology. Following Hammer’s analysis of 1st person narratives in esoteric ‘movement texts’, 2 Enoch engages its audience in a manner similar to the auditing process. Enoch, as the authoritative interpreter, potentially stands in for the charismatic leaders of esoteric communities, the Patriarch’s voice offering these elites a literary vehicle whereby dream experiences are funneled into a hierarchical religious discourse.
Structural similarities between Incident II and 2 Enoch may also stimulate re-evaluation of the latter’s social context. Might it be representative of a tradition not only engaged by a socially marginal, physically isolated, sect of survivalists, but also an elite cadre of eccentrics that controlled a less privileged initiate class through the manipulation of their unique version of the esoteric tradition? Does this relationship to the dominant culture by readers of 2 Enoch potentially help to explain, per DeConick, the tenacious influence of this literature up to the present day?
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The Muses’ Birdcage: Book III of the Sibylline Oracles and Alexandrian Intellectual Competition
Program Unit: Hellenistic Judaism
Ashley Bacchi, Graduate Theological Union
The emergence of Alexandria as a center of intellectual activity, supported by the Ptolemaic court, created a sense of scholarly competition. Timon of Phlius describes the competitive environment: “In Egypt of the many tribes, many bookish scribblers are being fed, endlessly wrangling in the Muses’ birdcage.” Recent studies have revealed the complexity of Hellenistic literature by acknowledging that authors were participating in an intellectual milieu that encouraged displays of traditional material such as Homer and Hesiod in innovative yet often subtle and sometimes obscure ways. The practice of intertextual reference would be a battleground of wits, a platform on which to demonstrate to fellow intellectuals how clever and well read their poetry was in comparison to others. The author of Book III of the Sibylline Oracles was participating in this competition of wits, demonstrating his knowledge of Greek tradition by creatively inverting references to present his own unique voice. This paper will address three previously unnoticed subtle allusions to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Callimachus’ Hymn to Zeus, and the Homeric Hymn to Apollo in Book III. The Jewish author used these references to demonstrate his familiarity of traditional hexameter models as well as acknowledge current trends in Hellenistic poetry. The author proves that he can play on the highest level and use his Jewish monotheistic tradition for creative inspiration. The Jewish author confidently inverted and subordinated allusions to Greek religious tradition to align the tradition with his own theological sensibilities. The creativity of the Jewish author reflects a complex hybrid identity that draws inspiration from both Greek and Jewish tradition to form innovative poetry that could hold up to any of the other scribes in the Muses’ birdcage.
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Priestly Mourning Prohibitions in Leviticus 10
Program Unit: Cultic Personnel in the Biblical World
Kurt Backlund, Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion
Following the deaths of Nadab and Abihu in Leviticus 10, verses 8-11 contain a prohibition against the priestly consumption of alcohol during cultic service. This injunction is often seen as an interpolation, but a convincing explanation of its textual placement and its relation to the surrounding context remains elusive. No attempt to clarify the meaning of these verses and their relation to the surrounding text has been met with widespread acceptance, as is shown by a review of past treatments.
This essay examines several biblical passages which deal with the topics of alcohol consumption, liturgical practice, and death by fire. These passages demonstrate that the injunction against drinking is not an implicit comment on the reason that Nadab and Abihu were killed.
Some extra-biblical texts are also considered, particularly those dealing with the well known marzeah institution. This phenomenon of inebriated communion with the divine seems to be occasionally conflated with mourning for the deceased. That this was the case in Israel is shown by the two biblical passages which contain the Hebrew word marzeah; one of which concerns a situation of mourning, while the other refers to a life of drunken indulgence.
The syntax of Leviticus 10 is then examined in contrast with Isaiah 7. This exercise demonstrates the narrative continuity of Leviticus 10:8-11 with the surrounding text.
Ultimately, this essay suggests that the prohibition against priestly drinking in Leviticus 10:8-11 proscribes drunkenness as a mourning rite, and should be read hand in hand with the other restrictions on priestly mourning in the immediate context. This conclusion is in keeping with the common biblical imposition of higher demands on the priesthood than on the general Israelite population.
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What Is Mary Doing in Acts? Reception History within the Synoptic Tradition
Program Unit: Maria, Mariamne, Miriam: Rediscovering the Marys
Jo-Ann Badley, Ambrose University
Mary, the mother of Jesus, is among the disciples in the upper room according to Luke (Acts 1:14), but she does not have any further narrative role in Acts. As well, the birth narratives have no part in the theology or themes of Acts; in the words of Richard Pervo, the “Christology of Acts is based on the resurrection, without reference to the events and empowerment of Luke 1-2” (Hermeneia, 2009, page 19). When historical critics consider the upper room account, if they notice Mary at all, they are concerned about Luke’s accuracy when he represents the events of the early church. From all these perspectives, Mary is incidental to Acts. In this paper, I argue that Mary’s presence in the upper room is not incidental to Luke’s overall story. The upper room account, part of Luke’s introductory material to his second volume, provides perspective for the reader of Luke’s gospel account—his first volume. That is, Mary’s presence in the upper room—after the resurrection, waiting with the faithful disciples for the promised Spirit—provides a point of view point for Luke’s readers of the infancy story. Without the Acts reference, the story of Mary in the gospel account is dissonant; the willing servant of the birth story cannot even reach her son (Luke 8:19). With the Acts reference, Mary’s story becomes a paradigm of the agenda Luke announced at the beginning of his first volume: to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled to produce confidence in his reader (Luke 1:1-4). I argue that Mary’s presence in Acts makes sense of Luke’s patterns of redacting the Mary material from Mark’s gospel, which scholars have long observed, and of the tradition of double paternity which is a more recent discussion.
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A Diptych of Destruction: Watchers and Sodomites in Second Temple Literature
Program Unit: Letters of James, Peter, and Jude
Jeremiah Bailey, Baylor University
Jude 5-7 forms a grammatically tightly knit unit which pairs a tradition of deliverance—the exodus from Egypt—with two traditions of judgment. These two judgment traditions concerning the Watchers and Sodom receive a great deal of attention in the Second Temple literature and could have easily been chosen by the author of Jude at random. There is, however, evidence that the two traditions were already frequently linked together in the literature. There appear to be two main ways that these stories came to be associated with one another:
First, the traditions seem to stick together because they are both stories of divine judgment. They thus provide fertile ground for prophetic warnings about eschatological judgment. Ezekiel, for example, draws together traditions of divine punishment such that the plagues in Egypt, the flood, and the destruction of Sodom all coalesce into a promised future judgment: “I will judge him [Gog] with plague and bloodshed. I will rain down on him, his troops and the many peoples who are with him a torrential downpour, hailstones, fire, and brimstone” (Ezekiel 38:22 NRS). A similar tradition of combining the flood judgment with the Sodom judgment must be behind Luke 17:26-30 wherein the “days of Noah” are compared (?µ????) with the “days of Lot.” The references are not mere echoes. Luke explicitly mentions both flood and the raining down of sulfur in order to connect these judgments to that on the last day.
Second, the stories are linked by their mutual concern with transgression of sexual norms. Jubilees 20:5 is a particularly poignant example: “And he told them of the judgment of the giants, and the judgment of the Sodomites, how they had been judged on account of their wickedness, and had died on account of their fornication, and uncleanness, and mutual corruption through fornication.” Similar examples can be produced from T. Naphtali, 3 Maccabees, and others. That the stories are linked in the tradition in this way should be no surprise since the story of Sodom is also a story about human beings attempting to have intercourse with angels.
In light of this evidence, Jude 6-7 can be viewed as unit of tradition that is received already assembled by Jude and passed on by it.
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“What Do You See?” Zechariah 4:1–5:4 through the Lens of Conversation Analysis
Program Unit: Israelite Prophetic Literature
Sarah Lynn Baker, University of Texas at Austin
The two visions in Zechariah 4:1–5:4 participate with Amos and Jeremiah in a formal dialogue pattern initiated by mâ ’attâ ro’ê “What do you see?”, but they transform this visionary tradition in accordance with the post-exilic prophet’s distinctive style. As a number of scholars have noted, the verbal exchange between the prophet and the divine messenger in Zech 4:1–14 diverges sharply from the traditional question-answer-explanation sequence (Amos 7:7–9, 8:1–3; Jer 1:11–19, 24:1–10). Even Zech 5:1–4, while conforming to the expected three-part structure, shows a marked difference in how the explanation relates to the prophet’s description of what he sees. In this presentation, I will apply the tools of conversation analysis to the dialogues of Zechariah 4–5 and their predecessors in Amos and Jeremiah. While most conversation analysts focus on naturally-occurring speech, either in “institutional” (formal) or informal contexts, some have recognized that written texts—particularly those grounded in an oral tradition—are a specific type of institutional context in which conversation analysis can prove fruitful. A close examination of the adjacency pairs (e.g., question-answer sets) in these dialogues will demonstrate how conversation analysis can give us a more precise linguistic tool for describing the strategies and rhetorical effect of Zechariah’s unique revision of a traditional prophetic form.
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Reinventing Hagar and Ishmael in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Traditions
Program Unit: Pentateuch
Carol Bakhos, University of California-Los Angeles
This paper is submitted as part of the session proposal, "Hagar and Ishmael from different perspectives (Gen. 16, 21)." I will explore the ways in which Jewish, Christian and Muslim exegetes have employed Hagar and Ishmael to serve theological as well as political purposes. I will focus primarily on the late antique and medieval periods, and will argue that even in the Islamic tradition, Hagar and Ishmael serve as markers of exclusion.
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"Do Not Handle, Do Not Taste, Do Not Touch" (Col 2:21): Rediscovering Ourselves as Community, in Order to Re-imagine Our Interconnectedness with Creation
Program Unit: Ecological Hermeneutics
Vicky Balabanski, Flinders University
From earliest childhood we are taught not to handle, not to taste, not to touch things that are unclean. Whereas in biblical tradition this reflected the fear of sacred or ritual contagion, contemporary cultural discourse warns us for reasons of hygiene and health against the microbial world. Yet the boundaries of the self are inseparable from the miniature cosmos of living creatures for which we provide a home: some 100 trillion microbes. Most microbes are commensals (literally, one who eats at the same table), some of which assist in digestion of food and defense against pathogens, and are indeed essential to our health and well-being, yet these organisms have been presented to our thinking as a threat, linked to notions of purity, pollution and danger. Just as the early Christians needed to learn to re-conceptualize purity and pollution in an interconnected world whose Creator had declared everything good, we too need to befriend our bodies – including the unseen, internal reality -- and learn to recognize ourselves not just as individuals but as thriving, diverse microbial communities.
Against a background of changing biblical attitudes to purity, pollution and contagion, this paper develops a theology in which all things, visible and invisible to the human eye, are recognized as being created and sustained in Christ (Col 1:15-20). The method of suspicion, identification and retrieval will be utilized, given the challenge of perceiving microbiota as worthy of theological discourse. As we begin to think of ourselves as part of a great community of being, we can conceptualize on a personal level what it means to live as community – not just with other humans or other creatures we encounter – but with our selves, including our constituent members. Scientists are just beginning to understand the role of microbes in human health. So also do we need to engage in spiritual and cultural discourse which leads to greater interconnectedness, and thus to greater wholeness. If we can begin to grasp the significance of the lives we share with our own internal community, we may be better able to grasp our interconnectedness with our biology, our humanity, and the Earth as a whole.
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Alienation and Exile in the Ascension of Isaiah
Program Unit: Ancient Fiction and Early Christian and Jewish Narrative
Matt Baldwin, Mars Hill University
Recent scholarship has tended to insist on the literary unity and Christian provenance of the Ascension of Isaiah and has persuasively shown that its story of Isaiah’s persecution and death at the hands of a Beliar-possessed Manasseh (Asc. Isa. 1-5) presents Isaiah as a type of Christian martyr avant la letter. Asc. Isa. 2:7–11 narrates the exile of Isaiah and his band of prophets from Jerusalem into the wilderness, and Asc. Isa. 3:13–4:22 presents a harrowing vision of eschatological persecutions and difficulties including the alienation of those who believe in the “ascension to the seventh heaven” even from the leadership of the churches in the last days. Pointing to these narrative complexes, contemporary scholars have with increasing confidence “discovered” in them an allegorical history of the community that first produced and used the work; the narratives are claimed to be a veiled history of a sectarian community of Christian ascetic prophets, a community in conflict with Jews, or conflict with Roman authorities, or conflict with emergent proto-orthodox church hierarchies. Such readings tend to ignore the theoretical difficulties of transposing pseudepigraphic fictions into historical evidence; extending allegorization with hypothesis and speculation, their reconstructions take on the appearance of fact without being able to assume the force of “history,” and offer no way to resolve the differences found among these reconstructions.
As a way out of this impasse, this presentation argues that we should treat composition of Asc. Isa. as a form of Christian myth-making and world construction. The visionary prophet Isaiah is the paradigm of Christian witness, and his flight from Manasseh—which echoes a wide variety of comparative narratives and motifs (from, e.g. Septuagintal, Pauline, and apocalyptic literatures)—establishes a pattern for Christian faithfulness in a hostile cosmos. The world of the text interpellates subjects as believers in continuous exile, inhabiting this world beneath the firmament that is ruled by the ever hostile forces of Beliar, “and as above, so also on earth” (Asc. Isa. 7:10). This mythological cosmos constructs believers who—even apart from any particular historic sectarian context—can ascend above this demonic world order by resisting it and preserving the truth of Isaiah’s vision, though they must first endure the strife which characterizes the age prior to the eschaton. Critically reassessing the allegedly “historical” element of the pseudepigraphical story, this paper argues that, rather than presenting a veiled true story of an historical community of prophetic practitioners, the story in Asc. Isa. should be seen as a rhetorical invention that is best described as a “proto-gnostic” (without meaning to imply any essentialist account of the later “gnosticism”) cosmological myth.
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"I Am God and Not a Human": The Tension between Divinized Ethics and Humanized Ethics
Program Unit: Israelite Prophetic Literature
Samuel E. Balentine, Union Presbyterian Seminary
An argument can be made that all forms of divinized ethics – ethics based on transcendent sources – have been effectively dismissed in the modern world. What is required instead, according to some legal scholars, is “humanized ethics” – ethics rooted in human needs and values (e.g., J. Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, 2000). This of course is not a new thesis; its roots can be traced through Schopenhauer (On the Basis of Morality) to Homer, who scorned the justice of the gods because they can be influenced by humans (Illiad, IX, 497-501). This paper argues that a similar tension between divinized ethics and human ethics is present in first person divine speech in prophetic texts such as Isaiah 55:8-11, Hosea 6:4-6 and Hosea 11:8-11 (cf. Num 23:19; I Sam 15:29; Isa 31:3), where the decision to be either merciful or wrathful involves a collision within God between the moral claims of external commandments and internal imperatives. Why does God want or need to distinguish between divine and human compassion? What are the assumptions about the moral character of a God who may or may not choose to act like humans, who may or may not choose to act like God? Do God and humans share a basic moral norm (O. Kaiser, "Einfache Sittlichkeit und theonome Ethik in der alttestamentlichen Weisheit," in Gottes und der Menschen Weisheit, 1998)? Put differently, if Hosea 11:9 is the “answer” to a divine dilemma – “I am God [or `a god’] and not a human” – then what were the metaethical “questions” about divinity and morality assumed by both the ancient “author” and the readers of the text?
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Choosing between Moses and Abraham: A Rhetorical Analysis of Mic 7:14–20
Program Unit: Israelite Prophetic Literature
Libby Ballard, Baylor University
Mic 7: 14-20 references the stories of Israel’s beginnings, moving backwards through time from the arrival at the promised land (v. 14), through the exodus narratives (vv. 15-19), to Abraham (v. 20). Mic 7:20 is the only mention of Abraham in the Book of the Twelve, and he only appears six times in the major prophets (Isa 29:22; 41:8; 51:2; 63:16; Jer 33:26; Ezek 33:24). In light of the few passages that bring together the ancestor narratives from Genesis and the exodus narrative, Pentateuchal scholars such as Konrad Schmid (2010) have argued that these two stories existed as competing origin stories and were only later put in their current chronological order. In this paper, I will examine those arguments and the rhetorical function of the allusions to Israel’s origin stories, particularly their placement in reverse order. I will argue that this passage invites readers to re-imagine a future for God’s people that begins again like Abraham. God’s people can choose to view themselves as enslaved in Egypt, waiting for a New Moses to lead them out in a New Exodus in which Yahweh defeats the oppressors. Instead, this passage invites them to see themselves as like Abraham, living in peace with the other peoples in a land that God has promised to give them one day in the future. This invitation applies both to past Micah readers and present, as each wrestle with the problems of living in a multicultural world.
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The (Mis)Foreignization Problem in Hebrew Bible Studies
Program Unit: Religious Competition in Late Antiquity
Debra Scoggins Ballentine, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
When biblical authors label particular practices such as child sacrifice and goddess veneration “foreign,” this is a rhetorical move whereby the particular author negatively categorizes phenomena that he rejects. Nonetheless, many passages feature Judeans doing such “foreign” practices for Yhwh, in Jerusalem, at the temple, as genuinely Judean things to do. While many scholars have recognized this tension within the primary sources, others tend to reproduce ancient authors’ vested stances, taking polemical portrayals at face value, overlooking the rhetorical work biblical authors accomplish with the categories “foreign”, “Canaanite”, and “other gods.” I term strategic use of the label “foreign” in primary texts: “foreignization.” We may then critique scholarly misunderstanding of “foreignization” as well as misguided use of “foreign” when attempting to explain difference among cultic preferences as “mis-foreignization.”
Consider Jeremiah 44, where Jeremiah (and Deuteronomistic editors) incorporates the Judean women’s statement about honoring the Queen of Heaven (Jer 44:15-19) into Jeremiah’s threats against them, as an admission of guilt. However, the passage preserves an alternative explanation for destruction that resembles broadly attested ancient West Asian theological apologies for political defeat, as exhibited in the Moabite Mesha Stele, the Babylonian Cyrus Cylinder, as well as biblical explanations for the destructions of Israel and Judah. These frame communal calamity as the result of the patron deity’s disfavor regarding actions that his people purportedly have done or failed to do. Attributing destruction to the patron deity guards divine reputation, precluding the alternative conclusion that destruction resulted from a rival god defeating the patron deity. This shared theological logic is one of many examples of continuity between biblical and non-biblical theo-political phenomena. Such continuities were previously de-emphasized in line with claims that Israel and Judah were utterly distinct from their neighbors. One biblical explanation for calamity is that Judeans honored “foreign” and “other” gods, unacceptable according to requirements of exclusive covenant loyalty to their deity as suzerain. Jeremiah 44’s Judean women credit the Queen of Heaven for communal calamity, explaining that Judean misfortune and destruction occurred only when they stopped honoring her, as Jeremiah prefers. If one invokes the concept of “foreignness” (or similarly “monotheism”) to explain the debate in Jeremiah 44, this distances Jeremiah from his fellow Judean interlocutors within the narrative and distances the conceptual world of this text from its ancient cultural milieu. We must recognize that the “foreignness” of veneration of the Queen of Heaven is contested within the text. The Judean women state that they and their husbands have honored the Queen of Heaven for generations. Even if these characters are “unreliable witnesses,” their testimony would remain verisimilar for Jeremiah’s imagined audience. Veneration of the Queen of Heaven would then be a long-held, traditional, even mainstream Judean cultic practice, not “foreign.” The rhetorical practice evident in primary texts that utilize labels such as “foreign,” Canaanite, “other,” barbaric, heretical, etc. warrants critical analysis. Moreover, in revising problematic category-based explanations, we facilitate comparative analysis and attain fuller reconstructions of what potential social and religious dynamics the biblical anthology preserves.
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Circumcising the Mouth of Moses: A New Comparative Method for the Fields of Assyriology and Biblical Studies
Program Unit: Assyriology and the Bible
Amy L. Balogh, University of Denver & Iliff School of Theology
Comparisons between texts from the Hebrew Bible and ancient Mesopotamia are often critiqued as methodologically problematic. Here, I offer a method of comparison that addresses those critiques. This method eliminates arguments for textual dependence, embraces both similarity and difference, supports the voice of the scholar, and focuses in a way that engages both texts deeply. The result is a contextualized and fruitful re-description of both objects. The key to this approach is what Jonathan Z. Smith calls a “third term,” the “with respect to” that is the subject of comparison. This third term is analogous to the subject of conversation between two individuals, and this conversation is mediated by a third-party — the scholar.
To demonstrate the benefits of this method for the fields of Assyriology and Biblical Studies, I compare Moses and idols with respect to status change. How does Moses become the mouthpiece of God? How do idols become manifestations of the divine? How might these processes of status change illuminate one another, without postulating textual dependence? To answer these questions, I compare the Mesopotamian Mis Pi ritual and incantation texts, which detail the process by which an idol was inducted into the community of the gods, to the exchange in which Moses protests “I am uncircumcised of lips” and Yahweh responds, “See, I have made you god to Pharaoh” (Exod 6:28-7:1). In comparing the language of the circumcision of Moses’s mouth and the Mis Pi ritual, I find that both processes are cast as purifying, symbolic (re)births. These births enable both Moses and idols to act as conduits of the divine word. Furthermore, it is this very word that both the Pentateuch and the Mis Pi consider to be the source of life itself.
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Did Jesus Expect to Die? A Test Case in Allison’s Methodology and a Response to His Critics
Program Unit: Historical Jesus
Michael Patrick Barber, John Paul the Great Catholic University
Recent explorations in Jesus research have given much attention to the implications of what might broadly be described as “social memory theory” (e.g., A. Kirk, T. Thatcher, A. Le Donne, C. Keith). Yet P. Foster and Z. Crook have criticized the way such approaches have been applied. This paper enters into this debate by revisiting the question of whether or not Jesus anticipated his demise, building upon the method and arguments of Allison’s, Constructing Jesus (2010). This paper will respond to recent criticisms of Allison’s method by showing that his argument relies on more than a mere appeal to the general trustworthiness of early memories about Jesus via “recurrent attestation”. Although rightly critical of the standard “criteria of authenticity”, Allison actually makes his case for the eschatological character of Jesus’ message by highlighting other indicators of historical plausibility. Among other things, Allison holds that the impression that Jesus was motivated by eschatological concerns is believable because (1) it is plausible within a Jewish setting (e.g., pp. 76–78); (2) it makes sense of the effects of his ministry (e.g., pp. 48–53), and (3) because it provides a helpful hermeneutical framework for understanding various other elements of the Jesus tradition (e.g., traditions regarding the twelve; cf. pp. 67–76). Following Allison’s method, this paper argues that there are good reasons to believe the passion predictions found in the Gospels likely reflect Jesus’ own expectations. Of course, that Jesus believed he would meet a violent end is affirmed throughout our sources. An appeal to social memory theory could suggest that such views did not originate ex nihilo but in some way convey impressions left by Jesus. Yet there are further reasons for tracing their origin back to Jesus: they are plausible within a Jewish setting, make sense of the effects of his ministry, and explain other aspects of the Jesus tradition. In particular, such predictions are consistent with Jewish eschatological texts that envision a period of eschatological tribulation during which the righteous will suffer (e.g., Jer 30:1–9; 12:1–3; Zech 13:8–9; 4Q171 II, 9–12; 1Q33 I, 11–12; cf., e.g., B. Pitre) as well as traditions that link the death of Jewish martyrs to hopes for the eschatological vindication of Israel (e.g., 2 Macc. 7:32–33, 37–38; 4 Macc. 1:11; 17:22; 1 En. 47; T. Moses 9–10). That such perspectives inform early Christian texts seems clear (e.g., the work of C. Pate and D. Kenard). Notably, while also holding an eschatological outlook, Paul seems to have anticipated his own sufferings (1 Thess. 3:4), interpreting himself as a sacrificial offering (Phil 2:17). In particular, Allison has shown how he relates Christian suffering to eschatological tribulation traditions (Rom 8:19–25; cf. Col 1:24). The most plausible account of the data is that Jesus “keyed” his coming death to such traditions as well. In sum, this paper demonstrates that recent memory research has much to offer Jesus studies, though its application must be carefully supplemented with other considerations.
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Jesus’ Vow at the Last Supper in the Synoptic Gospels: A Study in Divergent Narrative Strategies
Program Unit: Synoptic Gospels
Michael Patrick Barber, John Paul the Great Catholic University
In the three accounts of the last supper in the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus insists that he will not drink of the fruit of the vine until a future moment involving the kingdom (Matt 26:29//Mark 14:25//Luke 22:18). While the language of the vow itself differs in slight ways in the three accounts, what is most noticeable is Luke's unique placement of the saying. Whereas Jesus’ vow follows the eucharistic words over the bread and the cup in Matthew and Mark, in Luke it precedes them. This paper seeks to explain the rationale for the different placements of the saying against the backdrop of the larger narratives of the three gospels. In sum, the vow can be seen as serving different narrative functions in Matthew and Mark than in Luke. As we shall show, a close examination of the vow’s purpose in Matthew and Mark reveals that it is likely related to another distinctive aspect of their account. Specifically, while Matthew and Mark report that Jesus was offered a drink immediately before his death (cf. Matt 27:48//Mark 15:36), Luke only mentions that Jesus was offered a drink earlier during his passion, remaining silent about whether or not Jesus actually drank from it (cf. Luke 23:36). This scene in Luke has a parallel in Matthew, though Matthew’s version of it adds that Jesus refused to drink at this time (Matt 27:34). However, when he is offered the drink immediately before his death in Matt 27:48//Mark 15:36, Jesus makes no similar protest. We shall then revisit the question of the precise language used in this scene. Are the Matthean and Markan accounts best read as depicting Jesus partaking of the vinegar or does it depict the interruption of the attempt to provide him with a drink? Finally, we shall examine how the vow of Jesus in Matthew and Mark seems to relate to the episode of the request of James and John, which involves a conversation about the disciples' future drinking of the cup from which Jesus will drink (Matt 20:22–23//Mark 10:38–39). As we shall argue, these various episodes do not seem unrelated. In fact, the different placements of the vow of Jesus at the last supper seems to relate to narrative interests that seem to diverge in the Matthean/Markan and Lukan accounts, which this paper will attempt to explicate.
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P.Oxy. 7.1007 Christian or Jewish?
Program Unit: Papyrology and Early Christian Backgrounds
Don Barker, Macquarie University
P.Oxy. 7.1007 (British Library, inv. 2047) is one of only two fragments of the LXX on parchment dated to before the fourth century (with P.Oxy. 11.1351) This page from the codex presents a unique combination of Jewish and Christian abbreviations of the sacred name. The treatment of kurios suggests the text was copied by a Jewish scribe, the use of the nomen sacrum for Theos suggest a Christian context. This paper will explore the various options and possibilities for the social context of the codex.
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Christians and Torah Observance in Second-Century Perspective
Program Unit: Jewish-Christian Dialogue and Sacred Texts
James W. Barker, Western Kentucky University
This paper takes up the perennial question of why (most) Christians do not observe (much) Torah. Early in the second century, Ignatius of Antioch provided the earliest attestation to the Gospel of Matthew. According to Matthew, Jesus instructs his disciples not to break even the least of Torah’s commandments (5:19), and the gospel ends with an exhortation to make disciples of Gentiles, who should obey everything Jesus commanded (28:19–20). According to Ignatius, however, it is absurd to profess Jesus Christ and to practice Judaism (To the Magnesians 10.3). This paper asks how Ignatius could read Matthew’s gospel and not observe Torah. I explain Ignatius’s reception and interpretation of Pauline texts as a definite factor, and I suggest his reception of Johannine texts or traditions as a possible factor. I also contrast Ignatius’s rejection of Jewish practice with Justin Martyr’s argument in the mid-second century (see esp. Dialogue with Trypho 46–47). Despite Justin’s strong anti-Judaism and supersessionism, he assumed a surprisingly moderate position allowing Christians to keep as much Torah as they wanted, as long as Torah observance was optional, not mandatory. The paper offers a pedagogical application for raising the question of Torah observance when teaching New Testament and Early Christianity. The paper concludes by applying Ignatius’s and Justin’s teachings to a contemporary case study for Jewish–Christian dialogue, namely whether Christian churches should host Passover Seders.
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Where Does My Hope Come From? The Rhetorical Significance of Exod 34:6–7 in the Book of the Twelve
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Joel Barker, Heritage College & Seminary
Where Does My Hope Come From? The Rhetorical Significance of Exod 34:6–7 in the Book of the Twelve
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Augustine and the Construction of Martyrs’ Identities
Program Unit: Religious Competition in Late Antiquity
Heather Barkman, University of Ottawa
Augustine’s writings about martyrs are informed by the Donatist conflict. As both Catholics and Donatists looked to martyrs to help to construct their identities, the rhetorical attempts to claim some martyrs as one’s own (while rejecting others) were significant points of debate in the competition for who could rightfully claim the title of “the true church.” This presentation will explore the way Augustine discusses three specific martyrs: Castus, Aemelius, and Crispina. These martyrs are particularly useful for examining the role that religious competition plays in the construction of identity as Augustine changes their depiction from the way they appear in earlier sources. In particular, I will explore the changes in agency that these martyrs exercise (or do not exercise) in the successive representations of their martyrdom, and the reasons their agency is redirected or suppressed in Augustine’s discourse.
The Decian martyrs Castus and Aemelius were used by both Cyprian and Augustine as examples of Christians who became martyrs only after initial failure. Although Cyprian and Augustine describe these martyrs as true penitents and full martyrs, they use different rhetorical language. Further, Augustine’s discussion of these particular martyrs draws attention to one of the defining characteristics of the Catholic/Donatist conflict: the acceptance or rejection of the penitent lapsed. Thus, Augustine’s method of elevation of these martyrs speaks to broader themes that he wished to promote within his congregation.
So too with Crispina. Her Passio, which appeared shortly after her death in the Great Persecution, was used by both Catholics and Donatists. Augustine refers to Crispina in five of his sermons, but he describes her in much different terms than those used in the Passio. As with Castus and Aemelius, Augustine’s divergence from the earlier representation can be shown to have rhetorical significance, both for the Catholic-Donatist conflict and for Augustine’s views on the role of women.
Ultimately, these specific comparisons will allow for a close examination of Augustine’s use of rhetoric to construct martyr identities that fit within his social and temporal context. This will provide more nuanced insight into the role that martyr rhetoric played into Augustine’s battle against his religious rivals, the Donatists.
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Reading Isaiah with Paul: Who Are Mother Zion's Children?
Program Unit: Intertextuality in the New Testament
Gregory M. Barnhill, Baylor University
Paul’s use of the “heavenly mother Jerusalem/Zion” image and citation of Isa 54:1 in Gal 4:26-27 has provoked a variety of explanations in the history of the interpretation, but many interpreters have ignored the role of Isaiah 40-66 in explaining the “heavenly Jerusalem” as “our Mother” imagery. By reading Isaiah 40-66 with the question “Who are Mother Zion’s children?” in mind, the implicit inclusive relationship of Mother Zion to the nations becomes more explicit. An exclusively Jewish conception of the children of Zion transforms through the course of Isaiah 40-66 into an inclusive conception of the children, redefined around the “servants of Yahweh” (Isaiah 56-66), who are spiritually conceived and redefined around an ethic of faithful obedience rather than ethnicity. These ideas form the background of Paul’s employment of Mother Zion, as he redefines the people of God on the basis of faith and spirit in Galatians, not Jew and Gentile. The apocalyptic categories found in Galatians indicate that Paul’s view of the people of Yahweh has been transformed in line with the implicit eschatological vision found in Isaiah 40-66, which makes the nations into legitimate children of Yahweh. These ideas come to a climax in 4:21-31, where Paul uses allegory to redefine the children of Yahweh as spiritually conceived and participants in the new creation. Through reading of Isaiah with the concerns of Paul in mind (its apocalyptic and eschatological themes) and considering the intertextual relationship between these two texts, one can see why the Zion narrative and the expansion of Mother Zion’s offspring to include Gentiles is the background for Paul’s use of Isa 54:1 in Gal 4:27, as well as how Paul uses Isaiah to speak about his own contemporary situation.
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The Shema in John and Jewish Restoration Eschatology
Program Unit: Johannine Literature
Lori Baron, Duke University
This paper is drawn from a section of my dissertation on the Shema in John's Gospel. The Fourth Evangelist does not only portray Jesus' equality with God in terms of the Shema (e.g. 10:30), he also draws upon interpretations of the Shema in the OT prophets (Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Zechariah) to characterize the Johannine community as eschatological Israel restored. The prophets envision Israel regathered as a unity under the one God; John uses similar language and themes to demonstrate that Jesus' disciples now fulfill that role. This is a rhetorical move that effectively reverses the socio-historical situation of the Johannine community, which has been excluded from Jewish communal life in its particular locale. Johannine believers in Jesus are portrayed as God's restored people, while the Johannine "Jews" are "cast out" from the eschatological covenant community. The paper concludes by exploring the anti-Jewish potential of this reading.
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To Serve God and Not Mammon: Reading Matthew 6 as Missionally Located Formation for Economic Discipleship
Program Unit: GOCN Forum on Missional Hermeneutics
Michael Barram, Saint Mary's College of California
In a 2014 SBL session devoted to “Poverty in the Biblical World,” I argued (1) that traditional readings of Matthew 5–7 have generally overlooked its rather concrete economic context and dynamics and (2) that in light of such issues, the Sermon seeks to form not only the concrete economic behavior of the Christian community, but also, and perhaps most importantly, the kinds of economic reasoning characteristic of those faithfully gathered around Jesus.
This paper extends that work, focusing on the formative function of Matthew 6 (and 6:19–34, in particular), reading it specifically from the perspective of a consciously missional hermeneutic. Attending to the argumentative connections between 6:19–24 and 6:25–34, the paper argues that 6:24 serves a critical function relative to the concrete missional witness of the Christian community.
In several ways, the concerns of this paper dovetail well with the theme, “Biblical Formation of the Congregation for Missional Witness.” First, the argument focuses upon the formative dynamics of Matthew 6, emphasizing—unlike individualistic readings of the Sermon—the need for communities to embody concretely the implications of Jesus’ teaching.
Second, the paper exemplifies the benefits of attending to the hermeneutical nexus of a missional reading. It highlights two of the fundamental “streams” described by Hunsberger (2008) as characteristic of a “robust” missional hermeneutic, namely, streams two and three. While many understand “missional hermeneutics” primarily in terms of a grand, salvation-historical arc or missional meta-narrative evident on the ‘surface’ of biblical texts—and across the canon as a whole (stream one), the current paper seeks to demonstrate the interpretive force of the formative or equipping function of biblical texts (stream two) and of contemporary, missionally located readings of such formative texts (stream three). In other words, the present paper seeks to highlight the formative function of Matthew 6 both from an historical, exegetical perspective (i.e., the equipping function of the text) as well as from the hermeneutical vantage point of North American Christianity today (i.e., some of the implications of the text for contemporary, located readers). In this sense, paper moves decidedly beyond the descriptive task of stream one to the hermeneutical task that begins to emerge in stream three.
Third, Matthew 6 would not be found on most lists of traditional “mission” texts (e.g., Matthew 28:16–20; Acts; 2 Corinthians 4–5; 1 Peter) to which those predisposed to finding “mission” in the Bible might instinctively turn. For that reason, it provides a useful ‘test case’ for the hermeneutical legitimacy and value of a missional reading.
Fourth, the paper will also incorporate brief reflections on formation for mission from the author’s experience in leading a yearlong adult study of biblical texts oriented toward economic discipleship and justice, such as Matthew 6:19–34, in the context of a learning community at First Presbyterian Church, Berkeley, California.
In short, the paper will argue that Matthew 6 functioned—and should continue to function—as critically important missional formation for the Christian community in trying economic times.
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Exilic Afterlives
Program Unit: Ancient Fiction and Early Christian and Jewish Narrative
Jennifer Barry, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
Athanasius of Alexandria is frequently cited as one of the pillars of the Christian faith. It is often noted by his ancient—and contemporary—biographers that this legacy is tied directly to his experience of persecution. His frequent battles with emperors and heretics, however, were not the only reason his reputation spread well beyond the borders of Alexandria. In this paper, I argue that Athanasius’ identity as an exile became a popular trope that circulated within pro-Nicene Christian literature at the turn of the fourth century. In particular, his third exile takes on a literary life of its own. Many authors will use the story of his flight into the desert and triumphant return to legitimize subsequent episcopal exiles. Specifically, I examine how Athanasius’ exile is easily invoked to bolster support for John Chrysostom during the Johanine controversy. John’s biographer Palladius of Helenopolis insists that those who question John’s exile are no better than the enemies who persecuted Athanasius. Ultimately, Palladius uses Athanasius’ exile to shame John Chrysostom’s accusers and re-write the bishop’s legacy as an orthodox one.
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Having All Things in Common—Only in Your Dreams?
Program Unit: Poverty in the Biblical World
Scott Bartchy, University of California-Los Angeles
According to the Acts of the Apostles, the pre-66CE Christ-followers in Jerusalem rejected private ownership in favor of holding their possessions in common--as an essential witness to their conviction that Israel's God had raised Jesus from the dead. This Lukan claim is analyzed: (1) in light of biblical anticipations of a good life in an economy characterized by general reciprocity (koinonia) and the sharing of limited goods (including honor) in a sibling-based society ruled by Israel's God; (2) in view of Paul's both urging his converts to practice isotes (redistributive exchange) and his collection for the famine-stressed Christ-community in Jerusalem.
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Inquiring of YHWH in the Book of Ezekiel
Program Unit: National Association of Professors of Hebrew
Penelope Barter, University of St. Andrews
In the Book of Ezekiel, the elders sit before the priest-prophet three times (8.1; 14.1; 20.1), with a progressive revelation that they have come to "inquire" (drsh) of Yhwh through Ezekiel. What is not revealed, however, is the nature of their inquiry and why it angers Yhwh, who refuses to be consulted by them, but ultimately responds with an oracle (14.3-4; 20.3-4).
We will firstly investigate the use of the expression in the Hebrew Bible, arguing that the locution has a wide range of uses and connotations. Although the term is often defined as Deuteronomic (Levitt Kohn, 2002), the term is frequently found in prophecy, poetry, and prose outside DtrH, and is used in various contexts, including idolatry, law, and divination. The second part of the paper will establish which of these many interpretations of “inquiring” of Yhwh are utilised in Ezekiel, with particular attention to the linguistic links to Exodus 18, which offers a lens through which to interpret both the elders’ request and Yhwh’s anger, and furthers our understanding of Ezekiel’s prophetic role.
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The Novelist and the Chronicler: The Reception of Issachar in Literature
Program Unit: Use, Influence, and Impact of the Bible
Penelope Barter, University of St. Andrews
Issachar is hardly the most memorable of Jacob’s children in the popular imagination, yet the quiet reception of this character throughout the centuries stands as testimony to a continued interest in Leah’s fifth son. However, when the biblical Issachar is received in literature, it is not through the quirky account of his conception and naming, but rather primarily through the description in Jacob’s blessing of Issachar as “a strong donkey, lying down between the sheepfolds” who “bowed his shoulder to bear burdens, and became a slave at forced labour” (Gen 49.14-15) and the claim of the Chronicler that the sons of Issachar were “men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12.33 [32]). This paper explores this phenomenon in selected novels, plays, and poetry from 1691 to 2013, and assesses its impact on our reading of the biblical Issachar. Recurring themes in the use of the character and name include connections between Issachar and messianism and linking biblical descriptions of Issachar and his tribe to contemporary political events, including in satire.
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Old Testament Origins and the Question of God
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Craig Bartholomew, Redeemer University College
Old Testament Origins and the Question of God
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A Biblical Theologian's Response to Philosophical Criticism
Program Unit: Hebrew Bible and Philosophy
Craig Bartholomew, Redeemer University College
I will respond to Gericke's proposal that philosophical criticism ought to be a form of biblical criticism.
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Lawgiver-Response and Rhetorical Stratagems in the Deuteronomic Legislation
Program Unit: Book of Deuteronomy
Assnat Bartor, Tel Aviv University
One of the main topics of my narrative reading of biblical law is rhetoric. Because narrative reading, as opposed to legal reading, does not focus on norms, foundational principles, or the policies enacted by the law, but rather attends to characters and events, how they are described, which textual and rhetorical elements serve to elaborate the law's content, and the communicative processes through which the lawgiver transmits the law to its audience. The Deuteronomic lawgiver does not only seek to prescribe and prohibit, but also to influence the consciousness and awareness of its audience. He exposes his addressees/readers to the legislative process and invites them to respond to the substance of the laws; to contemplate and to feel, rather than just obey. My paper will focus on lawgiver-response and rhetorical stratagems mainly in the laws of warfare (Deut 20-21).
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Preaching Paul's Letters as Narrative: Philippians and Empathetic Imagination
Program Unit: Homiletics and Biblical Studies
Jennifer Garcia Bashaw, East Texas Baptist University
The last several decades of scholarship on homiletics have seen preachers emphasizing, to varying degrees, the importance of preaching the form of the text. The inclination to match sermon form to text genre has served as a catalyst to revolutionize preaching in many aspects. Fred Craddock’s inductive approach, which uses the exegetical process of interpretation as a schematic for sermon preparation, grows out of this concern. Thomas G. Long delves even deeper into this interest when he encourages preachers to ask, “How can people best hear the material in this sermon?,” rather than, “What is the most orderly way for this material to fit together?” (The Witness of Preaching, 96).
Although Long and Craddock’s approaches build upon a commitment to be faithful to the form of the text, the focus on hermeneutics and communication that they both display undermines a strict adherence to matching sermon form to text genre. The epistolary genre, for example, is reflective and propositional in nature, but is not strictly deductive. Paul’s letters are an intersection of several plots—Paul’s narrative, the narrative of the church to which he writes, and God’s narrative. In this paper, I suggest a form in which to preach Paul’s letters that both encompasses solid hermeneutics (à la Craddock) and shapes the material in a way that people can best hear it (à la Long). It does not adhere to a strict separation of narrative and epistle but instead immerses hearers in the narrative world of Paul and presents his epistles in the way his original hearers would have experienced them. This method involves empathetic imagination, reconstructing the city and situation of an epistle’s recipients and creating an identity for the sermon hearers to adopt. It leads the congregation to put themselves in the shoes of an ancient Christian and imagine what a passage might have meant to that original hearer. After describing this sermon form, I will briefly illustrate how it works in a sermon series on Philippians by presenting an introduction to the series.
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Biblical Study Aids in the Donatist Tradition
Program Unit: Development of Early Christian Theology
Alden Lee Bass, Saint Louis University
Augustine’s reliance on Tyconius’ hermeneutical arguments in the Liber Regularum (and his reluctance to admit it) for parts of De Doctrina Christiana is well known. Less well known is the Donatist contribution to biblical study aids in the fourth and fifth century. These study aids fall into two categories. First, the paratextual material found in Donatist editions of the Bible such as summaries, titles, and section headings (capitula). These elements were taken over from early Greek manuscripts and modified to fit Donatist theology. For instance, Codex Amiantinus preserves these headings for Jeremiah: 6) De falso baptism; 7) De aqua aliena hoc de falso baptism; 8) Non prodesse baptisma haereticorum. These summaries were not used liturgically, at least not in any immediate way, but for the purpose of biblical study; certain series of capitula were eventually incorporated into Carolingian and medieval Bibles. The second category consists of the study tools preserved in the “Donatist Compendium,” an early fifth century bifolium now residing in Marburg. The Compendium contains 11 distinct documents, including biblical chronologies, lists of miracles, and interpretations of names. The most extensive work is the Liber geneaologus, the Donatist historical chronology spanning the time from Adam to the Donatist persecutions. Present also is the much-discussed stichometry lists for the works of Cyprian and the Old and New Testaments. Bischoff called this work, which we now known to be Donatists, “the oldest document of the Christian booktrade.”
The Donatist contribution to ancient biblical criticism has been noted in passing, mostly by textual scholars, but no work has these study aids in the larger context of the Donatist theological and social agenda. The African church split in the early fourth century over the accusation that some bishops had surrendered the sacred books during the Diocletianic persecution. Those who came to be known as the pars Donati viewed such actions not simply as a moral failure, but as a betrayal of the Holy Spirit. The book itself was considered by these African Christians to be quasi-divine as a cultural product, saturated with the Holy Spirit of God. Thus, the Donatist movement seems to have attracted those with the highest possible view of scripture, which in turn resulted in careful, text-based study-aids. These aids would not only have been used polemically (as in the capitula cited above), but simply to expound the Bible, veneration of which lay at the heart of the movement. Like the hermeneutical work of Tyconius, the labor of Donatist biblical scholars, despite its far-reaching influence, has gone largely unnoticed.
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Christology of Divine Identity? Septuagintal Dialogues in the New Testament as Trinitarian Critique
Program Unit: Theological Interpretation of Scripture
Matthew Bates, Quincy University
In the study of Christian origins Richard Bauckham and N. T. Wright (among others) have adopted the terminology “Christology of Divine Identity” as a way of speaking about how Jesus correlates with the God of Israel in NT and early Christian texts. This paper will problematize the identity category by analyzing assumptions about person and time in NT and early Christian interpretations of “divine dialogues” in the Septuagint. It will be argued that there was continuity between first-century and third- and fourth-century practices of Christian scriptural interpretation that compelled the developing church to prefer “person” language in speaking about how God is differentiable. As such the notion of divine persons in fellowship beyond the ordinary boundaries of time is not alien to the first-century, but exegetically presupposed. Accordingly, it is suggested that the category “Christology of Divine Persons” is to be preferred over “Christology of Divine Identity.”
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The Rising of a Disembodiment of Creation by the Doctrine of creatio ex nihilo: Alternative Readings of Gen 1:1–3 (21) in Ancient Jewish Texts of the Second Temple Period
Program Unit: Early Exegesis of Genesis 1–3
Michaela Bauks, Universität Koblenz - Landau
For a long time scholars thought that Jewish authors from the Hellenistic Diaspora developed a concept of creation from a formless matter, they might have been influenced by Platonic philosophy or not. Starting point of the reflection was the notion of divine creation ??? ?? ??t?? in 2 Macc. 7:28, where creation is connected with resurrection. However the studies of G. Schmuttermayr (1973), G. May (1978) and recently B. Schmitz (2010) have revised the hypothesis that the idea of creation ex nihilo arose during the intertestamental period in a Jewish context. In addition, the textual evidences have been much more broaden: the providence of God and, especially, the separation between light and darkness are discussed in several Qumran writings with references to Gen 1. Though there is no debate about creation ex nihilo, there are allusions to the motif of creation from matter within some few eschatological, sapiental (e.g. Meditation on Creation A-C; 4Q303-305) and liturgical works (e.g. concerning calendars). Apocalyptic texts, such as 4 Ezr 6:38-54 and 2 ApocBar 24:16-19; 29:1-8, provide evidence for creation by speech, and deal with chaotic or dualistic elements by referring to Gen 1:21. A Hellenistic influenced sapiental writing emphasizes the creative role of the cosmos for salvation from “chaos” and dead (Wis. 1:14; 5:17, 20; 9:1-3 [cf. Jub 12:4]; 11:17 etc.). A particular case of Hellenistic influence encounters in Gen 1:2 LXX, in Jos. Ant. I: 27-33 and thereto we find controversial readings in the targumic material.
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The Question of Ethiopian Late Antique, Medieval, and Later Literary Heritage with a Look at the TraCES Project
Program Unit: Ethiopic Bible and Literature
Alessandro Bausi, University of Hamburg
An area of ancient written culture from the first millennium bce, the Ethiopian highlands have been home to a complex literary tradition (predominantly in Ge?ez) that has no parallel in sub-Saharan Africa. Its emergence was determined by late antique culture (Byzantium including Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and the Red Sea), Mediterranean cultural encounters, and the African background. The earliest known texts were translations from Greek, later works were adopted from Christian Arabic (esp. Copto-Arabic) literary tradition, in addition to a rich local written production. The complexity of literary history is fully reflected in the changes in grammar, lexicon and stylistic means of the Ge?ez language. During the years 2014-2019, the ERC-Advanced Grant TraCES project intends for the first time to analyze in detail the lexical, morphological and stylistic features of texts depending on their origins using the achievements of linguistics, philology, and digital humanities. An annotated digital text corpus of critically established texts is being created. Frequency and collocation analysis will reveal changes in grammatical and lexical choices across centuries. Novel ways of visualization of textual features and intertextual relationships will be offered to provide insights into the structure, history and evolution of texts. The resulting new understanding of the history of the Ge?ez language and of the Ethiopian creativity and literary activity will help establish features and criteria that may be helpful in determining the origins of texts when the direct ‘Vorlage’ is missing. The literary transmission and dissemination processes will be analyzed by contrasting and connecting Ethiopian late antique and medieval heritage with its parallels and antecedents in Near East and Mediterranean, contributing to our understanding of the cultural networks of the Christian Orient. A number of valuable research tools will emerge as by-products of the project. (S. https://www.traces.uni-hamburg.de/en.html)
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Late Antique Relics from the Ethiopian Highlands: The Ethiopic Version of the History of the "Episcopate" of Alexandria and Other Texts
Program Unit: Ethiopic Bible and Literature
Alessandro Bausi, University of Hamburg
As an interesting example of how the TraCES scope might be applied in practice, the case study of the ‘History of the Episcopate of Alexandria’ and other lesser known texts will be briefly introduced. The case-study is concerned with texts transmitted in a multiple-text manuscript that is preserved in a small church in an isolated area at the border of Ethiopia and Eritrea, an area which was once the cradle of Christian civilization in the northern highlands of the Horn of Africa. The manuscript contains a series of palaeographic and linguistic features which put it into relation with the Abba Garima Four Gospels books, as well as to other ancient biblical manuscripts, that probably make it the oldest non-biblical Ethiopic manuscript. The example appears to be interesting and fruitful for questions of textual and cultural history as well as of language.
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Deuteronomy's Brotherhood Ethic and Nehemiah 5
Program Unit: Economics in the Biblical World
Richard Bautch, St. Edward's University
Invited panelist
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Lewis vs. Bultmann: Myth as Fact or Fiction?
Program Unit: Christian Theology and the Bible
Leslie Baynes, Missouri State University
In April 1941 Rudolf Bultmann delivered his essay “New Testament and Mythology,” which proclaimed that no denizen of the 20th century could use electric lights, modern medicine, and the wireless and still believe in the New Testament world of angels and demons. In May 1941 C. S. Lewis published his first imaginative letter between the demons Screwtape and Wormwood. Both works to no small degree shaped their authors’ legacies. The war between their respective nations ended in 1945, but their intellectual skirmishes about the role of the supernatural in Christianity, the genre of the gospels, and other topics continue to this day. Lewis reacted strongly against Bultmann’s scholarship in The Screwtape Letters and the essay “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism,” but he did not always fully grasp it because of his lack of expertise in the field. On the other hand, some of Lewis’s critiques of Bultmann were perspicacious, foreshadowing the guild’s later reassessment of his work. This paper examines Lewis’s use and evaluation of the biblical scholarship of his day. Since the subjects Lewis critiqued continue to be debated by today’s biblical scholars, investigating how he both confirms and challenges the assumptions of standard biblical scholarship is a worthwhile task, one that provides a helpful bridge between academic biblical scholars and the broader constituency that reads Lewis’s work.
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The Violence of the Kingdom in Q
Program Unit: Q
Giovanni Bazzana, Harvard University
The paper will take into consideration "violent" behaviors that are ascribed to God and to human beings towards the establishment of the Kingdom of God in the Sayings Gospel Q. By comparing selected Q passages with the phrasing of documentary papyri, the paper will show how such violent imagery depends on the legal terminology with which the village scribes who composed and circulated the text where acquainted. Moreover, the paper will consider how violence is employed by Q to construct both divine and human agencies in the process of bringing about divine sovereignty. In conclusion and with specific reference to the rather enigmatic Q 16:16, the paper will show that violent imagery is deployed in Q as a means to convey a specific articulation of human participation in a theological political scenario that is consistent with the bureaucratic ethos of the local administrators that stood behind the document.
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From Holy Grail to The Lost Gospel: Margaret Starbird and the Mary Magdalene Romance
Program Unit: Maria, Mariamne, Miriam: Rediscovering the Marys
Mary Ann Beavis, St. Thomas More College
Although her work is little known to academic biblical scholars, the writings of Margaret Starbird have been, and continue to be, very influential in informing popular understandings of Mary Magdalene, including her portrayal as Jesus’ wife in The Da Vinci Code, and, most recently in Simcha Jacobovici’s and Barrie Wilson’s The Lost Gospel: Decoding the Secret Text that Reveals Jesus’ Marriage to Mary Magdalene (2014). Despite Starbird's key role in shaping popular ideas about the Magdalene, her immensely popular writings are little known to biblical scholars. This paper will trace the influence of Starbird's books on the reception history of the Magdalene since the publication of The Woman with the Alabaster Jar (1993), particularly in shaping the modern legend of the romance between Mary Magdalene and Jesus. Additionally, the paper will evaluate Starbird’s key claims and interpretations of the biblical and extra-biblical evidence, both appreciatively and critically, from the perspective of a professional biblical scholar.
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The Mithraeum as a Mechanism for Getting Down from Heaven and Back Up Again
Program Unit: Mysticism, Esotericism, and Gnosticism in Antiquity
Roger Beck, University of Toronto
The philosopher Porphyry tell us that the shrine and meeting place of the Roman cult of Mithras (now called a "mithraeum") was designed and furnished as an "image of the universe" in order to "induct the initiate into a mystery of the soul's descent and exit back out again" ("On the Cave" 6). Despite good archaeological evidence that some mithraea were indeed designed symbolically as microcosms, Porphyry's statement about the mithraeum's function in enabling a "mystery of the soul's descent and exit back out again" has generally been discounted. My paper will argue, to the contrary, that a cognitive approach to the apprehension of symbols in a context of this sort validates Porphyry's assertion.
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Is the Hebrew D-Stem Factitive/Resultative? An Examination of Virtually Every D-Stem Occurrence and Corresponding G-Stem in the Hebrew Bible
Program Unit: Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
John C. Beckman, Harvard University
The biblical Hebrew D stem (piel) seems to be inconsistent from verb to verb, both in its meaning and in its relationship to the G stem (qal). For example, the D stem has a higher valency than the G stem for some verbs (e.g., q-d-sh G ‘to be holy’, D ‘to make holy’), whereas for other verbs, the G and D stems seem to be interchangeable (e.g., sh-b-r can be glossed ‘to break’ in both the G and D stems). Several scholars (Waltke and O’Connor 1990, Jenni 1968, and Goetze 1942) propose that the D stem is factitive/resultative, meaning that it describes the subject causing a passive undersubject to enter a state without describing the process. Thus sh-b-r, which means ‘to break’ (process) in the G stem, means ‘to make broken’ (resultative) in the D stem. By developing criteria to detect this distinction and then examining every occurrence of every verb in the Hebrew Bible (except for a few high-frequency verbs that were sampled), this paper demonstrates that the D stem has a process meaning far more often than a resultative meaning, contrary to the factitive/resultative hypothesis. Furthermore, the factitive/resultative hypothesis cannot explain verbs that lack a direct object in the D stem.
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'Let Us Make Them in Our Image': The Historical Context and Contemporary Effect of 'Whitewashing' Ancient Egypt
Program Unit: Bible and Film
Meghan Alexander Beddingfield, Princeton Theological Seminary
Ridley Scott’s 2014 film Exodus: Gods and Kings lightly marketed itself as “sensitive” to the issue of race, yet the result falls in line with Hollywood’s corporate racism while maintaining historical inaccuracy. Most of the racial controversy around Scott’s film focuses on the unfair job opportunities within Hollywood and film creators’ acquiescence to fulfill American cultural, racist norms rather than challenge them from a standpoint of industry power. Yet, two aspects of the film that have received too little attention are the historical context of debates about the racial categorization of ancient Egyptians and the specific ways in which the White, male perspective of the film imposes itself on "other" viewers. This paper will begin with a contextualization of the irony of 19th century constructions of ancient Egyptian racial categorization and transition to how Scott reifies White supremacist ideologies in Exodus (2014). By analyzing the white male lens through which Exodus (2014) portrays history, this paper will delve into the emotional and religious displacement experienced by the "other" viewers, who do not ascribe to the normative position of white masculinity in the film.
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Marcion’s Evangelion and the Two Source Hypothesis
Program Unit: New Testament Textual Criticism
Jason BeDuhn, Northern Arizona University
The gospel included in Marcion’s scriptural canon offers the earliest datable extensive witness to the text of Luke, and therefore provides evidence crucial to probing the compositional history of the Synoptic Gospels. This paper surveys that evidence with regard to its implications for the viability of the Two Source Hypothesis. One challenge to the hypothesis is the presence of the so-called Minor Agreements, textual commonalities Luke shares with Matthew but not Mark, and which are not thought to derive from their other supposed common source, the hypothetical Q. The absence from Marcion’s Evangelion of a significant number of the Minor Agreements reveals them to be later harmonizations of the text of Luke to Matthew. Are the remaining Minor Agreements found in the Evangelion to be explained in the same way, as an earlier phase of textual harmonization? Previous scholarship has also identified a significant set of textual agreements between Luke and John in the Passion narrative, likewise lacking in Marcion’s gospel text. Should we regard such harmonizations as a product of copyists or redactors, or can we sustain the distinction, particularly at very early stages of textual transmission? The evidence of the Evangelion, therefore, in some ways addresses challenges to the Two Source Hypothesis, while in other ways adding new complications. Can the clean simplicity of the hypothesis survive what Marcion’s gospel has to tell us?
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The Difficulty with Diagnosing Lamed Objecti
Program Unit: Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
Peter Bekins, Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion
In Biblical Hebrew the grammatical object is variably marked by the specialized preposition ’t. Old Aramaic featured a similar system using the cognate form ’yt but a new system emerged in Imperial Aramaic in which the dative preposition l was reanalyzed as an object marker alongside its regular use as a dative. This development was paralleled to some extent in Biblical Hebrew, but it is not clear how wide the phenomenon was as it is often difficult to differentiate cases of lamed objecti from true dative arguments. The diagnosis is often based on distribution—if there are arguments realized elsewhere as accusatives, then an equivalent argument marked by l is generally considered to be an accusative as well—but this method does not account for the possibility that case marking may vary in certain contexts. This is compounded by the fact that we often do not have a large or diverse enough set of examples to recognize such patterns with any particular verb. This paper will discuss the relationship between transitivity and argument realization from a functional-typological perspective, outline common uses of the dative to mark verbal arguments in Biblical Hebrew, and explore some of the semantic and pragmatic factors that may trigger variations between accusative and dative marking.
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Wisdom and Worldview
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
David Beldman, Redeemer University College
Wisdom and Worldview
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Islandspacing in Acts 2: Identity and Mimicry in the Diasporic Ingathering at the Feast of Weeks
Program Unit: Islands, Islanders, and Scriptures
Camilla Belfon, University of Denver
This paper sets out to interpret the events surrounding the ritual feast of weeks (or Pentecost/Shavuoth) according to Acts 2 using critical post-colonial theory. These worshipers have traveled from coastal and island regions across Asia Minor and the Mediterranean Sea to memorialize this authentically Jewish feast that marks their identity. I will compare the significance of the anomalous event that transpires in Acts 2, the so called “Day of Pentecost” to similar ritual and cultural experiences Caribbean islanders, more appropriately, diasporic Jamaicans, might experience.
While the more traditional historiographical approach may have some benefit in suggesting what the redactor might have had in mind at the time the text was written, such a dialogue with the text has historically had only one kind of reader in mind, coming from one kind of demographic, which continues to empower a homogeneous, Eurocentric epistemology. My approach through a post-colonial reading bears in mind coastal and island people whose identity has been formed by diasporic movements, as in Acts 2.
How can Acts 2 be understood from the perspective of the subaltern individual who identifies with both island and inland geographic spaces? The cultural description the late Stuart Hall provides is helpful here. As a Jamaican islander, I have been first shaped by the amalgam of Présence Africaine and a Présence Européenne in addition to a handful of other cultures that colonialism has formed in me. Secondly, as a naturalized American in-lander, the Présence Americaine progressively re-frames me.[1] As a product of this ambivalent hybridity, I speak and subconsciously relate to a blend of English dialects, American, British and Jamaican in addition to what linguists call Jamaican Creole, or Patois. I am fluent in Spanish fluently and understand other languages for research purposes. Living in the United States as a child, I would look forward to returning home every year during the celebration of Jamaica’s independence. August is a High Holiday season that is felt strongly in the island as an ingathering of expatriates return largely from England, Canada, the United States, and other Caribbean nations.
Likewise, the text of Acts 2 is located in a complex cultural network. The variety of languages we learn about in the text, from pantos ethnous (every nation) gather together in a prescribed geographical space hearing each other speak in idia dialecto (each one’s own dialect). The text, in v. 9 informs us that this diasporic ingathering, although transient for the purposes of the annual Feast of Weeks, largely find its origins in island and coastal regions. Out of the events of Acts 2, a unique new cultural identity is formed, to again migrate. Using space theories of Philip Sheldrake and Edward Soja’s thirdspacing, how might we understand the location of this ingathering as well as the participation of the pantos ethnous in the dramatic events narrated in Acts 2?
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Affect and Embodiment in the Body of the Pythia
Program Unit: Religious Experience in Antiquity
Brigidda Bell, University of Toronto
This paper examines the figure of the Pythia in historical and literary perspective, examining the somatic markers that have historically accompanied the performance of her body in ritual display. Affect and embodiment theories bring the body and its experience into the foreground of analysis, allowing for the examination of descriptions of the tactile and the sensuous in reports of ritual practice and religious experience. This paper is interested in the ways that the body of the Pythia is written so as to affect its audience. In each given text, it is through the presence and manipulation of the body of the Pythia that the author impresses the reality of her experience of Apollo onto the reader.
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Some Thoughts on LDS Scholarship from the Perspective of a Religious Educator
Program Unit: Latter-day Saints and the Bible
Dan Belnap, Brigham Young University
Though it may be tempting to see LDS scholarship as a monolithic structure, the truth is it is more a spectrum, and within that spectrum is the Church’s Educational programs, and even specific, Religious Education at Brigham Young University. For those so employed, the distinction between Religious Education and Religious Studies may be subtle, but an important one. Yet finding the balance between our place within the academy and our responsibilities as religious educators can be challenging. In this presentation I’ll seek to explore this dynamic while suggesting that the time may be right to present good, critical studies that present the unique contribution that LDS approaches to scripture and ancient history have in the greater realm of the academy.
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The Case of Innocent Blood: The Relationship between the Cities of Refuge and the Ritual for the Unsolved Murder (Deut. 21:1–9)
Program Unit: Ritual in the Biblical World
Dan Belnap, Brigham Young University
Recognizing the difficult nature of Deuteronomy 21:1-9, the ritualized solution to unsolved manslaughter in rural space, both Ziony Zevit and David Wright tackled the pericope from two different perspectives. Zevit approached the text from a traditional historical perspective while Wright approached the pericope with comparisons to similar rites found in the ancient Near East. This study seeks to extend the conversation by elaborating on the significance of the rite as one of witness, namely that those who participated, and the communities they represented, are not be held accountable for the unaccounted manslaughter. The emphasis of the witnesses that the surrounding communities are not be responsible for the violent shedding of innocent blood is similar to the function of the cities of refuge suggesting that the ritual process may be seen as creating a temporary space that functions as a liminal space in which the social laws concerning the spilling of innocent blood may be suspended, similar to the city of refuge.
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Proper Household Relations in Whose Basileia? Examining Ephesians’ Subtle Revisions to the Household Code of Colossians
Program Unit: Disputed Paulines
Lisa Marie Belz, Ursuline College
Traditionally, Ephesians and Colossians have been read in support of each other as letters written by Paul. Nonetheless, a naïve reading of these two epistles alongside each other blurs some significant differences between them. Examining the earliest text of Eph. 5:21-6:9, this paper highlights the carefully nuanced revisions which the author of Ephesians makes to Col. 3:18-4:1, demonstrating both the author’s resistance to the imperial household relationships in view in Colossians and the author’s insistence that relationships in a Christian home conform to Paul’s own instructions, as found in his genuine letters, on how the baptized must treat each other.
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Judges 19:2 in Hebrew and Greek Traditions: How the Woman’s Departure Illustrates a Tradition’s Tendency
Program Unit: Transmission of Traditions in the Second Temple Period
Jason Bembry, Milligan College
In the story of the rape and murder of the Levite’s concubine in Judges 19, Greek versions disagree when explaining why she left the Levite at the beginning of the story. The MT says “she played the harlot against her husband and left”, the LXX B says “she went from him and she departed”, the LXX A says “she became angry and she departed”, and Josephus’s account depicts her departure as a result of unrequited infatuation. I argue that the LXX B reflects the oldest account which merely reports her departure. LXX B and Josephus reflect a later stage of the story whereby the departure is given some explanation. The MT marks the latest version of the story in which the concubine’s sexuality has become suspect. I suggest that the MT attempts to ameliorate the horrific nature of a rape and murder of an innocent person by blaming the victim. I connect the suspect sexuality of this character with the depiction of Balaam and Jezebel. Although Balaam and Jezebel are condemned in the biblical traditions, it is clear that the negative portrayals of each have been augmented by later tradents. Balaam is initially good but he is blamed in the Priestly strata (Num 31:16) for the sin at Baal Peor (Numbers 25), where “the people begin to play the harlot with the daughters of Moab.” Jezebel is condemned for sorcery and harlotry in 2 Kgs 9:22, although no other text depicts her harlotry. The concubine, like Balaam and Jezebel, dies at the hands of Israelites. All three are associated with the Hebrew root znh in the contexts of their death. These examples demonstrate a clear pattern among the late tradents of the Hebrew Bible who seek to justify the deaths of these characters at the hands of fellow Israelites.
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Philo as Historian: His Testimony on the Beginning of the Jewish Settlement at Rome as a Case Study
Program Unit: Philo of Alexandria
Miriam Ben Zeev, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
While dealing with Roman policy towards the Jews of Rome, Philo states that Augustus "was aware that the great section of Rome on the other side of the Tiber was occupied and inhabited by Jews, most of whom were Roman citizens emancipated. For having been brought as captives to Italy, they were liberated by their owners and were not forced to violate any of their native institutions" (Philo Leg. 155).
The question is whether this passage, which is often taken at face value, may be taken as historically reliable.
While Philo's positive evaluation of Augustus' policy towards the Jews is corroborated by literary and epigraphical material, the other statements of this passage raise a number of questions: when and in which circumstances Jewish prisoners of war reached Rome; whether they constituted the first bulk of the Jewish settlement; whether all or most of them were liberated by their owners and whether this means that they automatically became Roman citizens.
A survey of contemporary Roman sources suggests that Philo’s statement depicts a reality much more rosy than it probably was and cannot be taken at face value. However, this does not mean that Philo consciously lied to his readers, as some scholars assume. After all, he was not a historian but rather a politician, whose political agenda was more important for him than factual accuracy.
His statement on the beginning of the Jewish settlement at Rome, therefore, is probably to be seen as an example of factual inaccuracy that betrays political and apologetic aims.
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Chronicles’ Reshaping of Memories of the Ancestors Populating Genesis among (Late) Persian Period Literati
Program Unit: Pentateuch
Ehud Ben Zvi, University of Alberta
Reading and rereading Chronicles could not but make some impact on the social construction of memories about the ancestors of Genesis. Reading Chronicles and identifying with the message of conveyed by the Chronicler (i.e., the implied author/communicator) led, inter alia, to processes of drawing attention to or away from some mnemonic events and characters, reshaping and at times re-signifying implicit or explicit mnemonic narratives, and, on the whole involved an exploration of the potential roles and functions of such memories both among the literati of the period and for the ideological Israel, which they construed and with whom they identified. This paper will address these matters and the light that some mnemonic choices about ancestors made in Chronicles may shade on the social mindscape of the mentioned literati.
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The Many Faces of Pharaoh in the Hebrew Bible
Program Unit: Egyptology and Ancient Israel
Shirly Ben Dor Evian, Tel Aviv University and University of Lausanne
The Hebrew Bible refers to the Egyptian king in many different units and references. The references are not uniform in their terminology or in their treatment of the Egyptian royal institution. The most common term in use is “Pharaoh,” appearing on its own or with the additions “king of Egypt” and sometimes the Pharaoh’s proper name. The term “Pharaoh” is therefore employed as a substitute for the proper Egyptian name (e.g. Og king of Bashan, Pharaoh king of Egypt). This evolvement of the Egyptian term pr-’A from a title to a proper name, can be traced to ancient Egyptian texts from the late 22nd Dynasty and onwards. This study will therefore present the Egyptian etymology of the term pr-’A followed by a survey of the different biblical occurrences with special regard to the variations in the terminology. Finally this study will suggest that different terms can be ascribed to different phases of the biblical text, reflecting different attitudes towards Egyptian kingship.
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Jerusalem and Alexandria: Greek Text Criticism and Judean Biblical Texts
Program Unit: Qumran
Jonathan Ben-Dov, University of Haifa
The wide variety of biblical texts attested at the Qumran library is still awaiting full explanation. What was the reason for the creation of this variety? What are the intellectual-religious reasons for creating each of the texts? Were there political and societal factors behind each text-type? Why do sites other than Qumran display more consistency with (proto-)MT?
Curiously, in the intellectual world of Alexandria one can find abundant considerations and criteria of textual criticism. A well-established discipline of textual criticism produced academic editions of the text of Homer, but as we know today Jews also took part in a similar discussion. Jewish Bible exegetes in Alexandria debated the validity of various corrections to the text of the Bible in Greek. The idea of the present paper is to apply the explicit Alexandrian argumentation to the abundant Judean data. Such a move had been initially suggested by Saul Liebermann. In a previous study I suggested viewing the pre-Samaritan text type as an ‘academic’ text in the Hellenistic tradition. Presently I suggest examining the roots of the (proto-)masoretic text as representing a conservative, so-to-say anti-academic approach to the biblical text. Such an opinion is attested among Jewish-Alexandrian authors. If true, it would be meaningful for understanding the way Judean intellectuals participated in the critical literary activity of the Greek world.
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Competing Temporalities in Early Jewish Apocalypses
Program Unit: Wisdom and Apocalypticism
Jonathan Ben-Dov, University of Haifa
At the heart of early Jewish Apocalypticism lie two fundamental temporal schemes: the astronomical-calendrical template of the Book of Luminaries and the plan of history in the Apocalypse of Weeks. While the former pays meticulous attention to the minute particles of time, the latter is concerned with large and not necessarily accurate year cycles. Two additional paradigms dominate the early apocalyptic scene, both of them deeply historical but only vaguely temporal: the Animal Apocalypse and the Four Kingdoms Model (Daniel 2, 7). The present paper interrogates whether there was ever an attempt to compromise these conflicting temporalities. The Qumran texts 4QOtot and 11QMelchizedek, as well as passages from the Hebrew part of Daniel, will be considered in that respect. If the answer is negative, the question remains whether and how the followers of the great apocalyptic seers explained the gaps to themselves. In a way, it is the ancient Greek philosophical question of Unity and Plurality again: how do the smallest components of reality correspond to the large-scale blocks which construct the same reality? Answering this question is prone to disclose several unusual insights about Time in Jewish apocalyptic literature.
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A Novel Visualization of Biblical Texts Aligned at the Word-Level
Program Unit: Digital Humanities in Biblical, Early Jewish, and Christian Studies
Drayton C. Benner, University of Chicago
Biblical scholars are frequently engaged in comparing texts that are very similar to one another, either because one is a translation of the other or because there is a relationship of literary dependence between the two. A variety of print reference works have been dedicated to showing biblical texts that have been aligned, usually at the verse or sentence level. A variety of software packages and web-based tools show biblical texts that have been aligned at the verse or sentence level. In addition, the LXX has been aligned to the Hebrew Bible at the word-level, as have several English translations with both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.
Word-level alignments between the Hebrew or Greek text of the Bible and a translation of it have traditionally been visualized either with an interlinear display or a reverse interlinear display. Both of these visualizations have strengths, but they both also have a prominent weakness: only the text on the top line is presented in order, while the other text is presented out of order. In the computational linguistics community, the common approaches to visualizing word-aligned texts do present both of them in order, though they have other weaknesses that make it difficult for one to see the alignment clearly. We will present a way of visualizing word-aligned texts that allows readers to read both texts in order while simultaneously seeing the alignment quickly and clearly.
This novel visualization will be shown for three different types of word-level alignments. First, it will be shown for the existing word-level alignment of the Hebrew Bible and the LXX. This visualization will be released in digital format for scholarly consumption at the meeting. Second, it will be shown for a word-level alignment between the Hebrew Bible and an English translation as well as the Greek New Testament and an English translation. Finally, it will also be shown for parallel passages within the Hebrew Bible.
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Cross-Cultural Intertextuality, Orality, and an Indigenous African Provenance of Gen 8:6–17
Program Unit: African Biblical Hermeneutics
Berekiah Olugbemiro, University of Ibadan
Justin Ukpong posited that a “concern to link the biblical text with the realities of African contexts, and the methodological implications that this entails” constitutes one of the distinctive features of African Biblical Hermeneutics. Critical studies on the Primeval History (Genesis 1-11) spearheaded by Herman Gunkel, had concluded that Israel appropriated it from myths, derived from shared cultural milieu of the Ancient Near East, circulated in oral form but later preserved in ancient texts, like the Gilgamesh Epic. Consequently, majority of works on Gen.1-11 focused on its Ancient Near Eastern context, and Ancient Near Eastern texts; to the neglect of its correlations with oral traditions from other regions of the world like West Africa, probably because of cultural divergence, and lack of ancient written text from those regions. This necessitates a theoretical basis for utilising resources from distant cultures, and employing oral texts as hermeneutic tools in analysing the Biblical text. Nigel Nicholson proffers intertextuality as a critical tool that “can provide a model for articulating the relations between fixed texts and informal oral traditions”. Cross-cultural intertextuality therefore, is applicable in articulating the relations between the Biblical text and ancient West African oral traditions, if adequate consideration is given to the fundamental orality underlying both the Biblical text and the extant forms of ancient West African myths. In this paper, I analysed the cross-cultural intertextuality between Gen.8:6-17 and an oral text from ancient Yoruba culture of South-Western Nigeria with the axioms of orality. The analysis reveals that the motifs of deluge, birds, and expanding dry land are shared heritage among the Hebrew and the Yoruba, implying either that their ancestors must have experienced the same event, or they descended from a common ancestral source which directly experienced the event.
Keywords: Cross-cultural Intertextuality; Deluge; Orality; Primeval History; West African Oral Traditions.
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Trito-Isaiah and the Reforms of Ezra-Nehemiah: Coordination or Conflict?
Program Unit: Book of Isaiah
Ulrich Berges, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn
Regardless of how Old Testament scholars delimit the Trito-Isaianic chapters and determine their relation to the Book of Isaiah as a whole and its different major sections, two aspects are generally accepted: On the one hand the pragmatics of Trito-Isaiah cannot be understood apart from the pragmatics of the entire Book. This position is maintained especially by diachronic approaches which understand Trito-Isaiah as the redactor of Proto- and Deutero-Isaiah. On the other hand there is a broad consensus that the literary core as well as the main body of Trito-Isaiah date from the 5th century BCE. Considering this dating, the issue of Trito-Isaiah’s relation to the postexilic Reform movements which are tied to the names and books of Ezra and Nehemiah arises automatically. Is Trito-Isaiah – and thus the Book of Isaiah as a whole – to be understood rather as a prophetic propaganda in favour of Ezra/Neh or as an objection to them? The answer to this question highly influences the identifcation of the circles of prophetic tradents (Trägerkreise) in charge of Trito-Isaiah and of the whole Book.
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Redemptive vs. Non-Redemptive Suffering: Christian Theological Narratives as Spiritual Boot Camp
Program Unit: Healthcare and Disability in the Ancient World
John Berkman, University of Toronto
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Paratextuality and the Aramaic Psalm Titles
Program Unit: Book History and Biblical Literatures
AJ Berkovitz, Princeton University
Psalm headings are a productive site for exploring issues relating to paratextuality. While they are generally viewed as later additions to individual Psalms, subsequent transmitters and translators often understood them as integral to the original composition. The Psalm body composition, which may have initially generated the titles, is now read in light of them. This paper will explore the relationship between Psalm headings and body composition in the Aramaic Psalter. This will be, to my knowledge, the first such in-depth study. Instead of merely cataloging the various translations, we will explore their implications. We will uncover two opposing literary trends in dealing with the paratextual header. First, we will demonstrate the relative uniformity in the translational choice of certain headings. Some of these instances show little concern for and even clash with the body composition. We will then explore a counter trend in which content from the title influences translational and interpretive choices in the body composition and visa-versa. This will demonstrate that headings of the Aramaic Psalter are not fully partitioned independent units. Are these two trends reconcilable? To what degree did the translator(s) think of them as titles or part of the composition? What do they tell us about text-titles in the ancient world? How might the Aramaic Psalter been performed or studied, and what role would the titles play? In addition to proving a useful site to think with about paratextuality, such study may further help establish the date, location and redactional history of the Aramaic Psalter.
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Introducing: The Tiberias Project - A Web Tool for the Text Categorization and Analysis of Hebrew Scriptures
Program Unit: Global Education and Research Technology
Joshua Berman, Bar-Ilan University
Scholars have struggled for more than two centuries to parse the texts of the Hebrew Scriptures and to identify the different authors, genres, and editorial layers of the text. While the issue is foundational to nearly all aspects of the critical study of the Hebrew Bible, the field as a whole lacks a consensus concerning a methodology to tackle these critical questions. Many have tried to parse the texts on the basis of different styles. The quest, though, for any quantifiable, controllable measure of what "style" is, remains elusive. As a result, most of the proposed authorial and editorial divisions of the biblical texts are made on the basis of content, even as scholars sense that different biblical writers employed different styles. Meanwhile, over the last decade, a handful of computational linguists have achieved unprecedented results working in the sub-field of text-categorization, also known as authorship attribution. Results published in 2011 by a team of scholars led by Moshe Koppel demonstrate that it is possible to apply these algorithms to the Hebrew Bible and to achieve highly significant, controllable, verifiable results. We are in the beta stage of producing a web-based application for the categorization and analysis of Hebrew Scriptures along lexical, morphographic, and syntactic lines. In this presentation we will demonstrate Tiberias’ capacity to provide scholars the full panoply of measurable textual features and state-of-the-art machine learning methods to provide reliable statistical evidence confirming (or falsifying) user-provided hypotheses about distinct stylistic threads in the entire biblical corpus. The tool goes far beyond anything available to biblical scholars today. The tools available today, at best, can provide statistical analysis about a single word or phrase, but nothing about the statistical significance of a variety of elements when found in a given text.
The tool will give biblical scholars new capabilities with which to consider a range of critical questions: How many authors may have produced this text? Are two disparate texts written by the same author? Does this text reflect an earlier stage of ancient Hebrew or a later one? Does this psalm more closely resemble the linguistic profile of one genre or another?
Note: A 3-minute “trailer” video on the Tiberias Project is now available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDjx99KTMto
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Juxtaposed Conflicting Compositions (Genesis 1–2, 4a-2, 4b-2, 24; Exodus 14–15; Judges 4–5): A New Kingdom Egyptian Parallel
Program Unit: Hebrew Scriptures and Cognate Literature
Joshua Berman, Bar-Ilan University
One of the hallmarks of twenty-first century scholarship of the Hebrew Bible has been increased interest in the empirical compositional strategies exhibited in cognate literatures as a lens through which to understand the growth of biblical literature in ancient Israel, as exhibited in book-length studies by David Carr and Karel van der Toorn. In this study I look to the cognate literature to gain perspective on a long-standing compositional conundrum within the Hebrew Bible: the presence of conflicting accounts that are juxtaposed within the received version of the biblical text. This phenomenon is exhibited most clearly in the paired accounts of creation in Genesis 1-2,4a and 2,4b-2,24 and in the narrative vs. poetic accounts of both the splitting of the sea (Exod 14-15) and Barak’s defeat of Sisera’s army (Judg 4-5). Within cognate literature one may point to several examples of events that are told quite differently in two different compositions. One example concerns the Assyrian compositions that depict the war between Tukulti-Ninurta I of Assyria and Kashtiliash IV of Babylon. A prose account is found in the royal building inscriptions of the Assyrian king, while we also have a poetic rendering of the event, known as the Tukulti-Ninurta Epic. While these compositions differ in significant regards, they are nowhere found together physically and it is rightly assumed that they were never meant to be read together and were composed at different times for different audiences and for different purposes. To date no example from the cognate literature has been produced that reveals two differing accounts of the same event in juxtaposed fashion. It is in this context that I draw attention to the compositions found in the Kadesh Inscriptions of Ramesses II. Here we find that the pharaoh commissioned two differing and even conflicting accounts of the Battle of Kadesh and had them carved side by side at several monumental sites across Egypt. I will begin my presentation by examining the discrepancies between the two texts and the approaches that Egyptologists have proposed to explain the juxtaposition of these differing accounts. I then turn to examine the implications of this mode of literary composition for our understanding of juxtaposed conflicting compositions in the text of the Hebrew Bible.
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Yoke of the King or God: A Convergence of Metaphor and Metonym
Program Unit: Metaphor in the Bible and Cognate Literature
David Bernat, University of Massachusetts Amherst
The Hebrew word for “yoke,” ol, often takes a concrete or literal usage, referring to the device
that binds pack animals and chariot horses (eg Num 19:2). However, the term is also used
metaphorically, in political or theological contexts, to connote submission to, or dominance by, a
king, nation, or deity (eg 1 Kg 12:4ff; Is 9:3; Jer 5:5). The submissive entity is
portrayed as a pack animal while the dominant power is analogous to the human master. The
animal who accepts the yoke accepts the mastery. In like manner, Israel is seen to accept the
mastery of the conquering Assyrians, or of God and the divine commands and statutes. The use
of the ol metaphor is greatly expanded in Rabbinic literature and Jewish liturgy, where it
becomes a core theolegomenon.
The Akkadian semantic equivalent, nir, and less commonly, synonyms such as absanu, have identical usage patterns, on the literal and metaphorical levels. In an example of the latter, Tiglath Pileser I (Annals) asserts “I imposed the heavy yoke of my lordship (nir belutiya) upon him in for all time.” In a theological context “The Babylonian Theodicy” contains the epigram, “he who bears the yoke of his God (nir ili ) never lacks food, however sparse.” Note also that the Aramaic cognate of Akkadian nir is typically found in the Targumim when translating Biblical ol.
However, in an anomalous and happy linguistic coincidence, nir in Mesopotamian writings is also used metonymically to represent dominance and submission in political and theological spheres. The nir is the yoke found on the king’s battle chariot, and stands, by way of synecdoche, for his military might. Thus, Sennacherib’s campaign accounts typically display narrative patterns such as “I turned my yoke to NN.” As he directs his chariot, so are directed the totality of his forces. In the same vein, we find the expression, “NN submitted to my yoke.” Here, the readers is meant to envision the conquered king, in a gesture of abject submission, bowing down directly in front of the Sennacherib’s chariot. Occasionally, the metonym is used with one remove. The enemy is said to submit to the yoke of Ashur – The Assyrian king’s triumph is, by extension, the victory of his patron deity.
Applying contemporary theoretical frameworks, the proposed paper will flesh out the connection between the Akkadian nir metaphors and metonyms, and in turn, their relationship to the Biblical and later Jewish usage of the ol metaphors. This research is an outgrowth of my work on circumcision metaphor and metonymy the the Bible and Jewish literature, in their Ancient Near Eastern contexts.
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How and Why Does Cedar Purify? An Inhabited Approach to Ancient Ritual Texts
Program Unit: Religious Experience in Antiquity
Sarah Berns, Brown University
In this paper, I explore how an “inhabited” approach to ancient ritual texts, focused on bodily habits and spatial habitats, might illuminate the use of cedar products for purification in ancient Israel and Ancient West Asia more broadly. What does a sick man’s cedar amulet have to do with the Ugaritic Baal cycle, or the blob of resin placed in a diviner’s mouth with Assyrian timber procurement? I take Leviticus 14’s ritual of purification for a person healed from skin disease and the Mesopotamian incantation collection Šurpu, which purifies to relieve the ill effects experienced by an oath-breaker, as examples of a much broader practice of purification with cedar, attested in ancient Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Egypt, and Syria-Palestine. Reading with attention both to the sensory experiences produced by these rituals and to the material, ideological, and mythical resonances invoked by discussions of cedar ingredients, I argue that these rites worked by placing patients’ bodies within physical and imaginative geographies. In short, the use of cedar dissociated patients’ bodies from locations characterized by impurity, sickness, and ill fortune, and instead associated them with locations characterized by purity, divinity, health, and well-being. This ritual process of location served to transform both individual bodies and regional geographies. Even as they rendered people pure, rituals with cedar defined spaces as pure or impure, divine or human, sick or healthy, powerful or powerless, and as sources of or destinations for extracted natural resources. When we attend to the cedar-laden rites that made sick or cursed men and women well, the artificial distinctions between physical environment, mythic tropes, and individual bodily experience recede. In their place emerges a more holistic picture of the complex and potent relationship between people and cedar forests in the ancient eastern Mediterranean.
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Reading the Genesis Apocryphon: The First Decade
Program Unit: Qumran
Moshe J. Bernstein, Yeshiva University
In the case of a text such as the Genesis Apocryphon, which has been classified and read in so many different ways since its initial publication, and whose textual remains were not all published simultaneously, the history of its interpretation can and often does become a virtual and vital part of its interpretation. Although it was one of the first seven scrolls to be discovered in Cave 1, it was not published until almost a decade after its discovery, a decade during which Qumran studies began to develop and during which the other six scrolls were published and began to be analyzed. But the Apocryphon was quite different from the other six scrolls. To begin with, it was written in Aramaic, whereas the others were all written in Hebrew, and it clearly belonged to a genre different from all of the others. Only five of its twenty-two (later realized to be twenty-three) columns were published because of its poor physical condition. So it offered a challenge to its early readers and interpreters, perhaps beyond the ones presented by the other “new” scrolls discovered in Cave 1, the Hodayot, the War Scroll, the Community Rule and the Habakkuk pesher.
This paper will trace the ways in which the Genesis Apocryphon was read and interpreted from its initial publication by Nahman Avigad and Yigael Yadin in late 1956 until the appearance of the first edition of Joseph A. Fitzmyer’s now standard commentary in 1967. We shall see how the initial hypotheses and presuppositions of those early readers of the Apocryphon affected how they interpreted it. What did they call the work? In what context and against what historical and literary background did they read it? To what literary genre did they assign it? To what degree did scholars’ religious orientation, Jewish or Christian, affect their approaches to it? All of these elements and others played a role in the stance that scholars adopted toward this new text.
We shall see that the attempts to classify the Apocryphon proceeded from somewhat unsophisticated initial attempts to more subtle and complex ones. As we trace the paths that earlier scholars walked down in attempting to understand the text, the processes and strategies which they employed in reading the Apocryphon, and the lenses through which they examined it, we actually begin to understand the work more fully. Even some of the false starts made by those readers of the Apocryphon in the 1950s and 1960s can sometimes aid in our attempt to read and interpret the Apocryphon today.
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A New Perspective on the Kinship between Jews and Spartans in 1 and 2 Maccabees: The Issue of Ancestral Territory
Program Unit: Pseudepigrapha
Katell Berthelot, CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research)
Previous discussions about the kinship between Jews and Spartans referred to in both 1 and 2 Maccabees have focused on the issue of the historical reliability of the sources and the historicity of the diplomatic relationship between Judea and Sparta. The arguments put forward by Erich Gruen in favor of a negative conclusion are in my opinion wholly convincing, but the reasons for the invention of such a kinship still remain debated, as recently emphasized by Jan Bremmer. Fictitious letters documenting a kinship that was not acknowledged by the other side (Sparta) could hardly be used as a real diplomatic tool by the Hasmonean dynasty. The reasons that prompted the invention of the Judaeo-Spartan kinship, which goes back to the period before the Maccabean revolt, rather lie in the realm of representations. The image of the Spartans as brave, disciplined, faithful to their ancestral laws, etc., certainly played a role (as Josephus’s Against Apion still shows), but is that a sufficient explanation? Why was this kinship needed at all, and how did it make sense for the Jews themselves, beyond the idea of Abraham as a culture hero?
This paper aims at re-examining the issue of the kinship between Jews and Spartans in light of the claims made by Spartans and Jews to their ancestral territory. I shall compare the traditions known as the myth of the Return of the Herakleidai on the one hand and the biblical traditions pertaining to the “Promised Land” on the other, and show that the Spartan myth and the way it legitimates Sparta’s property right over a given territory may have played a role in the invention of the Judaeo-Spartan kinship among the Judean elites of Jerusalem during the first half of the 2nd century BCE.
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‘Revenge Is Mine, I Will Pay Back’: Has Mercy Not the Last Word, after All? Reading Rom 12:19 as a Hidden Discourse of Justice and Mercy
Program Unit: Bible and Ethics
Dorothea H. Bertschmann, University of Durham
Romans has been described as a text, which moves ‘from wrath to justification’ (A. Lincoln), where God’s righteousness is increasingly expressed as overflowing mercy, or, as Paul often prefers to render the biblical eleos: Grace, charis (chp.5). Whatever the mechanism behind God’s saving act in Christ, it is clear that the divine dikaiosune is not demonstrated in a just and fitting rendering of judgment, which would lead to the destruction of human beings under the conditions of sin. Instead, God has locked up everybody into disobedience, ‘so that he might have mercy on all’ (Romans 11:32). This mercy leaves no room for justice in the symmetric and retributive sense, indeed, some recent interpreters of Paul emphasize that this concept of justice, and its correlate, the divine wrath, have been radically abandoned by the Christ event (D.Campbell). For such meta-readings the mentioning of both God’s wrath (orge) and God’s vengeance/revenge (edkikesis) in both Romans 12:19 and Romans 13:4 is potentially troubling. At first glance ‘revenge’ looks like an alien concept for Paul, who, unlike many apocalyptic texts, seems no-where to ‘delight in the torture of the wicked’ (C. Beker). How can Paul still speak of wrath and, worse, revenge post Christum? And why is the admonition to act mercifully towards enemies backed up by a reference to God’s vindictive justice?
This paper will argue that Paul’s specific discourse of dikaiosune deliberately sharpens up the punitive aspects of God’s justice, the ‘wrath’, which will befall both disobedient Jews and Gentiles “without distinction”. In contrast, the divine wrath has soteriological aspects in many OT and Jewish texts, functioning as an integral part of God’s covenant faithfulness and being deployed on behalf of a wronged party over against its oppressors. Divine justice cannot be pictured without this salvific anger on behalf of the oppressed party. Universal mercy comes dangerously close to divine injustice seen from that angle. Since for Paul the universal mercy in Christ triggers a universalizing of orge, there is not easily space for the positive aspect of vindictive justice. Romans 12.19 can be seen as bringing an aspect of divine justice to the fore, namely God’s partisan wrath on behalf of his wronged people, which had no room anymore in Paul’s tight construction of mercy and justice. By linking his appeal to peaceful non-resistance with a reference to God’s vengeful activity, Paul can be seen to hold together God’s universal mercy and God’s partisan justice together in most intriguing ways.
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Hosting Jesus: Revisiting Luke’s ‘Sinful Woman’ (Luke 7:36–50)
Program Unit: Women in the Biblical World
Dorothea Bertschmann, University of Durham
The narrative of the sinful woman anointing Jesus’ feet is for many the paradigmatic story of repentance and forgiveness, highlighting in particular the woman’s tears as a sign of contrition.
For others, particularly socio-historical contributors, the emphasis is the radical inclusiveness of Jesus’ fellowship meal with ‘sinners’, an offensive gesture to many contemporaries (cf. the studies of Dunn, Neyrey, Bloomberg and others).
Both rightly perceive Jesus as the dominant actor of the scene in Luke 7:36-50, offering salvific goods to the woman, but they somehow underemphasize Jesus’ reinterpretation of the woman’s actions as the laudable gestures of a host.
Exploring ancient and anthropological notions of interactions between guests and hosts (Pitt-River, Arterbury), this paper argues that her hospitality is at the heart of the narrative, controlling any notions of gracious forgiveness or care for the marginalized. The Pharisee establishes an initial exchange of hospitality with Jesus, which is put at risk by the appearance of the woman. The woman’s provocative behaviour threatens to dishonor Jesus and indirectly his host. Jesus, however, does nothing to mend the initial cycle of hospitality. Instead he opens an alternative cycle, transferring the key function of the host from Simon to the woman. This rearranging of relationships is strangely and widely overlooked by exegetes, even while the activities of the woman are correctly read as hospitable actions. This paper will argue that far from being merely at the receiving end, the unknown woman is imaginatively and provocatively reconstructed as the powerful giving actor, who does not endanger the hospitality setting but actually upholds it. Though the woman is mute (cf. Corley’s criticism) her actions speak loudly and make her the central character, who becomes paradigmatic for the proper hosting of God’s messenger.
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Spatializing Heresy in Late Antiquity
Program Unit: Social History of Formative Christianity and Judaism
Todd Berzon, Bowdoin College
The Theodosian Code is replete with laws that proscribe heretical places of worship and assemblies, and that authorize the confiscation of property from churches and even individuals discovered to be heretics. A law from 389 C.E. went further still by seeking the removal of the heretics from the whole world: “If any person whatever should disturb the world under the name of Manichaeans, they shall indeed be expelled from the whole world but especially from this city (Rome), under threat of judgment.” The legal opinions of the Code described heresy in both specific and general geographic terms. While heretics resided in particular cities city, heresy itself was supra-spatial; it was neither conceptually nor practically confined to particular locations or ecclesiastical spaces. And with new heretics continually sprouting, mapping and controlling heresy was a constant challenge for an imperial church desperate to maintain the appearance of unity.
In this paper, I investigate the development of an expressly spatialized discourse of Christian heresy in the Theodosian Code. I argue that efforts to legislate heresy in spatial terms served both to reify its seemingly uncontrollable, ephemeral, protean nature, while also distinguishing heresy as a public contagion from heresy as a private (and in at least one case permissible) mental condition. To legislate heresy in the language of space and place was thus an attempt to regularize it, to subject it to conditions that could be usefully legislated against, maybe even with a modicum of tolerance in a narrowly defined “private” realm. But the Code presents more than an ideology of control and imperial domination; rather, it reveals a protracted struggle to define the very terms of heretical control. The Code, following the discourse developed by late antique heresiology, codified the Christian effort to manage the unmanagenable.
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Reading Galatians in Late Antiquity: An Ethno-History
Program Unit: Pauline Epistles
Todd Berzon, Bowdoin College
“O foolish Galatians, who has ensnared you?” Nearly three and a half centuries after Paul had reproached the Galatians for their spiritual regression and their apparent return to the works of the law, Jerome, writing in Bethlehem ca. 390 C.E., examined anew the underlying cause of Paul’s anger. Galatians 3:1a, Jerome explains, “can be understood in two ways: either that the Galatians…are called foolish because they have started in the spirit yet have finished in the flesh,” or that they are called foolish because of their ethnicity, since “each and every provincia possesses its own character.” To prove the latter point, Jerome unfurls a winding, digressive ethno-history of the Galatians, which he constructs in order to explain the underlying reasons for their arrogance, stupidity, and senselessness. By his reckoning, then, the error and obstinacy of the Galatians was as much a result of their own blood as it was an affirmative choice of the flesh over and against the spirit.
This paper analyzes a series of late antique commentaries on Galatians (by Jerome, Augustine, Marius Victorinus, and Ambrosiaster) with a view to investigating the connection between theological disobedience and ethnic constitutions or national dispositions. Through the interpretive history of Galatians, I attempt to trace the exegetical connection between Christian heresy and genealogical diversity. For Jerome and other late antique interpreters, the Galatians were an ethnographic plaything—a canvas upon which they could propose a correlation between Christian error, on the one hand, and ethnic mentalities, on the other. The differences (haereseis) that Paul naturalized in 1 Corinthians 11.19 were reimagined in late antiquity both as heresies and as heresies of ethnological origin. On the reading of these Paul interpreters, Paul was transformed from an apostle for Christ into a theological ethnographer and heresiologist.
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Using Bible Software to Teach Translation Theory
Program Unit: Global Education and Research Technology
Bryan Bibb, Furman University
Undergraduate students often have only a rudimentary understanding of why there are so many Bible versions. An instructor using biblical software can quickly reveal the many important differences in translation, but it is also important to help students understand why translations are different, i.e., what theoretical and practical factors have shaped each version. This presentation will demonstrate techniques developed in a course titled, "The Digital Bible," in which students use Accordance and free online tools to explore the underlying methods and assumptions behind particular translation decisions. One common motif in treatments of introductory exegesis is the contrast between "formal correspondance" and "dynamic equivalence" approaches to translation, popularized by Eugene Nida and now usually presented as a spectrum between two poles. Students are taught, for instance, that the NASB is one of the most "literal" Bibles and the Message is the most "dynamic," and they are asked to decide which version is "correct." However, translation theory in recent decades has moved beyond these two categories in order to emphasize that all translation is interpretation. Translators participate in power-laden interpretive frameworks, and all translations function within a web of reader expectations and needs. Students should recognize, for instance, that every translation of controversial passages related to gender (e.g., Ezekiel 23, 1 Timothy 2) is constrained by particular social, political, and theological goals and assumptions. By using tagged texts, lexicons, translators' notes, etc., students can gain a richer understanding of the translation process and why it matters to interpretation. Rather than casting one translation as more "accurate" or "faithful," this exercise shows how translation is always already an interpretive act.
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Yahweh as the Priest of Human Sacrifice in Isaiah 30:27–33
Program Unit: Metaphor in the Bible and Cognate Literature
Bryan Bibb, Furman University
The richly metaphorical description of God's judgment of the Assyrian king in Isaiah 30:27–33 is a challenge for both translators and interpreters. The text describes Yahweh in theophanic language, with attendant elements of fire, smoke, and thunderstorm. As the deity arrives in anger and overwhelming displays of power, the people hold a religious festival around a central act of ritual: Yahweh's killing of the Assyrian king on the tophet, the altar of human sacrifice. A metaphorical passage such as this challenges notions of "literal" versus "dynamic" translation. All attempts to render these images in English fail, but for different reasons. A formal translation that preserves the original imagery is difficult for modern readers due to their lack of historical domain knowledge. A dynamic translation that unpacks the "meaning" of the metaphors softens the shocking literalism of the text. Bodily metaphors for Yahweh's theophany are difficult enough, but in fact, no English translation has captured the essential nature of the metaphor as a whole, i.e., Yahweh as the high priest performing a human sacrifice. Most versions either transliterate "Tophet" or render it loosely as "the burning place." How does this metaphorical shift change the meaning of the text? When tophet is pictured as a funeral pyre, the metaphor slips into a less precise conceptual domain: Yahweh is angry, the people rejoice, and the Assyrian king dies. However, when "tophet" is translated as "altar of human sacrifice," Yahweh's anger is one element of a classic theophany, the people's rejoicing has the technical elements of a worship event, and the king's death occurs through a pagan ritual of human sacrifice. Why, then, do translators make this choice? In modern religious contexts, this passage is surprising, counter-intuitive, and inconsiderate. Translators have been unwilling to convey fully the significance of this metaphor because of the conceptual boundary between orthodox theology and heterodox abomination. Surely the Lord cannot be part of such a scene! In English translations of Isaiah 30:27–33, he is not.
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Road Work Ahead: Does mille yad Really Refer to Priestly Ordination?
Program Unit: Cultic Personnel in the Biblical World
Michael Biggerstaff, Ohio State University
The Hebrew phrase mille yad is commonly understood to refer to the ordination of priests. However, of the eighteen occurrences of the phrase, only thirteen occur in contexts explicitly mentioning priests. The remaining five, which comprise over one-quarter of occurrences, are devoid of explicit connection to priests, thus requiring scholars to nuance the idiom to fit these contexts. Additionally, even in Exodus 29, whose prescription for the ordination of priests preserves four occurrences of the phrase, the standard meaning of the phrase mille yad complicates the image of ordination by requiring Aaron and his sons to be ordained multiple times. Thus half of the occurrences of the phrase are infelicitous to the standard meaning of priestly ordination.
The goal of this paper is to hang in front of each of those eighteen occurrences a metaphorical sign saying, “Caution: Road Work Ahead.” Ideally such a sign would cause readers to slow down and further evaluate the context of each occurrence of the phrase. In order to do so, this paper seeks to elucidate the complications surrounding the commonly accepted interpretation of the phrase mille yad. This will be accomplished by an examination of the occurrences of the phrase outside ordination contexts and then proceed to Exodus 29. As the Akkadian phrase qatam mullu has often been adduced in support of the standard interpretation, I will also briefly evaluate its relevance. I then conclude with a suggested interpretation of the phrase that clarifies three of the previously problematized passages.
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Holy Places, Holy Fragrances: The Narrative of Joseph of Arimathea as Sensory Pilgrimage Map
Program Unit: Christian Apocrypha
Mark Glen Bilby, Claremont School of Theology
The Narrative or Declaration of Joseph of Arimathea is one of several texts to be included in a forthcoming CCSA critical edition by G. Aragione. Earlier scholars have postulated a highly varied range of theories about its date (e.g., Ehrman and Plese, 4th-12th; Frey and Outtier, 4th-6th). Its similarities to other Pilate Cycle literature—a collection of eclectic texts that have also proven difficult to date—have preoccupied previous scholarship. What has gone overlooked is the underlying purpose and lived setting of the Narrative as an experiential (and/or vicarious) pilgrimage map. This analysis will explore the pilgrimage and sensory dimensions of the Narrative and argue for a corresponding late 4th or early 5th century Palestinian provenance.
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Conceptions of Scripture in the Second Century: Irenaeus and Non-canonical Christian Texts
Program Unit: Function of Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphal Writings in Early Judaism and Early Christianity
D. Jeffrey Bingham, Wheaton College (Illinois)
Scholars have long been interested in Irenaeus’s understanding of the authority of Hermas due to his introducing it as ??af?. Opinions have been diverse, ranging from his seeing it as Scripture, on the same level as the Prophets and Apostles, to his counting it as merely an edifying writing. A recent article by Steenberg has brought the question to the forefront again. Steenberg renews the argument for its status as Scripture in the thought of the bishop of Lyons. However, there has never been a full accounting of how we are to understand the authority, not only Hermas, but also of other early Christian texts referred to by Irenaeus as ??af? and those authored by Christians he believed were associated with the apostles, particularly 1 Clement, Papias’s Exposition, and Polycarp’s Epistle. This article, attempts to set forth such an accounting. It argues that Irenaeus has an understanding of the term ‘Scripture’ that includes the Prophets and the Apostles, in first, foundational place, but also includes those writings of Clement, Papias, Polycarp in second, derivative place. For Irenaeus, then, ‘Scripture’ was a term of broad meaning, but his prejudice for the foundational nature of the Prophets and Apostles remains clear. It is this bias which he passes on and which guides future principles of canonical definition.
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Heresy and Catholicity in Economic Perspective: Irenaeus on Money
Program Unit: Early Christianity and the Ancient Economy
D. Jeffrey Bingham, Wheaton College (Illinois)
Proposal for the third project. Economic considerations played an important role in early attempts of Christian self-definition. In second-century Lyons, there was an economical dimension to Christian polemics and the attempt to identify the “other.” “Heresy” is costly. “Catholicity” is free. As Irenaeus penned his polemic against his opponents toward the end of the second century, these would have been his convictions. From the root of all error, that charlatan Simon, who coveted the powers of the apostles for purposes of monetary gain, to that deceiver and seducer, Marcus the magician, false teaching comes with a love for money and at a price (Acts 8:9-11). On the other hand, the Church’s doctrine, the apostles’ teaching, comes without cost. To these two perspectives, issues of secrecy and openness are attached. The “heretics” must pass along their teachings in hiding only to those with the wherewithal to trade. The Church, however, speaks its doctrines in public without regard for the hearer’s ability to make compensation, for what has been received without cost is distributed without cost (Matt 10:8). The Church is like a rich man, whose treasure, the water of life, is available to all who will draw from his wealth (Rev 22:17). For Irenaeus, there is little role for money within orthodoxy. The love of it is associated with perverse teachings while generosity is associated with the truth. The riches of righteousness are the concern of the Church’s members as they marvel at the unity of history that possesses grace in both economies, but in different degrees. As God has no need of money for he is self-sufficient, they have no need of loving it, for he gives all that is necessary within his ordering of all things.
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An Introductory Survey of the Ethiopic Books of Maccabees
Program Unit: Ethiopic Bible and Literature
Yonatan Binyam, Florida State University
The Ethiopic Biblical canon, broadly conceived, does not include the four books of Maccabees that are traditionally present in the so-called deuterocanonical lists of the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions. There is, however, a completely different text known as Mäqabeyan that exists in several manuscripts. Aside from Josef Horowitz’s 1906 article entitled “Das äthiopische Maccabäerbuch,” and the article by Alessandro Bausi in the Enclyclopaedia Aethiopica, very little work has been done on this important text. In this presentation, I attempt to provide an introductory survey to the Mäqabeyan. First, I present a survey of the known manuscripts of the Ethiopic Maccabees, which today are located in various places including Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, British Library in London, Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana in Vatican City, National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, University Library in Cambridge, Hill Museum and Manuscript Library in Collegeville, Ethiopian Manuscript Imaging Project in Oregon, and the Ethio-SPARE project in Hamburg. Secondly, I highlight the uniqueness of the Ethiopic Maccabees, which is the only native Ethiopian biblical text of which we know. It is also unique for not being translated from Greek in the Aksumite period, and for its relationship to the Hebrew Yosippon via an Arabic intermediary. Additionally, I discuss the brief history of research on the text and also provide some details about the canonicity of the text within the Ethiopian tradition.
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Rebuffing Solomon: The Intertwinement of Culture, Exegesis, and Art in the Drama Theory of the Song of Songs
Program Unit: Use, Influence, and Impact of the Bible
Elisabeth Birnbaum, Catholic Private University Linz
The variety of interpretations of the Song of Songs is not only due to the exegete’s methods or biblical hermeneutics. Instead, it is the openness of poetry that requires numerous preliminary decisions in very sensitive and intimate areas (e.g. the concepts of love, the relations between man and woman, God and sexuality). These decisions are pivotal for the interpretation, but they often remain unconscious and hidden. Artists, musicians or writers who – without noticing – take the same culture-bound decisions may agree with the exegete’s interpretation and based on this interpretation create new (literary) works with a certain impact on the writer’s and the exegete’s culture, thus completing the circle.
My paper wants to provide a case-study on this circle of mutual influence and impact. It focuses on the interpretation of the Song of Songs as a drama in exegesis, literature and music. This so-called „drama theory“ was highly regarded for about a hundred years (appr. between 1820 and 1920). Because of this limited period of time, it is especially suitable for a case study on culture-bound interpretation.
The drama theory was first developed (though there had been a few isolated predecessors) in 1771 by T. J. Jacobi who claimed the Song of Songs to be the story of a love triangle between Solomon, a young shepherd and the beautiful though humble country-girl. So „he was the first in Germany who showed that Solomon was not the object of the Shulamite’s affections, and that the beloved was a humble shepherd from whom the King endeavoured to separate her.”
This became the predominant view in the first decades of the 19th century, in Germany as well as in America and England. Christian Commentators such as Umbreit (1820), the „celebrated“ Ewald (1826), Hirzel (1840) or Friedrich (1855) endorsed this view as well as rabbis like Herxheimer (1848) and Philippson (1848) who, as Ginsburg states, „by virtue of their high position and great learning, may be regarded as representing the view now generally entertained by the Jews respecting the Song of Songs.“ So Ginsburg rejoices that since 1856: „In this opinion of the superiority of virtuous love to all the temptations of royalty, the Jew and the Christian, the Englishman and the German, are beginning to unite.”
Since at least 1857 (and more than 20 years before Herder’s famous plea for the „literal sense”) the story of the humble maid who rejects the alluring rich king Solomon began to inspire librettists and playwrights such as Paul Heyse or Ernst Hardt. At the end of the 19th century it was a favourite subject of both musical and non-musical stage-plays. Rubinstein/Rodenberg’s opera „Sulamith“ (1883), Mackenzie’s oratorio „The Rose of Sharon“ (1888) or Roman Wörner’s drama „König Salomo“ (1913) are only a few examples.
So in the story of this interpretation that was supported by the romantic era and influenced itself the reception of the book in the late romantic, the interlacement of culture, exegesis and arts becomes manifest in a most impressive way.
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Loss of Initial /n/ in Biblical Hebrew in Its Northwest-Semitic Context
Program Unit: Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
Øyvind Bjøru, University of Texas at Austin
The initial nasal of primae nun verbs in the Qal imperative and infinitive construct in Biblical Hebrew is manifest in some verbs, e.g., ntôš (Prov 17:14), but absent in others, e.g. sa? (Gen 13:14). This has been attributed to either the thematic vowel of the verb, or the imperative being clipped from the prefix conjugation. In this paper I will argue that there is no basis for the association of this phenomenon with the thematic vowel, and that the clipping hypothesis is untenable. There is rather a phonetic condition that can account for the loss of /n/ in these forms. A voiceless fricative following the /n/ disconnects the nasality from the consonant and ultimately deletes it.
The phenomenon is brought about by speakers reanalyzing the [+nasal] feature as the common spurious nasalization that occurs in vowels preceding voiceless fricatives. The same phenomenon can be seen in English five, goose from Proto-Germanic *fimf, *gans.
This process is reconstructed to Proto-Northwest-Semitic, and its outcome can therefore be seen in Ugaritic and Aramaic, in addition to Biblical Hebrew.
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Affecting Pink: Chagall, the Song of Songs, and the Senses
Program Unit: Senses, Cultures, and Biblical Worlds
Fiona C. Black, Mount Allison University
This paper wrestles with the 5 paintings in the series _Cantique des Cantiques_ by Marc Chagall. These allusive, highly symbolic pieces present appealing glimpses into the Song, but like the text itself, consist of a series of sense-impressions, resisting narrative logic, and prompting the reader to think seriously about the practice of viewing/reading, when easy interpretation seems thwarted. Indeed, how should the paintings be understood, beyond that they represent a pastiche of images? Part of the difficulty has to do with the fact that the paintings seem to force a sensate encounter--visual to be sure--but also olfactory, gustatory, and auditory. The question, then, is how to put a sensate reading on the table in the determination of the paintings' meaning, and subsequently when considering their significance for the text. How does one smell or taste a painting? Could it be in the same way one encounters a text like the Song? Perhaps a clue might come from medieval artists, in the form of another puzzling, yet affecting set of images. Using the medieval tapestry La Dame et la Licorne--an allegory of the senses, and perhaps based on the Song, if Richard Kearney is to be believed--to think with, along with some theoretical work on affect, the paper reads Chagall's work allegorically and with the senses, taking the works back to the Song itself, and the practices and challenges of reading it.
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The Meta-Historical Jesus: Or, What Has the Historical Jesus Done for Me Lately (and How Did He Do It?)
Program Unit: Historical Jesus
Stephen D. Black, Codrington College
While there has been a concern for method and criteria within the study of the Historical Jesus, there has not been an equal interest in its “metahistorical” aspects. Working with the theory of Hayden White, this paper will explore the historiography lying behind the various Historical Jesus’s. The histories of Jesus, like all history, follow certain rules of formation, which determine the shape, ideology, and mode of the history. Hayden White considers four basic elements of history that I will argue are immediately relevant to current representations of the historical Jesus. They are emplotment (the narrative shape given the history), ideology (the attitude the historical narrative holds towards the social status quo), argument (the structure of logic used to explain what the historical narrative means), and trope (the structural form that guides the historical narrative). After explaining these four elements, I will use them to analyze modern (re)constructions of the historical Jesus. Primarily, I will compare and contrast how the cynic/sage Jesus and the apocalyptic Jesus are emplotted, what their ideological orientations are, the general nature of the argument used to explain their respective relevance, and the tropes informing their respective narratives. In brief, I will argue that the “cynic/sage Jesus” is typically emplotted as a romance or satire; its ideological orientation is anarchism; its argument is contextualist; and its trope is irony. I will argue that the “apocalyptic Jesus” is emplotted as a tragedy; its ideological orientation is radicalism; its argument is typically mechanistic or contextualist; and its trope is metonymy. While all of this may not help us get any closer to the actual historical Jesus, it will help us better understand the major historical Jesus proposals in front of us. History is typically not merely an exercise in that which is archaic; typically it possesses a latent agenda. This model can help us discern what ideological preoccupations are embedded within the various proposals concerning Jesus.
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Paul and Rome: The Thematic Relationship between the Acts of Paul and Luke’s Acts Reconsidered
Program Unit: Texts and Traditions in the Second Century
Ben C. Blackwell, Houston Baptist University
As a second century text by an unknown presbyter, the Acts of Paul (APaul) like other Acts of that time period focuses on the life and ministry of one of the central figures in early Christianity. This text recounts Paul’s missionary travels and ultimately his martyrdom before Nero in Rome. Though Paul is the protagonist, the APaul shows little engagement with Paul’s letters; however, a growing number of scholars think the APaul shows some knowledge and use of Luke’s Acts (LA). Nevertheless, there is no consensus regarding the nature of the relationship between the APaul and LA, other than the fact that the (significant) differences between the two point to the Presbyter’s very different purpose. This is most clear when the Presbyter recounts Paul’s martyrdom before Nero, which many see as a complete about-face from the quasi-apologetic purpose of LA. Accordingly, Harry Tajra concludes: “The image [of the Paul of faith from the APaul] bears little resemblance—indeed it is quite alien—to the image of the historical Paul as he is understood from his own Epistles and from the canonical Acts.” By focusing on the conflict with the Rome in the martyrdom, Tajra and others have, however, missed the rhetorical and theological similarities that unite the two accounts. As a result, this essay will build upon Kavin Rowe’s analysis in World Upside Down and show how Paul’s martyrdom in the APaul reflects virtually the same values with LA, namely that 1) Jesus is “Lord of all” and the coming Judge, 2) Christians should thus be engaged in worldwide mission by proclaiming the resurrection, and 3) following Jesus in martyrdom is a subversion of the power of the Roman state. Therefore, while the narrative details vary significantly, the two texts share similar perspectives regarding Christ, the church’s mission, and engagement with the Roman Empire.
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The Rhetorical Theory of Tafsîr of Najm al-Dîn al-Tûfî (657–716/1259–1316)
Program Unit: Linguistic, Literary, and Thematic Perspectives on the Qur’anic Corpus (IQSA)
Khalid Yahya Blankinship, Temple University
While the Hanbalî scholar Najm al-Dîn al-Tûfî has often been cited in modern scholarship for his rationalistic contributions to usûl al-fiqh, his exegetical theory laid out in his book al-Iksîr fî ‘ilm al-tafsîr does not appear to have been so widely recognized. While many earlier Qur’ân commentators and some other scholars wrote methodological introductions to tafsîr (exegesis), including al-Tabarî, al-Râghib al-Isfahânî, Ibn ‘Atiyyah, Fakhr al-Dîn al-Râzî, and al-Qurtubî, and exegetical principles were also extensively elaborated in usûl al-fiqh works, al-Tûfî nevertheless made a unique contribution by emphasizing the rhetorical features of the Qur’ân’s language, including figures of speech, similes, and metaphors. He was preceded in this mainly by the famous rhetorician ‘Abd al-Qâhir al-Jurjânî, whose contribution has been highlighted by Margaret Larkin in her book The Theology of Meaning and even more in her article “The Inimitability of the Qur’ân: Two Perspectives,” but it is al-Tûfî who systematically applies the rhetorical categories, which he rearranges in his own way, to the Qur’ân. In applying rhetorical categories as major tools for interpreting and understanding the Qur’ân, al-Tûfî moves far away from the common, popular impression that the Qur’ân only has one meaning, an idea strongly supported by Ibn Hazm of the Zâhirî school, and one which has reappeared in strength in recent times. This idea is based on an unstated and often unrecognized underlying theory of language that there is a one-to-one correspondence between words and meanings, that a text necessarily means only what it says, no more, no less. While most medieval exegetes recognized categories of ambiguity, such as mushtarik, mujmal, and mutashabih (rendered by Muhammad Hashim Kamali as difficult, ambivalent, and intricate), they nevertheless strove always to limit their impact on varying interpretation. By introducing rhetorical categories and structures, al-Tûfî greatly widens the interpretive possibilities.
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Non-standard Features in Codex Leningradensis B19a and Other So-Called Standard Tiberian Manuscripts
Program Unit: Masoretic Studies
Samuel Blapp, University of Cambridge
The BHK, BHS and nowadays also the BHQ are critical editions of the Hebrew Bible based on National Library of Russia, St. Petersburg, I Firkovitch B19a aka the Leningrad Codex (L). The BHS and its digital version (Westminster Hebrew Morphology) are also the most commonly accepted reference tools for scholars of the Hebrew Bible. L has achieved this status because of its completeness and accuracy. It contains all the books of the Hebrew Bible and was vocalized according to manuscripts from the great Masoretic school of the Ben Asher family. This school is generally seen as representing the Standard Tiberian Hebrew vocalisation of the Bible. A closer examination of L, however, shows that it contains some Non-Standard features. In my paper I will present some of these examples, which will include the ?a?af vowels in closed syllables as well as an examination of the relation of the consonantal text to the Masorah Parva. In order to situate L in the Tiberian masoretic tradition I will compare these examples to further manuscripts of the same tradition such as the Aleppo Codex (A) and others. Subsequently, I will show that the A too already exhibits some Non-Standard features. Therefore, one of my main conclusions will be that the Standard Tiberian tradition itself shows a wide variety of subgroups, even down to the level of individual manuscripts. Furthermore, I will point out that the consonantal text of L and A differ in some cases, which questions the status of L as being the sole point of comparison for most linguistic and philological studies of the Bible.
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A Patchwork Quilt: Pieces of Daniel among the Dead Sea Scrolls
Program Unit: Book of Daniel
Amanda Davis Bledsoe, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
The book of Daniel is one of the top-represented works among the Dead Sea Scrolls. If one correlates attestation with the popularity a work enjoyed, then this is especially remarkable in that these manuscripts come very soon after its estimated date of composition (within about 50 years). In this paper, I will examine the current status of research on the Dead Sea Daniel manuscripts. I begin by discussing the form of Daniel attested in these fragments and how the evidence problematizes earlier text critical methods applied to their reconstruction. I consider two aspects of this question: (1) the presence of a “Book of Daniel” at Qumran; (2) the relation of the manuscripts to the different editions of the book (MT, OG, Th). I offer several examples where the earlier publications of these fragments were incorrectly presented in order to align with the Masoretic version of the book when the proposed reconstructions clearly do not fit in the allowed space. I conclude by looking at the status of Daniel at Qumran and its relation to other works of the Dead Sea Scrolls (dependence, influence, reception), and show that the actual picture is quite different than previously thought.
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Make Heavy the Heart: An Egyptian Idiom in Aramaic
Program Unit: Aramaic Studies
Seth A. Bledsoe, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Philological studies of the Aramaic Book of Ahiqar, a text dating to a fifth-century B.C.E. settlement in Elephantine, have often pointed to linguistic and stylistic features reminiscent of Old Canaanite, Akkadian, and even Old Persian. Recognition of an Egyptian influence on Ahiqar (despite the provenance of the papyrus), however, is considered to be quite minimal, if not absent entirely. Yet, this paper will show that there is at least one expression in Ahiqar which directly corresponds to an Egyptian one. In TAD C1.1.82 we find the following: “Make heavy (your) heart” (Aram. hwqr lbb). The immediate context of the expression in Ahiqar aids in determining its meaning, where it clearly has to do with discretion in one’s speech. Scholars have previously linked this peculiar idiom with similar imagery in Hebrew literature, namely with the Pharaoh’s “heavy heart” in the book of Exodus or with a unique expression in Proverbs 25:17. Others have looked to a passage in the Babylonian Counsels of Wisdom for inspiration which reads “let your lips be precious,” noting that the Aramaic verb y-q-r can also carry the meaning “to be precious.” Each of these examples has some formal, semantic, or lexical resemblance, but none matches the Aramaic text on all levels. However, there is an Egyptian idiom that is almost an exact parallel to the one in Ahiqar, but to my knowledge no scholar has brought them together. In both the Instruction of Amenemope and the Instruction of Any we find the construction dns jb.k “make heavy your heart” (with some variation on this construction occurring in other contexts). While admitting some minor differences, we can nevertheless trace a one-to-one correspondence between the idiom’s use in Ahiqar and in the Egyptian witnesses with respect to form (imperative), lexical constituents (heavy/heart), semantic meaning (discrete in speech), and connotation (positive). I argue, therefore, that in Ahiqar we have an Egyptian idiom that has been adopted into Aramaic and, moreover, one that bears a much closer resemblance to its use in Egyptian Instructions than in the Hebrew or Akkadian texts. This conclusion has implications both for how we perceive Ahiqar as a composition but also more broadly for our understanding of the interaction of Aramaic and Egyptian language and literature in the mid-first millennium B.C.E.
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Femineity in the Gospel of John
Program Unit: Psychology and Biblical Studies
Kamila Blessing, Blessing Transitions Consulting and Mediation Services
Femineity, meaning womanliness, is here used to express both the presence of the female in the gospel and the female aspect of the Deity portrayed by John. Jung and others have maintained that every person has both a male and a female aspect; we propose that we use this principle as a lens through which to interpret John. Doing this, we find just as important as the male theology of Son and Father is Jesus' attention to the women one on one, the female aspect of the disciples, the female aspect of the story as a whole, and in particular the female aspect of Jesus himself. When Jesus, from the cross, says Behold your mother, followed by the issue of blood and water from his own body, it is Jesus himself who is named (by Jesus and by the Evangelist) as Mother. We might also speak of the Holy Spirit (or the creator) as midwife to the new creation. This is the point of the image of the new birth that is so prominent in John. Along the way to making that point there are several other themes, including: the one to one conversations between Jesus and women will be seen to develop an image of the true believer (one who delivers children for God); and after the resurrection appearances, the disciples' hearts become the womb into which the Spirit must enter and grow for the new creation to be born into the world. These images would have been clear to the First Century hearer of the story and deserve to be articulated for the reader of today. The Femineity is as significant for the gospel message as is the Son of God. Note: this presentation will expand upon a previous paper and hope to stimulate discussion toward further publications.
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Wrestling with God: The Role of Prayer in the Life of Moses, the Paradigmatic Prophetic
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Daniel I. Block, Wheaton College (Illinois)
Wrestling with God: The Role of Prayer in the Life of Moses, the Paradigmatic Prophetic
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A New Jewish (?)/Christian (?) Inscription from Egypt
Program Unit: Early Jewish Christian Relations
Lincoln H. Blumell, Brigham Young University
This paper presents an examination and analysis of an unpublished Greek epitaph from Egypt. The epitaph commemorates a woman who is identified as a “Jew” (Ioudaia) and who was remembered for showing love to orphans. Yet, while the deceased is identified as a “Jew,” she is also styled as an “Ama,” a title that otherwise only occurs for Christian holy women in late antique Egypt. Thus, this epitaph resists a straightforward classification as it employs terminology that seemingly straddles religious categories.
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A New New Testament Papyrus in the J. Rendel Harris Collection
Program Unit: Papyrology and Early Christian Backgrounds
Lincoln H. Blumell, Brigham Young University
This paper will present on the discovery of a previously unknown New Testament papyrus in the Rendel Harris Collection at Birmingham. The papyrus was discovered earlier this year by the author while cataloging this collection. The papyrus contains a non-continuous passage from the Book of Acts and this presentation will seek to elucidate this papyrus and its contribution to New Testament papyri.
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Mis-placed Bodies: The Interpenetration of Body and Place in Jeremiah
Program Unit: Book of Jeremiah
Elizabeth Boase, Flinders University
To be human is to be embodied, and to be embodied is to be emplaced. The experience of being embodied and the experience of being emplaced are inseparable – to be is to be in place. Within the book of Jeremiah, there is an interpenetration of body and place that blurs the boundaries between human, city and land. The prophetic body is fortified (1:18-19) and the fortified city is embodied. The land calls out in groaning and lament. Drawing on insights from cultural geography and trauma theory, this paper seeks to explore the power of mis-placed bodies for a community whose place of knowing and meaning making has been decimated and destroyed.
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The Book of Haggai and the Twelve
Program Unit: Book of the Twelve Prophets
Mark Boda, McMaster Divinity College/McMaster University
This paper reflects on the role of the book of Haggai within the Book of the Twelve in conversation with the work of Martin Leuenberger.
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The Builders in Nehemiah 3 and the Craftsmen’s Charter in a Cuneiform Tablet from Persian Times
Program Unit: Literature and History of the Persian Period
Daniel Bodi, Université Paris 8 Vincennes à Saint-Denis - University of Paris 8
The paper will compare the list of builders in Neh ch. 3 with a Neo-Babylonian cuneiform text, dating from the time of Cyrus II (539-530 BCE). The latter has been described as the “Craftsmen’s Charter” by its first editor. It represents a contract between the representatives of the Persian administration and several groups of artisans designated under the generic term ummânu “experts.” The text enumerates the artisans by groups, which may indicate the existence of corporations: “carpenters” (nagaru); “metal engravers” (kubšaru); “jewelers” (kutimu). Among the jewelers one finds sons of “oblates” (širku). Limits were imposed to their works and punishments entailed if the artisans did not respect them. The biblical texts found in Neh 3 lists “jewelers” (Neh 3:8,31), “perfumers” (Neh 3:8), “merchants” (Neh 3:31-32), “corporation of snake-charmers” (Neh 3:12) and “oblates” (Neh 3:32; 11:21). Both texts describe projects of building and reparation. Moreover, both enterprises were carried out under the auspices of the Persian administration. While the Neo-Babylonian contract regarding the reparation of Eanna, a cultic complex in Uruk/Warka comprising several sanctuaries, may be precisely dated to 534 BCE, the list in Neh 3 stems from ca. 445, and deals with the reparation of the citadel, the temple complex and the walls of Jerusalem, called “the Holy City” in Neh 11:1. C. Schultz compared this Neo-Babylonian text with lists found in Neh 7 and Ezra 2. These latter two lists, however, deal with the people who came back from exile and do not mention artisans. Therefore, I argue that the list in Neh 3 represents a better analogy to the Neo-Babylonian contract allowing a fruitful comparison.
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The Book of Which Covenant? Intertextuality, Josiah's Reform, and the Enneateuch
Program Unit: National Association of Professors of Hebrew
Peter Boeckel, Southern Methodist University
Since the dawn of modern biblical studies, scholars have widely accepted that the account of Josiah's reform in 2 Kings 23 invokes the Book of Deuteronomy. Although valid in many ways, this interpretive tradition is also problematic. When it becomes incorporated into diachronic reconstructions, such as the Deuteronomistic History hypothesis, the result is neglect or dismissal of potential connections between 2 Kings 23 and other parts of the Pentateuch, for example, of what looks like a strong link between 2 Kings 23:2 and Exodus 24:7. To address this issue, the present paper explores the intertextual status of the account of Josiah's reform while eschewing diachronic assumptions.In addition to the above-mentioned allusion to Exodus 24:7, specific attention is given to four different areas of Josiah's reform. First, with regard to the cultic centralization, Deuteronomy appears to be the primary text of reference, but the contrast with the altar law of Exodus 20:24-26 may be exaggerated. Second, in the report of Josiah's campaign against Baal, Asherah/the asherim, and illegitimate cultic vessels, the described burning of the asherim (2 Kgs 23:6) parallels Deuteronomy, the cutting down of the same objects (2 Kgs 23:14) reflects Exodus, and the mention of vessels in a cultic context aligns more closely to the concerns of Exodus-Leviticus than to those of Deuteronomy. Third, the destruction and defilement of the high places has parallels in both deuteronomic and non-deuteronomic texts, but it is significant that Deuteronomy never mentions the high places as such. Additionally, the concern with defilement of the high places reflects the theology of Exodus-Leviticus much more than that of Deuteronomy. Finally, with Passover, the closest parallel is undeniably Deuteronomy, but a synchronic reading must grapple with the fact that even in that book the festival recalls the exodus tradition.
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Punctuated Progress: Narrative Organization in a Sixth-Century Version of the Syriac Life of Symeon the Stylite and Pilgrimage Performance at Symeon’s Cult Site
Program Unit: Syriac Literature and Interpretations of Sacred Texts
Dina Boero, University of Southern California
In late antiquity, the Syriac Life of Symeon the Stylite (for which our earliest extant version dates to 473 CE) did not exist as a single, stable text; rather, it displays a complex process of textual transmission, in which scribes produced manuscripts for and within specific communal contexts and revised the contents of texts in conjunction with cult practices related to Symeon. This is demonstrated by three different versions of the Syriac Life of Symeon which survive from the fifth and sixth centuries. Each of these versions presents diverging accounts of events, narrative arrangements, and descriptions of the saint. This presentation focuses on the unique narrative organization of a previously unstudied version of the Syriac Life of Symeon found in British Library Additional Manuscript 14484, ff. 134-152 (sixth-century). I propose that this version of the text was composed for an intended audience of pilgrims and was meant to be read within the context of pilgrimage performance at Symeon’s shrine. In this version of the Syriac Life of Symeon, groups of miracles are punctuated by increasingly intense visions and ascetic renunciations. This intensification of visions and renunciations prepares Symeon to complete acts of intercession more difficult than his previous miracles. In this way, ascetic performance and visionary experience underlie the gradual development of Symeon’s intercessory abilities as a holy man. At the same time, this unique, and ultimately teleological, ordering of the narrative mimics the pilgrim’s progression through the saint’s shrine. Just as each prayer practice transformed Symeon, so also the pilgrim is transformed by his prayer and punctuated movement through the site, ultimately culminating in seeing the column and partaking in Eucharistic liturgy. The scribe’s presentation of Symeon’s life is intricately connected with the performance of devotion to the posthumous saint.
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Purity, Perfection, and Beatific Vision: The Upward Journey to Christ in Gregory of Nyssa
Program Unit: Christian Theology and the Bible
Hans Boersma, Regent College
Gregory of Nyssa regards biblical interpretation as a means to facilitate the ordered ascent (anagogy) of the soul into the life of God. As such, Nyssen holds that biblical interpretation and spiritual progress are closely linked: both are marked by anagogy. Anagogy, for Gregory, is not one of four meanings (i.e., the eschatological meaning) of the scriptural text (which the term commonly comes to denote in the Middle Ages). Rather, he understands all spiritual reading of the biblical text as anagogical in character. This paper traces how Gregory links the themes of purity, perpetual progress (epektasis), and beatific vision in the biblical figures of the pure in heart, Moses, and the bride in Canticles. Gregory believes—rightly, I argue—that such an interpretive approach is based on identification with Christ, encourages a life of virtue, implies a limited valuation of this-worldly and material goods, and leads the soul to seek the beatific vision as her proper end.
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The Construction of Jewish Identity in Philo’s Defense of Sabbath Observance
Program Unit: Sabbath in Text and Tradition
Dulcinea Boesenberg, Creighton University
One of Philo of Alexandria’s better-known statements on the Sabbath comes from his treatise On the Migration of Abraham. Philo condemns those Jews who investigate the symbolic nature of the laws but neglect the observance of the command when “they ought to have given careful attention to both aims” (89). Though Philo agrees with the interpretations of these extreme allegorists, as they have been styled by modern scholars, he argues for the necessity of Sabbath observance, claiming that those who neglect the command act as though they are “disembodied souls” (90) rather than part of the Jewish community.
For Philo, Sabbath observance is one way in which the Jewish community is defined and distinguished from other peoples. For example, Philo notes that unlike other nations, the Jews know all their laws because they devote one day each week to studying them.
While it is certain that for Philo the Law of Moses is given to the Jewish nation in particular, what the Sabbath teaches is advisable for all peoples. Throughout his corpus, Philo explains various benefits of Sabbath observance, benefits which are presented as desirable not only for Jews, but for others as well. When the Jews cease from work one day each week, not only is their energy restored so that they might work harder the other six days, but they are also able to devote time to learning the virtues which their ancestral Law teaches; therefore, they emulate the perfect balance of the active and the contemplative lives.
This paper will examine the ways in which Philo constructs Jewish identity through his articulation of the benefits of Sabbath observance, giving attention to his vision of Judaism as both particular and universal. On the one hand, Sabbath observance distinguishes the Jewish ethnos from their neighbors in that they alone abstain from work on this day to devote themselves to the study of wisdom. On the other hand, Philo uses his descriptions of the benefits of Sabbath observance to convince his Hellenistic Jewish audience that through this ethnically particular practice, they are both acquiring and exhibiting universally lauded virtues. Such a claim requires understanding the Jews’ ancestral laws as in accord with the law of nature, and thus universally applicable.
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The Memory of “Peter” in Fourth-Century Rome: Church, Mausoleum, and Jupiter on the Via Praenestina
Program Unit: Art and Religions of Antiquity
Douglas Boin, Saint Louis University
As the author of the pseudepigraphic letter 1 Peter saw it, writing c. 80–90 A.D., many early Christians lived as “sojourners” in an empire that was not really their own. How were Christians supposed to navigate this foreign land? Speaking in the guise of the apostle Peter, the author advised them not to draw attention to themselves, to show respect to everyone in their daily interactions and above all, to “honor the emperor” (1 Peter 2.17). Despite the apoplectic protestations of their peers, many Christians did just that by taking part in Rome’s imperial cult. Behind our louder sources, from the text of Revelation (L. M. White in J. Brodd and J. Reed, 2012) to the writings of Tertullian (Boin 2014, JECS), Christians can be seen participating in festivals and sacrifices for the emperor.
My paper builds on this research and advances our understanding of this complicated phenomenon. Here, I begin by analyzing the reception of 1 Peter 2.17 (“Honor the emperor”) in early Christian writers. Many Christians writing before the so-called Edict of Milan in 313 A.D.—among them, Justin Martyr, Polycarp, Tertullian, and Cyprian—not only demonstrate an awareness of the text. They also avoid any acknowledgment of verse 2.17. All the while, they use snippets of the larger text to advocate separation from Roman culture as the essential marker of Christian identity. Seen in light of other Christians who are known to have taken part in imperial festivals, this appeal to Peter as a voice of cultural resistance can now emerge as a highly “selective” social memory of certain writers within the Christian movement. This background also opens up new avenues for research after 313 A.D. One archaeological site in Rome, the fourth-century circus-form church and mausoleum on the via Praenestina, is discussed here by way of example. There, at the modern Tor de’Schiavi, amid the ruins known as the Villa of the Giordiani, a painting of Jupiter was discovered in the vault of the mausoleum. Given the presence of Jupiter in manifestations of emperor worship throughout Roman history, the church and the burial on the via Praenestina may now emerge as a highly visible expression of a fourth-century Christian desire to “honor the emperor,” just as many Christians and Romans had been doing for centuries.
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Teaching the Cultural Background of the Bible
Program Unit: Global Education and Research Technology
Sean Boisen, Logos Bible Software
Learning about ancient worldview and cultural practices is an essential component of understanding biblical literature. The Lexham Cultural Ontology (LCO) is a novel classification of concepts relevant to the cultural world of the Bible. Using a model similar to Yale's Outline of Cultural Materials ([OCM]) but adapted to biblical studies, the LCO identifies, describes, and organizes over 1100 different concepts. We have annotated passages throughout the entire Hebrew Bible and New Testament with concepts from the LCO to make it easy to find information on the cultural background of thousands of different biblical passages. Additionally, we have annotated more than 20 important secondary sources like the Amarna Letters, the Context of Scripture, Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, Josephus, etc. (millions of words in total) with the same concepts. This links biblical passages to relevant examples from the historical context of the Bible. These resources are integrated for search, reading, and study as part of Logos Bible Software's digital library for biblical studies.
This new and unique resource can be used in classroom teaching to aid understanding the scope and structure of cultural practices across the biblical text and other ANE literature. For example, a discussion on "interpersonal relations" could begin in a top-down fashion by displaying and defining more specific concepts in the hierarchy (age roles, family relationships, tribal relationships, inter-ethnic relations, etc.). This could be followed by drilling into biblical examples of a particular concept like "age roles" and discussing their significance in a bottom-up fashion, then broadening into other examples in Philo or Josephus. After demonstrating this process, students could then work on their own to explore the secondary literature on another concept under interpersonal relationships, and comment on the related texts.
This presentation will demonstrate how the Cultural Ontology in Logos Bible Software could be used in a classroom setting to:
* find relevant cultural concepts for a biblical text
* discover other examples (both in biblical and secondary texts) of the same concepts
* find reference information to help understand more about the cultural concepts
* show the relationships between concepts (more general or specific, or domain relationships like ), other topics in biblical studies, and lexical senses of specific terms
[OCM]: http://hraf.yale.edu/online-databases/ehraf-world-cultures/outline-of-cultural-materials/
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Was All the Qur’an First Meant to Belong to the Qur’an?
Program Unit: Linguistic, Literary, and Thematic Perspectives on the Qur’anic Corpus (IQSA)
Anne-Sylvie Boisliveau, Paris-Sorbonne Université
This paper presents some of the conclusions of a long research on the development of self-referentiality in the qur’anic text according to its main hypothesis of chronological development. This research differentiates a text a which is the main text, from a text ß which is any part of the text commenting on the Qur’an (self-referential text that brings authority to the text recited by the prophet). By doing so in a period-by-period analysis, several interesting points can be observed. The most striking one is the different development of texts a and ß and their interplay and mutual support. One point is the well-organized use of the duality of a and ß texts in order to persuade the reader/listener of the authority of the whole text. Another point is that the analysis leads one to wonder whether, from a technical point of view, the ß text was meant to be part of the vulgate at an early period.
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A Spy in Our Midst: Qohelet and the Slippage of Identity
Program Unit: Wisdom in Israelite and Cognate Traditions
Thomas M. Bolin, Saint Norbert College
A common prop in espionage thrillers is the hideaway where the agent keeps multiple passports under different names for any needed quick identity-change. The authorial voice in Qohelet offers an equally slippery identity which has always challenged readers. In conversation with Brennan Breed's new study on reception history (2014) this paper discusses a variety of the partially revealed and constructed identities in Qohelet.
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The Whole Theatre: An Analysis of the Latin (IRT 321) and Neo-Punic (IPT 24a) Inscriptions of the Theatre at Lepcis Magna
Program Unit: Philology in Hebrew Studies
Catherine E. Bonesho, University of Wisconsin-Madison
The situation of Roman North Africa during the imperial period provides excellent data for bilingualism. Among the bilingual inscriptions found in that region are those featuring parallel texts in Latin and neo-Punic. Analysis of the correspondences between co-textual inscriptions in these languages can illuminate both ancient bilingualism and the process of translation in the ancient world. Recent studies fronting the phenomenon of bilingualism have typically pointed to the discrepancies in information between two parallel texts and the maintenance of formulaic conventions to argue that Latin and Neo-Punic co-texts are “bi-versions”—that is, parallel but unrelated versions. This is the case, for example, in Wilson's discussion of the dedicatory inscriptions on the lintel of the Theatre of Lepcis Magna in Latin (Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania [IRT] 321) and neo-Punic (Iscrizioni puniche della Tripolitania [IPT] 24a). However, by analyzing these texts as products of both cultural and cognitive processes using Descriptive Translation Theory, and by incorporating a visual analysis of the inscriptions, one finds that the two inscriptions are, in fact, similar in content. I argue here, in correspondence with Descriptive Translation Theory, that the use of a source text does not necessarily preclude adherence to the target culture’s literary conventions. This argument invalidates the assumption that the use of conventions appropriate to a certain target language implies that text’s conceptual independence. Although neo-Punic genre conventions are maintained in IPT 24a, the Latin syntax is maintained in the neo-Punic text and it is unlikely that these are independent texts; rather, the neo-Punic should be understood as a translation of the Latin inscription. Taking into account the natural divergences in Latin and neo-Punic epigraphic conventions, it thus becomes possible to argue that the Latin text (IRT 321) acts as the translational source text for its neo-Punic counterpart (IPT 24a). It is important to remember the secondary status of the neo-Punic in relation to the Latin inscription in no way detracts from the fine quality of the neo-Punic inscription.
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The Prologue to Sirach and the "Book" of Sirach in a Chain of Text Traditions
Program Unit: Book History and Biblical Literatures
Francis Borchardt, Lutheran Theological Seminary, Hong Kong
Among prefatory writings in the scriptures and parascriptures of the peoples of Ancient Israel and Judah, the translator's prologue to the book of Sirach has probably been studied more than any other. Frequently, research has focused upon the process of scripturalization/canonization, or alternatively upon the attitude toward translation displayed in the text. This paper sets out where these previous directions of research have ended by focusing on the prologue's ideas concerning the relationship between the translation of Sirach and the texts of ancient Israel. The paper will argue that the author of the prologue understands his work to be a link in a chain of "auxiliary texts" extending from the Torah through the work of his ostensible grandfather Ben Sira. In order to prove its thesis the paper will place the prologue to Sirach in the context of a genre of prefatory writings most extensively investigated by classicist Markus Dubischar, which introduce what Dubischar has termed "auxiliary texts", building upon Wienold's idea of Verarbeitungstext and Foucault's idea of texte second. Dubischar observes that these auxiliary texts are meant to preserve a valued tradition by correcting problems encountered throughout the process of transmission. This paper will show that the translator's prologue understands the Greek Sirach to be just such a text, and further sees the other texts within Israel's literary tradition in a similar vein.
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Skype in the Biblical Studies Classroom: Using Social Media Platforms to Construct Practical Contexts for Biblical Interpretation
Program Unit: Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies
C. Jason Borders, Huntingdon College
For the Spring 2015 Semester, I have designed a seminar entitled, “Justice, Nonviolence, and Luke’s Gospel.” This is a 400 level seminar designed for Religion Majors in their senior year. The seminar will introduce the student to the concept of nonviolent justice, as expressed in the Gospel of Luke and the Christian tradition. Student interest in the course is academic as well as practical. Students are interested to know, intellectually, the roots of Christian nonviolence as a viable alternative in the cause of justice. Further, students are searching for voices and movements as models to employ this peculiar alternative in their vocational aspirations.
In designing the course, I knew that students were interested in having honest dialogue with one another. For sustained conversation, in and out of class, I created a closed Facebook Group called Dikaiosyne. There, we challenge and encourage one another around issues and ideas we encounter during the semester. Beyond the use of Facebook, however, students were interested in having candid dialogue with the world, especially with leaders/scholars/teachers around the globe working in ministries and vocations of peace and justice. My students were/are concerned to know how they may live lives of nonviolent justice, who may be employing such strategies in their vocations, and how those strategies might work. As the course gradually took shape, I chose Skype as the tool to enlarge the scope of the classroom to take these questions seriously.
My decision to employ Skype as a learning tool allows me to consider, further, the social construction of knowledge in the classroom. How can nonviolent justice work? Skype had the potential to allow students to work with live contexts so that learning becomes the creative process whereby students generate additional questions and solutions for themselves. Contexts created by this social media platform could open up new possibilities for biblical interpretation, as well. To that end, I began working to arrange a series of Skype conversations for the Spring 2015 Semester. My students are/will be traveling the world engaging persons who have spent their lives engaging others in the pursuit of justice. Over the course of the semester, we will be meeting persons in Tanzania, Israel, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Russia (TBA).
Achieving high quality Skype video calls requires that certain technological considerations be addressed: speed and reliability of internet connection and computer hardware, audio input and output, webcam reception and video playback, location lighting, etc. How one plans to invite participants, conduct the video call, and possibly record the conversation should also be considered. We have recently held our first Skype discussion with a high degree of success. With the setup we have configured, I anticipate that future conversations will be equally as successful.
For the Teaching the Bible with Technology section, I would like to present and demonstrate my findings on the use of Skype in the classroom, the technological requirements necessary for my context, and the opportunities for biblical interpretation within the practical context made possible by this social media platform.
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Iconographic Illiteracy in the Hebrew Bible
Program Unit: Ancient Near Eastern Iconography and the Bible
Christina Bosserman, Catholic University of America
This paper will explore the possibility of “iconographic illiteracy” in the Hebrew Bible. Several observations have been made in iconographic studies and related literary studies: 1) There is evidence that the biblical writers share much of the larger conceptual world of the ancient Near East, as reflected in the many iconographic studies that seek to illuminate biblical texts with close readings of iconographic materials in their historical context, and 2) There is evidence for possible re-writings of ancient Near Eastern myths that offer uniquely Israelite interpretations, and may even offer anti-Mesopotamian / Egyptian interpretations (e.g. Genesis 1-3).
Both of these assume iconographic/mythic “literacy” of the biblical writer. An additional observation that I would like to explore with this paper is evidence for “iconographic illiteracy” in some biblical texts. I will discuss examples (as time allows) of biblical texts that fill foreign iconographic "constellations" with new content. One example is the so-called "Adam and Eve" seal. It is clear that 19th century scholars were iconographically illiterate when they suggested that Mesopotamia had an “Adam and Eve” myth based on the almost identical constellations of the Mesopotamian image and biblical narrative. Is it possible that the composer of Genesis 2-3 was similarly illiterate, being exposed to the visual motif of the “Adam and Eve seal,” but oblivious to its native conceptual context?
A few factors will certainly arise. First, there is the historical matter of what foreign images could have been widely known in Israel, and therefore have reasonable odds of inspiring the biblical author, detached from any awareness of the image's conceptual context. Second, how would one determine “iconographic illiteracy” rather than the intentional re-writings described above? Answering this question will require close readings of both the text and the visual data. For example, interpreters of the biblical Adam and Eve narrative have often been puzzled by the role of the tree of life in Genesis 2-3. It both introduces and concludes the narrative, yet the central portion of the narrative with its singular focus on the tree of knowledge leaves many commentators with the impression that the inner narrative thinks there is only one tree. An iconographic interpretation is aware of the images available to the author of Genesis 2-3, offering the possible explanation that the tree of knowledge narrative was inspired by the visual Mesopotamian motif that has only one tree.
Space restrictions for this proposal prohibit a fuller discussion, but a second possible text to be discussed in the paper is what I call the “death shepherd” in Psalm 49, which may be a similar iconographically illiterate interpretation of Egyptian Osiris iconography.
I am currently a PhD candidate, and this paper could fit both the text/image interface in a unique way and the PhD dissertation section. As of now, this topic has not been developed into a formal dissertation proposal, but may be by the end of the summer. Thank you for considering my paper.
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Deities as Mothers and Fathers: Evolutionary Psychology and the Study of Ancient Texts
Program Unit: Psychology and Biblical Studies
David A. Bosworth, Catholic University of America
Scholars in biblical studies and theology have long been interested in God as a parental figure (father and/or mother). Remarkably, this research has not been informed by attachment theory. Attachment theory is well-established scientific theory that describes the child-parent relationship across multiple species that is thoroughly integrated into evolutionary theory and provides an excellent example of evolutionary psychology. Many species have an innate attachment system, or set of behaviors that facilitate the survival of the young through parental caregiving. Attachment theory has been expanded to describe the human-divine relationship within the psychology of religion (e.g., Lee A. Kirkpatrick, Attachment, Evolution, and the Psychology of Religion), but these insights have not yet been applied to biblical studies. The present paper will briefly describe attachment theory and its role in the psychology of religion, then illustrate how these insights can be applied to reading ancient texts. Prior research on deities as parents has been limited to texts in which explicit parental imagery appears and has ignored attachment theory in favor of no theory or poor theory (e.g., Freud’s ‘oral fixation’). However, the dynamics of child-parent relationship are thoroughly described by attachment theory and these dynamics are present beyond the narrow limits of explicit parental imagery. The paper will focus on method and how attachment theory illuminates the relational dynamics encoded in Hebrew and Akkadian prayers and prophetic texts and how these texts speak about relationship with deities. The paper will include attentiveness to gender. In Akkadian and Hebrew, deities may be described as paternal or maternal independent of their gender (e.g., Shamash as mother, Ishtar as father). However, child-parent dynamics persist across gender lines because the attachment system in humans informs how people think about and relate to deities.
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Ignoring Infant Cries: Religious and Medical Influence on Infant Neglect
Program Unit: Children in the Biblical World
David A. Bosworth, Catholic University of America
Infant cries induce stress in those who hear them. Caregivers may respond with empathy and caregiving, or with neglect or abuse. The decisions caregivers make are significantly informed by their “attributions,” or what they think infants are like and why they cry. These attributions derive in significant measure from cultural context. Influenced in part by the doctrine of original sin, Christian religious leaders sometimes encourage infant neglect and abuse by attributing to infants manipulative intentions that they do not possess. Also, widespread modern Western ideas about infant cries reinforce these religious teachings (e.g., Dr. Spock) by claiming infants who are comforted become ‘spoiled’ and cry more. Both religious and medical authorities encourage parents to ignore their infant’s cries for the good of the infant. This advice is wrong. Infant weeping has been extensively studied, but these findings rarely inform advice for parents about infant weeping. The present paper will describe traditional Christian and modern Western teaching about infant crying and contrast this advice with empirically grounded science and biblical depictions of infant care. Research shows that babies cry less when caregivers respond to their distress compared to infants whose cries are ignored. Furthermore, infants suffer significant long-term harm from neglect. Biblical and ANE texts provide some insight into infant care practices. Pharaoh’s daughter responds to the cries of a Hebrew infant (Exod 2:5-10), and God also models this attentiveness (Gen 21:17; cf. Ps 27:10; Isa 49:15). Biblical texts present unanswered infant cries in order to illustrate disaster so catastrophic that parental capacity to love collapses and children suffer (e.g., Lam 2:11; 4:3-4). Mesopotamian incantations to soothe crying babies express both the stress and frustration of infant caregivers, and indicate the empathetic care that adults extended to these infants. Biblical and ANE texts seem to assume an attitude similar to that expressed by a Bedouin mother: “We Bedouin can’t let an infant cry.”
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Weakness and Imperfection in Early Christian Healing Practices: The Illusion of Inclusion
Program Unit: Greco-Roman Religions
Pieter Botha, University of South Africa
The historical interpretation and theorising of healing practices in Greco-Roman antiquity and especially in early Christianity are delimited by conventional assumptions concerning suffering and the “healthy body”. In early Christianity the care of others operated in the ambit of eschatological restoration and the discourse of philanthropy did not escape the devaluing of the body. By investigating the pseudo-Clementine Homilies (dealing with Jn 5-10) and selections from the apocryphal Gospels, this study aims to show that practices of social inclusion, and “being good” remained sites of conflict and oppression. Disability studies as theoretical framework provides a meaningful correction to conventional historical study of conflict among groups and between classes, and to reveal how religion not only reinscribe status, privilege and power, but obscures (and legitimate) denigration, abuse and exclusion.
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Invention and Impoverishment: John Muir, Technology, and “Godful” Ecology
Program Unit: Ecological Hermeneutics
Nicholas Bott, Stanford University; Palo Alto University
This paper examines the role invention played in the development of John Muir’s ecological hermeneutic, and its continued applicability in our technological economy. The son of a Campbellite frontiersman, Muir grew up clearing land and growing crops and learned from an early age how poor agricultural practices impoverished both land and laborer. He was also a gifted inventor, finding success early in his career increasing efficiency and improving productivity in large machine shops. After a factory accident nearly left him blind, however, Muir experienced a “conversion.” Declining a position as a partner of the shop, Muir “bade adieu to all [his] mechanical inventions, determined to devote the rest of [his] life to the study of the inventions of God.”
Muir’s repentance from technological invention and subsequent turn toward the beholding of the divine inventions of nature represent both a pivotal moment in his life and a hermeneutical imprint on Muir’s meditations on nature. After his conversion experience, Muir’s latent suspicions toward anthropocentric understandings of nature and his growing identification with the Earth and the non-human world cast a shadow over his writings and letters. Muir’s use of Scripture is anchored in principles of suspicion, identification, and retrieval to develop his “Godful” ecological hermeneutic. Muir wants to correct the impoverishment of the mechanical and rediscover the wonder of divine invention.
This identification is most clearly on display through his use of Scripture in the description of and reflection upon natural phenomena. Finally, through Muir’s retrieval of “Godful” ecology the impoverishment of the non-human world is understood as the result of a previous impoverishment – that of human invention dulling the senses of humanity. Human invention is doubly impoverishing, starving our bodies of the “pure air” through which we were made to thrive, and perhaps more important for Muir, desecrating the holy temple of divine invention. Through Muir’s life and writings the contrast between human and divine invention play a critical role in the principles of suspicion, identification, and retrieval clearly present in the development of his “Godful” ecological hermeneutic.
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Women's Speaking Justified: Margaret Fell and Quaker Biblical Intepretation in the Seventeenth Century
Program Unit: Recovering Female Interpreters of the Bible
Nancy R. Bowen, Earlham School of Religion
In her 2012 Willson Lectures at Earlham School of Religion, Rosemary Radford Ruether argued that early Quaker (Religious Society of Friends) interpretation of Scripture to justify Quaker women’s participation in public speaking and proclamation was a radical paradigm shift that paved the way for future arguments of women’s full inclusion in public ministry. A central figure in the early years of the Society of Friends was Margaret Fell, who was convinced to join Quakers in 1652 after a visit to her home of Swarthmoor Hall by George Fox, the leader in that movement. Although we don’t know what formal education she had, Fell was clearly literate and well versed in the Bible. Like many Quaker women through history, she was a prolific writer of letters and tracts. Her most important tract was published in 1666, “Womens speaking justified, proved and allowed by the Scriptures, all such as speak by the Spirit and power of the Lord Jesus. And how women were the first that preached the tidings of the Resurrection of Jesus, and were sent by Christ’s own command, before he ascended to the Father (John 20:17).” The title alone gives some indication of the hermeneutical moves Fell made to justify women’s public speaking. The tract is close to 7,500 words and is a masterful study of the biblical text, beginning with Genesis 1-3. Fell engages head on the counter arguments, including 1 Cor 14:34-35 and 1 Tim 2:11-12. This paper will give a summary of Fell’s tract, “Women’s Speaking Justified,” and identify some of the key ways that Fell made her argument, including her understanding of the nature of Scripture, demonstrating Ruether’s thesis of the importance of this tract, which very few people outside of the Religious Society of Friends are aware of, for future arguments regarding women’s roles in the Church.
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Apocalyptic Reverberations in the Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Program Unit: African-American Biblical Hermeneutics
Lisa M. Bowens, Princeton Theological Seminary
In New Testament studies, as well as in discussions of Jewish apocalyptic discourse, distinctions exist between apocalyptic, apocalypticism, and apocalyptic eschatology. Apocalyptic is generally used to denote a type of literature, apocalypticism refers to a pattern of thought or movement which endorses the “conceptual structure” of apocalypses, and apocalyptic eschatology emphasizes the end of history. Apocalyptic literature itself has been designated as “crisis literature” and as a “form of protest against society.” Although the New Testament contains only one example of the apocalypse genre, i.e. Revelation, it is commonly recognized that an apocalyptic worldview permeates the New Testament documents. This paper will explore Martin Luther King’s use of apocalyptic in his sermons and writings. It will, therefore, examine his relationship to the various distinctions mentioned above and analyze whether or not these distinctions hold for his exegetical and hermeneutical lenses. In addition, this paper will investigate how King uses apocalyptic imagery and language to depict the crisis of the African American in the United States and to protest the status quo.
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Mapping the Terrain: Tracing Paul’s Martial Imagery in 2 Cor 10–13
Program Unit: Second Corinthians: Pauline Theology in the Making
Lisa M. Bowens, Princeton Theological Seminary
In 2 Cor 10-13 Paul utilizes military language to shape the Corinthians’ perspective regarding their current situation, the presence of the servants of Satan in their congregation (11:15). Through the use of martial imagery Paul attempts to depict for his audience the contours of the apocalyptic cosmic struggle in which they are engaged. The presentation of this paper proceeds in three phases. First, it begins with the warfare motif in the opening verses of ch 10 and traces the use of this imagery throughout the remaining chapters of the letter. Second, it relates the military motif of these last chapters to previous chapters of the epistle. The third and final segment concludes with several important implications: (1) The significance of Paul’s use of military language for shaping the Corinthians’ vision of an existing cosmic conflict and (2) The recognition that Paul does not leave battle language behind after chapter 10 but this theme persists throughout chapters 10-13.
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Abraham and the Rhetoric against Titus in an Expansion of Tg. Isa. 10:32
Program Unit: Aramaic Studies
Samuel Boyd, University of Chicago/University of Colorado
Pinkhos Churgin argued over a hundred years ago that Tg. Isa. 10:32 has a midrashic addition based on b. Sanh. 95b. More recently, Leivy Smolar and Moses Aberbach have argued that Sennacherib in this addition is framed in the Targumic account, if not also in the Sanhedrin material, in a manner evoking Titus and his attack on Jerusalem. These studies have shown that there are many peculiarities concerning the addition in the Targum. In fact, this addition itself has many versions, at least one of which, mentioning Abraham, was based on the Targum Yerushalmi as seen in Codex Reuchlianus and has been examined by Bruce Chilton. While many of the variations in details are minor between these two texts and while their relationship to each other remains unclear, the framing of the reference to Abraham in the Targumic addition differs from that in b. Sanh. 95b, a difference that has gone unexplored and yet is significant. In this paper, I review the evidence for seeing the story of Sennacherib in Tg. Isa. 10:32 and b. Sanh. 95b in light of Titus and the Roman attack against Jerusalem. Further, I explore the additional material regarding Abraham in Tg. Isa. 10:32 as present in manuscript B. M. 2211 and Codex Reuchlianus on the basis of this implicit reference to Titus. This information in the Targumic material creates an allusion to another nefarious king, Nimrod. The significance of Nimrod in this context is heightened by the connection between the death of Nimrod and the death of Titus in b. Gi?. 56b. This examination, therefore, adds another basis through an intertextual link for reading this common midrashic material in light of Titus and the Roman attack on Jerusalem. By making reference to the story of Abraham and the fiery furnace in Tg. Isa. 10:32 in B. M. 2211 and in Codex Reuchlianus, the Targumic story not only positions Sennacherib, Nimrod, and Titus as archetypal evil kings, but also calls to mind their inevitable destruction in eschatological terms through evoking Gog and Magog.
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Violence to Earth: Oppression and Impoverishment of Earth Community in Habakkuk
Program Unit: Ecological Hermeneutics
Laurie J. Braaten, Judson University (Elgin, Illinois)
The prophet Habakkuk’s concern for the suffering among the human members of Earth Community is clearly evident to any reader. Habakkuk cries out on behalf of people who are oppressed and impoverished at the hands of the powerful. He entreats the LORD on behalf of those in Judah who are mistreated by the unjust (Hab 1:2-4). The prophet expresses horror (Hab 1:12-13) at the prospect of the Babylonian empire being raised up by the LORD (1:6), which will only further intensify cruelty toward weak humankind (‘adam, 1:14-15, see 1:5-17). Yet Habakkuk is given a vision which assures him that ultimately the LORD’s faithfulness will prevail, and the innocent/righteous (tsadiq) will be liberated (Hab 2:4). Out of the prophet’s trust in the fulfillment of this vision grows a series of prophetic woes denouncing the abuses of oppressive leaders and announcing their ultimate demise (2:6-20). On the one hand, the woes are congruent with the anthropocentric concerns articulated in the rest of the book. For example, they denounce the powerful who build estates by taking advantage of the poor (2:6, 9-10; cp. 1:2-4), and condemn those who plunder nations (2:8; cp. 1:9-10; 15). But on the other hand, the woes also contain explicit references to abuses characterized as violence committed against Earth (vv 8, 17). Furthermore, in Hab 2:17 the plundering of the forests of Lebanon (a common imperial practice and subject of royal boast) is condemned, along with the resulting (homelessness and) death of its nonhuman inhabitants. The verse continues with a chiastic structure which essentially likens this deforestation and destruction of animals to violence against cities and their populations. Considered together, this verse expresses a concern for Earth Community as a whole, and not just Earth’s human inhabitants. These are a few of the most obvious results yielded by reading Habakkuk with an ecological hermeneutic. The current paper will further engage in such a reading with a focus primarily on Hab 2:6-20. It will proceed with the suspicion that references to Earth have been ignored or missed due to the anthropocentric concerns and biases of readers. It will examine and develop the aspects in Habakkuk which promote the intrinsic value of Earth. One example of a passage where Earth implications are missed is the enigmatic Hab 2:15. We will demonstrate that the verse contains a condemnation of imperial debasement and impoverishment of Earth, as the conclusion of the section suggests (v 17). Our reading will retrieve the voice of earth (Hab 2:11) which laments human destruction. This voice (which we identify in Hab 2:12-20) acknowledges the LORD’s pervasive presence in Earth and offers resistance against empire building as self-serving idolatry which destroys Earth Community. Finally, we note that the point where Habakkuk begins to articulate concerns for Earth begins after the well-known vision in Hab 2:4. Is it possible that with this vision came an expanded awareness of the extent of Earth’s suffering righteous to whom God’s faithfulness extends?
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The Life of a Blog from Cradle to Maturity (?)
Program Unit: Blogger and Online Publication
Christian Brady, Pennsylvania State University
When I began blogging over 12 years ago I initially tried to create a focused blog, two actually, one for my university administrative related posts and the other for biblical and rabbinic studies posts. (I even briefly had an anonymous blog, but abandoned that rather quickly.) While I still maintain a “work” blog as dean of our college, within a year “Targuman” became a blog that was more eclectic. I wrote then that I had decided “to simply post that which is of interest to me. Sometimes scholarly and theological at other times Mac related or political. Who knows?” Now as I look back over a dozen years much has happened: the birth of our son, Katrina, a major shift in my career and location, ordination(s), and the death of our son. Along the way I have published over 2,800 posts ranging from SBL announcements to comics to technology podcasts to text criticism and theological musings. In this session I would like to reflect on the development of a very personal blog, the impact of this virtual community on my own growth academically and theologically, and the importance of transparency in maintaining an online presence.
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Garden Variety: Genesis 3 as a Dramatic Teaching Tool
Program Unit: Teaching Biblical Studies in an Undergraduate Liberal Arts Context
Robin Gallaher Branch, North-West University (South Africa)
Drama teaches biblical texts, I have found. Some of my most successful teaching sessions in introductory, undergraduate Old Testament classes have involved direct student involvement. I have written several plays that engage the students dramatically. One concerns Genesis 3, the chapter taking place in the Garden of Eden and known to Christians as The Fall. Using the NIV text verbatim, I have broken down the chapter to six speaking parts and numerous silent ones. The speaking parts include the narrator, the Lord God, the walking serpent, the woman, and the man. The sixth part reads my italicized directions for blocking and emotions. Non-speaking parts include the plants used for covering; the tree of knowledge of good and evil; the tree of life; the animals that present themselves for slaughter; the cherubim; and the flaming sword. The entire class—often 30 students—is engaged. The non-speaking parts have plenty of personality; for example the trees flap their leaves, and the animals come willingly to the Lord God to be killed. A favorite episode is when the Lord God curses the serpent and it falls to its belly and slithers away between the plants. A flaming sword flashes around at the end, closing the show. I group those students left without a speaking or acting part in a loose category called wind and bird sounds. These sounds herald joy, concern, warning, sorrow, and other emotions associated with the chapter; students enjoy whistling, puffing, moaning, and chirping. The drama and discussion questions take a class period. The students are invited to act out their parts according to their own interpretations. A memorable dog once jumped into the Lord God’s arms! The class session, although different with each group, always combines much laughter and a sober reflection on what humankind has lost. Pausing on the text and requiring physical involvement in it enable the students to remember it. This paper will demonstrate the teaching tool of dramatization by using Genesis 3. Surely the Bible presents a plethora of Old Testament and New Testament passages inviting similar dramatic re-enactments and encouraging imagination within the bounds of the text.
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Teaching Theology with Laughter, Song, Rap, and Dance via the Play "Funny Bone Finds a Home": A Musical Featuring the Body of Christ
Program Unit: Bible and Popular Culture
Robin Gallaher Branch, North-West University (South Africa)
Funny Bone finds a home: A musical featuring the Body of Christ: is both a play and a thoroughly researched teaching tool. On stage are unusual but recognizable members of the Body of Christ. This paper, based on my musical, examines the concepts of unity/disunity, snobbism/classism, pride/humbleness, and individuality/community in the teachings of Paul the Apostle in 1 Corinthians 12:12-27.
Set in modern times, the play incorporates songs and dances. The one act comedy contains seven characters mentioned by Paul: Heart, Hand, Ear, Nose, Eye, Foot, and Unpresentable Parts. Piano Player and Funny Bone round out the cast. Published in 2013 and containing 234 footnotes, the play featured nonagenarians and octogenarians in its opening performance.
The plot is simple. Funny Bone writes to Head and asks for a meeting. She wants to be recognized as a member of the Body of Christ. After all, she has gone on many mission trips with the assembled members and loves each one. Her friends decide to consider her proposal to see if it lines up with Scripture. In the process, the members showcase themselves, brag about how the Lord has used them, and proclaim their accomplishments in songs.
While doing so, they reveal their strengths and weaknesses. Head leads, as expected, but in an egotistical, grating way. Everybody knows that Hand both steals and creates. Nose (who exhibits a very objectionable personal habit!) wisely encourages forgiveness among his colleagues. Ear hears too much and tells all. Foot wanders frequently but usually wants to follow Jesus. That beloved softie, Heart, exhibits mercy. Eye, a visionary, knows he does everything better than anybody else and decides he’s better off going it alone. Unpresentable Parts, a new believer who likes flashy clothes, feels isolated and unwanted.
As these members of the Body of Christ listen to each other, they learn things that make them mad. True to their names, Foot and Hand start kicking and shoving. Mayhem prevails. Funny Bone calls for order, separates the combatants, and starts teaching. She explains the great principles in Paul’s letter and applies them—in a rap, no less!—to the present situation.
This paper argues that Paul intentionally uses humor to teach theological principles. He instructs the Corinthians on their need to honor all people and their different ministries and functions in the church. His writing uses imagination as a teaching tool. Coupling kindness with authority, Paul no doubt makes his beloved Corinthian congregation smile as they recognize others—and themselves!—in his letter.
Laughter defuses tensions and encourages learning. Employing a light touch instead of a heavy hand, Paul gives people breathing room, enabling them to grow in ways that foster love, repentance and acceptance. These principles preach today.
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From Blog, to Book, to the Larger Scholarly Discussion
Program Unit: Blogger and Online Publication
Rick Brannan, Faithlife
In 2013, Lexham Press published the two-volume "Greek Apocryphal Gospels, Fragments, and Agrapha." This collection of apocryphal material includes introductions, translations, and transcriptions or editions of most available apocryphal gospel material in Greek. While the volumes were under preparation in 2011–2012, several blogs reported the inclusion of a new apocryphal material represented in P.Oxy. 5072. To evaluate, I wrote a blog post with a provisional transcription and translation. This formed the basis of what made it into the books, and the work was published in 2013. Since then, mention of the "Greek Apocryphal Gospels" books, only available digitally, have bubbled up in the larger scholarly discussion. This paper talks about the inclusion of P.Oxy. 5072 in the books, the reception of the material, and the role of blogs and online resources in the process as well as in the reception and discussion of the material.
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(Re)Signifying Creation: Viewpoint in Job as a Basis for a Christian Environmental Ethics
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Alexander Breitkopf, McMaster Divinity College
(Re)Signifying Creation: Viewpoint in Job as a Basis for a Christian Environmental Ethics
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Theoretical Observations on the Isis Cult in the Early Imperial Period
Program Unit: Greco-Roman Religions
Frederick E. Brenk, Pontifical Biblical Institute, Rome
Regarding categorization, Jonathan Z. Smith described the Isis cult as a “diaspora” version of a “homeland” religion (Smith 1978, xii-xv, cf. Woolf 2014, esp. 73-74; cf. Bricault and Versluys forthcoming; on methodology in general, Rüpke 2011, Scheid 2003, 6-29). Mithraism, however, may have been created in Rome for foreigners (Beck 1998 and 2006), and was only loosely connected to real Persian religion (Gordon 1996, III 95-96, 111). What came to Greece, and then Italy, was not exactly Egyptian religion but a Hellenistic version, created in Alexandria, even if with the help of Egyptian priests (for Egypt, Bricault and Versluys 2010).
The models “oriental religion” and “fringe religion, “often fit poorly, since they fail to distinguish between the religion on entry and when well-established. Isism appealed early as chic to the Roman upper classes, partly because of its royal and Alexandrian origins (cf. Versluys forthcoming). Though the cult was initially persecuted, allegedly for abuse of women, but also for proselytism, the cult and Egyptian culture continued to appeal to upper-class Romans (cf. Beck 2006, Rives 2007, chs. 6 and 7, but better, North 2003, 215; see Melton 2004, 29, for modern parallels). For political reasons, the glorification of the conquest of Egypt, Augustus, and more so the Flavians, promoted aegyptiaca (Orlin 2008, Bülow-Clausen 2011, Capriotti Vittozzi 2014). Under Augustus, Egyptomania flourished, for political reasons, and especially under Nero and the Flavians, the Isis cult received official recognition, thus hardly remaining a fringe or foreign religion.
Also, the models besides often lacking chronological distinctions, underplay local ones (not so, however, in Gordon 1996, III, 109-110). The Temple of Isis at Pompeii was minuscule compared to the Isaeum Campense in Rome. It was much less Egyptian, evidently more restrained in animal worship, which was repulsive to most Romans, and probably appealed to a lower clientele (Roullet 1972, Lembke 1994; for Pompeii, Moorman 2007, 2011, Sampaolo 1998, Adamo Muscettola 1992; for animal worship Smelik and Hemelrijk 1984). The “Oriental” cults are often described as “mystery” or “salvation” cults. The Isis cult is especially portrayed this way by Apuleius, who even stresses individualistic aspect. Social aspects, however, have often been neglected (on mysteries, salvation, conversions, and brainwashing, see Gordon 1996, III 93, Sfameni Gasparro 2011, Harrison 2012; modern aspects, Anthony and Robbins 2004). Gasparini (2014) has analyzed social and political connections in the Pompeian temple. The leading donors, in particular, important freedmen, besides being socially connected, seem to have formed an influential local political faction, thus combining religion and politics. Entry into a fringe religion might secure advancement in other ways. The Isis cult in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, described by Harrison as corrupt (2000, 2012; contra Finkelpearl 2012), at least exploits the gullible. Lucius, though not “brainwashed,” is taken advantage of, a constant accusation against fringe religions. Yet, besides learning discipline and finding a community, he becomes a successful lawyer despite his shaved head. Evidently the new-found connections would have propelled his legal career.
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On Scholarship and Related Animals: A Personal View from and for the Here and Now
Program Unit:
Athalya Brenner, Universiteit van Amsterdam
No abstract is provided for the presidential address.
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Has the Vita Abercii Mislead Epigraphists in the Reconstruction of the Inscription?
Program Unit: Polis and Ekklesia: Investigations of Urban Christianity
Allen Brent, King's College - London
The reconstructed text of the fragmentary Abercius’ Epitaph has lead to an ongoing debate amongst scholars (from, for example, Ficker, Dieterich and Harnack originally, and more recently Dinkler, and from De Rossi and Dölger to Wischmeyer and Guarducci) regarding the character of the verbal imagery employed, whether it can be categorized as ‘Christian’ or as ‘Pagan,’ and the context of that imagery on a stone shaped like a Pagan bwmo/j and decorated with a corona. The methodology (that this paper will seek to challenge) has generally been a kind of ‘tit-for-tat’ exchange amongst the parties, seeking on the Pagan interpretation for isolated textual and iconographic references, and on the Christian for equally isolated and individual New Testament and early Patristics allusions.
This paper seeks to show how the fourth century, legendary Vita Abercii is not merely a transliteration of the Epitaph but a legend that has reshaped the original words and their meaning. If the legend involved a fourth century Christianization of the original Hellenistic culture of Hierapolis by giving a Christian interpretation of several of its artifacts originally Pagan, why, we shall ask, is prima facie Abercius’ bwmo/j shaped tomb to be excluded from that category?
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Imperial Authority and Exclusive Politics
Program Unit: Postcolonial Studies and Biblical Studies
Mark Brett, Whitley College
The ethnocentric tendencies in Ezra-Nehemiah have been frequently condemned in biblical scholarship, even in studies that present themselves as generally descriptive and historical in scope. Postcolonial studies, on the other hand, have sometimes defended the legitimacy of defensive social postures among minority and subaltern groups when their cultural survival is at stake. In conversation with the work of Tamara Cohn Eskenazi and Daniel Smith-Christopher, this paper explores the issues from a postcolonial perspective, and asks whether native administrators in Yehud adopted the rhetoric of imperial authorization in defending an ethnocentrism “from below,” and/or whether their nativism created new social divisions within the Yahwist polities at the time.
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The Politics of Divine Naming in the Ancestral Traditions
Program Unit: Literature and History of the Persian Period
Mark Brett, Whitley College
In Priestly memory, the ancestors did not know the name Yhwh (Exod 6:2-3), yet the non-P traditions held that the ancestors were unapologetic in their use of Israel’s national name for God. A key question arising is why the late editors of Genesis would have juxtaposed these contrary views, without explanation. Our inquiry will investigate this question with a particular focus on the narrative of Genesis 24 and the politics of the Persian period.
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The Eclipse of Daniel’s Narrative: The Limits of Historical Knowledge in the Theological Reading of Daniel
Program Unit: Theological Interpretation of Scripture
Richard S. Briggs, University of Durham
This paper uses Hans Frei's famous image of the "eclipse" of biblical narrative to explore the question of how far it is true that we either do (or do not) need to situate the book historically in order to grasp its theological point(s). While historical-critical discernment plays an inevitable part in any disciplined imaginative engagement with the text, the difference this makes to theological reading varies from case to case according to the ways in which specific texts interact with history. A range of such cases is considered, including attention to the unusual complexities of Daniel 11's complicated relationship to what did and did not happen to Antiochus Epiphanes.
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The Textualization of Prophecy: The Lachish Letters in Light of Evidence from Mari, Nineveh, and Literacy in Judah
Program Unit: Hebrew Scriptures and Cognate Literature
Will Briggs, Baylor University
Since the discovery of the Mari archives, scholars have made a number of attempts at drawing various parallels between the Mari prophetic texts and the biblical prophetic corpus. The increase in interest surrounding the Neo-Assyrian prophetic texts and the Lachish letters has made the comparative task as it regards prophecy even more difficult. In light of these difficulties in the comparative enterprise and the conversations surrounding the phenomenon of prophecy in the ancient Near East and in Israel/Judah, this study examines the relationship between prophecy and writing found in the Mari archives, the Nineveh archives, and the Lachish ostraca. This examination sheds light on the textualization of prophecy in Judah before the fall of Jerusalem, acknowledging that the demands of scribalism significantly reduce the possibility that these texts preserve the ipssissima verba of the original prophecies. This situation leads to a more thorough investigation of the Lachish letters themselves, particularly in relation to the use of oral and literary conventions therein as they pertain to prophecy in ostraca 3, 6, and 16. Through this method, this paper demonstrates three primary conclusions. Firstly, state officials in Judah significantly concerned themselves with prophetic messages, as is the case at both Mari and Nineveh. Secondly, there were multiple forms in which prophecy became textualized in Judah with the biblical prophetic corpus and Lachish letters displaying different methods of textualization parallel to that of the Nineveh archives and the Mari archives, respectively. Thirdly, through their use of both orally and textually-influenced vocabulary for messages (dbr and spr), the Lachish letters demonstrate a society in which orality and literacy operated side by side, without the latter subsuming the former. The importance of these observation lies in that they display a more complete picture of prophecy in Israel and Judah before 587/6 BCE. Furthermore, they militate against an understanding of prophecy in Israel that is solely based on prophetic books in the Bible, as has sometimes been the case in the study of the phenomenon of biblical prophecy due to the highly redacted form in which the biblical prophetic collections have come to us today.
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Syrian Models of Ascetic Practices in Ethiopian Monasticism
Program Unit: Syriac Literature and Interpretations of Sacred Texts
Antonella Brita, Universität Hamburg
to be supplied later
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Competing Jewish Traditions and the Formation of the Gospel of Matthew
Program Unit: Jewish Christianity / Christian Judaism
Edwin K. Broadhead, Berea College
The Gospel of Matthew has long been considered the most Jewish of the gospels, or at least of the Synoptics. Almost without exception, scholars credit this ethos to the editorial work and theological design of an author named Matthew. The nature of the Matthean community is then reconstructed in the light of this literary design. In contrast to this scholarly norm, I will argue that the Jewishness of the Gospel of Matthew is due primarily to the competing, conflicting traditions that have been gathered into the composition of this gospel. After delineating six lines of tradition (sources), I will consider the larger question of how and why the dialectical engagement of such traditions and their tradents provides the primary dynamic behind the composition and transmission of the Gospel of Matthew. I will argue that most, if not all, of these traditions (sources) are sponsored by Jewish followers of Jesus, and I will contend that the resulting narrative remains fully within the world of 2nd Temple Judaism, even in its vision of the future. Finally, I will give consideration to 1) the consequences of this compositional process for the purpose and identity of the Gospel of Matthew, both in terms of sociology and theology, and 2) the consequences for our understanding of the role of Jewish Christianity as a foundational and enduring movement.
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Preaching the Epistle of Straw: Luther’s Homiletical Hermeneutics and James
Program Unit: Homiletics and Biblical Studies
Amanda Brobst-Renaud, Baylor University
Discussions of James customarily begin with Luther’s indication that James is an “Epistle of Straw.” The image of the reformer tormented by works-based righteousness and his anti-Pauline reading of James are well noted and oft-rehearsed. Many interpret Luther’s sharp quotes in his preface to the New Testament as reflective of reformer’s disdain of works-based righteousness, which is among his favorite polemics. The tendency to focus on these components of Luther’s thought and writing fail to take into account his understanding of the Christian in society, particularly as revealed in Luther’s sermons, in which we find his thought is not as opposed to James as we – or perhaps he – thought. It is here we find that Luther’s biblical interpretation in his “Preface to the New Testament” diverges from his hermeneutics in preaching. Whereas Luther’s emphasis and polemics on “justification by faith alone through grace apart from works of the law” are myriad, Luther’s sermons and concern for the Christian in society echo the words of James. By focusing on Luther’s quote from his “Preface to the New Testament,” scholarship has overlooked some key convergences in Luther and James’ thought and the ways in which Luther’s homiletics mitigate – or perhaps challenge – his indications of James’ role within the New Testament canon. This paper will place James and Luther into conversation, considering the ways in which their thoughts cohere with one another despite the assertion that James is a “Gospel of Straw.” This presents a problem both for those who might want to ascribe to Luther an antinomian or anti-works position and those who might want to hold that Luther thought that faith – by itself – is an indication of reception of the Gospel and Christ.
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Prophetic Intercession: What Do We Think the Prophets Were Doing?
Program Unit: Prophetic Texts and Their Ancient Contexts
Marian Broida, Gustavus Adolphus College
Biblical prophets not only transmitted messages from the deity to the people—they also interceded with the deity on the people’s behalf. But what did such intercession entail? This paper analyzes biblical depictions of prophetic intercession, looking for evidence of a possible ritual dimension. Biblical accounts suggest that prophetic divination and intercession were often combined in a single encounter between the prophet and the deity. Such accounts reflect one of two perspectives: encounters between the prophet and those seeking help, and encounters between the prophet and God. Certain terms in Amos 7:2, 5 suggest that the prophet’s intercession may have been expected to yield a yes/no result, like priestly intercession and divination. Other commonly-used expressions in prophetic intercession may reflect a degree of ritualization. Yet in general, the Bible emphasizes the spontaneous and dialogic nature of prophetic intercession. Sacrifice is rare (and generally not conducted by the prophet); other manual rites are few and nonstereotypic. In contrast, the Bible stresses the legal and ritual dimensions of intercession by priests, e.g. in Lev 16, the Day of Atonement Ritual. This contrast between prophetic and priestly intercession corresponds roughly to the distinction between asking the deity to change his mind vs. purifying a ritual patron from evil—two aspects that are sometimes combined in intercessory rituals from elsewhere in the ancient Near East. By its nature, prophecy is the means of divination most akin to ordinary communication. Based on biblical accounts, Israelite prophets appear to have relied more on perceptions of their intimate relationship with the deity, as opposed to technical or ritualized methods, both when transmitting the divine will and when interceding against it.
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Mark as a Source for Mark
Program Unit: Markan Literary Sources
E. Bruce Brooks, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Mark contains material of different ages. It treats the Gentile Mission as both an irrelevance (The Syrophoenician Woman, Mk 7:24-31) and as a prerequisite for the Last Days (Mk 13:10). It treats Jesus as both a healer (The Leper, Mk 1:40-45) and as God (the forgiving of sins, Mk 2:5-10). Why? Either Mark was combined on one occasion from diverse material, or it was compiled over a period of time, and continually updated itself by adding material to reflect the latest ideas about Jesus (his increasing divinization) and the continually receding date of the Return. The latter can be shown to be the case, since the more advanced passages show the standard signs of interpolation. Then Mark is not an integral, but an accretional text.
If so, then its earlier layers were available to its later layers as literary sources capable of further development. I here note three examples of seeming internal development: (1) TheWoman with a Flow of Blood (Mk 5:24-34, a development of Mk 6:56); (2) The Feeding of Four Thousand (Mk 8:1-9, a development of the Five Thousand in Mk 6:34-44), and (3) The Ambition of James and John (Mk 10:35-44, a development of the anonymous dispute over priority in Mk 9:33-34). It is easily shown that in each case, the more developed form is an interpolation. The third has the further advantage that, as a prophecy ex eventu, its terminus a quo is the year 44. This gives us one firm date within the span over which Mark was composed, and that date correlates well with references to Paul in Mark, the fact (Koester Ancient Christian Gospels, 52f) that much of Paul’s knowledge of early Christian tradition seems to come from Mark, and with everything Acts tells us about the real life relation between Mark and Paul. Clarification of the nature of Mark thus helps us locate it within the chronology of Christian writings, a chronology in which Mark, or its earliest layers, seem to occupy the very first place.
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Bishops versus Radical Egalitarians: The Synod of Gangra (343 CE)
Program Unit: Slavery, Resistance, and Freedom
Bernadette J. Brooten, Brandeis University
In this paper, I employ feminist intersectionality theory to interpret the interrelationship among gender and legal status among the fourth century followers of Eustathios of Sebaste who supported enslaved persons’ efforts to self-emancipate. I will argue that this is related to their rejection of traditional gender roles, of gender differentiation in dress, of marriage, of partaking in the Eucharist from married priests, of venerating martyrs, and of meat-eating, and to their desire to control their own church funds for their charitable and other activities. Female Eustathians apparently cut their hair short, and community members wore the pe??ß??a???, which caused considerable scandal. Thirteen bishops gathered around 343 in Gangra, Paphlagonia, to anathematize the Eustathians for encouraging enslaved persons to withdraw from their owners and other transgressions. The Synod of Gangra’s twenty canons and the accompanying Synodical Letter contain some biblical allusions, and later canon lawyers suggested scriptural texts that would support the canons. I will argue that the Eustathians could also have mounted a plausible theological and biblical case for their radically egalitarian positions.
In order to arrive at what may have been the scriptural arguments on both sides, I will first establish the most likely date for the Synod of Gangra as 343, which allows the identification of Bishop Basil as Basil of Ankyra. Basil’s On the True Purity of Virginity helps to understand the dilemma faced by the Gangran bishops. They agreed with the Eustathians to a high degree in their biblical interpretation, which complicated their desire to anathematize them. Analyzing Basil and the precise wording of the Gangran canons, as well as ancient translations and western and eastern canon law commentators, I will suggest which canonical and extra-canonical texts each side may have used. In their canons, the Gangran bishops allude, i.a., to Acts 15:20 and parallels (meat is allowed); 1 Cor 11:2–16 (women’s hair, veiling, and submission); and 1 Tim 6:1–2 and Tit 2:9–10 (enslaved submission). The Eustathians, however, could well have appealed to Gal 3:28 (all are one in Christ); Acts 4:34–35 (communal property); 1 Cor 7:20–22 (construing µ????? ???sa? as “use your becoming free”); and the Acts of Paul and Thekla 9–17; 25; 40 (rejecting marriage, short hair, and male clothing). Epiphanios of Salamis (ca. 315–403) describes the biblical justification for a less hierarchical understanding of the church given by Eustathian Aerios around two decades after the synod. Aerios argued that the New Testament does not sharply distinguish between bishops and elders (Phil 1:1; 1 Tim 4:14).
I will then suggest why this particular configuration of practices would accord with assisting enslaved persons to escape slavery when other highly ascetic writings, such as the Acts of Paul and Thekla and the Passion of Andrew, support slavery. Gender-bending does not per se lead to compassion with enslaved persons. In closing, I will point out several ways in which Eustathios or his followers had an impact on Basil of Caesarea’s, Makrina’s, and Gregory of Nyssa’s practice and thought on slavery.
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The "Messiah" according to the Aramaic Meturgeman of the Isaiah Targum
Program Unit: Aramaic Studies
Adam Stewart Brown, McMaster Divinity College
This paper will investigate why the meturgeman intentionally added the word “Messiah” to Isaiah Targum Jonathan (ITJ) 4:2, 9:5, 10:27, 11:1, 11:6, 14:29, 16:1, 16:5, 28:5, 43:10, 52:13, and 53:10. The thesis of this paper is that the insertion of “Messiah of YWY” originated in ITJ 4:2 as a literal interpretation for the metaphorical use of “branch of YHWH” in Isa 4:2 of the MT. Once this interpretive move was made a series of interpretive decisions in the proceeding verses followed. We can track and chart the relationship between all of these verses in this order: 4:2; 11:1; 14:29; (9:5, 16:1, 16:5, 28:5); 10:27; 43:10; (52:13, 53:10); and 11:6. Isaiah 4:2, 11:1, and 14:29 are linked by the Hebrew words “branch,” “branch”, and “root.” The meturgeman then interpreted “staff” in 14:29 to metaphorically mean “ruler”. Isaiah 9:5, 16:1, 16:5, and 28:5 are all linked thematically with Isa 14:29 because of their use of “prince of peace,” “ruler of the land,” “judge,” and “crown of beauty and a diadem of glory” respectively. Together, these first seven verses congeal an understanding of Messiah as eschatological leader. The meturgeman then returned to Isa 10:27, having seen in this verse a perfect consolidation of eschatological messianic power. The victory of the Messiah then became, in the mind of the meturgeman, the validating witness to the eternal sovereignty of God in Isa 43:10. Therefore, the Messiah naturally fills the role of “my Servant” in Isa 43:10, 52:13, and 53:10. The only remaining verse is Isa 11:6. It is difficult to know where to place this verse in this overall schematic and it seems at first that this one verse might sink the entire hypothesis. However, the theme of ITJ 52:13 and 53:10 is the prosperity of the Messiah and the prosperity of those who will see the kingdom of their Messiah. Isaiah 11:6 captures this theme by illustrating what this prosperity will be like.
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Satan: The Author of False Teaching in the Pastoral Epistles
Program Unit: Disputed Paulines
Derek Brown, Lexham Press
The Pastoral Epistles reveal a number of intriguing developments within the Pauline tradition. One area which has not received sufficient attention is the references to the devil within Pastoral Epistles. Both 1 Timothy and 2 Timothy mention the malevolent figure— whether by the well known term satanas (1 Tim 1:20; 5:15), diabolos (1 Tim 3:6, 7; 2 Tim 2:26), or even ho antikeimai (“the opponent” or “the enemy,” 1 Tim 5:14; cf. 1 Clem. 51.1; Mart. Pol. 17.1)—but the collective importance of these references is rarely discussed in scholarly literature. The present paper will explore the nature of the allusions to Satan within the Pastorals by considering their function within their epistolary context, the theology of Satan which they imply, and their relationship to references to Satan in the other Pauline letters (both undisputed and disputed; see Brown, The God of this Age: Satan in the Churches and Letters of the Apostle Paul [Mohr Siebeck], forthcoming 2015). It will be argued that although the Pastoral Epistles sometimes reflect, or perhaps mimic, the earlier Pauline references to Satan (e.g., 1 Tim 1:20; cf. 1 Cor 5:5), the references to Satan in 1 Timothy and 2 Timothy aim to establish a direct connection between false teaching and Satan that is intended to warn and prevent the readers of the letters from subscribing to teaching that would separate them from the truth of the gospel and the community of faith.
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The Textual History of the Prayer of Jonah in the Ethiopic Manuscript Tradition
Program Unit: Ethiopic Bible and Literature
Jeremy R. Brown, Catholic University of America
Jonah 2:3-10 was not only transmitted in Minor Prophets manuscripts in the Ethiopic manuscript tradition. This passage also was copied as the Seventh Biblical Canticle within the Ethiopic Psalter. For this study, we have transcribed more than 60 transcriptions of the canticle from codices that span the extant manuscript tradition and we will employ these to examine the textual development of the Prayer of Jonah across the centuries. We will identify manuscript families and their date ranges. We will then compare the textual history of the Seventh Biblical Canticle with the development of the text within Old Testament manuscripts. We will utilize the fifty manuscripts of Jonah that have been transcribed for the Textual History of the Ethiopic Old Testament Project and examine if similar revisions and alterations occurred in both the Psalters and the Minor Prophet manuscripts. We will also consider possible influence from the Psalter upon later revisions of the Minor Prophets. Lastly, we will compare the data from the Ethiopic manuscripts with the canticles tradition in Syriac and Arabic.
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Healing Words: Spoken Words, Hip Hop Poetry, and Psalms of Lament
Program Unit: Bible and Practical Theology
Sharon A. Brown, Moravian Theological Seminary
This paper will explore how the contemporary forms of expression, spoken word and hip hop, can be used as a method to engage today’s young people and meet their pastoral needs during crisis, much like how the lament Psalms function in both the ancient Israelite and contemporary contexts for people who are in pain. Oftentimes teens and young adults are at loss for words to express their deep emotions. Spoken word/hip hop offers an outlet for their feelings and in effect can be considered a 21st century form of the Psalms of Lament. In my work with young adults I have come to understand the power of spoken word as a healing and transformative modality that is aligned with and connected to the Psalms of Lament in the Hebrew text. A powerful component of this work is when students shared their work at the spoken word café ---it was the place where they “owned their voice and personal transformation” and inspired others to “speak their truth.” I will illustrate how a spoken word group of students from different backgrounds met over a two year period and wrote about their personal experiences with traumatic situations, anger, and loss. Their “psalms” shared in a “safe place” allowed them to recapture a sense of “wholeness” and experience the healing power of community lament.
Just as ancient Israel psalmists struggle with issues of marginality, injustice, and brokenness, as seen in Psalms like 22 where the Psalmist cries out in pain in the midst of injustice, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” or in Psalm 55 as the singer expresses the experienced hurt when a faithful friend turns into the betrayer, so the contemporary writers and spoken word artisans (today’s psalmists) sing out their pathos. When hip hop artist Tupac Shakur writes “ I beg God to make a way for our ghetto kids to breathe--Show a sign--Make us believe--Cuz I aint mad at cha!”
And spoken word writer Kashi Johnson speaks “Speech is my hammer—bang the world into shape, Now let it fall” or my student says “Disappointment is like a bombshell When it hit's your body... it sends a multitude of shrapnel and confusion your way “ they are lamenting in the lineage of these ancient Israelite Psalmists.
Historically, spoken word poetry can be traced to the Ancient Greeks and was revived during the Harlem Renaissance. It continued to be part of culture of those who were marginalized and oppressed during the civil rights movement and made its way into popular culture in the late 80’s. Contextually, the structure of spoken word/hip hop mirrors that of the psalms. More important, both forms of lament provide an outlet for the expression of pain, anger, resistance, hope, and justice; each offering the architect/psalmist of the lament a process for self-expression, reconciliation, healing and, most importantly, a vehicle for using his or her voice individually or collectively to “speak truth to power.”
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The Memory of Jesus through the Sabbath: Exploring Jewish-Johannine Dialogues in the Diaspora
Program Unit: John, Jesus, and History
Sherri Brown, Creighton University
Asia Minor is likely the formative center for Johannine Christianity in the decades following the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. Traditionally, Ephesus has been identified as the locus of its developing social and religious life and relationships in this new diaspora setting. Although the Johannine community would have sought fellowship in the Jewish synagogue, they also would have found themselves in dialogue and, soon, conflict with these same kinspeople about not only their belief in Jesus as Messiah but also their developing high Christology. This same sort of good news would not have been a problem in the nascent Gentile churches of the region. This distancing from mainstream traditional Judaism and simultaneous pull toward the Hellenistic Gentile mission through the shared memory of Jesus who is the messiah who is both divine and human is a strong undercurrent of the Gospel of John.
This paper explores how this undercurrent rises to the surface in the Fourth Evangelist’s shaping of traditions about Jesus’s actions and teaching on the Sabbath. The sign and discourse of John 5 focus on the feast of the Sabbath and John’s understanding of Jesus’ authority to work as God works on the Sabbath. The Evangelist’s composition of the sign, the ensuing trial process, and Jesus’ response in John 9 is more subtle: the spotlight shines elsewhere—on the response of those he encounters to Jesus—yet he is careful to set the entirety of the scene on the Sabbath. John and his community live in this memory of the Jewish Messiah and his revelation of God on the Sabbath, but, like Jesus before them, find themselves at odds with their own people, now in the diaspora. The implications of this marginalization through belief in the Word of God in Jesus are far reaching for both the Johannine community and developing Christianity.
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The Use of Reference Works in Mesopotamian and Qumran Commentaries
Program Unit: Assyriology and the Bible
Bronson Brown-deVost, Brandeis University
The use of reference works is one of the hallmarks of the Mesopotamian commentary tradition. Most frequently these texts use various lexical lists such as Malku and An = Anum to explain difficult words, and bilingual lists such as Ea A = naqû, Aa A = naqû to form more complex word associations. But the use of literary resources sometimes plays a role in the exegetical process as well. Sometimes this involves using one passage of a base-text to explain another passage in that same base text, as when a comment to Enuma eliš VII 57 quotes VII 67 (BM 54228 [82-5-22, 379] rev.). Other times the commentator may use a different literary composition to this end, as when an albeit obscure comment to Sa-gig 4 quotes Enuma eliš 4:101 (CT 51, 136 obv. 13–14).
The Qumran commentaries use quotes in their interpretations as well. Sometimes a pesher may quote one passage from its base-text in an explanation for another: the interpretation of Isaiah 21:11-15 in 1QpIsa E quotes Isaiah 21:2. But the pesher interpretations may also quote from external sources, both with source citation, as when 4QpappIsa C cites Zechariah (4Q163 f8–10:8), and without source citation: 1QpHab quotes from Isaiah 13:18ba (1QpHab 6:12) and 4QpHos A quotes Jubilees 6:35 (4Q166 2:16).
What is more, the pesharim have further developed this hermeneutic in two important ways: 1) The commentary text itself may be structured so that multiple passages from the base-text are linked together to create an exegetical chain of sorts, as is done in 4QpIsa B, which moves from one comment on Isaiah ?–5:14 to the next on 25b–30, and from one on Isaiah 5:?-5:30 to one on 6:9–?. 2) A related passage from another literary sources may be updated to explain how the base-text applies to a contemporary context, as when the comment to Habakkuk 1:9b–10a in 1QpHab takes the Chronicler's explanation for the fall of Judah in 2 Chronicles 36:16 (a narrative text that describes the events of Habakkuk's time) and updates it to apply to a contemporary context.
The pesher to Habakkuk indeed does frequently apply the text of Habakkuk to a contemporary context and to an apocalyptic eschaton with what seems like little regard for the original meaning and intent of the base-text itself. Nevertheless, that is not always the case, for the pesherist was able to relate the book of Habakuk to the historical time period when Habakkuk was active, as described in the narrative of Chronicles. Moreover by situating the text of Habakkuk within a historical context, the pesherist was beginning to engage in an approach to texts that could be construed as similar, albeit in a primitive and imperfect way, to the modern historical critical method.
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"Make Me a Sanctuary, That I May Appear in Your Midst": The Structure of Leviticus 8–9 in Light of the Vorlage of LXX Exodus
Program Unit: Cultic Personnel in the Biblical World
Brandon Bruning, University of Notre Dame
Literary critics dispute the integrity of Leviticus 8-9, not only on synchronic but also on diachronic grounds. While it is widely recognized that Leviticus 8 reports the seven-day ordination of Aaron and his sons as priests in the newly established Tabernacle, rites commanded (Exodus 29) along with the instructions for the Tabernacle's manufacture and assembly (Exodus 25-31), at least three points lead to diverging analyses: (1) the contents of Leviticus 8 do not all match Exodus 29 but incorporate material that corresponds also to Exodus 40, (2) the sometimes exact, sometimes varied repetition of the formula "as Yhvh commanded (Moses)" can be found seven times (or more, depending on the counting and the textual witnesses), suggesting a literary structure in Leviticus 8, and (3) there are questions about the relationship of Leviticus 8 to Leviticus 9, which describes the "eighth day" not explicitly so called in Exodus 29 in which Aaron and his sons also perform some of the rituals of Leviticus 1-7 and at least two more exact iterations of the fulfillment formula appear.
Curiously, on this last point, the relationship of Leviticus 9 to 8, the report of the first truly Aaronid priestly sacrifices concludes with the appearance of divine fire, just as Exodus 29 promises a theophany in the regular ministration of the fully-functioning, legitimately staffed cultus. (a) Setting aside the anointing of the sancta in Leviticus 8 that recalls Exodus 40, not Exodus 29, and (b) considering that the repertoire of sacrifices in Leviticus 9 incorporates more elaborate instructions from Leviticus 1-7 just where Exodus 29 would have required only the daily sacrifices, Leviticus 8-9 taken together serve as a more complete report of the execution of the commands in Exodus 29 than is often recognized. The aim of the commands (Exodus 29) and their execution (Leviticus 8-9) alike is not merely the seven-day ordination of the priests and purification of the altar, but a fully functioning, legitimately staffed cultus as the means by which the divine presence is manifest to Israel.
Not only content, but structure of Lev 8-9 may retain more integrity than often recognized: across MT Lev 8-9 there are seven exact repetitions of the fulfillment formula ("as Yhvh commanded Moses"). There are also seven inexact repetitions of it that cluster together at the end of Leviticus 8 and the beginning of Leviticus 9--that is, between the first five and the last two exact iterations. This disruption in the form corresponds to the point where Moses fully transfers authority for the priesthood to Aaron.
Do these observations justify reading Leviticus 8-9 as a unit? The claim becomes more convincing when compared to the structure of Exodus 35-39 in the LXX and its Hebrew Vorlage. There the manufacture of the Tabernacle subdivides into seven sections, each marked by a variation of the fulfillment formula. After the second, thus at the beginning of the next five, comes a section with seven exact iterations: these mark the making of the priestly vestments, commanded in Exodus 28 (and introduced by 28:1 as if they were part of the inauguration of the priestly service, rather than the manufacture of the sancta). Thus in LXX Exodus 35-39 the division 2/5 with seven exact iterations within seven inexact is the inverse of the structure of Leviticus 8-9, with its division 5/2 with seven variations within seven exact iterations. The point of division in LXX Exodus' report of the manufacture also comes at the point where Moses transfers authority for the manufacture of the Mishkan to Bezalel and Oholiab and their workshop, just as the division in Leviticus' report of the inauguration comes at the point where Moses transfers authority for the priestly service of the Mishkan to the Aaronid priesthood at the conclusion of their seven-day inauguration/ordination. Moreover the cluster of exact repetitions of the formulae within Exodus concerns the making of the priestly garments (per Exodus 28), just as the exact repetition throughout Leviticus 8-9 concerns the inauguration of the Mishkan's priestly service (per Exodus 29). This exact repetition distinguishes the execution of the instructions for the operation of the Mishkan (Exodus 28-29, as set off by Exod 28:1) from the execution of instructions for its manufacture (in Exodus 25-27, 30-31).
Thus the Hebrew text translated by LXX Exodus 35-40 helps identify a skillful and intricate literary pattern in the execution report of the manufacture-and-inauguration of the Mishkan that spans (LXX*) Exodus 35-39 (manufacture) and Lev 8-9 (inauguration); these two sections are (or were?) two symmetrical halves of a single execution report that corresponds to the commands for manufacture (Exodus 25-27) and inauguration (28-29) of the Mishkan (followed by 30-31). This structure is summarized even better, not coincidentally, by the Hebrew underlying LXX Exod 25:7 than MT 25:8: "Make me a sanctuary
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Neither Women nor Mirrors: A Masoretic Miscue, an Alexandrian Error, and the Formation of the Tabernacle Account
Program Unit: Transmission of Traditions in the Second Temple Period
Brandon Bruning, University of Notre Dame
MT Exodus 38:8 reports that Bezalel made a water-container and its stand of bronze, using “mirrors of the serving-women who served at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting.” As some commentators observe, the consonantal text allows “visions” rather than “mirrors”; “mirrors” is unique in the Pentateuch, and the Tabernacle Account begins with visual instructions (e.g. 25:9 MT) and concludes its instructions: “See! I have called Bezalel…” (31:2). Is the water-container made not with materials donated by the women but in accordance with their visions? The problem of female cultic specialists in P is not resolved by ascribing to them Moses-like instructions for the Tabernacle; the mystery only deepens with the contextually logical reading “visions.”
The corresponding phrase in LXX reads, “mirrors of the women who fasted at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting”--then continues, “on the day it was set up.” Thus the manufacture of the water-container cannot precede the Tabernacle’s assembly in LXX 40, nor is it mentioned there. By contrast MT 40 supplies commands for its placement and anointing; awkwardly, MT 40:30-32 follows the placement of the water-container with a long explanation about the ritual uses of its water. This purpose for the water does appear in LXX Exodus--not in LXX 40, but in the report of the manufacture of the water-container in LXX 38--immediately following the verse the translator took to refer to women whose mirrors supplied the bronze. These verses conclude a chapter in LXX Exodus unlike anything readers of MT encounter: a register of Bezalel’s achievements (LXX 38).
Except for incense and anointing oil, listed just before the water-container, Bezalel’s oeuvre catalogue in LXX 38 is strictly metallurgical. Yet LXX 36 (priestly vestments) and 37 (the Tent and Court) also include metalwork. What distinguishes the items in LXX 38? They are shown to Moses--the Tent’s furniture (Exodus 25), its three-sided frame (26), and the Altar (27)--just as he is shown Bezalel (31). These visions must be realized prior to the Tabernacle’s assembly (40)--except the water-container and spice compounds needed only once it is set up. The water-container and spice compounds are also juxtaposed in Exodus 30 between instructions for the half-shekel census and the “showing” of Bezalel (31). The words that both the Greek translator and a later editor (whose rearrangement of the Tabernacle Account underlies MT Exodus 35-40) construe as “serving-women” and their “mirrors” instead collect the oddly placed commands in Exodus 30 as “visions for the troops.” “Troops” anticipates the outcome of the census in Numbers: the organization of the camp around the Tabernacle and Levitical divisions “serving at the entrance...” By citing the Exodus 30 commands as “troop-visions,” the redactor who attributes the spice compounds and water-container to Bezalel acknowledges the principle by which Bezalel’s other deeds appear together in the form of Exodus that underlies both the LXX translation and the edition preserved in MT.
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Christological and Trinitarian Exegesis of Daniel 7 in Early Christianity
Program Unit: Theological Interpretation of Scripture
Bogdan G. Bucur, Duquesne University
This presentation focuses on the reception history of Daniel 7 in early Christian literature and later Byzantine hymnography. Two broad strands of interpretation—Christological and Trinitarian—can be discerned in this material. The same holds true for the reception history of the Song of the Three Youths and of theophanic texts such as Genesis 18, Isaiah 6, and Habakkuk 3:2, all of which patristic exegesis often connects with Daniel 7. My paper proposes (1) a survey of the exegetical, doctrinal, and hymnographic productions illustrating the rich reception history of Daniel 7 in early Christianity; (2) an attempt at categorizing this material; and (3), finally, a discussion of the ways in which today’s interpreters can make sense of this multi-layered exegetical tradition, characterized by diverse modes of symbolization and diverse ways of appropriating the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture.
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Performative Exegesis in Anastasius the Sinaite’s Homily on the Transfiguration
Program Unit: Performance Criticism of the Bible and Other Ancient Texts
Bogdan G. Bucur, Duquesne University
Building on Austin’s understanding of performatives as “simultaneously saying something and doing something by talking about saying and talking about doing,” scholars speak of “performative utterances” and “performative exegesis” in the religious literature of the Ancient Near East, in biblical and parabiblical writings. “Performative exegesis,” then, would be a ritual reading of the sacred text in which the latter is used as a script to be performed and re-enacted, so that the reader is united with the rhetorical “I” of the sacred text, enters the world of the text, and experiences that which the text describes. The seventh-century homily on the Transfiguration penned by abbot of St. Catherine’s monastery, Anastasius the Sinaite, is counted among the most beautiful productions of its genre. This work discloses the meaning of the Transfiguration by weaving together several theophanic texts—chiefly, the theophany at Bethel and at least three Sinai-events—in order to, as it claims, mediate the experience of the prophets Moses and Elijah, and of the apostles Peter, James, and John, to its Christian audience of pilgrims celebrating the Transfiguration on Mt. Tabor. Scripture exegesis allows the speaker to make oblique references to his own ecstatic experience, and to set himself up as a model and mediator of how the audience should consume the text by experiencing it. The rhetorical and exegetical movements of the homily spring from the writer’s understanding of the sacred text as encapsulating the paradigm of ecstatic experience. This paradigm, although veiled by human language and locked away in a constellation of Scriptural accounts, is accessed and reproduced by the inspired exegete, who then mediates it to the hearers by means of performative and mystagogical exegesis.
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Poimandres, Kmeph, and the Laughing God: A Hermetic Scheme of Creation
Program Unit: Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism
Christian H. Bull, University of Oslo
In his defense of Egyptian theurgy, The Response of Abammon to Porphyry (De mysteriis), Iamblichus provides an account of creation that he attributes to the Egyptian Hermes. In this cosmogony the first principle is the pre-noetic Kmeph, who conceives himself as the noetic Ikton. From this first nous derives the demiurgic nous, which is called Ammon, Ptah or Osiris according to its activities, and the demiurge derives matter from materiality, which has been separated from God’s essentiality.
This emanatory protology bears strong structural similarities with that found in the Poimandres, where the myth of creation is presented as a revelation. Here the enigmatic figure Poimandres is seen as the primal, luminous nous of authentia, “the sovereign power,” and a second, demiurgic nous derives the elements from dark and moist Nature, which has broken away from the first luminous nous.
A third Hermetic account of creation can be found in a Greco-Egyptian magical papyrus, the so-called Leiden kosmopoiia (PGM XIII), where God laughs the universe into being in seven consecutive laughs. Especially the hypostases that result from the first four laughs correspond to the scheme of creation found in Iamblichus and the Poimandres.
The present contribution aims to demonstrate the common dependence of these Hermetic accounts of creation on a Neopythagorean numerological scheme, possibly from the Pythagorean Hypomnemata, known from the first century BCE, or a similar source. However, we shall also see that the protologies of Iamblichus and the Leiden kosmopoiia substantially correspond respectively to Roman-era inscriptions found in the temples of the god Amun in Thebes and the goddess Neith in Esna. This supports the hypothesis that there was a real connection between Hermetism and the Egyptian temples, and that the Egyptian elements in the Hermetica were not merely orientalizing décor, as earlier scholarship would have it.
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At Play in Potential Space: Reading King Qohelet’s Building Experiment with Winnicott
Program Unit: Psychology and Biblical Studies
Mette Bundvad, University of Copenhagen
This paper explores the royal fiction in the book of Qohelet, 1:12–2:20, and its relationship to the cosmological poem which precedes it in 1:4–11. Interpreters struggle to read the two texts together: are they connected in a meaningful way or do they provide two independent entry-points into the book? There are also problematic elements in the royal fiction when read on its own. It is, for example, difficult to explain why a large part of the king’s experiment with wisdom takes the form of a magnificent building project (2:4–8). Are we simply meant to read this passage as a depiction of kingly might, giving credence to Qohelet’s claim that he is the richest and wisest king of them all, or does the building experiment play a more integral role in his exploration of humanity’s conditions of life?
I show that a psychoanalytic/spatial reading of the two passages can cast light on these issues, allowing the introductory poem and the royal fiction to enter into a meaningful dialogue with each other. I argue that the king’s building project may productively be read as a counter-space to the cosmic space of the initial poem, established to protect his identity in the midst of a hostile cosmos. To understand the character and purpose of the king’s spatial project, I bring in Winnicott’s psychoanalytic work. Winnicott discusses the relationship between the inner reality of the individual human being and the external world in spatial terms, making him an ideal conversation partner for a study of the function of the different kinds of space in the book of Qohelet. His concept of potential space, an in-between space which mediates the relationship between the inner psyche and external reality, provides a particularly useful analogy to the way that space is utilized in the royal experiment.
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Early New Testament Manuscripts and the Implications for Textual Criticism
Program Unit: Global Education and Research Technology
Alan Bunning, Purdue University
Over the centuries, New Testament textual criticism has often been operating in the dark, relying on outdated apparatuses that only display a limited number of variants, cite a limited number of witnesses, lack the context of where manuscripts start and stop, conceal the state of the manuscripts’ conditions, do not distinguish between the importance of witnesses, and on top of that, they contain errors! The Center for New Testament Restoration (CNTR) attempts to address these concerns by providing all known references to the Greek New Testament on extant manuscripts dated before 400 AD. In addition to the major continuous texts, a second category containing quotations, amulets, inscriptions, etc. has also been included. Individual electronic transcriptions of each manuscript have been made, along with a complete collation showing the word-by-word alignment. Associated metadata including the description, contents, date, provenance, location, and publication has also been collected for each artifact. This corpus of data is significant because it reveals the most complete picture of the early New Testament sources to the general public and enables new types of advanced statistical data analysis, including the algorithmic computer generation of a base text. This data is currently hosted on the CNTR website and will be made available for free download using the TEI XML format.
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Effective Death Traditions, Imitation of Christ, and the Suffering of Christians in the New Testament
Program Unit: Sacrifice, Cult, and Atonement
Justin Buol, University of Notre Dame
As New Testament authors grapple with understanding the significance of Jesus’ death, they cast it in diverse terms and imagery: as sacrifice, ransom, atonement, noble death, exemplary model, and so on. One of these themes that has particular currency in many books of the New Testament is the portrayal of Jesus’ suffering and death as a model for Christians to follow. This paper surveys a handful of such passages (e.g. Mark 10:45; Luke 23:26; John 15:12-13; 21:15-19; Acts 7:54-60; Heb 13:13; 12:2; 1 Pet 2:21; 3:17-18; 4:1, 12-16; 5:1-4) to understand precisely what about Jesus’ suffering is being offered as a model in each case. After this overview, analysis is given to two particular aspects of Jesus’ death as model: (1) who is supposed to follow Jesus’ model, and (2) whether the suffering of Christians who follow Jesus’ model has beneficial effects for others. Both questions are essentially concerned with the extent to which Jesus’ death is imitable. In answering the first question, special focus falls on places where leaders are supposed to enact Jesus’ example. Answering the second question requires some attention to effective death traditions from the Greco-Roman world (such as certain practitioners of the Roman devotio ritual, Greek pharmakos rituals and their mythic forebears, as well as the Maccabean martyrs) and the beneficial effects of Jesus’ death in the New Testament. This analysis finds diverse perspectives on the beneficiaries of Christian suffering in the New Testament: sometimes no beneficiary is indicated, or rarely God is the one affected, but for the most part it is the church who receives tangible effects from Christian suffering and death.
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Mark's Jesus: Spirit-Filled Charismatic and Deified Human
Program Unit: Gospel of Mark
Delbert Burkett, Louisiana State University
The present paper addresses the question of whether Mark’s Jesus is in some sense divine or identified with God. Interpreters of Mark’s gospel commonly see Mark as representing a “low” christology, in which Jesus is a human being, not a divine being. This perspective, however, continues to be challenged by interpreters who find in Mark a “high” christology, in which Jesus is a divine being or in some way identified with God. The present paper examines this issue. It supports the thesis that Mark’s Jesus is a human being to whom God grants divine power and prerogatives. It supports this thesis by paying attention not only to the narrative world of Mark’s gospel but also to its cultural and religious context in Second-Temple Judaism, the Greco-Roman world, and early Christianity. The examination proceeds diachronically in the order of Mark’s narrative, so that Mark’s christology is unfolded in the order in which Mark presents it as well as the order in which a reader encounters it. In the process, the paper examines aspects of the story in which some interpreters have found Jesus identified with God--such as Jesus’ claim to forgive sins, his ability to calm a storm, and his power to raise the dead--and it finds this identification unjustified. It concludes that two moments in Jesus’ story are key for understanding his relation to God. The first is his baptism, at which he receives the Spirit of God. This event must be understood in the context of Jewish traditions about the Messiah and early Christian traditions about baptism. At this point, the man Jesus is anointed as the Messiah, adopted as God’s son, and imbued with the power and prerogatives of God. The second is his ascension, at which he sits at the right hand of God. This event must be understood in the context of Greco-Roman traditions concerning apotheosis. At this point, God bestows on Jesus a place of authority in the divine realm and shares with him his own name. In Mark’s christology, a god does not become a man, but a man becomes a god.
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A New Interpretation of Line Five of the Amman Citadel Inscription
Program Unit: Ugaritic Studies and Northwest Semitic Epigraphy
Andrew R. Burlingame, University of Chicago
Since the discovery of the Amman Citadel Inscription in 1961 during excavations directed by Rafiq Dajani and the Jordanian Department of Antiquities and Siegfried Horn’s publication of the same in a brief presentation in 1968 and a lengthier editio princeps in 1969, the importance of the text for the study of Ammonite language and paleography have been virtually universally acknowledged. Despite its and length and its apparent cultural significance, however, the fragmentary state of this text has hindered its interpretation. While numerous studies have significantly enhanced our understanding of the text, an increasingly agnostic trajectory has characterized the scholarly disposition toward line 5 of the inscription in particular. Though this line is perhaps the best preserved of the entire text, most scholars have ultimately resorted to emendation or the proposal of a variety of morphological or lexical interpretations of questionable probability in an effort to interpret this line. More recent studies have despaired of any meaningful interpretation whatsoever.
The present study is designed to contribute to our understanding of the Amman Citadel Inscription at precisely this point. I would like to call attention to several data of potential relevance, which have not yet been introduced into the discussion of the interpretation of this problematic line. Specifically, while a number of scholars have recognized a denominative verb in the line-initial sequence {tdlt}, these treatments have depended on improbable semantic analyses. I propose that this verb in fact means “to outfit with a door” and point out the generally overlooked instance of this verb in the Temple Scroll (11Q19 33.13), where it appears to have precisely the semantic value envisioned here. Furthermore, by reconsidering Cross’s 1969 syntactic analysis of the end of the line in light of the corrected reading offered by subsequent collations, to which Cross had no access at the time, I believe we are in a better position to identify the morpho-syntax and semantics of the entire line. By recognizing in {kbh} a noun with 3ms suffix, and by connecting this noun to possible Akkadian and Ugaritic cognates, I propose that the addressee is in this line instructed to equip with a door “the interior of its [the structure’s] sanctuary.” I hope to illustrate that these proposals allow us to arrive at a more philologically satisfying reading of the line. This reading may, in turn, allow us better to understand the function of the inscription within its historical context, while simultaneously shedding new light on related philological questions in Northwest Semitic studies.
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The Sword and the Servant: Reframing the Function of the “Two Swords” of Luke 22:35–38 in Narrative Context
Program Unit: Synoptic Gospels
David A. Burnett, Criswell College
The “two swords” passage of Luke 22:35-38 has plagued interpreters for centuries. Scholars have attempted to explain this passage by suggesting that Jesus was either not speaking literally of buying swords, alluding to future persecution of the disciples, preparing them for bandits along the way, preparing them for the time of trial to come when he is gone, etc. Many of these interpretive positions seem to be out of step from Luke’s narrative portrayal of the mission and ethic of Jesus and his disciples. In recent scholarship the dominant approaches to solving the interpretative issues associated with this enigmatic text have tended to focus myopically on the pericope itself apart from a thorough treatment of passage within its narrative context. This study will provide an explanation of Jesus’ command to buy a sword within the immediate context of the narrative as a prophetic announcement of the disciples’ denial in the same way he announces Peter’s denial in the previous section. This will be demonstrated in two ways: 1) arguing for Luke’s positioning of the unique “two swords” pericope (Lk 22:35-38) within a wider chiastic structure of Lk 22:31-62 and 2) demonstrating that in Luke’s employment of Isaiah 53:12 in the immediate narrative context, he understands the transgressors that Jesus is to be counted with are not the criminals that he is crucified next to, as traditionally understood, but with his disciples who brandish the sword. This reading is consistent with the non-violent martyrological ethic of the Jesus movement in Luke-Acts and has profound implications for early Christian ethics in the context of Roman imperial domination in the first-century as well as for contemporary Christian ethics today.
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Religion in Iron Age Jordan
Program Unit: Archaeology of the Biblical World
Joel S. Burnett, Baylor University
This paper will introduce a panel session on religion in Iron Age Transjordan. The primary aim is to establish a context for papers that follow in the session, which may focus on specific archaeological sites or specific forms of religious evidence. I will offer an overview of archaeological, epigraphic, and biblical evidence relating to religious beliefs and practices east of the Jordan during this period (ca. 1150-550 B.C.E.) with attention to geographic, historical, and economic contexts and in relationship to social and political identity both east and west of the Jordan. Basic questions to be addressed include how the archaeological and epigraphic evidence from Jordan relates to biblical evidence, how that evidence relates to national identities, and what roles religion played in both contested and cooperative relationships among Iron Age kingdoms and their populations east of the Jordan.
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Is Ghulat Religion Islamic Gnosticism? (2) Syro-Mesopotamian Gnostic Traditions
Program Unit: The Qur’an and Late Antiquity (IQSA)
Dylan Burns, Freie Universität Berlin
Is Ghulat religion “Gnostic”? This contribution will elaborate how mythological and doctrinal ideas associated with the infamous Shi’ite “Gnostics” known as the Ghulat have strong parallels with Sethian Gnosticism as well as Manichaeaism and Mandaeanism. These themes include interest in identifying authority-figures as reincarnations of primeval patriarchs and savior-prophets, belief in the reincarnation of human souls, speculation about the celestial liturgy and doxology, and interest in the transformation of the self into a divine being with a divine body. Meanwhile, other characteristics of Ghulat thought that seem vaguely “Gnosticizing” at first glance simply recall more general themes in ancient religious discourse. Finally, characteristics of Ghulat myth that have been held by scholars to be of distinctly Gnostic provenance—the accounts of the fall of the shadows or humans, or the creation of the world by the Prophet-cum-Demiurge—are not be Gnostic at all, but quite idiosyncratic. Thus, while much of Ghulat thought is original, much is indebted to Sethian Gnostic and related traditions from the Roman East. At the same time, despite this indebtedness to these Gnostic sources, Ghulat thought should not be characterized as strictly “Gnostic” or even “dualistic,” and therefore its designation, common to the secondary literature, as a kind of “Islamic gnosis” is a misnomer. Rather, the phenomenon of Ghulat religion might be best described as an original “Islamicization” of a variety of ancient religious traditions, many of them stemming from Gnostic and Manichaean sources we know to have circulated in late antique Syria and Mesopotamia.
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Alchemical Metaphor in the Paraphrase of Shem (NHC VII,1)
Program Unit: Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism
Dylan M. Burns, Freie Universität Berlin
Among the most difficult—and fascinating—of the Nag Hammadi texts is the Paraphrase of Shem (NHC VII,1). Particularly mysterious are its opening pages, which describe the repeated descents and ascents of a savior-figure, who liberates spiritual light from the darkness with which it was once mixed. This liberation is described as, among other things, a series of obscure reactions between light, darkness, fire, heat, and weight—images whose meaning and motivation have yet to be explained by modern research. This paper seeks to demonstrate that the metaphors used in this and other parts of NHC VII,1 derive from the contemporary metallurgical practice of tincturing, a practice which occupied a central role in the development of Greco-Egyptian alchemy. The talk will also address the greater question of framing research into Gnosticism, alchemy, Egyptian magic, and esotericism.
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Fasting on the Sabbath: An Ancient Jewish Stereotype Deconstructed
Program Unit: Sabbath in Text and Tradition
Joshua Ezra Burns, Marquette University
A number of ancient Roman authors expressed the belief that Jews fasted on the Sabbath day. Modern commentators have yet to offer a convincing explanation of this apparent misconception. Most have simply attributed it to ignorance. Some have inferred confusion with the traditional prohibition against cooking on the Sabbath. Others have posited that Roman Jews actually did fast on the Sabbath. Assessing the empirical advantages and disadvantages of these theories, I propose an alternative explanation. Specifically, I contend that the belief that Jews did not eat on the Sabbath was born of the fact that Jews did not shop for food on the Sabbath. At a time when most food was prepared for consumption on the day of its purchase, the weekly disappearance of Jews from the Roman marketplace signaled to observers outside their community their abstinence from eating. I therefore conclude that the perception that Jews routinely fasted on the Sabbath, though likely mistaken, was the result of a benign cultural misunderstanding.
I shall base my thesis on two arguments: 1) Roman Jews, like other Jews, avoided conducting financial transactions on the Sabbath, 2) Roman Jews, like other Romans, normally obtained their foodstuffs from vendors in the macellum, or market, where they would have interacted with non-Jews as a matter of course. My evidence for the former will draw upon comments by Philo (Legat. 158) and Josephus (Ant. 16.163, 168), among other data drawn from the Old and New Testaments and rabbinic literature. My evidence for the latter draw upon the treatment of Claire Holleran, Shopping in Ancient Rome (2012), with data specific to Jewish participation in Roman marketplace culture culled from a catacomb inscription (ILS 9432).
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Ancient Biography, Matthew’s Genre, and the Development of the Canonical Collection
Program Unit: Matthew
Richard A. Burridge, King's College - London
The biographical gospel genre (Burridge, What are the Gospels? (CUP 1992; second edition Eerdmans 2004) is widely accepted. However, significant implications of this genre have received less attention, particularly regarding genre theory and the way groups of ancient lives inter-related in composition and interpretation. Reviews of Watson’s Gospel Writing (Eerdmans 2013) note its curious absence of consideration of gospel genre. The four canonical gospels display the features and conventions of Graeco-Roman Lives, different from those in other so-called ‘gospels’. This paper explores whether the gospels’ biographical genre explains both their development and their later recognition as canonical, distinguishing them from other ‘gospels’, lacking this biographical genre.
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"Sprinkle the Place with This Water”: Christianization and Islamification of Religious Space in Late Antiquity
Program Unit: Religious World of Late Antiquity
Adam Bursi, Cornell University
The blessedness inherent in holy places, in the bodies of holy men, and in the relics of their bodies, was understood in late antiquity as a portable commodity that could be moved from place to place via physical contact, as we see for example in the phenomenon of pilgrims’ eulogiai. This portability of blessedness was even transferable to new spaces through a relic sacralizing the space of its new resting place, physically separated from the original holy man, shrine, or even the original relic. In sanctifying spaces, the placement of relics could be used not only to add holiness to an otherwise neutral space, but also to symbolically (and, in all likelihood, literally in the minds of many late ancient observers) cleanse a space perceived to contain a pagan or heretical past. For example, the first attested translatio of relics—the movement of a Decian-era martyr named Babylas from Antioch to a sanctuary in the Antiochene suburb of Daphne—is associated with the repelling from Daphne of a previously powerful oracle of Apollo. The placement of relics became a mandated component of church dedications at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 and the Venerable Bede’s eighth-century Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum cites a letter from Pope Gregory the Great describing the installation of relics as an official part of the ritual process for converting pagan temples into Christian church spaces. In these descriptions, the installation of holy water, altars, and relics serves to symbolically remove the pagan past and to repurpose such spaces for Christian usage.
This paper will examine a similar ritual for the conversion of religious space described in an early Islamic hadith that deals with the conversion of Jewish/Christian biya’ (“churches, prayer spaces”) into Muslim masajid (mosques). Specifically, this hadith narrates the usage of an Islamic contact relic—the Prophet Muhammad’s used ablution water—for the cleansing and repurposing of heterodox religious space, a Christian prayer space. This “Islamification” of religious space displays an interest in using religiously powerful objects for the transformation of space similar to what see in the “Christianization” of pagan temples through saints’ relics. Like Christian relics, divided and translated to new spaces for the sanctification of new spaces, Muhammad’s used ablution water offers a transportable embodiment of his authority to be brought to a distant location for the establishment of a new Muslim religious space. Instead of a Christian martyr’s relic sanctifying a church, a contact relic from the Muslim prophet allows this religious space to become a masjid. Christian space becomes Islamic space through the presence of a specifically Islamic relic and Mu?ammad’s body itself serves as a boundary marker, distinguishing Christian from Muslim space and identity.
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The Animal World, Horror, and the Unimaginable in the Book of Job
Program Unit: Ideological Criticism
Sean Burt, North Dakota State University
This paper seeks to investigate the horrific in The Book of Job's whirlwind speeches, particularly the animal questions in Job 38:39–39:30. Drawing on the work of scholars who have explored the whirlwind speeches in Job (Timothy Beal, William P. Brown, Davis Hankins, others), this paper engages with current theoretical and philosophical work on horror (including that of Eugene Thacker, Dylan Trigg, and Graham Harman). In the animal speeches, the character of Job encounters a fragmentary, seething creation that is indifferent to humanity, that simultaneously overflows and remains inaccessible. These speeches present the reader with a vision of the cosmos that could be characterized “Lovecraftian,” following the fictional universe of the writer H.P. Lovecraft. In the Book of Job, creatures, indeed even Job’s own body, have lives of their own. Animal life has its own autonomy insofar as it is unassimilable and unable to be mastered by humans. In other words, the horizon within which humans meet the cosmos is not one of sublimity or wonder, but of horror. Further, the book does not simply grant non-human life its own autonomy, but it also suggests that the precondition for considering and understanding the cosmos is acknowledging it as unimaginable.
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Revisionary Interpretation of Homeric and Biblical Myth
Program Unit: Bible, Myth, and Myth Theory
Austin Busch, SUNY Brockport
The category of Scripture cannot be limited to authoritative writings, but must also incorporate the conventional hermeneutical practices uniquely (at least in degree) associated with the writings that these practices, in fact, canonize: a combination of exhaustive editorial activity, consistently rehabilitative interpretation, frequent literary transposition into innovative contexts, etc. By this account, Homeric epic is no less “scriptural” than the Hebrew Bible in Greco-Roman antiquity—for polytheists, especially, but in a sense, for Christians and Jews as well. Dennis MacDonald’s analysis of New Testament narrative’s employment of Homer in its own way confirms this observation, challenging biblical scholars to work with a broader understanding of canonically authoritative writings than they normally employ. I embrace that challenge by arguing that early Christians acknowledged and negotiated Homeric epic’s status as Scripture in various ways—not merely by rewriting Homer, as MacDonald demonstrates, but also by adopting conventional strategies for interpreting Homeric myth to the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. As a case study, I will demonstrate that Gnostic interpretations of Genesis, which have long troubled scholars of ancient Christianity, quite straightforwardly adapt interpretive models from Second-Sophistic readings of Homer. Analogously, I will argue that certain Second-Sophistic readings of Homer adopt models from early Christian interpretations of the Gospels. My study ultimately suggests that scholars of the New Testament and early Christianity would be better served by acknowledging that the category of “Scripture” was more fluid and porous in antiquity than today, and that it as frequently served strategies of religious appropriation as it did those of religious exclusion.
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The Western Text of Acts Evidenced by Chrysostom?
Program Unit: Novum Testamentum Graecum: Editio Critica Maior
Gunnar Büsch, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster
Ever since Fred C. Conybeare’s article “On the Western text of Acts as evidenced by Chrysostom” (1896), James Hardy Ropes’ “The Text of Acts” (1926) and finally Boismard/Lamouille’s “Texte Occidental” (1984) it is generally agreed that Chrysostom’s Homiliae in Acta Apostolorum and the biblical text contained in them were passed down in two forms, an early rough version and a later smoothed-out recension. The former is commonly supposed to contain larger amounts of ‘Western’ readings. It is also agreed that Chrysostom’s text still is in desperate need of further investigation, especially as we still lack a critical edition that adequately incorporates both text forms.
Preparing the patristic evidence for the ECM of Acts, we had to revisit the questions related to the earlier tradition of Chrysostom’s homilies as represented by two Oxford manuscripts, New College 75-76. This paper will discuss supposedly ‘Western’ readings in these manuscripts and present a re-evaluation of the evidence.
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“Chaining Out” on Deuteronomy: Fantasy Theme Analysis of Prayers in Ezra-Nehemiah
Program Unit: Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah
Aubrey E. Buster, Emory University
Ernest Bormann (1972) has analyzed the phenomenon of group communication by means of Robert Bales’ account of the dynamic process of group fantasizing. Bales’ research provides an account of how dramatizing communication creates social reality for people. Analysis of these group fantasies provides insight into the group’s culture, motivation, emotional style, and cohesion. While we do not have access to the audience reaction of Ezra or Nehemiah’s provocative public prayers, we do possess the tools to analyze the respective fantasy themes of each presentation. These are the themes of language that, once accepted by the group, become self-perpetuating, characterizing the drama which the group understands itself to be enacting. In my paper I identify and analyze at least four fantasy themes present in the penitential prayers of Ezra-Nehemiah:
1) the chosenness of the community;
2) the promise of land;
3) divine provision in times of difficulty;
4) obedience to divine commandments.
The speakers of the prayer effectively provide a motivation for the community to get on the bandwagon, to “chain out” on the Deuteronomic fantasy. The result is just such a commitment, as demonstrated in Nehemiah 9: “Because of all this we make a firm covenant in writing; on the sealed document are the names of our princes, our Levites, and our priests” (Neh 9:38).
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Jesus Prays the Shema as Ezekiel’s Prophesied King: A Reassessment of Johannine Oneness
Program Unit: Intertextuality in the New Testament
Andrew Byers, St John's College, University of Durham
The prayer for oneness in John 17 has been understood as evidence of an historical schism that threatened the integrity of the Johannine community, giving rise to the influential interpretative tradition in ecumenical dialogue in which Jesus’ prayer is treated as a foundational text for building the unity of the church. This paper proposes a reappraisal of the Johannine oneness motif by attending to a strategically employed pattern of intertextual references. By the time Jesus prays “that they may be one, as we are one” in John 17:22, the concept of oneness has undergone a careful, complex development within the Gospel’s sequence. Approaches that understand “one” as signifying a unity of social harmony do not sufficiently take this prior intertextual development into hermeneutical account. Demonstrating that Johannine oneness draws alternatively from prophetic texts in Ezekiel and from the language of the Shema in Deuteronomy 6, I will build the case that the prayer for believers to become “one” as Jesus is “one” is with the Father is not intended to address an internal threat of church division but an external threat of rejection and persecution from a Jewish socio-religious context. The social crisis evoked by Christology among Johannine Christians would have been severely distressing for them as Jews finding themselves at odds with their communal identity and scriptural traditions. In the collective self-understanding underlying the Gospel, however, it is not Johannine Christians who have parted ways with Judaism; on the contrary, it is the polemicized “Jews” that have parted ways with the “one” God who cannot be known apart from the revelation made available in Jesus, the “one” divine Shepherd (10:16). The oneness motif in John 17, therefore, is intended not as a call to social unity but as an expression of social identity. The evangelist’s intertextual appropriation of these two sets of scriptural texts is intended to show that Johannine Christians’ experience of group extraction and subsequent resocialization into a new collective entity does not amount to a departure from the “one” God of Israel.
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More Than Symbolic Blackness: Some Hermeneutical Reflections on Ethnicity and the Interpretation of Luke-Acts
Program Unit: Book of Acts
Gay Byron, Howard University
Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature was one of several books published during the first decade of the twenty-first century charting a new direction in New Testament interpretation that foregrounded questions of ethnic identity, literary theory, rhetorical strategy, and theological meaning. Whether scholars called it “ethno-political rhetoric” or “ethnic reasoning” or color-coded language,” there was consensus that ethnicity matters and reading for ethnicity opened a new window onto the world of the early Christians. While Paul claims there is “no Jew or Greek,” Luke and several of his contemporaries demonstrate in their writings that Judeans, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Canaanites, Cretans, and other ethnic “others” are central for the creation of a type of Christianity that advances the interests of those who resonated with the dominant discourses and values of the empire. After providing an overview of how New Testament critics have already explored the terrain of ethnicity, this paper will outline some new directions for interpreting ethnicity in Luke-Acts that move beyond minoritized perspectives and invite a broad spectrum of hermeneutical entry points.
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One Grave, Two Women, One Man: Complicating Family Life at Colossae
Program Unit: Archaeology of Religion in the Roman World
Alan Cadwallader, Australian Catholic University
A recently discovered inscription from the necropolis of Colossae adds a further complication to the varieties of family structure evident at Colossae from published and unpublished epitaphs and from New Testament textual witnesses. The concentration of the paper will be on the inscription for Meniandros and his extended family found on a bomos in the Colossian necropolis, here released for the first time by kind permission of Professor Ender Varinlioglu. Comparison with other inscriptions and stelai reliefs from Colossae reveals that the actual structures of family life recorded at Colossae were quite varied, even given the limited materials available for interpretation. The implications for assessing the levels of adherence to the promoted imperial models of family life will be explored, with special attention to an evaluation of the rationales for material and textual displays of compliance, such as in standardized funerary banquet reliefs and the household code in the letter to the Colossians.
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"The Word That Was from the Beginning": Syriac Etymology in a Digital Age
Program Unit: International Syriac Language Project
David M. Calabro, Brigham Young University
Abstract: Although Brockelmann’s Lexicon Syriacum (2nd ed., 1928) and Sokoloff’s revision of the Lexicon Syriacum (2009) include etymologies, and the Thesaurus Syriacus of Payne Smith (1879-1927) includes some information related to etymology, Syriac scholarship still awaits an in-depth etymological dictionary that makes use of the resources available to modern Semitists. In this presentation, I will point out some advantages of a digital dictionary and text corpus in producing an in-depth etymological dictionary. For example, digital technology makes possible the interlinking of the lexicon and corpus, ultimately allowing etymological options to be relatively easily compared with geographical, chronological, and dialectal data. In addition, a digital lexicon in which etymologies are tagged by category of semantic change allows research on the typology of semantic shifts. An etymological lexicon of Syriac that makes use of digital technology will also be useful in related Semitic and Afroasiatic fields, since tagged comparanda can be instantly sorted to generate partial etymological lexicons of whatever languages are included in the Syriac lexicon’s comparative scope. I will show how a typical etymological entry that optimizes these possibilities would look, using examples from the in-progress Oxford-BYU digital corpus and lexicon project.
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To See the Invisible One: Moses and Hermes in the Greek and Demotic Magical Papyri
Program Unit: Mysticism, Esotericism, and Gnosticism in Antiquity
Jared C. Calaway, Illinois College
The Greco-Egyptian Magical Papyri that date from the first four centuries CE are exemplars of the fluidity of the exchange of religious ideas and practices. They contain love spells, exorcisms, and instructions for calling upon and having a vision of a deity. The most significant figure in Greco-Roman Egypt to provide such mediation was Hermes Trismegistus in the collections of Hermetica and the magical papyri. Other than Hermes Trismegistus, however, Moses is one of the most invoked figures in the Greek and Demotic magical papyri. Many treatises are associated with Moses and the revelation of the divine name, the source of his power, such as the “Eighth Book of Moses” (PGM XIII.1-343; XIII.343-646) and “The Tenth Book of Moses” (PGM XIII.734-1077). Moses’ moment on Sinai and the revelation of the divine name becomes paradigmatic for any practitioner – not only for Jews and Christians, but also for others seeking a divine encounter. He was invoked as a common exemplar, whose authority circulated beyond Jewish and Christian sub-cultures, becoming a cross-religious figure. By acting as Moses did, one could even call oneself Moses, taking on Moses’ identity to call down God upon the mountain and to have a vision of the invisible (PGM V.109-116; PDM 125-132). Moses became the magus par excellence. As the most commonly invoked mediators, were practitioners who used Moses and Hermes competitors or do we find confluence? Some traditions identify the two as the same figure, given their similar functions; others suggest they were rivals, largely for the same reasons. In addition to social interactions among practitioners, to what extent did the actual practices in the passages invoking Moses and in those invoking Hermes coincide and diverge? And how did these practices relate to or diverge from broader Moses visionary traditions among late antique Jews and Christians, who, too, sought to see the invisible One?
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Spatiotemporality in Hebrews, 4 Ezra, and Revelation
Program Unit: Hebrews
Jared C. Calaway, Illinois College
In general, scholars have divided themselves among those who study space and those who study time, treating them as discrete, yet complementary categories. This is true in the academe broadly, in biblical studies, and in the study of Hebrews specifically. Concerning Hebrews, scholars focusing on the spatial cosmology tend to prefer a Platonic or Philonic reading, while those with a temporal perspective prefer a more apocalyptic/eschatological stance. More recently, however, a handful of scholars have begun to note the sophisticated spatiotemporal interactions that occur throughout Hebrews. Applying insights by critical theorists such as Henri Lefebvre and M.M. Bakhtin among others, this paper will explore some of the sophisticated relationships of space and time that extend throughout Hebrews with special attention to traditions of rest/land, tabernacle, and the camp, and how these spatial categories map in complex ways onto temporal categories of Sabbath, present, and future ages. This paper will provide a differential reading of the spatiotemporality of Hebrews by drawing in roughly contemporary apocalyptic works, particularly 4 Ezra and Revelation, which also have strong interests in the relationship between past, present, and future ages and the spatial categories of land/rest and temple/tabernacle, but map these relationships in different ways. This analysis, therefore, will take some initial steps to show what distinctive contribution Hebrews gives, while also seeing how it participates in spatiotemporal speculation of its own historical time and place.
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Prophetic Corpus: Jeremiah’s Body in Biblical and Postbiblical Tradition
Program Unit: Book of Jeremiah
Mary Chilton Callaway, Fordham University
The prophet’s body is a constant presence in both biblical text and post-biblical tradition, yet it remains elusive. The first part of the paper explores the unusually prominent role of the prophet’s body as both subject and object. Jeremiah is the subject in poetic descriptions of inner turmoil as bodily distress: pain in the gut, wildly beating heart, fire in the bones. Describing emotions in terms of their physical manifestations is a well known feature of ancient Near Eastern poetry, from Sumerian lament to Babylonian epic. The somatizing of the prophet’s inner distress in the poetry of Jeremiah represents a highly developed subjective aspect of this long established tradition. On the other hand, in the biographical narratives Jeremiah’s body is repeatedly described as the object of others’ actions, including assaults, imprisonment and kidnapping. The paper argues that in juxtaposing the prophet as both subject and object in this way, the final form of the Jeremiah tradition creates a new discourse about the prophetic body as the locus of the divine word. The second half of the paper shows how this complex trope of Jeremiah’s body began to shape the way the book was received and elaborated in Second Temple Judaism and then in Christianity. The developing Jeremiah tradition is characterized by new stories that highlight the prophet’s physical presence as locus of divine power, typically in miracles. The most enduring aspect of Second Temple reception, which persisted into early modernity, is the tradition that Jeremiah was stoned to death by his countrymen. This very influential tradition shifted the emphasis from the older trope of Jeremiah’s body as locus of divine word to the new model of martryred body as site of holiness. When the Jeremiah tradition later becomes embodied in codices, an illustration of the prophet’s body assaulted by stones often introduces the reader to his words. Examples of these illustrations will accompany the presentation.
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“He Had neither Form nor Beauty”: The Physiognomic Curiosity of the Negative Descriptions of the Physical Appearance of Jesus
Program Unit: Social Scientific Criticism of the New Testament
Callie Callon, Queen's University
In ancient physiognomic consciousness there was almost a universal consensus that a person of good moral character would have an attractive appearance that testified his or her virtues. Moreover, it was understood that figures who were either divine themselves or favoured by the divine would have a corresponding impressive physique. Some early Christian authors who operated with an otherwise typical physiognomic mind frame in other works nonetheless do not object to - and sometimes actively promote - the lacklustre physical form of the “Suffering Servant” as applied literally to Jesus to describe his physical appearance. This is a rather curious tension, and at odds with their contemporaries such as Philo and Josephus who demonstrate discomfort with and an attempt to refute traditions about the physical shortcoming of Moses. In view of this a reason why these early Christian authors deviate from the practices of their contemporaries requires a potential explanation. In this paper I suggest that these early Christian authors utilized the idea of a physically unimpressive Jesus for particular rhetorical gains that they thought trumped the stigma of an unattractive authority figure.
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The Study of the Theology of Prayer in the Old Testament: Retrospective
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Phillip G. Camp, Lipscomb University
The Study of the Theology of Prayer in the Old Testament: Retrospective
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Greek Prepositions and New Testament Exegesis
Program Unit: Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics
Constantine R. Campbell, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
This paper will explore key issues and complexities for understanding prepositions in the exegesis of Greek text.
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Reframing 2 Thessalonians: Paul's Response to the Gaian Crisis
Program Unit: Disputed Paulines
Douglas Campbell, The Divinity School, Duke University
Recently I have argued that many of the basic scholarly judgments about Paul's letters need to revised (Framing Paul, Eerdmans, 2014). Moreover, I suggest that many of our techniques for evaluating authenticity need to be refashioned. I suggest in this paper that this new approach suggests the authenticity of 2 Thessalonians, alongside 1 Thessalonians. The indications are, furthermore, that these letters were written early within Paul's missionary career, while some hints suggest their location during "the Gaian crisis," which unfolded principally through 40 CE, as the emperor planned to erect a statue of himself, portrayed as Zeus/Jupiter, in the Jerusalem temple. Paul's engagement with the emperor cult was consequently very direct in this instance. Indeed, it was threaded into his eschatology.
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Answering Our Question about Strategic Atheism
Program Unit: Westar Institute
John D. Caputo, Syracuse University
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Doubling Claimants
Program Unit: Markan Literary Sources
Kenneth Cardwell, Saint Mary's College of California
The Question of Tribute (Mk 12:13-17) and The Decision of Solomon on the Disputed Child (I Kings 3:16-28) bear a superficial resemblance. Each places two contending parties before a judge. The judges ( a king and a “king”) render judgment at the place where a temple is about to be built. The contending participants in both accounts employ a language full of antitheses stated and restated. Jesus’s “Bring me a denarius” chimes with Solomon’s “Bring me a sword.” Solomon’s judgment causes those who heard of it to hold him in awe. Bystanders at the judgment Jesus rendered were also amazed; but the pithy saying about Caesar and God was not the cause. It was and is rather the onlookers’ and readers’ recognition of the coin’s dual claims that did or should provoke amazement. The coin displays the image of a Caesar, and on the same face an inscription makes a claim about his divinity. No sword can separate one from the other. Every person refusing to pay Caesar his coin fails to render to Caesar what is his. Every person paying the coin will render something of God’s to Caesar. Unlike the child, who has two claimants but is owed only to the one mother, the coin has two claimants and is owed to both.
The case is made that on this reading, Mark’s passage meets most of the criteria for literary mimesis. If only barely.
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Was Paul Happy? A Contextual Reading of Phil 3:1–4:1 in Conversation with North American Psychology and Its Limitations
Program Unit: Contextual Biblical Interpretation
Greg Carey, Lancaster Theological Seminary
Happiness, understood as a state or process of human flourishing, has reemerged as a prevailing interest in North American philosophy and psychology. A participant in the Pursuit of Happiness project hosted by Emory University’s Center for the Study of Law and Religion (see Brent A. Strawn, ed., The Bible and the Pursuit of Happiness), the author draws upon Phil 3:2-4:1 as a case study for investigating the insights and limitations of happiness as construed in a Western postindustrial society. In this textual unit Paul reflects on his disavowal of one set of values and relationships for the sake of the gospel, and he invites his hearers to follow him on the path. Polemical in nature, Paul’s project aims to dissuade hearers from adopting an alternative set of values. Although joy constitutes a major theme in Philippians, Paul appeals to that value only indirectly in this unit, and he never invokes language that corresponds to happiness, yet he promotes one life path over another and reflects upon its rewards. Contemporary psychology would underscore the role of progress, community, and even afterlife hope in Paul’s argument, but it would struggle to account for the mystical language heavenly participation and that of knowing and being known by Christ. The paper also examines the relationship of suffering to happiness.
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Archive, Imitation, and the Search for Identity in Ezra 1–6
Program Unit: Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah
Laura Carlson, Yale University
This paper examines the concept of archive in Ezra 1-6 and its relationship to community reconstruction in the postexilic era. I will argue that the archive functions as a symbol within the text of effective yet arbitrary imperial power; simultaneously, the text itself functions as a virtual archive through its configuration of correspondence and other “source” material. I argue that both dimensions of archive in Ezra 1-6 constitute a case of mimicry of imperial styles of text collection and citation. This imitation ultimately exposes the postexilic community’s vexed relationship with empire, being at the same time dependent on its resources, shaped by its symbols, and resistant to its values.
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Shared Theodicies of Pharaoh’s Evil in the Wisdom of Solomon and the Mekhilta De-Rabbi Ishmael
Program Unit: Wisdom in Israelite and Cognate Traditions
Reed Carlson, Harvard University
Many receptions of the Exodus story (including a well-known passage from the Passover liturgy) seek to project Pharaoh as a “type” beyond the framework of his narrative and group him with other villains in Jewish history. The hearer is thus reassured that the God who acted to save in the past, will do so again, even in the face of total annihilation. This is more than a pastoral message of assured deliverance. This view also charts an arc through time, linking those who seek the destruction of God’s people on a phenomenological plane. Pharaoh’s evil is not entirely his own.
This essay explores constructions of evil in two receptions of the Exodus story: the Wisdom of Solomon and the Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael. I argue that both works express the phenomenological view of evil stated above while at the same time intentionally try to avoid specific personifications of cosmic evil. This latter emphasis is at odds with the chaoskampf and apocalyptic traditions both works are heir to and must occasionally make use of. Rather, the problem of overwhelming evil is solved through God's just punishment. In many cases, interpretive impulses present in Wisdom can also be identified in a more mature form in the Mekhilta.
The essay outlines these two themes broadly in both works. First, it explores cosmogonic issues, showing first how Wisdom accommodates certain features of ANE chaoskampf traditions, latent in the biblical texts, into its Hellenistic worldview. Of special interest is Wisdom’s view of death as invasive to creation and whether or not diabolou is to be understood as a person in 2:23-24 (cf. 1:16). Similarly, the Mekhilta receives traditions of supernatural evil both from the Bible and interpretive tradition, but redirects their efficacy as most manifest in human behavior. Thus Baal Zaphon is seen as an idol that inspires Pharaoh (Beshalla? III:10-15; Pisc?a XIII:25-27) and God is envisioned as punishing the guardian angels because of the evil of their assigned kingdoms (Shirata II:111-119). Likewise God personally strikes down the firstborn in the tenth plague rather than using an agent (Pis?a XIII.9-11).
Second, both works hyperbolize Egypt’s evil actions (e.g. Wisd 12:4-6; Wisd 19:13-16; Beshalla? II.221-30; Beshalla? VI.76-105) as well as God’s corresponding excessive punishment (e.g. Wisd 17; Beshalla? VII.109-21; Pis?a XIII.28-38; Pis?a XIII.98-106) and thus operate out of a tight causal understanding of lex talionis (e.g. Wisd 12:23; Beshalla? I.109). While Wisdom is more sensitive to skepticism regarding the justice of God’s actions (Wisd 12:15; 18:19b) the Mekhilta is unrelenting (Beshalla? II.195). Thus, God’s vengeance is its own justification: The God of the Universe would not be so consistently merciless were it not justified.
The essay concludes by outlining some implications of the study for the study of wisdom literature more broadly, including the possibility of a genetic relationship between these works (a shared Sitz im Leben of persecution is the more likely explanation for most of these parallels) and the ways that apocalyptic traditions were received and transformed in later wisdom and midrashic literature.
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Creation and Head Coverings: Another Look at 1 Corinthians 11:15
Program Unit: Pauline Epistles
Stephen C. Carlson, Australian Catholic University
Paul’s teaching about head coverings in 1 Cor 11:2-16 has been called one of the most obscure passages in the entire Pauline corpus. Paul begins his case for female head coverings with a headship argument (vv.3-5a), which turns into an argument based on shame (vv.5b-6). Then Paul continues on to a reflection on creation (vv.7-12), followed by an appeal to common-sense (v.13), nature (v.14), and finally to contemporary practice (v.16). Tucked towards the end of this argument is the head-scratching explanation in v.15 that “she was given hair for a covering.” This comment has perplexed exegetes over the centuries because it seems to undercut Paul’s point in the passage. If a woman is given hair for a covering, why would she need a veil? Shouldn’t the (long?) hair suffice? Consequently commentators have proposed a variety of ingenious solutions ranging from redefining the issue as modesty in appearance to redefining the term “covering” as a testicle. I propose that, when Paul appealed to nature in v.14, his mind returned to creation and addressed a flaw in his application to Adam and Eve: they were naked and had no need for any covering before the fall. Verse 15, then, is meant to patch that hole in the argument: “for she—Eve—was given hair for a covering.” Though this fixes one counter-argument, it has the effect of marginalizing the applicability of creation for the issue of head coverings, hence his final appeal to contemporary practice. As we continue to work through gender issues today, we should keep in mind that even Paul’s favorite argument from creation has its limits, and here Paul knew it.
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The Polysemy of Pálin
Program Unit: Biblical Lexicography
Stephen C. Carlson, Australian Catholic University
Polysemy presents a particular challenge for lexicographers because polysemous words have a number of distinct but related senses. Though having antecedents in Wittgenstein, polysemy as a specific field of research within lexical semantics did not come into its own until the contributions of Lakoff and Langacker in the late 1980s. By contrast, the major dictionaries for Hellenistic Greek, especially the Bauer lexica, date back to a time before polysemy was better understood. As a result, they do not structure their lexical entries based on prototypical meanings and their cognitively motivated extensions. The iterative adverb pálin is a case in point. The Bauer lexica subdivide the semantic field for this word, primarily based on its glosses into German and English. Their first entry corresponds to the glosses back/zurück; their second entry corresponds to again/wieder; their third entry to various discourse glosses such as on the contrary; and their fourth entry pertains to two problem cases. This paper explores the polysemy of pálin based on modern linguistic literature and identifies six distinct but related senses for pálin: 1. counter-directional, in the direction opposite from which one came (Mark 7:24, 2 Cor 1:16, Gal 4:9a); 2. restitutive, returning to a position or state in which one had been in before (Mark 11:3, John 10:17, Rom 11:23, 1 Cor 7:5, Gal 1:17); 3. repetitive, repeating a previous action (John 10:31, 20:19, Acts 27:38); 4. contrastive focus (Luke 6:43, 1 Cor 12:21); 5. scene-shifting (Mark 2:1, John 4:3); 6. argumentative listing (Rom 15:10-12, 1 Cor 3:20, Heb 1:5). This paper concludes with a brief examination of some problematic instances of pálin within this framework (Mark 15:13, John 18:40, 2 Cor 2:1, and 1 John 2:8).
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A Review of Eng and Fields, "Devotions on the Hebrew Bible" and Some Further Thoughts
Program Unit: Ethnic Chinese Biblical Colloquium
M. Daniel Carroll R., Denver Seminary
n/a
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The Captives' Audience and (Dis)Interested Elite: Social and Economic Unrest in Nehemiah's Jerusalem
Program Unit: Economics in the Biblical World
Charles Carter, Seton Hall University
Invited panelist
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Gospels, Synagogue Conflicts, and Horizontal Violence
Program Unit: Jesus Traditions, Gospels, and Negotiating the Roman Imperial World
Warren Carter, Brite Divinity School (TCU)
That the Gospels of John and Matthew construct violent (sometimes verbal, sometimes physical) interactions between Jesus-followers and synagogues is indisputable. Conventionally this violence has been understood as reflecting and expressing religious differences and disputes, even separations, between the two groups. This paper, understanding the gospels as involved in the task of negotiating Roman imperial power, employs the notion of “horizontal violence” (Frantz Fanon; Paulo Freire) to offer another explanation for the violence between these groups. This notion of horizontal violence observes that violence between groups often occurs in contexts where vertical pressure is exerted by colonizing or imperializing powers. Oppressed peoples and groups negotiate such power, at least in part, by mimicking it in attacking similarly oppressed groups rather than engaging in direct and non-winnable confrontation with oppressors. Utilizing this notion of horizontal violence enables readers of Matthew and John’s Gospels to understand the conflicts with synagogue communities constructed in the Gospel narratives as another strategy for negotiating the imperial world. Two implications follow. Dynamics of horizontal violence reflect and express vertical imperializing pressures. And purported Gospel contexts comprising synagogue conflicts and negotiations of imperial power are interrelated.
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John, Jesus, and the Roman Empire
Program Unit: John, Jesus, and History
Warren Carter, Brite Divinity School (TCU)
This paper will explore some of the interactions between John’s Gospel and the Roman Empire. How does the world view of John’s Gospel construct the Roman Empire (imperial structures and personnel)? How does it construct Jesus? How do these constructions interact?
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Ezekiel's Sandbox: The Creation of Virtual Worlds in Ezekiel and Video Games
Program Unit: Book of Ezekiel
Corrine Carvalho, University of Saint Thomas (Saint Paul, MN)
When looking at the book of Ezekiel through the lens of spatial categories, many studies have focused primarily on the ways in which the spatial aspects of the book create, reflect or re-inforce social hierarchies. This is especially the case for chapters 40-48 which wed the descriptions of ritual and urban space to social categories. The book of Ezekiel utilizes spatial metaphors throughout the text, however, and these metaphors serve a variety of rhetorical purposes. To be sure, they all include social meaning, but they also create space in which the reader is invited to play. One of the more popular forms of video games today are called “sandbox” games, where the player creates the virtual world within which the game ensues. In fact, in a game such as “Minecraft,” space-creation is the essential activity of the game whereby the tensions that provide the game’s motivation are resolved or heightened by the creation of virtual space. This paper will explore the function of the creation of virtual space within gaming culture as a lens through which to examine the functions of Ezekiel’s virtual worlds as sites of audience formation. Special emphasis will be given to the crafting of the city as a cauldron (24:3-14), the roles of the world of the dead in chapters 32 and 39, before re-examining the built ritual space of 40-48.
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The Myth of the Good Victim: Reading the Hebrew Bible in Rape Culture
Program Unit: Use, Influence, and Impact of the Bible
M. L. Case, The University of Texas at Austin
The past two years have seen an explosion of controversy surrounding how institutions of higher learning handle cases of sexual violence on their campuses. Many colleges and universities have been investigated for Title IX violations or have failed to report campus violence under the Clery Act in a timely manner. Public inquisitions of rape survivors, seen through the pervasive practice of victim-blaming made even more ubiquitous through social media, indicate that we live and work in a rape culture. In this paper, I investigate how rape stories in the Hebrew Bible help us respond to this environment which simultaneously romanticizes a hypothetical “perfect” rape victim and vilifies actual victims of sexual violence in the real world. Looking specifically at the rapes of Dinah (Genesis 34), the Levite’s pîlegeš (Judges 19), and Tamar (2 Samuel 13), I explore how these narratives both problematize and support this myth of the good victim, the standard against which contemporary rape survivors are judged. Rather than ignore these stories which may be unpleasant to read, they can help us address campus climate and cultural attitudes toward sexual violence in a real and meaningful way.
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Biblical Proof-Texts in the Qur'anic Exegesis of Ibn Barrajan of Seville (d. 536/1141)
Program Unit: The Qur’an and the Biblical Tradition (IQSA)
Yousef Casewit, American University of Sharjah
Abu?l-?akam Ibn Barrajan was hailed as the “al-Ghazali of al-Andalus” for good reason. He authored the most extensive Andalusian works of Sufi Qur?an commentary and theology during the intellectually formative 12th century. A true pioneer, Ibn Barrajan is likely the earliest qur?anic exegete to use the Arabic Bible extensively and non-polemically in his quest to understand the Qur?an. He freely incorporated biblical materials, especially from Genesis and Matthew, into his works to explain the Qur?an and fill gaps in his understanding of biblical figures and narratives. This paper assesses Ibn Barrajan’s mode of engagement with the Bible on the basis of my recently completed critical Arabic edition of the author’s 1000-page Qur’an exegesis (A Qur?an Commentary by Ibn Barrajan of Seville: I?a? al-?ikma bi-a?kam al-?ibra, “Wisdom Deciphered, The Unseen Discovered,” Brill, June 2015). I examine the different strategies Ibn Barrajan employed to resolve perceived incongruities between narratives of the Qur?an and the Bible. I argue, (1) That the Bible enjoys the same degree of interpretive authority in his works as Prophetic reports (?adith), and that there are instances where the Bible not only complements but also challenges his understanding of the Qur?an. (2) Ibn Barrajan’s openness to the Bible rests on his hermeneutical principle of ‘Qur?anic hegemony;’ that is to say, his reasoning that since the Qur?an is God’s final and untampered divine revelation, it can serve as the ultimate litmus test with which all other scriptural passages, including Bible, are to be judged and mined for wisdom. His far-reaching hermeneutical principle of qur?anic hegemony was probably partly inspired by the scripturalist-literalist writings of the ?ahiri scholar Ibn ?azm (d. 456/1064). (3) I demonstrate, on the basis of a close examination of Ibn Barrajan’s biblical quotations, that Ibn Barrajan’s Arabic Bible translation was a Mozarab text that was translated into Arabic directly from Jerome’s Latin Vulgate. When culled together, the biblical passages in Ibn Barrajan’s extant works occupy approximately twenty full pages in modern print, and a close examination of these passages confirms beyond reasonable doubt that Ibn Barrajan had a copy of a Latin-to-Arabic Andalusi translation of the Bible.
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Filling the Qur'anic Gaps: Citations of Genesis and Matthew in the Works of Ibn Barrajan (d.536/1141)
Program Unit: Qur'an and Biblical Literature
Yousef Casewit, American University of Sharjah, UAE
Abu ?l-Hakam Ibn Barrajan was hailed as the “al-Ghazali of al-Andalus” for good reason. He authored the most extensive Andalusian works of Sufi Qur’an commentary and theology during the intellectually formative 12th century, and certainly left his mark on later generations of Muslim scholars. Having lived at the end of the Almoravid dynasty (r. 1062-1147), this pioneer of Andalusian mysticism represents a particularly unknown yet crucial development in the Andalusian intellectual and exegetical traditions. Despite his unmistakable importance for the formation of qur?anic exegesis in the Muslim West, Ibn Barrajan’s works and legacy remain terra incognita. Ibn Barrajan is the earliest qur?anic exegete known to date to use the Arabic Bible extensively and non-polemically in his quest to understand the divine Word. He freely incorporated biblical materials, especially from Genesis and Matthew, into his works to explain the Qur?an and fill gaps in his understanding of biblical figures and narratives.
This paper assesses Ibn Barrajan’s mode of engagement with the Bible on the basis of my recently completed critical Arabic edition of the author’s 1000-page Qur’an exegesis entitled Idah al-hikma bi-ahkam al-‘ibra (“Wisdom Deciphered, The Unseen Discovered”; Brill, June 2015). I examine the different strategies Ibn Barrajan employed to resolve perceived incongruities between narratives of the Qur?an and the Bible. I argue, (1) that the Bible enjoys the same degree of interpretive authority in his works as Prophetic reports (?adith), and that there are instances where the Bible not only complements but also challenges his understanding of the Qur?an. Ibn Barrajan’s openness to the Bible rests on his hermeneutical principle of ‘Qur?anic hegemony;’ that is to say, his reasoning that since the Qur?an is God’s final and untampered divine revelation, it can serve as the ultimate litmus test with which all other scriptural passages, including Bible, are to be judged and mined for wisdom. The Qur?an proclaims itself to be the conclusive revealed book of God which confirms, clarifies, safeguards, and according to many, abrogates previous revelations. Taking these teachings to heart, Ibn Barrajan substantiates his approach to Biblical scholarship by means of the Qur?an. Pushing the premises of this principle as far as they will go, he argues that biblical materials and ?adith reports are to be assessed uniquely on the basis of their alignment with the Qur?an. His far-reaching hermeneutical principle of qur?anic hegemony was probably partly inspired by the scripturalist-literalist writings of the ?ahiri scholar Ibn ?azm (d. 456/1064). When culled together, the biblical passages in Ibn Barrajan’s extant works occupy approximately twenty full pages in modern print and are almost certainly taken from a Latin-to-Arabic Andalusi translation. It will also be argued, on the basis of a close examination of Ibn Barrajan’s biblical quotations, that the Mozarab Bible used was translated into Arabic directly from Jerome’s Latin Vulgate.
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The Significance of the Eschatological Restorative Imagery of James 1:1: Wisdom, Eschatology, and Apocalypticism in James
Program Unit: Wisdom and Apocalypticism
Helen Cashell-Moran, Trinity College - Dublin
The letter of James’ sapiential discourse does not exclude an “apocalyptic” eschatology, however, the degree and manner to which it does so is open to question. This paper takes as its point of departure James 1:1 where one might find eschatological apocalyptic implications in the twelve tribes of the Diaspora. Indeed, this opening address sets the context for our broader assessment of “wisdom” and “apocalyptic” in the document. One of the ways this opening has been understood, among several, is as the twelve tribes representing the ideal and restored end-time community. This paper contextualizes this idealized address among similar traditions related to restoration before turning to implications.
Ideological future restoration of the twelve tribes is encountered in Isa 49:6; Sir 36:13 and 46:10, and in Ezek 37:15-28 where this imagery is linked to a Davidic messiah who will bring about the reunification of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms. References to the idealized twelve tribes in 4 Ezra 13:1-3 and 2 Baurch 1:1-5 are also accompanied by a messianic expectation. A renewed interest in the eschatological restoration of the twelve tribes of Israel is viewed as characteristic of Jewish and Christian literature of the Roman period. Jesus’ promise to the twelve apostles in Matt 19:28 and Luke 22:30, that they will be seated on thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel, is indicative of this. This association of the twelve tribes with messianic expectation suggests an explanation for the contested presence “Lord Jesus Christ” in James 1:1.
How the introduction of James is interpreted may signal the extent to which eschatology shapes the author’s thought world. Reward and punishment are set within an otherworldly framework. There is the “crown of life” in 1:12, and the righteous and sinners are described as separated in the coming judgment (5:1-11). Those who are poor will be rich in the world hereafter (2:5), whereas those who are rich in earthly terms will perish (1:11). Only God decides who will be judged (4:12). This apocalyptic view of the world has implications for how one conceives of the portrayal of revealed wisdom in James (1:5; 3:13-18), and consequently this wisdom may be seen as serving the addressee to understand and find their rightful place with the apocalyptically-defined cosmos.
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Zechariah's Joshua as an Archetypical Figure of Collective Prejudice
Program Unit: Israelite Prophetic Literature
Jeremiah Cataldo, Grand Valley State University
Using recent trends in ritual and prejudice studies as an optic for analyzing Zechariah, this paper will focus in particular on Joshua as a fraught literary symbol of restoration. Joshua, the embodiment of salvation, is an archetypal figure that embodies the semblance of the minority community's (remnant) collective prejudice. This understanding of Joshua, we will show, is consistent with Zechariah's emphasis upon the restoration of the remnant. This investigatory avenue helps better expose the anxieties that shaped the early monotheistic community: the community's prejudice against the "other" helped shape its own monotheistic ideals.
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Learning from the Scribes: Using Variant Readings and Marginal Comments as Interpretive Tools for John's Apocalypse
Program Unit: Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies
Jeff Cate, California Baptist University
John’s Apocalypse was transmitted through hand-written copies for fourteen centuries before the age of printing dawned. Whether intentional or accidental, changes occurred in the text as new copies were made. These variants readings—regardless if pertinent towards establishing the initial text or not—are significant because they provide insight as to how texts were understood or misunderstood by readers. The variant readings and marginal comments can become a pedagogical tool for modern readers to see interpretive issues that arose in the minds of ancient scribes and readers of these texts. Textual changes in John’s Apocalypse can be shown that affect how protagonists and antagonists were understood in conflict. In chapters 1-3, several seemingly minor changes heighten the authority of the son of man speaking to the recipients. In other places, manuscripts cast antagonists such as Jezebel in a more negative light. Marginal comments show how scribes and readers struggled to interpret difficult apocalyptic symbolism such as that of “the beast.” Manuscripts and their peculiarities can function as an effective pedagogy to visible illustrate critical issues to be considered in an apocalyptic text. The audience will participate in sample exercises. Session takeaway will consist of a handout with teaching and resource suggestions.
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The Elevation of the Sabbath by the Holiness Writers: The Juxtaposition of the Sabbath with the Sanctuary and Its Further Development in Relation to the Holy Land and People
Program Unit: Sabbath in Text and Tradition
Moon Kwon Chae, Baylor University
While there were a number of inquiries into the origin, development, ancient practice of the Sabbath and its relationship with creation, temple, and tabernacle during the 20th century, only a few researches argued for a special connection between the Sabbath and the Holiness Code (HC; Lev 17-26). Israel Knohl was among the first to recognize that the Sabbath is greatly emphasized in the HC. The special concern of the HC for holy time has received relatively less attention than the holy land. In the HC, however, the holy time is greatly elevated and the special concern for the holy time is developed by their elevation of the Sabbath and its juxtaposition with the sanctuary.
In this paper, I will develop Knohl’s observation that H emphasizes the Sabbath by focusing on the Sabbath regulations within the HC and the most significant Sabbath texts outside the HC: Exod 31:12-17 and 35:1-3. The literary analysis of Exod 31:12-17 and 35:1-3 will not only show that H wrote these two texts, but it also shows how H greatly elevated the Sabbath to the level of the sanctuary by juxtaposing the Sabbath regulation with the commandments of the tabernacle. The elevation of the weekly Sabbath also shows H’s expansion of the holy time as the holy place is expanded from the tabernacle to the entire land of Jerusalem and the holy people from the priestly classes to all residents of the land. In particular, Lev 25-26 shows H’s further developments of the Sabbath (holy time) in relation to holy land and holy people as a proper way of worshiping YHWH.
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Poetry as Commentary in the Danielic Court Tales
Program Unit: Book of Daniel
Michael Chan, Luther Seminary
The poetic speeches found in the court tales of Daniel (MT: Dan 2:20-23; 3:31-33; 4:31-32; 6:26-28; Old Greek: 2:20-23; 3:26-45; 3:52-90; 4:1-9, 11-14, 33-34; 6:26-27; Theodotian: 2:20-23; 3:26-45, 52-90, 100; 4:7-14, 31-32, 34; 6:26-27) function as theological commentary on the narratives (cf. Towner, 1969). Typically placed in the mouths of Daniel, his friends, or the king, these poems reflect on topics such as divine sovereignty (Willis, 2010), judgment, and revelation. This paper not only analyzes the formal features of these poems, but also seeks to understand what, in their respective versions (MT, OG, TH), these poems are trying to accomplish and how they affect the literary texture of the court tale narratives more generally. Questions considered include: What do these poems clarify in the narratives and what do they obscure? What theological and textual problems do these poems attempt to address? And what problems do they create as a result of their efforts?
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Phinehas: A Source for High Priests in the Second Temple Judaism
Program Unit: Function of Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphal Writings in Early Judaism and Early Christianity
Dongshin Chang, Univ. of Manchester
In Numbers 25, God promises a “covenant of perpetual priesthood” (Num 25:13). Intriguingly, the promise is not given to Levi or Aaron, who might occupy the pinnacle of the list of priestly nominees.1 No one else but Phinehas received the promise, which was offered as a reward for his zeal for the LORD. Phinehas’ zeal and the subsequent reward seem to have become significant motifs for priestly covenant accounts in some of the late Second Temple period’s Jewish texts.2 In this short paper, first, I want to demonstrate that the Phinehas tradition is widely used by many Second Temple period Jewish documents in regard to building particular priestly traditions (or claims). The Phinehas tradition is used sometimes directly (e.g. 1 Maccabees and Ben Sira) and other times indirectly (e.g. Jubilees and Aramaic Levi Document).
Moreover, the Phinehas tradition seems to have been used at times in relation to a “father” motif and in other instances in relation to a patriarchal covenant—the “covenant of Jacob.” The developments of the “father” motif or patriarchal aspect based on Phinehas’ priestly covenant tradition are probably linked to possible priestly disputes among Levitical, Aaronic, and Zadokite priesthood institutions in the late Second Temple period (as Olyan has argued). Therefore, by reading the father motif and patriarchal characteristics of particular priestly traditions, I also want to present the way in which some Second Temple Jewish writers composed priestly claims based on the Phinehas tradition and how their compositions shed light on the possible priestly disputes in late Second Temple Judaism.
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The Korean Translation of "Two Stones" in Exod 1:16
Program Unit: Korean Biblical Colloquium
Sok-Chung Chang, Catholic Kwandong University
This study is to reconsider the translation of "two stones" in Exodus 1:16 from the perspective of textual criticism. In most of Korean Bibles this word is not even translated into Korean. The problem is not a wrong translation but a non-translation, which the responsible translators should avoid doing it at all times. Various Korean translations of the Bible translate the Pharaoh's command to the Hebrew midwives like "you should look at them closely, if it is a boy, kill him..." As a result, those translations do not deliver the hidden sign of 'secrecy' originally embedded in Pharaoh's command of killing Hebrew male infants. According to those translations, all the midwives had to do was to look at a child closely and find out that infant's gender. In this context, when those midwives were asked by the king their answer is hardly understandable to the readers. It is because the late arrival of the midwives does not justify the inability of killing male infants no matter how well the interpreters defend the translated texts.
In contrast to Korean Bibles, most English Bibles translate the word "two stones" as BHS writes it in v.16. Therefore, their translations go as follows: "when you see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him..." We know that the word "two stones" could be translated in several ways because the scholars are not sure about its exact meaning. Literally, it means 'two stones' whatever it actually means in the context of Ex 1:16. I intend to compare several leading scholars' interpretations of this word and analyzed their arguments in this study. LXX does not translate this word and simply says "they are at the point of giving birth" as if the word is not there. It is possible that Korean Bibles follow the LXX translation as they had been doing before.
When the English translations reveal the existence of the word "two stones" , they show the secrecy hidden in the Pharaoh's command of killing the infants. The first measure the king commanded in order to reduce Israel's population was to make them work more. The command itself did not have any secrecy but it did not work at all. This second measure focused on the secrecy because the king feared that Israel might become furious about this command of killing their babies. The fact of the matter is that the midwives had to kill the infants secretly. Therefore, this crucial secrecy was delivered to the midwives in the command by using the word "two stones" . As BHS has it in the text, the Korean Bibles should translate the word in order to let the readers know the secrecy of the king's command and understand the shrewdness of the midwives' answer.
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Israel's YHWH Worship in Judges
Program Unit: National Association of Professors of Hebrew
Sok-Chung Chang, Catholic Kwandong University
"The people worshiped the Lord all the days of Joshua" (Judg 2:7). This sentence does not necessarily assume Israel's exclusive worship of YHWH. Israel did not know YHWH (v.10); the Israelites worshiped the Baals (v.11) and the Astartes (v.13); they abandoned YHWH (v.12, 13); they did not listen even to their judges (v.17); they lusted after other gods and bowed down to them (v.17). Othniel defeated Cushan-rishathaim and the land had rest forty years and he died (Judg 3:11). The change of Israel's attitude in serving YHWH is not even mentioned: from idolatry to monolatry. What would be the purpose of YHWH's raising up a deliverer for the Israelites? It is certainly to defeat the enemies but it cannot be the main reason. It should be to make Israel worship YHWH alone. Why isn’t there any mention of Israel’s exclusive worship of YHWH? In the case of Ehud, so many verses were allotted to describe how many Moabites he killed (v. 29) and the land had rest eighty years (v. 30). Not a word about Israel's serving of YHWH is in the text. It seems to me that the writer is more interested in the condition of the land, that is, whether the land had rest for some years. He does not even care about Israel's exclusive worship of YHWH. The invasion of other nations was ignited by Israel's serving other gods. Is the expression of the land's rest the sign for Israel's exclusive worship of YHWH in the land? The writer might use this expression instead of describing Israel's attitude of worshipping YHWH. This paper will deal with this expression relating to Israel's YHWH worship throughout the Book of Judges.
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The Whence and Whither of Those Born of the Spirit: John 3:8 and the Correlation between Son of God and Children of God
Program Unit: Society for Pentecostal Studies
Blaine Charette, Northwest University (Washington)
The Whence and Whither of Those Born of the Spirit: John 3:8 and the Correlation between Son of God and Children of God
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Aseneth, the Samaritan Woman, and the Trope of Travel
Program Unit: Johannine Literature
Ronald Charles, St. Francis Xavier University
Women play an important role in conquest strategies both in the ancient and in the modern world. This paper will illustrate that reality through the stories of Aseneth and the Samaritan Woman. I will argue that through the trope of travel these ancient women are made to be the mouthpiece of particular theological agendas. In Joseph and Aseneth the mythical uniqueness of Israel is reinforced through the conversion of Aseneth. Her conversion, it can be proposed, has implications that go beyond the individual. She is “a prototype and representative of a whole company of proselytes.” In Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan Woman at the well (John 4:4-42), the nameless Samaritan Woman is confronted with the savior of the world (4:42), who told her everything she ever did. Through proselyting her neighbors she opens up her whole village to Jesus’ grand theological discourse.
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God as Nursing Father: Tracing an Image from Isaiah through the Hodayoth and Odes of Solomon to Patristic Writings
Program Unit: Function of Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphal Writings in Early Judaism and Early Christianity
James H. Charlesworth, Princeton Theological Seminary
An unperceived but startling image appears in Odes of Solomon 19. God, the “Father,” is described with “breasts” that are “full” with milk [4 times in the first three stichoi]. In numerous international congresses, no Jew or Christian could discern the origin of this symbolism. One may discern some background in Anobius’ Adversus Gentes and “the full-breasted Ceres” who nurses Iacchus. This metaphor, as so many others, simply follows nature. Conceivably, the image began with Isaiah 60:4 but the meaning is ambiguous. In 1 Thess 2:7-12, Paul imagines himself “like a nurse;” but that is a simile for caring for children. Origen and the author of the Epistle to Diognetus seem to develop the image, but they could be influenced by the Odes. The image now is apparent in the new Princeton edition of the Hodayot, Hymn 22. The deep link between the Odes and the Hodayot becomes more intriguing.
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Big Tent, Smaller Tents, Blue Tent, and the Specter of the Red Tent: What Do We Do and Does Anyone Outside of the Tent Know We Are Doing It?
Program Unit: Metacriticism of Biblical Scholarship
Ipsita Chatterjea, Independent Scholar
To address the impact of the “big tent” on secular studies of religion and sacred texts, we want to consider evidence regarding the status of the field in Howard’s “Citation by Citation, New Maps Chart Hot Research and Scholarship's Hidden Terrain.” In the first graphic, http://chronicle.com/article/Maps-of-Citations-Uncover-New/128938/, Biblical Studies cites Classics and does so enough to map, Religion, or the Big Tent does not. While the data can be contested for various reasons, we do identify as interdisciplinary and should discuss our subfield’s “brand.” Beyond this graphic, social scientists articulating qualitative research standards identified religion as “a new frontier,” as if analytical scholarship on religion did not exist.
As analysts, our issues are paralleled across the social sciences specifically the problematically formulated binary between activist and empirical scholarship. With recent examples, I will outline how people in the tent have talked about or are structurally allowed to ignore “us” while reasserting a notion of the big tent; arguably this is part of a dynamic identified by Lincoln. We want to articulate how we have long aligned with the wider social sciences. Social scientists advocated critical theory informed, historically attenuated, empirically grounded practice long before a recent reassertion. That consensus maps with J.Z. Smith, Riesebrodt, Lincoln, Taves, Lynch and others and has manifested in theory-attentive, descriptive historical scholarship that has grown to address research design more explicitly. We want to clearly articulate how we use theory and method in research design: accountability to representation, falsifiability and existing secondary literatures; the use of theory to denaturalize dominant narratives and our research questions; how we define, acquire, delimit and make claims about data; scale and the purpose of our communications with the people we understand to be our potential audiences.
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Teaching Biblical Hebrew in an International Setting: An Approach through Language Typology
Program Unit: Ethnic Chinese Biblical Colloquium
Kevin Chau, University of the Free State
n/a
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Conflicting or Mutually Dependent Perspectives? Interpreting the Flesh, Sin, and the Human Plight in Paul
Program Unit: Pauline Epistles
Stephen Chester, North Park Theological Seminary
Recent discussion of Paul has moved beyond a simply binary opposition between 'New Perspective' and 'Lutheran' approaches with new scholarly voices asserting that the 'New Perspective' is not radical enough in rejecting previous approaches. It remains too dependent upon Christian theology in general and Augustinian/Lutheran approaches in particular, and so fails accurately to reflect Paul in his first century context. This paper explores that contention in relation to Paul's anthropology, especially his use of the term 'the flesh' and its relationship to his use of the term 'sin'. Their treatment in both early Protestant and New Perspective exegesis of key texts in Romans and Galatians is explored. Despite some differences in detail, 'New Perspective' exegesis does continue to depend in very significant ways upon the exegetical conclusions of the Reformers. Yet precisely this dependence upon the exegesis of the Reformers leaves 'New Perspective' accounts of Paul's anthropology in disagreement with other significant figures in the history of interpretation, most notably Augustine. While correct in their assertion of continuity between the 'Lutheran' approach and the 'New Perspective', those advocating a more radical perspective underestimate the complexity of the relationship between contemporary exegesis of Paul and that of previous eras. The rhetoric of conflicting or dependent perspectives masks a more complicated reality.
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Text and Paratext in Documentary Papyri from Roman Egypt
Program Unit: Book History and Biblical Literatures
Malcolm Choat, Macquarie University
As the history of the book intersects with that of other types of scribal productions on antiquity, so does the use of paratextual features in nonliterary paradigms inform the use of such scribal techniques in ancient books. Many scribes produced and copied texts in both the literary and documentary sphere, and the many paratextual features familiar from the former occur in the latter, including word spacing and other features of textual division and punctuation, marginal signs and notations, titles, and other elements which effect the text’s presentation. In arguing that practice across the spectrum of ancient scribal activity must be taken into account to properly understand paratext in the ancient world, this paper addresses the use of paratextual features in ancient scribal practice by examining their use in documentary papyri from Roman Egypt.
In examinations of New Testament papyri (including texts on associated material, e.g. parchment), such features are often taken as lectional aids, and seen as reflecting features (e.g. sense pauses) within the text which can be witnessed in later manuscripts. The possibility of documentary influence and the likelihood that scribes were reflecting features found in their exemplars have also been raised. Testing of these hypotheses is hampered by the paucity of situations in which we possess both exemplar and copy of any particular literary papyrus and the lack of certainly that any of these manuscripts were actually read aloud (even if various factors strongly suggest that many of them were intended to be). In order to advance our understanding of how these elements may have been transmitted between texts, and how they may have functioned within a text, this paper concentrates on papyrus documents on which exist in duplicate copies, concentrating on those which may have been read aloud, asking what we can learn from such texts about the use of paratextual features in the ancient world.
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External and Internal Displacement: Reframing Notions of Exile, Space, and Place in Jeremiah 29 and 42
Program Unit: Israelite Prophetic Literature
Diandra E. Chretain, Graduate Theological Union
The exile to Babylon is a crucial element in the book of Jeremiah that illustrates diverse and conflicting ideological perspectives. On the surface Jeremiah 29 and 42 delineate two supposedly incompatible exilic ideologies. However, these exilic perspectives contain crucial parallels that reconcile the conflicting differences in these texts. This paper demonstrates how the contrasting pro-golah and pro-Judah elements in Jeremiah 29 and 42 do not render these chapters as incompatible, rather similar concepts of estrangement from the homeland serve as the foundational ideology of both chapters. A critical analysis of Jeremiah 29 and 42 through diasporic notions of "space" and "place" illustrate that exile from one’s homeland is not merely a physical ordeal that requires a geographical relocation, but a group can undergo an exilic experience even if they remain in the same territory. "Space" is the representation of a specific geographical location, while "place" is established through the cultural, political, and religious perspectives that groups formulate and sustain in order to develop their collective identity within a particular space. Even though the golah and the remnant in Judah reside in different "spaces," they mutually experience exile through the loss of sovereignty over their "place," and as a result they are faced with the difficult task of reconstructing their group identities in the midst of alienation. Examining Jeremiah 29 and 42 through the lenses of "space" and "place" demonstrates that whether the Judeans live in the land or relocate to Babylon, both groups undergo the same inevitable fates: both groups become the subaltern “other,” lose authority and power over Judah, and must exist as a collective without the stability of their territory.
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The Axial Age and Cult Criticism in the Hebrew Bible
Program Unit: Social Sciences and the Interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures
Line Søgaard Christensen, Aarhus Universitet
This paper will discuss one of the recent trends in social-scientific theory, namely, the idea of the axial age, referring to a major shift in human thinking around 500 B.C.E. The concept of an axial age has gained an established, although not uncontroversial or uncontested, position in various academic fields, including historical sociology, cultural sociology, and the history of religion. Robert N. Bellah – who stands in the tradition of such sociologists as Émile Durkheim and Max Weber – has formulated a fruitful cultural evolutionary model, depicting the development of religion and different cultural versions of the axial phenomenon. Bellah’s book, Religion in Human Evolution (2011), describes a religious evolution moving from a tribal phase, through an archaic phase, and lastly to the axial phase. His chapters on the axial age cover developments in India, China, Greece, and Israel. With regard to Israel, he focuses primarily on Deuteronomistic topics such as the covenant, the Torah, and the monarchy. Relevant in relation to Bellah’s model is German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk who also understands the axial age as a pivotal moment of cultural evolution. His anthropological model describes humans as self-training beings. A human being has, according to Sloterdijk, the potential to recreate itself and its life conditions perpetually through self-shaping and repeated exercises ? in short: through “anthropotechnics”.
In my paper I will discuss whether the notion of the axial age in Israel is to be linked exclusively with Bellah’s topics or whether there may be more essential axial phenomena in the Hebrew Bible. Here I wish to call attention to the development of ritualistic actions in the Hebrew Bible. Even though the majority of the texts belong to a cultic sacrificial mentality, certain texts oppose this thought. In my opinion, the strong prophetic cult criticism is a decisive example of a cultural evolutionary transition from an archaic religion to an axial religion. In addition, the prophetic critique may well be an early instance of a conscious form of “anthropotechnics”.
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Spotting the Bronze under the Silver: The Art of Money Changing and Early Christian Interpretation
Program Unit: Early Christianity and the Ancient Economy
Michelle Christian, University of Toronto
Versions of the curious saying, "be approved moneychangers," circulated widely among early Christian writers, who identified their own interpretive practices with the ability to discern true from counterfeit coin. This paper, intended for the third project, first explores the saying's economic context by examining evidence for those figures (e.g. dokimastai, nummularii, trapezitai) entrusted with controlling and testing currency in the Roman world. It then discusses how this specific economic activity became a suggestive analogy for interpretation by considering its cultural status as an art or techne, that is, a trade requiring specialized knowledge and skill.
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The Aggareion and Non-violent Resistance: Matthew 5:41 as a Subaltern Strategy for Social Change
Program Unit: Jesus Traditions, Gospels, and Negotiating the Roman Imperial World
John Christianson, Brite Divinity School (TCU)
In this paper I take up Walter Wink’s helpful argument that Jesus’ statement about aggareion in Matthew 5:41 is not meant to encourage passive acquiescence, but to provide a means of non-violent resistance for those who suffer from oppressive Roman practices. I argue, however, that Wink’s binary of oppressor/oppressed risks romanticizing the members of Matthew’s audience because it overlooks aspects of subaltern identity, especially in regard to gender, status (free/slave), and agency. In contrast, the postcolonial perspective of hybridity offers a more robust reading that accounts for the complex allegiances of subaltern people, and their potential course of action upon hearing Matthew 5:41.
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The Vorlage of the Formula Quotations in Matthew’s Infancy Narrative
Program Unit: Matthew
Woojin Chung, McMaster Divinity College
Matthew’s use of Scripture in his infancy story of Jesus raises a host of questions. Not only his enigmatic employments of citations that R. T. France calls a “minefield littered with exegetical corpses,” but also the sources of his non-Septuagintal quotations, are notoriously difficult to locate. However, the discussion of the origin of Scriptural citations can yield insights to the sources that Matthew may have used, which also throws light on further examination of F. Watson’s recent proposal. Breaking with the current scholarly consensus that Matthew and Luke independently wrote their Gospels without having knowledge of each other’s work, Watson argues that Luke composed his infancy story of Jesus based on Matthew’s narrative in a creative way. This fresh approach, however, is dealt with a laconic manner that eventually undermines the significance of the distinctive features and exegetical strategies of Matthew and Luke. Especially, the origin of the citations as well as the way Matthew uses Scripture in his infancy narrative are radically different from Luke that it is hard to conclude that Luke’s story was secondary to Matthew’s. In this paper, I will trace the origin of Matthew’s formula quotations with a critical assessment of the contributions of K. Stendahl, R. H. Gundry, G. M. Soares-Prabhu, and other contemporary scholars such as M. J. J. Menken and A. M. O’Leary, and perform a comparative analysis of the Scriptural citations and allusions of Matthew and Luke in order to demonstrate that Watson’s recent proposal is unsatisfactory.
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Rethinking P.Hev/Se 13 and P.Yadin 18 and the Social and Legal Contexts of Mark 10:12
Program Unit: Papyrology and Early Christian Backgrounds
Wally V. Cirafesi, McMaster University
Scholarship on Mark’s Gospel has traditionally understood the divorce logion of 10:12 as a later addition and/or as indicative of Mark’s Roman origins and audience, since Josephus (Ant. 15:259–60) seems to indicate that, while Jewish law prohibited women from initiating divorce, Roman law in fact permitted it (e.g., Brody 1999; France 2002; Doering 2009). Furthermore, later rabbinic halakha also seems to restrict women in this way (e.g., m. Yeb. 14:1). Thus, the saying attributed to Jesus is understood to have little, if any, basis within the context of first-century Judean social practices. However, a number of studies within the last decade or so (e.g., Instone-Brewer 2002; Crossley 2004; Loader 2005; Collins 2007) have departed with the traditional view and have suggested that Jewish women in the first century did indeed possess the legal right to initiate divorce. Evidence for this position is typically gathered from the marriage contracts among the Elephantine papyri, Josephus on the Herodian marriages of Salome and Herodias, and the second-century document P.Hev/Se 13 (a divorce bill or waiver of claims). Both of these views, however, are faced with a range of methodological problems that are not fully acknowledged by New Testament scholars and, I suggest, do not provide an adequately nuanced interpretation of the ancient data. Through a reassessment of some of the documentary evidence from Na?al ?ever (P.Yadin 18 and P.Hev/Se 13), I propose that, while the divorce logion of Mark 10:12 as it stands in modern critical editions of the Greek New Testament seems to cohere with the legal situation of Jews in first-century Roman Judea, it does not seem to cohere with what Jewish women would have normally practiced. A fundamental distinction is made between Jewish women initiating divorce, which was legally allowable, and Jewish women initiating separation, which was potentially the more common practice. This distinction is supported by, and facilitates an explanation of, the rise of the variant reading exelthe for apolusasa in some manuscripts of Mark 10:12.
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From Fear’s Narcissism to Participatory Imagination: Martha Nussbaum on Religion, Law, and Justice
Program Unit: Bible and Emotion
Juliana Claassens, Universiteit van Stellenbosch - University of Stellenbosch
Many laws, both ancient and contemporary, are born out of a deep-seated fear for the wellbeing and safety of one’s own as well as one’s loved ones. For instance in Deuteronomy 7:1-5 one finds the infamous herem law in which God commands that when Israel enters the Promised Land, they are to utterly destroy the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. The Israelites are further commanded to “make no covenant with them and show them no mercy” (v2). Moreover, in v 5 the Israelites are ordered to “break down their altars, smash their pillars, hew down their sacred poles, and burn their idols with fire.” Whether this violence occurred in the way it is commanded in this text is a much debated question. Yet its intention to divide ethnic and religious groups is clear, and, as Ferdinand Deist has shown in his article, “The Dangers of Deuteronomy: A Page from the Reception History of the Book,” has implications also for the way the Bible has been read in Apartheid South Africa. Moreover, the unfortunate ways in which religion and law come together is also evident from another law many centuries later when a national referendum in Switzerland in November 2009 with 70% of the vote passed a bill that would add the following law to the Constitution: “The building of minarets is prohibited.”
In all of these instances (also the way in which Deuteronomy was interpreted in Apartheid South Africa), one could argue that what is responsible for these laws is a primitive narcissistic fear that is concerned only with the self, drawing sharp boundaries between “us” and “them.” Martha Nussbaum argues in her book, The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age, that what is necessary for overcoming the narcissistic notion of fear is for a society to embrace the following three principles: (1) Political (and I would add religious) principles that express equal respect and dignity for all people (2) Rigorous critical thinking that criticizes inconsistences which as Nussbaum formulates it, “noticing the ‘mote’ in someone else’s eye which failing to note the large plan in one’s own eye” (3) Developing an empathetic or participatory imagination, in which one is able to consider how the world looks from the point of view of a person of a different religious or ethnic background.
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Abigail’s Hospitality: Breaking the “Frames of War” in 1 Samuel 25
Program Unit: Feminist Hermeneutics of the Bible
Juliana Claassens, Universiteit van Stellenbosch - University of Stellenbosch
As part of larger project on female resistance in the Old Testament, this paper will focus on the fascinating account of Abigail resisting the very real threat of violence that threatens her household when David vows to kill all the male members of Nabal’s household because he and his men had been refused sustenance. I propose that what is particularly interesting about this narrative account of female agency that is told in 1 Samuel 25 is that Abigail’s act of resisting violence comes through acts of hospitality, by her decision to offer a feast of food to the hungry, to the landless, to the marginalized (cf. 1 Sam 22:2 that describes the men who gathered around David as “everyone who was in distress and everyone who was in debt, and everyone who was discontented”).
Engaging Judith Butler’s work in Frames of War, this paper will investigate the nature and the extent of Abigail’s resistance, inquiring about the factors that make it possible for this woman to step outside of her predetermined societal role and to resist the reality of violence that permeates her world. Moreover, this paper will reflect on the ongoing significance of narratives that outline acts of (female) resistance. I propose that the narrative of Abigail’s hospitality that saved her whole household, offered the community of 1 Samuel, as well as later generations who find themselves in situations of violence themselves, hovering on the brink of annihilation, the opportunity to reflect on questions such as: How does one survive in a hostile world? How may one go about transcending violence?
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Sensing Scripture in a Medieval Illustrated Prayer Book
Program Unit: Society for Comparative Research on Iconic and Performative Texts
Anne Clark, University of Vermont
Bibles were not the only, or even the primary way, that medieval people engaged Scripture. One striking Scriptural medium is a twelfth-century prayer book that portrayed salvation history and personalized it for its reader, by a carefully designed program of paired pictures and prayers. This book (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek CLM 935), was created for a woman, as indicated by the noun and adjective endings in the Latin prayers and by the comprehensive use of images, a means of devotional engagement increasingly associated with women’s spiritual practices. On almost every opening in the book, there is a full-page painting on the verso and a full-page prayer on the recto. The sequence begins with creation and includes major scenes from Genesis, then shifts quickly to the focus on Gospel events in the life of Jesus. The book is unusual for its extensive portrayal of scenes in the public career of Jesus, with much attention to women as recipients of his miracles. This paper examines the ways that the paired texts and images were designed to evoke a multi-sensory devotional experience for the user of the book. Some of these dynamics were common to the personal use of any book in this period: the feel of the parchment with its tactile reminder of flesh or the kinetic engagement of turning pages. Other dynamics were more peculiar to the devotional purpose of this particular book: the portrayal of angels singing in heaven as a trigger to shift from physical hearing to spiritual hearing; the prayers that reposition words with specific sensory correlates from Jesus’ passion (wound, spear, vinegar, etc.), into the life of the reader. This paper also incorporates recent neurological research that reveals a subliminal level of empathic response to art. Thus in some cases, the pictures in the Munich prayer book can be seen to work in tandem with the words of the prayers to push the reader to see herself in the biblical roles depicted and described. Yet sometimes the pictures and the prayers seem to diverge in their messages, leaving the reader perhaps to wonder which senses to trust. The issue of gender will run throughout this analysis, with attention to medieval ideas about the particularly sensual nature of women, and the types of religious practice most suitable for women.
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The Gods Must Be Crazy: Iron Age Religion at Tall al-`Umayri, Jordan
Program Unit: Archaeology of the Biblical World
Douglas R. Clark, La Sierra University
The site of Tall al-`Umayri, Jordan, part of the Madaba Plains Project, boasts an occupational history primarily from the Early Bronze Age through the Hellenist Period (ca. 3000-150 BC), most of this time span producing important cultic remains. Especially significant finds illustrating religion/ritual activities at `Umayri come from the Late Bronze Age, the transitional period between the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age, and Late Iron I/Early Iron II. And they come in the form of cultic architecture and furnishings; standing stones; ceramic vessels and figurines; and faunal remains.
This presentation will explore archaeological architecture and artifacts from `Umayri related to ancient religion and will seek to understand them sociologically and in the context of Iron Age religion elsewhere in the region. By time period, the following finds will be explored:
Late Bronze Age Temple Complex – By way of setting the context for religion at `Umayri in the Iron Age, the paper will briefly examine the extremely well preserved temple from the 14th century BC. Its architectural layout, while unusual, clearly points to public cultic functions in at least three of its five rooms. Particularly noteworthy in the main sanctuary are a votive altar and a cultic niche encasing five standing stones (strongly suggesting a dominant female deity), numerous ceramic cultic vessels and mud figurines.
Transitional Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age Shrine – As part of the emerging western neighborhood of `Umayri from ca. 1200 BC, religious architecture and artifacts demonstrate the central role of religion at a time of tremendous flux in the region. Building A enclosed a central household shrine with altar and standing stone resting in a pillared, stone-paved room, as well as a possible cultic niche with seven fallen “standing stones.” Building B, the best preserved “four-room” building in the southern Levant, produced the lower portion of a bronze figurine of a male deity. The additional three buildings (C, D, and E) revealed no other tangible cultic remains.
Late Iron I/Early Iron II Remains – A courtyard sanctuary was excavated from this period, consisting of a possible altar, bench stones, and two layers of paving cobbles, the upper one likely a repair. From between the floor layers emerged sherds from several model shrines, having respectfully been deposited there. In addition, a large number of figurine fragments appeared in the vicinity, some almost life-size and some likely from later periods.
Late Iron II Gate Shrine – The easternmost acropolis field of excavation revealed a standing stone and libation bowl at a partially preserved gate entrance to the city. Otherwise, cultic architecture and artifacts were quite limited.
Thus, `Umayri is characterized by cultic remains of varying types which speak to the diversity of cultic expression and practice at the site over the centuries.
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Constructing a Stemma for Nicetas of Heraclea’s Johannine Catena
Program Unit: Novum Testamentum Graecum: Editio Critica Maior
Michael Clark, University of Birmingham
Nicetas of Heraclea’s catena of the Gospel of John remains unedited and unpublished in its entirety, and largely unexamined. The current paper presents a text-critical study of the Gospel of John as it is preserved in all known extant manuscripts of the catena (Gregory-Aland 249 317 333 423 430 743 869). Using genetically significant readings, overall levels of agreement between witnesses, and, in the case 333 423, paleographic evidence, I propose that the witnesses of the catena are related as follows: 1) 249 333 423 are descendants of a lost common ancestor, ß; 2) 333 was the exemplar used by the copyist of 423; 3) 317 869 are descended from a lost common ancestor, ?; 4) 430 is an independent witness with an idiosyncratic text; 5) 743 has a high degree of contamination from the majority text and an unclear relationship with the other witnesses.
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Ritual Reading and Affective Shaping: John Cassian and Late Antique Technologies of the Self
Program Unit: Religious Experience in Antiquity
Niki Clements, Rice University
At the center of John Cassian’s late antique ascetic program stands the Latin category of *affectus*, a multivalent term denoting its English cognate affect, as well as emotion, state of mind, and disposition. The centrality of *affectus* puts the lie to readings of Cassian, typified by Michel Foucault, which privilege the intellectual, interior dimensions of the human person as the locus of “the self.” Far from this view, affective awareness integrates the bodily and cognitive activities of the person, which in turn, enables the cultivation of ethical dispositions that shape the religious and inter-social self. Cassian’s affective reading practices—notably of the Psalms—stage this dynamic, where high-repetition, high-arousal ritual practices prove powerful precipitates of progress in the ascetic life. To best frame the affective in Cassian, I draw on research in cognitive neuroscience and cognitive science of religion, while also challenging some of its categories.
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“Your Son Is Dead and My Son Lives!” (1 Kgs 3:22): Painting, Poetry, and Polemic in the North French Hebrew Miscellany
Program Unit: Bible and Visual Art
Ruth Clements, Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls
The North French Hebrew Miscellany (NFHM) (Brit. Lib. Add. Ms. 11659) is a Hebrew manuscript dating to the late thirteenth century; it includes a treasury of diverse texts ranging from liturgy to legal texts to poetry, and an extensive program of artistic decoration. The manuscript was written and decorated at a time of increasing persecution for the Jews of France, framed by the burning of the Talmud in Paris in 1242 and the expulsion of the Jews from France in 1306.
Among the full-page miniatures is a representation of the judgment of Solomon (1 Kgs 3:16–28). The two mothers, positioned to the left of Solomon, are interestingly differentiated. One stands, clothed in red, wearing the headgear of a well-to-do woman, gesticulating with a knowing smile; the other, blue-robed and wearing a simple snood, kneels with troubled expression and hands up in supplication. The painting is placed near the beginning of the manuscript’s third series of images, between portrayals of fantastic beasts and seemingly out of sequence with the representations of biblical scenes that follow later in the series.
Recent research on the NFHM has highlighted the connections between the artistic program and the anti-Christian polemic in some of the texts; I suggest that in this case, attention to one particular text can provide clues to the enigmatic features of the image.
One of the many piyyutim included in the collection is a well-known poem, Tzama Nafshi (My soul thirsts), written by the twelfth-century Spanish commentator and philosopher R. Abraham ibn Ezra. One stanza of the poem opposes “the true mistress” to “the handmaid,” and puts in the mouth of the handmaid the assertion of the (deceitful) mother in 1 Kgs 3:22: “Your son is the dead one and my son is the living one!” This verse is generally interpreted as a rather obvious symbolic mapping of Sarah and Hagar (as Judaism and Islam), onto the judgment scenario, with the vindication of Judaism in view.
Such a reading is not impossible; however, verses added to the poem (found in the NFHM), one very early in its circulation and one which may have come from the pen of the scribe of the NFHM, suggest that the Church is actually the object of this polemic. I argue that in fact, ibn Ezra’s imagery inverts the Christian appropriation of Sarah as the “true mistress,” rooted in turn in Paul’s allegorical deployment of Sarah and Hagar in Galatians 4. Language in some of the piyyut commentary included in the Miscellany seems to reflect the same association.
I argue that both the miniature’s portrayal of the two women in the judgment scene and the placement of the image in relation to the overall program reflect the same midrashic and anti-Christian deployment of the story as that found in ibn Ezra’s poem. Both image and text thus participate in the NFHM’s subversive message that the true children of the “true mistress” will ultimately be vindicated against the claims of the false one.
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Wisdom and Revelation
Program Unit: Wisdom in Israelite and Cognate Traditions
Richard J. Clifford, Boston College
In traditional societies “wisdom” is what smart people revere and practice because it guides them to live successful lives and avoid trouble. This practical wisdom is gleaned from experience (especially the experience of the older generation and office holders) and is primarily found, written in scribal style, in the proverb collections of Proverbs. Though Proverbs teaches experiential wisdom, it also regards wisdom as a divine gift to be prized and received. The sages seem not to have made the modern distinction between revealed versus experienced-based wisdom: wisdom is both a divine gift and the fruit of experience. Proverbs 2 teaches paradoxically that one should pursue wisdom with all one’s energy in order that God might bestow it as a gift. In Proverbs 1-9, both the father (sometimes with the mother) and Woman Wisdom (who dwells with God) address youths and the general population with the same intent of enhancing and furthering life. Even the skeptical Qoheleth counsels humans to accept the (pre-determined) moments from God’s hand and so to find joy in the moments. One might go further and suggest that one strand of biblical thought assumes that wisdom is with God and is mediated to humans through the ordinary hierarchical institutions of that society—the king (or royal scribes) and the fathers of families.
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Petition and Performance: Justin Martyr's Apologies and Second Century Greek Literary Culture
Program Unit: Corpus Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti
Brandon Cline, Brite Divinity School
This paper is situated within a larger project that analyzes Justin's First and Second Apology (hereafter, simply the Apologies) in light of their subjective appropriation of the forms and practices of the Roman administrative system of petition and response. In this wider project, I argue that the Apologies perform the genre of the administrative petition, but they perform it multiply, as complex and many-faceted literary creations, manipulating generic conventions and weaving together multiple discourses in a way that both points to and transcends the conventions of administrative petitions. This simultaneous invocation, hybridization, and, at times, subversion of the petition form lies at the heart of Justin's literary project. Taking its start from the essentially eclectic nature of the Apologies, the present paper focuses specifically on hybridity as a crucially important aspect of Justin's persuasive program, and one that situates him firmly within the wider currents of Greek literary culture in the second century (i.e., the Second Sophistic). Justin's eclecticism--far from a personal idiosyncrasy, a sign of inferior style, or the result of a simple lack of mastery--is, upon further examination, integral to his literary self-fashioning, which performatively elaborates cultural and literary codes in a way perfectly intelligible in the context of second century literary culture. This paper demonstrates the nature of the Apologies' generic promiscuity, especially their interweaving of administrative, apologetic, and protreptic discourses; it examines Justin's performance of these various generic modes as a philosopher, paying special attention to the relationship he constructs between himself as petitioner, his addressees as supplicandi, and his various opponents; and it provides a broader contextualization of his hybridizing strategy within the Greek literary world. It will conclude by suggesting a reading of the Apologies as a kind of monumentalizing performance of voiced injustice and Christian transparency, understandable against the backdrop of the publicness of the petition system and the public performance spaces of the ancient city. It therefore contributes to our understanding of the Apologies as sophisticated literary creations that participate in and manipulate both the Roman imperial system of petition and response and the hybridizing self-fashioning current in contemporary Greek literary culture.
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Monasticism and the Disabled Body
Program Unit: Healthcare and Disability in the Ancient World
Brent Cline, Spring Arbor University
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The Holy and the Clean: Category Confusion in Semitic?
Program Unit: International Syriac Language Project
David J. A. Clines, University of Sheffield
It is generally recognized that the correlative of Heb. qodeš “holiness” is hol “common”, and that of tahôr “clean” is tame “unclean”, as Lev. 10.10 has it: “You are to distinguish between the holy and the common, and between the unclean and the clean”. The categories are totally distinct, except that they overlap at one point: a person or thing must be “clean” in order to be “holy” (however, being clean does not make a person or thing holy). When we read of Bathsheba at 2 Sam. 11.4 that she was “making herself holy (mitqaddešet) from her [ritual] impurity” there is an apparent confusion of categories: she is washing in order to become ritually “clean”, not to become “holy,” and in fact she cannot become “holy” since women are never regarded as “holy” in the Hebrew Bible. This paper explores other similar examples in the Bible, and investigates whether such apparent confusion occurs also in other Semitic languages. In Aramaic and Syriac, it appears, the root qdš mainly means “make holy, sanctify”, but sometimes, against expectation, “make clean, purify” (Payne Smith gives “be clean” as the principal sense, though in almost all quotations “be holy” is the obvious meaning), in Akkadian (CAD) it commonly means “purify”, in Ugaritic and Arabic it always means “sanctify”. The confusion extends to lexicographers also, and the paper will conclude with a study of the treatment of anomalous cases of qdš in Hebrew lexica.
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The Scandal of a Male Bible
Program Unit: Gender, Sexuality, and the Bible
David J. A. Clines, University of Sheffield
The Bible is a male book, written by men, to be read by men. That means that it is permeated by characteristically male values and ideals, some overt, others rarely noticed. Among these values are: the glorification of strength; the valorization of strength in action, which is violence and killing; the importance of size; the quest for honour; exclusionary holiness; womanlessness; totality thinking; binary thinking. (Among the biblical examples of male thinking I will show how Mary’s Magnificat is almost entirely composed of male language.)
These embedded values continue to influence Bible readers, often subconsciously. They are most potent when they affect the language of religion, and shape the picture of the Bible’s deity. The scandal is twofold: it is that the Bible is deeply compromised by its ubiquitous adherence to specifically male values, and that its masculinity is rarely assessed, noticed, or mentioned, even in our much more egalitarian world.
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Does Any Fragment Count? Considering the Digital Culture from a Papyrological Point of View
Program Unit: Papyrology and Early Christian Backgrounds
Claire Clivaz, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
Every intellectual adventure has a starting point. Digital Humanities are today well anchoraged in the Swiss academic landscape, but when I started to focus my attention on this growing research trend and involved an interdisciplinary team of colleagues in this adventure, I started from papyrological evidences and research. Six years later, I would like in this paper come back to this apparently surprising starting point. In a masterful small essay, the French writer Pascal Quignard has drawn the praise and the complexity of the “fragment”, inspired by the work of La Bruyère (Une gêne technique à l’égard des fragments, 1986). In our emerging digital culture, the “fragment” sounds again to be a quite usual form of textuality, a form so well known in papyrology. Indeed, by its so often fragmentary aspect, a papyrus is an object proper to disrupt and deconstruct the careful categories established by the Modern Age. Papyrology has always lead researchers to «visualization», beyond a textual perception of it: it has always mattered to see the papyrus, to compare its writing with another one, in order to date it. Such elements draw the general background that has lead papyrology to get the digital country before other Ancient fields, as I begun to argue it in a 2011 article. I will develop this general background and observe in which ways some DH projects are dealing with the notion and perception of the «fragment», such as SAWS for example. Finally, I will considering the specific case of the small P126 (PSI 1497). It challenges our common modern and pre-digital notion of the “text” of the Epistle according to the Hebrews (see Clivaz 2010): to “take the digital risk” of the fragment impacts what we know about and read in Hebrews.
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Funny Martyrs: Examining the Function of Humor in Early Christian Martyr Texts
Program Unit: Texts and Traditions in the Second Century
Stephanie Cobb, University of Richmond
This paper asks whether martyrdom can ever be funny. Certainly early Christians took the martyr texts seriously as examples of faithful endurance, but did their heroes and heroines also make them laugh? And if so, how does the martyrs’ humor function—literarily and socially—in the midst of torture?
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The Textual History of the Greek Book of the Watchers: Contextual Clues from Translation and the Value of Variant Readings
Program Unit: Papyrology and Early Christian Backgrounds
Kelley Coblentz Bautch, St. Edward's University
This paper examines extant Greek versions and manuscript traditions of the Book of the Watchers, a work esteemed by many early Christians. The focus of the study concerns the nature and significance of the Greek witnesses, with attention to the textual history of the Book of the Watchers (BW). Building on the work of William Adler, Erik Larson and Luca Arcari, variants, tendencies in the translation and relation to other translations are explored through examination of two principal Greek versions preserved among Christians. The first and most extensive recension is from the Akhmim Codex, a collection of texts buried in the grave of Coptic monk. This Greek manuscript contains BW 19:3-31:9 and then BW 1:1-32:6, which follow the incomplete texts of the Gospel of Peter and Apocalypse of Peter. Of special interest to this study is the translation found in the Akhmim manuscript, which makes reference to “titans,” “Tartarus,” and “sirens”; a question we take up is whether the translation, in which some observe Septuagintal conventions, is pre-Christian. The second Greek version is preserved in excerpts conveyed by Byzantine chronographer, George Synkellos. These correspond to BW 6:1-9:4; 8:4-10:14; 15:8-16:1. Synkellos apparently derives his information concerning Enoch from fifth century CE chronographers Panodorus and Annianus. While the text of Synkellos exhibits revisions or interpolations that could fit Byzantine ethos of the chronographer, at times the textual evidence from Synkellos agrees with the fragmentary Aramaic text recovered in Cave 4 at Qumran. Additional witnesses, while not as extensive, also contribute to the study of Greek recensions. The Epistle of Jude (verse 14) includes a citation of BW 1:9, that differs somewhat from the Akhmim copy. Further, a recently rediscovered Greek manuscript P.Gen. inv. 187 shares language reminiscent of BW 17:2-5. Paleography dates the papyrus to the third century CE. While some of the Greek agrees with the Akhmim manuscript, there is also agreement with an Ethiopic recension of BW. In sum, examination of these four textual traditions sheds light on the translation of BW and its transmission among diverse Christians.
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Trashing the Bible: Using Critical White Studies to Re-evaluate James and Paul and Vice Versa
Program Unit: Bible and Cultural Studies
K. Jason Coker, Albertus Magnus College
In Learning to Be White: Money, Race and God in America (1999), the race theorist Thandeka, asks a blistering, but important, question, “When did you learn to be White?” The nature of the question assumes whiteness to be socially constructed and performative. Other scholars of critical race theory, in particular John Hartigan, Jr., use the category of “White Trash” to further deconstruct whiteness as a racial ideology. The “trashing” of whiteness becomes a failure to perform, which critically marks whiteness and further exposes the socially constructed nature of race in general, but whiteness in particular.
Using these propositions to construct a reading strategy, I would like to explore the way the Letter of James and some of the Pauline letters construct competing identities. James’s insistence on purity and perfection as key components of negotiating identity significantly contrast with Pauline notions of “becoming all things to all people” (1 Cor. 9:22). The binary between purity and hybridity within these competing modes of identity negotiation make these writings an interesting, if not important, site to use critical race theory as a mode of inquiry. Specifically, how does the purity/hybridity binary in the biblical text refract under the lens of the white/trash binary and vice versa?
With race and racism being profoundly in the public eye over the past year, my greatest, however naïve, hope is that this paper would be an intervention at some level where issues of whiteness and power critically intersect with biblical texts in ways that seek justice and peace. Rather than seeking the answers for modern ills in the ancient text, I want to use the James/Paul debate as an example of how identity (religious or racial) is constructed so that we are more critically aware of how identity and otherness functions as social control. The violence in the rhetoric of the biblical text, then, may function as a negative example of how to move forward in racial discourse, or as a sad mirror for the ways racial difference continues to be negotiated.
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The Lukan Beatitudes in the Canonical Choir
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Rachel Coleman, Regent University
The Lukan Beatitudes in the Canonical Choir
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Professors of Religion and Their Strange Wives: Diluvian Discord in Matthew Henry’s Bible Commentary
Program Unit: Use, Influence, and Impact of the Bible
Matthew A. Collins, University of Chester
The summer of 2014 marked the tercentenary of the death of Matthew Henry (1662–1714), a leading figure among early 18th-century dissenters and author of the six-volume Exposition of the Old and New Testaments (1707–1714/25). This monumental work, which by 1855 had already been published in 25 different editions, attempted a peculiarly practical approach to the biblical text and continues to be widely used and readily accessible even today in both print and online versions. The theme of foreign (or “strange”) wives and Israelite intermarriage is one which occurs throughout the Hebrew Bible and, accordingly, throughout Matthew Henry’s commentary upon it. Where it appears, the practice of intermarriage is characterised by Henry as (at best) unwise and (at worst) a very real threat to both social and religious cohesion. In this paper, I intend to explore how Henry deals with the issue of “strange wives,” why he believes they continue to pose a threat, and (in view of the overall intention of his commentary) what “practical observations” he offers to his reader as a result. In doing so it will be argued that Henry’s commentary traces a thematic thread from the ante-diluvian age to the post-exilic period of calamities resulting from mixed marriages between “professors of religion” and their “strange wives.”
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The Identity and Significance of the Hellenes John 12:12–43
Program Unit: Johannine Literature
Mary L. Coloe, Yarra Theological Union
Using Narrative Critical methods I will argue that the "Hellenes" in John 12 are Gentiles, not Greek-speaking Jews. I will give strong consideration to the narrative context particularly the OT citations in this passage from Zephaniah and Zechariah. These citations correct the crowd’s acclamation that Jesus is the King of Israel and extend Jesus’ significance to the entire cosmos. The cosmic dimension engages Jesus in a final struggle with ‘the ruler of this world’ which will draw all things/people (panta/s) to him.
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“Honor Flits Away as though It Were a Dream”: Statues, Honor, and Favorinus’ Corinthian Oration
Program Unit: Speech and Talk in the Ancient Mediterranean World
Cavan Concannon, University of Southern California
On his third visit to Corinth in the early second century, Favorinus of Arelate found himself confronted by a quandary. On an earlier visit, the Corinthians honored the famous sophist and philosopher by erecting a bronze statue of him in front of the city’s library (possibly the building modern archaeologists call the Southeast Building of the Corinthian Forum). For reasons that remain unclear, the Corinthians later decided to take the statue down. Confronted by this affront to his honor, Favorinus delivered (or, at least, fantasized about delivering) the stinging rebuke of the Corinthians that has come down to us as his Corinthian Oration, found among the collection of Dio Chrysostom’s speeches. In the oration, Favorinus stands in front of the library alongside his fallen statue and conjures it back into existence to defend it in a mock trial before his Corinthian audience, gathered in the Forum. Switching between characters, Favorinus defends his statue and (by extension) himself by lampooning the Corinthians, their city, and the very practice of representing honor in statues. Statues are not safe repositories of honor because they can be destroyed, desecrated, and even misidentified. Ultimately, Favorinus suggests that it is the fallen statue conjured in the sophist’s own speech that transcends the vagaries of history and remains forever a true symbol of Favorinus’ paideia, honor, and virtue.
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In the Great City of the Ephesians: Contestations over Apostolic Memory and Ecclesial Power in the Acts of Timothy
Program Unit: Social History of Formative Christianity and Judaism
Cavan Concannon, University of Southern California
The fifth-century Acts of Timothy (Acts Tim; CANT 295) describes Timothy’s tenure as the first bishop of Ephesos, beginning with his arrival and installation alongside the apostle Paul and culminating with his martyrdom during the Katagogia, a festival in honor of Dionysos. The narrative of the Acts Tim has posed a number of puzzles for scholars, from its presumption that the disciple John authored all four of the canonical gospels to the small amount of space devoted to Timothy himself. In this paper, I argue that the peculiarities of the Acts Tim make sense when we pay attention to the broader imperial and ecclesiastical context in which the Acts Tim was produced. On the one hand, the Acts Tim fits within a longer history of contestation among cities over claims to apostolic traditions and even apostolic bodies. Though strange in its literary structure, the Acts Tim makes possible the interweaving of apostolic traditions associated with Paul, John, and Timothy, while also narrating the foundation of Timothy’s (bodiless) martyrium (the body having been removed to Constantinople in 356). On the other, the Acts Tim also fits within broader ecclesiastical contestations of the late fourth and early fifth centuries, in which Ephesos ultimately lost much of its ecclesial authority in Asia Minor as a result of the rapid rise of Constantinople. Produced during a period of Ephesos’ decline among the major episcopal sees of the east, the Acts Tim is one among several attempts to recast and solidify the apostolic origins of the Ephesian church as it resisted the encroachment of the imperial city’s ecclesial authority.
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John, Gender, and Genre: Revisiting the Woman Question after Masculinity Studies
Program Unit: Johannine Literature
Colleen Conway, Seton Hall University
The paper brings gender construction into conversation with genre for the interpretation of the Gospel of John. I argue that considering gender in John alongside ancient biographies leads (again) to such a strong picture of a manly/divine Jesus that it raises again the question of what purpose the female characters serve in the narrative. On the other hand, when we consider the Gospel in light of other ancient genres a more complex picture of gender dynamics emerges. Because both Greek drama and the Greek novels feature women in prominent roles, paying attention to how gender functions in these genres presents new possibilities for reading the role of women in John.
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Caleb Reproved, Achsah Approved: The Function of the Caleb-Achsah Vignette in the Structure of Judges 1:1–2:5
Program Unit: Joshua-Judges
Mary L. Conway, McMaster Divinity College
The Caleb-Achsah narrative is virtually identical in Joshua 15:13-19 and Judges 1:9-14; however, the pericope differs significantly in its co-textual and contextual placement. Its position in Joshua is relatively isolated—an intimate family anecdote which is linked to the surrounding allocations of tribal territory only by the announcement of Caleb’s portion—but in Judges it forms an integral part of the complex structure of the first introduction and contributes significantly to the book’s themes.
Incorporating methodologies such as discourse analysis and literary analysis, this paper will argue that the first introduction of Judges is structured by the source of Israel’s strength and moves through four stages: 1. Yahweh’s strength gives the land to Israel, 2. Yahweh is with Israel, his strength available to them, 3. Israel grows in its own strength and disobeys Yahweh, and 4. Yahweh rebukes Israel and withdraws his strength. The Achsah-Caleb narrative fits between stages 1 and 2 when Judah’s campaign is stalling. Caleb is anxious for victory and makes a vow to give his daughter to the warrior who conquers Debir.
In spite of the fact that Caleb is a competent and successful leader, this vignette serves as a negative comment on Caleb’s vow and his lack of trust in Yahweh’s strength. In spite of Israel’s covenant with its God, he did not trust Yahweh to give him success but, like Jephthah, took inappropriate steps to obtain it. Achsah, on the other hand, acts in a way that implicitly reproves her father’s actions. As early as the first introduction, this pericope suggests the incipient inadequacy of Israel’s leadership which will escalate in the judge cycles that follow.
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The Greek Biblical Odes: Origins and Second-Temple Background
Program Unit: Greek Bible
Jeremiah Coogan, University of Oxford
(For Open Session)
Through a close reading of the earliest attestations for the odes of the Greek Bible, this paper reconsiders the origins of the collection and challenges the consensus that tradition originated in Christian liturgical practice (Schneider 1949) or in traditions of prayer (Harl 2014). Drawing on observations from scholars who have noted significant parallels in content between the first Christian attestation of the odes in the oeuvre of Origen and the tannaitic ten songs midrash, the paper notes the way in which the early sources, both Christian and rabbinic, read the odes as a cohesive and unified narrative. Rather than being a liturgical anthology of independent hymns and prayers, the biblical odes re-narrate biblical history using the words of scripture itself.
Nonetheless, the shaping of the odes tradition attested in sources from the third century CE and later does not exclude a common core of texts in earlier liturgical or theological traditions around which the odes took form. Rather, when the original author or authors approached such an enterprise, certain texts would have demanded inclusion, texts that were already central to the ways that Jews or Christians were telling the story of scripture and locating themselves in it. Liturgically significant texts such as the Song of the Sea and the Song of Moses would be natural building blocks for a larger exegetical re-narration of the biblical story. The paper thus briefly surveys the extent to which Second Temple sources, including the OG biblical tradition and interpretations dependent upon it, suggest an antecedent core tradition which provided the starting point for the narrative elaboration of the tradition witnessed by Origen, the Mekhilta, and their respective successors.
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Ambiguity, Polysemy, and Contextual Variation in the Qumran Aramaic Lexicon
Program Unit: Qumran
Edward Cook, Catholic University of America
The distinctions among ambiguous lexemes – whether they are examples of homonymy,
polysemy, or vagueness – can often be hard to spell out, and the existing tests for polysemy (such as those outlined in e.g., Geeraerts 1993) sometimes give conflicting results. This presents
special problems for lexical semantics, and especially for lexicography. Some different
approaches to these problems, especially as they bear on the composition of a dictionary of
Qumran Aramaic, are here explored in some detail, particularly with reference to words for
human physical (e.g., yd, r' š) or mental (e.g, rwh., npš) features.
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Resurrections of Greco-Roman Figures and the Resurrection of Jesus
Program Unit: Corpus Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti
John Granger Cook, LaGrange College
Although James George Frazer’s concept of “dying and rising” gods has gone out of favor, some scholars continue to argue that several Greco-Roman deities experienced resurrections. In this essay, I will review the evidence for the “resurrections” of Osiris, Dionysus, Adonis, and Attis. My goal is to compare the vicissitudes of the Greco-Roman figures with certain formulations of Paul and the Gospels concerning the resurrection of Jesus. The comparison will serve to illuminate the problem of analogy and genealogy that is still current among historians of religion.
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Reflections on Deuteronomy, Dearth, and Debt
Program Unit: Poverty in the Biblical World
Stephen Cook, Virginia Theological Seminary
Abstract not submitted
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The Shocking Severance from Sheol of Ezekiel’s Utopia
Program Unit: Book of Ezekiel
Stephen L. Cook, Virginia Theological Seminary
Cosmic geography alters dramatically in the concluding visionary chapters of Ezekiel’s book. The cosmic structure in Ezek 38-48 morphs. There occurs a sharp severing of the temple’s old interconnections with the netherworld and a radical intensification of the shrine’s nexus with heaven. The new cosmic map is unique, differing substantially, for example, from reality’s structure in Third Isaiah. Isaiah 56:3-5 retains mortuary memorials in the temple, assuring eunuchs that they will not lose their ongoing membership among the living after death. Ezek 43:6–9, by contrast, insists that all temple precincts be completely untainted by death’s defiling uncleanness (cf. Ezek 44:25, etc.). So too, the cosmic deep is present in Zech 1:8, but its iconography, the bronze sea, has no place whatsoever in Ezekiel (see 40:28-47). Only fresh, living waters now flow from its old locale south of the altar (Ezek 47:1). According to Ezek 39:11, the passage to the netherworld is now clogged with the crush of enemy departed souls. On the other hand, Ezekiel’s utopia greatly strengthens the shrine’s nexus with Heaven. It provides earth with a powerful and perpetual interconnection with living divine reality. The temple of Ezek 40-48 is something entirely new in Israel, not a return to an ideal past but a veritable experience of transfiguration on earth.
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Epistemic Novelty and Philological Elasticity: The Problem of New Knowledge and the Stream of Tradition
Program Unit: Assyriology and the Bible
Jeffrey Cooley, Boston College
The epistemology of scribes in the ancient Near East was fundamentally traditional. Physical documents handed down by previous generations of scribes, copied and recopied, were the primary means of knowing not only the past, but the contemporaneous world as well. The stream of tradition was the font of knowing all things at all times.
Nonetheless, scribes were not statically unresponsive to changing cultural needs. Ancient documentary traditions could be adapted to new contexts and concerns. Recent scholarship has shown that Babylonian scribes asserted the validity of ancient documents as a way of knowing their world, but they also recontextualized that ancient knowledge by means of translation and commentary (Gabbay, “Deciphering Cuneiform Texts through Ancient and Modern Conceptions of Literal Meaning,” 2009). In Mesopotamia, old documents in a dead language were translated into a living one, and they were re-envisioned in the process. They were also hermeneutically manhandled into contemporary linguistic and cultural relevance.
In contrast, Judah’s invention of vernacular documentation in the Iron Age (Sanders, The Invention of Hebrew) meant that Judean scribes dealt with opaquely novel documents and documentary styles. It also marked the loss of older, venerable, but ultimately foreign writing traditions. Nonetheless, they, too, asserted that older was better, and drew from a native stream of tradition like their Mesopotamian counterparts. One course of that stream was the remembrance and veneration of the (written) names of eponymous ancestors (Radner, Die Macht des Namens, 2005). Judean scribes employed their philological training to adapt the ancient and commensurately valid data of names to invent meaningful and contemporaneously relevant documents. Thus, like their Babylonian contemporaries, they both conceded to the font of the stream of tradition, while at the same time managed its course and, indeed, capitalized on its epistemic momentum.
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Death and Disaster: 2012 Meets Noah
Program Unit: Bible and Film
Laura Copier, Universiteit Utrecht
In this paper a comparative analysis is made of Roland Emmerich’s film 2012 and Aronofski’s Noah using Rick Altman’s work on genre in film as our theoretical lens. The use of genre in both film theory and biblical studies will be explored, more specifically the genre of the disaster film and that of apocalyptic literature. They will be put in tandem in our analysis of 2012. Next, we will apply the same approach to Noah, thus allowing an reading that moves away from the interpretation of Noah as Bible epic. To substantiate our point we will offer a comparative reading of 2012 and Noah focusing on the way the issues of death and disaster feature in both films.
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Love, Friendship, and the Ascent through the Beautiful to the Good: Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus
Program Unit: Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism
Kevin Corrigan, Emory University
This paper will trace Plotinus’ explorations of eros and ascent in the Enneads (primarily, because of time restrictions, in such “middle” works as 3 8 (30) and 6 7 (38)), in relation to two issues in the thought of Plato and Aristotle: first, with reference to Plato’s and Aristotle’s treatments of love and friendship primarily in the Lysis, Alcibiades I (which I think is genuinely by Plato), Republic, Symposium, Phaedrus and Nicomachean Ethics/Eudemian Ethics; and, second, with reference to the paradeigmatic ascents of Republic 7, Symposium (“greater mysteries”) and (much less noticed) Metaphysics 12, 7. I will argue for a striking, if often overlooked hermeneutical resonance between Plato and Aristotle, on the one hand, and Plotinus and later Neoplatonism, on the other.
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The Social Location of Q: The Problem of a Greek Q for the Oppressed in the Galilee
Program Unit: Q
Wendy Cotter, Loyola University of Chicago
The social location of Q has been posed as the Galilee where midlevel scribes, perhaps in Tiberias, prepared it in support of the oppressed workers. The problem here is that Q has been proven to be a Greek composition. If Jesus taught in Aramaic, and the workers speak Aramaic, why would this enormous effort be done in the language of the oppressors? The paper will propose that the evidence on Q supports a situation of listeners who do not understand Aramaic, yet belong to the oppressed. The paper will suggest that the evidence more strongly supports the location of Antioch.
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The Image of Assyria in Isaiah from the Perspective of Trauma Studies
Program Unit: Book of Isaiah
J. Blake Couey, Gustavus Adolphus College
In discussions of the Hebrew Bible’s response to traumatic events, the sixth-century BCE Babylonian invasion of Jerusalem and subsequent exile appropriately receive considerable attention. It should not be forgotten, however, that biblical texts contain memories of earlier experiences of collective trauma, including the various Neo-Assyrian incursions in the late eighth century BCE that resulted in the conquest of Israel and the political subjugation of Judah. Pre-exilic texts from Isaiah 1-33 represent some of the earliest attempts to process and interpret these experiences. This paper will examine Isaianic depictions of Assyria (e.g., Isa 5:25-29; 10:5-15) in conversation with trauma studies, with special attention to the use of language typically associated with YHWH to describe Assyria, and the oft-discussed reappropriation of motifs from Assyrian propaganda for YHWH. Typically, these features are understood as part of a rhetorical strategy to assert YHWH’s superiority over Assyria and thereby discredit Assyrian claims of preeminence. While this explanation has merit, matters become more complicated when these texts are interpreted as “trauma narratives,” that is, as symbolic representations of traumatic events that allow their victims to negotiate their meaning at a safe distance. From this perspective, the slippage between Assyria and YHWH in these texts reveals the community’s struggle to determine responsibly for its suffering, which it attributes simultaneously to Assyria and to YHWH. The notion of a divine plan by which YHWH uses Assyria to punish Judah for its offenses (e.g., Isa 10:5-15; 14:24-27) partially reconciles these multiple impulses to assign blame, but Isaiah’s emphasis upon the incomprehensibility of the divine plan (e.g., Isa 28:21) also preserves some of the tension and ambivalence that necessarily remain in the community’s understanding of its trauma.
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Re-structuring for Engagement: An Experiment in Changing How Class Time Is Allocated in Old Testament Survey
Program Unit: Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies
Melinda Cousins, Tabor Adelaide
In the context of increasing numbers of students with little familiarity with the biblical text and poor skills in reading and interpreting texts, the time allocated in class in an Old Testament Survey course was restructured. Students were required to read 15-20 chapters of the OT text per week. Moving from 3 x 1 hour lectures, the new class format included discussion groups based on students’ pre-reading of significant sections of the OT text, critical reflection on contemporary interpretations of the text, inductive learning through Q & A, and the teaching of interpretive and study skills. Challenges for the teacher included trusting students to learn through participation and helping students overcome barriers to reading texts. Student feedback indicated greater levels of preparation and engagement with the class, as well as self-discovery of the relevance and transformative power of the text.
For this workshop-style session, this presentation will provide a snapshot of how the in-class time was re-structured, modelling a variety of content delivery methods to SBL audience members.
1. Infographics will set the context of Bible literacy in Australia today.
2. A handout will provide the necessary methodological framework and practice details for participants.
3. The class format will be spoken about including an overview of the challenges faced by the teacher and the positive responses from students.
4. Short youtube clips will be shown as examples of the contemporary interpretations of texts used in the class.
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Name and Glory: Associative Concepts in the LXX of Deutero-Isaiah
Program Unit: Greek Bible
Joshua Coutts, University of Edinburgh
In Deutero-Isaiah, divine glory (doxa) and the divine Name, i.e. onoma used in reference to YHWH, are featured together as the central issue at stake in the trial speeches, and are summative of divine eschatological revelation. The significance of these concepts is likely to have generated the emphasis placed on glory and the divine Name in John’s Gospel. Yet in this paper, I wish to draw attention to a third aspect of glory and Name language in the Greek LXX of Deutero-Isaiah: It’s function to associate God with a distinguishable “servant” figure. Through a survey of Name and glory language in the “Servant songs,” I will propose that this language itself functions as the locus of the most explicit association between YHWH and the Servant, which may well have facilitated John’s christological interpretation of Jesus as the one who is uniquely given the divine Name to reveal it (John 17.6, 11-12).
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The Death of Tragedy: The Form of God in Euripides’ Bacchae and Paul’s Carmen Christi
Program Unit: Corpus Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti
Michael Cover, Marquette University
Scholarship on Phil 2:6–11, the carmen Christi, has long wrestled with the question of “interpretive staging.” Against which religious, cultural, or political matrix was the song’s dramatic Christology composed and heard? Recent studies of Phil 2:6–11 continue to trace its genealogy primarily along two lines: the Hellenistic/Roman apotheosis narratives of heroic and imperial cult or the philosophical and angelological speculation of Jewish wisdom literature and apocalypses.
While not disputing these two primary matrices, the following study suggests a third backdrop against which the carmen Christi would have been heard in Philippi: Euripidean tragedy. In particular, echoes of Dionysus’s opening monologue from Euripides’s Bacchae in the carmen Christi—recognized previously by Ulrich Müller—suggest that Roman hearers of Paul’s letter might well have understood Christ’s kenotic metamorphosis as a kind of Dionysian revelation—albeit, one which departs significantly from Euripides’ tragic grammar. The plausibility of this position is supported not only by intertextual analysis of Philippians and the Bacchae (itself composed in Macedonia), but also by a study of Dionysus in the Roman religion and politics, including the Bacchic inscriptions catalogued by Pilhofer at Roman Philippi, the popularization of the Bacchae early on in the Latin paraphrases of Euripides by Pacuvius and Accius, and the phenomenon of cultured emulation of Dionysus, from Alexander the Great to Mark Antony.
In light of these studies, the echoes of the Bacchae in Paul’s carmen Christi—at least at the level of the letter’s reception—emerge as more than literary enculturation. Rather, they accomplish a new integration of the letter’s Jewish and imperial-cultic transcripts. In particular, I will suggest that for the Philippian church, Jesus’ Bacchic portraiture supports (in its own mythic register) a theology of the Son’s pre-existence, while simultaneously establishing him, in his veiled economic parousia, as a Dionysian antithesis to the imperial Apollonian kyrios Caesar—an image cultivated by Octavian and his successors. The Bacchic Christology of the Philippians hymn does not leave the Dionysian typos intact, however, but simultaneously upends it as well.
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Scholasticism and the Form of Medieval Biblical Commentary: Divisio Textus in Thomas Aquinas’ ad Ephesios
Program Unit: Use, Influence, and Impact of the Bible
Eric Covington, University of St. Andrews
The systematic development of medieval theology has long been recognized as one of the distinguish marks of the emerging scholasticism of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Peter Lombard’s Sentences and Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae are prime examples of how scholasticism influenced the very form of medieval theology. Less recognized, though, is the impact that scholasticism had on the form of biblical commentaries. This paper proposes to examine one particular way in which scholasticism introduced a new form within the composition of biblical commentaries: the divisio textus. Using Thomas Aquinas’ Lectura ad Ephesios as a test-case, we will examine the way in which some scholastic commentators divided and subdivided every passage of a biblical text in order to demonstrate its relationship to a single, unifying theme. Influenced by a renewed philosophical vigor in the High Middle Ages, these divisions were then used to communicate the commentator’s particular interpretation of the logic and theological significance of the multivalent and inexhaustible sacred scripture. In Ephesians, for example, Aquinas suggests the main theme of the letter is the origination of church unity and then sees two main subdivisions contributing to this theme: confirming the church in good habits (Chaps 1–3) and strengthening the church to a higher good (Chaps 4–6). Both of these sections are further subdivided, illustrating how each aspect of the letter contributes to the single unifying theme. In the conclusion, we suggest that the scholastic movement introduced a new form for biblical commentary that, though quite distinct from the grammatical-syntactical and discourse analyses of modern commentaries, would become something of a precursor for the continued orderly analysis of the biblical texts in academic commentary.
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Why Does Paul Think Hagar = Sinai (Gal 4:24–25)?
Program Unit: Greek Bible
James R. Covington, University of Chicago
Though much progress has been made in the past century on discovering why Paul equates Hagar with Sinai in Galatians 4.24-25, little attention has been given to trying to read the Hagar stories of Genesis allegorically, as Paul suggests. This paper shows how productive such an allegorical reading actually is for understanding Paul's historically puzzling argument. While the extensive presence of exodus themes in the Hagar stories allows Paul to make a legitimate connection between Hagar and Sinai, he is able to leverage the significant differences to support his argument in Galatians 4.21-31.
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Telling the Flood Stories in LXX-Genesis
Program Unit: International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies
James R. Covington, University of Chicago
In modern times, the flood narrative in Genesis 6-9 has been a proof-text for the methodological value of source criticism in studying the Hebrew Bible, just as it has been a lightning rod for heated debate about the integrity of the narrative. While it is not the intention of this paper to offer a new source-critical investigation of this often-studied passage, it aims to show that the text’s integrity (or lack thereof) has been a prime issue for biblical interpreters since the beginning. In particular, it aims to demonstrate that the translator of LXX-Genesis employed a handful of translation-technical strategies to smooth over contradictions and redundancies in his Vorlage (esp. lexical collapse, lexical differentiation, and variation in verb tenses), and that he often deviated from his normal translation practices in order to do so.
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The Old Is Good? Antiquity in Josephus’ Antiquitates Judaicae and the Writings of Luke
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
J. Andrew Cowan, University of St. Andrews
The Old Is Good? Antiquity in Josephus’ Antiquitates Judaicae and the Writings of Luke
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Translator as Author: The Old Greek Translator of Job
Program Unit: International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies
Claude E. Cox, McMaster Divinity College
This paper attempts to access the mind of the translator of Job by examining those instances the OG has no correspondence in the source text. Since these pieces of text cannot really be called “translation,” they belong uniquely to the translator. In the LXX corpus this is a rare phenomenon and, as such, provides an unusual opportunity to examine what is, in effect, non-translation Greek in a translated document. If this foray is successful, the examination should allow us to access the translator’s mind with respect to vocabulary, grammar, rhetorical features, and religious thought.
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“Through Others”: The Dirty Work of Heavenly Intermediaries in Philo, Plutarch, and Early Christianity
Program Unit: Philo of Alexandria
Ronald Cox, Pepperdine University
Philo of Alexandria and Plutarch compare well in their filling the gap between God and humanity with intermediary powers, daemons, and unembodied souls. They reflect a common Platonic inheritance in depicting these spiritual forces as “interpreting and transmitting human things to the gods and divine things to humans” (Plato, Symposium 202E). This paper describes and compares the characteristics and roles of these mediating forces in Philo and Plutarch, focusing especially on how for both authors certain “unseemly” aspects of the powers and daemons compensate for divine transcendence. It then considers whether the “powers and authorities” spoken of in Pauline literature might be situated among such company.
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Shamanism as a Cross-cultural Interpretive Tool: Jesus, Paul, and Early Christianity
Program Unit: Religious Experience in Antiquity
Pieter F. Craffert, University of South Africa
The argument of this paper is that Jesus and Paul were not shamans but if you want to grasp what they were up to and understand the dynamics of their lives, there is probably no better cross-cultural model available than shamanism or the shamanic complex. In the first part of the paper shamanism is presented as an biopsychosocial phenomenon which appear in identifiable patterns of human experiences, behaviour and conduct across cultures. As such it is presented as a neurophenomenological entity. That means, it links phenomenal experiences found cross-culturally with neurological functions. Put differently, it treats shamanism as a (neuro)biologically based phenomenon that finds expression in world-wide manifestations of culturally diverse but recognisable patterns. Alternate states of consciousness (ASCs), or what Winkelman calls “a biologically based integrative mode of consciousness” lie at the root of shamanism as identifiable world-wide pattern of human experience and conduct. Shamanism as a biopsychosocial phenomenon offers an interpretive tool for analysing a whole range of embodied experiences often associated with figures such as Jesus of Nazareth and Paul.
In the second part of the paper the interpretive potential of shamanism defined in this way is utilised in order to show how central features attributed to Jesus of Nazareth and the apostle Paul are illuminated when seen through this lens. Shamanism offers one way of understanding and describing many of the extraordinary, if not unbelievable, aspects of the early Christian tradition as embodied experiences and neurocultural phenomena. This include visionary and soul travel experiences, spirit possession or fulfilment, dying and rising experiences and healing and exorcism activities.
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Please Be Patient: Jewish Narratives of Embracing Pain and Finitude
Program Unit: Healthcare and Disability in the Ancient World
Jonathan Crane, Emory University
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Reading the Gospels Canonically in Late Antiquity: Eusebius of Caesarea’s Canon Tables as a Hermeneutical Key to the Fourfold Gospel
Program Unit: Development of Early Christian Theology
Matthew R Crawford, Australian Catholic University
The canonical fourfold gospel that spread throughout the Mediterranean basin and beyond during late antiquity was not usually transmitted as a bare text, but typically included various paratextual features, including most prominently the Eusebian Canon Tables. This apparatus represents a sophisticated cross-referencing system invented by Eusebius of Caesarea in the fourth century, though building upon the earlier work of Ammonius of Alexandria. Eusebius’ system proved to be astonishingly successful and was soon being copied in gospel codices from Ireland to Ethiopia, and from Ravenna to Armenia. Indeed, one could say that it was not just the fourfold gospel, but specifically Eusebius’ edition of the fourfold gospel that became central to the diverse Christian traditions that emerged from the fourth century onwards. The significance of this observation lies in the potential of the Eusebian apparatus to function as a hermeneutical key to the fourfold gospel by guiding the reader to an intertextual reading of the four. This paper will explore the way this intertextual approach ties the Gospel of John more closely to the other three gospels by highlighting points of comparison between John and the Synoptics. The Eusebian Canons thus enable a canonical exegesis which respects the irreducible diversity of the four accounts, while also highlighting their underlying unity as a witness to the single Jesus presented therein.
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Deuteronomy in the Temple Scroll and Its Use in a Critical Edition
Program Unit: Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible
Sidnie White Crawford, University of Nebraska - Lincoln
The paper will present a text-critical exposition of the portions of Deuteronomy found in the Temple Scroll, and discuss how they will be used in constructing a critical edition of the book of Deuteronomy for the Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition series.
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What Religion? Whose Identity? Methodological Considerations in Constructing Christian Identities
Program Unit: Construction of Christian Identities
David Creech, Concordia College - Moorhead
The work to describe and map out the varieties of Christianities in the first and second centuries is beset by numerous thorny methodological questions. This paper seeks to lay out some of the problems with talking about “religion” or “religious identities” as descriptive categories in the Roman Empire. Drawing on the work of J.Z. Smith as applied by students of early Christianities such as William Arnal and Karen King, the contemporary, political nature of the categories will be underscored. In short, the paper asks: Is our work describing ancient identities as much about describing contemporary identities as it is about reconstructing the past? What questions should we ask and what controls can we put in place to avoid reifying categories that did not exist?
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The Biblical Citations of the “Untitled Text” of the Bruce Codex
Program Unit: Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism
Eric Crégheur, Université Laval
Being one of the least researched Coptic Gnostic texts, the incomplete treatise known as the “Untitled Text” of the Bruce Codex (Bodleian Library MS Bruce 96) is usually quickly categorized as a late witness of the so-called “Platonizing Sethian” treatises, a modern category which is represented in the Nag Hammadi library by four tractates (“Allogenes”, “Zostrianos”, the “Three Steles of Seth”, and “Marsanes”). Notoriously difficult to interpret, the “Untitled Text” presents a series of hymns addressed to a metaphysical Primordial Principle. One of the many puzzling aspects of the treatise is the important number of direct biblical citations found in the text, close to 20, ranging from the Old to the New Testament. This paper aims to thoroughly look into these citations, from the Coptic text of the quotes, to their place and their role in the treatise. Finally, considering that the number of biblical citations, or even allusions, found in the four Platonizing Sethian treatises of Nag Hammadi is quite low, if not completely absent, we will examine what impact the presence of biblical material in the “Untitled Text” can have its traditional categorization.
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An Analytic Theologian's Response to Jaco Gericke’s Thesis
Program Unit: Hebrew Bible and Philosophy
Oliver Crisp, Fuller Theological Seminary
This will be a response to Jaco Gericke's argument for philosophical criticism as a form of biblical criticism.
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The Chaoskampf Motif and the King of Mount Zion: Isaiah 24
Program Unit: Israelite Prophetic Literature
Lacy K. Crocker, Baylor University
Since Herman Gunkel wrote "Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit" in 1895, the battle between Marduk (storm god) and Tiamat (sea) in the Enuma Elish has been known as Chaoskampf (“chaos battle”). Gunkel’s work demonstrates parallels between the Babylonian creation account and the Hebrew Bible, particularly YHWH’s battle with the dragon and the sea. According to Dan Johnson, the pattern of Chaoskampf includes threat (some form of chaos), victory, and restoration. Johnson refers to Chaoskampf as an overriding theme that ties together the composition of Isa 24—27. I intend to build from Johnson’s work, focusing on the elements of the Chaoskampf motif in Isa 24 and giving specific attention to the phrase “for the windows of heaven are opened” in Isa 24:18. This phrase has parallels in both the Noahic Flood account (Gen 7:11) and the Baal Cycle (CAT 1.4 VII 25–28), which I will examine using a comparative methodology. The Chaoskampf motif intersects with the Zion tradition in Isa 24. Here, Zion functions as the mountain where YHWH triumphs over the flood of chaos waters and where YHWH defeats the kings and the nations. I will argue that the intersection of the Zion tradition with Chaoskampf in Isa 24 heightens the message that YHWH creates chaos against those who violate his covenant and that he reestablishes harmony by asserting his dominion and kingship over the kings of the earth.
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Tillich’s Discourse on Political Theology
Program Unit: Westar Institute
Clayton Crockett, University of Central Arkansas
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Childbearing as Reward and Punishment for Women in Hebrew Bible
Program Unit: National Association of Professors of Hebrew
Sonya Cronin, Florida State University
The scandalous story of David's adulterous affair with Bathsheba and the subsequent murder of her husband Uriah has rightly captured the attention of readers throughout the ages. The biblical text leaves no doubt regarding David's culpability. He is guilty. Where the text seems to be silent is in regard to Bathsheba's role in this drama. While some commentators deem that the text does not give enough information to ascertain anything about Bathsheba, many commentators have discerned clues that suggest Bathsheba is equally culpable. These readers suggest that her bathing on the roof was designed to attract David's attention. As the wife of a simple soldier, Bathsheba had set her sights on a bigger prize; she was aiming to elevate her social status by entrapping David and becoming the wife of the king. These same commentators suggest that Bathsheba's manipulative plotting paid off and her true motivations seen at the end of the David narrative when Solomon is made king, and Bathsheba becomes the next queen mother. While this is definitely a possible reading, this requires reading the text with certain blinders on, assuming the overall story portrays the characters as being in charge of their own fate, and that the narrator and architect of the story are not in charge of a much bigger picture. Instead, I propose an alternative possibility. Using the story of David and Michal in 2 Samuel 6, and Amnon and Tamar in 2 Samuel 13, a pattern can be seen which sets the David and Bathsheba story into a larger context of sin, violation, and recompense. When evaluated in this larger context, it is not hard on the smaller scale to see that text asserts Bathsheba's complete innocence, and on a larger scale that reward and punishment are dealt to women in Hebrew Bible in the form of childbearing.
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Potential Anti-Judaism in Gospel of John: How Biblical Interpretation Affects Homiletics
Program Unit: Homiletics and Biblical Studies
Sonya Shetty Cronin, Florida State University
In the past fifty years, the issue of anti-Judaism in the New Testament has been a growing concern. While all the gospels and various letters in the New Testament have content that fuels debate in the area of anti-Judaism, the Gospel of John is especially problematic, because of its devotional nature and prominence in the daily life of the Church and because of its blanket use of the term ?? ???da??? for the enemies of Jesus. While best translated “the Jews,” in order to avoid fostering a modern anti-Jewish sentiment that could be picked up from the text, many modern commentators/interpreters of the Fourth Gospel avoid the general use of the term “the Jews” and instead translate ?? ???da??? as “Jewish leaders,” “Jewish Authorities,” “Judeans,” or in other substitute terms. This transfers as well into the realm of homiletics as preachers knowingly and unknowingly give sermons based on such translations and commentaries. As a result, the hearers of these homilies may never know the interfaith controversy and the persecution history at stake in their beloved texts. The texts come to them "pre-sanitized," fostering an unfortunate ignorance among the laity and even some ministers. New Testament scholar Raymond Brown, who wrote on the Gospel of John for 38 years, slowly came to an awareness of the potential anti-Judaism in the text. While an active member of the academy, Brown was also a Catholic priest, meaning that he could not simply dismiss unsavory portions of the Gospel of John as invented claims of a first-century Jew-hater. Instead, he had to navigate between his religious convictions that held the text as authoritative with historical merit, and his modern sensibilities that over time could not ignore the grave possibilities available when a religiously authoritative text could be read as fostering anti-Judaism. Opposed to deliberately softening translations, Brown instead advocated that scholars should translate accurately, protecting neither the text nor those who would hear/read it, but then ministers should explain the text and preach forcefully against the adoption of anti-Jewish attitudes that one might find in the text. Using the Gospel of John and the issue of anti-Judaism, this paper will explore the relationship between biblical interpretation and homiletics, and focus particularly on Raymond Brown’s understanding of this problem and the validity of his proposed solution.
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Economy Scales, Honorific Inscriptions, and Paul's Corinthian Patrons
Program Unit: Social Scientific Criticism of the New Testament
Zeba A. Crook, Carleton University
This paper offers a critical assessment and appreciation of Bruce Longenecker's economy scales (2009, 2011) for assessing the economic location of Pauline patrons in Corinth, and considers how inscriptions from voluntary associations can supplement Longenecker's scales.
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The Rhetoric of Identity in the Deuteronomistic Framework of Deuteronomy
Program Unit: Book of Deuteronomy
Carly Crouch, University of Nottingham
This paper identifies several broad shifts in the character of Israelite identity during the exilic period by focusing on the rhetoric used by the deuteronomistic framework of Deuteronomy. The paper's primary objective is to contribute to our understanding of the development of Israelite identity, thought and theology, particularly with regard to the book of Deuteronomy. It aims also to offer a more sophisticated perspective on the question of whether Israelite identity during this period merits the term 'nationalist'.
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King Solomon and the Biocolonialism of the Ancient Empires
Program Unit: Ecological Hermeneutics
Brad Crowell, Drake University
King Solomon is portrayed in the Deuteronomistic narrative of 1 Kings 9-10 as a ruler who became wealthy by exploiting the subjected territories of his United Monarchy. From rare timber to unusual animals, Solomon displayed exotic elements of the natural world in his palace and temple to signal his prestige and power. This paper will use theories related to biocolonialism and postcolonialism to analyze this major but neglected ecological theme in the narrative of Solomon and its parallels among the records of other ancient Near Eastern empires.
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Parochialism or Scepticism in Nazareth? Reconsidering Jesus’ Conflict with His Own People (Luke 4:16–30)
Program Unit: Gospel of Luke
Monique Cuany, University of Cambridge
Jesus’ encounter with his hometown in Luke 4:16–30 is widely held to play a programmatic role in Luke’s double-volume work. In particular, the conflict described in the second part of pericope seems to anticipate the rejection of Jesus by his own people and his forthcoming death, just as the allusion to the ministries of Elijah and Elisha beyond Israel seems to foreshadow the extension of the Christian movement to the Gentiles which becomes so important in Acts. The passage has thus played an important role in assessing Luke’s view of the Jewish people. Despite the hermeneutical importance of this episode, however, its narrative logic continues to perplex interpreters. Indeed, as is well-known, the passage depicts a crowd apparently appreciative of Jesus’ “words of grace” suddenly turning into a murderous mob against him apparently as a reaction to his mention that a prophet is no welcomed in his hometown and his allusion to the ministries of Elijah and Elisha.
A common explanation of the pericope is that it is the clarification of the focus or the scope of Jesus’ ministry which greatly offends the population. According to this interpretation, Jesus refuses to give in to his hometown’s narrow and parochial understanding of his mission when they press him to benefit his own people with the proverb “Physician, heal yourself!.” Rather, Jesus answers with a statement asserting that his ministry must focus, or at least be extended to, others, just like the ministries of Elijah and Elisha were addressed to Gentiles. It is thus the narrow-mindedness or parochialism of Nazareth which is exacerbated by Jesus’ allusion to Elijah and Elisha’s blessing of Gentiles and causes their anger. Alternatively, some exegetes argue that the rage of Jesus’ hometown was caused by Jesus’ self-claims and their unwillingness to believe in them.
The present paper challenges those common interpretations of the pericope and makes an alternative proposal to explain the conflict in Nazareth. To do so, it is divided into three parts. The first part re-examine the common explanations of this passage and demonstrates that they fail to offer a coherent reading of this pericope. The second part then re-examines the meaning of the proverb “Physician, Heal Yourself” in the context of ancient parallels, and shows that—unlike what has been asserted—its usage in antiquity does not support the common interpretations of this passage. Finally, in light of the preceding analysis, the last part of the essay offers a new interpretation of the sequence of thought in Luke 4:22–30, highlighting the function of the proverb in the narrative, and showing how it coheres with Jesus’ allusion to the ministry of Elijah and Elisha. It then concludes by tentatively suggesting another explanation for the offense taken by the crowds in Nazareth. It shall be argued that the proverb “Physician, heal yourself”—while not reflecting the parochialism or scepticism of the inhabitants of Nazareth—nonetheless captures the very essence of the dilemma between Jesus and his own people.
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Art Therapy and the Biblical Exile: Detained Refugee Central American Children and Youth Draw Their Homeland and Journey Experiences
Program Unit: Bible and Cultural Studies
Gregory Cuellar, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary
This paper explores the benefits of an art therapy project for Refugee Central American children and youth, who have been released immigration detention. The project is called Arte de La´grimas: Refugee Artwork Project. Since August 2014, project members partnered with Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley to set up art stations at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church Relief Center and the McAllen Central Bus Station in South Texas. With each participating child artist, group members initiate art activities that incorporate two major exilic themes in prophetic literature, homeland and journey. Art-making with a view toward these two biblical exilic themes open up a healing space in which prophetic visions of home and laments of family separation serve to counter, albeit momentarily, their traumatized memories of violence and victimization. In the end, this paper intends to examine the role of exilic oriented art therapy, as seen in the biblical exilic themes of journey and homeland, in addressing the trauma and mental stress of detained undocumented immigrant children.
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More Than Words: A Conceptual Approach to Wealth and Poverty and the Rich and the Poor in the Book of Proverbs
Program Unit: Cognitive Linguistics in Biblical Interpretation
Elizabeth Currier, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Interpreters who read the book of Proverbs observe tensions in the ways statements within it characterize wealth and poverty and the rich and the poor. Many conclude that these statements are inconsistent, some that they are incoherent. The most common strategy of accounting for the apparent tensions has been to determine that different sayings originated in different social locations. A less common approach has been to identify either sub-discourses or lexical fields that have different things to say about wealth and poverty and the rich and the poor because each sub-discourse or lexical field is concerned with, and geared toward, different matters.
I suggest in this paper that a conceptual approach leads to greater clarity regarding statements in the book of Proverbs that mention wealth and poverty and the rich and the poor. I use the interpretive framework developed by Ronald Langacker to arrive at greater clarity in this discussion. Axiomatic in his approach is that linguistic meaning is more than what is said (or written): “an expression’s meaning is not to be found ‘in its words’” (Langacker 2010: 97). It “involves both conceptual content and a particular way of construing that content” (Langacker 2008: 44). Words are prompts for the elaborate processes of meaning construction (conceptualization) we undertake whenever we hear or read something expressed in human language. In order to make sense of words, conceptualizers must access relevant background knowledge, properly construe conceptual content, and implicitly apprehend the context in all its dimensions (linguistic, physical, social, cultural). Importantly, relevant context includes the discourse surrounding an expression and the speech event itself.
I characterize the sayings in Proverbs as literary speech events and argue that conceptions evoked throughout the book are factors in the ways that wealth, poverty, the rich, and the poor are construed in its collections. These other conceptions figure critically in determining which cognitive domains the producers of Proverbs most probably intended to activate and thereby use to shape and render their sayings coherent. The speech-event nature of Proverbs is equally important because, as Langacker explains, “the speaker and hearer are always part of the conceptual substrate supporting an expression’s meaning” (2008: 78). The speech event itself, in other words, and certain conceptions associated with it, are each a cognitive domain and, as such, also figure critically in the meanings of expressions. We gain insight into sayings in Proverbs by keeping in mind the schematic conception of the speaker and hearer as teacher and learner, and then theorizing about the nature and intent of their interaction. I submit that the teacher, schematically conceived, intended for the hearer, also schematically conceived, to learn from the examples of onstage saying-participants by objectively construing himself (the learner) as either one of the focal participants or as a bystander who is supposed to come to a right judgment about onstage actions and events.
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Magdalene, Mother, Martha’s Sister, or None of the Above? The Mary in the Dialogue of the Savior
Program Unit: Maria, Mariamne, Miriam: Rediscovering the Marys
Anna Cwikla, University of Toronto
The name “Mary” is used to refer to a number of female characters in the New Testament gospels most notably Jesus’ mother, Mary Magdalene, and the sister of Martha. A woman named Mary appears in a number of non-canonical texts such as those found in the Nag Hammadi codices including the Gospel of Thomas, the Sophia of Jesus Christ, and the Dialogue of the Savior. In these texts, however, the Mary character is never explicitly identified with any of the “canonical” Marys. Most scholars have traditionally associated the unspecified Mary with Mary Magdalene. Recently, some have challenged this assumption arguing that the mother of Jesus is just as plausible, as well as Martha’s sister, often called “Mary of Bethany.” Another explanation that has been proposed is that this unspecified Mary is meant to represent a composite figure incorporating at least two of the main canonical Marys. These theories seem to imply that the non-canonical texts were familiar with the stories and characters of the New Testament gospels. Not only this, they also imply that the authors or final redactors attentively adhered to the characterizations of the disciples in the New Testament. Instead of granting the canonical gospels a priori status, I argue that one possibility that has not been seriously considered is that the unspecified Mary of the non-canonical texts need not be referring to any of the New Testament Marys. I suggest this based on onomastic data from ancient Palestine as well as fourth century Egypt which indicates that Mary was a very common name for women. Given the popularity of the name Mary, it is worth considering that the final redactors of the fourth century Coptic texts found at Nag Hammadi did not intend to refer to any of the canonical Marys, but just used what was a common name for women at that time. In order to examine this hypothesis, my paper will use the Mary of the Dialogue of the Savior as a test case to see if she embodies or is associated with any of the characteristics that Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of Jesus, or Mary of Bethany have in the New Testament gospels. I will also consider the ways in which the other two named disciples of the Dialogue of the Savior, Judas and Matthew, are represented in the text in comparison to Mary.
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Morality after Empathy? Current Trends in the Cognitive and Neuroscientific Study of Empathy and Their Implications for Biblical Interpretation
Program Unit: Cognitive Science Approaches to the Biblical World
Istvan Czachesz, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
This paper surveys current trends in the cognitive and neuroscientific study of empathy and considers how they inform the understanding of the role of empathy in biblical literature. Inspired by the work of Frans de Waal, the pioneering monograph of Thomas Kazen (2011) examined the role of empathy in the ethical dimension of biblical law. The first part of this paper will extend Kazen’s approach, exploring how multi-layered (de Waal) and multi-dimensional (Decety) models of empathy stand up against empirical evidence and how the complexities of textual transmission and readers’ perspectives factor into the use of empathy in the creation and application of biblical laws. Examples from the New Testament (Golden Rule, Good Samaritan) will be added to the previously discussed Pentateuchal materials. The second part of the paper looks at the limitations of empathy as a basis of moral behavior and considers recent arguments against the universalistic approach advocated by de Waal and evolutionary science. (1) Recent developments in the study of the Theory of Mind (Goldman/Shanton 2015) suggest that our understanding of other people’s thoughts and emotions (as well as our understanding of the past) is largely determined by our momentary cognitive and emotional state. (2) Social relationships (between organisms) can be analyzed as opportunities for exploitation rather than altruism (Jones 2007) and empathy in this framework is part of Machiavellian intelligence. (3) Morality as understood in the Western world is possibly a fairly recent cultural phenomenon, related to the spread of literacy (Decety & Cowell 2014). These challenges to the conventionally assumed connection between empathy and morality will be illustrated using selected examples from the Gospels and Pauline epistles. Finally, the question will be raised as to how far biblical literature can be considered a source of moral values in light of the foregoing analysis.
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Literacy and Law in the Documentary Finds from the Judaean Desert
Program Unit: Qumran
Kimberley Czajkowski, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster
Among the documentary finds from the Judaean desert were the archives of two Jewish women: Babatha and Salome Komaise. The papyri record the various legal transactions of these two women, their families and their contacts. They date mostly from c.94 C.E. to August 132 C.E., just before the outbreak of the Bar Kokhba revolt. The community that is attested lived in the small village of Maoza on the south coast of the Dead Sea, an area which was first part of the Nabataean Kingdom but was later incorporated into the province of Roman Arabia in 106 C.E. The documents therefore provide invaluable information about a Jewish community’s experience before and after the creation of the province. Moreover, the laws and traditions in evidence in the two archives are remarkable for their diversity, exhibiting elements of Jewish, Nabataean, Roman and Hellenistic law, sometimes within a single document. The operative law of the documents has consequently provoked much debate, with staunch advocates for both a Jewish and a non-Jewish legal framework.
This paper will consider the impact of illiteracy on these women’s control over their documents’ contents. Both women appear to have been illiterate; furthermore, many of their documents were written in Greek and not in their native language of Aramaic. Thus, although they obviously prized their documents highly and took great care to preserve them, it is highly likely that they were not able to read their contents without assistance. While we should certainly not make them powerless or mere passive bystanders in their own legal transactions, we must explore the ways in which their illiteracy may have affected their legal transactions and choice of law, considering how they could still exercise power over their legal lives and the papyri that evidence them.
Such considerations might influence our assessment of the parties’ control over the ‘operative’ law of their documents. This, in turn, has wider implications for the operation of law within the Graeco-Roman world, including the neighbouring province of Judaea, where similar issues of language capability and choice could have played a vital role. Indeed, it will be suggested that literacy levels in various languages should be an explicit consideration in any study of the operation of law in Jewish communities in the ancient world.
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Afterlife Exiles: Death and Dying in the Sierra Leonian Diaspora
Program Unit: African Association for the Study of Religions
JoAnn D'Alisera, University of Arkansas
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Susanna's Choice: Susanna and Lucretia as Companions and Foils
Program Unit: Women in the Biblical World
Mary R. D'Angelo, University of Notre Dame
Feminist and conventional readings alike have compared Susanna to other heroines and even heroes from antiquity; Judith, Esther, Joseph and David are especially prominent in the list, but Ruth, Persephone and still more exotic figures have also been invoked. This paper suggests another heroine for comparison: Lucretia, hailed by Valerius Maximus as dux Romanae pudicitiae. The two narratives offer some striking similarities. Both appear in multiple versions; both are stories about rape and especially the threat of rape; both focus on the dilemma presented to the heroine and the choice she must make; both women are matronae and married; both rapists (the judges, Sextus,) possess social and political power; both husbands are rather exiguous (Joakim, Collatinus); both fathers (Helkiah, Lucretius) play at least as important a role as the women’s husbands; in both stories, sexual predation is an index of political corruption; both women become exempla of chastity. Both stories affirm political change; in both that change constitutes an internal shift of power; both women are championed by a hitherto untried youth (Daniel, Brutus) who is not the woman’s husband; both endorse the youth’s emerging career and signal (or imply) the passing of leadership to a new generation. There is of course a radical contrast between them as well; for Lucretia, the only solution requires her death; Susanna triumphs over the fate she herself expected. Yet from the perspective of most interpreters Susanna does not emerge as a feminist heroine. This paper accepts that judgment, but also argues that, if Lucretia’s role is to affirm the patriarchal control of female fertility as the internal other, Susanna’s gender functions not to assert the sexual status quo (though it is assumed), but to represent the vulnerable yet victorious self, and the conviction that all Jews, including women, children and slaves, should know the law and practice the virtue it teaches.
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Material Gods
Program Unit: Social History of Formative Christianity and Judaism
Mary R. D'Angelo, University of Notre Dame
“You that abhor idols, do you rob temples?”(Rom 2:22NRSV; ho bdelussomenos ta eidola hierosuleis?) Paul’s rhetorical question has been confusing to interpreters. The two preceding examples make sense: “you who preach not to steal, do you steal? You who say do not commit adultery, do you commit adultery?” But it is not easy to see how robbing temples undercuts, rather than affirms, one’s abhorrence for idolatry the word hierosulein has a rather broader range of meaning than “rob temples”; it also means “to commit sacrilege.” Even so, it is hard to see how abhorring idols discourages sacrilege. The suggestion that Paul spoke metaphorically, castigating the Jews for idolatrous regard for the law is not particularly helpful. Jewett proposes instead Philo’s counsel that Jews should not speak disparagingly of idols, lest their worshippers be provoked to retaliate by insulting the deity (Spec 1:53), or lest they themselves to make light of the name “God” (Mos 2.253). This paper will suggest that Paul’s example reflected a relatively common experience of Jews contesting the material world of the Empire. Cups and utensils, often of metal, frequently bore images and symbols of the gods, a problem both for Jews who bought them for use, and for those who were collectors and sellers of scrap. They had to be “desecrated” before purchase, not by Jews but by the gentile vendor. The rationale, though not entirely clear, seems to be that even to desecrate them might imply Jewish affirmation of the idol’s power. Despite the later date of the Mishnah and Tosefta and their location in the land of Israel, they illuminate an issue and a solution likely to have exercised first century Jews of the diaspora.
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Cultural Influences on the Representation of Bible Characters in Selected Christian Nollywood Films
Program Unit: Use, Influence, and Impact of the Bible
Adekunle Dada, University of Ibadan
The Nigerian film industry, popularly called Nollywood, is ranked as one of the emerging popular artistic media in the world. Christians in Nigeria have also seized the opportunity of this medium to produce films for evangelical activities. However, existing studies on Nollywood and the role of Christianity have paid little or no attention to the representation and portrayal of biblical characters in Nollywood films. This paper, therefore examines the cultural influences on the representation of Bible characters in selected Christian Nollywood films. This is done with a view to determining the extent of cultural influences on the representation of Bible characters in these films and the impact of such on the process of internalization of the messages of these films by selected audience in Lagos, the commercial capital of Nigeria. The Bible remains a principal reference point, especially on issues bordering on faith and life of some Christians in Nigeria. However, many Nigerian Christians do not have the time or are not adequately equipped to read the Bible, while the films act as their vital source of information on the Bible. A research into the reception and impact of these films is therefore apposite. The theoretical framework of the paper is performance criticism, which analyzes the performance event as site of interpretation that includes the dynamics of performance, the influence of place and circumstance, and the experience of an audience.
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Rereading Gen 2:22–24 in the Context of African (Yoruba) Kinship and Family
Program Unit: African Biblical Hermeneutics
Adekunle Dada, University of Ibadan
Contemporary interpretations of Gen. 2: 22-24 are often done from Western individualistic perspective, with no attention paid to the African concept of kinship and family. The consequence of this is marital conflict between spouses and their relatives which, some of the times, leads to divorce. Among the Yoruba, like most other Africans, marriage goes beyond the union of two individuals; it is a union of families and also a means of extending the frontiers of kinship. A man, for example, is said to marry into the family instead of leaving the family to start an independent family unit. Therefore, this paper explores how this text can better be interpreted in the light of the African (Yoruba) understanding of kinship and family. Two principal words in the selected text -leaving and cleaving- are often interpreted to mean a total break from the extended family kinship. Does the text actually advocate a break from the extended family tradition as being promoted in some interpretations? What are the real life consequences of the interpretations that neglected the traditional African (Yoruba) concept of marriage? How can the text be interpreted using African cultural and epistemological resources to address the problems arising from the misinterpretations and misapplications of the selected text? Finding answers to these questions will be the focus of this paper. It must however, be noted that the paper is premised on the African cultural hermeneutics which reads the Bible from a premeditated Africentric perspective.
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A Hitchhiker's Guide to Midrash: Fanfic Canons and Interpretive Communities
Program Unit: Metacriticism of Biblical Scholarship
Krista Dalton, Columbia University in the City of New York
The maxim “Respect the Canon” is one of famed fan fiction writer, Valis2’s rules for writing fan-fiction. And if you were to peer down the rabbit hole of fanfic blogging, larping reddits, and gamer youtube channels, the theme of “the canon’s” endurance appears throughout the various mediums. The first creators of “the world,” a setting for iconic characters, magic, and lore that structure the imagined domain, set the “canon” for modern sci-fi and fantasy genres. The offspring of this imagined world generate fanfic texts and role-playing in a tightly knit interpretive community.
What is striking about the endurance of fanfic canons is the reverence fans have for the canon and its characters. This reverence is one facet of a kind of Durkheimian “collective effervescence” that generates from a collective interpretive community deeply invested in the world of the canon. As Gavia Baker-Whitelaw writes, “At the core of every fandom are fanfiction writers who are drawn to explore those specific storylines. They don’t want to write original fiction. They want to linger a little while longer in the world they love” (DailyDot).
Using this framing of fanfic canon and interpretive fan communities, we can appreciate the late-antique Jewish enterprise of midrash in a different light. Traditionally scholars have approached ancient midrashic writers as authors invested in biblical religiosity, studiously pondering, “how their interpretations reveal the real sense of Scripture” (Fishbane, The Midrashic Imagination, 2). However, fanfiction offers another perspective. In fandom communities, while the canon provides the framework, massive extensions and creative projects flourish within the bounded rules. These projects are not invested in preserving the original creation but are directed toward the fan community as a wholly new form, often with just as enduring a legacy. In this sense, canon is sacred, but not so sacred it cannot be touched. Some scholars have begun to problematize the bounds of the biblical canon, demonstrating that our modern Bible canon box is a relatively late invention. Still, how should we think of ancient midrash, which functions from a sense of scriptural precedence?
In my paper, I will develop a reading of midrash through the lens of fanfic canonicity. I will consider the rules of scriptural canon and the enduring characters whom “crossover” and collide in specifically fanfic ways (think: Harry Potter travels to Isengard). As well, I will develop the way midrash is specifically invested in resolving apparent contradictions in scriptural texts, a common practice of fanfic communities. Ultimately, I will consider how midrash is a strategy of identity formation, or group bonding, around a common narrative with iconic characters without presuming a modern sense of holy sanctity. Fanficdom’s reverence for canonicity, a reverence held loosely between a wand and a quill, offers an interesting way of thinking about religious reverence for a text.
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Religion, Cultural Evolution, and Axial Age Transitions: Investigating the Queen of Heaven in the Iron Age Mediterranean
Program Unit: Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions
Megan Daniels, Stanford University
In the last decade, several scholarly and journalistic works have emerged concerning religion’s role in society, with studies demonstrating religion’s social benefits neck and neck with those detailing its detrimental effects and delusional premises. In this paper, I examine how situating religion as a significant component in cultural evolution can elucidate its role in social development, particularly for periods of significant social, political, and economic transformations. I demonstrate my argument through presenting a long-term analysis of the myths and rituals surrounding deities worshiped across the Near Eastern and Mediterranean worlds as the Queen of Heaven. I focus in particular on the Queen of Heaven’s specific manifestations in the Iron Age Mediterranean (ca. 1000-500 BCE), contextualized against her broader evolution as a deity connected to political power and economic prosperity. I adopt two major theoretical orientations from social psychology and sociology to apply to the evolution of the Queen of Heaven and her role in social development: 1) theories put forth, most recently, by Ara Norenzayan (Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict; 2013), that see religions focused on “big gods” as integral to growing social complexity through their ability to engender social cooperation and cohesion; and 2) the seminal study by Robert Bellah (Religion in Human Evolution; 2011) that situates religion as a powerful medium through which societies across Eurasia articulated novel worldviews with far-reaching socio-political implications in the Axial Age (ca. 800-200 BCE).
The Queen of Heaven, worshiped over several millennia from Mesopotamia to Spain, took numerous names – notably Aphrodite and Hera among the Greeks – and was connected to multiple domains, particularly kingship and divine sovereignty, but also warfare, seafaring, sexuality, and prosperity. I begin my paper with an overview of the evolution of the Queen of Heaven’s socio-political associations through her manifestations in Bronze Age literary (Akkadian, Ugaritic, and Linear B) and iconographic sources. I use this overview to contextualize her appearance in the Iron Age, focusing on votive iconography from the sanctuary of Aphrodite at Naukratis, a trading port in the Nile Delta given to the Greeks by the Egyptian pharaoh in the sixth century BCE (Herodotus 2.178-179). Through relating the cross-cultural associations apparent in the worship of Aphrodite at Naukratis to her epithet at this site, "pandemos" (“All the People”), I argue that the cultural evolution of the Queen of Heaven reveals a medium through which increasingly complex Mediterranean societies articulated and enacted ideas of sovereignty in the Axial Age while simultaneously fostering social cohesion with one another across cultural, ethnic, and political boundaries. The application of models from sociology and social psychology as outlined above can thus allow us to articulate specific mechanisms in the evolution of religious worship that both reflected and structured growing social complexity. Finally, such approaches can help us move away from treating religion as an isolated category of analysis and instead move us towards approaches that consider how the evolution of religious systems factored into broader social, economic, and political shifts in human history.
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Modeling “Magic”: Evaluating Archaeological Approaches to the Ritual Functions of Near Eastern Terracottas
Program Unit: Art and Religions of Antiquity
Erin Darby, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Owing to their polyvalence and ephemerality, figurine rituals remain difficult to detect in the archaeological record. In many cases all that remain are the figurines themselves. In the case of Judean Pillar Figurines (JPFs), for example, the figurines are rarely found in “official” contexts or with other religious objects, such as incense stands or altars. They are not inscribed with a name of a goddess or a devotee and their iconography remains largely ambiguous.
In the absence of data, interpreters are left to use either the iconographic form of figurines or ethnographic analogy to hypothesize about the type of rituals in which figurines were used and the people who wielded them. These models are particularly problematic when used to describe “magical” rituals, and may actually impede our understanding of the complete ritual nexus in which ancient Near Eastern figurines might have functioned.
In contrast, this paper will draw upon a wealth of ancient Near Eastern textual sources that describe figurine rituals, using these descriptions to test modern interpretive inferences based on excavated figurines. The paper will address the populations using figurines, figurine function, and ritual type. The sources in question date to the period during which figurines experienced a resurgence in popularity throughout the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean basin – the eighth through sixth centuries B.C.E. When compared with interpretations based on iconography or ethnographic analogy, these texts provide a more solid basis for models that seek to identify which aspects of figurine iconography or find context are truly indicative for the interpretation of “magical” functions. The comparison of text and artifact will also help us identify whether the term “magic” is appropriate in the ancient Near Eastern context.
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Kinship and Leadership in 1 Timothy: A Study of Filial Framework and Model for Early Christian Communities in Asia Minor
Program Unit: Disputed Paulines
Daniel K. Darko, Gordon College
This paper examines kinship framework and language in the directives for leadership in early Christianity communities of Ephesus, aiming to curb the influence of false teachers and bolster mutual support in the membership. It investigates direct appeal to responsible household management, portraits of natural and fictive kinship, and group dynamics couched in filial parlance in the leadership correspondence (1 Timothy). The Greek text will be examined carefully against the background of Greco-Roman conventions on kinship and use of kinship lexemes in relation to leadership. The study of the household code alongside other references to kinship in the prism of Christian leadership will lead to new and perhaps alternate insights regarding how we read the institutional structure of the house churches, even the notion of monarchical leadership. The manner in which fictive and natural kinship are utilized will receive critical attention in the quest also to answer the question: Does fictive kinship override natural kinship or are there interface of the two to harness group identity and group dynamics?
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Love Aquatic in the Time of Pestilence
Program Unit: Egyptology and Ancient Israel
John C. Darnell, Yale University
Imagery and vocabulary in the New Kingdom love poetry reveal bucolic settings, often indicative of private events on the periphery of larger riverine festivals. In this aquatic and festive milieu, tensions between the two human protagonists, with themes of separation, role reversals, and transformations of the lovers and the physical accoutrements of their encounters, are consistent with the time of the coming of the inundation waters and the return of the wandering goddess. The poems echo the rituals and settings of aquatic festivals, and a number of depictions of such celebrations contain allusions to the events and encounters that appear within the poems. The transcendental metaphysics of love that Fox has so well explained for the Song of Songs is present within the Egyptian Love Poetry as well, although seen clearly only when the songs and their parallel festival iconography are viewed together.
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The Search for Priestly Law Genre within Ancient Mediterranean Context
Program Unit: Ugaritic Studies and Northwest Semitic Epigraphy
Guy Darshan, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Numerous scholars—such as Rolf Rendtorff and Baruch Levine—have compared the priestly legal texts in the Pentateuch to ancient Near Eastern ritual texts. However, rather than being belong to the genre of descriptive or prescriptive ritual texts, the priestly legal material more generally corresponds to the casuistic law codes, which was dedicated in the ancient Near East to civil law. In this paper, I would like to adduce some of the affinities these biblical passages exhibit in form, genre, and content to some of the casuistic Greek “Sacred Laws” inscribed on stone and other materials throughout the eastern Mediterranean basin from the sixth century B.C.E. onwards. An examination of related Northwest-Semitic and Punic texts, as well as potential precedents from the Hittite world further contributes to our understanding of the Sitz im Leben of the Pentateuchal priestly law.
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An Audience-Oriented Approach to Paul’s Use of Scripture in Galatians: Reader Competence and Differing Target Audiences
Program Unit: Intertextuality in the New Testament
A. Andrew Das, Elmhurst College
Many literary theorists define an allusion as an author’s intentional use of a source text as opposed to an echo that may or may not be intended. An author-oriented approach to Paul’s use of Scripture, as advocated by several specialists, is understood to circumvent problems of the original audience’s competency. Gentile readers in the Roman world may not have been knowledgeable enough in the Jewish Scriptures to grasp biblical allusions, whether sophisticated or not. That does not prevent Paul from alluding to and echoing the Scriptures as he sees fit. Nevertheless, literary theorists have further explained that an author alludes for the sake of an audience, that is, with the intention of being recognized by an audience.
Stanley Porter’s definitions, especially his cline from formula quotation to echo, offer a methodological starting point. Some distinguish an allusion from an echo as intended by the author and/or for the sake of the audience. At a minimum, an echo is subtler, weaker, and perhaps even subliminal. Many proposed allusions or echoes in Galatians are of a weaker character. This paper will analyze Paul’s quotations as well as allusions that have garnered a greater consensus among commentators and specialists. The paper will also assume the usual distinction between Paul’s gentile Galatian audience members and a group of Jewish Christian rival teachers.
The paper will then offer an analysis of the quotations and select allusions from the point of view of the Galatian audience. Each of Paul’s quotations, formulaic or direct, may demonstrably function as a proof-text for the rival’s own Law-observant perspective, even those in Gal 2:16 (Ps 143:2), 4:27 (Isa 54:1), and 4:30 (Gen 21:10). The formulaic quotations, in fact, offer some of the strongest evidence for the rival position. Since Paul does not quote Scriptural texts that are, on the face of them, supportive of his own position or that he might have shared in his teaching in Galatia, the Galatian audience appears to have been introduced to the Scriptures by the rivals. Paul’s allusions, on the other hand, function differently. They frequently appear to target the rival teachers themselves in an ad hominem fashion, and not the gentile Galatians. The apostle appears to be differentiating among audience members on the basis of their competence with the Scriptures.
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Bulls, Horses, Gods, and Goddesses: The Religious Iconography of Israel’s Neighbors
Program Unit: Archaeology of the Biblical World
Michele Daviau, Wilfrid Laurier University
Diversity in the religious practices of the peoples of ancient Israel and Judah has been exhaustively documented by Ziony Zevit. Yet with each site excavated in the region, more elements of that complexity are revealed. The same is true of Israel’s neighbors, especially Ammon, Moab and Edom to the east. This paper is an investigation of the iconographic traditions represented in plastic art, with a focus on anthropomorphic and zoomorphic images and their distribution across the social landscape. Both the representation of deities and their attribute animals and the concentrations of these images in one or more town, temple and shine sites point to shared religious beliefs and ethnic cohesion. Like Israel, a considerable amount of variety is seen in and among what we consider to have been individual yet related kingdoms, revealing cultural complexity in religious belief systems. A certain amount of shared imagery between sites in Moab and Judah, especially with Jerusalem, Horvat Qitmit and ‘En Haseva, adds to this complexity.
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'Warning' or 'Turning' in Isa 8:11 and the Qumran Communities
Program Unit: Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible
Brian W. Davidson, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
In 1969 the United Bible Society launched the Hebrew Old Testament Text Project. As an aid to their translators, six scholars were commissioned to analyze roughly 5,000 of the most significant text critical problems in the Hebrew Bible. Dominique Barthélemy drafted the committee’s “final report” in his four-volume Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament. This paper is a critique of the committee’s conclusion regarding weyisserenî in Isaiah 8:11. Should one read weyisserenî as a verbal form of sûr (to turn) or ysr (to warn)? The committee preferred the "mediating" reading of Symmachus, a hiphil wayyiqol 3ms from sûr, a reading which stands between that of MT and 1QIsa-a. After surveying the textual evidence and discussing the prominence of Isaiah 8:11 among the Qumran communities, this paper concludes that weyisserenî should be read as a qal w?yiqtol 3ms of ysr. Accepting ysr as the more original reading allows one to better explain the rise of the other readings. Furthermore, Isaiah 8:11 was prominent in the writings of the Qumran communities, and this textual problem again raises the issue of how the sectarian nature of the Qumran communities might have impacted the transmission history of the Hebrew Bible.
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Women’s Bodies and the Interrogation of National Liberation: Reading Judges with Beloved in Light of a Black Nationalist Liberation Discourse
Program Unit: Gender, Sexuality, and the Bible
Steed Vernyl Davidson, McCormick Theological Seminary
Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the book of Judges in their own way both represent failed or at best stalled nationalist narratives of liberation. Morrison uses the house “124" as a signifier of black nationalist aspirations. As a way station on the Under Ground Railway, “124" provides a site for black struggles from slavery and the freedom to thrive. In the novel that same site of liberation witnesses the deformation of black women’s bodies whether through infanticide, remembered physical traumas, mental instability, or spectral body transformations; all part of the legacies of slavery. The novel Beloved ruptures the black nationalist discourse to focus attention on black women’s bodies and the way the violence that attends those bodies interrupts liberation. In Judges the quest to achieve possession of the land from the Canaanites advances slowly with spotty military victories. The vision of liberation hardly materializes in the book, especially for women. That the book ends with the abduction of women from Jabesh-Gilead/Shiloh to ensure the territorial integrity of Benjamin and by extension ancient Israel indicates the limits of liberation particularly as it relates to women’s bodies. This paper uses the notion of the failed nationalist liberative discourse present in Beloved to interrogate the nationalist discourse present in the book of Judges or the one customarily thought to exist in the book. This examination takes place in the context of the scholarly framing of Judges as a part of the historical narrative of the Deuteronomistic History that either provides justification or criticism of the monarchy in general or the Davidic monarchy more specifically. By attending to the fate of women’s bodies in the book of Judges in the way that Morrison forces readers to do with black women’s bodies in Beloved, this paper shows how Judges may not serve the authenticating function for a particular national formulation for the monarchy. Rather women’s bodies in Judges - whether as killers, seducers, sacrificed, dismembered, or abducted - disrupts the notion of the nation founded upon the ideal of liberation. The paper goes further to draw insights from various critiques of black nationalist liberative discourse from thinkers such as bell hooks to explore alternative conceptions of community discourses that may be present in the book of Judges.
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The Moral Vision of the Bible: A Hebrew Bible / Old Testament Approach
Program Unit: Bible and Ethics
Eryl W. Davies, Prifysgol Bangor - Bangor University
Any attempt to provide a clear and systematic account of the ethics of the OT and NT is bound to prove a complex and challenging task. The paper will examine some of the methodological problems encountered by OT scholars who have sought to construct an ‘ethics of the Hebrew Bible’ and consider the extent to which these problems are encountered by their NT counterparts. It will consider whether the historical-critical and the literary-critical approach have been successful in broaching the subject of biblical ethics and how both OT and NT scholars have sought to discern a moral coherence within the Bible.
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Hekhalot Mysticism and Jewish Shamanism: Where Do We Stand Now?
Program Unit: Mysticism, Esotericism, and Gnosticism in Antiquity
James R. Davila, University of St. Andrews
In 2001 my monograph Descenders to the Chariot: The People Behind the Hekhalot Literature was publish by Brill. The Hekhalot literature is a corpus of Jewish mystical texts composed mainly in Babylonia and Palestine in the Geonic era, but which drew on traditions from late antiquity and perhaps earlier, and which continued to be shaped when transmitted to Europe in the Middle Ages. The texts present Tannaitic rabbis as practitioners of a form of mysticism (“Merkavah mysticism”) in which they undertook ritual and ascetic practices that led them into visionary states in which they could ascend to heaven to see and participate in the angelic liturgy around God’s throne-chariot (the Merkavah) or call down angels from heaven who could reveal the secrets of Torah and other mysteries to the practitioners. The meaning of this literature was and is debated, with some taking it as entirely fictional exercises in scriptural exegesis and others arguing that it (also) described an actual visionary praxis. Descenders to the Chariot presented a case for the latter viewpoint. In this volume I drew on anthropological data concerning Siberian, Inuit, Native American, and Japanese shamans, as well as the anthropological theoretical literature on shamanism, to argue that the descenders to the chariot — the practitioners described in the Hekhalot literature — displayed significant parallels to the shamans of other cultures and could be profitably compared to them. I argued that like shamans, the descenders to the chariot (1) were elected at least partly through their heredity; (2) engaged in a recognizable complex of ascetic and ritual techniques that promoted altered states of consciousness; (3) endured an experience of initiatory disintegration and reintegration; (4) traveled to a multi-tiered otherworld via a world tree or world ladder; (5) focused much of their efforts on the control of helping spirits; and (6) served their human community by various means. I found an especially useful typology of practitioners in the work of Michael Winkelman and concluded that the descenders to the chariot were very similar to his “shaman/healer,” a type of shamanic practitioner found in complex agricultural and pastoral societies. My central conclusion was that the instructions and rituals in the Hekhalot literature were recognizably of the type used by shamans to generate visionary experiences and that the visions described in the Hekhalot literature were of the type reported by shamans. Although the literature is pseudepigraphic and the illustrative stories it tells are fictional, it is a literature of instruction that preserves rituals that were used by actual magico-religious practitioners.
In the fourteen years since the publication of this volume a number of scholars have engaged with the arguments and conclusions of Descenders to the Chariot. The purpose of this paper is to review the responses, along with my own reflections, and evaluate where the case for the Hekhalot literature as the literary residue of a quasi-shamanic intermediary movement stands today.
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Dangerous Audience Scenes in the Hebrew Bible and Mesopotamia as Background to Dingiršadibba Prayers
Program Unit: Assyriology and the Bible
Ryan Conrad Davis, University of Texas at Austin
Annette Zgoll (2003) has persuasively argued that both the actions and wordings of Akkadian šuilla prayers, and incantation-prayers in general, are formatted to resemble an audience with a human ruler. In making her argument, Zgoll relied primarily on the audience scene described in the Akkadian folktale “Poor Man of Nippur.” But the dingiršadibba prayers, normally directed towards personal gods, are different in structure and content than šuilla prayers and require a more nuanced explanation. In šuilla prayers, the addressed deity is often a third party to a problem between the supplicant and his personal gods. Dingiršadibba prayers, however, concern a direct confrontation between an offended deity and the perpetrator. The goal of these kinds of audiences for the supplicant was survival, rather than having a specific petition granted. In my paper, I will adapt Zgoll’s observation more particularly to dingiršadibba prayers, using descriptions of dangerous audience scenes, not only from Mesopotamian literature, but from the Hebrew Bible as well. The conventions of audience scenes are remarkably similar throughout the ancient Near East, and narrative descriptions of many dangerous audience scenes in the Hebrew Bible provide important data for understanding the strategies implemented in dingiršadibbas for navigating such encounters. These examples from the Hebrew Bible provide parallels to the social context that dingiršadibba prayers are meant to address. Such biblical narratives include Absalom’s reconciliation to David (2 Samuel 14), Jacob’s encounter with Esau (Genesis 33), and Shimei’s audience with David (2 Samuel 19). These examples not only help us to understand how individual dingiršadibba prayers are formatted, but Absalom’s reconciliation is also illuminating when examining the use of dingiršadibba prayers in larger rituals, such as the bit sala? mê and ili ul ide rituals.
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"More Than a Slave" (Phlm 16): Christianization and Pro-slavery Rhetoric in the Antebellum South
Program Unit: Slavery, Resistance, and Freedom
Stacy Davis, Saint Mary's College (Notre Dame)
The Torah makes a distinction between Hebrew and non-Hebrew slaves. The former live in a temporary state of slavery, unless family ties formed during their six years of servitude prove stronger than their desire for freedom. The latter are slaves in perpetuity, according to Leviticus 25.44-46. Christian slaveowners in the antebellum South and their northern allies used that distinction to justify the enslavement of Africans. Yet, unlike in the Torah, which says next to nothing about the religious lives of Israelite chattel, U.S. slaveowners insisted upon the religious instruction of their slaves. My paper will examine this emphasis on catechesis and conversion and the ways in which that emphasis problematized the justification of African slavery on the grounds of ethnicity. Since the "foreigners" were also "brothers and sisters in Christ," Christian slaveowners had to use all of their rhetorical and exegetical skills to hold both views simultaneously.
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Beyond Male and Female: Same-Sex Imagery in Malachi 2
Program Unit: African-American Biblical Hermeneutics
Stacy Davis, Saint Mary's College (Notre Dame)
Malachi 2.10-13 is often interpreted as a complaint against idolatry. The passage, however, may also contain an atypical form of the prophetic marriage metaphor, in which God is male and Israel is female. In honor of the work of Dr. Randall Bailey and placing African American biblical hermeneutics in conversation with queer theory and masculinity studies, I propose to read the passage in Malachi 2 as an example of the queering of the heterosexual marriage metaphor. God's personification as male and the lack of Judah's personification as female suggests a same-sex marriage metaphor. My argumentation will be based on the Hebrew text and the application of theory and conclude with implications for the text's use in marginalized communities. If this passage in Malachi 2 need not be read in heteronormative terms, then more opportunities for religious discourse about broader views of marriage and intimacy that are not limited to a gender binary become possible.
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Manuscripts, Monks, and Mufattishin: Digital Access and Concerns of Cultural Heritage in the Yale Monastic Archaeology Project
Program Unit: Digital Humanities in Biblical, Early Jewish, and Christian Studies
Stephen J. Davis, Yale University
The Yale Monastic Archaeology Project (YMAP) currently sponsors work at two monastic centers in Egypt: the White Monastery near Sohag in the south, and Wadi al-Na?run (ancient Scetis) in the north. The study of manuscripts at these sites has presented exciting possibilities—and has raised complex challenges—related to digital access and cultural heritage. Accordingly, this paper will consist of two main parts and two areas of focus. First, I will report on our work at the White Monastery, where excavations in December 2011 yielded the discovery of manuscript fragments in the monumental Church of St. Shenoute. This discovery served as a catalyst for a series of research steps that began with archaeological analysis and photo-documentation supported by the local inspectors (mufattishin) representing the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, and that culminated with the digitization of the fragments and their publication online at Yale’s Egyptological Institute website. Second, I will report on my work cataloguing the Coptic and Arabic manuscripts in the library at the Monastery of the Syrians in Wadi al-Na?run, a project started in December 2013. In the case of the Monastery of the Syrians, the goal of digitization has been complicated by monastic concerns related to cultural heritage and the control of manuscript content in the digital age.
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The Destination of Paul’s First Journey: Asia Minor or Africa?
Program Unit: Archaeology of the Biblical World
Tom Davis, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary
The results of experimental archaeology related to ancient seafaring, new studies of eastern Mediterranean trade networks and recent archaeology on Cyprus, shed new light on the itinerary of the first Pauline missionary journey and the related question of the departure of John Mark from the mission team as related in Acts 13:13. It is now clear that Nea Paphos normally was used as a port of departure for ships sailing to Alexandria and North Africa, not Asia Minor. If Perga in Pamphylia were the original intended destination, then the travelers should have sailed from Lapithos or Kyrenia on the north coast of Cyprus. This paper will propose that the original intended destination of the missionaries was Cyrene and that the change in itinerary, driven by the results on Cyprus, lead to the departure of John Mark. This model will help better understand Luke’s literary enterprise, Paul’s missionary purposes, and the development of early Christianity in the eastern Mediterranean
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Making a Greek, Syro-Phoenician Woman a Canaanite: Matthean Alterations of Mark 7:24–30 and Deuteronomistic History
Program Unit: Synoptic Gospels
Kathy Barrett Dawson, Duke University
Some commentators (e.g., Hagner, Harrington, and Davies and Allison) stress the parallelism between the centurion’s request for his paralyzed servant (Matt 8:5-13) and the Canaanite woman’s request for her demonized daughter (Matt 15:21-28). Thus, Matthew upholds God’s election of and faithfulness to Israel while simultaneously praising the great faith of the two Gentiles, a faith that results in Jesus granting the Gentiles’ requests and authorizing the Gentile mission. However, recent works have challenged such a limited reading (e.g., Glenna Jackson maintains that the story describes the acceptance of the woman as a proselyte in the synagogue, and Musa Dube reads the story as an example of imperialist values and women’s oppression).
I propose that each Matthean alteration to the Markan story contributes to the meaning of the whole. The identification of the woman as a Canaanite should be understood in conjunction with the woman’s verbal plea: “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David” (v.22; cf. Mark 7:25). In contrast to equating the woman’s cry with the centurion’s request for healing solely on the basis that the two characters are Gentiles, her words, unique for a Gentile in Matthew, should be understood as the exact opposite of the Deuteronomist’s stipulation that the Israelites must not show mercy to the Canaanites (Deut 7:2). By deleting “Let the children first be fed” (Mark 7:27), the Matthean Jesus gives no indication that the Gentile “dogs” might be fed subsequent to the children. Finally, in Matthew the woman’s return home is not described (cf. Mark 7:30); we are simply told that the daughter is instantly healed at Jesus’s command (v.28).
In Matthew the Gentile mother is a “Canaanite” because, as Niels Lemche has demonstrated, the term is representative of Israel’s enemy in the Deuteronomistic History and the rest of the Pentateuch. The demon-possessed daughter in the Matthean account is an allusion to the rationale behind the Deuteronomistic command to utterly destroy the indigenous peoples during the Israelite conquest of the land. The Deuteronomist warrants such genocide on the basis that Israelite intermarriage with the daughters and sons of pagans would result in the worship of foreign gods. The mere existence of the Canaanite mother and daughter is representative of Israel’s failure to obey the Deuteronomistic command as the story is described in the biblical tradition.
The Matthean Jesus initially ignores and then rejects the woman’s plea because, in keeping with the tradition, his mission is solely for “the lost sheep of Israel” (15:24). Jesus’s hesitation highlights the community’s fear of religious defilement. However, Jesus reforms the tradition by highlighting personal intention and faithfulness and goes far beyond merely authorizing a Gentile mission. The woman is not to remain as she was with the exception that her daughter is now demon-free (cf. Mark 7:29-30). Rather, the Canaanite woman can now eat from the master’s table without becoming a proselyte to Judaism (contra Jackson). The primary message is the destruction of previous differences that included or excluded one from the Kingdom of God.
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From Atlanta to Africa: Class, Globalized Gospels of Success, and the New Black South
Program Unit: Poverty in the Biblical World
Keri Day, Brite Divinity School
Charismatic and Evangelical Christianity has led out in providing religious and “biblical” logics that reinforce and support economic exploitation and class injustices, impacting global cities around the world from Atlanta, Houston, Miami, and Dallas to Accra, Lagos, and Seoul. Charismatic Christianity merges materialistic, market-driven ideas of success with notions of Christian identity built on favor and wealth, what I refer to as globalized gospels of success. These globalized gospels of success (also known as prosperity gospels) have taken deep roots in the Black South and is also present around the globe. This paper explores this global gospel of success, its reinforcement of class injustices, and prospects for resistance in the “New Black South.”
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The na?aš in the Garden of Eden (Gen 2:4b–3:24): Malevolent or Benevolent?
Program Unit: Genesis
Wilson de A. Cunha, LeTourneau University
In her recent study of the Garden of Eden story, Ellen A. Robin argues that the serpent should not be seen as a villain as the history of interpretation has made him to be (105-109). She further claims that, differently from the perspective of modern readers, the ancients did not view snakes in a negative light, citing Num 21; 2 Kings 18 in support (111). The present paper will tackle the question as to whether the na?aš in the Garden story was meant to be taken as malevolent or benevolent. The paper will be divided into three main sections. The first will show that the serpent had, indeed, become a villain in the history of its reception in both Jewish and Christian sources. However, even here, in some sources, the serpent can be seen in a positive light (see gnostic texts). The second part will also briefly show that, in the mythology and iconography of the Ancient Near East, the serpent can be seen either in a positive or negative way. As such, Robin’s claim would be partially correct. This mix representation of the symbol of the serpent shows how complex the presence of the na?aš in the Garden was for the ancient audience, while also testifying to the literary skills of the ancient author. The third section will show that, despite the ambiguity of the symbolism of the serpent, the ancient author did cast the na?aš in a negative way: (a) through what Eve says: “the serpent deceived me” and (b) in the punishment of the serpent: “you will strike his heel.” With another recent study (see Ziony Zevit, What Really Happened in the Garden?), this paper will show that to “strike the heel” points to the serpent malevolent motivations.
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Eusebius of Caesarea and the “Drink of Immortality:” The Reception of LXX Isaiah 25 in Eusebius’ Commentary on Isaiah
Program Unit: Greek Bible
Wilson de A. Cunha, LeTourneau University
This paper will focus on the reception of LXX Isaiah 25 in Eusebius’ commentary on Isaiah, paying especial attention to his hermeneutical framework. For Eusebius, LXX Isa 25 is a prophecy that predicted the establishment of Christ’s kingdom in heaven. There, death will have no power over “those who will be found worthy” of the promises because they will participate in God’s symposium whose main drink will be the “drink of immortality” (See comments on vv. 1, 6-8). However, LXX Isa 25 is also a prophecy that predicted and was fulfilled during the reign of Constantine, when persecution was stopped and Christianity became an important religion in the Empire (see comments to vv. 2-5). As such, Eusebius read LXX Isa 25 both as already fulfilled and as not-yet-fulfilled. The paper will be divided into three main parts: (1) LXX Isa 25 in its own literary context (2) Eusebius Interpretation of LXX Isa 25 (including his use of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion); and (3) Concluding Thoughts on Eusebius’ Hermeneutical Framework.
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Biblical Lexicography and the Semantic Structure of the Target Language: The Case of 'Akh
Program Unit: Biblical Lexicography
Reinier de Blois, United Bible Societies
No lexicographer can write entries without a proper semantic analysis of the available data. This is a fact that few people will dispute. Ideally, all passages where a given lexeme is found should be studied in context in an effort to determine its lexical and contextual meanings, which are then rendered in some form in the language used by the intended audience of the dictionary. The key question that will be addressed in this paper is the following: How important is the semantic structure of the language of the audience for the semantic analysis presented in a dictionary? This question never received much attention in traditional lexicography of Biblical languages until David J. Clines addressed it in his introduction to the first volume of the Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, where he claimed that “our perception of senses is often dependent on the semantic structure of the English language.”
This paper wants to discuss this issue in detail, and the author wants to use examples from the Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew -- for which he is the editor -- to illustrate how too much attention to the structure of the target language can blur important semantic distinctions in the source language. Special attention in this discussion will be given to the Hebrew particle 'akh.
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The ‘Sign from Heaven’ and the ‘Bread from Heaven’: Echoes of the Manna Tradition in Mark 8:10–13
Program Unit: Intertextuality in the New Testament
Mateus de Campos, University of Cambridge
The pericope about the Pharisees’ demand for a sign from heaven in Mark 8:10-13 has called the attention of a number of exegetes for its somewhat cryptic meaning and elusive literary function. At a first glance, the story seems to sit quite uncomfortably in its literary context, breaking a natural transition from the feeding of the multitudes (8:1-10) to the rebuke of the disciples’ lack of understanding thereof (8:14-21), neatly established by the shared motif of “bread” (a?t??). The awkwardness of the arrangement is accentuated by the puzzling narration of the events. In an apparent trivial trip, Mark has Jesus cross the sea only to be confronted by the Pharisees, returning immediately after to the “other side”. In addition to its odd placement and plot function, the request itself is also enigmatic and has been diversely interpreted, with the prevailing opinion that the expression ‘from heaven’ functions as a simple circumlocution for ‘from God’, meant merely to identify the sign’s divine nature.
The present study proposes that a greater clarity can be obtained both in relation to the request and the function of the episode when they are approached in light of the traditional development of theme of the giving of the manna. It will be argued that the giving of the manna constitutes a unique sign of divine agency in Israel’s religious experience and that Mark’s articulation of the Pharisaic request within that framework stands in continuity with his Christological concerns in the narrative. We proceed first by evaluating the internal elements in the Markan narrative in light of the development of the manna tradition and then by showing how such a reading makes better sense of Mark’s literary arrangement and discourse.
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Qur'anic Premises in Rhetorical Analogy: The Case of al-Ma'mun's Mihna
Program Unit: Qur’anic Studies: Methodology and Hermeneutics (IQSA)
Vanessa De Gifis, Wayne State University
Strategic references to the Qur’an in rhetorical argument is a vital way for politicians to construct analogies between paradigmatic characters in the Qur’an and people in their own social milieu in order to persuade an audience of the moral value of particular political attitudes and actions. My paper examines Qur’anic referencing in letters attributed to the Caliph al-Ma’mun (r. 813-33) promulgating his famous reform policy known as the mihna (test), ostensibly to enforce the doctrine of the createdness of the Qur’an. The letters, most fully preserved in al-Tabari’s History, are rich with Qur’anic references, not only verbatim quotations of doctrinal proof-texts, but also paraphrastic allusions to scriptural characters and themes that situate the mihna policy as a whole in the salvific worldview of the Qur’an. In the course of my presentation, I will argue that Qur’anic referencing in political rhetoric essentially functions as analogical (qiyasi) exegesis by establishing likeness between referents in the Qur?anic text-context and referents in the political-rhetorical context. The goal is to secure the audience’s assent, if not to any literal likeness, then to the imaginative relationship established in the analogical figure and to the conclusion that emerges from it. Working from classical Arabo-Islamic rhetorical theories (e.g. al-Farabi and Ibn Rushd), I explain the two basic classes of rhetorical analogy—the example (mithal) and the enthymeme (?amir)—and their structure and significance in Qur’anicized rhetoric. An example implies that if two particular subjects are alike in one respect, then they should be alike in other respects as well. By confirming a particular with another particular via a universal common to both, a rhetorical example using the Qur’an can give us insight into perceived “universal principles” in the Qur’an, a crucial—if elusive—hermeneutical category for many Qur’an exegetes. Examples are basically validated through the logic of enthymeme. An enthymeme is an abridged syllogism in which one of the two premises (usually the more “universal” major premise) is omitted. Most grammatical techniques for integrating Qur’anic references into political speech, especially meddling with the internal grammar of a Qur’anic verse, result in condensed forms of enthymeme, because of the linguistic interweaving within a single utterance of major premises (with referents from the Qur’an text) and minor premises (with referents from the political circumstance). The effective meaning of the Qur’anic reference is thus inextricably bound up with circumstance in which it is uttered. In the mihna letters, Qur’anic proof-texts are given to demonstrate al-Ma’mun’s knowledge in interpreting the scripture, while more allusive references are made to analogize his role as caliph with the Qur’anic paradigm of the rightly guided leader, the deviance of those targeted in his test with the errors of the Qur’anic disbelievers, and the mi?na itself with the prophetic mission to correct error and enforce right guidance.
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The Iconography of ‘Coastlands’: A Historical Perspective
Program Unit: Islands, Islanders, and Scriptures
Izaak J. de Hulster, University of Helsinki
This paper provides a historical perspective on the interpretation of the ‘coastlands’ as mentioned in the Hebrew Bible through iconography. Iconographic exegesis studies pictorial sources in order to illuminate the ‘biblical world’, e.g., its conceptualization of the earth. Ancient images with a geographical interest, such as the so-called ‘Babylonian world map’ (now in the British Museum, BM 92687) and other examples of ancient Near Eastern iconography inform our understanding of ancient cosmography, a useful background for a historical reading of the Hebrew Bible texts about the ‘coastlands’ (also ‘islands’, or possibly mountain-islands). This approach makes aware of “the specific geography that these texts have in mind” (quoting the call for papers) but also leaves space for exploring the texts’ use of this geography with regard to figures of speech (cf. merism) and symbolism. The paper mainly focuses on the islands in the Isaian corpus and round off with how this cosmographic imagination fosters the (symbolic) geographical dynamics of Isaiah 66:18-21.
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Literature Studies, Liberation Theology, and Impulses for Contextual Biblical Methodologies
Program Unit: Contextual Biblical Interpretation
Izaak J. de Hulster, University of Helsinki
This 'theory-framed' paper takes its starting point in the concept of 'rereading', as developed within literature studies, seminally so by Matei Calinescu ("Rereading", 1993). This concept of 'rereading' (not to be confused with the historical-critical concept of 'rélecture') has hardly been employed in biblical studies (maybe the only true example is Karolin Lewis, "Rereading the 'Shepherd discourse'", 2008). Biblical studies' use of 'rereading' seems to have been developed against the background of the hermeneutics of liberation theology. Nevertheless, the most common use of 'rereading' is simply linked to its dictionary meaning, maybe with the exception of the work of Ehud Ben Zvi who has developed his own use.
After surveying the use of 'rereading' in literature studies and biblical studies, this paper contours a hermeneutics of rereading contributing to contextual theology with emphases on the prevailing actuality of Scripture, the aspect of community in biblical interpretation, and the attitude of attentive (slow) reading.
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The Bronze Snake according to Philo of Alexandria in Legum allegoriae II, 79–81
Program Unit: Philo of Alexandria
Ludovica De Luca, Università degli studi Roma Tre
Philo of Alexandria in Legum allegoriae II, 79-81 interprets the bronze serpent of Num 21, 4-9 as *logos sophrosunes* ("character of temperance"). The snake in LA II, 79-81, as *ophis Euas* ("serpent of Eve"), on the one hand, is the vice, but on the other, as *ophis Mouses* ("serpent of Moses"), is the image of virtue. Philo considers the snake of Numbers according to both the ethical and the noetical level. As *logos sophrosunes* the bronze serpent corresponds to the intelligible virtue. It is the *idea* ("idea") that must be looked at so that we can have a moral model to imitate, to eliminate every vice.
The mosaic snake, like an ethical and noetical mirror, shows a new possibility for the Israelites to embrace the faith in the sign of temperance. The exegesis of Philo of Num 21, 4-9 is imbued with elements of the Greek-Roman World and the Jewish Tradition. His exegesis returns back in the interpretation of some ecclesiastical authors, that considered the snake of Numbers in relation to Jn 3, 14-15. Authors like, Tertullianus, Origenes, Gregorius Nazianzensus, Gregorius Nyssenus and Ambrosius, largely repeat the ethical and pharmacological aspects of his exegesis. Furthermore, the interpretation of Philo leaves a trace in the Physiologus and in the fantastic imagination of the medieval bestiaries, in which animals become moral models to follow.
Over the centuries the intelligible character of the bronze snake of the Philonian exegesis will not be recalled again, which thus remains an innovative and isolated interpretation. The interpretation of Philo has contributed to the development of the ethical and pharmacological character of the mosaic snake. Moreover, it fostered the positive image of the snake, that divided between good and evil, becomes the representation of temperance as moderation. To look at the *sophrosune* means to avoid the vice and to embrace the virtue.
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Hopeful Responses: Visions of War and Peace as Keys to the Formation of Isaiah
Program Unit: Book of Isaiah
Rodrigo F. de Sousa, Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie
The present paper seeks to explore the role of the Isaianic visions of a peaceful future in the composition of the Isaiah scroll. The main argument of the paper is that the reality of war was one of the most influential factors in the formation of Isaiah, and thus the relationship between visions of war and peace provides significant clues for the interpretation of the book and fresh insights regarding the history of its reception.
The Book of Isaiah is well known for its awe-inspiring images of a future of lasting peace. They have been instrumental in the construction of eschatologies, apocalyptic visions and political utopias. A survey of these images will reveal that they represent different historical moments in the growth of the Isaianic tradition. Yet, their form, content and placement in the book indicate that there are unifying themes, motifs and ideological underpinnings that bring them together.
The paper will present a broad synopsis of the visions of future peace in the different sections of the book, suggesting a rationale for their placement. Closer attention will be given to elements of chapters 33-34; 59:15b-63:16; and 65-66. The analysis will take into account and evaluate recent proposals as to the significance of these sections for the composition of the book, such as those of Beuken (1989), Gosse (1990; 1994; 2001, 2008), Gregory (2007), Lynch (2008), Stromberg (2009), and Schuele (2014).
Visions of future peace in Isaiah have often been described as “eschatological”, and much work has been devoted to ascertaining whether this is an adequate category to designate some or all of these texts. An important element of our proposal is to offer a different angle to approach the imagery of peace. Rather than starting with the question of eschatology, we begin with the basic observation that all the visions of future peace in Isaiah appear in contrast to equally powerful visions of wartime violence.
The imagery of war is here taken as part of the cultural memory shared by the different Isaianic authors, who may or may not have lived through actual conflicts, but who have a perception of the reality of war derived from their cultural milieu. Whereas the visions of peace represent imagined scenarios, the images of violence represent ever impending possibilities, and are closely linked with the actual social experiences of the authors and redactors.
The Isaianic visions of peace are “hopeful responses” to concrete experiences and cultural perceptions of violence in contexts of war. The volatile and violent contexts of those responsible for the growth and transmission of the Isaiah tradition led to the ascription of great significance to the hope of a peaceful future and led to the placement of the peace visions at key junctures of the scroll.
It is expected that this study will contribute to a renewed understanding of the formation of the Isaiah scroll and of the origins and development of eschatology.
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“Betray Not the Fugitive”: Isaiah 15–16 and the Plight of Refugees
Program Unit: Hebrew Bible and Political Theory
Rodrigo F. de Sousa, Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie
The plight of war refugees is one of the most significant problems related to human rights in the contemporary world. The reality of displacement resulting of conflict is an issue that concerns governments, humanitarian bodies, and societies. The phenomenon is not new. Throughout history, humankind has been plagued with war, and with its inevitable consequence of forceful relocation of populations.
Isaiah 15:1-16:14 is one of the clearest references to the suffering of refugees in antiquity. The section deals with the displacement of the Moabite population in the aftermath of conflict (15:1-9), contains an apparent description of the exchange between the refugees and rulers of Judah (16:1-5), moves on to a prophetic injunction on the humiliation of Moab (16:6-12), and concludes with a short additional note (16:13-14).
The oracle betrays certain ambiguity in Judahite perspectives with regards to what in modern terms would be construed as “war ethics”, “human rights” and the status of “aliens” (particularly those pertaining to antagonistic nations, as was the case with the Moabites). These ambiguities run through the entire Book of Isaiah (and the rest of the Hebrew Bible).
An in-depth study of the oracle yields important insights into Isaiah’s political and ethical perceptions. Yet, this is arguably one of the least studied passages in the Isaianic corpus.
Our approach starts with an exegetical study of the text, focusing on the portrayal of the Moabite refugees and placing their situation in its proper historical and ideological context. This analysis serves as the basis for a broader observation of key points in Isaiah’s ethics. Following recent studies, we affirm that Isaiah’s ethical perspectives cannot be traced to a particular code, and derive from various legal, cultic, Wisdom, and prophetic traditions, with the book of Amos often pointed out as a significant source, sharing a similar social milieu to that of the earliest Isaianic texts. It is also argued, with Barton (1981), that Isaiah’s ethics is somewhat akin to the latter theological and philosophical concept of Natural Law.
The study of the passage and the exploration of Isainic ethics will be carried out in critical dialogue with the recent theoretical concepts of “involuntary migrants” and “environmentally displaced people”, as developed by Roger Zetter, and my own personal experiences and interaction with African and Haitian refugees.
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The Righteous King in LXX Isa 32:1–8: Hope and Ideology in Translation
Program Unit: International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies
Rodrigo F. de Sousa, Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie
The portrayal of the righteous king in LXX Isa 32:1-8 displays some noteworthy differences from the Masoretic version of the same passage. In this paper, I attempt to highlight and explain these differences.
My starting point is a comparative analysis between the Greek and Hebrew versions of the oracle, having established that the Hebrew is similar to a proto-Masoretic text form. The analysis will deal with lexical and syntactical choices, reading strategies of the translator, and intertextual relationships between LXX Isaiah 32 and the LXX of the Pentateuch, Psalms, and Amos. After the analysis, the paper deals briefly with shifting perceptions of kingship from biblical times to the Second Temple period, in order to identify notions that might have influenced the translation. It is our contention that the deviating rendering of LXX Isa 32:1-8 has been shaped in line with theological and political tendencies which can be perceived in different strands of early Judaism.
This study also serves as a contribution to an ongoing debate in the field of LXX Isaiah, namely, the proper understanding of what “actualizing” interpretation means. It is well known that two diametrically opposing views have become standard. On the one hand, the approach of authors such as Arie van der Kooij, who sees a high degree of theological and ideological transformation and an effective attempt to recreate independent oracles in Greek. On the other, the view championed by authors such as Ronald Troxel and J. Ross Wagner, who eschew the idea of actualizing interpretation altogether.
The present analysis of Isaiah 32:1-8 indicates that both extreme views have problems that need to be addressed. In fact, it shows that an alternative model for understanding the phenomenon of actualizing interpretation needs to be developed. This model flows from the exegetical work with the passage, but also takes into account some recent developments in literary theory, critical studies and anthropology.
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Love and Law in the Letter to the Romans
Program Unit: Bible and Ethics
Pieter G.R. de Villiers, University of the Free State
The reception history of the letter to the Romans indicates how often readers of the letter are preoccupied with its theme of justification by faith. As a result its pronouncements on love are treated as a subsidiary motif and then mostly approached from an ethical perspective. The focal point of this approach is the practical exhortations in the last chapters, and, especially, Romans 13:8-10 about love as fulfillment of the law. Dunn’s theology of the Pauline letters, for example, extensively discusses the role of love in Pauline ethics, but otherwise hardly refers to other important dimensions of love. This relative lack of attention to love in the letter as a whole is also affected by equally limited attention in scholarly research to love in the New Testament. The paper will investigate love as a central motif in Romans as background for his comments on love as fulfillment of the law.
The paper will, firstly, research its references to love (Rom.1:1-7; 5:5, 8; 8:28, 35, 37, 39; 9:13; 12:9-10; 13:8, 10; 14:15; 15:30), taking into account other words from the semantic field of love, affection and compassion (as found in Louw & Nida’s Lexicon). It will, secondly, investigate the divine nature of love, analyzing love as a foundational aspect of the divine character, but also as divine action that has an originary character which qualifies and drives God’s salvific actions (Rom.1:7; 5:5; 8:37; 15:30). This will include an investigation of the Christological nature of love (Rom. 5:8, 8:39, cf. 8:32, 34 and 35). In a third section, the relational nature of love, flowing from its divine nature, will be investigated, revealing how love is about the divine outreach to and bond with humanity. The intimate, reciprocal nature of love (Rom.8:28), is a formative factor on Christian identity. In its transformative power (Rom.8:39) it has major implications for the lived experience of believers. The indestructible, powerful presence of love with its resting, secure and irrevocable nature brings about an experience of peace, of joy and of celebration (Rom. 11:25-36), but also represents, complements and completes the law as covenant of love (Rom.13:8-10).
The relationship of love and law will be discussed in the final part of the paper. It will investigate how comprehensively and radically Paul portrays the law and its commandments in terms of love (Rom.12-13) and how his ethical instructions about love as fulfillment of the law is to be understood in terms of the seminal place of love in the letter as a whole. This analysis will apply recent scholarly criticism of the distinction between indicative and imperative, with its tendency towards moralizing love. The commandment to love does not merely follow upon and is based upon love, but is the necessary reflection of being conformed to the likeness of God’s character and actions in the divine Son (Rom. 8:29), that is, to having been renewed into a self-giving love to one’s community, but also to enemies (Rom. 12:10; cf. 1-2, 9, 13, 14-21).
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A Mystical Perspective on the Christophany in Revelation 1
Program Unit: Mysticism, Esotericism, and Gnosticism in Antiquity
Pieter G.R. de Villiers, University of the Free State
This paper investigates the mystical nature of the Christophany in Revelation 1 in the context of recent research on Jewish and Christian mysticism. After a brief overview of relevant research, It analyses the mystical portrayal of the exalted, divine nature of the Christophany in Revelation 1 within the book as a whole. It explains how the Christophany is developed in terms of prominent mystical characteristics that relate, firstly to the appearance and, secondly, to the function of the Son of Man.
The mystical nature of the Christophany is, firstly, discussed in depth in terms of the glorious appearance of the Son of Man. The glory accorded to Christ, ascribes the divine kavod, characteristic of mystical texts, to him. This is not only evident from his glorious appearance (Rev. 2:13-16), but also from the worship of the Son of Man as divine in Revelation 1:6 and other parts of the book (e.g. Rev. 5:12). In this regard the paper will analyse how carefully the author portrays the Son of Man as Son of God when he uses the title in a key position in Revelation 2:18 and in language similar to Jewish mystical prayers and Hekhalot hymns.
The paper then, secondly, focuses on the function of the Son of Man as revelatory figure. It explains the Christophany in terms of the mystical revelation of hidden knowledge (Rev.1:19; cf. 6:6 and 10:7, 11). In both the commissioning visions in Revelation 1 and 10, the visionary is given privileged information by Christ as an angelic figure and the mighty angel. This mystical revelation authorizes and characterizes his book as a prophetic writing that determines the fate of its readers (Rev.22:19). The paper will argue that the mystical nature of the book as revelation of hidden knowledge, is confirmed by the following parts of Revelation: John ascends to heaven to receive hidden knowledge (Rev.4:1). The vision of Babylon in Revelation 21:10 (cf. 17:7) is portrayed as a mystery that eludes human understanding and that can only be explained by a divine figure. Finally, in Revelation 10:4, the mystical nature of this knowledge is emphasized when not all privileged information is made known to the readers. Only John is given insight into it. In some cases aspects of the revelation are inaccessible to all readers. The Rider on the white horse has a name written on him “that no one knows but he himself” (Rev. 19:12). Closely resembling this hidden name is the new name that the one who conquers in Pergamum receives on a white stone “known only to him who receives it” (Rev. 2:17; cf. also 14:3b). The paper concludes with an explanation of the historical function of this mystical picture of Christ within its first century context and what such an anlysis contributes to the study of mysticim in Late Antiquity.
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Slavery and Sonship in Basil of Caesarea’s De spiritu sancto
Program Unit: Slavery, Resistance, and Freedom
Chris L. de Wet, University of South Africa
The aim of this paper is to investigate the intersection between slavery and sonship, as metaphors, in Basil of Caesarea’s De spiritu sancto. The metaphor of slavery, and the difference between being a slave and a son, is used extensively by Basil to argue against the pneumatomachi for the divinity of the Holy Spirit. What aspects of ancient slaveholding are used by Basil in the treatise, and to what ends, and—most importantly—what could the effects have been for real, institutional slaves in the early church? Maintaining the distinction between slave and free was an important strategy in early Christian doctrinal disputes; this investigation hopes to shed some important light on the interplay between the metaphorical use of slavery and kinship language and the social realities of slaveholding in the formulation of early Christian doctrines and creeds.
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The Preacher’s Diet: Regimen, Sexuality, and Masculinity in the Homilies of John Chrysostom
Program Unit: Gender, Sexuality, and the Bible
Chris L. de Wet, University of South Africa
The aim of this paper is to explore the fourth-century bishop John Chrysostom’s recommendations on dietary regimen, which, in turn, have implications for the sexuality and masculinity of his audience. I am specifically interested in masculine self-fashioning by means of regimen, as a subset of a larger project on the formation of masculinity in Chrysostom’s works. In the presentation, I firstly aim to highlight, albeit briefly, how Greek and Roman medicine informed the preacher’s dietary prescriptions. Secondly, I will examine more closely the diet Chrysostom gives to men (and women) in his congregation, by looking at the topos of the true Christian symposium ever-present in Chrysostom’s works. Finally, I will investigate the issue of fasting and gluttony as strategies for affirming or denying masculinity, particularly with a focus on the effect of both on the soul, whose state had very real and material effects on the health of the body – in both sections the link between eating and sexuality will be extrapolated. Thus, the first section of the paper highlights the influences on Chrysostom’s thought regarding dietary regimen, the second section of the paper focuses of the qualities of food (as related to sexual desire and/or self-control), while the third part looks at the quantities.
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Up, Down, In, Out, and Back Again: Sensory Motor Schema and the Ascent of the Soul
Program Unit: Cognitive Linguistics in Biblical Interpretation
April D. DeConick, Rice University
The greatest contribution that cognitive studies is making to historical studies is its focus on the universality of the human brain and body as an evolved organism interacting in concrete ways with the environment. How might some of these universal interactions of the human being with the environment explain religious phenomena like the concept of the ascent of the soul? This paper will explore how we mentally build integrated systems of concepts through which we come to understand and communicate about our world using sensory motor schema, intuitive, and reflective arenas of cognition.
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Shamanism and Gnostic Ritual
Program Unit: Mysticism, Esotericism, and Gnosticism in Antiquity
April D. DeConick, Rice University
Gnostic rituals developed to as ceremonies to (1) awaken the spirit from unconsciousness, (2) to purge the soul of its demons, (3) to mature the fledgling spirit into an adult divinity, and (4) to integrate the mature spirit with its transcendent root. All in all, Gnostic groups were offering therapy for the separated spirit or divided self, a psycho-religious cure. In this paper, Gnostic therapeutic rituals of ascent and demonic purge will be examined in light of what we know about shamanic practices in the Mediterranean world.
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The qdeshot in Hos 4:14 and the Myth of the Sacred Prostitute
Program Unit: Israelite Religion in Its Ancient Context
Jessie DeGrado, University of Chicago
Over the past two centuries scholars have pointed to the parallelism of zonot and qdeshot in Hosea 4:14 as evidence for the existence of cultic prostitution in Israel. Understanding qdesha in this manner allowed these scholars to interpret Hosea 4:12-14a as a condemnation of a syncretistic sex cult that had infiltrated Israelite worship. More recently, however, Mayer Gruber and Joan Westenholz, among others, have surveyed the biblical and cognate evidence and found no evidence for the existence of sacred prostitution in any ancient Near Eastern society; nevertheless, neither scholar has offered a compelling alternative translation for qdesha. In this paper I argue that the misunderstanding of qdesha as cultic prostitute arose because the Hebrew word possesses a semantic range that includes both priestesses and prostitutes. In particular, I assert that qdesha is used to designate women who operate outside of the patrimonial household. These women are set aside (the base meaning of the root qof-dalet-shin), either given over to the service of a deity or employed in another professional context. Consequently, the indictment of men who sacrifice with qdeshot functions on two rhetorical levels: the prophet offers a critique of a specific cultic practice while strengthening his personification of Israel as a wayward woman who has gone astray from her husband.
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Further Research on the Recensions of the Ethiopic Song of Songs
Program Unit: Ethiopic Bible and Literature
Steve Delamarter, George Fox University
At the 2014 annual SBL meeting, Delamarter and Jarod Jacobs presented a study of the textual history of the Ethiopic Song of Songs, performed as part of the work of the Textual History of the Ethiopic Old Testament (THEOT) project. That work was based on the knowledge that there was a longer and a shorter recension of the Ethiopic Song of Songs and that the Song was copied in at least three different types of manuscripts (Psalters, biblical manuscripts containing the Solomon corpus, and Lectionary for Passion Week, Gabra Haymamat). Thirty-two manuscripts were transcribed with some representatives from each of the recensions and types of manuscripts. A picture emerged that was clear enough to discern the general contours of the textual history and to clarify some general trends. At that point we could confirm the existence of the longer and shorter recensions and the transmission of those recensions in the three types of manuscripts. But through the process we became aware of the development of the second recension across time. Further, we became aware of the transmission of the Ethiopic Song in forms of manuscripts beyond the three we had known, and it became clear that in order to sort out the rest of the story about the developments in the various strands of the transmission history across time, we would have to increase our sample sizes nearer to thirty manuscripts for each manuscript type in the study.
So we designed a follow up study with the goal to produce the data that would clarify with some precision the individual lines of transmission for the two recensions and also that would clarify in precise chronological terms the differentiation between the recensions and the patterns of usage of each in the Ethiopian tradition.
In this presentation we will tell the story of our research on more than 100 manuscript, the methods by which we proceeded, and the results achieved.
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Using Computer Search Tools in Masorah Research
Program Unit: Masoretic Studies
David Delauro, Jewish Theological Seminary of America
This presentation will focus on computer based search tools for researching the Masorah.
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Similarities between Paul and the Stoics on Ethics
Program Unit: Pauline Epistles
Will Deming, University of Portland
There are number of similarities between Paul's vision of ethical living and that of the late Stoics. These include: the sinfulness of all humanity, the instantaneous change from sinner to saint or sage, the impossibility, or near impossibility of living ethically through one's own efforts, the necessity of actions, the insufficiency of actions, and the need for precepts and repeated admonitions rather than written laws. This paper explores how these individual similarities function within Pauline and Stoic ethical systems, and concludes that while Paul and the Stoics worked with a similar pool of assumptions, they arrived at different, but equally idiosyncratic, understandings of the ethical life.
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The Abecedary as a Literary Device in Biblical Poetry
Program Unit: Biblical Hebrew Poetry
Aaron Demsky, Bar-Ilan University
Biblical poetry was meant to be recited orally. It is therefore of interest that the abecedary, suggesting a written composition, is found in nine alphabetic acrostic psalms and was the primary factor in shaping the structure of the Book of Lamentations. It is most reasonable to assume that the authors of these later books were literati able to blend both the oral and written media. The Psalmist has even used scribal imagery for expressing this duality, capturing the idea of the textualization of biblical poetry:
“My heart is astir with gracious words; I speak my poem to a king; my tongue is the pen of an expert scribe” (Ps 45:2); “He put a new song into my mouth, a hymn to our God…; then I said I will bring a scroll recounting what befell me." (Ps 40: 4, 8).
In this paper, I will concentrate on Lamentations 1-2 and show how, in addition to the alphabetic acrostics, the poet has composed two intricate chiastic laments that were inspired by the elementary at-bash writing exercise. In his hands, the abecedary became an aesthetic literary device that gave new poetic expression to the national trauma caused by the destruction of Jerusalem.
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Religiones Antiquae: Reviving Nostra Aetate to Expand the Scope of Salvation History
Program Unit: Jewish-Christian Dialogue and Sacred Texts
Christopher Denny, Saint John's University
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Switchback Codes: Paul, Apocalyptic, and the Art of Resistance
Program Unit: Westar Institute
Arthur Dewey, Xavier University
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Children at the Intersection of Sacrifice, Prophecy, and Inner-Biblical Interpretation
Program Unit: Children in the Biblical World
Heath D. Dewrell, Princeton Theological Seminary
Child sacrifice in ancient Israel is a topic that has produced an enormous amount of scholarly literature. Most of this work has understandably been devoted to exploring the alleged practice of child sacrifice itself. Numerous articles and monographs have been devoted to the questions of whether children were ever sacrificed in ancient Israel; if so, whether they were sacrificed to Yahweh or to some other deity; how often such sacrifices would have occurred; what purpose they might have served; and so on. Less attention has been paid to the rhetoric of those Israelites who opposed the practice. While a blanket opposition to child sacrifice might seem natural and even obvious to modern readers, such condemnations in a society which had a history of practicing such rites, at least in some circumstances, calls for our attention. This paper examines the strategies employed in the oracles of both Ezekiel and Jeremiah, which unequivocally reject any legitimacy for the practice of child sacrifice. It will demonstrate that, although both collections of oracles condemn child sacrifice, their rhetoric differs significantly. In particular, the question of whether Yahweh ever commanded that children be sacrificed is addressed in both Ezekiel (Ezek 20:25-26) and Jeremiah (Jer 7:31; 19:5; 32:35). Interestingly, although both prophets agree that Yahweh has no desire for child sacrifice, they disagree as to whether he ever commanded it. This paper will show that their differences can be attributed to the different streams of tradition in which the Jeremiah and Ezekiel material participate, and at root spring from different conceptions of what constitutes authentic Yahwistic law. In this way, the lives of Israelite children came to hang on questions of biblical interpretation.
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Why Bother with Redeeming Gentiles? The Project of Justifying the Oppression of the Righteous in the Second Age
Program Unit: Paul within Judaism
Genevive Dibley, Rockford University
With a few notable exceptions, gentiles in early Jewish texts, when they are mentioned at all, are generally portrayed as the dross of humanity. The spawn of wayward forbearers, they existed outside the clearly defined boundaries of the covenant and so lay, by default, beyond its life-giving benefits. This, of course, did not preclude a sufficiently motivated gentile individual from renouncing their gentileness and, conforming to the strictures of Torah, becoming Jewish. The handful of gentile converts in the Hebrew Bible, however, does little to dispel the established taxonomy of gentiles as wicked trash.
While the prophets repurposed the gentiles as the unwitting tools of divine chastisement for the moral discipline of Israel and faintly sketched the idea that those who survived the winnowing of the final judgment would benefit secondarily in the world-to-come from the excess of Israel’s eschatological blessing – there is simply nothing on par with the sweeping first century reform which saw the integration of gentiles sans becoming Jewish within the community of the righteous as practiced by in the early church. Those seeking explanation for this phenomenon beyond an appeal to messianic epiphany have theorized that gentile inclusion in the nascent church was an attempt to resolve an acute pre-existent theological tension within the culture existing between the tenants of absolute monotheism and ethic-nationalism. That the inevitable evolutionary arc of monotheism fated ancient Jewish religious theorists to resolve the question of the continued existence of gentiles in effect granting them some form of amnesty.
This paper will contend, however, that Paul’s argument for gentile qua gentile inclusion in the early Jesus following movement is better explained not as a theological imperative but as the realization of an apocalyptic apologetic aimed specifically at justifying the oppression of the righteous in the later Second Temple period. The redemption of gentiles who remained paradoxically gentiles – a redemption verified by their acceptance in the community – was rather bound intricately to the eschatological hope that the redemption of gentileness would make possible the advent of the final judgment and thereby the salvation of the righteous. Far from being the grand edenic telos closing the circle of history, the redemption of gentileness as a category of being was for Paul a means to a very classic Jewish end.
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Using the Graphic Novel to Surface Students' Latent Midrash
Program Unit: Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies
Genevive Dibley, Rockford University
One of the critical challenges in teaching biblical and pseudepigraphical literature is how to help students, particularly undergraduates, become aware of their own interpretive biases. Often such self-awareness is difficult to achieve as students raised in biblically based religious traditions feel themselves to be thoroughly familiar with the text as they have heard countless sermons and teachings on the Bible. They are further, unwittingly hamstrung in literary-critical studies by inherited systems of theology causing them to alternately read into passages what is not there, anticipate and insert the arguments of much later authors or miss altogether critical interpretive details of a passage. On this account, such students have little inherent ability to appreciate the midrashic genius of the early Jewish apocalypticists who so adroitly exploited the textual gaps inevitably left by the biblical authors. They are slow to grasp the methodologies of the apocalypticists and therefore miss the significance of their import for the composition and reception of the New Testament. In an attempt to speed the process of self-discovery I have experimented with having students compose graphic novels on key biblical passages. In surfacing their own midrashic interpretations, this experiment has resulted in a much deeper engagement with the text and earlier, more profound appreciation for the contribution of the apocalypticists.
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New Testament Narrative Criticism and the Preacher: The Beginning of a Discussion
Program Unit: Homiletics and Biblical Studies
Frank Dicken, Lincoln Christian University
This paper seeks to bring insights from New Testament narrative criticism to the preaching of New Testament narrative texts. While homileticians are increasingly sensitive to the genre conventions of the biblical writings and seek to propose creative homiletical methods for preaching narratives, the work of narrative critics is rarely, if ever considered in the formulation of these methods. The paper will proceed with an overview of NT narrative criticism. Next, the paper will highlight the differences between this discipline and the homiletical methods for preaching narrative texts proposed by scholars. Finally, the paper will offer several benefits of appropriating narrative critical insights for the task of preaching.
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Forbidden Vistas: Henry Ossawa Tanner’s “Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah”
Program Unit: Bible and Visual Art
Linda A. Dietch, Drew University
In “Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah,” which is part of the permanent collection at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, Henry Ossawa Tanner permits us to see with him what Lot’s wife saw. The painting depicts Genesis 19:23–26 as Lot and his family are entering Zoar in the early morning as God rains destruction upon the plain. The canvas is filled with a tumultuous and dark greenish-blue sky over a rolling terrain of neutral earth tones. Human figures appear small and indistinctly in the right corner. Great expanses of sky and land suggest the artist’s vantage point is far from the destruction, yet the perspective and tones convey a sense of awe rather than terror. In contrast to many other renderings of this moment, which use the warm and hot tones of fire and brimstone, the artist’s cool palette creates a strikingly somber and reflective scene.
Henry Ossawa Tanner was the first African-American artist to be recognized internationally after moving to Paris to, in part, escape the racist climate in the United States. Born in Pittsburgh, PA, to an AME minister, he spent most of his formative years in the Philadelphia area, where he studied with Thomas Eakins, and later moved to Georgia. In this paper I will be using W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness and his findings on the role of religion in the African American experience to better understand Tanner’s devotion to biblical themes and his sensitive portrayal of them.
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Aramaic Tobit at Qumran
Program Unit: Aramaic Studies
Devorah Dimant, University of Haifa
Six (rather than five) copies of Tobit have turned up among the Qumran scrolls, five of them in Aramaic. What is the story of Tobit and his son Tobias doing at Qumran? It does not concern a biblical, prophetic or eschatological figure, as do other Aramaic texts from the Qumran library. The paper will try to answer this question by examining Tobit in the light of various aspects of the Qumran manuscripts.
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Doing Gender Differently: Scribal Masculinity and the Court Tales of Daniel
Program Unit: Gender, Sexuality, and the Bible
Brian Charles DiPalma, Emory University
The court tales of Daniel are often overlooked in feminist biblical scholarship. With the exception of the brief appearance of the queen in Daniel 5, these short stories portray an all-male environment. Given the tendency of feminist biblical scholarship to focus on narrative texts with female characters, the absence of research on gender in the court tales of Daniel is partly explainable. In this paper, I address this gap in scholarship by answering this question: How are Daniel and his colleagues represented with respect to assumptions about masculinity in the socio-historical context in which the stories were composed? They have been defeated in war and exiled to serve in the court of a foreign king. Moreover, none of them marry or produce sons that could perpetuate their name. Thus, Daniel and his companions appear to deviate from a culturally pervasive construction of masculinity that entailed martial prowess and producing sons. However, I argue that scribal masculinity, which is attested in the ancient Near East and other portions of the Hebrew Bible, is crucial for understanding gender and the court tales of Daniel. I show that a scribal masculinity is produced in a negotiation with a culturally pervasive construction of masculinity in a way that reproduces widespread gendered ideologies. So, for example, whereas a more common construction of masculinity entailed displays of power through martial prowess or physical violence, a scribal masculinity was produced through powerful displays of knowledge. This exchange accepts an equation of masculinity with power and reproduces unequal categories of gender in the process. Thus, even as it deviates from a common cultural construction of masculinity, it is not necessarily subversive. Quite to the contrary, it is differently invested in the reproduction of gendered inequality. From this perspective, I contend that Daniel and his colleagues are differently masculine rather than non-masculine.
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Cakes for the Queen(s) of Heaven: Women’s Worship in Phoenicia and Israel
Program Unit: Israelite Religion in Its Ancient Context
Helen Dixon, North Carolina State University
Recent decades have seen a growing scholarly literature on women’s religious behavior and the worship of female deities—sometimes mistakenly conflated—in Israel and Judah during the 9th-5th centuries BCE. While similarities between these southern territories and the northern coastal city-states of Phoenicia have been noted with respect to figurine types, domestic shrine construction, and even burial practices, explicit discussion of Phoenician women still often centers on literary constructions like the biblical Jezebel. At the same time, data from the past quarter-century’s excavations in Lebanon, including finds like the favissa of over 800 terracotta figurines from Beirut, have gone understudied and may now be brought to bear on larger questions of gender and worship in the Iron Age Levant.
This paper offers a dedicated examination of Phoenician women’s religious practices and roles, and compares this newly emerging picture with the religious reconstructions of their Israelite neighbors. A basic understanding of gendered space and identity will first be offered, incorporating Phoenician inscriptional and other northern Levantine archaeological evidence alongside mortuary remains (from the author’s database of all known homeland Phoenician burials). Despite the difficulties in interpretation associated with figurines and other small votive evidence, a range of plausible interpretations of the Phoenician varieties will then be discussed. Finally, cross-regional comparisons will be undertaken, questioning in the process whether women from either side of the northern Israelite border would have had much to quarrel about.
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God of Wrath and Mercy: Is Paul's God the 'Old Testament God'?
Program Unit: Paul within Judaism
Thomas Dixon, Princeton Theological Seminary
It may be a hackneyed misconception that the “Old Testament God” is wrathful while the “New Testament God” is loving, but the notion subtly persists even in scholarship. While many have been quick to highlight the love of God in the Old Testament, fewer have addressed the prevalence of the wrath of God in the New Testament. This problem is particularly relevant to the study of Romans, in which the term ???? appears more times than in any other NT book.
C. H. Dodd famously argued that Paul’s concept of God’s wrath describes “an inevitable process of cause and effect in a moral universe” (Romans, 23). The punitive measures in Rom 1:18-32, e.g., are not God’s direct actions but rather God’s permission of sin’s natural consequences. Others have functionally followed suit, distancing Paul’s God from any semblance of personal punishment, a picture which stands in conflict with many accounts of God’s judgment in the Old Testament. But are there only two options: either Paul abandons the God of his Jewish scriptures for a more removed and therefore merciful God, or he uses wrath to describe the merciless belligerence of a “stormy Jehovah”?
This paper argues that both pictures are distortions – both of Paul and of his Jewish scriptures. On the one hand, God’s wrath in Paul does indeed resemble many depictions of the “Old Testament God”; on the other hand, this wrath is not merciless in either case. This essay examines selected portions of Isaiah and the Psalms to explore how, both in these texts and in Romans, the wrath with which God punishes often promotes a greater goal of mercy: God’s wrath is not devoid of mercy but, somehow, consonant with it. A proper understanding of wrath in Romans then sheds light elsewhere, not least on Paul’s apparently enigmatic discussion of vessels of wrath and mercy in Romans 9-11.
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Aniconic Non-images in Iron Age Phoenicia and Israel: Theoretical Considerations and Comparative Avenues
Program Unit: Israelite Religion in Its Ancient Context
Brian R. Doak, George Fox University
The question of whether the Iron Age Phoenicians employed aniconic representational techniques has significance not only for the many under-explored aspects of Phoenician religion generally, but also for the question of whether aniconism can be considered a broader trend among the Semitic populations of the ancient Near East. Indeed, past research on aniconic phenomena is often motivated by a desire to understand the larger context of the Hebrew Bible’s proscription of divine images (e.g., Exod 20:4; Deut 5:4–8)—does this most famous of image-prohibitions represent a kind of religious or intellectual parthenogenesis, or is it one vigorous form of a broader West Semitic trend toward aniconic cultic expressions? In this paper, which will largely take the form of a visual presentation, I argue that the Phoenicians did participate in an iconographic program that moved toward divine symbols, abstract forms, and even purely aniconic expressions. In particular, I highlight two areas for discussing putative forms of Israelite aniconism in light of the Phoenician examples: (a) on a terminological level, defining “aniconism” requires a rigorous theoretical and ritual-contextual framework, without which aniconisms cannot be compared between Phoenicia, Israel, and other groups; (b) examples of miniature shrines in terracotta and inscribed on stelae provide an instructive test case for assessing whether we can truly speak of aniconism when no anthropomorphic figure appears inside the shrine (e.g., the Qeiyafa model shrines), and a consideration of the ritual use and political contexts of these shrines allows us to assess the object in light of the iconic or aniconic needs of the ancient worshipper.
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Rachel Weeping: Intertextuality as a Means of Transformation of the Reader’s Worldview
Program Unit: Bible and Emotion
Sébastien Doane, Université Laval
Literary texts commonly invite affective responses in readers, which, in turn, influence their construal of meaning and shape their worldview. Using affective stylistics, a form of reader-response criticism developed by Stanley Fish, I propose to examine the emotional aspects of the complex intertextual appeal to Rachel’s tears in Matthew’s story of the massacre of the children of Bethlehem (Mt 2.16-18).
Matthew’s fulfilment citation makes intertextual links with different emotionally charged situations. Matthew quotes Jeremiah (31.15) who comments on the Babylonian exile by evoking the memory of Rachel, a matriarch whose death during childbirth on the road to Bethlehem is narrated in the book of Genesis (35.16-20). In addition, there is a strong resonance with the book of Exodus (1.15-22) which narrates Pharaoh’s massacre of Hebrew boys.
Each of these inter-texts emerges from contexts of suffering under foreign empires. What effects do these inter-texts produce in Matthew's readers? How is this affective appeal to Rachel’s tears meant to impact the reader’s response to Matthew’s story?
One hypothesis is that the story of the Bethlehem massacre uses many levels of intertextuality as a rhetorical device to solicit an emotional response powerful enough to influence the reader’s world view. This narrative would, then, be an implicit critique of the abuse of imperial power. The complete barbarity of the situation invites the reader to seek justice elsewhere than from the negatively portrayed king.
The reader of Matthew’s gospel eventually sees that like the other children of Bethlehem, Jesus was executed by the religious and political leaders in Jerusalem. In the end, there is an astonishing reversal. A new and unexpected life comes from a situation where there was nothing but certain death. Through the use of intertextual echoes, Matthew harnesses the affective punch which earlier narratives had produced in his audience in an effort to transform their worldview.
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“The Person Who Receives Blessing . . . Must Also Suffer Much”: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Wilhelm Herrmann, and a Hermeneutic of Suffering
Program Unit: Theological Interpretation of Scripture
Chris Dodson, University of Aberdeen
Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Wilhelm Herrmann both use encounters with suffering as hermeneutical tools for relating the Old and New Testaments. They do so in differing ways, however. For example, Bonhoeffer’s account is concerned with the suffering of others; Herrmann draws his interpretation from how these two texts explore one’s own experience of suffering. This paper explores their two accounts for ways in which they are parallel or divergent, in order to explore how they might work together towards a hermeneutic of suffering that accounts for the suffering of all, highlighting the this-worldly redemption upon which Christianity must insist.
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Good Grief: Parental Bereavement in Biblical Literature and Its Late Ancient Reception
Program Unit: Children in the Biblical World
Maria E. Doerfler, Duke University
Childhood mortality rates in the biblical -- and, more generally, the pre-modern -- world were notoriously high: as many as half of all children did not live to see their tenth birthday. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, there are few explicit testimonies concerning parental grief over such deaths: ancient burial grounds offer at best ambiguous evidence for children's commemoration, and letters and speeches directed at those who had suffered bereavement encourage stoic self-possession in the face of tragedy.
The latter was the case for ancient Christians as much as for their Jewish and Greco-Roman counterparts; indeed, the developing understanding of God as all-knowing and wholly just urged the further suppression of mourning in the face of divine wisdom, as sermons and treatises by, e.g., Gregory of Nyssa and Jacob of Serugh attest. In sharp contrast to such discourses of parental equanimity, however, stood homilists' treatment of bereavement or anticipated bereavement experienced by biblical characters. The stories of Eve and Adam, parents to the first prematurely deceased child as well as his murderer, of Job and David, and of the mothers of those infants killed by Herod in Matthew 2:16-18, reverberate through ancient Christian homily and hymn as the stories of parents' grief, outrage, and wrestling with divine providence. In the process, the biblical characters in question served as vehicles for expressing and, at times, appeasing the affective experience of bereaved parents in their exponents' communities.
This paper examines one of the most productive and provocative accounts of the (near) death of a child: the Akedah, the "binding of Isaac" in Genesis 22, and the concomitant experiences of Abraham and Sarah. Early Jewish and Christian interpreters midrashically expounded themes of parental grief only incipient, or, in Sarah's case, entirely absent in the biblical text; in the process, their narratives came to legitimize and on occasionally liturgically subsume those of families confronting the death of a child in antiquity and subsequent eras.
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Ambiguities within Psalms 47 and 72: Women’s Voices as Intertextual Clues
Program Unit: Book of Psalms
Denise Dombkowski Hopkins, Wesley Theological Seminary
When Ps 47 praises God’s universal sovereignty, it does not escape the particularism of the conquest (v 3) and God’s choice of Jerusalem/Zion (v 8) and Israel (v 4). A “compliant” reading (Seibert) of Ps 47 joins Israel in its raucous praise, while a “conversant” reading recognizes the tensions between universalism and particularism within the psalm. The story of Rahab in Josh 2; 6 viewed through the lens of postcolonial criticism can help to surface the tensions of such a conversant reading. Created as ‘Other’, Rahab “provides the ‘Us’ of Israel with an identity” (J. McKinlay). Rahab’s voice is co-opted (M. Dube) to proclaim what Israel wants to hear, just as Ps 47 assumes that all of the nations of the world will gladly accept God’s universal sovereignty. What would Rahab say “off the [Israel’s] record” about this? The ambiguity of Rahab’s situation can shed light on the debate over the translation of Ps 47:9ab and expose Israel’s fantasies about power and desires for self-validation.
Several audiences overhear the words of royal psalm 72. Addressed to God (v 1), the psalm is overheard by the king who is pressured rhetorically to fulfill what is expected of him. Also overhearing this prayer are the king’s subjects, both peasants and the elite. The superscription, “Of Solomon,” along with the description of gift-bearing rulers in vv 10-11, 15 (cf. 1 Kgs 10) invite us to imagine that a special member of the elite audience, the Queen Mother Bathsheba, also overhears this prayer for her son, Solomon. Paying attention to how Bathsheba might receive the words of Ps 72 in light of her experience with King David in 2 Sam 11 and 1 Kgs 1, as well as in the aftermath of Solomon’s bloody ascent to his father’s throne, can help readers to surface and enter into the contradictions inherent in the royal ideology of the psalm. Several ironies revealed in the idealistic hyperbole of the language of Ps 72 contribute to destabilizing the surface meaning of the text as “untrustworthy” (C. Sharp). The complexity of Bathsheba’s portrayal mirrors the complexity embodied in Ps 72 itself.
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The Electronic Version of the Keter
Program Unit: Masoretic Studies
Christopher Dost, Alliance Theological Seminary
This presentation will be a demonstration of the electronic version of the Keter and its application for research in the Masorah.
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Offering All the Life They Have: Reading Luke 21:1–4 in Dialogue with Earth's Impoverishment
Program Unit: Ecological Hermeneutics
Elizabeth Dowling, Australian Catholic University
Interpretations of Luke 21:1-4 range from highlighting the widow’s exemplary giving of her whole life to critiquing a system that exploits the vulnerable. In this paper, I will read this Lukan passage, informed by the context of the historical gendering of Earth as female. A dualistic western association of women with Earth and men with reason/culture has reinforced a structure of oppression of women and Earth. As has been well documented now, such a structure is not only patriarchal. It must be understood as reinforcing a range of dualisms based on race and class, for instance, as well as gender and species, in a network of domination. [See, for example, Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993), 42-43].
The Lukan story of the widow and her two coins (21:1-4) is, on the one hand, a story of all that have been exploited and impoverished by oppressive systems. Both the widow and Earth are vulnerable to unjust practices and can be exploited until they have nothing more to give. Considering both the widow and the coins, Earth’s resources, this paper will weave together strands of gender, class and material structures of domination and exploitation.
But there is more to the widow of 21:1-4. She cannot be wholly subsumed under the label of “victim”, having little or no agency herself. She actively gives her “life”, as Jesus will later do, with her actions prophetically highlighting the inadequate response of the rich. As with Earth, the widow is a subject rather than an object. This paper will argue that such an understanding of the widow and Earth cuts across the stereotyping inherent in the dualistic systems of domination.
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Southcottians and Shiloh: Genesis 49:10 and the Morphology of a Messianic Hope
Program Unit: History of Interpretation
Jonathan Downing, University of Bristol
In 1814, a 63 year-old self-styled prophet scandalised London society by proclaiming that she was to give birth to miraculous child, and fulfil the enigmatic promise of Genesis 49:10. In the KJV, this text promises the emergence of a figure called “Shiloh” who shall bring about the “gathering of the people”. It subsequently became an important apocalyptic proof-text for the prophetic communities which make up the movement known as the Southcottian Visitation, whose geographical reach extended to America and Australasia in the 19th century. The exposition of Genesis 49:10's promises by prophetic claimants within the group's history formed the basis for individual and community identity, and provided a focal point for groups' praxis, their view of history, and eschatology. This paper explores how reflections on this text by successive communities in this religious sub-culture can show us how messianic and apocalyptic interpretations of biblical texts adapt to shifting historical contexts. By examining the interpretation of Genesis 49:10 in three distinct stages of the movement – from its founder, through prophets that emerged in the mid-19th century, to early 20th century readings of the text – I demonstrate how a sacred text within a prophetic movement becomes a palimpsest, with successive and competing interpretations becoming layered onto the text over the course of the movement's history. In the case of the Southcottian Visitation's interpretation of Genesis's “Shiloh” prophecy, this raises important hermeneutical questions: the gender identity of the messianic figure; the negotiation of rival translations of the text; the interaction between competing interpretations within a single movement. I argue that prophetic movements such as the Southcottians use the apparently “failed” interpretations of previous authoritative readers to creatively re-engage with apocalyptic promises to forge new readings and new prophetic identities. This has important ramifications for understanding how texts can become “apocalyptic”, and how they can continually invite and engender interpretations throughout their history, and how this interpretative activity – often within religious subcultures – is a vitiating force in their textual and cultural afterlife.
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The Role of Ambiguous Inscriptional Evidences in the Historical Reconstruction of Jewish Diaspora Communities
Program Unit: Archaeology of the Biblical World
Luke Drake, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Inscriptional references to the term sunagoge have often been used as the primary evidence for the presence of ancient Jewish Diaspora communities because the synagogue, as a monumental building, served as the Jewish communal space par excellence throughout antiquity. In this paper, however, we argue that the Greek term sunagoge is not a reliable means of identifying an ancient Jewish Diaspora community, since the meaning of sunagoge was flexible and dependent upon the context in which it was used. Scholars have drawn problematic conclusions concerning the nature and presence of the Jewish Diaspora synagogue through erroneous translations and interpretations of inscriptional and sources containing the word sunagoge. This a priori assumption has lead to further untenable conclusions concerning the nature of Diaspora Judaism and the relationships between Jews and Gentiles in the Mediterranean world. In this paper, we categorize all known sunagoge inscriptions according to a simple numeric scale (1-5), which organizes each inscription according to positive Jewish or non-Jewish elements within the surviving material (designated as the JNJ score). A JNJ score of 5 indicates a Jewish inscription (strong evidence); a score of 4 indicates a potentially Jewish synagogue inscription (weak evidence); a score of 3 indicates an ambiguous reference to a synagogue (no evidence); a score of 2 indicates a potentially non-Jewish synagogue inscription (weak evidence); and a score of 1 indicates a definite non-Jewish synagogue inscription (strong evidence). Having obtained JNJ scores for the inscriptions, we organize the data temporally and geographically, and reproduce the results visually through a set of infographics. We conclude with an analysis of our findings as well as a discussion of how this study informs and disrupts current conversations concerning ancient Jewish communities in the Diaspora. (co-authored with Daniel Schindler and Bradley C. Erickson)
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Basil's Origenism: Education by the Scripture
Program Unit: Development of Early Christian Theology
Volker Henning Drecoll, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen
Even if according to Basil words do not contain the whole content of perceptions or thoughts, the biblical wording is the decisive instrument of the Holy Spirit for the education of the believers. The paper aims to deal with this pedagogical impact of the Bible, in which Basil is heavily dependent upon Origen's hermeneutics. Basil adapts not only philological methods of Origen's exegesis, but also inherits the persuasion from Origen that no detail in the biblical text is meaningless. Therefore he looks for the sometimes hidden hints to theological, anthropological and ethical teachings in the biblical text. He does not simply assume a verbal inspiration, but a direct influence of the Holy Spirit on the mind of the human authors, thus taking into account the historical context and the variety of language in the diverse biblical books. This makes Basil an important forerunner of an exegetical methodology that deals with the verbal sense of the biblical texts (subsumed later under the label „Antiochene exegesis“ – but, of course, this category has to be questioned). Behind the language use of the individual biblical authors, however, Basil recognizes a complex language use of the Holy Spirit and a plan of God that can be observed by the diverse readers and listeners of the Bible and its exegesis (in homilies and theological works). Only the subjugation of oneself to this intention of the Holy Spirit in a methodologically controled manner avoids using Scripture as base for arbitrary own assumptions (that result in being heretical). That’s why Basil rejects allegorical interpretations, but aims to detect a deeper sense that makes the biblical text fruitful for the listeners viz. readers of his works. This can be compared with the methodology of Origen who was more confident of a spiritual layer of Scripture that leads to the highest topics of theology. Thus, the interesting relationship of Basil's exegesis to Origen on the one side, to the so-called "Antiochene exegesis" on the other side can be elucidated more precisely. Within Basil’s work, the deep link between antiheretical and exegetical works can be focused.
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Aramaic Inscription Sefire III: What Kind of Treaty Is It?
Program Unit: Ugaritic Studies and Northwest Semitic Epigraphy
Jan Dušek, Univerzita Karlova v Praze
The Aramaic inscription “Sefire III” from the mid-8th century BCE was very often considered to be a vassal treaty concluded between Bar-Gayah and Mati’el, like the inscriptions on the other two stelae (Sefire I and II). This was the position held by the epigraphers who wrote about these texts; among them the authors of the editio princeps André Dupont-Sommer and Jean Starcky (“Une inscription araméenne inédite de Sfiré,” Bulletin du Musée de Beyrouth 13 [1956], p. 23-41), and also by Émile Puech (“Les traités araméens de Sfiré,” in J. Briend [ed.], Traités et serments dans le Proche-orient ancien, Paris, 1992, p. 88-107). This seems to be also the opinion of the eminent historian Edward Lipinski (“Re-reading the Inscriptions from Sefire,” in: idem, Studies in Aramaic Inscriptions and Onomastics I, Leuven, 1975, p. 24-57). André Lemaire and Jean-Marie Durand (Les inscriptions araméennes de Sfiré et l’Assyrie de Shamsi-ilu, Genève – Paris, 1984 p. 56-58) considered the treaties to be a series of renewals of vassal treaties of the Assyrian kings (suzerains) with the kings of Arpad, Attaršumki and Mati‘’el (vassals). In the German scholarship, Herbert Donner and Wolfgang Röllig qualified all three stelae from Sefire as “Staatsvertagstexte der Könige Bar-Gaja von KTK und Mati’rel von Arpad” (KAI 222-224). Martin Noth was of a different opinion (“Der historische Hintergrund der Inschriften von sefire,” in M. Noth, Aufsätze zur biblischen Landes- und Altertumskunde, Neukirchen – Vluyn, 1971, p. 161-210). For him, the stela no. III should not be qualified in the same manner as the other two stelae, because at least one of the contracting parties of the treaty was different from those who concluded the treaties on stelae no. I and II.
The inscription Sefire III has been reexamined by the author of the present paper in the context of his work on a new corpus of Aramaic inscriptions of the Iron Age. In this paper I would like to propose a new interpretation of the character of the treaty on the stela “Sefire III” which sheds and interesting light on international relations of the kingdom of Arpad in the eve of the Assyrian context of the region in the early 2nd half of the 8th century BCE.
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Christ in the Bathhouse: A Chi-Rho Graffito at the Roman Fort of ‘Ayn Gharandal
Program Unit: Archaeology of Religion in the Roman World
Carrie Duncan, University of Missouri - Columbia
During the 2010 excavation season of the 4th century CE Roman fort at ‘Ayn Gharandal (ancient Arieldela) in southern Jordan, work uncovered a large number of graffiti and dipinti on the walls of the fort’s associated bathhouse. Among them, to our surprise, was a crudely sketched chi-rho. The discovery of this symbol immediately raised the question of whether our fort, and the Roman military in southern Jordan, served as a social location for Christians in the 4th century.
The fort and bathhouse at Gharandal were built some time between 293 and 305 CE, just at the time of Diocletian’s purported purge of Christians from the army and the last great persecution of Christian civilians, and occupied for a single century. The formal inscriptions in the officers’ headquarters of the fort itself speak to Gharandal as a location of official Roman religiosity, with references to Rome, Jupiter Ammon, and a priestess or other traditional religious official. Does the difference between the fort’s formal inscriptions and the bathhouse’s chi-rho graffito reflect the slippage between state sanctioned and individual religiosity? Or does this difference stem from the tumultuous religious changes witnessed during the 4th century, with the fort’s official inscriptions reflecting the proclivities of Diocletian at the time of its founding and the chi-rho signifying the opportunities made possible by Constantine’s Edict of Milan scant decades later?
Surveys of Roman military sites on the Kerak plateau, north and east of Gharandal’s location in the Arabah valley, conclude that there is little evidence for significant Christianization of the army until the 5th or even 6th centuries. The situation in the Arabah appears to differ. Evidence from tombstones indicates that the local population, from among which the soldiers at Gharandal were likely recruited, were already converting to Christianity in significant numbers by the 4th century. The cities of Petra and Aila (modern Aqaba) were Gharandal’s primary trading partners, and each was the see of a 4th century Christian bishop. Finally, the accounts of Diocletian’s purge of the army and associated military martyr texts, regardless of their historical accuracy, testify to the compatibility of military service and Christian identity – at least for some.
This paper argues that the Gharandal chi-rho, in conjunction with other archaeological, historical, and literary evidence, signals that the Roman army in southern Jordan was a viable social location of early Christians. The Roman military’s one hundred year occupation of Gharandal offers a unique opportunity to witness the changing religious landscapes of a turbulent century.
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The Epistolary Narrative Preface of the Pseudo-Clementine "Homilies"
Program Unit: Ancient Fiction and Early Christian and Jewish Narrative
Patricia Duncan, Texas Christian University
The lengthy, fourth-century Christian novel known as the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies begins with three relatively brief documentary fictions: an epistle from Peter to James, an anonymous account of the reading of the epistle by James, and an epistle from Clement of Rome to James. The first two documents, especially, have often been regarded as vestiges of an earlier version or source of the novel, and it has been pointed out that they appear to be somewhat ill-suited to the final version of the work. This paper argues, however, that the three opening documents (the Epistula Petri, the Diamartyria, and the Epistula Clementis) together serve a number of critical functions in the framing of the novel as we have it. Perhaps most importantly, these prefatory documents put in place an esoteric conceit that is essential to the complex pedagogical project that will unfold through the extensive homilies and discourses of the Apostle Peter woven into the twenty books of the narrative proper. The first letter, I would argue, also serves to set the novel in the context of the particular early Christian controversy reflected in the so-called Incident at Antioch described in Gal 2, and together with the account of its reading, the Epistula Petri betrays deep suspicions about the ability of any text to preserve truth (a suspicion manifest also in the Homilies’ well-known doctrine of “False Pericopes” in the scriptures of the Jews, for instance). The mock proposal found in the Diamartyria for the safeguarding of the written transcript of Peter’s teachings serves only to heighten the serious import of the pedagogy in right reading that will be effected through the patently fictional (at least insofar as it is a recognizable adaptation of the genre of the Greek romance) narrative of the Homilies. When the second letter, the Epistula Clementis, is juxtaposed with the first, a broad geographical and temporal gap opens, waiting to be filled in by Clement’s narration of his travels with Peter. When we fail to take all three of the prefatory documents fully into consideration, it is impossible to see the full arc of the Homilies’ revisionist historical fiction.
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Cyprian in the Homilies of Augustine
Program Unit: Contextualizing North African Christianity
Geoffrey Dunn, Australian Catholic University
With the discovery of a new homily in Erfurt in 2007, the number of homilies Augustine preached on the feast of Cyprian now numbers 12 (Serm. 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 313A, 313B, 313C, 313D, 313E, 313F, and 313G). Cyprian is a figure of great importance for Augustine as someone who, in Augustine’s De baptismo contra Donatistas, needed to be rescued from the Donatists’ claims that they were the living embodiment of his legacy rather than Caecilianists like Augustine. This focus is not evident in these homilies, where Cyprian himself could be little more than a launching pad for preaching on any topic at all, or where the Carthaginian bishop’s conversion and martyrdom could be presented as of imitative value for the local community. This paper will examine the images of Cyprian presented in Augustine’s homily, particularly 313E, where the Donatists are the object of Augustine’s preaching and where something more akin to what is found in De baptism could have been expected.
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Romans 1, Queer Theory, and the History of Sexuality
Program Unit: Paul and Politics
Ben Dunning, Fordham University
This paper explores how Greco-Roman protocols of gender have functioned in scholarly interpretations of Romans 1:18-32 that seek to place this much-debated text within the history of sexuality. Here I am especially interested in scholars’ selective engagement with theoretical resources loosely falling under the rubric of “queer theory” in order to pursue various historicist, political, and theological projects. I begin with a brief glance at representative scholarship that has ignored the relevance of ancient gender ideology (Hays) before turning to a concise overview of readings that take more seriously the notion that sexuality does indeed have a history, thereby necessitating attention to the specific cultural logics, sexual politics, and gender hierarchies that underwrite its articulation (or lack thereof) in a particular time and place (Brooten, Martin, Moore, Swancutt). I then consider the recent work of Kyle Harper, which presents itself as participating in this project and building especially on the work of Brooten. I argue that Harper’s idiosyncratic reading of the evidence presented by Brooten works to minimize the degree to which specifically ancient, historically-sedimented concepts of gender and status inform the deep logic of Paul’s thought. In this way (while not stated explicitly), on Harper’s reading, Romans 1 effectively “invents” the category of homosexuality – a development analogous in theoretical terms to the radical rupture of the event à la Badiou and Žižek. In opposition to this reading, I build instead on Joseph Marchal’s compelling proposal that a more robust engagement with queer theory provides resources for unpacking the complex interrelations of identity and difference that necessarily attend the interpretation of the Romans passage. I suggest in particular that the Derridean mode of philosophical argument that undergirds some strands of queer theory might be profitably mobilized to situate the passage within a larger Pauline anthropological system—a framework in which, crucially, the system’s desire for full coherence proves impossible on its own terms. Thus queer historiography might approach Romans 1 in a way that neither renders the text’s violence entirely foreign nor denies our convoluted inheritance of that violence (thereby acknowledging Heather Love’s insight that “the cross-historical touch . . . may be as much a mauling as a caress”), while at the same time locating the text genealogically in a Pauline tradition of anthropological speculation that proves queerly “open” in its very failure to deliver the closure that it promises.
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The Maccabean Martyr Tradition and the Epistle of James
Program Unit: Letters of James, Peter, and Jude
Bryan R. Dyer, McMaster Divinity College
The account of the martyrdom of seven Jewish brothers, their mother, and teacher Eleazer before the Greek king Antiochus IV was a powerful narrative that circulated in the Second Temple period and was recorded in the literature of that time (2 and 4 Maccabees). Early Christians undoubtedly knew the tradition and presented the martyrs as exemplars of dying for one’s faith in a world that was hostile against them. The author of Hebrews clearly refers to this tradition and one can trace its influence on other New Testament writers. The goal of this paper is to argue for the Maccabean Martyr Tradition as a plausible background for the author of the Epistle to James’ comment in 5:10–11a: “As an example of suffering and patience, beloved, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. Indeed we call blessed those who showed endurance” (NRSV). To do so, this paper offers a linguistically informed approach to identifying an allusion in a text. The result of this paper places the Epistle of James squarely within its first-century Jewish context and the tradition of using the Maccabean martyrs as exemplars of endurance and suffering.
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Bible and the Arts for the Biblically and Visually Illiterate
Program Unit: Bible and Visual Art
Bobbi Dykema, Strayer University
Panel presentation on the theme " Teaching the Bible and the Arts in the Undergraduate Classroom."
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The Innovation of Death: The Rhetoric of Martyrdom and Christian Identity
Program Unit: Inventing Christianity: Apostolic Fathers, Apologists, and Martyrs
David L. Eastman, Ohio Wesleyan University
This paper examines the impact of martyrdom literature on the formation of Christian identity in the early centuries. Although the earliest Christian writings provide examples of those who die for the faith (e.g. Jesus and Stephen), death is not presented as the exemplary Christian experience. With the development of martyrological literature, death as the highest good is introduced into Christian rhetoric and forever alters the sense of what it means to be a follower of Jesus and the perception of those both inside and outside the Christian community.
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"Ignatius" on Ignatius and the Construction of the New Paul
Program Unit: Corpus Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti
David L. Eastman, Ohio Wesleyan University
This paper focuses on the reception of Ignatius as a "New Paul" by the fourth-century redactor and expander of the Ignatian epistles. The analysis will highlight the ways in which this pseudo-Ignatius employs Pauline imagery, language, and themes in constructing a version of Ignatius that looks even more like the apostle than the vision that had been cast by the bishop himself.
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Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Popular Exegesis: Window to Biblical Women and 19th Century Woman Question
Program Unit: Women in the Biblical World
Amy Easton-Flake, Brigham Young University
When Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a series of biographical sketches of women of the Old and New Testament for the Christian Union her work became part of the growing body of women’s exegesis. While Stowe’s weaving of religion into her novels has long been noted and discussed, her earlier non-fiction work in evangelical presses and later work on the Bible has been largely ignored. What makes her a particularly interesting nineteenth-century exegete is that her work stands at the intersection of what male biblical scholars were producing for the academy and what male and female popular exegetes were producing for consumer audiences. Consequently, the first part of this paper analyzes how Stowe adapted and popularized a range of hermeneutic tools such as historical criticism, anthropology, and typology as well as how she weaved in popular nineteenth-century scientific theories and rhetoric to enhance rather than detract from the Bible’s divinity. Perhaps most intriguing about Stowe’s biblical portraits is that we can see in them Stowe’s plan for the advancement of women. As one of the most prominent women in nineteenth-century America, Stowe’s views on the woman question were highly sought after by the press and those intimately involved in the various woman’s movements of the day. Since Stowe never aligned herself with or became a spokesperson for any of these movements, her answers to the woman question are best ascertained through her 1870s publications, such as My Wife and I and Woman in Sacred History. This conference paper examines how Stowe re-interprets biblical women to raise the status of wives, mothers, and housekeepers, while simultaneously extending the boundaries of traditional domesticity and establishing multiple paths of progressive womanhood. Her exegesis, as my paper argues, is an interesting mix of biblical women’s narratives and nineteenth-century gender norms and cultures, which can only be understood within the context of the nineteenth-century woman question and growing concerns about the relevancy and veracity of the Bible. Through a close analysis of her biblical interpretations, we learn much more about Stowe’s world and the use she found in the Bible than we do the biblical women she tried to bring new relevancy and life to in Woman in Sacred History.
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“The Mountain Was Burning with Fire”: The Burning Horeb in Illustrations of Late Antiquity and the Biblical Exodus Story
Program Unit: The Bible in Ancient (and Modern) Media
Ruth Ebach, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen
Many pictures show Moses and the burning bush as it is described in the narrative of Moses’ Call in Exod 3-4. Nevertheless, already in late antiquity different illustrators started to add burning stones to the scenery. The paper deals with a carving on the church door of Santa Sabina in Rome, which presents several Old and New Testament-scenes since the 5th century to the broader public. One division shows events of Moses’ life in a sequence. In one scene, God calls Moses in front of a burning stone structure. In current research, several scholars interpret these stones as an altar and assume an integration of a cultic dimension. However, by comparing this iconographic aspect with the same scenery in the labeled illustration of the “Christian Topography” probably written by Cosmas Indicopleustes (“the Monk”) in the 6th century, it seems to be more plausible that the stones represent a burning mountain. Moreover, these illustrations link this burning mountain with the giving of the Torah. Looking for the textual basis of such a tradition does not lead to the Sinai-pericope in the Book of Exodus, but to the Horeb tradition in Deut 4; 5; and 9. According to these texts, Moses gets the tablets, while the mountain is burning with fire. Thus, the illustrator visually combines the story of Moses’ Call in Exod 3-4 with the account of the transmission of the Torah in Deut 4-9 and links both the starting point and the destination of Moses’ task. Remarkably, Cosmas’ illustration shows a chronological differentiation by showing Moses during the Call and at the mountain in different clothes, but links the two episodes by a crossing over of these elements in his picture. Thus, the composition underlines the differentiation of time and the duration of the story and therefore creates a frame around the Moses-narrative in the whole Pentateuch. The redactors of the growing Pentateuch, created a similar type of canon-orientated composition by linking Exod 3-4 and Deut 4-9 through parallel formulations regarding the description of the burning object (bush and mountain). Therefore, the growing of the biblical texts itself as well as its reception in some early Jewish texts like Targum Pseudo-Jonathan and Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer, and the early pictorial reception create a broad and integrative view on the life of Moses by linking main aspects of the Mosaic traditions.
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The “Semitic thiasos”: Reconsidering a Model
Program Unit: Qumran
Benedikt Eckhardt, Universität Bremen
The emergence of private, voluntary forms of corporate organization (thiasoi, hetaireiai, etc.) can be seen as a characteristic feature of Mediterranean cities in the late Classical and Early Hellenistic period. It was also one of the elements of civic life that survived the Roman conquests. The relationship of this Graeco-Roman phenomenon to ancient Near Eastern forms of corporate organization has often been discussed, including the possibility of Greek influence. One of the concepts developed in this debate is the “Semitic thiasos” (“thiase semitique”).
Information about this particular type of social formation includes formal aspects such as leadership and ideal size, but more importantly extends towards conclusions about the groups’ general character. It has been argued that Semitic thiasoi are marked by a “theocratic” form of organization that sets them apart from their Greek counterparts: according to this model, they were brought together by gods, not men, and their internal jurisdiction was based on religious instead of secular norms. The “Semitic thiasos” as a type is thus characterized (and distinguished from Greek and Roman associations) by the individual’s submission not to man-made statutes voluntarily agreed upon by members, but to a God-given social order.
However, in contrast to Greek and Roman clubs, no “Semitic thiasos” has left a nomos thiasoton or lex collegii. The basic sources used for modeling the “Semitic thiasos” are honorific decrees issued by Syrian merchants on Delos, evidence relating to the Palmyrean marze?a, and very ambiguous lists of names from Dura Europos. To fill the gaps, important information has been taken from Jewish sources. The Qumran scrolls give important insights into the rules and regulations of the ya?ad, a late-Hellenistic Jewish movement that has often been compared to Greek and Roman associations. Rabbinic literature contains information about “fellowships” (?avurot) that have also been explained against the backdrop of non-Jewish associations. In a synthetic reading of Hellenistic and Roman evidence from the Aegean islands, Syria and Judea, all deviations of this material from Graeco-Roman patterns could be explained with the common Semitic background of all the groups in question.
Based on a collection of all the data on private associations in the Hellenistic and Roman Near East carried out for the Copenhagen Associations Project Inventory, the paper presents a re-evaluation of this model. Faced with problems of taxonomy and postulates of historical interrelations, it is necessary to properly contextualize the epigraphic evidence, without a priori assuming a coherent Semitic, un-Greek type of associations. At the same time, the case for a more or less unified world of “Graeco-Roman associations” that reaches from Spain to Syria, recently put forward by a number of scholars, is also weak. If we take into account not only the formal structure of the groups, but also the question of group-society relations, differences between the Judean ya?ad, the Palmyrean marze?a and the Greek thiasos cannot be overlooked.
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Two Likely Instances of Hidden Ancestor Polemics in Genesis Reflecting Persian Era Religious Debate
Program Unit: Pentateuch
Diana Edelman, University of Oslo
Abraham’s purchase of a family tomb site at Machphelah (Genesis 23) and Jacob's burial of the foreign gods under the tree near Shechem (Gen 35:1-4) provide two likely examples where the multivalent theme of the promised land in Genesis involves a dimension of hidden polemic asserting that YHWH controls land inheritance, not the family ancestors. This would address a larger polemical topic concerning YHWH’s existence as the sole divinity and the controller of earth, of communication between the realm of the living and the dead, and of entitlement to land. Genesis 23 has not generally been acknowledged to address the issue of ancestral divinization and worship. I argue there is a rhetorical emphasis on "the dead" who need to be buried out of sight, without the creation of subsequent teraphim images, in a tomb that becomes a multi-generational family burial site for descendants of the "promised" blood-line, male and female. The three male heads of the family worship YHWH as the god of their father or forefathers, leaving no room for the forefathers to be considered gods themselves. Jacob’s burial of the foreign gods under the oak near Shechem in Gen. 35.1–4 has been linked explicitly but not uniquely with Laban’ s stolen teraphim (images of family gods) in the history of scholarship. I add an overlooked rhetorical strategy as part of that linkage; Rachel and Leah claim their father has treated them as "foreigners," which anticipates and so reinforces the connection of the "foreign gods" with the images of the dead family ancestors. In both cases, the rejection of the cult and power of the ancestors seems to be expressed via the mechanism of a hidden polemic because of the sensitivity of the issue among early Jewish populations resident in "the homeland" and in the Diaspora.
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Joshua 24: A Diaspora Oriented Overriding of the Joshua Scroll?
Program Unit: Joshua-Judges
Cynthia Edenburg, Open University of Israel
No Abstract
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" . . . And Clothed Me with Joy" (Ps 30:12): Emotions in Psalm 30
Program Unit: Bible and Emotion
Sigrid Eder, Catholic-Theological Private University Linz
This paper follows the analysis of the textual manifestations of emotions established and worked out in the study of Simone Winko with the title of “Kodierte Gefühle” (Encoded Emotions), specifically with regards to her distinction between explicit and implicit emotions.
Explicit emotion words in the text surface are the ones such as “happiness” or “anxiously”, whereby implicit or connoted emotions can be expressed by all textual elements. Implicit emotions can be triggered through neutral expressions without mentioning any emotions at all. Only by additionally knowing the context in semantics and syntax (e.g. imperatives, repetitions etc.), can certain elements be identified as connoted emotions. Implicit emotions can also be expressed through verbal images, especially through metaphorical language, and are much more inherent in poetic texts than explicit emotions are.
Verbal images, figurative language and metaphors are characteristic elements of the psalms, which touch the full range of human emotion in all its heights and depths. Among the book of psalms, psalm 30 stands out at first sight because of its high number of explicit emotion words. In this individual prayer of thanksgiving, the psalmist describes his/her deliverance by God by means of the rescued perspective of joy, which frames the entire psalm. Thus, explicit as well as implicit emotions of Psalm 30 will be analyzed with special focus on the emotion of joy.
The paper aims to contribute both to the theoretical discourse about emotion analysis in the Bible, as well as to the study of emotions in the book of psalms.
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Putting Him on a Pedestal: (Re)collection and the Use of Images in Plato’s Phaedrus
Program Unit: Corpus Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti
Radcliffe G. Edmonds III, Bryn Mawr College
The Greek tradition presents a number of curious stories of the hopeless passion of an individual who attempts to sexually assault a statue, and, in the Phaedrus, Plato provides a curious description of how the dark horse of the soul tries to sexually assault the image of the beautiful beloved, only to be restrained by the reverent awe of the soul’s charioteer, who falls back, stunned by the vision of the beloved as by a divine image. Plato uses this image of two ways of treating an image as an illustration of how – and how not – to treat images in general, whether they be the image of beauty presented by the beautiful beloved or even images of wisdom and justice presented by the writings of a philosopher. In every case, the image must serve as a reminder, a stimulus to recollection and a track that marks the path that memory and reason must follow to arrive at truth, rather than something to be enjoyed as an end in itself. The proper treatment of an image is thus itself an image of the process of recollection, and the ritual actions of adornment, sacrifice, and following in a procession that are appropriate to the treatment of statues of gods become images, not just of how the lover should treat the beautiful beloved, but of how the orator should compose a speech and of the way the philosopher should treat all the images of divine truth that appear in the world. The graphic image of the horse sexually assaulting the boy is likewise an image of what can go wrong when an image is used not as a reminder but as a source of pleasure in itself. In the Phaedrus, then, Plato plays with the problematic status of images, employing some of his most vivid and memorable images to illustrate how images may be used philosophically in the process of recollection. Both the worship paid to the beloved icon and good speeches employ images and mnemonic associations to lead the follower, step by step, toward the truth. While Phaedrus fixes his desire upon the images, both the beloved boy and the speeches, Socrates uses these images as signs on his philosophic path, reminders of whence he has come and whither he is going.
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(Not) Baptizing Thecla: Early Interpretive Efforts on 1 Cor 1:17
Program Unit: Texts and Traditions in the Second Century
Ben Edsall, Australian Catholic University
Paul’s reticence to baptize Thecla is a perennial crucx interpretum within the Acts of Paul. If one takes the Acts of Thecla as a self-standing piece, then the problem can perhaps be somewhat contained to a peculiarly passive presentation of Paul, though it would still stand out among other ancient portrayals of the apostle. Within the ‘final form’ of the Acta Pauli, the problem becomes even more acute: why did Paul not baptize Thecla if he was happy to baptize others, including women?
While not excluding the contributions of themes such as self-control or interpretive overtones between Acta Pauli and, say, Gal 3:28 (so Glenn Snyder; cf. Peter-Ben Smit), I argue that Paul’s ambivalence toward baptism – refusing to baptize Thecla while baptizing others – is the author’s attempt to narrate the ambivalence suggested by Paul in 1 Cor 1:17 – ‘For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel’. As this famous phrase follows Paul’s own vacillation regarding the number of Corinthians he had baptized (1 Cor 1:14–16), the tension within Acta Pauli, reflects the tension within Paul’s own letter.
This explanation is strengthened by comparisons with other early interpretations of this passage by, e.g., Origen and John Chrysostom. These readings emphasize the importance of Paul’s role as a teacher while down playing the importance of the role of the one who baptizes someone who has already been instructed. In doing this, they appropriate Paul as the archetypal teacher of the church, the catechist, whose teaching enthralls the nations with the gospel, just as it enthralls Thecla.
The argument here, then, is that Paul's putting off Thecla's baptism, her theological/moral infatuation with Paul and her own auto-immersion all function within the framework of interpreting Paul's curious disowning of baptism as part of his calling within a larger project of appropriating Paul as the arch-teacher.
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Solomon’s Kiss from Origen to the Later Middle Ages
Program Unit: Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism
Mark Edwards, University of Oxford
This paper will survey Christian interpretations of the biblical verse, let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth (Song of Songs 1.1), from Origen (who takes the kiss to mean the direct communication of the true sense of scripture by the Logos) to Thomas Gallus (for whom it signifies intimate communion between the soul and the Word in a state of concentrated suspense). Other commentators will include Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Elvira, Honorius of Autun, Bernard of Clairvaux and Rupert of Deutz. The shift in understanding of the song will be shown to exemplify a more general shift from an Origenistic or Dionysian concept of the “mystical” as the true sense of the scriptures to the mediaeval concept of “mystical states” which may be cultivated by ascetic discipline and subjected to philosophic introspection. The paper will conclude with some remarks on the relation between the erotic and sexual in Platonism and in Christianity.
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The First Advent of Christ in Victorinus of Pettau’s Commentary on Revelation
Program Unit: History of Interpretation
Robert G. T. Edwards, Wycliffe College
Though little is known of the life and ministry of Victorinus, bishop of Pettau in the late third century, his are among the earliest Christian Latin-language biblical commentaries now extant. His commentary on Revelation has received attention, both in antiquity and in modern times, primarily for its chiliastic interpretation. More Recently, Dulaey (Victorin de Poetovio, premier exégète latin, 1993) has drawn attention to Victorinus’ idea that the book of Revelation is recapitulative of the biblical narrative. This is what my paper will follow up on: namely, how Victorinus interprets the first seven chapters of Revelation as a recapitulation of the first advent (i.e. apocalypsis) of Christ. Thus, my paper will investigate the revelatory/apocalyptic function of the first coming of Christ in Victorinus’ interpretation, especially focusing on his use of the canonical Gospels as interpretive keys for these early chapters of Revelation.
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Living and Dying a Christian under Islam: Martyrologies and the Islamification of Late Antiquity
Program Unit: Religious World of Late Antiquity
Jessica Lee Ehinger, University of Oxford
The purpose of this communication is to discuss a martyr tradition from the early eighth century, the stories of sixty martyrs executed by the Muslims in Palestine. The various version of this story share several important features - the martyrs are singled out for execution due to their particular role (as either soldiers or Byzantine citizens on pilgrimage), marking them out as different from the general Christian population of the Near East; their allegiance to Byzantium is stressed, but the stories remain otherwise silent regarding their sectarian identity, and their Muslim persecutors remain relatively neutral characters, apparently requiring their conversion for legal reasons, rather than due to personal or spiritual conviction. In this way, these stories present an important perspective on how the Christian Near East of Late Antiquity adapted to the rise of Islam and the emergence of Muslim rule.
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Hot Jesus, Tragic Superstar, Suffering Son of God: How Jesus Films Aim to Shape Our Moral Imaginations
Program Unit: Bible and Film
Rebekah Eklund, Loyola University Maryland
Jesus films shape the imagination of their viewers, in relation to the identity and mission of Jesus, in both intentional and unintentional ways. The capacity of film to shape its audience connects to recent scholarly interests in several areas: mimetic studies in relation to the theme of participation in Christ (so Susan Eastman, et al.); ethics and the performance of Scripture (so Nicholas Lash, Kevin Vanhoozer, et al.); and virtue ethics, including recent work on liturgy as ethics (so Sam Wells, Stanley Hauerwas, and the intelligent critiques of Jennifer Herdt).
Jesus films represent a particularly powerful example of the capacity of films to shape the moral imagination because of their subject matter: their representations (and therefore interpretations) of Christ himself. They are also an interesting example because they themselves are portions of the biblical text. Thus they serve as a case study for the ability of both film and scripture to shape the moral imagination.
In this paper I make several relatively modest and interconnected claims. First, Jesus films simply are not capable of shaping their hearers in precisely the same ways that the gospels do. They are irreducibly different media. However, the first corollary to this claim is that they always shape their hearers with respect to the mission and identity of Jesus, and that they can choose to do so in ways that cohere more closely to the gospels or that disrupt the gospels’ aims. I offer as one example the way that the portrayal of Jesus’ ethnic and racial identity (whether he is white and in what way he is Jewish) has the capacity to have a significant effect on the moral imagination of the film’s viewers.
I use material from a variety of films (including The Passion of the Christ, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Gospel of John, Son of Man, Godspell, and the mini-series Jesus of Nazareth) to explore the question of Jesus’ mission and identity. If the viewer is meant to identify with Jesus’ mission to redeem the world through his suffering, or to model self-sacrificial love, this inevitably suggests different responses on the part of the viewer than the suggestion that Jesus either misunderstood his mission or failed to complete it.
For the final example, I suggest that the tendency to portray Jesus on screen as Caucasian/western European may have the unintended effect of allowing white Western viewers to identify more closely with Jesus but also to distance themselves from Jesus’ identification with the poor and oppressed (as reported in the gospels). To evaluate this claim, I explore the South African movie Son of Man, the forthcoming film Killing Jesus, and the recent controversy over Jesus’ “sexy” portrayal in the 2014 film Son of God. Finally, I use Adele Reinhartz’s essay on the Jewishness of Jesus in film, alongside responses to Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, to explore how anti-Semitism itself—and anxiety over anti-Semitism—has shaped not only the films themselves but also how viewers have responded to the films.
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Law and Tradition in the Long Seventh Century (570–705): Between Qur’an and Church Canon
Program Unit: The Qur’an and Late Antiquity (IQSA)
Emran El-Badawi, University of Houston
This paper posits the “long seventh century” (570-705) as an incubation period, within late antiquity, for the articulation of later Islamic law and tradition in the 9th century. 570 CE marks the approximate birth date of the prophet Muhammad, the articulator of the first Near Eastern scripture in Arabic—the Qur’an. 705 CE marks the death of the Umayyad Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik b. Marwan, under whom Arabic language becomes the official language of administration in the region, and under whom Islamic identity begins to crystalize. This paper demonstrates that during this period the Qur’an is one among a handful of other interconnected sources of Near Eastern law and tradition, what I broadly dub “church canon.”
This paper will explore about a dozen qur’anic terms and phrases, especially references to bodies of law and tradition in the long seventh century. These include discussing ‘ilm and dars (Q 3:79) and its relationship to ta’wil al-ahadith (Q 12:6; 101); discussing al-nubuwwa wa al-kitab and rahbaniyyah (Q 57:26-27); and discussing the relationship between al-kitab wa al-hukm wa al-nubuwwah (Q 3:75-79; 6:74-93; 57:26-27; 45:16-18) and shari‘ah (Q 15:18). I will argue that these references are part of a larger discourse on family law, the center of which are women (widows?) and orphans. I will also argue that these references are extremely precise and may point to Syriac or Greek texts, including the Didascalia Apostolorum, Syro-Roman Law Book (SRLB) and memre and madrashe of Syriac Christian authors.
This paper also builds on the theories of Holger Zellentin, Garth Fowden, Fred Donner, Patriacia Crone and Ali Mabrouk. Assuming later Islamic law and tradition build upon Christian and Roman (as well as Arabian) legal discourse, then it is integral to understanding the Qur’an’s masterful reference to and typology of church canon in the long seventh century.
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The Media Matrix of Mark and Matthew: From Gospel to Book
Program Unit: Performance Criticism of the Bible and Other Ancient Texts
Nicholas A. Elder, Marquette University
Socio-linguists recognize that the acts of speaking and hearing markedly differ from the acts of writing and reading. The distinctive psychodynamics of speaking and writing, in particular, produce notably dissimilar syntax and grammar. This is because writing fills in the existential void that is left when a physical speaker is absent. The different mental processes that are at work when a text is composed by speech and when a text is composed by writing have often been overlooked in discussions of early Christian media forms. If the psychodynamics of speaking are found in a written narrative, we must reckon with the possibility that that particular narrative was composed as, or during, a speech act. In contrast, when the psychodynamics of writing are found in a text, our first assumption must be that the text was conceived literarily. The conception of a text is then significant for determining what kinds of interpretive methodologies, whether oral and/or written, are most useful for understanding that text.
With reference to the synoptic tradition, this paper demonstrates that multiple unique features of Markan syntax, on the one hand, are representative of oral psychodynamics. Both the Matthean redaction of Mark and the unique Matthean pericopae, on the other hand, demonstrate markedly literary psychodynamics. While the written form of Mark’s gospel established what Jan Assmann called an ‘extended situation,’ Matthew has syntactically altered Mark’s text and composed his own pericopae in a manner that improves upon Mark’s novel ‘extended situation.’ These syntactical concerns make sense of the titles in Mark 1.1 (euangelion) and Matthew 1.1 (biblos), which, I argue, are paratexts that serve as media markers for the hearers and readers of these documents. The linguistic differences between the two texts also possess explanatory power concerning Matthew’s rise to prominence over Mark in the first few centuries of earliest Christianity and the development of the gospel genre from its oral-kerygmatic framework to its literary framework.
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On Transcription and Oral Transmission in Aseneth: A Study of the Narrative’s Conception
Program Unit: Pseudepigrapha
Nicholas A. Elder, Marquette University
Because writing/reading and speaking/hearing are fundamentally different linguistic and social affairs, socio-linguists have noted that these acts produce markedly different syntax, grammar, and meta-aspects in any given narrative. From this socio-linguistic perspective, narrative and performance critics have developed criteria for determining whether a text is (more) orally or literally conceived. These criteria have been used to demonstrate the performative and folkloristic nature of variegated texts in different times, languages, and cultures. This perspective, however, has not been consistently applied to pseudepigrapha studies. This paper, then, interprets the Jewish narrative Joseph and Aseneth using this oral-performative methodology. It demonstrates that certain syntactical elements of the narrative, such as the paratactic and additive use of the coordinating conjunction, the presence of only one new idea in each clause – usually accomplished by using variegated forms of the ‘to be’ verb, – and the visible and descriptive nature of the text, all point to its oral origins.
Based on these observations, this paper suggests that Joseph and Aseneth had an oral tradition that preceded, and likely also proceeded, the written versions that are now extant. Approaching the text from this oral hermeneutic solves a number of the text's enigmas, which are explored in the second half of the paper: the question of which manuscript recension is original; whether or not the narrative is written in the vein of the Hellenistic romance novels; the presence of Semitisms in the text, despite the general consensus that the text was originally composed in Greek; and the lack of wordplay on Aseneth’s name in 15.7 in the extant Greek witnesses.
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The Augustinian Captivity of Rom 5:12
Program Unit: Pauline Epistles
Mark A. Ellis, Faculdade Teológica Batista do Paraná, Brazil
In spite of modern scholarship’s recognition of Augustine’s dependence upon a faulty translation and unsupportable grammatical arguments in his exegesis of Romans 5:12, widely respected writers such as Cranfield, Moo and Shreiner continue to dedicate a significant portion of their commentaries on this text to defending the idea of Augustine’s doctrine of original sin. This paper will argue that the Augustinian interpretation misunderstands the purpose of Romans 5:12–21 within the argument of the epistle, and misdefines death in physical terms in order to gain proof of universal guilt due to Adam’s sin. This paper argues that Romans 5:12 is the initial verse of a transitional paragraph which takes the reader into Paul’s presentation of why those who have been justified should pursue personal righteousness, Rom 5:12 serving as both a recapitulation of his conclusions regarding universal sinfulness in Romans 3:23, and an introduction of spiritual death.
This paper is divided between an explanation of the Augustinian interpretation of Romans 5:12, the presentation of Romans 5:12 as a transitional paragraph which introduces the theme of spiritual death, and a brief consideration of whether the idea of original sin can be established elsewhere in Romans.
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Adam and Eve’s Labors and Marriage Ideals in Early Christian Relief Sculpture
Program Unit: Archaeology of Religion in the Roman World
Mark D. Ellison, Vanderbilt University
The image of Adam and Eve, popular in early Christian iconography, appears in a variant form on about thirty fourth-century sarcophagus reliefs: Adam and Eve stand to either side of Christ-Logos, who hands them symbols of their labor (typically a sheaf of grain for Adam and a sheep for Eve). Though this image differs from the more popular portrayal of Adam and Eve on either side of a tree, covering their nakedness and looking ashamed, it has been interpreted along the same theological lines as a reference to sin and the Fall; the assigned labors symbolize punishments for transgression, a view based on patristic commentary on Genesis 3:16–19.
This paper questions that interpretation, which fails to consider discontinuities between text and image and assumes that patristic literature represents (completely) the intentions and perceptions of sarcophagus patrons and viewers. Re-reading the sarcophagi in light of the patronage of aristocratic, married Christians enables an appreciation of how the image of Adam and Eve’s labors could represent and evoke marital ideals such as partnership in the division of labors and divine formation of the married relationship.
Visual and literary evidence supporting this interpretation includes: (1) comparable iconography in images of Christ extending power or blessing to figures on either side of him; (2) early Christian texts and art using Adam and Eve as exemplars for married Christians; (3) the division of labors between spouses as a traditional ideal of marriage in Greco-Roman literature and art and in early Christian texts.
The image of Adam and Eve’s labors was new visual vocabulary serving traditional aims of funerary display; it presented sarcophagi patrons as upholders of the social and spiritual order, and as spouses joined and defined by divine action at the center of their relationship.
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The Sensation of Love: Song of Songs 4:9–16 and the Simulation of Emotion
Program Unit: Senses, Cultures, and Biblical Worlds
Barat Ellman, Fordham University
The Song of Songs is clearly love poem. But as scholars have observed, the book is less a narration of events in the love story of its two protagonists, than it is a series of declarations of love. In a sense, it is a poem about love itself, a poem that imitates the experience of love. In a 1980 article entitled “Beauty and the Enigma,” Francis Landy offered an astute explanation of how the language of the Song makes possible that act of imitation. Combining two functions, an “intellectual, referential” function and an “emotive” function, the Song “communicates in language what is beyond language.” Song of Songs, Landy says, “tries to recreate sensations, to make words ‘say’ something instead of just signifying.” The sensory immediacy that results contributes to the Song’s capacity to create a world where, in Cheryl Exum’s words, “love is always already in progress and consummation is simultaneously anticipated, enjoyed and deferred. Conjuring up the beloved—and letting the beloved disappear so that the conjuring can begin again—this is the game the lovers are continually playing.”
Concentrating on Song 4:9-16, verses which form a brief poem in praise of the enchanting power of the female beloved on the male love and which give voice to the attraction the male lover feels for the object of his love, this paper will demonstrate how the Song’s language, imagery and formal structure combine to recreate for the reader the sensuality of a sexual attraction that is experienced visually, aurally and aromatically and that, together, produce tension and release bound up in sexual attraction and fulfillment.
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The Mechanics of Death: Philo’s and Plutarch’s View on the Death of the Human
Program Unit: Philo of Alexandria
Julian Elschenbroich, Protestant University Wuppertal/Bethel
This paper examines how Philo and Plutarch, two main representatives of Middle Platonism in the 1st century, envisaged the processes taking place at the end of man’s life on earth. The question is not only, whether and how the concept of a tripartite anthropology (body, soul and mind) shapes the transition from life to death and afterlife, but also, if and how God or divine intermediates are involved in this process of seperation. Comparing their views on the „mechanics of death“ might contribute to a more accurate picture of the intersection of anthropology and theology in 1st century Platonism. Finally, some considerations will be given to the question how this discusssion may enlighten Paul’s thoughts on the transition from life to afterlife.
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Trauma and Counter Trauma in the Book of Esther: Reading the Megillah in the Face of the Post-Shoah Sabra
Program Unit: Reading, Theory, and the Bible
Sarah Emanuel, Drew University
Sociologist Kai Erikson defines collective trauma as a blow to one’s collective identity and social life. “It is a form of shock . . . a gradual realization that the community no longer exists as an effective source of support and that an important part of the self has disappeared.” We catch glimpses of a culture’s memories of trauma and survival of them in an array of discursive formations, including narrative. By naming, shaping, and giving words to traumatic experience, storytelling becomes an act of processing – an act that seeks to make sense of and survive the many haunting associations and dissociations that, paradoxically, signify events that exceed categorized signification. Though typically not utilizing trauma theory, scholars indirectly describe the book of Esther as taking part in this process. As Timothy Beal writes, Esther is a book “about living beyond the end,” often doing so by utilizing humor to lampoon the powers that be. However, rather than simply undermine the enemy via subversive jest, the Jews eventually turn the tables completely as they call for a mass annihilation of Jewish foes. As such, the creation of a new Jewish identity – one that appropriates Amalekite power and force – becomes another glimpse of the culture’s attempt to process, survive, and counter trauma. These tactics become even clearer, however, when cross-read intertextually with the celebration of Purim throughout the Shoah followed by the construction of the Israeli sabra and IDF culture post-WWII. Whereas the celebration of Purim functioned more regularly as hidden resistance, the establishment of the Israeli sabra created space for both revenge fantasy and revenge reality against any and all lingering “Amaleks.” Though differing in strategy, context, and, arguably, productivity, these responses nevertheless illustrate a range of survival strategies employed in the face of communal suffering. Reading the book of Esther alongside these examples of counter trauma exposes Esther’s use of humor and appropriation of enemy ideology as articulations of post-traumatic wish-fulfillment. In short, by reading Esther as haunted by the Holocaust and the creation of the post-Shoah sabra, we may better recognize the range of survival tactics employed in the text.
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Old Testament Worldview and Early Christian Apocalypses
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Matthew Emerson, Oklahoma Baptist University
Old Testament Worldview and Early Christian Apocalypses
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African Women in the Book of Genesis: The Wife of Abraham, Hagar (16), the Wife of Joseph, Asenath (41 and 46), and the Wife of Potiphar (49)
Program Unit: Genesis
Doris Enede, Kogi State University
The book of Genesis specifically identified these women as Egyptians. However, since there are still some controversies as to whether ancient Egyptians were Africans, Romans or Europeans, this paper will examine the ancient Egyptians records and scholars’ opinions in order to establish the Africanness of the above women. It will also do the various analysis of the above three passages. After the brief examination of various references to the above women in Christian, Islamic and Judaistic literatures, this paper will examine each of the above woman’s contribution to Africa and ancient Israel.
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The Nameless African Wife of Potiphar: An African Reading of Genesis 39
Program Unit: Women in the Biblical World
Doris Enede, Kogi State University
The majority of scholars, especially Western Scholars’ reading of Genesis 39 is that of condemnation of Mrs Potiphar’s actions of seducing the young handsome Joseph and sending him to prison. This writer believes that such condemnation is due to lack of understanding of Mrs Potiphar’s vision in the light of African cultural values.
The purpose of this paper is to examine critically Mrs Potiphar’s action in light of African cultural and religious values, especially when a woman is childless because of impotence of her husband and her duty is to protect her husband’s shame. Could this be the spirit behind Mrs. Potiphar’s so called seductive action? After discussing the Africanness of the ancient Egyptians this paper will also examine the probable justification of Mrs Potiphar’s action in light of African culture and tradition and her contribution to ancient Israel.
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On Not-Knowing When Knowing Is All You Know
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Peter Enns, Eastern University
Careers in biblical studies are a paradox. We are trained and therefore value and strive for mastery of knowledge of Scripture to understand better a God who is beyond our knowing. This talk explores the wisdom--and even responsibility--of accepting the counterintuitive challenge of modeling true intellectual vulnerability in our writing and speaking as a deliberate means of encouraging intellectual and spiritual growth.
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Love by Order? The Concept of Love in Law Texts in the Hebrew Bible
Program Unit: Bible and Ethics
Erbele-Kuester Dorothea, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
In debates about the underlining principle of an Ethics in the Old Testament those who stress ethical rules are grounded in the obedience to God´s will oppose those who stress that the motive clauses of the laws refer to God´s deeds and human experiences. Love as a virtue does not seem to have a central place in these motivations. However, prominent texts in the Tora, due to their compositional place, their rhetoric and their reception history, engage with the concept of love (esp. Dtn 6:5 and Lev 19).
The paper shall investigate the role love plays within ethics - especially ethics as expressed in the genre of law texts in different literary layers. Along the classical text Dtn 6:5 the very notion of love implied in this exhortation to love God shall be highlighted. Love has to be experienced with the heart (ratio), the nefesch (desire, inner person) and the physical or creative power. Different aspects of the concept of love shall thus come to the core, as well as the role that the senses play in this specific moral action (motive) according to the legislative texts. Finally the relevance of the concept of love within the larger frame of an Ethics of the Old Testament shall be pointed out.
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De facto Canonicity in Ethiopia
Program Unit: Function of Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphal Writings in Early Judaism and Early Christianity
Ted M. Erho, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
The precise nature of the biblical canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church has been a subject of discussion within the academic community over the past few decades. Unfortunately, this discussion has largely been carried out under a misguided presupposition, namely that a defined de jure canon exists within Ethiopian Christendom. In reality, and perhaps uniquely among Christian traditions, no formal canon of either Old or New Testament writings has ever been officially enacted by the Ethiopian Church to date (though recently the Patriarchate in Addis Ababa has given some consideration to beginning such a process). Lists variously adduced in this regard, especially those numbering eighty-one items, have largely been taken over from other sources, primarily Copto-Arabic ones, and merely represent hermeneutical mathematic gymnastics by one author or another to arrive by whatever means necessary at the required figure. However, although a de jure Ethiopian canon has yet to be proclaimed, comprehensive analysis of the Ge‘ez (classical Ethiopic) manuscript tradition reveals a fairly distinct segregation of scriptural and non-scriptural writings, allowing for the delineation of a de facto canon instead. Since Ethiopian biblical pandects are excessively rare, impeding the straightforward inclusion or exclusion of a work on such a basis, this paper will statistically compare and map the manuscriptal companions of both universally (e.g. Genesis and Isaiah) and non-universally (e.g. 1 Enoch, Jubilees, 4 Ezra, and the Ascension of Isaiah) accepted writings. Even though such an analysis establishes the contours of a canon with relative certainty, evident alterations to this corpus in the fourteenth century and the scarcity of earlier Ge‘ez manuscripts jointly caution against simplistically foisting it upon Ethiopian Christianity of the first millennium.
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Recent Excavations at Ancient Smyrna
Program Unit: Archaeology of Religion in the Roman World
Akin Ersoy, Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi
Ancient Smyrna, a major port city on the west coast of Asia Minor, had an important Jewish population during the Imperial period. It also hosted a nascent Christian community mentioned in the book of Revelation as one of the Seven Churches. Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna, was martyred in the city’s stadium in 156 CE. This presentation will review the excavations at the civic agora that I have led since 2007. First, the city’s history and its archaeological excavations to date will be reviewed briefly. A map of major archaeological monuments still extant in modern Izmir will be shown. Then the major monuments revealed in the agora excavations will be discussed such as the basilica and bouleterion. The restoration and conservation of the agora finds will likewise be covered. I will close by discussing the challenges of preserving and presenting an archaeological site situated in a major urban environment. Smyrna emerged as a major Christian center in the Late Roman period, and our excavations have brought to light interesting aspects of the material world of this community.
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The Artist Speaks: Dio Chrysostom's Defense of Images in His Twelfth Oration
Program Unit: Rhetoric and Early Christianity
Philip Erwin, Graduate Theological Union
In his Twelfth (Olympic) Oration, Dio Chrysostom addresses a crowd in Olympia, which has gathered for a festival in honor of Zeus. On this occasion, Dio delivers a speech on the sources of humanity’s conception of the divine, which soon slips into a hypothetical account of a speech of Phidias in defense of his sculpture of Zeus before a tribunal. Phidias’ apology steers Dio’s oration into an exposition on the status and role of images in relation to knowledge of the gods, Zeus in this case. This essay examines the ways in which Dio Chrysostom defines the general relationship between speech and image through Phidias’ apology. In particular, it is argued that, for Dio, words and images participate in the same economy of representation; speech does not simply (re)produce and order/arrange sound, but engenders images that become implanted in the mind of the hearer. On this particular point, this essay posits that Dio’s Twelfth Oration responds directly to Platonic critiques of graphic/visual representation as inimical to philosophical contemplation of the truth.
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"At That Time Jerusalem Shall Be Called the Throne of the LORD": Jeremiah 3:17 and the Relation between Israel and the Nations in Aggadic Midrashim
Program Unit: Midrash
Johanna Erzberger, Institut Catholique de Paris
Jer. 3:17 is one of the most frequently cited passage from the book of Jeremiah in aggadic Midrashim. By linking Jer. 3:17 and Isa. 54:2 with Gen 1:9, GenR 5, LevR 10 and PRK 20 discuss the functioning of the sanctuary in light of the order of creation, and the order of creation as reflected in the sanctuary. While using an almost identical traditional piece of interpretation that links the above mentioned intertexts, these Midrashim contextualize this tradition in
fundamentally different ways. This different contextualization of the passage in these Midrashim touches the potential tension created by the linking of the gathering of the nations in Jerusalem according to Jer 3:17 and the stretching out of the sanctuary as well as Israel’s descendants possessing or inheriting the nations according to Isa 54:2-3. The Midrashim differ regarding the definition of the relation between Israel and the nations. The paper analyses the function of an exemplary exegetical tradition in the contexts of different Midrashim and argues for the meaningfulness of its broader context.
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Ezra-Nehemiah and the Construction of Community
Program Unit: Postcolonial Studies and Biblical Studies
Tamara Cohn Eskenazi, Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion
The “identity politics” in Ezra-Nehemiah continue to generate controversy, both when read in the context of postexilic Judah and in terms of a biblical text with contemporary applications. This paper will examine the issues as part of a broader biblical and cultural conversation in the ancient world, in dialogue with Mark Brett and Daniel Smith-Christopher, and in relation to current studies about mixed marriages and the shaping of communities in multi-cultural settings in the Modern and Postmodern world. A special lens includes the impact of colonialism and postcolonialism on past and present interpretations.
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The Birth of the Maccabean Ethnic State: Ethnic Groups Not “Empire” in the Meaning of 1 Maccabees
Program Unit: Construction of Christian Identities
Philip Esler, University of Gloucestershire
A torrent of current research into biblical and extra-biblical texts construes them as reactions against, or even subversions of, the Ptolemaic, Seleucid, or Roman “empire.” In Apocalypse Against Empire Anathea Portier-Young has interpreted 1 Maccabees along these lines. It is submitted, however, that inadequate attention has been given to modeling what the putative group entity “empire” means in such scholarship. Such inattention runs counter to another, and far more credible, interest in biblical studies at present—that which focuses on identities, group and personal, and employs social-scientific ideas to sharpen our understanding of them. I will argue that 1 Maccabees does not present the Maccabean revolt as a victory against the Seleucid “empire.” Rather, the text is plausibly interpreted as the narrative of an ethnic group’s triumph against an onslaught by other ethnic groups that threatened its survival. As in many ethnic conflicts, moreover, indivisible possession of the ethnic homeland was central to the struggle and victory meant the creation of an “ethnic state,” where an ethnic group establishes a polity in its homeland.
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"All That You Have Done…Has Been Fully Told Me": The Power of Gossip and the Story of Ruth
Program Unit: Social Sciences and the Interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures
Philip Esler, University of Gloucestershire
Exegetical studies using social-scientific perspectives on gossip undertaken by Richard Rohrbaugh, John Daniels and Marianne Kartzow have proven extremely illuminating in relation to New Testament texts. In this paper, I will pursue a similar approach on a text from the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Ruth. When Boaz first meets Ruth he says to her, “All that you have done for your mother-in-law … has been fully told me” (2:11), and what he has learned has clearly been in Ruth’s favour. Boaz can only have gained such information through what we call gossip. In this paper I will first review the current state of social-scientific research into the nature of this phenomenon. I will then apply this to the several passages in the text of Ruth that depend upon its occurrence. This exercise will reveal the truth of anthropologist Robert Paine’s dictum that “gossip is a catalyst of social process” by uncovering the remarkable extent to which the plot of the book is propelled, and character developed, by gossip.
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The New Isaac: The Characterization of Jesus as the Fulfillment of the Patriarch Isaac
Program Unit: Johannine Literature
Mitchell Alexander Esswein, Princeton Theological Seminary
Nils Dal (“The Atonement: An Adequate Reward for the Akedah?” in Jesus the Christ, 1991, 137–151) argues that the ‘Aqedah served as a strong foundation for understanding Christ’s sacrifice in Rom 8:32 and other New Testament texts. In this paper, I argue that various themes found in Second Temple texts concerning Isaac’s near-sacrifice have their parallel in the Fourth Gospel. Within this developed tradition surrounding Isaac, he became a willing sacrifice (Jth 8:26–27; 4 Macc 13:12; 16:20; Ps. Philo, Biblical Antiquities 32:2–3; Josephus, Ant. 1:232). Jesus, too, announces routinely how he alone has the authority to hand over his life (John 2:21-22; 3:14-15; 18:21-30; 10:11-21; 12:7; 12:27-36). The atoning sacrifice of Christ had already been noted in the Apostolic period, “…He was in His own person about to offer the vessel of His Spirit a sacrifice for our sins, that the type also which was given in Isaac who was offered upon the alter should be fulfilled” (Barn. 7.3). This is logical since an Isaac typology is the only means by which an adequate theology of atonement could arise within Christianity. The Suffering Servant of Deutero-Isaiah could serve as a backdrop, but this figure also developed associations with Isaac. The only legend in Jewish literature that has a father sacrifice an only son is Abraham and Isaac, which is similar to how John describes the Father’s sending of his only Son into the world (John 1:14, 18; 3:16; 1 John 4:9–10). Lastly, both Isaac (Jub. 17:15–18:19; Palestinian Targum on Exod 12) and Jesus’ (John 13:1; 19:14) Passions both occur during Passover, which is 14 Nisan. The connections between Jesus and Isaac are considerable, and I will systematically lay out these associations in order to reveal that John’s theology of atonement is partially dependent upon an Isaac typology.
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Weapons for War
Program Unit: Ugaritic Studies and Northwest Semitic Epigraphy
Bryan Estelle, Westminster Seminary California
This paper applies Michael O’Connor’s methodology to a section from the Baal cycle (KTU 1.2 IV, 6-27). The content of this part of the Baal cycle contains a possible debate, Kutharu’s speech, and the preparation of two weapons for battle against Yamm. This paper argues that this section of the Baal cycle contains 52 lines. I claim that this kind of analysis demonstrates that there are no “strict” phonological rules regarding the prosody; rather, syntax should govern the explanation of the poem. Finally, a number of observations come out of this analysis. For example, although the repetitions do not agree with the apparent narrative sense units, this paper claims that sensible patterns and coherence are noted when O’Connor’s methodology is applied to this text. Other implications are discussed as well.
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The Gospel according to William Blake: On the Use of Biblical Apocalyptic Imagery in “The Everlasting Gospel”
Program Unit: History of Interpretation
Rebecca K. Esterson, Boston University
William Blake’s "The Everlasting Gospel" is an exercise in contradictions. As he works out an alternative vision of the nature of Christ in this iconoclastic and fragmented poem, it becomes less and less clear what kind of a messiah Blake has in mind. His Jesus is at once forgiving and vengeful, meek and unapologetically proud, chaste and impure, violent and gentle, fully in the flesh and fully transcendent. Furthermore, Blake’s dependence on, and hostility toward, his biblical heritage confuses his final message. Even where he is obviously ironic “it is hard to see how the irony is supposed to work,” as one scholar laments.
While Blake’s Gospel is dissonant and at times lighthearted it is by no means unserious. His concerns are ultimate ones, his message urgent. This is made evident by the poem’s dependence on the imagery and language of the biblical book of Revelation: the promised final judgment on humanity. By drawing out the apocalyptic allusions in "The Everlasting Gospel," this paper will attempt to illuminate something of Blake’s convictions as expressed in this poem. These convictions, while contrary in many respects to the religious norms of his day, are no less religious in their concern for ultimate things.
The paper will respond to and build on the scholarship of scholars Morton Paley, Karen Shabetai, Randel Helms, Jeanne Moskal, and others in interpreting the poem in light of Blake’s context and unique aesthetic. It will consider the particular temperament of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Christian eschatology, the discursive use of figures such as Rome and the Jew, and Blake’s anti-authoritarian position regarding the Church of England. Blake is a product of English utopianism, critically judging the church itself, and envisioning the possibility of a post-biblical/pre-biblical new age. His work does not describe the end of time, or any literally chronological scheme of events. Rather, his “end” is in the present tense. His Last Judgment is the event of being awakened from a deep sleep, entering a new age and a new consciousness.
"The Everlasting Gospel" is a trickster gospel; it follows a literary path to truth rather than a linear one. Blake finds in the book of Revelation both the narrative absurdity and the vivid imagery needed to retell the gospels in apocalypse terms. Inspired by the everlasting gospel mentioned in the book of Revelation, which is preached to everyman, his is the sacred text for the ritually impure: the leapers, the prostitutes, the poets. His messiah is about serious business. He is neither humble nor gentle in persecuting injustice. His followers are kept from their sleep. His mission is a revolution of consciousness. The gospel according to William Blake is an apocalypse, ushering in the age of the liberated, enlightened spirit. That he attempts to liberate himself from the very biblical tradition that brings him such a vision is an irony that only such a gospel can celebrate.
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7 Fallacies of Conflict Resolution: An Application of Matt 5:23–26 in Ecclesial Practice
Program Unit: Bible and Practical Theology
Douglas Estes, South University - Columbia
Conflict resolution is an integral and necessary part of ecclesial practice in today’s society. Unfortunately, since it tends to fall outside the sphere of traditional spiritual disciplines, and has some difficulty in reconciling with the traditional practice of church discipline in everyday situations, conflict resolution remains an important but thorny topic in practical theology. In this paper, I introduce the practical and biblical need for effective conflict resolution, starting with a close reading of Matt 5:23–26. This reading argues for the primary principle of biblical conflict resolution, person-to-person peacemaking. Next, I identify seven conflict resolution fallacies that people commonly engage in to avoid person-to-person peacemaking, and why these fallacies occur. Following each fallacy, I use examples and suggestions for improving conflict resolution skills in each scenario. I conclude the paper with a summary of how these fallacies work in conjunction with each other—to the detriment of healthy ecclesial practice—and in contrast with Matthew 5.
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Cyprian and Urban Life: A Development of Church Hierarchy: Construction or Consequence
Program Unit: Contextualizing North African Christianity
Alexander Evers, Loyola University Chicago
In the 3rd century AD, Cyprian of Carthage played an essential role in the development of the hierarchical structure within the Church in Roman North Africa, as well as the Roman Empire at large. His principal model for this was urban life in the cities of the African provinces. In analysing the language that Cyprian used, in combination with the archaeology of the cities of Roman Africa, one can clearly detect a cross-fertilisation. The question arises, whether Cyprian was providing a blueprint of his own construction towards the organisation of the Church, or whether he was merely consolidating existing practices – his work a consequence of earlier developments.
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A Comparative Vocabular Analysis of the Pentateuch Targums
Program Unit: Aramaic Studies
David L. Everson, Cincinnati Hills Christian Academy
Though fully tagged text files of the targums have been available for some time now and despite the ongoing publication of relevant lexicographical works, there is currently no thorough comparative analysis of the vocabulary of the Pentateuch Targums. For this paper, I will conduct such an analysis. That is, once an exhaustive comparison of the vocabulary lists is completed, in addition to identifying words that are unique or common to the respective targums, I will also identify tendencies within the data, paying special attention to vocabulary within expanded passages and the so called Kaufman effect. The implications of the data with regard to dialect geography and (non-)literary dialects will also be discussed.
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Teaching the Bible in the Arts as an Upper Level Undergraduate Class
Program Unit: Bible and Visual Art
J. Cheryl Exum, University of Sheffield
Panel presentation on the theme "Teaching the Bible and the Arts in the Undergraduate Classroom."
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Cognitive Time-Travel in Paul’s Mythmaking
Program Unit: Redescribing Christian Origins
Jennifer Eyl, Tufts University
This paper builds on earlier work, in which I have attempted to redescribe and theorize the practice of reordering historical sequence for ideological purposes. I have argued previously that anachronism is a constituent feature of mythmaking. This paper applies such theorization specifically to the apostle Paul and the way he discursively constructs the supremacy of theos (his word for the Judean god), and Christos. Paul’s letters are thick with claims that the new deity he is proselytizing, Christos, is not new at all. By arguing that Christ’s first-century appearance on earth was long foretold—and, indeed, part of a timeless master plan—Paul can assert the validity and supremacy of the Judean deity and his divine son over and against other deities who have birth narratives (and therefore, must “begin” at some point in time). The paper will focus on Romans 1:1-7 as just one example where Paul claims that Christ’s appearance for the salvation of Gentiles was long foretold.
The paper uses cognitive science to explore the mechanism by which humans are prone to place things wildly out of order intentionally (to locate the existence of things long before they actually exist, and vice versa). In particular, Kurt Stocker’s “The Time Machine in Our Mind” serves as a framework for understanding this ability, which can then be applied to Paul’s strategies of anachronism. Usually categorized under the umbrella of “prophecy,” Paul’s claims are an example of the human cognitive ability to rearrange time. This paper will seek cognitive explanations for prophetic time-rearranging. Stocker’s study offers a “comprehensive conceptual account for the imagistic mental machinery that allows us to travel through time” (36) and notes that the neural correlates of mental time travel are equally stimulated, whether “true” or “fictive” sentences are heard. I argue that cognitive approaches to chronological (re)arrangement can help us to better understand Paul’s practices of mythmaking.
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God, the Lord, and Angels in the Sahidic Testament of Isaac
Program Unit: Pseudepigrapha
John W. Fadden, Saint John Fisher College
In this paper, I explore the different divine identities (e.g. God and the Lord) and agents (i.e., the various angelic beings) found in the narrative of the Sahidic Testament of Isaac. I posit that their usage reflects a late ancient Egyptian monastic context. First, I argue that the Lord’s identity, while somewhat ambiguous in the narrative, would be understood as the Son of God/Christ figure throughout Testament of Isaac while God’s identity would be understood most often as the Father God/God of Abraham figure. The narrative’s identification of God and the Lord would be familiar for readers an Egyptian monastic context of the fourth and fifth centuries and their reading of scripture. Isaac was intimate with the divine, including the Lord/Son of God/Christ in his time which makes him an appropriate exemplar for the monastic readers in their context. Second, I argue in its representation of the relationship between the angels and Isaac, Testament of Isaac reflects an Egyptian monastic context in which angels participate in a monastic’s ascetic practices. Finally, in Testament of Isaac’s portrayal of Isaac in relation to God, the Lord and angels, Egyptian monastic readers would discover an Isaac who would be a relevant model for their ascetic lives. I suggest that the deployment of divine identities and divine agents in the Sahidic Testament of Isaac is crucial to the narrative and is apt for the Egyptian monastic context in the fourth and fifth centuries. Any future discussions of an earlier context than Egyptian monasticism for Testament of Isaac as a narrative whole would need to account for these divine figures.
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By the World Forgot: Sabbatians and the Manipulation of Memory in Fifth Century Constantinople
Program Unit: Religious World of Late Antiquity
Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos, Brown University
In their Ecclesiastical Histories Socrates Scholasticus and Sozomen describe an affair that occurred in Constantinople in the early 380s. A former Jew by the name of Sabbatius had converted to Christianity and become a Novatian presbyter. He then convinced his fellow Novatians to abandon their bishop and follow him in observing the Jewish Passover. The incident resulted in seventy deaths when a demonic panic descended upon the assembly and caused its participants to trample each other. Although Sabbatius escaped, the site of the massacre was destroyed to allow for the construction of an imperial forum, and the Sabbatian community disappeared.
Several oddities surround the Sabbatian affair. Not least of these is the paucity of evidence for this group in Constantinople. Early mentions of the group are rare, and the first narratives about the massacre are these same accounts from Socrates and Sozomen, written eighty years after the event. The thinness of attestation raises intriguing questions about whether the incident occurred at all and how the Sabbatians fit within the religious politics of Constantinople. Equally interesting is the way that the narratives about the Sabbatian massacre adapt contemporary anti-Jewish rhetorical tropes. Throughout their histories, Socrates and Sozomen frequently portray Jews as the instigators of violence, riots, and murder—but only in cities other than Constantinople. The Jewish population of the city, in contrast, is largely invisible in these texts, save when they appear as irenic counterexamples to violent Christian heretics. For these authors, it is Sabbatius and his followers who fill the role of the violent outsider in Constantinople. Where, then, were the city’s Jews? Why substitute the Sabbatians, only to erase them, too, from the narrative landscape?
This paper complicates narratives about the Christianization of the late antique city by examining the relationship between the Sabbatians and Jews in these fifth-century accounts. Drawing upon conversations about the construction of collective memory and spatial politics, I argue that Socrates and Sozomen were participating in a larger imperial project to define Nicene orthodoxy and to assert Constantinople’s position as a thoroughly Christian city. As such, their narratives played with the religious boundaries dividing Christians and Jews in order to characterize the Sabbatians as a heretical, quasi-Jewish sect that threatened the security of the city. I propose that the memory of the Sabbatian massacre and its attachment to an imperial forum constituted a damnatio memoriae against groups that looked “too Jewish,” without actually blaming local Jews for violence. The damnatio suggested that Christian groups that fell outside the parameters of imperially-sponsored Nicene Christianity presented a danger to the city. The incident consequently served a double purpose for those interested in the Christianization of the city: it reinforced the boundaries between Christians and Jews while warning against attending festivals led by the “wrong” types of Christians.
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Reading Material Culture of Ancient Prayer
Program Unit: Prayer in Antiquity
Daniel K. Falk, Penn State University
The vast majority of surviving evidence for ancient prayer is textual of some kind, such as descriptions of prayer and prayers embedded in literary works; dedicatory and funerary inscriptions; graffiti; collections of hymns; sealed texts; and so on. For the most part, scholarship on prayer focuses on disembodied prayer texts, with little regard to the significance of the different media, and so it is frequently the case that completely unequal phenomena are brought into comparison, and more apt analogues are ignored. Emphasizing that prayer--as a set of phenomena--is not a “text,” and that the textual component is only part of what constitutes prayer (and not necessarily the most important part), this paper turns attention to the material culture related to prayer in antiquity as an understudied source of data. In theory, there is a very significant difference between a textualized prayer, and a liturgical manuscript that constitutes a material artifact of prayer practice. Is it possible to distinguish between these in practice? This paper will survey the range of material culture of prayer practice in the ancient Mediterranean world, and attempt an initial taxonomy for the purposes of cross-cultural comparison.
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Messianic Judaism: Jewish and/or Christian?
Program Unit: National Association of Professors of Hebrew
Zev Farber, Project TABS - TheTorah.com
*
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The Gift of Fear
Program Unit: Hebrews
Douglas Farrow, McGill University
Douglas Farrow
Hebrews Section SBL
x
David Moffitt
Mar 23 (1 day ago)
to me, amy.peeler
Dear Amy and Craig,
Douglas Farrow just sent me the abstract for his paper in the Hebrews section entitled "The Gift of Fear" (see below). He will have to leave SBL on Monday afternoon and has asked that the session not be scheduled later than Monday morning.
Hope all is well!
Best,
David
The Gift of Fear
Post-Copernican man peers into the heavens and sees grandeur and mystery but no throne of God. Neither does he recognize any purification of ta epourania. Consequently he does not understand the shaking of either earth or heaven. There is no fear of God before his eyes. He lacks the gift of fear, which (as Thomas says) exists preeminently in Christ. The kind of fear he knows is rather the kind that leads to despair, that belongs to what Kierkegaard called the sickness unto death. The lack of the former and the presence of the latter are transforming western law and culture in its own pursuit of a better country. Hebrews, then, is a tract for our times. The paper explores the theme of godly fear that is fundamental to its ethos and ethics, as counterpoint to the confidence motif, the two being mediated by the document’s ascension theology.
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The Bounded Landscape: Israelite Perceptions of Space in Bible and Archaeology
Program Unit: Archaeology of the Biblical World
Avraham Faust, Bar-Ilan University
While massive defensive walls were characteristic of many cities in antiquity, rural settlements were in many cases unfortified. In Iron Age Israel and Judah, however, both cities and villages were surrounded by a boundary wall which separated the nucleated settlements from the surrounding areas. These villages differ from most villages that existed in the region during the Bronze Age, and also from Iron Age villages in neighboring cultures. While the existence of boundary walls can teach us a great deal about community organization and social relations, in this paper I would like to address the question why did the Israelites bounded the landscape, creating such a clear dichotomy between inside and outside, and between human habitation and the surrounding areas? Notably, a similar perception of space, including a sharp dichotomy between places of human habitation and the countryside, is reflected in the (biblical) Hebrew language as well as in various texts, and this seems to fit nicely into an analysis of other traits of material culture. Thus, the archaeological evidence, when examined in tandem with the period's textual sources, enables us to gain some important insights into ancient Israel's world-views and perceptions of space.
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Traces of Reading in the Writing of Early Qur'anic Manuscripts
Program Unit: The Qur’an: Manuscripts and Textual Criticism (IQSA)
Alba Fedeli, University of Birmingham
Early Qur’anic manuscripts are mere fragments without the additional information concerning the historical context in which they were copied, about the conventions of their writing process, or the conditions of their later use. Nevertheless, in a few cases it is possible to propose conjectures about the mechanism behind both the writing process and elements added by later users, i.e. the later scribal hands. Thus, inks, erasures, and later corrections/additions can reveal the process of copying from written exemplars as well as elements of the tradition of reading the manuscripts themselves.
This paper aims at presenting an interesting case in which an additional ink can reveal the perspective of a reader who added his notes to a copy of the Qur’anic text. A manuscript scattered in Birmingham, Saint Petersburg and Doha shows traces of corrections and later interventions by readers. Sometimes, it is evident that corrections were done by the original scribe cancelling or adding letters and words immediately as he worked. A second stage in the process of writing is the result of correction activity seen in the additions made in black ink. A third stage is seen in further additions in red ink. The red ink has been used not only for adding letters to the consonantal skeleton, but also for indicating vocalization by means of dots. Did the third hand make his additions in red ink with the purpose of correcting the text and its subdivisions? Was he decoding them? Was he reading/reciting the text? These are questions that will be explored as these additions are examined.
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The Coptic Lexicon of the Coptic Biblical Texts
Program Unit: Biblical Lexicography
Frank Feder, Universität Göttingen
The translation of the Coptic Bible from the LXX and the Greek New Testament is regarded as the first and most important creation of the Coptic Christian Literature. Grammar, morphology, and lexicon of these translations, as well as the huge amount of Greek loanwords, are believed to be the most typical and classical form of the Coptic language. Therefore, almost all Coptic Grammars have been based predominantly on examples from the biblical texts. However, since we have particularly among the first known attempts of biblical translations into Coptic several dialectal versions a comparison between them offers an insight into the variety of the Egyptian-Coptic language in Late Antiquity.
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Defilement and Moral Discourse in the Hebrew Bible: An Evolutionary Framework
Program Unit: Cognitive Science Approaches to the Biblical World
Yitzhaq Feder, University of Haifa
The aim of this paper is to examine the role of disgust and notions of pollution in shaping the moral discourse of the Hebrew Bible. Modern psychological research has devoted considerable attention to both “physical”/“bodily” disgust and “moral” disgust, finding both similarities and significant differences between them. Of particular interest is the plausible evolutionary hypothesis that physiological disgust provides the phylogenetic basis for social or moral disgust. To a considerable extent, these distinctions are comparable to the different categories of pollution which have been identified in the Hebrew Bible, specifically the distinction between so-called “ritual” and “moral” impurities. It will be argued that the evolutionary framework employed for the study of disgust can shed light on the role of pollution beliefs in shaping moral discourse in ancient Israel. Some key questions to be addressed include: Is moral disgust/ pollution “metaphorical” (and what are the implications of such a designation)? How do biological constraints serve as motivating forces governing this role of pollution beliefs in moral discourse? In other words, how are we to explain the phenomenon characterized by Louis Dumont as “the eruption of the biological into social life”? Finally, what are the limitations of the evolutionary framework?
These considerations will then be applied to a test-case: the narrative describing the “defilement” of Dinah (Genesis 34) and the violent response of her brothers in decimating the village of Shechem. In previous research, the different views of intermarriage reflected in the text have been interpreted as reflecting an ambivalent author or multiple literary sources or layers. In many cases, these interpretations are more indicative of the moral and political biases of the reader than the ideology reflected by the text. These issues can be elucidated by the Moral Foundations Theory of Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues. As will be shown, this theory can clarify the divergent moral voices expressed in the story as well as the correlation between pollution, ethnicity and violence reflected in it. It can also shed light on the moral dispositions of modern readers of this disputed text.
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Reassessing Josephus' View of Kingship
Program Unit: Josephus
Jacob Feeley, University of Pennsylvania
In this paper, I argue that although Josephus had serious and sophisticated reservations about monarchical rule as a form of government, he also had a concept of the ideal king, and that a key component of this concept can be found in his discussion of kings and virtue. Josephus’ views on kingship, therefore, are nuanced and complex. Scholars (e.g., Spilsbury, 1998; Mason, 2003; Rogers, 2009; Eckhardt, 2013) who have addressed Josephus’ view of kingship tend to characterize him as anti-king. Typically, they base their claims on two sections of Antiquities (e.g., Ant. 4.222-23 and Ant. 8.35-44) in which Josephus interprets two well-known “anti-monarchical” Biblical passages (Deut. 17.14-20 and 1 Sam. 8.4-22), and expresses a preference for a priestly-led politeia over a monarchy.
Much of Josephus’ negative and positive views of kingship are embedded in his numerous narrative accounts of kings’ actions. These accounts, underutilized for assessing Josephus’ complex view of monarchy, offer penetrating critiques of kingship. Josephus draws extensively from the Greek and Roman concept of tyranny and, in doing so, exposes the flaws of monarchical rule. These same accounts, however, emphasize a set of standard Greek and Roman royal virtues as key determinants for “good” kings. Josephus’ discussion of these royal virtues indicates that he had a concept of ideal kingship, and thus could envision monarchical rule as beneficial.
The first section of my paper develops and elaborates upon previous scholarly assessments of Josephus’ anti-monarchical stance. I argue that Josephus’ pro-priestly bias was not the only factor that accounted for his ambivalence towards kingship. As I demonstrate, Josephus was fully aware that kings easily turned into tyrants because they had unlimited power and therefore were “unaccountable” (anupeuthunos). Moreover, Josephus drew extensively from Greek and Roman conceptions of tyranny in his narratives of kings, which attests to his awareness that monarchical rule was a fundamentally unstable and unreliable form of government.
The second section demonstrates that despite Josephus’ misgivings about kingship, he had a concept of ideal kingship in which the Classical virtues played a key component. I illustrate this with Josephus’ discussion of two royal virtues: clemency (epieikeia, philanthropia) and generosity (philanthropia, philotimia, euergesia, megalopsychia), both important royal attributes in Hellenistic and Roman discussions of kingship. I provide a selection of examples in which Josephus repeatedly emphasizes the importance of these two virtues for kings, and also demonstrates how these virtues enable kings to govern in the interests of their subjects. The virtues I discuss form just one component of Josephus’ broader view of kingship, but they demonstrate that Josephus had a well-developed concept of the ideal king.
My findings show that Josephus’ views of kingship are more nuanced than have previously been recognized. He was not only opposed to kingship because he favored a priestly-led politeia; he understood the fundamental weaknesses in monarchical rule. On the other hand, it is too simplistic to label him anti-monarchic, since he thought seriously about how kings could effectively and responsibly govern their subjects.
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Egypt and Israel: From Ramses II to Ramses VI
Program Unit: Hebrew Bible, History, and Archaeology
Peter Feinman, Institute of History, Archaeology, and Education
This paper seeks to understand the history of Israel from its origins in the time of Rames II to the withdrawal of Egypt from the land of Canaan in the time of Ramses VI. It seeks to bring together the archaeological evidence which would contribute to the story even if the Bible did not exist combined with the biblical texts about the same events. To do so, it draws on the works of:
1. Nadav Na’aman who commented on the 350 years of Egyptian imperialism in the land of Canaan an wondered about the Israelite reference to it
2. Donald Redford who stated that after the Battle of Kadesh, Canaanites knew that Ramses II could be beaten but ignored the Canaanites in Egypt.
3. Richard Friedman who suggested that the violent Levites participated in an exodus from Egypt but ignored the warriors from the beyond the river who were in Egypt.
4. Mark Leuchter who posited the Songs of Deborah and Sea derive from early Israelite history.
5. Adam Zertal who identified Mount Ebal as a place where early Israel met.
6. Jacob Wright who stressed the importance of songs of commemoration but ignored the early history of Israel and Ebal.
The intention is to propose an historical reconstruction for the emergence of Israel in history consistent with the archaeological information in the 13th and 12th centuries BCE.
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Redefining Affliction (inuy): The Role of the Senses of Taste, Sight, and Touch and the Relationship between Them in a Babylonian Talmud Aggadic Midrash
Program Unit: Midrash
Yonatan Feintuch, Bar-Ilan University
A biblical verse in Deuteronomy defines the years of the Israelites’ wondering in the wilderness using the term affliction (inuy), and referring specifically to the Israelites’ feeding on the manna during those years (Deuteronomy 8:16). An aggadic exegesis of this verse by two amoraim serves as the starting point of a lengthy aggadic-midrashic unit in the tractate Yoma in the Babylonian Talmud (spanning roughly four pages in the standard printed editions of the Babylonian Talmud (74b-76a)). Most of this aggadic unit consists of a collection of midrashim on the manna that was provided to the Israelites in the wilderness.
At first glance it appears difficult to pinpoint one consistent organizing principle in this lengthy talmudic unit, apart from the fact that most of the material in it belongs to the genre of aggadic midrash, and expounds various biblical verses relating to the manna. However, a closer reading of the first few passages (74b-75a) allows one to identify that they carry a few more specific common themes, in addition to the manna, and that the various senses – especially sight, taste and touch, and the relationships between them, play dominant roles in the discussions and exegeses in those passages. This paper discusses those passages and the attiuted toward those senses that are mentioned in them.
In this paper I would like to claim that at least the abovementioned opening passages may be read together as one thematic unit, in which the different senses play a larger role in creating a wider picture – defining the concept of affliction – with regarding to the experience of eating the manna, as well as in the context of another physical activity – sexual relations. Furthermore, I claim that in the even wider context, that of the talmudic sugya in which these midrashim are embedded, these midrashim, put together, redefine the concept of affliction on Yom Kippur, vis-à-vis a very different definition that arises from a proximate halakhic midrash that precedes the aggadic midrash in the sugya, and expounds, inter alia, a similar verse from the same chapter in Deuteronomy (8:3).
I will begin my discussion of the abovementioned texts by briefly outlining the wider talmudic context of the lengthy aggadic unit and the circumstances of its embedment in its present location in the Babylonian Talmud. Next I will closely examine the abovementioned aggadic-midrashic passages, and will discuss the role that the various senses play in each passage, and in the general context of the unit, with respect to the shaping of the experience of eating the manna. Finally, I will present the role that the exegetical discussions under discussion play in the wider context of the talmudic sugya, defining the concept of affliction, in the wilderness and on Yom Kippur.
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The Enlightenment, Deism, and the “Painful Prick” of the Second Advent Expectation
Program Unit: History of Interpretation
Tucker Samson Ferda, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary
New Testament scholars have only begun to investigate the impact of Enlightenment rationalists and Deists on the so-called Quest of the Historical Jesus. But it is being increasingly realized that the modern Quest did not exactly begin with Herman Reimarus in 1778, as Albert Schweitzer had proposed. Instead, Reimarus and other early questers were shaped in important ways by earlier discussions, and sometimes unwittingly. This paper contends that that is perhaps nowhere more evident than in their reception of an earlier disdain for certain apocalyptic or eschatological traditions in the New Testament, such as the notion of the Second Advent of Christ. In their polemic against orthodox Christianity, thinkers such as Charles Blount, Anthony Collins, Thomas Woolston, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Morgan, and Peter Annett, among others, all had disparaging things to say about the Second Advent idea. And they all voiced their opinion with a similar interpretive technique: they attributed the Second Advent traditions in the New Testament to the disciples of Jesus, who either misunderstood or blatantly misrepresented their master’s true intentions. Moreover, these thinkers would often link the doctrine of the Second Advent with what they called “carnal Jewish messianism,” politicism, and violence—all things that they believed were far from Jesus’ ethical message of the Kingdom of God. I submit that the 19th century Quest, knowingly or not, simply repeated these arguments, and even in current scholarship, I argue, it is common to find descriptions of the Second Advent idea that highlight the violent or militant nature of it. This paper also discloses a palpable irony to this history of interpretation: many of these pre-Reimarus rationalists and Deists were interested primarily in the Christian doctrine of the Second Advent. That is, they were not interested, as later critics were, in the reconstruction of Christian origins for its own sake. Thus, most understood and criticized the Second Advent “doctrine” as it had been constructed via harmonizing various New Testament witnesses. It is precisely this harmonization that makes sense of the common characterization of the violent or militant return of Christ: a notion which is not found in the Synoptics, but rather Revelation, where Christ, with his robe dipped in blood, returns to earth on a white horse to strike down the nations and tread the winepress of God’s wrath (Rev. 19:11-16). Thus, the later Quest for Jesus, which expressly forbid (at least in word) uncritical “harmonies” of New Testament texts, was nevertheless influenced in its understanding of the Second Advent by a prior harmonistic interpretation.
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Space for Moral Agency in the Book of Ruth
Program Unit: Space, Place, and Lived Experience in Antiquity
Danna Nolan Fewell, Drew University
As moral agents, the characters in the book of Ruth operate under pronounced circumstantial constraints. Examining how characters’ speeches project a ‘self’ that ‘answers the glance of the other’ (Monika Fludernik), and utilizing Michel de Certeau’s notion of narrative’s spatial syntax, this paper examines how geographical, social, and bodily spaces encourage and discourage certain self-identifications and actions and how the crossing of, and tactical behaviors within, these spatial boundaries inform our perceptions of moral agency. Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of ‘event-ness’ also contributes to our understanding of how the book’s plotting of human behavior invites further moral reflection.
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From Paul's Letter Collection to the Euthalian Apparatus: An Archival Perspective on Pauline Paratexts
Program Unit: Book History and Biblical Literatures
Gregory Fewster, University of Toronto
Several recent studies evidence a renewed interest in the Euthalian apparatus of the Pauline letters. The goal of this paper is to contextualize the emergence and ideological function of these paratextual materials. Building off the recent work of Eric Scherbenske, who argues that Pauline paratexts contribute to direct the interpretation of a canonized Paul, I propose that a canonized Paul is best considered as a particular moment of what I call Paul’s letter archive, a category benefitting from some recent and important shifts in archival theory and textual scholarship. Paul’s letters as an archive provides a material and conceptual site to evaluate the dynamics of three archival moments: collection, corpus, and canon, which have formerly received insufficient articulation. I argue that each of these archival moments comprise differing construals of authorship, authority, and textual unity. Euthalian paratexts perform a canonical function for the interpretation and use of the Pauline letter archive and my analysis attempts to foreground this canonical function in relation to the dynamics of collection and corpus.
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The Ritual Process in 1 Corinthians 5
Program Unit: Ritual in the Biblical World
Finny Abrhaam, Graduate Theological Union
Rituals can be grounded in many things, including but not limited to matters of the human bodies, the environment, cultural traditions and social processes. Rather than affirming one’s social status, rituals have the ability to transform a person by taking the subject across social boundaries. Arnold van Gennep, a premier in the field of ritual studies, argues that rituals are “rites of passage” or a “transition” that is required for the transformation of a person. Rituals not only draw boundaries around social spaces, they clearly identify those spaces as being in or out, good or bad, sacred or profane, clean or polluted, etc. In this paper I will attempt to do a ritual analysis of 1 Corinthians 5 to show that Paul’s rhetoric of punishment for the sinner follows a three stage transformative process (both for the sinner and the community) of separation, liminality and aggression, as proposed by Victor Turner. Following an analysis of Paul’s use of punishment language in 1 Corinthians, I will use Victor Turner’s model of ritual process to argue that Paul’s rhetoric of punishment can be seen as a ritual of transformation for the sinner and the community from impurity to purity.
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Rereading the Qur'an—Challenging Traditional Authority: Political Implications of Contemporary Qur'an Scholarship
Program Unit: Qur’anic Studies: Methodology and Hermeneutics (IQSA)
Rahel Fischbach, Georgetown University
My paper explores how historical-critical approaches to the Qur'an are tied to a liberal secular political vision for society. As a case study, I will focus on the Lebanese thinker Wajih Qansu whose recent work al-Na?? al-dini fi'l-Islam offers a rigorous critique of the interpretative framework in which traditional Qur'an interpreters operate. By partially deconstructing the Qur'an, Qansu hopes to develop a fruitful reformed interpretation of the text. Based on print media, interviews, and broadcast media, I will situate his work in the broader framework of contemporary discussions about applying historical critique to the Qur'an among Muslim thinkers, principally among traditionally trained Shi'ite clerics. Qansu’s view that the Qur'an is a “drama of revelation” posits the Qur'an “as text,” a claim that has become particularly in vogue in (Western) Qur'an scholarship. My paper seeks to question this hermeneutical turn. What would be the “text” of the Qur'an? Its linguistic structure, its material constitution, a kind of meta-text which refers to its overall meaning? What is implied in reading the Qur'an as text, and, moreover, as a historical text? For Qansu, the deconstruction of the Qur'an serves to arrive at a more authentically Islamic Qur'anic meaning; the tool for liberating the Qur'an is history. Simultaneously, his approach implicitly challenges the monopoly of the traditional clerical establishment over Qur'anic interpretation who react accordingly. I will demonstrate that the political implications of Qansu's hermeneutics are the main reason for traditionally trained clerics to reject such a reading of the Qur'an. I suggest that to read the Qur'an as literature or historical document presupposes not only a change in epistemology and method, but a change in how language and speech are viewed, and how subject and object relate to each other in that process.
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The 'Truth' of the Body: Jeremiah's Authentication as a Prophet by His Suffering
Program Unit: Book of Jeremiah
Georg Fischer, Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck
Jeremiah’s suffering exceeds everything that is reported about the trials of other prophets: he is imprisoned, beaten, tortured, in danger of death … His book, at the same time, describes more than any other biblical scroll conflicts with his colleagues as prophets: Pashhur, those in Babylon among the exiles, Hananiah, and others not mentioned by name, as in Jer 6:13–14; 14:13–18; 23:9–40, etc. These two foci of the Book of Jeremiah may be linked: Jeremiah’s suffering seems to have a specific role, namely to ‘prove’ the authenticity of his predication and divine commissioning against the claim of his prophetic colleagues. Jeremiah’s body thus becomes a ‘battlefield’, he is caught in the ‘crossfire’ between God’s protection (e.g. his assurance in Jer 1:19) and human attacks. This emphasis on the physical dimension of prophetic existence in Jer appears to be a new feature; it is probably based on the Servant Songs of the Book of Isaiah.
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Binoculars or Microscope: The Different Perspectives of Ezekiel and Jeremiah on the Fall of Jerusalem
Program Unit: Book of Ezekiel
Georg Fischer, Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck
The only two prophets who are explicitly said to have lived through the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BCE are Ezekiel and Jeremiah. They present this event, however, in two markedly different ways, taking very distinct viewpoints. Ezekiel, who is informed about it only about five months after the event, describes the capture of Jerusalem from afar, as if through binoculars. Jeremiah, an actual participant in the events, scrutinizes the reasons for them, and the background to them, in great and precise detail, as if through a microscope, extensively relating the various positions and happenings. These diverse presentations mirror the respective characteristics of the Books of Ezekiel and Jeremiah, and they reveal much about their theologies, too.
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Mythic Cartography: The Righteous Loci of the Latin Apocalypse of Paul
Program Unit: Function of Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphal Writings in Early Judaism and Early Christianity
Amy Marie Fisher, University of Toronto
Despite its relative obscurity in today’s world, the Latin Apocalypse of Paul (Vis. Paul) was extremely popular in both early and Medieval Christianity, translated into numerous languages, existed in multiple recensions, and delineated the form of a Christian apocalypse for hundreds of years. As such, this archetype’s depiction of the heavens is the ideal case study for explicitly Christian depictions of the heavens in antiquity. In this paper I look at the way mythic sites from the past are redeployed in Vis. Paul as sites for the emplacing of righteous souls. This redeployment marks a departure from earlier descriptions of the mythic sites of the heavens as proof of the veracity of the prophecies that an adept received in the heavens. One sees in Vis. Paul a move away from the careful mapping of the heavens and the various mythic topoi of the past for a focus on the places of people who were contemporaries of the apocalypse. The apocalypse, then, is not a display of the wonders of heaven, but a pedagogical tool to catalogue all the sorts of righteous Christians in the world and their locus in the hereafter.
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Early Greek Economic Thought
Program Unit: Early Christianity and the Ancient Economy
John Fitzgerald, University of Notre Dame
Beginning with Homer and Hesiod, various authors offer insights into early Greek economic practice and thought. This paper provides an overview of the major findings regarding early Greek economic performance and theory.
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Ezekiel 7:3–11: An Oracle of Texts
Program Unit: Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible
John P. Flanagan, Universiteit Leiden
This paper will examine the textual problems associated with Ezekiel 11:16-19. Emphasis will be given to the individual readings of each text witness and their contribution to understanding the MT. A text-critical methodology will be proposed in which each of the translations will be understood as versions in their own right. Ezekiel 11:16-19 will also be examined for its contribution to both the textual development of Ezekiel and the book’s literary growth.
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Why You Should Love Your Enemies: Examining Motive Clauses in 'Counsels of Wisdom'
Program Unit: Wisdom in Israelite and Cognate Traditions
Denise Flanders, Fuller Theological Seminary (Pasadena)
The biblical book of Proverbs contains the admonition to do good to one’s enemies. Proverbs 25:21-22 says, “If your enemy hungers, feed him bread, and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink. For you will heap coals on his head, and the Lord will reward you.” As commentators often note, a strikingly similar proverb is found in the Egyptian text The Instruction of Amenemope. In §2 5.1-6 it is advised that if an evil person is drowning, the one witnessing it should help him; “Raise him up, give him your hand; leave him in the hands of God. Fill his belly with your own bread, that he may be sated and ashamed.” It is generally accepted that the book of Proverbs has in some way been influenced by Amenemope and this passage provides an example. However, the motif of returning good for evil is not exclusive to these two texts. It is found elsewhere in both the Bible (e.g. Lev 19:18; Ex 23:4; Matt 5:44-48; Rom 12:17-21) and Egyptian wisdom literature (e.g. Papyrus Insinger 23.6 and The Instruction of Ptahhotep 74-77).
Furthermore, outside of the biblical and Egyptian texts, a lengthy admonition to return good for evil is found in an Akkadian wisdom text, a text which merits more attention than it has thus far received. The “Counsels of Wisdom” is one of a few number of preserved Mesopotamian collections of proverbial instruction and admonition. It is written in Akkadian and may date to the Kassite period (16th – 12th century BCE). In it, the author exhorts the hearer (“my son”), “Do not return evil to the man who disputes with you; Requite with kindness your evil-doer, maintain justice to your enemy, Smile on your adversary,” (lines 41-44). Unlike in Proverbs and Amenemope, however, the motivation given for such an action is not revenge; the hearer should do good and not evil to his enemy simply because “(Evil) is not agreeable to the gods, Evil is an abomination to Marduk,” (lines 47-48).
This paper closely examines the motivation given in “Counsels of Wisdom” for doing good to one’s enemy and engages it in a comparison with the reason given for the same action in Proverbs 25:22. Additionally, it investigates the reasons provided by the author for doing anything which is advised in “Counsels of Wisdom.”
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Commitment Mechanisms in the Book of Daniel: Fostering Loyalty in Antiquity and the Terrorist Present
Program Unit: Theology of the Hebrew Scriptures
Frances Flannery, James Madison University
Concentrating on the Book of Daniel, this paper shows how commitment mechanisms function to inspire loyalty in both peaceful and violent apocalyptic groups, whether in antiquity or in the present day.
A sustainable community requires the loyalty of its members. The study of commitment mechanisms in utopian communities can shed light on how group leaders foster loyalty in apocalyptic communities. Kanter (1968, 1972) postulated that commitment mechanisms adhere members’ self-identity to social organizational levels (continuance, cohesian, control), while Burke and Reitzes (1991) argued that such mechanisms bind self-identity to ideology. Both may be true.
In part one of this paper, I show that Daniel contains a fictionalized account of actual commitment mechanisms that worked to secure loyalty in the Jewish diaspora to a utopian ideal of Judaism. We can postulate the effect of these commitment mechanisms because while “all we have is text,” it is an apocalyptic text that succeeded in becoming canon through a rabbinical process that rejected all other apocalyptic textual contenders.
In part two of this paper, I look at some surprising, modern theological interpretations of the book of Daniel conducted by terrorists. Groups surveyed include the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord, a Christian identity terrorist group that conceived of the Oklahoma City bombing, and some contemporary Muslim apocalyptic interpreters who are favored by Al Qaeda. These interpreters not only use updated, violent theological interpretations of Daniel to secure the loyalty of their members, they also draw on the same commitment mechanisms that appealed to ancient audiences.
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Prophet Books in House-Based Scribal Schools
Program Unit: Hebrew Scriptures and Cognate Literature
Daniel Fleming, New York University
Although much Mesopotamian writing has been found in palaces and temples, it has become clear that training in the scribal craft often took place in private houses, where the skill was transmitted in an intimate circle of family and apprenticeship. The household setting of cuneiform schooling is especially visible in the Old Babylonian edubba or “tablet house,” but similar situations are found elsewhere, as with the diviner’s archive at Emar in Late Bronze Syria.
The house as location for schooling and the production of texts by master scribes has not drawn the attention it merits in discussion of biblical composition and transmission. In particular, this social framework could help explain the peculiar phenomenon of books defined by the name and work of individual prophets while displaying evidence of work by different hands across considerable time, maintaining the importance of coherence in a single document. This character is most striking in the long books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, where both the complexity and the unified result are equally present.
My goal is to offer a first elaboration of this hypothesis, with particular reference to Isaiah and Jeremiah. Both books are the products of learned scribes, sophisticated in their application of language and literary form, launching projects of social and religious opinion-making through an innovative written vehicle. We find in them repeated reference to teaching and learning, once in Isaiah 8:16 with explicit reference to the prophet’s students. It may be that early production and reproduction of the Bible’s long prophet books took place in individual house-based schools that maintained identification with the founding figure – and identified their work with the maintenance and constant renovation of the house book.
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Accusations of Sexual Misconduct in the David Narrative
Program Unit: Historiography and the Hebrew Bible
Erin Fleming, Johns Hopkins University
Three times in the David narrative a person is accused of a sexual, or sexually-charged, offense: Ishba‘al, king of Israel, accuses his military commander Abner of having sexual relations with Rizpah, his father Saul’s former consort (2 Sam 3:6-11); David’s wife Michal publicly denigrates David after he leads a cultic procession, implying that he has exposed himself indecently (2 Sam 6:16; 20-23); and King Solomon accuses his half-brother Adonijah of attempting to usurp the throne when Adonijah requests marriage to David’s former “attendant” Abishag (1 Kgs 2:13-25). In each episode, the accusation is initially presented in sexual language but responded to in political terms. That these situations are inherently political is not lost on any of the characters within the narratives, and in each case the accusation arguably represents an attempted power check against the (supposedly) offending party. Moreover, each accusation is set shortly after a significant shift in power has occurred, and the outcome of each accusation has considerable political consequences within the David narrative.
This paper will argue that these three episodes about accusations of sexual misconduct serve the strategic literary purposes of the David narrative by providing explanations for political fallout between particular characters while simultaneously defending the moral stature of the kings David and Solomon. Through stories of sexual accusations, the writers of the David narrative choose to represent the past in a particular manner, and a literary analysis of these texts provides a better understanding of the historiographical nature of certain portions of the overall David narrative. An examination of accusations of sexual misconduct in the David narrative elucidates conceptions of political hegemony and royal ideology in ancient Israel and Judah as preserved in the historical-cultural remembering of the most celebrated biblical king.
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Rethinking Abigail of Carmel: From Woman of Valor to Shrewd Diplomat
Program Unit: Women in the Biblical World
Erin Fleming, Johns Hopkins University
David’s wife Abigail has been interpreted as a representation of the “woman of valor” (’ešet ?ayil) described in Proverbs 31:10-31 while her first husband Nabal is regarded as the proverbial fool. The story of David’s marriage to Abigail is presented as a moralistic tale in 1 Samuel 25; however, the view of Abigail as an ’ešet ?ayil falters in several areas. For instance, Proverbs 31 downplays beauty (31:30) whereas Abigail is described as both intelligent and beautiful (1 Sam 25:3). Also, even though Abigail saves her household from David’s retaliation, Nabal hardly praises Abigail’s actions (cf. Prov 31:28), nor does he earn a good reputation because of Abigail (cf. Prov 38:23). Instead of the ‘model wife,’ in 1 Samuel 25 Abigail is depicted as an astute and effective diplomat who persuades David to change his course of action and also predicts his future kingship.
My paper will ultimately focus on the complex web of distinct gender, class, and potentially ethnic relationships that underlie the story of David’s marriage to Abigail. Abigail’s position as the widow of a wealthy, powerful Calebite benefits David and advances him on his rise to power. As David’s wife, Abigail prepares him for kingship by providing him with wealth and an alliance to a powerful clan located near Hebron, where David is declared king (2 Sam 2:4). Within the larger David narrative, it is surprising that though Abigail’s constituency is not connected to Saul or Israel, David’s marriage to Abigail seems to set him up to dominate the south. Rethinking the portrayal of Abigail of Carmel within the David narrative will provide insight into conceptions of gender, class, and ethnicity present within the biblical writers’ historical-cultural remembering of King David.
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Neo-Apocalypse-Noir: Using Film Noir to Reapproach the Book of Revelation’s Genre
Program Unit: Bible and Film
Michelle Fletcher, King's College - London
Whether the book of Revelation is really an apocalypse is still a contested issue. Whilst it lies at the heart of scholarly apocalypse understanding, it does not sit comfortably alongside other apocalypses: it is different. This paper offers a lens to understand and explain its difference by using Film Noir as a generic comparison.
Film Noir is one of Hollywood’s most notorious and recognisable genres: a group of films awash with dark streets, moody lighting, sex, violence, drifters, and Femme Fatales. However, as Richard Dyer points out “the makers of Detour, Double Indemnity, Gun Crazy and The Postman Always Rings Twice did not know that they were making Film Noirs.” This categorisation was retrospectively placed upon a body of films to construct the genre as we understand it today. This paper brings the theory surrounding Film Noir’s retrospective categorisation into dialogue with the scholarly awareness of apocalypse. It will begin by asking how modern scholarship developed an awareness of apocalypse as a literary genre, given that the concept was not discussed prior to the nineteenth century. This will reveal the central role played by the book of Revelation. It will then show how the construction of Film Noir came about by re-viewing past films through the lens of Neo-Noir. Next, Revelation will be brought into dialogue with Neo-Noirs such as Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) and Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981) to show how these texts act as lenses through which past texts are viewed in a fresh light. In doing so venetian blinds, saxophone music and Femme Fatales will explain afresh Revelation’s presentation of apocalyptic sensibilities, combined forms, and revealing/concealing dialectic. This will show that Neo-Noirs and Revelation act as both genre definers and defiers through their exaggeration, cutting, and foregrounding of past texts. Ultimately, it will conclude that whenever the destruction of the world is declared key to apocalypse it is more than likely this is because scholarship is forever coloured by the neo-apocalypse-noir that is Revelation.
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"De/coding the Apocalypse": Contemporary Artistic Insights into the Past, Present, and Future of the Book of Revelation
Program Unit: John's Apocalypse and Cultural Contexts Ancient and Modern
Michelle Fletcher, King's College - London
What new insights into the Apocalypse can be gained by interdisciplinary collaboration? This paper discusses the outcome of a collaborative project which focused on uniting biblical scholarship and cutting edge artistic practices to re-present the Book of Revelation for the digital age. "De/coding the Apocalypse" was the result, an art exhibition which visual artist Michael Takeo Magruder produced in in dialogue with King’s College London’s Theology and Religious Studies department. Displayed in London’s Somerset House, the exhibition presented five installations exploring Revelation through leading edge technology including virtual reality, real-time data, 3D printing, computer-generated barcodes and video games. However, this was not a predictable ‘visions of the future’ exhibition, but something far more slippery, described by the artist not as “destruction” but as “an unveiling” of the text. Each room was based upon a scholarly essay on an aspect of the Book: its reception history, cultural heritage, use of HB texts and theology. The insights into the text offered from this were ground-breaking, as Takeo’s artistic creations fused advanced technological systems with traditional artistic forms ranging from painting and sculpture to engraving and weaving, creating a tension between the past of the text and the future it looks into.
One of the five scholars involved in the realisation of the exhibition will present the paper, giving a ‘hands on’ reflection of the academic and artistic processes. Each room and the scholarship behind it will be discussed. The paper will then move onto the interpretative insights which this experience has provided for scholarship on Revelation, and how such visual re-imaginings can alter how we view the Apocalypse. Finally, a review of the importance of such collaborative projects will be offered, outlining the tensions and the creative processes behind the end result.
An introduction to the exhibition can be viewed here: http://www.crane.tv/apocalypse-now.
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Echoes in the Praetorium: Place, People, and Prospects in Phlm 1:13
Program Unit: Pauline Epistles
Michael Flexsenhar III, The University of Texas at Austin
Since the 1990s scholars have increasingly argued that Paul wrote Philippians from Ephesos. Other scholars have maintained that he wrote from Rome, interpreting the term praetorium (Phil 1:13) as a reference to the “Praetorian Guard.” On the basis of textual, historical, archaeological, and epigraphic evidence I argue instead that praetorium in Phil 1:13 refers to a provincial, administrative building, not the “Praetorian Guard” or their barracks (Castra Praetoria) in Rome. The verse, therefore, does not suggest a Roman provenance for Philippians. But scholars arguing for an Ephesian provenance have also overlooked other possibilities for understanding praetorium as a building. Thus, I incorporate architectural and topographical plans showing the several types of buildings that the term praetorium could indicate, describe their variations and flexibility in function, and explain the implications for Paul’s civic and social context when writing to the Philippians from Ephesos, or from elsewhere in Asia Minor.
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Charging Abel: A Reworking of Dale Allison’s Allusion in Matt 5:21–24
Program Unit: Matthew
Dallas Flippin, Marquette University
In 2005, Dale Allison used reception history and intertextuality to propose that Matthew 5:21-24 is an allusion to Genesis 4:1-16, the Cain and Abel pericope. Allison’s reading of Matthew 5:21-24 identifies Cain as the person at the altar who needs to reconcile with his brother. Allison concludes that the allusion provides rhetorical support for Jesus’s enlarging of the penalty for anger, causes the reader revulsion from what Jesus condemns through an association with Cain, and identifies the person at the altar as the guilty party. Unfortunately, Allison’s proposal for the allusion has not received apt consideration. The paper seeks to revive and augment Allison’s proposal through an analysis of point-of-view in Matthew 5:23-24. The paper maintains Allison’s claim that the text is an allusion to Genesis 4, but reorients the perspective and purpose of the allusion. Reading the allusion from the perspective of Abel, and not Cain, renders the point-of-view of the account more intelligible and suggests a more significant outcome. Jesus’s expansion of the prohibition of murder to include anger does not only indict Cain for murder and for anger. In addition, Matthew portrays Jesus as charging Abel to make peace proactively with Cain, his angry brother. This reading suggests that Matthew 5:23-24 exemplifies the characteristic of a heightened ethic throughout the Sermon on the Mount.
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The Qur'anic Conditional: Syntactic Evidence for the Periodization of the Qur'an
Program Unit: Linguistic, Literary, and Thematic Perspectives on the Qur’anic Corpus (IQSA)
Adam Flowers, University of Chicago
Of the many types of syntactic structures utilized by the Qur’an, the conditional
statement is perhaps its most versatile; it is found in early Meccan through late Medinan
suras and in discourses ranging from apocalyptic to legal. Among the varying ways in
which the conditional statement is constructed in the Qur’an, a common type of
conditional syntax consists of a protasis initiated by the particle idha (“when”); this idha-
initiated conditional occurs over one hundred times in the Qur’an. Through a
comprehensive catalog and analysis, the first section of this paper argues for a three-stage
chronological development of the idha conditional, both in terms of its syntax, from
multiverse to single-verse compositions, and the discourses in which it is employed, from
apocalyptic to factual to legal. The second section of this paper explores the implications
of this previously established three-stage chronological development for the periodization
of the Qur’an. It argues that the evolution in the Qur’an’s usage of the idha conditional
statement corroborates the division of the Qur’an into Meccan and Medinan periods of
revelation, for the shift to and exponential increase in the use of the conditional in legal
discourses corresponds to the shift from the Meccan to the Medinan period. Additionally,
attention is given to the chronological development of specific genres of Qur’anic
discourse and how further analyses of individual syntactic structures can contribute to the
understanding of the chronological development of the Qur’anic revelation.
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“He Was Not the Christ”: A Proposed Emendation to Josephus’ Testimonium Flavianum
Program Unit: Historical Jesus
Michael Flowers, University of Manchester
In the so-called Testimonium Flavianum Josephus makes several interesting statements about Jesus, among which is: “He was the Christ.” This statement is usually seen as an interpolation by a later Christian copyist. After all, Josephus nowhere else indicates that he regarded Jesus as the Messiah. In fact, this statement has led some to dismiss the entire passage as a Christian interpolation. Yet there are good reasons for seeing the Testimonium as being at least largely Josephan in origin. It occurs in all extant manuscripts and is quoted as early as Eusebius. Several of Josephus’ idiosyncrasies come through in its style and vocabulary. One would also be quite surprised if Josephus, writing from Rome in about 94 C.E., had written nothing about Jesus or Christianity (aside from the passing remark about James in Ant. 20.200). Finally, an Arabic version omits many of the most patently Christian words and phrases, suggesting that the original Testimonium had suffered from Christian editing.
Origen claims that Josephus “did not accept Jesus as the Christ” (Comm. in Matth. 10.17). This has often been taken as proof that the phrase “He was the Christ” was not original to Josephus. But the question should be asked what prompted Origen to say this in the first place. He would have hardly said it if he thought Josephus’ writings contained no references to Christ at all. Silence would have been interpreted as silence, not outright rejection. Nor is it likely that Origen and others would have refused to quote the Testimonium because it only contained neutral historical data about Jesus and Christianity. A neutral Testimonium would have still been apologetically useful (or at least interesting enough to quote) and would not have necessarily been interpreted to mean that Josephus “did not accept Jesus as the Christ”.
I propose that Origen knew the Testimonium in a relatively neutral form similar to the Arabic version, except that it contained the following statement: “He was NOT the Christ.” This would explain why Origen says that Josephus “did not accept Jesus as the Christ” and why he and other early authors avoid quoting from the Testimonium. It would explain the abrupt reference to “Jesus, who was called Christ” at Ant. 20.200, a statement which seems to recall a previous use of the word “Christ” in connection with Jesus. It would explain the alternative readings in Jerome, Agapius, and Michael the Syrian. Finally, it would explain how such an obviously Christian statement could make its way into the textual tradition; for it was not a complete fabrication but only a slight modification of something that already existed.
The alteration would have naturally led to a further Christianizing of the Testimonium, probably by the same scribe. Its propagation would have been ensured by the fact that it was so serviceable to early Christian apologists and so agreeable to the Christian copyists responsible for preserving Josephus’ writings.
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Oral or Written? The Concept of Ezekiel’s Prophecy in the Call Narrative
Program Unit: Book of Ezekiel
Friedrich-Emanuel Focken, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
Ezekiel’s call narrative in Ezek 1-3 develops and illustrates the concept of his prophecy contained in the book that carries his name. The call narrative takes up a complicated position between Ezekiel’s – fictive? – oral and written prophecy: It describes Ezekiel’s call to be an oral prophet. But first of all, the call narrative shows that Ezekiel will not succeed as an oral prophet: Already before Ezekiel begins to speak to the Israelites, Jhwh informs him that they will not listen to him. Jhwh generally states that this is not his concern. Instead, Jhwh commands Ezekiel to stay in his house where only few hearers will be able to listen to him. Ezekiel will be bound with cords and his tongue will stick to his palate. Only at times will Jhwh enable him to speak Jhwhs words to visitors (Ezek 2-3). Secondly, the call narrative depicts a scroll symbolizing the words of Ezekiel’s prophecy as a written text. The scroll contains the genres of lamentation, clamor, and woe. Ezekiel eats the scroll, which tastes sweet as honey (Ezek 2:8-3:3). Thirdly, the call narrative is the introduction into the book of Ezekiel as a written text.
In my paper, I will analyze the position of Ezekiel’s call narrative between Ezekiel’s oral and written prophecy. I will focus on the older call narrative consisting of Ezek 1*; 2; 3:1-11, 12-13*, 14-15, 22-27. Different phrasings and motives of these verses occur in the contexts of the Gola-oriented dates in the book of Ezekiel. These parallels make it probable that the older call narrative originally was a part of the Gola-oriented version of the book. This version dates back to the second half of the sixth century B.C. In this period the function of Ezekiel’s call narrative is not to inaugurate the oral prophet but to introduce the written book. On the one hand, the call narrative uses the oral prophet inaugurated by Jhwh to legitimate this book. On the other hand, it plays down the degree of reception of Ezekiel’s oral prophecy in order to enhance the interest of the first readers in the book. They truly are among the first persons who are able to receive Ezekiel’s prophecy. After Jerusalem’s downfall in 587/6 B.C. proved the correctness of Ezekiel’s announcements, the readers of the Gola-oriented version were familiar with the historical background to adequately accept Ezekiel’s prophecy as a word of Jhwh. The enigmatic scroll depicted in the call narrative – containing the genres lamentation, clamor, and woe, but sweet as honey – is their appetizer tempting them to read or hear the rest of the book.
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The Semantic Web of sêmeion and Papyrology
Program Unit: Papyrology and Early Christian Backgrounds
Hans Foerster, Universität Wien
The word sêmeion is one of the most difficult words in the Gospel of John – if not in the entire New Testament. The paper will argue that close attention to the use of this word as attested in papyrological sources might help to better understand the use of the word in the vernacular. The language of the New Testament might be closer to the vernacular than usually perceived. This, in consequence, seems to be of influence for a possible newly accentuated interpretation of the use of this word in the New Testament. It is obvious that this concerns quite a few passages in the Gospel of John.
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Is Influence of Versions on the Greek Text of the NT Possible?
Program Unit: New Testament Textual Criticism
Hans Foerster, Universität Wien
The versions of the New Testament are translations from the Greek text. The text is translated from the language of origin into the target language. Thus, in principle, there is – or at least should be – no versional influence on the Greek text. However, the question has to be raised under which conditions such an influence might be at least thinkable or even possible. The intention of the paper is to describe an instance where versional influence on the Greek text of one specific passage of the New Testament is actually beyond any reasonable doubt. This example will be used in order to describe the linguistic and perceptional environment in which such an influence can arise. This might help to identify other areas where influence is detectable. The main versions to be used in this context are Latin and Coptic, however, these observations might also be pertinent to other versions.
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The Diachrony Debate: A Tutorial on Methods
Program Unit: Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
A. Dean Forbes, University of the Free State
Traditional approaches to the linguistic dating of Biblical Hebrew (“BH”) have produced many innovative results. In part because of inattention to the deleterious effects of textual noise and to the attendant problem of the overfitting of textual features to restricted texts, the results have unfortunately exhibited limited generalizability. Nonetheless, traditional research has led to useful—and improvable—contributions. Among these are Hurvitz’s set of constraints determining the admissibility of evidence (especially “accumulation”) and several detailed studies of “pilot corpora.”
In recent years, approaches to strengthening and/or illuminating the results of traditional studies of diachrony in BH have been suggested. There have been proposals to consider, in addition to dates, other independent parameters in analyses, including “text type and genre, poeticality, orality, dialect, writer demographics, scribal influence, cultural status, and whether a text is a translation from another language” (Herring, van Reenen, and Schøsler, 2001, 1). Consideration of proposed conditioning variables has typically involved only marginal analyses, wherein a candidate parameter is assessed solely in its own right. Recently, a stalwart from innovation theory, the s-curve, has been taken up by a few BH diachrony aficionados.
Concurrently, the methods, results, and inferences associated with traditional analyses have been questioned at length, principally by Young, Rezetko (and Ehrensvärd). In their recent opus, Rezetko and Young assert that “trying to date biblical writings…is not a legitimate objective of historical linguistics” (Rezetko & Young, 2014, 249, n. 10). As readers evaluate the arguments in their book leading to this conclusion, it is critical to understand the methods involved in their work. In the remainder of this paper, I address their methods as simply as possible. First, I consider Rezetko’s and Young’s stance regarding historical linguistics in BH and the place of linguistic dating therein. Next, I examine Rezetko’s and Young’s methods vis-à-vis the proper execution of historical linguistic investigations. Finally, as time allows, I suggest some possible ways ahead based on statistical methods designed to deal with signals embedded in noise.
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Eschatology and Ethics: Basil of Caesarea's Use of Matthew in His Homilies on Wealth and Poverty
Program Unit: Early Christianity and the Ancient Economy
Coleman M. Ford, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
The socio-ethical thought of the fourth-century Cappadocian fathers is a stream that continues to provide an abundance of fresh insight for readers today. Basil of Caesarea (c. 329–379) has consistently been tapped to represent a Christian perspective on wealth and poverty in late-fourth century Greco-Roman context. His homilies paint a detailed picture both of the problem (the greed and vanity of the rich), as well as the solution (a call for the wealthy to care for those in need). Though much has been discussed on Basil’s socio-ethical commitments, surprisingly little has been said regarding Basil’s theological presuppositions in his homilies on poverty and wealth. Specifically, many contemporary entries on Basil regarding his social ethics neglect to engage the eschatological facet of his teaching that arises from his use of various gospel texts. For those who have noted the eschatological connection in Basil’s social ethics, there is a considerable lack of exegetical and theological discussion. This raises some necessary questions. What were the foundations for Basil’s social ethics? Is Basil’s social paradigm driven by circumstance, theology, or something else? How might understanding Basil’s theological commitments better inform our understanding of his overall ethical paradigm? Finally, what themes emerge from Basil’s use of Scripture in regards to his ethics? I will argue that Basil’s social ethics thoroughly integrates the concept of the eschatological Kingdom of God as understood through the gospel accounts, primarily the gospel of Matthew. Contrary to modern social historical readings, Basil is motivated primarily by theological concerns, namely, the eschatological Kingdom of God. The theme of the Kingdom of God provides a compass to navigate successfully through Basil’s homilies on wealth and poverty. A more well-rounded portrayal of Basil’s social ethics will begin to emerge through an analysis of select homilies and an evaluation of secondary literature.
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Employing the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies to Better Define Ancient Jewish Christianity
Program Unit: Jewish-Christian Dialogue and Sacred Texts
Deborah Forger, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
Over the years the term “Jewish-Christianity” has been employed to encompass a wide and often conflicting set of beliefs, practices, persons, and ideologies, underscoring the inherent subjectivity of the term. This paper considers how attending to early Christian exegetical practices might help to better illumine the notion of Jewish Christianity. In particular, I contrast how two fourth century CE Christian compositions, the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies (PsCl H) and John Chrystostom, made sense of Jesus’ troubling actions as told in Mark 7:24–30 and parallels. In the passage, when a distraught gentile mother approaches Jesus to solicit his aid in alleviating the torments of her demon-possessed daughter, Jesus first ignores but then ultimately humiliates here, insinuating that she was less than a human, no better than a dog. My analysis reveals that John Chrysostom and the author(s)/redactor(s) of PsCl H interpret this passage in quite different ways. While the exegesis of the prominent Gentile church leader, Chrystostom, distances Jesus’s actions from the subsequent Jews who live after him, the interpretation of the author(s)/redactor(s) of PsCl H reveals the opposite effect. Namely, for PsCl H, the gentile woman receives Jesus’s aid only after she has “converted” to a form of Judaism. I argue that these different hermeneutical responses reflect not only the concerns of the two respective authors, helping to underscore the Jewish nature of PsCl H, but also, and more significantly, that they provide a unique window into the specific way that certain Jews, in the 4th century CE, expressed their faith in Jesus. Since this expression is different than the modern construction of Jews being saved through Moses and gentile through Jesus, I further reflect upon how the PsCl H expression of Jewish Christian might inform contemporary Jewish-Christian dialogue related to the interpretation of sacred texts.
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Facing the Dark: The Hidden Face of God at the Jabbok River (Gen 32:22–32)
Program Unit: Theology of the Hebrew Scriptures
Noel Forlini, Drew University
The identity of Jacob’s assailant at the Jabbok River (Gen.32:22-32) has traditionally been attributed to God. On the surface, the narrative strains against its own intertextual echo—“You may not see my face—for no one may see me and live” (Ex.33:20). Nevertheless, elements of the narrative militate against making definitive statements regarding the face Jacob sees. For example, the polynomialism involved obscures his identity. Jacob’s assailant is referred to as Elohim, as ish, and also referenced in the place label, Peniel. The assailant refuses to disclose his name, in Derridian terms, “saving” his name and therefore his identity (Gen.32:29). Moreover, whatever “face” Jacob sees is hidden in the darkness of the night. In this paper, I apply Derrida’s notion of krypto and Samuel Terrien’s work on the “self-concealing God” to demonstrate the duality of a God hidden in darkness and also in plain sight. The episode at the Jabbok accords with Hebraic theology regarding divine hiddenness—God engages in active and sustained hiding, which emphasizes divine freedom and sovereignty.
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Homilies in Circulation: Producers and Readers of Syriac Homily Collections in Late Antiquity
Program Unit: Syriac Literature and Interpretations of Sacred Texts
Philip Michael Forness, Princeton Theological Seminary
The fifth and sixth centuries witnessed the flowering of Syriac homilies. Syriac stylists composed large corpora of homilies, and translation efforts led to an influx of homiletical materials from Greek authors. They remain key texts for understanding late antique biblical exegesis, the spread of complex ideas to wide audiences, and cultural exchange between Greek and Syriac communities. This presentation will address two questions about this genre: (1) How did late antique Syriac communities understand homilies? (2) Why were homilies preserved in such great numbers? Research on the sociology of reading in antiquity guides the approach taken to these questions, by focusing on the perspectives of the producers and readers of late antique manuscripts. Over fifty homiletical collections survive from the years between 400 and 700. The organization of these collections and their colophons serve as evidence for how producers of manuscripts thought about homilies and how readers encountered them. This analysis reveals categories that suggest common understandings of the value and purpose of homilies which led to their careful preservation. After presenting the findings on the manuscripts, the presentation turns to topics that apply more broadly to understanding readership in late antiquity. First, it examines differences and similarities between the organization of translated homilies and homilies written in Syriac. Second, it considers diachronic developments in reading practices of Syriac homilies. This final section has implications for understanding the transfer of knowledge from Greek to Syriac and the development of a unique, yet interdependent Syriac tradition in late antiquity.
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“Unite the Pair So Long Disjoined”: Theological Instruction and Qualitative Research
Program Unit: Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies
Benjamin K. Forrest, Liberty University
This presentation will model the potential use of Atlas.Ti, a qualitative research data analysis software, for teaching in the field of practical or pastoral theology. Qualitative research has typically been relegated to a research methodology appropriate primarily for social science research; however, in recent years practical theologians have started to embrace the value of qualitative research methods for assistance in understanding complex relationships between people and their world. Using Atlas.Ti can equip theologians interested in exploratory research methods that seek to analyze intuitive relationships between theological constructs and the way that these constructs are described, lived, and experienced in the real world. Specifically, this presentation will demonstrate how Atlas.Ti can be practically used by presenting a hypothetical study exploring the conversion experiences of women whose husbands are in the midst of ministry preparation.
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Recent Trends and Future Prospects: Will We Get Any Further?
Program Unit: Historical Jesus
Paul Foster, University of Edinburgh
This is an invited main paper, reviewing recent trends in historical Jesus research with regard to historiography, methods, and the use of criteria. The paper challenges current tendencies and suggests possible ways forward.
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Greed Is Idolatry: A Proposal for Reading Eph 5:3 and Col 3:5
Program Unit: Disputed Paulines
Stephen Fowl, Loyola University Maryland
Ephesians 5:3 indicates that the greedy person is an idolater. Similarly, Col 3:5 identifies greed itself as idolatry. Although a number of texts from the OT and Hellenistic Judaism indicate that greed is often a precursor to idolatry, this is not what Paul says in Eph and Col. He identifies greed (or the greedy person) with idolatry. Moreover, he does so as he is discussing several other vices, none of which are identified with idolatry. Further, taking the term pleonexia in its conventional sense of desiring more than one is due, does not readily help one understand the connection to idolatry that Paul assumes in these two letters. Nevertheless, Paul’s identification of greed with idolatry is offered without any real explanation, as if he assumed its ready intelligibility.
This paper will try to explicate a way of relating greed to idolatry that makes sense of what Paul claims, displaying a form of theological reasoning that can lead one to identify greed with idolatry. To do this, I will offer an understanding of greed within the context of a doctrine of creation as a gift of fellowship with God. Grabbing for more than is offered in creation, as the first humans do, effectively rejects God’s offer of fellowship in favor of something that it not God. Hence, greed becomes idolatry. On this account, the appropriate alternative to a greedy response to God’s offer of fellowship is thanksgiving. Although, I cannot demonstrate that Paul himself operated with this specific account of creation, it is striking that Paul’s identification of greed with idolatry in Col 3 is embedded in a context that is rich with reflections on and instructions about thanksgiving, a context that seems to be assumed, but less explicit in Eph.
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Decentering Paul, Contextualizing Crimes
Program Unit: Bible and Cultural Studies
Arminta Fox, Drew University
Interacting with previous scholarship on Roman imprisonment and Paul’s letters (Cassidy 2001; Wansink 1996; Rapske 1994), this paper uses a feminist decentering approach to consider the ways discourses of freedom and captivity function within Paul’s letters. This approach to Paul’s constructions of himself and others as both apostle and prisoner challenges common binaries in the American criminal justice system that focuses on individuals rather than understanding crimes within a context of complex socio-political dynamics. In several places throughout the letters of Paul, Paul identifies himself or other apostles as a prisoner (Philem 1:1, Ph 1:12-18, 2 Cor 6:5, 11:23, Col 4:3, 18, Eph 3:1, 4:1). In one example from Romans 16:7, Paul sends greetings to his kinsfolk in the Roman community, Andronicus and Junia. This male and female pair is identified as a set of prominent apostles who spent time in prison with Paul. What happens when we think these factors together? How does an identification as a “prisoner” relate to the identification as a “prominent apostle”? Prisons construct boundaries, and are designed to separate certain individuals from the rest of society. Prisons separate criminals from the innocent, and captives from the free. They separate men from women, and adults from the young. There is no third space in the eyes of the criminal justice system. Because of these divisions, forming partnerships with inmates is an unusual experience. In Drew Theological School’s Partnership for Religion and Education in Prisons (PREP) program, theological school students cross the boundaries and create a third space in the classroom. My experiences with this complex partnership challenge the assumptions society holds about prisoners and prisons. The women in these classes are not merely criminals, but are thoughtful, caring, and creative individuals. Most of them were victims of crimes before they became perpetrators. Seeing the humanity of these women in such a dehumanizing place can be constructive for interpreting Paul’s prisoner rhetoric. How might the multiplicity of identity markers, as both prisoner and apostle, mentioned in Romans 16:7 and throughout Paul’s letters, challenge assumptions about prisons and their boundaries?
Feminist scholarship has challenged scholars of Paul’s letters to decenter Paul and turn the focus onto early Christ communities as sites of complex debate and perspectival difference (Schüssler Fiorenza, 2007; Johnson-DeBaufre and Nasrallah 2010). Rather than being treated as either a hero or a villain, Paul must be placed within a network of others who are negotiating various discourses of empire, race, gender, class, etc. Such an approach can also be constructive for reconceptualizing captive prisoners today. As the complex problem of mass incarceration continues to devastate American lives and society, the individuals who are caught committing crimes are vilified or, in particular moments, idealized. This paper’s interpretation of Paul’s imprisonment rhetoric asserts that the boundaries upon which the current criminal justice system is based should be re-examined. In particular, rather than vilifying or idealizing particular individuals in the wake of crimes, these individuals and their actions should be placed in broader social systems and power dynamics.
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Rereading My Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love
Program Unit: Egyptology and Ancient Israel
Michael Fox, University of Wisconsin-Madison
My paper speaks about the aims of my Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs. I summarize my approach and findings and give special attention to one song (“The Stroll,” in pChester Beatty I) as an example of the way I identify and read complex, the muli-stanza songs. I consider what we can know about the relationship between the Egyptian Songs and the Song of Songs. Was the Song a descendent of the Egyptian songs, or did it receive motifs from various traditions, including Egypt, or were the similarities engendered by common topic? Literary comparison, even if there is no demonstrable “genetic” relationship,” can enhance our understanding of both groups of the songs.
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Wisdom and Revelation
Program Unit: Wisdom in Israelite and Cognate Traditions
Michael V. Fox, University of Wisconsin-Madison
This paper will argue that Wisdom Literature (including Egyptian) does not include revelation as a source of knowledge prior to Ben Sira. By “Wisdom Literature” I mean, first of all, didactic texts, such as Proverbs, Qohelet, and Amenemope, a genre which is well titled “Ethical Instructions” in New Kingdom Egyptian texts. Even when the Wisdom is broadened to include Job, revelation is not a source of knowledge. The absence of revelation is not due to an ideology held by authors of Wisdom but not others, but only to the constraints of the genre and its uses.
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Voluntary and Involuntary Sin and the Allegory of the Soul in Philo
Program Unit: Philo of Alexandria
Michael Francis, University of Notre Dame
In numerous passages in his exegetical works, Philo displays a pronounced interest in the distinction between voluntary and involuntary sin. Sometimes the interest appears to arise quite readily from the subject matter of the scriptural text itself. In many cases, however, the text in question shows no evident concern with the intentions of the human agent, or even the idea or phenomenon of sin. The latter cases are, quite predictably, most prevalent in Philo’s allegorical exegesis, and emerge, in a variety of ways, in relation to Philo’s programmatic concern to interpret scripture allegorically as an account of the experiences and ethical progress of the individual human soul. What motivates Philo’s interest in the distinction between voluntary and involuntary sin as it emerges as a function of the allegory of the soul? This is the question addressed in this paper. We will proceed in two stages. First, we will consider the primary ways and issues in relation to which Philo’s concern with the distinction between voluntary and involuntary sin is evident in his allegorical account of the career of the soul. We will give particular attention to Philo’s understanding of the constitution and plight of created humanity, and the psychology of human action. We will also address the ways Philo maps the distinction between voluntary and involuntary sin onto a range of characters named in the pentateuchal narrative—and, so, relates it to a spectrum of dispositions of the individual soul. Second, we will consider the significance of these findings, and that in light of the primary scriptural and extrascriptural influences on Philo’s conceptualization of different kinds of wrongdoing, and so offer an explanatory account of Philo’s allegorical concern with the distinction between voluntary and involuntary sin.
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An Ancient Winery Complex at Jezreel
Program Unit: Archaeology of the Biblical World
Norma Franklin, University of Haifa
The Jezreel Expedition was founded in 2012 with the aim of surveying, excavating and documenting the site of greater Jezreel in the longue duree. A LiDAR scan was commissioned and a three-four square kilometer area to the west, north, and east of the tel was surveyed. More than 360 features were documented and amongst them there were 57 agricultural installations, several of which were tentatively identified as oil and wine presses. One particularly impressive installation was recently excavated and recognised as an early winery. is there a connection between it and the story of Naboth in 1 Kings 21?
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Reading Ezekiel on the Way to Jerusalem
Program Unit: Gospel of Luke
Daniel Frayer-Griggs, Duquesne University
At three points in his Gospel, Luke makes apparent intertextual allusions to Ezekiel 20:45-47 (LXX 21:1-3). These include Jesus’ setting his face towards Jerusalem (9:51); his desire that the fire he came to cast on earth would already be kindled (12:49); and his words regarding the green tree and the dry tree (23:31). Each of these evokes the imagery of judgment by fire, while the first and the last roughly frame Luke’s travel narrative, concluding in Jerusalem as Jesus goes to the cross. As such they contribute to a better understanding of Luke’s theology of judgment as it relates to the destruction of Jerusalem as well as to Jesus’ death there. This paper analyzes the ways in which these intertextual allusions function within Luke’s narrative movement towards Jerusalem.
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Finding Lazarus in a Demoniac's Tomb
Program Unit: Johannine Literature
Daniel Frayer-Griggs, Duquesne University
The Johannine narrative concerning the raising of Lazarus (11:17-44) exhibits a number of rarely observed lexical and conceptual links to Mark’s story of the Gerasene demoniac (Mark 5:1-20). Both Lazarus and the demoniac are found in or among tombs; both of the afflicted, at one time or another, have their hands and feet restrained; both narratives contain references to “a loud voice”; both have Jesus issue the command to “come out”; and both events elicit mixed responses where some are inspired to belief while others reject Jesus. At the same time, there are such obvious differences between the two narratives that they cannot be understood as variants of the same story. This paper analyzes the aforementioned similarities (and others), deems them too numerous to be mere coincidence, and proposes a source-critical thesis that accounts for both the similarities and differences between these texts.
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The Image of YHWH’s Universal Reign as Moral Compass for the Traumatized “Servants of YHWH” in Third Isaiah
Program Unit: Book of Isaiah
Christopher Frechette, Saint Mary's University (San Antonio)
Addressing the effects of both collective and individual trauma involves interpreting the persons and events involved in the trauma, and such interpretations often carry moral implications. Processing collective trauma often involves assigning causality for the group’s suffering through negotiating contested notions of who committed certain moral violations that precipitated the suffering; when moral violations are established, moral lessons may be drawn that then shape the new social identity of the violated group. Traumatized individuals may experience moral disorientation in a variety of ways, ranging from unreasonable self-blame for the traumatic events and a diminished felt sense of dignity, to a breakdown of belief in any moral order; as individual survivors engage in interpreting past trauma they often require trusted others who can serve as a moral compass. The book of Isaiah develops the image of the universal kingship of Yhwh, and in Third Isaiah (Isa 56–66) this kingship is portrayed in terms analogous to an empire, with Jerusalem as a center dominating the other nations of the world. A central voice in Third Isaiah is that of “the servants of Yhwh,” who as a group were persecuted within the larger Jewish community and identified themselves with “the servant” of Second Isaiah (Isa 40–55). Many scholars consider Third Isaiah largely a product of the fifth century BCE, when a segment of the Jewish population in Judea was trapped in severe economic hardship by political and economic structures and was excluded from participation in the Jerusalem Temple. The present paper explores how passages in Third Isaiah that can be associated with “the Servants of Yhwh” would be consistent with the perspective of such a group. Moreover, it discusses how the group’s circumstances may be considered traumatic in that many members of this group would have experienced overwhelming suffering, and the group’s sense of identity within Israel would have been in crisis because of its relationship to the Temple establishment. Finally, it proposes that Third Isaiah employs the image of Yhwh’s universal reign in order to address the effects of such trauma in several ways. By strategically both affirming and contesting the common assumption that material wellbeing signals divine reward for right behavior, the text associates the present suffering of the servants with the favor of Yhwh as manifested in the wellbeing accorded to the servants in an unspecified future. By affirming in specific moral terms the group practices of the servants and condemning the oppressive practices of their opponents, the text establishes the identity of the servants as members of Israel in right relationship with Yhwh. By portraying the divine punishment of the servants’ oppressors as consistent with Yhwh’s larger plan to destroy oppressive empires, the text would have contested the felt lack of dignity and doubt about the possibility of a just moral order that the servants’ overwhelming suffering would have prompted.
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Reconceptualizing the Development of Genesis 17 within the Priestly Work
Program Unit: Pentateuch
Aron Freidenreich, Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York
Scholarship has reached remarkable consensus regarding Genesis 17, concluding not only that it derives from Priestly origins but also that it is central to the Priestly work. At the same time, however, two fundamental problems have been observed in the chapter, suggesting its lack of uniformity. First, Genesis 17:1-8 appears to present an unconditional covenant, yet these verses are followed by the imposition of a circumcision stipulation upon its human recipients in 17:9-14. Second, Genesis 17:23-27 emphasizes Ishmael’s circumcision in fulfillment of his covenantal responsibilities, even though he appears to be denied membership in the covenant immediately beforehand in 17:15-21. Thus Genesis 17 presents an inconsistent perspective on both the nature of the covenant (conditional versus unconditional) and the extent of its participants (inclusive versus exclusive). Because the circumcision requirement and fulfillment are implicated in both conflicts, the most common scholarly determination is that Genesis 17:9-14 and 17:23-27 represent foreign intrusions. In that case, an originally unconditional covenant that was initially limited solely to Isaac’s line was expanded to become more embracing of other Abrahamic peoples while simultaneously demanding more of its participants’ ritual performance.
In this paper, I assert that this solution to the chapter’s incongruities, despite its popularity, misconstrues the text’s development and consequently misinterprets the Priestly writers’ developing views on both the Abrahamic covenant and Ishmael’s status therein. Removal of the circumcision aspects of the chapter, I will demonstrate, leaves a core text that still contains the same inconsistencies whose goal it was to avoid. Moreover, a reconstructed base text consisting of Genesis 17:1-8, 15-22 yields an unbalanced and incoherent presentation of the covenant. Rather than relegating the circumcision aspects to a secondary position, I propose that it is instead Genesis 17:15-21 that comprises the later addition to the chapter. I will argue that it is in fact these verses that create the problems in the covenant’s exposition and in its scope, directly contradicting not only Genesis 17:9-14 and 17:23-27 but also 17:1-8. The Abrahamic covenant from its very foundation entailed human responsibilities in addition to divine promises, and it initially encompassed all of the nations that would descend from Abraham, including Ishmael. It is the secondary insertion of Genesis 17:15-21, with its reference to Sarah and prediction of Isaac’s birth, that deliberately undermines that original presentation. By introducing a matrilineal requirement to the covenant’s recipients through Sarah in addition to Abraham, this passage excludes Ishmael and restricts the covenant’s inheritance entirely to Isaac and his descendants. This new exclusive outlook on the participants in the Abrahamic covenant contrasts sharply with the view expressed in the remainder of the chapter. But it also stands in opposition to the more positive and embracing perspective on Ishmael seen in multiple other loci in the Priestly passages of Genesis, demonstrating a distinct shift in Priestly tradents’ stance toward foreigners as the Priestly work was updated over time.
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Discourse Markers in Lexica and the Benefit of Functional Descriptions: A Case Study of De
Program Unit: Biblical Lexicography
Chris Fresch, University of Cambridge
Historically, Greek and Hebrew lexica have not been able to provide the most helpful analyses of discourse markers (e.g., Greek DMs: de, oun, ei/ean me, alla, idou, men; Hebrew DMs: we'attah, wayhi, hineh, ki, laken). This is due to the fact that discourse marker is a functional category, comprised of linguistic items that narrow or explicate the relations between discourse contents and that instruct the reader on how to build his or her mental representation of the discourse. Instead of considering the function of a given discourse marker and how it contributes to the building of a reader's mental representation, however, lexica tend to rely on translational glosses that reveal an imposition of the semantics of surrounding contexts onto the particle.
This practice is problematic for a number of reasons. First, it does not consider the function of the marker itself. Moreover, because of the reliance on the semantics of context to determine the meaning of the discourse marker, many markers will receive two, three, or four glosses that differ widely in function. This creates the picture that a given discourse marker has multiple semantic meanings rather than a core pragmatic function. Second, without a discussion of what these markers pragmatically accomplish within a discourse, a translational gloss suggests functional equivalence between the Hebrew/Greek discourse marker and the marker(s) provided in the target language. Lastly, at best, it hinders the reader's ability to understand the structure of the discourse; at worst, it leads the reader astray in his or her understanding of the discourse.
Drawing on current functional linguistic work on discourse markers, this paper investigates the Greek particle de — how its function has been described by linguists in recent years (e.g., Runge, Levinsohn, Buth, Bakker, Sicking) and how it has been treated in lexica (e.g., BDAG, Muraoka, Louw & Nida, Danker). I propose that this kind of linguistic work can benefit future lexica as it facilitates more precision in lexical analysis by relying less on translational glosses and by offering functional, discourse-pragmatic descriptions for discourse markers. The paper concludes by making mention of recent linguistic studies on various discourse markers (both Greek and Hebrew) that significantly contribute to our understanding of how the markers function and, therefore, that may be of benefit to lexicographical work.
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Mary of Nazareth and Nazareth Archaeological Excavations 1997–2015
Program Unit: Maria, Mariamne, Miriam: Rediscovering the Marys
Richard Freund, University of Hartford
The past two decades has seen a number of new Nazareth excavations that are directly and indirectly associated with ancient canonical and non-canonical literary and post-Nicean episodes from the life of Mary, mother of Jesus.
In this paper I will survey the information that can be gleaned from the site excavations of the Antiquities Authority of Israel at Sisters of Nazareth Convent, my own university's Mary's Well and Bathhouse project, a project at the Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation and most recently at the so-called: “Mary's Cave.” Many of these sites are located in traditional religious pilgrimage sites in Nazareth but some are not. The question is what can be learned about the historical Mary of Nazareth from a comparison with the discoveries made at these archaeological sites. The paper will include a power-point of some of the architecture, coins, glass, pottery, and mapping of the locations in relation to one another (and to the Roman Catholic Church of the Annunciation) in modern Nazareth.
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Imperial Herod? The Temple of Apollo in Rhodes and the Temple of Jerusalem’s Herodian Stones
Program Unit: Art and Religions of Antiquity
Richard Freund, University of Hartford
Herod the Great’s massive building projects featured a distinctive style of stone framing which is associated with the Temple of Jerusalem but now has been found in other sites that include Rhodes. Where and why Herod chose this type of framing for some of his building stones is a matter of some debate. The issue that I will explore has implications for the direction of cultural influences in the decorations used in and around the Temple of Jerusalem. Was Herod adding an element that was distinctly imperial for his building or was he having his builders innovate a new decoration style to make his building distinctive? The issue is important for a variety of reasons not the least of which is an unusual reference in Josephus Flavius’ writings regarding one of the buildings attributed to Herod in Rhodes: the Temple of Apollo. In the Antiquities 16.5.3, Josephus writes of Herod: “But what [was] the greatest and most illustrious of all his [Herod’s] works; he erected Apollo’s Temple at Rhodes, at a great expense and gave them a great number of talents of silver to rebuild their fleet.” Indeed, at the Acropolis of Rhodes sits the Temple of Apollo and it has a series of framed Herodian stones around the outside of the enclosures of the Temple. The paper will explore this and other buildings in the region which are associated with Herod the Great.
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Miracle Stories, Semeia Narratives, and the Gospel as a Significant Story: Genre Bending and Epistemology in John
Program Unit: Johannine Literature
Jörg Frey, Universität Zürich
As is well-known, John labels his miracle stories 'semeia'. Although it is difficult or even questionable to define a genre 'miracle story', we can observe that John's 'semeia narratives' are not simply tales of past events but deliberately narrated in a manner that points readers to other elements in John's story, esp. the passion and resurrection story, to various symbolic dimensions, and in general to an understanding of the episodes in the light of the entire Jesus story, or in the post-Easter retrospective. From that point of view, they can be characterized as a revelation of his glory, of his true Christological identity, and of his life-giving power. These interpretive links are embedded into the narratives or added in lengthy discourses or dialogues. They all contribute to a reading of the Johannine miracle stories in steady consideration of their Christological and soteriological significance, not merely as episodes of the time and ministry of the earthly Jesus.
From John 20:30-1, the question raises whether the term 'semeia' only refers to the miracle stories in John 2-11 or whether other narratives such as the resurrection stories, are also included. A brief look at other Johannine narratives, e.g. the entry in Jerusalem or the footwashing, can show that they are also designed as significant stories that point to the whole of Jesus' ministry or its salvific and ethical meaning. This fits into John's epistemology that urges readers to perceive the whole of Jesus' ministry in the light of its final soteriological meaning, or in the perspective of the post-Easter insights. The semeia narratives as significant narratives are part of the literary strategy that shapes the gospel in its entirety.
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The Sabbath as Revelation of God
Program Unit: Sabbath in Text and Tradition
Mathilde Frey, Adventist International Institute of Advanced Studies
This study analyzes the subject of divine revelation in the context of the Sabbath. I will examine the Creation Sabbath in Gen 2:1-3, where God is the only subject in the text. God completed his work, God ceased from all his work, God blessed the seventh day, and God sanctified it. Human duty to the Sabbath is not expected. What does the Creation Sabbath suggest about God and his relationship to the human being? Based upon the Creation Sabbath's perspective about God, what is then the relationship of the human being to the Sabbath?
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The Role of the Governor's Meals in the Provincial Economy
Program Unit: Economics in the Biblical World
Lisbeth Fried, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
Invited paper
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Paulus Tragicus: Staging Apostolic Adversity in First Corinthians
Program Unit: Corpus Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti
Courtney Friesen, University of Oxford
In 1 Cor 4:9, Paul writes that God has “displayed” the apostles as condemned to death, “for we have become a theater for the cosmos.” This is followed with three (ironic) antitheses contrasting the apostles, who were foolish, weak, and dishonored with the Corinthians as wise, strong, and honored. This presentation will propose a fresh and hitherto unconsidered perspective on Paul’s “theater” in view of tragic drama. The argument will proceed in three stages. First, I shall situate Paul’s theater in the context of mid-first-century Corinth, by attending, on the one hand, to the city’s venues of public performance, and, on the other, to the context of Paul’s Corinthian correspondence, with its central theme of wisdom and foolishness, power and weakness. Second, I shall survey past and current identifications of Paul’s theater metaphor, ranging from the commonest interpretation in view of Roman arena spectacles to Larry Welborn’s more recent proposal of mime performances. Along with these tangible modes of theater known to the Corinthians, scholars have drawn attention to the similarity between Paul’s metaphor and Stoic writings where spectacle functions as a symbolic venue in which the sage develops and displays his or her virtue. Without denying the value of these earlier approaches to Paul’s metaphor, I suggest that new insight emerges when the conception of theater is expanded to include tragic drama. By way of comparison, the Stoic Epictetus evoked tragedy in warning his pupils against misplaced obsession with externals in a manner not unlike Paul’s instructions to the Corinthians. Third, therefore, I shall briefly survey examples from drama in which the downfall of the tragic hero is closely connected with contestations over wisdom and political power. Such theatrical reversals bear striking similarities with Paul’s emphasis that God would “put to shame” the wise and powerful. In his distinctly apocalyptic mode, this would occur at the judgment, that closing dramatic moment, as in the deus ex machina, when the deity appears above the stage to deliver his final verdict.
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Dying Like a Woman: Philo on the Tragic Death of Polyxena
Program Unit: Philo of Alexandria
Courtney Friesen, University of Oxford
In the treatise That Every Good Person is Free, Philo compiles an extensive and diverse list of individuals as exempla in support of the thesis that the virtuous person is free even if enslaved. Among these, he includes the tragic heroine Polyxena who, in Euripides’ Hecuba, dies willingly rather than go into slavery. For Philo, this female tragic death functions as an a fortiori demonstration that all the more unassailable must be the freedom of the masculine subject. This mode of argument relates to Philo’s so-called “gender gradient,” whereby he depicts advancement in virtue as a move from the feminine to the masculine. This presentation employs Philo’s appropriation of the exemplum of Polyxena as a means of interrogating his gendered construction of virtue. On the one hand, Philo’s reading of Euripides anticipates the thesis of Nicole Loraux’s Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman (org. 1985) that suicide on stage blurs the distinction between masculine and feminine by moving the agency of women beyond its conventional limitations and passivity into the realm of male kleos. On the other hand, Philo’s argument participates in a wider interpretative tradition of this tragedy. Several other ancient authors—e.g., Pliny the Younger, Galen, Lucian, and Clement of Alexandria—also evoke the dramatic death of Polyxena. A survey of these literary appropriations reveals that Philo’s is not a unique application, but rather reflects conventional reading strategies. What emerges, then, is that Philo’s engagement with Greek literature proceeds from within an intellectual tradition that had pre-established moralizing applications of classical texts.
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The Customs House Inscription at Ephesos (IvE 1a.20) and Paul’s Jerusalem Collection: Exchange, Surplus, Ideology, and the Divine
Program Unit: Paul and Politics
Steven J. Friesen, University of Texas at Austin
A customs house inscription from the mid first century CE was excavated in 1929 (IvE 1a.20). It has entered New Testament studies as an alleged example of an association with a demographic profile similar that of contemporary Pauline assemblies in that region. In this paper I first show that the inscription does not refer to an association nor is the demographic profile anything like that of the Pauline assemblies. A more profitable comparison is provided if we examine reciprocity and the use of ideology in this inscription and in Paul’s instructions regarding his collection for Jerusalem. More specifically, I analyze where and when the divine realm is invoked in these ideological statements about the redistribution of material and nonmaterial resources. I conclude that in both the customs house inscription and in the Pauline letters, the divine realm is invoked in two situations: in relation to the generation of surplus value; and in relation to significant gaps between ideology and practice.
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Instructive Violence: Educated Children as Victims and Aggressors in Late Antique Latin Martyr Poetry
Program Unit: Violence and Representations of Violence in Antiquity
Diane Shane Fruchtman, DePauw University
Building on the insights of affect theory, queer theory, and literary-rhetorical analysis, this paper explores two contrasting /ekphraseis/ about anonymous young boys in the martyrological poetry of Prudentius (fl. 405). In one, a child is martyred, suffering graphic violence at the hands of Roman persecutors; in the other, Roman children are the persecutors, viciously (and gleefully) attacking their Christian teacher Cassian with their wax tablets and styli. The passages are parallel: they share imagery, vocabulary, and distinctive narrative elements (including striking moments where the martyr uncharacteristically expresses the extent of his pain); both simultaneously presume and manufacture the reader’s emotional attachment to the children, using what the reader is assumed and encouraged to feel about children to heighten the affective drama of the scene playing before their eyes; both explore the effect of an educational model on a child’s character; and both draw from traditional accounts of childhood to offer the reader models with which to compare the victimized or victimizing children. But these parallels in fact highlight the distances between the narratives, showing, as would a mirror image, the inversion of the two and providing common ground for comparison. The literary elements leave the reader with contrasting lessons about children as religious actors. The cultivated emotional attachment to childhood is used to different effect—in one case to generate sympathy, in the other revulsion. The educational models are gendered differently, with a domestic and maternal education in the case of the martyr and a schoolroom-centered, male-dominated education in the case of the persecutors. And the accounts of childhood draw from different traditions: the child martyr story draws from and re-invents biblical models of childhood, including stories about Isaac and the Maccabean martyrs, while the story in which the children are the aggressors draws from and re-invents Roman educational commonplaces about disgruntled students and the role of corporal punishment in the schoolroom.
These two contrasting visualizations thus show Prudentius using representations of childhood violence to delineate Christian values. Exploring these two poles of representation will not only give us a departure point to explore the imaginal limits of violence toward and by children in Latin Christian late antiquity, it will also provide a window into the type of Roman Christian community identity that Prudentius sought to cultivate through his poetry.
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From Prophet to Waiter: Habakkuk’s Cameo Appearance in the Apocryphal Additions to Daniel
Program Unit: Book of Daniel
David J. Fuller, McMaster Divinity College
In the collection of apocryphal additions to Daniel known as Bel and the Dragon, the prophet Habakkuk is flown in from Judah by an angel to deliver food to a starving Daniel in the lions’ den. Not only is this incident somewhat bizarre, it raises the questions of why the HB figure of Habakkuk in particular was chosen to fill this role, and how this episode in Bel relates to the HB book of Habakkuk. This apparent lack of cohesion has led some scholars to assert that the appearance of Habakkuk in Bel and the Dragon was a late interpolation that simply lacks a meaningful literary purpose. For the investigation of this issue, the approach to intertextuality pioneered by Michael Riffaterre is particularly valuable, as it provides a set of categories that classify different ways that texts can symbolically point to other texts, and either import or creatively transform their original meaning. It is the intention of the present study to use Riffaterrean intertextuality to demonstrate that Bel 33–39/Dan 14:33–39 LXX (primarily in the Old Greek rather than the Theodotion text) describes the delivery of provisions to Daniel in the den using a sophisticated blend of allusions and echoes to various texts from the LXX, resulting in a creative story that summons up an array of images relating to the prophetic provision of food in a time of need, for the purpose of informing a first-century BCE Jewish audience that God was with them just as he was with their forefathers, and that the fulfillment of ancient prophecies of restoration was imminent.
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Quotations of the Minor Prophets in the War Scroll
Program Unit: Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible
Russell E. Fuller, University of San Diego
This paper will analyze quotations of and allusions to the Hebrew text of the Twelve Minor Prophets found in the War Scroll (1QM). In addition to issues surrounding the identification of biblical quotations and allusions, the paper will also consider the use of quotations and allusions for the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible.
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The Representation of Definiteness in Qumran Aramaic: Unsolving the Son of Man Problem
Program Unit: Aramaic Studies
William Fullilove, Reformed Theological Seminary
As recently pointed out by Edward Cook, the small sample size of Qumran Aramaic (QA) limits its usefulness for activities such as the back-translation of New Testament Greek into a proposed Aramaic source text. Nonetheless, as noted by Dr. Cook, certain high-frequency features of the language can be validly analyzed to represent the state of Aramaic in Palestine more generally. This paper examines one such feature, the determiner system, analyzing the relationship of nominal state and definiteness for the entire QA corpus. The results indicate the connection of the emphatic state with definiteness remained strong in QA. This casts doubt on the argument that the Aramaic phrases bar enash and bar enasha were equivalent in first century C.E. Galilean Aramaic, as has often been claimed in debates about the “Son of Man Problem” in New Testament scholarship.
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Smoke and Mirrors: Paul and the Politics of Class Conflict in 1 Corinthians
Program Unit: Rhetoric and Early Christianity
Amanda Furiasse, Florida State University
Contemporary rhetorical theory has demonstrated the propensity for contradiction within metaphor. Rather than disable constructive discourse, metaphor’s generative matrix of perpetual contradiction can facilitate social concord through the union of oppositions. Because this rhetorical tactic can effectively unify two seemingly opposing claims, contemporary politicians often use this strategy to resolve class conflict. Modern speakers and authors did not invent this tactic, but ancient authors typically employed this rhetorical strategy to quell class conflict. This paper argues that Paul in particular used this rhetorical tactic in his metaphor of the body politic in an effort to resolve class conflict in Corinth.
While Paul’s body metaphor has been at the center of New Testament scholarship, previous work on the topic neglected the important role that contradiction plays in his metaphor. While scholarship typically argues that his body metaphor in 1 Corinthians 12 is intended to subvert social asymmetries, I contest this claim and argue that the purpose of the metaphor is to justify existing social asymmetries and thereby resolve social unrest in Corinth. Drawing on Bruce Lincoln’s theory of symbolic inversion, I demonstrate how his body metaphor uses contradiction to unify two contradictory claims. I argue further that this union of oppositions has the intended effect of mystifying and naturalizing the existing status hierarchy. Naturalizing the existing status hierarchy ultimately enables Paul to blunt growing concerns over social inequities between members. Examining Paul’s metaphor through the lens of Bruce Lincoln’s theory of symbolic inversion, I conclude that Paul’s body metaphor in 1 Corinthians 12 does not subvert the existing hierarchy, but the underlying intent of the metaphor is to legitimate and naturalize the existing status hierarchy.
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Luke 4:18–19 and Salvation: In the Context of Marginalization of Women within Pentecostal Church in Botswana
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Rosinah Gabaitse, University of KwaZulu-Natal
Luke 4:18-19 and Salvation: In the Context of Marginalization of Women within Pentecostal Church in Botswana
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Versional and Patristic Evidence in the Apparatus of ECM Acts
Program Unit: Novum Testamentum Graecum: Editio Critica Maior
Georg Gäbel, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster
The Editio Critica Maior includes versional and patristic material in addition to the Greek evidence. It is not, however, a comprehensive multilingual edition. While all available versional and patristic evidence is made use of, that evidence is carefully sifted and examined in order to find potentially relevant material. The resulting pool of versional and patristic variants is then subjected to rigorous scrutiny in accordance with criteria developed specifically for this edition.
This paper will describe the process which leads to the inclusion of versional and patristic evidence in the critical apparatus (or exclusion from it). This will include specific conditions and challenges of individual versions, the criteria for inclusion in the apparatus, different ways of representing versional and patristic information in different parts of the apparatus, and the importance of similarities between versions such as Old Latin, Syriac, Coptic, and Ethiopic for the question of the (formerly) so-called „Western“ text.
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In Search of Common Ground: The Overlapping Ethics of Wisdom and Apocalypticism, with James and 2 Enoch as a Test Case
Program Unit: Wisdom and Apocalypticism
Timothy A. Gabrielson, Marquette University
Wisdom and apocalypticism have remained, in the eyes of many scholars, incorrigible opponents. Those who disagree with that assessment have generally noted their shared interest in attaining knowledge or have pointed to the many works that indulge in both sapiential and apocalyptic themes, but it is rare to find sustained focus on ethics as the point of comparison. A juxtaposition of the morals of James and 2 Enoch, however, shows how similar the goals of wisdom and apocalypticism can be. There are numerous similarities between their ethics — the use of the imago Dei to prohibit slander, concern for paying day laborers, an absolute ban on oaths, and more. In most cases neither work is dependent on the other. Rather, these connections demonstrate that ethics is important, and generally neglected, common ground for apocalypticism and wisdom.
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The Kabod YHWHs as a Key Concept of the Book of Isaiah
Program Unit: Book of Isaiah
Judith Gaertner, Universität Rostock
In the final redaction of the Book of Isaiah (Jes 56:1-8.65f) the main theological ideas of Isaiah meet and thereby enable us to retrospectively describe the composition of the Book of Isaiah. This is due to the fact that the final redaction takes up already existing lines of composition within the Book of Isaiah and raises their profile regarding a Großjesajabuch. This is particularly notable in the use of the word kabod, which is introduced as early as in chapter 6 and then significantly shapes the whole concept of the theology of Isaiah (Is 8; 30; 40; 60). The unique point concerning Isaiah – for example, in comparison with processes of redaction in the Twelve Minor Prophets – can be found in the fact that the tradents of Isaiah operate from the beginning to the end of the book with one word in order to reformulate central aspects of their respective ideas of God. In the paper this process of the composition of the Book will be presented from the end of the book Is 66:12 to exemplarily demonstrate the techniques, aims and requirements regarding the literary formation of the Book of Isaiah.
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Saved by the Blood: A Womanist Reading of Zipporah
Program Unit: Women in the Biblical World
Wil Gafney, Brite Divinity School (TCU)
Zipporah appears in the sacred literature of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. While her primary narrative is found in the Hebrew Bible it is elaborated upon in the Hadith, Midrash and patristic discourse. Womanism, itself an intersecting black feminist hermeneutical framework has been rightly critiqued for being presented as normatively Christian. In truth womanists and black feminists represent a variety of religious, non-religious, ethical and humanist perspectives. This paper will explore the intersection of gender and ethnicity in Zipporah’s body in the text and the intersection of race and ethnicity in the world in which she is interpreted. And, I will examine the way in which Zipporah’s performance of ritual circumcision inscribes gender in male flesh using her flesh, her hand.
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Epic Law? Parallelism and Other Poetic Constructions in the Holiness Legislation (Leviticus 17–26)
Program Unit: Biblical Hebrew Poetry
Jason M. H. Gaines, College of the Holy Cross
In a short line of striking simplicity and beauty, the prophet Micah tells us what God expects from mortals: “Only to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8). The poetic nature of this line is beyond serious question. In comparison, the preamble to the sexual purity laws in Leviticus reads, “My rules you shall observe, and my laws you shall keep, walking by them: I am YHWH your God” (Lev 18:4). If this verse occurred in another context, readers might identify grammatical parallelism, poetic word-pairs, marked diction, and even a “what’s more” heightening literary construction. Situated in a law collection, though, few would call this verse poetic. This paper will examine the compositional style of the Holiness Legislation (HL) in Leviticus 17–26, arguing that it contains many significant examples of literary devices usually associated with poetry. Specifically, HL’s use of parallelism and sentence-level chiasmus will be discussed. Types of parallelism in HL to be explored include correlative (“You shall not insult the deaf, and before the blind you shall not put a stumbling block” [19:14a]), euphemistic (“I will set my face against the person who eats the blood, I will cut him off from among his people,” [17:10b]), explanatory (“You shall fear your God; I am YHWH” [19:32b]), and reformulating (“The nakedness of your father, that is, the nakedness of your mother, you shall not expose. She is your mother! Do not expose her nakedness” [18:7]). Other ancient Near Eastern law collections will also be discussed, showing that the compositional style of HL is unusual in its repeated use of poetic devices. Identifying a characteristic compositional style for HL can help answer whether Holiness material exists outside of Leviticus 17–26, adding another element to the criteria of vocabulary and ideology commonly used to identify Holiness additions outside of HL.
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Reconstructing Ancient Borders: Galilean Archaeology and the Jewish Nature of Matthew's Gospel
Program Unit: Archaeology of the Biblical World
Aaron M. Gale, West Virginia University
This presentation seeks to fuse together two methods of scholarly inquiry (biblical criticism, archaeological research) in order to show how the biblical scholar and archaeologist may both benefit from a close, fruitful dialogue that yields possible exciting new insights into the world of the Bible. It can be argued that some biblical scholars do not take advantage of the constant flow of incoming cogent archaeological data that can shed light on the nature of the various Old and New Testament communities and their corresponding cultures. Conversely, it may be said that some archaeologists do not devote time to relevant methods of biblical inquiry.
Using Matthew’s Gospel as a test case, I will attempt to show how recent archaeological evidence may complement and augment a literary analysis of the text as it pertains to two areas of study: the economic status of the Matthean community and its prevailing Jewish inclinations. In particular, I will examine archaeological evidence related to Jewish urban identification and economic production in Galilee in order to provide a brief picture of first century life in the region. Textually, I will focus on specific passages in Matthew pertaining to wealth and/or religious inclination, including 5.17-18; 12.1-8; 18.23-35; 19.16-22, and 20.1-16. Ultimately, I will place the two spheres of study side-by-side in order to ascertain whether it is plausible to theorize that the Matthean community was a wealthy, urban Jewish Christian community located in Galilee that still adhered to the laws of the Torah.
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The Meaning of "pistis" in the Framework of the Greek-Spanish Dictionary of the New Testament
Program Unit: Biblical Lexicography
Israel Muñoz Gallarte, Universidad de Córdoba (España)
One of the most enduring and controversial questions in Semantics and Linguistics of the New Testament is still, beyond all doubt, the meaning of the Greek lexeme pistis. Indeed, the last and current decades have seen how a good number of researchers have dealt deeply and successfully with such an issue like that, as, for example, Desta Heliso (2007), G. Van Kooten (2012), and the numerous members of his research group, namely "Overcoming the Faith-Reason Opposition: Pauline Pistis in Contemporary Philosophy". However, in my view, by delimiting the problem excessively in the philosophical and rhetorical milieus of these ages, the works have been tending to ponder only the differences between the fideistic and the philosophical meanings of the term and, consequently, forgetting the need for a previous semantic analysis as unavoidable step. In order to fill this gap, my paper will try to elucidate the meaning of pistis by using the categories and analysis’ method of the Greek-Spanish Dictionary of the New Testament. Therefore, to begin with, I will offer an overview of the appearance of the lexeme pistis in context; secondly, I will try to trace the basic meaning and the secondary or contextual meanings of the lexeme; thirdly, the contextual causes of this change of meaning will try to be established. The final section will draw the emerging conclusions.
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What “Rest” Remains? A Close Reading of Hebrews 4
Program Unit: Sabbath in Text and Tradition
Erhard H. Gallos, Andrews University
The topic of “rest” in Hebrews has received considerable attention most recently. However, the existence of competing understandings of the religio-historical provenance of “rest” has not led to a consensus regarding its meaning.
This paper takes the initiative of not imposing foreign religio-historical constructs on the “rest” motif, but defines both terms katapausis and sabbatisomos etymologically and from the usage in the LXX. Also, the structural relationship between Heb 4 and 10 becomes important in understanding “rest.” This paper proposes that various semantic, syntactical, and formal cohesions between Heb 4 and 10 shed crucial light on the “rest” motif. The temporal dimension of “rest” becomes pivotal in understanding Hebrews 4.
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Remember, but Do Not Remember: The Trans-generational Imprint of Trauma in Isaiah 40–66
Program Unit: Book of Isaiah
David Garber, Mercer University
As explorations of the exilic literature through the lens of trauma theory have continued to emerge, questions regarding the nature of hope and/or recovery from the trauma of Jerusalem's destruction have arisen. Moreover, the complex composition history of the exilic and post-exilic prophets lead to questions of how the traumatic event leaves its imprint on succeeding generations. This paper will investigate how the late exilic and post-exilic material in the Isaiah tradition informs our understanding on the preservation and nature of traumatic memory and its implications for generations of a community that did not initially experience the traumatic events.
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Teaching Jesus in the Context of Jewish Studies Taught at a Two-Year Public College
Program Unit:
Zev Garber, Los Angeles Valley College
I proposed to discuss my methodology of Revelation and reason in presenting Torah and Jesus related issues in lower division Judaica. The intent is to remind SBL membership of the Wisdom of and about Moses and Jesus: Teaching and the rest is commentary.
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Of Image, Earth, and Dust: Genesis Creation Topoi in Second Temple Texts and the Lowliness of Humanity in the Hodayot
Program Unit: Genesis
Jeffrey Paul García, Nyack College
Ancient interpreters were so keenly aware of the divergent qualities of Genesis’ creation narratives (1-2:3; 2:4-25) that topoi—the “image of God” and “from the ground”—developed in the Second Temple period and were utilized to describe unique human characteristics either innate or given by God. These literary threads were also employed to acknowledge a unique relationship between God and humanity. In particular, the unique language of Gen 2:7, “of the dust from the ground” (????? ?????????????), was expanded with synonymous phraseology, “out of/from earth” and from “dust/clay.” While the use of the “image of God” in Second Temple, early Rabbinic, and early Christian texts has garnered some attention, Rabbinic literature and the New Testament have received the lion’s share. Additionally, neither the second topos, “out of/from earth” or from “dust/clay,” nor the interplay of both to characterize humanity have gained no attention. Moreover, this study contends that the importance of these topoi were so compelling that they were rhetorically used in the Hodayot to emphasize the lowly state humanity. There-fore, the purpose of this study is to examine their employment in several Second Temple texts (Ben Sira, Wisdom of Solomon, Testament of Naphtali [TNaph], 4 Ezra ) with the additional objective of exploring the manner in which they highlight and intensify the baseness of humanity exhibited in the one of the closing hymns of the Hodayot (20:7-22:42).
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Knitting the Safety Net: The Evolution of the Soup Kitchen (tamhui) in Rabbinic Judaism
Program Unit: Poverty in the Biblical World
Gregg E. Gardner, University of British Columbia
Classical rabbinic texts envision a comprehensive safety net to support the poor. A prominent feature is the soup kitchen (tamhui), which was initially envisioned as an alternative to hospitality and evolved into a means to provide immediate relief to all those in need (in contrast to the charity fund or quppa, which provided only for locals). How did the soup kitchen evolve in classical rabbinic texts? This paper undertakes a close reading of classical rabbinic sources (e.g. Tosefta, Talmuds) to trace the development of the soup kitchen from early to later rabbinic texts (e.g. Tannaitic to Amoraic). I find that the soup kitchen would come to play an increasingly larger role among the Amoraim or rabbis of the fourth-fifth century C.E., eclipsing the charity fund in importance. These developments, I find, should be understood as the product of fundamental shifts in the socio-economic structure of the rabbinic movement – which evolved from a movement of well-off elites to one of greater diversity as it began to include the poor among their ranks. The result was the formation of legal discussions and narratives that depict encounters between “rich” and “poor” that are meant to generate trust in the poor and emphasize the importance of accommodating even the strangest requests in a timely fashion. These developments will be compared to contemporaneous Christian approaches to poverty and the poor. Moreover, as these classical rabbinic discourses form the foundations of all subsequent Jewish approaches to philanthropy, this paper will also address modern implications of the development of the soup kitchen.
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Domesticating the Holy: Ancient Israelite Artefacts in Late-Antique Judaism
Program Unit: Archaeology of Religion in the Roman World
Gregg E. Gardner, University of British Columbia
Artefacts, relics, and other forms of material culture play important, but often overlooked, roles in religious traditions. They concretize religious expression and foster connections with people and events from long ago and far away. This can likewise be seen among late-antique (third-seventh centuries C.E.) Jews, who connected to their biblical past (1000 B.C.E.–70 C.E.) by depicting the objects used in the Jerusalem Temples in material form and authoring narratives about them. This paper explores how the material culture of the Israelite and Jewish pasts were treated by late-antique Jewish sources. It examines depictions of cultic vessels (e.g. menorah), in mosaics, funerary art, architectural features, and other archaeological finds. Of particular interest are depictions of the menorah on household ceramic oil lamps – themselves repositories and producers of light. These artefacts will be read together with discussions of the Temple vessels in classical rabbinic texts (Talmud, Midrashim). I find that late-antique Jews domesticated and democratized the holy objects that were once the exclusive domain of the Jerusalem priests. They did so in reaction to and competition with the rising interest in religious relics among Christians. Challenging disciplinary boundaries between textual and material studies, this paper contributes to our understanding of ancient Judaism and scholarship on the roles of material culture in religion traditions.
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The Infinitive Absolute in Light of African Linguistic Phenomena
Program Unit: Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
Randall Garr, University of California-Santa Barbara
A recent issue of Linguistic Typology carried an article on a linguistic phenomenon, attested in a variety of African languages, that bears uncanny resemblance to the infinitive absolute construction in Biblical Hebrew. Called the “Cognate Head-Dependent Construction,” it has two elements: a finite lexical verb form (cognate head) and an etymologically related noun or non-finite verb form (cognate dependent). The two forms may share a transparent root, or one may stand in a derivational relationship to the other. Further, the construction is not obligatory; the non-finite verb form is not necessary to the meaning of its clause or sentence.
Drawing on the methodology and findings of that article, this paper is restricted to the prepositive, or tautological, infinitive absolute construction. It begins with an iconic observation: The infinitive absolute construction is reduplicative. It is not surprising, then, that the construction has been interpreted as emphatic or intense; hyperbolic discourse fits this category well (e.g., Gen 37:8). The paper then discusses two pathways for interpreting this reduplicative structure. One involves event plurality (e.g., repetition) and scalarity (e.g., the extent or degree to which the event is realized). The other involves predicate focus, especially as that focus interacts with – i.e., conforms, contrasts, or opposes – conversational presuppositions. This paper, then, hopes to specify what is conventionally meant as the “emphatic” or “intense” infinitive absolute construction.
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Under Sin: Finding the Antecedent for Paul's Charge in Rom 3:9b
Program Unit: Pauline Epistles
Joshua Garroway, Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion
In Rom 3:9b, Paul claims that he “previously charged that all, both Jew and Greek, are under sin.” But where? Theretofore Paul has not said anything at all about sin, much less that everyone is under it. Interpreters assume that Paul is referring to the arguments in 1:18-2:29, even if nothing as yet has been couched in terms of sin. This already problematic view is further challenged by recent scholarship suggesting that Paul’s indictment in 1:18-2:29 is directed primarily, perhaps even exclusively, at Gentiles. This study aims to unfasten the tenuous connection between Rom. 3:9b and Paul’s preceding argumentation by proposing that proaitiaomai need not refer to a charge levied beforehand in the selfsame letter. Paul’s own usage of the pro- prefix with verbs of communication--and other Greek usage--demonstrates as much. In 2 Cor 7:3, 2 Cor 13:2, 1 Thess 3:4, and Gal 5:21, such prefixed verbs refer to advice given not previously in the letter, but on previous occasions. Likewise in Eph 3:3, pseudo-Paul probably refers to something he (or Paul) wrote in a previous epistle. One need not look far to find a previous occasion on which Paul charged that all humanity is under sin, for in Gal 3:22 he says exactly that: “scripture has imprisoned everything under sin.” Thus, when he says in Rom 3:9b that neither Jew nor Gentile has an advantage because he has previously charged both with being under sin, Paul refers either to the charge levied in Galatians—a letter with which some Romans may have been familiar—or, as is more likely, to a charge Paul levied numerous times in numerous places during his preaching career. Then Paul buttresses that claim--introduced in Romans for the first time here--with a scriptural catena, indeed possibly the very "scripture" to which he alluded in Gal 3:22.
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'The Odd Man In': Reassessing Jonah's Entry into the Twelve
Program Unit: Book of the Twelve Prophets
Roy E. Garton, Baylor University
Jonah as a writing is the quintessential “odd-man out” stylistically and theologically within the Minor Prophets, leading many to conclude that its entry into the Twelve only occurred at the final stage of the corpus’ development. Yet Jonah itself appears to have developed over multiple stages, with the clearest of these stages being the insertion of the prophet’s psalmic prayer (Jonah 2:2-10) since the surrounding narrative reads quite well without it. Yet where was this earlier form of Jonah (i.e., without its psalm) in relation to the developing Twelve? Did such a Jonah circulate independently, or was it already bound to one of the precursory collections that eventually fed into the Twelve? This paper looks at several connections between MT Jonah 1, 3–4 and MT Nahum 1 ¬– connections which suggest that Jonah may not have been as independent as scholars widely presume.
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The Phoenician/Luwian Bilingual Inscription of Azatiwada: The Use of Subordinating and Volitional Verb Forms
Program Unit: Ugaritic Studies and Northwest Semitic Epigraphy
John Gee, Brigham Young University
In this paper we will explore the contributions the Luwian versions make in better understanding the Phoenician verbal system, as well as how Phoenician syntax can help us better understand the Luwian verbal system and its categorization of the Imperative and Indicative moods. We will examine the use of subordinating and volitional verb forms in both the Phoenician and Luwian versions of the inscription, and look at several examples taken from the Luwian corpus which support our claims. We will describe syntactic constructions and morphologically marked verbal forms which are used to convey non-indicative moods, and we will define the function of subordinating forms used in connection with volitive moods in the inscriptional material. We will demonstrate that rather than variant forms of the Luwian Present Indicative, that subordinating and volitional verb forms were marked and employed, and that Phoenician supported the same type of volitive expressions used to convey elements of wishes and modality. We will also highlight how these elements help define syntactic boundaries within the Phoenician expressions of blessings within the inscription.
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"Put off Thy Shoes from off Thy Feet": Sandals and Sacred Space
Program Unit: Egyptology and Ancient Israel
John Gee, Brigham Young University
In Exodus 3:5 Moses is commanded to remove his sandals to stand on holy ground. Bronze Age Egyptian temples show scenes where humans either are wearing sandals or not. Sandals are shown in specific contexts and places and bare feet are shown in others. The usage in various contexts is consistent. These contexts relate to sacred space as the Egyptians understood it. This illustrated paper will examine the use of sandals in Egyptian temples and how the patterns of sandal use interact with the few mentions in the Hebrew Bible. It will also shed new light on an episode in the Egyptian daily temple liturgy.
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The Development of the Mal’ak Yhwh and the Composition of the Ancestral Narratives
Program Unit: Genesis
Michaela Geiger, Kirchliche Hochschule Wuppertal-Bethel
The messengers of God appear in key passages within the ancestral narratives of Abraham and Jacob. But the respective figures differ distinctly from one another: They reflect the formation of the Pentateuch as well as the developing concept of the mal'ak yhwh – which I examine in my habilitation under narratological, redaction critical and tradition-historical aspects.
In both narrative cycles the herein described redaction-critical process starts with a clear but disparate idea of the mal’ak yhwh, which motivates the introduction of further messenger figures. Within the Abraham narrative, the earliest mal’ak forms part of the basic layer of Gen 16 (Vv. 1.2.4–8.11–14; cf. Fischer): An apparently human mal’ak meets Hagar at the well and promises her the end of her distress and the birth of a son (Gen 16:11). The second Hagar tale (Gen 21), which is inserted later, transforms the mal'ak into a superhuman figure calling Hagar from heaven (Gen 21:17.18). The tale of Gen 22:1-19* seizes on the motif, but now the messenger of God speaks with God’s voice (Gen 22:11.12). The further appearances of a mal'ak in the Abraham narrative are connected to different concepts of the divine messenger: The promise of a protecting mal’ak in Gen 24:7.40 refers to the messenger of the Exodus in Exo 23:20-23 and therefore presupposes the Pentateuch. But Gen 24:7.40 exceeds Exo 23:20-23, since it “transfers the concept of a guiding angel to the realm of family religion" (Köckert). The addition of the mal'akim in Gen 19:1.15 (Blum) finally ties in with the perception of the mal’ak as a guest (Jud 6:11-24*) and with the group of mal'akim in Gen 28:12; 32:2.
In the Jacob narrative the earliest mal'akim occur in plural (Gen 28:12; 32:2). They have no message directed to Jacob individually, but make him aware of the respective place: At “Bethel” Jacob recognizes the gate of heaven (Gen 28:17) while he comprehends “Mahanajim" as the location of God's camp (Gen 32:2). The divine speech in Gen 28:13-15, which is inserted along with the combination of the Abraham and Jacob narratives, connects the appearance of the mal'akim with the divine promise to Abraham and Isaac as well as with Jacob's life. The latter applies also to the appearance of the mal’ak in Gen 31:11, which, unparalleled in the Hebrew Bible, occurs within a dream. The last mentioning of a messenger in Genesis (Gen 48:16) resumes the ancestral narrative (cf. Gen 48:15 with 24:40) and opens it towards the Book of Exodus.
The mal’akim in the ancestral narratives belong to different layers and represent several types of messengers. Nevertheless, under a canonical perspective a harmonious picture is created, which shows the messengers of God as reliable companions of the patriarchs and matriarchs und underlines the coherence of the ancestral narratives altogether.
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Mediation for the Mediator: The Encounter of Mal’ak and Prophet in Zechariah’s Night Visions
Program Unit: Book of the Twelve Prophets
Michaela Geiger, Kirchliche Hochschule Wuppertal-Bethel
The night visions (Zech 1:8–6:8*) form the core of Zechariah’s writing, before being combined with Hag 1-2* and then being included in the nascent Book of the Twelve (Schart, Woehrle). Within this basic layer Zechariah is not communicating immediately with God, but the "messenger who talks with me" acts as intermediary between God and prophet: He allows the prophet to see the visionary scenes and interprets them. Regarding the prophetic literature as a whole this mediation process marks a decisive turning point. Zech 1:8–6:8* is the oldest record introducing a prophet who requires the mediation of a mal'ak to receive the divine message. Given the commotion of faith in the exilic period the night visions are groping towards a new relationship with God in an "interplay of veiling and unveiling" (Lux) which holds a future for Jerusalem and Judah. The different messenger figures simultaneously draw attention to the distance between heaven and earth, protect the prophet resp. Jerusalem and Judah from God's wrath (Zech 1:12.15; 6:8) and gradually overcome the separation from God.
Some later texts refer to this distribution of roles between the prophet and the mal'ak (Num 22:22-35; 1Ki 19:3-8; 2Ki 1:1-18; 1Ch 21:18 as well as Dan 8:15-26; 9:20-27; 10:4-21), unlike the subsequent redactional layers of the Book of the Twelve. Within Zechariah especially the "word redaction" (Woehrle), also responsible for the composition of the Hag-Zech-corpus, emphasizes the immediate contact between God and prophet by introducing the “Wortereignisformel” (“the word Yhwh’s came to Zechariah“; Zech 1:1.7; 7:1; 8:1 etc.). Also Haggai and Malachi revise the idea of a mediated prophetic contact to God by calling the prophet Haggai himself "mal’ak yhwh" (Hag 1:13), whereas Malachi („my messenger“; Mal 1:1) carries the description of his role even within his name. The encounter between mal’ak and prophet in Zechariah’s night visions mark a turning point in the portray of the prophet and, as I will specify in my habilitation, also in the development of the mal'ak yhwh.
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A Loan to God: Wealth, Charity, and Usury in the Qur’an
Program Unit: The Qur’an and the Biblical Tradition (IQSA)
Andrew Geist, University of Notre Dame
Wealth in the Qur'an is a fickle substance. Gold is not an adequate currency to cover thevcost of one's redemption at the judgment (Q ‘Ali ‘Imran 3:91), and the possession of wealth is itself a sort of "test" (Q Taghabun 64:15). Usury (riba), the principle purpose of which is the
increase of wealth, has "no increase with God" (see, e.g., Q Rum 30:38–39; Q Baqarah 2:276). Conversely it is charity (?adaqa and zakat) that produces a real profit: ?adaqa and zakat are called a "loan" (qar?) to God, in whose hands the funds multiply (see, e.g., Q ?adid 57:11, 18).
One of the surprising effects of such a loan to God is that it atones (kaffara) for sins (Q Ma’ida 5:12; cf. Q 2:271). How may we understand the relation of these concepts to one another, and what might this say about the traditions with which they are in conversation?
The concepts of wealth, charity, and usury in the Qur'an are embedded in the worldviews of the Bible, early Judaism, and Christianity. Wealth's inability to save from death makes it unworthy of trust (Psa 49:6–7; cf. Prov 10:2, 11:4, 28). One can, however, through charity, loan to God with the hope of repayment (Prov 19:17). Almsgiving likewise funds a heavenly treasury in the New Testament (Luke 12). Where the Qur'anic passages draw from the Bible, however, it is likely through Christian and Jewish mediators of that tradition: Jacob of Serugh's homilies
proclaim wealth a "trap and snare," but also recommend being "rich toward God" through charity. Likewise, several of Ephrem's hymns praise the charitable for sending their wealth ahead to heaven, a deed by which saints have incredibly become God's creditors. Jewish sources likewise define the significance of almsgiving as an investment with an enduring principle in heaven and interest that pays in this world. In other cases the Hebrew zakah ("to be pure"), like Qur'anic zakat, appears in reference to almsgiving. In this broad linguistic and religious context,
we can also understand the peculiar statement in the Qur'an, that charity––as a loan to God––has an expiatory, atoning (kaffara) function. Q Tawbah 9:102–103 notably employs verbs of cleansing (?ahhara and zakka) to talk about the benefits of charity. It seems probable that this draws upon a linguistic and religious development in the Second-Temple period wherein expiation in the Hebrew Bible began to reflect language of the clearing and satisfaction of debt claims. ?adaqa and zakat, then, should be understood as developments of Jewish and Christian theologies of wealth.
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Wealth in the Šamaš Hymn and Psalms
Program Unit: Assyriology and the Bible
Andrew Geist, University of Notre Dame
The Akkadian Šamaš Hymn contains a unique section describing economic behavior (lines 99–125), in which Šamaš repays the honest merchant and lender with life and wealth, while illicit gain turns out to be no profit at all. I would like to suggest that in this scheme the hymn implies a certain metaphysics of wealth wherein various economic acts are akin to deeds of piety. On the damnable end the composition holds up examples of the deceitful merchant and creditor (ummânu). Their attempts at duplicitous gain in each case fail when each is "deceived concerning profit." Such wealth has an illusory quality. The hymn conversely commends deeds of gracious lending, weighing in another's favor, and lending with a generous measure as surer means to gain, emphasized through repeated use of wataru ("increase"). More importantly, these deeds please Šamaš, who extends the generous merchant's life (bala?a uttar). "Extra life" is typically a reward for sacrificial piety, with the implication that economic generosity in the hymn is an act of piety. Furthermore, the reward of an extended life in the Šamaš Hymn itself may have a financial coloring, since bala?a ("life," "to live") has the sense of financial solvency in certain credit and investment contexts. This point helps us to understand the mechanism by which economic deeds convert material wealth to "extra life" via a divine sort of repayment.
The relationship of wealth and piety in the Šamaš Hymn may also have a bearing on the relationship of illicit gain and economic mercy to piety in the Hebrew Bible. Specifically, there is the depiction of trust in wealth in Psalms 49 and 52 and piety and generosity in Psalms 37 and 112. In the former two there is a deep connection between wealth's illusory quality and the deceptive manner of its appropriation. The wicked person explicitly places his trust in the wealth he has gained by falsehood, a wealth due to fail him when he dies. That misplaced trust is itself an impiety, eclipsing his fear of God. Psalm 49 in particular may also recall the Šamaš Hymn's notion of life as a properly divine sort of commodity, since it considers life in terms of its redemption price. Psalms 37 and 112 likewise connect to the Šamaš Hymn when they describe how generous lending attends piety. That is, the God-fearer lends generously, a deed of piety which results in material blessing (i.e. wealth) and a full life.
In both the Šamaš Hymn and these examples from the Psalms, wealth is a more than incidental substance. It is a special medium for piety or impiety. Such a reflection on wealth's real value vis-à-vis the divine permeates biblical literature to a greater extent and more explicitly than Mesopotamian literature. Nevertheless, the Hebrew Bible may owe a certain conceptual debt to the Šamaš Hymn's notion of wealth's role in piety, even if it is the Bible that totally elevates pecuniary matters to a level touching on the divine.
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Sample Translation and Commentary on Philo De Plantatione
Program Unit: Philo of Alexandria
Albert C. Geljon, Christelijk Gymnasium Utrecht
In Plant. 46–58 Philo offers an allegorical exegesis of Exod 15:17–18, in which Moses prays that God may plant his people in the mountain of his inheritance. In these verses God is presented as planter and the notion of ‘planting’ is the connection with the main biblical lemma of Plant., Gen 6:9, where Noah is said to plant a vineyard. Philo interprets the mountain of God’s inheritance (klèronomia) as the cosmos because what comes into being is the allotment (klèros) of its maker. He also refers to an interpretation of others allegorists who say that God’s allotment is the good. In Philo’s exegesis the noun klèros, which has several meanings (‘lot’, ‘inheritance’ or ‘part’), plays a key role. All the several meanings are involved. The tribe of the Levites is called God’s klèros, and later on Philo discusses the portion of the Levites at considerable length (§§62–72). In the commentary the structure of this section is laid out. Attention is paid to theological and philosophical ideas, for instance the doctrine of the divine powers and aspects of Stoic ethics to which Philo refers. Furthermore, linguistic aspects are discussed, since Philo often employs words that are rarely used.
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Watch Your Step! Excrement and Self-Regulation in Deuteronomy
Program Unit: Hebrew Bible and Political Theory
Mark K. George, Iliff School of Theology
Governmentality studies draw on Michel Foucault’s understanding that the power of government is not restricted to that of political entities and structures but also includes shaping and directing the conduct of individuals, groups, and peoples. This theoretical understanding of government provides a means of understanding Deuteronomy 23:12–14 (MT 23:13–15), which commands Israel how to organize its military camp space for toilet purposes. “You shall have a designated area outside the camp to which you shall go. With your utensils you shall have a trowel; when you relieve yourself outside, you shall dig a hole with it and then cover up your excrement. Because the LORD your God travels along with your camp, to save you and to hand over your enemies to you, therefore your camp must be holy, so that he may not see anything indecent among you and turn away from you” (NRSV). This is an unusually precise, if rather mundane, practice to address, given that Deuteronomy presents itself as Moses’ last words to Israel before entering the land promised to it by God (Deut 1:3, 5). Scholars regularly claim Deuteronomy, with its stress on centralization, outlines the political organization for Israel. If so, why address toilet practices in the military camp? Why this aspect of military camp life rather than, say, dining practices or storage of weapons and materiel? The editors of the NRSV categorize this pericope under the heading “Purity of the Military Camp”; while the preceding verses address purity, this pericope does not. The camp is to be holy, but the motivation for this toilet practice is so that the deity does not see anything indecent (Deut 23:14 [MT 23:15]). So what is going on here? My argument is that the command about excrement demonstrates the extent to which governmental control, in Foucault’s sense of the term, is effected in Israel. Centralization manifests itself even in the smallest acts of human existence.
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Queering the Sacred, Sacralizing the Queer: The Bible and/as Gay Literature at the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco, 1986–2001
Program Unit: LGBTI/Queer Hermeneutics
Lynne Gerber, University of California-Berkeley
On Easter 1992, in the midst of the AIDS crisis, Jim Mitulski, senior pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco (MCCSF), preached a sermon about resurrection power. He drew on John 20, a traditional Easter text, but his second source was decidedly more contemporary: an except from Cancer in Two Voices by lesbian writers Sandra Butler and Barbara Rosenblum. Mitulski used the pairing of sacred Christian text and emergent LGBT literature to urge the largely gay congregation to see the Christian resurrection story as their own, a story specific to gay and lesbian people living through AIDS.
MCCSF is a significant site where sexual and religious identities intersected. Located in the Castro neighborhood, ground zero of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco, the church became an important community center in that seemingly secular community, hosting community forums and organizing responses to the AIDS crisis, housing dozens of recovery meetings, and conducting hundreds of AIDS funerals. It also became a congregational laboratory for the development of gay liberation and queer theology by its clerical staff and the many gay-positive leaders and theologians that preached from its pulpit. The church is a rich historical case for studying efforts at mutually constructing sexual and religious identities, liturgies, and canons in a time when Christianity and homosexuality were widely viewed as irreconcilable.
Drawing upon a newly available archive of sermon transcripts, this paper will analyze Jim Mitulski’s construction of a queer Christian canon consisting of both biblical texts and lesbian and gay literature in sermons delivered at MCCSF between 1986 and 2001. It will pay particular attention to how the pairing of Christian and LGB texts was used to maintain a gay- and sex-positive position in the face of AIDS while using AIDS as an opportunity to both draw upon the Christian tradition for spiritual sustenance and to challenge its adequacy in the face of the crisis. It will demonstrate how Mitulski tried to build a queer canon, not just by queering biblical texts but by sacralizing queer ones through the juxtaposition with traditional biblical materials.
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Analytic vs. Continental Varieties of Philosophical Criticism
Program Unit: Hebrew Bible and Philosophy
Jaco Gericke, North-West University (South Africa)
Given the existence of five major currents in philosophy of religion, one might conclude that there are presently at least five types of philosophical criticism possible. Classically, however, philosophical criticism was and is most often associated with "analytic" philosophy of religion (and to some extent with comparative philosophy of religion). This leaves the question as to what remains for the exegetical methodology to be in terms of relations with the so-called "continental" currents in philosophy of religion, i.e. hermeneutics, deconstruction, critical theory and feminist perspectives. The discussion to follow seeks to provide a typology and evaluative assessment of what seem to be the potential and pitfalls of each variation within the theory of an enlarged view of this new form of biblical criticism.
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The Compositional Horizon of the Verb “yarash” (Qal and Hiphil) in Deuteronomy and Joshua: A Re-evaluation
Program Unit: Deuteronomistic History
Stephen Germany, Emory University
Over thirty years ago, Norbert Lohfink proposed the existence of a Deuteronomistic conquest narrative spanning from Deut 1 to Josh 22 (DtrL, “deuteronomistische Landeroberungserzählung”) that was composed during the time of Josiah and thus preceded the formation of the larger, exilic Deuteronomistic History (DtrG). According to Lohfink, the use of the verb “yarash” (Qal and Hiphil) is a characteristic element of DtrL and most likely reflects Josiah’s expansionist policies in the late 7th century. While Lohfink’s notion of an originally independent DtrL composition has not found widespread acceptance (though it has recently had a limited revival among some scholars), subsequent research has continued to assume that the verb “yarash” reflects Deuteronomistic usage, broadly understood. This paper will demonstrate, in contrast, that most of the occurrences of this verb in Deuteronomy and Joshua are in fact found in post-priestly compositional contexts, suggesting that the characterization of the verb “yarash” as Deuteronomistic only addresses part of a larger picture. It will argue, furthermore, that the concepts of the possession of the land and the dispossession of its former inhabitants expressed by the verb “yarash” should be associated not with Josiah’s expansionist efforts in the 7th century but rather with the circumstances of the Persian period following the return from exile—a possibility that Lohfink in fact raised but dismissed prematurely. Finally, on a broader methodological level, this paper seeks to reiterate the insufficiency of investigating the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua solely or primarily within the context of the so-called Deuteronomistic History, for in doing so, the degree to which these books also developed within the horizon of a Hexateuch (both pre- and post-priestly) risks being overlooked.
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To Kill or Not to Kill: The Confluence of Ancient and Modern Theological Responses to the Moral Problem of Cherem
Program Unit: Theology of the Hebrew Scriptures
Justus T. Ghormley, University of Notre Dame
The account of Israel’s conquest of Canaan in Joshua 6-11 is perhaps one of the most difficult passages in the Hebrew Scriptures. In particular, the divine decree of cherem in Deut 7:2 and its enactment within these chapters of Joshua have presented a formable moral problem to ancient and modern readers alike. For their part, modern biblical scholars and theologians have employed a variety of hermeneutical strategies in the attempt to remove or at least mitigate the ethical offensiveness of the account of Israel’s conquest. In all such attempts, modern interpreters must confirm or deny the validity of the following three premises: 1) Joshua 6-11 and Deut 7:2 are Scripture, i.e. revelatory of the nature and character of the God of Hebrew Scripture; 2) Deut 7:2 and Joshua 6-11 are to be interpreted literally; and 3) the God of Hebrew Scripture is just and good. Most hermeneutical strategies affirm only two of these three premises. For example, some in accepting the first two premises conclude on the basis of these two that the third is false. If Joshua 6-11 reveals who the God of Hebrew Scripture is, and if this text is to be taken literally, i.e. as an enactment of divinely-inspired genocide, then—logically, it would seem—the God portrayed in these passages would neither be just nor good. Of course, there are some who try to affirm all three premises. And there are others who—in seeking to maintain the justness and goodness of the God—either reject Joshua 6-11 and Deut 7:2 as Scripture or deny the literal meaning of these passages. Of particular interest are those who take the latter route. For they, often unconsciously, place themselves within an ancient interpretive tradition otherwise largely repudiated by modern scholars, namely the tradition of allegorical interpretation. This diachronic confluence of hermeneutical strategy should not surprise; for ancient readers like their modern counterparts found depictions of violence in Jewish Scripture—such as cherem—to be problematic. Moreover, in antiquity as today, interpreters had to take a position on the truthfulness of the same three premises described above. The basic hermeneutical solutions to the moral problem of cherem that are employed today were already available to ancient readers. In light of this observation—that hermeneutical strategies do not change with time—it would not be unreasonable to assume that the “Deuteronomistic” compilers and revisers of Deuteronomy 7 as well as of Joshua 6-11 were also aware of these strategies. In fact a close examination of the redactional layers of Joshua and Judges suggests both that the compilers of these books were aware of the problematic nature of the command and execution of cherem and also that they sought to address this moral problem in a manner similar to that of later interpreters from antiquity and modernity. Like many of these later interpreters, the compilers—through their compositional intentionality—invited their audience to read the text of Joshua 6-11 in a non-literal fashion.
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Wish Fulfillment or Real Presence? The Old Testament’s Trinity
Program Unit: Theological Interpretation of Scripture
Mark S. Gignilliat, Beeson Divinity School, Samford University
Is the Trinity materially present in the Old Testament’s textual witness? Answering this question remains an enduring challenge for hermeneutical instincts shaped by modernity’s heightened historical consciousness. Certainly Moses was not a Trinitarian, was he? This paper affirms Brevard Childs’s claim that the early church’s struggle to come to terms with Trinitarian logic was not a battle against the Old Testament but was a battle for it. Or in other terms, the characterization of Yhwh in the Old Testament in relation to his Word, Wisdom, Spirit, and Angel (mal’akh) is a narratival dynamic necessitating an external hermeneutical grammar. The Trinitarian distinctions derived from the church’s speculative theology, distinctions such as person and substance or names pertaining to essence and relation, provide a hermeneutical rationale for the Old Testament’s own internal logic regarding the singularity of Yhwh and the sharing of his singular identity in differentiated personae. Drawing on such diverse figures as Augustine, Aquinas, John Owen, and Benjamin Sommer, this paper will argue for the insoluble relationship between Trinitarian doctrine and Old Testament exegesis regarding the divine name and identity.
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Disposal of the Flesh of the Sin/Purification Offering: Explicit, Implicit, and Conjectural Explanations for Ritual Instructions
Program Unit: Biblical Law
William K. Gilders, Emory University
According to sacrificial instructions in the book of Leviticus, Aaronide priests are to consume the flesh of ???? (“sin” or “purification”) offerings from which blood was not taken into the tent of meeting, while the flesh of such offerings from which blood was taken into the tent shrine is prohibited for consumption and must be burned (Lev 6:17-23 [Eng. 6:24-30]; 10:16-18; 16:27). While the instructions clearly indicate that treatment of the blood is the defining criterion for different treatments of the flesh of ???? offerings, they do not explain why it is the criterion. In this paper I will address the various ways interpreters have tried to fill this explanatory gap, with particular attention to distinctions between textually explicit data and the extrapolation of implicit conceptions. For example, does textual evidence support the conclusion that the treatment of the blood affects the condition of the flesh, rendering it either dangerously holy or dangerously impure (or a volatile combination of the two conditions)? Why is Aaronide consumption of some ???? flesh apparently obligatory rather than simply optional? How is the act of eating the flesh related to the act of burning it? I will also consider the relationship between the explicitly stated reason for a ritual rule and its functional effects—specifically, were the rules about the treatment of ???? blood and flesh deliberately conceived in order to prevent priests from benefiting from offerings made on their own behalf (as James W. Watts has recently affirmed); if so, why was this motivation not made explicit? The paper will conclude with reflection on the ritual instructions’ emphasis on sacred space, which appears to provide the key for understanding the special defining role assigned to the manipulated blood.
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Gerîm as gôyîm in 4QOrdinances A: Restoring Lacunae in the Slave Law of 4Q159 fr. 2–4 and 8 1–3a
Program Unit: Biblical Law
Yonder Moynihan Gillihan, Boston College
Lacunae in the slave law of 4Q159 frustrate attempts to reconstruct its commands, logic, and purpose. I argue that the best clue to its purpose and contents comes in an analogous slave law in 4QDf, which focuses on the redemption (????) of an enslaved Israelite. Assuming ???? to be the theme of the law of 4Q159 brings an external control to bear on its interpretation and allows a greater degree of confidence in the restoration of crucial lacunae in its first line. The reading that results seems superior to previous proposals insofar as it shows consistency with other sectarian halakhic and eschatological texts, e.g., MMT and the Eschatological Midrash and repeats the ancient habit of interpreting the slave laws of Deut 15 through those of Lev 25. Further, my proposal affirms Moshe Weinfeld's longstanding speculation that the presentation of laws in 4Q159 is at least partially governed by the order of laws in Deuteronomy.
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Inspired Interpretation of Inspired Texts: The Habbakuk Pesher's Doctrine of Exegesis (1QpHab 7:1–5a) in Hellenistic-Roman Context
Program Unit: Qumran
Yonder Moynihan Gillihan, Boston College
This study aims to identify a possible source of the interpretive doctrine that stands behind the exegesis of Scripture in the pesharim of the Dead Sea Scrolls. I focus on the Habbakuk pesher's explanation of how God revealed the true meaning of Habbakuk's oracles to the Teacher of Righteousness, a much later reader, and not to the prophet (1QpHab 7:1-5a). It is possible, I argue, that the Covenanters appropriated a method for interpreting inspired texts from a doctrine on the philosophical interpretation of poetic texts preserved in a number of Plato's dialogues and elsewhere. In brief, the doctrine identifies two moments of divine inspiration that are necessary to gain full understanding of a poetic text. In the first moment the gods inspire poets to write but do not give the them understanding of their own words. In the second moment the philosopher, whose soul intimately communes with the gods, reveals the divine meaning of the poets' words. This "double inspiration" doctrine is, to be sure, very different in the pesharim and Plato, but the similarities in hermeneutical principle and practice—especially the requirement that the inspired interpreter be highly learned and able to deal directly with the actual words of a written text—justify bringing analysis of Greek and Roman doctrines of interpretation into conversations on textual interpretation in the Dead Sea Scrolls, early Judaism, and early Christianity.
My study concludes with reflections on the implications of this kind of interdisciplinary work for the humanities in general. By bringing Qumran into conversation with Classics, we not only enrich the study of the DSS but of the Greco-Roman world as well: Qumran scholars, after all, curate one of the most valuable collections of evidence for the study of the eastern Mediterranean world in an age of profound transformation. Social, intellectual, and political history, as well as concepts of the sociology of knowledge, stand to be enriched by the dialogue.
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Two Sides of the Same Coin: Blending Distinct Perspectives through Parallelism
Program Unit: Biblical Hebrew Poetry
Susanne Gillmayr-Bucher, Catholic Private University Linz
Parallelism usually focuses on one fact, action or message, which is presented it in two different ways. Thereby the contiguous lines of parallelism superimpose an at least slightly divergent view of the same event or message. Adele Berlin calls the effect of such a perception a “binocular vision”. Such emphasis on the point of view goes beyond a mere description of parallelism as a poetic phenomenon and includes its cognitive dimension. Recently, various studies on biblical anthropology also address the cognitive-noetic dimension of parallelism emphasising the multidimensional aspects of perception and thinking it initiates. In this way, parallelism opens a space were dynamic insights might unfold.
Following this approach my paper will focus on one specific form of change between perspectives, were, on the one hand, an event is presented as a result of an action, and, on the other hand, the same event is shown from the perspective of someone who experiences this action. Because many of such examples express “cause” and “effect”, they are usually subsumed under the category “subordination”. Yet, the explicit change between an event or a causal agent and the perspective of the affected yields more than an assessment of a causal or consecutive argument may provide. If an event is presented from two distinctly different perspectives, the diverging estimations, explicit emotional responses, or new conjunctions (may) challenge the anticipated images evoked by the first or second part alone. In this way the recipients are presented two distinct sides of the same coin, and it is their task to correlate these images.
Based on psalms 90–106 I will describe the performance of this specific variety of presenting diverging perspectives through parallelism. For this purpose, I will first analyse the syntactic and semantic structures of the examples whereby special attention will be given to evaluations, emotions and also metaphorical images. Subsequently, I will focus on the interaction of the different perspectives. For that the theory of “blending” will be applied to outline the interaction and consolidation of the distinct perspectives.
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Solomon: A Mirror of Political Criticism
Program Unit: Use, Influence, and Impact of the Bible
Susanne Gillmayr-Bucher, Catholic Private University Linz
Throughout centuries king Solomon has been used as a model for contemporary rulers. On the example of this biblical king positive and negative aspects of sovereigns and their reign have been demonstrated. Therein Solomon’s exemplary reign of peace, his great wisdom but also his power is acknowledged, however, critically.
With this critical emphasis the reception of king Solomon continues a tendency already present in the biblical stories. Despite all his glory Solomon’s image in 1 Kings also includes a critical evaluation. Later, the self critical references to Solomon in the book of Ecclesiastes and the open critique in the book of Sirach continue this trend thereby building the basis for further receptions.
Regardless of whether political poems, historical novels or even adventure stories from the realms of light fiction make use of king Solomon, the critical element often is one of the most important features. On the example of the biblical stories of Solomon authors present a critique of rulers or regimes of their own time. Thus the image of king Solomon always depends on the actual political situation and political discourses. From the image of Solomon as a fallen king to a totalitarian sovereign, from the master of demons to a ruler of little relevance, the reception history of this biblical king mirrors actual political conditions at the time. Furthermore, such literary images join the political discourses and in this way they also shape and influence political opinions.
In this paper I will show how the biblical image of Solomon’s rule is used to initiate or participate in critical political discourses. First I will present a short overview on the history of this tradition and then I will focus on selected examples from the 20th/21st century. Thereby I will chose political novels and poems from the context of totalitarian regimes (e.g. from the former GDR) but also historical novels, poems and examples from light fiction expressing less radical critique of political leaders presented in the image of Solomon. These works will be discussed in the context of their own time in order to estimate their contribution to the political discourse. Short side glances on contemporary exegetical and church-related interpretations of Solomon’s reign and their interaction with current political trends will add further insights to the influence of images of Solomon on political discourses.
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Juxtaposition and Reinterpretation in the Book of Joshua
Program Unit: Joshua-Judges
Rachelle Gilmour, University of Sydney
This paper analyses the significance of the juxtaposition of episodes/stores in the Book of Joshua and proposes that this is an interpretative key both for the final form of the book, and for its earlier stages when redactors brought the various episodes together. It argues that pericopes in the narrative are re-evaluated and given a new interpretation based on their new contexts. The literary features that promote this reinterpretation will also be examined. The primary examples I will focus upon are the allusions to the exodus story in Joshua 3-5 which are brought to the fore by juxtaposition; the undermining of Joshua 6 by juxtaposition with Joshua 7; the interpretive effect of repetition in Joshua 7:26 and 8:29; and plot reversal in Joshua 9-11. I will conclude by showing how disparate stories are brought into dialogue with one another by juxtaposition, resulting in a comprehensible, if complex, message in the final form of the book.
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Does the Study of Rhetoric Still Matter for the Integrity of 2 Corinthians?
Program Unit: Rhetoric and Early Christianity
Mark D. Given, Missouri State University
The number of proponents of the literary integrity of 2 Corinthians has increased in recent years and rhetorical criticism is often identified as a contributor to this trend. However, many scholars remain unconvinced and one might wonder if rhetorical criticism has anything more to offer. One weakness of previous rhetorical-critical defenses of the letter’s integrity has been an excessive formalism, a fact now increasingly acknowledged by rhetorical-critical scholars themselves. This paper will assess the strengths and weaknesses of previous applications of ancient rhetorical theory to 2 Corinthians and offer a way forward. Any defense of the integrity of 2 Corinthians must make sense of the letter’s structure and, above all, account for chaps. 10-13. Young and Ford were the first to realize that chaps. 10-13 are a peroration but, ironically, rhetorical scholarship has consistently weakened the force of this insight. Initially the idea was dismissed because of an over-reliance on ancient rhetorical handbooks and a serious misunderstanding of what the handbooks say about perorations. Later, rhetorical scholars granted that chaps. 10-13, or some portion thereof, could be a peroration, but muddied the waters with overly formalistic analyses of the passage. This paper will build on my forthcoming article on the disposition of Romans to offer a new comparative argument concerning the disposition of 2 Corinthians. By avoiding formalistic defects in rhetorical-critical readings of 2 Corinthians and keeping rhetoric and theology together, I will demonstrate the rhetorical and theological integrity of 2 Corinthians.
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Alienated Identity in Acts of Thomas
Program Unit: Ancient Fiction and Early Christian and Jewish Narrative
Jennifer A. Glancy, Le Moyne College
Acts of Thomas is structured around narrative disruption of identity, in multiple senses of the word. Most fundamentally, identity refers to selfhood or personal identity—what makes a person unique. Concern with identity extends beyond questions about selfhood to include questions about both spatiotemporal continuity and the relationship between individual and group identity. Exposition of Christian identity in Acts of Thomas implicates these multiple senses of identity. Supplanting corporate identification according to geography, language, and race/ethnicity, Acts of Thomas constructs an alienated, exilic identity dependent on relationship with Jesus and expressed through polymorphy of various kinds, identity epitomized, not without ambiguity, as radical twinning with Christ. What do I mean by an alienated, exilic identity? In Acts of Thomas, we confront "those differences that make us more than we are, recognizable perhaps for a moment in our path of becoming and self-overcoming but never fixed in terms of how we can be read (by others), or how we classify ourselves, never the basis of an identity or a position, ever a fractured identity and multiple positions" (Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections of Life, Politics, and Art, p. 91).
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Radical Gratitude and the Mission of God: Nourishing Celebration and Inclusivism in Local Congregations in Light of the Festival Calendar (Deut 16:1–17)
Program Unit: GOCN Forum on Missional Hermeneutics
Mark Glanville, Trinity College - Bristol
The festival calendar of Deuteronomy (16:1-17) offers a radical vision for a community of thankfulness, of generosity, and of inclusion for the vulnerable. This text invited ancient Israel into seasonal rhythms of celebration in light of the harvest, namely through Passover-Massot, the feast of Weeks and the feast of Booths. A missional reading highlights how the festival calendar aimed to shape the Old Covenant people as a contrast society (Gehard Lohfink) of thanksgiving and generosity. A three-part movement characterizes Deuteronomy 16:1-17, of (1) the divine gift of land and its produce, which results in (2) thanksgiving with celebration, which in turn produces (3) generosity and inclusion for vulnerable people, namely the stranger, the fatherless and the widow. “The concept of Israel rejoicing together ‘before Yahweh’ is the supreme expression of its election as Yahweh’s people and the culmination of deliverance from Egypt” (Gordon McConville).
This paper offers an exegesis of the festival calendar, highlighting themes of thanksgiving, feasting, and justice. It then unpacks these three themes in turn. It takes time to explore practically, in light of the presenter’s own journey as a missional pastor, how thanksgiving, celebration, radical generosity, and inclusivism may be brought into the life of the local congregation. The study foregrounds the importance of thanksgiving as the beginning of missional activism, illustrating Peskett and Ramachandra’s observation that, “Mission is about being. It is about being a distinctive kind of people, a countercultural . . . community among the nations.” The missional implications of Old Covenant feasting in light of the Lord’s abundance will also be explored. Local congregations may be a source of joy and celebration within their local communities. Practical ways in which worshipping communities may foster diversity and may share their lives across socio-economic barriers will be addressed.
This paper dialogues both with scholarship on Deuteronomy and also with scholarship on mission, in particular recent dialogue upon a missional hermeneutic.
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The Bible Online Learner as an Effective and Open Source Biblical Language Learning Environment for Seminaries and Faculties of Theology
Program Unit: Applied Linguistics for Biblical Languages
Oliver Glanz, Andrews University
On the basis EU funded EuroPLOT project an open-source and open-access web-based platform “Bible Online Learner”/Bible OL (http://bibleol.3bmoodle.dk/) was developed. Bible OL allows for corpus-based teaching and learning of Biblical Languages. In lated 2014 the Eep Talstra Centre for Bible and Coumputer at VU University gave open access to its feature-rich database. Any language instructor can now for the Biblical Hebrew class quickly construct exercises that focus on any chosen linguistic level (alphabet, vocabulary, morphology, phrase analysis [subject, object, predicate, etc.], clause types, clause relations [attributive, adjunctive, etc.]).
Nicolai Winther-Nielsen will describe the latest achievements by the Global Learning Initiative (http://global-learning.org/) which supports collaboraton among developers, partners and teachers. He will present three new or updated features are being developed during 2015 in collaboration with programmers Claus Tøndering and Judith Gottschalk. First, the learning outcomes of students are documented in a skill optimizing application called Learning Journey; teachers can monitor the learning curve of students and give informed feedback on performance on regular bases, and students can compete with each other. Second, a new application will help students determine lexical meaning in context. Third, In early 2015 the syntactically analyzed Greek Text of the Global Bible Initiative was implemented for the open source Nestle 1904, and he will invite colleagues to join in the development of new courses for Greek. He emphasize the need to join forces in supporting settings where poverty or persecution restricts language learning and he will invite students to participate in a competition to support global learning.
Oliver Glanz will show how the architecture of Bible OL allows to partner with scholars, resaerch teams and institutions to further improve corpus based learning. A good example is the cooperation with shebanq.ancient-data.org (receiver of the Digital Humanity Awards 2014) and Andrews University. Oliver Glanz will demonstrate three major results of this collaboration. First, due to the same database implemented in the query site SHEBANQ and the learning site Bible OL the user can compose very detailed exercises. Second, due to SHEBANQ enabled queries all different verbal classes (e.g. i-nun, iii-he, etc.) were detected and integrated in Bible OL. This allows Hebrew instructors to filter out any verbal class that student are not yet prepared to analyze. At the same time the instructor can select those classes that have been covered in the teachings so far and present them as exercises to students. Third, through the implementation of the Bible OL in several Hebrew courses at Andrews critical data can be generated that allows for measuring learning efficiency. Statistical analyses show that the average student performance has significantly increased through Bible OL. The subjective experience of more than 100 students that joined Bible OL based Hebrew classes supports the statistics. The great majority of students regards the combination of the Bible OL, a corpus-based approach and a Hebrew Reference Grammar as clearly outperforming the pedagogical efficiency of textbook-based, classical teaching methods. A short overview on how the BOL can be integrated in a Hebrew course will given.
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SHEBANQ in the Exegesis Classroom: Teaching Exegetical Research with the Receiver of the Digital Humanities Awards 2014
Program Unit: Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies
Oliver Glanz, Andrews University
In March 2015 the SHEBANQ project did receive the prestigious Digital Humanties Award of 2014 in the category “Best DH Tool or Suite of Tools”. With funding of CLARIN, the ETCBC developed in cooperation with the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences a web-based service under http://shebanq.ancient-data.org/. The service allows for open access to the richly annotated Amsterdam Hebrew database. The user can interact with SHEBANQ on five levels: (a) reading the Hebrew Bible in its plain format (MT) or visualizing any chosen selection of linguistic annotations (morphology, phrase information, clause information, etc.); (b) querying the Hebrew Bible on all its linguistics levels; (c) saving queries as annotations to the Hebrew text and making them publically available if so chosen; (d) hyperlinking ran queries with a persistent identifier (pid) as references in scholarly publication; (e) exporting query results as spreadsheet for further processing in Excel or similar programs.
In my presentation I will demonstrate how SHEBANQ can be used in the classroom as a tool for teaching exegetical methodology. I will show how SHEBANQ can help the student to translate his/her exegetical question into a query that transcends the usual limitations that come with word based searches. After students have been introduced to SHEBANQ and learned how to run syntactical queries it has not been seldom that students communicate that they rather use SHEBANQ for Hebrew queries than their personal BibleSoftware installations. My presentation I will first give a short overview on the functionalities that come with SHEBANQ. Second, I will demonstrate the taught process from question to query. Finally, I will explain what SHEBANQ features have been proven to be most useful in the classroom setting.
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Genealogy Lists as a Window to Historiographic Periodization in the Book of Chronicles
Program Unit: Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah
David A. Glatt-Gilad, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
This paper will take note of three aspects of historiographic periodization that permeate the genealogy lists in Chronicles. The first is the tendency of the lists to compress past and present - a phenomenon that corresponds well with the Chronicler's desire to emphasize the timeless dimension of certain ideals, among them his view of Israelite identity as encompassing all of its ancient constituent elements. The second is the mention of particular kings in the genealogy lists (Saul, David, Solomon, Jotham, and Hezekiah) in connection with events or actions that suit the positive tenor of their reigns, as reported in or alluded to later on in the Chronicler's continuous historical narrative. The third is the chronological centrality of the Davidic period in the genealogical lists of priests and levites - a phenomenon that implicitly underscores David's key role in the history of the cult, as spelled out on numerous occasions throughout the Chronicler's historiography. When taken together, the above three points demonstrate the value of probing the Chronicler's genealogy lists in terms of how they can contribute to appreciating the Chronicler's unique historical outlook.
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Joseph of Nazareth in the Protevangelium of James
Program Unit: Christian Apocrypha
Justin M. Glessner, DePauw University
Without dismissing the importance of prior critique of gendering of Mary in the Protevangelium of James (PJ), I offer here an aligned study concerned with other questions related to some of PJ’s secondary (more implicit) gendered concerns. Joseph makes a substantial and significant appearance in this work as well, and, as has rarely been acknowledged or put to critical reflection, Joseph is never far from the narrative center (even when he is). PJ’s complex and gendered reception of Joseph both preserves and shapes canonical traditions about Joseph with Mary and Jesus. Similar to his showing in the Gospel of Matthew (Matt 1-2), every single one of PJ’s tales that feature Joseph (PJ 9-19) are narrated from his (not Mary’s) point of view. As suggested by James H. Liu and János László with regards to prototypical in-group characters in ‘historical’ narratives, Joseph’s point-of-view characterization in PJ feasibly plays a key role in mediating collective memory and putative in-group identity, intimately bound up with the processes of male self-fashioning. My findings expose the political mechanics behind Joseph’s colorful reception in PJ and open interpretive possibilities for rethinking normative views of manliness in early Christianity and beyond.
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The Significance of the “Midrash of Shemhazai and Azael” for the Study of the Qumran Book of Giants
Program Unit: Qumran
Matthew Goff, Florida State University
J.T. Milik in his justly famous The Books of Enoch (1976) published the editio princeps of the Book of Giants fragments from Qumran. In the same book he also published an edition of a late rabbinic text known as the “Midrash of Shem?azai and Azael.” He discerned that this midrashic work has a significant amount of material in common with the Book of Giants fragments. In this paper I explore this under-utilized midrashic resource for understanding the Book of Giants. I examine the rabbinic sources for the “Midrash of Shem?azai and Azael,” which are not fully represented in Milik’s edition. Milik, though his opinions on these two texts and the relationship between them are at times unpersuasive, was fully correct that this midrashic text can help us better understand key details of the Qumranic text, which are often unclear, due to the highly fragmentary condition of the text. In my paper I discuss the major instances in which this is the case. My chief conclusion is that the “Midrash of Shem?azai and Azael” suggests that in Book of Giants at least some of the giants do not perish in the flood, whereas a leading view today holds that in this work all the giants die in the flood.
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The Cruciform Faith and Freedom in Galatians: A Dialogue with Chinese Churches
Program Unit: Contextual Biblical Interpretation
Menghun Goh, Vanderbilt University
This essay argues that Paul’s notions of freedom, faith, and law are cross-oriented and thus cannot be objectified. Consequently, believers’ relationships with God, spirit, Christ, and others need to be vibrant; they cannot be systematized. These cruciform notions are highlighted by my Chinese yin-yang correlational worldview, which is not unlike the biblical worldview that is proprioceptive and communal (for instance, the values of honor and shame).
The problematic that I am addressing are the individual-centered biblical interpretations in Chinese churches that are shaped by the Western traditional theology that values autonomy, even though Chinese cultures are group-oriented. The Western lens through which Chinese churches engage the Bible alienates them from their heritage and makes them incorporate foreign problems embedded in such a lens. Foregrounding the communal and religious dimensions of Galatians, I want to stress that believers are not independent, but are always already interconnected with others. This dynamics of text and context in our interpretation also points to the need of a cruciform orientation in Chinese cultures that tend to overemphasize seniority in one’s relationship with others.
Now if believers are called to freedom (5:13) and that “Christ freed us with respect to freedom” (5:1), then faith and law cannot contradict freedom. Note that as Paul does not qualify freedom, our notions of faith and law cannot be objectified. The communal and religious aspects of faith that cannot be objectified can be found in phrases like “through faith,” “in faith,” and “out of faith.” Such an interconnectedness is highlighted when those who believe out of faith (like Abraham) are the children of Abraham (3:6-7) and are blessed together with him (3:9). For Paul, this blessing of Abraham is a promise sustained by faith in, through, and out of the faith of Christ (3:14, 22). While believers are children of God through faith in Christ (3:26), the correlation between the children of Abraham and children of God is not a one-to-one correspondence. Rather, the correlation is figurative (4:24).
This figurative correlation in Paul’s narrative of law and promise is significant. It signals that the law is not negative in itself. In saying that the entire law is summed up in “Love your neighbor as yourself” (5:14; cf. 6:2), Paul points to a paradoxical notion of law. Just as the law does not oppose the promises of God (3:21) but leads believers to Christ to be justified out of faith (3:24), it lets Paul died with respect to itself so that he might live with respect to God (3:19). The law, as such, exposes believers to its own limit; after all, it was introduced 430 years after God’s promise given to Abraham (3:17). Indeed, since the law was given after Israel was called and liberated from the Egyptian bondage, it should serve faith and freedom. This non-objectifying feature of freedom, faith, and law not only can help us navigate through Galatians, it can also empower Chinese churches to engage its own culture and Western traditional theology analytically and hospitably.
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Qoheleth’s Gospel in Ecclesiastes: Eccl 3:1–15, 7:15–22, and 11:1–6 Considered
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Elaine Wei Fun Goh, Seminari Theoloji Malaysia
Qoheleth’s Gospel in Ecclesiastes: Eccl 3:1-15, 7:15-22 and 11:1-6 Considered
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Aramaic Dialectal Awareness in Late Antiquity
Program Unit: Aramaic Studies
Binyamin Y. Goldstein, Yeshiva University
In Late Antique Mesopotamia, Aramaic was the lingua franca, spoken from the Mediterranean to India. Over this broad geographic range there existed an equally broad range of dialectal variety. In this paper, we will examine several Christian and Jewish primary sources which testify to a perception of distinct dialects of Aramaic. Moreover, this awareness seems to have developed over several centuries, with the perception of the dialectal division becoming more and more defined. Although the distinct features of each dialect remained essentially static through this period, perception of their dissimilarity developed slowly. Discussion of this dialectal awareness has several exciting implications, shedding further light on Jewish-Christian interaction in Late Antique Mesopotamia as well as on Late Antique linguistic theory.
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On Some Small Collections within Isaiah 1–39 and Their Composition
Program Unit: Book of Isaiah
Ronnie Goldstein, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The paper will attempt to deal (by close reading of diverse passages) with some examples of the place of small collections and compilations within the composition of the book of Isaiah, and especially with the dislocation and relocation of sources, as part of the different redaction phases of Isaiah 1-39.
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Questioning God: Cain and Abel as Hominis Sacri – An Agambenian Reading of Gen 4:1–16
Program Unit: Latino/a/e and Latin American Biblical Interpretation
Julián Andrés González, Southern Methodist University
The proposed study posits that an interpretation of Gen. 4:1-16 grounded in Giorgio Agamben’s notions of homo sacer, state of exception, and sovereign power offers a fruitful theoretical and critical framework to the reading of the story of Cain and Abel, and can adequately account for the intervention of God in the tale. I examine early Christian and Jewish interpretations as well as a sample of contemporary readings from the field of biblical scholarship. The analysis illustrates their inattentiveness to God’s intervention in the life of the brothers. In addition, it offers an Agambenian reading to demonstrate political advantages of reading Gen. 4:1-16 in the context of contemporary notions of violence and migration. The study makes the character of God the center of analysis and sympathizes with Cain in order to argue that the shift of emphasis opens up the symbolic world of the text to new and relevant meanings. These meanings become pertinent by overlapping the Agambenian reading of Gen. 4:1-16 with social realities that inform the construction of strong identities, yet they as well conceal the problematic character of the other who disrupts the social order. Therefore, the study shifts the focus of interpretation of the story and insists on the public-political responsibility of biblical scholarship. The study argues that once the character of God is included in the interpretive task, God’s incomprehensibility as the reason for his intervention in the life of the brother needs reevaluation. Under the Agambenian framework, Cain and Abel are examples of hominis sacri. Questioning God in the story then upsets the traditional readings of the narrative, creates symbolic bridges to demystify the intervention of God, and promotes the discussion of issues of violence and migration in contemporary societies.
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What Does Thomas Have to Do with Q? The Afterlife of a Sayings Gospel
Program Unit: Matthew
Mark Goodacre, Duke University
Francis Watson's Gospel Writing fills the void left by the absence of Q with a sayings gospel genre instantiated by Thomas. But does the absence of Q require an appeal to Thomas? If Thomas is a second century work familiar with the Synoptics, how far can it help with reflections on first century Christian origins? In the aftermath of Watson's work, is there still a future for Sayings Gospels?
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"Strange, Restless, and Unfamiliar": The Character of the Fourth Gospel in the John, Jesus, and History Project
Program Unit: John, Jesus, and History
Mark Goodacre, Duke University
This paper addresses the scholarly receptions of the John, Jesus, and History project. It will highlight emerging themes in such receptions and reflect on the relationship between these themes and the diverse articles included in the first three volumes of John, Jesus, and History.
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Leviticus 22:24: A Prohibition on Gelding for the Land of Israel?
Program Unit: Biblical Law
Elaine Goodfriend, California State University - Northridge
Lev 22:24 is found in a passage enumerating various physical blemishes which exclude an animal from being offered as a sacrifice. Lev 22:24A lists four kinds of genital mutilation which are prohibited for sacrificial animals. However, the second half of the verse adds, "And in your land you shall not do [thus]," which is understood by most modern commentaries as a reiteration for emphasis of the first half of the verse. In contrast, ancient commentaries and some moderns understand the clause as a general prohibition on castration for domesticated animals in the land of Israel. This issue has several important ramifications for life in ancient Israel. First, the prohibition of castration would have led to an excessive number of intact males, which cannot be utilized for the purposes of plowing and pulling because they are unmanageable. (For the purpose of insemination, one male can supply the needs of tens of females.) As a consequence, more (male) animals would have available for sacrifice and consumption. Therefore, while most scholars assume that ancient Israelites rarely ate meat, this may not have been the case. This interpretation is also relevant for understanding the Israelite attitude to animals, especially those of the flock and herd. Further, an examination of the terminology for bovines in Biblical Hebrew is important for understanding Exodus 21's legislation on “the goring ox” (or is that “the goring bull”?). This paper, after careful examination of biblical law in general and H in particular, will confirm the interpretation of ancient exegetes that Lev 22:24B served as a ban on animal castration.
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The Purpose of Calling and the Groaning of Creation: Re-considering the Grammar and Context of Romans 8:28
Program Unit: Ecological Hermeneutics
Haley Goranson, University of St. Andrews
Empathy for the natural world is steadily increasing. Evidence for this is seen in the secular arena, as well as within traditional theological readings of the bible. ‘Ecological hermeneutics’ is no longer an altogether unfamiliar phrase. And, yet, readers of the bible remain trapped by anthropocentric perspectives which have dominated and continue to dominate hermeneutical landscapes, particularly those within popular Christianity in America. One well-known text which serves as a perfect example of such human-centered perspectives is Romans 8:28: ‘We know that all things work together for good for those whole love God, who are called according to his purpose (NRSV). No less than a handful of elements of 8:28 are disputed among scholars: the subject of the verb, the textual omission or addition of 'ho theos', the presence of 'panta', to name just a few. Though these and other elements of 8:28 are disputed, what is never disputed and is purely assumed is how one should render the dative participles: ‘those who love God’ and ‘those called according to [God’s] purpose’. In the majority of translations, the datives are read as datives of advantage or the indirect object: ‘to the advantage of or for those who love God’. But this is to miss Paul’s point. The datives can just as easily be read as datives of instrumentality or association, so that ‘good’ is not brought about to believers but through or in cooperation with believers. That the datives should be taken in this way is evident on the basis of (1) 'synergei', which most accurately means ‘work with’ or ‘cooperate with’, (2) Paul’s use of 'panta' and its relationship to the wider context, most specifically the relationship between believers’ glory and creation’s groaning in 8:19-22, and (3) the covenantal significance of believers’ ‘calling’ and God’s purpose for them.
When the grammar of 8:28 is re-evaluated in the light of the wider context (8:17-30), a context framed by believers’ glory in 8:17 and 30, then 8:28 is no longer clearly about God promising to bring a believer through suffering and unpleasant circumstances to their own personal ultimate end of salvation or eternal life with God. Romans 8:28 is not about the good of the believer. It is about what God is doing through the believer or with the believer on behalf of the entire cosmos. It is about Christians fulfilling their ultimate purposes as God’s people, those renewed in the new Adam, taking up their adamic duty as God’s representatives to the creation and intercessors to God on behalf of creation. It is about God bringing redemption to ‘all things’ through those already redeemed in his Son. This re-reading of Romans 8:28 will demonstrate to those already empathetic to ecologic concerns that even their presuppositions and longings for spiritual assurance and encouragement remain in force, even in creation-focused texts such as Romans 8.
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'Rule(s)' as Tools: The Functions and Features of the Rule of Faith as Hermeneutical Criterion in Patristic Exegesis
Program Unit: Development of Early Christian Theology
Joseph K. Gordon, Marquette University
A number of patristics scholars, including Frances Young, Eric Osborn, Paul Blowers, Prosper Grech, Lewis Ayres, and others have recently drawn attention to the functions and features of the regula fidei/kanon tes pistes, or "rule(s)" of faith, in early Christian hermeneutical reflection on and engagement with scripture. Osborn, in particular, has demonstrated the similarities between the Christian employment of the "rule(s)" and the epistemological functions of kanoni/regulae in antecedent Greco-Roman philosophy. Starting especially from Osborn's work on the potential philosophical context of the "rule(s)," the present essay will provide a historical examination of the functions and features of the "rule(s)" in the writings of Irenaeus, Origen, and Augustine, to identify commonalities and developments in the use of the rule as a hermeneutical criterion for Christian engagement with scripture. Through my examination of the use of the "rule(s)" in these figures I will argue that the "rule(s)" represent accounts of 1.) ecclesially received judgments constitutive of Christian faith which are born in worship and employed for catechetical and polemical needs, 2.) which insist upon the synthetic and sequential relationships of divine and human actors in the redemptive activity of the Son and Holy Spirit in history, 3.) have a consistently realist cast--that is, they are not merely grammatical guidelines for Christian speech but refer to the actuality of God's action in history--and 4.) exhibit and remain open to further development and specification as specific theological questions arose in the Christian communities' ongoing reflection on the relationships between the Father, Son, and Spirit and the constitution and nature of the Son and the Holy Spirit. The "rule(s)" then, bear witness to Christian self-understanding on the move which are antecedent to the two-Testament Bible and which specify the actual content of scripture--to quote Augustine, the rule provides in concise fashion the res to which scripture refers. A number of contemporary theologians have proposed the utility of the "rule(s)" or of creedal affirmations for Christian engagement with scripture today. My presentation will conclude with a critique of some of these recent approaches and will suggest principles for responsibly and adequately understanding the actual historical employment of the "rule(s)" in the early church and for appropriating the "rule(s)" in the service of Christian hermeneutics and exegesis of scripture in our own time.
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Syntactic Stylometry on the Basis of Ancient Greek Treebanks
Program Unit: Global Education and Research Technology
Robert J. Gorman, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
This presentation aims to familiarize the audience with new methods of generating and exploiting corpora of syntactic data on ancient Greek, as evidence in stylometric investigations. The basic input is drawn from the major treebanks of ancient Greek (AGDT and PROIEL), and therefore I will briefly introduce new features in Arethusa, one of the most important treebanking platforms. The bulk of the discussion will focus on the application of treebank-derived data to research questions. The proximate research goal is to identify syntactic fingerprints in order to distinguish authorship and to characterize aspects of text reuse in Greek prose, especially where surface features such as vocabulary may be misleading. Because data are lacking for a range of Greek prose authors, the first step, which is well advanced, is to prepare syntactic trees of representative writers, particularly historians. The second step is to extract syntactic information from this corpus in a usable form. The most straightforward approach seems to be to convert dependency relationships into “syntactic words” (sWords). To do this, one may trace the dependency path between each leaf node and the sentence root and record the dependency label for each edge.
A chief advantage of recasting dependencies as syntax words is that they are both human readable and suitable for immediate computational analysis: with trivial modifications such files can be put into standard text-processing software to produce type-token ratios, word frequency histograms, etc., providing detailed syntactic information about individual authors.
Next I examine the results of applying various computational models of pattern recognition and prediction to the corpus of syntax words. Here, I will show that we can computationally distinguish between different authors on this basis. The presentation will conclude with illustrations of abstract value by concrete results: I will discuss syntactic constructions that significantly distinguish, one from another, various works and authors in AGDT and PROIEL, as well as exploring questions of authorship and text reuse.
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The Necessity of Appropriate Fear: The Two-Fold Function of Q 12:4–5
Program Unit: Q
Shane Patrick Gormley, Loyola University Chicago
John Kloppenborg’s analysis of the stratigraphy of Q stands as one of the most comprehensive and consistent approaches to the composition and genre of Q as we are able to reconstruct it. His work, along with that of Ronald Piper and others, have highlighted the integrity of independent collections of aphoristic sayings within the “formative stratum” of Q. Each collection, or “cluster,” contains “hortatory sayings, topically arranged,” some being “prefaced with programmatic pronouncements” and concluding with warnings or sanctions “that underscore the gravity of the discourse” (Kloppenborg-Verbin, Excavating Q, 145-55).
Within one of these clusters, delineated by Kloppenborg as Q 12:2-7, 11-12, sits the saying about the necessity of appropriate fear: “And do not be afraid of those who kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul; rather, be afraid of the one who is able to destroy both body and soul in Gehenna” (Q 12:4-5). In Kloppenborg’s analysis of this cluster, he concludes that 12:4-5 is the “kernel” around which other sayings have been added. Piper argues that the saying of 12:4-5 is the beginning of a collection of sayings, stretching at least as far as verse 9. Christopher Tuckett suggests that these verses are themselves a later interpolation into another collection of sayings.
This paper reexamines the saying of Q 12:4-5 within its immediate context. I agree with Kloppenborg’s delineation of the original cluster, but I do not find 12:4-5 to be key to the cluster’s composition. Instead, I argue that the saying of Q 12:4-5 is included within this cluster in order to bolster the significance of the cluster’s programmatic statement in 12:2-3: “Nothing is hidden that will not be exposed, and hidden that will not be known. What I say to you in the dark, speak in the light; and what you hear whispered in the ear, proclaim on the housetops.” This “bolstering” accomplished by Q 12:4-5’s two-fold function: first, it quells inappropriate fear of humans, epitomized in the synagogue of Q 12:11-12; second, it instills in the listeners an appropriate fear of God, the one who has, though his envoy, called his audience to participate in the revealing of things once hidden and cryptic (12:2-3). The listeners are to take seriously the mission with which they have been tasked, and the double-saying on fear admonishes them not to allow their fear of humans (inappropriate fear) to outweigh their fidelity to God or their devotion to their task (appropriate fear).
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A New Project in Targum Digitization
Program Unit: Aramaic Studies
Leeor Gottlieb, Bar-Ilan University
During the past generation we have witnessed the development of powerful electronic tools which aid us in the research of the Bible and its ancient translations. The texts of all the known central biblical Targums have been morphologically tagged and are available worldwide through CAL as well as various commercial software platforms. These tagged texts allow students and scholars to perform a wide range of advanced searches that undoubtedly facilitate studies and enhance our understanding of the Targums and particular words therein.
While morphological tagging has opened – or at least accelerated – research possibilities, it has not fundamentally changed our grasp of translation technique because the morphological information regards each text as an independent, stand-alone composition and not as a translation linked to a source text. In this paper I wish to present a project I am currently developing which strives to link every Aramaic word in the Targum to its corresponding Hebrew equivalent in the biblical text. Such a database will allow scholars to track and assess the translation technique of a given unit in the Targum, or compare different Targums to each other on a large scale. This database will also present before its users expansive elements in the Targums which do not stem from a Hebrew equivalent in the source verse. This new tool will build upon the digitization achievements of the last generation and add to them by tying thus far independent Targumic texts to the Hebrew base text and to each other on a word for word basis.
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To What Extent Did the Shoah Really Influence the Redaction of Nostra Aetate §4?
Program Unit: Jewish-Christian Dialogue and Sacred Texts
Therese Andrevon Gottstein, Institut Catholique Paris
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A Tale of Two Kitabs: A Radical Reconsideration of Qur'anic Scripturology
Program Unit: Linguistic, Literary, and Thematic Perspectives on the Qur’anic Corpus (IQSA)
Mohsen Goudarzi, Harvard University
This paper proposes that the key Qur’anic term kitab is not a generic label for all scriptures but rather a designation for comprehensive scriptures. In other words, kitab is a technical term in the Qur’an’s revelation discourse, denoting a book but also connoting the characteristic of comprehensiveness. Furthermore, I argue that the Qur’an considers only itself and the Torah to be comprehensive scriptures—to be kitabs. A corollary of this view is that only the Torah and the Qur’an provide self-sufficient paradigms for religious conduct. Thus, inter alia, the Gospel falls within the Torah’s paradigm, functioning as a supplement to the latter, not its substitute. In addition to necessitating a thorough reassessment of Qur’anic scripturology, the “two-kitabs” hypothesis has significant implications for Qur’anic worldview as a whole. The paper notes some of these implications as well as the potential chronological development of Qur’anic scripturology. First I discuss a few significant, yet rarely examined, attestations of kitab that suggest it is an exclusive appellation for the revelations of Moses and Mu?ammad. A prominent example is the passage that has the jinn describe the Qur’an as “a kitab sent down after Moses” (Q 46.30). Second, I analyze a number of Qur’anic verses that seem to have the opposite implication. These are passages that appear to suggest that Prophets other than Moses and Mu?ammad received kitabs, or that imply kitab is a generic label for all revealed books. I argue that these passages can in fact be reconciled with the two-kitabs hypothesis. For instance, Surat Maryam has the infant Jesus say: “I am God’s servant. He has given me the kitab” (v. 30). I argue that this kitab is not the Gospel, but rather the same kitab mentioned earlier in the Sura as having been given to John the Baptist (v. 12)—that is, the Mosaic kitab, the “inheritance of the House of Jacob” (v. 6; cf. Q 40.53, Deuteronomy 33.4). The third part of the paper discusses the Qur’anic phrase ahl al-kitab, which under this hypothesis would mean “People of the (Mosaic) kitab.” I note that the application of this label to Christians is consistent with a conception of Christianity as a primarily Israelite/Jewish movement—supported by several other Qur’anic passages. The revised scripturology thus has a direct bearing on the question of Jewish-Christianity in the Qur’an. This research project also affords us a window onto the chronological development of Qur’anic conceptions. If we adopt the common approach to chronology advocated by Angelika Neuwirth, we can chart coherent transformations in the vocabulary and themes associated with kitab. The so-called Meccan passages emphasize the historical teachings embedded in Mu?ammad’s kitab, while Medinan texts are primarily concerned with its legal rulings. The latest Medinan passages witness the introduction of al-tawrah and al-injil into scriptural vocabulary, and thus present a subtle shift away from the focus on the Torah-Qur’an correspondence. However, while giving the Gospel a more significant status, these passages still preserve the two-kitabs paradigm and the distinction of the Mosaic and Mu?ammadan revelations.
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Aaron's "Silence" upon Hearing of His Sons' Death by Fire
Program Unit: Bible and Emotion
Naomi Graetz, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
It is considered weakness for leaders to express emotion. Crying is a sign of breaking down and therefore not acceptable. David's advisers criticize his all too human sorrow on the death of his son Absalom (2 Samuel 19:2-8). Like David, Jacob is inconsolable and weeps and mourns and rents his clothes and goes into deep mourning when he hears of his beloved son Joseph's death (Gen. 37:34-35). Both David and Jacob refuse to be comforted. In contrast Aaron is silent (va-yidom Aharon) on hearing of the death of his two sons Nadav and Avihu (Lev. 10:3). Moreover, Moses orders him not to show outward signs of mourning and to carry on normal work, for not to do so, would lead to his death. Aaron seemingly follows these orders. It is his wife, Elisheba the daughter of Amminadab, who is allowed to mourn in rabbinic literature: "when her sons entered to offer incense and were burnt, her joy was changed to mourning" (Leviticus Rabbah 20:2). One of the few commentators to address Aaron's emotions is Nachmanides, the 13th century medieval Jewish scholar. His comment on Numbers 10, states that the verse “And Aaron was silent” actually "means that he had cried aloud, but then became silent." Nachmanides uses as a prooftext the verse from Lamentations 2:18: “Give yourself no respite, your eyes no rest (tidom)” to show that Aaron did express normal emotions. Was Aaron affected in any way by "bottling up" his emotions? This paper will first compare the emotional reaction of David and Jacob to their sons' deaths and then will contrast and examine Aaron's stoic behavior by looking at the psychological and midrashic literature on the efficacy of crying as an expression of emotion.
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The Effect of the Conquering of Laish on Future Generations
Program Unit: Warfare in Ancient Israel
Naomi Graetz, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Many episodes in the Book of Judges depict a state of lawlessness. There is a downward spiral in the entire book culminating in the civil war of Judges 19-21 in which only 600 men of the tribe of Benjamin survive. This number correlates with the 600 military men from the tribe of Dan who totally destroyed the peaceful town of Laish (in Judges 18) without giving any advance warning to this non-Israelite settlement -- a clear violation of the Deuteronomic law (Deut. 20:10-5) that states that in dealing with cities that are "at a great distance from you" Israelites are to first make an offer of peace. This act of violence is echoed in the sacking of Shechem (Gen 34: 25-29), by the brothers, Simeon and Levi, when the newly circumcised males in the city are resting securely (bt?). Although neither text overtly criticizes the perpetrators' actions, one can read into the texts that there is disapproval of both the Danites' and the brothers' actions. By looking at both texts intertextually, this paper draws a tentative conclusion that underlying both texts is a negative attitude to the violent nature of conquest which results in total destruction. I posit that Jacob's blessings/curses to his sons Simon and Levi (Gen. 49:5-7) and Dan (Gen. 49: 16-18) serve as further intertextual support to this view. Although many commentators feel that the blessing of Dan refers to Samson (who is from the tribe of Dan), this paper argues that Jacob's death-bed statements can refer equally to the conquest of Laish by the tribe of Dan in Judges 18. If this is the case, perhaps we can understand that Jacob is alluding to the non-acceptability of unprovoked aggression and the corrosive effect of violence on future generations.
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An Examination of Paul's Use of Ps 51:4 in Rom 3:4 and Its Implications on Rom 3:1–8
Program Unit: Scripture in Early Judaism and Christianity
Michael T. Graham Jr., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
In Rom 3:4, Paul offers a citation from Ps 51:4 (Ps 50:6 LXX) that poses an interpretive difficulty for scholars. The problem centers on how Paul uses Ps 51:4 within the argument found in Rom 3:1-8. Scholars propose two views. The first view holds that Paul is affirming God’s right to judge the Jews (Thomas R. Schreiner, Douglas J. Moo, Mark Seifrid, William Sanday and Arthur C. Headlam), while the second maintains that Paul is affirming God’s faithfulness despite Israel’s unfaithfulness (N. T. Wright, Robert Jewett, James D. G. Dunn, Joseph A. Fitzmyer). In this paper, I propose a third option. I will argue that Paul is alluding to the Davidic Covenant when citing Ps 51:4 in order to account for the judging and saving features of God’s faithfulness in his current dealings with Israel and the Gentiles. I will defend my thesis by demonstrating that first, Paul has a covenantal context in mind in Rom 3:1–8. Second, his selection of the Psalms as the means through which he alludes to the Davidic covenant further strengthens his argument. Third, seeing this allusion best answers the three questions posed by the interlocutor in vv. 1, 3, and 5.
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"I Think" vs. "The Thought Tells Me": What Grammar Teaches Us about the Monastic Self
Program Unit: Speech and Talk in the Ancient Mediterranean World
Inbar Graiver, Tel Aviv University
In view of the importance of the mind (nous) in the Eastern theological tradition and the central role of thoughts (logismoi) in early monastic asceticism, this paper explores the early monastic language of thinking – the ways in which thinking was "semanticized" or construed in language. While there is a large cross-linguistic variability in the ways of talking about thinking, "think" is a universal linguistic concept. Linguistic interpretations of this basic human activity may lend us an insight into early monastic perceptions of the self and the process of self-fashioning. Whereas modern interpreters of ancient texts tend to focus on the referential function of language, this paper looks at the language itself.
In particular, I examine the language of thinking employed by monks in verbalizing their thoughts for the discernment of an elder – a procedure appraised by Foucault as a distinctively early Christian contribution to the history of the self. Surprisingly, in verbalizing their thoughts late ancient monks didn't use the common Greek verbs expressing "I think." Instead, the most common formulation is "the thought tells me" (ho logismos legei moi). Additional ways of representing thinking use the same pattern.
This unique linguistic interpretation of thinking, I argue, worked in subtle ways to support the ascetic process of self-fashioning: As monks learned over time to construe themselves in terms of this language, a transformation of identity took place. While the role of the traditional ascetic practices in bringing about what Hadot described as "a profound transformation of the individual's mode of seeing and being" has received much scholarly attention, the role of language itself in this process has been neglected. The paper shows that by looking at language itself, we can trace the ways in which this transformation actually worked, and how it was continually constituted in different habits of speaking.
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The Orientation of the Temple of YHWH in Elephantine: Reflecting the Concept of Sacred Direction?
Program Unit: Literature and History of the Persian Period
Gard Granerød, MF Norwegian School of Theology
The paper discusses the thesis proposed by Bezalel Porten about the orientation of the temple of YHW in Elephantine. According to Porten, the temple was intentionally oriented toward Jerusalem. Moreover, according to Porten, the physical orientation of the temple of YHW toward Jerusalem also reflected the “sacred orientation” of the Judaean community in Elephantine. To the knowledge of the author of the paper, Porten’s theory has never really been discussed in the history of research on Elephantine. The present paper attempts to scrutinise Porten’s theory under three rubrics: 1. The concept of sacred direction in biblical texts (texts from the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and the Apocrypha), 2. The Elephantine Judaean temple theology (based on the documents of the Judaeans in Elephantine), and 3. The longitudinal orientation of the temple in the light of the general orientation of the ancient town (the archaeology of the ancient town of Elephantine). The present author’s conclusion is that Porten’s theory about the orientation of the temple of YHW being intentionally oriented toward Jerusalem is unlikely from the perspective of all three rubrics mentioned above.
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The Psalter, Worship, and Worldview
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Jamie Grant, Highland Theological College
The Psalter, Worship, and Worldview
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Stylistic Criteria in Nöldeke's Chronology of Qur'anic Material in the Context of 19th Century Biblical Studies
Program Unit: Qur'an and Biblical Literature
Michael Graves, Wheaton College (Illinois)
A major concern of biblical studies and western Qur'anic studies in the 19th century was to reconstruct the process by which the texts were written and to assign dates to the various units of text. One important criterion for establishing a chronology of textual development was literary style. It was thought that differences in style could be used to identify different authors, and that it was possible to separate earlier from later material by describing how style evolved over time. Such thinking was employed in 19th century studies of the Pentateuch and Isaiah, and it was also employed in the seminal work of Nöldeke-Schwally, The History of the Qur'an (Geschichte des Qorans). Many modern Qur'anic scholars (e.g., A. Neuwirth, C. Ernst, N. Robinson, R. Farrin) continue to regard Nöldeke-Schwally as a viable framework for understanding the chronology of the suras of the Qur'an. Similarly, biblical scholarship continues to operate with conceptions of the composition of the Pentateuch and Isaiah that bear genetic similarities with the 19th century theories of Wellhausen and Duhm (despite some major paradigm shifts in Pentateuchal studies). This paper will reconsider the specifically stylistic criteria used by Nöldeke-Schwally in reconstructing the chronology of the Qur'an, and will compare this analysis with related studies from the same period on the Pentateuch and Isaiah. The main questions will be: What are considered to be characteristics of early style rather than late style? What is the basis for thinking that we can recognize early stylistic features and how style evolved over time? Which styles are evaluated positively? Which are viewed negatively? How does the evaluation of styles impact judgments about chronology? How are stylistic criteria used to identify interpolations? This paper will attempt to describe some key assumptions common among 19th century oriental scholars about religion, aesthetics, and history that underlie important elements of the literary theories of Nöldeke-Schwally and 19th century biblical criticism. In the end, these assumptions may not be entirely suitable for understanding the Pentateuch, Isaiah, or the Qur'an; rather, they are distinctively 19th century ideas that reflect the situated nature of this scholarship. It will not be argued that 19th century scholarship was without merit. On the contrary, these studies made great contributions, even in the midst of their comments about style. It will be suggested, however, that it is not advisable to adopt 19th century literary chronologies of these biblical and Qur'anic texts without seriously rethinking their appeal to style in identifying early and late material.
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Jerome's Epistle 106: Text-Critical and Exegetical Studies in the Psalter
Program Unit: History of Interpretation
Michael Graves, Wheaton College (Illinois)
Jerome's Epistle 106 is a remarkably extensive (42 pages in the CSEL edition) discussion of the differences between the LXX Psalter and Jerome's hexaplaric revision of the Psalter (the so-called "Gallican Psalter") using insights from the Hebrew text. Jerome presents this "letter" as a response to 178 questions on textual difficulties in the Psalms put to him by two individuals named Sunnia and Fretela, who are generally thought to be Gothic monks living in Constantinople. Unlike many of Jerome's letters, which imitate classical models, there is little in the prior history of Latin epistolography to explain what Jerome is doing in this letter. Numerous basic questions surround its composition: first, some have argued that this letter is not a letter at all, but is simply a treatise that Jerome wrote to display his knowledge, and that Sunnia and Fretela were likely invented by Jerome. Second, the date of the letter is not clear; most locate it somewhere between 404-414 (Cavallera I: 291-292), but precise dating has been allusive. Third, the genre of the letter is uncertain; for example, whereas Alfons Fürst describes Epistle 106 as a text-critical tractate (Hieronymus: Askese und Wissenschaft, 119-120), Andrew Cain classifies it as an apologetic letter (Letters of Jerome, 209-210). Each of these questions will be addressed in some way in this paper. Yet, these questions will be taken up as part of a broader consideration of Jerome's exegetical purpose in the letter. Jerome had written his Hebrew Questions on Genesis ca. 391 at the start of his iuxta Hebraeos translation project, in part to demonstrate to Latin readers what benefits could come from returning to the Hebrew. Why, at the end of or after the IH translation (completed in 405), would Jerome devote such attention to his hexaplaric Psalter? Recent studies have shown that Jerome did not simply abandon the hexaplaric revision after his turn to the Hebrew (see Adam Kamesar, Jerome, Greek Scholarship, and the Hebrew Bible). This paper will suggest that in Epistle 106 Jerome capitalized on an opportunity to re-interpret the significance of the hexaplaric revision in light of the complete IH edition, construing the earlier attempt as a success for its limited aims, but now ultimately superseded by the Hebrew-based version for those who want to know the real meaning of the text. In addition, this paper will offer some key examples of Jerome's philological analysis of the text of the Psalms, and will explore what Epistle 106 as a whole contributes to our understanding of the Hexapla in Jerome's day.
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C.S. Lewis and the Historical Jesus in the Screwtape Letters
Program Unit: Christian Theology and the Bible
Patrick Gray, Rhodes College
In C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, the demon Wormwood discusses the usefulness of “the Quest for the Historical Jesus” for accomplishing his nefarious purposes. The Quest’s usefulness for him amounts to a critique of sorts on the part of the author. This paper gives a close reading of this particular “letter,” situates it in the context of mid-century New Testament scholarship, and examines its relation to themes found in Lewis’ broader corpus.
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When Bodies Meet: Fraught Companionship and Entangled Embodiment in Jeremiah
Program Unit: Book of Jeremiah
Rhiannon Graybill, Rhodes College
This paper will use Donna Haraway’s theoretical work on “companion species” to offer a new perspective on the mutually implicated bodies in Jeremiah. The prophet’s obsessive references to his bodily suffering in the first half of the book are largely replaced, in the second half, with narratives of the prophet’s actions and conflicts. Here, however, the body remains a central problem, as Jeremiah’s body is acted upon, and acts out against, the bodies of kings, rival prophets, ruined scrolls, and layers of text. While it is tempting to approach this prophetic body through the symbolic relations of language and flesh, this paper will instead argue for approaching the body through companionship, entanglement, and significant otherness. Haraway’s theorization of interdependence, conflict, and co-becoming offers a new model for understanding the individual and compounded bodies of prophet, scribe, king, and nation in Jeremiah’s prose narrative. I will read the bodies in the narratives of Jeremiah, with a special emphasis on the bodies of Jer. 36-38, as experiments in (fraught) companionship and mutual embodiment, offering an alternate framework for imagining the body in and of prophecy.
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Whose Justice Is It Anyway? Analyzing a Matrix of Identity Geopolitics in the Parable of the Widow and the Judge (Luke 18:1–8)
Program Unit: Bible and Cultural Studies
Bridgett Green, Vanderbilt University
Whose Justice Is It Anyway? Analyzing a Matrix of Identity Geopolitics in the Parable of the Widow and the Judge (Luke 18:1-8)
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"Does Not Nature Itself Teach You?" Theological Meditations on a Troubled/Troubling Text
Program Unit: Society for Pentecostal Studies
Chris E. W. Green, Pentecostal Theological Seminary
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A New Appraisal of Abigail's Brave Actions in 1 Sam 25:2–42
Program Unit: Assyriology and the Bible
Samuel Greengus, Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion
The long history of ancient Near Eastern laws limiting women's access to marital property offers a new perspective on Abigail's bold actions in 1Sam 25:4–42. These restrictive laws, attested over many centuries, evidently represented deeply rooted customs. Examples are to be found among the Old Babylonian and Middle Assyrian laws; and the later continuity of these restrictions is attested in formal law statements preserved in the Mishnah (for Palestine), Talmud (for Babylonia), and Syriac-Roman lawbooks (Syria). We are looking particularly at laws limiting women's legal rights to dispose of marital property in commercial activity, specifically, sale and deposit. While similarly explicit restrictions are not preserved among the extant biblical laws, we nevertheless believe that these restrictive norms were likewise operative in Israelite society and look to find them in the narrative describing the interactions between Abigail, her husband Nabal, and David. Assuming the presence of such norms may provide a deeper understanding of Abigail's story and why it was retold in the Hebrew Bible.
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Quoth, Doth, and Thy: The Translated Bible in Popular Culture
Program Unit: Bible and Popular Culture
Leonard Greenspoon, Creighton University
Bible translations constitute a recognizable, if not recurrent theme in popular culture. Through comic strips (collected over four decades), images (some more artistic than others), television and movie presentations (primarily comical), Bible translation, as a phenomenon, and Bible translations (such as the King James Version [KJV]) appear in multiple contexts and media. Often it involves the difficulty of fully understanding the “antiquated language” of KJV (and its contemporaries) or the shock of encountering updated, sometimes jarring wording (as in The Message and its contemporaries). In this sense, the visual and the textual complement and comment upon each other. So it is that in addition to their status as popular culture, these representations also have educational value, which varies considerably among exemplars.
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Stumbling through the Book of Joshua: Is a Roadmap Possible?
Program Unit: Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible
Leonard Greenspoon, Creighton University
The middle chapters of the book of Joshua are filled, for the most part, with place names, many of which are found nowhere else in the biblical text. It is tempting to skip over those chapters, as many readers do. However, textual critics, among others, are not allowed such latitude. What sorts of aids are available to help us navigate through this territory? And what types of results are we likely to come up with? These are among the issues we discuss, centering our analysis on specific examples and sites.
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Teaching the Historical Jesus: One Text, Many Contexts
Program Unit:
Leonard Greenspoon, Creighton University
Within the past few years, I have taught courses relating to the historical Jesus at Spertus Institute in Chicago, where the class consisted primarily of graduate students who are Jewish, and at Creighton University, to an undergraduate class made up of Christians, mostly Roman Catholics. In our effort to locate Jesus within the Jewish environment he inhabited, we looked at many of the same New Testament passages in both pedagogical contexts. Neither the Jewish graduate students nor the Christian undergraduates had much experience in this type of analysis, so the starting points were not as dissimilar as I might have thought. Their reactions to the material we covered did vary, but not to the extent or in the ways I would have predicted. Having surveyed in-class experiences on the part of different groups of students, I will hazard one or more predictions as to how this material, and our approach to it, might affect (in positive ways, I hope) the future academic, religious (spiritual), and general lives of these individuals—and their teacher.
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Ahab’s Death Twice Told: The Identity of the “King of Israel” in 1 Kings 22
Program Unit: Deuteronomistic History
Kyle Greenwood, Colorado Christian University
First Kings 22 appears to depict two opposing conclusions to Ahab’s life. According to 1 Kgs 22:33–37, the “king of Israel” was lethally struck by an Aramean’s arrow. Upon his death the “the king” was subsequently buried in Samaria. Three verses later, however, Ahab “slept with his fathers.” The discrepancy in the manner of death for Israel’s king has led commentators to assume that the Deuteronomistic Historian conflated two separate narratives, and assigned a non-Ahabite tradition to the unnamed king in 1 Kgs 22. According to J. M. Miller, this phrase “appears elsewhere in his history only in the cases of those kings who died a natural death” (J. M. Miller, 1966; M. White, 1994). Simon DeVries presses the implications by stating that the phrase “has to mean that he died in peace and honor, and therefore cannot apply to the king of v. 37” (1985). It is thus argued that verses 37 and 40 cannot refer to the same king. In reassessing the prevailing thought regarding the identity of the unnamed king in 1 Kgs 22, this paper will consider three specific areas of inquiry. First, it will consider other examples within the Deuteronomistic History in which unnamed kings play a prominent role in the narrative. Second, it will reexamine the lexical evidence within the Deuteronomistic History regarding the usage of the phrase “slept with his fathers.” Third, it will reckon with the historian’s portrait of Jehosphaphat, particularly as it pertains to his alliance with this king. Ultimately, this paper will argue that since Ahab did not die as a result of a palace coup, and because he was an ally with the pious Jehoshaphat, the historian, in fact, identifies the “king of Israel” throughout 1 Kgs 22 as Ahab.
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Not All Blessings Are Equal: Post-Nostra Aetate Catholic Interpretations of the Biblical Blessings to the Jews and to the Nations
Program Unit: Jewish-Christian Dialogue and Sacred Texts
Adam Gregerman, Saint Joseph's University
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The Role of Jewish Priests in Early Synagogue Leadership and Liturgy
Program Unit: Cultic Personnel in the Biblical World
Matthew Grey, Brigham Young University
Traditionally, scholarship on early Judaism has assumed that the socio-religious influence of priests was largely restricted to the cultic sphere of the Jerusalem temple, while other groups (including scribes, Pharisees, and proto-Rabbis) were popular leaders of Jewish communities and institutions in areas outside of Jerusalem. However, a growing corpus of epigraphic, literary, and archaeological evidence suggests that, before 70 C.E., the socio-religious influence of Jewish priests extended well beyond the Jerusalem temple cult and that, after 70, much of that priestly influence persevered within some circles of the Jewish community. In particular, priests seem to have been much more involved in early synagogue leadership and liturgy than was previously assumed.
This paper will consider the evidence for priestly leadership in some synagogues and the role priests played in facilitating divine worship in synagogue settings during the Second Temple (pre-70) and late Roman (post-70) periods. Evidence for priestly involvement in synagogues can be found in funerary and dedicatory inscriptions, in the writings of Philo, Josephus, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Mishnah, and in the surviving features of some early synagogue buildings. This confluence of evidence suggests that, in many Jewish communities, priests presided over synagogue activities and provided divine mediation in synagogue liturgy through their offering of prayers, the exercising of their legal rights to read and teach the Torah, and their bestowing divine beneficence upon congregations in the form of the priestly blessing. Such activities reflect the extra-temple functions of priests before 70 C.E. and the continuation of those functions for centuries after the temple’s destruction. They also show that, while some Jewish circles after 70 shifted their religious focus to the leadership of lay Torah scholars (such as the early Rabbis), others continued to view hereditary priests as the mediating link between God and the Jewish community.
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Like Sees Like: Platonic Theories of Vision and Jesus' Polymorphic Body in Early Christianity
Program Unit: Speech and Talk in the Ancient Mediterranean World
David P. Griffin, University of Virginia
An important but poorly understood aspect of early Christian reflection on Jesus was the notion that he was a polymorph—that is, Jesus’ body could assume different forms, and it appeared in multiple shapes that could be perceived either successively or even simultaneously by different people. As part of the Christian tradition, the textual phenomenon of a shapeshifting Jesus begins as early as the Transfiguration and post-resurrection narratives in the canonical Gospels, and it figures prominently in several apocryphal Acts, Gospels, and patristic sources, most notably in Origen. One need not dig too deep into these sources before we discover the importance of visual metaphors that are woven into the discourse of polymorphism. In this paper I will examine the theories of vision from antiquity that inform this tradition, devoting particular attention to Plato and Philo’s works. I contend that many early Christian texts that feature a polymorphic Jesus reflect a Platonic way of speaking about vision, which is, in Martin Jay’s terms, a “participatory” understanding of sight. I develop this argument in three movements. First I examine the metaphors Plato uses in Republic Book 7 and Timaeus 45a-e to articulate theories of vision (and, by extension, knowledge). The passage from the Timaeus speaks of vision as the active emission of light rays from the eyes and the passive entry of light into the eyes, the sensation of “seeing” resulting when the active and passive sources of light match. This is a principle of similarity. Republic 7 represents a narratization of Plato’s theory of sight in the famous Allegory of the Cave. As an already thoroughly researched text, the cave allegory is of interest here as it seems to inform a passage in Philo that reflects the way Plato metaphorizes the discourse on vision through narrative. Thus, the second movement of my argument briefly analyzes Philo’s On Dreams 1.238-241, in which the Alexandrian exegete explains Jacob’s vision in Genesis 31 in terms of the Logos’ ability to appear to people in many different forms according to their capacity to see, using imagery highly evocative of Plato’s cave allegory. I contend that Philo’s discourse on how one perceives the Logos operates on the same visual principle of like sees like. In the third movement of my argument, I apply this analysis to an odd argument in Origen’s Contra Celsum 2.67. Origen claims that before the resurrection, anybody could see Jesus, although individuals perceived him differently according to their intellectual and moral capacities. However, the resurrected Christ did not appear to everyone. He mercifully did not appear to those who killed him because, if he had, they would have been blinded like the men of Sodom. I argue that this passage in the Contra Celsum on perceiving Jesus’ resurrected body is constructed using the solidly Platonic principle that like sees like. Because Philo had already woven this principle into his biblical exegesis, it was not so great a leap for Origen to apply like sees like to Jesus, the Logos made flesh.
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Bringing Ancient Texts to Life for Tech-Savvy Students
Program Unit: Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies
Tyler J. Griffin, Brigham Young University
Students today are digital natives. Most have spent significant time immersed in video games, smart phones, tablets, and countless computer technologies. These students are inherently comfortable and capable of navigating complex visual and spatial environments while processing vast amounts of information. Most academic teaching today, however, relies heavily (and at times, exclusively) on textual and logical argument to engage the learners. This can lead to an inordinate focus on what we are teaching while disregarding who we are teaching. Much more could be done to bridge this technological gap between academic teaching styles and current learning preferences.
Immersive technologies can be used in academic settings to increase a “sense of time and space” for the students. These tools make it easier for the students to visualize what they are reading about. For instance, we could show students a 2D map of ancient Jerusalem with arrows proposing a route that Jesus followed during his final 24 hours or we could show them a virtual fly-over of the various sites in a 3D immersive environment. We could show them a diagram of Herod’s Second Temple or let them walk through it much like they would navigate a video game. If a teacher today wants to engage learners at a deeper level in ancient stories, these immersive technologies become an inviting portal for them.
This presentation will “practice what it preaches” by showing many examples of how various forms of interactive tools and apps can be used to enhance the teaching of a variety of pericopes in the New and Old Testaments. While some of the tools demonstrated are available for sharing, others are available for purchase as an app, and others are not yet accessible for distribution. This will also be an opportunity to find other academics who have the interest and means to help contribute in designing and developing similar teaching tools to be shared.
The goal of the presentation is not to minimize non-visual teaching practices that have proven effective. The presentation will (1) demonstrate a vision of how new immersive technologies can be used to engage our learners at deeper levels with ancient texts, (2) show how these tools can be used for teaching a variety of passages from any number of theological or academic contexts, (3) help highly verbal teachers learn how to better connect with more visual students in their classes without having to become a computer expert, (4) show where many of these helpful resources can be found, and (5) find others who are willing and able to contribute in efforts to develop and effectively use such teaching tools to increase our effectiveness in bridging the many gaps that exist between our students and the ancient world they read about in the pages of the Bible.
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Reading Resurrection in the Additions to Daniel
Program Unit: Theological Interpretation of Scripture
Jennie Grillo, Duke University
It is well known that Daniel, the Three Jews and Susanna were taken as emblems of deliverance in early Christian writings and visual representations. This paper examines in more detail the theological construals of resurrection in some of those readings, and considers the interplay between text and image in their production of meaning.
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Intertextuality and Canonical Criticism
Program Unit: Intertextuality and the Hebrew Bible
Marianne Grohmann, Universität Wien
Intertextuality as a theoretical framework for describing the relationship between texts in the Hebrew Bible and their ongoing interpretation has both common and different interests with canonical criticism.
On the one hand, the concept of intertextuality enables the inclusion of the different Jewish and Christian contexts of reading and the perspectives of different canons. In addition to the historic analysis of echoes, allusions and citations, it adds the mutuality of the reading process. Different canons make different intertextual links possible.
On the other hand, the concept of intertextuality, especially in its wide sense, stands in tension with the notion of a canon. By calling into question the borders between canonical texts and their interpretations, it undermines the concept of canonical boundaries and challenges the distinction between text and commentary.
This paper addresses basic theoretical questions in the intersection between intertextuality and canonical criticism. It reads texts from the book of lamentations in intertextual relationship to other parts of the Hebrew Bible canon and post-biblical interpretation. It focuses on examples of rabbinic intertextuality which finds a balance in this tension between canonical criticism and intertextuality: Having a special interest in and sensitivity for the interconnectedness of texts, the rabbies use texts from different parts of the Hebrew canon and bring them together in a new text.
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A Mujerista Reading of Judges 19
Program Unit: Latino/a/e and Latin American Biblical Interpretation
Corinna Guerrero, Graduate Theological Union
Exponential violence has increased against Latina bodies along the US-Mexico border as girls and women flee economic and political impoverishment, disenfranchisement, and warfare. I propose a Mujerista reading of the controversial and violent passage Judges 19, in which an unnamed woman is impassionedly dismembered. In the paper I will define the boundaries of a Mujerista biblical interpretive framework with attention to: (1) liberation of the Latina woman in her daily life; (2) contemporary sexual abuse, decapitations, dismemberment, and death of Latina women at the US-Mexico border; and (3) the option to reject or recover reading Judges 19 as and for Latinas. I will present and synthesize rejection and recovery readings of Judges 19 in order to present a spectrum of readings that may be in service of liberating Latinas from terrorizing Scriptures and drawing awareness to the growing threat of sexual and physical violence against socially and politically vulnerable women in our society.
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Faith without Works Is…Apocalyptic? Apocalyptic Wisdom between James and Paul
Program Unit: Wisdom and Apocalypticism
Andrew Guffey, Virginia Theological Seminary
Was James truly a work of anti-Pauline polemic? Scholarly assessments diverge widely. Those who uphold the claim that James is a work of anti-Pauline polemic cite especially James 2:14-26 as a clear example of the letter’s refutation of Pauline teachings. Those who deny that James is (directly, at least) an example of anti-Pauline polemic highlight the apparent difference in meaning the key terms “faith” and “works” convey in Paul and in James. The difference some interpreters highlight between Paul’s construal of faith and works and that of James can been attributed to reconstructions of an apocalyptic Paul and a sapiential James. This paper seeks to problematize that schema, arguing that the neat division between the soteriologies of Paul and James collapses under the recognition that the neat division between apocalypticism and wisdom does not hold. The apocalyptic soteriology of Paul (esp. in the letters to the Galatians and Romans) is not without sapiential elements, and the wisdom influence in the letter of James (including its discussion of faith and works) is not without apocalyptic coloring. Thus the tension between the letters of Paul and the letter of James should not be conceived as a fault line between soteriologies funded by, respectively, apocalyptic and wisdom traditions. The paper further suggests, with special reference to Adamic and Enochic models of theodicy, that the tension between Paul and James in fact reflects a tension within apocalyptic-wisdom traditions themselves.
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“Jealousy” and the Juridical: A Reexamination of the Hebrew Root QN’
Program Unit: Biblical Law
Erin Villareal, The Johns Hopkins University
This paper provides a reanalysis of the Hebrew root QN', which is traditionally translated as “jealousy,” “zeal,” “envy,” or “anger.” Many scholars have noted the ambiguous character of QN’ and have claimed that its meaning is context dependent. In addition, previous studies have often examined divine QN’ and human QN’ separately, with the intention of distinguishing its meaning from a “religious” verses a “secular” context. Instead, it will be argued in this paper that human and divine QN’ inform each other. Both describe and are triggered by a similar phenomenon, which is defined by a legal and social contract and the boundaries set by this contract’s expectations. In most cases, these boundaries deal with the maintenance of exclusivity in social and religious relationships, and when invoked, signifies a concern for the breach in the social contract, causing a disruption in legal or religious obligations. Thus, the traditional understanding of QN’ as a word primarily dealing with “jealousy,” “anger,” “envy,” or “zeal” will be challenged. I will propose instead that this term expresses social obligations that may even carry legal force. These bonds may be reflected both in human relationships and in the relationship between a god and his people.
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Where’s the Beef? Paul, Poverty, and Love in 1 Corinthians 8
Program Unit: Poverty in the Biblical World
Judith Gundry, Yale Divinity School
It is well known that the majority in the Corinthian ekklesia belonged to the poorer echelon of Hellenistic society (cf. 1 Cor. 1:26). Further, it is well-known that expensive meat was consumed only on special occasions (weddings, birthdays, funerals, and celebrations in honor of a god) by most inhabitants of the Roman Empire. We can thus infer that the majority in the Corinthian church consumed meat only on special occasions, and that at least in some of these cases, participation in pagan sacrificial meals in an idol’s temple would have been implied. Paul’s discussion in 1 Corinthians 8 of participation in such meals – which he prohibits on the ground that it demonstrates lack of love for the “brother” with a “weak” conscience – can thus be interrogated for its implications about the life of poor in the Pauline communities.
Scholarship has neglected this economic dimension of Paul’s discussion in 1 Corinthians 8, however. In this paper, I will explore how poor, former polytheists may have been dependent on participation in pagan sacrificial meals to have meat in their diet, and seen such participation to be innocuous in the light of their monotheistic belief that “there is no idol in the world” and “there is but one God” and “there is but one Lord” (1 Cor. 8:4, 6). I will also explore the economic implications of Paul’s objection that this “knowledge” – leading to the consumption of meat in pagan sacrificial meals – causes the “brother” to “stumble” and “be ruined” (1 Cor. 8:9-11). Does Paul suggest that the poor Corinthian Christ-followers put the avoiding the “ruin” of the one without knowledge above their own carnivorous desires? And if so, is the body of Christ to provide an alternative communal meal for these poor with food and drink to overcome the shame of poverty (cf. 1 Cor. 11:17-34)?
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Walled City, Waning Sovereignty: The New Jerusalem and the Process of Unbelonging
Program Unit: Reading, Theory, and the Bible
Lindsey M. Guy, Drew University
The New Jerusalem looms large at the end of Revelation – overwhelmingly large, even farcically so. As it descends out of the heavens for its (or her) wedding day, the city captivates the narrator, who is foremost taken by its high and opulent walls. This paper argues that the walls of the city are not security measures but insecurity measures, protecting the singular and normative power structure within. Through a critical reading of the construction of the city and the beings who remain outside its walls, we may find possibilities for critique of monolithic authority and spaces for alternative configurations of belonging.
Wendy Brown argues in her 2010 book Walled States, Waning Sovereignty that states’ construction of literal barriers is a response not of heightened security, but of increasing irrelevance and permeability in an age of globalization. Assertions of state sovereignty paradoxically affirm its weakness: “While [the walls] may appear as hyperbolic tokens of such sovereignty, they reveal a tremulousness … or instability at the core of what they aim to express – qualities that are themselves antithetical to sovereignty and thus elements of its undoing.” Understanding the New Jerusalem as also existing in a post-national world – for Babylon/Rome has been devoured and crushed under the new empire – causes its walls to signal something more urgent than the city limits.
As feminist political philosophers have argued, the disjunctions between “citizen” and “human,” and between “human” and “non-human,” reveal the ways in which state power is predicated upon violent exclusion. The state authorizes normative bodies, leaving the anomalies outside to demarcate the foreign, perverse, and Other. Assuming exclusionary practice indicates the state’s weakness, this paper thinks with those excluded from the New Jerusalem: “outside are the dogs and sorcerers and fornicators.” They are only “outside” relative to the state-defined “inside,” and it is this “outside” that provides a potent political rhetoric for the state but also reveals its instability. With a critical re-imagination of these “outsiders” enacting performative resistance, the scene deconstructs itself as a revelation of the limited and fragile nature of sovereignty: God needs the outsiders more than they need Him.
Feminist scholars such as Judith Butler and Sasha Roseneil have suggested as feminist political resistance a stance of unbelonging, a deliberate removal of oneself from a state that does not incorporate them anyway. The sorcerers and fornicators, who themselves “unbelong,” cause John’s gaze to flicker momentarily from the city. But in this moment, the city and its projected sovereignty are put in perspective, compared with the figures who stand before it. In their unbelonging, these outsiders cast doubt on the power and authority of the coming kingdom, revealing it to be too fragile to accommodate heterogeneity and too embedded within an imperial system to radically re-imagine belonging. But in measuring the height of the New Jerusalem’s wall according to the scale of the outsiders who stand in its shadow, readers may find a critical religious-political belonging – or unbelonging – outside the boundaries of a singular, normative authority.
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A Cross-Cultural Reading of Disability and Illness in Sacred Texts: A Subversive Vision in Job and in Zhuangzi
Program Unit: Bible and Cultural Studies
SungAe Ha, Graduate Theological Union
In this paper, I will explore a subversive view of disability and illness in sacred texts from two different religious and cultural traditions, namely, the Judeo-Christian tradition and the East Asian Daoist tradition. For this cross-cultural study, I have selected some texts from the book of Job and from the Zhuangzi because both sacred texts address not only socioeconomic and political contexts of disability and illness but also ideological conflicts surrounding these issues.
Like other minority issues, such as gender, class, and race, the issues of disability and illness are a point of conflict, in which other minority issues intersect. Like other minority issues, these have a long history of religious, cultural, and social prejudices and discriminations. One of the most common myths about disability and illness is that they are the result and the mark of God’s/Heaven’s punishment or curse. Thus, how major religions and sacred texts read disability and illness and how we reread religious traditions and sacred texts in this regard have a tremendous significance in destroying the oppressive myth that undergirds discriminations.
In the Bible, Job is the figure who struggled and protested most thoroughly against the myth that his illness and disabled body were the result and the mark of God’s punishment. Hence, I will explore how the issues of disability and illness are closely connected to socioeconomic and political structures of poverty and social injustice, undergirded by religious and cultural ideologies and traditions, in the book of Job. While Job’s physical illness has explicit textual references, the symptoms of his mental illness caused by the shock of the horrible disaster are implied by his own confessions of his mental status as being fraught with stress, fear, hallucinations and nightmares. It is commonly witnessed that extreme poverty can cause one’s physical or mental crisis and illness/disability, and vice versa. Poverty and disability/illness intersect and reinforce each other, forming a vicious circle.
Zhuangzi portrays a diversity of mutilated or deformed characters as having high virtue in chapter five, The Sign of Virtue Complete (???). Zhuangzi’s view of disability has a sociopolitical implication as he finds true humanity in a number of mutilated criminals punished by the state. According to Zhuangzi, the very mutilation of the outer form is a sign that there is something unique about that person, namely the uniqueness engendered by the life of Heaven (Zhuangzi, ch. 3). Therefore, disability in Zhuangzi, far from being defective, opens a crack in the sociopolitical and ethical order through which we can see the real. The mutilated or deformed characters in Zhuangzi share some commonality with Job in that they are rejected by the realm of humans but are affirmed by Heaven/God. Hence, I will explore how the ideology of “difference” that undergirds religious, cultural, and social prejudices and discriminations against disability and illness as well as other minorities is subverted by the concept of “uniqueness” in both Zhuangzi and the divine speech in the book of Job.
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Utilizing Cross-Textual and Cross-Cultural Readings as a Hermeneutical Tool for Asian Women
Program Unit: Contextual Biblical Interpretation
SungAe Ha, Graduate Theological Union
Contextual readings of the Bible, particularly in the form of cross-textual or cross-cultural interpretation, have been one of the prevalent approaches in Asian and Asian American interpretation of the Bible. From the Asian reality of having multi-faith traditions and multiple and pluralistic scriptures and classics, which form the backbone of Asian cultures, a methodological question arises: how to relate the Bible to other scriptures in Asian religious and cultural traditions. Hence, the biblical texts have been read alongside Asian religious, cultural, and sociopolitical texts as a way of appropriating the Bible, since the Bible and the Christian faith were introduced in Asia.
The term “texts” here includes not only written texts like scriptures but also oral tradition and political or social events that raise fundamental faith questions. These texts of Asian resources, whether written or not, are not passive contexts against which the biblical text has to be read, but ‘living’ texts that address questions to the biblical text and provide religious/theological messages that have to be addressed. In this way, reading biblical texts alongside Asian religious, cultural, and sociopolitical texts should go beyond a mere comparison of drawing parallels between similar ideas or contrasting different concepts.
Reading the Bible alongside the living texts of Asian resources can evolve around three ways of reading practices: reading the texts of Asian resources in light of the biblical texts and their (Western) Christian interpretations; reading the biblical texts and their Christian interpretations in light of the texts of Asian resources; reading that incorporates both ways. Given Eurocentric bias in biblical studies and the Western Christian tradition as well as the history of the colonial use of the Bible, the second methodology of re-reading the biblical texts from the perspective of Asian resources can contribute to challenging Christian colonialism that utilizes Asian resources in the service of the claim of Christian superiority over other religions and cultures.
However, there is a danger in this way of reading practice because not only the biblical and the Western Christian tradition but also Asian religious, cultural, and scriptural traditions can be read patriarchal and utilized to reinforce patriarchal traditions. Hence, it is essential to reread first Asian resources from the context of Asian women’s experiences and struggles for liberation before utilizing the second and the third ways of reading practices. Given that the authority to appropriate texts and resources has been claimed and exercised through history, either in the East or in the West, by established scholars’ guilds composed mainly of male elite groups to serve the status quo, depatriarchalizing both Asian resources and biblical texts through cross-textual and cross-cultural readings is a legitimate strategy to challenge Western, modern, traditional, and/or male-centered interpretations of scriptures that have prevailed both in the East and in the West and have had much influence on Asian women’s lives as well as Christian churches all over the world.
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Mere Christianity for Mere Gods: C.S. Lewis and Theosis
Program Unit: Christian Theology and the Bible
Myk Habets, Carey Baptist College
C.S. Lewis’s articulation of a doctrine of theosis is often asserted but has rarely been examined for its biblical and theological sources, coherence, and promise. This paper offers a survey of the way Lewis constructs and articulates theosis within his works of theology and fiction, highlighting how he articulates this doctrine using the theme of Transposition. This discussion follows Lewis’s articulation of the art of Transposition, through the concept of the ‘grand miracle’, to finally wrestle with the ‘weight of glory’ we currently experience. Applying the concept of ‘Transposition’ to Lewis’s doctrine of theosis allows an investigation into possible ways in which a discussion of theosis may be extended. Lewis’s use of Scripture will be a key focus of the discussion.
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Taking the LEAP: Biblical Studies across an Integrative General Education Curriculum
Program Unit: Teaching Biblical Studies in an Undergraduate Liberal Arts Context
Susan E. Haddox, University of Mount Union
My institution recently revised its general education curriculum with the AAC&U LEAP Essential Outcomes at its core. We are currently in the final year of implementation of a four-year curriculum, which aims to introduce essential knowledge at the lower levels, facilitate integration of knowledge at the upper levels, and incorporate the development of intellectual and practical skills at every level. Bible courses that previously fulfilled a broad “religious studies” general education requirement now play roles at two different places in the curriculum and must meet specific outcomes, including building foundational skills in written and oral communication. My Biblical Texts and Contexts course fills a requirement in the Foundations, which are intended to meet the first LEAP outcome of knowledge of human cultures and the world, in addition to developing and assessing several of the LEAP intellectual and practical skills. An introduction to Bible is an excellent course to address many of these outcomes, but doing so has required a lot of specific planning of assignments and activities. Most of my upper-level Bible courses fit into a junior-level Theme requirement, which integrates ideas and perspectives from different disciplines around a common idea or topic. The implementation of this aspect of the program is essential to teaching students skills of integration, but carries with it a number of challenges. Two of my theme courses are the Deuteronomistic History, which is part of the War and Peace theme, and Paul and the Epistles, which contributes to the Personhood and the State theme. The theme shapes the content and emphases of the courses, as well as some student assignments that facilitate and assess integration. These courses also incorporate LEAP intellectual and practical skills, especially written and oral communication. In addition, they attempt to touch on personal and social responsibility outcomes, which have proven to be some of the most challenging outcomes to incorporate effectively into the curriculum. In this paper, I will share some of the challenges and successes I have faced in tailoring my biblical studies courses to the LEAP-based curriculum.
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“In His Manhood He Strove with God”: Masculine Embodiment in Hosea
Program Unit: Israelite Prophetic Literature
Susan E. Haddox, University of Mount Union
While the bulk of scholarly attention to Hosea has focused on female embodiment in the form of the wife in the marriage metaphor, references to masculinity and male embodiment take up much more space and attention in the text as a whole. Within the marriage metaphor of the first three chapters, the prophet’s body figures strongly, representing not only himself, but also standing in for that of YHWH. The prophet performs a range of masculinities. At times, he is potent, fathering children, detaining and stripping the wife, providing grain and wine, pursuing legal action. At other times the prophet is impotent and cuckolded in the face of the wife’s straying, refraining from sexual intercourse. In the remainder of the text, the prophet himself remains behind the words, though hints about prophetic sentinels who hew with words peek through. In contrast the male audience is imagined and embodied in a variety of ways. The male bodies in Hosea lust, fornicate, drink to excess, eat, and sacrifice. They move landmarks, commit adultery, and assassinate kings. They also stumble around in sickness and impotence, and waver between helpless infancy and old age. There is tension in the text between the masculinities that the men in the implied audience want and attempt to perform and those that the prophet imposes upon them. This paper will apply concepts from cognitive anthropology, specifically the work of James Fernandez, to explore how the prophet uses metaphors to reconfigure the implied audience’s masculinity and thus to move them in social space. Cognitive rhetorical analysis shows that metaphors drawn from many different image fields serve to flesh out the potential masculinities within Hosea. The masculinities of the implied audience are contrasted with that of YHWH, who is placed in the most favorable sector of social space, and consistently, but not exclusively, portrayed as supremely masculine. I argue that the rhetoric of the text intentionally challenges the masculinity of the elite rulers as part of its critique of Israel’s domestic and international political intrigue.
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Eve and Sons: Ambivalent Motherhood
Program Unit: The Qur’an and the Biblical Tradition (IQSA)
Zohar Hadromi-Allouche, University of Aberdeen
Eve, the primordial woman, is generally perceived as the paradigmatical mother. But what sort of a model does she suggest? The Qur‘an and its commentaries offer more than one answer to that question. Through an examination of Eve‘s parenthood and relationship with five of her sons, this paper will demonstrate the ambivalent construction of Eve‘s motherhood, and hence (due to Eve‘s role as the archetypal woman) of women in general. Although Eve is not mentioned by name in the Qur’an, her presence there has been assessed already by the earliest other Islamic sources available to us, such as Ibn Is?aq (d. 767 CE), who identified Adam‘s spouse with Eve. Whereas the Bible derives Eve’s name from the etymology “mother of all living”, it is notable that a Muslim etymology explains the name in that Eve was created from a living being.
This latter etymology reflects on the perception of Eve’s role as a mother and a giver of life. The current paper will aim at demonstrating how Eve’s image as a mother has been constructed within the context of the Qur’an and extra-Qura’nic literature. Tafsir and Muslim traditon tells us of Eve’s numerous children. The discussion will focus on five of Eve’s (biological and adopted) sons, who have their own narratives: Cain, Abel, Seth, ‘Abd al-?arith and Khannas. These narratives are
detailed either in the Qur’an itself, or in the tafsir and additional extra-Qur’anic literature. Each son will be presented within their Qur’anic (and/ or Qur’anic exegetical) context (e.g., Q 5:27, 7:189–190, Q 114); and the implicatin of each such case on the construction of Eve‘s motherhood will be analysed. The paper will conclude by a summary of how the image of Eve’s motherhood (and hence, motherhood in general) is portrayed through these narratives.
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Perennial Ritual: The Prophet Adam, Founder of Islam
Program Unit: Prophetic Texts and Their Ancient Contexts
Zohar Hadromi-Allouche, University of Aberdeen
This paper will discuss the role of Adam as a prophet and a founder of Muslim ritual, according to Muslim Islamic sources.
When discussing the Paradise narrative in Muslim tradition, modern scholarship often tends to emphasise difference the "egalitarian" view of the Qur’anic narrations of the story, and the tradition’s "misogynist" approach. This is because in the Qur'anic Paradise story Adam and his (unnamed) spouse are simultaneously tempted to eat of the forbidden tree, whereas the extra-Qur'anic sources reflect several biblical and extra-biblical themes concerning Eve, such as Eve the temptress, negation of feminine characteristics and legitimisation of patriarchal order.
This scholarly view thus makes two assumptions: one, that the fall from Paradise is the main theme of the Adam and Eve stories in Islam; and two, that the Qur'an's view of Eve is more egalitarian than that of medieval extra-Qur'anic literature.
The current paper questions both these assumptions, which emerge from the application of a biblical prism to the Islamic texts. Through discussing Qur'anic material, commentaries to the Qur’an, and Stories of the Prophets literature, this paper argues that the focus of Muslim sources when discussing the Paradise narratives is not Eve and transgression, but Adam and ritual. Rather than the transgression in Paradise as such, these sources are far more interested in Adam’s life before, and particularly after, his expulsion from Paradise, to the extent that certain Islamic sources completely omit the transgression scene from their discussion of Adam's life. These sources mainly emphasise Adam’s role as the first prophet, who was also a foreteller of the prophet Muhammad, the first performer of the Muslim rituals ("the pillars of Islam") and founder of these practices in Islam. The function of this literature is, therefore, to portray Adam as the first Muslim; and Islam as the primordial tradition, which rituals were ordained and practiced since the creation of humanity.
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The Unity of the Bible? Really?
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Scott Hafemann, University of St. Andrews
What happens when we do not read the Bible with one of the many "dialectical" or "diversity" theories that dominate biblical theology hermeneutically, but instead ask whether the canonical editing of the Scriptures reflects a fundamental uniformity both theologically and in terms of its Heilsgeschichte? Can a "one-covenant" reading of the Christian canon do justice both to the multiplicity of its covenants and historical epochs and to its eschatology? Can we speak of the unity of the Bible, really? If so, then what is "new" in the "new covenant"?
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What Kind of Love Is It? Egyptian, Hebrew, or Greek?
Program Unit: Egyptology and Ancient Israel
Anselm Hagedorn, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Humboldt University of Berlin
The paper will take another look at the (possible) cultural background of the Song of Songs. Taking M.V. Fox’s observation that “[t]his Song is … post-exilic and probably Hellenistic, and we have no way of even speculating reasonably about the earlier forms from which it supposedly evolved” (Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs [1985], 190) as a starting point we will consider the interpretative value as well as the possible modes of literary transmission of the comparative material. It will be argued that the growing internationalism of the late Persian and Early Hellenistic period provides the best background for the origin of such a collage like the Song of Songs. Like Qoheleth, then, the Song of Songs represents a distinctly Jewish attempt to participate in the international intellectual life of the time.
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Ignatius of Antioch and the Drug of Immortality
Program Unit: Ritual in the Biblical World
Andrew Hagstrom, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
In his letter to the Christians at Ephesus, Ignatius of Antioch (CE 35-110) expressed the wish that they “may obey the bishop and the presbytery … breaking one bread, which is a medicine that brings immortality (f??µa??? ??a?as?a?), an antidote that allows us not to die (??t?d?t?? t?? µ? ?p??a?e??) but to live at all times in Jesus Christ” (Eph. 20:2). In other words, for Ignatius, the bread of the Eucharist, which he elsewhere identifies as the actual flesh of Jesus, is a drug and an antidote that brings eternal life to those who partake.
I argue in my paper that Ignatius, by drawing on the traditional medical and religious understanding of pharmakon, infuses the Christian Eucharist with a more nuanced meaning and thereby makes it more palatable in a world that was still immersed in paganism.
The paper, then, focuses on the meaning of pharmakon in Greco-Roman culture and how this ties in with Ignatius’s treatment of the word in his letters. I focus in particular on how pharmakon was understood as a drug. This entails an attention to Galen and Hippocrates’ understanding of drugs and their effect on the human body. I also suggest an association between Ignatius’s “drug of immortality” and known ancient drugs, namely, Theriac and Athanasia. Both of these were antidotes or cure-all drugs mentioned by Hippocrates and known to have been used around the time of Ignatius. I draw attention to verbal parallels between the way these drugs are talked about and the way the drug of immortality is discussed by Ignatius.
Next, I consider the other side of this medical process – namely, Jesus’ role in the administration of the drug. For Ignatius, Jesus not only administered the drug, but also embodied it. As I point out, this was not a completely foreign idea in Greco-Roman culture at large. The gods Asclepius and Isis, in particular, were also associated with medicine and healing, though they were not thought to embody the medicine. I spend some time looking at verbal parallels between the passage under discussion in Ignatius and a passage in Diodorus Siculus’s History, which describes a “drug of immortality” allegedly discovered and administered by the goddess Isis. Lastly, I consider the role of pharmakon in the moral health of the community. Unlike a real known drug, it does not bring healing or prolonged life in the present. Immortality is only achieved after death. In the present, the drug of immortality brings moral well-being. In this context, I briefly consider references to pharmakon as an instrument of moral or political redemption in classical literature. I also consider the role of the pharmakoi (a derivative of pharmakon/a meaning “druggists”), or scapegoats, in the yearly festival of Thargelia in classical Athens. In the same way that these pharmakoi were thought to morally purify the community, I suggest, Ignatius’s drug of immortality (the very embodiment of Jesus) was thought to purify the community in which it was partaken.
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Sound Matters: The Role and Function of Pronunciation in Ancient Performance
Program Unit: Performance Criticism of the Bible and Other Ancient Texts
T. Michael W. Halcomb, Conversational Koine Institute
Within the arenas of ancient oratory, praise and mockery often surfaced as soon as a performer opened his or her mouth to speak. This is because the topic of pronunciation, specifically regard to orthoepy (i.e. proper pronunciation—or a lack thereof—was an important component of delivery. Yet, even beyond the formal realms of rhetorical practice and into the venues of everyday speech, pronunciation was still judged to be significant. While this paper will touch briefly on the latter, its focal point is on the former and, as such, seeks to offer insights on the role and function of pronunciation in ancient performances.
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Benjaminite-Judahite Tensions in Persian Period Yehud
Program Unit: Hebrew Bible, History, and Archaeology
Erin Hall, Tel Aviv University
Many scholars hold that the shift in power from Jerusalem to Tell en-Na?beh/Mizpah had a negative impact on Benjaminite-Judahite relations in the Neo-Babylonian and early Persian periods. Although several researchers focus on anti-Benjaminite rhetoric in the Bible as proof of intertribal tensions, few studies incorporate Yehud's stamped storage jar systems into their reconstructions. My research addresses this issue by analyzing the distribution of m(w)?h, lion, and yehud stamped storage jar handles with an eye to the changing geopolitical status of Jerusalem, Tell en-Na?beh, and Ramat Ra?el. It then turns to instances of anti-Benjaminite rhetoric in the Bible to explain why Benjamin declined in the post-exilic period as Ramat Ra?el continued to thrive. The results are considered in conjunction with the history of Benjaminite-Judahite relations in the centuries leading up to Alexander's conquest of Yehud.
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Co-designing a Survey Course with Learners to Achieve Learning Transformation
Program Unit: Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies
Taylor Halverson, Brigham Young University
“What do you teach?” is a common question in the halls of Higher Education. Typical responses run the breadth of topics in human learning. However, a better response is “I teach students” or even better yet, “I help students to learn.” This presentation will explain and demonstrate core principles of co-agentive design. Co-agentive design is a process of teaching and learning design whereby the teacher and learner constructively create the learning experience. Participants will then actively explore how these principles can be meaningfully applied to Bible Survey courses where neither content coverage or student-focused learning are sacrificed.
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Displacement, Diaspora, and Exile in Biblical Narrative
Program Unit: Ancient Fiction and Early Christian and Jewish Narrative
Martien Halvorson-Taylor, University of Virginia
This paper examines the influence of ideas about displacement, exile, and diaspora upon Israel’s recollection of her more distant past. Early pre-exilic narratives of Israel’s beginnings were redacted during and in response to Israel’s experience of exile, so that, for example, earlier Abraham and Joseph traditions were reshaped to draw on the realities of the Babylonian exile and the related Diaspora; these reworked traditions, in turn, informed narratives, such as Esther and Daniel, that took exile and diaspora as their explicit subject. The stories of Israel’s origins, particularly those of Abraham and Joseph, and its accounts of post-exilic and diasporic existence exerted a reciprocal influence on each other; and thus Israelite history came to be narrated as a series of exiles and returns, in which current dislocations were understood in terms of primeval patterns, and ancestral stories were revised in light of current dislocations.
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Land Tenure, Labor, and Debt
Program Unit: Economics in the Biblical World
Gildas Hamel, University of California-Santa Cruz
Rents, debt payments, and taxes played a crucial role in the re-allocation of the product of land-based labor in ancient agrarian societies. This paper looks at three aspects of this allocation in the Hellenistic and Roman period. First, it examines land tenure as an organized system of household-based labor done by seasonal workers, some slaves, sharecroppers, fixed-rent tenants, and petty landowners. Second, it revisits the question of the evolution of tenancy versus small and large landownership on the basis of selected textual and archaeological evidence. In this regard, particular attention is given to the function of debt and reciprocity ethos. Finally, consideration is given briefly to three ideological aspects: the role of temple and torah in enforcing contracts, the vocabulary of faith and fidelity, and the theme of the son and absent father.
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The Role of the Divine Warrior: Isaiah 42:13–17 in Light of the Comparative Literature
Program Unit: National Association of Professors of Hebrew
Matthew Hamilton, Carson-Newman University
This project seeks to identify and analyze the relationship between Isaiah 42:12-17 and its ancient Near Eastern counterparts found in comparative literature. This study sets out to identify and define those relationships as intentional, yet more than mere borrowing. The intertextual relationships between this biblical text and comparative texts are intentional allusions and/or echoes that subvert the foreign literature in order to create new meaning. Texts within the Hebrew Bible, and specifically Isaiah 42:13-17, allude to numerous ideas and themes from the surrounding ancient Near Eastern culture. This is done to correct a perceived wrong; the ancient material expressed a misunderstanding of the way Yahweh's world worked, and the author of the biblical text sought to correct that misunderstanding. First, I will apply H. Wayne Ballard's method of locating specific uses of the divine warrior motif, which he utilized in the Psalms, within the book of Isaiah. In his The Divine Warrior Motif in the Psalms, he used eight semantic groupings in order to locate the motif within a the Psalms, of which I have identified numerous vocabulary used within Isaiah 42. I will then apply the methodology used by Richard B. Hays and Christopher B. Hays to determine if a specific allusion or echo might exist between those biblical text and ancient Near Eastern texts. Richard B. Hays developed seven criteria for recognizing echoes between the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible, and Christopher B. Hays has applied those same criteria to the intertextual relationships between the Hebrew Bible and ancient Near Eastern comparative literature. Based on the applicability of these seven criteria to the text, I will analyze whether or not an intertextual relationship exists, and explain the relationship in light of current scholarship. I will seek to move beyond the major interpreters of Isaiah to explain the theological implications of reading Isaiah 42 intertextually, instead of as a mere product of borrowing.
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Translation as Interpretation in the Psalms of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke
Program Unit: Book of Psalms
Hannibal Hamlin, Ohio State University
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De Iside et Osiride and the Greek Creation of Egyptian Religion
Program Unit: Greco-Roman Religions
James Constantine Hanges, Miami University
This paper will argue that Plutarch’s treatise on Isis and Osiris is largely a social product with only tenuous connections to anything that might be identified as historical realities. Using postcolonial critique as its prism, this paper argues that Plutarch has created his story of religious innovations in the process of cultural viewing, a process that involves the casting of his glance toward the ambiguous other, in this case a multifaceted Egyptian cult and its devotees, that projects Plutarch’s values and assumptions onto the other. This process of viewing entails a simultaneous reflectivity in which Plutarch’s act of creative imaging not only creates the other but reconstructs his own sense of self in his act of viewing. Since Plutarch’s viewing lens, his assumptions about and stereotypes of Egyptian cult, is a social construct produced by his social location, Plutarch has created his Egyptian cult, its history, and its functionaries in the process reshaping his own image, his own identity against the image of the other he has created.
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Making the Right Hole Appear in the Right Place: Eccl 4:17–5:6 in Text and Tradition
Program Unit: Ideological Criticism
Davis Hankins, Appalachian State University
For many attempts to read the book of Qohelet as a whole, Qoh 4:17-5:6 (Eng. 5:1-7) is a central passage. It tends to frustrate readings that emphasize the irreligious character of the book, as it mentions sacrifice, vows, and speech to God; for those that describe Qohelet’s God as transcendent and, especially, as transcending any moral principle, this text says both that God is in heaven and that God can respond to an offense with punitive action. According to most readings, this text responds primarily to a sense of the fundamental incommensurability between human and divine zones. Verse 1c seems to state plainly that this is the issue: “God is in the heavens and you are on the earth.” Beyond this, the general portrayal of human ineptitude (unknowing, earth-bound, afflicted, foolish, mistaken, the object of God's anger) serves, so the argument goes, to underline the contrary hugeness of God. Yet our reading reveals a surprising alternative. Qohelet’s response tries to steer a course that neither achieves its orientation through reference to some transcendent God, nor pretends that it has overcome such fantasies by acknowledging the limitations of humans to ever know or approach something like the divine. Vows and sacrifices can efface the distance between word and deed by acknowledging it or, even worse, determining it as a distance separating human beings from some God beyond them. Qohelet counsels instead to fear, to keep one’s eyes looking down and one’s ears to the ground, aware that dangerous fantasies and costly sacrifices often emerge in the gap between words and deeds. Our paper concludes with a brief survey of the reception history of Qoh 4:17-5:6, highlighting various ways in which readers seek to close this very gap that Qohelet insists is always open.
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Mary of Bethany: Her Leadership Uncovered
Program Unit: Maria, Mariamne, Miriam: Rediscovering the Marys
Mary Stromer Hanson, Denver Seminary
S24-324 Maria, Mariamne, Miriam: Rediscovering the Marys
A new reading of Luke 10:38-42 is long overdue. I agree with G.B. Caird: “Few stories in the gospels have been as consistently mishandled as this one.” A comparison between the two sisters results in the eventual compromise: Martha is important, but Mary is the preferred. Did not Jesus himself state preference for Mary’s choice? This paper offers a brief survey of prior interpreters who hint of an alternative interpretation. With additional exegesis and examination of many textual variants, a new story emerges that does not force a choice between spiritual and practical service. Indeed, Martha’s worries are of much greater consequence than serving food on that day. Mary is evangelizing in Galilee and is causing Martha concern for her safety. She implores Jesus to bring her back home to help with the diakonia. This interpretation suggests that Mary of Bethany attracted her own following, therefore explaining her greater prominence in John 11:31,45 and her position of church leadership often eclipsed by the Magdalene.
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Masculine Domination and the Anthropology of Biblical Commentary: The Case of Philo of Alexandria
Program Unit: Use, Influence, and Impact of the Bible
James E. Harding, University of Otago
The symbolic violence of what Pierre Bourdieu called masculine domination (cf. Bourdieu 2001 [1998]) is everywhere in evidence in the biblical texts, which bear the scars, unconsciously inflicted, of this violence by virtue of their genesis and transmission in societies in which masculine domination was taken as natural. These scars have been, and continue to be, examined in the works that constitute the Jewish and Christian scriptures, thanks to the important advances made by various forms of feminist exegesis. Important work has also been, and continues to be, done on the way a largely unrecognised and unexamined androcentric epistemology governs much biblical commentary, both ancient and modern. How, though, is the commentator constituted as a subject, and how is this process marked in respect of gender? In this paper, my concern is with one ancient instance of how the scriptural commentator was constituted as a subject, that of Philo of Alexandria. It is not simply a matter of how Philo’s exegetical work reflects the assumptions of a patriarchal society, or of an individual exegete who is the product of that society, still less of the brute fact (as if there could even be such a thing) that Philo happened to be a man: it is a matter, rather, of the relationship between how Philo understood the nature of male and female, and how he understood the nature of scriptural exegesis. In particular, it is a matter of the relationship between, on the one hand, Philo’s symbolic interpretation of “mind” (nous) as corresponding to man and “sense perception” (aisthesis) as corresponding to “woman” (Opif. 165; cf. QG 1.25), and, on the other hand, his understanding of scriptural exegesis as accommodating literal and allegorical senses. Philo’s predominant preference for the allegorical over the literal sense, especially in QG, reflects a concomitant preference for soul and mind over body and the senses, and, by extension, entails a tacit assumption about the commentator: he must be constructed as male.
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"Apocalyptic Rhetoric" in the Pastoral Epistles
Program Unit: Disputed Paulines
Mark Harding, Australian College of Theology
The Apostle Paul is rightly termed an apocalypticist not only because his message originated in an apocalypse (Gal 1:12, 16), but also because he continued to receive visions and revelations. He imparted these to his hearers. The post-Pauline authors of Ephesians and Colossians mediate Paul’s apocalypticism chiefly through the discourse of “mystery.” Although it has been fashionable to downplay the apocalypticism of the Pastoral Epistles (PE), the letters do subscribe to this worldview.
In the PE, Paul’s apocalypticism is encountered not only in their espousal of apocalyptic eschatology but also in their discourse of the finality of the mystery and revelation uniquely received and authoritatively mediated by the Apostle. This discourse—rooted as it is in revelation—is aptly termed “apocalyptic rhetoric.” This is a term that was first applied to the rhetoric of the New Testament Apocalypse by Adela Yarbro Collins and Barry Brummett in the early 1980s. The term can be applied to the rhetoric of the PE, although the PE (like the Pauline corpus as a whole) are letters and not apocalypses. In this discourse, the authority of the Apostle in the highly contested context of the PE is grounded in the epiphany of Christ and the moral and creedal implications that are in accord with that epiphany and to which his ministry, and the ministry of those he commissions, finally, infallibly and exclusively bears witness. The apostolic “deposit” vouchsafed to Paul and through him to his delegates and their successors is full, perfect and sufficient, such that teaching that is not in accord with it is a betrayal of the Pauline heritage. In this way, the PE are testimonies of the power of speech grounded in revelation and mediated by a writer who uniquely articulated the apostle’s authority.
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Tattooing as a Violent Art in the Ancient Mediterranean
Program Unit: Art and Religions of Antiquity
Christina Harker, Yale University
This paper examines the role of drawing on others’ bodies as an expression of violence and domination in the ancient Roman context. Tattooing was used as a way to mark runaway slaves and was a violent display of ownership in Greece and Rome. This contrasts with the use of tattoos as self-identifying cultural marks in other ancient cultures (ancient Britons, Thracians, and Scythians were known by their tattoos). In the paper, I survey examples of the tattoo as a label of ownership on the bodies of slaves in Greece and Rome (e.g., Diogenes Laertius, Xenophon, etc.) and theorize the inscription of owned bodies as an enactment of permanent violence against the personhood of the Other. I also examine instances where tattooing expressed the dominance of a ruler over free people, as in Suetonius and 3 Maccabees, to discuss the ancient Hellenistic and Roman tattoo as creating alterity and subordination in the act itself. In these situations, the tattoo functioned as a symbol of the ruler’s absolute power. Both of these typical aspects of ancient tattoos tie into how tattoos expressed ownership in cultic settings, as seen in examples from Egypt, in Revelation, and in Paul’s writing.
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Thinking about Prayers and the Practice of Prayer from the Past to the Present
Program Unit: Prayer in Antiquity
Angela Kim Harkins, University of Birmingham
This paper explores the different ways that integrative approaches associated with emotion studies can help to shed light on the experiences of religion in the past. In a general and programmatic way, we will discuss the methodological issues of comparing religious experience cross-culturally, specifically with regard to describing the contrasting understandings of emotion and subjectivity in the experiences of prayer. A selection of prayer texts and texts describing prayer from the ancient and modern period will be discussed.
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The Iconography of Beheading in Roman Imperial Art: Some Ramifications for Christianity in Its Representation of Suffering
Program Unit: Art and Religions of Antiquity
Felicity Harley-McGowan, Yale University
In Roman art, a strong tradition of the public depiction of battle had existed from the third century BCE, wherein symbolic and allegorical compositions were used to depict and proclaim Roman victory. As this practice evolved, the vanquished were the recipients of increasing attention: represented as captives, bound, humiliated, and brought to servitude at the feet of Roman trophies they became ‘abstract symbols’ of Roman power. Within the frame of imperial art, prominent representations of the beheadings of captives (or the decollated heads themselves) functioned to glorify the peace-making efforts of the Roman army; they asserted the glory not only of the Emperor, but of the army itself, and of the Empire.
This paper will argue that while early Christian art made use of the idioms developed in Roman imperial depictions, there had to be a fundamental shift in the viewer’s perception of the vanquished for Christians to be able to visualize situations where suffering was integral to a story. The body of the enemy-captive (de-humanized, defeated, and held in contempt), had to be transformed into the body of the sacred-hero (humanized, victorious and celebrated) for the iconography of the victim to have a new purpose. Through examination of the iconography of beheading, the paper will propose that in effecting a reversal of the iconography’s meaning, image-makers in the fourth century realized the creation not only of a new image for Christian patrons, but an entirely new genre of imagery: Christian suffering. This genre would come to dominate Western visual culture, and at its centre would be nailed the dead Christ, as the central and defining image of the Christian faith.
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Rhetorical Renunciations of Extravagance: Ambrose’s Educated Simplicity
Program Unit: Early Christianity and the Ancient Economy
Andrew M. Harmon, Marquette University
Late-antique Christian denunciations of worldly extravagences were often themselves exemplary in their eloquence. Ambrose is our case in point. This paper briefly explores some sources and themes dominant in Ambrose’s education, before analyzing two of his letters. The first is one of his earliest (Lent, 379 CE) to a certain bishop, Constantius, newly appointed in northern Italy. Ambrose warns Constantius of the trappings of the world and doublespeak and yet advises him to take up persuasive methods in sermon preparation and preaching. The second letter, dated 395 CE, takes up the conversion of Paulinus of Nola, who, while noble in birth, social rank, and wealth, had taken up the practices of the faith. Because of the impress of his conversion, Paulinus gave away his property and said farewell to his former life, unloading the heavy burden of home, country, and kindred in order to serve God. Paulinus’s wife, Therasia, followed suit, imitating her husband’s zeal. Ambrose equates Paulinus’s luxury with his nobility, exemplified by wealth and rhetorical excess. Worship of the dei ueri precludes these fineries. Paulinus could not serve two masters; by loving the One, he must hate the other.
As much as these letters might tell us about Constantius and Paulinus, they tell us even more about the perceived struggle of fourth-century Christian minds. In one corner were the trappings of the world, the lure of wealth, and the elitist education that perpetuated its acquisition. In the other were the Christian virtues and their promise for proliferation among the lower classes, fostered and evidenced by simple, straightforward speech and living. Ambrose was caught between these two poles. Hailing from a notable family of social standing and imperial administration in Trier, he was keenly familiar with both the importance of public performance in matters of civic dispute and the specific educational formation this performance entailed: his classical education demanded the sort of persuasion driven by eloquence that Paulinus supposedly disowned. Yet, his abrupt appointment to bishop forced him into a position that was distinctly for the people, that stressed rusticity and frank speech. These competing goals heightened the necessity of public presentation, of showing when and where Christian virtues outstripped their rivals. What resulted was often a verbose underselling of Christianity for the masses. Despite his explicit distance from his past, Ambrose is never free from his educational formation. More importantly, given the fact that Ambrose utilizes his training against itself, this paper argues that it mattered less that Ambrose was truly struggling and more that he appeared to struggle.
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Cyprian and His Plague: Taking the Pandemic Seriously
Program Unit: Contextualizing North African Christianity
Kyle Harper, University of Oklahoma
Cyprian gave his name to the pandemic disease that sporadically ravaged the Roman Empire from at least 249-270. Yet, until recently, this disease event has received relatively little attention from historians of the third century. The author has recently published a study (forthcoming, Journal of Roman Archaeology) for the first time bringing together the testimony for the Plague of Cyprian. Despite the famously poor evidentiary base for the mid-third century, there is an astonishingly thick and detailed record of an empire-wide pandemic, possibly of hemorrhagic fever, sweeping across the empire, with major demographic effects. Comparative evidence suggests that severe demographic shocks can have major spiritual and cultural effects. This paper will look more closely at the leadership of Cyprian and ask what a hypothetically significant empire-wide disease event would mean for his leadership and the expansion of Christianity during his tenure as bishop.
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Why Mary? The Gospel of Mary and Its Heroine
Program Unit: Maria, Mariamne, Miriam: Rediscovering the Marys
Judith Hartenstein, Universität Koblenz - Landau
Mary (Magdalen) is clearly the most important disciple in the Gospel of Mary. About half of the extant text is direct speech of Mary and the whole gospel is named after her. Is there any reason for this central position of Mary and what impact does it have for the interpretation of the text?
In my paper, I will examine the titles of second century gospels and the roles of the persons named. Some of them are similar to the Gospel of Mary but the comparison highlights its special features as well. Moreover, I will analyse whether older or contemporary traditions connected to Mary Magdalen can be found in the Gospel of Mary. Apart from the ascend of the soul the transmission of words of Jesus is relevant here. The Gospel of Mary might present a distinct form of Jesus tradition. In general, the evaluation of the relation between Mary and the content of her gospel will help to place the Gospel of Mary within early Christianity – and to get a clearer picture of the ideas associated with the name of Mary.
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The Limits of Trafficking in Augustine's Letter 10*
Program Unit: Slavery, Resistance, and Freedom
Midori E. Hartman, Drew University
Augustine was not opposed to the institution of slavery; he used the language of slavery when engaging scripture and advocated for proper relations between masters and slaves. When confronted with the reality of rampant human trafficking in North Africa, he turned to Roman law to defend personal freedom against trafficking that he believed exceeded the limits of acceptability. In Letter 10* to his friend Alypius (428 CE), Augustine did not abide situations that would reduce or erase one's free status and bodily integrity (Glancy 2006). Yet his argument for limits hinged on the fact that there must be those who do not qualify, for example, the so-called “true slaves” or those whose services are sold by their parents for up to twenty-five years (2,7). This paper examines Augustine's confrontation with the “disease” of trafficking in Letter 10* as a legal issue in order to explore who benefits or loses within his logic of acceptable trafficking. I focus upon two categories of people: A. the traffickers (mangones) and B. those who remain tolerable figures of trafficking. I argue that Augustine's attentiveness to the humanity and citizenship of the traffickers (5) and his desire to shield them from the full extent of the law (4) means that the mangones ultimately benefit as figures within the law even as they break it in pursuit of immoderate gain. However, the traces of those who are not within the law and therefore cannot be illegally trafficked—“true slaves,” legal child labor, even barbarians—populate the text in resistance to Augustine's emphasis on the rights of free people. This focus calls us to consider the ways in which contemporary narratives about human trafficking exclude people from being considered within the law and how we hold perpetrators of violence accountable within and beyond national borders.
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Pesher and Hypomnema: The Dead Sea Scrolls Commentaries in Their Hellenistic-Roman Context
Program Unit: Qumran
Pieter B. Hartog, KU Leuven
This paper argues that the development of commentary-writing in the Dead Sea Scrolls reflects the Hellenistic-Roman background of their composers and the prominence of “commentary” as a type of scholarly literature in the Hellenistic-Roman world.
The first part of this paper compares the “running” Pesharim from Qumran with Greek papyrus commentaries (hypomnemata) on the Iliad. Thus, it surveys the similarities and differences between the physical features, the structure, and the hermeneutics of these two collections.
The second part of this paper addresses the context in which these similarities and differences must be understood. It argues that the Pesher exegetes were aware of and influenced by Greek traditions of commentary-writing not through having had a thorough Greek education, but through various more indirect means of knowledge transmission.
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The Aqedah in the Bavli: An Analysis of Sanhedrin 89b
Program Unit: Midrash
Matthew Hass, Harvard University
A prominent trend in recent scholarship on rabbinic biblical interpretation is to trace the development of individual exegetical motifs and traditions. However, when focusing on isolated traditions, scholars rarely place rabbinic midrashim within their broader literary and rhetorical frameworks. Thus, the new meanings created by the redactors of rabbinic compilations through their juxtaposition of different traditions are often underappreciated.
My paper examines the midrashim on Genesis 22, commonly referred to as the Aqedah, which are found in Bavli Sanhedrin 89b. I show how the editors of the Talmudic sugya presented a unique picture of the Aqedah by juxtaposing specific midrashim within a particular halakhic context. Through strategic changes to received Palestinian traditions, the Bavli’s redactors direct the reader’s attention to the heavenly struggle between God and Satan, and to Abraham’s role as God’s soldier in this battle. Satan is about to emerge victorious, when Abraham remembers the rabbinic halakhah that is under discussion: One may only accept the prophecy of someone who is an established prophet. Since Satan does not fall into this category, his arguments, while convincing, must be disregarded. In this way, Abraham is presented as the model rabbinic Jew, who follows the dictates of the rabbis even in the most trying of circumstances. Additionally, the foundational status of the Aqedah now supports the legitimacy, and indeed indispensability, of the rabbinic project. The midrashim, while originally devoid of legal content, thus become an essential component of the sugya’s halakhic discourse.
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Midianites, Melanesians, and Myths of Superiority: Numbers’ Game and Polynesian Arrogance
Program Unit: Bible and Cultural Studies
Jione Havea, Charles Sturt University
This paper interweaves the unexplained discrimination against the Midianites in the book of Numbers with the myth of whiteness that colors Polynesians’ demeaning arrogance over Melanesians. Was the prejudice against the Midianites racially motivated? To what extent was it driven by skin-color? What (oral) scriptures prompted Israelite biases against the Midianites? What influence did the bible and the White Christian mission have in the fairer skin-color Polynesians’ debasing view against the darker skin-color Melanesians? How might the bible be used to reconcile such racial and color biases? I will show that the bible was used to instigate racial discrimination (in the case of Polynesians, as well as among White settlers to Australia) and argue that to use the bible in processes of reconciliation requires that it be read as an unravelling (or deconstructed) text. Herein is a multi-plying argument. The bible can be a solution to the problem it helped create only if it unravels itself. Since the bible unravels itself, it can be used in race-based reconciliation processes.
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Politics and the Promised Land
Program Unit: Joshua-Judges
Rachel Havrelock, University of Illinois at Chicago
no abstract
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Saviors and Savages: Hybrid Types at the Frontiers of Conquest and Identity
Program Unit: Bible and Film
L. Daniel Hawk, Ashland Theological Seminary
The Indigenous Helper and the Indigenized Invader play pivotal roles in the conquest narratives of biblical Israel and modern America. Both narratives articulate a charter for the nation and reflect a working out of national identity over against the indigenous Other. Rahab and Achan, both of whom assume Canaanite/Israelite identities, appear at the outset of Joshua and take on complementary roles. Rahab the indigenous prostitute protects the vanguard of the Israelite invasion and through her confession (2:9-11) expresses indigenous acquiescence to it. Because of this, she and her family are spared, although assigned a place outside the Israelite camp. Achan the pedigreed Israelite, on the other hand, illustrates the threat of indigenous presence. When he hides Canaanite plunder in the camp, the nation takes on the semblance of Canaan on the battlefield. He and his family are killed and entombed under a pile of rocks, linking them symbolically with the king of Ai and with the Canaanite towns reduced to rubble (7:26; 8:29). Corresponding roles in American national mythology took shape during the 19th Century, primarily in the figures of Pocahontas and Simon Girty (the White Savage) and under the influence of the frontier motif that crafted American identity. The types, however, have been reconfigured in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, as the United States renegotiates is national identity through the retelling of its narrative of origins. Attention to the way the types coalesce and play out in three selected films suggests that America’s mythic infrastructure has become increasingly ambivalent as the nation comes to terms with its violent origins in the land. “Little Big Man” (1970) reveals an inchoate attempt to address the conquest through a veiled association with the War in Vietnam. “Dances with Wolves” draws on the myths of the Vanishing American and the Noble Savage and concludes with the indigenized whites (John Dunbar and Stands with a Fist) safely distant from the fate that awaits the Lakota. In “Avatar,” the types are turned on their heads via the medium of fantasy, yet remain tethered to the core trope of the White Savior.
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Contrapuntal Reading and the Grammatical-Historical Method: Provocations and Possibilities
Program Unit: Postcolonial Studies and Biblical Studies
L. Daniel Hawk, Ashland Theological Seminary
Evangelical exegesis has been broadly configured by the grammatical-historical method, which locates the meaning of a passage in the author’s intention and seeks to discern the intended meaning through a close reading of the text within its historical context. Postcolonial reading strategies expose the method’s instantiation of the Western intellectual tradition (e.g. objective analysis, a single meaning, principle and application, exegesis as exploration and discovery) but also open new trajectories for re/forming evangelical exegetical practices toward a diverse, global discourse. The potential of this enterprise can be illustrated via an interrogation of evangelical commentaries on the book of Ruth.
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"O Lord, Is This Not What I Said?" Soundings in Reception History of Prayers in Exodus
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Ralph K. Hawkins, Averett University
'O LORD, Is This Not What I Said?' Soundings in Reception History of Prayers in Exodus.
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The “Low-Life” Mockers of Job: Job 30:1–8 as an Extended Animal Metaphor
Program Unit: Metaphor in the Bible and Cognate Literature
Lance Hawley, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Commentators have puzzled over Job 30:1-8 on account of the apparent discontinuity between the disparaging tone of 30:1-8 and Job’s sympathetic attitude toward the poor in other Joban texts (Job 24:1-12; 29:12-17; 30:24-25; 31:16-22). With seeming unanimity, commentators interpret Job 30:1-8 as a portrayal of Job’s enemies, those who mock his suffering, as extremely impoverished people who live in the desert. The corresponding claim is then, as Newsom says, “What makes these people so contemptible is their abject poverty” (“The Book of Job,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible, 544). However, if the text is understood as an extended animal metaphor, human poverty is not the issue at all. My argument is that Job evokes the conceptual metaphor JOB’S MOCKERS ARE DESERT ANIMALS, projecting features of the source domain DESERT ANIMALS onto the target JOB’S MOCKERS in order to portray these cruel people as desperate scavengers who are despised by civilization. It is not that Job’s mockers actually live in holes the desert, survive off of roots of broom root, or make braying sounds among the desert weeds, but that the author excessively makes a simple point that these low-life mockers are completely uncivilized. The text makes best sense as a collage of desert animal conceptual domains including WILD DONKEY and, perhaps, WILD DOG or JACKAL. Besides providing a new interpretation of Job 30:1-8 on the basis of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and observational studies of animal behavior and plant life, this paper comments on the issue of “mixed metaphor.” Combining features of various animals may strike one as imprecise, but metaphor binding and mixing within metaphor clusters is typical. Extended metaphor is often expressed without complete intentionality, inner-consistency, or exactitude, especially with regard to the source domain. Mixed metaphor “works” when the binding is external to the single clause. In other words, conceptual metaphors may shift as arguments progress and meaning planes switch from one clause to the next. Moreover, while the multiple expressions in Job 30:1-8 may vary with respect to the specific signified animal, they share a “cognitive root” in DESERT ANIMALS, providing perceptible coherence to the metaphor cluster. The crucial point is not the identification of specific animals or even their particular behaviors, but the more general character of desert animals as wild, uncivilized, and bothersome. The particular animals that I suggest serve for source imagery in Job 30:1-8, the wild donkey and wild dog, are prototypical desert animals that epitomize destitution, wildness, and marginalization. In the book of Job, DESERT ANIMALS serves as a source for portraying MARGINALIZATION, whether the intended evocation is sympathy, as in Job 24:4-8, or scorn, as in Job 30:1-8.
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An Analysis of the Attributive Participle and the Relative Clause in the Greek New Testament
Program Unit: Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics
Michael E. Hayes, St. John's Lutheran/Concordia Seminary
Many New Testament Greek grammarians assert that the Greek attributive participle and the Greek relative clause are “equivalent.” A survey of those assertions reveals a lack of comprehensive and original research with respect to this grammatical “rule.”
James W. Voelz originally asserted that the two constructions were equivalent. In recent times, however, he has made exploratory observations concerning the restrictive nature of attributive participles and the possible nonrestrictive nature of relative clauses, thereby questioning the notion of equivalence. His observations have served as an impetus to reassess these grammatical constructions especially with respect to the restrictive/nonrestrictive distinction.
The present work puts forth the findings of an analysis of every attributive participle and relative clause in the Greek New Testament. The linguistic categories of restrictivity and nonrestrictivity are thoroughly presented. Multiple restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses (both attributive participles and relative clauses) are analyzed and general tendencies are noted. The Accessibility Hierarchy provides a helpful framework for accurately comparing the two constructions, focusing the central and critical analysis to the subject relative clause and the attributive participle.
The analysis of the present work leads to the conclusion that with respect to the restrictive/nonrestrictive distinction these two constructions could in no way be described as “equivalent.” The attributive participle is primarily utilized to restrict its antecedent except under certain prescribed circumstances, and when both constructions are grammatically and stylistically feasible, the relative clause is predominantly utilized to relate nonrestrictively to its antecedent. As a result, this study serves as a call to clarity and correction for New Testament Greek grammarians, exegetes/commentators, and modern editors and translators of the Greek New Testament.
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Hope and History in Isaiah 24–27: Reassessing a ‘Proto-Apocalyptic’ Text
Program Unit: Book of Isaiah
Christopher B. Hays, Fuller Theological Seminary (Pasadena)
Although the designation of Isaiah 24-27 as a “Little Apocalypse” has largely been abandoned, it has long and widely been accepted that the chapters display ‘proto-apocalyptic’ features, notably eschatological and universal perspectives. This has been one of the pillars supporting the dating of some or all the section as late as the Hellenistic period. However, recent studies of apocalyptic(ism) suggest that there is, increasingly, uncertainty about Isa 24-27’s place in that conversation. Since other pillars of the chapters’ dating have been shown to be quite unstable, this paper now explicitly re-opens the question of the section’s relationship to apocalyptic and eschatology. Surveying the history of the conversation, especially from Plöger to Hanson to Cook, it also assesses the viability and future of the category of “proto-apocalyptic” itself.
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Gradations of Unholiness: The ‘Circles’ of Ezekiel’s Underworld
Program Unit: Book of Ezekiel
Christopher B. Hays, Fuller Theological Seminary (Pasadena)
Recent studies of Ezekiel 32 have paid increasing attention to the fact that not all of the dead in Ezekiel’s underworld are equal. This paper argues that these distinctions among the dead are a reflex of the book’s Priestly emphasis on holiness and order. A recent volume presented numerous essays on “Ezekiel’s hierarchical world.” This paper shows that even the underworld made up part of that “tiered reality.”
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What Hath Babylon to Do with Jerusalem? Isaiah 54:13 in Light of the Contrast between Lady Babylon and Lady Zion
Program Unit: Israelite Prophetic Literature
Nathan Hays, Baylor University
Despite a growing scholarly consensus that Lady Zion in Isa 54 literarily contrasts with Lady Babylon in Isa 47 (Spykerboer, Steck, Biddle), scholars have not noticed the role that Yahweh’s teaching of Zion’s children plays in this rhetoric of antithesis throughout Isa 47–54. Isaiah 54:13 contrasts Zion’s children instructed by Yahweh with the educated elite of Babylon from Isa 47. Yahweh’s instruction ensures that Zion’s children will never again go astray and thereby guarantees the permanency of Zion’s restoration. By contrast, Lady Babylon places her confidence in the instruction of Mesopotamia’s educated cadre of enchanters and diviners, but their instruction proves ineffectual and even contributes to Babylon’s inevitable fall (47:9–15). Lady Babylon’s reliance upon her educated elite is thus misplaced, but Isa 54:13 encourages Lady Zion to understand that the education of her inhabitants will bolster Zion’s stability. In this way, Isa 54:13 contributes to the motif of the permanency of Zion’s restoration that pervades and unifies Isa 54 and highlights the central place of Yahwistic education in the polemic against the Neo-Babylonian Empire throughout Deutero-Isaiah.
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Trauma, Remembrance, and Healing: The Pastoral Effect of Joining the Wisdom Tradition and Historical Reflection in Psalm 78
Program Unit: Bible and Practical Theology
Rebecca Poe Hays, Baylor University
The way a text follows, bends, and breaks generic conventions can have a significant impact on the effect the text has on its readers. While wisdom and history generally stand divorced from one another, Ps 78 unites the two genres. Recognizing patterns reminiscent of Judith Herman’s trauma therapy approach in Ps 78 illuminates the way wisdom and history function together in this psalm. Herman’s classic model for trauma recovery involves moving the traumatized through three stages: reestablishing safety and stability, remembering and mourning the trauma, and reconnecting with reality. In Ps 78, the initial wisdom elements establish a sense of safety while historical review prompts the audience to remember its past trauma—in which the audience was not always an innocent victim—and reconnect with reality. The linking of wisdom and history within Ps 78 has the effect of creating a safe space in which a traumatized community can reflect on their past, recover emotionally, and reorient themselves to the reality of their covenant relationship with God. While proposals for the original context into which Ps 78 spoke range from the tenth century BCE to the postexilic period, the functionality of this psalm transcends its original context because it reflects a traumatic past still relevant to readers struggling to understand a God who allowed or even caused atrocities against God’s people.
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The Digitization of Jesse Payne Smith’s Compendious Syriac Dictionary and the Development of JPS 2.0
Program Unit: International Syriac Language Project
Kristian S. Heal, Brigham Young University
This paper will report on the project thus far and talk about ways in which the digital dictionary will be developed beyond the print version (semantic tagging, improved etymologies, corpus linkage giving citations and usage information, etc.).
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“As It Is Written”: The Text of the Bible in the Syriac Narrative Poems on Joseph
Program Unit: Syriac Literature and Interpretations of Sacred Texts
Kristian Heal, Brigham Young University
This paper proposes to examine the relationship between the corpus of Syriac narrative poems on Joseph and the text of the Syriac Bible. It will do so by tackling three questions: What is the function of particles and phrases suggesting quotation in these poems? Are these poems textually significant for scholars primarily concerned with establishing a critical text of the Peshitta of Genesis? What do these poems tell us about attitudes to the text of Syriac Bible?
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Christian Heresiology in Context: Religio, Superstitio, and Roman Rhetoric of Difference
Program Unit: Jesus Traditions, Gospels, and Negotiating the Roman Imperial World
Robert D. Heaton, University of Denver / Iliff School of Theology
Robert M. Royalty’s recent book The Origin of Heresy examined Jewish and early Christian materials in attempt to account for precursors to the later patristic discourse known as heresiology, a worldview of religious truth and falsehood that disallowed others from claiming a particular identity and separated “orthodoxy” from “heresies.” Though Royalty observed that Christian heresiology might have also imitated Roman ideology (156), his study did not endeavor to explore Roman political writings—even those that prominent Christian heresiographers, such as Tertullian, can be shown to have known—for further clues that could elucidate the genre. From a survey of the use of the Latin terms religio and superstitio in Cicero, Tacitus, Pliny, and several others, this research indicates that elite Roman discourse increasingly began to use superstitio, a term well-established to indicate religious oddities circulating in Roman society, against foreigners, and particularly against those foreigners perceived to pose a threat to its sociopolitical life. This Roman rhetoric of difference bears an important telic similarity to Christian heresiology: both demarcated the boundary between an in-group and various out-groups, marking the latter as insufficient in thought or deed while bolstering a dominant identity rooted in righteousness, virtue, and absolute truth. By examining Roman writings diachronically from the 1st century BCE to the early 2nd century CE, this research identifies an emerging discursive trend among philosophers and historians of the Roman imperium while simultaneously proposing a wider cultural basis for the origin of Christian heresiology than is normally permitted. It also explores whether we can posit a definitive “genealogy” for heresiology, given the manifold influences upon the numerous early Christian theologians setting out to define orthodoxy.
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Crafting a "Big Picture" Assignment: Interviews as Teaching Tool
Program Unit: Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion
Brent Hege, Butler University
Student interviews of classmates, faculty and staff can provide valuable material for critical reflection on course themes and texts when writing a final paper. I will share my rationale for and reflections on such a “big picture” assignment for a First Year Seminar on Faith, Doubt and Reason in which students interview five people on campus and use those responses as material for critical engagement with the definitions of these concepts and their interrelation in the course texts and discussions. I will reflect on the outcomes of this assignment over seven years of teaching the course, propose strategies for using this assignment in a variety of Religion and Theology courses, and suggest ways that such an assignment might positively impact recruitment efforts for Religion and Theology programs.
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How to Use the Dotan/Reich Thesaurus of the Leningrad Codex
Program Unit: Masoretic Studies
Tim Hegg, TorahResource Institute
This presentation is a demonstration of the new Dotan/Reich Thesaurus of the Masorah of the Leningrad Codex.
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The Q Group in Galilee and Syria
Program Unit: Q
Christoph Heil, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz
In a first step, the present paper argues that there are enough distinctive signs of social formation in Q (e.g., rules for discipleship, experiences of persecution, rituals like prayer) to presuppose a group behind Q. Then the scholarly consensus will be defended that the Q group developed in the same Galilean villages and towns where Jesus preached and performed. This thesis is especially argued against Julius Wellhausen, J.M.C. Crum, Marco Frenschkowski and Eckhard Rau who locate the composition of Q in Jerusalem. The Galilean provenance of the Q group is further defended against those who argue that there is not enough evidence for an early Galilean Christianity to situate Q there. Finally, against the majority in Q research, the paper will support the thesis that the Q group fled to Southern Syria when the Romans invaded Galilee in 67 C.E. Accordingly, the final redaction of Q took place in Syria.
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A Mixture of Error and Purpose: Pseudepigrapha among the Writings of the Church Fathers
Program Unit: Pseudepigrapha
Uta Heil, Universität Wien
In contrast to the New Testament (e.g., J. Frey et al. [eds.], Pseudepigraphie und Verfasserfiktion in frühchristlichen Briefen, Tübingen 2009; S. E. Porter/G. P. Fewster [eds.], Paul and Pseudepigraphy, Leiden 2013), research on pseudepigraphy among the writings of the “Church Fathers” is not very intensive. Although many non-authentic ancient Christian writings are known, these texts are more or less ignored in most cases. In general only rediscovered “lost writings” of “heretics” (e.g., the writings of Marcellus of Ancyra and Apollinaris of Laodicaea handed down under the name of Athanasius of Alexandria) have been taken into consideration, but more with the aim to get an authentic voice of those persons and not with an interest in the problem of pseudepigraphy itself. The history of research by Martina Janßen (Unter falschem Namen, Frankfurt am Main 2003) also concludes that the main questions are still unanswered. The overview of Wolfgang Speyer (Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft I/2, 1971) is only a first step as well as the miscellany edited by Javier Martínez García (Mundus vult decipi, 2012).
This paper tries to widen the horizon regarding ancient Christian pseudepigrapha. A starting-point is the book by Bart D. Ehrman (Forgery and Counterforgery, Oxford 2013) who insists on describing pseudepigraphy as forgery and deceit. However, he also mentions some other categories: plagiarism, falsifications, fabriciations, false attributions, problems of anonymity and of homonymity, and fiction. Are those categories adequate and sufficient for describing the emergence of pseudepigraphic writings attributed to “Church Fathers”? Is it convincing that pseudepigraphic writings are in most cases polemical and apologetic forgeries? To put Ehrman’s categories to a test, a special look will be taken at the pseudepigraphic writings attributed to Athanasius of Alexandria. In addition, the interdependence between author and authority will be taken into consideration for a better understanding of these pseudepigraphic writings.
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Imperial or Christological Art? Constantine’s Churches in the Holy Land
Program Unit: Art and Religions of Antiquity
Uta Heil, Universität Wien
Under Constantine the Great, sole ruler of the Roman Empire since 324, the famous churches in the “Holy Land” were built which soon became the main destinations for pilgrims: the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, the Eleona Church at the Mount of Olives, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and finally the church in Mamre. Although there was much research, the reason for the decision of the emperor still remains unclear and a matter of debate. Was this just an expression of his might as a successful ruler of the whole empire? Or are these buildings part of anti-pagan and/or anti-Jewish measures? Or did he want to demonstrate his Christian faith and his support for the Christian church in public? But what inspired him, who has never been in Jerusalem in person? Questions remain, because these buildings were an innovation without precedent.
Some recent publications tried to answer these questions with explicit theological interests of Constantine himself (Martin Wallraff: an expression of the Jesuanism of the emperor; Klaus Bieberstein: the Nicene Creed in stone; Jeanne H. Kilde: a proof for physical ascension; Katharina Heyden: a symbol for the unity of the church). These interpretations require a critical revision on the basis of archaeological evidence and in respect to the belief and “theology” of Constantine.
The paper deals with these latest theological interpretations of the imperial church-building-program of Constantine in the “Holy Land”. The focus will be on the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the first church of Constantine in the “Holy Land”. Important is more interdisciplinary research and more caution concerning an exaggerated theological interpretation of architecture. At the very most, these church buildings meant for Constantine a proof for the truth of Christianity.
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The Lexical Semantics of thriambeuein in Greek Literature: Building the Interpretation of 2 Cor 2:14 and Col 2:15 on a Firm Foundation
Program Unit: Biblical Lexicography
Christoph Heilig, Universität Zürich
The meaning of transitive thriambeuein has puzzled interpreters of the New Testament for a long time. Although, surprisingly, there has not been any detailed work on the lexical semantics of this verb, there are many suggestions in the literature including some that do not see any connection to the rite of the Roman triumphus. These proposals include the neutral meaning ‘to make sb./sth. known’ (Field/Egan), the broad ‘to lead sb. in a religious procession’ (Findley/Duff), and the more negative ‘to expose sb. to shame’ (Marshall/Gruber). However, these proposals cannot offer the necessary lexical support. A clear connection to the Roman triumph is maintained by Hafemann, who thinks the meaning is ‘to lead sb. to death’, namely captives to their execution. However, Hafemann does not offer an analysis of the usage of the verb either but only analyses the concept of the triumphus. Breytenbach was the first to take into account the actual usage of transitive thriambeuein to a significant extent. He concludes that the meaning is: ‘to celebrate a triumph over sb.’ - without including the actual presentation of that person in the procession. However, there are occurrences of the word documented in the TLG that Breytenbach has not taken into account. More importantly, Breytenbach did not pay any attention to paradigmatic relations of transitive thriambeuein. Hence, his analysis of the components of the semantic range of this verb remains deficient. This strange situation of a multitude of suggested “meanings” and the clear lack of detailed lexical analyses is reflected in all the dictionaries of Ancient Greek. In this paper, I will present the results of an in-depth analysis of a) the usage of thriambeuein up until the 3rd century CE as well as b) an analysis of its semantic components in light of semantically related paradigmatic options in the same corpus. As a result, for the first time a definition of transitive thriambeuein can be offered that is actually rooted in an appropriate lexical analysis. I will close with an outlook on its discourse meaning in 2 Cor 2:14 and Col 2:15.
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The Function of Paul’s Triumph Metaphor: Solving the Crux of 2 Cor 2:14
Program Unit: Second Corinthians: Pauline Theology in the Making
Christoph Heilig, University of Zurich
It has long been noticed that 2 Cor 2:14 is crucial for understanding Paul’s apologia. This importance stands in stark contrast to the lack of detailed analysis of the historical setting of Paul’s use of the verb thriambeuein. There have been influential studies on this issue, but they focused on the conceptual level of the rite of the triumphus (Hafemann) or did not take into account the lexical material sufficiently (Breytenbach). Building on methodological considerations of Chapters 3 and 7 in Hidden Criticism? The Methodology and Plausibility of the Search for a Counter-Imperial Subtext in Paul (WUNT II, 392; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), I will offer a lexical analysis that for the first time takes into account a) the usage of thriambeuein in Greek literature up to the 3rd century CE as well as b) its semantic components in light of semantically close paradigmatic options in the same corpus. This will allow us to place our interpretation of the metaphor in 2 Cor 2:14 on a much firmer foundation than was possible before. These considerations will be supplemented by taking into account indications from the immediate literary context. Taken together with the results of the lexical analyses, they point in a direction for the function of the metaphor that is generally not recognised by commentators. Though not new data in itself, the evidence from the literary context is re-assembled differently in light of the semantic result. Making a new contribution to this issue, I will then refer to the concrete historical context of Paul in order to shed light on Paul’s usage of thriambeuein. It will become apparent that the exegesis of this passage has not taken into account the historical reference of Paul’s metaphor. This is all the more surprising since an analysis of archaeological remains, numismatic and epigraphical evidence, and historiographical reports shed much light on how the metaphor must have functioned in the discourse between Paul and the original readers of his letter.
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Libations in the New Testament: About a Forgotten Ritual
Program Unit: Meals in the Greco-Roman World
Jan Heilmann, Technische Universität Dresden
Libations can be seen as forgotten rituals in the texts of the New Testament. In the last decades, New Testament scholarship has drawn only little attention to this topic. It is significant for instance that there is no entry “libation” in the relevant encyclopedias such as the Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum and the Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 4th edition. References to libation rituals in the Greek text of the New Testament are often concealed by the translations – not only in German and English translations but also in the Latin Vulgata. Moreover, depending on the completeness of my overview survey of the literature in Classics there are currently no comprehensive studies analyz-ing the complex and diverse practice of pouring out libations on the one hand and describing the ex-act relation to the ancient concept of “sacrifice” on the other hand. From this perspective, it seems to be appropriate to give an overview of the relevant passages in the NT that refer to a libation ritual. A short draft for systematizing libation rituals in the Greco-Roman world obtained on the basis of an-cient sources should serve as heuristic tool for the analysis of the New Testament data. The paper includes some methodological reflections on the relation of texts and the specific ritual of pouring out libations during meals as well as considerations on theological implications of libations in New Tes-tament texts. In this regard, the question has to be asked if the particular liquid (e. g. wine or water) is given a specific significance. In sum, the paper has three main goals: 1) to explain why references to libations in the New Testament texts were often ignored by scholarship as well as in the history of reception; 2) to outline perspectives for the interpretation of the references to libations in the New Testament and to determine the relation to early Christian meal practice; 3) to name questions for further research.
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The Firstborn among Many Brothers and Sisters: Identity Formation and the uiothesia Metaphors in Romans 8
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Erin M. Heim, Denver Seminary
The Firstborn Among Many Brothers and Sisters: Identity Formation and the uiothesia Metaphors in Romans 8
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The Inward Groaning of Adoption (Rom 8:12–25): Reimagining the Pauline Adoption Metaphor for Women in the Adoption Triad
Program Unit: Feminist Hermeneutics of the Bible
Erin M. Heim, Denver Seminary
The aim of this paper is to focus on recovering the voices of women whose voices and experiences have been papered over through irresponsible and oppressive applications of the Pauline adoption texts. To do this, I will focus on the dialectic between displacement and belonging, which is present both in the stories of women in the adoption triad, and in Paul’s text in Romans 8:15-25. In the United States, adoption is fast becoming a common alternative means of establishing a family, where approximately 2-4 percent of the country’s children are adopted. While there is certainly a growing amount of both scholarly and popular literature on adoption from a pro-adoption theological perspective, the voices of women in contemporary adoption triads are noticeably absent in theological literature. Moreover, although it is often cited as a theological exemplar for modern adoptive families, there are no women present in a straightforward reading of the Pauline metaphor of adoption either. Rather, the texts draw on a kyriarchal image (huiothesia = adoption by a Father to sonship) to communicate an aspect of the believer’s life in Christ (Gal 4:5; Rom 8:15, 23; 9:4; Eph 1:5). When the metaphor is mapped onto contemporary contexts, the kyriarchal framework of the text silences the stories of women in contemporary adoption triads. Though it is easy to romanticize adoption as a modern Cinderella story, this paper contends that both the Pauline text in Romans 8 and the personal narratives of adoption triad members plead for theological reflection that gives space for feelings of loss, grief, and displacement alongside affirmations of belonging, joy, and hope. This paper argues that the text in Romans 8:12-25 can be reimagined in ways that speak to the experiences of adoption triad members, and in ways that empower triad members to speak their narratives into the larger theological conversation surrounding contemporary adoption.
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Contrast or Comparison? Rethinking Dominant Group Identity Categories in Galatians
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Ryan Heisch, University of Aberdeen
Contrast or Comparison? Rethinking Dominant Group Identity Categories in Galatians
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Future Philology
Program Unit:
Ronald Hendel, University of California-Berkeley
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Substitutes in Hell: Schemes of Atonement in the Ezra Apocalypses
Program Unit: Christian Apocrypha
Meghan Henning, University of Dayton
From 4 Ezra to the Latin Vision of Ezra apocalyptic authors make claims about the relationship between human life and divine activity, claims that are likely related to the historical context in which each apocalyptic author writes. This paper will examine the distinct theological perspectives that are available in the various Apocalypses associated with Ezra. In particular we will consider each apocalypse's view of atonement, and the relationship between each work's theological reflections and its unique "lived context." Finally, after considering each of the Ezra apocalypses from a diachronic perspective we will also consider whether there are substantive theological connections between each unique instantiation of the Ezra apocalypse that allow us to speak of an "Ezra tradition."
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Behind Every Holy Man Is a Narrator: The Narrator’s Role in Shaping the Reader’s Opinion in the Gospel of Luke and Lucian’s Alexander the False Prophet
Program Unit: Gospel of Luke
James C. Henriques, University of Texas at Austin
There is little reason to doubt that the comedic skewering provided by Lucian of Samosata in his Alexander the False Prophet played a pivotal role in the sharp decline of Alexander of Abonoteichus’s nascent religious movement, much in the same way that the gospels contributed to the rise of the early Jesus movement. A modern comparison between Jesus and Alexander would likely draw little attention. Yet few (if any) modern scholars have bothered to examine the influence ancient author/narrators wielded in the success or failure of the movements surrounding ancient miracle workers. Authors of mundane non-fiction, such as Lucian, are faced with the hurdle of convincing their readers (ancient or modern) that the events contained within their narratives occurred exactly as described. This hurdle increases exponentially for authors attempting to recount events considered by both reader and author as miraculous or supernatural, as is the case with the gospels. If the narrative is too realistic, miraculous events become implausible, and vice versa. Resolution of this paradox is achieved through a set of narrative techniques referred to in this paper as the “dialectic of the miraculous.” The purpose of this paper, then, is to illustrate how the author of a gospel, namely Luke, employs this dialectic. This goal is accomplished by contrasting Luke’s gospel with the work of another author who is skeptical of his purportedly miraculous subject matter, in this case Lucian. The Gospel of Luke, with its prologue addressed to a named reader, as well as its reputation as the most culturally and stylistically Greek of the gospels, is a perfect gospel representative against Lucian’s Alexander. This paper examines the ways each author, serving double-duty as narrator, interacts with both his audience and his subject to affect the reader’s opinion of his subject. Among other literary methods, special attention is paid to the way each author employs narrative voice to build trust with his audience and further convince them that his interpretation of the miraculous deeds performed by his subject is the only interpretation (whether it be debunking or confirming). This comparison reveals that it is indeed an uphill battle for authors of miraculous non-fiction such as Luke. These authors skirt a fine line between the impossible and the possible. If they are to foster and maintain in their readers a sense of belief regarding their subjects, they must accordingly utilize a set of literary tools quite different than, and with far more precision, the tools employed by authors of non-miraculous non-fiction.
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Apotropaic Autographs: Evaluating the Epigraphical and Magical Tradition of the Abgar Correspondence
Program Unit: Christian Apocrypha
Andrew Mark Henry, Boston University
This study traces the development of the apocryphal correspondence between King Abgar of Edessa and Jesus from a Christological treatise in the 4th century CE to a magical and epigraphical tradition in the 6th century CE. Inscriptions bearing this correspondence have been discovered in Ephesus, Philippi, and Ankara, and although scholars have long agreed on their apotropaic function, none have situated these inscriptions within the magical tradition that developed out of the Abgar legend in Late Antiquity. Faced with a vast repertoire of available apotropaic strategies, what is it about the Abgar legend that would impel someone to create epigraphic forms of it? Why would an Ephesian in 6th century choose it over other options? This study will answer these questions by arguing that the Abgar legend developed from a Christological treatise to a vibrant magical tradition due to the notion that it preserved the original autograph of Jesus. Furthermore, these inscriptions’ respective contexts in Late Antique urban settings suggest that individuals came to recognize, and even favor, Jesus as a viable civic and domestic protector. This phenomenon, therefore, not only represents a distinct shift in the interpretation of the Abgar legend but also a novel reconsideration of Jesus’ role in civic religious practice in Late Antiquity.
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Shubhalmaran’s Missing Apocalypses
Program Unit: Aramaic Studies
Jonathan Henry, Princeton University
Recent publications about the writings of Šubhalmaran of Kirkuk have begun to illuminate the theology, exegesis, and ideals of this obscure 7th century metropolitan bishop. At a time and place in which Jewish, Byzantine, and other unique apocalyptic texts and traditions circulated, Šubhalmaran’s extant sermons yield a number of rich insights into the preservation and use of traditions such as these. In particular, the current paper queries Šubhalmaran’s characterization of the Man of Sin and his virgin mother in a homily that employs an intriguing array of sources. I seek to show that Šubhalmaran does not rely upon Revelation, but rather upon pseudo-Daniel and pseudo-apostolic traditions, many now missing, but some preserved for us both in Greek and Syriac texts. In showing the relationship between Šu??almaran and these other texts, I will note a number of intriguing trends that parallel ideas found in Sefer Zerubbabel and Sefer Eliyyahu, both Jewish apocalyptic works from a similar time and place. All of this gives us additional understanding about the library and eschatological concepts of a regionally-influential bishop just before the rise of Islam, after which the apocalyptic landscape would largely change.
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How Do the Pseudepigrapha Change the Way We Read Early Jewish Literature?
Program Unit: Pseudepigrapha
Matthias Henze, Rice University
A methodological examination of how reading the so-called Pseudepigrapha changes our view of early Jewish literature more broadly.
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Using the Stanley Parable to Teach Narrative Reading of the Gospels
Program Unit: Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies
Seth Heringer, Fuller Theological Seminary (Pasadena)
One of the challenges of any course that covers the Christian gospels is getting students to read them as individual narratives. Only by doing so can the students start to think about compositional, redaction, and narrative criticism in meaningful ways. For example, if the gospels all tell exactly the same story, then there is no reason to study how they were created or how their authors shaped source material. Professors can just repeat that each gospel needs to be read on its own terms, but this presentation will demonstrate that a more potent method is to use the computer game The Stanley Parable to show the power an author has in shaping a narrative, making students more aware of how authorial choices have shaped each gospel.
The Stanley Parable was created to be a commentary on the tropes and assumptions of video games, but it can easily be adapted to teach narrative theory more generally. During the game, the player is presented with a series of choices, for example, walking through the door on the right or the left. An ever-present narrator guides the player to the “correct” choices. Immediately it is clear, however, that the player has the agency to ignore the narrator’s instructions, upsetting the fixed narrative and forcing the narrator to adjust the story on the fly to incorporate new sets of circumstances. Although the surface commentary is about blindly following instructions and living within the rules of video games, it parallels similar characteristics of narratives. For example, the individual gospel accounts can be thought of as individual narrators guiding the reader through the “correct” story that they desire to tell about the life of Jesus. They force the reader’s attention to certain times and locations in the life of Jesus, ignoring other times and places that could have been included, and sometimes are, in other gospels. Some readers will not realize that the story is being guided and shaped by authorial choice. The Stanley Parable, however, highlights the hand of the narrator/author by making clear that other choices could have been made; another story could have been told by weaving together different events into a different whole. The Stanley Parable makes this shaping apparent, and does so with humor and in an engaging modality, leading students to see the power authors have in shaping stories. As they appreciate how stories are shaped by authors, they are more interested in learning what is unique about each gospel story so they can better see where it has been shaped by the author. Students are no longer walking through the narrative unaware, but search for the places where choices have been made, where the author has taken them through the left door rather than the right, and wonder why that choice was made.
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Bible Literacy, Public Discourse, and the Challenge to the Liberal Arts
Program Unit: Teaching Biblical Studies in an Undergraduate Liberal Arts Context
Gary A. Herion, Hartwick College
The continuing impact of religious and biblical illiteracy on American culture, the urgent need for a more civil public discourse, and the crisis of confidence in the value of the humanities urge us to reevaluate how we expose undergraduates to the Bible. The Liberal Arts Bible Project, still in its exploratory phase, invites us who teach undergraduates to begin exploring together models for a new college edition of the Bible that responds to this situation in a non-sectarian way.
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Mythical Parody and Gruesome Death: Representations of Executions in Late Antiquity
Program Unit: Art and Religions of Antiquity
John J. Herrmann, Jr., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
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Embodying Hope: The Function of Jeremiah and His Companions in the Later Baruch Literature
Program Unit: Book of Jeremiah
Jens Herzer, Universität Leipzig
In the corpus of Jewish-Hellenistic texts, the later writings under the name of Baruch (2 and 4 Baruch) reflect the impact of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE in very different ways. Both deal with expectations about the future of the Jewish people. For 2 Baruch the time of the prophets has definitely ended, and thus Baruch becomes the main character. In 4 Baruch, however, Jeremiah is transformed from the prophet of doom into a teacher of the law and in this role – in a specific relation to his companions Baruch and Abimelech – embodies the hope for the people’s restoration. The paper will focus on the embodiment of prophetic representation in the Jeremiah tradition and the function of these different “bodies” within the controversies about the future of the Jewish people after the catastrophe.
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“Like an Innocent Lamb”: Accusations of Ritual Murder in English Martyrological Narratives
Program Unit: Violence and Representations of Violence in Antiquity
Michael Heyes, Rice University
This paper will explore the Othering of the Jewish community in three narratives from medieval England that deal in the supposed crime of Blood Libel: Thomas of Monmouth’s The Life of William of Norwich, Matthew Paris’ The Life of Little St. Hugh of Lincoln, and Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Prioress’ Tale.” In particular, I am interested in the way that the Jews and their motives are depicted in each of the narratives: in William’s Life, as perpetrators of a depraved Passover ritual to reclaim their “fatherland;” in The Life of Little St. Hugh of Lincoln, as ritual reenactors of Christ’s death for the purposes of insulting Jesus and performing magical operations; and in Chaucer, as the murderers of the infant Christ who are driven by demonic lusts. These depictions will be placed against the backdrop of historical events to further inform the development of anti-Semitic sentiment in pre- and post-expulsion England.
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An Investigation into Some African Endogamous Models of Development
Program Unit: African Association for the Study of Religions
Komi Ahiatroga Hiagbe, Global Theological Seminary, Ghana
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Seeing and Believing: The Genre of Anagnorisis and the Johannine Signs
Program Unit: Johannine Literature
Jill Hicks-Keeton, University of Oklahoma
This paper offers a fresh analysis of the literary function of Jesus’ signs in the gospel of John by reading them in conversation with the anagnorisis microgenre found frequently in ancient narratives and in light of the gospel’s rhetorical goal of cultivating belief through signs (20:30-31). Arguing against the common notion in Johannine scholarship that the gospel disparages belief based on signs, I show that scholarly paradigms that devise hierarchies of belief-types inaccurately impose a classificatory system that is foreign to the genre of anagnorisis and its grammar in antiquity. In the gospel of John, I argue, signs receive affirmation, and seeing signs is a legitimate and welcome means of recognizing Jesus and of believing. Taking seriously the Johannine connection between anagnorisis and belief thus offers a more accurate paradigm for understanding the function of the signs in the gospel’s final form.
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Using 'Genius' to Teach Close Reading in Collaborative Learning Contexts
Program Unit: Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies
Jill Hicks-Keeton, University of Oklahoma
In this presentation, I will demonstrate the ways in which the online knowledge base Genius, a crowd-source software program that allows users to upload and annotate portions of text, is useful for teaching skills of close reading and textual analysis within biblical studies. I will model how to use the program, including the Educator mode specifically designed for classroom use, and then show and assess the finished products uploaded to Genius by my own students in a Bible and Literature class – the results of a semester-long collaborative learning project which required them to use Genius to analyze, annotate, and interpret biblical and post-biblical texts.
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Some Noteworthy Linguistic Features in Septuagint Genesis
Program Unit: International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies
Robert J. V. Hiebert, Trinity Western University
The Society of Biblical Literature Commentary on the Septuagint series (SBLCS) seeks to elucidate the meaning of Old Greek texts as they would have been understood by the original translators (and presumably their first readers/hearers) at their point of production, as distinct from how they may have come to be construed throughout the course of their reception history. Septuagint Genesis evinces a diverse range of interesting decisions by its translator in the representation of the meaning of its underlying Semitic source text. Sometimes those meanings overlap, sometimes there are divergences. This paper will explore a number of representative examples.
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Expansionism and Endogamy in the Entry to the Promised Land
Program Unit: Hebrew Bible and Political Theory
Andrew W. Higginbotham, Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion
The modern legal process of eminent domain, of the seizure of land from an occupant and the transfer to a new possessor, seems to have a parallel in the biblical text of Deu 2-3. Alternately, the 19th century concept of manifest destiny, of a cultural prerogative to expand into the territory of native but ethnically distinct peoples, could be used as a lens for God’s commands to Israel. A hybrid of the two ideas will be used to explore how the consanguineous relationships between Israel and some of her soon-to-be neighbors (Edom, Moab, and Ammon) protect those nations against Israelite incursion. The alternate construction of these people as exogamous rivals in Deu 23 (and other places) will be used as a foil for this study. Further comparisons arise from the favor shown to Caphtor (Philistia) in Deu 2-3, though not from the Abrahamic line, and the disfavor for Amalek, though a scion of the Esavite line, throughout the Pentateuch. The goal of this study is to explore the notions of nationhood and rights that arise from the familial links of the various Levantine nations. In other words, what barriers against (or impetus toward) war and conquest do ethnic boundaries play in the text of Deuteronomy?
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Wisdom and the Building of the Tabernacle: Hokmah and Hakam in Exodus 25–40
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Lance Higginbotham, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
Wisdom and the Building of the Tabernacle: Hokmah and Hakam in Exodus 25–40
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Do Not Look at His Appearance, for I Have Rejected Him: Bodily Language and Reversal in 1 Samuel
Program Unit: Gender, Sexuality, and the Bible
Ryan Stephen Higgins, The Jewish Theological Seminary
Human beings have a tendency to anthropomorphize, creating from the human body a universally analogical framework. In language, anatomy abounds. Semiotically, the body has a language all its own; its movements are indexical of certain meanings. Socially, acceptance is governed by physical normalcy. This is all as true of the ancient world as it is of the modern, yet the narratives of the Hebrew Bible contain few descriptions of their characters’ physical bodies. While Homer’s audience is always sure of the color of his heroes’ hair, in this respect the biblical narrators are typically reticent. They construct a literary world that is, in Erich Auerbach’s assessment, “fraught with background.” In the biblical books of Samuel, however, those terms relating to the parts, appearances, adornment, movements, and positions of bodies are uncharacteristically frequent. The constellation of these terms can be called “bodily language.” This paper will take a literary approach to interpreting the bodily language in the first half of Samuel. It will argue that the abundance of bodily language is purposeful, and that the writers and redactors of Samuel most often employ it in service of their major theme: reversal of fortune. Hannah’s Song in 1 Samuel 2 articulates this theme, and David’s Lament in 2 Samuel 1 recapitulates it. Between them, the narratives of Eli, Samuel, Saul, and David bear it out. This paper will demonstrate the consistency of this theme and of its expression through bodily language, even across originally disparate literary units in 1 Samuel.
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The Relationship of Prophecy and Wisdom in the Ancient Near East
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
John Hilber, Grand Rapids Theological Seminary
The Relationship of Prophecy and Wisdom in the Ancient Near East
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Prophetic Ritual in the Egyptian Royal Cult
Program Unit: Prophetic Texts and Their Ancient Contexts
John Hilber, Grand Rapids Theological Seminary
Revelatory settings described in diverse Egyptian texts, including binary oracles, dream reports, communication with the dead, narratives, seer consultation, wisdom contests, and funerary rituals, offer evidence of the socio-religious prerequisite for prophecy; however they do not qualify as messenger speech. On the other hand, first-person, divine speech delivered by human agents in rituals of the Egyptian royal cult (coronations, building inscriptions, and victory celebrations) qualify as prophecy. Drawing on ritual theory, this paper explores the relationship between these rituals and prophetic speech performance.
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Solomon's Temple Prayer (1 Kgs 8)
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Ted Hildebrandt, Gordon College
Solomon's Temple Prayer (1 Kgs 8)
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Textual Division in Early Gospel Manuscripts Part II: Matthew, Mark, and Luke, with Some Further Reflections on the Numbering System in Vaticanus
Program Unit: Papyrology and Early Christian Backgrounds
Charles E. Hill, Reformed Theological Seminary
In a paper read at the 2014 meeting I introduced the evidence for scribally-produced textual division (at the paragraph or section level) in some early Gospel manuscripts, focusing on the Gospel of John. The major result was the observation that the paragraphs in P75’s Johannine text, marked out by (punctuation), space, and ekthesis, and the primitive numbers set in the margins of Vaticanus’s Johannine text, are genealogically related and reveal a template for sectional divisions in the text of John that was preserved in at least one portion of the textual tradition. The present paper extends the investigation, asking whether any similar relationship exists between the numbers in B and the indicators of sense division in the non-Johannine Gospel papyri. In particular, analyses of P74 and P4 in Luke, P64, 67, in Matthew, and P88 in Mark will be summarized. This paper will also offer further information and reflection on the early numbering system in Vaticanus.
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Paul and the Narratable Divine Identity
Program Unit: Theological Interpretation of Scripture
Wesley Hill, Trinity School for Ministry
Recent discussion of Pauline God-talk (e.g., F. Watson; D. Campbell; R. Bauckham) has focused on the inability of traditional theological categories of "substance" and "nature" to do justice to the dynamics of Paul's discourse, in which divine action and agency, particularly as displayed in the Christ event, are more determinative for Paul's portrait of God. Focusing on Paul's use of *kyrios* with reference to God the Father and not only Jesus Christ, against the backdrop of the Septuagint, this paper will suggest that Paul's narration of God's agency prepared the way for subsequent theological treatments of "substance" and "nature," while also requiring those categories to be understood in light of the story of Jesus' death and resurrection. This paper will seek to demonstrate that Paul's understanding of God is both "narratable" and "metaphysical," insofar as the so-called immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity are held fruitfully together in Paul's language about God.
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Teaching with Spiritual Impact: An Analysis of Student Comments Regarding the Spiritual Influence of Religion Classes
Program Unit: Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies
John Hilton III, Brigham Young University
Recent research has indicated that some students desire outcomes that could be categorized as "spiritual" as part of their college experience. But what does that look like in practice? Between 2010 and 2014, 2,500 religion courses were taught at a private university. One of the questions in the university course evaluation given at the end of each course pertains to how students rank the spiritual impact of the course. We analyzed the student comments from the highest and lowest rated sections (representing the top and bottom 2.5% of all courses). In total, 2,450 comments coming from 112 different sections were coded. In examining student comments, several themes emerged in terms of what leads to and detracts from achieving course outcomes students identify as spiritual. In addition, we utilized computer software to identify key words from the higher and lower scoring classes and explored their use by students. This presentation will include specific descriptions of how these findings can be applied in religious education.
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Purity and Self with and without the Temple
Program Unit: Social History of Formative Christianity and Judaism
Martha Himmelfarb, Princeton University
Book review of Mira Balberg's Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature (Berkeley: UC Press, 2014)
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Jeremiah 7 and 5 Ezra: An Underrated Connection?
Program Unit: Pseudepigrapha
Veronika Hirschberger, University of Regensburg
Fifth Ezra is a pseudepigraphical writing which refers to numerous biblical and non-biblical texts. Although there have been studies on the relationship between 5 Ezra and e.g. 1 Baruch, Matthew, and 4 Ezra, there has yet to be a comprehensive intertextual profile for the text of 5 Ezra. Furthermore, an additional text, which could be a key for the understanding of 5 Ezra, has been thus far overlooked: 5 Ezra shows clear connections to Jeremiah 7. Many of these connections are common phrases, the number of which is only comparable to what we find between 5 Ezra and 1 Baruch. Both texts deal with God’s wrath over Israel’s sins, depict damage on account of the people’s wrongdoing, and pronounce their rejection by God. The similarities between these two texts suggest that Jeremiah 7 could be a key for the intertextual world of 5 Ezra, and more useful for its understanding than apocalyptic texts like 4 Ezra. Moreover, considering Jeremiah 7 as a main intertext for 5 Ezra changes our concept of 5 Ezra as a Christian apocalypse and prompts us to connect it closer with the prophetic texts of the Hebrew Bible. This paper seeks to illustrate the connecting lines between both writings and considers the consequences of such intertextual references for the understanding of 5 Ezra. Additionally, given the structural relations between 5 Ezra and 1 Baruch, the paper will examine whether and to what extent the text could be seen in the Jeremianic tradition. Detecting such a relation could also change the rather one-sided understanding of 5 Ezra’s message as proclaiming the abolition of Israel through the Christians, a thesis which fails to account for the distinct reverence for and use of texts of the Hebrew Bible. Considering this intertext will help us come closer to the world of this pseudepigraphical writing, which thus far eludes definite comprehension and continues to challenge research.
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Real or Perceived Scribal Habits? Assessing the ‘Singular Readings Method’ with Codex Sinopensis (O 023)
Program Unit: New Testament Textual Criticism
Elijah Hixson, University of Edinburgh
By assuming that the singular readings of a New Testament manuscript represent the tendencies of its copyist, a popular method used for determining scribal habits suffers from two flaws: it wrongly includes singular readings copied from the parent text, and it wrongly excludes non-singular readings created by the scribe. Codex Sinopensis (Paris, BNF, supp. gr. 1286; O 023) is one of three sixth-century purple codices copied from a common exemplar; the other two manuscripts are Codex Rossanensis (S 042) and Codex Purpureus Petropolitanus (N 022). These three manuscripts are in a unique position to test the singular readings method of determining scribal habits against a control. Because of this rare relationship, the actual scribal activity in Codex Sinopensis can be determined by observing the total number and type(s) of deviations the scribe made from the parent text, which is ascertained from the readings of all three manuscripts where Sinopensis is extant. The singular readings method itself can be tested by comparing the actual scribal activity to the results of a modified singular readings method, in which both the singular readings of Sinopensis and those sub-singular readings found only in Sinopensis and its two siblings are included in the data pool. This modification enables the method to include rare readings copied from the exemplar that would be normally included as singular readings for manuscripts that, unlike Sinopensis, do not have two extant siblings. Thus, with Sinopensis, one can detect both real scribal habits—all the places where the scribe did not follow his or her exemplar, and perceived scribal habits—those as measured by the singular readings method. When one compares real and perceived scribal habits, it becomes clear that in the case of Codex Sinopensis, the singular readings method fails to provide an accurate picture of scribal activity.
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“In God’s Way”: A Path-Breaking Metaphor in the Qur'an and Its Biblical Genealogies
Program Unit: The Qur’an and the Biblical Tradition (IQSA)
Thomas Hoffman, Københavns Universitet
Though often conferred a central role in academic titles on Islam (such as John Esposito’s Islam: the Straight Path or, more recently, Robert Hoyland’s In God’s Path) the concept and conceptualization of the ‘path’/’way’/’road’ (sabil, ?ira?, ?ariq, minhaj) and its associated semantic concepts (Îajj, Îijra, Îuda, jihad etc.) is a desideratum in Qur?anic studies, not least in regard to its Biblical, Near Eastern and Late Antique sources. Annemarie Schimmel’s very short and general Das Thema des Weges und der Reise im Islam (Nordrhein-Westfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1996) is symptomatic for Stand der Forschung. Symptomatic also is the striking absence of any Biblical references in Dmitry V. Frolov’s article “Path or Way” in Encyclopaedia of the Qur?an despite the obvious prominence of way and path-imagery in the Biblical literature (canonical and apocryphal, rabbinic and patristic) and its impact on theological thinking and practices, most markedly in Christianity. In this paper I attempt to outline the literary and metaphorical genealogies of the concept of the ‘way’/ ‘path’ as it appears in the Qur?an. It is thus my general hypothesis that the different lexical instantiations of the concept of ‘way’ or ‘path’ betray a Biblical genealogy. Secondarily, I hypothesize that the Christian use of the ‘Way’ (Gr. hodos) as a self-designation of Christianity (esp. in Acts, e.g. 9,2; 19,9, 23 etc) provided important metaphorical stimulus for the emerging religious identity formation in Qur’anic proto-Islam.
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Mother Zion or Mother Church? The Use of Baruch in 5 Ezra
Program Unit: Function of Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphal Writings in Early Judaism and Early Christianity
Karina Martin Hogan, Fordham University
The figure of Mother Zion is developed in the apocryphal book of Baruch (1 Baruch 4:5-5:9) by consolidating scattered references in Isaiah 40-66 to Jerusalem as the mother of the exiled Judeans (esp. Isa 49:18-23, 54:1-3, 60:1-4 and 66:8-12). A significant number of early Jewish and early Christian texts appropriate and use the Mother Zion figure to different ends; examples include Ps Sol 11, 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, and Gal 4:21-5:1. In the second century, a few early Christian exegetes interpret Isa 54:1 as referring to the Church, and Origen connects Paul’s “Jerusalem that is above” (Gal 4:26) with the preexistent heavenly Church. It is not until the third century, however, that the figure of Mother Church (Mater Ecclesia) becomes commonplace, first in North Africa. This paper argues that 5 Ezra (1 Esdras 1-2), a Jewish-Christian prophetic text, precedes and anticipates the development of the Mater Ecclesia figure, rather than being influenced by it. Despite 5 Ezra’s supersessionist tendency, the “mother” figure remains identified throughout 5 Ezra with the city of Jerusalem and Mt. Zion, as in Baruch.
Theodore A. Bergren has recently argued that “5 Ezra seems to have originated as a radically revisionist, Christian supersessionist reading of the apocryphal book of Baruch.” He believes that the structure of 5 Ezra comes from superimposing the dualisms of Paul’s allegory in Gal 4:21-5:1 upon the structure of the entire book of Baruch. I think that 5 Ezra’s dependence on Baruch is limited to the use of the Mother Zion figure from Bar 4:5-5:9 and that the Galatians allegory was a much less significant influence on the author of 5 Ezra than Bergren believes. Instead, the author of 5 Ezra combines allusions to the New Jerusalem of Revelation 21-22 with Baruch’s Mother Zion figure, while claiming that God has taken away the “kingdom of Jerusalem” from Israel and has given it to a new people, presumably the Christians (5 Ezra 2:10-11). Yet 5 Ezra for the most part avoids explicitly Christian vocabulary, cloaking its supersessionism in the language of the Israelite prophetic tradition. I do not think there is enough evidence to place the composition of 5 Ezra in North Africa in the third century, as Bergren tentatively does, based on the presumed influence of the Mater Ecclesia figure in Tertullian and Cyprian. I think it is more likely to have been composed in the second century, although the character of the Latin text is consistent with either composition in Latin or translation from Greek in a North African context. It is possible, therefore, that 5 Ezra’s limited “christianizing” of the Mother Zion figure may have influenced the development of the Mater Ecclesia figure in North Africa in the third century.
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The Rhetoric of PIETAS: First Timothy and the Negotiation of Roman Imperial Pietas
Program Unit: Disputed Paulines
Chris Hoklotubbe, Harvard University
This paper provides a postcolonial reading to 1 Timothy that attends to how the author negotiates the imperial situation in his appeal to piety (eusebeia) within the context of instructing the community to offer prayers on behalf of imperial authorities (1 Tim 2:1–2) and how women and widows ought to behave within the household of God (1 Tim 2:9–15). Scholars including Mary Rose D’Angelo and Angela Standhartinger convincingly argue that 1 Timothy’s instructions on prayer and admonitions for women to marry, bear children, and remain subordinate to their husbands accommodate to conservative social values promoted in imperial legislation and propaganda. However, scholars like Ben Witherington and Phillip Towner insist that these passages are not indicative of accommodation, but rather a missiological approach that Christianized secular virtues and even resisted imperial culture. I argue that a postcolonial optics is helpful for moving beyond a dichotomy of accommodation/resistance and allows us to better observe how both elements are present within the author’s negotiation of imperial social values and Christian doctrine within the scope of his construction of a hybrid Christian identity and piety.
This paper will also succinctly contextualize 1 Timothy’s appeals to piety within the prevalence of rhetorical claims to piety (pietas/eusebeia) that occur in Roman poetry, monumental inscriptions, and coins in order to clarify the cultural significance of this virtue for how both elite Romans and provincial subjects, including the author of 1 Timothy, conceptualized imperial power and their relation to it. I argue that both claims to piety that pervaded the imperial propaganda of Trajan and Hadrian as evidenced in coins, reliefs, panegyrics, and building campaigns as well as elite Roman discourses that contrasted Roman pietas against foreign superstitio textualized the structures that comprised the imperial situation of 1 Timothy’s and illuminate its rhetoric of piety.
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Acts, Christians, and the Third Race: Harnack Revisited
Program Unit: Book of Acts
Carl Holladay, Emory University
This paper explores how the term “Christians” (Acts 11:26) and other nomenclature used in Acts to characterize followers of Jesus fits within Harnack’s famous excursus “Christians as a Third Race” (Mission and Expansion, 266-78). Some questions addressed: To what extent does Acts envision Jesus’s disciples as distinct from Jews and pagans? How does Luke’s language of differentiation, e.g., church and synagogue, function in Acts? Is Acts correctly depicted as standing midway on the arc between early Christian preaching and early Christian apologetic? And how useful is the language of “race,” e.g., genus tertium, in describing Luke’s conception of early Christianity?
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Debt in the Early Roman Empire
Program Unit: Early Christianity and the Ancient Economy
David Hollander, Iowa State University
It is well known that debt was a frequent source of political and social conflict under the Roman Republic but the history of debt in the early Empire, aside from the financial crisis of 33 CE, has yet to receive much attention. Though the evidence is diffuse, this paper will argue that high levels of indebtedness continued to be a serious problem both at Rome and in the provinces at all levels of society.
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Surprising Secrets and Hidden Proclamations: Gethsemane and the Empty Tomb
Program Unit: Gospel of Mark
Laura C. S. Holmes, Seattle Pacific University
At least since the publication of William Wrede’s Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien in 1901 Markan scholarship has been puzzling over the meaning, boundaries, and significance of the messianic secret. Wrede’s assessment of the theological origins of the messianic secret is at once both too narrow and too broad. The content of the secret is too narrow because it is a messianic secret, only concerned with Jesus’ identity as the Messiah. Wrede’s work is also too broad because he finds many places in the Gospel where secrecy is a theological theme, but the issue is not Jesus’ messiahship (e.g., 10:46-52).
Stemming from this thematic legacy (highlighted by Juel and others), this paper argues that hiddenness and secrecy are broad themes in the Gospel of Mark that cannot be separated from their opposites, revelation and proclamation. Considering two episodes where all four of these concepts are present (14:26-52 and 16:1-8), this paper contends that uniting hiddenness and secrecy with revelation and proclamation produces not a Gospel of scattered “secret epiphanies” (Dibelius) but instead a Gospel where both secrecy and proclamation are at the heart of Christology and discipleship. Concealment and revelation in Gethsemane and at the empty tomb occur in three ways: through Jesus’ words, Jesus’ actions, and the actions of other characters. When Jesus proclaims that all will fall away (14:27), it appears that his words are fulfilled when he is arrested (14:50). Yet, Mark’s Gospel hides Jesus’ female followers from his audience, and they do not fall away until 16:8, when they keep the secret they should proclaim. The neaniskos’s proclamation collides with the women’s silence, revealing the fulfillment of Jesus’ words (16:4-8). In both of these episodes, however, Jesus himself withdraws from others (14:35-36) or is absent entirely (16:1-8), emphasizing that hiddenness has as much to do with presence as it does with (messianic) identity. Finally, characters like the two neaniskoi, one shamefully streaking and one angelically proclaiming, indicate the interplay between hiddenness and revelation in these texts. Mark’s Gospel not only surprises its audience in secrecy, but also sparks proclamation.
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Questioning the Status Quo: Freedom to Debate in the Gospel of John
Program Unit: Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies
Laura C. S. Holmes, Seattle Pacific University
In an upper-division undergraduate theology course on the Gospel of John, my students and I challenged the accepted state of Johannine ethics by using a series of debates. The students taking this class are mostly junior and senior theology majors. For this class, I used the experience of our urban university community—hosting a tent city of people experiencing homelessness—as a jumping off point for a particular project. I told the students (with support from various sources) that the Gospel of John is not the Gospel that one turns to for inspiration about social justice (Luke) or activism (Matthew), and therefore it is assumed that John would have little to say to such a community. Instead, John gets relegated to other-worldly descriptions like “the spiritual Gospel.” The students were eager to explore whether this neglect of John was appropriate. They divided into groups and chose one of six topics (Economic Justice, Racial Justice, Gender Dynamics, Violence/Non-Violence, Immigration, and the Value of the Body). After reading John as a whole, each group had to propose (1) a case study related to their topic and (2) a text from John which addressed their topic. I responded to their proposal with encouragement and critique, and also with a rebuttal text that refuted or challenged their original argument. Each group split into two teams and staged a debate.
One surprising result of this assignment was how it opened the class up for discussing topics, in the words of one student, “that no one else in my life talks about.” Results of these presentations ranged across the affective domain from personal stories, to words and prayers of confession, to one student merging his presentation on immigration with activism at the state capital in another class. Each debate is followed by questions from the class and discussion that are meant to extend the issue both into the Gospel of John (are there other texts that the debate should have considered?) and out into the world (does the value of the body take into account mental illness?). Letting the students set the agenda of discussion by staging these debates fosters an environment that makes them aware of these issues in texts where they would otherwise not have seen them (e.g., what does the man born blind in John 9 have to say about racial justice?). Furthermore, students exercise skills in listening and empathy as they try to understand the other side of the issue in the debate. Lastly, because students observe and experience these concerns outside the classroom, these debates have broken down the false walls between classroom and life, meaning that they engage the affective dimension of the students’ learning. Such a pattern of debate and discussion, with similar themes, would be easy to modify for other contexts.
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Dating the Martyrdom of Polycarp
Program Unit: Corpus Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti
Michael W. Holmes, Bethel University (Minnesota)
At the “Inventing Christianity” section meeting in Baltimore (2013), I suggested that Marcion of Smyrna, in the work commonly known as the Martyrdom of Polycarp, sought to inculcate a particular vision of Christian identity as it related to the increasingly contested topic of martyrdom. In arguing that case, it proved necessary to give attention to the hotly-disputed question of the date of the composition of MartPol. In the present paper I propose to revisit that foundational topic in light of subsequent discussion. This is a topic particularly appropriate for consideration in a section whose foci include the analysis “of early Christian texts in dialogue with Hellenistic materials,” inasmuch as one of the central methodological questions re the date of MartPol involves the evidentiary weight to be given to the document’s Hellenistic context vis-a-vis intra-Christian trajectories and developments.
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And the Word Became Words: The Inscription of the Divine Word on Jeremiah the Prophet in Jeremiah the Book
Program Unit: Book of Jeremiah
Else K. Holt, Aarhus Universitet
The importance of writing is one of the hallmarks of the so-called axial age (Jaspers, Bellah, Assmann, Lang), the period in which the majority of the Old Testament books were shaped in their current form. This is not least important in the case of Jeremiah where writing plays an important part, and the writing down of the prophetic words are expressly emphasized (e.g. Jeremiah 29; 36; 45; 51:64). In this paper I will discuss the inscription of the divine word on Jeremiah, the prophet, who serves as the incarnation of the word; the inscription of the covenant on the hearts of the house of Israel (Jer 31:33); and the impact of writing on the shape and shaping of the book of Jeremiah.
My thoughts are based on three methodological preconditions: 1) The figure of Jeremiah is not a representation of an historical person, but of a literary persona, Jeremiah, the prophet. 2) This literary persona serves as a representation of the divine word. 3) The inscription of the divine word in a book/books serves to preserve and authorize the word for later generations of readers.
Especially the last statement might seem trivial. Nevertheless, scribal activity has played a minor role in the discussion of the theology of Jeremiah, and thus calls for consideration. Such reflections also open up for the cross-disciplinary discussion of the “afterlife” of Jeremiah in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity.
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Psalm 109 and the Legal Meaning of Prayer
Program Unit: Biblical Law
Shalom E. Holtz, Yeshiva University
One account of the semantic history of the Hebrew word ???? posits a development from the meaning "plea (before an adjudicator)" to the meaning "prayer." Biblical evidence points in this direction, and Y. Feder has recently confirmed it based on a parallel semantic development in Hittite. The occurrence of the word ???? in Psalm 109:7 figures prominently in the discussion. Here, the word apparently refers to a plea or petition directed towards a human, rather than divine, authority. Studies of biblical prayer, such as those S. Blank and M. Greenberg, have drawn on this usage to advance an essentially legal interpretation of prayer in the Hebrew Bible. For the most part, however, scholarship has focused on the word ???? itself, rather than on wider context, including the remainder of the verse. This presentation adopts the legal meaning of ???? and situates it within the broader context of Psalm 109. It points to contextual factors that support this interpretation of the term. At the same time, it considers the implications of this interpretation for the exegesis of other parts of the verses in which the word occurs (109:4, 7), as well as for the understanding of the entire psalm.
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A Hybrid Agency in the Making of Hellenistic Judaism: 2 Maccabees as a Test Case
Program Unit: Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions
Sung Soo Hong, University of Texas at Austin
The present study analyzes the complexity of agency in the formation of Hellenistic Jewish identities, paying special attention to how it was possible for some Hellenized Jewish writers such as the authors of the Letter of Aristeas and the book of 2 Maccabees to remain convinced of their cultural purity and regard Hellenism as a foreign culture. Whereas Hellenism has often been conceived as an extrinsic entity which exerts influence on the Jews or is manipulated by the Jews in accordance with their ideological purposes, this study argues that both the force of Hellenization and the initiative of the Jews should be considered as joint agents in the formation of Hellenistic Jewish identities and that the Jews were often unaware of the permeation of Hellenism into their cultural norms.
As an analytical tool this study critically makes use of the concept of “the vegetarian Bible” that Homi K. Bhabha proposed in his analysis of the cultural norms of the colonized. This concept elucidates how colonial discourse surreptitiously permeates the cultural norms of the colonized and how the hybridized norms function as a site of authority shaping the responses of the colonized to colonial power. An applied exploration of this notion will corroborate that the author of 2 Maccabees was likely to be unaware of the hybrid nature of his Ioudaismos and that for this reason the author was able to critique the kings and officials of the Seleucid Empire with a sense of cultural purity and superiority. In order to assess the hybridity of the author’s cultural norms, the author’s concepts of civility and barbarism will be examined with reference to the occurrences of the terms barbaros, blasphemos, asebes, and their cognate words in the book.
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Journeying through Heaven, Hail, and Hell with Jimmy Hendrix and Hollywood: Engaging Students in Apocalyptic Texts with Music and Movies
Program Unit: Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies
Renate Hood, University of Mary Hardin-Baylor
Apocalyptic texts employ visual language. Typically, a celestial character discloses a transcendent reality to a human recipient while subjected to otherworldly journeys. Grasping the nature of the apocalyptic elements while identifying key characters, events, and plot movement proves difficult for students who are generally unfamiliar with the genre. Connecting visual imagery with forms of musical or cinematographic expressions enables students to analyze the text and follow the flow of the narrative. In this presentation, I will give examples from my classroom of students using sequences of music pieces and music videos, and line-ups of movie clips to express responses that apocalyptic scenes evoke. Audience participation in this session will consist of a brief discussion time and an opportunity to use visual and auditory media samples to engage select scenes from the Apocalypse of John.
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“Either a Forgery or a Damn Fine Original”: Cyprianus plebi Cartagini and the Origins of Donatism
Program Unit: Contextualizing North African Christianity
Jesse Hoover, Baylor University
In his anti-Donatist writings, Augustine sometimes insinuates that parts of the Cyprianic corpus – in particular, those most problematic for the Caecilianist position – may in fact have been forged by his opponents. One such alleged example was identified in 1899 by Giovanni Mercati: the letter Cyprianus plebi Cartagini, contained in a single manuscript (Codex Parisinus 1658). Cyprianus plebi Cartagini was clearly not written by the third century bishop and martyr; and as it was primarily concerned with setting out rules for dealing with traditores, Mercati deemed it a Donatist fabrication, and a poor one at that. Mercati’s identification proved influential: the letter has been deemed pseudo-Cyprianic ever since.
In this presentation, I will offer a translation of this short letter and a new interpretation of its provenance. My argument is that Cyprianus plebi Cartagini is not in fact a Donatist forgery, but rather a long-lost witness to the origins of the Donatist controversy. Its attachment to Cyprian, I believe, is evidence of medieval misattribution rather than intentional fakery. By reclaiming this letter, we may be able to add one more Donatist primary source to our rather limited collection, one which likely dates to the beginnings of the schism.
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W.H.C. Frend on Jewish Martyrdom and Persecution?
Program Unit: Inventing Christianity: Apostolic Fathers, Apologists, and Martyrs
William Horbury, University of Cambridge
A striking feature of Frend's work on 'martyrdom and persecution in the early church' (to quote the title of his 1965 book on the subject) was what might be called, from a traditional ecclesiastical standpoint, his view from the margins; he gave what was at the time unaccustomed prominence to 'heretical' as well as 'orthodox' suffering and persecution, and, again in an unusual way, he set all these aspects of early church history within the history of Jewish martyrdom and persecution. This broad scope was highlighted in the last words of his subtitle: 'from the Maccabees to Donatus.' Yet the attempt to sketch Jewish martyrdom and persecution in relation to early Christianity attracted some of the sharpest criticism levelled at his work. In this paper his approach is reconsidered against the background of trends in study when he wrote, and subsequent treatments of early Christianity in the setting of Jewish history.
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Teaching Biblical Art Using an Art Historical Method: Take What You Want
Program Unit: Bible and Visual Art
Heidi Hornik, Baylor University
Panel presentation on the theme: Teaching the Bible and the Arts in the Undergraduate Classroom
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Historical Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew: Observations from the Perspective of 4QReworked Pentateuch
Program Unit: Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
Aaron D. Hornkohl, University of Cambridge
In their 2014 monograph, Historical Linguistics & Biblical Hebrew: Steps Towards an Integrated Approach, Robert Rezetko and Ian Young articulate a thoroughgoing critique of the accepted historical linguistic approach to ancient Hebrew, criticizing Hebraists for (a) a failure to take seriously the problematic textual nature of the extant sources; (b) routinely privileging the medieval Tiberian Masoretic evidence over other, often earlier sources thereof; and (c) relying on statistics reflecting groups of books rather than individual compositions. Among other things, they propose the use of cross-textual variable analysis, according to which multiple versions of an individual composition are compared linguistically. Based on such an examination of MT Samuel vis-à-vis the relevant DSS manuscripts they conclude that “biblical manuscripts are reliable as evidence for the basic and common linguistic forms of ancient Hebrew, because these are quite stable in the textual witnesses, but do not provide evidence of the distribution of less common linguistic items in the biblical writings, because these were highly fluid during the editing and copying of the writings” (406–7). They then ambitiously declare: “[t]his conclusion undermines much of the work that has been done on the history of ancient Hebrew” (407).
Their study of MT and DSS Samuel, with its detailed application of potentially fruitful methodologies to the analysis of ancient Hebrew corpora, constitutes a valuable contribution to the field of Hebrew historical linguistics. It seems premature, however, to construe their results as necessitating the radical shift in our understanding of Hebrew linguistic history that they propose. Critically, it is questionable whether the characterization of the linguistic relationship between MT Samuel and the book’s DSS manuscripts (like the one previously explored by Kutscher between MT Isaiah and 1QIsa a) should be taken as generally representative of the relationships between Masoretic and DSS versions of biblical compositions.
On the basis of a comparison of the biblical material found in 4QReworked Pentateuch a–e (4Q158, 364–367) and parallel MT passages (with reference to other pertinent DSS manuscripts and the Samaritan Pentateuch), the current study presents the results of a cross-textual variable analysis of a not insignificant cross-section of the Torah, presenting clear evidence of non-coincidental distributional patterns of diachronically meaningful linguistic features against the background of more general linguistic stability. Crucially, when versions of biblical passages differ with regard to diachronically significant features, it is most frequently the later Masoretic version that preserves the classical features, the DSS versions the characteristically post-exilic alternants. Though these results may or may not typify the relationships between the respective versions of other MT and DSS biblical texts, they call into question the extreme pessimism often voiced concerning the feasibility of obtaining reliable results in the face of the transmitted nature of the sources in historical linguistic studies of ancient Hebrew. Arguably, they also demonstrate the relative reliability of the Masoretic versions of biblical texts as linguistic artifacts that reliably preserve both the general contours of First- and Second-Temple Hebrew as well as much in the way of linguistic detail.
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The Slender Man: A Trans Hermeneutic of the Apocalypse
Program Unit: LGBTI/Queer Hermeneutics
Teresa J. Hornsby, Drury University
In 2009 The Slender Man was born on the internet. This monster has become a paranormal terror that exists in the shadows, stalks children, and appears in dreams before victims disappear. His origins are ambiguous; he is faceless and nameless. His construction has been the result of thousands of online users creating fake documentary footage, photos, news items, etc. I argue here that The Slender Man is the product of a new apocalyptic fear, and the manifestation, as all monsters are, of our social anxieties; it is a vestige of Kristeva’s abject: the horror of the real.
Kristeva’s abjection is that which cannot be subsumed into order; it cannot be categorized for structure and security. But this is the essence of our postmodern horror: our “realities” are contingent upon an imaginary, dualist paradigm that depends upon a two-(and only two) gendered system; it is upon that imagined dualism that all order stands. To break the imaginary two-gender paradigm is to destroy the foundation of all order.
The second century horror, John’s Apocalypse, expresses - violently, grotesquely - the very real terror of that time and that place: a dissolution of boundaries and their subsumption into an evil system. Their resolution is found, partly, in ambiguous sexuality and trans bodies, i.e., a seepage of the abject into the fantasy (a la Pippin), yet this horror ends in genocide because the narrative refuses the reality of ambiguous bodies and clings to the fiction of gendered duality.
I will suggest that the 21st century horror, The Slender Man, similarly appears as a product of apocalyptic terror and an expression of instability, yet there is something new here. The Slender Man represents a very “real” monster that exists among us; as a personification of the neo-liberal capitalist, it has sponsored genocide, the destruction of whole civilizations, and the slavery of millions. Horrific indeed.
What I propose here is that the production and reception of The Slender Man are signs of hope. As opposed to John’s Apocalypse, The Slender Man’s mythos thrives upon ambiguity (not dualism), yet the evil emanates not from its ambiguity and dynamism, but from a familiar (and actual) source of fear: a faceless white man in a business suit. The hope here is that there seems to be an ideological shift away from placing all of our terrors upon ambiguous bodies, i.e., those who visibly defy precise, yet imaginary categories, such as “male” and “female,” or “us” and “other.” The Slender Man narrative maintains the ambiguity and refuses to collapse back into the binary construct.
I undertake here a “trans hermeneutic” of this new apocalypse, the tale of the Slender Man. The exegesis will 1) identify the threat of the old apocalypse (hierarchical dualism) that ultimately brings about genocide; 2) explore the ways in which the trans body’s apocalyptic representations simultaneously threaten and redeem; and 3) the means by which we thrive: the demise of the constructed, two-gendered hierarchy.
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The Moral Vision of the Bible: A New Testament Approach
Program Unit: Bible and Ethics
David G. Horrell, University of Exeter
This presentation will offer some methodological reflections on approaches to NT Ethics, assessing what kinds of perspectives are possible, how these might be similar and different for NT texts as opposed to those from the OT/Hebrew Bible, and how the approach taken depends on the kinds of questions we are interested in asking and the agenda and location of our inquiry. The publication of a new edition of my work on Pauline ethics, Solidarity and Difference, provides a point of reference for these reflections, which will therefore probe the rationale for the particular approach taken in this work, including the role of the OT/Hebrew Bible in relation to the NT, as well as considering what alternative approaches might have been possible.
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Class Conflict: What the Gospels Are All About
Program Unit: Poverty in the Biblical World
Richard Horsley, University of Massachusetts Boston
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Seeing Double: John’s Gospel and the Women of Mark and Matthew
Program Unit: Synoptic Gospels
Natalie K. Houghtby-Haddon, George Washington University
Should the label “synoptic” only be applied to Matthew, Mark, and Luke? Or might the author of the Gospel of John also know Mark and Matthew’s gospels, at least in part? This paper argues that John’s author did know Mark and Matthew, by tracing the editorial trajectories of two stories: Jesus’ encounter with a foreign woman (Mk 7:24-30//Mt 15:21-28//Jn 4:4-42), and the woman who anoints Jesus (Mk 14:3-9//Mt 26:6-13//Jn 12:1-8). Using a mix of rhetorical and literary analyses, and applying a model of the social imagination, the paper examines how John follows in the footsteps of Matthew by adapting these stories for his own purpose to tell his audience something about who Jesus is, and something about what the community which gathers in his name is like. Comparisons to relevant passages in Luke’s gospel (e.g., Lk 13:10-17; Luke 7:36-50) are also made to show how these women stories are used to imagine new social identities for the communities of Jesus.
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A Miscarried Messiah: The Lukan Jesus as a Source for Liturgy when Coping with Miscarriage
Program Unit: Bible and Practical Theology
Melanie A. Howard, Princeton Theological Seminary
The pain of miscarriage is often a private pain. Parents who have suffered from a miscarriage may choose not to reveal this experience to others, and as this silence is perpetuated, the trauma of the experience itself can be exacerbated by a lack of its acknowledgement. Parents grieving a miscarriage may need an invitation to bring this pain to light. As a means of encouraging grieving parents to cope with this struggle, this paper suggests that the Gospel of Luke, especially in its presentation of Jesus as a rejected Messiah, can be used as a resource for constructing worship experiences and for creating liturgy that can benefit the healing process of parents who have experienced miscarriage.
The paper proceeds in four steps. First, it recognizes and affirms the acknowledgement of scholars (cf. Robert Tannehill and Jocelyn McWhirter) that the Gospel of Luke presents Jesus as a rejected Messiah. Second, the paper considers how understanding Jesus as a rejected Messiah may impact a reading of his blessing of the barren wombs in Luke 23:29. Complementing this examination of Jesus’ blessing of the barren, an exploration of Luke’s use of the term “brephos” (unborn child or infant) in 18:15 suggests that the Lukan Jesus may be envisioned as a figure who invites both infants and unborn children, including the miscarried, to inherit the Kingdom of God. Third, the paper suggests ways in which the Lukan Jesus may be claimed as a figure of consolation for parents who have miscarried by viewing him as a rejected Messiah, an individual who welcomes the “brephe,” and the one who blesses the barren. Finally, the paper offers suggestions for how churches might compose and incorporate liturgy that would invite parents who have miscarried to identify the Lukan Jesus as a figure of hope within their circumstances.
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The Bible and Art: Teaching an Undergraduate Honors Seminar
Program Unit: Bible and Visual Art
David Howell, Ferrum College
Panel presentation on the theme "Teaching the Bible and the Arts in the Undergraduate Classroom."
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Naaman the Syrian and Ethnic Perspective in Luke-Acts
Program Unit: Gospel of Luke
Justin R. Howell, University of Chicago
The speech in which the Lukan Jesus inaugurates his ministry ends in the words “Naaman the Syrian” (Luke 4.27). A comparison between 4 Kgdms 5.1-27 and Luke 4.27-28 shows that where Naaman in 4 Kgdms “became angry and went away” (5.11) and then “went away in anger” (5.12), in Luke “all in the synagogue were filled with anger” (4.28) when Jesus concludes his speech. In this first instance of Jewish opposition toward Jesus, the author appears to have transferred any negative qualities about Naaman onto those in the synagogue.
Can we assume an ethnic distinction between Suros and Ioudaios? The fact that Jesus qualifies Naaman as “the Syrian” would suggest that we can. Yet, even within Luke 4.16-30, it is difficult to determine whether the emphasis is placed upon geography or ethnicity; for there is a geographical element within this scene (4.16, 23-24, 25-26). It is notable that Jesus says nothing about Elisha going to Syria, which does correspond to the account in the LXX where Naaman is healed of his leprosy in Israel (4 Kgdms 5.8-14). It therefore appears that the geographical contrasts in Luke 4.16-30 point also to ethnic distinctions between Jews and non-Jews.
When non-Jewish authors use the terms Suroi and Ioudaioi, the usages often refer to persons from Syria and Judea, respectively, and not necessarily persons who identify with a particular race. Even Jewish authors, such as Josephus, can use the terms to designate Syrians and Judeans. Josephus does, however, indicate that Ioudaioi can inhabit Syria; but those Ioudaioi would seemingly not then be regarded as Suroi, even if they are “in Syria.” It appears also that to call persons Suroi is not merely to designate their provincial locale, but also to identify their “race.” And the same can be said about those who belong to the “race” of Ioudaioi.
Can we identify the ethnic perspective of Luke and his intended readers? Throughout Luke-Acts, do the references to “Jews” (Ioudaioi), on the one hand, and to “Gentiles” (ethne), on the other, in either case imply that the group is ethnically different from the perspective of the author? An evaluation of the term ethne throughout Luke-Acts shows that only Jewish characters apply this term. The narrator in Acts also uses the term frequently. Is it significant that no Gentile character within Luke-Acts uses the term ethne? As a designation for non-Jews, ethne usually assumes a Jewish perspective. In attempting to identify the ethnic perspective of the author and his intended readers, it may be telling that the narrator of Acts refers to non-Jews as ethne. This evidence suggests that the author of Luke-Acts writes from a Jewish perspective, likely to an audience of Jewish Christians and God-fearers. In the synagogue of Nazareth, the controversy that erupts over the mention of “Naaman the Syrian” may point to disputes about how Gentiles were to be incorporated into the Jewish-Christian religious communities.
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Food for Thought: Reading Q 12:42–44 as Part of the Formative Stratum
Program Unit: Q
Llewellyn Howes, University of Johannesburg
On the level of the main redaction (or Kloppenborg’s Q2), the parable of the wise slave (Q 12:42-46) is undoubtedly about the unexpected return of Jesus and/or the Son of Man at the parousia. Yet, it is my estimation that verses 42-44 originally belonged to the formative stratum (or Kloppenborg’s Q1) as a parable in its own right, to which verses 45-46 were added by the main redactor. If so, Q 12:42-44 needs to be interpreted without the contaminating influence of subsequent redactional additions to reveal its original message at the level of the formative stratum. Such an interpretation reveals a wholly different message, surprisingly congruent with not only the remainder of the formative stratum, but also the socio-economic and politico-religious situation of first-century Galilee.
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Reading the Parable of the Wise Slave (Q 12:42–46) against the Background of Agricultural Slavery in Antiquity
Program Unit: Early Christianity and the Ancient Economy
Llewellyn Howes, University of Johannesburg
Last year, I presented a paper on “a day in the life of an ancient farm worker.” This year, I would like to continue down the same dirt road by presenting a paper on the same general topic as part of the second project of this program unit. The paper will look at a parable of Jesus that deals specifically with agricultural slaves in the ancient world. The parable of the wise slave is attributed to the Sayings Gospel Q by most New Testament scholars, appearing in both Matthew 24:45-51 and Luke 12:42-46 (e.g. Dodd 1958:158; Luz 2005:221). The parable assumes specific knowledge of the ancient institution of agricultural slavery on the part of its audience. Yet, biblical scholars and exegetes typically ignore the contextual background of agricultural slavery when interpreting this parable. This happens despite the insistent warnings by parable scholars that individual parables should first be understood on their literal levels of meaning, before any attempts are made to jump to their metaphorical levels of meaning (e.g. Crossan 1974:86-87; Van Eck 2015:5-9). The current intent is not to unearth the metaphorical message of the parable, but rather to contribute to our understanding of the parable on its literal level by taking its contextual references seriously. The examination draws upon papyrical (Roman Egypt) and classical (Jewish, Greek, Roman) sources.
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Pondering Micah’s Structure: A Syntactical Discourse Approach to Micah’s Problems
Program Unit: Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
JoAnna Hoyt, Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics
The lack of agreement on Micah’s structure is well documented. Scholars are often divided on the division between oracles and even the purposes of the oracles. In an effort to solve Micah’s structural riddles, this paper analyzes Micah based on discourse types. Building on Longacre’s approach to discourse analysis, this study employs an analysis of discourse types founded upon the underlying syntax and utilizes Cook’s aspect-prominent approach to the verbal system. Such an approach to the prophetic discourse types brings a new perspective to the structure of Micah. For example, Micah 1:10-16 is largely considered a woe oracle and the wordplays on cities’ names are alternatively seen as either the route of Sennacherib’s attack on Judah, or as simply a literary device to express general lament over their situation. Yet, a syntactical discourse approach to the passage reveals that the structure does not fit a woe oracle, but rather fits the structure of a covenant lawsuit and presents a crescendo-ing list of judgments against the nation of Judah. In a similar way a discourse analysis of the hope (salvation) oracles in Micah 4-5 reveals a chiasm built on discourse structure. While others have proposed chiasms for these two chapters, this syntactical discourse approach to the chiasm provides improvements to previous proposals and offers new insights, such as the integration of elements of hortatory discourse at the pinnacle of the chiasm.
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Making Men in Revelation 2–3: Reading the Seven Messages in the Bath-Gymnasium of Asia Minor
Program Unit: Archaeology of Religion in the Roman World
Lynn R. Huber, Elon University
Modern scholars of Revelation often note the specificity of chapters 2 and 3, which consist of seven messages written to assemblies situated within the urban centers of Asia Minor. The seemingly “concrete” nature of these messages prompt scholars to look for connections between them and the material world of the assemblies that are addressed. In some cases these connections are historically problematic and more often than not fail to shed light on how these chapters function rhetorically and within the overall narrative. Drawing upon those who call for a more methodologically sophisticated understanding of Revelation’s relation to material culture, including Steven Friesen and Craig Koester, and scholarship on gender and archeology, in this paper I read chapters 2 and 3 in relation to the bath-gymnasium complexes of Asia Minor. This approach is suggested by the messages themselves, which include rhetorical elements that resonate within the culture of the bath-gymnasium, such as references to “the victor," promises of reward and the theme of endurance. The bath-gymnasium was a significant part of the social fabric of the Greek East, as Zahra Newby, Onno van Nijf and Fikret Yegül all demonstrate, serving as one of the primary ways that elite male identity was constructed. In particular, these structures, which combined the Roman bath with the Greek palaestra, offered young men the space and opportunity to cultivate masculine virtue, accrue social status and demonstrate civic loyalty. Reading Revelation 2-3 in the long shadow cast by the bath-gymnasium in Asia Minor, I argue that these messages should be read as part of Revelation’s formation of masculine group identity. In this way, attention to the material culture of Asia Minor suggests adjusting how we, Revelation’s interpreters, read these specific chapters in relation to the narrative as a whole and to the gendered discourses of the dominant culture.
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The Iconography of Divine Empowerment and the Israelite King
Program Unit: Ancient Near Eastern Iconography and the Bible
Henry M. Huberty, Emory University
A number of biblical texts witness a complex interplay between human agency and divine empowerment. In Psalm 18, for example, the locus of agency shifts dramatically between Yahweh’s action and that of the human king. At one point in the psalm, the king is powerless and must be rescued by the divine warrior. At another point, the king singlehandedly puts entire armies to flight. Clearly, Yahweh plays a crucial role in the king’s eventual success, but the grammar of divine empowerment in this psalm also reflects deep tensions about the king’s strength vis-à-vis that of the deity.
The complexity of the relationship between human and divine power also appears in iconographic depictions of the king in the Ancient Near East. For example, numerous Egyptian sources depict the pharaoh victorious in battle. In virtually all of these images, the presence of a deity (or deities) undergirds a notion of divine empowerment. Yet, the different constellations of royal and divine images variously highlight or downplay the role of the deity in the king’s victory.
Like the royal psalms, such iconographic representations were part of a sophisticated program of royal self-representation and display. They communicated the king’s glory and inculcated obedience in those who encountered the divinely empowered king. This paper explores the various modes of representing divine empowerment of the king in ancient Near Eastern art and biblical texts. Comparing pictorial and textual representations of divine empowerment reveals several distinct ways of answering the fundamental question of how divine favor inflects or determines human action.
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Translating the Sacred
Program Unit: Philology in Hebrew Studies
Charles Huff, University of Chicago
The meaning of Q-D-SH in Biblical Hebrew, a debated subject, cannot be fully studied apart from its translation in ancient and modern languages. The work of Sherry Simon, Susan Bassnett, and other translation theorists who argue that translation undermines the binary opposition between original and translation helps clarify that what Q-D-SH means in modern scholarly imagination is tied up in what ‘sacred’ and ‘holy’ mean in English or what "heilig" means in German, etc., which is in turn tied up in the LXX’s "hagios" and the Vulgate’s "sanctus". Scholars are also grappling with definitions of the sacred/profane in religious theory, which often in turn rely on etymological arguments. With the premise that contact zones are multivalent, this paper will give a brief cultural history of the translation of Q-D-SH, showing its implications for theorists from Philo to Otto, and will then show how some contemporary scholarly treatments of Q-D-SH reflect and inform broader cultural and scholarly milieus.
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Revolutionary Sacred Architecture: Akhenaten’s Sun Temples and Israel’s Tent
Program Unit: Egyptology and Ancient Israel
Herbert B. Huffmon, Drew University
With revolutionary theology one anticipates revolutionary concepts of sacred space, and this expectation is realized in the sun temples built under Akhenaten (ca. 1348-1331 BCE) and in the concept and design of early Israel’s portable shrine, the tent/tabernacle, supposedly dating back to the 13th century. The basic concepts for these constructions are quite different, and the contrast with the standard sacred architecture of the latter part of the Second Millennium BCE is quite striking. What is similar is the independent attempt to give architectural expression to the revolutionary theologies in question. For the architecture of Akhenaten there is considerable archaeological evidence, but for the Israelite tabernacle there is only chronologically and conceptually elusive information in the Biblical tradition, with few parallels. A key statement is Nathan’s response to David in 2 Sam 7:5-7, “Thus says the Lord: ‘Is it you who would build a house for me as my residence? I have not resided in a house since the time I brought up the Bene-Yisrael from Egypt until the present. I have been going about in a tent and a tabernacle.’” God adds a comment about never having requested of any of those to whom he had entrusted the shepherding of his people, Israel, “Why have you all not built me a cedar house?” And the “Short Hymn to the Aten,” as an example, affirms of the Aten, “Your rays light up all faces, your bright hue gives life to hearts, when you fill the Two Lands with your love……When you dawn their eyes observe you, As your rays light the whole earth; Every heart acclaims your sight.” Israel’s tent/tabernacle and Akhenaten’s temples in Akhet-Aten reflect these respective theologies, departing from contemporary standards for religious architecture. With changes in theology, Akhenaten’s temples soon emptied and the tent became a “cedar” house.
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Ecclesia contemplativa: On the Relationship between the Mystical and Eschatological in St. Bonaventure’s Anagogia
Program Unit: Christian Theology and the Bible
Kevin L. Hughes, Villanova University
This paper will begin from Henri de Lubac’s assertion that the separation of the eschatological from the mystical senses of anagogia in the later Middle Ages is a key solvent in the dissolution of the coherence of the “fourfold sense.” As the “senses of Scripture” achieved finer formal distinction from each other in monastic and scholastic theology, and under the pressure of various Franciscan Joachimist eschatologies, Saint Bonaventure aims to reintegrate these two dimensions of anagogy in new ways. My paper will explore the ways in which he does this and will consider how successful his efforts were.
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The Eschatology of Barnabas: Transforming Biblical Apocalyptic
Program Unit: History of Interpretation
Kyle R. Hughes, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
The Epistle of Barnabas provides one of the earliest examples of Christian reception of biblical apocalyptic material. Though scholarly debate about the eschatology of Barnabas has focused on Barn. 15, this paper suggests that there are clues within the document’s epistolary frame that have the potential to resolve the puzzle concerning how the author of Barnabas wishes us to understand the eschatological views of the traditional material preserved in Barn. 15. In particular, this paper analyzes the use of “Spirit-language” in chapters 1 and 21 in order to shed light on how the author of Barnabas is alluding to apocalyptic texts such as Joel 3 and Revelation 20 to make his claim. This paper argues that the author of Barnabas, as is consistent with the larger purposes of his work, is concerned to transform the Jewish conception of an earthly millennium into a distinctively Christian eschatology. Comparisons with how biblical apocalyptic material is used in the contemporaneous document 2 Clement, which appears to share some eschatological ideas with Barnabas, are then analyzed in order to support this thesis. In so doing, this paper provides a window into not only the development of early Christian eschatology but also the second-century interpretation of biblical apocalyptic material.
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Making Able the Disabled Christ: Reverse Kalokagathia in Phil 1:20–2:13 in Light of Disability Studies
Program Unit: Healthcare and Disability in the Ancient World
Douglas A. Hume, Pfeiffer University
This paper performs a narrative ethical reading of Philippians 1:20–2:13 in discussion with contemporary issues associated with disabilities and disability studies. The central argument of the paper is that when Paul claims that “Christ emptied himself and took on the form (µ??f??) of the slave, being born (?e??µe???) in the likeness of a human being” (2:7), Paul is engaging in a reversal of Greco-Roman concepts of physiognomy and kalokagathia, wherein slave’s bodies and interior dispositions were thought to represent alteriority in a discourse centered on the perfected bodies and virtues of the free aristocratic Greco-Roman male.
Through a narrative ethical reading of the Philippians 1:20–2:13, the paper will place the narratives that undergird Paul’s letter to the Philippians in discussion with contemporary issues related to disability. Building upon studies that correlate Paul’s concepts of slavery and crucifixion with ancient figurations of disability (physiognomy), this paper will draw conclusions about how and why Paul is engaging in reverse kalokagathia, with an eye towards contributing to interpretative discussions in contemporary disability studies. Methodologically, narrative ethics proceeds through an examination of the text on three levels: the narrative analytical, representational, and hermeneutical. The first level, the narrative analytical level, will examine the story behind the letter (Paul’s reasons for writing the letter) as well as the meta-story portrayed within the letter (the Christ hymn in 2:6–11). The second level of examination, the representational, will explore the Greco-Roman philosophical and ethical concepts Paul is using in order to represent both narratives, his story with the Philippians, and the kenotic/exalted movement of the Christ story. It has been commonly accepted that Paul is engaging in the Greco-Roman ethical discourse on friendship to describe the relationship he has with the Philippians. In describing the story of Christ’s kenosis and exaltation, Paul is using the Greco-Roman friendship trope to encourage the Philippians to emulate Christ in their relationship with Paul and with one another. It is at this point that the paper will explore the representations of physiognomy and reverse kalokagathia assumed by Paul in the Christ hymn. Paul’s conclusion in 2:13 will be reinterpreted in this light. Just as God exalted Christ (2:9) who willingly took on the form of the slave, being born as a human being—hence taking on disability (2:7), so also God becomes the one who “makes able” (??e????) the Philippians to “make able” (??e??e??) one another (2:13). The hermeneutical analysis of this paper will put Paul’s narrative into discussion with a contemporary discussion of disability, particularly that of the work of Jean Vanier, the founder of the international L’Arche movement, a movement that has established intentional Christian communities of people with disabilities. The paper will place Vanier’s theological conception of friendship, particularly as it relates to the formation of communities of people of diverse abilities, in dialogue with Paul’s understanding of friendship, community, and reverse kalokagathia in Philippians.
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Checking the Demon and Saying What’s to Be Said
Program Unit: Christian Theology and the Bible
Edith M. Humphrey, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary
Narrative can be used as a powerful vehicle for the communication of the difficult and the mysterious; it can also be an objet d’art, a “joy forever.” The work of C. S. Lewis is a stunning example of writing that meets Keat’s criterion for beauty, even while it engages controverted areas of thought. We will consider two of Lewis’s most difficult and evocative works, Till We Have Face and The Great Divorce, demonstrating both the aptness of his fictive worlds for reflecting upon atonement and judgment, and the astonishing creativity of these pieces. To use Lewis’s own description of fiction, such writing can both “check the demon” of compulsive explanation, and say in the best way “what’s to be said” concerning significant and debated matters. With this dual focus, it neither devolves into pedestrian dogmatics nor abandons meaning for bare aesthetics.
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Addressing an Immaterial Problem in a Material World: Damage Control in Priestly and Other Ritual Systems
Program Unit: Biblical Law
Michael Hundley, Syracuse University
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Pilate: Am I a Jew?
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Laura J. Hunt, Prifysgol Cymru, Y Drindod Dewi Sant - University of Wales, Trinity Saint David
Pilate: Am I a Jew?
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Mounted Riders in Ancient Ammon: A Reappraisal
Program Unit: Ancient Near Eastern Iconography and the Bible
Regine Hunziker-Rodewald, Université de Strasbourg
In contrast to the more than 400 Iron Age II female terracotta figurines found all over Jordan, only a few male terracotta figurines have been recovered. Some of them represent mounted riders whose distinctive figurative marks (conical helmet, painted features, horses’ head-dress) represents a local adaptation of the characteristic outfit of Assyrian horsemen. The Jordanian riders all come from tombs around the citadel of Rabbat Ammon or from the citadel itself. The striking resemblance of the riders’ facial structures (model-made, red slip, painting) to female heads as well as the isolated terracotta drums (red slip, painting) that have been found in the same tomb close to the citadel of Rabbat Ammon indicates the reciprocal relation of the riders and the female drummers. Recently a new rider of the same typology has surfaced in Amman. The presentation of this artifact will be completed by a cross-cultural comparison with horsemen represented on Assyrian reliefs, attested west of the River Jordan and also mentioned in biblical texts. (This paper contains preliminary results of a research project in collaboration with Romel Gharib, Amman.)
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Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley
Program Unit: Polis and Ekklesia: Investigations of Urban Christianity
Ulrich Huttner, University of Siegen
In Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, Ulrich Huttner explores the way Christians established communities and defined their position within their surroundings from the first to the fifth centuries. He shows that since the time of Paul the apostle, the cities Colossae, Hierapolis and Laodicea allowed Christians to expand and develop in their own way.
Huttner uses a wide variety of sources, not only Christian texts - from Pauline letters to Byzantine hagiographies - but also inscriptions and archeological remains, to reconstruct the religious conflicts as well as cooperation between Christians, Jews and Pagans. The book reveals the importance of local conditions in the development of Early Christianity
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Tracking Optimality in Translation at Tell Fekheriyeh
Program Unit: Philology in Hebrew Studies
Jeremy M. Hutton, University of Wisconsin-Madison
This paper proposes a methodology for describing, explaining, and tracking the linguistic and non-linguistic shifts that occurred in ancient translations. I proceed from a standpoint informed by Descriptive Translation Studies [DTS], which is exemplified by theorists such as Gideon Toury, Andrew Chesterman, Kitty van Leuven-Zwart, and others. After briefly surveying pertinent theoretical points bearing on translations, I summarize the principles and methods of Optimality Theory [OT], as manifested in the works of Alan Prince, Paul Smolensky, and John J. McCarthy, for example. Using data drawn from the Akkadian-Aramaic bilingual discovered at Tell Fekheriyeh, and interacting with previous discussion of the texts, I demonstrate that the combined theoretical and methodological model provided by DTS and OT allows us to identify, describe, evaluate, and organize the norms constraining ancient translators. We may use the notational system resulting from this theoretical exercise to capture regularities and anomalies in ancient translations, outlining their respective ‘grammars.’
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Textual Data for the Study of Religion in the Transjordanian Kingdoms
Program Unit: Archaeology of the Biblical World
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